Ed Zitron has written a very lucid and sobering post of what he calls 'the business idiot', mainly a mid-level manager who's adept at bullshit, not working, and flailing with artificial intelligence as one of their main weapons.

What follows are highlights I've made while listening to his three-part podcast series on the business idiot, released in June 2025.

The episodes are available to hear from here:

• Episode 1
• Episode 2
• Episode 3

All show notes are listed in Ed's Google Doc.

My highlights are in green.

Episode 1

Hello, will welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed Zitron, and welcome to the Business Idiot Trilogy. What that means will supercome obvious. So on May fifteenth, Bloomberg profile Microsoft CEO Sacha and Nedella, revealing that on some level, Sacha Nadella is kind of a fucking idiot. The article revealed that, assuming we believe him, and this wasn't a thinly veiled ad for Microsoft's AI, the Copilot consumes Nadello's life outside the office as well as at work. He likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them with his ears, he loads transcripts into the Copilot app on his phone so that he can chat with the voice assistant about the content of an episode in the car as he commutes to Redmond at the office, he relies on Copilot to deliver summaries of messages he receives in Outlook and teams and toggles among allegedly at least ten custom agents from Copilot Studio. Now the article does not say what they do, doesn't seem like they bother to ask, but he allegedly views them as his AI chiefs of staff, delegating meeting prep, research, and other tasks, again unnamed to the bots, and to quote such and Adella in this article, he says, I'm an email typist, and he jokes about this, noting that Copilot is thankfully very good at triaging his messages. None of these tasks are things that require you to use AI. You can read your messages on Outlook and teams without having them summarized, and I argue that a well written email is one that doesn't require a summary. Podcasts are not there to be chatted too or about with an AI. Preparing for meetings isn't something that requires AI, nor as research, unless, of course, you don't really give a shit about the actual content of what you're reading, of what you're saying, just that you are seeing the right thing and that you know the facts of some kind. To be clear, I'm deeply unconvinced that Nadella actually runs his life in this way. But if he does, Microsoft should fire him immediately. It's a mission of negligence, akin to a taxi driver admitting he swallows a couple of glugs of cram Royale before he starts a shift. In any case, this article is rambling. It's cloying, and it ignores Microsoft AI CEO most of our soule man's documented history of abusing his workers ten customer agents to do. What what do you mean by other toss? Why are these questions never asked? Is it because the reporters know they won't get an answer? Is it because the reporters are too polite to ours probe in questions, knowing that these anecdotes are likely entirely made up as a means to promote a flagging AI ecosystem that costs billions to construct, but that doesn't seem to do anything, and the reporter in question doesn't want to force Sature to build a bigger has off cuts a sorry, sorry, I'm in my new studio all I'm all fired up and this is a bloody long one.

But really, is it because we as a society do not want to look too closely at the powerful? Is it because we've handed our economy to men that get paid seventy nine million dollars a year to do a job they can't seem to describe, even that they would sooner offload to a bunch of unreliable AI models they actually do the very small amounts of things they have to do. Look, we live in an era of the symbolic executive, when being good at stuff matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where what's useful is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure, but rather the vibes pass between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work. Our economy is run by people that don't participate in it, and our tech companies are directed by people that don't experience the problems they alleged to solve for their customers. As the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value, something I went through in their Shareholder Supremacy series you can go back to if you want, in another extremely long series of episodes. They're bloody good though, and they're free now. This three part series examines the phenomenon of something I call the business idiot, looking at the root causes of the idiocy and our economy itself, how they're ruining our world, and how these idiots are enabled by an embarrassingly deferential media. It's too afraid to say that the emperor has his dick out, it's it's going to be long. I'll take you on tangents, and I'll probably say fuck more than I usually do, which I admit is a lot.

But business idiots are a problem. They deserve our scrutiny and are discussed. I, however, believe the problem of the business idiot runs a little deeper than just the economy. Whether things we see are merely a symptom of a bigger, more virulent and treatment resistant plague that's infected the minds of those currently twigging at the levels of power, and really the only levels that actually matter, the incentives behind everything we do have been broken by decades of neoliberal thinking, where the idea of a company an entity created to do a thing in exchange for money, has been drained of all meaning beyond the continued domination and extraction of everything around it, with their leaders now focusing heavily on short term gains and growth at all costs. You know, I've been over that a little bit, and I'll get back to it in the second, aren't I. In doing so, the definition of what a good business is has changed from one that makes good products at a fair price with a sustainable and loyal market to one that can display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter. This is the rot economy, which is my useful description of how tech companies have voluntarily degraded their core products in order to placate shareholders, transforming useful and sometimes beloved services into a hollow shell of their former selves as a means of expressing growth to the markets. When a social network hides things that you want to see because they want to juice their metrics, that's the rot economy.

But it's worth noting that this transformation isn't constrained to the tech industry, nor was it a phenomena that occurred when the tech industry into its current VC fuel publicly traded incarnation. We simply notice it more in tech because we use tech in our personal and professional lives, and thus it affects everyone in a way that's kind of impossible to ignore. In the shareholder Supremacy, I drew a line from the early twentieth century court ruling which opened that Ford must put shareholder value ahead of the interests of its employees, though it was a bita dicta, meaning it was just literally said by the judge, but a lot of people ever since have taken it literally. And then I went to a course former GES CEO Jack Welch to the current tech industry. But there's one figure I didn't really pay that much attention to, and I regrettably now have to do so.

Famed Chicago School economists and dweller of Hell, Milton Friedman once argued in his 1970 doctrine - no, literally, that's what it was called when it was published, of course in the New York Times, which is an incredible act of hubris when you think about it, that those who didn't focus on shareholder value were unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of free society these past decades. Acting with social responsibility, say, treating work as well. Doing anything other than focusing on shareholder value is tantamount to an executive taxing as shareholders buy and I quote, spending their money on their own personal beliefs, said Freedman. Freedman was a fundamentalist when it came to unrestricted, unfettered capitalism, and this zelatory surpassed any sense of basic human morality. If he had any for example, in his book Capitalism and Freedom, he argued that companies should be allowed to discriminate our racial grounds because the owner might suffer should they be required to hire an equally or better qualified black person. Bear in mind, this was written at the height of the Civil rights movement, just six years before the assassination of Martin Luther King, and when America was rapidly waking up to the evils of racism and segregation, a process I add that's ongoing, sadly not complete, and people still don't seem super happy with.

I'm not going to read the full quote because I've already got a lot of talking and not much time, and also there are some words that i really don't want to say, but you can see it in Falling in its original context on the newsletter version of this episode that I'll share in the episode notes and as a special tree I'll actually update them. Freedom was really grotesque. Though I'm not religious, but I really do hope that hell exists only for him and Margaret Thatcher and Robert Reagan actually quite a few people. Anyway. The broader point I'm trying to make is that neoliberalism is inherently selfish and it believes that the free market should reign supreme, bereft of government intervention, regulation, or interference, thinking that somehow these terms will enable freedom rather than the kind of market dominated, quasi authoritarian dictatorship thing where our entire lives are dominated by the whims of the affluent, and that there's no institution that could possibly push back against them. Of course, there's no example in current politics like that now. Friedman himself makes this kind of facile argument that economic freedom, which he says is synonymous with unfettered capitalism, is a necessary condition of unfettered political freedom. Obviously, that's bollocks, although it's an argument that's proven persuasive with a certain class of people that either intellectually or morally hollow or both, or run the New York Times op ed page.

