Jul 29, 2023 · 2023 #23. Read the transcript grouped by speaker, inspect word-level timecodes, and optionally turn subtitles on for direct video playback
Edit labels for this show, save them in this browser, or download a JSON override for the production folder.
Human Transcript
Timed transcript
Blocks are grouped by speaker for readability. Expand a block to inspect word-level timing.
Speaker
I've got sunshine on a cloudy day When it's cold outside, I've got the month of July. Everybody say, I guess you say What can make me feel this way? It's my girl, my girl, I'm talking about my girl, my girl, I've got sunshine on a cloudy day I think we're in the dog days of summer and Keith has his dog with him. It is a Friday. So it is time for that was the week. A summary of the tech news of the week. Must be a slow week. Keith, you're using Winston Churchill of all people as your. I hope this was not an AI produced photo. It's for real. Never waste a crisis. Apparently Winston once said. How did Winston get on the cover of that was the week? He's not that guy, is he? No. Good question, Andrew. I think it's known as struggling to find the headline. So if you look at the content this week, which is all about what's happening in venture capital, I struggle to find the headline. Usually I don't. I can come up with something a bit catchy. This week I couldn't. Maybe on this show you could think of a better headline. Couldn't you rely on our old friend chat GPT? Couldn't it come up with a headline of its own? I don't think it's very good at headlines. It's not very creative. I'm not sure it's very good at anything. You said at the beginning of the editorial this week you could write about X. We're going to talk about X or WorldCoin. We're going to talk about that. You're in favor of both. But you said also this week saw what you call a torrent of excellent writing about venture capital. And we were saying, we were chatting earlier before we went live, Keith, that there's a real crisis now. The venture capital industry has fallen off a cliff. I didn't even know there were cliffs left in the business. Every week the news seems to get worse. How much worse can it get? It can get quite a lot worse before it gets better because it's all about the flows of money and the timing of flows of money. And what people have realized is the money isn't flowing either to funds. In fact, funds have been the biggest loser. And neither is it flowing to companies, of course. Why would it if it's not flowing to funds? Which means that there's what you could think of as a massive backlog of previously venture-funded companies that are not able to get capital for the next round. Sounds like a blockage. It's a blockage for companies. It's also a blockage for funds because if funds can't return capital to their investors from the past, which they can't, then those investors can't put new money to work. So the flow of money into funds is blocked as well. And, you know, we need a serious venture plumber to unblock the whole thing. Maybe, well, Nixon's not around anymore. Maybe we need a White House plumber. But in all seriousness, and we were chatting about this before we went live, my sense is that the economy isn't too bad. There doesn't seem to be a recession. The markets are up. People are reasonably cheerful, as cheerful as you can be in America these days. What's gone wrong with venture? You've got AI. You've got all sorts of other technological innovation in the pipeline. Yeah. So it's really, if you really want to focus in on the cause, it's the price of money. In the past years, the price of money was zero. In fact, people would almost pay you to borrow money from them. The price of money today is at least 5%. In other words, if you'll give the government money, they'll give you 5% interest. So 5% annually, compounding over 10 years, is pretty decent. And there are very few venture funds that return that kind of return. There's some great analysis in the newsletter this week of where the returns in venture come from. And really, it's from the top 1% of funds. And here's one of the key metrics that you present. But you always used to give me ridiculous numbers in the past when things were more cheerful. You're saying that even the best venture funds don't return more than 5%? In actual cash, 5% compounded over the life of the fund. It's more than 5%. But it's a lot less than 3x, which is the typical number people strive to deliver to their investors.
