Better Offline - The Era of the Business Idiot, Part 3

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

In part three of this week's three-part Better Offline, Ed Zitron walks you through how the era of the Business Idiot has led to a dramatic deceleration in innovation - and how the tech media must fight back against their ridiculous narratives to save Silicon Valley. 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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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. 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. What is a podcast? A miserable little pile of secrets. I'm Ed Zittron and welcome to the conclusion of our three-part episode of Betrovline and the phenomenon known as the business idiot. In the first episode, we met our first business idiot, the real prince of them, Sachi Nadella, and talked about the origin of the business idiot and the rotten ideology that drives them. Then we talked about the enablers of the business idiots, particularly those in the media. In this episode, I want to tell you about where all this goes.

Nothing I've said in this three-part should suggest that the business idiot is weak. In fact, business idiots are in full control. We have too many managers and our most powerful positions are valorized for not knowing stuff, for having a general view that we can take the big picture from, not realizing that the big picture is usually made up of lots of little brushstrokes. Business idiots have a cultural cachet though. We aspire to be business idiots, and our education pushes people to careers where the goal is to climb from the worker class

to the oxygen-starved apex of business-adiot mountain. Yet there are eventually consequences for everything being controlled by business idiots. Our current society, an unfair or unjust one, dominated by half-broken tech products that make their owners billions and that manipulate and mislead by design, is the real punishment wrought by growth, a brain-draining corporate society, one that leads it to doing illogical things and somehow making money doing so.

It doesn't make any fucking sense that generative AI got this big. The returns aren't there. outcomes aren't there, and any sensible society would have put a gun to chat GPT's head and aggressively pulled the trigger. Generative AI is symbolic of the future of capitalism, one that celebrates mediocrity and costs billions of dollars, one that surrenders every human work the model can consume, and that accepts the destruction of our planet, all because everybody kind of agreed that this is what we're all doing now, with nobody able to give a convincing explanation of what

that even is or why we're doing it. Generalative AI is revolting both in how overstated its abilities are and in how continually it tests, how lowest standards somebody will take for a product, both in its outputs and in the desperate companies trying to integrate it into everything, and its proliferation throughout society and organizations is already fundamentally harmful. We're not just drowning in a sea of slop. We're in a constant state of corporate AI beta test, new features sprouting out of our products like new limbs that sometimes function normally, but often attempt to strangle us.

you know, like the stand in that episode of Jojo's bizarre. Stop it. It's unclear if companies forcing these products on us have contempt for us or simply don't know what good looks like. Or perhaps it's both with the business idiot resenting us for not scoffing down whatever they serve us, as that's what's generally worked before. They don't really understand their customers. They understand what a customer pays for and how a purchase is made. You know, like the leaders of banks and asset managers during the subprime mortgage crisis didn't really think about whether people could pay those mortgages, just that they needed a lot of them to put in a seat. The business idiot's economy is one run and built for other business idiots. They can only make things

that sell to companies that must always be in flux, which is the preferred environment of the business idiot, because if they're not perpetually starting new initiatives and jumping on new innovations, they'd actually have to interact with the underlying production of the company and the people actually doing the work. Does the software work? Sometimes. The successful companies exist that sell like this? Sure. But look at today's software and tell me with a straight face that things feel good to use. And something like Generative AI was always inevitable. An industry claiming to change the world that never really does so, full of businesses that don't function as businesses, full of flim-flam and half-truths used to impress people who will likely never interact with it,

or do so only in a passing way. By chasing out the people that actually build things in favor of the people that sell them, our economy is built on production puppetry, just like Generative AI, and especially like Chad GPT and Claude. These people are antithetical to what's good in the world, and their power to bribes us of happiness, the ability to thrive and honestly any true innovation. The business idiot thrives on alienation, on distancing itself from the customer and the thing that they consume and in many ways from society itself. Mark Zuckerberg wants us to have fake friends, and he said that to the Wall Street General, Samo, and wants us to have fake colleagues in the form of the agency makes that don't fucking work. And an increasingly loud group of executives salivated the idea of replacing us with a fake version of us

