January 26, 2026 • 55 mins
To kick off this week’s Better Offline Dot Com Special, Ed Zitron is joined by The Register’s Matt Rosoff to talk about what it was like to be in the tech industry during the last time the markets got drunk on a major digital hype cycle.
Matt Rosoff: https://www.theregister.com/Author/Matt-Rosoff/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Also media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm, of course your
host ed zitron and today I am joined for a
dot com special by Matt Rosoff, the editor in chief
(00:25):
of the Register, who has been in Silicon Valley.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
I believe three hundred years. You said it was three
hundred and twenty five. Yeah, so I'm actually a vampire.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
That's nice. Oh, what like Kevin O'Leary and Martin Supreme. Sorry,
Martin Supreme. That's a thing he says in it. Have
you heard about that?
Speaker 1 (00:41):
No, I don't know, but I haven't seen that yet.
Ping Pie doesn't really do it for me.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
I didn't really like it, but there is a bit
in it where Kevin O'Leary goes, I'm a fucking vampire.
I've lived for this many years and I read about this.
I did not like the movie, but I read about it.
I was like, oh, I would actually love it if
this was true. And apparently they did film it with fangs,
and they should have done that. They should have just
(01:05):
had him be a vampire at the end. However, he's
regularly in the sun, so I'm not sure how they
would have squared that circle. AnyWho, my time only computers.
So Matt, you were what were you We're just going
to go straight into it. What were you doing in
the dot com bubble era?
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Like?
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Where did you begin and where did you find yourself
as it progressed?
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Yeah, it's an interesting blast from my very distant past.
But I moved to San Francisco in nineteen ninety two,
sort of the tail end of the Gulf War recession,
so there wasn't much.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
Going on then.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
I was interning doing different kinds of od jobs, copy editing,
doing some of those kinds of things, and then in
nineteen ninety five I joined a little startup that was
going to publish content on the World Wide Web. They
didn't call it content then, I guess it was. They
called it.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
An online magazine.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
They already had a TV network and that was Senet,
So cnet is still out today in a very different format.
But I was employee number forty two there. Started off
as an editorial assistant, and my very first task there
was to come up with an email newsletter, which we
called Digital Dispatch, and it was mostly summaries of stuff
(02:18):
that we were publishing on the site, and then occasional
snarky commentary. I remember a couple of years later, we
did ten reasons why Wired's IPO failed, and one of
them was the prospectus was printed on neon green and
red paper, which we thought was OK, funny and cute
at the time.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
So anyway, that was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
We were, you know, growing at a very rapid pace.
I think I was there from ninety five to ninety nine.
Like I said, I was employee number forty two on
the way in, and I think when I left there
were over five hundred people working there with that. One
was owned by Zif Davis at the time, it was
not Cnet, was an independent company. It had a number
(02:59):
of early venture investors, including Paul Allen, the Microsoft co founder.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
I don't remember the other ones.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
The CEO was guy named Halsey Minor, and no, it
was it was completely you know, it was privately held
and weipo'd in ninety seven or ninety eight, I'm not, oh.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Just before that was just before things started to fall apart, right.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Well, ninety eight was still go go go. I think
it really kind of went on until two thousand and
two thousand and one was when things started to turn. So,
you know, it was fun being a company that was
growing fast.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
I was able to do a.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Whole bunch of different kinds of things. I was writing
TV scripts and doing CD ROM reviews back when multimedia
was a thing, and writing features and I interviewed a
two way pager from this little company called Research in
Motion before the BlackBerry was out, and I interviewed one
of the first MP three players. I think it was
the Rio, and I was like, Wow, interesting idea, but
it can only hold like twelve songs, so this is
(03:58):
a complete waste time. It'll never go was before the
Creative Nomad. Then I think around the same time. I
don't remember which one was first, but yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
I remember the Creative Nomad could have like three hundred
songs on it. I felt like, oh, yes, Sultan of
BRUNEI I was the fanciest man ever, three hundred songs.
How would I ever choose?
Speaker 3 (04:17):
Yeah, that's it, that's right. Yeah. No, this was a
lot less than that.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
I mean, we had to sort of do math and
go backwards and we're like, wait, that's only twelve songs.
That's worthless. So anyway, and then you know, took some
filthy dot com Luker went backpacking for a little bit
with my girlfriend at the time, who later became my wife.
And then when I moved back, moved back to Seattle,
and I think we came back on the day that
(04:41):
Microsoft lost a verdict during its big antitrust case.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Yeah, the MS one.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
Right, Yeah, this was well, this was anti trust.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Basically they had a whole bunch of different charges against them.
Tying the browser to Windows was kind of the big one,
you know, and making deals with PC makers to bundle
certain software and not allowing them to bundle other software
and all kinds.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
And incentivizing bundling MS dos. Yeah, I vaguely know this story.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
Yeah, it was.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
It was really about like Netscape Navigator was the thing,
and you know, that's what we were all using in
nineteen ninety five. It started with Mosaic and it was Navigator,
and then Microsoft built Internet Explorer in the Windows ninety
five and four years later Navigator didn't really exist for
all intents and purposes.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
So it was But anyway, that was the day.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
It was Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, and he ordered them
to be broken into two companies, an APPS company, which
is office and all those products, and an OPS company,
which was Windows. I believe now maybe remembering this slightly
wrong and I don't have a resource in front.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Of YEA very recently covered this and you will back on.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
So but I think that was kind of the peak,
and I think that was actually perhaps the beginning of
the end. So it's even though Microsoft had had very
little to do directly with the dot com bubble, there
was sort of this sense that, oh, the tightest turning anyway,
long story short, I moved back to Seattle and I
found work with this startup. At the time, they were
(06:14):
called a Cadio and the idea was that they were
going to do online education, so they wanted to have
articles written and I was the computers tech guy. We
were going to you know, training people on computer technology.
And it was the most incompetently run company I have
(06:34):
ever seen been a part of. I walked in immediately
realized that I needed to get out.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
So by way of example, they didn't have so you
know what. Yeah, it was this was.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Early two thousands, so this is still this was when
companies were getting funding on a promise and going public
on powerpoints. Still it was still still at the peak,
but we could see it starting to turn. So you know,
these guys had enough money to hire a bunch of people,
and they had a cool loft in Pineer Square, which
is you know, brick building and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
But they didn't.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
So they you know, they hired me, and they're like,
go get some freely, you know, fine, start hiring freelancers,
and we need to get some content up. They had
no way to put the content on the internet. They
didn't have a CMS, they didn't know what a CMS was.
And we were using Visual Source Safe, which is a
Microsoft product used for you know, creating code and sharing code.
It was that level. And I remember later here over,
(07:31):
you know, hearing secondhand that somebody had overheard a very
tense meeting between the CEO and the investors where one
of the investors yelled through a closed door, we might
as well just sell the servers back to the investment bank.
So I quickly got out of there, found a job
at Directions on. Microsoft did that for ten years, and
they were out of business by I believe, early two
thousand and one.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
So about when did it become obvious something was wrong.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
So it was never obvious that something was wrong large scale,
but it was obvious that a lot of the specific
individual companies that were part of this were completely hot air.
There was nothing there. There weren't revenues, there weren't customers,
or they were you know, selling dollars for seventy five
(08:23):
cents basically. So you know, pets dot Com was a
big one, Cosmo dot Com was another one, And all
these ideas came around later and were more nearly profitable
in the second go round. So Cosmo dot Com was
just home delivery. It was like Instacart.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
It's basically Cosmo was Instacom, and pets dot Com was Chewy.
And I looked at Chewy's revenues recently, three point one
billion dollars in a quarter fifty million dollars of profit,
which is good. But also one of those business is
what I hear metrics like that, I get scared.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Yeah, it's fine, it's a you know, it's a low
margin retail business.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
That's fine.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Retail retail's good, you know, it's it's okay, it's real. Yeah,
it's it's you sell things for more than you make
them for. That's that's how it's supposed to work. So
I think there were just so many of those. The
other one was there was a business and I think
they were only based in Seattle, called Lackeye dot com.
And I remember my uh my boss at directions at
the time said that, you know, this is when I
(09:21):
knew that the revolution was impending. Is when you have
a website called Lackeye dot com that is basically a
personal assistant. I guess it was kind of like task Rabbit,
that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Yeah, but even toss grab it has never really is
tosk grab it even profitable.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
They got bought by Ikea, so it's buried now. I
don't I don't think they ever were.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
My lackey dot com. Okay, I I hate to interrupt
to read a Wikipedia page, but it was founded in
April not you know, you know, by a guy called
Brian McGarvey and another guy called Brendan Bonnacle.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
I remember that name. Yeah, I remember that name with
an I right correct, yes.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Yes, yeah. In the memo he had a memo that
was on fuck Company. It said this is still a startup.
And he complains that it is now six forty five
PM and they're only twelve people in our office. We
have sixty four people who work here in Seattle. It's
totally unacceptable. So the more things change, the more things
stay the same.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
I think that's true. Yeah, there are there are absolutely
some similarities and some differences between today and them.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
But what about the the telecom side though, was it
did everybody just think that was going to work out
until it didn't? What was their a point when the
Loosens and the wind stars of the world got scared
or scary?
Speaker 3 (10:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
I was less close to that at the time. I
was pretty focused on end user consumer stuff. But I
remember having friends who were sort of retail trading and
talking to me about Siena, Siena Networks, It's going to
be huge. And I think those busts came a little
bit later, right with WORLDCLM. I think that was maybe
a bit after the doc Bom bust. And I'm a
(11:02):
little bit less familiar with how all of that worked.
But as I understand it, there was a lot of
circular There were a lot of circular deals and deals
that weren't really deals, and deals that were agreements but
actual no money changing hands.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Yeah, it's interesting because as I dig into this, and
I've spent the last week or two digging into kind
of how we got to this conversation, I realized it
seems like there were two very specific The dot com
bubble was actually like two bits. It was the dot
com website stuff, and then the follow up of the
the the what was it the telecommunications fiber.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Boom fiber boom, Yeah, it was, you know, it was
the it was the the websites. There was definitely some
circularity there too. Everybody knew that everybody was buying advertisements
from each other. But you know, you remember AOL bought
Time Warner and then that valuation collapsed. I mean, there
were some really huge deals that turned out to be
(11:57):
in the end worth almost nothing. And then I think
once you're once, you know, once all of those things
fell apart and the end user picture wasn't there A
lot of the infrastructure valuations came crashing down as well.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
What was the moment you knew? Like, when was the moment?
What was was there an event where you went, oh shit,
and yeah?
Speaker 1 (12:17):
When I joined that startup and I wasn't I couldn't
believe they had any money, So that was that was
a spring of two thousand. I was like, it felt
like they were just sort of handing money out to anybody,
and I mean, this guy had a record. I think
he had had a CRM company that competed with Salesforce
that either sold or went public, So he wasn't a
(12:38):
total nobody. It's just they couldn't hire enough people to
actually get anything smart done on time. It just wasn't
It just wasn't working, and everybody was kind of showing
up to the office and play acting. There were some
moments during the nineties that were, you know, kind of crazy,
like see it they funded this party. I played bass
(12:59):
and I was playing base and sort of this pickup
band at work, and they basically rented out the.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
Film more for our holiday party.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
And you know, we played on a stage in front
of twelve hundred or however, maybe the film is not
that big, five hundred people. And then they had a
I can't remember the name of the of the you know,
they had an actual working band come on after us.
But it was a lot of fun. The singer we
were playing with nailed, Janis Joblin. She did a really
spectacular job. We had a couple of good songs. So
but that was those kinds of things were regular, like
(13:30):
that was just expected these big parties, and nobody really
asked where the money was coming from. I do remember
after Senet went public. I don't remember what year this was,
ninety eight or ninety nine. I actually looked at an
earnings report and I was like, oh, we're losing money.