Neoliberalism also represents a kind of modern day feudalism, dividing society based on whether somebody is a shareholder or not, with the former taking precedents and the latter seeming irrelevant the best or disposable at worse. It's curious that Friedman saw economic freedom, a state that is non interventionist in economic matters, as essential for political freedom. While also failing to see equality is the same. I realize all this is kind of clunky and big, but I want you to understand how these incentives have fundamentally changed everything, and why they're respond for the rot we see in our society and our workplaces, and our tech industry and a bunch of other shit. When your only incentive is shareholder value, and you raise shareholder value as a platonic ideal, everything else is secondary, including the customer you are selling something to. Friedman himself makes a moral case for discrimination because shareholder value, in his example, the store owner matters more than racial equality. At its most basic level. When you care only about shareholder value, the only job you have is to promote further exploitation and dominance, not to have happy customers, not to make your company a good place to work, not to make a good product, and not to make a difference or contribute anything to the world other than further growth. While this is, to anyone with a vapor of an intellectual or moral dimension, absolutely fucking stupid, It's an idea that's proven depressed, singly endemic among the managerial in part because it's entered the culture and because it is hammered again and again across in MBA classes and corporate training seminars. Is simpler terms, modern business theory trains executives not to be good at something or to make a company based on their particular skills, but to find a market opportunity and exploit it. The chief executive who makes over three hundred times more than their average worker is no longer a leadership position, but the kind of figurehead measured on their ability to continually grow the market capitalization of their company or the theoretical valuation before they flog it to a public company or they take it public themselves. It's a position inherently defined by its lack of labor, the amorphousness of its purpose, and the lack of any clear responsibility other than making sure the money goes up to them. While CEOs do get fired when things go badly, it's often after a prolonged period of decline and stagnancy and almost always comes with some kind of payoff. And when I say badly, I mean that growth is slow to the point that even firing masses of people doesn't seem to make things better. We have, as a society reframe all business leadership, which is increasingly broad, consisting of all management from the C suite down to the equivalent of Paul Blant mallcop a person that exists to make sure people are working without having any real accountability for the work themselves or to even understand the work itself. And I must apologize to mister Blant. He worked hard, he stopped some criminals in that movie. Really should respect his service. But when the leader of a company doesn't participate in or respect the production of the goods that enrich them, it creates a culture that enables similarly vacuous leaders on all levels. Management as a concept no longer means doing work, or even managing work so the output of that work is better. You know, management, No, it's become about establishing cultures of dominance and value extraction. A CEO isn't measured on happy customers or even how good the revenue is today, but how good revenue might be tomorrow and whether those customers are paying them more. A manager, much like a CEO, is no longer a position with any real responsibility. They're there to make sure that you're working, to know enough about your work they can sort tell you what to do but somehow the job of telling you what to do doesn't come with any actual work of their own, and instructions don't need to be useful or meaningful or impart any great wisdom. Now, if you're a manager hearing this, you're really not going to like these episodes. These episodes are really going to dig at your heart. Now. I've heard from a few managers when I've had a dalliance with this in the past, and usually fifty to fifty to fifty percent people saying like, Hey, I get it. I'm a manager too, and like, I think you're right about management. Great managers move stuff out the way. They get people the resources they need, They understand and respect the labor that they're working with, and they help them do their work. They make sure they're on tasks, they get the people, get business idiots out of their way. Then the other fifty percent get real but her. If you're butt hurt hearing this, go cry, but go cry outside. Nobody likes you. Decades of direct erosion of the very concept of leadership means that the people running companies have been selected not based on their actual efficacy, especially as the position became defined by a lack of actual production, but on whether they zamble what a manager or executive is meant to look like based on the work that somebody else did once. That's how somebody like David Zaslav, a lawyer by trade and arguably the worst CEO in the entertainment industry, managed to become the head of Warner Brothers. That he kissed up to Jack Welch of GE who he called a big brother that picked him up like a friend. Jack Welsh fired like over one hundred thousand people over his tenure. Real piece of fucking shit, talking to pieces as shit. It's how Carly Fiorina, an MBA by trade, went on to become the head of HP, and she drive the company into a ditch where it stopped innovating and largely missed the biggest opportunities of the early Internet era. The three CEOs that followed her at HP, Mark Hurd was ousted after fudging expense reports to send money to a love interest and still got tens of millions of dollars in severance. Léo Apotheker, who in The New York Times suggests may have been worse than Fiorina and Meg Whitman, famous for being both a terrible CEO HP and co founding the doomed video startup Quibi. Well, they all similarly came from a non take background and similarly did a shitty fucking job, in part because they didn't understand the company, or the products or the customers. Are really give a shit about anything other than getting paid. Hey, you know where Meg Whitman now is. She's on the board of fucking CoreWeave. I swear to god history is driving me insane.

Management has over the course of the past few decades eroded the very fabric of corporate America, and I'd argue it's done much the same to other multiple other Western economies too. I'd also argue that this kind of dumb management thinking also infected the highest echelons of politics across the world, and especially in the UK, my country of birth and where I lived until 2008, delivering the same kind of disastrous effects, but at a macro level, as they impacted not a single corporate entity, but the very institutions of the state. Now, the UK has never been an egalitarian society, is demonstrated by the fact that one [...] school produced 20 of our 55 prime ministers, and that 20% of the current MPs went to either Cambridge or Oxford University. And yet things have changed markedly in the past few decades. You can kind of use the Thatcher years as the epoch when that political culture shifted. I was born in the midst of the Thatcher government. My formative years were spent as British society tried to recover after her reforms, which is itself a comfortable euphemism for the reckless shedding of the state, and pushed towards an American style individualism. Thatcher, who fucking loved Friedman's thinking, once famously quipped that there was no such thing as a society. Jesus Chris [...]. She didn't understand how things work, but was nonetheless completely convinced that the power of the market to handle what was the functions of the state, from housing to energy to water And if you know how things going with Thames water, what do you think? The end result of this political and cultural shift was, in the long run pretty bad. The UK is the smallest houses in the OECD, the smallest housing stock of any developed country and some of the worst affordability. The privatization of the UK's water infrastructure meant that money that would previously go towards infrastructure upgrades was instead funneled to shareholders in the form of dividends. As a result, Britain is literally unable to process human waste and is actively dumping millions of liters of human sewerage into its waterways and coastline. When Britain privatized its energy companies, the new management sold or closed the vast majority of its gas storage infrastructure. As a result, when the Ukraine War sparked and natural gas prices surged, Britain had some of the smallest reserves of any country in Europe and was forced to buy gas at market prices which were several times higher than their pre-war levels, thus sending household and energy builds through the fucking roof. I'm no fan of Thatcher, and like Friedman, I hope she fucking burns and it hurts. The reason that brought her up was to stress the consequences of this kind of clueless managerial thinking on a macro level, where the impacts aren't just declining tech products or white collar layoffs, but rather the emergence of generational crisis of housing and energy in the environment. These crises were obvious consequences of decisions made by someone whose belief in the free market was almost absolute, and whose fundamentalist beliefs surpassed the actual, informed understanding of those working in energy, housing a water. As the legendary advertiser Stanley Pollet once said, bullshit baffles brains.

The sweeping changes we've seen both in our economy and our societies led them to an unprecedented gilded age of bullshit, where nothing matters and things things of actual substance only matter even less. We live in a symbolic economy where we apply for jobs, writing CVs and cover letters that will resemble a certain kind of higher with our resume read by someone who doesn't do or understand our job, but is somehow responsible for determining whether we're worthy of going up to the next step of the 87-point hiring process. All this so that we can get an interview with a manager or an executive who will decide whether they think we can do it.

We're managed by people whose job is implicitly not to do work, but to oversee it, which doesn't necessarily mean they understand. We are, as children and young adults encouraged to aspire to become a manager or an executive, or to own our own business, to have people that work for us, and the terms of our society are by default that management is not a role you work at so much as a position you hold a figurehead that passes the bug and makes far more of them than you ever will. This problem, I believe, is poison to the fabric of almost every part of modern business, elevating people that don't do work to oversee companies that make things that they don't understand, creating substrates of management that do not do anything but create further distance from doing actual work. While some of you might automatically think and email me again and again that I'm talking about Graeber's concept of bullshit jobs, and I've linked to it in the show notes, what I'm talking about is far, far, far bigger. The system as it stands selects people at all levels of management, specifically because they resemble this kind of specious worker verse dollar that runs seemingly every company. A person built to go from meeting to meeting with the vague consternation of someone who may or may not be busy that suggests [...] that they're hard at work and they're important, and that you should respect them. As a result, the higher you get up in an organization, the further you get from the customer the problem you're solving really any of the actual work, and the higher up you get, the more power you have to change the conditions of the business and the ways in which you actually make money. On some level, modern corporate power structures are a giant game of telephone where vibes beget further vibes, where managers only kind of sort of understand what's going on, and the more vague ones understanding is the more likely you are to lean toward what's good or easy or makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside. The system selects for people comfortable in these roles, creating all charts full of people that become harder and harder to justify other than they've been here a while and they're nice. Even if they're not, they do not do work on the product, and their answer as to why would be: what am I meant to do? Go down to the line and use a machine, or am I meant to call a customer and make a sale? And the answer is yes, you lazy, fucking piece of shit. You would do that once in a while, or at the very least go down and watch the well, listen to somebody else doing so, and do so regularly. Why are you? Why do you look down on the things that make you rich? You piece of shit.

But that's not what a manager does, right, Ashman isn't isn't work. It's about thinking really hard and telling people what to do. It's about making the cause. It's about managing people, and that can mean just about anything, but often means taking credit from some ort or passing blame to someone else. Because modern management has been stripped of all meaning other than continually reinforcing power structures for the next manager up. The system creates products for these people because these people are more often than not, the ones in power. They're your boss, your boss's boss, and their boss too. Big companies build products sold by specious executives or manager to other specious executives and managers, and thus the products themselves stop resembling things that solve problems so much as they resemble a solution. After all, the person buying it at least, that the scale of a public or large company isn't necessarily the fun or recipient or user of the product, so they too are trained and selected to make calls based on vibes.

I believe the scale of this problem is society wide, and it is at its core a destruction of what it means to be a leader and a valorization of a kind of selfish, isolation-ish thinking, turning labor into a faceless resource, which naturally leads to seeing customers in an equally faceless way. Their problems generalize, their pain points viewed as parts of a PowerPoint rather than anything that your company earnestly tries to solve or even really thinks about. And that assumes that said pain points are even considered to begin with, or not ignored in favor of fictitious and purely hypothetical pain points that sound better in presentations. People, be they the ones you're paying or paying you, become numbers. We've created and elevated an entirely new class of person, the nebulous manager, and told decades worth of children that that's what they should aspire to, and that the next step from doing a job is for us to tell other people to do a job, until we're one day able to tell those people how to do their job, with each rung on the corporate ladder, further distancing ourselves from anything that actually interacts with reality.

