Better Offline - The Rot-Com Bubble

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

Tech's hyper-growth era is ending, with online 100 million new people getting online between 2022 and 2023, and almost every major web platform seeing a decline in growth since 2021. In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how tech's decline is driving the tech industry to try and sell you useless products like the metaverse, cryptocurrency and generative AI. Episode Links: https://tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinksSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than adds supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined.

Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-I-Hart. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest,

SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the I-Heart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Joey Dardano, and on my new podcast, hope from a hypocrite, I'll be changing lives, helping people in need with thoughtful solutions. Sike, I'm a comedian. I'm not qualified to give good advice. Join me and my comedian friends

as we riff, rant and recommend some of the most legally dubious advice known to me. This is Help from a Hypocrite, the worst advice from the dumbest people you know. Listen to Help from Hypocrite Wednesdays on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

AllZone Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zittron. In the next two episodes, I want to present you with a theory about why the tech industry has felt so weird for the last few years, and why there are so many products that have popped up that don't seem to really do anything or be things that people have actually asked for. And it comes down to a few simple questions. Chief of them, what if the next big thing in tech is actually years or decades away?

What if the era of hypergrowth in tech is over? Now, as I've mentioned before, I believe the rot economy is to blame for a lot of this. It's a growth at all-cost mindset that sits at the core of pretty much everything I've written or spoken about. It's this force that drives businesses to grow bigger rather than better and make products to conquer markets and show growth to the public markets rather than fixing a problem that you or I might have or a business might have or provide a necessary service that was nevertheless popular and profitable. And the raw economy doesn't feel like any other economic period I've seen. It's not like, say, I don't know, the post-2008 financial crisis,

or that stagnation that lingered afterwards. And what's different was there isn't really a single obvious event that started the decline of the services we're using, or the companies that make them. And there's not really like a Lehman Brothers crater we can point at and say, there you go, that's the thing. The closest I can come is kind of FTX, which was the big crypto crash,

the big massive Ponzi scheme that no one really saw coming, other than many people who were looking behind the scenes. But other than that, that was kind of what crashed crypto. And maybe it was the end of the zero interest-free era where interest rates went up and it was harder to get money, but there was no one thing you could point out. But I do want to try. And I have one epoch, I think, for when the raw economy kind of took over. And I'd want to point to the latter point of the 2010s. Think about it.

Like, really think about it for a second. Sometime after 2019, the tech industry, it kind of lost its sizzle. There were new gadgets, there were new apps, new services. but tech started to feel iterative rather than innovative, yet they were making more money than ever. And by 2021, even the pretense of any gradual improvement was really dropped. It felt like, I don't know, they were trying to sell us things that didn't really exist. We were told that NFTs would replace physical, tangible collectibles, and that cryptocurrency would replace regular money, while also emancipating customers for an unstoppable market force like inflation or big tech,

because, of course, cryptocurrency came with it, the idea, and I mean idea, of decentralized software. And this was all meant to get rid of rent-seeking middlemen that were taking parts of every purchase, despite the very same middlemen investing in cryptocurrency. Yet, the actual services that came out of these movements didn't really seem to do anything or improve our lives in any meaningful way. And we were told at one point that our futures were in the metaverse, and we lived in this massive, interconnected, quote, new internet. Yet when we actually got there, it was just this really wonky VR virtual reality space

that Mark Zuckerberg has somehow burned $36 billion on. It's all so weird. And today, we're told that we have this glorious AI-powered future that's just imminent. Yet what we've actually got is this unprofitable, unsustainable generative AI that has this horrible, unassainable problem of hallucination. where it spits out incorrect information authoritatively, which worryingly, Google CEO Sunder Peshire has said in an interview with The Verge is an inherent feature of a technology that he's now plugged into Google search,

which means it's generating these horrible answers to queries based on the links of a search engine that Sondar Peshai has helped decay. It's all just very frustrating, and it's also quite useless, kind of illogical too. And at the forefront of this AI boom is, Sam Maltman and his $80 billion juggernaw Open AI, a company that claims it's going to build artificial general intelligence, one that experiences human-like cognition, which is just not possible with generative AI. The tech he is selling today is not going to give us AGI. I just want to be abundantly clear about that. Any time you read Sam Mortman talking about AGI, he is talking about tech that Open AI does not have and is not building.

