Another Podcast
86 episodes - English - Latest episode: 25 days ago - ★★★★★ - 59 ratingsIf you're looking for another over-scripted and edited podcast, this is not it. But if you want to listen to honest and unfiltered discussions about the latest in tech and its impact on society, welcome, you have come to the right place.
This is Another Podcast where two friends and colleagues discuss their overlapping experiences and perspectives on what happens in technology. We might know some of the same things, yet we also have different backgrounds and expertise, or at least, we ask different questions.
Benedict Evans has worked in equity research, strategy and venture capital and owns lots of old phones; Toni Cowan-Brown works at the intersection of tech, policy and politics.
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Episodes
Looking for AI use-cases
April 01, 2024 17:12 - 31 minutes - 29.2 MBGenerative AI is the thing, and all new software will be built around it. But while everyone is experimenting and some people are getting huge value out of ChatGPT or Midjourney right now, others haven't worked out how to make it useful. Yet. So how do we find use-cases for a universal, general purpose, magical technology, and is that a crazy question?
Tiktok, Apple and Temu
March 13, 2024 16:11 - 34 minutes - 31.8 MBWill the US finally break up Tiktok? Will the EU break up the App Store? And why does Temu want to keep your orders under $800?
Google Gemini and AI bias
March 03, 2024 23:16 - 32 minutes - 29.7 MBAre there questions that an AI chatbot shouldn't answer? Should it always give the 'right answer'? Are you sure? Google has egg on its face this week, but this isn't easy, and with generative AI, we're going to re-run all the arguments and panics we had over content moderation in the last decade.
Breaking and remaking media
February 16, 2024 00:00 - 39 minutes - 35.7 MBWe’re past peak TV, the charts are curving down, and Hollywood is pretty sure that streaming was a bad idea. On the other hand, music is growing strongly and might even end up bigger than CDs. Why have newspapers, books, movies, TV and music coped so differently with the internet?
Apple's Vision Pro
February 08, 2024 21:30 - 30 minutes - 28.1 MBYes, we bought one. What’s it like and what can we say that we didn’t say last summer? What has Apple built, what is it for, what does it mean for Meta, and why does it cost $3,500?
What's your AI strategy?
January 29, 2024 01:12 - 34 minutes - 31.2 MBEveryone needs an AI strategy (there was an email from the CEO!) but what would that mean? How does a big company work out how to deploy a new technology? How is this the same as every other platform shift, and how might it be different?
AI and Everything Else
December 17, 2023 19:02 - 35 minutes - 32.6 MBEvery year, Benedict produces a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. Here are some of the key takeaways from this year's presentation - AI, and everything else. Presentation - https://www.ben-evans.com/presentations
LLMs, links, and the death of links
October 29, 2023 20:24 - 30 minutes - 28 MBWe spent the last 30 years building structures on top or instead of the raw links of the web, from Google to TikTok… but now LLMs might read all the links for us.
Bundling/Unbundling AI
October 22, 2023 16:46 - 37 minutes - 34.6 MBChatGPT and LLMs can do anything (or look like they can), so what can you do with them? How do you know? Do we move to chat bots as a magical general-purpose interface, or do we unbundle them back into single-purpose software?
The magic customer
October 15, 2023 19:06 - 58 minutes - 53.9 MBA conversation with Leonard Brody, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Caravan. How do you build brands and consumer products in a world of infinite choice and infinite media? And how does celebrity fit into that? Caravan
Unbundling ChatGPT
August 17, 2023 18:29 - 24 minutes - 22.9 MBNine months on, everyone is still trying to understand where ChatGPT will go, but one big question for us: how is this useful, for us, today? What's the product? How does this get unbundled?
Threads
July 21, 2023 04:13 - 42 minutes - 39.1 MBWhat is Threads? A Twitter that doesn't suck? Something else? Could it work?
Vision Pro, two weeks on
June 18, 2023 17:08 - 44 minutes - 41 MBTwo weeks after Apple showed us the Vision Pro - what have they built, what is it for, what does it mean for Meta, and why does it cost $3,500? Check back in 2025. Apple's product pages (watch some of this if you haven't already).
Apple Vision
June 05, 2023 22:50 - 28 minutes - 26 MBApple does VR. We watched. We took pictures. We talk about it.
Working out AI questions
May 01, 2023 02:59 - 38 minutes - 35.2 MBWe don't know what generative AI will be (or what will happen next week), but we're starting to work out what questions to ask
Buzzfeed News, Reddit and OpenAI
April 24, 2023 13:01 - 34 minutes - 31.3 MBBuzzfeed News dies just as Reddit and Stack Overflow say they'll charge LLMs to train on their data. Who owns content and how does distribution work in an LLM age? Are those the right questions? What should we be asking?
Metaverse and crypto - beyond the BS
April 16, 2023 20:36 - 38 minutes - 35.6 MBCrypto crashed, metaverse was silly, and now we know that generative AI is the future of everything. Right? Well, sort of. But though the hype has moved on, the reasons web3 and VR were interesting haven't really changed.
