Better Offline - I Will Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again Ft. Nik Suresh & Robert Evans

Episode Date: July 3, 2024

A few weeks ago, an Australian tech worker called Nik Suresh wrote an evisceration of the current AI hype boom called "I Will F**king Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again." Ed Zitron and Robert Evans sat down to talk about the blog - and the wider problems that Nik sees in the tech industry at large. LINKS: Nik's blog: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/ 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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To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Mother, Father, come quick, it's better offline, the tech podcast. I'm your host Ed Zittron. A few weeks ago, the internet was captivated by the work of one particularly pissed off software developer, who claimed, and I quote the title of his blog, I will fucking pile drive you if you mention AI again. The writer, based in Australia, lays out in detail how infuriating a distraction

AI has become from the wider problems riddling many modern tech companies, as well as the noxious, nasty presence of Grifter management consultant types that are deliberately keeping it inflated regardless of whether it actually means anything. One particular quote stood out to me. You see, while hype is nice, it's only nice in small bursts for practitioners. We have a few things that a grifter 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 actually need to study things and build experience.

Grifters, on the other hand, wield the omnis tool that they self-aggrandizingly call politics. That is to say, it turns out that the core competency of smiling and promising people things that you can't actually deliver is highly transferable. This piece caught both my eye and that of Cool Zone Media's Robert Evans, who assured me he promised that I'd be allowed to leave the Cool Zone Media pain cage if I was able to get the author of the piece on the show. So that's what I did. And joining us to talk about this incredibly aggressive blog is Nicol Seresh, who's the director

at Hermit Technology, and an excellent blogger. Nick, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, you know, thank you for the very kind words. I'm super excited to be here. But when that piece came out, at least three people said, hey, have you heard of Ed Zittron? And I was like, well, I'm talking to him tomorrow. So I'll be exciting. Now I will.

So you're angry. I think we've kind of got that, and I share your anger. But what is it about this that really boils your blood that makes you want to pile drive, folks? Yeah. So it's interesting because a lot of people read that piece, and they reached out and thought that, you know, I'm actually super angry about AI specifically. But a pretty consistent throughline through my blog. It's on a lot of traffic over the past year and a half. it's not about AI specifically,

it's about this massive class of non-technical managers that have entered the IT space and they're essentially cosplaying at doing software engineering. The thing that is infuriating about the LLM thing in particular is that it's uniquely suited for grifting.

So if you look at the average company, they can't ship incredibly basic applications. And even if you look at something like the crypto space, which I don't like, But you look around Melbourne, crypto companies actually have some level of engineering discipline. You know, they use newer technology.

They've got, there's things in the job descriptions to indicate seriousness. Right. AI companies don't have that. And I don't think at big corporations, CEOs are aware that their stuff are just typing and import open AI. You know, you're not doing any complex work. You just call like an API. You just send data to a company in the U.S.

They do everything. and people down here in Melbourne are making out like they're the greatest engineers ever, their thought leaders, you should put them on confidence stages. It's not hard. It's so easy. It takes like a week to make something from scratch. Yeah. I really appreciated that part of your piece because it gets at something that's like frustrated me as well,

which is, and I'm not coming at this from the same kind of technical background you are, but knowing that there's legitimate technology here, but all of the people being trusted with marshalling it and marshalling these. companies that are supposed to deliver it to us are on their face conman i'm thinking about sam altman today or at least the clip came out today where he's like soon you'll be able to just ask ask a chat gpt to solve physics for you just solve all the physics that's just that's absurd that's the way you said that right we can all tell that that's nonsense if if you're not defaming him that's a crazy thing like if he those are the words he used i'll find the

exact quote, but yeah. No, he, he was very much, that's what he said. You've spoken of this kind of like organizational cancer inside tech firms. Is it this kind of grifter? Yeah, yeah. It's not specific to technology. It's just the technology makes it very, very easy. I don't know of any industry that doesn't have this massive horde of people who don't

really know what they're doing, right? But they just kind of bulldoze people socially. Put it this way. So I think my blog is on two million hits in the past year and a million were last week. And when people talked about, you know, offering me work or anything, they said they would give me a reference at their workplace. But they wouldn't mention that piece because leadership would be so embarrassed. Like they can't have someone like me around going. Someone cool.

Someone cool things. You just says fuck sometimes. Can't have that. But no, it's just because like the emperor very clearly has no clothes. I don't even really get hate mail because people know I'll just point out that they're grifting and they'll have no defense. So they just leave me alone. Yeah. So how do you think that this has happened?