I didn't know you could stay in business and lose money.
(13:52):
How naive I was.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
That's so see, that's the thing I admit as I've
got further into finance in general and learned stuff the
amount of companies that just burn cash and then die,
but also the ones that are burning cash right now,
and the amount of people who just say, yeah, it's
actually fine, it's good that happens. It's like a completely
(14:15):
like a completely different world that has only worked a
few times in the past. It's actually not worked many
many more times.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
Right, most of the time it doesn't work.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
But I think the bet is when it does work,
it pays off spectacularly.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
Right.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
And the question, I don't think Google was ever losing
huge amounts of money, but Amazon did for some years.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Yeah, I've I've looked into it, and the companies that
have actually grown and been successful have never burned anywhere
near as much money as these AI companies. AWS was
like sixty nine billion over nine years, and that was
all of Amazon's Capex, not just AWS focused.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Yeah, yeah, no, they yeah, And again there was to me,
the Internet at large and the World Wide Web as
we used to call it, was a lot more immediately
obviously huge, and it was going to change a lot
of things and how business was done and how media
(15:14):
was distributed.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
It was it was clear.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
It was just a question of when and where the
technology had to go in which parts had to evolve.
You know, you needed consumers to have much more bandwidth
before video became a realistic thing and so forth, and
you know, they were gonna be fits and starts, but
I think everybody pretty much knew that it was not
fake like these things, some of these companies were going
(15:37):
to succeed. Something was gonna happen. When I look at AI,
to me, it does not seem nearly as revolutionary. I
don't even really like to call it AI because it's
not intelligent, but that's the that's the term that we use.
But it's you know, it's right, uh, you know, matrix math,
(15:58):
determinating determined, you know, basically auto complete. So it's interesting.
It can do some stuff that can be valuable in
certain situations. But it doesn't to me feel immediately massively
obvious that this is a huge change the internet did. Yeah,
(16:19):
web browsers did the iPhone. The first time I played
with one of those, I was kind of a skeptic
because I mean, I had a palm pilot and I'd
been yeah, yeah, I had around, Yeah, I had a
compact them, so keep going no, no, you know, and
you're you're you're playing with that stylist. And then someone
brought an iPhone into work and I was like, oh, Apple, whatever,
they're not going to do this, and I was like, oh, responsive,
touch screen, email, autocomplete maps, I'm like, this thing's cool.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
And then it got better from there.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
So yeah, I haven't felt that, and I've used all
the chatbots.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
I've played around with them.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
I don't code, but you know, from what I understand
from people who do, is if you're a non coder,
it can create some serviceable apps just based on your ideas,
which seems pretty magical. But if you do code and
you actually look under the hood, they're not maintainable. You know,
you can't deploy them like they you know, they they
(17:09):
tend to have a lot of problems unless you sort
of know what you're doing. And I certainly know as
a writer, you know, I can immediately detect AI generated
writing and it's not good.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
That's actually a really good thing to focus on. So
when you got into the internet industry, was there that
sense of wonderment. I'm not even being like a shield.
I'm just like because I remember when I first used
the internet in like nineteen ninety seven, I want to say, yeah,
like a child and being amazed by it, but even
like the iPhone moment as well. But when you were
getting into it in like the mid to late nineties,
(17:52):
was there that sense of wonderment and excitement?
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (17:55):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
So.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
There had been online services for a while.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
People used AOL compu serve, and you know, you hang
out in chat rooms and you do these keywords and
it would call up sort of a specific I don't
even remember what they were called, but i'd call them
apps now. But the web was interesting because it was
immediately accessible to everyone. Anyone could theoretically set up a website,
and it was yeah, immediately huge, and it was a
(18:21):
little hard to separate some of the hype from legitimate excitement.
But I remember in San Francisco even in nineteen ninety five,
and you know, you had had wired magazines sort of
sounding sounding the bells for it for several years by
that point. But in nineteen ninety five, everybody was online,
everybody was getting online, and you know, you had tons
(18:42):
of TV commercials, and everybody was talking about the World
Wide Web on the evening news, and it just it
was immediately clear that this was a new thing and
it was a new way that we were going to
do a lot of stuff. Right, So, yeah, there was
there was massive excitement over it.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Was there any kind of AI sorry, I same leading
question then? Were there dissenters? Were there people other than
the obvious news we call call that everyone sends me
every time, you know, the one I'm talking about the dynalltics,
weird gloss things now.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
But it was that descent there was, and I think
a lot of the descent, interestingly, was centered around some
of the same kinds of criticisms that we've heard over
the last five, six, seven years. So it wasn't that
this is stupid or this isn't going to work. It
was you know, there are no guard rails, there are
(19:34):
no there's no regulation. This thing is going to run
a muck. It's gonna you know, how how are we
going to protect against fraud? How are we going to
protect against people, you know, using it for crime? How
are we going to protect against you know, this kind
of information that maybe shouldn't be available to everybody. So
there were those kinds of questions, and people were, you know,
(19:57):
maybe we should slow down a little bit and put
some guardrails and pass some laws around this thing. Most
of that's that, Yeah, most of it didn't get done.
You know, the Telecoms Act, you know whatever, Section two
thirty whatever, the big Omnimus Bill that that was a
part of that was an attempt to deal with some
of that stuff.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
But it was pretty it was pretty lenient.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
It was more about sort of protecting companies from from liability.
But there were some yeah, there was some at least
some thought around it, but.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
But there wasn't just people saying this won't work in
the same way.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Very few, very few, I mean there, you know, I
suppose you could go into the boardroom of a newspaper
at the time and probably would have heard some arguments
that now in retrospect sound insane. But you know, who
wants to read on a screen that was one that
you sometimes heard people want to have a piece of
(20:52):
paper in their hand and you know, print is print
is the way nobody wants to read on a screen,
or you know, this is this is this is sort
of a nerd toy. This is never going to take
off among you know, mainstream people. There were issues with
internet access. It wasn't available everywhere, especially high speed. I
mean we were using pretty low speed modems for a
(21:14):
very very long time, particularly in rural parts of the country.
So there was some skepticism around that, you know, And
part of it, I have to be honest, is I
was in my twenties at the time, so I think
people at that age tend to be much more go
go about the future than perhaps old cynics as as
(21:35):
we are now.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
But there wasn't any kind of well maybe there was,
you can tell me. There wasn't a kind of bifurcation
between people who were like pro internet anti internet in
the same way.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
Nah.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
No, I don't remember that anyway, No, I really don't
think so. Yeah, it was all it was all hands
on deck. I mean, I mean again, like this was
on TV. This is like you know, advertisements, there were
there were commercials. There were people on that evening news,
you know, reaching, reaching mom. You know my parents who
are boomers, They were fully aware and gung ho about
(22:08):
the web by ninety seven or ninety eight, and that's
I think that's who was investing. So, you know, one
of the big differences between then and today it was
these companies were going public and it was really fueled
in large part by retail investors. You know, you wanted
to buy stocks on the stock market in these new
(22:28):
companies that represented the future. So you know, you had
doctors and dentists and you know, professors with a little
money and people putting their retirement savings into these things,
and they were the ones who probably got wiped out
the most in you know, two thousand and one through
two thousand and four.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Yeah, And I mean, was was that before e trade?
Speaker 3 (22:52):
Was it?
Speaker 2 (22:53):
Do you start to call a stockbroker? I literally don't
know how they bought stock back then.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
I realized, Yeah, I think E trade started in the
dot com boom, if I recall late in.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
Nineties, because I remember in England at the time, the
story is about how E trade led to people losing
tons of money, and there was one thing I'll credit
the press with at the time as being like, yeah,
you shouldn't bet on the stock market unless you know
what you're doing, right.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Yes, index funds hold forever.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
That's the that's the random walk down Wall Street, the
only investment strategy that works. But yeah, people were playing,
you know, they wanted they saw these ridiculous returns and
they wanted a piece of it. So yeah, I think
online trading was definitely a thing. You know, you had
the Yahoo Chat forums that's where people would pump and
(23:42):
dump these penny stocks.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
They were all clad and.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Really they were like there were actual pump groups back then.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Oh yeah, I mean yah. Yahoo Chat was sort of
infamous for it. Like you would hear about something, you'd
hear it was a lot like what happened with crypto
in twenty one twenty two. You know, someone issues a
new time and everybody rushes in to buy it and
then it crashed. You know, there's a rug pull and
it crashes, like it was. Those kinds of things were happening.
But Yahoo, I remember being that was the forum that
(24:09):
I was the most familiar with back then. It was
probably going on on AOL too.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
That's magical. Oh, the innocent days. It was the I
remember when I I'm Gonna do the It was a
Rockahaua speech and the end of Blade round of the
things I've seen in telegram groups about icos. But it's
it's kind of it's adorable to hear that stuff happening,
until you remember people lost lots of money. But it
(24:35):
doesn't feel like it doesn't sound like maybe it was
a different media climate, like there was that kind of
almost have There wasn't the noxious part of it where
it's like, oh, if you don't get on the internet,
you're gonna be left behind, You're an idiot, or maybe
I'm wrong.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
Not so much of that, but it was it was
just presumed that this is the future and if you
don't want part of the if you don't want to
be part of the future, that's fine, But you know,
why don't you go be a survivalist and live off
the grid in the woods? Kind of right, It was
just assumed. I mean, it's like, you know, do you
(25:12):
watch TV. There was a time when if you said
I don't have a TV you were very pretentious and
very special. Now it seems like everybody's cutting cable. But
so it was sort of like that. It was just
presumed that everybody was eventually going to get on board.
I mean, who needs a personal computer in their home?
That was a real question in the late eighties, right,
Oh PC on every desktop? Yeah, sure, bill, whatever you say.
(25:35):
Who wants one of these things? And then you know,
you find justifications for it. Oh, well you can you know,
you can pay your bills automatically, and you can do
this and that. And suddenly when Internet Explorer was built
into Windows and everybody could get online, that was the thing,
like that was, oh, of course, everybody has to have
a PC and we're all going to be on the web,
surfing the web.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
It also feels like it was a genuine too, like
a lot of these things would just too early and
run too crazy because the actual fundament of it, it
sounds like, was people were excited to get on the internet,
which was which was obviously a beneficial thing and had
immediate returns, like people could use it and say this
is useful in my life in this manner, right.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
I think the initial thing was access to information. You
could you could find out a lot of things very
fast and actually and there were some communication aspects, right,
You could talk to anybody anywhere in the world pretty easily,
pretty quickly.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
And then other things.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
You know, e commerce was very early, but you know,
suddenly you don't have to go to the bookstore and
ask them to order. I worked at a bookstore for
a year in nineteen ninety, and you know, it was
a thing if you don't have the book in stock,
they come in and you order the book, and then
they come back a week later, and suddenly you just
press a button and the you know, the book will come.
And then they started adding music. There were a lot
(26:51):
of you know, again, the lack of bandwidth among a
lot of consumers did sort of stall the idea of
digital video, but it eventually came around in two thousand
and one or two. That's when YouTube really took off.
Real networks had streaming video and Microsoft.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
Oh real real player.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Yeah, buffer, Remember we're all buffering. I interviewed Rob Glazer
a couple times. You know, he had the right idea.
But again, Microsoft sort of, you know, took that market
pretty quickly with Windows Media Player, and then Apple came
along and I they kind of blew everybody else away. So, yeah,
all of the ideas were there, and I think most
(27:31):
of what we were sort of experimenting with later became
real businesses. I mean, you know LimeWire and all the
sort of music MP three trading sites that was later
late nineties, I guess, early two thousands. That all eventually
became legitimized through Spotify and Apple Music and so on.
