Better Offline - The Cult of Failing Upwards

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

Ed Zitron walks you through how career manager Adam Mosseri pushed out Instagram's original founders, turning it into an ultra-profitable app that barely works, and how Sam Altman, the so-called hero of the AI boom, is a lobbyist dressed as a technologist best-known for being an absent, self-obsessed demagogue.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hello and welcome to Better Offline, Cool Zone Media's happiest podcast. I'm your host, Ed Zittron. As I've run through in the last two episodes, managers of Poison Takes Ability to innovate with a degenerative capitalism known as the rot economy, pushing growth at all cost metrics on companies you love while isolating and removing those that don't agree. And by the way, they're the same people who actually build things.

and make good products and use them as well. Nowhere is this more obvious than meta, a company with leadership completely removed from any meaningful interaction with their products or any value to society. Since 2009, Facebook's core products have reliably become more profitable at exactly the same rate they decay,

with every founder behind every product that Zuckerberg has acquired, including Instagram, Oculus and WhatsApp, leaving the company and almost immediately talking about how much they hated working there. According to a New York Times piece from 2018, Kevin Sistram, co-founder of Instagram, only chose to quit the company after Mark Zuckerberg became jealous of the app's success, taking the spotlight away from that of Facebook itself,

and Appy kind of stole from the Winklevosses. Sistram allegedly didn't really want to leave Facebook, but felt that Zuckerberg was depriving Instagram of resources, and now, and I quote, seemed to want Instagram to use its momentum, to help the Big Blue app, which is an annoying way of describing a situation that feels a convenient time to reveal that this was a Kara Swisher piece. Despite Swish's bloviating, it took TechCrunch's Josh Constine to reveal the real reason

that Systrom had left. Facebook had replaced Instagram's VP of product, Kevin Well, who everybody loved, with the former VP of Facebook News in May 2018, you know, that great year for news. and that man was named Adam Masseri. He would take over, and over the next six years, he would absolutely destroy everything that Sistram and his co-founder, Mitchell Krieger, had built. According to Constine's reporting,

Sistram had also clashed with Chris Cox, Facebook's chief product officer at the time. Constine described Messeri as a Zuckerberg loyalist, who was, and I quote, disappointed that he didn't get the head of Facebook gig that went to Will Kathcote, who now heads up WhatsApp. Over time, Messerian Zuckerberg moved to erode Sistram and Instagram's independence from Facebook, and eventually, I guess it all became too much to bear.

Cistram was there to oversee the most damaging change to Instagram, though, which was the introduction of the algorithmic feed in June 2016, two years before he left, that horrified users who feared that they would now not see posts from their friends, a thing that almost immediately happened on both Instagram and Facebook, which made a major change to its newsfeed algorithm in 2015. Wait, wasn't that when Adam was serious? Oh my God! Anyway.

A few months later, Instagram would try and clone the functionality of Snapchat, a company that has had quite literally one profitable quarter in its history, with the release of stories. By the way, that's exactly what it was called on Snapchat. They just didn't anyway. This move was illustrative both of the lack of creativity within Instagram and Facebook, but also of its future direction, with stories serving as yet another touchpoint for advertisers

and yet another thing that Mark Zuckerberg would rip off from people who actually build things and have ideas. Once Sistram left, Messeri became the head of Instagram, turning it into one of the most profitable business units in history, while destroying its basic functionality is an app that showed you photos and videos from people you chose to follow, doubling down on the algorithm's ability to interrupt and annoy you

and stop you from seeing things that you want to see, pushing ads and sponsored content seemingly at random, but the one thing you can rely on is it would do it a lot. Since taking over Instagram, Adam Messeri has, with the direct approval and support of Mark Zuckerberg, turn the app into a glorified ad network

devoid of any ability to innovate with products like IGTV and threads by the way not the social network it was a camera app built to compete with Snapchat which has also been shut down neither of them found traction and every change under Masseri seems to be a direct copy of either

snap or TikTok it's also important to remember and know what Adam Masseri is Adam Masseri is not a creator he's not an engineer he's not a founder He's a designer that found his way into product manager, escaping the doldrums of actually doing things into the beautiful pantheon, of wearing suits and yelling at people.

