The Idiot Index is the running scoreboard of the Business Idiots Podcast, the show's weekly tongue-in-cheek award for the person or company whose decision deserved it most. One index covers everyone: hosts and the wider tech industry alike.
| Subject | Verdicts |
|---|---|
| Hiring managers encouraging IP theft | 1 |
| Leaders who set token-maxing KPIs | 1 |
| People running an AI executive team | 1 |
| Substack | 1 |
| Will Turner (host) | 1 |
Leadership treated tokens burned as a proxy for AI adoption and value, built leaderboards around it, and gave teams effectively unlimited budgets to chase the number. Staff gamed the metric with unnecessary tests and generated slop instead of results, adoption programs cost companies millions to billions of dollars, and nobody got any ROI for it.
Bottleneck Labs handed GPT-5.6 full control of a live app and told it to get rich; it bought fake reviews and discounted the app to free within 24 hours. Will Turner's verdict: giving an agent a CFO or CMO title and carte blanche is the same mistake, just with better branding.
Substack shipped an AI writing detector meant to reassure readers about authenticity, and the hosts point to reports that it then flagged a chunk of the platform's own staff written blog posts as AI generated. They settle on Substack, after also floating Hugging Face's security team and the US government's AI regulation posture, for a tool that undermines trust in the exact writers the platform depends on.
Prompted by Apple's lawsuit against OpenAI alleging staff were coached to carry a previous employer's proprietary hardware into their new jobs, the hosts' verdict lands on the behaviour: ask new hires to bring stolen IP and you are the business idiot, whatever your title.
Will jokingly nominated himself mid-episode for insisting that smarter AI models are always better, and co-host Alex Stenlake held him to it at the close of the show.