Our Predictions for 2024

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Hello, everyone. You're listening to After Hours. I'm Felix. I'm Mihir. And it's time for predictions, Felix. It is time for predictions. You know how you predict all kinds of things all year long, really, not only at the end of the year. Right. go back to check are you mostly right mostly wrong you know i don't that often i think part of the fun of it is just

thinking about the future. I don't think you necessarily really want to be constrained by the mistakes you've made in the past. Having said that, obviously, as you point out, every day we make a thousand predictions and naturally create intuition.

out of all those little predictions and I think that's a very powerful process and so I don't think I've ever formally gone back and really revisited it but I think predictions are a way of honing intuition which has got to be one of the most important skills in life. That's in part what makes it fun. Yeah, I'm exactly like you. I rarely go back. That's always been really fascinating to me. How much...

people are influenced by what actually happens. So exposed, you see the company got bought or the company didn't get bought. But really, what it's mostly about is, was your thinking right? Exactly. If the thinking was correct, that led you to make a prediction. Because it's all uncertain. It's all probabilistic anyway.

And so you shouldn't be swayed very much. Your thinking was right. It was 50-50. And I guess half the time, what happens in the end is not what you predicted. But you shouldn't really be that influenced. It's tempting sometimes to look at X post outcomes and be like, oh, I was wrong. And it's not always the right way to think about the problem. It's not right. Yes. Although it's so tempting and people tend to do that. Yes. Well, I think this gives us license to go crazy, Felix. Yes. Let's do it.

All right, Felix, your first prediction. Yes. So my first prediction is in 2024, we will see OPEC, the oil cartel. We will see it fall apart. What? here is how I'm thinking about it. So if you're in a cartel and you can raise prices by cutting production, That's, of course, super interesting and lucrative if there is a big price increase as a result of...

the more limited availability of oil. As we diversify the sources of energy, so there's more electricity, there's more solar, there's more wind, there's more everything. I think that volume... reduction will be much much bigger and as a result it will be much more difficult to keep the cartel intact now am i super sure that this is going to happen in 2024 no but

directionally, I think we will see OPEC being a much, much weaker force in the global economy. Interesting, Felix. So that depends on two things. It seems like one is you seem to be saying that... External dynamics will not favor them, meaning as renewables grow, their shares come down and their power goes down. Do you have a vision also of what's happening internally? So you're not telling a story of they start to fight and it falls apart. You're telling a story of the external environment.

is not conducive to their power. Yes. That's mostly how I'm thinking about it, because if demand is very price-inelastic... then agreeing on production cuts is relatively easy. The moment the demand is much more elastic, now you will argue, as we know from the past, it's not easy for them to agree on production cuts in the first place. And I think these...

tensions will just be exacerbated. I have less insight into how the negotiations are going to evolve, but I just think the cartel as a force in the world will be much more limited. Wow. Fantastic. That's a super interesting one. I might take the other side of that or certainly take it over a longer time. Mainly because I think of the internal dynamics. I think primarily it's internal dynamics that dictate that. One way to interpret it is that as their share falls, small countries...

become less important and then the big swing producer becomes more important and then they can enforce discipline. But that's a super interesting prediction. My sense was it's less about the total share, but it's about... the response of the world to an increase in oil prices, where we now have degrees of flexibility that just didn't really exist because we didn't have the battery systems, we didn't have the diversity of sources.

more we can respond to an increase in oil price, the less attractive it becomes to create that increase in oil prices in the first place. Super interesting. I love that prediction. Who knows? Definitely one to be potentially wrong.

What's your first prediction here? So we got to do something on AI. And here comes mine, which is everything in AI will become longer and shorter and narrower and deeper. Okay. So first, I think things in AI will get shorter. And in particular, I think leads will get shorter. For example, currently, ChatGPT and OpenAI look like they're well ahead of competitors. NVIDIA looks like they're well ahead on computing power. I think all those leads shrink.

and everything gets shorter. At the same time, I think some things get longer, which is, I think, the productization and how long people take to adopt. takes considerably longer. So I think Adobe in their most recent earnings call actually warned a little bit on this. And so we're going to see things get a little bit longer as well. In particular, adoption is just going to take much longer than people think.

things get narrower and deeper. And so narrower means we become much more clear about the specific pieces of the economy where AI will pay off. And the kind of informational problems that AI will really help us with. And then there'll be large chunks of the economy where it'll become more clear that AI will not have an impact. And then the places where it will, it will get really deep.