The real breaking point is fairly simple. The higher up you got a company, the further you are from problems or purpose. Everything's abstract, the people that work for you, the people you work for, and even the tasks that you do. We train people, from a young age, to generalize and distance oneselves from other people and actual tasks, to aspire to do managerial work because managers are well paid and know what's going on, even if they haven't actually known what was going on for years if they ever did so. This phenomena has led to a stigmatization of blue collar work and the subsequent evisceration of practical trade and technical education across most of the developed world in favor of universities. Society respects an MBA more than a plumber, even though the latter benefits society more. Though I can see that both roles involve on some level a lot of shit, with the plumber unblocking it and the MBA, meanwhile, finding new places to put in. I should also add I have nothing against universities in general. I'm just saying that our university system is out of work with the working world except in the specialist fields, and we have a problem there. We also have many other problems there.

But one example I'll talk about in the next episode is the push to return to the office. Have you noticed how all those calls have come from people who occupy managerial roles and not those who do actual jobs. Isn't that fucking weird? Because if you go back and look, and by the way, Kevin Roose of the Hard Fork podcast in The New York Times, in March 2020, had a story saying that working from home is not as good. March 2020, the fucking lockdown hadn't even begun yet. This man was so ahead of the terms of what the powerful wanted him to tell people. I actually kind of admire it. I wonder if I could do that. I could just every week just wake up and just go to Microsoft.com and be like, 'that's my work for the week, fellas pardon me, sorry'. I apologize to mister Roose. I would go to anthropic.com and I find out what they're doing.

Oh, Ed's such a petty bitch. But I digress. I believe that all of this stuff I'm talking about, this process has created, like I said, a symbolic society, one where people are elevated not by an ability to do something or knowledge they may have, but by the ability to make the right noises and honks and look the right way to get ahead. And yeah, usually a white guy, but increasingly getting all sorts of races of guys who get these roles.

The power structures of modern society are run by business idiots, people that have learned enough to impress the people above them and around them. Because the business idiots have been in power for decades, they bread out true meritocracy or achievement or value creation in favor of this symbolic growth and superficial intelligence because real work is hard, and there are so many of them in power that they've all found a way to work together that do fucking nothing. And I need you to understand how widespread this problem is, because it's why everything feels fucking wrong.

Episode 2

Hello there, I'm Ed Zitron and welcome to Better Offline and you're on the second part of the Business Idiot at Trilogy. And indeed that was a concept I introduced you to last episode. Think of the business idiot as a kind of con artist, except the con has become the standard way of doing business for an alarmingly large part of society. The business audiot is the manager that doesn't seem to do anything but keeps getting promoted, and the CEO of a public company that says boring, specious nonsense about artificial intelligence that the tenured professor that you wish would die, the administrator whose only job appears to be opening and closing the laptop, and the consultant that can come up with a million reasons to charge you more money, yet not one metric to judge their success by. Also the marketing executive that's worked exactly three years at every major cloud player but does not appear to have done it anything. And of course the investor that invests based on founders but really means guys that look and sound exactly like me. These people are present throughout the private and public sector and our governments too, and they paradoxically do nothing of substance, but somehow damage everything that they touch. This isn't to say our public and private sector is entirely useless, just that these people are poisoned so many parts of our power structure that avoiding them is entirely impossible. Our economy is oriented around them, made easier and more illogical for their benefit because their literal only goal in life has been to take and use power and help others who feel the same. The business is also an authoritarian and will do whatever they need to, including harming the institution that they work for or those closest to them, like their coworkers, of their community, as a means of avoiding true accountability or responsibility. Decades of neoliberalism has incentivized their rise because when you incentivize society to become management, to manage or run a company, rather than do something for a reason or purpose, you're incentivizing a kind of corporate narcissism, one that bleeds into whatever field the person goes into, be a public or private. Our society is in the thrall of dumb management and functions. As such, every government, the top quarter of every chart features little Neros, who, instead of battling the fire that's engulfing Rome, are sat in their palaces, strumming an off key version of Wonder Wall and the Lyre and grumbling about how the firefighters need to work harder and maybe we could replace them with an LLM or a smart sprinkler system. Every institution keeps its core constituents and labor forces at arm's length, and effectively, anything built at scale quickly becomes distance from both the customer and the laborer. This disconnection or alienation better put sits at the center of almost every problem I've ever talked about. Why would companies push generative AI in seemingly every part of their services even though their customers don't like it and it doesn't really work? It's simple: they neither know or care what the customer wants. They barely know how their businesses function, They barely know what their products do, and barely understand what their workers are doing, meaning that generative AI feels magical because it does an impression of somebody doing an impression of somebody doing a job, which is an accurate way of describing how most executives and middle managers operate. But let me get a little more specific. An IBM study based on conversations with two thousand global CEOs recently found that only 25% of AI initiatives have delivered their expected return on investment over the last few years, and were still 64% of the CEO's surveyed acknowledged that the risks of falling behind drove their investments in some technologies before they had clear understanding of the value they brought to the organization. 50% of respondents also found that the pace of recent investments has left their organizations with disconnected, piecemeal technology, almost as if they don't know what they're doing and they're just put in AI and stuff because it feels good or for no reason. Johnson and Johnson recently decided to shift from a broad generative AI experimentation to a focused approach on high value use cases. I quote from The Wall Street Journal: adding that only ten to fifteen percent of use cases were driving about eight percent of the value - Pareto principle MVP, baby - its last two CEOs, Alex Gorsky and Joaquin Duato, both have MBAs, with current CEO Duato's previous ten years at J&J being some sort of chairman or vice president, and the previous two CEOs were both pharmaceutical sales and marketing people. A fun fact about Alex Gorsky: during his first tenure at Johnson & Johnson, he led marketing of products that deliberately underplayed some drug side effects and paid off the largest nursing home pharmacy in America to sell more drugs to old people. Well a lovely man.

The term executive loosely refers to a person who moves around numbers and hopes for the best. The modern executive does not lead, they prod. Their managers are hall monitors for organizations run predominantly by people that by design are entirely removed from the business itself, even in roles like marketing and sales where CMOs and VPs bark orders without really participating in the process. We talk eagerly about how young people in entry level jobs should earn their stripes by doing grunt work, and that too, is the neoliberal poison in the veins of our society, because by definition, your very first experience of the workforce is working hard enough so that you don't have to work as hard, and you have to do the shit that nobody else wants to do and anyway. The same managerial types you bitch about the entitlement and unrealistic expectations of young people are the same ones that are also eviscerating the bottom rung of the career ladder, typically by offshoring many of these roles or consolidating them in responsibilities that they're increasingly burned out senior workers, or CAIs as a way to eliminate what they see as an optional cost center and not the future of their workforce. I should also be clear with that this is the big thing with AI and jobs right now, that people are afraid of these entry level positions that are going to get quote automated out. I made a point in the last monologue that I want to clear up as well. I don't think AI will not take any jobs. I think it's taken jobs already. Tons of freelancers, copy editors, aren't directors. People are really suffering. The point is these people, the business idiots. They want you to believe that AI is going to take every job next year, in three months, or very soon. It isn't clear how soon. They can't tell you they don't understand: they're fucking wrong. They need you to do this so that you start giving up. That you give up because you giving up gives them more power. If you believe they can replace you with AI that doesn't work or do your job, they will. They will do so. Now it may happen to you anyway. They may happen that they'll put an AI that can't do the shit that you do and replace you with properly contract labor. That's gonna happen, regardless of whether AI happens. Offshoring and contract to work have being eroding employment work for a long time at will. Employment in America is a big fucking problem. It always has been. The way that labor is treated here is fucking insane.

And a little comment as well for this episode. As I record this, the Vox Union is yet to get an agreement with Vox. In the event that Vox does not give the deal in the next week, you're probably gonna hear this one that's happening. I request that every single listener of Better Offline, I need you to actually boycott every single Vox property, which because the Verge has some great writers and also Neli Patel, and you should boycott everything that Fox is doing right now based on this anyway, which sucks because they just hired some really excellent reporter called Hayden Field. She's excellent. The writers are the ones who are the victims here. The power structure of Vox is not giving them a fair deal. Solidarity with Vox. Do not fucking click their websites unless that deal gets done. Anyway, moving on:

One of my favorite things that really fucking pissed me off was quite ac quitting it. It was something that they've berated people for in 2022. And is this gas the euphemism for doing the job as specified in your employment agreement. Because journalism is enthralled by the management class, and because the management class has so thoroughly rewritten the concept of what labor means, the people got called lazy for doing their jobs. And this is because **the middle manager brain doesn't see a worker as somebody hired and paid for a job, but as a kind of an asset that must provide a return. As a result, if another asset comes long that could potentially provide a bigger return, like an offshore worker or a theoretical AI agent, that medal manager won't hesitate to start getting hot and heavy with the idea of getting rid of this annoying person who keeps doing the thing that the manager needs them to, but won't magically read the manager's mind, and also keeps asking the manager all these annoying questions. Leave the manager and learn to get paid.