(27:53):
So every idea was already there. It was just maybe
it's a little bit underground. Maybe it doesn't work quite right,
it's a little clunky, it's a little cluegy, or maybe
the companies were just you know, they borrowed too much
money too fast and couldn't turn it around.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Which feels almost entirely different to the AI bubble, like
it's they such in a Dela on the morning of
recording this, uh At Davos was saying, Yeah, the thing
that might make the suspeculative bubble if nobody but if
nobody buys it. But if nobody buys AI. Not really,
he's so cool. I love that we live in this area.
(28:27):
I'm going to read you this sentence actually because this
really got me. Microsoft chief executive Search and a Delas
warn that AI risk becoming a speculative bubble unless its
use is spread beyond big tech companies and wealthy economies.
For this not to be a bubble, by definition, it
requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread.
He knowed that a telltale sign of it's abobble would
be if only tech groups are benefiting from the rise
(28:48):
of AI rather than the companies and other sectors.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
Yeah, that's good, good shit self evident. Yes, correct, he's
not wrong.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Creative perhaps if no one uses also, isn't his job.
But nevertheless, there was a question I had. So something
that frustrates me with this whole conversation is how flippantly
people say, oh, it's a bubble, but sometimes bubbles are good.
What was the aftermath like?
Speaker 1 (29:20):
So this is where things get a little bit complicated,
because I don't think that you can really fairly separate
events from other events that happen at the same time. So,
the the dot com bubble did burst, but then you
(29:40):
had nine to eleven happen in September of two thousand
and one, sort of in the late middle of it,
and that literally changed everything. It changed confidence, it changed
where everybody's attention was going. You know, you had money
flowing into completely different places. Everybody got much more conservative
and so forth.
Speaker 3 (29:59):
So I think.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
The real effect of the dot com bust, I mean,
you had a lot of people my age, people who
were in their twenties and the go go nineties, suddenly
lose their jobs or suddenly not have the great paychecks
that they.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
Had become accustomed to.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
And you had a lot of retail traders get wiped out.
You know, some people lost their lost their life savings
or a big portion of their life savings. And you know,
my attitude toward investing has always been caveat empt or
you shouldn't be betting if you can't afford it. You
should put your money in an index fund, and you
should hold on to that until you retire. That's the
safest thing to do. But you know, some people say, hey,
(30:41):
I've got ten percent of this of my holdings are
play money, and I'm just going to make some bets
and see what happens. And then you find other people
who who go too far with it.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
But what about people in tech?
Speaker 1 (30:55):
You know, in tech, most those skills didn't become useless, right,
so the technology was always changing. If you were you know,
learning HTML and JavaScript and Java programming, and then you
could transition into new different kinds of things. The technology
continued to evolve, so people who had those technical skills
(31:15):
could continue forward and find other interesting things to do.
And then, you know, honestly, after the sort of telecoms
bus two thousand and four, two thousand and five, you
had a pretty long boom. I mean, there was the
financial collapse of eight around the housing market, but the
tech industry independently was building a lot of stuff. Tons
(31:36):
of companies got started in the wake of the dot
com bust, and many of those companies are still around today.
So I don't feel like people in the tech industry
were permanently hurt. You know, there was a couple of
years set back, and then they generally were able to
learn new skills, apply what they'd already learned, and go
find other things that some of which turned out to
(31:56):
be really lucrative.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
Right.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
But I think, I think, how can I phrase this?
I think that people are very flippant about the consequences
of a potential bubble collapse. I think that that's really
what I'm that's where my concern you're talking about today today, Yes,
because people compare it to the dult com bubble, and
they say, well, after the dult kombubble, there was that value,
which is completely correct.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
But yeah, again, I think the other thing is about today.
So the circumstances around the world are very different. You know,
ninety two ninety three, the Cold War was over. There
was this peace dividend. They were turning army bases into
(32:43):
national parks. Everybody was sort of enjoying, you know, good times.
There was a book called The End of History by
Francis Fukuyama that's sort of posited.
Speaker 3 (32:56):
Hey, this is it.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
You know, we're here in this permanent utopia world. Of course,
events intervened and I think nine to eleven was the
big turning point there, and there's some other stuff around
that time, you know.
Speaker 3 (33:06):
The contested election of two thousand.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Now, contested elections are such a common thing we don't
really think about them anymore, but that was the first
big one in my lifetime. The situation today, I think
you would agree, is very different. You know, we have
an unprecedentedly chaotic leader in the United States who seems
to be bent on ripping down old world orders that
(33:33):
have enabled stability since World War Two. I mean, if
you're talking about seizing land from a NATO ally, and
you're seeing Europe strike all these free trade deals with
the rest of the world, and so forth, and so on.
We could go on and on about this, but I don't.
I'm not an analytical expert. But the background scenario is
(33:54):
very different, and I think you could almost make a
case for AI being sort of the logical outgrowth of
a certain number of years of rot in the business
and in the economy. And I think you've made that argument.
You know, you can decide where that started. Did it
(34:15):
start in the eighties and nineties when the US started
off shoring and outsourcing everything to China and other countries.
Did it start after that? But it's been somewhat clear
for some time that a lot of the easy sort
of technological gains that we got from the mobile revolution
and from the cloud, those have mostly been gathered like those. Yeah,
(34:39):
and there's not that much more upside. You can get
a little efficiency here and a little efficiency there. Everybody
kind of knows how the internet works, you know, what
advertising looks like, you know, so this sort of to
me seems like it's it's sort of the last big push.
And you know, you have a lot of people in
big bureaucratic jobs who you've written about this, they don't
(35:02):
really produce much day to day. They produce a lot
of emails and a lot of presentations, and they sit
in meeting occasionally they got to make a yes no
decision and they got to you know, mune some data
together and say, Okay, it looks wiser if we do
this instead of doing that. But you know, a lot
of it is performative, and I think, you know, AI
is great for that. I don't have to create the
(35:23):
spreadsheet anymore. I don't have to create the presentation anymore.
I don't have to write the email that no one's
going to read, and then they don't have to read
it because they can have AI summarized for them. I
think it's good for that kind of good enough stuff.
And there are a lot of jobs that are good enough.
But I want to it's a bigger problem with the economy.
I don't think it's all about AI. I think AI
(35:43):
is a symptom rather than perhaps a cause.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
But even then, it's like, can it do presentations? Because
I've never been a like I've genuinely tried just to
see if it could do it. It's never been able
to do it. I think it's an interest.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Yeah, I mean I've seen presentations created with AI that
are pretty good.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
I think you get it, gets you.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
A certain percentage of the way there, and then you
tweak it a little bit.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
Okay, yeah, it's just that. But but then you kind
of look at it and say, great, did we really
need to spend however, many hundreds of billions of dollars
to get a spreadsheet maker. I also think that people
(36:32):
are just being flippant about the idea of a financial
collapse as well. That's what that's what's worrying me as well.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
Right, But again, I think that there are a lot
of potential reasons for a potential financial collapse, and AI
is one of some number.
Speaker 3 (36:51):
I don't think it.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Again, the dot com bust was not entirely attributable to
ridiculous valuations. There were things going on in other parts
of the world. There was a change of in confidence,
and I think here again, you've got you've got a
lot of disruption and a lot of disorder and a
lot of chaos. So there are many many things that
(37:12):
could happen. But I agree, I think people maybe underestimate
how how deep this is. Then again then again, you know,
who are the big investors in this? I mean it's
mostly really large tech companies with massive, massive revenues and massive.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Cash maybe highly anymore though one hundred and seventy eight
point five billion dollars of data center credit deals, you've
got venture capital is actually they yeah, venture capital is
also half a venture capital is going into it. But
the other thing that shocked me as well was back
then in the dot com boom, venture capital was so
(37:48):
much smaller.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
Oh it was tiny, but yeah, you need it was
investment banking is where is where you found the money.
So venture capital though, you know, that's not their money.
They're they're playing with somebody else's money. So whose money
are they playing with? Who are the LPs, Well, we
don't really know, but it's it's personal wealth funds, it's
sovereign wealth funds, you know, it's it's Middle Eastern and
(38:10):
other country sovereign wealth funds. Sure, there's teachers pensions, and
there's university endowments, and there's some other things that that
that those LPs are holding that will actually harm you know,
normal working folk.
Speaker 3 (38:25):
But I think a lot of it is.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
Massive excess wealth at the top of society where people
are looking for new, new kinds of returns, they're looking
for outsized returns because all the easy all the easy
money is sort of already taken. So I don't know
if that. I think where it hurts is when you
think about, Okay, the you know, the real estate carry
on effects, all the people who are employed now and
(38:49):
will be suddenly unemployed. Those those kinds of things could
really hurt. But I just it doesn't seem to me
like you have the retail trader exposure as you did
during the dot com boom. Yeah, okay, if there's a
huge AI bust and Nvidia loses a massive portion of
its value, sure people are going to hurt who have
(39:10):
invested in in video, but they're not going to get
wiped out. I don't see Nvidia disappearing. I don't see Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle.
I don't see any of those companies disappearing as a result, and.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
Neither do I. I think the thing that people need
to understand is that a wipeout isn't going to be
what hurts. It's going to be a draw down. It's
going to be because in Vidia eighty eight percent of
the revenue's data center like and I even looked back
for a premium I date a few weeks ago where
it was the amount of revenue that like Loosened or
(39:43):
Corning or whomever had in those specific segments, or how
weighted they were on their customers, Like I think Loosen's
top customers were eight and T and Verizin, but those
only represented thirteen to fourteen percent. In Nvidia has customers
that make up fifteen to twenty percent of their revue
new each quarter. They have massive centralization around four to
(40:03):
five customers that diversified revenues dropping. It's just it isn't
that in video is going to die. It's the half
to eighty percent of their revenue is going to disappear.
It happened with crypto with them, yeah, I'm really worried.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
They were never as Yeah, they were never as dependent
on Crypto. They've tried a lot of things over the years.
I mean right, they were doing so chips for self
driving cars and all kinds of things.
Speaker 3 (40:27):
I do.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
I am not as technical as the writers on the
registers staff to bias Man, for example, does a great
job covering GPUs and data centers. It is positive that
there are other potential uses for GPUs that could be
very interesting with in terms of high performance computing and
some other things that are AI adjacent, you know, different
kinds of data processing and so forth.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
So it may not what we call AI.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
Even if that you know that those end use cases
and turn out to be eh, you know, vibe coding, eh,
chatbots eh, even though those aren't it. Some of these,
some of the some of the hardware may be repurposable
into other functions. I don't think it. It's just not
at this.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
But not at the scale that they're building.
Speaker 1 (41:11):
Though. No, no, again, I would be stunned if all
of the data centers that are being promised by twenty
thirty are actually built.
Speaker 3 (41:20):
But maybe I don't know.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
I also just don't think that that will be happening.
I just don't see it happening. I am looking through
the old dot com companies, though I really can't find
anything like open AI. They are truly special.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
They are.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
It's like they took a bit of Global Crossing, a
bit of Enron, a bit of loosen but also a
bit of pets dot Com just kind of amazed what
Silicon Valley can still spoot out. No like innovations but
financial collapses like these, We've never seen one this big, folks.
Speaker 3 (41:55):
It's massive. Yeah, it's it's there.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
There are there are a lot of commitments there in
The value is massive, massive, massive. I do think their
announcement last week or their acknowledgment that they're finally getting
into advertising is interesting. And I know we've talked about
this offline before, but when I think about all of
the information that a chatbot has about a heavy user,
(42:21):
they actually should theoretically be able to target ads at
least as well as Facebook and at least as well
as Google.