It clearly isn't something that happened overnight, but it feels like especially the tech industry has just been poisoned by product managers and management consultants. How did this happen? Off the top of my head, something that really influences this is just very strange ideas on how things scale. I listened to those two episodes you suggested, and I think the main one is the wrought com bubble, which people should go listen to. And there is this idea that everything should scale up forever, and the only way to handle that communicatively

is like this hierarchical structure. But it's really hard to find good people. And I think a huge hierarchy can work if you only have really great people in it. But it's really hard. There's one good software engineering company I know in Melbourne. flip down in the CBD. And they regularly interview 40 people for one role, right?

Because just the quality of candidates not there. If you insist you need this massive structure and you need a hierarchy for it, you're just going to have to insert people who don't know what they're talking about. You can't find good people fast enough. And then those people who aren't very good, to hire other people who aren't very good. And soon that's the whole industry, right? And that feels, something I'd be writing that will end up being a podcast

that may run before or after this is just this. idea of shareholder supremacy, that the companies have been engineered to make a market need work, to hit analyst expectations, Jack Welch, classic bastard. And it feels like this, that LLMs in particular have become the ultimate form, like the super sayan of rot capitalism, where people just kind of, like you said, just bullshit about them. It's like, yeah, it can do all this shit, right? Yeah, it's the future. What is your actual background? So I've got a four-year qualification in psychology. So I mostly did cognitive psychology and circadian science.

And then I moved over to a postgraduate qualification at one of Australia's bigger universities. So that was in data science, I did a master's with a little bit of thesis work in it. So I'm reasonably good. I'm not a PhD, but I do know what I'm talking about in the space. I did want to drill into something because you're coming at this, like from the perspective of somebody who was working in a technical capacity, seeing the way this group of people who are talking nonsense are coming in. And as you said, kind of like bulldozing their way into conversations with people. Can you talk socially about the way that kind of happens?

Because we all sort of see the way these people try to monopolize conversations about technology at events. You know, if you're coming at it from like press, it's something like CES, but also just kind of, if you're looking at things on Twitter or looking at just sort of the way popular conversations go. But I'm curious about like the social dynamics of these people who are. coming into organizations full of real people, trying to do real things, and hijacking that for the purpose of cashing out. Yeah, I think a lot of them are latching onto some pre-existing level of grift that's just been in the industry. So when I entered around 2018, 2019, that's when I got into the Australian tech market,

LLMs were not this massive thing, right? There were a couple of GPT2 demos, but there is no way for you at a normal company to roll out something like Gen AI, right? You really had to know what you were doing. You didn't have the resources. Like you couldn't just hit an endpoint somewhere and get a result. And I cannot emphasize that enough for like non-technical listeners. It's like two lines of Python to use open AI. People making these chatbods are not serious practitioners. I could teach like my 13 year old cousin how to do this. But there's this kind of this pre-existing class of person that talks a lot, gets on stages, doesn't really know what's been going on.

but they were much smaller back then. They did talk about AI relentlessly, but the difference in 2019 and 2024 is those people in 2019 didn't have any working products. They would talk and then they would leave organizations every two years before they were on the hook

for their failed projects. The difference now is people are going to those same people. So you just turn up and you go, hey, I'm going to be your lead data scientist, your chief data officer, whatever you want. I'm going to do this AI revolution for you. And then they can very quickly ship stuff that doesn't quite work.

But organizations are really bad at tracking what actually drives revenue. So the moment you get the flashy product out, people think you're some sort of superhero. Even if it's broken. Yeah, absolutely. So I've been, probably shouldn't say this, but I will and just leave the details out. I've been leaked a couple of confidential documents from, I would say, small to medium businesses on how GenAI has worked in their chatbots. I can't name the companies because I'm not supposed to the documents. Like, it's not impressive. Even the ones that sort of work, you get really weird statistics like interacting with

the chatbot predicts tickets being escalated to human support teams, like way worse than usually. But they still roll them out, right? That's good. So the one thing that they say this is going to be able to do, customer service. Very cool. Yeah, it definitely can't do it now. Great.

Jesus. Do you get the sense they're rolling it out, even though they're. not seeing an immediate, like, positive effect because the kind of effect on their potential valuation by throwing AI in is higher than whatever they lose by having a less efficient actual solution? I think it's threefold. So the first one is it's speculative, which means even if I was dishonest and I thought it was bad for the company, I might want AI on my CV specifically.

