Listen now | Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast We, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Pseudo-...Sp,eto,e; Aspirationally Less than 60 Minutes: Key Insights: 1. The most recent round of Tech elephants, rhinoceroses, unicorns, and spiny lizards—Netflix, Shopify, etc.—are very unlikely to payoff for those investors who stay on the ride to the very end. 2. That said, they were very much worth doing even if they never make their shareholders any money. The growth of communities of engineering, entrepreneurial, and organizational practice is a huge benefit for innovation and growth—and the overwhelming bulk of that becomes non-rival public knowledge, that nobody can make scarce and hence charge people through the nose for. 3. Having your rich and your superrich fund R&D for little return is not the worst thing to have happen. 4. The ideas behind “Web3”—an end to the walled-garden Web2 internet, with the useful parts of the social graph trustable and publicly accessible to anyone who wants to communicate—are great ones. 5. The ideas behind “Web2”—the clickbait-ad walled-gardens—are horrible. And it is not just Facebook and Twitter. Google and Amazon are manifestly less useful to me than they were a decade and a half ago. Why? Because using pixels to inform me is less profitable than using them for selling ads, and the companies have decided to be evil. 6. Code is fundamental: a tech-finance drought is no reason not to learn to code. It is a reason to get a job working for a company that already has a real product, and, you know, profits. 7. At bottom, all of “crypto” is very familiar. It is taking out a map, drawing property lots boundaries on them, and then trying to sell those lots to people by telling them that the railroad is coming through. And in the end everyone will be very happy If the railroad does come through, and does not decide to build its river-crossing bridge ten miles north. 8.Hexapodia!
"Having your rich and your superrich fund R&D for little return is not the worst thing to have happen."
We were promised R&D and we got cheap taxi rides.