"Fisher-Price Management" with Cory Doctorow

Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. This is Nick as always and today we have very special guest We have Cory Doctoro who is going to introduce himself in a second But first I wanted to shell for something. So as you know, I don't make any money on this podcast I don't advertise. I don't ask for money anyway. I mostly just do it to bring attention to interesting people and I meet a lot of interesting people at a local writers group called Meridian Australis. They do a bunch of cool stuff and I was with them the other day and they were joking about how awkward it is for authors to pitch their own work And I wanted to tell all of you about like one of my favorite fantasy books from a local author here in Melbourne Will Great Witch And then I thought it'd be funnier if I made Will Pigeon himself because it's a lot more awkward for him that way You can say hi Will. Hi. He's gonna he's gonna talk to you about this book the House of the Ranking for one minute And we're gonna cut to Doctoro and I really do love this book and I encourage lots of people to get it Will please take it away. Hey everyone. I'm Will Great Witch I'm an Australian fantasy author and you should check out my novel House of the Ranking It's a book about a young monk who was grown up in a monastery worshiping the god of rain But when the rain god comes back in the flesh He's not how they expected him to be. He's old. He's seen oil He doesn't really know where he is and that makes him very dangerous to be around So it's about these monks trapped inside the monastery with their god and meanwhile outside the flood waters arising So it's also about the people of the valley and how they deal with this mythical natural disaster What makes this book pretty unique is that it has a fantasy setting based on the Australian landscape So if you are Australian you're gonna get a lot of enjoyment out of seeing Australian plants and animals and especially Australian birds playing a big role in the story And if you're from overseas you're gonna get a really original fantasy setting that you probably haven't seen before You can get it in paperback or ebook the ebook is DRM free if you buy it direct from my website That's will great witch dot com or you can just search House of the Ranking Cheers Cool. Thank you. Well, I also like how you left out like a ton of my favorite elements It's a red mercenary company. There's my favorite sociopath in maybe any book. I've ever read it's it's incredible But yeah, thank you so much Will thanks So Cory, do you want to introduce yourself to the one person who doesn't know who you are? Well, I'm a writer and an activist and a journalist I've worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation as an activist I think we're the most important and successful digital rights group in the world and I've worked there for 25 years All over the world. I was their first European director. I've written more than 30 books The most recent two are in shittification and the reverse Center was guide to life after AI And I am Canadian American in British and mostly these days I live in London. Cool. I didn't actually know you're in London I thought you're in the US this whole time Well since November my wife worked for one of the studios in LA and she quit her job and went to work back at the BBC Where she used to work when I met her She's a Londoner and so she moved back here. So I followed her and You know she needs to be back in LA one month and four for partner meetings And so when she's in LA I try to be based there but where I'm based is very hypothetical because Mostly I live in a suitcase I've I've never heard someone describe their location as hypothetical Yeah, you know what? Yeah, well, it's like where do Where do I go if I need to like Put some more underwear in my suitcase is is the city that I live in but that doesn't mean that I spend much time there Yeah, that makes sense So the thing I wanted to talk to you in particular was because you read something I wrote on AI Mania which my audience will be familiar with And when I was looking at your commentary at the end of it It got to something that I'm really interested in which is not AI specifically like what I actually started writing about and got well known in tech For it was criticizing Management fads and management pathology You know just just the the little inefficiencies that creep in every day are sort of inexplicable You know like a good example is just the massive protest to remote work And in most managers, you know, that's not really best seen sometimes it's about worker control or or capital A lot of the time it's just neurosis. Yeah, it's it's like really insecure people who don't know how to go to their Colleagues and say hey, this makes me uncomfortable. Can we talk about this? I'm worried no work will get done. How can I be sure? Yeah, they just don't know how to discussion And something I saw that I already liked was you talked about the idea Executives operating the Fisher price steering wheel at the business Could you run some of the audience through what the Fisher price steering wheel is? Yeah, I'm indebted here to Riley Quinn from trash future who is a font of excellent analogies So, you know, if you are the boss you fancy that you're in the driver's seat But you know if you don't show up for work Everything will more or less be fine But if all the people who report to you don't show up for work nothing is gonna happen And so maybe you're not in the in the driver's seat. Maybe you're in the back seat with a Fisher price steering wheel But AI and the AI sales pitch is what if we wired that Fisher price steering wheel directly into the cars drivetrain So you have an idea and you ask a chatbot and it shits out the product and there is no like ego shattering confrontation with someone who knows how to do something Who explains to you that your idea is like impossible or illegal or Stupid or you're all gonna get it go to jail or it's gonna murder people and it just happens and you know my first inkling of this Because the the rest of the time when I'm not in in London. I spend my time in LA We live in Burbank right near the studios and I'm a member of one of the Hollywood guilds I'm a writer in the animator's guild and so during the writer's strike I went out on those picket lines and I was on the Warner picket line one day and a writer told me You know, you give a chatbot notes This or you give a chatbot prompts the same way you give shitty notes to a writer's room Right give make me make me ET, but it's about a dog and put a car chase and a love interest in it Which admittedly is just airbud But if you say that to a writer's room either tacitly or depending on how bullshit they're feeling explicitly They will say why don't you fuck off and make a spreadsheet People here are making a movie and that is a thing you assuredly do not know how to do go away And what the chatbot does is it just shits out the script and the fact that that script is almost certainly not Producable in any way might not be as important from the perspective of the sales call And maybe from the perspective of the people investing in the company That makes the chatbot as the fact that bosses are just like infinitely horny for this psychological comfort of like Engaging in the solipsistic fantasy that other people don't exist And and I think that's the that's the that's the part that I'm interested in about the psychology of AI I was actually in psychology for quite a few years before I was in tech specifically And I did a bunch of improv theater and that sort of thing and the you know The status dynamic is very deeply built into like the war of improv theater That there's a book by guy called Keith Johnston And I didn't know what I was expecting. I didn't know anything about improv when I picked up this book And it just opens with chapters on status he was like that that is like the dominant thing You know when you when you look at a Sort of like the corporate dynamic. I've had a reader reach out who just teaches improv To I believe it was lawyers So that they're better able to manage points because yes, ending the judge Yeah, the judge clients all sorts of things because they just need that right But something really interesting when I heard about the Fisher Price steering wheel is It occurred to me you know one of the functions for a long time Of having people in the office presumably so the manager can watch them But I've realized it is also partially because you know companies are highly politicized environments And by having a lot of your people physically in the office You have like a whole Fisher Price car You know your your presence is not actually necessary, but other executive look at you Sure, and they go man look at that car. He's like surrounded by 10 people. There's a whole chassis Look at him walking around like turning the wheel as quickly as possible That's a very David Graber bullshit jobs idea that you know, I forget what he calls that he's you know He's got box tickers and duct tapers and then there's I forget what they're called, but it's something like you know Basically henchmen or something right like just the people where you're the number of boxes underneath you on the org chart Is a marker of how important you are uh, and you know, I read a An amazing book this year my my friend data Palmer who's Maybe best known as a science fiction writer outside of academic circles, but in academic circles is a superstar Renaissance historian At the University of Chicago wrote a historiography of the Renaissance called inventing the Renaissance and there's a whole chapter in there about grace and Like not your entourage, but you're like the people who answer to you and how if you're one of the great families of Florence during the Renaissance There's just this patronage network of Effectively like vassals not formally, but like people who depend on you and you know like right if they're if if the breadwinner in the family You know gets kicked to death by a horse you support them But also if like another great family challenges you they run into the streets like beating pots and pans and screaming your surname And literally a mob forms in the streets right and I think there's corporate versions of this where like if you have the right Vassals around you within the corporate hierarchy when another manager challenges you right when they start rat fucking you There is this army people who will like in meetings in the cafeteria in emails and memos and whispers say, you know, my boss has the right of this and wants to do the thing that will make the business billions of dollars. And the other boss, the pretender to the throne who's challenging them, is a, is a, you know, an absolutely terrible person who is dooming the company by their greed and sure-sightedness. And, you know, I've watched this play out in firms. I had a friend who was on the wrong side of one of