Better Offline - Working In The Dot Com Bubble ft. Matt Rosoff

Episode Date: January 26, 2026

To kick off this week’s Better Offline Dot Com Special, Ed Zitron is joined by The Register’s Matt Rosoff to talk about what it was like to be in the tech industry during the last time the markets got drunk on a major digital hype cycle. Matt Rosoff: https://www.theregister.com/Author/Matt-Rosoff/ https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:agrmux4phzmfvgyblvhxrbnh Please support me by subscribing to my premium newsletter - here’s $10 off your first year of annual https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/84rt762qen 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/@edzitron Email Me: [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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. 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 I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was. Your

identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets. He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move. And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off. And that was the last time I saw him. Listen to Season 14 of Family Secrets on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your 20s can be so exciting, but they can also be really overwhelming, confusing, and honestly, just kind of lonely. May is Mental Health Awareness Month

and the psychology of your 20s is breaking down the science behind the biggest roadblocks we face. I was six years into my career, the 80-hour weeks and just the first one in, the last one out, and I ended up burning out. There was a large chunk of my 20s that I was just so wanting to be out of that phase out of my skin

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And today I am joined for a dot-com special by Matt Rosoff, the editor-in-chief of the Register, who has been in Silicon Valley, I believe, 300 years you said? It was... 325, yeah, so I'm actually a vampire. That's nice. Oh, what, like Kevin O'Leary in a Marty Supreme... Sorry, Martin's Supreme. That's a thing he says in it.

Have you heard about that? No, I don't know, but I haven't seen that yet. Ping pong doesn't really do it for me. I didn't really like it, but there is a bit in it where Kevin O'Leary goes, I'm a fucking vampire. I've lived for this many years. And I read about this. I did not like the movie, but I read about it. I was like, oh, I would actually love it if this was true.

And apparently they did film it with fangs. And they should have done that. They should have just had him be a vampire at the end. However, he's regularly in the sun, so I'm not sure how they would have squared that circle. Anywho. Nighttime only. Computers. So, Matt, you were, what were you, we're just going to go straight into it.

What were you doing in the dot-com bubble era? Like, where did you begin and where did you find yourself as it progressed? Yeah, it's an interesting blast from my very distant past. But I moved to San Francisco in 1992, sort of the tail end of the Gulf War recession. So there wasn't much going on then. I was interning, doing different kinds of jobs, copy editing, doing some of those kinds of things. And then in 1995, I joined a little startup

that was going to publish content on the World Wide Web. They didn't call it content then. I guess it was they called it an online magazine. They already had a TV network. And that was CNET. So CNET is still around today in a very different format. But I was employee number 42 there, started off as an editorial assistant,

and my very first task there was to come up with an email newsletter, which we called Digital Dispatch, and it was mostly summaries of stuff that we were publishing on the site, and then occasional snarky commentary. I remember a couple years later we did 10 reasons why Wired's IPO failed, and one of them was the prospectus was printed on neon green and red paper, which we thought was very funny and cute at the time. So anyway, that was a lot of fun.

We were, you know, growing at a very rapid pace. I think I was there from 95 to 99. Like I said, I was employee number 42 on the way in. And I think when I left, there were over 500 people working there. With that one, was CNET owned by Zip Davis at the time? It was not. CNET was an independent company. It had a number of early venture investors, including Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder.

I don't remember the other ones. And the CEO was guy named Halsey Minor. And no, it was, it was completely, you know, it was privately held. And we IPOed in 97 or 98. I'm not, oh, just before. So that was just before things started to fall apart, right? Well, 98 was still go, go, go. I think it really kind of went on until 2000, 2001 was when things started to turn.

So, you know, it was fun being a company that was growing fast. I was able to do a whole bunch of different kinds of things I was writing TV scripts and doing CD-ROM reviews back when multimedia was a thing and writing features. And I interviewed a two-way pager from this little company called Research in Motion before the Blackberry was out. I interviewed one of the first MP3 players. I think it was the Rio. And I was like, well, interesting idea, but it can only hold like 12 songs. So this is a complete waste of time. It'll never work. Oh, so that was before the creative nomad then? I think around the same time. I don't remember which one was first, but yeah. I remember the creative nomad could have like 300 songs on it. I felt like,

oh yeah, the Sultan of Brunei. I was the fanciest man ever. Three hundred songs. How would I ever choose? Yeah, that's, that's right. Yeah, no, this was a lot less than that. I mean, we had to sort do math and go backwards and we're like, wait, that's only 12 songs. That's worthless. So anyway, and then, you know, took some filthy.com lucre, went backpacking for a little bit with my girlfriend at the time who later became my wife. And then when I moved back, moved back to Seattle. And I think we came back on the day that Microsoft lost a verdict during its big antitrust case.

Yeah, the MS-DOS one, right? Yeah, this was, well, this was antitrust. Basically, they had a whole bunch of different charges against them. Tying the browser to Windows was kind of the big one, you know, and making deals with PC makers to bundle certain software and not allowing them to bundle other software and all kinds of things. Yeah, and incentivizing bundling MS DOS. Yeah, I vaguely know this story. Yeah, it was really about like Netscape Navigator was the thing. And you know, that's what we were all using in 1995. It started with Mosaic and there was Navigator. And then Microsoft built

internet explorer into Windows 95 and four years later, Navigator didn't really exist for all intents and purposes. So it was, but anyway, that was the day. It was Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, and he ordered them to be broken into two companies, an apps company, which is Office and all those products, and an ops company, which was Windows, I believe. Now, I may be remembering this slightly wrong, and I don't have a resource in front of my refresh memory. I very recently covered this, and you all bang on. Yeah. Yeah. So, but I think that was kind of the peak.