Just slow down. So I don't understand what 3x means in the context of 5%. I understand it. If I gave you $100 every year, I would make $5 on that if you pay me 5%. What does the 3x mean? Well, let's just sit with the first one first. Your $100 turns into $105 in year one. Right. Then you have $105 going into year two. So $105 also returns 5%. Yeah, I understand it's compounded and it gets more. But what's 3x got to do with it? So 3x is what a fund manager promises their investors before they invest in the fund. 300% gain over about 12 years. So for 12 years, if I gave you my $100, you'd promise me you'd give me $400 back. The $100 plus $300. $300 actually. It's $100 plus $2. And how would that work in terms of the compounding over 12 years on 5%? So if I do 12 years on 5%, you get to year 12 $171 million from $100. Not million. Well, if it's $100 million, you get $171. I'm not in your league, Keith. I'm just talking about $100. It doesn't make any difference. There's not that much difference between $170 versus $200. Not that much difference. And almost no funds. If you put that graph back up and you look at who delivers greater than 2x,
most of the funds are in this left-hand side where it's less than 1x and between 1 and 3. And if you break down between 1 and 3, most of it will be under 2. Just to be clear, so you've guaranteed a fund that if I gave you $100 million for a fund, you're guaranteed that you'll get it back in 12 years, but you don't have access to that money. No, you're not guaranteed. Put it back up and I'll show you. That left-hand column, you'll get less than your money back. Describe it because some people are listening to this. Well, 45% of finances and 37% of dollars invested return less than the amount invested. So it's close to 50-50 that you'll lose some of your money. And then the next 42% of money invested and 27% of financings only return between 1 and 3x. And I'd bet you anything it's closer to 1 and 3. So the chances of you being in this right-hand side where it's 3x or more is, if you add them together, it's 9 and 8, which is 17 plus 3 is 20%. A 1 in 5 chance that you'll get venture returns. And a 4 out of 5 chance you won't. So it's really not a great asset class. And this is over the past decade. But you used to tell me about how, what's the excitement then of venture capital? So most venture capitalists lose some of the money, at least of its investors. Most funds lose. So I talk in terms of deciles. So the top decile of venture will return 3x-ish. The bottom 90% won't. And that's just a fact. So you've got to believe, if you're a venture investor, that you're going to get into the top decile. Now, even in the top decile, most funds return the fund from something called the power law. And the power law is that really one of their companies is massive in its success. Yeah, I mean, it's the venture model of 1 in 10 being, 1 in 100 being Google or Facebook. Yeah. So it's a game of chance for sure. And so expertise and repeat win is a huge signal that you have to look at to see where you should put your venture money. There's your little plug for SignalRank. Well, SignalRank does that, but other people try and do it as well. And so venture is a game you should really play with, you know, when you have... I mean, a lot of people call themselves venture capitalists, but I'm always suspicious. They don't sound like venture capitalists to me. How do you define what venture capital is?
Venture capital is investing in companies that are often pre-revenue with the goal of turning your money into something like 100x by getting into one of the power law winners. So venture capital is risk capital with high reward if you do it well. And, you know, the chances of losing 100% of your money are real. But so you can lose 100% of your money, but that's all you can lose. OK, so we go back to the price of money. So I take your point. So everything's changed. Inflation is being tamed. Interest rates are up. Are you suggesting that this is an existential crisis for venture capital or just a more traditional shakeout so that all the dumb money disappears and the smart venture capitalists continue to win? Well, what I think is very close to what Sam Lessing writes about in this week's newsletter. He makes the point that factory capital, that's his name for people like Y Combinator or Ron Conway, for that matter, Silicon Valley Angel, 500 Startups, which sometimes is called spray and pray, where you do a lot of investments. That model worked when there was a lot of late stage money coming in to bolster the valuations of companies that were attractive to that late stage money. His argument is that's not any longer there and it isn't coming back. Therefore, seed stage investing is going to have to do a makeover and start from scratch with its core that it used to have, which is just really good seed investors picking good companies one at a time. And by the way, he also massively knocks AI investing as being the last dying breath of that factory allocation model. To put it vulgarly, spray and pray. Yeah, but to answer your question then, no, seed isn't going away, but it's going to revert to the mean or the norm, which is that it's very, very good seed investors that are super good, A, at finding talent, B, at investing in it, and C, partnering with the entrepreneurs to make it happen. I mean, it's so big deal, so it goes back to normal. It's always been the case that when things, you know, it's the old phrase, when things get tough, whatever it is, the tough get going. That was one of my potential titles. It was too long, though. Yeah, what has Churchill got to do with it? Never waste a great crisis. So this is a bit obtuse, but the reason I chose that is the writing this week is fantastic and it's coming out of a crisis. And it is interesting that a crisis brings out the best in people who think. And the evidence is in this week's newsletter. I mean, this is some of the best writing on venture capital I've seen for years. So what's the so the fix is to just go back to being more careful. Is that what Lesson says? More expert, I would say. You didn't have to be an expert in 2020, 2021, even 2019, really, or 22, because almost everything you would invest in, someone else would invest later at a higher valuation. So you didn't need to be much of an expert. Now you do. And that that was true, you know, ever since 2007, when the first seed funds emerged out of the last bubble bursting. The people who initially did it were really good at what they did. Paul Graham included, by the way, and Y Combinator.
