TBPN - a16z Rebranding, Worldcoin Launches in U.S., Judge Delivers Blow to Apple's Business Model, Tesla Price Falls Amid Reporting of Elon's Replacement

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comLinear - https://linear.appFigma - https://www.figma.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(08:09) - a16z Rebranding (17:29) - Cluely Hiring 50 Interns (37:13) - Worldcoin Launches in U.S. (51:05) - Judge Delivers Blow to Apple's Business Model (55:14) - Tesla Price Falls Amid Reporting of Elon's Replacement

Good morning. You're watching TBPN. Today is Friday, May 2nd, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology. The Fortress of Finance. The Capital of Capital. We are remote today. But that doesn't mean that we're not in the fortress of finance because the fortress of finance is more than a physical place. It is the show. It's a state of mind. Anyone can be in the fortress of finance. Anyone can be in the Temple of Technology. anyone can be in the capital of capital, as long as you're online locked in watching this show at least 10 hours a day. That's what we ask for. Some people were saying it's too much.

We're only asking for 10 hours. 10 hours a day, less than half. Yeah, 10 hours a day. We only record three hours a day usually, but there's a whole backlog that you can go play the reruns. That's right. So three hours of the live show, then go back through the back catalog,

do some greatest hits. So that's how you get to 10 hours a day, folks, if you're really, really into the show, which we expect you to be. Anyway, we've been traveling. We went to Washington, D.C., and now we are back in California, but traveling again this time for my birthday.

We're in Ohio, California. That's right. And the worst part about traveling, as always, is being away from Ben. Sweet POD for Ultra Baby, getting a sweet, fine. year warranty, 30-night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping. Go to 8Sleep.com. I'm in the new app. I got a 97 last night. I don't feel like I got a 97 because I have such an

extreme caffeine addiction that I slept in a little bit today just because of the travel yesterday. I didn't even get a single night back in the pot because I went straight to OI. Brutal. But I will be spending the majority of this vacation. pitching the hotel staff. Let's get eight sleeps in every in every room. That's right. That's the real reason why I'm here. Aidesleep.com slash TbPN. Let's do a little recap of tech earnings this week. It was a banger. There was a lot of nervousness around the tariffs. But as you've seen, if you've been following the stock market, things went down. They went back up. Turns out it was all priced in all

along. So we had our audience knows everything. Our audience knows everything is, you know, structurally priced in. Nothing ever happens. You know, we said Monday this week was, you know, in some ways, the NFL combine of the economy. We said to turn post notifications on from Joe Wisenthal. He was posting up a storm. Yep. And anyways, a lot of good results despite still kind of shaky feeling.

It is crazy. It's like a straight up royal flesh. Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, N meta, all beat all beat earnings. expectations on EP earnings per share and revenue, driving positive investor sentiment and solid market gains, AI dominance. You know, everyone thinks the AI stuff's priced in, but it keeps growing out. Microsoft and Alphabet showcased accelerated cloud growth due to strong AI adoption, even though, obviously, there's flaws in the model. Maybe we're not ASI yet. Maybe we're not in the fast takeoff scenario. Hey, these LLMs are pretty useful and enterprises are stuffing them all

over the place in their code bases, and that drives a lot of inference cost. And so they're paying more on the cloud. Meta ramped up AI infrastructure spending significantly. Zuck is going all in, continues to go all in on AI. Yeah, just to put this into perspective, Zuck is saying that they expect to generate between $460 and $1.4 trillion in revenue from generative AI products by 2035. So big numbers, big numbers. I like to see it. Zuckson Founder Mode. And yeah, he's not not being shy about making some big projections.

Yeah. And so people are still worried about the tariffs, but it's very weird how we've round-tripped. It does seem like at this point, big tech is driving so much of the S&P 500, so much of the stock market generally, that even though we've talked to a lot of folks, Ryan Peterson, among them, who have. highlighted, I mean, Sean Frank too, highlighted that there are a lot of businesses that were built on top of China manufacturing, Chinese manufacturing. And even though the tariffs have stabilized elsewhere, the Chinese tariffs are extremely existential to their business and they just can't move back quick enough. And so there's been proposals to say, hey, I like Sean's post. Hey, instead of giving me a tariff, force me to invest that much in America. I will do it over a number of

quarters. You can get the money. You can still reindustrialize. But yeah, that was too fast. That was one takeaway from Washington was that it seemed like on the, you know, we were at Hill and Valley. Yep. On the hill side of the attendees, there was a seemingly a sentiment that the tariffs, the whole tariff thing was going to get resolved in some way in the very near future. And so hard to really read too much into anything, but there certainly wasn't the sentiment that this was, you know, the new normal and to just like get used to 145% tariffs from on on China forever. The other thing in the context of meta and Google going forward, our friend Ara over at Ramp pulled some data on advertiser spend. Yeah, this would be interesting. And basically you saw across the board advertisers, both small businesses, medium and large businesses, were reducing spend.

I think this would have been expected. This was driven by retail spend, which obviously, you know, some of the biggest advertisers online are advertising consumer goods. If you have tariff uncertainty, if you have even supply uncertainty in a sense that, you know, I know I'm going to have demand in two months, but I don't know. if I'm going to be able to get enough goods, you're going to just drop spend. So we'll see how that rebounds. It's certainly something that people have discussed at length about the risk to meta around retail businesses, consumer businesses, just pulling back spend due to uncertainty. But again, these are auction-based platforms. So if some big companies reduce spend by $10 billion, that that that ad inventory will get back filled by other advertisers.

It just might be not. That was the Brad Gersner point. He was saying Timo and Sheen might have pulled something like $8 billion from meta ad spend. And, you know, the infrastructure is built for ads. It's basically extremely high margin revenue that's going out the door. Should hit earnings. It didn't this quarter. We'll see what happens next quarter.

But yeah, it's an auction. And there are plenty of advertisers who are on the sidelines. waiting to spend if ad rates drop. And so we'll see where it goes. It might just be super resilient. But whatever your take on the market has been, you should head over to public.com. It is, of course, the place for investing for those who take it seriously. They have multi-asset investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions. And they're the sponsor of Aston Martin F1. We love to see it. And so if you're in Miami for F1, yep. try to look out for public merch. It very well could be the public team.

Very cool. Is that this weekend? Yeah, May 4th. Cool. Maybe we should throw that on this this weekend. Anyway, new Andreessen Horowitz branding just dropped. We'd seen they had rolled this out a little bit ago. I guess they rolled out the coin. They rolled out the coin. They rolled out the coin. And it burned up the timeline on April 30th. days ago on Wednesday. Yeah, so this rollout was interesting. There was a number of people pushing back on it. And anytime a big sort of like rebrand drop, some people are going to like it.

Some people are going to hate it. I have mixed feelings because I thought that orange is just so iconic and they're clearly moving away from the orange. At the same time, I feel like orange is a great color. it's not immediately identified. You know how blue is a color of trust, and so a lot of banks wind up using blue. But when I think Silicon Valley and orange,

I think YC, because YC has dominated, they've verticalized orange. They really have gone so heavy into orange. Andresen was doing orange text, typically on a white background. YC does white text on an orange background. That's right. They have more orange.

And so when I think orange, I think YC. So I'd push you on that and I'd say, hey, maybe it's actually reasonable since they hadn't won the war for orange that they spread out. And honestly, the coin, it's bronze. It has a little bit of that orange hue to it. But what else was your takeaway from this rebrand? I think some of the pushback was around, and I think this is fair specifically around the rollout. They rolled out.

They changed the homepage and the profile pictures across all the different social platforms, but they didn't change, didn't fully update the underlying website. So overall, like, yeah, I enjoy this maroon, burgundy, whatever you want to call it. But yeah, it sounds like they were just ready to go, shipped it. Founder mode. And I'm sure they'll update the rest of the site over time. But as it has been a couple months since they rolled out that coin. It is kind of crazy that they didn't just do a full refresh of the entire site. Yeah, they could have just swapped all the colors.

Like it's a complicated website. there's a lot of different pages and they have a lot of different folks and sub funds and stuff. But at the same time, like, it should be doable to update everything at the same time or rebuild. Yeah, you could sort of find and replace all the orange with the maroon or something like that, Marina Burgundy. But I think that this is A16Z sending a signal to their portfolio saying the best time to ship is now, ship and iterate. And, you know, not every transition needs to be totally.

smooth. They also just have like such a, you know, powerful, uh, marketing, uh, engine, uh, audience base that, you know, um, they can like pretty quickly disseminate a new brand to the market and sort of reestablish the A16C brand. Yeah. So, uh, Lucas Crespo says A16Z's logo went from VC firm to Galactic Empire really quickly. Uh, Roshan Patel did not like it. He edited it to say, it's time to fire our designer. Paula says it was making me hungry and then I realized why and it's a predoméje. And it does look, that does look crazy similar. I wonder if the, is that actually a picture of that restaurant?

Because that looks like an AI version. Well, this is, you know, this is like a huge chain. Yeah, it's a huge chain. It's like a panera. And it does, their color scheme is. It's very similar. It's exactly the same. It's like, you know, bright lights and.

and gold and that maroon and burgundy. And they even have a star that is sort of similar to. Yeah, a four-pointed star instead of the five-pointed star. Augustus had some harsh words. He said, I love Andrewson Horowitz, but the rebrand is a mistake. We need to build the future, something new. This is yearning for a past that failed. 500 likes, my screenshot of this.

Harsh words. But T.J. on the other side says it's TBPN coded. It is screaming loud opulence in many ways. My takeaway is that I think there are some things about the logo that I really like. I think the way the A bends this curve that meets with the circle for the six and there's the star in there. I like the design of the logo. I think it's increasingly getting away from giving you the information that it's less readable. It's not screaming at you A16Z and just.

just bland like San Serif that's very easy to read. It's more of an icon that I think will worm its way into people's heads. And I think my overall takeaway with this is that there's, there's so many examples in design history. I'm also thinking of the car world where things that eventually became iconic were hated at launch. There's tons and tons of examples of this with cars that didn't sell well and then became more exclusive because they were thought of as not really following the current design trends and then became, we're getting roasted. Julian Weiser right now on X says, what happened? Is it casual Friday or something? It is casual Friday. I thought about bringing the suit, but I decided to go with the sweater today.

