Working In The Dot Com Bubble ft. Matt Rosoff

27:28No, no, I don't remember that anyway. No, I really don't think so. Yeah, it was all hands on deck. I mean, again, like this was on TV. This was like, you know, advertisements. There were commercials. There were people on the evening news, you know, reaching mom. You know, my parents, who are boomers, they were fully aware and gung-ho about the web by 97 or 98. And that's, I think, who was investing. So, you know, one of the big differences between then and today is these companies were going public. And it was really fueled in large part by retail investors, you know, wanted to buy stocks on the stock market in these new companies that represented the future.

28:14So, you know, you had doctors and dentists and, you know, professors with a little money and people putting their retirement savings into these things. And they were the ones who probably got wiped out the most in, you know, 2001 through 2004. yeah and i mean was was that before e-trade was it do you start to call a stock broker i literally don't know how they bought stock back then i realize yeah i think e-trade started in the dot-com boom if i recall late 90s because i remember in england at the time the stories about how e-trade led to people losing tons of money and there was a one thing i'll credit the press with at the time as being like, yeah, you shouldn't bet on the stock market unless you know what you're doing.

29:01Right. Yes, index funds hold forever. That's the random walk down Wall Street, the only investment strategy that works. But yeah, people were playing. They saw these ridiculous returns and they wanted a piece of it. So yeah, I think online trading was definitely a thing. You know, you had the Yahoo chat forums. That's where people would pump and dump these penny stocks. There were all kinds of - Wait, really? There were actual pump groups back then? Oh, yeah. I mean, Yahoo chat was sort of infamous for it. Like you would hear about something, you'd hear - It was a lot like what happened with crypto in 21, 22.

29:40You know, someone issues a new token and everybody rushes in to buy it. And then it crashed. You know, there's a rug pull and it crashes. Like it was - Those kinds of things were happening. But Yahoo, I remember being, that was the forum that I was the most familiar with back then. It was probably going on on AOL too. that's magical oh the the innocent days it was the i remember when i sound like i'm gonna do the was a rocker hower speech and the end of blade run of the things i've seen in telegram groups about icos but it's it's kind of it's adorable to hear that stuff happening until you remember people lost lots of money but it doesn't feel like it doesn't sound like maybe it was a different media climate like there was that kind of almost have there wasn't the the noxious part of it where it was like oh if you don't get on the internet you're gonna be left behind you're an idiot or maybe i'm wrong um not so much of that but it was it was just presumed that that this is the future and if you don't want part of the if you don't want to be part of the future that's fine but you know why don't you go be a survivalist and live off the grid in the woods kind of right It was just assumed.

30:53I mean, it's like, you know, do you watch TV? There was a time when if you said, I don't have a TV, you were very pretentious and very special. Now it seems like everybody's cutting cable. But so it was sort of like that. It was just presumed that everybody was eventually going to get on board. I mean, who needs a personal computer in their home? That was a real question in the late 80s, right? Oh, PC on every desktop. Yeah, sure, Bill, whatever you say. Who wants one of these things? And then, you know, you find justifications for it. oh, well, you can pay your bills automatically and you can do this and that.

31:26And suddenly when Internet Explorer was built into Windows and everybody could get online, that was the thing. Like that was, oh, of course, everybody has to have a PC and we're all going to be on the web. Surfing the web. It also feels like it was a genuine, like a lot of these things were just too early and run too crazy because the actual fundament of it, it sounds like, was people were excited to get on the internet, which was obviously a beneficial thing and had immediate returns. Like people could use it and say, this is useful in my life in this manner. Right. I think the initial thing was access to information.

32:02You could find out a lot of things very fast and there were some communication aspects, right? You could talk to anybody anywhere in the world pretty easily, pretty quickly. And then other things, you know, e-commerce was very early, but, you know, suddenly you don't have to go to the bookstore and ask them to order. I worked at a bookstore for a year in 1990. And, you know, it was a thing. If you don't have the book in stock, they come in and you order the book and then they come back a week later and suddenly you just press a button and the, you know, the book will come. And then they started adding music.

