Tech Used to Be Bleeding Edge, Now it’s Just Bleeding

00:19
Speaker 1
Sir, he's uploading the virus. Eagle one, the package is being delivered.

00:24
Speaker 2
You so Ed, thank you for coming onto the show. Can you tell people who you are, who this lovely voice is, and what your new project is?

00:35
Speaker 1
So, I'm Ed Zetron. I run a PR firm called Easypr. I also write the where's your Ed at? Newsletter, and I have an upcoming show with iHeartRadio and Coolzone Media, the Better offline podcast. It's a weekly tech show.

00:47
Speaker 2
And what's theme of the weekly tech show, other than we shouldn't be online at all, apparently.

00:53
Speaker 1
Well, something I've noticed with a lot of tech coverage, and principally tech podcasts, is that many of them don't seem to actually cover anything from an informed perspective. It's either two guys limply discussing something in a way that somehow makes you know, less by the end of it, or it's one extremely pallid man mumbling out questions, forgetting them mid sentence, and then asking them for a second time in a broken manner. I'm not talking about anyone specifically, especially not someone called Lex. And the problem I've also found with a lot of tech coverage in general, I've seen this from both sides, is that I actually really believe that the format of objective journalism, which is going to get me in some trouble, I realize saying it is actually somewhat limited for the tech industry.

01:42
Speaker 1
We actually need more opinion journalism within tech because we have this in politics, we have this in business, we have this in all sorts of ways, but tech, it's very limited. And I actually think great opinion journalism is super informative because, look, everyone is biased. There's no such thing as true objectivity. And thus going into something and saying, this is going to be my opinion. This is going to be my informed opinion from the executive side, from the reporting side, from the consumer side, I can tell you what my perspective is, and I'm fiery. And I have a perspective and an opinion, and it's something that I've seen that has really resonated with my newsletter in a way that's actually genuinely surprised me. People just want to know what's someone who knows what's going on.

02:28
Speaker 1
They want to know what they think and then take their own conclusion away from it. I don't want to be one of those angry hellions like the Jesse singals of the world or the freaky substac weirdos, Glenn Greenwald stars who are like, I'm not here to tell people what to be pissed off at. That's not my job. My job however, is to say, here are the agendas in play, here are the consequences of these agendas. Here's what I think. And then you come out of it, and it's going to combine narrative and interview formats, and it's going to be a lot of fun.

02:58
Speaker 2
So before we hit record, you were explaining the difference between american and british pr.

03:04
Speaker 1
Yes.

03:04
Speaker 2
And this sounds like a british model of journalism, too.

03:08
Speaker 1
Yes. It's something that I wouldn't say. I haven't lived in England since 2008. And it's something you'll see in, like, news night, for example. Not an exact format, but it's this combination of narrative journalism. So leading you through a story, saying, this is what it's about, here are the things that you might not know, here are the things you do know and where they fit in, and then mixed with real interviews, something that genuinely frustrates me with tech interviews and with american interviews in general. Is this amnesiac effect, kara swisher being one of the worst for this? It's like, ask questions, sit, listen to answer, and go, okay, and then move on to the question after it, versus saying, hey, wait a second, what you just said doesn't make any sense. Sam altman is probably the biggest beneficiary of this.

03:57
Speaker 1
Elon musk as well, though I think that elon Musk would just start crying if you asked the second question. But the point is, a lot of the analysis is done with a fear of alienating the source. And the truth is, as we've discussed with other things you're dealing with, sources get alienated, even if you play completely by their rules. And I'm not looking to do this. I'm going to bring you the real truth thing. I don't think that's fair or good for the format, but, yes, the british format is generally more investigative. It's more opinionated, it's a bit more fiery, it's a bit more emotional, and that's what people learning about tech deserve. We don't need this kind of flat journalism that a lot of tech journalism is. And I should add, there is a good space for that.

04:50
Speaker 1
Everything doesn't have to be fiery, emotional and all that. And actually, I will say someone who's doing this very well, Joanna Stern from the Wall Street Journal and Nile Patel from the Verge, those two, they do opinionated reviews content, and it doesn't have to be over the top emotional like I will because I've got some fire. I've got that dog in me. But you can come at it from a personal perspective and say, this is my opinion. Nile actually did a really good job bringing Addie Robertson in from the Verge as well. Great work in VR. She's covering the Zuckerberg hearings right now. I believe those people are doing great job. A great job.

05:29
Speaker 1
I think there are other organizations that have podcasts who may be major newspapers that are grey, that have this kind of very empty, echoing format where they just go, yeah, Mark Zuckerberg did say that, didn't. That's interesting. Cryptocurrency, that's interest. Bollocks. Complete nonsense. Serves no one. Billions of dollars lost in cryptocurrency from real people because of that kind of approach. And I have just ranted quasi aimlessly for a minute there. I apologize.

05:59
Speaker 3
No, but I think it's very relevant. Especially, I think about it, talking about access and how in covering culture and covering celebrity related topics, it ends up being a culture of access journalism. I think the best example of this is the person who was hired for that Gwinnett Taylor Swift reporter position, especially with people like Sam Bankman Fried, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg. They're not going to talk to people, for the most part, if they're not put in a good light. They have this choice of who they're going to actually give the interview to, or even on the consumer tech side of things, who apple is going to give the early headset to. And I think something like CEs, too, is a really good example of this.

06:47
Speaker 1
Oh, Ces. Oh, ces, what a show. What a town. If you'd have knocked me out and told me that I had woken up in 2018 this CES, I would have believed you. It felt like nothing changed. It didn't feel like there was much new. There were products there that got written about, that were literally written about in 2018. There were things in there that just example, I'm trying to remember the one that I really should have got to be such a smart ass about it. I should probably have that ready. But it was one of these weird gadgets where it was like a self heating thing. Damn it. I'm going to have to find this out later. Now I'm going to remember the moment we're done. But you could think about it, but.

07:27
Speaker 3
We'Ll come back to it.

07:28
Speaker 1
There are multiple products that get written about at ces that have appeared or have been appearing at CES for years. The spacetop laptop, there's a good one, this ar laptop that allegedly gives you an 100 inch screen. I think that one was written about numerous times. And it might actually be shipping now. I saw some mid 2023 coverage for it, and it feels at times like there is just genuine memory issues with ces. And I think that it's tough to do because CEs is a complete mess. It's just a complete mess. You go through a hundred things, and then you're like, oh, God, what is it that was relevant? I personally, it washed over me. I went with the cool zone people, this ces, and it just washed over me. My brain was just.

08:16
Speaker 1
I was sitting there just being like, okay, what do I even remember? I saw a thing that said the Chat GPT for animals. That really upset me, that, like, I began to disassociate when I heard about that.

08:28
Speaker 3
Wait, sorry.

08:29
Speaker 1
Yeah, it isn't as fun as it sounds. It's like a Chat GPT thing where you can take a picture of your pet and it might say something's wrong with it.

