Cory Doctorow and Ed Zitron on Enshittification and the Rot Economy

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart Podcast.

Speaker 2 Securities offered by Ameriprise Financial Services LLC, member FINRA and SIPC.

Speaker 3 There's more to San Francisco with the Chronicle. There's more food for thought, more thought for food.
There's more data insights to help with those day-to-day choices.

Speaker 3 There's more to the weather than whether it's going to rain.

Speaker 3 And with our arts and entertainment coverage, you won't just get out more, you'll get more out of it. At the Chronicle, knowing more about San Francisco is our passion.

Speaker 3 Discover more at sfchronicle.com.

Speaker 7 To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Mint is still premium, unlimited wireless for a great price.

Speaker 9 So that means a half day.

Speaker 7 Yeah, give it a try at mintmobile.com/slash switch.

Speaker 1 Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. New customer offer for first three months only.
Speed slow under 35 gigabytes, but networks busy.

Speaker 1 Taxes and fees extra.

Speaker 5 See Mintmobile.com.

Speaker 10 So as summer dies down in New York City and I get a burger from Hamburger America or ice cream from Van Luin, I'm always happy to see Square as their stuff just works and that's why I like it and I think you will too.

Speaker 10 Square keeps you up so you don't have to slow down. Get everything you need to run and grow your business without any long-term commitments.
And why wait?

Speaker 10 Right now you can get up to $200 off Square hardware at square.com slash go slash better offline. That's sqar e dot com slash go

Speaker 10 slash better offline. Run your business smarter with square.
Get started today.

Speaker 5 Corezone media.

Speaker 11 Hello, and welcome to this week's Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

Speaker 11 So this week is going to be a recording of a panel held in Seattle at the Seattle Public Library with my good man Corey Doctorow.

Speaker 11 And we were discussing Institutification, the rot economy, and the destruction of modern tech platforms.

Speaker 11 We were moderated by the wonderful Whitney Beltran, and big up to Clarion West, a wonderful group out there, non-profit that you should definitely support. Everything in the episode notes.

Speaker 11 Have fun with this. I certainly did.

Speaker 12 Well, welcome everybody. Again, thank you for hucking it out on this Wednesday night.
We're really excited to have you all. The energy in the room is great.

Speaker 12 We're all here to talk about what is happening to us and seems to be spinning wildly out of our control and what it is and how it's going to affect us and what we can possibly do about it.

Speaker 12 Future facing.

Speaker 12 I have two really, really illustrious guests with me tonight, Corey and Ed. I did my research beforehand and watched all of their other interviews with other people.

Speaker 12 I'm not going to do as good of a job. So I'm really counting on them to shine.

Speaker 12 But for those of you who maybe just, you know, showed up by accident, I would love for first Corey and then Ed to do a brief introduction of themselves before we launch into this really incredible topic.

Speaker 12 So Corey, why don't you go ahead?

Speaker 13 Hi, I'm Corey Doctorow. I have worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, for a quarter of a century now.
I've been an activist and a journalist and a writer.

Speaker 13 I'm a recovering library worker and bookseller and Clarion West instructor every now and again. And I'm very pleased to be back here in Seattle to talk with you folks.

Speaker 5 All right, so yeah, let's open up this pip.

Speaker 5 I'm Ed Zittron. I'm the host of a podcast called Better Offline about technology and the decay of society.

Speaker 5 I also wrote a newsletter called Where's Your Ed At that I mostly started because I was depressed. It's got 82,000 subscribers now somehow.

Speaker 5 But yeah, I write about tech, decay of society, and had to learn a bunch of economics to do it, which was extremely exhausting, but I enjoy it. Thank you for being here.

Speaker 12 Okay, so

Speaker 12 we're just going to have like a little bitty five minutes on the basics before we launch into the complexities of the situation we're in.

Speaker 12 I'm going to start with an anecdote, which is one day I woke up and Google sucked.

Speaker 12 I don't know what happened, but one day I was like looking for a thing and I'm like, this is so much worse than I am used to.

Speaker 12 And that tripped me into a world of it sucks on purpose, here is why.

Speaker 12 And I would love for Ed and Corey to tell me why Google sucks.

Speaker 13 Well, Ed, do you want to start by talking about Prabagar Ragavan?

Speaker 5 Prabagar Raghavan.

Speaker 5 Love saying that motherfucker's name. So

Speaker 5 I don't know if any of you have have read The Man Who Killed Google Search, which was a piece that I wrote by accident. I found a bunch of notes from the Department of Justice.

Speaker 5 Anyway, long story short, around the early part of 2020, there was a thing called a code yellow at Google, which just meant there was...

Speaker 5 I'm going to use some financial things, but there was query weakness in Google, which means that not enough people were just asking Google things.

Speaker 5 Now, you may think, well, Google ideally gets you an answer, right? No, no, no, you pleb. How dare you? What do you mean? You get an answer? Fuck you.

Speaker 5 You need to look at ads sundar peshai needs and all of his mckinsey friends need to do their seance or whatever nevertheless there was an internal argument at google there was a guy called ben gomes who ran search who literally said i'm worried that all google cares about is growth turns out he was right around june that year a guy called brabagaragavan took over he was formerly the head of ads and he pushed pushed Ben Gomes to change things to make Google search worse to keep people on Google search.

Speaker 5 So the decay of Google search really started then. It was actually a few years beforehand.
They were slowly making it so it was harder to tell sponsored links and ads from regular search results.

Speaker 5 At the point it's pretty much impossible now, and most of the results are pretty bad as well.

Speaker 5 But long story short, Google deliberately made things worse, and then the guy who's called Prabhagar Ragavan, remember that name? Asswipe?

Speaker 5 He mandated basically that if I can't prove it, but it matches up, that he just reduced the quality of results.

Speaker 5 They allowed websites that had been previously pushed down to come back, spamming results, so that you ended up farting around on Google more, seeing more impressions, and bing-bong, number go up.

Speaker 5 Propagar, sadly, he sadly moved on. He's alive.

Speaker 5 He is now the chief technologist at Google. I would say like 30% of my work was the problem.
The funny thing is that Propagar was riding high, taking a

Speaker 5 massive growth of Google. He was doing so well.
And then he got made to take over Gemini, Google's AI.

Speaker 5 And then there was a thing in, I think it was early 2024, where this, well, maybe it was 2025, where Google Gemini was generating Chinese George Washingtons.

Speaker 5 And the conservatives were going, and there was, there's a black Nazi, there's a black, there's a Chinese George Washington.

Speaker 5 I can't, my, my tiny little brain is vibrating at a thousand miles a minute. And for some reason, Propagar Raghavan had to take responsibility.
And this is not a charming man.

Speaker 5 This isn't a man who's like a political navigator. He's just rude.

Speaker 2 He's very good at being rude.

Speaker 5 In the end, sadly, Propaga's work has been done. Google sucks now.

Speaker 5 And as Corey will tell you in his excellent book and across his wonderful literature, this is a platform problem across basically the entirety of the internet.

Speaker 13 Yeah, so Ed has got this way of talking.

Speaker 13 Is my mic on? No, no.

Speaker 13 There's a little button. Press it up.
Sign up.

Speaker 13 There we go.

Speaker 13 I do have an honorary PhD in computer science.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 Ed has got this way of talking about the ideology that says let's make Google worse in order to increase profits.

Speaker 13 And you have to understand, you know, when Google hit this code yellow, they had a 90% market share in search. So of course query growth had slowed, right?

Speaker 13 How do you increase query growth when you have a 90% market share? You can raise a billion humans to maturity and make them Google customers.

Speaker 13 That's a product called Google Classroom, but it doesn't work quickly. And so they needed something else to goose growth.

Speaker 13 And they came up with this idea, let's make Google worse in order to make more money.

Speaker 13 And you see in these documents that Ed surfaced this ferocious debate between technologists who want to do the right thing in the form of Ben Gomes, and business people who want to do the wrong thing in the form of Prague Varaghavan.