32:33There were a lot of, you know, again, the lack of bandwidth among a lot of consumers did sort of stall the idea of digital video, but it eventually came around in 2001 or two. That's when YouTube really took off. Real networks had streaming video and Microsoft. Oh, real, real player. Yeah, buffering. I remember real player. We're all buffering. I interviewed Rob Glazer a couple of times. You know, he had the right idea, but again, Microsoft sort of, you know, took that market pretty quickly with Windows Media Player and then Apple came along and they kind of blew everybody else away. So yeah, all of the ideas were there And I think most of what we were sort of experimenting with later became real businesses.

33:19I mean, you know, LimeWire and all the sort of music MP3 trading sites, that was later, late 90s, I guess, early 2000s. That all eventually became legitimized through Spotify and Apple Music and so on. So every idea was already there. It was just maybe it's a little bit underground. Maybe it doesn't work quite right. it's a little clunky, it's a little kludgy, or maybe the companies were just, you know, they borrowed too much money too fast and couldn't turn it around. Which feels almost entirely different to the AI bubble. Like it's, they, Sachin and Dela, on the morning of recording this, Davos was saying, yeah, the thing that might make this a speculative bubble if nobody buys it.

34:05If nobody buys AI. No, really, he's so cool. I love that we live in this area i'm going to read you this sentence actually because this really got me microsoft chief executive satire nadela has warned that ai risks becoming a speculative bubble unless its use is spread beyond big tech companies and wealthy economies for this not to be a bubble by definition it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread um he noted that a telltale sign of it's a bubble would be if only tech groups are benefiting from the rise of ai rather than the companies in other sectors yeah that's good good shit self-evident yes correct he's not wrong uh a bit late perhaps if no one uses it also isn't his his job but nevertheless there was a question i had so something that frustrates me with this whole conversation is how flippantly people say oh it's a bubble but sometimes bubbles are good what was the aftermath like so this is where things get a little bit complicated because i don't think that you can really fairly separate events from other events that happen at the same time.

35:19So the dot-com bubble did burst, but then you had 9-11 happen in September of 2001, sort of in the late middle of it. And that literally changed everything. It changed confidence. It changed where everybody's attention was going. You had money flowing into completely different places. Everybody got much more conservative and so forth. So I think the real effect of the dot-com bust, I mean, you had a lot of people my age, people who were in their 20s and the go-go 90s, suddenly lose their jobs or suddenly not have the great paychecks that they had become accustomed to. And you had a lot of retail traders get wiped out.

36:04you know, some people lost their life savings or a big portion of their life savings. And, you know, my attitude toward investing has always been caveat emptor. You shouldn't be betting if you can't afford it. You should put your money in an index fund and you should hold on to that until you retire. That's the safest thing to do. But, you know, some people say, hey, I've got 10 % of my holdings are play money and I'm just going to make some bets and see what happens. And then you've got other people who go too far with it. But what about people in tech? You know, in tech, most those skills didn't become useless, right?

36:43So the technology was always changing. If you were, you know, learning HTML and JavaScript and Java programming, and then you could transition into new different kinds of things, the technology continued to evolve. so people who had those technical skills could continue forward and find other interesting things to do. And then, you know, honestly, after the sort of telecoms bust 2004, 2005, you had a pretty long boom. I mean, there was the financial collapse of 08 around the housing market, but the tech industry independently was building a lot of stuff. Tons of companies got started in the wake of the dot-com bust.

37:22And many of those companies are still around today. So I don't feel like people in the tech industry were permanently hurt. There was a couple years set back and then they generally were able to learn new skills, apply what they'd already learned, and go find other things, some of which turned out to be really lucrative. Right. But I think, how can I phrase this? I think that people are very flippant about the consequences of a potential bubble collapse. I think that that's really what I'm, that's where my concern is. You're talking about today. Today, yes. Because people compare it to the dot-com bubble and they say, well, after the dot-com bubble, there was that value, which is completely correct.

