All right, let's do some technology questions. Now I said questions, but it's probably more accurate to say question because I only have one technology question. I only selected one because it's big and open-ended. It comes from Miranda. And she asked, what are your thoughts in general about AI machine learning and where technology is headed?

So we haven't done a good open-ended technology question in a while. Well, Miranda, I'll tell you where the focus seems to be, at least in popular online conversation in the media, there's a lot of focus on crypto, social media, and AI. Those seem to be big topics. So let's go through those briefly one by one.

All right, so let's talk about crypto. As you may have heard me talk about before, my personal belief is that the hype around crypto is a little bit excessive. So there's a political element to crypto that's based around trust and power and control. This idea that these distributed ledgers implemented by cryptographic protocols, that these distributed ledgers are not controlled by a single government or controlled by a single company.

And therefore there can be coordination and information sharing on the internet that is not beholden to the censorious efforts of individual organizations or countries. So there's a crypto, a sort of techno libertarian political argument for what you gain from this decentralization. I don't think most people care about that.

I don't think, I think it's important for certain people who think a lot about this, but for the average consumer, they don't care about that, right? So that by itself is not that strong. But if you take out the techno libertarian political justification for crypto based ledger technologies, there's not something else there that we don't already know how to do much better and much faster.

We know how to have consistent distributed data stores. This is what distributed databases do. This is easy to implement. So it's not like there's a new technological capability that is introduced by crypto based blockchains. It's just, there's a decentralization that comes with it. And the value of that is largely political, not technological.

So again, I think most consumers don't care. They don't really care whether the data for this app they're using is stored in the cloud somewhere in just a virtualized SQL database system, or if it's implemented by an Ethereum blockchain. It looks the same to them, and they don't really care about which way this is being implemented.

Now for a while, there was an argument about the particular aspect of crypto. That is the currency aspect. So all of these ledgers, or not all of them, but open ledgers are almost all based on there being some sort of underlying currency. And there's some thought that a currency not controlled by governments, it was critical and it was going to be a worldwide currency.

That's sort of fallen flat. The currencies didn't really take over from fiat money. So you get rid of that. Again, there's nothing sexy about what's being, the functionality implemented by these crypto tools. It's really just the political reality that no one controls it. And I, again, don't think enough people care about that for this to be a complete game changer.

Could be wrong about this. And Jason Horowitz would probably say that firm would not be happy with my interpretation, but there you go. All right, social media. That's the other thing that seems to be really the focus of a lot of techno criticism and conversation right now. Longtime listeners know that I believe that social media as we know it, that is this age of a small number of massive platform monopolies that everyone is culturally pressured into using.

We are in the twilight of that moment. That moment is passing. This is the standard oil, Pennsylvania Central Railroad, robber baron era of the social internet era. And I think it is passing. I've talked about this before, so I won't go into too much detail, but basically at the core of my thought is one of the things that used to capture people in the social media was network effects.

People were using social media platforms to connect to people they know. Therefore for a platform to be useful, it has to include among its members, all the people that you know or might wanna connect to. That is a huge advantage once you get there first, because another social media platform will have a hard time competing because until they can get your cousin and your aunt and your six friends from high school onto their service, it will be lesser than an existing service like Facebook.

This is called network effects. There's a sort of trivial mathematical law here that says in a network, it's the value grows with the square of the number of users because now you have a potential connection between every person in it. Forget that math. In general, this was a big justification for why you could not unseat.

You could not unseat existing platform monopolies. Then they got out of the connection business. They thought there was more money in offering distraction because people will spend more time distracting themselves than they wanna spend talking to their aunt or their cousin or their six friends from high school. And so Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, in particular Twitter and Facebook moved away from what's your friends up to.

And towards here's an algorithmically generated feed of content curated to press some buttons in your brain and keep you looking at your phone. You need a moment to get lost or distracted. Life is hard, you're stressed, you're anxious, you're bored. We will give you something that'll be palliative in the moment.

They went towards that model, which did get their existing users using the phones more, looking at these apps more, but it has destabilized the originally motivating network effect, which is the people you know are on here. Once it is no longer giving you that advantage, social media is now competing with any other form of distraction.

And there's a lot of them and they're good. And now suddenly it's not so critical that my distraction is coming from Facebook versus coming from Spotify versus coming from TikTok or coming from some sort of bespoke, small niche network. You're competing with any source of distraction. There's no reason to have a massive $500 billion monopoly in this type of context.

I can be just as diverting with my podcast that is produced with a slightly smaller budget than $500 billion a year. With even just half that money, I could produce deep questions. All right, so I think that's what's happening with social media. I think TikTok is actually the harbinger of this transition.

