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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
Happy July 4 to everyone. I hope everyone had a fantastic weekend. How was your fourth? Jordy?
Speaker 2:Incredible.
Speaker 1:It was incredible. Cinema. Tyler, how was your fourth?
Speaker 3:It was electric.
Speaker 1:Can you tell us about that white party that you went to? You can't talk about that? What about the wedding you went to? Was that a fun one? That was in New York.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 3:New York. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Manhattan?
Speaker 3:Yep. Madison Square Garden.
Speaker 1:But you can't you can't break it down for us?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's They they told us not to
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. Got it.
Speaker 2:Well NDA?
Speaker 1:I'm glad you had fun. I'm glad you had fun. I'm glad everyone had fun. My fourth of July was great. It was a little was it humid?
Speaker 1:Did you
Speaker 2:even get sunburned?
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:You don't even look sunburned.
Speaker 1:Not sunburned. Can't say that for the rest of He's the larping. Half the team
Speaker 2:around saying, oh, I had the best fourth of July. Not even sunburned. No. Make it make sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Shade. Shade. You stay in the shade at the right times.
Speaker 2:UV index sunburned. Why are you Oh, totally sunburned.
Speaker 1:Oh, on the back. On my back. Okay. Okay. That makes sense.
Speaker 1:UV index. Was it humid in Malibu?
Speaker 2:A little
Speaker 1:it was a little humid in Pasadena and it made it feel very East Coast. Like, felt like an East Coast 4th Of July to me. I went did East Coast 4th Of July a couple years ago and it was sort of refreshing. I don't know. It was nice.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 2:Drone shows were in this year?
Speaker 1:Yes. Fireworks are out given the Palisades fire, the Altadena fire. So a lot of townships are playing it safe with drone shows instead of fireworks, which is I don't know. I feel like it's cool. I like a drone show.
Speaker 1:I've only seen one when we were in France. It was cool. I don't have a problem with it, but I'm anticipating a backlash. I'm anticipating that people will be like, we gotta go back to the organic authentic fireworks. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. They're like, I like when the air quality is terrible.
Speaker 1:Okay. It's an air quality risk for you. You noticed that?
Speaker 2:I didn't notice this year.
Speaker 1:Did you see fireworks
Speaker 2:I I honestly I didn't see a single asleep.
Speaker 3:I didn't see a single firework.
Speaker 1:I was up at 6AM, so I went to bed at like nine.
Speaker 2:I did not sing see a single firework on the July 4 which was crazy. I heard some Yeah. Around. But I remember when I lived in LA Yeah. The air quality would genuinely be terrible
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:For at least a few days Yeah. Because it just sits in there and there's no wind.
Speaker 1:When I lived in Echo Park, it was like fireworks everywhere. It's the craziest neighborhood because people in the neighborhood buy the production level fireworks. You know how normally you get like a sparkler or you get something like Yeah. Shoots off a little? No.
Speaker 1:They buy the the same thing that you see at like Dodger Stadium, like the cannon that goes off and goes boom. That but they they don't coordinate them. So it's not like there's music that's playing and then it's sync seat synced up and there's some finale. It's just whenever someone feels like lighting one off, goes full fireworks scale. There's some really cool like helicopter video shots of Los Angeles during, I think, fourth of July where they go really really crazy.
Speaker 1:But I feel like that's good probably dangerous.
Speaker 2:Dalian would do is like, I'm gonna go Oh, yeah. Fly my plane at 9PM on the July 4 Yeah. And just get into I
Speaker 1:have some crazy video of the fireworks show at Dodger Stadium before there were regulations around drones. I had one of the first drones and I flew it like through the fireworks and then spectacular footage. I'll I'll have to play it on the show one day. Wildly illegal by modern drone standards, but at the time no one knew how to regulate those things so you could just fly them anywhere, which was really, really crazy, but a lot of fun. Anyway, big changes at Microsoft, big changes at Xbox.
