Pod Insights Better Offline The Era of the Business Idiot, Part 3 About this episode In part three of this week's three-part Better Offline, Ed Zitron walks you through how the era of the Business Idiot has led to a dramatic deceleration in innovation - and how the tech media must fight back against their ridiculous narratives to save Silicon Valley.
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Transcript 9,083 words · 14 speakers
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2:33 Speaker 04 What is a podcast? A miserable little pile of secrets.
2:48 Speaker 04 I'm Ed Zitron, and welcome to the conclusion of our three-part episode of Better Offline and the phenomenon known as the business idiot. In the first episode, we met our first business idiot, the real prince of them, Satya Nadella, and talked about the origin of the business idiot and the rotten ideology that drives them. Then we talked about the enablers of the business idiots, particularly those in the media. In this episode, I want to tell you about where all this goes. Nothing I've said in this three-part should suggest that the business idiot is weak. In fact, business idiots are in full control. We have too many managers and our most powerful positions are valorized for not knowing stuff, for having a general view that we can take the big picture from, not realizing that the big picture is usually made up of lots of little brushstrokes. Business idiots have a cultural cachet, though.
3:32 Speaker 04 We aspire to be business idiots, and our education pushes people to careers where the goal is to climb from the worker class to the oxygen-starved apex of business idiot mountain. Yet there are eventually consequences for everything being controlled by business idiots. Our current society, an unfair or unjust one dominated by half-broken tech products that make their owners billions and that manipulate and mislead by design, is the real punishment wrought by growth. A brain-draining corporate society, one that leads it to doing illogical things and somehow making money doing so. It doesn't make any fucking sense that generative AI got this big. The returns aren't there, the outcomes aren't there, and any sensible society would have put a gun to ChatGPT's head and aggressively pulled the trigger. Generative AI is symbolic of the future of capitalism.
4:15 Speaker 04 One that celebrates mediocrity and costs billions of dollars. One that surrenders every human work the model can consume and that accepts the destruction of our planet. All because everybody kind of agreed that this is what we're all doing now, with nobody able to give a convincing explanation of what that even is or why we're doing it. Generative AI is revolting both in how overstated its abilities are and in how continually it tests how low a standard somebody will take for a product, both in its outputs and in the desperate companies trying to integrate it into everything. And its proliferation throughout society and organizations is already fundamentally harmful. We're not just drowning in a sea of slop. We're in a constant state of corporate AI beta tests, new features sprouting out of our products like new limbs that sometimes function normally, but often attempt to strangle us.
5:00 Speaker 04 You know, like the stand in that episode of JoJo's Bizarre Stop It. It's unclear if companies forcing these products on us have contempt for us or simply don't know what good looks like. Or perhaps it's both, with the business idiot resenting us for not scarfing down whatever they serve us, as that's what's generally worked before. They don't really understand their customers. They understand what a customer pays for and how a purchase is made. You know, like the leaders of banks and asset managers during the subprime mortgage crisis didn't really think about whether people could pay those mortgages, just that they needed a lot of them to put in a CDO. The business idiot's economy is one run and built for other business idiots. They can only make things that sell to companies that must always be in flux, which is the preferred environment of the business idiot. Because if they're not perpetually starting new initiatives and jumping on new innovations,
5:44 Speaker 04 they'd actually have to interact with the underlying production of the company and the people actually doing the work. Does the software work? Sometimes. Do successful companies exist that sell like this? Sure. But look at today's software and tell me with a straight face that things feel good to use. And something like generative AI was always inevitable. An industry claiming to change the world that never really does so. Full of businesses that don't function as businesses. Full of flimflam and half-truths used to impress people who will likely never interact with it or do so only in a passing way. By chasing out the people that actually build things in favor of the people that sell them, our economy is built on production puppetry, just like generative AI and especially like ChatGPT and Claude. These people are antithetical to what's good in the world
6:25 Speaker 04 and their power deprives us of happiness, the ability to thrive in honestly any true innovation. The business idiot thrives on alienation, on distancing itself from the customer and the thing that they consume and in many ways from society itself. Mark Zuckerberg wants us to have fake friends and he said that to the Wall Street Journal. Sam Altman wants us to have fake colleagues in the form of the agency makes that don't fucking work and increase and an increasingly loud group of executives salivate the idea of replacing us with a fake version of us that will make a shittier version of what we make for a customer that said executive doesn't give a fuck about. And yeah, that is describing a form of slave, especially if it's conscious. I mean, if it's not conscious, it isn't. But the moment you make AGI, you've got a real fucking problem on your hands. They're never gonna do it. Also, what if the AGI is just dumb?
