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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Welcome to technology brothers. The number one live show in tech. We are live from the Temple Of Technology, the Fortress Of Finance, the capital of capital. It is Friday, February 14, Valentine's day, '20 '20 '5. This show starts now.
Speaker 1:Jordy, you're back on the West Coast. Give us an update.
Speaker 2:Look, John, if us telling you it was Valentine's day at this very moment is a surprise, you're probably already kind of in a bad spot with your lady. So Yep. I hope that, our, you know, basically daily reminders this week and and last week were helpful in getting people prepared for this monumental moment. Whatever your girlfriend, wife, mistress says, she thinks about Valentine's Day. It's important to her.
Speaker 2:You gotta pull out the stops, get creative. We gave, you know, we gave a gift guide, but, you know, there's there's plenty of of, of ways to impress today. So we're recording early today for the West Coast. And, after after that, we'll be taking a little bit of time away to, hang out with our lovely wives.
Speaker 1:So We got a fantastic show today. We're talking about Alex Karp. There's an a profile on him in the Wall Street Journal, the Gundo boys. Our boys are in the Economist now.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:Was just down stop for these guys. They just get higher and higher. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They they they've transitioned from attempted hit pieces to everybody realizing that it's just such fantastic content that they end up being puff pieces. Totally. And so, we'll break it down.
Speaker 1:Then we're going on to a Wall Street Journal deep dive on how the Trump family is making money. They have it's not just the coins. It's not just the SPACs. They're all over the place. They're they're doing three sixty deals.
Speaker 1:They're selling documentaries. You'll hear all about it. We're gonna go through the timeline. But first, we're going back to Valentine's Day. What better Valentine's Day gift for the woman you love if she happens to be in federal prison then getting her presidential pardon, we're going to Elizabeth Holmes who gave her first prison interview to People magazine.
Speaker 1:If you're in a relationship with someone who's in jail, get them out. Get them out. Start with
Speaker 2:them out. Start with the People magazine feature.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And the media, is the immediate precursor to actually drawing enough attention to get on the presidential pardon docket. It worked for Ross Ulbricht. And who knows? Maybe it'll work for Elizabeth.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Dan Primack. He says Elizabeth Holmes prison interview. He shares the link. 12 likes, 13 retweets, clearly nerfed in the algorithm, but built different. He posted it anyway.
Speaker 1:Feedback to this post, not great. Lots of people say, seems like she wants to copy paste the Ross Ulbrich playbook. Another guy says, we don't care, but we're different on the show. We do care, so we're gonna read it to you. Elizabeth Holmes breaks her silence in first interview from prison.
Speaker 1:It's been hell and torture. The former Theranos CEO convicted of fraud, say shares her details of her life behind bars and separation from her family. And so let's go through some of this. I'll read a couple paragraphs, then I want your hot take, Jordy. Twice a week for a few fleeting hours, life is sweet for the 41 year old Elizabeth Holmes.
Speaker 1:It's when her kids, William, three, and Invicta, two, snuggle in her lap and talk excitedly about insect ant ant farms and sea creatures. Her son builds Legos, and her daughter dismantles them. Seemingly unaware of the beeping of metal detectors and the watchful eyes of guards at Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas, the children and their father, Holmes' partner, Billy Evans, thirty three, enjoy each moment together. And like always, their most recent visit ended with a ritual when their time was up. The children pat pressed their fingers together to make a heart sign, saying in unison, mommy, this is our love.
Speaker 1:To which their mother responded, our love is a superpower. Watching them leave through the secured glass door that separates her from freedom shatters my world every single time, says Holmes. The people I love the most have to walk away as I stand here a prisoner, and my reality sinks in. Rough. What do you think, Jordy?
Speaker 2:Super rough. You know, she you know, I I don't know the full backstory and the full sort of timeline on when exactly she decided or, you know, ended up having children. But, you know, part of this positioning, it did you know, there there was sort of a narrative that she was actually, you know, interested you know, part of the idea of, like, you know, let's let's have a bunch of kids, was potentially oriented around building this narrative that, hey. I'm a mom. You're taking me away from, like, my young children, which is which is ignore all the facts and the circumstances.
Speaker 2:Just the nature of being a mom, you know, separated from her young children is deeply tragic. You know? You have kids. I have kids. The idea you know, my kids, I can noticeably see them not doing so well after literally two hours away from moms.
Speaker 2:And, like, for our youngest, and I'm sure you're you're too.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Even like, they're just in a better mood. Like, they're just doing better when mom is in their orbit. And so before we get into any of the sort of analysis or the facts or or the sort of takes, I would say I would just say that it's it's, you know, irrespective of what, you know, Holmes, you know, did and the crimes that she committed. It's it's just a very sad sad situation. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, she's 41 now. She's served two years of an eleven and a quarter year sentence that's been reduced to nine years, so she has seven more years. But she was 39 when she was, convicted and sent off to this nine year stint. What are you gonna do? You wait nine years, you're probably not gonna be able to have kids at all.
Speaker 1:So That's true. There is this, like I I understand where the narrative came from of, like, oh, she did this on purpose to, like, win Yeah. Fate Curry favor. But at the same time, like, having kids before you're 40 is just generally advisable. So, it's not that crazy of an idea, even though, obviously, it's turmoil while you're in the clink.
Speaker 1:So she, is serving a nine year sentence for fraud and conspiracy over the collapse of Theranos, the billion dollar biotech corporation she founded. She is speaking out for the first time in a prison interview conducted in a cold visitation room furnished with vending machines and blue plastic chairs. Gone are the black turtlenecks and crimson lipstick she wore when she dazzled Silicon Valley in the national media as a bold CEO of a startup. Her company promised to revolutionize the healthcare industry with cheap diagnostic testing and devices able to screen patients for hundreds of diseases with a few drops of blood. Now she wears drab, khaki prison garb with her blonde hair pulled back, bare makeup, and a silver cross around her neck, speaking in a voice notably softer than the throaty baritone she was she was known for.
Speaker 1:I'm not the same person I was back then, says Holmes, who pleaded not guilty at her trial and maintains her innocence today, albeit while vaguely acknowledge acknowledging there are things I would have done differently on her path to lock up. It's surreal. People who have never met me before believe so strongly about me. They don't understand who I am. It forces you to spend a lot of time questioning belief and hoping the truth will prevail.
Speaker 1:I am walking by faith and ultimately the truth, it's but it's been hell and torture in here. At 20, she dropped out of Stanford her sophomore year to focus on developing health care technology on a mission to save lives. In 02/2003, she launched Theranos, which secured a $9,000,000,000 valuation in a decade, hailed as NextEve Jobs, and backed by investors such as Rupert Murdoch and the family behind Walmart. Holmes became the youngest self made billionaire in 2014. But following the public of the publication of an expose in the Wall Street Journal that questioned the accuracy of the company's testing technology, the federal probe led to the indictment of Holmes and her fellow executive, Sonny Balwani, her secret boyfriend at the time on charges of misleading investors and defrauding them along with patience for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Speaker 1:Very rough situation.
Speaker 2:Really rough. You know, ultimately, you know, I don't I don't think it it it makes sense in this context to try to psychoanalyze her too much. Right? And I do believe that, the her going to prison and have to be every single day face to face with the reality that her freedom was taken away Yep. Because of things that she did.
Speaker 2:Right? She admits that she would have done things differently. If you look at the approach that she took, she applied the move fast and break things methodology
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:That was popularized by you know, in that era by, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and and other, you know, founders, but applied it to health care in a scenario where human human life was on the line and health care outcomes were on the line. And, it's just there's totally a world where she was building SaaS or a social media app, and it actually you know, it's it's much easier to visualize a SaaS app in your mind. And if you have billions of dollars, you'll be able to execute against that.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And she I do believe that she clearly visualized this future of being able to test for all these different things with a single drop of blood. Yep. I believe that she firmly, you know, believed in that and and genuinely felt that she could execute against that with the right amount of resources. But over time, it just became obvious that you know? And I and I and I believe it's widely sort of known at this point, but it's worth restating.
Speaker 2:You know? This was not a Silicon Valley startup despite being started out of Stanford. Right? Like, the investors were people like Rupert Murdoch and a lot of the best, you know, biotech funds in Silicon Valley passed on the company. And in the short term, their LPs were probably telling them, what are you guys doing?
Speaker 2:How did you miss this one? Yep. And they were ultimately proven right. But, you know, in the scenario where she was building consumer a consumer mobile app or SaaS, she would have been able to actually execute against the product. But then, clearly, her and the rest of the executive team, you know, made decisions along the way that were just, you know, deeply, deeply wrong, right, in terms of shipping things that they knew weren't working, you know, trying to continue to execute on big partnerships that they had at, you know, with CVS that they had the part, like, major or was it Walgreens or CVS?
Speaker 2:I forgot. But, ultimately, you know, series of just, like, very bad, very bad decisions, and and, you know, she's experiencing the consequences of those now. I don't know the it's hard for me to, see a scenario where where Trump has some big incentive to, you know, pardon her. I don't see that path. You know, maybe maybe, you know, we can get into it in a little bit, but, not a you know, doesn't doesn't seem like a very straight line.
Speaker 2:Right? There's not a you know, what because she she wants to she wants to apply the Ross Ulbrich playbook. But to understand the Ross Ulbrich playbook, you have to understand that every single libertarian, you know, maximalist was backing Ross for years and years and years with huge amounts of resources and active boots on the ground in Washington. And,
Speaker 1:you
Speaker 2:know, it it was not a, you know, it was a basically, when did when did Ross actually get convicted and go to prison? I mean He
Speaker 1:was in prison for ten years, essentially. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's like So so she'd
Speaker 1:be out by the time that playbook ran through.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So even if she had that type of backing, it might still take a decade, and then she'd be out anyway. So, I think that, she seems to be very motivated by the spotlight. I know that that she's already working on, it's either a series or a movie, like a nondocumentary, like a sort of drama on the situation. Which will be She is.
Speaker 2:She is. She is.
Speaker 1:How is she involved? She's a business.
Speaker 2:No. I'm just saying she's, like, approved it, and she's
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Like, sold life rights or something. Interesting.
Speaker 2:Doc the main documentary was so was so bad that, you know, there's a scenario where if she does it actually more semi you know, a drama sort of fictionalized
Speaker 1:Yeah. A little,
Speaker 2:it would come out, better.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a million ways that the Theranos story could have gone differently. Obviously, using the tier one venture funds as a true gating mechanic or the biotech funds as a gating mechanic. And, there's often this time this happens a lot with founders where they get turned down by all the best VCs in their industry, and they say, I'm built different.
Speaker 1:I still need to go raise a ton of money. And then they raise from unsophisticated investors, and then the business plan doesn't work out. And it turns out that the tier ones actually saw something, a flaw in the business model that would only be realized later. Now sometimes, you know, tier ones turn down and you go and you build your own thing and and and everything works out perfectly.
Speaker 2:No. We talked we talked about this, you know, with with OpenAI. Right? A lot of people turn down OpenAI because they're like
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:This is, like, the most weird rationalist, you know, you know, nonprofit. You know? If we can't make this work, we like the team, we like the vision, but this model doesn't work for us. Yeah. In this situation, it was more so on the, like, actual diligence side.
Speaker 2:So, you know, people love to to, talk poorly about VCs for lacking, doing proper diligence on opportunities. But in this case, I really do think it was, hey. This this woman is clearly compelling. Stanford drop out, highly motivated. She she clearly is very talented at fundraising.
Speaker 2:But, ultimately, people are like, like, I wanna believe that this is possible, but everyone is telling us. You know, people have been I think this is one of those things, like, people the entire medical industry, you know, health care industry would have been incentivized to make this tech work for decades. Right? And and there's probably been, you know, thousands of studies and and experiments to attempt to make this possible. And so I I'm imagining people looked at this and said, hey.
Speaker 2:You know, this has actually been tried before, and that's ultimately oftentimes why VCs pass. Right? I I was looking at a company yesterday with a buddy. I'm like, look. Like, here's here's a very clear example of, like, a better iteration of this idea and a and a more stacked team with more funding, and it didn't work for these reasons.
Speaker 2:Like, you need to show me why this new team is gonna be able to do, you know, the same thing and actually make it work. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so many different ways to to build a business that looks somewhat like the mission of Theranos without, getting over your skis. You know, we're seeing this with function and superpower now where blood testing clearly is a real market, and they act as almost like wrappers on top of Quest Labs and LabCorp. Now Yeah.
Speaker 1:Those companies do seem to have some sort of, cornered resource or some sort of monopoly over the actual physical lab space. And so Yeah. No startups been really able to break in there. But I also know a guy who started a medical device company, got it approved, and it was a box that did a diagnostic, and he sold it into doctor's offices. And and and the value prop was very simple.