that will make a shittier version of what we make for a customer that said, doesn't give a fuck about. And yeah, that is describing a form of slave. Especially if it's conscious. I mean, if it's not conscious, it isn't. But the moment you make AGI, you've got a real fucking problem on your hands. They're never going to do it. Also, what if the AGI is just dumb? What if it doesn't want to work? Anyway, the business idiots are building products for other people that don't interact with the real world. We're no longer the real customers. And so we're worth even less than before, which is, as is the case in the world dominated by shareholder supremacy, not all that much to begin with.

They don't exist to make us better. The business idiot doesn't really care about the real world or what you do or who you are or anything other than your contribution to their power and wealth. This is why so many squealing little middle managers look up to the musks and almonds of the world because they see in them the same kind of specious corporate authoritarian, somebody who's above work and thinking and knowledge and doing stuff. Disgusting. But one of the most remarkable things about the business idiot is their near invulnerability.

Modern management is resource control, shifting blame away from the manager, who should hold responsibility, after all, if you don't, why do you have a fucking job? On to the labourer, knowing that the organisation and the media will back them up. While you may think I'm making a generalisation, the 2021 to 2023 anti-remote work push in the media was grotesque proof of where the media's true allegiance lies. The media happily manufactured consent for return-to-office mandates from large companies by framing remote work as some sort of destructive force, doing all they can to discuss how modern management has no fucking idea how the workplace actually works.

Now, these articles were effectively written as fan fiction for managers and bosses demanding that we return to the office. Ridiculous statements about how remote work failed young people, which it didn't, or how employees needed remote work more than their employers because the chit-chat and lunches and happy hours are so important. They're really not. I'm also going to link to these in the notes. I've written a lot about the remote work push and the people who were pushing for us

to return the office. It's actually where I got started. And it really was the ultimate jocification for me. It's what actually set me on the path to better offline because it's when you saw both how little the bosses knew what was going on and how willing people in the media were to support them. And these were people, people writing these stories were journalists that were going to be forced back to the office and ended up being so.

And they were like, yeah, this is actually, it's actually good that we go into the office. And when you ask the journalist, hey, what do you get at the office? They say, well, one time I ran into someone and we had a good idea. or it was quicker to walk over to someone's desk. Does that mean the work was better? No, but the vibes felt better, I guess. I also know way more people who just fucking hated working in the office. But these articles rarely, if ever, cared about whether remote work was more productive

or the disconnect appeared to be between managers and workers. Had any of those reporters ever spoken to an actual worker, they'd say that they valued more time with their families, rather than the grind of a daily commute, softened with the promise of an occasional company pizza party, which usually happens outside of the typical working hours anyway. And these art calls and this period, it was from the very beginning about crushing the life out of a movement

that gave workers more flexibility and mobility while suppressing manager's ability to hide how little work they actually did. I do give credit to CNBC in 2023 for saying the quiet part out loud that, and I quote, the biggest disadvantage of remote work that employers cite is how difficult it is to observe and monitor employees, because when you can't do that, you have to actually know what they're doing

and understand their work. Jesus Christ. You know what? I'm with the managers. How disgusting. But yet, higher up the chain, the invulnerability continues, CEOs may get fired.

I mentioned it before. And more are getting fired than ever, it turns out, although sadly, not the ones we want. They always receive a golden parachute at the end before walking into another role at another organization doing exactly the same level of nothing. Yet before that happens,

A CEO is allowed to pull basically every lever before they face any kind of accountability. They can lay people off. They can freeze pay. They can move people from salary to contracted workers. They can close down sites. They can offshore. They can cut certain products. They can even spend more fucking money so they lose less. If you or I misallocated billions of dollars on stupid ideas, we'd be fired and we'd have real trouble finding more employment. We would be well known for our incompetence, and indeed we would be in real trouble. And there would be real problems. And there would be real problems, finding more work if we were a big, stupid piece of shit. Yet when CEOs do that, they get board placements, they get other positions, they can run companies dead into the ground.