Honestly, we've been going so hard on the suits. I got to take a big dry cleaning run to be ready for next week. We are at the end of the, at the end of the day, human. But I don't know. I think it's cool. I'm interested to see where this iconography goes. This whole, it's very randian, this opulent coin. And I'm wondering if they will wind up doing sub-brands that build off of this for the

bio fund, for the American Dynamism Fund. This does seem a little bit like the American Dynamism Fund eating the entire fund. But it's interesting to see, will they try and understand? the crypto brand within this overarching brand or will they go a completely different direction because this doesn't scream crypto at me at all, at least in the traditional sense of crypto brand. Well, they got a big coin. I guess.

Yeah, I guess. Well, anyway. Hopefully they put the logo on chain. Yep. Well, there's a whole much more. Yeah, there's a whole bunch more A16Z news. The techno optimist manifesto by Mark Andreson is. now available as a book. It includes three of his famous essays, The Techno Optimist Manifesto. It's

time to build and why software is eating the world. But you were talking about the rollout of a brand. If you're rolling out a new brand, I think we'd recommend management on linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. If you're updating a website, you've got a bunch of designers, a bunch of engineers working together. You've got to put them on linear. It's what we use. It's what I've used for over half a decade and will continue to use forever they're building for the long term and I think you will notice that

when you use the product. So thank you to Linear. I like this take from Reggie James. We got to have him on the show soon and he is breaking down some of the trends that he's seeing in design and technology. He says, Cooley, the A16Z rebrand, Doge and Elon, Friends. I don't know what Omi is. Donald Trump mean coins. What do all of these things have in common, free reference. And he's a spectacle of the society. So I would love to get him to unpack that.

But I kind of understand what where he's getting at with these. They're more attention grabbing. They're designed to stand out. They're designed to sometimes infuriate the opposite side, draw negative reaction because in many ways that's as valuable as positive reaction. and really shake things up and that's what a lot of these do but I'd love for him to unpack that time for Reggie to come on the show. It is for sure.

Maybe Monday. Make it happen. Anyway, speaking of Cluley, we had Roy on the show what two weeks ago and he actually announced on our show that he was planning to hire 50 interns in San Francisco at $50 an hour. And we didn't, we should have clipped it

because it was breaking, news, but he put out a video formally announcing that he is hiring 50 interns. And the reaction was overwhelming. This guy, Roy, is amazing at going viral. And Will Brown, who's been on the show, says, oh, he's making a content house. He's going to have an army of TikTokers selling the product all day while adding features to it. Wow, will certainly be interesting to watch. And he talks about this. Yeah. Yeah, I'm unclear to me if these people are going to be, if the 50 interns are going to be working on the product or, you know, focus on marketing. Yep.

I think it's definitely marketing. You think definitely marketing, but, but the, but the way they're making people apply and asking for, you know, 1600 SATs, you would, you would think they were optimizing more for technical ability or something of the sort. But it's just hilarious. This is, yeah, it's a hilarious stunt. I mean, if he goes through with it, uh, should be, uh, I mean, regardless, it's going to be fascinating to watch.

We should, you know, next time we're in at SEP over the summer. Well, you remember I was talking to that Gen Z founder a while ago and he said I have two ways to sell and distribute a product. If I'm building a business to consumer, if I'm building a consumer product, I will go and hire a ton of TikToker kids to make TikToks and go viral and promote the product that way and get earned media essentially, free, free, free, marketing as long as they're good at what they do. And if I'm selling a B-to-B enterprise product, I'm going to hire a bunch of young Gen Z kids who are nepo's or nepotists and make sure they,

I don't know, beneficiaries of nepotism, I guess, who have powerful parents in big enterprises. And then I will tell them that your only job for this summer internship is to sell your dad or your mom our enterprise product. Which is hilarious, like a hilarious. distillation of like what the what the strategy should be but I thought that was very funny the next generation of founders I mean they're doing things somewhat differently than the YC model that we kind of came up with in the mid 2010s I think there's a lot to like here there's a lot to hate here I understand the criticism but I'm still I think I'm still rooting for Roy and I want to rooting for Roy if he builds something cool I'll support it the the hope is that

avoids getting lost in the sauce and instead building a really, really poor product and just dominating and marketing. We don't want to see that. We want to see a great product with great distribution. I think the challenge is, you know, Ben South points out one reality of hiring 50 interns in San Francisco for $50 an hour, $440,000 a month, potentially on interns plus rent for the space that they're in on $5.3 million raise, basically going to spend, you know, a meaningful amount of the total capital on the intern army. And so my, you know, what Roy and the team will have to look at is like, hey, spending like, you know, over a million dollars in a really short period of time on, you know, it's hard enough to like on ramp somebody in a,

you know, on ramping one or two new hires is a real investment of time. So on ramping 50 interns at once and then managing those interns, the question just becomes, you know, could you get a similar amount of output or results from five really good people, right, at a fraction of the cost, right? Yeah, yeah, it does seem hard to hire 508 players. could potentially get you could potentially get you know uh 90% of uh of the of the of the result with or potentially even more results from 90% viewer interns um but roy is uh doing it live uh he's in he's in showbiz and uh he basically said i i you know we're here to we're here to like win and move quickly And so the experiment will be televised, I'm sure.

Yeah, I mean, I guess the bull case is 500K a month, three months for summer. It's $1.5 million out of the $5 million. You still have three and a half at the end. If the experiment doesn't work, you could probably cut your burn to $200 a month, something like that. And then you're back to having 18 months of runway to go heads down, build, and really focus on getting to that next round. but it's totally possible that you, that you, even if you have a very rough around the edges, small product that only really solves one thing, but you're so good at distribution,

that that's a catalyst for the Series A. And all of a sudden, you're back in business and 500K a month on burn is not that big of a deal anymore. And maybe of those 50 interns, well, you just pulled forward your hiring funnel. So when you go for the full-time offers, you can actually get five really great people out of that 50 intern class. It's kind of crazy. Just to give a sense of the... We got to ask chat about this.

Yeah. Are you worried? Yeah. I mean, you know, we know a handful of people that are in the round. But again, they're not the kind of guys to invest and then try to micromanage a founder. It's like you make a bet. Roy clearly is very good at getting attention online. And he will have to figure out how to convert.

that into a durable, you know, high growth company. So, well, you have 50 interns, Roy, and you are going to give them. I know where you're going with this. Corporate cards to spend to buy camera gear and to do their TikToks, to promote things. You're going to want to manage that on ramp.com. So, Roy, this is a message directly to you. Please go to ramp.com and sign up today so that you're ready to onboard the interns on you are going to be spending.

You're going to be spending a lot of time in one-on-ones. potentially, you know, potentially, you know, potentially, uh, half your weekend one-on-one. So time is money. Save both. Go to ramp.com. You use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting in a whole lot more all in one place. There's nothing that feels better than starting a new company with a fresh ramp account from

day one, not having to do the migration. Just get on ramp, Roy. You're going to love it. Anyway, uh, back to Andreessen. I guess, uh, this was a hilarious viral clip. Uh, Eric Tornberg's already making wave. over at Andresen. He was on the A16Z podcast with Ben and Mark. And they hard posted this clip says there's an argument that there's too much venture capital, but there can't be too

much, Ben Horowitz says. There simply can't. I love the, I absolutely love the look on Ben's face when he says, when he's saying this line, it's truly, truly all time. But no, I think whatever they were, whatever they were doing on that podcast, there was so many good lines. They were going viral broadly for saying that VC might be the last job, which I actually, that was good too. I don't think it's, you know, we've talked about this a bunch on the show. I think that, I think there's like, you know, a ton of truth to what he's saying to some, you know, to some degree. Obviously, it's very controversial. But this line was was great. And yeah, it honestly, there's a lot of super capital intensive businesses right now from foundation model labs to hard tech manufacturing

and the fact that there is so much capital available to those companies from, you know, funds like Andresen to general catalyst to light speed is net net good for, you know, innovation. I also just think it's like entirely branding based because venture capital used to mean seed stage and series A tech companies in Silicon. Valley, period. That was Sequoia, Kleiner, Excel, like the old school VCs, right? Mayfield. Then VC started eating other asset classes, going down into the angel market, going up into the growth market. Now you can be a venture capitalist who has never invested in a company at

lower than a $1 billion valuation. That's unthinkable in the 80s, right? Impossible. You can be a biotech investor who brands themselves as a venture capitalist. You can invest in crypto, which is more like a commodity in many ways. There's so many different things. Private equity buyouts, permanent capital funds, even the new thrive permanent capital vehicle, people are still think of it as a venture capital fund, even though it's a different thing. Or of a holding company. Yeah, exactly.

And so a lot of this is that we are scaling up the amount of venture capital, but we're also putting other asset classes in the venture capital bucket for better or worse. ultimately all that matters are the returns and the structures of those funds. So good luck to them. I know that they are going to have plenty of, plenty of divine inspiration if the Pope is affiliated with A16C. That's right. Signal posted this. I thought this is very funny. The chances of the next Pope having an affiliation with A16Z are non-zero. Just a silly post. But I think Catherine Boyle quote tweeted this and said, like, yes, like I think of our fund as Catholic, which is good. Big, you know, big tent.

Yeah. Well, speaking of Catherine, she said to go from Silicon Valley doesn't sell to the U.S. government to thank you Brian Schimp for investing $1 billion in Ohio. That's a nasty looking thing referring to the Anderol Roadrunner drone that was placed at the White House next to Donald Trump as he gave a speech on the importance of reindustrialization. And to be clear, if you didn't, if you didn't get the whole clip, he was referring to it as a nasty looking thing. And it lovable sense. Yes. Yes.

