SPEAKER_00: Hey everybody, welcome back to Monday. It is going to be a huge Monday and it's going to be a huge week on this weekend startups because the news keeps coming. It's a big week. There was a big

SPEAKER_01: news dump on Friday, tons of stuff over the weekend and some great interviews coming this week. I'm going to interview one of the commissioners at the FCC about them wanting

SPEAKER_03: to ban TikTok. Before that though, we'll do the Monday news dump. The Friday news dump was

SPEAKER_04: huge too. So before we get into the new news, we're going to talk a little bit about the Twitter deal or no deal situation still evolving even as we're talking about it.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah, and there's big news in the Uber world. There has been a document dumped by a former

SPEAKER_10: Uber executive in Europe and then also Uber launched over the weekend. I noticed ads which could be geolocated. I think that's going to become a billion dollar business.

Jason Calacanis: And then of course, we're going to talk a little bit about the information as usual, getting the

SPEAKER_15: inside dirt on drama at Apple over its self-driving car project. It is a bit of a hot mess.

SPEAKER_16: It's a hot mess. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us.

SPEAKER_19: This Week in Startups is brought to you by Dell for Startups provides key solutions for all your startup needs. A dedicated tech advisor will get to know your business goals and deliver customized solutions for rapid tech enablement with top business class PCs and accessories. Apply for Dell for startups and get an additional 10% off of all Dell Latitude products at dell.com slash twist. This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp, providing access to easy, affordable, and private professional counseling anytime, anywhere. Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com slash twist. And THORN. THORN empowers people to take control of their long-term well-being with a proactive science-based approach to health. Through a variety of at-home tests, THORN teaches you about what your body needs and provides the right, high-quality, certified nutritional supplements for you. To get started and take 10% off your first order, head to THORN.com slash you slash twist.

SPEAKER_14: All right. It looks like Elon has called off the Twitter deal. Twitter's board is saying that they're

SPEAKER_24: going to take them to court and go through the deal terms. I know nothing. Just to be clear here, if folks want to insinuate that I am a, what do they call that word? Like a surrogate or something like that? Uh, I literally know nothing. I haven't talked to Elon about any of this. So, but it looks like this is heading to court. Potentially. I don't buy that. Uh, but go ahead and fill us in on

SPEAKER_04: some of the details, Molly. Yeah. I, I mean, the details are sort of, as you said, Elon Musk sent this letter saying, uh, I want to cancel the deal because the bot problem is significant and materially relevant and they haven't given us the information that we've asked for. Um, then Twitter's board tweeted, you know, it takes, you can't, that's not how contracts work. Basically. You can't just be like, I canceled this contract that I signed. So they said, we're going to take you to court in Delaware and force you to go through with the deal at presumably the price that he agreed upon, which is way more than what Twitter is worth now. Of course, this morning, Elon Musk tweeted that he would be thrilled to go to court and force some discovery on the bot problem. Twitter has hired a high power legal firm to try to force the deal through. And honestly, the only person I listened to on this

SPEAKER_32: ever is Matt Levine, because he's always just, I mean, and he just is like, look, there's every

SPEAKER_04: chance that he will, that Elon Musk will bury everybody in lawsuits and walk away from this thing completely, or maybe pay the billion dollars. But like, fundamentally, this is not how contracts work. You don't, there is no, you signed and agree, like diligence is the thing that you do before you sign the contract. Once you've signed the contract, it's not legally defensible necessarily

SPEAKER_14: to just be like, nah, I don't want to anymore. Well, there is this like concept of fraud. And so we don't know what will come up in discovery, right? All it takes is for one person in even a rank and file person says, Hey, I don't you think these this 5% number is legit, or I think it's more like 6% or

SPEAKER_36: it's 12%. And all of a sudden, the entire thing blows up because who knew that who knew what when and that's really the nuance here, I think is what comes up in discovery, nobody knows what's going

SPEAKER_14: to come up. And then also, there's a gamesmanship here, like, does really does Twitter want to go through 2345 years of this, who knows how long this will take, right? I don't think this tends to be, you know, I think this tends to be measured in years, these kind of legal fights. So years of discovery, years of debating this, and then you have to then calculate how many other lawsuits are going to pop up. So if they can't come to a settlement, which is what this is obviously going to happen in my mind is there'll be some sort of settlement here, either a different price, or, you know, maybe additional investment from Elon, I think that might be, I heard some people speculating that. So Elon says, you know what, I own whatever 10%, I'll go up to 20% and I'll join

SPEAKER_24: the board or whatever. And let's just move on. And that's what Evan Williams said, you know, the

SPEAKER_26: co founder of Twitter was like, Yeah, I think it's time to move on and put this ugliness behind us. So we'll see what happens. We'll monitor it. I think this is going to be a long drawn out process. And then eventually end in a way for both parties to save face and come to an agreement, you know, a settlement and a settlement will be painful, or to both parties, but my Lord, what drama

SPEAKER_04: and craziness. Yeah, yeah, no matter what, I think it will have done pretty lasting damage to Twitter, like certainly to morale, certainly to, you know, executives have left certainly to the, the brand itself. There's going to be this ongoing kind of speculation and question about the bot thing. And which has been very consistent on but it's going to linger and and I think it's just gonna, it's likely going to get a lot uglier.

SPEAKER_14: Which gives me actually a really good piece of advice here, which is if there can be some path to resolving the bot problem, once and for all, that could be the upside in this, hey, yes, of course, there's been a bot problem. Everybody in the industry has had it. And this whole, you know, acquisition and then the acquisition not happening has given us, you know, newfound resolve and a lot of great feedback on how to solve the problem. And hey, we've squashed it. And here's how we squash it, they could actually come up with a system of saying, like, you know, some transparency. That's the thing I think it's sort of missing here. That's kind of strange is that Twitter is not saying like, hey, listen, here's all the numbers. And here's how we solved it, which maybe they'll do at some point is just explain to everybody. Here's the actual number of bots. Here's how we define bots. They haven't been clear enough about that. And I think that's why all this speculation here is but that could be actually a silver lining. I do think all this attention on Twitter, as it you know, this incredibly valuable product or service, I think is going to make Microsoft or another company come

SPEAKER_26: out and make an offer for it. So I have no inside information on that. But I could just imagine people

SPEAKER_14: looking at this going, yeah, smartest guy in the world, most successful entrepreneur of our time, arguably the best product, you know, person since Steve Jobs. If he likes it, maybe we should buy it. And maybe there's some massive value here. And I do think there's massive value, if you could have competent product and leadership, and not a revolving door at Twitter. I was thinking over the weekend, I was talking to some friends in a chat. I was like, Is there a company that at scale has been less

SPEAKER_26: competent on a product basis than Twitter, we can only think of one company, what company do you think in the modern era, you know, our lifetimes, hit scale, but just felt like it was a revolving door of leadership, and they couldn't get their product act together, yet they were still very successful at that during a period. What company comes to mind, an internet company that hits scale? Yeah, see if anybody in the chat room can guess, think of a company that you used a lot, it is not AOL, AOL was just really never good at product. You know, if you look at AOL's products, but you're,

SPEAKER_15: you're in the zone, Nick. Is it that old? Because I got to say, I'm inclined to say

SPEAKER_59: Yahoo. It's Yahoo. Oh, it's Yahoo. Nick got it. Yeah. Very, very well done. Yeah. Bob G got Yahoo. Zachary got Yahoo. Yeah, but he started saying it. So you look at Yahoo, like we all used Yahoo. It

SPEAKER_14: had these great products. Yahoo mail was great. Yahoo flicker was great. Finance was great. The homepage

