
Tech • IA • Crypto
Google enters its I/O event with surging valuation and strong AI momentum, as investors bet on its position as a full-stack leader in the next phase of artificial intelligence.
Alphabet shares have climbed roughly 140% over the past year, pushing its market capitalization near $4.6 trillion. The rally reflects a sharp shift in investor sentiment, with markets increasingly pricing the company as a dominant AI platform rather than a legacy search business.
The company reported nearly $110 billion in quarterly revenue, underscoring the scale of its core operations. Its Search and Other segment grew 19% year over year, with query volumes reaching all-time highs, signaling resilience despite earlier fears that AI chatbots would erode search demand.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is currently growing faster than AWS and Microsoft Azure, strengthening Alphabet’s enterprise positioning. This acceleration is central to the “full-stack AI” narrative, spanning infrastructure, models, and applications.
Wall Street increasingly views Alphabet as an integrated AI leader across Google Search, Gemini models, DeepMind, and cloud services. Earlier concerns about disruption to search have faded as AI features are embedded directly into existing products.
Gemini capabilities are now embedded across multiple Google surfaces, sometimes redundantly. While this demonstrates aggressive rollout, it has also raised usability concerns, with overlapping AI interfaces occasionally complicating workflows rather than simplifying them.
New Gemini video models show significant improvements in realism, including better motion, audio quality, and synchronization. The technology is approaching near-production quality, potentially disrupting industries reliant on high-cost CGI and explainer content.
AI-generated video tools could dramatically lower the cost of producing educational and explainer content. This raises questions about the future role of creators, as platforms may eventually generate personalized videos on demand based on user preferences.
The newly introduced Gemini 3.5 Flash model emphasizes speed and efficiency, reaching up to 1,400 tokens per second in demonstrations. It delivers strong performance at lower cost than comparable frontier models, though it is pricier than earlier “Flash” versions.
Investor attention is shifting toward enterprise adoption, particularly how Google distributes AI through Google Cloud and developer tools. Stronger models and faster inference could drive uptake in coding assistants and enterprise automation.
Internal metrics indicate token generation is up roughly 7x year over year, reflecting rapid growth in AI usage across Google products. This surge is partly driven by embedding AI features across consumer and enterprise services.
Google is expected to roll out additional models and tools, including a personal AI agent known as Spark. More advanced versions, such as Gemini 3.5 Pro, are anticipated in the near term, suggesting a staggered release strategy.
Google introduced SynthID, a framework for identifying AI-generated content, developed in collaboration with firms like OpenAI, NVIDIA, and ElevenLabs. The initiative aims to create cross-platform standards for labeling synthetic media, though technical challenges remain.
While AI capabilities are expanding rapidly, monetization remains uncertain. Google is exploring agent-driven commerce, leveraging its dominance in search and shopping, but adoption of AI-assisted purchasing remains early and limited.
Alphabet’s strong financial performance and rapid AI integration have reshaped its market narrative, positioning it as a central player in the AI economy while leaving open questions about usability, monetization, and long-term competitive dynamics.
Google IO starts today and the stock is ripping. I think uh people might have missed this if you haven't been uh watching closely, but Google is up 140% in the last year. Absolute ripper. It's almost a $5 trillion company now 4.6. >> I was really confused what chart you were reading because it's down 1.3% today. >> Today? Okay. No, it is up massive. >> We think in years, sometimes decades. >> Yes. Yes. uh and and uh yeah, they pulled in just shy of $110 billion revenue last quarter. Uh and they're in a great position for the next era of the AI story. So, uh GCP is growing faster than AWS and Azure. Um Wall Street has basically fully repriced the company as a like a full stack AI winner. That's the new narrative across Google Cloud, Google Search, Gemini, the models, DeepMind, everything that they're doing. Uh so long gone are the concerns about Google's search weakness because even core Google search is so 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 on the last call that it's at an all-time high certainly not going down. And uh search and other revenue which is their bucket there is uh is up 19% year-over-year. So, holding up well and Google IO generally offers consumers uh launches or previews of tons of new products. I'm getting called previews of tons of new products and features. Um, 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. actually the former CEO of Google. Uh yeah, understatement giving that uh 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, uh they are fans of this stuff. I think they're generally pro AAI, excited about new features. Some of the new features that we'll show are very, very cool. But uh there is this like goal of being ambient and useful instead of pushy and desperate. Uh many Google experiences now have duplicative Gemini panels and I was writing this uh update in a Google doc and I noticed that I had two Gemini stars basically uh one Gemini star in my Google doc and then another in the Chrome browser that I'm using to load Google Docs and it's a really hilarious outcome because I was writing this in sort of like h 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 a Google doc which I don't really use AI in the actual Google doc. I just kind of write it. Um but uh there's you know there's stuff it everywhere and then actually make it useful, make it ambient, make it uh delightful. And so uh 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. uh and there will be tons of delightful experiments that may turn out to be blockbuster products or they may get sheld by year end. That's kind kind of the beauty of Google's culture is that they have plenty of opportunity for experimentation. Uh we sort of uh some people remember all the all the things that are in the Google graveyard. Uh but uh most people just remember Gemini and whatnot. So yeah, we can play this video 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 V8 engine features eight cylinders. >> 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. 