But really, though, our official intelligence is the ultimate panacea of the business idiot: a tool that gives an impression of productivity with far more production than the business city it themselves because they don't really do any work. The Information reported recently that ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott, the chief executive of a company with a market capitalization of over 200 billion dollars. By the way, despite the fact that like Salesforce, nobody really knows what they do, he chose to push AI across his entire organization, both in the product and in practice in the organization itself, based on the mental consideration I would usually associate with a raven finding a shiny object. The following is an actual quote from the article: 'When Chat-GPT debuted in November 2020, McDermott joined his executives around a boardroom table and they played with the chatbot together. From there, he made a quick decision', and this is a guy's voice, Bill's like, 'let me make it clear to everybody here. Everything you do AI, AI, AI, AI, AI!' recalled Tzitzon, the ServiceNow vice chair, to begin a customer meeting on AI. McDermot has asked his salespeople to do what amounts to their best impression of him: 'Hi, I'm Bill McDermott. Ooh, I'm a fucking idiot.' Anyway, present AI not as a matter of bots or databases, but in grand sounding terms like business transformation. During the push to grow AI, McDermott has insisted these manager's improve efficiency across their teams. He's laser focused on the sales team's participation rate. 'Let's assume you're a manager and you have twelve direct reports', he said. 'Now, let's assume out of those twelve, two people did good, which it was so good that the manager was 110% off plan. I don't think that's good. I tell the manager what did the other ten do?'

You'll notice that all of this is complete nonsense. What do you mean, 'efficiency'? See, what does that quote even mean? 110% percent off plan? What are you on about? Did you hit your head on something, Bill? Do you have a gas leak in ServiceNow? I fucking swear, these people make so much money, but when you hear them talk, they sound so stupid. They sound so very stupid. If you or I said stuff like that to someone, they check us for a concussion. But I'd wager that mister McDermot is concussion free. And then true example of a business idiot, a person with incredible power and wealth that makes decisions not based on knowing things or caring about his customers, but on the latest shiny object that makes him thing line go up.

No, that's really Bill McDermott's thing. Back in 2022 he said to Yahoo! Finance that 'the metaverse was real and that ServiceNow could help someone create an email in the metaverse' and have a futuristic 'storefront of some sort'. One might wonder how ServiceNow provided that, and the answer is it did not provide that at all. I cannot find a single product that it's offered that includes anything of the sort.

But like any of these CEOs, he doesn't really know stuff or do stuff. He just is, Descartes-arsed motherfucker. The corporate equivalent of a stain on a carpet that nobody really knows how it got there, but hasn't been removed, and it's kind of difficult to get out without ripping the whole fucking thing up. The modern executive, like I have said, is symbolic, and the media has due to a large amount of business idiots running these outlets and middle managers stuffed into the editorial class, being trained to never ask different questions such as, what the fuck are you talking about, Bill, or even the simple what does that mean? Or how would you do that? Or I'm not sure I understand? Would you mind explaining? Perhaps the last part is the symptom of the overall problem. Though so many layers of editorial and managerial power are filled full of people that don't know anything, and there's never anyone crueler about ignorance than somebody who's ignorant themselves. We're still, in many fields, journalism included, we're rarely rewarded for knowing things or being right, being right in the way that keeps the people with the keys from scraping them across our cars. We are, however, rewarded for saying the right thing at the right time, which more often than not means resembling our white male superiors, speaking like our peers, and delivering results in the way that makes them feel the happiest or the best about themselves.

A great example of our vibespace society was back in October 2021, where a Washington Post article written by two Harvard professors rallied against remote work by citing a Microsoft-funded anti-remote work study and quoting an 130-year-old economist called Alfred Marshall about how, and I quote, 'workers gather in dense clusters', ignoring the fact that Marshall was so racist that they've written academic papers about him, and also ignoring how excited he was about eugenics or the fact that he was writing about fucking factories.

Remote work terrifies the business idiot because it removes the performative layer that allowed them to stomp around and feel important, reducing their work to work, you know, stuff they've done. Office culture is inherently heteronormative, and white and black women are less likely to be promoted by their managers, and continuing the existence of the office is all about making sure the business idiot continues railing supreme. Removing the ability for the managerial hall monitors to look at you and try and work out what you're doing without ever really helping is a big part of being a manager. And if for a manager hearing this and saying you don't do this, I challenge you to talk to another person that doesn't confirm your biases.

The business idiot does reign supreme. Their existence holds up every public company almost and remote work was the first time they've willingly raised their heads and started honking angrily. Google demanded employees returned to the office in 2021, but let one executive work remotely from New Zealand because absolutely none of the decision making was done with people that actually do work. [...] The return to office push was almost entirely done in two ways, one executive's demanding people return to the office, two journalists asking executives if remote work was good or not, entirely ignoring the people that do the work and mostly not seeing if it was good, and mostly just asking whether it was bad and how bad it was, asking managers. This guy called Callum Borchers over the Wall Street Journal, and he has written some real scorches, Borcher scorches, if you call them, by which I mean, I've never seen someone so interested in publishing what bosses think in my fucking life. And I run a PR firm. That should tell you everything.

But The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and many many other outlets all fell for this crap because the business idiots have captured our media too, training even talented journalists to defer to power every term. When every power structure is stuff full of do nothing management types that have learned exactly as little as they need to get by, it's inevitable that journalism will cater to them specious, thoughtless reproductions of the powerful's ideas. Look at the coverage of AI or the metaverse or cryptocurrency or Clubhouse. Look how willingly reporters will willingly accept narratives not based on practical experience or what the technology can do, but what the powerful and the popular as suddenly interested in. Every single tech bubble has followed the same path, and that path was paved with flawed, deferential and specious journalism from small blogs to the biggest mast heads. Look at how reporters talk to executives, not just the way they ask things like Neal Patel's hundred plus word questions to send off as shy, or his interview with fucking Gary Vaynerchuk, the constant scam artist who has an FT thing. NELI, what the-- Pardon me? Pardon me.

Let me take this from the top. If you look at how reporters talk to executives, you should look not just at the way they ask things, but the things they accept them saying, and the willingness they have to just accept what they're told. Satya Nadella is the CEO of a company with a market capitalization of over three trillion dollars (that's Microsoft, by the way) and, according to an interview mentioned in the last episode, uses AI to summarize podcast episodes and digest emails and effectively do all the obvious parts of his daily working life. I have no idea how you, as a reporter, do not say, 'Satya, what the fuck you're outsourcing most of your life to generate AI, that's insane!', or even 'do you actually do that?' and then asking further questions, but that would get you in trouble. And the editorial class is the managerial class now, and it's spent decades mentoring young reporters and teaching them how not to ask questions, how not to push back, and to believe that a big, strong, powerful CEO would never mislead them. Kara Swisher's half-arsed interviews are considered daring and critical because journalism has at large lost its teeth, breeding reporters rewarded for knowing a little bit about a few things, and punishing those who ask too many questions or refuse to fall in line. The reason that they don't want you to ask these questions is that the business idiot isn't big on answers.

Editors that tell you to not push too hard at doing so because they know the executive one have an answer, or they themselves don't know fucking anything. It isn't just about the PR person that trained them, but the fact that these men more often than not do not have a glancing understanding of their underlying business or even the things they're saying. Yeah, in the same way that business idiots penetrated every other part of society, they eventually have found their way to journalism. While we can and should scream at the disconnected idiots that ran Vice [Magazine] into the ground, the problem is everywhere because the business idiots aren't just at the top, but infecting the power structures underlying every newsroom.

While there are some really great editors, there are plenty more that barely understand the articles they edit, the stories they commission, or that make reporters pull punches for fear of advertiser blow-back, or worse still, just worried they'll get attacked on social media. Fucking cowards. Go hide under your table, you fucking coward. That and mentorship is dead across effectively or parts of society, meaning that most reporters, as with many jobs, learned by watching each other, which means they all make sure to not ask the rough questions and not push back too hard against the party or market or company messaging until everybody else is doing it. And under these conditions business idiots thrive.

The business idiot's reign is one of speciousness and shortcuts, of acquisition, of dominance, and of theft. Mentoring people is something you do to pass on knowledge. It may make them grateful to you, but it ultimately in the mind of a business that it creates a competitor or arrival. Investing in talent or worker conditions, or even really work itself would require you to know what you're talking about or actually do work, which doesn't really make sense when you're talking to a work who should be doing it for you, and they're the ones that are meant to work, right, you're there to manage them. Yeah, they keep talking back, asking questions about the work you wanted to do. I ask you need to step in and help on something. And that's so annoy-- Eew, I'm a manager. I'm not here to-- non, sir, I'm a bloggeur here. I'm not here to do work. Just know the stuff, do the stuff. I have to go get lunch, and then I have to go back out because I have another lunch. Okay enough, Oh my god, you want another thing. Why haven't you done the thing? I didn't tell you yet.

Anyway, I believe that this is the predominant mindset across most of the powerful, to the point that everything in the world is constructed to reaffirm their beliefs rather than follow any kind of logical path. **Our stock market is inherently illogical, driven not by whether a company is good or is bad, but whether it can show growth even if said growth is horrifically unprofitable or ultimately unsustainable. I'd argue it's because the market has no idea how to make intelligent decisions, just complex ones that mean you don't really have to understand the business so much as you have to understand the associated vibes of the industry and the weird black magic of how hedge funds work. Friedman's influence and Reagan's policies have allowed our markets to be dominated by business idiocy, where a bad company can be a good stock because everybody, specifically other traders and the business press likes how it looks and smells, which allows the business idiots to continue making profit using illogical and partially rigged market making, with the business press helpfully pushing up their narratives.