And I think that was actually perhaps the beginning of the end. So it's even though Microsoft had very little to do directly with the dot-com bubble, there was sort of this sense that, oh, the tide is turning. Anyway, long story short, I moved back to Seattle and I found work with this startup at the time. They were called a cation. And the idea was that they were going to do online education. So they wanted to have articles written. And I was the computers tech guy. We were going to, you know, training people on computer technology.

and it was the most incompetently run company I have ever seen been a part of. I walked in, immediately realized that I needed to get out. So by way of example, they didn't have so, you know, I was this just just so that. This was early 2000. So this is still, this was when companies were getting funding on a promise and going public on PowerPoint still. It was still still at the peak. But we could see it starting to turn.

So, you know, these guys had enough money to hire a bunch of people and they had a cool loft in Pioneer Square, which is, you know, brick building and all this kind of stuff. But they didn't. So, you know, they hired me and they're like, go get some freely, you know, fine, start hiring freelancers and we need to get some content up. They had no way to put the content on the internet. They didn't have a CMS. They didn't know what a CMS was. And we were using Visual Source Safe, which is a Microsoft product used for, you know, creating code and sharing code. It was that level.

And I remember later hearing secondhand that somebody had overheard a very tense meeting between the CEO and the investors where one of the investors yelled through a closed door. We might as well just sell the servers back to the investment bank. So I quickly got out of there, found a Java directions on Microsoft. Did that for 10 years. And they were out of business by, I believe, early 2001. So about when did it become obvious something was wrong? So it was never obvious that something was wrong large scale, but it was obvious that a lot of the specific individual companies that were part of this

were completely hot air. There was nothing there. There weren't revenues. There weren't customers. Or they were, you know, selling dollars for 75 cents, basically. So, you know, Pets.com was a big, one, Cosmo.com was another one. And all these ideas came around later and were more nearly profitable in the second go-round. So Cosmo.com was just home delivery. It was like Instacart.

Yeah, it's basic. Cosmo was Instacart and Pets.com was Chewy. And I looked at Chewy's revenues recently, $3.1 billion in a quarter, $50 million of profit, which is good, but also one of those business, when I hear metrics like that, I get scared. Yeah, it's fine. It's a, you know, It's a low margin retail business. That's fine. Retail's good. You know, it's okay.

It's real. Yeah, it's, you sell things for more than you make them for. That's how it's supposed to work. So I think there were just so many of those. The other one was there was a business and I think they were only based in Seattle called lackey.com. And I remember my, my boss at directions at the time said that, you know, this is when I knew that the revolution was impending. It's when you have a website called lackey.com. that is basically a personal assistant.

I guess it was kind of like TaskRabbit, that kind of thing. Yeah, but even TaskRabbit has never really, is TaskRabbit even profitable? They got bought by IKEA, so it's buried now. I don't think they ever were. Mylacky.com. Okay, I hate to interrupt to read a Wikipedia page, but it was founded in April 1999 by a guy called Brian McGarvey

and another guy called Brendan Barnacle. I remember that name. Yeah, I remember that name. With an I, right? Correct. Barnell. Yes, yes. In the memo, he had a memo that was on Fuck Company. It said, this is still a startup. And he complains that it is now 6.45 PM and there are only 12 people in our office. We have 65 people who work here in Seattle. It's totally unacceptable. So the more things change, the more things stay the same. I think that's true. Yeah, there are absolutely some similarities and some differences between today and them. But what about the telecom side, though? Was it, did everybody just think that was going to work out until it didn't? Was there a point when the lucence and the wind stars of the world got scared or scary? Yeah, I was less close to that.

At the time, I was pretty focused on end-user consumer stuff. But I remember having friends who were sort of retail trading and talking to me about Sienna. Sienna networks is going to be huge. And I think those busts came a little bit later, right, with WorldCom. I think that was maybe a bit after the dot-com bust. And I'm a little bit less familiar with how all of that worked. But as I understand it, there were a lot of circular deals and deals that weren't really deals and deals that were agreements, but actual no money changing hands. Yeah.

It's interesting because as I dig into this and I've spent the last week or two, digging into, just kind of how we got to this conversation, I realized, it seems like there were two very specific, the dot-com bubble was actually like two bits. It was the dot-com website stuff and then the follow-up of the, the, what was it, the telecommunications, fiber boom. Fiber boom. Yeah, it was the, it was the, it was the websites. There was definitely some circularity there too. Everybody knew that everybody was buying advertisements from each other. But you know, you remember AOL bought Time Warner and then that valuation collapsed. I mean, there were some really huge deals that turned out to be in the end worth almost nothing. And then I think once you, once, you know, once all of those

things fell apart and the end user picture wasn't there, a lot of the infrastructure valuations came crashing down as well. What was the moment you knew? Like, when was the moment? What was, was there an event where you went, oh, shit? Yeah, when I joined that startup and I couldn't, I couldn't believe they had any money. So that was, that was, that was spring of 2000. I was like, it felt like they were just sort of handing money out to anybody. And I mean, this guy had a record. I think he had had a CRM company that competed with Salesforce that either sold or went public.

