TBPN Live - Elizabeth Holmes Breaks Silence, Jamie Dimon Locks In, Machine Parts Pizza Tracker, Monkeys on Macbooks

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(02:01) - Elizabeth Holmes Breaks Silence (40:25) - The Timeline

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 14th, Valentine's Day 2025. This show starts now. Jordy, you're back on the West Coast. Give us an update. 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 I hope that our, you know, basically daily reminders this week 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. You got to 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 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, um, hang out with our lovely watch. So we've got a fantastic show today. We're talking about Alex Karp. There's a profile on him in the Wall Street Journal. Uh, the Gundo boys, our boys are in the economist. Now the puff piece was just on stop for these guys. Uh, they just get higher and higher. Uh, and 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, uh, we'll break it down. 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 doing 360 deals. They're selling documentaries. You'll hear all about it. We're going to 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. If you're in a relationship with someone who's in jail, get them out. Get them out. Start with the People Magazine feature. Exactly. And the media is the immediate precursor to actually drawing enough attention to get on

the presidential pardon docket. It worked for Ross Ul Ross Ulbricht, uh, and who knows, maybe it'll work for Elizabeth. Uh, 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. Uh, feedback to this post, not great. Lots of people say, uh, seems like she wants to copy paste the Ross Ulbricht playbook. Another guy says we don't care, but we're different on the show. We do care. So we're going to read it to you.

Elizabeth Holmes breaks her silence in first interview from prison. It's been hell and torture. The former Theranos CEO convicted of fraud 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, Jordi. Twice a week for a few fleeting hours, life is sweet for the 41-year-old Elizabeth Holmes. It's when her kids William, three, and Invicta, two, snuggle in her lap and talk excitedly about insect and 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, home's partner, Billy Evans, 33, enjoy each moment together. And like always, their most recent visit ended with a ritual when their time was up.

The children pressed their fingers together to make a heart sign, saying in unison, Mommy, this is our love, 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? Super rough. You know, she, you know, 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 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, 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, uh, the idea, you know, my kids, I can noticeably see them not doing so well after literally two hours away from moms and like, or our youngest, and I'm sure you're, you're too, uh, 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 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. Um, yeah, I mean, she's 41 now she's served two years of an 11 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 uh convicted and sent off to this nine-year stint what are you going to do you wait nine years you're probably not gonna be able to have kids at all so that's true there is this like I understand where the narrative came from of like, oh, she did this on purpose to like win 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. Um, uh, so she, uh, 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 and 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 known for. 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 acknowledging there are things I would have done differently on her path to lockup. 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. I am walking by faith and ultimately the truth, but it's been hell and torture in here. At 20, she dropped out of Stanford her sophomore year to focus on developing healthcare technology on a mission to save lives. In 2003, she launched Theranos, which secured a $9

billion valuation in a decade, hailed as the next Steve 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 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, Sunny Balwani, her secret boyfriend at the time on charges of misleading investors and defrauding them, along with patients for hundreds of millions of dollars. Very rough situation. Really rough. You know.

Ultimately. You know, um you know ultimately you know uh i don't i don't think it makes sense in this context to try to psychoanalyze her too much right and i do believe that uh the her going to prison and have to be every single day face to face with the reality that her freedom was taken away because of things that she did, 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 that was popularized by, you know, in that era by, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and other, you know, founders, but applied it to healthcare in a scenario where human life was on the line and healthcare 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. Yep. And she, I do believe that she clearly visualized this future of being able to test for all these different things for the single drop of blood. I believe that she firmly you know um 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 believe is widely sort of known at this point but it's worth restating you know this was not a silicon valley startup despite being started out of Stanford. The investors were people like Rupert Murdoch and a lot of the best 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?

How did you miss this one? And they were ultimately proven right. But, you know, in the scenario where she was building 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 things that they knew weren't working you know trying to continue to execute on big partnerships that they had you know it was cvs that they had the part like major or was it walgreens or cvs i forget but ultimately you know series of just like very

bad very bad decisions 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, right? There's not a, you know, what she wants to, she wants to apply the Ross Ulbricht playbook, but to understand the Ross Ulbricht 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, you know, it was not a, you know, it was a basically, when did when did Ross actually get convicted and go to prison? He was in prison for 10 years, essentially. Yeah. So it's like, so she'd be out by the time that playbook ran through yeah so even if she had that type of backing uh it might still take a decade and then she'd be out anyway so um i think that uh she seems to be very motivated by the spotlight i know that that she's already working on um it's either a series or uh a movie uh like a non-documentary like a sort of drama on the situation um she is she is how is she involved she's no i'm just saying she's like approved it and she's like sold life rights or something interesting the main documentary was so

was so bad that you know there's a scenario where if she does it actually more semi-draught you know a drama sort of fictionalized a little bit uh it would come out uh better yeah yeah i mean there's a million ways that the theranos story could have gone differently um 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, ah, I'm built different. 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 everything works out perfectly we talked we talked about this you know with with open ai right a lot of people turn down open ai because they're like this is like the most weird rationalist you know uh uh, uh, uh, you know, nonprofit, you know, we can't make this work. We like the team, we like the vision, but this model doesn't work for us in this situation. It was more so on the deal, like actual diligent side. So, you know, people love to, to, uh, talk poorly about VCs for lacking, uh, doing proper diligence on opportunities. But in this case, I really do think it was,

hey, this woman is clearly compelling, Stanford dropout, highly motivated. She clearly is very talented at fundraising, but ultimately people are like, eh, like I want to believe that this is possible, but everyone is telling us, you know, people have been, I think this was one of those things like people, the entire medical industry, you know, healthcare industry would have been incentivized to make this tech work for decades. Right. And there's probably been, you know, thousands of

studies and, and experiments to attempt to make this possible. And so I'm imagining people looked at this and said, Hey, you know, this has actually been tried before. And that's ultimately oftentimes why VCs pass, right? 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 more stacked team with more funding. And it didn't work for these reasons. Like you need to show me why this new team is going to be able to do, um, you know, the same thing and actually make it work. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so many different ways to, to build a business that looks somewhat like the mission of Theranos without, uh, getting over your skis. Uh, 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 lab corp. Now those companies do seem to have some sort of, uh, cornered resource or some sort of monopoly over the actual physical lab space. And so no startup has 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 the value prop was very simple. It was, if you're a doctor and you want to test for this blood marker, normally you would have to send it out. But instead you can buy this machine. It's expensive, but you can bring that CapEx internally. Maybe there's

some financing there, 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. It was great, great outcome for everyone. And Theranos clearly could have done that or they could have wrapped, they could have started by wrapping, you know, Lab corp 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 we're going to 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, uh, of like finger blood, but there's just not enough. And like kind of the laws of physics come in and essentially break it down. It's maybe theoretically possible, but it, but it's like clearly a massive, massive engineering challenge. And my problem was just that, uh, I think that's a skill issue. And I think like, uh, you should just kind of man up and just give a bunch of blood. And every time I go in to get blood labs, I'm just like, yeah, take, take six vials, whatever. Like I'm fine. And it doesn't bother me. And I think building that narrow audience of people who are fearful about giving blood is like, uh, maybe, maybe, maybe the wrong motivation,

