Better Offline - How Shareholders Are Destroying The Tech Industry

Episode Date: July 12, 2024

The shareholder supremacy has eaten the tech industry, driving private and public companies to chase unprofitable, unsustainable ideas like generative AI as a means of expressing eternal growth to the markets. In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how this destructive mindset has created an entirely new kind of manager - one disconnected from labor and creation - and how the dark hand of shareholder supremacy is behind everything strange and bad in tech in the last few years LINKS: https://tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: wheresyoured.at Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/betteroffline Discord chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials - http://www.twitter.com/edzitron instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/zitron.bsky.social https://www.threads.net/@edzitron See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-I-Hart. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel,

help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The story I've told myself can then shape my behavior, and that can lead me to sabotage the possibility of connection.

This Mental Health Awareness Month, tune into the podcast Deeply Well with Debbie Brown if you've been searching for a soft place to land while doing the work to become whole. This podcast is for you to hear more. Listen to Deeply Well with Debbie Brown from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Oh, hello. Fancy meeting you here. I'm Ed Zittron and this is Better Offline. In the previous episode, I walked through how General Electric's Jack Welch created the disgraceful terms of modern capitalism. A corporate mindset where thousands of people are laid off to boost revenues when a company is making millions or billions of dollars in profits, and an era of growth at all-cost corporations that create nothing but shareholder value,

run by an entire class of managerial pencil pushers that only really care about hitting analyst targets. In this episode, I'm going to show you how bad that's been specifically for the tech industry. As ever, please check out the episode details for an URL that has sources for everything I'm talking about in this and future episodes. Sorry to repeat myself on that one, but it's really important, you know, I did not just make all of this up. Anyway, a couple weeks back, OpenAI CTO, Miramorati, spoke for nearly an hour at Dartmouth University, where she recently accepted an honorary, which by the way means fake, doctorate of science,

for, and I quote, pushing the frontiers of what neural networks can do. This is, by the way, very funny. It's very funny indeed. Because other than when she graduated with her Bachelor of Engineering from the Thayer School of Engineering, and for one year of her career,

Miramorati has only ever been a manager, specifically a project manager, somebody who doesn't write code or build software, but points at things and say is, yeah, we should do that. After graduating, Miramirati worked briefly at a French aerospace company called Zodiac as an advanced concepts engineer before joining Tesla in 2013 as a product manager, before moving to Leap Motion from 2016 to 2018, where she was the VP of Product and Engineering.

A deceiving title, again, does not mean she actually wrote code for a company that also burned tens of millions of dollars on a gesture-based control system for a Mac, only to be acquired for $30 million in 2019 at about a tenth of its all-time value. Her role would have undoubtedly involved wrangling gank charts, weird product management stuff, just Google it, and spec sheets rather than lines of code in a text editor. After leaving leap motion, Miramorati's career trajectory accelerated in a way that's hard to explain. She moved to OpenAI as its vice president of Applied AI and Partnerships and was promoted

to SVP of Research, Product and Partnerships in 2020. And then at some indeterminate time in 2022 became its chief technology officer, despite having, from what I can tell, exactly one academic credit to her name in a list of 20 or so people. By the way, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskeva, if you're curious, he has over 100. And I realize this is the kind of dick measuring stuff that might not matter. But in this specific case, for the CTO of an organization that's about researching how to build AGI, you'd think you'd have an academic. But don't worry there's many more annoying things about Miramirati. During her speech, she spoke about how artificial intelligence could kill creative jobs, and I quote,

that shouldn't have been there in the first place. Something you'd only say if you'd never created anything in your entire goddamn life. Putting that aside, and trust me, I'll get to it, Mirati, much like Sam Altman, seems like she's full of shit, rambling in this vaguest of ways about how the societal impacts of this work are not an afterthought. and that you kind of have to build them alongside the technology.

They're all fucking technical. The chief technology officer of the most prominent startup in America appears to not know that much about technology, to the point that a couple months back, she was unable to answer whether SORA, Open AI's generative video product, was trained on publicly available data. Making a face that kind of looks like she was chewing a vinegar-flavored wasp,

and I've linked to this, you know the face if you looked it up already, it's not a great one. She could have been lying, but Marathi rarely demonstrates any kind of technical depth, dancing around answers with these vague, weird explanations. And if you're wondering why the host didn't push back at her at all, it's because the host at Dartmouth, by the way, was Jeffrey Backburn, a career manager at Amazoner recently joined DoorDash's board. Marathi's a weird one.

I've watched a lot of her interviews. A lot of them. Hours of them. They're all so boring. I cannot explain how boring they are. But they're not boring because I'm stupid. That's another problem. They're boring because they're meandering.

They're non-specific. And the people interviewing are just like, yeah, wow, damn, that's crazy. Yeah, so you think AI's good then. Oh, shit. That's the criticism she's got. She never, much like Mr. Altman, seems to be in front of anyone who knows what they're talking about or is capable of asking those questions.

And yes, the media interviewing these people are limited. They have remits. about what they can and can't say. I can't speak to the exact fundamental of it, but it isn't great. But it's very goddamn worrying that the future of the tech industry is in the hands of people who don't seem to know much about tech. Open AI is run by Sam Altman, an unqualified, non-technical founder who has conned his ways to the heights of Silicon Valley. Google is run by Sundar Pishai, an MBA and a former McKinsey management consultant that's overseen the destruction of Google's core products, laid off tens of thousands of people, and pushed Google to shoehorn

generative AI into the core search product with disastrous results, including telling you to put glue on pizza and eat rocks and so on and so bloody forth. Microsoft is run by Satchin Adela, yet another MBA, that has, in his tenure, overseen layoffs of over 30,000 people and pushed his company deep into the deeply unprofitable and unsustainable world of generative AI, while laying off people from the Xbox group. You know, one of the only beloved things Microsoft has left, and also wasting a lot of time on the Metaverse, but I'll get to him.