Now they're going to have to be good again. They can't just do scale. They're going to have to do quality at scale. I'm not. This does sound like late July news to me. I don't think this is particularly big news. What's the big deal about it? It isn't a big deal for the average person because the average person doesn't and isn't allowed to invest in early stage venture. It is a big deal for the future of Silicon Valley writ large as the global early stage ecosystem, because it means the supply of good companies coming through and the rate at which they impact the world is in is in contradistinction to the rate at which technology is having an impact. You know, technology is having a huge impact. So I get that. So what does that mean? I mean, AI is clearly maybe it's there's a lot of froth there, but it is for real. What will this mean in terms of, quote, unquote, the AI boom if there's not enough capital to fund these companies? Well, firstly, we've talked about this before, but there really isn't an AI boom. Most of the money in AI is going to the large companies. And AI is a large company business because it requires so much capital to even play. So AI probably isn't the place to make a lot of money from startups. So what is? I think Web3 is making a comeback, and that is probably we can talk about WorldCoin in a bit. I think that just standard innovation in enterprise and consumer always has a role to play. I think the shift from the smartphone to whatever comes next will create a lot of value. So the real question is, how do 4 billion people with smartphones, how do they evolve over the next 10 years? And what will they be using? That's really the secret. It's a bit abstract. Wouldn't it be better if you've got money to just invest in Google and Microsoft and Amazon and Facebook? That's where everyone's making fortunes these days, certainly over the last six months or a year or two. Andrew, it's a very astute point. It's not that astute. It's obvious. Well, it's only just obvious now. Two years ago or even 18 months ago, if you'd have said that, people would have said, you're crazy. You can make much more money in venture investing. The truth is, post the correction, the public markets, even with the corrections, the top-performing companies would have made you a lot more than any venture investment, two or three times your money easily. So it is the case that venture as a long-term play has societal upside. It isn't necessarily the right thing to put your money into if you're looking to grow your assets. So what will this mean in terms of innovation and tech? I mean, Google and Microsoft are leading the AI boom. Microsoft's bankrolling open AI. Google has its own initiative, Facebook and Amazon as well. Is this good for innovation? Can these large companies drive an innovation economy even if we don't have traditional startups? Well, they can drive software. Microsoft and Google obviously can. Amazon will eventually. Open AI isn't going away. They can drive software top-down into businesses and enterprises that result in productivity gains. But they're not where the high growth is going to come from. They're already huge companies. Apple, by the way, is valued at $3 trillion today. So could it get to $6 trillion? Yeah, but that's only 2x. So if you're really a venture investor… Yeah, but what do you mean 2x? 2x, that's just a phrase. I mean, that's $3 trillion additional. So that's meaningful. It's not just 2x. Yeah, but turning $3 trillion into $6 trillion is easier than turning $5 million into $1 billion. So the real game that I'm interested in, and one of our listeners just posted, it's not exciting to invest in big companies. This is Elio Assunção. It's Brazilian, I think. I can't pronounce the cow. It's either cow or chow. He can tell us. It's not exciting to invest in big companies, which is correct. And if you're of a retirement age like me, you don't want exciting because you might lose all your money. But most people do want exciting. Do you like to lose your money, though, Keith? You're an expert, aren't you? I have had many years in which I lost money. That's certainly true. But I've had really good years where I made money and never from big companies, only ever from startups. Well, because you didn't invest in big companies. If you don't invest in them, you won't make any money. So, okay. So it sounds to me like there's certainly no existential crisis. You'll probably get more cycles. And as big companies, they have investment arms. Ruth Porat at Google, who was their CFO, they announced this week that she was going to become