Ed Zitron
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Robert Maxwell: How Ghislaine Maxwell's Dad Ruined Science
This was all under official government activity. They built a apartment that had a glass mirror where he could sit there and watch. And then they would drug these customers. And he was just sort of taking notes and God knows what else behind this double mirror. And this was all in the name of science.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Robert Maxwell: How Ghislaine Maxwell's Dad Ruined Science
This is so insane. This was all under like official government activity. They built a apartment in San Francisco that had a glass mirror where he could sit there and watch. And then they would drug these customers. And he was just sort of taking notes and God knows what else behind this double mirror. And this was all in the name of science.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Robert Maxwell: How Ghislaine Maxwell's Dad Ruined Science
If it allows me to go hella-skiing, then yeah, I'm hella on board.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
So what you're suggesting is that the poorer people pay more and the richer people have found a way around taxes somehow? Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
The people with the signature are probably the one. Why are the kings so insulated? Well, is it just because they can deploy the army against the peasantry?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Bonnie, there's a juggler.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Foreign world famous Robert Juggler. It would be really bad if we had a foreign guy doing something to our government as well.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
That's what I wanted to establish. Is this child in France, can the child do things yet?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Better than AI. Fucking Macron.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Shit ton of tyranids. And you're just like, this is why you can't, like, your power is $100 pounds an hour.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And someone who looks and sounds like both Beavis and Butthead knows my social security now.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Is that just, he promises it? He has him on, on him? Like, no, no, he's got tons of horses on him. Yeah. Just like,
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
So is there a logic behind the mirror room, or is it just so everyone could see you have mirrors?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Yeah. Fucking rude.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
People are so fucking unsafe. Mm-hmm.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Like- That's fine.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Because you're going to and from parties and working out how you dress.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
This is just CES, but French. Yes, yes.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
When you say they're warriors, what does that mean, though, for the nobility?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
So the economy literally centralized around a house.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
This is so awful, but also so cool.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
It's just like half the economy. Yeah. Like all of the, we have an entire thing of like housing furnishings.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Like multiple industries.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
This really is kinging it about as hard as one.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
If you're going to be a king, spend half of the economy, create multiple industries, make everything built in one country to make your house cool. To make your house cool. And then create a bunch of bizarre social rules inside it so that everyone's freaked out.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
You must come to my house. Build my house.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And I think that is the thing with Elon Musk and all of these other damp fellows. They don't have the killer instinct of like an old school French atrocity merchant.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
No, no, no. It's just, Musk is trying to couch everything, like, oh, I'm doing this for the betterment of humanity. Louis is just like, we need more fucking children to build my party house. Go, go, go.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Go, go, go. What are you fucking kidding? They don't make chairs here. Fuck you. You can't leave the country until you fuck more.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Those are the only projects- It's not built fully yet, or are they just building more of it?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Yeah, just like there's a side Turk economy, and all of this, again, is to pretty much make sure a big house is built.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
So we're talking about boundaries.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
No consideration that the magic didn't work. It's just that you didn't use effective enough magic.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And these people are, like, sleep deprived. They stink.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
So they're just, like, insane. Yeah, they're out of their minds. Well, they're already in an altered reality. Because they're living in this world where, like, you can't piss or shit. You can't, like, the wrong person can't hand a shirt. Of course they're open to magic.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Go to betteroffline.com. Download the podcast. Subscribe to the podcast. Go back. Download every single episode or else.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And what do you know about Versailles? Oh, alarmingly little. Just the Treaty of Versailles and how well that went.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Anyway. I truly don't actually know. I just know that they all have sex with each other.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Sordid Story of Nature Boy: The Instagram Cult Leader Who Hates Toilets
This is so insane. This was all under like official government activity. They built a apartment in San Francisco that had a glass mirror where he could sit there and watch. And then they would drug these customers. And he was just sort of taking notes and God knows what else behind this double mirror. And this was all in the name of science.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Sordid Story of Nature Boy: The Instagram Cult Leader Who Hates Toilets
If it allows me to go hella-skiing, then yeah, I'm hella on board.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Sordid Story of Nature Boy: The Instagram Cult Leader Who Hates Toilets
This is so insane. This was all under like official government activity. They built a apartment in San Francisco that had a glass mirror where he could sit there and watch. And then they would drug these customers. And he was just sort of taking notes and God knows what else behind this double mirror. And this was all in the name of science.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Sordid Story of Nature Boy: The Instagram Cult Leader Who Hates Toilets
If it allows me to go hella-skiing, then yeah, I'm hella on board.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Robert Maxwell: How Ghislaine Maxwell's Dad Ruined Science
This is so insane. This was all under like official government activity. They built a apartment in San Francisco that had a glass mirror where he could sit there and watch. And then they would drug these customers and he was just sort of taking notes and God knows what else behind this double mirror. And this was all in the name of science.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Robert Maxwell: How Ghislaine Maxwell's Dad Ruined Science
If it allows me to go hella-skiing, then yeah, I'm hella on board.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Better Offline
He joined the company in 1999, a time long before Google established dominance in the field, and the same year when Larry Page and Sergey Brin tried to sell the company to Excite for $1 million, only to walk away after Vinod Khosla, an Excite investor and co-founder of Sun Microsystems that's now...
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a VC who tried to stop people going to a beach in Half Moon Bay, well, he tried to lowball them with a $750,000 offer, also known as a 100-square-foot apartment in San Francisco. In an interview with Fast Company's Harry McCracken from 2018, Gomes frayed Google's challenge as taking the PageRank algorithm from one machine to a whole bunch of machines.
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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 2018, after John Ghiondouria moved to Apple to work on its machine learning and AI strategy. Gomes had been described as Google's search czar, beloved for his ability to communicate across Google's many quite decentralized departments.
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Every single article I've read about Gomes and his tenure at Google spoke of a man deeply ingrained in the foundation of one of the most important technologies ever made. A man who had dedicated decades to maintaining a product with a, and I quote Gomes here, guiding light of serving the user. and using technology to do that.
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And when finally given the keys to the kingdom, the ability to elevate Google search even further, he was rat-fucked by a series of rotten careerists trying to please Wall Street, led by Prabhakar Raghavan. Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan's old job was?
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What Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that ran Google Search, that runs Google Search right now, that is running Google Search into the goddamn ground. Do you want to know what his job was? His job before Google? He was the head of search for goddamn Yahoo from 2005 through 2012.
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When he joined the company, when Prabhakar Raghavan took over Yahoo Search, they held a 30.4% market share, not far from Google's own 36.9%, and miles ahead of the 15.7% that Microsoft's MSN Search had. By May 2012, Yahoo was down to just 13.4% and had shrunk for the previous nine consecutive months, and was being beaten by even the newly released Bing.
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That same year, Yahoo had the largest layoffs in its corporate history, shedding 2,000 employees, or 14% of its overall workforce. The man who deposed Ben Gomes, someone who worked on Google Search from its very beginnings, was so shit at his job that in 2009, Yahoo effectively threw in the towel on its own search tech, instead choosing to license Bing's engine in a 10-year deal.
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If we take a long view of things, this likely precipitated the overall decline of the company, which went from being worth $125 billion at the peak of the dot-com boom to being sold to Verizon for $4.8 billion in 2017, which is roughly a 3,000-square-foot apartment in San Francisco.
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With search no longer a priority and making less money for the company, Yahoo decided to pivot into Web 2.0 and original content, making some bets that paid off, but far, far too many that did not. It spent $1.1 billion on Tumblr in 2013, only for Verizon to sell it for just $3 million in 2019.
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It bought Zimbra in 2007 ostensibly to complete with the new Google Apps productivity suite, 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.
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Anyway, just a big shout out right now to Kara Swisher, who referred to Prabhakar as well-respected when he moved from Yahoo to Google. You absolutely nailed it, Kara. Bang up job.
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In an interview with ZDNet's Dan Farber from 2005, Raghavan 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 actually hard to find out exactly what Raghavan did.
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Though according to ZDNet, he spent 14 years doing search and data mining research at IBM. Hmm.
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In April 2011, The Guardian ran an interview with Raghavan 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 Bartz, the focus had shifted to the direct development of new products.
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It speaks of Raghavan's scientific approach and his steady, process-based logic to innovation that is very different to the common perception that 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.
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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 Raghavan's career made this feel right? How has nobody connected these dots 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, Dracula is now the CEO of the blood bank. Nobody saw this.
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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.
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In a financial deal that the next CEO, Marissa Mayer, who replaced Bartz, was still angry about for years, Raghavan's reign as what ZDNet 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.
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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 Bartz would be fired by telephone by then-chairman Roy Bostock.
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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 Marissa Mayer, in part because it emerged he lied on his resume about having a computer science degree. Hey, Robocar, did you not notice? Anyway, whatever.
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Bartz joined Yahoo in 2009, so about four years into Robocar's reign of terror, I guess. And she joined in the aftermath of its previous CEO, Jerry Yang, refusing to sell the company to Microsoft for $45 billion.
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In her first year, she laid off hundreds of people and struck a deal that I've mentioned before to power Yahoo's search using Microsoft's Bing search engine tech, with Microsoft paying Yahoo 88% of the revenue it gained from searches, a deal that made Yahoo a couple hundred million dollars for handing over the keys and the tech to its most high-traffic platform.
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As I previously stated, when Prabhakar Raghavan, 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, but there's a way of looking at this that you could say that Yahoo's entire value at the end of his career was driven by nostalgia in association with days before he worked there.
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Anyway. Thanks to the state of modern search, it's actually very, very difficult to find much about Ragavan's history. It took me hours of digging through Google, and at one point being, embarrassingly, to find three or four articles that went into any depth about him.