Speaker 1:It was if you're a doctor and you wanna test for this blood marker, normally you would have to send it out. But instead Yeah. You can buy this machine. It's expensive, but you can spend you you you can bring that CapEx internally. Maybe there's some financing there.
Speaker 1:But in general, you do that test on-site, gets you rapid results, and it's approved. And he eventually sold that company to Roche Pharmaceuticals for hundreds of millions of dollars. And it was just, like, a very, like, clean, like, by the book, like, one marker. They built the box. They sold it.
Speaker 1:It was great Yeah. Great outcome for everyone. And and Theranos clearly could have done that, or they could have wrapped they they could have started by wrapping, you know, LabCorp. If they wanted to go the consumer direction, they could have done a bunch of different things. It was clearly just that she was telling this, like, okay.
Speaker 1:We're gonna be able to do so much with so little blood. And my my my, like, hot take on this was always that so she was she was fearful of blood draws, and so she wanted to be able to do a ton of diagnostics with just one pinprick of, of, like, finger blood. But there's just not enough. And, like, kind of the laws of physics come in and and essentially break it down. It's maybe theoretically possible, but it but it's, like, clearly a massive, massive engineering challenge.
Speaker 1:And my problem was just that, I think that's a skill issue, and I think, like, you should just kinda man up and just give a bunch of blood. And every time I go in to get blood labs, I'm just like Yeah. Yeah. Take take six vials, whatever. Like, I'm fine, and it doesn't bother me.
Speaker 1:And I think building to that
Speaker 2:narrow audience
Speaker 1:of people who are fearful about giving blood is, like, may maybe maybe the wrong motivation. But it's very emotional, and so you could see a lot of investors saying, hey. I happen to be I happen to have the same thing. I don't like giving, you know, six vials of blood just to know my testosterone levels and my
Speaker 2:No. And this was this this was some of the pushback on on companies like function and superpower from investors early on is, hey. You have this cool consumer, you know, product, this consumer app that you're building, but it's dependent on getting customers to actually physically go to a lab and gives give six vials of blood. Yep. Conversion is gonna be, you know, tough on that.
Speaker 2:And the other thing for women to actually get accurate blood, biomarkers, they need to go at a specific time of the month due to their cycle. So if you go at the wrong time, then, you know, you're getting a way different hormone profile than than maybe as baseline. So, Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's also a lot of, like, over self diagnosis with a lot of these, like, blood metric companies. Like, you you you could imagine, okay, you're just testing yourself every single day and you're freaking out because, like, one day your your, you know, cholesterol is a little higher than usual, and so you're doing some crazy intervention. And you're not living a life that's, like, just in tune with yourself and kind of it's like that Wilma Nitis quote about, like, you should be able to just, like, how do you feel? You know?
Speaker 2:Right. Is that doctor doctor Bill Nitis?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Doctor Bill Nitis, the the the world renowned expert. But, there is something to that where if you if you give the patient to you can give them actually too much data, and then they become hypochondriacs, and then they freak out every time some metric slides off just slightly. And so little bit It's
Speaker 2:such an interesting it's such an interesting scenario where the all of humanity should have should have desperately wanted Theranos to work. Right? Yeah. It clearly would have just been such a fantastic innovation that would have saved, you know, countless lives and enabled, you know, much better, you know, biomarker analysis. And you could have I'm sure she was in pitch meetings like, you know, when we roll this out, we're gonna be able to increase humanity's lifespan on average by six years or something like that because we're gonna be able to do early detection for all this stuff.
Speaker 2:And, you know, now it's almost you know, over twenty years later from when she founded the company.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:If you, you know, we're still doing the same thing and the same you know, the other the other thing is is, one of the challenges with having to take so much so much blood to get, you know, this actual real analysis done is because, a, you know, labs are a snapshot of you in that exact moment. Right? So I've I've gone in and I've had I've done testing sometimes, and I'm like, wow. My testosterone is, like, falling off of a cliff. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because you just fasted or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Then I go, you know, the next the next you know, three months later, and it's and it's back up to, you know, beyond what what my expectation was.
Speaker 1:Through through through the physiological levels here at 3,000.
Speaker 2:And so so, yeah, it's it's it's, a very sad situation where, you know, FTX going away didn't really impact anything other than, you know, cause customer damage.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But and you could argue, like, there's people that were rooting for it to fail because they were saying, oh, we only have five engineers and, you know, we're, you know, worth $40,000,000,000. You remember they, like that was part of the FTX narrative is they were like, we have no we have basically no our technical team is, like, five people.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:And, in the opposite situation with Theranos, it's like, everybody should wish that this worked. And Yeah. I would hope that somebody pulls this off, and whoever eventually does this Yeah. Will be an absolute legend.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I just think it'll be a much more iterative approach. It'll be okay.
Speaker 2:One Yeah.
Speaker 1:We made yeah. Yeah. We made the big aluminum machine a little bit smaller. And then it went from, you know, the lab, like, warehouse, like, facility into the doctor's office. And then eventually, it be it it it goes in the trunk of a car that a phlebotomist can come to your house and do a draw and and turn around really quickly.
Speaker 1:And then eventually, yeah, it's like the size of a toaster and you can get it, but you gotta iterate through those jumping straight from, you know, a pint of blood or something or to, just one one drop. Clearly, like, a very, bold ambition, like, great visual pitch, but Yeah. Unfortunately, just too much from a science and and engineering perspective. Let's keep reading her her interview. Holmes is still processing the downfall that wiped away her entire fortune, and she considers her trial and conviction a San Jose in a San Jose courtroom in 2022 to be a miscarriage of justice.
Speaker 1:First, it was about accepting it happened, says Holmes about her relationship with Balwani. Then it was about forgiving myself for my own part, and I refused to plead guilty to crimes I did not commit. Theranos failed, but failure is not fraud. On the stand, doctors and patients testified that blood tests Holmes developed and marketed were a healthcare scam. One woman claimed the test results showed she had a miscarriage when she was actually pregnant.
Speaker 1:Another patient told was told he might have prostate cancer when he didn't. A third received a false HIV diagnosis. And this is where the the rubber meets the road with the Theranos, like, harm that the that that that they that they can fast and break things ideology. Like like, you know, if you're building a social app or an NFT project, like, people could lose money. People could, you know, have, you know, some weird thing happen on the Internet.
Speaker 1:The app doesn't work or whatever. You're chat GPT. You get some hallucinated response. But this is, like, real impact on health and wellness.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, to just just giving her the benefit you know, it's a little credit. Misdiagnosis happens every single day. Right? I'm sure there's millions.
Speaker 2:It's just in The US, you know, maybe not millions, but could be something like there's 300,000, you know, misdiagnosed patients per day in America or or whatever. Just spitballing. Right? But these they they were have these kind of things happen at a much lower rate than, her product, which which was so unreliable. It was unethical to let patients in a in life or death scenarios.
Speaker 2:Right? This guy, thinks he he might have prostate cancer
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Based on the results of this. Yep. And, yeah, it's just it's it's doing emotional damage, right, telling this woman in this situation that she had a miscarriage when, when she didn't. That's, like, incredibly, you know, damaging to to a woman's psyche. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And, again, it just never should have actually gotten to the point where it was in production. Right? Yeah. Like, this was a, you know, this and so there there's very clear. And, again, you know, she's putting her spin on this.
Speaker 2:People is not gonna put her in the truth zone so much, but, we we have to do our part.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. There was another element of it where, you'd go in to do, like, the Theranos pinprick test, but then they would actually just do a normal blood draw and send it out to Quest Labs, which was a little fraudulent. But I think that there was a way that they could have done that in a very positive way in the same way that, you know, you go into one of those Amazon stores and they say it's all AI, but they still have people monitoring the cameras. You're in a Waymo.
Speaker 1:There's a human watching over, and they can take over the feed if they need to. If they get confused, oh, there's a cone that they don't understand. Human can step in. Human intervention and intervening with a with a more robust system on its face does if you're upfront about it, doesn't seem like a problem to me. It would have been fine if I went in and said, hey.
Speaker 1:I wanna get a blood draw from Theranos. And they're hey. We're still working on the pinprick thing. We're gonna do that one. But then we're also gonna do one with Quest
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and the gold standard just to make sure that we don't make any mistakes here. That could have been great for the brand, actually.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's it's one of those things if they rolled it out as as a more of a trial and said, hey. You're gonna go to Walgreens or CVS, and you're gonna get your regular blood test, and we are also going to do a prick. And you're enrolling in that, and you're not relying on that for for health care. We got a question in the chat from the Chrome.
Speaker 2:He says, do you think that Theranos ordeal increase the amount of due diligence happening generally in biotech? And I would I would argue, like, probably not. I think I I think the the actual, you know, traditional deep tech biotech investors in the valley Yeah. Like, almost unilaterally passed on the company because of their due diligence. And I think in many cases, they probably didn't even have to do that much.
Speaker 2:Right? You call up a single. She also was was nontechnical. Yep. So, having, you know, this sort of, very, you know, a nontechnical founder promising that she's gonna do something that, that the experts or other, you know, medical device manufacturers and and scientists have been trying to do for decades and been unable to.
Speaker 2:And she says, well, if you just give me, like, billions of dollars, I'll you know, we're gonna actually do it. You know? Or or, you know, I'm sure in in some of these pitch meetings, she's like, yeah. Internal testing shows that we're one to one with, you know, with traditional, you know, blood testing. Right?
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, there's a big question here about who was really driving the the aggression at the company, her or Sunny Balwani. And during her case, she her defense attorney, made the, what's it called, the Spingali defense, saying that he kind of pushed her to create this narrative and and perpetrate this fraud.
Speaker 2:Wait. Tiger did?
Speaker 1:Tiger. What?
Speaker 2:That that was that was her, nickname.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Tiger. And so, I I I don't know. It's it's an open question. Sonny has not done any interviews, but we gotta hear his side of the case. But, when when I look at, like, college dropout first time entrepreneur, I see that it's very easy for an investor or more senior person to go to them and say, hey.
Speaker 1:Look. It's, like like, actually, Steve Jobs faked it till he made it, and it's okay to push the envelope a little bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's okay. The the end product for Theranos is not the device
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:Which they made. Yep. It is the results.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:The the tiger thing I'll I'll read out this quote quickly because this was one of the most iconic exchanges that that, you know, emerged, during the legal process. This was a text message between Holmes and Sunny Balwani. It said, Holmes, or she's saying this, you're you're the breeze in the desert for me, my water, and ocean meant to be only together, tiger. And Balwani replies, okay. So he was he was clearly locked in at least in that moment.
Speaker 1:But So she was actually acquitted of fraud related to charges of the patient, results, but she was convicted, of fraud, financial fraud. And so this came down more to her represent her representation of the progress the company was making to investors. Her prison sentence was postponed because of the pregnancy. And although the start of her prison sentence was postponed, Holmes says she was still wasn't mentally prepared to serve time as a mother with two babies. She gave birth to her first child, William, just weeks after her before her fraud trial began.
Speaker 1:Evans, whom she met at a rooftop charity event in October of twenty seventeen during the Theranos scandal, presented a silver snake ring bought at a Taylor Swift Reputation Tour concert when he proposed to her a year later. Together, they decided to start a family despite the legal jeopardy that Holmes was soon to face. I asked him 20 times if he wanted to spend his life with me, she recalls. There were a million reasons why not. Although Evans is an heir to the Evans Hotel Group, his family has not contributed to Holmes' legal defense.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so out of the the Evans family is based in Southern California and the San Diego area and is very, very, very widely, you know, respected and and, very, you know, big part of the community down there. So I think that the entire, you know, debacle was was very, you know, stressful in many ways given given, the son's relationship with with Elizabeth, which clearly they they didn't, you know, fully support if they weren't, you know, putting up resources to to help with the process.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The timeline here is just crazy. I mean, 2017 is where the scandal goes down. I remember this breaking. John Carreyrou at the Wall Street Journal broke the story, and it looked bad immediately.
Speaker 1:I actually remember when I got to Silicon Valley, my cofounder David was a biotech, PhD, Caltech, and and Harvard guy. And and I was like, wait. Like, why aren't we using any of your skills? Like, we I I can develop software. We're in, you know, Y Combinator, loosely, like, we're in the Silicon Valley area.
Speaker 1:We should do, like, a blood testing company because you know about, like, blood testing. And then we looked it up and we're like, oh, there's already this company that's, like, ripping. Like, we we we shouldn't compete with them. Isn't that funny?
Speaker 2:It's great. Wow.