Okay, okay, I don't know if Adam yelled at people, but he definitely annoyed them. And in late 2020, he made arguably the worst change to Instagram yet, launching reels, a 15-second video format for Instagram built to compete with the ascendant rise of the extremely algorithmic TikTok. Reels quickly became the dominant form of content on both Facebook and Instagram, flooding your feed with 15 and eventually 60-second clips that automatically play as you scroll by, each one engineered or paid to get in the way of things that you actually want to see. And I really want to be clear, though, there are people who are going to say, well, surely, surely, Ed, the fact that Reels was such a runaway success, well, that's proof that it was good, right? Wrong, horribly wrong. Facebook's algorithm controls everything with Instagram and Facebook now. Sistram's worry, and Kevin Sistram, the founder of Instagram, his worry was that Zuckerberg was trying

to just turn Instagram into an arm of Facebook, kind of a feature app, like you went on Instagram to do things with your Facebook account. This is exactly what has happened. Instagram is just Facebook, but with more visual media. It has the same. logins. It has the same problems. It also has no customer support of any kind, like every social network. But don't worry, thanks to Adam Goddamn Messeri, you can now pay $15 a month for verification on Instagram and Facebook, which will also get you access to customer support. Great goddamn idea, Adam, burn in hell. Anyway, I'm not the only one angry with Adam Masseri. He's also one of the least popular tech executives in history, and I'm not kidding. I have been reading

the tech media very deeply for, Jesus, coming up on 16 years. Bloody hell. Anyway, I've never seen someone this unpopular other than maybe Elon Musk. And even then, Elon Musk, who's a loathsome individual, has far more riz than Adam Messeri, who mostly spends his time apologizing. No, seriously, since taking over Instagram, he's had to apologize for an update that made Instagram's feed mood sideways, and I'm not kidding about that one. He's had to apologize for Instagram censoring pro-Palestinian content.

He said to testify before Congress about Instagram's harm to young people, and he said to tell people that Instagram was no longer a photo sharing app. What does the gram? Anyway, he's overseen so many deeply unpopular changes that Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, who between them have over 600 million followers, had to beg him to stop Instagram from trying to be TikTok, to which he responded that more and more of Instagram is going to become video

over time and claim that it had cut back on recommended content. Something I think we can all agree was a blatant fucking lie. I find Adam Messeri very annoying as well because when you watch his videos, he's always going, hey guys, yeah, so, yeah, so the reason that Instagram's bad now is because, and you can see him in real time trying to come up with a reason why it sucks, that isn't just, well, it makes it, it makes me so rich. I have a house in Kensington now. I'm so rich.

is so good. He's just, he's worm-like. I don't want to get into personal insight. I take that back. Adam Messeri is not worm-like. He is a coward, though. He is the reason that Instagram sucks now. He is the architect of the destruction of one of the most dominant places on the web. These are his decisions. Masseri, like many of the most powerful men in tech, is a glorified management consultant, incapable of creating anything of note. Maseri has already announced that threads, Meta's dollar store clone of Twitter, is not for news and politics, making news organizations kind of hesitant to invest in a platform that was made by a company that has a rich history of screwing over news organizations. Also, what the hell do I talk about on social networks then, Adam?

No, nothing that's happening in the government or otherwise. Oh, wait, let me answer that. On threads, what people talk about is, whatever's making them angry, that day without much form or feature, and they still talk about politics and news. It's just not supported by the algorithm. It's just, it's the kind of thing that you would make if you had no idea how social networks worked, but you knew product management. If you were like, what do we want to see out of a social network? We want to see lots of clicks. We want to see lots of scrolling. Yeah, we definitely want people interacting and engaging. That's what makes good social networking, right? And I think we can all agree at this point that Twitter was a mistake. It was like

a text-based platform. I don't think Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey are particularly gifted product people, but they were smart enough to leave it the hell alone. If you look at the Twitter files, which, by the way, are very funny because they Matt Taiibi sold his soul to Elon Musk, the most deceptive man alive other than Donald Trump. It rocks. Didn't think the leopards would eat your face, did you, mate? Anyway, the Twitter files, all you can see in there is Twitter's executives just being like, I don't want to touch it, mate. I don't want to, if we mess with it, it's going to make it bad. It's going to break.

Everyone will be so angry if we do anything. We shouldn't ban this person. We shouldn't change this. Threads is this weird hyper-optimized hyper-alorithmic crap fest. And all the people on there are people who write comments on Instagram. It sucks. And there are some good journalists on there. I'll pop in for that.