They may claim they're building it behind the scenes, but they're only working on generative AI. And the frustration you hear in my voice, you might have felt yourself, you might not have, but it's this prevailing sense of, you keep telling me the future is here, but when I look at what the future is, it isn't even close. And the products you're selling me aren't actually useful. Let me give you another example. Windows laptops will soon integrate an AI-powered search feature called Recall that allows you to search everything you've ever done on your computer in the last three months.

And it does so by recording everything, everything, from the meetings you've been into to the things you've written. I should be clear, I don't think anybody actually asked for a feature like this. And it's also inherently invasive. It directly encroaches on your privacy and you security, and it takes screenshots of your machine every few seconds and stores them, along with AI generated inferences, in a locally held database. This isn't good. And the fact that they're not sending it anywhere doesn't.

really make it better. It is, in essence, a pre-installed screen recorder, the kind of thing that hacker might install on a victim's computer, and if an attacker gains access to it, it's obvious how catastrophic the ramifications are. Or, let's be honest, domestic abusers, people at work. There are people who can get on your computer force access by forcing you or just getting your password, and they can now see everything you've done. Despite this being an inherently AI-powered feature, it just can't distinguish between your regular computer usage and say, sensitive information, passwords, health information, trade secrets, the very obvious stuff you would not want your computer recording. It treats, I don't know, like an email from your doctor

with the same level of concern and copying as it would like YouTube or a chat conversation. It's just really bad. And already, White Hat security researchers, they've created proof of concept malware applications that can pull sensitive data obtained or generated by Microsoft Requel from your computer and with pretty minimal effort. And now the UK's Information Commissioner's Office, the nation's privacy watchdog, by the way, they can actually do quite steep finds. It's not great. They're now probing whether the tech actually presents an unacceptable risk to consumers, which, as anyone who thinks about it for more than 12 seconds, or even 5, can confirm it does. It's just very frustrating

and who asked for this? Who actually asked for this? Now, every major tech company, they're integrating AI into their products and services, yet underneath the hood, the AI they're integrating doesn't actually seem to do anything new or generate a profit or solve anyone's actual needs. Even the companies themselves seem incapable of explaining

why AI is such a big deal, to the point that Microsoft Super Bowl commercial for its AI-powered co-pilot assistant featured multiple things that it cannot do, like generate the code for an open world game. When you, by the way, you type in the prompt, which on the commercial is 3D, generate the code for an open world 3D game, and you type that in and it will give you a list of things you should do to build an open world game.

It's so strange, and it's so strange how so many of these companies just can't really explain why this is the next best thing. They just need you to believe them. And maybe that might actually be the problem. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan

to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an Acapella band with their between songs banter. The worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah.

Me. Is there anything? to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yardt. They're open.

Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. You let me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny.

Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So 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.

Call 844-844-Eyheart to get started. That's 844-8-4-8-4-I-Hart. There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast, and for Mental Health Awareness Month, we're dedicating a series to understanding the mind when it struggles. I'm joined by doctors, researchers, and those with lived experience. We'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety.

I started living in my car, got stolen. I was shoplifting, I was having panic attacks, I was agoraphobic. And making it through hardship. To be present is a learned skill, and it's hard to be present. We'll talk with John Nelson about clinical depression and the brain implant that saved his life. What I learned is that procedure made me happy because I'm disease-free. And we'll talk with leading experts like Judd Brewer about anxiety and John Hirschfield about obsessive compulsive disorder and the science of how the brain can change. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course and what we can do about it. Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. For decades, the tech industry and its various venture capital funders, they've been remarkably good at coming up with both innovative new products and ways to turn them into huge new markets for hypergrowth, 100 billion trillion dollar markets that they could then sell into investing companies within actual industries. You had search engines, digital maps, smartphones and apps, social media, cloud computing, software as a service, electric cars, streaming audio and video. And also another thing, in the period between 2005 and 2024, we've tripled the amount of people on the internet. It's now over 5 billion people who use it. And that's also another problem I'll get to in a little bit. There were obvious meaningful markets

to move into. Ways to connect people, ways to get people content they wanted, algorithms to present it to them, ways to sell people things that solve problems that they had, or either for the first time or solving them faster, like the transition from physical to digital media, and problems that were both important to solve and actually solvable. Tech has perpetually succeeded, at building things, new things, that neatly create these new markets, and they've been incentivized by both the public and private markets, in growing these companies as fast and as big as possible to dominate these new markets, with the assumption that there would always be more of them, more massive multi-billion and multi-trillion dollar markets to conquer.