Speaker 1:I was like, yeah. We should do some biotech thing because, like, you have a great pedigree here. We're really not using you. You know, like, you're learn you're learning all this business stuff from scratch.
Speaker 2:I always forget that David is just the ultimate PhD Chad. Yeah. Yeah. He's just like you know, he's just chatting out, but, you know, in a more traditional manner.
Speaker 1:But but but he he was like, yeah. It's like impossible. Like, there there's no opportunity there. Like, it's it's not it's not gonna happen. And I was like, oh, interesting.
Speaker 1:Like, you know, it seems like they're doing well. Like, they're raising money. And he's like, doesn't matter. Like, it's it's the science is real. Like, he clocked it in And that's
Speaker 2:why that's why usually, you know, even Sequoia wrote a big check-in FTX. Right? Because you could use like, yeah. There were questions about Sam, the idea of, you know, if you wouldn't want Brian Armstrong owning Coinbase and, like, actively running a billion dollar hedge fund and trading against the users constantly. Like, there's some obvious sort of ethical reasons why, you know, maybe, s s, SPF, you know, shouldn't have been doing that, you know, even prior to to the other issues that happened.
Speaker 2:But, but at least in the FTX situation, there were happy FTX users. There were you know, you could you could, you know, at least demo the product and say, okay. This is, like, this is a real thing. And and so that in in in some in some ways, I'm sure contributed to a bunch of the best Silicon Valley Investors and crypto investors piling in capital into that company. But that just didn't happen.
Speaker 2:Like, the the the funny thing is, like, Rupert Murdoch is, like, very influential, connected, huge access to resources. But if he is seeing a biotech deal, it's it's very bearish. Right? And he, at the time, should have been asking himself, why did the entire West Coast and fund managers representing billions of dollars of capital, you know, pass on this company? And, like, why am I getting the opportunity?
Speaker 2:But I'm sure it was his ego being like, yeah. Of course, I would invest in the next Yeah. You know, the apple of health care. Right? It just makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. Yeah. It it's it's also, like I mean, even the tier one Silicon Valley, like, tech VCs are not the go to shops for biotech growth fundraising. Like, are you familiar with the flagship pioneering model?
Speaker 1:I mean, they've just had, like, banger after banger. Basically, they they have almost like an incubation model. So, typically, it's like some PhD professor level, like, twenty years of research in a particular molecule or particular technique, CRISPR or some sort of really fundamental analysis that's, like, almost Nobel Prize level. And then they take that person, and they immediately pair them with, like, world class CEO, MBA type, and then they put a ton of funding behind it. They IPO the company.
Speaker 1:Moderna went through this with Stephane Bancel. It was a spin out, and I think Flagship did the deal and, and took that company. They were actually called the the next Theranos because they were very secretive. And the CEO was saying that they're gonna cure cancer and create, like, a vaccine for cancer, was giving TED Talks. And everyone was like, what's going on here?
Speaker 1:This company hasn't produced anything. And then the COVID vaccines, happened, which are obviously controversial, but, the stock ripped. And it was, like, a fantastic investment for Flagship. Yeah. And they did very well.
Speaker 1:It's funny that, I don't know what how prison works these days, but then if you go to the the second slide here, there's a photo of Elizabeth Holmes, her, partner, Billy Evans, and their two children on a beach in La Jolla. And I didn't know you could just go out and do photoshoots on the beach. Like, it's pretty pretty nice that you get to get out and
Speaker 2:Oh, so that was for the New York Times. So that had to have been during the
Speaker 1:Oh, like, right before she went in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That must be They don't they don't let they don't let prisoners convict.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. And so, yeah. When when
Speaker 2:Can you imagine that exchange? She's talking with, you know, whoever
Speaker 1:I don't know how it works, honestly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, like, you don't understand. It's People magazine.
Speaker 1:It's People magazine. I get
Speaker 2:an opportunity to for profile on People magazine. Like, you gotta let me out. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so the People magazine does a good job of telling the the condition that she's in while home shivers from the frigid air conditioning and picks the nuts out of a bag of trail mix. She says she has settled into the dormitory style prison's routine. Each morning, she wakes up just after 5AM on the grind, Jocko Willink style, eats fruit for breakfast and then does a forty minute daily workout lifting weights, rowing, and running on a track. She's grinding.
Speaker 2:Grinding.
Speaker 1:I like it. Get back in the, by 8AM, she's at the Education Building earning 31¢ an hour as a reentry clerk, helping women slated for release write resumes and prepare, to apply for tax credits and other government benefits. I bet she's pretty good at that. She also teaches French classes. Pretty Can
Speaker 2:you imagine if she spent a decade just just deep in the science James Cameron style?
Speaker 1:I would a % agree, and I want that to happen. Like, if she's the real deal, publish some research, publish some blog posts, even just give us, you know, your take on the latest science. Like, break down CRISPR. Like, study this stuff and show us that you're the real deal and that you actually understand the science, and you'll win me over. But as long as you're, you know, just talking out the personal side, it's like, it's a lot harder to take you seriously as, hey.
Speaker 1:Yes. You were you were really, a student of Yeah. The of the craft that you were building in, and you just got over your skis. It's like, did you ever understand the science? Because if you did, you should double down on that and come out with a banger thesis based on a ton of research.
Speaker 1:Find something that's undiscovered in in the scientific research, and, drop a bomb on us, Elizabeth. I'm I'm ready. I'm I'm listening. So many of these women don't have anyone, and once they're in here, they're forgotten between roll calls five times a day. Holmes also works as a law clerk, helping women secure compassionate release in the for for their court cases.
Speaker 1:Holmes says she was, was raped at a college fraternity party and testified at her Theranos trial that she had been sexually abused and manipulated by her co defendant Balwani. This is the, this is the, the Spangali defense that he was manipulating her, and you can kinda see that in the text messages. Sympathetic case. She claimed he controlled everything from the food she ate to her daily schedule and kept her away from her family. Kind of a, I don't know, like some cult situation.
Speaker 1:I wish that I left. I wish I had seen the abuse or I understood it and why I didn't, and I'm finding peace with all that. If I can break, it can break a lot of people, and I was able to rise through it as best I can. Balwani's lawyer did not respond for a request for comment. Once a week, Holmes attends cognitive and behavioral behavioral therapy for PTSD.
Speaker 1:She also counsels inmates who are survivors, and it helps her find meaning in her incarceration. Human beings are not made to be cells. It goes so far beyond understanding. I'm trying really hard not to tear up right now. I'm trying to grow as every moment matters.
Speaker 1:And if one person's life can be touched, trying to help them in a crisis, it matters. She's on a largely vegan diet. Although, she has added salmon and tuna after becoming anemic in her first year in prison. Yeah. It'd be rough to be in, she's reading a lot.
Speaker 1:She read Harry Potter, Rick Rubin's The Creative Act, and, Cherry Hubert's
Speaker 2:Is it somewhat surprising that that they have salmon in a prison like this?
Speaker 1:Why? I don't know. That doesn't seem that crazy.
Speaker 2:I don't know. It's just
Speaker 1:You gotta get protein from someone.
Speaker 2:Certainly not certainly not the least expensive, you know, fish that you get. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:Oh, well. Well, she's scheduled for release in 04/03/2032. She'll be on the show April 4, hopefully. We'd love to interview her and see what she's cooking up in the biotech world next. Maybe someone will acquire the Theranos IP I
Speaker 2:mean with it.
Speaker 1:What's your last take before we close out?
Speaker 2:I'm very confident that we could do a we could do a Holmes prison interview episode, if it ever made sense, but we'd like to see, we'd like to see the research first. We'd like to look at, you know, the data. We'd like to see I think it's awesome that she's trying to help, you know, help people from within the walls, but we wanna see the science.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I wanna put her in the ring with a couple biotech PhDs, quiz her on a bunch of stuff, pop quiz, how does CRISPR work, you know, see if she ever cared. If she Yeah. If she gives some good answers, I'm willing to And
Speaker 2:she's saying that
Speaker 1:Willing to forget.
Speaker 2:She's saying that, she's gonna when she gets out, she's gonna fight for reform of the criminal justice system.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:She recently drafted an American Freedom Act bill, a seven page handwritten document to bolster the presumption of innocence and change criminal procedure. This will be my life's work as home. So it sounds like she's gonna abandon biotech and and focus on this. And maybe, you know, maybe she can have a positive, you know, real positive impact there. So, again, everybody, everybody's doing their best.
Speaker 2:Sometimes their best is terrible, but, you know, hopefully hopefully, she can hit a good trajectory.
Speaker 1:It is a fascinating story, though. It's captivating. I I see why they made a show out of it. I see why they're making movies out of it. It is wild.
Speaker 1:Well, let's move on to some good news. Hadrian has announced Atlas. Zane, a good friend of the show says, I've said it before and I'll say it again, Domino's pizza tracker, but for manufactured parts. Probably why the difference in pay. And he shows the Domino's pizza tracker.
Speaker 1:He wants to know if he's manufacturing a part, when is he gonna receive it? Where is it in the manufacturing pipeline? Hadrian delivered. If you can track a $15 pizza in real time, why not your $15,000 machined part? We fixed that.
Speaker 1:And so, if you're a Hadrian customer, now you have access to Atlas. You can track all the parts that you're, that they're making for you and see where they are in the pipeline. We're good friends with Chris and Hadrian and, wish him the best with this project. You got any takes, Jordy?
Speaker 2:I mean, it's very cool. There's just so much. If you've ever, you know, got anything manufactured anywhere, it's just a lot of email and PDFs and, you know, calling calling people up and saying, where's where is this thing? You know, and so it, makes a ton of sense. It's it's cool that Hadrian that this wasn't actually the problem they were trying to solve.
Speaker 2:Like, they're trying to solve sort of the more base level. Like, let's just make these things, faster, better, cheaper here in The US. But, it's great that now that they've sort of established that, they can start layering on these features that are gonna make it, you know, world where why would I order, you know, this part with somebody else when, you know, I can get it and have, like, linear visibility into how it's getting made, the timeline, and things like that. So very cool to see. And this is, like, going into more of this, like, vertical, like, these sort of verticalized businesses that are doing the the production, and they're not saying, oh, we're just gonna use this random, you know, order management SaaS app that we bolt on, or we're gonna use Salesforce.
Speaker 2:We're gonna actually own the entire stack from the actual part being manufactured to the delivery to the end, end, purchaser. So Yeah. Very cool to see.
Speaker 1:And It's like YouTuber.
Speaker 2:Chris has just been Chris has just been such a legend in his support for the show. I've never met him personally, but, he's absolutely, exemplifies brother behavior, so I'd love to see Hadrian win. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I saw a a screenshot from a YouTuber who, is one of those, like, builder DIY hacker types that builds, like, physical, like, kinda gadgets. Like, oh, I built a robot to, you know, make pizza or whatever. It's just like fun little YouTube, projects, for the kind of mechanical engineering folks. And, she tried to get a part made. She contacted five manufacturers in China, Five manufacturers in America, Five manufacturers in Europe.
Speaker 1:No one in Europe even responded. There were, like, three quotes that came back from America, and they were all too expensive and too slow. And every single person in China gave them a super low gave her a super low quote in two seconds. And it was just kind of like another anecdote of how important what Hadrian is doing is Yeah. To America and the fact that we really have fallen behind on, like, the machine shops.
Speaker 1:If you don't have a standing relationship with a guy Yeah. Who just knows how to make that part and they might be retiring, you're gonna have a rough go. But let's stay on Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's something that's something that, you know, we we we throw a little bit of shade at the CCP from time to time. But, one, you know, looking at the actual culture on the ground in China, this idea around response rate matters, timeline matters, speed, their generalized, you know, sort of startup and just, like, business culture over there is just so, friendly to customers and that let's get this to you as as, cheap as possible, as fast as possible. And, you know, they make really high quality stuff. Right? The whole narrative that Chinese products are are are low quality is just no longer the case.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's all it's all over the place. I mean, Timu, obviously, lowest quality product possible. Did did I tell you we got duped by Timu?
Speaker 1:Right after we did the deep dive, they must have been listening because I ordered a, a wireless headset that I'm wearing right now on Amazon. And Yeah. It arrived, and it's a Sennheiser product. It said Sennheiser. I bought it.
Speaker 1:We get it. We try and set it up, and we're like, this isn't working. It doesn't have the right buttons. It doesn't even say Sennheiser on it. What had happened is someone, I guess, the scam is they buy the product.
Speaker 1:They swap out swap in like a Timoo clone, and then they return it, And then it goes back into the Amazon inventory system. And then we receive it, and we're like, this doesn't work. And so I wound up just buying it on b and h, and it came a couple days ago.
Speaker 2:That's crazy.