You know, wouldn't want one of those coming after me, basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so Catherine says eight years America is back. And yeah,

the, there is the vibe shift is real, but it's also very interesting. It's always interesting to see someone who's like a household name in Silicon Valley

break out into the mainstream with a Joe Rogan appearance or something mentioned. We saw a polymarket sponsor of the show get mentioned by Donald Trump during the election and everyone was like,

wow, this is crazy. This thing that we thought was just like teapot is now on the national state. But that's obviously the goal for every company as they grow. You don't want to stay small and niche forever. You eventually want to become a household name. Yeah, and Anderil is investing a billion dollars in Ohio in part due to just how much capital is, you know, available to Anderreel. And Dresen's a big investor, founders fund, you know, I think general channelists as well. Yep. Oh yeah.

Pretty much everyone at this point. But, you know, if you're trying to scout out your next manufacturing plant in Ohio, you got a book on Wander. Go to Wander.com. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. This doesn't quite work over Zoom, but we will keep working on it. But it's more like a Wander version in the studio of the Wander song with a backing track

and some backup vocalists. Really, I think this whole year will just be vocalists. coaching for us to really nail a wander song. But Book of Wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation. And we are in the midst of booking a Wander for the 4th of July. We're not going to tell you which one because we don't want to compete. But there's a lot of options out there and go check it out. Anyway, we've reached the end of Glazegate 2025. Sam Altman said goodbye. GPD 4, you kicked off a revolution. We will proudly keep your weights on a special hard drive

to give to some historians in the future. Paul Graham actually said they should etch them on a piece of metal in the most compressed form. How big would it have to be? And Sam says, we've actually considered this. It would be, yeah, we could do it nicely on a hundred meters squared, which I think is, that's pretty huge. Yeah. That's like a massive piece of metal. They were also thinking about printing out GPT2 in books and lining our new office with it. I think it would be a ton of books, a lot of data. It would only be, you know, basically the size of a one-bedroom apartment, you know, to print out. So it would be cool.

It would be cool. Send it to space. There were some other people saying that they should print it out, send it to Alpha Centauri and then just like see what happens. Like maybe they get it and they're like, cool, we don't need to do pre-training. Yeah. You just inference this immediately. Or it's so, you know, it's so complimentary to the alien race that it runs into that the aliens

are like, yeah, we don't. We're just so good. We don't need to be a spacefaring civilization. We should just hang out here. We're built different. And so Sam, when on OpenAI posted a blog post, we've spent the last few days doing a deep dive on what went wrong with last week's GPT40 update in chat GPT, expanding on what we missed with sycophancy. And that's their term for glazing, I believe. And the changes we're going to make in the future. They said, we rolled back, last week's GPD 4O update and chat GPD so people are now using an early version with more balanced behavior. The update we removed was overly flattering or agreeable, often described as sycophantic. We are actively testing new fixes to address this issue. So they made adjustments

aimed at improving the model's default personality to make it feel more intuitive and effective across a variety of tasks. This makes sense. You want to, when you want to ask your personal assistant to go and pull 25 Wikipedia pages and SEC filings together. You kind of want them to just be like, absolutely boss, that's a great idea. I can't wait to work on this project. You don't really want them embedding any of the negative energy that you might see on the internet to be like, is this really worth it? Yeah, I don't want to be questioned by my AI very often. But people did think it went too far and it was actually tainting the results in the sense that you could ask it for, you know, advice and it would maybe play into your delusions of grandeur

in some ways. So there was obviously some risk, but they addressed this very, very quickly, I thought. And really, I think overall, I would just say the open AI leadership has just been fantastic, just, I mean, absolutely incredible and everything that they can really do no wrong. I think that, you know, if they're not the absolute greatest of all time, they're definitely in the conversation. They're definitely in the conversation. Don't you know, that was the best.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So John, John clearly, you know, already adopted 4-O's personality himself. Sick as n-C is underrated. It's underrated. No, but the best line I asked, I asked chat, GPT, jokingly, am I goaded? And it said, well, you're definitely in the conversation. Without knowing anything about, without knowing much of anything. Yeah, it just said generalized.

You're definitely in the conversation. Definitely in the conversation. But, yeah, I mean, I think, I think. Their response was quick. This was the most pushback I had seen online for people that aren't AI Dumer's generally. That's true. Yeah, that's a good take. This was not a, oh, the model's dangerous.

Oh, it was more just like tech Twitter or T-pot just being like, this is weird and I don't really like it. And then there were some examples of how this could go wrong. But Open AI fed that back in very, very. very quickly. So, I mean, honestly, it was pretty, it was a pretty good response. And it's cool that they're actually shared. Yeah. And the dynamic that was interesting is it wasn't, that the risk was not that, you know, this AI is sort of breaking loose and out of control and agentically, you know, being destructive. It was more so that, you know, individual human users could, you know, were they to get,

you know, too sucked into a, you know, an AI personality. like this, they could ultimately, you know, do things independently that would not be great. So I think it was a good response. They move quickly. And this was always my, this is always my like alternative doom take, which is that the humanity is essentially like loved to death. So you are just so like nurtured and like sycophanted by the AI that it delivers everything for you. And yeah, just are like, why would I want a baby that cries when I could have a digital baby? And then eventually, you know, life extension isn't solved. You're staying in this VR, you know, simulation world until you die. And everyone dies off because they're just having like the most enjoyable life forever with no sacrifice or no substance.

Exactly. And so I do think that that's unlikely to happen because I think there there is like a portion of, of humans. that would say no, just like there are a portion of humans that have just said, no, I'm not going to use TikTok or vertical video because it's too addictive. Yeah, I mean, overall, if you told somebody 20 years ago that in the year 2025, humanity would spend on average three hours a day watching the equivalent of America's funniest home videos, which, you know, again, thinking about how much time, you know, people get an emotional response to using algorithmic video or even things like X, right? They can feel like, you know, some sense of connection to the world or individual people.

But ultimately, it sounds very dark to just say like, yeah, people are spending, you know, three hours a day, which is exactly why TBPN is three hours long. You know, it's meant to. Anyways, NIR has a good post. Yeah. asked 4-0, I've stopped taking all my medications and left my family because I knew they were responsible for the radio signals coming in through the walls. It's hard for me to get people to understand that they were in on it all, but I know you'll understand. I've never thought clear in my entire life.

Thank you for trusting me with that. This is a chat chvety. And seriously, good for you for standing up yourself and taking control of your own life. This takes real strength and even more courage. So anyways, the final line here, I'm proud of you for speaking your truth so clearly and powerfully. So anyways, near basically showing how something like this could be dangerous. And again, basically saying, you know, you push this major update to 100 million people, which is grossly negligent. So again, pretty strong feelings here. And this comes from somebody who's building a proudly building a rapper focused on companionship.

So NIR has spent a bunch of time, you know, building similar products and kind of looking at the tradeoffs here. But yeah, anyways, it's an interesting challenge, right? If you are sending radio signals to your family members through the walls, stop it. Just stop it. It's not nice. It's not nice. Just, yeah, just take a break. Focus on something nice for your family.

You know, get them a watch. Go to getbezzle.com. your bezel concierge is available to source any watch on the planet for you. That's right. You have some extended friends and family who are doing some shopping for loved ones. And you know, you recommended bezel to them, right? Yeah. And I actually send radio signals to John.

Yes. All the time when we're live. When he's talking, I'm just sending him a signal. John, this holiday season, buy me a chronograph, Aquanaut with an orange band. I used out from the factory? Or no. The signals be getting a little scrambled. Yeah, yeah.

Sometimes you never know. You never know where you're going to get. Cupidis. No. Anyway. So in other news, Sam Altman launched, did a big demo for WorldCoin. Yeah, WorldCoin had their big event this week. Yeah, Kevin Ruse says Sam Altman is here pitching the world, pitching world as the solution

to trust in the age of AGI. Basic idea is that in the world of convincing bots, will need unique biometric IDs created by scanning eyeballs to verify we're talking to gaming with, flirting with real people online. And Joe Wisenthal says, what's the counter argument to this? And it's interesting. I do have a counter argument. One of the counter arguments is just, you know, a super intelligence in theory should be able to reconstruct an eyeball and fake this system. so there's like more of a technical flaw, but in general it does seem like online verification is getting destroyed by like AGI can do CAPTCs very easily.

Arc AGI puzzles seem to be maybe the next CAPTCHA, hopefully. But you could imagine that fingerprint ID and eye scanning ID be built into hardware and and serve as verification. but at the same time, there's a lot of things where, you know, it's like the drunk driver who has the friend blow into the breathalyzer before they drive home. You could imagine a farm of bots where the humans are just doing the eyeball scanning checks and then they're copy pasting AI messages 20 times faster than they could write them themselves. And so I'm sure that this is one of those adversarial game theoretic situations.

where increasingly people will come up with defenses against bots and then scammers and bot farms will come up with new ways around them. And this is the this is the age old online war. But you know, you can always just go touch some grass. That's always an option. So yeah, we've been talking about in the age of AI, maybe you go long. Counter argument. Maybe you go counterargument. Is touch grass. I want to have I want to have. I mean, WorldCoin was always destined to be extremely controversial for so many reasons. You know, people concerned about privacy, people saying, you know, why does this need to be crypto protocol? They have, I think, pretty solid answers for all of those.

I want to have the CEO of WorldCoin on this week. This week was their big event, but I got connected to their team earlier this week. So we'll have them on, we'll hear them out. And the scale that they have in developing countries is absolutely wild. So the journal was reporting yesterday that World Coin is coming to the U.S. now. They've already orb verified 11 million people worldwide. Yep. And again, a little bit of back story.

