This Week in Startups - Archegos founder arrested, Bolt sued by Authentic Brands, $GOOG & $MSFT earnings, Apple sells repair parts, EV Corvette | E1445

Episode Date: April 28, 2022

All news. First we break down the SEC's allegations from one of the craziest financial stories since Bernie Madoff, Archegos Capital (4:20). Then cover: Bolt being sued by its largest customer (28:47), Google and Microsoft's Q1 2022 earnings for the first quarter (42:45) and Apple selling iPhone spare parts and repair tools (1:02:10). We wrap with GM's EV corvette announcement (1:07:20). 00:00 Jason and Molly tee up today’s news stories 04:20 Archegos Capital owner Bill Hang and its CFO were arrested this morning for concealing billions of dollars of leverage that led to the firm closing last March 10:25 Cyvatar - Get your first 2 months free at https://cyvatar.ai/twist 11:42 More on the Archegos Capital fraud and losses 22:17 Odoo - Get your first app free and a $1000 credit at https://odoo.com/twist 23:23 Family Offices and the Archegos fraud 28:47 Bolt sued by their largest customer for failing to deliver on product & potentially, maybe, allegedly committing light securities fraud? 38:42 Coda - The All-in-one doc for teams, get a $1,000 credit at https://coda.io/twist 39:58 Facebook Q1 revenue up 7% y/y, net income down 21% y/y 42:45 Google reported earnings yesterday after the markets closed 51:58 Microsoft reported earnings yesterday after the markets closed 56:58 Manscaped released their Q4 and 2021 full year earnings 1:02:10 Apple acting on Right to Repair 1:07:20 Chevy is making an electric Corvette FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Hey, everybody, hey everybody. It is Wednesday on the most insane newsweek of all time. Thanks for making the show pop in the rankings. Just a lot to talk about, a lot of things going on in the world. Today will be no difference. This first story is going to be a story that captures the public's imagination for the next two or three years as this goes to trial. Explain the first story. This is bonkers.

Cannot wait to watch this show on Hulu. It is one of the craziest financial stories since Bernie made off. Archigos capital owner Bill Wang getting arrested today, along with his chief financial officer, on allegations that he hid billions in risks from banks and then caused massive losses, including, I believe, $20 billion of his own money in two days. It's bonkers. And this is a level of fraud and detail that you shouldn't understand. And we're going to go into detail about how these frauds occur and some theories.

But yeah, this is a crazy, crazy case. And the crazy is not limited to public markets. It's happening in private markets as well, Molly. The one-click checkout startup, Bolt founded by our pal, friend of the show, Ryan Breslau, who you remember said the entire industry is run by the mafia here. It's all against him. It's all a conspiracy. Not only is YC against him and venture capital and Stripe.

It also turns out Forever 21, and they're pretty. Parenthood against them. Their largest customer is suing them claiming they lost $100 million and lost revenue

because Bolt Software is terrible. And they're kind of accusing them of securities fraud because they're saying that Bolt claimed when they

raised money that they were being used by brands that the Forever 21 Parenthood company didn't even own yet. It's a hot mess. It's a hot mess.

It's a good. Let's just say it's one of those lawsuit filings that you like to read word for word. It's, this one's going to be the gift that keeps giving. This is going to get uglier before it gets cleaned up.

It's my prediction. It's a fun day in business stories. I'll tell you what. Crazy is on the menu. Crazy is on the menu. It's also earnings season. Google, Microsoft, and meta. We got all of them.

Google and Microsoft, we're going to go the deepest on. They reported earnings for the first quarter of 2022. We dug up the interesting points from those. And yeah, no, we're not talking about that one story today. Not at all. And one has a 30 P.E. one has a 20 PE and one has a 12 PE. Price to earnings ratio will explain why each of them has that.

Also, Apple is finally allowing people to repair their own goddamn iPhones and equipment. The right to repair has been embraced by Apple. Good move, Apple. It's arrived. And more good news. GM rolling out an EV Corvette for those of you get tired of us drooling over cars. Well, this isn't your day. And we got to go to the track with those EV Corvettes.

Say shout out to my friends over at Chevy. Molly and I will do an entire episode on the electric corvette. Get us on the track. We will absolutely give you air time to get behind the wheel of that car. Yes. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. Please, stick with us all me.

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Odu is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business. Your first app is free forever, and right now, Odu is offering $1,000 off your first implement. presentation pack at Odu.com slash twist. That's O-D-O-O-O-com slash twist. And CODA. Koda is the all-in-one dock for teams. If you've got a stack of niche workflow tools or if you're buried in docs and spreadsheets, Kota is the dock that brings it all together. Startups can get a $1,000 credit at coda.io slash twist. I am obsessed with the story and I just cannot believe the twist and turns that we're about to go through today.

And I know you think that I'm talking about Elon Musk and Twitter, but not yet. Not yet. Not yet. Craziest month in tech ever. Ever. Since the iPhone launch. Phenomenally, that story has been replaced by news today that Bill Huang of Arcaghost Capitol has been, and the CFO of Arcagose Capital, have been.

arrested for concealing billions of dollars of leverage that led to the firm, Arcagagos Capital, collapsing last March. Now, we're going to have to catch you up because this is a beast. I don't know if you were paying attention last March when Arcagose Capital sort of abruptly all of a sudden burst onto the scene losing $100 billion in something like two days. Bill Wang himself lost $20 billion of his personal fortune at that point when they They got, Archegos got a margin call in 2021. So Bill Wang was what is known as a Tiger Hub.

He formerly worked at Tiger Management, not Tiger Global, for its original founder, Julian Robertson. At the time, it was reported that Archegos was trading billions of dollars on over 5x leverage. Okay, we should explain what leverage is. Yes, please. And we should explain what a margin call is. So many things. We're going to have so many things to explain here.

So leverage, I'll do leverage. is if you have, if you're a trader and you have a billion dollars, they might let you trade two billion dollars worth of stock because the stock has some inherent value and then they can margin quality if the stock goes down and you have

to cover it, they force you to sell it. So if you had a billion, you know, a billion dollars in Google shares and then you said, I'm going to lever this up, I'm going to borrow money against it, I'll buy another billion in Google shares. Now, if Google's going up, now you're making twice as much money. Right.

And so people are allowed to use leverage. And I think this was a little controversial with Robin Hood having leverage in their product. Rich people have had leverage for since time, for a long time. And obviously these big funds because the underlying asset has some value. Now, a margin call is when you are using this leverage, but the stocks are going down. And at a certain point, a trigger goes off. And the bank who is giving you that leverage, loaning you that money to against your stock, holdings, at a certain point, they have the custodial ownership of your shares, and they just

start selling them. That's liquidating them. That's when you get liquidated on a margin call. And normally, people are allowed to have two, three, four X leverage, and this is, you know, something that is quite normal and effective for people if they want to be aggressive. And, you know, in an up market, it doesn't matter in a down market. Boy, does it ever. Keep going.

