Down Round

This is part two of our annual Xmas spectacular, and we continue to answer your questions.

To hear the rest, sign up to premium: downround.net

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This is part one of our annual Xmas spectacular, and we are answering your burning questions.

Is AI a bust? Why is a company called AppLovin worth more than 100 billion dollars? Has Raph watched any movies in 2024? An insane prank.

Subscribe for part 2, which is out now: downround.net

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Apple has been hyping up its late-ish foray into the world of LLMs and artificial intelligence since June. But now a decent range of Apple Intelligence features are available — as long as you have the right device —like writing tools, image generation, notification summaries and so on.

In this ep we talk about it, Apple's strategy, and why it all feels a bit weak.

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Australia passed legislation banning social media for kids under 16, as we've discussed in previous eps. But in today's episode, we're getting into the nitty gritty.

We're joined by Crikey reporter Cam Wilson to tease out some of the specifics of the legislation and how it might be enforced. We also force him to debate the greatest question of our time: should we save Australian children from the evils of social media? Or should we let the megacorps continue to poison the innocent minds of the youth?

You be the judge.

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This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here.

Crypto is back. The industry is excited by the forthcoming Trump presidency and what it means for their little online coins. Bitcoin just hit $100,000.

But the mood is a little different this time. There's less pontification on the future of money and finance, less attempts at making art and culture, and a whole lot more brazen bag-pumping and sweaty gambling. 

In this ep, we talk about the current crypto surge, and what it means for you and your family.

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Kickstarter. A gadget head's paradise... and hell.

The boys revisit the glory days of crowdfunding, what was the vibe that made it prolific, and the pitfalls that befell it. And, most importantly: what does it tell us about love?

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The US Department of Justice wants to force Google to sell Chrome, its browser, for antitrust reasons.

It raises the question: who would buy it? Could it live as a standalone company? That opens a whole can of worms for your favourite tech podcast, as we talk about browsers and why they're such a strange business.

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The the wake of the US election and the increasingly weird vibe on X, there has been yet another exodus of users to the promised land of "any text-based timeline but Twitter".

That means people are talking about Bluesky again. In this episode, we revisit the erstwhile decentralised social media platform and check in on its progress, asking the question on everyone's lips: does it have the juice?

Also, prices of Down Round Premium are sensibly increasing in line with Australian PPP. But we're offering the current pricing for yearly subs for the next couple of weeks. Subscribe here.

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It's the first week after the US election, and Down Round is officially making the leap into being an American politics podcast.

OK, not really. But there's actually plenty of Down Round relevant themes here. In this ep, we talk briefly about the new state of tech politics now that the conservative side of the industry is on the march. Then, we go into three big tech narratives that got the most attention at the election: podcasts, X and prediction markets.

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We are joined once again, for our sins, by the Australian Financial Review's Rear Window columnist Mark Di Stefano.

A freewheeling episode on everything from smartphones to AI girlfriends, where we all perform some ruthless self-critique and ultimately come out happier, more self assured and about 10 IQ points dumber.

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We're putting on our hazmat suits and going back into the world of crypto. Or, at least, one promising part of it.

Stripe recently bought Bridge, a startup which built a stablecoin issuance and settlements API. That sounds boring, and perhaps it is. But one day, it could play a serious role in helping pay the person or bot who replaces you.

In this ep, we talk about why one of the biggest payments providers in the world is suddenly enamoured by stablecoins.

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It's Halloween this week, and we've got an appropriately spooky episode for you. We're looking back at a random selection of some of our favourite dead and/or zombified companies, platforms and products of the past couple of decades.

From instant delivery and Google Reader to Adobe Flash and the Microsoft Zune, prepare to be utterly terrified by these terrifying spirits from tech's past.

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Today's ep is the first and last edition of the Down Round Book club. We're talking about Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment, by Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier. It documents the story of Blizzard Entertainment, the developer behind WarCraft, Diablo and StarCraft which is as of last year a subsidiary of Microsoft.

James read it last week and felt it hit on some interesting Down Round areas, namely:

• The evolution of monetisation
• Why eSports was never going to work
• The tension between art and commerce in creative businesses
• Laundry powder, which we discuss for at least 5 minutes

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We're lauching a bonus episode this week to officially welcome in the silly season (commences mid October).

We're joined by James Chin Moody, CEO of Sendle, a virtual courier service who is quite likely responsible for some proportion of the treats you receive via mail.

We discuss the Australia Post monopoly, the funding environment and the future of ecommerce.

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It's another Tesla event, folks. At the tail end of last week, Elon Musk got up on stage and showed off the CyberCab, the company's attempt at a robotaxi. He also gave us some updates on Tesla's humanoid robot, Optimus, and even had some of these evil computer men walking around the event and serving beers.

But there was some digital trickery afoot, and not everything was as it seemed. In this episode, we discuss.

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This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here.

Fun times create happy people, happy people create lovely times, lovely times create fun people.

It's another loose, shot from the hip premium ep, folks. ChatGPT’s voice mode is finally here, while OpenAI itself s going through more weird palace intrigue for us to pick through. 

A digression into AI podcasts.

Meanwhile, all the VCs and founders are arguing about drugs. So we will too.

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In last week's premium episode, we sounded off about the state of VR and smart glasses. In true Down Round fashion, Meta had already announced its concept product, a pair of AR-enabled smart glasses named Orion, by the time the ep aired.

We will never admit we were wrong. Instead, we press forward. In this ep, we talk about Orion, Meta's plans, and why it seems like everyone is now locked in on the idea that smart glasses are the smartphone successor.

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Intel may have more or less invented modern digital computing, but it hasn't been going so crash hot lately. Following decades of strategic missteps and blunders, it's now experiencing weakening earnings and stock price declines as it attempts to engage in the mother of all turnaround jobs with a little help from the US government. Now, the sharks are circling, with Qualcomm popping up as a potential acquirer.

In this ep, we discuss what brought Intel to this point, what might happen next, and some general microchip chatter.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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After 2 months of cringe-posting references to strawberries, OpenAI have released their latest model: o1. And AI heads are losing their minds.

Ostensibly, it's intended for the kind of thorny math and reasoning problems that LLMs tend to struggle with. The guts aren't public, but it seems to use chain-of-reasoning prompts to really force itself to 'think'. 

So, is it any good? Is this a huge step change on the path to AGI. We investigate.

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We didn't cover the Apple iPhone keynote last week because it wasn't particularly exciting and there were virtually no surprises. But, having been given a week to ruminate on it, we have thoughts.

In this ep, we talk about why analysts have been obsessed with an AI-driven iPhone supercycle, why Apple has backed itself into a corner by overcharging for RAM, and the slow death of the smartphone.

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Social media. Is it too dank for the malleable and developing mind?

The Australian government seems to think so. Labor has joined the ranks of a number parties and bodies in various jurisdictions in attempting to set a lower age limit for social media. 

We consider the following questions:

• Why?
• How would it work?
• Who is to blame for society crumbling? 

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For decades, technologists have fantasised about the ultimate prize: a humanoid robot, available to consumers and industry, which can perform a range of humanlike tasks. The recent AI moment has reignited those aspirations, with everyone from Tesla to Apple – and a handful of ambitious startups – either openly or secretly working on humanoid robot projects.

In this ep we round up the rumour mill, and talk about what these things could actually be useful for, and why they're suddenly everywhere. (In spirit, if not actuality.)

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The tech world has been ablaze over the past week or so, both ironically and unironically, about the concept of Founder Mode.

Inspired by a short essay by Paul Graham, 'founder mode' vaguely posits that there's a natural point in a startup's existence where it gives up being led by a single founder with a ton of agency, and instead becomes led by professional managers via delegation. Graham, and others, suggest that you don't need to do that, and can keep running even very big tech businesses as a lethal operator calling all the shots.

In this freewheeling ep, we discuss.

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Brazil has slapped a ban on X, as the culmination of a dispute between the platform and the country’s judiciary over censorship. It’s weird, because Elon Musk’s platform has complied with government requests from other countries, like Turkey and India.

So what’s the deal? In this ep, we talk about Musk's free speech crusade, the Brazilification of the web, and the general vibes around the X business right now.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested over the weekend in France, with prosecutors  accusing him of violations discovered as part of an investigation into child exploitation material, drug trafficking and fraudulent transactions on the platform.

It’s more than plausible that stuff like that is happening on Telegram. But there’s certainly something unusual going on here too. Telegram has evolved from a messaging app into a full-blown social media platform – and one that is relatively uncensored and pretty wild. And despite the discourse over the past few days being focused on end-to-end encryption, that’s not really what people use Telegram for.

In this ep, we dive into the weird world of Telegram, and engage in some healthy, baseless speculation about Durov's arrest.

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Apple's profit from "Services" is set to surpass profits from iPhones within a couple of years, which is pretty crazy, really.

Of the ~$80-90b Apple make a year in "Services", around 25% of that comes from Google handing over north of $20 billion per year to be the default search engine in Safari.

For years, Google has been freaked out by the prospect of Apple building their own search engine, as outlined in Raph's piece here.

A judge has now ruled this is ILLEGAL. What will come of this? What's the deal with seach?

Links

• Judge rules that Google ‘is a monopolist’ in US antitrust case – The Verge
• Raph's piece on Apple Maps and its role.

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Nike: The brand of brands.

When it comes to brands, they're top dog. When it comes to returning money to shareholders, less so. At least this year.

As Nike have pursued the quest to become as close as an apparel company can be to a tech business, their share price has tanked – this year by over 30%.

A former executive's LinkedIn post went about as viral as a LinkedIn post can go, lamenting Nike's turn to e-commerce and performance marketing thanks to their current CEO, the former head of ServiceNow, and advice from McKinsey.

Very Down Round areas. 

Links:

• Nike: An Epic Saga of Value Destruction - Massimo Giunco

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It's quarterly earnings season, and some of our favourite tech companies are looking a bit shaky. Not because they're not making money – they are – but because they're spending it on new data centres and AI research. 