SPEAKER_39: was great. Entertainment stuff was good. You need to find yourself going there for news stories once in a while. Yahoo messenger was great. They could just never keep it together. And it was just, I think,

SPEAKER_14: weak leadership when David Filo and Jerry Yang kind of left, just nobody there who cared enough. You

SPEAKER_63: know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. Chad is pointing out eBay, which I think is, is also a good example of

SPEAKER_15: that. And then I would argue that I think Google is potentially headed in that direction in some ways, like, yeah, they're great at the core, but don't have the focus. Like they just don't. It's a good observation. Whenever they launch like hardware, they don't stick with it. You know, I mean, all the efforts at chat, like, I think they're in that kind of drift phase. And we could be saying that about

SPEAKER_14: them in a while. The founders are no longer there on a day to day basis. And so they could definitely go that way. And in fact, I was tweeting at Sundar about this whole nest, which is what's the greatest like camera system you could get for a long time. And then they kept releasing the nest cameras, but they said, you have to use Google home. And Google home is the worst app ever created in the app store, like literally the worst. And so every nest fan is like, I just want to use nest. And like, so I have nest, but the three new cameras I got don't work on the nest app. They only work in Google home. So I have two apps. And Google home is unusable. And nest was like a single feature app, like Sonos, or Apple TV, where it just works, and it does what it's supposed to do. And then Google home is like, Do you want to create macros to turn your lights on to do this when your temperature hits this? And we're like, No, no, we don't want that. We just want to pop up a

SPEAKER_73: beautiful app and see our camera and save a clip. Yeah. Yeah. I would say the counter argument for

SPEAKER_04: Twitter, though, is that it has new leadership, as of fairly recently, but he's been there for a long time has been to had been shipping products like we had started to see improvement. There was Twitter spaces, there was Twitter blue, we had started to see improvement. And I think the counter argument to what you're saying is that actually Elon Musk came in and blew it up and stopped it cold. And whatever momentum that Twitter had been developing from a product perspective was crushed, like releasing product pretty quickly, you know, like,

SPEAKER_78: they keep all the releases. Because of this acquisition thing. I don't think I mean,

SPEAKER_14: morale is terrible. Morale is a problem. It's definitely the most overstaffed and lazy

SPEAKER_46: group in Silicon Valley. Everybody knows that. Like it does everybody know that? Or does Elon know that?

SPEAKER_85: No, that's I mean, basically, that existed long that when Jack ran the place that that was like the

SPEAKER_39: criticism of like, they can't ship product. They got so many people like it's bloated, which was what they said about Yahoo as well, by the way, right? She'd have to cut it. So this this that that existed long

SPEAKER_00: before. So this is well, I mean, now Jack is gone and better leadership came in. And frankly, I

SPEAKER_26: think you know, the better leadership is was there for seven years, right? So Prague was there for seven or eight years, I think he's not like, he's not like a new guy to the you know, and leader there,

SPEAKER_14: he's kind of the old regime. But you know, to your point of like, they were supposed to stop releasing stuff. We just got co tweets and communities. So they're still releasing stuff. So maybe they're not releasing, maybe they're releasing stuff that was on a pre approved timeline or something. Yeah, yeah. So it's hard to know. But they did increase product velocity. Twitter blue was a miss communities, I think is going to be a hit. What else did they release spaces has

SPEAKER_94: been a kind of a hit? Yeah, that's a hit. Yeah, I think it's a niche. But sure, but Twitter is a niche product. Like that's what I know. I don't know. I don't know. I think it's like it's on the

SPEAKER_97: cusp of being bigger than niche. 100 million people is not niche, like 20 million would be niche. It's

SPEAKER_00: niche compared to Facebook, right? Like 2 billion people, right? But it's a product for I don't

SPEAKER_15: know, especially I don't think of it as a full feature, like live your life social network. It's like broadcasting. It's like for journalists and primarily, right? It's like flooded with the tech industry. Like I know, like, if you're an average everyday person, and you come to Twitter, and you start to try to use it, it's you find it like boring and baffling. That is 100% Twitter's

SPEAKER_33: fault. But it you know, it's a company that has been like, sort of happy to be that lots of remote

SPEAKER_10: employees are traveling the summer. And if you want to keep your employees performance high while they're on the road, you need to get them a Dell latitude laptop. And I'm going to give you an awesome discount code from Dell for startups. If you're a founder, you need to apply for Dell for startups. And here's why you'll get access to a team of expert IT advisors, these experts will provide you with customized solutions to make your tech stack world class. Dell will help you access capital for building out your tech stack, and you'll get exclusive discounts. And you know, we love Dell at launch. In fact, we sent every new employee a beautiful 39 inch ultra sharp curve monitor. And that's my personal favorite, such a beautiful monitor, you want to have that working remote lifestyle, you need to have the right equipment and Dell is the best. So here's your call to action apply for Dell for startups today, and you'll get an additional 10% off all Dell latitude laptops and tablets, just head to Dell.com slash twist. That's Dell.com slash twist. Hey, do me a favor, producer Nick, I want to get the latest Dell one, can you get me one because I want to play a little video games as well. I got to get into Starcraft two and maybe play some age of empires. Give me a new one when I'm on the road. Oh, you know, building on our conversation from

SPEAKER_14: last week of how good the tick tock algorithm is, um, for better or worse, you know, really good.

Chamath Palihapitiya: What if Twitter, when you're a new user, just gave you the best of, and then as you interacted with

SPEAKER_14: stuff, it just went full algorithm. And that said, you know, you could follow stuff. And then if you swipe left, you know, they have like the people you follow, and they just, instead of trying to blend those two things as one, they just said, we're just going to copy tick tock approach, which is, here's the people you follow. And then here's the best stuff. So take the explore tab for new users and make the explore tab for them. And then as they see stuff, and they interact with it, if they favorite it, you show more. So if you start favoriting MBA, you show more, as opposed to like

SPEAKER_26: Twitter's, you know, kind of legacy of separating those things, right? If you want to explore, you got to click on and say, I'm in explore mode. And then the algorithm kind of serves you what you missed. But they kind of have hedged, it seems like going all in on one or the other is the way to do it. And if you want it to go mass and double the user base, probably going the tick tock route would be the best way you could. Yeah, for me, but it would definitely be for the other, right, you know, whatever,

SPEAKER_114: it feels like historically, Twitter has chosen to be closer in spirit to Reddit, then to

SPEAKER_116: Facebook or tick tock. Yeah, even read it is now I think Reddit is doing an algorithm on their

SPEAKER_20: homepage. And it used to be like, you follow your group. So now I think that it's based a little bit on like what you're into. And right, exactly. But hard algorithm, I would call this like,

SPEAKER_14: yeah, hard algorithm, or populace, our populace algorithm, you know, because it's like, here's the most popular stuff. But it's the most popular customized to you as opposed to customized to you, based on your explicit feedback. Anyway, God, it's still such an inspiring platform. And

SPEAKER_36: I'm still so addicted to it. I was like, God, I'm spending too much time on Twitter, but it's so intellectually engaging for me, you know, like, if you're an intellectually curious person who likes to talk, God, it just, it just hits that nerve of like, I need to talk to people, I need to have a really good debate, I need to, you know, go deep on a subject. And I just love it for that.

SPEAKER_122: I feel like you're just described a niche product. I did. Yes. No, for me.

Jason Calacanis: Yes. For me, it is a niche product.