08:43
Speaker 2
It's like WebMd for your dog or your cat.

08:46
Speaker 3
You take a picture, they have that for house plants, and that's actually pretty cool.

08:51
Speaker 1
You take a photo of a plant, but that's what that was. And I was both upset that it existed, but more upset that it wasn't as dark. I thought it was going to be like, my dog barks into this and Chat GPT says, my dog has been radicalized or something.

09:05
Speaker 3
I would prefer that my dog has.

09:07
Speaker 1
Gone woke, but the thing that I'm thinking of, by the way, was the spacetop laptop. It's this AR glasses laptop that's just a crappy Android thing. It was at both CES 2023 and CES 2024 and has been around for years. No one appears to have asked in this period when this thing will actually goddamn ship. This thing is thousands of dollars, and it's just, Jesus Christ. These people raised $61 million as well. This is what the problem is with a lot of tech journalism. These things feel like they are minor. Like, okay, it's okay that this company has done this, but okay, if there are hundreds of people out there who have spent thousands of dollars preordering these things that never ship, the job should be to follow up on these, set a calendar, reminder, I don't care. But I feel that just.

10:00
Speaker 1
And I realize that this is a kind of an impossible mission. There's so much to follow up. There's tons of layoffs, there's tons of news all the time. But this is something where I feel like everyone is being let down, and Ces as a show is a problem. I think it's problematic for the industry. I don't think it contributes at least to journalism. And I feel like the process of following it around can at times lead people in a strange place. Like, there was a physical keyboard for your iPhone at this CES, or it was like, launched around that time. What no one revealed in the journalism around this was nobody played with this thing. Nobody actually used it. They just posted the picture and said, this is cool, which is fine, but at the same time, that is valuable information. The rabbit.

10:57
Speaker 1
Did you hear about the rabbit that wasn't even launched at CES? They just timed it with CES and that thing. No idea when it ships. No real explanation as to what it will do. Just for listeners who might not know what this is, the Rabbit R one.

11:11
Speaker 3
I have no idea what this is.

11:14
Speaker 1
First of all, it had the single worst intro video I've ever seen for a product, ever. Just very awkward. But it's this little tablet thing that connects to your phone and allegedly can connect to all of your apps. And then you can be like, rabbit, take me, get me an Uber home, and also order me doordash from Honeymee. So it arrives when I get that. And allegedly this thing will connect to it and then do all the things for you. Now, you'll also notice from a lot of the coverage, no one really appears to have questioned this. And it's insane. Like, that drives me bonkers. This thing raised millions of dollars in sales already, and it just feels like just a tiny bit more introspection, just a little bit more.

12:04
Speaker 3
It's Siri, but the Internet of things. And that 2018 but 2024 comparison now feels very apt.

12:12
Speaker 2
It's another level of abstraction between you and the task mediated by a piece of hardware you don't need, right?

12:19
Speaker 1
Yes. And it's just like, okay, brilliant. Now what? When is this shipping? Who knows? It has a little 360 degree camera that for some reason will look at stuff and then take actions. But in the weird 25 minutes long, I think demonstration and launch of this product where this guy, who is not Steve Jobs, does a Steve Jobs style speech and it's pretty bad. He at one point turns and looks at this poster of Rick Asley and goes, oh, hi, Rick. Then holds this rabbit thing up and it searches and it takes way too long. It has, bless them for actually being honest about the speed at which it indexes things, but it was very slow and it really slowly just sits there loading and then it starts playing. Rick Astley's never going to give you up.

13:07
Speaker 1
And the guy turns to the camera and. Huh. Did I just get Rick rolled in my own video? And yes, that is bordering on exactly how he says it. How is this the shit that everyone's going nuts for? This is bad looking. I realize I'm in public relations. I hype things for a living, but even if I saw a client put that crap out, I would be like, no, let me do it. Let anyone do it. Let literally anyone else do this, because this is complete crap. And to your point, when we just explained this to you, who is this for? How is saying something with words to a computer less work than just tapping an app? I just don't know. I also don't want to hand off that much control. Anyway, there's always stuff at Ces that pisses me off.

13:57
Speaker 1
But something about this one just felt like there wasn't really much new. There really wasn't. And it just felt like there were a few cool things, like the transparent OLED, which was fine and cool and good. Everyone clap, clap. That looks cool. Glad that exists, I guess, even if there is really no. But you know what? I'll actually forgive stuff that doesn't have a point if it's cool. But it has to be both.

14:22
Speaker 2
It has to be both pointless and cool.

14:24
Speaker 1
Yeah, well, something can be pointless if it's cool, if it's, like a proof of concept that feels like the soul of Ces to me. But the problem is, there was a lot of stuff that was pointless and wasn't cool. It's just so strange.

14:38
Speaker 2
How long have you been going?

14:40
Speaker 1
Ten years now.

14:41
Speaker 2
Ten years?

14:42
Speaker 1
Ten years.

14:42
Speaker 3
Oh, man.

14:43
Speaker 2
How different was the mood ten years ago?

14:46
Speaker 1
It was the same. It felt the same. It felt the same. Which is probably good for the tech industry. It just felt like this thing where everyone was like, well, I guess I'm here. It didn't have good despondency before. Like, the year before. There was genuinely, like, a malaise on Ces.

15:07
Speaker 2
It does feel like we keep. Wait, actually explain the malaise.

15:13
Speaker 1
So the first ces after the pandemic waned. Not going to say the pandemic's over, was very much a. It wasn't clear whether ces would ever continue. Everyone kind of felt like there's a degree of. I don't know if this show is toast or not. I think this year it felt like it was back, so to speak. I think everyone was so happy to have AI crap to talk about. Oh, good. This is good. What will it do? Who goddamn knows?

15:47
Speaker 2
Yeah. As long as it's got AI in the title. We can get an evaluation and make some money, right?

15:52
Speaker 1
Yeah.

15:52
Speaker 3
It's really funny because it's like the last ces that I covered at my last job doing consumer tech was CES 2020.

16:02
Speaker 1
That was a weird year where everyone.

16:04
Speaker 3
Got sick for no good reason. Nobody could explain.

16:07
Speaker 1
I got really sick. But I know I didn't get Covid because the way I got sick was not anything like when I actually got Covid quite a while. I got, like, a massive stomach bug. But I think that also saved me because I couldn't go to the floor because I just felt like dying.

16:20
Speaker 3
Just some casual for your sins.

16:24
Speaker 1
I just got punished by God for.

16:26
Speaker 3
Attending this show, for going to Las.

16:29
Speaker 1
Vegas and trying to. I live in Vegas, so it's actually pretty convenient.

16:32
Speaker 3
Oh, I see. You just needed a stay at home weekend.

16:36
Speaker 1
Yeah, well, I had a hotel room, so I got to stay in a hotel. It was pain in the ass, the whole thing.