Right. So it's sort of a form of debt. Right. I mean, leverage is debt. They're borrowing against. It's a loan. Right. There we go. And then a margin call is like, hey, we want our money back. We're getting a little squirly. We'd like you to go ahead and retop up that account, put it back. If you don't have it, you could, you if you did go down, like let's say you had one billion in Google, you've now bought another billion, you have two billion. And it goes down 25%. You now have $1.5 billion. You could come up with $500 million in cash. Right. So some people in a company might have a big war chest over here. and they're levered up on their investments, but they have some cash over here where they can liquidate some other asset, a home, a business, or something to cover it, right?

Yep. According to the SEC complaint that is part of the sort of pile of evidence against Bill Wang, at its peak, Arcoa's capital was managing $36 billion with $160 billion of exposure, or and a half times leverage.

So just spend in, like they say in Top Gun, his mouth was right in checks that his body could not get that his portfolio could not cash. And so if this was, you put $36 billion as a down payment on a bunch of real estate, right? And then you had this other whatever that would be. The difference would be $124. It's other $124 and you considered it a mortgage. Okay, well, you have the underlying asset that has been appraised to have a certain value.

So if you just think about it in the mental model as like a building, they bought the Sears Tower or something, and the bank could take the Sears Tower here, and the Sears Tower might not change in terms of its value that often, whereas stocks can change quite rapidly, as we've learned. Continue. So, Arco goes at its peak again, essentially trading on 100 to one leverage on a massive scale, and here's where it goes wrong, made some bad bets,

built up huge positions that we'll talk about later in some bad bets. When the firm imploded, it caused billions of dollars in losses for Wall Street in a single day. I mean, it was just, in fact, evidently, you and the besties covered this in real time on the All In episode 28 as it was happening, because it was a, it was a day. It was a big deal in the finance industry, but obviously it takes a long time to build a case. And so the SEC, I guess, was building a case. But what's really crazy about this is he only had like 1.5 billion in assets back in March of 2020.

So that 36 billion he was managing and then got the 160 billion of exposure. I think it was eventually they found that he actually had $1.5 billion of actual capital. So he was at a hundred times leverage. And how that occurred is what I think this case is really about. He was doing some sort of fraud here to get even more leverage. The swaps, which will, yeah. We'll explain the swaps in a minute. But yeah, it sounds like he...

So I think everybody's following us. I think you're following. This maniac did like... Very complicated. Ten mortgages on top of one house is what we're about to reveal. At least, exactly. Here's a problem a lot of startups face.

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Morgan Stanley lost a billion. in UBS, Switzerland's largest bank, lost $774 million. So on Wednesday, today, as we're recording this, Bill Wang and his former CFO were arrested and charged with what the New York Times calls, quote, orchestrating a stock manipulation scheme that relied on them masking and concealing the enormous risk the firm had taken on. They face racketeering, conspiracy, and wire fraud charges. Yep, that's where they get them. Always get them on that wire fraud.

Always get them on the wire fraud. Got them on that. The racketeering's great, though. That means there was more than one person or I think it's two or more people planning to do a crime. It's like when they get you on racketeering. It's multiple people conspiring to commit the crime. Interesting. Yeah.

I love the racketeering. It's got a great sound to it. It's very dramatic. It's like wire fraud. What did you do? You sent a wire you weren't supposed to. You move some money around. But racketeering, it's like you're shaking something up, right?

I like a good racketeering and conspiracy. It also sort of suggests that we have no. idea, right? But it also sort of suggests like there's a, there's a possibility that others could go down. Like maybe- And anybody who knew what? Fire fraud. Hey, I mean, you could commit wire fraud today. Anybody can commit wire fraud. But to racketeer run a conspiracy. That's the only level. In the now immortal words of producer Nick, wire fraud is chump. Racketeering is big boy.

It is very big boy. All right. Well, here's that on a t-shirt. Here's a crazy quote, right? The SEC complaint says from at least March 20th to March 2021, March 2020 to 21, Wang purchased on margin billions of dollars of total return swaps. This is where you come in to explain what the hell the total return swap is, which it seems like Rucker Ghost kind of invented. Okay. So these things I don't fully understand, these are like when people start doing derivatives

and stuff and make weird synthetic trades. But these swaps basically allow investors take large positions while posting very little capital up front, basically borrowing from investment banks who buy the shares on their behalf for a fee. So there's a lot of fees associated with this. And then these swaps also allow them to remain anonymous because the shares are being purchased by the banks, not the firm. And so when you do that, you could be pumping your stock that you already own.

So what was happening here is he was buying the stock on margin. building these big positions and then also doing these swaps. And so he was trying to prop up his trades according, if I'm understanding this breaking news correctly. I think so. Yes. It also seems to have allowed him to build the mechanism of the swap seems to have allowed Arco goes to build up massive positions in individual stocks that they didn't have to report.

Which drove up the prices. which drove up the prices, exactly. Which is the market manipulation. I think that's the big crime here. Yes. That in theory is him basically the problem here. And it's funny because we have some very educated noties who are like, this is just what happens on Wall Street.

And the banks love this. And they were getting the fees from the swabs. And it was all great. It seems to be that the allegation is in fact in hiding the amount of risk. Because then when it all blew up, it blew up on the order of billions and billions. there's a whole complicated thing about short squeezes that they would do. That's where they're accused of sort of trying to manipulate the market. Yep. And a short squeeze

pretty, we saw this with GameStop, etc. There's a small amount of shares available. Everybody starts buying them. Nobody sells them. The price starts going up. The person has to cover. As they cover, they're short. They have to buy the share, give return it to the person they were borrowing it from because they're betting that it goes down by covering, they're increasing the price. So it's very painful, which is, in fact, what might be happening to Bill Gates with his shorting of, say, Tesla, which if he shorted it at 300 a share and it ran up 1,200, maybe it's at 900, now whatever it's at.

We'll get to that later, I suppose. You know, that can just become problematic because if you cover your buying, which is, you know, making the price go up. Right. Almost universally. So, uh, this is. It's just crazy stuff. I mean, it's bonkers.

It's just bonkers. And the quotes from the SEC filing are just absurd, right? Wang's goal was to induce other traders, such as short sellers or other market participants to observe active trading in an upward price movement at the share prices of certain issuers, blah, blah, blah. One of the most, the other reason that I find this fascinating is that one of the most concentrated positions that Wang held was in Biacom CBS, my former parent company. Yes.

And I had a lot of questions. I mean, because there are so many fascinating things about this, not least of which is the fact that this is like a family office with very little oversight that Bill Wang himself, like, Archegos means like Greek God or child of light or something or leader. And he would have lots of prayer. Did you ever watch the videos of him talking about Jesus? Like whenever anybody's like making videos of themselves talking about Jesus,

instead of like just going to church and like just quietly, you know, being dedicated to your religion. Like, it gets really weird. But this Viacom stuff was really gnarly. It's wild. Yeah. The SEC alleges that Wang tried to induce a short squeeze on Viacom 19 different times. And I would do this before the market's open. This drove the price of Viacom CBS from 40 bucks a share to 97 at its peak valuation around March 19th, 2021.