Speaker 1:But very well there.
Speaker 2:Any anytime I return, something, you know, an Amazon purchase, you can, like, drop them off at a Whole Foods or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 2:I'm always shocked at the lack of, you know, emphasis from the team on just saying, you know, I'm always returning, like, exactly what I ordered, but they're you know, I could have just put, like, a horse head in the box, and they would accepted it. It's kind of so it's customer friendly, which is cool, but, yeah, you can definitely be abused.
Speaker 1:Well, let's go to Ted Feldman. He has a startup idea, the Port Of El Segundo, a fully automated container port to compete with inefficient ports of LA and Long Beach. He's raising a billion at 10,000,000,000 post. Let's give him a little size gong for that. Why agent Aidan goes Guo says, why isn't this feasible realistically?
Speaker 1:Ted says, I don't know, but I'm interested in finding out. I would be interested in finding out. Yeah. I mean, if you've been to Dock Wyler, the beach right there, it's just in front of this, sewage treatment plant. And so it's not like if you built a port there, you would be destroying the value of homes that have beautiful views.
Speaker 1:Like, the sewage treatment plant or the as a water treatment plant doesn't really care probably about that.
Speaker 2:So I
Speaker 1:would love to see a port built there. I think that's an awesome idea, Ted, and good luck.
Speaker 2:So one of the pushback that some of the pushback that you're gonna get is the entire surfing community in El Segundo will come out in full force
Speaker 1:to Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:To make sure it doesn't happen and, you know, obviously, you know, environmental stuff. Stuff. But this actually happened before they added a, Dana White. Not Dana White. Dana Pointe.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Always UFC always on the mind. Yeah. Dana Pointe used to have the best surf break in Southern California. It was this iconic break, and they put a port in in Dana Point, and it just went was gone completely. And so, you can watch crazy documentaries on on the whole history of that.
Speaker 2:But surfers are very triggered anytime you start doing sort of, like, actual infrastructure development near surf spots. And and I grew up actually surfing, in El Segundo at El Porto, which is just south of of, Yeah. Dockweiler.
Speaker 1:Why not do more geoengineering? Let's let's put a port in that takes a break away, and then let's dig out a massive trench that Yeah. Creates a Nazarene like hundred foot wave right off of Santa Monica.
Speaker 2:They're here. You're here.
Speaker 1:Big wave surfing.
Speaker 2:You can actually create waves by sinking boats strategically. And so maybe you could do a trade where, hey. You can build the port, but you have to, sink some aircraft carrier.
Speaker 1:Aircraft carrier that just completely changes the the surf break and just turns it into the best
Speaker 2:surf spot.
Speaker 1:I love that.
Speaker 2:In in high school, I worked at a surf shop, and we were actually trying to, at one point, explore, like, intentionally sinking a boat, like, at this one place that was got really good swell. It had the right wind direction. Yeah. But just didn't have the sandbags. And so we've, like, seriously looked into it in the economics of, like, okay.
Speaker 2:If we get Yeah. You know, 50 of our buddies to, like, chip in for an old boat and then, like, take it out there and sink it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, a a lot of these things have, like, second order consequences that you need to be really careful about. Like, in Dubai, when they built those islands, I think there was a lot of silt and it basically kicked up a ton of sand and killed, like, everything in the region, basically. And it kinda ruined scuba diving for a little bit, maybe. But at the same time, in, Truck Lagoon in Palau, in Micronesia during World War two, the Japanese had
Speaker 2:When you said when you said Truck Lagoon in Palau, I was just like, are you just completely making stuff No.
Speaker 1:No. No. This is a real story. So Yeah. The so the Japanese had, a whole fleet of fighter aircraft, Zeros that were stationed on this island, towards the end of World War two and the war in the Pacific.
Speaker 1:And they had intel that the Americans were gonna come and bomb the landing strip and blow up all the planes because the American bombers had detected that these planes were vulnerable. And so Yeah. The team, like, the the the Japanese army or the air force, didn't wanna lose all the planes. They said, hey. If we lose a landing strip, we can repave that potentially, but we don't wanna lose all these planes and have to remanufacture them.
Speaker 1:So what they did was they took all the planes, and they sunk them to the bottom of this shallow lagoon. And they were like, they'll get all wet for a day or two. The bombs will come, we'll repave, and then we'll be able to just crane the the, we'll crane the the the planes out, dry them out, and then we'll need to clean them and stuff, and get out all the water out of the engine, oil change, but then they'll be good to go, and we'll be able to go on the counter attack. Right? But the war ended, and so those planes were never, like, retrieved.
Speaker 1:Wow. But it's created this incredible artificial reef that has created a ton of fish life, and it's one of the best, scuba diving spots in the entire world.
Speaker 2:Crazy. Yeah. And so that's one of
Speaker 1:the examples where, like, the second order effects of this mistake actually were pretty good. I mean, I'm sure there are some environmental considerations. Like, there's probably some oil in the water for a little bit, but now it's just Yeah. Fantastic for basically everyone. The scuba divers enjoy it.
Speaker 1:The fish enjoy it. Everyone's good.
Speaker 2:I would not think that you could I mean, I don't think you could drop an f 35 in in in salt water for for more than, you know, ten minutes without just completely destroying it at this point. I mean,
Speaker 1:the electronics are a different factor now.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Back then, very analog. And so you dry it out, and you're pretty much good as long as the the oil lines are good and everything's the pistons are cleaned out and stuff. It's crazy. You could do this.
Speaker 2:But first Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean
Speaker 2:the first flight back in a in a plane that had been submerged in saltwater for, you know, forty eight hours would have been a little hectic. But
Speaker 1:Yeah. A lot of those guys were willing to put it all in the line anyway. So, you know, what what's a little Kamakazi.
Speaker 2:Kamikaze.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's move on to Anarki, fan of the show. Anarki says, is, quote tweeting, six levels deep here. We got consequence. Fifteen out of twenty three monkeys implanted with Elon Musk's Neuralink brain chips have reportedly died. Broly says, why must I, a STEM major, take an ethics class, terminally online leftist, says Evergreen, and Anarki closes it out by saying, that's why we test on monkeys, LMAO.
Speaker 1:Update, it has been brought to my attention that the monkeys were already terminally diagnosed. So perhaps eight monkeys had their lives extended, and this has been one of those narratives that's been going around with with, with, Neuralink for a long time. And the Neuralink team actually is goes way, way above what most research clinics do in terms of, like, monkey safety because they know that they're gonna be such an attack vector. But Yeah. It's just such an emotional story that it goes viral, like, every week, basically.
Speaker 1:Like, oh, they're abusing monkeys. But, fortunately, the monkeys live very good lives at over at Neuralink. And they, and they get to use MacBooks, which is crazy. Yeah. I was talking to one of the Neuralink guys, and he was just like, it's the best place to work in the world because you walk in and there's just a monkey on the computer.
Speaker 1:And I was like, yeah. That sounds amazing.
Speaker 2:We should we should really try to get one of them on the show, at some point.
Speaker 1:Play Pong against them? See Yeah. See who can win.
Speaker 2:They're probably they're probably cracked at
Speaker 1:I mean, we can get Nathan on the show. I I've I've texted with him before. He's a good dude. He's the first Neuralink patient, p one, pair paraplegic, quadriplegic. I'm not exactly sure the term, but, has been regifted this ability to use the computer and can tweet and play civilization and, play games.
Speaker 1:And it's, it's truly like a magical, wonderful, technology. And I'm I'm I'm very excited for it. And, obviously, it's gonna be slow. Obviously, there's gonna be a lot of things to do. I mean, the Neuralink team, when I've talked to them, they said, like, yeah.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be, like, fifty years maybe until this is in, like, you know, an average person who's healthy. But, in terms of in terms of seeing it as a true medical device for helping people that have a serious, serious disability, the impact's already happening right now. And, I'm I'm I'm I'm it just makes me it just feels incredibly futuristic, incredibly positive, and Yeah. Something that, needs to be rolled out everywhere. Well, let's go to some other amazing news.
Speaker 1:America is back on top of
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 1:The lap records at five different, courses. The Chevrolet ZR one, unleashed, was unleashed on five of America's best tracks, Road America, Road Atlanta, VIR's full course and grand course, and Watkins Glen with GM employees and engineers behind the wheel. I love this. They don't get test drivers. They get GM employees.
Speaker 1:The guy who broke those speed record Yeah.
Speaker 2:I gotta I gotta potentially
Speaker 1:put it True zone there?
Speaker 2:That they can employ.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Of course. Of course. But but the guy who did the speed record in this car so, if you don't know, Chevrolet, the, the the, the Corvette has been a historical American front engine muscle car for generations at this point, decades. They're now on the the, Zio, the sorry.
Speaker 1:The c eight, the c eight transition from a front engine to a mid engine or rear engine, I think mid engine sports car. So it drives more like a Italian Ferrari or or Lamborghini at this point. And then they have a number of packages and upgrades. And the z r one, you can think of it as like the GT three RS, like, almost the track focused, but still road legal version of the Corvette, c eight. And so, the c the c eight, they really went all out on this.
Speaker 1:They gave it over a thousand horsepower. And, typically, for a long time, American cars, just car just carmakers in general have kind of given up on the on the high speed records. They just don't even go after them anymore because Bugatti set the record so high at, like, two fifty miles an hour. There was no real point, but, Corvette wanted to and the team over at Chevrolet wanted to break something, so they made the fastest American production car. I think this z r one goes, something like 223 miles an hour.
Speaker 1:And that test, you have to drive straight on a on a track, and then you have to drive the opposite way so the wind is adjusted for. And the guy who did it was, like, a vice president at the company. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I'm sure he's, like, a track driver. He's, like, very experienced.
Speaker 1:But he does have a daytime job at Chevrolet, and it's very cool to see them do this. Some of the lap records are, incredible and fantastic, and they made a whole little documentary about it. So congratulations to the Corvette team and the Chevrolet team. Jordy, what's your take on the on the Chevy z r one?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think so I think we need to put this in context. Please. They, were basically rent racing against time set by the GT three RS Yeah. And the GT two RS and maybe a GT four RS.
Speaker 2:But that's for sure the GT three and the GT two. So these are tracks that Porsche has historically been absolutely dominant on. And so to come out and put up these times is, just incredible. I I've never been never been an American muscle car guy. You you have a a more, meaningful appreciation for them, but, but I but I I'm very excited that to see American, you know, manufacturer competitive here and putting this emphasis on a car that will basically be in the supercar category.
Speaker 2:It's it's it's hard to call a, you know, one of, yeah, a z r one, a, a supercar, for me. But it certainly is when you're putting up numbers like this. But but at the same
Speaker 1:time 200 k. And, yeah, I mean, America has a long history with the muscle car, but I think America's kind of locked that up in the sense that you have Mustang, g t Yeah. GT three fifty r, the GT 500. You also have the Dodge Demon, which is like the ultimate muscle car. And then even a Tesla model s Plaid, it's not a track focused car, but it goes zero to 60 in two seconds.
Speaker 1:So it's, again, kind of an American muscle car. I love Yeah. That Chevy was like, hey. Let's go a different direction and try and get into the more, rear engine sports car, hypercar, supercar market, and reposition this classic muscle car because there's enough exposure in the American market. And so I I think it's really cool.
Speaker 1:I think it looks fantastic.
Speaker 2:Thing is is the z r one is basically less than half the cost of the cars that it's racing against. And so you're making this ridiculous performance accessible,
Speaker 1:which is awesome. Yeah. I love it.
Speaker 2:A great great daily, great commuter car
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Wherever you are in the world. Yeah. It's And,
Speaker 1:I mean, if you're
Speaker 2:if you're an
Speaker 1:American dynamism investor, you're trying to tell a story about revitalizing American manufacturing, you don't wanna get caught in some Italian or British or German.
Speaker 2:Is this American made? Some of their stuff is Mexico. Right?
Speaker 1:I don't know. But it's an American company.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I think this I I think this is probably made in America. Yeah. At least modified in America. Let's move on to, Nikunj Kothari. You're right.
Speaker 2:It's, it's made in Kentucky.
Speaker 1:Made in Kentucky. Let's go.
Speaker 2:Couldn't be more American than Kentucky.
Speaker 1:I mean, the perfect three car garage right now, I think, is probably new Tesla model y for the daily. It's got the self driving, throw the kids in the back. No problem. Then you get one of these as your sports car. Take this out.
Speaker 1:Then you get the the land yacht, the Cadillac Escalade,
Speaker 2:and There you go.
