Factually! with Adam Conover - Debunking the Tech Hype Cycle with Dan Olson

Episode Date: June 7, 2023

From the Metaverse to AI, tech giants continue lure us with false promises of "the next big thing." This week, Adam is joined by Dan Olson, a perceptive YouTube personality known for deconstructing narratives and the modern tech landscape. Together, they unravel the reasons behind this technological hype cycle and discuss potential pathways to break free from its grip. Find Dan's channel at Folding Ideas.Like the show? Rate Factually! 5-Stars on Apple Podcasts and let Adam know what conversation you'd like to hear next.Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's all right. That's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover.

Thank you so much for joining me once again as I talk to an incredible expert about all the amazing things that they know that I don't know and that you might not know. Both of our minds are gonna get blown together today. We're gonna have a lot of fun doing it. Now, if you hadn't noticed, we are in the middle of a full-blown

stage three code red hype cycle. Its subject, artificial intelligence. To see how deep the hype hole goes, just type the phrase AI will transform into your search bar and you'll see articles about how AI will transform lives and labor markets, how AI is set to transform the construction industry, how AI and machine learning will transform your legal department. Even an article that dares to ask, can AI transform the skincare buying experience? You know, as if I need a large language model to understand the importance of moisturizing.

Please, I know how to take care of my skin. Now, it's not like generative AI isn't a real thing or that there aren't good and bad, maybe very bad repercussions to come from its development and adoption. We're in early days. It's just that this current wave of hype and those headlines promising transformation in every conceivable sphere, well, it's something we've seen before. And it is bullshit. Remember the good old days of 2022? Well, that year was filled with headlines about the metaverse, like will the metaverse really transform filled with headlines about the metaverse, like, will the metaverse really transform our lives? Or how the metaverse could change work? And of course,

you guessed it, how the beauty industry is entering the metaverse. Okay. Well, as we all know, Mark Zuckerberg's multi-billion dollar gamble on the metaverse was a total flop. Even the Wall Street Journal talked trash with the headline, the metaverse is quickly turning into the metaverse. Get it? They're up with the kid lingo over there. Well, the metaverse wasn't even the tech industry's only hype wave to crash on the rocky shores of reality last year because cryptocurrency also went up in flames. The industry's resident genius, Sam Bankman Freed, turned out to be a wildly corrupt and incompetent fraudster who is now awaiting trial. And the crypto collapse didn't

just hurt something that doesn't matter much like Mark Zuckerberg's ego. It had serious consequences. It wiped out two trillion dollars in value in 2022. And many of those vaporized dollars belong to normal people who had bet the farm on the crypto hype cycle. So why do we have these repeated hype cycles over and over again? Well, here's the fundamental problem. The tech industry is structured around having a new, completely transformative technology roll out every two years or so. But after the invention of the Internet, smartphones, GPS and the mobile Internet, they started

to run out of low hanging fruit to blow our minds with. A lot of the important technological innovations have now already been made. So these companies now have to resort to telling us over and over again that whatever new magic potion they've come up with is going to solve all of our problems. And, you know, some of it might turn out to be magic, but at least some of it is turning out to be snake oil. So whenever we're caught up in a tech industry hype cycle tornado like the AI one we are in right now, we need to remember that this hype is being created by huge corporations and investors who have a financial stake in us buying into the bullshit. And for that reason, it's important that we all remain skeptical to

keep our critical thinking faculties intact so that we can dissect the hype to figure out what is real and what is fake. And our guest today is absolutely brilliant at doing just that. His name is Dan Olson, and his video essays on the YouTube channel Folding Ideas are essential viewing, whether he's ripping apart NFTs or the metaverse. So I cannot wait to talk to him about what he has learned about tech industry hype cycles and how they might help us think a little bit more critically about those yet in our future. But before we get to that conversation, I just want to remind you that if you want to support this show, you can do so on Patreon. Just head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. For five bucks a month, you get every episode of this show ad-free. Plus, you can do so on Patreon. Just head to patreon.com slash adamconover. For five bucks a month,

you get every episode of this show ad-free. Plus, you can join our community Discord. We even do a live book club every couple months where we read a book together and discuss it. It is so much fun. We'd love to see you there. And of course, if you enjoy stand-up comedy, don't forget that I am going on tour this year.

If you live in Illinois, Maryland, Missouri, or Rhode Island, please come see me do my brand new hour of standup in a city near you. Head to adamconover.net slash tour dates to get those tickets. And now without further ado, please enjoy this conversation with Dan Olson. Dan, thank you so much for being on the show. Glad to be here. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. I've admired your videos for so long. You had a huge video about crypto and NFTs came out last year. Right. And when I say huge, I'm talking, it was like two and a half hours long, something like that. It's a very long, you make very long YouTube videos.

218. Okay. And you have a new one out about the metaverse. Yeah. Came out just a month ago. And so I'm curious what got you into making these videos? Because there's something that both of those have in common, right? About there's some, there's some themes shared between them. What, what is it that Like these are these are subjects that are effectively like they're they're products that exist almost entirely as this narrative that runs both in parallel to and and ultimately like sort of the point of the videos disconnected from sort of the reality of what they are, you know, you, you have this story that's being used to sell them, but the disconnect between the story and the actual thing is, is just this immense gulf. And I find that fascinating. Yeah. It's, and by the way, it's impossible not to bring up AI. As we talk about those two things, I see the similar gulf there where people talk about, oh my God, here's what these are, whether metaverse crypto or AI, here's what these products are going to be used for in just two years. They're going to change the world.

And then you look at the technical details of what they actually do. Yeah. Whether it's what the blockchain literally does, how it's used in practice today, or what a large language model, which is the technology that everyone's excited about, how it literally works. literally works and you immediately have trouble connecting a to B connecting the two, the two ends together to see how the possible use cases that people are floating have anything to do with the technology at all. I mean, is there a particular example from say the metaverse video that leaps out to you of what people say is possible versus what actually is? I mean, just the, like it's, it's difficult because difficult because uh to pull out a specific example i mean probably the big one would be like this the the rhetoric the narrative of like people are

going to like move into like they're going to move to the metaverse they're going to move into the metaverse and we use sort of the language of like you know living online like being too online and whatnot um but the thing is but this this the disconnect ends up being that you get this narrative of like moving to the metaverse you know people are living in the metaverse but they're they're not you know they're they're i don't live in world of warcraft i don't live on twitter you know even if we say it like you know metaphorically we know that it's a metaphor and the problem is is that the metaphor of like move to the metaverse um we should be able to cut through that pretty easily because it's like it's a it's a website it's a

it's a tool and so the question of like are we like so really that metaphor is saying one it's either just completely incoherent because your body won't fit inside your computer. Or if we take it metaphorically, it's saying that it's like, this is going to be a medium by which we engage with a whole bunch of other like specific use cases. And it's like, okay, but that second one is a lot more boring

and it's also falsifiable. We can look at that and we can say like, okay, wouldn't it be cool if a website was three-dimensional and like you could put on a vr headset and wander around inside a website or like whatever whatever that like implies but the thing is we've been trying that since the 90s you know yeah i remember vrml yeah vrml um you know, we've been rudimentary VR markup language for websites from the late nineties that never took off, but I, I remember reading Wired magazine in like 1998

and reading about it. And, and Wired has, uh, they've got a great post-mortem on it from, uh, about 18 months ago, uh, on, on VRML and like kind of like what became of it. And like the fact that it is sort of like still around as this very niche, hobby sort of uh hobby sort of thing um and so the thing is we've been trying this for decades and we know that at the end of the day text and like being able to flatten the website and being able to uh interact via buttons and hypertext and, and all of these things. And like, you know, you have a cursor that you can use to hover over things and that can pop up new information and all of that, that that level of like abstract interaction is incredibly powerful and more

use, like useful for more contexts, like just so many contexts that, that it's like Twitter is not going to be a better experience. If it's three-dimensional ordering stuff like us, an online store, we tried 3d online stores that you walk around and look at. And then it's like, ah, but it turns out if we just create like a flat page with a grid of like product images and short little text descriptions, we can fit in so much more information. Because at the end of the day, like the benefit of going to something in the store is like the tactile nature of the product that you're looking at.

