Working In The Dot Com Bubble ft. Matt Rosoff

To kick off this week’s Better Offline Dot Com Special, Ed Zitron is joined by The Register’s Matt Rosoff to talk about what it was like to be in the tech industry during the last time the markets got drunk on a major digital hype cycle. Matt Rosoff: https://www.theregister.com/Author/Matt-Rosoff/ https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:agrmux4phzmfvgyblvhxrbnh Please support me by subscribing to my premium newsletter - here’s $10 off your first year of annual https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/84rt762qen 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 Email Me: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:36Speaker 02

  Call Zone Media.

• 0:38Ed Zitron?

  Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm of course your host, Ed Zitron.

• 0:54Ed Zitron?

  And today I am joined for a dot com special by Matt Rosoff, the editor in chief of The Register, who has been in Silicon Valley, I believe, 300 years, you said it was?

• 1:05Speaker 04

  325, yeah. So I'm actually a vampire.

• 1:09Ed Zitron?

  That's nice. Oh, what like Kevin O'Leary in a Marty Supreme. Sorry, Martin Supreme. That's a thing he says in it. Have you heard about that?

• 1:16Speaker 04

  No, I don't know, but I haven't seen that yet. Ping pong doesn't really do it for me.

• 1:20Ed Zitron?

  I didn't really like it, but there was a bit in it where Kevin O'Leary goes, I'm a fucking vampire. I've lived for this many years and I read about this. I did not like the movie, but I read about it. I was like, oh, I would actually love it if this was true. And apparently they did film it with fangs. And they should have done that. They should have just had him be a vampire at the end. However, he's regularly in the sun, so I'm not sure how they would have squared that circle. Anywho.

• 1:46Speaker 04

  Nighttime only.

• 1:48Ed Zitron?

  Computers. So Matt, you were, what were you, we're just gonna go straight into it. What were you doing in the dot com bubble era? Like, where did you begin and where did you find yourself as it progressed?

• 2:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's an interesting blast from my very distant past, but I moved to San Francisco in 1992, sort of the tail end of the Gulf War recession. So there wasn't much going on then. I was interning, doing different kinds of odd jobs, copy editing, doing some of those kinds of things. And then in 1995, I joined a little startup that was going to publish content on the world wide web. They didn't call it content then. I guess it was they called it an online magazine. They already had a TV network and that was CNET. So CNET is still around today in a very different format, but I was employee number 42 there. Started off as an editorial assistant

• 2:43Speaker 04

  and my very first task there was to come up with an email newsletter, which we called digital dispatch. And it was mostly summaries of stuff that we were publishing on the site and then occasional snarky commentary. I remember a couple of years later, we did 10 reasons why Wired's IPO failed. And one of them was the prospectus was printed on neon green and red paper, which we thought was very funny and cute at the time. So anyway, that was a lot of fun. We were, you know, growing at a, at a very rapid pace. I think I was there from 95 to 99. Like I said, I was employee number 42 on the way in. And I think when I left, there were over 500 people working there.

• 3:26Ed Zitron?

  With that one, was CNET owned by Ziff Davis at the time?

• 3:29Speaker 04

  It was not. CNET was an independent company. It had a number of early venture investors, including Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder. I don't remember the other ones. The CEO was a guy named Halsey Minor. And no, it was, it was completely, you know, it was privately held and we IPO'd in 97 or 98. I'm not

• 3:50Ed Zitron?

  Oh, just before. So that was just before things started to fall apart, right?

• 3:55Speaker 04

  Well, 98 was still go, go, go. I think it really kind of went on until 2000, 2001 was when things started to turn. So, you know, it was fun being in a company that was growing fast. I was able to do a whole bunch of different kinds of things. I was writing TV scripts and doing CD-ROM reviews back when multimedia was a thing and writing features. And I interviewed a two-way pager from this little company called Research in Motion before the BlackBerry was out. I interviewed one of the first MP3 players. I think it was the Rio. And I was like, well, interesting idea, but it can only hold like 12 songs. So this is a complete waste of time. It'll never work.

• 4:34Ed Zitron?

  So that was before the creative nomad then?

• 4:36Speaker 04

  I think around the same time. I don't remember which one was first, but yeah.

• 4:41Ed Zitron?

  I remember the creative nomad could have like 300 songs on it. I felt like

• 4:45Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:45Ed Zitron?

  Sultan of Brunei. I was the fanciest man ever. 300 songs. How would I ever choose?

• 4:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's That's right. Yeah, no, this was a lot less than that. I mean, we had to sort of do math and go back and say like, wait, that's only 12 songs. That's worthless. So anyway, and then, you know, took some filthy.com lucre, went backpacking for a little bit with my girlfriend at the time, who later became my wife. And then when I moved back, moved back to Seattle, and I think we came back on the day that Microsoft

• 5:18Speaker 04

  lost a verdict during its big antitrust case.

• 5:22Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, the MS-DOS one, right?

• 5:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, this was, well, this was antitrust. Basically, they had a whole bunch of different charges against them. Tying the browser to Windows was kind of the big one, you know, and making deals with PC makers to bundle certain software and not allowing them to bundle other software and all kinds of things.

• 5:40Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and incentivizing bundling MS-DOS. Yeah, I vaguely know this story.

• 5:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was, it was really about like Netscape Navigator was a thing and you know, that's what we were all using in 1995. It started with Mosaic and there was Navigator. And then Microsoft built Internet Explorer into Windows 95. And four years later, Navigator didn't really exist for all intents and purposes. So it was, but anyway, that was the day, it was Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, and he ordered them to be broken into two companies, an apps company, which is Office and all those products, and an ops company, which was Windows, I believe. Now, I may be remembering this slightly wrong, and I don't have a resource in front of me to refresh my memory.

• 6:22Ed Zitron?

  I very recently covered this and you are bang on.

• 6:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, but I think that was kind of the peak, and I think that was actually perhaps the beginning of the end. So it's even though Microsoft had very little to do directly with the dot com bubble, there was sort of this sense that, oh, the tide is turning. Anyway, long story short, I moved back to Seattle and I found work with this startup at the time. They were called a Catio, and the idea was that they were going to do online education. So they wanted to have articles written, and I was the computers tech guy. We were going to, you know, training people on, on computer technology and

• 7:05Speaker 04

  It was the most incompetently run company I have ever seen, been a part of. I walked in, immediately realized that I needed to get out. So,

• 7:15Ed Zitron?

