Pod Insights Better Offline The Era of the Business Idiot, Part 2 About this episode In part two of this week's three-part Better Offline, Ed Zitron walks you through how Business Idiots demanded we all return to the office to hide their own lack of utility - and how this directly led to their desperation to adopt generative AI.
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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.
1:20 Ed Zitron? Hello there. I'm Ed Zitron and welcome to Better Offline.
1:35 Ed Zitron? And you're on the second part of the Business Idiot 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 idiot 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, 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. Also, the marketing executive that's worked exactly three years at every major cloud player but does not appear to have done anything, and of course, the investor that
2:17 Ed Zitron? 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 have 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 idiot 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 or their community, as a means of avoiding true accountability or responsibility.
3:01 Ed Zitron? 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 it 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 Nero's who, instead of battling the fire engulfing Rome, are sat in their palaces strumming an off-key version of Wonderwall and The Liar, 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 arms-length, and effectively, anything built at scale quickly becomes distant from both the customer and the laborer.
3:46 Ed Zitron? 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 2,000 global CEOs recently found that only 25% of AI initiatives have delivered their expected return on investment over the last few years.
4:31 Ed Zitron? And worse still, 64% of the CEOs 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 organisation. 50% of respondents also found that the pace of recent investments has left their organisations with disconnected piecemeal technology. Almost as if they don't know what they're doing and they're just putting AI and stuff because it feels good, all for no reason. Johnson & 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 10 to 15% of use cases were driving about 80% of the value. Pareto Principle, MVP baby.
5:13 Ed Zitron? Its last two CEOs, Alex Gorski and Joaquin Duato, both have MBAs with current CEO Duato's previous 10 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 Bill Gorski. 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. What 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. They prod, their managers are hall monitors for organisations run predominantly by people that, by design,
5:54 Ed Zitron? 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 at 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 who 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 see AI as a
6:38 Ed Zitron? 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 "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, art 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, within 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
7:21 Ed Zitron? 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. It may happen that they'll put an AI that can't do the shit that you do and replace you with probably contract labor. That's, that's gonna happen regardless of whether AI happens. Offshoring and contractor work have been 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
8:04 Ed Zitron? deal in the next week, you're probably gonna hear this when it's happening, I request that every single listener of Better Offline, I need you to actually boycott every single Vox property, which sucks, because The Verge has some great writers and also Neelai Patel. And you should boycott everything that Vox 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 quiet quitting.
8:46 Ed Zitron? It was something that they berated people for in 2022, and it's this ghastly 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, that 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 along that could potentially provide a bigger return, like an offshore worker or a theoretical AI agent, that middle manager won't hesitate to start getting hot and heavy with the idea of getting rid of this annoying person who
9:27 Ed Zitron? 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, just leave the manager alone to get paid. But really, though, artificial intelligence is the ultimate panacea of the business idiot, a tool that gives an impression of productivity with far more production than the business idiot 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, 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
10:12 Ed Zitron? object. The following is an actual quote from the article. When ChatGPT 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 Sitzen, the ServiceNow vice chair. To begin a customer meeting on AI, McDermott 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 his managers improve efficiency across their teams.
10:56 Ed Zitron? He's laser focused on a sales team's participation rate. "Let's assume you're a manager and you have 12 direct reports," he said. "Now, let's assume out of those 12, two people did good, which was so good that the manager was 110% of plan. I don't think that's good. I tell the manager, what did the other 10 do?" You'll notice that all of this is complete nonsense. What do you mean efficiency? What does that quote even mean? 110% of plan? What are you on about? Did you hit your head on something, Bill? Did you like, 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'd check us for a concussion.
11:40 Ed Zitron? But I'd wager that Mr McDermott is concussion free and a 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 think 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 e-mall 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 motherfucker.
12:23 Ed Zitron? The corporate equivalent of a stain on a carpet that nobody really knows how it got there, but it 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, been trained to never ask difficult 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. Worse still, in many fields, journalism included, we're rarely rewarded for knowing things or being right.
