Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech. And there is an increasing amount of conversation around the concept of the metaverse, which is pretty amusing because there's no real definition of what a metaverse is or will be. But generally speaking, most versions I've seen revolve around some combination of virtual reality or VR and augmented reality or a R implementations that allow for a persistent and pervasive integration of digital and physical realities. How's that for some consultant marketing speak. Now, some versions lean way more on the VR side and suggest that the next phase of the Internet will be made up of virtual spaces and people roaming around as avatars. By the way, that is an idea that has been around for a long time, with folks kind of thinking of this as a sort of web three point oh for ages. Heck, you watch movies where people are accessing the Internet, especially from like the nineties, like the late nineties, and it almost always was envisioned as you know, navigating through a virtual three dimensional space, even though that's not how any of us really interface with the Internet, so it's interesting that this still is is launching onto that idea. However, what all of this has really reminded me of is the concept of the hype cycle, which is not a super enthusiastic two wheeled vehicle. It's, you know, kind of a concept here. It's um the hype cycle, or more properly Gartner's hype cycle, because it's from the research company Gardner. It's a way to describe the stages that a concept or technology goes through from ideation, as in the first announcement of the tech, not just the thinking of it, but even just the expression of what attack might do, all the way to actual realization and adoption. It's not a straight path. In fact, it's got very curvy. If you look at a graphic of the hype cycle, it's almost always shown as a curve. It starts off low, peaks up, slopes down, dramatically bottoms out, and then slowly grows from there. That's that's how it always looks. So it's a journey that includes diversions into overenthusiastic expectations and some trips over into the mundane reality that tech can settle into. But we're going to explore all those various key moments shortly. First, let's learn a little bit about where this came from. So back in a market analyst named Jackie Fen created the hype cycle concept by observing the typical phases that technologies tend to go through. Now, to be clear, this has little to do with the capabilities of the tech itself. I mean that does tie into it, but it has more to do with the general perception of the tech. So you can think of it like buzz or excitement. And while there are a lot of examples of tech going through these phases, it's not exactly a law or anything like that. It's more like these are trends that we see pop up frequently, right, It's it's a pattern that we've seen repeat itself. So there are five phases in the hype cycle. We start off with what is called the technology trigger. This is when a tech which can be hardware, or it could be software, or it could be a service, it could be any combination of those things. It just has to be new. This is when it first launches in some way. And by launches, I don't necessarily mean you actually get a physical product that rolls out or an actual service that you can subscribe to right at the get go. Instead, there's some form of announcement. It might be a demonstration, or it might be, you know, something similar along those lines that alerts people that this technology exists. I think of the mother of all demos, uh, something that we often hear about, where things like graphical user interfaces and the first computer mouse were really shown off to you know, a wider audience. That's sort of an example of a technology trigger. If you want to think of something a little more recent, although still in our past, think of the old Apple press events where Steve Jobs would introduce his one more Thing. It was typically something brand new from Apple. Now, I should point out that an Apple's case, we were mostly talking about technology that had already been in some form of existence from other companies, and Apple really just went in and refined it and made it, you know, aesthetically pleasing, and we're able to market it properly. But you know, this is an event that tells the world, hey, we've got something neat over here and you should check it out. Now. In these early stages, it's not unusual for the creators of the technology to promote the heck out of it, you know, hiring PR firms and marketing firms to really push this out, even if that technology has a very limited use case or doesn't actually work yet. So, for example, you could argue eight K televisions are somewhere in this phase right now because a K TVs have been around for a bit, it's not like they're brand new. However, there's not really any native eight K content you can get on those TVs. So you've got televisions that are technically capable of playing ultra ultra high definition video, but you have a lack of actual video content that meets that level of resolution. So you've got something that's able to show you this incredible picture, you just don't have any of the content that has that built into it. Now, you could argue that eight K t V s are actually a bit further along the hype cycle than where I'm talking about right now, because most of them can actually upscale lower definition video and boost it so it looks better. Meanwhile, eight K t V s are marketed toward home theater enthusiasts who like to get out their set up with the most advanced tech available in the space people who make way more money than I do. In other words, typically the goal for creators at this stage is to talk of the tech so that investors become interested in it and they will start to pour some money into the efforts to keep things going. So this can be a really tense waiting game because you need the cash to flow in to operate until a market develops that can support the technology. But that also means that you have to convince the investors that there will be a market for the tech at some point, even if there isn't one at that very moment. So our starting point is the technology trigger. So if you imagine, you know, a graph, and the X axis is marked as time, So the further to the right you go, the more time has passed, and the y axis is marked in expectations. So the higher up on the y axis you are, the higher expectations are for this tech. Well, the tech trigger would be our starting point. It would be at the beginning of our time axis, and it wouldn't be very high up on expectations. From there, however, we ramp up expectations dramatically in a relatively short amount of time. This is where I would argue we are in the metaverse conversation right now. We're thinking about possibilities with companies like meta Slash Facebook really pushing this concept super hard and investing huge amounts of money and dedicating enormous teams toward developing stuff that people can actually use. Along the way, we might see some early implementations of technology, this particular tech, whether it's metaverse or something else. But typically the implementations we see during this this early phase after the technology trigger, they're really limited, and if they're actually available at all to consumers, they're really really expensive. This is when bleeding edge early adopters might jump in, and we've seen this with lots of tech over the years. I remember when CD players first hit the market, compact discs, y'all, I'm old. When compact disc players first hit the market, they were prohibitively expensive for many people. I mean, they were hundreds and hundreds of dollars, and keep in mind that with inflation that would probably be more than a thousand dollars today, so it was way too expensive for people like yours. Truly. I remember I didn't get my first CD player, which was actually a little portable CD player until years after they had been on the market because they were just too expensive. Now, without early adopters, most technology, particularly hardware, wouldn't go anywhere, Investors would lose confidence in the tech, and companies wouldn't be able to scale up to produce stuff at a a scale where they could bring prices down. Now, according to the Gartner hype cycle, around the time early adopters start exploring tech is when mass media really starts to pick up the story and run with it and thus push the hype further. Then we reached the top of this climb at you know where the hype cycle calls it the peak of inflated expectations. So this is like the top of the first hill in your classic out and back roller coaster. It's the highest point that you're ever going to hit. And as the name suggests, this is when people have the highest expectations for the tech will be able to do. Uh, these are expectations that are likely not going to be borne out by the technology itself. Now, I can think of no better example of a tech that went through this particular phase in a way that was incredibly apparent than virtual reality. In