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

33:22So you are just so nurtured and sycophanted by the AI that it delivers everything for you. And you just are like, why would I want a baby that cries when I can have a digital baby? And then eventually, life extension isn't solved. You're staying in this VR 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 uh and so i do think that that's unlikely to happen because i think there there is uh like a portion of of humans that would say no just like there there are a portion of humans that have just said no i'm not going to use tiktok or vertical video know because it's too addictive but yeah i mean 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 yeah which you know again thinking about how much time uh uh you know people get an emotional response to using algorithmic video or you know even things like x right they can feel like you know uh some sense of connection to the world or individual people but uh 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 yeah you know it's meant to okay um anyways near has a good post uh uh we read this out asked uh for oh 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.

35:09It'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 Chachupiti and seriously good for you for standing up for 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.

35:47So 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. 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 getbezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available to source any watch on the planet for you.

36:35That's right. You have some extended friends and family who are doing some shopping for loved ones. And you recommended bezel to them, right? Yeah. And I actually send radio signals to John 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. as a holiday. Are you stout from the factory? Or no? The signal's been getting a little scrambled. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wind up buying the wrong size. You never know what you're going to get. Cubitus? No. Anyway. So in other news, Sam Altman launched, did a big demo for WorldCoin.

37:18Yeah, WorldCoin had their big event this week. Yeah, Kevin Roos 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 weisenthal 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.

37:56So 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 CAPTCHAs 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 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.

38:49And 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 on Home Depot. Counter-argument is touch grass. I want to have... I mean, WorldCoin was always destined to be extremely controversial for so many reasons.

39:32People concerned about privacy, people saying, why does this need to be a crypto protocol? They have, I think, pretty solid answers for all of those. I want to have the CEO of WorldCoin on. 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 WorldCoin is coming to the US now. They've already orb verified 11 million people worldwide. Yep. uh and again uh a little bit of back story sam altman project uh sam altman's project that aims to scan the irises of every single person on earth in exchange for cryptocurrency has made its debut 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 in 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 they decide hey let's go on a date and uh you know uh 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 um anyways uh world says on its website as ai advances it's increasingly important to distinguish between humans and bots online and uh the company was started back in 2019 so 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.

41:47Now, is WorldCoin guaranteed to be the solution? Maybe there will be a different tack or different set of strategies 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 Clear. We went through Clear just recently and they're scanning a ton of biometric data. They probably have, you know, from like 10 million people have signed up for Clear or something like that.

42:34Probably because, and that's just, that's not even an exchange for crypto. That's just, you actually have to pay to get them. Well, Amex. 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 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. And somebody out there is going, they're turning down the digital verification at TSA, walking through, looking like a genius.

43:18yeah um well uh i mean do you have any advice for sam on how to kind of grow the effectiveness of the of the world coin rollout really on board people all i would i would you know if i was world coin i'd probably buy every single billboard in the united states yep i would agree and just attach an order to it how well i would of course go on ad quick john that yeah that that does make sense actually uh 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 uh and use a platform that combines technology out of expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe uh so yes sam i'm sure you're listening uh hop over on adquick.com and plan your first world coin rollout anyway big news for apple uh tim sweeney is taking a victory lap uh 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 for apple and 12 after that versus 30 for apple so they're competing next month we watch we launch epic game store web shops for out of purchase out of app purchases as an alternative to in-app purchases.

44:41The Northern District of California court has ruled on the Epic versus Apple anti-steering injunction, condemned of court proceeding, details incoming, no fees on web transactions, game over for the Apple tax. Apple's 15 to 30 % 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.

45:38And 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 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.

46:19So they're not just going to take it lying down. uh its story is not entirely overall though it is a huge win uh a couple things that kind of came to mind we were discussing this i think yesterday on the way back from dc one is that uh 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 yep you were excluded from this right so if you're getting an uber uber's not paying 30 to apple uh but if you were running a mobile app yeah you basically had this massive massive tax so imagine operating a business where 30 of your revenue goes uh to a platform that is very critical for operating your business but that's like paying like 30 if a sas company had to pay 30 of revenue to aws yep that would be uh you know extremely painful and really limit, you know, growth potential and the economics of the underlying.

47:18Yes. 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 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.

