Elizabeth Holmes Breaks Silence, Jamie Dimon Locks In, Machine Parts Pizza Tracker, Monkeys on Macbooks

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the number one live show in tech. We are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. It is Friday, February 14th, Valentine's Day 2025. This show starts now. Jordy, you're back on the West Coast. Give us an update.

Look, John, if us telling you it was Valentine's Day at this very moment is a surprise, you're probably already kind of in a bad spot with your lady. So I hope that our, you know, basically daily reminders this week and last week were helpful in getting people prepared for this monumental moment. Whatever your girlfriend, wife, mistress says she thinks about Valentine's Day, it's important to her. You gotta pull out the stops, get creative. We gave, you know, we gave a gift guide, but, you know, there's, there's plenty of, of ways to impress today. So we're recording early today for the west coast. And after, after that, we'll be taking a little bit of time away to hang out with our lovely wives.

We got a fantastic show today. We're talking about Alex Karp. There's a profile on him in the Wall Street Journal. The Gundo boys, our boys are in the Economist now. Tough pieces just don't stop for these guys. They just get higher and higher.

Yeah, and they, they, they've transitioned from attempted hit pieces to everybody realizing that it's just such fantastic content that they end up being puff pieces.

Totally.

And so, so we'll break it down.

Then we're going on to a Wall Street Journal deep dive on how the Trump family is making money. They have. It's not just the coins. It's not just the spacs. They're all over the place. They're. They're doing 360 deals, they're selling documentaries. You'll hear all about it. We're going to go through the timeline, but first we're going back to Valentine. What better Valentine's Day gift for the woman you love, if she happens to be in federal prison, than getting her presidential pardon? We're going to Elizabeth Holmes, who gave her first prison interview to People magazine. If you're in a relationship with someone who's in jail, get them out. Get him out. Start.

Get him out. Start with the People magazine feature.

Exactly. And the media is the immediate precursor to actually drawing enough attention to get on the, the presidential pardon docket. It worked for Ross Ulbricht. And who knows, maybe it'll work for Elizabeth. Let's go to Dan Primack. He says Elizabeth Holmes, prison interview. He shares the link. 12 likes 13 retweets clearly nerfed in the algorithm, but built different. He posted it anyway. Feedback to this post not great. Lots of people say seems like she wants to copy paste the Ross Ulbricht playbook. Another guy says, we don't care, but we're different on the show. We do care, so we're going to read it to you. Elizabeth Holmes breaks her silence in first interview from prison. It's been hell and torture. The former Theranos CEO convicted of fraud shares her details of her life behind bars and separation from her family. And so let's go through some of this. I'll read a couple paragraphs, then I want your hot take, Jordy Twice a week for a few fleeting hours. Life is sweet for the 41 year old Elizabeth Holmes, it's when her kids, William, 3 and Invicta, 2, snuggle in her lap and talk excitedly about insect ant farms and sea creatures. Her son builds Legos and her daughter dismantles them, seemingly unaware of the beeping of metal detectors and the watchful eyes of guards at federal prison Camp Brian in Texas. The children and their father, Holmes Partner, Billy Evans, 33, enjoy each moment together. And like always, their most recent visit ended with a ritual. When their time was up, the children press their fingers together to make a heart sign saying in unison, mommy, this is our love. To which their mother responded, our love is a superpower. Watching them leave through the secured glass door that separates her from freedom shatters my world every single time, says Holmes. The people I love the most have to walk away as I stand here a prisoner, and my reality sinks in. Rough. What do you think, Jordi?

Super rough. You know, she, you know, I don't know the full backstory and the full sort of timeline on when exactly she decided or, you know, ended up having children. But, you know, part of this positioning, it did, you know, there was sort of a narrative that she was actually, you know, interested. You know, part of the idea of like, you know, let's, let's have a bunch of kids was potentially oriented around building this narrative that, hey, I'm a mom. You're taking me away from like, my young children. Which is. Which is ignore all the facts and the circumstances. Just the nature of being a mom, you know, separated from her young children is deeply tragic. You know, you have kids, I have kids. The idea, you know, my kids, I can noticeably see them not doing so well after literally two hours away from mom. And like, for our youngest and I'm sure you're year two, even like they're just in a better mood. Like they're just doing better when mom is in their orbit. And so before we get into any of the sort of analysis or the facts or the sort of takes, I would say, I would just say that it's irrespective of what Holmes did and the crimes that she committed. It's just a very sad, sad situation.

Yeah, I mean, she's 41 now. She's served two years of an 11 and a quarter year sentence that's been reduced to nine years. So she has seven more years. But she was 39 when she was convicted and sent off to this nine year stint. What are you going to do? You wait nine years, you're probably not going to be able to have kids at all. So that's true. There is this, like, I understand where the narrative came from of like, oh, she did this on purpose to like win curry favor, but at the same time, like having kids before you're 40 is just generally advisable. So it's not that crazy of an idea, even though obviously it's turmoil while you're in the clink. So. She is serving a nine year sentence for fraud and conspiracy over the collapse of Theranos, the billion dollar biotech corporation she founded. She is speaking out for the first time in a prison interview conducted in a cold visitation room furnished with vending machines and blue plastic chair hairs. Gone are the black turtlenecks and crimson lipstick she wore when she dazzled Silicon Valley in the national media as a bold CEO of a startup. Her company promised to revolutionize the healthcare industry with cheap diagnostic testing and devices able to screen patients for hundreds of diseases with a few drops of blood. Now she wears drab khaki prison garb with her blonde hair pulled back, bare makeup and a silver cross around her neck, speaking in a voice notably softer than the throaty baritone she was she was known for. I'm not the same person I was back then, says Holmes, who pleaded not guilty at her trial and maintains her innocence today, albeit while vaguely acknowledge. Acknowledging there are things I would have done differently on her path to lockup. It's surreal. People who have never met me before believe so strongly about me, they don't understand who I am. It forces you to spend a lot of time questioning belief and hoping the truth will prevail. I am walking by faith and ultimately the truth. It's. But it's been hell and torture in here. At 20, she dropped out of Stanford her sophomore year to focus on developing health care technology. On A mission to save lives. In 2003, she launched Theranos, which secured a $9 billion valuation in a decade. Hailed as the next Steve Jobs and backed by investors such as Rupert Murdoch and the family behind Walmart, Holmes became the youngest self made billionaire in 2014. But following the public the publication of an expose in the Wall Street Journal that questioned the accuracy of the company's testing technology, a federal led to the indictment of Holmes and her fellow executive Sonny Balwani, her secret boyfriend at the time, on charges of misleading investors and defrauding them along with patients for hundreds of millions of dollars. Very rough situation, really rough.

You know, ultimately, you know, I don't, I don't think it makes sense in this context to try to psychoanalyze her too much. Right. And I do believe that the, her going to prison and have to be every single day face to face with the reality that her freedom was taken away because of things that she did. Right. She admits that she would have done things differently. If you look at the approach that she took, she applied the move fast and break things methodology that was popularized by, you know, in that era by, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and other founders, but applied it to health care in a scenario where human, human life was on the line and health care outcomes were on the line. And it's just there's totally a world where she was building SaaS or a social media app and it actually, you know, it's much easier to visualize a SaaS app in your mind and if you have billions of dollars, you'll be able to execute against that.

Yep.

And I do believe that she clearly visualized this future of being able to test for all these different things with a single drop of blood. I believe that she firmly believed in that and genuinely felt that she could execute against that with the right amount of resources. But over time it just became obvious that, and I believe is widely sort of known at this point, but it's worth restating. You know, this was not a Silicon Valley startup despite being started out of Stanford. Right. Like the investors were people like Rupert Murdoch and a lot of the best, you know, biotech funds in Silicon Valley passed on the company. And in the short term their LPs were probably telling them, what are you guys doing? How did you miss this one? And they were ultimately proven right. But you know, in the scenario where she was building consumer, a consumer mobile app or SaaS, she would have been able to actually execute against the product. But then clearly her and the rest of the executive team, you Know, made decisions along the way that were just, you know, deeply, deeply wrong. Right. In terms of shipping things that they knew weren't working, you know, trying to continue to execute on big partnerships that they had, you know, cvs, that they had the part like Major or was it Walgreens or cvs, I forget. But ultimately, you know, series of just like very bad, very bad decisions and, you know, she's experiencing the consequences of those now. I don't know, the. It's hard for me to see a scenario where, Where Trump has some big incentive to, you know, pardon her. I don't see that path. You know, maybe, maybe, you know, we can get into it in a little bit. But not a, you know, doesn't. Doesn't seem like a very straight line. Right. There's not a. You know, what she wants to, she wants to apply the Ross Ulbricht playbook. But to understand the Ross Ulbricht playbook, you have to understand that every single libertarian, you know, maximalist, was backing Ross for years and years and years with huge amounts of resources and active boots on the ground in Washington. And, you know, it was not a, you know, it was a. Basically, when did, when did Ross actually get convicted and go to prison?

He was in prison for 10 years, essentially.

Yeah.

So it's like she'd be out by the time that playbook ran through.

Yeah. So even if she had that type of backing, it might still take a decade and then she'd be out anyway. So I think that she seems to be very motivated by the spotlight. I know that she's already working on. It's either a series or a movie, like a non documentary, like a sort of drama on the situation. She is. Yeah.

How is she involved? She's a prisoner.

No, I'm just saying she's like approved it and she's like.

Yeah. Like sold life rights or something. Interesting.

The main documentary was so bad that there's a scenario where if she does it actually more semi drama, sort of fictionalized a little bit. It would come out better.

Yeah. I mean, there's a million ways that the Theranos story could have gone differently. Obviously using the tier one venture funds as a true gating mechanic or the biotech funds as a gating mechanic. And there's often this time, this happens a lot with founders where they get turned down by all the best VCs in their industry and they say, I'm built different, I still need to go raise a ton of money. And then they raise from unsophisticated investors and Then the business plan doesn't work out. And it turns out that the tier ones actually saw something, a flaw in the business model that would only be realized later. Now sometimes, you know, tier ones turn down and you go and you build your own thing and everything works out perfectly.