fact, I could argue that it's done this a couple of times now. But back in the very late eighties early nineties, the early stages of VR had the world anticipating an entirely new experience with computing. We would all be immersed in computer virtual worlds, and it's a narrative that we're seeing repeated today with the metaverse discussions. And there was a lot of exciting R and D in the field of VR at this time. It's just that our technical capabilities were fairly primitive compared to what people were imagining. We had movies and TV shows come out that centered on this premise of an unbelievably immersive virtual experience, one that in some cases would literally pull you into a virtual world. And even this idea was preceded by films like Tron, which came out before the VR craze had even begun. But then folks got a chance to actually experience VR for themselves. I remember a VR arcade opened up in a mall not too far from where I lived, and so I went and paid I think it was like five bucks for five minutes in order to experience it. The actual graphics in the world were beyond primitive, everything consisted of very simple polygons. I played a game called Dactyl Nightmare, infamous in VR circles. This was way back in the day like uh and Dactyl, by the way, means like like Pterodactyl because there was a a quote unquote pterodactyl flying around, a bunch of polygons flying around that could occasionally pick you up and drop you. It was an interesting example of VR capabilities, but it was far from a sophisticated experience, and I really recommend going on YouTube and searching videos of it if you're interested. Just remember that it's an experience that came out in n anyway. The point I'm making is that the expectation of what VR would be and the reality of what it was that was a huge disconnect. As a result, people lost interest in VR pretty quickly, and that loss of interest had a devastating effect on the VR research industry. Organizations that had previously enjoyed financial support found themselves scrounging for money. Some programs had to shut down entirely as folks decided that their money might be better spent on other pursuits, other investments. The VR industry as a whole almost died. Some departments that were exploring VRS use and stuff like medical treatments were reduced to hacking together VR systems from video game peripherals in order to make it work. Devices like the Nintendo Power Glove or the PlayStation I or the Microsoft Connect. We're all to varying degrees failures in the gaming space, but the VR industry took those tools, altered them, and made use of them. We'll explore more of the hype cycle in just a moment, but first let's take this quick break. So VR had entered the third phase of the hype cycle. We were at the technology trigger, we were at the peak of inflated expectations, and then we start to enter the trough of disillusionment. I love the names for these phases, by the way. It makes me think of things like the Pit of Despair from The Princess Bride. But yeah, the trough of disillusionment. So between the peak of inflated expectations and the trough of disillusionment is a decline that in most versions of the hype cycle. It's just as steep as the climb up to the peak of inflated expectations and almost as long like you almost go down as far as when you first announced the technology. UM. In most versions of this cycle, that's not necessarily indicative of what every technology goes through, but that's typically how it's how it's illustrated. UM. Along the way between that peak and that trough, you start encountering things like negative press as the media begins to criticize the tech for not living up to expectations. Now, this is rich and hypocritical, and I think most of the press is not blind to the fact that the press contributes to inflated expectations. Right. It's part of the press covering the stuff that builds up the hype and enthusiasm, and then that same press reaps the reward of throwing shade at a technology once it fails to meet those heightened expectations. So, in other words, the press benefits on both sides of this curve. And I mean that's typically where the press does its best work, right in the sense of where they get the most cash. They end up making a lot of getting a lot of attention by hyping things up, and then a lot of attention by tearing things down up And then once you get past that, you know you're still gonna get coverage, but it won't be nearly as sensational as that part of the hype cycle. So this decline is also when you start to see companies that had begun to pop up during the climb, you know, companies that were specializing either in the technology or producing something that was tangential or connected to that technology. You start to see the number of companies decrease. There's the sort of fade away by the number of players in the space. So there's also a lot of consolidation in this stage as well, where smaller companies will end up merging together because they wouldn't be able to survive on their own. Sometimes they're not able to survive even after they merge, and they still, you know, they still fail. I'm reminded of the dot com craze leading up to two thousand. I was also those before. I was working at how Stuff Works, but I was working at a consulting firm and a lot of our our clients were in the dot com space. Well, the during the heyday business was great, but then you hit two thousand and two thousand one and things took a dramatic turn. We saw so many web based companies appear up to that point, a lot of which you know, had tons of investments, like ludicrous amounts of venture capital pouring into them, even when they had no real business plan to support the organization. And then the market shifted in two thousand and again in two thousand one, particularly after the attacks on nine eleven, and a lot of those companies weren't able to survive this shifting market, this declining market, and the web as a whole kind of entered the trough of disillusionment as people began to realize that the gold rush days of the web really weren't going to pay off, at least not at this crazy return on investment that people had anticipated. Now typically around the trough, only a small percentage of the text potential customer base has actually adopted the technology, so we haven't really gone beyond early adopters yet. We're talking less than ten percent of the potential market, maybe less than five of the potential market, even having bought into the tech at this point. But on the flip side, when you hit rock bottom, there's nowhere left to go but up, unless you can't rebound at all, in which case you go nowhere like you just stop existing. But let's talk about the tech that manages to weather this storm in the hype cycle. Now, around this time is when we typically start to see a new generation of products or services based in and around this technology. So the first generation will have taught folks what works, what doesn't work, and what could work better. So ideally the second generation of products will be built upon that knowledge and address the flaws and accentuate the things that made the tech appealing in the first place, to make better versions. In other words, So now we start to enter the fourth phase. This is called the slope of enlightenment, or as I typeoed in my notes, the slop of enlightenment, which just sounds like something that pigs would really enjoy, very thoughtful pigs. Now it's the slope of enlightenment. This is when people actually figure out what the tech is good for. Now it maybe that has uses that were never anticipated during the initial hype phase of this technology, and that while the real tech can't live up to the grandiose promus is of stuff that we heard about during the peak of inflated expectations, the stuff it can do might still be really compelling. Now that realization might come from the creators of the tech themselves. It's actually possible that it's what they had in mind the whole time, but the hype got away from them, right. They might have said this will be very good for X, but during the hype phase, the early phase, it's promoted as X to the tenth power times a billion, and that's not what the creators were ever claiming. That can happen sometimes the realization actually comes from outside the creators, with folks figuring out really cool uses of this technology that the creators had never even really intended. Now, again, this makes me think of the Microsoft Connect in that regard. So in case you're not familiar with these, the Connect devices were peripherals for a couple of different Xbox consoles. There were two main generations of the Microsoft Connect. They incorporated cameras, including an infrared camera, and microphones that were meant to boost the interactive capabilities of an Xbox console. So the Connect could sense depth and it could create essentially a three D map of a space, and that meant that when the Connect was paired with the right software, it could sense movement along three axes, the X, Y and Z ax s or if you prefer it could sense