The Chaser Report - Silicon Valley Has Sili-Gone Broke

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

Charles really really wants to buy himself a new pair of AR-Ski-Goggles - that don't exist yet. Meanwhile, an update on the state of Silicon Valley's finances. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report. I'm Charles Firth and with me today is Dom Knight. Hello! Hello. So we're doing another episode of Welcome to the Future. So excited to hear more devices coming down the pipe, Charles.

Yes, and we've got a very, very good augmented reality device today that I'm going to get to in a sec. But before that, I just wanted to say what genius I am, right? Oh. Because, you know, a couple of months ago, I said to you, Dom, I said, hey, why don't we spin off Welcome to the Future as a sort of regular podcast on its own feed? We'll still do it on a Wednesday on the Chase Report feed. But, you know, eventually it will turn into like this mega tech review.

Yeah, like a juggernaut. And we'll just, the main problem that we'll have is counting. all our money, right? Yeah. Well, literally, a few weeks after we started this project, the entire tech sector is about to go bankrupt. I don't know whether you've seen the news over the weekend. The bank of Silicon Valley, which is called Silicon Valley Bank, and it's the bank that pretty

much every founding, you know, firm, you know, like all those sort of little venture capital firms that end up being the mega corporations of tomorrow. like the Facebooks and the Twitters and the Redits and the Roblox and everything. They all bank with this bank called Silicon Valley Bank. And there was a bank run on Friday. And it no longer exists. It literally got taken over by the FDIC, which is the sort of insurance scheme there. And it's just fucked.

It's gone. It's gone. It's already gone. Right. And that has, I mean, there's sort of. of systemic risk that may crash the entire US economy, but there's also just the fact that there are going to be hundreds, if not thousands of tech companies who, you know, there's a real question mark over whether they're going to be able to make payroll in the next few weeks

because, you know, in the US, if you put more than $250,000 in your bank account, everything over $250,000 is not insured. You just sort of, you just, you could look. lose your money. Well, Charles, that just makes me, it makes me very, very sad for all concerned in the tech industry. And I just wish they've been able to put those funds instead of putting it in it like a regulated bank, they should have put it somewhere more sensible and safer like crypto. If they just put all their funds into Bitcoin or Ethereum or any of the other very reliable

coins out there that have only lost 90 to 95% of their value over the past. year or so, they'd have enough for at least one more week of payroll, whereas in fact, in this situation, they have nothing. Well, actually, it was interesting because somebody pointed out that, you know, perhaps, you know, these firms should have been in crypto. And then they pointed out that there's no possibility of a bank run in crypto because a blockchain is a form of technology that cannot possibly process, because there was like $40 billion went out the door at Silicon Bank on Friday.

It can't possibly price even a fraction of that amount in one day. The future of finance, this amazing new technological platform for losing money, is so unimble that you can't even have a run on it. That's pretty funny. And look, I mean, it was a classic case of incredibly bad financial management. In fact, it made me think that, you know, the Silicon Valley Bank is very much in the realm of the sort of financial management that we have here at the chase. Oh, yes.

The guy who was the chief finance. We had an account there, did we? The guy, well, no, but the guy, the CFO, the chief financial officer, his last job before joining Silicon Valley Bank was at Lehman Brothers in 2007. Oh, fantastic. Amazing. So, which, you know, it's obviously the largest bank collapse in the history of the world. And one of the other employees, the chief risk officer, also, um, you know,

came from, um, was it from Lehman Brothers or Washington Mutual? It was one of the ones that collapsed. If you, if you were formally in the risk division of Lehman Brothers, how do you get another job as chief risk officer anywhere? Like the one thing, your one job is to stop this sort of thing from happening. Well, I'd love to see the CV that led them to get the job. Yeah, well, I think the other problem is the previous risk officer left about a year ago. And, uh, For most of 2022, they actually just had failed to appoint a chief risk officer. So it was sort of... So they got one just in time for the collapse.