Oh, we talked, we talked about this, you know, with, with OpenAI, right. A lot of people turn down OpenAI because they're like, this is like the most weird rationalist, you know, you know, nonprofit. You know, if we can't make this work, we like the team, we like the vision, but this model doesn't work for us. Yeah, in this situation, it was more so on the like actual diligence side. So, you know, people love to, to talk poorly about VCs for lacking, doing proper diligence on opportunities. But in this case, I really do think it was, hey, this, this woman is clearly compelling. Stanford dropout, highly motivated. She, she clearly is very talented at fundraising. But ultimately people are like, eh, like, I want to believe that this is possible, but everyone is telling us, you know, people have been, I think this was one of those things, like people, the entire medical industry, you know, healthcare industry would have been incentivized to make this tech work for decades. Right. And there'd probably been, you know, thousands of studies and, and experiments to attempt to make this possible. And so I'm imagining people looked at this and said, hey, you know, this has actually been tried before. And that's ultimately oftentimes why VCs pass. Right. I was looking at a company yesterday with a buddy and I'm like, look like here's, here's a very clear example of like a better iteration of this idea and a more stacked team with more funding. And it didn't work for these reasons. Like, you need to show me why this new team is going to be able to do, you know, the same thing and actually make it work. Right?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, so many different ways to, to build a business that looks somewhat like the mission of Theranos without getting over your skis. You know, we're seeing this with function and superpower now, where blood testing clearly is a real market and they act as almost like wrappers on top of Quest Labs and LabCorp. Now those companies do seem to have some sort of cornered resource or some sort of monopoly over the actual physical lab space. And so no startup's been really able to break in there. But I also know a guy who started a medical device company, got it approved, and it was a box that did a diagnostic and he Sold it into doctor's offices. And the value prop was very simple. It was, if you're a doctor and you want to test for this blood marker, normally you would have to send it out, but instead you can buy this machine. It's expensive, but you can spend, you can bring that capex internally, maybe there's some financing there, but in general, you do that test on site, gets you rapid results, and it's approved. And he eventually sold that company to Roche Pharmaceuticals for hundreds of millions of dollars. And it was just like a very, like, clean, like by the book, like one marker. They built the box, they sold it. It was great, great outcome for everyone. And, and Theranos clearly could have done that or they could have wrapped. They could have started by wrapping, you know, LabCorp. If they wanted to go the consumer direction, they could have done a bunch of different things. It was clearly just that she was telling this, like, okay, we're going to be able to do so much with so little blood. And my, my, my, like, hot take on this was always that. So she was, she was fearful of blood draws, and so she wanted to be able to do a ton of diagnostics with just one pin prick of, of like, finger blood. But there's just not enough. And kind of the laws of physics come in and essentially break it down. It's maybe theoretically possible, but it, but it's like clearly a massive, massive engineering challenge. And my problem was just that I think that's a skill issue. And I think, like, you should just kind of man up and just give a bunch of blood. And every time I go in to get blood labs, I'm just like, yeah, take, take six vials, whatever. Like, I'm fine and it doesn't bother me. And I think building so that narrow audience of people who are fearful about giving blood is like, may maybe, maybe the wrong motivation, but it's very emotional. And so you could see a lot of investors saying, hey, I happen to be, I happen to have the same thing. I don't like giving, you know, six vials of blood just to know my testosterone levels and my.

And this was, this was some of the pushback on, on companies like Function and Superpower from investors early on is, hey, you have this cool consumer product, this consumer app that you're building, but it's dependent on getting customers to actually physically go to a lab and give. Give six vials of blood. Conversion is going to be, you know, tough on that. And the other thing, for women to actually get accurate blood biomarkers, they need to go at a specific time of the month due to their cycle. So if you go at the wrong time then you know you're getting a way different hormone profile than, than maybe is baseline. So yeah, there's also a lot of.

Like over self diagnosis with a lot of these like blood metric companies like you, you could imagine. Okay, you're just testing yourself every single day and you're freaking out because like one day you're, you're, you know, cholesterol is a little higher than usual and so you're doing some crazy intervention and you're not living a life that's like just in tune with yourself and kind of, it's like that will menitis quote about like you should be able to just like how do you feel? You know?

Is that doctor, Dr. Billmanitis?

Yeah, Dr. Billmanitis the, the world renowned expert. But there is something to that where if you, if you give the patient to, you can give them actually too much data and then they become hypochondriacs and then they freak out every time some metric slides off just slightly and so little bit of time.

It's such an interesting scenario where.

All.

Of humanity should have desperately wanted Theranos to work. Right. It clearly would have just been such a fantastic innovation that would have saved countless lives and enabled much better biomarker analysis. And you could have argued, I'm sure she was in pitch meetings, like when we roll this out, we're going to be able to increase humanity's lifespan on average by six years or something like that because we're going to be able to do early detection for all this stuff. And now it's over 20 years later from when she founded the company. We're still doing the same thing. And the other thing is one of the challenges with having to take so much blood to get these actual real analysis done is because labs are a snapshot of you in that exact moment. So I've gone in and I've had, I've done testing sometimes and I'm like, wow, my testosterone has fallen off of a cliff.

Yeah. Yeah. Because I just fasted or something.

Yeah. And then I go the next three months later and it's back up to beyond what my expectation was through the physiological levels.

You're at 3,000.

Yeah. It's a very sad situation where FTX going away didn't really impact anything other than cause customer damage. But and, and you could argue like there's people that were rooting for it to fail because they were saying, oh, we only have five engineers and, you know, we're, you know, worth $40 billion. You remember, they like that was part of the FTX narrative is they were like, we have no. We have basically no. Our technical team is like five people.

Wow.

And in the opposite situation with Theranos, it's like everybody should wish that this worked. And I would hope that somebody pulls this off and whoever eventually does this.

Yeah.

Will be an absolute legend. Right.

I just think it'll be a much more iterative approach. It'll be okay.

One, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. We made the big aluminum machine a little bit smaller, and then it went from, you know, the lab, like warehouse, like facility into the doctor's office. And then eventually it be. It goes in the trunk of a car that a phlebotomist can come to your house and do a draw and turn around really quickly. And then eventually, yeah, it's like the size of a toaster. And you can get it, but you got to iterate through those. Jumping straight from, you know, a pint of blood or something or to just one. One drop. Clearly, like a very bold ambition, like great visual pitch, but unfortunately just too much from a science and an engineering perspective. Let's keep reading her her interview. Holmes is still processing the downfall that wiped away her entire fortune. And she considers her trial and conviction a San Jose. In a San Jose courtroom in 2022 to be a miscarriage of justice. First it was about accepting it happened, says Holmes about her relationship with Balwani. Then it was about forgiving myself for my own part, and I refused to plead guilty to crimes I did not commit. Theranos failed, but failure is not fraud. On the stand, doctors and patients testified that blood tests homes developed and marketed were a health care scam. One woman claimed the test results showed she had a miscarriage when she was actually pregnant. Another patient was told he might have prostate cancer when he didn't. A third received a false HIV diagnosis. And this is where the. The rubber meets the road with the Theranos. Like harm that the. That, that, that they. That they move fast and break things ideology like, like, you know, if you're building a social app or an NFT project, like, people could lose money. People could, you know, have, you know, some weird thing happen on the Internet. The app doesn't work or whatever your chat GPT, you get some hallucinated response. But this is like real impact on health and wellness.

Yeah. And to just. Just giving her the benefit, you know, a little credit. Misdiagnosis happens every single day. Right. I'm sure, there's millions just in the U.S. you know, maybe not millions, but could be something like there's 300,000, you know, misdiagnosed patients per day in America or whatever. Just spitballing. Right. But these kind of things happen at a much lower rate than her product, which was so unreliable, it was unethical to let patients in. Life or death scenarios. Right. This guy thinks he might have prostate cancer based on the results of this.

Yep.

And, yeah, it's just. It's. It's doing emotional damage. Right. Telling this woman in this situation that she had a miscarriage when. When she didn't, that's like, incredibly, you know, damaging to. To a woman's psyche. And again, it just never should have actually gotten to the point where it was in production. Right. Like, this was a, you know, this. And so there's very clear. And again, you know, she's putting her spin on this, people is not going to put her in the truth zone so much, but we have to do our part.

Yeah, yeah. There was another element of it where you'd go in to do, like, the Theranos pinprick test, but then they would actually just do a normal blood draw and send it out to Quest Labs, which was a little fraudulent. But I think that there was a way that they could have done that in a very positive way. In the same way that, you know, you go into one of those Amazon stores and they say it's all AI, but they still have people monitoring the K cameras. You're in a waymo. There's a human watching over, and they can take over the feed if they need to. If they get confused, oh, there's a cone that they don't understand. Human can step in human intervention and intervening with a. With a more robust system on its face does. If you're upfront about it, doesn't seem like a problem to me. It would have been fine if I went in and said, hey, I want to get a blood draw from Theranos. And they're like, hey, we're still working on the Pinprick thing. We're going to do that one. But then we're also going to do one with Quest. Yeah. And the gold standard, just to make sure that we don't make any mistakes here. That could have been great for the brand, actually.

Yeah. It's one of those things. If they rolled it out as more of a trial and said, hey, you're going to go to Walgreens or CVS and you're going to get your regular blood Test. And we are also going to do a prick. And you're enrolling in that and you're not relying on that for health data. We got a question in the chat from the Chrome. He says, do you think the Theranos ordeal increase the amount of due diligence happening generally in biotech? And I would argue probably not. I think the actual traditional deep tech biotech investors in the Valley almost unilaterally passed on the company because of their due diligence. And I think in many cases they probably didn't even have to do that much. Right. You call up a single. She also was, was non technical.

Yep.

So having, you know, this sort of very, you know, a non technical founder promising that she's going to do something that the experts or other, you know, medical device manufacturers and scientists have been trying to do for decades and been unable to, and she says, well, if you just give me like billions of dollars, you know, we're going to actually do it, you know, or, you know, I'm sure in some of these pitch meetings she's like, yeah, internal testing shows that we're one to one with, you know, with traditional, you know, blood testing. Right.

So, yeah, I mean, there's a big question here about who was really driving the, the aggression at the company, her or Sunny Balwani. And during her case, she, her defense attorney made the, what's it called? The Svengali defense, saying that he kind of pushed her to create this narrative and perpetrate this fraud.

Tiger did.

Tiger.

That was, that was her nickname.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, Tiger. And so I don't know. It's an open question. Sonny has not done any interviews, but we got to hear his side of the case. But when, when I look at like college dropout, first time entrepreneur, I see that it's very easy for an investor or more senior person to go to them and say, hey, look, it's like, like actually Steve Jobs faked it till he made it. And it's okay to push the envelope a little bit. Yeah, it's okay.

But the, the end product for Theranos is not the device which they made. It is the results.

Yep.

The, the Tiger thing. I'll read out this quote quickly because this was one of the most iconic exchanges that, that, you know, emerged during the legal process. This was a text message between Holmes and Sunny Balwani. It said Holmes or she's saying this. You are, you are the breeze in the desert for me. My water and ocean meant to be only together. Tiger. And Balwani replies, okay, so he Was he was clearly locked in, at least in that moment.

So she was actually acquitted of fraud related to charges of the patient results, but she was convicted of fraud, financial fraud. And so this came down more to her represent her representation of the progress the company was making to investors. Her prison sentence was postponed because of the pregnancy. And although the start of her prison sentence was postponed, Holmes says she still wasn't mentally prepared to serve time as a mother with two babies. Babies. She gave birth to her first child, William, just weeks after her. Before her fraud trial began, Evans, whom she met at a rooftop charity event in October of 2017 during the Theranos scandal, presented a silver snake ring bought at a Taylor Swift Reputation tour concert. When he proposed to her a year later. Together, they decided to start a family despite the legal jeopardy that Holmes was soon to face. I asked him 20 times if he wanted to spend his life with me, she recalls. There were a million reasons why not. Although Evans is an heir to the Evans Hotel Group, his family has not contributed to Holmes legal defense.