Like you can touch it, you can see it, you can feel it, you can weigh it. And it's like all the metaverse stuff they like they they gesture towards that you know mark zuckerberg having his presentation where he's in a fencing match against someone and it's like yeah but it's not going to play out that way because you will never be able to like physically interact with someone via the medium. No one will ever be able to shove you in the metaverse and make you fall over in your house on the other side of the world. That's just physically impossible. There's so many ways in which,

and you've name checked like five of them that people who are promoting these technologies seem to fundamentally misunderstand reality when they're promoting the technology. And it's a number of different types of realities. You just mentioned, for instance, the reality of being a physical being instantiated in the world. Yeah. Right. And the ways in which, you know, that extends past just, okay, I have a screen on my eyes and I've got some gloves on, right. That can maybe interact with my fingers being extended in reality. There's a lot more senses than that. There's prior perception, your sense of, I think I'm pronouncing it right.

Where your hands are relative to your body. Yeah. Yeah. Where your physical body is stuff like that, that, that a no set of goggles is ever going to be able to reproduce. Um, and so there's, there's that misunderstanding. Uh. Then there's the misunderstanding of how people actually use technology. As you say, the reason Amazon was able to, you know, dominate online retail wasn't because they made a facsimile of a physical store. It's because they realized the most important thing was being able to, people being able to buy stuff as quickly as possible. I have a thought that I need a thing in with Amazon. If I'm a if I'm an Amazon power user, I can buy it within 30 seconds and have it shipped to my house and stop thinking about it. Whereas if you have to, like, have a virtual avatar that's wandering around in a store,

it's going to take a million years. The point is the convenience. And then the last thing they seem to misunderstand is how these businesses actually how real life businesses actually work. One of the things that shocked me the most about the metaverse was the claim that you used to see it all the time. If I got an item in one video game, I could then bring it to any other video game. And like I I was like the people making this claim, I guess, don't play video games because that doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make business sense. It doesn't make technological sense. It doesn't make video game sense. Like, okay, so I'm playing Diablo and I get a sword in Diablo and I want to bring that sword to Zelda Breath of the Wild, right? Well, the game mechanical effects of that,

of that sword in Diablo are completely different than in Zelda, right? The weapons work fundamentally differently in Zelda. They're physical objects that you can throw and have, you know, they're extended in space and Diablo. They're basically like just little, you know, uh, they,

it's all about the stats, right. And the, and the effects that it has. Um, so that would require, if that were to actually happen, uh,

Diablo could create an item. Every single item in Diablo would have to be recreated in Zelda by the people at Nintendo. To like, okay, what did this lightning spear do in Diablo? Okay, how do we make that make sense in Zelda? And then there'd have to be a hook to have every single one of those items come in. And Nintendo's not going to fucking do that. Because they don't give a shit about taking items from Diablo and putting it in Zelda or whatever else the amount of work it would create

for an extremely marginal benefit. Uh, like how does it benefit Nintendo or anybody playing a Nintendo game to bring in a thing from it? So it's just like, it's a failure to think through the basics of what your own proposal entails is sort of the shocking thing that is lacking in these, you know, in all these predictions about crypto metaverse. And I would argue AI as well, though, we can get there in our conversation. Yeah. It doesn't make sense as a business decision. It doesn't make sense as a technological claim and it doesn't make sense as a creative claim like that. It's like the thing that this is probably that third one is probably the one that rankles me the most about those kind of claims is it's like it it denies intentionality to things that people create and this goes for like this is a big thing

in like a lot of the ai pushers as well is that it's like well it fails to consider that people make a video game humans make a video game in order to say something in order to create a specific type of experience in order to have a world and interactions and emergent properties and instrumental uh uh elements and and all of this and that interacting with those is fun and rewarding and players play the game in order to experience that experience you know like okay so a good example of this that just came out yesterday speaking about ai was uh this just hit i think twitter yesterday uh the nvidia ceo unveiled did you see this video their new ai npc um this was like a key it was a keynote address by the ceo of nvidia apparently a big deal because he doesn't give

addresses very often and so he unveils this tech where you go talk to an npc and like a cyberpunk style video game okay and you use your real voice to talk to him you say hey steve what's up and then and then steve goes oh I'm not feeling so great. There's a bunch of criminals in the area and they're being controlled by a mob boss. And you say, oh, where can I find the mob boss with your actual voice? And they go, oh, well, you can make a left down there. And he's, you know, et cetera. The guy talks back to you.

But it's talking back to you via a large language model. Yeah. Yeah. Which means it's not scripted. They've like, you know, they've given it a bunch of text and it's giving you text based on your you know it's processing of what you've said to it um and so according to the ceo of nvidia a very important video game company uh or a very important company in video gaming this is how we're going to talk to npcs in the future i'm watching this going no we're fucking not no like because as soon as you give

a video game player a completely unbounded text input where they can say whatever they want all they're going to ask it is like what color the president's dick is you know or or like hey would you uh they're going to ask it to perform sex acts with them they're gonna they're just gonna talk to it about nonsense all day long they're gonna try to get it to say weird stuff. They're not, the quest isn't even going to come up. Right. And that's all they're creating. Every single NPC is going to be a bizarre conversational sandbox where you try to trick the AI into doing weird stuff. That becomes a completely different type of video game. An NPC quest giver is there to give you a quest. So you have something interesting to do.

Gameplay only works because of constraints that are placed on the, on the, on the player and the, and the lack of understanding about that from a CEO for a very important company in the gaming space was a kind of astounding to me that he didn't watch his own demo going, well, this game would fucking suck. You know, like what I've presented, maybe there's, maybe there is a use as large language models in video games, but it's certainly not what they present it. No, no. Uh, and I mean, uh, just to point to a very basic

thing with that, like when the Nintendo, we, and DS came out, you know, they had integrated sort of stuff like like they had integrated multi like multimodal interactions. So, you know, shout into the microphone in order to do a thing in WarioWare. And people you have fun with it the first couple of times, like talking to your DS. And then you realize that, like, oh, it's just looking for like literally any input at all. And I can just blow on it. I can just blow on the microphone so that if I'm playing on the train, uh, I'm not sitting there chatting to my video game, uh, but I can still play it. Like, so it's, it's, it's kind of like lack of understanding of like the actual physical act of interacting with the software that sort of seems to elude a lot of

these people in a very bizarre way where it's like you're in charge of a very big part of the industry and you don't you don't seem to understand just like why people would find this awkward and weird uh and you and makes it very clear that it's like they have literally never taken even five minutes to get someone who is not a yes man to like interact with the thing. Because as you said, like, okay, let's just pull in three random Redditors, give them access to this thing, make the NPC female and realize the like, realize our mistake very quickly. Yeah. And it's also a complete misunderstanding of how the product that they're talking about is made. They don't know anything about how video games are made.

