# Silicon Valley's Billion Dollar Design Scams ## Метаданные - **Канал:** Design Theory - **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDvAQf1cnr8 - **Дата:** 02.04.2026 - **Длительность:** 35:41 - **Просмотры:** 721,498 - **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/50313 ## Описание Download AnyDesk for free today using my link: https://Anydesk.com/DesignTheory LET'S WORK TOGETHER OR JUST TALK: connect@mauriellodesign.com BECOME A PATRON: https://www.patreon.com/JohnMauriello CHECK OUT MY OTHER SOCIALS: DISCORD: https://discord.gg/hFw55nh TWITTER: https://twitter.com/john_mauriello IG: https://www.instagram.com/mauriellodesign/ LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mauriellojohn/ All content directed, written and (partially) edited by John Mauriello. John Mauriello has been working professionally as an industrial designer since 2010. He is a former adjunct professor at California College of the Arts. Silicon Valley keeps designing products that barely work, solve nothing, and somehow still make investors and founders insanely rich. In this video, I break down how that happens. This is a video about design, grift, and the systems that reward shallow spectacle. Together, let's find a way to overcome it. 0:00 Intro 1:18 ZIRP 2:06 Runway Exhaustion 3:30 Hype C ## Транскрипт ### Intro [] You don't need to design a good product to make billions. Some of the smartest investors in the world poured a billion dollars into this. It's a fitness tracker that didn't really even work. The company collapsed, but the founder raised another 65 million for a new startup before the dust had even settled. It's a carefully crafted grift that keeps the wealthy on top and squeezes every last penny from you and me. I've been a designer in Silicon Valley for 15 years, and I'm going to show you how it all works. To understand this whole system, let's talk to one of Silicon Valley's greatest intellectual authorities. He's a legendary founder and a legendary investor, Peter Teal. Surely he can explain all of this clearly. Take it away, Peter. — It's um well, let me It's I I — In 2008, the American dream shriveled up in front of our eyes when the economy collapsed. Soon, chance rang across Wall Street. People wanted change. They were tired of money influencing politics. Sound familiar, Peter? — I I There's several different things one could say. It's uh I Oh, and by the way, see that number in the corner there? That's a live estimate of how much money Peter Teal has made every second, even while stumbling his way through simple questions. We'll be doing that for all the billionaires in this video. So, anyway, the government heard ### ZIRP [1:18] our cries for justice, but instead of redistributing money from the wealthiest among us, we got something different. Zerp, the zero interest rate policy. With ZERP, the rich could borrow huge sums of money at almost no cost. And we were told that all this investment would eventually make life better for everyone else. That was the promise, at least. Before this, billionaires could just park their money in safe investments and expect steady profits from things like government bonds. But once interest rates went to zero, they couldn't just coast anymore. Their safe returns were melting away. The rich were pushed off the cliff of safe investments. But waiting below was something that promised as much as a h 100red times their money back. High-risk venture capital. Grab your money bags cuz there's another gold rush in California. ### Runway Exhaustion [2:06] This is Juicero, a $700 juicer with a $150 monthly subscription for juice packets. Most people have heard of Juicero, but nobody ever talks about the key lesson from it. The company raised over $120 million because the pitch sounded just plausible enough. Maybe people really would spend $700 on a high-end juicer. People do buy expensive espresso machines. So, the vision didn't sound that crazy at the time, but that vision was built on a very fragile narrative with a lot of missing details and major assumptions about what people might actually want. Why did it need to be connected to Wi-Fi to work? Why did you need a monthly subscription? So, Bloomberg came along with a counternarrative that was far more concrete and way more powerful. They showed someone squeezing the juice pack by hand. And instantly, the company's whole premise of a $700 juicer became impossible to defend. What's the point of this juicer if you can just use your hands to do the same thing? The public had been handed a much more straightforward story that anyone could understand. So, the real lesson of Juicero is not just look at how stupid and out of touch these Silicon Valley people are, although that is partially true. The deeper lesson is that a product can survive on a speculative story for years. But if someone produces a counter story that's simpler, more concrete, and easier to feel in your gut, the whole thing unravels very fast. The Juicero illusion