Speaker 3 (42:30):
Right, so good to know.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
About that, because Google and Facebook have very hard demographic
data and very like a nuanced layer of cookies that
can track I don't know if, especially as these are
free users, we don't know how much actual personal data.
Like Facebook's big advantage was that when you registered, you
(42:53):
gave them the demographic data they needed to target right right.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
I don't know how much they're collecting, but if they
can still say, well, I know everything that you're interested in,
everything that you've been talking about for the last year,
they should be able to track that back to an
individual user. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (43:11):
I don't know the.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Details maybe, but they've said low billions of revenue. But
it is. It is just interesting because in any I
maybe you know this, I looking through the history of
the computer, have never seen a point when everybody was
just screaming that something that didn't work would work.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
Yeah, it's uh wow, it's hard to it's hard to
remember something that has been you know, this hyped.
Speaker 3 (43:38):
And again I always leave. I always try to approach
this with.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
An open mind because I am, you know, older, so
I tend to be more cynical with experience. But yeah,
I sort of shrug and I'm like, I don't quite
understand the big deal here. Doesn't seem to really do
what it's supposed to do. I mean, I'm still you know,
Gemini has foist it on me every day when I
(44:02):
try to do Google searches, and it's nearly almost always
slightly wrong, which is kind of worse than being completely wrong,
because it lulls you into this false sense of security
and you're like, wait a minute, that doesn't seem right,
and then you go to the source link and it
just got it wrong.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
Like yeah, the beginning of the Google chapter of my
book that's coming out next year is I went to
look for how many people, how many users Google has,
and it's just me going insane as I get an
AI generated answer that's generated based on two SEO articles
that do not cite their sources.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Right, there's a lot of that, so it's taking what
all this kind of garbage data. And I mean, as
an editor, I'm I have for the last fifteen years
been hounding reporters who try to source stuff off the internet.
I'm like, where'd you get that from? How do you
know that's a reliable source? And AI just sort of
absorbs it all and presents and Lodi da, here you go.
(45:02):
They don't have any you know, they don't care, they
don't have any checks. It just comes from wherever. So yeah,
the one, the one thing I would what you were
saying about never seen sort of this much happen. I
do remember before the Segue came out and people were
saying I can't remember who, if it was Steve Jobs
or somebody, but somebody was saying this is going to
revolutionize transportation and change cities.
Speaker 3 (45:24):
And we were like, WHOA, what could this thing be?
Speaker 1 (45:27):
And then it was the Segue. Maybe not, but that
was one very small, isolated thing I don't. Yeah, I
don't recall sort of large scale where everybody in the
industry was saying this is going to revolutionize everything, and
end users are kind of going, I don't know how
many times a day, co pilot comes up on my
(45:47):
Windows PC and I dismissed it immediately because I didn't
really want it to show up. It just sort of
pops up. I hit a key combo too fast. I'm like, thanks, Nah,
I'm good.
Speaker 2 (45:56):
I keep thinking about the thing you said, though, It's
like the conditions that different. But at the same time,
we've read like it's not like we're in a new
frontier of new ideas where everybody has something new that
might work. It's where it almost feels like the end
of something. It feels like the dot com bubble was
created by the excitement about a beginning rather than this.
(46:19):
It is people trying to pretend that something's happening and
that we're not at the end of an ela. I
should say, I don't think we're at the end of society.
Speaker 1 (46:28):
Yeah, I mean, I think we are probably seeing probably
the beginning of new pretty major global shifts and power,
and you know, some of the guiding societal philosophies that
guide that will change. And yeah, there's there's there's a
lot of different things going on right now. You know,
(46:49):
I started a climate section at the NBC and was
very deeply entrenched in climate tech and some of the
climate politics.
Speaker 3 (46:56):
And things around that.
Speaker 1 (46:57):
And you talk to the green piled folks and they think,
you know, eighty years from now, we're all doomed.
Speaker 3 (47:03):
So do I believe that?
Speaker 1 (47:04):
No, not necessarily, but I do feel like things are
changing pretty rapidly and pretty dramatically on a lot of
different fronts, and AIS just kind of this, Hey, let's
let's keep this, let's keep this playbook running this place.
Speaker 2 (47:15):
Yeah, let's keep doing That's really it. It's like keeping
let's keep doing what we've done the whole time during
the dult kombubble, people would trying new shit.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
It was.
Speaker 1 (47:25):
It goes all the way back to semiconductors. I mean, this,
this tech boom has been going on since the since
the nineteen sixties, really in different waves, but it's been
going on and on and on. I mean, I do
think like when Bill Gates said a computer on every
desktop whenever, that was in the eighties, that was nuts.
And then it was a computer on every desk and
in every home, and that was even more nuts, but
(47:47):
it happened. So, you know, I think that it's been
I don't want to say easy, but it's been running
so well for so long that I think everybody just
kind of wants it to keep running.
Speaker 3 (47:58):
And I'm not. I don't know, I'm not. I'm with you.
Speaker 1 (48:01):
I'm not seeing it yet. I'm not seeing a ton
of day to days. I mean, I mean, you know,
you look at the teenage demographic.
Speaker 3 (48:09):
That's kind of who I always go to.
Speaker 1 (48:10):
And my son is fifteen, and he's very cynical about
like he jokes about obvious AI writing and like they
make fun of phrases and terms that are so AI.
And he'll see a you know, a poster and advertisement
he's like, that's so AI and it's it's something that
you scoff at and make it.
Speaker 2 (48:27):
Oh they're fuck, No, okay, AI is fuck. Then I'm sorry.
If you've got teenagers who are making fun of calling
bad stuff AI, right, I don't. I'm actually serious. That
is legitimately lethal. Teenagers dumb people. I'm I'm thirty nine
years old now, like I was, I've never been cooler
(48:48):
a year of my life. But I know that when if,
because that's in because you read a lot of things
that people try and say, well, young people love AI
not be my experience either.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
I don't young people love TikTok. Young people love Instagram reels.
You know, they're on they're on vertical they're scrolling vertical
video all.
Speaker 3 (49:09):
Day and and commony.
Speaker 1 (49:12):
I don't even want to say they love you know,
Snap or any social media because it's all you know,
it's all text change, right, It's all you just get
your different text strings. Like. There's a lot of stuff
that they love. Games, huge online games, you know, participatory games.
But yeah, I don't see them hanging out all.
Speaker 3 (49:30):
Day with their chatbot.
Speaker 1 (49:31):
You know, once in a while, if you have something
you really want to you're curious and you want to
experiment with something, it'll prototype something quite quickly for you.
And I think people do that sometimes and find it useful.
It's like, Okay, this is a prototype, this is cool.
This would have taken me six hours of grunt work
to generate. Thanks for doing that for me. So there
are some you know, I don't want to I don't
want to slam and say it's totally useless in all
scenarios because it's not it's a it's just it's sort
(49:53):
of an extension of a compute. It's just a better computer.
In some ways it helps you do certain things, some fast.
Speaker 2 (49:59):
But some times it's a better that's the other thing.
It's like, I have this growing theory about AI psychosis
being far more common than people think, because I think
that there is something that happens when people use a
large language model and what they extrapolate from there that
makes some people do insane things like I don't know
by two hundred billion dollars worth of data centers and GPUs.
(50:23):
And on one hand, you might argue, oh, that's just
business idiots being business idiots. No, I think such An
Adela and sun Dar Pashai used an LM and went,
holy shit, I need to do this. I mean I
got told once that such An Adella's whole reason that
he started this facade was because he saw chat GPT
(50:44):
and wanted it in Bing. I think that there is
that everyone is experiencing micro versions of Kevin Bruce's Chat
GPT told me to leave my wife thing. It's just
what do you believe AI will do next, Like what
do you think it will do? And what do you
believe will happen if you don't use it today? And
it's just very bizarre. Sorry that was that was more
(51:05):
of a point than a question, I should be clear.
Speaker 1 (51:07):
But how many people are subject to that? I don't
think it's a huge number. Yeah, to some degree. The
folks who are, you know, the sachun Adelas of the world,
are I should say, someone insulated from the trials and
tribulations that most of us experience. They're insulated from their money.
And if you are someone like Sam Altman or Elon
Musk who is surrounded by a cadre of people who
(51:29):
always say yes to everything you suggest and and you know,
are constantly saying you are a genius. You're a genius, man,
You're a genius. I think, you know, some of these
chatbots almost duplicate that mentality, like it's like, yeah, I
want someone to tell me that whatever I'm doing, I
am great and I am special and I have inside
(51:49):
knowledge that nobody else has.
Speaker 2 (51:51):
That's a nice but that's kind of what I'm getting at.
Using a large language but convinces some people that they
are in the field future and creates this kind of
religious feeling around it.
Speaker 1 (52:03):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (52:03):
I hate to explore this idea more. I've just never
I've seen it in like game FAQs, when people would
argue between PlayStation and Nintendo and Xbox. I've seen, but
not like that. You don't have people just saying the
Xbox can do things things it can't.
Speaker 3 (52:20):
But it's part of what we're seeing.
Speaker 1 (52:21):
I think that feeling it's pervasive in our society right now. Regardless,
we have this sort of strong current of anti expert
right the people who've studied this for years are no
smarter than me. I'm really smart because I have my
own special knowledge and.
Speaker 3 (52:40):
Nobody else has it.
Speaker 1 (52:41):
And I'm going to tell you the secret that I've
learned that's, you know, really important.
Speaker 3 (52:45):
I think that.
Speaker 1 (52:47):
Whatever if you want to call it psychosis or that
narcissism that comes out of fifteen years of social media,
like that's old enough to remember. In fact, Facebook didn't
come out until I was already an adult and and
had a child. I mean, Facebook didn't really become mainstream.
I had a two year old kid. So I'm old
and I remember how sort of society changed and how
(53:09):
people interacting with one another changed dramatically as social media
became popular, and it was much more about you're on
stage all the time and look at my life, and
your life is better than my life. We I mean,
there's some of that that's always been around, but it
just wasn't so easy to indulge.
Speaker 3 (53:26):
That side of oneself pre social media.
Speaker 1 (53:29):
So I think, you know, again, everything that was set
in the past just continues along its way. Like I
think again, I don't think AI is necessarily, you know,
the one thing that is different. It's a natural outgrowth
of a lot of different trends that have been happening
for a long time.
Speaker 2 (53:49):
Yeah, I mean, I keep thinking a long term jok
I make is posting it's the beginning of history with
a big smiley face, because I actually worry that that
that's what like, It's not that everything's coming to an end.
It's that one era is ending and another is beginning
aggressively and loudly.
Speaker 3 (54:07):
This is the.
Speaker 1 (54:08):
Dawning of the Aquarius.
Speaker 2 (54:12):
All right, I think that's a great place to end it.
Matt rose Off, editor in chief of The Register, Thank
you so much for joining me.
Speaker 3 (54:19):
All right, Thank you ed a lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (54:22):
Thank you everyone to listen. Thank you everyone to listening.
I'm not going to edit that out. You'll have him
on log this week as well. Maybe I'll chuck you
an extra one if I'm feeling generous. Thanks everyone for
stomaching the four part of last week, and yeah, catch
you soon. Thank you for listening to Better Offline.