  Nice.

• 7:15Speaker 04

  By way of example, they didn't have, so you know,

• 7:17Ed Zitron?

  What year was this? Just, just so that-

• 7:19Speaker 04

  This was early 2000s. So this is still, this was when companies were getting funding on a promise and going public on PowerPoint still. It was still, still at the peak, but we could see it starting to turn. So, you know, these guys had enough money to hire a bunch of people and they had a cool loft in Pioneer Square, which is, you know, brick, brick building and all this kind of stuff. But they didn't, so they, you know, they hired me and they're like, "Go get some freely, you know, fine, start hiring freelancers and we need to get some content up." They had no way to put the content on the internet. They didn't have a CMS. They didn't know what a CMS was. And we were using Visual Source Safe, which was a Microsoft product

• 7:59Speaker 04

  used for, you know, creating code and sharing code. It was that level. And I, I remember later here over, you know, hearing secondhand that somebody had overheard a very tense meeting between the CEO and the investors, where one of the investors yelled through a closed door, "We might as well just sell the servers back to the investment bank." So, I quickly got out of there, found a job at Directions on Microsoft, did that for 10 years, and they were out of business by, I believe, early 2001.

• 8:26Ed Zitron?

  So, about when did it become obvious something was wrong?

• 8:33Speaker 04

  Um, so, it was never obvious that something was wrong large scale, but it was obvious that a lot of the specific individual companies that were part of this were completely hot air. There was nothing there. There weren't revenues, there weren't customers, or they were, you know, selling dollars for 75 cents, basically. So,

• 8:59Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 8:59Speaker 04

  You know, pets.com was a big one, cosmo.com was another one. And all these ideas came around later and were more nearly profitable in the second go around. So, cosmo.com was just home delivery. It was like Instacart.

• 9:12Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's basic. Cosmo was Instacart and pets.com was Chewy. And I looked at Chewy's revenues recently, $3.1 billion and a quarter, $50 million of profit, which is good, but also, one of those business, when I hear metrics like that, I get scared.

• 9:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's fine. It's a, you know, it's a low margin retail business. That's fine. Retail, retail's good. You know, it's, it's okay.

• 9:37Ed Zitron?

  It's real.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, it's, you, you sell things for more than you make them for. That's, that's how it's supposed to work. So I think there were just so many of those. The other one was, there was a business and I think they were only based in Seattle called lackey.com. And I remember my, uh, my boss at Directions at the time said that, you know, this is when I knew that the revolution was impending. When you have a website called lackey.com that is basically a personal assistant. I guess it was kind of like TaskRabbit, that kind of thing.

• 10:05Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but even TaskRabbit has never really, is, is TaskRabbit even profitable?

• 10:10Speaker 04

  They got bought by IKEA, so it's buried now. I don't, I don't think they ever were.

• 10:14Ed Zitron?

  My lackey.com. Okay, I, I hate to interrupt to read a Wikipedia page, but it was founded in April 1999 by a guy called Brian McGarvey and another guy called Brendan Barnacle.

• 10:29Speaker 04

  I remember that name. Yeah, I remember that name with an I, right? Correct.

• 10:32Ed Zitron?

  Yes, yes.

• 10:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:34Ed Zitron?

  Um, uh, in the memo, he, he had a memo that was on Fuck Company that said, this is still a startup. And he complains that it is now 6:45 PM and there are only 12 people in our office. We have 65 people that work here in Seattle. It's totally unacceptable. So the more things change, the more things stay the same.

• 10:51Speaker 04

  I think that's true. Yeah, there are, there are absolutely some similarities and some differences between today and them.

• 10:59Ed Zitron?

  But what about the, the telecom side though? Was it, did everybody just think that was going to work out until it didn't? Was there a point when the Lucentz and the Windstars of the world got scared or scary?

• 11:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was less close to that. Um, at the time I was pretty focused on end user consumer stuff, but I remember having friends who were sort of retail trading and talking to me about Sienna, Sienna Networks is going to be huge and. I think those busts came a little bit later, right? With WorldCom, I think that was maybe

• 11:32Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 11:33Speaker 04

  bit after the dot com bust. And I'm a little bit less familiar with how all of that worked. But as I understand it, there was a lot of circular, there were a lot of circular deals and deals that weren't really deals and deals that were agreements, but actual no money changing hands.

• 11:50Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. It's interesting because as I dig into this, and I've spent the last week or two digging into, just kind of how we got to this conversation, I realized it seems like there were two very specific, the dot com bubble was actually like two bits. It was the dot com website stuff. And then the follow up of the, the, what was it? The telecommunications fiber boom.

• 12:11Speaker 04

  Fiber boom. Yeah. It was, you know, it was the, it was the, um, the websites. There was definitely some circularity there too. Everybody knew that everybody was buying advertisements from each other. Um, but you know, you remember AOL bought Time Warner and then that valuation collapsed. I mean, there were some really huge deals that turned out to be in the end worth almost nothing. And then I think once you, once, you know, once all of those things fell apart and the end user picture wasn't there, um, a lot of the infrastructure valuations came crashing down as well.

• 12:45Ed Zitron?

  What was the moment you knew? Like, when was the moment? What was, was there an event where you went, oh shit?

• 12:51Speaker 04

  And yeah, when I joined that startup and I couldn't, I couldn't believe they had any money. So that was, that was, that was, uh, spring of 2000. I was like, it, it felt like they were just sort of handing money out to anybody. And, and I mean, this guy had a record. I think he had had a CRM company that competed with Salesforce that either sold or went public. So he wasn't a total nobody. It's just, they couldn't hire enough people to actually get anything smart done on time. It just wasn't, it just wasn't working and everybody was kind of showing up to the office and play acting. Um, there were some moments during the nineties that were, you know, kind of crazy, like CNET, we, they funded this party. I, I played bass and I was playing bass in sort of this pickup.