broke before everyone got their big payday. But a lot ### Hype Cycles [3:30] of times they succeed and they do it without ever actually producing anything of value. Vacc Ramaswami's story is a wild example of how you can make a fortune without producing anything useful. He bought the rights to an Alzheimer's drug that had already failed clinical trials. He rebranded it and sold investors on his vision, raising over a billion dollars. So once again, are these investors stupid? Sometimes yes, but not always. These people are just responding rationally to a system that rewards confidence in the face of uncertainty. Most investors already know a lot of the companies they back are going to fail. So, what they really need is a story big enough to justify the risk and a personality fanatical and confident enough to make that story feel like it's inevitable. I've been in rooms with billionaires when pitches like this happen. It's all basic sales psychology. I'll pretend to be Vivvec pitching his terrible idea and I'll highlight all the tactics on screen that he probably used. Hey, how are you doing today? You contacted me a while ago requesting information when new opportunities come up. I'm finally getting back to you because I've just acquired rights to a drug called Ineparddine. It's a latestage Alzheimer's treatment that has massive upside potential in one of the largest medical markets on Earth. I wanted to tell you first because this is exactly the kind of asymmetric opportunity savvy investors like you are looking for. Now, I know what you're thinking. Didn't I just buy the rights to this drug from somebody else? And didn't it fail the clinical trials? But that's exactly the beauty of it. Some other big pharma company spent millions on the research so we don't have to. And we acquired the patent for pennies on the dollar. These big bureaucratic pharma companies leave gold sitting on the table because they can't move fast enough to see what our MIT researchers do. And the real opportunity here is bigger than one drug. We've developed a scalable business model for identifying these overlooked compounds and unlocking billions in value before the rest of the market catches up. Your profits on a small $30 million investment could be upwards of $3 billion. Now look, I know this sounds crazy, but based on every technical factor out there, we are looking at the biggest pharmaceutical innovation in decades. So, how much would you like to invest? I'm going to be speaking with Sequoia Capital and A16Z later this afternoon. So, I would advise locking in your investment sooner rather than later. And really, that's the whole trick. When these guys pitch, they're selling you the feeling that you're getting in early on something that nobody else sees. And that's how you raise billions of dollars with a terrible product. And look, I get it. You might be thinking that would never work. But the thing is, Vivvec did raise over a billion dollars on a failed Alzheimer's treatment. I've been in the room when these deals happen, and Vivc's pitch probably did sound a lot like what I said. By the way, every time I say something bad about an investor or one of these companies, I'm pretty much destroying my future career prospects and design. That's what this little counter is for. It's my real-time future income loss meters. So, don't forget to subscribe. I'm going to need it. Vivc didn't actually make anything. He didn't even develop the failed drug on his own. He bought the patent for cheap and sold other people on the vision. He ended up cashing out with nearly $40 million. When the drug failed clinical trials a second time, the stock collapsed by about 75% in a single day. Some public investors, including pension funds, were left eating that loss. But Ramaswami was more insulated from that fallout because most of his investment was not in Axovant, the main company. It was in his related company called Royant. Today, Vivec's net worth is $2. 4 billion. And that's the real pattern. The product doesn't really need to succeed. The story just needs to hold long enough for the right people to get rich before reality sets in. The early industrialists of the 20th century were awful and exploitative, don't get me wrong, but at least they actually made things that improved people's lives. Henry Ford's company manufactured the Model T, one of the most revolutionary designs of its time, and it was a legitimate technological jump. Now, make no mistake, cars have huge downsides. But at least he actually made a real thing that was a distinct marker on the scope of human progress. These days, it's just people hyping up speculative investments, promising they're going to change the world, and then failing miserably to deliver. All they're doing is shuffling money around. They haven't actually produced anything. Making good products is hard, and you don't need a good product or even a sustainable business to make money in Silicon Valley. You just need to convince people