Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, AI Data Center Forecast Jumps, Poppi’s Pepsi Deal | Diet TBPN

Yeah, this weekend every time I would refresh it would be you can see everything takes. Everyone had all these different opinions and takes. The one that stuck out to me was that there's this there's a little bit of a like you you watch the movie and most people came away thinking more positively of Elizabeth Holmes being like oh maybe she wasn't maybe she's not that bad maybe there's more to the story maybe she was manipulated she seems to be manipulated multiple times potentially like maybe. Maybe she's more of a—

some people might be like, she's bad, but she'd probably be nice to me if I interacted with her.

Yeah, yeah, a little bit of that. There's some sort of like suspicion that I feel some people in Silicon Valley are having where it's like, oh, it's just like the fake it till you make it thing. It's, you know, it's not that big of a deal. I just can't stop thinking about like, it seems like she's just a bad founder. Like, put aside the fraud. Like, it just seems like total slop in terms of the execution of that business and gives me absolutely no faith in a Theranos 2.0.

Totally.

And the whole time I was like almost yelling at the movie screen because she taught— the way she describes Theranos is like this box and like it's in the cloud. It's just like, it's so unaware of the medical device industry, which is so frustrating to me because she's making this point where it's like, we have an invention and our invention allows you to test blood for things and like we test all this stuff. And she's making it sound like it's like magical science. And it's like, I looked it up. There have been 60+ companies since Theranos started that sold for over $100 million in that category. It's like someone coming to you and being like, I have a magical— we invented something. It takes information and stores it on a database that you can access through a website. It's like, so you make a SaaS product. Literally hundreds of people make those. And there are thousands of people that work in the medical device industry, and they've made boxes that look kind of like a Theranos box, and it runs a test, and then they don't go to prison for

10 years.

Yeah, they don't go to prison. And she never just says like, look, this stuff happens all the time. It's not crazy that I'm going to be able to build a box that tests for something like this happens all the time. Instead, it's like, it's like I'm the only one that could possibly do this. Which is so weird. It's such a bad frame to not just admit what's really happening on the field, which is that diagnostic boxes get built and sold every few years for hundreds of millions of dollars. You could just do that. But instead it has to be this pie in the sky nonsense. And it really, really frustrates me, as you can probably tell. Nikita Beer broke down a little bit of this concept. He said, one of the things that hasn't been talked about with Elizabeth Holmes, she was created in the era of the TED Talk entrepreneur. And this is exactly what I was picking up on. So between 2011 and 2015, after the release of The Social Network, there was an entire apparatus built around child prodigies, college accelerators, young entrepreneur organizations. I watched countless founders of hard tech companies present fraudulent products at conferences. They had fake studies with fudged numbers. Most of the adults in the room excused it as faking it till you make it, but Holmes was the one who rode the wave better than anyone else. When the TED Talk era came to an end, when people finally came to their senses, she was still running the same playbook. And in the most scrutinized field there is, medical technology, when people ask how far she— how she got so far, it is largely explained by the period she did it in. And she got caught when the world suddenly woke up. And so there's other things, which is that this is strictly regulated by the FDA. So if you're a founder of a medical device company, Like what you are going for is FDA authorization. That's marketing authorization. That's literally the ability to sell the product. Yeah. It's not illegal to build a medical device. It's illegal to sell it, to market it. And so that also includes like, you can't, you typically can't go on podcasts and media and say, oh yes, we have this thing that does this thing. We have to say, oh, we're working on this progress. Like we can't say that it actually works because we haven't been approved to say that by the FDA.

Spoiler alert.

Spoiler alert. You don't wanna hear spoilers. Just turn, leave the stream going, but just turn the audio down.

Yeah, and we'll just talk away.

What spoiler do you want to talk about?

So Billy does this side deal to get a cut of profit on the back end of the movie. You would probably know what that's exactly called.

Yeah, points on the back end.

Points on the back end. So he does this thing.

Incredibly good thing.

And then later, after the movie's totally been finished, he decides, ah, it's going to look pretty bad, backs out. Damage has already been done, right? Like he looks, he looks, he doesn't look great.

Yeah.