So that means Wang had a $10 billion state. in the media firm, which would have been 17% of the company at Viacom's peak market cap during the run-up. And then Viacom announced a $3 billion secondary share sale, which led the stock dropping 20%, and then he himself basically got squeezed. Yeah. So that stock collapse, while way back to 40, triggered the original margin call. So he was playing really dangerous games. And this feels like, I'm trying to remember the scale of the made-off.

fraud is going to look, I think, smaller than this. And actually with the Madoff stuff, when they look at the money put in, not the fake gains, but if you just look at the money put in, I think people generally netted out to what they had put in. So there was enough there in the markets going up

with Madoff that people kind of, you know, if you put in $100,000 of your retirement, you might have gotten your $100,000 back or something like that from what I had read. but you didn't get any of those gains. So if he was perfectly getting you 12% a year or whatever it was and you thought you had 400,000, you didn't get the 300,000 in fake gains.

So who knows what the total size of this is because it's all these synthetic. So who knows what reality is here. But he's going to jail forever. I mean, this might be a die-in jail kind of situation. And you have to wonder, were these banks who are letting him make all these bets in cahoots

or were they turning a blind eye or were they victims? Right. And I think that's where this is going to get gnarly because how do you not know what's going on here? If you work at a bank

that's loaning him and giving him margin and giving him leverage, come on. Yeah. Like you must know what's going on. On the good side, we've had a number of bad actors

and sketchy situations in the market over the years and the market seems to be able to absorb something like this every, you know, number of years. I mean, the market did 100% just shake it off, which is pretty remarkable because I think on that actual day, it was, it seemed like it could kick off, you know, a cascade. One of the other, the director of the SEC enforcement division called this a house of cards.

We allege that Wang and Arcagos propped up a $36 billion house of cards by engaging in a constant cycle of manipulative trading lying to banks to obtain. additional capacity and then using that capacity to engage in still more manipulative trading. But the House of Cards could only be sustained if that cycle of deceptive trading lies and buying power continued uninterrupted. And once Archegos's buying power was exhausted and stock prices fell, the entire structure collapsed allegedly leaving Archegroost's counterparties billions in trading losses. It is fascinating. Again, I'm going to point out that a lot of our notee gang is like, this doesn't sound illegal at all.

Well, this kind of leverage is illegal. You can't have this kind of leverage put on 100 to 1, whatever it winds up being. And for good reason, there are rules around leverage. I don't know the exact ones. And there's supposed to be safeguards around this. We were supposed to have that because of the real estate bubble that burst in, you know, that during the Great Recession. So there's supposed to be some here, but people can always lie. You know, like sometimes you're supposed, if you take out a home equity line to like

ostensibly pay for college or redo your kitchen and bathrooms, But then you use it as the down payment on a second home, but you say it's your primary residence, so you get the better treatment. And people have done all that kind of stuff in mortgages. And that's what happened during the mortgage crisis. The policing and, you know, the diligence, dare I say, got very weak because everybody was making money. And it was like, well, this is a great party.

And it's like, well, yeah, you really shouldn't drink that much. And maybe you shouldn't imbibe so many of those substances. Like, but it's a great party. Right. Why not drink? Let's do more shots. And then all of a sudden somebody passes out against alcohol poisoning. Like sometimes the party gets a little too crazy.

And that's apparently what was going on over there is these guys just went nuts. Yeah. And you just have to wonder like what, I mean, Molly, what's enough? Like you're a billionaire. You're making so much money. What? What does the incremental one to 10 billion get you? Like, what does it get you?

I mean, that's just about winning, right? That's just about winning. Maybe or some, this person's a sociopath. Like, what is the, what's the goal here? You're got a billion dollars. You have a plane. You can buy any steak you want. You can go on any vacation you want.

I just don't understand about people who get really rich and then do dangerous, crazy stuff that puts them in jail forever. That's the thing that's crazy. Yeah, it is. Listen, when you start scaling quickly, your company needs to be run professionally. And O-Doo is the software that helps you maintain control of your fast-running business.

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times the size of like private equity or something like, something bananas like that. So it's market empirically, massively market moving amounts of money that effectively, I think one person on Twitter said have regulations that could fit on a post-it. And listen, if you're a family office, It's your money. You don't have LPs. You know, we have LPs where we do a syndicate. Other people are participating. You know, if it was just my, I always often think about this, which is kind of was

the theme of Axe Capital during the first couple of seasons of billions was, was he a better investor when he invested his own money and was going crazy and would take crazy bets? Or was he a better investor when he was being staked by other folks because he felt like he would be more focused because he had somebody to answer. to where he might feel guilt about the pension fund that he was investing money on behalf of. And a lot of capital allocators have to deal with this. And I wonder sometimes, like, if I, am I being too conservative because I have other people's

money? Am I doing too much diligence? Am I, you know, turning down deals that maybe are not tight enough for me to want to syndicate to people? But if it was just me, I would make the bet because, okay, I know what I can lose. Yeah. And I've chosen to be very thorough in my process, as you've learned in your friends. first four months here.

Congratulations on your first syndicate deal being 2x over subscribed, I believe. Two X. It's bonkers. Yum yamskies. Now we's got to get the founder to take the extra money. I mean, that's a good, that's a good VC Sunday school that we're going to have to. Yes. We have more money for you.

Would you like to take it? No, I would like to take all the risk of not having an extra million dollars. But it is interesting though because, yes, at the most basic level of family office is just investing a person's money. But these family offices, first of all, they're just an exploding category. It's like there are more and more and more of them over the last decade. Increasingly are of a big enough scale that they're operating like Arcago. So they're interacting with banks just the way that a hedge fund would or a financial,

a regulated financial institution would in terms of, you know, taking on leverage and being subject to margin calls, all the same financial behaviors of a bank, but with none of the oversight. This is going to like change the way Wall Street works. This is going to change. Maybe. Maybe. And maybe like, I always think these regulations are short term and then they get loosened up in my experience. Like when people forget, like they didn't. Well, currently there aren't any stills.

Well, here's a thing. You would, you would think if this is your family office, the ramification of losing your entire family's net worth and going to jail would be enough of a safeguard to prevent you from doing crazy shit. But apparently not for this maniac. So then the question becomes, Molly, do you create a bunch of rules for the 990, 8,000? family offices that want to preserve capital for generations to come and are acting or good actors or for the two maniacs who decide, Yolo, let's risk it all in the name of Jesus. I think you have those rules to protect the person whose money is being invested. Like this, Bill Wang doesn't have a fiduciary duty because there aren't any rules.

Like you're, it's his money. If I were rich enough to have a family office and somebody managing in a decade, in a decade, I will want there to be rules on the person who's investing that money. And you will sign every trade. So it would be as if you were in this example, you're a bill. Very true. You're a bill hanging and you're signing every rule that comes across your desk. So that's probably why they don't feel there has to be rules.

