This Week in Startups - Twitter deal called off, Uber leaks, + Apple Car setbacks | E1505
Episode Date: July 12, 2022Today we talk about the Elon Musk & Twitter deal-or-no-deal (2:14). Then we get into two big pieces of Uber news today: first, over a hundred thousand leaked documents about Uber’s aggressive ex...pansion efforts back in the early days (20:47), and second, present-day Uber under Dara is testing out geo-located ads (33:18). Finally, we’ve also got some insider dirt from Apple’s autonomous car efforts (49:20). (0:00) Jason and Molly intro today’s show (2:14) Elon Musk calls off the Twitter deal (12:49) Dell For Startups - Apply for Dell for Startups and get an additional 10% off of all Dell Latitude products at http://dell.com/twist (13:58) Is Twitter a niche product? (19:28) This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp - Get 10% off your first month at https://betterhelp.com/twist (20:47) The Guardian obtained 124,000 leaked internal documents from Uber’s global expansion phase under Travis (32:04) Thorne - Personalized, science-back wellness. Get 10% off your first order at thorne.com/u/TWIST (33:18) Uber is testing its ad business (49:20) Apple Car project has faced repeated setbacks (58:39) Outro + Plugs
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hey, everybody, welcome back to Monday.
It is going to be a huge Monday and it's going to be huge week on this weekend startups because the news keeps coming.
It's a big week.
There was a big news dump on Friday, tons of stuff over the weekend and some great interviews coming this week.
I'm going to interview one of the commissioners at the FCC about them wanting to ban TikTok.
Before that, though, we'll do the Monday news dump.
The Friday news dump was a huge too.
So before we get into the new news, we're going to talk a little bit about the Twitter deal or no deal situation still evolving even as we're talking about it.
Yeah, and there's big news in the Uber world.
There has been a document dump by a former Uber executive in Europe.
And then also Uber launched over the weekend, I noticed ads, which could be geolocated.
I think that's going to become a billion dollar business.
And then, of course, we're going to talk a little bit about the information, as usual,
getting the inside dirt on drama at Apple over its self-driving car project.
It is a bit of a hot mess.
Hot mess.
It's going to be a great show.
Stick with us.
This week in Startups is brought to you by Dell for Startups provides key solutions for all your startup needs.
A dedicated tech advisor will get to know your business goals and deliver customized solutions for rapid tech enablement with top business class PCs and accessories.
Apply for Dell for startups and get an additional 10% off of all Dell Latitude products at Dell.
at Dell.com slash twist.
This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp, providing access to easy, affordable, and private professional counseling anytime, anywhere.
Get 10% off your first month at BetterHelp.com slash twist.
And Thorne.
Thorne empowers people to take control of their long-term well-being with a proactive,
science-based approach to health.
Through a variety of at-home tests,
Thorne teaches you about what your body needs
and provides the right,
high-quality, certified nutritional supplements for you.
To get started and take 10% off your first order,
head to thorn.com slash you slash twist.
All right, it looks like Elon has called off the Twitter deal.
Portisboard is saying that they're going to take them to court
and go through the deal terms,
I know nothing, just to be clear here, if folks want to insinuate that I am a, what do they call that word?
Like a surrogate or something like that?
I literally know nothing.
I haven't talked to Elon about any of this.
But it looks like this is heading to court potentially.
I don't buy that.
But go ahead and fill us in on some of the details, Molly.
Yeah.
I mean, the details are sort of, as you said, Elon must sent this letter saying, I want to cancel the deal because the bot problem is.
is significant and materially relevant,
and they haven't given us the information that we've asked for.
Then Twitter's board tweeted, you know, it takes, you can't,
that's not how contracts work.
Basically, you can't just be like, I cancel this contract that I signed.
So they said, we're going to take you to court in Delaware and force you to go through
with the deal at presumably the price that he agreed upon,
which is way more than what Twitter is worth now, of course.
This morning, Elon Musk tweeted that he would be thrilled to go to court and force some
discovery on the bot problem.
Twitter has hired a high power legal
firm to try to force the deal through.
And honestly, the only person I listened to on this ever is
Matt Levine.
Because he's pretty smart.
I mean, and he just is like, look,
there's every chance that Elon Musk will bury
everybody in lawsuits and walk away from this thing completely
or maybe pay the billion dollars.
But like, fundamentally, this is not how contracts work.
You don't, there is no, you signed and agreed.
Like, diligence is the thing that you do before you sign the contract.
Once you've signed the contract,
it's not legally defensible necessarily to just be like,
nah, I don't want to anymore.
Well, there is this concept of fraud.
And so we don't know what will come up in discovery.
All it takes is for one person in even a rank and file person says,
hey, I don't you think this 5% number is legit or I think it's more like 6% or it's 12%?
And all of a sudden, the entire thing blows up because who knew that,
who knew what when?
And that's really the nuance here, I think, is what comes up in discovery.
Nobody knows what's going to come up.
And then also there's a gamesmanship here.
Like, does Twitter want to go through two, three, four, five years of this?
Who knows how long this will take?
Right.
I don't think this tends to be, you know, I think this tends to be measured in years,
these kind of legal fights.
So years of discovery, years of debating this.
And then you have to then calculate how many other lawsuits are going to.
going to pop up. So if they can't come to a settlement, which is what this is obviously going to
happen in my mind, is there'd be some sort of settlement here, either a different price or,
you know, maybe additional investment from Elon. I thought, I think that might be, I heard some
people speculating that. So Elon says, you know what, I own whatever 10%, I'll go up to 20% and
I'll join the board or whatever and let's just move on. And that's what Evan Williams said,
you know, the co-founder of Twitter was like, yeah, I think it's time to move on and put this
ugliness behind us.
So we'll see what happens.
We'll monitor it.
I think this is going to be a long,
drawn-out process.
And then eventually end in a way for both parties to save face and come to an
agreement, you know, a settlement.
And a settlement will be painful or to both parties.
But my lord, what, what drama and craziness?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, no matter what I think, it will have done pretty lasting damage to Twitter.
Like, certainly,
to morale, certainly to, you know, executives have left, certainly to the brand itself.
There's going to be this ongoing kind of speculation in question about the bot thing.
And which has been very consistent on, but it's going to linger.
And I think it's just going to, it's likely going to get a lot uglier.
Which gives me actually a really good piece of advice here, which is if there can be
some path to resolving the bot problem once and for all, that could be the upside in this.
hey, yes, of course there's been a bot problem.
Everybody in the industry has had it.
And this whole, you know, acquisition and then the acquisition not happening has given us,
you know, newfound resolve and a lot of great feedback on how to solve the problem.
And, hey, we've squashed it.
And here's how we squashed it.
They could actually come up with a system of saying like, you know, some transparency.
That's the thing I think it's sort of missing here.
That's kind of strange is that Twitter's not saying like, hey, listen, here's all the numbers
and here's how we solved it.
Which maybe they'll do at some point.
It's just explained to everybody, here's the actual number of bots.
Here's how we define bots.
They haven't been clear enough about that.
And I think that's why all this speculation is.
But that could be actually a silver lining.