with money that you'll have a sustainable business sometime in the distant future. Now look, I know this video is incredibly cynical. So, I just want to say not all of Silicon Valley and startup culture is like this. I live here and there are a lot of people here ### AnyDesk Sponsored Ad Spot [8:20] who I really deeply admire. They are genuinely trying to make things better and there are some really great companies out there that actually provide a useful service. One example is Anyesk and that's why they're sponsoring today's video. If you're a designer, creative, or editor working across multiple devices, Anyesk might be the best tool you're not using yet. I've been integrating it into my workflow, and it's kind of a gamecher. With Anyesk, I can remotely access my editing rig from my laptop. The connection is so fast and responsive, it feels like I'm right there in my office. And it works on Windows, Mac OS, and all these other platforms, too. And because Anyesk uses a proprietary codec, the image quality stays sharp even in remote areas or on spotty Wi-Fi. Audio pass through means I can scrub and edit YouTube videos remotely. And thanks to the 99. 98% uptime. I know I can rely on it. The direct file transfers are also really useful. No more cloud uploading, no more waiting to sync. I can move raw footage, project files, whatever I need straight from device to device instantly and securely. If your workflow lives across many devices or locations, Anyesk brings it all together seamlessly. It's free for personal use. And if you've got a team, they offer tailored business plans. Thanks to Anyesk for sponsoring this video. Download Anyesk for free today using my link in the description. Back to the video. Generating wealth has ### To The Moon! [9:39] become completely untethered from meeting human needs. Normally, a stock's price is more or less aligned with what the company produces. But the wealthiest person in the world has a company that runs on inventing stories and hype about how amazing he's going to make the future with no plan for how he's going to achieve it. This strategy makes perfect sense if you think about it. Concrete, measurable value has limits. You can't really argue or speculate on how many units you sold last quarter or easily fake your price to earnings ratio, but a story has infinite upside. The only limit is your imagination. The line can only go up. ### Burn Rate [10:15] And that's how we ended up with millennial direct to consumer products. They're basically just regular products that are sold directly to an end customer, bypassing any middleman. The beauty of these products is that you don't actually have to produce anything new. Just slap some buzzwords on an existing product. Here's what I mean. We're not a luggage company. We're deploying a frictionless modular infrastructure for the global nomad. We're not making wool shoes. We're leveraging the proprietary material science to architect a carbon negative movement towards a better future. We don't sell stationary bikes. We're a media company and one of the most innovative global technology platforms of our time. And there goes a bunch more of my income. Add that to the meter. But anyway, you just need a fanatical speaker, ideally with weird hair. And don't forget to add a statement about how your technology is going to save the world. Because wealthy investors could borrow money basically for free during this time period, they started investing in riskier and riskier companies. It got to a point where you could pitch any idiotic idea and get money. A bed desk toilet hybrid so you can stay in one place all day. Funded. Uber Eats but for strippers. Sure, why not? A small robot with a personality of Larry David that follows you around. Honestly, I kind of like that one. Social media, but it's only for horses. Boom. Funded. a dystopian surveillance apparatus that strips us of our privacy and personal agency. That one's actually real. It's called Palanteer. The great Peter Teal had something to do with that one. Anything to add, Peter? — Look, I I'm not um you know, without um going into all the det, you know, I — Okay, never mind. Here's what Zer got us. Products that all follow the exact same formula, and it is a formula. Oh, and by the way, these companies are absolutely never hiring me for design work now. So, please enjoy the future income loss meter falling in real time. Once again, don't forget to support me on Patreon. Millennial DTC products are one homogeneous group of inoffensive designs meant for maximum market penetration. Notice how they all share the same minimal aesthetic. They say nothing about us or our lives other than the fact that we love passive consumption. Anthropologist Mark Oay talks about non-places like airports, hotel lobbies, and shopping malls. They're places we simply pass through to get from point A to point B with no meaningful connection to our lives. Now look at the $700 cookware set by Carowway. It's a nonplace in product