It would be like, do you need to have rules for people to go play poker? Like, okay, or better a sports book. I'm so with the noties on this. You're just like, yeah. Well, no, I do think this is a sociopathic crazy person. I think the banks are the ones who are not doing. doing their work. That's where I think this is going to lie.

Because you know what? You can't stop every crazy person from doing crazy stuff. Like, I know crazy people when I lived in L.A. who were actors or directors or in the Hollywood set, and they would make some big payday for their TV show or movie. And then I'd watch them lose it at the poker table over two months. And then they'd go do another movie and watch them lose it at the poker table. I'm like, I think you want to put that money away?

Like, who's watching your money? like, this is crazy. All right. So just a little addendum here. When you put a swap like this on, a total return swap, they're called TRS is from what I understand. With a prime broker,

you have to send them your full risk profile. So they know what other risks are happening. Okay. So the theory here is Wang lied to them by faking the reports. And then that's why the CFO was arrested. So they, to my point earlier, I think I was talking about like, how do the banks let this happen?

in all likelihood, the TRS, the total return swap, you needed to show the other risks and they didn't, which to my analogy of, like maybe somebody got a second mortgage or multiple mortgages on the same house, people were doing crazy stuff like that during the dot com, I'm sorry, the real estate boom, so that's what these swaps are.

Right. All right. Speaking of crazy, I've got to wrap this up, right? Yeah, we do. We can do this all day. Let's move on. We're having like a little bit of law Twitter today.

We're just having fun with reading allegations. Bolt is in the news again. Wait, is that Ryan Breslo's company? Yeah, it is. The mafia company? It is Ryan Breslo's company, which everything that ever went wrong at Bolt was because Stripe and the Silicon Valley Mafia stood up competitors to take them out. They never did a single thing wrong except for maybe this one thing.

Maybe this one thing. Okay, here we go. Bolt is being sued by its largest customer for failing to deliver on its product promise and maybe allegedly committing some light securities fraud. Light, light. Bolt is being sued by Authentic Brands Group, ABG, which is the parent company of retail brands that you have heard of Forever 21 Reebok Brooks Brothers. The lawsuit is really fundamentally about Bolt's mobile integration with Forever 21. Got it. The lawsuit alleges that Bolt failed to deliver on promised technology lost Forever 21 over $150 million in sales.

A lot of money. And here are some fun quotes from the article describing the lawsuit. Bolt has utterly failed to deliver on the technological capabilities that it held itself out as possessing. ABG described the integration with Forever 21's mobile app as, quote, disastrous. Whoa. and claimed it resulted in significantly fewer customers making purchase. Like, I think they're actually saying people would have made purchases. But Bolt screwed them.

But Bolt screwed them. The suit said that because of these technical issues, only two of the company's brands, Forever 21 and Lucky Brands are using the software. And it goes on to allege potential securities fraud. Okay. So they made a claim or something? Apparently, according to this legal complaint, Bolt, they say, raised funding at increasingly high valuations by consistently overstating the nature

of its integration with ABG's brands to suggest it had more customers than it did and to convince investors to bankroll additional growth for the startup. We talk about this a lot. You've heard me talk about this with founders privately. Never overstate any metrics, never massage the data, never exaggerate, never exaggerate, never spin, the data is the data presented as such, perhaps even be conservative and give disclaimers, unaudited data, you know, but if you're selling a security and you make a claim, the person who bought that securities, if the claim is later found to be

not true and you did that on purpose, or not on purpose, you could be in a world of hurt, a world of hurt. My God, the moral relativism and the Nody gang. Founders spin all the time. It works. Okay, well, hold on a second. Let's define spin. Let's define spin.

So, there is spin, as in our vision, is to someday be able with one drop of blood to test for 200 different diseases and, you know, to do 200 different blood tests. that is our goal it's our mission it's our north star today we can test if you have hepatitis with one drop of blood and that is the start of our journey from one to 200 now that is enthusiasm that is you know uh excitement it's a it's an audacious big hairy goal totally permissible because if i invested you told me you got hepatitis and your test is as good and just to unpack it even more, if I said, our hepatitis test,

in our trial, he's showing extreme promise. We're at 86% of efficacy of other tests in the market. Again, 86% efficacy with one drop of blood versus a vial of blood with a needle

and having to draw a full vial of blood. And you could do this ultimately at home someday if we can get FDA regulation. All of those things I say have qualifiers in them. They're exciting. They're game-changing. But there's a reality here.

So if they lied to investors, you know who would know? Forever 21 would know. Because they might have said, and I'm just speculating here based on my 11 years investing in 300 companies. So take it for what it's worth. I do not have inside information, secure speculation. My guess is somebody said, how many people made it to the checkout page? How many were integrated?

Therefore, we have those customers. So, you know, 100,000 people this month got to the check. out pay. So, and they created bolt accounts for them, right? Because they cooking them. Now, do they really have bolt accounts? Did they actually check out? They could say, you know, we now have 100,000 customers and nobody has the definition of customers. So that's when you start getting into funny business and fun with numbers. And you've seen this when you've been on calls with me. And somebody says, I say, how many customers have this? They say, great, how many paying customers do you have? They say, zero, where they're on trials. And

I say, oh, okay. So you have 97 people doing free trials. And I don't admonish the founder. I just clarify for myself. But in that instance, the founders kind of committed securities fraud if I were to invest and think they were 97 paying customers because these are customers, not trials or users. So always, always, always, always be 100% ethical and moral and conservative when sharing your metrics because investors know these are works in progress.

but I'm not surprised people is what I'll say here definitely do do this right I'm not discounting the fact that people do this and they say things or their customers when they're not their customers or they're it's like they want them to be their customers or whatever but if you do that and then your stuff does not work

and then the company that is angry at you because they allege that you lost them $150 million in sales is like I'm sorry wait a second You told investors that Reebok, a brand that ABG had not even acquired yet, is using your software because of your deal with ABG. If that's true, that's a crazy smoking gun. Wait a second. Oh, so that's being claimed as well.

That is being claimed as well. I did my whole like theory here, but this is, if this is true, that they said they had Reebok as a customer and put them on the customer slide and ABJ, the parent company, not bought them yet, that would be knowingly misleading investors if it was true. In which case, those investors could go back and say, I want my money back, I want damages, I want more shares, I would have valued the business taking Reebok out. If that was one of your top four customers, I would want a 25% discount on my investment. I want 25% additional shares.