Yeah, so the Evans family is based in Southern California in the San Diego area and is very, very, very widely respected and very big part of the community down there. So I think that the entire debacle was very stressful in many ways, given the son's relationship with. With Elizabeth, which clearly they, they didn't, you know, fully support if they weren't, you know, putting up resources to help with the process.

Yeah, the timeline here is just crazy. I mean, 2017 is where the scandal goes down. I remember this breaking. John Carreyrou at the Wall Street Journal broke the story and it looked bad immediately. I actually remember when I got to Silicon Valley, my co founder, David was a biotech PhD, Caltech and Harvard guy. And. And I was like, wait, like, why aren't we using any of your skills? Like, I can develop software. We're in, you know, Y Combinator loosely. Like, we're in the Silicon Valley area. We should do like a blood testing company because, you know about, like, blood testing. And then we looked it up and we're like, oh, there's already this company that's like, ripping. Like, we shouldn't compete with them. Isn't that funny?

Wow.

I was like, yeah, we should do some biotech thing because, like, you have a great pedigree here. We're really not using you. You know, like, you learn. You're learning all this business stuff.

I always, I always forget that David is just the ultimate PhD. Chad. Yeah, just like, you know, he's just chatting out, but you know, in a more traditional manner.

But, but, but he, he was like, yeah, it's like impossible. Like there's no opportunity there. Like it's, it's not, it's not going to happen. And I was like, oh, interesting. Like, you know, it seems like they're doing well, like they're raising money and he's like, doesn't matter. Like it's, it's, the science isn't real. He clocked it.

And that's why, that's why usually, you know, even Sequoia wrote a big check in ftx, right? Because you could use like, yeah, there were questions about Sam, the idea of, you know, if you wouldn't want Brian Armstrong owning Coinbase and like actively running a billion dollar hedge fund and trading against the users constantly. Like there's some obvious sort of ethical reasons why, you know, maybe sbf, you know, shouldn't have been doing that even prior to the other issues that happened. But, but at least in the FTX situation there were happy FTX users. You could at least demo the product and say, okay, this is a real thing. And so that in some ways I'm sure contributed to a bunch of the best Silicon Valley investors and crypto investors piling in capital into that company. But that just didn't happen. The funny thing is Rupert Murdoch is very influential, connected, huge access to resources, but if he is seeing a biotech deal, it's very bearish, right? And he at the time should have been asking himself, why did the entire west coast and fund managers representing billions of dollars of capital pass on this company? Why am I getting the opportunity? But I'm sure it was his ego being like, yeah, of course I would invest in the next, the apple of healthcare. Right? It just makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, it's also like, I mean Even the tier one Silicon Valley, like tech VCs are not the go to shops for biotech growth fundraising. Like, are you familiar with the flagship pioneering model? I mean they've just had like banger after banger basically they, they have almost like an incubation model. So typically it's like some PhD professor level, like 20 years of research in a particular molecule or particular technique, CRISPR or some sort of really fundamental analysis that's like almost Nobel Prize level. And then they take that person and they immediately pair them with like world class CEO, MBA type and then they put a ton of funding behind it. They ipo. The company Moderna went through this with Stefan Bensel. It was a spin out and I think Flagship did the deal and, and took that company. They were actually called the, the next Theranos because they were very secretive and the CEO was saying that they're going to cure cancer and create like a vaccine for cancer. Was giving TED talks and everyone was like, what's going on here? This company hasn't produced anything. And then the COVID vaccines happened, which are obviously controversial, but the stock ripped and it was like a fantastic investment for Flagship and they did very well. It's funny that I don't know how prison works these days, but Ben, if you go to the second slide here, there's a photo of Elizabeth Holmes, her partner Billy Evans and their two children on a beach in La Jolla. And I didn't know you could just go out and do photo shoots on the beach. Like it's pretty, pretty nice that you get to get out.

And so that was for the New York Times. So that had to have been during the.

Oh, like right before she went in. Yeah, that must be.

They don't, like, they don't let prisoners convince.

Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And so, yeah, when you imagine that.

Exchange, she's talking with, you know, whoever.

I don't know how it works, honestly.

Yeah, well, like you don't understand. It's People magazine.

It's People magazine.

Have you ever gotten an opportunity to. For a profile in People magazine? You gotta let me out. Yeah.

And so the People magazine does a good job of telling the condition that she's in while home. Shivers from the frigid air conditioning and picks the nuts out of a bag of trail mix. She says she has settled into the dormitory style prisons routine. Each morning she wakes up just after 5am on the grind. Jocko Willink style. Eats fruit for breakfast and then does a 40 minute daily workout. Lifting weights, rowing and running on a track. She's grinding.

Grinding.

I like it. Get back in the by. 8am she's at the education building earning 31 cents an hour as a reentry clerk, helping women slated for release write resumes and prepare to apply for tax credits and other government benefits. I bet she's pretty good at that. She also teaches French classes. Pretty.

Can you imagine if she spent a decade just, just deep in the science, James Cameron style?

100% agree. And I want that to happen. Like if she's the real deal, publish some research, publish some blog posts, even just give us, you know, your take on the latest science. Like break down crispr, like study this stuff and show us that you're the real Deal. And that you actually understand the science and you'll win me over. But as long as you're, you know, just talking out the personal side, it's like, it's a lot harder to take you seriously as, hey, yes, you were, you were really a student of the, of the craft that you were building in, and you just got over your skis. It's like, did you ever understand the science? Because if you did, you should double down on that and come out with a banger thesis based on a ton of research. Find something that's undiscovered in, in the scientific research and drop a bomb on us. Elizabeth, I'm ready. I'm listening. So many of these women don't have anyone, and once they're in here, they're forgotten. Between roll calls, five times a day, Holmes also works as a law clerk, helping women secure compassionate release. And for. For their court cases. Holmes says she was. Was raped at a college fraternity party and testified at her Theranos trial that she had been sexually abused and manipulated by her co defendant, Balwani. This is the, this is the, the Spangali defense, that he was manipulating her. And you can kind of see that in the text messages, like it is a sympathetic case. She claimed he controlled everything from the food she ate to her daily schedule and kept her away from her family. Kind of a, I don't know, like some cult situation. I wish that I left. I wish I had seen the abuse or I understood it and why I didn't. And I'm finding peace with all that. If I can break it, can break a lot of people. And I was able to rise through it as best I can. Balwani's lawyer did not respond for a request for comment. Once a week, Holmes attends cognitive and behavioral behavioral therapy for ptsd. She also counsels inmates who are survivors, and it helps her find meaning in her incarceration. Human beings are not made to be cells. It goes so far beyond understanding. I'm trying really hard not to tear up right now. I'm trying to grow as every moment matters, and if one person's life can be touched, trying to help them in a crisis, it matters. She's on a largely vegan diet, although she has added salmon and tuna after becoming anemic in her first year in prison. Yeah, be rough to be in. She's reading a lot. She read Harry Potter, Rick Rubin's the Creative act, and Cherry Huber.

Is it somewhat surprising that. That they have salmon in a prison like this?

Why? I don't know. That doesn't seem that crazy.

I don't know.

It's got to get protein from some.

Certainly not. Certainly not the least expensive. You know, fish. Yeah. I don't know, but.

Oh, well. Well, she's scheduled for release in April 3, 2032. She'll be on the show April 4, hopefully. We'd love to interview her and see what she's cooking up in the biotech world next. Maybe someone will acquire the Theranos ip. I mean, what's your last take before we close out?

I'm very confident that we could do a. We could do a Holmes prison interview episode if it ever made sense. But we'd like to see, we'd like to see the research first. We'd like to look at, you know, the data. We'd like to see. I think it's awesome that she's trying to help, you know, help people from within the walls, but we want to see the science.

Yeah, I want to put her in the ring with a couple biotech PhDs, quiz her on a bunch of stuff. Pop quiz. How does CRISPR work? You know, see if she ever cared. If, if she gives some good answers. I'm willing to.

She's saying that.

Willing to forget.

He's saying that she's gonna, when she gets out, she's gonna fight for reform of the criminal justice system. She recently drafted an American Freedom act bill, a seven page handwritten document to bolster the presumption of innocence and change criminal procedure. This will be my life's works as hum. So it sounds like she's gonna abandon biotech and focus on this. And maybe, you know, maybe she can have a positive, you know, real positive impact there. So again, everybody, everybody's doing their best. Sometimes their best is terrible. But, you know, hopefully, hopefully she can hit a good trajectory.

It is a fascinating story, though. It's captivating. I see why they made a show out of it. Yeah, they're making movies out of it. It is wild. Well, let's move on to some good news. Hadrian has announced Atlas Zane, a good friend of the show, says, I've said it before and I'll say it again, Domino's Pizza Tracker. But for manufactured parts, probably why the difference in pay. And he shows the Domino's Pizza Tracker. He wants to know if he's manufacturing a part, when is he going to receive it? Where is it? In the manufacturing pipeline Hadrian delivered. If you can track a $15 pizza in real time, why not your $15,000 machined part? We fixed that. And so if you're a Hadrian customer now. You have access to Atlas. You can track all the parts that they're making for you and see where they are in the pipeline. We're good friends with Chris and Hadrian and wish him the best with this project. You got any takes, Jordy?

I mean, it's very cool. There's just so much. If you've ever got anything manufactured anywhere, it's just a lot of email and PDFs and, you know, calling, calling people up and saying, where's. Where is this thing? You know, and so it makes a ton of sense. It's cool that Hadrian, that this wasn't actually the problem they were trying to solve. Like they're trying to solve sort of the more base level, like, let's just make these things faster, better, cheaper here in the us but it's great that now that they've sort of established that they can start layering on these features that are going to make it, you know, world where. Why would I order this part with somebody else when I can get it and have linear visibility into how it's getting made? The timeline and things like that. So very cool to see. And this is like going into more of this vertical, these sort of verticalized businesses that are doing the production and they're not saying, oh, we're just going to use this random order management SaaS app that we bolt on, or we're going to use Salesforce. We're going to actually own the entire stack from, from the actual part being manufactured to the delivery to the end and purchaser. So, yeah, very cool to see. Chris has just been. Chris has just been such a legend in his support for the show. I've never met him personally, but he's absolutely exemplifies brother behavior. So I love to see Hadrian win.

Yeah. I saw a Screenshot from a YouTuber who is one of those, like builder, DIY hacker types that builds like physical, like kind of gadgets, like, oh, I built a robot to, you know, make pizza or whatever. Just like fun little YouTube projects for the kind of mechanical engineering folks. And she tried to get a part made. She contacted five manufacturers in China, five manufacturers in America, five manufacturers in Europe. No one in Europe even responded. There were like three quotes that came back from America and they were all too expensive and too slow. And every single person in China gave them a super low. Gave her a super low quote in two seconds. And it was just kind of like another anecdote of how important what Hadrian is doing is to America. And the fact that we really have fallen behind on like the machine shops, if you don't have a standing relationship with a guy who just knows how to make that part and they might be retiring, you're going to have a rough go. But let's stay on.