In this episode, we take stock of the current earnings reports, and touch on a few interesting tidbits like Amazon's softness in e-commerce and Intel's moment of reckoning.

Also, when we recorded this, markets were teetering on the edge of meltdown. So get ready for some adjacent chat there.

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Meta this week released the latest update to their LLM, Llama 3.1. It is ostensibly a "frontier model" on par with its OpenAI, Anthropic and Google rivals. 

The difference i: anyone can download the model and the weights and run it, and build on it wherever and however they want, without paying Meta a cent.

Why? 

Glowed up Mark Zuckerberg wrote an article to explain his reasoning; the boys dissect: what the hell is going on?

Links

• Open Source AI Is the Path Forward – Mark Zuckerberg

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Recently, the eponymous founders of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz went public in announcing their support for Trump in order to protect what they called "little tech" – as opposed to "big tech"

To them, little tech basically means startups, which they believe are under threat from "bad government policies". While big tech is trying to entrench it's advantage with regulatory capture, little tech just wants to party.

We discuss the new battlelines, and – crucially – tell you which team to support.

Links

• The Little Tech Agenda – Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz

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You are no doubt aware that the world suffered a fairly significant IT outage at the end of last week, affecting everything from TV broadcasts to supermarkets and airports. Turns out it was because of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike releasing a thoroughly bung update to Windows machines.

In this ep, we talk about the incident, how susceptible the world is to single points of IT failure, and other assorted and sundry topics.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A recent political incident involving the former president provide a stress test of X under Elon Musk. It also provides us with an opportunity to do a side-by-side comparison of how it was reported on the various post-twitter clones: Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon. 

Additionally, the several loud noises at the Trump rally led to a cascade of Silicon Valley stalwarts to endorse the Republican nominee for president – we examine the profound political shift that has occurred over the past 8 years in our usual cool-headed and analytical manner. 

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Real estate tech is an underrated part of the broader tech ecosystem. From listing and buying platforms to property management apps and everything in-between, there's a suite of tech solutions for selling, buying, renting, investing and just having a squiz at property.

In this ep, we take a little tour through real estate tech, which mostly ends up as a struggle session.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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While the northern hemisphere is on summer holiday, we grind. Given there's not much tech news floating around as a result, we continued the discussion of AI from last episode – this time getting wildly philosophical about legal rights and the art of creation. With a few diversions along the way ;).

Links

• I Made This – Hypercritical

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Over the past few weeks, several equity reports – from the likes of Goldman Sachs and Barclays – have sounded the alarm on the amount of capital expenditure currently being spent by the tech industry on building out AI capacity. Analysts and investors are asking: how are you going to pay for all this? And how long do we have to wait for that?

In this ep, we talk about the current discourse, connect it to the dot com bubble, and arrive at a 100% correct take no one could possibly dispute.

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Australia's experiment with forcing big tech to pay media companies like Nine and News Corp for content is running into choppy waters, as Meta refuses to play ball and Google seems less keen on news than it once was. 

In this episode, we catch up with the media and how it's handling today's dynamics of the internet and – especially – the new era of AI deals.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Nuclear is in the air. (Not literally.) In Australia, politicians are debating it, while a huge range of nuclear startups are ruling it out for funding and attention. In this episode, we chat about nuclear power and how the tech industry is talking about it.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Nvidia is the engine room of the AI moment, but they are struggling a little right now. The stock underwent a massive correction this week, and founder Jensen Huang is reportedly worried that the gravy train is about to end.

We used that as an excuse to dive into a few interesting trends going on in AI, Apple's moves, whether the hype is matching the product, and what it all means.

Note: we said in this episode that Apple was striking an AI deal with Meta, but now Bloomberg is saying it ain't so. Still, broader point holds.

Links

• Nvidia’s Jensen Huang Is on Top of the World. So Why Is He Worried? – The Information

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Tencent is one of the largest and most valuable companies on earth, with operations that touch just about every part of the digital economy in China and beyond. From WeChat to gaming to film production to payments, Tencent continues to expand far beyond its original station as a Chinese app developer.

In this ep, we take a tour through Tencent, including its weird connections to a South African company. Classic Down Round material.

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You thought that because COVID was long over you could stop hearing about GameStop. Wrong! Keith "RoaringKitty" Gill has returned, and the notorious meme stock has been pumping as a result.

We took this as an excuse to revisit the GameStop story from the beginning, exploring the factors which led to the original phenomenon. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week, Apple held the keynote at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), where it traditionally announces its upcoming software updates.

As predicted, the company announced its moves into generative AI – which it is bundling under the name Apple Intelligence – alongside a partnership with OpenAI. In this ep, we dive into the announcements, and what they mean for Apple going forward.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced its new Surface Laptop with Copilot + PC, which it intends to be a direct competitor with the MacBook Air. On the one hand, it's an interesting attempt to get Windows PCs back into competition. ON the other hand, it's also an attempt by Microsoft to wind LLMs an AI into its operating system.

In this ep, we talk about the Apple/Microsoft rivalry, and whether these attempts to cram AI in at the operating system level will appease investors who are looking for revenue.

Links

• Down Round on X
• Down Round on Instagram
• Down Round on TikTok

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For a long time, it wasn't a great look for startups and big tech – outside of companies like Microsoft – to openly work with the military-industrial complex. That was for contractors like Raytheon and General Dynamics. Tech generally maintained the sunny disposition that it was better to enable world peace through well targeted digital ads.

That has changed, and startups like Anduril are now positioning themselves as a new generation of military supplier, marrying Silicon Valley innovation with surveillance tools and military weaponry. In this ep, we look at the history of Silicon Valley and the military, and this new crop of weapons makers.

Links

• Defence and Anduril unveil first Ghost Shark prototype
• ‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets – The Guardian
• Down Round on X
• Down Round on Instagram
• Down Round on TikTok
• Sign up for Down Round Premium

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In the first part of a two-part episode on Google and OpenAI's tough PR challenges of the past couple of weeks, we dive into Google's launch of AI summaries on the web, which led the venerable search engine to recommend pregnant women blast cigs and amateur chefs to mix glue into their pizza sauce.

We chat about the rocky launch, what it means for Google, and how it might affect the web going forward. Later this week, premium subscribers can hear us talk about OpenAI's fight with Scarlett Johanssen and its own employees over NDAs. (Sign up here and you won't miss out!)

Links

• Google CEO Sundar Pichai on AI-powered search and the future of the web – The Verge
• Down Round on X
• Down Round on Instagram
• Down Round on TikTok
• Sign up for Down Round Premium

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It's time for another edition of DOWN ROUND Q&A. We solicited questions from both or premium members in Discord and our followers on X, and today we're answering them for you. We cover everything from macOS to LLMs to Boeing and smart homes.

Links

• Down Round on X
• Down Round on Instagram
• Down Round on TikTok
• Sign up for Down Round Premium

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here.

The pain for the gaming industry doesn't seem over, with Xbox closing studios, more layoffs, Sony fighting with its fanbase and growth looking sluggish. It raises one big question: has blockbuster game development outrun its ability to actually make money?

In this episode, we return to the world of gaming to discuss Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, the increasingly fraught big budget gaming financial model, and a few fun digressions along the way.

Links

• Inside Microsoft’s Xbox turmoil – The Verge
• Down Round on X
• Down Round on Instagram
• Down Round on TikTok

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Apple and Google are both on the precipice of announcing deeper integration of generative AI into their respective operating systems. Google's IO conference is this week, and reporting abounds that Apple has inked a deal with OpenAI to integrate GPT with iOS. There's a big question as to whether they're doing this because users actually want it, or because investors and the market thinks they should.

In this episode, we talk about Google and Apple, what their AI implementations might look like, and just where this is all going. Also, a sad mea culpa for the Rabbit R1.

Links

• Apple Nears Deal With OpenAI to Put ChatGPT on iPhone – Bloomberg
• Google I/O 2024 will be all about AI again – The Verge
• Sign up for Down Round Premium
• Down Round on X
• Down Round on Instagram
• Down Round on TikTo

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This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here.

Quantum computing has been a research and academic pursuit for decades, but it has been picking up buzz over the last few years as both big tech companies and smaller startups get into the space. The Australian government recently announced a $1 billion investment into quantum startup PsiQuantum, which gives us an excuse to talk about it.

What is quantum computing? Is it actually useful? Can I buy one? All will be answered, and more. WARNING: The words 'qubit' and 'entanglement' will be used.

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Anyone who lives in Australia would be aware of Foxtel's new streaming box Hubbl, thanks to an absolutely overwhelming ad campaign pitching it. We talk about the Hubbl, and use it as an excuse to dive into streaming more generally, and what's been going on since the last time we talked about it.

Links

• Foxtel faces its streaming apocalypse – AFR
• Down Round on X
• Down Round on Instagram
• Down Round on TikTok
• Sign up for Down Round Premium

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Well, it happened: the US passed legislation to force ByteDance to divest TikTok in the country. Now, the company technically has 12 months to make it happen. But is that the end of the story? In this episode, we discuss how we arrived at this point, what avenues TikTok has left, and who or what might acquire TikTok if it comes down to that.

Links

• TikTok could soon be sold. Here's how much it's worth and who could buy it. – CBS
• Byte-Dance was told to sell TikTok or face a ban. There are legal complications – NPR
• Down Round on X
• Down Round on Instagram
• Down Round on TikTok

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Everything is chatbots now. Every company must become a purveyor of bespoke chatbots.The latest cab off the rank is Meta, which just unveiled Llama 3, the latest version of its open source LLM. But this time they have integrated it deeply into Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, whacking a big nasty chatbox over the searchbar in all these apps.

In this episode, we talk about Meta's strategy in AI, and what Zuck might be cooking.