But it's a bad social network. and it's a bad social network because it's made by a guy who doesn't build products. Unless you think of products as like financial vehicles, in which case, Adam Messeri may be the most gifted man alive. But let's be honest. Nowhere is Adam Messeri's consultant mindset more obvious than in his suggested plan to deal with Instagram's hundreds of thousands of underage users by creating a new type of family-centered account in Instagram

that would permit META to upsell Instagram to children under 13. A disgusting, loathsome program that was planned as an alternative to instituting stricter registration procedures, according to a lawsuit against META filed by the Attorney General of New Mexico. Yeah, Adam, I won't come without a link because I'm scared. Anyways, this is the man running one of the most important tech platforms in the world, a man bereft of morals or qualifications or even ideas, a walking, talking figurehead that exists only to spout vague platitudes about what social media can or will do

as the profits of making it harder to communicate with friends and family make him unfathomably rich. He comes out every so often, babbles about how social is important, how the changes he's made that make Instagram worse are actually good, and then disappears up his own asshole. One time he responded to something I wrote on the information, and he responded with a bunch of typos, which is very funny, but he also responded saying that Facebook planned no layoffs and Instagram planned no layoffs. They laid people off, six months later.

It's just this is the guy. These are the guys in power now. Well, much of the blame for the state of Instagram and Facebook can obviously be laid at the feet of Mark Zuckerberg. It's important to remember Mark sucks. And Mark is the reason he did the original Facebook after he stole it from the Wet Brothers. But nevertheless, it's also important to understand the sheer level. of damage that Adam Messeri has done to the world. Instagram is now a truly awful product. It's terrible.

And Masseri's only response to the pain and frustration of his users is to tell them that he intends to make it shittier. That was his actual response when Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian said, hey, stop making Instagram like TikTok. He said, I'm actually going to make it more like TikTok, you fucking assholes. Okay, that's not exactly what he said. He just said there'd be more video. They've claimed they're rolling things back, but it's all nonsense. It's all lies. And this is the management consultant mindset that dominates tech. They trap users in these terrible experiences, and they do so because they have giant monopolies. And then they make their products worse and worse and worse once they know that their users can't or won't go anywhere else. And what's

insane about this is, Instagram could have probably made Facebook tens of billions of dollars without sucking. There are honest ways to do a business like this. If they really actually invested in algorithms, and I kind of hint at this in previous episodes, and made it so it was just very good at showing you things you like, hell, they'd make TikTok. Why do you think TikTok has done well? Because its algorithm, while extremely weird and unsettling, is actually very good at showing people things they'd find interesting. It's invasive, it's weird, it's bad, but guess what? Met is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. They're putting tens of billions of dollars into the Metaverse still.

Reality Labs are still burning, what, 10, 15 billion dollars a quarter or a year? It's an insane amount of money. How about feeding that into the algorithm so your experience doesn't suck ass? I'm being vulgar and I've been quite vulgar in this episode and I apologize. I really do. I shouldn't swear so much. My mother tells me this. My father tells me this.

My shrink tells me this. But anyway, I just find this. all so annoying. I find it frustrating because the bad guys keep winning. And the reason they keep winning is nobody points at them and says how bad they are, or at least they don't do it enough. Really, people should walk out of Instagram. We should stop using Instagram and Facebook. I think I use it Instagram like once every couple of days to look at my friend's very fat dog, which I do enjoy. I might just text him and say, can you just send me pictures of your dog? But that's kind of weird.

these apps have become part of the social fabric and people like Adam Messeria are aware same with Mark Zuckerberg they know exactly how well they've done and they have they are a success story an evil success story but they're a success story

you are on Instagram you are on Twitter you are on email you are on these platforms because that's where people exist online there are people that I can only speak to on Instagram they're just bad at text

but they love Instagram. And it sucks. I don't want to use these platforms. And I imagine you don't want to either, which is why it's important to talk about who mess them up. It's important to say Adam Messeri 100 times and keep saying it. That's the only way that history will know who has done this damage.

And these management consultant types, they're everywhere. They're everywhere, and they're inspiring people to be like them, to be ruthless assholes, to be terrible product developers but excellent businessmen. And there is a middle ground, a sustainable ground, one which doesn't involve burning cash or burning customers,

or in the case of Instagram, shortly adding generative AI to everything, to Facebook, to Instagram. And by the way, here's a crazy story for you. Recently, a generative AI on Facebook responded to a group saying that it had a gifted child. And you may think I'm mistaking something. No, no, it said this whole thing about having a gifted child.