Yeah. So that would not be spinning. Bolt responded. This is the part where we should say, Bolt responded by saying that ABG's claims are without merit and that this was an attempt to renegotiate their deal, they also said that any of these alleged implementation issues were not evidence of a failure of Bolt's technology, and that in fact ABG's complaint, they essentially said it was user error. ABG's complaint doesn't show anything more than typical technical issues that arise while

implementing a product like this, let alone that Bolt failed to solve them, we're technically practical. And then here's a really interesting nugget in the lawsuit, which states that ABG's, that ABG has the rights to purchase up to 5% of Bolt for $29 million, which would be worth $500 million at Bolt's current valuation. So Bolt's new CEO, not Ryan Breslo, his successor, Maju Kouravila, had the following quote. It's clear that Authentic Brands Group has confidence in Bolt's future as they are fighting to own a meaningful percentage of our business. The plot thickens. So maybe they didn't want to let them buy those shares or something or they want to renegotiate that.

I'm talking about Bolt. Yeah. But that's super complicated. It is not uncommon for a strategic to ask to be able to invest or for a company that wants to land that strategic to give them warrants to buy those shares. So at the time, 5% for $29 million might have been a great deal. And these could be warrants. What a warrant is is you have the right over the next 10 years, typically. typically, it could be five, but I would say 10 typically, to buy up to 5% of the business for

$29 million. At the time, the business might have been worth 20 times, 30 million, which would be 600 million. So they said, yeah, you can pay 29 million. You don't get the shares for free. Companies worth 600 million right now, incredible valuation at the time probably. You can buy up to 5%. That's a free option in case the company becomes worth 20 times more. And when it is worth 20 times more. They can buy those shares, even without giving the money, and then just take the difference in the share price, et cetera. So there's all interesting ways to do that.

So fascinating. It is. I don't think it's, I mean, it's very possible. It's not quite as clear cut as it seems. You know, when you read the, like the, it's fun to read lawsuits. And they're always, there's always two sides. They're always really juicy. Well, three.

Three sides. Yeah, exactly. Your version, my version, and the actual reality. and the actual reality. Yep, exactly. If you're a startup, you know you have to save where you can. That's why we love Coda. Cota is one doc to rule them all.

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Quick breaking news. Okay, here's related. Yeah, I think this breaking news, well, okay, so the news is that meta. Just say, Facebook. I'm not going to call the meta until they have 100 million people using that every day. The Facebook. The Facebook has reported earnings. Q1 revenue up 7% year over year, net income down 21% year over year. Meta stock up 14% in after hours trading. Evidently,

the expectations were super low because everyone hates them. But I also have to wonder if some of the news about Twitter has got investors thinking, well, is going to be the social network of last resort for all those angry liberals. All 0.1% of them who are leaving. They're all going to Instagram. The 0.1% who have left for Canada. I mean, I do know one person who left for Canada

when Trump won't, one. Do you know anybody who left for Canada? Literal Canada? Oh, wow. I know somebody who moved to Canada. They were considering it because they wanted to have a, you know, a different lifestyle than America.

They were in New York City, a good friend of mine, I wouldn't say who. But he left and he just felt, you know, the U.S. politics was dysfunctional. he was like, and then he also wanted a different lifestyle. And he also did the arbitrage. He had raised money in Silicon Valley and New York and then moved to Canada to deploy it and was getting, you know, all the tax credits and lower cost of living.

It was a pretty savvy move. So it wasn't really just that it was like a lot. Yeah. But I mean, here's the thing about Facebook. The expectations were incredibly low. Seven percent year over year means the business is not contracting. It's growing. The income going down makes sense because.

of the headwinds of what's happening with Apple. Apple, yeah. And making look-alike audiences and tracking of individuals, arguably the best advertising business-look-a-like audiences or technology since Google Search. And they're also pouring money into the headsets and everything like that. So maybe people are thinking it's bouncing along the bottom. It's PE is 12.7 right now.

So that makes them a really good deal. I know. I think this is like buying a tobacco company or something. You may want to hold your nose and just buy it. It's buying a tobacco company and lots of different. That's a very apt metaphor. I knew people who, you know, were climate folks and, you know, obviously did not believe in cancer. Kind of hard to be pro-cancer and be anti-environment.

But they had a juicy, they made lots of their money through investing in those plays. It's pretty cynical, but the cynical play would be it's 12 PE and it could go to 25 again. So you might double your money. You never know. Quickly, Google and Microsoft also reported earnings yesterday after the market's closed. So you've probably seen some of that news, but we'll break a little bit of it down with our special flavor. A little flavor here. Google is a bigger story.

And I think this, again, is so interesting compared to meta because Google reported in some ways like kind of fine earnings. But yesterday, it was actually like pretty good. Yeah. But yesterday after the market's closed, Google was down as much as 7% at one point. It's down about 3% today. Yeah. So year over year, it's 3%. Year to date, what is it? About 20%, over 20%. So that's a $400 million loss in market cap just since January 1st. And that is on these numbers, total revenue up 23% year over year. On a major number. On a major number, $68 billion. That was, and Wall Street hates this, it was less growth, 11% less growth compared to the year prior.

Net income was $16.4 billion down about 8% year over year. So, yeah, tiny tick down. And, you know, if you look, it's really interesting to watch what's happening with YouTube and search. People don't realize this, but YouTube is at $6.86 billion. You know, rounded up to $7 billion, and surges at $39.5 billion, rounded up to $40. And what you're seeing is, you know, YouTube is a very significant portion of the revenue, but they missed on YouTube by $500 million. Yeah.

And so ad revenue is actually down quarter over quarter from Q4, which is not uncommon because of the big push to spend money during the holidays, but is uncommon for Google, which, you know, so that that's a seasonality thing, but Google's been such a juggernaut. Their cloud business, 5.8 billion, I think, 45% year over a year, so that's great. Their other bets are meaningless. How?

The YouTube miss is interesting because YouTube is sort of trying to find its way as a TikTok, in the world of TikTok, right? Which is short and super fast moving, and YouTube had leaned heavily into longer form content to put more ads in there. Now they're admitting that the growth of shorts, YouTube shorts, which is now averaging over 30 billion views daily.

Is it really? Wow. That is growing like crazy. We need to do more shorts. We definitely do. I mean, that's four times higher those views as a year ago. Wow. But they're saying, yeah, and we even have a clip if we want to play it, the growth of shorts has had a negative revenue impact on YouTube.

Okay. The ads don't work as well. The ads don't work as well. And they can't get as many in there because it's only however long. All right. Let's listen. How many seconds? 24 seconds.