And it'll get really profound. So I guess I have a sense that in just in general, we have seen AI blanket everything in the world. And I think what we're going to see is everything gets shorter, leads get shorter. Things get longer, narrower, and deeper. And then my final prediction is, one I'm personally invested in, which is AML, A-I-M-L, becomes a verb.

And so we'll now talk about emailing everything. Oh, wonderful. Yeah, I think I agree with so much of what you said, in particular the part about... the differences in the quality of these systems, I think they will just disappear over time. It'll actually be really interesting to see competition between OpenAI and Tropic, Google.

And I think essentially it will be maybe a little bit like the situation in cloud. The companies compete on an almost equal footing and then they carve out niches, things that they're really good at. The part that I... find really interesting is about where it will and where it will not lead to productivity increases, which in the end dictates where it's going to be big and where it's not going to be big.

And for many of the super optimistic predictions, I have sometimes a sense that people don't really carefully identify bottlenecks. all the excitement about I can write so many more emails in half the time a third of the time 20% of the time yeah that's exactly right But what about the recipient? What about the people who have to read the emails? I don't know about your experience. I can already tell pretty much when someone used ChatGPT to write an email. And then because it's...

costless to them these emails tend to be really really long and sometimes they're really really complex and so I'm sitting there and instead of reading five lines I now have a small book ahead of me and that of course will undo many of the productivity gains that we expected in the first place. What I always try to do is think through the entire process and then think about where is that bottleneck? AI is really productivity enhancing if it helps with.

the bottleneck. But generally speaking, yeah, I think it'll be super interesting both the width and I guess the depth of the technology that will change over time. That's a really nice prediction. Fantastic. Okay.

What do you got, Felix? We will see a tsunami of... erotic and even pornographic content that is produced by artificial intelligence. Right now, it's basically held in check. because the big, reputable companies are really concerned about that kind of output. So, for instance, when the systems first became available, it turned out they were fabulous at writing erotic novels. Companies like Microsoft, companies like Google, Alphabet.

they have their reputation at stake. And as a result, they cut down. Just a couple of weeks ago, Twitch allowed its users to use artistic depictions of nudity. And after a couple of days, they had to adjust the policy because they got flooded with content. But I think there's enormous possibilities. There's obviously demand, as we know from the web more generally.

And as AI, the technology moves from large reputable companies to more niche players who have less of a reputation, maybe it's the traditional... pornographic companies that we have today that will fully exploit the technology. We have no idea how much content will be created. That I think will be as dominant in AI generated content as

pornography is now dominant on the web itself. It's so interesting. It's like one of those dirty little secrets about the web that pornography was so... important in its growth and just continues to be so important i don't think we understand always fully how important pornography is to the web and so i think you're absolutely right and of course you're pointing to this larger theme which is just the cheapening of

content creation with ai and so pornography is going to be one place where we see it it's going to be with political news it's going to be with potentially fake news and so that i think is going to lead to maybe more guardrails, but just maybe more of a coarsening of dialogue and maybe a little bit more of...

concern and skepticism about the power of these things so i think you're absolutely right and it's going to be in some sense kind of fairly unpleasant to watch but what do you make of ai's ability to actually foster more human connections. So there are now conversations about friendships with AI bots, that becoming. a more fertile area. I think it's pretty amazing already. I guess depending on your personality, it will take on many, many different forms.

including sexual and neurotic interchanges. To give you one personal example, so character AI, you probably know. So I recently used it. And when you first open it, It has some famous celebrities if you don't want to create your own companion. So I happened to see Einstein. And so I called it Einstein. And my prompt was...