16:43
Speaker 2
So speaking of AI, I know this is to show people how the sausage was made. We had a list of questions, but after I sent it, like a whole bunch of things happened. So I have to bring some of them up in a pretty dismal mood, all things considered today. But do you see the story in Reuters about the plummeting market cap after the Alphabet and Microsoft report for AI?

17:12
Speaker 1
Yes, I did. I didn't get a good look at it, but I'm aware of the story.

17:16
Speaker 2
What do you think about all of this and this part of the AI hype?

17:23
Speaker 1
Sorry. No, you go.

17:26
Speaker 2
No, I was about to be pallid and ask a question three times, so please.

17:30
Speaker 1
Well, my general thing is, I actually think, and this is not from a. I'm not technological enough to program with AI, so caveat important, but my general feeling is that we might be approaching the limits of what AI can actually do right now. For a while, we had that massive jump in what Chat GPT could do. The initial bump from Chat GPT was really something. It's like, wow, this can do stuff. Though at times, hard to tell what that stuff is, but I think we're actually approaching a point where people might be thinking, okay, now what? You keep talking about why this is the future. Robert Evans, the calls I made, he quoted someone at CES saying, oh, the biggest danger of AI is not being on board.

18:18
Speaker 1
But I think people are beginning to ask a very simple question, which is, what does that mean? What is it we are missing out on here? What is it that is happening or not happening? And I think the answer is not that much. I think that there are things automate like, there are automations and there are some useful use cases for GPT, fine. But I think that companies in general are now realizing, oh shit, this doesn't solve all my problems at all. I've been telling my board about this for a while and doesn't appear to actually do anything. What's that about? Anyway, I'm going to go and sell my stock, and I think that these plummeting valuations are the real vulture capitalist types are not seeing the savings they wanted to. They've not replaced the entire workforce.

19:18
Speaker 1
And I just think that it has got to the point where people are perhaps a little earlier than most hype cycles saying, okay, now what's this crap do? Why am I excited about this? I've had enough of theoreticals. You tell me what this thing is going to do that changes my life, and it isn't doing it. It isn't helping evil businessmen replace workers. It isn't reliable enough to do that. It isn't helping in a measurable way with people. And I saw someone on Twitter the other day say, oh well, it's the fastest adopted software of all time. And it's like, okay, but who gives a shit? I'm sorry, I really hate to sound pessimistic here, but do something. Show me. Why do I have to be excited about this shit?

20:05
Speaker 1
Why do I have, I mean, if I'm paid to, I will, but why is the average person excited about this? And why is a corporate businessman excited about this? What about this saves them money or makes them money? And the answer is not that much. And indeed, it's quite expensive to run. The compute requirements are quite high. So we're in a shit creek lack of paddle situation, I think. I also think that there is a desperation on the part of people like Sam Altman where they're realizing, oh shit, I don't really have enough to flog.

20:41
Speaker 3
Here I am trying to think of why, aside from just the cool tech advance aspect of it, why the average person would be super excited about AI right now.

20:54
Speaker 1
And that's the thing, I imagine that there are going to be things about it that are actually really useful. I know it's inevitable because you've kind of seen this with some of the new Galaxy phones, for example, that you'll have like live translation and you'll have live transcription. That's super useful. I think that will be super awesome and useful. I'm not going to pretend like that won't be useful for me and many others, that is a direct consumer benefit. I think stuff like that's going to be great. Is that an entire bloody universe of investments that is the new tech infrastructure that saves this industry? Probably not. It's not. It's not like.

21:35
Speaker 1
Because when there was the whole going back to 2010s now, when there was the whole, like, software as a service boom, the reason that took off, in my opinion, is that was a business model plus a way of delivering software and of monetizing software. The inherent excitement there was. Oh, shit. There's an actual business model here. It's software as a service you sell by the sea. It's become the foundational to the tech industry. And it's like, where is that with AI? AI is just expensive.

22:06
Speaker 2
Do you think tech is looking to save itself?

22:09
Speaker 1
Yes, I think. Well, okay, rephrase the question. Are you asking if tech's trying to save itself in a good way or save itself economically?

22:21
Speaker 2
Economically, yes. I don't know if I care if it's trying to save itself in a good way.

22:28
Speaker 1
Well, it is.

22:29
Speaker 2
That makes sense.

22:30
Speaker 1
Don't worry. It isn't. It's not trying to save itself. Like, that's absolutely not what's happening. No problem there. I think that. Yes, I think that right now there is a big. And I've written about this a few times that I believe Mark Andreessen led to probably more deaths of more startups than anyone else in history. His push of the software is eating the world model. This idea that tech stocks were not related to actual valuable businesses, but more related to. I don't know whether it's something that I can flog and then eventually get an acquisition out of. Yeah, that model has driven tech down many dark roads. And I feel that now tech is trying to find a way to make tech valuable again.

23:21
Speaker 1
And AI theoretically seemed like it would be really good for that because it actually does something unlike the metaverse or crypto. But the problem is it's expensive. It's really goddamn expensive. And also, for what? What's it doing? How is this changing anyone's life? How is this helping anyone? Sure, you can come up with little use cases, and you can find ways that uninventive cretans can write anodyne business copy at scale. Cool. That's great. However, what does that do for the average person? The average person who, by the way, and in my latest piece, I kind of wrote this, the average person who has just had tech take a big dump on them for a decade. Tech has helped. But tech has also dramatically accelerated the pace at which invades and monetizes our lives. Average person has just seen tech laugh in its face.

24:16
Speaker 1
Two years ago, three years ago, I guess the whole crypto boom, the metaverse boom, everyone kind of, I think at once saw everyone in tech getting rich. And the things that tech was offering just didn't exist. The metaverse didn't exist. It was all a lie. So many people, journalists fell for that. Every single person who wrote an incredulous piece about the metaverse. You led people down a dark path. You helped rich people get rich, and you did not inform anyone. I think that was a big point at which a lot of people said, you know what? Tech industry can eat my ass. I don't blame anyone who felt like that. I kind of felt like it, and I saw through the con. And it's frustrating as well, because tech doesn't have any interest in saving itself.

25:05
Speaker 1
Tech wants to make more money, and it's fine, whatever. It's a business. But at least in the 2010s, it felt like tech was making money while making things cooler or more fun or more capable instead of more expensive and more toll boothy.

25:22
Speaker 3
All right, cyber listeners, we're going to take a break. We'll be right back.

25:29
Speaker 2
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Speaker 1
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28:17
Speaker 3
All right. Welcome back, cyber listeners. We're continuing our conversation with Ed Zitrin. I want to talk a little bit more about what that was like. I wouldn't say the golden days, but how things were before we all became. I feel very cynical about it all. I'm just thinking back to the early days of iPhone releases and how people would camp out and you'd see on the evening news all of these stories about someone being the first person to get the new iPhone model, which is, I guess, still a thing.

28:50
Speaker 1
Nowhere near.