movement left and right, up and down, and toward and away from the camera. Now, the purpose of this peripheral was to give game developers options to create new kinds of games that would lean on those capabilities, like a fighting game where your real world motions would be translated into the game in some way. Or they could use it to create new ways to interact with the Xboxes user interface, so that you could do things like activate a game with your voice or by gesturing a certain way. But what was cool was that the AI and robotics fields began to use the connect in their projects. They began to hack the connect and make use of it. The peripheral was fairly sophisticated, but it was also affordable, so it meant that people who otherwise might not be able to get hold of the sensors that they needed to work on their projects had another option. Sadly, Microsoft never really found a way to profit from that. In fact, they kind of hamstrung attempts to make use of the Connect in this way. They made some changes to the connect that actually eliminated those use cases, or at least made them much more difficult to do, which is unfortunate because the Connect otherwise, you know, it kind of died a sad death. It never really reached full adoption by the the video game community, largely because there was a lack of support from the developer side. But the Connect could have continued a very useful life in robotics and AI. Unfortunately it just didn't turn out that way. But it's the sort of thing that can happen along the hype cycle where the hacker community figures out fun ways to use or depending on your point of view, misuse a technology. Now, gradually the technology emerges from the slope of enlightenment to hit the plateau of productivity. Now it's in this phase that the text capabilities and usefulness are well understood by the market, so it's found its place. It is likely not nearly as grand as was expected back in the early part of the hype cycle, but it also is somewhat sustainable or even profitable. Not all tech reaches the stage, mind you, Some just outright fail because the customer base never forms around it. I've got a really good example of a tech that never reached the plateau of productivity, and it is three D Television's Now when I first started working at how stuff works dot com, which I think was back in two thousand ven. Well, three D TVs were being pushed really hard by multiple companies as well as by the movie and TV studios, and there were a lot of different reasons for this. So from the artistic side, you had directors who were convinced that making films and three D would give them a new set of tools to tell their stories in a way that they had envisioned. I'm thinking primarily of folks like James Cameron and Peter Jackson. These were directors who really embraced elements of three D technology with the thought that it was a real way to enhance a story and evoke a response from the audience. And since that's what storytellers want to do, I kind of understand this. From the movie studio side, there were a couple of really big reasons to push three D TV and film. One of those big reasons is that it is way harder to pirate three D movies than two D movies. You need special cameras to capture the three D effect, you need se shoal equipment to reproduce the three D effect. And since the film and television industries have traditionally been absolutely certain that every pirated copy of a work represents a lost sale and thus lost revenue. Things that appear to help curtail piracy are highly valued. Now, I'm not gonna go into the logical fallacies behind piracy and lost sales, as that goes well beyond this discussion. But if you want to hear more about those ideas, I've got several episodes that touch on it in the archives. Anyway, the TV manufacturing companies were really behind three D tv s because you know, it created a reason for customers to go out and buy a new television. Let's face it, there are certain types of tech, like smartphones, for example, that companies have successfully marketed as a gadget that you need to replace every two to three years. Um. I think of this kind of like the directions on shampoo that's say, rents and repeat. At least I assume shampoo's still say that I haven't had hair in more than twenty years, so I don't look at shampoo bobbles anymore. There's I mean, there's just no reason right. So Anyway, the whole rents and repeat thing, I mean, do you need to rent and then repeat, well, you need to rentse, you need to get the soap out of your hair, but the repeat part probably you don't need to do that. However, it does mean that you would end up using the shampoo up twice as fast. That means you have to buy shampoo more frequently, and that means more money for big shampoo, big shampoo. It's kind of hard to set up that same kind of repeat business with folks buying television's. At least back in the day, the idea was, you know, you bought a TV and you pretty much stuck with it until it don't work no more, at which point you would either see if you could get it repaired, or you know, you would buckle down and buy a new one. In fact, that second one was, you know, sometimes preferable, because as often the repair costs would be about the same or maybe even more than buying a new TV. Now, the emergence of h D t V and the migration from analog TV to digital TV helped change that a little bit. But after h D t V came out, improvements in television were incremental or sometimes not even noticeable, like you were reduced to arguing that your television was better at reproducing colors, for example, but you couldn't otherwise show some sort of technological advantage that differentiated your TV from any of the other dozens of televisions that were coming out at that same time. So how do you create a demand for new televisions that reaches beyond the small percentage of folks who are either buying their very first TV or they're replacing, you know, a broken television. Well, you have to introduce new features, and three D was a new feature, one that companies hoped would catch on, and they pushed really hard. For about three years, you could not find a new TV in store that either wasn't three D or three D ready. It was pretty much a standard feature, and companies pushed hard to get people to adopt three D televisions. But there was a really big problem. Customers did not buy into the hype cycle, at least not like they had with other types of technology. See, most people didn't care for the idea of having to wear special glasses just to watch television, even if that TV had dynamite three D effects. It would mean having to keep track of yet more stuff, and in the case of active three D glasses, you would have to keep that stuff charged so that it works. The active three D glasses have little shutters and the lenses and they alternate, so like the left shutter is closed and the right shutter is open, and then they switch and they do this many many times a second. But in order to do that you have to actually charge the glasses. They are powered, their battery powered. So that proved to be too much for the market to bear, and adoption was low, and the skepticism in the press, particularly in the tech journalism field, was really high, and after a few years, manufacturers quietly phased out marketing three D television's. I mean that doesn't mean that there are no televisions out there that support three D these days, but rather that stopped being the feature that that companies like Panasonic and Sony were pushing. But man, they really did try and make a go of it for a few years. There was more than one c s I attended where these companies were really trying to make three D TV at talking point. So the hype cycle isn't necessarily a foregone conclusion. I'll explain more after we come back from this quick break. So not every technology is going to go through the hype cycle sequence, and certainly not every tech will ultimately reach the plateau of productivity. Some will just fade away. Uh. You know, here's the crazy thing. The merit of the technology itself doesn't necessarily play into whether it survives the hype cycle or not. There are technologies quote unquote out there that don't really do anything, that are essentially scams that make it through and become profitable and and persist. There are other technologies that arguably could be really useful that don't survive this cycle. So you have to keep in mind that surviving the hype cycle and being a good technology don't necessarily overlap perfectly. You have a much better chance of surviving the hype cycle if your technology has merit. It's just not a guarantee, and it's not a guarantee if your technology doesn't have merit that you won't survive. That's the fun thing about human beings. Some tech will enter that downward slope after they peek and never pull out the dive. Some might have a more gradual path from the point of introduction to the point where they proved to be productive, but they don't have dramatic highs and lows like it's not a technology that's considered to be so sexy that