Better Offline - AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making w/ Nik Suresh

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

In this week’s Better Offline, Ed is joined by writer and software engineer Nik Suresh to talk about how AI mania is eviscerating global decision-making, weakening businesses and creating a culture of fear that demands workers lie about the benefits of AI to kiss up to Business Idiots. Nik’s blog: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/ https://hermit-tech.com/ Brainwash An Executive Today! https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/brainwash-an-executive-today/   To celebrate the one year anniversary of the premium newsletter, I’m offering a sale on one-year subscriptions. I extended it exclusively for Better Offline listeners through this Sunday (the last time, for real this time), you can get a permanent annual rate of just $60— a $10 discount on the usual price of $70 - for life - https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/N9bqSLKBoS?ref=wheresyoured.at    YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline use FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more.  --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined.

Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-8-44-I-Hart. It just came out. Jeremy, what did you just do? You just sit yourself up for failure. I've never heard you tell this story. I have never told this story. This must have been tucked deep, deep into Jeremy Lynn file.

My name is MC Jin. to tell you about laugh but not least. I'll be chatting with guests from all walks of life about the power of humor when it comes to facing difficult times. These will be conversations that remind us all, life is hard, laugh harder. Listen to laugh but not least with MCJent

on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast playing along is back with more of my favorite musicians. Check out my newest episode with Phineas. So I went home and I asked Billy if she wanted to sing it, she immediately made it her own thing.

You really know how to make me cry when you give me those ocean eyes, and I'm scared. So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, my love. I'm Ryan Weiss, and for the past 15 years, I've been an emotional intelligence coach and a spiritual guide. and I'm sharing with you my new podcast, Waking Up with Ryan. Waking Up with Ryan is a daily audio video podcast, here to help you connect with yourself before the noise of the day takes over. So let's start our days together with a moment of calm

that's just for you. Listen to Waking Up with Ryan on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Greetings, hello, and salutations. I am Ed Zittron, and this is better offline. We are back. You need to subscribe to the newsletter. You need to download the podcast you're already listening to. Take your friend's phones, download it on there. You will have failed me if you don't do this. Not really. I love you all dearly. But look, today I am joined by the incredible writer and consultant Nick Suresh, who two weeks ago put out one of the best pieces on AI I've ever read and not just because it confirms my biases. And it's called AI Mania is eviscerating global decision-making. Nick, thank you for joining me. Hey, thank you so much for having me on again. This piece was terrifying.

I just want to be really clear that like this, the things that I read in here, a lot of them I was like, I assumed this was happening. I was assumed that it was this bad. But to summarize the piece in short, it appears that just AI is this bordering on religious thing within business now that people get into, regardless of whether it even does anything. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I think the thing they got it so widely circulated is even that people who use AI in their work and say they're seeing benefits, a lot of the more sensible people are looking at their colleagues and going, what are you guys doing? Right. Like, I think I'm a little bit faster at my job, and here we have my CEO saying, let's just scrap every other project. We'll remove all the employees. We're going to have 100x productivity. And even sensible people that enjoy it are. getting a little bit worried by the level the mania's gotten to. Yeah, so give me an example here. The first section is called AI Investments are generally total failures. And I realize the title really does say it all there. But can you break that down for me? Yeah. So it's interesting because most projects at companies do fail, especially big companies. They're just bad at running tech

projects. I've written about this well before the AI thing was big. What is fascinating is that they have an even higher failure rate for the AI projects. And again, like just a, we don't need to get into an argument with people about whether it works or not, right? We can just start with the basis of normal IT projects fail a bunch. Right. AI projects are novel technology. So these are failing even more. And the protective factor to companies normally that they don't want to spend all their money on IT. They actually want to spend the smallest amount in IT possible, right? It's mostly a thing you're, it's a cost for the business. Right. With AI, this is totally a, inverted and companies are going, I'd like to take as much budget as I can feasibly get,

and I'm going to put it all into this thing that I know I'm bad at, and I want to do a harder version of that. But I can't admit to anyone I've just wasted millions and millions of dollars. So it's sort of like all the organizations in the planet are going all in on the thing they know they're bad at, playing it on hard mode, and then sort of just lying about it after the fact. And when you say lying, what do you mean, are they just being like, yeah, this is making me one bazillion more productive percent. I'm so good at AI. I love it. Like, what is that, like, what are they doing? What are they actually doing with this crap? Well, okay, so it happens in a couple of ways, right? When I say lying, that sounds like very intentional. And there are people

that lie because there are people that lie everywhere. But usually it's two things. Like, internally, it can be a lot of delusion. There are a lot of executives out there who have funded AI And they don't realize that the whole organization has sort of shifted into presenting them with the rosiest view of what is happening that is possible. Like if you're a CEO who has heard good things about AI and let's say you've got two guys underneath you gunning for a promotion. Right. Those two guys are now at an arms race to talk about their AI productivity and how much

AI they're rolling it across the business. Like that is the goal. It's not to make money. It's to be the most AI, whatever the fuck that means. Right? So it's pretty nonsensical. But that's self-delusion? It's very important to watch. And again, it's an extreme version of what we already see, right?

Because people already lie to CEOs for promotions. This is just that on steroids. So you mentioned in here, you say you've seen 0% success in a year and a half. Is it really zero? You've seen nothing? I just want to be, my audience is going to eat this up, I realize. But like, I just want to make sure. Yes. We should add one asterisk there because some people misunderstood that.

Me seeing 0% doesn't mean like it's 0% across the whole world because I haven't seen every project in the world. Sadly, some people don't have enough reading comprehension for that. So you have to lay it out or you get like an AI booster who's like it's not literally zero. Some must be getting some results somewhere. I have seen nothing. And I've been doing nothing but sales and onsites at companies like all across Australia and the US. for a year and a half now. I don't get brought in to do them.

They're like things I see on the side, and I go, well, that's, that is not working. Well, the thing I think about when I hear that people are like, actually, it's you haven't seen every software thing. It's just, this is how AI boosters work. They want you as the defender of reality to be like, prove unilaterally. This is, the AI is terrible. If it's so bad, prove it. But when you ask them to prove anything, they look at you and go, well, you know, darn,

The numbers, just the bigger, the number I made so big this year. It's the biggest I've ever seen. And they refuse to show you anything real. I think I've been sent the fucking Erdos problem thing 15 times now. And the next time someone sends it to me, I'm going to draw a gut. That is a joke. That's a joke. I'm not going to do anything with a gun.