38:04But... Yeah, again, I think the other thing is about today.

38:12So the circumstances around the world are very different. You know, 92, 93, the Cold War was over. There was this peace dividend. They were turning army bases into national parks. Everybody was sort of enjoying, you know, good times. There was a book called The End of History by Francis Fukuyama that sort of posited, hey, this is it. You know, we're here in this permanent utopia world. And of course, events intervene. And I think 9-11 was the big turning point there. And there's some other stuff around that time. You know, the contested election of 2000, now contested elections are such a common thing.

38:53We don't really think about them anymore. But that was the first big one in my lifetime. Yeah. The situation today, I think you would agree, is very different. You know, we have an unprecedentedly chaotic leader in the United States who seems to be bent on ripping down old world orders that have enabled stability since World War II. I mean, if you're talking about seizing land from a NATO ally and you're seeing Europe strike all these free trade deals with the rest of the world and so forth and so on, we could go on and on about this, but I'm not a political expert. But the background scenario is very different.

39:38And I think you could almost make a case for AI being sort of the logical outgrowth of a certain number of years of rot in the business and in the economy. And I think you've made that argument. You can decide where that started. Did it start in the 80s and 90s when the US started offshoring and outsourcing everything to China and other countries? Did it start after that? But it's been somewhat clear for some time that a lot of the easy sort of technological gains that we got from the mobile revolution and from the cloud, those have mostly been gathered. Yeah, we've conquered those lands. Yeah, and there's not that much more upside.

40:24You can get a little efficiency here and a little efficiency there. Everybody kind of knows how the internet works. You know what advertising looks like, you know, so this sort of, to me seems like it's, it's sort of the last big push. And, you know, you have a lot of people in big bureaucratic jobs who you've written about this. They don't really produce much day to day. They produce a lot of emails and a lot of presentations and they sit in meetings. Occasionally they got to make a yes, no decision and they got to, you know, munch some data together and say, okay, it looks wiser if we do this instead of doing that.

40:59But, you know, a lot of it is performative. And I think, you know, AI is great for that. I don't have to create the spreadsheet anymore. I don't have to create the presentation anymore. I don't have to write the email that no one's going to read and then they don't have to read it because they can have AI summarized for them. I think it's good for that kind of good enough stuff. And there are a lot of jobs that are good enough. But I wonder if it can even do that stuff. That's a bigger problem with the economy. I don't think it's all about AI. I think AI is a symptom rather than perhaps a cause.

41:30But even then, it's like, can it do presentations? Because I've never been, like, I've genuinely tried just to see if it could do it. It's never been able to do it. I think it's an interest. Yeah, I mean, I've seen presentations created with AI that are pretty good. I think they get you a certain percentage of the way there, and then you tweak it a little bit. Okay. Yeah, it's just like, but then you kind of look at it and say, great, did we really need to spend however many hundreds of billions of dollars to get a spreadsheet maker?

42:11What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain.

42:47It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP, its crazy cast of disciples, and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined.

43:26So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart. streaming radio and podcasting let us show you at iheartadvertising.com that's iheartadvertising.com hey what's up y 'all this is quest love recently i had the opportunity to sit down with asap rocky ahead of his album release don't be dumb he reflects on his journey from his harlem roots to global icon status discovering the hip-hop origin of his name the ledge was on the tv Rakim had the bucket hat King Gold Jr.

44:04Pops was like, that's Rakim. That's who you named after. I just was like, damn, that was f***ing got swag. Rocky offers a window into not only a boundary-breaking artist, but as a man committed to fusing creative ideas, community, and remaining unapologetically himself. Have you ever gotten roasted for any of your outfits? For sure. Some people don't be getting the vision. Look, they can roast me, they can cook me, they can deep-fry me, they can sauté whatever they want. You know, there's nobody who can f*** with my fashion sense and my taste is impeccable. I'm just like, I impress myself a lot.

