The Era of the Business Idiot, Part 3

you about where all this goes. Nothing I've said in this three part should suggest that the business idiot is weak. In fact, business idiots are in full control. We have too many managers, and our most powerful positions are valorized for not knowing stuff, for having a general view that we can take the big picture from, not realizing that the big picture is usually made up of lots of

little brushstrokes. Business idiots have a cultural cachet. Then we aspire to be business idiots, and our education pushes people to careers where the goal is to climb from the worker class of the oxygen starved apex of business idiot Mountain. Yet there are eventually consequences for everything being controlled by

business idiots. Our current society, an unfair, unjust one dominated by half broken tech products that make their owners billions and that manipulate and mislead by design, is the real punishment wrought by growth, A brain draining corporate society, one that leads it to doing illogical things and somehow making money doing so. It doesn't make any fucking sense that

generative AI got this big. The returns aren't there, the outcomes aren't there, and any sensible society would have put a gun to chat GPT's head and aggressively pulled the trigger.

Generative AI is symbolic of the future of capitalism, one that celebrates mediocrity and costs billions of dollars, one that surrenders every human work the model can consume, and that accepts the destruction of our planet, all because everybody kind of agreed that this is what we're all doing now, with nobody able to give a convincing expert nation of

what that even is or why we're doing it. Generative AI is revolting, both in how overstated its abilities are and in how continually it tests how lower standards somebody will take for a product, both in its outputs and in the desperate companies trying to integrate it into everything, and its proliferation throughout society and organizations is already fundamentally harmful. We're not just drowning in a sea of slop. We're

in a constant state of corporate AI beta test. New features sprouting out of our products, like new limbs that sometimes function normally but often attempt to strangle us. You know what the stand in that episode of JoJo's Stop It. It's unclear of companies forcing these products on us have contempt for us, or simply don't know what good looks like, or perhaps it's both, with the business idiot resenting us for not scarffing down whatever they serve us, as that's

what's generally worked before. They don't really understand their customers. They understand what a customer pays for and how a purchase is made, you know, like the leaders of banks and asset managers during the subprime mortgage crisis didn't really think about whether people could pay those mortgages, just that they needed lot of them to put in a cedo. The business Idiot's economy is one run and built for

other business idiots. They can only make things that sell to companies that must always be in flux, which is the preferred environment of the business idiot, because if they're not perpetually starting new initiatives and jumping on new innovations, they'd actually have to interact with the underlying production of the company and the people actually doing the work. Does the software work? Sometimes the successful companies exist that sell

like this. Sure, but look at today's software and tell me with a straight face that things feel good to use.

And something like generative AI was always inevitable. An industry claiming to change the world that never really does so, full of businesses that don't function as businesses, full of flim flamm half truths used to impress people who will likely never interact with it, or do so only in a passing way, by chasing out the people that actually build things in favor of the people that sell them. Our economy is built on production puppetry. Just like GENERATIVEAI,

and especially like chat, GPT and Claude. These people are antithetical to what's good in the world, and their power deprives us of happiness, the ability to thrive and honestly, any true innovation. The business city it thrives on alienation, on distancing itself from the customer and the thing that

they consume, and in many ways, from society itself. Mark Zuckerberg wants us to have fake friends, and he said that to the Wall Street Channel Samuel and wants us to have fake colleagues in the form of the agency makes that don't fucking work and increase and an increasingly loud group of executives salivated the idea of replacing us with a fake version of us that will make a shittier version of what we make for a customer that

said executive doesn't give a fuck about. And yeah, that is describing a form of slave, especially if it's conscious. I mean, if it's not conscious, it isn't. But the moment you make AGI, you've got a real fucking problem on your hands.

than your contribution to their power and wealth. This is why so many squealing little middle managers look up to the Musks and Altman's of the world, because they see in them the same kind of specious corporate authoritarian, somebody who's above work and thinking and knowledge and doing stuff disgusting. But one of the most remarkable things about the business

IDIA is their near in vulnerability. Modern management is resource control, shifting blame away from the manager, who should hold responsibility. After all, if you don't, why do you have a fucking job onto the laborer, knowing that the organization and the media will back them up. Or you may think I'm making a generalization, the twenty twenty one to twenty twenty three anti remote work push in the media was grow tesque proof of where the media's true allegiance lies.