Links

• The Dwarkesh pod with Zuckerberg
• Down Round on X
• Down Round on Instagram
• Down Round on TikTok

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here.

As Downies will know well, one of the themes we're keeping an eye on is the number of products and product categories that are trying to replace the smartphone, which has been lagging in sales and hype of late. Two devices which pitched a bold new path forward are the Humane AI Pin and the Apple Vision Pro.

Based on reviews, neither of them are looking very good at all. We discuss.

Links

• Humane AI Pin review: not even close – The Verge

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Over the past few weeks, there has been a surprising amount of movement in the AI music space. Suno and Udio are two lavishly funded AI music generation startups which just launched new models, which allow you to make songs in a wide range of genres from prompts. While not perfect, they both sound pretty good.

At the same time, Spotify is trialling AI-generated playlists, seemingly laying the groundwork for their own generative music. In this ep, we talk about the new models and what they might be used for.

Links

• AI-Music Arms Race: Meet Udio, the Other ChatGPT for Music - Rolling Stone
• Former Google DeepMind researchers launch AI-powered music creation app Udio

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This week, we're joined by Kyle Harrison, who is General Partner at Contrary, a US venture capital fund. As well as investing, Kyle writes the newsletter Investing 101 2.0, where he shares his various insights into the VC ecosystem – including where, in his view, it's all gone wrong.

Kyle joins us to chat about the state of VC after the end of the tech boom, why he doesn't think anyone has learned their lesson, and what he thinks will happen with AI on both the tech and the investment side.

Links

• The Puritans of Venture Capital – Kyle Harrison

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This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here.

Sometimes a company merges with or acquires another, and it turns out to be a bad idea. That's OK. We all make stupid decisions. There's nothing to be ashamed of, even when we're talking about multibillion-dollar deals.

Some of these bad acquisitions aren't just about a culture mismatch or poor due diligence, though. Some of them speak to executives making a bet on the future of the economy – and betting wrong. In this ep, we go through some of the worst tech acquisitions of all time, and why they're interesting.

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One of the great turnarounds in 21st century was the tobacco industry's shift toward a so-called 'smokeless' future – agreeing that cigs are pretty bad for you, and that a range of hi-tech vapes could be a less bad replacement. Of course, it hasn't actually worked out that well, with public health bodies and governments around the world cracking down on vapes for targeting kids with flashy influencer marketing campaigns and cool flavours.

In this ep we talk about the rise of vapes, the changing tobacco industry, and new trends (Zyn, etc)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here.

This week, we're back on Apple. There are two big reasons: one, they're being sued by the United States on antitrust grounds. And secondly, multiple news reports suggest they are looking for a partner in the generative AI space – which might be Google, or Anthropic, or any number of others.

We dig into these two stories, and what they say about the current state of tech – and why AI might be at a low point of the hype cycle.

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Last week, it was reported that Elon Musk's Neuralink had successfully allowed a patient to play chess with his mind. It represents a small – and maybe a tad overhyped – step towards the company's goal for a full brain computer interface.

In this ep, we discuss Neuralink, brain-computer interfaces, and exactly what Musk and others in the space are trying to achieve. Also, the big question: who is the market?

Links

• Elon Musk wants to merge humans with AI. How many brains will be damaged along the way? – Vox
• Elon's tweet about 'Blindsight'

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This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here.

Dropbox. There's a name you probably haven't thought about in a while. Once among the hottest startups on Earth, it lost some of its lustre once every major company in the world began offering consumer and enterprise cloud storage. But it's still alive, kicking and profitable – and making a pivot to AI.

In this ep, we talk about Dropbox and the other cloud storage businesses of the 2000s and 2010s, and why they're between a rock and a hard place.

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This week we're looking at BYD, the Chinese battery maker turned electric vehicle behemoth, which is now the world's biggest EV maker. Following on from our premium episode about the Apple Car a couple of weeks ago, we talk about the current state of the EV market, how BYD found success, and why the world is still relatively slow on the uptake of electric cars.

Always remember: build your dreams, folks.

Links

• Tesla overtaken by China’s BYD as world’s biggest EV maker – FT

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Well folks, it's happening again. The US is threatening to ban TikTok. A bill is currently worming its way through Congress which would ban the app unless it fully divested itself from ByteDance, its Chinese parent company. This led TikTok to engage battle stations, and launch probably the stupidest PR campaign in recent history.

In this episode, we talk TikTok, make predictions about a ban, and pontificate on its effect on politics and culture.

Links

• TikTok Prompts Users to Call Congress to Fight Possible Ban – NY Times
• As TikTok Ban Looms, ByteDance Battles Oracle For Control Of Its Algorithm – Forbes
• TikTok Struggles to Protect U.S. Data From Its China Parent – WSJ

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here.

The fabled Apple car – also known as Project Titan – is no more. After working on it for the last 10 years and blowing $10 billion, the company internally announced that it would scrap the project and reassign many of its staff to generative AI.

In this ep, we talk about the Apple car project: why it was originally imagined, what it sought to do, and why it ultimately didn't work out. 

Links

• How Apple Sank About $1 Billion a Year Into a Car It Never Built – Bloomberg

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One less discussed angle of the rise of AI and widely available LLMs is the relationship dimension. From ChatGPT's personalisation features to AI chatbots on Meta platforms, through to porn and sexbots, many people are using AI for companionship. It's big business too, with The Information reporting that pornbot providers are one category of AI company which are growing without the need for external investment.

To unpack the weird world of AI companionship, some of the rising companies in the space, and what it means for society, we're joined by comedian Tom Cashman. (You can watch his brand new special here.)

Links

• One Class of AI Startups That Can Thrive Without Funding: Porn Chatbots – The Information
• Snapchat’s new AI chatbot is already raising alarms among teens and parents – CNN
• ‘Sometimes, It Feels Real’: Character.AI Gives Humans the Chatbots They Desire – The Information
• Meta’s new AI lets people make chatbots. They’re using it for sex. – Washington Post

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Nvidia, the graphics card company turned into AI chip powerhouse, posted its earnings at the end of last week. Surprising no one, they were huge – propelling the company even higher up the charts of the most valuable companies on Earth.

In this ep, we unpack the earnings and what they mean, as well as talking about Nvidia's future, and even incompetently attempting to put forward a bear case.

Links

• Nvidia posts revenue up 265% on booming AI business – CNBC

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Reddit is going public. After a false start a couple of years ago, the online message board is undergoing the IPO process, setting markets up for the biggest social media IPO since Pinterest in 2019. 

The company has filed its S1, which for the first time lets the world peek into Reddit's books, also revealing what it thinks are its biggest risks and opportunities. Join us as we pick through the document for revealing nuggets.

Links

• Reddit S-1

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The gaming world was ablaze over the past few weeks over reports that Xbox was throwing in the towel and letting some of its biggest exclusive titles go to its eternal rival, the PlayStation. It riled up the Xbox ultras and raised questions about how committed Microsoft is to console gaming – despite its monster $75B acqusition of Activision-Blizzard.

It ended up being a little less dramatic than anticipated. But it still raises questions about Microsoft's strategy in gaming, and how the world's biggest company is approaching the rapidly growing -- and increasingly unstable --  gaming market.

Links

• Microsoft is slowly building to a future where ‘every screen is an Xbox - The Verge
• Microsoft: four Xbox-exclusive games are coming to PS5 and Nintendo Switch – The Verge
• Sony’s value reportedly dropped by $10 billion following ‘disappointing’ PlayStation financials

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Last week, OpenAI announced Sora, its text-to-video model. Only a few people have their hands on it, so all we have to go off are example videos provided by OpenAI. But it looks good – and like a leap forward for AI video creation.

This has raised lots of questions. How does it work? How much crap is about to flood our internet feeds? And is Hollywood doomed? All these questions and more are answered to a base level of satisfaction in this episode.

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The word on the street is that Sam Altman, the once embattled and now seemingly fine CEO of OpenAI, is currently out in the market trying to raise money for a new microchip-related venture. The amount of money he's raising? Seven trillion dollars, which is about 10% of global GDP. In this episode, we discuss the insane computing requirements of a company like OpenAI, and why Sam might be looking to find a new friend other than Nvidia.

Links

• Sam Altman Seeks Trillions of Dollars to Reshape Business of Chips and AI – The Wall Street Journal
• OpenAI Shifts AI Battleground to Software That Operates Devices, Automates Tasks – The Information

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One of the big crazes of the last few years was consumer genetic testing. Through services like 23andme and AncestryDNA, regular punters could find out their ethnic background, link up with distant cousins, and find out what mysterious blood illnesses they were genetically predisposed to get.

But there is trouble in paradise. 23andme has lost a staggering 98% of its value from its peak, and it has people asking: can you build a real, sustainable business from someone spitting into a tube and mailing to to a lab? We dive in.

Links

• 23andMe’s Fall From $6 Billion to Nearly $0 – The Wall Street Journal

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This is a preview of a premium episode. We're currently running a sale on Down Round Premium – head here to score an annual membership for $49 instead of $70. Only until Sunday Feb 11.

Let's face it: Google Search sucks now. We've talked about it on many episodes, along with the broader conversation about how AI might disrupt it.

In this episode, we dig a little deeper. What are the factors that made Google Search so successful, and what are the factors making it no longer fit for purpose? We look at new challengers, like Perplexity, and what Google is doing to prepare for the deprecation of its core business – whenever that may be.

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Hey! Down Round is still running a sale on premium membership until Friday February 9. Sign up using this link, and you can get an annual membership for $49 instead of the usual $70.

Today we're diving into the world of Australian startups and venture capital. After the end of the post-COVID tech boom, you might find yourself wondering who is investing in what, and where all the money is going now. Well, you're in luck.

To help us unpack what Australian tech investment looks like now – as well as give his hot takes on the tech fads and trends of the past few years – we're joined by Damian Fox, partner at Carthona Capital. 

