Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
Google IO starts today, and the stock is ripping. I think, people might have missed this if you haven't been, watching closely, but Google is up a 140% in the last year. Absolute ripper. It's almost a $5,000,000,000,000 company now, 4.6
Speaker 2:What percent the chart you're reading because it's down 1.3% today.
Speaker 1:Today? Oh, okay. No. It is up massively.
Speaker 2:We think in years, times, decades.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. And and, yeah, they pulled in just shy of a $110,000,000,000 revenue loss last quarter, and they're in a great position for the next era of the AI story. So GCP is growing faster than AWS and Azure. Wall Street has basically fully repriced the company as a, like, a full stack AI winner.
Speaker 1:That's the new narrative across Google Cloud, Google Search, Gemini, the models, DeepMind, everything that they're doing. So long gone are the concerns about Google's search weakness because even core Google search is showing is showing resiliency. Google search, the business continues to grow. Queries are at an all time high. They're not reporting exact numbers of queries, but Sundar said that in the last call that it's at an all time high, certainly not going down.
Speaker 1:And search and other revenue, which is their bucket there, is up 19% year over year, so holding up well. And Google IO generally offers consumers launches or previews of tons of new products. I'm getting called. Previews of tons of new products and features. The Verge was saying that there might be some like AI fatigue, which is maybe an overstatement given that, you know, people are getting booed.
Speaker 1:Actually, the former CEO Yeah. Understatement, giving that the the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, was booed off stage at a commencement speech. That is a good point. But, you know, the people that watch Google IO, the Google core consumers, they are fans of this stuff. I think they're generally pro AI excited about new features.
Speaker 1:Some of the new features that we'll show are very, very cool. But there is this, like, goal of being ambient and useful instead of pushy and desperate. Many Google experiences now have duplicative Gemini panels. And I was writing this update in a Google Doc, and I noticed that I had two Gemini stars, basically. One Gemini star in my Google Doc, and then another in the Chrome browser that I'm using to load Google Docs.
Speaker 1:And it's a really hilarious outcome because I was writing this in sort of like a half window to the side of the screen. And if I open both Gemini panels, the Google Doc disappears entirely. And I'm just left with two chat boxes to interface with the Google Doc, which I don't really use AI in the actual Google Doc. I just kind of write it. But there's, you know, there's stuff it everywhere and then actually make it useful, make it ambient, make it delightful.
Speaker 1:And so that is, I think, what consumers are looking for more than just an AI button in a new place. But they're certainly showing that already. The new Gemini video model looks incredible. We'll play some videos of that. And there will be tons of delightful experiments that may turn out to be blockbuster products or they may get shelved by year end.
Speaker 1:That's kind of the beauty of Google's culture is that they have plenty of opportunity for experimentation. We sort of some people remember all the things that are in the Google graveyard, but most people just remember Gemini and whatnot. So, can play this video.
Speaker 3:And features eight cylinders arranged in a v shape driving a single crankshaft. They take turns firing to deliver smooth, massive. That's pure mechanical genius at work. A v eight engine features eight cylinders.
Speaker 1:So I feel like this got rid I mean, the the video fidelity is incredibly high quality. There's no six fingers. It looks HD. The motion looks good. The lips are synced.
Speaker 1:And I feel like they got rid of that like hollow sound that you used to hear in AI video that where the audio was generated on
Speaker 4:it, but it's a lot more subtle.
Speaker 1:It's really subtle. It's crazy because you see these and you're like, oh, feel like this is it. Like it's done. Like, this is fully, fully done. And then there's just like, ah, we're at 99.9% now, I wanna be at 99.999%.
Speaker 4:Also, like, is kind of a nitpick, but isn't that a v six? Right? This is
Speaker 1:Oh, is it? I don't know. Is this good for video explainer channels on YouTube, bad for video explainer channels on YouTube? Certainly, commoditizing the production of video explainers. I've seen a lot of these video explainers that will show you like inside of a rocket or inside of a an RPG or or an AK 47 or Glock, and those get like tens of millions of views.