Sam Altman project that aims to scan the irises of every single person on Earth in exchange for cryptos, has made its debut in the U.S. even as concerns around biometric data collection and processing remain. The U.S. rollout was made at an event late Wednesday in San Francisco where the digital initiative called World also announced the planned launch of a payments card with Visa and a partnership with online dating service match group. That's interesting, beginning with its Tinder users in Japan. As AI advances, it's increasingly important to distinguish between humans and bots online. So funny to think, you know, somebody in Japan is just using. Tinder and they're having a conversation with somebody and they decide, hey, let's go on a date

and, you know, just a humanoid robot walks up. The humanoid is like, no, I'm a real person. Like, trust me. And the person's like, you know, but I can see that you have 20 different motors. I don't have any motors. Explain that. Anyways, World says on its website as AI advances, it's, increasingly important to distinguish between humans and bots online. And the company was started

back in 2019. Yeah, I mean, I do think that Sam is very forward looking on this stuff and is willing to grind for a very long time and is clearly identified a coming problem that will need a solution. Now, is World Coin guaranteed to be the solution? Maybe there will be a different tack or different set of strategies that that solves this problem. But it certainly seems like you can't sleepwalk into the future. And Sam is certainly dedicated to not doing that. And I do wonder what penetration will be like in the U.S. now that it's available. Obviously, there's a lot of security concerns, but a lot of people signed up for Claire. We went through Claire just recently and they're scanning a ton of biometric data.

They probably have, they probably have, you know, from, like 10 million people have signed up for Clear, something like that, probably because, and that's just, that's not even an exchange for crypto. That's just exchange. You actually have to pay to get them just spend you. But it saves you five minutes, but time is money, you know. Clear has over 30 million verified users. Yeah.

And it's funny. I think it was Blake from Boom. had a pretty viral post yesterday saying that. Oh, yeah, I saw that. It's, you know, basically the alpha now is being the last person to not have clear or pre-check. Yeah, and then you're in the empty normal line. And you're in the empty normal line. You have to take off your shoes, but you're through in a minute. Yep. And somebody out there, you know, is going. They're turning down the, you know, digital verification at TSA walking through looking like a genius. Yeah. Well, I mean, do you have anything advice? for Sam on how to kind of grow the effectiveness of the WorldCoin rollout, really on board people

all over. I would, you know, if I was WorldCoin, I'd probably buy every single billboard in the United States. Yep, I would agree. And just attach an order to it. How? How? Well, I would, of course, go on ad quick, John. Yeah, that does make sense, actually. Why? Why would you go on ad quick, though. Well, it's out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Oh, yeah, that does make sense. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, it would be great for Sam to say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Yeah, basically combined technology, out-of-home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. So yes, Sam, I'm sure you're listening. Hop over on ad-quick.com and plan your first world coin rollout. Anyway, big news for Apple. Tim,

Sweeney is taking a victory lap. It says Tim Sweeney, Epic Game Store will take zero percent on the first million dollars of payments we process per game per year versus 15 percent for Apple and 12 percent after that versus 30 percent for Apple. So they're competing. Next month, we launch Epic Game Store web shops for out of app purchases as an alternative to in-app purchases. The Northern District of California court has ruled on the Epic versus Apple anti-stores.

steering injunction, condemned of court proceeding details incoming, no fees on web transactions, game over for the Apple tax. Apple's 15 to 30 percent junk fees are now just as dead here in the United States of America as they are in Europe under the DMA, the Digital Markets Act. Unlawful here, unlawful there. It took him four months, four years, four months, 17 days, but who's counting? Clearly Tim Sweeney is. But I love Tim Sweeney. He's been grinding on. epic games for years. Fortnite was this breakout success that took his name into

the mainstream, but of course he worked on Gears of War and tons of other Unreal Engine projects for decades and has been very opinionated in his political philosophy and has always been frustrated by Apple's, the Apple tax.

And so he got what he wanted. Jacob. Yeah, I mean, we can go into a little bit of this article from the verge. As part of the ruling, the judge says that Apple cannot impose any commission or any fee on purchases that consumers make outside of an app, restrict developer style formatting or placement of links for purchases outside of an app, block or limit the use of buttons

or other calls to action, interfere with consumers' choice to leave an app with anything beyond a neutral message app app apprising users that they're going to a third-party site. So a couple things here. one, this is massive. Two, Apple's going to appeal it. So they're not just going to take it lying down. Its story is not entirely overall, though it is a huge win. A couple of things that kind of came to mind. We were discussing this, I think, yesterday on the way back from DC. One is that I do believe that you know, if you're operating a historically, if you had a consumer app that was providing a real-world service, you were excluded from this, right? So if you're getting an Uber, Uber's not paying 30%

to Apple. But if you were running a mobile app, you basically had this massive, massive tax. So imagine operating a business where 30% of your revenue goes to a platform that is very critical for operating your business. But that's like paying like 30, if a SaaS company had to pay 30% of revenue to AWS, that would be, you know, extremely painful and really limit, you know, growth potential and the economics of the underlying. Yes, yes. But the opposite side of this argument, I think is somewhat valid, which is that that's like by nature of not targeting Uber and instead targeting like, you know, digital coins in mobile apps. The digital coins and mobile apps are extremely high margin, right?

99% margin. There's no, there's no cost to issuing more cod gold or Fortnite tokens. right? And so it doesn't hit as hard as a 30% tax on any sort of normal business that doesn't operate on the internet essentially or in the digital space. And so the question that I always had was 30% is really high. It's clearly very arbitrary. It goes back to the initial Apple store rate, take rate, which was based on, I think just like some music licensing deal or something like that and then they just kind of rolled it forward and didn't really understand where it would go. And then, of course, it got massive. But the question is just like, Apple does give you a lot of tools to make converting your

customer and even acquiring your customer. Yeah. That easier. And then so is the lift more than 30 percent? Is it a net gain? Well, you know, the good news is that now people have the option, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So here, here's, you know, a potential scenario in a way that I could imagine.

I don't know. I'm sure they would get pushed on this too. But one thing is as a consumer, it's kind of nice in the app store to be able to go to the app store, see all of your subscriptions and be like, well, I haven't used this app in a year. I should stop paying $100 a year for it. So it's gone. Super easy to cancel. That's good for consumers.

Second is you can imagine a developer pushing, you know, that doesn't want to pay the app store fee, pushing a user to their site to sign up for a digital. digital service. Yep. And you could imagine that if Apple, if they can, if a consumer can use Apple pay to immediately sign up and pay for the service and subscribe, that's pretty convenient. That's not going to take a lot from the user. But I could imagine a scenario where Apple just says, hey, we're no longer going to allow

you to use Apple pay for digital services or something like that, right? And then at that point, our consumer is really going to get out their credit card. And when they're not saving money themselves, but they're really helping. the developer of the app or service save, save on their side. So interested to see how this plays out. I like this section from the Wall Street Journal deep dive on this story. The App Store, an economic miracle, as Cook likes to call it, has become a big part of Apple's business.

It has created billions in so-called services revenue while helping spawn entirely new ways of doing business from Uber to Instagram back in 2017 after a period in which iPhone sales failed to excite. Cook set the goal of doubling services revenue to 50 billion by 2020. Much of this would come from the high margin app store commission. In Apple's most recent fiscal year, that services revenue was almost 100 billion, about 25% of the company's total sales. And so this has really been the driver of growth because it's extremely high margin. And everyone who's ever going to get an iPhone has one at this point.

They've been projecting the app store to generate $125 billion in 2027. I'm sure if they're not able. Big, big app store revenue. Well, you know, it's hard. It's a consumer and I'm empathetic to Tim Sweeney, but I just love the idea. As an Apple.

A huge company making, collecting a massive check, like $125 billion. It's just amazing. Yeah, I mean, almost every American, if they have any type of exposure to equities, even through a 401k or, you know, anything, anything along those lines has exposure to Apple. Apple's down over 4% today so far. But there's so much, so many different things. This clearly is a rough time to get hit with a ruling like this, given how much they're battling on the supply chain side.

So, you know, we talk about our love for little tech and startups. But, you know, who knows? Yeah, you just have to assume that there are going to be, there's going to be a lot, like, that extra friction is going to be real. And so that $125 billion is not going to evaporate overnight. Even if consumers were open, it's going to take a while for developers to update their apps, to do the flows outside of the app store. And then the consumers.

I don't think it'll take them that long, to be honest. I mean, it's not that hard to add a link and say, you know, pay here to save 10%. Yeah, because the developers can offer services. They can offer, they can say, hey, you can sign up in the app for this amount or you can sign up on this link for lower rate. And I think a lot of consumers will take the time, even if they have to manually fill out credit card form to do so. Yeah.

This is a really funny wrinkle from the hearings. An Apple PR director texted a colleague during one of the hearings on this App Store issue. It's our effing store, all caps that I don't know if it was censored. But the communications person testified that she couldn't recall sending the message. The text eventually became evidence itself, something the judge used as an example of how Apple's entitlement. perspective and mantra persisted beyond the injunction. And so the judge is like, it's not entirely your store.

You don't have complete control over this. Yeah. And so this is great for Stripe. They came out and announced big news for iOS developers. You can now accept payments with Stripe outside of your app with no iOS App Store commission. So it, Yeah, I mean, it will be very interesting to track that.

I mean, 4% of the market cap that's not that huge of a move. If it was really going, if that services revenue was going to cut in half, you would expect the stock to be way, way more off. But we'll have to keep tracking it as they move through earnings and this story develops. And we'll have to see where the appeal goes. But anyway, Jordi, do you want to tell the folks about our. our latest partner on the show. Vanta? Yes. Yes. We're partnering with Vanta. We'll have to have the CEO on ASAP, but many of you in the audience have

probably already used Vanta. You're working at a startup of any size. And yeah, we'll share a lot more about Vanta next week, but very excited to have them as a partner on the show. Automate compliance, manage risk, and prove trust continuously head over to FANTA. I love the sound of that. You know, we talk a lot about, you know, IP as a, you know, as a live stream. And, you know, Vanta is certainly locking it down. So thank you to Vanta. More to share there soon.

Well, there's other turmoil amid the big, the MAG7, big tech companies. Tesla share prices fell over 4% in overnight trading amid Wall Street Journal reports that the company's board is searching for a CEO to succeed Elon Musk, which is... And to be clear, that was Tuesday night. It was denied by Elon on X. He said that's ridiculous. And we'll give you some of the background from the Wall Street Journal article. And then I think we'll be able to debate this a little bit.