I think this whole theory about dark matter is complete nonsense. You just made it up. And then a 20-minute conversation about what we know about dark matter and why we think it exists. All that was missing from it was the slight German accent in the way Einstein really spoke. But the whole back and forth, really just fabulous. And I learned a bunch of things about dark matter.

probably learn anything because he already knew everything there is to know that's a great prediction i love it that's awesome so what is your next prediction me here there is this proverb the longest mile is the last mile home

And I think that's roughly true. And I think we're going to see that in the economy. This is a prediction about the macro monetary policy, fiscal policy outlook. I think the last mile, of course, is getting from 3% inflation in the U.S. to 2% inflation. And I think that last mile is going to be a long mile. have lots of zigs and zags and actually be more complicated than people understand it to be so if that's right then we don't get to two percent that fast

And we get there and then we go back. We kind of stay closer to three. So there'll be a big debate about whether three is the right number as opposed to two being the right number. I think the Federal Reserve will find itself subject to. political pressure in a way that it may never have before because during a very complex election year central banks around the world but in particular the federal reserve will find themselves in the crosshairs of

politicians, they will feel even more pressure to become politicized in a way that they have never seen before. And then the final piece of that story is we had this remarkable event in October where bond yields blew out up to four or five percent and i think that is not a red herring i think that is the canary in the coal mine we're going to see those concerns reassert themselves

And I think broadly, what monetary policy was in the last 15 years, which is kind of the dominant thing in the world. is going to be replaced by fiscal policy. And the next 15 years are about fiscal policy and the way that monetary policy was dominant for the last 15 years. Yeah, interesting. Can I ask you about the first part of your prediction?

So say if you go from 4% to 2%, that's really hard. What is it that is substantively different from, say, going from 6% to 4% or 8% to 6%? That's a good question. think it's about the difference between six and five and three and two. I think it's more that two, which we lived with for so long.

It's kind of unsupportable going forward, which is that was undergirded by lots of goods deflation, especially from China. So I don't think it's about what is this one percentage point difference. But if you have wage growth for the reasons we talked about in the last episode and you have. pressure on that margin. It's just very difficult to get all the way back down. So said another way, the fact that we lived for so long at two might just have been an artifact of

very odd circumstances. I think we may need to just renormalize around a different number. And that debate will, I think, become very, very political. Yeah. And this is a great debate to have because... As you pointed out, there's nothing magical about two. In fact, one of the most important reasons why we like low inflation numbers is because unexpected inflation has really...

big consequences, has really big cost. As long as we're in steady state and the number is two or three or four, but our expectations match up with reality. I don't really think there's anything that special about a number like two. It's just that as inflation goes up.

it typically becomes much more volatile. And as inflation bounces back and forth, then our expectations are not in line with what happens, which always leads to big redistributions that we want to avoid. Exactly. You could make many other arguments.

So, for instance, we know it's very hard to cut nominal wages. If you have a little bit of inflation, there's a lot of flexibility. Yeah, I totally agree with everything you said. The contrasting force is political, which is I think inflation has proven. to be much more politically costly than anybody anticipated. Now, of course, that was very high inflation relative to the levels we're talking about. But I think there is going to be this pushback about how...

costly inflation really is because people are angry about it and they seem to be persistently angry about it. So I think you're right. In a normal world, we'd have a conversation about whether two or three make sense. But I think there is also going to be this pushback.

oddly on the politics of it which is gosh is it more costly than we thought it was yeah this kind of idea that we're returning back to the world that we had before of two percent very quickly i think is going to turn out to be wrong Yeah. And that'll be interesting part of 2024. Super interesting. Okay. Felix, rock on.

My prediction is that one of the big streaming companies, so Disney, Netflix, will buy Electronic Arts, the electronic game maker. Think about it, what happens in streaming. So one discovery is that if you add a tier that is advertising supported. that can be financially very lucrative. And in fact, if you look at revenue per subscriber, it's probably even better than having fairly high subscription prices. So I see Disney+, I see Netflix.