7:10 Speaker 04 What if it doesn't want to work? Anyway, the business idiots are building products for other people that don't interact with the real world. We're no longer the real customers and so we're worth even less than before, which is, as is the case in the world dominated by shareholder supremacy, not all that much to begin with. They don't exist to make us better. The business idiot doesn't really care about the real world or what you do or who you are or anything other than your contribution to their power and wealth. This is why so many squealing little middle managers look up to the musts and altons of the world because they see in them the same kind of specious corporate authoritarian, somebody who's above work and thinking and knowledge and doing stuff. Disgusting. But one of the most remarkable things about the business idiot is their near invulnerability. Modern management is resource control, shifting blame away from the manager who should hold
7:54 Speaker 04 responsibility after all, if you don't, why do you have a fucking job? Onto the laborer, knowing that the organization and the media will back them up. While you may think I'm making a generalization, the 2021 to 2023 anti-remote work push in the media was grotesque proof of where the media's true allegiance lies. The media happily manufactured consent for return to office mandates from large companies by framing remote work as some sort of destructive force, doing all they can to discuss how modern management has no fucking idea how the workplace actually works. Now, these articles were effectively written as fanfiction for managers and bosses demanding that we return to the office, ridiculous statements about how remote work failed young people, which it didn't, or how employees needed remote work more than their employers because the chit chat and lunches and happy hours are so important.
8:38 Speaker 04 They're really not. I'm also gonna link to these in the in the notes. I've written a lot about the remote work push and the people who were pushing for us to return the office. It's actually where I got started. And it really was the ultimate joker-ification for me. It's what actually set me on the path to better offline, because it's when you saw both how little the bosses knew what was going on and how willing people in the media were to support them. And these were people, people writing these stories were journalists that were gonna be forced back to the office and ended up being so. And they were like, yeah, this is actually, it's actually good that we go into the office. And when you ask the journalists, hey, what'd you get at the office? They say, well, one time I ran into someone and we had a good idea, or it was quicker
9:22 Speaker 04 to walk over to someone's desk. Does that mean the work was better? No, but the vibes felt better, I guess. I also know way more people who just fucking hated working in the office. But these articles rarely, if ever, cared about whether remote work was more productive, or the disconnect appeared to be between managers and workers. Now, had any of those reporters ever spoken to an actual worker? They'd say that they valued more time with their families rather than the grind of a daily commute softened with the promise of an occasional company pizza party, which usually happens outside of the typical working hours anyway. And these articles in this period, it was from the very beginning about crushing the life out of a movement that gave workers more flexibility
10:05 Speaker 04 and mobility while suppressing managers' ability to hide how little work they actually did. I do give credit to CNBC in 2023 for saying the quiet part out loud, that, and I quote, "The biggest disadvantage of remote work that employers cite is how difficult it is to observe and monitor employees, because when you can't do that, you have to, ew, actually know what they're doing and understand their work. Jesus Christ." You know what? I'm with the managers. How disgusting. But yet, higher up the chain, the invulnerability continues. CEOs may get fired, I mentioned it before, and more are getting fired than ever, it turns out, although sadly, not the ones we want. They always receive a golden parachute at the end before walking into another role at another organization, doing exactly the same level of nothing. Yet, before that happens, a CEO is allowed
10:49 Speaker 04 to pull basically every lever before they make, they face any kind of accountability. They can lay people off, they can freeze pay, they can move people from salary to contracted workers, they can close down sites, they can offshore, they can cut certain products, they can even spend more fucking money, so they lose less. If you or I misallocate billions of dollars on stupid ideas, we'd be fired and we'd have real trouble finding more employment. We would be well-known for our incompetence and indeed, we would be in real trouble and there would be real problems finding more work if we were a big stupid piece of shit. Yet, when CEOs do that, they get board placements, they get other positions, they can run companies dead into the ground. Let me give you an example.