I do think all this attention on Twitter has this incredibly valuable product or service,
I think is going to make Microsoft or another company come out and make an offer for it.
So I have no insight information on that.
But I could just imagine people looking at this going, yeah, smartest guy in the world,
most successful entrepreneur of our time.
arguably the best product, you know, a person since Steve Jobs.
If he likes it, maybe we should buy it and maybe there's some massive value here.
And I do think there's massive value if you could have competent product and leadership
and not a revolving door at Twitter.
I was thinking over the weekend, I was talking to some friends in a chat, I was like,
is there a company that at scale has been less competent on a product basis than Twitter?
We can only think of one company.
What company do you think in the modern era, you know, our lifetimes?
Hit scale, it just felt like it was a revolving door of leadership,
and they couldn't get their product act together,
yet they were still very successful during a period.
What company comes to mind?
An internet company that hits scale,
see if anybody in the chat room can guess.
Think of a company that you used a lot.
It is not AOL.
AOL was just really never good at product,
you know, if you look at AOL's products.
But you're in the zone, Nick.
Is it that old?
Because I've got to say, I'm inclined to say Google.
Yahoo.
Oh, it's Yahoo.
Nick got it, yeah.
Very, very well, then.
Yeah, Bob G got Yahoo.
Zachary got Yahoo.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you look at Yahoo!
Like, we all used Yahoo!
Yahoo!
It had these great products.
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Mail was great.
Yahoo!
Flickr was great.
Finance was great.
The homepage was great.
Entertainment stuff was good.
You know, you found yourself
going there for news stories once in a while.
Yahoo Messenger was great.
They could just never keep it together.
And it was just, I think,
weak leadership when David Philo
and Jerry Yang kind of left.
There's just nobody there who cared enough.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
Yeah.
The chat is pointing out eBay, which I think is also a good example of that.
And then I would argue that I think Google is potentially headed in that direction in some ways.
Like, yeah, sure.
They're great at the core, but don't have the focus.
They just don't.
It's a good observation.
Whenever they launch like hardware, they don't stick with it, you know, I mean, all the efforts at chat.
Like, I think they're in that kind of drift phase.
and we could be saying that about them in a while.
The founders are no longer there on a day-to-day basis,
and so they could definitely go that way.
And in fact, I was tweeting at Sundar about this whole Nest,
which was the greatest camera system you could get for a long time.
And then they kept releasing the Nest cameras,
but they said, you have to use Google Home.
And Google Home is the worst app ever created in the App Store,
like literally the worst.
And so every Nest fan is like, I just want to use Nest.
And like, so I have Nest, but the three new cameras I got don't work on the Nest app,
They only work in Google Home.
So I have two apps, and Google Home is unusable.
And Ness was like a single feature app like Sonos or Apple TV where it just works
and it does what it's supposed to do.
And then Google Home is like, do you want to create macros to turn your lights on to do this
when your temperature hits this?
And we're like, no, no, we don't want that.
We just want to pop up a beautiful app and see our camera and save a clip.
The end.
Yep.
We're not looking to do anything fancy here.
Yeah.
I would say the counter argument for Twitter, though, is that
it has new leadership as of fairly recently.
But he's been there for a long time, right?
Had been shipping products.
Like we had started to see improvement.
There was Twitter spaces.
There was Twitter blue.
We had started to see improvement.
And I think the counter argument to what you're saying is that actually Elon Musk came in and blew it up and stopped it cold.
And whatever momentum that Twitter had been developing from a product perspective was crushed.
Like, killed in the cradle.
I mean, they're still releasing product pretty quickly, you know, like they keep.
they froze the releases
because of this acquisition thing.
I don't think that's actually true.
I mean, morale is terrible.
Moral is a problem.
It's definitely the most overstaffed
and lazy group in Silicon Valley.
Everybody knows that.
Does everybody know that or does Elon know that?
No, that's, I mean, basically that existed long.
When Jack ran the place, that was like the criticism of like,
they can't ship product.
They had so many people.
Like, it's bloated, which was what they said about Yahoo as well,
by the way.
Right.
But she'd have to cut it.
So that existed long before.
So this is not Jack.
Well, I think.
Now Jack is gone and better leadership came in.
And frankly, I think Yonan came in and stomped on it.
The better leadership is, was there for seven years, right?
So Parag was there for seven or eight years, I think.
He's not like, he's not like a new guy to the, you know, and leader there.
He's kind of the old regime.
But, you know, to your point of like, they were supposed to stop releasing stuff.
We just got co-tweets and communities.
So they're still releasing stuff.
So maybe they're not releasing,
maybe they're releasing stuff that was on a
pre-approved timeline or something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's hard to know.
But they did increase product velocity.
Twitter blue was a miss.
Communities, I think, is going to be a hit.
What else did they release?
Spaces has been kind of a hit.
Spaces.
Yeah, that's a hit.
Yeah.
I think it's a niche shit, but.
Sure.
But Twitter's a niche product.
Like, that's what I don't know.
No, I don't know.
I think it's like it's on the cusp of being bigger
than niche. A hundred million people is not niche. Like 20 million would be niche. It's niche compared
to Facebook, right? Like two billion people. Right. But it's a product for, I don't know,
I don't think of it as a full feature like live your life social network. It's like broadcasting.
It's like for journalists and primarily, right? It's like flooded with the tech industry.
Like I know like if you're an average everyday person and you come to Twitter and you start to try to
use it, you find it like boring and baffling. That is 100% Twitter's fault. But it,
you know, is a company that has been like sort of happy to be that.
Lots of remote employees are traveling this summer.
And if you want to keep your employees performance high while they're on the road,
you need to get them a Dell Latitude laptop.
And I'm going to give you an awesome discount code from Dell for startups.
If you're a founder, you need to apply for Dell for startups.
And here's why you'll get access to a team of expert IT advisors.
These experts will provide you with customized solutions to make your tech stack world class.
Dell will help you access.
capital for building out your tech stack and you'll get exclusive discounts. And you know,
we love Dell at launch. In fact, we sent every new employee a beautiful 39-inch ultra-sharp
curve monitor. And that's my personal favorite. Such a beautiful monitor. If you want to have that
working remote lifestyle, you need to have the right equipment and Dell is the best. So here's
your call to action apply for Dell for startups today and you'll get an additional 10% off
all Dell latitude laptops and tablets. Just head to Dell.com slash twist. That's Dell.com.
com slash twist.
Hey,
give me a favorite
producer, Nick.
I want to get the
latest Dell one.
Can you get me one?
Because I want to play
a little video games as well.
I got to get into StarCraft 2
and maybe play some age of empires.
Give me a new one when I'm on the road.
Oh,
you know,
building on our conversation from last week
of how good the TikTok algorithm is,
for better or worse,
you know,
it was really good.
What if Twitter,
when you're a new user,
just gave you the best of?
And then as you interacted with stuff,
it just went full algorithm
and then said, you know, you could follow stuff
and then if you swipe left,
you know, they have like the people you follow.
And they just,
instead of trying to blend those two things as one,
they just said,
we're just going to copy TikTok's approach,
which is here's the people you follow
and then here's the best of.
So take the explore tab for new users
and make the explore tab for them
and then as they see stuff
and they interact with it,
if they favorite it,
you show more.