They don't know what design is. And not to get too far afield, but I see the exact same thing in the ideas about replacing TV writers, which is what I do with AI as well. People who think that that's possible don't understand how television is made. They don't understand what writing is. They don't understand what the job of a writer is. We don't need to get too much into that. I want to ask you about, you know, your last video, you explored one of the metaverses that has had the most extravagant claims about it made, Decentraland. And if you could just summarize what you found, what was the gap between promise and reality there?

Oh, the gap between promise and reality in Decentraland is is the Grand Canyon lengthwise. It's it's it's kind of monumental. Decentraland has been struggling and kind of it was limping along and and on like the verge of death. It was saved by Mark Zuckerberg. It was like. What was it initially pitched as? So it was initially pitched as a virtual reality space, basically an MMO with user generated user generated content and a real estate model. So you would purchase on the blockchain. Yeah. A crypto,

a crypto product. So it has its own crypto coin. It has multiple crypto tokens that signify various other things. So one of them, the most important one is land. So you have this artificial scarcity of this, this digital um people purchase plots and then they build on the plots using you know various like model construction uh construction software um and this sounds extremely similar to the video game second life which again i played in 2002 2002 yeah was a game with it's a 3d virtual world where you can buy land and you can sell products on it for fake digital currency. And this seemed like basically the same idea plus blockchain. But, you know, I enjoyed Second Life.

Yeah, VR Second Life plus blockchain was kind of the pitch in its initial form. And then it turned out that like the developers just simply weren't skilled enough to produce even a 10th of what they had promised. Um, and so it, it was very much like, you know, um, just the, we, we have, uh, uh, we have McDonald's at home and then, you know, have uh uh we have mcdonald's at home and then you know mcdonald's at home is just like two slices of bread with some bologna um the the gulf was wide and the the claims just like very very like quickly got winnowed down um vr just sort of like quietly disappeared from the things that this thing that it was supposed to be even though that was a foundational claim and that one's like astounding to me because you know knowing what i like i'm not a game dev but i have like dabbled in it uh and and i just

like knowing how things are made so i watch a lot of uh i watch a lot of documentaries about game production i follow a lot of game designers on twitter um and and i love like listening to like you know gdc talks and whatnot like i'm just fascinated by that stuff and so the simple fact that like vr went away so quickly it was like oh you were never actually building that because vr like i'm a i i'm a vr aficionado I like VR. I spend a pretty like decent amount of like just personal time, like playing, you know, beat saber and stuff like that. Um, and, and the thing that, you know, if you actually like engage with VR as a product, like as an actual existing product is that it's like, there has to be a very high degree of intentionality that that things that are sloppily converted into

a vr mode are just like awful like even if it was a first person experience like it cannot just be like haphazardly uh ported and so there are some things that started as like regular fps games and got a pretty good vr port but there's tons that are just like unplayably bad because they lack that level of intentionality. Yeah. They weren't designed for VR from the bottom up. It's like not worth putting the headset on. I mean, I've played games that I really loved in, you know, on the screen, but I didn't

enjoy playing them on VR because I was like, it's not really worth the nausea for this experience versus something like, you know, Beat Saber, which is like designed explicitly for VR. It's a game that can only work in that context. And like like No Man's Sky is kind of my my point, too, because like their their first version of VR No Man's Sky was like unplayably bad. And then they put a lot of work into it. And now it's playable and like cruising around in your spaceship in VR super rules. Everything outside of your spaceship is like, well, this is playable. Mm hmm. I can I can see it, but but it's like, but it's actually mining for resources.

Maybe I'll take the headset off. I'll take that fashion. Yeah, because it's like it's it's just it's a lot slower. You face a lot more like performance bottlenecks um you know the gameplay is just a lot less interesting when you're like teleporting around a planet just like zoop zoop it's like using node-based movement yeah and uh you can use freeform movement um if you enjoy the taste of your carpet uh and would like to would like to have a very close and personal experience with the ground in the next like 15 seconds. But like, you know, and and you can see that that lack of intentionality, because like the movement in No Man's Sky, if you're just playing the base version of the game is is tremendous fun.

There's a great like sense of like inertia and physicality to it. You're jumping around, you're using your jet pack. Uh, you know, exploration in that game is just, it's, it's a delight. You can just do it for hours. You can get lost on some no name planet that like doesn't even have anything you want and just get just waste hours exploring because moving around is is enjoyable and so vr the vr version of it has to strip so much of that out that it's like okay like what's what's the point anymore and so vis-a-vis decentraland you sort of realized quickly that well they never had any intention they never had any real intention yeah if they were able to strip

it out as easily as they did, then it's like they were never like seriously trying to make it because it's not something that you can just like, oh, well, we'll build the like third person version first and then we'll work on the VR. And it's like, no, you could maybe go the other direction, but like, but that you're just, you're doing this in just fundamentally the wrong order.

Your product is never like, yeah, but that you're just you're doing this in just fundamentally the wrong order. Your product is never like it just it said that like emotionally they ruled out VR years before they ever officially like dropped it from the website. Or they never knew what it took to actually put it in. And they were saying it, you know, glibly. Oh, well, it'll be VR without actually having any cognizance. Because like Snow Crash is virtual reality. So of course it's going to be VR because we're building Snow Crash. And it's like, okay. But yeah, they had no idea of what that actually meant. And this is meant to be one of the main like flagship crypto metaverse projects that people invested a ton of money into it, my understanding is. But when you go and actually explore it it's like it's sad trombone it's like there's this is garbage this is this

is sad it's kind of a bummer there's so little to do it's so janky yeah and one of the big things that you see like just from the software side like going back to the this this notion of like deliberateness in the production of things that it's like that that decentraland posits this idea of vr you know the the ready player one like all video games are just one giant video game you know they're all they're all based on the same backbone and decentraland shows this like oh that's actually like just kind of a bad idea because because your base layer is going to impose creative and technical decisions. Right. On to then everything.

Yeah. You know, it's going to have a physics model that then everyone needs to like start with and then modify in order to uh in order to build what they want and and that's going to like that's going to have an indelible effect on on everything down the road and that means that if an update like changes how gravity works ever so slightly every game everything built on top of it is then like impacted yeah you know the the lighting model the rendering engine like all of these things like those those change but it sort of fits this fantasy that a lot of these tech ceos have where like oh everything in the future will run on my product whether that's Unreal Engine or my crypto blockchain or my, you know,

Mark Zuckerberg, whatever he believes himself to be building. So you said Decentraland was saved by Zuckerberg. I actually didn't realize that. In what sense was it saved? Because of the whole like because of the whole pivot that they did, you know, renaming to Meta and and announcing that they had dumped like literally billions of dollars into developing the metaverse suddenly like metaverse as a uh as a um uh pitchfork just just massively takes off and so all of the speculators then go like oh what else is like a possible metaverse like thing? Where is metaverse?

What is metaverse? How can we metaverse? Do I have a metaverse? Are you a metaverse? And so Decentraland, which had been like limping very slowly towards its grave for a year up to like for a year already up to that point suddenly sees this like huge resurgence in the value of mana which is their crypto token um you know a whole bunch like land sales suddenly spike as people i mean a big thing was actually just a wave of people who were like trying to be super early because they're like i bet i bet people stupider than me are going to not know what Mark was talking about.