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But from what I've gleaned, his expertise lies primarily in failing upwards, ascending through the ranks of technology on the momentum from the explosions he's caused. In a Wired interview from 2021, glad handler Stephen Levy said Raghavan isn't the CEO of Google, he just runs the place, and described his addition to the company as a move from research to management.
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While Levy calls him a world-class computer scientist who has authored definitive texts in the field, which is true, he also describes Raghavan as choosing a management track, which definitely tracks with everything I've found out about him.
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Raghavan proudly declares that Google's third-party ad tech plays a critical role in keeping journalism alive in a really shitty answer to a question that was also made at a time when he was aggressively incentivizing search engine-optimized content, and a year after he'd deposed someone who actually gave a shit about search.
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Under Raghavan, Google has become less reliable and is dominated by search engine optimization and just outright spam. And I've said this before, but look, we complain about the state of Twitter under Elon Musk. And justifiably, he's a vile anti-semi-racist bigot. We all know this. It's fully true. We can say it a million times.
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However, I'd argue that Raghavan, and by extension, Sundar Pichai, deserve a hundred times more criticism. They've done unfathomable damage to society. You really can't fix the damage they've been doing and the damage they'll continue to do, especially as we go into an election.
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Raghavan 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 Pichai could make more than $200 million a year.
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And Raghavan, a manager hired by Sundar Pichai, a former McKinsey man, the king of managers, is an example of everything wrong with the tech industry.
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Despite his history as a true computer scientist with actual academic credentials, Raghavan 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.
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Since Prabhakar took the reins of Google in 2020, Google search has dramatically declined, with these core search updates I've 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.
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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 Raghavan is some vague bullshit about how important data is. It's so goddamn offensive to me.
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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 10 or 15 years, and big tech too. And it's because the people running the tech industry are no longer those who built it.
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Larry Page and Sergey Brin left Google in December 2019, 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.
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Prabhakar Raghavan 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 know, and fucked up Google so badly that every news outlet has run a story about how bad it is.
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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. You're a parasite.
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And it's these parasites that have dominated and are now draining the tech industry of its value. They're Driving it into a goddamn ditch. Ragavan's story is unique, insofar as the damage he's managed to inflict, or if we're being exceptionally charitable, failed to avoid in the case of Yahoo.
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On two industry-defining companies, and the fact that he did it without being a CEO or founder is remarkable. Yet, he's far from the only example of a manager falling upwards.
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to editorialize a bit here i want you to think about your job history i want you to think 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.
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I'm sure someone will email me now and say, well, I'm a manager and I do work all the time. Yeah, mate, sure you do. That's why you're emailing me telling me how good you are at your job. People who actually do work don't feel defensive about it. People who do things and are part of the actual profit center, they don't need a podcast to tell them they're good at their job.
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What I think the problem is in modern American corporate society is that management is no longer synonymous with actually managing people. It's not about getting the people what they need. It's not about organizing things and making things efficient and good. It's not about execution. It's about handing work off to other people and getting paid handsomely.
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And if you disagree, easy at betteroffline.com. I will read your email. Maybe I'll even respond. But the thing is, management has become a poison in America. Managers have become poisonous because managers are not actually held to any kind of standard. No, only the workers who do the work are.
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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 Thacker, great guy as well, were saying, hey, growth is bad for search.
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The 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.
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But queries going upwards linearly suggests that if you're not magic into user growth, at least the people are not getting what they want on the first try, which by the way, kind of feels like how Google is nowadays. When you go to Google and the first result and the second result and the fifth result and the 10th result, just don't get what you need because it's all SEO crap.
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Now, this is all theorizing, but what I think Prabhagar Raghavan did was I think he took off all the fucking guidelines on Google search. I think he rolled back changes specifically to make search worse, to increase queries, to give Google more chance to show you adverts.
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I am guessing, don't have a source telling me this, but the pattern around the core search updates, the fact that Google search started getting worse toward the middle and end of 2019, and unquestionably, dipped in 2020, well, that's when Prabhakar took over. That's when the big man took the reins. That's when Dracula got his job at the blood bank. And this is the thing.
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There's very little that you and I can actually do about this. But what we can do is say names like Prabhagar Raghavan 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. You can be pissy on the internet like the rest of us.
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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.
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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 utter slug-like ability to protect oneself, I want to talk about how these people managed to obfuscate their true intentions by pretending to be engineers, by pretending to be technologists, and pretending to be innovators.
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I want to tell you all about how Adam Masseri destroyed Instagram. And I want to tell you how little Sam Altman has achieved other than making him and his friends rich. See you next time.
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Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zetron. As I discussed in the last episode, Sam Altman has spent more than a decade accumulating power and wealth in Silicon Valley without ever having to actually build anything.
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Using a network of tech industry all-stars like LinkedIn co-founder and investor Reid Hoffman and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky to insulate himself from responsibility and accountability. 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.
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And the last month has been particularly difficult for Sam, starting with the chaos caused by OpenAI blatantly mimicking Scarlett Johansson's voice for the new version of ChatGPT, followed by the resignation of researchers who claim that OpenAI prioritized, and I quote, shiny products over AI safety, after the dissolution of OpenAI's safety team. I know, it's almost cliche.
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Shortly thereafter, former OpenAI board member Helen Toner revealed that Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI because of a regular pattern of deception, one where Altman would give inaccurate info about the company's safety processes on multiple occasions, and his deceit was so severe that OpenAI's board only found out about the launch of ChatGPT, which by the way is OpenAI's
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First product that really made money, arguably the biggest product in tech. You wanna 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 OpenAI, the company which they were the board of. Very weird.
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Toner also noted that Altman was an aggressive political player, with the board, correctly by the way, worrying that, and I quote again, "...that if Sam Altman had any inkling that the board might do something that went against him, he'd pull out all the stops, do everything in his power to undermine the board, and to prevent them from even getting to the point of being able to fire him."
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Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zittroth. And in the next two episodes, I'm going to tell you the names of some of the people responsible for destroying the internet. And I'm going to start on February 5th, 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google's former head of search, well, he had a problem.
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As a reminder, by the way, the board succeeded in firing Sam Altman in November last year, but not for long, with Altman returning as CEO a few days later, kicking Helen Toner off of the board, along with Ilya Sutskeva, a technical co-founder that Altman manipulated long enough to build ChatGPT, and then ousted him the moment that he chose to complain. Sutskeva, by the way, has resigned now.
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He's also one of the biggest technical minds there. How is open AI going to continue? Anyway, last week, a group of insiders at various AI companies published an open letter asking for their overlords, 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.
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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. AI researchers, you have to live up to Sam Altman's promises. Sam Altman doesn't.
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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.
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And the bigger concern that they should have should be about what Leo Aschenbrenner, a former safety researcher at OpenAI, had to say on the Dwarkesh Patel podcast, where he claimed that security processes at OpenAI were, and I quote, "...egregiously insufficient." and that the priorities at the company were focused on growth over stability or security.
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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.
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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 cognitive capabilities, by the way, Kind of like data from Star Trek. They're afraid of that happening when they should be afraid of Altman's focus. What does Sam Altman care about?
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Because the only thing that I can find reading about what Sam Altman cares about is Sam bloody Altman. And right now, the progress attached to Sam Altman actually isn't looking that great.
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OpenAI's growth is stalling, with Alex Kantrowitz reporting that user growth has effectively come to a halt based on a recent release claiming that ChatGPT had 100 million users a couple of weeks ago, which is, by the way, the exact same number that the company claimed ChatGPT had in November 2023. ChatGPT is also a goddamn expensive product to operate.
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With the company burning through capital at this insane rate, it's definitely more than $700,000 a day. It's got to be in the millions. If not more, it's insane. And while OpenAI is aggressively monetizing ChatGPT, both to customers and to businesses, it's so obviously far from crossing the break-even Rubicon. They keep leaking, and they'll claim, oh, I didn't put that out there.
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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, Satya Nadella is going to call Sam Altman and say, Sammy, Sammy, it's time. Sammy, it's got to be a real business. I assume he calls him that because of Supernatural.
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But as things get desperate, Samuel was going to use the only approach he really has, sheer force of will. He's going to push open AI to grow and sell into as many industries as possible. And he's a specious hype man. He's going to be selling to other specious hype men. The Jim Cramer's of the world are going to eat it up.
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And they're all, all of them, the Mark Benioff's, the Satya Nadella's, the Sundar Pichai's, they're all desperate to to connect themselves with the future and with generative AI. And those that he's selling to, the companies 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.
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And I'd argue that this is exceedingly dangerous for Silicon Valley and for the tech industry writ large, as executives that have become disconnected from the process of creating software and hardware follow yet another non-technical founder hocking unprofitable, unsustainable, and hallucination-prone software. It's just very frustrating.
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Jerry Dishler, then the VP and GM of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering Search and Ads on Google Properties, had called something called a code yellow for search revenue due to, and I quote emails that came out as part of Google's antitrust hearing, "...steady weakness in the daily numbers and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind in metrics that... kind of unclear."
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If there was a very technical 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 research, an analyst suggesting that they would buy a lot.
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But now OpenAI is doing a deal with Apple to power the next generation. 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.
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Now, it might look like an asshole if it comes out they have, but also, why are they subcontracting this to OpenAI 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 Altman story.
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And as I discussed last episode, Ellen Hewitt 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 Altman's rise to power. So tell me a little bit about the show you're working on.
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So you've just started this series about Sam Altman and his upbringing and also the growth of OpenAI and Lubed and everything. Who are the people that have helped him get where he is today, though?
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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.
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And that included Twitch as well, right?
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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.
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Quasi-evacuous startup Bible things.