44:40It's an amazing conversation. One you definitely don't want to miss. So listen to the Questlove show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

44:53Every January, we're encouraged to start over. But what if this year is about slowing down and learning how to understand ourselves more deeply? What if this year is about giving ourselves permission to feel what we've been holding and knowing that it's okay to ask for help? I'm Mike De La Rocha, host of Sacred Lessons. This is a podcast for men navigating stress, emotional health, fatherhood, identity, and the unspoken pressures we're taught to carry alone. We talk honestly about mental health, about healing generational wounds, and about learning how to show up with more presence and care. If you want a healthier relationship with yourself and the people you love, then Sacred Lessons is the podcast for you.

45:41Listen to Sacred Lessons with Mike DeLaRocha on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow Sacred Lessons with Mike DeLaRocha and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

45:56I also think that people are just being flippant about the idea of a financial collapse as well. That's what's worrying me as well. Right. But again, I think that there are a lot of potential reasons for a potential financial collapse. And AI is one of some number. I don't think, again, the dot-com bust was not entirely attributable to ridiculous valuations. There were things going on in other parts of the world. There was a change in confidence. And I think here, again, you've got a lot of disruption and a lot of disorder and a lot of chaos. So there are many, many things that could happen. But I agree.

46:39I think people maybe underestimate how deep this Then again, then again, you know, who are the big investors in this? I mean, it's mostly really large tech companies with massive, massive revenues and massive cash flow. Not really anymore, though. $178.5 billion of data center credit deals. You've got venture capital is actually, yeah, venture capital is also half of venture capital is going into it. But the other thing that shocked me as well was back then in the dot-com boom, venture capital was so much smaller. Oh, it was tiny. It was teeny tiny. It was investment banking is where you found the money.

47:19So venture capital, though, that's not their money. They're playing with somebody else's money. So whose money are they playing with? Who are the LPs? Well, we don't really know, but it's personal wealth funds. It's sovereign wealth funds. It's Middle Eastern and other countries' sovereign wealth funds. Sure, there's teachers' pensions, and there's university endowments, And there's some other things that those LPs are holding that will actually harm normal working folk. But I think a lot of it is massive excess wealth at the top of society where people are looking for new kinds of returns. They're looking for outsized returns because all the easy money is sort of already taken.

48:04So I don't know if that, I think where it hurts is when you think about, okay, the real estate carry-on effects, all the people who are employed now and will be suddenly unemployed. Those kinds of things could really hurt. But I just, it doesn't seem to me like you have the retail trader exposure as you did during the dot-com boom. So yeah, okay, if there's a huge AI bust and NVIDIA loses a massive portion of its value, sure, people are going to hurt who have invested in NVIDIA, but they're not going to get wiped out. I don't see NVIDIA disappearing. I don't see Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle. I don't see any of those companies disappearing as a result of this.

48:45And neither do I. I think the thing that people need to understand is that a wipeout isn't going to be what hurts. It's going to be a drawdown. It's going to be, because NVIDIA, 88 % of their revenue is data center. And I even looked back for a premium I did a few weeks ago, where it was the amount of revenue that Lucent or Corning or whoever had in those specific segments, or how weighted they were on their customers. I think Lucent's top customers were AT &T and Verizon, but those only represented 13 % to 14%. Then NVIDIA has customers that make up 15 to 20 % of their revenue each quarter. They have massive centralization around four to five customers.

49:30Their diversified revenue is dropping. It's just, it isn't that NVIDIA is going to die. It's that half to 80 % of their revenue is going to disappear. It happened with crypto with them. And that's what I'm really worried about. Yeah, they were never as dependent on crypto. They've tried a lot of things over the years. I mean, right, they were doing chips for self-driving cars and all kinds of things. I am not as technical as the writers on the register staff. Tobias Mann, for example, does a great job covering GPUs and data centers. It is posited that there are other potential uses for GPUs that could be very interesting in terms of high-performance computing and some other things that are AI adjacent, you know, different kinds of data processing and so forth.