Speaker 1:They can be viewed in any language, but they're very intense from a from a CGI perspective. You have to go and model every little detail, every pin in the in the weapon or whatever the object is that's being visualized in this particular video explainer, Close to being on command and then the question is where does the value sit? Does if you prompt YouTube and you ask for a video explainer of a chair, break it down, explode it, show me the innards. Will it just do it on demand for you? Will it just generate that or will this still sit below the creators?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I've always had the question at what point do you go to YouTube and there's just a series of videos waiting for you Yeah. Generated based on your interest. Right? Sometimes you might be going to YouTube because your favorite sports team just played and you want some analysis on the game or your favorite fighter or something like that or some news is happening.
Speaker 2:And it doesn't seem like we're that far from a future where you land on YouTube. And YouTube has just, again, fully generated a video based on what it knows about your interests. That said, that would cause potentially a creator strike Yeah. Because it's YouTube starting to compete against their own content producers on the platform. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So we'll see.
Speaker 1:Yeah. At least in the interim, it feels like the dawn of stock footage. YouTubers have been creating these have been using these tools for a long time. They have been getting cheaper. Even the CGI world has become increasingly commoditized every year as you get more to templates and the tools become cheaper.
Speaker 1:Let's watch this other science explainer from the timeline. Gemini Omni explains science with video. Thanks a lot for this, says Chetosloo. Now every student will get a custom video for the topic of science and math. I'm so happy, like, while typing.
Speaker 1:I want to see all your reaction to this. Which looks white. This is about photosynthesis, I think.
Speaker 5:Every color of the rainbow. As this light enters our atmosphere, it crashes into molecules of nitrogen and oxygen. This triggers a phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering. Because gas molecules are tiny, they affect shorter wavelengths much more than longer ones. Blue light has a very short wavelength, so it's scattered in every direction, filling the sky with color.
Speaker 5:Meanwhile, longer red wavelengths pass
Speaker 1:There has been a big push on YouTube for like as people ask questions, like, they would go to Google and say, how do I fix this particular washing machine? You type in the number of the washing machine and it would take you to not just a single video about someone fixing that washing machine, but the actual section in the video with the solution to the exact problem you had. And being able to read a manual and constitute a video on the fly of exactly that is pretty incredible and you can imagine satisfies that use case very, very quickly. And then, of course, there will just be entertainment and all sorts of different use cases. Logan Kilpatrick, friend of the show, says, introducing Gemini Omni.
Speaker 1:Omni is our new model that can create anything from any input, starting with video. Think Nana Banana, but for video. Okay. Liao, let's play this because there's some amazing, like, different styles here going on. I wonder if those if that if that motion graphic transition was created in Omni, because that's something that would you'd normally bump out to After Effects four.
Speaker 1:Or, like, the edit here, I wonder I wonder if if if you'll be able to upload multiple clips and have it edited together to the beat of a song that you pick, or will it be able to AI generate a video and then match the match the footage to the to the beat of the video. So this is give it anything. So I think you could potentially give it a bunch of videos and it could edit it together into a Vibrio, something like that. Swap style, swap environment, swap angle. They've been having a lot of fun with this.
Speaker 1:The other news out of Google today is Gemini 3.5 Flash, our most powerful model to date. It pushes the frontier of intelligence, speed, and cost, putting 3.5 Flash in a class of its own. We spent the last six months making sure Flash is great for real world use cases. It's the strongest agentic coding model yet from Google. It delivers frontier level performance at 4x, the speed of comparable frontier models, often at less than half the cost.
Speaker 1:So dominating the Pareto frontier has been the goal for a long time. The the speed is being heralded as a key feature. Google just showed a demo of Gemini Flash running between six hundred and fourteen hundred tokens per second on TPU 8i. It peaked out around fourteen eighty TOCs per tokens per second with an average of around 800 per second, so very, very, very fast. The flip side is it's more expensive than previous flash models, but that's been the trend with smart smarter intelligence for a while.