It doesn't actually have anything to do with the company, right? It's just for me. The second one is, yeah, obviously it's very easy to get funding. Someone reached out to me, a CEO of a company that does LLM work. And this person admitted to me their product doesn't work so they don't accept funding because they're trying to get it to work. And people are still flinging money at them, this thing that self-admittedly doesn't function. That's very cool.

Yeah, it's great. It's great that the industry's in that position. And the last one is... Good for them. The last one is, you know, the chatbot piece. I don't work in that domain, but I kind of wonder, is it cheaper to just provide bad customer service and lay off all your support stuff? Like when I'm trying to cancel my mobile plan, do they actually care that I got frustrated and put the call down? That sounds good for them.

Right. Well, yeah. I mean, that's one of the things that's so insane about this is that this could work out for them at least in, I still don't think that when you're looking at the kind of like the dollar amount of valuations that like Open AI is seen. I don't think that letting companies that don't give a shit about customer service economize more is going to be the size of industry that they're hoping for. It's not trillions of dollars in value, right? That could be a profitable business and just making everything a little bit worse for everybody. Like that could be a very good business to be it.

Yeah. Just Google? No. I mean, yeah, Google's done well off of that. It's just making things gradually. iteratively worse? Well, I will say that I get a lot of email from people who left Google. And, you know, some of them are, it's a huge company, so they do some useful stuff.

But a lot of people are like, I left because it sucks there now. So that's definitely a thing. 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, Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel

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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.

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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. So you said the data science field was large but largely fraudulent.

What exactly does that, does it mean that most of data science is just grifting or is it just something a little more deep? It's a little deeper than that. So as a technical discipline, machine learning is very, very serious, right? You do see it used in genuinely helpful things. It's probably being used right now as we're recording this. It's somewhere in the supply chain. And you'll hear more old school practitioners. is they get very annoyed at the words AI and machine learning.

They say things like it's just statistics. LLMs are obviously doing something. It would be wrong to just say they're classical statistics and not impressive in any way. But when I say it's grifting, I mean this whole artificial intelligence thing, the people deciding on the size of the data science market are not technicians.

So when you say AI, they're thinking Skynet, generative AI, general intelligence. Right. They really have no idea what they're hiring for. but they'll do things like, say, we need to hire 20 data scientists tomorrow, right? Like that's...

Right. Without really knowing what they do with them. No idea what they do with them. And it's really hard to solve problems with data science, right? It is entirely possible to have a problem that is fundamentally intractable, no matter how disciplined your team is, because the data doesn't exist, or the problem's just too hard mathematically.

That happens all the time. It almost feels like the problem with the tech industry is that nobody knows what they're doing. You have people that know stuff, how to do things, and then they get a job of Google in a pile of people that can do stuff run by someone who goes, all right, dickheads, put the AI in it now, and then stuff comes out.

It almost, like the problem you mentioned earlier of just, they're not being enough good people, also appears to be there are no good managers. I wonder kind of pivoting, or not pivoting, but building on that, I wonder how much of it is that the guys who are really good at keeping the hype going are also just better socially than the kind of people who are really good at coding and are really good at the actual like science. Like if some of the being bulldozed effect is that the people who really know their shit just are not used to the kind of energy that a hype man is capable of deploying against them. Yeah. So this has come up. I've thought about this a lot.

So that's a kind of component of engineering I work on a lot, not hyping myself up, but actually being able to hold conversations. But that's not quite the attribute I see in the managers who do this kind of thing. Because what you're describing is like a pure con man. And at least, and not to be mean to people who aren't con men, but I'm like, at least there's some skill in that. But what we're talking about is they just like... This is where Steve Jobs comes in.

Right. There's a version of this that requires talent. Right, right. Like, it may not be talent. I respect, like, morally, but I'm like, it's an actual skill set. But we're talking about people who have really just learned how to, like, mimic the trappings of success and responsibility. You know, they're real big on suits. They're real big on talking very slowly with long pauses.