Question. We're experiencing a slight headwind to revenue growth as shorts viewership grows as a percentage of total

YouTube time. We are testing monetization on shorts and early advertiser feedback and results are encouraging and the team

is focused on closing the gap with traditional YouTube ads over time. So we're excited about the new opportunities with shorts,

but a slight headwind. Yeah, so I can explain that. Here's what's happening. It's a new format. The new format is growing. Advertisers are always a couple

years in terms of the content format, then the creators. The creators are the avant-garde. They're making these short clips. They understand how to make it in a tall format as opposed to a landscape. All the ads in the world are made for TV format landscape. Now you're asking some creative agency, okay, I need somebody to look close up to the camera. I need you to make these really hard cuts and make them look like, you know, whatever. And you need to make ads that work in that format. Well, it's going to take them a couple of years for these agencies to figure out how to soap or a movie, you know, like, how do you sell a Marvel movie in a stand-up? Well, I've seen Marvel ads or other ads for TV shows or Netflix in TikTok and in that format. They look

because they're like trying to pan or do this stupid stuff because a beautiful Marvel film is not meant to be shown in portrait. It's meant to be shown in landscape. But people are not turning their phone sideways, you know, on TikTok or in this format. So this is just an adjustment period. And so I think it's a short-term pain in terms of advertising because more users are using this. It's going to be a long-term gain because maybe that format could be even more effective. Oh, I think so. It's a long-term gain in terms of competition because clearly TikTok has shown that people just want to like burr-burp burr-bh just turn this through tons and tons and tons of short videos. Have you watched enough TikTok to get the warning where the person's like, hey, you're a piece of shit.

You've been listening. You've been watching too many TikToks. You need to go to bed. No, I know Producer Rachel's gotten this. Producer Rachel, have you? I don't know

if she's on the show today. Maybe she's out. I don't know. Producer Rachel? Oh, 100%. 100%.

So what? Really? It'll come and warn you and be like, whoa, whoa, peanut. You got to go ahead. You can come on air,

producer Rachel. Yeah, come on and tell us about this. Yeah. I told you be camera ready, everybody. I am. I'm good.

We're going to go. See it. Yeah, there's no hoodie. No hoodie. Okay. So wait. It's 1am. Take me through it.

How, what's the longest you've been watching TikTok after midnight? How many minutes before they give you this warning and tell you, listen, you need to make better life choices, Rachel. It used to be somebody that would go like, stop. And like it really, really abruptly stops you, right? And it's like a per, like it looks like it would be a normal TikTok. And the first time it happened, it's kind of jarring. The longest I was ever on TikTok that was during the pandemic. And I was doomed scrolling.

And it was like two or three in the morning. And I've gotten to the point to where it's that person, popped up like multiple times. Really? It's like an hour that you have to be on it consistent, but I deleted TikTok since then, had a TikTok break and re-downloaded it and now I don't have any notifications.

Don't get that person anymore, but I think it was 2020. I've had it happen and it is a feeling of shame, Molly. I can't even imagine. It's like you've wasted 45 minutes of your wife. You could have been sleeping. You could have been crisper for work tomorrow. You could have spent time with your children.

could have read a book. Instead, for 45 minutes, you've been watching garbage and you can't remember one of these videos. They've done nothing to enhance your life in any way. Is it so sad that now I want to try it? Like, now I want to see if I can trigger the person to tell me. This is what I mean when I say I'm a sleep achiever. I've never had this happen because bedtime is serious business. I'm out. I got to delete TikTok and all my social media in another couple of weeks because I'm going to start the finish in the book. And I'm taking a major break. I'm just going to put buffer on my phone so I can post out, but not actually load the apps. So I had buffer.

It's like a third party app. Buffers is a really cool third party app, a free commercial for them, but it's like 10 bucks a month. We'll let you post like five places at once. It was like posterist, Gary Tan's first company. Thank you, Bruce, Rachel. And so posterist was very cool. You could email an address and it would put the photo on your humbler, your Instagram

and your Twitter and your WordPress blog. Now with Postgres, you can like have five different Twitter handle. LinkedIn. So if you wanted to say like, hey, I'm going to be in New York next week, you post it through Buffer, you put a time, you can schedule it or you can just do it live,

and then it posts it to everything, so you don't need to have the app. You just post from Buffer, but you don't load the app. So you don't consume. Everybody needs to take a break from these services at some point. They're not healthy.

I would like to have, like, the ability to set a limit for myself. I guess you can do that, but. Oh, so just back to YouTube for a second, Molly, as we wrap that up, and Google. Here's my theory. A lot of people plowed money into Google during this recent downturn

because it's a safe haven. And, you know, over the last year, it's basically trading at the same price now. And if you look at the five-year chart, you know, like, yeah, they wiped out a year of like crazy the last year of growth, but it's still trading at an amazingly great... It's still at 20 PE for a predictable company.

So if we're looking at... at Facebook, 12 PE, you look at Google 20 PE. It tells you the story. People are much more bullish on Google long term. Google long term. Search is not optional. I mean, this is like, I've been waiting to be proven right and maybe I never will be long term, but I have been saying for years that if one of those two things we're going

to go away, it would be the one that's optional. And search is not. And fundamentally, you know, if Google is sticking to organize the world's information and they're going to provide search and content around that. Like, that's not optional, but yelling at your anti-vacs or anti on Facebook is. I don't need Facebook. I log in, like, every one or two months and I'm just always disappointed when I get there. And if you look at Microsoft, it's trading out a 30-pe ratio right now.

And they're up 11% over the year. They're down 15% year-to-date. And maybe we just give a quick capsule of their results, which have been fantastic. Yeah, I mean, Microsoft proving that business software is also not optional. Let's see. So Microsoft also, I want to jump right to the Azure to the cloud business because we noted that Google's cloud business is $5.8 billion, right? That grew 45% year over year.

Yep. Microsoft's cloud revenue is $23.4 billion. They're more focused, right. They have inroads into businesses. Google has inroads into advertisers. That tells you everything. Absolutely. Azure and other cloud services increased 46% year over year.

The $19 billion of that revenue was from Intelligent Cloud up 26%. LinkedIn revenue was up 34% year over year. Go LinkedIn. Our biggest sponsor, I believe. Go LinkedIn. We love LinkedIn. The silent storm. Just getting her done.

Talk about a great purchase. I mean, is there anybody who has made a, better series of purchases than Microsoft over the last couple of years. Like, let's go through it. Right? LinkedIn. So we got LinkedIn.

GitHub. Minecraft. Was, and they're doing Activision now? Activision. Mm-hmm. We said Minecraft. Didn't they buy another big gaming studio as well? I mean, and they bought Skype.

That was kind of sideways. Oh, right. They bought the Elder Scrolls game studio. They've been buying a lot of game studios, like quieter, smaller ones that we haven't heard of either. So, so smart. And yeah, fantastic. Congratulations, Microsoft and Microsoft training at a 30-P-E ratio.

So when you look 30, 20-12, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, how do you interpret that, Molly? Well, you interpret as stability and predictability of that revenue, which you absolutely pointed out. If you had to list those three, for a business person, Microsoft is essential. Yeah. The cloud, et cetera.

And for video gamers who are into that, world, essential, hard to live without. Google, very hard to live without. I don't think I can live without YouTube at this point. I don't think I can live without search. Of course, I've tried all the other search engines. It's disappointing eventually. Although I will say, I have been pleased with using other platforms for writing content.

So I do think, like, the Office suite and some of those things, I see young companies are, you know, going from Office to Google, from Google to Notion Coda, grammarly. I think Grammarly's got to play to actually not just correct your grammar, but I told them, like, why can't I edit a document in grammarly? I kind of love their interface. I would love to make that my hub of, you know, documents, but they don't have multiplayer. So, yeah, I think you nailed it. Facebook completely fungible and not essential.