And Elizabeth is trying to say like, oh, I didn't, I don't really know much about the details. So one thing, like the damage was already done and now the movie is a massive hit and it's going to be continue to be a massive hit. It seems like it'll be like a cult classic. And I can't imagine being 60 years old being like, I'm going to turn on some Nathan Fielder. Just take me back to the good old days. But the funny thing is, do you think that Billy, do you think it made sense for him to do the side deal? Because she has— she claimed in the show she has hundreds of millions of dollars of restitution to pay. So, of course, she wouldn't want to make— even if she wanted to make money on it, she wouldn't get any benefit of it. So, she would want to route it through Billy.

That's a good question. There's some ambiguity over whether or not they're married. I couldn't get to the bottom of this, but I think they might not be legally married. In which case, it would make sense for him to get those profits and then use that for their kids and their family, but then it doesn't flow to her bank account, which immediately gets grabbed by the investors.

That's what I'm saying.

I think you're— I think you might be onto something there.

She gets a lot of the benefit in that it's sort of funding

the family. Yes. And so is your point that if she's in on the deal, sitting there being like, we want to get paid, but just pay it to Billy's account, don't pay it to— that's more tricky from a restitution perspective?

Totally. I imagine a judge would be like—

Oh, that's an interesting wrinkle. I hadn't thought of that.

Yeah, a judge would be like, yeah, you're earning money. I don't care.

Yeah, I don't care that you did it.

Billy has to like go behind her back and make it really public that she's—

that

he's going behind her back.

Huh. Yeah, good point. Good point. So, I mean, the wildest part about the whole You Can See Everything Theranos thing is that one, I've talked to Billy on the phone about the Twitter that he was running and all that stuff, answered all those questions. Nothing that really was different than what you saw in the movie. But he sort of gave me the pitch for Theranos 2.0, and I was like pushing back, being like, so you should go for like a specific diagnostic, go for it, like do this. Like I have a buddy who ran this exact playbook, made $400 million in a very short amount of time. Like this is tractable. And then he was like—

When did you have this conversation?

I talked to him like last year. And so my pitch was, I said, look, if we're gonna take this Elizabeth Holmes redemption arc seriously, I wanna see some great calls about biotech because this is sort of what's happened with other individuals who have been rehabilitated. From a branding perspective, my point that I posted about was like, I want to see Elizabeth Holmes give an incredible take about peptides and how that market will evolve and then watch that happen and be like, oh wow, she was early. I want her to be a good biotech analyst. I want her to be smart on the science. I want her to—

The crazy thing about the movie, though, I can't remember a single point where she was locked in on anything science-related.

I completely agree.

It was just— it was Billie.

That's the point.

Learning about mitochondria.

Yeah, that's my point. Like, if a genius scientist goes to jail wrongfully, I would assume that they continue reading science literature and that they come up with interesting theses around that.

One simple trick. That the medical industry hates.

You can actually do that. That happens. And I want Elizabeth Holmes to throw down, gimme your biotech 2027, gimme your AI 2027 thesis. Let's watch it play out. If you're right—

At the very least, a market map.

At the very least, a market map. Give us— Show me that you understand what Roche acquisition was doing. Or a tier list.

A tier list.

Or a tier list. A tier list of biotech acquisitions in the medical device space. Yeah. Show me you're a student of the industry you're operating in, right?

Yeah. Watching Nathan have that light bulb moment where they're pitching him Theranos 2.0.

Yeah.

And them not realizing that people have been using the phrase Theranos 2.0 to describe like massive—

FTX, yeah.

Things that they perceive might be massive fraud.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's great. Yeah, I just also, when I got to YC in 2018, my visiting partner was Diego Rey, co-founder of GeneWeave, who actually built and sold a real diagnostics box, a medical device. And it was basically just a lab testing machine, previously size of a dishwasher at a lab down the street. You shrink it down to the size of a box and you put it at the actual hospital, and then the hospital can test for a specific thing. They were testing for antibiotic-resistant bacteria. They developed a chemistry. It's not rocket science. Like, it is hard science, but like, it's not magic. It's not future sci-fi magic. And if you can get that data in an hour as opposed to 2 days, everything in the hospital is just gonna move a little bit smoother and people are gonna be a little bit healthier and you're gonna sell your company for $425 million, which is exactly what happened. They raised $25 million. It was a great outcome for founders, employees. Roche eventually got the product approved by FDA. So in 2019, it got authorized for the Cobas VivoDx MRSA test. Which is like not gonna be on the stage at TED anytime soon, but it should be. It's like real science and it actually moved the needle forward.

