Speaker 1: All Zone Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm
Speaker 1: your host ed ze Tron. In the next two episodes,
Speaker 1: I want to present you with a theory about why
Speaker 1: the tech industry has felt so weird for the last
Speaker 1: few years and why there are so many products that
Speaker 1: have popped up that don't seem to really do anything
Speaker 1: or be things that people have actually asked for. And
Speaker 1: it comes down to a few simple questions, chief of them,
Speaker 1: what if the next big thing in tech is actually
Speaker 1: years or decades away? What if the era of hypergrowth
Speaker 1: in tech is over now? As I've mentioned before, I
Speaker 1: believe the rot economy is to blame for a lot
Speaker 1: of this. It's a growth that all cost mindset that
Speaker 1: sits at the core of pretty much everything I've written
Speaker 1: or spoken about. It's this force that drives businesses to
Speaker 1: grow bigger rather than better, and make products to conu
Speaker 1: markets and show growth to the public markets, rather than
Speaker 1: fixing a problem that you or I might have or
Speaker 1: a business might have, or provide a necessary service that
Speaker 1: was nevertheless popular and profitable. And the row economy it
Speaker 1: doesn't feel like any other economic period I've seen. It's
Speaker 1: not like, say, I don't know the post two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight financial crisis, or that stagnation that lingered afterwards.
Speaker 1: And what's different was there isn't really a single obvious
Speaker 1: event that started the declient of the services we're using,
Speaker 1: all the companies that make them, and there's not really
Speaker 1: like a Layman Brothers crater we can point at and say,
Speaker 1: there you go, that's the thing. The closest I can
Speaker 1: come is kind of FTX, which was the big crypto crash,
Speaker 1: the big massive Ponzi scheme that no one really saw
Speaker 1: coming other than many people who were looking behind the scenes.
Speaker 1: But other than that, that was kind of what crashed crypto.
Speaker 1: And maybe it was the end of the zero interest
Speaker 1: free era where interest rates went up and it was
Speaker 1: harder to get money. But it was no one thing
Speaker 1: you could point out. But I do want to try,
Speaker 1: and I have one epoch I think for when the
Speaker 1: rat economy kind of took over, and I'd want to
Speaker 1: point to the latter point of the twenty tens. Think
Speaker 1: about it, like really think about it for a second.
Speaker 1: Sometime after twenty nineteen, the tech industry it kind of
Speaker 1: lost its sizzle. There were new gadgets, there were new apps,
Speaker 1: new services, but tech started to feel iterative rather than innovative.
Speaker 1: Yet they were making more money than ever, and by
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, even the pretense of any gradual improvement
Speaker 1: was really dropped. It felt like, I don't know, they
Speaker 1: were trying to sell us things that didn't really exist.
Speaker 1: We were told that NFTs would replace physical, tangible collectibles
Speaker 1: and that cryptocurrency would replace regular money, while also emancipating
Speaker 1: customers for an unstoppable market force like inflation or big tech.
Speaker 1: Because of course cryptocurrency came with it the idea and
Speaker 1: a mean idea of decentralized software, and this was all
Speaker 1: meant to get rid of rent seeking middle men that
Speaker 1: were taking parts of every purchase, despite the very same
Speaker 1: middle men investing in cryptocurrency. Yet the actual services that
Speaker 1: came out of these movements didn't really seem to do
Speaker 1: anything or improve our lives in any meaningful way. And
Speaker 1: we were told at one point that our futures were
Speaker 1: in the meta verus and we lived in this massive
Speaker 1: interconnected called New Internet. YEP, when we actually got there,
Speaker 1: it was just this really wonky VR virtual reality space
Speaker 1: that Mark Zuckerberg's somehow burned thirty six billion dollars on.