This also keeps regular people from accumulating too much wealth. If regular people could set the tone for the markets as a company that makes something people like and people pay them for it, and they make more money than they spend, that may make things a little too even. It would make things too accessible. Why would you hire a hedge one where you could just follow a common sense? No, no, no, that's not how we run our markets here, sir. It doesn't matter that core Weave, a company that went from mining crypto to taking on multi billion dollar contracts to provide compute for OpenAI and other companies, quite literally does not have enough money for its capital expenditures and lost over 300 million dollars in the last quarter. But everyone still liked it because if it's year over year of growth, which was 420%. It doesn't matter that CoreWeave has an October loan payment that will crush the life out of the company either. These narratives are fed to the media knowing that the media will print them because thinking too hard about stock would mean the business idiot had to think also, and that is not why they're in this business.

The AI trade is the business-idiot Nirvana, a fascination for a managerial class that long since gave up any kind of meaningful contribution to the bottom line, as moving away from fundamental creation of value as a business naturally leads to the same kind of specious value that one finds from generative AI.

Not even saying there's no returns from generative AI or that LLMs don't do anything, or even than there's no possible commercial use case for them. They just don't do enough, almost by design, And we're watching companies desperately try and contort them into something, anything that might work, pretending so fucking hard they'll stake their entire futures on the idea screaming just fucking work? Will you? Agent Force doesn't make any money? It sucks, But goddamn is Marky Mark Bennioff gonna make you bear witness? Does it matter that Agent Force barely makes Salesforce any money? No, because Bennioff and Salesforce have got rich selling to fellow business idiots who then shove Salesforce into their organization without thinking about who would use it or how they'd use it other than in most general purposes, which they can barely explain anyway. Agent Force was and is a fundamentally boring and insane product, charging right now 2 dollars a conversation for a chat that to quote, the information provides customers with and I quote: 'incorrect answers, AI hallucinations while testing how the software handles customer service queries.'

I should also add I've heard rumblings that Salesforce will actually be changing to a different model now because the 2 dollars conversation one has really not been working for them. I just don't think the new one is going to work either.

But in generat of AI this hit is catnip to the business idio, because the business idiot really ideally never has to deal with work, workers, or customers. Generative AI doesn't do enough to actually help us be better at our jobs, but it gives a good enough impression of something useful so that it can convince someone really stupid that doesn't understand what you do that they don't need you, sometimes. A generative output is a kind of generic soulless version of a production, one that resembles exactly how a know nothing executive or manager would summarize your work.

OpenAI's deep research wows professional business idiot Ezra Klein [...] because he doesn't seem to realize that part of research is the research itself, not just the out as you learn about stuff. As you research a topic and you come to a conclusion, you search for things, and you don't just go 'I have enough research now'. You kind of like dig in and you learn things and you come to something called a conclusion. This is what you would know if you did work.

But back to AI. The concept of an agent you've sure heard about is the erotic dream of the managerial sect. It's a work that they can personally command to generate product that they say as their own, all without having to know or do anything other than the bare minimum of keeping up appearances, which is the entirety of the business that it's resume. I should also add the other term for this is slave, and it's something that everyone's fucking dancing around. And the reason the AGI people Kevin Ruson included, don't want to talk about what the actual consequences of conscious AI, which is fictional by the way, are is because what people are describing me with AGI is a form of slavery. If this thing is conscious, it means that we are enslaving a conscious being to do our bidding. That's called slavery. And we're not going to get AGI from these freaks. But I think the next person that interviews Dario Amadei or Sam Altman or Satya Nadella and they bring up agents, they should bring up AGI and say: what do you think of AGI? Get talking about it and then say so this conscious creation? They say yes, and you say this conscious creation that you own? Yes, so you own the conscious creation? Yes, I own the agent. Great, so you own slaves? And just see what they do, because that really is it. I feel like every AGI conversation really that this is what they don't want to talk about because they're describing how do we make a digital slave and they're afraid of that language because they know the shit storm that would come, which is why I think everyone needs to start calling it that it is slavery. That's what they're trying to do. They want a digital wife, or a digital work slaver, or a digital home slave. They love the idea of a robot that does things that go up and get them a soda. And I drink like eleven diet cokes a day. I can get up and do it myself. I'm not fucking stupid or lazy, but I think it's important. This is such a tangent as well. But I'm glad I said it put back to the thing.

As far as the business idiot career goes, though they've mostly built it on only knowing exactly enough to get by, and they don't dig into what large language models can actually do other than hammering away at Chat-GPT in saying we must put this in everything, Everything must have AI now. Yet the real problem is that for every business city it's selling a product, there are many more that will buy out. Which has worked in the past for software as a service or SaaS companies that grew fat and happy, honking giant annual contracts and continual upsells because CIOs and CTOs - that's chief information officer and chief technology officers - work for business-idiot CEOs that demand that they put AI in everything now, a nonsensical and desperate remit that's part of the growth last and part ignorance born of the fear that one gets when they're out of their depth and want to follow everyone else, and how they are honking. Look at every single institution installing some kind of Chat-GPT integration and look for the business idiom. Perhaps it's the Cal State University Chancellor Mildred Garcia who claimed that giving everybody a Chat-GPT subscription would elevate students' educational experiences across all fields of study in powers faculties teaching and research and help provide the highly educated workforce that will drive California's future AI driven economy, which is a nonsensical series of words to justify a 16.9-a-year, single-vendor, no-bid contract, or a product that is best known as either a shitty search engine or a way for college students to cheat.

By the way, Sam Altman is also the business idiot's antichrist. He takes advantage of a society with a powerful rarely know much other than what they want to control or dominate. Chat-GPT and other AI tools are for the most part sold based on what they might do in the future to people that will never really use them. An Altman has done well to manipulate, pest and terrify those empowered the idea that they might miss out on something. Does anyone know what what it is? No, they don't, because the powerful are business idiots, too willing to accept anything that somebody brings along that makes them feel good or bad in a way that they can make headlines with. In any case, Altman's whole Slopenheimer motif has worked wonders on the business idiots in the markets and global governments that fear what AI could do. Even if they can't really define artificial intelligence or what it could do or what it is, they're scared of it doing. The fear of China's rise in AI is one particularly based on sinophobia, but also based on the fact that China has their own business idiot's willing to shovel hundreds of millions of dollars into data centers which are, according to some stories, not being used over there. Is that good?

Generative AI has created a reckoning between the business idiot and the rest of the society. It's forced adoption and proliferation, providing a meager return for the massive investment of capital, and the revulsion it causes in many people, not just in the business idiot's excitement in replacing them, but how wrong the business idiot is. Well, there are people that dick around with Chat-GPT. Years since it launched, we still can't find a clean way to say what it does and why it matters, other than the fact that everybody agreed it did and a lot of people are putting a lot of money into things that look like it. The media, now piloted by business idiots, has found itself deplored, its reporters, unprepared, unwilling, and unsupported. The backbone torn out of most newsrooms for fear that they're being too critical and that doing so is somehow not being objected, despite the fact that what you choose to cover objectively is still subjective. Reporters are, still to this day, as these companies burn hundreds of billions of dollars to make an industry the size of the mobile free to play gaming industry, refuse to save things that bluntly, because the cost of inference is coming down and these companies have some of the smartest people in the world, they ignore the truth that sits in front of them that the combined annual recurring revenue of The Information's comprehensive database of every single generative AI company is less than ten billion dollars or four billion dollars if you remove Anthropic and OpenAI. You can add on top of that, by the way, the thirteen billion dollars that Microsoft makes, ten billion dollars of which is OpenAI's compute spend on Azure and there's an Information story behind that too. Yeah, it's so small, man, it's so small. The revenue is so small. I cannot get over how small it is.

But Chat-GPT's popularity is the ultimate business city, its success story. It's the fastest growing product in Silicon Valley history that didn't grow because it was super useful or good at anything, or able to do a specific thing, but because it could do a lot of vague things, and because the media is controlled by business idiots who decided it was the next big thing and started talking about it non-stop since November 2022, guaranteeing that everybody would try it, and even to this day, even if the company can't really explain what it is you're meant to use it for, everybody still acts super impressed. Much like the business city it themselves. Chat-GPT doesn't need to do anything specific. It just needs to make the right sounds at the right times to impress people that barely care what it does other than the fact it makes them feel forward looking, trail blazing and futuristic. Real people, regular people, not business idiots, not middle managers and just not executives, not coaches, not MBAs not CEOs, not Kevin Bruce, not Neeli Patel have seen this for what it was early and often, but real people are seldom the ones with the keys, and the media, even the people writing good stuff regularly fails to directly and clearly say what's going on. The media is scared of doing the wrong thing, of getting in trouble with someone for misquoting them or misreading what they said. And in a society where in depth knowledge is subordinate to knowing enough catchphrases, the fight often doesn't feel worth it. Even with an editor's blessing and frankly, I don't believe that most outlets give their writers any backing. Sam Altman humiliated a writer from The Verge last year. I didn't see fucking Neeli Patel say boo. Probably cause he wants him on the pod.