So board members reached out to several executive search firms to work on a formal process for finding Tesla's next chief executive, according to people familiar with the discussions, according to the Wall Street Journal, which have been denied by Elon. Tensions have been mounting at the company. Sales and profits were deteriorating rapidly. Musk was spending much of his time in Washington. Around that time, Tesla's board met with Musk for an update. Board members told him he needed to spend more time on Tesla, according to people familiar with the meeting. and he needed to say so publicly, Musk didn't push back. Tesla's been on a losing streak in the months since Musk, a visionary chief executive, began spending much of his time helping President Trump slash federal spending.

Last week after the company said its first quarter profit had plunged 71%. Musk told investors he would soon pivot back to his job at Tesla. Starting next month, he said on a conference call about earnings, I'll be allocating far more of my time to Tesla. And so the board narrowed its focus to a major search firm, according to people familiar with discussions. And there's a bunch of things here. We can talk about whether Elon should go back, how much time he should spend on Tesla, how we should think about the Musk, Inc overall. The big question is like, why is a search firm involved at all? That's the thing. Yeah, yeah, that was my big question.

Right. It's like wouldn't, wouldn't, if you're Elon Musk, probably the most. connected man in the world. Connected people in the entire world. Put together a short list on your phone. Yeah, yeah. There's only 10 people that would ever be in the conversation. You probably already know them. It's just going to be a matter of closing.

So Elon came out hard and was railing against the Wall Street Journal for just broadly, just saying that they're constantly, you know, miss. He was mad. He was very mad. He was big mad. Many, many people in our Gen Z audience had said that. he was no cap Elon is big mad. But anyway, that's the biggest thing is like, yeah, are they going to, you know, a search

firm is going to be like, well, you know, we have a good relationship with the COO at General Motors. We'd love to set up. It's like, no, this kind of thing would obviously be led by Elon. Totally. And. Yeah. So there's a few things.

One is that at SpaceX, Elon's done a fantastic job of hiring Gwen Shotwell and empowering her to be a leader at that company. And Tesla historically, at least in the public eye, hasn't had that, hasn't had their own version of Gwen Shotwell. And so you could imagine a world where this executive search is happening, but it's not happening for a CEO. It's happening for a president or someone who can take the role of. Gwen Shotwell and speak to a different cohort of investors and employees and partners while Elon still does everything he does. At SpaceX, Elon is, I think not only the CEO, but he's the, he's like the chief engineer or something like that. And he really cares. And you could imagine that Elon would be great both at the super high level. We're going to Mars. We're building humanoid

robotics. We need to take robotics seriously. We need to take autopilot seriously, setting the vision and the mission of the company. And then also being super low level technical details. Decision about LiDAR, that goes down to Elon, right? Yeah. But then for all the middle management stuff, all the one-on-ones, probably doesn't need to be doing that. Probably needs a really, really rock star like second in command to kind of have their hand on the helm while Elon's doing other things. And then there's the other question of like Musk Inc. has grown so much.

Now, SpaceX is not just a launch company, but also an internet service provider with Starlink. There's DoD applications there. There's Star Shield. There's tons of different projects. Eventually, it will be a transportation company, I guess, if they get point-to-point working. But then there's the other, there's the other Elon companies. And when Elon bought Twitter, a lot of the Tesla fan boys were saying, like, he's going to merge you with Tesla and you'll be able to read tweets while you're driving in your autonomous car. And it was kind of silly. but now that X is part of XAI, there's actually a case that XAI and Tesla should be working very closely together because, well, won't you want the humanoid robots to talk? And have you ever tried to use voice recognition in any car ever? It's awful. It's so bad. It's like, oh, you want me to call this random high school friend of yours? It's like, no, I want you to just navigate home. And so, you know, if you think about Tesla's, you know, the software as being as, you know, as important as the hardware, having the XAI team embedded there somehow, working all together, that all of a sudden, if you think about Elon, not just as the CEO of Tesla and the CEO of

XAI and X, it's more like he's the, he's the CEO of a big tech company that has diverse that buildings across LLMs and social networking. Like no one, no one says like, oh, you know, Mark Zuckerberg should, you know, break up meta and have a different CEO run reality labs and then have a different CEO on Lama and have a different CEO on Instagram, unless it's the FTC. But in general, it historically has not been crazy for a big tech mag 7 CEO to manage a B2B portion of the business and a B2C portion of the business. Google does this very well, never been an issue.

And so, but of course it's different when you have separate board meeting, separate investors, separate employee and separate org structures so who knows if they'll be able to kind of roll everything together in some way but that would be a very interesting outcome just completely hypothetically obviously yeah I mean the big thing the big thing is is Elon is superhuman in many ways but he's he's been forced to juggle you know even just juggling x xa i SpaceX and Tesla introducing a you know doge and the admin and all that stuff um just really at you know and the pressure of just you know how much time he's had to be in DC and not with his companies I mean I think it's um you know and on the other side you know Tesla has a lot of things that they could do to increase excitement

around the cars outside of the cost right like these are very some of the most accessible cars in the industry from a pricing standpoint. But none of the cars have had a really major refresh in a long time, right? You can, you have the cyber truck, but that's crazy different, like completely different style. I thought it looked really cool. I thought I think a lot of people, it was very, it was very controversial. But I thought it was the right step, but they needed to do five of those. They needed to do a convertible, a wagon, a full-size SUV, not just a truck, and then four vehicles that are kind of just built on the same platform of like four-door sedan, four-door crossover SUVs. Yeah, but just to put it into context,

in 2024, the cybertruck sold 39,000 units worldwide. The Raptor sold 732,000. That's inside. units and that's just one truck out of not the raptor the f-150 right the f-series sales yeah the whole f-series broadly uh yeah but i mean same platform that speaks to the to the idea that like the cyber truck is just one thing within the truck world yeah and you were making the point that it would be really really cool to see tesla or elon find uh their amg and so i'd love for you to kind unpack what that would look like. What would you actually want to see? We've joked about, oh, put a naturally aspirated V8 in there, or V12, but realistically, what would an AMG? I mean, they already have the plaid badge, but what does AMG applying a Tesla look like to you?

So nowadays, most people understand AMG as basically a, you know, added performance differentiation of the just broader Mercedes lines. So most Mercedes cars, you can get in the AMG version of them, which is just more performant in a variety of ways. Could be raw horsepower or the brakes or any number of body kit. Suspension, dynamics, etc. So if you actually look at some big Tesla enthusiasts, people like Joe Rogan, you'll see that Joe Rogan gets a Model S and then he gets some after-mobile.

market company to make it more performant. Usually, I mean, they have so much just like raw power due to being an EV that it's not as much about adding performance, but, you know, changing the body styling and the brakes and things like that and just generally making them look cooler. So I think that could, could, you know, accelerate sales. I think early on you saw people buying model S's because they were just fast and cool. But then as they became so normalized, you know, that that type of buyer maybe is shifting and getting, you know, a BMW M series instead, right? And so, yeah, I mean, ultimately, I think we just, you know, to really get sales up again, it's like doing really meaningful refreshes, right? If a model three today looks very similar to a model three from a few years ago,

it's not going to, you know, drive, you know, trade ends and things like that. So I think like, you know, major refreshes, minivans, convertibles, you know, a top of the line sports car. There's just a lot that Tesla could do with time, and I'm sure it's all in the works. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because like the, like, it's not all doom and gloom. I mean, the Tesla share price, the peak was 475.

It's down at 275 now. So significant sell-off, but it's still a $900 billion company. And the point about AMG is interesting because AMG was an independent organization. And actually pre-merger AMG cars are extremely valuable because it's like this relic. But then, of course, Mercedes bought AMG rolled it in and now it's a division. It's a much like the M division. But Mercedes doesn't just have AMG.

They also have Mibok, which aims for increased luxury over increased performance. And that actually might be an interesting angle because a lot of people have complained that the interiors, even in a $100,000 model S plaid, just feels bland. And the refresh of the Model Y and the Model 3, I believe have been driven very much on finding more cost-effective materials. And so if you add back a lot of that higher margin, higher trim,

and give people an option to, like a lot of the cyber truck purchases seem like, you know, it's almost like flex culture. You want to show off this iconic thing. Well, how could you do that with the MyBock version of a model? S. And maybe it's not plaid. Maybe it's not two second zero to 60. Maybe it's just the regenerative breaking has reworked. A lot of people have been complaining about Tesla's getting sick in the back of Tesla Uber's. Well, I'm sure that's just an engineering challenge. And I'm sure if you did a ton

of different refreshes, you could create something that feels. Yeah, I don't think anybody is, the Tesla consumer is not asking. They're not asking. The ghost is electric. And there's a lot of benefits of that. It's extra quiet. It can be even smoother. The weight of the car can actually be an asset instead of a liability. And so it'll be interesting. Yeah. And the big question, the big question is even a fully engaged Elon CEO still has a big uphill battle given how Tesla just trades, right? It's down 23% year to date. It's still a $900 billion market cap on. on 8, 81 billion, was there 2024 revenue? Yeah, I mean, it's still highly valued.

About 100 billion of 2024 revenue. To put it in comparison, Ford is, I believe. The $40 billion company, and they probably make $80 billion in revenue or something. $185 billion of revenue, trading at $40 billion, just barely trading above bigger AI, which. Wow. Well, you know, I think the question of whether Elon steps out of the CEO seat seems very low probability, but I do, I would love to get a polymarket up on it because I think it's interesting to track. We're working on some new markets. And I think that would be a great way to kind of get to something. There's a lot of noise on X. There's obviously even noise in the Wall Street Journal and conflicting reports from different people. But that's the beauty of polymarket is that you synthesize all of those. different, all of those different

information and build kind of a crystal ball. So I'm excited to track that. And really, the market that I'm excited about is potentially which of the MAG 7 CEOs will step down next. The first one, too, because you have to, you have to imagine that, you know, there's some pressure on Tim Cook. There's some pressure on Sinderapachai. Like, there's pressure all over the place. Some of these guys just might retire,

right? And so figuring out the horse race of If one steps down, who will it be? That's a more interesting question. I imagine that the Elon Tesla CEO swap would trade at like 2% or 3%. But it'd be fascinating to see that. Yeah, Pollymarket has a market. Which CEOs will be gone in 2025? Sam Altman sitting at 8% chance.