form. They're designed to fit in any kitchen in the world from Brazil to Bristol. They don't suggest any sort of cultural heritage or personality because they're trying to appeal to the widest demographic possible. This is the case with pretty much any Millennial DTC product. Now compare those pots with this. These cultural objects carry a history and they tell a story you learn. so much about what a culture values just by looking at them or watching someone cook with them. In contrast, these products aren't usually very good. They often fall in this weird middle ground where they're not awful but also not great but somehow feel a tiny bit elevated. Venates Ralph calls it premium mediocre. He gives us some examples. The finest bottle of wine at Olive Garden. Cupcakes and fro yo truffle oil on anything. Extra leg room seats in economy. It's often something designed to look good on Instagram above everything else. The point was never to make a good product. You see, during the Zerp funding era, getting engagement on Instagram was a better show of profit than actual profit. So, they put a lot of emphasis on a nice unboxing experience. And because most of these startups were online businesses in some way, they could capture your data to optimize their marketing funnel. Even your Casper mattress received millions of dollars in funding by promising investors they could track your sleep data and use it to sell you more stuff. ### Scale up [13:48] Picture this. It's 2016. You hop in a $6 Uber to your Airbnb that only cost 30 bucks a night. You drown out the sound of people arguing on the street below with a new Spotify playlist. It was a good day. You get home just in time for your Door Dash delivery to arrive. All that food was only $4. 99. Now you can sit back and binge watch Netflix so you can forget about your boring desk job till tomorrow. Life is good. Too bad it was all a fever dream. The zero interest rate policy allowed investors to subsidize our lives for a decade. It was informally called the millennial lifestyle subsidy. Let's say you order an Uber for $6. That was only possible because the actual cost was $12. Half of your fair was being paid by venture capital investors in an attempt to put the taxi industry out of business. Uber is now another company that will never work with me. But anyway, it's a strategy known as blit scaling. Venture-backed companies blast all the headlines with their product launch. They scoop up all the best developers and they buy all the ads before their competitors. It's growth at all costs. You spend billions of dollars choking out the competition. And once they're all gone, you jack up your prices. Cory Doctoro and Rebecca Giblin call it chokepoint capitalism. And it's shaped like an hourglass. At the top are the service providers. In the case of Uber, that's the taxi drivers. At the bottom are the customers who need rides. The whole game is for companies to jam themselves into that narrow middle until they become the only real way the two can connect. Once you've starved out your competitors, nobody can avoid using your service. So, you choke out both sides. You can charge customers more and pay workers less. Whoever can afford to lose money for longer becomes the choke point AND WINS. THIS IS WHAT THE homogenized group of millennial DTC products are trying to do. They also lock you in on a subscription so you never really own anything and end up paying more for that subscription over time than you would if you just bought the product outright. In his book, Inshitification, Dr. O explains how these platforms lure us in with extremely low offers intended to trap us. But now that everything's full price again, plus inflation, it's clear that Ubers aren't any better than cabs. Airbnbs don't make vacations cheaper. And basically any optimism we felt for the past 15 years was a lie. We're all trapped on the same four or five websites that dominate the internet. As Brad Trol puts it, the millennial lifestyle subsidy didn't convince anyone that they were rich. It just helped us pretend we weren't poor. By the way, I know this is getting extremely depressing, but I promise there is a silver lining at the end of this video. So anyway, those ultra low prices got people in the door. Now that they have us captured, the real machine kicked in. ### Brand Safe [16:23] Optimization. They need to keep us in the salesunnel. Every part of the interface is designed to remove friction and encourage thoughtless automatic spending. The goal is to make buying feel so seamless that it barely feels like you're making a decision at all. Design becomes more about extraction rather than beauty or care or reflection. You see this in the hyperoptimized interfaces, the simplistic sterile products, and even the illustration styles that these companies use. Just like all millennial DTC products started to share the same look, tech company illustrations have started to look eerily similar as well. These race-free, gender