So if you start favoriting MBA,
you show more.
As opposed to like Twitter's,
you know, kind of legacy of
separating those things, right?
If you want to explore, you've got to click on and say,
I'm in explore mode.
And then the algorithm kind of serves you
what you missed, but they kind of
have hedged. It seems like going all in
on one or the other is the way to do it.
And if you wanted to go mass and double the user base,
probably going the TikTok route would be the best way.
You could. Yeah, absolutely.
It's not for me, but it would definitely be for the other,
you know, whatever.
It feels like historically Twitter has chosen to be closer
in spirit to Reddit than to Facebook or TikTok.
Yeah.
Even Reddit is now, I think Reddit is doing an algorithm on their homepage.
And it used to be like you follow your group.
And now I think they're based a little bit on like what you're into.
Right.
Exactly.
But hard algorithm.
I would call this like, yeah, hard algorithm or populist algorithm.
You know, because it's like here's the most popular stuff, but it's the most popular
customized to you as opposed to customized to you.
based on your explicit feedback.
Anyway, God, it's still such an inspiring platform,
and I'm still so addicted to it.
I was like, God, I'm spending too much time on Twitter,
but it's so intellectually engaging for me, you know?
Like, if you're an intellectually curious person who likes to talk,
God, it just hits that nerve of like, I need to talk to people.
I need to have a really good debate.
I need to, you know, go deep on a subject.
And I just love it for that.
I feel like you just described a niche product.
I did.
Yes.
For me,
exactly.
Yes.
For me, it is a niche product.
But that's what you have to want is you have to want to do that and you have to have the,
the thick skin to be able to take it.
Like I increasingly in the past, I mean, I would say over the past like seven or eight
years have found the transaction cost on Twitter to be high enough that I don't find
it fun to go there and engage people and have a conversation because there's always like
somebody responding way too literally, somebody yelling at me about the seven nuances that I miss.
No, people.
Oh, actually.
I'm sorry.
I think the bot thing is a total red herring
and I do I think the bot thing is a really big
problem if you have a million followers
plus. Yeah. I don't have that.
I have rude jerks.
Yeah. Or I have like internet
pedantics. Right. But that's what I'm
saying. It's a niche product for like
white guys with huge followings who have a lot of fun
and don't get yelled at that much. That's niche.
I get yelled at. You know, people
come at me pretty hard. It's not as fun.
Yeah. It used to be a lot more fun and now I can find
those conversations to my group chats.
I agree that it's become less and less fun.
And talking in your group chat is better.
That's why I think they released.
Wait,
they released another feature.
The circles feature.
So co-treat circles and community.
All three of those are really interesting.
You know,
so the product velocity is good there.
Leave it alone.
Elon,
the product velocity is great.
Yeah.
I mean,
pay your billion dollars and move on.
I don't think they're going to,
I don't think they want to let them off for the billion.
If that was the case,
I think it would have happened.
They want to go for the whole.
Well,
I'm assuming he is not saying he's,
willing to pay the billion dollars.
Yeah, well, come on.
It's not like he's, it's not like he sent a letter that was like, I don't think this deal is
good for either of us.
Let's break up.
Here's the billion dollars.
Yeah.
Well, say, I mean, who knows what's happening in behind closed doors?
I mean, one of the problems here is like, if your Twitter management, if your Twitter,
Twitter's bored, rather, like, what do you do in a situation like this?
You have to fight for getting the best price, but you also have to look at the downside of a
protracted legal battle and then
you know it's it's pretty obvious
to anybody who's close to
Twitter or who knows people there
that it's completely mismanaged and that
like the stuff that's going to come out is not going to be
pleasant to say the least
there is I'm not going to lie there's like a tiny
part of me though that just I would be like
I would watch Twitter go bankrupt
I would watch Twitter bankrupt itself just trying to hold
this guy accountable and just being like fine
let's go here's everything
Yeah, yeah.
They won't.
It'll be a settlement.
It'll be a settlement.
It'll probably take.
My guess is I have no inside information.
I'm just handicapping based on what I've seen in the industry is six to nine months from now.
There's some easy settlement.
The market comes back.
The stock price goes up.
So the delta between the current stock price and the sale price gets narrowed.
The company does better, et cetera, et cetera.
I mean, the power move would be for Twitter to get permission to do less.
and stuff like that to make the business even stronger, right?
So if the business looked stronger and the only way the business can look stronger is by cutting a third of the staff, that's what Yahoo needed to do for a long time.
And it took the private equity folks to be able to do that.
And now a word from our sponsor, Better Help.
Hey, listen, we all know the startup grind can be really overwhelming and a ton of people in our industry are dealing with burnout.
And some, you might not even know they're dealing with burnout.
They hide it, right?
But you know the symptoms.
Fatigue, lack of motivation.
maybe some irritability on the margins, all of those things, right?
And we associate burnout with work.
But that's not the only cause.
You ever try to raise kids or running a startup?
Trust me, it's not easy.
And you might have personal life.
You might have things from your childhood.
There's a lot of things that you may have on your mind that are keeping you from being
your best self and running your company at the level you want.
So better help online therapy wants to remind you to prioritize yourself.
And talking with someone can help you figure out what's causing stress in your life.
obviously you know this, but you haven't prioritized it.
So go ahead and prioritize it and understand that BetterHelp is customized online therapy.
It offers video, phone, and even live chat sessions with your therapist.
You don't have to see anyone on camera if you don't want to.
It is much more affordable than in-person therapy, and you can be matched with the therapist in under 48 hours.
And you can do it on your schedule, and you can do it remote, all that good stuff.
So Twist listeners can get 10% off their first month at BetterHelp.com slash Twist.
Better H-E-L-P-com slash T-W-I-S-T.
Go ahead and take care of yourself, okay?
All right, let's talk about another one of your favorite companies.
Which one is that?
Oh, Uber, here we go.
And this banana's Uber story.
It's not, I don't know.
I don't even know if it's that bananas.
It sort of feels like another version of things that everybody knew at the time.
But the Guardian obtained over $124,000 leaked internal documents from Uber's
global expansion phase under Travis Kalanick.
There were some pretty interesting findings.
The leaks covered this period between 2013 and 2017 when it was like, go hard, grow everywhere.
It includes more than 83,000 emails, I messages,
WhatsApp messages, covers over 40 countries,
and they're going to go full kind of Facebook whistleblower on it.
All these publications, including the Washington Post and the BBC,
are going to publish all these reports under the Uber files.
I liked it when it was the Facebook files.
Where are these documents from?
This morning, yeah, this guy came out,
Mark McGahn, who was Uber's former head of European expansion,
and revealed that he leaked the documents.
He said he's a whistleblower.
And then he quit in 2016 over Uber's culture.
He thought his family might be at risk because of the backlash against Uber.
And then now he said they want to make amends.
He wants to make amends because he thinks they sold drivers and consumers a lie.
Okay.
So the documents, you know, these are the guardians takeaways.
We have not seen these documents.
But they cover a lot of this global expansion question,
some of the risk of violence.
when there were big backlashes in places like brands.