SPEAKER_04: But that's what you have to want is you have to want to do that. And you have to have the thick skin to be able to take it. Like I increasingly in the past, I mean, I would say over the past, like seven or eight years have found the transaction costs on Twitter to be high enough that I don't find it fun to go there and engage people and have a conversation because there's always like somebody responding way too literally, somebody yelling at me about the seven nuances that I miss. No people. Oh, I'm sorry. I think the bot thing is a total red herring. And I do. I think the bot

SPEAKER_130: thing is a really big problem. If you have a million followers plus. Yeah. I don't have that. I have

Jason Calacanis: rude jerks. Right. Or I have like internet pedantics. Right. But that's what I'm saying. It's a niche product for like white guys with huge followings who have a lot of fun and don't get

SPEAKER_12: yelled at that much. That's nice. I get yelled at. Um, I, you know, people come at me pretty hard.

SPEAKER_28: It's not as fun. Yeah. It used to be a lot more fun. And now I can find those conversations to my

SPEAKER_26: group chats. I agree that it's become less and less fun and talking in your group chat is better. That's why I think they released, oh wait, they released another feature, the circles feature. So co-treats,

SPEAKER_14: circles and community, all three of those are really interesting. You know,

SPEAKER_142: Yeah. So the product velocity is good. Leave it alone. Elon, the product velocity is great.

SPEAKER_97: Ah, yeah. I mean, pay your billion dollars and move on. I don't think they're going to, I don't think they want to let them off for the billion. If that was the case,

SPEAKER_08: I think it would have happened. They want to go for the whole, I'm assuming he is not saying he's willing to pay the billion dollars. Yeah. Well, come on. It's not like he's, it's not like he sent a

SPEAKER_15: letter that was like, I don't think this deal is good for either of us. Let's break up. Here's the

SPEAKER_01: billion dollars. Yeah. We'll say, I mean, who knows what's happening in behind closed doors? I

SPEAKER_14: mean, the, the, one of the problems here is like, if your Twitter management, if your Twitter, Twitter's bored rather, like, what do you do in a situation like this? You, you have to fight for getting the best price, but you also have to look at the downside of a protracted legal battle. And then, you know, it's, it's pretty obvious to anybody who's close to Twitter or who knows people there that it's completely mismanaged and that like the stuff that's going to come out is not going to be

SPEAKER_148: pleasant, um, to say the least. There is, I'm not going to lie. There's like a tiny part of me

SPEAKER_15: though, that just, I'm, I would be like, I would watch Twitter go bankrupt. I would watch Twitter bankrupt itself. Just trying to hold this guy accountable and just being like, fine, let's go. Here's everything. Yeah. Yeah. They won't. It's, it'll be a settlement. It'll be settlement to

SPEAKER_14: probably take, I, I, my guess is I have no inside information. I'm just handicapping based on

SPEAKER_24: what I've seen in the industry is six to nine months from now, there's some easy settlement. The market comes back, the stock price goes up. So the Delta between the current stock price and the sale price gets narrowed. The company does better, et cetera, et cetera. They, I mean, what they wrote,

SPEAKER_14: the power move would be for Twitter to get permission to do layoffs and stuff like that, to make the business even stronger, right? So if the business looked stronger and the only way

SPEAKER_26: the business can look stronger is by cutting a third of the staff, that's what Yahoo needed to

SPEAKER_24: do for a long time. And it took the private equity folks, uh, to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_10: And now a word from our sponsor better help. Hey, listen, we all know the startup grind can be really overwhelming and a ton of people in our industry are dealing with burnout and some, you might not even know they're dealing with burnout. They hide it, right? But you know, the symptoms, fatigue, lack of motivation, maybe some irritability on the margins, all of those things, right? And we associate burnout with work, but that's not the only cause you ever try to raise kids or running a startup. Trust me, not easy. And you might have personal life. You might have things from your childhood. There's a lot of things that you may have on your mind that are keeping you from being your best self and running your company at the level you want. So better help online therapy wants to remind you to prioritize yourself and talking with someone can help you figure out what's causing stress in your life. Obviously, you'd know this, but you haven't prioritized it. So go ahead and prioritize it and understand that better help is customized online therapy. It offers video phone and even live chat sessions with your therapist. You don't have to see anyone on camera. If you don't want to, it is much more affordable than in-person therapy. And you can be matched with a therapist in under 48 hours. And you can do it on your schedule. And you can do it remote all that good stuff. So twist listeners can get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com slash twist. That's

SPEAKER_162: better h e l p.com slash t w i s t. Go ahead and take care of yourself. Okay. All right, let's talk about another one of your favorite companies. Which one is it? Oh, bananas Uber story.

SPEAKER_15: It's I don't know. I don't even know if that it's that bananas. It sort of feels like another version

SPEAKER_04: of things that everybody knew at the time, but the Guardian obtained over 124,000 leaked internal documents from Uber's global expansion phase under Travis Kalanick. There were some pretty interesting findings. The leaks covered this period between 2013 and 2017 when it was like, go hard, grow everywhere. It includes more than 83,000 emails, I messages, WhatsApp messages, covers over 40 countries, and they're going to go full kind of Facebook whistleblower on it. All

SPEAKER_15: these publications, including the Washington Post and the BBC are going to publish all these reports under the Uber files. I liked it when it was the Facebook files. Where are these documents from?

SPEAKER_04: Did they say? Actually, this morning, yeah, this guy came out, Mark McGann, who was Uber's former head of European expansion, and revealed that he leaked the documents. He said he's a whistleblower, and then he quit in 2016 over Uber's culture. He thought his family might be at risk because of the

SPEAKER_15: backlash against Uber. And then now he said they want to make amends. He wants to make amends because he thinks they sold drivers and consumers a lie. Okay. So the documents, you know, these are the

SPEAKER_04: Guardian's takeaways. We have not seen these documents. But they cover a lot of this global expansion question, some of the risk of violence when there were big backlashes in places like brands. One thing that's really interesting, actually, is the documents reveal a very close working

SPEAKER_28: relationship with Emmanuel Macron. Yeah, which is kind of interesting that he was really at the time,

SPEAKER_175: or? No, he was the chief economic. Yeah. Oh, right. Economy minister on me. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: Allowed Uber frequent and direct access to him and his staff. He was texting with Kalanick a lot. Apparently, he seems to have gone to extraordinary lengths to help Uber. Well, they were having like violent protests. And what's interesting about that is that at that point, like there were these really

SPEAKER_15: violent taxi driver protests, I think in France. I kind of remember scenes of people like kicking doors.

SPEAKER_14: And yeah, I mean, it was intense protesting, but I don't I don't think anybody got beaten or murder

SPEAKER_180: or anything. I think it was like banging on cars and blocking intersection type violence. Yeah, I remember described as violence. Yeah.

SPEAKER_181: All right. Okay.

SPEAKER_14: No, I don't think I would ever remember, you know, obviously, I was tracking all this stuff as an early investor. I don't remember any of those protests ever becoming like, people were beaten up, they were intense. But there wasn't like a shooting at a thing or a person beat up or anything like that.

SPEAKER_39: Because I do remember, Uber also had this issue outside their offices, like it was a pretty intense

SPEAKER_14: in San Francisco here on market, they're pretty intense protests, right? Because people would send

SPEAKER_24: it to me like, Oh, my God, look, what's going on outside the Uber office, but it wasn't people being

SPEAKER_04: beat up kind of thing. That I remember. I don't know. I'll look. Taxi drivers, let's see in 2015 set fire to vehicles and blocked major roads.

