The Cult of Failing Upwards

them as well. Nowhere is this more obvious than Meta, a company with leadership completely removed from any meaningful interaction with their products or any value to society. Since two thousand and nine, Facebook's core products have reliably become more profitable and exactly the same rate they decay, with every founder behind every product that Zuckerberg has acquired, including Instagram, Oculus, and WhatsApp, leaving the company and almost immediately talking about

how much they hated working there. According to a New York Times piece from twenty eighteen, Kevin Sistrom, co founder of Instagram, only chose to quit the company after Mark Zuckerberg became jealous of the app's success, Taking the spotlight away from that of Facebook itself, an appy kind of

stole from the Winklevosses. Sistrom allegedly didn't really want to leave Facebook, but felt that Zuckerberg was depriving Instagram of resources and now and I quote seemed to want Instagram to use its momentum to help the big Blue app, which is an annoying way of describing a situation that feels a convenient time to reveal that this was a Kara Swisher piece. Despite Swisher's bloviating, it took tech Crunch's Josh Constein to reveal the real reason that Sistram had left.

Facebook had replaced Instagram's VP of Product Kevin will who everybody loved, with the former VP of Facebook News in May twenty eighteen. You know that great year for news, and that man was named Adam Masseri. He would take over and over the next six years he would absolutely destroy everything that Sistrom and his co founder Mitchell Krieger had built. According to Constein's reporting, Sistrom had also clashed with Chris Cox, Facebook's chief product officer at the time.

Constein described Masseri as a Zuckerberg loyalist who was and I quote, disappointed that he didn't get the head of Facebook gig that went to Will Cathcot, who now heads up Whatsam. Over time, Massi and Zuckerberg moved to erode Sistrom and Instagram's independence from Facebook, and eventually, I guess it all became too much to bear. Sistrom was there to oversee the most damaging change to Instagram, though, which was the introduction of the algorithmic feed in Due twenty sixteen,

two years before he left. That horrified users who feared that they would now not see posts from their friends, a thing that almost immediately happened on both Instagram and Facebook, which made a major change to its newsfeed algorithm in twenty fifteen. Wait, wasn't that when Adam Masius? Oh my god. Anyway, a few months later, Instagram would try and clone the functionality of Snapchat, a company that has had quite literally one profitable quarter in its history, with the release of Stories.

By the way, that's exactly what it was called on Snapchat. They just didn't anyway. This move was illustrative both of the lack of creativity within Instagram and Facebook, but also of its future direction, with Story serving as yet another touch point for advertisers, and yet another thing that Mark Zuckerberg would rip off from people who actually build things

and have ideas. One Systrom left, Masseri became the head of Instagram, turning it into one of the most profitable business units in history while destroying its basic functionality is an app that showed you photos and videos from people you chose to follow, doubling down on the algorithm's ability to interrupt and annoy you and stop you from seeing things that you want to see, pushing ads and sponsored content seemingly at random. But the one thing you can

rely on is it would do it a lot. Since taking over Instagram, Adam Massei has, with the direct approval and support of Mark Zuckerberg, turned the app into a glorified ad network, devoid of any ability to innovate with products like IGTV and Threads. By the way, not the social network. It was a camera app built to compete with Snapchat, which has also been shut down. Neither of them found traction, and every change under Massi seems to

be a direct copy of either snap or TikTok. It's also important to remember and know what Adam Massari is. Adam Massari is not a creator. He's not an engineer. He's not a founder. He's a designer that found his way into product manageer, escaping the doldrums of actually doing things, into the beautiful pantheon of wearing suits and yelling at people. Okay, okay, I don't know if Adam yelled at people, but he

definitely annoyed them. And in late twenty twenty, he made arguably the worst change to Instagram yet, launching Reels, a fifteen second video format for Instagram built to compete with the ascendant rise of the extremely algorithmic TikTok. Reels quickly became the dominant form of content on both Facebook and Instagram, flooding your feed with fifteen and eventually sixty second clips that automatically players you scrolled by, each one engineered or paid to get in the way of things that you

actually want to see. And I really want to be clear, though there are people who are going to say, well, surely, surely ed the fact that Reels was such a runaway success, Well that's proof that it was good, right, wrong, horribly wrong. Facebook's algorithm controls everything with Instagram and Facebook. Now, Systram's

worry and Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram. His worry was that Zuckerberg was trying to just turn Instagram into an arm of Facebook, kind of a feature app, Like you went on Instagram to do things with your Facebook account. This is exactly what has happened. Instagram is just Facebook, but with more visual media. It has the same logins, it has the same problems. It also has no customer support of any kind, like every social network. But don't worry.