But, like, they don't have novel thoughts. their brain has just had like Forbes magazine flashed onto it like there's nothing else there so when we talk about social skill and bulldozing I'm not talking about the art of war and you know we're not talking about people who are doing this very savvy political piece where they finesse things and you know it's very Machiavellian

we're talking about people who just turn up and if you point out they don't know what they're talking about they're a fucking dick to you. And they do this until you leave them alone. And that's their whole career. The industry is just full of that. They're not even smart. I have seen an executive at a restaurant, order the wrong dish, have their family,

eat the whole thing, then tell the waitstaff that like, hey, you brought us the wrong thing. And when a kid piped up, they shush the kid. You know, it's not like a talent that they've cultivated in the managerial space. It's like personality disorder. That just leads into everything and ruins the families and ruins of reality. My dinner will be how I want. It's some of it is because like we talk, I talk about jobs a lot and I think you have to because a lot of these guys, if not all of them, at some level, wish they were him, right? With the exception of the not, you know, the medical issue.

But like they, he's he's like mythologized to a significant degree, especially. I'm recording from San Francisco right now. I mean, he's almost like a saint down here. here. And I feel like the act of copying him, you get these people who are like carbon copies of just the personality disorder without any of the actual insight. And I think that's like further exacerbated because they're all like, yeah, read the art of war, read like one of three Malcolm Gladwell books, read the four-hour body and do not read anything else. There's no humanities. There's nothing like, because all you need to learn how to do is be the most optimized asshole you can

be. I like how you just pick the, if I, if I, I had hitman budget. Like, that would be my hit list. Yeah. As a data scientist is Malcolm Gladwell, like, I might hate him more than anyone on the planet. Oh, I'm right there with you, buddy. He's been advertising on our shows. Oh, man.

I don't love it. I don't love it. So with that in mind, Nick, what do you think of Sam Altman? I don't really know a whole bunch about it because out here in Melbourne, I don't really play around in the Fang super huge space, right? Our clients are relatively small. I work at like medium-sized businesses, tiny compared to the size of Google and Open AI. All I will say is if he said what you just said about physics, like he needs to come out with the greatest innovation I've ever seen in the next two years or he will be one of the most insane people I've ever

heard of, right? Like that's, he really has to deliver on that statement or he's obviously full of shit. It just, it blows me away that he's even able to say it without someone just being like, what the fuck you talking about Sam Altman? Sam Altman, did you hit your head somewhere on the way here? Because it's not even the first insane thing he said. He has said so many times, I was super smart, it's going to be a super smart friend

that knows everything about you. The fuck are you talking? What does any of this mean? And my own frustration I've shared about the media is that no one ever seems to say the appropriate thing, which is wait, what was that? Excuse me, mate. But it almost feels, with everything you're talking about and in your excellent blog, that also feels like the problem that you've just got these guys who just say things, raise money, go up in organizations, and don't actually do anything.

Like, Sam Altman did not make GPT. Someone else did that. Miramorati did not do it. CTO of OpenAI. Didn't do it either. It's just so strong. It feels like we're living. in an alternate reality at times

and it's freaking me out. I'm going to be honest I'm putting on the clown makeup, the Joker makeup almost every day now. Was Miramirati the one who couldn't answer that question on whether they used YouTube to train on? Yes. Yes, she sure couldn't. And I found at least

I watched the video with captions while we were doing this of Sam Altman and the exact statement was basically someday you'll be able to ask chat GPT discover physics for me. It'll do it. Discover all of physics, something like that.

I've got the link in there. But like, just a nonsense statement. Like, at least go to make it, you could make like Star Trek claims, right? Like, that's the rational end of this. I don't know that it'll actually be that good, but be like, one day I'll have a computer and you can tell it to do all these things,

and it'll organize your life and answer questions, it'll run complex systems, and it'll let us explore space. That's nonsense too, probably, at least in, any kind of near term, but it's at least a thing that theoretically could happen, as opposed to just telling a robot to discover physics for you. And he says, computer, solve all of physics for me, which is so funny. Right.

And it's not what anyone also, it's just not what, I don't know, I don't need to go into this. That's not how physics works. You don't solve physics. You don't solve physics, and it's not what's appealing about the Star Trek dream of a computer that works the way the ones on those ships do, right? The enticing thing is the idea of technology that is hopeful and still needs humans at the center of it. And I don't know, he doesn't seem to know how to like promise anything but the elimination of human creativity, interest action, which I guess is part of what I find disturbing about him. It also, you know, that's obviously something that is said to drive stock prices at various companies.

