This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed human.

Quarzone Media.

What is a podcast?

A miserable little pile of secrets.

What's our time? I'm Ed Zittron and Wattelphi. Better Offline

I'm Ed Zittron 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, Sachi Nadela,

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. 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 chat GPT's head and aggressively pulled the trigger.

...