11:32 Speaker 04 Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, and I quote, "The ultimate computer is the mixed-reality world and that Microsoft would be inventing new computers and new computing in 2016", pushing his senior executives to tell reporters that HoloLens was Microsoft's next wave of computing in 2017, selling hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of headsets to the military in 2019, then debuting HoloLens 2 at Build 2019 only for the on-stage demo to break in real-time, calling for a referendum on capitalism in 2020, then saying he couldn't overstate the breakthrough of the metaverse in 2021. Now, let's hear what Nadella had to say about it, and massive props to Preston Growler of Computer World for writing this piece. Nadella, in that 2021 keynote, made big promises. "When we talk about the metaverse,
12:15 Speaker 04 we're describing both a new platform and a new application type, similar to how we talked about the web and websites in the early 90s. In a sense, the metaverse enables us to embed computing into the real world and to embed the real world into computing." Fucking what? "Bringing real presence to any digital space. For years, we've talked about creating the digital representation of the world, but now we actually have the opportunity to go into that world and participate in it." I just want to be clear, at this time, Microsoft had nothing of the sort. They had like websites, they had Microsoft Teams, they tried to claim Microsoft Teams was metaverse. Fucked up. As Growler notes, Nadella made big promises, beefing up development in projects such as its mixed-reality toolkit, MRTK, the virtual reality workspace project AllSpace VR which it bought back in 2017, its HoloLens virtual
12:59 Speaker 04 realities headset, and its industrial metaverse unit, among others, before firing all members of its industrial metaverse core team along with those behind MRTK and shutting down its AllSpace VR in 2023 before discontinuing HoloLens 2 entirely in 2024.
13:16 Speaker 04 Guess that wasn't anything then, just, you know, it's like a friend of yours is in a really chaotic relationship and they just, the next stage tag like it's not happening, or someone tells you they've had a big moment in their life and they just pretend it doesn't happen, except it was hundreds of millions of dollars and tons of media coverage where people said, "This is what Microsoft's doing next." This is what happened. It's so insane that that happened. We really don't talk enough about how fucking insane the metaverse thing was. Just like a year or so where everyone just played make-believe, completely insane. I, of course, was writing about it at the time and it was very fucking clear. And there are a few people that were negative as well. There are also some people who claim they were negative who weren't. Their time will
13:58 Speaker 04 come. Now, Nadella was transparently copying Meta and Mark Zuckerberg's ridiculous metaverse play and absolutely nothing happened to him as a result. The media, outlets like The Verge and independents like Ben Thompson, happily boosted the metaverse idea when it was announced and conveniently forgot about it the second that Microsoft and Meta wanted to talk about AI. Not really. Both The Verge and Ben Thompson were ready and waiting to do literally the same interview but about a different subject. No consideration of what was previously said at all. A true business idiot never admits wrongdoing and the more powerful the business idiot is, the more likely there are power structures that exist to avoid them having to do so. The media, captured by other business idiots, has become powerfully poisoned by power, deferring to its whims and ideals and treating CEOs with more respect, dignity and intelligence than anyone who ever worked for them. When
14:43 Speaker 04 a big company decides they want to do artificial intelligence, the media's natural reaction is to ask how and why and write down the answer rather than to think about whether it's possible, whether the company might profit, say, by increasing their shareholder price by having whatever they say printed ad verbatim. These people aren't challenged by the media or their employees because their employees are vulnerable all the time and often are encouraged to buy into whatever bullshit de jour there is, like hostages held captive, until the media and corporate culture give them Stockholm syndrome. They're only challenged by shareholders. We're agnostic about idiocy because it's not core to value in any meaningful sense, as we've seen with crypto, the metaverse and AI. And shareholders will tolerate infinite levels of idiocy if it boosts the value of their holdings.
15:29 Speaker 00 Hey what's up? This is Cheekies from Soul Searching with Cheekies. You know those moments when you're out with friends? Everyone is catching up, your food hasn't made it to the table yet, but your ice cold Coca-Cola Zero Sugar arrives first? You tell yourself you're just going to enjoy one sip while you wait. Then the conversation gets going. Somebody tells a funny story, you take another sip here and there, and before you know it, your food shows up and you're thinking, "Wait, where did my drink go?" Well, we've all been there. It's one of those little moments that just seems to happen when you're enjoying good food and even better company. Coca-Cola Zero Sugar has the real Coca-Cola taste you love. With zero sugar. It's one of those drinks that's hard to resist. Whether you're catching up with friends, grabbing lunch, or sitting down to dinner.
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16:25 Speaker 05 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, pay, or sponsored.
16:57 Speaker 06 Hi, it's Kathleen Griffith, co-host of the Unshakeables Podcast. Listen in as Ron and Kelly Moore share their story.
17:06 Speaker 07 I'm Ron Moore.
17:07 Speaker 08 And I'm Kelly Moore. And starting our own business in our 50s was a little scary, but exciting.
17:16 Speaker 07 The biggest advantage was our community. The whole thing about business is relationships.
17:21 Speaker 08 We'll say team a lot, not just our internal team. It's the team of our vendors, the team of our clients.
17:28 Speaker 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."
17:42 Speaker 08 If you work to give, you just see the world differently.
17:45 Speaker 07 I'm gonna help as many people as we can. I can't take it with me.