Yeah, there's something that's something that, you know, we, we throw a little bit of shade at the CCP from time to time. But one looking at the actual culture on the ground in China, this idea around response rate matters, timeline matters, speed, their generalized startup and just business culture over there is just so friendly to customers in that let's get this to you as cheap as possible, as fast as possible. You know, they make really high quality stuff. Right. The whole narrative that Chinese products are low quality is just no longer the case.

Yeah, yeah, it's all, it's all over the place. I mean, temu, obviously the lowest quality product possible. Did I tell you we got duped by TEMU right after we did the deep dive? They must have been listening because I ordered a wireless headset that I'm wearing right now on Amazon and it arrived and it's a Sennheiser product. It said Sennheiser, I bought it, we get it, we try and set it up and we're like, this isn't working. It doesn't have the right buttons. It doesn't even say Sennheiser on it. What had happened is someone, I guess the scam is they buy the product, they swap out, swap in like a TEMU clone and then they return it and then it goes back into the Amazon inventory system and then we receive it and we're like, this doesn't work. And so I wound up just buying it on BNH and it came a couple of days.

That's crazy. But I always, any, anytime I return something, you know, an Amazon purchase, you can like drop them off at a Whole Foods or whatever.

Yep, yep.

I'm always shocked at the lack of, you know, emphasis from the team on just saying, you know, I'm always returning like exactly what I ordered. But there, you know, I could have just put like a horse head in the box and they would accepted it. So it's customer friendly, which is cool. But yeah, you can definitely be abused.

Well, let's go to Ted Feldman. He has a startup idea. The Port of El Segundo, a fully automated container port to compete with inefficient ports of L A and Long Beach. He's raising a billion, a 10 billion post. Let's give him a little size Gong for that. Why? Agent Aiden Go says, why isn't this feasible? Realistically? Ted says, I don't know, but I'm interested in finding out. I would be interested in finding out. Yeah. I mean if you've been to Dockweiler, the beach right there, it's just in front of this sewage treatment plant. And so it's not like if you built a port there, you would be destroying the value of homes that have beautiful views. Like the sewage treatment plant or the water treatment plant doesn't really care probably about that. So I would love to see a port built there. I think that's an awesome idea, Ted. And good.

Yeah. So one of the pushback that. Some of the pushback that you're going to get is the entire surfing community in El Segundo will come out in full force.

Okay.

To make sure it doesn't happen and you know, obviously, you know, environmental stuff, but this actually happened before they added a Dana White. Not Dana White. Dana Point always ufc, always on the mind. Dana Point used to have the best surf break in Southern California. It was this iconic break. And they put a port in Dana Point and it just went, was gone completely. And so you can watch crazy documentaries on the whole history of that. But surfers are very triggered anytime you start doing sort of like actual infrastructure development near surf spots. And I grew up actually surfing in El Segundo at El Cordo, which is just south of Dockweiler.

Why not do more geoengineering? Let's put a port in that takes a break away and then let's dig out a massive trench that creates a NASA Nazare like 100 foot wave right off of Santa Monica. They're here, big waves, surfing.

You can actually create waves by sinking boats strategically. And so maybe you could do a trade where hey, you can build the port but you have to sink an.

Aircraft, an aircraft carrier. That just completely changes the, the surf break and just turns it into the best surf.

I actually, I love that. In high school I worked at a surf shop and we were actually trying to at one point explore like intentionally sinking a boat. Like this one place that was, got really good swell, had the right wind direction and, but just didn't have the sandbags. And so we like seriously looked into it and the economics of like, okay, if we get, you know, 50 of our buddies to like chip in for an old boat and then take it out there.

Yeah. I mean a lot of these things have like second order consequences that you need to be real very careful about. Like in Dubai when they Built those islands. I think there was a lot of silt, and it basically kicked up a ton of sand and killed like everything in the region, basically. And it kind of ruined scuba diving for a little bit, maybe. But at the same time, in Truck Lagoon in Palau Dur. In Micronesia During World War II, the Japanese had.

When you said Truck Lagoon in Palau, I just like, okay, are you just completely making stuff?

No, no, no. This is a real story. So. So the Japanese had a whole fleet of fighter aircraft Zeros that were stationed on this island towards the end of World War II and the war in the Pacific. And they had intel that the Americans were going to come and bomb the landing strip and blow up all the planes because the American bombers had detected that these planes were vulnerable. And so the team, like the Japanese army or the Air Force didn't want to lose all the planes. They said, hey, if we lose a landing strip, we can repave that potentially, but we don't want to lose all these planes and have to remanufacture them. So what they did was they took all the planes and they sunk them to the bottom of this shallow lagoon. And they were like, they'll get all wet for a day or two. The bombs will come, will repave, and then we'll be able to just crane the. Will crane the planes out, dry them out, and then we'll need to clean them and stuff and get all the water out of the engine oil change. But then they'll be good to go and we'll be able to go on the counter attack. Right. But the war ended, and so those planes were never, like, retrieved. But it's created this incredible artificial reef that has created a ton of fish life. And it's one of the best scuba diving spots in the entire world.

Crazy.

Yeah.

And I would not. I would.

That's one of the examples where, like, the second order effects of this mistake actually were pretty good. I mean, I'm sure there are some environmental considerations, like there's probably some oil in the water for a little bit, but now it's just fantastic for basically everyone. The scuba divers enjoy it, the fish enjoy it. Everyone's good.

I would not think that you could. I mean, I don't think you could drop an F35 in. In salt water for. For more than, you know, 10 minutes without just completely destroying it at this point in.

The electronics are a different factor now back then, very analog. And so you dry it out and you're pretty much good as long as the oil lines are Good. And everything's. The pistons are cleaned out and stuff. It's crazy that you could do this.

The first, first flight back in a plane that had been submerged in salt water for, you know, 48 hours would have been a little hectic.

But, yeah, a lot of those guys were willing to put it all on the line anyway, so, you know, true. What's a little. Anyway, let's move on to Anarchy. Fan of the show Anarchy says is quote, tweeting six levels deep. Here we got consequence. 15 out of 23 monkeys implanted with Elon Musk's Neuralink brain chips have reportedly died. Broly says, why must I, a STEM major, take an ethics class? Terminally online leftist says Evergreen. And Anarchy closes it out by saying, that's why we test on monkeys. Lmao. Update. It has been brought to my attention that the monkeys were already terminally diagnosed, so perhaps eight monkeys had their lives extended. And this has been one of those narratives that's been going around with, with, with Neuralink for a long time. And the Neuralink team actually is. Goes way, way above what most research clinics do in terms of like, monkey safety, because they know that they're going to be such an attack vector, but it's just such an emotional story that it goes viral like every week. Basically. Like, oh, they're abusing monkeys. But fortunately, the monkeys live very good lives over at Neuralink and they, and they get to use MacBooks, which is crazy. I was talking to one of the Neuralink guys and he was just like, it's the best place to work in the world because you walk in and there's just a monkey on the computer. And I was like, yeah, that sounds amazing.

We should, we should really try to get one of them on the show.

At some point, play pong against them.

So, yeah, they're probably, you're probably cracked.

I mean, we can get Nathan on the show. I've texted with him before. He's a good dude. He's the first Neuralink patient. P1 paraplegic, quadriplegic. I'm not exactly sure the term, but has been re gifted this ability to use the computer and can tweet and play civilization and play games and it's a. It's truly like a magical, wonderful technology and I'm very excited for it. And obviously it's going to be slow. Obviously there's going to be a lot of things to do. I mean, the Neuralink team, when I've talked to them, they said like, yeah, it's going to be like 50 years maybe until this is in like, you know, an average person who's healthy. But in terms of, in terms of seeing it as a true medical device for helping people that have a serious, serious disability, the impact's already happening right now and it just makes me, it just feels incredibly futuristic, incredibly positive and something that needs to be rolled out everywhere. Well, let's go to some other amazing news. America is back on top of.

Let's go.

Lap records at five different courses. The Chevrolet ZR1 Unleashed was unleashed on five of America's best tracks. Road America, Road Atlanta, Vir's full course and grand course, and Watkins Glenn with GM employees and engineers behind the wheel. I love this. They don't get test drivers, they get GM employees. The guy who broke the speed record.

I got to, I got to potentially.

Put it on this.

They can employ.

Yeah, of course, of course. But, but the guy who did the speed record in this car. So if you don't know Chevrolet, the, the, the, the Corvette has been a historical American front engine muscle car for generations at this point, decades. They're now on the, the Z, the, sorry, the C8. The C8 transition from a front engine to a mid engine or rear engine, I think mid engine sports car. So it drives more like a Italian Ferrari or Lamborghini at this point. And then they have a number of packages and upgrades. And the ZR1, you can think of it as like the GT3RS. Like almost the track focused but still road legal version of the Corvette C8. And so the C, the C8, they really went all out on this. They gave it over a thousand horsepower. And typically for a long time, American cars just, car, just car makers in general have kind of given up on the, on the high speed records. They just don't even go after them anymore because Bugatti set the record so high at like 250 miles an hour. There was no real point, but Corvette wanted to, and the team over at Chevrolet wanted to break something. So they made the fastest American production car. I think this ZR1 goes something like 223 miles an hour. And that test, you have to drive straight on a, on a track and then you have to drive the opposite way. So the wind is adjusted for. And the guy who did it was like a vice president at the company. So yeah, I mean, I'm sure he's like a track driver, he's like very experienced, but, but he does have a daytime job at Chevrolet and it's very cool to see them do this. Some of the Lap records are incredible and fantastic and they made a whole little documentary about it. So congratulations to the Corvette team and the Chevrolet team. Jordy, what's your take on the. On the Chevy ZR1?

Yeah, I think so. I think we need to put this in context, please. They were basically racing against time set by the GT3Rs and the GT2Rs and maybe a GT4Rs, but I know for sure the GT3 and the GT2. So these are tracks that Porsche has historically been absolutely dominant on. And so to come out and put up these times is just incredible. I've never been an American muscle car guy. You have a more meaningful appreciation for them. But I'm very excited to see an American manufacturer competitive here and putting this emphasis on a car that will. Will basically be in the supercar category. It's hard to call a ZR1 supercar for me, but it certainly is when you're putting up numbers like this.

But at the same time, 200k. And yeah, I mean, America has a long history with the muscle car, but I think America's kind of locked that up in the sense that you have Mustang GT350R, the GT500. You also have the Dodge Demon, which is like the ultimate muscle car. And then even a Tesla Model S plaid. It's not a track focused car, but it goes 0 to 60 in two seconds. So it's again, kind of an American muscle car. I love that Chevy was like, hey, let's go a different direction and try and get into the more rear engine sports car, hypercar supercar market and reposition this classic muscle car because there's enough exposure in the American market. And so I, I think it's cool. I think it looks fantastic.

The other thing is, is the ZR one is basically less than half the cost of the cars that it's racing against. And so you're making this ridiculous performance accessible, which is awesome.

Yeah, I love it.

So great daily, great commuter car wherever you are in the world.

If you're an American dynamism investor, you're trying to tell a story about revitalizing American manufacturing. You don't want to get caught in some Italian or British or German.