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It's essentially the equivalent of DEFCON 1, and activates, as Levi 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.
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My question is always where he got $15,000 from. He was still working on Looped at the time. It's funny how privileged we are. Anyway.
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So you called him, in one of the titles, the most Silicon Valley man alive. Is this what you're getting at, this kind of power player mentality?
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It's quite boring and irrelevant to this situation. In emails released as part of the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Google, as I previously mentioned, Dishler laid out several contributing factors.
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So, in your experience talking to people about Sam Altman, how technical is he, do you think? What have you heard? Because you say there he wasn't lucky, but he also does not appear to have successfully run a business.
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Because Looped shut down two people, well, two executives tried to get him fired from there, he got fired from Y Combinator, which did very well, but at the same time, YC was basically a conveyor belt for money at one point. Not so much recently.
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It just, it feels weird that this completely non-technical, semi-non-technical guy has ascended so far.
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So it feels like Silicon Valley on some level. Just to give some thoughts here, within the two episodes I'm doing here, the pattern I've seen with Sam Altman is that everyone seems to want him to win. And there's almost a degree of they will make it so. Have you seen anyone who's really a detractor or anyone who's... Not pro-Sam Altman because it's interesting how few people are in tech.
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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 really want to be clear about this.
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I've previously and erroneously referred to the code yellow as something that Gomes raised as a means of calling attention to the proximity of Google's ad side getting a little too close to search. I'm afraid the truth is extremely depressing and so much grimmer.
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Isn't that Silicon Valley, though? I'm afraid of dealing with them, but they were so nice to me.
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Yeah, that's actually an interesting point. So when Sam Alton was fired from OpenAI, there was this very strange reaction from Silicon Valley, including some in the media, where it was almost like Hunger Games, everyone doing the symbol thing where everyone was like, oh, we got to put Sam Alton back in. Isn't it kind of strange we still don't know why he was actually fired, though?
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I mean, Helen Toner has elaborated. Have you seen anything like this in your career?
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So on to the AI hype in general. Said that a bit weird, but I'll keep going. Why do you think there's such a gulf between what Sam Altman says and what ChatGPT can actually do?
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As in he says it will be a super smart companion.
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The code yellow was actually the rumble of the goddamn rot economy, with Google's revenue arms sounding the alarm that its golden goose wasn't laying enough eggs. Gomes, a Googler of 19 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.
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And he was destroyed by a guy called Prabhakar Raghavan, 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.
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It's driving a lot of work, sure. But with Altman himself, there is this gulf. It is a million mile gulf between the things he says and what ChatGPT is even on the most basic level capable of doing and will be capable. And it just feels like, it almost feels like he's become the propagandist for the tech industry.
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And it's very strange 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 Altman doesn't even feel like he's in with either. He's just kind of, he'll say one day that he doesn't think it's a creature. The next one he'll say it's going to kill us all. It all just feels like a PR campaign, but for nothing.
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It's a bit like if Ford decided that things were going poorly because their drivers weren't putting enough goddamn miles on their trucks. This whole story has personally upset me, and I think you're going to hear that in this, but going through these emails is just very depressing.
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So... As Altman accumulates power, and as he ascends to the top of OpenAI, do you think he's done there? Do you think there's going to be another thing he starts? Because it feels like you've discussed UBI and all these other things. Do you think he has grander ideas that he wants to pursue?
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Anyway, a few days beforehand on February 1st, 2019, Kristen Gill, then Google's VP Business Finance Officer, had emailed Shashi Thakur, then Google's VP of Engineering, Search and Discover, saying that the ads team had been considering a code yellow to close the search gap it was seeing. vaguely referring to how critical that growth was to an unnamed company plan.
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Final question. Why do you think the entire tech industry has become so fascinated with AI? Do you think it's just Altman or is it something more?
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To be clear, this email was in response to Thakur stating that there is nothing that the search team could do to operate at the fidelity of growth that the ads department had demanded.
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Altman has taken advantage of the fact that the tech industry might not have any hypergrowth markets left, knowing that ChatGPT is, much like Sam Altman, incredibly adept at mimicking depth and experience by parroting the experiences of those that have actually done things.
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Like Sam Altman, Chad 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 tech ecosystem has been dominated and funded by people who don't really build tech.
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As I've said before, generative AI, things like ChatGPT, Anthropix Claude, Microsoft's Copilot, which is also powered by ChatGPT, it's not going to become the incredible supercomputer that Sam Altman is promising.
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Shashi forwarded the email to Gomes, asking if there's any way to discuss this with Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, and declared that there was no way he would sign up for a high-fidelity business metric for daily active users on search.
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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.
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How can a thing think when it doesn't know? Eh? Anyone want to ask Brad Lightcap, Miramarati, Sam Altman, any of these questions just once? Hear what they fart out? No? Ha!
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While ChatGPT isn't inherently useless, Altman 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 to speciously hype it, and he has to hype it to wealthy and powerful people who also do not participate in the creation of anything. And that's who he is.
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I've been pretty mean about this guy. I really have, but he does have a skill. He knows a mark. He knows how to say the right things and get in the right rooms with the people who aren't really touching the software or the hardware. He knows what they need to hear. He knows what the VCs need to hear. He knows quite aptly what this needs to sound like.
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But if he had to say what chat GPT does today, what would he say? Yeah, yeah, it's really good at generating a bunch of text that's kind of shitty. Yeah, sometimes it does math, right? And sometimes it does it really wrong. Sometimes you ask it to do it, it can draw a picture. Hey, what do you think of that?
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These are all things, by the way, that if like a six-year-old told you, you'd be like, wow, that's really impressive. Or like a 10-year-old, perhaps, because that's a living being. ChatGPT does these things and it does it, I know it's cheesy to say, but in a soulless way.
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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.
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Thakur 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.
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A person has put thought and intention in, even if they're not great with the English language. What ChatGPT 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. Look who he is. What has he created, other than wealth for him and other people?
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What about Sam Altman is particularly exciting? Well, he's been rich before and his money made him even richer. That's pretty good. He was at Y Combinator. Don't ask too much about what happened there. just feels like sometimes Silicon Valley can't wipe its own ass. It can't see when there's a wolf amongst the sheep.
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It can't see when someone isn't really part of the system other than finding new ways to manipulate and extract value from it. And Sam Altman is a monster created by Silicon Valley's sin.
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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.
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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.
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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 Sundar Pichai of Google are willing to break Google's search in pursuit of this next big hype cycle created by Sam Altman.
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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, all while having his nasty little boosters further propagate this bullshit, mostly because they don't know. Or perhaps they don't care if Sam Orton's full of shit. Maybe it doesn't matter to them.
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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 markets.
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A day later, on February 2, 2019, 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 sudden lust for growth.
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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 Altman 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.
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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, unashamedly 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.
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As I mentioned in the Rockcom bubble, things are already falling apart, web traffic is already dropping. And what sucks is the people around Sam Altman should have been able to see this. Even putting aside his resume, I've listened to an alarming amount of Sam Altman 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.
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I've been around a lot of people whose job it is to kind of obfuscate things. And quite frankly, Orman's really obvious. I'm not going to do any weird lie-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 OpenAI? What did you work on?
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I know you can't talk about the future, Sam, but how close are we actually to AGI? And if he says, oh, a few years, that's not specific enough, Sam. How about give me a ballpark? And then when he lies again, you say, okay, Sam, how do we get from generative AI to AGI? And when he starts waffling, say, no, no, no, be specific, Sam. This is how you actually ask questions.
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This thread is a dark window into the world of growth-focused tech, where Thakur listed the multiple points of disconnection between ads and search, discussing how the search team wasn't able to finally optimize engagement on Google without hacking it, a term that means effectively tricking users into spending more time on a site, and that doing so would lead them to, and I quote, "...abandon work on efficient journeys."
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And when you say things like this, by the way, to technical founders, they don't get worried. They don't obfuscate. They may say, I can't talk about this due to 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. He's full of it. It's so obvious.
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And one deeply unfair thing with the Valley is there are people that get held to these standards. Early stage startups generally do. The ones that aren't handed to people like Altman or Alexis Ohanian of Reddit or Paul Graham or Reid Hoffman. They don't get those chances because they're not saying the things that need to be said to the venture capitalists. They're not in the circles.
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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 Orman'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.
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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 Altman. The people that did not get born with a silver spoon in each hand and then handed further silver spoons as they walked the streets of San Francisco. People that don't live in 9,500 square foot mansions.
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The people trying to raise money who can't right 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.
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Well, the markets need you to do something eventually, and I just don't think it's going to 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 Satya Nadella, back up this obvious con artist who has acted like this forever?
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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 Altman's actually a genius. Turns out the whole thing was not. No, it's not going to happen.
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And I worry that there is no smooth way out of this, that there is no way to just casually integrate open AI with Microsoft. Because now there's an antitrust thing going in with Microsoft acquiring Inflection AI, another AI company. And that's the thing. It feels like we are approaching a precipice here. And the only way to avoid it is for people to come clean, which is never going to happen.
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Or, of course, for Sam Altman not to be lying. For HAI to actually come out of OpenAI, 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.
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When companies realize that generative AI has given them 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 for Nvidia, which is still over $1,000, when those orders stop coming in quite as fast, what do you think is going to happen to tech stocks?
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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.
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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 Altman getting washed out. I don't want it to happen. I really must be bloody clear.
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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 bath full of ice and they need to dunk their head in it aggressively and wake the hell up. Venture capital needs to put money back into real things.
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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 better Silicon Valley. Because a better Silicon Valley builds things for people. It solves real problems.
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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 you're early, early days. It is not befitting the most famous company in tech. It is not befitting a multi-billionaire.