Amazon CEO Andy Jesse, who replaced Jeff Bezos, surprise, surprise. He's another MBA, and he started Amazon as a marketing manager in 1997. To his credit, he came up with the idea of Amazon Web Services, which is the cloud platform that a chunk of the internet uses, and by the way, 10 other people also came up with the idea. And then he was made CEO of Amazon in 2021, at which point a man called Adam Sillipsky was made CEO of Amazon Web Services. And guess what?

He also has a Harvard MBA. But then he was replaced in March by another guy who also had an MBA, this time from Northwestern. It's always these management guys. The most tentacle and one of the most profitable parts of Amazon, their cloud storage and processing product. And I'm crushing it down for the podcast. calm down if you're super technical. You'd think that would be a tech guy. You'd think that would be someone who actually knew what they were goddamn talking about,

other than the osmosis of being in rooms with people who actually do the work. And the reason I'm harping on about this is the founding story of Amazon Web Services, maybe one of the greatest lies in tech's history. I can find no, maybe a little specific evidence as to who the actual architect of AWS was, just this endless mulling about how Andy Jassy and MBA built one of the most important pieces of technological infrastructure of all time. It's just bollocks! And Jassy regularly uses the Royal Wee to talk about how we built Amazon Web Services, despite the fact that he didn't build shit. He didn't build anything at all.

He was a manager managing managers with Jeff Bezos, who was the CEO, who was another manager. It's all managers, all managers doing a management. Centipede, ugh. And what little I can find suggests that much of the actual technical work to build Amazon Web Services was done by people like then-C-TO Alan Vermeulen and Brewster Cale, who founded a company called Alexa Internet that Amazon acquired in 1999 that was instrumental to spinning up the services that became Amazon Web Services, two names that I've never really read in the many, many articles crediting Jassy as the architect behind Amazon's most profitable service. yet arguably the most welch-pilled management-based Silicon Valley staple is Meta.

A company dominated by MBAs like Cheryl Sandberg, its first chief operating officer who has left, replaced by a guy called Javier Olivan, who also has an MBA, Facebook's chief people officer Laurie Gola and the chief privacy officer Michael Prottie, all MBAs. Yet what makes Meta such a weltsian nightmare is its dedication to making its products worse in the search of growth, with career-feworthy. product managers like CMO, Alex Schultz, and head of product Naomi Glyt, dominating the company from its earliest days and creating a culture that focused entirely on gaming Facebook's metrics to please Mark Zuckerberg's demand for perpetual 10% year-over-year growth in core growth metrics.

Meta has laid off of a 13% of its workforce in the last year, over 11,000 people, despite the fact that the company has been profitable for over a decade, even while plunging tens of billions of dollars. into Zuckerberg's Reality Labs Metaverse division and authorizing $50 billion in stock buybacks. In many ways, Zuckerberg is Welch perfected, the CEO of a company that provides a continuously deteriorating service that prints money while gaming its metrics, such as no longer reporting its monthly active users on earnings, to make Wall Street believe that it's a, quote, good company. It doesn't matter that Met has effectively given up on trying to solve

its massive problems with AI-generated spam and scams, and 4-04 media. reports that META has turned its back on the experts that helped bolster its content moderation services. Sadly, and this really matters because the markets still love META, even though they punish the company briefly in recent earnings for a and I quote, light forecast where it, quote, raised investor expectations due to its improved financial performance in recent quarters, leaving little room for error, according to CNBC, a business network that Jack Welch owned a large chunk of through his acquisition of NBC.

part of a deal for General Electric acquired RCA Corp in 1985. It all goes back to Welch, and it's also important to add that, despite all of these layoffs and these light forecasts, meta executives received bonuses when they fired thousands of people in 2023. Google isn't much better. Since Sundar Pashai, a career product manager and MBA, became CEO in 2015, Google's culture is soured, giving Android inventor Andy Rubin, 19, million dollars in 2018 to leave the company after credible sexual misconduct claims, causing a massive walkout over Google's forced arbitration clauses over harassment and discrimination that muzzles victims and empowers the fucking assholes to hide behind Google,

and gives Google the ability to hide its failure to police these people. This happened in the same year that others walked out over Google's work with the Pentagon. Under Peshai, Google has been fined billions of dollars by the European Union for antitrust violations around its Android operating system and has found itself embroiled in a three-year-long antitrust battle with the U.S. Department of Justice around its anti-competitive approach

to keeping Google search on top, including paying Apple $20 billion in 2022 to be the default search engine on Safari, their web browser. Under Pishai, Google has replaced hardworking life as the built the very foundation of the company with contractors, and on the higher levels, scumbags, cretins like Prabagar Ragavan and Jerry Dishler, the latter of which transparently intimidated the Google search team

to increase ad revenue generated by search in emails revealed in the trial from March 2019. You'll be shocked, by the way, to hear that Jerry Dishler has an MBA. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide? Not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier.

This week, my guest, SNL's Mike. Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard,

you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged. One erection.

Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. 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. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio.

Think Podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-844-I-Hart. Hey, everyone, it's Ryder Strong and Wilfredel from PodMeets World. And now the Pod Meets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV,

who now have covered Dancing with the Stars, Traders, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor. So yeah, now we're experts. I know we annoyed a lot of our listeners by our severe lack of survivor knowledge. That is the point of the show. I'm just going to remind you. I have watched some Survivor. I obviously haven't watched enough.

Did people not like it? Like what was just because we? Yeah. We'll be recapping the big conclusion of the 50th season from the final attempts at gameplay to the desperate pleas of finalists to a bunch of who. Aha, ooh, ha, oh. Again, we are experts. So make sure to tune into PodMeets Twirled for all our Survivor 50 takes.