48:13And 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. that easier. And then so is the lift more than 30 %? Is it a net gain? Well, the good news is that now people have the option, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So here's 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.

48:55I 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, that doesn't want to pay the app store fee, pushing a user to their site to sign up for a digital service. And you could imagine that 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.

49:34And 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 on their side. So interested to see how this plays out. Yeah. 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.

50:23Much 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. Like there's no one to sell. And they've been projecting the App Store to generate$125 billion in 2027. Yep. I'm sure if they're not able... Let's hear it for big, big App Store revenue. I just like, you know, it's hard because it's a consumer. And I'm empathetic to Tim Sweeney, but I just love the idea.

51:03As an Apple. A huge company 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 anything along those lines has exposure to Apple. Apple's down over 4 % today so far. But there's 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.

51:56And 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 say, hey, you can sign up in the app for this amount, or you can sign up on this link for a 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.

52:41Yeah. 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 that the communications person testified that she couldn't recall sending the message. The text eventually became evidence itself, something the judge uses an example of how Apple's entitlement perspective and mantra persisted beyond the injunction. And so the, the judge is like, it's not entirely your story. You don't have complete control over this. Yeah. And so, so this is, uh, great for Stripe.

53:24They, uh, came out and announced, uh, big news for iOS developers. You can now accept payments with Stripe outside of your app with no iOS app store commission. So, um, it, uh, yeah, I mean, um, 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, Jordy, do you want to tell the folks about our latest partner on the show, Vanta?

54:11Yes, 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. 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, improve trust continuously head over to Vanta. I love the sound of that. We talk a lot about IP as a live stream. And Vanta is certainly locking it down. So thank you to Vanta. More to share there soon. Well, there's other turmoil amid 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.

55:21It 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.

55:56Board 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 has 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.

56:34And 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, like connected people in the entire world, together a short list on your phone, you know, like 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.

57:08So Elon, Elon came out hard and, uh, you know, was, was railing against, uh, the wall street journal for just broadly just saying that they're constantly, uh, you know, miss mad. He was very mad. He was Big mad. Many, many people in our, in our Gen Z audience had said that he was no cap. Elon is big mad. um but anyways yeah that's the biggest thing is like yeah are they gonna you know a search firm is going to be like, well, you know, uh, 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, uh, would obviously be led by Elon. Totally.

57:50And, um, yeah. So there's a few things. One is that, uh, 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 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 chief engineer or something like that.

58:39And you can 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? 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.

59:14And 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'll be a transportation company, I guess, if they get a point to point working. Um, but then there's the other, there's the other Elon companies. And, uh, when, when Elon bought Twitter, a lot of the Tesla fanboys were saying like, they're, he's going to merge with Tesla and you'll be able to like read tweets while you're driving in your autonomous car.

59:45And it was kind of silly. Um, but now that X is part of X AI, there's actually a case that X AI 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? 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 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.

1:00:29It's more like he's the CEO of a big tech company that has diversified holdings across LLMs and social networking. No one says like, oh, Mark Zuckerberg should break up Meta and have a different CEO run reality labs and then have a different CEO on Llama 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 seven 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, but of course it's different when you have separate board meetings, separate investors, separate employees and separate org structures.

1:01:13So 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 um yeah i mean the big thing the big thing is is uh elon is superhuman in many ways but he's he's been forced to juggle you know even just juggling x x x ai 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, 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?

1:02:04Like 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 well 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 uh it was it was very controversial but i thought it was the right step but they needed to do five of those um uh they needed to do a convertible a wagon a full-size suv not just a truck and then uh four four vehicles that are kind of just built on the same platform of like four-door sedan four-door crossover suvs uh yeah but just to put it into context uh in 2024 the cybertruck sold 39 000 units worldwide the raptor sold 732 000 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 to the idea that like the cyber truck is just one thing within the truck world.

1:03:16Um, and you were making the point that, uh, it would be really, really cool to see Tesla or Elon find, uh, their AMG. And so I'd love for you to kind of 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, but a V12, but realistically what would an AMG, I mean, they already have the plaid badge, but what does AMG-fying a Tesla look like to you? So nowadays, most people understand AMG as basically an added performance differentiation of the just broader Mercedes line. So most Mercedes cars, you can get an AMG version of them, which is just more performant in a variety of ways could be you know raw horsepower or you know the brakes or any number you know body uh suspension dynamics etc so if you actually look at uh some big uh tesla enthusiasts people like joe rogan you'll see that joe rogan like gets a model s and then he gets some aftermarket company to make it uh more performant uh 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.