The basis of their model is an ad-supported tier. And then the next trick that we talked about once, because I find it so irritating, is that instead of giving us entire shows and entire seasons, they now drip. Drip, drip, drip, give us little pieces. So think about what that means. We have a business model that is essentially ad supported and we force you to consume in little chunks. Oh my God.

They are reinventing television. It's exactly what we had with network television. And so then the question is, okay, so from television history, it is okay, but it's not super exciting. Where will growth come from? I think growth will come from games. Activision, Blizzard, Microsoft, as so often these days, is a little ahead of the pack. But I think streaming will...

make use of these opportunities as well. And Electronic Arts is probably one of the companies that is really attractive to acquire. And Felix, I think the whole streaming world is fascinating. I'm curious. what the motivation is would a streamer want to buy them for ongoing gaming content creation or is it about the library What are we getting if you buy electronic arts? Are you getting an engine for new games or are you getting properties? It's a really interesting question. In part, I think...

an engine for new games, that alone is attractive. The most successful gaming franchises, they have long lives, surprisingly long lives. And so even buying that revenue stream and bless its... priced really dearly is attractive but then also maybe most important the dividing lines between different types of content get really blurry. So you take gaming content and maybe you make a documentary out of it, or maybe you have a short episode where some character from a game world can appear.

A little bit like the... blurring lines between sports and more traditional entertainment i think the same is happening to the gaming and the more traditional video world that makes this really attractive the thing i like about this prediction is not just about gaming. I think it's a broader story about using content and distributing content.

as opposed to creating content. So I've been struck by these decisions about letting suits get onto Netflix and how powerful that has been. Historically, content creation has been the dominant way. to go in the last 15 years. And I actually think... people will scale that back and want to just monetize existing content. And I think gaming is one version of that. So I think the interesting thing about gaming is the properties and then how you monetize it.

In my sense of the world, we're going to end up saying, well, how can I just take existing content and monetize that as opposed to constantly asking the question of how do you produce new content? Interesting. Do you think these limits that we now see with... the overviews of the Marvel universe, innumerable stories, somehow related to one hero or another. And maybe the aficionados can follow the storylines, but probably 90% of them.

humanity couldn't care less do you think as we push to reuse content or as we push to reuse popular characters that in the end the audience just gets tired of it your ability to do wonderful content based on the same ingredients. It's just limited. I think that's got to be true. But I think it's also true that new content is just not proving economically.

rewarding enough because of the fragmentation it's this tension you're absolutely right audiences want that but it's not clear that it's gonna pay off and we just happen to live through a time when We were willing to do this remarkable level of content creation for relatively small audiences. And that just may be done. Yeah, mildly depressing. Because I need more British cop shows. Yes, that's right. Your next prediction, Mihir.

I don't know if it's a prediction or just maybe the most interesting story to watch in 2024 is going to be Argentina. It is absolutely fascinating what is going on there. As you, I'm sure, know, Felix Javier Millet has been elected. He's the new president of Argentina. To say he's a remarkable character is just a complete understatement. But the reason it's important for the world is Argentina... is a serious economy.

If what he is trying to do in Argentina has any kind of an effect that is salutary, I think it becomes a model for a lot of people. And so what he's talking about is just remarkable regulatory reform and stripping of.

Crazy amounts of regulations. He's talked about dollarization of an economy that's a pretty large economy. And so if he's even moderately successful, it's going to become a playbook of sorts. Alternatively, if he... isn't, I think it's going to be a real tough moment for the economic populism and one version of the economic populism that has taken hold around the world.

I think he's going to end up doing pretty radical things. Not as radical as he's promised because he'll get slowed down in various ways. But it is going to be a really remarkable story to watch. Either because I think he's going to... fail significantly or he's going to have some positive benefits i do not know how optimistic i should be and not only because it's argentina the track record isn't exactly encouraging

But also because he lacks legislative support. So for many of the reforms that he talks about, he would need that. Dollarization is so... difficult to even think about for an economy whose business cycles are so fundamentally different from the US business cycles. Absolutely. And we spoke about it in the context of Greece. When we thought, oh, if Greece had its own currency, what would the economy look like? Would there be a degree of flexibility that would actually help?

manage the crisis now that the worst is over for Greece and Greece is now growing very quickly. It's one of the fastest growing economies in Europe. It makes you rethink that. kind of discipline that comes from being less on your own more constrained maybe after all that's not such a bad things so exactly the dollarization alone is completely completely fascinating to think about also just symbolically speaking a clear break with the

Peronist's past is probably something that is really valuable for Argentina. Yeah. And I think the other piece of it, which is just the level of frustration. In Argentina is so great because the economic performance has been so difficult. If you look back at a longer chart of GDP per capita in Argentina over the last hundred years.