So he wasn't a total nobody. It's just there couldn't hire enough people to actually. get anything smart done on time. It just wasn't. It just wasn't working and everybody was kind of showing up to the office and play acting. There were some moments during the 90s that were, you know, kind of crazy. Like C-Net, we, they funded this party. I play bass and I was playing bass in sort of this pickup band at work. And they basically rented out the Fillmore for our holiday party. And, you know, we played on a stage in front of 1,200 or however, maybe the film was not that big 500 people and then they had a uh i can't remember the name of the of the you know

they had an actual working band come on after us but it was a lot of fun or the singer we were playing with nailed janice joplin she did a really spectacular job we had a couple good songs so but that was those kinds of things were regular like that was just expected these big parties and nobody really asked where the money was coming from i do remember after c net went public i don't remember what year this was, 98 or 99, I actually looked at an earnings report and I was like, oh, we're losing money? I didn't know you could stay in business and lose money. How naive I was. That's so, see, that's the thing I, I admit, as I've got further into finance in general and learn stuff, the amount of companies that just burn cash and then die, but also the ones that are burning

cash right now. And the amount of people who just say, yeah, it's actually fine. It's good that happens. It's like a completely, like a completely different world that has only worked a few times in the past. It's actually not worked many, many more times. Right. Most of the time it doesn't work, but I think the bet is when it does work, it pays off spectacularly. Right. And the question is, I don't think Google was ever losing huge amounts of money, but Amazon did for some years. Yeah, I've looked into it and the companies that have actually grown and been successful have never burned anywhere near as much money as these AI companies. AWS was like $69 billion over nine years. And that was all of Amazon's CAPEX, not just AWS focused. Yeah, yeah. No, they, yeah. And again, there was, to me, the internet at large and the World Wide Web, as we used to call it, was a lot more amazing.

immediately, obviously huge. And it was going to change a lot of things and how business was done and how media was distributed. It was clear. It was just a question of when and where the technology had to go and which parts had to evolve. You know, you needed consumers to have much more bandwidth before video became a realistic thing. And so forth. And, you know, there were going to be fits and starts. But I think everybody pretty much knew that it was not fake. Like, Like some of these companies were going to succeed. Something was going to happen. When I look at AI, to me, it does not seem nearly as revolutionary.

I don't even really like to call it AI because it's not intelligent, but that's the term that we use. But it's, you know, it's right, you know, matrix math determining, determining, you know, basically auto-complete. So it's interesting. it can do some stuff that can be valuable in certain situations, but it doesn't to me feel immediately massively obvious that this is a huge change. The internet did. Web browsers did. The iPhone, the first time I played with one of those,

I was kind of a skeptic because I mean, I had a Palm Pilot and I'd been. Yeah, yeah. I had a common around. Yeah. I had a compact. So keep going. No, no. You know, and you're playing with that stylus.

and then someone brought an iPhone into work and I was like, oh, Apple, whatever, they're not going to do this. And I was like, oh, responsive touch screen, email auto-complete maps. I'm like, this thing's cool. And then it got better from there. So, yeah. I haven't felt that. And I've used all the chatbots.

I've played around with them. I don't code, but from what I understand from people who do is if you're a non-coder, it can create some serviceable apps just based on your ideas, which seems pretty magical. But if you do code and you actually look under the hood, they're not maintainable, you know, you can't deploy them. You know, they, they tend to have a lot of problems unless you sort of know what you're doing. And I certainly know as a writer, you know, I can immediately detect AI generated writing and it's not good.

Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's, Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

There's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, uh, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard herds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion?

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We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV, who now have covered Dancing with the Stars, traders, 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.

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Again, we are experts. So make sure to tune into Pod Meets Twirled for all our Survivor 50 takes. Listen to PodMeets Twirled on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast, and for Mental Health Awareness Month, we're dedicating a series to understanding the mind when it struggles. I'm joined by doctors, researchers, and those with lived experience. We'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. That's actually a really good thing to focus on. So, when you got into the internet, industry, was there that sense of wonderment? I'm not even being like a shield. I'm just like, because I remember when I first used the internet in like 1997, I want to say, like a child, and being amazed by it, but even like the iPhone moment as well. But when you were getting into it in like the mid to late 90s, was there that sense of wonderment and excitement? Oh, absolutely. So there had been online services for a while. People used AOL and comp you serve and you know,

you hang out in chat rooms and you do these keywords and it would call up sort of a specific, I don't even remember what they were called, but I'd call them apps now. But the web was interesting because it was immediately accessible to everyone. Anyone could theoretically set up a website. And it was, yeah, immediately huge. And it was a little hard to separate some of the hype from legitimate excitement. But I remember in San Francisco, even in 1995, and you know, you had had wired magazines sort of sounding the bells for it for several years by that point. But in 1995, everybody was online. Everybody was getting online. And, you know, you had tons of TV commercials and everybody was talking about the World Wide Web on the evening

news. And it just, it was immediately clear that this was a new thing. And it was a new way that we were going to do a lot of stuff. Right. So, yeah, there was, there was massive excitement over it. Was there any kind of AI, sorry, I see him leading question there. Were there dissenters? Were there people other than the obvious newsweek article that everyone sends me every time you know the one i'm talking about the guy now makes weird glass things now yeah were there it was their descent there was and i think a lot of the dissent interestingly was centered around some of the same kinds of criticisms that we've heard over the last five six seven years so it wasn't that this is stupid or this isn't going to work it was um you know there are no guardrails there are