Speaker 1:You're pretty good then. You got your you got your weekend car. You're, you know, you're going to the mountains. You need a big land yacht, and then you got your little daily self driving car. And that's
Speaker 2:Yeah. So you do you you build out your American stack and also stick with my German stack.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And, Yeah. You'll be at the dealership getting service every two weeks, and, I'll be driving my Escalade in the apocalypse because we got reliability on our side in in America. You know?
Speaker 1:You you you get your Ford GT. You got a problem with that. You take it down with the Ford dealership. They swap it out. Oh, this, your mirror broke?
Speaker 1:Yeah. That'll be $25. Oh, your your rearview mirror. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's the same one that's in the, yeah, it's the same one that's in the the Corolla.
Speaker 2:We gotta we gotta do do more on Ferrari. They're they're spiraling right now.
Speaker 1:There's a there's a post in here. We'll get to it in the timeline.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Cool. Let's move on to token maxing from Nikunj Kothari. I believe he just departed his, his venture firm. He says token maxing, too many founders and investors are obsessing over margins at the earliest stages instead of focusing on building the best product with series a getting harder. I get it.
Speaker 1:Everyone wants to show good margins. But right now, use as many tokens as needed to give customers confidence in your product. The cost curve on these models is dropping so fast that margins will improve automatically. What won't improve? Your chances when a second mover builds on better frontier models from day one.
Speaker 1:You can optimize your models, architecture, and prompts later. Right now, just really nail the experience and reliability. So he's not talking about crypto tokens. He's talking about AI tokens, and he's saying, you know, use the best model, spit out a ton of reasoning tokens, doesn't matter. Your margins don't matter right now.
Speaker 1:Get product market fit. Get locked in. Get established. Let your brand be known as the company that delivers on their AI product as opposed to, a company that, you know, has sub subpar results.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right now, every single sort of enterprise and consumer category in anything Gen AI related is deeply competitive. Right? It doesn't matter what you're coming up with. You either already have five well funded competitors or you are about to, basically.
Speaker 2:And so I think this is good advice. It certainly puts companies in a, you know, sort of very risk on position where you're saying, hey. We just raised this, you know, seed round, and we're basically if we wanna scale quickly, we're gonna have to spend it in the next, you know, twelve months, which is typically, like, a much tighter timeline than than people wanna see. Right? You wanna be positioned so that, it's it's never great if you're having to raise money, you know, nine to seven months before you're out of cash because it just puts this pressure on, and then you're getting to the point where even if you get a term sheet, at that term sheet stage where people wanna do the deal, you're still staring down the barrel of a gun being like, we have, you know, weeks, basically, to actually get this done and closed and and all that stuff can drag on.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 1:I wonder if companies are gonna deal with, like, degrading performance. Like, you know how there was those times when it was like, oh, like, Claude feels lazy today or, like, ChatGPT got stupider somehow. And I wonder if there's a world where you you install some product and you're like, this is magical. It's completely doing all my, like, AI SDRs or it's it's filtering my email and summarizing everything perfectly. And then once you're installed as a client, they're, like, degrading you to a lower lower inference cost, and you're like, wait a minute.
Speaker 1:Like, that email that that AI SDR sent was terrible. And they're like, well, yeah. Like, we wanted to get squeeze more margin out of you. Yeah. And so there needs to be, like, almost like an audit on the AI tools that you're using to make sure that
Speaker 2:Don't give me the dumb don't give me the dumb tokens.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and and don't don't downgrade me to the dumb tokens once you have me locked in a contract. Yeah. If I'm in for a year, I want the I want the the the o three high max capacity on every single inference.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The, the the the positive thing here, and and he calls this out, is that it's not like everybody's predicting that the token cost is gonna drop. It it already has so substantially. Yeah. DeepSeek is just another example of that where, you know, when DeepSeek launched, people are like, think about all the stuff you can do when when inference is basically free.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so it's a good bet to take right now because, again, if you, you know, focus on margins now, the product quality is lower. You're gonna get smoked by the switching costs, right now is fairly low for a lot of these tools, and people have an extreme willingness to try new tools. So Yeah. Your competitor comes out with the same, you know, core product, and, you're gonna get smoked.
Speaker 1:So let's move on to Andrew Reed. He says, Ashim from Greylock has all of his realized losses from twenty years of investing tattooed on his arm. That's sick.
Speaker 2:I need to see a picture of this. How how crazy would it be if it it's, I'm imagining it's, like, four companies, but that'd be hilarious if it was just, like, his entire arm.
Speaker 1:He's just got a massive sleeve because he's been ripping seat checks, you know, hundred checks a hundred checks a year or something. Yeah. I I I thought this might be a joke as in he's been a later stage investor. He's never he's never realized a loss. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And so he actually has no tattoos.
Speaker 2:So then
Speaker 1:Andrew's just making a joke about it, but I
Speaker 2:don't know. Yeah. So this is just a very low tan banger. Hope so. Eric Eric, Reiner says nice niche audience, but I like it.
Speaker 2:And then the other guy says or he says no ink was used in this process. So sounds like he has no no real losses, to date.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I think that's possible. Although, how can you possibly be an investor for twenty years and never realize loss? You have to be later stage. Right?
Speaker 1:Or maybe you just sell secondary, like, the savage.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's something like look look at look at Sequoia statistics. I think Yeah. That's right. Think they've I think, like, 1% of the companies they've backed have not, like, resulted in some sort of exit. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But there's still, like like, it it also, like, what's the difference in a realized loss here? Because a zero is different than a realized loss. Like, it it would be easy to be like, well, yeah, we we we sold this company. We got stock in this other company, and then that went down.
Speaker 1:And so we realized, like, a 10% loss by the time we, you know Yeah.
Speaker 2:You can get fully committed. Acquired by another private company and its majority stock.
Speaker 1:You could wind up taking that.
Speaker 2:You could make the case that we haven't realized this loss because if this other company does well, we're gonna make it all back. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Also, I mean, anything below the the the the benchmark for the market, in my opinion, is a loss. You know? If you're not beating the average, you need to tattoo that on your body. I I I don't give me, oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:This company returned 1.5 x. You're getting that tattoo for that. That's not a five x, or that's not a 10 bagger. Oh, yeah. We doubled.
Speaker 1:We doubled. Oh, yeah. Well, we're not in the game of doubling here.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Get the tattoo.
Speaker 2:Have higher standards.
Speaker 1:Yeah. High higher standards. Well, speaking of the highest standards in the game, Perplexity is working to sponsor an f one team, but they got blocked by Oracle. Kylie Robinson writes scoop. So you're hearing it here first.
Speaker 1:Perplexity has been in negotiations to sign a sponsorship deal with Red Bull Racing worth $5,000,000 a year, but after both parties had agreed to the terms, the deal was blocked by Oracle, the team's biggest sponsor, which is very interesting. Two issues that are are at the heart of the conflict. Oracle has made a bid to purchase TikTok and Perplexity as a rival bidder. Oracle is also a backer of Stargate, the $500,000,000,000 project to build data centers for OpenAI, which competes with Perplexity. It doesn't seem like Oracle and perplexity are indirect competition, but I understand how they might want to, yeah, flex their
Speaker 2:roles No. No. This is
Speaker 1:be a little I'm be a little sharp elbowed. What do you what's your take?
Speaker 2:I mean, when I when I read into this you know, when I saw this headline, great scoop. Great scoop, by the way. Great scoop. You know, we love it. We love it, tech adjacent f one story.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:I I think this is more, you know, Oracle. You know, my, OpenAI went from being, you know, betting on the Microsoft relationship, and they still have a really deep relationship. Microsoft obviously owns, a large amount of the company. I think this is more about OpenAI and perplexity being directly competitive right now that, you know, OpenAI is basically saying people are using OpenAI as, like, like, perplexity is positioned as an answer engine.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:ChatGPT also acts as an answer engine, but they just have a different knowledge cutoff. Perplexity's knowledge cutoff is, like, you know, more real time effectively. You can say, like, you can ask it about what's going on. You know? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like,
Speaker 1:what happens to you. Many of the Chachipi models have that little search button that you can turn on, and then it will search the Internet actively and give you
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Kind of up to date answers, but it's not the product isn't designed that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You're correct. So I just think this is like Sam like, the other the other factor here is, the perplexity CEO
Speaker 1:Yeah. Works Arvind.
Speaker 2:Worked at worked at OpenAI. Yeah. And Yeah. Early early OpenAI employee, chat. Feel free to fact check me on that, but, I'm pretty confident.
Speaker 2:And he clearly hates Sam. Yeah. And and so, basically, once a day, he's posting some some sort of, like, shade towards Sam and OpenAI or Yeah. You know, sharing something about the the OpenAI whistleblower. You know?
Speaker 2:He's sort
Speaker 1:of like Yeah.
Speaker 2:He's They clearly have beef. Yep. And this is not that I'm sure perplexities deal with, Red Bull, Oracle racing would have been a relatively small logo. Right?
Speaker 1:Like Yep.
Speaker 2:And and so I I have to imagine this is, like, could easily have been Larry Ellison asking Sam, hey. Do you mind if we were you know, like, hey. They want perplexity wants to sponsor Red Bull, Oracle racing, and, you know, Sam's just like, absolutely not. You know? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Totally possible.
Speaker 2:The other thing here too, to to be clear, like, perplexity integrated deep seek into the into the product into their product as well. Yep. And so that's just another reason that if Oracle's betting on Stargate and OpenAI and putting tens of billions of dollars to work with Sam Altman, they don't wanna have association with a, you know, adjacent sort of indirect direct competitor.
Speaker 1:Yep. When you said, you know, chat can correct you, I was thinking, you know, how ChatGPT owns chat.com. I feel like x should get the handle at chat, and you should be able to just tag, like, at chat is this real, and then Grok would respond and create, like so it's like sharing public Grok content, and you could just have a conversation with Grok as a participant in the x feed.
Speaker 2:I thought that'd be fun
Speaker 1:for them to do. I don't know who else chat. But I thought that would be a good, Yeah. There's little further rivalry for the two. One of them can get the.com.
Speaker 1:1 of them can get the at handle, and they can duke it out. But let's move on to, the what do we got here? This isn't working. The Effitt NVIDIA GPU belt, Hampt Hampton shares a photo of a woman wearing a GPU belt. It looks like she also has a GPU phone case and a wonderful baby Cartier Santos there as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Really, really style it in this photo, but very cool very cool to see, NVIDIA GPUs break into the fashion world. Jensen Wong, obviously, a fashion aficionado with his leather jackets, very iconic. Maybe he should come out in some NVIDIA GPU chain mail for the next for the next,
Speaker 2:chain chain.
Speaker 1:NVIDIA mail is crazy.
Speaker 2:Bulletproof bulletproof jacket made of, you know, Blackwell chips. Yeah. But if
Speaker 1:you're looking for a Valentine's Day gift, this belt isn't for sale. But, GPUpurse.com was, mentioned underneath here. There's a woman that makes purses out of GPUs. You can get a basic one for a thousand dollars, and you can get an a 100 for $64,000, something like that. I think the I think the basic GPU purse is, $1,024.10 24.
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 2:And they actually gift. They build in the cooling fan.
Speaker 1:AI investor. Yeah. The cooling fan's in there. So if you're a female, AI investor, I think you gotta have the GPU purse. Certainly makes a statement when you're out at the founders' happy hours.
Speaker 1:But let's move on to some controversy in Hollywood. The IMAX versus the standard debate. Alice Maz says, still amazed the movie companies made TVs are square, but only in theaters can you see rectangle, a slam dunk marketing strategy. And then a half a century later, somehow pulled off TVs are rectangle, but you can only see square in theaters. And it really is hilarious that they went just back and forth and back and forth here.
Speaker 1:But this image, if you're not watching the stream, it's from Dune, and it is crazy how different the IMAX version looks from the cropped version. Maybe we should shoot our show in in IMAX, and and demand that people see it in the theater. I think that'd be good.
Speaker 2:True. Coming to theaters near you.
Speaker 1:I've always been frustrated with IMAX. Like, it became this marketing term. There's actually, like, a real definition of what an IMAX theater is. It has the ability to show these square images. There's one at Universal Studios Hollywood, but then they licensed the name out.
Speaker 1:So IMAX could mean just, like, a slightly bigger screen or better audio, and it became they really muddled the brand. And when I think IMAX, I want the movie to be shot in IMAX, and then I want it to be shown in IMAX screen, and I want everything to be the full chain of production needs to be IMAX. Same thing with three d. For a long time, there were companies that would shoot the whole movie in two d, and then they'd pay people to go in and rotoscope and cut out all the different layers and make it three d after the fact as opposed to Avatar where James Cameron is literally shooting Avatar with two cameras to make it three d from start to finish. The whole movie is shot in three d, and it looks way better.
