Google I/O, Fertility Decline, Spotify Logo Drama | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Google I/O 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 140% in the last year. Absolute ripper. It's almost a $5 trillion company now.

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was really confused what chart you're reading because it's down 1.3% today.

• 0:22John Coogan?

  Today, okay. No, it is up massively.

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  We think in years, sometimes decades.

• 0:27John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. And yeah, they pulled in just shy of $110 billion revenue 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. 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 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

• 1:12John Coogan?

  time high, certainly not going down. And search and other revenue, which is their bucket there, is up 19% year over year. So holding up well. And Google I/O 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. Actually, the former CEO of Google.

• 1:42Jordi Hays?

  You mean understatement?

• 1:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, understatement, given that the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, was booed offstage at a commencement speech. That is a good point. But, you know, the people that watch Google I/O, the Google core consumers, they are fans of this stuff. I think they're generally pro AI, excited about new features. 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

• 2:21Speaker 02

  They're everywhere.

• 2:22John Coogan?

  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 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. 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

• 3:07John Coogan?

  of delightful experiments that may turn out to be blockbuster products, or they may get shelved by year end. 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 yeah, we can play this video.

• 3:26Speaker 03

  ... 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.

• 3:37John Coogan?

  So I feel like this got rid, I mean, 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 hollow sound that you used to hear in AI video, that where the audio was generated alongside.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  You can still clock it, but it's a lot more subtle.

• 3:57John Coogan?

  It's really subtle. It's crazy because you see these and you're like, oh, I 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, and I want to be at 99.999%.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  Also, like, this is kind of a nitpick, but isn't that a V6, right?

• 4:14John Coogan?

  I don't know, is it 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 RPG 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 CGI perspective. You have to go and model every little detail, every pin 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, you know, a chair,

• 4:59John Coogan?

  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?

• 5:07Jordi Hays?

  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, you know, you might be going to YouTube because your favorite 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 YouTube and YouTube is just, again, fully generated a video based on what it knows about your interests. That said, that would cause potentially a creator strike.

• 5:48Jordi Hays?

  Because it's YouTube starting to compete against their own, you know, content producers on the platform. So we'll see.

• 5:56John Coogan?

  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. Let's watch this other science explainer from the timeline. Gemini Omni explains science with video. Thanks a lot for this, says Chetosluwa. 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 reaction to this. This is about photosynthesis, I think?

• 6:38Speaker 04

  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. Meanwhile, longer red wavelengths pass through almost

• 7:01John Coogan?

  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? 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 could 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. Omni is our new model that can create anything from any input, starting with video.

• 7:46John Coogan?

  Think Banana Banana But For Video. Okay, yeah, let's play this because there's some amazing like different styles here going on.

• 7:57John Coogan?

  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 for. 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 it says, give it anything. So I think you could potentially give it a bunch of videos and it could edit it together and do a vibe reel, something like that. Swap style, swap environment, swap angle. They've been having a lot of fun with this. The other news out of Google today

• 8:40John Coogan?

  is Gemini 3.5 Flash, our most powerful model to date. It pushes the frontier of, 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. 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 600 and 1400 tokens per second on TPU 8i.

• 9:21John Coogan?

  It peaked out around 1480 talks per tokens per second with an average of around 800 tokens 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 smarter intelligence for a while. 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, they have anti-gravity, but Gemini CLI has not seen as much traction. And so better model, might pull that forward, might wind up seeing more traction there.

• 10:05John Coogan?

  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? 3.5 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. 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.

• 10:49John Coogan?

  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 a very different model from Claude. The benchmarks will go out 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 don't think tomorrow's show, because I O is a number of days and there's a whole host of different announcements that could that could happen in the interim. There's a lot of other things going on.

• 11:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Has anyone been vague posting around? Will there be a three, five pro?

• 11:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

  This week?

• 11:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's going to happen over the course of the next few days. They just started with flash.

• 11:42Jordi Hays?

  Okay, starting with flash. Cool. And then they also announced Bark.

• 11:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 11:47Jordi Hays?

  Which is a personal agent that lives in anti-gravity.

• 11:51John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 11:52Jordi Hays?

  Is my understanding?

• 11:52John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 11:53Jordi Hays?

  And so trying to make.

• 11:55John Coogan?

  When I hear personal agent, I think more like Gemini app, Google search, like Gmail, like the very like the consumer product surfaces. I think, well, I guess I just think personal and I think consumer. But given how much people are using code, X, Claude code for like personal like things, like just because writing code creates a more dynamic agentic surface, open claw, we saw all of this. It's helpful to have something running on a MacBook Pro that can go around and find different stuff. What?

• 12:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just an additional context. 3.5 Pro is coming out next month.

• 12:26John Coogan?

  Next month?

• 12:26Jordi Hays?

  So not this weekend.

• 12:27John Coogan?

  A little bit of a delay there. I wonder, I wonder what else is in the bag of like Mythos like surprises because the cybersecurity 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 Moderna 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 agentic 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

• 13:11John Coogan?