It's really quite striking and depressing. Argentina was a very wealthy country 100 years ago. And it is a story that is really one of the great economic misfortunes of the last 100 years. And so then... people are so desperate for such radical changes and one has to appreciate that

desperation. It's easy to say, oh my God, it's all kooky and crazy, but it's not because it's founded in deep, deep desperation. Seeing how that plays out, I think is going to be really fascinating. I'm not sure whether to be optimistic or not, Felix. But it is going to be something where we learn about some big ideas that matter for economies like Turkey, like developing countries all around the world in Africa and Latin America.

And I think those lessons will get learned in the next 12 to 24 months. Yeah. Oh, my God. I so wish your optimism would play out. I, of course, hope for the best for Argentina. But I just think as an object lesson, it's going to turn out to be. Let's put it this way. Lots of dissertations are going to get rid. One measure of output. Yeah, exactly. One measure of output is going to be going up.

TED Talks Daily is supported by Northwestern Mutual. If you want a better way to plan, relax, and retire, then tune in to the award-winning podcast, A Better Way to Money. It's here to help you feel better about your finances, to help you uncover your own blind spots and find opportunities as you make progress toward your goals.

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All right, Felix, what do you got? So my prediction is in 2024, we will increasingly come to see plastic as the new asbestos. I think we have taken plastic just completely for granted at any day in your life. how many interactions you have with plastic products. And often you don't really think about it. And often it is just incredibly useful. It's just about perfect. And now, like in asbestos, two things have happened. One is it's a product that is related to oil and we're trying to make...

the economy less carbon intensive. So I think that's one headwind. That alone would probably not be that effective. But I think the conversation about microplastics, you know, in every human body, essentially, you find lots and lots of plastic because we're inhaling it, it's in the water, it's in the air, it's everywhere. I think...

That is essentially how asbestos came to be seen, what it is to be seen, because it had this dramatic impact on human health. And I think we're well on our way towards seeing... plastic as something that yes absolutely crucial for so so many things we do but also deeply deeply problematic in a way that I don't think historically we've really appreciated wow

That's a big one, Felix. I got to think about this one. The asbestos story, I don't know enough about it as I probably should, but you're right. It was kind of sudden and it was related to concerns about its safety that I think that really... made it in some sense go away in a fast way and in a very public way. With plastics, there are definitely concerns and they've been percolating up for a little bit of a while.

I wonder if it requires a larger moment, something to happen where people say, oh my God, because the convenience issues and the... cost efficiency is so amazing with plastics that it has to be some kind of a seismic moment where I think people wake up. How do we think about the replacements and the substitutes? Or do we think about just reductions in use?

All of the above. Think about plastic straws. The image, what happens with plastic straws when they're in the water and they get eaten by fish. I think those images, I think were absolutely crucial in convincing us. So first, the plastic straws get replaced by paper-based products. And then they're just awful, basically. The touch is just not right. And then all of a sudden we think, really, is it absolutely necessary to drink out of a glass with...

the help of a straw? Maybe not. Maybe we can do away with the straw altogether. And I think those are the two kinds of responses that you will see. So you see it in plastic bags now. We just substitute paper. And then you start thinking about, well, well, actually, could I bring bags to the supermarket instead of picking up paper bags every time? Of course, plastic, because it's everywhere. It's used across such a broad range of products.

