Behind the Bastards Presents: Better Offline

special format with fewer ads. So today you're going to hear some episodes of Better Offline, ed Zytron's excellent critical tech industry podcast, which has taken the tech world by storm. And I'm excited for you to learn about the man who killed Google Search, about Sam Altman, the CEO of Open Ai, and why he's dangerous for society, and what ed Zitron calls the rot economy.

would end the quarter significantly behind in metrics. That kind of unclear for those unfamiliar with Google's internal kind of scientology esque jargon, which means most people, let me explain, a code yellow isn't a terrible need to piss or

some sort of crisis of moderate severity. The yellow, according to Stephen Levy's Tell All book about Google, refers to and I promise this is not a joke, the color of a tank top that a former VP of Engineering called Wayne Rosling used to wear during his time at the company. It's essentially the equivalent of deafcom one and activates, as Levy explained, a war room like situation where workers are pulled from their desks and into a conference room

where they tackle the problem as a top priority. Any other projects or concerns are sidelined and independently. I've heard there are other colors like purple. I'm not going to get into that, though, it's quite boring and irrelevant to this situation. In emails released as part of the Department of Justices antitrust case against Google, as I previously mentioned,

Dishla laid out several contributing factors. Search query growth was significantly behind forecast, the timing of revenue launches was significantly behind, and he had this vague worry that several advertiser specific and sector weaknesses existed in search. Now I want to cover something because I've messed up, and I've really want.

enough eggs. Gomes, a Googler of nineteen years that basically built the foundation of modern search engines, should go down as one of the few people in tech that actually fought for an actual principle, and he was destroyed by a guy called Prabaka Ragavan, a computer scientist class traitor that sided with the management consultancy sect. More confusingly, one of their problems was that there was insufficient growth in queries, as in the amount of things that people were asking Google.

It's a bit like if Ford decided that things were going poorly because their drivers weren't putting enough goddamn miles on their truck. This whole story has personally upset me, and I think you're going to hear that in this but going through these emails is.

To be clear, this email was in response to Thaker stating that there is nothing that the search team could do to operate at the fidelity of growth that the Ads department had demanded. Shashi forward did the email to Gomes asking if there's any way to discuss this with san Dar Pashai, Google CEO, and declared that there was no way he would sign up for a high fidelity

business metric for daily active users on search. Thakkh also said something that I've been thinking about constantly since I read these emails, that there was a good reason that Google's founders separated search from ads. I want you to remember that line for later. A day later, on February second, twenty nineteen, Thacker and Gomes shared their anxieties with Nick Fox, a vice president of Search and Google assistant, entering a multiple day long debate about Google's some lust for growth.

to and I quote, abandoned work on efficient journeys. In one email, Fox adds that there was a pretty big disconnect between what finance and ads wants and what Search was doing. Every part of this story pisses me off so much. When Gomes pushed back on the multiple requests for growth, Fox added that all three of them were responsible for Search and that Search was and again I quote the revenue engine of the company, and that bartering with the ads and finance teams was now potentially the

new reality of their jobs. On February sixth, twenty nineteen, Gomes said that he believed that Search was getting too close to the money and ended his email by saying that he was concerned that growth is all that Google was thinking about. On March twenty second, twenty nineteen, Google VP of Product Management Darshan Cantac would declare the end

of the Code Yellow. The thread mostly consisted of congratulatory emails until Gomes made the mistake of responding congratulating everyone, saying that the plans architected as part of the Code Yellow would do well throughout the year, enter probaka Ragavan, then Google's head of Ads and the true mastermind behind the code yellow, who would respond curtly saying that the current revenue targets were addressed by heroic RPM engineering and

that the core query softness continued without mitigation, a very clunky way of saying that despite these changes, query growth was not happening at the rate he needed it to. A day later, Gomes emailed Fox Andhaker an email he intended to center Ragavan. He led by saying that he was annoyed both personally and on behalf of the search team.

In this very long email, he explained in arduous detail how one might increase engagement with Google Search, but specifically added that they could increase queries quite easily in the short term, but only in user negative ways, like turning off spell correction or ranking improvements, or placing refinements effectively labels all over the page, adding that it was possible that there are trade offs here between the different kinds of user negativity caused by engagement hacking, and that he

was deeply, deeply uncomfortable with this. He also added that this was the reason he didn't believe that queries, as in the amount of the things with people searching on Google, were a good metric to measure search, and that the best defense against the weaknesses of queries was to create compelling user experiences that make users want to come back.

so forth. But they do a lot of them. The one that's really interesting and a little bastard and I went and looked through pretty much the last decade of these. The one that stood out to me was the March twenty nineteen Core update to Search, which happened about a week before the end of the code yellow, meaning that it's very likely that this was a result of Prabaker's blome shit. So This was expected to be one of the largest updates to search in a very long time,

and I'm quoting Search Engine Journal there. Yet when it launched, many found that the update mostly rolled back changes and traffic was increasing to sites that had been suppressed by previous updates, like Google Search's Penguin update from twenty twelve that specifically targeted spami search results.

A few months later, in May twenty nineteen, Google would roll out a redesign of how ads we shown on Google Search, specifically on mobile, replacing the bright green ad label and URL color on ads with a tiny, little, bolded black note that said ad in the smallest font you could possibly put there, with the link looking otherwise identical to a regular search link. I guess that's how they managed to start hating their numbers.

SVP of Education at Google. Domes, who was a critical part of the original team that made Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing the culture of the world's largest and most important search engine, was chased out by a growth hungry managerial type several of them, actually led by Probagar Ragavan, a management consultant wearing an engineer costume. As a side note, by the way, I use the

term management consultant there as a pejorative. While he exhibits all the same bean counting morally young guided behaviors of a management consultant. From what I can tell, Ragavan has never actually worked in that particular sector of the economy.

oxy content, an extremely addictive painkiller. McKinsey has paid nearly one billion dollars over several settlements due to its work with Perdue. But I'm getting sidetracked, but one last point. McKinsey is actively anti labor. When a company brings in a McKinsey consultant, they're often there to advise on how to cut costs, which inevitably means layoffs and outsourcing. McKinsey is to the middle class what fleshy in bacteria.

be able to see a newslet that has links to them. Well, these emails tell a dramatic story about how Google's finance and advertising teams, led by Ragavan, with the blessing of CEO Sandhar Pashai, the McKinsey guy, actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money. This is exactly what I mean when I talk about the economy, an illogical, product destroying mindset that turns products you love into torturous, frustrating, quasi tools that require you to fight

the company to get the thing you want. Ben Gomes was instrumental in making search work both as a product

and a business. He joined the company in nineteen ninety nine, a time long before Google established dominance in the field, and the same year when Larry Page and Serge Britain tried to sell the company to Excite for one million dollars, only to walk away after Vinnard Coosler and Excite investor and co founder of some Microsystems that's now a VC who tried to stop people going to a beach in Half Moon Bay, Well, he tried to low ball them

with a seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars offer, also known as a one hundred square foot apartment in San Francisco. In an interview with Fast Companies Harry mc crack him from twenty eighteen, Gomes frayed Google's challenge as taking the page erank algorithm from one machine to a whole bunch of machines and they weren't very good machines at the time.

Despite his impact and tenure, Gomes had only been made head of Search in the middle of twenty eighteen after John Gianderia moved to Apple to work on its machine learning in AR strategy.