Speaker 1:So investors are focused across three key areas, not so much the consumer story, more the next Gemini model, so where this fits in, and then what adoption and diffusion looks like, how Google through Google Cloud will be getting this out into enterprises, into coding agents. Obviously, have antigravity, but Gemini CLI has not seen as much traction. And so a better model might pull that forward, might wind up seeing more traction there. Overall, I think token generation at Google is up seven x year over year, which seems great. It's unclear how much of that is because there's more reasoning happening.
Speaker 1:But given the fact that the Gemini models are sort of stuffed all over the product services, I'm not surprised that there's massive growth. That makes a lot of sense. On the core Gemini model, everyone was wondering, are we getting four, three point five launched? And there's a staged rollout with Flash going first. Andrew Curran had an interesting post here talking about the lack of vague posting.
Speaker 1:The DeepMind folks have not been vague posting about the new Gemini model, so he did some vague posting for them. At this point, everyone knows it's arriving tomorrow along with their personal agent named Spark. This reticence, of course, can be interpreted in many ways. I'm choosing to interpret it in accordance with my nature. I think they train the largest model they've ever successfully trained, probably possibly the largest one anyone ever has and something unexpected emerged at scale.
Speaker 1:They had their mythos moment, but not in the same way Anthropic did. Gemini has always been very a very different model from Claude. The benchmarks will go out today tonight under embargo. They probably already are, but I don't think they will fully reflect what I'm talking about. I think they hit something even they weren't aiming for, something that surprised them.
Speaker 1:If I'm right, that surprise will be part of tomorrow's show. We shall find out together in the morning. I don't think tomorrow's show because IO is a number of days and there's a whole host of different announcements that that could happen in the interim. There's a lot of other things going on.
Speaker 2:And Yeah. Has anyone been vague posting around, will there be a three five Pro
Speaker 1:Yeah. This week? Yeah. That's gonna happen over the course of the next few days. They just Okay.
Speaker 1:Started with Flash.
Speaker 2:Starting with Flash. Cool. And then, they also announced Spark
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Which is a personal agent that lives in anti gravity.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:It's my understanding.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 2:And so, trying to
Speaker 1:make When I hear personal agent, I think more like Gemini app, Google search, like Yeah. Gmail, like the very like the consumer product services. I think well, I guess I just think personal and I think consumer. But given how much people are using Codex Cloud Code for like personal like things, like just because writing code creates a more dynamic agentic surface. Open Claw, we saw all of this.
Speaker 1:It's helpful to have something running on a MacBook Pro that can go around and find different stuff. What what
Speaker 4:what Yeah. Just some additional context. Yeah. 3.5 Pro is coming out next Next month? So not this week.
Speaker 1:A little bit of a delay there. I wonder I wonder what else is in the bag of like mythos like surprises because the cyber security one was like sort of predicted by the AI 2027. I feel like bio is next. Like it feels like, okay, we tested a bunch of stuff and we talked to a bunch of scientists and like this thing can come up with like super viruses and it's really scary, so we gotta give it to all the pharmaceutical companies in in advance and like Moderna gets it and creates like antiviruses or something like that. I don't know what else.
Speaker 1:But I'm sure there will be surprises. There always are in the AI era. So Agenda Commerce will also be top of mind for investors since messaging around the Google the Gemini app has sort of strayed away from advertising as an immediate monetization engine. I think Demis said that Davos. Google has a lot of capabilities when it comes to closing the consumer shopping loop.
Speaker 1:Like, they have Google Shopping. They have a bunch of hooks into all sorts of different e commerce services. People search for stuff on Google all the time to buy. E commerce customer behavior seems to be lagging expectations here, generally. There 's been a lot of announcements from companies around agentic shopping protocols and the numbers whenever we dig into them, we're always like, is it going to get to 1% this year?
Speaker 1:Are we going to see and everyone's talking about the growth, which means we're growing from zero, obviously, because this didn't exist. But where is it going? Will Google have something to show here? Will they have some sort of demo of new user experience, a new flow for agented commerce that results in a faster takeoff of that adoption of that behavior. As I mentioned yesterday on the show, had a lovely conversation with Joanna Stern from thenewthings.com.