13:08 Ed Zitron? 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.
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16:50 Ed Zitron? Now, a great example of our vibes-based 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
17:35 Ed Zitron? to be promoted by their managers. And continuing the existence of the office is all about making sure the business idiot continues reigning supreme."
17:43 Ed Zitron? 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 you're 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 return 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 in mind. While we can, well, you can, I'm not interested, debate whether exclusively working remote is productive or not, the return to office push was almost entirely done in two ways.
18:27 Ed Zitron? One, executives 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, Borchers 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.
19:12 Ed Zitron? When every power structure is stuffed 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 are 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 mastheads. Look at how reporters talk to executives, not just the way they ask things like Neel I Patel's hundred-plus-word questions to Sundop is shy, or his interview with fucking
19:54 Ed Zitron? Gary Vaynerchuk, the constant scam artist who has an NFT thing. Neel I, what the f— 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. Sachin Adella is the CEO of a company with a market capitalization of over $3 trillion. 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, "Sachin, what the fuck? You're outsourcing most of your life to generative AI. That's insane." Or even, "Do you actually do that?"
20:38 Ed Zitron? And then asking further questions. But that would get you in trouble. And the editorial class is the managerial class now. And I've 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-assed 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 are doing so because they know the executive won't have an answer or they themselves don't know fucking anything. It isn't just about the PR person that trained them,
21:23 Ed Zitron? 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. Yet, 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 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 blowback 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,
22:08 Ed Zitron? effectively, all parts of society. Meaning that most reporters, as with many jobs, learn 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 idiot, creates a competitor or a rival. 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 worker who should be doing it for you.
22:50 Ed Zitron? And they're the ones that are meant to work, right? You're there to manage them. Yet they keep talking back, asking questions about the work you want them to do, asking you to step in and help on something? And all of that's so annoying. Ew! Oh, I'm a manager. I'm not here to... Nonsense. I'm a blogger. I'm not here to do work. Just know the stuff. Do the stuff. I have to go get lunch and 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.
23:30 Ed Zitron? 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. And it argues 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.
24:15 Ed Zitron? 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 fund when you could just follow common sense? No, no, no. That's not how we run our markets here, sir. It doesn't matter that CoreWeave, the 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 in the last quarter. But everyone still liked it because of its year-over-year 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.
24:58 Ed Zitron? 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 species value that one finds from generative AI.
25:33 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.
26:04 Speaker 04 This is Hoda Kotb from Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. Have you started your holiday shopping yet? This time of year always feels like the list just keeps growing. Gifts for family, gifts for friends, stocking stuffers, plus all the everyday things you still have to buy, like groceries and gas. That's why being a little strategic about the spending on gifts and those everyday needs is key. With the Chase Freedom Flex card, you can be a little savvier. Finding the right gift feels good, and maximizing cash back feels even better. Freedom Flex offers plenty of ways to earn more. You get 5% cash back on popular rotating quarterly categories, 3% on dining and drugstores, and 1% on all other purchases.
26:47 Speaker 04 So while you're checking names off your holiday list, those gifts can be a treat for you too. This holiday season, let Freedom Flex reward you. More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded. So sign up for the Chase Freedom Flex card. Learn more at chase.com. /getflex. This is a paid collaboration with Chase Freedom Flex. Cards issued by J.P. Morgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Subject to credit approval. Offer subject to change. Terms apply.
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29:30 Ed Zitron? Not even saying there's no returns from generative AI or the LLMs don't do anything, or even that 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 ya?" Agent Force doesn't make any money, it sucks, but goddamn is Marky Mark Benioff gonna make you bear witness? Does it matter that Agent Force barely makes Salesforce any money? No, because Benioff 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.
30:15 Ed Zitron? Agent Force was and is a fundamentally boring and insane product, charging right now $2 a conversation for a chatbot 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 a conversation one has really not been working for them. I also don't think the new one is gonna work either. But generative AI, this shit is catnip to the business idiot, 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
30:59 Ed Zitron? 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, and I'll link to his shitty fucking article in the show notes, because he doesn't seem to realize that part of research is the research itself, not just the output. 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 then you come to something called a "conclusion." This is what you would know if... You did work, but back to AI.