no, there's no regulation. This thing is going to run amok. It's going to, you know, how are we going to protect against fraud? How are we going to protect against people, you know, using it for crime? How are we going to protect against, you know, this kind of information that maybe shouldn't be available to everybody? So there were those kinds of questions and people were, you know, maybe we should slow down a little pit and put some guardrails and pass some laws around this thing. Most of that didn't get done. You know, the telecoms act, you know, whatever, Section 230, whatever, the big omnibus bill that that was a part of. That was an attempt to deal with some of that stuff. But it was pretty, it was pretty lenient. It was more about sort of protecting companies

from liability. But there were some, yeah, there were some, at least some thought around it. But there wasn't just people saying this won't work in the same way. Very few, very, very few. I mean, you know, I suppose you could go into the boardroom of a newspaper at the time and probably would have heard some arguments that now in retrospect sound insane. But, you know, who wants to read on a screen? That was one that you sometimes heard. People want to have a piece of paper in their hand and, you know, print is, print is the way. Nobody wants to read on a screen. Or, you know, this is just sort of a nerd toy. This is never going to. going to take off among, you know, mainstream people. There were issues with internet access. It

wasn't available everywhere, especially high speed. I mean, we were using pretty low speed modems for a very, very long time, particularly in rural parts of the country. So there was some skepticism around that, you know, and part of it, I have to be honest, is I was in my 20s at the time. So I think people at that age tend to be much more go-go about the future than perhaps old cynics as as we are now. But there wasn't any kind of, or maybe there was, you can tell me, there wasn't a kind of bifurcation between people who were like pro-internet, anti-internet in the same way. No, no, I don't remember that anyway. No, I really don't think so. Yeah, it was all hands on deck. I mean, again, like this was on TV. This was like, you know, advertisements, there were,

there were commercials, there were people on the evening news, you know, reaching, reaching mom, you know, my parents who are boomers, they were fully aware and gung ho about the web by 97 or 98. And that's, I think, that's who was investing. So, you know, one of the big differences between then and today is these companies were going public and it was really fueled in large part by retail investors. You know, wanted to buy stocks on the stock market in these new companies that represented the future. So, you know, you had doctors and and dentists and, you know, professors with a little money and people putting their retirement savings into these things. And they were the ones who probably got wiped out the most in,

you know, 2001 through 2004. Yeah, and I mean, was that before E-Trade? Was it, do you start to call a stock broker? I literally don't know how they bought stock back then,

I realize. Yeah, I think E-Trade started in the dot-com boom, if I recall, late 90s. Because I remember in England at the time, the stories about how E-Trade led to people losing tons of money. And there was a,

one thing I'll credit the press with at the time as being like, yeah, you shouldn't bet on the stock market unless you know what you're doing. Right. Yes, index funds hold forever. That's the random walk down Wall Street, the only investment strategy that works. But yeah, people were playing. You know, they saw these ridiculous returns and they wanted a piece of it. So, yeah, I think online trading was definitely a thing.

You know, you had the Yahoo chat forums. That's where people would pump and dump these penny stocks. There were all kinds of... Wait, really? There were actual pump groups back then? Oh, yeah. I mean, Yahoo! Yahoo! Chat was sort of infamous for it.

Like, you would hear about something you'd hear. It was a lot like what happened with crypto in 21, 22. You know, someone issues a new token, and everybody rushes in to buy it, and then it crash. You know, there's a rugpole, and it crashes. Like, it was, those kinds of things were happening. But Yahoo, I remember being, that was the form that I was the most familiar with back then. It was probably going on on AOL, too.

That's magical. Oh, the innocent days. It was the, I remember when I, I'm going to do the, it was a Rockefeller speech on the end of Blade Runner, the things I've seen in telegram groups about ICOs. But it's, it's kind of, it's adorable to hear that stuff happening until you remember people lost lots of money. But it doesn't feel like, it doesn't sound like, maybe it was a different media climate, like there was that kind of almost, have, there wasn't the, the noxious part of it where it was like, oh, if you don't get on the internet, you're going to be left behind, you're an idiot. Or maybe I'm wrong. Um, not so much of that, but it was, it was just presumed that, that this is the future. And if you don't want part of the,

if you don't want to be part of the future, that's fine. But, you know, why don't you go be a survivalist and live off the grid in the woods kind of. Right. It was just assumed, I mean, it's like, you know, do you watch TV? There was a time when if you said, I don't have a TV, you are very pretentious and very special. Now it seems like everybody's cutting cable. So it was sort of like that. It was just presumed that everybody was eventually going to get on board. I mean, who needs a personal computer in their home? That was a real question in the late 80s, right? Oh, PC on every desktop. Yeah, sure, Bill, whatever you say. Who wants one of these things? And then, you know, you find justifications for it. oh, well, you can, you know, you can pay your bills automatically and you can do this and that.