Thanks to Adam goddamn Massari, you can now pay fifteen dollars a month for verification on Instagram and Facebook, which will also get you access to customer support. Great goddamn idea, Adam burn in hell anyway, I'm not the only one angry with Adam Assei. He's also one of the least popular tech executives in history. And I'm not kidding. I have been reading the tech media very deeply. For Jesus

coming up on sixteen years bloody hell. Anyway, I've never seen someone this unpopular other than maybe Elon Musk, and even then, Elon Musk, who's a loathsome individual, has far more riars than Adam Massearri, who mostly spends his time apologizing, No, seriously. Since taking over Instagram, he's had to apologize for an update that made Instagram's feed mood sideways and I'm not kidding about that one. He's had to apologize for Instagram

censoring pro Palestinian content. He's had to testify before Congress about Instagram's harm to young people, and he said to tell people that Instagram is no longer a photo sharing app.

What does the Graham eh? Anyway, He's overseen so many deeply unpopular changes that Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, who between them have over six hundred million followers, had to beg him to stop Instagram from trying to be TikTok, to which he responded that more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time, and claim that it had cut back on recommended content, something I think

we can all agree was a blatant, fucking lie. I find Adam Massari very annoying as well, because when you watch his videos, he's always going, hey, guys, yeah, so yeah, So the reason that Instagram's bad now is because, uh, and you can see him in real time trying to come up with a reason why it sucks. That isn't just well, it makes it. It makes us so it may it may have made me so rich. I have a house in Kensington, now I'm so rich. Is so good? He's just he's worm like. He and I want to

get into personally inside. I take that back. Adam Massari is not wormlike. He is a coward. Though he is the reason that Instagram sucks. Now he is the architect of the destruction of one of the most dominant places on the web. These are his decisions. Massari, like many of the most powerful men in tech, is a glorified

management consultant, incapable of creating anything of note. Massari has already anounced that Threads metas dollars stor clone of Twitter, is not for news and politics, making news organizations kind of hesitant to invest in a platform that was made by a company that has a rich history of screwing over news organizations. Also, what the hell do I talk about in social networks? Then, Adam, No, nothing that's happening in the government of words. Well oh wait, let me

answer that. On threads, what people talk about is whatever's making them angry that day, without much form, more feature, and they still talk about politics and news. It's just not supported by the algorithm. It's just it's the kind of thing that you would make if you had no idea how social networks worked, but you knew product management. If you were like, all the people, what do we want to see out of a social network? We want to see lots of clicks, we want to see lots

of scrolling. Yeah, we definitely want people interacting and engaging. That's what makes good social networking, right. And I think we can all agree at this point that Twitter was a mistake. It was like a text based platform. I don't think Bisstone and Jack Dorsey are particularly gifted product peace people, but they were smart enough to leave it

the hell alone. If you look at the Twitter files, which by the way, are very funny because they Matt Taybe sold is sold to Elon Musk, the most deceptive man alive other than Donald Trump. It rocks didn't think the leopards would eat your face, did you, mate? Anyway? The Twitter files, all you can see in there is Twitter's executives just being like, Oh, I don't want to touch it, mate, I don't want to know. I don't want to if we mess with it it's going to

make it bad. It's going to break. Everyone will be so angry if we do anything. We shouldn't ban this person, we shouldn't change this threads is this weird, hyperoptimized, hyper algorithmic crapfest. And all the people on there are people who write comments on Instagram it sucks, and there are some good journalists on there. I'll pop in for that.

