Better Offline - The Era of the Business Idiot, Part 1

Episode Date: June 11, 2025

In part one of this week's three-part Better Offline, Ed Zitron walks you through how Business Idiots have captured our society, with middle management losers breeding out true meritocracy and value-creation in favor of symbolic growth and superficial intelligence. YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitronSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your 20s can be so exciting, but they can also be really overwhelming, confusing, and honestly, just kind of lonely.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month and the psychology of your 20s is breaking down the science behind the biggest roadblocks we face. I was six years into my career, the 80-hour weeks and just the first one in, the last one out, and I ended up burning out. There was a large chunk of my 20s

that I was just so wanting to be out of that phase out of my skin and I just like really regret not living in the present more. You don't need to have everything figured out right now. You just need to understand yourself a little bit better. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The story I've told myself can then shape my behavior, and that can lead me to sabotage the

possibility of connection. This Mental Health Awareness Month, tune into the podcast Deeply Well with Debbie Brown if you've been searching for a soft place to land while doing the work to become whole. This podcast is for you to hear more. Listen to Deeply Well with Debbie Brown from the Black Effect Podcasts network on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Citron. And welcome to the Business Idiot Trilogy. What that means will super come obvious.

So on May 15th, Bloomberg profile of Microsoft CEO Satchin Adela, revealing that on some level, Satchanadella is kind of a fucking idiot. The article revealed that, assuming we believe him and this wasn't a thinly veiled ad for Microsoft's AI. The copilot consumes Nadello's life outside the office, as well as at work. He likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them, like with his ears, he loads transcripts into the copilot app on his phone so that he can chat with the voice assistant about the content of an episode in the car as he commutes to Redmond. At the office, he relies on Copilot to deliver summaries of messages he receives in Outlook and Teams, and toggles among, allegedly, at least 10 custom agents from Copilot Studio. Now, the article does

not say what they do, doesn't seem like they bothered to ask, but he allegedly views them as his AI chiefs of staff, delegating meeting prep, research, and other tasks, again, unnamed to the bots. And to quote Satchan Adela in this article, he says, I'm an email typist, and he jokes about this, noting that co-pilot is thankfully very good at triaging his messages. None of these tasks are things that require you to use AI. You can read your messages on Outlook and Teams without having them. summarize. And I'd argue that a well-written email is one that doesn't require a summary. Podcasts are not there to be chatted to or about with an AI. Preparing for meetings isn't something that

requires AI, nor is research, unless, of course, you don't really give a shit about the actual content of what you're reading, or what you're saying, just that you are saying the right thing and that you know the facts of some kind. To be clear, I'm deeply unconvinced that Nadella actually runs his life in this way. But if he does, Microsoft's board should fire him immediately. It's an admission. of negligence akin to a taxi driver admitting he swallows a couple of glugs of Kram Royow before he starts a shift. In any case, this article is rambling, it's cloying and it ignores Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleiman's documented history of abusing his workers. Ten custom agents to do what? What do you mean by other tasks? Why are these questions never asked? Is it because the reporters know they won't get an

answer? Is it because the reporters are too polite to ask probing questions, knowing that these anecdotes are likely entirely made up as a means to promote a flagging AI ecosystem that cost billions to construct, but it doesn't seem to do anything, and the reporter in question doesn't want to force Satcher to build a bigger house of cuts, and he needs to... Sorry. Sorry, I'm in my new studio. I'm all fired up, and this is a bloody long one. But really, is it because we as a society do not want to look too closely at the powerful? Is it because we've handed our economy to men that get paid $79 million a year to do a job they can't seem to describe? And even that, they would sooner offload to a bunch of unreliable

AI models that actually do the very small amounts of things they have to do. Look, we live in an era of the symbolic executive when being good at stuff matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where what's useful is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure, but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work. Our economy is run by people that don't participate in it, and our tech companies are directed by people that don't experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value, something I went through in the shareholder supremacy series

you can go back to if you want in another extremely long series of episodes. They're bloody good, though, and they're free. Now, this three-part series examines the phenomenon of something I call the business idiot, looking at the root causes of the idiocy in our economy itself, how they're ruining our world, and how these idiots are enabled by an embarrassingly deferential media. It's too afraid to say that the emperor, as is dick out. It's going to be long. I'll take you on tangents.