[...]

Episode 3

I'm Ed Zitron, and welcome to the conclusion of our three part episode of Better Offline and the phenomenon known as the business Idiot. In the first episode, we met our first business idiot. The real prince of them, Satya Nadella, and talked about the origin of the business idiot and the rotten ideology that drives them. Then we talked about the enablers of the business idiots, particularly those in the media. In this episode, I want to tell you about where all this goes.

Nothing I've said in this three part should suggest that the business idiot is weak. In fact, business idiots are in full control. We have too many managers, and our most powerful positions are valorized for not knowing stuff, for having a general view that we can take the big picture from, not realizing that the big picture is usually made up of lots of little brushstrokes. Business idiots have a cultural cachet. We aspire to be business idiots, and our education pushes people to careers where the goal is to climb from the worker class of the oxygen starved apex of business idiot mountain. Yet there are eventually consequences for everything being controlled by business idiots.

Our current society, an unfair, unjust one dominated by half broken tech products that make their owners billions and that manipulate and mislead by design, is the real punishment wrought by growth, a brain draining corporate society, one that leads it to doing illogical things and somehow making money doing so. It doesn't make any fucking sense that generative AI got this big. The returns aren't there, the outcomes aren't there, and any sensible society would have put a gun to Chat-GPT's head and aggressively pulled the trigger. Generative AI is symbolic of the future of capitalism, one that celebrates mediocrity and costs billions of dollars, one that surrenders every human work the model can consume, and that accepts the destruction of our planet, all because everybody kind of agreed that this is what we're all doing now, with nobody able to give a convincing explanation of what that even is or why we're doing it.

Generative AI is revolting, both in how overstated its abilities are and in how continually it tests how lower standards somebody will take for a product, both in its outputs and in the desperate companies trying to integrate it into everything, and its proliferation throughout society and organizations is already fundamentally harmful.

We're not just drowning in a sea of slop. We're in a constant state of corporate AI beta test. New features sprouting out of our products, like new limbs that sometimes function normally but often attempt to strangle us. You know what the stand in that episode of JoJo's Stop It.

It's unclear of companies forcing these products on us have contempt for us, or simply don't know what good looks like, or perhaps it's both, with the business idiot resenting us for not scarfing down whatever they serve us, as that's what's generally worked before. They don't really understand their customers. They understand what a customer pays for and how a purchase is made, you know, like the leaders of banks and asset managers during the subprime mortgage crisis didn't really think about whether people could pay those mortgages, just that they needed lot of them to put in a CDO.

The business idiot's economy is one run and built for other business idiots. They can only make things that sell to companies that must always be in flux, which is the preferred environment of the business idiot, because if they're not perpetually starting new initiatives and jumping on new innovations, they'd actually have to interact with the underlying production of the company and the people actually doing the work. Does the software work? Sometimes the successful companies exist that sell like this. Sure, but look at today's software and tell me with a straight face that things feel good to use. And something like generative AI was always inevitable. An industry claiming to change the world that never really does so, full of businesses that don't function as businesses, full of flim-flam half truths used to impress people who will likely never interact with it, or do so only in a passing way, by chasing out the people that actually build things in favor of the people that sell them.

Our economy is built on production puppetry. Just like generative AI and especially like Chat-GPT and Claude. These people are antithetical to what's good in the world, and their power deprives us of happiness, the ability to thrive and honestly, any true innovation. The business idiot thrives on alienation, on distancing itself from the customer and the thing that they consume, and in many ways, from society itself. Mark Zuckerberg wants us to have fake friends, and he said that to the Wall Street Journal. Sam Altman wants us to have fake colleagues in the form of the agency makes that don't fucking work and increase and an increasingly loud group of executives salivated the idea of replacing us with a fake version of us that will make a shittier version of what we make for a customer that said executive doesn't give a fuck about. And yeah, that is describing a form of slave, especially if it's conscious. I mean, if it's not conscious, it isn't. But the moment you make AGI, you've got a real fucking problem on your hands. They're never going to do it. Also, what if the AGI is just dumb? What if it doesn't want to work anyway? The business idiots are building products for other people that don't interact with the real world. We're no longer the real customers and so we're worth even less than before, which is as is the case in the world dominated by shareholder supremacy, not all that much to begin with. They don't exist to make us better. The business idiot doesn't really care about the real world or what you do do, or who you are, or anything other than your contribution to their power and wealth. This is why so many squealing little middle managers look up to the Musks and Altmans of the world, because they see in them the same kind of specious corporate authoritarian, somebody who's above work and thinking and knowledge and doing stuff. Disgusting.

But one of the most remarkable things about the business idiot is their near in vulnerability. Modern management is resource control, shifting blame away from the manager, who should hold responsibility - after all, if you don't, why do you have a fucking job? - onto the laborer, knowing that the organization and the media will back them up. Or you may think I'm making a generalization, the 2021-2023 anti-remote work push in the media was grotesque proof of where the media's true allegiance lies. The media happily manufactured consent for return to office mandates from large companies by framing remote workers [as] some sort of destructive force doing all they can to discuss how modern management has no fucking idea how the workplace actually works now. These articles were effectively written as fan fiction for managers and bosses demanding that we return to the office, ridiculous statements about how remote work failed young people, which it didn't, or how employees needed remote work more than their employers because the chit chat and lunches and happy hours are so important that they're really not. I'm also going to link to these in the notes.

I've written a lot about the remote-work push and the people who were pushing for us to return the office. It's actually where I got started, and it really was the ultimate joke-fication for me. It's what actually set me on the path Better Offline, because it's when you saw both how little the bosses knew what was going on and how willing people in the media were to support them. And these were people people writing these stories were journalists that were going to be forced back to the office and ended up being so, and they were like, yeah, this is actually it's actually good that we go into the office. And when you ask the journalists, hey, what do you get to the office, they say 'well, one time I ran into someone and we had a good idea', or 'it was quicker to walk over to someone's desk.' Does that mean the work was better? No, but the vibes felt better, I guess. I also know way more people who just fucking hated working in the office. But these articles rarely, if ever, cared about whether remote work was more productive or the disconnect appeared to be between managers and workers. Now, had any of those reporters every spoken to an actual worker, they'd say that they valued more time with their families rather than the grind of a daily commute, so often with the promise of an occasional company pizza party, which usually happens outside of the typical working hours, anyway.

These articles and this period, it was from the very beginning about crushing the life out of a movement that gave workers more flexibility and mobility while suppressing managers' ability to hide how little work they actually did. I do give credit to CNBC in 2023 for saying the quiet part out loud, that, and I quote: 'the biggest disadvantage of remote work [...] is how difficult it is to observe and monitor employees, because when you can't do that, you have to hear, actually know what they're doing and understand their work.' Jesus Christ. Now I'm with the managers, how disgusting.

But yet higher up the chain the invulnerability continues. CEOs may get fired, I mentioned it before, and more getting fired than ever. It turns out, although sadly not the ones we want. They always receive a golden parachute at the end before walking into another role at another organization doing exactly the same level of nothing. Yet before that happens, CEO is allowed to pull basically every lever before they make they face any kind of accountability. They can lay people off, they can freeze pay, they can move from people from salary to contracted workers. They can close down sites, they can offshore, they can cut certain products. They can even spend more fucking money so they lose less. If you or I misallocated billions of dollars on stupid ideas, we'd be fired and we'd have real trouble finding more employment. We would be well known for our incompetence, and indeed we would be in real trouble and there would be real problems finding more work. If we were a big stupid piece of shit. When CEOs do that, they get board placements, they get other positions. They can run companies dead into the ground.

Let me give you an example. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, and I quote, that 'the ultimate computer is the mixed reality world, and that Microsoft would be inventing new computers and new computing' in 2016, pushing his senior executives to tell reporters that HoloLens was Microsoft's next wave of computing in 2017, selling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of headsets to the military in 2019 then debuting HoloLens 2 at Build 2019, only for the onstage demo to break in real time, calling for a referendum on capitalism in 2020, then saying he couldn't overstate the breakthrough of the metaverse in 2021.

Now let's hear what Nadella had to say about it, and massive prompts the Preston Growler of Computer World for writing this piece: 'Nadella in that 2021 keynote made big promises. When we talk about the metaverse, we're describing both a new platform and a new application type, similar to how we talked about the web and websites in the early nineties. In a sense, the metaverse enables us to embed computing into the real world and to embed the real world into computing.' Fucking what? 'bringing real presence to any digital space. For years we've talked about creating the digital representation of the world, but now we actually have the opportunity to go into that world and participate on it'.

I just want to be clear, at this time, Microsoft had nothing of the sort. They had like websites, They had Microsoft Teams. They tried to claim Microsoft Teams was a sort of metaverse: fucked up. As Growler notes, Nadella made big promises, beefing up development in projects such as its Mixed Reality tool Kit MRTK, the virtual reality workspace project all Space VR, which it brought back in 2017, It's HoloLens Virtual Realities headset, and its Industrial Metaverse unit, among others, before firing all members of its Industrial Metaverse core team, along with those behind MRTK, and shutting down it's all Space VR in 2023, before discontinuing HoloLens 2 entirely in 2024.