But I am just going to possibly imagine the SOAR from Jigsaw. Sorry, Jigsaw from Saw, even they're going to get me in the comments for that one. just kind of tying them to radiate and say, sure, tell me what you think the Erdos problem means. Tell me what it means. Tell me what you think Erdos means. Because that's the thing. These people don't have anything tangible to share.

And your piece kind of, I read it in an airport and I was just sitting there going like, fucking hell. And I did get a few looks because I was so surprised by it. But it feels like your piece crystallizes everything I've been thinking for two years. That just, this is this weird death of Stalin-style situation where people are just saying, God damn, I love AI, because if they don't say it, they'll make their boss feel bad, their customers feel bad, and their colleagues feel bad, despite none of them getting anything out of AI.

Yeah, you know, the simple way to think about it is that any given business, you know, you have one problem generally that is bottlenecking how you're making most of your money. And whatever you think AI can do, it's really only the correct thing to deploy that solves that one problem. It doesn't matter if you write more code if writing code isn't the way to make more money. And I mean, it's basically just like as simple as that, right? People are going all in on a thing that doesn't really make sense for whatever context they're inhabiting. So you mentioned within the piece that you had to basically stop offering AI services or a specific one. Forgive me if I misread that, but you just won't mention AI services within software projects because people go not outrageous over them. Yeah, what we found was, you know, we're a relatively small business, and we optimize a lot for working with people we enjoy.

And you're a software consultancy, just to be clear. Yes, we're a software consultancy in data specifically. So my post-grad degree was a master's in data science. Like I was into AI nominally before the whole LLM thing took off. And yeah, what we found was whenever we mentioned AI, two things would happen. And the one I mentioned in the piece was people would become rabid. interested in buying from us. But they were also really bad customers.

Like they made bad decisions. They had cash flow issues. They didn't think clearly. Like these were not people we wanted to work with as a matter of lifestyle. But also, you know, it's like a lot of startups and stuff. The sort of customer we have to take all the money up front because you're worried they're just going to scam you. Like these are not people you want to be in bed with. And the people we really liked, we would mention it just as an aside.

And they would immediately become so disinterested because they just go, well, you know, a lot of people are trying to scam me with this right now. I'm just not interested. So we just don't talk about it at all in any context. We don't like doing it. The work's really boring anyway. But yeah, like it's just, here's another thing I can tell you. Our clients that don't talk about AI at all are like far in a way the most profitable because they're focused on whatever their biggest problem is at any given moment. It's very, very simple.

Like, this is not rocket science. Yeah, it's just like, it's like the companies that are doing well are focusing on solving business issues. The companies that are doing badly are the ones getting very expensive digital fidget spinners. Yeah, like it's as simple as that. I don't know many companies where LLMs unblock like whatever their core issue is. There's stuff I can think, like maybe customer support, but I don't know much about customer support. Anything where I have some subject matter expertise, I'm like, an LLM is not the most important thing you need right now. I can't think of it.

I've had two, three, four boobless years into this bullshit. And I am a spreadsheet hog, and it doesn't do spreadsheets very well. I will say people are going to be, people will be very mad at me for this. I've found one use of LLMs, one. And I think I've told you about this, the Bloomberg Terminal, because the way that you request stuff on a Bloomberg terminal is through Python. I don't write Python, so you'd be like, Bloomberg LLM, tell me out to get this, and it gives you the code, and it runs it. it. Boom, simple. Probably the least, like literally just sexy search. Well done. That $1.1 trillion of CAPEX. I'm sure that was all worth there. But what's funny is the example

you give in the piece of the AI chatbot thing for Snowflake feels like the things that LLM should be good at, which is a database request, right? Why doesn't it work? Surely, that is the thing that this should be good at. What is the issue there? And why don't LLLU. them solve them? Yeah, the complexity there is, you know, I don't know much about Bloomberg terminals, although it's very funny everything you've told me about. It's an autism portal. It's so good. Yeah, so, you know, I imagine they're fairly constrained in what they can do. Yes. For example, you know, you mentioned writing Python, which means someone has written a Python library that interfaces with the Bloomberg terminal and constrains what sorts of things you can ask it. So if it's very well,

designed and you put all the text in there, the same thing that lets me a human interrogate it, would let an LLM do it. What's very hard at a business is a lot of that stuff is just not written down or it exists in someone's head or the real world is very, very complicated. And the very people who are, let's use this example, right? Why does Cortex not work? So you go in and you're the CFO and you type in, I would like to know how much revenue we made last year. It doesn't know all the little nuances of your business. And for something really important, and you need it to be correct. But if you're making use of an LLM and you're the CFO,

you can't debug whatever it put out. And that's okay when the number is totally wrong because you'll go, hey, this isn't correct. If it's off by like 5% or 10%, you probably don't know. And exactly with like with your Bloomberg terminal, right? If you looked up something really important, you might reach out to a friend and say, is this Python correct?

Because I'm about to spend a lot of money on this. Yeah. And to be clear, when you make a request on the terminal, it does the Python. It's just the Python code to request Bloomberg's actual data. Like it hasn't, I imagine, I don't write Python, but I imagine there is a library in this, that this is just a layer on top of it so that people like me can actually use it without just punching the, typing in like three letter things and making things pop up and then spending hours fucking with it, which of course I never did before I used the LLM side. Of course. Yeah, yeah. But with Cortex,

the search side, it seems that the problem is also the is it making stuff up? Because I, not being an ignoramus here, surely looking over a big database and information and pulling stuff out is what an LLM is good at, or is the suggestion that the database layer is not something LLMs can solve? It's just very complicated, you know? So we were at a client site yesterday, and, you know, they have this ledger internally, which tracks like all the transactions coming in and out. And there's like 40 different account types stored in all these different tables. And in different situations, you want to use different types of transactions to calculate certain things around like service utilization. And an LLM looks at that. And it just goes,

well, I haven't worked here for eight years. So I don't know how to run this calculation. Like it's very, very complicated. So the data isn't labeled properly and all these are, so it's how the data is presented and looked over. Yeah, yeah. You can even label it properly, but there's a reason we have human specialists. Yeah. It's the same reason I don't get an LLM to write all my contracts. I could, but instead I go to my lawyer, Ian, and I go, what should I actually do here? You know, like the... Yeah, it's experience versus data. Right. You know, like when we started the business, he wrote a contract for me that, you know, it's like a standard one. And it has things in there like I wouldn't have thought of. Like, for example, the, um, uh, agreement we have

with clients on how long we take between email responses and... Yep. When I was still doing PR stuff, That's exactly what I had in there. Like basic things that you wouldn't think of unless you'd experience the thing. But it's funny because even now, even people who are anti-LM, I will hear them say, but it's good for searching large databases. And it sounds like it isn't. Like AI is just not good at that. I specialize in the specific area, which is just like big information retrieval.

