This Week in Startups - EV Truck Startup Nikola Runs Out of Juice | E2087

Episode Date: February 20, 2025

This Week in Startups is brought to you by…Gusto. Get three months free when you run your first payroll at http://gusto.com/twist*Gusto pricing shown in ad is based on pricing prior to March 2025Lemon.io. Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twistAtlassian. Head to https://www.atlassian.com/software/startups to see if you qualify for 50 free seats for 12 months.Today’s show: Jason and Lon Harris cover Nikola’s Chapter 11 and how founders can avoid the same mistake, Superhuman AI’s new features, Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines and where Sam Altman went wrong holding onto top talent, plus much more!Timestamps:(0:00) Episode teaser(1:26) Introduction to startup news and trends(2:47) Bill Ackman's J trade and Herbalife controversy(5:24) Comparing trading strategies: Jason vs. Pelosi(9:49) Gusto. Get three months free when you run your first payroll at http://gusto.com/twist(11:29) HP's acquisition of Humane and its significance(13:52) Challenges facing the AI industry(20:30) Lemon.io. Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist(21:47) OpenAI veterans launch a new venture(28:09) Chamath's venture into high stakes poker(29:35) Atlassian. Head to https://www.atlassian.com/software/startups to see if you qualify for 50 free seats for 12 months.(36:37) Nikola's Chapter 11 filing and securities fraud(48:10) The upside of failing as a founder in the U.S.(50:24) Superhuman introduces AI-powered email features(51:58) Preview of upcoming guests on the podcast(53:03) Key characteristics of successful founders(56:21) Play-along: Guess the fake startup(1:04:12) Movie trilogy rankings: Superman, Star Wars, TerminatorSubscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpCheck out these past Guess The Fake Startups segments:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKP2iiF1oYIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhnOXuGnh14https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueazpyGOgccFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/alexFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisThank you to our partners:(9:49) Gusto. Get three months free when you run your first payroll at http://gusto.com/twist*Gusto pricing shown in ad is based on pricing prior to March 2025(20:30) Lemon.io. Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist(29:35) Atlassian. Head to https://www.atlassian.com/software/startups to see if you qualify for 50 free seats for 12 months.Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara,Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta,Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.comSubscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

I knew Milton was a fraud. You know, I got a pretty good eye for this. There are people who are delusional and, I would say, not thoughtful. And then there are people who are delusional and competent. And I love me the latter. But incompetent delusional people, I mean, they just incinerate money. Competent delusional people change the world. And they might incinerate some money.

But, you know, if you think, hey, I'm going to put a, computer on everybody's desk and you're broke aides and you're competent and you make good software and you're aggressive and you understand distribution and whatever you know like you might just make it happen and that's what we do all day long is venture capital we're looking for those delusional another word would be ambitious competent people this weekend startups is brought to you by gusto gusto is easy online payroll benefits in HR built for modern small businesses get three months free when you run your first payroll at gusto.com slash twist. Lemon.io. Get access to Lemon hire, a platform with more than 80,000 pre-vetted engineers

that you can interview within 48 hours. Get $2,000 off your first hire at lemon.io slash hire today. And Atlassian. From MVP to IPO, Atlassian for startups provides your team the right tools to plan, track, and collaborate on work. Head to atlassian.com slash software slash startups to see if you qualify for 50 free seats for 12 months. All right, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups. We go live three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And this week we did Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday with me, the L director, the director. Lon Harris, you can follow him on Twitter X, X.com slash L-O-N-S. And we've got a full news docket today. So let's just rip through it. And you can follow the docket at this week in startups.com slash docket.

We also have a bunch of links on that docket. And when you go to the docket, you'll see links to everybody's socials. But we're also experimenting with some communities. We have a subreddit, which we're cleaning up and getting rid of the spam. And we have a LinkedIn group for startup founders. We have a Twitter X community. And yeah, we've got a Slack community. We're just going to figure out where you all like to hang out.

And we'll start out by asking you questions about your startup. hopefully that gets the everybody's conversations going. And, you know, each community has to have a purpose. And each podcast has a purpose. The purpose of this podcast is to talk about startups, technology, innovation, and founders. Once in a while, we drift. We drift over to politics as it relates to technology. We drift into finance and culture as it relates to entrepreneurship. But let's get started. So, yeah, first item, we got to talk about you. We're posting about this. yesterday on social media. There is a new J-Trade. Oh,

a J-Trade has come in. Howard Hughes Holdings. Now, Atman is comparing this project to Warren Buffett's famous transformation of Berkshire Hathaway from a failing textile manufacturer into a diversified holding company. The plan is for Ackman's Pershing to acquire 10 million newly shared issues of HHS at $90 a share. Then they're going to take controlling interests in various public and private companies that appeal to Pershing, that Pershing would already have been interested in using their sort of

criterion for companies and investments. H.H.H., unlike the failing textile company that Warren Buffett was sort of transforming, they're going to keep doing what they do. They are developing smart cities and planned communities like the woodlands near Houston, Summerlin outside Las Vegas. So that company is going to continue operating independently while also helping to fund and drive this new holding company. So I've been following Bill Ackman for a while. He's very smart. He makes great trades. He had a hilarious fight over herbal life with the other famous hedge fund corporate rater, whatever they call them, activist investor, I guess. What's his name? God, Carl Eich. You know, when I saw him do that herbal life thing, I was like, yeah, I know people in herbal life. It's a, it's an MLM, a multi-level marketing. Some might say scheme.

Some might say system. I don't get sued here. Everybody's got a little hair trigger on on the suing. But I always thought, like, every time I met an herbal life person, that the, what I got was this person is entrepreneurial. They want to do great things in the world. And herbal life got their hooks into them. And now they're annoying their families. by trying to sell them supplements,

I felt like it was predatory. I feel like a lot of these MLMs feel predatory to me. That's when Bill Ackman came on my radar because I used to see NBC a whole bunch. And I was like, huh, this guy's smart. Then the next piece of the puzzle was he bought a bunch of Uber just two or three weeks ago. He had massed like a $3 billion position.

And I thought his analysis was incredibly thoughtful. So when I saw this one, I just snapped. I was like, you know, I feel my J-trading, I think I'm up. I put in 1.6 million and I think it's at 3.4 million in like two years. I mean, I like. Pelosi level results. I mean, well, interesting. You say that.

The Pelosi tracker put Pelosi versus J-Cal. You can look it up on Twitter. And or versus Jason. I was beating Pelosi for like six months, which I just thought, whoa, wait a second. If I'm beating Pelosi, I need to stop trading because people are going to start thinking I have Pelosi level information. I don't want to get pinched. I'm looking at this. I'm looking at this graph right now. Your 2023 performance, she did, she was up 45%. You were up 47.4%. Yeah, you don't want to be beating Pelosi. That means the SEC is going to start investigating you.