And suddenly when Internet Explorer was built into Windows and everybody could get online, that was the thing. Like that was, oh, of course, everybody has to have a PC and we're all going to be on the web. Surfing the web. It also feels like it was a genuine, like a lot of these things were just too early and run too crazy. Because the actual fundament of it, it sounds like was people were excited to get on the internet, which was obviously, a beneficial thing and had immediate returns. People could use it and say, this is useful in my life in this manner. Right. I think the initial thing was access to information. You could find out a lot of things very fast. And there were some communication aspects, right? You could talk to anybody anywhere

in the world pretty easily, pretty quickly. And then other things, you know, e-commerce was very early, but, you know, suddenly you don't have to go to the bookstore and ask them to order. I worked at a bookstore for a year in 1990. And, you know, it was a thing. If you don't have the book in stock, they come in and you order the book and then they come back a week later and suddenly you just press a button and the, you know, the book will come. And then they started adding music. There were a lot of, you know, again, the lack of bandwidth among a lot of consumers did sort of stall the idea of digital video. But it eventually came around in 2001 or two. That's when YouTube really took off. Real networks had streaming video in Microsoft.

Oh, real, real player. Yeah, buffering. I remember real player. We're all buffering. I interviewed Rob Glazer a couple times. You know, he had the right idea, but again, Microsoft sort of, you know, took that market pretty quickly with Windows Media Player. And then Apple came along and they kind of blew everybody else away. So, yeah, all of the ideas were there.

And I think most of what we were sort of experimenting with later became real businesses. I mean, you know, LimeWire and all the sort of music MP3 trading sites, that was later, late 90s, I guess, early 2000s. That all eventually became legitimized through Spotify and Apple Music and so on. So every idea was already there. It was just maybe it's a little bit underground. Maybe it doesn't work quite right. It's a little clunky. It's a little clugie.

Or maybe the companies were just, you know, they borrowed too much money too fast and couldn't turn it around. which feels almost entirely different to the AI bubble. Like, it's, they, Satchin and Della, on the morning of recording this, Davos was saying, yeah, the thing that might make this a speculative bubble, if nobody buys it. If nobody buys AI, no, really, he's so cool. I love that we live in this here. I'm going to read you this sentence, actually, because this really got me.

Microsoft Chief Executive Satchin Adela has warned that AI risks becoming a speculative bubble unless it uses spread beyond big tech companies and wealthy economies. For this not to be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread. He noted that a telltale sign of its above would be if only tech groups are benefiting from the rise of AI rather than the companies and other sectors. Yeah.

That's good shit. Self-evident, yes, correct. He's not wrong. A bit late, perhaps. If no one uses, also isn't it his job? But nevertheless, there was a question. I had. So something that frustrates me with this whole conversation is how flippantly people say, oh, it's a bubble, but sometimes bubbles are good. What was the aftermath like?

So this is where things get a little bit complicated because I don't think that you can really fairly separate events from other events that happen at the same time. So the... That's fine. The dot-com bubble did burst, but then you had 9-11 happen in September of 2001, sort of in the late middle of it. And that literally changed everything. It changed confidence. It changed where everybody's attention was going. You know, you had money flowing into completely different places.

Everybody got much more conservative and so forth. So I think the real effect of the dot-com bust, I mean, you had a lot of, you had a lot of, people my age, people who were in their 20s and the go-go-90s, suddenly lose their jobs or suddenly not have the great paychecks that they had become accustomed to. And you had a lot of retail traders get wiped out. You know, some people lost their life savings or a big portion of their life savings. And, you know, my attitude toward investing has always been caveat emptor. You shouldn't be betting if you can't afford it. You should put your money in an index fund and you should hold on to that until you retire. That's the safest thing to do. But, you know, some people say,

hey, I've got 10% of this of my holdings are play money and I'm just going to make some bets and see what happens. And then you've got other people who go too far with it. But what about people in tech? You know, in tech most, those skills didn't become useless, right? So the technology was always changing. If you were, you know, learning HTML and JavaScript and JavaScript and Java, programming and then you could transition into new different kinds of things. The technology continued to evolve so people who had those technical skills could continue forward and find other interesting things to do. And then, you know, honestly, after the sort of telecoms bus 2004, 2005, you had a pretty long boom. I mean, there was the financial collapse of 08 around the

housing market, but the tech industry independently was building a lot of stuff, tons of companies got started in the wake of the dot-com bust, and many of those companies are still around today. So I don't feel like people in the tech industry were permanently hurt. There was a couple years setback, and then they generally were able to learn new skills, apply what they'd already learned and go find other things, some of which turned out to be really lucrative. Right. But I think, how can I phrase this? I think that people are very flippant about the consequences of a potential bubble collapse. I think that that's really what I'm, that's where my concern is. You're talking about today. Today, yes, because people compare it to the dot com

bubble and they say, well, after the dot com bubble there was that value, which is completely correct. But yeah, again, I think, I think the other thing is about today. So the circumstances around the world are very different. You know, 92, 93, the Cold War was over. There was this peace dividend. They were turning army bases into national parks. everybody was sort of enjoying, you know, good times. There was a book called The End of History by Francis Fukuyama that sort of posited, hey, this is it. You know, we're here in this permanent utopia world. And of course, events intervened. And I think 9-11 was the big turning point there. And there's some other stuff around that time. You know, the contested election of 2000. Now contested elections are such a common thing. We don't really think about them anymore. But that was the first big one in my lifetime. Yeah. The situation today, I think you would agree, is very different. You know, we have an unprecedentedly chaotic leader in the United States who seems to be bent on ripping down old world orders that have enabled stability since World War II. I mean, if you're talking about

