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Guaranteed Human.

CallZone Media.

Hello and welcome to Better Offline.

I'm your host at Zittron.

In the next two episodes, I want to present you with a theory about why the tech industry has felt so weird for the last few years, and why there are so many products that have popped

up that don't seem to really do anything or be things that people have actually asked for.

And it comes down to a few simple questions.

Chief of them, what if the next big thing in tech is actually years or decades away?

What if the era of hypergrowth in tech is over?

And as I've mentioned before, I believe the rot economy is to blame for a lot of this.

It's a growth at all-cost mindset that sits at the core of pretty much everything I've written or spoken about.

It's this force that drives businesses to grow bigger rather than better and make products to conquer markets

and show growth to the public markets rather than fixing a problem that you or I might have or a business might have

or provide a necessary service that was nevertheless popular and profitable. And the raw economy

doesn't feel like any other economic period I've seen. It's not like, say, I don't know,

the post-2008 financial crisis or that stagnation that lingered afterwards. And what's different was there isn't

really a single obvious event that started the decline of the services we're using, or the companies

that make them. And there's not really like a Lehman Brothers crater we can point at and say,

there you go, that's the thing. The closest I can come is kind of FTX, which was the big

crypto crash, the big massive Ponzi scheme that

no one really saw coming other than many people who were looking behind the scenes. But other than

...