SPEAKER_191: Yeah, that I remember. I didn't remember the fire. I remember blocking roads, but I remember

SPEAKER_00: setting a car on fire. Wow. Two of them angry taxi driver, somebody was dragged from his van. An Uber driver was dragged from his van in France. Terrible. And then they slashed his tires,

SPEAKER_193: smashed his window and set it on fire. Ah, okay. That was probably the peak of it.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah, that is, that would be violent. Yes. Attacking a driver would be, and pulling them

SPEAKER_15: out of the car is very violent. And then what these documents suggest is that there were texts saying in which, like in which Travis Kalanick said, I think it's worth it about this violence, violence to guarantee success. And these guys must be resisted, agreed that the right place and time must be thought out. He of course has responded since his camp and said like,

SPEAKER_28: we would never condone violence against our own drivers. Nobody would ever condone it. I mean,

SPEAKER_01: it's obvious. They were probably thinking strategically, if the cab drivers are going to beat up the Uber drivers, that is, you know, unacceptable and probably a good PR angle, right? To

SPEAKER_24: work. If you're trying to say, Hey, like, please don't beat up drivers. And like, in defense

SPEAKER_191: of our drivers, please don't slash their tires. I can understand that. Let's see the current head of

SPEAKER_15: Uber Eats appeared to throw Travis under the bus a little bit saying, I regret some of the tactics used to get regulatory reform for ride sharing in the early days. Looking back, he said I was young and inexperienced and too often took direction from superiors with questionable ethics.

SPEAKER_01: And I guess doors come out and said, Hey, listen, we're not going to make excuses for these things. And, you know, it's not our present values, which I think, you know, you look, I look back at

SPEAKER_14: those go go days, I didn't have an operational role at the company. And my role was to say like,

SPEAKER_24: Hey, are we, you know, when I would talk to management, or, you know, which was, you know, like maybe every month or two, I would talk to Travis, or, you know, me all or whoever, just to, you know, be a sounding board or something. It wasn't, I don't want to overstate my influence, obviously,

SPEAKER_14: especially in the later days. But, you know, they went very aggressively to go into markets where they were told they weren't allowed. And so if you want to change the world, and, you know, you want to have Airbnbs or ride sharing, and people are debating it, and you've got the forces of the cab company against you. And, you know, there were some gnarly forces on the other side of this, it was a bit basically a battle for should people be allowed to do ride sharing, that's what this all comes down to is, you know, the protectionist cab lobbies, versus, you know, a new way to do it, that's cheaper and better. And, you know, obviously, there's a lot at stake.

SPEAKER_32: And it's, there's a lot at stake. I think it was, I mean, it was obviously full court, I don't, I think it is clear that the tactics were aggressive, like, we should not pretend that

SPEAKER_15: they weren't aggressive, and that it did, in fact, and, you know, it resulted in Uber drivers being beaten up by taxi drivers, you can sort of say, like,

SPEAKER_206: Well, it doesn't say it was beaten up, he just said it was pulled from the car.

SPEAKER_04: It, there were occurrences, I've Googled it since there were other occurrences in which Uber drivers were beaten up by taxi drivers. Oh, really?

SPEAKER_15: And the suggestion in these documents is that Uber was like, yeah, that's going to happen. And it's going to make the taxi industry look bad. Yeah, that is a win for us. Now, it did make the taxi industry look bad, right? And where there was protectionism, it all and also, and Uber wanted to win, and they wanted to, to disrupt this industry. And also, they were ugly when they needed to be. I don't think there's any doubt about that. And that's been well reported. And these documents just seem to like, say that all over again, by the way, I should point out, Macron, I thought that was the most interesting part, because he just was sort of narrowly reelected, and apparently is already facing some investigation over that internally.

SPEAKER_14: Yeah, interesting to say, I mean, this is the other double edged sword, when you have a company that consumers love, because remember, in the early first half of Uber was, this is the greatest company, when does it come to my town, right? People forget that part of, God, I can't wait till we have

SPEAKER_01: Uber, I don't have to pay overpay for, you know, arrive from the airport or wait on an hour line,

SPEAKER_24: yada yada, or I can't get a cab in Brooklyn, you know, or I'm a minority, and I can't get, you know, a person of color in Manhattan, you know, would get passed over for a cab,

SPEAKER_14: and they would just pick a white guy. All of those great things made people were rooting for Uber, that was kind of the tough part, if I'm being honest, like being an investor is going from the world is rooting for this company, to now, like, people are starting to root against it, you know, the truth of it is, is we're on This Week in Startups, every time one of these controversies happened, you know what happened, Molly? More people used Uber. More downloads. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: Every single time. I mean, there was that mini delete Uber thing that did cause them to panic,

SPEAKER_26: and that forced a lot of change. There was like, I would say about five points of market share,

SPEAKER_24: you could contribute to like the peak chaos. If I remember correctly, as it was explained to me, like, maybe they lost five points to Lyft. When people are like, I've had enough of this, you know, bad company behaving badly. And I think a lot of it was around the harassment stuff. That was the stuff that kind of made people go, you know what, I'm done. And so,

SPEAKER_14: as a big lesson there, if you're fighting for people's right, this is the way I look at it, if you're fighting for people's rights to use a product, you're doing an innovative product, you're taking on incumbents. Great. But if you're just being, if people feel you're bullying people, or you're abusing people, or abusing your power, that's when they turn on you. And I think that's what you saw at the peak was they just people felt like, okay, Uber is now the 800 pound gorilla Uber is now the bully, right? And that's when people are like, I'll just delete Uber, and I'll go to this thing. Yeah. But ultimately, they ultimately, they won. So this is another thing to understand about how power works. Very rarely do people remember how you got the power, how you got the

SPEAKER_220: money, and how you succeeded. Now, I'm not saying that's not like life advice, necessarily. It's just

SPEAKER_24: an observation. But getting the power, you know, and then people just don't remember what happened. They just remembered, you built a great company, and you got a lot of look at Facebook,

SPEAKER_04: the great example of it. I mean, they don't remember why you can actually use an app now to

SPEAKER_118: call a taxi or pay with your, you know, something other than cash. Yeah, like it really did becomes

SPEAKER_15: a standard. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think you make a really good point, which is that there were that you have to fight really, really, really hard. You have to be absolutely gonzo to try to take on

SPEAKER_04: an abs and utterly entrenched incumbent that is 100% corrupt. There's no doubt about it. Yeah. And also,

SPEAKER_118: you have to probably be not very nice in the process.

SPEAKER_228: Yeah. Because being super nice is not gonna win.

SPEAKER_36: It never has. There's a time like, everybody likes to think like wartime, you know, is pleasant, and it's messy, and it's not pleasant, and bad things happen. And like, this was a war time,

SPEAKER_14: and people hate the metaphor. I know some people were triggered by like me using wars or plane crashes for samurai. But this was a wartime situation, right? And Travis is a wartime CEO. There's just some, some CEOs are built for it. And jobs is also a wartime CEO when he went up against Microsoft, right? Microsoft was just it's race analogous, Molly, Microsoft was this loved company. Oh, my God, they're putting software everywhere. And then it was like, Oh, they're overplaying their hand. And they're, you know, dictating too much of what happens in the market. And then Steve Jobs

SPEAKER_00: became the antidote to that, right? Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. And I suppose it has,

SPEAKER_04: it's unfortunate that it might have to follow that you then have a sort of a, like, you've got this kind of gonzo wartime situation, and then you end up with a toxic work environment. I don't know if those things have to go hand in hand, but they did. And I think that is what did more damage to Uber's reputation, probably even then. Well, and it was also that was, you know,

SPEAKER_234: the B2 era at the same time. And if you were to look at Google and the amount of complaints at Google,

SPEAKER_24: I can guarantee you, just based on what I know, at Google, Google's early years compared to like,

SPEAKER_14: Uber's worst moment, it would be not comparable. There was just also a cultural moment at that time,