but it's very emotional. And so you could see a lot of investors maybe, 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, and this was some of the pushback on, on companies like function and superpower from investors early on is, Hey, you have this cool consumer product, this consumer app that you're building, but it's dependent on getting customers to actually physically go to a lab and give, give six vials of blood conversion is going to be, you know, tough on that. And the other thing for women to actually get accurate blood, uh, 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 his baseline. So, um, there's also a lot of like over self diagnosis with a lot of these, uh, like, uh, blood metric companies, like you, you could imagine, okay, you're just testing yourself every single day and you're freaking out because like one day you're, you're, 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 Wilmanitis quote about, uh, like you should be able to just like, how do you feel? You know, right. Is that doctor, Dr. Bill Minitis? Yeah. Dr. Bill Minitis, uh, the, the, the world renowned expert. Um, but, uh, 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. Uh, and so a little bit of trouble so it's such an interesting, it's such an interesting scenario where the all of humanity should have should have desperately wanted Theranos to work, right? 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 going to be able to increase humanity's lifespan on average by six years or something

like that, because we're going to be able to do early detection for all this stuff. And, you know, now it's almost, you know, over 20 years later from when she founded the company. Yeah. If you, you know, we're still doing the same thing and the same, you know, the other, the other thing is, is, um, one of the challenges with having to take so much, so much blood to get, you know, these actual real analysis done is because, uh, 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. Yeah. Cause I go just fasted or something. Yeah. And 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 through physiological levels here at 3000. And so, so yeah, it's, it's, it's, uh, a very sad situation where you know ftx going away didn't really impact anything other than you know cause customer damage yeah but and 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 billion dollars 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 uh wow and uh in the opposite situation with theranos it's like everybody should wish that this worked and i would hope that somebody pulls this off and whoever eventually does this

yeah will be an absolute legend. Yeah. I just think it'll be a much more iterative approach. It'll be okay. One, you know. 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 goes in the trunk of a car that a phlebotomist can come to your house and do a draw and turn around really quickly. And then eventually, yeah, it's like the size of a toaster and you can get it. But you've got to iterate through those. Jumping straight from a science and engineering perspective. Let's keep reading her interview. Holmes is still processing the downfall that wiped away her entire fortune, and she considers her trial and conviction in a San Jose courtroom in 2022 to be a miscarriage of justice. 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 health care scam. One woman claimed the test results showed she had a miscarriage when she was actually pregnant. Another patient was told he might have prostate cancer when he didn't. A third received a false HIV diagnosis. And this is where the rubber meets the road with the Theranos, uh, like harm that, that, that, that they, that they 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, the app doesn't work or whatever your chat GPT, you get some hallucinated response, months. But this is like real impact on health and wellness. Yeah. And to just just giving her the benefit, you know, a little credit misdiagnosis happens every single day, right? I'm sure there's millions 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 whatever, just spitballing. Right. But these, they, they were happy. These kinds of things happen at a much lower rate than, uh, her product, which, which was so unreliable.

It was unethical to let patients in a, in life or death scenarios right this guy uh thinks he he might have prostate cancer yeah based on the results of this yep um and uh yeah it's just it's it's doing emotional damage right telling this woman in this situation that she had a miscarriage when uh when she didn't that's like incredibly you know damaging, to a woman's psyche. Uh, and, um, again, it just never should have actually gotten to the point where it was in production, right? Like this was a, uh, you know, this, and so there there's very clear, um, and again, you know, she's putting her spin on this. People's not going to put her in the truth zone so much, but, uh, but uh uh we we have to do our

part yeah yeah there was another element of it where uh 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 to labs uh 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 uh 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 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. 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 more robust system on its face, 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 i want to get a blood draw from theranos and they're like hey we're still working on the pinprick thing we're going to do that one but then we're also going to do one with quest and and the gold standard just to make sure that we don't make any mistakes that could have been great for the brand actually yeah it's it's one of those things if they rolled it out as as a more of a trial and hey, you're going to go to Walgreens or CVS and you're going to get your regular blood test. And we're also going to do a prick. And you're enrolling in that and you're not relying on that for health data.

We got a question in the chat from The Chrome. He says, do you think the Theranos ordeal increased the amount of due diligence happening generally in biotech? And I would argue like probably not. I think the actual, you know, traditional deep tech biotech investors in the Valley, 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, right? You call up a single, she also was non-technical. So having, you know, this sort of very, you know, a non-technical founder promising that she's going to do something that the experts or other, you know, medical device manufacturers and, and scientists have been trying to do for decades and been unable to. And she says,

well, if you just give me like billions of dollars, I'll, you know, we're going to actually do it, you know, or, or, you know, I'm sure in some of these pitch meetings, she's like, yeah, internal testing shows that we're one-to-one with, uh, you know, with traditional, you know, blood testing, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a big question here about who was really driving the aggression at the company, her or Sunny Balwani. And during her case, her defense attorney made the, what's it called, the Spingali defense,

saying that he kind of pushed her to create this narrative and perpetrate this fraud. Wait, Tiger did? Tiger? What? That was her nickname. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Tiger. And so I don't know. It's an open question. Sonny has not done any interviews, but we got to hear his side of the case. But 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, look, it's like actually Steve Jobs faked it till he made it. And it's OK to push the envelope a little bit but the end product for theranos is not the device which they made it is the results yep um the the tiger thing i'll read out this quote quickly because this was one of the most iconic exchanges that that uh you know emerged uh during the legal process this was a text message between

holmes and sunny balwani uh it said holmes uh 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 clearly locked in, at least in that moment. 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.

Evans, whom she met at a rooftop charity event in October of 2017 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. is based in Southern California in the San Diego area and is very, very, very widely respected and a very big part of the community down there. So I think that the entire debacle was very stressful in many ways

given the son's relationship with Elizabeth, which clearly they, they didn't, you know, fully support if they weren't, you know, putting up, um, resources to, to help with the process. Yeah. The timeline here is just crazy. I mean, 2017 is where the scandal goes down. I remember this breaking John Kerry Rue at the wall street journal broke the story and it looked bad immediately. Um, I actually remember when I got to Silicon Valley, my co-founder David was a biotech PhD, Caltech and Harvard guy. And I was like, wait, like, why aren't we using any of your skills? Like I can develop software. We're in, you know, Y Combinator loosely, like we're in the Silicon Valley area. 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 shouldn't compete with them isn't that funny oh wow i was like yeah we should do some biotech thing because like you have a great pedigree here we're really not using you uh you know like you're learning you're learning all this business stuff i always i always forget that david is just the ultimate phd chad yeah yeah just like you know he's just chatting out, but you know, in a more traditional manner. But, but, but he, he was like, yeah, it's like impossible. Like there's no opportunity there. Like it's, it's not, it's not going to happen.