And I must be clear, you should never assume anything. Between 2022 and 2023, only 100 million additional people. got online, which is the slowest rate of growth in the last 18 years. And that's not because the need to bring connectivity to the masses is actually solved, especially in the global South. It hasn't been. And as of the most recent figures from the UN's International Telecoms Union shows, 33% of the world's population, or about 2.6 billion people, have never actually used the internet. But I have more worrying stuff. I've received some data from similar web that shows that the majority of the majority of

the internet's top 100 web properties have seen significant declines in traffic since 2021. In the years since the world slowly emerged from lockdown, Google.com has seen a decline of 5.3% in web visits, as has YouTube, which lost 3.8% of its traffic, Facebook, which lost a remarkable 27.7%. Twitter, which lost 3.5%, Amazon, which lost 11.6%. Twitch.TV, 17.5% lost there, they're owned by Amazon. Sadly, Wikipedia, which lost 24.8% of his traffic, and here's the thing that really worried me. Porn sites like X-Vidios, 27.4% loss,

and Porn Harp, 17.1% loss. When the pawns down, that's when you start worrying. Though you might be tempted to dismiss this all as a result of life returning to normal and that traditional office-based environments aren't particularly conducive to a crafty midday wank, you shouldn't. The trend actually began earlier with similar web data showing the decline starting in 2019. My analysis focuses on 2021 to 2024 because that's the one I have the most detailed month-by-month and year-by-year breakdowns for.

And by the way, I'm going to put in the episode notes links to things so that you can all see this. I want you to know, this data is very worrying, but don't trust me, trust the data from Similar Web. When you look at the trajectory of the web's most valuable properties on a year-over-year basis, things look quite bleak. With Google, which lost about 0.9%, YouTube, lost about 4.4%. Facebook, 7.7% loss. Twitter, 6.2% loss. Twitch, 11.9% loss.

And Amazon, 2.7% loss, all still seeing significant declines. Only a few sites like Reddit, which saw a 31.3% growth. TikTok, 11.6%. percent growth and Instagram, 9.9% growth, but trending down every year since 2019, and also LinkedIn, up 17.9%. They're the only ones that are really seeing good year-over-year growth. And while it's important to note that these are visits rather than active users, and in fairness, this data only covers visits made through a browser rather than an app, this is still a truly astounding trend that suggests for the most part that the web's largest platforms are seeing

kind of a digital recession. While there might be really, revenue coming to these companies and they might still be acquiring no users, there's really no good way to spin the fact that traffic to platforms like Amazon and Google has plateaued, then declined. Something's shifting downwards and it's been doing so since 2019. Perhaps this explains why platforms like Google and Facebook have kept making changes to make each user journey create more engagement and make it more profitable to sustain growth, because fewer people than ever are actually visiting the platforms. I believe we're at the end of something I called the rockcom boom, the tech industry's hypergrowth cycle,

where there were so many new lands to conquer, so many new ways to pile money into so many new, innovative, useful ideas that it felt like every tech company could experience perpetual growth, just by throwing money at a problem. It also explains why so many tech products, YouTube, Google search, Facebook, and so on, feel like they're either trapped in amber or like they've got tangibly worse. Because when you think about it, when there's no incentive to improve the things you've already built, why would you? You should just be working on the next big thing or new ways to juice the thing you have right now

to keep people coming back, maybe, but to keep people on the platform, sometimes by monopolizing an industry so they have nowhere else to go. And that's the thing. All of these companies, Facebook, Google, Amazon, I mean all of them, they've all built themselves on this very simple idea, that they'd always be a next big thing. And I'm not even saying that there won't be, but they've assumed. And the problem that they're facing right now is that there would always be one around the corner. This belief that exponential growth is not just a reasonable expectation, but a requirement is central to the core of the rot in the tech industry.