One thing that's really interesting actually is the documents reveal a very close
working relationship with Emmanuel Macron.
Yeah.
Which is kind of interesting that he was really like.
Was he president at the time or?
No, he was the chief economic.
Yeah.
Oh, right.
Economy minister.
Yeah.
Allowed Uber frequent and direct access to him and his staff.
He was texting with Kalanick a lot.
Apparently he seems to have gone to extraordinary lengths to help Uber.
Well, they were having to have.
having like violent protests.
And what's interesting about that is that at that point,
like there were these really violent taxi driver protests, I think, in France.
I kind of remember scenes of people like kicking doors and, yeah.
I mean, it was intense protesting.
But I don't think anybody got beaten or murder anything.
I think it was like banging on cars and blocking intersection type violence.
Yeah, I don't remember.
Described as violence.
Yeah.
I don't think.
Okay.
No, I don't think.
I would remember, you know, obviously I was tracking all this stuff as an early investor.
I don't remember any of those protests ever becoming like people were beaten up.
They were intense.
But there wasn't like a shooting at a thing or a person beat up or anything like that.
Because I do remember Uber also had this issue outside their offices.
Like there was some pretty intense in San Francisco here on Market Street.
They're pretty intense protests, right?
Because people would send it to me like, oh my God, look, what's going on outside the Uber office?
but it wasn't people being beat up kind of thing.
I don't know.
I'll look.
Taxi drivers,
let's see,
in 2015 set fire to vehicles
and blocked major roads.
Yeah.
That I remember.
I didn't remember the fire.
I remember blocking roads,
but I remember setting a car on fire.
Wow.
Two of them.
Angry taxi driver,
somebody was dragged from his van.
An Uber driver was dragged from his van in France.
Oh,
terrible.
And then they slashed his tire,
smashed his window,
and set it on fire.
Oh, okay. That was probably the peak of it. Yeah, that would be violent, yes. Attacking a driver would be, and pulling them out of the car is very violent.
And then what these documents suggest is that there were texts saying in which, like in which Travis Kalanick said, I think it's worth it about this violence. Violence, it guaranteed success. And these guys must be resisted. Agreeed that the right place in time must be thought out. He, of course, has responded since his camp and said, like, we would never condone violence against our own drivers.
Nobody would ever
can do it.
I mean, it's obvious
they were probably thinking
strategically,
if the cab drivers
are going to beat up
the Uber drivers,
that is,
you know,
unacceptable and probably a good
PR angle, right,
to work if you're trying
to say, hey,
like,
please don't beat up drivers
and, like,
in defense of our drivers,
please don't slash their tires.
I can understand that.
Let's see.
The current head of Uber Eats
appeared to throw
Travis under the bus a little bit
saying,
I regret some of the tactics
used to get regulatory reform
for ride sharing in the early
days, looking back, he said I was young and inexperience and too often took direction
from superiors with questionable ethics. And I guess Doris come out and said, hey, listen, we're not
going to make excuses for these things. And, you know, it's not our present values, which I think,
you know, I look at, I look back at those go-go days. I didn't have an operational role at the
company. And my role was to say, like, hey, are we, you know, when I would talk to management or,
you know, which was, you know, like maybe every month or two, I would talk to Travis or, you know,
me,
or whoever,
just to,
you know,
be a sounding board
or something.
It wasn't,
I don't want to
overstate my influence,
obviously,
especially in the later days.
But,
you know,
they went very aggressively to,
go into markets where
they were told
they weren't allowed.
And so if you want to change the world
and,
you know,
you want to have
Airbnbs or ride chairing
and people are debating it
and you've got the
forces of the cab company
against you.
And,
you know, there were some gnarly forces on the other side of this.
It was basically a battle for should people be allowed to do ride chairing.
That's what this all comes down to is, you know, the protectionist cab lobbies versus, you know, a new way to do it that's cheaper and better.
And, you know, obviously there's a lot at stake.
There's a lot of stake.
I think it was, I mean, it was obviously full court.
I don't, I think it is clear that the tactics were aggressive.
Like we should not pretend that they weren't aggressive and that it did.
in fact, and, you know, it resulted in Uber drivers being beaten up by taxi drivers.
You can sort of say, like, yes.
Well, it doesn't say it was beaten up.
He just said it was pulled from the car.
There were occurrences.
I've Googled it since.
There were other occurrences in which Uber drivers were beaten up by taxi drivers.
Oh, really?
And the suggestion in these documents is that Uber was like, yeah, that's going to happen
and it's going to make the taxi industry look bad.
Yeah, it would make you look really bad.
Now, it did make the taxi industry look bad, right?
there was protectionism.
It does it all and also.
And Uber wanted to win and they wanted to to disrupt this industry.
And also they were ugly when they needed to me.
I don't think there's any doubt about that.
And that's been well reported.
And these documents just seem to like say that all over again.
By the way, I should point out,
Macron,
I thought that was the most interesting part because he just was sort of narrowly
reelected and apparently is already facing some investigation over that internally.
Yeah.
I'm interesting to say.
I mean, this is the other double edge sword.
when you have a company that consumers love, because remember in the early first half of Uber was,
this is the greatest company, when does it come to my town? Right? People forget that part.
God, I can't wait until we have Uber and I don't have to pay overpay for, you know, a ride from the airport,
or wait on an hour line, yada, yada, or I can't get a cab in Brooklyn, you know, or I'm a minority
and I can't get, you know, a person of color in Manhattan, you know, would get passed over for a cab
and they would just pick a white guy. All of those great things made, people,
people were rooting for Uber.
That was kind of the tough part,
if I'm being honest,
like being an investor,
is going from,
the world is rooting for this company
to now,
like,
people are starting to root against it,
you know?
The truth of it is,
is we're here on this week in startups,
every time one of these controversies happened,
you know what happened,
Molly?
More people use Uber?
More downloads.
Yeah.
Every single time.
I mean,
there was that mini delete Uber thing
that did cause them to panic
and that forced a lot of change.
There was like,
about five,
I would say about five,
points of market share, you could contribute to like the peak chaos, if I remember correctly,
as it was explained to me. Like, maybe they lost five points to lift when people are like,
I've had enough of this, you know, bad company behaving badly. And I think a lot of it was around
the harassment stuff. That was the stuff that kind of made people go, you know what, I'm done.
And so it's a big lesson there. If you're fighting for people's right, this is the way I look at it.
if you're fighting for people's rights to use a product,
you're doing an innovative product,
you're taking on incumbents,
great.
But if you're just being,
if people feel you're bullying people
or you're abusing people or abusing your power,
that's when they turn on you.
And I think that's what you saw at the peak was they just people felt like,
okay,
Uber's now the 800 pound gorilla.
Uber is now the bully,
right?
And that's when people are like,
ah,
I'll just delete Uber and I'll go to this thing.
Yeah.
But ultimately,
ultimately they won.
So this is another thing
to understand
about how power works.
Very rarely do people
remember how you got the power,
how you got the money,
and how you succeeded.
Now I'm not saying,
that's not like life advice necessarily.
It's just an observation.
But getting the power,
you know,
and then people just don't remember
what happened.
They just remember
you built a great company
and you got a lot of power.