And I was like, oh, interesting. 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 isn't real. Like he clocked it immediately. And that's why, that's why usually 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 um s s uh sbf you know shouldn't have been doing that uh you know even prior to the other issues that happened but um but at least in the ftx situation there were happy ftx users there were you know you could you you know, at least demo the product and say, okay, this is like, this is a real thing. And so that 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. Like 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 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 pass on this company?

And like, why am I getting the opportunity? But I'm sure it was his ego being like, yeah, of course I would invest in the next, you know, pass on this company and like, why am I getting the opportunity? But I'm sure it was his ego being like, yeah, of course I would invest in the next, you know, the Apple of healthcare. Right. It just makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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? 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 20 years of research

in a particular molecule or particular, uh, technique, uh, CRIS, 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. Moderna went through this with Stefan Benzel. It was a spin out. And I think Flagship did the deal and took that company. They were actually called the next Theranos because they were very secretive. And the CEO was saying that they're going to cure cancer and create like a vaccine for cancer was giving TED talks. And everyone was like, what's going on here? 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. And they did very well. It's funny that I don't know how prison works these days. But then if you go to 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 their two children on a beach in la jolla and i didn't know you could just go out and do photo shoots on the beach like it's pretty pretty nice that you get to get out and so that was for the new york times so that had to have been during the not like right before she went in yeah that must be they don't they don't like they don't let prisoners okay okay yeah yeah yeah that makes sense.

Can you imagine that exchange? She's talking with whoever. I don't know how it works, honestly. Yeah, well, you don't understand. It's People Magazine. It's People Magazine. You ever gotten an opportunity for a profile on People Magazine? You've got to let me out. Yeah.

And so the People Magazine does a good job of telling 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 prisons routine. Each morning she wakes up just after 5 a.m. on the grind. Jocko Willink style eats fruit for breakfast and then does a 40 minute daily lifting weights, rowing, and running on a track. She's grinding. I like it. By 8 a.m., she's at the education building earning 31 cents an hour as a re-entry 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. Can you imagine if she spent a decade just deep in the science, James Cameron style? I 100% agree. And I want that to happen. If she's the real deal, publish some research, publish some blog posts, even just give us your take on the latest science. Break down CRISPR, 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 just talking about the personal side, it's a lot harder to take you seriously as, hey, yes, you were really a student 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. Find something that's undiscovered in the scientific research and drop a bomb on us, Elizabeth. I'm ready. 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 for their court cases. Holmes says she 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 Spangali defense that he was manipulating her. And you can kind of see that in the text messages, like it is a 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. 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 therapy for PTSD. 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. 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 be rough

to be in uh she's reading a lot she read harry potter rick rubens the creative act and uh cherry huber is it somewhat surprising that that they have salmon in a prison like this. Why? I don't know. That doesn't seem that crazy. I don't know. It's got to get protein from somewhere. Certainly not. Certainly not the least expensive, you know,

fish. Yeah. I don't know. But, uh, Oh, well, uh,

well, she's scheduled for release in April 3rd, 2032. She'll be on the show April 4th. Hopefully we'd love to interview her and see what she's cooking up in the April 3rd, 2032. She'll be on the show April 4th, 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 mean, what's your last take before we close out?

I'm very confident that we could do a Holmes prison interview episode if it ever made sense. But we'd like to see the research first. We'd like to look at the data. I think it's awesome that she's trying to help people from within the walls. But we want to see the science. Yeah. I want to put her in the ring with a couple biotech phds quiz her on a bunch of stuff pop quiz how does crisper work you know see if she ever cared if she if she gives some good answers i'm willing to she's saying that willing to forgive he's saying that uh she's gonna when she gets out she's gonna fight for reform of the criminal justice system yep 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, says Holmes. So it sounds like she's going to abandon biotech and focus on this. And maybe, you know, maybe she can have a real positive impact there. So again, everybody's doing their best. Sometimes their best is terrible. But hopefully she can hit a good trajectory. It is a fascinating story, though. It's captivating.

I see why they made a show out of it. I see why they're making movies out of it. It is it is wild well let's move on to some good news hadrian has announced atlas uh 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. He wants to know if he's manufacturing a part, when is he going to 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. And so if you're a Hadrian customer, now you have access to Atlas.

You can track all the parts 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? I mean, it's very cool. There's just so much. If you've ever got anything manufactured anywhere, it's just a lot of email and PDFs and, uh, you know, uh, calling, calling people up and saying, where's, where's this thing? Uh, you know, and so it, uh, makes a ton of sense. Uh, it's, it's cool that Hadrian is that this wasn't

actually the problem they were trying to solve. 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 going to make it, you know, a 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 production and they're not saying oh we're just going to use this random you know order management sass app that we bolt on or we're going to use salesforce we're going to actually own the entire stack from the actual part being manufactured to the delivery to the end uh and uh purchaser so yeah very cool to see and uh youtuber chris has just been chris has just been such a legend in his support for the show uh i've never met him personally but um, he's absolutely, uh, exemplifies brother behavior. So I'd love to see Adrian win.

Yeah. I saw a screenshot from a YouTuber who, uh, is one of those like, uh, builder DIY hacker types that builds like physical, like kind of 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. 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 to America. And the fact that we really have fallen behind on like the machine shops. If you don't have a standing relationship with a guy who just knows how to make that part and they might be retiring, uh, you're going to have a rough go. Um, but let's stay on. Yeah. There's something, that's something that, uh, you know, we, we, we throw a little bit of shade at the CCP from time to time, but, uh, 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 in that. Let's get this to you 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 low quality is just no longer the case. Yeah. Yeah. It's all, it's all over the place. I mean, Timu, obviously the lowest quality product possible. Did I tell you we got duped by Timu right after we did the deep dive? They must have been listening because I ordered a wireless headset that I'm wearing right now on Amazon and it arrived and it's a Sennheiser product. It said Sennheiser. I bought it. 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 they swap out swap in like a timu clone uh 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 bnh and it came a couple days that's crazy um but yeah i always any anytime i return uh something you know an amazon purchase you can like drop them off at a whole foods or whatever a couple of days later. That's crazy. Um, but I always, any, anytime I return, uh, something,

you know, an Amazon purchase, you can like drop them off at a whole foods or whatever. 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 there, you know, I could have just put like a horse head in the box and they would accepted it. So it's customer friendly, which is cool, but, uh, yeah, it can definitely be abused. Uh, 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, a 10 billion post. Let's give him a little size gong for that uh why agent aiden goes guo

says why isn't this feasible realistically 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 dockweiler the beach right there it's just in front of this uh 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. Like the sewage treatment plant or the water treatment plant doesn't really care probably about that. So I would love to see a port built there. I think that's an awesome idea, Ted. And good. Yeah. So one of the pushback that some of the pushback that you're going to get is the entire surfing community in El Segundo will come out in full force to make sure it doesn't happen and you know obviously you know environmental stuff but this actually happened