they go through the crazy hype cycle and then the trough of disillusionment. They might have a more steady path from point A to point B, with point B being the plateau of productivity. But for certain technologies, we definitely can look at how they emerged and plot them against this sort of general observation, and that brings us back to the metaverse. I would say we're still headed toward the peak of inflated expectations at this point. We're still in that initial crazy hype phase which has been pushed primarily by companies like Meta Slash Facebook. However, at least some media outlets have not butt into the hype and have not pushed that further, pushed that narrative toward that peak um and they have offered up a more level headed perspective. I would say that the tech journalism side in particular has taken a more realistic, or if you prefer, cynical view of the metaverse. I count myself in that field. By the way, when I say cynical, I'm not I'm not saying that they're wrong, because I fully agree with them. Uh, they point out that we just we don't even have a definition for what the metaverse really is. We've got a lot of competing definitions out there, so we we definitely don't have a clear path to get into the metaverse because we don't even all agree on what the metaverse is. Outlets like The Verge have published some really great pieces about this, and once you start to straight outside of tech journalism, that's where reporting can get a little more loosey goosey. You typically see this in places where the person who's presenting the piece doesn't actually have a tech background, and they're primarily repeating bullet points that might be laid out in marketing literature. This is another issue we see a lot in I mean, it's it's you can't really call it journalism at that point, right, but we see it done a lot of blogs that cover tech where the blogger is essentially regurgitating a bullet list that was presented by some PR firm to cover a technology and they're not applying any kind of critical thinking or independent research or any kind of investigative journalism to it at all. They're just presenting the bullet points practically as is, and They're just elevating that that message, which again may not be reflective of reality. Uh, and that's how they play into that hype cycle. Metaverse. I'm not seeing that as much, and I think a big part of that actually has nothing to do with the concept of the metaverse itself, but rather the growing distrust in Facebook you know now meta. So there's this growing distrust in that company and of Mark Zuckerberg in particular, and I think that is playing way more into the narrative than necessarily the concept of the metaverse itself. Uh. Even so, though even if you remove Facebook from this this entire you know equation, I'm still pretty skeptical that we're going to see a metaverse in you know, the near future. I mentioned last week in a tech News episode of Tech Stuff that there was a blog post written by Intel's Rajah Kaduri. He's the senior VP of Intel's Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics group and could dury estimates that in order to support a metaverse akin to something that you might see in science fiction like Ready Player one, that it's going to require something like a thousand times more computing power or than what we have at our disposal today that includes processing, storage, um networking infrastructure. All of that's going to have to be considerably more powerful than what we have today in order to support the version of the metaverse that a lot of people are talking about, this idea of this persistent and pervasive virtual world that ties in with our physical world in some meaningful way. We just aren't there yet. And in fact this is you know, kind of proven by the fact that most of the virtual environments that are kind of the proto version of the metaverse that we have today are incredibly limited and primitive. They might be limited to something like twenty or fewer participants in a given space. Well that's not that's not a metaverse, right, That's not what you think of when you hear the word metaverse, you do. You think of interconnected worlds that you can move in between easily and that can have hunt ards of thousands of people in it. Well, we're nowhere close to that, and so we're not likely to see a version of the metaverse that even closely resembles what's being marketed in in in the near future. Also, the VR and A r ideations of the metaverse are going to require people to invest a significant amount of money into hardware in order to access those services. You know, virtual reality has gone through the hype cycle a couple of times, like I mentioned, and there is you know, a customer base for virtual reality, but it's still pretty small. So right now, those would be the people who would arguably have the hardware that might allow them to access this, although that's not clear either. It may be that by the time we actually have a quote unquote metaverse available, the tech we have today, like the hardware like VR sets and stuff, won't be up to the task. We don't know. I mean, if you want to have an untethered experi ants, that's gonna cost you more, obviously, So that's gonna limit the audience for the metaverse to people who can afford it. So you're gonna have haves and have nots, right because they're going to be people who just can't go out and purchase a computer system and VR hardware and are hardware to be able to experience it. So you're gonna have a digital divide based on you know, economic status. Beyond that, presumably everyone who can afford it, not not all of them will be interested in it, right, Like there's gonna be people who actually could technically afford to access the metaverse who might not have any reason to do so, so they don't have any you know, impetus to get involved. So that means that the percentage of people who will want to and be able to access the metaverse will be pretty limited. It might be so limited that it doesn't go anywhere. So there are a lot of reasons to doubt that the metaverse is going to come along at least any time in the near future. It may be inevitable, but we're talking about a much longer timeline than what is typically presented to us through marketing pushes. So it's something that we need to keep in mind. I think the hype cycle, while you know it's it's again not universal. We can't apply to every single technology, not all of them participated in the hype cycle at the same pace as everything else. Right, There's some things that over the course of many years went through this process, and somewhere maybe it's over the course of a year and a half um But I think it's useful for us to think of in the in the sense of keeping ourselves grounded when something new is debuting, and to remember the promises that are being made early on may not at all come to pass, and that it's okay to be excited with new technology. It's okay to be interested in new technology. If you're an early adopter. It's okay to adopt that technology as long as you're doing so with the knowledge that it might not live up to the hype, and that could be okay. As long as there is you know, a good use case for it, then it's okay. If it doesn't live up to the hype, it's okay if it it has uh returns, they're not nearly as grand as long as everyone's willing to, you know, take that chill pill and and go forward with a more level headed approach. The issue is that we often don't see that happen. I mean, that's why the hype cycle was even uh something that you could say is a thing. You know, that's a trend that we've seen happen many times, that history repeats itself. That people get caught up in these ideas and they drum up the hype and they also drum up the disappointment when the hype fails to match reality. This is something that we're probably gonna keep on seeing. But as individuals, if we're aware of it, we can limit its effect on ourselves, elves, and maybe on people with that we care about, so that they don't, you know, put all their money in f t s for example. Al Right, well, I hope you found this episode about the hype cycle interesting. I really love talking about it because I do think it's a useful tool to to kind of examine really marketing trends in tech more than tech itself, and it allows me to look back on my own history with tech and see the times where I bought in to the hype and times where I felt truly disillusioned by the realities of tech, and of course also the times where I bought into the tech after it has gone through that cycle because I couldn't afford to do it before that, so I bought it when I knew what the tech could and could not do, not because I was smart, but because I was poor. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that episode. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover tech stuff, reach out to me. The best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is text stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Yeah. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. 