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, but it's a lot more subtle. >> It's really subtle. It's crazy because you see these and you're like ah 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 and I want to be at 99.9999%. >> Also, like this is kind of a nitpick, but isn't that a V6, right? 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. They can be viewed in any language, but they're very intense from a uh 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 uh you know a chair, break it down, explode it, show me the inards, will it just do it on demand for you? Will it just generate that or will this still sit below the creators? >> 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 that were generated based on your interests. Right. Sometimes sometimes, you know, you might be going to YouTube because your favorite uh sports team just played and you want some analysis on the game or, you know, your favorite fighter or something like that or some news is happening. And it doesn't seem like we're that far from a future where you land on on YouTube and YouTube has just again fully generated a video based on what it knows about uh your interests. That said, that would cause potentially a creator strike. >> Yeah. >> Because it's YouTube starting to compete against their own, you know, content producers on the platform. Yeah. >> So, we'll see. >> Yeah. At least in the interim, it feels like uh the dawn of stock footage. YouTubers have been creating these, they've been using these tools for a long time. They have been getting cheaper. Even the uh the CGI world has become uh increasingly commoditized every year as you get more to templates and uh and the tools become cheaper. Let's watch this other uh science explainer from the timeline. Uh Gemini Omni explains science with video. Thanks a lot for this says Chattaslua. Uh now every student will get a custom video for the topic of science and math. I'm so happy like while typing. I want to see all your action to this. >> This is about photosynthesis. every color of the rainbow. As this light enters our atmosphere, it crashes into molecules of nitrogen and oxygen. This triggers a phenomenon called 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. Meanwhile, longer red wavelengths pass. There has been a big push on YouTube for like as people ask questions like they would go to Google and say like how do I fix this particular washing machine and 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 uh 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 could imagine satisfies that use case very very quickly. And then of course there will just be entertainment uh and all sorts of different use cases. Uh Logan Kilpatrick friend of the show says introducing Gemini Omni. Omni is our new MA model that can create anything from any input starting with video. Think Nano Banana but for video. Okay. Uh yeah, 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 uh would you'd normally bump out to After Effects for or like the edit here. I wonder I wonder if uh 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. Uh so it says give it anything. So I think you could potentially give it a bunch of videos and it could edit it together into a vibe reel, something like that. Swap style, swap environment, swap angle. Uh they've been having a lot of fun with this. The other uh news out of uh Google today is Gemini 3.5 Flash, our most powerful model to date. It pushes the frontier of EV of intelligence, speed, and cost, putting 3.5 Flash in a class of its own. Uh we spent the last six months making sure Flash is great for real world use cases. Um it's the strongest agent coding model yet from Google. Uh it delivers frontier level performance at 4x the speed of comparable Frontier models, often at less than half the cost. So, uh, dominating the paro frontier has been the goal for a long time. The the speed is being heralded as a key feature. Uh, Google just showed a demo of Gemini Flash running between 600 and,400 tokens per second on TPU8. We peaked out around 1480 talks per tokens per second with an average of around 800 tokens per second. So, very, very, very fast. Uh the flip side is uh it's more expensive than previous flash models but that's been the trend with uh smart smarter intelligence for a while. So uh investors are focused across three key areas not so much the consumer story uh more uh 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, they have anti-gravity, but the Gemini CLI has not seen as much traction. And so, better model might pull that forward, might wind up seeing more traction there. Overall, I think token generation at Google is up 7x year-over-year, which seems great. It's unclear how much of that is because there's more reasoning happening. But given the fact that the Gemini models are sort of stuffed all over the product surfaces, 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 uh 3.5 launched? And there's a stage roll out with Flash going first. Andrew Curran had an interesting post here talking about the lack of vague posting. The Deep Mind 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. Uh this reticence, of course, can be interpreted in many ways. I'm choosing to interpret it in accordance with my nature. I think they trained the largest model they've ever successfully trained, probably possibly the largest one anyone ever has and something unexpected emerged at scale. 