Yes, it's true that TikTok is widely, widely used. It has a lot of active users, but TikTok is different than Twitter. TikTok is different than Facebook from five years ago. Why? It's popular, but it's just pure distraction. They don't pretend like it's anything else. And because of that, it no longer has the situation of cultural valency where it feels like you have to use it.

Lots of people use Facebook. No one thinks, I mean TikTok, no one thinks it's weird if you don't. A lot of people like TikTok. No one says you're missing out on business opportunities or knowing what's going on in the world if you don't use it. And so from TikTok, we'll get multiple other, I think increasingly niche, increasingly focused, increasingly much smaller and independent types of apps and sources of distraction that leverage social connections and groups, et cetera.

And it'll be a fragmented marketplace in which there's no monopoly powers. And that's gonna be, I think, a much healthier social internet. So social media is a focused a lot of conversation. I think it's moment has passed. The final one I mentioned was AI. I don't know what to think about AI.

I haven't got my arms around AI yet. I've been trying to. I mean, I understand a lot of the underlying technologies, but in terms of its cultural impact, I don't know where I fall. I don't have, for example, a natural fear of AI, general intelligence, sentience in AI and what that might cause.

I just don't have that instinctual fear. Is that something that's even on a development pipeline that we need to worry about? I don't know either way. AI's role in disrupting industries, it's gonna be disruptive. It's complicated how I think it's hard to predict. So AI, keep your eye on it, but I don't have a good sense.

Let me tell you two things that I think are being overlooked that are gonna be super disruptive, but I think are being overlooked in a lot of conversations today about technological trends. The first is augmented reality. This came out of some reporting I've done for the New Yorker. I don't think people realize the economic disruption that is going to come from what I call the augmented reality singularity.

This is gonna be the point where multiple technologies that exist today advance sufficiently to allow the following with a relatively unobtrusive piece of headgear. So some sort of pair of glasses that is socially appropriate to wear, comfortable. It's not like Google Glass where you walk around with a Google Glass on.

And I think Google tried this experiment. They said, try walking around with Google Glasses on and people's instinct when they saw you with on it was, I think I need to punch you. Like when we get past that, with Google Glass, people were walking around with Google Glasses and I'm not exaggerating here.

Nuns would walk out of the convent, say, forgive me, father, and then just punch you in the face because it was so annoying looking. That's what AR.1, version one looks like. That will get better. So when we get past that stage where AR devices make people wanna punch you, you look so weird and pretentious wearing them.

When we get past that stage, when nuns no longer walk out of their convents to punch you, and then two, two, we get a sufficient power and field of view in these glasses that you can replicate with sufficient resolution, basically any type of screen, digital screen interface we use today.

And three, we have sort of sufficient internet backbone that we can essentially stream screen surfaces without actually having to do the computation locally. And so what I mean by that is, if I want to play a video game, there's sufficient wireless internet backbone that that video game can run in a server somewhere.

And the thing that's being streamed to my AR device is just what's on the screen. So there's this key point, there's this key speed point where the contents of a high resolution screen can be streamed over the internet to a device in which you no longer need to actually bring computation with you, just enough computation to get the screen of computation happening in the cloud.

When those three things come together, again, to summarize, hardware that is unobtrusive and people are willing to wear, sufficient field of view and resolution that you can replicate most of the standard digital screens you look at in your day-to-day life, and three, sufficient internet wireless backbone, which by the way, we might already have, that you can stream high resolution screens to devices so we can now virtualize actual computation.

It will be the end of the consumer electronic industry as we know it. Samsung, Apple, Sony, the companies that produce complicated electronics that they sell to people, and those people buy these devices and use them. Those companies will essentially have to go out of business or massively retool because why would I buy a phone when my AR headset can put in front of me, in the space in front of me, the interface for whatever phone I want?

Why would I buy a computer when I can make a computer monitor anywhere? It doesn't exist in the real world, it's being projected in my AR goggles, but I can make a nice monitor wherever I wanna go, and all the computation is happening in the cloud somewhere. So I have the most powerful computer computing, much more powerful than I could actually buy, and I can just see the screen right there.

Why would I buy a TV when I could just stretch a 72 inch on my wall? It's all virtual. And everyone who's in that same room sees it in the same place. We literally cannot tell the difference between that and an actual TV. Why would I buy a TV, ship it to me, bring it into my house?

I could just have that right up there on my wall. The end of the consumer electronics industry as we know it, it's gonna create some of the most powerful companies in the history of the world. It's gonna make Apple seem like a lemonade stand. If you are the company that owns the first mainstream widely adopted full function AR singularity goggles with that backend doing all the computation, all of these companies like Sony, Samsung will become essentially software companies.