The media happily manufactured consent for return to office mandates from large companies by framing remote workers some sort of destructive force doing all they can to discuss how modern management has no fucking idea how the workplace actually works now.

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

were pushing for us to return the office. It's actually where I got started, and it really was the ultimate jokification for me. It's what actually set me on the path the better offline, because it's when you saw both how little the bosses knew what was going on and how willing people in the media were to support them.

And these were people people writing these stories were journalists that were going to be forced back to the office and ended up being so, and they were like, yeah, this is actually it's actually good that we go into the office. And when you ask the journalists, hey, what do you get to the office, they say well, one time I ran into someone and we had a good idea, or it was quicker to walk over to someone's desk. Does that mean the work was better? No, but the

vibes felt better, I guess. I also't know way more people who just fucking hated working in the office. But these articles rarely, if ever, cared about whether remote work was more productive or the disconnect appeared to be between

managers and workers. Now, had any of those reporters every spoken to an actual worker, they'd say that they valued more time with their families rather than the grind of a daily commute, so often with the promise of an occasional company pizza party, which usually happens outside of the

typical working hours. Anyway, and these articles and this period, it was from the very beginning about crushing the life out of a movement that gave workers more flexibility and mobility while suppressing managers' ability to hide how little work

they actually did. I do give credit to CNBC in twenty twenty three for saying the quiet part out loud that and I quote, the biggest disadvantage of remote work that employeers cide is how difficult it is to observe and monitor employees, because when you can't do that, you have to hear, actually know what they're doing and understand their work. Jesus Christ. Now I'm with the managers, how discussing.

But yet higher up the chain the invulnerability continues. CEOs may get fired I mentioned it before, and more getting fired than ever. It turns out, although sadly not the ones we want, they always receive a golden parachute at the end before walking into another role at another organization doing exactly the same level of nothing. Yet before that happens, CEO is allowed to pull basically every lever before they

make they face any kind of accountability. They can lay people off, they can freeze pay, they can move from people from salary to contracted workers. They can close down sites, they can offshore, they can cut certain products. They can even spend more fucking money so they lose less. If you or I misallocated billions of dollars on stupid ideas, we'd be fired and we'd have real trouble finding more employment.

We would be well known for our incompetence, and indeed we would be in real trouble and there would be real problems finding more work. If we were a big stupid piece of shit.

Let me give you an example. Microsoft CEO Sachan Nedella said and I quote that the ultimate computer is the mixed reality world, and that Microsoft would be inventing new computers and new computing in twenty sixteen, pushing his senior executives to tell reporters that Hololenz was Microsoft's next wave of computing in twenty seventeen, selling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of headsets to the military in twenty nineteen, then debuting HoloLens two at Bill twenty nineteen, only for

the on stage demo to break in real time, calling for a referendum on capitalism in twenty twenty, then saying he couldn't overstate the breakthrough of the metaverse in twenty twenty one. Now let's hear what Nadella had to say about it, and massive prompts the Preston Growler of Computer World for writing this piece. AHM. Nadella in that twenty

twenty one keynote made big promises. When we talk about the metaverse, we're describing both a new platform and a new application type, similar to how we talked about the web and websites in the early nineties. In a sense, the metaverse enables us to embed computing into the real world and to embed the real world into computing. Fucking

what bringing real presence to any digital space. Years we've talked about creating the digital representation of the world, but now we actually have the opportunity to go into that world and participate on it. I just want to be clear, at this time, Microsoft had nothing of the sort. They

had like websites, They had Microsoft Teams. They tried to claim Microsoft Teams was a matter of us fucked up, and as Grella notes, Nedella made big promises beefing up development in projects such as its Mixed Reality tool Kit MRTK, the virtual reality workspace project all Space VR, which it brought back in twenty seventeen, It's HoloLens Virtual Realities headset, and its Industrial Metaverse unit, among others, before firing all members of its Industrial Metaverse core team, along with those