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It is not befitting anyone and it is insulting to the people actually building things both in and outside of technology. The people I hear from after every episode, they are angry. They are frustrated because there are good people in tech. There are people building real things. There are people that remember a time when the tech industry was exciting.
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When people were talking about cool shit in the future and then they'd actually do it. Returning to that is better for society and the tech industry. just don't know when it's going to happen.
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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.
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Hello and welcome to Better Offline, I'm your host Ed Zitron. It's been a hard couple of weeks, it's been pretty hard to focus. I've written a few newsletters, I've gone to Portugal, I've done a bunch of shit. Just trying not to think about everything happening outside, but it's time to do so.
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seemingly every single person on earth with a blog or a podcast or even a twitter account or x the everything app or whatever it's called now they've all tried to drill down into what happened on november 5th to find the people to blame to explain what could have gone differently but
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Really looking for who to blame, though, and find out why so many actions led to a result that will overwhelmingly harm women, minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and lower-income workers. It's terrifying. It fucking sucks. I'm not gonna mince words. Not that I would, usually, anyway. And I don't feel fully equipped to respond to the moment.
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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.
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On February 6th, 2019, 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 22, 2019, Google VP of Product Management, Darshan Kantak, would declare the end of the Code Yellow.
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People don't trust authority, and yeah, 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 and somehow against institutions on their face. I'm not.
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But at the same time, understanding this moment requires us to acknowledge that institutions have failed us, and failed most people, and how certain institutions' missteps have led us to exactly where we are today.
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Legacy media, and while oftentimes they're staffed by people who truly love their readers and care about their beats, they're weighed down by this hysterical, nonsensical attachment to the imaginary concept of objectivity and the will of the markets.
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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.
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They did, but the bulk of these price increases were caused by these fucking companies raising the prices. It was in their earnings. It was right there. Pepsi-Cola said it on the news. Yet some parts of the legacy media spent an alarming amount of time chiding their readers for thinking otherwise.
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even going against their own reporting as a means of providing balanced coverage, insisting again and again that the economy is actually good, contorting their little bodies to prove that prices aren't actually higher, even as companies literally boasted about raising their prices on earnings.
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In fact, the media spent years debating with itself whether price gouging 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.
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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 necessities of life. It was just a national-level gaslighting, and it was disgusting. And I know some of you might say, you know where to email me, oh, it's not just this.
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No, of course it's not just this, arsehole. But I think this is a big thing. Now, before I go any further, I've used the term legacy media here repeatedly, but I don't completely intend for it to come across as a pejorative. Despite my criticism, and believe me, I've got a few of them, there are people in the legacy media doing a good job.
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They're reporting the truth, they're doing the kinds of work that matters, and they're actually trying to teach their readers stuff and tell them what's happening and giving them context. I read and pay for several legacy media outlets, and I think the world is a better place for them existing, despite their flaws.
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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 own, but I don't think the answer to these failings is to simply discard legacy media entirely.
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But I want to implore them to do better and to strive for the values of truth-hunting and truth-telling and actually explaining what's happening and criticising the people that don't have PR firms and lobbying groups and lawyers and the means to protect themselves from the world. The time for fucking around is over and we're currently finding out.
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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.
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Now, anyway, as you know as a person existing in the real world, the price of everything has kept increasing, despite the fact that wages 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.
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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. Anyway, anyway. And a year later, in 2023, they insisted that the years of remote work
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were actually bad because profits didn't reach the same profit levels of 2021, which was something to do with remote work. Now, did anyone actually prove this? Did anyone actually go and... No, they didn't. They just, well, they just listened to Mark Benioff, who's one of the more evil people alive.
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Now, I also think a lot of these problems come to 2021, a year that we really need to dig into more. We might not do so today, but we will in the future.
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But one of the big things that punished workers and led to so many layoffs in 2023 was the fact that we couldn't get back to the post-lockdown boom of 2021, 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...
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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.
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Enter Prabhakar Raghavan, 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.
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Yeah, that seems way better. Yeah. Anyway, while the majority of people don't work remotely, from talking to the people I know outside of tech or 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...
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Legacy Media doesn't seem to have that much piss and vinegar. They just have much more guarded critiques. The appetite for shaming and finger-wagging, it's always directed at middle and working class workers, and seemingly disappears when 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.
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Despite the fact that Elon Musk has spent years telegraphing his intent to use his 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, too much of the media, both legacy and otherwise, responded slowly, cautiously, failing to call him a liar, a con artist, an aggressor, a manipulator, a racist, a deadbeat dad, you know, all the things actually happening.
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No, no, no. They kind of danced around him. They reported stories that might make you think that they maybe noticed it. But there was this desperation to guard objectivity. And it was just... It lacked any real intent. It lacked any interest in calling account to a man who has pretty much bought an election for Donald Trump.
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A racist billionaire using his outsized capital to bend 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 50 to 100 hours a week for a boss who makes 130 times what they do.
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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.
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And while there are columnists that 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 tone that often fails to express any actual consequences or context around the news itself. and just doesn't seem to care about making sure that the reader or listener learns something.
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My mate Casey has a good point about podcasts, and I'd apply it to 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. I think this falls into it. Now, this isn't to say that outlets are incapable of doing this correctly. I love the Washington Post. They've done an excellent job on analyzing major tech stories.
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But a lot of these outlets feel custom-built to be bulldozed the moment an authoritarian turns up. This force that exists to crush those desperately attached to norms and objectivity. Authoritarians know that their ideologically charged words be quoted ad verbatim with the occasional, Huh, this could mean...
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Little dribble, this drizzle, this spunk of context that's lost in the headline that repeats exactly what the fucking authoritarian wants them to. And guess what? Some people don't read the article. They just read the headline. And Musk is the most brutal example of this, by the way.
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Despite the fact that he's turned Twitter into a website pumped full of racism and hatred that literally helped make Donald Trump president, Musk was still able to get mostly positive coverage from the majority of the mainstream media for his fucking robo-taxi nonsense.
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Despite the fact that he spent the best part of a decade lying about 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...
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that some of these outlets, by the way, had accompanying coverage that suggested that the markets weren't impressed by Tesla's theoretical robo-taxi plans or their fake-ass robots run by people.
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Musk is still able to use the media's desperation for objectivity against them, and he knows that they never dare to combine reporting on stuff with thinking about stuff for fear that Elon Musk might say they're biased, which he has been doing for years. Do you see my goddamn point yet? And this, by the way, is not always the fault of the writers.
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A day later, Gomes emailed Fox and Thakur an email he intended to send to Ragavan. He led by saying that he was annoyed both personally and on behalf of the search team.
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There are entire foundations of editors that have more faith in the markets and the powerful than they do the 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.
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I'm not even talking about Jeff Bezos or Lauren Powell Jobs or any number of billionaires who own any number of publications, but the editors editing business and tech reports who don't know anything about business and tech, or the senior editors that are terrified of any byline that might dare get the outlet under fire from somebody who could call their boss. It's fucking cowardice.
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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 wrongness and the lies and the bullshit. And I'm talking about Elon Musk still, obviously.
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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 go, ooh, ooh, ooh, send me more, daddy, show me more of the apps. It's fucking disgraceful. Just look at the coverage of Sam Altman from last year. You know, the guy who spent years lying about what AI can do.
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And tell me why every single thought he says must be uncritically cataloged. His every goddamn decision applauded. His every claim trumpeted as certain. His brittle little company that burns five billion dollars a year talked about like it's a fucking living god.
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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.
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Sam Altman is a liar who's been fired from two companies, including OpenAI, 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.
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Their geniuses, entrepreneurs, firebrands, their challenges are framed as missteps and their victories framed as certainties by the same outlets that told us that we were quite quitting and that the economy is actually good and that we're the problem for high prices.
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While 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're 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 healthcare, strong unions.
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expanded social safety nets, you know, the stuff that would actually be helpful. No, they're biased in favor of fellating 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.
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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.
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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 at all costs ecosystem, where the number must always go up, because everybody is using technology all the time, and the technology in question is getting worse.
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This election cycle saw more than 25 billion text messages sent to potential voters, and seemingly every website was crammed full of random election advertising. Here's the thing about elections. They're not...
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really always about policy no they're a referendum on the incumbent party or 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
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And what we're seeing is an enshitification of existence, to use Mr. Doctorow's phrase. Everything just, I don't want to be this much of a curmudgeon, but everything just kind of sucks. It's all terrible, it's miserable, and hardly anyone thinks it's going to get better. And this creates the kind of fertile conditions for a strong man to emerge.
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One who arises and says that only he can fix things, even if he spent four years proving how he could not. And the problem for Democrats and for institutions more broadly is that the all-encompassing nature of this milieu is kind of hard to solve. It's hard to change the perception that everything's terrible when you're reminded of it when you're trying to do the most basic of tasks.
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Our phones are full of notifications trying to growth hack us into doing things that companies want. Our apps are full of microtransactions. Our websites are slower and harder to use with endless demands of our emails and our phone numbers and the need to log back in because they couldn't possibly lose a dollar to someone who dared to consume a Washington Post article.
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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.
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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 costing money and being attached to our account, we don't actually own any of the streaming media we purchase.
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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 11. They get 100. We really actually don't know because there's no legislation to tell us what they're fucking doing.
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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 texts. Three spam calls, two spam texts. We look at our bank balance, two-factor authentication check. We read the news.
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A quarter of the page is blocked by an advertisement asking for our email that's deliberately built to hide the button to get rid of it. And then we log into Slack and feel a pang of anxieties, 15 different notifications appear in a way that is really not built for us to find what we need, just to let us know something happened. Modern existence is just engulfed in sludge.