Speaker 4:We had lots of fun takes about like the AI tools that I think most of
Speaker 1:us have interacted with. Everyone's used agents. Everyone's sort of felt what it's like to talk to a chatbot. But one place where she went deeper than I think most consumers and AI fans have is in the wearables, because she was wearing that recording device consistently. And she maintains that like humanoids are farther away.
Speaker 1:You need a lot more training data. The AI chat apps are here. We already know. They're diffused. Waymo is now boring.
Speaker 1:But the next big wave she's sort of predicting is in the next few years wearables will have like a big moment and everyone will be sort of adopting these and contending with them. And it is interesting how we talk about a capability overhang in the enterprise with AI deployments, and that's why the big labs are partnering with consulting firms and private equity groups to get AI installed into large corporations. There's even more of a capability overhang in consumer hardware. Apple iterates extremely methodically. You know, they made a big story about Apple intelligence.
Speaker 1:Was that just one year ago? I guess that was one year ago because WWDC is in a few weeks.
Speaker 2:Feels longer than that. I I just remember they did a global billboard campaign for Apple Intelligence.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But anyway, like, the actually changing anything in hardware takes Apple a long time. They still haven't launched a folding phone. Like, they they they take their time to deliver a great product at the right time. And then if you're a challenger and you just want to manufacture new devices at scale, that takes years to ramp up.
Speaker 1:And then you also have to distribute, sell. It's not one click away. It's go to the store or wait for the mail. And Google has had some fun swings at these, like, preview emerging hardware platforms. Google Glass, I mean, way ahead of its time.
Speaker 1:We're now there with the meta Ray Ban displays. But even those are not selling by the millions and millions. They're they're very early stage. Google Cardboard, I don't know if you remember that one. This is you put your phone in a cardboard box that they send you, and then you can put it on your face and use it as a as a VR headset.
Speaker 1:Woah. Well, what How can we
Speaker 2:strap someone's phone to their face?
Speaker 1:Basically. Serve the magic. And then they also did the Samsung Galaxy
Speaker 2:At point blank range.
Speaker 1:Which was yeah. You'd slot it into, like, a piece of hardware, but much cheaper than buying an Oculus at the time.
Speaker 2:Lisan Alghaib says, 3.5 Flash score is kind of low on coding index due to rough terminal bench hard scores. So I think the big question coming out of IO today is how do developers respond to the updates to anti gravity to 3.5 flash. The speed is amazing. We know how much people care about that in just like day to day coding. But the model has to be able to perform.
Speaker 2:So we'll see what people's reactions are. And we'll see if Google can really start to ramp revenue on the cogen side or still get exposure to that through Anthropic. It did come out yesterday that Demis is an angel in Anthropic himself. Yeah. And I don't not super surprising, although less pushback.
Speaker 1:When did they Yeah. When did they meet? I wonder what the story is there, how early he got in. He might be sitting on a bag. Well, who else is going to Anthropic?
Speaker 1:Andre Carpathi has gone from OpenAI to Tesla to Anthropic. I think he went back to OpenAI at one point in in there. And Andre, a different account, is pointing out this KMT general who defected and subsequently betrayed five different five different countries in Asia ending in Japan jumping around. He's seen it all. Certainly, the world tour of AI labs.
Speaker 1:I guess Andrei Karpathy was never inside of xAI because he was sort of the precursor at Tesla.
Speaker 2:He's He real was poached by Elon
Speaker 1:Did he work at
Speaker 2:Google too? The early days.
Speaker 1:I feel like he might have been at Google before OpenAI. I don't know.
Speaker 4:So he he interned there.
Speaker 1:He interned there.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So he's never He's
Speaker 1:the he's got the Thanos rings.
Speaker 2:Huge pickup and excited to see what they do together. He's apparently, according to Alex Heath, gonna be working on basically RSI.
Speaker 1:RSI.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. RSI. He's continuing on his like auto research project.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. He's been doing RSI basically in the open source world. Our auto research is open source. Right?
Speaker 4:Yes. Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's I think you can read into this that it was effectively an acquihire Mhmm. Of the company he was working on. So Oh, interesting. I don't.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm assuming.
Speaker 1:He said he was gonna get like get back to the education project that he was
Speaker 2:I thought he had I thought he had raised for it.
