FYI - For Your Innovation

In this episode of The Brainstorm, Sam, Nick, and Brett dig into the opening shots of the AI shopping wars. Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse from crawling its site to protect a $70 billion advertising business, while Shopify did the opposite and opened Shop Pay and its agent-ready catalog to the same model. Nick argues Amazon is making a mistake and will have to reverse course the moment Walmart or Target defect and see the Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) lift. Brett makes the case that agents expand the market rather than divide it, pulling services, grocery, and home projects into e-commerce for the first time, and that Meta’s years of social commerce tooling on Instagram may be the most underrated head start in the whole fight. Plus ghost brands, proof of human, and why agents may develop brand taste of their own.

Key Points From This Episode:
Why Amazon has a $70 billion reason to block agents, and why a 5% agent take rate may be the compromise
How agents could push US e-commerce past 30% of retail by pulling services and expertise into the cart
Why Meta’s social commerce tooling on Instagram is potentially an underrated head start in agentic shopping

If you know ARK, you know we focus on long-term innovation. But that doesn’t mean we ignore breaking news. Every day, we debate the latest developments in tech and markets. Now, we’re bringing those conversations to you in “The Brainstorm,” a co-production from ARK, WOLF, and Public. Tune in weekly for our quick takes on what’s shaping innovation right now.

Learn more about WOLF: https://wolf.financial
Learn more about Public: https://public.com/
Disclosure: http://arkinv.st/39rzF94

In this episode of Bitcoin Brainstorm, Rod Roudi, Cathie Wood, and Lorenzo Valente are joined by Rob Hamilton, Seth For Privacy, and Dhruv Bansal to discuss how rapidly advancing AI models are changing cybersecurity and Bitcoin security. The group examines the Coldcard vulnerability, the growing capabilities of open-weight models, and the resulting shift in the balance between attackers and defenders. They discuss AI-powered code auditing, self-custody and hardware wallet risks, the importance of domain expertise, and how teams can build continuous security systems around their software. The conversation also explores quantum computing threats, Bitcoin’s resilience, and why AI could ultimately strengthen software security.

Guests on this month’s Bitcoin Brainstorm include:
Cathie Wood: Founder, CEO and CIO, ARK Invest 
Lorenzo Valente: Director of Research, Digital Assets, ARK Invest
Rod Roudi: Founder, Bitcoin Park
Rob Hamilton: Co-Founder And CEO, AnchorWatch
Dhruv Bansal: Co-Founder And CSO, Unchained
Seth For Privacy: COO, Cake Wallet And Radar

Key Points From This Episode:
How falling inference costs, rapid model advancement, and open-weight models have unlocked a new level of capability in software vulnerability research.
The Coldcard weak-entropy vulnerability, and why we believe it represented a software and vendor problem rather than a failure of the Bitcoin protocol.
The trade-offs between self-custody, third-party custodians, ETFs, hardware wallets, and multi-vendor multisig—and why security demands ongoing vigilance rather than a "set it and forget it" approach.
Why we expect AI to benefit defenders more than attackers, from continuous repository scanning and faster audits to preparing Bitcoin for potential quantum computing threats.

Learn more about Bitcoin Park: bitcoinpark.com

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com)

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Disclosure: http://arkinv.st/39rzF94f

In this episode of The Brainstorm, Sam, Nick, and Brett dig into Dario Amodei’s open letter calling on frontier labs to pace themselves, a position Elon Musk and Sam Altman both signaled agreement with. Brett argues the real risk is not extinction but agentic swarms mangling digital infrastructure that was never hardened for them, and that slowing the public frontier may hand closed labs both a wider lead and a defense business to sell. Nick pushes back on the competitive motives behind a federal AI regulator. Then Nick reports back from six days inside Meta’s Muse, the agentic consumer app that found him over $1,000 in unclaimed money sitting in Michigan.

Key Points From This Episode:
Why frontier labs want to pace the public frontier, and what that does to 99.99% cost declines
Whether an AI regulatory regime protects the public or locks in the incumbents
How Meta’s Muse is built for the consumer, not the prosumer, and why commerce take rates beat subscriptions

If you know ARK, you know we focus on long-term innovation. But that doesn’t mean we ignore breaking news. Every day, we debate the latest developments in tech and markets. Now, we’re bringing those conversations to you in “The Brainstorm,” a co-production from ARK, WOLF, and Public. Tune in weekly for our quick takes on what’s shaping innovation right now.

Learn more about WOLF: https://wolf.financial
Learn more about Public: https://public.com/
Disclosure: http://arkinv.st/39rzF94

In this episode of The Brainstorm, Sam and Brett unpack Tesla’s Cybercab launch, a two-seat vehicle with no steering wheel and no pedals that Brett believes can operate at roughly 25 cents a mile, a level at which Waymo may not be able to stay gross profitable. They settle the debate over why Tesla would sell Cybercabs at all instead of owning the fleet outright, and what a 4.5x jump in robotaxi app users on the back of a deliberately low key event says about demand at half the price of an Uber. Then the team turns to OpenAI’s Astra, the model release behind a solution to Navier-Stokes, and why Brett thinks the closed frontier labs eating their own caviar are pulling away from open weight models rather than converging with them. Plus Apple’s folding iPhone Duo, which neither host is buying, and why they believe the Apple Watch is the more interesting announcement.

Key Points From This Episode:
Why the Cybercab could run at 25 cents a mile, and what that price does to Waymo’s economics
Why Tesla is selling Cybercabs to third party owners instead of keeping every mile for itself
Why we believe closed frontier models are pulling away from open weight models, and why Apple’s walled garden becomes a liability in an agent driven world

If you know ARK, you know we focus on long-term innovation. But that doesn’t mean we ignore breaking news. Every day, we debate the latest developments in tech and markets. Now, we’re bringing those conversations to you in “The Brainstorm,” a co-production from ARK, WOLF, and Public. Tune in weekly for our quick takes on what’s shaping innovation right now.

Learn more about WOLF: https://wolf.financial
Learn more about Public: https://public.com/
Disclosure: http://arkinv.st/39rzF94

Gautam Narang built India’s first customized humanoid robot as a teenager — then walked away from humanoids because they were nowhere near commercial. Today his company, Gatik, runs fully driverless trucks 24/7 across Texas, Arkansas, and Arizona for PepsiCo, Kroger, and Loblaw: dock to dock, no safety driver, no observer, no required remote monitoring. He tells Tasha Keeney and Daniel Maguire why Gatik took the contrarian bet on the middle mile while the rest of the industry chased long haul, how a $200,000-per-truck take-or-pay contract moves utilization risk off Gatik’s books, and why he believes autonomous trucking has moved from a technology challenge to an execution story.

Key Points From This Episode:
00:00:00 Meet Gautam Narang, CEO and Co-founder of Gatik
00:05:49 The contrarian bet: why Gatik started with the middle mile
00:08:12 Dock to dock, and the interface problem nobody talks about
00:12:56 $200,000 per truck, take-or-pay: the business model explained
00:18:15 Inside the PepsiCo partnership: Frito, beverage, and dynamic routing
00:20:48 From 10-mile routes to 400-mile routes
00:32:12 A $300B market, and why the tech is platform agnostic
00:36:58 The $200M Series D and putting strategic partners on the capitalization table
00:39:17 Why ARK doubled down: what we believe the proof actually looks like
00:46:07 The 3x utilization assumption underpinning everyone else’s margins
00:48:25 Isuzu, NVIDIA, South Carolina, and 50,000 units a year by 2030

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com)