50:15So it may not, what we call AI, even if that, you know, that those end use cases and turn out to be, you know, vibe coding, chatbots, even though those aren't it. Some of these, some of the, some of the hardware may be repurposable into other functions. I don't think it's, it's a dead loss. But not at the scale that they're building though. No, no. Again, I would be stunned if all of the data centers that are being promised by 2030 are actually built. but maybe i don't know i i also just don't think that that will be happening i just don't see it happening i am looking through the old.com companies though i really can't find anything like open ai they're they are truly special they are they are like they took a bit of global crossing a bit of enron a bit of lucent but also a bit of pets.com just kind of amazed what Silicon Valley can still spook out.

51:14No like innovations, but financial collapses like these. We've never seen one this big, folks. It's massive. Yeah, there are a lot of commitments there and the valuation is massive, massive, massive. I do think their announcement last week or their acknowledgement that they're finally getting into advertising is interesting. And I know we've talked about this offline before, but when I think about all of the information that a chatbot has about a heavy user, they actually should theoretically be able to target ads at least as well as Facebook and at least as well as Google, right? So I don't know about that because Google and Facebook have very hard demographic data and very like a nuanced layer of cookies that can track.

52:06I don't know if, especially as these are free users, we don't know how much actual personal data like Facebook's big advantage was that when you registered, you gave them the demographic data they needed to target. Right, right. Right. I don't know how much they're collecting, but if they can still say, well, I know everything that you're interested in, everything that you've been talking about for the last year, they should be able to track that back to an individual user. I don't know. I don't know the details of it. But they've said low billions of revenue. But it is just interesting because in any – maybe you know this.

52:45I, looking through the history of the computer, have never seen a point when everybody was just screaming that something that didn't work would work. Yeah, it's – wow. It's hard to remember something that has been this hyped. And again, I always try to approach this with an open mind because I am older. So I tend to be more cynical with experience. But yeah, I sort of shrug. And I'm like, I don't quite understand the big deal here. It doesn't seem to really do what it's supposed to do. I mean, I'm still, you know, Gemini has voiced it on me every day when I try to do Google searches and it's, it's nearly almost always slightly wrong, which is kind of worse than being completely wrong because it lulls you into this false sense of security.

53:40And you're like, wait a minute, that doesn't seem right. And then you go to the source link and it's just got it wrong. Like, it's like, yeah, the beginning of the Google chapter of my book that's coming out next year is, um, I went to look for how many people, how many users Google has. And it's just me going insane as I get an AI generated answer that's generated based on two SEO articles that do not cite their sources. Right. There's a lot of that. So it's taking what all this kind of garbage data. And I mean, as an editor, I have for the last 15 years been hounding reporters who try to source stuff off the internet.

54:18I'm like, where'd you get that from? How do you know that's a reliable source. And AI just sort of absorbs it all and presents it and la-di-da, here you go. They don't have any, you know, they don't care. They don't have any checks. It just comes from wherever. So yeah, the one thing I would, what you were saying about never seen sort of this much hype, I do remember before the Segway came out and people were saying, I can't remember who, if it was Steve Jobs or somebody, but somebody was saying, this is going to revolutionize transportation and change cities. And we were like, Whoa, what could this thing be?

54:52And then it was the segue. Maybe not, but that was one very small isolated thing. Um, I don't, yeah, I don't recall sort of large scale where everybody in the industry was saying, this is going to revolutionize everything. And then users are kind of going, huh? I don't know. How many times a day copilot comes up on my windows PC and I dismiss it immediately. Cause I didn't really want it to show up it just sort of pops up i hit a key combo too fast i'm like thanks nah i'm good i keep thinking about the thing you said though it's like the conditions are different but at the same time we've re like it's not like we're in a new frontier of new ideas where everybody has something new that might work it's where it almost feels like the end of something it feels like the dot-com bubble was created by the excitement about a beginning rather than this is people trying to pretend that something's happening and that we're not at the end of an era, I should say.