Speaker 1:I don't think he did.
Speaker 2:Maybe not. I don't know. It's always helpful. But
Speaker 1:that was a cool idea. I I I wonder how that fits in. It was always interesting to to think about like LLMs are really good at education. I mean, we're seeing that today with the with Gemini Omni. Like, it can generate a video for you.
Speaker 1:Now, we haven't really pushed it to the limit. Like, I wonder, is it like, if you give it a PhD level problem, is it gonna teach you as well as, you know, a a great professor who has thought about all the different responses? Like, maybe it's not fully there, but education certainly seems on, like, the core path of the models. Going to a computer and asking, teach me something felt something felt like something most of the AI models would get very, very good at because there's a lot of training data. There's a lot of open source educational materials.
Speaker 1:All the textbooks have been scanned. Wikipedia is in the models. There's so much information that's readily available. It isn't tightly held secrets that are hard to bring to bear in the pre training data.
Speaker 2:But we'll be One more thing out of IO that we forgot to cover, Google's new Synth ID framework that 11, OpenAI, and NVIDIA are joining forces. This is to help identify AI generated content creating a standard for Yeah. Across platforms Yeah. So that yeah. When you generate an asset
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Eleven Labs, OpenAI Yeah. Omni, it'll it should be auto Yeah. Detected by the different platforms.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I've I've seen that on X recently. There's been a little tag that says, like, made with AI and but I feel like you can get around that if you screenshot it and
Speaker 4:some Well, so I I think the ones on x are are just in the metadata. In the metadata. Change it, like, fairly easily. I don't think it's actually using, like, like, on on nano banana images on g b t h two, there are, like, watermarks. Yeah.
Speaker 4:You've seen these, like, weird patterns people posted. Yeah. Subtle changes to
Speaker 1:the to the saturation or
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or I
Speaker 4:think they've just been it's just been metadata so far. Yeah. But I I see Yeah. The
Speaker 1:trick with all of those is that, like, it's in theory pretty easy to, like, rip that out if you're running, an advanced AI, you know, slop avoidance detection system or something. But just to know, okay, for the average poster, if this is an AI image, that's certainly helpful. But as you start bringing different assets and you bring in some stock footage, you bring in some AI footage, you blend them together, you're doing a lot of different things, You'll probably lose a little bit of that AI detection ability, but hopefully people aren't too annoyed by it. If it's used tastefully, I guess it shouldn't matter at the end of the day. Anyway, do you think Spotify used AI to create their new disco ball icon.
Speaker 1:This was burning up the timeline this weekend.
Speaker 2:I was I was shocked at all the negative reactions Me too. This icon.
Speaker 1:Me too.
Speaker 2:What's wrong
Speaker 4:with you?
Speaker 2:What's wrong with you? Seriously, if you don't like this, seek I
Speaker 4:will say, first, it threw me off. I was like, where did my Spotify app go? Because it's too dark.
Speaker 1:Genius. I think it was genius. I opened up my phone and I was and I was I was drawn to it immediately. My eyes jumped because I was like, something's wrong with my phone. Something's wrong with my home screen.
Speaker 1:Things don't look the way they normally look. It drew my eye. I saw, oh, Spotify. Okay. Look a little bit deeper.
Speaker 1:The icon looks a little bit different. The color's a little bit deeper. Oh, there's something else going on there. Peel back the onion. You see that there's a disco ball.
Speaker 1:And then, of course, that there is a meaning behind it. They didn't just there's a whole reason why they did this. It's the twentieth anniversary of the company. And so lots of people complained but party it's your party It's of the it's so funny
Speaker 2:because I don't I don't know prior to this where people sitting around being like, wow, really hope they never changed the Spotify logo even for a few weeks. I just love it so much. Yeah. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think it's fun. I think it's a nice change from, you know, this flat minimalist logos Yeah. That we've all grown accustomed to.
Speaker 1:Keep it. Dylan said, I thought this was fun. I'm sure the complainers thought so too. But when tapping an icon is second nature after being
Speaker 2:Citizens have I told my wife to cancel our subscription.
