Down Round

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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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 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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