Speaker 13 And what's interesting about this is that although for many years you can imagine fights like this played out at Google, where

Speaker 13 the side that wanted to make things better won out against the side that wanted to make things worse, in this case you see this guy losing.

Speaker 13 And he's losing because his argument consists of: if I made Google worse, I would feel bad about my work and my life.

Speaker 13 And Prague Bar Raghavan's argument is: if we make Google worse, we'll make a lot more money.

Speaker 5 And there's one other thing as well, Jerry Dishler, who's now the head of ads. One of his things was, look, I'm not saying that revenue needs to control ads.
However, we all have a shared reality.

Speaker 5 Basically, what he said, it's fucking in when you read these things, it's chilling and makes you think of things you can't say in public.

Speaker 13 So,

Speaker 13 you know, you have to wonder, like, what is it that created this environment?

Speaker 13 Ed calls the the mindset that says well if you can you should worsen things to make money the rot economy and I think it's a very apt phrase and the question that I try to interrogate in in In shittification is what gave rise to it right what what created the in shitocene and my conclusion is it wasn't because you shopped wrong, right?

Speaker 13 It's not because oh you didn't pay for the product so you became the product

Speaker 13 You know farmers who buy half million dollar tractors are exploited by John Deere, which won't let their repairs go live until they pay a $200 call-out fee for a John Deere person to come out and type an unlock code into the keyboard.

Speaker 13 Now, that is not a free ad-supported tractor, right? That's a tractor they paid, you know, six large for, and it won't work until they pay ransom money. So it's not because you shopped wrong.

Speaker 13 It's also not because these guys are the wrong guys to be running the company.

Speaker 13 They are terrible people, but the reality is that these Zucker-Muskian mediocrities that run these companies are not smart enough to be causes, they must be effects, right?

Speaker 13 They're responding to an enshittogenic environment created by policy.

Speaker 13 And that policy, in the case of Google, is the policy that oversaw for decades Google's serial acquisition of both vertical and horizontal competitors.

Speaker 13 So that a company that had only made one really successful consumer-facing product, which they made a millennium ago, right, that their search engine, and that had almost without exception failed to launch anything internally, except for things they bought from other people in anti-competitive acquisitions, to the point where they bought all the shelf space, right?

Speaker 13 Nowhere else a search engine could take root.

Speaker 13 They're bribing Apple to the tune of more than $20 billion a year not to enter the search market and have a direct competitor that would erode their margins. So, they become too big to care.

Speaker 13 And this is really my thesis, right? That it's as much as

Speaker 13 Ed is right to be angry at Peppergar Raghavan, there are people alive today and not so recently dead who presided over shifts in our policy environment where they were warned at the time that the decisions that they were contemplating would have the absolutely foreseeable effect of rewarding firms that did bad things to us, who took those decisions anyway, and today are like hanging around polishing their fake Nobel Prizes in economics and collecting six-figure consulting fees working for blue chips and not being held responsible at all, much less worrying that when they go out abroad amongst us that someone might be sizing them up for a pitchfork.

Speaker 13 And so that's the thing that I want to recover in this book.

Speaker 5 And the thing that I'm going to jump in here. Oh my bad.

Speaker 12 So this is Seattle, and collectively as Seattleites, we tend to have certain feelings about capitalism.

Speaker 12 Would you say, either of you, that this phenomenon, right, this rot economy is just an inescapable fact of capitalism? Or is there real policy change?

Speaker 12 Is there some other way we could do this that we could eskew this rot economy and actually still have functioning capitalism in some way and the things that we want and improved lives?

Speaker 5 So, a lot of people talk about going back in time and killing baby Hitler. Sure, fine.
I also think baby Reagan should be on the table.

Speaker 5 Same goes for that

Speaker 5 fuckhead Milton Friedman.

Speaker 5 Finally, an audience with class.

Speaker 5 Because whatever, however you feel about capitalism, the whole growth-focused capitalism started with Milton Friedman and the free market nonsense.

Speaker 5 I'm not going to spend as many angry hours as I need to to get that out of my system.

Speaker 5 The flaws of capitalism are obvious, but the real once you remove the regulation, once you allowed Reagan and his various judges to pull away regulation and just effectively stop doing antitrust.

Speaker 5 When Lena Khan, who who was good, was remarkable because she tried. That was the real, like, Lena Khan is excellent.
I've had her on the show. I'm going to have her back.
She's fantastic.

Speaker 5 But it's like, she was particularly remarkable because she was like, actually, knew what she was talking about. I know, I was surprised.

Speaker 5 And also was like, what would stop these companies from doing things? What would be the incentives? The incentives were created over the course of decades.

Speaker 5 Yes, capitalism is at its root doing what capitalism will do, but by allowing it to be unrestrained and allowing the markets to become growth because that's all the markets, that is the center of the rot economy, that everything is growth.

Speaker 5 Every single thing is driven by growth. Nothing, to the point that the AI economy isn't even, there's like $60 billion of real revenue.
It's not about even whether the product creates money anymore.

Speaker 5 It's just number go up forever. It sounds simple, but it is at the root of everything.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I mean, I think Ed makes a really good point here. And, you know, look, I'm not someone who believes that markets are the best or only arbiter of how we allocate resources.

Speaker 13 I think that there are other ways that we can do things. But even if you are the kind of like Elon Musk adult

Speaker 13 libertarian who can't open your copy of Atlas Shrugged anymore because the pages are all stuck together,

Speaker 13 and you think that the only thing that our government should ever do is enforce contracts, you still want them to enforce contracts.

Speaker 13 And for the referee to referee the game adequately, they have to be more powerful than the players on the field.

Speaker 13 So I tell my libertarian friends: look, the smallest government you can have is determined by the largest corporation you're willing to tolerate.

Speaker 13 And the decision, which was taken in the late 1970s, first under Carter and then accelerating under Reagan and through the rest of it, and really co-terminal with the tech industry.

Speaker 13 So remember, Ronald Reagan went on the campaign trail the year the Apple II Plus went on sale. The tech industry grew up, and as it got bigger, antitrust got smaller.

Speaker 13 It's really the first post-antitrust industry, which is why it looks the way it does.

Speaker 13 And when we decided that we would no longer enforce anti-monopoly law, we really did set in motion these very foreseeable outcomes.

Speaker 13 And the people responsible for it, they insist that their pro-monopoly posture, which boiled down to this, that monopolies are efficient.

Speaker 13 That when you observe a monopoly in the wild, what you must be seeing is a company that is very pleasing to people.

Speaker 13 Because if a company isn't pleasing to people, then other people will enter the market and take away your monopoly.

Speaker 13 And so any monopoly that you find tautologically by circular reasoning must be a good company.

Speaker 13 And so if Apple is controlling all of the app market, if Google is controlling 90% of the search market, what you are observing is a firm that is so pleasing that everyone is voluntarily using them.

Speaker 13 And if they weren't, then they would be out-competed. And so they said, well, let's tolerate monopolies as efficient.

Speaker 13 Let's not engage in this perverse labor of punishing companies for pleasing the people who've elected us to represent them. Let us

Speaker 13 celebrate these new efficiencies. And you do that for 40 years, and suddenly every sector becomes a cartel.

Speaker 13 We have this in glass bottles, vitamin C, eyeglasses, intermodal shipping, rail. The internet, as Tom Eastman says, has five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four.

Speaker 13 We have it in semiconductors. We have it in professional wrestling, we have it in

Speaker 13 plastic bags filled with sterile saline, and one company controls not just the hospital beds but also the coffins. Think about that for a minute, right?

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 this rampant monopolization

Speaker 13 did ultimately give rise to this world where firms didn't have to worry about being disciplined by markets, but it also meant they didn't have to worry about being disciplined by governments.

Speaker 13 Because when you boil a sector down to just a handful of firms, it's very easy for them to to decide what line of bullshit they're going to feed to their regulators.

Speaker 13 And because they are so a slosh in money, because they don't compete head-to-head, you know, for Google, $20 billion a year to Apple not to enter the search market is a bargain because the erosion of both of their margins, if they were competing head-to-head in these markets that they've actually divided up amongst themselves, like the Pope dividing up the New World, would cost them both far more than $20 billion.

