April 9, 2024 • 49 mins
Ever wonder why Google results are getting worse, or why you aren't seeing your friends on Instagram? It's all because of the growth-at-all-costs economy that's swallowed the tech industry, where the user experience takes a back seat to monetizing every interaction with the platforms you used to love. Ed Zitron is joined by Cool Zone Media's Robert Evans to walk you through the economic theory that's destroying the tech industry from within.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
There Are No Girls on the Internet, as a production
of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridge Todd and this
is There Are No Girls on the Internet. Y'all know.
I feel that we don't have enough good media podcasts
that are critical of technology and the people will make it.
I don't know what it is about the podcast space.
(00:25):
I feel like it just encourages a lot of really
spawning tech coverage, which I think makes us all less
informed and by extension, less safe. That is why I
am thrilled about Better Offline, a new podcast from Cool
Zone and veteran journalist Ed Zatrone. If you like the
kind of conversations that we have on There No Girls
on the Internet, I think you'll like it, So check
out the first episode and be sure to subscribe.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Aol Zone Media.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host. That's it, Tron.
I've spent the last fifteen years in tech, both as
a rapport and a public relations executive career. I've realized
that many see the tech industry as kind of a monolith.
It's actually a lot simpler than you'd imagine, and it's
my mission with this podcast to got through the buzzwords
and nonsense and explain to you how venture capital and
(01:12):
big tech are trying to change the future for better
or for worse. Today, I'm joined by Robert Evans of
cool Zone Media to break down a theory I have
that is pretty much core to everything I think about
and we'll talk to you about on this podcast.
Speaker 4 (01:34):
Thank you for having me ed. I love that we're
coming on to talk about this because the concept you're
about to introduce was like the thing that made me
reach out to you about doing this show, or at
least one of the major ones. I think everyone has
this feeling that like something is fucked up and wrong.
We can remember this period of like optimism about technology
and the Internet, and not just feeling excited about like
(01:57):
new shit that we could buy, but feeling excited about
the things that technology was going to bring us, the
promise of like the new digital age, and that all
fell aside to be replaced by this looming sense of
doom so quickly that I don't think a lot of
us have a good idea about like why it happened.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
And you know what, I think that's actually a great
place to start with a very simple question, why does
it feel like the tech we use every day is
getting worse. Look your search results. They're full of sponsored
content and articles that don't actually answer any questions, or
just a big thread of people asking the same question
without ever getting an answer. Your friends aren't popping up
(02:38):
on Instagram. You're constantly getting product emails, notifications pop up,
spam emails, and people you've maybe spoken to once to
buy some do dad. But then you look at the
news and seemingly every tech company is making billions of dollars,
growing at this alarming, almost unsustainable rate, or while laying
(02:59):
off ten of thousands of people a year. And that's
because there is a problem at the center of the
tech industry, and actually the market's at large. It's a
cancerous problem, and it's at the fabric of how capital
is deployed in modern business. Public and private investors, along
with the markets themselves, have become entirely decoupled from the
concept of what good business truly is, focusing on only
(03:22):
one goddamn thing, only one noxious, shitty metric growth in
the row economy, products are made worse, customers are abused,
labor is disposable, and executives are getting richer every single day. Now,
growth in this case is not necessarily just about being
(03:43):
bigger or better. It's just about more. It's always more.
Everything must be generating more money, must be having a
higher headcount, even when laying people off. No, the problem
here is growth in this case is not necessarily about
being bigger or better. It's just about more. It means
(04:06):
the companies generating more revenue, high evaluations, and gaining more
market share. And then it's looking around and saying, you know,
that's just not enough. We must have more. Businesses are
expected to be. In fact, they're rewarded for being so
eternal engines of capital. They must continue to create more
and more shareholder value while hopefully at some point providing
(04:29):
a service of some kind to a customer in the
public markets. This means that companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft,
they're all rewarded for having these unfocused, capital intensive businesses
that are also involved laying off tens of thousands of people.
Over the last few years, hundreds of thousands of tech
workers have been laid off as multiple tech companies have
(04:51):
been worth half to three quarters to even a trillion dollars.
It's ridiculous.
Speaker 4 (04:58):
Yeah, it's I think like one of the really important
things to nail in here is that, like, this isn't
a question of profitability. The fact that you tip it
to growth is so important because like the issue is
not that these companies are not profitable, Like profit has
nothing to do with these decisions. It's about all I
mean Abida does, which is basically like profit over costs
(05:18):
and stuff. But it's like it's this this question of
like growth, right that if you're not if you're not
returning this kind of algorithmically scaling growth, then your company
is seen as a failure by a lot of the
people who who are responsible for like the financial decisions.
And so all of these choices that are kind of
choking the Internet out and making the stuff we use
(05:40):
every day work less aren't about It's not a question
of the company could can't be profitable if we don't
do this, it's that we won't have the right number
on a sheet to show somebody.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
And Microsoft is actually a really good example. So Microsoft,
of course they bought Activision Blizzard for sixty eight billion dollars. Recently,
they then even more recently downsize the gaming division at
the cost of about nineteen hundred jobs, and then they
became more valuable than Apple in the process. In December,
(06:11):
shares of Spotify jump by nearly seven point five percent
upon the news that it was slashing seventeen percent of
its workforce, adding nearly two point six billion to the
company's market cap. And the process. None of these companies,
of course, were punished for their poor planning, or their
stagnating products, the mismanagement of human capital, or their general
lack of any real innovation. And it's because the number
(06:33):
kept going up, and that is all that seems to matter.
Speaker 4 (06:38):
Yeah, And I like, when I was a kid kind
of questioning why stuff like layoffs happen, you know, where
my dad got laid off from his job and tech
and stuff, it was always framed to me as like, well,
these are you know, companies aren't charities. They have to
like do this to turn a profit otherwise they can't
afford to operate. And I think it's so crucial that
(06:58):
like that is not at all what's happening here.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
Yeah, Microsoft had twenty two billion dollars in profit. Yeah,
their last arnings. These companies are fine. Google when they
did mass layoffs last year and in yes, twenty twenty three,
they had like ten billion dollars in profit. These companies
are in the green and they're fine. There's no reason
to lay off these people other than the fact that
(07:23):
they can and they don't need them anymore. Or perhaps
they just ran the company in this big, shitty, messy way.
And nowhere is that more obvious than with Meta.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
Oh god.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Yeah, So back in October of twenty twenty two, I
said that Mark Zuckerberg was going to kill Meta. Perhaps
I was a little bit early on that one, but
I genuinely think that they're on the path to death.
So my argument is that their user numbers are declining.
They will occasionally have a time when they go up
by the percent, perhaps, but then they'll drop. But also,
(07:57):
the user experience of Facebook and in Instagram has just
become awful. They spend these insane amounts of money, tens
of billions of dollars on Meta's Reality division, which is
where they stick the horrible VR experiences that everybody hates,
and the term metaverse. But what was crazy was Mark
Zuckerberg didn't get punished for literally lying about the metaverse.
(08:21):
The street did not mind the fact that he very
clearly misled everybody in the announcement of Meta, he played
a video of a bunch of stuff that no one
can do is technologically impossible, shit jumping through things all
around you with no headset, completely insane. The stock had
a little bit of a wobble, but nothing happened. Yet.
(08:41):
Once he fired eleven thousand people and claimed that twenty
twenty three would be the Year of Efficiency, the market
loved him double digit increases in the price of Meta shares.
Nothing happened to Zuckerberg with the next part, though, because
he also lost thirteen point seven billion dollars on the metaverse.
Thing that has never made the many money.
Speaker 4 (09:00):
Yeah, and for some reference, thirteen point seven billion dollars
is about the GDP of Rwanda. Like that, that's how
much that's a rwanda worth of losses he's lost to
Rwanda in his in his metaverse.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
Bet it's actually a bit more as well, because recently.
Speaker 5 (09:17):
It's more than it is more than a rwanda. Yes,
it's it's actually multiple. It might even be as many
as three rwandas. Because an estima from last year suggested
that he's lost nearly forty two billion dollars on the metaverse.
Speaker 4 (09:31):
Jesus Christ, So yeah, that's that's about that's almost three
and a half macedonias.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
And it doesn't matter to the markets. You'd think a
public company that makes his money meta off of social
media experiences and selling ads on them, you think the
markets would care. The Instagram, one of their largest products,
one of their big money makers, an app for sharing
and following your friends photos and videos, no longer reliably
(09:57):
shows you content from those you follow. That's because Meta
must simply interrupt your feed with sponsored content based on
and actually impossible to define amount of data. It is
not obvious how they choose. There are things that have
appeared on my Instagram that I've only ever said out loud.
It's very strange. And this is because it doesn't matter
if the product sucks, if Meta is growing by double
(10:20):
digit percentages, if they're making billions of dollars, even if
they're fucking the user and the process. Another great example
for you is Google. It doesn't matter that Google's aipower
Gmail plugin literally makes up it hallucinates email conversations. But
because they put AI on Gmail, Google's market cap goes up.
Everyone loves Sanda Pishaei, despite the fact that he gets
(10:43):
paid two hundred and eighty million dollars and lays off
tens of thousands of people seemingly all the time. And
it really doesn't matter. And this is one that really
bothers me because I think we're all kind of stuck
with Amazon. The Amazon experience is even worse. You go
on there and you spoon or Spatula, and there's eighty
seven different knockoffs with names that sound like someone had
(11:07):
a seizure while typing that skib spatula eleven dollars will
deliver in three minutes. But because Amazon is able to
show double digit percentages of growth every year, yay, it's fine.
It doesn't matter that the product sucks. No, no, no, no.
Only a few things really matter when it comes to
big tech and their oh outsized valuations, layoffs, growth, and
(11:30):
the promise of growth no matter how faint or how speculative.
The markets lack any long term thinking, and they lack
the analysis that would actually force businesses to become sustainable
and make great products. And when I say sustainable, I
don't mean anything about the environment. I mean and this
is a crazy concept, Robert. This one's going to really
blow you away. That they make more money than they
(11:53):
spend and don't have to fire people all the time.