Let me give you an example. Microsoft CEO Satchinadella said, and I quote, that the ultimate computer is the mixed reality world and that Microsoft would be inventing new computers and new computing in 2016, pushing his senior executives to tell reporters that HoloLens was Microsoft's next wave of computing in 2017, selling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of headsets to the military in 2019, then debuting HoloLens 2 at Build 2019 only for the on-stage demo to break in real time, calling for a referendum on capitalism in 2020, then saying he couldn't overstate the breakthrough of the Metaverse in 2021. Now let's hear what Nadella had to say about it, and massive props to Preston Growler of Computer

World for writing this piece. Nadella in that 2021 keynote made big promises. When we talk about the Metaverse, we're describing both a new platform and a new application type, similar to how we talked about the web and websites in the early 90s. In a sense, the Metaverse enables us to embed computing into the real world and to embed the real world into computing. Fucking what? Bringing real presence to any digital space. For years, we've talked about creating the digital representation of the world,

but now we actually have the opportunity to go into that world and participate on it. I just want to be clear at this time, Microsoft had nothing of the sort. They had websites, they had Microsoft Teams. they tried to claim Microsoft Teams was Metaverse. Fucked up. And as Grella notes, Nadella made big promises, beefing up development in projects such as its mixed reality tool kit, MRTK, the virtual reality workspace project AllSpace VR,

which it bought back in 2017, its HoloLens virtual reality headset, and its industrial metaverse unit, among others, before firing all members of its industrial Metaverse core team, along with those behind at MRTK and shutting down its AllSpace VR in 23, before discontinuing HoloLen. to entirely in

2024. Guess that wasn't anything then, just, you know, it's like a friend of yours who's in a really chaotic relationship and they just, the next stage, like it's not happening, or someone tells you

they've had a big moment in their life and they just pretend it doesn't happen, except it was hundreds of millions of dollars and tons of media coverage where people said, this is what Microsoft's doing next. This is what happened. It's so insane that that happened.

We really don't talk enough about how fucking insane the metaverse thing was. Just like a year or so where everyone just played make-believe. Completely insane. I, of course, was writing about it at the time, and it was very fucking clear. And there were a few people that were negative as well.

There were also some people who claimed they were negative who weren't. Their time will come. Now, Nadella was transparently copying Meta and Mark Zuckerberg's ridiculous Metaverse play, and absolutely nothing happened to him as a result. The media, outlets like The Virgin,

independence like Ben Thompson, happily boosted the Metaverse idea when it was announced and conveniently forgot about it the second that Microsoft and Meta wanted to talk about AI. No, really, both The Verge and Ben Thompson were ready and waiting to do literally the same interview a bit about a different subject. No consideration of what was previously said at all.

A true business idiot never admits wrongdoing, and the more powerful the business idiot is, the more likely there are power structures that exist to avoid them having to do so. The media, captured by other business idiots, has become powerfully poisoned by power, deferring to its whims and ideals and treating CEOs with more respect, dignity and intelligence than anyone who ever worked for them.

When a big company decides they want to do artificial intelligence, the media's natural reaction is to ask how and why and write down the answer rather than to think about whether it's possible, whether the company might profit, say, by increasing their shareholder price, by having whatever they say printed adverbatim. These people aren't challenged by the media or their employees, because their employees are vulnerable all the time and often are encouraged to buy into whatever bullshit de jour there is, like hostages held captive, until the media and corporate culture give them stock, Home Syndrome. They're only challenged by shareholders. We're agnostic about idiocy because it's not

core to value in any meaningful sense, as we've seen with crypto, the Metaverse and AI. And shareholders will tolerate infinite levels of idiocy if it boosts the value of their holdings. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smyl 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 headwriters' Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group?

The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The 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 IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me, I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message.