Right. It is insane. Like, no one believes that. Like, it can't be the case. Even the people investing don't believe that. Because if you could get a computer to solve physics, stock prices wouldn't matter anywhere. Right? So that can't be why you're investing. I just don't know. That statement I haven't really thought about too much before right now, but I can't get over the idea of solving physics. Like, it's a statement said by someone who doesn't know what they're talking about for other people who don't know what they're talking about to go, damn, this boy's smart.

It kind of makes me suspect, Ed, that he thinks about, like, writing a novel that way, too. Well, the author could just solve, you know, Wuthering Heights, right? He could have the Chatsbyp.T. do it for her. She could have Chatsby would have survived in my book. Yeah. Those kids would have been safe in the brothers' caramers of. Yeah, Chetchee P.T accidentally pulled too much from Deviant Art. And Gatsby ends with some Captain Kirk and Spock, Improft.

pregg fan fiction. That's the most curse sentence I've ever heard. But that's the thing. It doesn't feel like anything's being done about this shit. What was at the end of 2022, GPT popped up, and now like, what were like a year and a half into it.

And like, oh, great, I can get a pregnant picture of Garfield with an AK-47. Great. Now what? And you actually kind of made not an identical point.

I don't think the Garfield-Mprick stuff was in there. I have to look again. But you made a simple point where it's like, as a company, you probably don't need AI or you're already using it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just baked into the software you use, right? So we did a little bit of work for a managed security

provider down here in Melbourne. They have AI in their supply chain, but they don't like need data scientists and specialists doing it here, right? They've got some vendor way upstream, very small company that hires a couple of PhDs, they write some algorithms, which are not LLMs, just like old school statistical computing to detect when someone's like trying to get into your network, you

just buy the product from them, right? You just sit there and it's the same way we get benefits out of Zoom and YouTube and Twitter or whatever the heck, right? Like there's just some stuff baked in the back. Like you don't have to stress about it. It is insane how many companies that have no business playing in the space are doing this stuff instead of figuring out things like, you know, staff retention averages one year, how do we get it up to seven. They don't worry about that because they're just fixated on this AI thing.

I need to calm down because I was, I'm going to strangle the next person to mention it, but it might come across as more of a legal threat. Calming down is not how better offline works. My aura ring tells me I'm working out during the show, so I don't have it on today, sadly. But you mentioned there that they should be doing other things. And you actually mentioned in the piece as well that companies aren't like checking their backups to make sure they work. What should organizations actually be doing instead of AI? Just turn their brains on for like 20 seconds. It's not hard. They're just so hyper fixated on this. Anyway, it's not AI. If it's not LLMs or Gen AI, it was like older AI. I mean, it's not that it's

blockchain. It's not that it's quantum. I went to a talk at a big conference called, I really put them on blast year. I went to something digital in Queensland last year. It was dystopian. It was just entirely filled with like, non-technicians, the stage was just filled by people lying to them. And half the products were about quantum. And that whole talk, they never explained what quantum was, right? They were just like, quantum is going to revolutionize everything. And I'm in the audience being, what the hell does that even mean?

Right? What do you mean quantum? But yeah, what they should be doing is just like really basic fundamental stuff, right? It's not even interesting, which is why no one wants to do it because you can't like rocket ship your way to CEO by doing this stuff. like you need to figure out how to get your teams out of more meetings. You need to actually spend time with people on the ground and ask them what needs changing in the business. You don't need AI to figure all that stuff out.

Just ask a guy who's been there for a while. It's all pretty common sense. And AI is really pulling away from that. We talk a lot about the investment in AI as a waste of money. But there's probably like just as much unrealized opportunity cost in people just wasting my time in meetings about it. Right. Like we could just be doing something else. I just got back from a trip to Fiji

and I volunteered for a tiny bit with my girlfriend in Animals Fiji so they can treat a dog for about 30 Australian dollars Can you imagine how many dead dogs Open AI has produced? Like you could just weigh them, right? It's going to be hundreds of tons. Wait, wait, wait, be a little more specific.

How did Open AI kill the dogs? Well, because we could have just spent the money on the dogs, right? Right. Like, you do the math. Right. This many dogs' worth of potential, yeah, life. I'm putting that in the document of if I ever get the Sam Altman interview.

