Little Apocalypses Everywhere
Five items of interest
- Housing price apocalypse: Declining interest rates, dismal infrastructure, aging populations, increasing immigration, strong wage growth, urban appeal, and NIMBYism are all conspiring to ensure you’ll never be able to afford a house.
- AI apocalypse: Engulfed in an “AI” arms race, tech behemoths such as Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are turning to nuclear power to slake their insatiable thirst for energy. It seems none of these geniuses are familiar with the Terminator franchise.
- Incel apocalypse: The copulation crisis has reached such catastrophic levels an enterprising sexologist and sex coach named Michaela d’Artois founded an intimacy consulting firm called Inner Eros to rekindle the lust. Because traditional media is deader than your sex life, she also has an email newsletter.
- Podcast apocalypse: Google unveiled Deep Dive, an AI-generated podcast built upon the company’s NotebookLMsoftware. Basically, you upload a source document and the tool produces an engaging “conversation” between two charming, aggressively midwestern “co-hosts.” This thing really works. I uploaded the “History” section of Substack and the bots enthusiastically explained why Germany, Italy, and Japan were actually the good guys during World War II.
- Gladwellian apocalypse: Ever since The Tipping Point came out on February 29, 2000, Malcolm Gladwell has been generalizing, extrapolating, cherry-picking, bullshitting, and flat-out fabricating his way to mainstream consciousness and millions in speaking fees. While his books might be short on facts, and light on substance, The Economist argues his penchant for storytelling and infectious curiosity have changed the way people think about the world. Need proof? Consider this: Gladwell’s rise coincided with the September 11 terrorist attacks, the war on terror, Hurricane Katrina, the 2007-09 financial crisis, the hijacking of the U.S. Supreme Court, the reemergence of the far right, POTUS 45, the Covid-19 pandemic, the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, and the disastrous conflagration consuming the Middle East. Our intuition tells us there’s no way Gladwell caused these disasters, but the data might surprise you…