• 13:36Speaker 04

  Band at work and they basically rented out the Fillmore for our holiday party and you know, we played on a stage in front of 1200 or however, maybe the Fillmore is not that big, 500 people. And then they had a, I can't remember the name of the, of the, you know, they had an actual working band come on after us, but it was a lot of fun. The singer we were playing with nailed Janice Joplin. She did a really spectacular job. We had a couple of good songs. So, but that was, those kinds of things were regular. Like that was just expected, these big parties and nobody really asked where the money was coming from. I do remember after CNET went public, I don't remember what year this was, 98 or 99, I

• 14:17Speaker 04

  actually looked at an earnings report and I was like, oh, we're losing money? I didn't know you could stay in business and lose money. How naive I was.

• 14:28Ed Zitron?

  That's so, see, that's the thing I, I admit, as I've got further into finance in general and learned stuff, the amount of companies that just burn cash and then die, but also the ones that are burning cash right now, and the amount of people who just say, yeah, it's actually fine. It's good that happens. It's like a completely, like a completely different world that has only worked a few times in the past. It's actually not worked many, many more times.

• 14:57Speaker 04

  Right. Most of the time it doesn't work, but I think the, the bet is when it does work, it pays off spectacularly.

• 15:04Ed Zitron?

  Right. And the question is-

• 15:05Speaker 04

  I don't think Google was ever losing huge amounts of money, but Amazon did for some years.

• 15:11Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I've, I've looked into it and the companies that have actually grown and been successful have never burned anywhere near as much money as these AI companies. AWS was like 69 billion over nine years and that was all of Amazon's capex, not just AWS focused.

• 15:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. No, they, um, yeah. And again, there was, to me,

• 15:34Speaker 04

  The internet at large and the world wide web, as we used to call it, was a lot more immediately, obviously huge. And it was going to change a lot of things and how business was done and how media was distributed. It was, it was clear. It was just a question of when and where the technology had to go and which parts had to evolve. You know, you needed consumers to have much more bandwidth before video became a realistic thing and so forth. And you know, there were going to be fits and starts, but I think everybody pretty much knew that it was not fake. Like these, some of these companies were going to succeed. Something was going to happen.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  When I look at AI, to me, it does not seem nearly as revolutionary. I don't even really like to call it AI because it's not intelligent, but that's the, that's the term that we use. But it's, you know, it, it's right. Uh, you know, matrix math determining, determining, you know, basically autocomplete. So it's interesting. It can do some stuff that can be valuable in certain situations, but it doesn't to me feel immediately massively obvious that this is a huge change. The internet did.

• 16:52Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 16:53Speaker 04

  Web browsers did. The iPhone, the first time I played with one of those, I was kind of a skeptic because I mean, I had a Palm Pilot and I'd been

• 17:01Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, I had a

• 17:02Speaker 04

  Turn around.

• 17:03Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. I had a compact and so keep going.

• 17:05Speaker 04

  No, no, you know, and you're, you're, you're playing with that stylus. And then someone brought an iPhone into work and I was like, oh, Apple, whatever. They're not going to do this. And I was like, oh, responsive touchscreen, email autocomplete maps. I'm like, this thing's cool. And then it got better from there. So

• 17:18Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 17:19Speaker 04

  I haven't felt that and I've used all the chatbots. I've played around with them. I don't code, but you know, from what I understand from people who do is if you're a non coder, it can create some serviceable apps just based on your ideas, which seems pretty magical. But if you do code and you actually look under the hood, they're not maintainable. You know, you can't deploy them like that. You know, they, they tend to have a lot of problems unless you sort of know what you're doing. And I certainly know as a writer, you know, I can immediately detect AI generated writing and it's not good.

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• 18:30Ed Zitron?

  All right, everyone, I'm back talking about Quince, one of my favorite clothing brands. And as we speak, I'm currently wearing one of their excellent cotton knit overshirts that wear like a jacket. Nice prefall piece to wear as things cool off a bit. I've also been eyeballing one of their heritage water-resistant Harrington jackets, too, for later in the year to pair with their Mongolian cashmere sweaters I bought. And I have several of them, and I really can't recommend Quince's stuff enough. I love Quince because they focus on high-quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials, jackets, pants, fitted tees and polos, activewear, and even travel gear. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands, and because they work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen, you're getting more for less. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince.

• 19:13Ed Zitron?

  Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was on Better Offline. It's the best way to support the show.

• 19:30Speaker 06

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• 20:11Speaker 07

  I'm Ron Moore.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  And I'm Kelly Moore. And starting our own business in our 50s was a little scary, but exciting.

• 20:21Speaker 07

  The biggest advantage was our community. The whole thing about business is relationships.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  We'll say team a lot, not just our internal team. It's the team of our vendors, the team of our clients.

• 20:33Speaker 07

  We help the Veterans Resource Center and we give scholarships. I'm doing this for my heart, for my children, for you, for your children's family. I don't want anything back. And I tell a lot of people, don't give back to me, pay it forward.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  If you work to give, you just see the world differently.

• 20:51Speaker 07

  I'm gonna help as many people as we can. I can't take it with me.

• 20:54Speaker 06

  To hear more from Ron and Kelly, listen to the Unshakeables wherever you get your podcasts.

• 21:05Ed Zitron?

  That's actually a really good thing to focus on. So when you got into the internet industry, was there that sense of wonderment? I'm not even being like a shill, I'm just like, because I remember when I first used the internet in like 1997, I wanna say. Yeah. Like a child and being amazed by it, but even like the iPhone moment as well. But when you were getting into it in like the mid to late 90s, was there that sense of wonderment and excitement?

• 21:30Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely. So there had been online services for a while. People used AOL and CompuServe and you know, you hang out in chat rooms and you, you do these keywords and it would call up sort of a specific. I don't even remember what they were called, but I'd call them apps now. But the web was interesting because it was immediately accessible to everyone. Anyone could theoretically set up a website. And it was, yeah, immediately huge. And it was a little hard to separate some of the hype from legitimate excitement. But I remember in San Francisco, even in 1995, and you know, you had had Wired magazine sort of sounding. Um, sounding the, the, the bells for it for several years by that point, but in 1995,

• 22:12Speaker 04

  everybody was online, everybody was getting online and you know, you had tons of TV commercials and everybody was talking about the world wide web on the evening news and it just, it was immediately clear that this was a new thing and it was a new way that we were going to do a lot of stuff. Uh, so yeah, there was, there was massive excitement over it.