behind MRTK, and shutting down it's all Space VR in twenty twenty three, before discontinuing Hololenz two entirely in twenty twenty four. Guess that wasn't anything then, Just you know, it's like like a friend of yours is in a really chaotic relationship and they just the next stage tag like it's not happening, or someone tells you they've had a big moment in their life and they just pretend

it doesn't happen. It was hundreds of millions of dollars and tons of media coverage where people said, this is what Microsoft's doing next, this is what happened. It's so insane that that happened. We really don't talk enough about how fucking insane. The metaverse thing was just like a year or so where everyone just played make believe, completely insane. I of course was right about it at the time, and it was very fucking clear, and there are a

few people that were negative as well. There were also some people who claim they were negative who weren't. Their time will come now. Nadella was transparently copying meta and Mark Zuckerberg's ridiculous metaverse play, and absolutely nothing happened to him As a result. The media outlets like The Vergin Independence like Ben Thompson, happily boosted the Metaverse idea when it was announced, and conveniently forgot about it the second

that Microsoft and Meta wanted to talk about AI. Not really. Both the verg and Ben Thompson were ready in waiting to do literally the same interview, but about a different subject, no consideration of what was previously said at all. A true business city it never admits wrongdoing, and the more powerful the business city is, the more likely there are power structures that exist to avoid them having to do so.

The media, captured by other business idiots, has become powerfully poisoned by power, referring to its whims and ideals and treating CEOs with more respect, dignity, and intelligence than anyone who ever worked for them. When a big company decides they want to do artificial intelligence, the media's natural reaction is to ask how and why and write down the answer, rather than to think about whether it's possible whether the company might profit, say by increasing their shareholder price by

having whatever they say printed advobatim. These people aren't challenged by the media or their employees because their employees are vulnerable all the time and often are encouraged to buy into whatever bullshit dju there is, like hostage is held captive until the media and corporate culture give them Stockholm syndrome.

They're only challenged by shareholders ru agnostic about idiocy because it's not core to value in any meaningful sense, as we've seen with crypto, the metaverse, and AI, and shareholders will tolerate infinite levels of idiocy if it boosts the

value of their holdings. It goes further too. Twenty twenty one saw the largest amount of venture capital invested in the last decade, a record breaking six hundred and forty three billion dollars, with a remarkable three hundred and twenty nine point five billion dollars of that invested in the US alone. Some of the biggest deals include Amazon reseller aggregate e Thrasio, which raised a billion dollars in October twenty twenty one and file for bankruptcy in February twenty

twenty five. Cloud security company lace Work, which raised five hundred and twenty five million dollars in January twenty twenty one, then one point three billion dollars in October twenty twenty one, and was rumored to be up for sale to Whiz, only for the deal to collapse and then they ended up selling for about two hundred million dollars to another company.

And then, of course there was autonomous car company Crews, which had hundreds of headlines about being the future, raised about two point seventy five billion dollars in twenty twenty one,

and was killed off in December twenty twenty four. Suddenly, the people who lose their livelihoods those who took stock in low of cash compensation, those who end up getting laid off at the end are always work while people like Lacework co CEO j Perick, who oversaw reckless spending and management dysfunction according to the information, can walk into highly paid positions at companies like Microsoft, as Jay did in October twenty twenty four, a few months after a

file sale and the one I mentioned before, the two hundred million dollar one even to a company for fourt in it. Yeah, this is the behind the actor studio A bit. I got a little ahead of myself, But I'm not editing it. Why would I? It doesn't matter if these people are wrong or if they run their companies badly, because the business idiot is infallible and judged

too by fellow disconnected business idiots. In a just society, nobody would ever want to touch any of the C suite that oversaw a company that handed out Nintendo switches to literally anyone who booked a meeting, as was the case with Lacework. Instead, the stank remains on the employees alone. One point about this, just an aside. Maya's most recent layoffs were explicitly said to target low performers, needlessly harming the future job prospects of those handed the pink slip