Do you want to know what his job was? His job before Google, He was the head of search for god damn Yahoo from two thousand and five through two thy and twelve when he joined the company. When Probakar Ragavan took over Yahoo Search, they held a thirty point four percent market share, not far from Google's own thirty six point nine percent, and miles ahead of the fifteen

point seven percent that Microsoft's MSN Search had. By May twenty twelve, Yahoo was down to just thirteen point four percent and had shrunk for the previous nine consecutive months and was being beaten by even the newly released Bing. That same year, Yahoo had the largest layoffs in its corporate history, shedding two thousand employees, or fourteen percent of

its overall work. For the man who deposed Ben Gomes, someone who worked on Google Search from its very beginnings, was so shit at his job that in two thousand and nine, Yahoo effectively threw in the towel on its own search tech, instead choosing to license Being's engine in

a ten year deal. If we take a long view of things, this likely precipitated the overall decline of the company, which went from being worth one hundred and twenty five billion dollars at the peak of the dot com boom to being sold to Verizon for four point eight billion dollars in twenty seventeen, which is roughly a three thousand

square foot apartment in San Francisco. With Search no longer a priority in making less money for the company, Yahoo decided to pivot into web two point zero and original content making sum beats that paid off, but far far too many that did not. It spent one point one billion dollars on Tumblr in twenty thirteen, only for Verizon to sell it for just three million dollars in twenty nineteen.

It put Zimbra in two thousand and seven, ostensibly to complete with the new Google Apps productivity, only to sell it for a reported fraction of the original purchase price to VMware a few years later. That's not his fault, but nevertheless, Yahoo was a company without a mission, a purpose, or an objective. Nobody, and I'll speculate even those leading the company really knew what it was or what it did. Anyway, just a big shout out right now to Kura Swisher,

who referred to Prabaka as well respected. When he moved from Yahoo to Google. He absolutely nailed at Kara bang up job. In an interview with zdnets Dan Farber from two thousand and five, Ragavan spoke of his intent to align the commercial incentives of a billion content providers with social good intent while at Yahoo, and his eagerness to

inspire the audience to give more data. What anyway before that, it's It's actually hard to find out exactly what Ragavan did, though according to zd net, he spent fourteen years doing search and data mining research ibm M. In April twenty eleven, The Guardian ran an interview with Ragavan that called him Yahoo's secret weapon, describing his plan to make rigorous scientific research and practice to inform Yahoo's business from email to advertising,

and how under then CEO Carol Bart's the focus had shifted to the direct development of new products. It speaks of Ragavan's scientific approach and his steady process based logic to innovation that is very different to the common perception the ideas and development are more about luck and spontaneity. A sentence that I'm only reading to you because I really need you to hear how stupid it sounds and

how specious some of the tech press used to be. Frankly, this entire article is ridiculous, so utterly vacuous that I'm actually astonished. I don't want to name the reporter. I feel bad. What about Ragavan's career made this feel right? How has nobody connected these thoughts before? I have a day job. I run a PR firm. I am a blogger with a podcast, and I'm the one who said, yeah, okay, drag Killer is now the CEO of the blood Bank. Nobody saw this. Nobody saw this at the time. I

just feel a bit crazy. I feel a bit crazy. But to be clear, this was something written several years after Yahoo had licensed its search technology to Microsoft in a financial deal that the next CEO, Marissa Maya, who replaced Barts, was still angry about for years. Ragavan's reign as what zd net referred to as the search Master was one so successful that it ended up being replaced by a search engine that not a single person in

the world enjoys saying out loud. The Guardian article ran exactly one year before dramatic layoffs at Yahoo that involved firing entire divisions worth of people, and four months before Carol Barts would be fired by telephone by then chairman Roy Bostock. Her replacement, Scott Thompson, who previously served as president of PayPal, would last a whole five months in the role before he was replaced by former Google executive a Mayor, in part because it emerged he lied on

his resume about having a computer science degree. Hey brabaka, did you not notice that anyway, whatever Barts joined Yahoo in two thousand and nine, so about four years into Braba Kha's bign of terror, I guess, and she joined in the aftermath of its previous CEO, Jerry Yang, refusing to sell the company to Microsoft for forty five billion dollars.

In her first year, she laid off hundreds of people and struck a deal that I've mentioned before to power Yahoo Search using Microsoft's being search engine tech, with Microsoft paying Yahoo eighty eight percent of the revenue it gained from searches, a deal that made Ya who are couple hundred million dollars for handing over the keys and the

tech to its most high traffic platform. As I previously stated, when Brabakar Ragavan, Yahoo's secret weapon was doing his work, Yahoo's search was so valuable that it was replaced by Bing its sole value. In fact, I mean, maybe I'm being a little unfair.

company as a move from research to management. While Levy calls him a world class computer scientist who has authored definitive text in the field, which is true, he also describes Ragavan as choosing a management track which definitely tracks

with everything I found out about him. Ragavan proudly declares that Google's third party adtech plays a critical role in keeping journalism alive and a really shitty answer to a question that was also made at a time when he was in aggressively incentivizing search engine optimized content and a year after he'd deposed someone who actually gave a shit about search. Under Ragavan, Google has become less reliable, and it's dominated by search engine optimization and just outright spam.

to do, especially as we go into an election. Ragavan and his cronies worked to oust Ben Gomes, a man who dedicated a good portion of his life to making the world's information more accessible, in the process burning the Library of Alexandria to the goddamn ground so that Sundar Peshai could make more than two hundred million dollars a year, and Ragavan, a manager high by Sundar Peshai, a former McKinsey man. The King of Managers, is an example of

everything wrong with the tech industry. Despite his history as a true computer scientist with actual academic credentials. Ragavan chose to bulldoze actual workers, people who did things, and people that care about technology and replace them with horrifying toadies that would make Google more profitable and less useful. Since Prabakar took the reigns of Google in twenty twenty, Google

search has dramatically declined. With these core search updates are mentioned, allegedly made to improve the quality of results, having the adverse effect increasing the prevalence of spammy shitty search optimized content. It's frustrating. The anger you hear in my voice. The emotion is because I've read all of these antitrust emails. I have gone through this guy's history, and I've read

all the things about Ben Gomes too. Every article about Ben Gomes where they interviewed, is this guy just having these dreamy thoughts about the future of information and the complexity of delivering it at high speed. Every interview with Ragavan is some vague bullshit about how important data is.

It's so goddamn offensive to me, and all of this stuff happening is just one example of what I think are probably hundreds of things happening across startups or that have happened across startups in the last ten or fifteen years and big tech two. And it's because the people running the tech industry are no longer those who built him.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin left Google in December twenty nineteen, the same year, by the way as the Code Yellow thing, and while they remained as controlling shareholders, they clearly don't give a shit about what Google means anymore. Probakar Ragavan is a manager, and his career, from what I can tell, is mostly made up of did some stuff at IBM, failed to make Yahoo anything of no, and fucked up Google so badly that every news outlet has run a

story about how bad it is. This this is the result of taking technology out of the hands of real builders and handing it to managers at a time when management is synonymous with staying as far away from actual work as possible. When you're a do nothing looking to profit as much as possible, who doesn't use tech, who doesn't care about tech, and you only care about growth, well, you're not a user.

about the managers you've had. I've written a lot about management, and specifically to do with remote work and the whole thing around guys who don't do work, who are barely in the office telling you you need to be in the office. This problem is everywhere. Managers are everywhere, and managers aren't doing work. I'm sure someone will email me now and say, well, I'm a manager and off I'll do work.