They're going to not realize that Decentraland isn't the Facebook product. And they're just going to buy this crap and I can flip it for a quick buck. Yeah. And presumably some of them were able to do that. Yeah. Yeah. And that's been the story of crypto for the last couple of years entirely until it finally, you know, we seem to have entered a longer period of crashing. But I mean, that pivot that Facebook did was so massive to call themselves meta to pour at this point tens of billions of dollars into developing something that sucks that nobody wants and i

did a video on this as well i talked about much more briefly than you did but like the amount of money the sheer amount of money that zuckerberg has poured into this while creating such talking about horizon worlds his metaverse such a turd of a product like i've used it it's it's unplayable it's there's nothing at best fine like it's worse than second life was in 2002 it's worse it looks worse it plays worse you can do less in it there's less people using it and he's not just invested so much money into it he changed the name of the fucking company and by the way he changed it And now nobody talks about the metaverse at all. It's been like, it's been like nine months and now people are,

have moved on to AI entirely. And he's having to repivot the company. And he's literally out there going, well now Facebook, now meta is an AI company. It's beautiful. It's just the name of the company again. It brings a tear to my eye. It's just so beautiful. He's such a loser. He's just the name of the company again it brings a tear to my eye it's just so beautiful

he's such a loser he's just he got he got lucky once with an idea that like 50 other people were all trying 50 other people hundred like hundreds of people on the planet all knew that something facebook-esque was about to like yeah you know, somebody just needed to crack that nut and he just happened to hit it at the right angle. Yeah. Yeah. He, he, he was the one who did it right. He was, he was just bloodthirsty enough. You know, he bought up enough of his competitors. He killed enough competitors in the crib and he was able to like, you know, build a monopoly that everybody hates. And then he lied to literally all of us in the media about pivot to video and fed us just bad numbers and killed our websites. philosophically, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, genetically fit to rule humanity.

And then just to take an L of this size is, is poetic. And to personally take the L. Yeah. Not to shit on Mark too much. Yeah. It's not just the company. It's not like, it's like, oh, the company made some weird decisions to say he put himself out there as like the face of it.

And like personally. Yeah. Assured that like, it's like the doubt, like I have, I have whipped the doubters in the company into line. This is my vision. Like he, he put his, he put his fingerprints all over it in public and just, it's beautiful. It's so diluted i mean even the fact that he's the guy hosting the concept videos right who thinks that mark zuckerberg is the guy we all want to be like the guy we all want to hear from the guy who's going to explain this to us like i guess he must believe himself i'm steve jobs i i'm one you know everyone rever me, but everyone hates his fucking guts and everyone thinks he's a loser. Like the right wing hates him. The left wing hates him.

Like everybody on earth hates the guy. He goes to Congress. He gets yelled at and sweats, you know, like he's he's he's not. And look, you know, maybe not everybody has to be good on camera, you know, to be a valuable, to be a valid person on earth. But why does he think that he is, is, I mean, fucking hire Shaq to do it. You know, like you can pay Shaq a million bucks. He'll say whatever the fuck you want. He'll tell you metaverse is great. Why, why, why is, why is Pinocchio out there telling us that I'm sorry, now I'm getting personal. Yeah. Yeah.

Like, like Bobby Kotick is also an evil billionaire and he has the good sense to like, right. Not go on camera. Well, so, so what is it before we go to break? Like the,

what do you think is the fundamental motivation that would cause Zuckerberg to do this to, to like, cause he's, I just, I have to give him credit for being a smart guy yeah you know in general like you would think you would understand that what he's building sucks like what what what is the business motivation for for this for this enormous shitty pivot i mean my hypothetical at the time was that that it

was a political play in order to bury a bunch of bad debt and and like legal culpability for data harvesting. Yeah. And I don't think that's anything. Yeah. And that hasn't been like that, like the the size of the L does not justify that goal, though there has been like and there has been demonstrably like some of that in the, uh, in the intervening time. But, um, I think like, I don't know, it's, I'm fixated on that question as well. I think it might just be a combination of hubris and the dude has gotten to a point where he's so insulated from reality that the numbers don't mean anything

anymore. You know, like the, the volume of cash that has been, uh, uh, put onto a barge lit on fire and pushed out to sea, um,

just doesn't register anymore. Uh, and that's the, like, because that and crime are the only things that make any sense to me. Oh, that is, he's literally committing crimes of some sort of some sort that we just don't know about yet. Like, you know, cause, cause otherwise it doesn't, otherwise it just doesn't parse. Yeah.

But he clearly has some compulsion, some impulse, right? Like there's the, the Facebook growth impulse has always been there to get more and more billions of people signed up to, you know, his whole thing about bringing the internet to places where there aren't internet. The whole purpose of that is to get more bodies signed up to Facebook. Right. And so you can tell he's got some overriding impulse that he's trying to fulfill by doing this. And probably what that is, like, you know, to kind of back off from the, like, you know, the things that neighbor libel would just be that,

that there is a lot of like, because, because this applies to a lot of like tech tech guys is this sort of regret that they don't have a time machine and they can't go back and like hire Tim Berners-Lee and turn a WWW into a walled garden. Right. Um, that like,

that if you had been able to, to walled garden, you know, if, if AOL had, had been just like five years earlier or had one, then you would be a trillionaire. Yeah.

And so I think a lot of this is just like, okay, we need a new version of the web so that we can get a do-over. Yeah. I also wonder if some of the impulse is the need to create a new frontier. Yeah. That these guys are all literally frontier

like oil barons, kind of. They're the people who came out first, dug the wells, mined the shit when no one else was there. Whether you're talking about, you know, Steve Jobs,

whether you're talking about Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, they all got to, they all mined for oil first in a new place. And now the wells are drying up or they've at least topped out and they're saying, wait, I need to do that again. What's the next frontier?

And they're pointing at something and declaring that's the frontier. Everyone's going to go there and we're all used to that pattern. So we're all going, Oh, okay. Yeah. I guess that's the new frontier. And then we get there and we're like, this is, this is just like fucking Detroit or whatever. Like this is just I've already been here. Second life already existed. This sucks. Why did you take us? Why did you send the wagon train over here?

It's it's like a weird kind of it turns into a weird sort of scam to try to reproduce what they've done in the past. Yeah. I mean, and even that is kind of lightly buying like buying into their narrative. I mean, I definitely think that they think of themselves that way. lightly buying, like buying into their narrative. I mean, I definitely think that they think of themselves that way, but you know, that they're buying into that narrative of themselves as pioneers when really like someone else came out, did the hard work, found the oil died at like, you know, fell off, uh, fell off a ladder and died at the bottom of a mine. And they came by and found a hole in a skeleton and went, Oh, Hey, there's some oil down at the bottom there.

You know, uh, there's, there's there's the old like you know uh racist adjacent uh uh saying you know um uh the pioneers got the arrows the settlers got the land uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh that that at the end of the day like zuckerberg's a settler he's not a pioneer yeah oh i love that correction. We got to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with a lot more from Dan Olson. Okay. We're back with Dan Olson. We're talking about tech hype, the metaverse, crypto, maybe some AI. Do you feel that, you know, having made last year, this big video about crypto this year, a big one about metaverse, are these things already in the rear view? I mean, crypto has sort of like the media hype has cooled a lot.