Speaker 1:Xbox is cutting 3,200 jobs by the end of next year. And here's where it gets interesting, it's not because of artificial intelligence. AI, the new CEO of Xbox, has been very clear that they're not stuffing AI everywhere. They're going back to their roots, but they are focused on efficiency. And so the newly appointed Xbox CEO, Ashish Sharma, has announced this morning that Xbox will lay off 3,200 staffers by the end of twenty twenty seven with 1,600 layoffs taking place today.
Speaker 1:She posted her full email to Xbox employees on X and it's very candid about the failures and trajectory of the company.
Speaker 2:Very notable Yes. That the first major layoff from a major company just admits that the business is not healthy Yes. And doesn't blame it on AI. Yes. Have not seen a layoff of this scale Yes.
Speaker 2:That wasn't at least partially credited to like the productivity increases that we're seeing from AI. Yes. And this feels like the most honest layoff. And they're sort of forced into doing it Yeah. Because of the gaming community is like so anti AI.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah. I think And we get even worse
Speaker 1:new things that are going on. So, yeah, we need to break this debate into strategic. Should they be doing layoffs? What does this mean for the Xbox business? And then the communications around it as well because the communications, we can dig into what she actually said.
Speaker 1:In her email, she says the business is not healthy unless a bunch of surprisingly bad trends aspects of the operation. One, Xbox is operating at margins three to 10 times lower than its competitors. It released its latest console to a smaller install base, while the cost structure of the console itself was higher. Of course, memory prices are going up now, and so the cost of these consoles is going to be even higher in the future. And in some of the parts in some parts of the company, work has to pass through as many as 14 layers of management.
Speaker 1:Wow. That's a lot. In a typical year, Xbox lost 64¢ for every dollar it invested. In addition to the layoffs, Asha said that Xbox will spin out game studios that it acquired over the years. Compulsion Games, Double Fine Productions, Ninja Theory, Undead Labs, and Arcane are all getting yeeted in one way or another Stop.
Speaker 2:From the company. Has been running Xbox into the ground for the love of the game.
Speaker 1:You mean running it unprofitably for the love of the game?
Speaker 2:No. No.
Speaker 1:No. Because I do do agree that they face really fierce competition. PS five has a ton of amazing exclusives and then Nintendo has Nintendo the N 64 used to compete directly with the PlayStation. It was like, do you get an N 64 or a PlayStation? And then once Xbox came in, PlayStation and Xbox, they fought for every exclusive.
Speaker 1:And by and large, you could play Call of Duty on either. You could play most of the games Madden was on both of them. And so you would sort of decide, oh, I got some friends on Xbox. I'm on the Xbox crew or I'm in the PlayStation world. But then Nintendo went off and just did something completely different with the Switch.
Speaker 1:PC gaming continued to grow and became more and more accessible on more and more devices. So even a laptop that you might get for school can still play most of the library on Steam. And so you have more competition. And then you also have mobile. Like, the hyper casual games are taking mindshare.
Speaker 1:People are scrolling TikTok. There are tons of free entertainment resources that they compete with. This is something all the movie studios love to say.
Speaker 2:People are making Yeah. Podcasts like Podcasts. Weird. We didn't have this.
Speaker 1:No. You can be gaming while you watch this. We we approve. No. I'm saying But yes.
Speaker 2:Because you're making this, you're not gaming.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. No. Okay.
Speaker 2:You were spending Yeah. At least back in the day
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Pretty penny on
Speaker 1:That's true. That's true. So, yeah. They they're they're they're tightening up operations at Xbox. The question I think on everyone's mind is will Xbox be spun out as a standalone entity at some point?
Speaker 1:Is it too far afield from the core Microsoft mission? There was a move. Xbox was seen as a foothold into consumer for Microsoft. Of course, with the way Azure has grown in their cloud platform and their cloud business, really, it feels like Microsoft is having the biggest win in in enterprise and teams Cloud. And cloud and all of the workforce and productivity tools that they launch.
Speaker 1:Obviously, they're very big in AI. And so the idea that the Xbox would be at one point, they it came with the best four k Blu ray player, an Xbox One S, I believe. You can get one of these for a $100 right now. It's actually a great steal if you want to go physical media, which is very popular with parents these days. Instead of, oh, yeah, scroll the endless feed of Netflix and and Disney plus Instead of that, it's like, you like Toy Story?