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The institutions that exist to cut through it seem to bounce between the ignorance of their 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.
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Opening our devices is willfully 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.
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He also added that this was the reason he didn't believe that queries, as in the amount of 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. Crazy idea there. What if the product was good? Not good enough for Prabhaka.
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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.
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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.
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Why wouldn't people crave change? Why wouldn't people be angry? Living in the current world absolutely fucking sucks sometimes. It's miserable. It's bereft of industry and filthy with manipulation. It's undignified. It's disrespectful. and it must be crushed if we want to escape this depressing goddamn world we've found ourselves in.
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Our media institutions are fully fucking capable of dealing with these problems, but it starts with actually evaluating them and aggressively interrogating them without fearing accusations of bias that, as I've said repeatedly, happen either way. The truth is that the media is more afraid of accusations of bias than they are of misleading their readers.
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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 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.
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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, Oh, the media's too critical of tech. You're flat fucking wrong. Kiss my asshole.
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Everything we're seeing happening right now is a direct result of a society that let technology and the ultra-rich run rampant, free of both the governmental guardrails that might have stopped them and the media ecosystem that might have actually held them in check.
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Our default position in interrogating the intentions and actions of the tech industry has become that they will work it out as they continually redefine what work it out means and turn it into make their products worse but more profitable.
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covering Meta, Twitter, Google, OpenAI, and other huge tech companies, as if the products they make are remarkable and perfect, is disrespectful to the reader's 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.
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And that's before you get to the ones like Facebook and Instagram that are outright 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.
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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.
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Open AI being worth $157 billion for a company that burns $5 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.
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Whatever you may feel about ChatGPT, 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.
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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.
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But please don't forget Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sander Pesci, 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.
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So a little bit of history about Google here. They regularly throughout the year do core updates to search. These are updates that change the algorithm that say, okay, we're going to suppress this kind of thing. We can elevate this kind of thing. And they are actually the reason that search changes. It's why certain sites suddenly disappear or reappear. It's why sites get a ton of traffic.
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Similarly, governments have entirely failed to push through any legislation that might stop the rot, both in terms of dominance and opaqueness of algorithmic manipulation, and the ways in which tech products exist with few real quality standards.
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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 dogshit. And if you're hearing this and saying I'm being a hater or a pessimist, shut the fuck up. I'm tired of you. I'm so fucking tired of being told to calm down about this.
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As we stare down the barrel of four years of authoritarianism built on top of the decay of our lives, both physical and digital, with a media ecosystem that doesn't do a great job explaining what's being done to the people in an ideologically consistent way.
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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.
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If three-quarters of the biggest car manufacturers were making record profits by making half of their cars at a break that sometimes didn't work, that'd be international news. Government inquiries would happen. People would go to prison. And this isn't even conjecture. It actually happened.
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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.
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And their former CEO is currently being tried in Germany and being indicted in the U.S. too. And here we are in the tech industry. Facebook barely works, used to genocides and bully people and harass teen girls. Pedophiles run rampant on there. There was a Wall Street Journal story about it. They're fine.
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So much of the tech industry, consumer software like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and even chat GPT, and business software from companies like Microsoft and Slack, It sucks. It sucks. It's bad. You use it every day. You've been listening to me ramble for 50 episodes now. You know what I'm talking about. It's everywhere. Yet the media covers it just like, eh, you know, it's just how things are, mate.
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Now, Meta, by the admission of its own internal documents, makes products that are ruinous to the mental health of teenage girls. And it hasn't made any substantial changes as a result, nor has it received any significant pushback for failing to do so. Little bit of a side note here. Big shout out to Jeff Horwitz and the rest of the Wall Street Journal people who did the Facebook files.
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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 60s. And that was when Ralph Nader wrote Unsafe at Any Speed. And his book, it actually brought about change.
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It led to the Department of Transportation and the passage of seatbelt laws in 49 states and a bunch of other things that can get overlooked.
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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 rulebook and a different criteria for success, as well as this completely different set of expectations.
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By allowing the market to become disconnected from the value it creates, we enable companies like, I don't know, Nvidia, that reduce the quality of their services so they make more money for their GeForce Now service. Or Facebook. They can just destroy our political discourse so they can facilitate genocide in Myanmar.
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Some don't get any and so on and so forth, but they do a lot of them. The one that's really interesting, I'm a little bastard and I went and looked through pretty much the last decade of these.
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And then, well, they get headlines about how good a CEO Mark Zuckerberg is and how cool his chains are and how everything's just fine with Facebook and they're making more money. No, no. I actually want to take a step back, though. I want to take a little bit of a step back. I previously mentioned, I said it twice now, oh, Meta enables genocide and it destroys our political discourse.
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I want to be clear. When I say that everything is justified at Meta, I'm actually quoting their chief technology officer. That's quite literally what Andrew Bosworth said in an internal memo from 2016, where he said that, and I quote,
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All the work Facebook does in growth is justified, even if that includes, and I'm quoting him directly, somebody dying in a terrorist attack coordinated using Facebook's tools. Now, the mere mention of violent crime is enough to create reams of articles questioning whether society is safe and whether we need more plastic in our Walgreens.
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Yet 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, has anything gone wrong? You know it. I know it has. You know it has. It's time to wake up.
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We, the users of products, we're at war with the products we're using and the people that make them. And right now, we are losing. The media must realign to fight for how things should be. This doesn't mean that they can't cover things positively, or give credit where credit is due, or be willing to accept that something could be something cool.
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The one that stood out to me was the March 2019 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 Prabhakar's bullshit. 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.
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But what has to change is the evaluation of the products themselves, which have been allowed to decay to a level that has become at best annoying and at worst actively harmful for society. Our networks are rotten. Our information ecosystem is poisoned with its pure parts ideologically and strategically concussed.
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Our means of speaking to those that we love and making new connections are so constantly interfered with that personal choice and dignity is all but removed. But there is hope. There really is. Those covering the tech industry right now have one of the most consequential jobs in journalism, if they choose to fucking do it.
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Those willing to guide people through the wasteland, those willing to discuss what needs to change, how bad things have gone, and hold the powerful accountable and say what good might look like, have the opportunity to push for a better future by spitting in the faces of those ruining it. I don't know where I sit, by the way. I don't know what to call myself. Am I legacy media?
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I got my start writing in print magazines. Am I an independent contractor? Am I an influencer? Am I a content creator? I truly don't know, and I don't know if I care, but all that I know is that I feel like I'm at war too, and that we, if I can be considered part of the media, are at war with people that have changed the terms of innovation so that it's synonymous with value extraction.
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technology is how i became a person how i met my closest friends and loved ones and without it i wouldn't be able to write i wouldn't be able to read this podcast i wouldn't have got this podcast and i feel this poison flowing through my veins as i see what these motherfuckers have done and what they're continuing to do and i see how inconsistently and tepidly they're interrogated now is the time to talk bluntly about what is happening
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The declining quality of tech products, the scourge of growth hacking, the cancerous growth at all cost mindset. These are all the things that need to be raised in every single piece. And judgments must be unrelenting. The companies will squeal, ooh, that they're being so unfairly treated by the biased legacy media. Ooh, ooh, save me. Hey, Nileh Patel, interview with Sondar Pichai.
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This is how you sounded when you handed him your phone. It was pathetic. They should be scared of you, Nileh. The powerful should be scared of the media. They shouldn't be sitting there sending letters to the editor like fucking customer support. No. They should see this podcast. They should see these newsletters. They should see everything published by the tech media and go, uh-oh.
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And there can be good people. There can be good boys and girls and others. There can be plenty of people that make good products and get great press for it. But do you really think Meta, Google, Apple to an extent, frankly, do you think Amazon looks good right now? Do you think it's easy to find stuff or do you think it's slop, full of more slop?
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Mark Zuckerberg said on an earnings call the other day that he intends there to be an AI-specific slop feed. That should... These are harmful things. This is... Pouring vats of oil into rivers and then 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. Readers are already aware.
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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 2012 that specifically targeted spammy search results. There were others that were seeing traffic as well from an update that happened on the 1st of August 2018.
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But are and... This is really thanks to members of the media, by the way. They're gaslighting themselves into believing that, oh, I just don't keep up with technology. It's getting away from me. I'm not technical enough to use this.
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When the thing that they don't get, that the average person doesn't get, is that the tech industry has built legions of obfuscations, 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.
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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.
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And that starts with journalism. And the 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.
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Get a service like Delete.me. And by the way, I pay for it. I worked for them like four years ago. I have no financial relationship with them. but they're great for removing you from data brokers. Molly White, who's a dear friend of mine, and even better right, you might remember her from one of the early episodes about Wikipedia.
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She's also written this extremely long guide about what to do next that I'll link to in the notes, and it runs through a ton of great things you can do. Unionization, finding your communities, dropping apps that collect and store sensitive data, and so on. I also heartily recommend Wired's Guide to Protecting Yourself from Government Surveillance, which is linked in the show notes.
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Now, before we go, I want to leave you with something that I posted on November 6th on the Better Offline Reddit. The last 24 hours have felt bleak and will likely feel more bleak as the months and years go on. It'll be easy to give in to doom, to assume the fight is lost, to assume that the bad guys have permanently won and there will never be any justice or joy again.
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Now's the time for solidarity, to crystallize around ideas that matter, even if their position in society is delayed, even as the clouds darken and the storms brew and the darkness feels all-encompassing and suffocating. 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. Put shit on your fucking calendar.
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Keep yourself active and busy, and if not distracted, at the very least, animated. Darkness feeds on idleness. Darkness feasts on a sense of failure and a sense of inability to make change. You don't know me very well, but know that I'm aware of the darkness and the sadness and the suffocation of when things feel overwhelming.