Yeah. Sam, what, talk to someone who said, 30 bucks, I can help a dog. How many dogs would you kill to bring AGI to life? Actually, that's a great question. It's one of those things, because people, there's that talk about, like, how much power does it use to ask a question of chat, GPT, how much water are we basically pouring on the ground every time we use these models? And it's, you could say the same things about every useless thing humans do, but like we mostly don't, right? Like I could say that about like Warhammer models, but at the end of the day,

you get a Warhammer model, right? Like that's why people keep buying that shit, as opposed to like at the end of the day, I think a lot of the ultimate result of a shitload of what's going on in AI right, AI right now is that briefly a lot of people, hopefully briefly, a shitload of people lose their jobs and customer service gets wildly worse, maybe forever, right? Like that's what we're giving it up for. And I would rather have little models. Yeah. Also, no one's turning up in the public service and going, I need $10 million to hire someone to paint ultramarines. Right. Like that's not. Right, right. They should be. Maybe in the UK. That would be a better use. Big part of the NHS. Yeah. At least someone's having fun.

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 Yardt. 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.

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Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-8-4-I-Hart. 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. You kind of hinted at this in the piece, but where does this actually go? Because it feels like we're hitting a wall with what LLMs can do. And there's all of this hype, but there's not that much stuff that's come out of it. What happens? Like, you've named a few scenarios, the first being like, magic. Like, just, it gets better in two years.

But otherwise. Yeah, I think realistically, the hype just dies down. And a lot of people are very, very embarrassed by their overinvestment in the space. You'd hope that's the case. It's very possible. They'll just kind of get away with it and drift their way into something else. Especially, you know, if all their CEO friends did the same thing, I don't know who holds them accountable, especially if the board was, you know,

it's a bit like arguing with people who are like late stage Trump supporters. And it's not that they necessarily agree with things he's saying at this point. I hope that's not too political for this podcast. No, I don't worry. Yeah, it's just that they've said so many embarrassing things that it's like too late to back out now.

You can't, even if you're in theory, you're like, okay, you know what? He just said something insane. You can't admit that you've been saying insane things for four years. you know, so you're kind of locked in. Yeah, I think the magic scenario is possible. You know, Open Eye has tons of money and a lot of PhDs. But, you know, they've got people there who know more about the field than I do.

Maybe they've got something in the wings that's incredible. But, I mean, we would, there's no need to speculate on that, right? They'll just show us if they've got something. Yeah, surely they would do it. Yeah, just do it. We don't need to speculate. And if they do it, I don't even know of investing makes sense because I don't know if like in that universe

stock markets make sense because they're really talking about a level of innovation that would do away with all human labor so it still doesn't make sense to put money into them then it's all very very strange what I'm hoping for to quote

my co-director Ash Lally the people who did this are going to be the acts body spray of CEOs like we'll just be done with them we'll just remember the investment we'll have all the snippets of them getting on their 10x stages. And then hopefully we'll never work with them ever again.

Yeah, but we'll, like, won't. It feels like they'll find another grift. But I think that's really the question. So it's not quantum. It's not blockchain. It's not AI. What the hell is next? Like what now?

Where does all of this money and hype go? This is the thing that I feel crazy about. A number of things drive me crazy. It's just, where does it go from here? is the next thing that people even can invest in in organizations? Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, quantum and blockchain are not very predictable, nor were the LOMs. Nor definable.

Yeah, nor defiable. And I suspect it's very possible the bubble will not be allowed to pop until there is a new thing because I think the people making this investment also control when the investment explodes. And it's a load-bearing bubble, right? Like, yeah. When this pops, things fall down. But when you say they won't allow it to, what do you mean? I just have no idea how long the kind of investor class involved in this can just keep pumping money into it, right?

I have no idea of their on their last legs. I don't have a background in international finance. I don't know where the money's coming from. It's coming from somewhere I don't understand because I know they're not making profits, right? So I don't know if they could keep this going for 20 years if they need to or if we're sick. six months from some sort of massive collapse. Like, you'd have to get an economist in here to comment on that. But I do know it's very likely it will collapse at some point.

It's why at Hermit, we don't do AI consulting. We could get a lot of work doing it. I just don't think it's, you know, we're thinking on a five to 10 year time span. I don't think it's sustainable to be in that game. It all feels very nihilistic. It all feels just like grifters grifting each other at this point. Like Microsoft is now the largest customer of Oracle. because Oracle is now building data centers for Microsoft to build AI.