28:51
Speaker 3
I don't think it's. It's. It's not the same. Yeah. And I don't think that's just because we buy things online more now. I think it's just a general environment thing.

29:01
Speaker 1
I think people are just less excited about tech because also the pace of innovation has precipitously dropped. I mean, it's just new. Things are not as new anymore. Computer. The jumps in computer speed are not as fast.

29:17
Speaker 2
Yeah, Moore's law plateaus, right? You can only make semiconductors so tiny.

29:22
Speaker 1
Beyond Moore's law, though, because a great deal of the innovations with the iPhone came from software. Siri was kind of wanky, but was still something that helped people and that was new and it's got better over time. It's dog shit for a while, but there were things that you could look at in your phone and say, this is cool. When Uber first started, before we. And people also were less suspicious of tech because tech hadn't really pissed off everyone yet. Everyone remembered the.com boom, but there was still some hope, there was still some excitement. But I think people forget that the 2010s were also full of just like, little daggers in people. Prism, of course, massive government metadata connection from almost every company in tech. I think that one kind of flowed over people.

30:10
Speaker 1
But it was the first time people realized during that time, cloud computing was growing. Dropbox was actually, I believe, one of the name parties within Prism giving a access to the NSA, even if they claim it was just foreign nationals. I don't know. I don't like them being in there. I don't think most people do. But there were these kind of subtle upgrades. But every new iPhone was kind of like something new. Like, they made it smaller, they made it faster, it did something cooler. The camera was much better. Now each generation, there's just a smaller gap, and there's been that smaller gap for a while. And also tech just started swallowing up independent entities.

30:51
Speaker 1
I'll put this in my newsletter recently, but, like, Oculus Rift was an independent company run by Palmer Lucky, who's kind of evil, bought by meta, which then called Facebook. And it's like, okay. And then they bought WhatsApp. That was 2014. Microsoft bought Mojang makes Minecraft. I'm reading these off of my newsletter because we got to see all of these tech people get rich just as tech stopped quite innovating at the speed it needed to. And also there were all these promises who were promised, like, flying cars. How many people wrote about goddamn flying cars from Uber? Jesus. Goddamn cry. I'm so angry at that. It was bollocks then, it was bollocks now. And so many people are like, uber's gonna fly your own. Uber can barely get a car to you these days. Jesus Christ. But that was one.

31:34
Speaker 1
Flying cars, autonomous cars, autonomous taxis. Didn't happen. Just really.

31:41
Speaker 2
Really.

31:42
Speaker 1
I don't think people realized it was like a death by a thousand cuts thing, where innovation slowed as scrutiny of tech grew. And so by the time we got to Cambridge Analytica in 2015, 2018 took a few years for it to shake out. People were stopped. They didn't really have as many excuses for tech. You couldn't say, well, at least it did this for me. At least it did that for me. The massive jumps between generations stopped happening. We kind of topped out in even, like, resolution of TVs with 4K TVs, with HDMI 2.2. Even the latest PlayStation and Xbox aren't necessarily. They're better looking, kind of, but it's the kind of shift you'd have between graphics cards in a pc rather than the massive console leap. It's faster, it's cooler. I love them, but it's not a huge leap.

32:37
Speaker 1
And I think people really discount how that slowdown innovation plus just a flume of just terrible stories for tech. I mean, it's pretty bad. And then we got to a point, I think, where people said, okay, where is the future? What about autonomous cars? Oh, a Tesla killed several people. Oh, Teslas keep. Oh, Elon Musk is just lying every two weeks, and the media is just posting it. Well, that sucks. How about virtual reality? Oh, this makes me feel sick. And whenever I try and say it makes me feel sick, the person who likes the virtual reality says, you'll get over it. Which, no, I don't want to pay to feel sick. I can look in the mirror for free.

33:22
Speaker 3
I was watching this review of the new Apple headset this morning and getting super nauseous. Like, I know that I can't play first person video games. I can only play map games because my motion sickness with virtual stuff is that bad. Yeah, I mean, look, I haven't lost that much. We love Crusader Kings, and I'll leave it at that. But, yeah, it's just like, there's such a. I don't know if it's just like a reality check because it feels more substantial than that, but it feels like we're on the other side of a bubble or on the other side of a boom. It's very weird.

34:10
Speaker 2
It's different than either of those things because it feels like we're in something and watching the end of it creep up on us.

34:17
Speaker 3
Right. That's it. Yeah.

34:19
Speaker 1
I think that you're right in saying it isn't quite a bubble or a burst or anything, because there are still multiple successful, functional tech companies. Apple. I bought the vision pro. I'm doing one of the first episodes of better offline on it. I can't wait. I am actually quite excited about it, but I'm still going to rinse it for the things it does wrong, because that's what you need to do if you love.

34:42
Speaker 2
Cost $3,500.

34:44
Speaker 1
Yeah, like, it costs $3,500 and it's heavy and it needs a little battery, but there's plenty of stuff to make fun of there. But Apple, by and large, makes good products that consumers like. They've done some dodgy shit. Everyone knows it. Apple, functional company. Samsung, relatively functional company. Now they got past the Samsung Galaxy Note seven situation. Shout out to my Dan Nineham fans there.

35:08
Speaker 3
And simpler times.

35:10
Speaker 1
Simpler times. But that's the thing. The Samsung Galaxy Note Seven is actually a great example of where this kind of dream started to fall apart because people never thought their phones would explode in their luggage. Like, that's the thing. And on top of all of this, the reason that it feels like we're approaching the end of something or the beginning of a darker era or whatever, is because a lot of these tech companies just made their products worse. Facebook, Instagram, worse. Adam Masseri, what was it last year? I believe head of Instagram went out and was like, well, it's actually good that you can't see your friends. It's actually good. You don't want to see. You want to see what I tell you.

35:45
Speaker 1
I need to send you a million videos every day based on a lot of data I'm not meant to be taking from you because that's how Adam Assaria affords his 7th boat. But Google search results, four or four media had a piece coming out. They had a piece come out week or two ago where it was like, yeah, Google results are worse, and they do it because they want to make more money so they can grow eternally. I call this the rot economy. And I think tech is one of the nastiest examples where they just make shit worse so that they can grow faster. Teslas have objectively got worse. Put aside Elon Musk, though. I think his interference is the problem. That weird wheel they have looks awful. The cybertruck is a joke.

36:26
Speaker 1
Instead of the future and the kind of leaders of the future, the overlords of the future, creating cool shit that we have to look forward to. Shit is late, shit is worse, shit is more expensive. And I think that regular people just see it now. I think they just see it. Tech combined so many things so well in, like, 2008 through 2017. That was when it really ended. And then things slowed down and got worse. And I think things like Google search, that is the biggest story in tech. That is the thing that hits the most people that has got worse. And it sucks as well because some of the outlets covering it, not going to say who are kind of part of the problem. Everyone trying to fit their affiliate marketing schemes, their SEO schemes to get in there.

