Well, folks, our favorite lil’ Coconut finally picked her running mate. In a surprise turn of events — genuinely, I was shocked — Kamala snubbed Josh Shapiro, the center-left Governor of Pennsylvania (a crucial swing-state battleground), and selected Tim Walz, the far-left Governor of Minnesota (which hasn’t voted Republican in over fifty years). Shapiro is Jewish, and served in Israel’s IDF, which hasn’t played well for Kamala’s increasingly antisemitic base. But I think the bigger factor here is really just Kamala’s DEI worldview, in which a person’s value is determined by the way they look rather than their record. Josh Shapiro has moderate ideas, or at least espouses them, which is what Kamala needs to win Middle America. But Walz is a pudgy, grandpa-looking white guy with rosy cheeks. He hunts turkeys! He looks “Middle American.” Yesterday I noted Kamala doesn’t have ideas. But today? We learned she isn’t even capable of perceiving them.

Just four months after securing a $20-an-hour minimum wage for its members, California’s fast-food labor union is back for more, demanding an additional 3.5% hike. Evidently, the 10,000-odd layoffs and widespread price hikes that followed the first wage increase didn’t scare the union bosses off the war path — either because they’re complete economic illiterates, or because they’re actually in the pocket of the AI/robo-cashier lobby. Which sounds crazy, I know. But remember, this is California politics. Corruption is not the exception, it’s the rule. Everyone knows these jobs are easy to automate. Is it possible the union bosses are reaching for kickbacks while they still can? Then again, maybe they really just are *that* dumb. (Tbh, probably.) Regardless, the outcome will be the same: robots taking your order, mixing shakes, and flipping burgers, all coming soon to an In-N-Out near you.

Monday, a federal judge ruled Google maintains an illegal search monopoly, a major step forward for the DOJ’s crusade against “Big Tech,” and a victory for both the standard “companies should not exist” crowd as well as Google’s competitors — a new class of thing that increasingly exists. We’re still waiting to see what “remedies” (some fun NYT verbiage) the judge hands down in the coming months. But if he breaks up Google’s pay-to-play agreement with Apple, as many expect he will, Google will lose a catastrophically large portion of its business. More importantly, a whole new generation of ambitious competitors (OpenAI, Perplexity, et al) will be emboldened. Industry insiders and detractors alike have referred to Google as an unstoppable monopoly for decades. Ironically, these past few years are the first in memory the company has shown any sign of weakness. Now, with the government’s hammer over their head, get ready for the hottest new investment craze: search.

Last week, a startup called Delphi launched an interactive video clone feature. As an introduction, Delphi creates digital clones of coaches, investors, advisors, and other thought leaders so that users can interact with them 1:1 (imagine getting personalized advice from Balaji Srinivasan, or Friedrich Nietzsche). Now, with video calling, you can seek advice in the most accessible format possible: the FaceTime call. If you’re a startup founder or an ambitious reader of this newsletter, you probably don’t have a billionaire investor on speed dial, and if you do, they’d probably block you if you hit them up every day asking to chat. Delphi has solved this problem, allowing you to get your questions answered, no matter how tedious or embarrassing they are.

Chat with Delphi founder Dara’s clone here.

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a house judiciary report suggests an advertising cabal organized a boycott of 𝕏 and took similar actions against other websites it deems ideologically problematic

inside the cultural revolution at wikipedia, which pivoted it from a decentralized database of all the world’s knowledge to a top-down social activism and advocacy machine

this week, nic carter joins the pod to give us the latest on bitcoin and crypto after trump recently mentioned operation chokepoint 2.0. plus: crypto money changing the landscape of elections, vcs for kamala, google search results on the trump assassination attempt, and more

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