  Demis said that at Davos. 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 surfaces. 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. 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 agentic commerce? That results in, you know, a faster takeoff of that adoption of that behavior.

• 13:56John Coogan?

  As I mentioned yesterday on the show, we had a lovely conversation with Joanna Stern from thenewthings.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. Waymo is now boring. 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.

• 14:39John Coogan?

  And 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 installed into large corporations. There's even more of a capability overhang in consumer hardware. 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.

• 15:09Jordi Hays?

  It feels like longer than that. They had, I just remember they did a global billboard campaign for Apple Intelligence.

• 15:16John Coogan?

  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. 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. Google Glass, I mean, way ahead of its time. 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.

• 16:00John Coogan?

  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.

• 16:08Jordi Hays?

  Whoa. Whole experiment of how can we strap someone's phone to their face?

• 16:13John Coogan?

  Basically.

• 16:14Jordi Hays?

  And serve the mat.

• 16:15John Coogan?

  And then they also did the Samsung Galaxy.

• 16:17Jordi Hays?

  At point blank range.

• 16:18John Coogan?

  Which was, uh, yeah, you'd slot it into like a piece of hardware, but much cheaper than buying an Oculus at the time.

• 16:24Jordi Hays?

  Lisan Algaib 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 I O 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, in just like day-to-day coding, 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 revenue on, on the Coogan side or still get exposure to that through Anthropic. It did come out yesterday that Demis is an angel in Anthropic himself.

• 17:09Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, I don't, not, not super surprising, um, although less pushback.

• 17:16John Coogan?

  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. Well, who else is going to Anthropic? Andre Karpathy has gone from OpenAI to Tesla to Anthropic. I think he went back to OpenAI at one point in there. And Andre, a different account, is pointing out this KMT general who defected and subsequently betrayed five different countries in Asia, ending in Japan, jumping around. He's seen it all, certainly the world tour of AI labs. I guess Andre Karpathy was never inside of XAI because he was sort of the precursor at Tesla.

• 18:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Elon, he was poached by Elon in the early days.

• 18:04John Coogan?

  Did he work at Google at some point? I feel like he might have been at Google before OpenAI. I don't know.

• 18:08Jordi Hays?

  So he interned there.

• 18:09John Coogan?

  He interned there, so he's been everywhere.

• 18:11Jordi Hays?

  I think when he was a PhD.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  He's got the Thanos rings.

• 18:14Jordi Hays?

  Huge pickup and excited to see what they do together. He's apparently, according to Alex Heath, going to be working on basically RSI.

• 18:23John Coogan?

  RSI, yeah.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think he's continuing on his auto research project.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, he's been doing RSI basically in the open source world. Auto research is open source, right?

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 18:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 18:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think you can read into this that it was effectively an acqui-hire of the company he was working on, so.

• 18:39John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 18:40Jordi Hays?

  I don't, yeah, I'm assuming.

• 18:41John Coogan?

  He said he was going to get back to the education project that he was working on at some point.

• 18:46Jordi Hays?

  I thought he had raised for it.

• 18:47John Coogan?

  I don't think he did.

• 18:48Jordi Hays?

  Maybe not.

• 18:49John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 18:50Jordi Hays?

  It's always helpful.

• 18:51John Coogan?

  But that was a cool idea, and I wonder how that fits in. It was always interesting to think about, like, LLMs are really good at education. I mean, we're seeing that today with Gemini Omni. Like, it can generate a video for you. Now, we haven't really pushed it to the limit. Like, I wonder, if you give it a PhD-level problem, is it going to teach you as well as, you know, a great professor who has thought about all the different responses? Like, maybe it's not fully there, but education certainly seems on the core path of the models. Going to a computer and asking, "Teach me 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, all the textbooks have been scanned, Wikipedia is in the...

• 19:33John Coogan?

  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. But we'll be

• 19:43Jordi Hays?

  One, one more thing out of I O that we forgot to cover. 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, yeah, when you generate an asset in 11 labs, OpenAI, Gemini Omni, it'll, it should be auto detected by the different platform.

• 20:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, 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.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  Well, so I think the ones on X are just in the metadata.

• 20:19John Coogan?

  In the metadata, yeah.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  You can actually change it like fairly easily. I don't think it's actually using like, like on, on banana banana images on GPT. Which two that are like watermarks.

• 20:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  You've seen these like weird patterns people posted.

• 20:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, subtle changes to the, to the saturation.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think they've done, it's just been metadata so far.

• 20:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. But 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 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. 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 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?

• 21:19John Coogan?

  This was burning up the timeline this weekend.

• 21:21Jordi Hays?

  I was, I was shocked at all the negative reactions to this icon.

• 21:25John Coogan?

  Me too.

• 21:26Jordi Hays?

  Like, what's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? Seriously, if you don't like this, seek help. I will say at first it threw me off. I was like, where did my Spotify app go? Cause it's too dark.

• 21:37John Coogan?

  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'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 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.

• 22:13Jordi Hays?