Listen to PodMeets Twirled on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yet as with meta, and as with all of these companies excluding Open AI, which is not public, Google Prince money, netting over $23 billion in its first quarter 2024 earnings, the same ones where it announced its first dividend and a $70 billion stock buyback program. It doesn't matter that Google search is incredibly broken as a result of Google's constant drive to increase revenue, or that Google has decided to generate results on search using unreliable generative AI, that generates insane answers. Alphabet, Google's holding company, has seen its stock continually rise since March of this year.

Even after the eating rocks thing, doesn't that fill your veins full of bile? Doesn't it make you just really, really makes me angry? It makes you very annoyed. I don't like this. I don't like the... You and I... I guess I'm a podcast, so probably not, but regular people like you.

You go to a job, you do the job, if you do the job badly, you get shit-canned. Fair enough. That's what happens, right? These guys, they get paid through the nose for it. They get to appreciate it. They get a...

Go get them, boy. The fucking everything up. It's just disgusting. It makes me very upset. And as I've said previously, this is a special kind of financial nihilism that the market continues to reward, one that's poisoned Silicon Valley, an elevated men and woman like Sam Altman and Miramarati,

the positions of power despite the fact that neither of them actually seems to build technology. Altman himself is a seedy charlatan, one that's grown incredibly powerful in the valley, despite not really having done anything. And it shouldn't surprise anyone that, as I mentioned previously, one of Altman's nine recommended books is Winning by Jack Welch, a book where Welch claims that winning companies are meritocracies, and lionizes Kenneth Yu of 3M's Chinese Operations for, and I quote, throwing out the phony ritual of annual budgeting and replacing it with skies

the limit dialogue about opportunities, claiming that budgeting at 3M is not about delivering good enough plans and being them, but about having the courage and zeal to reach for what can be done. And doesn't that sound like more fun than budgeting? Yes, that last part is a quote. And I imagine he must have been referring to 3M bribing Chinese government officials as a means of selling product between 2014 and 2017, or the thousands of people that 3M has laid off in the last few decades, including in China.

Sure, that's what he meant. Jack Welsh wouldn't have just been talking out of his ass, would he? No, Jack Welch is the man that Sam Altman lionizes, a sleazy con artist that continually moved around data as a means of making General Electric look bigger and stronger than it really was. Kind of like how Sam Altman regularly says things like,

and I quote, that we'll be able to ask our computer to solve all of physics. Now, this came up on a previous episode the interview with Nick, the man who said he'll fucking pile driver you've mentioned AI again. I just want to be clear that's actually what Sam Oatman said he said. You can ask the computer to solve all of physics.

This kind of proves that he doesn't understand tech, but it also proves that he might just be really goddamn stupid. How do you solve physics, Sam? What are you solving? Physics isn't a solution. Sam, maybe you should have stayed in Stanford instead of dropping out and becoming a car.

Sam Orkman is kind of in trouble though, Because behind the scenes, generative AI, it isn't moving the needle. With Ezabel Busquette of the Wall Street Journal reporting that companies are finding getting the full value of AI assistance requires heavy lifting, including in her article this hilarious quote from Google Cloud Chief Evangelist Richard Sorota, by the way as a career product manager, where he blames those not finding the value in AI for, and I quote, not having their data house in order, chirping that you can't just buy six units of AI and then magically change your business. And you know what? I actually agree with him. In essence, it isn't generative AI's fault that it isn't adapting to your workflows or fulfilling anything. No, it's your fault, you nasty little pig.

You didn't do the work to make artificial intelligence smart, right? That's your fault somehow. You should feel ashamed. You should apologize to Sam Altman. Just kidding. In all seriousness, the commonality between all of these people, Jack Welch, Sunder Peshai, Miramorati, Sam Altman, Mog Zuckerberg. and honestly an alarming amount of CEOs inside and outsider tech is that they, along with their companies, have kind of escaped humanity. They've escaped the human condition. They make their companies bigger for the sake of making them bigger, making more money to increase the value of the financial instrument attached to the company, abstracted away from purpose or craft

or creativity or production. These people, management consultants, MBAs, product managers, they're not creators of anything other than financial occultism. A dark art where the financial value of a company is often separated from what it does or whether it's good at it. They're parasites. Meta calls itself. It still calls itself.

Go on their website and look. A social metaverse company that's, and I quote, committed to keeping people safe and making a positive impact. But at its core, it's a near monopolistic social data and advertising company that's testing the limits of how little connectivity it can provide in its. core products without sacrificing advertising revenue. Mark Zuckerberg has proven he'll do whatever he needs to, including letting deadly misinformation spread on Facebook to keep showing that meta is growing. One might be forgiven for thinking the Mark Zuckerberg is the exception, that he isn't a management

goon disconnected from the processes of writing code. This guy coded Facebook, right? This guy's a nerd. He's a little nerd with his keyboard. He types code, right? Wrong. He stopped coding 18 fucking years ago in 2006. This is the guy. Like, just every time I think I've really nailed how bad it gets. I... Hey, wait a second.

Hold on. Wait, wait a second. I just thought about something for a second, though. Wasn't Cheryl Sandberg brought in to make Facebook a real mature business? Oh, fuck. She shared a communications coach with goddamn Jack Welch. It all goes back to the... All right, sorry,

sorry. Like Welch, Zuckerberg has weathered numerous scandals. The social network, a movie that framed him as a sociopathic thief. A data leaking scandal that may or may not have influenced Markle elections. A scandal where Facebook deliberately emotionally manipulated 700,000 users using the news feed in 2014. And that is real, by the way, there's a link to it. It's completely insane. Oh yeah, and a $5 billion FTC fine. And he's come out and scathed, all as he publicly destroys a company that was once globally beloved in the name of endless growth. In fact,

Much like Welch was applauded as one of the greatest business minds in management for decades as he burned GE to the ground, Zuckerberg, a man who has taken a once profitable company that once benefited society, and made it both harmful and shitty at providing its services, was named one of Barron's top CEOs of 2024 a couple of weeks ago, where it credited him with a corporate course correction from Metaverse to Artificial Intelligence. Neither of those are making money. Much like so many journalists and industry figures failed to properly identify Welch, when he was right in their midst.

