Better Offline - The Rot-Com Bust

Episode Date: June 7, 2024

In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through what happens when tech's growth-at-all-costs epoch begins to collapse, and how the only way to save Silicon Valley is to put power back in the hands of those who actually build things - and reject the management consultant mindset killing innovation. Episode Links: https://tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinksSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. 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.

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,

SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Why are we all so obsessed with romance? On the Radio 831 podcast, join us, Sanjana Basker and Tyler McCall, as we unpack all. the trending tropes, fuzzy adaptations, book talk drama, and celebrity love stories with hot takes and sharp guests. Each episode digs into what these stories reveal about desire, fantasy, identity, and how we love now. Listen to the Radio 831 podcast on the IHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AllZone Media Hello and welcome to BetRofline. I'm your host Ed Zittron. Last episode, I posited that everything weird and bad you're seeing in the tech industry right now could be attributed to the death of its hyper-growth era. You see, up until around 2019, tech experience this epoch where there were these obvious giant multi-trillion dollar markets to conquer, things like software as a service, cloud storage, streaming audio and video, things like that, along with billions of people that were getting online every single year. Yet now they face another problem, that only a hundred

million new people got online between 2022 and 233, and the traffic that they're sending to the majority of the internet's top 100 internet properties has entered this prolonged, agonizing period of decline. And worse still, they don't appear to be any new multi-trillion markets left to grow into. This led to a profound period of desperation in tech. The tech industry got high on the hog, promising the world and then somehow actually managing to deliver it. You see, Facebook, they actually connected billions of people. There are millions of electric cars. Cloud products are both ubiquitous and useful. You can stream music anywhere. There are real things, real ideas, new things that they could just pump money into and then reap the benefits, until, of course, there weren't. Venture Capital

also got used to making easy safe bets on new startups and seeing pretty much automated, massive returns, because there were still these massive markets to enter, and of course they were able to get very cheap money borrowed from limited partners. And I at some point really do need to explain exactly how venture capital works, but that's a future episode. Yet since 2019, tech's biggest ideas have been a bit... Wank. These new ideas they've had, NFTs, cryptocurrency, the Metaverse, Generative

AI, these movements, they seem to sell ideas and glimpses of the future rather than an actual product that would solve an actual problem for anyone, let alone the billions of people required to make a giant market. And the commonality between all of these products is that they're all trying to create one. They all need to make a new hypergrowth market, an industry that could be worth hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars for investors to pile capital into, or I should say into startups that will then grow into these industries. But in all of their cases, they kind of seem to fall short the moment they enter the real world. Had NFTs actually been a replacement for art or collectibles, they could have created an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars,

except they lacked any compelling use case or reason to do so, other than the fact that venture capitalists really wanted them to do so. The same went for cryptocurrency, which draped itself in these horrible manipulative concepts like decentralized software, programmable money, democratized finance. Ideas that could theoretically be trillion-dollar concepts, except in practice cryptocurrency is horrible as a store of value and even worse as an operable piece of software. But the same does go for the metaverse and for generative AI. Their concepts sold on the idea of what if it could do this rather than what it can actually do. And that's before if you got to the nasty, messy problem of whether actually people wanted them to do anything, whether people wanted to live

in the metaverse or transact with digital money. You can do that using Zell or VEMO today. You could do it years ago. I don't really get it. And yet the most obvious problem with these movements is that they're constantly having to explain why you should care rather than showing you why you should care. The promises they've made, they're not based on things that they're actually doing, but on showing you this kind of messy, childish drawing of a concept of something that one day might exist and almost universally rely on this kind of pseudo-religious belief system, where one has faith in an industry, and that doing so makes you smart, and you need to decry cynics as Luddites that hate progress, because, well, one has to be first, right?

And what's crazy as well with all the AI people who are like, ah, you need to believe in AI, a lot of these people aren't invested in these companies, they just want to be part of a movement. It's so sad, but it's also so craving and manipulative. And the problem isn't so much that these concepts are bad, but that they're premature. The Metaverse is a silly idea at the scale that Zuckerberg pitched it, but digital worlds that people spend thousands of hours of their lives, and are not. The tech that he's talking about just isn't there and may not actually be.