these where they went from like a very senior position to fired with under the threat of civil prosecution for minor paperwork errors like in a week. Wow. It was amazing to see. Yeah, you see a lot of that stuff in crypto companies. They love pulling coups. They just love shoving everyone out the door and then like a new guy controls the crypto. When you said that, though, you know, often you hear people say we're moving towards like boring cyberpunk. It is very distressing to hear that we're also in shitty Renaissance already. Yeah. Not even a cool version of it. Inventing the Renaissance is such a good book and everyone should read it. It completely blew my mind in a thousand different ways. And just to give you a taste of what an amazing person aida is, I know this is somewhat to one side of this, but talking about improv and management. Yeah. She is famous at the University of Chicago. She has tenure as a Renaissance historian at Chicago where she specializes in forbidden knowledge during the Inquisitions, Heresy, Homosexuality, pornography, and so on. And famously, her first year class ends with a four-week long harp in which they re-enact the election of the Medici's Pope. Fascinating. And everybody gets like a 70-page character briefing that she has written over the case of, of course, many years, and they spend four weeks wheeling and dealing and stabbing each other in the back and forming alliances. And then there's a fake Gothic cathedral on campus. They take it over. She dresses them in Renaissance drag. She's found through Google Alert for theater companies that are selling their costumes. And they invest a Pope and every year it's different. Even though like two of the final candidates are always the same because there's always going to be like two people from the great families in there. But like the power blocks that support them and who emerges victorious is always different. And so like what's going to happen next is always different. And this is her way of teaching students that history is contingent and that there are like as much as there are great forces of history, they're not dispositive. They're entirely like they may form the envelope of possibilities within which humans can act. But they are subject to human agency. It's such an amazing thing. And the book ends with a description of why she does this and how it works. And yeah, it's boy, it's a good book. It's called Venting the Renaissance. She's also a librettist and singer. If you want to hear a fucking great opera about the Norse mythos, you should get her fire and ice. It's great. And she performs under sass of brass. You've got some cool friends. Let's fucking wrap. Well, eight a Palmer is like eight cool friends and one. So yeah. But yeah, that is that is fascinating. You know, right before we recorded, I was talking about, you know, these sort of systems that have been, they're being framed as under attack by AI, but we're actually pretty degraded before AI got here, right? We're just seeing some of those flaws pop up. And you described in that university experience, this reminded me of mine, where I didn't like get any of that. I had a guy who didn't know how to program, who messed up a bunch of stuff. Like as I think assignments didn't work, they still basically just sold me a visa, right? Like, that's what the university is. It's interesting because I found out we have a mutual friend, Jathan from. Yeah, I heard you catching him. Yeah, I think he's at Monash. So I studied at Monash and we were talking about this. And he was saying that Monash is also sort of completely degraded on the AI front. It's actually what prompted the Fisher price thing because he was telling me that the management team there had a great year last year. We recorded an episode for this machine kills this morning. So it's not like this. This is not made just like leaky. Yeah, we should say, this is Jathan Sudowsky of this machine kills podcast and also a wonderful book called The Lodite in the Mechanic. If you're interested in learning more. Yes. I'm a terrible podcast from terrible and chilling. So it's very helpful to have. But no, that's true. I didn't even occur to people wouldn't know. But yeah, so he was talking about how they had a great year last year was like record breaking. This year is still set to be good, but it's not record breaking. And the narrative internally has been that last year was record breaking because of the embraced AI. And in Australia, universities are very much powered by international student money. And when you told me this this morning, they're going, it's got nothing to do with AI, right? It's purely geopolitics beyond control device chance. Yeah, Trump sent a bunch of people to Australia who would have otherwise gone to America. And that's it. That's like, that's the whole thing. I call him Comrade Trump because of all of the terrible things that he's inadvertently fixing, like convincing the world to stop using oil, convincing the world to stop using the American internet. Trump has done more to convince the world that we need to stop embracing American tech policies in our domestic policy than I did in 25 years. And he's done more to convince people to solarize than Greta Tonberg has ever done. He is, like, he's doing praxis. It's very weird. He's crushing it. Maybe this was the plan the whole time. Secret agent from Comrade Trump. Just be as unappealing as possible as uncurried myth as possible. And that'll get everyone to move off. But yeah, no, it's true. Like a lot of things. He's an op. My friends won't study in the US anymore. Like, do you want to head out there? They go, why? I'm going to get like violated at the airport. I'm going to be arrested. He's fired. Shudder sent to a Salvadoran slave labor camp for the rest of my life. Yeah. Totally. Is fucked up. Even I was meant to do a big US tour because I've got a lot of readers in the US. And I just is literally not safe for me to go. I'm too brown. Wow. It would be unwise for me to head around safe. Sure. Are you your US citizen or naturalized or Australian? I'm Australian. You're an Australian citizen. But you don't sound Australian. You sound. No. Well, so I'm actually, I was a Malaysian citizen. I just got my citizenship approved. I'm doing the ceremony in a couple of weeks. Muzzle top. Thank you. Malaysia is an interesting case because they have renounced all of their treaties with the US. And they are now saying that they will not honor any of the policy commitments that they made to the US specifically. They, along with every other country in the world, have signed up to something called anti-circumvention. That makes it illegal to reverse engineer and modify technology if it's designed not to be modified to change like the RM systems. Right. Which is why, you know, there's not a company in Malaysia today that will make you like the universal printer unlocking kit that makes it just disabled for every printer, disables their ink checking routine so that you can use generic ink or refilled cartridges with them, which would be a giant business. I mean, it's like $10,000 a gallon. And so, you know, like you could just supply that to everyone, you know, 25, 30 years ago, Malaysia led the world to making de-regionalized DVD players. But once it signed up to its US free trade agreement, it promised to criminalize people who reverse engineer DVD players and de-regionalize them. And so, that, that, that, that, that, that export sector used to be like Malaysian DVD players were the world's, you know, most sought after DVD players because they were all region zero. You know, growing up there, it didn't even occur to me that that was special. I, I didn't even know regionalized DVD players existed. I just assumed that. Interesting. Well, I've learned something. Anti-circumvention is a way to effectively invent a law because there's no copyright law that says if you go to Australia and bring home a blinky bill DVD and try and play it in Florida that like, you're not allowed to watch it, right? Like you bought the DVD, it's yours, it's your property. But, you know, the sector wants to segment the market and DVDs make it hard to do, you know, in the age of of CRTs, it was easy because you had conflicting video standards palen and TSC, DVDs that just goes away, they're multi output digital, whatever. And so this business model becomes a law, right? The way anti-circumvention works is once it's illegal to reverse engineer and modify something, then if you make something that enshrines a business model, reverse engineering and modifying the device to frustrate your commercial desires becomes a crime, Jay Freeman calls it felony contemptive business model. And so this is why you see the metastasis of these what are called access controls, DRM, not just in DVD players, but printers, ventilators, cars, tractors, in smart speakers, phones, obviously, apples, like single largest line item on the revenue sheet is $100 billion a year they get from processing transactions for the app store because you have to use their 30% payment processor for every dollar you collect in their app store. And it's just illegal to reverse engineer the phone and like make a jail breaking dongle you can buy in the checkout aisle at Walmart or SPAR that jail breaks your phone and installs a regional app store that charges 3% to the same software vendors and service providers. And so Apple gets to preserve this $100 million market and that market could be someone else's, right? Australia could go into business like having the most up-to-date jail breaking toolkits that make sure your phone always works but is always patched with the latest security patches and they could export that to the whole world and offer a 90% discount on payment processing and make $10 billion instead of $100 billion except the U.S. Australia free trade agreement of 2003 makes it illegal to do that in exchange for terror free access to the American market which is no longer there. It's high this all to AI because I know this isn't what we signed up to speak about although this is my special Australia is sitting there along with every other country in the world having a digital sovereignty crisis, and like the digital sovereignty crisis is fucking real. You know, Trump like shut off Microsoft Office 365 access for foreign officials that made him angry, right? The International Criminal Court. He bricked it for swearing out in a restaurant for genocide against Netanyahu, the high court that sentenced Jerrible Sonarro, bricked, right? You lose your M365, you lose the email address used to log in everything else because that's your outlook address. Yeah. You lose all your working files, all your cloud documents, email archives, calendars, address books, everything. You're effectively like kicked off the fucking internet. And he's doing this to foreign governments. He could get up tomorrow and say like, I want Greenland. I'm not going to put tanks in Nuke. I'm just going to shut down Denmark. I was thinking about this this morning because I was chatting with Ed Zitron who I don't know if he's spoken of say, I'm guessing you have. I love Ed. So I was chatting with Ed and he said, he revealed some numbers to me and he went, you know, maybe this spells doom for Microsoft. And I had to think about it. I saw that article. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I was also thinking about it. And I went, but Microsoft can just like 5X their prices and everyone has to, I mean, at least a couple of years just suck it out. Right? Like, what are you going to do? And it's not just office productivity software, although that's very important. It's also hardware. So you remember when those John Deere tractors were stolen from Ukraine and ended up in Chechnya by like Putin's thugs, John Deere killed switched them remotely. They can break any tractor in the world. So like again, Trump doesn't even have to shut down all the ministries and companies in Denmark. He can just brick all the tractors in Denmark. Right? So there's this like urgent need to get your data out of these silos and to gel break the firmware locks on these devices and also to create like compatibility layers between conflicting services, right? If you are the EU, like the EU is built its own blue sky server, but like maybe they'll pouch some people off of blue sky. They're not going to get people who are stuck on Twitter and Instagram because they're stuck there because like they have a rare disease and that's where the people have the same rare diseases they are or because like they move from another country and that's where their family is or you know, it's where their customers are, their, their, their audience or whatever. But like when Facebook started, they solved this by giving everyone a Myspace scraper that you gave your Myspace credentials to and it scraped everything waiting for you on Myspace and put it in your Facebook feeds who could eat your cake and have it too. You could still talk to your friends on Myspace but use Facebook to do it. It's very like Prodigy AOL, last nonsense that you have to care which network someone's on to talk to them, right? So you can make that app, right? All of that stuff is possible if you get rate of anti-circumvention law. So AI, when you talk about digital sovereignty, it's almost always an argument at how we build AI in our country. I was just on a panel in Toronto where five of us, four of them were like, how do we build national AI? And I was like, guys, if Trump orders Dario and Sam to switch off all your chatbots tomorrow, not one firm fails, not one ministry shuts down. Kids have to do their own homework, who gives a shit? Whereas, if Trump bricks our tractors because we won't give them Alberta or he shuts down all of our ministries and structurally important firms and households, he bricks all of our phones, right? Like, that's it. Canada is like in the Stone Age, right? Because like, yes, we could do all that stuff analog, but not right now. And we couldn't rebuild it without those digital tools to coordinate the rebuilding of something else. That is a digital sovereignty emergency. Meanwhile, we can see the writing on the wall with AI. Like, the AI bubble is going to burst. If you really do want AI, like, don't buy at the top of the market, wait until the shit is 10 cents on the dollar. Right. Right. And if you build like digital public goods internationally using, like, to help everyone escape the American internet and build a post-American internet, well, then you'll have all the skills and kind of networks and, you know, procedures for building digital public goods in the form of AI, should you decide such a thing as important? Yeah. There's been a big uptake in engineers who have this sort of hero fantasy where they go at the end of the AI thing. I'm going to make a lot of money cleaning this up. And I'm like, firstly, you're not all the people that are pretending to sell good AI products are now going to pretend to be clean up crew. And secondly, like, half these companies are fucking gone, right? Like, there's going to be nothing to clean up. They'll have no money. They want to be sold from parts because the parts won't be worth anything. Like, there's not a lot to because there's no fallout, right? If someone turns off the chatbot, feature an outlook, companies are not going to go, wow, we need someone to fix this. They're going to go, wow, I don't know if anyone was using that. Yeah. I'll tell you what I'm afraid of, though, right back to this idea that the AI can't do your job, but your boss is infinitely horny for replacing you with a chatbot. I think we're going to take people who do real jobs. We're going to fire them. We're going to replace them with chatbots that can't do their job. And so they'll do a half ass shitty job of doing their job. But the people we fire are going to become discouraged. They're going to retrain. They're going to exit the job market. They won't be reassemblable when the chatbots all get switched off. And then we shut off the chatbots. And then we just have a void where like, you know, take, take functions we should never give to a chatbots, but we're doing anyway, like deciding whose children get taken away by the state, right? Taking children away from parents who are abusive is a regrettably important thing that the state needs to do. It's a, it's a significant function of the state. And if we fire all the people to know how to do that job, which is a hard job that already the state doesn't do well, and we replace them with chatbots. And then the chatbots go away. We still have this pressing need to protect children who are in abusive households. And the people who know how to do it are not available anymore. And the chatbot that was supposed to do it has been switched off because the data center went bust. And now what? Right? That's, that's my concern. We've already seen that happen, right? Quite a few industries are in COVID. I'm thinking of the airline industry in particular. I know there were massive difficulties because a bunch of people got laid off. And then they went, well, actually fuck this. I can't take care of my family here. I need to retry to do something else. Even right now, you know, software engineers are pretty privileged and the skills hold for a long time. But I know a lot of people that have been laid off for AI nonsense. And, you know, the engineer to electrician pipeline is, it's real. They just go, I'm going to go do something a chatbot can't do. And then, and then there's the kind of the process knowledge, right? Which I think is very systematically undervalued. And again, this ties into AI. So I'm sure you're familiar with this idea of process knowledge as opposed to IP, right? The sometimes called tacit knowledge. But yeah, I think tacit knowledge is mostly an individual matter, whereas process knowledge tends to be spread out across individuals within divisions, across divisions within a firm, across firms within a sector, both vertically and horizontally. Right. And that process knowledge, it's like if you can write it down and put in a filing cabinet, it's not process knowledge at IP, which is to say that if you can, if it's a thing you can train a chatbot on, it's not process knowledge. And if it's process knowledge, you can't train a chatbot on it because it's all tacit. It's not, it doesn't exist in a form that can be fed to AI. And process knowledge is systematically undervalued by markets and firms because it's not commodifiable, right? So it never shows up on a balance sheet. But process knowledge is so important that we have the work to rule, which is when workers show up for work and only do what the IP says and don't employ any process knowledge and then firms just shut down, right? If all you do is follow procedures where you wrote in your piece that firms are very bad at writing down the procedures. In part because there's parts of the procedures that are that cannot be embodied, they're, they're like super contingent. They're with the Germans called finger spits and could fill the fingertip feeling, you know, and it's literally things like eye apprentice. So I know with the pace at which feed stock goes in this machine based on a whole bunch of feedback that's coming from the machine. I can hear it. I can feel it. But I also know because I have process knowledge that when the machine jams and the person who can fix it is off. The person who trained me who retired last year will do it for 100 pounds. And here's his mobile number, right? And like that's the difference between the line shutting down and not shutting down. And my favorite example of recent process knowledge is there was someone at a chip fab where a whole ton of chips failed QA. And they only ran at like 50% of their nominal clock speed. But they knew they had a downstream customer where there was a faction within the firm that had been briefing for making lower end computers. And they called them up and they said, what if I could give you a ton of chips for like cheap? And they said, yeah, I think I can sell this new product line, which is called the MacBook Neo. And it's the most successful product Apple has launched in 10 years. Right. And it's so successful. They used up all the shitty chips. And they're now making shitty chips for new MacBook Neo's, right? Like that's that stuff is just that when you vaporize that, it doesn't come back, right? It has to be rebuilt through like hard yards where you have to make miss like the machine has to break down over and over again. And you have to call in repair people and have like days long shutdowns of the factory while you wait for the machine to get fixed before you figure out the finger spits and go full the finger tip feeling of how to load the machine. And before you get the phone number of the person who fixed it the first time but then quit, but who will come in and do it for a hundred bucks. And that's like that's the thing that keeps the system running. Yeah, you know, it's actually a pretty common failure for, you know, because we're data consultancy that's specifically focused on something called extreme programming, which I'll skip a lot of the details. I know extreme programming. Yeah. Cool. So we're next B shop. And that means like a lot of the thing we do at a company is we just sit down with people, you know, like they'll hire Deloitte and Deloitte will go into meeting and do births presentations. But we'll just get the ground stuff and it will go, so what does this look like when it's not in the PowerPoint? Right. We still haven't seen a PowerPoint that looks like what the actual process is. You know, there's a lot of, well, you do all of this and then you send it to John. and they go, what does John do? No one actually knows what John does apart from John, but all we know is if we don't send him numbers, like it comes out wrong every time. And you talk to John and it's like this complex system of I talk