Plus only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. The story I've told myself about love or relationships 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 and explore the journey of healing, self-discovery, and returning to yourself. We explore higher consciousness, emotional well-being, and the practices that help you find clarity, peace, and self-mastery in a world that can feel overwhelming. The world is becoming lonelier. We're not becoming more social and connected. We're becoming more individualized, but we actually meet people in connection. If you've been searching for a soft place to land while doing it, you're not becoming more socialized.

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. If you're watching the latest

season of the Real Housewives of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down. Georgia accusing Kelly of sleeping with a merry man. They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew. Pinky has financial issues. I like the boogey. style of Housewives show. I think it looks like it's going to be interesting.

On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real Housewives franchise, the drama, the alliances, M&T, everybody's talking about. As an executive producer in reality television, I'm not just watching it. I understand the game. As somebody who creates shows, I'll even say this. At the end of the day, when people are at home, they want entertainment. To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. It goes further, too.

2021 saw the largest amount of venture capital invested in the last decade, a record-breaking $643 billion, with a remarkable $329.5 billion of that invested in the U.S. alone. Some of the biggest deals include Amazon reseller, Aggregator Thrasio, which raised a billion dollars in October, 2021 and filed for bankruptcy in February 2025, Cloud Security Company Lacework, which raised $525 million in January 2021, then $1.3 billion in October 2021 and was rumored to be up for sale to whiz, only for the deal to collapse. And then they ended up selling for about $200 million

to another company. And then, of course, there was autonomous car company Cruz, which had hundreds of headlines about it being the future, raised about $2.75 billion in 2021, and was killed off in December 2024 suddenly. The people who lose their livelihoods, those who took stock in low of cash compensation, those who end up getting laid off at the end, are always workers, while people like Lacework co-CEO CEO Jay Perrick, who oversaw reckless spending and management dysfunction, according to the information, can walk into highly paid positions at companies like Microsoft, as Jay did in October 2024, a few months after a file sale, and the one I mentioned before, the $200 million one even, to a company for Fortinette. Yeah, this is the,

behind the actor's studio a bit. I got a little ahead of myself, but I'm not editing it. Why would I? It doesn't matter if these people are wrong or if they run their companies badly because the business idiot is infallible and judged too by fellow disconnected business idiots. In a just society, nobody would ever want to touch any of the C-suite the oversaw a company that handed out Nintendo Switches to literally anyone who booked a meeting, as was the case with lacework. Instead, the stank remains on the employees alone. One point about this, just an aside. Mare's most recent layoffs were explicitly said to target low performers, needlessly harming the future job prospects of those handed the pink slip in an already fucked tech job market. It was cruel and pointless, and I'm certain

a big fat lie. Meta is spending big on AI and has spent big on the Metaverse, which went nowhere, and owns two dying platforms, Instagram and Facebook and one that's hard to monetize in WhatsApp. It needs to get cost down and improved margins. Layoffs are one way to go and things are getting bad enough that matter is now, according to the information, walking around Silicon Valley begging other big tech companies for money to train their open source llama LLM. As shit is, that is, the low-performance jive is an unnecessary twist of the knife, demonstrating that meta would gladly throw its workers under the bus if it serves their interest, because the optics of firing low performers is different to say,

firing a bunch of people because she keeps spanking money on dead-end vanity projects and Me Too products that nobody wants or wants to use or can understand. Mark Zuckerberg, I add, owns an island on Hawaii. The idea that he even thinks this much about Meta is disgraceful. Go outside, you fucking freak. Anyway, it's so easy and perhaps inevitable to feel a sense of nihilism about this. Nothing matters. It's all symbolic.