Think automobiles, basically anything you can think of, there's plastic involved. I think these substitution patterns will look very different. But the story that will drive it is this realization. how much we breathe it in, how much we eat it. It reminds me a little bit when you look at organic products. We made the most progress, I think, in organic food. And it's always this idea that, oh, it's something that's in me or it's something that I'm feeding my kids.

that then becomes a very powerful motivator. And I think with plastics, probably similar, where you're thinking the moment it touches your body, the moment you ingest it in some fashion, I think that's sort of like... game changer in the sense that we care about it in a way that we haven't really cared about it historically but i agree with you the substitution process much much more difficult than with asbestos where

We used to think of asbestos as just this amazing building material. We forget now how even very late companies made acquisition. of other companies that had asbestos legacies, not really thinking about the long-term consequences. Plastic is sort of at this moment where you can think about it and, you know, it's completely innocent and who cares? And I think you will come to regret it. That's great. Mihir, what do you have?

The last decade has seen this remarkable rise in quantitative trading and algorithmic trading. And I think in part we're ready for something to shake that world. and i'm not sure what will shake that world but i think it is likely to be some kind of a scandal and maybe regulatory crackdown So these quant funds are remarkable players in financial markets today, and their growth has kind of...

I'm not speaking entirely of just index funds, things like Vanguard and BlackRock, which have already seen a little bit of pushback. But I'm really talking about... quantitative systematic trading funds. And we referenced this, Felix, in our last episode when we talked a little bit about how market movements appear to be out of line with things that are going on in the economy.

I think there's conceivably a regulatory crackdown and maybe a market manipulation scandal that will plague that world and will cause people to ask questions. that have not been asked during the last 15 years. So in particular, what kind of asset prices are contributing to their returns? Which kinds of assets? And what are they doing? And what are those strategies?

Once regulators get interested in those questions, I think that world will have to kind of become much more public and much more mainstream. And in that process, I think we may learn things that people may feel not so great about. And so I'm not exactly sure how that shakes out, Felix, as you can tell from my vagueness. But my sense is that that world is ripe for some combination of a scandal or regulatory crackdown that changes.

the rules of the game in interesting ways. Is your sense that there are particular asset classes that are problematic or is it that... trading practices and the extent to which they exploit momentum that then leads us to asking questions about where the momentum comes from in the first place. It's that piece, Felix. Exactly. Thank you. You said it better than I did, which is I think there's going to be a sense of what is going on with momentum in markets.

Who's driving that momentum? And then are we seeing more violence in markets than we need to? Because in fact, these are self-reinforcing, self-feeding phenomenon and the detachment from fundamentals. in certain asset classes and of course we've seen this before the old version of this was market manipulation scandals in the silver market where you had like the hunter brothers doing things

I'm just wondering if there's something like that that is going to end up playing out. I know that's a very vague idea, but I have a feeling that something like that can happen, especially given what's been going on in the last 12 or 18 months. One reason why I find this prediction so interesting is because it will also lead to a conversation about how the trading is related to real economic activity.

And I think that's the triggering thing, which I think we end up asking those questions, which we should be asking. And frankly, that world has grown up without asking those questions. I think we're ripe to see something there, Felix. Wow. Okay. Excellent. It'll be an exciting 2024. Exactly. Exactly. And what do you have, Felix?

I have a slightly gloomier one. I think the quality of search results, so Google search or Bing or any one of these. will deteriorate rapidly. Even more so, you mean? Even more so than today. So today, frankly, it's basically the business model that pollutes the search results. So the 15,000...

sponsored links that are vaguely unrelated to what you're really looking for, so that you have to now go on page five to really figure out what you want. So I think that's not going to disappear, but I think it will be... incredibly difficult for Google and everyone in the search business to distinguish between AI-generated content that then includes every hallucination of AI that you can imagine.

The content that is verified high quality. This is such a lucrative market. Search is just so incredibly profitable. Think about all the industries that sprang up around search engine optimization. That is going to have an exact equivalent in how can I produce AI content that is really hard to detect for Google. That is really hard to detect for Microsoft because that's like...

like search engine optimization, you end up in the results. And that is of course where the big money is. As a result, if you want to see a silver lining in this, I think we will... rely to a much greater extent on trusted brands. I would not be surprised if, say, the use of Wikipedia would explode. because it's a source that is less polluted. Normally, people are skeptical about what AI means for search, but they're thinking that AI chatbots will replace search. But I think...