in an already fucked tech job market. It was cruel and pointless, and I'm certain of big fat Meta is spending big on AI and has spent big on the metaverse, which went nowhere and owns two dying platforms Instagram and Facebook, and one that's hard to monetize in WhatsApp. It needs

to get costs down and improve margins. Layoffs are one way to go, and things are getting bad enough to matter is now, according to the information walking around Silicon Valley, begging other big tech companies for money to train their

open source Lama LLM as shit is. That is, the low performance Jive is an unnecessary twist of the knife demonstrating the metal would gladly throw its workers under the bus if it serves their interests, because the optics of firing low performers is different to say, firing a bunch of people because she keep spunking money on dead end vanity projects and me too products that nobody wants or wants to use or can understand. Mark Zuckerberg I add owns an island on Hawaii. The idea that he even

thinks this much about meta is disgraceful. Go outside, you fucking freak. Anyway, It's so easy, and perhaps inevitable, to feel a sense of nihilism about this. Nothing matters, It's all symbolic. Wild is filled with companies run by people who don't interact with the business and that raise money from venture that neither run businesses nor really have any

experience doing so. And despite the fact that these people exist several extractions from reality, the things that they do and the decisions they make impact us all, and it's hard to imagine how to fix it. I don't want you to live without hope. Understanding how evil these people are is the first step to things changing, and more

people understanding is genuinely important. But we really do live in a system of inequity dominated by people that do not interact with the real world, who have created an entire system run by their fellow business idios. The rot economy's growth at all costs manor is a symptom of the grander problem of shareholders supremacy, and the single minded economic focus on shareholder value inevitably ends at an economy

run by and for business idios. There is a line, and it ends here with layoffs, the destruction of our planet and our economy and our society, and a rising tide of human misery that nobody really knows where it comes from, and so we don't know who to blame

and for what. If our economy actually works as a true mayor autocracy where we didn't have companies run by people who don't use their products or understand how they're made, and who hire similarly specious people, these people would collapse under the pressure of having to know their ass from their ear hole. Yet none of this would be possible without their enabling layers, and those layers are teeming with both business idiots and those unfortunate enough to have learned

from them. The tech media has enabled every single bubble without exception, accepting every single narrative fed to them by vcs and startups, with even critical reporters still accepting the lunacy of companies like open Ai just because everyone else does too, and because the standard has been set of if a company raises money, they're real. Let's be honest when you remove all the money. Our current tech industry

is kind of a disgrace. Our economy is held up by Nvidia, a company that makes most of its money selling GPUs to other companies, primarily so that they can start losing money selling software that might eventually make them money, just not today, and they're not sure how. In video is defined by massive peaks and valleys as it jumps on trends and bandwagons at the right time, despite knowing that these bandwagons always come to some sort of halt.

The other companies feature Tesla, a meme stock car company with a deteriorating brand and a chief executive famous for his divorces from both reality and multiple women, along with a flagrant racism that may cost the company its life, a company that we're watching die in real time with a snagnant lineup, and an actual fucking competition from companies that are spending on innovation in Europe and elsewhere. Bid is eating Tesla's lunch, offering better products for half the

price and with far less racism. And this is just the first big Chinese automotive brand to go global. Others like Cherry are enjoying rapid growth outside of China because these cars are actually good and affordable and even when

you factor in the things like tariffs. Hey, remember when Tesla fired all those people and it's charging network despite the fact that it's one of the most profitable and valuable parts of the business, and they meant to then went and had to hire them back because it turns out they actually needed them. This is a good example of managerial alienation decisions made by non workers elon Musk who don't understand their customers, their businesses, or the work

their employees do. And let's not forget about the cyber truck and monstrosity, both in how it looks and how it's sold. It's illegal to drive in the majority of developed countries because it's a death trap for drivers and

pedestrians alike. Oh and nobody actually wants it. With Tesla sitting on a quarters worth of inventory they can't sell elsewhere is Meta a collapsing social network of ninety nine percent of its revenue based on an advertising model to an increasingly aged population, and a monopoly so flagrantly abusive in its contempt for its customers that at times it's difficult to call Instagram or Facebook a social network. Mark Zuckerberg had to admit to the Senate Judiciary Committee that