Speaker 4 (11:55):
Wow. Yeah, what a concept in business.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
If the market's actually care to about sustainable companies that
could last the test of time without constantly burning capital
and firing people, the markets might not have ignored the
fact that Meta got a four hundred and ten million
dollar fine from the EU under the General Data Protection Regulation,
which is the laws that govern data use and customer
(12:20):
data in Europe. And they also would have probably noticed
the fact that European users now have to deliberately opt
in to share their data. Now, as a little aside,
Facebook makes their money off of using cookies and various
other means of getting your data and then presenting you
with ads based on that. Some of it comes from
(12:41):
how you use the platform, but a lot of it
comes from this very insidious hidden tracking. What's happened here
is that European users will no longer have that by default.
They will have to choose whether to help Mark Zuckerberg
by another fifth of Hawaii.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
Maui, just maui.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
Oh, I'm sorry, terribly sorry. I wouldn't want to hurt
mister Zuckerberg. But what's really bad about this is statistically
users do not like opting into these things. Only about
twenty five percent of iOS users have chosen to opt
in to app tracking, which was a feature that was
actually added a few versions of iOS ago to your iPhone,
your iPad and so on and so forth. And by
(13:24):
the way, this means that basically every app is kind
of on notice if it's an Apple device. Now users
know when they might be sharing their data, and it's
genuinely a threat to a lot of the tech ecosystem
that a lot of people don't know. In fact, Meta's
business model is intrinsically linked to the repurposing of customer
data into a targeting but the markets don't seem to care.
(13:49):
And I get it. It might seem unthinkable that mister
Zuckerberg's fancy party could come to an end, but we
really need to be clear about something. Meta's core advertising
models depend heavily on things that in the next decade
will likely become impossible to do legally. They might not
even be possible technically because now Apple is adding apptracting transparency,
(14:12):
which have kind of mentioned with the iOS update, and
this means that people are first of all aware of
when their date is being shared and they're probably going
to tell them to pound sand. There are other different
changes that are happening as well, alphabet which Google of
course they're going to be retiring third party tracking cookies.
Meta is kind of at a point where if anyone
(14:33):
was paying attention, they'd be a little bit more worried.
And that existential threat is why Mark Zuckerberg is so
desperate to distract you with dreams of the metaverse. It's
so desperate to make you think that meta will be
the thing that builds the artificial general intelligence, which is
just the buzzword for an AI that can have kind
(14:56):
of human level intellect, despite the fact that most generative
AI right now just makes shit up and when you
really look at it. And this is what confuses me
about how much this company's worth. Hundreds of billions of dollars.
Their other products don't make that much money. And Zuckerbug's
last big idea, the one that he changed his goddamn
(15:16):
company name for, lost them billions of dollars forty two billion,
probably be sixty billion next year.
Speaker 4 (15:23):
God.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
Yeah, the street loves six.
Speaker 4 (15:25):
Or seven Macedonias.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
Yeah, multiple Macedonias there. Since I published my original thoughts,
on the row economy, their share process is more than doubled.
It was one hundred and seventy seven dollars then and
it's now four hundred dollars right now. It's despicable.
Speaker 4 (15:49):
Yeah, I think the thing you have to understand when
you look at like, how can a company be burning
money at this rate and their stock price increase as
much as Facebook has or Metas has. I guess we
have to call it. I don't. I still don't like
calling it that. I feel like that's giving him a win.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
Yeah, it's it's not fair.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
It's not fair. But I think part of what you
have to understand is that like the people buying the stock,
like their vested financial interest is in it, continuing to like,
this is not all that different from what was happening
with n FTS right in that like there is this
there is very much a group of people with a
(16:28):
vested interest in that stock price raising well above what
could actually be justified by the performance of the business,
and the people who are making a fortune on that
right now, understand that it is a limited timeframe that
this game will work in. I don't know that Mark
fully does. He may he's he may be to some
extent a little deranged himself at this point. But I
(16:50):
think there are a lot of people who absolutely do
understand and are heavily invested in Facebook now, trying to
get as much of that as they can while it lasts,
but they understand that it's not going to last forever.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
And I think there is a big fall of Rome
style story coming for tech, and I think the rot
economy is behind it because so much of tech has
become engineered to growth at all costs. It's a phenomenon
that controls everything. And I think the place where it
hits the most people because you know, Instagram's annoying, Facebook's annoying,
(17:23):
but you can kind of get around it. But I
think the place that hits home the most is Google. Yeah,
so the thing that everyone knows Google for is of
course Google Search. Used to be a place where crazy
idea you go and you type in a thing, tip
tap tap search, and then a bunch of results come
up that are actually useful. Now it's a labyrinth full
(17:44):
of optimized garbage. Search engine optimization is an important thing
to remember here, which is companies have worked out how
to trick Google into making you see their link rather
than Google finding a useful thing. This is partially ruined
Google Search. But the other problem is adds sponsored content
(18:06):
and of course artificial intelligence crap. So Charlie Wazel over
The Atlantic, he argued a couple of years back, he said,
Google Search, what many consider an indispensable tool of modern life,
is dead or dying. And I agree. Users have to
effectively find a way to cheat and con Google into
giving them what they want. They add things like, I
don't know you put PC repair error. Put the error
(18:29):
in plus read it to get anything approaching a reliable answer.
If you go and type a regular tech problem in
as I mentioned earlier, you just get a lot of shit.
You just get a bunch of things that it will
seem right. You'll say, oh, this is how to fix
Era forty two on my iPhone. Cool, and then you
click through and there's not actually really much useful content.
(18:52):
It's have you tried resetting your iPhone? Is your iPhone broken?
Is something wrong? Have you tried restarting your iPhone? Useless? Garb.
But nevertheless, pushing traffic towards media outlet's the kind of cretinous.
Speaker 4 (19:05):
Yeah, And that's like, I think it's important both as
you noted, a lot of the fucking worst shit in
tech can be strangled by stuff like what the EU
has done to force the companies to not allow you
to be opted in on stuff that's directly against your interests.
And likewise, if that were to be, if that were
the kind of thing that we could like make more
(19:26):
moves like that in the United States. You're not just
strangling the worst parts of big tech with that, You're
strangling a lot of really predatory, toxic media with that.
That all of their money comes from that kind of
shit one way or the other. That like, they are
an integral part of this and can be harmed by
like doing damage to this fundamentally dishonest way of doing business.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
And Google spends decades, they claim, trying to improve the
quality of organic results, but it's over a decade has
been easily gained anyone who knows how to create an
algorithmic headline, a headline that will make the Google spider
that looks over all the websites say this is the thing,
this is the answer. I personally don't know whether Google
(20:13):
does this deliberately or whether they've simply lost track of everything,
whether the evil parties are winning, but you mention media
companies and these predatory ones. The problem is it's not
just predatory ones. A large chunk of modern media is
obsessed with affiliate marketing, which is you'll see these things,
which is like best apps for blah blah, and those
(20:34):
will be affiliate links, yeah, which give them a little
bit of little bit of money, or best super Bowl
deals again, a little bit of cash, little bit of
money every time you buy something through it. And it's
turned a large chunk of the web, but especially Google Search,
into this complete slot, and without finding a way to
(20:54):
negotiate with it, you're offered this kind of fragmented buffet
of content based on what Google kind of thinks you
want to see, but it's more based on how much
money Google is paid and how often Google has been trigged.
Let's be honest, and I think it's fair to argue
that Google no longer provides the best results to any query.
(21:15):
It provides an answer that it believes is most beneficial
or profitable, which can sometimes be the thing you want,
isn't always.
Speaker 4 (21:25):
I think one of the problems is that I don't
know of a search engine that I would say is
better than Google. In the way that Google used to
be better than anything else. Right, and I'm talking ten
years ago. I do know there are search engines and
options that are better than Google at certain things. I've
come to learn that, like, if I use Perplexity AI,
it'll be worse than Google at a bunch of stuff,
(21:45):
but there are a few specific things it's better at,
and like that has increasingly become how I use search, right,
is that I cycle through different options with the same
question to try to figure out, like, well, who's going
to fuck me least on trying to get this information?
Speaker 3 (22:01):
And it sucks as well, because sure we all know
that any free service online isn't free. There is some
way they're making money, and that's fine, you've got a service,
cost money, whatever, But at some point how much profit
is too much? And also how can you justify this
much profit while making things so much worse? And I
(22:25):
mean the result is that it just sucks. It sucks.
Googling sucks now, It's an exercise in pain. It leads
you to a bunch of content that is so obviously
engineered to get your clicks rather than actually provide any service.
That the web is slower, this makes the Internet slower.
(22:45):
It makes the flow of information between people and countries worse.
And what's worse is Google loves this monopoly and they
pay a pretty penny to keep it. They pay Apple
eighteen bills billion dollars a year, and this came out
in a recent US versus Google antitrust case. Eighteen billion
(23:07):
dollars a year to be on your iPhone, to be
on Apple devices. It's not because they're better. It's not
because Apple even thinks that they couldn't do better. This
is specifically to stop Apple trying and to make your
lives worse so that Google can make their search worse,
to make more money and give some Darpashi two hundred
(23:29):
and eighty million dollars. And it's depressing. It's something that
makes me I have to fight the cynicism every time
I use Google. This is a problem that hits billions
of people. This is a real thing. And this isn't
an attack on any journalistic outlet. But where the fuck
(23:49):
is the horror here? This is a horrifying thing. This
would be like if certain freeways just randomly led you
to a different place because someone paid the dotam.