I'll probably say fuck more than I usually do, which I admit is a lot. But business idiots are a problem and they deserve our scrutiny and are disgust. I, however, believe the problem of the business idiot runs a little deeper than just the economy. Well, the things we see are merely a symptom of a bigger, more virulent and treatment-resistant plague that has infected the minds of those currently twigging at the levels of power. And really the only levers that actually matter. The incentives behind everything we do have been broken by decades of neoliberal thinking, where the idea of a company, an entity created to do a thing in exchange for money, has been drained of all meaning beyond the continued domination and extraction of everything around it,

with their leaders now focusing heavily on short-term gains and growth at all costs. You know, I've been over that a little bit and I'll get back to it in a second, aren't I? In doing so, the definition of what are good business is has changed from one that makes good products at a fair price with a sustainable and loyal, market to one that can display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter. This is the rot economy, which is my useful description of how tech companies have voluntarily degraded their core products in order to duplicate shareholders, transforming useful and sometimes beloved services into a hollow shell of their former selves as a means of

expressing growth to the markets. When a social network hides things that you want to see because they want to use their metrics, that's the rot economy. But it's worth noting that this transformation isn't constrained to the tech industry, nor was it a phenomenon that occurred when the tech industry entered its current VC-fueled publicly traded incarnation. We simply notice it more in tech because we use tech in our personal and professional lives, and thus it affects everyone in a way that's kind of impossible to ignore. In the shareholder supremacy, I drew a line from the early 20th century court ruling, which opened that Ford must put shareholder value ahead of the interests of its employees, though it was a Peter Dictor, meaning it was just literally said by the judge, but a lot of people ever since

have taken it literally. And then I went to, of course, former GE, CEO Jack Welch to the current tech industry, but there's one figure I didn't really pay that much attention to, and I regrettably now have to do so. Fame Chicago School economist and Dweller of Hell, Milton Friedman, once argued in his 1970 doctrine. No, literally, that's what it was called when it was published, of course, in the New York Times, which is an incredible act of hubris when you think about it, that those who didn't focus on shareholder value were unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of free society these past decades. Acting with social responsibility, say, treating work as well, doing anything other than focusing on shareholder value

is tantamount to an executive taxing his shareholders by, and I quote, spending their money on their own personal beliefs, said Friedman. Friedman was a fundamentalist when it came to unrestricted, unfettered capitalism, and this zealotry surpassed any sense of basic human morality. If he, any. For example, in his book capitalism and freedom, he argued that companies should be allowed to discriminate on racial grounds because the owner might suffer should they be required to hire an equally or better qualified black person. Bear in mind, this was written at the height of the civil rights movement, just six years before the assassination of Martin Luther King, and when America was rapidly waking up to the evils of racism and segregation, a process I add that's

ongoing, sadly not complete, and people still don't seem super happy with. I'm not going to read the full quote because I've already got a lot of talking, not much time, and also there are some words that I really don't want to say, but you can see it in full and in its original context on the newsletter version of this episode that I'll share in the episode notes, and as a special treat, I'll actually update them. Friedman was really grotesque, though. I'm not religious, but I really do hope that hell exists only for him, and Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Actually quite a few people. Anyway, the broader point I'm trying to make is that neoliberalism is inherently selfish, and it believes that the free market should reign supreme, bereft of government intervention,

regulation or interference, thinking that somehow these terms will enable freedom rather than the kind of market-dominated quasi-authoritarian dictatorship thing where our entire lives are dominated by the whims of the affluent and that there's no institution that could possibly push back against them. Of course, there's no example in current politics like that. Now, Friedman himself makes this kind of facile argument, that economic freedom, which he says is synonymous with unfettered capitalism, is a necessary condition of unfettered political freedom. Obviously, that's bollocks, although it's an argument that's proven persuasive

with a certain class of people that either intellectually or morally hollow or both or run the New York Times op-ed page. Neoliberalism also represents a kind of modern-day feudalism, dividing society based on whether somebody is a shareholder or not, with the former taking precedence and the latter seeming irrelevant at best

or disposable at worse. It's curious that Friedman saw economic freedom, a state that is non-interventionist in economic matters, is essential for political freedom, while also failing to see equality is the same. I realize all this is kind of clunky and big, but I want you to understand how these incentives have fundamentally changed everything and why they're responsible for the rot we see in our society and our workplaces and our tech industry and a bunch of other shit.