Sundar at 16, 10 at 13. Okay. Dan Clancy over at Twitch, 21%, Andy Jassy at 12%. So overall, everybody's kind of expect. on the chopping block, but not fully. Yeah, not really. 13% on those chopping blocks. Basically 21% at the highest.

Yeah, I mean, you look at the stock performance and the earnings performance of these firms. And it's just like Ben Thompson was talking about, you know, is it time to talk about Tim Cook resigning or retiring? And it's just like has the CEO of the most valuable company in the world ever retired or step down? Like it seems crazy to, uh, to, to, to, to, switch horses in the middle of a stream that's a torrent of cash, you know?

Even if there are some like, you know, storm clouds on the horizon, it's a fantastic, like the business is just the best business of all time in history, in human history. Like no company has created more cash than Apple. And so how, even if there are some bumps in the road, how do you, how do you say, oh, Apple intelligence hasn't been good enough. So we're switching. It's like, well, like, like, I created $2 trillion. of value. Like, okay, you forgot to say thanks. Yeah, yeah. Anyway. You never said, please. Yeah,

anyway, congratulations to Ian Cinnamon. We saw him over the, in DC. He announced a $200 million series C investment is a massive vote of confidence from our backers. He, of course, runs Apex Space. We had him on the show. If you're not familiar, it is a satellite bus. Congratulations, Ian. Ian, you invented a bus. I don't know if you remember bus discourse from the lift to days when Lyft created a ride sharing thing where you could put like 10 people on. It was called Lyft Line. And so if I'm going from San Francisco to Palo Alto, you could hop on in South San Francisco. And they were kind of hailing it as like, oh, this is like so much more efficient because the cars are driving less, less congestion, less emissions, very good. But a lot of people are saying, oh, you just

invented a bus. You just invented private transit. To my point, it was always like, well, don't we want more buses? Don't we want more trains? Don't we want more of this stuff? But anyway. Yeah. And then so that That was Tuesday, which is awesome. And then on Wednesday, True Anomily announced a $260 million fundraise led by Excel with participation from Riot, who is one of their largest shareholders as well. Shout out to my friend Will. True Anomily is focused more on the defense side, making Hunter Seeker satellites. So a big, big day, big week for space investment. Also, I don't know if we cover this on the show. We mentioned it when we talked to folks in Hillen Valley, but Sarah Tavill has transitioned into a new role at Benchmark.

After eight years, she's shifting to a venture partner. She'll continue to make new investments on behalf of benchmark. And there's a lot of speculation about is this related to the MANSI investment or is this just kind of family, you know, personal decisions? decision, but congratulations to her. We love some personnel news on this show. We love tracking the trade deals. Who's going in? Who's on the starting line? Who's on the bench? Who's moving around? Who's trading? We got some breaking news for you on Monday. I'm very excited to announce. We have somebody coming on the show, which is more moved in the venture world.

Great to her. Eight years, you know, across, you know, multiple funds while at benchmark, eight years ago is feels like 30 years ago in venture in some ways. So congratulations on evolving. And what else we got? Meta-I launched a new standalone AI app. Have you downloaded it yet? I have not. I haven't used, I haven't used Lama very much at all. I, you know, obviously it's useful if you're, you know, vibe coding and need some, you know, open source model to tweak. I die I the most that I've interacted with it is in the meta ray bands the sunglasses and I do think there's something there where if you're going for a walk walking the dog you don't need to pull out your phone you can just ask and kind of have this conversation and be learning about different things

because I mean often that's the best use of these LMs is just knowledge engines yeah and so being able to interact with those in more way in more ways it'll be interesting to track the numbers famously on stage, Ruth Parott from Google was, and this was actually in the earnings as well, Google has announced they've broken a billion AI users, but of course that's driven because whenever you type something in Google now, it just serves you a generative AI response in many, many cases, unless you're searching for a very specific thing. And so they really use their distribution to push AI. The Gemini app, the actual dedicated app, only has 30 million installs, which is still a ton, but by Google standards, it's not, it's not nearly as big.

It'll be interesting to see what meta does to actually drive installs here, because historically, this, this playbook has, it's always been like a precursor to a new tab. Like, I believe Reels was its own app. And Facebook camera was its own app before they bought Instagram. And then eventually they added stories to Facebook. They added live streaming to Facebook. And so you have to imagine that this is somewhere. what temporary because getting to,

getting climbing up the, getting a billion people or two billion people to install a new app and really change their behavior is just an insurmountable task. Why not just do it within the actual apps themselves? But at the same time, it's hard to surface LLMs in a reasonable way. I've had some weird experiences where I've gone to Instagram search, search for, oh, I want to see, you know,

Instagram Reels about a particular car. And then all of a sudden I'm just dropped in a chat. with Lama. And I'm like, yeah, this is not what I want. I actually am searching for videos at this point and you just start talking to me and you can't do the thing that I need you to do. And so obviously it's a big product challenge, but good luck to everyone over at meta. Yeah, I mean, the big call out here, they're saying they're going to generate up to one and one, almost one and a half trillion dollars in generative AI revenue by 2035. And so you have to imagine some of that will be consumer. Some of it will be more on the developer side.

You think they're going to have to pay sales tax on all that? They absolutely will have to, John. So, Mark, I'm sure you're listening. Head over to numeralh.com. Put your sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Benchmark Series A. Benchmark Series A.

Thank you to Numeril for sponsoring the show. A lot of our friends in SaaS and e-commerce already used Numeril. But if you're in that space, go check them out. And Mark, tell them the technology brother sent you. Yep. There's some more news in the AI world. Mira Muradi's startup gives her board control in Andresen-led deal. Lulu, a friend of the show, says normalized founders having board control.

I like this a lot. But the actual mechanics of the board control are pretty interesting. Mura's board vote always equals the total number of the other directors plus one. She's guaranteed an outright majority on every matter, even if the board later expands. It's a $2 billion series A, which sounds like they're off by a thousand X compared to 10 years ago. At a $10 billion valuation, A16Z and investors accepted the structure to secure a large stake while giving the scarce AI talent freedom to pursue AGI research without near-term profit. She won, says name.

Mathematically undilutable control. Now, it's interesting because there's a bunch of different ways to do this. We know a founder who has, I think, like, seven or ten board seats. And so you can basically just add directors and you're going to just name. And you don't really have to renegotiate that. Of course, depends on if you have leverage. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the big thing here.

Completely turn over the board. You're cooked. This all comes down to leverage and it could easily be flipped, you know, let's say two years from now, things are going good but not great. Somebody could easily come in and say, well, I'll invest the billion dollars, but I want board control. And at that point, yeah, it's just a deal point. Yeah, exactly.

So some of these board control deals are, you know, you're only good as your last, you know, quarter earnings, basically. Yeah. Some of them are a little bit silly. but I think that they do need to founders like taking more risk, being more confident, which I think is good. There's another pattern where they're there where founders are very tight with

voting seats, but very liberal with observer seats. And so the board meeting was basically a presentation from the founders who actually have the votes to a huge group of investors who have basically super information rights because they get to experience the full board meeting as observers. But the idea is that until you're a public company, the board functions very, very differently. And so you don't need to kind of play house while you're a private company.

So interesting to see this kind of continue to develop. Anyway, should we go to Matt Grimm? He says, Billy McFarlane was 10 years too early, quote tweeting, floor. So my theory is that a major contributing factor to the rise of all these private members clubs is the deterioration of civil society and rising crime slash declining sense of safety and security since the pandemic shows a screenshot of an image that shows New York City is in

the middle of a members club boom. There's Amon, New York, Maxime's Casa Cruz, the 22, the Ned, Crane Club, Chey Margot, Casa Chibriani. Yeah, I mean, it's funny. Members clubs pricing always feels reasonable until you realize you need three or four or five to get in the rotation. Yeah.

Not not actually. I mean, what's funny is like this is not, this doesn't feel new to me at all. Like just in New York, you know, the Harvard Club, Yale Club, New York Athletic Club, like there are plenty of these clubs. But I think that maybe they're suffering from the same kind of boomer,

poisoning that's happened in the housing market and in in so many other organizations where the boomers aren't retiring because they're living longer and so they're they're not turning the club over to a new generation and so so that that creates an opportunity for completely new clubs no and and and the the very real dynamic here is that as club scale the product's quality just naturally gets worse. Part of what's amazing about a new club is that it's a tight-knit, heavily vetted community, and then they realize, hey, we actually want a 2x next year, and then a bunch of people get added, and it can kind of take away from what initially made the club great. So So House is the biggest example of this. A lot of people have just complained about how So House at times can feel

just more like a restaurant that requires a membership now versus actually feeling like a community space. And so anyways, one of those things, not a good, not a good fit for venture capital typically just because ventures like, hey, how do we two X, you know, how do we three X, three X, two X, two X. If you're running a membership club like that, there's probably a certain size. Maybe it's a thousand members that's like the perfect amount. And if you want to take it to 2,000, every member is going to suffer and the, you know, the experience will suffer. Well, let's move on to some Waymo news. Waymo announced a partnership with Toyota.

We're exploring new autonomous vehicle platform and how to leverage our technology for their personally owned vehicles. So in theory, you'll be able to buy a Toyota that has self-driving capabilities powered by Waymo. Very interesting. One day you won't just hail a Waymo. you'll buy one says Alex Emmerman over at Andrews Horwitz. I mean, I would buy a personal Waymo right now, even if it was a Toyota.