Managers have become poisonous because managers are not actually held to any kind of standard. No, only the workers who do the work are What happened to Ben Gomes is one of the most disgusting, disgraceful things to happen in the tech industry. It's an absolute joke. Ben Gomes was a goddamn hero. And I really need you to read the newsletter and read these emails. I need you to see how many times him and thaka Great Guy as

well were saying, hey, growth is bad for searching. Thing that Ben Gomes was being asked to do was increase queries on Google. The literal amount that people search. There are many ways of looking at that and thinking, oh shit, that's not what you want. Surely you don't want no queries. You don't want people not using it at all. But queries going upwards linearly suggests that if you're not magic good to use the growth, at least the people are not getting what they want on the first.

but the pattern around on the core search updates. The fact that Google Search started getting worse toward the middle and end of twenty nineteen and unquestionably dipped in twenty twenty. Well that's when Prabaka took over that's when the big Man took the reins. That's when drack Killer got his job at the blood bank. And this is the thing. There's very little that you and I can actually do

about this. But what we can do is say names like Probakar Ragavan a great deal of times so that people like this can be known, so that the actions of these scurrilous assholes can be seen and heard and pointed at and spat upon. I'm not suggesting spitting on anyone, No violent acts. No can be pissy on the internet like the rest of us. Now I'm ranting. I realize i'm ranting, but this subject really really got to me.

But it's not the only one. In the next episode, I'm going to conclude this sordid three part fiasco with a few more examples, and how many of these managers, these bean counters, devoid of imagination or ability or anything of note save for that.

the Better Offline theme song is Mattosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattasowski dot com, m A T T O s O W s ki dot com. You can email me at easy at better offline dot com or check out better offline dot com to find my newsletter and more links to this podcast. Thank you so much for listening.

Yet things are beginning to fall apart as years of half baked ideas and terrible, terrible product decisions have kind of made society sour on the tech industry, and the last month has been particularly difficult for Sam, starting with the chaos cause by open ai blatantly mimicking Scarlet Johansson's voice for the new version of chat GBT, followed by the resignation of researchers who claimed the open ai prioritized

and I quote shiny products over AI safety. After the dissolution of open AI's safety team, I know, it's just

it's almost cliche. Shortly thereafter, former open ai bos bard member Helen Toner revealed that Sam Altman was fired from an open Ai because of a regular pattern of deception, one where Aortman would give inaccurate info about the company's safety processes on multiple occasions, and his deceat was so severe that open aye's board only found out about the launch of chet GPT, which, by the way, is open Ayes first product that really made money, arguably the biggest

product in tech. Do you wont know how they found out about it, Well, they found out when they were browsing Twitter. They found out then, not from the CEO of open Ai, the company which they were the.

As a reminder, by the way, the Board's seeded in firing Sam Altman in November last year, but not for long, with Ortmand returning as CEO a few days later, kicking Helen Toner off of the board along with Ilia Sudskava, a technical co founder that Altman manipulated long enough to build chat GBT and announced it him the moment that he chose to complain Sidskava, by the way, has resigned now. He's also one of the biggest technical minds there. It's

so how is open are going to continue anyway? Last week, a group of insiders at various AI companies published an open letter asking for their overlords, for the heads of these companies, for the right to warn about advanced artificial intelligence in a monument genuinely impressive monument to the bullshit machine that Sam Altman has created. While there are genuine safety concerns with AI, there really are, there are many

of them to consider. These people are desperately afraid of the computer coming alive and killing them when they should fear the non technical asshole manipulator getting rich making egregious promises about what AI can do. Airis you have to live up to Sam Altman's promises. Sam Alton doesn't. This is not your friend. The problem is not the boogeyman

computer coming alive. That's not happening man. What's happening is this guy is leading your industry to ruin, and the bigger concern that they should have should be about what Leo Ashenbrenner, a former safety researcher Open ai, had to say on the Duaquesh Ptel podcast, where he claimed that security processes of open ai were and I quote egregiously insufficient and that the priorities that the company were focused

on growth over stability of security. These people are afraid of open AI potentially creating a computer that can think for itself that will come and kill them at a time where they should be far more concerned about this manipulative con artist that's running open AI. Sam Altman is dangerous to artificial intelligence. Not because he's building artificial general intelligence, which is a kind of AI that meets or surpasses human cove capabilities by the way, kind of like data

from Star Trek. They're afraid of that happening when they should be afraid of Aortmand's focus. What does Sam Moortman care about? Because the only thing I can find reading about what Sam Mortman cares about is Sam bloody Aortman. And right now the progress attached to Sam Mortman actually

isn't looking that great. Open AI's growth is stalling, with Alex Cantruwitz reporting that user growth has effectively come to a halt based on a recent release claiming that chat gpt had one hundred million users a couple of weeks ago, which is, by the way, the exact same number that the company claimed chat gpt had in November twenty twenty three. Chat gpt is also a goddamn expensive product to operate with the company burning through capital at this insane rate.

It's definitely more than seven hundred thousand dollars a day. It's got to be in the millions if not. What it's insane and what open ai is aggressively monetizing chat GPT, both the customers and to businesses. It's so old, fiercely far from crossing the break even rubicon. They keep leaking and they'll claim, oh, I didn't put that out there. They keep telling people, oh, it's making billions of revenue,

but they never say profit. And eventually someone's going to turn to them and say, hey, man, you can't just do this for free or for negative. At some point, Sacha Nadella is going to call Sam Ortman and say, Sammy, Sammy, it's time, Sammy.

Sacha Nadellas, a Sun dapashies. They're all desperate to connect themselves with future and with generative AI and those that he's selling to the company's brokering deals. Yes, even Apple, they're desperate to connect their companies to another company which is building a bubble, a bubble inflated by Sam Altman.

mind at these companies, they might walk away. And I'm not going to give Tim Cook much credit, but looking into it, I can't find any evidence that Apple is buying a bunch of GPUs, the things that you use to power these generative AI models. I found some researcher and analysts suggesting that they would buy a lot. But now open Ai is doing a deal with Apple to power the next iOS, and it's interesting. It is interesting that Apple isn't doing this themselves. Apple a company with

hundreds of billions of dollars in the bank. I believe that pretty much prints money. That alone makes me think it's a bubble. Now, it might look like an asshole if it comes out they have. But also, why are they subcontracting this to open ai when they could build it themselves, as Apple has always done. Very strange, It's all so peculiar. But I wanted to get a little

bit deeper into the Sam Almonds story. And as I discussed last episode, Ellen Hewett of Bloomberg she's been doing this excellent reporting on the man and joins me today to talk about the subject of a recent podcast, Sam Almond's Rise to Power. So tell me a little bit about the show you're working on.

But in doing so, we really tried to do a character study of Sam Altman, like he's a very important person in the tech industry right now, with a lot of power, and we really wanted to ask ourselves a question and to help listeners ask themselves a question. Should

we trust him? Should we trust this person who is currently in a position of a lot of influence and about whom there have been very serious, you know, allegations and questions raised about, you know, to put it in the words of the opening eyeboard, his not consistently candid behavior. And I think it's, you know, my hope is that we give listeners a chance to hear kind of the whole story. And it's like broader you know, when there's news that's happening, it can happen so quickly it's hard

to get a step back. And I think what the show really does is it collects a lot of information in one place, and we also have lots of new information that you won't hear anywhere else, and interviews with people who you know have worked with Sam, who knew him when he was younger. We have an interview with Sam's sister Annie, from whom he is estranged, and there's a lot of material in there. I think that tries to get closer to this answer of like, what should

we make of this person? How should we think about checks and balances of power when we have these companies that are, by all appearances, gathering a lot of power and there for the people who are running them have

a lot of power as well. So we have it's a five episode arc, five episode season, and the first three episodes are out now to the general public and the last two will come out on subsequent Thursdays, And if you would like to binge the whole season right away, the episodes are available early to Bloomberg dot com subscribers.