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 Bodenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, 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, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open to change. Do you have a name suggestion?

We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined.

So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-8-4-I-Hart. Hey, I'm Deanna Maria Riva, actress, mother, lover, and a Gen X woman walking through life one hot flash

and hormonal crying jag at a time. You ladies know what I mean. I'll bet you a paramedipausal chin here you do. So let's talk about it. Join me on my new podcast. How hard can it be with the Adamani Arriba, where I call on my Gen X squads from Ohio to Hollywood as we navigate midlife's most fantastic BS.

All of a sudden, I'd had hanginess happening on my own. I was like, what the hell is that? I was married when I had her, so I didn't even consider how empty that nest was going to be. Mood swings, night sweats, fupas, sex drug. Wait, what sex? Dating at 45. How high can it be? Getting naked at 50 with the new guy.

That one's kind of hard now. Well, that's lighting. They say we can't polish a turd, but we're sure going to try. So let's get blunt with laughs, tears or tears of laughter, and dive into it unfiltered and unbothered and ask, how hard can it be? I cannot believe I'm about to say this out loud in public. Listen to How Hard Can It Be with Diana Maria Riva

as part of my Cultura Podcast Network available on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. 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.

When your only incentive is shareholder value and you raise shareholder value as a platonic ideal, everything else is secondary, including the customer you are selling something to. Friedman himself makes a moral case for discrimination because shareholders, of value, in his example, the store owner, matters more than racial equality at its most basic level. When you care only about shareholder value, the only job you have is to promote further exploitation and dominance, not to have happy customers, not to make your company a good place to work, not to make a good product, and not to make a difference that contribute anything to the world, other than further growth. While this is to anyone with a vapor of an intellectual or moral dimension, absolutely fucking stupid. It's an idea that's proven depressingly endemic among the

managerial elite, in part because it's entered the culture and because it is hammered again and across an MBA classes and corporate training seminars. In simpler terms, modern business theory trains executives not to be good at something or to make a company based on their particular skills, but to find a market opportunity and exploit it. The chief executive, who makes over 300 times more than their average worker, is no longer a leadership position, but the kind of figurehead measured on ability to continually grow the market capitalization of their company or the theoretical valuation before they flog it to a public company or they take it public themselves. It's a position inherently defined by its lack of labor, the amorphousness of its purpose and the lack of any clear responsibility

other than making sure the money goes up to them. While CEOs do get fired when things go badly, it's often after a prolonged period of decline in stagnancy and almost always comes with some kind of payoff. And when I say badly, I mean that growth is slowed to the point that even firing masses of people doesn't seem to make things better. We have as a society reframed all business leadership, which is increasingly broad consisting of all management from the C-suite down, to the equivalent of Paul Blart Mallcorp, a person that exists to make sure people are working without having any real accountability for the work themselves, or to even understand the work itself. And I must apologise to Mr. Blart. He worked hard. He stopped some criminals in that movie.

Really should respect his service. But when the leader of a company doesn't participate in a respect the production of the goods that enriched them. It creates a culture that enables similarly vacuous leaders on all levels. Management as a concept no longer means doing work or even managing work. So the output of that work is better. You know, management. No, it's become about establishing cultures of dominance and value extraction. A CEO isn't measured on happy customers or even how good the revenue is today, but how good revenue might be tomorrow. And whether those customers are paying them more, a manager, much like a CEO is no longer. a position with any real responsibility. They're there to make sure that you're working, to know

enough about your work that they can sort of tell you what to do, but somehow the job of telling you what to do doesn't come with any actual work of their own. And instructions don't need to be useful or meaningful or impart any great wisdom. Now, if you're a manager hearing this, you're really not going to like these episodes. These episodes are really going to dig at your heart. Now, I've heard from a few managers when I've had a dalliance with this in the past, and usually 50, 50, 50 percent of people saying, like, hey, I get it. I'm a manager too. And like, I think you're right about management. Great managers move stuff out the way. They get people the resources they need. They understand and respect the labor that they're working with. And they help them do their work. They make sure they're on task. They get the people get business idiots out of their way. Then the other 50% get real butt hurt. If you're butt hurt here in this, go cry, but go cry outside. Nobody likes you. Now, decades of direct erosion of the very concept of leadership means that the people running companies have been selected not based on their actual efficacy, especially as the position became defined by a lack of actual production,