It's pretty good at, you know, a database specifically in tech means something. systems like Postgres or whichever, which mean nothing to normal people, I would say they're pretty good at reading gigantic amounts of texts and then pointing a human at the correct place. So a good use is if we're like in a new client site and they have a million lines of some fucking thing, I can go, I need to look for the places where this logic might happen. And they'll point me at them and it's still wrong sometimes, but at least I can look. That's not useless, but it's like how much would I put? pay for that? I don't know, maybe like $20 a month. It's not that big a deal. But that's the thing.

It's like, even with the terminal, it's the same thing. It will get things wrong. It never gets the numbers wrong because when it runs the numbers, it's pulling them from a specific place. And I still tell it if I ever touch the LLM stuff, run it again, run it again, just like, and then I'll Google it and I'll look up the stuff because I don't trust anything that touches him. But still, it's just, it is a fishing expedition. You can't rely on. on it to have any logic, which I think is what most people want from search. When human beings are pretty terrible about asking for exactly what they want, and I feel like it just falls down.

And the reason I keep going on about this stuff is because searching big databases and making decisions feels like 90% of the LLM integrations I've heard about. Like it's just, how do I do this and what does this mean is how people are kind of seem to at least be describing how it's useful in their business. but it can't do that, which is bad. Yeah. At the end of the day, as long as we're constrained by having to go in and check whether the results are correct, even if we grant that they're correct most of the time, which is not always true.

It's very domain specific. That just means you can't get 100 times faster, and that's what's justifying the bajillion million infinity dollars of investment, right? If we went, hey, this makes you 50% faster, like, all right, is that worth a trillion dollars? I don't think so. I don't think it's worth of trillion dollars. Like the market thesis depends on the psychosis claim. Also, I mean, it's meant to be artificial intelligence.

Just to be clear, that the intelligence part is in the name. But everything was saying makes it sound really fucking stupid. It's just, it's not smarter to it doesn't know anything. And it does dumb guy stuff. Oh, you didn't ask me in exactly the way I needed to be asked. I don't understand, mate. Sorry. I'm not going to be helpful at all.

And also, what we are describing is very simple stuff. It's not a trillion dollar. It's not even a 50 billion tam industry. It's just, even if it got everything we're saying, right, it still wouldn't be that exciting? Yeah, you know, I think it was, it was very interesting when it came out. It was, like, pretty novel. When GPT3 came out, I went, what the hell? Like, this was not available when I was at university.

This is fucking wild. I think this is really sort of overstayed it's welcome. And it's just so interesting because we've taken a technology that, I mean, if you're willing to set aside many, many ethical claims around stealing from artists and environmental things, like if we just handwave all of that, which I'm not happy to do, but in this context for an argument, I will. Yeah, yeah. If you hand wave all of that, it's like, all right, we've made something pretty neat. And then we've still somehow completely managed to fuck everything up. Like all we had to do was be reasonable for 10 seconds about how we use this and invest in it, and we have completely failed.

Everyone has gone insane. You've heard the chaos. Now you can see it. Hello. My gosh. Watch all your favorite podcasts from start to finish, right inside the free IHare Radio app. Gets the blood going up. Catch every laugh and eye roll on shows like the Tom Green Farmcast and park the bus.

Now with full video. We're building a ramp for Tony Hawk. It's the same hosts and the same chemistry. with all the hilarious moments you've been missing right on your screen. Cheers. Open the free IHRRadio app. Search video podcasts and tap watch. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting.

Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think I-Hard. Streaming, radio, and podcasting.

Call 844-8-4-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-8-4-I-Hart. We've all been there. We've had seasons that have shaken everything. The question is, what remains when the shaking stops? Hi, I'm Gary Valenciano. And on my podcast, Unshaken with Gary Vee, I sit down with amazing personalities

and we talk about the seasons that nearly broke them, the lows that carried them to their highs. Listen to Unshaken with Gary V on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Emily Oster. I'm an economist and data expert. And I'm Perry Wilson. I'm a medical doctor. And this is our new podcast, Wellness Actually. Because you're getting a staggering amount of health and wellness information nowadays,

and some of it is awesome. And some of it is, well, actually, bullshit. Fortunately, we're both people who know how to read studies, parse data, and can tell you what's worth trying out and what you can safely ignore. Each episode, we tackle the health news of the week and then take a deeper dive into a misunderstood health and wellness topic, like... What's the deal with peptide? What's the deal with GLP-1s? What's the deal with creatine?

What's the deal with cupping? What's the deal with sleep? So join us for a weekly dose of sanity. It might actually be just with the doctor. or The Economist. Ordered. Listen to Wellness Actually on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Yeah, it's... I don't know, I'm trying... It's like if everyone did Platform as a Service and take it to a truly... It's like, wow, you could just put a single line of code and now your entire ecosystem is working perfectly on this. Yeah, it sounds like the promise that was made with past and then just didn't happen.

I worked on a few of those clients. It was fucking terrible, explain to journalists what Platform as a Service meant. But again, no, everyone didn't suddenly... say that no one was running their own computers anymore, no one was running their own databases anymore. And it's just, it feels like it's completely escaped reality. And you are very much in the trenches with this. And one thing I did want to ask about as well was this, my favorite section of the piece, heretics will be shot. And the way you describe it is that there is this

genuine religiosity behind this, this aggressive kind of tech evangelism that says, if you are in with the AI stuff, you're out of the crowd. Yeah, and it's actually kind of scary to watch. Like, normally when I write something, I'm mostly angry about it. And you also, there wasn't a lot of anger in that piece because I was more slowly realizing, yeah, I was like, hey, there are not adults running our hospitals. You know, it turns out, I think the worst thing was realizing that they were always sort of immature and childlike and not responsible or brave.