Yeah. That's triggering an investigation for sure. Here's the extent of my insider information. What I see on Twitter, which is all public. So I see, uh, Ackman, make, this trade, and I think to myself, I know the planned communities, I know Ackman, and I know from first principles, oh my God, that's hilarious, Pelosi versus Gakhanis, that's, this is like when you're getting too much heat. You remember in Goodfellas? Yeah. After the big heist at the airport, LaGuardia. The Lufthansa heist, yeah. The Lufthansa heist. What happens? Everybody shows up at the bar, Cadillacs, uh, fur coats. Excuse me.

Excuse me. That's the matter. Take it off. Take it. Take it off. Take it off. Take it off. Didn't I tell you not to get anything free?

Didn't I tell you not to attract a pension? Two days, one. You don't get your $20,000 make. Bring it back. All right. I'll bring it back. I don't care what you do. Bring it where you got to be.

Get it out of here. I don't get it. Get it out of it. One of the things I noticed when I moved to Austin. Now, you know, Alam. I live 20 years Brooklyn. 10 years Manhattan, 10 years L.A., just over 10 years, split between San Francisco and a really tony town called Hillsborough in, which is kind of like the Bel Air of the peninsula.

And what I found was in New York, people found every nook and cranny to find an abode. In L.A., I watched Venice go from like, you don't want to live in Venice to Venice's the most expensive neighborhood, right? And Silver Lake, downtown LA, you don't want to live in these places. Now they're like amongst the more expensive areas. But what I did notice from living in essentially one, two, three, arguably five cities, if you can consider Brooklyn, Manhattan different, and you consider San Francisco and Hillsborough different, which I do. I've lived in five, I lived in five cities. And I never saw anybody build enough housing in those cities. In fact, I saw Nimbianism. And in fact, in the Bay Area, I saw my rich friends buy the lots next to either

side of their houses. Pretty well documented. People just do this as a, you know, if you're sitting on a billion dollars, you might, you know, a $5 million house comes up next to you, you buy it and you sit on it and, you know, maybe it's a guest house or you just don't want somebody to build a new house there. Right. When I moved to Austin, Texas, and I saw what was going on in Houston, I just spent a little time there, uh, my lord. Billy, you build whatever the hell you want. Yeah, they don't care. It does screw up the landscape a bit when you see like somebody's got a bar with a

performance space next to a bakery, next to a storage locker next to a strip mall. It's a bit random, but people can afford homes. Housing prices went down two years in a row. I watched all these Caltera, Bell Tara, all these terrors being built all over Austin. And I said to myself, that's got to be a great. great business, like to be in the building a new city business and watching everybody leave the Bay Area to go to Miami where they build a lot, Vegas where they build a lot. And Texas, where they build a lot, I just realized, man, so much pent up demand that when you can buy a home for

one-fifth of the price as the Bay Area's average home, people are going to move. So I just thought this would be an easy J-trade. I've been looking for a play here. It feels like it's pre-vetted since Ackman's in it. And then on top of that, Acman wants to be super involved. So he's got like a bigger vision here. Yeah, he's going to be the CEO of this new holding company, Ackman personally. So that's a big deal. All right. You didn't start your company to run payroll. Did you? Of course not. We all know that. Gusto is here to help.

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startup. So here's your quick call to action. Do you want all Gusto has to offer with no hidden fees? Well, how about a discount? Try Gusto and get three months free. Gusto.com slash twist. That's G-U-S-T-O-com slash twist. And that means attention. So there's money. There's a lot of that in the world, But people generally don't like to lose money when they place a bet, great. But when you see somebody give their attention to something and they have a bigger strategy, that means he sees an opportunity there

that's bigger than the average investment he makes. Same thing with Uber. He saw a bigger opportunity there because he's publicly talking about it. It's a $3 billion. So when you see people move from, you know, placing a J-trade to placing a major J-trade or not selling, that's when you know something's up,

we'll see. And we'll now cover this. company. Yeah, it's an interesting concept, and I liked how he turned the launch and the pitch into this kind of narrative, like calling back to Berkshire Hathaway, reminding people of what Warren Buffett did. He turned his pitch into a story, which I think gives it a lot of appeal. And to turn it into a story, there must be a story there. And another word for a story is a thesis. So if you think about like a story and a screenplay, it's got three acts, right? And you have these challenges and then you have this resolution. You know more about this than I do. But there is something that

to the story arc in a three-act play slash film to an investment thesis, right? You have to overcome some things in that second act. There's a mission you go on and then hopefully gets resolved in the first act. I think things get set up. Is that generally the case of... And I think what's especially interesting here is all scripts, they have to have a thing called the pregnant moment, which is why does this story happen right now instead of a month ago next year?

Like, why is this the decision the character makes in this moment? So if you think about a movie about a guy, he's desperate for money, you open the movie with the eviction notice on his door. Like, okay, it's happening right now because he's going to lose his house, you know? And I feel like that also very much applies for an investment piece. It's like, why am I making this bet today instead of a month ago or next year? And that's called the pregnant moment? In screenwriting, that's what we call it, the pregnant moment. Like, why is this, the story must begin right now instead of another moment?

We call that the why now. So the why now in venture investing is, oh, GPS now exists, therefore Uber can exist. Oh, unlimited storage at a very low price exists. Now YouTube can exist and store these files. Oh, unlimited fiber and bandwidth exists. Now Netflix can stream in, you know, HD and a large number of people can hit those files. So you do have the Y now. And obviously, AI is going to be the Y now for so many companies, whether it's full self-drive,

or optimist the robot and robot technology or any number of pieces of software. So anyway, that's my J-Trade. Next story, Humane. They've been acquired by HP. There are, of course, the makers of the infamous AI in. That was a device. The goal was, we're going to replace your smartphone

with a device that doesn't have a big screen so you won't be staring at the screen all day. The founders, they're two former Apple executives. And Bethany Bonjourno and Imranchaude. and they said they were at a restaurant and they saw this family and everybody was staring at their screens and it made them very depressed and they thought, isn't there a way we can keep

everybody connected using these incredible new AI tools, verbal commands. And so it's a combination you can input things verbally like just talk to your device or it has a little projector so you could hold your hand up and it could actually project like a screen instead of having a screen.