seizing land from a NATO ally and you're seeing Europe strike all these free trade deals with the rest of the world and so forth and so on. We could go on and on about this, but I don't, I'm not a political expert. But the background scenario is very different. And I think you could almost make a case for AI being sort of the logical outgrowth of a certain number of years of rot in the business and in the economy. And I think you've made that argument. You know, you can decide where that started. Did it start in the 80s and 90s when the U.S. started offshoring and outsourcing everything to China and other countries? Did it start after that? But it's been somewhat clear for some time that a lot of the easy sort of technological gains that we got

from the mobile revolution and from the cloud, those have mostly been gathered. Yeah, we've conquered those lands. Yeah, and there's not that much more upside. You can get a little efficiency here and a little efficiency there. Everybody kind of knows how the internet works. You know what advertising looks like, you know. So this sort of, to me, seems like it's sort of the last big push. And, you know, you have a lot of people in big bureaucratic jobs who you've written about this.

They don't really produce much day to day. They produce a lot of emails and a lot of presentations and they sit in meetings. Occasionally they got to make a yes-no decision and they got to, you know, munch some data together and say, okay, it looks wiser if we do this instead of doing that. But, you know, a lot of it is performative. And I think, you know, AI is great for that. I don't have to create the spreadsheet anymore. I don't have to create the presentation anymore.

I don't have to write the email that no one's going to read and then they don't have to read it because they can have AI summarize for them. I think it's good for that kind of good enough stuff, and there are a lot of jobs that are good enough. But I wonder if it can even do that stuff. I don't think it's all about AI. I think AI is a symptom rather than perhaps a cause. But even then, it's like, can it do presentations? Because I've never been, like, I've genuinely tried just to see if it could do it. It's never been able to do it.

I think it's an interest. Yeah. I mean, I've seen presentations created with AI that are pretty good. I think they get you a certain percentage of the way there, and then you tweak it a little bit. Okay. Yeah, it's just like, but then you kind of look at it and say, great, did we really need to spend however many hundreds of billions of dollars to get a spreadsheet maker? Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smigel and friends.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast, and for Mental Health Awareness Month, we're dedicating a series to understanding the mind when it struggles. I'm joined by doctors, researchers, and those with lived experience. We'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car, and then my car got stolen.

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And we'll talk with leading experts like Judd Brewer about anxiety and John Hirschfield about obsessive-compulsive disorder and the science of how the brain can change. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course and what we can do about it. Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I also think that people are just being flippant about the idea of a financial collapse as well. That's what's worrying me as well.

Right. But again, I think that there are a lot of potential reasons for a potential financial collapse. And AI is one of some number. I don't think it, again, the dot-com bust was not entirely attributable to ridiculous valuations. There were things going on in other parts of the world. There was a change in confidence. And I think here, again, you've got a lot of disruption and a lot of disorder and a lot of chaos. So there are many, many things that could happen.

But I agree. I think people maybe underestimate how deep this is. Then again, then again, you know, who are the big investors in this? I mean, it's mostly really large tech companies with massive, massive revenues and massive cash flow. Yeah, not really anymore, though, $178.5 billion of data center credit deals. You've got venture capital is, actually, yeah, venture capital is also half of venture capital is going into it. But the other thing that shocked me as well was back then in the dot-com boom, venture capital was so much smaller. Oh, it was tiny.

It was tiny, yeah. It was tiny. It was investment banking is where you found the money. So venture capital, though, you know, that's not their money. They're playing with somebody else's money. So who's money are they playing with? Who are the LPs? Well, we don't really know, but it's, it's personal wealth funds, it's sovereign wealth funds. You know, it's Middle Eastern and other country's sovereign wealth funds. Sure, there's teachers' pensions and there's university endowments, and there's some other things that those LPs are holding that will actually harm, you know, normal working folk. But I think a lot of it is massive, excess wealth at the top of society where people are looking for new, new kinds of returns. They're looking for outsized returns because all the easy, all the easy money is sort of already taken. So I don't know if that, I think where it hurts is when you think about, okay,

the, you know, the real estate carry on effects, all the people who are employed now and will be suddenly unemployed. Those kinds of things could really hurt. But I just, it doesn't seem to me like you have the retail trader exposure as you did during the dot-com. Boom. Yeah, okay, if there's a huge AI bust and Nvidia loses a massive portion of its value, sure, people are going to hurt who have invested in Nvidia, but they're not going to get wiped out. I don't see Nvidia disappearing. I don't see Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle. I don't see any of those companies disappearing as a result of it. And neither do I. I think the thing that people need to understand is that a wipeout isn't going to be what hurts. It's going to be a drawdown. It's going to be, because in Vidia,

88% of their revenues data center. And I even looked back for a premium I did a few weeks ago, where it was the amount of revenue that, like, Lucent or Corning or whoever had in those specific segments or how weighted they were on their customers. Like, I think Lucent's top customers were AT&T and Verizon, but those only represented 13 to 14%. And Nvidia has customers that make up 15 to 20% of their revenue each quarter. They have massive centralization around four to five customers. Their diversified revenues dropping. It's just, it isn't that Nvidia is going to die. It's that half to 80% of their revenue is going to disappear. It happened with crypto with them. And that's what I'm really worried about.