1:04:41So I think that 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, BMW M series instead. Right. Um, and so, yeah, I mean, ultimately I think we just, you know, to, 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, um, it's not going to, you know, drive, um, you know, trade-ins and things like that. Uh, so I think like, you know, major refreshes, minivans, convertibles, you know, a top of the line sports car.

1:05:26There's just a lot that Tesla could do with time. And I'm sure it's all in the works. So, 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 much like the M division. But Mercedes doesn't just have AMG, they also have Maybach, which aims for increased luxury over increased performance.

1:06:10And that actually might be an interesting angle because a lot of people have complained that the interiors, even in a hundred thousand dollar model last plaid just feels bland and the refresh of the model Y and the model three, I believe have been driven, uh, very much on, 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 totally iconic thing well how could you do that with the my bach 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 braking has reworked a lot of people have been complaining about tesla's getting sick in the back of tesla ubers 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 that feels yeah i don't think anybody is the tesla consumer is not asking they're not asking is electric and there's a lot of benefits to that it's extra quiet it can be even smoother um like the weight of the car can actually be an asset instead of a liability and so uh it'll be interesting uh yeah the big question the big question is is even a fully engaged elon ceo still has a big uphill battle uh given how Tesla just trades, right?

1:07:37It's down 23 % year to date. It's still a$900 billion market cap on $81 billion. What was their 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... A$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. Wow. Well, I think the question of whether Elon steps out of the CEO seat seems very low probability, but I would love to get a poly market up on it because I think it's interesting to track. We're working on some new markets.

1:08:26And I think that would be a great way to 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 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 Mag7 CEOs will step down next. the first one to because you have to you have to imagine that you know there's there's some pressure on tim cook there's some pressure on sindar pachai like there's pressure all over the place some of these guys just might retire right and so uh 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 two percent or three percent but it but it'd be fascinating to see yeah poly market has a market up which ceos will be gone in 2025 sam altman sitting at eight percent chance sundar at 16 10 at 13 okay dan clancy over at twitch 21 andy jassy at 12 so overall yeah everybody's kind of expects uh on the chopping block but not fully yeah not not really 13 on this chopping basically yeah i mean 21 at the highest yeah i mean you look at the you look at the stock performance and the earnings performance of these firms.

1:09:53And it's just like Ben Thompson was talking about, 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 stepped down? It seems crazy to switch horses in the middle of a stream that's a torrent of cash. 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, uh, how, how, even if there are some bumps in the road, how do you, how do you say, Oh, uh, uh, Apple intelligence hasn't been good enough.

1:10:36So 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 uh congratulations to ian cinnamon we saw him over the uh in dc he announced a 200 million dollar series c investment uh 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 days when lift created a ride sharing thing where you could put like 10 people on it was called lift line and so uh yeah if i'm going from san francisco to palo alto you could hop on in south san francisco and and 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 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 um uh yeah and then so that was that was tuesday which is awesome and then on wednesday uh true anomaly announced a 260 million dollar fundraise led by excel yep uh with uh participation from riot who uh is one of their largest shareholders as well shout out to my friend will yep um true anomaly is focused more on the on the defense side, making hunter-seeker satellites.

1:12:06So big, big day, a big week for a space investment. Also, I don't know if we covered this on the show. We mentioned it when we talked to folks in Hill and Valley, but Sarah Tavel 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 manis ai investment or is this just kind of family uh uh you know personal decision but uh congratulations to her we love some personnel news on this show we love tracking the trade deals who's going in who's 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 uh which is fun more yeah this is cool sarah uh congrats to her eight years you know molt across you know multiple funds while at benchmark uh eight years ago is feels like 30 years ago and in venture in some ways so congratulations on evolving and uh what else we got meta ai launched a new uh standalone uh ai app have you downloaded it yet i have not uh i haven't used uh i haven't used llama very much at all i i you know obviously it's useful if you're, you know, vibe coding and need some, you know, open source model to tweak.