Most of the startup's assets have now been acquired by HP for $116 million. $1.HP, first thing, discontinued sales of the $499 AI in. Support ends on February 28. So if you own one of these, they want you to download your data and your photos because it's going to stop working at the end of this month. So they're just acquiring the team, I guess. And the IP, maybe they have some patents. But this is, you know, sometimes you get what's called an aqua hire or a landing. I think this means there's no number associated with this,

and they're very clearly saying this product is done. They're closing the book on it. They're actually going to move the team into a new HP division called HP IQ that is going to develop other kinds of AI tech and gadgets. I thought that this product had potential. Any kind of wearable has potential given how small these devices are getting. and how powerful they are and how good voice is getting.

This one felt like they really got it out early and I think they didn't manage expectations. If you were gonna launch a really groundbreaking product like this and it doesn't exactly work, and I think Marquez, you know, kind of gave it a harsh review and they got a little tweaked and everything. If you launch this and said,

this is a beta product, It's an alpha product. It's for the Vanguard. It's a work in progress. We're going to put out some use cases. We're looking for a thousand people to join the beta, and then we're going to expand the beta to 5,000. And it's a developer preview, which they did for Apple Vision Pro.

They said, this is not for consumers. This is for developers. If they just had launched us as developers, I think the company could still exist today. I think the problem was they've, thought they could just launch just like an iPhone. And they came from Apple and they thought it was polished enough. And you know what?

It looks polished enough. But the use cases weren't there. Sometimes you need use cases. Use cases and what we would call in the business a killer app. Now, most startups are just a killer app themselves, hopefully, right? You're like, I have a killer app. This is my idea. It's going to be a killer app.

The idea here was to create a platform and then a killer app would emerge. But they kind of launched it as if it was like super polished. And it looked super polished. So I think the expectation was, well, it's going to do what it says it's going to do and it didn't because language models aren't ready. Now, there's a rabbit R1 or something. That's that little handheld device, if you remember, and I had the founder on here. And it was very clear.

Like, I'm launching an experimental device. I want you to play with it. Give me some ideas. And I think that's still going. You know, when you release things like that and their spunk work projects, developer previews like Apple Vision Pro, there's nobody. like ringing their hands about Apple Vision Pro not working or not being perfect because they know it's a developer preview. This one, and we have to get the founder back on when he hits the one year mark.

So producer Maddie, if you could, researcher Maddie, if you could go look into when he was on and let's have him back on. He's a really fascinating cat who built this. I think that was their problem. They just, the gap between what people thought it was going to be and what it was. So Marquez, if it was, framed as this is just a developer review, he would have given it a different review. But he was like, hey, this thing's weighed. It's like destroying my sweater. And it's getting hot on my skin.

You know, and it didn't answer these questions. There was just a long line of things that he thought were not ready for prime time. Yeah. If you're going to release something that's not ready for prime time, it can't cost a premium price and you can't pitch it as it's ready for prime time. To me, that immediately at that $500 price point, if this is a $200 thing that early adopters can, chess can play around with, I think it's a totally different story. I think it's the same thing

with the Apple Vision Pro. It didn't launch with like one killer thing you have to try and it's overpriced. And so people are like, well, I'll wait until the next iteration of whatever this is. Correct. Yeah. So lots of startup lessons there. I do give them points for audacity and being bold. I wish there were 10 more companies that did this. I believe the winning format is a bangle. I'm putting it out there right now. I like a bangle. You remember in Empire Strikes Back, there were the lobots that had the earpieces on.

Are they a brand of robot? I thought that was that guy's name, Lobot. I think his name is Lobot, but there have been other people who look like him. With those cybernetic kind of. Yes, in future episodes. I don't know. We'll have to look at Wikipedia, Wikipedia. Wikipedia.

But Rolando Calaricene, you can pull it up and show him for people who don't know, starts typing. And you see on his arm, he has like a computer on his arm. Yeah. It goes like from his wrist, you know, his whole forearm is basically a computer. I would very much like to be at dinner as I'm holding my hands right now. So the person I'm talking to is seeing the back of my hand. And when I hold it up here, there's a robot. I'm looking at a screen where my veins are on the inside of my foreman.

forearm. Interesting. And I think I'd been very not intrusive because if you look at how I'm looking right now, I'm kind of looking

at my palm, and they have that same observation, except they wanted to project onto your palm. Right, you'd hold it. Your pocket was here, and so you'd hold your

hand out and you'd see what would be on the screen. It's interesting. It's hard for me to imagine doing that all day, but I did like, I agree with you. Like, I like the idea

that they had this far out. Maybe people will get into using their phones this way, and they went for it. It's definitely like a very creative new approach, even if it didn't work out. Founders, let's be real. Let's keep it a buck.

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an entire tech team in 48 hours or less. And twist listeners get 15% off the first four weeks. So stop burning money, hire developer smarter. Visit lemon.com.com. We got another quick hit story here. Open AI vet Mira Murati. She's their former CTO. She launched her. new startup this week, Thinking Machines Lab and it staffed full of former Open AIs, two-thirds of the team exited Open A.I to come work for this new company. Miramaradi, of course, left Open A.I. Unexpectedly in late September, we heard rumors of behind-the-scenes personality clashes, but I did a lot of research on this yesterday and couldn't get a definitive, here's what happened behind the scenes at Open A.I. That includes Barrett Zof. He was Open AIs,

researcher. He's now thinking machine's new CTO and former OpenAI chief scientist, John Shulman, is a co-founder along with Miramirati. Zop actually quit Open AI on the same day that Mira Moradi left in September. Something happened behind the scenes. I mean, I think what happened was exactly what we saw during the firing of Sam Waltman and the rehiring of him. Sam has taken control over the non-profit and the for-profit. I think maybe this stage is big enough for one person from Open AI, and you had a collection of incredibly talented people there. If we were to make a list of like the 10 most important people from Open AI taking out Sam Altman, I don't know, three years ago, I wonder how many are still there. It's kind of,

I think they've bled this talent. There's probably two reasons for it. One, there's some leadership style that Sam has or the way he's decided to take it from an open source, um, non-profit to a closed for-profit. So there's an, you know, the self-dealing or the deal-making, which is, you know,

I know Sam for a long time, 20 years almost, you know, he's, he's really good at deal-making. Uh, so, I mean,

maybe that rubbed people the wrong way. Um, which is fine, you know, uh, cultures change. I think they shouldn't be allowed to do it, but, or there should be some constraints on it.