And without that tech, I just don't think they become ubiquitous concepts adopted by hundreds of millions or billions of people in the way that he said. To do the things that he demonstrated in the 2021 video he showed when he changed Facebook's name to meta, would require, as I mentioned last episode, all of this extrasensory tech that is nowhere near existing. But let's get a little bit into the present for a second and talk about generative AI, which has use cases and can do some cool things, but the desperation to make it the next big hypergrowth market has turned it into more of a marketing campaign, and a marketing campaign

made up of these gratuitous, insane promises about artificial general intelligence or about how AI could run our lives, all kind of to hide the fact that most of these models are trained on a noxious form of public larceny, stealing from thousands or millions of creators to train models to do nothing. Training these models, by the way, will not give us AGI. It's not going to give us cognition in AI. They are lying about that. I really want to be clear, but also want to be

clear that well, Generative AI is probably not going to do much more than it's doing today. I'm making that call right now. What's happened in the last year? Nothing. But these problems are created by the fact that they might be good ideas, but they're not trillion-dollar ideas, but they're being

given the funding and the marketing efforts to make them that way. Even though they're so premature, it's ridiculous. And it's just a rotten kind of mindset. It is the rot economy and it is the rotcom bubble. This is the bubble being inflated, pushing concepts to the limelight before they're ready, pushing things through to show that companies can keep growing, that the tech industry can keep growing.

And you can see miniature versions of this problem running through all of your favorite tech products right now. Google's forcing AI into search. Facebook's constantly changing its algorithms and adding AI. Amazon's letting him basically anyone to sell anything on Amazon at any time, even if it's clogging the Kindle store with AI generated crap. They're all doing it because they're desperate to show that they're innovative and adding new things and able to express perpetual growth, even if doing so makes things worse. Even Apple, who I generally like the products of, is doing it too. iOS is a complete mess.

Go into your settings. There's a hundred different things. At the top, it will sometimes try and sell you Apple News Plus. Sometimes you get a notification about a baseball game that's a night of biteer. I had one yesterday for the Angels Marlins. And if you're not a baseball fan, that's not that exciting a game. It's like watching two turds fighting a toilet. Sorry if I've got any Marlins or Angels fans.

Back to the tech stuff, though. I must be clear that there is a mindset behind this, and it is the ROT economy. And the Rott economy's growth at all-cost mindset, it drives these companies away from innovation. It flies in the face of what it takes to innovate, which means losing money on ideas that actually help people. And it's all happening because these markets, they reward public companies and the startups that they try and acquire for making a number go up rather than any kind of consistent, profitable, sustainable or useful business. And it frustrates me and fills me full of angry bile because they're all capable of making cool stuff. Amazon made AWS, Amazon Web Services, the foundational thing of all cloud computing. Facebook at one point was a very useful product that connected people that you loved and you liked and that you just met,

except they had to make the number go up. And I think, by the way, Zuckerberg is separate to a lot of these companies because he was always kind of evil. Listen to the Facebook episodes and not lying. But really, though, all these companies had noble times. They had times when they were still doing value extraction, where they were. still doing some form of conning where they were still doing monopoly plays, but they were at least providing something useful. Now they're making things worse because they have no more useful ideas, or at least useful and profitable ones. 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. 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. 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. the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Huber 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, 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, everyone. It's Ryder Strong and Will Ferdell from PodMeets World. And now the PodMeets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV, who now have covered Dancing with the Stars, traitors, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor. So yeah, now we're experts. I know we annoyed a lot of our listeners

by our severe lack of survivor knowledge. That is the point of the show. I'm just going to remind you. I have watched some Survivor. I obviously haven't watched enough. Did people not like it? Like what was... Yeah.

Just because we... Yeah. We'll be recapping the big conclusion in the 50th season from the final attempts at gameplay to the desperate pleas of finalists to a bunch of... Ha, who.