37:19
Speaker 1
They are also part of the problem. But Google should also, Google should try and kill the SEO industry. But they've only made it worse because they don't care. They don't care about providing results. They care about holding their monopoly, which is why they pay apple billions. And I think people just see it now. People get what, how many spam calls have you had today, you two?

37:42
Speaker 3
I don't think I've had any.

37:44
Speaker 1
I've had five.

37:45
Speaker 2
How have you not had any?

37:46
Speaker 1
God, yeah, that's the.

37:48
Speaker 3
I don't know, most people, I don't know.

37:50
Speaker 1
Most people are getting a bunch of spam calls a day caused by data brokers like Spokyo and Intellius who have bought and sold our information for over a decade. And now it's coming. Now we get our email accounts. They're full of growth hacking bullshit. Where we have.

38:08
Speaker 3
Yeah, that's the stuff that I get.

38:09
Speaker 1
We get an email from a company we saved to get 10% off of a product we never bought ten years ago. They're still emailing us. We hit unsubscribe. They seem to still come through. We forget how many things. None of the unsubscribed products actually work either. People just have got used to tech not doing what it says. And so I don't know, maybe that might make them feel a little bit resentful toward the tech industry. It feels like a giant con. And if tech wants to change that, perhaps, I don't know, make mobile websites. Not 90% ads taking up 90% of your screen. I realize I'm ranting here.

38:48
Speaker 2
We all feel this, though.

38:50
Speaker 1
Yeah. This is a very human problem.

38:52
Speaker 2
We're all drowning in a river of shit every day. And I can't tell you how many times I'm on a website or reading something on my phone and suddenly the part that I'm reading is gone and it's replaced by a giant screen sized picture of the dog food ad. It's pushed the text around. I have no idea how to get back to it. I just shut the tab down. Yeah. I'm not going to fight it anymore. It happens so often that I just. I don't want to fight it.

39:22
Speaker 3
Yeah, I'm using twelve foot ladder more in the past two months than I ever have before.

39:30
Speaker 1
I pay for a Washington post subscription, but due to the fact that there are so many data breaches and I've had to change my passwords on things so many times, I straight up can't use it. I have to use like archive is or twelve foot ladder or something to get to the things that I pay for. Because also I can't find the email account it's connected to. And I'm pretty good at tech. I know how the computer works. But guess what? The Internet has turned into the world's biggest, shittiest puzzle for the average person. And I don't think the tech industry, if they might understand and just not care. But I also think a lot of them don't realize how much it just sucks. It all sucks in a way that everyone is feeling and no one is talking about enough.

40:19
Speaker 1
And that's where better offline comes in. I will tell you why I'm mad, and perhaps you're that mad, too. But seriously, this is a problem. This is the problem. And I think that if the tech industry can realize how shitty it's got and make a change, perhaps they can save it. And guess what? They'd make more money too.

40:37
Speaker 2
I don't think that happens to them until they take the economic hit.

40:40
Speaker 1
Yes, that too. But they will lay off thousands of people first to prove Sandar Pashai, I think, gets like 200 million, 300 million. It's insane. That guy has laid off tens of thousands of people and he still gets paid. It's just completely stupid. The whole thing's so bloody stupid. When I think about it too much.

41:00
Speaker 2
I get very especially, you know, I don't know how deep we want to go into this, but, Emily, you and I are watching our industry be destroyed by this. Like, journalists will still be around, things will reform in some way. But we're recording this. The day after what was effectively like a tech startup version of an online magazine was destroyed. Right? The messenger, gone. Not always a great website, but there was a lot of great reporters there that were doing incredible work. And it's just gone. Millions of dollars evaporated or just destroyed.

41:44
Speaker 1
Just set on fire, mostly on office space.

41:47
Speaker 2
Yeah.

41:49
Speaker 1
And that is a bigger business. That's not just a tech thing. I think that tech, what we're starting to see is other business. I was about to say business industries. That makes me sound real smart. A lot of industries are trying to take this tech startup model of raise a bunch of funding, then spend that money and hope money comes out the end. Despite Josh Topolsky proving that doesn't work at least 100 times now. There's a guy who everyone needs to be angrier at because he same goddamn deal. He's run multiple publications that have raised ten to $15 million and they've gone down the shitter. And the problem is that you can't really run a journalistic enterprise like a startup. You actually defect is a great example of how you can run one of these things.

42:32
Speaker 1
But the problem is these money men get involved. The money men, they come in, they say, we want to go big. And the actual answer is no, we do not. Old Techcrunch. Old Techcrunch back before, and Techcrunch just had layoffs too, which is disgraceful. They laid off some really goddamn great people. Harry Weber, Darren Everton. I mean, it's just disgraceful. Catherine Shu. And they did this because Verizon's arse and ear hole evaluation software doesn't quite work. But the reason it keeps happening is they can't just understand sometimes you don't need so many people to start with. And if you want to go bigger, you get bigger based on the rate of growth, rather than assuming that spending the money will make the growth happen. And it all comes back to this addiction to growth that the american economy has. They can't build sustainable businesses.

43:19
Speaker 1
And journalism itself has been looking for a sustainable business model for years.

43:25
Speaker 2
Journalism, sustainable business models for journalism has been a problem. I think almost the entire time the people have been selling the news.

43:31
Speaker 1
But the thing is, there are ones that work, which is build sustainable businesses and make sure they don't spend stupid money on stupid shit like a bunch office space. It's just very frustrating. It's very frustrating because the people who are actually responsible, the executives making six, seven figures, nothing happens to them. Not saying anything should, but, you know, nothing happens to them. Nothing ever changes. And until those people are run out of town with pitchforks, this world will continue to get darker.

44:04
Speaker 2
They get book deals and they write LinkedIn posts about wellness and.

44:12
Speaker 1
Jim Spamfella killed Deadspin. Jim Spamfella. I'm not going to say anything legally actionable, okay? But it's just the poison of growth at all cost. Capitalism has got into everything. And I try not to fall into the anti capitalism stuff too much because very clearly hypocritical of me to do.

44:32
Speaker 2
So, but it's the water we all swim in. I think to a certain extent it's the reality of the world that we're in and we have to reckon with it. Capitalism, I mean, not growth at all costs capitalism.

44:44
Speaker 1
But you can run sustainable businesses. My mate Casey put this way. It's like growth is like a fire. You can build a sustainable fire. That's a while. Keeps you warm, or you can throw a bunch of shit on it and it'll grow really big and then die. And the crazy thing is the stock market actually encourages the growth at all cost model, which is insane. There's no reason that company like Uber shouldn't exist, for example. That company has never made a profit. The tech industry, tech journalism especially, has finally kind of woken up to the fact that someone saying they're a bit DaR, profitable is actually not profitable. What we need to get back to is, I don't know, building businesses that make more money than they spend. It's an idea defector works really well on that model.