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This is a preview of a premium episode. We're currently running a sale on Down Round Premium – head here to score an annual membership for $49 instead of $70. Amazing stuff.

Last week, we talked about Apple shaky Vision Pro launch, thanks to a number of key developers saying they wouldn't be making apps for the mixed reality headset. This week, the story continues, with Apple officially unveiling its response to recent EU regulation which would force it to open up access to third-party app stores and payment processors in Europe.

Of course, in true Apple fashion, the response is a poison chalice. And it's pissed off everyone from Spotify to Epic Games and all in-between. We discuss.

Links

• Apple's response
• Thread by Spotify CEO Daniel Ek

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This week we're talking about the much-hyped weight loss drug Ozempic and its producer, Danish pharma giant Novo Nordisk. Thanks to the crazy success of Ozempic, Novo Nordisk is now literally the biggest company in Europe by market cap. Now the vultures are circling, and a whole bunch of drugmakers are rushing competitors to market.

We talk about the drug, the company, it's weirdly 'techy' marketing and where it fits into the incoming universe of biotech and pharma tech.

Links

• Our episode from last year with Tim Doyle, founder of Australian online pharmacy Eucalyptus.
• Weight-loss drug maker Novo Nordisk becomes Europe’s most valuable company – FT
• Ozempic is on the rise. That could be a problem for food companies – CNN

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Twitch, the venerable video game livestreaming platform which has repeatedly attempted to become the livestreaming platform for everyone, recently announced a slew of layoffsf. It also confirmed that the company, owned by Amazon, has never been profitable. 

Today, we're talking about Twitch: what it is, the escalating troubles it has faced, and why it and the livestreaming business in general has never quite managed to hit its stride.

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Apple is releasing its Vision Pro mixed reality headset in the US next month. But some of the biggest platforms in the world – from Netflix to Spotify – have announced they aren't supporting it from the get go.

That's partially because it's a niche device with an uncertain chance of success... but could it also be a rebuke of Apple's notorious developer policies, which have pissed off many people over the past decade and a half? We discuss.

Links

• Apple’s Testy Developer Relationships Threaten to Hamper Vision Pro – Bloomberg
• Vision Pro may have an app problem, with developers possibly unwilling to commit to Apple's 'revolutionary' new platform – TechRadar

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The age of the AI device is upon us. At this year's Consumer Electronics Show, the undisputed star was the Rabbit R1, a standalone AI companion device which uses a 'large action model' to understand the things you like doing on your apps and platforms, and does them for you. 

Will it work? Who knows. But Raph bought one. We discussed the hype about the Rabbit, as well as some of the other currents in AI devices which have emerged since the last time we talked about them.

Links

• Say Hello to Rabbit R1: A Tiny Orange Box That Trades Phone Apps for AI – CNET

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Over the Xmas break, the New York Times announced it would be suing OpenAI for copyright infringement, alleging that its GPT platform is trained on copyrighted NYT content. This has become a problem, according to the NYT, because OpenAI is now a direct competitor.

We dive into the lawsuit, and chat a bit about the media, AI and what the future of content looks like. If you're holding out for the last episode of The Down Round Experience... fear not, it's coming this week.

Links

• The Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I. Use of Copyrighted Work – NY Times
• OpenAI's response
• Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers - Futurism

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Happy New Year! We trust you're all well. Today, we're looking back on the 2023 that was – diving into some of the episodes we recorded and checking in how those things landed at the end of the year. These include:

• Afterpay/BNPL
• Crypto and NFTs
• Tech layoffs
• Instant groceries
• Dating apps

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is part 3 of Down Round's Christmas and New Years production, all recorded in one session. To get every part, sign up to Premium here.

The Down Round Community is overflowing with geniuses. The next trillion dollar company will no doubt be founded by someone who is currently paying us $7 a month, representing one of the highest ROI investments anyone could make.

For today's episode of the Down Round Experience, we're taking your pitches. Our Discord community came with the ideas, and we're evaluating them in the inaugutal Down Round Shark Tank. Joining us is producer and musician Joyride (Rowan Dix) from The Meeting Tree, whose enterpreneurial nous fills out the panel.

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This is part two of our marathon holiday record. This is a preview – the full episode is available for premium subs. Sign up here.

The Down Round holiday episodes continue. As the beers continue to flow, we turn our critical attention to another major tech event of December: the hack and leak of Insomniac Games, a first-party developer owned by Sony. 

Links

• Insomniac finally responds to hack that leaked ‘Wolverine’ game and more – The Verge
• GTA 6 hacker handed indefinite hospital order – BBC

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Welcome to our holiday special.

We have recorded a marathon 4 hour podcast with much holiday spirit (we got drunk), and will be dropping it in parts throughout the holiday season.

We started with a quick reflection on the latest news: Bird Scooters has gone under, and Adobe's planned acquisition of Figma has collapsed. 

Plus, due to listener demand, we explain our not particularly complex recording and editing process.

Our original Adobe episode.

Descript audio/video editor

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We had it all planned out. A huge Xmas bonanza episode featuring guests, fun, laughs and all you could ever want from a Down Round variety show.

But then Raph was struck by a mystery illness and we had to delay it by several days. So, until then, enjoy this delightful backup episode where we dig into the world's biggest companies by market cap, and opine on our future. It isn't financial advice. But we would not blame you if you took it that way.

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For many years, Apple has enforced iPhone dominance by refusing to adopt modern text messaging standards, meaning group chats and multimedia messages between iPhones and Android devices has been fundamentally broken. But last month, Apple announced it would adopt the RCS standard.

But at the same time, it came down hard on Beeper Mini, an app which purported to bring the locked down iMessage experience to Android. In this ep, we dive into iMessage and the weird politics of the green bubble.

Links

• Apple has seemingly found a way to block Android’s new iMessage app – The Verge
• Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year - 9to5Mac
• Google's site pleading Apple to adopt RCS

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Poor Google. What used to be possibly the best business in human history has taken a few heavy body blows after the rise of generative AI, with the folks in Mountain View no longer looking like the obvious winners of the internet age. Though they were instrumental in building our current AI moment, companies like OpenAI are hogging the limelight.

But they've been trying to wrestle that crown back. This month, Google announced Gemini, the model it hopes will challenge OpenAI. But will it? It already seems like it won't be that easy. We discuss.

Links

• The demonstration video
• Google just launched a new AI and has already admitted at least one demo wasn’t real - The Verge

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You probably know the story by now. Elon Musk replied positively to a weirdo's anti-Semitic post, which led to an advertiser exodus and Elon melting down at the New York Times DealBook conference. Now, X seems increasingly loaded up with crap tier chum advertising, which is never usually a good sign for a platform.

Is the company spiralling? Is it at death's door? Who knows, but it's fun to talk about with friends.

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We last updated you on the OpenAI drama a couple of weeks ago, right in the middle of it. Back when it looked like Sam Altman was gone, and the future of AI was up in the air.

Ah well! Now that the dust has settled, we're reflecting on what we know about what went down, internet arguments about accelerationism vs decelerationism, and what the near future might hold for OpenAI and AI generally.

Links

• Microsoft to Become Non-Voting Observer in Latest Shake-up of OpenAI Board – The Information
• Who Is @BasedBeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite’s ‘E/Acc’ Movement? – Forbes
• Our episode on AI Doom
• Become a premium member of Down Round

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Welcome...to the silly season.

We answer a bunch of your questions which allows us to prognosticate about the future with less constraints than the few there are usually.

Topics covered include:

• Will AI stagnate?
• Biden's AI regulation framework
• Can I have $20?
• How many beers do we typically drink before a podcast?
• Will VC stop funding boneheads, or is it built into the system?

Sorry if we didn't get to your question, join the discord and ask in there!

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The day James left for honeymoon, the unthinkable happened; Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, got boned by his board of directors like a dog.

How can a man who took a product from 0 to 100 million users in less than a year, who is on top of the world be so unceremoniously dumped by a board of AI doomers and safety dorks?

Well, we dragged James away from the margaritas and discussed all the crazy happenings in the first official Down Round emergency pod. 

(Also our first remote recording on non-studio mics, soz)

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Since the last time we did an episode about Airbnb, the company has both done well and faced deeper problems. Earnings look pretty good. But it has also faced political problems – like being functionally banned in NYC – plus a general perception that it has gotten shittier. 

So, CEO Brian Chesky says he's going to fix it. That means two things: AI, and putting the boot into hosts.

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Once again we’re brought back to the world of AI. Sorry, there’s simply no escape. A few things have happened over the past week:

• Elon Musk announced Grok, the first model for his new company xAI
• OpenAI released a new model as well as a host of new consumer features for ChatGPT - many of which put them in direct competition with the developers who are their API customers. We discuss whether the future of OpenAI is as an API, or a consumer tech play.
• Humane finally announced its ‘AI Pin’. Does this make the Down Round Hot Gadget Guide?

Lots to go over. So we did.

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One of the very first things people realised they could do online was sell their crap. Since that realisation, e-commerce has gotten a little more advanced. But online marketplaces like Facebook Marketplace, eBay and Gumtree still kick along, promising you the opportunity to find great deals as long as you're willing to drive 40 minutes to some guys house.

We go through a whirlwind tour of the online marketplace, how it got to where it is, and the forces making them less essential.

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It's official: Sam Bankman-Fried is GUILTY of committing fraud while running his doomed crypto empire at FTX. The crazy-haired freak took down the credibility of the whole sector while doing it. 

The trial -- particularly the testimony of Sam's fellow execs at FTX and Alameda -- turned up all sorts of juicy little details. In this ep, we go through them and reminisce on the crypto exchange that was.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a preview of a premium episode. To become a member and get access, go here.  

It's been a minute since we've checked in on Twitter/X, which has become a playground for whatever Elon Musk thinks is cool at any given moment and yet still has many millions of users. But it certainly hasn't collapsed as some predicted.