If you told me Facebook and Instagram or shutting down tomorrow, I'd be like, okay, can I download my pictures? I have them all probably on my phone and my, you know, already, but yeah, maybe I could. So that is so funny that you say that, because that is the only. only reason I haven't downloaded Facebook. Because I just can't be bothered trying to figure out or turned it off. Right. Like I don't,

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I still have it, but they make it impossible to download my freaking photos. And there's a lot of them that in there that aren't anywhere else. I know there's a way, but I can't be bothered to figure it out. And I still occasionally use Instagram,

so I haven't deleted the account. That's the only reason. This is what I do when I'm on Facebook. I look at my main feed. And anybody in my main feed who I haven't had a meal with or talk to on the phone, you know, had a real conversation with. in 10 years or five years, I just unfollow them.

I unfriend them. And I try to unfriend like 50 people in my feet. So my feet actually starts to look a little bit better because I was in the era when all these things came out, one of the reasons I became more well known is I put an intern full time for 10 bucks an hour on literally going into my social media accounts and following everybody. And it just people were like, oh, Jason Calcanus found me. Who's that?

It's like, I don't know. I have to follow him back. And it was like a really good technique. Thanks, guys. But, uh, yeah, here you. There's all kinds of, it's not like I can't find out. It's that I don't have eight minutes to go and do it.

It's like, it's like, look at how many steps it is. It's like, go here, hit settings, go to here, do this. And then we're going to maybe email you a zip. And then it's just like, and then deselect all and then click on the photos and videos and then choose

the range. And by the way, take a hammer and bang your hand with a hammer three times. Break your knuckles. And then, yeah, it's, it's, the last step requires you to switch to available copies.

By the way, I guarantee this was published in January I see. I'm sure that Facebook has changed that already to make it simpler for me. Yeah. Yeah. And they put a blog post about how it was no easy. However, Nick makes a really good point that Facebook's most influential product. The only product in the arsenal that might not be optional for people is WhatsApp. That is true. Yeah, billions of users. Yeah. It's, yeah, WhatsApp has got a global phenomenon. I agree. Yeah. You know, and they had that thing where it was a dollar a year. Remember that? Like a little device they had a dollar a year.

They were charging people or something. No. Yeah, WhatsApp had done an experiment. I think that's 600 people paying a dollar a year or something. Which is their way of like getting people to put money in there for the wall. Okay. Hey, I saw people dunking on Manscape. And I hear Manscape ads on Nick Fan TV, my favorite YouTube channel to talk to long-suffering Knicks fans.

Shout out to CP, the franchise. This company is a consumer company. And people were saying it's not making any money, but there was kind of a debate on Twitter. walk us through Manscape, which makes Mal grooming products. I hope that. This is one of those ones where like Nick put in a bunch of math, and I'm hoping we can explain it for people. Manscape released its Q4 and 2021 full year earnings on Friday's style note.

I was referred to companies in the singular because the company is an entity, not a they. It's an it. That's true. That's the pronoun. The consumer grooming brand, Manscape disclosed some key revenue statistics. For example, it has grown quickly since it's launched in 20, 2016 now claims 5 million men have bought its products. Revenue increased from 65 million in 2019 to 210.10.7 million dollars in 2020. And then some more, 297 million dollars in 2021. So a triple and then a 50% increase. Yeah. So like,

slowing down, but big numbers, got it. slowing down. So we don't know, uh, the number of employees increased from 49 in December 31st, 2019 to 10099 at. the end of last year, 2021. In 2020, Manscape's gross margin was 50%-ish, but apparently its margin is falling. Here's an interesting note, though,

just back of the envelope. They have 200 employees, and they're making almost 300 million, they're making 1.5 million employee, which is, like, think two and a half times what Twitter makes per employee. Just in terms of efficiency,

not to dunk on anybody, but they're making, revenue per employee. Now, again, it's a physical product, so it has less margin than software, yada, yada. But that's pretty strong on a per employee basis. Yeah, no, pretty good. And then the gross margin fell

some in 2021-Q4, when you may recall there were lots of supply chain things, fell to 44%, which again on hardware doesn't seem that terrible. Right. To me, this could be a result of increased manufacturing and shipping costs that we saw across the globe, and could be for Manscaped's new product launches.

The supply chain issues. Supply chain issues. Yes, we all had that. But here's where it gets sort of interesting, and this is the part where people start dunking. Like, none of this seems like a giant red flag on its surface. However, then we dig in and discover that Manscapes $315 million net loss was driven by about $310 million in stock-based compensation costs.

And they accounted for the stock-based, compensation in their adjusted EBTA, which they claimed was break-even at $5.1 million. So let's dig into, this is like when we were invented community EBITDA. It's not that bad. We need a new way to define community, Rivka. Why not have pictures in the S-1? That's why we did it. That's why we put the pictures in the S-1 because nobody's done it.

Nobody's done it. Nobody's done it. That's why we did it. Adjusted EBTA, we would have been profitable, Rivka. If we did not have to pay people. Stock options. So many stock options. So people on Twitter were calling out Manscape for this terrible adjusted EBITDA calculation.

I don't understand. Is this funky accounting or does it matter? I don't think it's funky accounting. Listen, if you give people stock-based accounting and that is not the actual nuts and bolts of the business, right? To get people to incentivize them to stay at the company and to bring in talent. I guess ultimately on an accounting basis that is coming out of the other shareholders. But I think looking at the actual spending and profitability of the business is what's important,

the growth rate, the revenue per employee, etc. And sometimes these are like large balloon payments that happen to executives during IPOs, etc. So you could have like the CEO got a $100 million grant or a fifth, you know, the CFO got a $25 million grant. So usually you net those out to understand the actual business. Not a terrible business is what I would say. So, congrats. We'll find out over the next couple of earnings if they're just paying King's ransoms and diluting the cap table by giving so many shares to the employees.

And that's really what it's about. If you own 10% of this business, if you were like an endowment or some big, you know, fidelity or something, you own 10% of the business. Yeah. Well, if they give 20% of the business to the employees, you now own 20% less shares. if they were doing that every year, kind of sucks, right? Because you've got a headwind

of more shares are being issued to the employees. Now, if they're issuing them to better employees who have better results, maybe you take the 20% hit on the amount of shares out there in their dilution

because the business is growing 50% a year. And they got great people, you know, in those seats. So you'll find out over time if they overdid it with the stock comp. Yeah, we shall see. All right, well, then two little newside,

lightning round news items that I think are super interesting that we can't leave for tomorrow. and one of them is that Apple is finally acting on its right to repair program. Explain what a right to repair is. So right to repair is the idea that if you buy something, you should be allowed to fix it.

And a company should make parts and manuals available for you to be able to pick your gadget instead of saying only authorized repair shops can fix this. And if you open it up, you'll void the warranty. Apple has been the worst offender here. So up to and including making proprietary screws, that required proprietary screwdrivers is I'm not making that up.