Speaker 1: It's all so weird, and today we're told that we
Speaker 1: have this glorious AI powered future that's just imminent. Yet
Speaker 1: what we've actually got is this unprofitable, unsustainable generative AI
Speaker 1: that has this horrible, unastainable problem of hallucination where it
Speaker 1: spits out incorrect information authoritatively, which, worryingly, Google CEO Sander
Speaker 1: Pesha has said in an interview with The Verge is
Speaker 1: an inherent feature of a technology that he's now plugged
Speaker 1: into Google Search, which means it's generating these horrible answers
Speaker 1: to queries based on the links of a search engine
Speaker 1: that Sundar Pieshai has helped decay. It's all just very frustrating,
Speaker 1: and it's also quite useless. Kind of it logical too.
Speaker 1: And at the forefront of this AI boom is Sam
Speaker 1: Moltman and his eighty billion dollar Jugger or open Ai,
Speaker 1: a company that claims it's going to build artificial general intelligence,
Speaker 1: one that experiences human like cognition, which is just not
Speaker 1: possible with generative AI. The tech he is selling today
Speaker 1: is not going to give us AGI. I just want
Speaker 1: to be abundantly clear about that. Anytime you read Sam
Speaker 1: Mortman talking about AGI, he is talking about tech the
Speaker 1: open AI does not have and is not building. They
Speaker 1: may claim they're building it behind the scenes, but they're
Speaker 1: only working on generative AI. And the frustration you hear
Speaker 1: in my voice you might have felt yourself. You might
Speaker 1: not have, but it's this prevailing sense of you keep
Speaker 1: telling me the future is here, but when I look
Speaker 1: at what the future is, it isn't even close. And
Speaker 1: the products so selling me aren't actually useful. Let me
Speaker 1: give you another example. Windows laptops will soon integrate an
Speaker 1: AI powered search feature called Recall that allows you to
Speaker 1: search everything you've ever done on your computer in the
Speaker 1: last three months, and it does so by recording everything,
Speaker 1: everything from the meetings you've been into to the things
Speaker 1: you've written. I should be clear, I don't think anybody
Speaker 1: actually asked for a feature like this, and it's also
Speaker 1: inherently invasive. It directly encroaches on your privacy and your security,
Speaker 1: and it takes screenshots of your machine every few seconds
Speaker 1: and stores them, along with AI generated inferences, in a
Speaker 1: locally held database. This isn't good, and the fact that
Speaker 1: they're not sending anywhere doesn't really make it better. It
Speaker 1: is in essence a pre installed screen recorder, the kind
Speaker 1: of thing that hacker might install on a victim's computer,
Speaker 1: and if an attacker gains access to it, it's obvious
Speaker 1: how catastrophic the ramifications are, or let's be honest, domestic
Speaker 1: abuse people at work. There are people who can get
Speaker 1: on your computer, force access by forcing you or just
Speaker 1: getting your password, and they can now see everything you've done.
Speaker 1: Despite this being an inherently AI powered feature, it just
Speaker 1: it can't distinguish between your regular computer usage and say,
Speaker 1: sensitive information passwords, health information, trade secrets, the very obvious
Speaker 1: stuff you would not want your computer recording. It treats,
Speaker 1: I don't know, like an email from your doctor with
Speaker 1: the same level of concern and copying as it would
Speaker 1: like YouTube or a chat conversation. It's just really bad
Speaker 1: and already white hat security researchers they've created a proof
Speaker 1: of concept malware applications that can pull sensitive data obtained
Speaker 1: or generated by Microsoft Recall from your computer and with
Speaker 1: pretty minimal effort, and now the UK's Information Commissioner's Office,
Speaker 1: the nation's privacy watchdog, by the way, they can actually
Speaker 1: do quite steep fines. It's not great they're now probing
Speaker 1: whether the tech actually sen's an unacceptable risk to consumers,
Speaker 1: which as anyone who thinks about it for more than
Speaker 1: twelve seconds or even five can confirm it does. It's
Speaker 1: just very frustrating. And who asked for this? Who actually