Speaker 13 They'd have to hire each other's employees and pay them more. They'd have to offer us cheaper things.
They'd have to be better to advertisers.

Speaker 13 They'd have to be better to publishers, and that would erode their margins.

Speaker 13 And so you end up with this moment where they have all of this money, they find it very easy to come to a single position, and their regulators do as they're told.

Speaker 13 And so we end up with both regulatory capture and market capture arising out of this same set of policy choices.

Speaker 13 And so two of the most important forces that we count on to punish companies that do bad things, to ensure that when Prague Bar Raghavan and Les Gomes are fighting, that Les Gomes can say more than this would make me feel bad about my life's work.

Speaker 13 He can say, and we're going to have our lunches eaten by someone smarter than us,

Speaker 13 or we're going to get smacked around by a regulator. That at that moment, he's going to lose that argument.

Speaker 13 And so, this is how you end up with the devil of your worst nature on your left shoulder whispering in your ear and winning the argument over the angel of your better nature on your right shoulder telling you to do the right thing.

Speaker 2 Is your financial advisor supported by a firm with over 130 years of strength and stability in changing markets? Every AmeriPrise financial advisor is.

Speaker 2 When you work with AmeriPrize, you get personal financial advice from an advisor who knows you and a range of goal-based investing and solutions.

Speaker 2 No wonder AmeriPrize is rated 4.9 out of 5 in overall client satisfaction. Visit Ameriprise.com/slash advice for information and disclosures.

Speaker 2 Securities offered by AmeriPrise Financial Services LLC, member FINRA and SIPC.

Speaker 10 Once again, you're hearing me talk about Quince in an ad because I like the clothes they make and the way they make them.

Speaker 10 I recently picked up a bunch of nice-fitting t-shirts along with a leather cafe racer jacket, which fits incredibly and looks like a high-end one, but it only costs $250, which Quince paid part of as part of this ad, but I'm very happy with it.

Speaker 10 I've paid significantly more for lower-quality jackets. So why Quince?

Speaker 10 Well, by partnering directly with Ethical Factories and top artesians, Quince cuts out the middleman to deliver premium quality at half the cost of other high-end brands, so you can give luxury quality pieces without the luxury price tag.

Speaker 10 I was a customer before, and I'll be a customer afterward. Everything I've got from Quince, I really, really like, and I look forward to getting more in the future.

Speaker 10 Give and get timeless holiday staples that last this season with Quince. Go to quince.com/slash better for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.
Now available in Canada, too.

Speaker 10 That's q-u-i-n-ce-e dot com/slash better.

Speaker 10 Free shipping and 365-day day returns. Quince.com slash better.

Speaker 10 As New York cools off and I begin actually going outside again, I'm always happy to pay for a sandwich at Court Street Grocer's or a coffee from Birdie in Williamsburg with Square.

Speaker 10 The tech just works.

Speaker 10 It's easy to set up for businesses, giving them instant access to earnings with Square Banking, built-in marketing and loyalty tools, and powers over 100,000 different food and beverage sellers, from boutique bakeries to national coffee chains.

Speaker 10 It's incredibly easy to use for customers and businesses alike, and you don't need any special training or elaborate setup.

Speaker 10 And in my personal experience, I don't think I've ever had trouble with a Square terminal. You just tap it and go, or you slide a credit card in.
In person, it works, online, it works.

Speaker 10 I just really like Square, and I'm happy that they're advertising with the show. Square keeps you up so you don't have to slow down.

Speaker 10 Get everything you need to run and grow your business without any long-term commitments. And why wait?

Speaker 10 Right now, you can get up to $200 off Square hardware at square.com/slash go/slash better offline. That's s-q-u-a-r-e

Speaker 10 slash go

Speaker 10 slash better offline. Run your business smarter with Square.
Get started today.

Speaker 9 Tired of spills and stains on your sofa? Wash away your worries with Anibay. Anibay is the only machine-washable sofa inside and out where designer quality meets budget-friendly prices.

Speaker 9 That's right, sofas start at just $699.

Speaker 9 Enjoy a no-risk experience with pet-friendly, stain-resistant, and changeable slip covers made with performance fabric.

Speaker 9 Experience cloud-like comfort with high-resilience foam that's hypoallergenic and never needs fluffing. The sturdy steel frame ensures longevity, and the modular pieces can be rearranged anytime.

Speaker 9 Shop washable sofas.com for early Black Friday savings up to 60% off site-wide, backed by a 30-day satisfaction guarantee. If you're not absolutely in love, send it back for a full refund.

Speaker 9 No return shipping or restocking fees, every penny back. Upgrade now at washable sofas.com.
Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 12 So on that note, our regulators are not really regulating right now

Speaker 12 in general. And for us, the average person, right, this is all really over our heads power-wise.
Like we as individuals don't really have power to do anything about getting Google to behave, right?

Speaker 12 But what do we do in our personal lives when we're affected by this, right? Like, I work in video games, I'm working on Cyberpunk 2.

Speaker 12 And I feel the effects of the raw economy and shitification on my job every day. Like, it's very, very, very stressful.
You know, I was talking to a woman earlier, her name's Carolyn.

Speaker 12 Hi, Carolyn, about

Speaker 12 AI's effect on higher ed. So, for us, for the people in this room, do you have any ideas or or guidance for like, how do we live our lives now? What do we do?

Speaker 5 So we live in a high-information, low-processing environment. The reason that regulators don't do much is not only because they're incentivized not to, but also they don't know shit about fuck.

Speaker 5 In fact,

Speaker 5 when you go around reading most, a ton of media, when you read a bunch of regulatory stuff and you read what the government says about things, they don't know what they're talking about.

Speaker 5 I don't even mean slightly, I mean that the markets have been running away with this idea that generative AI is the future. The media has been reporting that generative AI is replacing jobs.

Speaker 5 Neither of these are true. They're not true.

Speaker 5 There are some jobs being eroded by LLMs, but it's jobs like translators that were already being eroded by machine translation, I forget the exact terms, and art directors.

Speaker 5 So real jobs, but contract labor. And also bosses that wouldn't pay real people anyway.
The world itself is run on ignorance.

Speaker 5 Not just social ignorance, but just straight-up factual ignorance about what AI can do. And the reason I pick AI is because this is is where you can actually be disruptive.

Speaker 5 You hear a fucking data center popping up, go to the town hall meeting. Make your mayor upset.
I'm deadly serious.

Speaker 5 I saw one brave soul at a Wisconsin data center meeting, who just quoted my work, love him, going to these places and actually not making a scene, just going in and saying, hey, there's only $60 billion worth of revenue in this industry.

Speaker 5 There's no growth outside of chat GPT. Like these companies, OpenAI burned $9.2 billion in the first half of this year.
That's fucking crazy. That's a completely crazy thing.

Speaker 5 There's no path to profitability for these things, on top of there not being that much demand. I'm not just quoting things in my newsletter at you.

Speaker 5 This is the shit that you should be saying to your elected officials. And show up at town hall meetings.
They hate it. They do not want to see you.
But they have to.

Speaker 5 So you show up and you tell them these very simple things. And they'll say, what I read in the newspaper, shut the fuck up, Mayor.
I want to hear from you, Mayor Stanley. I don't know.

Speaker 5 Well, Bowser, I guess. But

Speaker 5 nevertheless, showing up and actually just saying the very basic things and sticking to your points will do a lot.

Speaker 5 I know it sounds small, but really, that's where you get things done because these data centers are probably not getting built anyway.

Speaker 5 But if you can undermine them, then they're really not getting built.

Speaker 13 You know,

Speaker 13 when the early reviews started to come out for inshittification,

Speaker 13 there was a kind of common theme that emerged from some of these reviews. It was, I found this book very exciting and interesting.

Speaker 13 It gave me a way to attach a handle to something that had been kind of big and diffuse and frustrating to me that I couldn't make sense of.