Yeah, they were never as dependent on crypto. They've tried a lot of things over the years. I mean, right, they were doing chips for self-driving. cars and all kinds of things. I do, I am not as technical as the writers on the register staff. Tobias Mann, for example, does a great job covering GPUs and data centers. It is posited that there are other potential uses for GPUs that could be very interesting in terms of high performance computing and some other things that are AI adjacent, you know, different kinds of data processing and so forth. So it may not, what we call AI, even if that, you know, those end use cases and it turn out to be, eh, you know, vibe coding, chatbots, eh, even though those aren't it.

Some of these, some of the hardware may be repurposable into other functions. I don't think it's a dead loss. But not at the scale that they're building, though. No, no. Again, I would be stunned if all of the data centers that are being promised by 2030 are actually built. But maybe, I don't know. I also just don't think that that will be happening.

I just don't see it happening. Looking through the old dot-com companies, though, I really can't find anything like OpenAI. They are truly special. They are. It's like they took a bit of global crossing, a bit of Enron, a bit of Lucent, but also a bit of pets.com,

just kind of amazed what Silicon Valley can still spute out. No, like innovations, but financial collapses like these. We've never seen one this big folks. It's massive. Yeah, there are a lot of commitments there and the valuation is massive, massive, massive. I do think their announcement last week or their acknowledgement that they're finally getting into advertising is interesting. And I know we've talked about this offline before, but when I think about all of the information that a chatbot has about a heavy user, they actually should theoretically be able to target ads at least as well as Facebook and at least as well as Google, right? So I don't know about that because Google and Facebook have very hard demographic data and very like a nuanced layer of cookies that can track.

I don't know if ever, especially as these are free users, we don't know how much actual personal data like Facebook's big advantage. was that when you registered, you gave them the demographic data they needed to target. Right. Right. I don't know how much they're collecting, but if they can still say, well, I know everything that you're interested in everything that you've been talking about for the last year, they should be able to track that back to an individual user. I don't know. I don't know the details of it. Maybe. But they've said low billions of revenue. But it is just interesting, because in any, I, maybe you know this, I, looking through the history of the computer, have never seen a point when everybody was just screaming that something that didn't work would work.

Yeah, it's, uh, wow, it's hard to, it's hard to remember something that has been, you know, this hyped. And again, I, I always lead, I always try to approach this with an open mind because I, I am, you know, older. So I tend to be more cynical with experience. But yeah, I sort of shrug and I'm like, I don't quite understand the big deal here. It doesn't seem to really do what it's supposed to do. I mean, I'm still, you know, Gemini has voiced it on me every day when I try to do Google searches. And it's nearly almost always slightly wrong, which is kind of worse than being completely wrong because it lulls you into this false sense of security.

And you're like, wait a minute, that doesn't seem wrong. Right? And then you go to the source link and it's just got it wrong. Yeah, the beginning of the Google chapter of my book that's coming out next year is I went to look for how many people, how many users Google has. And it's just me going insane as I get an AI generated answer that's generated based on two SEO articles that do not cite their sources. Right. There's a lot of that. So it's taking what all this kind of garbage data. And I mean as as an editor, I'm, I have for the last 15 years been hounding reporters who try to source stuff off the internet. I'm like, where'd you get that from? How do you know that's a reliable source?

And AI just sort of absorbs it all and presents it and la-di-da, here you go. They don't have any, you know, they don't care. They don't have any checks. It just comes from wherever. So, yeah, the one thing I would, what you were saying about, never seen sort of this much type, I do remember before the segue came out. and people were saying, I can't remember who if it was Steve Jobs or somebody, but somebody was saying, this is going to revolutionize transportation and change cities.

And we were like, whoa, what could this thing be? And then it was the segue. Maybe not. But that was one very small, isolated thing. I don't, yeah, I don't recall sort of large scale where everybody in the industry was saying, this is going to revolutionize everything. And end users were kind of going, I don't know. Is it?

Yeah. how many times a day, co-pilot comes up on my Windows PC and I dismiss it immediately because I didn't really want it to show up. It just sort of pops up. I hit a key combo too fast. I'm like, thanks. Nah, I'm good. I keep thinking about the thing you said, though. It's like the conditions are different, but at the same time, it's not like we're in a new frontier of new ideas where everybody has something new that might work. It's it almost feels like the end of something. It feels, like the dot-com bubble was created by the excitement about a beginning rather than this is people trying to pretend that something's happening and that we're not at the end of an era,

I should say. I don't think we're at the end of society. Yeah, I mean, I think we are probably seeing probably the beginning of new pretty major global shifts in power and, you know, some of the guiding societal philosophies that guide that will change. And yeah, there's a lot of different things going on right now. You know, I started a climate section at CNBC and was very deeply entrenched in climate tech and some of the climate politics and things around that. And you talk to the green-pilled folks and they think, you know, 80 years from now, we're all doomed. So do I believe that? No, not necessarily. But I do feel like things are changing pretty rapidly and pretty dramatically on a lot of different fronts. And AI is just kind of this, hey, let's keep this playbook running.