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Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech. And there is an increasing amount of conversation around the concept of the metaverse, which is pretty amusing because there's no real definition of what a metaverse is or will be. But generally speaking, most versions I've seen revolve around some combination of virtual reality or VR and augmented reality or a R implementations that allow for a persistent and pervasive integration of digital and physical realities. How's that for some consultant marketing speak. Now, some versions lean way more on the VR side and suggest that the next phase of the Internet will be made up of virtual spaces and people roaming around as avatars. By the way, that is an idea that has been around for a long time, with folks kind of thinking of this as a sort of web three point oh for ages. Heck, you watch movies where people are accessing the Internet, especially from like the nineties, like the late nineties, and it almost always was envisioned as you know, navigating through a virtual three dimensional space, even though that's not how any of us really interface with the Internet, so it's interesting that this still is is launching onto that idea. However, what all of this has really reminded me of is the concept of the hype cycle, which is not a super enthusiastic two wheeled vehicle. It's, you know, kind of a concept here. It's um the hype cycle, or more properly Gartner's hype cycle, because it's from the research company Gardner. It's a way to describe the stages that a concept or technology goes through from ideation, as in the first announcement of the tech, not just the thinking of it, but even just the expression of what attack might do, all the way to actual realization and adoption. It's not a straight path. In fact, it's got very curvy. If you look at a graphic of the hype cycle, it's almost always shown as a curve. It starts off low, peaks up, slopes down, dramatically bottoms out, and then slowly grows from there. That's that's how it always looks. So it's a journey that includes diversions into overenthusiastic expectations and some trips over into the mundane reality that tech can settle into. But we're going to explore all those various key moments shortly. First, let's learn a little bit about where this came from. So back in a market analyst named Jackie Fen created the hype cycle concept by observing the typical phases that technologies tend to go through. Now, to be clear, this has little to do with the capabilities of the tech itself. I mean that does tie into it, but it has more to do with the general perception of the tech. So you can think of it like buzz or excitement. And while there are a lot of examples of tech going through these phases, it's not exactly a law or anything like that. It's more like these are trends that we see pop up frequently, right, It's it's a pattern that we've seen repeat itself. So there are five phases in the hype cycle. We start off with what is called the technology trigger. This is when a tech which can be hardware, or it could be software, or it could be a service, it could be any combination of those things. It just has to be new. This is when it first launches in some way. And by launches, I don't necessarily mean you actually get a physical product that rolls out or an actual service that you can subscribe to right at the get go. Instead, there's some form of announcement. It might be a demonstration, or it might be, you know, something similar along those lines that alerts people that this technology exists. I think of the mother of all demos, uh, something that we often hear about, where things like graphical user interfaces and the first computer mouse were really shown off to you know, a wider audience. That's sort of an example of a technology trigger. If you want to think of something a little more recent, although still in our past, think of the old Apple press events where Steve Jobs would introduce his one more Thing. It was typically something brand new from Apple. Now, I should point out that an Apple's case, we were mostly talking about technology that had already been in some form of existence from other companies, and Apple really just went in and refined it and made it, you know, aesthetically pleasing, and we're able to market it properly. But you know, this is an event that tells the world, hey, we've got something neat over here and you should check it out. Now. In these early stages, it's not unusual for the creators of the technology to promote the heck out of it, you know, hiring PR firms and marketing firms to really push this out, even if that technology has a very limited use case or doesn't actually work yet. So, for example, you could argue eight K televisions are somewhere in this phase right now because a K TVs have been around for a bit, it's not like they're brand new. However, there's not really any native eight K content you can get on those TVs. So you've got televisions that are technically capable of playing ultra ultra high definition video, but you have a lack of actual video content that meets that level of resolution. So you've got something that's able to show you this incredible picture, you just don't have any of the content that has that built into it. Now, you could argue that eight K t V s are actually a bit further along the hype cycle than where I'm talking about right now, because most of them can actually upscale lower definition video and boost it so it looks better. Meanwhile, eight K t V s are marketed toward home theater enthusiasts who like to get out their set up with the most advanced tech available in the space people who make way more money than I do. In other words, typically the goal for creators at this stage is to talk of the tech so that investors become interested in it and they will start to pour some money into the efforts to keep things going. So this can be a really tense waiting game because you need the cash to flow in to operate until a market develops that can support the technology. But that also means that you have to convince the investors that there will be a market for the tech at some point, even if there isn't one at that very moment. So our starting point is the technology trigger. So if you imagine, you know, a graph, and the X axis is marked as time, So the further to the right you go, the more time has passed, and the y axis is marked in expectations. So the higher up on the y axis you are, the higher expectations are for this tech. Well, the tech trigger would be our starting point. It would be at the beginning of our time axis, and it wouldn't be very high up on expectations. From there, however, we ramp up expectations dramatically in a relatively short amount of time. This is where I would argue we are in the metaverse conversation right now. We're thinking about possibilities with companies like meta Slash Facebook really pushing this concept super hard and investing huge amounts of money and dedicating enormous teams toward developing stuff that people can actually use. Along the way, we might see some early implementations of technology, this particular tech, whether it's metaverse or something else. But typically the implementations we see during this this early phase after the technology trigger, they're really limited, and if they're actually available at all to consumers, they're really really expensive. This is when bleeding edge early adopters might jump in, and we've seen this with lots of tech over the years. I remember when CD players first hit the market, compact discs, y'all, I'm old. When compact disc players first hit the market, they were prohibitively expensive for many people. I mean, they were hundreds and hundreds of dollars, and keep in mind that with inflation that would probably be more than a thousand dollars today, so it was way too expensive for people like yours. Truly. I remember I didn't get my first CD player, which was actually a little portable CD player until years after they had been on the market because they were just too expensive. Now, without early adopters, most technology, particularly hardware, wouldn't go anywhere, Investors would lose confidence in the tech, and companies wouldn't be able to scale up to produce stuff at a a scale where they could bring prices down. Now, according to the Gartner hype cycle, around the time early adopters start exploring tech is when mass media really starts to pick up the story and run with it and thus push the hype further. Then we reached the top of this climb at you know where the hype cycle calls it the peak of inflated expectations. So this is like the top of the first hill in your classic out and back roller coaster. It's the highest point that you're ever going to hit. And as the name suggests, this is when people have the highest expectations for the tech will be able to do. Uh, these are expectations that are likely not going to be borne out by the technology itself. Now, I can think of no better example of a tech that went through this particular phase in a way that was incredibly apparent