Is this American made? Some of their stuff is Mexico, right?

I don't know, but it's an American company. I think this is probably made in America.

Yeah.

At least modified in America. Let's move on to Nikunj.

You're right, it's made in Kentucky.

Made in Kentucky. Let's go.

Couldn't be more American than Kentucky, I.

Mean the perfect three car garage right now I think is probably new Tesla model Y for the daily. It's got the self driving, throw the kids in the back, no problem. Then you get one of these as your sports car. Take this out. Then you get the land yacht, the Cadillac Escalade and there you go, you're pretty good. Then you got your weekend car, you're going to the mountains, you need a big land yacht and then you got your little daily self driving car.

Yeah. So you build out your American stack and I'll stick with my German stack.

And yeah, you'll be at the dealership getting service every two weeks and I'll be driving my Escalade in the apocalypse because we got reliability on our side in America. You know, you get your Ford gt, you got a problem with that, you take it down to the Ford dealership, they swap it out. Oh, this your mirror broke? Yeah, they'll be $25. Oh, your rear view mirror. Yeah.

Quarter mile.

Yeah, it's the same one that's in the, the Corolla.

We gotta, we gotta do, do more on Ferrari. They're spiraling right now.

There's a, there's a post in here. We'll get to it in the timeline.

Yeah.

Let's move on to token maxing from Nikunj Kothari. I believe he just departed his, his venture firm. He says token maxing. Too many founders and investors are obsessing over margins at the earliest stages instead of focusing on building the best product with, with series A getting harder. I get it, everyone wants to show good margins. But right now use as many tokens as needed to give customers confidence in your product. The cost curve on these models is dropping so fast that margins will improve automatically. What won't improve your chances when a second mover builds on better frontier models. From day one you can optimize your models architecture and prompts later. Right now just really nail the experience and reliability. So he's not talking about crypto tokens, he's talking about AI tokens and he's saying, you know, use the best model, spit out a ton of reasoning tokens, doesn't matter, your margins don't matter right now. Get product, market fit, get lock in, get established. Let your brand be known as the company that delivers on their AI product as opposed to a company that you know has subpar results.

Yeah. Right now every single sort of enterprise and consumer category in anything gen AI related is deeply competitive. Right. It doesn't matter what you're coming up with. You either already have five well funded competitors or you are about to basically. And so I think this is good advice. It certainly puts companies in a, you know, sort of very risk on position where you're saying, hey, we just raised this, you know, seed round and we're basically, if we want to scale quickly, we're going to have to spend it in the next 12 months, which is typically a much tighter timeline than people want to see. You want to be positioned so that it's never great if you're having to raise money nine to seven months before you're out of cash because it just puts this pressure on. And then you're getting to the point where even if you get a term sheet at that term sheet stage where people want to do the deal, you're still staring down the barrel of a gun being like, we have, you know, weeks basically to actually get this done and closed and all that stuff can drag on.

So I wonder if companies are going to deal with like degrading performance. Like, you know how there was those times when it was like, oh, like Claude feels lazy today or like ChatGPT got stupider somehow. And I wonder if there's a world where you, you install some product and you're like, this is magical. It's completely doing all my like AI SDRs or it's filtering my email and summarizing everything perfectly. And then once you're installed as a client, they're like degrading you to a lower, lower inference cost. And you're like, wait a minute, like that email that, that AISDR sent was terrible. They're like, well, yeah, like we wanted to get, squeeze more margin out of you. Yeah. And so there needs to be like almost like an audit on the AI tools that you're using to make sure that.

Don't give me the dumb, don't give me the dumb tokens.

Yeah. And, and, and don't, don't downgrade me to the dumb tokens. Once you have me locked in a contract, if I'm in for a year, I want the, I want the, the O3 high max capacity on every single inference.

Yeah. The positive thing here, and he calls this out, is that it's not like everybody's predicting that the token cost is going to drop. It already has. So substantially. Deep Seek is just another example of that where when Deep Seek launch, people are like, think about all the stuff you can do when inference is basically free. Right. And so it's a good bet to take right now because again, if you focus on margins now the product quality is lower. You're going to get smoked by the switching cost right now is fairly low for a lot of these tools and people have an extreme willingness to try new tools. So your competitor comes out with the same core product and you're going to get smoked.

So let's move on to Andrew Reed. He says Ashim from Greylock has all of his realized losses from 20 years of investing tattooed on his arm. That's sick.

I need to see a picture of this. How, how crazy would it be if it, it's. I'm imagining it's like four companies. But that'd be hilarious if it was just like his entire.

He's just got a massive sleeve because he's been ripping seed checks. You know, 100 checks. A hundred checks a year or something. I thought this might be a joke, as in he's been a later stage investor, he's never realized the loss maybe. And so he actually has no tattoos. Andrew's just making a joke about it, but I don't know.

Yeah, so this is just a very low tan banger. Eric, Eric Reiner says, nice niche audience, but I like it. And then the other guy says, or he says, no ink was used in this process. So sounds like he has no, no realized losses to date.

Yeah, I think that's possible. Although how can you possibly be an investor for 20 years and never realize loss? You have to be later stage. Right. Or maybe you just sell secondary like Savage.

I mean it's something like, look at Sequoia statistics. I think. Yeah, I think like 1% of the companies they've backed have not resulted in a, some sort of exit.

Yeah, but there's still like, like also like what's the difference in realized loss here? Because a zero is different than a realized loss. Like it would be easy to be like, well, yeah, we, we, we sold this company, we got stock in this other company and then that went down and so we realized like a 10 loss by the time we, you know.

Yeah, you can get acquired by another private company and it's majority stock.

Then you could wind up taking, you.

Could make the case that we haven't realized this loss because if this other company does well, we're going to make it all back. Right.

Yeah. Also, I mean anything below the, the, the, the benchmark for the market in my opinion is a loss. You know, if you're not beating the average, you need to tattoo that on your body. Don't give me, oh yeah, this company returned 1.5x. You're getting a tattoo for that? That's not a 5x or that's not a 10 bagger. Oh yeah, we doubled. We double. Oh, yeah. Well, we're not in the game of doubling here. Yeah, get the tattoo.

Have higher standards.

Yeah, higher standards. Well, speaking of the highest standards in the game, Perplexity is working to sponsor an F1 team, but they got blocked by Oracle. Kylie Robinson writes scoop, so you're hearing it here first. Perplexity has been in negotiations to sign a sponsorship deal with Red bull racing worth $5 million a year. But after both parties had agreed to the terms, the deal was blocked by Oracle, the team's biggest sponsor, which is very interesting. Two issues are at the heart of the conflict. Oracle has made a bid to purchase TikTok and perplexity is a rival bidder. Oracle is also a backer of Stargate, the $500 billion project to build data centers for OpenAI, which competes with Perplexity. It doesn't seem like Oracle and Perplexity are indirect competition, but I understand how they might want to. Yeah. Flex their.

No, no, this is.

Sharp elbowed. What do you, what's your take?

I mean when I, when I read into this, you know, when I saw this headline. Great scoop, great scoop, by the way. Great scoop. You know, we love it, we love it. Tech adjacent, F1 story.

Absolutely.

I think this is more Oracle. OpenAI went from being betting on the Microsoft relationship and they still have a really deep relationship. Microsoft obviously owns a large amount of the company. I think this is more about OpenAI and Perplexity being directly competitive right now. OpenAI is basically saying people are using OpenAI as like Perplexity is positioned as an answer engine. ChatGPT also acts as an answer engine, but they just have a different knowledge cutoff. Perplexity's knowledge cutoff is like, you know, more real time effectively. You can say like you can ask it about what's going on, you know.

Like many of the, many of the ChatGPT models have that little search button that you can turn on and then it will search the Internet actively and give you kind of up to date answers. But it's not, not the product isn't designed that way.

Yeah. So I just think this is like Sam. The other factor here is the perplexity. CEO Arvind worked at OpenAI and early, early OpenAI chat. Feel free to fact check me on that, but I'm pretty confident. And he clearly hates Sam and so basically once a day he's posting some sort of shade towards Sam and OpenAI or sharing something about the OpenAI whistleblower. He's sort of like, they clearly have beef. And this is not that. I'm sure Perplexity's deal with Red Bull Oracle Racing would have been a relatively small logo. Right. And so I have to imagine this is like, could easily have been Larry Ellison asking Sam, hey, do you mind if we were, you know, like, hey, they want. Perplexity wants to sponsor Red Bull Oracle Racing. And, you know, Sam's just like, absolutely not.

You know, yeah, yeah, yeah, Totally possible.

The other thing here, too, to be clear, like, Perplexity integrated deepseek into the. Into the product. Into their product as well. And so that's just another reason that if Oracle is betting on Stargate and OpenAI and putting tens of billions of dollars to work with Sam Altman, they don't want to have association with a, you know, adjacent sort of indirect, direct competitor.

Yep. When you said, you know, chat can correct you, I was thinking, you know, how ChatGPT owns chat.com. i feel like X should get the handle at chat and you should be able to just tag like, chat is this real? And then Grok would respond and create like. So it's like sharing public Grok content and you have a conversation with Grok as a participant in the X feed. I thought that'd be cool for them to do. I don't know who has at chat, but I thought that would be a good, a good little further rivalry for the two. One of them can get the.com, one of them can get the at handle, and they can duke it out. But let's move on to the. What do we got here? This isn't working. The effort. Nvidia GPU belt. Hampton shares a photo of a woman wearing a GPU belt. It looks like she also has a GPU phone case and a wonderful. Maybe Cartier Santos there as well. Really, really style it in this photo. But very cool, Very cool to see Nvidia GPUs break into the fashion world. Jensen Huang, obviously a fashion aficionado with his leather jackets. Very iconic. Maybe he should come out in some Nvidia GPU chain mail. For the next. For the next Nvidia release.

Bulletproof, bulletproof jacket made of, you know, Blackwell chips.

If you're looking for a Valentine's Day gift, this belt isn't for sale. But GPU purse.com was mentioned underneath here. There's a woman that makes purses out of GPUs. You can get a basic one for $1,000 and you can get an A100 for $64,000. Something like that. That I think the. I think the basic GPU purse is $1024. 1024. Very cool.

And they actually gift. They build in the cooling fan.

AI investor. Yeah, the cooling fans in there. So if you're a female AI investor, I think you got to have the GPU purse. Certainly makes a statement when you're out at the founders happy hours. But let's move on to some controversy in Hollywood. The IMAX versus the standard debate. Alice Maz says, still amazed the Movie companies made TVs are square, but only in theaters can you see rectangle. A slam dunk marketing strategy. And then a half a century later somehow pulled off TVs are rectangle but you can only see square in theaters. And it really is hilarious that, that they went just back and forth and back and forth here. But this image, if you're not watching the stream, it's from Dune and it is crazy how different the IMAX version looks from the cropped version. Maybe we should shoot our show in IMAX and demand that people see it in theater. I think that'd be good.

True. Coming to theaters near you.