This is what happens when people who don't know product, who don't build anything, who don't understand anything, get the keys to the kingdom. They fuck it up. And they'll keep doing so. And their massive success only seeks to inspire generations of useless founders, obsessed with creating profitable pain boxes over useful products. And as we speak, the most quirked-up

Loathsome one of them all is rising to power. I'm talking about Sam Goddamn Altman. Another 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 Acapella band with their between songs banter. Who's the 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 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.

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streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. Agency, the ability to know that we're the experts in our own body. On the podcast, cultivating her space, Dr. Dom and Terry Lomax create a space where black women can show up fully and be heard. I wholeheartedly think, you know, you hit 30. You shouldn't have to share one with anybody.

Mm-hmm. From navigating friendships and healing to setting boundaries and prioritizing your mental health. These are real honest conversations. We don't always get to have out loud. Totally unreasonable with different parts of life, right? Like, oh, have all three meals and make sure you're mindful during all of them? Absolutely not.

During one meal, I'm standing. I'm standing and handing my children food. Because healing, empowerment, and resilience aren't just ideas. Their practices. And this Mental Health Awareness Month, there's no better time to pour back into yourself. Listen to cultivating her space on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Now, if you don't know who that is, Sam Orman is the CEO of Open AI, which is a very unprofitable revenue generating company, building software to do something, and Generative AI might do something. You should go back and listen to the episodes about that.

But I want to tell you how Sam Olman got started. and I want to let you know how shit Sam Altman has been at his job in the past. In 2005, Altman, a Stanford dropout, co-founded a company called Looped. That's L-O-O-PT, that's what companies were called back then, and they were a location-based social networking app that raised over $30 million from tech incubator Y Combinator

and VCs like Sequoia Capital and NEA. Seven years later, Altman would flog looped to a publicly traded financial services company called Green Dot. best known for their prepaid cards, for a remarkable $43.4 million, despite the fact that the app didn't find traction or revenue. Ormond got quite rich from the loop deal, despite the fact that a group of senior employees urged the board on two separate occasions to fire Altman for what they described as deceptive and chaotic behavior, according to the Wall Street Journal. Orton would almost immediately become a partner at Y Combinator, surprising a lot of people, after working there part-time, before being made president by co-founder Paul Graham in 2014.

Yet behind the scenes, according to reporting by Elizabeth Dwaskin and Natasha Tiku of the Washington Post, Altman was well known for, and I quote, for an absenteeism that rankled his peers and some of the startups he was supposed to nurture. Orton was also double-dipping in Y Combinator startups by investing through Alt Capital, a venture firm founded with his brother Jack, with one source quoted by the post describing Altman's tenure as the School of Loose Management that's all about prioritizing what's in it for me. Altman became wildly rich during his tenure at Y Combinator,

using his connections and his cult of personality to make early investments in companies like Gusto and Optimizely, which was acquired in 2018 for 1.16. billion dollars and Patreon and Asana and Reddit. Probably made a couple hundred mill on Reddit. Really depressing. In 2015, he founded OpenAI. At the time, a non-profit organization dedicated to building responsible artificial intelligence applications. Yet it's really important to note that Altman is not and was not ever an engineer or a technologist. He did code, but he was in every case from what I can find a figurehead and a fundraiser that was able to convince actual academics and engineers like Dirk Kingman and Wachec Zaremba and Ilyas Setskava to do the actual work

at OpenAI while he sent master-patory emails to Elon Musk who only ever donated $50 million of the $100 million he claimed he'd invested in Open AI. You know what the thing is, Sam? At the very least, can you make sure that Elon Musk pays up? Are you that much of a coward? Anyway, I really want you to remember that Sam Orkman was an absentee parent for the first few years of Open AI. He split his efforts in actually a way that was very similar to Elon Musk, across multiple other investments and enterprises, like the two funds he'd built inside of Wycombinator for him to run. In 2019, according to reports at the time, Altman would step down from Y Combinator amid a series of changes at the accelerator,

A story that much of the industry press just simply chose not to look into. Though I will give Eric Newcomer some credit for calling people out for this, kind of in vain. Yet the Washington Post's reporting revealed that Wycombinator founder Paul Graham, best known for writing extremely annoying tweets and very long, quite boring blogs. That's my job, Paul. Anyway, he flew from the United Kingdom to San Francisco to personally kick Sam Altman out, though he blamed his wife for some reason. and anyway, due to Altman continuing to focus on his own personal projects and press over his thing at Wycombeira.