And as these rapacious demands run into reality, I'm sorry to say that the rock corn bubble is going to deflate. And as we speak, the tech industry, they're grappling with somewhat of a midlife crisis. And they're desperately searching for that next hypergrowth market. And they're eagerly pushing customers and businesses to adopt this technology that nobody actually asked for. They must keep the rot economy alive. Because if they don't, they're going to have to face the fact that they've built pretty unsustainable businesses. Even though they're profitable, even though they keep growing, the only thing that grows forever is cancer. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy,

not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst?

Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, uh, You only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name.

The Harvard Yardt Yard. But they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Humor me. I need some jokes to make me. See funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So 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. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-4-4-4-Ehart to get started. 844, Iheart. There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast,

and for Mental Health Awareness Month, we're dedicating a series to understanding the mind when it struggles. I'm joined by doctors, researchers, and those with lived experience. We'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car, and then my car got stolen. I was shoplifting. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic.

And making it through hardship. To be present is a learned skill. And it's hard to be present. We'll talk with John Nelson about clinical depression and the brain implant that saved his life. What I learned is that procedure made me happy because I'm disease-free. And we'll talk with leading experts

like Judd Brewer about anxiety and John Hirschfield about obsessive-compulsive disorder and the science of how the brain can change. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course and what we can do about it. Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The rot economy and techs growth lust, it isn't new, though. Venture Capital has been incentivizing and monetizing rot for over a decade, and Mark Andreessen advocated in 2011 that we should look to expand the number of innovative new software companies created,

rather than constantly questioning their valuations. Yet just a year earlier in March 2010, his partner, Ben Horowitz, he advocated for fat startups, and I'll link to that in the notes, saying that you can't save your way to winning the market, and that startup purgatory is when you don't go bankrupt, but you fail to build the number one product in this space and have zero chance of becoming a high-growth company.

Which, by the way, Horowitz described this as worse than startup hell because you are, and I quote, stuck with the small company, even if it's cash flow positive. At the time, this might have made sense to them because this mindset made them quite rich. Even though there's something inherently abnormal about describing being a stable, profitable company as being an estate that's worse than hell. Anyway, I want you to take a step back in time with me, though, and think about how much has changed in the last 10 years, 15 years?

Think about it for a second. In 2010, it felt like we were just making our first steps into the digital world. It was still pretty new. 2010, there was no Instagram, there was no Zoom, no Snapchat, no Lyft, no Tinder, no Slack, no snowflake, no DoorDash, no TikTok, no Discord, no Coinbase, no Robin Hood, and there wasn't any Venmo or Zell either. Tesla, Facebook, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Uber, Square, Elassian, Octa, MongoDB, Workday, Palo Alto Networks, Asana, UiPath, Spotify, they hadn't even gone public yet.

Instagram was still independent It wasn't part of Facebook yet And consumer drones They hadn't reached ubiquity Voice assistants hadn't even been launched Full G LTE networks They were brand new And Amazon Web Services

One of the most profitable things in the world As I'll get to Was on course to make $600 million in revenue in 2010 Which is by the way 2.5% of the 24 billion that AWS on its own made in the first quarter of 2024

Google and Apple's stock prices were worth less than a tenth of what they are today. And NVIDIA, a stock now worth over $1,000, traded at under $3 a share. Between 2005 and 2018, we saw this incredible surge of innovation and tech valuations and this kind of seemingly unstoppable period of growth and big, sexy ideas that created big, sexier new markets. While applications existed in 2008, Apple's App Store, and the perpetual nature of connection that we get from smartphones, It consumerized the concept of distinct service-based apps, as well as the overall concept of software ecosystems, which has become a multi-trillion dollar philosophical and economic force.