their president and head of investments. Won't venture just shift into these big companies? They've got so much extra cash. They've actually got to do something with it. Well, that has already happened, especially at Google. They have had venture practice for a long time, too, actually. They have Google Ventures, which does startup investing, but later stage. And then they have Google Corporate, which also does investments. So Google are already doing it. What do you think of the Porat shift? You didn't have a link, but it seems interesting. I didn't read about it, actually, Anders. So why don't you tell us about it? Well, she was their CFO, or she still is their CFO. Their announcement this week, their numbers were pretty good. Her title will change. She'll become president and head of investments internally, and I'm not sure externally, more internally. So she'll be in charge of the self-driving car initiative and all their other moonshot projects, which haven't always been realized, but sometimes they are. So it makes her, I think, the most powerful woman in tech. David Drummond used to have that job when he was general counsel. But he was never president, Drummond. He was just head of legal. Yeah, but he was in charge of investments. Yeah, but that was when it was a startup. What is it now, a $1.5, $2 trillion company? Yeah, no, she's very influential.
I have a lot of friends who work at Google, some of them in Google Ventures. My observation from the outside is that they are very Google-like in that they're data-driven, and they have a lot of data to drive from. They're not really outliers. They don't really invest early enough, and they've been burned with some big bets like that VR company that they invested in. They went nowhere. But then, again, made some good bets like Uber. So I think I wouldn't like that job. I think there's too many voices at Google with opinions. Well, I don't think you're going to get it. Ruth just got in, so I don't think they're going to offer it to you, Keith. Let's go on. I mean, again, I'm not convinced that you're very much inside the beltway when it comes to venture. It seems to me as if things are just not that dramatic. What about AI of the week? You don't believe that it's for real, the boom, or you think the technology is for real. Most people believe it is for real. Lots of politics about this. OpenAI and Google now have developed watermark AI-generated content to hinder deepfakes, one of the interesting news stories of the week. Is that significant, do you think, or are these companies just playing sort of a kabuki theater with government pretending to care and not actually doing anything? I think they do care about government staying away from them. And in order to achieve that, they actually have to engage with government on their own terms. So I think there is some diplomacy happening there where the end goal is to keep government out. And in order to achieve that, they've got to voluntarily step up to some commitments, and that's what happened this week. Is this for real? Is it possible to have watermarked AI-generated content so that people will be able to distinguish between human content and AI content? As you've said before, and I agree with you on this, it's such a gray area now. It's very hard to separate the two. I think watermarking is kind of a catch-all phrase for a bunch of potential technologies, none of which are yet real. One of them is talking about inventing a new alphabet and embedding from this new alphabet into old documents a code that says where it came from that would be invisible to the human eye. So there probably are things that could happen, and there'd be other people that would try to undo those things. So let's see. I personally think the genie is out of the bottle with AI. I think it's not going to be possible to control it so we better make sure that it's good, technically good initially, and that the publicly available stuff is way better than the private stuff. And that's a long journey. And what do you make of it? Biden announced, and you have a link to this, the fact sheet, the Biden-Harris administration. Voluntary commitments to manage the risks posed by AI. Is this all window dressing, maybe preparation for the 2024 election? It was the paper that came out of the meeting in the White House that the previous article referred to. So it's really just a statement of fact about what was discussed and what was agreed to. I think it is window dressing in that I don't know how much that's really tangibly going to happen in any short term. So it's more of an intent than