Speaker 4 (54:45):
The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
is Mattasowski. You can check out more of his music
and audio projects at Mattasowski dot com, m A T
T O s O W s ki dot com. You
can email me an easy Better Offline dot com or
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and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you
(55:07):
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Speaker 2 (55:11):
Better Offline to check out I'll Reddit. Thank you so
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Speaker 1 (55:15):
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Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm, of course your
host ed zitron and today I am joined for a
dot com special by Matt Rosoff, the editor in chief
(00:25):
of the Register, who has been in Silicon Valley.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
I believe three hundred years. You said it was three
hundred and twenty five. Yeah, so I'm actually a vampire.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
That's nice. Oh, what like Kevin O'Leary and Martin Supreme. Sorry,
Martin Supreme. That's a thing he says in it. Have
you heard about that?
Speaker 1 (00:41):
No, I don't know, but I haven't seen that yet.
Ping Pie doesn't really do it for me.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
I didn't really like it, but there is a bit
in it where Kevin O'Leary goes, I'm a fucking vampire.
I've lived for this many years and I read about this.
I did not like the movie, but I read about it.
I was like, oh, I would actually love it if
this was true. And apparently they did film it with fangs,
and they should have done that. They should have just
(01:05):
had him be a vampire at the end. However, he's
regularly in the sun, so I'm not sure how they
would have squared that circle. AnyWho, my time only computers.
So Matt, you were what were you We're just going
to go straight into it. What were you doing in
the dot com bubble era?
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Like?
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Where did you begin and where did you find yourself
as it progressed?
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Yeah, it's an interesting blast from my very distant past.
But I moved to San Francisco in nineteen ninety two,
sort of the tail end of the Gulf War recession,
so there wasn't much.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
Going on then.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
I was interning doing different kinds of od jobs, copy editing,
doing some of those kinds of things, and then in
nineteen ninety five I joined a little startup that was
going to publish content on the World Wide Web. They
didn't call it content then, I guess it was. They
called it.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
An online magazine.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
They already had a TV network and that was Senet,
So cnet is still out today in a very different format.
But I was employee number forty two there. Started off
as an editorial assistant, and my very first task there
was to come up with an email newsletter, which we
called Digital Dispatch, and it was mostly summaries of stuff
(02:18):
that we were publishing on the site, and then occasional
snarky commentary. I remember a couple of years later, we
did ten reasons why Wired's IPO failed, and one of
them was the prospectus was printed on neon green and
red paper, which we thought was OK, funny and cute
at the time.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
So anyway, that was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
We were, you know, growing at a very rapid pace.
I think I was there from ninety five to ninety nine.
Like I said, I was employee number forty two on
the way in, and I think when I left there
were over five hundred people working there with that. One
was owned by Zif Davis at the time, it was
not Cnet, was an independent company. It had a number
(02:59):
of early venture investors, including Paul Allen, the Microsoft co founder.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
I don't remember the other ones.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
The CEO was guy named Halsey Minor, and no, it
was it was completely you know, it was privately held
and weipo'd in ninety seven or ninety eight, I'm not, oh.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Just before that was just before things started to fall apart, right.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Well, ninety eight was still go go go. I think
it really kind of went on until two thousand and
two thousand and one was when things started to turn. So,
you know, it was fun being a company that was
growing fast.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
I was able to do a.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Whole bunch of different kinds of things. I was writing
TV scripts and doing CD ROM reviews back when multimedia
was a thing, and writing features and I interviewed a
two way pager from this little company called Research in
Motion before the BlackBerry was out, and I interviewed one
of the first MP three players. I think it was
the Rio, and I was like, Wow, interesting idea, but
it can only hold like twelve songs, so this is
(03:58):
a complete waste time. It'll never go was before the
Creative Nomad. Then I think around the same time. I
don't remember which one was first, but yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
I remember the Creative Nomad could have like three hundred
songs on it. I felt like, oh, yes, Sultan of
BRUNEI I was the fanciest man ever, three hundred songs.
How would I ever choose?
Speaker 3 (04:17):
Yeah, that's it, that's right. Yeah. No, this was a
lot less than that.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
I mean, we had to sort of do math and
go backwards and we're like, wait, that's only twelve songs.
That's worthless. So anyway, and then you know, took some
filthy dot com Luker went backpacking for a little bit
with my girlfriend at the time, who later became my wife.
And then when I moved back, moved back to Seattle,
and I think we came back on the day that
(04:41):
Microsoft lost a verdict during its big antitrust case.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Yeah, the MS one.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
Right, Yeah, this was well, this was anti trust.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Basically they had a whole bunch of different charges against them.
Tying the browser to Windows was kind of the big one,
you know, and making deals with PC makers to bundle
certain software and not allowing them to bundle other software
and all kinds.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
And incentivizing bundling MS dos. Yeah, I vaguely know this story.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
Yeah, it was.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
It was really about like Netscape Navigator was the thing,
and you know, that's what we were all using in
nineteen ninety five. It started with Mosaic and it was Navigator,
and then Microsoft built Internet Explorer in the Windows ninety
five and four years later Navigator didn't really exist for
all intents and purposes.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
So it was But anyway, that was the day.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
It was Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, and he ordered them
to be broken into two companies, an APPS company, which
is office and all those products, and an OPS company,
which was Windows. I believe now maybe remembering this slightly
wrong and I don't have a resource in front.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Of YEA very recently covered this and you will back on.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
So but I think that was kind of the peak,
and I think that was actually perhaps the beginning of
the end. So it's even though Microsoft had had very
little to do directly with the dot com bubble, there
was sort of this sense that, oh, the tightest turning anyway,
long story short, I moved back to Seattle and I
found work with this startup. At the time, they were
(06:14):
called a Cadio and the idea was that they were
going to do online education, so they wanted to have
articles written and I was the computers tech guy. We
were going to you know, training people on computer technology.
And it was the most incompetently run company I have
(06:34):
ever seen been a part of. I walked in immediately
realized that I needed to get out.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
So by way of example, they didn't have so you
know what. Yeah, it was this was.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Early two thousands, so this is still this was when
companies were getting funding on a promise and going public
on powerpoints. Still it was still still at the peak,
but we could see it starting to turn. So you know,
these guys had enough money to hire a bunch of people,
and they had a cool loft in Pineer Square, which
is you know, brick building and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
But they didn't.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
So they you know, they hired me, and they're like,
go get some freely, you know, fine, start hiring freelancers,
and we need to get some content up. They had
no way to put the content on the internet. They
didn't have a CMS, they didn't know what a CMS was.
And we were using Visual Source Safe, which is a
Microsoft product used for you know, creating code and sharing code.
It was that level. And I remember later here over,
(07:31):
you know, hearing secondhand that somebody had overheard a very
tense meeting between the CEO and the investors where one
of the investors yelled through a closed door, we might
as well just sell the servers back to the investment bank.
So I quickly got out of there, found a job
at Directions on. Microsoft did that for ten years, and
they were out of business by I believe, early two
thousand and one.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
So about when did it become obvious something was wrong.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
So it was never obvious that something was wrong large scale,
but it was obvious that a lot of the specific
individual companies that were part of this were completely hot air.
There was nothing there. There weren't revenues, there weren't customers,
or they were you know, selling dollars for seventy five
(08:23):
cents basically. So you know, pets dot Com was a
big one, Cosmo dot Com was another one, And all
these ideas came around later and were more nearly profitable
in the second go round. So Cosmo dot Com was
just home delivery. It was like Instacart.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
It's basically Cosmo was Instacom, and pets dot Com was Chewy.
And I looked at Chewy's revenues recently, three point one
billion dollars in a quarter fifty million dollars of profit,
which is good. But also one of those business is
what I hear metrics like that, I get scared.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Yeah, it's fine, it's a you know, it's a low
margin retail business.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
That's fine.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Retail retail's good, you know, it's it's okay, it's real. Yeah,
it's it's you sell things for more than you make
them for. That's that's how it's supposed to work. So
I think there were just so many of those. The
other one was there was a business and I think
they were only based in Seattle, called Lackeye dot com.
And I remember my uh my boss at directions at
the time said that, you know, this is when I
(09:21):
knew that the revolution was impending. Is when you have
a website called Lackeye dot com that is basically a
personal assistant. I guess it was kind of like task Rabbit,
that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Yeah, but even toss grab it has never really is
tosk grab it even profitable.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
They got bought by Ikea, so it's buried now. I
don't I don't think they ever were.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
My lackey dot com. Okay, I I hate to interrupt
to read a Wikipedia page, but it was founded in
April not you know, you know, by a guy called
Brian McGarvey and another guy called Brendan Bonnacle.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
I remember that name. Yeah, I remember that name with
an I right correct, yes.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Yes, yeah. In the memo he had a memo that
was on fuck Company. It said this is still a startup.
And he complains that it is now six forty five
PM and they're only twelve people in our office. We
have sixty four people who work here in Seattle. It's
totally unacceptable. So the more things change, the more things
stay the same.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
I think that's true. Yeah, there are there are absolutely
some similarities and some differences between today and them.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
But what about the the telecom side though, was it
did everybody just think that was going to work out
until it didn't? What was their a point when the
Loosens and the wind stars of the world got scared
or scary?
Speaker 3 (10:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
I was less close to that at the time. I
was pretty focused on end user consumer stuff. But I
remember having friends who were sort of retail trading and
talking to me about Siena, Siena Networks, It's going to
be huge. And I think those busts came a little
bit later, right with WORLDCLM. I think that was maybe
a bit after the doc Bom bust. And I'm a
(11:02):
little bit less familiar with how all of that worked.
But as I understand it, there was a lot of
circular There were a lot of circular deals and deals
that weren't really deals, and deals that were agreements but
actual no money changing hands.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Yeah, it's interesting because as I dig into this, and
I've spent the last week or two digging into kind
of how we got to this conversation, I realized it
seems like there were two very specific The dot com
bubble was actually like two bits. It was the dot
com website stuff, and then the follow up of the
the the what was it the telecommunications fiber.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Boom fiber boom, Yeah, it was, you know, it was
the it was the the websites. There was definitely some
circularity there too. Everybody knew that everybody was buying advertisements
from each other. But you know, you remember AOL bought
Time Warner and then that valuation collapsed. I mean, there
were some really huge deals that turned out to be
(11:57):
in the end worth almost nothing. And then I think
once you're once, you know, once all of those things
fell apart and the end user picture wasn't there A
lot of the infrastructure valuations came crashing down as well.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
What was the moment you knew? Like, when was the moment?
What was was there an event where you went, oh shit,
and yeah?
Speaker 1 (12:17):
When I joined that startup and I wasn't I couldn't
believe they had any money, So that was that was
a spring of two thousand. I was like, it felt
like they were just sort of handing money out to anybody,
and I mean, this guy had a record. I think
he had had a CRM company that competed with Salesforce
that either sold or went public, So he wasn't a
(12:38):
total nobody. It's just they couldn't hire enough people to
actually get anything smart done on time. It just wasn't
It just wasn't working, and everybody was kind of showing
up to the office and play acting. There were some
moments during the nineties that were, you know, kind of crazy,
like see it they funded this party. I played bass
(12:59):
and I was playing base and sort of this pickup
band at work, and they basically rented out the.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
Film more for our holiday party.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
And you know, we played on a stage in front
of twelve hundred or however, maybe the film is not
that big, five hundred people. And then they had a
I can't remember the name of the of the you know,
they had an actual working band come on after us.
But it was a lot of fun. The singer we
were playing with nailed, Janis Joblin. She did a really
spectacular job. We had a couple of good songs. So
but that was those kinds of things were regular, like
(13:30):
that was just expected these big parties, and nobody really
asked where the money was coming from. I do remember
after Senet went public. I don't remember what year this was,
ninety eight or ninety nine. I actually looked at an
earnings report and I was like, oh, we're losing money.
I didn't know you could stay in business and lose money.