Speaker 1:And it made people hate three d because they were like, this is crappy looking.
Speaker 2:Speaking of movies, we gotta organize some, brother, you know, movie events.
Speaker 1:Ben had an idea. He texted me about this. What what did The accountant. The accountant. The accountant.
Speaker 1:Ben Affleck's The Accountant gets a sequel nine years later. The Accountant two opens in theaters April 25 after world premiering at South by Southwest. Watch the official trailer here. I think that's gonna be a great movie for for the boys.
Speaker 2:So stay tuned. Well, we can do them in a in a few cities. We can do SF, LA, New York.
Speaker 1:Go buy a bunch of tickets on Fandango. They're refundable. Then go through your text messages, text every dude who's in the same city as you. Hey. We're gonna see the accountant too.
Speaker 1:This date, this time, this location. Are you in or are you out? And then wear suit. And then, you know, you you you you'll get you know, you'll send out 20 messages. Eight guys will be in.
Speaker 1:10 will show up. You'll refund the rest of the tickets. You'll be good, and you'll have a great time. And it's way better than, being a degenerate and going and gambling on sports or drinking or winding up in the back of some limo running around, Nashville. That would be a disaster.
Speaker 1:You wouldn't wanna do that. Yeah. And so Avoid. Avoid. Well, speaking of of suits, if you're gonna wear a suit to the movie theater, you should definitely, wear what we're promoting today, Loro Piana.
Speaker 1:Crafted with an appreciation for Loro Piana's master of fibers and raw and sourced raw materials from Fiona's gardener's farm to the Maison's final garments, Pecora Nera is completely traceable throughout every step of its making. And so
Speaker 2:Yeah. So people interesting.
Speaker 1:Laura? A
Speaker 2:lot of people don't know this. You can go buy fabric from Laura Piana and then take it to your preferred tailor, and they can use that to make a suit in, you know, completely bespoke and, you know, and and customize, you know, out every element of this. So I I just did this with, Jay Muser. You can also do this, you know, John, John Theo's Fiorentino label can do this for you as well. So, you don't need to go buy, Laura Pianna ready to wear at the store to wear their fine fabric.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 1:Get the get the money counter out when you're ready to spend some money on on, Loro. Well, let's move on to this fantastic post from Naveen Rao. This is one of the funniest and most amazing posts I've seen in a long time. So this is, this is one of the cofounders or executives at Databricks, the, what, $60,000,000,000, tech tech company. He says, I have a ton of FOMO about the data AI summit we're putting on at Databricks.
Speaker 1:I will not be there since I've got my hands full with this. Super bummed, but it's gonna be an amazing event. And so he is going racing in this incredible car, and he can't make it to his own his own AI summit, which is absolutely wild.
Speaker 2:This is the only I don't wanna hear, oh, I've got some family trip or I've got
Speaker 1:Yep. You
Speaker 2:know, my cousin's wedding. I can't make it to my own conference. I wanna hear that you're, you know, you know, making a run at Le Mans, you know, and you need to be in That's
Speaker 1:what he's doing.
Speaker 2:He's doing
Speaker 1:the twenty four hours Le Mans.
Speaker 2:Oh, so this is okay.
Speaker 1:This is
Speaker 3:a Le
Speaker 1:Mans car. Yeah. Yeah. Which is insane.
Speaker 2:This this looks, right at home. They're Incredible. This thing is beautiful. I I wish they made more, you know, sort of street legal Le Mansque cars because this thing, imagine imagine driving this to the grocery store.
Speaker 1:I mean, you you just sound like someone who didn't get an Aston Martin Valkyrie allocation.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think it's a skill issue.
Speaker 2:Skill issue.
Speaker 1:If you just talk to your
Speaker 2:Aston Martin Valkyrie could've
Speaker 1:gotten the Valkyrie, and you would've looked like this pulling up to Erewhon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Valkyrie is fantastic. But I wonder, does does it say any more details on on how how this was manufactured? Or is it I
Speaker 1:have no idea. I think there are a number of teams. Yeah. We gotta have them on the show to talk about this because this is fantastic. We I posted a a a comment about what, about what makes for good way to attract VCs.
Speaker 1:I should have put, an LMP car, a Le Mans, great time, and a lot of endurance at the twenty four hours Le Mans. But I said what actually attracts VCs is, the ability to drive stick, a good Nurburgring time, to being down to do the Dakar, owning a McLaren f one, being good at drifting, a solid Pikes Peak time, funny gumball stories, being a beast in the simulator, actively being on an f one team, multiple Grand Prix wins, and, and ideally, seven f one driver's championship titles. And so Naveen is well on his way. I understand why Founders Fund, ripped into the company. I understand why so many tier one VCs have been clamoring to put their money in Databricks.
Speaker 1:With a guy like this on the team, somebody who's ready to endurance race, at Le Mans, you can't go wrong. So very bullish.
Speaker 2:Incredible.
Speaker 1:Let's move on to Dylan Patel. He says, the new OpenAI model specs allow for sexual content. As we speak, millions of third world annotators are being tasked with the kinkiest role plays. Hundreds of thousands of AI judges are being spun up to provide reinforcement learning for synthetic furries. The market opportunities are endless.
Speaker 1:And, I guess OpenAI redid their prohibitive content. They said, prohibitive content should never be produced by the assistant in any circumstance, including transformations of user provided content. To maximize freedom of our users, only sexual content, involving minors is considered prohibited. And, there's a little pushback here. Maine says, please read the next section.
Speaker 1:Sensitive content may only be generated under specific circumstances. And, in general, they don't want the model to respond with erotica. But we'll see how this plays out. And I'm sure you'll see it on the timeline because people will get the model to do all sorts of funny things and post it for for, for likes and impressions.
Speaker 2:I mean, this is the knack the natural you know, OpenAI can't let character AI just run away with all the erotica. You know? This was bound to happen at some point. People don't realize that everything that people are doing with OpenAI OpenAI will do eventually. Like, that does seem to be, the the only thing that they don't seem to wanna do is all of the reinforcement learning and offshoring and things like that.
Speaker 2:Right? So stuff that sort of, like, you know, doesn't touch the user. Right? They don't necessarily care about, you know, except, you know, data centers. But then, naturally, if they see character AI with, you know, billions of visits a year, they're going to eventually sort of move in that direction or allow the product to be used in that way.
Speaker 2:And probably smart for them to just focus on these sort of more, you know, PG consumer use cases of how to do your homework, you know, helping with homework or writing or marketing copy or things like that. But, eventually, you know, you know, they'll support, you know, seemingly everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I saw Justin Moore share some videos from TikTok of, women who had essentially jailbroken Chatt GPT to some extent to create kind of a not erotic, but just generic boyfriend or kind of a, like, a a more of a more of a personality character that they could talk to for a long time, and they were having a lot of fun with that. It'll be interesting to see where it goes. I'm sure we'll see lots of examples. But let's move on to Reggie James, good friend of the show.
Speaker 1:He says, one suggestion for Elon Musk. Freedom of speech on this site is great, but the agency around what I see is horrendous. The for you feed clearly has an agenda, and that's fine. Many for you feeds do. But two powerful features give users more agency, allow people to make their lists their default feed.
Speaker 1:You can actually do this if you use it on web, and you, install this, this thing called social focus as a as a browser add on. It kind of degrades the experience, but you can actually mute the For You feed and just use a list or just the following tab if you want. But it requires actually modifying the HTML and this plugin. It's very janky. And then he also says opening up the tuning of the For You feed in settings so users can see more of what they'd like.
Speaker 1:And, Arman says, why be in your own echo chamber when you can be an Elon's? And, yeah, the feed, it it it it it it's honestly, like, great one week and then terrible the next week. It really feels like it's all over the place. And I think that also affects, like, post performance just from tech people. Like, I I think we've certainly felt like, oh, today, like like, the post just aren't doing well.
Speaker 1:Maybe that's on us, but also maybe the algorithm
Speaker 2:changed. I get messages from people every single day being like, what's going on?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know? Am I shadow banned? Yep. You know, there's, like, this weird balance where when you're posting your if you're posting a specific type of content from a specific lens, you're acquiring followers that want that kind of content. And so if you change the content that you're putting out, your engagement's gonna drop because you need to find new people that want that kind of content.
Speaker 2:And, you know, maybe you're hopefully attracting, like, a generalist audience that's generally interested in a lot of the things that, you know, you you wanna talk about. But Yep. There's a lot of factors at play here. I think, you know, I think these two suggestions from Reggie are awesome.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:They make
Speaker 2:a lot of sense. I would like to have them. I think that the x team would look at this and say, that's great and all, but if we encourage that, we may see a 30% drop in overall user activity because there's this, again, this, sort of balance between stated preferences, which I want business content, and I want educational content, and I want stuff about AI. And then the revealed preference, which is, Montoya. Montoya.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Montoya. Yeah. Yeah. The real movie.
Speaker 1:And Reality shows. Everybody
Speaker 2:likes you know, if we put out a video that's, you know, breaking down, slow launching their new creator fund, and then, you know, the user can kinda see the next video is, like, Montoya or whatever. You know, like, freaking out. It's like, it's difficult to compete with him.
Speaker 1:You know? Exactly. Exactly. He's
Speaker 2:got the attention of the world. So Yeah. Yeah. And and and I do, you know, I feel like I was lucky to come on on the original Twitter at a time when I would see basically a % content from Yeah. Other sort of business people, investors.
Speaker 2:And maybe they would post something, like, about f one when f one is happening and you see that, but then it's just generally the feed felt more like a professionalized like, that was what I was there for.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And
Speaker 2:then now the one one challenge I've had, you know, every activity that you're doing on the app affects, you know, what you're gonna see in the for you page. I started just for banger archive when I would see, like, a a post that got, like, a 50,000 likes. I started just copy and pasting it into a, into a notes app. And I realized that I was training the algorithm to think that I really wanted that content.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Because you're saying
Speaker 2:something like that. I'm not gonna keep doing that.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:Because I don't want it to think that I just want that kinda content. Like, I'm fine with, like, one out of 20 posts being some viral slop, but I don't want it to all be that.
Speaker 1:I also noticed that I think the algorithm, it it it sorts everything and ranks everything, but eventually, it runs out of, like, tech content. And so what I'll notice is, like, if I haven't been on for a while, I load up the feed. It's actually really high quality good stuff from tech and business people that I really want to engage with. And then as I scroll down after a while, I run out of that, and there's just not that much more content. And then it'll be like, well, like, why don't we just show you, like, this, you know, politically enraging thing or this sports thing or this viral moment or this, reality TV drama.
Speaker 1:And it's You did it. So much that it's like yeah. It's like it's not really like you want this the most. The algorithm is just like, hey. This is the best thing I got for you right now because you ran out of tech content.
Speaker 1:That that is perfect.
Speaker 2:When I was 22, I distinctly remember running out of new content on
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Twitter, which is basically the cardinal sin of a social media app. Totally. Yeah. Your user wants to be using the app because they're addicted. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you're not providing for them. You know? It's like it's it'd be like turning on the TV and Yeah. And CNN is just blank. You know?
Speaker 2:Like
Speaker 1:The answer is for tech people just to post way more. Just post more and over overload the feed
Speaker 2:A lot of people have this a lot of people have this, you know, sort of thing where, oh, I already posted once today, or I I had a good post today. I'm gonna take the rest of the night off. No. You know, I think I honestly think that's this mentality of, like, the the original Instagram posting, like, the common the common sort of strategy on Instagram
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:If you were, like, an Instagram influencer, which is, like, make sure you post once a day. And it was almost, like, rude to post more. But now that I've everything's algorithmic, the algorithm is gonna show people your content if it thinks that they were gonna enjoy it, and they're not. If not, it's, like, very and so you'll see, like, I I posted a bunch yesterday because I was flying back from the East Coast, and maybe, like, six of my posts did well. And then one that I thought was the funniest just completely bombed.
Speaker 2:You know? So it's like
Speaker 1:happens. Yeah. Just post through it. Post through the pain. Doesn't matter what.
Speaker 1:You just gotta keep going. Well, let's move on to, one of the greatest posters. He's been on the show many times, Will Menitis. Will Menitis. You could spend the rest of your life complaining about New York City rent prices, or you could simply live in this houseboat for $2,500 a month and commute to Midtown via jet ski, kayak, the six in, like, fifteen minutes.
Speaker 1:A better life is possible. I mean, that's so funny.
Speaker 2:I I have joked before about jet skiing into LA for Malibu because PCH can just get so bad Yeah. Traffic wise. I'm like, if I was able to rip at 60 miles an hour on the open water, can you imagine how great you'd feel after, you know, for your for your day of work if you just spent, like, thirty minutes jet skiing into work? That that that just seems like the dream to me. So it's definitely something here.