Speaker 13 And now that I've got this handle on it, I feel like I can do something with it. And I read all of these, you know,

Speaker 13 suggestions for how we could make policy at the end and what that would do in order to forestall or roll back in shidification and make a better world.

Speaker 13 But there wasn't anything I could do personally in my life as a consumer. And, you know, they're right.
They're right.

Speaker 13 I don't think your personal consumption choices really play a role in changing our systemic

Speaker 5 problems.

Speaker 13 Now, by all means, if there's a business you want to support, go to third place books instead of Amazon in order to get your books because it'll make their lives better and you'll have a bookstore in your community.

Speaker 13 But don't kid yourself that it's going to fix the structural problem of Amazon.

Speaker 13 The structural problem of Amazon is that regulators allow them to buy all of their competitors such that they were able to corner markets. And then they were able to lock people in.
Am I too quiet?

Speaker 13 Is that the issue? All right.

Speaker 13 And then they were able to lock people into their platform through getting them to pay in advance by a year for their shipping with Prime, such that merchants found that they couldn't sell anywhere else.

Speaker 13 And then they were able to lard onto those merchants 45 to 51% junk fees on every dollar they brought in.

Speaker 13 And then they were able to hit them with this most favored nation deal that says that if you raise your prices on Amazon to recover some of those 45 to 51 percent junk fees, you have to raise your prices everywhere else at Target and Walmart and mom and pop stores and your own warehouse store so that Amazon started to impose a worldwide tax on all consumption.

Speaker 13 And that's not a thing you solve by changing your own consumption habits.

Speaker 13 You know, by all means, if you feel that Twitter is bad for your mental health, and it probably is, and you want to go to Blue Sky, you want to go to Mastodon, sure, but just don't fetishize that as the thing that's going to make a systemic difference, right?

Speaker 13 The thing that makes a systemic difference is intervening not as an individual, but as a polity.

Speaker 13 So as I've mentioned before, I work at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We have a national network of grassroots groups, including several here in Seattle, called the Electronic Frontier Alliance.

Speaker 13 If you go to efa.eff.org, you can find some of these local chapters. And they work on things like limiting police use of

Speaker 13 facial recognition,

Speaker 13 buying surveillance technology, privacy for abortion seekers, limitation on the use of digital infrastructure to track down people that ICE is chasing,

Speaker 13 right to repair laws. Washington's got a really good one.
All of those things start at these grassroots levels, and it's getting involved as a polity that makes a difference.

Speaker 13 I know it's easy to despair if you think you can't solve things individually through your own consumption choices. We've been told this for 40 years, that you have to vote with your wallet.

Speaker 13 The reason rich people want you to vote with your wallet is they have thicker wallets than you.

Speaker 13 You are always going to lose that election.

Speaker 13 So, you know, don't vote with your wallet.

Speaker 13 Be a citizen.

Speaker 13 Someone in the reception before this asked me about what advice I would give to tech workers, and statistically, a bunch of you are probably tech workers.

Speaker 13 So, you know, the tech workers did have this chance to

Speaker 13 consolidate their power, and they missed it. So, for a long time, one of the forces that constrained inshittification was workers themselves.

Speaker 13 Because tech workers are this uniquely constituted workforce historically.

Speaker 13 The tech sector has always had very low union density, but an enormous amount of worker power. And that's because tech workers were both very scarce and very, very valuable.

Speaker 13 The National Bureau of Economic Research estimates that the average tech worker in Silicon Valley and Seattle was adding a million dollars a year to their employer's bottom line.

Speaker 13 That's why they gave you free kombucha and massages and why they'd hire a surgeon to freeze your eggs so you could work through your fertile years. It wasn't because they loved you, right?

Speaker 13 It was because they were afraid of you getting a job across the street. Now, we know how tech bosses treat the workers.
They're not afraid of losing.

Speaker 13 That's the Amazon driver who's got the AI camera that takes points off if they look away from

Speaker 13 the road to check something to one side or the other and it decides that their eyeballs were in the wrong orientation.

Speaker 13 It's the warehouse workers that are injured at three times the rate of other warehouse workers in the sector. It's everyone who pees in a bottle.

Speaker 13 It's people who assemble iPhones in China and have suicide nets around the factory.

Speaker 13 That's how they treat the workers they're not afraid of. So there was this opportunity at one point for tech workers to use that power and consolidate it through a union.
And they missed it, right?

Speaker 13 Because tech workers thought that they were temporarily embarrassed founders. They didn't think that they were workers.

Speaker 13 And they thought that because their bosses would meet them in monthly town hall meetings where they could ask impertinent questions about corporate strategy, that their bosses thought that they were peers.

Speaker 13 But your boss didn't think you were a peer. Your boss thought you were a problem to solve.
And after half a million layoffs in the tech sector, they're not afraid of you anymore.

Speaker 13 There's other workers who will take your job.

Speaker 13 You can no longer say, I refuse to inshidify the thing I missed my mother's funeral to ship, and you can't hire someone else to replace me, because they'll just fire you and hire someone else to replace you.

Speaker 13 And so now is the time to unionize. And it can,

Speaker 13 yes.

Speaker 5 Also, Ilma, if you have anything pertaining to the revenues or spend of Anthropic or OpenAI, you could email me

Speaker 5 that information.

Speaker 5 And I could add shit, piss and fuck, between the numbers.

Speaker 5 They love it in the podcast.

Speaker 13 And so, you know, it might feel like a bad time to be unionizing because we no longer have the National Labor Relations Board as it was constituted under Biden.

Speaker 13 In fact, it's been so illegally denuded of commissioners that it can no longer form a quorum and investigate unfair labor practices. So it can feel like this is a bad time.

Speaker 13 But here's the category error Trump is making. Trump thinks that the reason we have unions is because we have the National Labor Relations Act.

Speaker 8 It's backwards.

Speaker 13 Long before unions were legal, we had unions.

Speaker 13 And the union piece represented by the National Labor Relations Act was brought about because bosses were scared of what their workers were doing to them at that point, because militancy had gotten so intense that they sued for peace.

Speaker 13 And that peace came in two parts. Part of the National Labor Relations Act describes what your boss can't do to you.

Speaker 13 But a lot of the National Labor Relations Act is about what you can't do to your boss. And one guess, which half of the National Labor Relations Act has been most vigorously enforced.

Speaker 13 So Trump thinks that we fired the referee, and so that means all the players have to leave the field. He's wrong.
When you fire the referee, it means there's no more rules, right?

Speaker 13 And there's a reason that fascists attack unions first. It's because the opposite of fascism is solidarity.

Speaker 12 Yes, excellent answers all around. And just to summarize, what I heard was: don't vote with your wallet, unionize.
So take that out the door.

Speaker 13 And EFA.eff.org.

Speaker 5 Plug it.

Speaker 12 Okay, my next question for you is one that a lot of people have been thinking about, which is the bubble.

Speaker 12 The bubble is coming. We've all heard about the bubble.
Is the bubble real? This is ads to what is going to happen.

Speaker 12 If we are tiny investors that have our 401k and index funds, what the fuck do we do?

Speaker 13 Buy long polls to dig through rubble with canned goods.

Speaker 5 Let's try again, Ed?

Speaker 5 Go back in time, but if you can't, know that gravity exists. Right now the market is going absolutely batshit insane.

Speaker 5 I'm not a stock analyst, I cannot give you financial advice, but right now number going up. So maybe you could I don't own stocks, I'm a psychopath.
I live in cash, I invest in words.

Speaker 5 The problem we have right now is that NVIDIA is the largest stock on the stock market. There has never been a more problematic fact than that.

Speaker 5 Eighty eight percent or more of their revenue is selling these fucking GPUs. You want to know what happens when you plug those GPUs in? They start losing you money.

Speaker 5 Nobody, not a single company, other than NVIDIA, is making any kind of profit on AI. In fact, they're burning billions.
The reason I tell you this is

Speaker 5 you can't really navigate away from the bubble right now, other than just selling, I imagine. So know what you're going into.