You know, he's been in the valley for you know, since two thousand and five, I think is when he started college two thousand and four, two thousand and five at Stanford. Then he dropped out, and then he joined y Combinator, the now famous startup accelerator. But he was actually part of the first cohort of founders ever in in YC.

with already established people in the valley. The most important one is Paul Graham, who is the you know, one of the founders of y Combinator and you know basically like immediately took Sam under his wing when Sam joined this first batch of YC. And yeah, Paul's a really

important mentor to Sam. He's kind of the first person who really sees in Sam this you know, ambition, this hunger for power, this like drive to really build bigger and bigger companies, even when you know, they met when Sam Altman was nineteen, so Paul like sees him as

a teenager and sees this future potential. And so yes, you know, not only did Paul become a mentor to him and sort of helped build Sam's profile over those early years because he would you know, Paul Graham is very famous for writing these essays about how to build startups and how to build the best startups, and if you're at all interested in building startups, you've read many of them. They're kind of like almost like a startup bible, and in many of them. He extols the virtues of

Sam Altman. He talks about Sam's ambition, He talks about Sam's cunning, his ability to like you know, make deals and like think big and.

unique insight into Sam, like they were close. They in many ways I'm sure still are. But it is this interesting role where you know, Paul met Sam when he really didn't have much to his name, and he really elevated him early on through his writings as this like startup founder to emulate right, that other founders should be emulating Sam. And then of course, as Sam progresses in the Valley, he also starts to write these like startup

Wisdom essays in a similar style to Paul. And then, of course, the most important thing that happens is that in twenty fourteen, when Paul decides he no longer wants to run hy Combinator, which at this point is a much bigger vehicle than it was when Sam first started. It has no longer just a few stops totally. It has produced Stripe, Dropbox, Airbnb. This is a big job,

right like running y Combinator. And when Paul wants to hand it off to someone, you know, he has said that the only person he considered giving this to was Sam. So in twenty fourteen, when Sam is I believe twenty eight years old, he becomes the president of y Combinator, and this is you know, he had started a startup, it didn't really work, he sold it and was starting to tabble in angel investing. And at that point Paul

really elevated Sam to this new position of power. And then he ran YC for a while and then started open Ai. And in starting open Ai, he also leveraged these like very useful connetions with particularly powerful people who could help him, such as Elon Musk, who was able to give the vast majority of the pledged funding to start open Ai. Later, when Elon Musk splits from open Ai, Sam makes his very powerful partnership with Satya Nadella to

help fund open Ai. Another important partnership that Sam has made, you know, much earlier on was his friendship with Peter Teel. And one of the things Peter Teal does is also, you know, gives him millions of dollars to start investing. This is like before Sam takes over at White Yeah. And you know another thing that Paul did that really Paul Graham did that really helped Sam was also he gave Paul had the opportunity to be one of the

first investors in Stripe. He was offered the chance to invest thirty thousand dollars for four percent of Stripe, which, of course now that Stripe is enormous, we all know how valuable that was, and Paul split it with Sam. He was like, oh, I might as well this with Sam. So Sam has said that that fifteen thousand dollars for a two percent of Stripe has been you know, one of his best performing Angel investments.

accounts and by other lists, a billionaire. And this money comes from you know, not from open Ai, but from these angel investments that he's made early on that have been enormously successful.

you know, the topics totally. Even before he took over I y comminator, I think he was extremely well connected. He's very social, he's very helpful, he's very efficient, Like many people have told me stories in which he you know, calling Sam and talking for five minutes has solved their problem because he knows exactly the right person to call to fix it, or you know, he's really good at

making deals. I think it's just clear he's extremely well integrated into this world and has very successfully moved up the Silicon Valley status ladder to the point where he is now, which is kind of you know, one of the you know, he's the CEO of the one of the arguably hardest companies in the valley right now. And I think that that's not luck right, Like he didn't just come up with He's not like a nobody who

came up with an idea. It's like he has the connections and has parlayed his connections into power to bring him to the point he is now.

one point, not so much recently. Yeah, it just it feels weird that this completely non technical, semi non technical guy has ascended so far.

out the best way to get something to happen. You know, one of the people I spoke to is someone who knows Sam from when he was younger and knows him personally, and said that his superpower is figuring out who's in charge or figuring out who is in the best position to help him, and then charming them so that they help him with whatever goal he's trying to get done.

And I think that, like, yeah, one could argue that that's actually a really good skill set if you want to build a very big company, which you know, I think at this current moment he has, right like opening eyes really, you know, you can there's a lot that you can say about whether they're upholding their digital mission or that. You know, that's up for debate, but I think that they've obviously been commercially successful so far, so.

drop in future weeks. But you know, I would say in in in some of the conversations that I've had off the record about people about in some of the conversations I've had off the record with people about Sam, I think, you know, my general impressions are people often do find him impressive in terms of what he has gotten done, you know, the size and scale of his ambitions, and the way that he has generally been able to

make that happen. I think there's also a lot of people who you know, are willing to privately share some gripes that they might have about him. Also, you know, in recent weeks, we've seen people be a lot more public about some of those gripes. We have Helen Toner, a former former board member at open AI who voted to remove Sam last November, saying publicly in the last few weeks that Sam lied to her and the other former board members that his you know, misdirection made them

feel like they couldn't do their jobs. And she has also said that people were intimidated to the point where they did not feel comfortable speaking more publicly about negative experiences they'd had about Sam, that they are afraid to speak more publicly about you know, times that he has been honest with them or you know, has in which

they've had challenging experiences. And that has also been reflected in some of the private conversations I've had in which people, you know, they might have complaints or they might have had like challenging situations with him, and I think they just feel like the risk calculus is not worth it to come out and say something like that. But you know, there have been bits and pieces where people have come

out and said things that you know, Sam has. You know, another thing that the board members have said was that Sam had been deceptive and manipulative, and that's also followed up by or not followed up. There was also, I think back in November, a former Open Eye employee who had tweeted something publicly about that, you know, saying that Sam had lied to him on occasion, even though he had also always been nice to him, which I think is a very interesting combination of.

in recent weeks about what happened. I think, you know, people were obviously asking this question six months ago, and so I think like there's been a little bit of a delay and trying to get this this answer, and I wonder if maybe there just isn't like a very neat answer to it, and so and then in that absence we get this kind of more of a like murky, multifaceted,

multi voiced answer. But I, yes, I agree that it is sort of surprising that there that there hasn't been more clarification on what exactly happened or a little bit more granular detail about what led up to it.

like extreme projections about AI. And in the industry you see both positive ones and negative ones, and I think, you know, the negative ones, that's what looks like AI dooomerism, AI existential risks, sometimes called AI safety depending on your point of view. But you know, it's these projections that you know, superintelligence might very quickly and very soon learned to self improve in a way that allows it to rapidly outstrip our control and our capabilities and could lead

to the extinction of humanity. There are so many interesting things to say about the psychology of believing that our human race might either be wiped out or incredibly changed within our lifetimes, and we get into that in episode three.