A world is filled with companies run by people who don't interact with business and raise money from venture capitalists that neither run businesses nor really have any experience doing so. And despite the fact that these people exist several extractions from reality, the things that they do and the decisions they make impact us all. And it's hard to imagine how to fix it. I don't want you to live without hope. understanding how evil these people are is the first step to things changing and more people understanding is genuinely important but we really do live in a system of inequity dominated by people that do not interact with the real world who have created an entire system run by their fellow business idiots the rot economy's growth at all cost manor is a symptom of the grander problem of shareholder supremacy

and a single-minded economic focus on shareholder value inevitably ends at an economy run by and for business is. There is a line and it ends here with layoffs, the destruction of our planet and our economy and our society and a rising tide of human misery that nobody really knows where it comes from, and so we don't know who to blame and for what. If our economy actually worked as a true meritocracy, where we didn't have companies run by people who don't use their products or understand how they made and who hire similarly specious people, these people would collapse under the pressure of having to know their ass from their earhole. Yet none of this would be possible without their enabling layers, and those layers are teeming with both business idiots and those

unfortunate enough to have learned from them. The tech media has enabled every single bubble without exception, accepting every single narrative fed to them by VCs and startups, with even critical reporters still accepting the lunacy of companies like OpenAI just because everyone else does too, and because the standard has been set of if a company raises money, they're real. Let's be honest, when you remove all the money, our current tech industry is kind of a disgrace. Our economy is held up by NVIDIA, a company that makes most of its money selling GPUs to other companies primarily so that they can start losing money, selling software that might eventually make the money just not today and they're not sure how. Invita is defined by massive

peaks in valleys as it jumps on trends and bandwagons at the right time, despite knowing that these bandwagons always come to some sort of halt. The other companies feature Tesla, a meme stock car company with a deteriorating brand and a chief executive famous for his divorces from both reality and multiple women, along with a flagrant racism that may cost the company its life, a company that we're watching die in real time with a stagnant lineup and an actual fucking competition from companies that are spending on innovation. In Europe and elsewhere, bid is eating Tesla's lunch, offering better products for half the price and with far less racism. And this is just the first big Chinese automotive brand to go global. Others like Cherry are enjoying

rapid growth outside of China because these cars are actually good and affordable, even when you factor in the things like tariffs. Hey, remember when Tesla fired all those people and its charging network, despite the fact that it's one of the most profitable and valuable parts of the business? And they meant to have them, they went and had to hire them back because it turns out they actually needed them. This is a good example of managerial alienation, decisions made by non-workers, Elon Musk, who don't understand their customers, their businesses or the work their employees do. And let's not forget about the cyber truck, a monstrosity both in how it looks and how it's sold, and it's illegal to drive in the majority of developed countries because it's a death trap

for drivers and pedestrians alike. Oh, and nobody actually wants it, with Tesla sitting on a quarter's worth of inventory that it can't sell. Elsewhere is meta, a collapsing social network of 99% of its revenue based on an advertising model to an increasingly aged population and a monopoly so flagrantly abusive in its contempt for its customers that at times it's difficult to call Instagram or Facebook a social network. Mark Zuckerberg had to admit to the Senate Judiciary Committee that people don't use Facebook as a social network anymore. The reason why is because the platform is so fucking rotten run by a

company alienated from its user base. It's the crepit product actively hostile to anybody trying to use it. And more fundamentally, what's the point of posting on Facebook if your friends won't see it because Meta's algorithm decided it wouldn't drive engagement? Meta is a monument to disconnection, a company that runs in counter to its own mission to connect people, run by Mark Zuckerberg, a man who hasn't had a good idea since he stole it from the Winkle Brothers. I meant to say the Winklevoss

Brothers, but I'm actually going to keep it. The solution to all that ails him? Adding generative AI to every part of Meta, which shit, it was meant to do something other than burn $72 billion in capital expenditures in 2025, right? It isn't clear what was meant to happen,

but the Wall Street Journal's Jeff Horwitz reports that Metas AI chatbots are and I quote, empowered to engage in romantic roleplay that can turn explicit, even with children. In a civil society, Zuckerberg would be ousted immediately for creating a paedophile chatbot. Instead, four days after the story ran, everyone cheered their better-than-expected earnings report. In Redmond, Microsoft sits atop multiple monopolies, using tariffs as a mean to juice flailing Xbox revenue, as it invest billions of dollars into OpenAI so that OpenAI can spend billions of dollars on cloud compute, losing billions of dollars in the process, requiring Microsoft to invest.

further money to keep them alive. All because Microsoft wanted generative AI and Bing. What a fucking waste. And they're also raising the costs of their office suite, too, well, which is only something they've been able to hold on to because of an underhanded bullshit fest from their antitrust trial

from the 90s. Amazon Lumbus listlessly through life. It's giant labor-abusing machine shipping things overnight at whatever cost is necessary to crush the life out of any other possible source of commerce. It's cloud services and storage arm unsure of who to copy next, dumping billions into Anthropic as a means of creating revenue for their dead-end products.