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. If I'm right, that surprise will be part of tomorrow's show. >> We shall find out together in the morning. I I I don't think tomorrow's show because IO is a number of days and there's a whole host of uh different uh announcements that could that that could happen in the interim. There's a lot of other things going on and >> yeah, has anyone been vague posting around will there be a 35 Pro? Yeah. This week? >> Yeah, that's going to happen over the course of the next few days. They just started with Flash. >> Okay, starting with Flash. Cool. And then uh they also announced Spark. >> Yes. >> Which is a personal agent that lives in anti-gravity. >> Oh, okay. >> It's my understanding. >> Oh, interesting. >> And so trying to make >> when I hear personal agent, I think more like Gemini app, Google search, like Gmail, like the very like the consumer products, services. I think well, I guess I just think personal and I think consumer. But given how much people are using codeexcloud code for like personal-like things like just because writing code creates a more dynamic agentic surface open claw we saw all of this uh it's helpful to have something running on a MacBook Pro that can go around and find different stuff. What what >> uh yeah just additional context 3.5 Pro is coming out next month. >> Next month. >> So not uh this week. >> A little bit of a delay there. I wonder uh 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 got to give it to all the pharmaceutical companies in advance and like Mona gets it and creates like antiviruses or something like that. I don't know what else but I'm sure there will be surprises. There always are in the AI era. So agent commerce will also be top of mind for investors uh 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 at Davos uh Google has a lot of capabilities when it comes to closing the consumer shopping loop. 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? 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. Um, but where is it going? Will Google have something to show here? Will they have some sort of demo of a of a new user experience, a new flow for agent commerce that results in, you know, a faster takeoff of that adoption of that behavior. As I mentioned yesterday on the show, we had a lovely conversation with Joanna Stern from the new things.com. We had lots of fun takes about like the AI tools that I think most of 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 like AI fans have is in the wearables because she was wearing that recording device consistently. And she maintains that like humanoids are farther away. You need a lot more training data. The AI chat apps are here. We already know they're diffused. Whimo is now boring. But uh the next big wave she's sort of predicting is uh 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 uh it is interesting how you know 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 uh installed into large corporations. Uh there's even more of an capability overhang in consumer hardware. Uh it Apple iterates extremely methodically. You know they made a big story about Apple intelligence. Was that just one year ago? I guess that was one year ago because WWDC is in a few weeks. >> Feels like longer than that. They had I I just remember they did a global billboard campaign for Apple intelligence. >> 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. Um and then if you're a challenger uh and you just want to manufacture new devices at scale, that takes years to ramp up. And then you also have to, you know, distribute, sell. It's not one click away. It's go to the store or wait and wait for the mail. And Google's had some fun swings at these like preview emerging hardware platforms. Uh Google Glass, I mean, way ahead of its time. We're now there with the Meta Rayband displays, but even those are not selling by the millions and millions. Uh they're they're very early stage. Uh 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 uh as a VR headset. >> Whoa. Experiment of how can we strap someone's phone to their face >> basically serve the matter. >> And then they also did the Samsung Galaxy range >> which was uh yeah you'd slot it into like a piece of hardware but much cheaper than buying an Oculus at the time. Leisan Algib says 35 flash scores kind of low on coding index due to rough uh terminal bench hard scores. So I think the big question coming out of IO today is how do developers respond to the updates to uh anti-gravity to 35 flash. The speed is amazing. We know how much people care about that um in in just like day-to-day coding. Uh but the model has to be able to perform. So, we'll see what people's reactions are and we'll see if we'll see if Google can really start to >> ramp uh revenue on on the cogen side or still get uh exposure to that through anthropic. It did come out yesterday that Demis is an angel in Anthropic himself. >> Um >> and uh I don't not not super surprising. Um although uh less push back. >> When did they Yeah. When did they meet? I wonder what the story is there. How how early he got in? He might be sitting on a bag. Uh well, who else is going to Anthropic? Andre Carpathy has gone from OpenAI to Tesla to anthropic. I think he went back to OpenAI at one point in in there. Uh and Andre, a different account, uh is pointing out this KMT general who defected and subsequently betrayed uh five different uh five different countries in Asia, ending in Japan