And it's changed just about everything about how we communicate and even do business. It's remarkable and also was a new market just sitting there waiting for the hardware and software to catch up with it, and for someone to come up with the idea, of course. Connecting people digitally through social media, voice video and so on, it's been central to the hypergrowth cycle, with innovations like connectivity and cloud infrastructure allowing multiple companies to carve out these $100 billion and trillion ecosystems. On some level, big tech companies could put money through research and development, investment or acquisitions, wherever they needed to as a means of making the future a reality. And thanks to the fact that interest rates were rock bottom and there was a lot of private money going into,

startups, they were never really short of cash to do so. At some point, hype began to outpace innovation, and while there were new ideas, the actual fundamental technology required to actually innovate may not actually exist, making a lot of these ideas theoretical and so far behind the cart that you may as well shoot the horse dead. When Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to Meta, he told Casey Newton, who by the way should feel nothing but shame for accepting this in good faith, that he believed the mettaverse was an embodied internet that was a persistent, synchronous environment, that resembles social media, but also be an environment where you're embodied in it. That's a real quote, by the way. This is, of course,

total nonsense, a total word salad that will make you throw up, conjured up by somebody without any real ideas that knows that they won't receive any pushback on them anyway. Not a even from those whose job it is to scrutinize the tech industry and ask the difficult questions so that people don't buy stupid shit. Anyway, what Zuckerberg had actually built, by which, for the most part, I mean acquired, was a half-farse virtual world accessed through niche virtual reality technology that nobody asked for that already kind of existed that made people sick and that meta couldn't actually build. And what Mark Zuckerberg wanted to do was built the successor to the mobile internet, in the hopes that, quote, the Metaverse, would be another hypergrowth

industry where people would buy land, which they didn't, or hang out en masse, which they didn't, or have meetings, which they did not, all while sharing data and watching ads served by Meta and other companies that Meta could sell ads too. In this cynical, horrible version of the future, the internet, neutral, standards-based, and controlled by no single company, would be transformed into a platform, a feudal system where meta would set the rules and exact a cut from each engagement, interaction and transaction. It was quite plainly a power grab, the likes of which the internet hasn't seen since the bleak days of Internet Explorer 6 and ActiveX, and if you don't know what those are, Microsoft has some evil things in the past. The tech, however, it was never

there. Mark Zuckerberg sold everybody on the concept of a Ready Player 1 metaverse, and putting aside for a second that Ready Player 1 is a poorly written dystopia, this vision hinges heavily on the idea of technology that completely immerses the user and their senses and makes them feel like they're actually in a world, which is just insane. It's not possible. It's not even close to possible. We're talking about full sensory takeover and the ability to traverse the digital world somehow without moving. This would be a revolution both in cloud computing because just the raw data would be insane, but also immersive technology. Just what was everyone doing accepting this idea?

And let's be honest, the reality was just so much worse. You had these nausea-inducing headsets that led you into this horrible, clunky cartoon world that wasn't fun or practical or useful, and tens of billions of dollars of R&D costs developing headsets that lose money on every sale. It's just insane. By the way, Mark Zucker, has spent tens of billions of dollars, and I realize sometimes people don't like it when I get

yellow, and I apologize, but where has the $30 billion gone? What has Mark Zuckerberg done with it? Where is it going? I don't know. I'm not accusing anyone of anything, but the whole thing just feels like a con. And Zuckerberg's glossy metaverse video, the first one he published when they rebranded Facebook to meta, it was significant in quite a few ways. First of all, the most disgusting bullshit I've ever seen a tech company put out just complete lies, but it was also a demonstration of the company's future ambitions and directions, and it showed exactly what they hoped they could build. And had Zuckerberg actually done so, I would have said it would have been a success,

but said success would have been predicated on a pace of innovation that we haven't had in over a decade. All longer, I don't actually know how we get to anything close to what Mark Zuckerberg was selling. But $40 billion later, the metaverse is just nowhere near close to existing. And yet he keeps burning cash in the hopes that he can get just one more hit of hypergrowth, man. That's all Mark Zuckerberg needs just one more hit, brother. Just give me a little more growth. I'll be okay. I swear I won't need any in the future. Putting that aside, I really think this is why Zuckerberg is so full force on generative AI. He shoved it into every meta platform now, regardless of whether it does anything useful,

or whether it's doing anything weird, like commenting on a parenting group that it has a gifted child and telling parents where to take their kids. It's just so weird, and it's the same reason that Sundar Pashai and Liz Reid are forcing Generative AI into Google Search, even as it misinforms customers.

And it's recommending people put glue on their pizza and eat rocks, and it's claiming that Barack Obama is a Muslim, and it's regurgitating stories from the onion, as indisputable fact. And it's just, it's very frustrating. You can hear it in my voice, but it all comes down to a simple problem, which is, the tech industry is getting withdrawal symptoms. They're realizing there might not be any massive new markets.