Let's put it aside. I think the second thing, you know, that's happening here is Joshua Kushner, Jared's brother. He has a firm called Thrive. Thrive has been doing secondaries. What's a secondary? That's when an investor buys employee shares or early investor shares so that they can own a higher percentage of the company. So the company's issuing, I don't know, a billion dollars. new shares, and then they set up a billion dollars to buy out the existing employees who

have been there for four, five, six, seven years. I think that's what happened. Yeah. Yeah. Is that they cashed out and they're like, hey, let me start a new thing where I'm in control. Exactly. And I get to make the decision. Yeah. So this new company focusing on AI alignment, which they define as encoding human values into AI models to make them safer and more reliable. Okay, so she is leading with safety and reliability. Which is the same thing. I'm going to put out this. Another open AI early innovator.

His company safe superintelligence is now also AI safety and protecting us from the evil robots to come. I think that was everybody's original concept was, you know, let's build this in a safe way. It was the mandate, and now it's not the mandate. Now the mandate is to maximize shareholder value, make as much money as possible, et cetera, and become a for-profit. So understandable. And I think this is Open AI's biggest challenge.

And you won't see it in the short term because they've got, they had a pretty good head start. They coined the term chat in GPT. It's become a brand. People use it instead of using Google or bang. So it's, you know, it's like a, they've gotten a certain amount of credibility. there. In terms of consumer facing AI, chat GPT is super dominant.

Like, we're super amazingly dominant, I think. And that will take a little while for it to change, right? In the early days of search engines, Magellan and Lycos.

Yeah, there were tons of different opera. Opera. Well, those were the browsers. And then on the search engine, so even with browsers, you had it too, right? You had a Netflix browser,

a Netscape browser, a links browser, whatever. And then now you use Chrome or Firefox. I wonder what their innovation curve is going to look like when they lose those individuals. I don't know that they've

replaced them, but I do not with better people or hungry at your people, but what I do know is every time one of those people leaves and creates a competitor, you've got a double challenge. So this is why Google was so brilliant. They dumped money

into the lapse of their top talent. An absurd, such an absurd amount of money that and and such a low expectation of performance that they literally created a meme on the Silicon Valley TV show with Huli where people would rest and vest and big head would hang out on the roof with other people resting investing getting sun and it was kind of like a no show job from the Sopranos at the Esplanade. So why did they do that and why was it brilliant. Well, if you pay somebody $2 million a year to sit on the roof for five years,

and they make $10 million, you seem like the sucker. If that person leaves and creates a Google competitor and takes but 1% market share, well, that cost you $10 billion in market cap. No, $20 billion in market cap. So that was the strategy. It was explicit in Silicon Valley. They just wanted to corner the market on technologists and people who could create competitors. If Sam was smart, he would have... I'm not saying Sam's not smart. But a better strategy for Sam would have been to lock these folks up

with deals that were so absurd. If the company's going from $150 billion to $350 billion, he should have literally given the top 10 people a billion dollars in equity to stick around. To not go do this, yeah. To not go and do this.

Not because they're worth a billion dollars each, nobody is, but blocking future competition would be worth it. Shout out, Lena, Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. That is definitely something that's going on. One more quick hit before we jump into the main stories of the day.

I wanted to pull up your bestie Chmoth had this idea for a high-stakes poker tournament. I wanted to pick your brain on all of his various, the rules he's attaching, whether this is something you would like to compete in. So first of all, no, no, he will, he's going to enforce a no drug policy, which includes focus up drugs like Ritalin and Adderall. no sunglasses, you can't obscure your face. He wants everybody making eye contact the whole time and doesn't want it to be one of these

like all night endurance test kind of tournaments he wants it to be. You play during normal work hours. What do you think? Would you jump in on this? Well, okay. I can just give you a bit of insight information. Oh, okay.

I have another podcast. It's called All In. I started with Chumas and then David Sachs and then Freeberg joined us. America's Crypto and AI Zard. David's that. Yes. And it's become quite successful.

It was number eight this week on the top charts. And Chimoff and I were on Megyn Kelly. And that shot melling Megan Kelly, who already is in the top 10 regularly, up to number four. That's all. For the Valentine special. So very weird weekend for me. I was in two of the top eight podcasts of the weekend. All right.

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And of course, Lume for quick video explainer creation. Now, Lume is really brilliant. My team started using Lume on their own. They started paying for it on their own. Why? They wanted to get credit on the investment team for, communicating to me, the general partner of the firm, why they wanted to invest in a company. So they would do a loom where they recorded over a recording of an interview they did with

a founder or visiting their website and going through why they want to invest in a company. And this was so great for me. I would be skiing in Japan. I would be on a flight to New York to see my parents. And all of a sudden I get a notification for one of my team members. Hey, watch this loom. And I get the link for the loom. I click it. And then I can put comments at any time. So it's like doing a conference call, but on my time, asynchronously, and I can communicate right there on the video. Also included in Atlassian for startups is Compass, Jira Product Discovery, BitBucket, so much more, all powered by Atlassian intelligence. That's their built-in AI. Atlassian software helps companies like Canva, Cloudflare, and Rivian, keep growing and

keep innovating. Whether you're brainstorming on sticky notes or scaling to the big leads, atlasian is here to accelerate your startup's growth. Check out. Elassian for startups where eligible startups get up to 50 seats for free for one full year. That is absurdly generous. Why can they be so generous at Atlassian? Because they're the standard. Atlassian is the standard. And they are generous to startups because they were once a startup.

I remember meeting them 20 years ago in Australia. What a great company. Head to atlacian.com slash startups slash twist for complete details. That brand is very strong amongst rich people around the world. very elite people. This one is very popular with venture capitalists and startups.

This is a niche podcast. That's a broad-based podcast. And we've been talking about doing this under the All In Brand. Publicly, we've talked about this many times. But you might have seen Phil Helmuth and you can pull up his tweet.

He's 60 years old now. He's one of my best friends in the world, just a stand-up match of a guy. And he was lamenting, and he basically made an announcement that he will not be playing. He put the announcement I think on Instagram, but I'm sure it's on his Twitter.

He said he's not going to play the main event. Now, he is the number one tournament poker player in the history of poker. He has 14 bracelets from the World Series of poker. But what he said is, like, playing seven days in a row, and they play, I think, 12-hour days. And you get an hour break for dinner and then like two 20-minute breaks. But he said, you know, at 60 years old, it's an endurance test, not a skill test. And so I saw that he was sharing this. I saw people commenting on it.

And let's just play it. If we have sound, we'll just play what he says here. This is a, this, I think, is part of it. It's just too tough. You know, people at home are like, oh, Phil, you could play seven days in a row. Yeah, try it. Try getting up and playing at noon until midnight. Seven days in a row.

And then they're, oh, well, today we have to play till two or three in the morning, which also happens at the WSOP main event. It's just exhausting and I can't win. And I think that it really hurts the older players in a much bigger proportion than the younger players. And I'll say this. I had four great players come and tell me that they blew the main event because they got too tired with 50 left, with 30 left, with 100 left. It's turned into an endurance test. I don't think that the World Series Booker main event is measuring.