Yeah, yeah. And the whole thing was it was about risk management. So the actual nuts and bolts of the collapse is quite interesting, which is what happened was in 2021, the head of the Federal Reserve, which is sort of a bit like the Reserve Bank here. So the Philip Lowe of America said, look, I'll. I'll tell you what, the one thing that we won't do is raise interest rates rapidly, right? And so based on that comment, Silicon Valley Bank bought $170 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities, which basically, you know, paid, you know, about 1.9% interest, you know, low yield,

but the whole point is totally hold their value as long as interest rates didn't start going on. Aren't mortgage-backed securities the literal thing that caused it to, 2008 financial crisis. Shut up, Dom. The GFC. Shut up, Dom. I don't know much about finance, but I've just... Shut up.

I've heard that term before. Oh, you're one of these people who, you know, says that maybe they shouldn't have done the same thing again. Oh, yeah. Oh, good, you know, nice. Thanks for being wise in hindsight, fuck with. I mean, who would have thought that a central banker would make a prediction about the future of the world economy that might be wrong later, unless they'd followed the

worker Philip Lowe? if they've been paying attention to Philip Lowe and the Reserve Bank, they wouldn't have done it because everyone knows that Philip Lowe said they wouldn't put interest rates up and then they did. Yeah, happened a year ago. They then, those, all those securities that they bought, which it was sort of a bit like we work, right, which is they bought a whole lot of things that didn't actually mature for 30 years.

So they literally couldn't get their money back for 30 years. And then, you know, all these people sort of got a bit worried about, you know, I want to take my cash out now. And the nature of a bank is you're allowed to take your cash out, right? Yeah, it's your cash. And then they just went, oh, we don't have any money. I love how stupid banks are. Why haven't we started a bank?

I honestly don't. Oh, we have. Chaserbank. Because the great thing about our bank is that no one who gave us money could possibly believe they're going to get it back. Yeah. It's just, I mean, if you put your Chaser Bank ATM card in, and you found you had any money to withdraw,

you'd be astonished, it'd be such a pleasant surprise. Here we go, chaserbank.org. Oh, important update. Recent media reports suggest that a data breach may have exposed the personal information of 20 million customers. We want to reassure you that if this breach had never been made public, you would have nothing to worry about, and we will work tirelessly to make sure you never have to worry again.

Here is a cute picture of a baby to make you feel reassured. Check your data. I love that chaserbank.org in my browser says, not secure i know exactly the chaser report less news more often so charles that is quite amusing slash depressing yeah

okay so yeah we should get on with but charles we haven't had any Bluetooth yet I mean that's it's not a it's a stupid tech bank rather than a stupid tech product and I think I think there is to be more for our devoted listeners so before we get to the gadget of the day I'm just going to also talk about one other invention, which is, I'll just say in passing, which is somebody has developed an enzyme, discovered

an enzyme that can turn air into electricity. It can, it's an enzyme that actually strips hydrogen from air. Really? And turns it into electricity, like strips the electrons and turns it into electricity. So that's the future of the universe sorted. Like, that's all our energy problems sorted in one fell swoop. Amazing. So that's, that's, it's the minor story of the day. and then the it's still in early stages like it'll be we'll be at war with china by the time well hang on charles presumably this is this is what they've discovered but presumably the fossil fuel companies will conspire to stop it going anywhere right like oh yeah yeah oh no yeah just because you can just it's like the electric car you can just because you can just have a discovery

doesn't mean you have to actually change the world but the thing that i want to talk about today is you know how apple's about to release their VR air headset like they're literally months away from releasing it. There are, in fact, some really interesting use cases where there are actually good AR goggles out right now. So you don't need to wait until Apple does it properly. Instead, you should buy a pair of the serious AR ski goggles. Ski goggles. So this is the whole point.

So everyone's saying, well, what's the fucking point of this AR-V-R headset? Because you're going to have this chunky headset around your head. No one's going to want to walk around with a chunky headset on the head. What do you do when you're skiing? You walk around with a chunky goggles on your head, though. Oh, that's the one time when you wear stupid annoying goggles. That's true. It's the perfect use case.

So the serious AR ski goggles are pretty amazing. Now, they don't actually exist yet. Oh, of course not. Just little. But they've got some amazing. amazing demo videos that if true, and that's a little bit of a caveat, if true, do things like they monitor you real-time speed, they give you a clock, they give you temperature, they give you friend finding and tracking, like inside the headset.