Barons failed to call Zuckerberg what he is, another con artist that took useful software and turned it into a data collection firm with a shitty product attached. Zuckerberg is trying something that Welsh could have only dreamed of, though, seeing how little he can actually make to convince the markets that matter is valuable.

It's almost a little on the nose, and it fits. It perfectly fits. Shareholder supremacy is the force currently driving the tech ecosystem and one that, as I've noted, currently lacks any remaining hypergrowth markets, funding and proliferating technologies that exist not to provide an innovative useful service, but to create more growth. A phony sense of progress that allows companies like Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon

to create something that looks and smells sort of innovative, even if their models are all extremely similar, as they're all trained on the same quickly dwindling amount of training data. And AI developers don't seem to really care what training data they use or indeed what data source they use at all. Look at Google Search, which, as I've mentioned, took a Reddit post that made it recommend putting glue on a pizza to keep cheese on or claiming that you should eat a rock each every day. It's just every time I read this. It's so frustrating. It's so annoying. And then putting aside how funny the Google AI search was on top of it, these companies are running out of data.

and they very clearly don't care about quality at all. They're not doing the work. They're not doing the things they need to do to make sure this is done right. No, they must have it today. They must have it now, even if it's bad, even if it burns money. And it's not like the markets are actually seeing if this shit does anything, or whether it's truly revolutionary. They didn't care that many tech products have got increasingly worse over time

as tech executives rewarded again and again for pursuing growth, delivering any kind of quality product. Since becoming CEO of Google, Sundar Peshide has been paid over half a billion dollars. Literally in the last three years, by the way, taking home $281 million, mostly made up of stock in 2019,

a fateful year that many of you might remember from the man who killed Google Search, and then he got paid $226 million in 2022, a year before Google laid off 10,000 people. Sondar Pishai's job as CEO at Google is not to make sure that Google delivers great products, such as a quick path to an answer using Google search. No, no, no, no, no.

You fool, you buffoon. You ignoramus. Why would you think that? No, Sondar Pichai's job is to continually grow the amount of money that Google's business units make. I have complete confidence that if Sondar Pashai was able to make Google search worse than it already is and maintain double-digit year-over-year revenue growth, he would not only do so, but he would do so with a big smile on his face

and be rewarded with hundreds of billions of dollars of stock options. pretty much in perpetuity. Sanda Peshai is not judged for what he's done to Google for turning it into this Welchian nightmare, not by the markets, not by Nilei Patela the Verge, who pretty much gave him softballs the whole time. And nobody's punishing him at all

of really saying it to his face that he's burning a genuine technological innovation that billions of people rely upon. And it's a heartbreaking tragedy that's happening in real time, one where a bad person makes worse people richer in a way that tangibly hurts us all. We're all forced to suffer

the consequences and mourn the loss of Google search in slow motion, with nobody really wanting to admit the obvious that Google intends to bleed this thing out until regulation or the markets stop them. And I realize I sound a little bit dramatic describing this as a tragedy. Google Search was always a for-profit business, and advertising would so obviously poison it that founders Brin and Page warned about it in the original Google paper, saying that they expected that advertising-funded search engines would be biased towards advertisers and a from needs of customers.

But Google search was for a while something magical. It was a thing we all took for granted, and I think you're being disingenuous if you pretend that this isn't something you cared about or relied upon, and I'd argue for the earlier days of Facebook and Instagram to kind of fit this bill too. These are, or perhaps were, sadly,

institutions that helped many people my age, and I'm an ancient 38 years old, become who we are today, finding the things and the people we need, and the connections we otherwise wouldn't have made or sustained. I know, at least in my case, that social networking is how I met the world. I was kind of a lonely kid. I didn't make friends easily.

I never have, really. I've done a lot better thanks to the internet. Pretty much everything that I found has been thrown the internet. Much of it from Google search? Much of it from social networking. From Facebook, from Instagram to an extent, Twitter to a much larger. watching these things get burned sucks. And I think a problem that some people have with this show

is that they think I'm just pissy and I hate all of this stuff and I don't. I would love it to go back to how it was or maybe how it felt. I wish it was less craven of a value in exchange. These were companies that made billions of dollars in profit by providing a kind of a social good, even if it was one where they realized they could use it to create a monopoly and then rugpole when they needed to for the shareholders. But I do mourn the loss of these products, and I think many of us do,

maybe if I'm wrong, you can email me. Easy at letter E, letter Z at better offline.com. If you disagree by all means, I love to hear from you, even the haters, one or two of you. But in all seriousness, I mourn this stuff. I'm sad about this. I'm pissed off, not because I like being angry. I genuinely don't. I'm sad.

I'm a broken-hearted romantic. I love the tech industry and what it used to do. Perhaps I was naive. Perhaps now I'm realizing that a lot of that stuff that I thought was great wasn't. It wasn't this bad, wasn't? Where Jack Welch destroyed multiple local economies in Massachusetts, Indiana and Pennsylvania by laying off thousands of workers in favor of cheaper outsourced options, Sondar Pishai and Mark Zuckerberg have realized that shareholder supremacy

only means making a product as useful as necessary and optimizing it at all times to meet analyst expectations of revenue. The unique problem that Sundar Peshaya and the rest of the Rock Barons currently face is that there aren't any hypergrowth markets left and they've been so desperately adapting to that reality since 2015.

