Pod Insights Better Offline The Era of the Business Idiot, Part 1 About this episode In part one of this week's three-part Better Offline, Ed Zitron walks you through how Business Idiots have captured our society, with middle management losers breeding out true meritocracy and value-creation in favor of symbolic growth and superficial intelligence.
YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more.
---
LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks
Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/
Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv
Ed's Socials:
https://twitter.com/edzitron
https://www.instagram.com/edzitron
https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com
https://www.threads.net/@edzitron
See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. Empower is all about helping you invest well so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.
0:39 Speaker 01 Every small business owner has that one moment that could have broken them, but remarkably, it didn't. Hi, I'm Kathleen Griffith, co-host of The Unshakeables, along with Stevie Barron, CEO of Chase for Business. We have more incredible stories of overcoming the impossible still to come in season three. Listen to The Unshakeables wherever you get your podcasts and learn more at chase.com/podcast. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., member FDIC. Copyright 2026 JPMorgan Chase and Company.
1:18 Speaker 02 Call Zone Media.
1:21 Ed Zitron? Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Citron.
1:35 Ed Zitron? And welcome to the Business Idiot Trilogy. What that means will soon become obvious. So on May 15th, Bloomberg profiled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, revealing that on some level, Satya 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 Nadella's life outside the office as well as at work. He likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them, like 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.
2:19 Ed Zitron? Now, the article does not say what they do, doesn't seem like they bothered 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 Sachin 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'd argue that a well-written email is one that doesn't require a summary. Podcasts are not there to be chatted to or about with an AI. Preparing for meetings isn't something that requires AI, nor is research,
3:02 Ed Zitron? 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 saying 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 Board should fire him immediately. It's an admission 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 clawing, and it ignores Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman's documented history of abusing his workers. Ten custom agents to do what? What do you mean by other tasks? 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 ask probing questions,
3:45 Ed Zitron? 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 Sachin to build a bigger house of cards than he needs to..."
3:57 Ed Zitron? Sorry, sorry, I'm in my new studio. I'm 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? And even that, they would sooner offload to a bunch of unreliable AI models than 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 passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work.
4:41 Ed Zitron? 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 allege 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 the 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 in our economy itself, how they're ruining our world, and how these idiots are enabled by an embarrassingly deferential media that's too afraid to say that the emperor has his dick out. It's gonna be long. I'll take you on tangents, and I'll probably say fuck more than I usually do, which I admit
5:23 Ed Zitron? is a lot, but business idiots are a problem, and they deserve our scrutiny and our disgust. I, however, believe the problem of the business idiot runs a little deeper than just the economy, where the things we see are merely a symptom of a bigger, more virulent, and treatment-resistant plague that has 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 dreamed 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 a second, aren't I?
6:09 Ed Zitron? 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 phenomenon that occurred when the tech industry entered its current VC-fuelled, publicly traded incarnation.
6:51 Ed Zitron? 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 20th century court ruling, which opened the that Ford must put shareholder value ahead of the interests of its employees, though it was a beta dictator, 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, of course, former GE 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. Fame Chicago school economist 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,
7:35 Ed Zitron? 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 his shareholders by, and I quote, "spending their money on their own personal beliefs", said Friedman. Friedman was a fundamentalist when it came to unrestricted, unfettered capitalism, and this zealotry 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 on racial grounds because the owner might suffer should they be required to hire an equally or better qualified black
8:20 Ed Zitron? 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 full and in its original context on the newsletter version of this episode that I'll share in the episode notes, and as a special treat, I'll actually update them. Friedman was really grotesque, though. I'm not religious, but I really do hope that hell exists only for him, and Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan, actually quite a few people.
9:03 Ed Zitron? 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 are either intellectually or morally hollow, or both, or run the New York Times op-ed page.
9:47 Ed Zitron? Neoliberalism also represents a kind of modern-day feudalism, dividing society based on whether somebody is a shareholder or not, with the former taking precedence and the latter seeming irrelevant at best, or disposable at worst. 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 as 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 responsible for the rot we see in our society, in our workplaces, in our tech industry, and a bunch of other shit.
10:28 Speaker 00 Empower is all about helping you invest well so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals, and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends, or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money, and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.
10:59 Speaker 04 Underdog already has team picks, player props, money lines, spreads, you name it, they got it. But apparently, somebody over there said, "You know what's missing? Screaming like a maniac about a rookie card on your couch." And we love them for that. Because Underdog now has rips. You get a digital pack, starting at just $5. You check the live odds, see which grails you could pull, then rip it open to reveal a real, physical card. And the grails are no joke. They have cards up to $125,000 in value, and plenty to pull. From football and basketball to Pokémon, with new limited edition packs dropping regularly. Even cooler, you can decide to keep the card and Underdog will ship it straight to your home. Or sell it back instantly at 100% of its fair market value.
11:43 Speaker 04 And the cash goes right in your account. No listing it online, no stranger lowballing you in the messages. Just rip, reveal, and cash out instantly. Or make some room on your shelf. Download Underdog and get in on the chase. Get five free rips packs when you deposit $5. Real rips, real cards, real cash. Only on Underdog. Unleash your dog. 18+, terms apply. Top grails are extremely rare.