That being said, I came away from the movie, right, feeling like, okay, Sunny had done some side deal and got way less— You mean Billy? No, no, no, Sunny Balwani, the other co-founder. My impression was that he was getting way less jail time.

Yeah. Elizabeth was going to jail for like 11 years.

Yeah, it seemed like Sunny, they were positioning it as like Sunny was able to pin it on her. Yeah. He got out.

Yeah.

Or at least he got a reduced sentence. Yeah. Whatever. And you told me afterwards Sunny is in prison for like 12 years or he had like a— Yeah.

It's about a year longer.

12 years, 11 months was the sentencing. Elizabeth got a 10-year sentence.

Yeah.

Reduced originally from 11 years and 3 months.

Yeah.

According to the internet, Sunny Didn't sell secondary either.

I know, that's ridiculous.

So none of them—they both go down with the ship. They both don't make money.

Jaw-dropping moment for me. I was like, least shrewd person in the world, potentially. No secondary selling. Eleven

billion doing fraud purely for the love of the

game. What are you doing? What are you doing? And it's not like I came away being like it wasn't a fraud. Like it was. Yeah, it was very clear that like everyone there, Sunny heard. They knew. It didn't work.

They didn't have the revenue or the profits. That's really like the TED entrepreneur.

Yeah, absolutely. Goes to prison. For the love of the game.

For the love of the game. Insane. Just for the vision.

If you do want to sell secondary, there's one neat trick. One neat trick. This is a new thing. So, if you're a founder and you want to sell $10 million in secondary, $100 million in secondary, you don't want it to be a negative signal. Here's what you do. Before, so you've grown your company to the point where you're valued in the billions. You don't want to sell secondary because everyone will be like, oh, he's like selling out, she's selling out. Like that's not good. That's not a good sign. So, what you do is you take out an immense amount of debt. So, you get like $100 million of debt.

Yep.

Then you sell the secondary, sell another $100 million of secondary, pay off the debt, and then you can tell everyone, Look, I just sold secondary to pay off my debt, my personal debt.

Yeah. And everyone assumes it's like, oh, they think it's credit card debt.

Yeah. Yeah. They think it's credit card debt. They don't realize that it was an equity-backed $100 million line of credit from a major financial institution. You don't need to clarify that part, but you can still get away with $100 million out of the gate. It's possible. I

wonder if anyone's doing that.

It might be happening. Who knows? Who knows? Anyway,

SemiAnalysis raised its 2027 data center capacity forecast from 43 to—

Gigawatts. 50 gigawatts. Wow. 50 gigawatts. 50 gigawatts. That's a lot. That's a lot of compute. And people are going back and forth on this, right? Did Gerstner say it was too much? Something like that. It seems like SemiAnalysis has the data and has been pulling together a whole bunch of satellite photos and stuff.

SemiAnalysis said, so we looked at the data.

They looked at the satellite photos. I mean, a lot of these things, Like they were papered a long time ago. And if the market's like having a hiccup right now, that's not going to stop people from actually pulling out of the bull—

I sent you this. I sent you this. What'd

you send me?

This morning.

What'd you send me?

From RevCap, which is SemiAnalysis saying, if you're worried about demand, don't be, because there's going to be even more supply than you realize. Of course, SemiAnalysis is also saying that they have some of the most bullish forecasts for the labs. But it's funny that in the midst of like everyone being worried about ARR growth over the last 2 weeks, that SemiAnalysis is coming out and saying, don't worry, there's an obscene amount of supply coming online within the next 12 months.