• 22:32Ed Zitron?

  Um, was there any kind of AI, I'm sorry, I'm seeing a leading question there. Were there dissenters? Were there people other than the obvious Newsweek article that everyone sends me every time? You know, the one I'm talking about, the guy now makes weird glass things now. But were there, was there dissent?

• 22:52Speaker 04

  There was, and I think a lot of the dissent, interestingly, was centered around some of the same kinds of criticisms that we've heard over the last five, six, seven years. So it wasn't that this is stupid or this isn't going to work. It was, um, you know, there are no guardrails, there are no, there's no regulation. This thing is going to run amok. It's gonna, you know, how, how are we going to protect against fraud? How are we going to protect against people, you know, using it for crime? How are we going to protect against, you know, this kind of information that maybe shouldn't be available to everybody? So there were those kinds of questions and people were, you know, maybe we should slow down a little bit and put some guardrails and pass some laws around

• 23:37Speaker 04

  this thing. Um, most of that, yeah, most of it didn't get done. You know, the, the telecoms act, uh, uh, you know, whatever, section 230, whatever, the big omnibus bill that that was a part of, that was an attempt to deal with some of that stuff, but it was pretty, it was pretty lenient. It was more about sort of protecting companies from, from liability. Um, but there were some, yeah, there were some, at least some thought around it, uh, but.

• 24:02Ed Zitron?

  But there wasn't just people saying this won't work in the same way.

• 24:06Speaker 04

  Very few, very few. I mean, there, you know, I suppose you could go into the boardroom of a newspaper at the time and probably would have heard some arguments that now in retrospect sound insane, but you know, who wants to read on a screen? That was one that you sometimes heard. People want to have a piece of paper in their hand and you know, print is, print is the way. Nobody wants to read on a screen or you know, this is, this is just sort of a nerd toy. This is never going to take off among, you know, mainstream people. There were issues with internet access. It wasn't available everywhere, especially high speed. I mean, we were using pretty low speed modems

• 24:48Speaker 04

  for a very, very long time, particularly in rural parts of the country. So there was some skepticism around that, you know, and part of it, I have to be honest, is I was in my twenties at the time. So I think people at that age tend to be much more go-go about the future than perhaps old cynics as, as we are now.

• 25:11Ed Zitron?

  But there wasn't any kind of, or maybe there was, just you can tell me, there wasn't a kind of bifurcation between people were like pro internet, anti-internet in the same way?

• 25:20Speaker 04

  No, no, I don't remember that anyway. No, I really don't think so.

• 25:24Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 25:24Speaker 04

  It was all, it was all hands on deck. I mean, I mean, again, like this was on TV. This is like, you know, advertisements, there were, there were commercials, there were people on the evening news, you know, reaching, reaching mom, you know, my parents who are boomers, they were fully aware and gung ho about the web by 97 or 98. And that's, I think who, that's who was investing. So, you know, one of the big differences between then and today, it was these companies were going public and it was really fueled in large part by retail investors, you know, who wanted to buy stocks on the stock market in these new companies that represented the future. So, you know, you had doctors and,

• 26:09Speaker 04

  and dentists and, you know, professors with a little money and people putting their retirement savings into these things. And they were the ones who probably got wiped out the most in, you know, 2001 through 2004.

• 26:23Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and I mean, was was that before E-Trade? Was it, do you start to call a stockbroker? I literally don't know how they bought stock back then, I realize.

• 26:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think E-Trade started in the dot com boom, if I recall, late 90s.

• 26:40Ed Zitron?

  Because I remember in England at the time, the stories about how E-Trade led to people losing tons of money. And there was a bit, one thing I'll credit the press with at the time as being like, yeah, you shouldn't bet on the stock market unless you know what you're doing.

• 26:54Speaker 04

  Right. Yes, index funds hold forever. That's the, that's the random walk down Wall Street, the only investment strategy that works. But yeah, people were playing, you know, they wanted, they saw these ridiculous returns and they wanted a piece of it. So yeah, I think online trading was definitely a thing. You know, you had the Yahoo chat forums, that's where people would pump and dump these penny stocks. There are all kinds

• 27:19Ed Zitron?

  Wait, really? There were like, there were actual pump groups back then?

• 27:19Speaker 04

  of them.

• 27:23Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. I mean, Yahoo, Yahoo, Yahoo chat was sort of infamous for it. Like, you would hear about something, you'd hear, it was a lot like what happened with crypto in 21, 22, you know, someone issues a new token and everybody rushes in to buy it. And then it crashed, you know, there's a rug pull and it crashes. Like, it was, those kinds of things were happening. But Yahoo, I remember being, that was the forum that I was the most familiar with back then. It was probably going on on AOL, too.

• 27:49Ed Zitron?

  That's magical. Oh, the, the innocent days. It was the, I remember when I, I'm gonna do the, was it Rucker Howard speech in the end of Blade Runner, the things I've seen in Telegram groups about ICOs. But it's, it's kind of, it's adorable to hear that stuff happening until you remember people lost lots of money. But it doesn't feel like,

• 28:13Ed Zitron?

  it doesn't sound like, maybe it was a different media climate, like there was that kind of almost, there wasn't the, the noxious part of it where it was like, oh, if you don't get on the internet, you're gonna be left behind and you're an idiot. Or maybe I'm wrong.

• 28:27Speaker 04

  Not so much of that, but it was, it was just presumed that, that this is the future. And if you don't want part of the, if you don't want to be part of the future, that's fine. But you know, why don't you go be a survivalist and live off the grid in the woods?

• 28:43Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 28:44Speaker 04

  It was just assumed, I mean, it's like, you know, do you watch TV? There was a time when if you said, I don't have a TV, you were very pretentious and very special. Now it seems like everybody's cutting cable, but so it was sort of like that. It was just presumed that everybody was eventually going to get on board. I mean, who needs a personal computer in their home? That was a real question in the late eighties, right? Oh, PC on every desktop. Yeah, sure, Bill, whatever you say. Who, who wants one of these things? And then, you know, you find justifications for it. Oh, well, you can, you know, you can pay your bills automatically and you can do this and that. And suddenly when Internet Explorer was built into Windows and everybody could get online, that was the thing. Like that was, oh, of course, everybody has to have a PC and we're all going to be on the web, surfing the web.