12:08 Speaker 05 Right now, you can save 70% on SimpliSafe home security. Because what a break-in really costs isn't your home or your valuables, it's the feeling that your home stopped being safe. That's why SimpliSafe doesn't wait for danger to reach your family. We help stop it before it gets close with not just one, but three layers of protection. One, preventing threats outside with smart AI cameras and live US-based agents who intervene to deter intruders before they break in. Two... Sounding the alarm at points of entry and three agents requesting emergency response when needed. Three layers, all working together to keep your loved ones safe. Plus, you control your privacy and recordings and with the 60-day money-back guarantee, you can try us risk-free. Monitoring a deterrence plan start around $1 a day.
12:52 Speaker 05 Order today to get 70% off a new system with professional monitoring. Save now at simplysafe.com/iheart. Simply Safe, ahead of crime in real time.
13:02 Speaker 06 Outdoor deterrence plans start at $49.99 a month. Visit simplysafe.com/licenses for alarm license information.
13:12 Ed Zitron? 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 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 depressingly endemic among the managerial
13:57 Ed Zitron? elite, in part because it's entered the culture and because it is hammered again and again across MBA classes and corporate training seminars. In 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 300 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 immorflness of its purpose, and the lack of any clear responsibility, other than making sure the money goes up to them.
14:40 Ed Zitron? 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, reframed all business leadership, which is increasingly broad, consisting of all management from the C-suite down to the equivalent of Paul Blart Mall Cop, 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 Mr. Blart, 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
15:23 Ed Zitron? 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 that they can sort of 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
16:06 Ed Zitron? really not going to like these episodes. These episodes are really going to dig at your harm. Now, I've heard from a few managers when I've had a dalliance with this in the past, and usually fifty-fifty, fifty percent of 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 labour that they're working with, and they help them do their work. They make sure they're on task, they get the people, get business idiots out of their way. Then the other 50% get real butthurt. If you're butthurt hearing this, go cry, but go cry outside. Nobody likes you. Now, decades of direct erosion of the very concept of leadership means that the people
16:48 Ed Zitron? 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 resemble 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 Zaslove, a lawyer by trade and arguably the worst CEO in the entertainment industry, managed to become the head of Warner Brothers. That and he kissed up to Jack Welch of GE, who he called a big brother that picked him up like a friend. Jack Welch fired like over 100,000 people over his tenure? Real piece of fucking shit. Talking of pieces of shit, it's how Carly Fiorina? Fiorina? Not gonna fix that. An MBA by trade, went on to become the head of HP, only drive the company into a ditch where it stopped innovating and largely missed the biggest opportunities of the early internet era.
17:33 Ed Zitron? The three CEOs that followed her at HP, Mark Hurd, who was ousted after fudging expense reports to send money to a love interest and still got tens of millions of dollars in severance, Leo Apotheker, who in the New York Times suggests may have been worse than Fiorina, and Meg Whitman, famous for being both a terrible CEO at HP and co-founding the doomed video star up 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, or 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 Callwave. I swear to God, history's driving me insane. Management has, over the course of the past few decades, eroded the very fabric of corporate
18:15 Ed Zitron? 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, as demonstrated by the fact that one fee-paying school produced twenty of our fifty-five prime ministers, and that twenty per cent of the current MPs went to either Cambridge or Oxford University. And yet, things have changed markedly in the past few decades, and 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.
18:58 Ed Zitron? 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 a push 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 Christ, it's like, sub-Joakarian thinking. She didn't understand how things worked, 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 are going with Thames Water, what do you think? The end result of this political and cultural shift was, in the long run, pretty bad.
19:39 Ed Zitron? The UK has the smallest houses in the OECD, the smallest housing stock of any developed country, and some of the worst affordability. The privatisation of the UK's water infrastructure meant that money that would previously go towards infrastructure upgrades was instead funnelled to shareholders in the form of dividends. As a result, Britain is literally unable to process human waste and is actively dumping millions of litres of human sewerage into its waterways and coastline. When Britain privatised 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
20:23 Ed Zitron? and energy bills through the fucking roof.
20:37 Speaker 00 Empower is all about helping you invest well so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals, and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends, or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money, and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.
21:09 Speaker 04 Underdog already has team picks, player props, money lines, spreads, you name it, they got it. But apparently, somebody over there said, "You know what's missing? Screaming like a maniac about a rookie card on your couch." And we love them for that. Because Underdog now has rips. You get a digital pack, starting at just five bucks. You check the live odds, see which grails you could pull, then rip it open to reveal a real, physical card. And the grails are no joke. They have cards up to $125,000 in value, and plenty to pull. From football and basketball to Pokémon, with new, limited-edition packs dropping regularly. Even cooler, you can decide to keep the card and Underdog will ship it straight to your home. Or sell it back instantly at 100% of its fair-market value. And the cash goes right in your account.