Speaker 1:Oh, no. For so long, even the slightest change in appearance can make you double take when searching for it, and that's annoying when trying to open an app. Mass says that it's too it's too dark. And so Mass turned up the place.
Speaker 2:You're at the disco, John.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:A disco ball would never look that bright in a nightclub. Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the It
Speaker 4:is real disco ball knowers. Yeah. That that's way too that's way too light.
Speaker 1:Well, one story that we didn't get to yesterday that I want to discuss is the root cause of the fertility crisis, why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once. So the demographic landslide defining our era is gaining speed and terrain. In more than two thirds of the world's 195 countries, the average number of children born to each woman has fallen below the replacement rate of 2.1 that keeps populations stable without immigration. In 66 countries, the average is closer to one than two. In some of in some, the most common number of children born to each woman is zero.
Speaker 1:Both the pace and the breadth of the decline are defying expectations. Just five years ago, the UN predicted that there would be 350,000 births in South Korea in 2023. That was a 50% overestimate. The real figure was 230,000. While high and middle income countries have been wrestling with demographic decline for more than half a century, the phenomenon has markedly accelerated in the past ten years.
Speaker 1:Analysts of data ranging from population records to Google searches indicate that although many factors contribute to falling birth rates, the most recent plunge appears connected with our use of technology. And so this is a question that the Financial Times is trying to answer: Should you put the blame on the recent decline in fertility on smartphones in particular? And so you can go through a whole bunch of the charts. It's a great article. But the final image is this image where they took a whole bunch of different countries and they and they adjusted the charts to show when did smartphones actually take off in that particular country because America had the iPhone moment in 2007, but different countries got wide smartphone adoption or four gs or or actual rollout of of cell phones or smartphones at different times.
Speaker 1:And so they adjusted all the figures. And when you look at this chart that Luis is sharing, you'll see all of the charts seem to be very, very closely aligned at the exact same time. And so Luis Giancarlo says pushes back though. He says, No smoking gun, but the preponderance of evidence points to smartphones, not economics as the culprit. Yeah, there's the chart.
Speaker 1:It looks like a smoking gun. He says it's not, though. He says, In The U. S. And U.
Speaker 1:K, births fell first and fastest in areas that got four gs earliest. Birth rates were stable in The United States, U. K, Australia until 2007, in France and Poland until 2009, Mexico and Indonesia until 2011, and Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal until 2023, 2013, 2015. Each of these inflection points matches local smartphone adoption. The younger the age group, the sharper the drop in person socializing among young adults is dropping in Singapore in South Korea by 50% in twenty years.
Speaker 1:Effect is largest in culturally traditional societies, Middle East, Latin America, Sub Saharan Africa. Decline holds across countries hit hard by GFC and those who were not hit by the global financial crisis. And so it teases out a bunch of the other possible explanations and puts the blame firmly on smartphones. But people have been pushing back. So Ross Douthit says, On the latest round of fertility discourse, friends don't let friends share chart one without the important context of Chart two, which is the child survival adjustment.
Speaker 1:And so if you look at the total fertility rate, if you click on that left graph, you will see that the baby boom is remarkably pronounced there, but in fact, birth rates had been declining since the eighteen hundreds. Baby boom in the forties, fifties, sixties, and then the rate starts declining. I I asked 5.5 pro a bunch of questions about this, trying to dig in further, and it had a bunch of funny answers about how children used to be economically valuable and so people would have a lot of them to work the farm for them. And the economics of having a child flipped at a certain point where it became expensive and and a net, sort of a net burden on the parent as opposed to before it would be, you had a kid, you didn't have to pay for college, you didn't have to pay for education or really anything and they would work the fields for you. And so, it was advantageous to have as many children as possible.
Speaker 2:Do you think children yearning for the minds is sort of like a survival mechanism? Right? They they want to be economically valuable. Want to be productive. Right?
Speaker 2:They're saying we can we can carry our own weight. I I look at all these charts and I just think, it's over. It's over. But then I remind myself to never black pill.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Never black pill even if it's down.
Speaker 1:Never black pill. Never black pill.