Speaker 1: asked for this? Now every major tech company they're integrating
Speaker 1: AI into their products and services. Yeah, underneath the hood,
Speaker 1: the AI they're integrating doesn't actually seem to do anything new,
Speaker 1: or generate a profit or solve anyone's actual needs, even
Speaker 1: the companies themselves seeming capable of explaining why AI is
Speaker 1: such a big deal. To the point, the Microsoft Super
Speaker 1: Bowl commercial for its AI powered co pilot assistant featured
Speaker 1: multiple things that it cannot do, like generate the code
Speaker 1: for an open world game. When you, by the way,
Speaker 1: you type in the prompt, which on the commercial is
Speaker 1: three D generate the code for an open world three
Speaker 1: D game, and you type that in and it will
Speaker 1: give you a list of things you should do to
Speaker 1: build an open world game. It's so strange, and it's
Speaker 1: so strange how so many of these companies just can't
Speaker 1: really explain why this is the next best thing. They
Speaker 1: just need you to believe them, and maybe that might
Speaker 1: actually be the problem. For decades, the tech industry and
Speaker 1: its various venture capital funders, they've been remarkably good at
Speaker 1: coming up with both innovative new products and waste to
Speaker 1: turn them into huge new markets for hypergrowth, one hundred
Speaker 1: billion trillion dollar markets that they could then sell in
Speaker 1: to investing companies. Within actual industries, you had search engines,
Speaker 1: digital maps, smartphones and apps, social media, cloud computing, software
Speaker 1: as a service, electro cars, streaming audio and video, and
Speaker 1: also another thing. In the period between like two thousand
Speaker 1: and five and twenty twenty four, we've tripled the amount
Speaker 1: of people on the Internet. It's now over five billion
Speaker 1: people who use it. And that's also an problem I'll
Speaker 1: get to in a little bit. There were obvious meaningful
Speaker 1: markets to move into, ways to connect people, ways to
Speaker 1: get people content. They wanted algorithms to present it to them,
Speaker 1: ways to sell people. Things that solve problems that they
Speaker 1: had or either for the first time or solving them faster,
Speaker 1: like the transition from physical to digital media, and problems
Speaker 1: that were both important to solve and actually solvable. Teke
Speaker 1: has perpetually succeeded at building things, new things that neatly
Speaker 1: create these new markets, and they've been incentivized by both
Speaker 1: the public and private markets in growing these companies as
Speaker 1: fast and as big as possible to dominate these new markets,
Speaker 1: with the assumption that there would always be more of them,
Speaker 1: more massive, multi billion and multi trillion dollar markets to conquer.
Speaker 1: And it must be clear you should never assume anything.
Speaker 1: Between twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three, only one
Speaker 1: hundred million additional people got online, which is the slowest
Speaker 1: rate of growth in the last eighteen years. That it's
Speaker 1: not because the need to bring connectivity to the masses
Speaker 1: is actually solved, especially in the global South. It hasn't been,
Speaker 1: and as of the most recent figures from the UN's
Speaker 1: International Telecoms Union shows thirty three percent of the world's population,
Speaker 1: or about two point six billion people, have never actually
Speaker 1: used the Internet. But I have more worrying stuff. I've
Speaker 1: received some data from similar Web that shows that the
Speaker 1: majority of the Internet's top one hundred web properties have
Speaker 1: seen significant declines in traffic since twenty twenty one. In
Speaker 1: the years since the world slowly emerged from lockdown, Google
Speaker 1: dot Com has seen the decline of five point three
Speaker 1: percent in web visits, as has YouTube, which lost three
Speaker 1: point eight percent of its traffic, Facebook, which lost a
Speaker 1: remarkable twenty seven point seven percent, Twitter which lost three
Speaker 1: point five percent, Amazon which lost eleven point six percent,
Speaker 1: Twitch dot tv seventeen point five percent lost. There they
Speaker 1: are owned by Amazon. Sadly, Wikipedia which lost twenty four