a practical roadmap. But it's a real intent, and let's see where it goes. I saw this week the new Mission Impossible movie, and the evil genius at the heart of it wasn't Russians or Al-Qaeda or the Americans or the British. It was AI. So it's entered the popular pantheon, certainly when it comes to Hollywood. You came up with the idea. I mean, Sam Altman is doing quite a lot with his biometric-based cryptocurrency, WorldCoin. Like Musk, it's hard to understand how he does everything he does. You came up with this idea. Also, you've been talking about it a while. What exactly is WorldCoin, and why do you believe it might be more real than AI? Yeah, the fact I came up with it, I call it UBI coin, I think I called it. A few years ago, we talked about it on this show in the early days. That's evidence of the fact that for any given idea, there's hundreds of people who think of it, but there's only usually one or two that actually go and do it, and he's that guy. So hats off to him. WorldCoin is basically the idea that we underestimate how rapidly AI is going to remove jobs, and we overestimate how many new jobs are going to be created in the midst of that, and that the likely scenario that he believes in is there'll be lots of people who don't have paid employment. And WorldCoin is his answer. He basically said that the very act of being human gives you a stake in the collective wealth of humanity, and what we need is a mathematical system, an allocation system, to deploy that wealth to people. And WorldCoin is his mechanism. By the way, it's been widely criticized this week for a couple of reasons, but just so people understand it, WorldCoin is a cryptocurrency called WLD. You have to download the World app on iOS or Android. You then have to go and have your retina scanned to prove that you're human and that there's only one of you. Once that's done, you will get WorldCoins into your app at regular intervals. Today, a WorldCoin is worth about $2.20. You can trade them. Not in the US, but on... So it's basically, at the moment, speaking of the price of money, it's free money. It's free money. Or free cryptocurrency, anyway. Free cryptocurrency allocated just because you're human, almost like a heritage check from the novel. And anyone can qualify. All you've got to do is give up your identity, your retina, so that it's... Yeah, but they don't store your retina. They store what's called a hash, which is an algorithmic reduction of your retina that basically means that you can prove you're you. They don't know who you are. And how is this guaranteed, the value of this coin? It isn't guaranteed. There's absolutely zero guarantee. So what they've done is they've issued 100 million of them to market makers. And the deal they've made with the market makers is if they can maintain the price at $2.20, I think it is, or higher, they get to keep the tokens. But if they drop below $2.20, they owe WorldCoin money. And so they've incented the market makers to maintain the value and the price at at least $2.20. What does a market make? What does that mean? It comes from stock exchanges. This is people with a pool of assets whose job it is to buy and sell the asset as the market asks and to maintain a price. But then it's a shell game. Where's the value? And why would anyone do that? Well, that's the same for all market makers in all assets. The underlying asset has to have a value. So the argument here is, and this goes back to my idea, these WorldCoins will become accepted by people who sell goods and services. Therefore, they will achieve the value of currency because people will give up actual goods and services for them. As that happens, the market for WorldCoin, of which there's a limited number, by the way, will drive its price up, most likely. And therefore, WorldCoin, as a currency capable of buying and selling things, will achieve a value, a slice, if you will, of human value delivered through work. Yeah, this sounds like sort of a bad introduction. It's just more nonsense. What about Musk's ex? Is this another play here? I mean, he changed the name from Twitter. He wants to do a financial startup. Is this what he's trying to do too? This is so abstract. It could come out of a Dave Edgar novel. It's absurd. Yeah. No, he's doing something different. If I hold this up to the camera, you might be able to see, if I block it, that the Twitter logo is now an X on my phone. But it's still Twitter. I mean, or it's X, whatever. It's just a brand name change, right? Absolutely right. It's still Twitter. And I think that's the main point. Twitter hasn't changed.