AI, copyright and collective knowledge
April 02, 2023 15:29 - 29 minutes - 27 MBIf you spend an hour typing prompts into MidJourney, who owns the result? There are easy answers to this, but they're probably wrong - these are new questions with new puzzles, much like radio, photography or music before.
GPT-4 is here, now what?
March 27, 2023 08:53 - 39 minutes - 36.2 MBGenerative machine learning is moving so fast it's impossible to keep up. What questions can we ask about GPT4, before everything changes again next week?
The right questions to ask about TikTok
March 20, 2023 15:06 - 40 minutes - 37.3 MBThe 'ban it' snowball is getting bigger and bigger, but what problem are we solving - privacy, or propaganda? How does this scale to all the other Chinese apps? And meanwhile, how well do we pay attention to the product itself?
Amazon's $40B advertising business
March 12, 2023 15:38 - 31 minutes - 28.4 MBAmazon sold close to $40bn of advertising last year - bigger than Prime, bigger than the entire global newspaper industry and probably more profitable than AWS. But is this really advertising, rent, or something else? And what does that mean for Google? Blog post and charts
ChatGPT versus Google
February 12, 2023 22:50 - 34 minutes - 31.3 MBMicrosoft thinks (or says) that Generative ML will reset the search market, unlocking Google's market share and collapsing those 60% operating margins. Really? What would that mean?
Generative search
February 06, 2023 03:42 - 35 minutes - 32.5 MBWhat would generative search mean? Generative video? Indeed, Generative products? Last week we talked about how ChatGPT, LLMs and generative ML work - now, what might they mean.
Generative AI
January 30, 2023 03:47 - 34 minutes - 32 MBThe wave of enthusiasm around ChatGPT and generative AI feels like another Imagenet moment - a step change in what ‘AI’ can do that could generalise far beyond the cool demos. But - it makes things up, and it doesn't actually understand anything it's doing. Probably. What does that mean? What's this for?
Why are chips interesting again?
December 19, 2022 00:46 - 41 minutes - 37.7 MBChips have always been the foundation of tech, but the rest of us didn't need to pay much attention - stuff just got faster every year. But now there are actual real, big, interesting structural changes happening - what does that look like?
No Soup for You! Regulating tech M&A
December 11, 2022 21:22 - 38 minutes - 35.5 MBWithin and Activision, but also PA Semi and Android - how do we think about big tech buying stuff, and why is it hard for regulators?
ChatGPT and the Imagenet Moment
December 05, 2022 02:11 - 40 minutes - 37.1 MBWhen machine learning started really working, back in 2012-13-14, the demos were amazing, but it wasn't immediately obvious how universal the applications would be. The same with Generative AI now - now - the demos are cool, but what will they mean? How will this generalise to change search or law firms?
All the other things happening in tech part 1.
November 29, 2022 16:53 - 30 minutes - 27.5 MBWhat does Anker have to do with Mr Beast, Amazon ads or Aesop? A chat about unbundling ecommerce and building brands in a world of infinite media.
The FTX face-palm
November 18, 2022 10:46 - 30 minutes - 28 MBWhat can we say about a ‘crypto’ crash if we’re not crypto people, nor Wall Street people? How much does it matter?
How many metaverses?
October 31, 2022 16:27 - 32 minutes - 29.5 MBEvery now and then, big company CEOs all read the same tech trends piece and send the same email - "what's our strategy for this?!" And in 2022, there were a lot of "metaverse?!" emails. But what does 'metaverse' mean, can you have a strategy for it, and do you even need to care? Probably not.
Wondering about generative AI
October 19, 2022 03:32 - 36 minutes - 33 MBGenerative AI looks like second wave of ML hat might be as big a deal as the Imagenet wave from 2013 or so. What questions can we ask?
Figma, unbundling and $20bn of antitrust
September 19, 2022 15:57 - 36 minutes - 33.5 MBWhat does Adobe's purchase of Figma tell us about the ways that software is changing, and the kinds of tools that people build and use? And, how long until the antitrust lawsuit arrives?
TV after software
September 05, 2022 22:35 - 30 minutes - 27.9 MB‘Software eats the world’, and now it’s eating TV, but then what? Pretty soon software seems to stop mattering, and all the questions become TV questions, fashion questions, or music questions, while tech moves on to something else. Follow Benedict on Twitter Follow Toni on Twitter
A new wave of company creation
August 23, 2022 03:00 - 30 minutes - 28.2 MBAdam Neumann's latest venture shines a light on some of the interesting questions that arise, such as: What is this, what could it be, and can it work? Can this person make it work? As well as, is this the kind of deal we should be doing? Do we understand this? Follow Benedict on Twitter Follow Toni on Twitter
Lighting and tech diffusion
August 15, 2022 20:43 - 26 minutes - 23.9 MBWhat does a light on a restaurant table say about the failure of smart home startups? Or Shein? Follow Benedict on Twitter Follow Toni on Twitter
The FTC's antitrust thesis
August 01, 2022 23:15 - 26 minutes - 24.5 MBThe US is fundamentally rethinking its approach to competition, and M&A, and tech, and big tech buying startups. The FTC trying to block Meta from buying Within is the test case for all of those. How many interesting problems can we cover in 30 minutes? When big tech buys small tech Follow Benedict on Twitter Follow Toni on Twitter
When the point of leverage changes
July 25, 2022 21:02 - 37 minutes - 34.4 MBWhat does 'focus' mean for a trillion dollar company? Amazon is buying doctors and Apple might be a bank - should we change our assumptions for what these kinds of companies would never do? How does the point of leverage change? Follow Benedict on Twitter Follow Toni on Twitter
Remember AI?