Speaker 1: point eight percent of its traffic. And here's the thing
Speaker 1: that really worried me. Porn sites like ex videos twenty
Speaker 1: seven point four percent loss and porn harp seventeen point
Speaker 1: one percent loss. When the pawn's down, that's that's when
Speaker 1: you start worrying. Though you might be tempted to dismiss
Speaker 1: this all as a result of life returning to normal
Speaker 1: and the traditional office based environments aren't particularly conducive to
Speaker 1: a crafty mid day wank, you shouldn't. The trend actually
Speaker 1: began earlier, with similar web data showing the declines starting
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen. My analysis focus is in twenty twenty
Speaker 1: one to twenty twenty four because that's the one I
Speaker 1: have the most detailed month by month and year by
Speaker 1: year breakdowns for. And by the way, I'm going to
Speaker 1: put in the episode notes links to things so that
Speaker 1: you can all see this. I want you to know
Speaker 1: this date is very worrying, but don't trust me. Trust
Speaker 1: the data from similar Web. When you look at the
Speaker 1: trajectory of the web's most valuable properties on a year
Speaker 1: over year basis, things look quite bleak, with Google which
Speaker 1: lost about point nine percent, YouTube lost about four point
Speaker 1: four percent, Facebook seven point seven percent loss, Twitter six
Speaker 1: point two percent loss, Twitch eleven point nine percent loss,
Speaker 1: and Amazon two point seven percent loss, all still seeing
Speaker 1: significant the clients. Only a few sites like Reddit, which
Speaker 1: saw a thirty one point three percent growth, TikTok eleven
Speaker 1: point six percent growth, and Instagram nine point nine percent
Speaker 1: growth but trending down every year since twenty nineteen, and
Speaker 1: also LinkedIn up seventeen point nine percent. They're the only
Speaker 1: ones that are really seeing good year over year growth.
Speaker 1: And while it's important to note that these are visits
Speaker 1: rather than active users, and in fairness, this data only
Speaker 1: covers visits made through a browser rather than an app,
Speaker 1: this is still a truly astounding trend that suggests for
Speaker 1: the most part that the web's largest platforms are seeing
Speaker 1: kind of a digital recession. While there might be revenue
Speaker 1: coming to these companies and they might still be acquiring
Speaker 1: no users. There's really no good way to spin the
Speaker 1: fact that traffic to platforms like Amazon and Google has
Speaker 1: plateaued then declined something shifting downwards, and it's been doing
Speaker 1: so since twenty nineteen. Perhaps this explains why platforms like
Speaker 1: Google and Facebook have kept making changes to make each
Speaker 1: user journey, create more engagement and make it more profitable
Speaker 1: to sustain growth, because fewer people than ever are actually
Speaker 1: visiting the platforms. I believe her at the end of
Speaker 1: something I called the rock coom boom, the tech industry's
Speaker 1: hypergrowth cycle, where there were so many new lands to conquer,
Speaker 1: so many new ways to pile money into, so many
Speaker 1: new innovative, useful ideas, that it felt like every tech
Speaker 1: company could experience perpetual growth just by throwing money at
Speaker 1: a problem. It also explains why so many tech products YouTube, Google, Search, Facebook,
Speaker 1: and so on feel like they're either trapped in amber
Speaker 1: or like they've got tangibly worse, because when you think
Speaker 1: about it, when there's no incentive to improve the things
Speaker 1: you've already built, why would you you should just be
Speaker 1: working on the next big thing or new ways to
Speaker 1: duce the thing you have right now to keep people
Speaker 1: coming back, yeah, maybe, but to keep people on the
Speaker 1: plat sometimes by monopolizing an industry so they have nowhere
Speaker 1: else to go. And that's the thing. All of these companies, Facebook, Google, Amazon,
Speaker 1: I mean all of them. They've all built themselves on
Speaker 1: this very simple idea that they'd always be a next
Speaker 1: big thing. And I'm not even saying that they won't be,
Speaker 1: but they've assumed and the problem that they're facing right
Speaker 1: now is that there would always be one around the corner.