people don't use Facebook as a social network anymore. The reason why is because the platform is so fucking rotten run by a company alienated from its user base. It's the crepit product, actively hostile to anybody trying to use it. And more fundamentally, what's the point of posting on Facebook if your friends won't see it? Because metas algorithm decided

it wouldn't drive engagement, monument to disconnection. A company that runs encounter to its own mission to connect people, run by Mark Zuckerberg, a man who hasn't had a good idea since he stole it from the Winkle Brothers. I'm meant to say that Winklevoss Brothers, I'm actually going to keep him the solution to all that ails him adding generative AI to every part of Meta, which are shit. It was meant to do something other than burn seventy

two billion dollars in capital expenditures in twenty twenty five. Right, it isn't clear what was meant to happen, but the Wall Street Journals Jeff Horwitz reports that metas ai chatbots are and I quote empowered to engage in romantic roleplay that can turn explicit, even with children. In a civil society, Zuckerberg would be ousted immediately for creating a pedophile chatbot. Instead, four days after the story ran, everyone cheered they're better

than expected earnings report in Redmond. Microsoft sits atop multiple monopolies, using tariffs as I mean toduce flailing Xbox revenue, as it invests billions of dollars into open Ai so that open Ai can spend billions of dollars on cloud compute, losing billions of dollars in the process, requiring Microsoft inverst further money to keep them alive, all because Microsoft wanted

generative Ai'm bing what a fucking waste. And they're also raising the costs of their office suite too, while which is only something they've been able to hold on to because of an underhanded bullshit fest from their antitrustrial from the nineties. Amazon lumbers listlessly through life. It's giant labor abusing machines, shipping things overnight at whatever cost is necessary to crush the life out of any other possible source

of commerce. It's cloud services and storage arm on shore of who to copy next, dumping billions into anthropic as a means of creating revenue for their dead end products. Is it Microsoft? Is it Google? Who knows? Who knows what Amazon is anymore? But one analyst believes it's making five whole billion dollars in revenue from AI in twenty twenty five. And you know how much they've put in capital expenditures this year, one hundred and five billion dollars

in capital expenditures. There are slot machines with better ROI than this bullshit. Again, Amazon is a company that's totally exploitive its customers, no longer acting as a platform that helps people find the shit they need, but directing them to products that pay the most for prime advertising real estate, no matter whether they're good or safe. Let's be clear, Amazon's recklessness will kill someone if it hasn't already. The products they allow on their are not safe. They do

not give a fucking shit. But then there's the worst of them, Google, most famous for its namesake, a search engine that has been reduced as hard as possible and will continue to be juced before the inevitable anti trust sentencing that will rob Google of its power, along with the severance of its advertising monopoly along with them. But

don't worry. Google has a generative AI think for some reason, and no, you don't have a choice about using it, because they've now replaced Google Assistant with Google Gemini and Google Search all but requires you to use their AI. They burn money for no reason. It sucks, and at no point do any of these companies seem to be focused on making our lives better or selling us any

kind of real future. They exist to maintain the status quo where cloud computing allows them to retain their previous fifdoms. They're alienated from people, they're alienated from workers, they're alienated from consumers, and they're alienated from the world. They're deeply antisocial, they're narcissistic, they're sociopathic, and they're misanthropic, as demonstrated by zux moronic aisocial network comments, and AI is a symptom

of a reckoning of the stupidity in hubris. They cut, they cut, they cut, the cut, they cut some more, and then they stagnated. Their hope is a product that will be adopted by billions of imaginary customers and companies and will allow them to cut further without becoming just a peer box and a domain name. We have to recognize that what we're seeing right now with generative AI isn't a fluke or a bug, but a feature of a system that's rapacious and short, termed by its very

nature and doesn't define value as we do. Because value gets defined by a faceless shareholder as growth, the system can only exist with the contribution of the business idiot. These are the vanguard, the foot soldiers of this system and a key reason why everything is so terrible all the time and why nothing seems to be getting better. Breaking from that status quo would require a level of bravery that they do not have and perhaps isn't possible