That's actually not quite right. I think what will happen is search itself will be such a miserable experience as a result of AI that you'll go directly to the New York Times or you'll go directly to the Wall Street Journal. Wow, that's a radical... prediction i love this prediction let me push back a little which is okay it seems like it becomes a cat and mouse game between google and all these people trying to trick google yes and if that's the cat and mouse game

isn't Google going to win? Aren't they going to be able to like figure it out? If it is this cat and mouse game, do we really think that these more bit players can outfox Google, given how valuable the search?

business is to them yeah why can't they always stay one step ahead so think about practically speaking how that might happen so you have a piece of content that lives on the web already and now we're thinking How would we distinguish something that has been generated by AI from something that wasn't AI generated in the first place, which might just be wrong information?

You could exclude particular sources. So you could say anything on Reddit. Reddit is probably going to be completely overwhelmed by bots. And as a result, anything on Reddit, I don't trust. That makes search worse because guess what? There is a lot of really fabulous content on Reddit that should be included. You could do things like...

If the grammar is not quite right, we know that all of these chatbots are really beautiful at grammar. I now get email from people who English is not their first language and they're writing me these really beautiful emails, which obviously come from some chatbot. So then what will people do? They will introduce mistakes in their AI-generated content. So in search engine optimization, it's just been incredibly, incredibly hard.

to beat the optimizers at their game. That's interesting. No real reason to believe that that should be different in AI. Right. And so it is just this remarkable cheapening. of the technology to create this stuff. It's a persistent problem, but now the cost of producing that... bad content have gone so low that the battle shifts in some tectonic way. That's interesting. 97% of the web will be... bot generated and so then search really becomes

and search for the needle in the haystack. Okay, that's not something to look forward to. Yes. Hold on to your New York Times subscription. I think it's one piece of advice. There you go.

I'm fresh out of predictions for 2024. How about you, Mir? Do you have one or two for us? I just have three little weird product kinds of recommendations or thoughts about what will be important. So I'll give you all three super fast. One. I think energy drinks are going to really struggle. There have been now more and more health concerns that have been raised. So, for example, Panera has run into this with their lemonade, and they've stuck by it, interestingly.

And I think they get replaced by prebiotic drinks. So this is my beverage market prediction, which is energy drinks finally have their comeuppance and prebiotic drinks, which are basically drinks with fiber embedded in them. Kind of take them. Number two, I think the Apple Vision Pro is going to be amazing. It's going to be more amazing than people realize. Forecasts are...

for something like maybe 100,000 to maybe 400,000 units in the first year. And I have a feeling it's going to just be like more than a million. Now that doesn't really move the needle for Apple in any meaningful way. And I don't think it becomes a product. like the iPhone or anything else. If you've seen the video, the way they integrate the real world and that world, it's really something else. And so I think that's going to be better than you think.

I see someone spend thousands of dollars on a new headset. You're right. It's going to be around a $4,000 price tag. And I think that market is larger than we understand it to be. And it's going to be far better than Meta's.

efforts it's going to be far better than a lot of people's efforts so that'll be interesting and the final one is percy jackson new disney content is going to go gangbusters and is going to lead to like a whole revival of disney so yeah there you go three crazy product predictions can i ask you about the apple prediction i can completely see why

It's so novel. It's so good. Lots of people will want one. The bigger question, I think, is do you see people use it daily? You know how that novel thing that is amazing and then... Really? You want to wear something like that every day for long hours? Well, so how about this? Obviously gaming is a big part of this, which I'm not going to talk about, but let's just think about consuming content on an iPad. So I will watch.

a TV show or a movie on an iPad. I'm not sure I'm going to be doing that in a couple of years. I actually think I could be using the Apple Vision Pro to be consuming content in that way. It'll be a better visual experience. And I'll have integrated with the real world in a kind of interesting way. And I think it replaces that form of content consumption. And that is a large market.