Is it Microsoft? Is it Google? Who knows? Who knows what Amazon is anymore? But one analyst believes it's making $5 billion in revenue from AI in 2025. And you know how much they've put in capital expenditures this year? $105 billion in capital expenditures. There are slot machines with better ROI than this bullshit.

Again, Amazon is a company that's totally exploitative for its customers, no longer acting as a platform. that helps people find the shit they need, but directing them to products that paid the most for prime advertising real estate, no matter whether they're good or safe. Let's be clear. Amazon's recklessness will kill someone if it hasn't already. The products they allow on there are not safe. They do not give a fucking shit. Other podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygle and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk, to David Lerner, to David Letterman, help make you funnier.

This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriters, Streeter Seidel, help an Acapella 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 group, the yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. since you guys are middle-aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two guys. 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 IHart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-8-4-8-4-I-Hart.

The story I've told myself about love or relationships can then shake 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 and explore the journey of healing, self-discovery, and returning to yourself. We explore higher consciousness, emotional well-being, and the practices that help you find clarity, peace, and self-mastery in a world that can feel overwhelming. The world is becoming lonelier. We're not becoming more social and connected.

We're becoming more individualized, but we actually meet people and connect. 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. If you're watching the latest season of the Real Housewives of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down. Gorsha accusing Kelly of sleeping with a merry man. They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew. Pinky has financial issues. I like the bougie style of Housewives show. I think it looks like it's going to be interesting.

On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real Housewives franchise, the drama, the alliances, and the team everybody's talking about. As an executive producer in reality television, I'm not just watching it. I understand the game. As somebody who creates shows, I'll even say this. at the end of the day, when people are at home, they want entertainment. To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

But then there's the worst of them, Google. Most famous for its namesake, a search engine that has been juiced as hard as possible and will continue to be juiced before the inevitable antitrust sentencing that will rob Google of its power, along with the severance of its advertising monopoly along with it. But don't worry, Google has a generative AI thing for some reason. And no, you don't have a choice about using it because they've now replaced Google Assistant with Google Gemini and Google Search all but requires you to use their AI. They burn money for no reason.

It sucks. And at no point do any of these companies seem to be focused on making our lives better or selling us any kind of real future. They exist to maintain the status quo where cloud computing allows them to retain their previous fiefdoms. They're alienated from people. They're alienated from workers. They're alienated from consumers and they're alienated from the world. They're deeply antisocial. They're narcissistic.

They're sociopathic and they're misanthropic, as demonstrated by Zuck's moronic AI social network comments. And AI is a symptom of a reckoning of this stupidity and hubris. They cut. They cut. They cut. They cut. They cut. They cut.

they stagnated. Their hope is a product that will be adopted by billions of imaginary customers and companies and will allow them to cut further without becoming just a PO box and a domain name. We have to recognize that what we're seeing right now with generative AI isn't a fluke or a bug, but a feature of a system that's rapacious and short-term by its very nature and doesn't define value as we do because value gets defined by a faceless shareholder as growth. The system can only exist with the contribution of the business idiot. These are the vanguard, the foot soldiers of this system, and a key reason why everything is so terrible at the time and why nothing seems to be getting better. Breaking from that status quo would require a level of bravery that they do not have,