Yeah. Yeah, I believe them on— I believe them on supply. That seems very cut and dry. I don't think anyone has a stronger read on what's actually getting built than them. I think if you look at the satellite photos and you look at the deals that have already been inked, that even though, oh, the Nasdaq sold off 5% last week, like, that's not enough to be like, okay, pack up the dump trucks, we're not building this thing. Like, maybe in months if things continue to get bad and the rates go up, like, some projects will be delayed or stalled or deals will get unwound. But like, Right now, it's not that it's full speed ahead, it's just like it's a train. You can't slow it down that quickly. Like, it's just going to keep going. On the demand side, I feel like the agentic stuff, the personal agentic stuff, is going to be high demand for compute. I'm less clear on what the willingness to pay will be. How many people will be willing to pay the equivalent of $1,000 a year for inference related to like their semi-personal prosumer life shopping and all the little agentic features. Now I think the tech is incredible. Like I've been using Dot a ton and I think having an agent that just runs in the background and just tries to go find little opportunities for you is amazing. It just catches things in my email that I never would've gone through or taken the time to do. And it just sends me a little message being like, hey, like you asked for this and you should follow up because like they said that they would do it.

You used it to cancel your Roadster order. Too, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So just like little things like that, it's just a better interface. Like, I love interacting with the open web through an LLM. It's amazing. No cookie popups, no ads. Like, it's truly like the best consumer experience. Yeah. There's a lot of controversial stuff downstream of that, but like, as a consumer, if I'm trying to learn about something, instead of having like 25 tabs open where I have to accept cookies 25 times, make sure I'm logged into 25 different things and like scroll, find the fact, it's so much better To just have it, oh, put it all together with the exact quotes. I can click out to the link if I need to. And that's starting to happen in the personal agent space. The question is, like, how do you get the money from people? Is it the ads? Is it the interchange? Like, there's that sort of bearish take that even that the agentic commerce market, if you assign all these take rates, it's like a $40 billion market or something like that. It's like not big enough to justify.

No, I think what needs to happen is something closer to going from automating tasks to automating certain roles or extending the capabilities of people, right? Because we're in this era of— obviously, there's a viral clip going on over the last 24 hours talking about somebody having a 26-hour day because they need to stay up. She's changing and manipulating time. She's changing and manipulating time because they need to be online and available to keep their agents productive.

Are you saying Are you saying she's crazy?

I'm not saying—

Because she's not crazy. She's not crazy. You're crazy. You're crazy for thinking that it takes 24 hours to complete a full day.

That's right.

Not 26.

But anyways, it's like the next leg up will probably be—

She's a special case. She's an entrepreneur. Yeah, the question is like for the 90% of Americans that aren't in—

But that's not what we're seeing. We're seeing that one— we're seeing that a very, very small number of companies are driving all of the adoption. And so there's probably not all the adoption, but a massive amount of it. And so there's another leg up there just with a capabilities increase. And then what you're saying is, like, the other 99% of businesses, how are they going to be— how is their spending going to ramp? Will it ramp beyond the $20, $100, $200 a month subscription?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, in the business side, like, the Jensen take of, like, a software engineer who makes $300K should also get $300K in tokens or something. Like that seems to be happening basically. It's like, yeah, like a software engineer can deploy AI very efficient— very efficiently and like at a high ROI. It is less clear for a marketer, for a salesperson. It's like, okay, what should your actual token, your inference budget be? If you gave a sales rep $50,000 a month in inference, like is there something that they could do with the best models to actually— Yeah. generate $100,000 in value that they wouldn't have otherwise. Like, those are the economic equations that happen across the business. I'm talking more on the personal side, the consumer side. Like, people are using the LLMs that—

No, and I'm just saying we don't pay for all this cap. Like, the CapEx is not gonna be paid for by consumers.

Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. So you're saying that's not the— that is not the leg up that needs to happen. It has to be diffusion into the enterprise and B2B. beyond what it is. It has to 10x. So, like, the small company that has basically everyone on a $200 a month plan and they're maybe spending $100,000 on maybe $10 mil top line, they need to go to $1 million of inference a year even though they're a $10 million business. Maybe they go to $15 million of top line.

Speaking of $1 million budgets,

What we got?

Brett Adcock launched Hark, which is something like a Muse or an Instinct or a Dots. And they gave away or tried to give away $1 million of pizza. I believe it was on Friday. You just had to download and order from the Hark app. And I don't know that it went well. I

think the summary we have here is an app called Hark tried to do a pizza giveaway, but it quickly turned into a PR disaster. That's the— Yeah,

I don't know. I mean, clearly they got a ton of people to download the app. Like, I think it wasn't working.