I know I've said later, but I think 2015's the year. So many promises augmented reality, home robotics, autonomous cars, and even then, artificial intelligence, writ large, never quite materialized into these viable business units, making big tech that little bit more desperate. I've repeatedly and substantively proven in my newsletter and this podcast that both Meta and Google have made their products worse in pursuit of growth, and they've done so by following a roadmap drawn by Jack Welch, a sociopathic scumbag that realized that he could

turn General Electric into a shambling monstrosity of a company that could shape shift into whatever the street needed, even if the product sucked. And I believe that this is the same financial nihilism that empowers people like Mira Murati and Sam Altman. And also millions more middle managers and absentee CEOs like the kind of being writing about and speaking about for the last three years. Our economy is run by people that have never built anything, running companies that they can talk to make a number go up for shareholders they rarely meet. People like David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, who intentionally chose not to release companies. Coyote v. Acme, a fully produced and ready-to-debutteam movie featuring Warner Bros.'s core brands, choosing instead to never release it ever in exchange for a cut to its tax bill.

Zaslav, a CEO of Warner Brothers' discovery, has overseen one of the darkest periods in the company's history, including endless cutbacks and through his own mismanagement caused a five-month-long strike in Hollywood. Zaslav continued to complain even after the strike ended, claiming that studios overpaid for the strike to end as he earned a $50 million salary for driving his company into the ground. Hey, hey, just one moment, though. Where do you think David Zaslov learnt this all? Do you think he learned it by reading books? Or maybe he learned his management philosophy a little more directly.

Can you guess who his close friend was? It was Jack Wells. Jack Welch was his, oh my God. But you know who's not horrible? Our advertisers. other podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends.

Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me.

Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, uh, you only got in because your parents made a huge. donation. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion?

We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. 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, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined.

So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart 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. There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast, and for Mental Health Awareness Month,

we're dedicating a series to understanding the mind when it struggles. I'm joined by doctors, researchers, and those with lived experience. We'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car, and then my car got stolen. I was shoplifting. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. And making it through hardship.

To be present is a learned skill, and it's hard to be present. We'll talk with John Nelson about clinical depression and the brain implant that saved his life. What I learned is that procedure made me happy because I'm disease-free. And we'll talk with leading experts like Judd Brewer about anxiety, and John Hirschfield about obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the science of how the brain can change. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course and what we can do about it. Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

During a commencement speech in 2003 where David Zaslav was booed by students, he told the story of how, sometime after General Electric acquired NBC through GE's acquisition of RCA in 1985, he sent a handwritten note to Jack Welch. telling him about himself David Zaslav and what he'd been doing. He was a lawyer, leading to a job running NBC in 1989. This story doesn't make a ton of sense, by the way, based on any living history of David Zaslav's life. He joined NBC three years after the acquisition of RCA closed. He claimed he was working for a few years in cable news. But everything I found suggests that he went straight from school to working at a law firm called

Leboof Lamb-Libian McCray, according to his Warner Brothers profile. when he graduated from Boston University in 1985, meaning that he would have had to send that note while working at a firm that was mostly not working in anything to do with cable news at all. Just a liar. Just lying. Regardless of whether Zaslav made up an entire story about how he got his job,

he was and is one of Welch's most nasty cronies, his most staunch acolytes, telling David Gellis, who wrote the man who destroyed capitalism about Jack Welch, that Jack set the path, that he saw the whole world that he was above the whole world, and that what Jack Welch created at GE became the way that companies now operate, which is true.

David Zaslav, a man who has caused unfathomable damage to the entertainment industry while intentionally choosing not to release two different movies, learned to do so from the Michael Jordan of corporate destruction. And to Zaslav,

Welch was like an older brother that would pick people at NBC up with a hug when things were tough, and that there was no better friend, according to an interview with CNBC. Jesus Christ, man. It's like a poorly written drama. I hope it ends with a big anvil falling on me.

Anyway, I realize I'm oscillating between industries and names, but the shareholder supremacy is something that has poisoned almost every part of global capitalism. Dedication to the shareholders in many ways is kind of like a religion. It isn't even about a shareholder or the shareholder, just moving assets to make a number go up and making another number look like it might go up in the future. Welch, Zaslav, Peshai, Zuckerberg. They're all the same kind of monster, one divorced from consequence and production, and capable of contributing meaningfully to the world at large,

because the market is shown, it doesn't really care if they do so. Sundar Pashai doesn't use Google, and Mark Zuckerberg doesn't use Instagram, Facebook or threads. At least, not like a regular person does anyway, much like how David Zaslev doesn't watch or care about TVs and movies. It doesn't even release them sometimes. It's crazy. The deep-sea denialism means that they aren't users or creators or even active participants in any part of society,

they're there to move the stuff around so that they can keep the number going up. And I believe this is all the consequence of Jack Welch's legacy, where the economy has been built on the back of a management philosophy that no longer involves managing people or building things. The business media and society at large elevates executives like Zuckerberg and Peshai as they demolish their products and lay off thousands of people because the terms of success are no longer about

making money by providing a good service or a product people like. The markets don't reward steady growth, nor do they punish executives for the quality of their product, because analysts and investors aren't really concerned about the product, just the financial output. I don't think their users either. At this point, the illogical rush to boost artificial intelligence makes a lot more sense.

When you have a society and economy dominated by people who don't create things or understand the things they're selling, people that don't experience or respect labor or talk to people, of course their natural thought will be that any form of creativity or work can and should be automated. It isn't about what's good, but what's good enough, and artificial intelligence allows them to test the boundaries of what enough can mean. Toys R Us, or at least what remains of it after a leveraged buyout, should feel an abundance of shame for releasing a horrifying AI-generated origin of Toyser Russ movie full of ugly hallucinations and janky animations.