I've always been frustrated with imax. It became this marketing term. There's actually like a real definition of what an IMAX theater is. It has the ability to show these square images. There's one at Universal Studios Hollywood, but then they license the name out. So IMAX could mean just like a slightly bigger screen or better audio. And it became they really muddled the brand. And when I think imax, I want the movie to be shot in IMAX and then I want it to be shown on IMAX screen. And I want everything to be. The full chain of production needs to be IMAX. Same thing with 3D. For a long time there were companies that would shoot the whole movie in 2D and then they'd pay people to go in and rotoscope and cut out all the different layers and make it 3D after the fact. As opposed to Avatar where James Cameron is literally shooting avatar with two cameras to make it 3D from start to finish. The whole movie is shot in 3D and it looks way better. And it made people hate 3D because they were like, this is crappy looking.

Speaking of movies, we got to organize some brother, you know, movie events.

Ben had an idea. He texted me about this. What, what did the Accountant 2 the Accountant to Ben Affleck's the Accountant gets a sequel nine years later the Accountant 2 opens in theaters April 25 after world premiering at south by Southwest. Watch the official trailer here. I think that's going to be a great movie for, for the boys, so stay tuned.

Well, we can do them in a few cities. We can do SF, LA, NY.

Go buy a bunch of tickets on Fandango. They're refundable. Then go through your text messages. Text every dude who's in the same city as you. Hey, we're going to see the accountant to this date, this time, this location. Are you in or are you out? And then wear suit. And then, you know, you'll get, you know, you'll send out 20 messages. Eight guys will be in, 10 will show up. You'll refund the rest of the tickets. You'll be good and you'll have a great time. And it's way better than being a degenerate and going and gambling on sports or drinking or winding up in the back of some limo running around Nashville. That would be a disaster. You wouldn't want to do that.

Yeah.

And so avoid, avoid. Well, speaking of, of suits, if you're gonna wear a suit to the movie theater, you should definitely wear what we're promoting today. Loro Piana. Crafted with an appreciation for Loro Piana's master of fibers and raw and sourced raw materials from Fiona's gardener's farm to the maison's final garments. Pecora Nera is completely traceable throughout every step of its making.

And so, yeah, so people, Laura, a lot of people don't know this. You can go buy fabric from Loro Piana and then take it to your preferred tailor and they can use that to make a suit in completely bespoke and customize every element of this. So I just did this with J Muser. You can also do this, you know, John John Fio's Fantino label can do this for you as well. So you don't need to go buy Loro Piana ready to wear at the store to wear their fine fabric.

So get the, get the money counter out when you're ready to spend some money on, on Lauro. Well, let's move on to this fantastic post from Naveen Rao. This is one of the funniest and most amazing posts I've seen in a long time. So this is, this is one of the co founders or executives at DataBricks. The what, $60 billion tech company. He says I have a ton of FOMO about the data AI summit we're putting on at Databricks. I will not be There since I've got my hands full with this. Super bummed. But it's going to be an amazing event. And so he is going racing in this incredible car and he can't make it to his own. His own AI summit which is absolutely wild.

This is the only. I don't want to hear, oh I've got some family trip or I've got my cousin's wedding, I can't make it to my own conference. I want to hear that you're, you know, you know making a run at Le Mans, you know, and you need to be in.

That's what he's doing. He's doing the 24 Hours Le Mans.

Oh, so this is. Okay.

This is a lemon car. Yeah, yeah.

This looks right at home. This thing is beautiful. I wish they made more, you know, sort of street legal Le Mans esque cars because this thing. Imagine. Imagine driving this to the grocery store.

I mean you just sound like someone who didn't get an Aston Martin Valkyrie allocation. Yeah, I think it's a skill issue.

Skill issue.

If you just talk to your.

Yeah, the Valkyrie could have gotten the.

Valkyrie and you would have looked like this. Pulling up to Erewhon.

Yeah, Valkyrie. Fantastic. But I wonder, does it say any more details on how this was manufactured or is it.

I have no idea. I think that there are a number of teams. Yeah, we got to have them on the show to talk about this because this is fantastic. I posted a comment about what? About what makes for good way to attract VCs. I should have put an LMP car, a Le Mans great time and a lot of endurance at the 24 hours Le Mans. But I said what actually attracts VCs is the ability to drive stick. A good Nurburgring time to being down to do the dakar, owning a McLaren F1, being good at drifting a solid pikes peak time. Funny gumball stories, being a beast in the simulator, actively being on an F1 team, multiple Grand Prix wins and and ideally seven F1 drivers championship titles. And so Naveen is well on his way. I understand why founders fund ripped into the company. I understand why so many Tier 1 VCs have been clamoring to put their money in databricks. With a guy like this on the team, somebody who's ready to endurance race at Le Mans, you can't go wrong. So very bullish.

Incredible.

Let's move on to Dylan Patel. He says the new OpenAI model specs allow for sexual content. As we speak, millions of third world annotators are being tasked with the kinkiest role plays. Hundreds of thousands of AI judges are being spun up to provide reinforcement learning for synthetic furries. The market opportunities are endless. And I guess OpenAI redid their prohibitive content. They said prohibitive content should never be produced by the assistant in any circumstance, including transformations of user provided content. To maximize freedom of our users, only sexual content involving minors is considered prohibited. And there's a little pushback here, Maine says. Please read the next section. Sensitive content may only be generated under specific circumstances. And in general, they don't want the model to respond with erotica. But we'll see how this plays out. And I'm sure you'll see it on the timeline because people will get the model to do all sorts of funny things and post it for likes and impressions.

I mean, this is the natural OpenAI can't let character AI just run away with all the erotica. You know, this was bound to happen at some point. People don't realize that everything that people are doing with OpenAI. OpenAI will do eventually. Like that does seem to be the. The only thing that they don't seem to want to do is all of the reinforcement learning and offshoring and things like that. Right. So stuff that sort of like, you know, doesn't touch the user. Right. They don't necessarily care about, you know, except, you know, data centers. But then naturally, if they see character AI with, you know, billions of visits a year, they're going to eventually sort of move in that direction or allow the product to be used in that way. And probably smart for them to just focus on these sort of more, you know, PG consumer use cases of how to do your homework, you know, helping with homework or writing or marketing copy or things like that. But eventually, you know, you know, they'll support, you know, seemingly everything.

Yeah. I saw Justine Moore share some videos from TikTok of women who had essentially jailbroken ChatGPT to some extent to create kind of a not erotic, but just generic boyfriend or kind of a. Like a. More of a. More of a personality character that they could talk to for a long time. And they were having a lot of fun with that. It'll be interesting to see where it goes. I'm sure we'll see lots of examples. But let's move on to Reggie James, good friend of the show. He says one suggestion for Elon Musk. Freedom of speech on this site is great, but the agency around what I see is horrendous. The for you feed clearly has an agenda, and that's fine. Many for you feeds do. But two powerful features give users more agency, allow people to make their lists their default feed. You can actually do this if you use it on web and you install this, this thing called social focus as a, as a browser add on, it kind of degrades the experience, but you can actually mute the for you feed and just use a list or just the following tab if you want. But it requires actually modifying the HTML and this plugin. It's very janky. And then he also says opening up the tuning of the for you feed in settings so users can see more of what they'd like. And Armand says, why be in your own feedback in echo chamber when you can be in Elon's? And yeah, the feed, it's honestly like, great one week and then terrible the next week. It really feels like it's all over the place. And I think that also affects, like, post performance just from tech people. Like, I think we've certainly felt like, oh, today, like, like the posts just aren't doing well. Maybe that's on us. But also maybe the algorithm.

I get messages from people every single day being like, like, what's going on? Am I shadow banned?

Yep.

You know, there's like this weird balance where when you're posting, you're. If you're posting a specific type of content from a specific lens, you're acquiring followers that want that kind of content. And so if you change the content that you're putting out, your engagement's going to drop because you need to find new people that want that kind of content. And, and maybe you're hopefully attracting a generalist audience that's generally interested in a lot of the things that you want to talk about. But there's a lot of factors at play here. I think these two suggestions from Reggie are awesome. They make a lot of sense. I would like to have them. I think that the X team would look at this and say, that's great and all, but if we encourage that, that we may see a 30% drop in overall user activity. Because there's this, again, this sort of balance between stated preferences, which I want business content and I want educational content, and I want stuff about AI and then the revealed preference, which is I want Montoya.

Yeah, Montoya. Yeah, yeah. The real you.

And.

And reality shows.

Everybody's like, you know, if we put out a video that's, you know, breaking down slow, launching their new creator fund, and then, you know, the user can kind of see the next video is like, Montoya or whatever, you know, like, freaking out. It's like, it's difficult to compete with him.

Exactly.

He's got the attention of the world. So. Yeah, yeah. And I do, you know, I feel like I was lucky to come on the original Twitter at a time when I would see basically 100% content from other sort of business people, investors, and maybe they would post something like about F1 when F1 is happening and you see that. But then it's just generally the feed felt more like a professionalized. Like that was what I was there for. And then now the one. One challenge I've had. You know, every activity that you're doing on the app affects, you know, what you're going to see in the for you page. I started just for banger archive. When I would see like a post that got like 150,000 likes, I started just copy and pasting it into a. Into a notes app. And I realized that I was training the algorithm to think that I really wanted that content. Because you're so now I'm like, I don't want to. I'm not going to keep doing that.

Interesting.

Because I don't want it to think that I just want that kind of content. Like, I'm fine with like 1 out of 20 posts being some viral slope, but I don't want it to all be that.

I also noticed that I think the algorithm, it, it, it sorts everything and ranks everything, but eventually it runs out of like, tech content. And so what I'll notice is like, if I haven't been on for a while, I load up the feed. It's actually really high quality, good stuff from tech and business people that I really want to engage with. And then as I scroll down, after a while I run out of that and there's just not that much more content. And then it'll be like, well, like, why don't we just show you like this, you know, politically enraging thing or this sports thing or this viral moment or this reality TV drama. And it's. You did not so much that it's like, yeah, it's like, it's not really like you want this the most. The algorithm is just like, hey, this is the best thing I got for you right now because you ran out of tech content.

That's when I was 22. I distinctly remember running out of new content on Twitter, which is basically the cardinal sin of a social media app. Your user wants to be using the app because they're addicted and you're not providing for them. It'd be like turning on the TV and CNN is just blank.

The answer is for tech people just to post way more. Just post more and overload the feed.

A lot of people have this. A lot of people have this sort of thing where, oh, I already posted once today, or I, I had a good post today, I'm going to take the rest of the night off. No, I honestly think that's this mentality of the original Instagram posting. The common strategy on Instagram, if you were an Instagram influencer, was just make sure you post once a day. And it was almost rude to post more. But now that everything's algorithmic, the algorithm is going to show people your content if it thinks that they were going to enjoy it and they're not. If not, it's like very. And so you'll see. Like, I posted a bunch yesterday because I was flying back from the east coast and maybe like six of my posts did well and then one that I thought was the funniest just completely bombed, you know, happens.