Ha ha, ha, who. Again, we are experts. So make sure to tune in a pod meets twirled for all our Survivor 50 takes. Listen to Podmeets Twirl on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What makes the last few years worth of bullshit, stupid tech movements different from the previous innovations is that when an industry is ready for hypergrowth, there's a product that actually exists that will truly change people's lives. The promises made by tech

executives were at one point based on things that one can reasonably believe would happen, rather than this kind of weird erotic fan fiction to send a stock number up. Using the first iPhone, you could kind of see that you might make video calls on it, or take video, or use distinct third-party apps like you were already doing on a Mac. And while Steve Jobs, and yes, he was an awful person, I know, did talk about what's coming next. He did so by saying that the iPhone, on the initial announcement, would add 3G and amazing things in the future. And he did so just before, and this was in the original iPhone speech,

showing the actual real features of the first iPhone, things that people actually wanted, like having your music on your phone. being able to see what voicemails you had versus just calling a number and then hitting buttons to skip to the ones you need to see, or here in this case. And these promises, they were believable, either because they felt like a logical next step or because they described features that could be found in other competing products. Apple's always been a company of iteration rather than forceful, explosive innovation. It doesn't really create new categories, but it does refine them. And this trait was even referenced in the classic Douglas Copeland novel, Microsoft's first published in 1995 before Tim Cook took over or even the return of Steve Jobs. It didn't make the first smartwatch or the first tablet or the first arm-based PC, but Apple did make them good and made them practical and useful and sellable.

You saw these new products and you said, oh, I could do that. I could take photos with that. Oh, I don't need an iPod and a phone. I have a phone that does two things. even trying to romanticize the iPhone. I'm just describing what basic utility sounds like in a product, something that has been lost in the tech industry. Just look at Sam Altman, Sondar Peshai, and Satchin Adela of OpenAI, Google and Microsoft. They seem intent on discussing what AI will do, that it will have a monumental impact, that it will be a smart person and knows everything about

your life. And yet when they're actually asked about what it does today, they just seem to go kind quiet. They stutter. They're speechless. And when Satchinadella was actually asked about how he uses AI in his day-to-day work, he said the Microsoft co-pilot helps him compose emails better. Congratulations, Microsoft. You invented Grammally, a product that's existed for 15 years. Jesus Christ. Anyway, as an aside, Satchin Adela of Microsoft said in 2021 that Microsoft was with the Metaverse, creating, and I quote here, a new platform, and a new application type that was similar to how it talked about the web and the websites in the early 90s, and that he could not overstate how much a breakthrough the Metaverse was.

He would then dump it entirely two years later. Two years before that, so in 2019, Nadela called HoloLens 2, Microsoft's augmented reality glasses, an absolute breakthrough, a few months after its demo failed live on stage at Microsoft's Build 2019 conference. And while Microsoft hasn't killed HoloLens, it's clear the company's appetite for mixed and virtual reality has kind of dampened, with HoloLens work as partially impacted over the last year's sweeping layoffs at Microsoft, and Microsoft discontinuing its VR social network, AltSpace VR, and Windows Mixed Reality. Where's the breakthrough, Satcher? Satcher, you told me this shit was a breakthrough in 2019. Hey, the Metaverse was a breakthrough. Is everything a breakthrough, Satcher?

Anyway. every single one of these questionable, weird, stupid products and the stupider decisions behind them, it's all an act of desperation, an attempt to keep the rot economy going and the growth that all costs fire from going out, stripping crap off of the walls and throwing it in, selling shit so you can get more oil to throw on the fire. You can tell I've done a lot of fires. But seriously, this is all desperation to keep a party going that ended quite some time ago. There's a finite amount of people in the world right now, less of them getting online, and while more people are being born, they're going to be born into a very different tech industry than the one

we see today. And there's an even more finite amount of those people that will go online at any given time, and in turn, even fewer of them that might actually want to use a particular service, especially one that isn't obvious in why you should bloody use it. Previously, these companies were able to anticipate and meet customers' needs on both the consumer and enterprise level, in part because they actually understood their customers and knew that making their customers happy actually made them successful. I believe that behind the scenes, many of these companies have been struggling for years to find the next big thing, knowing that while there might be needs to be met, you know, those horrible, nasty customers that always want problems solved. those needs might not be things that will create double-digit revenue growth or convince Wall Street that a stock will grow forever. Though I can't say for certain, I'd also say the assent of management consultancy types in tech, people like Cheryl Sandberg, Adam Messeri, Sondar Pichai, and Sam Altman, who's adopted by the management consultant types, it's a testament to how obvious that they're desperate for the next big thing is and how big their failure is to actually adapt to customer needs or,

how incapable they are of building useful things. Management consultancy people, and Sundar and Cheryl, by the way, they both came from McKinsey, one of the worst companies around. They're not built to innovate. They're built to grow. They're built to create business cancer.

