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

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

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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.

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

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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