Speaker 4 (24:00):
It would be like if we had a I don't
want to oversell this, but like what we're talking about
is there was a brief period that for the first
time in human existence, all knowledge ever collected and earned
by human beings was easily accessible to the vast majority
of people if they had an Internet connection, and that
(24:22):
is becoming no longer the case with rapidity and it
is it is a problem that kin to like if
we had a cure for cancer and then we decided
to start like breaking it if you didn't buy like
the pancreatic cancer bonus pack like like it is, it
is that big a problem, Like when you think about,
like what it means for all human knowledge to be
(24:43):
accessible and then to throw that away so that Sundar
Pachai I can get two hundred and eighty million dollars
a year. It is an obscenity.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
And then you have the level of from that as
well as think about it from those of us who
spend I don't know, twenty two of twenty four hours
a day online and we're aware of what SEO content
looks like search engine optimization. There content that is built
just to rank highly on Google, to send money to
an out there and traffic to an out there. We
know what that looks like. We know when we are
(25:13):
being misled. We know when the flow of our information
is being interfered with. I don't argue that most people do,
and this isn't their fault. This is a nuanced topic,
but this is horrifying. Google has, like every major tech company,
focused entirely on what will make revenues and market share increase,
even if the cost of doing so is just destroying
(25:35):
its entire legacy and interrupting the free flow of information
around the world. Last year, they launched their own Barred
AI to compete with being Microsoft Search Engine and their
Chat GPT integration. By the way, Chat GPT, all these
generative AI things, Yeah, they make stuff up. They hallucinate it.
Speaker 4 (25:53):
Oh yeah, no, they hallucinate more than I do. And
I did have permanent damage to my brain by experimenting
with Sulgarann Kimmel.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
And what was crazy was bing AI came out and
immediately started hallotinating things. BARDII. Google did a media day
and they showed a demo of BARTII and you thought,
for a second, oh shit, this might replace search engines.
This might be a moment where they sell us back
an experience we had before and then literally in the
demo it made a factual error. Yeah, Google attempted to
(26:26):
sell us back search engine results and then provided us
just another broken Google kind of like JADGBT is just
a broken form of knowledge.
Speaker 4 (26:34):
Well, and didn't they also or was that Microsoft that
absolutely like lied in the demo and like it pretended
that they were showing live results when it was really
something they'd curated.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
I'm not sure which one it was, but seemingly every
company does some sort of con like this. It sucks
and it just it doesn't help anyone. And you'd think,
and we're describing what is a big shitty mess, we're
described being something that afacts billions of people, that was decayed,
a very important product. You think the markets would respond negatively,
(27:08):
and you would be wrong. There was a couple percentage
points that got shaved off Google when they had that
initial wobble with barred AI, and then it went right
back up. The markets. They bloody love that Microsoft is
invested in chat GPT. They love the open AI is
partially being meddled with by Microsoft, despite the fact that
that company does not make any profit. And that's because
(27:31):
the markets do not prioritize innovation. They don't prioritize sustainable growth,
companies that can last on their own without screwing over customers.
They don't care about stability. The result is that companies
don't function with the intent of making good businesses anymore.
(27:51):
They want businesses that kind of seem right there, kind
of feel good, and they sell a product and they
make money. But I don't really care about anything else
as long as it keeps growing exponentially ten eleven, fifteen
to twenty percent every quarter. It's disgraceful, sadly, the rock
(28:19):
economy and its growth at all costs. Fuck. The customer
mentality isn't limited to big tech startups, so private companies
that are invested in by venture capital firms private equity firms.
They're regularly pumped full of venture capital dollars enticing users
with a subsidized product, meaning that they basically sell something
a massive loss to pump up their user numbers. That
(28:41):
gradually becomes worse and worse and more expensive over time
as they attempt to reach some sort of vague stability.
Speaker 4 (28:50):
I think really crucially too, like they pump up the
price after they've killed everyone who provided maybe a better product,
but yeah, charged more money for it, Like it's the
uber effect, right.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
Oh, and I will get to uber because a big
part of this, and it's what Corey doctor O calls
in shitification, which is a painful neologism that actually pretty
accurate in describing the startup ecosystem. A big part of
that is they get pumped full of these venture dollars
and they become these horrifying companies that are not good companies.
(29:26):
They burn capital, they barely make anything, but they destroy
businesses that say run based on offering a product that
users paid for that is priced higher than the cost
of the product, making the company something known as profit.
Speaker 4 (29:39):
Yeah, and I think that's I think that's so im important,
especially for like the younger people who maybe you never
fell for it. I did for a little while in
the early two thousands fall for some of Google shtick. Yeah,
because the thing that they delivered for a while was miraculous,
like great using Google before it exists, like when it
(30:02):
like when it first came out, Like the degree to
which it was superior to any other way to access
knowledge that it ever existed was wild, and like you
wanted to believe maybe these people are not a bunch
of fucking demons.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
And it was don't be evil that used to be
that tagline hit anymore, No zop, how don't you go?
Now it's don't comma be evil with an exclamation.
Speaker 4 (30:28):
They did a lot of lots of me and I
don't know that's it's a it's a foolmy once sort
of situation. I'll never I'll never love again.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Yeah, it is enough. And seeing Google decay, by the way,
really has That's what's jokified me. That's what's driven me
a little insane. But then when you look up the
startup side and you now that you when you're aware
of the rots economy and you're aware of in shitification,
you can kind of watch it in real time, and
it drives you a little crazier still because there is
(31:00):
a very abusive cycle here. Companies are born, they're funded,
and they're grown in this unnatural way where they're subsidized
on It's funny a lot of these right leaning venture
catalysts they hate welfare, but they love putting startups on it.
Because venture capital exists in many ways at times in
the tech industry to keep companies alive that should be
(31:22):
left to die, and they would have that same attitude
to a regular person who could not meet their bills
through unsustainable spending or even sustainable spending. Nevertheless, they're fucking hypogrittes.
But the problem is with these companies as well, is
their services. Because they are not sustainable, eventually have to
become worse. They grow the dependence of the market, they
(31:45):
kill everything else in the market, and then they make
them worse in shitifying them Again, Corey, love your buddy,
but no terrible term, great idea.
Speaker 4 (31:54):
I like, yeah, I think we could all agree. He's
got the idea, right. It is really hard to get,
like your mom to buy into using that term.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
Yeah, a little bit epic bacon for my taste. Look,
if these stars were held to real standards, crazy ideas
that a business should make more money that it spans
and be able to survive independent of investor capital, there
are a lot of startups that would just die. In fact,
that's kind of happened in twenty twenty three. There was
a phenomenon known as the zero interest free period, when
(32:26):
it was just easy for venture capitalists to get a
bunch of money at low interest or zero percent interests
that went away into late twenty twenty two early twenty
twenty three. As a result, venture capitals suddenly realized, ah,
are we just spending money on bullshit? So they killed
the startups. They just pulled the plug. They didn't send
them any more money. There were no more venture rounds,
(32:47):
and real companies, good companies died because no one got investment.
And it's sad, but don't worry. I'm major a promise
and I'm keeping to it. We've got to talk about Uber.
Uber is the ultimate rottic economy startup.
Speaker 4 (33:01):
Yeah, it was like that. It was the thing where,
you know, unlike with Google, there was no like trade off, right, Like,
nothing was getting harmed with Uber. You always knew the
company was evil, but also it was so much easier
to get a fucking ride when you were like hammered,
right Like, it did make a problem go away for
a lot of.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
People, and at first it wasn't. When Uber launched in
twenty eleven, it was mostly with like town cars, black
cab services. So when we'd call them back home, I
guess you'll just live. I don't know there's an American term,
I'm sure, But nevertheless, you were getting these Lincoln town
cars and you were able to call them and it
was kind of magical and you were like, oh, wow,
(33:39):
we could do this. Eventually, they'd launch uber x. Anyone
can pick up a phone and start driving their car
for money with Uber. The press at the time, because
everyone was kind of still thinking that tech was the
good guys, kind of let it go by that these
people were paid below minimum wage, they had questionable insurance policies,
and absolutely goddamn profit. They were screwing the drivers while
(34:02):
also not actually building a sustainable company. Very confusing to me.
Uber only became profitable last year. They had a three
hundred and twenty six million dollar operating profit in August
twenty twenty three. To get there, it had to burn
thirty two billion dollars.
Speaker 4 (34:18):
Hey, you gotta spend money to make money.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
Yeah, what an incredible return. Just but for the sake
of clarity, it's also worth noting that Uber had previously
reported profitable quarters, but they didn't come from actually providing
rides or delivering food or any kind of business. They
were just selling stuff they'd bore. It's just Uber frustrates me.
(34:42):
Their business model is just incredibly precarious and relies exceedingly
heavily on governments failing to impose labor laws, so much
of their existence is predicated on being able to screw
general contractors. Its continued existence would not have happened without
local authorities. Without local authorities seeding ground to these companies
(35:07):
because at the time they were like, yeah, taxis kind
of suck. Taxis are bad, sure, And of course Uber
needed a bunch of money, with the largest amount of
that coming from the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund three point
five billion dollars.
Speaker 4 (35:20):
Uh huh.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
And also Uber just burns capital. They burned billions of dollars,
and their share price is doubled in the last year
and now has a larger market cap than Ford and
Stilantis combined. The markets are on crack.
Speaker 4 (35:36):
It's it's so fucking frustrating. It's like if it's like
if there were a network of guys running those shell
games where you put like a dollar and wear three cups, right,
and some VC guys were like, hey, just give someone
money every time they pick a cup, no matter what
cup it is, and then we'll also buy up all
of the ATMs and shut them down. So this is
(35:56):
the only way to get cash. Right like that that's
almost the way that it works, right Like it is
replacing something that, like cabs needed to be. I hate
to say this disrupted, right like it was a business
that existed. The system is not working exactly exactly. There
needed to be a way for you to like get
one wherever you happen to be or whatever, and do
(36:18):
it through your phone and not have to like fucking
call a cab company. Like there there was a degree
to which innovation needed to happen. But one of the
side effects that I mean, in addition to the stuff
you've brought up, is that, like it's so much less safe.
You have no way of knowing if your driver is
either qualifying or going to like sexually assault you, like,
which is the thing that happens a lot.
Speaker 3 (36:39):
I had an Uber driver last year when my parents
were here in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, who was very
clearly drunk and just mumbling swear words the entire time.
I reported to Uber and I'm like, yeah, that sucks.