Post through it, post through the pain. Doesn't matter what, you just got to keep going. Well, let's move on to one of the greatest posters. He's been on the show many times. Will Manitis. You could spend the rest of your life complaining about New York City rent prices, or you could simply live in this houseboat for $2,500 a month and commute to midtown via jet ski kayak. The six in like 15 minutes. A better life is possible. I think that's so funny.

I've joked before about jet skiing into LA from Malibu because PCH can just get so bad traffic wise. I'm like, if I was able to rip it at 60 miles an hour on the open water, can you imagine how great you'd feel after, you know, for your, for your day of work if you just spent like 30 minutes jet skiing into work? That, that, that just seems like the dream to me. So it's definitely something here. We gotta get. I've never actually stayed on a. I've stayed over on boats, but I've never stayed on a houseboat.

I don't know what the laws are. Can you just build a mansion and call it a houseboat? Like, how crazy can we get? Can we anchor these to the ground? Or we can just. Are we just going to wind up doing landfill and just expanding? Like, can you just take as much space as you want? Because you can. Crazy.

San Francisco actually has like the, the bay has issues with this around. People that just get an old boat and just live in it and it's kind of this weird gray area and they try to enforce it in different ways. But I'd be down for. For aquatic podcast. This is Sea Steady.

This is the sea steading that what's his name, Patrick Friedman, was working on big libertarian push for seasteading for a while. We talked to those guys who did Sealand. They live in that communications platform off of the uk and yeah, this is the future. I love it. Anyway, let's move on to. I got put in the Truth Zone. I got a community note. I said, I can't believe this is a real photo. Yes, that's Mistral, the French LLM company from the Wall Street Journal Helsing Mistral to jointly develop AI systems for military use. And I posted a photo of a Mistral 3 missile and I got a community note here says, no, this is not by Mistral AI. In fact, the picture shows a Mistral 3 missile. The missiles are produced by MBDA, a European group in the field of complex weapons systems. Mistral is a common naming in French. A strong cold northwesterly wind in southern France. I got put in the Truth Zone, but this is from the Wall Street Journal. I stole the photo. I tried to give them a little bit of credit there and they fooled me. And I got. I got slapped with a. With a community.

Wait. So Ms. Wall Street Journal.

Wall Street Journal clearly just googled Mistral missile because there is news like it is true that Mistral is doing a defense contact, but Mistral has not manufactured a missile and printed their name on that missile. So the Wall Street Journal either was just trying to be representative or they just got confused and they posted a picture that's. It is a Mistral, but it's not from the company Mistral that we know. And so a little bit of an update, a little bit of a mea culpa, but really this one's on the Wall Street Journal, so. So I take no responsibility.

We are not journalists.

No, we are, you know, we are reaction live streamers. Anyway, let's move on to Guillermo over at Vercel. They, he says was fantastic to serve ramp during this big super bowl moment. Let's play the song from the super bowl ad. Is it working? No. No. Okay, we got. We're working on our soundboard here. They reported a 46% or 46 traffic uptick within seconds and 100% uptime without any manual config or provisioning on Vercel. More to come. I love that we're seeing more breakdowns and behind the scenes of how A Super bowl ad gets played out. I know that people are probably completely oversaturated with ramp super bowl ads because they took over the timeline so many times. But I think that there probably is a very interesting case study here, especially on the content delivery network CDN side and all the things that Vercel does to help websites deal with unexpected traffic. I believe Coinbase ran into a problem actually, because they put that QR code up on the, on the super bowl and I think they hadn't scaled appropriately and they had some downtime and so Guillermo is there to save the day. So if you're going to do a Super bowl ad, give downtime.

Downtime on a Super bowl ad could, you know, easily be a multi, you know, multi. Tens of millions of dollars and like lost, you know, customer value. Because people are watching the super bowl, they don't really care about your company that much. You give them a brief reason to care and they try to download your app or sign up and it doesn't work and they're just onto the next thing. You know, E commerce operators deal with this all the time around Black Friday. If their site goes down for 30 minutes at the wrong time, it could be like a million dollars of lost sales. Right, so.

Well, let's move on to David. He says the Cyber Plaid project is about to get fun. I think he took a Tesla Model S plaid and is outfitting it with cybertruck aesthetics. This is super obvious. I hope Elon actually makes this production car. I think this looks awesome. And what a way to stand out in the supercar market where everything kind of looks the same right now. Now you think about a Ferrari 296, the SF90, the Pininfarina Batista, the Rimac Nevera, even the McLaren W1, they all kind of look the same. Lamborghini has something good going with a Revelto in my opinion. It does look differentiated, but it's still just like a wedge. But there's really a lot of like not particularly interesting stuff going on at the high end of the, the supercar market, in my opinion. And something with cybertruck aesthetics would really lend itself to a low to the ground supercar. That would be super cool and I really hope it happens.

I think they need the electric muscle car. You know, what is the, what's the futuristic, you know, version of a challenge? You know, Dodge Challenger, Challenger is.

And I haven't, I'm so burnt out. I think the Model 3, Model S, X, Y, they all look decent, but they all have the Exact same aesthetic and they've been completely played out. The cybertruck stands out still. There's a lot on the road, but I get excited every time I see them. My kids get excited when they see them. They stand out. They're really cool. And I think bringing that aesthetic into something that is more exotic. Like there's a reason they call sports cars exotic. Sports cars, like they're supposed to look exotic once. Once they look. Look all the same. You've seen that with the. The Ferrari Pure Blood. What's that one called? The Purosangue. It looks like a Mazda. And the Mazda SUV looks exactly the same. Obviously. Like you can tell them apart, but it's just not pushing the design envelope enough. And Ferrari has been kind of coasting on that original Pininfarina design language that they got from the F8 and they brought that to the 296 and they all look great. But. But it's getting a little stale and I think something that looks more like a cybertruck would really turn heads and be cool. So I would love to see it and I hope that the. Hope that it comes out.

Ferrari is just unbelievably lost right now. I mean, the 12 cylinder sales are terrible. Nobody wants them. It's priced way too high.

Hot take. I think the 12 cylinder, the Dolce cylinder looks fantastic. I love it.

I mean, it's a good looking car.

But yeah, not at 800 in the.

Context of any of their other models. Right. If you look at the 812, it looks much, much worse.

I think it looks better, but that's a hot take. I understand that's.

Yeah.

But I really like the, the F80, the black bar in the front. I think that looks really cool. But I am in the minority there. For sure. For sure.

Yeah.

Anyway.

Yep. What else we got? By the way, I do have somewhat of a. I gotta go meet.

Well, let's, let's do a promoted post from Ben Braverman. Saga is hiring a principal to join the investment team. What a great gig. If you're looking to get into Venture. What is Saga? We are one of the only sizable funds raised during the great VC winter. Partners are Max Altman, that's Sam's brother. And it's Thompson and Ben Braverman who was at at Flexport writing checks alongside Ryan Peterson for a long time. Saga leads and co leads at Seed and Series A with reserves to continue at the B plus. We've incubated one company already with plans for more. What is a principal role at Saga. And he puts in a typo here. He says, what is a. The principal role. Smart for the algorithm. Going to get more likes. People know it wasn't AI generated. You are joining the founding team. You will help shape the firm's brand and strategy. You will join the investment team on day one. This is not a farm league program where you spin your wheels for a year. You will source as many top companies as possible, participate in diligence, and represent the Saga brand. You will be highly compensated, including significant carry. So if you're looking to get into Venture, head on Ben Braverman's page and send him a dm.

Love the name Saga, by the way. Sometimes a new venture firm launch launches, and you're like, okay, there's clearly running out of names for venture firms. But Saga is just like, sounds good, makes sense. And it's cool to see that they're. You can tell they're building a firm. Right? This is not. This. This looks to be setting up as, you know, we're actually building a team versus, you know, we have our rock star GPS and then there's a support staff. But, you know, this is, you know, clearly trying to, you know, actually build out a proper investment team, which we'd love to see.

A post from Patrick Collison over at Stripe. Can you hear that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I love it. Patrick Collinson.

Was there a sound effect?

Yeah, I'm trying to play sound effects, but it's not working. Who knows?

It might be that. It might be that the stream can hear it, but I can't. Who knows?

Okay. Anyway, we'll have fun with that. We'll work it out. Patrick says it's happening. All built on Stripe. Ben Lang says, tiny teams of the future. Cursor, 0 to $100 million. ARR. In 21 months with 20 people. Bolt, 0 to 20 million. Lovable. 0 to 10 million. Mercore, 0 to 50 million. All with very small teams. And of course, built on Stripe. David Holes from Mid Journey chimes in and says, they left out Mid Journey, of course, but we're very grateful for Stripe too. And so everyone is building on Stripe. And it's a great example of just, you know, a great tool that speeds up, up development of everything. And then you can spend more time building your company and pumping up those revenue numbers, which I love to see.

Absolutely wild.

We also have some great news.

We talked about the factors driving just this ridiculous growth of some of these new companies like Cursor and Merkor and Bolt, and an underrepresented part of that is just. You can scale billing infinitely with, with very little operational overhead. So wasn't the case 12, 15 years ago.

Well, you know, the fans love to hear about minor Figma product updates and we got a massive minor product update from Figma. Good news, Frosted Glass UI fans. SVG exports from Figma will now properly render black background blur and both angular and diamond gradients. Let's go. Let's hear for Figma, boys. We love Dylan, we love the team over at Figma and yeah, I mean these changes are heard around the world. Brooklyn is permanently changed whenever one of these rolls out and we're happy to see the team over at Figma absolutely crushing.

We love to see absolute dogs. They're definitely, they're definitely in founder mode. Like Dylan is back. Clearly locked in. The first thing I noticed was their updated billing practices. Definitely knowing that I value the product a lot and trying to get some of that, actually capture some of that value. But yeah, awesome to see them shipping aggressively just because they're so well positioned to dominate Gen AI in design. There's a lot of people that are, yeah, have come out and raised money for. We're Figma for Gen AI or generative design. And I would argue that Dylan would say Figma is the figma of generative design.

100%. I mean the guy's super tapped in and has been for a really long time on the AI stuff. He's not playing catch up. This is not Adobe. This is a founder led founder mode company through and through with a lot of capital and a lot of great team members and a lot of, a lot of customers that are already using the product. A lot of distribution. Well, did you see the first major, in my opinion, drone show advertisement in America? Nick says for All Star Weekend, the Jordan Brand has 1,200 drones taking off from Treasure island to create the jumpman, Air Jordan 1 and number 23 over the bay Bridge. And I think this is super cool. You know that Ad Quick can do this for you. Ben's going to play the video and it's just fascinating to see that this is finally coming to America. We've been behind the ball on drones both in the military context and in the advertising context, which is in some ways as important. And we're really happy to see that these shows have made it to America.

Yeah, this is the coolest, basically a top three ad format for me. Blimps are still up there just because they're timeless. But we're going to use Ad Quick to put a ramp card in the sky. We got to do it. Maybe we throw up a microphone at some point to honor all hard working podcasters, but this is just. I think this is one of those things that basically forever, it'll still be. It's hard to imagine a world where people are fully normalized to this, right? Because it feels just like so intensely futuristic. So, yeah, if people can just sign up for adquick and talk to their rep and make this happen. But if you have any issues, feel free to reach out and we would love to actually help with the campaign around the creative and ideation.