So anyway, he made this comment. Then Daniel Nugranu, you can look it up as well, a friend of mine. And he was complaining about all these people wearing hats, people wearing scarfs, masks, sunglasses, and how it just looks ridiculous on television, and you can't read people and it takes something out of it. So I think that resonates with people. And then I made a comment publicly like, you know, a lot of the things. these kids are on speed. So in order to do 12 hour a day, seven days in a row, what's happened in poker is everybody's

on speed. Like everybody's on something, Adderall, maybe illegal speed, I don't know, everything in between. Now, I understand people might use these things legally and have a prescription. However, I think it's like performance enhancing specifically for poker. If you've ever tried any of these things, like, you will be focused. And so, who knows, maybe in the 80s and 90s people were doing cocaine, and now they're just doing Adderon and substituting that. And so, Chmah, very vibrantly or precociously, whatever, he said in his post that, hey, cocaine, not cocaine, they do drug testing for stimulants, whatever.

That's pretty controversial. So anyway, this is all shaping up to be really fascinating and interesting, excited to be part of it whenever it does happen. I'm assuming it's going to happen because Shemoth gets things done. Yeah. I feel like you guys should definitely live stream this. Like the celebrities versus billionaires versus poker stars tournament.

Like I know people who would want to watch that. I think it will be a big hit. The all-end brand is a juggernaut, obviously. We don't need, you know, I'll leave it to Chimov to, because I think he's going to spearhead it, obviously. I'll leave it to him to do all the details, obviously, and I'll just show up.

But just thinking about the, all in brands reach, the top 1% of our audience can play, you know, $100,000 and up buy-ins. And then I would say the top 20% of the audience could play 10,000, 25,000, 50,000, no problem. I mean, the World Series Progress 10-Ked. Yeah, no. Yeah, it's a lot of money, but if you're a poker player and you do it 10 times and you think you can cash, you know. And you don't want to make it too low because you don't want amateur casuals play.

want it to be people who take their poker relatively seriously, so they're good, they're good matches, you know? Yeah, so I will see what he comes up with. I'm here to support it. I'm here for it. It sounds like it'd be also a lot of fun. And I tweeted, like, make it eight hours a day of playing instead of 12 and then do three 20 minute breaks, no dinner break. So you start at 11, you're done by 8. Then you can go to dinner or you can choose to go to bed. And then in the morning, you can work out, you can hit the pool, you can have a nice leisurely, breakfast and you can show up at 11, 11, 30, 12. Some people show up late for these ornaments and they'll lose a couple of blinds, but they'd rather be fresh. All right, let's get

into some of our main topics for the day. Number one, Nicola files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. This is, of course, the electric truck maker that at one time they were going to be Tesla for semi-trucks. Once valued at $30 billion, they've now filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. They failed to find a buyer or raise funds to sustain operations. So now the plan is auction off assets. Big turning point in the history of this company, of course, launched to a lot of fanfare. Wall Street got briefly excited.

They launched on the stock market before they even had sold a single truck. Since this was always people were very conceptually excited about this. But founder and original CEO Trevor Milton, there was a scandal around his leadership of the company. He was convicted in 2022 for securities and wire fraud after misleading investors. A lot of it comes down to what's known as the rolling truck video where he claimed the Nicola truck was driving under its own power. It was actually rolling downhill in the video. It was purely sort of fraudulent.

So the SEC settlement cost the company about 125 million in penalties. That was basically the beginning of the end for them. They only have 47 million in cash left for bankruptcy proceedings with liabilities between $1 and $10 billion. and one to five thousand outstanding creditors. So they are in a lot of trouble. And they're part of a broader shakeout in the EV sector. Lordstown Motors in 2023, arrival in 2024, canoe already this year have all sort of a gone belly up.

And Rivian and Lucid are still afloat, but uncertain futures they're struggling as well at the moment. Yeah, I mean, Rivian and Lucid are learning just how hard it is to scale manufacturing. You remember, it almost killed Elon in the Model 3. I spent some time with him in the... I mean, I basically went to see him do a mental health check on my guy during the Model 3 because, you know, I was talking to him and he's like, yeah, I'm at the factory. And I was like, wait, it's just like 11 o'clock.

Like, let's go get a steak or something. He's like, yeah, I got to stay here. I was like, all right, I'm going to bring you a bird. Where are you? I came out to see him. Like, he was literally sleeping in the conference room while he was trying to get that Model 3 out the door. And he did.

And it became, actually, I think, the best-selling car in the EV category. You're correct. The Model 3 was the world's all-time best-selling electric car as of 2021. It's since been topped by the model lot. You're correct. Okay. So I got it exactly right. Sometimes I get things right here.

Sometimes you mail it. Well, I mean, I read a lot and I get prepared for the show. And then when I'm wrong, people pile on. I mean, my Lord, there's a large number of mag of folks who are waiting for me to make a mistake. they just don't got me, which I like actually, call me if I get something wrong. And so it's really hard to scale manufacturing.

Anybody can make 100 cars, anybody can make 1,000 cars. When you want to make 1,000 a week, 5,000 a week, now you got a real challenge. I knew Milton was a fraud. You know, I got a pretty good eye for this. There are people who are delusional

and, I would say, not thoughtful. And then there are people who are delusional and competent. And I love me the latter, but incompetent delusional people, I mean, they just incinerate money. Component delusional people change the world. And they might incinerate some money. But, you know, if you think, hey, I'm going to put a computer on everybody's desk and you're building, you're competent,

you make good software and you're aggressive and you understand distribution and whatever, you know, like you might just make it happen. And that's what we do all day long is venture capitalist. We're looking for those delusional, another word would be ambitious, competent people. And it's important, my only second point here is that I want all founders to understand what securities fraud is at its core. You make a claim and then somebody buys a share of stock from you, whether you're a private company or a public company. So you make a claim and then they buy a share. If you make a claim that you know is false or you are reckless, you know, in a, in a repeated way, and, you know, this is a spectrum here, and that's why we have courts.

What Elizabeth Holmes did in covering up these wild claims and then raising money, that's where the wire fraud comes in. So securities fraud, you told the story. We're just talking about Bill Ackman telling a story, right? We talked about storytelling. Yeah, you could spin a yarn all day long. But the facts have to be correct as you know them. And then your predictions need to be clearly predictions. You can make the most outlandish prediction you want if it's framed as a prediction.