I will make sure you're not paid with him again. Thanks.
I hope he doesn't crash his car.
Speaker 4 (36:57):
Yeah, cool.
Speaker 3 (36:59):
And the thing is the punishment should come from the
markets it really should the markets. If the free markets
actually functioned in the way that guys with Grecian statue
avatars claimed it did on Twitter, then the market would
deal with this. But it doesn't. But there is actually
another culprit, and that's the media. They kind of fuel
the growth mongering. C the NBC, for example. I generally
(37:20):
like CNBC, but the way they report earnings and many
people do. Lots of different media companies do this. They
don't acknowledge the fact that Uber just burns money, that
they spent fifteen goddamn years burning money, that they have
an unsustainable business, that Travis Kalanick, who's long since departed,
obviously was running a very mob esque thing where he'd
(37:43):
sidle in with Bradley Goddamn Tusk, a form of lobbyist
pr creature that he found in More Door, and just
bullying local markets until they agreed. He would just launch
Uber places and be like, what you're going to do
about it, and then the local box would say, uh, yeah,
we're gonna we're gonna do something, and then nothing would
(38:04):
happen and would be made legal and local. And just
to be clear, if you don't know this about your
Uber driver, every time you take Uber and you think, oh,
I've paid twenty bucks for that, the driver gets like
less than half I believe, Oh yeah, get they get
screwed and they don't have insurance in many cases, or
they're not insured. And this is a very technical thing,
but this is important to know. When your Uber driver
(38:25):
has you in the car, oftentimes they're insured. When they
don't when they're just driving around, they oftentimes need different
insurance because they're not running a business while they're driving around.
These are the kind of things that happen when you
don't have strong labor laws, when you don't have the
government protecting workers. It's just it's frustrating, and like I
(38:46):
can understand whether the media probably doesn't want to cover this,
because otherwise the markets would be varying levels of Yeah,
this company sucks, this one sucks. Also, this one's bad. Uber.
They really just don't make enough money to really make sense.
And if they had I don't know, ten to twenty
percent drop in writing, I mean, they probably fall apart.
(39:08):
They don't want to say that, so they just want
to just look at it. They just want to go, Okay,
here's what's happening today. Uber also really cannot be killed now.
And that's a horrifying future we live in and a
horrifying present, I guess. And because people keep buying the stock,
it's a valuable company, and it's valuable in the eyes
of markets that seemingly have cataracts. And look, the raw
(39:33):
economy is why you see these oscillations of hiring and firing.
It's why you see Google or Microsoft making billions tens
of billions of dollars each quarter, then fire in ten,
fifteen thousand people while the executives get rich. It's because
these companies are never actually punished for failing to operate
their business is in a sustainable way. There is no
punishment for them. There's not really a punishment for them
(39:56):
missing something. There's not no CEO seems to be fired for, say,
over hiring by tens of thousands of people. That's fine,
you know what, Easy come, easy go. Not for the
people who got laid off, though, And when it comes
to the startup industry, when it comes to startups in general,
the rot economy is probably a much bigger deal than
(40:19):
you realize. Because startups got used to getting venture capital
whenever they needed it. Businesses like Uber were predicated on
an endless supply of cheap money, even though the FED
steadily ratcheted up interest rates in the years leading up
to the COVID pandemic, only slashing them to mitigate the
pain of COVID and, to a lesser extent, the US
(40:40):
China trade war. They were trying to incentivize investment. They
were trying to incentivize putting money into companies that allegedly
would create jobs. But once the specter of inflation reared
its head, well, things got kind of nasty. And then
there was the war in Ukraine. It's the collateral damage
of China zero COVID policy, the labor shortage. Things started
(41:03):
to unravel and now there isn't really any free money
to go around. We're in an illogical point in economic history.
And it's scary to me. It's scary when I look
at how many companies that just should not exist, and
it scares me. It scares me that the markets don't
react when they see like mass hiring of people to
(41:24):
capture consumer demand. They don't think, ah, what if consumer
demand goes down? They just don't think in that way.
They don't react when Microsoft, just an example, lays off
people almost every year and then makes billions of dollars,
makes giant acquisitions that don't even make sense.
Speaker 4 (41:43):
Yeah, it's this enshraining of instability as a sign of virtue,
and like, yeah, like that is that is really dangerous
because like the more instability you accept and the more
you like reward the people running these companies for creating
situations that make the lives of their employees unstable and
our economy unstable, Like, the more you incentivize that, and eventually,
(42:07):
like it's going to oscillate too much for balance to
be regained, you know.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
And I fear that, Yeah, and I fear the fact
that the market also has no memory. In twenty twenty,
sach An Adella, CEO of Microsoft, he called for a
and I'm serious here I referendum on capitalism, telling businesses
to start grading themselves on the wider economic benefits that
they bring to society rather than profits. To be clear,
(42:33):
this was four months after Microsoft laid off one thousand
people and one year before they hired twenty three thousand people,
and then in early twenty twenty three, they laid off
a further ten thousand people to and I quote deliver
results on an ongoing basis while investing in their long
term opportunity. And these savage job cuts have continued into
twenty twenty four as well. As I mentioned, they laid
(42:56):
off nineteen hundred people from Activision Blizzard and their expoctvis
as well, and that's like eight percent of the overall
Microsoft gaming team. To be clear, Bobby Kotik, the horrible
pervert freak who used to run Activision Blizzard, he got
a several hundred million dollar payoff while all of these
people got fired. And then a week after laying off
(43:16):
these people, Microsoft would report solid second quarter earnings. They
beat expectations in both revenue and profit, and they became
the most valuable company in the world. And the process
human capital used as food and fuel for the rich.
And I hate to get that kind of alarmist, preachery feeling,
but that is what is happening, and it's something that
(43:39):
people need to realize and look at and scream at
because it's disgraceful. Real people with real problems lose their
jobs and I know tech workers get paid or whatever.
There's still people with mortgages, with rent, with families with children.
Sachi Nadella has billions of dollars. He's fined. Bobby Kotik,
(44:01):
who was a reprehensible guy oversaw a period of multiple
alleged sexual harassment things over at Activision, paid off unfathomably rich.
Why did that asshole get money, Well, all these people
got laid off. It's because the street doesn't care. It's
because the street doesn't see that as a problem. They
don't see moral problems or even logical problems like huh,
(44:26):
we could have saved a bunch of money. No, they
want to reward the people that buy into their wretched,
rotten system. It's a scummy way of running a business
that society in the market seem to deeply appreciate, and
it's actually killing innovation. It rewards bad ideas that make
lots of money. It rewards shitty businesses that fail their
(44:47):
customers but make tons of money. And it rewards abusing
customers in a way that I find wretched.
Speaker 4 (44:56):
Yeah, it is. It is disgusting the degree to which
the wealth of the billionaire class, and I guess, even
to be even more specific, the CEO class hinges upon
the regular human sacrifice like that is what they're doing,
Like part of why they hire people is so that
(45:16):
you can do these big layoffs when you need to
do them in order to increase stock value enough to
hit whatever your bonus target for that year or that
quarter is. Like it is very much. It is very
much just human sacrifice so that they can get an
extra however many million dollars a year that fucking bonus
provision in their contract give them.
Speaker 3 (45:38):
What's crazy is there are guys like Marc Benioff who
runs Salesforce again, another company that burns billions to make millions.
That guy has laid off ten thousands of people, all
while getting these glossy cover stories that talk about his
Ohanna philosophy where everybody's important up until the point that
they're not. And also, listeners, if you want to email
me easy at better offline dot com. Do you who
(46:00):
know what Salesforce does? Because I know multiple people who
pay for it who don't.
Speaker 4 (46:05):
They have their big tower with a shitty screen on
top of it.
Speaker 3 (46:08):
Yeah, it's it's a way for Mark Benioff to make
a bunch of money, and that does not flow down
laying off tens of thousands of people. It's just it's disgraceful,
but you know what it does begin somewhere, and I've
kind of hinted that this with Uber, but it's important
to realize how much of this comes from this much
more reckless, ugly, and violent form of funding. I'm talking,
(46:32):
of course, about venture capital. Venture capitalists are sometimes firms
who get money from something called a limited partner, so
they get a pool of money that they invest in startups,
using their alleged smarts to pick the winners of the future.
And then when they put that money into these companies,
they hope that this company will either go public much
like Uber did and Facebook did, or be sold to
(46:54):
another company. And when you look at many of the
problems that you find in the tech industry, when you
search for something, you think you've said the right thing
and just eleven lines of nonsense pop up, or you
go to look at your grandmother's pictures on Facebook, but
someone tries to sell you a fitness supplement. This is
what's happening. The rot economy is working against you. The
(47:16):
CEOs of the companies of the products you're using, they
don't care. They care as much as they need to
monetize you, but deep down they're going to choose themselves
and their shareholders and their board members way before you,
and they currently have all the power and the web.
I'm scared, but I don't want you to be. I
(47:39):
want to inform you about how this is happening. I
want the Better Offline podcast to be a place where
you can understand, where you can be educated about how
you are being conned about how they are monetizing your
digital lives. And I very much look forward to telling
you more about this in the future. Thank you for listening.
Please check out Better Offline dot com. Email me at
(48:00):
easy at better offline dot com if you've got any thoughts.
Thank you Robert so much for joining me. By the way,
I very much appreciate the couson media rocks. I've very
much enjoyed building this with you.
Speaker 4 (48:12):
Yeah, I'm excited to hear what you come up with
the next and continue this conversation, because I think you're
putting like a name to a demon that has been
like haunting all of our nightmares for a while now.
And that's not you know, the only thing that you
need to do to beat it, but it's certainly where
like turning back the tide starts.
Speaker 3 (48:32):
And I really look forward to walking through these problems
with you and many other incredibly smart people in the future,
and of course, Better Offline is a weekly podcast. You
can find us every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app and
wherever else you find your podcasts. The editor and composer
of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can
check out more of his music and audio projects at
(48:52):
Mattasowski dot com, m A. T. T OsO w Ski
dot com more information and got a Better Offline dot
com or email me at easy at better offline dot com.