People just don't want to give them the data because— I

know people were giving them the data.

You had to give them Google Drive files. Yes. In order to get this pizza, I will need to edit your tax return.

See, edit, download, and permanently delete all of your— see, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Sheets spreadsheets. See, edit, share, and permanently delete all the calendars you can access. Read, compose, and send emails from your Gmail account.

Yeah.

See and download your organization's workplace directory. I don't know if all of these were required.

Yeah, sometimes you can just not check those and still get access. It's like when you download an app on the iOS App Store, you can just say, like, no thanks, I don't want any notifications.

Armand tried to get a free pizza and had some issues, and so he used the app to submit a formal complaint to the FTC. Dude, actually— Hark said, fair, that's annoying, and I just tried again with no luck. I can file with the FTC, but a giveaway that's been flaky for a few minutes on launch night isn't something they'll act on. I'd rather report it straight to Hark's team now with all the details so they can fix it. Want me to send that? No, file a complaint with the federal government. Submit FTC complaint about a Hark pizza promotion.

This is great.

On October 16th, 2026, Hark publicly advertised a $1 million free pizza giveaway promoted on X and stated users could claim it by typing order a free pizza in the Hark app. Crazy. Yeah. Interesting. I'm so curious why, why Brett didn't just do Hark as part of Figure because the whole like

I don't

know. It doesn't make any sense to me other than you wanted a fresh cap table that could raise—

Yeah, I mean, Elon kind of created the playbook, right? xAI was a separate thing. You raise fresh funds, you get— it's a way— it would be hard for SpaceX to go to a top AI scientist and say, we're going to give you $5 billion of equity. Now, Zuck has kind of broken that glass and been like, I'm just going to do it. the way you get, you know, the multi-billion-dollar outcome is you give a co-founder role of a new company and then you acquire them in. Like, so I think it's probably that. I don't know. Is there another?

The only thing is Elon had, you know, sold a lot of cars and launched a lot of rockets prior to doing that. And so I think it's the kind of thing that makes more sense in the fullness of time.

Tropic staff expect AI to do $70 5% of their work by 2030 and GDP growth to reach 17.1%. Now, did they specify if this is real GDP growth? Because they just said GDP growth. Because what if inflation is at like 40%? That would be the equivalent of negative 23% real GDP growth. You got to clarify these things if you're going to be asking the tough questions. But let's assume they went with real GDP growth. You think that's low? You think that's high? There's someone at Anthropic who said it would be 28%. I like that. The lowest was 6%. Basically, no one there thinks that GDP growth is going to be, you know, at normal levels. Everyone is expecting a boom within the building. Agree? Disagree?

Bullish.

Bullish. Drinking the Kool-Aid. I don't know. Just added the FOMC. The FOMC, of course, thinks GDP growth will be 2%. That's the government suit. Anthropic staff are obviously like the most bullish. Like they are at 17.1% GDP growth. Reminder, America grows 2% typically. They're saying 17%. Huge economic explosion unlike anything we've ever seen in America. Absolutely fantastic. Like If we grow at 17%, like, it is so positive sum. There's so much to go around. You can do everything, basically. You can build new roads, you can give people healthcare, like, everything just solves itself because a rising tide lifts all boats.

Where would you really put it, though?

I'd put it at 200% GDP growth.

Yeah.

I want to be tripling every year.

Yeah.

Predict what you want to happen. Manifesting. This is manifestation. I want to manifest it. Site visitors said 12.5%. Again, staggeringly high, but interesting. U.S. adults predict 5.4% just broadly, which is again way above where we've been. So like everyone is bullish.

The American mind must be set.

Spoor doesn't buy it. Spoor says this is borderline mental illness. I'm sorry, but 20% GDP growth in 2030 is a common belief at Anthropic. What are these people smoking? How does one get so divorced from reality? Cigarettes. They're smoking cigarettes. They're smoking cigarettes, yeah. Because lung cancer will be solved. Lung cancer will be solved. That was reported from— we talked about this a little bit, but that was reported from Shom Sankar and has not been widely confirmed beyond his anecdote that he shared, I believe, on Bloomberg or CNBC. But—

I don't think this is unique to Anthropic.