By the way, I'm not making predictions about that. I just think in the short run, it's going to be a banging product and it's going to be way better than the competition. And then ultimately it's about, am I willing to switch to that way to consume content?

pure like sit back kind of consume content not lean forward content consumption and i think it can be so that i think is going to be fun to watch it's interesting i do think comfort will decide its fate exactly you know i've been wearing glasses forever my glasses are not uncomfortable in any real way but do i like moments when i don't have to wear my glasses yes absolutely so

Somehow, the comfort level needs to be quite amazing for it to make it into an everyday product. In particular, the moment when you want to relax and watch a show. Well, that's the interesting part. I don't think there's a world where we're all walking around with this stuff on, at least not now, but that can happen maybe. I think it's a little bit more about, do I consume a little bit of content for an hour or two at night? And is that an interesting way to do it?

And I think it may well be. Yeah. It's been a while since I've done the Apple fanboy thing. So there you go.

Okay, Felix, recommendations. What do you have for us this week? One of the trends I... paid a little bit of attention to is the quality of data visualization and it's been around as a topic for quite some time now but i have to say wherever you look mainstream media I follow a subreddit called Data is Beautiful.

people have just become so good at telling sometimes complex stories with the help of beautiful and simple data visualization and wanted to recommend One particular graph that I really loved, it appeared in The Economist. And it asks the question, how rich are countries really? If we had a ranking of the richest country, what would it look like? And what the graph does is it takes...

Three steps. It starts just with GDP per capita. And then it asks, well, but actually prices of products and services are not the same. What if we adjust for Switzerland being super, super expensive and other economies less so? And then the last step is an adjustment for how many hours do people actually work to produce that kind of income. Right. And it's one of these things where just... Seeing these very simple and obvious ideas, how big a difference they make, it's just absolutely...

Fabulous. So the US, for instance, starts out ranked sevens on the list of GDP per capita. It slips by a rank once you take prices into account, and then it ends up being 11s. Once you take into account that Americans work long hours. Right. One of the most dramatic changes is if you look at Belgium, no one thinks of Belgium as a superstar economy. So they start out. 18th on

GDP per capita, they're 15 once you take prices into account. And then once you take into account how much they work, they end up being the sixth richest economy. So it's all captured. in this really simple, elegant graph that connects the different steps. People who do data visualization. If you have a chance to look at it on Visual Capitalist, on Reddit, on any of these forums, I think it's such a joy. You learn so much and it's often...

Just incredibly beautiful to look at at the same time. That is a great recommendation. I agree. Data visualization is such a wonderful field. I remember like being obsessed with Tufti like way back when. Yes, exactly. The FT actually has gotten really good at this. And one of the things they've done, which I really... love is the regional differences within countries so if you look within the u.s and you look at the poorest parts of those countries they look a lot like

developing countries all around the world looking under the hood is so powerful just like what your example does which is really fantastic that sounds great what do you have for us me here so i have just started this book but i have just already fallen in love with it. It is a book by Carlo Rovelli, who is a physicist who writes books for the lay audience about physics. But his latest book is about an oxymander.

which is a mouthful and somebody I had never heard of before, who is a Greek thinker and really, Ravelli argues, kind of the original scientific thinker. And so... Anaximander turns out to be this incredible character who arguably is the father of the scientific method, is somebody who thought about evolution.

quite deeply early, who thought about laws. And I had never heard his name before. Yeah, I haven't either. Yeah. And Rovelli writes so beautifully. And in a world that sometimes is lacking. reason it is wonderful to like read about somebody who thinks so seriously about the origins of science so it's carlo revelli and the book is called an oxymander

and the birth of science. And it's really fantastic. Fabulous. So this is it for tonight, and this is it for 2023. We wanted to thank... all our listeners for listening in for thinking with us about the world and the changes in business the changes in culture And then, of course, a very, very big thank you to our audio engineer, Peter Linane, who's responsible for the wonderful sound that you get to hear on the After Hours podcast. This is it. After Hours from the TED Audio Collective.

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