Down Round
The number one podcast about tech business and culture, from James "JR" Hennessy and Raph Dixon.
Episodes
We're back with podcast content after a regrettable interruption last week.
This ep we've got a stacked deck. First, we are forced by fate to talk about Trump, Elon and Tesla briefly. Then we get into the lawsuit against creator economy platform and OnlyFans lite platform Passes. This gives us an excuse to go on a whirlwind tour of a few things:
- Scale AI, the AI infrastructure company co-founded by Passes founder Lucy Guo
- The ...
Unfortunately due to circumstances within our control we are unable to record an episode this week.
We promise we'll record a really really extra good one next week.
Thank you for your patience. Enjoy this AI generated James reading a text message from James.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Tech stocks have been having a rough time since December. The Magnificent Seven, the undisputed kings of the market, have slipped 10% since then — even before the DeepSeek moment.
But not all are made equal. Meta, for example, is doing basically fine. Apple isn't too terrible. Tesla, on the other hand, has lost 37% of its value since then. In this ep, we discuss the market correction, including a long chat on Tesla and ...
Plenty of tech industry nonsense to chat about this week, folks. Elon Musk is fathering his 13th child (and a new Grok model) and trying to destroy OpenAI. Everyone is trying to match OpenAI's Deep Research with similar products of their own. The markets are back.
As always, Down Round is here to guide you.
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We got a few requests last week to talk more about OpenAI's Deep Research feature that everyone's been going wild about. We thought it was a good opportunity to return to a topic that we've touched a few times over the past couple of years — what sort of work is being threatened with change by new systems like this?
In this two parter, we look at Deep Research and the current prospects for automating white collar work with AI...
Apple is worth $3.5 trillion. Trillion with a T.
But all is not necessarily well in Tim Cook's kingdom. iPhone sales are slowing and the Apple Intelligence rollout was unimpressive and underwhelming. Now rumours abound that they are abandoning their rescue mission for their VR and AR ambitions.
Are Apple floundering? Or just doing things The Apple Way? Who better to discuss than the Down Round boys?
See omnystudio.com/listener ...
It's fair to say things have been a little crazy this week. Thanks to the drop of Chinese AI lab DeepSeek's beautiful, powerful AI reasoning model, tech stocks took an absolute pounding — producing, in no small part because of Nvidia, the largest individual loss of share market value in American history.
The freakout wasn't just in markets. AI developers in the US were also going through it. We talked about DeepSeek a little ...
It's not even the end of January and there's already so much crap going on in the world of tech. We're spoiled for choice here. In this two-parter, we're tackling the various stories that have sprung up around the inauguration of Donald Trump — everything from TikTok to meme coins to Project Stargate and Chinese AI.
In this first part, we're looking at the latest on the TikTok ban, as well as DeepSeek, the Chinese AI shop tha...
The number one social media app in the Apple App Store is currently Xiaohongshu, AKA The Little Red Book, the Chinese social shopping app reminiscent of TikTok but with more shopping.
We take a squiz at that, before assessing the latest announcements from Nvidia and what it all means.
Strap in, the boys are back for 2025.
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Over the last couple of weeks, Mark Zuckerberg and Meta have signalled a shift in the way the company is run — eliminating factcheckers, rolling back internal DEI policies and bringing politics content back to company platforms. On the one hand, you can read it as an obvious sop to the incoming Trump administration. But there's definitely a cultural change in the air when it comes to online platforms and politics, and Zuck is...
On Down Round, we make many predictions. Almost all of them are correct. For this episode, we have used the power of AI to forensically audit a representative sample of episodes over the last year, with the goal of answering the question: just how right were we?
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Just like we did last year, we're continuing the silly season with another entry of DOWN ROUND SHARK TANK. On social media and in our Discord, you submitted your startup pitches, and now we're going to decide if we will invest.
Joining us on the panel are friends of the pod Becky Lucas and Joyride, who will assist us in the mammoth task of evaluating your very serious startup ideas.
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
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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...
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 ...
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.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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?
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