July 18, 2022 17:22 - 34 minutes - 31.3 MBFive years ago AI was everything, but attention moved on (Metaverse! Crypto!) and ‘Applied AI’ became useful but boring. Now things like DALL-E look cool, but what are they useful for? What’s the second wave? Follow Benedict on Twitter Follow Toni on Twitter
What's next for advertising?
June 06, 2022 17:12 - 32 minutes - 29.5 MBAdvertising is $700bn - after IDFA and the cookie apocalypse, what else is breaking apart and where do things land? Follow Benedict on Twitter Follow Toni on Twitter
Three ways to say no
May 30, 2022 16:04 - 30 minutes - 27.5 MBThe more that governments, regulators, policy-makers and activists demand that tech works differently, the more argument there is, and the more that tech people and companies people say ‘no!’ But what does it mean when a tech company, or indeed any company in any industry, says ’no’? Follow Benedict on Twitter Follow Toni on Twitter
Shein, TikTok and Netflix - thinking about limits
May 26, 2022 19:52 - 35 minutes - 32.8 MBShein added 60k new products in the last week - double Zara and H&M's total combined stock. Netflix made more shows last year than the entire US TV industry back when it start streaming. What happens when you remove physical limits? What's the feedback cycle? Follow Benedict on Twitter Follow Toni on Twitter
Metaverse - how to be wrong in the right way
May 16, 2022 22:00 - 34 minutes - 31.6 MBWhat do we mean when we say 'the metaverse'? And what do we mean by interoperability? It's far more useful to get specific about how we think about the future of the internet. What will it do and not do? How will it work and not work? If we are going to make predictions and be wrong, we might as well be wrong in specific ways. Follow Benedict on Twitter Follow Toni on Twitter
Stories in the noise
May 02, 2022 21:26 - 39 minutes - 36.1 MBElon made a lot of noise this week, but what else was going on? We chat about half a dozen things that happened in tech this week, all of them more interesting than the bird company. Follow Benedict on Twitter Follow Toni on Twitter
Netflix isn't a tech company
April 25, 2022 22:15 - 39 minutes - 36.4 MBNetflix missed its numbers, but what's really going on in streaming? Is this a tech company, and does it have winner-takes-all effects? Or are all the questions to ask really about television? And whatever happened to the Apple TV? Follow Benedict on Twitter Follow Toni on Twitter
The future of Twitter
April 18, 2022 19:05 - 35 minutes - 32.6 MBElon is on manoeuvres, but what are the problems? Has he thought about this at all? Why has Twitter always been such a mess, and why is it such a tiny company?
Are you a seal?
April 11, 2022 22:34 - 31 minutes - 28.4 MB‘Big tech’ is big and scary, but do they care about your market? They could come in, yes, and make a mess, but would that make any sense for them? And, do you look like a seal? Follow Benedict on Twitter Follow Toni on Twitter
The Evolution of networks
March 14, 2022 18:24 - 41 minutes - 37.7 MBWeb3 will remake networks, content and online publishing - apparently. But how many cycles have we been through, how much do the forms, networks and intersections change, and what does it mean to own your data? Is that even possible? Follow Benedict on Twitter Follow Toni on Twitter
Ukraine
March 07, 2022 22:51 - 38 minutes - 35.1 MBA chat about Ukraine without pretending we know about Russia, geopolitics and Ukraine. Rather we will focus on some of the things happening in and around tech with regards to this. And we are absolutely conscious these may not be the most important things happening right now. Follow Benedict on Twitter Follow Toni on Twitter
Talking about crypto
March 01, 2022 00:00 - 39 minutes - 36.5 MBCrypto is so big and yet so unclear that we can’t even agree what to call it. What does ‘web3’ mean, what might it mean, how do we ignore the noise, and what questions might matter? Follow Benedict on Twitter Follow Toni on Twitter
The retail reset
February 21, 2022 20:04 - 33 minutes - 30.9 MBEverything comes out of Covid (we hope), especially retail. US ecommerce penetration jumped forward a little and the UK a lot, but what kinds of companies, brands and stories can be created now that everything and anything can be online? Follow Benedict on Twitter Follow Toni on Twitter