Thank you for listening everyone.
Speaker 2 (49:13):
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia
dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts
Speaker 4 (49:38):
That's off line
There Are No Girls on the Internet, as a production
of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridge Todd and this
is There Are No Girls on the Internet. Y'all know.
I feel that we don't have enough good media podcasts
that are critical of technology and the people will make it.
I don't know what it is about the podcast space.
(00:25):
I feel like it just encourages a lot of really
spawning tech coverage, which I think makes us all less
informed and by extension, less safe. That is why I
am thrilled about Better Offline, a new podcast from Cool
Zone and veteran journalist Ed Zatrone. If you like the
kind of conversations that we have on There No Girls
on the Internet, I think you'll like it, So check
out the first episode and be sure to subscribe.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Aol Zone Media.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host. That's it, Tron.
I've spent the last fifteen years in tech, both as
a rapport and a public relations executive career. I've realized
that many see the tech industry as kind of a monolith.
It's actually a lot simpler than you'd imagine, and it's
my mission with this podcast to got through the buzzwords
and nonsense and explain to you how venture capital and
(01:12):
big tech are trying to change the future for better
or for worse. Today, I'm joined by Robert Evans of
cool Zone Media to break down a theory I have
that is pretty much core to everything I think about
and we'll talk to you about on this podcast.
Speaker 4 (01:34):
Thank you for having me ed. I love that we're
coming on to talk about this because the concept you're
about to introduce was like the thing that made me
reach out to you about doing this show, or at
least one of the major ones. I think everyone has
this feeling that like something is fucked up and wrong.
We can remember this period of like optimism about technology
and the Internet, and not just feeling excited about like
(01:57):
new shit that we could buy, but feeling excited about
the things that technology was going to bring us, the
promise of like the new digital age, and that all
fell aside to be replaced by this looming sense of
doom so quickly that I don't think a lot of
us have a good idea about like why it happened.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
And you know what, I think that's actually a great
place to start with a very simple question, why does
it feel like the tech we use every day is
getting worse. Look your search results. They're full of sponsored
content and articles that don't actually answer any questions, or
just a big thread of people asking the same question
without ever getting an answer. Your friends aren't popping up
(02:38):
on Instagram. You're constantly getting product emails, notifications pop up,
spam emails, and people you've maybe spoken to once to
buy some do dad. But then you look at the
news and seemingly every tech company is making billions of dollars,
growing at this alarming, almost unsustainable rate, or while laying
(02:59):
off ten of thousands of people a year. And that's
because there is a problem at the center of the
tech industry, and actually the market's at large. It's a
cancerous problem, and it's at the fabric of how capital
is deployed in modern business. Public and private investors, along
with the markets themselves, have become entirely decoupled from the
concept of what good business truly is, focusing on only
(03:22):
one goddamn thing, only one noxious, shitty metric growth in
the row economy, products are made worse, customers are abused,
labor is disposable, and executives are getting richer every single day. Now,
growth in this case is not necessarily just about being
(03:43):
bigger or better. It's just about more. It's always more.
Everything must be generating more money, must be having a
higher headcount, even when laying people off. No, the problem
here is growth in this case is not necessarily about
being bigger or better. It's just about more. It means
(04:06):
the companies generating more revenue, high evaluations, and gaining more
market share. And then it's looking around and saying, you know,
that's just not enough. We must have more. Businesses are
expected to be. In fact, they're rewarded for being so
eternal engines of capital. They must continue to create more
and more shareholder value while hopefully at some point providing
(04:29):
a service of some kind to a customer in the
public markets. This means that companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft,
they're all rewarded for having these unfocused, capital intensive businesses
that are also involved laying off tens of thousands of people.
Over the last few years, hundreds of thousands of tech
workers have been laid off as multiple tech companies have
(04:51):
been worth half to three quarters to even a trillion dollars.
It's ridiculous.
Speaker 4 (04:58):
Yeah, it's I think like one of the really important
things to nail in here is that, like, this isn't
a question of profitability. The fact that you tip it
to growth is so important because like the issue is
not that these companies are not profitable, Like profit has
nothing to do with these decisions. It's about all I
mean Abida does, which is basically like profit over costs
(05:18):
and stuff. But it's like it's this this question of
like growth, right that if you're not if you're not
returning this kind of algorithmically scaling growth, then your company
is seen as a failure by a lot of the
people who who are responsible for like the financial decisions.
And so all of these choices that are kind of
choking the Internet out and making the stuff we use
(05:40):
every day work less aren't about It's not a question
of the company could can't be profitable if we don't
do this, it's that we won't have the right number
on a sheet to show somebody.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
And Microsoft is actually a really good example. So Microsoft,
of course they bought Activision Blizzard for sixty eight billion dollars. Recently,
they then even more recently downsize the gaming division at
the cost of about nineteen hundred jobs, and then they
became more valuable than Apple in the process. In December,
(06:11):
shares of Spotify jump by nearly seven point five percent
upon the news that it was slashing seventeen percent of
its workforce, adding nearly two point six billion to the
company's market cap. And the process. None of these companies,
of course, were punished for their poor planning, or their
stagnating products, the mismanagement of human capital, or their general
lack of any real innovation. And it's because the number
(06:33):
kept going up, and that is all that seems to matter.
Speaker 4 (06:38):
Yeah, And I like, when I was a kid kind
of questioning why stuff like layoffs happen, you know, where
my dad got laid off from his job and tech
and stuff, it was always framed to me as like, well,
these are you know, companies aren't charities. They have to
like do this to turn a profit otherwise they can't
afford to operate. And I think it's so crucial that
(06:58):
like that is not at all what's happening here.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
Yeah, Microsoft had twenty two billion dollars in profit. Yeah,
their last arnings. These companies are fine. Google when they
did mass layoffs last year and in yes, twenty twenty three,
they had like ten billion dollars in profit. These companies
are in the green and they're fine. There's no reason
to lay off these people other than the fact that
(07:23):
they can and they don't need them anymore. Or perhaps
they just ran the company in this big, shitty, messy way.
And nowhere is that more obvious than with Meta.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
Oh god.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Yeah, So back in October of twenty twenty two, I
said that Mark Zuckerberg was going to kill Meta. Perhaps
I was a little bit early on that one, but
I genuinely think that they're on the path to death.
So my argument is that their user numbers are declining.
They will occasionally have a time when they go up
by the percent, perhaps, but then they'll drop. But also,
(07:57):
the user experience of Facebook and in Instagram has just
become awful. They spend these insane amounts of money, tens
of billions of dollars on Meta's Reality division, which is
where they stick the horrible VR experiences that everybody hates,
and the term metaverse. But what was crazy was Mark
Zuckerberg didn't get punished for literally lying about the metaverse.
(08:21):
The street did not mind the fact that he very
clearly misled everybody in the announcement of Meta, he played
a video of a bunch of stuff that no one
can do is technologically impossible, shit jumping through things all
around you with no headset, completely insane. The stock had
a little bit of a wobble, but nothing happened. Yet.
(08:41):
Once he fired eleven thousand people and claimed that twenty
twenty three would be the Year of Efficiency, the market
loved him double digit increases in the price of Meta shares.
Nothing happened to Zuckerberg with the next part, though, because
he also lost thirteen point seven billion dollars on the metaverse.
Thing that has never made the many money.
Speaker 4 (09:00):
Yeah, and for some reference, thirteen point seven billion dollars
is about the GDP of Rwanda. Like that, that's how
much that's a rwanda worth of losses he's lost to
Rwanda in his in his metaverse.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
Bet it's actually a bit more as well, because recently.
Speaker 5 (09:17):
It's more than it is more than a rwanda. Yes,
it's it's actually multiple. It might even be as many
as three rwandas. Because an estima from last year suggested
that he's lost nearly forty two billion dollars on the metaverse.
Speaker 4 (09:31):
Jesus Christ, So yeah, that's that's about that's almost three
and a half macedonias.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
And it doesn't matter to the markets. You'd think a
public company that makes his money meta off of social
media experiences and selling ads on them, you think the
markets would care. The Instagram, one of their largest products,
one of their big money makers, an app for sharing
and following your friends photos and videos, no longer reliably
(09:57):
shows you content from those you follow. That's because Meta
must simply interrupt your feed with sponsored content based on
and actually impossible to define amount of data. It is
not obvious how they choose. There are things that have
appeared on my Instagram that I've only ever said out loud.
It's very strange. And this is because it doesn't matter
if the product sucks, if Meta is growing by double
(10:20):
digit percentages, if they're making billions of dollars, even if
they're fucking the user and the process. Another great example
for you is Google. It doesn't matter that Google's aipower
Gmail plugin literally makes up it hallucinates email conversations. But
because they put AI on Gmail, Google's market cap goes up.
Everyone loves Sanda Pishaei, despite the fact that he gets
(10:43):
paid two hundred and eighty million dollars and lays off
tens of thousands of people seemingly all the time. And
it really doesn't matter. And this is one that really
bothers me because I think we're all kind of stuck
with Amazon. The Amazon experience is even worse. You go
on there and you spoon or Spatula, and there's eighty
seven different knockoffs with names that sound like someone had
(11:07):
a seizure while typing that skib spatula eleven dollars will
deliver in three minutes. But because Amazon is able to
show double digit percentages of growth every year, yay, it's fine.
It doesn't matter that the product sucks. No, no, no, no.
Only a few things really matter when it comes to
big tech and their oh outsized valuations, layoffs, growth, and
(11:30):
the promise of growth no matter how faint or how speculative.
The markets lack any long term thinking, and they lack
the analysis that would actually force businesses to become sustainable
and make great products. And when I say sustainable, I
don't mean anything about the environment. I mean and this
is a crazy concept, Robert. This one's going to really
blow you away. That they make more money than they
(11:53):
spend and don't have to fire people all the time.