So as you're skiing down, you can get distracted by all these different, you know, things on your sort of thing. So you don't have to pay attention to the lovely ski slope anymore and the beautiful nature that you're in. Yeah, and the beautiful tree that's coming for you. That's absolutely fantastic. Because there's one time you really would have plenty of time to welcome distractions and things beeping at you and distracts,

is when you're hurtling down a snowy slope full of objects, which if you hit could prove fatal. That'd be the time to really just enjoy the amazing augmented reality experience. And look, maybe it'll flash a tree, a tree, like two seconds before you can pass. It does. I mean, it's got, yeah, I don't know. I mean, it could, it can coordinate. all your sort of thing and it can give you crashes all your fatal so the accident investigators can you have HD vision of your impact but it gives

you directions it gives you a compass it gives you know your elevation so you can see yourself um not moving in elevation once you've crashed um it can even give you phone notifications of your SMSs that are coming oh that's very useful yeah from from spammers so it's a real way to it No, if ever you go skiing and you go, oh, this is nice to get away. I just like to be in nature. This ruins all of that in one fell swoop.

I mean, I suppose the lucky thing is that because neither of these... So there's actually two companies are making competing ski goggles. Of course. There's one by Sirius and one by Recky, right? Worth checking out. The thing is, neither of them can be reviewed yet because... But they've got amazing, like the, I can't tell you how good the videos look, like, for once, you know, like about the idea of what they will be like once they... Oh, sure.

Yeah. I mean, I've often thought that the notion of, you know, sunglasses or something, if you're in a strange city and you need to know the directions and so on, the little sunglasses that point you in a direction to go, so you're not looking. Because we do, when you look at your phone walking around an unfamiliar city or something, it is very dangerous. Traffic can be on the other side of the road or something. you might need to know which way to go and maybe you can get signs translated in real time that stuff all sounded quite useful at walking pace

not at very high speed hurtling down a mountain space I hope they'll let you play games I hope you get to play snake in your little goggles as you're skiing down the hill well it's interesting because it's it's supposed to be sort of augmenting your reality

what they're claiming is it's not so much for like games it's for things like AI so the whole idea is that combining the sort of video camera with an AI to sort of tag

things in your vision so as you hurdle towards that tree it will come up and say oh that's a tree there and point in their own can identify the species of the tree that takes you out yeah exactly that's brilliant

That said, just having a look at it, like, it is really very clear that it doesn't act. I mean, there's lots of amazing, like, it looks amazing, right? Yeah. But it's clear that it doesn't actually exist yet. Right. Although they do say, our innovations in proprietary technologies make us the leaders in civilian AR plus AI system and outdoor AR pioneers, TM. Thank you to years of continuous R&D and our brilliant team. we were able to create products that are unrivaled.

Yeah, so it's not clear to me, though, that they have actually created the product yet. And I think, Charles, that is an amazing use case for augmented reality glasses, is if you're browsing the internet or something and there's something that clearly doesn't exist in as a scam, it can pop up until you don't buy this product. I've just done a quick check in the background,

and it doesn't actually exist, and it never will. That is the use case. You should buy the ski goggles. look actually I'll tell you what so the ones by Sirius the ones that I was talking about don't exist yep the Recky Smart Snow goggles

this is honestly true are available for pre-order Dom they're available for the pre-order for the 349 349 yeah so this is the less I wonder when they'll be delivered

it didn't say you do have to you have to use Bluetooth to of course because if there's one thing sync it to your phone. There's one thing you're about to rely on as you're hurtling down the slope is Bluetooth.

Yeah. When's that ever gone wrong? So this is the Recky, the one that's available for pre-order. It's not as high-tech as the one that doesn't exist. So it's got a five-hour battery life, which is useful. If you want to go out for a full day of skiing, you'll conk out halfway through. It's glove-friendly, which is great. It's got swappable lenses.

It sounds like an amazing high-tech way to die. Yeah. It doesn't really seem to do much It literally just seems to be Like this The recky one seems to just be about Answering calls and viewing stares It's essentially

The same as you get if you put a fucking Aepod in your In an ear Or a watch You can control music You can check your notification I mean All these things are on the Apple watch

Right And and you can Like even though you can't actually get the goggles Yet You can download The Android B app. So there you go.

That'll be useful. Oh, Charles, look, I would have ordered them already, but unfortunately all my money's in the Silicon Valley Bank. Our Gary is from Road and we're part of the Iconiclass Network. See you tomorrow.