but on whether they resemble what a manager or executive is meant to look like based on the work that somebody else did once. That's how somebody like David Zaslav, a lawyer by trade and arguably the worst CEO in the entertainment industry, managed to become the head of Warner Brothers. That and he kissed up to Jack Welch of GE, who he called a big brother that picked him up like a friend. Jack Welch fired like over 100,000 people over his tenure. Real piece of fucking shit. talking a piece of shit, it's how Carly Fiorina, Fiorina, not going to fix that, an MBA by trade went on to become the head of HP, and he drove the company into a ditch where it stopped innovating and largely missed the biggest opportunities of the early internet era. The three CEOs that followed

her at HP, Mark Hurd, was ousted after fudging expense reports to send money to a love interest and still got tens of millions of dollars in severance, Leo Apotheca, who in the New York Times suggests may have been worse than Fiorina, and Meg Whitman, famous for being both a terrible CEO, HP, and co-founding the doomed video star up Quibi. Well, they all similarly came from a non-tech background and similarly did a shitty fucking job, in part because they didn't understand the company or the products or the customers or really give a shit about anything other than getting paid. Hey, you know where Meg Whitman now is?

She's on the border fucking Corpave. I swear to God, history's driving me insane. Management has, over the course of the past few decades, eroded the very fabric of corporate America, and I'd argue it's done much the same to other, other Western economies too. I'd also argue that this kind of dumb management thinking also infected the highest echelons of politics across the world, and especially in the UK, my country of birth and where I lived until 2008, delivering the same kind of disastrous effects, but at a macro level, as they impacted not a single corporate entity but the very institutions of the stain.

Now, the UK has never been an egalitarian society, as demonstrated by the fact that one fee-paying school produced 20 of our 55 prime ministers, and that 20% of the current MPs went to either Cambridge or Oxford University. And yet things have changed markedly in the past few decades, and you can kind of use the Thatcher years as the epoch when that political culture shifted. I was born in the midst of the Thatcher government.

My formative years were spent as British society tried to recover after her reforms, which is itself a comfortable euphemism for the reckless shedding of the state and pushed towards an American-style individualism. Thatcher, who fucking loved Friedman's thinking, once famously quipped that there was no such thing as a society.

Jesus Christ, it's like sub-jokerian thinking. She didn't understand how things work, but was nonetheless completely convinced that the power of the market to handle what was the functions of the state, from housing to energy to water. And if you know how things are going with Thames Water, what do you think? The end result of this political and cultural shift was in the long run pretty bad. The UK is the smallest houses in the OECD, the smallest housing stock of any developed country and some of the worst affordability. The privatization of the UK's water infrastructure meant that money that would previously go towards

infrastructure upgrades was instead funneled to shareholders in the form of dividends. As a result, Britain is literally unable to process human waste and is actively dumping millions of liters of human sewerage into its waterways and coastline. When Britain privatized its energy companies, the new management sold or closed the vast majority of its gas storage infrastructure. As a result, when the Ukraine War sparked and natural gas prices surged, Britain had some of the smallest reserves, of any country in Europe and was forced to buy gas at market prices, which were several times higher than their pre-war levels, thus sending household and energy bills through the fucking roof. 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, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard,

you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard, but they're open to change. 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. Human me! I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message.

Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's IHeartadvertising.com. Hey, I'm Deanna Maria Riva, actress, mother, lover, and a Gen X woman walking through life one hot flash and hormonal crying jag at a time.

You ladies know what I mean. I'll bet you a perimenopausal chin here you do. So let's talk about it. Join me on my new podcast. How Hard Can It Be with Deanna Maria Riva, where I call on my GenX squads from Ohio to Hollywood as we navigate midlife's most fantastic BS. All of a sudden, I'd had hanginess happening on my own. I was like, what the hell is that?