But it's a bad social network. And it's a bad social network because it's made by a guy who doesn't build products, unless you think of products as like financial vehicles, in which case Adam Massei maybe the most gifted man alive.

But let's be honest. Nowhere is Adam Massari's consultant mindset more obvious than in his suggested plan to deal with Instagram's hundreds of thousands of underage users by creating a new type of family centered account in Instagram that would permit Meta to upsell Instagram to children under thirteen, a disgusting, loathsome program that was planned as an alternative to instituting stricter registration procedures, according to a lawsuit against Meta filed

by the Attorney General of New Mexico, Yeah, Adam I won't come without a link because I'm scared anyways. This is the man running one of the most important tech platforms in the world, a man bereft of morals or qualifications or even ideas, a walking, talking figurehead that exists only to spout vague platitudes about what social media can or will do, as the profits of making it harder to communicate with friends and family make him unfathomably rich.

He comes out every so often bab about how social is important, how the changes he's made that make Instagram worse are actually good, and then disappears up his own asshole. One time he responded to something I wrote on the information, and he responded with a bunch of typos, which is very funny. But he also responded saying that Facebook planned no layoffs and Instagram planned no layoffs. They laid people off on six months later. It's just this is the guy.

These are the guys in power now. Well. Much of the blame for the state of Instagram and Facebook can obviously be laid at the feet of Mark Zuckerberg. It's important to remember Mark sucks, and Mark is the reason he did the original Facebook after he stole it from the Wet Brothers. But nevertheless, it's also important to understand the sheer level of damage that Adam Massei has done to the world. Instagram is now a truly awful product.

It's terrible, and Massari's only response to the pain and frustration of his users is to tell them that he intends to make it shittier. That was his actual response when Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian said, hey, stop making Instagram like TikTok, he said, I'm actually gonna make it more like Tiktel. Your fucking assholes. Okay, that's not exactly what he said. He just said there'd be more video. They've claimed their rolling things back, but it's all nonsense.

It's all lies. And this is the management consultant mindset that dominates tech. They trap users in these terrible experiences, and they do so because they have giant monopolies, and then they make their products worse and worse and worse once they know that their users can't or won't go anywhere else. And what's insane about this is Instagram could have probably made Facebook tens of billions of dollars without sucking. There are honest ways to do a business like this

if they really actually invested in algorithms. And I kind of hinted this in previous episodes and made it so it was just very good at showing you things you like. Hell, they'd make TikTok. Why do you think TikTok has done well? Because it's our algorithm, while extremely weird and unsettling, is actually very good at showing people things they'd find interesting. It's invasive, it's weird, it's bad. But guess what Matt's worth hundreds of billions of dollars. They're putting tens of

billions of dollars into the metaverse. Still, Reality Labs is still burning what ten fifteen billion dollars a quarter or a year. It's an insane amount of money. How about feeding that into the algorithm so your experience doesn't suck us. I'm being vulgar, and I've been quite vulgar in this episode, and I apologize, I really do. I shouldn't swear so much. My mother tells me this, my father tells me this, shrink tells me this. But anyway, I just find this

all so annoying. I find it frustrating because the bad guys keep winning and the reason they keep winning is nobody points at them and says how bad they are, or at least they don't do it enough. Really, people should walk out of Instagram, and we should stop using Instagram and Facebook. I think I use it Instagram like once every cup day's look at my friend's very fat dog, which I do enjoy. I might just text him and say, can you just send me picture of site of your dog?

But that's kind of weird. These apps have become part of the social fabric, and people like Adam Masseria are aware. Same with Mark Zuckerberg. They know exactly how well they've done, and they have. They are a success story. An evil success story, but they're a success story. You are on Instagram, you are on Twitter, you are on email. You are on these platforms because that's where people exist online. There are people that I can only speak to on Instagram.