And I'll just give you an example of this. And this will be an amalgamation of startups because I never like to talk specifically about one startup. people might be able to unpack it and then, you know, it's a bad look for me to be criticizing a founder since my mission in life is to support founders and inspire innovation. Imagine you pitch a bunch of investors, angel investors, and you put on a slide for your team, somebody who you made an offer to, but who had not accepted the offer. Now imagine, on your next slide, you talk about customers. Customers pretty well-defined term of art. It's not even a term of art. It's a term. Yeah, It's very binary.

Like they bought something from you or they have. Exactly. And then there's people on unpaid trials. There are people who have tested your product. There are free users. And then there's something in sales called your pipeline. I have seen, imagine the same, you know, composite of a founder.

They took their customer lists, which had one customer, let's say. And their pipeline, which had nine customers. And they put it on a slide that said, our customers. And those nine people had clicked on a link and used the product as in they logged into it maybe or they touched it in some way. But they didn't actually put a credit card in or get an invoice or actually use it meaningfully. Now that same angel investor finds out that these facts they were pitched on weren't right. And they saved your documents and they, you know, wrote notes. And then they come back and say, by the way, I'd like me.

my money back. Company's failing. Trying to raise a new rent. We just got some money left in the bank and say, you know what, I'd like my 50,000 back. Founder says, well, you know,

you made the investment. He says, yeah, but you committed securities fraud. This person never worked at the company. And I called three of these customers. They have no idea who you are. So I know that these three aren't customers. If you were that founder,

what would you do with your last 100K? You pay that guy off. Yeah. Quietly. Fight them up. Yeah. Yeah. And then,

because if not, that person literally all they have to do is just email the SEC and say, I suspect fraud. The SEC is filled with people who have given up jobs, lawn, that are high paying in the private sector in order to do what they believe is noble, important work in markets. And they might be doing it to get a bigger payday later. Okay, whatever, sure.

But they are sacrificing for a couple of years to go do this kind of thing. And Trevor, Iving, and the courts found, knowingly committed Secureus Fraught. I kind of saw it. There was a really interesting moment when I interviewed him on Twist. And I don't know if we have a clip ready, but we do. I just, okay, so this is, I did this over Zoom from our studio. And I'm just want to just give a trigger warning here.

You're going to see Fat J-Cal. So be careful folks. I'm pretty chubby here. I know you see the schvelness and you see the canons and, you know, the muscle definition. That is best. Listen. Yeah, but in fact, Jay Cow is going to ask a question to Trevor Milton. The problem is 90% of Americans will never own a semi-truck. And so your portfolio of investors can be very limited. And we wanted to go and build a company that's going to be worth $500 billion trillion over, say, 10 or 15 years. And if you're limiting yourself to 10% of the

market, you'll never do it. No matter how good your numbers are. The reason why people love Apple, everyone touches their product. Why do they love Google? Everyone touches their product. So what I did is I knew day one, you know, once we started coming out, we had all this gravy train coming in from the semi-truck program. My question was, okay, that's great, but I'll never touch the average consumer. So therefore 90% of investors will probably never invest in me. So I needed to touch the consumer. And so the truck is for the profit, the semi-truck, the pickup trucks for the consumer. And the consumer is the one who is part of the Robin Hood.

So I heard this and I just said, okay, got it. I had asked him, why are you creating the badger? He was doing, the premise of Nicola was they would have, they would rent trucks to Anheuser-Busch, buy the mile, trucking as a service, and they would have a complete stack of, I don't know, hydrogen, electric, everything. But then they released a badger to compete with the F-150, Nicola, and the cyber truck. And he explains to me that he's doing this to bait Robin Hood, in my estimation, I'm using the term bait, but to get retail investors to buy the stock.

and he says to make a trillion dollar market cap company. Yeah, he specifically says that. He's like he's trying to do Apple. Like people invest in Apple because they love their products. People will love this product. They'll invest in me. My understanding is that clip was used in the criminal case against me. Wow.

Yeah, so if you look up the criminal case and somebody in one of our producers, I'm going to have a crowd source producers here. If you want to get extra bonus points from J-Cal, I'll follow you, and maybe I'll send you a twist mug or something. if you correct us or do research in advance. There'd be some kind of benefit. I don't know what it is yet. We'll brainstorm it.

But the kindest interpretation here was he wanted to raise awareness. I don't think so. I don't know how anybody could ever justify what he said. It was absolutely clear to me that he was trying to manipulate or bait. I don't know what the word is. I'm trying to think of a good word here. Help me out.

I'll fill in U.S. attorney Damian Williams has had this to say. Quote, Trevor Milton lied to investors again and again on social media, on television, on podcasts, and in print. So that seems to be an explicit shout out to appearances just like that one we saw this week of start on. My understanding is they played the clip in the courtroom. That was crazy. That would make sense if there. If he's going in his big comment, he's like, these lies happened on podcast, yeah, that would be part of his case would be showing here's one of those podcasts. I think it's gross when people do this kind of stuff.

Is he out of jail? I think he's out of jail and the company's out of business. Yeah, I think he did three years of like supervised. I don't even know if he was in like federal prisoner if it was just like house arrest or something. But, oh, no, four year prison sentence. So maybe he's not out yet. I just want to let founders know the system is rigged

for founders in the United States. That's why every founder in the world wants to come here. The system is so rigged in your favor already. You can build a company here. Fail magnificently. Go down like Humane did. Blowing hundreds of millions of dollars,

have your product shut down. You know what the next discussion is? What's your next idea? When somebody fails in our portfolio, I say to them, where they have like an aquire. And Raul from Superhumans, the perfect example. He did a company called report.

If he sold it to LinkedIn, you know, he tripled our money. I put in 25 or 50K. I got back 150K. I was kind of bummed because I wanted it to, he had some big plans that I thought were very interesting. Long story short, I said, I'm okay with this. Because, you know, the major investors, or all investors, you got to get them to sign.

Sure. Like, okay, I'm willing to sell my share. So, you know, it's that moment in time, hey, we're selling. It didn't work out as well as we wanted to, but I need you to sign this piece of pay that says you're not going to sue or you're cool with the sale so that the other person is cool with the acquisition. You want to get what's called unanimous consent for the sale. And so all

shareholders. You want ideally all shareholders to do it. If not, you got to get the majority and then you pull the minority shareholders who are not willing to sell and they have no choice. I said to him, just please promise me that when you do your next company, I'll be the first phone call that you get. I kid you not two years later. He texts me on a Sunday. I said, where are you right now? I can't wait to hear the idea. He said, you know, I'm a Noe or whatever. I said, I'm in Pack Heights or a Cow Hollow. I'm getting bagels. I'll meet you at the house. How quickly can you get here? He said, I'll be there at 11. I went and got bagels. We sat there. He pitched me on a Gmail competitor. That one is superhuman. I just looked

at my returns for Superhuman for my first fund. My lord, if I sold my shares right now, I would have returned, I think, I don't know. Maybe another two times, one or two times, depending on the valuation I got, maybe one even to three times, because it's, you know, valuations I've been up and down. It's been an incredible investment price. What a segue.