Now, you might say that's horrible, but at the same time, do you think Facebook's useful? Do you think Google Search has got better? Or do you think that management consultancy people have seen it and gone, number must go up, Number must go up forever because if number go up, money go up, money go up, good.

I know I'm being somewhat facetious. But really, look at the tech industry right now. Look at it and tell me that this is an industry going well, that this is an industry building the future. No, right now, the tech industry feels like a management consultancy. People trying to do PowerPoint presentations to customers to say this is going to change your life without actually showing them how it will. in the product, and in the case of Microsoft lying in their Super Bowl commercial, or in the case of Samuatman and Open AI lying all the time. I mean, tons of liars at the top of most of capitalism, but really, the tech industry is just full of them. But I think Generative AI is quite special,

and what makes it so special is it kind of has the hint of utility, the scent of a product. And as a result, it can be sold to the markets as the next big boom, the next big thing that justifies hundreds of billions of dollars of investment and increased market caps, even if it doesn't really do something. Every single company chasing the generative AI dragon is hoping that it's the next Amazon Web Services, which, as I mentioned, is the ubiquitous cloud product that went from a side project of Amazon store to actually something that makes more than it. And today, it underpins most of the internet. And you want to know why AWS does that? It's because it's useful. It's because it actually does something.

It's actually a thing that has utility. You don't need to explain why someone needs a website on the internet or why they need services to do the compute to run an application that runs in the cloud. That's pretty bloody obvious. And that's the problem with Generative AI. And that's the problem with a lot of the things you see in the tech industry. Nobody really seems to be able to explain why

or how Generative AI is the next big thing. Just that it is. Chat, GPT, Gemini, Cloor. all of these large language models, they can do some things that are superficially cool. They can generate images. They can quickly query databases, albeit with no guarantee they won't hallucinate and make up something that isn't true and tell you it is. And they can craft poetry. But there's no real endearing reason to pick one of them up every day and use them. These use cases that they enable, they're not really exciting or ubiquitous or world changing.

They're not anything like what the tech executives are actually selling us. And the problem might not be that they're useless, but that as a piece of technology, Generative AI just isn't a hypergrowth market or much of an industry changer, no matter how much money you shove into him. Sam Altman is not asking Microsoft for an $100 billion supercomputer because Generative AI is going to get better. He's doing it because what we have today is not a world-changing product.

It's not the boondoggle that the tech industry needs it to be, and his only prospect of fulfilling these promises is basically a tech industry equivalent of the Marshall Plan. Yet without generative AI, what do these companies have left? What is the next big thing? For the best part of 15 years, we've assumed that the tech industry

would always have something up their sleeves. But what's becoming apparent is that they might have actually run out of ideas. They don't have any big, sexy things to sell us. And the disruption that has become associated with tech was predicated on their being new market. for them to disrupt and ideas in their hands that they could actually use to do so. And a paper from last year from nature that kind of worried me too posited that the pace of disruptive research is actually slowing.

And I believe the same thing is actually happening in tech, except we're conflating innovation and finding new markets to add software and hardware to. And we've been doing so for 20 years. And the net result of this is a kind of innovation stagnation and the rot economy and the rockcom bubble. A tech industry laser focused on finding markets to disrupting anything, rather than actually disrupting anything, rather than actually meeting anyone's needs. When the biggest venture capital investments go into companies that can sell for massive

multiples rather than sustainable, stable businesses, or things that might truly change the world, venture capital is not investing in moonshots. They're not putting money into the future. They're putting money into the goddamn present. And there are exceptions. I like a lot of seed stage investors because they're actually. taking risks on real companies that are doing new things. However, the largest VC firms need to get their heads out their asses and actually invest in the future. But really, what's so stupid about

this is, of all these big tech companies, before they really mess with their products, they were good, sustainable, insanely profitable businesses. There's no reason that Google or META or Amazon couldn't build businesses that have flat, sustainable growth and really respectable, reliable profitability. They just choose not to, in part because the markets will punish it, and partly because their DNA has been poisoned by the rot economy. And the demands of the rot economy are very simple. More. Always more. I also think that the tech industry, both the venture capitalists funding it and those running big tech firms, they've been dominated by people who don't build things. The people running VC firms, the people running Google, Facebook, and all these, well, Mark Zuckerberg, I guess was a code of

he's not doing it anymore. They're not actually building products, and they're not coders even. Sam Altman's not an engineer. The future isn't being built by the people saying what the future is. The future is being built by people under the thumb

of management consultant brains. And I know, I know, I'm being a little facetious again. But really? These people aren't speaking to people with real products. They're not looking at the human condition and saying, let's make this better for money. No, they're saying, how do we drain more blood from the consumer until they give up on our website?