Look at Facebook's a great example of it.
I mean,
they don't remember why you can actually use
an app now to call a taxi or pay with your, you know, something other than cash.
Yeah.
Like it really did.
It becomes a standard.
Yeah.
I mean, I think you make a really good point, which is that there were that you have to
fight really, really, really, really hard.
You have to be absolutely gonzo to try to take on an absolutely entrenched incumbent that is
100% corrupt.
There's no doubt about it.
Yeah.
And also, you have to probably be not very nice in the process.
Yeah, I mean, being super nice is not going to win.
There's a time, like, everybody likes to think, like, wartime, you know, is pleasant and it's messy and it's not pleasant and bad things happen.
And like, this was a war time.
And people hate the metaphor.
I know some people were triggered by like me using wars or plane crashes for, and samurai.
But this was a wartime situation, right?
And Travis is a wartime CEO.
Some CEOs are built for it.
And, you know, Steve Jobs was also a wartime CEO when he went against Microsoft, right?
Microsoft was just, it's very analogous, Molly.
Microsoft was this loved company.
Oh, my God, they're putting software everywhere.
And then it was like, oh, they're overplaying their hand.
And they're, you know, dictating too much of what happens in the market.
And then Steve Jobs became the antidote to that, right?
Right, right.
Yeah.
And I suppose it has, it's unfortunate that it might have to follow that you then have a sort of a, like you've got this kind of gonzo war time situation.
And then you end up with a toxic work environment.
I don't know if those things have to go hand in hand.
but they did, and I think that is what did more damage to Uber's reputation, probably even then.
Well, and it was also, that was, you know, the B2 era at the same time.
And if you were to look at Google and the amount of complaints at Google, I can guarantee you,
just based on what I know, at Google, Google's early years compared to like Uber's worst moment,
it would be not comparable.
There was just also a cultural moment at that time, right?
and a great cultural moment of accountability.
So yeah.
Listen,
dealing with your personal health and wellness,
it can be daunting.
You're probably being bombarded by ads and blog posts.
You have no idea where to start.
And that's why Thorne created a care system that's personalized,
preventative,
and holistic while still being science-based.
And if you're a high-performing founder or operator,
you need to make sure you take care of your health.
And listen,
I was out of shape for a long time.
Now I'm taking my health very seriously
and you should too. And that's where Thorne can help.
Thorne offers at-home tests, which identify where you need the most care.
Like a gut test that analyzes your gut microbiome and a stress test that measures your stress hormone fluctuations.
These tests help eliminate the guesswork for good health by providing personalized steps for how you should eat, how to exercise, and what supplements you should take.
These are the questions that are on all of our minds.
They've got a range of multivitamins and supplements you can subscribe to, and Thorne is totally vertically integrated.
created. So you're not dealing with anybody in the middle. Again, this is personalized health and
wellness. To get started, take 10% off your first order, I want you to head to thorn.com
slash the letter you slash twist. That's thorn.com slash you slash twist. Thanks for supporting
the show, Thorne. Really appreciated. And thanks for making such an innovative product.
Back to present day, Uber. Okay, here we got. Present day Uber. Uh, Twitter user Joshua
Ogundo tweeted the following screenshot of this burberry ad that he was served in his,
Uber app, which presumably was, I think, geolocated, or one assumes. Anyway, it seems like they're
testing some apps. I don't know anything about this, except that you tweeted, you know,
would become a million dollar business. Do you know if it's geo-located? What do we know about this?
I don't know that, but I know this was always in the plans. I had talked to Travis and the team there
about it. And we have an investment in a company called Rapify, which wraps cars on the road.
And some of them are Uber's and lifts and door dashes. And they would pay to
wrap your car to get your ads and then RAPify will allow you, it's still operating as a business,
to do an ad buy and then you would see all the cars on the road and you know, hey, these cars were
on the 280, these cars were by the, you know, Warriors Arena during the game and you would get
credit for those impressions, right? So you think about it, it's pretty cool. And of course, because
they're independent contractors, Uber drivers, Lyft drivers can do these things outside of the Uber or
Lyft ecosystem. And this, I was always like, hey, man, we should wrap the car.
Right. Imagine if we had a million cars get wrapped for the Super Bowl or for, I don't know, an Avengers movie. It's like, yeah, then they become full-time employees. You know, we're dictating how they drive, yada, yada. And so it's hard to be a freelancer, right? And so the cars, you have a lot of kept advertising. You have a lot of what's called the kept audience. So, and you have a lot of data on them. This is incredibly valuable. You've been in taxes, I'm sure, or in Vegas where they have those annoying ad things.
Are you trying,
and they're like,
up,
up,
please turn off the video off,
off,
and then some Uber drivers
would have those
in their cars as well.
Yeah.
But this business is different.
Now you're in the app.
This is why Uber's becoming a super app.
And this is why Uber,
I think,
will become the number one super app
in the Western world very quickly.
You,
they have experiences in it now.
They have the gold belly business.
You can ship like e-commerce-wise,
you know,
your favorite brisket from Texas to your house
or to a friend as a gift,
and now advertising.
And so,
So somebody was saying this might have been from Google's ad network, but imagine you are driving to your destination and it says there's a Starbucks or a fills, you know, coffee within two blocks, 150 feet of your destination.
Would you like to reroute there and get a dollar off?
This would be bonkers in terms of, you know, the impact it would have because if the person did click reroute, Google, I'm sorry, Google, Uber could just ask for a dollar.
you know, for saying the customer there.
It could be an incredible, incredible.
Oh my God.
Imagine it if you were on your way places and you could actually search for a waypoint.
Like I'm going to this thing and I have a, this is going to be the oldest lady example,
but for whatever reason, it's the one that popped into my head.
Oh, I have a run in my stockings or a hole in my sock.
I need to stop at Walgreens and like pick up or I didn't bring my lipstick or I'm out of
chapstick.
Like if you could have some version of waypoints and you could use the Uber app to be like
help any chapstick.
and it would be like, do you want to stop at Walgreens?
You know, maybe it costs you an extra dollar, but you don't care.
And then while Uber gets paid twice because they get a lead from Walgreens, like, do genius.
Or imagine you're going to a destination.
It knows it's a hotel.
Okay, it knows you're going to a hotel.
It assumes, hey, maybe you're staying there because you're coming from the airport to the hotel.
And then it says, by the way, here are the shows playing near you.
Here are the restaurants playing near you.
Would you like to get a reservation?
Make a reservation.
Boom.
So that's, or I'm going to this movie theater, right?
So you know it's a movie theater.
What do people do after the movies?
They may get a bite to eat, may get a drink.
And it says, hey, here's some cocktails or you're going to a movie during the day.
It's like, hey, here's some ice cream places and some boba places, whatever.
So this could be very quickly with hundreds of millions of people in the app and their location.
And you know, they're in an Uber black versus an Uber X.
You know, UberX could be Starbucks.
Uber Black could be, you know, blue bottle might bid higher for that.
Or cast.
Or like Brandon Brooks is one of the notice just pointed out.
if you're on the way to a Steelers game, you get Steelers merch ads, you could order food and beer
ahead.