Speaker 1: This belief that exponential growth is not just a reasonable
Speaker 1: expectation but a requirement is central to the core of
Speaker 1: the rot in the tech industry. And as these rapacious
Speaker 1: demands run into reality, I'm sorry to say that the
Speaker 1: rock coombubble is going to deflate. And as we speak,
Speaker 1: the tech industry they grappling with somewhat of a midlife crisis,
Speaker 1: and they're desperately searching for that next hypergrowth market, and
Speaker 1: they're eagerly pushing customers and businesses to adopt this technology
Speaker 1: that nobody actually asked for. They must keep the rot
Speaker 1: economy alive, because if they don't, they're gonna they're gonna
Speaker 1: have to face the fact that they've built pretty unsustainable
Speaker 1: businesses even though they're profitable, even though they keep growing.
Speaker 1: The only thing that grows forever is cancer the row
Speaker 1: economy and takes growth lust. It isn't new, though. Venture
Speaker 1: capital has been incentivising and monetizing rot for over a decade,
Speaker 1: and Mark andrew's An advocated in twenty eleven that we
Speaker 1: should look to expand the number of innovative new software
Speaker 1: companies created rather than constantly questioning their valuations. Yet just
Speaker 1: a year earlier, in March twenty ten, is partner Ben Horowitz.
Speaker 1: He advocated for fat startups, and I'll link to that
Speaker 1: in the notes, saying that you can't save your way
Speaker 1: to winning the market, and that startup purgatory is when
Speaker 1: you don't go bankrupt, but you fail to build the
Speaker 1: number one product in this space and have zero chance
Speaker 1: of becoming a high growth company, which, by the way,
Speaker 1: Horowitz described this as worse than startup hell, because you
Speaker 1: are and I quote stuck with the small company, even
Speaker 1: if it's cash flow positive. At the time, this might
Speaker 1: have made sense to them because this mindset made them
Speaker 1: quite rich. Even though there's something inherently abnormal about describing
Speaker 1: being a staple profitable company as being an estate that's
Speaker 1: worse than hell anyway. I want you to take a
Speaker 1: step back in time with me, though, and think about
Speaker 1: how much has changed in the last ten years, fifteen years.
Speaker 1: Think about it for a second. In twenty ten, it
Speaker 1: felt like we were just making our first steps into
Speaker 1: the digital world. It was still pretty new twenty ten.
Speaker 1: There was no Instacart. There was no Zoom, no Snapchat,
Speaker 1: no Lyft, no Tinder, no Slack, no Snowflake, no door Dash,
Speaker 1: no TikTok, no Discord, no Coinbase, no Robinhood, and there
Speaker 1: wasn't any Venmo or Zel either. Tesla, Facebook, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Uber, Square, Alassian, Octor,
Speaker 1: Mongo dB, work Day, Palo Alto Networks, Asana, UiPath, Spotify.
Speaker 1: They hadn't even gone public yet. Instagram was still independent,
Speaker 1: it wasn't part of Facebook yet, and consumer drones they
Speaker 1: hadn't reached, Ubiquity, Voice assistance hadn't even been launched. Full
Speaker 1: Glte Networks they were brand new, and Amazon Web Services,
Speaker 1: one of the most profitable things in the world, as
Speaker 1: I'll get to, was on course to make six hundred
Speaker 1: million dollars in revenue in twenty ten, which is, by
Speaker 1: the way, two point five percent of the twenty four
Speaker 1: billion the AWS on its own made. In the first
Speaker 1: quarter of twenty twenty four, Google and Apple stock prices
Speaker 1: were worth less than a tenth of what they are today.
Speaker 1: An Nvidia A stock now worth over one thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: traded at under three dollars a share. Between two thousand
Speaker 1: and five and twenty eighteen, we saw this incredible surge
Speaker 1: of innovation and take valuations, and this kind of seemingly
Speaker 1: unstoppable period of growth and big sexy ideas that created big,
Speaker 1: sexier new markets. While applications existed in two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: Apples app Store and the perpetual nature of connection that
Speaker 1: we get from smartphones. It consumerized the concept of distinct
Speaker 1: service based apps, as well as the overall concept of
Speaker 1: software ecosystems, which has become a multi trillion dollar philosophical
Speaker 1: and economic force, and it's changed just about everything about
Speaker 1: how we communicate and even do business. It's remarkable and
Speaker 1: also was a new market just sitting there waiting for
Speaker 1: the hardware and software to catch up with it and
Speaker 1: for someone to come up with the idea, of course,
Speaker 1: connecting people digitally through social media, voice, video, and so on.