Well, guess what, asshole? They are giving up on it. But this problem, it's poisoning the startup industry as well, leaving big tech for a second. So the Rabbit R1 and the Humane Pin, I'm not sure if you've seen them. The Rabbit R1 is this $200 orange brick with a screen that claimed when you got it that you could talk to it and it'd run these apps. And it cost $200, by the way. And the Humane Pin is this AI-powered pin that costs $700. $200 and it has a little infrared screen that goes on your hand, except when you use it too much of heat. Anyway, now that they're giving you back, kind of the backstory there, both of these

companies, they raised incredible sums of capital based on these vague ideas, you know, that people felt overwhelmed by their smartphones or they're not connected with the real world, things that sound nice to investors who don't experience speaking to people. And they raised all this money, hunt over $200 billion between them, I believe, to build products that range from extremely bad to potentially fraudulent. And they failed to build products that anybody actually needed. What they did build were very expensive things that answered questions nobody had and solved problems that nobody had very poorly. And I'm not sure if it was ignorance, ambivalence or just pure evil. But anyway, if I'm honest, these startups, they're only a symptom of the rock-com bubble.

The investors are disconnected from the process of building things, and they're funding ideas that they don't understand in the hopes that the people building them aren't full of shit. And they're not even doing the necessary due diligence, because clearly the people funding these companies don't know enough about tech to actually see whether these things are possible. Remember, Sequoia, one of the largest venture capital firms, put a lot of money into FTX. Again, the cryptocurrency thing that was a big scam. There are ways of looking beyond the spreadsheet or the PowerPoint, you know. you can ask more questions and if they don't give you an answer that's good. I just feel a little crazy when I think about tech from the last few years. There's just been so much wasted money.

There are people out there who were just raising tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for nothing. And I'm going to say something a little bit controversial, but who can blame them? I think they're scum. I think they're con artists. I think they should give back the money to their customers and they should give back the money to investors. But really, what do you expect when the industry is engineered to capture what the next big thing is when it isn't defined by utility or necessity, but rather how big a market it can grow into. Why wouldn't you try and capture that demand? Why would you make a real company when venture money

is going into fake companies again and again for years and years and years and years? Why do you think people don't want to make startups? People are making startups, by the way. It's still happening. But why would they be incentivized to try something new when they know that venture capitalists are funding stupid, bloody ideas that sound. good on paper. It's so frustrating and it frustrates me working with startups every day, hearing real ideas, which actually exist. And they'll raise modest rounds. They won't raise $100 million because the people giving away $100 million are giving it to people who have the next big thing idea and then burning the money anyway. It's just, it's so insane. Like, look at the

Rabbit R1. So the Rabbit R1 is a, it's a little orange box. When you ask it to order Uber, it breaks most of the time. It does not work. It claims it has a lot. large action model that controls your apps on a server, it doesn't really work. The whole thing feels like a sham. There's a coffeezilla video I really encourage you to watch. But the big thing is, is that what Jesse Lou, the CEO of Rabbit has done is he's over-promised what this device could do. He said it can control all your apps with your voice and it can only kind of do that. And he's raised a bunch of money as a result of these, I don't know if you call them lies, half-truths, scams. I don't know, that's up to you to choose. But nevertheless, what Jesse Lou has done,

done is, as well as previously run an NFT company, which was the same entity that made the rabbit, Jesse Liu has stated that AI can do more than it can, that his device is actually capable of doing things that might one day be possible, but really might not be based on the existing technology. If we're honest, what's the difference between Rabbit CEO Jesse Liu and OpenAI CEO Sam Alman? They both went through Y Combinator, which is a tech incubator in the bay, and both Both of them have sold products that don't do what they say based on what it might do in the future.