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Give yourself some mercy, and in the days to come, don't castigate yourself for feeling gutted. Then keep going. I realize it's little solace to think, well, if I keep saying stuff out loud, things will get better, but I promise you doing so has an effect and actually matters. Keep talking about how fucked up things are.
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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. Look, I know I'm imperfect. I'm emotional. I'm off-kilter at times. I get emails saying that I'm too angry. I'm sorry if it's ever triggered you. I really do mean that. It's not intentional.
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That was a few months after Gomes became head of search. While I'm guessing here, I really don't know. I do not work for Google. I do not have friends there.
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I just feel this in everything I do. I use technology all the time, and it is extremely annoying, but also I'm aware that I have privilege. And the more privilege you have within tech, the more you're able to escape the little things. Go and buy a cheap laptop today. Try and see what a $200, $300 laptop is. It's slow.
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It's full of 18 pop-ups trying to sell you access to cloud storage, to shit that you'll never use, tricking grannies and people who can't afford laptops or people that just don't know. When I see this stuff, it enrages me. Not just for me, but because I know that I'm at least lucky enough to know how to get around this shit. Spent most of my life online. Spent most of my life playing with tech.
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I know how it works. And I know I have my tangents and my biases. But I wear them kind of like 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 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.
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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 happened on November 5th. 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.
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I think the timing of the March 2019 core update, along with the traffic increases to previously suppressed sites that 100% were spammy SEO nonsense, I think these suggest that Google's response to the code yellow is to roll back changes that were made to maintain the quality of search.
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Some of you know your way around tech 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 fills me full of fucking rage.
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And it makes me angry for you and for me. For my son growing up in 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.
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that just exist in this swill, in this active digital terrorism, poked and prodded and nagged and notified constantly. And 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.
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And I've watched this thing that I love, technology. Really do love tech. I really do, deeply. I've watched it corrupted and broken and the people breaking it. They don't just make billions of dollars. They get articles and they get interviewed on the news. Mark Zuckerberg, he wears a chain and there's articles about how cool he is. He should be in fucking prison.
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He should be in a prison on a boat that just circles the world. And he shouldn't have air conditioning or heat, depending on how the weather is. And I know that I'm kind of errant and, again, tons of tangents. But, look, the reason I'm like this is because I really care. And I think caring, I think being angry at the things that actually matter...
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and giving context as a result, I think that's deeply valuable. And I realize I do fly off the handle a lot, but it really is because I care. I care about you. I care about the subject matter. I'm so grateful and so honored that you spend your time listening to me every week, and I hope you'll continue to do so, because I'm not going anywhere.
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The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I dot com. You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter.
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I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.
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A few months later, in May 2019, Google would roll out a redesign of how ads were 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.
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I guess that's how they managed to start hitting their numbers, huh? And then in January 2020, Google would bring this change to desktop, and The Verge's John Porter would suggest that it made Google's ads look just like search results now. Awesome.
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Five months later, a little over a year after the Code Yellow situation, Google would make Prabhakar Raghavan the head of Google search, with Jerry Dishler taking his place as the head of ads. After nearly 20 years of building Google Search, Gomes would be relegated to the SVP of Education at Google.
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Gomes, 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 Prabhakar Raghavan, a management consultant wearing an engineer costume.
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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 unguided behaviors of a management consultant, from what I can tell, Raghavan has never actually worked in that particular sector of the economy. But you know who has?
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Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, who previously worked at McKinsey, arguably the most morally abhorrent company that's ever existed, having played roles both in the 2008 financial crisis, where it encouraged banks to load up on debt and flawed mortgage-backed securities, and the ongoing opioid crisis, where it effectively advised Purdue Pharma on how to growth-hack sales of OxyContin, an extremely addictive painkiller.
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McKinsey has paid nearly $1 billion over several settlements due to its work with Purdue. 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 flesh-eating bacteria is to your skin.
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But back to the emails, which are a stark example of the monstrous, disgusting rot economy, the growth at all costs mindset that's dominating the tech ecosystem. And if you take one thing away from this episode, I want it to be the name Prabhakar Raghavan and an understanding that there are people responsible for the current state of the internet.
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These emails, which I really encourage you to look up, and if you go to wheresyoured.at, you'll be able to see a newsletter that has links to them, Well, these emails tell a dramatic story about how Google's finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, the McKinsey guy, actively work to make Google worse to make the company more money.
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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.
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No, it's funny how we both stumbled across AI products for kids like the same day during the exact same time.
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And it's interesting you say that because the first thing I did today was go to a panel at the Venetian titled Raising AI Kids Responsibly. which is maybe the best title for any single panel. Yeah, that's fucked up. The description was, a new generation of kids are being brought up with AI technologies as a part of their lives. How does this affect their learning, entertainment, and socialization?
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Which is a good question. Yeah, we should be asking that. More people should. There was four people on the panel. Karen Ruth Wong from Ido Play Lab Partnerships. Nilo Lewick from Skyrocket Toys. Melissa Hunter from Family Video Network. And Joshua Garrett from Readyland. And I'll talk about all these different companies and people in a sec.
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Yeah, so the panel started with Karen Ruth Wong from IDO, which is the company that first partnered with Sesame Workshop to start making online apps. So, you know, that was interesting to me because Sesame Workshop generally puts a lot of care into, like, you know, making media for children. is a company that works with them. So I was interested in what she was going to say.
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And basically, she talked not about any products that her company's making, but instead research into how AI is affecting Gen Z, how Gen Z wants to interact with AI, and talked about a whole bunch of research that her company has been doing for the past few years on what people my age and younger, what their attitudes are towards this thing that has become an increasingly encroaching lives.
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I'm just going to play a series of clips. Couldn't be more excited.
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Yeah, the very first thing, this is literally like minutes into the panel, this is like after they do their introductions, the first thing they talk about is how Gen Z is both an early adopter of new tech, but they're also kind of the most AI critical right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's cringey. Yeah, like how it feels cringey, and not just that, how it's affecting people's sense of humanity.
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and viewing this like, you know, in some ways as like an obstacle to get over, but also this is, I'm not sure how I feel about, about like, you know, Karen and the company she's representing here. Cause in some ways I felt like she was probably actually good.
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She just had to frame all of the things she was saying as like shocking revelations to all these tech bros be like, actually it turns out kids surprisingly don't want their lives run by AI. Yeah.
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I actually like what she was saying. It's just her presentation of it felt kind of odd at times because of who the audience was.
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Maybe like 2080. So like a little bit of like, yeah, we have to sell some of this. But mostly it felt like trying to inform people about how this isn't really what people want. And, you know, it has a lot of actual like drawbacks. Here's a clip of Karen talking about the sort of questions that they're asking kids to, you know, get data on how they feel about AI.
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Being able to live life for yourself is a badge of honor.
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No, it's super interesting. And even the first thing she said about you lost some friends. Do you want an AI to counsel you or talk about your feelings? Or do you want a friend replacement? And no, people don't want a friend replacement. And this even odder question of AI swiping your Tinder for you, trying to figure out what your preferences are. No, Gen Z wants to live life for themselves.
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It's odd. Because that's what being a person is. That's what being a person is, right. But it's odd how that's framed as a surprising revelation. Wow, these kids want to live lives. So, yeah, it was kind of an odd panel to go to. She highlighted that the key areas of tension in AI for Gen Z is twofold, creative expression and human relationships.
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These are the two biggest things that people are concerned about is how it will affect your ability to, you know, make art, be creative, and what it means for, like, you know, relationships as a human being, right? Especially if you're being asked questions about, you know, would you let an AI, like, meet someone that you want to date first? Have...
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Have them go through, like, a first, like, fake AI date to, like, get through, like, icebreaker questions or something?
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Well, and the data that this person was talking about showed no, like people actually don't want these things. Like this actually isn't what anyone wants out of life. This isn't what anyone wants out of this technology, right? Like we use AI all the time, you know, like, like, you know,
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like autocomplete it has a whole bunch of like you know pretty basic uses yeah it saves me from having to spell certain words too many times yeah but we don't want it to like go on dates for us and the whole part of being human is having you know a degree of bad experiences and that that helps shape us as people and this isn't like a hurdle to get over this is like a part of what it means to be human and she kind of talked about that a little bit more uh in this last clip that i'll play
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No, but there's a whole bunch of interesting stuff there. Gen Z has great fears about being replaced. Yeah. You know, like having, having like a workforce replacement. Gen Z prefers to actually, like, make connections and network with other people our age and actually, like, share opportunities. Yeah.
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In previous panels, this was something that was also talked about, how millennials were way more, like, selective about, like, sharing, like, employment opportunities because they were, like, so focused on, like, making sure that they make it. And there's a lot more, like, open collaboration and sharing opportunities.
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Yeah, yeah. No, talking about, you know, like, designing for friction. Like, there's value in something being challenging.
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One thing she kind of closed on in this section is talking about how Gen Z does not trust AI to understand the nuance of their lives. especially in this age of like tech optimization, like that misses a part of what it means to like, you know, feel proud of yourself and the work that you've done. Yeah.
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Something she talked about at the very end of the panel was like how they hadn't factored in like, like Gen Z, you know, and people in general, right. Well, we'll feel proud about, you know, making a piece of art. Yeah. And they don't have that same sense of pride for an AI generated image. No. Whether it's like a screenplay, whether it's whatever.
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Someone gave an example of like, you know, I have a kid who does creative stuff. They edit videos, right? And there is AI tools that make editing videos like easier. But if the AI does all the work, they don't feel happy about that. Like they don't feel proud. They don't feel like they've actually achieved something. And you have to feel proud about the work that you've done.