55:52I don't think we're at the end of society. Yeah, I mean, I think we are probably seeing probably the beginning of new pretty major global shifts in power and some of the guiding societal philosophies that guide that will change. And yeah, there's a lot of different things going on right now. Uh, you know, I started a climate section at CNBC and was very deeply entrenched in climate tech and, and some of the climate politics and things around that. And, uh, you talk to the green pill folks and they think, you know, 80 years from now we're all doomed. So do I believe that? No, not necessarily, but I do feel like things are changing pretty rapidly and pretty dramatically on a lot of different fronts.

56:35And AI is just kind of this, Hey, let's, let's keep this, let's keep this playbook running. This playbook. Let's keep doing it. That's really it. It's like, let's keep doing what we've done the whole time. During the dot-com bubble, people were trying new shit. It goes all the way back to semiconductors. I mean, this tech boom has been going on since the 1960s, really, in different waves. But it's been going on and on and on. I mean, I do think when Bill Gates said, a computer on every desktop, whenever that was in the 80s, that was nuts. And then it was a computer on every desk and in every home.

57:11And that was even more nuts, but it happened. So, you know, I think that it's been, I don't want to say easy, but it's been running so well for so long that I think everybody just kind of wants it to keep running. And I'm not, I don't know, I'm not, I'm, I'm with you. I'm not seeing it yet. I'm not seeing a ton of day-to-day excitement. I mean, you know, you look at the, the teenage demographic, that's kind of who I always go to. And my son is 15 and he's very cynical about like he jokes about obvious ai writing and like they make fun of phrases and terms that are so ai and he'll see a you know a poster and advertisement he's like ha that's so ai and it's it's something that you scoff at and make oh they're fucked no okay ai is fucked then i'm sorry if a if you've got teenagers who are like making fun of calling bad stuff ai right i I'm actually serious.

58:04That is legitimately lethal. Teenagers, young people. I'm 39 years old now. I've never been cool a year of my life. But I know that when... Because you read a lot of things that people try and say, well, young people love AI. Not being my experience either. I don't... Young people love TikTok. Young people love Instagram Reels. um you know they're on they're on vertical they're scrolling vertical video all day and and comedy um i don't even want to say they love you know snap or any social media because it's all you know it's all text change right it's all you just got your different text strings like there's a lot of stuff that they love um games huge online games you know participatory games um but yeah i don't see them hanging out all day with their chat bot you know once in a while if you have something you really want to you're curious and you want to experiment with something it'll prototype something quite quickly for you and i think people do that sometimes and find it useful it's like okay this is a prototype this is cool this would have taken me six hours of grunt work to generate thanks for doing that for me so there are some you know i don't want to i don't want to slam and say it's totally useless in all scenarios because it's not it's a it's just it's sort of an extension of a computer it's just a better computer in some ways it helps you do certain things sometimes fast but sometimes it's a better that's the other thing it's like i have this growing theory about ai psychosis being far more common than people think because i think that there is something that happens when people use a large language model and what they extrapolate from there that makes some people do insane things like i don't know buy 200 billion dollars worth of data centers and gpus and and on one hand you might argue oh that's just business idiots being business idiots no i think sachin adela and sundar peshai used an lm and went holy shit i need to do this i mean i got told once that sachin adela's whole reason that he started this facade was because he saw chat gpt and wanted it in bing i think that there is that everyone is experiencing micro versions of Kevin Bruce's chat GPT told me to leave my wife thing.

1:00:18It's just, what do you believe AI will do next? Like, what do you think it will do? And what do you believe will happen if you don't use it today? And it's just very bizarre. Sorry, that was more of a point than a question, I should be clear. But how many people are subject to that? I don't think it's a huge number. Yeah. To some degree, the folks who are, you know, the Satya Nadellas of the world are should I say, somewhat insulated from the trials and tribulations that most of us experience. They're insulated from their money. And if you are someone like Sam Altman or Elon Musk, who is surrounded by a cadre of people who always say yes to everything you suggest and, you know, are constantly saying, you are a genius.