This is the story of the man who New York magazine called the Oppenheimer of our age, in a meandering piece that frames Altman's vagueness about AI as some sort of big secret, a hidden truth. When I think the truth might be far simpler, Sam Altman is yet another fucking management consultant. In a piece published in early 2021, Sam Altman proposed the concept of Moore's Law for Everything, referring to the principle that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years, leading to a linear increase in computing power in the process. And if I got that wrong, I just, I think it's right. Okay, anyway.

Moore's Law for Everything is, in essence, a utopian take on the impact of AI, noting that as machines usurp the roles of humans in the supply chain, the prices of goods and services, and thus the cost of living, will go down exponentially, something that has been proven wrong by a lot of history. The problem with this piece is it's kind of like Sam Altman, in that it's a deeply complex bucket of nothing. It's an extremely verbose screed that says things like AI will lower the cost of goods and services because labor is the driving cost at many levels of the supply chain,

and suggest things like that we should tax capital rather than labor by creating an American equity fund where companies are forced to give up a percentage of their shares to a nationally incorporate adventure fund, an idea that makes sense if you're in the business of flogging private companies to public companies. Moore's Law for Everything is a remarkably telling piece in that it frames Altman's worldview

as one where the only thing that can save mankind is startups, and those startups should be funded in the way that Sam Altman likes. And this piece feels a lot like everything in Altman's universe. Endeavour actually connects Moore's law to anything, which I should add isn't so much of a law as an observation that as long ceased to be relevant as the shrinkage of transistors has slowed in the recent years. In many respects, this comparison is actually eerily prophetic given the slowdown and even regression of improvement we've seen in large language models like Chat GPT. And much like ChatGPT, Ortman is capable only of loosely approximating the output requested, because that is core. Or he lacks any kind of substance or technical history that you'd need to do so. Like Chat GPT, he's a very intelligent know-nothing that through deterministic measures,

completely detached from the meaning of the underlying ideas, picks the right words to say at the right time. And by the way, this is the man selling the artificial intelligence dream. He's a salesman, and he's a salesman capable of superficial connections between ideas in a way that's initially, satisfying as long as you just don't think about it too much. Altman's famed startup playbook, which is published in 2015, is full of the kind of obvious yet satisfying crap that you'd expect. He extols the virtues of being flexible yet rigid, advises that you talk to your users and watch them use your product, which is an exact quote.

And he says that you should try to improve your product 5% each week. These are the kind of things that are very useful genuinely to an early 20s founder and super impressive to a mid-50s white venture capitalist that doesn't remember the last time they worked a job that wasn't 10 hours a week of investing in Chunkley, the sass for dog breeders. They're the tech equivalent of live-lath love. It does, however, at one point betray Sam Altman's real mindset, that the only universal job description of a CEO is to make sure that the company wins. Allman's material contributions to Open AI are kind of hard to nail down.

Well, it's unfair to judge someone entirely by their emails. Those that I can find, such as the ones from Elon Musk's lawsuit against Open AI, feel like they could be from any other managerial huxter. And they feel kind of as specious as Elon Musk's. And by the way, you're able to compare those because when Elon Musk sued OpenAI, OpenAI published a bunch of emails and him and Allman. Altman are the same guy. They're both just sitting and going, yes, yes, the future will be very good.

It'll be very important that we have technology in the future. Yes, AI will be able to grow. And Sam Orman's like, yeah, dude, yeah, that's great. That's crazy, man. It's like Joe Rogan, except they're worth billions of dollars. Oortman blathers on about governance structures and how open AI needs to create the first general AI and use it for individual empowerment, which he defines as the distributed version of the future that seems the safest.

Like I said, Musk and Orkman are very similar creatures, managers wearing engineering costumes, and both are credited as having expertise in AI without actually appearing to have written a single line of code in a decade. And let me tell you something about most of the guys who actually work deep in AI. You know what they've got? Academic papers. They have actual published things they've done. They're not afraid to share their code. They're not asking, as Elon Musk.