I think I really wanted to get into the psychology of someone who believes that AI doom is just around the corner, and so we talked to someone who sort of became convinced of this belief soon after the twenty sixteen Alpha Go matches in which the go playing AI beat the the world's champion in Go, and he talks about yeah, no longer, you know, deciding not to make a retirement account because he was like, what is the point by the time I reach retirement age, either the

world will be dramatically different and money won't matter, or will all be dead. And I think that, even though some people might scoff at that, that's like a real belief that people believe that this, you know, these extreme possible scenarios are in our near future. And on the other hand, we also see extreme projections in a positive direction. You know, this idea that AI is going to unlock a whole new era of human flourishing, that we might expand beyond our planet, that we might be able to

give say what abundance abundance, right exactly. You know, one of the things we do I believe in episode three is is do a little bit of a supercut of Sam all been talking about abundance. It's it's pretty clear that this is a way that he likes to frame our AI future is going to be this future in which everyone has plenty, right, everyone has, you know, access to intelligence, abundant energy, abundant access to superintelligence that can help us live kind of our best lives and beyond

our wildest dreams. Right. And I you know, obviously Silicon Valley is a place where people like to make grandiose statements. But this is beyond that, right, This is not just yeah, this is not just like you know, we joked about we work.

technological leap forward for humanity. Talk about a motivating reason to work on this technology, right, talk about a way to feel powerful, feel like you're making a huge difference. I think that's a really key part of what's driving a lot of work in AI right now.

to me how far that distance is. Because you've got the AI doomers and the AI optimist I guess you'd call them, but Allmond doesn't even feel like he's in with He's just kind of He'll say one day that he doesn't think it's a creature, the next one will say it's gonna kill us, or it all just feels like a pr campaign but for nothing.

that AI might kill us all. But there's also this, you know, very famous blog post that he wrote in twenty fifteen in which he says that, you know, basically, super intelligence is one of the most serious risks to humanity, you know, full stop. And so it's clear that at some point in his life, he believed kind of what we might now call a more doom ory outlook. But as time has gone on, he has you know, offered views that are a little bit more measured and more positive.

You know, he tends to you know, in his big media tour of twenty twenty three, he tended to talk about how AI was going to. You know, his projection was that AI would radically transform society, but that it would be net good, right that like, overall we would be glad that this happened, and that it would improve lives, even if in the short term or for some people it might prove to be bringing a lot of challenges as well.

being like a spokesman for it. And often that is the role of a CEO is to be a really good storyteller, to bring the pitch of the company to the public, to investors, to potential employees, to customers, to try to sell them on this vision of the future. And I do think Sam is good at that. There is an interesting tidbit in episode three in which we interview a fiction writer who was actually hired on contract by open Ai to write like a novella about AI

futures and things like that. And yeah, he just talks a little bit about you know, the novella is not I think in active use within open ai, but they did at some point, see they did at some point see value in commissioning it. And I think you know something that the author Patrick House explains to us is you know that open a Ey, just like many other startups, is really motivated by story, right, and that Sam Altman is inspired by fiction. You know, it's inspired by certain

kinds of sci fi. I think this is not unique to Sam. Many founders in Silicon Valley, you know, Elon Musk has talked about this as well, are driven to create things in part because of what they read about when they were younger, that you know, these dreams of the future. And so it's just interesting to get his perspective on how motivating a story can be, and how motivating this compelling story of like, oh, we're building something

that's gonna change the course of human history. Like you just couldn't ask for a more powerful motivating force.

which he has invested a ton of money into. I think he has said publicly that you know, his his vision is that this is a potential way to provide abundant energy that could then power the technology that we need to you know, uh, improve AI to the level that we're hoping that it can get to, or that he's hoping that it can get to. At the same time, you know, we've talked a little bit about universal basic income.

This has been something that Sam has been a proponent of and an advocate of since at least twenty sixteen, when he was running y Combinator and they started a side research project to study universal basic income by giving cash payments to families in Oakland of I believe a thousand dollars a month. That research project is still ongoing. It's now moved away from y Combinator and is associated with open Research, which is I believe funded by open Ai, and so it has kind of moved with Sam to

his new role. And of course he also co founded this company called world Coin, which used these silver orbs machines to scan to take pictures of your iris and give everyone register every individual human as like a unique human individual, and to create this eyeball registry in which by which one could in the future distribute a universal

basic income. So he's funding these energy companies. He's like involved in these sort the sort of crypto eyeball registry project that will help distribute UBI in this future that he's imagining. Like I think it's safe to say he's definitely thinking about things beyond just open AI for the future and imagining like, Okay, well, if we have this piece that's growing, what else will we need to support it?

And I'm sure there are other things he's working on that we don't even know about, right, Like I know he has also funded some like longevity bioscience projects and things like that. He's I guarantee he's thinking about stuff beyond what we know about.

look at like flight price predictors. Yeah, exactly. But you know, I think as we you know, we talk about this in episode three, but that you know, chat chipet wasn't even new technology. It was actually just a different user interface on a model that already existed GPT three point five.

And yeah, something about that really captured not just you know, the minds, but also the hearts of people and like getting them really thinking about, like what could a future like this look like? And I think while some people were excited, a lot of people also reacted with fear right and like I think in the valley like you will hear a lot of people more openly discussing their fears of sort of like job loss or or just like dramatic social change that might come about in the

next ten or twenty years. The feeling I get in conversations that I have in and around San Francisco is, you know, even people who are pretty deep in this technology are uncertain about whether it's going to be overall good or bad. Like they're just uncertain of how to look back on this time, like whether it will have ended up being elite forward for humanity or something differ.

that have actually done things. Like Sam Altman, chat GPT consumes information and feeds it back to the people using it in a way that feels superficially satisfying, and it's quite impressive to those who don't really care about creativity or depth, And like I've said, it takes advantage of the fact that the teche CoSystem has been dominated and

funded like people who don't really build tech. As I've said before, generative AI things like chat gpt, anthropics Claude, Microsoft's co Pilot, which is also powered by chat gp. It's not going to become the incredible supercomputer that Sam

Mortman is promising. It will not be a virtual brain or imminently human like or a super smart person that knows everything about you, because it is, at its deepest complexity, a fundamentally different technology based on mathematics and the probabilistic answer to what you have asked it, rather than anything resembling how human beings think, or act or even know things. Generative AI does not know anything. How can a thing

think when it doesn't know a anyone? I want to ask bradlight Cap Miramurati, Sam Ortman any of these questions just once hear what they fart out. No, Well, chat

GBT isn't inherently useless. Almand realizes that it's impossible to generate the kind of funding and hype he needs based on its actual achievements, and that to continue to accumulate power and money, which is his only goal, he has the speciously hype it and he has the hype it to wear healthy and powerful people who also do not participate in the creation of anything.

that's a living being. CHATGBT does these things, and it does it I know it's cheesy to say, but in a soulless way, but it really does that because and the reason all of this, the writing and the horrible video and the images, the reason it feels so empty is because even the most manure adjacent press release still has gone through someone's manure adjacent brain. Even the most pallid empty copy you've read has gone through someone. A person has put thought and intention in, even if they're

not great with the English language. What chat GPT does is use math to generate the next thing, and sometimes it gets it pretty right. But pretty right is not enough to mimic human creation. But look at Sam Altman.