Occasionally you say, you see, okay, Bitcoin's up again or whatever, but it's, you know, no longer are, you know, my friends, you know, begging me to buy Dogecoin. Uh, do you think that that bubble has burst? Uh, or do you think we're, you're, you know, we're still in the middle of it? Because sometimes it does feel that way. Yeah. So I'm hesitant to say that the bubble is has like truly like burst for the last time because it's burst before and and deflated a whole bunch. And then it like reinflates and whatever. When it comes to crypto, I think crypto is sort of like here to stay in a sense in the same way that like multi-level marketing is is here to stay uh because the thing is is that like

so the the appeal of crypto of like okay we can create a security uh that we can gamble on out of thin air and humans love gambling they they have an instinct for risk and gambling and it's addictive. And the narrative of like get rich quick and all of that is is so appealing. So like the floor for spinning up a new coin is like trivial in the scope of things. You can you can do it in an afternoon. You can learn and you can wake up at 9 a.m and have your own crypto coins spun up by dinner time uh starting from like cold start zero just by following tutorials um so because of that like absolute rock bottom floor of of access i think like crypto in some form is just never going to go away it's it's it's

always going to be it will now always be somewhere in the way that like multi-level marketing you know multi-level marketing has gone through three different rebrands uh you know from uh from just straight up pyramid schemes to multi-level marketing to like you know affiliate marketing uh affiliate sales uh so i think crypto is going to go through the same thing. You're going to have some, you know, it'll crypto will maybe fall out of vogue as a word and it'll be unique digital assets, you know, digital non-securities like it. Yeah, it's going to become endemic like COVID basically, where it's like, oh, it's around, but it's you feel bad for your friend who's got kind of sucked in like a Mary Kay or like Herbalife salesperson. You're like, oh my God,

they started doing that. But it's, it's maybe something that, uh, well, we'll let the IRS worry about going after the, the, the bad actors and, and it won't be such a daily annoyance for all of us basically. Yeah. Yeah. I yeah i so in in the same way that like penny stocks you know penny stock scams and and whatnot like it'll become just kind of like an endemic thing that you you know gold bug uh stuff every now and then it'll surge back up into like you know have a have another 15 minutes in the spotlight um but i think that like the the arc of crypto uh as we have dealt with it in like 2021 um is uh is is depleting um my kind of like insane you know risky prediction is that like you know it's all gonna have another big pump but that pump isn't going to will be like a lower peak than the previous peak and that's

then just gonna start like the the multi-year sort of downward slide into irrelevance and just becoming this like niche thing that like people still get sucked into. But yeah, like I think the name of the Lakers stadium is going to change in the next couple of years. Don't you like they, they set crypto.com. They signed like a 10 year deal. And I feel like they're like, Oh, how are we going to make the payment for year three is, is a concern for them. My, my friends who I used to have endless arguments with about crypto, I was like, guys, this is bullshit. They're like, no, you're wrong. We don to have endless arguments with about crypto, I was like, guys, this is bullshit. No, you're wrong. We don't have those arguments anymore.

And they haven't admitted I was right. But, you know, they they've hushed up about it a little bit. I started to feel bad when I text them because because I'm like, I feel like I'm beating a dead horse. But it feels like what hasn't changed is it feels like a lot of those people have moved on to the new shiny object and that the sort of recurring cycle of tech hype bubbles have has moved from crypto to metaverse to AI and maybe onto something else after that. I mean, do you do you feel that way or. and maybe onto something else after that. I mean, do you, do you feel that way or. Yeah. I mean, and that's demonstrable just by looking at like a, a vertical analysis of both sentiment and like what people are talking about, like social media sentiment, um, and, um, uh, publication, uh, uh, media, media sentiment, like what people are talking about,

what tech blogs are talking about, you know, what, uh, hype fluencers on social media, media sentiment, like what people are talking about, what tech blogs are talking about, you know, what, uh, hype fluencers on social media, you know, the number of like dot Fs that are now like all about mid journey, um, every single day is, is like, it's, it's just observable that literally the same people, uh, this is now the thing that they're talking about. And I think it's AI in particular is sort of a it's a bit of a trickier one, like metaverse was like untenable at base concepts. Crypto wasn't going to scale and was laid down by people who were so clearly like desperately self-serving that it was never going to break mainstream. AI is trickier because it has emerged like very slowly out of like useful tools and is

now in kind of this like it's in this irrational hype bubble, but it's an irrational hype bubble that better resemble like that actually literally better resembles the dot-com boom where like we have a tool that does something and so you have a whole bunch of like people rushing in to claim it does everything yeah and that in the future it's going to do everything like yeah um the the like large language models the first time i played them this is is very cool. This is cool tech. It's fun to play with and people are using it to do things. But the connection from large language model to what people are claiming it's going to do in the future is like we've invented, I love the comparison people call like GPT and systems like it, a word calculator. You put words in one end, you can get similar words out the other end. You can use the system to turn one kind of word into another kind of word. You might be

able to save yourself some time by doing that, or at least get interesting output, you know? But the idea that, well, it's moving so quickly and it's going to replace every single job. And we're going to have like, you know, we're very quickly going to have like artificial general intelligence. We're going to have data from Star Trek or or you know uh omnivac from old isaac asimov stories is like i i don't see how you get from how you get from a to b and it's uh but it is more complicated because there is a core of truth and interesting tech to it yeah um i wonder is what drives you i feel like we're we have similar interest levels in some of this tech in a lot of ways that like i

you know the first time i saw uh i'm always interested in new technology uh uh and uh i love watching you know demos of uh what's one of the people i sig graph who come up with new image processing technology every year yeah i love watching the demos and going oh look at look at what this is capable of um and uh and, uh, so when I first see that thing, like mid journey or the very first time I heard about blockchain, um, I was like, oh, what a neat idea. You could, you could, uh, like there's one of something digitally that I've never seen that before. Uh, you know, normally digital stuff there's millions of, but this time there's only one. Oh, that's so cool. Um, or even the, even the idea of the metaverse, the first time

I saw second life, I was like, wow, neat. I like this. I want to play around with it a little bit. You have that positive reaction makes you think of the actual possibilities. But then as someone who understands technology, seeing people who understand it less go insane and say things that make no sense. It sort of drives you nuts. Right. Is that your is that your motivation for making these videos of like, uh, how are people spinning out so crazy about this thing? So the, the, the thing that if I were to make an AI video, it would, it would not be about the technology itself. It would be about the human interaction with it because the thing that fascinates me the most is that I see this on Reddit. Like, so I deal with a lot of like

conspiracy theorists. The, the current video that we're in like mid production on is about like financial conspiracies, um, and, and like meme stocks and whatnot. And the thing that you see in these circles is people, the, the only like, okay. So I have a background in, in theology. Um, and so I do end up filtering a lot of stuff, maybe unnecessarily through that lens. But the only language that makes sense to me is that I see people praying to chat GPT. They have a question in their mind, and they they're doing? Yeah, they have a question in their mind and they petition this thing that they place as a higher power. They approach it as an oracle

and ask it questions and simply trust what it gives them. They don't see it as a, they don't understand that it doesn't know what a pineapple is. Like that it does not actually, that you can ask it the same question four times in a row and it

will give you four different outputs and you can then ask it to like you can try to have a conversation with it and be like hey what did we talk about like 10 minutes ago can you just sum up the thing that you said to me earlier and it's just going to give you nonsense out of it because it doesn't actually like it's not actually intelligent it doesn't know what any of these things are but we have humans interacting with it and trusting it and utilizing it as though it is and that is fascinating and also scary and so like as a content creator you know the thing that sort of does scare me about like AI going to take creative jobs is that we look at something like TikTok. We look at Facebook videos. If you're not familiar with like the the the sort of community, like the the the local dialect of Facebook native video, it is it is insane.