Speaker 1: It's been central to the hypergrowth cycle, with innovations like
Speaker 1: connectivity and cloud infrastructure allowing multiple companies to carve out
Speaker 1: these one hundred billion and trillion dollar ecosystems. On some level,
Speaker 1: big tech companies could put money through research and development, investment,
Speaker 1: or acquisitions wherever they needed to as a means of
Speaker 1: making the future a reality, and thanks to the fact
Speaker 1: that interest rates were rock bottom and there was a
Speaker 1: lot of private money going into startups, they were never
Speaker 1: really short of cash to do so. At some point,
Speaker 1: hype began to outpace innovation, and while there were new ideas,
Speaker 1: the actual fundamental technology required to actually innovate may not
Speaker 1: actually exist, making a lot of these ideas theoretical and
Speaker 1: so far behind the cart that you may as well
Speaker 1: shoot the horse dead. When Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to
Speaker 1: Meta he told Casey Newton, who by the way, should
Speaker 1: feel nothing but shame for accepting this in good faith,
Speaker 1: that he believed the metaverse was an embodied internet that
Speaker 1: was a persistent, synchronous environment that would resembles social media
Speaker 1: but also be an environment where you're embodied in it.
Speaker 1: That's a real quote By the way, this is of
Speaker 1: course total nonsense, a total word salad that will make
Speaker 1: you throw up, conjured up by somebody without any real
Speaker 1: ideas that knows that they won't receive any pushback on
Speaker 1: them anyway, not even from those whose job it is
Speaker 1: to scrutinize the tech industry and ask difficult questions so
Speaker 1: that people don't buy stupid shit anyway. What Zuckerberg had
Speaker 1: actually built, by which for the most part I mean acquired,
Speaker 1: was a half fast virtual world accessed through niche virtual
Speaker 1: reality technology that nobody asked for that already kind of existed,
Speaker 1: that made people sick, and that Meta couldn't actually build.
Speaker 1: And what Mark Zuckerberg wanted to do was built the
Speaker 1: successor to the mobile Internet, in the hopes that quote
Speaker 1: the metaverse would be another hypergrowth industry where people would
Speaker 1: buy land which they didn't, or hang out on mass
Speaker 1: which they didn't, or have meetings which they did not,
Speaker 1: all while sharing data and watching ads served by Meta
Speaker 1: and other companies that Meta could sell ads too. In
Speaker 1: this cynical, horrible version of the future, the Internet, neutral
Speaker 1: standards based and controlled by no single company, would be
Speaker 1: transformed into a platform a feudal system where meta would
Speaker 1: set the rules an exact cut from each engagement, interaction,
Speaker 1: and transaction. It was quite plainly a power grad the
Speaker 1: likes of which the Internet hasn't seen since the bleak
Speaker 1: days of Internet Explorer six and Active X. And if
Speaker 1: you don't know what those are, Microsoft has some evil
Speaker 1: things in the past. The tech, however, it was never there.
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg sold everybody on the concept of a ready
Speaker 1: Player one metaverse and putting aside for a second that
Speaker 1: Ready Player one is a poorly written dystopia. This vision
Speaker 1: hinges heavily on the idea of technology that completely immerses
Speaker 1: the user and their senses and makes them feel like
Speaker 1: they're actually in a world which is just insane. It's
Speaker 1: not possible, It's not even close to possible. We're talking
Speaker 1: about full sensory takeover and the ability to traverse the
Speaker 1: digital world somehow without moving. This would be a revolution,
Speaker 1: both in cloud computing because just the raw data would
Speaker 1: be insane, but also immersive technology. Just what was everyone
Speaker 1: doing accepting this idea, And let's be honest, the reality
Speaker 1: was just so much worse. You had these nausea inducing
Speaker 1: headsets that led you into this horrible, clunky cartoon world
Speaker 1: that wasn't fun or practical or useful, and tens of
Speaker 1: billions of dollars of R and D costs developing headsets
Speaker 1: that lose money on every sale. It's just insane. By
Speaker 1: the way, Mark Zuckerberg has spent tens of billions of
Speaker 1: dollars and I reallyz Sometimes people don't like it when
Speaker 1: I get yelly, and I apologize. But where has the
Speaker 1: thirty billion dollars gone? What has Mark Zuckerberg done with it?