in the current economic system. These people are powerful and

they have big platforms. They're people like Derek Thompson, famed co author of the Abundance Agenda, who celebrates the idea of a fictitious version of chat GPT that can entirely plan and execute a five year old's birthday party, or his co author Ezra Klein, who, while recording a podcast where his researchers likely listened, talk proudly about replacing their work with open ais broken deep research product because anything that can be outsourced must be and all researches is

looking at stuff. It's relevant if you're a fucking idiot, and really that's the most grotesque part of the business idiom. They see every part of our lives as a series

of inputs and outputs. They boast about how many books they've read rather than content, have said books the way they made them feel, About how many hours they work, even though they never ever ever work that many, About how high level they are in a video game they don't actually play, about the money they've ated than the scale they've raised it at, and about how expensive and fancy their kitchen gadgets are, even if they use the

wrong oils. Everything is dominance, acquisition, growth, and possession over any lived experience because their world is one where the journey does not matter, because their journeys are riddled with privilege and persecution of others in the pursuit of success. These people don't want to auter make work, They want

to automate existence. They fantasize about hitting a button and something happening, because experiencing living is beneath them, or at least your lives and your once and your joys are. They don't want to plan their kids birthday parties. They don't want to research things. They don't value culture or art or beauty. They want to give to the end. They want to hit fast forward on anything, because human struggle is for the poor, the unworthy, and the uneducated.

When you're steeped in privilege and have earned everything basically through a mixture of stolen labor and office pantomime, the idea of effort is always a negative. The process of creation of a fiction of love, of kindness, of using time not just for an action or output, is disgusting to the business idiot, because those are the times that could be focused on themselves or some nebulous, self serving vision that is, when stripped back to its fundamental truth,

either moronic or malevolent. They don't realize that you hire a worker not just for the output, but for their actual labor and their experience in creating that labor and their understanding of the world around it, which is why they don't see why it's so insulting to outsource their

interactions with human beings. You'll notice that these people never bring up actual examples of automating actual work, the mind numbing grunt work that we all face in the workplace, because they either don't really know what that is, or they don't really give a shit about what it is.

They are the things that frustrate them, like dealing with other people, or existing outside of the gilded circles of socialite fucks and pleurocrats, or just things that are inevitable facets of working life, like reading an email, your son's birthday part or a conflict with a friend. Can indeed be stressful, but these are not problems to be automated.

These are the struggles that make us human, the things that make us grow, the things that make us who we are, which isn't a problem for anybody other than somebody who doesn't believe they need to change in any way. It's both powerful and powerless at the same time. A nihilistic way of seeing our lives is a collection of events we accept or dismissed like a system, prompt the desperate pursuit of such efficient living that you barely feel

a thing until you die. I spent years talking about these people without giving them a name, because categorizing anything is difficult. I can't tell you how long it took me to synthesize the rot economy from the broader trends I saw in tech and elsewhere. How long it took me to thread that particular needle to identify the various threats that unified events that are otherwise separate and distinct.

I am but one person. Everything you've read in my newsletter or artclesse I've written or heard on my podcast to this point has been something I've had to learn. Building an argument and turning it into words, often at the same time that other people read, doesn't really come naturally to anyone. It's something you have to work deliberately out. You might have talent, but you have to work towards them.

It's imperfect. There are fuck ups. I sometimes mispronounced names and words, including my own name, which Metasowski has always been kind enough not to laugh at me. About these podcasts and newsletters, they increase in length and breadth and have so many links, and I'll never change my process because part of said process is learning, relearning, processing, messaging Casey saying Casey, I don't understand this, arguing with Casey a little bit, coming up with another idea and a

chord is by text. Matt Hughes, I talk with Robert Evans, I go back and forth with everyone. I get more pissed off. Then I write, and I really write, and I speak, and so on and so forth. This process makes what I do possible, and the idea of someone automating it discuss me not because I'm special or important, but because my work is not the result of me reading a bunch of links or writing a bunch of words. The script for this piece is not just about thirteen