  It's, uh, it's so funny because, uh, I don't, I don't know. Prior to this, were people sitting around being like, wow, I really hope they never changed the Spotify logo, even for a few weeks. I just love it so much.

• 22:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:27Jordi Hays?

  Right? I think it's fun. I think it's a nice change from, you know, this flat minimalist logos that we've all grown accustomed to.

• 22:35John Coogan?

  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 used to it.

• 22:45Jordi Hays?

  I told my wife to cancel our subscription.

• 22:47John Coogan?

  No.

• 22:50John Coogan?

  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.

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because you're at the disco, John.

• 23:05John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 23:06Jordi Hays?

  A disco ball would never look that bright in a nightclub.

• 23:09John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah. I mean, the, the black lines.

• 23:10Jordi Hays?

  It is real disco ball knowers. Yeah. That's way too, that's way too light.

• 23:16John Coogan?

  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 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. Both the pace and the breadth. Of the decline or defying expectations, just five years ago, the UN predicted that

• 23:56John Coogan?

  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 10 years. 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 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

• 24:39John Coogan?

  of different countries 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 actual rollout of cellphones or smartphones at different times. And so they adjusted all the figures. And when you look at this chart that Luis Giancarlo 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,

• 25:22John Coogan?

  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 Senegal until 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 South Korea by 50% in 20 years. Effect is largest in culturally traditional societies, Middle East, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa.

• 26:06John Coogan?

  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 Douthat says, "On the latest round of fertility discourse, friends don't let friends share Chart 1 without the important context of Chart 2, which is the child survival adjustment." 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 1800s.

• 26:47John Coogan?

  Baby boom in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and then the rate starts declining. 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 like work the farm for them. And the economics of having a child flipped at a certain point where it became expensive 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.

• 27:26Jordi Hays?

  Do you think children yearning for the mines is sort of like a survival mechanism, right? They want to be economically valuable. They want to be productive, right? They're saying, "We can carry our own weight." I look at all these charts and I just think, "It's over."

• 27:45John Coogan?

  It's over.

• 27:46Jordi Hays?

  But then I remind myself to never black pill.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  Never black pill, even if it's down.

• 27:54John Coogan?

  Never black pill.

• 27:55Jordi Hays?

  Never block a pill. 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'd be huge amounts of fundraising happening to try to save the species.

• 28:11Jordi Hays?

  But when it's us, we just sort of like, you know, see the chart and just keep scrolling.

• 28:16John Coogan?

  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 organizing? Because the, the smartphones have diffuse 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.

• 28:48Jordi Hays?

  And they're not using technology.

• 28:50John Coogan?

  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 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, childcare and the relation with how people spend their time.

• 29:29Jordi Hays?

  Also, what else happened in, around the, the launch of the iPhone?

• 29:33John Coogan?

  What?

• 29:34Jordi Hays?

  Like massive economic disruption, right?

• 29:37John Coogan?

  They controlled for that, though. That, that, 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. There were some countries that went through boom periods. There were some countries that went through, uh, economic retraction, contractions. And they were all sort of affected equally. Like, uh, even China, China has the lowest replacement rate. One. Per family or something like that. Whereas we're, America's at like 1.8. Many societies, many modern societies at 1.6, 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 6, 7, 8, sometimes 10% a year. Like they're not going through an economic contraction, certainly not from 2007 to today.

• 30:21John Coogan?

  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 in the aging population. There's an article that Derek Thompson shared, "Dad Books," which this article and some publishing insiders used to describe "serious nonfiction 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 & Schuster and publisher of the new Simon 6 imprint. "When we have internal meetings to talk about this problem, it always comes around to podcasts."

• 31:02John Coogan?

  Interesting, saying podcasts are eating the dad book, serious nonfiction.

• 31:07Jordi Hays?

  We gotta figure out who's doing this.

• 31:09John Coogan?

  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 nonfiction, but it is, it is increasingly hard to find the time. Fed speak 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. When you adjust for age, so this is a curve of time spent with children by age.

• 31:38Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 31:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:59Jordi Hays?

  And so.

• 32:00John Coogan?

  What was the silent generation doing? What was the, what were the baby boomers doing? Were they just like, kid, hit the mines, buddy? I, I gotta read. I don't know. I mean, the podcasts creep in, but it's

• 32:12Jordi Hays?

  I listen to podcasts when I'm not at home.

• 32:15John Coogan?

  When I can't read.

• 32:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:16John Coogan?

  Right?

• 32:17Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 32:18John Coogan?

  Maybe self-driving cars bullish for serious nonfiction. Because, oh, maybe people will get sick.

• 32:23Jordi Hays?

  Self-driving cars are bullish for the infinite scroll.

• 32:27John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:28Jordi Hays?

  They're bearish for the podcasts and long-form mediums broadly.

• 32:32John Coogan?

  And the book and the serious nonfiction, the dead book. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Sharp.

• 32:39Jordi Hays?

  Love you.

• 32:40John Coogan?

  Goodbye.