They're just bad at text, but they love Instagram, and it sucks. I don't want to use these platforms, and imagine you don't want to EVA, which is why it's important to talk about who mess them up. It's important to say Adam Masseri a hundred times and keep saying it. That's the only way that history will know who has

done this damage. And these management consultant types they're everywhere, They're everywhere, and they're inspiring people to be like them, to be ruthless assholes, to be terrible product developers, but excellent businessmen. And there is a middle ground, a sustainable ground, one which doesn't involve burning cash or burning customers or in the case of Instagram, shortly adding generative AI to everything, to Facebook, to Instagram. And by the way, here's a

crazy story for you. Recently, a generative AI on Facebook responded to a group saying that it had a gifted child. And you may think I'm mistaking something. No, no, it said this whole thing about having a gifted child. This is what happens when people who don't know product, who don't build anything, who don't understand anything, get the keys

to the kingdom. They fuck it up and they'll keep doing so, and their massive success only seeks to inspire generations of useless founders with creating profitable pain boxes over useful products. And as we speak, the most quirked up loathsome one of the more is rising to power. I'm talking about Sam goddamn Altman. Now if you don't know who that is. Sam Altman is the CEO of open Ai, which is a very unprofitable revenue generating company building software

to do something, and Generative Ai might do something. You should go back and listen to the episodes about that. But I want to tell you how Sam Altman got started, and I want to let you know how shit Sam Altman has peen at his job in the past. In two thousand and five, Altman, a Standford dropout, co founded

a company called Looped. That's loopt, that's what companies were called back then, and they were a location based social networking app that raised over thirty million dollars from taking Hiba,

y Combinator, and vcs like Sequoia Capital and NEA. Seven years later, Aortmand would flog Looped to a publicly traded financial services company called green Dot, best known for their prepaid cards, for remarkable forty three point four million dollars, despite the fact that the app didn't find traction or revenue ormand got quite rich from the Loop deal, despite the fact that a group of senior employees urged the board on two separate occasions to fire Aortmand for what

they described as deceptive and chaotic behavior. According to The Wall Street Journal, Ormand would almost immediately become a partner at y Combinator, surprising a lot of people after working there part time before being made president by co founder Paul Graham in twenty fourteen. Yet, behind the scenes, according to reporting by Elizabeth Dwaskin and Natasha Tiku of The Washington Post, Aortmand was well known for and I quote for an absenteeism that rankled his peers and some of

the startups he was supposed to nurture. Ortmand was also double dipping in y combine at startups by investing through Alt Capital, a venture firm founded with his brother Jack, with one source quoted by the Post describing Aortman's tenure as the school of loose management that's all about prioritizing

what's in it for me. Aortmand became wildly rich during his tenure at y Combinator, using his connections and his cult of personality to make early investments in companies like Gusto and optimizedly, which was acquired in twenty eighteen for one point one six billion dollars, and Patreon and Asana and Reddit probably made a couple hundred million red air

really depressing. In twenty fifteen, he founded OpenAI, at the time, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building responsible artificial intelligence applications. Yet it's really important to note that Aortman is not,

and was not ever an engineer or a technologist. He did code, but he was, in every case, from what I can find, a figurehead and a fundraiser that was able to convince actual academics and engineers like Dirk Kingman and we'll check Zaremba and Iliasidskava to do the actual work at open AI, while he sent master ptory emails to Elon Musk, who only ever donated fifty million dollars of the one hundred million he claimed he'd invested in open AI. You know what the thing is, Sam, at the very least,

can you make sure that Elon Musk pays up? Are you that much of a count anyway? I really want you to remember that Sam Mortman was an absentee parent for the first few years of open AI. He split his efforts in actually a way that was very similar to Elon Musk, across multiple other investments and enterprises like the two funds he'd built inside of Y Combinator for

him to run. In twenty nineteen, according to reports at the time, Alltmond would step down from Y Combinator amid a series of changes at the accelerator, a story that much of the industry press just simply chose not to look into. Though I will give Eric Newcomer some credit for calling people out for this kind of in vain. Yet the Washington Host's reporting revealed that Y Combinator found a Paul Graham, best known for writing extremely annoying tweets

and very long and quite boring blogs. That's my job, Paul. Anyway, he flew from the United Kingdom to Francisco to personally kick Sam Altman out, though he blamed his wife for some reason, and anyway due to Altman continuing to focus on his own personal projects and press over his thing at WY combinetor This is the story of the man whom New York Magazine called the Oppenheimer of our Age in a meandering piece that frames Altman's vagueness about AI

as some sort of big secret, a hidden truth, when I think the truth might be far simpler. Sam Altman is yet another fucking management consultant. In a piece published in early twenty twenty one, Sam Altman proposed the concept of Moore's law for everything, referring to the principle that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years, leading to a linear increase in computing power in the process. And if I got that wrong,