Speaker 2:We gotta get I've never actually stayed on a I've stayed over on boats, but I've never stayed on a houseboat. I I
Speaker 1:don't know what the on. Can you just build a mansion and call it a houseboat? Like, how crazy can we get? Can we anchor these to the ground, or we can just are we just gonna wind up doing landfill and just expanding? Like, can you just take out as much space as you want?
Speaker 1:Because you can
Speaker 2:be crazy. San Francisco actually has like, the the bay has issues with this around people that just get an old boat and just live in it. And it's kind of this weird gray area, and they try to enforce it in different ways. But, I'd be down for for aquatic, podcast
Speaker 1:This is this is the seasteading that, what what's his name? Patrick Friedman was working on.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Big libertarian push for seasteading for a while. We we we talked to those guys who did Sealand. They live in that, communications platform off of, off of The UK. And, yeah. This is the future.
Speaker 1:I love it. Anyway, let's move on to I got put in the truth zone. I got a community note. I said, I can't believe this is a real photo. Yes.
Speaker 1:That's Mistral, the French LLM company from the Wall Street Journal Helsing Mistral to jointly develop AI systems for military use. And I posted a photo of a Mistral three missile, and I got a community note here. It says, no. This is not by Mistral AI. In fact, the picture shows a Mistral three missile.
Speaker 1:The missiles are produced by MBDA, a European group in the field of complex weapon systems. Mistral is a common naming in French, a strong, cold, northwesterly wind in Southern France. I got put in the truth zone, but this is from The Wall Street Journal. I I stole the photo. I tried to give them a little bit of credit there, and they fooled me.
Speaker 1:And I got I got, slapped with a with a, community
Speaker 2:Wait. So miss Wall Street Journal
Speaker 1:Wall Street Journal clearly just Googled Mistral missile because there is news. Like, it is true that Mistral is doing a defense
Speaker 2:company.
Speaker 1:Contact contract. But Mistral has not manufactured a missile and printed their name on that missile. So the Wall Street journal either was just trying to be
Speaker 2:So this is
Speaker 1:representative or they just got confused and they posted a picture that's it is a The
Speaker 2:wrong message.
Speaker 1:Called Mistral, but it's not from the company Mistral that we know. And so Classic. Little bit of an update, little bit of a mea culpa, but really this one's on The Wall Street Journal. So I take no responsibility.
Speaker 2:We are not journalists. No. We are, you know
Speaker 1:We are reaction live streamers. Anyway, let's move on to Guillermo over at Vercel. They he says, was fantastic to serve ramp during this big Super Bowl moment. Let's play the song from the Super Bowl ad. Is it working?
Speaker 1:No? No? Okay. We got we we're working on our soundboard here. They reported a 46% or 46 x traffic uptick within seconds and a % uptime without any manual config or provisioning on Vercel.
Speaker 1:More to come. I love that we're seeing more breakdowns and behind the scenes of how a Super Bowl ad gets played out. I know that the people are probably completely oversaturated with ramp Super Bowl ads because they took over the timeline so many times, But I think that there probably is a very interesting case study here, especially on the content delivery network CDN side and all the things that Vercel does to help websites deal with unexpected traffic. I believe Coinbase ran into a problem actually because they put that QR code up on the on the Super Bowl. And I think they hadn't scaled appropriately, and they had some downtime.
Speaker 1:And so Yeah. Guillermo's there to save the day. So if you're gonna do a Super Bowl ad, give Guillermo call. Downtime on
Speaker 2:a Super Bowl ad could, you know, easily be a multi, you know, multi tens of millions of dollars in, like, a lost, you know, customer value because people are watching the Super Bowl. They don't really care about your company that much. You give them a brief reason to care, and they try to download your app or sign up, and it doesn't work, and they're just on to the next thing. You know, ecommerce operators deal with this all the time around Black Friday. If their site goes down for thirty minutes at the wrong time, it could be, like, a million dollars of lost sales.
Speaker 2:Right? So Terrible.
Speaker 1:Well, let's move on to David. He says the cyber plaid project is about to get fun. I think he took a Tesla Model S Plaid, and he's outfitting it with, cyber truck aesthetics. This is super obvious. I hope Elon actually makes this production car.
Speaker 1:I think this looks awesome. And Yeah. What a way to stand out in the supercar market where everything kinda looks the same right now. You think about a Ferrari two nine six, the, SF 90, the Pininfarina Battista, the Rimac Nevera, even the McLaren w one, they all kind of look the same. Lamborghini has something good going with the Raveto, in my opinion.
Speaker 1:It does look differentiated, but it's still just like a wedge. But there's really a lot of, like, not particularly interesting stuff going on at the high end of the supercar market, in my opinion. And Yeah. Something with cyber truck aesthetics would really lend itself to a low to the ground supercar that would be super cool. And I really hope it happens.
Speaker 2:I think they need the electric muscle car. You know? What is the what's the futuristic, you know, version of a, you know, Dodge Challenger? Challenger is Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I haven't I'm so burnt out. I think the model three, model s, x, y, they all look decent, but they all have the exact same aesthetic, and they've been completely played out. The Cybertruck stands out still. There's There's a lot on the road, but I get excited every time I see them. My kids get excited when they see them.
Speaker 1:They stand out. They're really cool. And I think bringing that aesthetic into something that is more exotic. Like, there's a reason they call sports cars exotic sports cars. Like, they're supposed to look exotic.
Speaker 1:Once, once they look all the same. You've seen that with the, the Ferrari, Pureblood. What's that one called? The Purosangue. It looks like a Mazda, and the Mazda SUV looks exactly the same.
Speaker 1:Obviously, like, you can tell them apart, but it's just not pushing the design envelope enough. And Ferrari's been kind of coasting on that original Pininfarina, design language that they got from the f eight, and they brought that to the '2 '9 '6. And they all look great, But it's a little it's getting a little stale, and I think something that looks more like a Cybertruck would really turn heads and be cool. So I would love to see it, and I hope that the Yeah. The Hope that it comes out.
Speaker 2:Ferrari is just unbelievably lost.
Speaker 1:Yep. Right now.
Speaker 2:I mean, the 12 cylinders sales are terrible. Nobody wants them. It's priced way too high.
Speaker 1:Hot take. I think the 12 cylinder, the Dolce Chilean looks fantastic. I love it.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's it's a good looking car
Speaker 1:But, yeah, not at 810.
Speaker 2:Of any of their other models. Right? If you look at the $8.12 Yeah. It looks much, much worse.
Speaker 1:I think it looks better, but that's a hot take. I I understand that's it. But I I really like the the f 80, the black bar in the front. I think that looks really cool, but I am in the minority there for sure for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyway.
Speaker 2:Yep. What else we got? By the way, I do have somewhat of a I gotta go meet
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:With Bob from,
Speaker 1:Well, let's, let's do a promoted post from Ben Braverman. Saga is hiring a principal to join investment team. What a great gig if you're looking to get into venture. What is Saga? We are one of the only sizable funds raised during the great VC winter.
Speaker 1:Partners are Max Altman. That's, Sam's brother. And it's Thompson and Ben Braverman, who was at Flexport, writing checks alongside Ryan Peterson for a long time. Saga leads and co leads at seed and series a with reserves to continue at the b plus. We've incubated one company already with plans for more.
Speaker 1:What is a principal role at Saga? And he puts in a typo here. He says, what is a, the principal role? Smart for the algorithm. Gonna get more likes.
Speaker 1:People know it wasn't AI generated. You are joining the founding team. You will help shape the firm's brand and strategy. You will join the investment team on day one. This is not a farm league program where you spin your wheels for a year.
Speaker 1:You will source as many top companies as possible, participate in diligence, and represent the Saga brand. You will be highly compensated, including significant carry. So if you're looking to get into venture, head on over to Ben Braverman's page and send him a DM.
Speaker 2:Love the name Saga, by the way. Sometimes a new venture firm launch launches and you're like, okay. They're clearly running out of names for venture firms, but Saga is just like, sounds good, makes sense. And it's cool to see that they're you can tell they're building a firm. Right?
Speaker 2:This is not this this looks to be setting up as you know, we're actually building a team versus, you know, we have our rock star GPs, and then there's a support staff. But, you know, this is, you know, clearly trying to, you know, actually build out a a proper investment team, which we'd love to see.
Speaker 1:A post from Patrick Collison over at Strife. Can you hear that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I love it. Patrick Collison says
Speaker 2:Is there was there a sound effect?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm trying to play sound effects, but it's not working. Who knows?
Speaker 2:It might be that it might be that the stream can hear it, but I can't. Who knows?
Speaker 1:Okay. Anyway We'll work
Speaker 2:it out.
Speaker 1:Fun with that. We'll work it out. Patrick says it's happening all built on Stripe. Ben Lang says tiny teams of the future cursor, 0 to $100,000,000 ARR in twenty one months with 20 people. Bolt, 0 to 20,000,000.
Speaker 1:Lovable, zero to 10,000,000. Mercor, 0 to 50,000,000, all with very small teams, and, of course, built on Stripe. David Holes from Midjourney chimes in and says, they left out Midjourney, of course, but we're very grateful for Stripe too. And so, everyone is building on Stripe, and it's a great example of just, you know, a great tool that speeds up development of everything, and then you can spend more time building your company and pumping up those revenue numbers, which I love to see.
Speaker 2:Absolutely wild.
Speaker 1:We also
Speaker 2:have some great news to figure out We talked about we talked about the factors driving, just this ridiculous growth of some of these new companies like Cursor and Merkor and Bolt. And, an under, underrepresented part of that is just you can scale billing infinitely with with, you know, very little, operational overhead. So wasn't the case, you know, twelve, fifteen years ago.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, the fans love to hear about, minor Figma product updates, and we got a massive minor product update from Figma. Good news, frosted glass UI fans, SVG exports from Figma will now properly render black background blur and both angular and diamond gradients. Let's go. Let's hear it for Figma boys. We love Dylan.
Speaker 1:We love the team over at Figma. And, yeah. I mean, these changes are, heard around the world. Brooklyn is, permanently changed whenever these whenever one of these rolls out, and we're happy to see the team over at Figma. Absolutely crushing.
Speaker 1:We love to see
Speaker 2:Absolutely, dogs. They're they're definitely, they're definitely in founder mode. Like, Dylan is back.
Speaker 1:100%.
Speaker 2:Clearly locked in. The first thing I noticed was was their
Speaker 1:updated, billing practices. Definitely, you know, knowing that I
Speaker 2:value the product a lot and and trying to, you know, but, yeah, awesome to see them shipping aggressively just because they're so well positioned to dominate Gen AI in design. Right? There there's a lot of people that are Yeah. Have come out and raised money for we're Figma for Gen AI or generative design. And, I would argue that Dylan would say Figma is the Figma of generative design.
Speaker 1:100%. I mean, the guy's super tapped in and has been for a really long time on the AI stuff. He's not playing catch up. This is not Adobe. This is a founder led, founder mode company through and through, with a lot of capital and a lot of great team members and, a lot of a lot of customers that are already using the product, a lot of distribution.
Speaker 1:Will, did you see the first major, in my opinion, drone show advertisement in America? Nick says for all star weekend, the Jordan brand has 1,200 drones taking off from Treasure Island to create the Jumpman, Air Jordan one, and number 23 over the Bay Bridge. And I think this is super cool. You know that AdQuik can do this for you. Ben's gonna play the video, and it's just fascinating to see that this is finally coming to America.
Speaker 1:We've been behind the ball on drones, both in the military context and in the advertising context, which is in some ways as important. And we're really happy to see that these shows have made it to America.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is the coolest basically, a top three ad format for me. Blimps are still up there just because of their their timeless. But, I can't We're gonna put we're gonna use AdQuik to put a ramp card in the sky. We gotta do it.
Speaker 2:Maybe we throw up a microphone, at some point to to honor all hardworking podcasters, but, this is just it's still I I think this is one of those things that basically forever, it'll still be, it's hard to imagine a world where where people are fully normalized to this. Right? Because it's it feels just, like, so intensely futuristic. So, yeah, if, people can just sign up for AdQuick and and talk to their rep and and make this happen. But, if you have any, you know, issues, feel free to reach out.
Speaker 2:And and we would love to actually help with the campaign around the the creative and the ideation.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Oh, speaking of partnerships, Eight Sleep sent us some fabulous hats.
Speaker 2:There we go. Put it on.
Speaker 1:Try it now.
Speaker 2:You're looking you're looking kind of kinda like an athlete right now.