(13:52):
How naive I was.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
That's so see, that's the thing I admit as I've
got further into finance in general and learned stuff the
amount of companies that just burn cash and then die,
but also the ones that are burning cash right now,
and the amount of people who just say, yeah, it's
actually fine, it's good that happens. It's like a completely
(14:15):
like a completely different world that has only worked a
few times in the past. It's actually not worked many
many more times.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
Right, most of the time it doesn't work.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
But I think the bet is when it does work,
it pays off spectacularly.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
Right.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
And the question, I don't think Google was ever losing
huge amounts of money, but Amazon did for some years.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Yeah, I've I've looked into it, and the companies that
have actually grown and been successful have never burned anywhere
near as much money as these AI companies. AWS was
like sixty nine billion over nine years, and that was
all of Amazon's Capex, not just AWS focused.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Yeah, yeah, no, they yeah, And again there was to me,
the Internet at large and the World Wide Web as
we used to call it, was a lot more immediately
obviously huge, and it was going to change a lot
of things and how business was done and how media
(15:14):
was distributed.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
It was it was clear.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
It was just a question of when and where the
technology had to go in which parts had to evolve.
You know, you needed consumers to have much more bandwidth
before video became a realistic thing and so forth, and
you know, they were gonna be fits and starts, but
I think everybody pretty much knew that it was not
fake like these things, some of these companies were going
(15:37):
to succeed. Something was gonna happen. When I look at AI,
to me, it does not seem nearly as revolutionary. I
don't even really like to call it AI because it's
not intelligent, but that's the that's the term that we use.
But it's you know, it's right, uh, you know, matrix math,
(15:58):
determinating determined, you know, basically auto complete. So it's interesting.
It can do some stuff that can be valuable in
certain situations. But it doesn't to me feel immediately massively
obvious that this is a huge change the internet did. Yeah,
(16:19):
web browsers did the iPhone. The first time I played
with one of those, I was kind of a skeptic
because I mean, I had a palm pilot and I'd
been yeah, yeah, I had around, Yeah, I had a
compact them, so keep going no, no, you know, and
you're you're you're playing with that stylist. And then someone
brought an iPhone into work and I was like, oh, Apple, whatever,
they're not going to do this, and I was like, oh, responsive,
touch screen, email, autocomplete maps, I'm like, this thing's cool.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
And then it got better from there.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
So yeah, I haven't felt that, and I've used all
the chatbots.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
I've played around with them.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
I don't code, but you know, from what I understand
from people who do, is if you're a non coder,
it can create some serviceable apps just based on your ideas,
which seems pretty magical. But if you do code and
you actually look under the hood, they're not maintainable. You know,
you can't deploy them like they you know, they they
(17:09):
tend to have a lot of problems unless you sort
of know what you're doing. And I certainly know as
a writer, you know, I can immediately detect AI generated
writing and it's not good.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
That's actually a really good thing to focus on. So
when you got into the internet industry, was there that
sense of wonderment. I'm not even being like a shield.
I'm just like because I remember when I first used
the internet in like nineteen ninety seven, I want to say, yeah,
like a child and being amazed by it, but even
like the iPhone moment as well. But when you were
getting into it in like the mid to late nineties,
(17:52):
was there that sense of wonderment and excitement?
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (17:55):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
So.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
There had been online services for a while.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
People used AOL compu serve, and you know, you hang
out in chat rooms and you do these keywords and
it would call up sort of a specific I don't
even remember what they were called, but i'd call them
apps now. But the web was interesting because it was
immediately accessible to everyone. Anyone could theoretically set up a website,
and it was yeah, immediately huge, and it was a
(18:21):
little hard to separate some of the hype from legitimate excitement.
But I remember in San Francisco even in nineteen ninety five,
and you know, you had had wired magazines sort of
sounding sounding the bells for it for several years by
that point. But in nineteen ninety five, everybody was online,
everybody was getting online, and you know, you had tons
(18:42):
of TV commercials, and everybody was talking about the World
Wide Web on the evening news, and it just it
was immediately clear that this was a new thing and
it was a new way that we were going to
do a lot of stuff. Right, So, yeah, there was
there was massive excitement over it.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Was there any kind of AI sorry, I same leading
question then? Were there dissenters? Were there people other than
the obvious news we call call that everyone sends me
every time, you know, the one I'm talking about the dynalltics,
weird gloss things now.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
But it was that descent there was, and I think
a lot of the descent, interestingly, was centered around some
of the same kinds of criticisms that we've heard over
the last five, six, seven years. So it wasn't that
this is stupid or this isn't going to work. It
was you know, there are no guard rails, there are
(19:34):
no there's no regulation. This thing is going to run
a muck. It's gonna you know, how how are we
going to protect against fraud? How are we going to
protect against people, you know, using it for crime? How
are we going to protect against you know, this kind
of information that maybe shouldn't be available to everybody. So
there were those kinds of questions, and people were, you know,
(19:57):
maybe we should slow down a little bit and put
some guardrails and pass some laws around this thing. Most
of that's that, Yeah, most of it didn't get done.
You know, the Telecoms Act, you know whatever, Section two
thirty whatever, the big Omnimus Bill that that was a
part of that was an attempt to deal with some
of that stuff.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
But it was pretty it was pretty lenient.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
It was more about sort of protecting companies from from liability.
But there were some yeah, there was some at least
some thought around it, but.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
But there wasn't just people saying this won't work in
the same way.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Very few, very few, I mean there, you know, I
suppose you could go into the boardroom of a newspaper
at the time and probably would have heard some arguments
that now in retrospect sound insane. But you know, who
wants to read on a screen that was one that
you sometimes heard people want to have a piece of
(20:52):
paper in their hand and you know, print is print
is the way nobody wants to read on a screen,
or you know, this is this is this is sort
of a nerd toy. This is never going to take
off among you know, mainstream people. There were issues with
internet access. It wasn't available everywhere, especially high speed. I
mean we were using pretty low speed modems for a
(21:14):
very very long time, particularly in rural parts of the country.
So there was some skepticism around that, you know, And
part of it, I have to be honest, is I
was in my twenties at the time, so I think
people at that age tend to be much more go
go about the future than perhaps old cynics as as
(21:35):
we are now.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
But there wasn't any kind of well maybe there was,
you can tell me. There wasn't a kind of bifurcation
between people who were like pro internet anti internet in
the same way.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
Nah.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
No, I don't remember that anyway, No, I really don't
think so. Yeah, it was all it was all hands
on deck. I mean, I mean again, like this was
on TV. This is like you know, advertisements, there were
there were commercials. There were people on that evening news,
you know, reaching, reaching mom. You know my parents who
are boomers, They were fully aware and gung ho about
(22:08):
the web by ninety seven or ninety eight, and that's
I think that's who was investing. So, you know, one
of the big differences between then and today it was
these companies were going public and it was really fueled
in large part by retail investors. You know, you wanted
to buy stocks on the stock market in these new
(22:28):
companies that represented the future. So you know, you had
doctors and dentists and you know, professors with a little
money and people putting their retirement savings into these things,
and they were the ones who probably got wiped out
the most in you know, two thousand and one through
two thousand and four.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Yeah, And I mean, was was that before e trade?
Speaker 3 (22:52):
Was it?
Speaker 2 (22:53):
Do you start to call a stockbroker? I literally don't
know how they bought stock back then.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
I realized, Yeah, I think E trade started in the
dot com boom, if I recall late in.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
Nineties, because I remember in England at the time, the
story is about how E trade led to people losing
tons of money, and there was one thing I'll credit
the press with at the time as being like, yeah,
you shouldn't bet on the stock market unless you know
what you're doing, right.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Yes, index funds hold forever.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
That's the that's the random walk down Wall Street, the
only investment strategy that works. But yeah, people were playing,
you know, they wanted they saw these ridiculous returns and
they wanted a piece of it. So yeah, I think
online trading was definitely a thing. You know, you had
the Yahoo Chat forums that's where people would pump and
(23:42):
dump these penny stocks.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
They were all clad and.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Really they were like there were actual pump groups back then.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Oh yeah, I mean yah. Yahoo Chat was sort of
infamous for it. Like you would hear about something, you'd
hear it was a lot like what happened with crypto
in twenty one twenty two. You know, someone issues a
new time and everybody rushes in to buy it and
then it crashed. You know, there's a rug pull and
it crashes, like it was. Those kinds of things were happening.
But Yahoo, I remember being that was the forum that
(24:09):
I was the most familiar with back then. It was
probably going on on AOL too.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
That's magical. Oh, the innocent days. It was the I
remember when I I'm Gonna do the It was a
Rockahaua speech and the end of Blade round of the
things I've seen in telegram groups about icos. But it's
it's kind of it's adorable to hear that stuff happening,
until you remember people lost lots of money. But it
(24:35):
doesn't feel like it doesn't sound like maybe it was
a different media climate, like there was that kind of
almost have There wasn't the noxious part of it where
it's like, oh, if you don't get on the internet,
you're gonna be left behind, You're an idiot, or maybe
I'm wrong.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
Not so much of that, but it was it was
just presumed that this is the future and if you
don't want part of the if you don't want to
be part of the future, that's fine, But you know,
why don't you go be a survivalist and live off
the grid in the woods? Kind of right, It was
just assumed. I mean, it's like, you know, do you
(25:12):
watch TV. There was a time when if you said
I don't have a TV you were very pretentious and
very special. Now it seems like everybody's cutting cable. But
so it was sort of like that. It was just
presumed that everybody was eventually going to get on board.
I mean, who needs a personal computer in their home?
That was a real question in the late eighties, right,
Oh PC on every desktop? Yeah, sure, bill, whatever you say.
(25:35):
Who wants one of these things? And then you know,
you find justifications for it. Oh, well you can you know,
you can pay your bills automatically, and you can do
this and that. And suddenly when Internet Explorer was built
into Windows and everybody could get online, that was the thing,
like that was, oh, of course, everybody has to have
a PC and we're all going to be on the web,
surfing the web.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
It also feels like it was a genuine too, like
a lot of these things would just too early and
run too crazy because the actual fundament of it, it
sounds like, was people were excited to get on the internet,
which was which was obviously a beneficial thing and had
immediate returns, like people could use it and say this
is useful in my life in this manner, right.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
I think the initial thing was access to information. You
could you could find out a lot of things very
fast and actually and there were some communication aspects, right,
You could talk to anybody anywhere in the world pretty easily,
pretty quickly.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
And then other things.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
You know, e commerce was very early, but you know,
suddenly you don't have to go to the bookstore and
ask them to order. I worked at a bookstore for
a year in nineteen ninety, and you know, it was
a thing if you don't have the book in stock,
they come in and you order the book, and then
they come back a week later, and suddenly you just
press a button and the you know, the book will come.
And then they started adding music. There were a lot
(26:51):
of you know, again, the lack of bandwidth among a
lot of consumers did sort of stall the idea of
digital video, but it eventually came around in two thousand
and one or two. That's when YouTube really took off.
Real networks had streaming video and Microsoft.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
Oh real real player.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Yeah, buffer, Remember we're all buffering. I interviewed Rob Glazer
a couple times. You know, he had the right idea.
But again, Microsoft sort of, you know, took that market
pretty quickly with Windows Media Player, and then Apple came
along and I they kind of blew everybody else away. So, yeah,
all of the ideas were there, and I think most
(27:31):
of what we were sort of experimenting with later became
real businesses. I mean, you know LimeWire and all the
sort of music MP three trading sites that was later
late nineties, I guess, early two thousands. That all eventually
became legitimized through Spotify and Apple Music and so on.