Most of the critics of Twitter are still on it. Everyone I read who's criticizing Twitter and Musk, I go and look if they're still on Twitter, and they are. Why are they still on Twitter? Because there is no other app on the planet that brings what Twitter brings to a discussion, which is people who have opinions and sometimes are experts. And it's very, very good at that. And I don't think that's going away. They did announce that the user numbers on Twitter are the highest ever. But coming back to X, why has he changed the name? You know, that's an obsessive individual who likes a name. I mean, he paid $44 billion for the thing. As you said, it doesn't really make any difference. Twitter is Twitter, whether you call it X or Y or V, it doesn't matter. So why is it even news? I don't even understand. Someone told me earlier that they got off Twitter because Musk changed the name to X, and that's fascist. I don't understand what the letter X and fascism have to do with one another. I think they think it's fascist because he did it without permission. But what it really is... We are. There's no news this week, Keith. It's why we've got Winston Churchill saying, never waste a crisis, which I'm not even sure he did say. There's one piece of news that is real, which sounds very interesting to me. You have a link from the Times of Israel. 70% of Israeli startups act to shift funds because of their judicial shakeup. How is that going to change the so-called startup nation? Well, you know, what's super interesting is how many Israelis are taking to the streets to protest the government reducing the power of the Supreme Court and increasing the power of the executive branch of government, which is a tilt away from democracy. Some would argue it's fundamentally undemocratic in a state that prides itself on being the only democracy in the Middle East. You would think, based on history, Israelis, you know, us non-Israelis would assume that Israelis would turn a blind eye because they really don't want to rock the boat of their nation, given its precarious geography and surrounded by potential enemies. But they didn't. They've gone to the streets, and they care more about democracy than they care about, you know, any of those things. And I think that's massively symptomatic of young Israelis having the big picture in their mind and caring. I think it's fantastic. And startups are young Israelis. Very few Israeli startups are, you know, the generation that formed Israel. They're the generation that live in Israel and were born there or moved there recently. But won't the shifting funds mean they'll all move to L.A. or New York or London or Berlin? I don't think they'll move because I think they're committed to Israel. I think they'll move money so it's safe, and they won't believe the shekel is going to be stable. That's probably smart. So that's not. Is that major news for tech? I mean, does it matter? Yeah, we've prefigured it twice before on this show, so it isn't major news. What is major news is that parliament did pass the changes. So now it's on its way to becoming fixed in Israeli constitution. And therefore, the protests now are protesting against the law, not the possible law, but an actual law. And that means the protests are a lot more serious with a lot more consequences if they succeed. So for one, I'm hoping the protests get bigger, not smaller. You did send me another link, which you haven't put in the newsletter, about how there's souring over the partnership between Apple and Goldman Sachs on the Apple card. What happened with that? So this is really about the economics of the credit card industry. Apple's card has a number of things that it has going for it. The first is there's no fees. The second is there's no penalties for late payment. The third is you can have a savings account that pays you over 4% interest. And it turns out, shock, shock, none of those things make a profit. Now, Apple underwrites some of it, but the speed at which Apple card took off was a little bit slower than anticipated, and the losses made on the Goldman Sachs side are higher than anticipated. So the time it's going to take to get into profit is longer than they all thought. So Goldman Sachs really wants to get out of the business, and Apple isn't letting them out of their contract. So Goldman's trying to negotiate. The rumors is American Express to take over the contract. That's basically what's going on. So it's savvy Apple negotiating a deal with banks that ends up not being profitable. But you can still get, coming back to what we were originally talking about, the price of money, you can still get more for your money. The price of money is, I don't know, more or less at Goldman than Apple. Yeah. Well, if you can put your money into a place, and treasury bonds are the place most people put it, there's a new startup called Public, where I'm getting 5.65% for up to, you can put up to $250,000 insured into