I can't work out the difference other than the amount of money they've raised. Both of them lied? Both of them haven't delivered the products they say. I think the only difference, as far as I can see, is that Sam Altman was better at playing the game. I'm... No, no, really, though. Really, sit with me for a second. Jesse Liu absolutely misled his customers about the capabilities of what the R-1 could do,

and the company's previous operations. But Sam Altman has shamelessly overhyped, generative AI almost every day for years. Senior members of Sam Altman's first startup loop tried to get him fired twice for what they described as a deceptive and chaotic behavior pattern. He was fired from Wycombinator for an absenteeism that rankled his peers and some of the startups he was supposed to nurture. And former OpenAI board member Helen Toner told the TED AI show that Altman was so deceitful that the board found out about the launch of Chat GPD, which, by the way, is the definitional generative AI product,

when they saw it was posted on Twitter. Toner also admitted that Sam Orman was caught outright lying on multiple occasions and that two executives provided evidence of psychological abuse and lying and manipulative behavior on multiple occasions. If anything, Sam Orman's much worse than Jesse Liu. All while lacking much of a technical background at all, he is the archetypal rockcom CEO, an unqualified lobbyist pretending to be.

a technologist and abusing anyone he needs to in the pursuit of growth. Sam Altman is the opposite of what the tech industry needs. He is not building real things. He is selling you a dream that doesn't exist. And when this bubble bursts, people like him will escape. They'll be fine because he's already rich. 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. 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. It's 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. bind. 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 844-4-4-i-heart to get started. That's 844-844-I-Hart. Hey, everyone, it's Ryder Strong and Wilfredel from PodMeets World. And now the PodMeets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV, who now have covered dancing with the stars, traitors, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor.

So yeah, now we're experts. I know we annoyed a lot of our listeners by our severe lack of survivor knowledge. That is the point of the show. I'm just going to remind you. I have watched some Survivor. I obviously haven't watched enough. Did people not like it? Like what was just because we?

Yeah. We'll be recapping the big conclusion in the 50th season from the final attempts at gameplay to the desperate pleas of finalists to a bunch of. Ha-hoo. Again, we are experts. So make sure to tune into Pod Meets Twirled for all our Survivor 50 takes. Listen to PodMeets Twirl on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Nothing I'm saying is meant to suggest that there can't be successful tech companies,

or that they won't be any more innovation. I just think there's going to be less of it and at a much smaller scale. And I don't think we should fear it. The tech industry can no longer rely on the idea that every year or every couple of of years, somebody will find an idea that will create 2,000 more startups or trillions of dollars in market cap. Tech must reconfigure both venture capital investment and public tech companies to a sustainable, profitable and useful model where, get this, existing products are made better and more profitable with the understanding that we're approaching the maximum amount of people

who are going to be online, and that these products cannot be built with the assumption that more and more users will always exist. I'm sure some of you might say I'm wrong and that tech's hypergrowth era isn't over and that Generative AI is going to usher in this glorious new future of powerful assistance. But seriously, what does that look like? What happens next? Where does Generative AI go from here? Do they fix the problems?

How do they make it cheaper or more efficient? How do they eliminate hallucinations when Google themselves can't? When Facebook can't? when none of these big companies can fix the biggest problem that all of them know about. How will OpenAI train GPT-5, their next model? They need four to five times the amount of data that they have right now, which already required them to do masses of plagiarism, to make GPT-5 happen. How are they going to do that?

Hey, another question, just while I have you, has Google or META or Microsoft, have any of these companies found a way to make generative AI profitable yet? When will they do so? How long do they have? How long until the market sours? Salesforce just had their first revenue miss since 2006, partially based on the fact that Mark Beniof,

the bullshitter-in-chief who constantly talks about AI and has done so for years, where it turns out he didn't make any money from it, and people are kind of upset. And seriously, though, putting all that aside, when does Generative AI prove itself useful? Where's the big moment? Where's the iPhone moment? Is it this autocorrect thing? Is it this thing that can write poetry or generate pictures of the Joker as president?