45:30
Speaker 1
You get a bunch of really cool people who write well, you give them enough money to pay their bills. Aftermath is the same deal. You've got some amazing people there. What I don't get is why. No, you remember the substac boom with the newsletter boom? How the fuck, upon my french. How the fuck did nobody notice that? The reason that those were all successful people like Casey Newton people like Charlie Walzall for a bit, people didn't go to them because they were like, oh, esteemed reporter from. No, they went to them because they trusted them. They went to them because they believed what they were saying was valid and thoughtful and true and they wanted their opinion about it, which is actually kind of more modeling. How a lot of great outlets have grown.

46:21
Speaker 1
Techrunch grew a lot from the rat fuckery of Michael Arrington. I mean, one of the best columnists at the Wall street journalist Christopher Mims. And I've already mentioned Joanna Stern, who grew the verge out of, this is my next. Which grew out of Engadget, which grew out of the individual voices. It's insane to me because the answer is fairly straightforward. It's find great people with good opinions, interesting opinions, good sources, and pay them. And don't spend $8 million on goddamn real estate. Pay them well. Give them industry, let them do their work, let them cook, leave them alone. And sell sponsorships and events off of that. It worked for Techrun for a while and then verizon, of course. Of course decided to piss it. Well, wait, I'm sorry, I'm kind of going in circles here, I realize. No, I think it's very frustrating.

47:14
Speaker 3
I think that this helps because it makes me think again about what were talking about at the beginning of our conversation with access. Because you have a lot of people that personalities, YouTube personalities, influencers in this space that kind of fill that gap, but that also don't necessarily always go hard in the same ways that you would expect a traditional journalist to do. That's something that I actually don't mind that.

47:45
Speaker 1
So with influencers like Marcus Brownlee, for example, he's been very friendly to Elon Musk, but even he's kind of changed. And the reason that I don't mind that is I know that's his opinion. I have no illusions about him doing that. The difference between him and, like, kara swisher, for example, is swisher has been a voice in tech for years and grew from having. She grew her career off of having access and getting scoops. When you do that, you have a duty to the reader to not, I don't know, spend years propping up Elon Musk, including never fighting on behalf of journalists like Aaron Bieber, who got harassed by Elon Musk's cronies, never saying a goddamn word about it, and then turning on Elon Musk when he called you an asshole.

48:33
Speaker 1
That is the problem when you're an access journalist, but you don't clearly state your access. If you don't clearly state that you are doing this for opinion, that you understand your own authority and you take that seriously, and you're clear with what your biases may be, I think that's fine. But the problem is, when you have people writing blindly about Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse and saying, this sounds good, that is not. That's not right. You need to push back on that. You need to push back on the fact that Zuckerberg changed the name of his company to Meta. And then a few years later, it was like, you know what? I've spent $20 billion on this. I'm bored of it now. See? A bitch. That's why people are cynical about tech, though. People are waking up to this.

49:23
Speaker 1
Regular readers, they know that they're being misled. They know and they're angry. They either want things to go well or go quietly. They don't want to be misled. They don't want to feel like they're being fed a line of shit. And I think they are, and it frustrates me.

49:42
Speaker 2
How, then, do you feel about the coverage of this new Apple vision Pro, this headset?

49:50
Speaker 1
It's actually really interesting because my last newsletter kind of talked about this. I think it's really interesting how you can see the vast difference between this coverage and the Apple Watch for example, this coverage, it hasn't all been negative. It really hasn't. Like, Joanna Stern was extremely, she was extremely complimentary of several things. Scott Stein CNET same deal, complimentary. Talked about the cool stuff, which is fine, but they're so much less willing to buy Apple's bullshit, though. They're so much like the Apple Watch. There was a review where someone said, oh, yeah, but that's the limits of the platform right now. You don't get any of that anymore for Apple. And you shouldn't give a trillion dollar company a, oh, that's all right. You know, this shit's hard. And I think that is the biggest difference. You're really just seeing.

50:44
Speaker 1
People are not just buying what Apple is saying and saying, wow, this is amazing. With absolutely no criticism would have happened with Steve Jobs. I think Steve Jobs had a better hold of the media. But you know what? I think it's better that it's like this and you've still got plenty of people who are gormlessly saying whatever Apple wants them to. Don't get me wrong. Plenty of them. There will always be those people. But I think you are seeing the mainstream media far more willing to take a stand, not necessarily saying it sucks, but they're willing to say, this has real problems. This is too early. I don't know what the point of this is. And so on and so forth.

51:24
Speaker 1
With the Apple Watch, you had a lot of people who were very much willing to just say, oh, but imagine what this could be like in the future. Now with the vision Pro, none of that shit happening anymore. Apple's pissed off everyone too much. And it sucks because it actually seems like it could be kind of cool. But you know what? Guess what? If you release something for $3,500 at the most depressing time in the tech industry, in quite some time, and you make it so it's heavy and you make it so it's got like 200 apps when it comes out. Yeah, people are going to be a little bit cynical. You should get everything you deserve and more. They should have waited, but the rot economy got them. They had to release this.

52:06
Speaker 1
Tim Cook had to do it for fear that Apple would not be a trillion dollar company forever, even though it probably will get there and stay there forever.

52:16
Speaker 2
It's just such a grotesque price point.

52:18
Speaker 1
To is it is. And I say this is someone who bought one. It really ridiculous. Like, I understand why it is that price. It's still an utter piss take. Like, come on, man, $3,500. That is the price of a top end MacBook Pro.

52:36
Speaker 2
Yeah. And I can get your competitor that has a bunch of stuff and is compatible with more computers.

52:43
Speaker 1
Oh, I actually will push back on that one. Really? I don't think Oculus. I've got a quest.

52:51
Speaker 2
Which quest do you have?

52:52
Speaker 1
The quest. Two.

52:54
Speaker 2
Okay.

52:55
Speaker 1
I think it is hot dog shit. I think the quest is a very awkward device. I think the Facebook login process is awful. That does. Yes. And that's the thing. Those are the things that actually bother me the most. And perhaps that's just me being me. But also I'm not saying, oh, Apple has no competitors in like a protective sense. It's just I feel like this device is something different. And Apple has also done a goddamn awful job doing pr for it. There are so many questions unanswered that they could have pushed. They should have had, I don't know, PlayStation remote on there. They should have had these things ready to go. They should have thought of all the different people who spent money on it. Instead they tried a very apple thing where it's like, this is the future.

53:36
Speaker 1
Here's a person walking around an office. A thing that no one should ever do with a device like this. It's just very funny because they don't want to be competitive with the quest. The quest is not a good, I don't think quest is a good product. I think the big boy oculuses are cool. But I've always found the quest to be weak, uncomfortable.

53:59
Speaker 2
I like it. I like it because, and I've got background. I've done Oculus two, I've done valve index. I've done the quest.

54:08
Speaker 3
Wait, do you have one?