17:49 Speaker 06 To hear more from Ron and Kelly, listen to The Unshakeables wherever you get your podcasts.
17:57 Speaker 09 She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.
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18:52 Speaker 10 about Zolair. This is an advertisement for Zolair paid for by Genentech and Novartis.
19:01 Speaker 04 It goes further, too. 2021 saw the largest amount of venture capital invested in the last decade, a record-breaking $643 billion, with a remarkable $329.5 billion of that invested in the U.S. alone. Some of the biggest deals include Amazon reseller aggregator Thrasio, which raised $1 billion in October 2021 and filed for bankruptcy in February 2025. Cloud security company Lace Work, which raised $525 million in January 2021, then $1.3 billion in October 2021, and was rumored to be up for sale to Wiz, only for the deal to collapse. And then they ended up selling for about $200 million to another company. And then, of course, there was autonomous car company Cruise, which had hundreds of headlines about it being the future, raised about $2.75 billion in 2021, and was killed
19:46 Speaker 04 off in December 2024 suddenly. The people who lose their livelihoods, those who took stock in lieu of cash compensation, those who end up getting laid off at the end, are always workers, while people like Lacework co-CEO Jay Perick, who oversaw reckless spending and management dysfunction, according to the information, can walk into highly-paid positions at companies like Microsoft, as Jay did in October 2024, a few months after a fire sale, and the one I mentioned before, the $200 billion, million-dollar one even, to a company called Fortinet. Yeah, this is the behind-the-act of studio a bit. I got a little ahead of myself, but I'm not editing it. Why would I? It doesn't matter if these people are wrong, or if they run their companies badly, because the business idiot is infallible and judged to by fellow disconnected business idiots.
20:31 Speaker 04 In a just society, nobody would ever want to touch any of the C-suite that oversaw a company that handed out Nintendo Switches to literally anyone who booked a meeting, as was the case with Lacework. Instead, the stank remains on the employees alone. One point about this, just as an aside: Meta's most recent layoffs were explicitly said to target low performers, needlessly harming the future job prospects of those handed the pink slip in an already fucked tech job market. It was cruel and pointless, and I'm certain a big fat lie. Meta is spending big on AI and has spent big on the Metaverse, which went nowhere, and owns two dying platforms, Instagram and Facebook, and one that's hard to monetize in WhatsApp. It needs to get costs down and improve margins. Layoffs are one way to go, and things are getting bad enough that Meta is now, according to the information, walking around Silicon Valley begging other big tech companies for money
21:15 Speaker 04 to train their open-source Llama LLM. As shit is that is, the low-performance jibe is an unnecessary twist of the knife, demonstrating that Meta would gladly throw its workers under the bus if it serves their interests, because the optics of firing low performers is different to, say, firing a bunch of people because you keep spunking money on dead-end vanity projects and Me Too products that nobody wants or wants to use or can understand. Mark Zuckerberg, I add, owns an island on Hawaii. The idea that he even thinks this much about Meta is disgraceful. Go outside, you fucking freak!
21:46 Speaker 04 Anyway, it's so easy and perhaps inevitable to feel a sense of nihilism about this. Nothing matters, it's all symbolic. A world is filled with companies run by people who don't interact with the business and raise money from venture capitalists that neither run businesses nor really have any experience doing so. And despite the fact that these people exist, several extractions from reality, the things that they do and the decisions they make impact us all. And it's hard to imagine how to fix it. I don't want you to live without hope. Understanding how evil these people are is the first step to things changing. And more people understanding is genuinely important. But we really do live in a system of inequity dominated by people that do not interact with the real world, who have created an entire system run by their fellow business idiots.
22:29 Speaker 04 The rotten economy's growth at all costs manor is a symptom of the grander problem of shareholder supremacy and a single-minded economic focus on shareholder value inevitably ends at an economy run by and for business idiots. There is a line and it ends here with layoffs, the destruction of our planet and our economy and our society and a rising tide of human misery that nobody really knows where it comes from and so we don't know who to blame and for what. If our economy actually worked as a true meritocracy, where we didn't have companies run by people who don't use their products or understand how they're made and who hire similarly specious people, these people would collapse under the pressure of having to know their arse from their ear hole. Yet none of this would be possible without their enabling layers and those layers are teeming with both business idiots and those unfortunate enough to have learned from them.
