Down Round: Recent Episodes
Down Round
Culture is downstream of technology. On that stream is a beautiful boat. One of us is the skipper, the other, the coxswain. You decide who is who.
Join James "JR" Hennessy, author of newsletter The Terminal, and Raph Dixon, semi-retired producer from The Meeting Tree and "start up guy", as they delve into the weird and wonderful at the intersection of technology, business and culture.
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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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. What side of the divide you fall on is mostly generational.
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.
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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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The internet — and particularly Twitter/X — was ablaze last week over LK-99, a new new compound that was being heralded as a possible room-temperature superconductor, which is the holy grail of materials science. It turns out it almost certainly isn’t, but that didn’t stop everyone going absolutely berko.
That weird social phenomenon was worth a look tho…
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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By popular request from at least two of you, we’re digging into the BlackBerry. The first popular smartphone and mobile email device, BlackBerry was too professional, too keyboardy, and simply too Canadian for this world.
In this episode, we dig into to what made the BlackBerry work, right up until it didn’t.
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.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit downround.substack.com/subscribe
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Scams are pretty bad these days. Social media is polluted with them, you can’t answer your phone without hearing a robot voice which claims your PayPal account is being debited $200, and companies everywhere are being hit with ransomware attacks.
What’s to be done? This week, we’re talking scams.
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.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit downround.substack.com/subscribe
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The humble internet browser doesn’t get much love these days. There used to be new browser innovations coming out more regularly, as people switched between Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari as their previous one got too slow and clunky.
Turns out it’s pretty hard to innovate in this area. But companies like The Browser Company have been tryi…
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.
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. In this ep, …
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.
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 …
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. We talk through why.
Just kidding. This episode is an excuse…
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 …
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.
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 …
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.
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…
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…
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.
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, companies like General Motors 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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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 …
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…
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.
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
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Shein: The TikTok of Ecommerce - Packy McCormick and Matthew Brennan
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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.
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
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Tim Cook bets on Apple’s mixed-reality headset to secure his legacy – Financial Times
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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.
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.
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 …
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
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Milkrun, the last local grocery delivery standing, is still trying to find fresh capital after raising $75 million - Startup Daily
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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.
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
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Fake Meat Was Supposed to Save the World. It Became Just Another Fad” - Bloomberg
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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.
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
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?
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit downround.substack.com/subscribe
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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.
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!
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.
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.)
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit downround.substack.com/subscribe
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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.
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.
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.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit downround.substack.com/subscribe
We talk the persistence of the 14 year old smartphone, and the failure of voice, AI and the metaverse to usurp it.Everybody promised to disrupt the smartphone — and the smartphone outlasted them all: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474090/smartphone-next-big-thing-ar-vr-metaverse-alexa
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.
This week we're responding to listener questions put to us via the Down Round Twitter: @downroundpod
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.
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 $36b to nothing.
Even by crypto standards this story is absurd.
Links
- The FTX "balance sheet"
- How Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto Empire Collapsed – NY Times
Airbnb sort of sucks now, and it seems like the company realises it. It has announced guest-friendly changes, but are they enough?
Raph and James dive into all the thorny problems surrounding the company, and come to a final decision on whether you should be forced to do the dishes in your Byron Bay short-term stay. (The answer is no.)
The EU is forcing Apple change its iPhone cable, and they’re huffy even though they were definitely going to do it anyway. The boys discuss European regulation more generally.
A recent series of high-profile hacks of Australian companies including Optus and Medibank have people worried about user data and privacy. Given Raph and James are both terminally chill about their own data, they brought on someone who actually knows what they're talking about: ABC journalist Ariel Bogle.
Links
- The biggest hack in history: Australians scramble to change passports and driver licences after Optus telco data debacle – The Guardian
- ‘The damage here is potentially irreparable’: Scale of Medibank hack worsens – Sydney Morning Herald
- Critics say more needs to be done to stop the next Optus or Medibank style of data breach – ABC
Productivity software. Our many and valued white collar listeners will know it very well. But will they be able to respect Microsoft Teams after the Down Round boys give it a skewering?
Streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are changing the way music is made. We discuss.
We've plugged into blockchain metaverses, but how is Facebook/Meta's multi-billion dollar attempt going?
Company Documents Show Meta’s Flagship Metaverse Falling Short - Wall Street Journal ($)
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?
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.
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.
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
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...
The relationship between frictionless payment, recreational drugs and attempting to find a greater purpose. Silicon Valley's weird relationship with drugs.
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
Have the promises of Uber come to fruition?
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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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OnlyFans, the adult content platform that has become a cultural force, made a lot of money last year. So you can understand why Twitter wanted a slice of that pie. Right? Right? What happened next? Listen and find out.
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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 Corp.
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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