to this regulator and then I check this number and I confirm with Michael that it looks okay. And frequently at these organizations, they don't seem to realize they're like two guys quitting away from some sort of pretty major crisis. I know at least one financial institute in Australia that has exactly one man who has the password to a system and that system has a bunch of encrypted data from a massive data breach. It's the list of customers who were affected. And I was talking to him, I was going, so where do they keep the password? And he goes, I just know it. You know, there was an emergency five years ago, so I wrote the password down. And what happens if you leave? He's like, I don't know. I guess they'd have to call me to unlock it. But it's just, I'd know if I'll be around, I was thinking of moving to Germany. And what if you get hit by a bus, right? Yeah, everybody has this problem, right? Like this is not unique to large firms. All of us have inadequate plans for contingencies, right? And it's just like even if you like document everything and think through all the contingencies, 10 days goes by and new potential contingencies emerge because of exogenous factors. And so this is why, you know, if you've got a plant, we're actually going through this. I live in a flat on top of a low rise office building in East London, and we have an insane system in the UK called freeholding where like the building is actually owned. Like it's not a condo association. It's like a private company that bought the title to the land from an aristocrat and they own the skin of the building. And we have statutorily defined 999 year leases in it. And it's just insane. Fascinating. They're responsible for fire safety. And also they sold our second fire stairwell to the neighbours so they could expand their building. So now we only have one stairwell to leave by. So like there's just all this insane kind of stuff that happens so that even if like, you know, if my family, if we had a plan for getting out of the flat, if it catches fire, that plan goes away, the minute the freeholder takes away our second fire escape. And so it has to just be continuously adjusted. Well, to jump back to something you were talking about earlier, we were talking about the sort of coordinated attack against certain digital freedoms. Yeah. You know, we were talking about the, can you remember what it's called? It was the anti-circumvention. Anti-circumvention laws. Thank you. So, you know, that sounds like a pretty sophisticated and coordinated attack to like capture part of the market. I have a lot of trouble reconciling that with like how fucking stupid some of the people I meet are. Like it's, it is difficult to imagine some of the people I just like putting this together, because they have difficulty with ideas like, maybe people at my company know things. Right. What are we talking about two different groups of people? Or here's the way to understand this. So there's a bunch of criminology about how this law got enacted and then how it got spread. So the, you know, in the early 90s, Clinton decided to demilitarize the U.S. internet, depending on who you ask. Someone like Ben Tarnoff would say he wanted to privatize it. It's also true. I think that calling it privatization implies that before that it was like mostly a public spirited project of the U.S. government. And it was actually mostly a military project, the public of the American government with some, you know, academic stuff around the periphery. So privatization and demilitarization, tomato tomato. Al Gore was in charge of this. They called it the National Information Infrastructure Project, but more colloquially, you'll know it as the information superhighway. You remember that? - Yep, yep. - Yeah. So Clinton's IP's are was this guy called Bruce Layman, who pitched Gore on anti-circumvention and Gore told him to fuck off, 'cause he thought it sounded stupid. And so Layman, the IP's are, went to the World Intellectual Property Organization, which is a UN Specialized Agency that started as an industry consortium. I think it's the only one. The only UN Agency that was an industry consortium that then became a UN Agency. So they're like, they're the most corporate, even, you know, the ITU, do the phone stuff. They're the most corporate of all the UN agencies, the most capture, the most captureable, not least because like the majority votes in a UN Agency come from the Global South, but the majority delegates of the Global South Nation sends to Geneva are not gonna be experts in IP law, right? They're like water experts and children's health experts and whatever, right? So they're easily misled by these industry reps who show up there. It's funny, like an NGO at the UN is Pharma and the Motion Picture Association. Those are classed as NGOs. So when you're like in a UN meeting, I used to be a wipe-o delegate. When you're in a UN meeting, like the NGO section has got the rep from Pharma in it. It is wild, bizzara world nonsense. - That is baffling. (laughing) - Well, they're structured as a nonprofit, right? So like, yeah, they're a nonprofit. They're not governmental. What are they? They're an NGO, right? So these NGOs just led them by the nose into creating a treaty obligation under the wipe-o copyright treaty and the wipe-o phonograms and performers treaty that's actually weaker than the laws. But it's a similar treaty obligation then Bruce Lehman went back to America and in a movie his publicate described as doing an end run around Congress. He told Congressman that they now had an obligation to pass a much more extreme version of the law, the one he'd originally pitched to Al Gore that not even the UN would make a treaty obligation. And then they passed the DMCA 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Section 1201 establishes a felony punishable by a $500,000 fine and a five-year prison sentence for jail-breaking locked devices. - Holy shit. - Respective of whether it's for a lawful purpose or not. - That is a hefty fine. - Oh yeah, and then the US Trade Representative made it the number one trading priority of the US all around the world. So I used to, before Orban, I used to sometimes lecture in the summer program at Central European University in Budapest. And this was like a doctoral program in international relations. And a lot of the students were ex-government ministers and officials who had been politicians but wanted to understand governance better and wanted to do a doctorate in this. So one of my students one year, one of these lectures where I was talking about this was someone who had been the information minister of a Central American country during the Central American Free Trade Agreement Negotiations CAFTA. And they came to me afterwards and they said, I wanna tell you about how CAFTA got negotiated. 'Cause I told our rep, do not give the Americans anti-circumvention under any circumstances. And I got a phone call saying, we are in the negotiating room. The Americans say that we cannot export coffee to them unless we give them anti-circumvention. And that's our whole export economy. So you lose, right? That's how we got it. So then we have this, so this is the ground state, right? So now we have this kind of gravity that attracts assholes who wanna make it illegal to change how your technology works so that they can fuck you, right? And that force of gravity acts on the stupidest and worst people in the world who learn through experience, through intuition, through consultations with asshole lawyers. Look, if you sell like there's a bassinet called the snoo, and the bassinet has like a thing that when your kid cries, wakes up in the night and tries to rock them to sleep. And so the guy who runs the snoo has sold some bassinets and now he wants to extract more revenue from them. And somewhere he gets the idea that he can push a firmware update that disables it after it changes hands. So if you sell your used snoo, you have to then buy a subscription. And if you've got your snoo and you wanna use it for the next kid, you have to buy a subscription. So this is like the Darth Vader MBA. I'm altering the deal, pray I don't alter it further. And this guy does not have to be smart. He just has to be greedy in a world where greed is rewarded and not punished. And so like that's what we've done, right? We've established, this is like my whole enchantification thesis is that enchantification is not the result of individual greed of tech executives. It is the product of an enchantogenic policy environment that makes the worst ideas of the worst people the most profitable. And so you don't have to be smart. You just have to be ruthless. - That makes a lot of sense. So basically you just need someone relatively intelligent to kick off whatever the new norm is. - You need a Bruce Layman. - Right. - And then everything follows from there. - You need an intelligent sociopath. Yeah, and then you just need a bunch of people who can learn by social script, which probably explains why so many of these people are, I mean, it sounds like you've met a lot of executives. You've probably met like medium executive. I know someone's I really like for the most part, right? Like I know some cool people, but I will say that typical executive I meet just bulldozes people. Like they're just bullies. And I frequently see them deploy this in context. You know, you see them doing a work and you go, "Well, it's just like a clever strategy." And then you'll see them yell at a six-year-old and you're like, "Oh, you can't turn it off." But like this was not, you were, yeah. - Although I'll tell you my favorite counter example, there's a great speech by Yohai Bangkler, who's the guy who wrote "Coses Penguin" and started to talk about free software, like where free software fit into these ideas, organizational theory and so on. So great writer, lawyer and thinker, who talks about the fact that although, you know, homo-economicus is like a bedrock of the, of the, you know, neoclassical economics, and it's an assumption we make about how everyone operates, that everyone's always maximizing their own utility, that like no one wants to actually live that way in their personal life. and he describes going down Wall Street to up. playground where stockburgers had brought their children to play and they're standing on the edge, you know, talking on phones, doing deals, but periodically looking over at their kids and going, "Timmy, share!" because you don't want to live with a kid who acts like that in like life because no one could fucking do that. That would like you kill your children and then yourself if that was how your family lived. It's honestly, you know, the first time I met Ed, he was asking me how many so many executives get in power. This is pretty early in the AI bubble. Because two years ago, you would have read this, the Apple Powell drive you if you mentioned AI in. And he went, "Well, how is this working? If it's, you know, we're still