23:14 Speaker 04 The tech media has enabled every single bubble without exception, accepting every single narrative fed to them by VCs and startups with even critical reporters still accepting the lunacy of companies like OpenAI just because everyone else does too and because the standard has been set of if a company raises money, they're real. Let's be honest, when you remove all the money... Our current tech industry is kind of a disgrace. Our economy is held up by Nvidia, a company that makes most of its money selling GPUs to other companies primarily so that they can start losing money selling software that might eventually make them money, just not today and they're not sure how. Nvidia is defined by massive peaks and valleys as it jumps on trends and bandwagons at the
23:57 Speaker 04 right time, despite knowing that these bandwagons always come to some sort of halt. The other companies feature Tesla, a meme-stock car company with a deteriorating brand and a chief executive famous for his divorces from both reality and multiple women, along with a flagrant racism that may cost the company its life. A company that we're watching die in real time with a stagnant lineup and an actual fucking competition from companies that are spending on innovation. In Europe and elsewhere, BID is eating Tesla's lunch, offering better products for half the price and with far less racism. And this is just the first big Chinese automotive brand to go global. Others like Cherry are enjoying rapid growth outside of China because these cars are actually good and affordable, even when you factor in the things like tariffs.
24:40 Speaker 04 Hey, remember when Tesla fired all those people on its charging network despite the fact that it's one of the most profitable and valuable parts of the business? And they went to have them and had to hire them back because it turns out they actually needed them? This is a good example of managerial alienation, decisions made by non-workers, Elon Musk, who don't understand their customers, their businesses, or the work their employees do. And let's not forget about the Cybertruck, a monstrosity both in how it looks and how it's sold. It's illegal to drive in the majority of developed countries because it's a death trap for drivers and pedestrians alike. Oh, and nobody actually wants it with Tesla sitting on a quarter's worth of inventory they can't sell. Elsewhere is Meta, a collapsing social network of 99% of its revenue based on an advertising
25:22 Speaker 04 model to an increasingly aged population and a monopoly so flagrantly abusive in its contempt for its customers that at times it's difficult to call Instagram or Facebook a social network. Mark Zuckerberg had to admit to the Senate Judiciary Committee that people don't use Facebook as a social network anymore. The reason why is because the platform is so fucking rotten, run by a company alienated from its user base. It's the crepit product actively hostile to anybody trying to use it. And more fundamentally, what's the point of posting on Facebook if your friends won't see it because Meta's algorithm decided it wouldn't drive engagement? Meta is a monument to disconnection, a company that runs in counter to its own mission to connect people, run by Mark Zuckerberg, a man who hasn't had a good idea since he stole it from the Winkle Brothers.
26:06 Speaker 04 I meant to say the Winklevoss brothers, but I'm actually gonna keep it. The solution to all that ails him? Adding generative AI to every part of Meta, which, uh... Shit, it was meant to do something other than burn seventy-two billion dollars in capital expenditures in 2025, right?
26:21 Speaker 04 It isn't clear what was meant to happen, but The Wall Street Journal's Jeff Horowitz reports that Meta's AI chatbots are, and I quote, "empowered to engage in romantic roleplay that can turn explicit, even with children." In a civil society, Zuckerberg would be ousted immediately for creating a pedophile chatbot. Instead, four days after the story ran, everyone cheered they're better than expected earnings report. In Redmond, Microsoft sits atop multiple monopolies, using tariffs as a means to juice flailing Xbox revenue as it invests billions of dollars into OpenAI so that OpenAI can spend billions of dollars on cloud compute, losing billions of dollars in the process, requiring Microsoft to invest further money to keep them alive. All because Microsoft wanted generative AI and Bing. What a fucking waste.
27:04 Speaker 04 And they're also raising the cost of their office suite too, while... Which is only something they've been able to hold on to because of an underhanded bullshit fest from their antitrust trial from the 90s. Amazon lumbers listlessly through life. Its giant labor-abusing machine shipping things overnight at whatever cost is necessary to crush the life out of any other possible source of commerce. Its cloud services and storage arm unsure of who to copy next, dumping billions into Anthropic as a means of creating revenue for their dead-end products. Is it Microsoft? Is it Google? Who knows? Who knows what Amazon is anymore? But one analyst believes it's making five whole billion dollars in revenue from AI in 2025, and you know how much they've put in capital expenditures this year? A hundred and five billion dollars in capital expenditures.
27:47 Speaker 04 There are slot machines with better ROI than this bullshit. Again, Amazon is a company that's totally exploitative of its customers. No longer acting as a platform that helps people find the shit they need, but directing them to products that pay the most for prime advertising real estate, no matter whether they're good or safe. Let's be clear. Amazon's recklessness will kill someone if it hasn't already. The products they allow on there are not safe. They do not give a fucking shit.