Speaker 5 Everything you're reading Oracle say right now about their relationship with OpenAI is bullshit. And to get specific, Oracle has a five-year-long $300 billion contract with OpenAI.

Speaker 5 Sounds amazing, right? They just need four and a half gigawatts of data center capacity. Any guesses how much they have? 200 megawatts.

Speaker 5 Now, don't worry about it.

Speaker 13 That's less than 400 gigawatts.

Speaker 5 That's a lot less. That's a lot less.
And I must be clear, I actually mean power. IT load, they've got about $1.30.

Speaker 5 So, not to worry, though, because OpenAI also doesn't have the money. Nevertheless, the stock has run.
AMD now has a deal where they're going to sell chips to OpenAI. Who the fuck knows who's paying?

Speaker 5 Nvidia, same deal. Whenever you see OpenAI involved, just don't.
Just don't do it. There is no avoiding a bubble popping now.
There just isn't.

Speaker 5 So the smartest thing you can do is stick to the fundamentals. We're going to get into the more hysterical phase now.
We're going to see some crazy shit.

Speaker 5 I had someone suggest the other day that OpenAI may do a SPAC IPO. I think it's insane, which is why it's possible.
Do not let your money touch OpenAI under any circumstance. That company is cancer.

Speaker 5 I'd say the same thing about Anthropic. But just be aware that right now the stock market and all of the associated media is going to tell you, oh, there's a bubble.
I've read many places.

Speaker 5 Oh, there's bubbles can be good. They can never be good.

Speaker 5 We don't call them bubble. I'd see it in multiple headlines.
We're like, yeah, but this is a good bubble.

Speaker 5 Yeah, you know, I've got the good kind of cancer.

Speaker 5 I've got the good kind of diarrhea. Anyway,

Speaker 5 the point is,

Speaker 5 knowledge is power here, and you're going to look at the media, and the media is going to say, AI, number go up, everything great.

Speaker 5 Broadcom's going to ship $10 billion of chips, 10 gigawatts of chips to OpenAI by the end of 2029. Costs $50 billion and two and a half years to make a gigawatt of data center capacity.

Speaker 5 Everyone is going to feel like they're saying that this is inevitable. Know that it's not.
I realize I can't give you much better advice than that, but just know that gravity exists.

Speaker 5 This cannot succeed on top of the fact that everyone's unprofitable it's not actually that popular either chat GPT is very popular because a lot of people love being driven insane or trying to fuck it I think and

Speaker 5 terrible surprise

Speaker 5 for me that's what my friends no I'm it

Speaker 5 sorry Caleb but it's

Speaker 5 it's frustrating as well because I'm sure all of you have felt the poison of generative AI within your workplace and these people will tell you that you must learn AIs come in, you must learn to use AI.

Speaker 5 The reason it's not able to do your jobs is it's shit.

Speaker 5 Like, I realize that all of this sounds maybe very elementary to you, sounds like most of you get it.

Speaker 5 You're going to keep reading that it's not the case, that it's replacing coders. It isn't.
That is a fucking lie. Everyone's saying it.
Sunda Peshai, Satchinadella, Andy fucking Jassy.

Speaker 5 These chunda fucks love to say this stuff. It's not true.
So, really, the advice I can give you is: this is going to pop. It's going to happen.
And act accordingly.

Speaker 13 So let me advance a theory of the less bad and more bad bubble, if not a good bubble.

Speaker 5 That would be nice.

Speaker 13 So some bubbles have productive residues and some don't. So Enron left nothing behind.

Speaker 13 Now WorldCom, which was a grotesque fraud, some of you will remember, right? They raised billions of dollars claiming that they had orders for fiber. They dug up the streets all over the world.

Speaker 13 They put fiber in the ground. They didn't have the orders for the fiber.

Speaker 13 They stole billions of dollars from everyday investors, people who just wanted to go through their old age without starving to death or not having a roof over their head.

Speaker 13 The CEO died in prison and it was good riddance. But there was still all that fiber in the ground.

Speaker 13 So I've got two gigabits symmetrical fiber at home in Burbank because AT ⁇ T bought some old dark fiber from WorldCom because fiber lasts forever, right?

Speaker 5 It's just, it's glass.

Speaker 13 So once it's there, it is a productive residue, right? So what kind of bubbles are we living through? Well, crypto is not going to leave behind anything.

Speaker 13 Crypto is going to leave behind shitty Austrian economics and worst JPEGs.

Speaker 13 AI is actually going to leave behind some stuff. So, if you want to think about like a post-AI bubble world, and

Speaker 13 I just got edits from my editor, I wrote a book over the summer called The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI.

Speaker 13 And if you want to think about a post-AI world,

Speaker 13 imagine what you would do if GPUs were 10 cents on the dollar, if there were a lot of skilled applied statisticians looking for work, and if you had a bunch of open source models that had barely been optimized and had a lot of room at the bottom, right?

Speaker 5 I got to push back on this. Okay.

Speaker 5 These AI GPUs are mostly owned by private equity firms and big tech. The majority of the GPUs are not owned by people who will let them enter the market.

Speaker 5 And there are really not a ton of, like, if the idea is that GPUs, someone will work something out, sure.

Speaker 5 But you don't think all the King's horses and all the King's men would have come up with something else?

Speaker 5 Because that's the thing that I worry about, the thing that terrifies me about this bubble is this is not useful infrastructure at all. Everyone loves to say, oh, it's just like the dot-com bubble.

Speaker 5 It's nothing like that.

Speaker 5 It's not even like the, at least the fiber was somewhat useful. These GPUs, the amount of power alone,

Speaker 5 and one of the reasons that OpenAI and Anthropic have been able to have their monopolies is because

Speaker 5 they have the capital. And no one's going to have the capital to run these things.
I mean, they'll be selling A100s. They'll be paying you 50 cents an hour.

Speaker 5 It's just what terrifies me is the, and I'm not saying you're doing this, that there are people already trying to rationalize this and say, well,

Speaker 5 and you were the one that actually told me the stories of the dot-com where they're a useful service space because it was before AWS. Right.
I don't see that usefulness here.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 I take your point. I think that there's going going to be a lot of firms in receivership.

Speaker 13 I don't think that private equity bosses' preferences are going to enter into it. I think that there's going to be a lot of firms in receivership.

Speaker 13 And I do think that when you contemplate the intersection of optimization of existing open source models, think about what happened when DeepSeq entered the market.

Speaker 13 You've got Chinese firms that are prohibited from using the more advanced GPUs.

Speaker 13 So rather than doing this sort of display of how serious they are about AI by spending as much money as they can, they went and they said, okay, well, what can we juice out of

Speaker 13 previous generations of GPUs?

Speaker 5 And then they got some pretty impressive results. Yeah, but what results?

Speaker 5 So they made it cheaper, sure, but what actually happened as a result of DeepSeek? Other than everyone, all of Silicon Valley went, didn't happen. Sure,

Speaker 5 they can't do it cheaper. They're Chinese.

Speaker 13 So my point is not about the market realities, the material reality. So I'm talking about what happens after the market pops, right? So

Speaker 13 I have seen people do interesting and useful things with AI. I think you've probably seen people do some useful and interesting things.
I'll give you an example.

Speaker 13 I was writing an essay, and I couldn't remember where I'd heard a quote I'd heard in a podcast. I couldn't remember which quote it was.

Speaker 13 So I downloaded Whisper, which is an open source model from OpenAI, to my laptop, which doesn't have a GPU, right? A little commodity laptop.

Speaker 13 Through 30 hours of podcasts that I'd recently listened to, I got a full transcription in an hour. My fan didn't even turn on.

Speaker 5 That's awesome.

Speaker 13 Yeah, so I know tons of people who use this.

Speaker 13 And the title of the book, Reverse Centaur, refers to this idea from automation theory, where a centaur is someone who gets to use machines to assist them, a human head on a machine body.

Speaker 13 And so, you know, you riding a bicycle, you using a

Speaker 13 horse with human legs. Yes.
And a reverse centaur is, that's right, a machine head on a human body, right? It's someone who's been conscripted to be a peripheral for a machine.