than virtual reality. In fact, I could argue that it's done this a couple of times now. But back in the very late eighties early nineties, the early stages of VR had the world anticipating an entirely new experience with computing. We would all be immersed in computer virtual worlds, and it's a narrative that we're seeing repeated today with the metaverse discussions. And there was a lot of exciting R and D in the field of VR at this time. It's just that our technical capabilities were fairly primitive compared to what people were imagining. We had movies and TV shows come out that centered on this premise of an unbelievably immersive virtual experience, one that in some cases would literally pull you into a virtual world. And even this idea was preceded by films like Tron, which came out before the VR craze had even begun. But then folks got a chance to actually experience VR for themselves. I remember a VR arcade opened up in a mall not too far from where I lived, and so I went and paid I think it was like five bucks for five minutes in order to experience it. The actual graphics in the world were beyond primitive, everything consisted of very simple polygons. I played a game called Dactyl Nightmare, infamous in VR circles. This was way back in the day like uh and Dactyl, by the way, means like like Pterodactyl because there was a a quote unquote pterodactyl flying around, a bunch of polygons flying around that could occasionally pick you up and drop you. It was an interesting example of VR capabilities, but it was far from a sophisticated experience, and I really recommend going on YouTube and searching videos of it if you're interested. Just remember that it's an experience that came out in n anyway. The point I'm making is that the expectation of what VR would be and the reality of what it was that was a huge disconnect. As a result, people lost interest in VR pretty quickly, and that loss of interest had a devastating effect on the VR research industry. Organizations that had previously enjoyed financial support found themselves scrounging for money. Some programs had to shut down entirely as folks decided that their money might be better spent on other pursuits, other investments. The VR industry as a whole almost died. Some departments that were exploring VRS use and stuff like medical treatments were reduced to hacking together VR systems from video game peripherals in order to make it work. Devices like the Nintendo Power Glove or the PlayStation I or the Microsoft Connect. We're all to varying degrees failures in the gaming space, but the VR industry took those tools, altered them, and made use of them. We'll explore more of the hype cycle in just a moment, but first let's take this quick break. So VR had entered the third phase of the hype cycle. We were at the technology trigger, we were at the peak of inflated expectations, and then we start to enter the trough of disillusionment. I love the names for these phases, by the way. It makes me think of things like the Pit of Despair from The Princess Bride. But yeah, the trough of disillusionment. So between the peak of inflated expectations and the trough of disillusionment is a decline that in most versions of the hype cycle. It's just as steep as the climb up to the peak of inflated expectations and almost as long like you almost go down as far as when you first announced the technology. UM. In most versions of this cycle, that's not necessarily indicative of what every technology goes through, but that's typically how it's how it's illustrated. UM. Along the way between that peak and that trough, you start encountering things like negative press as the media begins to criticize the tech for not living up to expectations. Now, this is rich and hypocritical, and I think most of the press is not blind to the fact that the press contributes to inflated expectations. Right. It's part of the press covering the stuff that builds up the hype and enthusiasm, and then that same press reaps the reward of throwing shade at a technology once it fails to meet those heightened expectations. So, in other words, the press benefits on both sides of this curve. And I mean that's typically where the press does its best work, right in the sense of where they get the most cash. They end up making a lot of getting a lot of attention by hyping things up, and then a lot of attention by tearing things down up And then once you get past that, you know you're still gonna get coverage, but it won't be nearly as sensational as that part of the hype cycle. So this decline is also when you start to see companies that had begun to pop up during the climb, you know, companies that were specializing either in the technology or producing something that was tangential or connected to that technology. You start to see the number of companies decrease. There's the sort of fade away by the number of players in the space. So there's also a lot of consolidation in this stage as well, where smaller companies will end up merging together because they wouldn't be able to survive on their own. Sometimes they're not able to survive even after they merge, and they still, you know, they still fail. I'm reminded of the dot com craze leading up to two thousand. I was also those before. I was working at how Stuff Works, but I was working at a consulting firm and a lot of our our clients were in the dot com space. Well, the during the heyday business was great, but then you hit two thousand and two thousand one and things took a dramatic turn. We saw so many web based companies appear up to that point, a lot of which you know, had tons of investments, like ludicrous amounts of venture capital pouring into them, even when they had no real business plan to support the organization. And then the market shifted in two thousand and again in two thousand one, particularly after the attacks on nine eleven, and a lot of those companies weren't able to survive this shifting market, this declining market, and the web as a whole kind of entered the trough of disillusionment as people began to realize that the gold rush days of the web really weren't going to pay off, at least not at this crazy return on investment that people had anticipated. Now typically around the trough, only a small percentage of the text potential customer base has actually adopted the technology, so we haven't really gone beyond early adopters yet. We're talking less than ten percent of the potential market, maybe less than five of the potential market, even having bought into the tech at this point. But on the flip side, when you hit rock bottom, there's nowhere left to go but up, unless you can't rebound at all, in which case you go nowhere like you just stop existing. But let's talk about the tech that manages to weather this storm in the hype cycle. Now, around this time is when we typically start to see a new generation of products or services based in and around this technology. So the first generation will have taught folks what works, what doesn't work, and what could work better. So ideally the second generation of products will be built upon that knowledge and address the flaws and accentuate the things that made the tech appealing in the first place, to make better versions. In other words, So now we start to enter the fourth phase. This is called the slope of enlightenment, or as I typeoed in my notes, the slop of enlightenment, which just sounds like something that pigs would really enjoy, very thoughtful pigs. Now it's the slope of enlightenment. This is when people actually figure out what the tech is good for. Now it maybe that has uses that were never anticipated during the initial hype phase of this technology, and that while the real tech can't live up to the grandiose promus is of stuff that we heard about during the peak of inflated expectations, the stuff it can do might still be really compelling. Now that realization might come from the creators of the tech themselves. It's actually possible that it's what they had in mind the whole time, but the hype got away from them, right. They might have said this will be very good for X, but during the hype phase, the early phase, it's promoted as X to the tenth power times a billion, and that's not what the creators were ever claiming. That can happen sometimes the realization actually comes from outside the creators, with folks figuring out really cool uses of this technology that the creators had never even really intended. Now, again, this makes me think of the Microsoft Connect in that regard. So in case you're not familiar with these, the Connect devices were peripherals for a couple of different Xbox consoles. There were two main generations of the Microsoft Connect. They incorporated cameras, including an infrared camera, and microphones that were meant to boost the interactive capabilities of an Xbox console. So the Connect could sense depth and it could create essentially a three D map of a space, and that meant that when the Connect was paired with the right software, it could sense movement along three axes, the X, Y and Z ax s or if