I just I think it's okay anyway. Moore's Law for Everything is, in essence a utopian take on the impact of AI, noting that as machines usurp the roles of humans in the supply chain, the prices of goods and services and thus the cost of living will go down exponentially, something that has been proven wrong by a lot of history. The problem with this piece is it's kind of like Sam Moultman in that it's a deeply complex bucket of nothing.

It's an extremely verbose screed that says things like AI will lower the cost of goods and services because labor is the driving cost at many levels of the supply chain, and suggests things like that we should tax capital rather than labor by creating an American equity Fund where companies are forced to give up a percentage of their shares to a nationally incorporate adventure fund, an idea that makes sense if you're in the business of flogging private companies

to public companies. Moore's law for Everything is a remarkably telling piece in that if frames Aortman's worldview as one where the only thing that can save mankind is startups, and those should be funded in the way that Sam Ortman likes, and this piece feels a lot like everything

in a Ortmand's universe. Endeavor actually connects Moore's law to anything, which I should add isn't so much of a law as an observation as long ceased to be relevant as the shrinkage of transistors as slowed in the recent years. In many respects, this comparison is actually ierially prophetic given the slow down and even regression of improvement we've seen in large language models like chat GPT, And much like chat GPT, Ortmand is capable only of loosely approximating the

output requested, because that is core. He lacks any kind of substance or technical history that you'd need to do so, like chat GPT, he's a very intelligent know nothing that, through deterministic measures, completely detached from the meaning of the underlying ideas, picks the right words to say at the right time. And by the way, this is the man

selling the artificial intelligence stream. He's a salesman, and he's a salesman capable of superficial connections between ideas in a way that's initially satisfying as long as you just don't think about it too much. Altmand's famed startup playbook, which is published in twenty fifteen, is full of the kind of obvious yet satisfying crap that you'd expect. He extols

the virtues of being flexible yet rigid. Advis is that you talk to your users and watch them use your product, which is an exact quote, and he says that you should try to improve your product five percent each week.

These are the kind of things that are very useful, genuinely to an early twenties founder, and super impressive to a mid fifties white venture capitalist that doesn't remember the last time they worked a job that wasn't ten hours a week of investing in Chuntley the SaaS for dog breeders. They're the tech equivalent of live, Laugh, Love It does. However, at one point, betray Sam Altman's real mindset that the only universal job description of a CEO is to make

make sure that the company wins. Almand's material contributions to open Ai kind of hard to nail down. Well, it's unfair to judge someone entirely by their emails. Those that I can find, such as the ones from Elon Musk's lawsuit against open Ai, feel like they could be from any other managerial huckster, and they feel kind of as specious as Elon Musk's. And by the way, you're able to compare those because when Elon Musk sued open Ai, open Ai published a bunch of emails and him and

Alman are the same guy. They're both just sitting going, yes, yes, the future will be very good. It'll be very important that we have technology in the future. Yes, AI will be able to grow. And Sam Almond's like, yeah, dude, yeah, that's great. That's crazy man. It's like Joe Rogan, except

they're worth billions of dollars. Almond blathers on about governance structures and how open ai needs to create the first general AI and use it for individual empowerment, which he defines as the distributed version of the future that seems the safest. Like I said, Musco and Aortman are very similar creatures, managers wearing engineering costumes, and both are credited as having expertise in AI without actually appearing to have

written a single line of code in a decade. And let me tell you something about most of the guys who actually work deep in AI. You know what, They've got academic papers, they have actual published things they've done. They're not afraid to share their code. They're not asking, as Elon must did when laying people off at Twitter for people's most salient lines of code, because they actually know how code works. I, by the way, do not. I'm not going to pretend I do. But I'm also