They might not be another way to create another billion dollar arm of a trillion dollar enterprise. And on some level, I believe that the industry-wide alignment around this unprofitable, unsustainable AI tool is just proof that they're getting desperate. and that some of them might be irredeemably washed. Why else would Sam Altman spend most of the time talking about what AI might do? Why else would Sam Altman talk so often about building artificial general intelligence? A thing that, as I have mentioned, is totally and utterly impossible to build with any of the generative AI tech his company makes,

and likely requires kinds of computing that do not exist yet. it's really frustrating and the rockcom bubble bursting is it's going to be nasty for bid tech it's going to wash out at least one of these companies and it might take years to happen but the growth trend is reversing every single one of these companies with a few exceptions i realize is seeing traffic declines and they're not improving perhaps they will find new ways but where are they going to find them What are the things they're going to do? What happens when none of this stuff actually is the future? What happens when Google Search tells someone to actually do something that kills them? How to clean up a chemical fire incorrectly, for example. There are very real ways that these things are going to hurt people, but putting that aside, even if they don't, they're not going to make them the kind of money

and get them the kind of customers that they need to perpetually show perpetual growth. As I said last episode, well, two episodes ago, Facebook is dying and Facebook's dying because I actually believe Mark Zuckerberg is quite innovative about one thing, which is he can smell blood in the water, except now he can smell his. I think Mark Zuckerberg realized that this was happening many years before everybody else, and that's why he pushed the Metaverse in 2021. That's why he was talking about Web 3 in 2021. That was a very, very easy year to get money, and it was a year when people were aggressively buying things, so it was a great time to sell new ideas.

Also, I think you read Ready Player 1 and he actually liked it, which is so strange. But either way, I do think Zuckerberg's an innovator because he's realized that the hypergrowth era is over, and he's really trying to create the next best thing. Now, notice I didn't say something good or something useful. That's just not in Zuckerberg's DNA, and it's not in Sundar Peshai or Sam Altman or Satchanadellas,

either. Microsoft, Amazon, meta, these companies not innovative anymore because they're no longer engineered to be. When the living was free and easy, when there were tons of these markets to attack and grow and eat and shit out the other way and make money from, they just needed a management consultant mindset. It was growth at all cost. It was growth all the time because all they had to do was throw more money at the problem and they'd always keep growing. And to their credit, they have been. But mark my words, they're not going to grow forever and they don't have a next trick. They don't have the next one billion user product. They don't have the next innovation.

And I don't think they're going to have it for a long time. And this is why all of this stuff feels kind of weird. It's why all of this stuff doesn't seem to be solving a need that you or I have or even a business has. And it's why so often it feels like they're pleading with. us to believe that this is the future. Companies that build useful things that people need don't need to talk about what they're built in the future. You can see it in the things they're selling you today. You could see in the early days of cloud computing how ubiquitous storage

like Dropbox or Box might have existed. Obviously, it's an FTP. Thank God for Dropbox, honestly. But seriously, you could see why these things were the future. And in the next episode, I'm going to walk you through how the tech industry's promises no longer actually seem to match their ability to build things and how this desperation I've been discussing shows that we're close to the rockcom bubble bursting. Thanks for listening. Thank 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 Mattisowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-K-I.com. You can email me at E-S-K-I-S-E-S-K-I-com. 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. Where's Your Ed?orgat to visit the Discord and go to R slash Better Offline 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 podcast. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and Friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier.

This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your... podcasts. The story I've told myself can then shape my behavior and that can lead me to sabotage the

possibility of connection. This Mental Health Awareness Month, tune into the podcast deeply well with Debbie Brown. If you've been searching for a soft place to land while doing the work to become whole, this podcast is for you to hear more. Listen to deeply well with Debbie Brown from the Black Black Effect Podcast Network on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Joey Dardano, and on my new podcast, Hope from a Hypocrite, I'll be changing lives, helping people in need with thoughtful solutions. Sike, I'm a comedian.

I'm not qualified to give good advice. Join me and my comedian friends as we riff, rant, recommend some of the most legally dubious advice known to me. This is Help from a Hypocrite, the worst advice from the dumbest people you know. Listen to Help from a Hypocrite Wednesdays on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcast. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.