Speaker 1:We got you Toy Story on four ks Blu ray. You can put it in the box and it's a $100, which is six months of a streaming service. So a lot of people are starting to physical media max a little bit more. But the idea was that you would get this Xbox and you would get it because you were a gamer, you want to play games, but you also had an HD DVD player, Blu ray player, and it would also serve as like your home media console and they would grow from there, get the foothold consumer market. But that never really materialized.
Speaker 1:Most people if they have an Xbox, they use it to play one specific set of games. They might have a PS5 as well and Nintendo Switch as well. And then if they're in the Apple ecosystem and they play Xbox games on the weekend, they're not lamenting the lack of integration there. They're like, yeah, it's fine. Like, I play the games over there.
Speaker 1:I talk to people on the iPhone. It's fine. So let's read through a little bit of Asha's post to see because there's this there's this key decision to announce 3200 layoffs throughout fiscal year twenty twenty seven, but announce only 1,600 today. The question is, strategically, what does that do for morale? Like, because you sort of have this guillotine hanging over everyone.
Speaker 1:Is this a good incentive for everyone to lock in and not and make the cut because you know another cut is coming? Is it is it going to stop complacency in the organization? Or is it gonna make everyone start looking for other jobs and think, oh, like, I could get fired at any moment. They've already teed up 1,600 layoffs. If I'm likely to be in that, maybe I should be looking for another job right now.
Speaker 1:Now, that could be good because maybe those aren't the missionaries who you want on the team. But what do you think about the idea of announcing to your company that there there are layoffs today and there's also a whole bunch more coming down the pipe?
Speaker 2:Xbox slash Microsoft Gaming has around 16,000 employees. So this cut is quite significant. Yes. I think that, at least in startups
Speaker 1:It's 10% today.
Speaker 2:10%
Speaker 1:within the next year.
Speaker 2:Yeah. At least in startups, the the best advice that I've ever gotten and and would typically talk with founders in my portfolio about is, like, if you need to do cuts, cut deep. Right? Yeah. And this is, like, maybe this is like a talking point for at least, like, five significant founders and investors.
Speaker 2:Right? Mhmm. Like, a lot of people just repeat this. Right?
Speaker 1:And I think
Speaker 2:it I think it generally holds true. It's better to I think the question is like, why did they feel like they needed to cut 1,600 today and then also keep a 1,600 cut in the in the tank? Yeah. Like, do they need like, is is there some
Speaker 1:know who those 1,600 people are? And they're like Yeah. We just need twelve months to let them finish what they're doing? Or is it that we haven't even identified them Yeah. And we just suspect And
Speaker 2:and either way, it doesn't necessarily seem that great. Right? Yeah. Because if you've identified who you're gonna cut like, you should probably just do it now.
Speaker 1:It's much better to just do a big cut and then say, look, everyone who's still on the ship, we're going on the offensive. We're gonna be hiring in these areas. We're this is where we're winning. So everyone get on because we're going on a big run right now. We, you know, had to shrink a little bit, but now we're on the offensive in this particular with this particular strategy.
Speaker 2:But who knows? Perspective. They've they certainly understand Yeah. The implications of doing this.
Speaker 1:Microsoft as a whole is laying off 4,800 employees, which is 2.1% of its workforce. This is a massive company. And you have to wonder, because they're obviously hiring as well, like, will the company shrink this year on the back of these layoffs? Or will they just do 2% layoffs and then wind up growing the company 3%? And so they wind up a larger organization at the end of the year.
Speaker 1:There's some interesting history here because Microsoft has had a long history of rank and yank stack ranking they invented. It was always a hardcore culture. People sort of forget this about Microsoft because it's such a dominant tech company that, of course, they got lumped in with the nap rooms and free lunches. But, in fact, back in the late '70s and '80s, Microsoft was famously intense, very tiny teams, huge deadlines, technical arguments. Gates Bill Gates was personally reviewing work and they had a culture that rewarded extreme competence.