book native video. It is, it is insane. It's just, it'll be these like 20 minute videos that consist entirely of, um, of denied gratification. So they're like building up to something. Yeah. Yeah. It's someone going, Oh, and then folks, when I, when I finally take the top off the bottle and everything comes, it's going to be so beautiful. Here we go. And they're doing that for like 20 minutes straight. Yeah. Yeah. I um that like that that there is a part of our lizard brain that is entranced by that and this race to the like there is there is a a very financially profitable race to the bottom in being able to churn out just low quality garbage at scale. Yeah. And so you and I can sit here and make a very good argument that is like audiences don't want mass produced derivative slop that is cranked out by a robot that doesn't know what it's doing.

And we and that is true. People don't want that, but they will still drink it. They might, they might. I mean, this is my, and this is, yeah, this is the question. This is the open question to me about AI, right? Because I agree with you when people say, oh, everything's going to, you know, AI is going to make all content in the future. I'm like the main thing it seems useful for is making spam. Essentially, you can make endless amounts of content that looks like other content. You're talking about spam generation. Yeah. And so that's my fundamental reason why I am less concerned about people like, oh, AI is going to like make scripts for movies. No movie studio is going to spend 50 million dollars shooting something that an AI wrote. Yeah. Yeah. And what they are going to do is they're going to have an AI spit out something and then they're going to spend $50 million shooting something that an AI output. That an AI wrote, yeah. Yeah, and frankly-

What they are going to do is they're going to have an AI spit out something and then they're going to underpay someone to edit it. Exactly right. That's exactly the concern. And that's what, in the Writers Guild right now, we're on strike partially in order to make a provision to make sure they can't, you know,

use AI to undermine our working conditions in that way, right? Yeah. But okay, so you might say, well, the movie studio is not going to do that. They're just going to use AI to create the entire film. Um, like from, you know, from moment to moment. And I'm like that, if the production cost is zero, then they're going to sell it to you for zero, right? The movie industry, the American movie industry is one of the, is the high end of American media production. Yeah. It costs the most both to produce and to watch, you know,

it costs you $15 to go see it in the theater. And that is, it's the luxury car of media, you know? And they like that. They like that relationship. They like being able to say like that confers status and they like having that status and they don't want to give that up. And some, and people enjoy watching media like that too. They want the luxury car experience. Sometimes, sometimes you want chum and that's when you open Tik TOK. Right. And so you're right that, uh, that's what AI is going to affect. Like AI is going to affect the low end first, um, in terms of, you know, where AI content might be, but then also, I, I don't know, is that what people really want? So like a low end kind of chum media that we currently have is like music on the radio,

you know, pop music. Muzak has existed for a long time, right? Yeah. And it's what plays in the grocery store. And so maybe we'll have AI music in the grocery store. But like when it comes to what people listen to on the radio, what, you know, what people want in terms of music coming out, they still want something new and weird that they haven't heard before.

And, you know, part of the reason when I'm on Tik TOK, I skip past the videos where it's just someone going, Oh, this filter does X, Y, Z. Right. The videos that I want are the weird moments of surprise and serendipity. The guy drinking the, the, the drinking the Sunny D riding the skateboard, you know, that was like, what was fun about that video that made TikTok explode was who the fuck is this guy and where is he?

Why is he riding a skateboard on the side of a freeway? Why is this dude listening to this Fleetwood Mac song? You know, there's like, knowing that he existed in the real world was the appeal of that video. And I do think that it's something that people still want, even on the low level. They want that weird human chunkiness to some extent. intelligent, it couldn't create something like that to the degree it did, because essentially what that video did, you know, you've got this guy in SoCal on a longboard on the freeway at sunset drinking cranberry juice, listening to Fleetwood Mac. Cranberry juice, not Sunny Delight, I'm so sorry.

Drinking cranberry juice, listening to Fleetwood mac and and it's like it it taps into this essence of like a perfect moment of you watch it and you're like god i want to be spiritually there right now yeah i want to like you look at it and it's like that feels free. Yeah. And like a perfect moment. And that's what made that video so appealing was it was just this like perfect sort of like great weather, you know, beautiful view, the wind in your hair and Fleetwood Mac. Yeah. Yeah. And that kind of like those things are emergent from just like human creativity and the ability to spot a moment. Yeah. Or construct a moment. And and, you know, TikTok has created already a perfect system for getting moments like that for free.

Yeah. Right. In that they have created an app that encourages people to upload content all day long. I saw a video like that yesterday that I went nuts for where a 12 year old kid is on a bike. Maybe people on TikTok have seen this video. 12 year old kid is on a bike. He's parked the bike. He says, I got a, I pulled over. I saw a fucking minion. And what he does is he runs into a bar, right? Where there's a group of adults like people who are 35 sitting inside. And one of them is wearing a yellow shirt and blue overalls. And he runs up to the guy and he goes, Gru isn't here, bro. Gru is not here.

And the entire group of adults starts laughing because a 12 year old has run in and started bullying one of their friends. Yeah. Right. And they start yelling, send us this video. Send us the video as the kid runs away. And it's so fucking funny. Right. And they start yelling, send us this video, send us the video as the kid runs away. And it's so fucking funny. Right. This is a kid. Now, the only reason

that video exists is TikTok created an app that incentivized every 12 year old in America to give them random content for free. Nothing else the kid has ever done

has been funny. Right. So I'm kind of like, what is the point of even generating that content via AI when they're already getting so much of it for free.

It's kind of like when Uber- It's computationally cheaper to just like distribute that out to the crowds for free because like, you know, it takes less bandwidth. It takes less tariff slots. It takes less electricity. They'd have to pay electricity to run, you know, large video production models or whatever to create this shit. It kind of reminds me of when, you know, Uber was telling people they were going to replace all the drivers with a,

with AI drivers and robot cars. It's like, well, hold on a second. Currently in order to do that, Uber would have to like build and develop a fleet of robot cars that they personally own. They own and maintain.

Yeah. Yeah. Which is an enormous expense. Currently they, people bring their own cars and they pay them pennies on the dollar for doing the job for them. It will always be cheaper to underpay real humans to do your dirty work than it'll be to maintain your own fleet of robot cars.

So as a business proposition, like at the time we could have looked at Uber and said, actually, they're not going to do that. It took us a couple of years to all realize the truth. And I wonder if the same thing is going to happen with, you know, certain areas where people say that the language models or the AI models are going to beat us. Well, won't it still be cheaper to pay like some of the many billions of people alive on the planet, nothing to do it for you

and trick them into it. Yeah. I think a big, like a big thing that we're going to see a lot of stories about coming in the next year are going to be products that are like AI powered. And then, I mean, we've already had a couple of these, but there's going to be more of like, it's like, oh, it's AI powered. And then it turns out that the AI is a sweatshop. Yeah. Yeah. And some, they already seem like that to some degree, where, you know, ChatGPT currently has to run all of its output through, you know, people in Kenya or whatever who are doing the filtering for them.