(27:53):
So every idea was already there. It was just maybe
it's a little bit underground. Maybe it doesn't work quite right,
it's a little clunky, it's a little cluegy, or maybe
the companies were just you know, they borrowed too much
money too fast and couldn't turn it around.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Which feels almost entirely different to the AI bubble, like
it's they such in a Dela on the morning of
recording this, uh At Davos was saying, Yeah, the thing
that might make the suspeculative bubble if nobody but if
nobody buys it. But if nobody buys AI. Not really,
he's so cool. I love that we live in this area.
(28:27):
I'm going to read you this sentence actually because this
really got me. Microsoft chief executive Search and a Delas
warn that AI risk becoming a speculative bubble unless its
use is spread beyond big tech companies and wealthy economies.
For this not to be a bubble, by definition, it
requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread.
He knowed that a telltale sign of it's abobble would
be if only tech groups are benefiting from the rise
(28:48):
of AI rather than the companies and other sectors.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
Yeah, that's good, good shit self evident. Yes, correct, he's
not wrong.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Creative perhaps if no one uses also, isn't his job.
But nevertheless, there was a question I had. So something
that frustrates me with this whole conversation is how flippantly
people say, oh, it's a bubble, but sometimes bubbles are good.
What was the aftermath like?
Speaker 1 (29:20):
So this is where things get a little bit complicated,
because I don't think that you can really fairly separate
events from other events that happen at the same time. So,
the the dot com bubble did burst, but then you
(29:40):
had nine to eleven happen in September of two thousand
and one, sort of in the late middle of it,
and that literally changed everything. It changed confidence, it changed
where everybody's attention was going. You know, you had money
flowing into completely different places. Everybody got much more conservative
and so forth.
Speaker 3 (29:59):
So I think.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
The real effect of the dot com bust, I mean,
you had a lot of people my age, people who
were in their twenties and the go go nineties, suddenly
lose their jobs or suddenly not have the great paychecks
that they.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
Had become accustomed to.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
And you had a lot of retail traders get wiped out.
You know, some people lost their lost their life savings
or a big portion of their life savings. And you know,
my attitude toward investing has always been caveat empt or
you shouldn't be betting if you can't afford it. You
should put your money in an index fund, and you
should hold on to that until you retire. That's the
safest thing to do. But you know, some people say, hey,
(30:41):
I've got ten percent of this of my holdings are
play money, and I'm just going to make some bets
and see what happens. And then you find other people
who who go too far with it.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
But what about people in tech?
Speaker 1 (30:55):
You know, in tech, most those skills didn't become useless, right,
so the technology was always changing. If you were you know,
learning HTML and JavaScript and Java programming, and then you
could transition into new different kinds of things. The technology
continued to evolve, so people who had those technical skills
(31:15):
could continue forward and find other interesting things to do.
And then, you know, honestly, after the sort of telecoms
bus two thousand and four, two thousand and five, you
had a pretty long boom. I mean, there was the
financial collapse of eight around the housing market, but the
tech industry independently was building a lot of stuff. Tons
(31:36):
of companies got started in the wake of the dot
com bust, and many of those companies are still around today.
So I don't feel like people in the tech industry
were permanently hurt. You know, there was a couple of
years set back, and then they generally were able to
learn new skills, apply what they'd already learned, and go
find other things that some of which turned out to
(31:56):
be really lucrative.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
Right.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
But I think, I think, how can I phrase this?
I think that people are very flippant about the consequences
of a potential bubble collapse. I think that that's really
what I'm that's where my concern you're talking about today today, Yes,
because people compare it to the dult com bubble, and
they say, well, after the dult kombubble, there was that value,
which is completely correct.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
But yeah, again, I think the other thing is about today.
So the circumstances around the world are very different. You know,
ninety two ninety three, the Cold War was over. There
was this peace dividend. They were turning army bases into
(32:43):
national parks. Everybody was sort of enjoying, you know, good times.
There was a book called The End of History by
Francis Fukuyama that's sort of posited.
Speaker 3 (32:56):
Hey, this is it.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
You know, we're here in this permanent utopia world. Of course,
events intervened and I think nine to eleven was the
big turning point there, and there's some other stuff around
that time, you know.
Speaker 3 (33:06):
The contested election of two thousand.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Now, contested elections are such a common thing we don't
really think about them anymore, but that was the first
big one in my lifetime. The situation today, I think
you would agree, is very different. You know, we have
an unprecedentedly chaotic leader in the United States who seems
to be bent on ripping down old world orders that
(33:33):
have enabled stability since World War Two. I mean, if
you're talking about seizing land from a NATO ally, and
you're seeing Europe strike all these free trade deals with
the rest of the world, and so forth, and so on.
We could go on and on about this, but I don't.
I'm not an analytical expert. But the background scenario is
(33:54):
very different, and I think you could almost make a
case for AI being sort of the logical outgrowth of
a certain number of years of rot in the business
and in the economy. And I think you've made that argument.
You know, you can decide where that started. Did it
(34:15):
start in the eighties and nineties when the US started
off shoring and outsourcing everything to China and other countries.
Did it start after that? But it's been somewhat clear
for some time that a lot of the easy sort
of technological gains that we got from the mobile revolution
and from the cloud, those have mostly been gathered like those. Yeah,
(34:39):
and there's not that much more upside. You can get
a little efficiency here and a little efficiency there. Everybody
kind of knows how the internet works, you know, what
advertising looks like, you know, so this sort of to
me seems like it's it's sort of the last big push.
And you know, you have a lot of people in
big bureaucratic jobs who you've written about this, they don't
(35:02):
really produce much day to day. They produce a lot
of emails and a lot of presentations, and they sit
in meeting occasionally they got to make a yes no
decision and they got to you know, mune some data
together and say, Okay, it looks wiser if we do
this instead of doing that. But you know, a lot
of it is performative, and I think, you know, AI
is great for that. I don't have to create the
(35:23):
spreadsheet anymore. I don't have to create the presentation anymore.
I don't have to write the email that no one's
going to read, and then they don't have to read
it because they can have AI summarized for them. I
think it's good for that kind of good enough stuff.
And there are a lot of jobs that are good enough.
But I want to it's a bigger problem with the economy.
I don't think it's all about AI. I think AI
(35:43):
is a symptom rather than perhaps a cause.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
But even then, it's like, can it do presentations? Because
I've never been a like I've genuinely tried just to
see if it could do it. It's never been able
to do it. I think it's an interest.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Yeah, I mean I've seen presentations created with AI that
are pretty good.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
I think you get it, gets you.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
A certain percentage of the way there, and then you
tweak it a little bit.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
Okay, yeah, it's just that. But but then you kind
of look at it and say, great, did we really
need to spend however, many hundreds of billions of dollars
to get a spreadsheet maker. I also think that people
(36:32):
are just being flippant about the idea of a financial
collapse as well. That's what that's what's worrying me as well.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
Right, But again, I think that there are a lot
of potential reasons for a potential financial collapse, and AI
is one of some number.
Speaker 3 (36:51):
I don't think it.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Again, the dot com bust was not entirely attributable to
ridiculous valuations. There were things going on in other parts
of the world. There was a change of in confidence,
and I think here again, you've got you've got a
lot of disruption and a lot of disorder and a
lot of chaos. So there are many many things that
(37:12):
could happen. But I agree, I think people maybe underestimate
how how deep this is. Then again then again, you know,
who are the big investors in this? I mean it's
mostly really large tech companies with massive, massive revenues and massive.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Cash maybe highly anymore though one hundred and seventy eight
point five billion dollars of data center credit deals, you've
got venture capital is actually they yeah, venture capital is
also half a venture capital is going into it. But
the other thing that shocked me as well was back
then in the dot com boom, venture capital was so
(37:48):
much smaller.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
Oh it was tiny, but yeah, you need it was
investment banking is where is where you found the money.
So venture capital though, you know, that's not their money.
They're they're playing with somebody else's money. So whose money
are they playing with? Who are the LPs, Well, we
don't really know, but it's it's personal wealth funds, it's
sovereign wealth funds, you know, it's it's Middle Eastern and
(38:10):
other country sovereign wealth funds. Sure, there's teachers pensions, and
there's university endowments, and there's some other things that that
that those LPs are holding that will actually harm you know,
normal working folk.
Speaker 3 (38:25):
But I think a lot of it is.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
Massive excess wealth at the top of society where people
are looking for new, new kinds of returns, they're looking
for outsized returns because all the easy all the easy
money is sort of already taken. So I don't know
if that. I think where it hurts is when you
think about, Okay, the you know, the real estate carry
on effects, all the people who are employed now and
(38:49):
will be suddenly unemployed. Those those kinds of things could
really hurt. But I just it doesn't seem to me
like you have the retail trader exposure as you did
during the dot com boom. Yeah, okay, if there's a
huge AI bust and Nvidia loses a massive portion of
its value, sure people are going to hurt who have
(39:10):
invested in in video, but they're not going to get
wiped out. I don't see Nvidia disappearing. I don't see Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle.
I don't see any of those companies disappearing as a result, and.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
Neither do I. I think the thing that people need
to understand is that a wipeout isn't going to be
what hurts. It's going to be a draw down. It's
going to be because in Vidia eighty eight percent of
the revenue's data center like and I even looked back
for a premium I date a few weeks ago where
it was the amount of revenue that like Loosened or
(39:43):
Corning or whomever had in those specific segments, or how
weighted they were on their customers, Like I think Loosen's
top customers were eight and T and Verizin, but those
only represented thirteen to fourteen percent. In Nvidia has customers
that make up fifteen to twenty percent of their revue
new each quarter. They have massive centralization around four to
(40:03):
five customers that diversified revenues dropping. It's just it isn't
that in video is going to die. It's the half
to eighty percent of their revenue is going to disappear.
It happened with crypto with them, yeah, I'm really worried.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
They were never as Yeah, they were never as dependent
on Crypto. They've tried a lot of things over the years.
I mean right, they were doing so chips for self
driving cars and all kinds of things.
Speaker 3 (40:27):
I do.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
I am not as technical as the writers on the
registers staff to bias Man, for example, does a great
job covering GPUs and data centers. It is positive that
there are other potential uses for GPUs that could be
very interesting with in terms of high performance computing and
some other things that are AI adjacent, you know, different
kinds of data processing and so forth.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
So it may not what we call AI.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
Even if that you know that those end use cases
and turn out to be eh, you know, vibe coding, eh,
chatbots eh, even though those aren't it. Some of these,
some of the some of the hardware may be repurposable
into other functions. I don't think it. It's just not
at this.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
But not at the scale that they're building.
Speaker 1 (41:11):
Though. No, no, again, I would be stunned if all
of the data centers that are being promised by twenty
thirty are actually built.
Speaker 3 (41:20):
But maybe I don't know.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
I also just don't think that that will be happening.
I just don't see it happening. I am looking through
the old dot com companies, though I really can't find
anything like open AI. They are truly special.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
They are.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
It's like they took a bit of Global Crossing, a
bit of Enron, a bit of loosen but also a
bit of pets dot Com just kind of amazed what
Silicon Valley can still spoot out. No like innovations but
financial collapses like these, We've never seen one this big, folks.
Speaker 3 (41:55):
It's massive. Yeah, it's it's there.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
There are there are a lot of commitments there in
The value is massive, massive, massive. I do think their
announcement last week or their acknowledgment that they're finally getting
into advertising is interesting. And I know we've talked about
this offline before, but when I think about all of
the information that a chatbot has about a heavy user,
(42:21):
they actually should theoretically be able to target ads at
least as well as Facebook and at least as well
as Google.