Speaker 13 And when I, you know, I should say, you talked about good cancer. I have the least bad kind of cancer.
I've got a very treatable form of cancer.

Speaker 13 But I've been paying a lot of attention to stories about cancer and

Speaker 13 open source models or AI models that can sometimes see solid mass tumors that radiologists miss.

Speaker 13 And if what we said was, we at the Kaiser Oncology Department are going to invest in a service that is going to sometimes ask our radiologists to take a second look to see if they miss something, such that instead of doing 100 x-rays a day, they're going to do 98, right then I would say as someone with cancer hmm that sounds interesting to me I don't think anyone is pitching any oncology ward in the world on that I think the pitch is fire 90% of your oncologists fire 90% of your radiologists have the remainder babysit AI have them be the accountability sinks and moral crumple zones for a machine that is processing this stuff at a speed that no human could possibly account for have them put their name at the bottom of it and have them absorb the blame for your cost-cutting measures.

Speaker 13 And so, you know, when I hear people talk about AI, right, I hear programmers talk about AI doing things that are useful.

Speaker 13 Like one that I've heard many programmers say is, I had one data file in a weird format that for one as a one-off, I needed to get into a different format.

Speaker 13 And I had ways that I could check it and tell what was going on. And so I asked, I one-shotted it with an AI, I did some checksums, and it was great.
And it saved me an hour. That's a centaur, right?

Speaker 5 Sure, but here's the thing. How many of those anecdotes actually exist in any given time? And how many of them are...

Speaker 5 The DGX box that NVIDIA's launched, I could see a future where large language models are run locally, sure.

Speaker 5 Also, I question how much of the cancer-related stuff would actually be generative, but that's a separate discussion.

Speaker 5 Because one of the things these people do is they conflate AI, which has been around for a while, with generative.

Speaker 5 And my concern is that...

Speaker 5 I don't know, a lot of the anecdotal one-shot stuff and that Carl Brown, Internet of Bugs, if any of you have ever seen it, fantastic YouTube channel, you should look him up. He's fucking brilliant.

Speaker 5 He said it makes the easy things easier and the harder things harder. Sure.
If we could have that as client-side, awesome.

Speaker 5 But I don't really think any of this GPU infrastructure, even in receivership, is going to like you can already get discount A100s, H100s, H200s. Can't wait for the discount Blackwells pieces of shit.

Speaker 10 As New York cools off and I begin actually going outside again, I'm always happy to pay for a sandwich at Court Street Grocer's or a coffee from Birdie in Williamsburg with Square.

Speaker 10 The tech just works.

Speaker 10 It's easy to set up for businesses, giving them instant access to earnings with Square Banking, built-in marketing and loyalty tools, and powers over 100,000 different food and beverage sellers, from boutique bakeries to national coffee chains.

Speaker 10 It's incredibly easy to use for customers and businesses alike, and you don't need any special training or elaborate setup.

Speaker 10 And in my personal experience, I don't think I've ever had trouble with a Square terminal. You just tap it and go, or you slide a credit card in.
In person, it works, online it works.

Speaker 10 I just really like Square, and I'm happy that they're advertising with the show. Square keeps you up so you don't have to slow down.

Speaker 10 Get everything you need to run and grow your business without any long-term commitments. And why wait?

Speaker 10 Right now, you can get up to $200 off Square hardware at square.com/slash go/slash better offline. That's square.com/slash go

Speaker 10 slash better offline. Run your business smarter with Square.
Get started today.

Speaker 9 There's nothing like sinking into luxury. Anibay sofas combine ultimate comfort and design at an affordable price.

Speaker 9 Anibay has designed the only fully machine washable sofa from top to bottom. The stain-resistant performance fabric slip covers and cloud-like frame duvet can go straight into your wash.

Speaker 9 Perfect for anyone with kids, pets, or anyone who loves an easy-to-clean, spotless sofa. With a modular design and changeable slip covers, you can customize your sofa to fit any space and style.

Speaker 9 Whether you need a single chair, love seat, or a luxuriously large sectional, Annabe has you covered. Visit washable sofas.com to upgrade your home.

Speaker 9 Sofas start at just $699 and right now, get early access to Black Friday savings, up to 60% off store-wide with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Shop now at washable sofas.com.

Speaker 5 Add a little

Speaker 9 to your life. Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 4 Master distiller Jimmy Russell knew Wild Turkey Bourbon got it right the first time. Mellowed an American oak with the darkest char.

Speaker 4 Our pre-prohibition style bourbons are aged longer and never watered down. So you know it's right too for whatever you do with it.

Speaker 4 Wild Turkey 101 Bourbon makes an old-fashioned or bold fashion for bold nights out or at home. Wild Turkey Bourbon, aged longer, never watered down to create one bold flavor.

Speaker 4 Copyright 2020 Black Cooper America, New York, New York, never compromised, drink responsibly.

Speaker 14 Here for Lowe's early Black Friday deals? Perfect timing. Get up to 50% off, select major appliances, plus up to an extra 25% off when you bundle select appliances.
Holiday lights going up soon?

Speaker 14 Select ladders are up to 50% off right now at Lowe's.

Speaker 5 Lowe's, we help.

Speaker 14 You save. Valid through 1119.
Selection varies by location. Select locations only while supplies last.
See Lowe's.com for more details.

Speaker 9 Visit your nearby Lowe's on East Starquez Avenue in Sunnyvale.

Speaker 5 So I'll give you another example.

Speaker 5 I'll put my fingers between the tigers here.

Speaker 13 I really want to squeeze out one more example here. It's a really good one because it's about a nonprofit people should be supporting as well.

Speaker 13 So there's a nonprofit called the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, hrdag.org. It's run by

Speaker 13 some really brilliant mathematicians, statisticians.

Speaker 13 They started off doing statistical extrapolations of war crimes for human rights tribunals, mostly in The Hague, and talking about the aspects of war crimes that were not visible but could be statistically inferred from adjacent data.

Speaker 13 They did a project with Innocence Project New Orleans, where they used LLMs to identify the linguistic correlates of arrest reports that produced exonerations, and they used that to analyze a lot more arrest reports than they could otherwise.

Speaker 13 And they put that at the top of a funnel where lawyers and paralegals were able to accelerate their exoneration work. That's a new thing on this earth, right?

Speaker 5 It's very cool.

Speaker 13 And, like, I'm like, okay, well, if these guys can accelerate that work with cheap hardware that today is out of reach, if they can figure out how to use open source models but make them more efficient because you've got all these skilled applied statisticians who are no longer caught up in the bubble, then I think we could see some useful things after the bubble.

Speaker 13 That's my argument for this is fiber in the ground and not shitty monkey JPEGs.

Speaker 12 Thank you both.

Speaker 12 We got there. So, what I think I heard was: we feel like the GPU infrastructure is just kind of fucked.
That's not going to be useful afterwards.

Speaker 12 But also, the actual technology itself could possibly be useful in a number of use cases that could be socially just.

Speaker 13 If workers get to decide how they use their tools, they generally will be able to make some good decisions about it.

Speaker 13 And new tools for workers who are skilled and get to decide how they use them, that's great. You know, look, if you're, I met a video editor who changed the eye lines of 200 extras in

Speaker 13 a crowd scene, right, using a deep fake. And he was like, Yeah,

Speaker 13 I was sitting over the director. We thought, wouldn't this scene be really interesting if they were all looking that way instead of this way? And they were able to do it.

Speaker 13 And I'm like, okay, that's a new tool on this earth.

Speaker 5 Is that generative?

Speaker 5 Was that looked like that? Yeah, it's a deep fake, right?

Speaker 13 They just move the eyeballs.

Speaker 5 Yeah, but the deepfake, is that generative AI? Because

Speaker 5 this is just a really important point.

Speaker 13 It's just because. Well, they made new pixels where pixels didn't exist before by making an inference.
Right?

Speaker 5 Right, but that doesn't mean it's a transform of the reason they say this is not because you're wrong about that. That example is great.