early in this thing and people have no real reason to go along with this." Because the dicks, you know, you're there at 10 a.m. and you just want to get through the day and someone goes, "Well, if you don't let me get this chatbot right now, I'm going straight to the CEO. I want to make a huge deal out of it. He's not going to understand shit, but he's going to be mad at you because I'm the first person who complained." And everyone just heard I went, "All right, fine, you can have the chatbot. You know, like, I'm not paid enough to deal with this." And two years later, we're sitting here going, "Christ, I wish I hadn't given you the chatbot." It's gotten so far out of control. I also want to suggest to you that consolidation in a sector produces the circumstance where within a firm, the major competitor for any executive is another executive within that firm. So it creates a kind of autoimmune disorder, right? Where, like, if you think about a Fortune 100 where you've got like directors, EVPs, or SVPs, EVPs, presidents, CEO, like that's a typical studio structure. Other companies have different ranks. But there's something like an order of magnitude difference in lifetime running expectation between each of those tiers. And also, it's a very steep pyramid. And so it's, it's dead man's shoes, right? You don't move up unless someone gets fired or promoted or dies. And so if there's a new thing, right, that might be the next thing, right? Like, if AI might be the next thing for your firm, if you think about, like, the tech sector's successors, right? Where, like, Microsoft's successor was the guy who figured out cloud for them. Apple successor was the guy who figured out logistics and Chinese contract manufacturing for them. And Google's successor was also a cloud guy, right? So the person who brought them into the next multi-billion dollar sector, everyone in their patronage network moves one step and one order of magnitude up the lifetime earning expectation on this steeply-canted pyramid, which means that when there is anything that might be that thing, everyone starts to, on the one hand, jockey to become the person who runs that. But quietly, because if the other execs think that you're going to make the move, then their patronage network all start to rat fuck all of your vassals in order to destroy them in order to weaken your power base, because they don't know who should do this. They know it shouldn't be you because if it's you, it's not their boss. Yeah. And then their lifetime chance about order of magnitude, lift and lifetime earning expectation goes down. You know, one of the things I'm a great pains to do right now is to get leftists to stop saying endless growth is the ideology of a tumor because I don't think this is ideological. I think this is totally material, right? I think that like, this is not, this is not just people are greedy for like no reason, right? Like 10X in your lifetime earnings expectation in a highly financialized economy with a weak social safety network is the chance to permanently attain a kind of dynastic family in which you can be sure that your kids can go to university and have a house and not have medical debt. And you have a pension, right? Which is like those are those are increasingly aspirational goals to get those all of those, right? In one like in one generational transfer that used to be that was normal for the the what the French called the 30 glorious years after the war and now you that's like top death style and above economic aspirations. Those are material goals, right? It's it's not ideological to say I want to have a decent retirement. I want my kid to have somewhere to live and I don't want my kid to be saddled with debt for their entire life because of their university degree. Those are those are absolutely material goals. Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think it manifests a little bit less frequently in engineers because we're still basically at the earning level where we get fired, we can help in front of the role. But I do know a lot of, you know, director to your people at places like hospitals and when they get drunk out of the hospital, like that's it. They're back to the unwashed messes. Like there's no they don't have a skill to apply that allow them to go back out and go, I would like another $300,000 next year. People just go, well, you have no supporters. No one here, no one works here knows you. Where's your patronage? Oh, I would let you in. Yeah. I will say on top of all that though, I've seen that dynamic you're describing play out. I haven't thought about it that much because I think frequently the people in it are operating on pure lizard brain. Yeah, I don't think they necessarily plot everything out. Just some little bit of their subconscious goes, it would be very bad if I didn't climb this ladder. I would have to say things that would identify my sources to say more, but I know for a fact that there are people within the patronage networks of important executives at large firms who explicitly view their tenure and their career in these terms and act accordingly. Like this is this is just the way that they they understand the lay of the land. Yeah. If you've read a moral mazes by I think it's Robert, it's either jackal or jackal. I don't know how to pronounce it. Yeah. Yeah, I have not. I know the book. There's a there's a radio program on the BBC called the moral maze that I think was inspired by it. Yeah, it was quite interesting because the the companies he landed at the people inside clearly had a very heightened awareness that the dynamics were talking about. And I think it is more prevalent in some industries. Like, you know, the players I meet in the state government are not switched on in this way. The partners I meet at law firms I think very much are. You know, there's a sort of yeah. Yeah. And it's, I mean, it's it's scary to deal with people like that. We try to avoid the matter of company because at our small scale like no good can come of it. We just don't want to like wake up on a Monday and have a contract get knife because it was slightly inconvenient aspirationally like it's bad business. Yeah. No, I get it. It's, you know, Brandeis wrote about the curse of bigness, right? One of the one of the great antitrust jurists. And I believe briefly the the Chief Justice Supreme Court wrote about the curse of bigness and just the sense that you not only have these like cozy and coordination problems when firms get very large, but you also have like this political problem, which is like it's real and non ideological that like the the locus of competition becomes internal when a firm dominates a sector or when the number of firms and sector dwindles to a very small number, you get a lot of internal competition that displaces the external competition. And you know, when you read like the moral philosophers and markets, you know, the Ricardo and Smith and so on, hardly, hardly, you know, socialist, they're the ones who say that the way that firms and markets produce public benefit. And the reason we should have them is that competition makes them strive to provide better goods and services to the public. But internal competition does not do that. Internal competition is is all about like a firm that knows that its position is cemented. It's too big to care. It's the only game in town. And so now it's about who dominates the firm by dominating its politics rather than who dominates the market by producing the best goods and services at the best prices or tracks the best talent. And I do think that this is where I think there is an ideological component because I think tech workers, you know, were in very short supply. The Silicon Valley engineer on average adds about a million dollars to their employer's bottom line. There weren't enough of them. And their bosses had to pretend to like them. And they had to pretend to be co-equal, right? And you know, I think a lot of tech workers, despite the cliche of the tech bro, I think a lot of tech workers path into tech was having their lives dramatically improved by exposure to networked computers where like they found communities and words to describe themselves and ideas that allowed them to transcend the circumstances their birth and what they thought the limitations their life would be. And a lot of people really want everyone else to have that. I call them Tron Pilled because they want to fight for the user. And you know, you know, these people, right? You meet someone who runs Linux on the desktop and try and make them stop talking about their computer. It's very hard because they want you to experience the benefit they're experiencing. I am that guy. And so those workers very exploitable. And I think their bosses kind of trick them into thinking that they weren't workers. They trick them into thinking that they were temporal and barist entrepreneurs because everyone wears a hoodie. You and Mark Zuckerberg both wear a hoodie. And you get to go to the meeting where like it's an all hands meeting and you can tell him you think his tech ideas are stupid and his business ideas are stupid. And he like goes, yeah, I'll take that under consideration and like you don't get immediately fired for insubordination. But secretly bosses were seeding about this. They fucking hated it. And you know, when you look at the Google layoffs that 12,000 person lay off that followed their $80 billion stock buyback that would have paid those wages for 27 years, they preferentially fired senior mouthy engineers, right? Like they were they were like going after the people who were a pain in the ass because they knew how everything worked and they they had a power base. People looked up to them, they remembered a time when Google was more responsive to its workers. And I think this is why tech bosses love AI chatbots that do coding because it's a way to put the fear of God into mouthy entitled programmers. Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch because there's a specific thing I've seen multiple times, which is some sort of directorer above comes into the office. And they put this big message up and they go over the weekend, I made it to do list using cloud code. Why can't we all be this productive all the time? And you know, implicit in that is this sort of idea, like, you fucking morons couldn't figure this out. You know, this, I just did it in one evening. Do you need me to tell you to use the robot? And everyone starts saying they're going, yeah, that's a great point boss. And then they, they leave and they approach me and they go, what does he think I fucking do all day? Like, this is my job. I do this 40 hours a week. I went to university and, but, you know, they just have to suck it up. The thing is that there's a lot of stuff that's very easy to build if you only care how it works and don't care how it fails. And so if you're not worried about maintenance, if you're not worried about dependencies, if you're not worried about edge cases, if you're not worried about scalability, if you're not worried about security, you can make the two do list app in a weekend, right? And if you have to care about all of those things suddenly, it's very hard. Look, I actually think, so one of the things that I've always championed as a technologist is no code, low code tools. I think visual basic hypercard, you know, scratch. I think these are amazing. And not just as learning tools, although they are very good learning tools. They're nice smooth, you know, gradient into a series of more advanced programming challenges, more advanced programming knowledge. But I like them as ends on to themselves because I think that there is a limit to the fidelity with which requirements could be transmitted from practitioners to to coders. Yeah. But requirements document is never going to fully capture the needs of the person at the quill face. And when we're talking about especially personal needs, you know, this motto of the disability movement is nothing about us without us, right? Like don't, don't try and solve a disability problem without consulting disabled people. But you know, that motto goes back to the 16th century, it goes back to the Polish dukes who did the Poland's version of the Magna Carta, which was just like to the King, don't change the way the country works without talking to the people who have to run the outlying provinces. I think broadly, like people should have self-determination. And in software that we have self-determination is by producing code. And I actually don't see any problem if you have like a chap out running on your computer that's not consuming the world's water and energy that you use to vibe code a thing that solves a problem you have. And it breaks in six weeks and then you vibe code another one. I think that's totally fine. Yeah, sure. I think the problem is when you make that into something everyone uses, right? Then like you turn it into a product without thinking about security, scalability, maintainability and so on. And you expose other people to risk. And this is the thing that I think bosses miss when they walk in on Monday morning and say, here's the app I've coded on the weekend, what are you assholes doing? Yeah, one of my favorite things is every time I get linked to any vibe code in startup, I try to make an account and 50% of them you literally can't. Like the login flow does not work. And that has been, I know Ed's very critical of replete, but you know, like none of these things actually work, which is interesting because I expected them to fail deep in the technical internals, right? Like you make the account because that's easy. Like there's so many examples of like correct login flow to copy from, I thought you'd get in and then like six months later, your stuff disappears and you go, ah, something was wrong with some retention policy in an S3 bucket, but it's literally at the point where you click login and it doesn't work and the guy who runs it hasn't noticed because he doesn't even have the domain knowledge to understand things like, oh, you should try logging in more than one time. Like just because it worked, it doesn't mean it works for every person on every computer. Like that's just so far. Try key to creating an account with an email address that doesn't end in comm edu net or org. Right? Yeah. Whatever, right? Like right now we're recording on Riverside and every time I go to podcast, they have to go like, hey, remember to use a Chrome browser. It's just not going to work on the others. Yeah, I know. I know. I'm a Firefox user. I keep a version of Chrome in a sandbox specifically for Riverside and the other one starts with an H. Oh, I had a squad cast too. I also put, there's the one trash future uses I forgot what it's called starts with an H. But yeah, you know, and do they think that we didn't get this working on Firefox for fun? Like it's super hard. Right. It's actually complicated. It turns out that WebKit and whatever the, I forget with the rendering engine WebKit and Kako and whatever the running engine for Chrome are, are very different. Yeah. Yeah. You can't just go like cloud knock this out for me or we would have done it. Yeah. You know, something I didn't want to talk about was, um, this is baffled me, but I was talking to jathan about it this morning. So we've seen a huge uptick in executives bragging about their AI productivity and a lot of this is, you know, like the C of Spotify was talking about merging, I'm making the number up, but I'm pretty sure I said it was hundreds of pulled requests per week. You know, just some absurd number. I am really curious as to, I mean, like Spotify is not noticeably changed in any way. Like, if you asked me what's changed in the past two years, I'd go, if you held a gun to my head and said, what did those pulled requests change, I probably die. I could not tell you. Right. Like a button moved one pixel to the left. I don't know. What do you think, um, motivated that statement? Because you know, my thesis in the article was, I've seen a bunch of actual mania, right? I've seen some people, for instance, I know at, um, at GitHub, you know, they have like four AI buttons on the front page, uh, a pretty senior engineer at GitHub recently told me, uh, when I was talking about this, he went, yeah, no, our, our executives are basically as mercilessly cutthroat as, you know, 80 executive anywhere, very much talking about what you've been describing, which is just a bunch of people trying to knife each other to be the AI guy. And if no one's the AI guy, it doesn't matter, they're not going to get fired, right? Just no one moves up the, the hierarchy. But I have met a certain number of people who are not quite undergoing, like, AI psychosis, like someone like Stevie I gave you're familiar with him, you know, like not actively undergoing some sort of like pretty public mental health episode. I just mean someone who's really excited and seems to actually believe something is happening with the product, like, do you have any theory of mind for the guy that turns up and goes, I've done a thousand PRs a week and doesn't think he's going to be embarrassed when someone goes like, but what do they do? Like what? Do you know how many a thousand is? Yeah. That's a good question. It's a very number go upish kind of phenomenon where like, you know, there's good hearts law. Like that, you know, targets become metrics become targets, right? Like if you don't care about the quality of the PR, you can make a lot more PRs. And you know, we saw this early with a lot of GitHub projects and other like, like, get hosted projects, not just on GitHub, but GitLab and whatever where people got really excited about AI, not just execs, but just like junior coders and we're like, there's a project with 10 outstanding bugs, I'm going to fix all 10 of them with my chatbot. And I'm going to like, be the most bug fixing son of a bitch on, you know, this little corner of open source land. And I think it's, I don't know, I think it's just like, it's back to like not caring how things break, but how they work, you know, if you can like, if you can just like satisfy a unit test or whatever, if you can build, and you don't really have the discernment to distinguish between, I guess that's it. It's the discernment to distinguish between a good bug fix and a bad bug fix. It's especially pernicious if you think other people aren't real and what they do is nonsense. And that, you know, not as hard as what you do, because then you look at it and you're like, oh, well, that was easy. I guess that person is as much of an idiot as I thought they were. Because you don't understand what they do. But also like you just lack discernment, I actually think this is a deep problem with the AI story about AI displacing labor. Like you, I'm less dismissive than add about whether AI is useful. But I think that AI is primarily useful to skill practitioners who make thoughtful judgments about when and how to integrate it into their workflow, because they have the discernment to distinguish good AI output from bad AI output, and they have the self-knowledge to know the pace at which they can make those fine distinctions, because oftentimes, because AI is doing statistical extrapolation from things that work, the things that break that AI makes are often statistically close to a thing that would work as it's possible to be without actually working. And so it's really, really hard to spot those bugs. And so while I know some extremely talented programs, in fact, some of the most talented programmers I know who are using really extensive AI tools to write code that they swear blind is very good. You know, my favorite example here is a guy called Patrick Ball, who founded a thing called the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, and HRdag.org. They have decades of experience using advanced statistical technique to describe the parts of war crimes that have been obscured from the record using the parts that are visible for human rights tribunals, truth and reconciliation and war crimes trials. And they're now using a lot of AI tools to build this stuff, and in fact, they announced yesterday they've launched a thing called the Tech Freedom Coalition, or something. I forget what it's called, Tech Liberty Coalition. That's basic. consortium that's building federated data centers outside of the US for both like office-style productivity suites but also local open AI model not opening eye open source AI models that are reproducible and testable and they're also training other NGOs how to do large scale data analysis using this hardware and this software in a way that's very robust and the thing is that Patrick has a ton of discernment right like he is someone who has a lifetime career at the top of his field in making extremely highly consequential software outputs that then have to be defended in court in the Hague and in truth reconciliation tribunals in order to put genocide errors into prison right like it's really really he's really careful right and so when he tells me I figured out how to use chatbots that help me write this code right or that help me process documents one of the things HR DAG has done is partner with Innocence Project New Orleans and they've taken the arrest reports of people they've successfully exonerated found the linguistic correlates of a successful exoneration and use that to sort all the arrest reports they have in Louisiana to put the ones that are most similar to successful exonerations at the top so that lawyers can review them right I look at that I'm like if you tell me that works right if the lawyers are saying I am finding good exonerations in there I'm not gonna say well AI is bullshit you're wrong right I'm gonna say like yeah people with discernment using AI can do it but here's the paradox it means that you can't just have a bunch of junior people fire the senior people and ask the junior people to