1:13:32The most that I've interacted with it is in the meta Ray-Bans, 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 LLMs, just knowledge engines. And so being able to interact with those in more ways in more ways. It'll be interesting to track the numbers. Famously on stage, Ruth Peratt from Google was, and this was actually in the earnings as well. Google has announced they've broken a billion AI users.

1:14:09But 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 nearly as big. It'll be interesting to see what Meta does to actually drive installs here because historically, this playbook has always been like a precursor to a new tab. I believe Reels was its own app and Facebook Camera was its own app before they bought Instagram.

1:14:50And then eventually they added Stories to Facebook. They added live streaming to Facebook. And so you have to imagine that this is somewhat temporary because 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 Llama.

1:15:29And 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 almost$1.5 trillion 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. Do you think they're going to have to pay sales tax on all that? They absolutely will have to, John.

1:16:04So Mark, I'm sure you're listening. Head over to numeralhq.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 Numeral for sponsoring the show. A lot of our friends in SaaS and e-commerce already use Numeral. But if you're in that space, go check them out. Tell them. And Mark, tell them the technology brothers sent you. Yep. There's some more news in the AI world. Mira Morati's startup gives her board control in an Andreessen-led deal. Lulu, a friend of the show, says, normalize founders having board control.

1:16:48I like this a lot, but the actual mechanics of the board control are pretty interesting. Mira's board vote always equals the total number of the other directors plus one. 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 1 ,000x 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 NIMM. Mathematically undilutable control. Now, it's interesting because there's a bunch of different ways to do this.

1:17:34Like we know a founder who has, I think like seven or 10 board seats. And so you can basically just add directors and you're, you're going to just, and you don't really have to renegotiate that. Of course, it depends on if you have leverage because it's not investing unless you completely turn over the board, you're hooked. 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 uh some of these some of these uh board control deals are you know you're only good as your last you know quarter earnings basically yeah um some of them are a little bit silly but i think that they do lead to founders like taking more risk being more confident which i think is good there's a long-term thinking yeah They are where founders are very tight with voting seats, but very liberal with observer seats.

1:18:36And 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, but the idea is that until you're a public company, the board functions very, very differently. And so you don't need to, 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 Michael Miraflor says, my theory is that a major contributing factor to the rise of all these private members clubs the deterioration of civil society and rising crime slash declining sense of safety and security since the pandemic shows a uh a screenshot of an image that shows new york city is in the middle of a members club boom there's amon new york uh maximes casa cruised the 22 the ned uh crane club che margot casa cipriani yeah i mean it's it's funny um members clubs uh pricing always feels reasonable until you realize you need three or four or five to to to get in the rotation yeah not not actually i mean what's funny is like these 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 uh i i think that maybe they 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 um so that that creates an opportunity for completely new clubs no and and and the the very real dynamic here is that as clubs scale the product's quality just naturally gets worse like 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 uh so so house is the biggest example of this a lot of people have just complained about how uh so house at times can feel just more like a restaurant that It requires a membership now versus actually feeling like a community space.

1:21:17And so anyways, one of those things, not a good fit for venture capital typically just because ventures like, hey, how do we 3x, 3x, 2x, 2x? If you're running a membership club like that, there's probably a certain size. Maybe it's 1 ,000 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 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.

1:22:05Very interesting. uh one day you won't just hail a waymo you'll buy one says alex immerman over at andreese horowitz i mean i would buy a personal waymo right now uh even if even if it was a toyota like i actually get a supra yeah of course with under lighting you would have it stanced yeah yeah stanced for sure stance with the under lighting dance imagine when you go drift yeah 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.

1:22:45Yep. Which is 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 like 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 Waymos and then cleaning them?

1:23:25Because obviously that's a very human problem. them you have to wash them and charge them and where do they stay uh 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 choice yeah um and uh 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 uh yeah you're still in the front and in the waymo there's no person so it's clearly full self-driving uh but at the same time like does xai teach us nothing about elon's ability to catch up when someone also to be clear waymo is doing roughly i think a million rides a month yep as of the latest estimates.

1:24:20Yep. And Tesla is doing, they must be doing a million a day or 10 million a day. I mean, how many cars are they? Oh, okay. But you're counting, I'm counting the data collection. That's right. 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, we were driving autonomously. And then the, then the human grabbed the wheel and steered to the left.