before they added a uh dana white uh not dana white dana point um okay always ufc always on the mind uh dana point used to have the best surf break in southern california it was this iconic break and they put a port in dana point and it just went was gone completely and so um you can watch crazy documentaries on on the whole history of that uh but surfers are very triggered anytime you start doing sort of like actual infrastructure development near surf spots and i grew up actually surfing uh in el segundo at el porto which is just south of um doc weiler 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 creates a nazare like hundred foot wave right off of santa monica they're here you have big wave surfing 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 uh sink an aircraft carrier that just completely changes the the surf break and just turns it into the best surf i actually i love that 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 this one place that was got really good swell it had the right wind direction and um but just didn't have the sandbags so we like seriously looked into it and the economics of like okay if we get you know 50 of our buddies to like chip in for an old boat and then like take it out there and sink it. Yeah. I mean, 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 kind of ruined scuba diving for a little bit maybe um but at the same time uh in uh truck lagoon in palau uh dur in micronesia during world war ii uh the japanese had when you said truck lagoon in palau i was just like okay are you just completely making stuff no no no this is a real story so so So the Japanese had a whole fleet of fighter aircraft, Zeros, that were stationed on this island towards the end of World War II and the war in the Pacific. And they had intel that the Americans

were going to 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 the team uh like the the japanese army or the air force uh didn't want to lose all the planes they said hey if we lose a landing strip we can repave that potentially but we don't want to lose all these planes and have to remanufacture them 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 uh we'll crane the the planes out dry them out and then we'll need to clean them and stuff and get 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 counterattack. Right. But the war ended. And so those planes were never like retrieved, 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. Crazy. Yeah. And so that's one of the examples where like the second order effects of this mistake actually were pretty good. I mean, I'm sure there were some environmental considerations, like there's probably some oil in the water for a little bit.

But now it's just fantastic for basically everyone. The scuba divers enjoy it. The fish enjoy it. Everyone's good. I would not think that you could. I mean, I don't think you could drop an F-35 more than, you know, 10 minutes without just completely destroying it at this point. The electronics are a different factor now, uh, back then very analog. And so you dry it out and you're pretty much good as long as the oil lines are good and everything's

the pistons are cleaned out and stuff. It's crazy that you could do this. The first flight back in a, in a plane that had been submerged in salt water for you know 48 hours would have been a little hectic but yeah a lot of those guys were willing to put it all on the line anyway so you know what's a little more comedy anyway let's move on to anarchy fan of the show anarchy says uh is uh quote tweeting six levels deep here we got consequence. 15 out of 23 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 Anarchy closes it out by saying, that's why we test on monkeys, LMAO.

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 uh with uh 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 going to be such an attack vector but it's just such an emotional story that it goes viral like every week basically like oh they're abusing monkeys um but uh fortunately the monkeys live

very good lives at over at neural link and they uh and they get to use macbooks which is crazy yeah i was talking to one of the neuraluralink 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. And I was like, yeah, that sounds amazing. We should really try to get one of them on the show at some point.

Play Pong against them? Yeah. See who can win? They're probably cracked at Pong. I mean, we can get Nathan on the show. I've texted with him before. He's a good dude. He's the first neuro link patient P one, uh, uh, paraplegic quadriplegic. I'm not exactly sure the term, but, uh, has been re gifted this ability to use the computer and can tweet and play civilization and, uh, play games.

And it's, uh, it's truly like a magical wonderful uh technology and i'm very excited for it and uh obviously it's going to be slow obviously there's going to be a lot of things to do i mean the neural link team when i've talked to them they said like yeah it's going to be like 50 years maybe until this is in like you know an average person who's healthy but uh in terms of in terms of seeing it as a true medical device for helping people that have a serious, serious disability, the impact is already happening right now. And it just makes me, it just feels incredibly futuristic, incredibly positive and something that needs to be rolled out everywhere. Well, let's go to some other amazing news america is back on top of let's go lap records at five different uh courses the chevrolet zr1 uh unleashed uh was unleashed on five of america's best tracks road america road

atlanta vir's full course and grand course and watkins glenn with gm employees and engineers behind the wheel i love this they don't get test drivers they get gm employees the guy who broke the speed record yeah i gotta i gotta potentially put it on this they can employ yeah of course of course but but the guy who did the speed record in this car so uh if you don't know uh cherolet, the Corvette has been a historical American front engine muscle car for generations at this point, decades. They're now on the C8. The C8 transitioned from a front engine to a mid-engine or rear engine, I think mid-engine sports car. So it drives more like an Italian Ferrari or Lamborghini at this point. And then they have a number of packages and upgrades and the ZR1, you can think of it as like the GT3 RS, like almost the track

focused, but still road legal version of the Corvette C8. And so the C8, they really went all out on this. They gave it over a thousand horsepower. And typically for a long time, American cars, just car makers in general have kind of given up on the high speed records. They just don't even go after them anymore because Bugatti set the record so high at like 250 miles an hour that 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 ZR1 goes something like 223 miles an hour. And that test, you have to drive straight 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. So yeah, I mean, I'm sure he's like a track driver. He's like very experienced,

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 ZR1?

Yeah, I think we need to put this in context. Please. They were basically racing against time set by the GT3 RS and the GT2 RS and maybe a GT4 RS. That's right. For sure, the GT3 and the GT2. So these are tracks thatche has historically been absolutely dominant on um and so to come out and put up these times is uh just incredible uh i i've never been a never been an american muscle car guy you you have a a more uh meaningful appreciation for them but uh but i but i i'm

very excited that to see an american you know manufacturer competitive here and putting this emphasis on a car that will basically be in the supercar category it's it's it's hard to call a um you know one of yeah a zr1 uh a supercar for me, but it certainly is when you're putting up numbers like this, but at the same 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 GT, GT three 50 are 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. So it's again, kind of an American muscle car. I love that Chevy was like, hey, let's go a different

direction and try and get into the more rear engine sports car, hyper car, super car market and reposition this classic muscle car because there's enough exposure in the American market. And so I think it's really cool. I think it looks fantastic. The other thing is the ZR1 is basically less than half the cost of the cars that it's racing against. And so you're making this ridiculous performance accessible,

which is awesome. Yeah. I love it. Great, great daily, great commuter car, wherever you are in the world. Yeah.

It's a, I mean, if you're an American dynamism investor, you're trying to tell a story about revitalizing American manufacturing. You don't want to get caught in some Italian or British or German. Is this American made? Some of their stuff is Mexico, right? I don't know, but it's an American company.