SPEAKER_24: right. And a great cultural moment of accountability. So yeah, listen, dealing with

David Friedberg: your personal health and wellness, it can be daunting. You're probably being bombarded by ads and blog posts, you have no idea where to start. And that's why Thorne created a care system that's personalized, preventative, and holistic while still being science based. And if you're a high performing founder operator, you need to make sure you take care of your health. And listen, I was out of shape for a long time. Now I'm taking my health very seriously. And you should too. And that's where Thorne can help. Thorne offers at home tests, which identify where you need the most care, like a gut test that analyzes your gut microbiome, and a stress test that measures your stress hormone fluctuations. These tests help eliminate the guesswork for good health by providing personalized steps for how you should eat, how to exercise and what supplements you should take. These are the questions that are on all of our minds. They've got a range of multivitamins and supplements you can subscribe to. And Thorne is totally vertically integrated. So you're not dealing with anybody in the middle. Again, this is personalized health and wellness. To get started and take 10% off your

SPEAKER_36: first order. I want you to head to thorne.com slash the letter U slash twist. That's thorne.com slash U slash twist. Thanks for supporting the show. The one really appreciate it. And thanks for making such an innovative product. Back to present day, Uber. Okay, here we go. Present day, present day,

SPEAKER_15: Uber, uh, Twitter user, Joshua Ogundo tweeted the following screenshot of this Burberry ad that he was served in his Uber app, which presumably was, I think geo located or one assumes. Anyway, it seems like they're testing some apps. I don't know anything about this except that you tweeted, you know,

SPEAKER_242: it would become a dollar business. Do you know if it's geo geo located? What do we know about this?

SPEAKER_14: I don't know that. This was always in the plans. I had talked to Travis and the team there about it. And we have an investment in a company called rapify, which wraps cars, um, on the road. And

SPEAKER_26: some of them are Ubers and lifts and door dashes, and they would pay to wrap your car to get your ads.

SPEAKER_14: And then rapify will allow you to still operating as a business to do an ad buy. And then you would see all the cars on the road and you know, Hey, these cars were on the two 80. These cars were by the, you know, warriors arena during the game and you would get credit for those impressions, right? So you think about it's pretty cool. Um, and of course, because they're independent contractors, Uber drivers, Lyft drivers can do these things outside of the Uber or Lyft ecosystem. And this, I was always like, Hey man, we should wrap the cars, right? Imagine if we had a million cars get wrapped for the Superbowl or for, I don't know, an Avengers movie. And it's like, yeah,

SPEAKER_26: then they become full-time employees, you know, we're dictating how they drive, yada, yada.

SPEAKER_14: And so it's hard to be a freelancer, right? And so the cars, you have a lot of kept advertising, you have a lot of, uh, what's called a kept audience. So, and you have a lot of data on them.

SPEAKER_36: This is incredibly valuable. You've been in taxes, I'm sure, or in Vegas where they have those. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_250: And you're like, please turn off the video off, off, off. And then some Uber drivers would have

SPEAKER_14: those in their cars as well. Yeah. Um, but this business is different. Now you're in the app. This is why Uber's becoming a super app. And this is why Uber, I think will become the number one super app in, uh, the Western world very quickly. You, they have experiences in it now. Um, they have the gold belly business. You can ship like e-commerce wise, you know, your favorite brisket from Texas to your house or to a friend as a gift and now advertising. And so somebody was saying this might've been from Google's ad network, but imagine you are driving to your destination and it says there's a Starbucks or a fills, you know, coffee within two blocks, 150 feet of your destination. Would you like to reroute there and get a dollar off? This would be bonkers in terms of,

SPEAKER_39: you know, the impact it would have, because if the person did click reroute, Google, I'm sorry, Google, uh, Uber could just ask for a dollar, you know, for saying the customer there. Uh, it could

SPEAKER_87: be an incredible, incredible, um, Oh my God. Imagine if you were on your way places and you

SPEAKER_04: could actually search for a waypoint. Like I'm going to this thing and I have a, this is going to be the oldest lady example, but for whatever reason, it's the one that popped into my head. Oh, I have a run in my stockings or a hole in my sock. I need to stop at Walgreens and like pick

SPEAKER_15: up, or I didn't bring my lipstick or I'm out of chapstick. Like if you could have some version of waypoints and you could use the Uber app to be like, help, I need chapstick. And it'd be like, do you want to stop at Walgreens? You know, maybe it costs you an extra dollar, but you don't care. And then while Uber gets paid twice, cause they get a lead from Walgreens, like

SPEAKER_50: Amazing. Or imagine you're going to a destination. It knows it's a hotel.

SPEAKER_14: Okay. It knows you're going to a hotel. It assumes, Hey, maybe you're staying there. Cause you're coming from the airport to the hotel. And then it says, by the way, here are the shows playing near you. Here are the restaurants playing near you. Would you like to get a reservation? Make a reservation. Boom. So that's, or I'm going to this movie theater, right? So, you know, it's a movie theater. What do people do after movies? They may get a bite to eat, may get a drink and it says, Hey, here's some cocktails, or you're going to a movie during the day. It's like, Hey, here's some ice cream places and some boba places, whatever. So this could be very quickly, uh, with hundreds of millions of people in the app and their location. And, you know,

SPEAKER_36: they're in an Uber black versus an Uber X, you know, Uber X could be Starbucks, Uber black could be,

SPEAKER_24: you know, blue bottle might bid higher for that. Uh, maybe a cast or like Brandon Brooks is one of

SPEAKER_15: the notice is pointed out. If you're on the way to a Steelers game, you get Steelers merch ads,

SPEAKER_04: you could order food and beer ahead. Like if you could say, that's the easiest place to start is with events. I'm going to this concert. I want to pre-order food and drinks or buy my way to the

SPEAKER_14: front of the line or whatever. And it's just like any kind of revenue generation. And here's the great thing. That's going to be a marketplace. So if you're, uh, Cirque du Soleil and, you know, the average person spends $400 and your Starbucks, you know, the average person spends, you know, $8 Cirque du Soleil is going to say, you know what, you're in Vegas, you're going to see Cirque du Soleil ads and, you know, but you're in Boise and, you know, there's nobody else competing against it. Yeah. You can get the Starbucks ad. So this could be really big, you know, cash for Uber. And if you want to see the analogy, you need to only look at what's happening with Instagram ads or more accurately, Amazon's ad network, Amazon's, you know, Instagram was designed to do ads, but Amazon never even thought about that. And now they've got a multi-billion dollar ad business

SPEAKER_36: inside of, and you see it, right? When you do a search, there's ads right there. And it says

SPEAKER_15: sponsored. That means ads. This really could be big. And I'll be interested to see. This is where the ghosts of the past come back to Han Dara a little bit like Uber stock now, right? This second, right?

SPEAKER_04: It's down 3.7% today to a $42 billion market cap, still not profitable. Dara is trying to make all these moves that could be huge. And all of these Uber file stories are going to keep coming out. And so it'll be interesting to see how hard he has to fight the, like the history, the accumulated history of how you got here. And there are still complaints. In fact, even that one of the notices was a, was an Uber driver and was talking about, you know, watching his pay go to so little that he invented eventually quit. Like there are still some barriers to this. And I mean, it's analogous to the Twitter thing, right? Like you have a new CEO in this case, brand new from outside who's trying to

SPEAKER_118: build this thing and has this sort of accumulated scar tissue. And it's like, can he overcome it? Yeah. And there's a ton of potential here. Yeah. I mean, the good news is they've raised

SPEAKER_14: prices massively and the subsidies have stopped. So that was the other thing we were waiting for. I think we all thought it would happen quicker that, you know, Lyft and DoorDash and Uber would stop competing against each other and stop spending massively to incentivize the drivers to go from one platform to the other. But now with Lyft running out of money, DoorDash being forced to show they can be profitable and Uber being forced to show they were profitable. They've all switched to, you know, show cash flow and the growth, Uber's growth has been tremendous and their price to sales ratio is incredibly modest. So I'm a long term holder. And I've actually been thinking I'm going to start actively trading the market. So this is like a mini announcement,

SPEAKER_257: Nick, producer, Nick. Oh, boy. I just, you know, I had some, I had a couple million bucks, uh, enough flexing here. I'm just trading. I'm going to start J trading on the show.