• 29:29Ed Zitron?

  It also feels like it was a genuine, like a lot of these things were just too early and run too crazy because the actual fundament of it, it sounds like was people were excited to get on the internet, which was, which was obviously a beneficial thing and had immediate returns. Like people could use it and say, this is useful in my life in this manner.

• 29:51Speaker 04

  Right. I think the initial thing was access to information. You could, you could find out a lot of things very fast and there were some communication aspects, right? You could talk to anybody, anywhere in the world, pretty easily, pretty quickly. And then other things, you know, e-commerce was very early, but you know, suddenly you don't have to go to the bookstore and ask them to order. I worked at a bookstore for a year in 1990 and you know, it was a thing. If you don't have the book in stock, they come in and you order the book and then they come back a week later and suddenly you just press a button and the, you know, the book will come. And then they started adding music. There were a lot of, you know, again, the lack of bandwidth among a lot of consumers

• 30:32Speaker 04

  did sort of stall the idea of digital video, but it eventually came around in 2001 or two. That's when YouTube really took off. Real networks had streaming video and Microsoft.

• 30:43Ed Zitron?

  Oh, Real, RealPlayer.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:46Ed Zitron?

  I remember RealPlayer.

• 30:48Speaker 04

  We're all buffering. I interviewed Rob Glazer a couple of times. You know, he had the right idea. But again, Microsoft sort of, you know, took that market pretty quickly with Windows Media Player. And then Apple came along and they kind of blew everybody else away. So, yeah, all of the ideas were there. And I think most of what we were sort of experimenting with later became real businesses. I mean, you know, LimeWire and all the sort of music MP3 trading sites, that was later, late 90s, I guess, early 2000s. That all eventually became legitimized through Spotify and Apple Music and so on. So every idea was already there. It was just,

• 31:31Speaker 04

  maybe it's a little bit underground, maybe it doesn't work right, quite right. It's a little clunky. It's a little klugey. Or maybe the companies were just, you know, they borrowed too much money too fast and couldn't turn it around.

• 31:41Ed Zitron?

  Which feels almost entirely different to the AI bubble. Like it's, Sachin Adella, on the morning of recording this, Davos was saying, yeah, the thing that might make this a speculative bubble if nobody, if nobody buys it. If nobody buys AI, not really. He's so cool. I love that we live in this era. I'm going to read you this sentence, actually, because this really got me. Microsoft chief executive Sachin Adella has warned that AI risks becoming a speculative bubble unless its uses spread beyond big tech companies and wealthy economies. For this not to be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread. He noted that a telltale sign of it's a bubble would be if only tech groups are benefiting from the rise of AI rather than the companies in other sectors. Yeah.

• 32:27Speaker 04

  That's

• 32:27Ed Zitron?

  Good shit.

• 32:29Speaker 04

  Self evident. Yes, correct. He's not wrong. A bit late, perhaps.

• 32:34Ed Zitron?

  If no one uses, also, isn't it his job? But nevertheless, there was a question I had. So, something that frustrates me with this whole conversation is how flippantly people say, oh, it's a bubble, but sometimes bubbles are good. What was the aftermath like?

• 32:55Speaker 04

  So this is where things get a little bit complicated because I don't think that you can really fairly separate events from other events that happen at the same time. So the the dot com bubble did burst, but then you had nine 11 happen in September of 2001, sort of in the late middle of it. And that literally changed everything. It changed confidence. It changed where everybody's attention was going. You know, you had money flowing into completely different places. Everybody got much more conservative and so forth. So I think

• 33:37Speaker 04

  the real effect of the dot com bust, I mean, you had a lot of people my age, people who were in their twenties in the go go 90s, suddenly lose their jobs or suddenly not have the great paychecks that that they had become accustomed to. And you had a lot of retail traders get wiped out. You know, some people lost their lost their life savings or a big portion of their life savings. And, you know, my, my attitude toward investing has always been caveat emptor. You shouldn't be betting if you can't afford it. You should put your money in an index fund and you should hold on to that until you retire. That's the safest thing to do. But, you know, some people say, hey, I've got 10% of this of my holdings are play money and I'm just going

• 34:21Speaker 04

  to make some bets and see what happens. And then you've got other people who who go too far with it.

• 34:26Ed Zitron?

  But what about people in tech?

• 34:29Speaker 04

  You know, in tech, most those skills didn't become useless, right? So the technology was always changing. If you were, you know, learning HTML and JavaScript and Java programming, and then you could transition into new, different kinds of things. The technology continued to evolve. So people who had those technical skills could continue forward and find other interesting things to do. And then, you know, honestly, after the sort of telecoms bust 2004, 2005, you had a pretty long boom. I mean, there was the financial collapse.

• 35:04Speaker 04

  Of oh eight around the housing market, but the tech industry independently was building a lot of stuff. Tons of companies got started in the wake of the dot com bust and many of those companies are still around today. So I don't feel like people in the tech industry were permanently hurt. That you know, there was a couple of years setback and then they generally were able to learn new skills, apply what they'd already learned and go find other things that some of which turned out to be really lucrative.

• 35:32Ed Zitron?

  Right. But I think, how can I phrase this? I think that people are very flippant about the consequences of a potential bubble collapse. I think that that's really what I'm, that's where my concern is.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  You're talking about today.

• 35:47Ed Zitron?

  Today, yes, because people compare it to the dot com bubble and they say, well, after the dot com bubble, there was that value, which is completely correct. But.

• 35:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, again, I think, I think the other thing is about today.

• 36:04Speaker 04

  So the circumstances around the world are very different. You know, 92, 93, the Cold War was over. There was this peace dividend. They were turning army bases into national parks. Everybody was sort of enjoying, you know, good times. There was a book called The End of History by Francis Fukuyama that sort of posited, hey, this is it. You know, we're here in this permanent utopia world. And of course, events intervene. And I think 9/11 was the, the big turning point there. And there's some other stuff around that time. You know, the contested election of 2000, now contested elections are such a common thing. We don't really think about them anymore. But that was, that was the first big one in my lifetime.