That said, the situation doesn't look great. The ads haven't come back, users seem to be slipping away, investors are writing down their stake – all while the Israel/Palestine conflict really kicks the tyres of Twitter as an information platform. We dig in.

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Snitch Tech.

One of the weirdest trends in tech over the last decade has been the spread of surveillance tech for consumers. Everything from Ring doorbells from Amazon to facial recognition AI and family location tracking software has made it a breeze to film, track and trace your fellow citizens.

But it goes deeper. Social networks for ratting out your neighbour. Weird Nextdoor threads. Number plate recognition software for landlords. We're coining it SNITCH TECH, and we're talking about it today.

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Nintendo has made some of the most popular consumer products of all time, and also invented Mario. Pretty great run! But it's also an interesting business, with a relatively unique approach within the gaming industry and beyond.

As the rumoured announcement of the Switch 2 draws ever nearer, we chat about the House of Mario and what makes it tick.

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The first iPad was released over a decade ago and pitched as a bold new frontier for consumer computing. It helped kill the netbook and spawned generations of copycat tablets from Android manufacturers and Microsoft.

But it hasn't really played out all that well. In fact – despite selling a healthy number of them – the iPad sometimes seems like a mostly forgotten product range, with confusing options and not much by way of innovation.

What gives? Are tablets in general a dead end? We discuss.

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Wow! We're checking in on OpenAI again. Reporting over the weekend confirmed that the company is on track to book over $1 billion of revenue this year – suggesting this whole AI thing might have an actual consumer base. Meanwhile, the company released a handful of new features for ChatGPT which demonstrate just how hard they're going for it. We discuss.

Links

• OpenAI’s Revenue Crossed $1.3 Billion Annualized Rate, CEO Tells Staff - The Information
• DALL·E 3

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Elon Musk may be a complete weirdo these days, but SpaceX is still a pretty cool company. Started to assist mankind in its journey to Mars, it has been the leading company in the world of private spaceflight, and the undisputed king of satellite tech. 

In this ep we talk about SpaceX, Starlink, the various forces which made it successful, and speculate on what jobs we will have on Mars.

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YouTube is indisputably the king of online video, and has been virtually since it launched in 2005. It's part of the infrastructure of the internet, and has imprinted itself on the culture through a combo of its algorithmic recommendations engine and sheer scale. But in the age of TikTok, can YouTube be toppled?

In this episode, we talk through YouTube's history, key points in its development, and what its future might look like. Also, sadly, YouTubers.

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This is a preview of a premium episode. To subscribe and get an extra episode every week, go here.

These days it seems just about everyone can make professional looking video. Thanks to the video production tools available to the average user of TikTok, Zoomers are better at editing video than millennials ever were. It leaves the question: what are the classic pro video platforms like Avid, Adobe Premiere and Apple Final Cut Pro doing?

At the same time, music production seems like a harder problem to make simple for the masses. In this ep, we dive into the current situation around audio and video production.

Links

• Bill Gates tries to install Movie Maker – Internal Tech Emails

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Among the numerous announcements made at this year's Meta Connect was a new generation of its smart glasses, developed with Ray-Bans. Aside from the usual stuff about capturing photos and listening to audio, Mark Zuckerberg casually dropped that he thinks they will soon be an interface into conversational AI.

It comes as there are rumours of other companies considering AI devices, like OpenAI working with former Apple design boss Jony Ive. In this ep, we dive in.

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Digital identity references a simple idea: how much a computer system knows about you. But, just like everything else, it's a bit weird these days. People have increasingly fractious online identities, even as the platforms we use and our own governments collect more and more data about us.

This episode, we discuss changes in digital identity, and Raph gets to go off about his deep and unabiding love of the surveillance state.

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The smartphone camera arms race seems to be a little less intense these days, but the quality of a phone camera remains one of the major reasons people choose to upgrade – especially when most iPhone and Android devices have been basically the same black glass rectangle for a decade now. 

But there's only so much circuitry and lens technology you can cram into a phone. So much of the development has been software level, with machine learning and AI doing heavy algorithmic work to make your photos pop. This ranges from automatic red eye removal and saturation adjustment all the way up to faked photos of the moon.

So we ask the bold question: where does smartphone photography go from here? And does it really matter if the photos your phone is taking don't really reflect reality?

Links

• Samsung caught faking zoom photos of the Moon - The Verge
• Artificial intelligence and the future of smartphone photography - ZDNet
• Your smartphone photos are totally fake – and you love it - Washington Post

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If you pay any attention to tech or VC Twitter, Flexport will have crossed your radar. A freight forwarding business which wants to do for supply chains what Stripe did for payments, Flexport (and its founder Ryan Petersen) has become one of the most hyped startups among a certain flavour of tech poster. Petersen also became a well-known talking head during the COVID supply chain crisis.

The company is in the news because Petersen sacked his successor, former Amazon logistics boss Dave Clarke, and has returned to the helm amid a revenue collapse. In this ep, we talk about Flexport, logistics, and what the heck's going on.

Links

• Flexport CEO Dave Clark resigns from logistics startup after one year in the role - CNBC
• Can Ryan Petersen Fix Flexport? - The Information

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Unity is one of the most popular game engines in the world, powering everything from a solid chunk of the mobile gaming universe to bigger console and PC games. Last week, it managed to annoy basically all of its customers by announcing a new, highly extractive pricing model.

In this episode, we dive into what a game engine does, the rise of Unity, and why making everyone who uses your product homicidally angry is the bold marketing move of 2023.

Links

• Unity plan pricing and packaging updates - Unity
• Unity plans to change its disastrous new pricing program - The Verge

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This is a preview of a premium episode. To sign up for Down Round Premium and get an extra episode every week, go here. 

This week brought news that Clubhouse, the social audio streaming platform endlessly hyped during the early pandemic, has pivoted away from its original purpose and is now trying to become sort of a group chat for audio instead.

It's as good a time as any to talk about social audio, the way people share audio online, and why it's such a tough nut to crack.

Links

• Clubhouse reinvents itself as an audio messaging app - The Verge

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Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites on earth, and an example of a quasi-utopian internet project which has kind of worked out in the end – and managed to stick around too. Despite some evident problems, it all works surprisingly well.

To help us understand Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation which manages it – and the weird world of the editors who keep it functional – we're joined by author Richard Cooke, who is currently writing a book about it. 

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This is a preview of a premium episode. To sign up for Down Round Premium and get an extra episode a week, go here. 

Canva is one of Australia's most successful tech companies. It has proven pretty disruptive to the global design landscape, with its template-based offering making it relatively easy for even novices with zero taste to make stuff that looks pretty good.

In this ep, we talk about Canva's effect on design, and where it might go next to justify its sky-high valuation.

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MrBeast is the most popular individual YouTuber, with over 180 million subscribers. He makes a lot of sleekly produced videos where he gives away money, cars, islands and life-altering surgeries. To some, he is history's greatest philanthropist. To others, he's deeply evil in a way that is hard to articulate. Which side of the divide you fall on is mostly a generational thing.

To help us understand the man, the business and the phenomenon that is MrBeast, we're joined by writer Max Read, who formerly edited Gawker and has written for New York Magazine, The New York Times, and The New York Times Magazine. (And possibly other New York related publications.) Max recently authored a feature article for the NYT on MrBeast, making him well-placed to take us on this dark odyssey into the heart of YouTube.

Max also writes a newsletter called Read Max, which you should subscribe to.

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This is a preview of a premium episode. To sign up for Down Round Premium and get an extra episode a week, go here. 

A fun one for you this week. Over the past few weeks, we've been blessed with many news stories about Bryan Johnson, the tech billionaire who is putting his considerable wealth towards becoming functionally immortal through a weird diet, militant sleep schedule, and injecting himself with his son's blood.

Pretty neat! On this episode, we discuss Johnson's quest, and where it fits in with recent Silicon Valley fixation on biotech and the physical sciences.

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Snapchat was one of the major social media platforms of the 2010s, and still remains pretty popular with the kids. It helped create much of the modern social media landscape, but hasn't been able to turn that into lasting wins -- in no small part because every innovation it comes up with is pretty quickly cloned by its biggest rival, Instagram.

Now it finds itself in a precarious position, with parent company Snap Inc reporting a decline in revenue and the company trying just about every pivot Down Round loves to see, from AI to augmented reality.

Links

• Snap plunges on first-quarter revenue miss - CNBC
• Snapchat is releasing its own AI chatbot powered by ChatGPT - The Verge

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One of the most enduring rumours in tech markets and investing subreddits is that Apple is on the cusp of buying Disney and integrating its IP and content into Apple's tech and distribution network. It's like a sick fantasy for guys with no lives and ZERO swag.

It seems pretty unlikely. But with news that returned CEO Bob Iger could be planning to break up the empire and sell off assets like ESPN, the rumour mill is kicking back into gear. We ask the question: should Apple buy at least PART of Disney?

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QR code menus became popular during the pandemic, when everyone collectively decided it was much safer to have your beers delivered to the table at the pub instead of walking up yourself.

Now there are a million different providers of QR code menus. But but how does it all work, and is it actually a good business? We dig in.

For an extra episode each week, and no ads, subscribe to Down Round premium here.

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Big news, WeWork fans! The company has announced that it is hurtling towards bankruptcy, with serious doubts about its capacity to continue as a “going concern”. For those who haven’t been paying attention for the past couple of years and assumed it was bankrupt and out of business anyway, this will be a shock.

In today’s ep, we take a tour through the WeWork story — particularly what it has been up to since its famous IPO collapse in 2019.

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Recent years have seen a surge in telehealth and online health delivery — from essential prescriptions to more discretionary health spending. Everyone from smaller boutique startups to Amazon want a slice of the pie. There’s a big debate in the medical community about so-called ‘asynchronous care’ — where a patient and doctor communicate through non-live online services. Pharmacists, already rattled by the retail revolution led by Chemist Warehouse, are also mad about this stuff. But many patients do like to do medicine on the computer.