28:26 Speaker 00 Hey what's up? This is Cheekies from Soul Searching with Cheekies. You know those moments when you're out with friends? Everyone is catching up. Your food hasn't made it to the table yet, but your ice cold Coca-Cola Zero Sugar arrives first? You tell yourself you're just going to enjoy one sip while you wait. Then the conversation gets going. Somebody tells a funny story, you take another sip here and there, and before you know it, your food shows up and you're thinking, wait, where did my drink go? Well, we've all been there. It's one of those little moments that just seems to happen when you're enjoying good food and even better company. Coca-Cola Zero Sugar has the real Coca-Cola taste you love with zero sugar. It's one of those drinks that's hard to resist, whether you're catching up with friends, grabbing lunch, or sitting down to dinner.
29:10 Speaker 00 And since it's zero sugar, you can always order another when you're ready. That's exactly why it's just too good to wait. Try it for yourself. Coca-Cola Zero Sugar. Real Coke taste, zero sugar. It's too good to wait.
29:22 Speaker 05 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.
29:54 Speaker 06 Hi, it's Kathleen Griffith, co-host of the Unshakeables Podcast. Listen in as Ron and Kelly Moore share their story.
30:03 Speaker 07 I'm Ron Moore.
30:04 Speaker 08 And I'm Kelly Moore. And starting our own business in our 50s was a little scary, but exciting.
30:12 Speaker 07 The biggest advantage was our community. The whole thing about business is relationships.
30:17 Speaker 08 We'll say team a lot, not just our internal team, it's the team of our vendors, the team of our clients.
30:24 Speaker 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.
30:38 Speaker 08 If you work to give, you just see the world differently.
30:42 Speaker 07 I'm gonna help as many people as we can. I can't take it with me.
30:46 Speaker 06 To hear more from Ron and Kelly, listen to The Unshakeables wherever you get your podcasts.
30:54 Speaker 09 She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.
31:07 Speaker 10 Zolair 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one of more foods. While taking Zolair, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolair. Zolair may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolair should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolair is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolair.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist
31:49 Speaker 10 about Zolair. This is an advertisement for Zolair paid for by Genentech and Novartis.
31:58 Speaker 04 But then there's the worst of them: Google. Most famous for its name's sake, a search engine that has been juiced as hard as possible and will continue to be juiced before the inevitable antitrust sentencing that will rob Google of its power, along with the severance of its advertising monopoly along with it. But don't worry, Google has a generative AI thing for some reason, and no, you don't have a choice about using it because they've now replaced Google Assistant with Google Gemini and Google Search all but requires you to use their AI. They burn money for no reason. It sucks. And at no point do any of these companies seem to be focused on making our lives better or selling
32:39 Speaker 04 us any kind of real future. They exist to maintain the status quo where cloud computing allows them to retain their previous fiefdoms. They're alienated from people, they're alienated from workers, they're alienated from consumers, and they're alienated from the world. They're deeply antisocial, they're narcissistic, they're sociopathic, and they're misanthropic, as demonstrated by Zuck's moronic AI social network comments. And AI is a symptom of a reckoning of this stupidity and hubris. They cut, they cut, they cut, they cut, they cut some more and then they stagnated. Their hope is a product that will be adopted by billions of imaginary customers and companies, and will allow them to cut further without becoming just a P O. Box and a domain name.
33:21 Speaker 04 We have to recognize that what we're seeing right now with generative A I isn't a fluke or a bug, but a feature of a system that's rapacious and short-term by its very nature, and doesn't define value as we do, because value gets defined by a faceless shareholder as growth. The system can only exist with the contribution of the business idiot. These are the vanguard, the foot soldiers of this system, and a key reason why everything is so terrible all the time, why nothing seems to be getting better. Breaking from that status quo would require a level of bravery that they do not have, and perhaps isn't possible in the current economic system. These people are powerful, and they have big platforms. There are people like Derek Thompson, famed co-author of The Abundance Agenda, who celebrates the idea of a fictitious version of Chat G P T
34:06 Speaker 04 that can entirely plan and execute a five-year-old's birthday party. Or his co-author Ezra Klein, who, while recording a podcast where his researchers likely listened, talked proudly about replacing their work with OpenAI's broken deep research product. Because anything that can be outsourced must be, and all research is is looking at stuff that's relevant if you're a fucking idiot. And really, that's the most grotesque part of the business idiot. They see every part of our lives as a series of inputs and outputs. They boast about how many books they've read, rather than the content of said books, or the way they made them feel, about how many hours they work, even though they never, ever, ever work that many, about how high-level they are in a video game they don't actually play, about the money they've raised, and the scale they've raised it at,
34:47 Speaker 04 and about how expensive and fancy their kitchen gadgets are, even if they use the wrong oils. Everything is dominance, acquisition, growth, and possession over any lived experience, because their world is one where the journey does not matter, because their journeys are riddled with privilege and persecution of others in the pursuit of success. These people don't want to automate work, they want to automate existence. They fantasize about hitting a button and something happening, because experiencing "living" is beneath them, or at least your lives and your wants and your joys are. They don't want to plan their kids' birthday parties, they don't want to research things, they don't value culture, or art, or beauty. They want to skip to the end, they want to hit fast forward on anything, because human struggle is for the poor, the unworthy. And the uneducated.