SPEAKER_97: So here's my idea. I just, I had some money sitting in like one of these, Why is that on a show? That's a show. J trading. Okay. But anyway, it's gonna be a segment. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take like a million bucks or two million bucks. Is this legal? I think it's going to be legal. Is this investment advice?

SPEAKER_279: This is not investment advice. Do not follow my...

SPEAKER_50: Say that a bunch of times. It's not investment advice, but I'm going to explain my trades and I'm going to make my trades live on the air.

SPEAKER_257: So I talked to my partner. I said, I want to start actively trading. It's just like, yeah, you know, like every time you like go make money, like she wants to ride the horse,

SPEAKER_220: you know, like you got, you got a pony. You want to, you want to see.

SPEAKER_36: So yeah, starting next week, I'm going to clear out some of these like, you know, Vanguard funds. I have it. I'm going to do it live.

SPEAKER_50: And I'm going to just maybe for, what do you think, Nick, if I was going to put, let's just pick a number, 2 million bucks.

SPEAKER_284: First thing I would do, I would say, wait to clear your Vanguard funds out until you move to Austin or Miami for six months. That's all right. I don't mind taking it. That would be my first order of advice.

SPEAKER_285: I don't mind paying a little tax here. It's no big deal. I mean, they're up, but it's not like they're up ridiculous.

SPEAKER_20: I'm actually with Cole Highland,

SPEAKER_08: consult an attorney first before you start doing this live. Anyway, here's what I'm going to do live.

SPEAKER_10: I'm going to say, here's my trade. I want to pull up the account live. I want to put the trade in live and I'll explain my thinking. And then I'll have the notice. Tell me if they think this is a good, a good trade or not. And so like, I really want to build a position in Disney. I talk about Disney all the time. I love Disney. So, but I've been talking to show a bunch. I love Disney, but why don't I just, you know, when I say I love Disney, I'll just say, okay. Hey, Nick trade 50 K on the Disney. Boom. And we just put it in there.

SPEAKER_97: Somebody says they hate it. Oh, I know. Greenhouse creative. I really hate this.

SPEAKER_292: I'm not sure if we watch Jason go broke J trading.

SPEAKER_20: It's going to be a small amount of my net worth, but I think it would be fascinating. Doesn't it get into front run? This is going to be huge. Kramer meets twist. Yeah. It's Kramer. It's going to be Kramer meets twist. Moving markets.

SPEAKER_295: Look out Kramer. I tried my best at front run.

SPEAKER_36: Yo, nobody, that's why I'm going to do it live. I'm literally going to share my screen. I'm going to say I'm buying this much Disney by the end.

SPEAKER_10: Because we talk about these companies and we do all the back of the envelope math. How cool would it be if we did the back of the envelope math? And then I said, you know what? I think Buzzfeed is going to get bought out for like three times. So I'm going to, I'm going to make a 25 K bet. Boom, put it into the thing. And then is there a platform? I don't know if anybody knows this where you could see all my trades live.

SPEAKER_299: If not, that would be a good start. Uh, I think we just onboarded one as an advertiser actually last week.

SPEAKER_124: We did. Okay, cool. Yeah. Remember them?

SPEAKER_284: The social, uh, financial platform.

SPEAKER_302: Was that for me to go do that? Or that was like other experts?

SPEAKER_284: No, no, no, no, no, no. They're, they're doing ads on this week in startups, but.

SPEAKER_50: No, I know. But would I be able to share my trades? Or is that, I thought they had existing experts who you were going to follow.

SPEAKER_284: They do have that, but I'm sure that they would onboard you quickly. If you're like, Hey, I'm doing this for content.

SPEAKER_50: Yeah. Well, I'm doing it for content. Also. I'd like to, I think the market's going to be, I think it's going to be a unique

SPEAKER_26: buying opportunity for the next three to 12 months. But I, and I, cause everybody's so scared. Like every week watching what we do here, everybody's so scared. Everybody's so down on these companies, watching like the meta discussion on all in of like this chaos, when there's this much chaos, it feels like that's the right time. To buy. Right. And not being an index fund for me personally, you, you do what you want with your money.

SPEAKER_304: Chad says common stock, by the way, common stock and public also, but common stock seems

SPEAKER_97: to be the one that.

SPEAKER_10: Anyway. So if somebody could do some research on like, if I was going to publicly do it, that'd be good. And then if people could follow my trades and then they could just put money into

SPEAKER_14: an account and just do exactly what I do. I don't want to do that. I don't want responsibility of you following my trades.

SPEAKER_307: I mean, then you know, that's literally what is going to happen, which is why I call a lawyer first. Or shorting you, or shorting you, which would be way.

SPEAKER_160: People might fade my trades. I mean, what if I'm a maniac and I'm like, you know what? Short the J trading index. What if I'm a maniac?

SPEAKER_283: To be completely honest with you. I think it would be cool. Uh, if you made it, uh, some, a modest amount of profit from this, but it would be way better for content. If you just like got cut in half.

SPEAKER_313: I mean, I think that's what's going to happen.

SPEAKER_315: Cause I, I'll tell you my strategy. You're in a murder mode.

SPEAKER_318: That's my plan is to rule.

SPEAKER_14: Here's my, my plan is to, um, take a 10 year view of these trades, which is cause I don't want to make these trades like, and be a day trader and be like, have another thing distracting me on my life. I just think it's a unique time to buy something and hold it for 10 years. So, um, I was actually looking at SPAC.

SPEAKER_10: So I was thinking about doing like a J Cal SPAC pack. Oh boy. Cause I think there's a couple of the SPAC companies. Like, listen, I, we were private investors in desktop metal. I still believe in that company, uh, Joby. I always wanted to be an investor in Joby. Um, so I think there's some of them that, you know, you could actually trade in the, I don't want to say short term, but some of them would be long trades like desktop metal and Joby and some of them would be maybe short trades like Peloton and, um, Buzzfeed, which I think will be buyout candidates of their bio candidates. You might get a quick 20, 30% lift when they get bought out.

SPEAKER_325: Uh, I don't get financial advice on this thing live and saying that you are interested in buying up some SPACs and Peloton and Buzzfeed is the most contrarian thing you've ever said in your life. That is insane.

SPEAKER_32: It might be like literally Stan hope the note. He was like, are you high right now? I'm a little high. Yeah. Yeah. I'm saying this is unbelievable.

SPEAKER_331: I put a little bellies in my, my call bro. I'm high on cold bro. It's a hot man. This is a hell of a Monday.

SPEAKER_333: You're an idiot, but that rocks. Yeah.

SPEAKER_336: You should do that. There we go. The creativity flow. That's what's happening. Exactly.

SPEAKER_20: That's what happens when I spent too much time in the mountains. Text like blink if you're okay. That's true. The air is pretty thin. The air is thin.

SPEAKER_14: No, I've been up here for a week. I'm good. All right. Let's talk about, um, but anyway, so congratulations, uh, to the Uber team over there. I think. I don't get, I don't want to give projections, but I think the stock is going to triple in the next five years.