21:54 Speaker 04 No listing it online, no stranger lowballing you in the messages. Just rip, reveal, and cash out instantly. Or make some room on your shelf. Download Underdog and get in on the chase. Get five free rips packs when you deposit $5. Real rips, real cards, real cash. Only on Underdog. Unleash your dog. 18+, terms apply. Top grails are extremely rare.
22:17 Speaker 05 Right now, you can save 70% on SimpliSafe home security. Because what a break-in really costs isn't your home or your valuables. It's the feeling that your home stopped being safe. That's why SimpliSafe doesn't wait for danger to reach your family. We help stop it before it gets close with not just one, but three layers of protection. One, preventing threats outside with smart AI cameras and live US-based agents who intervene to deter intruders. Before they break in. Two, sounding the alarm at points of entry. And three, agents requesting emergency response when needed. Three layers, all working together to keep your loved ones safe. Plus, you control your privacy and recordings. And with the 60-day money-back guarantee, you can try us risk-free. Monitoring and deterrence plans start around $1 a day.
23:01 Speaker 05 Order today to get 70% off a new system with professional monitoring. Save now at simplysafe.com/iheart. SimpliSafe: Ahead of Crime in Real Time. Outdoor deterrence plans start at $49.99 a month. Visit simplysafe.com/licenses for alarm license information.
23:21 Ed Zitron? I'm no fan of Thatcher, and like Friedman, I hope she fucking burns and it hurts. The reason I 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 crises of housing and energy and 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, or water. As the legendary advertiser Stanley Pollitt once said, "Bullshit baffles brains." The sweeping changes we've seen, both in our economy and in our societies, led them to an unprecedented, gilded age of bullshit, where nothing matters and things, things of
24:03 Ed Zitron? actual substance, only matter even less. We live in a symbolic economy where we apply for jobs, writing CVs and cover letters that resemble a certain kind of hire, 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.
24:45 Ed Zitron? 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 buck and makes far more of them than you ever will. This problem, I believe, has poisoned 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 Graber'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 dullard that runs seemingly every company,
25:29 Ed Zitron? a person built to go from meeting to meeting with the vague consternation of someone who may or may not be busy that suggests, I don't know, 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 organisation, 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 one's 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 org charts full of
26:14 Ed Zitron? 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 should do that once in a while, or at the very least go down and watch and or 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? Management isn't work. It's about thinking really hard and telling people what to do. It's about making the calls. It's about managing people.
26:59 Ed Zitron? And that can mean just about anything, but often means taking credit from someone 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 species executives or manager to other species 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 at the scale of a public or large company, isn't necessarily the final recipient or user of the product, so they too are trained
27:42 Ed Zitron? 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
28:26 Ed Zitron? 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.
28:43 Ed Zitron? The real breaking point is fairly simple. The higher up you go in 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 oneself 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 phenomenon 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
29:26 Ed Zitron? unblocking it and the MBA, well, finding new places to put him. I should also add, I have nothing against universities in general, I'm just saying that our university system is out of whack 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 Roos, March 2020, Kevin Roos of a hard-fought podcast in the New York Times, had a story saying that working from home is not as good.
30:06 Ed Zitron? March 2020, the fucking lockdown hadn't even begun yet, and 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, "And there's my work for the week, fellas." Pardon me, sorry, I apologize to Mr. Roos. I would go to anthropic.com and I'd find out what they're doing. "Oh, Ed, you're 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.
30:50 Ed Zitron? But increasingly, getting all sorts of races of...
30:54 Ed Zitron? 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 bred 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. And the next episode will pick up from where we left off here. And it's going to be three straight days of episode, a crazy thing. No monologue this week unless you consider me just talking on my own for a while a monologue. And you're going to say that's the definition of a monologue and in which I'll say, shut
31:39 Ed Zitron? up, that's rude. I really do have more to say about business idiots though in the abstract because I feel as though this phenomenon is complex and multifaceted. And when you can identify the traits of the business idiot, you start seeing them everywhere. It's like they live, but with management consultants. You see them in your own life, in your own boss, the people running the biggest and most powerful companies in the world. And even some of the people you know in real life, people that don't seem to do real jobs, not even email jobs, they're everywhere. They can manage stores, they can be your boss, they can be your friend's boss. Shit, they can run their own consultancy, they can do all sorts of things. You've run into these people everywhere. And this three-part series is both about the history and helping you understand where
32:23 Ed Zitron? the business idiot in your life is. Catch you on the next episode.
32:35 Ed Zitron? Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M A T T O S O W S K I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's your ed dot at to visit the discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so much for listening.
33:07 Speaker 02 Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
33:42 Speaker 00 Empower is all about helping you invest well, so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals, and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends, or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money, and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.
34:15 Speaker 07 This is the moment, baby! This is the moment we separate the dogs from the boys. And if you ask me, I only got one question: Do you got that dog in you? Because it's never about the winners or the losers, but it is about the difference between those brave enough to put some action on the game, and those who just want to watch from the sidelines, eating off-brand pizza rolls. So sit down, lock in those pics, and trust that dog in you. Underdog. Unleash your dog.
34:43 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.
Previous Monologue: The AI Job Loss Con Next The Era of the Business Idiot, Part 2 Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