I think this is probably made in America. Yeah. At least modified in America. Let's move on to Nikunj. You were right. It's made in Kentucky. Made in Kentucky. Let's go go couldn't be

more american than kentucky 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 then you get the the land yacht the cadillac escalade and there you go you're pretty good then. You got your weekend car. You're going to the mountains. You need a big land yacht. Then you got your little daily self-driving car. Yeah, so you build out your American stack

and I'll stick with my German stack. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, you'll be at the dealership getting service every two weeks and I'll be driving my my escalade in the apocalypse because we got reliability on our side in in america you know you you get your ford gt you got a problem with that you take it down to the ford dealership you swap it out oh this uh your mirror broke yeah it'll be 25 oh your your rear view mirror yeah yeah it's the same one yeah it's the same one that's in the

the corolla we gotta we gotta do more on ferrari they're spiraling right now there's a there's a post in here we'll get to it in the timeline yeah uh let's move on to token maxing from nakunj kothari i believe he just departed his uh his venture firm 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. 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. 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, use the best model, spit out a ton of reasoning tokens. Doesn't matter. Your margins don't matter right now. Get product market fit, get lock 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 par results. 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. 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 want to scale quickly, we're gonna have to spend it in the next, you know, 12 months, which is typically like a much tighter timeline than people want to see, right? You want to be positioned so that 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 want to do the deal, you're still staring down the barrel of a gun being like, we have, you know, weeks basically uh to actually get this done and closed and and all that stuff can drag on so i wonder if companies are going to 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 chat gpt 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 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 don't give me the dumb, don't give me the dumb tokens. Yeah. And, and, and don't, don't downgrade me to the dumb tokens. Once you have me locked in a contract, if I'm in for a

year, I want the, I want the, the, the Oh three high max capacity on every single inference. Yeah. The, uh, 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 going to drop it. It already has so substantially.

Yeah. Deep seek is just another example of that where, you know, when deep seek launch, people are like, think about all the stuff you can do when, when inference is basically free, right? And so it's a good bet to take right now

because again, if you focus on margins now, the product quality is lower, you're going to 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 your competitor comes out with the same core you know, core product and, uh, you're going to get smoked. So let's move on to Andrew Reed. He says a sheem from Greylock has all of his realized losses from 20 years of investing tattooed on his arm. That's sick. I need to see a picture of this. How crazy would it be if it's, I'm imagining it's like

four companies, but that'd be hilarious if it was just like his entire arm. He's just got a massive sleeve because he's been ripping seat checks, you know, a hundred checks a year or something. I thought this might be a joke as in he's been a later stage investor. He's never realized the loss maybe. And so he actually has no tattoos. And Andrew's just making a joke about it, but I don't know. Yeah, so this is just a very low-tan banger. Eric Reiner says, nice niche audience, but I like it.

And then the other guy says, or he says, no ink was used in this process. So it sounds like he has no no real wise losses uh to date yeah i i think that's possible although how can you possibly be an investor for 20 years and never realize loss you have to be later stage right or maybe you just sell secondary like a savage i mean it's something like look look at look at sequoia statistics. I think 1% of the companies they've backed have not resulted in some sort of exit. 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. And so we realized like a 10% loss by the time we, you know, yeah, you can get acquired by another private company and it's majority stock. Then you could wind up taking, you could, you could make the case that we haven't realized

this loss. Cause if this other company does well, we're going to make it all back, right? Yeah. Also, I mean, anything below the benchmark for the market, in my opinion, is a loss. If you're not beating the average, you need to tattoo that on your body. Don't give me, oh yeah, this company returned 1.5X. You're getting that tattoo for that. That's not a 5X or that's not a 10 bagger oh yeah we doubled we double oh yeah well we're not in the game of doubling here yeah get the tattoo have higher standards yeah higher standards uh well speaking of the highest standards in the game perplexity is working to sponsor an f1 team but they got blocked by oracle uh kylie robinson writes scoop Blocked by Oracle. Kylie Robinson writes, scoop. So you're hearing it here first.

Perplexity has been in negotiations to sign a sponsorship deal with Red Bull Racing worth $5 million 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 are at the heart of the conflict. Oracle has made a bid to purchase TikTok and perplexity is a rival bidder. Oracle is also a backer of Stargate, the $500 billion project to build data centers for open AI, which competes with perplexity. It doesn't seem like Oracle and perplexity are in direct competition, but I understand how they

might want to, uh, yeah, uh, uh, flex their muscles, be a little sharp elbowed. What's your take? I mean, when I read into this, when I saw this headline, great scoop, great scoop, by the way, great scoop. We love a tech adjacent F1 story. Absolutely. I think this is more Oracle. Open AI went from 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 open AI and perplexity being directly competitive right now that open AI is basically saying people are using open AI and perplexity being directly competitive right now that, you know, open AI is basically saying people are using open AI as like, like perplexity is positioned as an answer engine. Chat GPT also acts as an answer engine, but they just have a different knowledge cutoff. Perplexity is 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 like many of the many of the chat gpg models have that little search button that you can turn on and then it will search the internet actively and give you kind of up-to-date answers but it's not the product isn't designed

that way yeah so i just think this is like sam like the other the other factor here is the Perplexity CEO worked at OpenAI. Did he? Yeah. Early OpenAI employee chat. Feel free to fact check me on that. But I'm pretty confident. And he clearly hates Sam. And so basically once a day, he posting some some sort of like shade towards sam

and open ai or yeah you know sharing something about the the open ai whistleblower you know he's sort of like they clearly have beef and this is not that i'm sure perplexities deal with uh red bull oracle racing would have been a relatively small logo, right? Like, and, and so I have to imagine this as like, could it easily have been Larry Ellison asking Sam, Hey, uh, do you mind if we were, you know, like, Hey, they want perplexity wants to sponsor Red Bull Oracle racing. And, uh, you know, Sam's just like, racing and uh you know sam's just like absolutely not you know yeah yeah yeah totally possible the other thing here too to be clear like perplexity integrated deep seek into the pro 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 want to have association with a, you know, adjacent sort of indirect direct competitor. 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 uh i thought that'd be fun for them to do i don't know who has that chat but i thought that would be a good uh yeah there's a good little further rivalry for the two one of them can get the dot com one of them can get the at handle and they

can duke it out uh but let's move on to uh the what do we got here? This isn't working. The FIT NVIDIA GPU belt. Hampton shares a photo of a woman wearing a GPU belt. It looks like she also has a GPU phone case and a wonderful, maybe Cartier Santos there as well. Really, really styling 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 big Nvidia release. Bulletproof jacket made of, you know, Blackwell chips. Yeah. But if 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 $1,000 and you can get an A100 for $64,000, something like that. I think the basic GPU purse is $1,024, 1024. Very cool. And they actually, they build in the cooling fan. Yeah, the cooling fan's in there. So if you're a female, uh,

uh, AI investor, I think you got to have the GPU purse. Certainly makes a statement when you're out at the founders happy hours. Uh, but let's move on to some controversy in Hollywood. The IMAX versus the standard debate. Alice Maz says still 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. 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 IMAX and demand that people see it in the theater. I think that'd be good. True.

Coming to theaters near you. 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.

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 on IMAX screen. And I want everything to be, the full chain of production needs to be IMAX. Same thing with 3D. For a long time, there were companies that would shoot the whole movie in 2D.