Like, they've always been that way. this has just allowed them to coordinate around a thing that allows them to behave this way at the same time. And anyone that does not get on board, like, God, I've seen some pretty wild stuff. We're sort of at the point where if you tell a CEO at maybe most companies, especially big ones, right, if they're worth over a billion dollars, if you tell certain people, certain executives that you do not believe that AI is the future. And I mean, those words, right? I'm not talking like, have a sound business plan or you believe a specific initiative will work, if you will not sign off on statements like AI is changing everything, it will

transform this business, they will just fire you. I've never seen anything like it. Even, you know, we had the cloud a while ago. People still behave the same way. It's like a little bit culty. They go, we've got to move everything to the cloud. You got to move everything to the cloud. I don't think I've seen someone get fired for expressing doubt about that. But if you say something like, I don't think AI is the way for me to do my job. CEOs, I've seen multiple CEOs say things like, well, then you don't belong at this company. You know, pack your bags, get out of here. What the fuck?

What's the justification? Well, you're against AI, which must mean you're bad at your job because we won't need people who don't use AI anymore. You know, it's just, I don't know what to say, man. Because the question of why implies there's like a coherent reason. They've gone insane. That's just, because you mention in here as well that doubting AI also scares their customers and that it's kind of a chain of idiocy, if you could talk about that a little bit.

Yeah. So what was really interesting was I was chatting with a Fortune 500 executive, right? I thought it was really interesting because some of the, you know, two brain cell dudes on Hacker News were like, ah, this can't be real. And I'm like, I mean, look, it's a Fortune 500 executive. Like, what do you want me to say? It's just, it's the truth. And this guy was pretty smart, but his company had said some pretty crazy things.

So I went, well, you know, do you, like, between you and me, we're sitting here having coffee, is it true? Or do you believe that? Or, you know, what is making you say this? Is it just because you need to hit certain sales numbers? And it's like, yes, some people are very gullible and they bind to this stuff. We don't really believe it internally. Some people believe it internally, but whatever, it's crazy people everywhere.

It was that at this company, because they're huge, they have tons of enterprise contracts. And some of those CEOs have deals with them. And that CEO says something like, we have a 100 times speed up in productivity. And the original guy, the guy I was talking to, goes on the news and says, well, 100 times is not possible. He has embarrassed his customer. And these people can be very, very petty. So they'll cancel the contract. And the first guy gets fired for insulting a customer.

And where this weird game theoretic prisoner's dilemma, you know, standoff. where you can't even contradict another executive because you can't tell if they're cynically playing the game because then you can say it and they don't care or if they really believe it because then you have embarrassed them in public. So all of them have just sort of gone, even pretty responsible people have gone,

I'm not going to disagree with them. I'm just not going to talk about this because it's too dangerous to talk about. That is fucking insane. I realize we're to say this a lot today. But it's fucking insane. That is one of the craziest thing that if you go on television and say you don't like something, you will lose a contract over

it, which kind of explains what happened with the PR firm, I guess. I mean, I don't know how they would have worked out. I don't like AI, but maybe there were some clues somewhere. But this is an industry gone mad. This is the craziest thing I've heard in any. This is like an actual information hazard situation. I am actually a little bit chilled by it. Yeah, I think it's fascinating because it's always been bad to insult your customers. Right. Obviously. But usually all your customers aren't saying the same thing at the same time in such a destructive way.

When they're all saying one thing, that topic is just off limits because if you agree with them, I mean, you haven't really accomplished anything. They don't care if you agree with you. They're just like, for example, if you were the CEO at zero or something, right? You're going to have huge contracts with a bunch of big companies. you can't actually say what you think on this topic because you might upset someone. And I think what's been really interesting as well as seeing the pressure from boards.

I've had so many executives write in since I wrote that and go, yeah, my board has ordered me to use AI. I don't believe in it. But they said if I don't use AI, yeah, boards are saying this. But I've also had board members tell me that they feel like if they don't tell everyone to use AI, they'll be removed from their position.

So like, it's just this, I don't know, what to tell you. It's insane. It doesn't make any sense. It's like this huge mass delusion event that I feel like we might be writing about for the next 20 years. Like, it's just fascinating. Well, I think what the contra to all of this is, it also feels like it could reverse very aggressively and suddenly. Because if everyone's just kind of sitting around being like, yeah, I actually fucking hate, or like, there's a contingent of people that's impossible to measure of people who are kind of fucking sucks. I kind of fucking hate this. But I'm going to along with it, and enough people start just saying they don't like it, it just feels like one

day that the mood could shift, because this is what I've been predicting the whole time, that just at some point everyone will stop doing AI or someone they like and respect will say, fuck this, I'm not doing it anymore, and then everyone will walk away. They're just looking for permission. Correct. We're basically talking about coordination problems, right? Which is a thing where a bunch of people want to say a certain thing. If one person puts their hand up, that person will be killed, so no one wants to put their hand up first. What you need is just some event for everyone to say the same thing at the same time. And what's interesting is we're here because a different problem was solved, which is a lot of executives and board

members and people are very easily excitable. They always had this sort of latent level of mania. AI coming out in the form of LLNs, solve that problem for them. Because if you put your hand up and you said, I'm going all in on the metaverse, like that's, That's kind of a joke. It was silly back then. So we first solved the problem by giving them something to coordinate and be frantic around. And now we're just waiting for the first, like, hyperscaler to collapse for the reverse event. Or just Sachin Adela or probably not Sundar Pashai with the way that Google's earnings just went. But someone is going to eventually just go, fuck this.

I truly, I think it could be meta, but also, who knows with that wacky son of a bitch, Mark Zuckerberg, what it'll get up to next? I hear he's working on a Tamagotchi. Like an actual AI power. You wacky son of a gun. It's really cool, though. It kind of reminds me of your other piece I love, which is a brainwash and executive today. But the most extreme version of LinkedIn psychosis, where it's just everything you do is a,

is an artifact of how much LinkedIn you consume except everyone is LinkedIn now. Can I talk about that brainwash piece for a second? Yes, please, please. Please do. Okay. So, you know, the whole thing in the piece is one of my executives when I still, like, it did work for myself, came in and just asked everyone at the company about a product called Monte Carlo, which is like super niche, like, fucking nerd thing.

And we were like, why are you talking to all of us about this in our one-on-ones? You only talk to us once a year. This would be like my granddad coming in and going like, tell me about like quantum cryptography. Like, there's no way that this is a time. topic you should be interested in, right? Like, it's just so far out of your wheelhouse. Yeah, where'd you hear about this? Like, well, my kid comes in and says a new word.

I'm like, where'd you hear that? No, I did hear about this, and it was LinkedIn. So they did tell me where they heard about it from, which is dire. But I don't know if you saw this, the CEO of Monte Carlo, not knowing I'd written about the company with, you know, I wouldn't say criticize them, but I had some question marks. And I was like, who are you advertising to it? What the hell's wrong with your website?