Like if you could say, that's the easiest place to start is with events.
I'm going to this concert.
I want to pre-order food and drinks.
Sure.
Or buy my way to the front of the line or whatever.
And it's just like instant revenue generation.
And here's the great thing.
That's going to be a marketplace.
So if you're Cirque de Soleil and you know the average person spends $400 and your Starbucks,
you know, the average person spends, you know, $8,000, Cirque de Soleil is going to say, you know what,
You're in Vegas.
You're going to see Cirque to Salaids, but you're in Boise and, you know, there's nobody else competing against it.
Yeah, you can get the Starbucks ad.
So this could be really big, you know, cash for Uber.
And if you want to see the analogy, you need to only look at what's happening with Instagram ads or more accurately, Amazon's ad network.
Amazon's, you know, Instagram was designed to do ads.
But Amazon never even thought about that.
And now they've got a multi-billion dollar ad business inside of.
And you see it, right?
when you do a search, there's ads right there.
And it says sponsored.
That means ads.
This really could be big.
And I'll be interested to see this is where the ghosts of the past come back to
Haunt Dara a little bit like Uber stock now, right this second, right?
It's down 3.7% today to a $42 billion market cap, still not profitable.
Dara's trying to make all these moves.
That could be huge.
And all of these Uber file stories are going to keep coming out.
And so it'll be interesting to see how hard he has to fight the like the history,
the accumulated history of how you got here.
And there are still complaints.
In fact, even that one of the noties is,
was a Uber driver and was talking about, you know,
watching his pay go to so little that he eventually quit.
Like there are still some barriers to this.
And I mean,
it's analogous to the Twitter thing, right?
Like you have a new CEO in this case,
brand new from outside who's trying to build this thing.
Yeah.
And has this sort of accumulated scar tissue.
And it's like, can he overcome it?
Yeah.
And the good news is,
there's a ton of potential here.
Yeah.
I mean, the good news is they've raised prices massively and the subsidies have stopped.
So that was the other thing.
we were waiting for. I think we all thought it would happen quicker that, you know, Lyft and DoorDash
and Uber would stop competing against each other and stop spending massively to incentivize the
drivers to go from one platform to the other. But now with Lyft running out of money, DoorDash
being forced to show they can be profitable and Uber being forced to show they were profitable,
they've all switched to, you know, show cash flow. And the, Uber's growth has been tremendous.
And their price to sales ratio is incredibly modest. So I'm a lot.
a long-term holder.
And I've actually been thinking
I'm going to start actively trading the market.
So this is like a mini announcement, Nick,
for producer Nick.
Oh boy.
I just,
you know, I had some,
I had a couple million bucks.
I'm not flexing here.
I'm just,
I'm going to start Jay trading on the show.
So here's my idea.
I just,
I had some money sitting in like one of these.
Why is it out a show?
That's a show.
J trading.
Okay.
Well, anyway,
it's going to be a segment.
So here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to take like a million bucks or two million bucks.
Is this legal?
Lo,
well,
I think it's going to be legal.
Is this investment advice?
You just have to say this is not investment advice.
Do not follow my...
It's not investment advice, but I'm going to explain my trades
and I'm going to make my trades live on the air.
So I talked to my partner.
I said, I want to start actively trading.
She was like, yeah.
You know, like, every time you...
Like, go make money.
Like, she wants to ride the horse, you know?
You got a pony.
You want to see a run.
So, yeah, starting next week,
I'm going to clear out some of these, like, you know,
Vanguard funds I have.
I'm going to do it live.
And I'm going to just maybe for,
what do you think, Nick, if I was going to put,
let's just pick a number, $2 million bucks.
First thing I would do, I would say,
wait to clear your Vanguard funds out
until you move to Austin or Miami for six months.
That's all right.
I don't mind a first order of advice.
I don't mind to pay a little tax here.
It's not a big deal.
I mean, they're up,
but it's not like they're up ridiculous.
I'm actually with Cole Highland,
consult an attorney first
before you started doing this live.
Anyway, here's what I'm going to do like.
I'm going to say, here's my trade.
I want to pull up the account live.
I want to put the trade in live.
And I'll explain my thinking.
And then I'll have the notice tell me if they think this is a good trade or not.
And so, like, I really want to build a position in Disney.
I talk about Disney all the time.
I love Disney.
So, but I've been talking on this show a bunch of love Disney.
But why don't I just, you know, when I say I love Disney, I'll just say, okay, hey, Nick, trade 50K on the Disney.
Boom.
And we just put it in there.
somebody says they hate it oh
I know
Greenhouse creative
I really hate this
I've been enjoying
if you watch Jason
and broke J-trade
It's gonna be a small amount
of my net worth
but I think it would be fascinated
Doesn't it get to front run
This is going to be huge
Kramer meets twist
Yeah it's Kramer
It's going to be Kramer
Moving markets
Look out Kramer
My best of front run
Huh
You know nobody
That's why I'm going to do it live
I'm literally going to share my screen
I'm going to say
I'm buying this much Disney
Buy
The end
because we talk about these companies
and we do all the back of the envelope math
how cool would it be if we did the back of the envelope math
and then I said
you know what I think BuzzFeed's gonna get bought out for like three times
this I'm gonna make a 25K bet boom
put it into the thing and then is there a platform
I don't know if anybody knows this
where you could see all my trades live
if not that would be a good start-up
I think we just
onboarded one as an advertiser actually last week
we did okay cool
remember them
the social financial platform.
Was that for me to go do that or that was like other experts?
They're doing ads on this weekend startups.
No, I know.
But would I be able to share my trades or is that I thought they had existing experts who you were going to follow?
They do have that.
But I'm sure that they would onboard you quickly if you're like, hey, I'm doing this for content.
Yeah, well, I'm doing it for content.
Also, I'd like to, I think the market's going to be, I think it's going to be a unique buying opportunity for the next three to 12 months.
but I and I because everybody's so scared like every week watching what we do here
everybody's so scared every so down on these companies watching like the meta
discussion on all in of like this chaos when there's this much chaos
it feels like that's the right time to buy right and not being an index fund for me
personally you do what you want with your money
chat says common stock by the way common stock and public also but common stock
seems to be the one that anyway so if somebody could do some research on like if I
I was going to publicly do it, that'd be good.
And then if people could follow my trades and then they could just put money into an account
and just do exactly what I do, I don't want to do that.
I don't want responsibility of you following my trades.
I mean, you know that's literally what is going to happen, which is what I call a lawyer first.
Or shorting you, or shorting you, which would be way for sure to you.
People might fade my trades.
I mean, what if I'm a maniac and I'm like, you know what?
The J trading index.
If I'm a maniac, completely honest with you, I think it would be.
cool if you made it
some modest amount of profit
from this, but it would be way better for
content if you just got cut in half.
I mean, it's so funny.
I think that's what's going to happen.
I'll tell you my track is
your loss in a murder mood.
My plan is to
rule.
My plan is to
take a 10 year view
of these trades, which is because I don't want to
make these trades like and be a day trader
and be like have another thing to Shracking me
on my life. I just think it's a unique time
to buy something and hold it for 10 years.
So I was actually looking at SPAC.