35:31 Speaker 04 When you're steeped in privilege and have earned everything basically through a mixture of stolen labor and office pantomime, the idea of effort is always a negative. The process of creation, of affection, of love, of kindness, of using time not just for an action or output, is disgusting to the business idiot because those are the times that could be focused on themselves, or some nebulous self-serving vision that is when stripped back to its fundamental truth, either moronic or malevolent. They don't realize that you hire a worker not just for the output, but for their actual labor and their experience in creating that labor and their understanding of the world around it, which is why they don't see why it's so insulting to outsource their interactions with human beings. You'll notice that these people never bring up actual examples of automating actual work,
36:15 Speaker 04 the mind-numbing grunt work that we all face in the workplace, because they either don't really know what that is, or they don't really give a shit about what it is. Their problems are the things that frustrate them, like dealing with other people or existing outside of the gilded circles of socialite fucks and pleurocrats, or just things that are inevitable facets of working life, like reading an email. Your son's birthday party or a conflict with a friend can indeed be stressful, but these are not problems to be automated. These are the struggles that make us human, the things that make us grow, the things that make us who we are, which isn't a problem for anybody other than somebody who doesn't believe they need to change in any way. It's both powerful and powerless at the same time. A nihilistic way of seeing our lives as a collection of events we accept or dismiss
36:58 Speaker 04 like a system, prompt, the desperate pursuit of such efficient living that you barely feel a thing until you die. I spent years talking about these people without giving them a name because categorizing anything is difficult. I can't tell you how long it took me to synthesize the rotten economy from the broader trends I saw in tech and elsewhere, how long it took me to thread that particular needle, to identify the various threads that unified events that are otherwise separate and distinct.
37:23 Speaker 04 I am but one person. Everything you have read in my newsletter or articles I've written or heard on my podcast to this point has been something I've had to learn. Building an argument and turning it into words, often at the same time that other people read, doesn't really come naturally to anyone. It's something you have to work deliberately at. You might have talent, but you have to work towards it. It's imperfect. There are fuck-ups. I sometimes mispronounce names and words, including my own name, which Matt Asowski has always been kind enough not to laugh at me about. These podcasts and newsletters, they increase in length and breadth and have so many links and I'll never change my process because part of said process is learning, relearning, processing, messaging Casey, saying, "Casey, I don't understand this," arguing with Casey a little bit, coming up with another idea.
38:05 Speaker 04 An accord is, I text Matt Hughes, I talk with Robert Evans, I go back and forth with everyone. I get more pissed off than I write and I rewrite and I speak and so on and so forth. This process makes what I do possible and the idea of someone automating it disgusts me, not because I'm special or important, but because my work is not the result of me reading a bunch of links or writing a bunch of words. The script for this piece is not just about 13,000 words long, it's the result of more than a million words, probably more than that, that I wrote before it. The hundreds of stories I read in the past, the hours and hours of conversations with friends and editors, years of accumulating knowledge and yes, growing with the work itself. I, as a person, have grown with this show, thanks to the wonderful feedback I get from
38:47 Speaker 04 all of you, from the conversations we have on the Reddit or just the emails I get, the occasional one of you finds myself on, which is really quite scary, but not many of you do, and please don't look. The thing is, imperfections are what make us human. Imperfections are what make art so great. The fun things that happen in our life are never from a moment of perfection or from crystallizing something that is immaculate. Perhaps the timing is perfect, perhaps we're in the right place at the right time, but nothing about us is perfect and through those imperfections we grow and we thrive. Business idiots don't give a fuck about that. Sam Altman doesn't give a fuck about that. Sachin Adella doesn't give a fuck about that. They think they're fucking perfect.
