The Cult of Failing Upwards
Better Offline
Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 688 Ratings
🗓️ 1 May 2024
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ed Zitron walks you through how career manager Adam Mosseri pushed out Instagram's original founders, turning it into an ultra-profitable app that barely works, and how Sam Altman, the so-called hero of the AI boom, is a lobbyist dressed as a technologist best-known for being an absent, self-obsessed demagogue.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:06.5 | Cool Zone Media. |
| 0:09.6 | Hello and welcome to Better Offline, |
| 0:12.3 | Cool Zone Media's happiest podcast. |
| 0:14.9 | I'm your host, Ed Zittron. |
| 0:38.8 | What a hell? As I've run through in the last two episodes, managers of Poison takes ability to innovate with a degenerative capitalism known as the rot economy, pushing growth at all cost metrics on companies you love while isolating and removing those that don't agree. And by the way, they're the same |
| 0:43.6 | people who actually build things and make good products and use them as well. Nowhere is this |
| 0:50.4 | more obvious than meta, a company with leadership completely removed from any meaningful |
| 0:55.3 | interaction with their products or any value to society? Since 2009, Facebook's core products have |
| 1:02.5 | reliably become more profitable at exactly the same rate they decay, with every founder behind |
| 1:07.9 | every product that Zuckerberg has acquired, including Instagram, |
| 1:11.9 | Oculus and WhatsApp, leaving the company and almost immediately talking about how much they |
| 1:16.7 | hated working there. |
| 1:18.4 | According to a New York Times piece from 2018, Kevin Sistram, co-founder of Instagram, only |
| 1:23.4 | chose to quit the company after Mark Zuckerberg became jealous of the app's success, |
| 1:27.8 | taking the spotlight away from that of Facebook itself, an app he kind of stole from the Winklevosses. |
| 1:34.5 | Sistram allegedly didn't really want to leave Facebook, but felt that Zuckerberg was depriving |
| 1:39.1 | Instagram of resources, and now, and I quote, seemed to want Instagram to use its momentum to help the |
| 1:45.0 | big blue app, which is an annoying way of describing a situation that feels a convenient |
| 1:50.0 | time to reveal that this was a Kara Swisher piece. Despite Swishers bloviating, it took TechCrunch's |
| 1:56.6 | Josh Constine to reveal the real reason that Sistram had left. |
... |
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