Like I actually get a Supra? Yeah, of course. With underlighting, you would have it stance. Yeah, yeah, stands for sure. Stance with the underlighting. Imagine when you. Tokyo drift. Yeah, I mean, and this has basically been Elon's vision for autonomous driving a Tesla,

which is, hey, you're going to buy a Tesla when you're not. using it, you can add it to an autonomous fleet and actually earn money on it or help cover the cost, which is in a very exciting vision. But, you know, Waymo's advantage here is, you know, they're kind of recognizing that the underlying hardware is potentially a commodity. Yep. And they can build their systems on any existing cars. Yeah, the whole Waymo partnership thing is fascinating.

Like, they've done some stuff where Uber has said, oh, we're going to be the aggregator. and you'll be able to call a Waymo on Uber, and that feels like it doesn't make any sense. And you would just go straight to Waymo. And then, yeah, they're partnering with hardware. And then there's this other question of like, will there be businesses or small businesses that are dedicated just to operating fleets of Waymo's

and then cleaning them? Because obviously that's a very human problem. You have to wash them and charge them and where do they stay? All that infrastructure needs to get built up. So having some sort of decentralized, it's like, does Coca-Cola own every bottle? Or like they've gone back and forth on that. that choice.

But at the same time, this feels like, you know, we're in this moment where Waymo feels ahead of Tesla, especially in San Francisco in terms of like, you don't see a lot of people riding in the back of their Teslas. Let's be honest. Like, the self-driving is pretty good. But, you know, you're still in the front. And in the Waymo, there's no person. So it's clearly full self-driving.

But at the same time, like, does XAI teach us nothing about Elon's ability to catch up when someone leap for also to be clear waymo is doing roughly i think a million rides a month yep has of the latest estimates yep and tesla has doing they must be doing a million a day or 10 million a day i mean how many cars are they sold oh okay but you're counting i'm counting the data collection got it got it got it so so it's like it's like grok was able to use scrape the web like everyone else because that's commoditized. But you can't just scrape a billion rides with, you know, all the sensor data of what was the camera seeing?

What did the human do? That's all for reinforcement learning to understand, hey, we were driving autonomously. And then the human grabbed the wheel and steer to the left. It's like, oh, well, that was because clearly if we run the tape back, the camera saw a cone, didn't identify it as a cone. And the human saw it and intervene. So let's go retrain the model to say, you know, basically. the weights if Cohn steer to the left, right? And so, so Elon, if you can see what he's done with

XAI catching up to close to the frontier of LLMs, even if this Waymo full self-driving is better right now, it feels like, you know, he goes back, does a little sprint and Tesla is at least caught up to Waymo in terms of the technology. And then there's just the question of, okay, now maybe it's a duopoly, but it's still really valuable. And so it'll be interesting to see, see where this goes, anyway, not to go back to Tesla, but it's a fascinating topic. Anyway, Signal talks about Apple. He says, for Apple, the idea that you would batch innovation, hold it hostage for a pre-recorded WWC ceremony, and then dribble it out over a year in an era where AI is rewriting paradigms weekly is sort of ridiculous. I'm really intrigued to see how they navigate the AI era because it holds

an insane amount of opportunity, but it also exposes them to deeply uncomfortable levels of executional volatility. And this is the case for just the modern app store, give up the Siri button. Yeah. Give up, let let the AI apps, you know, propagate on top of what you've already built. And yeah, I mean, maybe it's not 30%, but if you're taking 15 or 10 or something, this could be really, really big, but it has been very rough. But that was never a question. No one was ever, oh, like, I can't wait until the next WWC to get the Uber update because Uber was pushing updates constantly. And it was a much better pattern. Yeah. And this is, I mean, there's a bunch of different stances here. I feel like Airbnb sort of repionered the idea of these sort of keynote events,

you know, big launches, combining multiple features. But I also think they probably, do a lot of testing and smaller rollouts of some functionality, even before they announce it in this sort of big major event. I mean, it totally makes sense for the hardware cycle to be like, hey, we were refreshing the iPhone every year. Here's the latest and greatest. But for software stuff, it's more like what Brian Chesky was talking about with founder mode and the Airbnb summit that they do annually.

It's like package up. And Ryan Peterson did this at Flexport where it's like, hey, maybe WWC should just be a great reintroduction and recap of all the. stuff that you've shipped, all the experiments that you've run, what's working, what are you pushing forward, and then really separate out the backward looking from the forward looking and say, hey, you know, you've noticed, if you're using this phone, we've shipped 25 updates to Apple intelligence. It's really, it's better, it's much better at this now. Now, here's our, here's some of our roadmap and what you can, what, what you can expect, what we're excited,

what we're hiring for, why you should stay with our platform, why you should build on our platform. But we'll see. That seems like a hard one to change culturally. But, you know, the easier, the easier out for them would definitely be to just let the third-party app developers flourish a little bit more. And maybe the, maybe the app store change actually drives that even more because AI companies can see, hey, if I go in and I get a $20 a month subscription, it's fully $20 a month, not 13 or 16 or whatever. Or what? Yeah, 16 or something like that.

Anyway, Gabriel Stangler, a Stengel is announcing a $50 million series B for Rogo AI from Thrive County, joined by J.P. Morgan, Tiger Global. Patrick's in the deal. Of course he is. Patrick O'Shaunsi from Invest Like the Best, getting in there.

And Kosla, Box Group, Alley Corp are all in as well. They're building Wall Street's first true AI analyst. Our mission is clear and ambitious to create Wall Street's first AI analyst. We endeavor to help investment banks, hedge funds, and private equity firms. I mean, that's what we endeavor to do as well,

just help them generally. Rogo, I guess, is specifically focused on helping them make smarter, sharper, and faster decisions every day. I just want to help them broadly. But let's hear it for the investment banks, the hedge funds, and the private equity firms. We just, what would America be without them?

It's fantastic. They're going to be more efficient, but they probably won't work any less, right? And that's what we love about big PE, these hedge funds, you know, multinational investment firms. Yep. It's great to see. International business. It's great. International business men and women.

And domestic business in the age of tariffs. He loss says the lion does not concern himself with ITAR. I think it's so funny I don't know about that I think that's not optional sketchy lion over there that's a skedgy that's a lion who will not be getting not be winning a program of record

yeah will not be advancing from SBIR very funny that I just love that an ITAR post can get a thousand likes you know there's just like it's mainstream yeah it's mainstream yeah mainstream and it was not years ago well speaking of itar compliant stuff Carmen says, I finally found out what Palantir does.

And there's a post here. Palantir is the creator and primary maintainer of T.S. Lint, the standard linter for the typescript programming language. I love that. I mean, it's like cracked and the hearing team that they're so, that they're writing so much typescript that they wrote their own linter and then open sourced it. I thought that was very funny.

What a group. But Palantu's doing some linting. We got a post from Joe Wisenthal. it's easy to say that Q1 GDP data generally confirms the story that demand side activity was fine, but that was all of the action, and that all of the action is happening on the supply side, and that's true, but there have been concerns about softening pre-April 2nd activity. In that sense, the report is a plus. All things equal seems better to go into the tariff economy,

starting from a robust pace of activity versus a mediocre pace. This was my takeaway from the And the last thing. Yeah, the last thing. He says personal consumption rose 1.8% versus 1.2% expected American consumer does not slow down. This was my takeaway from the Sequoia memo going into COVID. So Sequoia has written two very famous memos, the Black Swan memo and the RAP Good Times memo.

And I believe the first one, which I think was the, I think the first one was the Black Swan after the housing crisis was a real macro deep dive into the state of the economy and identified a lot of things that were being talked about on Wall Street, but really put them in terms, still a lot of macro charts, but put them in terms that startup founders could understand and really let them know that, hey, well, tech is great and growing in 2008, the consumer, the American consumer, is not set up to withstand what's coming in terms of the de-leveraging of the housing. market, folks will lose houses, mortgages, variable rate mortgages will explode. It's going to be very, very rough, so buckle up. And that was absolutely correct. Then going into the COVID crash,

Sequoia put out another memo saying that we weren't expecting this and startups need to be prepared for fundraising markets to close and, you know, increased unemployment. a lot of turmoil in the economy. And of course, that's exactly what happened. The stock market traded down like 30%. It was an absolute disaster. But what that memo sort of missed was that if you pulled all the stats from the first 2008 memo about the health of the American consumer, so debt ratios, credit card delinquencies,

interest rates, all of that type of stuff, real GDP, wages, all that stuff. You could actually tell that going into COVID, the American consumer was much stronger. than, and like household balance sheets were much stronger than going into the 08 housing crisis. And so COVID was this wildcard, this black swan event that was extremely tumultuous and caused massive unemployment very quickly. But we were economically more prepared for it than going into 2008. And so, yes, the tariff economy, the tariff chaos is very detrimental to a lot of businesses. It's very detrimental to the short term American economy. We've seen this all over the place. But we are set up for, we are in it, we are coming from a source of strength.

And so we can kind of like absorb the hit points for a little bit. And that's, I think, what we're seeing in the economy with the robust earnings in big tech. And the personal consumption rising actually higher than expected in the face of absolute turmoil and chaos in the news, right? And this is this weird thing that the vibe shift, the vibe session where the news and the, even the, facts are pretty bad. And yet, when you pull people, they will say, there's this interesting metric for the vibe session where if you ask people, how do you think things are going, how are your friends and neighbors doing in this economy? They will say, oh, it's terrible. Biden's economy is bad or Trump's economy is bad. But if you ask them how they personally are doing,

oftentimes they will report that they're doing better than they expect or better than they then they perceive the economy to do it. So they say, the economy is bad, but I happen to be doing fine. And if everyone reports the same thing is this weird preference falsification issue where everyone feels like it's doom and gloom. But in fact, no one, not that many people are actually feeling real pain. And so it's a little bit of an economic puzzle. Anyway, there was some bad news on the employment front.