Speaker 1:It was sort of an Elon Musk type endeavor at that time. It was not nice, still founder led and product obsessed. Vanity Fair had profile in the company in 2012, describes young Microsoft as thrilling but also unnerving with Gates demanding intense commitment from hires and Balmer joining in 1980 as the hard charging business
Speaker 2:operator. Asha wants the new culture at Xbox to be thrilling and a little unnerving.
Speaker 1:Maybe. Maybe. So in the nineties, they started to develop a monopoly. Windows '95, Office, there was a lot of lock in to Excel, Word. Business was just printing cash.
Speaker 1:And Microsoft became enormous, rich, internally competitive. The company still had the old smart people, brutal review, ship or die energy, but it was becoming more layered as we saw 14 layers of management at Xbox in some cases. Stack ranking became part of the culture, but no one really knows exactly when exactly what date it went into effect, but a former Microsoft employee writing in Geekwire said stack ranking had been an integral part of Microsoft culture for decades and that when he joined in 1999, it was often viewed positively as a part of Microsoft's meritocracy. And so stack ranking was you rank all the employees, you put them on this bell curve, you're sort of grading on a curve, you have a couple a players, but then there's certain people that are falling behind and and everyone knows where they sit in the organization.
Speaker 2:Did you illustrate this for me?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just with the team? Yeah. Yeah. Of
Speaker 2:course. That would be helpful.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I'd give myself S tier, U, F tier and I think I think we can start and end there. No. But Balmer came in and and people started pointing to stack ranking as a little bit more of dysfunction.
Speaker 1:Of course, there were other strategic missteps during the Balmer era and the stock was flat and this is what birthed Strathecory is as soon as Ben Thompson left Microsoft. He had tons to write about because he was there during the pre Satya era when they were trying to get into mobile and and did so unsuccessfully. Then Satya comes in, the pivot to cloud, the business does very well, and everything's off to the races again. But during the infamous Balmer era, there was a forced curve performance review. Managers had to distribute employees into buckets.
Speaker 1:So even a strong team had to produce winners and losers. So there even if you love everyone on your team, the bottom 10% is going to be labeled the bottom 10%, and that creates a lot of stress. But it can also create a lot of incentive and a lot of excitement. It can be tough but fair sometimes.
Speaker 2:But ABC thrilling and unnerving.
Speaker 1:Thrilling and unnerving.
Speaker 2:ABC How would you describe your corporate environment? Thrilling and unnerving.
Speaker 1:Better than just unnerving. I'd rather have some thrill in there. I don't
Speaker 2:know. You
Speaker 1:sort of opt into it. You know? Ideally ideally, this is all out in the open. It comes out in the hiring process. You don't go in blind.
Speaker 1:You know what you're getting. But of course of course, cultures change over time. If you've been with a company for a decade, you might say, I signed up for a chill monopoly. Why are we wartime? I'm a peacetime employee, you know, or vice versa.
Speaker 1:And then it might be time to find another opportunity. So ABC summarized it as managers grading on the bell curve. Vanity Fair's critique was harsher. They said former and current employees described stack ranking as the most destructive process inside Microsoft because it made employees compete with teammates instead of competitors. It's a good point.
Speaker 1:So the question is, like, is this new? Is this is this a new trend or is this just a continuation of the stack ranking process? It actually is new. Stack ranking would push out low rated people. Sometimes it would block promotions, reduce bonuses, force transfers, but they weren't necessarily doing mass layoffs around it.
Speaker 1:That's sort of a misconception. So even if they look at all the stack ranking at the end of the year and they say, Okay, these people are clearly in the bottom 10%, they saw it more as an opportunity to reallocate talent from different pieces, different teams. And it wasn't always, okay, every at the end of every year, we're we're just firing the bottom 10%.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Bottom 10% on one team might be top 10% on another team.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Which again, thrilling, but unnerving. Overall, is there cause for optimism with Xbox? It's the hardest gaming platform to be excited about. When you think about Valve, it's just a money printing machine on top of PC.