So she took that piece and boosted it and said it's being shared with executives and boardrooms around the world. It might be the most circulated thing in boardrooms right now. I have no way of measuring that. And then if you look up the Monte Carlo website, from someone who has just gone, you know, I like this piece. I think it raises some good points. Montecarlo, I don't know if it's always at this, but it's now montacarlo. com. And they've completely shifted their messaging because they are no longer a data observer.

They're now an agent observability platform. Whatever the fuck that means. Jesus fucking. What's great as well, though, is the reaction to your piece, and I've been looking it up. I occasionally see it with mine, but I'm more direct with how I feel about AI people, so they're less willing to share it. But the amount of people I've seen sharing it, who are very clearly the subject of the piece, is insane to me.

It's just like people like, yeah, wow, can't believe people are mis... People are all using AI for no reason. I, of course, am nothing to do with this. All my AI solutions are perfect. I love AI so much. But these other imbeciles who are using it wrong, it's genuinely driving me insane, if I'm going to be honest. I have a phrase for this, which I think is novel.

I might have invented this. It's the n minus two idiot solution, which is if you look around a room and you go, that guy is the smartest person in here. Everyone will agree. And in a room full of sufficiently, you know, ridiculous or compromised people, they're all okay with it because they assume they're number two. Right. So you just need to leave them enough wiggle room. What you can't do is go, only one person in this room is smart. You can go, two of you are smart, and everyone's okay with that.

They'll all agree on the first person. They all assume they're the second person. And yeah, a lot of the coverage has been, you know, this insane phenomenon. And, you know, credit to possibly the Monte Carlo CEO, maybe she didn't say this in so many words, but maybe what she was actually saying was, I feel trapped by the situation. My whole company is pivoted to AI agents, even though it doesn't make sense.

Maybe that was her gentle way of screaming into the void. I don't actually know, but it is very funny. I kind of want to do a blog at some point that's just you can stop using AI. It's just like literally you can stop this at any time. You don't have to do this. If you feel trapped, you can just leave. You kind of did that at the end of the piece. You did a very empathetic thing at the end saying,

here's how to deal with organizational AI stuff. If you're told this, well, just quit. And in other situations, you could also do something else. It's just, it's genuinely sickening. It is actually sickening in a way that it pisses me off. I've said this before in not so many words, But this is meant to be an industry of meritocracy. This is meant to be the industry where people, oh, we do things for efficiency reasons.

And we do things because they get good business results. And now I'm realizing you've kind of told me this in the past as well. Everyone was lying about that. They were just doing stuff that made them feel good. Yeah, I kind of wish we had that. You know, every so often you'll hear someone say something like, you know, the issue with capitalism is it optimizes everything for money, right? We throw away every other value for money

and efficiency and productivity. And God, I wish that was true because we somehow have like the worst of both worlds where we're throwing away every other value and somehow still not achieving peak efficiency. Right? Like we're doing all these horrible, hideous things and then you look, well, how much money are we making?

It's like not even that much money. We're wasting all the data centers. I mean, the data centers alone are just fucking insane. to me. I've been, what's really good as well is, on the subject of meritocracy and numbers, trying to just pull together very basic things like, is any of this profitable? And asking people and them getting angry at you. Just very angry, just agitated by like, why'd you keep asking these questions? Why did you keep doing this? I grew up in a rough neighborhood. I've met my fair share of scam artists. And 100% of the time, if someone gets angry at you for asking for things like

that, that's because they are full of shit. Yeah, yeah. You know, I was in psychology before I was in IT, and you see that a lot in things like multi-level marketing scams and stuff. You know, like there, if you go, hey, isn't this a pyramid scheme? They've got the whole script, which is like, what do you mean it's a pyramid scheme? What's your understanding of a pyramid scheme? Answer me, you fucker. And it's sort of the same thing here. Didn't we, maybe we talked about this previously, But have you seen like that clip of, you know, a very, very gentle interview with Sam Altman. And at the end, this interviewer who clearly loves him very gently goes like, so what's the plan for profitability?

It's just like, I've had enough of these questions. No, he's just like, we're waking way more than $13 billion this year. You know, and if you need someone to buy your stock. And what's funny is Sachinadella was on that call. Like just your bought. Yeah, just Sachinadella. Della just sitting there with the, I don't know, the magic, magic roundabout thing. Do do, do, do.

Just nothing going on up there, waiting for the next input. The world's most, just like, the little monkey with the symbol that does backflips, just sitting in such in Adela's head. It's going, did, did, do it, did. Wait, for Amy Hood. I was going to say, I'm imagining, like, you know, the little Mac OS speech ball. It's just a little spinning widget up there. The thing is, Sam Ompman will never talk to me.

They've already told me he won't. But that's because I know within five minutes he will get pissed off of me. Because he would just be really easy to just be like, hey, why don't you make any money? Why'd you lose so much money, Sam? Well, we make money. And then just you'd get more and more immature until he eventually tries to get at you through the screen like a dog that sees his reflection. Easy peasy. He'd try and kill me within a day.

I mean, there's no reason to, right? Like, you know, as a PR person, I would, I would rather kill myself than put Sam Hortman on a call with me. Like, I've just, that is the, that would actually be the appropriate choice. Like, whatever you do, do not put Ed Zitcher on a call with Sam Hortman. Yeah. It's also, it's like only a losing proposition for it. Yeah. Because let's say he comes on and he has the greatest showing of his whole life. You know, like he just, he feels every question perfectly. That is the same outcome. as just talking to another journalist that's going to jerk him off for an hour, right? There's no reason for him to take that risk when he can get so much positive coverage from people that aren't going to ask him any questions. And I will only ask him the most annoying. I'll just ask him, are you happy? And his head will start like erupting in smoke. Anyway, so we've kind of got off topic, I realize.

I wanted to actually talk to you and break down something that I've heard with various people, which is this whole issue of demos with AI. AI is really good at making a good enough demo to sell to someone. And you kind of covered this before AI was as far down the hole as possible with brainwash and executive. But I get the sense that it's just very good at doing enough to sell an imbecile on something. Yeah. And, you know, I'm willing to be a little bit more charitable here because it doesn't have to be an imbecile necessarily. It just has to be someone who is not proficient with tech.

because when you work with something sufficiently complicated, you understand there's a lot of difficulty around the fine details in deploying a piece of software and the design and achieving business value, whatever you want to do. But, you know, as a end user, like, I don't really know how my oven works. I just have some knobs that I twiddle and then the oven works, right? So if you turned up and you said, you know, I've got nanobots that assemble ovens perfectly and then it does it and it bakes a pie.