And then they'd pay people to go in and rotoscope and cut out all the different layers and make it 3d after the fact as opposed to avatar where james cameron is literally shooting avatar with two cameras to make it 3d from start to finish the whole movie is shot in 3d and it looks way better and it made people hate 3d because they were like this is crappy looking speaking of movies we got to organize some uh brother you know movie events ben had an idea he texted me about this what what did the accountant to the accountant to uh ben affleck's the accountant gets a sequel nine years later the accountant 2 opens in theaters april 25th after world premiering at South by Southwest. Watch the official trailer here.

I think that's going to be a great movie for the boys. So stay tuned. We can do them in a few cities. We can do SF, LA, New York. 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 going to see the accountant to this date, this time, this location, are you in or are you out? And then wear a suit. And then, uh, you know, you, you, you'll get, you know, you'll send out 20 messages. Eight guys will be in 10. We'll 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, uh, being a degenerate and going and gambling on sports or drinking or winding up in the back of some limo running around, uh, Nashville, that would be a disaster. You wouldn't want to do that. Yeah. And so avoid, uh, well, speaking of, of suits, if you're going to wear a suit to the movie theater, you should definitely, uh, where what we're promoting today, Laurel Piana, uh,

crafted with an appreciation for Laurel 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 yeah so people uh laura uh a 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 completely bespoke and customize every element of this. John, uh, John Fios, Fiorentino label can do this for you as well. Um, so, uh, you don't need to go buy, uh, Laura Piana ready to wear at the store to wear their fine fabrics. So, uh, get the, get the money counter out when you're ready to spend some money on, on, uh, Laura. Uh, well let's move on to this fantastic post from navin rao this is one of the funniest and most amazing posts i've seen in a long time uh so this is uh this is one of the co-founders

or executives at databricks the what 60 billion dollar uh tech company uh he says i have a ton of FOMO about the data ai summit we're putting on at databricks i will not be there since i've got my hands full with this super bummed but it's going to 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 uh which is absolutely wild this is the only i don't want to hear oh i've got some family trip or i've got you know my cousin's wedding i can't make it to my own conference i want to hear that you're you know you know making a run at le mans you know and you need to be that's what he's doing he's doing the 24 hours le mans oh so this is okay there's is a Le Mans car. Yeah. Yeah. Which is insane. This looks right at home there.

Incredible. This thing is beautiful. I wish they made more, you know, sort of street legal Le Mans-esque cars because this thing, imagine driving this to the grocery store. I mean, you just sound like someone who didn't get an Aston Martin Valkyrie allocation. Yeah. I think it's a skill issue. Skill issue. If you just talk to your Aston dealer a little bit more an Aston Martin Valkyrie allocation. Yeah. I think it's a skill issue. Skill issue. If you just talk to your Aston dealer a little bit more,

you could have gotten the Valkyrie and you would have looked like this pulling up to Erewhon. Yeah. Valkyrie is fantastic. But I wonder, does it say any more details on how this was manufactured or is it? I have no idea. I think there are a number of teams. Yeah, we got to have them on the show to talk about this because this is fantastic. I posted a comment about what makes for a good way to attract VCs. I should have put an LMP car, a Le Mans, great time and a lot of endurance at the 24 hours of Le Mans. But I said what actually attracts VCs is the ability to drive stick, a good Nürburgring time, being down to do the Dakar,

owning a McLaren F1, being good at drifting, a solid Pike's Peak time, funny gumball stories, being a beast in the simulator, actively being on an F1 team, multiple Grand Prix wins, and ideally seven F1 drivers 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.

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. Incredible. 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. 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. 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 uh for likes and impressions i mean uh this is the neck the natural you know open ai 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 open AI, open AI will do eventually. Like that does seem to be the only thing that they don't seem to want to do is all of the

reinforcement learning and offshoring and things like that. 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, 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. And probably smart for them to just focus on these

sort of more, you uh pg consumer use cases of how to do your homework uh 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 yeah i saw justin moore share some videos from tick tock of uh women who had essentially jailbroken chat gpt to some extent to create kind of a not erotic but just generic boyfriend or kind of a like 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 uh it'll be interesting to see where it goes i'm sure we'll see lots of examples uh but let's move on to reggie james good friend of the show.

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 4U feed clearly has an agenda, and that's fine. Many 4U feeds do. But two powerful features give users more agency. Allow people to make their lists their default feed you can actually do this if you use it on web and you install this uh 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. It's very janky. And then he also says opening up the tuning of the 4U feed and settings so users can see more of what they'd like. And Armand says, why be in your own echo chamber when you can be in Elon's? And yeah, the feed, 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 think we've certainly felt like oh today like like the posts just aren't doing well maybe that's on us but also maybe the algorithm i get i get messages from people every single day being like what's going on? Am I shadow banned? There's like this weird balance where when you're

posting, 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 is going to drop because you need to find new people that want that kind of content. 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 want to talk about. But there's a lot of factors at play here. I think, you know, I think these two suggestions from Reggie are awesome. They make 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, uh, and, uh, 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 kind of see the next video is like Montoya or whatever, you know, like freaking out. It's like, it's difficult to compete with him. You know, he's got I was lucky to come on, on the original Twitter at a time when I would see basically 100% content from other sort of business people, investors,

and maybe they would post something like about F1 when F1 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. And 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 going to see in the for you page. I started just for banger archive. When I would see like a post that got like 150,000 likes, I started just copy and pasting it into a, uh, into a notes app. And I realized that I was training the algorithm to think that I really wanted that. So now I'm like, I don't want to, I'm not going to keep doing that because I don't want it to think that I just want

that kind of content. Like I'm fine with like one out of 20 posts being some viral slop, but I want it to all be that. I also noticed that I think the algorithm, 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, uh, reality TV drama. And it's not 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. Cause you ran out of tech content. When I was 22, I distinctly remember running out of new content on Twitter, which is basically the cardinal sin of a social media app. Your user wants to be using the app cause they're addicted and you're not providing for them. You know, it's like,

it'd be like turning on the tv and cnn is just blank you know the answer is for tech people just to post way more just post more and over overload the feed 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 uh 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 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 everything's algorithmic uh the algorithm is going to show people your content if it thinks that they were going to enjoy it and they're not if not it's like very um until 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, you know, it's like, uh, happens. I just post through it, posted the pain. Doesn't matter what you just got to keep going. Well, let's move on to, uh, one of the greatest posters. He's been on the show many times. Wilmanitis. He says 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 15 minutes. A better life is possible.

I think that's so funny. I have joked before about jet skiing into LA from Malibu because PCH can just get so bad 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 30 minutes, jet skiing into work that, that, that just seems like the dream to me. So it's definitely something here. We got to get, I've never actually stayed on a,'ve stayed over on boats but i've never stayed on a houseboat i don't know what the laws are 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 going to wind up doing landfill and just expanding like can you just take as much space as you want because you can get 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 um i'd be down for for aquatic uh podcasts this is this is the seasteading that uh uh what's his name patry friedman was working on uh it's a big libertarian push for seasteading that, uh, uh, what's his name? Patrick Friedman was working on, uh, big libertarian push for seasteading for a while. We talked to those guys who did Sealand. They live in that, uh, communications platform off of, uh, off of the UK. And, uh, yeah, this is the future. I love it.