But what it's really trying to see is how much it can get away with, how shitty something can be without losing customers or whether the potential loss of customers is worth it to save the money it would take to actually shoot a goddamn commercial. And what's crazy, by the way, and you should watch this thing, it's terrible, is this video looks so bad and they put it out on the main Toys R Us account, they don't give a shit, they're trying to see what they can get away with. And I think that's a big theme. When Miramarati said that AI might kill creative jobs that shouldn't have been there in the first place, he wasn't just a grotesque insult to those actually working career. When Miramorati said that AI might kill creative jobs that should have never been there in the first place, it wasn't just a nasty insult to those working in the creative fields. It was also a demonstration of a unchained sociopathy and this nasty kind of hubris these tech people have.

And the fact that she believes that she, a woman of little actual accomplishment and talent, and the intellectual depth of a puddle on a flat sidewalk is singly ordained to decide which jobs are worthy and which one should die. Really, it was an insult to all of us. It was an expression of her belief that consumers don't deserve things created by a person who actually gives a shit. You don't deserve to watch movies that only exist thanks to the combined efforts of illustrators, sound engineers, composers, actors, directors, and countless other uncelebrated roles where each cock in the machine has spent years honing their skills until they've reached a level of unassadable. mastery? You, yes, you don't deserve to use software created by someone who actually thought about the problem and, at the very least, made a best effort to write secure, robust code. You don't deserve

anything in their eyes. You deserve the minimum viable product. You deserve as little as possible so that they can make as much as possible. That is what Mira Marati is saying. No amount of too long tweet storms, no amount of vacuous blogs, no amount of apologia, no amount of apologia, going to make up for the fact that this is what these people think. They see work and creativity as something to be optimized away. And it's disgraceful. And even when you get to the more workhorse roles, the coding roles, there are still these huge problems and they don't care.

As pointed out by Cybersecurity firms, SNCC, Microsoft's GitHub co-pilot tool routinely and unquestionally outputs insecure code because, as I've said, ad nauseum in other places, it doesn't know anything. A human being can look at a code base and identify, for example, areas where the system doesn't check for SQL injection attacks, which could allow an attacker to steal and modify data from a database. An AI tool merely guesses what code looks right, probabilistically, given the prompt that was involved.

When Marathi gleefully brags about how AI will eviscerate an unknowable amount of creative jobs, which she is personally identified as expandable, by the way, What she's really saying is that people should be content with using shitty, broken AI-generated software and watching shitty, broken AI-generated films, where the number of digits on each hand fluctuates wildly. Let the line on a telescope and where nothing new is said, but rather a machine is regurgitating stuff created by other people solely based on a mathematical model of probability. It's insulting. It's disgusting. And it sucks. objectively sucks. It's not even like this stuff is any good. It's not even like the things

that it's producing are respectable. Not that replacing people is good. But the amount of money they're being given, the amount of compute they're using, the amount of water they're boiling to make dog shit shows a complete contempt for everything, for creativity and labor itself. And generative AI is exciting to the disconnected business fucks running our economy because it's way to abstract and outsource even more forms of labor. We have spent decades pushing young people to get into management without ever teaching anybody about what managers are meant to do, creating a class structure in organizations where there are those that do things and those that take the credit. And the latter are the people in charge, disconnected from labor,

disconnected from quality, disconnected from production, and thus incapable of making informed decisions other than what if we moved around this number here, what have we stopped paying these people. The AI bubble has been inflated by people excited about the prospect of not having to deal with filthy laborers that do work, and they ultimately aspire to make companies with as few people as possible, with the CEO making the most money, because they're the ones that move the numbers around for the markets. This also explains where they're so incapable of describing what AI is, what it does, and why it's useful. It doesn't matter that data centers might end up using as much power as India by 2034, or that Generative AI isn't actually that useful. It's a chance for them to

further disconnect themselves from having to pay actual people to do actual work, a thing that they themselves consider the product of the underclass. They don't care that the output is mediocre, that the product is unprofitable, that there's a quickly approaching wall that generative AI can't leap over as it runs out of training data, or that the transformer-based architecture of large language models has hard limitations that are impossible to overcome. No. This is a shiny new object that they can waver investors that already don't know what any of this stuff means, one that lets them dream of a world without labour. Generative AI wants us to stop researching or talking or thinking and eventually it will come for your livelihood. If it worked.

But even then when it doesn't work, it's still taking money out of freelancers' mouths. It's replacing good coders with shit-generated code. There is a poison here. And it's disgusting. In some respects, generative AI is morally worse than Jack Welch's odious anti-worker philosophy. Whereas Welch saw workers as a cost center to be minimized and eliminated where possible, Generative AI extends that idea to the raw materials necessary to build apps like ChatGPT, with Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI and the co-founder of DeepMind,

declaring the existence of an unspoken social contract where, and I quote, online content is freeware for building AI models. The law, I note, tends to regard actual contracts more seriously non-unspoken, and let's face it, imaginary contracts, and I desperately look forward to the day when Suleiman's ideas are tested in court. I don't fancy his chances, and... Mustafa, you come from my content. You're not going to have words, mate. But that's the thing. In many of my newsletters and podcasts, I've argued that the current trajectory of the tech industry will lead it to ruin.

The poison of the shareholder supremacy, this nihilistic intention of contorting companies that please analysts and investors, is one that will uniquely punish the tech industry, just like it did to General Electric. Google, Microsoft, and Meta have bet their futures on generative AI, cramming it into their products with little regard for utility, all to show the markets that their futuristic rocket ship growth companies, rather than, at least in Meta and Google's case, aging and decaying empires that got too big and were corrupted by the forces of the MBA management sect. I realize that's Master of Business Administration Management. This is the force behind everything. This is it.

The dark hand that demanded you return to the office in spite of the productivity gains of remote work. The weight behind the people destroying the media. The people, the very same people who lied about cryptocurrency being the future of finance and the people that collapsed multiple banks in 2023 because risk management, to quote Mark Andreessen, is considered the enemy. These people will burn the world to a crisp in search of a profit, in search of eternal growth, in search of the things that will make them richer, richer, nastier disconnected monsters, even more capable of escaping the drudgery of knowing and doing things.