Speaker 1: Where is it going? I don't know. I'm not accusing
Speaker 1: anyone of anything, but the whole thing just feels like
Speaker 1: a con. And Zuckerberg's glossy Metaverse video the first one
Speaker 1: he published when they rebranded Facebook to Meta. It was
Speaker 1: significant in quite a few ways. First of all, the
Speaker 1: most disgusting bullshit I've ever seen a tech company put out,
Speaker 1: just complete lies. But it was also a demonstration of
Speaker 1: the company's future ambitions and directions, and it showed exactly
Speaker 1: what they hoped they could build, And had zucker actually
Speaker 1: done so, I would have said it would have been
Speaker 1: a success, but said success would have been predicated on
Speaker 1: a pace of innovation that we haven't had in over
Speaker 1: a decade or longer. I don't actually know how we
Speaker 1: get to anything close to what Mark Zuckerberg was selling,
Speaker 1: But forty billion dollars later, the metaverse is just nowhere
Speaker 1: near close to existing, and yet he keeps burning cash
Speaker 1: in the hopes that he can get just one more
Speaker 1: hit of hypergrowth. Man, that's all Mark Zuckerberg needs, just
Speaker 1: one more hit. Brother S, gim me a little more growth.
Speaker 1: I'll be okay. I swear I won't need any in
Speaker 1: the future. Putting that aside, I really think this is
Speaker 1: why Zuckerberg is so full force on generative AI. He
Speaker 1: shoved it into every meta platform now, regardless of whether
Speaker 1: it does anything useful, whether it's doing anything weird, like
Speaker 1: commenting on a parenting group that it has a gifted
Speaker 1: child and telling parents where to take their kids. It's
Speaker 1: just so weird. And it's the same reason that Sun
Speaker 1: Dhar Pashai and Liz Reader forcing generative AI into Google Search,
Speaker 1: even as it misinforms customers and it's recommending people put
Speaker 1: glue on their pizza and eat rocks, and it's claiming
Speaker 1: that Barack Obama is a Muslim, and it's regurgitating stories
Speaker 1: from the onion as indisputable fact, and it's just it's
Speaker 1: very frustrating. You can hear it in my voice. But
Speaker 1: it all comes down to a simple problem, which is
Speaker 1: the tech industry is getting withdrawal symptoms. They're realizing there
Speaker 1: might not be any massive new markets, they might not
Speaker 1: be another way to create another billion dollar arm of
Speaker 1: a trillion dollar enterprise. And on some level, I believe
Speaker 1: that the industry wide alignment around this unprofitable, unsustainable AI
Speaker 1: tool is just proof that they're getting desperate and that
Speaker 1: some of them might be irredeemably washed. Why else would
Speaker 1: Sam Altman spend most of the time talking about what
Speaker 1: AI might do. Why else would Sam Altman talk so
Speaker 1: often about building artificial general intelligence, a thing that, as
Speaker 1: I have mentioned, is totally and utterly possible to build
Speaker 1: with any of the generative AI tech his company makes,
Speaker 1: and likely requires kinds of computing that do not exist. Yet.
Speaker 1: It's really frustrating, and the rock com bubble bursting is
Speaker 1: it's gonna be nasty for bid Tech. It's going to
Speaker 1: wash out at least one of these companies, and it
Speaker 1: might take years to happen. But the growth trend is
Speaker 1: reversing every single one of these companies, with a few exceptions,
Speaker 1: I realize, is seeing traffic declines and they're not improving.