Speaker 1:The PC gaming industry broadly is is doing well and and PlayStation's done such a good job. Sony's done such a good job with PlayStation with creating like true intellectual property. You think about Last of Us, is now an HBO series. There's fewer and fewer exclusives. And when when Microsoft bought Activision, there was talk of, will Call of Duty go exclusive to Xbox?
Speaker 1:Because that would be sort of a killer feature that would get a lot of gamers. Even if they're in the PS five ecosystem, they say, well, I want play Call of Duty. I'll get an Xbox as well. They chose not to do that for potentially antitrust reasons. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:You can't necessarily cut it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The don't follow the video game industry.
Speaker 1:Loser alert. I don't but
Speaker 2:the thing that's easy to get excited about with Xbox
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is Modern Warfare two Rust.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And one v one ing Yes. Your best friends.
Speaker 1:Yes. But you buy in the secondary market. That's not pennies and
Speaker 2:on
Speaker 1:income me. Statement. It's rough over there. Okay. The 12 Cylindri is the first car with a gated manual shifter to come out of Maranello since 2012.
Speaker 4:Ferrari is building a new car with a manual transmission. This is the 12 cylinder Manuela. As you can see, it's a manual gearbox in a Ferrari. And what it really is is a mode of the eight speed DCT, but Ferrari has added a clutch pedal and a shifter. It's a six speed shifter.
Speaker 4:The Manoale goes on sale at the beginning of next year, the beginning of twenty twenty seven. The price will be right around half $1,000,000 for starters. I'm sure most of them will be optioned out with lots of goodies and cost a lot more.
Speaker 1:Do you think this checks the box? Does this count as a manual Ferrari? Are they giving their manual fans what they want? Or is this a poor simulacrum of what it means to have three petals?
Speaker 2:I think it's a obvious step in the right direction.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of people will be satisfied with this. I don't know. I think this checks enough of shambles. TJ Parker does not like it. He says, this is far more embarrassing than the Luche face plant.
Speaker 1:And people are saying, wow, that's bad as long as it's fun. Who cares? TJ Parker says, he cares. It's corny, but Look. Koenigsegg approved by the new Bugatti CEO seems
Speaker 2:Look. When I see this, I think that they're gonna sell at least 1,499.
Speaker 1:The details are in are hilarious and kind of brilliant. Look at listen to this. You can skip gears, heel toe downshift, and even stall the car if you mess up the clutch. But the system will also stop you from doing something truly stupid like over revving the engine or money shifting the car into the wrong gear. If you're not familiar with the money shift, that's where you shift.
Speaker 1:You skip a gear too much and it grinds the gears and you have to pay for, to, fix your engine. The Model YL from Tesla is coming to The United States. It's now available in The United States and Puerto Rico. Deliveries are still a couple months out, but it's a three row, six seat configuration for the Model y. It's longer than the standard Model y.
Speaker 1:It brings exceptional interior space with ample headroom and legroom for all passengers, zero to 60 in four point four seconds, 325 miles of range, front row, heated ventilated seats. They all have power recline, improved airflow, more trunk space, active damping, staggered tires for an enhanced grip, longer tailgate for better rear visibility, upgraded 50 watt wireless charging pads. I haven't seen the wireless charging pads in the wild yet. That seems like a cool innovation for your home charger. Can be a little bit slower because it's overnight, but every night.
Speaker 1:So you don't even need to deal with the plug. Well, there's other Tesla announcements. The Tesla Model y dual zone fridge, $600, fits in the sub trunk and has two separate compartments that can be fit, set to different temperatures from zero to 68 degrees Fahrenheit. You plug it into the outlet. I I love this.
Speaker 1:I think it's so cool that there's like this gadget that fits into the other thing that they have. Like, they have the front trunk. No one's really doing anything with it. Why not throw a couple
Speaker 2:Yeah. Not a lot of manufacturers are really willing to promote having 30 to 40 beers in the road and having 30 to 40 beers.
Speaker 1:I don't think these beers in this image. What is
Speaker 2:Tesla
Speaker 1:went this is Ollipop? I don't know. I think it's Oh, Blood Orange. I don't know which one this is. There was a a team that figured out how to order pizza with iMessage using artificial intelligence and people are not as impressed as they should be because the the image is AI.