mark the AI's homework and if you have senior people they're gonna tell you I can't mark the AI's homework at speed right like I need I need to use the AI in certain ways that will make my outputs better but won't necessarily increase my throughput that's the that's the historic dynamic of adoption of automation that labor-driven automation adoption is quality-based and capital-driven automation is throughput-based and so you can get I can totally see a quality-based automation adoption story for AI over the next 10-15 years we look back and we're like okay here's where it works but not quantity and the place where it's very visible as education because like if you need discernment to distinguish good AI put from bad you cannot use AI to learn things right you can't ask an AI to explain history that you're not familiar with to you or math that you don't know how to do to you right I have a hard time I have a horrifying story about this yeah so RMIT Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology is the biggest biggest in terms of undergraduates university here in Victoria maybe Australia actually and one of my one of my younger cousins was studying software engineering there first year I think he's moved to a different university now but he came out my house and he went hey I've got this really really hard assignment and you know I am 18 years old I do not know how to tackle this I don't know what Java is and I took a look at the material and it was like really really bad it was it was not suitable for for an 18-year-old to tackle but it's been like that for years you know the students just sort of grit their teeth and get a little traumatized and they find a way through it but it's a group assignment and he goes well you're a professional software engineer can you please help me explain it to me and it's a group assignment he shows me the rest of the code and I go wow like this is obviously like 10,000 lines of LLM generated Java and you didn't do this your your groupmate did it and I went it's not great but I went this I'm very impressed by your groupmate right like being able to prompt the thing to get this I wouldn't put like if some of this a company had still fired them but I went this is really good for an 18-year-old right this would get you an A in the assignment and I work with him through the the next couple days for everyone in the course is just using their parents corporate chat GPT subscription like that's how they think at the app done but we get to the final day and I'm like I think this is ready to go man like you can submit it I'd love to talk to your your groupmate like if he if he did all of this like I know some people he should talk to and he goes oh turns out it wasn't him he got his uncle to pilot the LLM who's also a professional software engineer so it's just it's just a bunch of guys 30 to 50 yeah it's just I guess that's what happened it right like yeah and it's interesting that the discernment popped up immediately I didn't even think it was good I just went on 18-year-old didn't do this there's just there's no way so to give you an example of how automation and education could improve quality without improving improving throughput my daughter went to the American secondary school system in Los Angeles she went to a big dumb American high school it's actually this school they based Glee on it's like it is like a very like American American high school you know they have a homecoming football game and totally outside of my experience I went to a weird alternative school in Toronto where the only sports team we had was an improv team but she she did the math right she did like higher math and she was never allowed to take home her math quizzes or tests or exams because there was only one test because they have to teach certain concepts in a certain order because there it's all goes it ends up with standardized tests with SATs and AP classes and and so on so the profs are the the the teachers are extremely constrained in what they can teach and so writing something that is this perniquity a test that's this perniquity is it's a lot of work so they have one and they don't want the answers leaking out so you write your your quiz but you don't get to see like you can review it in class but you don't get to take it home to review the mistakes you've made this is fucking batshit right my dad was a math teacher like you cannot teach math this way this is like teaching target shooting by making you shoot and then like blindfolding you before you see where the bullets go in you know it's it's right it's nuts so I could totally see a teacher vibe coding some Python that spits out tests and answer keys for every exam that go to those specific concepts and like use you know different variables or numbers or whatever it'd be very easy to write a unit test that like validates it I could I could see them actually just like making a prompt that produces again like you'd want them to actually work backwards and make sure that the questions are real and that they they solved the way that they think they're doing but that's the thing that if you have discernment you just look at it and you can tell right you just work the problem so that would be a thing that would significantly improve the quality of the education that teacher couldn't teach more students it couldn't teach they couldn't teach students faster they would just be doing better teaching because they'd have access to some automation now we started this by saying AI is being used to solve like to AI is being used to make things worse in places where they already suck and like the fact that math education and education more broadly so regimented in the American context is in fact the problem right so you're this is just a band-aid right the actual problem is regimentation and you know the inability of teachers to have small enough groups and enough flexibility that in their professional judgment they can observe students who are getting a bit in their teeth first certain concept or certain discipline and give them the rain to to tackle that you know I always think about my second grade class where you know in Canada when you come in in the winter there's like a 10-minute period where when it takes off their snow gear before the class starts and during that 10-minute period my teacher saw me take down a copy of Alice and Wonderland off the bookshelf and sit down and start reading it it was the first book I'd ever read to myself and she looked over at me and made a judgment call and said I'm just gonna leave him and I spent the next two days just on my own in the back of the class reading this book you know I was seven I'm 55 now I've written more than 30 books since many of them international bestseller's in award winners and I married a woman called Alice right she made the right call but she couldn't have made that call if there was a standardized test 24 months later where I'd have to be able to do fractions or something right like she understood that we were trading one you know set of instruction hours for another and that we would have to make it up later but it was because she had again just like a regular public school but in a different era in the 70s she had both the professional flexibility and the small one of class size that she could she could make that call it was hugely important so AI might like make teaching regimented material better but it doesn't solve regimentation yeah you know so I'm I'm pretty atypical as a success story for Malaysian right like I'm not many people fly out to Australia from there and get a highly paid software engineering job and all that stuff and I've been written about this in the blog before but I was partially saved from that because I actually went six years without an education because I got put into a local school which taught exactly the way you're talking about and because I didn't speak Malay my parents didn't teach me the teacher just left me alone for six years with books oh wow and like that is grossly irresponsible right they should not have done that but Malaysian teachers it's not like Australia or the US where they have a master's degree in education right it's frequently like just some guy who left a village right you know two years ago and they went this is slightly more than working at McDonald's you know go crazy with it this 50 students per class wow and it turned out just being totally uneducated was better benign neglect yes benign neglect is how not just in education right I think most managerial control is so even competently done is just like inherently harmful in like because of the modern paradigms around it almost every effective team I've seen even in software has been created under the condition of benign neglect it's usually just a guy who's like well I meant to be the director here but I don't think think anyone will notice if I go fishing every day. So I'm going to go fishing. And then just with the right sort of alchemy of people who are motivated in the right way in the right juniors, they just sort of become really high performance. Even I probably should name a specific company, but there was a company which I really looked up to in a lot of our advisors come from it. And I was talking to a staff engineer there, and I went, how did you all get so good at this? What was your brilliant management technique? What did the directors do, right? And he went, ah, benign neglect. That's actually the first time I heard that phrase. I just went, ah, they just left us alone. And some of us became really functional. And that was that, right? We just spread it internally. Of course, one of the issues we have with clients who actually allow people to cultivate those little micro decisions in building a functional system is they're actually really, really successful. And then they sell to someone who doesn't have that mindset. And then they're not good customers anymore. So we just have this sort of natural churn of the more effective, the more we like a customer, the less likely they're to stay good forever. And I would argue that to bring this back to process knowledge, when you sell a firm, primarily, especially from like at your selling inside P, but that the process knowledge doesn't necessarily carry over, especially the kind of top tier process knowledge in the executive team who take the buyout and leave, who are actually we're doing an important job in the smaller, spunkier firm, and who are displaced by managers who can read the memos, read the briefing, and sort through what everything is supposed to be doing. But because the process knowledge is carried in the minds of the people who've left. And in particular, we're talking about smaller firms. Oftentimes, the process knowledge is about idiosyncratic capabilities and different workers within a team, who, you know, when it's like, you know, 10 people in a startup, 15 people in a startup, right? Everybody knows what everyone else can do. And you know who to