Speaker 5 It's just these pigs have got rich conflating the useful with the useless. Okay.
Okay. All right.
Corey is also right.

Speaker 12 Thank you, sirs.

Speaker 12 I do have one small anecdote to add myself. Yes, I am of value.

Speaker 5 I work in the video games industry. Of course you are.

Speaker 12 I work in the narrative department, which means I write a lot of dialogue. And in my pipelines, we've actually, we have found a use for generative AI that doesn't steal anybody's work

Speaker 12 and makes us work about 15% faster. So what we've done is we got permission from our SAG actors to train our personal closed generative model on their voices.

Speaker 12 plug that into what we call RoboVoice, so our lines that do speech to text instead of the horrible Amazon Poly monstrosity that's like, hello, my name is Robot.

Speaker 12 And what we're able to do is hear the lines and iterate on them faster so that we're done by the time we actually get to record with the SAG actors at their SAG fees and nobody has lost any work.

Speaker 5 So I think my point is,

Speaker 12 right? Like, generative AI absolutely does have some uses. Is it worth burning down the planet? I can't answer that for you.

Speaker 5 It's a Wednesday, right?

Speaker 12 But there are, like, there's baby and there's bathwater. And I think it behooves us all to continue to have the discussion, right, to not 100% close the door.

Speaker 12 And on that note, we are going to switch to answering questions from the audience. And I have one picked out already.

Speaker 12 Since we're all adults here, I thought I would start with a spicy one, which is: wouldn't slowing AI development in the United States just allow China to dominate all of us?

Speaker 5 Oh, good.

Speaker 5 Oh, good. Take it away, Ed.
So,

Speaker 5 I love hearing shit that was said about the Soviet Union said again. Oh no, what if we don't have chat GPT like China? Oh no, what will we ever do if we don't have a chat?

Speaker 13 Oh, we can fuck like China.

Speaker 5 It's nonsense. The reason that China is pulling ahead of America in any way is because they have a massive renewables initiative and also terrible working conditions.

Speaker 5 But putting all that aside, That whole thing is built on an inherently xenophobic idea and also just nonsense, which is that America does not have the resources to get this.

Speaker 5 work nowhere ever has anywhere near this much money been shoved into one thing forever for years not the dot-com boom not the post-telecommunications act which Corey probably knows way better than I do but the thing is 400 billion dollars put into that nonsense nobody has ever had more chances and more money to do anything Using China as a convenient excuse to spunk money every month is a fucking stupid idea, but also to develop what?

Speaker 5 Look at the last releases from OpenAI, Atlas, oh wow, a fucking web browser. Great.
I've never used one of those. Oh, it can read the web page and then fuck up and not buy a thing.
Wow.

Speaker 5 I can just take five edibles if I want to not use Amazon properly.

Speaker 5 But in all seriousness, there is no development to be made that is not being made in America. Shit tons of talent.
Tons of it Chinese, by the way.

Speaker 5 Tons of Chinese engineers, as you all know, like it's a very common thing. There is no development that's being missed.

Speaker 5 What are we going to, oh no, we can't hand anthropic five billion dollars a year to destroy it for no real reason. There's no, it's not a cogent argument because

Speaker 5 look at what China seems to be doing about the same thing as America is with large language models, with way less. That just says more about large language models than anything.

Speaker 13 So there's a long history of saying that we should subsidize and protect large American firms to defend America against foreign firms.

Speaker 13 So for many, many years the argument against breaking up AT ⁇ T was that they were our national champion and that they were keeping us safe from foreign aggressors.

Speaker 13 In the mid-1950s AT ⁇ T was almost broken up. The DOD intervened to say that if we lost AT ⁇ T, if it wasn't intact, America might lose the Korean War.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 AT ⁇ T won the Korean War because they got another 30 years, right?

Speaker 13 The only people, arguably, who won the Korean War were AT ⁇ T, including both sides in the Korean War. So

Speaker 13 when the 80s rolled around, right, there was this law in the 70s and the 80s rolled around, and we were once again thinking about breaking up AT ⁇ T, there was this long argument about how there was this belligerent foreign power in the Pacific Rim, that they weren't original.

Speaker 13 They stole our IP and cloned our technology and they would destroy our high-tech industries if we did not have a giant company to defend us against them. That country was Japan.

Speaker 13 Now, it turns out that the major project of ATT was not

Speaker 13 defending America from Japan. It was preventing Americans from getting modems.

Speaker 13 Because AT ⁇ T really did not want you and anyone else in America to be able to provide a service to one another without them being able to veto it or charge rent on it.

Speaker 13 If you think about like the rollout of caller ID, $6.99 per month when it rolled out, right? This was what it cost you to find out who was calling you before you picked up the phone.

Speaker 13 You can't do that once people have modems. There is no caller ID for email.

Speaker 13 If your email provider says, until you click the message in the list pane, you don't get to find out who the from address is, you would just change email providers.

Speaker 13 So by controlling the network, by centralizing the network, they were able to just basically like kneel on the throat of the American tech industry.

Speaker 13 And so it is always the case that when we defend monopolists in order to prevent foreign firms from destroying our high-tech sectors, what we are actually doing is we are defending the firms that are structuring and controlling the market domestically for our own innovation.

Speaker 13 So these very large firms that are doing AI now, AI is only like one of the things they do.

Speaker 13 Obviously we have Anthropic and OpenAI, but Microsoft, Google, Apple, Oracle, these are firms that are effectively market structurers.

Speaker 13 They get to decide what products exist and what products don't exist, how much they're going to cost, and who can see them and who can use them.

Speaker 13 And when we defend them in the name of preventing China from pulling ahead in AI, what we're effectively doing is we're saying that we should maintain this shadow FTC that has more power than the FTC ever managed to exercise, but that never exercises it in the interest of the American public, but only in the interests of their shareholders.

Speaker 5 Thank you.

Speaker 12 All right, we have about five minutes left, and I run a tight ship, so this is the last question.

Speaker 12 So the question is, I have a high school senior who is technically minded. Ten years ago, I would have told her to get a CS degree and go into tech.
What should you tell someone to study now?

Speaker 5 Finance.

Speaker 13 It's interesting.

Speaker 5 I want to tell you a little story. So I taught myself economics in this past year and a half.
I'm a fucking idiot. I just want to be really clear.
I don't consider myself particularly smart.

Speaker 5 However, you feel is up to you. Point is,

Speaker 5 the world right now, the media, tons of analysts, tons of tech founders, don't know shit from fuck. Those are technical terms.
In all seriousness, finance is not as difficult or complex as it sounds.

Speaker 5 And indeed, the world runs on money.

Speaker 5 But also, these corporate structures are run fairly simply, but they dress them up in these confusing and annoying terms that actually, when you break them down, are pretty simple.

Speaker 5 There are people to blame. They've got houses.
They're very flammable.

Speaker 5 But in all seriousness, these people,

Speaker 5 they're empowered through ignorance. They're not powered through ability, intelligence, or even making good products.

Speaker 5 They're powerful because we have, and I'm not trying to sound paranoid, this is just the truth, media that in many cases does not understand the things they're writing about, or indeed have the capability of reading an earnings statement.

Speaker 5 This stuff seems very scary. You may say, I'm not a numbers person.
I couldn't possibly... You are a numbers person.
It's not that, it really isn't.

Speaker 5 If I can do it, I failed mathematics years and years in a row. It really is fairly straightforward.
They literally format things to make them boring. They word them to make them seem confusing.

Speaker 5 You can pick apart corporate structure. Any one of you can do it.
That is where anyone can have an effect. I think a high schooler could do it.
You want to change the world, you pull away their power.

Speaker 5 You take away their ability to obfuscate their wealth and the way they accumulate power by learning how these things work. I've written a lot about it.

Speaker 5 I had to, everything you read, it's so long because I'm learning as I go. It's 10,000 words because I'm teaching them.
Like, what the fuck is this?

Speaker 5 Anyone can do this. You want to teach a young person anything?