Speaker 1:Please press the order me pizza button. And it is wired up to press the order pizza button. Yes. DoorDash sort of already created an artificial intelligence for having food delivered to you. There is a button.
Speaker 1:And you can sort of reimagine the UI in a very in a different way. Vibe code a button that orders you the most recent thing or interfaces with a text message, somewhat cool. The bull case for what Arlen is working on is that iMessage is a more universal interface. Text is the universal interface in a future world where, everything is done via voice or via an agent or via text stream. Having a centralized place and not having to use a bunch of different apps and have the best app at the right time, and this one's
Speaker 2:on discount, that one's not,
Speaker 1:and this one's your payments information safe. Having all of that happen below the fold is just another layer to the user experience in the modern era that it feels like it's on the way.
Speaker 2:Can we play this video? Yeah. What'd you want From Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan.
Speaker 1:Joe Rogan is talking to the CEO of Perplexity, Arvind Srinivas.
Speaker 5:Pass to the show. Two pass to curiosity, one that can kill it and one that can supercharge it. In my opinion, the one that kills curiosity is algorithmic feeds.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Like, the brain rot that you're fed every day which is, you know, this continuous doom scrolling
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:That's bad. Mhmm. And the one that can supercharge it is AI.
Speaker 2:This is probably true from a maybe more macro sense. Like, if you're sometimes good ideas do come to you. Some people say in the shower. To me, it's in the sauna. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I think there's clearly inspiration that comes when you're not doing anything at all. Yep. But that being said, I get so many ideas from the feed.
Speaker 1:Oh. Okay.
Speaker 2:Don't you?
Speaker 1:Hot take.
Speaker 2:I like Like, so how many yesterday, I sent you something. From the feed. Yeah. Yesterday, I sent I sent you a link that I saw on x and I was like, hey, we should do something like this for this other thing.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:Once I have inspiration, then I'm going to AI. Right? Yes. Then I'm going in and exploring the idea and saying how how has this been done before in this way. Yes.
Speaker 2:Or I was looking at incidents where heads of state have interfered with the World Cup.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:Yes. Which was interesting.
Speaker 1:Yes. He is pointing to something that is correct, is that AI feels very pull. You choose what to pull out of the AI system. You prompt. You ask for information about a specific thing.
Speaker 1:So you have to come with an idea and then you're exploring that idea. And that's very satisfying for curious people. Whereas the algorithms feel very push. You go to YouTube Shorts or TikTok or Instagram and you're just being fed things and you're not starting your journey with an affirmative declaration, I want to learn more about the new Dolce Trelendri Manuale, and I'm going down that rabbit hole. And I think your frustration that you voiced earlier about YouTube shoving a bunch of random shorts in your face is that otherwise you would be more likely to search for something specific.
Speaker 1:You want to learn about a history of a specific thing. And this was the case at the dawn of YouTube. It was just a search box. Where does AI go? Where does Perplexity, ChatGPT?
Speaker 1:Where do these apps go? Do they become more push in the sense that you show up and there's already a bunch of interesting prompts already done for you. I was talking about this
Speaker 2:Oh yeah. No, that was Pulse.
Speaker 1:Pulse was that, but I was also when there was a rumor about the social network features, I was saying that like I would love to just scroll a timeline of, like, what are the deep research reports that Tyler Cowen is doing? There's a crazy story out of Arizona that's been brewing over the last six months. Back in February, a Circle K customer named Soon Chun Kim asked the cashier for $85 worth of $1 lottery ticket. So she shows up. She wants 85 tickets.
Speaker 1:But after all 85 were printed out, Kim found out that she only had $60 on her, only $60 So the cashier gave her 60 tickets and left the remaining 25 tickets on the counter. The next morning, Circle K manager Robert Galizza learned that the leftover tickets included the $13,000,000 winning ticket. So he clocked out, took off his Circle K shirt, and bought the tickets from another Circle K employee being like, what?
Speaker 2:No one no one's gonna notice.