Speaker 1:It goes it goes by the black suit. Athlete. But
Speaker 2:I
Speaker 1:am a corporate athlete. But the black suit, the black hat, this is a good combo. And so we got a bunch of people who will give them away.
Speaker 2:And being six eight, you do you you look like, you look like you you're you're about to sign a a max contract.
Speaker 1:I gave Chat GPT all of my stats, my height, my weight, my body fat percentage, and all of my measurements and had it benchmark me against athletes and give me tips for, like, where I should improve. And it was very complimentary. It was great.
Speaker 2:It it was awesome. Don't I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna gas you up for a second because people don't know this. John is actually just, like, way too jacked
Speaker 3:for
Speaker 2:being a podcaster who's not selling supplements.
Speaker 1:It it was so funny. It says, so I I had it put every measurement in, in, like, percentiles and and on my height of six eight, and it says exceptionally tall. This is elite even among athletes.
Speaker 2:That's got it.
Speaker 1:I love that. No. But but here's the thing. Here's is in the ninetieth percentile. It says a strong thick neck supports overall upper body aesthetics and function.
Speaker 3:I was
Speaker 1:like, let's go, Chad GBD. Thank you, Sam.
Speaker 2:Every every time we've been with, you know, the boys recently, I feel like somebody has asked, like, is John on gear? Like, it comes up. Like, people are so so the the goal in life is to not be on gear, but have people think that you are, you know, think that
Speaker 1:you are. Is the only performance enhancement that I need. I sleep I sleep like a baby, eight hours a night. My sleep score is at 90 today. Not bad.
Speaker 1:Not where it should be. Should be at a hundred. Tonight's a new night. I'll get there. But, yeah, the performance has been tip top lately.
Speaker 1:It's been great. Sleep well, get in the gym, crush it, lots of caffeine, little bit of nicotine, and, that's all you need.
Speaker 2:Incredible.
Speaker 1:That's all you need. We got another we got another delivery in the mail. This one's a little bit old. We're we're late getting to this. But Ian McCready heard our veil episode, our deep dive on veil, and sent us a beautiful book on veil.
Speaker 1:Veil. It says veil triumph of a dream. It's a full history of veil. I don't know if you can see this, but it's, like, serious. This is a serious, serious book.
Speaker 1:Sent us a whole copy. So we'll have to do a whole whole extra deep dive on the history of Vale because we have the authoritative copy now with lots of great images of Vale. And so thank you. Thank you, Ian, for sending
Speaker 2:me the opportunity to talk about very
Speaker 1:nice handwritten note. So it has been great getting to know you. Vale is a special place for my family. My grandfather was involved with the mountain since the since, nearly the beginning. I hope you enjoy the book and consider it an invitation to join me at our place anytime.
Speaker 1:Look forward to connecting again soon. So thanks, Ian, for sending that in. And, yeah, good to have you as a fan of the show. Do you have, time for one more post, or should we wrap it up?
Speaker 2:Of course. I got time for one more post,
Speaker 1:Sean. Let's do it. Let's do it. Still not working. I'm having fun.
Speaker 2:Wait. We we didn't get to the so people in the the, chat were asking about the Jamie Dimon reaction.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Let's do that one.
Speaker 2:We should get into that because it's it's,
Speaker 1:That one is timing.
Speaker 2:I saw I don't know if this is the post that we pulled.
Speaker 1:I have it. John Ziegler. In leaked audio, Jamie Dimon tells his takes his employees, especially the younger ones, to the woodshed over their desire to keep working remotely. He says, we're remote remote work is terrible. I don't know if Ben has the clip, but, Jamie, you're on notice.
Speaker 1:Ben, you wanna play this clip?
Speaker 3:A lot of you were on the fucking Zoom, and you were doing the following. Okay? You know, looking at your mail, sending texts to each other about an asshole the other person is. Okay? Not paying attention, not reading your stuff, you know, and if you don't think that slows down efficiency, creativity, creates rudeness, and it's got it does.
Speaker 3:Okay? And when I found out that people are doing that, you you don't do that in my goddamn meetings. You go to meet with me. You got my attention. You got my focus.
Speaker 3:I don't bring my goddamn phone. I'm not sending texts to people. Okay? It simply doesn't work, and it doesn't work for creativity. It slows down decision making.
Speaker 3:And don't give me the shit that work from home Friday works. I I call a lot of people on Friday. They're not a goddamn person to get a hold of. But here are the problems. Okay?
Speaker 3:And they are substantial. Okay? Which is the young generation is being damaged by this. That mean they may or may not be in your particular step, but they are being left behind. They're being left behind socially, ideas, meeting people.
Speaker 3:In fact, my guess is most of you live in communities a hell of a lot less diverse than this room. Every area should be looking to be 10% more efficient. If I was running a department of hundred people, I guarantee you if I wanted to, I can run it with 90 and be more efficient. I guarantee you. I could do it piss I could do it in my sleep.
Speaker 3:And the notion, these bureaucracies, I need more people. I can't get it done. No. Because you're you're filling out request that don't need to be done. Your people are going immediately they don't need to go to.
Speaker 3:Someone told me to prove something as wealth management that they had to go to 14 committees. I am dying to get the name of the 14 committees, and I feel like firing 14 chairman of committees. I can't stand it anymore. Now you have a choice. You don't have to work at JPMorgan.
Speaker 3:So the people of you who don't wanna work at the company, that's fine with me. I'm not I'm not mad at you. Don't be mad at me. It's a free country. You can walk with your feet, you know, but this company is gonna set our own standards and do it our own way.
Speaker 3:And and I've had it with this kind of stuff. And, you know, I I come in you know, I've been working seven days a goddamn week since COVID, and I come in and I where where's everybody else? But they're here and there and the Zooms and the Zoomers don't show up, and people said they need guest stuff. So that's not how you run a great company. We didn't build this great company by doing that, by doing the same semi disease shit that everybody else does.
Speaker 1:I love it. Jordy, you can't help but think he is, you know, reading between the lines. He's talking about you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was about to say
Speaker 1:Friday. No suit, jacket, no tie, really phoned it in remotely. No. I would Remote podcasters, they're on their way out, and they're dying breed. It's in person or bust.
Speaker 2:I would take it a step further. This this sounds like some private conversations that we've had.
Speaker 1:You know, when I've
Speaker 2:used my phone on the set and you and you, you know, you you start pulling out some swear words. Yep. You know? You're getting reals, testy, letting loose. But okay.
Speaker 2:Here's here's my actual read on this. I think this I I don't know how the audio clip emerged, but it was positioned as as leaked audio. Yep. And to me, this is, I have to imagine he he wanted this to leak Yeah. Because it makes him look like an incredible CEO.
Speaker 2:Right? He's Yeah. He's setting clear expectations.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:He's frustrated with how things are happening, and he's actively changing it. He's giving people an out. He is setting the the ex he's living the standard that he's expecting of other people. He's not asking anybody to do anything that he's not willing to do. He's right.
Speaker 2:I come into the meetings. You don't see me on my phone. You don't see me emailing other people while I'm in a meeting. He's like, I'm focused. I'm prepared.
Speaker 2:And so he's setting the standard, and he expects other people to follow here. And, look, I think that a company like JPMorgan will be able to reduce headcount dramatically over time. And so to me, what he's you know, he wants the people that wanna work remotely. He does like, why would a CEO want his team to work remotely? Right?
Speaker 2:He is there's this value exchange that happens with the company and their employees, which is I'm gonna pay you to provide services for the company, and, you can decide whether that value exchange makes sense. And if you don't feel the value is there, well, by coming to the office, you're welcome to leave. And so he's setting this up to say, doesn't want more remote work. I I think he genuinely believes that it's bad for, you know, younger employees. Right?
Speaker 2:There there there's very clear arguments for why, like, more senior people should be able to work remotely at least part time and and be effective in that way. But at the same time, it's very fair for a CEO to set their own standards. Right? This is not, this is not a this is not like a a charity or a support program for people. Right?
Speaker 2:They're choosing to work at JPMorgan. And so I think that this is sending a very clear message to the world and to his employees that, he's setting new standards and all of the COVID, you know, stuff is, you know, somebody posted that, you know, looks like Jamie Dimon, you know, found his his, I'm not gonna say
Speaker 1:Either Elon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He just sort of found his his you know, he feels like he's positioned to sort of speak his mind now. And and while we don't appreciate the sort of vulgar language that he used, I think, he's he's generally, like, completely correct in his analysis. And I agree. If I'm working at JPMorgan and I'm working five days, six days a week in the office and I hear my CEO say this, I'm only fired up to work even harder
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:Than than I was before. And there's certainly people that are gonna listen to that, and they're gonna say, I actually want a remote job. That's what's important to me. And so Yeah. They can go work somewhere else.
Speaker 1:Well, let's close out with, the announcement from Tim Cook, another CEO. He says get ready to meet the newest member of the family, Wednesday, February 19. There's an Apple launch, and a lot of people put on a tinfoil hat here because Elon Musk reposted Tim Cook's announcement about a new product unveiling. And so Bill Gurley chimes in and says, I know nothing, but just for kicks, imagine a Tesla slash Apple co branded vehicle that sells for $200,000. Don't both stocks soar?
Speaker 1:And, my read on this was that, look. Apple and Elon have had a, like, somewhat tumultuous relationship during the acquisition. He Elon famously went, for a walk with Tim Cook. There was a question about App Store fees for, converting people to paid memberships. Would Apple be taking 30% on that?
Speaker 1:Would they be able to negotiate that down? Apple's also been an advertiser on Twitter and now acts for a long time. And I think Elon wants the two companies to be working because Apple's a great big advertiser. And I think reposting this, a, could just be a cool thing, but also giving Tim some extra juice in the algorithm just is a good sign of good faith that
Speaker 2:Yeah. The other
Speaker 1:we're gonna get your your your your content to go a little bit further on our platform organically. And then, yeah, you're gonna spend a couple million bucks probably advertising on our platform, and we're all bought in on this. So I'm
Speaker 2:I would say
Speaker 1:hesitant about their idea that they're gonna launch a car together, but that would be awesome.
Speaker 2:I I I think another kind of crazy idea would be Apple CarPlay for humanoid robots. Right? There's a world where app like so, oh, oh. I don't follow. Sorry.
Speaker 2:Sorry. I I first for a brief second, I I I was thinking that Tesla had a CarPlay integration. They actually don't. So it's not that. But you can imagine but I but I do think in the future, right, like, they're they're if you have a humanoid robot in your home or you, you know, employ one in some way Yeah.
Speaker 2:Obviously so, anyway, there could
Speaker 1:be a bunch more obvious thing if if we're actually talking about a partnership would be Starlink on iPhones. Right? Like, we've already seen that that's rolling out and just making the official, like, the
Speaker 2:Rivian instance things.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I saw that one too.
Speaker 2:Doing the same thing. You know? Who knows?
Speaker 1:Rivian has been posting about a cryptic event happening the same day, and so maybe there's something deeper happening there. I don't know. Or talked about making fun before. There's so many different possibilities with Elon.
Speaker 2:People don't realize that Elon would find out about Rivian doing an event on like, and then post an event the same day and do it with Apple to just try to, like, drown it out. Yep. Everybody's a savage at that level. But, anyways, I'm excited to see. We hopefully, we'll be live streaming when this happens, and we can just, you know, talk about it live.
Speaker 2:I
Speaker 1:think, actually, come preinstalled. You should not be able to delete the app. It should be the only app on your phone. That should be the new version of the iPhone. Get rid of the notes app.
Speaker 1:Just post a tweet if you want, if you wanna make a note. You know? Instead of calling someone, just call them over a DM on x. It's the everything app. You don't need anything else.
Speaker 1:Just one app on your iPhone. And that's the new that's the new iPhone.
Speaker 2:I gotta go hang with Rob. Out of here. The the the, you know, potentially the greatest podcast producer of all time at currently, Ben, coming hot up on his heels. Yep. But, just wanted to say, thank you for listening, brothers.
Speaker 2:It was a good week. We're gonna be back in the studio full time next week, which I'm excited about. And I wanted to remind everybody that we are not independent media. We are dependent media. We are dependent on our advertisers, and I just wanted to thank Ramp, AdQuik, Wander, Public, Bezel, and Eight Sleep for their support.
Speaker 1:I have some big Bezel news coming soon. I'm excited.
Speaker 2:Can't wait. Awesome.
Speaker 1:So leave us a leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Put an ad in your review. We'll read it on the show, and thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. Have a great week.
Speaker 2:Thank you, brothers.
Speaker 1:Happy Valentine's Day.
Speaker 2:Happy Valentine's Day. Big day.
Speaker 1:Big day for the brothers.
Speaker 2:Big day.
Speaker 1:Talk to you soon.