Speaker 5 Honestly, teach them who the fuck Milton Friedman was. Teach them how the world got the way it got, but also...

Speaker 5 Learn about how companies are structured. It is not that complex.
And the reason that you get knocked off course is because the powerful people go, no,

Speaker 5 it's not that simple. It's actually very mystical.
Sam Altman is not just a con artist. He's not just a guy that's really good at convincing rich people to give him money.
He has secret brilliance.

Speaker 5 No, he doesn't.

Speaker 5 None of these people do. They're McKinsey eggplants.
These fucking people. Long story short, learn finance, seriously, and you don't have to go to school.

Speaker 13 It's good advice. You know, there's this idea from the finance sector, this acronym Migo, my eyes glaze over.

Speaker 13 It's when you lard so much complexity in a prospectus that no one can get through it, and they assume that a pile of shit that big has to have a pony underneath it.

Speaker 13 I have different advice though. So my daughter started college this year and she wasn't sure what to do.
We had a lot of talks about what to do.

Speaker 13 She didn't take my advice but I'll tell you what I told her, which is that if you don't know what you want to do at university, don't go to university, go to college and become an electrician.

Speaker 5 Absolutely.

Speaker 13 There is so much work for electricians and we are going to be solarizing for the next 40 years. There's going to be infinity work for electricians.

Speaker 13 It's like being a plumber, but you don't have to touch poo.

Speaker 13 You can be an electrician who just does emergency call-outs when money's getting low and you charge 500 bucks an hour. You can be an electrician on a cruise ship.
You can be a theater kid.

Speaker 13 You can be an electrician on a job site. You can be an electrician for the government.
You can be an electrician on a battleship.

Speaker 13 You can go abroad and be an electrician because electricity is the same, right?

Speaker 13 There's so, and it's and it's interesting work. And you get paid on the job, right? You get paid for your apprenticeship

Speaker 13 and you can be in a union

Speaker 13 and if you decide later you want to learn more and you like it, you can become an E-ENG and if you don't you can put yourself through college by being an electrician and learn finance.

Speaker 5 And one other thing.

Speaker 5 Seriously?

Speaker 5 I've talked to basically every power analyst that's at this point or read their work and I will say there's always space for someone who knows electricity and 100%. You will make so much.

Speaker 5 I'm not kidding. There are people who pay you $1,500 an hour.
Yeah. So it's crazy.
Or HVAC.

Speaker 13 HVAC electricity.

Speaker 5 Oh, hell yes.

Speaker 5 That is a killer combo. No, really.
You will make so much money. I'm not even kidding.
And it's so, like, the electricity stuff, that's hard. I couldn't do that.
The numbers, easy peasy.

Speaker 5 Like, just go and, yeah.

Speaker 13 Yeah, if you get your numbers wrong, you don't electrocute yourself.

Speaker 13 No one ever fell off a roof doing math.

Speaker 12 It's true. Well, Ed, Corey.

Speaker 5 We have time for one more question. We have time for one more question.

Speaker 5 Okay, thanks for sneaking that in there.

Speaker 12 We were at time.

Speaker 13 Okay.

Speaker 5 Oh no, now you're making me panic. Okay.

Speaker 12 Oh no, I got a line in.

Speaker 12 It shouldn'tification at work.

Speaker 5 Anyone use a computer? No?

Speaker 5 We're going, we're going.

Speaker 5 Hang on, hang on.

Speaker 5 I texted Sam Altman the other day, and he didn't take back to me.

Speaker 5 Just Just a fact to share with the audience. Dario Amadez PR, Anthropics PR.

Speaker 12 This is a short answer.

Speaker 5 Cool.

Speaker 12 Lightning round, which is, if you had to guess, what is the timeline we are looking at for the AI bubble to pop? Make your bets, people.

Speaker 5 No later than Q2 2026. Ooh.

Speaker 13 So I...

Speaker 13 I'm a firm believer that the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. So I'm not going to try and guess, but I think it's coming.

Speaker 13 And I also think the number, so to your point, Ed, I would say that the number of foundation models that will be around after the crash

Speaker 13 very likely could be zero. I'm not saying that it must be zero, but I think it very likely could be zero.

Speaker 5 And the open ones will be around.

Speaker 13 Yeah, the open models, you can't kill an open source model if people like it and contribute to it.

Speaker 5 Like a French murderer, they'll kill Claude.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 12 All right. So we have immediately and later than you can stay solvent, so don't try to guess.

Speaker 13 Yeah, save your stocks. Don't try and short that market.
Buy poles.

Speaker 13 Practice digging for canned goods and rubble.

Speaker 5 Use that time effect. But I'm an electrician.

Speaker 13 I had both my hips replaced and my cataracts done just in case civilization was about to fail. I saved one of my femurs.
I had a cane topper made, cast in brass.

Speaker 13 I had it scanned at 3D. If you go to interarchive.org/slash doctor-femur, you can get a 1200 DPI STL file.
You can print my disease femur. I wanted to make soup stock, but my wife said no.

Speaker 12 And on that note, everything's going to be fine.

Speaker 5 It's going to be fine. It'll be all right.
Have a wonderful night, everybody. Thank you.

Speaker 5 Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattasowski.
You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattasowski.com.

Speaker 5 M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I dot com.

Speaker 5 You can email me at easy at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter.

Speaker 5 I also really recommend you go to chat.where'syoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit.

Speaker 5 Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 12 Better Offline is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 12 For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 15 This podcast is brought to you by FedEx, the new power move.

Speaker 8 Hey, you know those people in your office who are always pulling old school corporate power moves?

Speaker 15 Like the guy who weaponizes eye contact. He's confident, he's engaged, he's often creepy.

Speaker 8 It's an old school power move.

Speaker 15 But this Alpha Dog laser gaze won't keep your supply chain moving across borders.

Speaker 8 The real power move?

Speaker 15 Having a smart platform that keeps up with the changing trade landscape.

Speaker 15 That's why smart businesses partner with FedEx and use the power of digital intelligence to navigate around supply chain issues before they happen.

Speaker 15 Set your sights on something that will actually improve your business.

Speaker 8 FedEx, the new power move.

Speaker 16 It's the gaming event of the year featuring T-Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentleman's Gaming.

Speaker 16 It's a 4v4 matchup featuring Call of Duty, Tetris, Track Mania, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 Plus 4, and Tekken 8. Season Zero of the Global Gaming League is live streaming on YouTube and Twitch.

Speaker 16 Head over to globalgamingleague.com.

Speaker 10 Com, com.

Speaker 6 Oral health goes beyond just aesthetics. It's deeply connected to your general health and well-being.
That's why preventing oral health problems before they start is so important.

Speaker 6 When you use the Colgate Total Active Prevention System, you're not just helping to prevent oral health problems like cavities and gingivitis. You're laying the groundwork for overall wellness.

Speaker 6 Colgate Total's three-product routine includes a reformulated toothpaste, an innovative toothbrush, and a refreshing antibacterial mouthwash that all support a healthy mouth.

Speaker 6 In fact, the three products were designed to work together to be 15 times more effective at reducing bacteria buildup in six weeks, starting from week one, compared to a non-antibacterial fluoride toothpaste and flat trim toothbrush.

Speaker 6 Take control of your oral health and get the Colgate Total active prevention system today so you can be dentist ready. Visit shop.colgate.com/slash total.

Speaker 5 Ah,

Speaker 3 greetings from my bath, festive friends.

Speaker 2 The holidays are overwhelming, but I'm tackling this season with PayPal and making the most of my money, getting 5% cash back when I pay in four.

Speaker 7 No fees, no interest.

Speaker 5 I used it to get this portable spa with jets.

Speaker 13 Now the bubbles can cling to my sculpted but pruny body. Make the most of your money this holiday with PayPal.

Speaker 5 Save the offer in the app.

Speaker 17 N1231, see PayPal.com/slash promo terms. points, give your redeeming for cash and more paying for subject to terms and approval.
PayPal Inc. at NMLS 910-457.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart Podcast.