Today we’re joined by Tim Doyle, founder of online healthcare company Eucalyptus, who gives a window into how this stuff works in Australia. And maybe beyond. (No promises.)

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Twitter is no more. From the ashes rises X, Elon Musk’s cringely-named attempt to actualise one of his long term goals: building an everything app. Musk wants X to be the central place where you post, shop, send money, access financial services and do whatever else it is you do as part of being alive on the planet.

In this episode we dive into the idea of the everything app, and why tech companies have been chasing that dream for at least a decade.

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It’s been a while since we’ve done a Q&A episode, and we know your pressing questions have been accumulating for months. We’re sorry we let it get so desperate.

Thank you to our subscribers on Substack and Twitter (X???) who sent in questions. If we didn’t make it to you, there’s a good chance we’ve got a whole ep planned in future.

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Hollywood actors and writers are both on strike for the first time since 1960. Two of the primary reasons they’re hitting the picket line are core Down Round areas: the economics of streaming, and the future of AI content.

Working actors are mad that they’re not being compensated properly for appearances in streaming content, where audience figures are much more opaque, and they’re staring down the barrel of having their likenesses reused with AI.

Ah well. Guess it’s up to us to figure it out then…

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The rise of the consumer-available drone over the past decade has been a huge win for real estate agents and YouTube fail compilations. But what about the rest of us chumps?!

In this episode, we talk about the drone — from the dominance of Chinese companies in their production, to the (possible) promises of drone delivery.

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At the end of last week, Mark Zuckerberg decided to take advantage of the chaos over in Twitterland by surprise dropping Meta’s own text-based social media platform, Threads. Because it leverages the Instagram social graph, it quickly exploded to over 100 million users.

In today’s ep, we dig into Threads and make a series of wild predictions which are sure to never be vindicated.

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The ongoing freakout at Twitter culminated this week in the platform limiting the number of tweets users could see per day, which Elon Musk claimed was to stop an onslaught of AI bots training themselves on Twitter data.

That caused a brief exodus to Bluesky, the wonky alternative currently being hyped by Twitter refugees and former addicts.

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The ticket industry is one of the most confusing online industries in 2023, a rentseeking behemoth which doesn’t seem to offer much for fans or artists alike.

Thanks to the suggestion of a few listeners who seem to have missed out on Taylor Swift tickets last week, we’re diving in.

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It’s been a hot minute since we’ve checked in on the world of AI, and things have been chugging along at rapid pace in the buzziest sector of tech.

This week, we dive into the current AI landscape, including the world of open-source AI.

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Let’s face it: LinkedIn is one of the most annoying websites ever to exist. Terrible emails, armies of recruiters, and some of the worst posts you’ve ever seen.

And yet it’s also one of the most successful social media platforms, a genuine moneymaker for Microsoft, and now completely integral to modern white collar life. In this episode, we talk through LinkedIn and the horrible posters who populate it.

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Reddit, one of the internet’s last largely functional online communities, is undergoing something of a political revolution. Thanks to the company’s plans to implement charge for API access — potentially affecting everything from third-party apps to moderation bots — subreddits large and small have gone dark, with the platform’s army of uncompensated …

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It’s been a couple of weeks since Apple announced the Vision Pro, the ‘spatial computing’ headset it believes is the future of going on the computer, getting online, and posting up a storm.

Now the dust has settled, it’s time for the boys to go in.

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Despite the fact the entertainment world at large is — for better or worse — piling in to the streaming model, sport has proven much more difficult. A headache-inducing labyrinth of rights deals, blackouts and other thorny problems have kept sport broadcasting from fully leaning into streaming. But that is changing, with streamers from Apple to Amazon d…

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James is in the US this week, so we're digging an episode from the deep and forgotten archives.

Swimply is, to put it simply, Airbnb but for pools. As in, you can go to a strangers house and swim in their pool for a small fee. It has tried to launch in Australia three times now, so obviously it deserved our attention. Comedian Becky Lucas joined us to discuss.

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At every major juncture of internet development since 1994, you’re guaranteed to find one company making baffling decisions: Yahoo. From one of the biggest stocks of the dotcom boom to the laughingstock of the mobile era, Yahoo has managed to stumble ungracefully through internet history in a way we simply had to chronicle.

In this episode, we look back …

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Esports was one of the weirdest hype cycles of the last tech boom. A surge of venture capital and investment led to a frothy market which somehow convinced people that ‘watching Apex Legends’ was not only the next frontier in video gaming, but also in sports and entertainment generally. This unstoppable hype train culminated in FaZe Clan, an esports influencer house, listing on the public markets via a SPAC.

Turns out it didn’t really work, and esports has not remotely lived up to its promise of being the future of sport. What went wrong? Down Round discusses.

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Netflix was once the golden child of the tech industry, with its streaming model held up as the future of content consumption. Now that every rightsholder has a streaming platform, and the end of the tech boom has led to drastic cuts in content budgets and the return of advertising, where does that leave Netflix?

The boys chat. Raph offers his strident view as a man who does not watch scripted television.

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This week, GPU maker Nvidia was briefly valued at $1 trillion, which is pretty wild for a company founded to cater to the whims of one of God’s most pathetic creatures: PC gamers.

The surge in value is largely thanks to Nvidia’s critical position in the emerging AI economy. It turns out the company’s graphics cards technology, originally intended to support high-performance gaming, are actually very good at training the neural networks that drive platforms like ChatGPT.

In this ep, we dive into how we got here.

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Apple’s developer conference is in a couple of weeks, and all signs suggest it is about to announce an insanely expensive AR/VR headset, which it hopes will be their next computing platform and maybe a smartphone successor somewhere down the line.

In this ep we talk about headsets generally, the companies trying to make them happen, and why no one seems …

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Despite the fact the social web seems inexorably on the march towards TikTok-style video feeds, there’s still a happy home on the web for big-brained lovers of text. Twitter, despite never being the biggest social network, has outsized influence. Now that Elon Musk is slowly transforming it into a big toilet, other challengers are poking their head above the parapets.

In this episode we’re talking through the vultures who are circling Twitter’s instability and trying to become the next place where text-heads congregate — from Meta to Bluesky.

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It’s been a hot minute since we’ve taken a look at what Meta is up to. It’s a good time, because they’re currently making a hasty AI pivot like everyone else.

Will it work? What happened to the metaverse? Will zoomers ever use Facebook? So many questions, so few answers.

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The worlds of fitness and tech have been converging for years thanks to innovations in wearables, apps and subscriptions. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys quantifying every minute biological detail of your workout, or developing a parasocial relationship with a chirpy American cycling instructor… your time is now.

In this ep, we survey everything from the Apple Watch and Fitbit to Peloton and Strava, and ask a key question: are you ready to feel the burn, boss?

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Over the past few weeks , BuzzFeed News shuttered its doors and Vice made deep cuts to its news product. They followed the collapse of other digital news brands like Gawker, which fell apart for a second time.

All these platforms were highly representative of the digital media era of the 2010s, which has come to what looks like a screeching halt. In toda…

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In March, we tackled the AI doom prophets who argue that rapidly advancing artificial intelligence will kill everyone on its journey to sentience.

That was cool. But obviously people have more pressing concerns — like, “are these new AI systems going to take my job?” Today, we’re digging into the discourse on AI and automation, and whether you personally are headed straight for the breadline. (Spoiler: you specifically are in serious trouble, but we’re fine.)

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Last year, Microsoft announced it would buy video game publisher Activision Blizzard for almost $70 billion, making it the biggest tech deal literally ever.

Last month, the UK competition regulator blocked the sale on antitrust grounds, arguing it would hurt competition in the nascent cloud gaming sector.

In this ep, we discuss Microsoft, Xbox, cloud gami…

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Anyone who spent any time online over the past few years will be intimately familiar with the constellation of cool ways to get rich online. Youtube grindset hustlers have been promising us for years that dropshipping and affiliate marketing are your ticket to financial freedom.

In this ep, we dive into this weird world. And hell, maybe you’ll learn how to become a billionaire along the way.

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It's been a little while since we opened the dusty Down Round mailbag and answered some listener questions.

Today we're answering a range of inquiries we got via Twitter and Substack, on everything from Linktree and Twitter to online booze subscription services and AI Drake.

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One of the most underrated battles currently emerging in the tech world is the fight over who will control your in-car experience.

Apple and Google have already made serious headway into controlling car entertainment systems, but now they want more. Now, some car companies are openly wondering whether they should ditch the big dogs altogether and go the Tesla route of owning the whole experience.

For James, proud owner of a 2012 Hyundai Getz with zero screens, this is barely relevant. But for Raph, an even prouder owner of a 2022 Skoda Kodiaq… it’s personal.

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Instagram was undeniably the most influential social network of the 2010s, and certaibnly one of the most important generators of 2010s culture.

But it’s looking a bit worse for wea these days. This week we dive into Insta, where it’s been, and where it’s going.

Editor’s note: we apologise for conflating Marilyn Manson and Slipknot.

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Discord has gone from being an ultra low latency voice platform for League of Legends heads into one of the major social platforms of 2023.

We talk about its rise through the pandemic, its challenge to both Slack and traditional social media, and we give Raph ample space to evangelise Microsoft Teams, his favourite piece of software on Earth.

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In the second part of this week’s topic, we talk about the current state of the microchip industry.

Thanks to the insane complexity of making them, chip supply chains are incredibly fragile, and it’s dominated by a tiny handful of companies. This is highly unfortunate, because we need microchips to do things like drive to the shops and watch TikTok for …

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Microchips. They’re extremely tiny and very cool. (You can quote us on that.) This week, we’re doing a two-parter on the modern world’s most important technology.

In the first part, we chat through the development of the microchip and how we got where we are today. In the second half, we’ll go into the incredible weird, fragile state of the industry today.