You're basically just running processes in the cloud that can then stream visuals to individuals. It's hard to underestimate how disruptive that's gonna be. I don't think we talk enough about it. I think it was perhaps a blind spot of Mark Zuckerberg to focus too much on virtual reality instead of augmented reality.

Google has invested many, many billions of dollars into this. Apple is investing many, many billions of dollars into this. Amazon is investing many, many billions of dollars into this less about the hardware and more about being the backend cloud computation to virtualize all this hardware. It is gonna be huge.

And I don't think we talk about it enough. We get too distracted. The other technological trend I think that's gonna be big is the continued decentralization of media production. This is the story of the internet, but I think it's just starting to get pretty interesting in recent years. So you get HTML in the 1990s, you get websites and then eventually web 2.0.

So it's websites that are easy for people to update regularly like blogs. That had a big impact on decentralizing the ability to produce and sell text. We take it for granted now, but remember in 1996, text came from magazines and newspapers. You had to have giant warehouses with these big machines with ink and newspaper rolls moving really fast and fleets of trucks.

And all the advertising dollars would come there. They had a ton of money. There's a lot of money in newspaper syndicates, a lot of money in magazine syndicates. That's where text was, available text. The internet changed that. Think about how many websites people go to now for information. How many independent little media companies, five person, six person shops.

Ain't it cool news? Let's go back to those early days. These type of sites are blogs. Esther Klein came out of blogging before moving over to the post and over to New York Times. Nate Silver, just all of this text, Politico. I mean, Politico eventually printed a hardcover version, a newspaper version for a while of their thing.

But there was so much innovation that happened in text media because of HTML. Now we're seeing this with audio, podcast. Incredibly disruptive. This industry is exploding because people like real time analog content. We can actually hear someone's voice. Radio is a pretty big industry. Podcasts will surpass radio soon.

It will surpass it soon. Because again, you open up the ability to create audio to most people. The big change happening now is video. Video, the ability to produce video whose quality crosses that uncanny valley and is at least comparable to stuff that we maybe saw on cable. That's where we're getting now.

Where more and more people at a fraction of the cost can produce video at a quality that you would say, I could have seen this 10 years ago on Bravo. And now you've decentralized video, which was the most powerful media forms of all, right? Television and movies is a huge dominant source of media and that is being decentralized now as well.

These trends I think are critical. I think the shift from audio is the stepping stone and the video is gonna be much bigger than even the decentralization of text that happened with the early HTML based web. All of this I think is really excited. I don't know where it's going, but I think it's really exciting.

The main critique people give, and I think this is so short-sighted, is every time one of these media technologies is decentralized, there's always this pushback that emerges where people set up this straw man of everyone now will be able to make a living off of this new decentralized media.

And then when they don't, and most stuff is bad, they say the revolution is a failure. Oh, so blogs arise. People looked around and said, well, most blogs are bad. This idea that everyone's gonna make a living off a blog isn't true. But that was never the point. Yeah, most people are bad at producing stuff.

Most people are not meant to be media figures. Most people don't have the insight or the training to produce really interesting audio or words or video. The point is when you open it up to everyone, you get this extreme Darwinian competition. And what is the point of Darwinian competition?

Not that all the different types of proverbial species are gonna survive, but that it's going to drive innovation into new species, new configurations that wouldn't have existed before. That is what is important about decentralization. There's 850,000 active podcasts right now. Most of them do not do very well, but that is a huge amount of selective pressure.

It's gonna produce a couple thousand that do really well and are really innovative and will change the media landscape altogether. Most of YouTube is dreck, but there's millions and millions of hours of footage being uploaded every minute. That is a huge amount of selective pressure. It's gonna change and evolve and mutate the visual media landscape.

So I don't know where all this decentralization is going. I just think it's important. That's why I'm doing audio. This is why Jesse and I were quick to get video going on the show as well. We think all of this is very important, even if we can't tell where it's going.

All right, Miranda, that was a long answer. That was a long answer to a short question, but I'm glad you asked it. So really quick summary. Crypto, I think is overhyped. We're in the twilight of the massive social media monopoly era. AI, I don't know, keep an eye on it.

I don't know what to tell you about it. Two biggest trends that are being missed. AR for sure. I think people don't understand the impact. Decentralized media, people know it's gonna be big, but maybe they don't realize how disruptive it's gonna be. I think the audio video, internet audio video revolution in particular is gonna be the biggest change to media since television.

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