So Apple announced that it would start a right to repair program. Everybody was really skeptical and now it's happening. They are issuing actual iPhone parts and tools. Great. Which can be purchased by anybody. You can fix your freaking phone

and put a new battery in it when the battery dies. Or if you don't live within, you know, the distance of an Apple store, you know, somebody could set up shop in their garage and fix your phone for you. This is the way it should be. Yeah. Let people fix it if they want to.

It's better for the environment. I mean, I really think it's better for the environment. So if Apple's going to talk to talk, they got to walk the walk. And they do walk the walk when it's convenient to them, which is, oh, we're not going to give you your charging brick and your headphones anymore because we know you already have those. It's better for the environment.

Also happens to be better for our margin. Well, then you have to do some things that are worse for your margin, like letting me order a kit to fix my screen instead of going to the store and paying you $100 and I can do it myself for $50. 100%. And then one last piece. I say good for Apple. They wish they didn't have to do it under pressure. And then I understand some people don't want people

screwing with their technology or some things you shouldn't do. So there could be some things that like maybe you can't take your camera or the battery apart and be under warranty because you're going to break because it's not possible because it's glued together or something. But swapping out the batteries obvious. Remember when you could buy an extra battery for your BlackBerry? I'd buy three extra batteries and I'd keep them charged in my backpack. I never had a dead battery.

You know, now when you could put a freaking SD card in your freaking phone instead of paying Apple $300 a megabyte or whatever they're charging these days. Yes, that's something Apple. Hey, you know what, crazy EU? To my friends in the crazy EU. Right. Here's something crazy for you to do. Force them to use a USBC and to have an SD card.

Yes. Do it. Do it. And a goddamn headphone check. From Europe and ship it here to have those two features. Oh my God. I totally would. And then finally, speaking of you ordering stuff.

Last bit of good news. What's that? Sheffey's making electric corvette. The reason I'm so drooling over that. And one more thing for Apple, for the punch list. And you can clip this and give it to somebody can clip this. And go ahead and re-aggregate this. Hey, Tim Cook, it's Molly and J-Cal.

Congratulations, yada, yada. We love you, Tim Cook. Great products. We spanned a King's Ransom on your stuff every year. Three things. Number one, SD cards. Number two, USB, on the iPhone ASAP. Number three,

I've bought so many lightning cables with you that will go in the garbage at some point. How about free dongles or a $1 dongle that lets you plug the lightning into that little dongle, little tiny thing on the tap, and changes your lightning into a USBC. I've bought these on Amazon from third-party sellers and you keep breaking them and turning them off. Exactly. But Molly, I was taking my little anchor charger. That was USBC to lightning. And they're bringing this little dongle with me, one cable to unite them all.

Or I'd have like the double that I have and the triple. But I would keep these extra ones. So when I wasn't, when my iPhone was fully charged, I could turn my lightning cable into a USBC. And they keep breaking it. And they keep breaking it. I mean, it's unacceptable. It's unacceptable. It's just Tim.

Get on a standard and stay on the standard. Or let us use a dongle, Tim. And just produce it yourself. Or here's a genius idea for you. Apple, when you sell us a lightning cable, do what Anchor did. Attached to it a little dangle with the USBC. Now, if you own an iPad and an iPhone,

I can bring one cable with me. Or with my kids, they could do their old iPad, which uses lightning and the new iPad, which uses the USBC. In other words, save the goddamn environment. You guys are so green. If you're not going to do it, stop blocking other people from doing it or just do it yourself.

Yeah. I don't like the hypocrisy. margin and enough premium pricing in these products. If you're going to charge like two to $7,000 for a laptop, you don't need to be nickel and diming us with this like, stop nickeling and fix the cables. Fix the standard. Use the standard.

I can't wait till they make the iPhone USBC. Yeah. That's going to be delightful. I mean, literally, I know that we've, you have solved this with the little anchor thing, but I still can't believe that it's three different cables to charge my phone, my watch and my laptop. Because now I have the magazine.

safe on the left. Like, I'm like, are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Just USBC everything. Get it together. Get it together. All right. And then on the Corvette, pull up the Corvette. Sting right from me. Please. And Orange, here we go. Here's a video of the electric one. They're going to make a hybrid from what I understand. Then I'm going to go full electric. And, you know, listen, I want to get a Roadster 2.0. That's going to take a couple of years, I understand. Oh, yeah. But the Corvette was my first love as a car. I mean, I had a 73 Mustang, Grande, 351, Cleveland. I love that car. But, Then I had a Corvette C6 in yellow, convertible. That was my dream, Los Angeles car.

And I really would love to own a Corvette again in my life, but I refuse to buy a car that's not electric. Yeah. That's the promise I made to myself. No more non-electric cars. And so I want to buy a Jeep Wrangler or a cyber truck when those are available. And if Corvette, you know, never, it makes an electric car, I would consider it. I'm a Tesla guy, but I would love to have a Corvette for a couple of years and go through

another midlife crisis. Beautiful. It's absolutely beautiful. Like get it done, get it out. get it done. And this is, I tell you why this is so important. Corvette fans are like loyalists.

Like they're like BMW for life fan kind of situation or Audi people. Like they're nutcases. And so this is bold. Like this is like the last muscle car to fall to EV. Like they did the Mustang. They screwed that up because they didn't make it look like a Mustang. But Corvette's saying, hey, it's a Corvette. It looks like a Corvette.

It's the same as the other one. And we're going to make it electric. You know what? The performance of this Corvette's going to be bonkers. And hey, you may even be able to have a trunk. or some room for stuff. Right. Because you can have a fronk.

I'm not saying that I stone cold smoked an obnoxious Dodge Charger getting onto the Bay Bridge last night. But I'm only saying that once in a while when you put that EV torque to work, it just brings a smile to your face. Let me just show this tomorrow. Show the Corvette Stingrin, 20203-Z6. Just if you can show it in orange, this thing is making the supercar, world lose their mind again because this thing is under 100 grand and it's better than a

Lamborghini or Ferrari. I know it's the affordable supercar. Yeah. Look at that. I'm going to be the 2023 one. That's not the 2020, 23, you don't think. And you want the stingray specifically. But anyway, you'll see some photos coming up here for our notice.

And this Z-0-6, it looks like the just a crazy looking car. It is so gorgeous. Yeah. That's the car I want so bad. Yeah. Look at that. Imagine that in electric, like zero to 60 and like sub two seconds. Going to Tahoe in that?

I mean. Going to LA and that. Summer, summer. Summer Tahoe. I want to get a convertible one. I mean, the thing is a piece. Look at those flares with the air intakes. I mean, it's just stunning.

What those air intakes do is not just cool down the engines, everything. It creates grip. So it pushes the car down onto the road. Oh, I loved my Corvette. Can't wait. All right. This has been a great show. Thanks everybody for tuning in.

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