Yeah, my experience, by which I mean, reading a great deal of blogs and earnings, is it doesn't seem like anyone's making any money from this. That seems to be your experience too, right? I haven't seen any medium-sized company that's dabbled in AI make any money off of it. most of our clients, fortunately, aren't too deep into it, but they bring us on and ask things like, hey, you know, we just bought this Microsoft product. Can we get it to do the thing it's supposed to do? And the answer is almost always no. Like there's just no, we mostly help people get out of the AI game, right? They bring us in to help them finish the project. And we mostly point out that they should just cancel the project.

And then we go do boring stuff like fix their databases because that's what they should have done five years ago. And that's kind of what you've been suggesting in the piece as well, that the real problem is organizational failure, almost like I mentioned earlier, the unchecked backups. Yeah. Yeah, what are other things that people are just not doing? Like, what is the actual thing being ignored? Well, the thing is, it's like a constellation of things, right? It would be like asking a writer, what is the one thing that writer is ignoring? It's about, like, developing your judgment across, like, the entire field holistically.

but that's really hard and takes a lifetime. So people just fixate on the latest thing and they build their whole career off of that. It takes like 30 seconds of skimming someone's CV to tell when they're full of shit. Like it's really, really obvious who's serious. How do you do it? Tell me. Again, even that's a judgment piece, right? But here's a good example. Most organizations I know are really into, I don't know if this resonates for non-technical people,

but there's this thing agile. Everyone's just obsessed with being maximally agile all the time. Please define that. I know what it is, but I'm looking forward to hearing. It's meant to be a set of like, it's literally like a four or five sentence thing, which says you value things like people over processes, right? It's literally five pages. And we've built this entire manic industry of like books and specialists and this and all built

around these five sentences, which just say things like, you know, let people work and pay attention to the human. And when you talk to these consultants, you find out they haven't even read those original five sentences, right? That's very, very common. I hope it's five sentences. It might be more. It's, again, it's like that copy of a copy, right? At this point, like the, we've gone to Kinko so many times you can't even really tell what's supposed to be written on the sheet.

But they all know it's deeply important to have to run a good business. We're all like Camino, but all the clothes have eight heads, you know, like they've been to be able to be in for too long. They no longer. They no longer look like that very handsome stuntman. Almost feels like the whole DevOps thing that happened. You remember the DevOps boom? Where I was like, yeah, DevOps is important. And then when I add clients, I'd also like, what's DevOps mean?

I'd be like, well, it's like the developers talk to the business people. I'm like, why do you need software for that? And they would kind of freeze. That's not over. It's just that it's been overshadowed by the AI thing. But so, you know, agile. We have this whole industry of people who turn up and tell you how to run meetings every day. And it's like, just talk to people.

What the hell are you talking about? DevOps. People still say that constantly. And it's really just code for like, automate your thing sensibly. Right? There's something useful in there. And the moment someone realized it was useful, we just got another gigantic industry around it. That's what most of my blog is actually about.

The AI piece was just like, I've never even written about it before. Because it was so obviously kind of bullshit, it didn't warrant it until someone really annoyed me last week. Yeah. What actually caused you to write that? Was there just a guy? I think I just been building up for like four years. And then finally, I think I put a picture in there of that scale AI survey. Yes.

And I just saw that line that was like, was it 8% of companies have not seen games from Gen AI? And then I chose violence. You know, I was just as done. Some really inventive threats as well. I was very happy to see you say it was, you need to replace your sweaters with full plate to survive my onslaught. I appreciate that. I think one of the problems we're having, and this isn't just a problem in the tech space,

but you've got a bunch of people who get by on not being challenged or the fact that if you are going to have a debate with someone, the act of like arguing with them about something lends some sort of credibility to their position when there are certain people that what they're saying is just such horseshit, potentially dangerous horse shit, potentially dangerous horse shit, that what you need to say is, if you say that again, I'm going to pile drive for you, right? Like, I'm going to give you a fucking stone cold stunner if you keep doing that shit. And I do appreciate that tone.

Yeah. And, you know, it's, we talk about that bulldozing. A lot of it is just the fact that, you know, they're basically just committing a low-level psychological violence on a societal level, right? They get you into an office, and then they will talk at you for, like, 100 hours. Like, they will not drop the point. They will just talk about AI 24-7.

And if you're a little bit pessimistic, they'll question your credentials, say you're not forward-looking, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No idea. And they'll just do this until you go, I just need a paycheck. All right, invest in whatever you want. I give up.

Just do it. Just do it. And this is a common. Is this like a, what kind of person does this? Is this like a C, is this an executive level person, the product manager? What's the arc or like a consultant?