• 36:49Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 36:50Speaker 04

  The situation today, I think you would agree, is very different. You know, we have an unprecedentedly chaotic leader in the United States who seems to be bent on ripping down old world orders that have enabled stability since World War II. I mean, if you're talking about seizing land from a NATO ally and you're seeing Europe strike all these free trade deals with the rest of the world and so forth and so on, we could go on and on about this, but I don't, I'm not a political expert. But the background scenario is very different. And I think you could almost make a case for.

• 37:34Speaker 04

  AI being sort of the logical outgrowth of a certain number of years of rot in the business and in the economy. And I think you've made that argument. You know, you can decide where that started. Did it start in the 80s and 90s when the US started offshoring and outsourcing everything to China and other countries? Did it start after that? But it's been somewhat clear for some time that a lot of the easy sort of technological gains that we got from the mobile revolution and from the cloud, those have mostly been gathered.

• 38:11Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, we've conquered those lands.

• 38:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, and there's not that much more upside. You can get a little efficiency here and a little efficiency there. Everybody kind of knows how the internet works. You know what advertising looks like, you know. So this sort of, to me, seems like it's it's sort of the last big push. And you know, you have a lot of people in big bureaucratic jobs who you've written about this, they don't really produce much day to day. They produce a lot of emails and a lot of presentations and they sit in meetings. Occasionally, they got to make a yes, no decision and they got to, you know, munch some data together and say, okay, it looks wiser if we do this instead of doing that. But, you know, a lot of it is performative. And I think, you know, AI is great for that. I don't have to create

• 38:58Speaker 04

  the spreadsheet anymore. I don't have to create the presentation anymore. I don't have to write the email that no one's going to read and then they don't have to read it because they can have AI summarize for them. I think it's good for that kind of good enough stuff. And there are a lot of jobs that are good enough.

• 39:14Ed Zitron?

  But I but I wonder if it could even do that stuff.

• 39:16Speaker 04

  That's a bigger problem with the economy. I don't think it's all about AI. I think AI is a symptom rather than perhaps a cause.

• 39:22Ed Zitron?

  But even then, it's like, can it do presentations? Because I've never been like, I've genuinely tried just to see if it could do it. It's never been able to do it. I think it's an interest.

• 39:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I've seen presentations created with AI that are pretty good. I think you get it. It gets you a certain percentage of the way there and then you tweak it a little bit.

• 39:40Ed Zitron?

  Okay. Yeah, it's just like, but but then you kind of look at it and say, great, did we really need to spend however many hundreds of billions of dollars to get a spreadsheet maker?

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• 42:14Speaker 07

  I'm Ron Moore.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  And I'm Kelly Moore. And starting our own business in our 50s was a little scary, but exciting.

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• 42:29Speaker 02

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• 42:36Speaker 07

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• 43:08Ed Zitron?

  I also think that people are just being flippant about the idea of a financial collapse as well. That's what, that's what's worrying me as well.

• 43:17Speaker 04

  Right. But again, I think that there are a lot of potential reasons for a potential financial collapse. And AI is one of some number. I don't think it, again, the dot com bust was not entirely attributable to ridiculous valuations. There were things going on in other parts of the world. There was a change of in confidence. And I think here, again, you've got, you've got a lot of disruption and a lot of disorder and a lot of chaos. So there are many, many things that, that could happen. But I agree. I think people maybe underestimate how, how deep this is. Then again, then again, you know, who are the big investors in this? I mean, it's mostly really large tech companies with

• 44:02Speaker 04

  massive, massive revenues and massive cash flow.

• 44:07Ed Zitron?

  Not really anymore, though. $178.5 billion of data center credit deals. You've got venture capital is, actually, yeah, venture capital is also half of venture capital's going into it. But the other thing that shocked me as well was back then in the dot com boom, venture capital was so much smaller.

• 44:25Speaker 04

  Oh, it was tiny. Yeah.

• 44:26Ed Zitron?

  It was teeny tiny.

• 44:28Speaker 04

  It was investment banking is where, is where you found the money. So. Venture capital, though, you know, that's not their money. They're, they're playing with somebody else's money. So whose money are they playing with? Who are the LPs? Well, we don't really know, but it's, it's personal wealth funds, it's sovereign wealth funds, you know, it's, it's Middle Eastern and, and other countries sovereign wealth funds. Sure, there's teachers pensions and there's university endowments and there's some other things that, that, that those LPs are holding that will actually harm, you know, normal working folk. But I think a lot of it is massive excess wealth at the top of society where people are looking for new, new kinds of

• 45:11Speaker 04

  returns, are looking for outsized returns because all the easy, all the easy money is sort of already taken. So I don't know if that, I, I think where it hurts is when you think about, okay, the, you know, the real estate carry on effects, all the people who are employed now and will be suddenly unemployed. Yeah, those, those kinds of things could really hurt, but I just, it doesn't seem to me like you have the retail trader exposure as you did during the dot com boom. Yeah, okay. If there's a huge AI bust and Nvidia loses a massive portion of its value, sure, people are going to hurt who have invested in Nvidia, but they're not going to get wiped out. I don't see Nvidia disappearing. I don't see Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle. I don't see any of those companies disappearing as a result of it.

• 45:56Ed Zitron?

  And neither do I. I think the thing that people need to understand is that a wipeout isn't going to be what hurts. It's going to be a drawdown. It's going to be, because Nvidia, 88% of their revenue is data center. Like, and I even looked back for a premium I did a few weeks ago, where it was the amount of revenue that like Lucent or Corning or whoever had in those specific segments or how weighted they were on their customers. Like, I think Lucent's top customers were AT&T and Verizon, but those only represented 13 to 14%. Nvidia has customers that make up 15 to 20% of their revenue each quarter. They have massive centralization around four to five customers.

• 46:41Ed Zitron?

  Their diversified revenue is dropping. It's just, it isn't that Nvidia is going to die. It's that

• 46:49Ed Zitron?

  Eighty percent of their revenue is going to disappear. It happened with crypto with them.

• 46:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:53Ed Zitron?

  And that's what I'm really worried about.

• 46:55Speaker 04

  They were never as, yeah, they were never as dependent on crypto. They've tried a lot of things over the years. I mean, right, they were doing chips for self-driving cars and all kinds of things. I do, I am not as technical as the writers on the register staff. Tobias Mann, for example, does a great job covering GPUs and data centers.