This is a dark future where somehow all labor is automated, all money flows upwards, and society drained of taxes in any kind of social safety net. does something with all the children that Elon Musk is saying we need to have. The tech industry is dominated now by management consultants, product managers, and middle management in general, with people that have written a few lines of code in their lives, holding sway over the actual builders, instructing them to create things they don't understand as means of improving the bottom line rather than solving an actual need, or even addressing the obvious business fundamentals like profitability and stability. A few episodes back when I was talking with Nick Suresh, one of the very basic things he said was, have you checked your backups?

This is a problem throughout the valley. We don't maintain anything anymore. As a society, we have a terrible approach to maintenance. We have a terrible approach to business maintenance. When you throw sustainability out in the window, you don't really check if everything's working well. And I think that that's going to be the problem. That and the financial precariousness of all of this. that and the fact the markets. It just kind of turn on them when things don't work their way.

And at some point, things have to collapse. I'm not saying that every tech company goes belly up, but I believe that the generative AI boom is the force that creates a massive reckoning in this industry. It's almost a little too on the nose with the wider shareholder supremacy. Generative AI, it's a tool that only seems revolutionary to people that haven't written or coded or drawn or sang or created anything in years. The last four years have proven that the tech industry is desperate for somebody to follow, and follow they have. Mark Zuckerberg claimed the Metaverse was the future in the most flimsy way, and the market, along with Microsoft and many other companies, agreed. Even if the Metaverse was barely conceived pipe dream by a guy who hasn't written code since 2006.

Generative AI is the next step up, a trend with a natural product, a superficially impressive doodad that can sell cloud-compute access and proliferate more software, even if the underlying. technology is so remarkably unprofitable and unreliable that big tech firms are having to calm down their salespeople, which happened a few months ago with Amazon. And big tech was so desperate for something new to follow, something new to do with themselves that would sustain the values threadbare facade as a crucible of innovation and progress. Rather than doing the hard work to actually invest in and research and develop important technologies that people like and would use and would care about. Sam Altman gave them all something to do with themselves, and he packaged it in a way that told them how to think about

it, and of course, lie about it. At some point, something has to give. The markets are fickle and demanding and engineered to demand endless growth and endless returns. Generative AI is hitting a wall. I'll go into that in the next episode, and any future improvements will be marginal and cost billions of dollars to achieve. The transformer-based architectures, like the kind used in Open AI's GPT models are gigantic maths machines that know nothing and will never, ever, ever, ever create the artificial general

intelligence, the conscious tech being that Sam Orkman has been claiming it will. Generative AI does not appear to provide the kind of easy business returns reminiscent of the cloud computing boom and mobile app store booms. And once that becomes clear, the markets

will punish those most deeply invested in quite a painful way. And once they do the real fun will begin, as big tech reconciles with a lack of innovation and leadership teams stuffed with management consultants, product managers, and sick events that lank any real ideas or expertise that might inform what actually might be next, not least because they've sequester themselves away from creators and pretty much any normal person or anyone who does an actual job. I don't really know when this reckoning will happen, though, but I do know this.

When I started writing this script, it was a brief way to connect the part of it. to the present. And as with everything I've written, it seems, I found my argument as I wrote it, researching as I went. There's no prompt that could have told a generative AI to write what I've written, nor is there a prompt that would let me delightfully enrage myself in a tiny sound booth in my garage. And all of that is the magic that creates things like this podcast, things like my newsletter, things like you're writing, you're singing, your coding and everything like that. The process of creation, the actual labour of considering what you should do next, the mistakes you make, the finding the theories behind the decisions you make is what creates

great work, what creates great writing. Not the probabilistic formulation of whatever you might create if you trained on billions of words of other people's stuff. It kind of reminds me, chat GPT especially, reminds me the kind of writing I'd read in college, where it was very much people saying things in the order that they thought they should say them, the structures like intro, body, conclusion, it was the same words, it was the same things. and this was quite a long time before chat GPT. And it was because people were writing to spec, they were doing what they thought they should do

rather than writing a lot and coming out with something at the end. And no offence them, they're college students. They should have been told. They should have been taught. Writing should be taught. Talking should be taught. There are social things that we learn, but we learn through making mistakes.

I can't code. But those people that I know can have messed up so many times of their code. They've broken things tons of tons of times. part of the great thing of creation is the destruction that you have to go through to get there. I've written about 700,000 words in the last four years, and I only really became good, I'd say, in the last 200,000, maybe 150,000.

I couldn't have got there just by reading that many words. You need to put in the time. But if you don't put time into anything, if you don't create anything, of course you don't respect that, and of course you don't know what good looks like. But these people, these people who are so disconnected, they will demand, as Jack Welch did, that we burn whatever we need in pursuit of growth. We must divert billions of dollars, exabytes of data, endless acres of data centers, all so that we could maybe create a future they don't understand or care about.

It doesn't matter if generative AI actually does anything, just as long as they can convince shareholders and analysts that it might one day do so. It's hard to consider any of this a grift because doing so would be it to admit how much of the economy is controlled by grifters. But you know what? I'm going to leave you with a quote from Nick Shearresh, who I interviewed a few episodes ago, about it, and this is a quote from his excellent blog,

I will fucking pile drive you if you mention AI again. Not going to do an Australian accent, that's rude. You see, while hype is nice, it's only nice in small burst for practitioners. We have a few key things that are Drifter does not have, such as job stability, genuine friendships, and souls. What we do not have is the ability to trivially switch fields the moment the gold rushes over, due to the sad fact that we've actually needed to study things and build experience.