31:44 Ed Zitron? The concept of an agent you've sure heard about is the erotic dream of the managerial sect. It's a worker that they can personally command to generate product that they say is 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 idiot'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 Russe 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 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.
32:27 Ed Zitron? But I think the next person that interviews Wario Amadei or Sam Altman or Satya Nadella, and they bring up agents, they should say, they should bring up AGI and say, what do you think of AGI? Get him talking about it and then say, so this conscious creation, they say, yes, and you said it's 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 they, 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 shitstorm 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.
33:08 Ed Zitron? They want a digital wife or a digital, digital work slave or a digital home slave. They love the idea of a robot that does things like go up and get them a soda. And I drink like 11 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. But back to the thing.
33:31 Ed Zitron? 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 ChatGPT and saying, "We must put this in everything, everything must have AI now." Yet, the real problem is that for every business idiot selling a product, there are many more that will buy it, which has worked in the past for software as a service or SaaS companies that grew fat and happy, hocking 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 lust 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
34:16 Ed Zitron? they're honking. Look at every single institution installing some kind of ChatGPT integration, and then look for the business idiot. Perhaps it's the Cal State University Chancellor Mildred Garcia, who claimed that giving everybody a ChatGPT subscription would elevate students' educational experiences across all fields of study, empower its faculties in 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 million a year, single vendor no bid contract to a product that is best known as either a shitty search engine or a way for college students to cheat. And I think that any, actually, tons of teachers listen to this, sorry for how much that paragraph pissed you off.
34:58 Ed Zitron? In some ways, by the way, Sam Altman is also the business idiot's Antichrist. He takes advantage of a society where the powerful rarely know how much other than what they want to control or dominate. ChatGPT 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. And Altman has done well to manipulate, pester, and terrify those in power with the idea that they might miss out on something. Does anyone know 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 Sloppenheimer 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
35:43 Ed Zitron? of it doing. The fear of China's rise in AI is one particularly based on cynophobia, but also based on the fact that China has their own business idiots 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? Anyway, generative AI has created a reckoning between the business idiot and the rest of society. Its 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. While there are people that dick around with ChatGPT, 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.
36:28 Ed Zitron? The media, now piloted by business idiots, has found itself declawed. 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 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 say things 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 $10 billion, or $4 billion if you remove Anthropic and OpenAI.
37:12 Ed Zitron? You can add on top of that, by the way, the $13 billion that Microsoft makes, $10 billion of which is OpenAI's compute spend on Azure, and there's an information story behind that too. Uh, yeah, it's so small, man. It's so small. The revenue is so small, I cannot get over how small it is. But ChatGPT's popularity is the ultimate business idiot success story. It's the fastest growing product in Silicon Valley history. It 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 fake 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.
37:55 Ed Zitron? 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 idiot themselves, ChatGPT 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, trailblazing and futuristic. Real people, regular people, not business idiots, not middle managers, not executives, not coaches, not MBAs, not CEOs, not Kevin Roos, not Neelai 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, Wrigley fails to directly and clearly say what's going on.
38:39 Ed Zitron? 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 Neelai Patel say boo, probably because he wants him on the pod. I'm bagging on Neelai because Neelai's done some good shit at some point. It's just that when you have power and you use it in such a lackadaisical, power-forward way, someone's got to do it. You know, I wanted to wrap this up into a nice two-parter. That was the original plan. I couldn't do it. It's not going to happen. But this next one's going to be fun.
39:24 Ed Zitron? The third part's going to be a laugh. It's going to give you some hope and we'll both enjoy being pissy about something together. And this next episode will truly wrap this up. And I really appreciate you for listening to our first three-part episode. I'll see you tomorrow.
39:48 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.
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Previous The Era of the Business Idiot, Part 1 Next The Era of the Business Idiot, Part 3 Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