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So like there's actually a sense of like ownership over like the art that we create. An exact quote was, quote, you can't eliminate life formative aspects, unquote, which is like, yes, like all life. Yeah. You don't ever do anything. I'm happy someone at CES is saying this. The fact that it needs to be said at all.
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Yeah, I think the last thing that she talked about was like Gen Z aren't technophobes, but they do have strong boundaries. Yeah, good. And they have to reinforce their own sense of self because we're constantly being bombarded with, you know, slop content, influencers, podcasts, live streams, like everything, you know, TikTok, social media.
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So we have strong like boundaries on how tech like integrates into our lives. And a lot of the way these tech bros want AI to like become more invasive. We are not super into it.
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And we're back. So unfortunately, that panel wasn't just talking about how kids maybe don't want AI to run their lives. It also had two other people from AI products. The first one that I'll mention is called ReadyLand, which I think partnered with Amazon to some degree. It at least uses like Amazon Alexa's.
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It's essentially a choose-your-own-adventure storybook with an actual physical copy that Alexa will read to you, and you can talk to it. So you can talk to characters and choose different pathways. I was more skeptical out of that at first because I just don't like AIs reading books to kids.
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But this became more of an interactive story thing, and it actually seemed kind of good at what it was doing. And then... the guy behind it clarified, ReadyLand is not using AI to generate new content for kids.
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It's all like pre-programmed like human paths, you know, just with so many variables already built in based on, you know, like if you're making food in one of these books or like, you know, a kid wants to go on like a weird side quest, the AI already has like stuff ready for how to handle that. He knows how to say these words. He knows how to stitch together these things.
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But it's not actually generating new content itself. If everything is pre-baked, it can just be assembled in many different ways. So every time you read a book to the kid, it'll be slightly different because the kid will respond to certain plot elements. The kid can talk to characters, ask questions. So this was actually pretty interesting.
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The fact that it's simply just not even generating new content makes it miles better than any of these other AI kids' products.
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Exactly, yeah. So it's actually a pretty interesting piece of technology. And it's not just Alexa reading a storybook. It has a large interactive element, which that makes the Alexa part actually useful. And then there was this other product. What was this one called? It's from a company called Skyrocket Toys. Poe the AI teddy bear or something like that.
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Poe the AI bear, which does generate live content with guardrails, he did say. Oh, good. But the AI content both comes from the input and the output. He talked about guardrails. He said, you know, ChatGPT does have internal guardrails, but the reliability is suspect. Yeah. Which there certainly is, considering just last week there was a piece of news about ChatGPT helping someone build a bomb.
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Yeah, yeah. Which they used in just this magical city. Yes. So he did say that guardrail reliability can be suspect, but there is a difference when you have certainly more child-friendly features turned on. But he admitted that moderation is part of the challenge. I don't know. Basically...
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How this works is you have an app synced up with this AI teddy bear that talks with a not very pleasing voice. Oh, I got to hear it. Do you want me to pull this up? Yes, absolutely. Okay. But basically you put in a whole bunch of story inputs being like, I want the story set in this place. I want it featuring these types of characters. I want this archetype to be the villain.
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It has like dozens, if not hundreds of like archetypal things that you can like click. And then the teddy bear will generate a new story. So it is generating new content, but with like pre-baked characters.
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So then it'll stitch together the story. The weirder you make the variables, the weirder the story is going to be. Let me play a clip for Robert here.
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No, so it doesn't sound good. So yeah, they generated a story set in CES in Las Vegas. And he would occasionally interrupt the bear to explain what it was doing. So that was the other product. Not nearly as polished or really as thoughtful as the AI storybook. But, you know, maybe if you are tired of having to, you know... talk to your kid.
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You can just get one of these teddy bears to throw in front.
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One other thing I will add is that the ReadyLand guy, the AI storybook, specifically when talking about the importance of guardrails, he said that there's multiple levels to safety, right? An AI kid's robot that swears, right, is one thing that's pretty easy to avoid, actually. That's pretty easy.
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And you can just block out certain things from happening. You can build that in. But another aspect that's really important to safety is the accuracy of the things it's saying. What if it's saying something that's supposed to be some factual statement about the world that just isn't true or could actually lead to danger?
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What if it tells your kid to do something which is actually kind of dangerous? Or what if it says... Not even directly telling them, but, you know, it says something that if the kid then tries to do that, it's really dangerous. And, like, this is why their storybook program, you know, does not generate new content. So everything it says is, like, already pre-approved.
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Like, it already is going to have, you know, like, verified content. Like verified, safe, you know, sentences versus this AI teddy bear because it is generating new content. You know, it could, if things go horribly wrong, you know, talk about drinking bleach, you know, theoretically, you know, just like something, you know, like things can go wrong.
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So it's not just about, you know, avoiding bad words or talking about sex or, you know, those types of like inappropriate things. It's also making sure it's not like hallucinating or saying things that could like lead to like dangerous situations.
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Yeah, no one wants this. Even six-year-olds are like, eh, I would prefer just a regular toy I can play with.
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We can even maybe order one and see what we can get out of it. Yeah. All right, we're going to go on another break and return to talk once again about AI products for your children.
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Like the video, like taking this thing everywhere the kid goes. It's like the kid's main interaction with the world.
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Is with this little rolling like plastic Furby. And yeah, like talking about like expressing like love. And how damaging this must be for a four-year-old to have the first thing that it constantly expressed love and affection for is this little rolling robot that you're going to throw in the garbage in four years when you're too old for it.
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How traumatizing and deeply fucked up that's going to be for your sense of self and love and affection.
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No, it's it was honestly I've seen a few like disturbing things, you know, all of like the the new drone tech to have like solar powered drones that can stay in the air to drop bombs is like bad. But like this type of stuff is like really dehumanizing. It really like viscerally upsets me.
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Yeah, because we're like four days in Vegas now. We still have one more day of CES.
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Hopefully tomorrow we'll have our final of our like on the ground coverage with our CES best in show. So end on maybe a high note. So see you there.
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think they're down crypto finds a way to squirm into your life it really is the zombie of the tech world yeah because it's dead and yet it's undead it's constantly trying to crawl back somehow the fact that it's dead makes it more dangerous now exactly it's it's specifically a zombie i will try to figure out what's the vampire but but specifically crypto is the zombie yeah
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Well, that's debatable. I think there was some very curious irregularities in multiple swing states. Straight forward from here.
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Best of CES, I think, was definitely the VLC media booth at Caritha Park, where they had big traffic cones on their head, wearing them like wizard hats with huge cloaks.
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Because putting subtitles on pirated media can sometimes be really hard. So they said, we have something that analyzes the audio that's being spoken in whatever media you're watching, and we will put subtitles up for you. We walked off. And we're like, so what do you have here? Like, we are not selling anything. We have nothing to sell you. And it's beautiful.
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And they're by far the coolest because of something, Robert, you said to them.
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Oh, no, no. No. Quite the contrary. I feel a magnetic attraction.
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And similarly, obviously all of the AI stuff for kids, all of like the AI slop is like obviously bad. We've talked about that a lot already. The other thing that's like kind of like the worst is similar to what you said, Ed, like a level of surveillance tech. I tried out multiple AI systems that are supposed to like detect and predict behavior. based on facial expressions or gesture.
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And this is really tricky. There was one at Eureka Park. It's a South Korean company that's powered, I believe, by Samsung with money. And also they've access to like their training data. They're called Visomatic. And specifically why this exists, it is a camera that you can put on a computer. It will detect where your face is pointing and where your eyes are paying attention to.
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And the reason why this exists is for online test taking. It's so people don't look at their phone to cheat. So it tracks where your eyes are moving. And if your eyes look down too much, it's going to flag it as someone's possibly cheating. So this was obviously introduced after the pandemic. There's a lot of online test taking.
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Samsung uses this tech themselves for any kind of online exams that they as a company will put on, whether it's for people, students, employees. But they also had other features where you could switch it. I assume it's doing all the same work. It just displays differently on the monitor.
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Instead, it can do object detection, what you're wearing, and the general behavior analysis if you seem like you're behaving suspiciously, which is something that we tried at the SK booth, which also is a Korean company, for their own surveillance detection. But I asked Visomatic, what kind of use cases do you see for this beyond test taking? They're like, yeah, general surveillance.
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Like, yeah, we... we want to learn how to like predict or like analyze potentially suspicious human behavior. As we were walking by the SK version, one quite funny thing is as I walked by it first, it first identified me as a blonde woman holding a cup. It then changed and said blonde person, which I think is pretty, it's pretty neat. Very progressive.
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It could sense the pronouns. It's like, Hmm, Maybe not a woman. Maybe not a blonde person. But yes, that was something that was quite well done, specifically the vis-a-matic stuff. Very functional. It could tell when I was looking at the screen, when I was looking at my phone. It could tell from various angles what I was holding, what I was looking at, where my attention was being directed.
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It was very well done. It was very accurate, but possibly scary.
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Okay, so I'm going to introduce our special white woman correspondent, Zai, to give us some exciting breaking news in the white woman tech development world.
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They're European. They're called ELI. ELI Health. That's E-L-I.
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Yeah, we will certainly as soon as possible test this compared to the regular like mail in blood tests, which is like the current way to do it. But that requires shipping your blood to a laboratory. And, That's maybe not always the best or even like convenient. So being able to test this just at home without chipping any of your DNA to some random laboratory would be really, really cool. Right.
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No, we tried to expect as much intel as possible about kind of what their future plans are, but not specifically like in that level. But privacy, like they seemed like they had a reasonably good understanding. Of course, because it is your own like DNA and hormones.
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You know, like I do not know if this company is even thinking about trans people if it is trans friendly, but it could be used by trans people regardless.