39:32 Speaker 04 But true art and true joy and true solidarity is what's needed to dispatch with these people. And to stop what they're doing. And really, the biggest thing that we can do early on, the real starting block is anyone within the tech media, listen to this. We need to change. We need to change how we cover these companies. We need to change the, honestly, everything needs to be inverted. Trusting a company based on how much money it has and how big it is, is the wrong way to go about this business. Business idiots have learned that and they have moved their marketing strategies to create metrics that journalists accept. And will print and then they will sound good for people that don't know what they're talking about. Because the journalists don't even bother to pull the metrics apart themselves.
40:16 Speaker 04 And I understand why. Everyone's doing what everyone else is doing. But we can change things. But you as a listener, how can you change things? You're already doing it. Over the last year, I've seen a remarkable growth in just regular people being willing to push back against these narratives. In pushing back in their businesses. Also, those of you with children can teach them not to aspire to be a fucking manager or an executive unless they know their fucking work. It is that simple. And I know it feels kind of bleak right now with everything going on in California, with everything going on with the government, with everything going on with OpenAI. But the amount of stories about how AI is going to take everything and take everything we have and recreate it in a shitty way. The fact that they're so desperate means that they're scared.
41:01 Speaker 04 And they're scared of the fact that you are willing to talk about this and you are willing to spit in their face. If you don't want to use AI, don't use AI. If you are curious about what it does, don't bother looking. Or fuck around with the free version a bit so that you only lose the money. If these things could automate you, they'd be automating you already. If they were close to doing so, they would be previewing the ways in which they do so. They're fucking scared. While the era of the business idiot is happening right now, it could potentially be coming to an end. Because as this movement ends, and I said this in the Rockcom bubble a year ago, they don't have any more growth markets. This is the end for them. I'm not saying the end of the companies, they'll work something out. But they don't have double-digit growth in them past the next year.
41:45 Speaker 04 The revenues are small and you, the listener, who've been sitting there the whole time saying, why the fuck does everyone say this, this thing is amazing? Whenever they use ChatGPT and not really understanding why. You're not the weird one, they are.
42:01 Speaker 04 They cannot beat us because we actually do things. If you're a business idiot yourself listening to this, open a book. Go and learn something. Go and talk to a customer. Start your car in the garage. I don't really know. I really don't encourage you to do that necessarily. But the point I'm making is this. Middle managers ruin lives. Business idiots ruin lives. I think everyone listening to this is going to have experienced several of them. The fact that management as a concept and that management as a discipline has died is a big part of this as well. Labor is really fucking hurting right now. I realize I'm kind of rambling, but I'll end on the simpler note. If you are around people who are scared, be scared with them.
42:45 Speaker 04 Offer them kindness, offer them solidarity and a generous ear. Support their work. Support independent creators. Support people at the Vox Union who are currently battling against a company that saw fit to give Kara Swisher tens of millions of dollars. The continually push his powerful people like the CEO of Airbnb, which is a company which has ruined pretty much rentals everywhere. I don't know why Neil Ippett had to talk to him about his house and the cat skills. That happened. When you hear these stories, push back on them. Say, I don't like this. Say fuck this. Support the Vox Union. In the event that the Vox Union does not get their contract, do not visit a single fucking Vox site. You must walk away from that.
43:28 Speaker 04 Support workers, support artists, support creators, support the people who actually do work and fuck the business idiots.
43:44 Speaker 04 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.
44:16 Speaker 11 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.
44:49 Speaker 05 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.
45:21 Speaker 09 She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.
45:34 Speaker 10 Zolair 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolair, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolair. Zolair may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolair should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolair is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolair.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolair.
46:17 Speaker 10 This is an advertisement for Zolair, paid for by Genentech and Novartis.
46:21 Speaker 12 You know when you try a new food and suddenly it's like, wait, how did I not know about this? Ryan Seacrest here. That's how people are reacting to Kupi mayo. The one with the red cap you've probably seen on TikTok. What makes it different? Egg yolks. Kupi uses egg yolks only, giving it this rich umami flavor that elevates just about anything. Chefs use it, restaurants use it, food lovers use it. You never tried it? Find the red cap and see what everyone's talking about. Kupi, the original Japanese mayonnaise.
46:50 Speaker 13 This episode is brought to you by Bobcat. They started the compact equipment industry through grit, determination, and a whole lot of... Think we can't do that? Watch us. They set standards, broke records, empowered people to build bigger and higher, to dig deeper, to make the impossible possible. We've all been there, with doubters telling us what we can't do. Who cares what they think? We don't need their permission or forgiveness. We just get things done. So go ahead and doubt me, judge me, challenge me. But when the time comes, watch me. Bobcat.
47:27 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.
Previous The Era of the Business Idiot, Part 2 Next Radio Better Offline: Pablo Torre and David Roth Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