54:10
Speaker 2
Yeah. I'm revealing that I'm a VR enthusiast.

54:14
Speaker 1
I've revealed I bought a vision pro. I think I'm the biggest dickhead on the court.

54:19
Speaker 3
Don't worry.

54:20
Speaker 2
Fair. But being like, not the index is probably the most comfortable and the most interesting to use. And I can plug it right into my pc and play all kinds of different stuff, but I'm tethered. And not having, being able to spend a couple hundred bucks and have the thing that I can play beat saber on in any room and not be tethered is like such a big deal. And I will put up with a Facebook login to do that and it not cost $3,500.

54:48
Speaker 1
Sure. And I just think they're different products. But this is not your fault. You shouldn't be having to justify this. Apple should be like, apple, you are the customer that's the thing, Apple really has got used to shit selling itself and the media kind of helping. And I think that era is gone. The media has grown quite tired of Mr. Cook and his fancy party. And I think that people realize, like the App Store, there's another thing that affects average people that sucks. Go on the App Store and download five free apps. Guarantee you not one of them is actually free. They're free in the sense that they will sell you microtransactions or sell your information to a chinese bot network. But it's very much a. Everything feels like a devil's deal right now.

55:44
Speaker 1
I keep coming back to this point, but I'm just so goddamn tired of how bad tech has got for the average person. The average basic experience is just so bad right now.

55:55
Speaker 2
Where do you think the AI stuff leads us then in the next year or two? Do you think this all is going to bottom out? Or do you think we're going to live in an SEO garbage fire where SEO juiced articles are just feeding each other, pushing themselves to the top of search and we just get to live that way for a couple of years?

56:17
Speaker 3
Is that not already?

56:18
Speaker 2
I mean, but worse, but accelerated?

56:21
Speaker 1
I think things are going to get worse there. But I think you will see Google turn on AI generated content at some point in the next year or two just because at some point Google was already a horror show. So I don't expect them to want it to be worse unless they just really don't care. I try not to think too dystopian, but yeah, there is also just a. There is a level here of they could just say, fuck it, who cares?

56:47
Speaker 2
I think they care deeply.

56:49
Speaker 1
I think they care deeply about money and monopolies. And I think that, look, if they cared deeply, they would not have let Google get this way. That's what's pissing me off. If they cared, they would not make it so that when I google something, there are 18 different things which are not even sponsored links, just affiliate content built. So if I look up a fix for something on my Mac, there's like four or five different Q and a sites that are mostly a guy asking a question and then four people not giving answer and the guy saying, still got this problem. Anyone want to help? And these are all.

57:30
Speaker 1
This is really something that I deeply feel it comes into the new podcast as well, is that these are the problems that tech has, these are the problems that journalism needs to be talking about. I know I've talked about Joanna Stern a lot, but she's the reason that the butterfly keyboard got fixed with the MacBook, the 2015 16 MacBook. Nick Builton. Never been a huge fan of Nick, but he is the reason that airlines are a little bit less stringent with putting your phone on Wifi mode, because he just proved that it wasn't the case. This is the kind of shit that matters. This is the stuff that is truly the pressure on Google. To make Google not suck is something that is in the hands of journalism right now. This is something where they can fight it. Because if these stories go out.

58:18
Speaker 1
When I wrote the rock economy last year, I had so many people being like, man, I didn't really understand why Google sucked. Now so many people have these problems. If tech wants to turn things around, stop making things suck, stop making the basics suck. Stop sending me random notifications from couch to five k, an app I downloaded once and have never used. I swear I turned off that goddamn notification. But this is the thing. These are the experiences that people. I sound a bit nuts, I realize, but people want to know why people feel disconnected from the tech industry. This is why. Because the tech industry feels disconnected from people.

58:58
Speaker 2
I'm going to circle back to something, Emily, unless you've got.

59:01
Speaker 3
No, please go ahead.

59:03
Speaker 2
So you said you described Palmer lucky as kind of evil, and I wanted to push back on that.

59:09
Speaker 1
I mean, he's very evil, but I couldn't remember why. But he did some border patrol software, didn't he?

59:17
Speaker 2
Oh, it's more than that.

59:18
Speaker 1
Yeah.

59:19
Speaker 3
I'm just remembering the helmet.

59:21
Speaker 2
The helmet's wild and funny.

59:26
Speaker 1
Was it like a suicide helmet or something? It was something, yes. It was cool.

59:31
Speaker 2
I would push the user if they.

59:33
Speaker 1
Die in the game. So he stole the plot of sword art online.

59:37
Speaker 2
Correct. And he said that Sword art online was a big inspiration for the Oculus.

59:43
Speaker 1
That was the thing he got from Sword art online.

59:46
Speaker 2
Correct.

59:47
Speaker 1
It's like watching Naruto and believing that small government is an issue.

59:52
Speaker 2
This is always the way though, right? It's the torment nexus tweet over and over again. They see something. They don't realize that it's a cautionary tale. They take a little piece of it they're obsessed with, and they make it a reality. And then when the problems that were in the fiction crop up, they say, oh, damn. Fuck.

01:00:14
Speaker 1
But also the whole thing with sort of online other than it would kill you is it was a good game in the anime. So that's the thing. They don't ever do the first part of the torment nexus where the experience is cool. Very unfair. Very nasty. But it's funny as well, because these guys, even when they try and do the torment nexus stuff, they're so lazy about it. Did he ever make that suicide helmet? Did he ever actually prototype? That's the thing. How do you prototype that also?

01:00:45
Speaker 2
Well, he certainly took a picture of one that he'd prototyped and put it online.

01:00:50
Speaker 1
Has he thought about using it? Not actionable. Just a question.

01:00:56
Speaker 2
It was, I imagine, a remembrance of how he made his money. That was what it was for him.

01:01:05
Speaker 1
It was like. Have ever been happy for a moment in their lives ever? They have so much money and they could just do anything. You can go online and you can watch at least 50 different queens of the Stone Age concerts in full. Go and do that for a minute. Palmer, you fucking idiot. None of these people have fun. None of these people. Tim Cook seems to be the closest thing to, like, Mark Zuckerberg is. There was that period where he was fighting all the time and he looked so happy, like, genuinely happy. And perhaps that's because he was like, I fuck. Well, actually, I have a theory about the fighting thing. I think he likes it because it's the only time he feels human, because his money doesn't matter. Flesh and very. I imagine that there's an equalization there.

01:01:51
Speaker 1
I would love to talk to Mark Zuckerberg about that, but the other questions I had might make him upset.

01:01:56
Speaker 2
That's why he grows his own food, I think, and wants to.

01:01:59
Speaker 1
Weird.

01:02:00
Speaker 2
He wants to hunt it because it's the only way that he can feel connected to anything anymore. He's like, going back to basics. Very basics.

01:02:08
Speaker 3
Are we going to think that he's going to become one of those anti shoe people pretty soon so that he.