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That was the first thing I said as soon as we walked away. I was like, this product wins the Cool Zone Media Award for the most white woman product. It specifically reminded me of like, if you see a slice of cheese on your windshield, you're already targeted. Run away. This is...
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This is that exact demographic of people who think they're going to get trafficked in your local Olive Garden parking lot. Gang-stalked Americans.
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It's like a crocodile tail. As soon as it ejects, it whips around, immobilizing anyone in the vicinity.
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There's small improvements for consumer tech, right? This is a very consumer-based, or it's supposed to be a consumer-based tech show. There's products like the Shox headphones, which every year get a little bit better. I tried out Bone conducting headphones last year, which are very good. They work underwater.
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Yeah, very cool stuff. This year they have what they called air conductive. I don't quite know how it works, but it does work. I can hear it if you're standing like two, three feet away. There's no sound bleed, but I hear music in the middle of my head despite having to not put an earbud actually like in my ear. They're super useful. They work great. Really good sound quality.
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Like small improvements, right? It's not necessarily like revolutionizing hearing, but it's very small improvements. Whereas the other kind of big trend, which isn't necessarily like wholly consumer-based, it's kind of what these larger companies are trying to move towards, is I feel like they're trying to replace... friendship with this form of technology and AI-enabled technology.
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You used to have friends. To get recommended new music, you used to have friends to tell you about new stuff that they're interested in. No longer. Now you have an AI agent that can do that for you. You don't need friends to help talk about you had a rough breakup. Instead, you can have a short-term replacement using AI. You can have a friend replacement, a girlfriend replacement.
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It's all these things that are trying to replace the core concept of friendship, even as a baby, even as a toddler. Your first friend doesn't need to be people you meet outside.
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It can be this little hovering robot you have in the living room that can also organize your fridge, tell you what you need on your shopping list, roll around your house in the middle of the night with cameras, and that could be your first friend. It's replacing the core concept of friendship.
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It's this move towards complete optimization of every aspect of human life, make it as smooth as possible, that completely ignores what it means to be human.
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Like, do they need chat GPT for this? I saw this other company that was like, it was designed to help you get over the loss of your pet. Where you could pump tons of photos of your pet into this AI machine. into this AI generator, and it will generate new images. And this is proven to help you move on from loss, which is literally a Nathan Fielder joke from like seven years ago.
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It's seven years ago. And like, no, you should talk with your friends about that. That's why you are a human. That's how you can move on from loss. You have to make new connections. Poorly AI generated images of your cat aren't going to help you move on. Like why? Why?
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Replacing friendship is the thing that I see a lot of the tech world wanting to do. Maybe because they don't really understand real human relationships that aren't innately transactional. I'm not sure. But that is a huge trend that I've seen multiple people mention. All right. Zai?
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And we discuss that way more in depth on Better Offline.
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Clapping his hands, eating his 400 pills a day. Drinking his son's blood.
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If I said that to a doctor, they'd think I had a concussion. You sure would.
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Yeah, you shouldn't be allowed to drive if you say things like that.
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But also, they use Digital Twin, which is some enterprise software shit.
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Yeah. It means so many different things. It means literally a digital representation of anything. It doesn't even mean an AI agent.
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I've watched it a few times to hate it the amount it deserves.
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Why? We're just going to play one. Well, I mean, that's what it spat out. Yeah. Oh, my God. If there's three different versions, that's just they saved the product. Fucking hell. Everyone is the same length of shot.
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I just can't believe we finally have the technology to have three trucks driving somewhere.
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Raccoons? Why is there a satellite? Are they going to drop the ion cannon on the polar bears?
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And the way that they move is very weird. It looks kind of right, but kind of right looks very strange. It does.
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And they move a little bit, but not too much. Like, they're not going anywhere with the movement. It's just, like, they are doing something, and that's it.
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You think in 10 years they're still going to have these commercials? No. Because where's the snow? There's just Polar Bears walking around, like...
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No one's watching a Coca-Cola ride and being like, yeah! Wow. I've never had one of these before. Yeah, yeah. It's never a new experience.
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By the way, I'm sure what you're about to show me looks like a dog's arse.
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I love when cars go backwards when they're driving forwards.
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Why is there so many fires? All right, let's take a shot every time the car's on fire.
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I also want to just say when it swerved in that thing, it was driving like half a mile an hour. Yeah. That's how I run. Yeah.
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That cop was like he had his arms out. Two cops are chasing... Three cops. Look how they're running.
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Okay. What is going on with his feet? Wait. Wait.
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Wow, I'm so glad that we have the technology to do a thing where a guy gets chased by the police.
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I just want to know about these thousands of generations of script. That is interesting. I am very curious. Because I just don't believe that for a fucking second.
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By 2030, you'll be able to make a man wear the same clothes for an entire video. This has happened before with Sora. When they put Sora out, they're like, check out Airhead. Oh, my God. And the balloon changes every single shot. It's a different size and color each time. There are just people running in the background sometimes. And then they made a new one.
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You're like, oh, this is going to be good. It was worse and less consistent. And it... This is what they think of us.
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It's so cool that this costs, like, so much money as well. Just burning. There was some fucking GPU melting and then... In a data center in Arizona that's draining the local water.
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And also, the little pigs that watch Star Wars, including myself, they'll notice every minor inconsistency. Do you think that they're going to tolerate Luke Skywalker's and Watto and all their favorite characters?
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But also, I just want to read out some of the fucking people that use this model. We started working with creatives like Donald Glover, who I said was washed 10 years ago and I'm fucking sick of people. Awaken My Love was a good album.
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It's a bad song with a great video. Yeah, yeah. I thought his kind of R&B stuff was very interesting. Anyway, moving on.
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And, of course, The Weekend, and someone called D4VD. Oh, his TV show was great. I'll work with creators on VO1 and form the development of VO2, and we look forward to working with trusted testers and creators to get feedback on this new model. How long are you going to get fucking feedback? It stinks.
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Oh, it's the end from Metal Gear Solid 3. What's he doing? Playing a concert? Grandad, calm down! I love these slash cuts. There's so many fast cuts. No, these fast cuts are because the next frame was unusable. Yes, actually.
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I like how also the old man does look very different each time. Very different old man. Yep, that's a different guy. That's a different guy.
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We'll say he's about to eat the microphone. Completely different. I've done it. Yum.
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This is the Better Offline bartender. I apologize. I apologize that you had to hit. I would like a drink. I also would like.
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We are in the Better Offline CES suite and we are all drinking. Because I just want to say I'm fucking disassociating after that. I'm so fucking sick. Every year of doing this nonsense and I look at these shit eaters and they show us that and they're like slurp down the slop. Oh, my God. It's hideous.
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I think I would rather... Hawk Tour has a more obvious use case than this shit. Hey, do you want to spend way more money to get something way worse? I actually can't get over the 75% check GPT. No, neither can I. Should it be more? No, it should be. Theoretically, it should be. It should be 100%. It should be 100%, yeah. Which means that a quarter... A quarter of it was just fucking unusable.
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Say that again? Meneminate. What the fuck? Yeah, that's a word. It's like when you find your cats vomited on the floor. Again, so first we see a diner called Meneminate that appears to be both on fire.
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Great AI voice. What is this Phantasmagoria-esque voice acting?
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We don't need to watch any more of that. Who is this for?
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If you watch this and have a positive reaction, they should keep you in a holding cell for a week. I'm deeply unhappy at the time we already spent watching this. We don't know what you're going to do next.
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Why do you think they think it looks good? It looks better than an Xbox. Yeah. And the idea is you typed a thing in and now a thing came out and that's magical.
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Can we attach... electrodes to panelists. To people's skulls?
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But also, to say that is, there's so many things they've said that just, they wouldn't survive a deposition.
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I would actually believe that was generated with ChatGPT. But, like, GPT 2.0.
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These people are too fucking smug. Yeah. These people sound too confident and too chummy and too happy to say things like this. That's not good. I don't like these people laughing about people losing jobs. No. They shouldn't have jobs.
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They have not. Or had structures fall to the beauty of the flame.
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The thing is, any of these things would be fucking fatal because you have to remove something from a model. How the fuck do we do that? We don't know how to do that. You have to throw away the entire model. You have to retrain. There's no way around it.
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You know what? This is the fucking problem with all of this, on top of how shit it is and how expensive it is. Which kind of AI are we talking about there, dipshit? That's not generative AI. That's not what that fucking was. And it still sucks.
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Oh, I love the movies and the future of them too. This is so good. This is so bad.
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All right. All right, Microsoft. Just once, I'd like on the panel someone to go and say, what the fuck do you mean?
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Exactly. That's their entire option. Mm-hmm. Somebody has the gun, somebody doesn't. Somebody knows the way the maze works and somebody doesn't.
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We shouldn't have a maze where I drop them in and one of them knows the maze and they have a gun?
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Sometimes sunlight creeps in through one of the corners. The Minotaur gets them only sometimes.
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I'm the Minotaur. Anyway, the gun maze isn't real. But also, most of their arguments mostly just come down to... well, you can't make an omelette without breaking it.
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oh god all right well that's the episode that's all i got folks that was my first day at ces 2025 huzzah yeah this is just my first day better off lines here all week um i'm gonna hear about stuff like this all week and i think i'm gonna be fully jokified i'm gonna wake up in the clown makeup on friday i'm gonna find the funnest thing to bring back for you i'm gonna find a an artist to put me in full joke no i'm not i'm gonna try to steal that ai enhanced grill yeah
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Open the door. Open the door. As someone who's done a lot of grilling, done a lot of spoken barbecue, I don't know what an AI would do. Is it going to talk to me in the six hours?