Yeah. Which is the case with Facebook and basically any other user-generated content site they're doing that with. There's also going to be a lot of relabeling existing stuff as AI-generated. A friend of mine was just like, oh my God, my friend just switched from her stockbroker to an AI stockbroker. Stockbrokers are out of a job.

And I was like, that's called a Vanguard account. Like I I've had one of those for almost 10 years. Yeah. Like that Betterment does that. Wellfront does that. Like that's a very common, you know, it's yeah, that already existed. The fact that they now say AI on their landing page doesn't mean anything has changed. Yeah.

So we're going to see a lot of a lot of hollow rebranding, a lot of. Oops, it's actually slavery. You know, I mean, like just to go back to the Uber thing, like I knew that they were never going to do the robot car thing because it's like, no, their entire business model, the entire thing that made them like the the evil brilliance of of uber as a bad idea is that they don't own any cars yeah and thus they don't have the liability of owning cars yeah they offloaded that onto other people and it's like they're not going to suddenly like they're not going to suddenly decide to go legit and like own cars because their entire business model, they make fabulous amount of money off of the fact that they can run a taxi service without owning a single car. Yeah. Or assuming the legal liability of the car hitting people, of paying for the gas, of paying for the depreciation on the car, of doing anything.

of paying for the depreciation on the car of doing anything. That was, that was their winning formula was wait, what if we could run taxis without owning cars? And they made a billion dollars. I've actually heard of this argument as being an explanation for the entire tech boom, including the part of the tech boom that worked right where, where that actually made products,

which is that these are companies that, what created the entire startup culture, it's that the startup costs of a tech company are much lower than any other type of company in American history. That you don't need to like create a steel mill or, you know, start fabricating paperclips or whatever. You literally just rent some, you know,

data services from Amazon, hire a couple coders who you pay very well, and then you can undermine an existing business with a very low cost. And so it almost looks like, to me, the various phenomena that you have been unpacking in your videos, crypto, the metaverse, et cetera, is an attempt to just keep that rolling keep that same sort of a historical engine afloat when maybe they've already picked all the low-hanging fruit off of it and there aren't that many more opportunities that you can do that cheaply i don't possibly have yeah i mean so one of the uh uh a phrase that i've been seeing around lately is that it's like the 2030s are going to be a process of reckoning of just how much of the 21st century was

built by low interest rates that, that like venture capital or like just, just all of the different financial instruments that allowed venture capitalists to access extremely low interest money, um, is, has enabled, um, some really good and interesting things. And a lot of just like, it is enabled a bunch of people to sit around and brainstorm. How can we get our customers to do our job for us? Uh, and, and thank us for the privilege.

Yeah. And let's unpack that a little bit because I'm learning what we mean by low interest when we're talking about that. We're saying the government kept literal government bond interest rates very low for a very long time, which means if you wanted to beat that rate, you don't have to offer lenders very much money. You can say, hey, you're not going to get a big return from the government. So give me your money instead. And I don't need to promise you that much, but in a world where the government is offering people five or 7% interest rates, suddenly it's a lot harder to borrow money. Um, there's cause that money is going to the

government instead basically. Um, and so it creates this, this bizarre scenario where you can borrow money to do a bullshit. Yeah. And like, there's a certain, there's a certain amount of like, it's like, okay, the, the world needs,

um, uh, you know, it's not a bad thing. If randos have access to capital to try bad ideas. Um, uh, but there's also like limits on that and limits on how much power those

people should ultimately be given. And like, maybe there needs to be, uh, a, a faster response to like, Hey, these things are actually like socially impactful or just,

you know, more people in power who can go like, you actually just built a taxi service where you don't own any taxis and your users pay to like what's going on here what's going on here because like who are your actual end who are uber's actual end users who are who are their target market and it's actually their drivers yeah and it's like you're you're you're doing something here that you know maybe yeah maybe maybe we should uh uh tamp on that i was actually proud of like my my city calgary like um had a very strict regulations on car sharing like from the word uh like basically from the word go of like no you're a taxi service

um and so it's it's far less prevalent up here, but that also means that, like, the people who are doing it, you know, the rates are a lot more, like, actually competitive towards, you know, like, livable. Because, like, the reality, like, you know, that's just the reality of it. But they had to crowdsource that. Like, in order to get Uber rates as low as they did, they needed just a unfathomable oversupply of drivers. They needed vastly more drivers than there were people who needed rides. And yeah.

And that model is starting to sort of bite them in the ass to a certain extent. Yeah, because it's unsustainable. Like it is. Yeah. Yeah. Because everybody at this point, so many people have driven Uber for long enough to realize they weren't making money and have stopped. Yeah. That they, you know, the sort of average Uber driver has sort of fallen off.

People used, you know, I have so many friends. I drove Uber for two weeks, then I quit. Right. So who's left doing it? It's folks who are frankly often in poverty, right. Who are, who are Uber drivers. And that turns out to be an uncomfortable writing experience for a lot of Uber customers. Right. Right. Like, like people don't want. To get in a car with a clearly desperate person who is like visibly on their last thread. Yeah. And just like, yeah. It's not, it's, it's not nice.

You feel, you're like, oh, sure. I want to go to the bar for a night out, but first I have to like confront the reality of wealth inequality in America to do so. It's not, it's not a nice riding experience. You know what I mean? And so now there's actually services popping up that are still app-based services, but they own all the cars and they pay all the drivers, at least here in California,

California minimum wage, because they realize that the, you know, there's a huge market of people who want to take a better version of, who actually want to take a cab again, you know, basically. And, you know, you're starting to sort of see Uber grapple with that.

Hopefully you'll start to see some of these other companies grapple with this too. When you look at a, you know, a company like TikTok that is making their money off of Chum, maybe at some point they, you know, they realize, oh wait,

they need to foster some better you know some better style of content by actually paying people or etc i don't know i i hope that the contradictions inherent eventually start taking down some of these companies or causing them to change maybe maybe not yeah i i think the contradictions are going to come a lot faster for like those that deal like for the companies that deal in like physical stuff so like uber has you know physical capital that they need to deal with they've got human uh you know they've got a human dimension um the other big one of course is like airbnb you know the hotel chain that owns no hotels um and and i think those are the ones that are going to see the reckoning like sooner uh uber in particular and like skip the dishes and

and uber eats and like the delivery apps are going like they have oh boy i i follow a couple of the subreddits for these um and uh there's a whole uh there's a whole culture of what's called multi apping uh where it's like, it's like, Oh, like what you do is you just work for like all of these simultaneously. And if you're savvy or desperate, you can like juggle these, you can pick up a ride, be like,

take them to a McDonald's, grab a delivery and like try and do like both at the same time on two different, you know, you have like three, four different phones, you know, like, you know, and on one hand, it's like, oh, it's like, it's courtesy to like, pause your other ones while you're like on a job. But like, you don't need to pause your other ones. Yeah.

Yeah. You can, you can try to like juggle all these and there's a lot of people doing that and it's it is of course like people who are desperate um and thus service is like bad because it turns out that they're they're they're overworking themselves they're trying to do an impossible task of like because they're just they're sitting there staring at an app and the app is just throwing at them basically like randomly generated tasks for all intents and purposes. And you are blind to the outcome of that. It's like, here's a job for you.