SPEAKER_337: So, um, that's just my, that's why I'm holding.

SPEAKER_14: I may actually buy more Uber and Robinhood. Those are two stocks I think are severely undervalued. So I might double down on existing positions again, you know? Yeah.

SPEAKER_24: Uh, so who knows? Live.

SPEAKER_341: Okay. And I'll do it live. I'll do it live.

SPEAKER_10: What we need is we need a stinger for like a live, you know, like a live trade. We got to come up with like a CNBC, like Jake house making a live trade. And so whenever I said, you know what, trade me 50 K on that. It does that like sound.

SPEAKER_346: And then you see Nick trading, and the trade gets put in and we do like a trading.

SPEAKER_257: I don't know that I want to be mechanically involved in this process.

SPEAKER_348: Lawyer.

SPEAKER_257: Can a lawyer tell me if what I've described today will get me in trouble or not?

SPEAKER_14: If I trade live on the air, or do I have to say, I'm about to do this trade.

SPEAKER_26: I'm going to do it at, you know, when the market closes today, I'm going to put the order in. What would be like just the most financial hygiene, mostly most hygienic financially. Uh, and just in fairness, because I also want to be fair to people. Like, I don't want to say I did this and then pump it. So if I was doing it live, that wouldn't be a pump, right? It would just be like, you're watching me trade it live. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_354: Just don't use a green hammer. That signifies a pump.

SPEAKER_179: No, I'm going to literally expand my thinking and then click the buy button live on air.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I know. Cole Highland who is really nerd. Cole Highland who's the most nervous about this said you can trade live on the air.

SPEAKER_15: I mean, this is not legal advice either. Dave Portnoy did it on Twitter live. Yes. That's. You need disclaimers legally. Yes. Probably in tax. Like we'd need it on the bottom of the screen. That would be like, this is not investment advice.

SPEAKER_291: Don't be an idiot. What do you think? Don't be an idiot. It'd be funny to do. I'm terrified right now, but sure. It's your money, man. It would definitely be funny.

SPEAKER_15: That's it would be unequivocally funny. It is unequivocally hilarious. And I will happily watch you do this with your money. It would be amazing.

SPEAKER_318: What if you get in for the trade? What if I do 2 million and you do 20,000? You just shadow each trade. You fade each trade.

SPEAKER_360: I was going to be like, and I do $2. That's how I bet. No, you put 20, put 20, and you can afford 20.

SPEAKER_283: And then you just follow them. I'm just imagining you like, this is a long way from. We're faping into Buzzfeed today, everyone. Exactly. Here we go. We're faping into Buzzfeed. No, no, no.

SPEAKER_366: The next thing you know. What? I would literally say.

SPEAKER_00: Dave Portnoy did it is also every reason not to do it. Fair point, Stan. Fair point. All right. No, I looked at Fortnoy was hilarious.

SPEAKER_368: What's the runway left? And I am bullish. It's good TV. You're like, I'm bull, man.

SPEAKER_39: You remember I said like, you're going to know the bottom of the market when a company has more cash in the bank or more revenue than their valuation.

SPEAKER_14: And that means somebody's going to look at this and just buy it. And when they buy it, it has to be at a premium to the market, because that's how it works. You have to give an offer that's higher for people to accept it. And so I do think like something that could happen with Peloton or Buzzfeed is what happened with Zendesk, which is somebody comes in and says, Hey, I'll just give you 20% over the market. Yada, yada. That's fair. Yeah.

SPEAKER_36: So, I mean, I think it's a stupid bet to make with like all of your money, but I think it's an entertaining bet. I would consider that like me gambling, like playing, I would consider this whole thing a high stakes poker game for me, but based on my knowledge.

SPEAKER_257: Right? Yeah. All right. Let's talk about.

SPEAKER_78: It's good TV. Apple cars. Let's do it. Speaking of good TV. Wow. Yeah. Speaking of a long running drama.

SPEAKER_20: Speaking of drama, this thing's got this, this thing makes ER jealous. Let's go. Hey, oh, um, the apple car project.

SPEAKER_04: Maybe you've noticed because it doesn't exist yet. Project Titan. Yeah. Uh, has been going on for eight years. Apple has spent the last eight years trying to maybe build a self-driving car or software for a car or back to maybe building a car. But the upshot is that the information interviewed 20 people who worked on the project and

SPEAKER_00: TLDR. It's a mess.

SPEAKER_50: Okay. Now this is interesting.

David Friedberg: The information interviewed 20 people who were in the, did they say if they were in the program previously currently in the program, I love how the information.

SPEAKER_379: A little bit of both. Yeah.

SPEAKER_36: Put this in context.

SPEAKER_257: Yep. So they, I feel more confident in this reporting. If there was 20 people and they all had either worked on or are currently working on the project,

SPEAKER_26: that sounds like a good sample size. Cause there's probably a thousand people working on it. Is that's the number that was the whisper number I heard years ago.

SPEAKER_04: I think I've heard that too. Well, they're saying this among the many fascinating things in this article is that Apple may be spending up to a billion dollars a year. Okay. On this project, even though a big part of what has caused all the setbacks with it is that they keep having to spend all this time convincing.

SPEAKER_00: Apple's leadership that it's important and they should keep doing it.

SPEAKER_94: Wait, they're getting gas lit by Tim cook. Tim cook evidently.

SPEAKER_00: Won't like come visit. Won't look at the price. Won't talk to them. Craig Federer. So how are you in a business?

Jason Calacanis: Imagine if you were J Cal, would you spend, I got so worked up. I called you J Cal, would you spend a billion dollars a year? Would you spend a hundred dollars a year on something that you could not be bothered with a billion dollars a year on something that he just is like, I don't think so. So then they had to like.

SPEAKER_384: I think he's nagging them to get performance.

SPEAKER_00: Maybe they like whipped up, but then it's causing them to backslide. They like whipped up this like, this like fake demo with cars that they rented on a, on a specific track to be like, look, we got it. We're doing it.

SPEAKER_20: Wait.

David Friedberg: So there may, that was the thing I thought was really interesting about this is that they made a video, a highly produced video with drone shots and everything that is to impress

SPEAKER_10: Tim cook and management. That's interesting in and of itself. Do you know what this reminds me of is member Bezos inside of Amazon would have them write

SPEAKER_14: the press release in order to like, kind of get an idea of like, Hey, here's what we're going to tell the press. And then here's the FAQ for the customers, right?

SPEAKER_10: That was a way to say, Hey, what is the finished product going to look like? How do we defend this is existence in the world? How do we market it? And obviously Apple has been known to make commercials. So I'm wondering if these are kind of like the commercials or what would be the demo at the keynote, right? So this is, it sounds to me like a keynote video and or videos for a commercial.

SPEAKER_36: And sometimes they put the commercials in the keynotes.

SPEAKER_10: That's actually kind of a brilliant thing on the, just on the side of, Hey, if you want to make this thing, give us our updates in the way we would tell our passionate, most passionate customers during a keynote. So that's kind of slick.

SPEAKER_36: But the fact that the cars, cause the also in the reporting was, this was like 40 miles of road

SPEAKER_39: through Montana, which by the way, the people in Montana are driving drunk and like, you know, with their foot out the window and a shotgun in their hand. That's not a difficult task to ride a road in Montana.

SPEAKER_389: I've driven those roads.

SPEAKER_39: You know, this is my home state.

SPEAKER_184: I'm just saying Molly, am I, am I directionally correct in your childhood? Did you ever see anybody with a foot out the window driving?