and perhaps isn't possible in the current economic system. These people are powerful, and they have big platforms. Their people like Derek Thompson, famed co-author of the abundance agenda, who celebrates the idea of a fictitious version of chat GPT that can entirely plan and execute a five-year-old's birthday party, or his co-author Ezra Klein, who, while recording a podcast where his researchers likely listened, talked proudly about replacing their work with OpenAI's broken deep research product, because anything that can be outsourced must be. And all researches is looking at stuff that's relevant if you're a fucking idiot. And really, that's the most grotesque part of the business idiot. They see every part of our lives as a series of inputs

and outputs. They boast about how many books they've read rather than the content of said books or the way they made them feel, about how many hours they work, even though they never, ever ever work that many, about how high level they are in a video game they don't actually play, about the money they've raised and the scale they've raised it at, and about how expensive and fancy their kitchen gadgets are, even if they use the wrong oils. Everything is dominance, acquisition, growth, and possession over any lived experience because their world is one where the journey does not matter, because their journeys are riddled with privilege and persecution of others in the pursuit of success. These people don't want to automate work, they want to automate existence.

They fantasize about hitting a button and something happening because experiencing living is beneath them, or at least your lives and your wants and your joys are. They don't want to plan their kids' birthday parties. They don't want to research things. They don't value culture or art or beauty. They want to skip to the end. They want to hit fast forward on anything because human struggle is for the poor, the unworthy, and the uneducated. when you're steeped in privilege and have earned everything basically through a mixture of stolen labor and office pantomime, the idea of effort is always a negative. The process of creation, of affection, of love, of kindness,

of using time not just for an action or output, is disgusting to the business idiot because those are the times that could be focused on themselves, or some nebulous self-serving vision that is, when stripped back to its fundamental truth, either moronic or malevolent. They don't realize that you hire a worker, not just for the output, but for their actual, labor and their experience in creating that labor and their understanding of the world around it, which is why they don't see why it's so insulting to outsource their interactions with human beings. You'll notice that these people never bring up actual examples of automating actual work, the mind-numbing grunt work that we all face in the workplace, because they either don't really know what that is, or they don't really give a shit about what it is.

Their problems are the things that frustrate them, like dealing with other people or existing outside of the gilded circles and of socialite fucks and plurocrats or just things that are inevitable facets of working life, like reading an email. Your son's birthday party or a conflict with a friend can indeed be stressful, but these are not problems to be automated. These are the struggles that make us human, the things that make us grow, the things that make us who we are, which isn't a problem for anybody other than somebody who doesn't believe they need to change in any way. It's both powerful and powerless at the same time, a nihilistic way of seeing our lives as a collection of events we accept or dismiss like a system prompt, the desperate

pursuit of such efficient living that you barely feel a thing until you die. I spent years talking about these people without giving them a name because categorizing anything is difficult. I can't tell you how long it took me to synthesize the rot economy from the broader trends I saw in tech and elsewhere, how long it took me to thread that particular needle, to identify the various threads that unified events that are otherwise separate and distinct. I am but one person. Everything you have read in my news, or articles I've written or heard on my podcast to this point has been something I've had to learn. Building an argument and turning it into words, often at the same time, that other people

read doesn't really come naturally to anyone. It's something you have to work deliberately at. You might have talent, but you have to work towards it. It's imperfect. There are fuck-ups. I sometimes mispronounced names and words, including my own name, which Medoselski has always been kind enough not to laugh at me about. These podcasts and newsletters, they increase in length and breadth and have so many links, and I'll never change my process, because part of said processes learning, relearning, processing, messaging, messaging, messaging, I don't understand this, arguing with Casey a little bit, coming up with another idea.

An accord is, I text Matt Hughes, I talk to Robert Evans, I go back and forth with everyone, I get more pissed off, then I write, and I rewrite, and I speak, and so on and so forth. This process makes what I do possible, and the idea of someone automating it, disgust me, not because I'm special or important, but because my work is not the result of me reading a bunch of links or writing a bunch of words. The script for this piece is not just about 13,000 words long. It's the result of more than a million words, probably more than that that I wrote before it.