it. And it's basically treasury bonds. So the price of money is over 5%. And, you know, anyone that has cash probably is inclined to get 5 point something percent annualized over some number of years as a base case for their money. Anything worse than that is, you know, silly for them to do. Why don't you just put it into a retirement fund? They tend to not do as much as 5%. I mean, because they buy stocks and bonds in a mix. It depends which ones you buy. Some of them do. It's all about the price of money, which has been the theme of this week, which I think is an interesting subject. I'm not convinced by Altman's world coin. I'm sure there will be huge hype around it. And then another classic bust. Let's get to the startup of the week, which you're all too familiar with, Keith, Cyber Cafe. Yeah, I couldn't resist putting this in. This is a great article from a website called Rest of the World that focused in on the remaining internet cafes. And the reason I couldn't resist is me and my three co-founders were the founders of the first internet cafe in the world called Siberia Cafe in London's Whitfield Street in 1994 with people like Morris Sarch and Mick Jagger as investors. And I should say Sinead O'Connor was a regular attendee. She passed away this week, which was sad. And this article mentions Siberia Cafe in the first paragraph. And so I was compelled... Why is it a startup? This is anything but startup of the week. Well, startup of the week... Startdown of the week, it should be. No, we can also... We're allowed to champion things that used to be startups. It doesn't have to be a current startup. Yeah, we won't be able to... They would disappear from Mission Impossible-style movies where the evil villain goes to the internet cafe to blow the world up. This article, by the way, has links to, I think, six different countries with stories about the internet cafes that still exist there. It's nice reading. And finally, finally, we have Tweet of the Week or X... Shouldn't we call it X of the Week, Keith? I think we've got to start calling it X of the Week. Yeah, I did. You know, I did use the designation X in my editorial, but I forgot to change Tweet of the Week to X of the Week. So... For all your defense of Elon Musk and you see one of his great defenders, you've got a Tweet of the Week which suggests that the guy is a lunatic. Well, both things can be true at the same time. It's from somebody called Alex Cohen. I was laid off from Twitter today. I was the designer in charge of our new rebranding to X. I learned so much in my two and a half weeks at the company, but I'm excited to see where I land next. If you're hiring a self-taught junior designer, please DM me. Graphic design is my passion. I mean, is this a joke? Yes, it's a joke. He's making the point that only a two and a half week old intern that has never done the job could have designed the X logo. So he's taking on... Oh, so this is not for real? No. No, that's why it's funny. I thought it was almost British humor, Andrew, but he's called another Cohen, so I'm guessing he's Jewish, so it's Jewish humor. He's probably one of those ones demonstrating in Israel. He could well be, or he could be British Jewish and be combining Jewish humor and British humor. There's no such thing as British Jewish. There's Anglo-Jewish. Jews aren't stupid enough to be British. Oh, so, yeah, well, the X, what's wrong with it? I mean, should there be a fancier X? Well, I'll tell you what. The day before, Musk tweeted that he wanted someone to come up with an X design, and he picked the best one, and it would become the logo the next day. Obviously, he didn't like any of them because what he ended up doing is paying $30 for a font from Monospace, which is a typeface company, and he took the letter X from the font, and he made that the logo. So he did zero work on it. He bought the company for $45 billion, and he spent how much on rebranding? $30. I don't know whether that's a reason to admire him. So are we going to have any real tech news, Keith, in August, or is this going to be four more weeks of Churchill titles with nothing actually happening? Can you think of a better title, given what the content is? I'll change it if you can. Yeah, I would call it The Price of Money. I mean, that's an interesting... The Price of Money, or Money Becomes More Expensive. I mean, isn't that really the... Or Money Becomes Cheaper, I'm not sure. Money is more expensive. That's what's happening. So, yeah, The Price of Money. Maybe that is the title. We'll only know in an hour when I publish it. Why don't you do 2X The Price of Money?
Well, Keith, we will be back next week for more of That Was The Week, an interesting week, or an interestingly uninteresting week. Maybe I'm wrong on Sal Monkman's World Coin. Only time will tell. One thing I can guarantee is you will go all frothy about it for months, if not years, and then it will collapse and you'll say, I told you so. Bye.