I was married when I had her, so I didn't even consider how empty that nest was going to be. Mood swings, night sweats, fupas, sex drive. Wait, what sex? Dating at 45. How can it be getting naked at 50 with a new guy? That one's kind of hard. Well, that's lighting. They say we can't polish a turd, but we're sure going to try.

So let's get blunt with laughs, tears or tears of laughter, and dive into it unfiltered and unbothered and ask, How Hard Can It Be? I cannot believe I'm about to say this out loud in public. Listen to How Hard Can It Be with Diana Maria Arriva as part of My Cultura Podcast Network available on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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.

I'm no fan of Thatcher, and like Friedman, I hope she fucking burns and it hurts. The reason I brought her up was to stress the consequences of this kind of clueless managerial thinking on a macro level, where the impacts aren't just declining tech products or white-collar layoffs, but rather the emergence of generational crises of housing and energy in the environment. These crises were obvious consequences of decisions made by someone who's believed, in the free market was almost absolute, and whose fundamentalist beliefs surpassed the actual informed understanding of those working in energy, housing or water. As the legendary advertiser Stanley Pollitt once said, bullshit baffles brains. The sweeping

changes we've seen, both in our economy and in our societies, led them to an unprecedented gilded age of bullshit, where nothing matters and things, things of actual substance, only matter even less. We live in a symbolic economy where we apply for jobs, writing CVs and cover letters that resemble a certain kind of hire. with our resume read by someone who doesn't do or understand our job, but is somehow responsible for determining whether we're worthy of going up to the next step of the 87-point hiring process. All this so that we can get an interview with a manager or an executive who will decide whether they think we can do it.

We're managed by people whose job is implicitly not to do work, but to oversee it, which doesn't necessarily mean they understand. We are, as children and young adults, encouraged to aspire to become a manager or an executive, or to own our own business, to have people that work for us, and the terms of our society are, by default, that management is not a role you work at so much as a position you hold, a figurehead that passes the buck and makes far more of them than you ever will. This problem, I believe, has poisoned the fabric of almost every part of modern business, elevating people that don't do work to oversee companies that make things that they don't

understand, creating substrits of management that do not do anything but create further distance from doing actual work. While some of you might automatically think and email me again and again that I'm talking about Graber's concept of bullshit jobs and I've linked to it in the show notes, what I'm talking about is far, far, far bigger. The system as it stands selects people at all levels of management specifically because they resemble this kind of specious work-averse dullard that runs seemingly every company, a person built to go from meeting to meeting with the vague consternation of someone who may or may not be busy that suggests, I don't know, that they're hard at work

and they're important, and you should respect them. As a result, the higher you get up in an organization, the further you get from the customer, the problem you're solving, really any of the actual work, and the higher up you get, the more power you have to change the conditions of the business and the ways in which you actually make money. On some level, modern corporate power structures are a giant game of telephone, where vibes forget further vibes, where managers only kind of sort of understand what's going on, and the more vague one's understanding is, the more likely you are to lean toward what's

good or easy or makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside. The system selects for people comfortable in these roles, creating org charts for the people that become harder and harder to justify other than they've been here a while and they're nice, even if they're not. They do not do work on the product. And their answer as to why would be, what am I meant to do? Go down to the line and use a machine? Or am I meant to call a customer and make a sale? And the answer is, yes, you lazy, fucking piece of shit. You should do that once in a while, or at the very least, go down and watch and or listen to somebody else doing so and do so regularly. Why do you look down on the things that make you rich, you piece of shit? But that's not

what a manager does, right? Matchman isn't work. It's about thinking really hard and telling people what to do. It's about making the calls. It's about managing people. And that can mean just about anything, but often means taking credit from someone or passing blame to someone else, because modern management has been stripped of all meaning other than continually reinforcing power structures for the next manager up. The system creates products for these people because these people are more often than not the ones in power. They're your boss, your boss's boss and their boss too. Big companies build products sold by species executives or manager to other species executives and managers, and thus the products themselves stop resembling things that solve problems