Guess that wasn't anything then, Just you know, it's like a friend of yours is in a really chaotic relationship and they just the next stage say it's not happening, or someone tells you they've had a big moment in their life and they just pretend it doesn't happen. Except, it was hundreds of millions of dollars and tons of media coverage where people said, this is what Microsoft's doing next, this is what happened. It's so insane that that happened. We really don't talk enough about how fucking insane. The metaverse thing was just like a year or so where everyone just played make believe, completely insane. I of course was right about it at the time, and it was very fucking clear, and there are a few people that were negative as well. There were also some people who claim they were negative who weren't. Their time will come.

Nadella was transparently copying Meta and Mark Zuckerberg's ridiculous metaverse play, and absolutely nothing happened to him as a result.

The media outlets like The Verge, and independents like Ben Thompson, happily boosted the Metaverse idea when it was announced, and conveniently forgot about it the second that Microsoft and Meta wanted to talk about AI. Not really: both The Verge and Ben Thompson were ready in waiting to do literally the same interview, but about a different subject, no consideration of what was previously said at all.

A true business idiot never admits wrongdoing, and the more powerful the business idiot is, the more likely there are power structures that exist to avoid them having to do so. The media, captured by other business idiots, has become powerfully poisoned by power, referring to its whims and ideals and treating CEOs with more respect, dignity, and intelligence than anyone who ever worked for them.

When a big company decides they want to do artificial intelligence, the media's natural reaction is to ask how and why and write down the answer, rather than to think about whether it's possible whether the company might profit, say by increasing their shareholder price by having whatever they say printed out verbatim.

These people aren't challenged by the media or their employees because their employees are vulnerable all the time and often are encouraged to buy into whatever bullshit du jour there is, like hostage is held captive until the media and corporate culture give them Stockholm syndrome. They're only challenged by shareholders rule agnostic about idiocy because it's not core to value in any meaningful sense, as we've seen with crypto, the metaverse, and AI, and shareholders will tolerate infinite levels of idiocy if it boosts the value of their holdings.

It goes further too. 2021 saw the largest amount of venture capital invested in the last decade, a record breaking 643 billion dollars, with a remarkable 329.5 billion dollars of that invested in the US alone. Some of the biggest deals include Amazon reseller aggregater Thrasio, which raised a billion dollars in October 2021 and filed for bankruptcy in February 2025. Cloud security company Lacework, which raised 525 million dollars in January 2021 then 1.3 billion dollars in October 2021, and was rumored to be up for sale to Whiz, only for the deal to collapse and then they ended up selling for about 200 million dollars to another company. And then, of course there was autonomous car company Cruise, which had hundreds of headlines about being the future, raised about 2.75 billion dollars in 2021 and was killed off in December 2024.

The people who lose their livelihoods those who took stock in low of cash compensation, those who end up getting laid off at the end are always work, while people like Lacework CEO Jay Parikh, who oversaw reckless spending and management dysfunction according to The Information, can walk into highly paid positions at companies like Microsoft, as Jay did in October 2024, a few months after a file sale, and the one I mentioned before, the 200 million dollar one [...].

It doesn't matter if these people are wrong or if they run their companies badly, because the business idiot is infallible and judged too by fellow disconnected business idiots. In a just society, nobody would ever want to touch any of the C suite that oversaw a company that handed out Nintendo switches to literally anyone who booked a meeting, as was the case with Lacework. Instead, the stank remains on the employees alone.

One point about this, just an aside. Meta's most recent layoffs were explicitly said to target low performers, needlessly harming the future job prospects of those handed the pink slip in an already fucked tech job market. It was cruel and pointless, and I'm certain of big fat Meta is spending big on AI and has spent big on the metaverse, which went nowhere and owns two dying platforms Instagram and Facebook, and one that's hard to monetize in WhatsApp. It needs to get costs down and improve margins. Layoffs are one way to go, and things are getting bad enough to matter [...] now, according to the information walking around Silicon Valley, begging other big tech companies for money to train their open source Llama LLM.

As shit as that is, the low performance jibe is an unnecessary twist of the knife, demonstrating that Meta would gladly throw its workers under the bus if it serves their interests, because the optics of firing low performers is different to say, firing a bunch of people because they keep spunking money on dead-end vanity projects and products that nobody wants or wants to use or can understand.

Mark Zuckerberg, I add, owns an island on Hawaii. The idea that he even thinks this much about meta is disgraceful. Go outside, you fucking freak! Anyway, It's so easy, and perhaps inevitable, to feel a sense of nihilism about this. Nothing matters, It's all symbolic. Our world is filled with companies run by people who don't interact with the business and that raise money from venture capitalists that neither run businesses nor really have any experience doing so. And despite the fact that these people exist several extractions from reality, the things that they do and the decisions they make impact us all, and it's hard to imagine how to fix it. I don't want you to live without hope. Understanding how evil these people are is the first step to things changing, and more people understanding is genuinely important.

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

There is a line, and it ends here with layoffs, the destruction of our planet and our economy and our society, and a rising tide of human misery that nobody really knows where it comes from, and so we don't know who to blame and for what. If our economy actually works as a true meritocracy where we didn't have companies run by people who don't use their products or understand how they're made, and who hire similarly specious people, these people would collapse under the pressure of having to know their ass from their ear hole. Yet none of this would be possible without their enabling layers, and those layers are teeming with both business idiots and those unfortunate enough to have learned from them. The tech media has enabled every single bubble without exception, accepting every single narrative fed to them by VCs and startups, with even critical reporters still accepting the lunacy of companies like OpenAI just because everyone else does too, and because the standard has been set of if a company raises money, they're real.

Let's be honest: when you remove all the money, our current tech industry is kind of a disgrace. Our economy is held up by Nvidia, a company that makes most of its money selling GPUs to other companies, primarily so that they can start losing money [by] selling software that might eventually make them money, just not today, and they're not sure how.

Nvidia is defined by massive peaks and valleys as it jumps on trends and bandwagons at the right time, despite knowing that these bandwagons always come to some sort of halt. The other companies feature Tesla, a meme stock car company with a deteriorating brand and a chief executive famous for his divorces from both reality and multiple women, along with a flagrant racism that may cost the company its life, a company that we're watching die in real time with a stagnant line-up and an actual fucking competition from companies that are spending on innovation.

In Europe and elsewhere, BYD is eating Tesla's lunch, offering better products for half the price and with far less racism. And this is just the first big Chinese automotive brand to go global. Others like Cherry are enjoying rapid growth outside of China because these cars are actually good and affordable and even when you factor in the things like tariffs.

Hey, remember when Tesla fired all those people and it's charging network despite the fact that it's one of the most profitable and valuable parts of the business, and they then went and had to hire them back because it turns out they actually needed them? This is a good example of managerial alienation decisions made by non-workers, Elon Musk who don't understand their customers, their businesses, or the work their employees do. And let's not forget about the cyber truck and monstrosity, both in how it looks and how it's sold. It's illegal to drive in the majority of developed countries because it's a death trap for drivers and pedestrians alike. Oh and nobody actually wants it, with Tesla sitting on a quarters worth of inventory they can't sell.

Elsewhere is Meta, a collapsing social network of 99% of its revenue based on an advertising model to an increasingly aged population, and a monopoly so flagrantly abusive in its contempt for its customers that at times it's difficult to call Instagram or Facebook a social network. Mark Zuckerberg had to admit to the Senate Judiciary Committee that people don't use Facebook as a social network anymore. The reason why is because the platform is so fucking rotten, run by a company alienated from its user base. It's a decrepit product, actively hostile to anybody trying to use it. And more fundamentally, what's the point of posting on Facebook if your friends won't see it, because Meta's algorithm decided it wouldn't drive engagement? Meta is a monument to disconnection, a company that runs encounter to its own mission to connect people, run by Mark Zuckerberg, a man who hasn't had a good idea since he stole it from the Winklevoss brothers. The solution to all that ails him? Adding generative AI to every part of Meta, which...shit. It was meant to do something other than burn 72 billion dollars in capital expenditures in 2020, right?

It isn't clear what was meant to happen, but the Wall Street Journal's Jeff Horwitz reports that Meta's AI chatbots are, and I quote, 'empowered to engage in romantic roleplay that can turn explicit, even with children.' In a civil society, Zuckerberg would be ousted immediately for creating a pedophile chatbot. Instead, four days after the story ran, everyone cheered their better-than-expected earnings report.

In Redmond. Microsoft sits atop multiple monopolies, using tariffs [to explain] flailing Xbox revenue, as it invests billions of dollars into OpenAI, so that OpenAI can spend billions of dollars on cloud compute, losing billions of dollars in the process, requiring Microsoft to invest further money to keep them alive, all because Microsoft wanted generative AI Bing. What a fucking waste. And they're also raising the costs of their Office suite too, while which is only something they've been able to hold on to because of an underhanded bullshit fest from their antitrust trial from the nineties.