I think it happens. like in every position. I've seen programmers do that. I've seen artists do that. I've seen executives do that. I can't respond to my emails anymore because so many people have written in with stories that I can't navigate that inbox.

Right. And yeah, I just see it everywhere I go. And then occasionally I see like these really small functional places where they don't have these issues stops usually anywhere between like five to 100 people. And it's really hard to get in there because they don't scale up

because they really don't need to hire more people. Yeah, yeah. They get to 100 and they're like, well, we're all really well paid and happy. And the more people we add, the higher the odds are, we just get someone like that. So we're just going to stop hiring. In my experience, people like that, and I run a tech PR from my day job, and I do occasionally run into people like this. And I've learned that there's just a really easy way of saying it is, I'm not done talking.

Like they really hate that when I run into this kind of sociopath. You say, I'm not done talking. and they get really mad because they're like, wait, I can't just attack. I've told me to fuck off. I don't care. The thing is, these people, perhaps they don't need to be power drive, but they need to be yelled at. Sam Hurtman Khan apparently walk around San Francisco anymore. And I think he'd want you to believe it's because he's famous,

but I like to believe it's because people fucking scream at him. I hope that that happens. I'd probably do. I'll tell you if I run into him today. Yeah, please do. give him my number. I should probably clarify, I don't know that much

about Sam Altman, so I don't want to, I'm going to read about him, and then I'll kick you an email to see if I feel bad or not about slamming. He's great. He's a cool dude.

He's a real charmer. He's got your best interest at heart. You should listen to him. Always has. So, okay, I think a good question to wrap up on is assume you are God. Really easy one here.

Yeah, yeah. How would you actually fix the current culture in tech? You've kind of hinted at it. It's like organizational stuff. What would you see done with like a Google or the bigger companies? What is the problem there? Yeah.

So I think it's some inherent issue to do with scale because fundamentally we're talking about the fact that there's a class of person who will either bully people in day-to-day interactions or they find ways to attach themselves to people who are very, very credulous or don't have the technical skill to push back on what they're saying. I suspect that's a lot of why journalists don't push back on, you know, people saying insane things. Because there's, of course, a fear in the back of your mind that they're going to come out with like, yeah, but you're not a technician. That was a stupid question. You've just been embarrassed on your own show, right? Like, that's very, very possible. I think a lot of those issues are so systemic that I view it from like a small-scale disruption standpoint. So I started Hermitech with just a couple of my friends, right?

They're just guys I met who behave very honestly in the space. Some of them are AI guys, but they just do like actual serious work that gets published in places. Yeah, and we're just taking all the business from places that actually need results, right? So most of the people rolling out open AI stuff are not interested in working with us because they're just doing some weird Ponzi scheme where they convert the investor money into status and they use the status to get a higher paying job. Like, they don't need us because they don't actually need results. They just need to grift. Right. I'm just going to let that market explode.

That's not my problem. I think it would be dangerous to do anything to it. It's just going to blow up on its own. I'm just going to hang out in the corner with some sane people and just find people who actually need stuff to work, right? I'm going to go in and just make sure all the database backups get tested. And then I feel like that's going to be a bajillion dollar industry. Right.

Like for the rest. Making things work. Yeah, just make things work. That's how people have made money for like the history of time. Just don't be insane about it. Nick, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find you? Yeah, thank you. Yep, so I bought Lutink.org so they can find my personal website. And there is hermit dash tech.com.

And that's where they can get us for consulting. If you need someone to not lie to you, that's us. And of course, I would never lie to you. My name's Ed Zittron. I run this podcast. you need to hear more from me. But of course, Robert Evans joined us today as well. Where can they find you, Robert?

Thank you. Thank you, Ed. You can find me occasionally on your show Better Offline and on my own show Behind the Bastards. So yeah. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Rosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects

at Mattisowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-K-I.com. You can email me, easy at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's Your Ed?at to visit the discord and go to R slash Better Offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone 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

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 IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why are we all so obsessed with romance? On the Radio 831 podcast, join us,

Sanjana Basker and Tyler McCall, as we unpack all the trending tropes, fuzzy adaptations, book talk drama, and celebrity love stories with hot takes and sharp guests. Each episode digs into what these stories reveal about desire, fantasy, identity, and how we love now. Listen to the Radio 831 podcast on the IHeart 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. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.