you prefer it could sense movement left and right, up and down, and toward and away from the camera. Now, the purpose of this peripheral was to give game developers options to create new kinds of games that would lean on those capabilities, like a fighting game where your real world motions would be translated into the game in some way. Or they could use it to create new ways to interact with the Xboxes user interface, so that you could do things like activate a game with your voice or by gesturing a certain way. But what was cool was that the AI and robotics fields began to use the connect in their projects. They began to hack the connect and make use of it. The peripheral was fairly sophisticated, but it was also affordable, so it meant that people who otherwise might not be able to get hold of the sensors that they needed to work on their projects had another option. Sadly, Microsoft never really found a way to profit from that. In fact, they kind of hamstrung attempts to make use of the Connect in this way. They made some changes to the connect that actually eliminated those use cases, or at least made them much more difficult to do, which is unfortunate because the Connect otherwise, you know, it kind of died a sad death. It never really reached full adoption by the the video game community, largely because there was a lack of support from the developer side. But the Connect could have continued a very useful life in robotics and AI. Unfortunately it just didn't turn out that way. But it's the sort of thing that can happen along the hype cycle where the hacker community figures out fun ways to use or depending on your point of view, misuse a technology. Now, gradually the technology emerges from the slope of enlightenment to hit the plateau of productivity. Now it's in this phase that the text capabilities and usefulness are well understood by the market, so it's found its place. It is likely not nearly as grand as was expected back in the early part of the hype cycle, but it also is somewhat sustainable or even profitable. Not all tech reaches the stage, mind you, Some just outright fail because the customer base never forms around it. I've got a really good example of a tech that never reached the plateau of productivity, and it is three D Television's Now when I first started working at how stuff works dot com, which I think was back in two thousand ven. Well, three D TVs were being pushed really hard by multiple companies as well as by the movie and TV studios, and there were a lot of different reasons for this. So from the artistic side, you had directors who were convinced that making films and three D would give them a new set of tools to tell their stories in a way that they had envisioned. I'm thinking primarily of folks like James Cameron and Peter Jackson. These were directors who really embraced elements of three D technology with the thought that it was a real way to enhance a story and evoke a response from the audience. And since that's what storytellers want to do, I kind of understand this. From the movie studio side, there were a couple of really big reasons to push three D TV and film. One of those big reasons is that it is way harder to pirate three D movies than two D movies. You need special cameras to capture the three D effect, you need se shoal equipment to reproduce the three D effect. And since the film and television industries have traditionally been absolutely certain that every pirated copy of a work represents a lost sale and thus lost revenue. Things that appear to help curtail piracy are highly valued. Now, I'm not gonna go into the logical fallacies behind piracy and lost sales, as that goes well beyond this discussion. But if you want to hear more about those ideas, I've got several episodes that touch on it in the archives. Anyway, the TV manufacturing companies were really behind three D tv s because you know, it created a reason for customers to go out and buy a new television. Let's face it, there are certain types of tech, like smartphones, for example, that companies have successfully marketed as a gadget that you need to replace every two to three years. Um. I think of this kind of like the directions on shampoo that's say, rents and repeat. At least I assume shampoo's still say that I haven't had hair in more than twenty years, so I don't look at shampoo bobbles anymore. There's I mean, there's just no reason right. So Anyway, the whole rents and repeat thing, I mean, do you need to rent and then repeat, well, you need to rentse, you need to get the soap out of your hair, but the repeat part probably you don't need to do that. However, it does mean that you would end up using the shampoo up twice as fast. That means you have to buy shampoo more frequently, and that means more money for big shampoo, big shampoo. It's kind of hard to set up that same kind of repeat business with folks buying television's. At least back in the day, the idea was, you know, you bought a TV and you pretty much stuck with it until it don't work no more, at which point you would either see if you could get it repaired, or you know, you would buckle down and buy a new one. In fact, that second one was, you know, sometimes preferable, because as often the repair costs would be about the same or maybe even more than buying a new TV. Now, the emergence of h D t V and the migration from analog TV to digital TV helped change that a little bit. But after h D t V came out, improvements in television were incremental or sometimes not even noticeable, like you were reduced to arguing that your television was better at reproducing colors, for example, but you couldn't otherwise show some sort of technological advantage that differentiated your TV from any of the other dozens of televisions that were coming out at that same time. So how do you create a demand for new televisions that reaches beyond the small percentage of folks who are either buying their very first TV or they're replacing, you know, a broken television. Well, you have to introduce new features, and three D was a new feature, one that companies hoped would catch on, and they pushed really hard. For about three years, you could not find a new TV in store that either wasn't three D or three D ready. It was pretty much a standard feature, and companies pushed hard to get people to adopt three D televisions. But there was a really big problem. Customers did not buy into the hype cycle, at least not like they had with other types of technology. See, most people didn't care for the idea of having to wear special glasses just to watch television, even if that TV had dynamite three D effects. It would mean having to keep track of yet more stuff, and in the case of active three D glasses, you would have to keep that stuff charged so that it works. The active three D glasses have little shutters and the lenses and they alternate, so like the left shutter is closed and the right shutter is open, and then they switch and they do this many many times a second. But in order to do that you have to actually charge the glasses. They are powered, their battery powered. So that proved to be too much for the market to bear, and adoption was low, and the skepticism in the press, particularly in the tech journalism field, was really high, and after a few years, manufacturers quietly phased out marketing three D television's. I mean that doesn't mean that there are no televisions out there that support three D these days, but rather that stopped being the feature that that companies like Panasonic and Sony were pushing. But man, they really did try and make a go of it for a few years. There was more than one c s I attended where these companies were really trying to make three D TV at talking point. So the hype cycle isn't necessarily a foregone conclusion. I'll explain more after we come back from this quick break. So not every technology is going to go through the hype cycle sequence, and certainly not every tech will ultimately reach the plateau of productivity. Some will just fade away. Uh. You know, here's the crazy thing. The merit of the technology itself doesn't necessarily play into whether it survives the hype cycle or not. There are technologies quote unquote out there that don't really do anything, that are essentially scams that make it through and become profitable and and persist. There are other technologies that arguably could be really useful that don't survive this cycle. So you have to keep in mind that surviving the hype cycle and being a good technology don't necessarily overlap perfectly. You have a much better chance of surviving the hype cycle if your technology has merit. It's just not a guarantee, and it's not a guarantee if your technology doesn't have merit that you won't survive. That's the fun thing about human beings. Some tech will enter that downward slope after they peek and never pull out the dive. Some might have a more gradual path from the point of introduction to the point where they proved to be productive, but they don't have dramatic highs and lows like it's not a technology that's