01:02:13
Speaker 2
Could be a barefoot is legal ground anti shower?

01:02:15
Speaker 1
Exactly.

01:02:17
Speaker 3
Yeah. That's my prediction for the rest of 2024.

01:02:20
Speaker 2
I mean, if you've got enough money and enough time and you're bored enough, all things are possible.

01:02:26
Speaker 1
I wish he fought Elon Musk.

01:02:28
Speaker 2
It would have been so cool.

01:02:29
Speaker 1
It would have been like low techs versus uve bowl all over again. Do you remember that from something awful?

01:02:35
Speaker 2
Yes, I do, very much.

01:02:38
Speaker 1
Stairs in your house, I guess, but I think that just. That's the thing as well. These people are all so joyless. Jeff Bezos is the closest. That guy is evil, though. Like, when he went into space and he was just like, yep, this one goes out to all the Amazon workers that made this possible. See a bitch. I'm going to space.

01:03:01
Speaker 2
He knows what he's doing. I think he's embraced the Lex Luthor.

01:03:06
Speaker 1
But also, he just got yoked out, and now he just walks around doing interviews with Lex Friedman. The fact that is the top tech podcaster is so depressing. But none of these people are, like, fun rich. Elon Musk has more money than anyone, and he chooses instead to go online and be like, well, the wokeness has allowed 1 billion immigrants to come in every day. And that's choosy. And Ian Miles Chong responds by saying, like, exactly. And it's just. That is his joy. He could do anything. He could crash a gold boat into another gold boat and be fine, and he chooses to be on. None of these people actually approximate the human race. And it's. Maybe that's why everything's like this. Maybe they just don't. They have someone to Google stuff. They have a guy who costs them a million dollars a year.

01:03:54
Speaker 1
Who is Google for them.

01:03:57
Speaker 3
Yeah, they don't have to Google. They're not on TikTok, having to go through Taemu ads to get to the next video, et cetera.

01:04:05
Speaker 1
Their toady is just like, sir, I've brought you another meme. Actually. That is kind of what Elon Musk gets. He just gets, like, guys with, like, greek statues called, like, Hitler enjoyer twelve who send him some very jpeg, some compressed jpeg that he posts later on that day. Like, that's his toady. God.

01:04:26
Speaker 3
How it's pre deep fried for him.

01:04:28
Speaker 1
Yeah, exactly. It was really good. You can really see. But that's the thing as well. I think we're also seeing these people for who they really are. Now, journalism has actually, really has actually improved the scrutiny of these people and their weird things. You see the alive girl text with Jeff Bezos, strangely horny fellow.

01:04:47
Speaker 2
No, I don't know this story.

01:04:49
Speaker 1
He was texting someone who was not. Let me read.

01:04:52
Speaker 2
Was this when the Saudis got a.

01:04:54
Speaker 3
Hold of his years ago?

01:04:55
Speaker 1
Okay, here are these texts. I'm just going to read these to you.

01:04:58
Speaker 3
Please. Yeah, this is great.

01:05:01
Speaker 1
I love you, alive girl. Dot, Dot. I will show you with my body. I want to smell you. I want to breathe you in. Ew. Not as funny as the Sonny Belwani and Elizabeth Holmes text, though. If you didn't hear those. These ones are actually important because I'll just read these to you. I'm just going to read this with.

01:05:24
Speaker 2
I like how fast you were able to summon them.

01:05:26
Speaker 1
Yeah. This is just pure posting energy. Okay. Holmes, you are the breeze in desert for me. My water and ocean meant to be only together. Tiger Balwani. Okay. But it's the thing, we're seeing these people for who they are, and they're pathetic. These rich, powerful tech people behind the curtain, they're boring, they're empty. They don't enjoy anything. They have more money than anyone should. And they're miserable. Miserable. They're directionless. Elon Musk should be happy. Money can buy you happiness when you have billions. I refuse to argue. Like, come on, give it to me. I'll be happy. I'll be fine. And you look at this guy, and he hasn't figured out shit. Actually, Hbomber guy, fantastic youtuber, made a point about this with plagiarism, that a lot of plagiarists are just trying to be someone else.

01:06:17
Speaker 1
They want to assume their lives and seem like, because these people who make great stuff, seem to have figured it all out. I think with a lot of tech people have kind of given the tech overlords a bit of space, a bit of understanding for the massive wealth and power they had, because these people were creating cool shit and they'd seem to live these cool lives. Now we have these pictures of Elon Musk with Ram Emanuel, I think, where he looks like Baron Harkonnen from Dune. We have these awkward texts. We have, like, Sam Altman, who is just very strange, and he got ousted from aboard. And then everyone posted, like, thumbs up emojis or whatever. I forget what they did. Everything just seems like a lame fucking cult. No one's doing any cool billionaire stuff. Peter Thiel loves blood.

01:07:08
Speaker 1
I guess he destroyed Gorker. Mark Andreessen is, and I am actually quoting something he said, I think it's 2022. He, in an interview, said, oh, I've been reading a lot of comprehensive biographies of Hitler. These are the rich guys. That's not fun. These aren't cool celebrities we can look up to. They're strange. Weirdo. They're weird. They would be weird if they didn't have the money.

01:07:36
Speaker 2
And it's just all of our supervillains feel like they came from discontinued comic book lines.

01:07:42
Speaker 1
Yeah. Like, really, like edge lord ones.

01:07:45
Speaker 2
Yeah. Like something that there was a kickstarter.

01:07:49
Speaker 1
Of didn't fully fund. Yeah, Lord boy. Yeah. Not a downer, though.

01:07:59
Speaker 2
No, I mean, I personally, I enjoy a down note ending on a podcast.

01:08:04
Speaker 3
As per usual.

01:08:05
Speaker 2
That is usually the direction I try to steer things.

01:08:09
Speaker 1
That's right, baby. Misery loves company.

01:08:13
Speaker 2
Where can people find your newsletter and the new podcast when it goes live?

01:08:19
Speaker 1
You can find me where's your ed at for the newsletter or betteroffline.com? The show is not out until the 21 February. I do not have the link yet otherwise, but it will be on betteroffline.com. You can find me on Twitter at Ed Zitron bsky social I believe on Bluesky, which I much prefer to xraymynudes biz. And yeah, I'm looking forward. First episodes will drop on the 21st. We've got a lot of fun stuff coming. Really excited actually. It's one of the coolest things I've ever worked on.

01:08:50
Speaker 2
Yeah, cool zone media is great.

01:08:53
Speaker 1
Robert Evans is great. Big shout out to Sophie and rob over there. Gare as well. I mean, they've been incredible, those people. Some of the best people I've worked with.

01:09:02
Speaker 2
And thank you so much for coming on.

01:09:04
Speaker 1
My pleasure.

01:09:05
Speaker 3
Yeah, thanks so much.

01:10:35
Speaker 4
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01:11:17
Speaker 4
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