Where is this big moment? I'm afraid the answer is kind of simple. It isn't coming. Generative AI is not going to change the world. And while AI itself kind of already has and it definitely will do so more in the future, it isn't going to with Generative AI and it isn't going to do so in the hands of Sam Altman and Open AI. I don't even think Anthropics going to do it. it either. When the bubble bursts, these firms, they're probably going to be absorbed into the massive tech companies that have put billions of dollars into them already in exactly the same way that Microsoft just absorbed inflection. And they'll do this to quietly hide the shameful failure, and they'll be able to, by the way, repurpose all of the cloud compute investments they've made. There are other places for that compute to go. They have, they make billions off of cloud. They'll work it out. But in the end, if all of this falls up, apart. If the rockcom bubble bursts, if the hypergrowth period is over, I actually think it's

better for the tech industry. To have a better world, one with more interesting things and where society doesn't constantly feel at odds with the tech industry, tech companies need to shed this growth addiction. They need to get off the horse. And I believe that we forced to do so whether they like it or not. There's still going to be many, many, many hundred million or even billion-dollar companies, there's just not going to be that many hundred billion or trillion-dollar ones. I realize I come off as negative at times. I know I do. And as I've said multiple times, and I'll say again, I'm a broken-hearted romantic. I want a better tech industry. I love the companies I work with. I love the companies I've worked with. I love the tech I use. I think that tonal, that it's a

workout machine, one of the best pieces of tech ever. It's changed my life. As iPhones have, have as computers, have as many things have. I want there to be these exciting, interesting, actually innovative and useful products that change my life and your life and other people's lives are the better. Any anger or frustration you hear in my voice is directed toward the people that have diverted

the massive sources of innovation that come from having masses of money and talent away from building useful things towards finding new vessels for hypergrowth. And the same goes for the venture capitalists that seem incapable of backing actually new or interesting things. They just double down on new trends that everybody else is following rather than putting money into young, hungry founders

that are trying to build real things. A better tech industry is one that puts more money into earlier stage companies doing new things in better ways, or completely new ways, rather than all following the same trends and doubling or tripling down on the same guys doing the same things. It's all so goddamn boring and useless and wasteful. I love tech. I find tech amazingly useful. I'm using it right now. I would be a liar if I said I didn't love the tech industry and I didn't love the tech that I use and I feel like many of you might feel the same way. Maybe you don't. Not put words in your mouth. But the problem is that it's getting less useful. It's getting less magical. It isn't magical. Generative AI isn't magical. We're being told it is and it isn't. I wish that AI was doing all these crazy things. I wish it didn't have to steal from everyone. And I wish that, quite frankly, any of the people building these big AI,

companies seem to want to build cooler interesting things. And I just feel that if they actually built useful things, things could change. Things would be better. And tech can be both an incredibly profitable industry and a vessel for building better, more interesting things and a better, more interesting future. What's holding it back are people with management consultancy brain. And all they can do is find and dominate new markets at all costs. And they fly in the face of innovation and invention and creativity when they do so. People like that, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Malm, Sondar Pishai and Satchin Adela, and Mark Andreessen too, are not interested in any future other than the one that they own and have turned their companies and the companies

they invest into management consultancy firms that happen to sell technology. The solution is a more decentralized, and I do not mean crypto tech industry. A decentralized tech industry, one where VC dollars flow into smaller, earlier stage companies, where the source of what's next isn't three or four large companies, but a thousand little ones that have actually taken a risk to build something new. Tech companies will be funded that don't succeed. It's happening already. It's been happening forever. But those failures should at least be trying to build something new and interesting. It doesn't have to be world changing. It can change the lives of people that run servers. It can be something that changes the lives of

people trying to get fit. There are many industries that can be fixed or improved or grown, but they might not be worth $100 billion. That still makes them valuable. It still makes them worthwhile, just not to the assholes in charge. Silicon Valley can be better by giving the keys back to the people who actually build things and actually solving problems that real human beings face. And I also believe that the tech industry, and especially Silicon Valley, needs to start talking to regular goddamn people again. The bubble, and I know I've mentioned multiples, the rockcom bubble itself is a problem, but also the bubble of Silicon Valley, of the venture capitalists and a lot of the big tech companies, is one that is never penetrated by regular people with regular problems.

That needs to change. Talk to some regular bloody people. Fix their problems. Focus on fixing the problems of the billions of people before you assume that those billions of people will become your goddamn users. The tech industry needs to realign around sustainability, profitability, and building useful things for real people. And until that happens, billions of dollars will be plowed into building hardware and software to inflate the rock com bubble, to keep the rot economy going and the hopes that the growth at all cost party will never end.

