📈 first Derivative [123]

"Waymo rides are over 25% of all rideshares in San Francisco, surpassing Lyft."

Bullfight, 1866 by Édouard Manet

📚 Currently reading Team of Rivals, a comparative biography of Lincoln and some members of his Cabinet, and for my book club The Leopard, a historical novel about the decline of the Sicilian aristocracy during the Risorgimento. If you’ve read either, would love to hear your thoughts.

📺 On the TV side, I finished The Studio, the second season of The Rehearsal, and (very late to the game, although it seems like it’s never really gone away) the first season of Sex and the City. I recommend all of them.

🎧 Good podcasts episodes I’ve listened to lately:

• Victor Shih interview on Dwarkesh: Good breakdown of the inner workings of the Politburo, the typical education and career pathway of a member, and some people who might succeed Xi Jinping

• Sholto Douglas and Trenton Bricken interview on Dwarkesh: My main takeaway was the argument that AI agents will be able to do significant chunks of online white collar work in the next few years, especially as we generate more computer-use data to train on. Same goes for generating robotics and human movement data on a longer timescale.

Highlights in this issue: Waymo cars taking over, anti-natalist terrorism, gene-editing treatments, military drones, AI

Good reading,

—TK

If you were forwarded this email, subscribe here.

---

🍸 Woke up hungover last weekend? I wrote about why that actually happens. Next time, take Last Call to help you metabolize alcohol and feel better the next day. fD readers get 20% off their first order with promo code “FD20”

---

🚗 Autonomous Waymo rides are over 25% of all rideshares in San Francisco, surpassing Lyft. I don’t think people are talking enough about this. I still haven’t been able to take one personally (I moved out of LA just as they were coming in) but all my friends who have rave about it. In 10 years will people think of Google as a car company?

Seems like people are under-reacting to having taxi fleets of self-driving cars in a few major American cities, and in a few years a lot more. They may not be self-flying but this is pretty sci-fi!

It cracked a million total paid rides in late 2023. By the end of 2024, it reached five million. We’re not even halfway through 2025 and it has already crossed a cumulative 10 million. At this rate, Waymo is on track to double again and blow past 20 million fully autonomous trips by the end of the year.

I can’t wait until these hit New York streets during the NBA playoffs.

---

⚫️ A 25-year-old bombed a fertility clinic in Palm Springs in an act of anti-natalist terrorism.

“I figured I would just make a recording explaining why I’ve decided to bomb an IVF building, or clinic,” he said at the beginning of the recording. “Basically, it just comes down to I’m angry that I exist and that, you know, nobody got my consent to bring me here.”

Describing himself as anti-life, he adds: “I’m very against [IVF], it’s extremely wrong. These are people who are having kids after they’ve sat there and thought about it. How much more stupid can it get?”