Yeah.

I think clearly the average American is already insanely full.

Exactly. So you're looking— Average American is already more than 2.5 cups.

And so if you go to the labs, anybody who like really truly believes in this current revolution. And that probably is like an average across the field.

There was a funny exchange in the Tyler Cowen-Dwarkesh Patel interview on Interesting Times. He was guest hosting for the now departed, not passed away, but he— Ross Douthat, laugh, for I think CBS and the Free Press or something like that. But Tyler Cowen and Dwarkesh Patel were going back and forth about AI. And Tyler asks Dwarkesh, like, when do you think I'll walk into a Walmart and see a product that is the product of artificial intelligence? And Dwarkesh is like, ah, it's really hard to say. Like, I think that there will be a real effect on the economy soon, 2028. I'm very bullish on this change in the economy, but I just, I can't predict how it'll be. And I was like, there's already AI slop beach towels in Walmart. Like, you can go into Walmart and get AI products now. Like, there's so many, like, pool floaty that looks like a tank that was sold on TikTok via, like, you know, AI video slop. We have signs.

This is happening. We have signs of signs.

Yes, we have signs of signs. Like, like the AI slop economy is thriving right now. But the, but the AI slop is being sold. And, you know, a lot of people will say, oh, the San Francisco tech people, they need to touch grass. I think If they wanna get in touch, they need to touch the gas pedal of a Lamborghini Countach or Lamborghini Huracán in Miami. You gotta get into the mind of the course seller, the dropshipper to understand how AI is changing the real economy because that crew is selling AI slop. It's happening. Like there is definitely AI instantiated products up and down the stack all over Facebook, Instagram Reels, Uh, TikTok. This stuff's flying off the shelf.

Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, says the games we've long wanted which didn't exist because they'd cost several times more to make than they'd earn back will soon become possible, as will the game— the games developers wanted to build but couldn't with the resources available. It'll be a new golden age of gaming.

Yeah, I like that he's taking the, the, the white pill on AI. 3Blue1Brown also put out a big He's a math YouTuber, does these incredible video explainers, these motion graphic explainers of difficult math concepts. And he put out a video saying like, it is the best time to go into math, very optimistic about it. And so obviously very divided organizations, but I love that Tim Sweeney went back and forth on this. I saw another post by him talking about like, Look, I had to migrate from C to C++, from 2D to 3D. Like, I've been through so many tech migrations. This is another one. I'm very excited for it. And he'll just adapt. He'll improvise, adapt, overcome. If people are rolling their own Fortnite clone in a web browser, decompiled or whatever, I'm sure he's going to find a way to participate in the upside in some way because he is innovative and Flexible. What about this Poppi deal? Have you seen this?

Yeah. I mean, it's really quite funny because everyone's trying to use it as an opportunity to try to dunk when it's like they sold their company for $1.9 billion.

Yeah.

And

so wait, wait, here, let me set the table. So Poppi is a beverage brand. It's a soda, probiotic soda company sold to Pepsi. For $2.2 billion. $300 million of that $2.2 billion was an earnout. So they got $1.9 billion on the day the deal closed and then $300 million waiting for milestones. Now Pepsi announced that instead of paying $300 million based on the performance of the brand, they will only be paying $12 million. And the dunk is like, oh, that stings. They didn't get their earnout. But yeah, they got $1.912 billion. Like, it's still an incredible amount of money. And people are like, yeah, like, here's how you negotiate an earnout. It's like, it seems like they already negotiated it. Like, they negotiated it really well. The disaster would have been if the numbers were reversed. $300 million for the company and $1.9 billion in earnout. And if they didn't get that earnout, it would seriously change the economics. But it seems like they got 90% of the deal value. Still pretty good outcome for the founders of Poppy. Amazing outcome. But yeah, Sean Frank chimes in and says a quarter is what you should expect in an earnout most of the time right off that second bit, that second bite to zero. You shouldn't go into one of these deals expecting to get the full earnout because companies have lots of resources. They control the budget, the distribution, all the success or failure. You're no longer in charge. You're no longer the master of your own destiny. And so if you put all the chips with them, they might bet them differently than you would expect to. Thank you for tuning into TVPN. Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Hit the gong again.

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