If I don't eat the pie or, you know, whatever, I might go, hey, that was really, really cool. And it is genuinely impressive enough that possibly no one would blame me for investing in it initially. Yeah, because you got shown something that looked plausible. Right. And not just plausible, like literally impossible prior to 2020. Like you couldn't do this sort of trick. And then the next day you start to find out like, hey, well, you know what? like this pie is really bad. And it turns out the oven only has one setting.

And sometimes it catches fire. And, you know, I still might not be an imbecile because what I saw up front was so impressive. I would be an imbecile if I kept buying it four years later, right? Like there was a period where the overinvestment was understandable. Well, this actually kind of gets back to Braymush and executive because there's the point in there that the people that buy software are often not the people that. use it. So you just have to impress the CIO or the CTO or the CEO enough. And that person does not

have the practical on the ground experience to make that decision, but usually does. Yes. And that is basically what makes, not just this con, but like a lot of enterprise bad software possible. You just go, hey, you know, your, your customer support monkeys, they need a new platforms. You want to put them on Zendesk. And then someone buys Zendesk. And is the CEO like, you're never going to log into Zendesk. You should. I actually think, you know, most executives I meet aren't that busy. They're pretty busy. Yeah, they got nothing on. I'm serious. Yeah, like, but they, they absolutely could just go down and sit next to someone for like an hour and check out what their work looks like. That might do a lot more for sort of a long-term company strategy than

whatever they're doing, like going to be meetings. Look, there's probably some level of wealth where that's not true if you're worth personally worth enough billions. But yeah, tons of people worth hundreds of millions of dollars still take the time to do that. And again, they run very profitable companies and they don't waste their time on this stuff beyond what's necessary. Heard the chaos. Now you can see it. Hello. My gosh. Watch all your favorite podcasts from start to finish right inside the free IHard Radio app.

Gets the blood going up. Catch every laugh and eye roll on shows like the Tom Green Farmcast and park the bus. Now with full video. We're building a ramp for Tony Hawk. It's the same hosts and the same chemistry with all the hilarious moments. you've been missing right on your screen. Cheers. Open the free IHRRA radio app.

Search video podcasts and tap watch. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message.

Plus, only IHart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart, streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. We've all been there. We've had seasons that have shaken everything. The question is, what remains when the shaking stops?

Hi, I'm Gary Valenciano. And on my podcast, Unshaken with Gary V, I sit down with amazing personalities, and we talk about the seasons that nearly broke them. the lows that carried them to their highs. Listen to Unshaken with Gary V on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Bill, why is my eye twitching?

Does this mean I'm in perimenopause? Maybe I have adult ADHD. I need to look this up. Where's my phone? Juliana, your phone is hot to the touch. I think it's asking you for a break. You know what? Maybe I should just ask chat GPT.

Or maybe we can ask an actual human. Yes, like a couple sex there. Whoa, that escalated quickly, but okay. Because I have questions. We have questions. And I bet everyone has questions. Like, is it normal to sleep in separate bedrooms? We do that.

How about this one? Is bribing your kids bad parenting or just negotiating? Oh, and I still do need to know why was my poop green that one time? Hypothetically, right? Okay, well, instead of letting the internet guess, we've got actual people answering these exact questions. And laughing with us has got to be better than spending three hours down to a rabbit hole online. Listen to Bill and Juliana.

The podcast. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. It really is just the grimmest thing ever. And I'm guessing that the reason that LLM's also good at creating these demos is you can vibe code together something that has like buttons that work. And because the buttons work is good enough. Yeah, the buttons do work. And that's the thing.

The buttons do work, which is why it's sort of. understandable. But then you had other problems, right? Like, you know, the buttons work until you load it on mobile. And then this button disappears and that button doesn't work. Or two people click the button at the same time and it puts down like, you know, it doesn't lock inventory. So now you've got minus one in the warehouse. Like all these things. And it, you know, it's not that an LLM can't solve them, especially with human guidance. It's that it hasn't delivered on the promise of human takes its handoff and software is solved. It's also very likely not running on your infrastructure, right?

Yeah, I mean, a lot of the time it's literally just running on a laptop and you haven't solved complex deployment issues and that kind of thing. But again, I understand, right? Like if I'm talking to a random CFO, they don't know what infrastructure means in the context of IT. So it's all basically understandable, but it's the same reason sane people don't get super excited about developments that they're not specialists in. I don't walk around every time there's like a new breakthrough in medicine going, oh my God, this is going to change everything. I go, I don't know how to evaluate this. I have no idea of this is game changing.

I'm just going to shut up and let doctors talk about it. But this feels like, actually, I think I've kind of worked out something, which is the problem isn't so, well, the problem is the fact that you've got executives buying something that they don't really understand. But that's been a problem before. The problem is they are more incentivized to do it. Instead of that one example of an executive getting kind of brainwashed into buying Monte Carlo, it's I will buy anything with AI on it. And in fact, I believe that if I don't do this, I will be under existential threat. Yeah, 100%.

And, you know, for what it's worth, that executive didn't buy Monte Carlo in the end. They just wasted a bunch of time. And I suspect if Monte Carlo had AI on their front page, they would have bought it, right? Like, it really... Just instantly. I think they would have been like, yeah. Yeah, especially because with this whole thing where no one is actually using the tools, it lets you tell your CEO that you've made a investment in AI and it's transforming something.

Don't ask any questions about what it's transforming. It's actually hard to make businesses more profitable, especially established ones, right? Startups can do whatever they want because they've nothing to lose. But if you've been in business for five years or 10 years or 20 years, there's a lot of things you're doing. And it's not as easy as just going claw double my profits. If that worked, we'd already be seeing it. That doesn't work. It kind of sounds like most software doesn't solve problems.

Well, I don't mean that. I don't mean that no software solves any problems. I just mean people regularly buy software that does not actually improve their companies. Yes, that is pretty common. And this is not an LLM point, right? This is generally true. Yeah, yeah. And I must be clear.

I mean this on a much larger scale than LLMs. Yes. I would say a lot of software does not deliver on its promises. They tend to have much stronger sales teams than they have. Firstly, literally programmers, like the programmers tend not to be very good at a lot of companies. I had to explain to a physio yesterday that we're not a regulated field. Like this blessed, very happy man was just like, oh, yeah, they wouldn't let you program a computer without like a license. I had to study physio for so long.