So I was thinking about doing like a J-Cal SPAC pack.
Oh, boy.
Because I think there's a couple of the SPAC companies.
Like, listen, we were private investors in desktop metal.
I still believe in that company.
Joby.
I always wanted to be an investor in Joby.
So I think there's some of them that, you know, you could actually trade in the,
I don't want to say short term, but some of them would be long trades like desktop
metal in Joby.
And some of them would be maybe short trades like Peloton,
and BuzzFeed,
which I think will be buyout candidates.
If they're buyout candidates,
you may get a quick 20, 30% lift when they get bought out.
I don't do financial advice.
You are coming on this thing live
and saying that you are interested in buying up some SPACs
and Peloton and BuzzFeed is the most contrarian thing
you've ever said in your life.
That is insane.
It might be.
Like literally Stan Hope,
the Nodi was like,
are you high right now?
I'm a little high, yeah.
Yeah, I'm saying.
This is unbelievable.
I put a little bellies in my cold bro.
I'm high on cold bro.
It's a hell of a Monday.
You're an idiot, but that rocks.
Yeah, you should do that.
There we go.
The creativity flow.
That's what's happening.
Exactly.
This is what happens when I spent too much time in the mountains.
Tech's like blink if you're okay.
That's true.
The air is pretty thin.
The air is thin.
No, I've been up there for a week.
I'm good.
All right, let's talk about, but anyway, so congratulations to the Uber team over there.
I think, I don't want to give projections, but I think the stock is going to
triple in the next five years. So that's just my, that's why I'm holding. I may actually buy more Uber
and Robin Hood. Those are two stocks I think are severely undervalued. So I might double down on
existing positions again, you know. Yeah. So who knows? And I'll do it live. I'll do it live.
Okay. Great. We're great. We need is we need a stinger for like a live, you know, like a live trade.
We got to come up with like a CNBC, like J-C housekeeping, like J-C making a live trade. And so whenever I
said, you know what, trade me 50K on that. It does.
does that like sound.
And then you see Nick trading and the trade gets put in.
And we do like a trading old-timey trading sound.
Lawyer.
Lawyer.
Can a lawyer tell me if what I've described today will get me in trouble or not?
If I trade live on the air or do I have to say I'm about to do this trade, I'm going to do it at, you know, when the market closes today.
I'm going to put the order in.
What would be like just the most financial hygiene, mostly most hygienic financially,
and just in fairness
because I also want to be fair to people
like I don't want to say
I did this and then pump it
so if I was doing it live
that wouldn't be a pump right
or just be like
you're watching me trade it live
yeah I don't know
yeah just don't use a big green hammer
that signifies a pump
no I'm gonna literally expand my thinking
and then click the buy button
live on air
yeah I know Cole Highland who is really nerd
Cole Highland who is the most nervous about this
said you can trade live on the air
I mean this is not legal advice either
Dave Portnoy did it on Twitter live
yes that's you need
disclaimers legally, probably in tax.
Like we'd need it on the bottom of the screen that would be like,
this is not investment advice.
Don't be an idiot.
What do you think, Bobby?
It'd be funny to do.
I'm terrified right now, but sure.
It would definitely be funny.
It would be unequivocally funny.
It is unequivocally hilarious and I will happily watch you do this with your money.
What if you get in for the trade?
What if I do $2 million and you do $20,000?
You just shadowy straight.
You fade.
I was going to be like, and I do $2.
That's how I bet.
$2.20.
Put $20.
And you could afford 20.
And then you just follow them.
I'm just imagining you like,
all right, boys,
we're keeping into Buzzfeed today.
Exactly.
We're everything in the bus feed.
No, no.
Like the next thing you know.
What?
I would literally say.
Did it.
It is also every reason not to do it.
Fair point, Stan.
Fair point.
No,
I was hilarious.
It's a runway left.
And I am bullish.
I'm bombish.
You remember I said like,
you're going to know the bottom of the market
when a company has more cash in the bank
or more revenue
then their valuation,
and that means somebody's going to look at this
and just buy it.
And when they buy it,
it has to be at a premium to the market
because that's how it works.
You have to give an offer
that's higher for people to accept it.
And so I do think something that could happen
with Peloton or BuzzFeed
is what happened with Zendesk,
which is somebody comes in and says,
hey, I'll just give you 20% over the market,
yada y'all.
That's fair.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I think it's a stupid bet
to make with like all of your money,
but I think it's an entertaining bet.
I would consider that like me
gambling like playing. I would consider this whole thing
a high stakes poker game for me. But based
on my knowledge, right? Yeah.
All right, let's talk about
it's good TV. Apple cars.
Speaking of good TV. Wow. Yeah. Speaking of a
long running drama. Speaking of drama, this thing's got,
this thing makes ER jealous. Let's go. Hey,
the Apple Car Project, maybe you've noticed because
it doesn't exist yet, Project Titan. Yeah.
has been going on for eight years.
Apple has spent the last eight years trying to maybe build a self-driving car or
software for a car or back to maybe building a car.
But the upshot is that the information interviewed 20 people who worked on the project
and TLDR.
It's a mess.
Okay.
Now, this is interesting.
The information interviewed 20 people who were in the, did they say if they were in the program,
previously, currently in the program?
I love how the information.
a little bit of both, yeah.
Put this in context.
Yeah.
So I feel more confident in this reporting.
There was 20 people and they all had either worked on or are currently working on the project.
That sounds like a good sample size.
Because there's probably a thousand people working on it.
That was the whisper number I heard years ago.
I think I've heard that too.
Well,
there's say this among the many fascinating things in this article is that Apple may be spending up to a billion dollars a year.
Okay.
on this project, even though a big part of what has caused all the setbacks with it
is that they keep having to spend all this time convincing Apple's leadership that it's
important and they should keep doing it. Wait, they're getting gaslit by Tim Cook.
Tim Cook evidently won't like come visit, won't look at the product, won't talk to them.
Craig Federer. So how are you in a business? Imagine if you were J-Cal, would you spend,
I got so worked up, I called you J-Cal, would you spend a billion dollars?
a year, we'd just spend $100 a year on something that you could not be bothered with,
a billion dollars a year on something that he just is like, ah, I don't think so.
So then they had to lagging them to get performance.
Maybe they like whipped up, but then it's causing them to backslide.
They like this like fake demo with cars that they rented on a specific track to be like,
look, we got it.
We're doing it.
Wait, so that was the thing I thought was really interesting about this, is that they made
a video, a highly produced video with drones.
shots and everything that is to impress Tim Cook and management.
That's interesting in and of itself.
You know what this reminds me of is?
Remember Bezos inside of Amazon would have them write the press release in order to
like kind of get an idea of like, hey, here's what we're going to tell the press.
And then here's the FAQ for the customers, right?
That was a way to say, hey, what is the finished product going to look like?
How do we defend this existence in the world?
How do we market it?
And obviously, Apple has been known.
to make commercials.
So I'm wondering if these are kind of like the commercials
or what would be the demo at the keynote, right?
So this sounds to me like a keynote video
and or videos for a commercial.
And sometimes they put the commercials in the keynotes.