fluid, geometric characters with pool noodle arms represent everyone and no one at the same time. It's all about maximum accessibility for maximum market penetration. And through that process, it erases all cultural identity and uniqueness. The style is called corporate Memphis. And these bright, happy monsters hide what's really going on beneath the surface. Big tech wants to keep painting a picture of a happy collective utopia when really they often do the opposite of furthering humanity and human progress. Let's check in on our favorite legendary investor and founder, Peter Teal, and see what he has to say about humanity. You would prefer the human race to endure, right? — Uh, — you're hesitating. — Well, I — Yes. — I don't know. I would I would um — This is a long hesitation. There's a long hesitation or look at Justin Kang's art. He parodies the inoffensive corporate art style, but applies it to infamous historical photos like the terror of war or the burning monk. These are photos so horrific that I can't even share them on YouTube. The irony is that you literally can't express the hurt and danger of the most horrific photos ever taken when they're adapted to be in the corporate Memphis style. The only emotion that you can express is happy obedience. That's what makes this style so insidious. It removes danger from ideas by sanding off the edges. But sometimes startups will do the opposite. ### Attention Hacking [18:27] Last year, Friend AI became the laughing stock of the internet. It's an AI chatbot that pretends to be your friend. Needless to say, people thought the idea of having an imaginary AI friend was incredibly dystopian. There are currently over 3,000 comments on the video, and most of them are very negative. The internet was outraged, but in my opinion, that was exactly the point. I've worked with the production company that made this commercial. They're extremely sharp and deliberate with their messaging. Every shot is considered. They likely spent months developing this ad. Nothing is left to chance. Watching awkward moments like this is deeply intentional. I believe. Notice the distance, the slightly far away framing, the weird silences, the off-kilter vibe where people are near each other but not really connecting. All of it creates this feeling that you can't quite name, which is exactly why it sticks in your mind. If it feels socially corrosive, that's because they're selling something socially corrosive. The ad is leaning into that discomfort to provoke your engagement. What makes campaigns like this so slippery is that the discomfort is rarely obvious enough to prove. The awkward ey lines, the dead air, the faintly distant framing all live just below the threshold of certainty. You can't tell if they're trolling you or not. Antisocial products need antisocial marketing. So, if the product promotes isolation, surveillance, and emotional outsourcing, or socially hollow behavior, the ad can't hide any of that. There may be no way to honestly film an AI imaginary friend pendant without it looking uncomfortable. And the production company who made this ad probably recognized that immediately. So rather than hiding that feeling, they normalized it. And some of the ad choices push even further. The final scene of two people on a date feels intentionally uncomfortable. They're together but never really looking at each other at the same time. There's no way this was accidental, at least in my opinion. All of this is by design, I think. And that's because Friend was never marketing to everyone. The company was most likely marketing to investors in order to raise the next round of funding. And the people who genuinely want an AI chatbot pendant are a tiny self- selecting group. They're terminally online and probably lonely. So, the company only needed to attract the small slice of people weird enough to find this thing compelling. Look at all these negative comments. This looks bad, but rage is still a form of engagement and arguably the best kind. Rage and perceived injustice are great ways to trigger action. That means commenting, sharing, texting a friend, or sharing a post about it. The worst thing you can do is react publicly and emotionally because that's exactly what they want. Outrage spreads the ad and tells the algorithm, "This thing matters. They don't want your approval. They just need your knee-jerk response and they're profiting from your disgust. " To put it simply, friend is trolling us. Now, to be fair, you could argue that I'm feeding the troll by even talking about this, but I think there's a difference between amplifying the outrage versus analyzing the mechanism so that you don't fall for it again the next time it happens. For right now, the strategy works. Later on, the founder, Avi Schiffman, doubled down and spent a million dollars buying up all the New York City subway ad space. His response told us everything. He called the hate entertaining. Public disgust is no longer being processed as