I know, I felt like I was breaking his heart. That's really fucking good. Oh, no, I kind of think you should have to now. I kind of think we need a computer licensing. Well, maybe, right? Like anything else serious, like, you know, if you want to be a firefighter, you train, you take it seriously. Yeah. I had to explain to him like, hey man, like, they'll let you program if you've read zero books on the topic, right?

You can be a principal engineer. And he went, that can't be true. I've met people who earned like $300,000 that have never read one book. It's so good. To be clear, that regulation of to do software engineering at a company you need a license, maybe not. But I think we can extend it to you can only use social media on a sit down computer. That's a good start. And you can only talk about programming if you've read these three books.

Like you have to qualify to be able to post about it. You can't post the bad. Yes, I think it would be helpful if we had some sort of accreditation that lent some trustworthiness to the right people. Because I don't even read comments I get on things anymore. I do emails. If someone emails me, I'll read it. But like the quality of comment is so bad.

And it's not just people that, you know, disagree with me. A lot of them have literal reading comprehensive issues. I rarely get like an actual critique on. what I've written. I get critiques what people think I've written. But even sometimes people will agree with me and I'll see they've also missed the point. And I'm like, well, I'm just going to stop reading these. But to answer your question, though, about software, you know, not being very good, there's the quality issue of a lot of programmers aren't very good. You can have badly programmed stuff that is still good enough to deliver value to someone. But a lot of software is fundamentally

ill-conceived. So an executive will hear some pitch that's like, well, if you get this software, you'll have 10% more throughput on your customer support whatever. A lot of the time, that is just not true. So they do the whole migration into a new system. And there's just no outcome at the end of it. They just don't see an improvement. That's, I mean, it really just feels like the entire software industry is based on nothing at this.

But it's just, I keep thinking of calamity at this point because we've got tons of people coding with LLMs, not reading the code anymore. You've got software being bought by people that don't use it and don't really understand it. And now just a mass acceleration of that problem that already existed for 10 or 15 years. I think probably the problem we're discussing is probably at least 15 years because it's like a very SaaS-based problem because software as a service allowed you to subscribe to software rather than buying an expensive license up front, which sounds good right up until you're in year three and there's been three price increases and you realize you're paying Oracle.

But it feels that we're just accelerating dramatically towards something breaking somewhere at scale. Like I really am, I mean, we were talking about GitHub last night. Right. Yeah. Oh, my God. The GitHub outages have been so funny. I've been really enjoying them. I think I mentioned that, what was it called?

Oh, God, I'm going to disappoint my friend so much. I forgot the name of the piece. But it's about GitHub. like their massive outages. It's by Ephron Lake. GitHub used by basically every person in software engineering, and it has the uptime of an unstable startup with $2,000. Yeah, I would say a startup with $2,000 can achieve higher uptime than that.

Like, that's actually probably true. Look, there's some extenuating circumstances like GitHub deals with a volume of traffic that a startup doesn't. But they're not broke, right? Like, what's going on here? More importantly, they weren't having these issues a couple of years ago. Like, they're doing something wrong. I've heard it's related to Azure migrations from inside Microsoft.

It probably doesn't help that they're slinging LLM slop everywhere, too. In that post by Ephron, he did talk about how almost every change log they've had has just used the word agent and AI over and over. He never sees the word stability and reliability. There's no like stability or the word improvement. It's just agentic. I think that there are now 11 different companies that claim you can do agents with credit cards now as well. It's just like the tech industry is all just KFAPE.

Sorry. What do you mean AI with agents with credit cards? What does that mean? Well, that's a good fucking question, Nick. they are suggesting that you can connect an API of some sort to an AI agent, and then the AI agent will go and buy something with your credit card. I mean, look, as a matter of technical truth, that is true. Why would you do that? That's such a bad idea. Well, because you love, I mean, no one uses it. No one's actually using these things. DoorDash is doing a command line interface now.

Why? What is it going on, dude? This whole industry is, what I think it is, is just, especially Bay Area people, have just been driven completely insane by this stuff. And they are, the way I describe it is, it's a community of 30 to 50 year olds desperately trying to impress 22 year olds. And they're all desperate to make the, like, they're all like, on God. This is a permanent underclass.

And they kind of look around. They're like, yeah, agentic, right? Fuck. Command line in. For real, for real. Yeah. On God, no cap. And it's just insane because even like Mark Andreessen being like, beast, it's like,

shut the fuck up. You are 100 years old. Did Mark Andreessen say based? That's very upsetting. I believe he has said based more than once. That's actually worse than all of the AI. investment. Go fuck your mosaic browser, you fuck with it. It's just like these people don't know anything. And I think we're just, because the argument about the CAPEX, for example, keeps coming back to, well, these are the richest companies in the world run by some of the greatest tech talent in the world.

What if that isn't true? What if that's not true at all? And in fact, what if it's not run by the smartest people? And indeed, as we've been discussing today, there is an active culture to reduce intelligence across the board. And that's the thing. If I am right, the entire tech industry is going to experience a depression because everyone went insane. Like everyone got taken into Heaven's Gate. Except instead of killing themselves and other people, they're just doing command line interfaces for fucking DoorDash. I don't understand why you'd want a CLI for DoorDash. That's baffling. But I might even going to talk about that because it's upsetting me because I don't.

Like, what do they think? No. D-D-C-L-I lets you order DoorDash directly from your agent. Search stores, find the best deals, checkout, and more. See, like, okay, no, you can't trick me to talking about this. I have, like, 80 different thoughts, and I'm not going to poison. What I love is the first response is Boris Churney, the head of Claude Code, saying BRB downloading. I don't know.

much about computers, but do you, do you download a CLI? Like, I mean, yeah, you type in like, you know, pseudo-abgettechor-dash, I don't know. I just, I feel like these are the people with the money and they gave me even half this money. I could do basically anything else and make them way more than zero or negative as is happening to them. But it's like, these people are never going this is a horrifying thing to say, I realize. These people are never going to learn without suffering. Like, it's just, it really is that the tech industry, I'm not saying that I want anyone to suffer.

I really wish there was a soft landing out of all of this. There was a way out of this without genuine depression hitting the tech industry. But I think that's the only way anything changes because they've never, like the dot-com bubble was much, I mean, the telecommunications, so I speak, but the dot-com bubble, the tech industry is much smaller back then. And I think that something like that is the only thing that could change things because they need an egregious screaming in the face. They need to be told not just that they're wrong, but they need to be shown it in a graphic way. Unless they're going to start learning stuff, unless they're going to start learning things.