manipulate and extract value from it. And Sam Altman is a monster created by Silicon Valley's sin, and their sin, by the way, is empowering and elevating those who don't build software, which in turn has led to the greater sin of allowing the tech industry to drift away from

fixing the problems of actual human beings. Sam Altman's manipulative little power plays have been so effective because so many of the power players in venture capital and the public markets, and even tech companies are disconnected from the process of building things, of building software and hardware, and that makes them incapable or perhaps unwilling to understand that sam Altman is leading them to a deeply desolate place and on some level it's kind of impressive how he succeeded in

bending these fools to his whims, to the point that executives like Sunned Up a Shi of Google, are willing to break Google Search in pursuit of this next big

hype cycle created by Sam Altman. He might not create anything, but he's excellent at spotting market opportunities, even if these opportunities involve him transparently lying about the technology he creates, or while having his nasty little boosters further propagate these bullshit, mostly because they don't know, or perhaps they don't care if Sam Morton's full of shit. Maybe it doesn't matter

to them. It doesn't matter that Google Search is still plagued with nonsensical AI answers that sometimes steal other people's work, or that AI in legal research has been proven to regularly hallucinate, which, by the way, is a problem that's impossible to fix. It's all happening because AI is the new thing that can be sold to the market, and it's all happening because Sam Altman, intentionally or otherwise has created a totally hollow hype cycle. And all of this

is thanks to Sam Moltman. And a tech industry that's lost its ability to create things worthy of an actual hype cycle to the point that this spacious, non technical manipulator can lead it down this nasty, ugly offensive anti tech path. The tech industry has spent years pissing off customers, with platforms like Facebook and Google actively making their products worse in the pursuit of perpetual growth and ashamedly turning their backs on the people that made them rich and

acting with this horrifying contempt for their users. And I believe the result will be that tech is going to face a harsh reprimand from society. As I mentioned in the rock Com bubble, things are already falling apart. WHEB traffic is already dropping. And what sucks is the people around Sam Moultman should have been able to see this, even putting aside his I've listened to an alarming amount of Sam Onman talk, and I'm a public relations person, who the hell am I I'm someone who's been around

a lot of people who make shit up. I've been around a lot of people whose job it is to kind of obfuscate things, and quite frankly, almost really obvious. I'm not gonna do any weird light to me esque ways of proving he's lying. He just doesn't ever get pushed into any depth. No one ever asks him really technical questions or even just a question like, Hey, Sam, did you work on any of the code at open AI?

They may say I can't talk about this duty of legal things, which is fine, but they'll generally try and talk to you. Listen to any interview with any other technical AI person, listen to them, and then listen to Sam Altman.

They're not doing the right things because the right things are no longer the right thing for the tech industry. And when all of this falls apart, Sam Almon's going to be fine. When this all collapses, He'll find something to blame it on, market forces, a lack of energy, breakthroughs, unfortunate economic things, all of that nonsense, and he'll remain

a billionaire, capable of doing anything he wants. The people that are going to suffer are the people working in Silicon Valley who aren't Sam Almon, The people that did not get born with a silver spoon in each hand and then handed further silver spoons as they walk the streets of San Francisco, people that don't live in nine and a half thousand square foot mansions, the people trying to raise money who can't write now because all the vcs are obsessed with AI the people that will get

fired from public tech companies when a depression hits, because the markets realize that the generative AI boom was a bubble, when they realize that the most famous people in tech have been making these promises for nobody other than the markets. Well, the markets need you to do something eventually, and I just don't think it's gonna happen. And I think that we need to really think why was Sam Altman allowed

to get to this point? Why did so many people like Paul Graham, like Reid Hoffman, like Brian Chesky, like Sacha Nadella. Back up, it's obvious con artists who has acted like this forever? And what sucks is I don't know if the valley is going to learn anything unless it's really bad, and I don't want it to be by the way. I would love to be wrong. I would love for all of this to just be like Sam Ortman's actually a genius. Turns out the whole thing is no, no, it's not gonna happen.

Agi to actually come out of open AI. And by the way, it's going to need to be in the next year. I don't think they've got even three quarters left. I think that once this falls apart, once the markets realize, oh shit, this is not profitable, this is not sustainable, they're going to walk away from it. When companies realize that generative AI it's given him a couple percent profit, maybe they're going to be pissed because this is not a stock rally worthy boondoggle. This is not going to

be pretty when things fall apart from it. For Nvidia, you're still over one thousand dollars. When those orders stop coming in quite as fast. What do you think is going to happen to tech stocks? Startups are already having trouble raising money, and they're having trouble raising money because the people giving out the money are too disconnected from the creation of software and hardware. The only way to fix Silicon Valley perhaps is an apocalypse. Perhaps is people

like Sam Ortman getting washed out. I don't want it to happen. I really must be bloody clear. But maybe it won't be apocalyptic. Maybe it would just be a brutal realignment. And maybe Silicon Valley needs that realignment because this industry desperately needs a big bathful of ice and need to dunk the head in it aggressively and wake the hell up. Venture capital needs to put money back

into real things. The largest tech companies need to realign and build for sustainability so they're not binging and purging staff with every boom. And if we really are at the end of the hypergrowth era, every tech company needs to be thinking profit and sustainability again. And that's a to Silicon Valley because a better Silicon Valley builds things for people, It solves real problems. It doesn't have to lie about what the thing could do in the future

so that it can sell a thing today. And I realize that sounds like the foundation of most venture capital. That's fine at the seed stage, that's fine at this moonshot stage where your early early days. It is not befitting the most famous company in tech, It is not befitting a multi billionaire, It is not befitting anyone, and it is insulting to the people actually building things, both in and outside of technology.

the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattasowski dot com, m.

is terrifying. It fucking sucks. I'm not going to mince words, not that I would usually anyway, and I don't feel fully equipped to respond to the moment. I don't have any real answers, at least not political ones. I'm not a political analyst, and I'd feel disingenuous trying to dissect either the Harris or the Trump campaigns, because I just feel like there's a take Olympics right now. It's the

Dunning Kruger Festival out there. Everyone is trying to rationalize and intellectualize these events that ultimately come down to something quite simple. People don't trust authority, and yet it's pretty ironic that this often leads them towards authoritarianism. Now, I don't want to give you the impression that I'm going to go on my crank mode that and somehow against institutions on their face.

of the markets. Case in point, regular people have spent years watching the price of goods increase due to inflation, despite the fact that the increase in pricing was mostly driven by get this, corporations raising their prices. Now, that's not to say that external factors like the war in Ukraine or lingering COVID restrictions in China, these things did play a role in it. They did, But the bulk of these price increases were caused by these fucking companies

raising the prices. It was in their earnings.

In fact, the media spent years debating with itself, where the price scouging was actually happening despite years of proof that it was. Some of them even reported that the price gouging was happening, So like, get this. I just don't think people trust authority, and they especially don't trust

the media, especially the legacy media. It also probably didn't help that the legacy media implored readers and viewers to ignore what they saw at the supermarket or at the pump and the growing hits that their wallets from the daily incessities of life. It was just a national level gas lighting and it was disgusting. And I know some of you might say, you know where to email me.

happening and giving them context. I read and pay for several legacy media outlets. I think the world is a better place for them existing despite their flaws. The problem is, as I'll explain, is this editorial industrial complex and how these people are writing about the powerful don't seem to be able to or maybe they don't want to actually

interrogate the powerful. This could be an entire episode on its sign, But I don't think the answer to these failings is to simply discard legacy media entirely.

are stagnating. It's forcing many of the poorest people to choose between food and fuel or I don't know, eating

and having heat simultaneously. Businesses have spent several years telling workers they're asking for too much and doing too little, telling people a few years ago they were quiet quitting, which is a fucking stupid term that just means going to your job and doing the thing you're paying to do any anyway, And a year later, in twenty twenty three, they insisted that the years of remote work were actually bad because profits didn't reach the same profit levels of

twenty twenty one, which was something to do with remote work. Now, did anyone actually prove this, did anyone actually going.

will in the future. But one of the big things that punish workers and led to so many layoffs in twenty twenty three was the fact that we couldn't get back to the post lockdown boot of twenty twenty one, when everyone bought everything always as they left the house for the first time in a while. Now, any corporation would be smart enough to know that that was a phase, that that was not going to be forever. Except every single big company seemed to make the same mistake and

say number going up forever, line go up forever. When it didn't, well, they started punishing workers and they started thinking, well, could it be that we as companies we set unrealistic expectations for the markets and we just thought that we'd keep growing forever. Or maybe it was the people using the computer at home. Yeah, that seems way better anyway, Well,

the majority of people don't work remotely. From talking to the people I know outside of tech business, there's this genuine sense that the media has allied itself with the bosses, and I imagine it's because of the many articles that literally call workers lazy and have done so for years. Yet when it comes to the powerful legacy, media doesn't seem to have that much pisson vinegar. They just have much more guarded critiques. The appetite for shaming and finger wagging.

