ZD 25.10: Speculations from the Pros
The future according to Scott Galloway and Amy Webb.
The scale of YouTube; how deep is the of our national debt; who has the rights to your AI images; and cross the uncanny emotional valley with AI. Explore 2025 with Scott Galloway and 2030 with Amy Webb in this week’s Zeitgeist Distilled.
The Distilled Spirit
Media Madness
📹 YouTube is Ginormous (Posting Nexus)
Measuring YouTube is a challenge — google does not really break them out from their earnings. What is absolutely clear YouTube serves the most media on the planet. A billion people a month visit the platform for podcasts alone. YouTube dominates music. All of this feeds a giant ad and content targeting engine just getting sharper with AI. Will it ever stop growing?
👶Screen Time Age 0 through 8 ()
More than half of six year olds own a tablet. The average screen time of that cohort is more than three hours per day. The conclusion — that parents need more support — certainly rings true to me.
A Well Run Country?
🧮 USA, Inc. Revisited (Bond Capital)
Mary Meeker is one of the sharpest financial minds around. In 2011, she reported on the state of USA’s balance sheet as a company. There were concerns about the debt then in an age of much gentler interest rates. The updated version is even more stark. Trends in national debt and entitlements are alarming and perhaps unaffordable. The COVID-related spending binge did not do us any favors. Rising interest rates make the debt load even more expensive as it continues to pile on. It is really scary where the numbers are going.
🔊 Thoughts on DOGE ()
DOGE is a really hard thing to understand. It is undeniably cruel and seems to be a politically motivated cudgel. Is there more to it beyond the headlines? Santi Ruiz unpacks the program from a number of angles to help the reader understand what is really going on and what they are accomplishing beneath all the noise.
📈 German Equities FTW ()
In a shocking turn, German Equities have been the top ranking worldwide asset class. In the same period, the so called MAG 7 have been down. Has the market worm turned to the ROTW?
AI on the Grand Scale
📃Fabricated Papers (Harvard Misinformation Review)
We are starting to see more and more papers made using AI tools. This paper finds two-thirds of papers retrieved from Google Scholar showed at least some sign of being produced at least in part by AI. Many of those were concentrated in more policy-relevant departments like health, environment or computing. It is getting harder to trust scholarly research.
🖼 AI Image Copyright Primer ()
Understanding your rights as a creator is important. The LawVerse does a great job explaining just what kinds of rights you have to your AI images. The headline is that in the US you have no copyright at all. She presents an informed view of how your rights to a DALLE-3 image compare to your rights to a stock photograph. Great reference for knowing what your rights as a creator are in many circumstances.
💻Ban the H20 Trade ()
AI expansion runs on two axis. Innovation or making bigger, better models with more capabilities. Diffusion is the ability to deploy and scale those advanced models. So far, US trade policy has focused on the innovation side of the equation by preventing China from training first-rate models. Perhaps it could be more successful to focus on preventing them from building the scale to effectively serve the advanced models we have not stopped them from training? To do so we need to close the H20 loophole — to stop a chip designed to skirt export controls that turns out to be superior for inference. We need to adjust our policy to suit the evolving technology.
AI on the Personal Scale
🐛 Never Let AI Debug For You ()
There are definitely uses for AI in coding. Vibe coding can be a great way to stand things up quickly with very loose requirements. Help with particular tasks like ‘write a function for X’ are wonderful. And help with planning and understanding are great. Using AI to debug is not good — you need to work through some of the problem and the tedium yourself to get better. This is especially true on projects with more specific requirements that are hard to translate to AI.
😢 AI has Learned How to Capture Emotion (Every Napkin Math)
Chat GPT 4.5 dropped last week and it’s superpower is that it understands emotion much better than it’s peers. It introduces the era of vibe compute. Context is baked into training. The tooling has memory about you and becomes a more personal assistant. More probabilistic outputs makes things seem more human. Could the computers start to understand our vibes better than we understand them ourselves?
💸 Crossing the Uncanny Valley ()
AI Voice technology is crossing an uncanny valley where agents are truly starting to seem human. Sesame has created a conversational speech model that feels natural, with features like pauses and ums and emotional cues to make the model seem more human. This is a big milestone, but the field is crowded and there is much more to come.
Fluff and Fun
⚽ Ruining Soccer with a Halftime Show ()
Halftime is a sacred ritual at a soccer game, not the time for a concert.
🗺 The Impact of your Street Grid ()
Street grids have profound effects on the communities around them. Interconnected streets make for much more efficient transit and tighter communities. The difference is shocking.
🕹Kids Love Old Tech ()
My newest justification for being a tech packrat: I can hook my kid up with my old gaming systems.
The Forecast per SXSW
It is March and that means it is time for SXSW. Thankfully I am sitting here in DC, far, far away from the madness in Austin this week. There is only so much time in your life one can spend waiting in line for an hour just to not quite get into the panel one can put up with in life. There are only so many horrible tasting complimentary theme cocktails one can sip on Rainey street.
My personal hang-ups aside, the event still does get some headliners. This year, per usual, Scott Galloway and Amy Webb shared vivid visions of the future. Through the magic of the internet you could watch both live. I did and here is my take on the thoughts the two leaders shared.
Scott Galloway’s Lonely 2025
Scott looks around and is very worried by what he sees as a loneliness epidemic. He is especially worried by this generation of young men. They seem to be a bit lost — many end up living in basements playing video games and vaping. They grow more and more lonely, get sucked into conspiracy theory and political anger. They are not in a great place overall. His #1 request is that you make a difference in a young man’s life before it is too late.
On the market he sees AI value getting soaked up by the many, not the LLM makers. They have no moat. NVIDIA and a few app companies will be the best investments. Meta is probably the best positioned app company. They have the most coal — all of your Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp data — to load into the furnace. YouTube will be the media platform of the year. It is winning TV and Podcasts. Mr. Beast is the #1 video star in the world.
Unfortunately SXSW took down the video so you cannot enjoy the quite entertaining talk secondhand. I’ll update this space should it surface.
Amy Webb’s Living Intelligence
Amy Webb is more of a futurist. She looks farther out — into 2030 and beyond. Her 2025 Tech Trends report release is focused on a concept she calls Living Intelligence. The cutting edge of AI has moved beyond the computer and into the physical world. The combination of biology and computer is getting very real. Scientists are building jellyfish with sea pollution sensors. Metamaterials — things that allow you to bend light or sound, create impossible shapes or take on programmable aspects — will break the rules of computing as we know it. Cortical labs is building a brain computer.
Meanwhile in robotics things are moving fast. You really cannot get to AGI without embodiment — that is without getting the intelligence into the messy, physical world. We are getting much closer to crossing that gap. Very smart people are saying 2030, and that date is not really that far off.
Download the trends report from her new Future Today Strategy Group site, or watch the keynote:
Your Thoughts?
What was the best section of this edition?
The Look
People are coming around to the fact that changing your clock is a horrible thing to do according to Chartr. Note that this publication was already there a year ago.
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