so much as they resemble a solution. After all, the person buying it, at least at the scale of a public or large company, isn't necessarily the fun or recipient or user of the product, so they too are trained and selected to make calls based on vibes. I believe the scale of this problem is society-wide, and it is at its core a destruction of what it means to be a leader, and a valorization of a kind of selfish, isolation-ish thinking, turning labor into a faceless resource, which naturally leads to seeing customers in an equally faceless way. Their problems generalize, their pay, points viewed as parts of a PowerPoint, rather than anything that your company earnestly tries to solve or even really thinks about. And that seems that said pain points are even considered

to begin with, or not ignored in favour of fictitious and purely hypothetical pain points that sound better in presentations. People, be they the ones you're paying or paying you, become numbers. We've created an elevated an entirely new class of person, the nebulous manager, and told decades' worth of children that that's what they should aspire to and that the next step from doing a job, is for us to tell other people to do a job until we're one day able to tell those people how to do their job, with each rung on the corporate ladder further distancing ourselves from anything that actually interacts with reality. The real breaking point is fairly simple. The higher up you go or company, the further you are from problems or purpose. Everything's abstract, the people that work for you,

the people you work for, and even the tasks that you do. We train people from a young age to generalize and distance oneself from other people and actual tasks. to aspire to do managerial work because managers are well paid and know what's going on, even if they haven't actually known what was going on for years, if they ever did so. This phenomena has led to a stigmatization of blue-collar work and the subsequent evisceration of practical trade and technical education across most of the developed world in favor of universities. Society respects an MBA more than a plumber, even though the latter benefits society more, though I concede that both roles involve on some level a lot of shit, with the plumber on blocking it and the NBA,

well, finding new places to put it. I should also add, I have nothing against universities in general. I'm just saying that our university system is out of whack with the working world, except in the specialist fields, and we have a problem there. We also have many other problems there. But one example I'll talk about in the next episode is the push to return to the office. Have you noticed how all those calls have come from people who occupy managerial roles and not those who do actual jobs? Isn't that fucking weird? Because if you go back and look, and by the way, Kevin Ruse, March 3rd. 2020, Kevin Rousse of a hard fork podcast in the New York Times, had a story saying that

working from home is not as good. March 2020, the fucking lockdown hadn't even begun yet. This man was so ahead of the terms of what the powerful wanted him to tell people. I actually kind of admire it. I wonder if I could do that. I could just every week, just wake up and just go to Microsoft.com and be like, and there's my work for the week, fellas. Pardon me, sorry, I apologize to Mr. Ruse. I would go to Anthropic.com, and I'd find out what they're doing.

Oh, Edge is such a petty bitch. But I digress. I believe that all of this stuff I'm talking about, this process has created, like I said, a symbolic society. One where people are elevated not by an ability to do something or knowledge they may have, but by the ability to make the right noises and honks and look the right way to get ahead. And yeah, usually a white guy. But increasingly, getting all sorts of races of guys who get these roles. The power structures of modern society are run by business idiots, people that have learned enough to impress the people above them and around them because the business idiots have been in power for decades.

They bred out true meritocracy or achievement or value creation in favor of this symbolic growth and superficial intelligence because real work is hard. And there are so many of them in power that they've all found a way to work together that do fucking nothing. And I need you to understand how widespread this problem is, because it's why everything feels fucking wrong. wrong. And the next episode we'll pick up from where we left off here. And it's going to be three straight days of episode. A crazy thing. No monologue this week, unless you consider me just talking on my own for a while a monologue. And you're going to say that's the definition of a monologue and in which I'll say, shut up. That's rude. I really do have more to say about business idiots, though, in the abstract, because I feel as though this phenomenon is complex and

multifaceted. And when you can identify the traits of the business idiot, you start seeing them everywhere. It's like they live, but with management consultants. You see them in your own life, in your own boss, to the people running the biggest and most powerful companies in the world. And even some of the people you know in real life, people that don't seem to do real jobs, not even email jobs. They're everywhere. They can manage stores.

They can be your boss. They can be your friend's boss. Shit. They can run their old consultancy. They can do all sorts of things. You've run into these people everywhere. And this three-part series is both about the history and helping you understand what the business idiot in your life is.

Catch you on the next episode. 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. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-S-K-I.com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.

Where's your ed. visit the Discord and go to our 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 podcasts.

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