So, you know, I had you on my podcast a few weeks ago, and the guest right after you were the authors of a book called Crisis Engineering. So they did some of the health care.gov bailout. One of them, Marino was the CTO of Veterans Affairs in the U.S. And the thesis behind crisis engineering is just that organizations don't undergo change unless they're in an acute state of crisis, which is not just a problem. I mean, a crisis so bad that there is a complete dissolution of sense making, like panic in the streets. This is sort of true everywhere, right? Like, people tend to make big lifestyle changes after a huge divorce.

or, you know, some massive event like that. And yeah, I think you're right. I think it's why my advice to most people now is not like, you know, raise a huge stink about this. It's like, if someone is actively hurting something in front of you that you care about because of AI, yes, stand up and say something. If you work at a fire department and you just need some money to fix a fire hydrant or whatever it is that is important to you right now, we're so far past the point of

arguing with these people. I'm like, just ask for your money and ask for an extra $10,000 for a chatbot that doesn't work. Fix the problem. Just pretend, pretend this doesn't exist until it all blows up. It'll be fine, right? Like, I'm just, I'm just waiting to pick up a bunch of really cheap and video shares. That's, that's all I'm doing. Well, that's the, and that, as we wrap up here, that is kind of what I'm telling people, which is after this blows up, and it will, goodness it will, there is going to be a lot of money and competency. I think you've already kind of seen this as well. It's just like, people are going to realize, because of the crisis to follow, the imbeciles have taken over, the business idiots are everywhere. I'm already, I mean, little PR work I've done in the last

few months. Even then, it's people being like, yeah, I keep talking to people, and they just day, I generate fucking everything. They don't seem to know anything. And I think that that is going to be everywhere, the things that people read. I don't think it's going to be a utopian society or anything, but I think that there is going to be in engineering, in any kind of business management role, a certain degree of, right, did you get taken by this? Because I must be clear, once this explodes, I am not going to stop pointing out people who fell behind this. I'm going to be, I have detailed notes to quote Casey Newton, not speaking about anyone specific about who I might be pointing out here.

We will, it will actually be, I think, our civic duty to remind everyone who fell for this. And I think that result of that is competent people are going to make more money. Yeah. And if I could, I have one bit here where I think I'm a little bit less. optimistic, which is, once this blows up, suddenly everyone will pretend that they were never for it, right? Oh, yeah. And a lot of these people are then going to immediately pivot because they have no principles, right, just chasing money.

A lot of these AI experts are going to be to go on LinkedIn and change their byline to AI project cleanup crew, right? Like, I think the time to be competent is right now. Like, I pay my team entirely through not doing A-A. I'm the only fucking guy. out here in Melbourne, I know that isn't just doing AI projects 24-7, right? But the market is there, and it's maybe the easiest it's ever been to find sensible clients, because now they're all signaling when they're insane. Once the bubble blows up, I'll have to find out by like signing the

contract and finding out if they suck on the day. Now I don't have to. I just need to see, can they make it through a 40-minute conversation with me without asking me to pivot their whole business to AI? And if they don't do that, they're almost certainly awesome to work with. Well, thankfully, my rautism allows me to document every single person I've ever seen mention AI. And it's really easy to tell. And by the way, every listener of this show, your civic duty when this breaks is take screenshots and respond to anything anti-AI someone says when they try and pretend that they never fell for this. This is going to be like the Super Bowl of this you images. Oh, yeah. I mean, I, I,

been keeping, I have hundreds of screenshots of people saying stuff about AI. And, like, the dumbest shit in the world, I cannot wait. I'm going to be quote posting so much my fucking trek pad breaks. I will keep a folder and then I will send it to you right after you invent a death note, right? Oh, no, no, I don't want these people to die. I want them to be alive to read how much I'm going to post about them. I need them to, like, they need to be alive so that they can suffer by facing the truth again and again and again. And I think it, I think it is going to be funny. It is really, it remains funny to me, though, the, these people still, that there are people who are still questioning whether there's a bubble. Like, it's just, it's remarkable to me, in fact.

I don't know anyone sensible who's questioning it. Even people I know who are like, I really like AI, they're like, this is clearly a bubble. Like, it's, it's fucking over. It's Jova. Well, you know what? Much like this podcast there, Nick, where can people find you? Two places. So the first one is my personal blog, ludic. blog, that's L-U-D-I-C, blog.

Or my company's website, which is hermit-tech.com. And we have a blog on there, too. Lovely. And you can find me, of course, on Google. dot com slash Google and then type in Ed Zitron, criminal and ignore all of the other stuff

just look at the podcast. I of course, we back later in the week with them on log and who knows it's earnings week so what the fuck's gonna happen? Who goddamn knows? Anyway, love you all. Thank you for listening.

This has been Better Offline. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Rousalski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects com, M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I-com.

You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's your ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to R-S-Better-O-Line to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of CoolZone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, CoolZoneMedia.com. or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast playing along is back with more of my favorite musicians. Check out my newest episode with Phineas. So I went home and I asked Billy if she wanted to sing it. She immediately made it her own thing. You really know how to make me cry when you give me those ocean eyes. And I'm scared. So come hang out with us in the studio. and listen to Playing Along on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It just came out. Jeremy, what did you just do? You just sit yourself up for failure. I've never heard you tell this story. I've never told this story. This must have been tucked deep, deep in the Jeremy Lynn file. My name is MC Jen.

I'm excited to tell you about laugh, but not least. I'll be chatting with guests from all walks of life about the power of humor when it comes to facing difficult times. These will be conversations that remind us all. Life is hard. Laugh harder. Listen and laugh but not least with MC Jen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hello, my love. I'm Ryan Weiss, and for the past 15 years, I've been an emotional intelligence coach and a spiritual guide, and I'm sharing with you my new podcast, Waking Up with Ryan.

Waking Up with Ryan is a daily audio video podcast, here to help you connect with yourself before the noise of the day takes over. So let's start our days together with a moment of calm. That's just for you. Listen to waking up with Ryan on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Emily Oster. I'm an economist and data expert. And I'm Perry Wilson. I'm a medical doctor.

And this is our new podcast, Wellness Actually. You're getting a staggering amount of health and wellness information, and some of it is awesome. And some of it is, well, actually, bullshit. Fortunately, we're both people who know how to read studies and can tell you what's worth trying out and what you can safely ignore. Listen to Wellness Actually on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.