moral rejection, but a proof that the campaign is working. They need your attention. — We used to colonize land. That was the thing you could expand into, and that's where money was to be made. We colonized the entire earth. There was no other place for the businesses and capitalism to expand into. And then they realized human attention. They are now trying to colonize every minute of your life. That is what these people are trying to do. Getting covered by every tech outlet, culture podcast, and angry Reddit thread is millions in earned media. If you get enough attention, a tiny fraction of people will buy almost anything. And more importantly, investors equate influence and engagement with eventual profitability at some point in the nondescript future, even though the product is often socially corrosive and dystopian. But friend isn't the only AI ### Vaporware? [22:27] pin in town. Rabbit R1 had one of the most compelling tech launches in years. The bright orange body, the scroll wheel, the rotating camera, and the little rabbit icon all felt playful and strange and futuristic in a way most consumer electronics just aren't anymore. And the pitch was even better. It was a new kind of device powered by a large action model or LAM. Basically, it was an AI that was supposed to understand what you wanted and take actions on your behalf. So, let's just say you want to call an Uber. In theory, you just speak to it and it would order the Uber for you without you needing to dig through apps on your phone. The vision was incredibly seductive because it implied the beginning of a different relationship with technology. We could finally escape our smartphones and people bought into the vision. Rabbit reportedly sold more than 130,000 units. The problem is that the actual product fell disastrously short of that promise. Early reviewers found it to be nowhere near the revolutionary assistant implied by the marketing. The scroll wheel that looked so cool in the launch video ended up feeling much worse than just a regular touchcreen. It was slow, awkward, and the large action model was barely there in any meaningful sense. That's what makes Rabbit such a perfect Silicon Valley product. It sold the feeling of the future without delivering the reality. The launch video made it look like a new category of technology. What shift felt more like a prop from that story. The Rabbit R1 still went on to raise another $10 million in spite of all of that because once again, all that really matters is attention. To Rabbit's credit, I will say this. More recently, the company did continue working on the product and improved it. And while it's still really far from perfect, and many believe it falls way short of what was originally promised years ago, at least they're trying. A healthy market should reward trust and usefulness. But for a lot of these startups, the product doesn't need to be useful at all. What matters is whether it can generate traffic, discourse, and memes, which leads to investor excitement. So instead of asking how do we build something people genuinely want, companies end up asking, "How do we create a reaction strong enough to keep the scheme going? " The more crowded and desperate the market gets, the more pressure there is to manipulate the feelings of the public. That's the real business model here. Take emotional volatility and find a way to convert it into money. It's just this loose web of incentives pushing everyone in a similar direction. Founders want growth. Investors want returns. Platforms want engagement. Agencies want more money. It's a machine that keeps rewarding manipulation, even if almost nobody inside it fully understands or controls the whole thing. The truth is, nobody's really driving any of this. These founders love to posture as high agency visionaries, but most of the time they're extremely obedient to their investors expectations. They try to appear rebellious, but the ultimate irony is that the people preaching personal agency and independence are often the most enthusiastic servants of this machine. Plus, at a certain scale of ### Polycule [25:16] wealth, normal reality becomes boring. So, the super rich start to venture into the uncanny and the grotesque. Their perspective is completely warped by the system, and they begin to seek out more novel experiences. So, when you see these investors putting their money on weird AI pins, it's almost like they're buying tickets to witness a weird social experiment. People have always been fascinated by the perverse and the inhuman and the spectacle of watching a distorted reality play out from a safe distance. These products can function like little windows into that twisted world. You break this cycle by refusing the frame. Stop asking whether one founder is cringe or evil and start asking what kind of system keeps rewarding companies for making manipulative garbage. Once you can identify that, the whole scheme loses its luster. Every few years, Silicon ### "Disruption" [26:05] Valley proudly announces that it's created a new paradigm in transportation. The music swells, the lights go down, a billionaire walks on stage and unveils some glossy object from the future. And then you look at it for two seconds and realize, guys, you made a bus. That's just a bus, but more complicated and worse. Silicon Valley's dumbest products are just trying to overwrite older, less glamorous systems that already have been proven to do a better job. But if you rebrand a bus as an autonomous self-driving robo van, I guess some investors see potential profit. And there goes Tesla. Add that to the future income loss meter. So anyway, public transit is boring, but it also moves huge numbers of people safely, cheaply, and with far less chaos than trying to turn every street into a privatized rolling software experiment. And that's the real issue here. These are social and infrastructural problems being awkwardly framed as tech problems. Sometimes I'm not even sure what problems these things solve. So, let's ask an expert, Elon, what problem is anyone actually solving with self-driving cars? uh sort of um so I think what what — he was probably going to say safety but that argument is shaky. Road safety has improved for decades mostly through things like regulation enforcement better road design and safer cars. Whether cars are autonomous or driven by humans they still need that same massive infrastructure like roads signals rules and enforcement. Putting an extra layer of fragile, expensive, constantly updated software infrastructure on top of that is insane to me. Maybe it helps traffic, but self-driving cars may not solve that either. If average vehicle occupancy is barely above one person per vehicle, the idea that adding giant fleets of unoccupied autonomous vehicles driving around is going to reduce congestion feels laughable. Maybe it's freedom from car ownership, but we already have simpler tools for that. just walk or use public transit or ride a bike or take a taxi. Once again, what problem are we actually solving here with this? If you remove the driver, you're probably going to get a tech company trying to dominate the category, wipe out alternatives, and extract more value once everyone's trapped, just like they always do. Whoever owns that fleet is going to be the one who keeps those savings. That's why so much of this future has no real social benefit. Framing a social problem as a technology problem allows investors and companies to profit off these essential services. That's why self-driving cars, Mars colonies, humanoid robots, and immortality tech all tend to travel together in the same imagination. There are very real human problems that need to be solved. But Silicon Valley is more interested in comic book fantasies for people who think reality is beneath them. On that note, let's check in on how much money some of the billionaires have made for the time this video has been running. And let's look at how much future income I've lost by trashtalking every single company in Silicon Valley. Don't forget to leave a like. There's this constant claim that they want to disrupt things and change the world. But disrupt what? And change the world for the benefit of who exactly? We already have plenty of resources, tools, and technology. What we lack is political will, coordination, trust, public investment, and functioning institutions. That's a social failure more than a technological one. we could never win an election on um on re on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority. But maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you through a technological means. Technology is the vehicle for how we should um we should be looking to uh to escape and move beyond uh beyond politics as we find it today. That's why these products often feel so unbearably arrogant. The assumption is always the same. Clearly, if this problem still exists, it must be because nobody smart enough has touched it yet. It's like they think everybody's waiting for some tech CEO to finally show up and fix them and save the day. These tech bros live in a sheltered bubble. They have no idea what they're talking about a lot of the time. I'm speaking from personal experience. They have very little understanding of humans, history, institutions, or the humanities. So, everything starts to look like an engineering waiting for an app to them. Sometimes the real frontier is looking at an old system and admitting that maybe the answer is not to blow it up and wrap it in software. Maybe the answer is to maintain and regulate it and accept that the best solution might be boring and impossible for one company to own. I get it. That's not a compelling founder pitch, but it is very often the truth. Now, to be clear, I think there is incredible value in creating revolutionary designs and completely changing the paradigm. It's okay to fail spectacularly at trying to achieve that. I've co-founded startups that didn't go