Grifters, on the other hand, wield the Omnitool that is self-aggrandizingly called politics. That is to say, it turns out that the core competency of smiling and promising things that you can't actually deliver is highly transferable. Generative AI is an act of theft in and of itself, perpetuated by people that have stolen innovation in the name of shareholder supremacy. Creating a degenerative form of innovation that optimizes the tech industry to create things that sound cool rather than actually do things and help people. And the people perpetuating these acts, Sondar Pishai, Mark Zuckerberg, Andy Jassy, Satchinadella, Sam Orman, Miramarati,

are all the same kind of charlatan, the ultimate manager, one that has created the means to escape the workforce and ultimately having to create anything of any kind. These people, they crave the ultimate business, where it's just them, and all the money flows up. Kind of like the final shave from Destiny 2, or the Ultimate Sukiyomi from Naruto,

and I won't spoil the Fun Fantasy 7 Rebirth Collection either. But there is this thing in fiction about this idea of a final shape of an ultimate dream where everything's locked under one eye. And as crazy as that sounds, this really feels like what they want. As few people as possible to make them as much money as possible

and the people who invest in them as much money as possible. And it's gross, it's frustrating. They could make a tenth of what they do and still be so incredibly rich and probably not destroy their companies. Google could putter around a 2 to 5% profitability each quarter. It doesn't matter. It would still be fine. But the markets don't care.

It sucks. It makes me angry. And I don't claim to have any answers or truly know how to unwind all of this. I don't know how to change things other than loudly saying what I see in front of my eyes and how it makes me feel. wanting others to, at the very least, have more clarity into the things that are being done to them and the ways in which others have twisted the system to make more money than anyone's ever had, transforming companies into these horrifying nihilist engines for growth,

anti-companies that create value by reducing what they contribute to the world. But I encourage you not to be nihilistic yourself. Do not lose faith in the power of sunlight in calling these people what they are, parasites. Sam Altman is a parasite. Sundar Pishai is a parasite. Satchinadella is a parasite. Every single one of these people. These people who have taken good companies that built good things that people like that still made money

and made them more money while making the things worse. They are parasites and calling them that is necessary. If you, Sondar Pishai or one of your ilk hears this and are offended, fix your goddamn company, make good things again, stop laying people off, pay yourself less and do more for the world. Otherwise you are a parasite and you're deliberate in doing so. Be clear and concise when speaking about these people, by the way. Be continually outraged at the damage they are doing to society. And I encourage you all to catalog everything you see.

And I know posting through it doesn't sound like much, but believe me. These people see it. These people know and these people have names. Sam, Altman, Sondapeshai, Mark Zuckerberg, Satchie Nadela, Andy Jassy, all of these people diverting the world's most talented engineers into an unsustainable, unprofitable boondoggle that does nothing that they don't understand. All of them can at least be held accountable on record, if not in real life. Believe your eyes, you are being given less so that others can have more. You are having things taken from you by corporations because they must always please

the nebulous form of the shareholder. As I said, don't give in denialism, though. people do read all this stuff. They are aware of things like this podcast, but they also see social media. They see the clouds of people talk about how bad Google is now, thanks to AI. And even before that, public pressure does work, loud public pressure, consistent public pressure, but also Sondapeshai, Prabagar Ragavan, Satchin Adela, Sam Altman, say the goddamn name, say them repeatedly, loudly, everywhere. When you don't like something with Google, mention Prabagar Ragavan mentioned Sondar Pishai, engrave their names to their bad acts. When you talk about how shitty Facebook is, Mark Zuckerberg, Javier Olivan, Alex Schultz,

Naomi Glite, put their names by them. Let them not hide behind the names of their corporations. Let history show that they made so much money while doing so much damage. Because that is how they've gotten away with them. These people have no more worldly concerns. They don't worry about bills. They don't worry about the mortgage. They don't worry about any of that crap. They don't have real problems. All they have is their legacy and their goddamn name. So take it from them. Take their name. Say that Cheryl Sandberg, a McKinsey operator, an MBA is the reason that Facebook started going downhill. Then Mark Zuckerberg, Javier Olivn, Naomi Gleight, Alex Schultz, Andrew Bosworth.

All these people are why Facebook is full of AI-generated spam. Say, Sam Altman, Miramirati of Open AI, they are the people that are stealing the entire internet to train models. Mustafa Suleim, the Microsoft CEO of AI. Guess what? That guy is also stealing your data. He is also training models on it. He is the one perpetuating the great theft. As long as their names are attached to these acts, it'll be scarier for them.

I can't promise it will stop them. But giving them a level of accountability, no matter how thin, is necessary and the first step to fixing things. And celebrate companies that make good shit. Celebrate things like the Steam Deck, one of the best consoles I've ever used. I love that thing. Celebrate companies like Anchor, great battery packs. There are things in tech that are still cool.

There are things in tech that are still good. You just have to look for them. And you're not finding them in big tech. And you're not finding them in big tech because you are not not. the customer. You are not the person that Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Satchina Della, Asanda, Asanda Pishai cares about. No,

they care about the nebulous form of the shareholder. The markets, and analyst targets. You deserve better, so give them so much worse. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattosowski.

You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattisowski.com. 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-L-Line to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

Better Offline is a production of CoolZone Media. For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia. Or check us out on the I-HartRad Radio. app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and Friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an

a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the Eye Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Saigon, the story of my family and of the country that shaped us. From IHeart Podcasts, Saigon.

You don't think I'm serious about a free Vietnam? One city, a divided country, and the war that tore America apart. This is for Vietnam. They're pouring patril all over here. Freedom for Vietnam! There's a fire coming to this country, and it's going to burn out everything. Listen to Saigon. on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The story I've told myself can then shape my behavior, and that can lead me to sabotage the possibility of connection. This Mental Health Awareness Month, tune into the podcast Deeply Well with Debbie Brown. If you've been searching for a soft place to land while doing the work to become whole, this podcast is for you to hear more. Listen to Deeply Well with Debbie Brown from the Black Effect Podcasts, network on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

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