And I really do not think that anyone in tech is ready for it to end. I think when this bubble pops, it's going to take out, maybe slowly, maybe it's a slow bleed, one of the big tech firms. What's happening with Google today, with AI search, is a travesty. It is a goddamn disgrace. Sandhapeshai and Liz Reed should be ashamed of themselves. They should tender their resignations. To turn Google search into an AI-powered slot machine that may or may not give you useful information,

that is disgusting. It's a societal loss. What's been done to Facebook is a disgrace. As I said in the two Facebook episodes, Facebook is barely functional. It's spreading pornography and misinformation. It's hurting people. It's helping people get scammed.

It's not connecting anyone. These are tangibly worse products. Amazon's so full of nonsense, the reviews, almost every review seems fake, and now it's got generative AI summaries that don't make any sense. Every product's getting worse. And what I want to say, and it's kind of big-headed to assume that

Sondar Pishai or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg would ever hear this, but if they do, your party will end one day. And when it does, you won't have any talent or innovation to lay back on. You have demonized your customers in treating, them with contempt, or so that you can please faceless people in Wall Street. When the Rodcom bubble bursts, you will be humiliated, you will still be so rich. But your legacy will be one of failure.

All that money that you extracted, all that value you took, will be just for you. You will have ruined products that were formative for people's lives. You will be known for that, not for innovation, for innovation, not for being a genius, not for being remarkable, but for being remarkable in the amount of damage you did to the tech industry. Cheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, you're all the same management consultancy brain, unable to create real value for real people, and it's perhaps because you don't talk to them. I realize I've kind of diverted from the podcast,

I'm yelling at people who may never hear. But this frustration in my voice is nothing to do with engineered rage. This is nothing to do with the podcast or even getting more downloads or anything like that. This is because tech changed my life. It changed so many people's lives. It's the reason that I'm able to keep talking to my family in England, that I, not having many friends in Las Vegas, can have rich, meaningful friendships throughout the world.

The reason that I'm able to is because people were able to find a balance between profit and actual innovation and actually creating things. But the people in charge in tech have lost their way. They have lost their way from creating meaningful things, from making meaningful decisions that help people. Now all they want to do

is make changes that make their companies look like they can grow forever. And when that bubble pops, I hope they're humiliated. And I hope they're... kicked out, but they probably won't be. Mark Zuckerberg can't even be fired. This is the injustice of tech right now. This is the disgraceful state of the rock con boom. My anger inside me is that things can be better, that tech can do great things, but the people with the money, the people directing the money and the compute, the people making the hires, the people that have hired the greatest

minds in tech who should get paid well, by directing them toward making stuff for Wall Street. And until that changes, I'm still going to feel like this. I'm not here to tell you how to feel. I'm just telling you how I feel. And I promise you, every episode of this show is about trying to give you transparency into the system and the things it creates. To try and answer why so much of the stuff we see today doesn't seem to be for us and doesn't even seem to be for a use case.

It's frustrating. It's nauseating. I don't like it being like this. I wish I had more good news. I wish there was something cool I could talk about from one of these companies. Shit, Gmail changed my life. Gmail was fantastic. These companies are fully capable of making great things. And even a deadbeat piece of shit, Steve Jobs is still beloved by history

because he actually ushered in good things, even though it was mostly him getting other people to do it. But no, tech doesn't seem to care, at least big tech. I want to see change. I want to see things being better. I just want tech to be fun and exciting and interesting and innovative again. I think you do too. Thanks so much for listening.

Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattersowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matasowski.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 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. For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, Coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite.

Unhumor me with Robert Smigel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The story I told myself can then shape my behavior, and that can lead me to sabotage the possibility of connection.

This Mental Health Awareness Month, tune into the podcast deeply well with Debbie Brown if you've been searching for a soft place to land while doing the work to become whole. This podcast is for you. to hear more. Listen to deeply well with Debbie Brown from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Joey Dardano.

And on my new podcast, hope from a hypocrite, I'll be changing lives, helping people in need with thoughtful solutions. Sike, I'm a comedian. I'm not qualified to give good advice. Join me and my comedian friends as we riff, rant,

recommend some of the most legally dubious advice known to me. This is Help from a Hypocrite, the worst advice from the dumbest people you know. Listen to Help from Hypocrite Wednesdays on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.