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This week we’re tackling not one but two topics. And they’re both kind of related to Elon Musk.

First we’re giving you an update on what’s been going on with Twitter, which despite our unshakeable faith Musk’s stewardship seems to not be doing so well. Then we dig into some new developments in the world of AI, including an open letter calling for researc…

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For the past few years we’ve had to listen to Western governments repeatedly threaten to ban TikTok and then ultimately not do much about it. But it does seem like the conversation is heating up. Will they do it? Or will an army of Zoomers addicted to those videos where a robot voice reads Reddit posts over Minecraft footage stop them?

We discuss.

Links

• Project Texas: The Details of TikTok’s Plan to Remain Operational in the United States — Lawfare Blog

• Australia-wide ban of TikTok on government devices announced as senior politicians quit the app — The Guardian

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We’ve alluded a few times on the pod to the weird developments in tech industry politics over the last few years. Bitcoin! Conservatives! New societies! Things are getting weird.

In today’s ep we go a little deeper, diving into the political tendencies currently driving Silicon Valley.

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Shein is one of the world’s most insane companies, and yet flies weirdly under the radar. One of the most popular shopping platforms in the world, it is revolutionising the fast fashion industry with its incredibly vertically integrated manufacturing, marketing and e-commerce machine.

We’re joined this week by writer, podcaster and former Triple J host Veronica Milsom, who recently hosted Threads, a series about the fast fashion industry.

We talk about fast fashion, Shein’s particular business model, and what the future of fashion holds for certifiably swagged out and drippy boys like Raph and James.

Links

* Shein: The TikTok of Ecommerce - Packy McCormick and Matthew Brennan

* How Shein beat Amazon at its own game and reinvented fast fashion – Rest of World

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Every time we think we’re done with AI episodes, they release something else. Can we catch a break?

Last week, OpenAI dropped GPT-4, the latest version of the large language model which powers ChatGPT. It’s now more creativ and less frequently wrong, and it’s caused another minor freakout online.

Is it all that? We discuss.

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Recent reports have indicated Apple is gearing up to announce its mixed-reality headset, which the company wants to be the next iPhone. CEO Tim Cook reportedly wants it to be his product legacy.

So, we thought it was a good time to take a look at Apple in 2023. At the precipice. What are they up to? And are we ready to put big clunky headsets on and enter the Cookverse?

Links

- Tim Cook bets on Apple’s mixed-reality headset to secure his legacy – Financial Times

- Inside the Tech Powering Apple’s Envelope-Pushing, Risky Mixed Reality Headset - The Information

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Down Round listeners who don’t work in software development or associated fields are always asking us about Atlassian. What the hell do Atlassian do? Why do devs complain about Jira all the time? Why do I have to see Mike Cannon-Brookes on TV?

Well, we’re here to answer your questions, and slightly more. If you know nothing about Atlassian, you’ll walk o…

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Silicon Valley Bank imploded last week, becoming the second-largest bank collapse in US history. This led to an insane meltdown within the tech industry and beyond.

In this ep, we explain what happened, what it means, and offer 1-2 prolonged rants along the way.

This was recorded on Monday March 13, so if anything insane happens after that which doesn’t vindicate our predictions, please give us the benefit of the doubt and assume we were right anyway.

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This is part two of a two part episode, for subscribers only.

In the second part of our AI doom episode, for subscribers only, we dive into the nitty gritty. What are people actually saying when they claim AI is going to kill us all? (They can be pretty vague on the specifics, after all.) Are they right? Is ChatGPT going to end your life?

Let us answer these questions, and perhaps a little more.

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This is part one of a two part episode.

With the end of a long AI winter and the rise of large language models and platforms like ChatGPT, we’re experiencing a renaissance of AI doomerism, and people making wild and bold predictions of the incoming robot apocalypse.

It’s almost quaint, in a way. Charming. This week, we’re looking at the AI doomer movement, who predict we’ll all be dead at the hands of ultrasmart computers in a few short years. In part one, we chart a course of its history, and the unusual places it developed over the past couple of decades.

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For hundreds of years, newspapers had a pretty good business model: you’d buy the paper, and it would have ads in it. Not bad!

Unfortunately, computers occurred. Now, our friends in the lying news media have been forced to adapt. In today’s episode, we dig into the uneasy marriage of news publishers and the internet.

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Over the past decade, we’ve successfully outsourced romance and human reproduction to a series of apps, most of which are owned by Match Group. Pretty cool!

But it’s starting to look like Tinder and its many clones have lost their spark. What does the future hold? This week: a dive into the sick, sordid world of dating apps.

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Unlike other tech podcasts – who we won’t name – Down Round is ruthlessly committed to accountability and self-critique.

On today’s ep, we revisit a handful of topics we’ve covered over the last six or so months and evaluate whether we got it right or wrong. And we have a few laughs along the way. This is exactly what you pay for.

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Gaming, which was considered a nasty little hobby for maladjusted dweebs as recently as 2018, is now as important to the global economy as healthcare and the natural resources industry.

OK, maybe that’s not true. But anyway. Gaming is big business, and it’s become deeply intertwined with the rest of the tech industry. This week, we’re talking about how t…

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The history of tech is littered with rivalries. Apple vs. Microsoft. Netflix vs. Amazon. PlayStation vs. Xbox. IBM vs. HP. Raph vs. Henno.

Microsoft vs. Google is one you hear about slightly less. But it’s been thrust to the forefront of the discourse now as the two companies battle in the world of AI and Google tries to tackle the ChatGPT threat.

But the rivalry goes back far longer and deeper than that. We dig in.

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Sports betting. It’s an enduring part of Australian culture, where having a flutter on your sport of choice is as natural as breathing oxygen, or putting your paycheque through the pokies, or having a flutter on something else like the dishlickers at Wentworth Park.

But sports betting is even more topical now that it has swept through the US in the wake of a Supreme Court decision back in 2018. Now it looks like Australia’s obsessive sports betting culture is hitting the global mainstream.

To dig through the detritus of the tech-enabled sports betting universe, we’re joined by Down Round repeat guest Mark Di Stefano, a reporter at the Australian Financial Review. We don’t even invite him at this point, he just wanders into the studio like he owns the place.

Links

How Sports Betting Hit the Mainstream in America – NY Times

Sportsbet under investigation for dodging online betting rules – AFR

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Reddit. Once infamous as a haven for libertarians, endless arguments about video games and borderline illegal porn, it has managed to survive the last decade of internet development as one of the last genuinely useful online communities.

We dive into the history, the culture, and why ‘Reddit’ has become one of the most common and effective Google search …

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Instant grocery (also known as instant commerce, 10-minute grocery, ultrafast delivery and a million other names) was one of the hottest categories globally at the tail end of the last investment craze. It seemed every major city had 3-5 companies trying to be the one to deliver you a bag of oranges at superhuman speed.

Now it doesn’t look so hot. In Australia, only Milkrun is left, with Voly and Send having collapsed already. And it’s looking shaky for Milkrun too.

What happened? Was instant grocery doomed from the start? How can they fix it? And where can a guy get toothpaste in five friggen minutes in this town??

Links

* Milkrun, the last local grocery delivery standing, is still trying to find fresh capital after raising $75 million - Startup Daily

* Instant grocery delivery app Send collapses - Sydney Morning Herald

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The creator economy was one of the most hyped sectors at the tail end of the last boom, promising that anyone with an iPhone and a $15 ring light could become a phenomenally wealthy celebrity if they just believed in themselves. It even convinced two crazy-ass white boys from Sydney they could become successful Substack podcasters.

Now the dust has settled, was the hype justified? We’re talking everything from YouTubers and Instagram influencers to link-in-bio startups and whatever the hell Mr Beast does on this week’s episode.

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The tech industry has had a long-time obsession with revolutionising food and the way we eat. From Soylent, the nutrient slurry intended for lifehacking programmers to optimise their sad lives, to the current obsession with plant-based and cell cultured meat, there are always venture-backed startups trying to disrupt the crap we stuff into our chompholes.

We dive in.

Links

* Fake Meat Was Supposed to Save the World. It Became Just Another Fad” - Bloomberg

* The original Soylent blog

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Since the last time we did an episode about AI, there’s been enough movement that we are being dragged back in. Join us… A few updates we dive into:

– Microsoft is deepening its investment in OpenAI, and integrating it into its cloud computing offering and software like Office.

– Google has called a “code red” and plans to roll out more customer-facing AI stuff this year and next.

– ChatGPT is turning into a paid product.

– Artists are becoming angrier and angrier about AI image generation, and the culture war is getting more intense.

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It’s Down Round’s 50th episode. We’re celebrating this momentous occasion by discussing a real upper of a topic: the avalanche of layoffs which have hit the tech industry over the past several months.

So what’s going on? Is the world economy about to collapse? Or are these hugely profitable big tech companies working themselves into a tizzy?

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Fans of tech scams will enjoy the first big one of the year. Frank, the student loan startup acquired by U.S. bank JP Morgan, turned out to be less of a business and more of a fraudulent Excel spreadsheet. We discuss how it fits in among the greats.

Links

* JP Morgan Says Startup Founder Used Millions Of Fake Customers To Dupe It Into An Acquisition – Forbes

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One of the buzziest sectors over the past half a decade is micromobility: e-scooters, e-bikes and the various rental apps which shell them out. Is it actually a good business? Or are they doomed to sink to the bottom of our various urban rivers?

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Unfortunately much like stocks, crypto, rare sneakers, NFTs, classic Nintendo games and vibes, Pokemon cards have crashed in value.

This week, the collectable boom and bust cycle.

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On today’s ep we’re joined by Mike Isaac, New York Times tech correspondent and author of Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber.

He’s writing a book about Facebook, and we grill him relentlessly for an hour about Zuckerberg, the metaverse, and how things are feeling in Silicon Valley.