Uh, anyway, let's move on to, I got put in the truth zone. Um, I got a community note. I said, I can't believe this is a real photo. Yes. 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 3 missile. And I got a community note here says, no, this is not by Mistral AI. In fact, the picture shows a Mistral 3 missile. 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 stole the photo. I tried to give them a little bit of credit there. And they fooled me.

And I got slapped with a community note. Wait, so Wall Street Journal. Wall Street Journal clearly just Googled Mistral Missile. Because there is news. It is true that Mistral is doing a defense company 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 so this representative or they just got confused and they posted a picture that's it is a wrong called mistral but it's not from the company mistral that we know and so a

little bit of an update a little bit of a mea culpa but really this one's on the wall street journal so i take no responsibility we are not journalists no we are you know we are reaction live streamers uh anyway uh let's move on to guillermo over at vercell 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? No? No? Okay. We're working on our soundboard here. They reported a 46% or 46X traffic uptick within seconds and 100% uptime without any manual config or provisioning on Vercel. 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

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, and all the things that their cell 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 way on the Superbowl. And I think they hadn't scaled appropriately and they had some downtime. And so Guillermo's there to save the day. So if you're going to do a Superbowl ad, uh, yeah. Downtime on a Superbowl ad could, you know, easily be a multi, you know, multi tens of millions of dollars and like lost, you know, customer value because people are watching the Superbowl. 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, e-commerce operators deal with this all the time around Black Friday. If their site goes down for 30 minutes at the wrong time, it could be like a million dollars of lost sales, right? Terrible. 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 a cyber truck aesthetics this is super obvious i hope elon actually makes this production car i think this looks awesome and what a way to stand out in the supercar market where everything kind of looks the same right now. You think about a Ferrari 296, the SF90, the Pininfarina Batista, the Rimac Navara, even the McLaren W1. They all kind of look the same. Lamborghini has something good going with a Rivalto, in my opinion. 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 something with Cybertruck aesthetics would really lend itself to a low to the ground supercar that would be super cool. And I really hope it happens. I think they need the electric muscle car. You know, what is the, what's the futuristic, you know, version of a challenge, you know, Dodge Challenger. And I haven't, I'm so burnt out. I think the Model 3, Model S, X, Y,

they all look decent, but they all have the exact same aesthetic and they've been completely played out the cyber truck stands out still there's a lot on the road but i get excited every time i see them my kids get excited when they see them 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 once once they look all the same you see that with the uh the ferrari uh pureblood what's that one called the pure osangue it looks like a mazda and the mazda suv looks exactly the same 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 F8 and they brought that to the 296 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 Ferrari is just unbelievably lost yep right i mean the 12 cylindries sales are terrible nobody wants them it's priced way too high hot take i think the 12 cylinder the dolce cilindri looks fantastic i love it i mean it's it's a good looking car but yeah not in the context of any of their other models right if you look at the 812 yeah it looks much much worse i think it looks better but that's a hot take i understand that's yeah but i i really like

the the f80 the black bar in the front i think that looks really cool uh but i am in the minority there for sure for sure yeah anyway yep um what else we got uh By the way, I do have somewhat of a, I got to go meet. Okay. Well, let's, let's do a promoted post from Ben Braverman. Saga is hiring a principal to join the investment team. What a great gig. If you're looking to get into venture, uh, what is saga? We are one of the only sizable funds raised during the great VC winter partners are Max Altman. That's a Sam's brother and it's Thompson and Ben Braverman who was at Flexport, uh, writing checks alongside Ryan Peterson for a long time. Uh, saga leads and co-leads at seed and series a with reserves to continue at the B+. We've incubated one company already with plans for more.

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. Going to get more likes. 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. 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 to Ben Braverman's page and send him a DM. 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. Um, and it's cool to see that there, you can tell they're building a firm, right? This is not, uh, this, this looks to be setting up as,

you know, we're actually building a team versus, you know, we have our rockstar GPs and then there's a support staff, but you know, this is, you know, clearly trying to, you know, actually build out a proper investment team, which we'd love to see. A post from Patrick Collison over at Stripe. Can you hear that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I. Uh, Patrick Collison says, was there a sound effect? Yeah. I'm trying to play sound effects, but it's not working. Who knows? It might be that it might be that the stream can hear it, but I can't. Okay. Anyway,

we'll have fun with that. We'll work it out. Uh, Patrick says it's happening all built on Stripe. Uh, Ben Lang says tiny teams of the future cursor zero to $100 million ARR in 21 months with 20 people. Bolt, zero to 20 million. Lovable, zero to 10 million. Mercor, zero to 50 million, 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 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. Absolutely, wow. We also have some great news for Figma. We talked about the factors driving just this ridiculous growth of some of these new companies like Cursor and Mercor and Bolt. And an underrepresented part of that is just you can scale billing infinitely with very little operational overhead. So it wasn't the case, you know, 12, 15 years ago.

Well, you know, the fans love to hear about a 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. We love the team over at Figma. And yeah, I mean, these changes are heard around the world. Brooklyn is permanently changed whenever one of these rolls out. And we're happy to see the team over at Figma absolutely crushing. We love to see it. Absolute dogs.

They're definitely in founder mode. Like Dylan is back, clearly locked in. The first thing I noticed was their updated billing practices. Definitely, you know, knowing that I value the product a lot and trying to, you know, get some of that uh actually capture some of that value um but uh yeah awesome to see them shipping aggressively just because they're so well positioned to dominate gen ai in design right

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 uh i would argue argue that Dylan would say Figma is the Figma of design. 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, uh, with a lot of capital and a lot of great team members and a lot of customers that are already using the product, a lot of distribution. Well, 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 1 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 going to play the video. And it's just fascinating to see that this is finally coming to America. 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. Yeah. This is the coolest, basically a top three ad format for me. Blimps are still up there just because they're timeless, but, uh, we're going to put, we we're gonna use ad quick to put a ramp card in the sky we got to do it uh maybe we throw up a microphone uh at some point to to honor all hard-working podcasters but uh this is just it's still i think this is one of those things that basically

forever it'll still be um 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 um yeah if um people can just sign up for ad quick and talk to their rep and and make this happen but uh if you have any um you know issues feel free to reach out and we would love to actually help with the campaign around the creative and ideation yeah oh speaking of partnerships uh eight sleep sent us some fabulous hats there we go put it on you're looking you're looking kind of kind of like an athlete right it goes it goes well you are a corporate athlete but i am a corporate athlete but the black suit the black hat this is athlete, but the black suit, the black hat, this is a good combo. And being six, eight, you do, you look like, uh,

you look like you you're, you're about to sign a max contract. 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. People don't, I'm going to, I'm going to, uh, I'm going to, I'm going to gas you up for a second because people don't know this, but John is actually just ridiculous, like way too jacked for being a podcaster. Who's not selling supplements. It was so funny. It says, uh, so I, I had to put every measurement in, uh, in like percentiles and on my height, I'm six, eight. And it says exceptionally tall. This is elite, even among athletes. I love that. My neck is in the 90th percentile. It says a strong, thick neck supports overall upper body aesthetics and function.