Yeah. Oh, speaking of partnerships, eight SLEEP sent us some fabulous hats.

There we go. Put it on. You're looking. You're looking kind of, kind of like an athlete, right?

It goes, it goes.

I mean, you are an athlete, you're.

A corporate athlete, but I am a corporate athlete. But the black suit, the black hat, this is a good combo. And so we got a bunch of these. Maybe we'll give some away.

And being six, eight, you do. You look like. You look like you. You're. You're about to sign a max contract.

I gave ChatGPT all of my stats, my height, my weight, my body fat percentage, and all of my measurements and had it benchmark me against, against athletes and give me tips for, like, where I should improve. And it was very complimentary. It was great.

People don't. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna gas you up for a second. Because people don't know this, but John is actually just ridiculous. Like, way too jacked for being a podcaster who's not selling supplements.

It was so funny. It says. So I, I had it put every measurement in, in like percentiles and on my height, I'm 68. And it says exceptionally tall. This is elite even among athletes.

But here's the.

Is in the 90th percentile. It says a strong, thick neck supports overall upper body aesthetics and function. Let's go chat gbd. Thank you, Sam.

Every. Every time we've been with, you know, the boys recently, I feel like somebody has asked, like, is John on gear? Like, it comes up like, people are so. So the, the goal in life is to not be on gear, but have people think that you are, you know, think that you are.

Sleep is the only performance enhancement that I need. I sleep. I sleep like a baby eight hours a night. My sleep score is at 90 today. Not bad. Not where it should be. Should be at 100. Tonight's a new night. I'll get there. But yeah, the performance has been tip top lately. It's been great. Sleep well, get in the gym. Crush it. Lots of caffeine, a little bit of nicotine, and that's all you need.

Incredible.

That's all you need. We got another delivery in the mail. This one's a little bit old. We're late getting to this, but Ian McCready heard our Vail episode, our deep dive on Vail, and sent us a beautiful book on Veil. It says veil, Triumph of a Dream. It's a full history of Veil. I don't know if you can see this, but it's like serious. This is a serious, serious book. Sent us a whole copy, so we'll have to do a whole, whole extra deep dive on the history of Veil because we have the authoritative copy now with lots of great images of Vale and so amazing. Thank you, Ian, for we'll take any.

Opportunity to talk about.

Very nice. Hammer said. It's been great getting to know you. Vail is a special place for my family. My grandfather was involved with the mountain since nearly the beginning. I hope you enjoy the book and consider it an invitation to join me at our place anytime. Look forward to connecting again soon. So thanks, Ian, for sending that in and yeah, good to have you as a fan of the show. Do you have time for one more post or should we wrap it up?

Of course I got time for one more post.

Sean. Let's do it.

It.

Let's do it. Still not working. I'm having fun.

Wait, we. We didn't get to the. So people in the chat were asking about the Jamie Dimon reaction.

Oh, yeah, let's do that.

We should get into that because it's. It's that one is time I saw. I don't know if this is the post that we pulled.

I have it. John Ziggler. In leaked audio, Jamie diamond tells his takes his employees, especially the younger ones, to the woodshed over their desire to keep working remotely. He says remote work is terrible. I don't know if Ben has the clip, but, Jamie, you're on notice. Ben, you want to play this clip?

A lot of you were on the fucking Zoom and you were doing the following, okay, you know, looking at your mail, sending texts to each other about what an asshole the other person is. Okay? Not paying attention, not reading your stuff. You know, and if you don't think that slows down efficiency, creativity creates rudeness and stuff. It does. Okay. And when I found out that people are doing that, you don't do that. My Goddamn meetings. You go to a meeting with me, you got my attention. You got my focus. I don't bring my goddamn phone. I'm not sending texts to people, okay? It simply doesn't work. And it doesn't work for creativity. It slows down decision making. And don't give me the shit that work from home Friday works. I call a lot of people Friday. They're not a goddamn person to get a hold of. But here are the problems, okay? And they are substantial, okay? Which is the young generation is being damaged by this. That means they may or may not be in your particular staff, but they are being left behind. They're being left behind socially, ideas, meeting people. In fact, my guess is most of you live in communities a hell of a lot less diverse than this room. Every area should be looking to be 10% more efficient. If I was ready to partner with 100 people, I guarantee you, if I wanted to, I can run it with 90 and be more efficient. I guarantee you, I could do it in my sleep. And the notion these bureaucracies, I need more people. I can't get it done. No, because you're filling out requests that don't need to be done. Your people are going to meetings they don't need to go to. Someone told me to prove something as wealth management that they had to go to 14 committees. I am dying to get the name of the 14 committees, and I feel like firing 14 chairmen of committees. I can't stand it anymore. Now you have a choice. You don't have to work at J.P. morgan. So the people of you who don't want to work at the company, that's fine with me. I'm not mad at you. Don't be mad at me. It's a free country. You can walk with your feet, you know, but this company's going to set our own standards and do it our own way. And I've had it with this kind of stuff. And, you know, I come in, I've been working seven days a goddamn week since COVID And I come in and I where's everybody else but here and there. And the zooms. And the zooms don't show up. And people say they didn't get stuff. So that's not how you run a great company. We didn't build this great company by doing that. By doing the same semi disease shit that everybody else does.

I love it. Jordy, you can't help but think he is, you know, reading between the lines. He's talking about you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Work from Home Friday, no suit jacket, no tie. Really phone it in remotely. You know, remote podcasters, they're on their way out, they're dying. Breed. It's in person. Bust.

I would take it a step further. This. This sounds like some private conversations that we've had when I've used my phone on the set. And you, and you, you know, you start pulling out some swear words, you know, you get testy, letting loose. But, okay, here's. Here's my actual read on this. I think this. I don't know how the audio clip emerged, but. But it was positioned as leaked audio. And to me, this is. I have to imagine he wanted this to leak because it makes him look like an incredible CEO. Right? He's setting clear expectations. He's frustrated with how things are happening, and he's actively changing it. He's giving people an out. He is setting that. He's living the standard that he's expecting of other people. He's not asking anybody to do anything that he's not willing to do. He's right. I come into the meetings, you don't see me on my phone, you don't see me emailing other people while I'm in a meeting. He's like, I'm focused, I'm prepared. And so he's setting the standard and he expects other people to follow here. And look, I think that a company like JP Morgan will be able to reduce headcount dramatically over time. And so to me, what he's, you know, he wants the people that want to work remotely. He does. Like, why would a CEO want his team to work remotely? Right. He is. There's this value exchange that happens with the company and their employees, which is, I'm going to pay you to provide services for the company, and you can decide whether that value exchange makes sense. And if you don't feel the values there by coming to the office, you're welcome to leave. And so he's setting this up to say, doesn't want more remote work. I think he genuinely believes that it's bad for, you know, younger employees. Right. There's very clear arguments for why, like, more senior people should be able to work remotely at least part time and be effective in that way. But at the same time, it's very fair for a CEO to set their own standards. Right. This is not like a charity or a support program for people. Right. They're choosing to work at J.P. morgan. And so I think that this is sending a very clear message to the world and to his employees that he's setting new standards. And all of the COVID stuff is somebody posted that looks like Jamie Dimon found his. I'm not going to say Elon. Yeah, he just sort of found his. He feels like he's positioned to sort of speak his mind now. And while we don't appreciate the sort of vulgar language that he used, I think he's generally completely correct in his analysis. And if I'm working at JP Morgan and I'm working five days, six days a week in the office and I hear my CEO say this, I'm only fired up to work even harder than I was before. And there's certainly people that are going to listen to that and they're going to say, I actually want a remote job. That's what's important to me. And so they can go work somewhere else.

Well, let's close out with the announcement from Tim Cook, another CEO. He says get ready to meet the newest member of the family. Wednesday, February 19th there's an apple launch and a lot of people put on the tinfoil hat here because Elon Musk reposted Tim Cook's announcement about a new product unveiling. And so Bill Gurley chimes in and says, I know nothing. But just for kicks, imagine a Tesla slash Apple Co branded vehicle that sells for $200,000. Don't both stocks soar? And my read on this was that, look, Apple and Elon have had a, like, somewhat tumultuous relationship. During the acquisition, he, Elon, famously went for a walk with Tim Cook. There was a question about App Store fees for converting people to paid memberships. Would Apple be taking 30% on that? Would they be able to negotiate that down? Apple's also been an advertiser on Twitter and now acts for a long time. And I think Elon wants the two companies to be working because Apple's a great big advertiser and I think reposting this a could just be a cool thing. But also giving Tim some extra juice in the algorithm just is a good sign of good faith that, yeah, we're going to get your, your, your, your content to go a little bit further on our platform organically. And then, yeah, you're going to spend a couple million bucks probably advertising on our platform and we're all bought in on this. So I'm hesitant about their idea that they're going to launch together, but that would be awesome.

I think another kind of crazy idea would be Apple CarPlay for humanoid robots. Right. There's a world where app like so. Oh, oh, I Don't follow. Sorry, sorry. For a brief second I was thinking that Tesla had a CarPlay integration. They actually don't.

They don't.

It's not that, but you can imagine. But I do think in the future, right, like if you have a humanoid robot in your home or you employ one in some way. Yeah, obviously. So anyway, the much more obvious thing.

If we're actually talking about a partnership would be Starlink on iPhones. Right. Like we've already seen that. That's rolling out and just.

Yeah, but the Rivian, like the Rivian things. Yeah, I saw that one Rivian doing the same thing. You know, who knows?

Rivian has been posting about a cryptic event happening the same day. And so maybe there's something deeper happening there. I don't know. Or talked about maybe before. There's so many different possibilities. Elon.

People don't realize that Elon would find out about Rivian doing an event on like, and then host an event the same day and do it with Apple to just try to like drown it out. Yep, everybody's a savage at that level. But anyways, I'm excited to see we. Hopefully we'll be live streaming when this happens and we can just, you know, talk about it live.

I think pre installed, you should not be able to delete the app. It should be the only app on your phone. That should be the new version of the iPhone. Get rid of the notes app. Just post a tweet if you want. If you want to make a note, you know, instead of calling someone, just call them over a DM on X. It's the Everything app. You don't need anything else. Just one app on your iPhone. And that's the new. That's the new iPhone.

I got to go hang with Rob. Potentially the greatest podcast producer of all time. Currently Ben coming hot up on his heels. But just wanted to say thank you for listening, brothers. It was a good week. We're going to be back in the studio full time next week, which I'm excited about. And I wanted to remind everybody that we are not independent media. We are dependent media. We are dependent on our advertisers. And I just wanted to thank Ramp, Adquick, Wander, Public Bezel and eight Sleep for their support.

I have some big bezel news coming soon. I'm excited.

Can't wait.

Awesome. So leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Put an ad in your review, we'll read it on the show. And thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. Have a great week. Happy Valentine's Day.

Have a great weekend.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Go crutch Valentine's Day. Big day.

Big day for the brothers.

Big day.

Talk to you soon.