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Today’s episode is all about payments and fintechs. From neobanks to buy now pay later, how are they all weathering the marginal increase in interest rates? Not well, it turns out!

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In the wake of Tesla’s huge stock price drop, Down Round discusses: is the company all that? Or is it going to be smoked by Volkswagen?

Happy New Year, and apologies for another episode about Elon Musk.

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We’re pausing the free ep this week over the Xmas/NY break. We’re back and firing all cylinders from January 4.

For our cherished premium subs, we have 28 red hot minutes of deeply researched analysis on where the tech world is going in 2023. From crypto and AI to corporate mergers and social media, we’re offering sharp analysis and comprehensive, action…

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Merry Christmas from the Down Round crew. Your present is another listener Q&A episode, packed to the brim with exciting questions about cutting edge companies like IBM and Salesforce. Do you like it? Say thank you Santa.

Want to participate in our next Q&A? Follow us on Twitter.

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Today we’re going meta. Various companies have been trying to turn podcasting (and ‘premium audio’) into a huge business on the level of streaming video. But is the hype actually justified? We discuss.

(Disclosure statement: as proud proprietors of Australia’s best value premium podcast, we think podcasts are going to the moon. Invest now.)

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TikTok: is it a fun lip syncing app for Zoomers, or a sinister intelligence operation by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party? You won’t find answers in this episode, that’s for sure. But we will hold your attention for 20-ish minutes.

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Elon has leaked internal comms from old Twitter onto the internet via trusted Substack journos, insisting that it reveals corruption, collusion and left-wing bias. But is it actually anything? The fellas discuss.

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Down Round has gone premium, and this is our first episode in the warm, comforting embrace of the paywall. We’re kicking off with an omnibus ep updating you all on a few things we’ve gone over previously: Apple, Elon and SBF.

If you’re listening to the preview in front of the paywall – do yourself a favour and sign up. Go on then.

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OpenAI’s ChatGPT has taken the internet by storm this week, making it seem like an AI-dominated future could be just around the bend. But is it all that? The fellas discuss.

But, more importantly: Down Round is going premium. If you want to invest in our future podcast content empire, visit our Substack and join the family.

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We talk the persistence of the 14 year old smartphone, and the failure of voice, AI and the metaverse to usurp it.

Links

Everybody promised to disrupt the smartphone — and the smartphone outlasted them all – The Verge

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Thank you to everyone who made the FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried episode our most listened ever. As a reward for your loyalty, you get another episode about it. Say thank you.

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As Bob replaces Bob (who in turn replaced Bob) we look at the recent goings on at The Walt Disney Company, and how it all fits into the streaming landscape.

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We’re checking back in on Twitter under the Musk regime. It’s all going great!

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Where do we begin with this mess?The world's second biggest exchange, and crypto's golden boy has collapsed in a matter of days - from $36b to nothing.

Even by crypto standards this story is absurd. Allow us to take you through it.

Links

The FTX "balance sheet"

How Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto Empire Collapsed – NY Times

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Airbnb sort of sucks now, and it seems like the company realises it. It has announced guest-friendly changes, but are they enough?

Raph and James dive into all the thorny problems surrounding the company, and come to a final decision on whether you should be forced to do the dishes in your Byron Bay short-term stay. (The answer is no.)

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The EU is forcing Apple change its iPhone cable, and they’re huffy even though they were definitely going to do it anyway. The boys discuss European regulation more generally.

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A recent series of high-profile hacks of Australian companies including Optus and Medibank have people worried about user data and privacy.  Given Raph and James are both terminally chill about their own data, they brought on someone who actually knows what they're talking about: ABC journalist Ariel Bogle.

Links

• The biggest hack in history: Australians scramble to change passports and driver licences after Optus telco data debacle – The Guardian


• ‘The damage here is potentially irreparable’: Scale of Medibank hack worsens – Sydney Morning Herald


• Critics say more needs to be done to stop the next Optus or Medibank style of data breach – ABC

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Elon's first few days at Twitter HQ have been eventful. 

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Productivity software. Our many and valued white collar listeners will know it very well. But will they be able to respect Microsoft Teams after the Down Round boys give it a skewering?

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Streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are changing the way music is made. We discuss.

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We've plugged into blockchain metaverses, but how is Facebook/Meta's multi-billion dollar attempt going?

Company Documents Show Meta’s Flagship Metaverse Falling Short - Wall Street Journal ($)

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Kanye says he's going to buy Parler, the 'free speech'-focused Twitter clone. But more broadly, what is a platform's responsibility when it comes to removing speech? Do we want our tech overlords to determine what is allowed to be said and what isn't? If not them... then who? 

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AI is once again all the rage – with investor money, engineering talent and media interest flooding into the sector once again. What does the future hold?

Dan Nolan, notorious poster and AI entrepreneur, joins us to discuss.

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An anti-woke bank, a conservative safe-space for the desperate and dateless, a censorship-proof YouTube and a free speech Twitter.

We check in on right-wing tech.

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Google. You know it as a search engine, an email provider,  a cloud hosting service, a mobile operating system, a friend. But did you know that Google is also a killer? Join us on a spooky pre-Halloween journey into the many products Google has unceremoniously killed before their time.

Links

• Google Is Killing Stadia, And Refunding Every Purchase Ever Made - Forbes


• Killed by Google

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As part of the ongoing 'Does Elon Have to Buy Twitter?' drama a court has ordered the messages between Elon and many wealthy business leaders and VCs to be made public. It's a treasure trove.

Leave us a review if you have something to say...

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The relationship between frictionless payment, recreational drugs and attempting to find a greater purpose. Silicon Valley's weird relationship with drugs. 

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Saudi Arabia is building the city of the future which includes a 250 metre wide, 500 meter tall and 170km long vertical city. It's supposed to be ready in 8 years time. How's it looking? On track, we bet.

Links:

MBS’s $500 Billion Desert Dream Just Keeps Getting Weirder - Bloomberg

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Have the grand promises of Uber come to pass? Or are we living in an endless nightmare from which we might never wake, endlessly begging from a release that surely never to come? No? Just us? OK.

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Adobe has announced it will acquire the much-loved design platform Figma. What does it all mean, and why does everyone hate Adobe so much?

Down Round investigates. (By which we mean we discussed it, with no investigation or reporting whatsoever.)

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You asked for a longer episode, and now we've delivered. We are joined by the Mark Di Stefano of the AFR – and formerly of BuzzFeed and The Information – who dispensed the dirt on Amazon for longer than our usual 15-20 minutes. Are you happy now?

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Is AI generated art going to put every graphic designer, writer and podcaster out of a job and win every small town local fete art competition? 

DALL-E, MidJourney, Stable Diffusion et al.

Where Does Alex Jones Go From Here? By Charlie Warzel

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A scheduling hitch leaves Raph and James unprepared, but little did they know, they'd been preparing for this episode their whole lives...

Instead of going deep on one topic, we touch on 7 things that are broken on the internet/in the tech we use every day. Introducing, The Rant Zone.

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The crypto world is in a tizz about the biggest change to Ethereum since it launched. Will Ethereum moving from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake be a black swan disaster event, or the beginning of a new global blockchain reality? Well, we know two guys who are ready and willing to pontificate baselessly on that very question. (Hint: it's us.)

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A whistleblower complaint by renowned hacker Mudge gives us a peek behind the curtain at the alleged shitshow that is Twitter Inc.

Photo of Mudge and Bill Clinton: https://twitter.com/dotMudge/status/1235223136334995457?s=20&t=v0rD3-FAuNEIgUeRP5fttQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3CKgkyc7Qo

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A sad mea culpa on Adam Neumann, then we talk the latest Metaverse happenings. Raph immersed himself in Decentraland, James immersed himself in Matthew Ball's new book, The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything.

They both report back.

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How did kickboxing champion, manosphere influencer and general ne'er-do-well Andrew Tate hack the algorithms to appear in everyone's feed and become the world's most Googled person? And what the heck does it mean?

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Tornado Cash is a decentralised "mixer" that allows users to obscure their crypto transactions. It's been sanctioned by the US government, who say it is used to launder money.

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Adam Neumann, the man who set $40 billion on fire during the WeWork IPO debacle, is back – and he's just been given $350 million for another crack.

Links

– Flowcarbon "Lite Paper"

- FT: WeWork’s Adam Neumann on investing, startups, surfing and Masayoshi Son

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BeReal: The hot new social media craze touts itself as the antithesis of Instagram. But one thing Instagram does is actually make money. Can BeReal reject the tried-and-true path of extracting value from its users while turning a profit? James and Raph discuss.

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Visa and Mastercard have both stopped offering their payment processing services to MindGeek, the shadowy conglomerate behind some of the internet's most visited sites – including, but not limited to, YouPorn, Pornhub, RedTube and Brazzers.

What's all this then?

Links:

MindGeek: the secretive owner of Pornhub and RedTube – Financial Times

Visa and Mastercard suspend payments for ad purchases on Pornhub and MindGeek amid controversy – CNBC

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James Hennessy and Raph Dixon on the intersection of technology, business and culture.

This week, after a quick update on the rollercoaster at Instagram since our last episode, we discuss the golden-child of the blockchain: Helium. According to crypto-utopians (including, somehow, the New York Times) Helium provides an obvious use case for crypto outside of buying drugs and evading financial regulation. Unfortunately it might not quite be living up to the hype.

Links:

Maybe There’s a Use for Crypto After All – The New York Times

Web3 darling Helium has bragged about Lime being a client for years. Lime says it isn't true. – Mashable

I’m Regretting Mining Helium… – VoskCoin on YouTube

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Snap and Twitter stocks plummet, Facebook is in a tizz, social media is being redefined – and it's all Apple and TikTok's fault.

Join James JR Hennessy and Raph Dixon at the intersection of business, tech and culture.

Subscribe to James' Substack here: https://www.theterminal.info/

More about The Meeting Tree here: https://themeetingtree.com

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