Speaker 4 (11:55):
Wow. Yeah, what a concept in business.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
If the market's actually care to about sustainable companies that
could last the test of time without constantly burning capital
and firing people, the markets might not have ignored the
fact that Meta got a four hundred and ten million
dollar fine from the EU under the General Data Protection Regulation,
which is the laws that govern data use and customer
(12:20):
data in Europe. And they also would have probably noticed
the fact that European users now have to deliberately opt
in to share their data. Now, as a little aside,
Facebook makes their money off of using cookies and various
other means of getting your data and then presenting you
with ads based on that. Some of it comes from
(12:41):
how you use the platform, but a lot of it
comes from this very insidious hidden tracking. What's happened here
is that European users will no longer have that by default.
They will have to choose whether to help Mark Zuckerberg
by another fifth of Hawaii.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
Maui, just maui.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
Oh, I'm sorry, terribly sorry. I wouldn't want to hurt
mister Zuckerberg. But what's really bad about this is statistically
users do not like opting into these things. Only about
twenty five percent of iOS users have chosen to opt
in to app tracking, which was a feature that was
actually added a few versions of iOS ago to your iPhone,
your iPad and so on and so forth. And by
(13:24):
the way, this means that basically every app is kind
of on notice if it's an Apple device. Now users
know when they might be sharing their data, and it's
genuinely a threat to a lot of the tech ecosystem
that a lot of people don't know. In fact, Meta's
business model is intrinsically linked to the repurposing of customer
data into a targeting but the markets don't seem to care.
(13:49):
And I get it. It might seem unthinkable that mister
Zuckerberg's fancy party could come to an end, but we
really need to be clear about something. Meta's core advertising
models depend heavily on things that in the next decade
will likely become impossible to do legally. They might not
even be possible technically because now Apple is adding apptracting transparency,
(14:12):
which have kind of mentioned with the iOS update, and
this means that people are first of all aware of
when their date is being shared and they're probably going
to tell them to pound sand. There are other different
changes that are happening as well, alphabet which Google of
course they're going to be retiring third party tracking cookies.
Meta is kind of at a point where if anyone
(14:33):
was paying attention, they'd be a little bit more worried.
And that existential threat is why Mark Zuckerberg is so
desperate to distract you with dreams of the metaverse. It's
so desperate to make you think that meta will be
the thing that builds the artificial general intelligence, which is
just the buzzword for an AI that can have kind
(14:56):
of human level intellect, despite the fact that most generative
AI right now just makes shit up and when you
really look at it. And this is what confuses me
about how much this company's worth. Hundreds of billions of dollars.
Their other products don't make that much money. And Zuckerbug's
last big idea, the one that he changed his goddamn
(15:16):
company name for, lost them billions of dollars forty two billion,
probably be sixty billion next year.
Speaker 4 (15:23):
God.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
Yeah, the street loves six.
Speaker 4 (15:25):
Or seven Macedonias.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
Yeah, multiple Macedonias there. Since I published my original thoughts,
on the row economy, their share process is more than doubled.
It was one hundred and seventy seven dollars then and
it's now four hundred dollars right now. It's despicable.
Speaker 4 (15:49):
Yeah, I think the thing you have to understand when
you look at like, how can a company be burning
money at this rate and their stock price increase as
much as Facebook has or Metas has. I guess we
have to call it. I don't. I still don't like
calling it that. I feel like that's giving him a win.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
Yeah, it's it's not fair.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
It's not fair. But I think part of what you
have to understand is that like the people buying the stock,
like their vested financial interest is in it, continuing to like,
this is not all that different from what was happening
with n FTS right in that like there is this
there is very much a group of people with a
(16:28):
vested interest in that stock price raising well above what
could actually be justified by the performance of the business,
and the people who are making a fortune on that
right now, understand that it is a limited timeframe that
this game will work in. I don't know that Mark
fully does. He may he's he may be to some
extent a little deranged himself at this point. But I
(16:50):
think there are a lot of people who absolutely do
understand and are heavily invested in Facebook now, trying to
get as much of that as they can while it lasts,
but they understand that it's not going to last forever.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
And I think there is a big fall of Rome
style story coming for tech, and I think the rot
economy is behind it because so much of tech has
become engineered to growth at all costs. It's a phenomenon
that controls everything. And I think the place where it
hits the most people because you know, Instagram's annoying, Facebook's annoying,
(17:23):
but you can kind of get around it. But I
think the place that hits home the most is Google. Yeah,
so the thing that everyone knows Google for is of
course Google Search. Used to be a place where crazy
idea you go and you type in a thing, tip
tap tap search, and then a bunch of results come
up that are actually useful. Now it's a labyrinth full
(17:44):
of optimized garbage. Search engine optimization is an important thing
to remember here, which is companies have worked out how
to trick Google into making you see their link rather
than Google finding a useful thing. This is partially ruined
Google Search. But the other problem is adds sponsored content
(18:06):
and of course artificial intelligence crap. So Charlie Wazel over
The Atlantic, he argued a couple of years back, he said,
Google Search, what many consider an indispensable tool of modern life,
is dead or dying. And I agree. Users have to
effectively find a way to cheat and con Google into
giving them what they want. They add things like, I
don't know you put PC repair error. Put the error
(18:29):
in plus read it to get anything approaching a reliable answer.
If you go and type a regular tech problem in
as I mentioned earlier, you just get a lot of shit.
You just get a bunch of things that it will
seem right. You'll say, oh, this is how to fix
Era forty two on my iPhone. Cool, and then you
click through and there's not actually really much useful content.
(18:52):
It's have you tried resetting your iPhone? Is your iPhone broken?
Is something wrong? Have you tried restarting your iPhone? Useless? Garb.
But nevertheless, pushing traffic towards media outlet's the kind of cretinous.
Speaker 4 (19:05):
Yeah, And that's like, I think it's important both as
you noted, a lot of the fucking worst shit in
tech can be strangled by stuff like what the EU
has done to force the companies to not allow you
to be opted in on stuff that's directly against your interests.
And likewise, if that were to be, if that were
the kind of thing that we could like make more
(19:26):
moves like that in the United States. You're not just
strangling the worst parts of big tech with that, You're
strangling a lot of really predatory, toxic media with that.
That all of their money comes from that kind of
shit one way or the other. That like, they are
an integral part of this and can be harmed by
like doing damage to this fundamentally dishonest way of doing business.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
And Google spends decades, they claim, trying to improve the
quality of organic results, but it's over a decade has
been easily gained anyone who knows how to create an
algorithmic headline, a headline that will make the Google spider
that looks over all the websites say this is the thing,
this is the answer. I personally don't know whether Google
(20:13):
does this deliberately or whether they've simply lost track of everything,
whether the evil parties are winning, but you mention media
companies and these predatory ones. The problem is it's not
just predatory ones. A large chunk of modern media is
obsessed with affiliate marketing, which is you'll see these things,
which is like best apps for blah blah, and those
(20:34):
will be affiliate links, yeah, which give them a little
bit of little bit of money, or best super Bowl
deals again, a little bit of cash, little bit of
money every time you buy something through it. And it's
turned a large chunk of the web, but especially Google Search,
into this complete slot, and without finding a way to
(20:54):
negotiate with it, you're offered this kind of fragmented buffet
of content based on what Google kind of thinks you
want to see, but it's more based on how much
money Google is paid and how often Google has been trigged.
Let's be honest, and I think it's fair to argue
that Google no longer provides the best results to any query.
(21:15):
It provides an answer that it believes is most beneficial
or profitable, which can sometimes be the thing you want,
isn't always.
Speaker 4 (21:25):
I think one of the problems is that I don't
know of a search engine that I would say is
better than Google. In the way that Google used to
be better than anything else. Right, and I'm talking ten
years ago. I do know there are search engines and
options that are better than Google at certain things. I've
come to learn that, like, if I use Perplexity AI,
it'll be worse than Google at a bunch of stuff,
(21:45):
but there are a few specific things it's better at,
and like that has increasingly become how I use search, right,
is that I cycle through different options with the same
question to try to figure out, like, well, who's going
to fuck me least on trying to get this information?
Speaker 3 (22:01):
And it sucks as well, because sure we all know
that any free service online isn't free. There is some
way they're making money, and that's fine, you've got a service,
cost money, whatever, But at some point how much profit
is too much? And also how can you justify this
much profit while making things so much worse? And I
(22:25):
mean the result is that it just sucks. It sucks.
Googling sucks now, It's an exercise in pain. It leads
you to a bunch of content that is so obviously
engineered to get your clicks rather than actually provide any service.
That the web is slower, this makes the Internet slower.
(22:45):
It makes the flow of information between people and countries worse.
And what's worse is Google loves this monopoly and they
pay a pretty penny to keep it. They pay Apple
eighteen bills billion dollars a year, and this came out
in a recent US versus Google antitrust case. Eighteen billion
(23:07):
dollars a year to be on your iPhone, to be
on Apple devices. It's not because they're better. It's not
because Apple even thinks that they couldn't do better. This
is specifically to stop Apple trying and to make your
lives worse so that Google can make their search worse,
to make more money and give some Darpashi two hundred
(23:29):
and eighty million dollars. And it's depressing. It's something that
makes me I have to fight the cynicism every time
I use Google. This is a problem that hits billions
of people. This is a real thing. And this isn't
an attack on any journalistic outlet. But where the fuck
(23:49):
is the horror here? This is a horrifying thing. This
would be like if certain freeways just randomly led you
to a different place because someone paid the dotam.