I was like, let's go Chad GBD. Thank you, Sam. 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. So the goal in life is to not be on gear, but have people think that you are, uh, you know, think that you are 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. Not where it should be. Should be at a hundred. Tonight's a new night. I'm I'll get there. Uh, but yeah, the performance has been tip top lately. It's been great. Sleep well, get in the gym, crush it.

Lots of caffeine, a little bit of nicotine. And, uh, that's all you need. That's all you need. Uh, 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 though 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 sent us a whole copy so we'll have to do a whole whole extra deep dive on the history

of veil because we have the authoritative copy now with lots of great images of veil and so thank you thank you ian for saying we'll take any opportunity to talk about a very nice handwritten note so it's been great getting to know you veil is a special place for my family my grandfather was involved with the mountains since the, since, uh, nearly the beginning. I hope you enjoy the book and consider it an invitation to join me at our place anytime. Look forward to connecting again soon. So thanks Ian for sending that in. And, uh, yeah, good to have you as a fan of the show. Do you have a time for one more post or should we wrap it up? Of course I got time for one more post. Let's do it. Let's do it.

Still not working. I'm having fun. We didn't get to the, so people in the chat were asking about the Jamie Dimon reaction. Oh yeah, let's do that. We should get into that because it's, it's, that one is time. I saw, I don't know if this is the post that we pulled. I have it. John Ziegler. In leaked audio, Jamie Dimon takes his employees, especially the younger ones,

to the woodshed over their desire to keep working remotely. He says remote work is terrible. I don't know if Ben has the clip, but Jamie, you're on notice. Ben, you want to play this clip? 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 play this clip? 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 what 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 so it does, okay? And when I found out that people were doing that, you don't do that at my goddamn meetings. You go to a meeting with me, you got my attention, you got my focus, 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, and don't give me the shit that work-from-home Friday works. 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?

And they are substantial, okay? Which is the young generation is being damaged by this. That may or may not be on your particular staff, but they are being left behind. They're being left behind socially, ideas, meeting people. 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 for 100 people, I guarantee you if I wanted to, I could run it with 90 and be more efficient. I guarantee you.

I could do it in my sleep. And the notion, these bureaucracies, I need more people, I can't get it done. No, because you're filling out requests that don't need to be done. Your people are going to meetings they don't need to go to. Someone told me to approve 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 J.P. Morgan. So the people of you who don't want to work at the company, that's fine with me. I'm not mad at you. Don't be mad at me.

It's a free country. You can walk on your feet, you know, but this company is going to set our own standards and do it our own way. And I've had it with this kind of stuff. And, you know, I come in, you know, I've been working seven days a goddamn week since covid and i come in and i where's everybody else but here and there and the zooms and the zooms don't show up and people say they didn't get 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 i love it jordy you can't help but think he is, uh, you know, reading between the lines. He's talking about you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was about to say Friday, no suit jacket, no tie, really phoned it in remotely, remote podcasters. They're on their way out and they're dying breed.

It's in person bust. I would take it a step further. This, this sounds like some private conversations that we've had when think when i've used my phone on the set and you and you you know you you start pulling out some swear words you know you're getting real testy letting loose but okay here's here's my actual read on this i think this i don't know how the audio clip emerged but it was positioned as as leaked audio yeah and to me this is uh i have to imagine he he wanted this to leak because it makes him look like an incredible CEO, right? He's setting clear expectations. He's frustrated with how things are happening and he's actively changing it. He's giving people an out. He is setting that,

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. 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. And so he's setting the standard and he expects other people to follow here. And look, I think that a company like JP Morgan will be able to reduce headcount dramatically over time. And so to me, he wants the people that want to work remotely. Why would a CEO want his team to work remotely? There's this value exchange that happens with the company and their employees, which is, I'm going to 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 values there 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 think he genuinely believes that it's bad for younger employees, right? There's very clear arguments for why more senior people should be able to work to work remotely, at least part time 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 this is not like a charity or a support program for people. Right. They're choosing to work at J Morgan. 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 going to say, Elon. 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 if I'm working at JP Morgan 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 than I was before. And there's certainly people that are going to listen to that. And they're going to say, I actually want a remote job.

That's what's important to me. And so they can go work somewhere else. 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 19th, 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? And my read on this was that, look, Apple and Elon have had a 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? Would they be able to negotiate that down? Apple's also been an advertiser on Twitter and now X 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 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 we're going to get your, your, your, your content to go a little bit further on our platform organically. And then, yeah, you're going to spend a couple million bucks probably advertising on our platform and we're all bought in on this. So I'm, I'm hesitant about their idea that they're going to launch a car together, but that would be awesome. I think another kind of crazy idea would be Apple car play for humanoid robots, right? There's a

world where app like, so, uh, Oh, Oh, I don't follow. Sorry. follow sorry sorry i i first for a brief second i i was thinking that tesla had a carplay integration they actually don't they don't not that but you can imagine but but i do think in the future right like they're there if you have a humanoid robot in your home or you and you know employ one in some way yeah obviously so anyways there could be a more obvious thing 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 there's a million different things yeah i saw that one doing the same thing you know who knows rivian has been posting about a cryptic event happening

the same day and so maybe there's something deeper happening there um i don't know or before there's so many different possibilities people I don't know. Elon's talked about making a phone before. There's so many different possibilities with Elon. People don't realize that Elon would find out about Rivian doing an event and then host an event the same day and do it with Apple to just try to drown it out. Everybody's a savage at that level.

But anyways, I'm excited to see. Hopefully we'll be live streaming when this happens and we can just talk about it live. I think X should come pre-installed. 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.

Just post a tweet if you want to make a note. Instead of calling someone, just call them over a DM on X. It's the everything app. You don't need anything else. Uh, just one app on your iPhone. And that's the new, that's the new iPhone. I got to go hang with Rob. Um, the, the, the, uh, you know, potentially the greatest podcast producer of all time at currently, uh, Ben, uh, coming hot up on his heels. But, um, uh, just wanted to say, uh, thank you for listening, brothers. It was a good week.

We're going to 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, AdQuick, Wander, Public, Bezel, and 8sleep for their support. I have some big Bezel news coming soon. I'm excited. Can't wait.

Awesome. So 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 weekend. Thank you, brothers.

Happy Valentine's Day. Have a great weekend. Happy Valentine's day. Happy Valentine's day. Big day. Big day for the brothers. Big day. Talk to you soon.