did when laying people off at Twitter for people's most salient lines of code, because they actually know how code works. I, by the way, do not. I'm not going to pretend I do, but I'm also not there selling you the future of AI. From what I can tell, Altman has, like Brobuchar Raghavan, the villain of the last episode, fallen upwards. He was a constant source of frustration at looped due to his pursuit, and I shi't you not, of side projects. With the Wall Street Journal reporting late last year, that Altman once diverted engineers to work on an unnamed gay dating app. As I previously noted, Altman was fired from Wycombinator for his absenteeism, and I quote, reputation for favoring personal priorities over official duties. And the Wallstreet Journal reports

that by early 2018, a year before he was fired, Altman was barely present at Wycombinator's headquarters, spending more time at OpenAI, which rankled longtime partners at Ycombinator, who began losing faith in him as a leader. Another 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 that 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 group. The yard herds, 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 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 844-8-4-I-Hart. agency, the ability to know that we're the experts in our own body. On the podcast cultivating her space, Dr. Dom and Terry Lomax create a space where black women can show up fully and be heard. I wholeheartedly think, you know, you hit 30. You shouldn't have to share one with anybody. Mm-hmm.

From navigating friendships and healing to setting boundaries and prioritizing your mental health. These are real honest conversations. We don't always get to have out loud. totally unreasonable with different parts of life, right? Like, oh, have all three meals and make sure you're mindful during all of them? Absolutely not. During one meal, I'm standing. I'm standing and handing my children food. Because healing, empowerment, and resilience aren't just ideas.

Their practices. And this Mental Health Awareness Month, there's no better time to pour back into yourself. Listen to cultivating her space on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. The journal's piece does reveal a little more about why Orton was fired, a CEO of Open AI, something that happened last November and was very weird. If you didn't see it happen, he was fired for like three days and then a bunch of managers like Reid Hoffman and Branceschioreen and Satchie Nadella, the king of managers, the CEO of

Microsoft, got together and bullied a nonprofit into putting him back. Super happy story. But one of the reasons that he was fired was because Sam Altman is a pretty atrocious manager. Founding and sadly now former OpenAI board member, Ilya Sudzkeva, described to the board when calling for Altman's removal a long-running pattern of Altman's tendency to pit employees against one another, or promised resources and responsibilities to two different executives at the same time, yielding conflicts. More worryingly, the journal reports that other members of the board had heard similar concerns from senior Open AI executives. By the way,

anyone who brought Sam Altman back in, you're a scumbag. We all know it. They also feared that Sam Altman would use his influence in Silicon Valley once fired, something that almost immediately came true when Sam Altman ran, as I mentioned, to Brian Chesky of Airbnb, who then called Satchie Nadela of Microsoft, which sparked a chain of events that restored Altman as CEO of OpenAI and led to the removal of the non-Mobile. believers like Ilya Suzkhafer from the board entirely. This, this is Silicon Valley's king. This is the guy that people think is the Oppenheimer of our age. This is the king of Silicon Valley now, a multi-billionaire who's actually a lobbyist role-playing as a founder, a diplomat masquerading

as a technologist, a charming, capricious, abusive and untrustworthy man that has proven time and time again, that his only reliable trait is that whatever happens must benefit Sam Altman. This also explains why so little of Sam Altman's promises about AI make sense, and why OpenAI has been so unashamed in steamrolling and plagiarizing the entire world. Altman has created nothing other than wealth for himself and other rich guys, helping elevate and protect existing power structures and the ideologies of men like Microsoft CEO Satchinadella and LinkedIn founder and career manager Reid Hoffman. And let's not forget Open AI's new board member Larry Goddamn Summers. And it all kind of makes sense why Generative AI doesn't really help anyone

other than those who want to sell something. When the center of attention at a company isn't really on the product or the tech, but the idea of what the product could do, very little about the company's culture is focused on building useful things for real people. When leadership is dominating, by managers that haven't touched a line of code in decades or talk to a normal person in decades, nobody steering the ship has the ability to judge whether software is good or useful or valuable or does anything, other than help you raise venture capital, of course. And this is the direct result of Silicon Valley's corruption by the managerial sect. While Prabhakar may be a decorated computer scientist and academic,

he arguably oversaw the destruction of Yahoo, formerly one of the web, most dominant search engines and failed upwards into a managerial role that allowed him to take over and now arguably ruin Google's search product, chasing away Ben Goames, a hero, and a man responsible for actually building things. Adam Messeri was and always will be a manager making calls about products he's had no hand in building and has architected the outright destruction of a social network used by billions of people. And Sam Altman, a career failure, famous for making himself rich and popular and upsetting and hurting the people he works with