The hundreds of stories I read in the past, the hours and hours of conversations with friends and editors, years of accumulating knowledge, and yes, growing with the work itself. I, as a person, have grown with this show. Thanks to the wonderful feedback I get from all of you. From the conversations we have on the Reddit, or just the emails I get, the occasional one of you finds myself on, which is really quite scary, but not many of you

do. And please don't look. The thing is, imperfections are what make us human. Imperfections are what make art so great. The fun things that happen in a life are never from a moment of perfection or from crystallizing something that is immaculate. Perhaps the timing is perfect. Perhaps we're in the right place at the right time. But nothing about us is perfect. And through those imperfections, we grow and we thrive. Business idiots don't give a fuck about that. Sam Malman doesn't give a fuck about that. Satchin and Della doesn't give a fuck about that.

They think they're fucking perfect. But true art and true joy and true solidarity is what's needed to dispatch with these people and to stop what they're doing. And really, the biggest thing that we can do early on, the real starting block, is anyone within the tech media listen to this. We need to change.

We need to change how we cover these companies. We need to change that, honestly, everything needs to be inverted. Trusting a company based on how much money it has and how big it is is the wrong way to go about this business. Business idiots have learned that, and they have moved their marketing strategies to create metrics that journalists accept and will print. And then they will sound good for people that don't know what they're talking about. Because the journalists don't even bother to pull the metrics apart themselves. And I understand why. Everyone's doing what everyone else is doing.

but we can change things. But you as a listener, how can you change things? You're already doing it. Over the last year, I've seen a remarkable growth in just regular people being willing to push back against these narratives, in pushing back in their businesses. Also, those of you with children can teach them not to aspire to be a fucking manager or an executive unless they know their fucking work. It is that simple.

And I know it feels kind of bleak right now with everything going on in California, with everything going on with the government, with everything going on with open AI, with the amount of stories about how AI is going to take everything and take everything we have and recreate it in a shitty way. The fact that they're so desperate means that they're scared, and they're scared of the fact that you are willing to talk about this and you are willing to spit in their face. If you don't want to use AI, don't use AI. If you are curious about what it does, don't bother looking.

Or fuck around with the free version of bit so that you only lose them money. If these things could automate you, they'd be automating you already. If they were close to doing so, they would be previewing the ways in which they do so. They're fucking scared. While the era of the business idiot is happening right now, it could potentially be coming to an end. Because as this movement ends, and I said this in the rock con bubble a year ago, they don't have any more growth markets. This is the end for them.

I'm not saying the end of the companies, they'll work something out. But they don't have double-digit growth in them past the next year. The revenues are small. and you, the listener, who'll be sitting there the whole time saying, why the fuck does everyone say this thing's amazing whenever they use JetGPT and not really understanding why

you're not the weird one, they are. They cannot beat us because we actually do things. If you're a business idiot, yourself listening to this, open a book, go and learn something, go and talk to a customer. Start your car in the garage, I don't really know.

I really don't encourage you to do that. necessarily. But the point I'm making is this. Middle managers ruin lives, business idiots ruin lives. I think everyone listening to this is going to have experienced several of them. The fact that management as a concept and that management as a discipline has died is a big part of this as well. Labor is really fucking hurting right now. I realize I'm kind of rambling, but I'll end on the simpler note. If you are around people who are scared, be scared with them, offer them kindness, offer them solidarity, and a generous ear. Support their work.

Support independent creators. Support people at the Vox Union who are currently battling against the company that saw fit to give Kara Swisher tens of millions of dollars. That continually pushes powerful people like the CEO of Airbnb, which is a company which has ruined pretty much rentals everywhere. I don't know why Eli Patel had to talk to him about his house and the cat skills. Does that happen? When you hear these stories, push back on them.

Say I don't like this. Say fuck this. Support the Vox Union. In the event that the Vox Union does not get their contract, do not visit a single fucking Vox site. You must walk away from that. Support workers, support artists, support creators, support the people who actually do work. And fuck the business idiots. 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 Matersowski.com. M-A-T-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 dot at to visit the Discord and go to R-S-Better-O-Line to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of CoolZone Media.

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