Speaker 3 (42:30):
Right, so good to know.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
About that, because Google and Facebook have very hard demographic
data and very like a nuanced layer of cookies that
can track I don't know if, especially as these are
free users, we don't know how much actual personal data.
Like Facebook's big advantage was that when you registered, you
(42:53):
gave them the demographic data they needed to target right right.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
I don't know how much they're collecting, but if they
can still say, well, I know everything that you're interested in,
everything that you've been talking about for the last year,
they should be able to track that back to an
individual user. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (43:11):
I don't know the.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Details maybe, but they've said low billions of revenue. But
it is. It is just interesting because in any I
maybe you know this, I looking through the history of
the computer, have never seen a point when everybody was
just screaming that something that didn't work would work.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
Yeah, it's uh wow, it's hard to it's hard to
remember something that has been you know, this hyped.
Speaker 3 (43:38):
And again I always leave. I always try to approach
this with.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
An open mind because I am, you know, older, so
I tend to be more cynical with experience. But yeah,
I sort of shrug and I'm like, I don't quite
understand the big deal here. Doesn't seem to really do
what it's supposed to do. I mean, I'm still you know,
Gemini has foist it on me every day when I
(44:02):
try to do Google searches, and it's nearly almost always
slightly wrong, which is kind of worse than being completely wrong,
because it lulls you into this false sense of security
and you're like, wait a minute, that doesn't seem right,
and then you go to the source link and it
just got it wrong.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
Like yeah, the beginning of the Google chapter of my
book that's coming out next year is I went to
look for how many people, how many users Google has,
and it's just me going insane as I get an
AI generated answer that's generated based on two SEO articles
that do not cite their sources.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Right, there's a lot of that, so it's taking what
all this kind of garbage data. And I mean, as
an editor, I'm I have for the last fifteen years
been hounding reporters who try to source stuff off the internet.
I'm like, where'd you get that from? How do you
know that's a reliable source? And AI just sort of
absorbs it all and presents and Lodi da, here you go.
(45:02):
They don't have any you know, they don't care, they
don't have any checks. It just comes from wherever. So yeah,
the one, the one thing I would what you were
saying about never seen sort of this much happen. I
do remember before the Segue came out and people were
saying I can't remember who, if it was Steve Jobs
or somebody, but somebody was saying this is going to
revolutionize transportation and change cities.
Speaker 3 (45:24):
And we were like, WHOA, what could this thing be?
Speaker 1 (45:27):
And then it was the Segue. Maybe not, but that
was one very small, isolated thing I don't. Yeah, I
don't recall sort of large scale where everybody in the
industry was saying this is going to revolutionize everything, and
end users are kind of going, I don't know how
many times a day, co pilot comes up on my
(45:47):
Windows PC and I dismissed it immediately because I didn't
really want it to show up. It just sort of
pops up. I hit a key combo too fast. I'm like, thanks, Nah,
I'm good.
Speaker 2 (45:56):
I keep thinking about the thing you said, though, It's
like the conditions that different. But at the same time,
we've read like it's not like we're in a new
frontier of new ideas where everybody has something new that
might work. It's where it almost feels like the end
of something. It feels like the dot com bubble was
created by the excitement about a beginning rather than this.
(46:19):
It is people trying to pretend that something's happening and
that we're not at the end of an ela. I
should say, I don't think we're at the end of society.
Speaker 1 (46:28):
Yeah, I mean, I think we are probably seeing probably
the beginning of new pretty major global shifts and power,
and you know, some of the guiding societal philosophies that
guide that will change. And yeah, there's there's there's a
lot of different things going on right now. You know,
(46:49):
I started a climate section at the NBC and was
very deeply entrenched in climate tech and some of the
climate politics.
Speaker 3 (46:56):
And things around that.
Speaker 1 (46:57):
And you talk to the green piled folks and they think,
you know, eighty years from now, we're all doomed.
Speaker 3 (47:03):
So do I believe that?
Speaker 1 (47:04):
No, not necessarily, but I do feel like things are
changing pretty rapidly and pretty dramatically on a lot of
different fronts, and AIS just kind of this, Hey, let's
let's keep this, let's keep this playbook running this place.
Speaker 2 (47:15):
Yeah, let's keep doing That's really it. It's like keeping
let's keep doing what we've done the whole time during
the dult kombubble, people would trying new shit.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
It was.
Speaker 1 (47:25):
It goes all the way back to semiconductors. I mean, this,
this tech boom has been going on since the since
the nineteen sixties, really in different waves, but it's been
going on and on and on. I mean, I do
think like when Bill Gates said a computer on every
desktop whenever, that was in the eighties, that was nuts.
And then it was a computer on every desk and
in every home, and that was even more nuts, but
(47:47):
it happened. So, you know, I think that it's been
I don't want to say easy, but it's been running
so well for so long that I think everybody just
kind of wants it to keep running.
Speaker 3 (47:58):
And I'm not. I don't know, I'm not. I'm with you.
Speaker 1 (48:01):
I'm not seeing it yet. I'm not seeing a ton
of day to days. I mean, I mean, you know,
you look at the teenage demographic.
Speaker 3 (48:09):
That's kind of who I always go to.
Speaker 1 (48:10):
And my son is fifteen, and he's very cynical about
like he jokes about obvious AI writing and like they
make fun of phrases and terms that are so AI.
And he'll see a you know, a poster and advertisement
he's like, that's so AI and it's it's something that
you scoff at and make it.
Speaker 2 (48:27):
Oh they're fuck, No, okay, AI is fuck. Then I'm sorry.
If you've got teenagers who are making fun of calling
bad stuff AI, right, I don't. I'm actually serious. That
is legitimately lethal. Teenagers dumb people. I'm I'm thirty nine
years old now, like I was, I've never been cooler
(48:48):
a year of my life. But I know that when if,
because that's in because you read a lot of things
that people try and say, well, young people love AI
not be my experience either.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
I don't young people love TikTok. Young people love Instagram reels.
You know, they're on they're on vertical they're scrolling vertical
video all.
Speaker 3 (49:09):
Day and and commony.
Speaker 1 (49:12):
I don't even want to say they love you know,
Snap or any social media because it's all you know,
it's all text change, right, It's all you just get
your different text strings. Like. There's a lot of stuff
that they love. Games, huge online games, you know, participatory games.
But yeah, I don't see them hanging out all.
Speaker 3 (49:30):
Day with their chatbot.
Speaker 1 (49:31):
You know, once in a while, if you have something
you really want to you're curious and you want to
experiment with something, it'll prototype something quite quickly for you.
And I think people do that sometimes and find it useful.
It's like, Okay, this is a prototype, this is cool.
This would have taken me six hours of grunt work
to generate. Thanks for doing that for me. So there
are some you know, I don't want to I don't
want to slam and say it's totally useless in all
scenarios because it's not it's a it's just it's sort
(49:53):
of an extension of a compute. It's just a better computer.
In some ways it helps you do certain things, some fast.
Speaker 2 (49:59):
But some times it's a better that's the other thing.
It's like, I have this growing theory about AI psychosis
being far more common than people think, because I think
that there is something that happens when people use a
large language model and what they extrapolate from there that
makes some people do insane things like I don't know
by two hundred billion dollars worth of data centers and GPUs.
(50:23):
And on one hand, you might argue, oh, that's just
business idiots being business idiots. No, I think such An
Adela and sun Dar Pashai used an LM and went,
holy shit, I need to do this. I mean I
got told once that such An Adella's whole reason that
he started this facade was because he saw chat GPT
(50:44):
and wanted it in Bing. I think that there is
that everyone is experiencing micro versions of Kevin Bruce's Chat
GPT told me to leave my wife thing. It's just
what do you believe AI will do next, Like what
do you think it will do? And what do you
believe will happen if you don't use it today? And
it's just very bizarre. Sorry that was that was more
(51:05):
of a point than a question, I should be clear.
Speaker 1 (51:07):
But how many people are subject to that? I don't
think it's a huge number. Yeah, to some degree. The
folks who are, you know, the sachun Adelas of the world,
are I should say, someone insulated from the trials and
tribulations that most of us experience. They're insulated from their money.
And if you are someone like Sam Altman or Elon
Musk who is surrounded by a cadre of people who
(51:29):
always say yes to everything you suggest and and you know,
are constantly saying you are a genius. You're a genius, man,
You're a genius. I think, you know, some of these
chatbots almost duplicate that mentality, like it's like, yeah, I
want someone to tell me that whatever I'm doing, I
am great and I am special and I have inside
(51:49):
knowledge that nobody else has.
Speaker 2 (51:51):
That's a nice but that's kind of what I'm getting at.
Using a large language but convinces some people that they
are in the field future and creates this kind of
religious feeling around it.
Speaker 1 (52:03):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (52:03):
I hate to explore this idea more. I've just never
I've seen it in like game FAQs, when people would
argue between PlayStation and Nintendo and Xbox. I've seen, but
not like that. You don't have people just saying the
Xbox can do things things it can't.
Speaker 3 (52:20):
But it's part of what we're seeing.
Speaker 1 (52:21):
I think that feeling it's pervasive in our society right now. Regardless,
we have this sort of strong current of anti expert
right the people who've studied this for years are no
smarter than me. I'm really smart because I have my
own special knowledge and.
Speaker 3 (52:40):
Nobody else has it.
Speaker 1 (52:41):
And I'm going to tell you the secret that I've
learned that's, you know, really important.
Speaker 3 (52:45):
I think that.
Speaker 1 (52:47):
Whatever if you want to call it psychosis or that
narcissism that comes out of fifteen years of social media,
like that's old enough to remember. In fact, Facebook didn't
come out until I was already an adult and and
had a child. I mean, Facebook didn't really become mainstream.
I had a two year old kid. So I'm old
and I remember how sort of society changed and how
(53:09):
people interacting with one another changed dramatically as social media
became popular, and it was much more about you're on
stage all the time and look at my life, and
your life is better than my life. We I mean,
there's some of that that's always been around, but it
just wasn't so easy to indulge.
Speaker 3 (53:26):
That side of oneself pre social media.
Speaker 1 (53:29):
So I think, you know, again, everything that was set
in the past just continues along its way. Like I
think again, I don't think AI is necessarily, you know,
the one thing that is different. It's a natural outgrowth
of a lot of different trends that have been happening
for a long time.
Speaker 2 (53:49):
Yeah, I mean, I keep thinking a long term jok
I make is posting it's the beginning of history with
a big smiley face, because I actually worry that that
that's what like, It's not that everything's coming to an end.
It's that one era is ending and another is beginning
aggressively and loudly.
Speaker 3 (54:07):
This is the.
Speaker 1 (54:08):
Dawning of the Aquarius.
Speaker 2 (54:12):
All right, I think that's a great place to end it.
Matt rose Off, editor in chief of The Register, Thank
you so much for joining me.
Speaker 3 (54:19):
All right, Thank you ed a lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (54:22):
Thank you everyone to listen. Thank you everyone to listening.
I'm not going to edit that out. You'll have him
on log this week as well. Maybe I'll chuck you
an extra one if I'm feeling generous. Thanks everyone for
stomaching the four part of last week, and yeah, catch
you soon. Thank you for listening to Better Offline.
Speaker 4 (54:45):
The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
is Mattasowski. You can check out more of his music
and audio projects at Mattasowski dot com, m A T
T O s O W s ki dot com. You
can email me an easy Better Offline dot com or
visit Better Offline dot com to find more podcast links
and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you
(55:07):
go to chat dot Where's Youread dot at to visit
the discord, and go to our slash.
Speaker 2 (55:11):
Better Offline to check out I'll Reddit. Thank you so
much for listening.
Speaker 1 (55:15):
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Ed Zitron
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