1:24:54It'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 in the weights, if cone 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's 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.

1:25:34And so it'll be interesting to 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 like the, just the modern app store, give up the Siri button, give up, let, let the, let the AI apps, you know, propagate on top of what you've already built.

1:26:23And yeah, I mean, maybe it's not 30%, but if you're taking 15 or 10 or something, this could be really, really, really big, but it has been very rough. But that was never a question. No one was ever, oh, I can't wait till the next WWDC 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 re-pioneered the idea of these sort of keynote events, big launches, combining multiple features. but um i also think they probably do a lot of testing and 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're 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 and the airbnb summit that they do annually it's like package up and and uh ryan peterson did this at flexport where it's like hey uh maybe wwc should just be a great reintroduction 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 it's really separate out the backward looking from the forward looking and say hey yeah you know we you 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 some of our roadmap and 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.

1:28:00But we'll see. That seems like a hard one to change culturally. But the easier out for them would definitely be to just let the third-party app developers flourish a little bit more. And 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 Stengler, Stengel is announcing a$50 million Series B for Rogo AI from Thrive Capital joined by JP Morgan, Tiger Global. Patrick's in the deal. Of course he is. Patrick O'Shaughnessy from Invest Like the Best getting in there.

1:28:50And Kostla, 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 said, what would America be without them?

1:29:25It'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, hedge funds, multinational investment firms. It's great to see. International business. It's great. International businessmen. And national business now. And domestic business in the age of tariffs. Heeloss says the lion does not concern himself with ITAR. I think it's so funny. i don't know about that yeah i think that's not optional sketchy lion over there that's a sketchy that's a lion who will not be getting a not be winning a program of record yeah will not be advancing from sb hour uh very funny that i just love that an itar post can get a thousand likes you know there's just like itar is mainstream out there it's mainstream yeah mainstream uh and it was not years ago uh well speaking of uh itar compliant stuff uh carmen says i finally found out what palantir does and uh there's a post here palantir is the creator and primary maintainer of ts lint the standard linter for the typescript programming language i love that i mean it's a craft engineering team that they're so that they're writing so much typescript that they wrote their own linter and then open sourced it uh i thought that was very funny what a group that palantir's doing some linting.

1:30:49We got a post from Joe Weisenthal. 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, but that all of the, 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 he says, personal consumption rose 1.8 % versus 1.2 % expected.

1:31:30American consumer does not slow down. This was my takeaway from the Sequoia memo going into COVID. So Sequoia's written two very famous memos, the Black Swan memo and the RIP 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, while 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 deleveraging of the housing market.

1:32:20Folks will lose houses, more 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 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.

1:33:25And so COVID was this wild card, 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're 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.

1:34:12Right. And this is this weird thing that the vibe shift, the vibe session where the news and even the facts are pretty bad. And yet when you pull people, they 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. well, 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 perceive the economy doing.

1:34:51So they say, the economy is bad, but I happen to be doing fine. And if everyone reports the same thing, it's this weird preference falsification issue where everyone feels like it's doom and gloom. But in fact, 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.

1:35:31Remarkable. Trey Stevens over at Founders Fund in Anderil says, one of Founders Fund's fastest growing Portco's Armada AI is hiring a VP 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 % of what you do and are interested in the role, send three to five bullet points demonstrating exceptional ability to federal VP at Armada.ai. Very cool rule. We got to hear about Armada AI actually yesterday from one of Armada's very earliest investors. And And there's not a lot out there on the company yet, but we left that conversation extremely bullish.

1:36:13Extremely 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 JetSuiteX 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.

1:36:51But as we kind of learned 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 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 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.

1:37:37But 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 very fun job. So good luck to everyone who applies. Yep. You talked about this a little bit. Sam Lesson had a wild idea. We've talked about this a little bit. Sam Lesson says, the reality is that OpenAI should really buy Snap. It's basically free and they do need a network. Jordy, what is your take on OpenAI buying Snap? For reference, I think OpenAI is around$300 billion, maybe a little bit higher. Snap is trading at around$7 billion. Is that right? No, no, no.