That's actually kind of a brilliant thing just on the side of,
hey, if you want to make this thing,
give us our updates in the way we would tell our passionate,
most passionate customers during a keynote.
So that's kind of slick.
but the fact that the cars,
because also in the reporting was,
this was like 40 miles of road through Montana,
which, by the way,
the people in Montana are driving drunk
and like, you know,
with their foot out the window
and a shotgun in their hand.
That's not a difficult task
to ride a road in Montana.
I've driven those roads.
You know, this is my home state.
I'm just saying, Molly,
am I directionally correct?
In your childhood,
did you ever see anybody
with a foot out the window driving?
Did we ever pick up a six-pack for the road?
and...
Yes.
Okay, maybe.
Maybe.
However,
they...
It's not an insult.
It's just you have very straight,
long roads that are perfect
with no potholes on them.
Well,
that's apparently one of the big complaints,
actually,
about the insiders interviewed here
in this story is no pun intended,
because it was an Apple Insider,
too,
is that they're like,
what they keep doing
is proving over and over
that they can do a super specific track.
That's easy.
And then they,
so they did this big demo in Montana,
and then they used these so prototype
to be a,
and created this drone video.
And then it came back to San Francisco
and the cars were like running into the curb
and weaving in and out of the lanes,
which to be fair is also everything that happens
in San Francisco driving.
Yeah.
But okay.
So in Montana,
have you ever seen anybody sit on their window
and drive the car with the,
drive the steering wheel with their foot?
Yes.
Like,
that's how hard it is.
In San Francisco, yes.
No,
no, not.
That happens in San Francisco too.
Uh-huh.
Exactly.
They just drive.
And they drive up on the hood.
Then they drive on top of the hood.
Cars drive on top of the hood.
Cars drive straight.
by default. That's how cars work.
You get no credit for driving straight.
Okay.
This is such a weird, spicy Monday show.
Anyway, it is just, it's been
back and forth, right? They've, like, decided
if it's going to be a physical car.
At one point, it was going to be software. Now, they're back.
Now, they keep testing it. But, but
it seems like fundamentally
the biggest problem is that
upper management is not behind this.
And I mean, honestly, when they announced this
for years, I was like, they're not going to build a car.
And I'm still not sure they're going to, despite
all of this money.
Like, is this pot committed at this point, Jason?
You know, when you have 200 billion in cash,
and then it just keeps coming in,
you keep buying back your stock,
and you don't know what to do with your money,
and you build like a $5 billion campus,
that makes no sense in the world
when you have, you know,
more efficient campuses you can move into or make.
Like, they have so much funny money.
I wonder how much money a day in profits,
AirPods make.
They'll Airpods?
Yeah, AirPods.
What is it?
I mean,
I know the AirPods is like,
they always have that infographic
going around that it's like,
you know,
it would be the 12th largest tech company or something.
Right.
What is the profits on AirPods?
I get the sense that this is a billion dollars
is probably two days
worth of iPhone profits and like maybe a month worth of AirPods.
Right.
So sure,
why not spend the billion.
Yeah.
And is it a tax write-off?
Like at some point,
if it's a lot,
then it's a write-off,
right?
It's R&D.
But they're so profitable,
yes.
So it's free money.
And think about it.
If you have two hundred,
billion and you make five, but five percent on that.
That means every year you're getting 10 billion of profits from your money sitting over here,
let alone the profits coming in from every other overpriced product, cable, you know,
and nonsense they're selling to us that we can't stop buying.
So sure, they should be, if anything, they should be doing 10 projects like this and
negging all 10 groups in the off chance that one works.
Like they should literally, they were doing a TV at one point.
I remember like hearing this, you know, Scoble had heard it.
And they were going to do an actual television.
Yeah.
And I was like, no, they're not.
Well, yeah.
And it's, I think what you have to realize is they probably in their secret rooms,
there are making designs of everything.
Why wouldn't you?
You know, it just keeps your R&D group engaged.
Yeah.
So.
About $265 million of profit per day for the total company in 2021.
265 million per year.
So in four days per.
Day.
So a billion dollars a year is.
So in four days.
Over to the whole day.
the long weekend. They made that much money
over the July 4th weekend. Exactly.
So I think it's okay.
I mean, it is insane
to neg those people,
but maybe this is like Tim Cook's
thing where he's like, you know,
you guys keep working harder, but I'm
not coming out there until you guys can
impress me with something.
It would be so dumb. And your drone videos not
cutting it.
Can I give a quick shout out to the production company that
produced that drone video and probably squeezed Apple
for like a 5X premium on whatever they charge?
Oh, my God.
They're not even looking at that though.
Shout out to those people.
I wonder if Apple makes there some, like these videos,
I'm sure they have an in-house production team that does those videos
because they don't want to have somebody leak it.
That's true.
Knowing Apple, I'm sure they do.
How many video editors, can somebody leak this information to me?
How many video editors, people in their production department do they have an Apple?
That might be 500 people.
It probably is, yeah.
Yeah.
That's actually a great point.
I never thought about that before.
They definitely don't outsource it because they don't want any leads.
No chance.
I mean, they will let you make it.
after the product's out, right?
They're famous for giving money to ad agencies.
But yeah, internally, there must be people who are,
there's your next job, Nick.
If you, can you imagine what they would pay Nick to work there, producer Nick?
But yeah, I think, don't you dare.
Don't you do it, Nick.
That would be a really crummy job, though,
because you get to see all this cool stuff, make these videos,
and then they burn the tapes.
They just delete it all, right?
It's just like you have to go work inside of a private room
where you don't have access to any of the files
and, you know, they scan you
when you leave the campus
that you're not stealing any videos.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Well, all right now.
You never hire me.
Hope Springs.
Your uncle was the guy who lied about the iPad
and caused it complete.
Oh, yeah, you're changing your last name.
They would do your last name and be like, oh, nope.
Hard now.
You have to change your last name.
Callan.
Callan.
My name is Nick Turchy.
Nicholas Turchy.
All right, everybody.
What a great show.
Camper. What a great show. There is so much more. There's so much more interesting news and
conversations. We're like backed up on them, but more keeps coming. But so it's going to be a big
weekend. Big week ahead. Yeah, we got to, there's a lot of Twitter threads over the weekend. I want
to chime in on. Join us in the Twitter community. That's where you can talk to us. I think there's
1,700 of us there now or so. And we talk about the show before the show shows up. Thanks to all
the Noties. Thanks to the 250 people watching live. And you can join us live every day. YouTube.com
slash this weekend. And we just chat. You get about, I would say, 20 to 50% more show if you come to the
YouTube channel. And if you give a super chat, we're going to give those all to charity. I think I'm
going to give those to Little Stevens, Silvio's charity, Nick, where he's teaching kids how to play
music in disadvantaged neighborhoods in Jersey. So I think that's kind of a cool one. All right,
everybody. We'll see you tomorrow. Follow at Molly Wood. Follow at Jason. We'll see you back here tomorrow.
Don't forget to join us on the Discord.
This week in Startups.com slash Discord.
And you can keep chatting even when the show's not alive.
Correct.
Absolutely.
All right.
We'll see you all tomorrow.
Bye.
Bye-bye.
