Weekly Report: October 12, 2025
#133 Waymo, AI circlejerk, ETFs
Observations
Waymo
We had a chance to try a Waymo self-driving car for the first time last weekend. Waymo has been publicly operating in San Francisco for a few years now, and was released to general availability in mid-2024. We’re very rarely in San Francisco these days, so this was the first chance that we had to try it out. (We’re seeing a lot of empty Waymos driving around our local neighborhood at the moment, so hopefully that means they are expanding to our area soon.)
When we arrived in San Francisco, we found it pretty much swarming with Waymos. Interestingly, the ones with passengers almost always had someone sitting in the front seat — eyes glued out the front windscreen and not looking down at a phone as you might expect.
You hail a Waymo just like you hail an Uber — with an app. You can select from a few nearby pick up locations, and the amount of time the Waymo will wait depends on how busy that section of road is. We chose a pick up area in a cul-de-sac (5 minutes wait time) instead of on the main road (2 minutes wait time). Our kids were with us, so we had to bring car seats with us and quickly install them.
The experience was pretty magical. San Francisco is not the easiest place to drive. Lots of tourists, badly marked lanes, cramped streets, steep hills, and cable car lines. Yet, I never really felt uncomfortable in the car. It drove remarkably smoothly, navigating 4-way intersections swarming with pedestrians, unprotected left turns at traffic lights, and crossing the center line to swerve around stopped cars with ease.
Waymo is the recognized market leader in the autonomous vehicle market. It felt much safer than Tesla’s supervised self-driving tech.
There was only one hiccup, when the Waymo got stuck behind a parked car for no discernible reason, and only got going again when we called support (see the video below).
Other Observations
The legal equivalent of vibe coding is vibe drafting. I see a lot of non-lawyers using ChatGPT to try to draft entire contracts, but through my eyes as a transactional lawyer, the tech is nowhere near ready yet. It is useful for drafting individual clauses, but only if you know what to look for to begin with.
Articles
Trump Used AI to Scan U.S. Generals’ Faces for Loyalty — and to Root Out Whistleblowers (Lev Parnas)
How the Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal came together (NBC News)
Someone Tipped Me Off About a Crypto Story. What I Found Was Crazy. (New York Times)
The stablecoin duopoly is ending (Nic Carter)
Ray Dalio warns of debt surge, brewing ‘civil war’ in U.S. (Seeking Alpha)
Retail investors buy stocks in droves, fueling Wall Street bubble fears (Quartz)
What’s Wrong With Las Vegas? (New York Times)
“As prices skyrocket and international travel declines, the city finds itself caught in a perfect storm.”A cartoonist’s review of AI art (The Oatmeal)
‘The most aesthetic line’: how Kilian Jornet climbed the 72 highest US mountains in 31 days (The Guardian)
You can see his route on his States of Elevation site. He climbed the equivalent of 123km.
Diversions
Reviews
📖 Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life (Michael Lewis, 2005)
A short book that is essentially a long story about Michael Lewis’ high school baseball coach. Lewis is one of the best storytellers around, and his ability to weave a story about a childhood figure made it a quick, captivating, and compelling read. The story is about how Fitz — an intense, tough, and often-irate coach — shaped the mindset of his adolescent self, and many other privileged private school students who passed through Fitz’s team, in fundamentally positive ways. And also how a generation later, helicopter parents started to get in the way of that rite of passage.
“‘It’ was the importance of battling one’s way through all the easy excuses life offered for giving up. Fitz had a gift for addressing this psychological problem, but he was no longer permitted to use it. ‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘every time I try the parents get in the way’. … ‘Look,’ he said, ‘All this is about a false sense of self-esteem. It’s now bestowed on kids at birth. It’s not earned. If I were to jump all over you today, you would be highly insulted and deeply offended. You would not get that I cared about you.’”
It sounds like a contemporary issue, but Lewis wrote this book in 2005 — which is now itself, a generation later. I hope that my kids encounter someone in their lives like Fitz. ★★★★★
Charts, Images & Videos
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