• 47:15Speaker 04

  It is posited that there are other potential uses for GPUs that could be very interesting with, in terms of high-performance computing and some other things that are AI-adjacent, you know, different kinds of data processing and so forth. So it may not, what we call AI, even if that, you know, that, those end-use cases and it turn out to be eh, you know, vibe coding eh, chatbots eh, even though those aren't it, some of these, some of the, some of the hardware may be repurposable into other functions. I don't think it's, it's a dead loss.

• 47:45Ed Zitron?

  But not at the scale that they're building, though.

• 47:48Speaker 04

  No, no. Again, I, I would be stunned if all of the data centers that are being promised by 2030 are actually built, but maybe, I don't know.

• 47:58Ed Zitron?

  I, I also just don't think that that will be happening. I just don't see it happening. I, looking through the old dot com companies, though, I really can't find anything like OpenAI. They're, they are truly special. They are.

• 48:13Speaker 04

  They are.

• 48:13Ed Zitron?

  It's like they took a bit of Global Crossing, a bit of Enron, a bit of Lucent, but also a bit of Pets.com. Just kind of amazed what Silicon Valley can still spook out. No like innovations, but financial collapses like these. We've never seen one this big, folks.

• 48:31Speaker 04

  It's massive. Yeah, it's, it's, there, there, there are a lot of commitments there and the valuation is massive, massive, massive.

• 48:40Speaker 04

  I do think their announcement last week or their acknowledgement that they're finally getting into advertising is interesting. And I know we've talked about this offline before, but. When I think about all of the information that a chatbot has about a heavy user, they actually should theoretically be able to target ads at least as well as Facebook and at least as well as Google, right?

• 49:07Ed Zitron?

  So I don't know about that because Google and Facebook have very hard demographic data and very like a nuanced layer of cookies that can track. I don't know if especially as these are free users, we don't know how much actual personal data like Facebook's big advantage was that when you registered, you gave them the demographic data they needed to target.

• 49:33Speaker 04

  Right, right. I don't know how much they're collecting, but if they can still say, well, I know everything that you're interested in, everything that you've been talking about for the last year, they should be able to track that back to an individual user. I don't know. I don't know the details of it.

• 49:49Ed Zitron?

  But they've said low billions of revenue, but it is, it is just interesting because in any, I, maybe you know this, I, looking through the history of the computer, have never seen a point when everybody was just screaming that something that didn't work would work.

• 50:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, uh, wow, it's hard to, it's hard to remember something that has been, you know, this hyped and again, I, I, I always lead, I always try to approach this with an open mind because I, I am, you know, older, so I, I tend to be more cynical with experience. But yeah, I, I'm, I sort of shrug and I'm like, I don't quite understand the big deal here. It doesn't seem to really do what it's supposed to do. I mean, I'm still, you know, Gemini has voiced it on me every day when I try to do Google searches and it's. It's nearly almost always slightly wrong, which is kind of worse than being completely wrong because it lulls you into this false sense of security. And you're like, wait a minute,

• 50:52Speaker 04

  that doesn't seem right. And then you go to the source link and it's just got it wrong.

• 50:56Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, the beginning of the Google chapter of my book that's coming out next year is I went to look for how many people, how many users Google has. And it's just me going insane as I get an AI generated answer that's generated based on two SEO articles that do not cite their sources.

• 51:15Speaker 04

  Right. There's a lot of that. So it's taking what all this kind of garbage data. And I mean, as, as an editor, I'm, I have for the last 15 years been hounding reporters who try to source stuff off the internet. I'm like, where'd you get that from? How do you know that's a reliable source? And AI just sort of absorbs it all and presents it and la di da, here you go. They don't have any, you know, they don't care. They don't have any checks. It just comes from wherever. So yeah, the one, the one thing I would, what you were saying about never seen sort of this much hype. I do remember before the segue came out and people were saying, I can't remember who, if it was Steve Jobs or somebody, but somebody was saying, this is going to revolutionize

• 51:59Speaker 04

  transportation and change cities. And we were like, whoa, what could this thing be? And then it was the segue. Maybe not. But that was one very small, isolated thing. I don't, yeah, I don't recall sort of large scale where everybody in the industry was saying, this is going to revolutionize everything. And then users were kind of going, huh, I don't know. How many times a day copilot comes up on my Windows PC and I dismiss it immediately because I didn't really want it to show up. It just sort of pops up. I hit a key combo too fast. I'm like, thanks. Nah, I'm good.

• 52:33Ed Zitron?

  I keep thinking about the thing you said, though. It's like, the conditions are different. But at the same time,

• 52:41Ed Zitron?

  We've read like, it's not like we're in a new frontier of new ideas where everybody has something new that might work. It's where it almost feels like the end of something. It feels like the dot com bubble was created by the excitement about a beginning rather than this is people trying to pretend that something's happening and that we're not at the end.

• 53:02Ed Zitron?

  Of an era, I should say, I don't think we're at the end of society.

• 53:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think we are probably seeing probably beginning of new, pretty major global shifts in power and, you know, some of the guiding societal philosophies that guide that will change. And yeah, there's, there's, there's a lot of different things going on right now. You know, I started a climate section at CNBC and was very deeply entrenched in climate tech and, and some of the climate politics and, and things around that. And you talk to the green pilled folks and they think, you know, 80 years from now, we're all doomed. So do I believe that? No, not necessarily. But I do feel like things are changing pretty rapidly and pretty dramatically on a lot of different fronts. And AI is just

• 53:47Speaker 04

  kind of this, hey, let's, let's keep this, let's keep this playbook running this.

• 53:51Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, let's keep doing, that's really it. It's like keeping, let's keep doing what we've done the whole time during the dot com bubble. People were trying new shit. It was.