1:01:00You're a genius, man. You're a genius. I think, you know, some of these chatbots almost duplicate that mentality. Like, it's like, yeah, I want someone to tell me that whatever I'm doing, I am great and I am special and I have inside knowledge that nobody else has. That's a nice thing. But that's kind of what I'm getting at. Yeah. That using a large language model convinces some people that they are in the future and creates this kind of religious feeling around it. I don't know. I need to explore this idea more. I've just never, I've seen it in like game FAQs when people would argue between PlayStation and nintendo and xbox i've seen but not like that you don't have people just saying the xbox can do things it can't but it's part of what we're seeing i think that feeling it's pervasive in our society right now regardless we have this sort of strong current of anti-expert right the people who've studied this for years are no smarter than me i'm really smart because i have my own special knowledge and nobody else has it.

1:02:06And I'm going to tell you the secret that I've learned that's, you know, really important. I think that whatever, if you want to call it psychosis or that narcissism that comes out of 15 years of, of social media, like that's old enough to remember. In fact, Facebook didn't come out until I was already an adult and had a child. I mean, Facebook didn't really become mainstream until I had a two-year-old kid. So I'm old. And I remember how sort of society changed and how people interacting with one another changed dramatically as social media became popular. And it was much more about you're on stage all the time and look at my life and your life is better than my life.

1:02:46I mean, there was some of that. That's always been around, but it just wasn't so easy to indulge that side of oneself pre-social media. So I think, you know again everything that was set in the past just continues along its way like i think again i don't think ai is necessarily you know the one thing that is different it's a natural outgrowth of a lot of different trends that have been happening for a long time yeah i mean i keep thinking a long-term joker make is uh posting it's the beginning of history with a big smiley face because I actually worry that that's what, like, it's not that everything's coming to an end.

1:03:27It's that one era is ending and another is beginning aggressively and loudly. This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius. All right. I think that's a great place to end it. Matt Roseoff, editor-in-chief of The Register. Thank you so much for joining me. All right. Thank you, Ed. A lot of fun. Thank you, everyone, to listen. Thank you, everyone, to listening. I'm not going to edit that out. you'll have a monologue this week as well maybe i'll chuck you an extra one if i'm feeling generous thanks everyone for stomaching the four part of last week and yeah catch you soon

1:04:08thank you for listening to better offline the editor and composer of the better offline theme song is matt osowski you can check out more of his music and audio projects at matt osowski.com M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I.com You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:05:13What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, a.k.a. neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle? A shady hypnosis scam? Or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:05:53A new year doesn't ask us to become someone new. It invites us back home to ourselves. I'm Mike Della Rocha, host of Sacred Lessons, a space for men to pause, reflect, and heal. This year, we're talking honestly about mental health, relationships, and the patterns we're ready to release. If you're looking for clarity, connection, and healthier ways to show up in your life, Sacred Lessons is here for you. Listen to Sacred Lessons with Mike Delaroach on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Joel. And Matt. From HowToMoney. If your New Year's resolution is to finally get your finances in shape, we've got your back.

1:06:31Prices, they're still high, and the economy is all over the place. But 2026 is the year for you to get intentional and make real progress. That's right. Each week we break down what's happening with your money, the most important issues to focus on, and the small moves that make a big difference. Kick off the year with confidence, listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, hello, all my people, what's up? It's Questlove. Recently I had the opportunity to sit down with the one and only ASAP Rocky. He reflects on his journey from Harlem roots to global icon status and discovering the hip-hop origin of his name.

1:07:09The ledge was on the TV. Rakim had the bucket hat Kangol join on. Pops was like, that's Rakim. That's who you named after. I just, damn the f***ing f***ing swag. Listen to the Questlove show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.