uh jumping around. He's seen it all. certainly the world tour of uh of AI labs. I guess he I guess Andre Karpathy was never inside of XAI because he was sort of the precursor at Tesla. But >> yeah, Elon he was poached by Elon. >> Did he work at Google in the early days point? I feel like he might have been at Google before open. I don't know. >> So he he interned there. >> He interned there. So he's been everywhere. >> He's got the he's got the Thanos rings. >> Uh huge pickup. Uh and excited to see what they do together. He's apparently according to Alex Heath going to be working on basically RSI. >> RSI. Yeah. >> Yeah. He's continuing on his uh like auto research project. >> Oh yeah. He's been doing RSI basically in the open source world. Uh auto research is open source, right? >> Yes. >> Okay. >> Yeah. It's uh I think you can read into this that it was effectively an aqua hire of the company he was working on. So >> Oh, interesting. >> Uh I don't Yeah, I'm assuming >> he said he was going to like get back to the education project that he was working on. >> Did he have I thought he had I thought he had raised for it. >> I don't think he did. Maybe not. >> I don't know. >> That's always helpful. >> Uh, but that was a cool idea and 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 uh Gemini Omni. Uh, like it can generate a video for you. 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 going to 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 uh educational materials. All the textbooks have been scanned. Wikipedia is in the is in the models. There's so much uh information that's readily available. It isn't uh tightly held secrets that are hard to bring to bear in the pre-training data. But u one one more thing out of IO that we forgot to cover uh Google's new synth ID framework that 11 Labs, OpenAI and NVIDIA are joining forces. This is to help identify AI generated content basically creating a standard for across platforms so that >> uh yeah when you generate an asset in 11 Labs OpenAI >> uh Gemini Omni it'll it should be auto detected by the different platforms. >> Yeah, I' 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 >> well so I think the ones on X are are just in the metadata. You can actually change it like fairly easily. I don't think it's actually using like like on on Nanana images on GBT image 2 there are like watermarks. You've seen these like weird patterns people posted >> subtle changes to the to the saturation or >> I think they've just been it's just been metadata so far. But I I >> yeah, the trick with all of those is that like it's in theory pretty easy to like rip that out if you're running like an advanced AI, you know, slop avoidance detection uh system or something. But just to know, okay, for the average for the average poster, if this is an AI image, that's certainly helpful. Uh, but as you start bringing different assets in, 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 uh 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? This was burning up the timeline this weekend. I was I was shocked at all the negative reactions to this icon. >> Me, too. >> What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? >> Seriously, if you don't like this, >> I I will say at first it threw me off. I was like, where did my Spotify app go? Cuz it's too dark. >> 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. Things don't look the way they normally look." It drew my eye. I saw, oh, Spotify. Okay, look a little bit deeper. The icon looks a little bit different. The color is a little bit deeper. Oh, there's something else going on there. Peel back the onion. You see that there's a disco ball. And then, of course, that uh there is a meaning behind it. They didn't just uh there's a whole reason why they did this. It's uh the 20th anniversary of the company. And so, lots of people complained, but uh party your party of the year. It's uh it's so funny because I don't I don't know prior to this were people sitting around being like, "Wow, I really hope they never change the Spotify logo even for a few weeks. I just love it so much." >> Yeah. >> Right. I think it's fun. I think it's a nice change from, you know, the flat minimalist logos that we've all grown accustomed to. >> Keep it. Uh 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 >> citizens have told my wife to cancel our subscription. >> Oh no. Uh 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. Uh Mass says that it's too it's too uh dark. And so Mass turned up the >> You're at the disco, John. >> Oh yeah. >> A disco ball would never look that bright in a nightclub. >> Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I mean the the black disco ball all knowers that that's way too that's way too light. >> Well, uh, 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 twothirds 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 population 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. Uh both the pace and the breadth of the decline are defying expectations. Just 5 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 inome countries have been wrestling with demographic decline for more than half a century, the phenomenon has marketkedly accelerated in the past 10 years. Uh 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 the question that the Financial Times is trying to answer. should you put the blame on the recent decline in fertility on uh on smartphones in particular? And so you you can go through a whole bunch of the charts. It's a 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 4G or uh or actual rollout of of cell phones or smartphones at different times. And so they adjusted all the figures and when you look at this chart that Lewis uh Gian Carlo is sharing, you'll see uh all of the charts seem to be very very closely aligned at the exact same time. Um, and so Lewis Gian Carlo 