It's always directed that middle and working class workers and seemingly disappears what a person has a three character job title like CEO. It's fucking stupid, it's insulting, and yes it's demoralizing for the average person, despite the fact that Elon Musk has spent years telegraphing is intent to uses billions of dollars to wield power equivalent to that of a nation state. As you may remember from my first episode of Anything over On, it could happen here.

outsized capital the Benz Society to his will. Just isn't a fucking problem for the media, or at least not as much of a problem as a worker who might not work fifty to one hundred hours a week for a boss who makes one hundred and thirty times what they do. The news at least outside of the right wing, is always separate from opinion, always guarded, always safe for fear that they might piss somebody off and be declared biased,

something that happens anyway. And while there are columnists are given some space to have their own thoughts, sometimes in the newspaper, sometimes online, the stories themselves are delivered with the kind of reserved hmmmm tone that often fails to express any actual consequences or context around the news itself, and just doesn't I seem to care about making sure

that the reader or listener learns something. My mate Casey has a good point about podcasts, and I applied some of the news too, that there's too much stuff out there that is there to make you feel intelligent rather than make you intelligent.

what Tesla will do next. There are entire websites just based on how much Elon Musk lies, yet they still report this shit. It makes me very upset, And it doesn't matter that some of these outlets, by the way, had a company in coverage that suggested that the markets weren't impressed by Tesla's theoretical robotaxi plans or their fake cass robots run by people.

people writing or the people reading their fucking words. And above them are entire editorial superstructures that exist to make sure that the editorial vision never colors too far outside

the lines or informs people a little too much. And not even talking about Jeff Bezos or Lauren Powell jobs or any number of billionaires who are in any number of publications, but the editors editing business and tech reporters who don't know anything about business and tech, or the senior editors the terrified of any byline that might dare get the outlet under fire from somebody who could call

their boss it's fucking cowardice. There are, however, I should add, also those who simply defer to the powerful that assume that this much money can't be wrong, even if said money, in the case of Elon Musk, is repeatedly wrong, and there's an entire website about the wrong US and the

liars and the bullshit, and I'm talking about Elon Musk still. Obviously, these editors are the people that look at the current crop of powerful tech companies that have failed to deliver any truly meaningful innovation in years, and they.

talked about like it's a fucking living god. Sam Moltman is a liar who's been fired from two companies, including open Ai, and yet because he's a billionaire with a buzzy company, he's left totally unscathed. The powerful get a completely different set of rules to live by and exist in a totally different media environment. Their geniuses, entrepreneurs, fire brands.

Their challenges are framed as missteps and their victories framed as certainties by the same outlets that told us that we were quiet quitting and that the economy is actually good, and that we're the problem for high prices. Well, it's correct to suggest that the right wing is horrendously ideological and they're terribly biased. It's very hard to look at the rest of the media and claim that they are not.

The problem is that the so called left media, which usually is just the center, isn't biased towards what we may consider left wing causes like universal health care, strong unions, expanded social safety, and it's you know, the stuff that would actually be helpful. Now, they're biased in favor of filating an ever growing carousel of sociopathic billionaire assholes, elevating them to the status of American royalty, where they exist above expectations and norms that you and I must live by.

This is the definition of elitism. The media has literally created a class of people who can lie and cheat and steal, and rather than condemn them for it. They're celebrated. While it might feel a little tangential to bring technology into this, I truly believe that everybody is affected by the rot economy, the growth or costs ecosystem where number must always go up because everybody is using technology all the time, and the technology in question is getting worse.

This election cycle saw more than twenty five billion text messages sent to potential voters, and seemingly every website was crown full of random election advertising. Here's the thing about elections. They're not really always about policy. No, they're a referendum on the incumbent party you're president, and by proxy, a poll on how people feel. And the reality is that most people are fucking miserable. There's this all encompassing feeling

that things are just harder now. It's harder to pay your bills, it's harder to keep in touch with your friends. It's harder to start a family, it's harder to buy a house, it's harder to fall in love, it's harder to do everything. And what we're seeing is an in shitification of existence.

do the most basic of tasks. Our phones are full of notifications trying to growth hack us into doing things that companies want. Our apps are full of micro transactions. Our websites are slower and harder to use, with endless demands of our emails and our phone numbers, and the nay to log back in because they couldn't possibly lose a dollar to someone who dared to consume a Washington Post article. And yes, I'm talking about the post, which I fucking pay for, despite the fact it logs me

out all the time. Our social networks are so algorithmically charged that they barely show us the things we want them to anymore, With executives dedicated to filling our feeds full of AI generated slop. Because despite being the customer, we're also the revenue mechanism, our search engines do less as a means of making us use them more. Our dating apps have become vehicles of private equity to add

a toll to falling in love. Our video games are constantly nagging us to give them more money, and despite it losting money and being attached to our account, we don't actually own any of the streaming media we purchase. We're drowning in spam, both in our emails and our phones, and at this point in our lives, we've probably agreed to three million pages of privacy policies allowing companies to

use our information as they see fit. We get one value transaction with every company they get eleven, they get one hundred. We really actually don't know because there's no legislation to tell us what they're fucking doing. And these are the issues that hit everything we do all the time, constantly, unrelentingly. Technology is our lives now. We wake up, we use our phone, we check our text, three spam calls, two

spam texts. We look at our bank balance, two factor authentication check, we're rid the news.

masters and this misplaced duty to objectivity. Our mechanisms for exploring and enjoying the world are interfered with by powerful forces that are just basically left unchecked. Opening our devices is wilfully subjecting us to attack after attack after attack from applications, websites, and devices that are built to make us do things for them, rather than operate with dignity and freedom that much of the Internet was actually founded upon.

These millions of invisible acts of terror are too often left undiscussed because accepting the truth requires you to accept that most of the tech ecosystem is rotten, and that billions of dollars are made harassing and punishing billions of people every single day of their lives through the devices that we're required to use in order to exist in

the modern world. Most users suffer the consequences, and most of the media fails to account for them, and in turn, people walk around knowing something is wrong, but not knowing who to blame until somebody provides a convenient excuse, like immigrants, like the Democrats, like whatever fucking works. Because we can't actually call the people out, the corporations crushing our existence, Why wouldn't people crave change?

either way. The truth is that the media is more afraid of accusations of bias than they are of misleading their readers. And while that seems like a slippery slope, and it may very well be one, there must be room to inject the writer's voice back into their work, and a willingness to call out bad actors as such, no matter and how rich they are, no matter how big their products are, no matter how willing they are to bark and scream that things are unfair as they

accumulate more power and money. We need context in our news. We need it, we need it now. We need opinion, we need voice, we need character, we need life, because as long as we follow this bullshit objectivity path, we're screwed. And if you're in the tech industry and hearing this and saying.

their products worse but more profitable. Covering Meta, Twitter, Google, open Ai, and other huge tech companies as if the products they make are remarkable and perfect is disrespectable to the reader intelligence and a disgusting abdication of responsibility, as their products, even when they're functional, are significantly worse, more annoying, more frustrating, and more convoluted than ever. And that's before you get to the ones like Facebook and Instagram that

are out right broken. I don't give a shit if these people have raised a lot of money unless you use that as proof that something is fundamentally wrong with the tech industry. Meta making billions of dollars of profit is a sign that something is wrong with society, not proof that it's a good company or anything that should

grant Mark Zuckerberg any kind of special treatment. Shove your chains up your ass, Mark open Ai being worth one hundred and fifty seven billion dollars for a company that burns five billion or more a year to make a product that destroys our environment. For a product yet to find any real meaning, isn't a sign that it should get more coverage or be taken more seriously. No, it should be a sign that something is broken, that something

is wrong with society. Whatever you may feel about chat GPT, the coverage it received is outsized compared to its actual utility and the things built on top of it. And that's a direct result of a media industry that seems incapable of holding the powerful accountable or actually learning about the subject matter in question. It's time to accept that most people's digital life fucking sucks, as does the way we consume our information, and that there are people directly responsible.