thousand words long. It's the result of more than a million words, probably more than that that I wrote before it, the hundreds of stories I've read in the past, the hours and hours of conversations with friends and editors, years of accumulating knowledge, and yes, growing with the work itself. I as a person have grown with this show thanks to the wonderful feedback I get from all of you, from the conversations we have on the Reddit or just

the emails. I get the occasional one of you who finds myself on which is really quite scary, but not many of you do, and please don't look. The thing is, imperfections are what make us human. Imperfections are what make art so great. The fun things that happen in our life are never from a moment of perfection or from crystallizing something that is immacular. Perhaps the timing is perfect, perhaps we're in the right place at the right time,

but nothing about us is perfect. And through those imperfections we grow and we thrive. Business idiots don't give a fuck about that. Sam Mortman doesn't give a fuck about that. Satchinnidella doesn't give a fuck about that. They think they're fucking perfect. But true art and true joy and true solidarity is what's needed to dispatch with these people and to stop what they're doing. And really, the biggest thing that we can do early on the real starting block

is anyone within the tech media listen to this. We need to change. We need to change how we cover these companies. We need to change that. Honestly, everything needs to be inverted. Trusting a company based on how much money it has and how big it is is the

wrong way to go about this business. Business idiots have learned that, and they have moved their marketing strategies to create metrics that journalists accept and will print, and then they will sound good for people that don't know what they're talking about, because the journalists don't even bother to pull the metrics apart themselves. And I understand why everyone's doing what everyone else is doing. But we can change things, But you, as a listener, how can you change things

You're already doing it. Over the last year, I've seen a remarkable growth in just regular people being willing to push back against these narratives, in pushing back in their businesses. Also, those of you with children can teach them not to aspire to be a fucking manager or an executive unless

they know their fucking work. It is that simple. And I know it feels kind of bleak right now with everything going on in California, with everything going on with the government, with everything going on with Open AI, with the amount of stories about how AI is going to take everything and take everything we have and recreate it in a shitty way. The fact that they're so desperate means that they're scared, and they're scared of the fact that you are willing to talk about this and you

are willing to spit in their face. If you don't want to use AI, don't use AI. If you are curious about what it does, don't bother looking or fuck around with the free version of bit so that you only lose the money. If these things would automate you, they'd be automating you already, if they were close to doing so, they would be previewing the world in which they do. So they're fucking scared. Well, the era of

the business idiot is happening right now. It could potentially be coming to an end because as this movement ends, and I said this in the rock Kom bubble a year ago, they don't have any more growth markets. This is the end for them. I'm not saying the end of the companies. They'll work something out, but they don't have double digit growth in them past the next year.

The revenues are small, and you the listener who've been sitting there the whole time saying, why the fuck does everyone say this thing is amazing whenever they use jet GPT and not really understanding why you're not the weird one. They are. They cannot beat us because we actually do things. If you're a business city yourself listening to this, open a book, go and learn something, Go and talk to a customer, Well, start your current in the garage. I

don't really know. I really don't encourage you to do that necessarily. But the point I'm making is this middle managers ruin lives, business city. It's ruined lives. I think everyone listening to this is going to have experienced several of them. The fact that management as a concept and that management as a discipline has died is a big part of this as well. Labor is really fucking hurting right now. I realize them kind of rambling, but I'll

end on the simpler note. If you are around people who are scared, be scared with them, Offer them kindness, Offer them solidarity and a generous ear. Support their work, Support independent creators. Support people at the Vox Union who are currently battling against the company that saw for to give Kara Swish to tens of millions of dollars, that continually pushes powerful people at the CEO of Airbnb, which

is company which is ruined pretty much rentals everywhere. Don't know why Neli Pittella to talk to him about his house and the catskills, because that happened. When you hear these stories, push back on them, say I don't like this, Say fuck this. Support the Vox Union. In the event that the Vox Union does not get their contract, do not visit a single fucking Vox site. You must walk

away from that. Support workers, support artists, support creators, support the people who actually do work, and fuck the business idiots. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Metasowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T T O S O W s ki dot com.