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. It looks like a smoking gun. He says it's not though. He says in the US and UK, births fell first and fastest in areas that got 4G earliest. Birth rates were stable in the United States, UK, Australia until 2007. In France and Poland until 2009, Mexico and Indonesia until 2011 and Ghana, Nigeria, and Sagal until 2023, uh 2013, 2015. Each of these inflection points matches local smartphone adoption. Uh the younger the age group, the sharper the drop in-person socializing among young adults is dropping in Singap uh in South Korea by 50% in 20 years. uh effect is largest in culturally traditional societies, Middle East, Latin America, subsaharan Africa. Decline holds across countries hit hard by GFC and those were who were not hit by the global financial crisis. Um 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 Douet says on the rad 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. And so if you look at the total fertility rate if you click on that left graph uh you will see that the baby boom is remarkably pronounced there. But in fact birth rates had been declining since the 1800s. baby boom in the 40s, 50s, 60s and then the rate starts declining. Uh I I asked 5.5 Pro a bunch of questions about this trying to dig in further and uh 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 like 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. Um >> do you think uh children yearning for the minds is is sort of like a survival mechanism, right? They >> they want to be economically valuable. They want to be productive, right? >> They're saying we can uh 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. >> Yes. >> Uh never black pill even if it's down. >> Never black pill. Never black poo. >> It's crazy. It's really crazy to look at these charts looking at uh if if this were any animal in the wild, there would be huge amounts of fundraising happening to try to save the species. >> Uh but uh when it's us, we just sort of like, you know, see the chart and just keep scrolling. >> Yeah. What are the high fertility members of the population doing on their phones differently? like are they using social media less? Are they using dating apps less? Are they texting their friends to come and hang out? Are they are they organiz because the the smartphones have diffused so widely that you need to cut in and understand uh for the groups that are uh above fertility rate. What are they doing differently? Obviously, the Amish are are an interesting case study because they do have a higher than replacement rate fertility. Uh, >> and they're not technology. >> They actually have adopted some cell phones, but not smartphones. So, they will use the, you know, like a dumb phone, a flip phone to make phone calls occasionally. And, and I'm sure that, you know, these are all gradations. There's not uh no smartphones whatsoever. But uh certainly the Amish have steered away from technology and the fertility rate has has stayed high. But uh even within the you know more you know modern enclaves or smart high high smartphone adopters I I do wonder uh what else is going on because there's a bunch of other interesting factors going on with uh child care and the relation with how people spend their time. >> Also what else happened in around the the launch of the iPhone? what >> like massive economic disruption, right? >> They controlled for that though. That that that's the point of the Financial Times article is to control for the economic digrations of different countries. So there were some countries that were unaffected by the financial crisis. There were some countries that went through boom periods. There were some countries that went through economic retra contractions and they were all sort of affected equally like uh even China China has the lowest replacement rate one per uh per family or something like that. Whereas we America's at like 1.8 many societies many modern societies at 1.6 six all below replacement rate but China's the lowest but China's going through like an economic boom the entire time like GDP is up at six seven eight sometimes 10% a year like 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 and they got their result and now they have to sort of contend with that the aging population there's an article that Derrick 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 freefall with sales declining every year for the last years. The trend couldn't be clearer, said Jonathan Karp, uh, former chief executive at Simon and Schustster and publisher of the new Simon 6 imprint. Uh, 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 job. >> We got to figure out who's doing this. >> We're all looking for the guy who did this. Uh I do listen to a lot of podcasts. I still listen to uh audio books of serious non-fiction. Uh but it is uh it is increasingly hard to find the time. Uh 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 uh based on their age when you adjust for age. So this is a curve of time spent with children uh by >> honestly every every time on the weekend 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 just pile up and I just look at them and think okay if I open one of those I will get exactly three pages before I'm disrupted. >> Yeah. >> And so >> what were what was the silent generation doing? What was the what were the baby boomers doing? Were they just like, "Kid, hit the minds, buddy. I I gotta read." I don't know. I mean, the podcasts creep in, but it's it's >> I listen to podcasts when I'm not at home. >> When I can't read. Yeah. Right. >> Maybe uh self-driving cars bullish for serious non-fiction because Oh, maybe people will get sick. >> Self-driving cars are bullish for the infinite scroll. They're bearish. They are bearish for the podcast and and long for medium >> and the book and the serious non-fiction the dad book. 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