• 54:02Speaker 04

  It goes all the way back to semiconductors. I mean, this, this tech boom has been going on since the, since the 1960s, really in different waves, but it's been going on and on and on. I mean, I do think like when Bill Gates said a computer on every desktop, whenever that was in the eighties, that was nuts. And then it was a computer on every desk and in every home. And that was even more nuts, but it happened. So, you know, I think that it's been, I don't want to say easy, but it's been running so well for so long that I think everybody just kind of wants it to keep running. And I'm not, I don't know, I'm not, I'm, I'm with you. I'm not seeing it yet. I'm not seeing a ton of day to day excitement. I mean, you know, you, you look at the, the teenage demographic,

• 54:46Speaker 04

  that's kind of who I always go to. And my son is 15 and he's very cynical about like, Jokes about obvious AI writing and like they make fun of phrases and terms that are so AI. And he'll see a, you know, a poster and advertising. He's like, ha, that's so AI. And it's, it's something that you scoff at and make

• 55:04Ed Zitron?

  Oh, they're fucked. No, okay. AI is fucked then. I'm sorry. If, if you've got teenagers who are like making fun of calling bad stuff AI.

• 55:13Speaker 04

  Right.

• 55:14Ed Zitron?

  I don't, I, I'm actually serious. That is legitimately lethal.

• 55:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:19Ed Zitron?

  Teenagers, young people. I'm, I'm 39 years old now. Like I was, I've never been cooler a year of my life, but I know that when, if, cause that's, cause you read a lot of things that people try and say, well, young people love AI. Not been my experience either.

• 55:35Speaker 04

  I don't, young people love TikTok. Young people love Instagram reels. You know, they're on, they're on vertical, they're scrolling vertical video all day and, and commenting. I don't even want to say they love, you know, Snap or any social media because it's all, you know, it's all text change, right? It's all, you just got your, your different text strings. Like there's a lot of stuff that they love. Games, huge, online games, you know, participatory games. But yeah, I don't see them hanging out all day with their chatbot. You know, once in a while, if you have something you really want to, you're curious and you want to experiment with something, it'll prototype something quite quickly for you. And I think people do that sometimes and find it useful. It's like, okay, this is a prototype. This is cool. This would have taken me six hours of

• 56:20Speaker 04

  grunt work to generate. Thanks for doing that for me. So there are some, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to slam and say it's totally useless in all scenarios because it's not, it's a,

• 56:29Speaker 04

  it's just a sort of an extension of a computer. It's just a better computer in some ways. It helps you do certain things very fast.

• 56:36Ed Zitron?

  But sometimes it's a better, that's the other thing. It's like, I, I have this growing theory about AI psychosis being far more common than people think. Cause I think that there is something that happens when people use a large language model and what they extrapolate from there that makes some people do insane things like, I don't know, buy $200 billion worth of data centers and GPUs. And, and on one hand, you might argue, oh, that's just business idiots being business idiots. No, I think Sachin Adella and Sundar Pichai used an LLM and went, holy shit, I need to do this. I mean, I got told once that Sachin Adella's whole reason that he started this facade was because

• 57:20Ed Zitron?

  he saw ChatGPT and wanted it in Bing. I think that there is that everyone is experiencing micro versions of Kevin Roos's ChatGPT told me to leave my wife thing. It's just what do you believe AI will do next? Like, what do you think it will do? And what do you believe will happen if you don't use it today? And it's just very bizarre. So that was that was more of a point than a question I should be put. But

• 57:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, but how many people are subject to that? I don't think it's a huge number.

• 57:48Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 57:49Speaker 04

  To some degree, the folks who are, you know, the Sachin Adellas of the world are, should I say, somewhat insulated from the trials and tribulations that most of us experience. They're insulated from their money. And if you are someone like Sam Altman or Elon Musk, who is surrounded by a cadre of people who always say yes to everything you suggest, and, and, you know, are constantly saying, you are a genius. You're a genius, man. You're a genius. I think, you know, some of these chatbots almost duplicate that mentality. Like, it's like, yeah, I want someone to tell me that whatever I'm doing, I am great, and I am special, and I have inside knowledge that nobody else has. That's a nice

• 58:29Ed Zitron?

  But that is, but that's kind of what I'm getting at.

• 58:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:32Ed Zitron?

  That using a large language will convinces some people that they are in the future and creates this kind of religious feeling around it. I don't know. I need to explore this idea more. I just never, I've seen it in like game FAQs when people would argue between PlayStation and Nintendo and Xbox. I've seen, but not like that. You don't have people just saying the Xbox can do things it can't.

• 58:56Speaker 04

  But it's part of what we're seeing. I think that feeling, it's pervasive in our society right now. Regardless, we have this sort of strong current of anti-expert, right? The people who've studied this for years are no smarter than me. I'm really smart because I have my own special knowledge and nobody else has it. And I'm going to tell you the secret that I've learned that's, you know, really important. I think that Whatever, if you want to call it psychosis or that narcissism, that comes out of 15 years of of social media like that. I am old enough to remember. In fact, Facebook didn't come out until I was already an adult and had a child. I mean, Facebook didn't really become mainstream till I had a two year old kid.

• 59:40Speaker 04

  So I'm old and I remember how sort of society changed and how people interacting with one another changed dramatically as social media became popular. And it was much more about you're on stage all the time and look at my life and your life is better than my life. We, I mean, there's some of that. There's, that's always been around, but it just wasn't so easy to indulge that side of oneself pre-social media. So I think, you know, again, everything that was set in the past just continues along its way. Like I think, again, I don't think AI is necessarily, you know, the one thing that is different. It's a natural outgrowth of a lot of different trends that have been happening for a long time.

• 1:00:25Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. I mean, I keep thinking a long-term Joker make is posting, it's the beginning of history with a big smiley face. Because I, I actually worry that that's what, like, it's not that everything's coming to an end, it's that one era is ending and another is beginning aggressively and loudly.

• 1:00:44Speaker 04

  It's the dawning of the age of Aquarius.

• 1:00:47Ed Zitron?

  All right. I think that's a great place to end it. Matt Rosoff, editor in chief of The Register, thank you so much for joining me.

• 1:00:56Speaker 04

  All right. Thank you, Ed. A lot of fun.

• 1:00:59Ed Zitron?

  Thank you, everyone, to listen. Thank you, everyone, to listening. I'm not going to edit that out. You'll have a monologue this week as well. Maybe I'll chuck you an extra one if I'm feeling generous. Thanks, everyone, for stomaching the four part of last week. And yeah, catch you soon.

• 1:01:20Ed 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.

• 1:01:52Speaker 07

  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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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