not there selling you the future of AI. From what I can tell, Altman has like broberkar Ragavan, the villain of the last episode Fallen Upwards. He was a constant source of frustration at Looped due to his pursuit and I share you not of side projects, with the Wall Street Journal reporting late last year that Altman wants diverted

engineers to work on an unnamed gay dating app. As I previously noted, Ortmand was fired from y Combinator for his absenteism and I quote reputation for favoring personal priorities over official duties, and the Wallstroop Journal reports that by early twenty eighteen, a year before he was fired, Ortmand was barely present at y Combinator's headquarters, spending more time at open Ai, which rankled longtime partners at y Combinator

who began losing faith in him as a leader. The journal's piece does reveal a little more about why Ortman was fired as CEO of open Ai, something that happened last November and was very weird if he didn't see it happen. He was fired for like three days, and then a bunch of managers like Reid Hoffman and Brancheski of Airbnb, sachurn Adela, the king of managers, the CEO of Microsoft, got together and bullied a nonprofit into putting

him back. Super happy story, But one of the reasons that he was fired was because Sam Altman is a pretty atrocious manager. Founding and sadly now former open Ai board member Ilia Sutzkava described to the board when calling for Altman's removal, a long running pattern of Altman's tendency to pit employees against one another, or promised resources and responsibilities to two different executives at the same time, yielding conflicts. More worryingly, the General reports that other members of the

board had heard similar concerns from senior OpenAI executives. By the way, anyone who brought Sam Altman back in ire

ascam bag, we all know it. They also feared that Sam Altman would use his influence in Silicon Valley once fired, something that almost immediately came true when Sam Altman ran as I mentioned to Brian Chesky of Airbnb, who then called Saturn Della of Microsoft, which sparked a chain of events that restored Altman as CEO of open Ai and led to the removal of the non believers like Ilia Suitskafer from the board entirely. This this is Silicon Valley's king.

This is the guy that people think is the Oppenheimer of our age. This is the king of Silicon Valley now, a multi billionaire who's actually a lobbyist role playing as a founder, a diplomat masquerading as a technologist, A charming, capricious, abusive, and untrustworthy man that has proven time and time again that his only reliable trait is that whatever happens must

benefit Sam Altman. This also explains why so little of Sam Altman's promises about AI makes sense and why open ai has been so unashamed in steam rolling and plagiarizing the entire world. Altman has created nothing other than wealth for himself and other rich guys, helping elevate and protect existing power structures and the ideologies of men like Microsoft CEO Sachnadella and LinkedIn founder and career manager Read Hoffman.

And let's not forget open AI's new board member Larry Goddamn Summers, and it all kind of makes sense why GENERATIVEAI doesn't really help anyone other than those who want to sell something. When the center of attention at a company isn't really on the product or the tech, but the idea of what the product could do, very little about the company's culture is focused on building useful things

for real people. When leadership is dominated by managers that haven't touched a line of code in decades or talked to a normal person in decades, nobody steering the ship has the ability to judge whether software is good or useful, or valuable, or does anything other than help you raise venture capital, of course, and this is the direct result

of Silicon Valley's corruption by the managerial sect. While Propakar Ragavan may be a decorated computer scientist and academic, he arguably oversaw the destruction of Yahoo, formerly one of the Webb's most dominant search engines, and failed upwards into a managerial role that allowed him to take over and now arguably ruin Google's search product chasing Away Ben Gomes a

hero and a man responsible for actually building things. Adam Masseri was and always will be a manager making calls about products he's had no hand in building, and has architected the outright destruction of a social network used by billions of people. And Sam Altman, a career failure famous for making himself rich and popular and upsetting and hurting the people he works with, is on course to become

the most toxic manager of them all. If left unchecked, OpenAI will perpetuate one of the largest thefts in history, looting the Internet and using it to train models that

have yet to prove their necessity. Other than there's a symbol that Silicon Valley has still fucking got it, even though it unquestionably doesn't when it comes to generative as yet, because Altman, like every manager, is so thoroughly divorced from natural production, he's only succeeded in generating unsustainable hype and making vague promises that the people who do the actual