Amazon lumbers listlessly through life, its giant labor-abusing machine shipping things overnight at whatever cost is necessary to crush the life out of any other possible source of commerce. Its cloud services and storage arm, unsure of who to copy next, dumping billions into Anthropic as a means of creating revenue for their dead end products. Is it Microsoft? Is it Google? Who knows? Who knows what Amazon is anymore?

But one analyst believes it's making five whole billion dollars in revenue from AI in 2025. And you know how much they've put in capital expenditures this year, 105 billion dollars in capital expenditures. There are slot machines with better ROI than this bullshit. Again, Amazon is a company that's totally exploitive its customers, no longer acting as a platform that helps people find the shit they need, but directing them to products that pay the most for prime advertising real estate, no matter whether they're good or safe. Let's be clear, Amazon's recklessness will kill someone if it hasn't already. The products they allow on their are not safe. They do not give a fucking shit.

But then there's the worst of them, Google, most famous for its namesake, a search engine that has been juiced as hard as possible and will continue to be juiced before the inevitable anti-trust sentencing that will rob Google of its power, along with the severance of its advertising monopoly along with them. But don't worry. Google has a generative AI think for some reason, and no, you don't have a choice about using it, because they've now replaced Google Assistant with Google Gemini and Google Search all but requires you to use their AI. They burn money for no reason. It sucks, and at no point do any of these companies seem to be focused on making our lives better or selling us any kind of real future.

They exist to maintain the status quo where cloud computing allows them to retain their previous fiefdoms. They're alienated from people, they're alienated from workers, they're alienated from consumers, and they're alienated from the world. They're deeply antisocial, they're narcissistic, they're sociopathic, and they're misanthropic, as demonstrated by Zuck's moronic AI-social network comments, and AI is a symptom of a reckoning of the stupidity in hubris. They cut, they cut, they cut, the cut, they cut some more, and then they stagnated.

Their hope is a product that will be adopted by billions of imaginary customers and companies and will allow them to cut further without becoming just a P.O. box and a domain name. We have to recognize that what we're seeing right now with generative AI isn't a fluke or a bug, but a feature of a system that's rapacious and short, termed by its very nature and doesn't define value as we do. Because value gets defined by a faceless shareholder as growth, the system can only exist with the contribution of the business idiot. These are the vanguard, the foot soldiers of this system and a key reason why everything is so terrible all the time and why nothing seems to be getting better. Breaking from that status quo would require a level of bravery that they do not have and perhaps isn't possible in the current economic system.

These people are powerful and they have big platforms. They're people like Derek Thompson, famed co author of the Abundance Agenda, who celebrates the idea of a fictitious version of Chat-GPT that can entirely plan and execute a five-year-old's birthday party, or his co-author Ezra Klein, who, while recording a podcast where his researchers likely listened, talk proudly about replacing their work with OpenAI's broken deep research product because anything that can be outsourced must be and all researches is looking at stuff. It's relevant if you're a fucking idiot, and really that's the most grotesque part of the business idiom.

They see every part of our lives as a series of inputs and outputs. They boast about how many books they've read rather than content of said books or the way they made them feel, about how many hours they work, even though they never ever ever work that many. About how high level they are in a video game they don't actually play, about the money they've raised than the scale they've raised it at, and about how expensive and fancy their kitchen gadgets are, even if they use the wrong oils. Everything is dominance, acquisition, growth, and possession over any lived experience because their world is one where the journey does not matter, because their journeys are riddled with privilege and persecution of others in the pursuit of success. These people don't want to automate work; they want to automate existence.

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

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

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

You'll notice that these people never bring up actual examples of automating actual work, the mind-numbing grunt work that we all face in the workplace, because they either don't really know what that is or they don't really give a shit about what it is. They are the things that frustrate them, like dealing with other people, or existing outside of the gilded circles of socialite fucks and plutocrats, or just things that are inevitable facets of working life, like reading an email, your son's birthday part or a conflict with a friend can indeed be stressful, but these are not problems to be automated. These are the struggles that make us human, the things that make us grow, the things that make us who we are, which isn't a problem for anybody other than somebody who doesn't believe they need to change in any way. It's both powerful and powerless at the same time. A nihilistic way of seeing our lives as a collection of events we accept or dismissed like a system, prompt the desperate pursuit of such efficient living that you barely feel a thing until you die.

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

I am but one person. Everything you've read in my newsletter or articles I've written or heard on my podcast to this point has been something I've had to learn. Building an argument and turning it into words, often at the same time that other people read, doesn't really come naturally to anyone. It's something you have to work deliberately at. You might have talent, but you have to work towards them. It's imperfect. There are fuck ups. I sometimes mispronounced names and words, including my own name, which Metasowski has always been kind enough not to laugh at me about. About these podcasts and newsletters, they increase in length and breadth and have so many links, and I'll never change my process because part of said process is learning, relearning, processing, messaging Casey saying 'Casey, I don't understand this', arguing with Casey a little bit, coming up with another idea and a chord is by text. Matt Hughes, I talk with Robert Evans, I go back and forth with everyone. I get more pissed off. Then I write, and I really write, and I speak, and so on and so forth. This process makes what I do possible, and the idea of someone automating it discuss me not because I'm special or important, but because my work is not the result of me reading a bunch of links or writing a bunch of words. The script for this piece is not just about 13,000 words long. It's the result of more than a million words, probably more than that that I wrote before it, the hundreds of stories I've read in the past, the hours and hours of conversations with friends and editors, years of accumulating knowledge, and yes, growing with the work itself. I as a person have grown with this show thanks to the wonderful feedback I get from all of you, from the conversations we have on the Reddit or just the emails. I get the occasional one of you who finds myself on which is really quite scary, but not many of you do, and please don't look. The thing is, imperfections are what make us human. Imperfections are what make art so great. The fun things that happen in our life are never from a moment of perfection or from crystallizing something that is immaculate.

Perhaps the timing is perfect, perhaps we're in the right place at the right time, but nothing about us is perfect. And through those imperfections we grow and we thrive. Business idiots don't give a fuck about that. Sam Altman doesn't give a fuck about that. Satya Nadella doesn't give a fuck about that. They think they're fucking perfect. But true art and true joy and true solidarity is what's needed to dispatch with these people and to stop what they're doing. And really, the biggest thing that we can do early on the real starting block is anyone within the tech media listen to this: we need to change. We need to change how we cover these companies. We need to change that. Honestly, everything needs to be inverted. Trusting a company based on how much money it has and how big it is is the wrong way to go about this business. Business idiots have learned that, and they have moved their marketing strategies to create metrics that journalists accept and will print, and then they will sound good for people that don't know what they're talking about, because the journalists don't even bother to pull the metrics apart themselves.

And I understand why: everyone's doing what everyone else is doing. But we can change things, But you, as a listener, how can you change things? You're already doing it. Over the last year, I've seen a remarkable growth in just regular people being willing to push back against these narratives, in pushing back in their businesses. Also, those of you with children can teach them not to aspire to be a fucking manager or an executive unless they know their fucking work. It is that simple. And I know it feels kind of bleak right now with everything going on in California, with everything going on with the government, with everything going on with OpenAI, with the amount of stories about how AI is going to take everything and take everything we have and recreate it in a shitty way. The fact that they're so desperate means that they're scared, and they're scared of the fact that you are willing to talk about this and you are willing to spit in their face. If you don't want to use AI, don't use AI. If you are curious about what it does, don't bother looking or fuck around with the free version of bit so that you only lose the money.

If these things would automate you, they'd be automating you already, if they were close to doing so, they would be previewing the world in which they do. So they're fucking scared.

Well, the era of the business idiot is happening right now. It could potentially be coming to an end because as this movement ends, and I said this in the rock com bubble a year ago, they don't have any more growth markets. This is the end for them. I'm not saying the end of the companies. They'll work something out, but they don't have double-digit growth in them past the next year. The revenues are small, and you, the listener, who've been sitting there the whole time saying, 'why the fuck does everyone say this thing is amazing?' whenever they use Chat-GPT and not really understand why, you're not the weird one. They are.

They cannot beat us because we actually do things. If you're a business city yourself listening to this, open a book, go and learn something, Go and talk to a customer, Well, start your car in the garage. I don't really know. I really don't encourage you to do that...necessarily.

But the point I'm making is this: middle managers ruin lives, business idiots ruin lives. I think everyone listening to this is going to have experienced several of them. The fact that management as a concept and that management as a discipline has died is a big part of this as well. Labor is really fucking hurting right now. I realize I'm kind of rambling, but I'll end on the simpler note.

If you are around people who are scared, be scared with them, Offer them kindness, Offer them solidarity and a generous ear. Support their work, Support independent creators. Support people at the Vox Union who are currently battling against the company that saw fit to give Kara Swisher to tens of millions of dollars, that continually pushes powerful people at the CEO of Airbnb, which is company which is ruined pretty much rentals everywhere. Don't know why Nelai Patella talks to him about his house in the Catskills, because that happened. When you hear these stories, push back on them, say I don't like this, Say fuck this. Support the Vox Union. In the event that the Vox Union does not get their contract, do not visit a single fucking Vox site. You must walk away from that. Support workers, support artists, support creators, support the people who actually do work, and fuck the business idiots. Thank you for listening to Better Offline.