ask and who not to ask and who you can't ask in a pinch. And that's like, that's not IP. No one writes that down. You can't train an A on it. You can't transfer it to the next manager. It's just a thing that you learn through through hard one experience. And it is why it's sometimes hard to make these transitions, you know. - Yeah, and you know, to go to the whole to the Fisher Price steering wheel. I think something interesting is, you know, implicitly most executives, I think they're insecure about it, which is why they frantically want the feeling of, hey, the steering wheel moves the car. - Yeah. - But a lot of the less competent ones. And my friend, Luke Canes, who ran a company called Puppet a long time ago, which was, it's important if you're a specific IT subdomain. He frequently says like we just don't have that many competent executives. And the most competent ones do tend to read the humanities and sort of, they all know who you are when I talk to my customers, right? Like they're excited when I said, I'm gonna give you a call this evening. Like that's the kind of how it's gonna work with. - Oh, that's nice. - And for a lot of those people, the way they achieve their results is because they read very broadly and they trust their intuition and they trust other people, they all come up with very, very creative innovations within their business. You know, it's not just like shug more features in the app. They will sit down with the team and a cup of coffee in a low pressure environment. They might even hire a facilitator they trust. And they will just come up with these great ideas. - Right. - And most executives aren't doing that. And they really only have like one thing in their playbook that's not stochastic, which is laying people off and canceling contracts. If someone says drop, I'll fix 10%. They're looking at the dashboard and they're going, I hit most of these buttons and deep down, I don't know if they do anything. Except the fire people button. And that one makes me nervous and I turn up in the news and people ask me if I know what I'm doing and I worry I'm gonna fire someone that calls us an incident next year. And now we have a new button and it's new. It's labeled AI so I don't have any scar tissue. And I'm sort of just going, please dear God, let this do something. I just hope this button's real. - Well, and here's the moral hazard of the AI button is the AI button lets you press the lay people off button and claim that you're doing it because you're achieving operational success and not because you're having an operational slowdown. - Yeah, there's been a cooling in Australia in the past couple of weeks. Like I run all our sales and people are suddenly a little bit less excited about AI, which surprised me. A lot of readers reached out and said, yeah, suddenly my executives, they still say the things but they clearly don't meet it as much. They say it like half as much. It's probably not a coincidence we just closed out of financial year. So I think we just got through run through six fun months of telling boards like, hey, we just maxed out on AI. Look at our token spend and last month they had to go and how much money do we make? Oh, that's a great question. Well, I'm sure we'll make money next year. And yeah, it's been very, very distressing to watch but also sort of funny. It shouldn't be funny because I see many people be hurt when the bubble bursts but the siren song of my told you so it's just so strong. And I think that's where Ed is as well. We just, every day we go, God, this is going to be funny. Well, Mike, I mean, I can put it in very stark terms which is that, you know, the thing to understand is that the purpose of a bubble is to separate suckers from their money, right? It's insider's lying about the capabilities of an investment opportunity so that small holders sabers will commit to that investment opportunity and let them cash out. And the, the small holder sabers who are like on the, who are holding the bag on AI, you know, we see this with SpaceX entering the NASDAQ 100 right away. Are you saying I shouldn't have gone all in on SpaceX? Because it's exactly, right? These are just people who are like, they're people who you would have had to find benefits pension, final salary pension 30 years ago and now are expected to buy shares in listed firms. And if they guess wrong, they starve to death and they're homeless when they get old. And so they're terrified and they're trying to make the right bet. And the longer the bubble goes on, the more those people lose their life savings. And that's the thing we should be concerned about. It's, you know, let the companies burn. But the collateral damage here is, first of all, anyone who's just like suckered in and second of all, anyone who's not suckered in but did the thing that we've been told to do for 40 years which is buying in this fund. - Yeah, if you're just like remotely in the blast radius, it's gonna be brutal down here in Melbourne. Like people have bought enormous houses because we just have such an inflated property market. And when the bubble bursts, like a lot of people are gonna lose their jobs and like there's no way. There's no way they can repay the insane mortgages they've picked up. - So maybe we can talk, I don't know how much longer you have scheduled. I kind of need to run, but maybe we can talk about the other bubbles. - Yeah, sure. - So I lived through the Dalcom bubble, I was in San Francisco during the Dalcom bubble and it was quite instructive. So I had always wanted steel case leap chair, these very good ergonomic chairs. - I know, yeah. - But there was no way I was gonna spend $1,500 on a chair. And I really coveted them 'cause a lot of the people I knew who worked in Dalcom's had them. So like after the bubble burst, I was walking down the street in the mission. And I saw a Dalcom CEO and it was like those photos in 1929 of a millionaires on Wall Street selling apples off the bumper of their rolls. Except it was a Dalcom CEO who lost his lease who had like a fleet of steel case leap chairs in the plastic wrap. And I bought six of them for $25 each off of them and I used them as a dining room set for the next 10 years. And I feel like if you're on Australian policy maker or firm or university trying to figure out what your AI strategy is and you're like, what we should do is buy AI now. You are buying steel case leap chairs in the early spring or well early I won't use seasons because of Australians. But in March of 2020 instead of September of 2020 because we can see the crash on the horizon. There's gonna be GPUs of 10 cents of the dollar or there's gonna be data centers going begging. There's gonna be open source models that have plenty of room for optimizations and there's gonna be lots of skilled workers who know how to mobilize them. And like don't buy this stuff now. Are you crazy? Like why would you buy this stuff now? - Right, just chill out and pick them up for $2. It's gonna be incredible. - Yeah. - Now I did have, well, three quick questions. And the first one is we got a lot of people reading this and I've mostly read your writing and I'm incredibly impressed with how much information you pull off the top of your head. But a lot of your writing is inept enough that I assumed that for each piece you sat down for a huge amount of time and had to assemble them. And in this conversation I realized you probably write pretty extemporaneously, which is, it's cool as hell. What would you suggest people read in the space? Obviously you've got your own book, which you mentioned. - Right, well, so I would say if you wanna learn the method for being able to kind of combine information this way, read a little short essay where we wrote called the Memex method as in Venovar Bushes, the Memex, which is about how blogging and revisiting your blog posts rather than taking notes for yourself is a very powerful way to mnemonically fix concepts in your mind and then iteratively improve your understanding of them and combine them in novel ways. They kind of create a super saturated solution of fragments that kind of rattle around. And when they nucleate, they crystallize into synthetic ideas stories for me and novels and so on, but also nonfiction and so on. that this is like, it's a hugely effective method. In terms of like things to read in this domain, I mean, like what got you started? - Oh, what got Piles in Wonderland? - Yeah, I mean what got me sure was Alice Wonderland, reading science fiction, you know, read, read, read, inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer, what a book, just like real kind of magnum opus should. One book I'm really looking forward to, I don't have the title in front of me, but it's Chinameville's next novel. This is not like how to criticize tech or whatever. This is just amazing book. So Chinameville, another pala mine, incredible writer, and he's written like after 10 years his 800 page novel that he's been trying to squeeze out for 10 years. And so it's coming out in this autumn. I can't wait to read it. So that's amazing. The next Chinameville novel I would recommend, everyone I know is writing magnum opuses except me. I'm just writing short books really quickly, but like China did this. There's an incredible book about the origins of the Bund and its contrast with Zionism that was written by Molly Krabapple called here where we live as our country, that again is her magnum opus. Like everyone's doing it except me. I'm just like right and quick fast books. Yeah, so read the next Chinameville novel, read it upon verse, inventing the Renaissance, and listen to her amazing music. And the last two questions are much faster. The first one which I just came up with was were there chairs actually that good? Was it worth the wait? Oh, the chairs. Yeah, yeah, the chairs are great. Well, I don't have one now. I bought it when I moved to London. I just bought a gamer chair. But yeah, still case leak chairs at the bottom. I have one in LA. The final question is actually from a pretty well-known, I don't know if you would know him, but he's very well known amongst like pure software engineers. This guy, Scott Smittelli, who's a friend of mine. He wrote a, I think he'd really like it. He wrote an essay. He got COVID and he went into a dark cave for two weeks. And he spat out this masterpiece called the ideal candidate Louis Punchton, the stomach, which is just his experience being employed as an engineer at a big firm, which I think he would enjoy. Good time. I need a very important question for round out the episode. People had like 10 other really good ones, but this was the best one. He wants to know if you think he's smart and pretty. What's the verdict? Well, I'm going to say your mom thinks you're smart and you're pretty. And that's all the matters. Well, thank you so much for coming on, Corrie. I really appreciate it, especially with the time it is in the UK. and I'll catch you around. - All right, thanks, Nick.