work at OpenAI likely know that they can't keep. And it's frustrating because, as I said before, bad guys keep winning. There are people in Silicon Valley making real products. There are people out there who are doing good things, but Silicon Valley will continue to suffer as long as we entrust the future to management consultants and showmen who don't

build things. Just look at Humane, a company that raised hundreds of millions of dollars to make a voice activated AI powered pin that the ultra popular YouTuber markus brownly called the worst product he'd ever reviewed. One might wonder how a company would willingly launch a seven hundred dollars product that overheated within minutes of use and repeatedly failed to answer basic queries. And the answer is actually really simple.

Was founded by Bethny Bonziano, a former management consultant at PwC, and Imronchell Dori, a former director of design from Apple, that re firs to himself as an inventor and innovator that was fired in twenty seventeen for sending out an email about his planned exit from the company that suggested that Apple could no longer innovate. Well, may look at the humane pen. Do you think you innovated? Just to be clear, if you haven't seen this thing, you should

really look it up. It's really funny. It clips on and you are meant to use it to project a laser thing onto your hand to make phone calls or take photos. It's got a little camera in it. Here's the problem. It overheats after a few minutes because of the laser. And on top of that, the queries don't work after time. And when they do, who really cares? It's just chat GPT except seven hundred dollars worth a

twenty four dollars a month subscription. And this is what happens when you're insulated from real people's problems, and when you don't participate in the process that might actually solve them, you become fundamentally disconnect from any real value creation. Silicon Valley is atrophying as a result of lazy, disconnected vcs and power players elevating man like sam Altman and incumbents helping career consultants dictate the actions of those who actually

build software and hardware. If the tech industry wants to escape the public's eire, it should push back against this managerial poison and talk to real people with real problems and focus on solving those before creating yet another growth centric bullshit machine. And as the value really wants to change, it needs to stop empowering those who have failed upwards just because they say the right things. It feels good.

I get it that we have a guy out there who's saying, yeah, I can help the value be worth money. But as we speak, in vidios down ten percent by the time this episode's out, I truly don't know where it will be. But I'm worried. I'm worried that the tech industry is going to start sputtering because every rues put their eggs in the AI basket. But I do have some hope. A lot of the startups I talked to are only slightly touching generative AI. They don't seem

firmly embedded in it. Maybe this is just anecdotal, Maybe I just know good people. I don't know, but my thought here is the fact that the zero interest free generation has kind of ended. That venture capitalists can't just get hundreds of billions of dollars quite so easily. Means that they're not so quick to invest in this stuff. But I think are reckoning's coming, and I don't know if it will be from people, but I think it's

going to be kind of a larger effect. It's going to be one where you see that these products just don't get adopted, like I mentioned in the AI episode, and I think you're going to see these big, nasty, overfunded consumer AI companies fall apart. But like I said before, I'm afraid the open AI is going to start falling apart, even if it is mostly part of Microsoft. I'm afraid of the knock on effects on the stock market. And

I know, oh, stock market is only rich people play. No, that's people's pensions as people like regular people do actually invest in the stock market, and regular people watch Jim Kramer as he goes you need to invest in AI. That man does not know a goddamn thing. By the way, a lot of people who've responded to my AI episode have said, yeah, it's good that AI's fail. It's good that the tech industry is falling apart, and it feels

good to see bad people fail. But the thing I need to caution you about is management consultants are also really good at avoiding blame. Prabakar Ragavan he destroyed Yahoo, or at least watched it happen, and he's now the head of Google Search and he's destroying that too. Sam Altman has messed up so many times, and yet here he is. He's the king of Open AI. He gets these glossy stories. He can be interviewed by anyone anywhere.

These people keep winning, but you want to know how they get defeated Sunlight talk about them, Talk about Adam Maseri, talk about Sam Mortman. These stories to your friends, say the name Propacar Ragavan. As much as you can blame these people for their actions, I can't say it will change much. But at least the wider society will know who to blame for destroying the Internet. Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and

composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matasowski dot com. M A t t O. S O w Ski 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. Better

Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the I or radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.