Speaker 2:It's crazy. It's really crazy to look at these charts looking at if if this were any animal in the wild, there would be huge amounts of fundraising happening
Speaker 4:to
Speaker 2:try
Speaker 1:to
Speaker 2:save the species. But when it's us, we just sort of like, you know, see the chart and just keep scrolling.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What are the high fertility members of the population doing on their phones differently? Like, are
Speaker 4:they using social media less? Are they
Speaker 1:using dating apps less? Are they texting their friends to come and hang out? Are they because the smartphones have diffused so widely that you need to cut in and understand for the groups that are above fertility rate, what are they doing differently? Obviously, the Amish are are are an interesting case study because they do have a higher than replacement rate fertility. And they're not And they have technology.
Speaker 1:They actually have adopted some cell phones, but not smartphones. So they will use the like a dumb phone, a flip phone to make phone calls occasionally. I'm sure that these are all gradations. There's not no smartphones whatsoever. But certainly, the Amish have steered away from technology and the fertility rate has stayed high.
Speaker 1:But even within the more modern enclaves or smart high smartphone adopters, I do wonder what else is going on because there's a bunch of other interesting factors going on with child care and the relation with how people spend their time.
Speaker 2:Also, what else happened in around the the launch of the iPhone? What? Like massive economic disruption. Right?
Speaker 1:They controlled for that, though. That's the point of the Financial Times article, is to control for the economic gyrations of different countries. So there were some countries that were unaffected by the financial crisis. Were some countries that went through boom periods. There were some countries that went through economic contractions.
Speaker 1:And they were all sort of affected equally. Like even China has the lowest replacement rate, one per family or something like that. Whereas America is at like 1.8. Many many modern societies are at 1.6, all below replacement rate. China's the lowest.
Speaker 1:China's going through an economic boom the entire time. GDP is up at six, seven, eight, sometimes 10% a year. They're not going through an economic contraction, certainly not from 2007 to today. And yet although that is a little bit different because it's confounded by the one child policy, which obviously resulted in exactly one child. So they set their policy, then they got their result, now they have to sort of contend with that, the aging population.
Speaker 1:There's an article that Derek Thompson shared, Dad Books, which this article and some publishing insiders used to describe serious non fiction books across biography, current affairs, and business and economics reportedly are reportedly in free fall, with sales declining every year for the last years. The trend couldn't be clearer, said Jonathan Karp, former chief executive at Simon and Schuster and publisher of the new Simon six imprint. When we have internal meetings to talk about this problem, it always comes around to podcasts. Interesting. Saying podcasts are are eating the dad book serious non fiction genre.
Speaker 4:We've to figure out who's doing this.
Speaker 1:We're all looking for the guy who did this. I do listen to a lot of podcasts. I still listen to audiobooks of serious non fiction. But it is increasingly hard to find the time. FedSpeak says it's not podcasts, it's kids, because the millennial generation, the Gen X generation is spending basically twice as much time with kids based on their age.
Speaker 1:When you adjust for age, so this is a curve of time spent with children by Yeah.
Speaker 2:Honestly, every time on the weekend Yeah. You know, when I'm holding, you know, one or two of of my children and I just stare at, you know, the stack of books from Amazon that pile up and I just look at them and think, okay, if I open one of those, I will get exactly three pages Yep. Before I'm disrupted. Yeah. And so I What
Speaker 1:were what was the silent generation doing? What was the what were the baby boomers doing? Were they just like, kid, head hit the minds, buddy. I I gotta read. I don't know.
Speaker 1:I mean, the podcast creep in, but it's it's
Speaker 2:I listen to podcasts when I'm not at home.
Speaker 1:When I can't read.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right? Exactly. Maybe self driving cars bullish for serious non fiction. Because, oh, maybe people sick.
Speaker 2:Self driving cars are bullish for the infinite scroll.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're
Speaker 2:bearish for the podcast and and long form
Speaker 1:mediums broadly. Serious non fiction, the dad book. Sign up for a newsletter at tbpn.com, and we will see you tomorrow at 11AM. Sharp. Love you.
Speaker 1:Goodbye.