Down Round

In the inaugural episode of this years holiday special, we rack up Ws as we dissect the predictions we made last silly season for 2025.

Go to https://www.downround.net/ to sign up for PREMIUM and get ad-free listening PLUS an extra episode every week. In this week's premium ep, we make our predictions for 2026, which will almost certainly come true (not financial advice).

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A highly requested topic in the Down Round Discord is mental health and mindfulness apps — from meditation platforms like Calm to therapist marketplaces like BetterHelp. That's the topic of today, discussing the boom during the ZIRP era, the peak during COVID, and how it all relates to other engagement platforms like Duolingo.

Go to https://www.downround.net/ to sign up for PREMIUM and get ad-free listening PLUS an extra episode every week.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Netflix wants to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. Paramount Skydance wants to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. Both for many billions of dollars. Why? We break down the $70 – 100 billion bids, the Ellison–Trump court politics, and why this could mark the final enclosure of the film industry by tech.

Also: James chronicles the history of film industry disruption, and Raph reveals his long-awaited top ten movies of 2025 list.

We also provide some follow-up on prediction markets after last weeks episode.

Go to https://www.downround.net/ to sign up for PREMIUM and get ad-free listening PLUS an extra episode every week.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week we're going deep on the rise of prediction markets — the hybrid of futures trading, sports gambling, and economic theology that suddenly seems to have eaten the world. Platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi are booming and an increasingly big part of both tech culture and also gambling culture.

We trace the whole arc: from Hayekian fantasies about prices revealing truth, to the far bigger truth: people just really, really like having a punt.

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This week, we open with the final chapter of Frank, the student finance startup that sold JP Morgan a fake email list. Founder Charlie Javice is in prison for fraud, but the bank is still footing a $115 million legal bill that includes everything from luxury hotels to cellulite butter.

Then we move onto Nvidia, which posted another absurd quarter with revenue up 60% year-on-year.

Then finally X’s new location feature, which exposed the global industry of rage-bait posters farming Elon’s ad-share program with US culture war posting from the Global South. As expected, everyone is responding to this normally.

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This week we unpack a growing split inside the AI world, centred on Yann LeCun — Meta’s AI pioneer who thinks LLMs are a dead end.

Reports suggest he’s preparing to walk, after being quietly sidelined under Meta’s “superintelligence” push and made subordinate to a 28-year-old ex-data-labelling kingpin, Alexander Wang. His alternative is the “world model” approach: systems grounded in physics and perception rather than predictive text.

LET'S GOOOOOOOO.

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Down Round hasn't checked in on Cupertino in a little while. This week, we take stock of Apple’s strange position in the AI boom — not really innovating very much, but quietly raking in billions as everyone else builds data centres. 

From Siri’s long road to Gemini, to the cult of thinness and the ghost of Johnny Ive, we talk about how Apple keeps winning by doing less. Plus: the Vision Pro flop, new MacBook Air rumours, and Apple TV.

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We realised that we've been talking a lot about data centres but have gotten pretty pointy headed about it, without bringing our beautiful listeners along for the ride. We apologise.

This episode is us pumping the brakes, going back to first principles and explaining the current data centre situation — from where they started, all the way to the current massive buildout due to the AI boom.

If you or someone you know would like to apply to be our new producer, send us an email at [email protected]. Include any past experience and examples of anything you've done — even if it's just your personal socials. 

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Today's episode is on the back of a curious report from The Information that Suno, the AI music generation app, now brings in $150 million in annual recurring revenue. That's not Meta level, but it's not bad either.

It opens up a discussion of how the world of AI generated content is progressing, including chat about OpenAI's Sora colonising TikTok and Reels with meme videos. 

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As was long predicted, OpenAI has released a browser: ChatGPT Atlas. It's a pretty clear attempt to attack Google's $100B search moat and establish a new surface for all the stuff OpenAI wants to do with agentic AI, personal assistants and all the rest of it.

But is it any good? We find out. Also, another conclusion to TIKTOK BANWATCH.

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