anywhere. There's also nothing wrong with making speculative concept designs. I absolutely love sci-fi concept art. The problem is that they pretend they're changing the world while recycling old ideas and making them worse. But really, I think this ### p(doom) [31:00] compulsive urge to escape into the future comes from somewhere deeper. Just a few months before the 2020 lockdowns, I did a design critique on the Cybert truck and said this. Why would you want to make our world look apocalyptic and deadly before we've even gotten there? And now here we are. — Oh, WOW. The Cybert truck is one of the clearest symbols of what Silicon Valley has become. Not all of Silicon Valley, obviously, but there is something deeply antisocial in this design. It looks like an indestructible tank built for suburbia, but in reality, it's incredibly flimsy and totally impractical. It has the aesthetics of something you drive in a post-apocalyptic hellscape where the driver sits inside their faceted tomb, sealed off from the rest of the world. It says nothing about openness, elegance, or community. All it communicates is hostility and distrust for the world outside its flimsy metal shell. But underneath all that machismo and brutal confidence is fear. It's a giant steel bubble for people who are terrified of sharing a world with people they don't understand. The crazy thing is that the vehicle isn't even good on its own terms. Just like the people who drive it, the Cybertruck is fundamentally out of step. It's horribly impractical and it doesn't even function as a truck. It's a visual eyesore. It doesn't even meet modern safety standards in Europe and the UK. Just like so much of Silicon Valley, it's all theater without any substance. The Cybertruck represents an ideology of fake futurism, completely devoid of substance or nuance. The fantasy is the point. To quote the New York Times, "The Cybertruck is a culture war on wheels. " The article goes on to say, "They feel like they don't recognize the society they are in anymore, so they built a shell to survive it. " Fascism has always thrived on two things: fear and exclusion. The Cybertruck provides both at a starting price of $80,000. Most great cars have a certain sensual beauty to them, but the Cybertruck is what happens when technology stops aspiring to improve society. And that same fear is all over Silicon Valley. Beneath all ### Redemption [33:11] that shallow confidence and techno optimism, there's fear. I've talked to many people in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and I know how real it is. Everyone is scrambling to get on top of the heat before the ladder gets pulled up and they become part of what they call the permanent underclass. They're terrified. They feel pressure from a boot pushing down on their neck and they're suffocating. And instead of pulling the boot off entirely, too many of them decide the only way out is to become the next person wearing it. That is the logic underneath so many of these Silicon Valley tech rifts. Panic. They're clamoring to dominate because they're afraid of becoming obsolete and irrelevant. If they don't get rich fast enough, they'll be the ones choking on the ground. I completely reject that. It's cowardly. I reject the idea that the future belongs to whoever can be the most cynical and extractive. This was never what Silicon Valley was supposed to be about. For all its flaws, the early mythology of this place was tied to the idea that technology could democratize access to information. The open-source movement was collaborative by nature. People were valued by what they contributed to a community, not just for how effectively they could squeeze everyone beneath them. So, I'm not ending this video in despair. I know so many incredible people here who genuinely want to make things better, but they're swimming upstream in a culture dominated by fear. We need to support each other. So, if anything in this video resonated with you, reach out to me. I don't care if you just graduated or you're the biggest founder in the Bay Area. If you want to work with me or you just want to talk and compare notes, let's figure out how to build something better. The future is not just something that's imposed on us. It's still something we can fight for. I spent over a year and a half thinking about this video, and it's honestly one of my personal favorites. If you like these videos and you want to help build a place where design and culture is discussed with depth and honesty, then consider supporting me on Patreon. You can sign up for a few dollars a month, and as a show of thanks, you get early access to my videos, plus a behind-the-scenes commentary video. I want to give a huge shout out to my patrons on Patreon. I sincerely appreciate your support. I couldn't do this without you. I also want to thank all my friends who helped me with this video and especially my parents who encouraged me to actually post it. I hope you learned something and have a great day.