is on course to become the most toxic manager of them all. If left unchecked, OpenAI will perpetuate one of the largest thefts in history, looting the internet and using it to train models that have yet to prove their necessity other than there's a symbol that Silicon Valley has still fucking got it. Even though it unquestionably doesn't

when it comes to generative AI. Yet because Altman, like every manager, is so thoroughly divorced from actual production, he's only succeeded in generating unsustainable hype and making vague promises that the people who do the actual work at OpenAI likely know that they can't keep. And it's frustrating, because as I said before,

bad guys keep winning. There are people in Silicon Valley making real products. There are people out there who are doing good things. But Silicon Valley will continue to suffer as long as we entrust the future to management consultants and showmen who don't build things. Just look at Humane, a company that raised hundreds of millions of dollars to make a voice-activated AI-powered pin that the ultra-popular YouTuber Marcus Brownlee called the worst product he'd ever reviewed. One might wonder how a company would willingly launch a $700 product that overheated within minutes of

use and repeatedly failed to answer basic queries. And the answer is actually really simple. Humane was founded by Bethany Bonjourno, a former management consultant at PWC and Imran Sheldori, a former director of design from Apple that refers to himself as an inventor and innovator that was fired in 2017 for sending out an email about his planned exit from the company that suggested that Apple could no longer innovate.

Well, mate, look at the Humane PIN. Do you think you innovated? Just to be clear, if you haven't seen this thing, you should really look at up. It's really funny. It clips on and you are meant to use it to project a laser thing onto your hand to make phone calls or take photos. It's got a little camera in it. Here's the problem. It overheats after a few minutes because of the laser. And on top of

that, the queries don't work half the time. And when they do, who really cares? It's just chat GPT except $700 with a $24 a month subscription. And this is what happens when you're insulated from real people's problems and when you don't participate in the process that might actually solve them. You become fundamentally disconnected from any real value creation. Silicon Valley is atrophying as a result of lazy disconnected VCs and power players elevating man like Sam Altman and incumbents helping career consultants dictate the actions of those who actually build software and hardware. If the tech industry wants to escape the public's ire, it should push back against this managerial poison and talk to real people with real problems and focus on solving those.

before creating yet another growth-centric bullshit machine. And as the Valley really wants to change, it needs to stop empowering those who have failed upwards just because they say the right things. It feels good, I get it, that we have a guy out there who's saying, yeah, I can help the Valley be worth money. But as we speak, Nvidia's down 10%. By the time this episode's out, I truly don't know where it will be.

But I'm worried. I'm worried that the tech industry is going to see. start sputtering because everyone's put their eggs in the AI basket. But I do have some hope. A lot of the startups I talk to are only slightly touching generative AI. They don't seem firmly embedded in it. Maybe this is just anecdotal. Maybe I just know good people. I don't know. But my thought here is the fact that the zero interest free generation is kind of ended, the venture capitalists can't just get hundreds of billions of dollars quite so easily, means that they're not so quick to invest in this stuff.

But I think a reckoning's coming. And I don't know if it will be from people, but I think it's going to be kind of a larger effect. It's going to be one where you see that these products just don't get adopted, like I mentioned in the AI episode. And I think you're going to see these big, nasty, overfunded consumer AI companies fall apart. But like I said before,

I'm afraid that Open AI is going to start falling apart. even if it is mostly part of Microsoft I'm afraid of the knock-on effects on the stock market and I know oh stock market it's only rich people who play no that's people's pensions

as people like regular people do actually invest in the stock market and regular people watch Jim Kramer as he goes you need to invest in AI that man does not know a goddamn thing by the way a lot of people who've responded to my

AI episode have said yeah it's good that AI's fall it's good that the tech industry's falling apart and it feels good to see bad people fail, but the thing I need to caution you about is. Management consultants are also really good at avoiding blame. Prabhakar Raghavan, he destroyed Yahoo, or at least watched it happen, and he's now the head of Google Search, and he's destroying that too.

Sam Altman has messed up so many times. And yet here he is. He's the king of open AI. He gets these glossy stories. He can be interviewed by anyone anywhere. These people keep winning. But you want to know how they get defeated? sunlight. Talk about them. Talk about Adam Messeri. Talk about Sam Orman. Tell these stories to your

friends. Say the name Prabhakar as much as you can. Blame these people for their actions. I can't say it will change much, but at least wider society will know who to blame for destroying the internet. Thank you for listening. 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. You can email me at easy at betteroffline.com or check out betteroffline.com to find my newsletter and more links to this podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media.

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