1:38:16Double 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. Llama is obviously partnered with Meta and, and, or, you know, owned by Meta. And so it can be deeply integrated into Facebook products and Instagram products. And, uh, there's been X and X AI have teamed up. So what should Snap and OpenAI do? Yeah. So, I mean, Snap, uh, declined to provide a forecast as of Wednesday stock fell 15%. So I think that may have prompted Sam Lesson's post. And I think the big question here is does integrating your foundation model with an existing app really drive incredible distribution?

1:39:06And the question with OpenAI is what percentage of Snap users are not already chat GPT users? And I And my sense is that if Snap has primarily a lot of market share or at least usage among young people, I think that my sense is that it could very well be that 60, 70, 80 % of Snap's weekly active users are already ChatGPT users. And I just don't think that from that sense, I'm not sure that it's completely valuable to open AI. 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 Grok are going to win because of distribution through X, right?

1:40:07I think it's useful, but I'm still not using Grok within X aggressively. 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 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 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.

1:40:53It's privacy centric. privacy centric but they do have a reels product and people do spend time scrolling uh tiktok style content um i would be very hesitant to try and just stuff a chat interface in snapchat and see any real meaningful uh interaction with the llm like we talked about with meta and llama but i i do think that you know 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 images with captions that are interesting based on your preferences in the algorithm?

1:41:38That 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, um, yeah, to actually, uh, get, um, uh, to, to surface like better, uh, better information that's more relevant. Um, anyway, uh, do you want to read the next post? Yeah, we got a post from Zach Abrams. Bridge and Visa are launching Stablecoin card issuing.

1:42:24It 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 US, Vlad 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 stablecoins are very, very real in many, many ways already. And enabling the seamless spending of those stablecoins across the Visa network will be super powerful.

1:43:09Yep. Let's rip through some other news. is Datadog's 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 Epo team. Datadog, absolutely dogs. Epo. Drop the N in Epo. It's just Epo. Anderl gave some updates on the YFQ-44A flying this summer. They're making progress on that collaborative combat aircraft. Looks great. Palmer said he has a strict no render policy. It's all real unless you see the anime. Yeah, that was cool. Which is a cool design choice, right? To be like, we will use CGI to visualize things that can't be seen.

1:43:56So like radio waves, for example. Or if we're describing like a future, we'll just use the anime style and it's obvious that it's rendered. Instead of doing photo real renders, is it real or is it not? 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, depending on it, has spent probably trillions of dollars on renders over the years of things that never, never actually came to fruition.

1:44:29Yeah. And same thing. And this happens in startups and hard tech. 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. This post from Delian was funny. He says, Mr. Asperuhov told reporters he's referencing Manus benchmarks investment in Chinese AI company Manis 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.

1:45:11He 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 is a funny exchange. It's 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.

1:45:50Long Doge. And we got lots of great photos hitting the timeline. Luke Ferretor looking fantastic in a suit and tie. Cody James, Bella's 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 Augustus. If you've been following, if you've been mutuals 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 doing Senate bean soup reviews. meeting with senators uh nvidia uh jensen wong announced a 500 billion dollar investment to build agi in the u.s kind of a continuation of that uh stargate announcement and uh yeah just well this is separate separate oh this is separate okay yeah it just turns out 500 billion dollars is a nice round number that everybody tends to gravitate towards but you know stargate was OpenAI 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.

1:47:08So what are the other top stories we need to cover before we get out of here GTA 6 has been delayed to 2026 poor one out for the gamers a little moment of silence for all the gamers um 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 gta 5 a lot when it came out in what 2012 or something uh 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 neural link team has a fda breakthrough designation device designation for speech restoration and elon says congrats to the neural link team so congratulations uh that's great any other the last one um the cia released two videos in mandarin this is very aimed at recruiting chinese officials oh yeah uh 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.

1:48:12So CIA is just going direct here, being very explicit. So 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 TahoeLifeAgency.com, the best place to get life insurance. And this is from my next door neighbor, Murph.

1:49:04So shout out to Murph. I, uh, I realized a couple of years ago that I should probably have a life insurance policy because I'm an adult with, uh, a family and, uh, I went to Murph and, uh, he's the best. So, um, shout out to Murph. Thank you for the five-star review. You're the man. I will see you probably, uh, at some point later today. Amazing. And we will see the rest of the, 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. Have a great weekend, everybody. Cheers. Cheers.