Speaker 4 (24:00):
It would be like if we had a I don't
want to oversell this, but like what we're talking about
is there was a brief period that for the first
time in human existence, all knowledge ever collected and earned
by human beings was easily accessible to the vast majority
of people if they had an Internet connection, and that
(24:22):
is becoming no longer the case with rapidity and it
is it is a problem that kin to like if
we had a cure for cancer and then we decided
to start like breaking it if you didn't buy like
the pancreatic cancer bonus pack like like it is, it
is that big a problem, Like when you think about,
like what it means for all human knowledge to be
(24:43):
accessible and then to throw that away so that Sundar
Pachai I can get two hundred and eighty million dollars
a year. It is an obscenity.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
And then you have the level of from that as
well as think about it from those of us who
spend I don't know, twenty two of twenty four hours
a day online and we're aware of what SEO content
looks like search engine optimization. There content that is built
just to rank highly on Google, to send money to
an out there and traffic to an out there. We
know what that looks like. We know when we are
(25:13):
being misled. We know when the flow of our information
is being interfered with. I don't argue that most people do,
and this isn't their fault. This is a nuanced topic,
but this is horrifying. Google has, like every major tech company,
focused entirely on what will make revenues and market share increase,
even if the cost of doing so is just destroying
(25:35):
its entire legacy and interrupting the free flow of information
around the world. Last year, they launched their own Barred
AI to compete with being Microsoft Search Engine and their
Chat GPT integration. By the way, Chat GPT, all these
generative AI things, Yeah, they make stuff up. They hallucinate it.
Speaker 4 (25:53):
Oh yeah, no, they hallucinate more than I do. And
I did have permanent damage to my brain by experimenting
with Sulgarann Kimmel.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
And what was crazy was bing AI came out and
immediately started hallotinating things. BARDII. Google did a media day
and they showed a demo of BARTII and you thought,
for a second, oh shit, this might replace search engines.
This might be a moment where they sell us back
an experience we had before and then literally in the
demo it made a factual error. Yeah, Google attempted to
(26:26):
sell us back search engine results and then provided us
just another broken Google kind of like JADGBT is just
a broken form of knowledge.
Speaker 4 (26:34):
Well, and didn't they also or was that Microsoft that
absolutely like lied in the demo and like it pretended
that they were showing live results when it was really
something they'd curated.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
I'm not sure which one it was, but seemingly every
company does some sort of con like this. It sucks
and it just it doesn't help anyone. And you'd think,
and we're describing what is a big shitty mess, we're
described being something that afacts billions of people, that was decayed,
a very important product. You think the markets would respond negatively,
(27:08):
and you would be wrong. There was a couple percentage
points that got shaved off Google when they had that
initial wobble with barred AI, and then it went right
back up. The markets. They bloody love that Microsoft is
invested in chat GPT. They love the open AI is
partially being meddled with by Microsoft, despite the fact that
that company does not make any profit. And that's because
(27:31):
the markets do not prioritize innovation. They don't prioritize sustainable growth,
companies that can last on their own without screwing over customers.
They don't care about stability. The result is that companies
don't function with the intent of making good businesses anymore.
(27:51):
They want businesses that kind of seem right there, kind
of feel good, and they sell a product and they
make money. But I don't really care about anything else
as long as it keeps growing exponentially ten eleven, fifteen
to twenty percent every quarter. It's disgraceful, sadly, the rock
(28:19):
economy and its growth at all costs. Fuck. The customer
mentality isn't limited to big tech startups, so private companies
that are invested in by venture capital firms private equity firms.
They're regularly pumped full of venture capital dollars enticing users
with a subsidized product, meaning that they basically sell something
a massive loss to pump up their user numbers. That
(28:41):
gradually becomes worse and worse and more expensive over time
as they attempt to reach some sort of vague stability.
Speaker 4 (28:50):
I think really crucially too, like they pump up the
price after they've killed everyone who provided maybe a better product,
but yeah, charged more money for it, Like it's the
uber effect, right.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
Oh, and I will get to uber because a big
part of this, and it's what Corey doctor O calls
in shitification, which is a painful neologism that actually pretty
accurate in describing the startup ecosystem. A big part of
that is they get pumped full of these venture dollars
and they become these horrifying companies that are not good companies.
(29:26):
They burn capital, they barely make anything, but they destroy
businesses that say run based on offering a product that
users paid for that is priced higher than the cost
of the product, making the company something known as profit.
Speaker 4 (29:39):
Yeah, and I think that's I think that's so im important,
especially for like the younger people who maybe you never
fell for it. I did for a little while in
the early two thousands fall for some of Google shtick. Yeah,
because the thing that they delivered for a while was miraculous,
like great using Google before it exists, like when it
(30:02):
like when it first came out, Like the degree to
which it was superior to any other way to access
knowledge that it ever existed was wild, and like you
wanted to believe maybe these people are not a bunch
of fucking demons.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
And it was don't be evil that used to be
that tagline hit anymore, No zop, how don't you go?
Now it's don't comma be evil with an exclamation.
Speaker 4 (30:28):
They did a lot of lots of me and I
don't know that's it's a it's a foolmy once sort
of situation. I'll never I'll never love again.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Yeah, it is enough. And seeing Google decay, by the way,
really has That's what's jokified me. That's what's driven me
a little insane. But then when you look up the
startup side and you now that you when you're aware
of the rots economy and you're aware of in shitification,
you can kind of watch it in real time, and
it drives you a little crazier still because there is
(31:00):
a very abusive cycle here. Companies are born, they're funded,
and they're grown in this unnatural way where they're subsidized
on It's funny a lot of these right leaning venture
catalysts they hate welfare, but they love putting startups on it.
Because venture capital exists in many ways at times in
the tech industry to keep companies alive that should be
(31:22):
left to die, and they would have that same attitude
to a regular person who could not meet their bills
through unsustainable spending or even sustainable spending. Nevertheless, they're fucking hypogrittes.
But the problem is with these companies as well, is
their services. Because they are not sustainable, eventually have to
become worse. They grow the dependence of the market, they
(31:45):
kill everything else in the market, and then they make
them worse in shitifying them Again, Corey, love your buddy,
but no terrible term, great idea.
Speaker 4 (31:54):
I like, yeah, I think we could all agree. He's
got the idea, right. It is really hard to get,
like your mom to buy into using that term.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
Yeah, a little bit epic bacon for my taste. Look,
if these stars were held to real standards, crazy ideas
that a business should make more money that it spans
and be able to survive independent of investor capital, there
are a lot of startups that would just die. In fact,
that's kind of happened in twenty twenty three. There was
a phenomenon known as the zero interest free period, when
(32:26):
it was just easy for venture capitalists to get a
bunch of money at low interest or zero percent interests
that went away into late twenty twenty two early twenty
twenty three. As a result, venture capitals suddenly realized, ah,
are we just spending money on bullshit? So they killed
the startups. They just pulled the plug. They didn't send
them any more money. There were no more venture rounds,
(32:47):
and real companies, good companies died because no one got investment.
And it's sad, but don't worry. I'm major a promise
and I'm keeping to it. We've got to talk about Uber.
Uber is the ultimate rottic economy startup.
Speaker 4 (33:01):
Yeah, it was like that. It was the thing where,
you know, unlike with Google, there was no like trade off, right, Like,
nothing was getting harmed with Uber. You always knew the
company was evil, but also it was so much easier
to get a fucking ride when you were like hammered,
right Like, it did make a problem go away for
a lot of.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
People, and at first it wasn't. When Uber launched in
twenty eleven, it was mostly with like town cars, black
cab services. So when we'd call them back home, I
guess you'll just live. I don't know there's an American term,
I'm sure, But nevertheless, you were getting these Lincoln town
cars and you were able to call them and it
was kind of magical and you were like, oh, wow,
(33:39):
we could do this. Eventually, they'd launch uber x. Anyone
can pick up a phone and start driving their car
for money with Uber. The press at the time, because
everyone was kind of still thinking that tech was the
good guys, kind of let it go by that these
people were paid below minimum wage, they had questionable insurance policies,
and absolutely goddamn profit. They were screwing the drivers while
(34:02):
also not actually building a sustainable company. Very confusing to me.
Uber only became profitable last year. They had a three
hundred and twenty six million dollar operating profit in August
twenty twenty three. To get there, it had to burn
thirty two billion dollars.
Speaker 4 (34:18):
Hey, you gotta spend money to make money.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
Yeah, what an incredible return. Just but for the sake
of clarity, it's also worth noting that Uber had previously
reported profitable quarters, but they didn't come from actually providing
rides or delivering food or any kind of business. They
were just selling stuff they'd bore. It's just Uber frustrates me.
(34:42):
Their business model is just incredibly precarious and relies exceedingly
heavily on governments failing to impose labor laws, so much
of their existence is predicated on being able to screw
general contractors. Its continued existence would not have happened without
local authorities. Without local authorities seeding ground to these companies
(35:07):
because at the time they were like, yeah, taxis kind
of suck. Taxis are bad, sure, And of course Uber
needed a bunch of money, with the largest amount of
that coming from the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund three point
five billion dollars.
Speaker 4 (35:20):
Uh huh.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
And also Uber just burns capital. They burned billions of dollars,
and their share price is doubled in the last year
and now has a larger market cap than Ford and
Stilantis combined. The markets are on crack.
Speaker 4 (35:36):
It's it's so fucking frustrating. It's like if it's like
if there were a network of guys running those shell
games where you put like a dollar and wear three cups, right,
and some VC guys were like, hey, just give someone
money every time they pick a cup, no matter what
cup it is, and then we'll also buy up all
of the ATMs and shut them down. So this is
(35:56):
the only way to get cash. Right like that that's
almost the way that it works, right Like it is
replacing something that, like cabs needed to be. I hate
to say this disrupted, right like it was a business
that existed. The system is not working exactly exactly. There
needed to be a way for you to like get
one wherever you happen to be or whatever, and do
(36:18):
it through your phone and not have to like fucking
call a cab company. Like there there was a degree
to which innovation needed to happen. But one of the
side effects that I mean, in addition to the stuff
you've brought up, is that, like it's so much less safe.
You have no way of knowing if your driver is
either qualifying or going to like sexually assault you, like,
which is the thing that happens a lot.
Speaker 3 (36:39):
I had an Uber driver last year when my parents
were here in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, who was very
clearly drunk and just mumbling swear words the entire time.
I reported to Uber and I'm like, yeah, that sucks.
I will make sure you're not paid with him again. Thanks.
I hope he doesn't crash his car.
Speaker 4 (36:57):
Yeah, cool.