Speaker 1:So when Circle K, the company, found out about the purchase, it ordered the ticket be held in its corporate office and filed a complaint against the manager who bought the tickets and the Arizona lottery and claimed that Circle K, the company, is the rightful owner of the lottery ticket. As of a week ago, at least three people slash entities are claiming ownership of the of the of the ticket.
Speaker 2:Wait. So the original buyer that didn't have the cash Yes. The the manager who's like, I don't care if I lose my job as long as I win the lottery. Yes. And Circle K is like, we really need to win.
Speaker 2:We really need we need to win, like We need 13 we need
Speaker 1:this. Yeah. So Galizza, a Circle K employee that Galizza got to sign the back of the ticket, not sure why he had her do all of this, and Circle K. Additionally, the judge presiding over the complaint has ordered that the woman who bought the tickets but couldn't pay for them, Soon Chun Kim, be found and brought into court before making a decision on who gets it. So she's gonna have to testify and explain her side to to make sure that that's exactly what happened because this is just claims at this point.
Speaker 1:How did the the local Circle K wind up with 25 lottery tickets?
Speaker 2:Who are going with? I'm going with manager.
Speaker 1:I'm going with big corporate. Big big big
Speaker 2:I'm going with the manager. Not because I think it's ethical, but I think that
Speaker 1:I think he's
Speaker 2:gonna I think that there's No way. I think it's unlikely that there is a rule at Circle K that says
Speaker 1:100% there's a rule that if you work at that company, you can't buy lottery tickets at all from your own store.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:Obviously. Because you have the machine right there. You can tamper
Speaker 2:on this claim.
Speaker 1:But they don't line number one of employee handbook.
Speaker 2:No. But but it seems very unlikely that that the circle, like, it's it's a machine that just prints tickets. Yes. It's like Yes.
Speaker 1:But there's so many ways you could tamper with it. You're the news, you're printing the ticket at the right time, you have access, you refill the ticket, all the Okay.
Speaker 3:Corporation can buy its own lottery tickets? Yes. Why? Manager can't? That seems also strange.
Speaker 1:Maybe. Maybe you got
Speaker 3:I think I got a ride with the woman. You think she's owed it?
Speaker 2:The manager?
Speaker 1:But then but then then the strategy Or the original buyer. But then but then you can just shift the odds in your favor by constantly going to circle constantly going in of $100 of of tickets. Oh, I only have $50. And then you're basically doubling your odds because you still have a claim on those
Speaker 2:says these clerks aren't super hackers, John.
Speaker 1:Who paid for the winning ticket?
Speaker 2:The manager? Comes down
Speaker 1:But the manager knew that the ticket won. He didn't have to put any money in
Speaker 2:that yet.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No. He did.
Speaker 1:He did. So there were 25 tickets there. Okay. Through that. If there's a
Speaker 2:rule if there's a rule that managers cannot buy lottery tickets at their own store Mhmm. Then you're correct.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But if there's no rule that explicitly I, you know, basically spells that out, I think he might he might he might be golden.
Speaker 1:He might be golden? You think so? I don't know.
Speaker 2:You have tech news. Yeah. Hit us up. Let's go. Know, is funny.
Speaker 2:What? It is funny. You know, we get into these slower summer months
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then all of a sudden you have just insane days. Yeah. So you gotta be live every day.
Speaker 1:So You
Speaker 2:gotta be ready.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the basic cycle of of tech news will slow down. Venture capitalists are famously on vacation from May 15 to September 27. Right? That's when they go on vacation.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Mid October is like real
Speaker 1:come back. Yeah. But, that leaves opportunities. Last year, we got the Talon Wars. Zac didn't take any breaks.
Speaker 1:He was poaching left and right. So, we'll always There's always a chance we get a wild card. But, things have been slow. So, lots of time to discuss vehicles and other fun topics. But stay with us.
Speaker 1:We will see you tomorrow at 11AM Pacific. Have a great week. Have a great day.
Speaker 2:Let's go USA.
Speaker 1:Leave us Fox, Stars, Apple Podcast, and Spotify. You around for news on tbpn.com.