considered to be so sexy that they go through the crazy hype cycle and then the trough of disillusionment. They might have a more steady path from point A to point B, with point B being the plateau of productivity. But for certain technologies, we definitely can look at how they emerged and plot them against this sort of general observation, and that brings us back to the metaverse. I would say we're still headed toward the peak of inflated expectations at this point. We're still in that initial crazy hype phase which has been pushed primarily by companies like Meta Slash Facebook. However, at least some media outlets have not butt into the hype and have not pushed that further, pushed that narrative toward that peak um and they have offered up a more level headed perspective. I would say that the tech journalism side in particular has taken a more realistic, or if you prefer, cynical view of the metaverse. I count myself in that field. By the way, when I say cynical, I'm not I'm not saying that they're wrong, because I fully agree with them. Uh, they point out that we just we don't even have a definition for what the metaverse really is. We've got a lot of competing definitions out there, so we we definitely don't have a clear path to get into the metaverse because we don't even all agree on what the metaverse is. Outlets like The Verge have published some really great pieces about this, and once you start to straight outside of tech journalism, that's where reporting can get a little more loosey goosey. You typically see this in places where the person who's presenting the piece doesn't actually have a tech background, and they're primarily repeating bullet points that might be laid out in marketing literature. This is another issue we see a lot in I mean, it's it's you can't really call it journalism at that point, right, but we see it done a lot of blogs that cover tech where the blogger is essentially regurgitating a bullet list that was presented by some PR firm to cover a technology and they're not applying any kind of critical thinking or independent research or any kind of investigative journalism to it at all. They're just presenting the bullet points practically as is, and They're just elevating that that message, which again may not be reflective of reality. Uh, and that's how they play into that hype cycle. Metaverse. I'm not seeing that as much, and I think a big part of that actually has nothing to do with the concept of the metaverse itself, but rather the growing distrust in Facebook you know now meta. So there's this growing distrust in that company and of Mark Zuckerberg in particular, and I think that is playing way more into the narrative than necessarily the concept of the metaverse itself. Uh. Even so, though even if you remove Facebook from this this entire you know equation, I'm still pretty skeptical that we're going to see a metaverse in you know, the near future. I mentioned last week in a tech News episode of Tech Stuff that there was a blog post written by Intel's Rajah Kaduri. He's the senior VP of Intel's Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics group and could dury estimates that in order to support a metaverse akin to something that you might see in science fiction like Ready Player one, that it's going to require something like a thousand times more computing power or than what we have at our disposal today that includes processing, storage, um networking infrastructure. All of that's going to have to be considerably more powerful than what we have today in order to support the version of the metaverse that a lot of people are talking about, this idea of this persistent and pervasive virtual world that ties in with our physical world in some meaningful way. We just aren't there yet. And in fact this is you know, kind of proven by the fact that most of the virtual environments that are kind of the proto version of the metaverse that we have today are incredibly limited and primitive. They might be limited to something like twenty or fewer participants in a given space. Well that's not that's not a metaverse, right, That's not what you think of when you hear the word metaverse, you do. You think of interconnected worlds that you can move in between easily and that can have hunt ards of thousands of people in it. Well, we're nowhere close to that, and so we're not likely to see a version of the metaverse that even closely resembles what's being marketed in in in the near future. Also, the VR and A r ideations of the metaverse are going to require people to invest a significant amount of money into hardware in order to access those services. You know, virtual reality has gone through the hype cycle a couple of times, like I mentioned, and there is you know, a customer base for virtual reality, but it's still pretty small. So right now, those would be the people who would arguably have the hardware that might allow them to access this, although that's not clear either. It may be that by the time we actually have a quote unquote metaverse available, the tech we have today, like the hardware like VR sets and stuff, won't be up to the task. We don't know. I mean, if you want to have an untethered experi ants, that's gonna cost you more, obviously, So that's gonna limit the audience for the metaverse to people who can afford it. So you're gonna have haves and have nots, right because they're going to be people who just can't go out and purchase a computer system and VR hardware and are hardware to be able to experience it. So you're gonna have a digital divide based on you know, economic status. Beyond that, presumably everyone who can afford it, not not all of them will be interested in it, right, Like there's gonna be people who actually could technically afford to access the metaverse who might not have any reason to do so, so they don't have any you know, impetus to get involved. So that means that the percentage of people who will want to and be able to access the metaverse will be pretty limited. It might be so limited that it doesn't go anywhere. So there are a lot of reasons to doubt that the metaverse is going to come along at least any time in the near future. It may be inevitable, but we're talking about a much longer timeline than what is typically presented to us through marketing pushes. So it's something that we need to keep in mind. I think the hype cycle, while you know it's it's again not universal. We can't apply to every single technology, not all of them participated in the hype cycle at the same pace as everything else. Right, There's some things that over the course of many years went through this process, and somewhere maybe it's over the course of a year and a half um But I think it's useful for us to think of in the in the sense of keeping ourselves grounded when something new is debuting, and to remember the promises that are being made early on may not at all come to pass, and that it's okay to be excited with new technology. It's okay to be interested in new technology. If you're an early adopter. It's okay to adopt that technology as long as you're doing so with the knowledge that it might not live up to the hype, and that could be okay. As long as there is you know, a good use case for it, then it's okay. If it doesn't live up to the hype, it's okay if it it has uh returns, they're not nearly as grand as long as everyone's willing to, you know, take that chill pill and and go forward with a more level headed approach. The issue is that we often don't see that happen. I mean, that's why the hype cycle was even uh something that you could say is a thing. You know, that's a trend that we've seen happen many times, that history repeats itself. That people get caught up in these ideas and they drum up the hype and they also drum up the disappointment when the hype fails to match reality. This is something that we're probably gonna keep on seeing. But as individuals, if we're aware of it, we can limit its effect on ourselves, elves, and maybe on people with that we care about, so that they don't, you know, put all their money in f t s for example. Al Right, well, I hope you found this episode about the hype cycle interesting. I really love talking about it because I do think it's a useful tool to to kind of examine really marketing trends in tech more than tech itself, and it allows me to look back on my own history with tech and see the times where I bought in to the hype and times where I felt truly disillusioned by the realities of tech, and of course also the times where I bought into the tech after it has gone through that cycle because I couldn't afford to do it before that, so I bought it when I knew what the tech could and could not do, not because I was smart, but because I was poor. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that episode. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover tech stuff, reach out to me. The best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is text stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Yeah. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.