Speaker 3 (36:59):
And the thing is the punishment should come from the
markets it really should the markets. If the free markets
actually functioned in the way that guys with Grecian statue
avatars claimed it did on Twitter, then the market would
deal with this. But it doesn't. But there is actually
another culprit, and that's the media. They kind of fuel
the growth mongering. C the NBC, for example. I generally
(37:20):
like CNBC, but the way they report earnings and many
people do. Lots of different media companies do this. They
don't acknowledge the fact that Uber just burns money, that
they spent fifteen goddamn years burning money, that they have
an unsustainable business, that Travis Kalanick, who's long since departed,
obviously was running a very mob esque thing where he'd
(37:43):
sidle in with Bradley Goddamn Tusk, a form of lobbyist
pr creature that he found in More Door, and just
bullying local markets until they agreed. He would just launch
Uber places and be like, what you're going to do
about it, and then the local box would say, uh, yeah,
we're gonna we're gonna do something, and then nothing would
(38:04):
happen and would be made legal and local. And just
to be clear, if you don't know this about your
Uber driver, every time you take Uber and you think, oh,
I've paid twenty bucks for that, the driver gets like
less than half I believe, Oh yeah, get they get
screwed and they don't have insurance in many cases, or
they're not insured. And this is a very technical thing,
but this is important to know. When your Uber driver
(38:25):
has you in the car, oftentimes they're insured. When they
don't when they're just driving around, they oftentimes need different
insurance because they're not running a business while they're driving around.
These are the kind of things that happen when you
don't have strong labor laws, when you don't have the
government protecting workers. It's just it's frustrating, and like I
(38:46):
can understand whether the media probably doesn't want to cover this,
because otherwise the markets would be varying levels of Yeah,
this company sucks, this one sucks. Also, this one's bad. Uber.
They really just don't make enough money to really make sense.
And if they had I don't know, ten to twenty
percent drop in writing, I mean, they probably fall apart.
(39:08):
They don't want to say that, so they just want
to just look at it. They just want to go, Okay,
here's what's happening today. Uber also really cannot be killed now.
And that's a horrifying future we live in and a
horrifying present, I guess. And because people keep buying the stock,
it's a valuable company, and it's valuable in the eyes
of markets that seemingly have cataracts. And look, the raw
(39:33):
economy is why you see these oscillations of hiring and firing.
It's why you see Google or Microsoft making billions tens
of billions of dollars each quarter, then fire in ten,
fifteen thousand people while the executives get rich. It's because
these companies are never actually punished for failing to operate
their business is in a sustainable way. There is no
punishment for them. There's not really a punishment for them
(39:56):
missing something. There's not no CEO seems to be fired for, say,
over hiring by tens of thousands of people. That's fine,
you know what, Easy come, easy go. Not for the
people who got laid off, though, And when it comes
to the startup industry, when it comes to startups in general,
the rot economy is probably a much bigger deal than
(40:19):
you realize. Because startups got used to getting venture capital
whenever they needed it. Businesses like Uber were predicated on
an endless supply of cheap money, even though the FED
steadily ratcheted up interest rates in the years leading up
to the COVID pandemic, only slashing them to mitigate the
pain of COVID and, to a lesser extent, the US
(40:40):
China trade war. They were trying to incentivize investment. They
were trying to incentivize putting money into companies that allegedly
would create jobs. But once the specter of inflation reared
its head, well, things got kind of nasty. And then
there was the war in Ukraine. It's the collateral damage
of China zero COVID policy, the labor shortage. Things started
(41:03):
to unravel and now there isn't really any free money
to go around. We're in an illogical point in economic history.
And it's scary to me. It's scary when I look
at how many companies that just should not exist, and
it scares me. It scares me that the markets don't
react when they see like mass hiring of people to
(41:24):
capture consumer demand. They don't think, ah, what if consumer
demand goes down? They just don't think in that way.
They don't react when Microsoft, just an example, lays off
people almost every year and then makes billions of dollars,
makes giant acquisitions that don't even make sense.
Speaker 4 (41:43):
Yeah, it's this enshraining of instability as a sign of virtue,
and like, yeah, like that is that is really dangerous
because like the more instability you accept and the more
you like reward the people running these companies for creating
situations that make the lives of their employees unstable and
our economy unstable, Like, the more you incentivize that, and eventually,
(42:07):
like it's going to oscillate too much for balance to
be regained, you know.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
And I fear that, Yeah, and I fear the fact
that the market also has no memory. In twenty twenty,
sach An Adella, CEO of Microsoft, he called for a
and I'm serious here I referendum on capitalism, telling businesses
to start grading themselves on the wider economic benefits that
they bring to society rather than profits. To be clear,
(42:33):
this was four months after Microsoft laid off one thousand
people and one year before they hired twenty three thousand people,
and then in early twenty twenty three, they laid off
a further ten thousand people to and I quote deliver
results on an ongoing basis while investing in their long
term opportunity. And these savage job cuts have continued into
twenty twenty four as well. As I mentioned, they laid
(42:56):
off nineteen hundred people from Activision Blizzard and their expoctvis
as well, and that's like eight percent of the overall
Microsoft gaming team. To be clear, Bobby Kotik, the horrible
pervert freak who used to run Activision Blizzard, he got
a several hundred million dollar payoff while all of these
people got fired. And then a week after laying off
(43:16):
these people, Microsoft would report solid second quarter earnings. They
beat expectations in both revenue and profit, and they became
the most valuable company in the world. And the process
human capital used as food and fuel for the rich.
And I hate to get that kind of alarmist, preachery feeling,
but that is what is happening, and it's something that
(43:39):
people need to realize and look at and scream at
because it's disgraceful. Real people with real problems lose their
jobs and I know tech workers get paid or whatever.
There's still people with mortgages, with rent, with families with children.
Sachi Nadella has billions of dollars. He's fined. Bobby Kotik,
(44:01):
who was a reprehensible guy oversaw a period of multiple
alleged sexual harassment things over at Activision, paid off unfathomably rich.
Why did that asshole get money, Well, all these people
got laid off. It's because the street doesn't care. It's
because the street doesn't see that as a problem. They
don't see moral problems or even logical problems like huh,
(44:26):
we could have saved a bunch of money. No, they
want to reward the people that buy into their wretched,
rotten system. It's a scummy way of running a business
that society in the market seem to deeply appreciate, and
it's actually killing innovation. It rewards bad ideas that make
lots of money. It rewards shitty businesses that fail their
(44:47):
customers but make tons of money. And it rewards abusing
customers in a way that I find wretched.
Speaker 4 (44:56):
Yeah, it is. It is disgusting the degree to which
the wealth of the billionaire class, and I guess, even
to be even more specific, the CEO class hinges upon
the regular human sacrifice like that is what they're doing,
Like part of why they hire people is so that
(45:16):
you can do these big layoffs when you need to
do them in order to increase stock value enough to
hit whatever your bonus target for that year or that
quarter is. Like it is very much. It is very
much just human sacrifice so that they can get an
extra however many million dollars a year that fucking bonus
provision in their contract give them.
Speaker 3 (45:38):
What's crazy is there are guys like Marc Benioff who
runs Salesforce again, another company that burns billions to make millions.
That guy has laid off ten thousands of people, all
while getting these glossy cover stories that talk about his
Ohanna philosophy where everybody's important up until the point that
they're not. And also, listeners, if you want to email
me easy at better offline dot com. Do you who
(46:00):
know what Salesforce does? Because I know multiple people who
pay for it who don't.
Speaker 4 (46:05):
They have their big tower with a shitty screen on
top of it.
Speaker 3 (46:08):
Yeah, it's it's a way for Mark Benioff to make
a bunch of money, and that does not flow down
laying off tens of thousands of people. It's just it's disgraceful,
but you know what it does begin somewhere, and I've
kind of hinted that this with Uber, but it's important
to realize how much of this comes from this much
more reckless, ugly, and violent form of funding. I'm talking,
(46:32):
of course, about venture capital. Venture capitalists are sometimes firms
who get money from something called a limited partner, so
they get a pool of money that they invest in startups,
using their alleged smarts to pick the winners of the future.
And then when they put that money into these companies,
they hope that this company will either go public much
like Uber did and Facebook did, or be sold to
(46:54):
another company. And when you look at many of the
problems that you find in the tech industry, when you
search for something, you think you've said the right thing
and just eleven lines of nonsense pop up, or you
go to look at your grandmother's pictures on Facebook, but
someone tries to sell you a fitness supplement. This is
what's happening. The rot economy is working against you. The
(47:16):
CEOs of the companies of the products you're using, they
don't care. They care as much as they need to
monetize you, but deep down they're going to choose themselves
and their shareholders and their board members way before you,
and they currently have all the power and the web.
I'm scared, but I don't want you to be. I
(47:39):
want to inform you about how this is happening. I
want the Better Offline podcast to be a place where
you can understand, where you can be educated about how
you are being conned about how they are monetizing your
digital lives. And I very much look forward to telling
you more about this in the future. Thank you for listening.
Please check out Better Offline dot com. Email me at
(48:00):
easy at better offline dot com if you've got any thoughts.
Thank you Robert so much for joining me. By the way,
I very much appreciate the couson media rocks. I've very
much enjoyed building this with you.
Speaker 4 (48:12):
Yeah, I'm excited to hear what you come up with
the next and continue this conversation, because I think you're
putting like a name to a demon that has been
like haunting all of our nightmares for a while now.
And that's not you know, the only thing that you
need to do to beat it, but it's certainly where
like turning back the tide starts.
Speaker 3 (48:32):
And I really look forward to walking through these problems
with you and many other incredibly smart people in the future,
and of course, Better Offline is a weekly podcast. You
can find us every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app and
wherever else you find your podcasts. The editor and composer
of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can
check out more of his music and audio projects at
(48:52):
Mattasowski dot com, m A. T. T OsO w Ski
dot com more information and got a Better Offline dot
com or email me at easy at better offline dot com.
Thank you for listening everyone.
Speaker 2 (49:13):
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia
dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts
Speaker 4 (49:38):
That's off line
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.