Speaker 1: Perhaps they will find new ways, but where are they
Speaker 1: going to find them? What are the things they're going
Speaker 1: to do? What happens when none of this stuff actually
Speaker 1: is the future? What happens when Google Search tells someone
Speaker 1: to actually do something that kills them, how to clean
Speaker 1: up a chemical firing correctly, for example. There are very
Speaker 1: real ways that these things are going to hurt people.
Speaker 1: But putting that aside, even if they don't, they're not
Speaker 1: going to make them the kind of money and get
Speaker 1: them the kind of customers that they need to perpetually
Speaker 1: show perpetual growth. As I said last episode or two
Speaker 1: episodes ago, Facebook is dying, and Facebook's dying because I
Speaker 1: actually believe Mark Zuckerbig is quite innovative about one thing,
Speaker 1: which is he can smell blood in the water, except
Speaker 1: now he can smell his I think Mark Zuckerberg realized
Speaker 1: that this was happening many years before everybody else, and
Speaker 1: that's why he pushed the metaverse in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 1: That's why he was talking about Web three and twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one that was a very very easy year to
Speaker 1: get money, and it was a year when people were
Speaker 1: aggressively buying things, so it was a great time to
Speaker 1: sell new ideas. Also, I think he read Ready Player
Speaker 1: one and he actually liked it, which is so strange.
Speaker 1: But either way, I do think Zuckerberg's an innovator because
Speaker 1: he's realized that the highpergrowth era is over and he's
Speaker 1: really trying to create the next best thing. Now. Notice
Speaker 1: I didn't say something good or something useful. That's just
Speaker 1: not in Zuckerberg's DNA, and it's not in Sandhar Peshai
Speaker 1: or Sam Ortmann or sach In Adela's either Microsoft, Amazon, Meta.
Speaker 1: These companies are not innovative anymore because they're no longer
Speaker 1: engineered to be. When the living was free and easy,
Speaker 1: when there were tons of these markets to attack and
Speaker 1: grow and eat shit out the other way and make
Speaker 1: money from, they just needed a management consultant mindset. It
Speaker 1: was growth at all costs. It was growth all the time,
Speaker 1: because all they had to do was throw more money
Speaker 1: at the problem and they'd always keep growing. And to
Speaker 1: their credit, they have been. But mark my words, they're
Speaker 1: not going to grow forever, and they don't have a
Speaker 1: next trick. They don't have the next one billion user product,
Speaker 1: they don't have the next innovation, and I don't think
Speaker 1: they're going to have it for a long time. And
Speaker 1: this is why all of this stuff feels kind of weird.
Speaker 1: It's why all of this stuff doesn't seem to be
Speaker 1: solving a need that you or I have, or they
Speaker 1: even a business has, And it's why so often it
Speaker 1: feels like they're pleading with us to believe that this
Speaker 1: is the future. Companies that build useful things that people
Speaker 1: need don't need to talk about what they're build in
Speaker 1: the future. You can see it in the things they're
Speaker 1: selling you today. You could see in the early days
Speaker 1: of cloud computing how you bickered with storage like Dropbox
Speaker 1: or box might have existed. I was us an FTP.
Speaker 1: Thank thank god for drop Box, honestly, but seriously, you
Speaker 1: could see why these things were the future. And in
Speaker 1: the next episode, I'm going to walk you through how
Speaker 1: the tech industries promises no longer actually seem to match
Speaker 1: their ability to build things, and how this desperation that
Speaker 1: I've been discussing shows that we're close to the rock
Speaker 1: com bubble bursting. Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening
Speaker 1: to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better
Speaker 1: Offline Thing song is Mattersowski. You can check out more
Speaker 1: of his music and audio projects at Matasowski dot com,
Speaker 1: M A T T O S O W s ki
Speaker 1: dot com. You can email me at easy at Better
Speaker 1: offline dot com or visit Better Offline dot com to
Speaker 1: find more podcast links and of course, my newsletter. I
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Speaker 1: slash Better Offline to check out our reddit. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of
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