SPEAKER_15: Did we ever pick up a six pack for the road? And yes. Yeah. Okay. Maybe fine.

SPEAKER_184: Maybe. Okay. However. It's not an insult. It's just that you have very straight, long roads that are perfect with no potholes on them. Hmm.

SPEAKER_15: Well, that's apparently one of the big complaints actually about the insiders interviewed here in this story is no pun intended. Um, cause it was an apple insider too, is that they're like, what they keep doing is proving over and over that they can do a super specific track. That's easy. And then, and then they, so they did this big demo in Montana. And then they use these prototype to vehicles and created this drone video. And then it came back to San Francisco and the cars were like running into the curb and

SPEAKER_00: weaving in and out of the lanes, which to be fair is also everything that happens in San Francisco driving.

David Friedberg: Yeah. But okay.

SPEAKER_184: So in Montana, have you ever seen anybody sit on their window and drive the car with their, drive the steering wheel with their foot? Yes.

SPEAKER_395: Like that's, that's how hard it is. In San Francisco? Yes. I've seen that as well. No, no, that's in San Francisco too.

SPEAKER_397: Uh-huh. Exactly. They actually just drive, they just climb onto the top of their hood. And they drive up on the curb. And then they drive back in.

SPEAKER_400: Drive on top of the hood. Cars drive straight by default. That's how cars work.

SPEAKER_20: You get no credit for driving straight. Okay. This is such a weird spicy Monday show. Anyway, it is just, it's been back and forth right there.

SPEAKER_15: They've like decided if it's going to be a physical car at one point, it was going to be software. Now they're back. Now they keep testing it. But, but it seems like fundamentally the biggest problem is that upper management is not behind this. And I mean, honestly, when they announced this for years, I was like, they're not going to build a car and I'm still not sure they're going to, despite all of this money.

SPEAKER_04: Like, is this pot committed at this point, Jason?

SPEAKER_14: Um, you know, when you have 200 billion in cash and then it just keeps coming in, you keep buying back your stock and you don't know what to do with your money. And you build like a $5 billion campus.

SPEAKER_24: That makes no sense in the world. When you have, you know, more efficient campuses, you can move into or make.

SPEAKER_10: Like they have so much funny money. I, I wonder how much money a day in profits air pods, make the air pods. Yeah. What is it? I mean, I know the air pods is like, they always have that infographic going around that. It's like, you know, it'd be the 12th largest tech company or something. Right. Right. What is the profits on air pods? I get the sense that this is a billion dollars is probably two days worth of iPhone profits and

SPEAKER_403: like maybe a month worth of air pods. Right. So sure. Why not spend a billion? Yeah.

SPEAKER_392: And is it a tax write off? Like at some point, if it's a loss, then it's a write off, right?

SPEAKER_318: It's R and D. But they're, they're so profitable. Yeah.

SPEAKER_10: So it's, it's free money. And think about it. If you have 200 billion and you make five, but 5% on that, that means every year you're getting 10 billion in profits from your money sitting over here, let alone the profits coming

SPEAKER_36: in from every other overpriced product, cable, you know, and nonsense they're selling to us that we can't stop buying. So sure.

SPEAKER_50: They should be, if anything, they should be doing 10 projects like this and negging all 10 groups in the off chance that one works.

SPEAKER_257: Like they should literally, they were doing a TV at one point. I remember like hearing this, you know, Scoble had heard it. And they were going to do an actual television. Yeah.

SPEAKER_218: And I was like, no, they're not. Well, yeah.

SPEAKER_257: And it's, I think what you have to realize is they probably in their secret rooms, there are making designs of everything. Why wouldn't you, you know, it just keeps your R and D group engaged.

SPEAKER_284: Yeah. So, uh, 265 million dollars of profit per day. It, for the total company in 2021, 265 million per year. So in four days, six billion in profit a year.

SPEAKER_417: So a billion dollars a year is.

SPEAKER_403: So in four days over the long weekend, they made that much money over the July 4th weekend.

SPEAKER_417: Exactly.

SPEAKER_421: So I think it's okay.

David Friedberg: I mean, it is insane to neg those people, but maybe this is like Tim Cook's thing where

SPEAKER_10: he's like, you know, I, I, you guys keep working harder, but I'm not coming out there until you

SPEAKER_14: guys can, you know, impress me with something.

SPEAKER_422: It would be so. And your drone video is not cutting it.

SPEAKER_423: Can I give a quick shout out to the production company that produced that drone video and probably squeezed Apple for like a five X premium on whatever they charge. Oh my God. They're not even looking at that though. They're never going to see the light of day. Shout out to those people.

SPEAKER_14: I wonder if Apple makes their, some vid, like these videos, I'm sure they have an in-house production team that does those videos. Cause they don't want to have somebody leak it. Probably. That's true. They must have a hundred.

SPEAKER_426: Knowing Apple, I'm sure they do.

SPEAKER_14: How many video editors, could somebody leak this information to me? How many video editors, people in their production department, do they have at Apple?

SPEAKER_124: That might be 500 people. It probably is. Yeah. Yeah. That's actually a great point. I never thought about that before. They definitely don't outsource it.

SPEAKER_356: Cause they don't want any. No chance.

SPEAKER_429: I mean, they will let you make ads after the products out, right? They're famous for giving money to ad agencies, but yeah, internally, there must be people

SPEAKER_14: who are, there's your next job, Nick. If you, can you imagine what they would pay Nick to work there? Producer Nick.

SPEAKER_97: Um, but yeah, I think don't you dare. Don't you do it, Nick.

SPEAKER_36: Um, that would be a really crummy job though, because you get to see all this cool stuff, make these videos and then they burn the tapes. They just delete it. All right. It's just like, you have to go work inside of a private room where you don't have access

SPEAKER_24: to any of the files and, uh, you know, they, they scan you when you leave the campus that you're not stealing any videos. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, all right.

SPEAKER_434: Never hire me. Hope Springs. Your uncle was the guy who lied about the iPad. Oh yeah. That's right. You're changing your last name. They would do your last name and be like, oh, nope. Hard no.

SPEAKER_437: You have to change your last name. Callen. Callen. My name is Nick Callen.

SPEAKER_441: Callen. Callen. My name is Nick Turchey now. Nicholas Turchey. Yeah. All right, everybody.

SPEAKER_15: What a great show.

SPEAKER_00: What a great show. There is so much more. There's so much more interesting news and conversations. We're like backed up on them, but more keeps coming. But so it's going to be a big weekend.

SPEAKER_268: Big week ahead. Yeah. We got, there was a lot of Twitter threads over the weekend.

SPEAKER_14: I want to chime in on join us in the Twitter community. That's where you can talk to us. I think there's 1700 of us there now or so. And we talk about the show before the show shows up.

SPEAKER_24: Thanks to all the noties. Thanks to 250 people watching live. And you can join us live every day. YouTube.com slash this weekend. And we just chat, you get about, I would say, 20 to 50% more show if you come to the YouTube channel. And if you give a super chat, we're going to give those all to charity. I think I'm going to give those to little Steven's Silvio's charity, Nick, where he's teaching kids how to play music in disadvantaged neighborhoods in Jersey. So I think that's kind of a cool one.

SPEAKER_447: All right, everybody. We'll see you tomorrow. Follow at Molly wood. Follow at Jason.

SPEAKER_00: We'll see you back here tomorrow. Don't forget to join us on the discord this weekend. Startups.com slash discord. And you can keep chatting even when the show is not alive.

SPEAKER_87: Correct.

SPEAKER_448: Absolutely. All right. We'll see you all tomorrow.

SPEAKER_87: Bye. Bye. Bye.