Yeah, let's keep doing, that's really it. It's like keeping, let's keep doing what we've done the whole time. During the dot-com bubble, people were trying new shit. It was, it goes all the way back to semiconductors. I mean, this, this tech boom has been going on since the, since the 1960s, really, in different waves, but it's been going on and on and on. I mean, I do think like when Bill Gates said a computer on every desktop, whenever that was in the 80s, that was nuts. And then it was a computer on every desk and in every home. And that was even more nuts. But it happened. So, you know, I think that it's been, I don't want to say easy, but it's been running so well for so long that I think everybody just kind of wants it to keep running. And I'm not, I don't know, I'm not, I'm with you. I'm not seeing it yet. I'm not seeing a ton of day to day excitement. I mean, I mean, you know, you look at the teenage demographic. That's kind of who I always go to. And my son is 15. And he's very cynical. about, like he jokes about obvious AI writing. And like they make fun of phrases and terms that are so AI. And he'll see a, you know, a poster and advertisement. He's like, ha, that's so AI. And it's, it's something that you scoff at and make. Oh, they're fuck. No, okay. AI is fuck then. I'm sorry.

If you've got teenagers who are like making fun of calling bad stuff AI, right. I don't, I'm actually serious. That is legitimately lethal. Teenagers. Young people. I'm 39 years old now. Like I was, I've never been cooler a year of my life. But I know that when if, because that's interesting. Because you read a lot of things that people try and say, well, young people love AI. Not be my experience either. I don't. Young people love TikTok. Young people love Instagram reels. You know, they're on, they're on vertical. They're scrolling vertical video all day and, and company. I don't even want to. I don't even want. to say they love, you know, snap or any social media because it's all, you know, it's all text changed, right? It's all, you just got your, your different text strings. Like, there's a lot of stuff that they love. Um, games, huge online games, you know, participatory games. Um, but yeah, I don't see them hanging out all day with their chat bot. You know, once in a while, if you have something you really want to, you're curious and you want to experiment with something, it'll prototype something

quite quickly for you. And I think people do that sometimes and find it useful. It's like, okay, this is a prototype. This is cool. This would have taken me six hours of ground work to generate. Thanks for doing that for me. So there are some, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to slam and say it's totally useless in all scenarios because it's not. It's a, it's just a sort of an extension of a computer. It's just a better computer. It's just a better computer. Sometimes. But sometimes it's a better. That's the other thing. It's like, I have this growing theory about AI psychosis being far more common than people think because I think that there is something that happens when people use a large language model and what they extrapolate from there that make some people do insane things like,

I don't know, buy $200 billion worth of data centers and GPUs. And on one hand, you might argue, oh, that's just business idiots being business idiots. No, I think Satchin Adela and Sundar Pishai used an LM and went, holy shit, I need to do this. I mean, I got told once, that Satchanadella's whole reason that he started this facade was because he saw chat GPD and wanted it in Bing. I think that there is that everyone is experiencing micro versions of Kevin Ruse's chat GPD told me to leave my wife thing. It's just, what do you believe AI will do next? Like, what do you think it will do? And what do you believe will happen if you don't use it today?

And it's just very bizarre. So that was more of a point than a question. I should be clear. But how many people are subject to that? I don't think it's a huge number. Yeah. To some degree, the folks who are, you know, the Sachin and Delas of the world are, should I say somewhat insulated from the trials and tribulations that most of us experience. They're insulated from their money. And if you are someone like Sam Altman or Elon Musk who is surrounded by a cadre of people who always say yes to everything you suggest and, you know, are constantly saying you are a genius. You're a genius, man. You're a genius. I think, you know, some of these chatbots almost duplicate that mentality. Like, it's like, yeah, I want someone to tell me that whatever I'm doing, I am great and I am special, and I have inside knowledge that nobody else has. That's a nice thing. But that is, but that's kind of what I'm getting at.

Yeah. That using a large language model convinces some people that they are in the future and creates this kind of religious feeling around it. I don't know. I need to explore this. idea more. I've just never, I've seen it in like game FAQs when people would argue between PlayStation and Nintendo and Xbox. I've seen, but not like that, you don't have people just saying the Xbox can do things it can't. But it's part of what we're seeing. I think that feeling it's pervasive in our society right now, regardless. We have this sort of strong current of anti-expert, right? The people who studied this for years or no, smarter than me. I'm really smart because I have my own special knowledge and nobody else has it. And I'm going to tell you the secret that I've learned that's, you know, really important.

I think that whatever, if you want to call it psychosis or that narcissism, that comes out of 15 years of social media. Like that's, I am old enough to remember. In fact, Facebook didn't come out until I was already an adult and had a child. I mean, Facebook didn't really become mainstream until I had a two-year-old kid. So I'm old. And I remember how sort of society changed and how people interacting with one another changed dramatically as social media became popular. And it was much more about you're on stage all the time and look at my life and your life is better than my life. I mean, there's some of that. That's always been around, but it just wasn't so easy to indulge that side of oneself pre-social media. So I think, you know, again, everything that was set in the past just,

continues along its way. Like, I think, again, I don't think AI is necessarily, you know, the one thing that is different. It's a natural outgrowth of a lot of different trends that have been happening for a long time. Yeah. I mean, I keep thinking, a long-term Joker makers posting, it's the beginning of history with a big smiley face. Because I actually worry that that's what, like, it's not that everything's coming to an end. It's that one era is ending in another. is beginning aggressively and loudly. It's the dawning of the age of Aquarius. All right.

I think that's a great place to end it. Matt Roseph, editor-in-chief of the Register. Thank you so much for joining me. All right. Thank you, and a lot of fun. Thank you everyone to listening. I'm not going to edit that out. You'll have a monologue this week as well.

Maybe I'll chuck you an extra one if I'm feeling generous. Thanks everyone for stomaking the four part of last week. And yeah, catch you soon. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattisowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-S-K-I.com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com

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