Second time, third time founders, they always do great. We actually have a story about Superhuman, ready to go today. You've done the most masterful segue in twist history without even knowing it. Superhuman, they released a video introducing new AI features aiming

to help users better, organize and categorize their emails. Some of these features include auto labeling. The AI will sort your emails into categories for you. You can even create custom categories that you'd like the, it just sorted into. Auto archive, instantly hiding emails so they don't clutter your inbox. AI follow-ups.

They'll let you know, hey, you didn't respond to this one yet, and even auto-draft a follow-up in your voice. Split inbox upgrade. You can use AI labels alongside existing filters to split your inbox into different groups to make things easier for you. And coming soon, they want to auto draft full replies and even schedule meetings for you

based on your calendar, all working sort of automatically in the background. We do have a little clip from Rahul introducing some of these new ideas. Ooh, looking good. He got the leather jacket. It is now constantly working beside you, organizing your inbox, making sure you never drop the ball,

writing and if you want, sending fully written emails on your behalf. It can even execute complete workflows end to end. Amazing. I mean, this is the holy grail. He's very good on camera, Rahul. Like, when you're saying before the show. He is now.

He is now. Very polished presentation there. And I think, you know, I invited him to come on the pod. So I think he's coming on the pod next Wednesday. Correct. And I think Vlad from Robin Hood's going to come on soon. Also correct. We've got a lot of cool bookings, like in process behind the themes.

on some more great. Well, here's the thing. And it's interesting that those two are both coming on next Wednesday. So, again, big Wednesdays, big Wednesday energy, big hump day energy. I mean, that's like two all-stars. And what I'll say about both of them, I don't know if we're going to overlap them on the live show. It might be good to overlap them for five or ten minutes to ask them a question. Both of these individuals are obsessed with product. And Vlad, and you look at Robin Hood, world-class design, and product velocity and a customer obsession. Then you look at Raoul from Superhuman.

Customer obsession, unbelievable world-class design, and they just have product velocity. These are three of the things in my playbook for investing in companies. Product and customer-obsessed individuals. I'll just say customer-obsessed because that leads to product.

So if you're customer-obsessed, world-class design and product velocity, these three things, I don't think you can lose in your lifetime if you have these three. How do I know this?

I've always had them. You've worked with Milan. How much of a design snob, am I? How often do I'm like, this design needs to be better? A lot. You're always thinking about that every time something's really,

like a lot of companies I've worked for, you kind of come up with, here's how the thumbnails look, here's how the blog post, look, here's how the descriptions are written. And then that's it. It's automated. People are just doing it from that on.

When you work for a Jason company, every time you do a new post, it's like, let's take a beat. Is this as good as it could be? Maybe we replace that line with this one. Yeah, why not look at it with a critical eye and say, I'm channeling the customer right now. Am I confused? What is the point of being here?

What's the purpose of this product service, blog post, tweet? What's the purpose of it? On the start of the show, I said the purpose of this show is to inspire founders and to help them grow their companies, and that's what we focus on. That's the purpose of this. You do have to think with purpose about these things, and this is a very important lesson for founders. If you are not focused on the design of your product, obsessed with your customers, and you're not shipping product on a regular cadence, you're not worthy of venture dollars or right. running a company you should get out of the way, let somebody else be the CEO, and then ask yourself deeply, why can't I get product velocity? Oh, you don't have that chip on your shoulder where you're

just absolutely perturbed, angry that things are not getting better in the world. The people who have invested in who have actually changed the world have that chip. Lon, they have that anger. They have that fire in their belly that it's got to be better. It's got to be better. And most people in the world, I think, and it's not a criticism of those people necessarily. I'm not saying they're worthless and weak and they don't deserve to exist. They're just content to punch that clock, collect that check, and then there's other things in their life that I'm sure they're passionate about. Some people might be passionate about beer, football, their family, horseback riding, guns, whatever.

Mazel Tov. my best suggestion for a career is if you find yourself, God, you find yourself not having that passion, then look at what you're passionate about off duty and make that your startup. If you're passionate about horseback riding when you're working at your desk, you're just thinking about the horseback running, quit that job, shut that startup down, pivot it, and then go work on what you're actually obsessed with. And shout out to my friend Roel, who just replied to us on X. Oh, nice. Very nice.

I guess somebody live, I guess we're live tweeting the show now a bit, too. As part of Lon being here, we've been looking at the show with fresh eyes. I'm like, why can we live tweet this and, like, mention who we're talking about? Roll was amazing. Yeah, I'm not doing that today. That's Maddie behind the scene. Thank you to Maddie. Yeah.

Maddie has got great potential. And co-host the show. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, not possible. Do you want to jump into our startup guessing game? Do you want to do one more story? Oh, it's back? Guess the fake startup is back. I got a new guest the fake startup for you if you want to jump in.

I'm going to describe, give you the log line and a basic description of three startups. Two of these startups are real. You could go invest in them. You could go look at their websites. They exist. They are real companies. One of these startups I made up with my own mind and it does not exist on any level. We want you and the folks watching at home.

Everybody, I'm going to give you a chance. I'm going to describe all three startups. You let us know which one you think is the fake startup. Now, for people who are in the chief startup, chat, don't ruin it. I'm not looking at the chat right now. I just went full screen, so I don't see the chat. Don't go look for the startups. And then don't Google. Don't go go, yeah, it's cheating. Yeah, that's true. Try to play along. Enjoy it. Okay, here we go. Startup number one. Okay. Bargall. Bargall. This is the,

the name is a combination of barter and haggle. The idea is that it's going to use AI to help you get the best deal when you're shopping at vintage stores, yard sales, when you're antiquing. So you can take a photo of the item you like, search for similar items that have been purchased in your area recently, scope out what other people are paying for them, and get a sense for like the relative quality. Like how does this one I'm looking at stack up against other similar items that people in my area are by? Okay. Bargle. Bargle. Startup number one. Yes. Combination. Bartering.

Yeah. Yeah. Barger and Hagel. Got it. Bargle. Start number two. Canary, but spell canary. This startup is building the world's first nose to computer neural interface for animals.

So a scent detecting animal, this is a neural implant that will interpret and decode everything that they smell. It enhances human and animal working relationships. If you've got a bomb sniffing dog, a drug sniffing dog, some other kind of animal that a human has to interact with, this makes it easier than having to read the animals huge. You can get a little written. Here's what the animal is detected. So it understands what's going, this is norling for drug sniffing dogs or fruit sniffing dogs.