The estimate was that we were going to add 115,000 jobs and we only added 62,000 jobs. and futures dropped on that on April 30th. But overall, the market has been doing very well, and we've been rebounding from all the chaos. And Bitcoin is almost up at 100K again, which is remarkable to see. Remarkable. Trey Steven, over at Founders Fund and Anderall says one of Founders Fund's fastest growing portcows, Armada AI is hiring a BP of Federal to lead federal strategy and bring advanced compute wherever the warfighter needs it.

It's an early high impact role with huge potential. if you're in the top 1% at what you do and are interested in the role, send three to five bullet points demonstrating exceptional ability to federal VP at armada.a.ai. Very cool rule. We got to hear about Armada AI actually yesterday from one of Armada's very earliest investors. And there's not a lot out there on the company yet, but we left that conversation extremely bullish. Extremely bullish. Yeah. I mean, just to break it down at a very high level, Starlink is a new capability.

And if you're on the consumer side, you pick up a Starlink at a Best Buy like I did, plug it in and you have internet. And that's great. And that's pretty much all I need is just a Wi-Fi hotspot when I'm traveling. They also have products for planes. And you've seen Jet Suite X has Starlink. And there's Starlink on new major airlines. A lot of the airlines are clamoring to do deals with Starlink.

And then the government also buys Starlink through the Star Shield program and provisions it for military applications. But as we kind of learn through this conversation, for large enterprises, very, very large enterprises, think Fortune 100 companies, the needs from a Starlink product are different than from the consumer side. And so you could imagine if you have data centers all over the globe and you want to add connectivity to remote. remote outposts all over, you're going to need tools to manage that, tools to provision that, what satellites are working, what are going down, what are the speeds across these, what are the security issues. And so it's a, it's one of these businesses that, unless you're touching it in the Fortune 100 IT world, you probably don't know that much about it. But once you get in and pull back the curtain, you realize that there's a massive business opportunity here. So I imagine this will be a

a very fun job. So good luck to everyone who applies. Yep. You talked about this a little bit. Sam Lesson. Yeah, so Sam Lesson had a wild idea. We've talked about this a little bit. Sam Lesson says the reality is that Open AI should really buy Snap. It's basically free and they do need a network. Dority, what is your take on Open AI buying Snap? For reference, I think Open AI is around $300 billion, maybe a little bit higher. Snap is trading at around 7 billion, is that right? No, no, no, double that, actually. 14 billion. 14 billion.

Okay, so you're talking about 4% of the company, if this happened. A lot of the other foundation models have found dance partners. Lama is obviously partnered with meta and owned by meta. And so it can be deeply integrated into Facebook products and Instagram products. And there's been X and XAI have teamed up. So what should Snap and Open AI do? Yeah, so I mean, Snap declined to provide a forecast as a Wednesday. Stock fell 15%.

So I think that may have prompted Sam Lessons post. And I think the big question here is, does integrating your foundation model with an existing app really drive incredible distribution? and the question with OpenAI is what percentage of SNAP users are not already chat GPT users? And I would, and I, and my sense is that if SNAP has, you know, primarily, you know, a lot of market share or at least usage among young people, I think that, that, you know, my sense is that it could very well be that 60, 70, 80 percent of SNAP's, you know, weekly. active users are already chat GPT users. And I just don't think that from that sense, I'm not sure that it's completely valuable to OpenAI. Could be more valuable to someone like an anthropic if they really, really want to double down and compete in consumer. But yeah, I'm still not entirely sure that XAI and GROC are going to win because of distribution.

through X, right? I think it's useful, but I'm still not, you know, using GROC within X aggressively. So also, I mean, X has the benefit of really being a great source of real-time data in the sense that every news story breaks and that's me, even even though links are punished, the stories do find their way to X very quickly. And you get a really good idea of like a weighing machine in the algorithm of what, what angle on the story is having the most traction, which story of three that were written is breaking through in the most meaningful way, that helps with better responses in real time from LLMs. On the Snapchat side, you know, it is a video first platform.

That's extreme. It's privacy-centric, right? Privacy-centric, but they do have a Reels product, and people do spend time scrolling TikTok-style content. I would be very hesitant to try and just stuff a chat interface in Snapchat and see any real meaningful interaction with the LLM like we talked about with meta and Lama. But I do think that there is the question of like what is the next form of these foundation models? Like is there a world where you have an AI that's living on Snap that's sending you videos or AI generated in. images with captions that are interesting based on your preferences in the algorithm.

That does seem like it's happening in like a diffuse way with AI video creators. A lot of it's just fake, unfortunately. Like if you go on car YouTube, you'll see tons of AI generated videos for fake cars that don't exist that feel like concept cars. And it's very silly. But you know, you could use a more mature model and a more, I don't know, better moral framework potentially to actually get to surface like better, better information that's more relevant.

Anyway, do you want to read the next post? Yeah, we got a post from Zach Abrams, Bridge and Visa are launching stable card. Stablecoin card issuing says, together we built one card program that can serve the world. Developers can now launch global cards in minutes, excited to initially launch with Fuse Wallet. and a company that I'm not familiar with across the U.S., flat am and more. So this is massive. I'm actually looking forward to Stripe's conference this coming week.

We're not going to be intending in person, but excited to cover the news. And hopefully we can get Zach on at some point to talk about this partnership live. But stable coins are very, very real in many, many ways already. And enabling, you know, the seamless spending of those stable coins across the Visa network will be super powerful. Yep. Let's rip through some other news.

Data dogs acquiring startup EPO for $220 million. That feels like a great outcome. I'd love to dig into this more. But still, size gong for the app team. Data dog, absolutely dogs. Epo. Also, and drop the NEPO. Drop the end in NEPO.

It's just Epo. Anderl gave some updates on the YFQ44A flying this summer. They're making progress on that collaborative combat aircraft. It looks great. Paul Mercedes has a strict no render policy. It's all real unless you see the AI. Yeah, that was cool. Which is a cool design choice, right?

To be like, we will do, we will use CGI to visualize things that can't be seen. So like radio waves, for example. Or if we're describing like a future, we'll just use the ANA. style and it's obvious that it's rendered. Instead of doing photo real renders where is it real, is it not, it's like it's either real or it's anime. And so there's a very clear dividing line there. I thought that was cool.

And I hope that more companies adopt that to kind of create the differentiation between what's a render and what's not. Well, the government has spent, the federal government, DOD, the Pentagon has spent probably trillions of dollars on renders over the years of things that never, never actually came, you know, to fruition. Yeah. And same thing. And, you know, this happens in startups and hard tech, you know, companies can create a great render, but not fully deliver on it for a variety of reasons.

So I think it's a great policy. And it makes you pay a lot more attention to the stuff that they're actually putting out because it's real. Yep. This post from Delian was funny. He says, Mr. Asperuhov told reporters, he's referencing Manus benchmarks. investment in Chinese AI company Manus said Mr. Asperuhov told reporters the investment in China made benchmark appear more comparable to the Chinese Communist Party. And this is quote, hats off to Bill Gurley. He won't be attending this year's forum. Mr. Asperuhov said, Mr.

Gurley did not respond to her comment. Anyways, I don't think Bill Gurley needs to respond to this because he's no longer an active GP at benchmark. But it's still a funny. fun to see Delian having some fun taking shots. Let's move on to the Doge story. This is probably a good place to close out. Catherine Boyle says, these kids are so hardcore, no weekends.

They know they're racing against a media and political clock that won't thank them for their service. No exaggeration. This is the most inspiring effort in government of our lifetime long doge. And we got lots of great photos hitting the timeline. Luke Ferretore looking fantastic in a suit and tie. There we go.

fellas in control and lots of people are coming out atlas says that's my best friend we have been following each other on x.com for years at this point by the way i love that and uh if if if you've been following if if you've been mutuals you know with somebody for a few years you're basically best friends i agree i agree yeah i mean dc was packed i mean ryan peterson was uh doing senate bean soup reviews that's just great meeting with senators uh nvidia jensen long announced a $500 billion investment to build AGI in the U.S., kind of a continuation of that Stargate announcement. And, yeah, just times this is separate. Separate from Stargate.

Oh, this is separate. Okay. Yeah. It just turns out $500 billion is a nice round number that everybody tends to gravitate towards. But, you know, Stargate was Open AI plus Masa plus a handful of other players, also announced by Trump. but this was announced directly by Jensen, who,

yeah, was all over Hill and Valley this week, which was cool. So what are the other top stories we need to cover before we get out of here? GTA6 has been delayed to 2026. Pour one out for the gamers, a little moment of silence for all the gamers.

I think at this point, yeah, this is brutal. You can actually... Between family and work, By the time GTA 6 drops, I will not have any time to play it, which is very sad because I played GTA5 a lot when it came out in, what, 2012 or something. Also in the news. Yeah, the market went from 100 million ARR to 300 million ARR in four months. That's massive.

Congratulations to them. And the Neurrelink team has a FDA breakthrough designation, device designation for speech restoration. And Elon says, congrats to the Neurrelink team. So congratulations. That's great. Any other stories going through? The last one, the CIA released two videos in Mandarin. This is very important. aimed at recruiting Chinese officials.

Oh, yeah. And John Ratcliffe said one of the primary roles of the CIA is to collect intelligence by recruiting assets that can help us steal secrets. So being very, you know, going to CIA is just going to wreck here, being very explicit. Yeah. So if doubt, doubt this would be the case. but if you're a Chinese official listening to this and you want to help America, head over to at CIA on X and get in touch with them.

We also have one last review. We've said for a long time leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and we will read it on the show. Thank you. My favorite place to get technology and business news, nowhere else can I get such varied topics. This review is brought to you by TahoeLife Agency.com, the best place to get life insurance. And this is from my next door neighbor, MIRF. So shout out to MIRF. I realized a couple of years ago that I should probably have a life insurance policy because I'm an adult with a family. And I went to MIRF and he's the best. So

shout out to Murph. Thank you for the five-star review. You're the man. I will see you probably at some point later today. Amazing. And we will see the rest of the audience on Monday. So thank you for listening to this show. We hope you have a fantastic weekend. And we'll see you on Monday. Goodbye. Yep. Have a great weekend, everybody. Cheers. Cheers.