Do you want to take it? But you're not actually given like a full disclosure of like what the job entails. Like you don't get to see the full instructions before you accept it. And so it's like it's a little surprise. You click. It's like, yes, take the job. I'm near the starting point and and it's not until you like commit to that that it's then like oh the person

wants you to like drive all the way over here uh in order to like you know and so then you fuck with the app a little bit you have your little you have your little scheme for for bargaining with it or for doing two things at once yeah And which, which is natural to do when a human encounters a system like that, but then that reduces the quality of the experience for the user. Like, okay, so I'm on the road a lot as a comic and I live on the West coast. So I traveled to the East coast. I often get in very late and I get in hungry. And so I get to my hotel and literally the only option, because sometimes I'm staying in a weird place, is DoorDash or Uber Eats. Yeah.

And it's a horrible experience. You know, it's like those services could be nice if you're in a big city. But if you're in, you know, a you know, if you're in the suburb of a second or third, you know, level city in America. You can say Cleveland. This is a safe space. You can say Cleveland. I like those cities, but they're not you know, you're not in the middle of like some some thriving food culture, right?

You're you're somewhere out, you know, you open these services and you can get delivered fast food or ghost kitchens. Yeah, right. You're like looking at this going. It's like, you know, number one pizza spot. And you're like, that's not a fucking pizzeria. Like I've ordered from places like that before. I've seen these photos before.

I know I'm going to get a horrible before. I've seen these photos before. I know I'm going to get a horrible meal. And if you order, you're like, I don't know if this person is going to bring me the food. Like, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to find them. Um, it's like this weird roll of the dice. And it's sort of similar to, I don't order shit on Amazon anymore because I no longer trust Amazon to deliver me the thing. It used to be, Oh, I get the genuine, genuine version of the product. Now I'm like, it'll be a knockoff. It'll never show up. Like, because they have crowdsourced it too widely.

And I see a similar thing happening with the delivery apps for the very reason that you mentioned. And it's because, it's almost because humans, like they've created this Skinner box for us to work within. Like literally it's, as as you say these constant just alerts that these workers are getting um but the workers are still people who are going to use their human faculties to try to fuck around with the system yeah to try to like yeah

yeah to get a to get one up over it they're gonna try to win you know and especially because like the the systems rely so much on like a gamification you know uber relies so much on its its gamified elements with the app robin hood the the day trading uh the day trading app like it is hyper gamified oh yeah um and and so but the thing is is like once you you introduce those gamified gamification elements um you introduce them in order to uh uh addict the user um and then shocked pikachu face they approach it like a game and they look for the cracks in the rules they they they run along the uh they run along the walls you know hammering spacebar looking for a break in the collision box so they can get behind the terrain and and cut 10 minutes off of off of their time. And and so it's like, oh, well, I can just have it's like, well, people won't you sit there in the office and go like, oh, well, we'll just ensure that only like one phone number can be like valid

at a time. And the person on the other end just goes like, OK, so I can get a prepay account for like 15 bucks a month. So I only need to do two, three jobs on on that second phone in order for that phone to pay itself off. And then everything above that is profit on phone number two, ditto for phone number phones, number three and four. And this, this, uh, those uses are never, they're never in the tech demo that the CEO gives of here's how great this is going to be. Here's the dude with a clipboard of iPhones, uh, all active at the same time going out to like a giant bat, like with cords going out to a giant battery pack that he keeps in a backpack, you know? Yeah.

Like that part doesn't, doesn't end up on, uh, on stage. Yeah. Uh, look, man, I could talk to you for a thousand years. Uh, and, and so I hope you'll come back sometime next time you have another big video that we can about a new topic. Um, but let me just ask you this as, as a fellow person who has devoted at least some of his career to dispelling bullshit of, you know, of this type. Um, uh, how do you feel about it? Do you feel ultimately heartened because there's never, there's a never ending supply of bullshit that

you can dispel and, and get a lot of views on YouTube from, and you know, you're a happy warrior about it. Or do you feel like, Hey, you make this video about the metaverse. Last year, you made a video about crypto. Next year, you'll have to make a video about whatever the fuck they come up with after AI. And like, oh, my God, people never learn. You know, like, are you going to end up like Jon Stewart quitting after 20 years, realizing, hold on a second, Fox and Friends is still on the fucking air. I've been I've been tilting at this windmill for a long time. I never make any progress. You know, like, are you a Sisyphus or are you happier than that? I'm tired.

I get tired. Yeah, like I alternate between the two. I'm ultimately an optimist, but I'm a very cynical optimist. I think that people are willing to defend themselves in the long run. I think that people are savvy enough to realize when, uh, systems are destructive and demand, uh, changes to those systems.

Um, but I, I, I'm also cynical about the willingness of those the willingness of the firstborn sons of Ski-Doo dealership owners Ski-Doo dealerships to invent Uber for cats invent like there's these guys I've been keeping

keeping track of that their whole tech thing is like what if you could rent t-shirts that are delivered to you via not pneumatic tube but like a robot in a 12-inch pipe and and they have this whole pitch package and they they they're getting money for it and I'm like and I just I see it. And I'm like, your entire product is going to be instantly destroyed by a five dollar by a five dollar hot and ready Little Caesars pepperoni pizza that I am going to shove into the mouth of your pipe and destroy your robot. I'm going to shove into the mouth of your pipe and destroy your robot. And that's before we get to the fact that no one wants to rent a t-shirt. Why are you renting it?

I don't even know if we can get into it. Renting a t-shirt. No, it sounds very similar to the bird scooters, right? Like, oh, this is how everyone's going to get around. Well, you forgot that 13 year olds are going to throw them into the river. for land like to put your junk on yeah that you have decided that like oh i can just park like i can just roll up a van and dump five of these on the side of the road and that's fine because it's public i can just abuse the commons uh and it's like well if you want to abuse the commons, I'm going to chuck your stuff into the river. And bullshit like that is always going to keep existing. I think it's part of the human condition that that new people are going to try to take advantage that way and are going to be that stupid.

But I share your optimism that most people are are smart enough to see through it. That's why people are chucking the scooters in the river is because they see through the bullshit and they're pissed off. That's why people I think are going to reject AI chum art for the most part, for the most, maybe there'll be a little bit of it. They'll enjoy it. But yeah, by volume,

there will be a, an astounding amount of it. But I, but yeah, the video stuff I think will be, will be curtailed by the actual like processing costs. I mean, I think some services are going to have to like start banning AI shit because their users are going to say we don't want it.

And they're going to promote themselves as we're only human generated content here. Like that is people are going to be able to tell the difference. And I agree with your optimism because the success of your videos proves there's an enormous appetite for skepticism and, you know, human reasoning about these, uh, about these things. Um, so I, I really thank you for being here. Where can people find your work, Dan, if they haven't already seen it? Uh, so you can find it on YouTube. The, the channel name is folding ideas and you can find, uh, my insane ramblings on social media, very like basically most of the platforms at Foldable Human. And I hope people check it out because it's amazing work.

Thank you so much for being here, Dan. Thanks for having me. Well, thank you so much again to Dan for coming on the show. That was such a fun conversation. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. If you did, remember, you can support the show on Patreon at patreon.com slash adamconover. I want to thank everybody, especially who supports at the

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If you want to come see me on tour in Illinois, Maryland, Missouri, or Rhode Island, head to adamconover.net slash tour dates. I'll see you next week. Thank you so much for watching. We'll see you next week. Thank you so much for watching. We'll see you next time on Factually. That was a HeadGum Podcast.