Right. Yeah. Contraband animals that look for contraband animals that look for contraband. Man, that is out there. That's an out there concept, which is making me lean towards it's real. It's so far out there. Keep going. All right.

Number three, reflect orbital. This is a solar energy startup. they have a master plan. They're going to install a string of giant mirrors into orbit over the earth. These mirrors will then reflect sunlight down to solar farms on the planet's surface. That will allow them to collect and distribute power even overnight. Okay. This has got to be real.

I know this because there are so many companies that have been talking about this kind of concept, and it's easier to get stuff into space. So I do know that reflecting from space energy is a real vertical. Now, I could be getting double faked by you right now since you know that I know. That would be impressive. That would be very impressive. But it would also be kind of lame because we know there's a whole category here and we would just be taking a real startup and just slapping a different name on it to be like, ha-ha. I think that's real.

So then I'm back to the other two. I got a 50-50 shot at that. Bargle versus Canary. Now, Canary spelled wrong. That was a key piece of this. There's an E-N-A-that should not be there. But gargle, bargle, gargle, gargle,

is such a clever name. And then one is misspelled. They're both decent concepts, actually. I would like a haggling, bartering kind of website. We haven't had a good one of those since Groupon. I like this was a very old. I feel like when smartphones in their current iteration were new, there were a lot of these like price comparison,

take a photo of a product and then get in for me, but nobody ever like nailed it to the wall. And it's got the AI angle. So as we were talking about earlier in the program, the why now is there. Right. So why bring Groupon back now? Well, AI.

Why bring eBay back now AI? Exactly. Because like if you think about it, about it, if I, let's say I took a picture of, you know, a lamp or something for my house, but if I didn't tag it correctly, the old apps wouldn't be able to find it. Whereas today, AI is smart enough to go, oh, you're looking at a lamp. Here's other lamps. But it feels almost too well constructed. It feels very well constructed. It feels so well constructed that it's almost as if somebody constructed it to be so well constructed that it was real. But it did not

yet exist. And I think if you were going to bring guess the fake startup back after a 10 year hiatus, you'd want to come out with that idea so strong and well-constructing the person doing this, Yulon, would want to do it well.

And the misspelled one I think is so obvious that it's going to exist because NorrLink exists and NorrLink has a dozen competitors actually. You just don't hear about them because I think they're behind and and they don't have the same team. That's prominent a leader.

As prominent a team. So I think I'm going to go with the fake startup being the one that is in fact the most well-constructed. I think the fake startup

is bargling. You are correct. The fake startup is bargling. Oh my God. Jain, that's it again. You nailed it. Boom. I'll tell you this one,

I actually, I started with the name. I came up with the name first, and then I reverse engineered what the app would be based on how good a name I thought that was. Wow. And if you go watch the old episodes,

I mean, my ability to deconstruct this. You're very good. It's tough to stump you. It's tough to stump Jake now. It's tough. Tough to stump Jacob. Because I think if this was a random panel, they wouldn't know that reflecting sunlight

down to the earth's surface for solar farms is real. That sounds made up. Like, when I was looking at the website, I was like, this is science fiction. I can't believe they're even telling people. It basically is moon raker or something.

It feels like it's a James Bond. There is a James Bond movie where they're using us like a mirror in space to like you could target people and blow them up, I think. I mean, it's kind of Death Star-esque. It's Death Star light to like put an energy beam down to the planet. This is for good.

Yeah. The only thing I'm a little worried about is if you miss the relay down at planet. I mean, something's turned into a desert. I think this was

also Superman 3. Yeah. Well, with Richard Pryor. Yeah, that is 3.

You're right. Richard Pryor, Superman 3. The thing I like about Superman 3 is it was such a mess that they made like 15 different edits.

You can watch different versions of this. But I just like the fact that Superman gets 5 o'clock shadow and he gets dark. Mm-hmm.

And like, I think there's a scene where he goes to a diner Is that three? I think that's three where like somebody's mouthing off to him. That might be two. But anyway, there's this diner scene. It's been a while.

Or somebody's mouthing off to him and he gets his butt kicked. Yeah. But then he comes back. Because he's lost his powers in two, right? Is that it? Yeah. No, but that's Superman too. But the bad kryptonite that turns him into a jerk is Superman three.

Right. That's it. Yeah. They're right. The personality shift is three. But losing his powers, that's Lex Luthor in too. And he gets punched. Remember, he gets punched by somebody and it bleeds.

This is Superman 2. This is Superman 2. That's Superman 2. The dying of fight scene where he gets beat up is 2. Okay. So once again, if you were to rank the trilogy, for me, it's 2-1-3. Wow, it's crazy if you say that.

I'm a huge Superman 2-fan. I agree with you. Like, I think that's the best one. It's 2-1-3. A lot of people disagree. Oh, by the way, what I do for Star Wars? 213. Yeah, I agree with that, too.

I like Superman 2 are the best. Richard Lester, the great Richard Lester. And you like Empire the best. And then you do it for Terminator. It's also 213. I like Terminator 1 a lot. I don't know. Because why?

It's acoustic and raw? Yes, it's more like a horror. It's like sci-fi horror. It's like a stalker movie and Schwarzenegger is really scary in it. And I feel like two is much more epic and the action is amazing. But it loses the horror angle, I think. But two is better. I mean, as a film.

They're both cool movies. But two, come on. I think, too, is so iconic with the water scene with the trucks and everything. It's a visual effects history, too, is a really important milestone because it was some of the first computer-generated animation being integrated into live-action scenes. This doesn't hold up for Jaws. On a level nobody had ever done before, like the liquid metal terminator coming out of the floor. That was super groundbreaking. It doesn't hold up for Jaws. Jaws is one, two, three.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. None of the Jaws sequel to that kid. I mean, Jules. It's like, that's one word. Well, Spilbert didn't come back, so you can't count that. Yeah. I've never done this for the Alien series.

We'll do more of this kind of stuff now that Lon's back because people like this kind of stuff. All right, everybody. A couple of programming notes. Lon will be with us again Friday and next week while Alex is out on the town. And my lord, is it right? Is Alien 2-13? I don't have to get back to you on that because I can't remember. I think aliens for sure, two, one, three.

But there's four, and then there's all those other sequels. Yeah, but we're just doing the first three here. Yeah, you're just talking to the first three. I actually like Alien 3 more than most people. David Fincher did that one, but the effects were not. It doesn't hold up visually as well as the other one. We'll see everybody on Friday. Bye-bye.