Benedict Evans is a former partner at Andreessen Horowitz and runs a newsletter with ~200k subscribers. We discuss smart glasses, amplified intelligence, robot dogs, the decentralization of media, and how AI is disrupting the very concept of user interfaces.
If these ideas interest you, we’re working on this kind of technology at Network School. You can apply online at https://ns.com.
OUTLINE
00:00 – Intro to Benedict Evans
01:38 – The smartphone dividend: how mobile enabled drones and VR
05:18 – Flying cars were like houseboats: a bad house and a bad boat
10:33 – What is “lowercase” tech that exists today that will go “uppercase?”
14:39 – Overestimating agentic AI
16:36 – Traditional software is easy to explain to machines, while machine learning is hard
20:59 – Phrases of power
26:27 – Google Trends: “Best” vs. “Cheap”:
34:49 – AI is great for researching things you already know a lot about
46:18 – Uber replaces taxis, Airbnb complements hotels
51:18 – The history of the elevator
58:50 – China disrupts Red America, the Internet disrupts Blue America
01:06:46 – Why are there so many new billionaires?
01:12:01 – The Internet is to America what America was to Britain
01:27:40 – Benedict Evans’ take on crypto
01:30:12 – Crypto is for transactions that are very large, very small, or very fast
01:46:13 – Blockspace is to crypto what bandwidth is to the web
01:54:40 – AI makes everything fake, crypto makes it real again
CITATIONS
(1) High Output Management: https://ift.tt/rpnG5bg
(2) Techlash: https://ift.tt/0FVTMfC
(3) eHang – “Chinese Flying Cars”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUTu4_8QznE
(4) Robodog Museum of the Future: https://ift.tt/ctzai6p
(5) GPS History : Global Positioning System History – NASA
(6) Regulatory challenges in US Consumer Drones: https://ift.tt/68NUfyB
(7) Understanding double descent: https://ift.tt/PJ5GDVU
(8) The Deep Research Problem: https://ift.tt/NwSKTkx
(9) ARC AGI: https://ift.tt/eUz7jX8
(10) Uber and Airbnb didn’t sell software: https://ift.tt/1ZG9ybJ
(11) AI Use cases: https://ift.tt/rl0kKPI
(12) The Elephant Curve: https://ift.tt/hs7vnqM
(13) China’s rise to manufacturing dominance: https://ift.tt/yWXSTEU
(14) Print media disruption : https://ift.tt/heaMuWj
(15) Evolution of Earth’s economic centre of gravity : https://ift.tt/xXFrqBo
(16) UN Membership growth: https://ift.tt/VIidMmv
(17) Number of countries in the world over time: https://ift.tt/CEvTy2u
(18) Balaji on crypto ten years ago – https://ift.tt/vz8hwFj
(19) Stable coin surpasses Visa & Mastercard : https://ift.tt/EWVlY2n
(20) Senate passes stablecoin bill : https://ift.tt/0x5tUvA
(21) YC on code developed by AI : https://ift.tt/M52CzbE
(22) Alex Tabarrok on partisanship when money is on line: https://ift.tt/bquYW2m
SOCIAL
https://ben-evans.com
https://ns.com
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