Be as angry as you want at Jeff Bezos, whose wealth and the inherent cruelty of Amazon's labor practices makes him an obvious target, but please don't forget Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sander Peshai, Tim Cook, and every single other tech executive that has allowed our digital experiences to become

fucked up through algorithms that we know nothing about. Similarly, governments have entirely failed to push through any legislation that might stop the raw, both in terms of dominance and a patness of algorithmic manipulation and the ways in which tach products exist with few real quality standards. We may have, at least for now, consumer standards for the majority of consumer goods, but software is left effectively untouched, which is why so much of our digital lives are such unfettered.

consistent way. There's this extremely common assumption in the tech media, based on what I'm really not sure that these companies are all doing a good job, and that good job means having lots of users and making lots of money, and it drives tons of editorial decision making. If three quarters of the biggest car manufacturers were making record profits by making half of their cars or the break that sometimes didn't work, that'd be international news. Government inquiries would

app but people will go to prison. And this isn't even conjecture. It actually happened after Volkswagen was caught deliberately programming its engines to only meet emission standards during laboratory testing. They were left to spew excessive pollution into the real world, but once lawmakers found out, they responded with civil and

criminal action. The executives and engineers responsible were indicted, one received seven years in jail, and their former CEO is currently being tried in Germany and being indicted in the US too. And here we are in the tech industry. Facebook barely works, used to nigenocides and bully people and harassed teen girls. Pedophiles run rampant on there. There was a Wall Street Journal about story about it.

any significant pushback for fame to do so. Little bit of a side note here, big shout out to Jeff Horwitz and the rest of the Wall Street General people who did the Facebook files. There are our legacy media people doing a good job on this. Nevertheless, Meta exercises this reckless disregard for public safety, kind of like the auto industry in the sixties, and that was when Ralph Nader wrote Unsafe at Any Speed in his book. It

actually brought about change. It led to the Department of Transportation and the passage of seatbelt laws in forty nine states, and a bunch of other things that can get overlooked. But the tech industry is somehow inoculated against any kind of public pressure or shame because it operates in this completely different world with this different rule book and a different criteria for success, as well as this completely different

set of expectations. By allowing the market to become disconnected from the value it creates, we enable companies like I don't know, in Vidia that reduce the quality of their services they make more money for their g Force now service, or Facebook they can just destroy our political discourse so they can facilitate genocide in Myanmar, and then well, they get headlines about how good a CEO Mark Zuckerbig is and how cool his chains are, and how how everything's

just fine with Facebook and they're making more money.

dying in a terrorist attack coordinated using Facebook's tool. Now, the mere mention of violent crime is enough to create dreams of articles questioning whether society is safe and whether we need more plastic in our walgreens. Yeah, our digital lives are this wasteland that people still discuss like a utopia, seriously putting aside the social networks. Have you visited a website on the phone recently? Have you tried to use a new app? Have you tried to buy something online

starting with a Google search? Within those experiences, sis, has anything gone wrong? You know it, I know it has, you know it has.

at best annoying and at actively harmful for society. Our networks are rotten, Our information ecosystem is poisoned with its pure parts ideologically and strategically concussed. Our means of speaking to those that we love and making new connections are so constantly interfered with that personal choice and dignity is.

I legacy media? I got my start writing in print magazines. Am I an independent contractor?

this podcast, they should see these news letters. They should see everything published by the tech media and go uh oh.

getting told you're the best boy in town. These companies, they're poisoning the digital world and they must be held accountable for the damage they're causing.

use this. When the thing that they don't get that the average person doesn't get is that the tech industry has built legions of obfiscations, legions of legal tricks, and these horrible little user interface traps specifically made to trick you into doing things, to make the experience kind of subordinate to getting the money off of you. And I think that this is one of the biggest issues in society.

And yes, of course I'm biased. I'm doing a podcast about tech, but for real, though, billions of people use smartphones, billions of people are on the computer every day. It's how we do everything. And it stinks. It stinks so bad. This is the rot economy. We're in the rot society. But things can change, and for them to change, it has to start with the information sources, and that starts with journalism. Work has already begun and will continue, but it must scale up and it must do so quickly.

And you, the user, have the power learn to read a privacy policy and the link there is to the Washington Post. Yes, there are plenty of great reporters there. Fuck Bezos. You can move to Signal, which is an encrypted messaging app that works on just about everything. Get a service like delete me, and by the way I pay for it, I work from four years ago.

show notes. Now, before we go, I want to leave you with something that I posted on November sixth on the Better.

Reach out to those you love and don't just commiserate. Plan It doesn't have to be political, it doesn't even really have to matter, but shit on your fucking calendar. Keep yourself active and busy and if not distracted, at very least animated.

you doing so as an effect and actually matters. Keep talking about how fucked up things are, Make sure it's written down, make sure it's spoken cleanly, and with the rage and fire and piss and vinegar it deserves. Things will change for the better, even if it takes more time than it should.

it works. And I know I have my tangents and my biases, but I wear them kind oft my heart, on my sleeve. I care about all this stuff in a way that might be a little different to some, and it's because I've I've watched an industry that really made me as a person, that allowed me to grow as a person, to actually meet people, to not feel

as alone. And I imagine some of you feel like this too, and then watching what happens to it every day, watching the people who get so rich off of making it so much worse, and then seeing what happen on November fifth, and you can draw a line from it. People are scared, they're lost. Their lives are spent digitally, and your digital lives are just endless terrorism, endless harm. Some of you know your way around take so you can escape some of it, but it's impossible to escape

all of it. Try meeting people these days, you can't. Everything is online, and everything online, everything on your phone is mitigated and interfered with. It's an assault on your senses, one deprived of dignity. And I see the people doing this and it feels me full of fucking rage, and it makes me angry for you and for me, for my son growing up, and what will probably be a worse world for my friends and loved ones who are harder to see, harder to speak to, whose lives too

are interfered with. And there are the millions and millions of people who have no fucking idea it's happening, that just exist in this swill, in this active digital terrorism, poked and prodded and nagged and notified constantly, And I don't want Early on in this I got a message saying, don't tell people to be angry, and I stick by that. But I'm not going to hide that I am. I'm not going to hide the pain I feel. I'm not going to hide the pain I feel seeing this shit happen.

And I've watched this thing that I love technology, really do love tech, I really do deeply.

I'm like this is because I really care. And I think caring. I think being angry at the things that actually matter and giving context as a result. I think that's deeply valuable. And I realize I do for to handle a lot, but it really.