E136 Hacking the pod, Threads launches, Fed minutes, immigration debate, balloon farce, heart health

Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. I'm Jason Calcanus. I am the grifter with the mostest, the mostest. That's the shortest. The shortest. That's the fattest.

And the fattest. That's the dumbest. He's not even here. You can't do that.

It's awful.

That's just bullying.

We'll let your winners ride, Rain man David Sack. And instead we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

Love you at night, queen of kin.

Great open Jamaica.

Welcome to where is Jcal?

He wanted the week off. And anytime any of us take the week off, JCal says the show must go on. And he rings up Brad Gerthner and says, hey, we need a sub. Come on in. This week, this week. When JCal wanted the week off, he said, guys, we're all taking the week off. And Sack said the show must go on. JCal refused to show up. His producer editor refused to show up. So we are here solo, hacking our way to all in pod episode 136. As your moderator today, Dave Friedberg, I am extraordinarily joyous and happy to bring you the first episode of the all in podcast without the hostess with the most is Jason Calicanus. Joining me today, il Duce from Elba island. Chamath, polyhapatia Chamath. Firing up tweet storms lately. Taking over the twitter soon to take the threads by storm, I'm sure. Rain Man David Sachs joining us from a curtain showroom in the south of wherever. And from an attic in an old house, the man who manages $10 billion to generate 50% plus returns year to date, the one and only Brad Gerstner. Brad, welcome to the show. Great to have you.

Good to be here. Appreciate the call. Half hour ago.

Yeah, great.

Are we even going to be able to drop this episode? How are we going to actually upload it to Apple podcasts and all the rest?

So here's the deal. I have the email login. I think I can get into the accounts. I'm going to do the request for password reset on all the accounts. I have imovie on my computer, so I'm going to use imovie to edit it. It's going to be fantastic. I'll send you guys a little link before I'm going to create a descript account so we can edit our show and comment on it. I'll see how that works?

The shows is magically going to appear on YouTube and Apple podcasts, and Jcal is going to be like, what happened?

Exactly. So let's not.

Freeberg is Bernardo during the takeover of LVMH, which is a great story if you've never heard about it.

I'd love to hear.

He says he's going to partner with this irish entrepreneur to basically buy LVMH and they're going through. And at the 11th hour, he pulls a rug out from him, stabs him in the back, and basically does the deal himself. Gets to own LvMH and the rest is history. But this is you, Friedberg. You're pulling a Bernard Arnold at the last minute.

No, I would never stab J Cal in the back.

I would just password him in the front.

You'd stab him in the front, tell him you should show up to work, stab him in the front and steal the password.

It's not stabbing in the front. We showed up, he didn't. Yeah, he's trying to exercise passive aggressive control over the pod. He's been outvoted. He does not control the pod.

We've done 135 episodes and every time we've suggested taking a week off as a group and he doesn't want to, he says the show must go on and he calls up a guest and he keeps the show going at his whim and his discretion. So this week we are doing the same. The show must go on. Jcal is enjoying a summer break, wherever he is. I think we're all on vacation this week. Right?

I know why he didn't want the show to go on is he has a deep insecurity that he might get replaced at some point. Yeah, by someone smarter than.

Oh, Gerstner. You were supposed to replace me, but you might end up replacing Jcal.

No, the fans will just have to.

The truth is, last year, remember the fateful morning when I get a call from Chamath and he said, hey, we need you to come in. Jcal's out. We got and we need you in as the fourth. And I'm talking to Chamath, my phone rings and it's Jcal. And he said, friedberg's out. I had both guys going at the same time and it's been that way for the last twelve months.

I was in Vegas with when I had to sort this out. It burned an entire day. A year ago. It was a year ago.

Well, at least we got our LLC doc sign. That's what came out of it.

It's literally like the show know all the intrigue or whatever. But that's why JCal wanted to sabotage the show rather than have it go on without him, because he's afraid that the audience might like the show better without him. There's certainly been a lot of commenters saying that sort of thing. I guess we're going to find out. The fans need to let us know what they think of this episode.

All right, well, let's kick it off. First topic on the docket today, which I think is a great one. And chamath, you've been tweeting a lot lately, as we just talked about. I think that'll end up probably being our cold open. But Zuck announced and Facebook Meta announced the launch of Threads. Gersner, big shareholder of Meta, I think. Right, reasonably sized shareholder. Zuck this morning announced 30 million downloads of the app overnight. Threads is Instagram, Facebook, metascompetitor to Twitter. Looks almost like a clone. I mean, it is so similar in features, in interaction, in everything. Brad, maybe you can kick us off and talk a little bit about the importance of threads and how this is important to meta, and then we can talk a little bit about the app itself.

Well, I mean, the first thing is if rumors are true, they developed this over a period of six to nine months with 20 people. Okay. And so the extraordinary pace that's now occurring within, inside meta, we've heard from several people inside that said, people are pumped. They're actually updating real time user counts. They're over 30 million users already on Instagram. And it just gets back to this culture of flattening the organization, speeding up the organization. I think everybody's excited. The best engineers in the world want to see their products set free. And so, you know, I think threads is really interesting for a couple of reasons. Number one, if we flash back to what went on in China with Yao and Doyan, remember that text based social networks were where kind of, it started there. And so it's a bit anomalous. Doyan, which is the TikTok equivalent in China, was started based on Tiao, which was a text based news feed. And so it doesn't surprise me to see the social graph being leveraged into a text based feed. I think initially they're seeding it, obviously, with all your friends, so it looks more like celebs and entertainment. And my team is like, it's easier to use, it's faster, it feels more free. I think Adam Asari posted on threads that he stayed up all night last night, so excited with a product launch he and Zuck are responding to. People actually live on threads. And so part of this just goes to the pulse of the company. Over the next four to six weeks, they're going to have massive launches out of the AI side of the business. I expect a lot more support for their OpenAI model or for their open LLM. I also think they're going to launch a bunch of agents on WhatsApp and Instagram. So what I see is just velocity and cycle time within the business, improving. And then one final thing. In the age of right, you want to collect as much data as you can from your users. And we know that Facebook is very heavy on video and pictures, but what they're light on is text. And so in a world where the most important thing on the Internet to train your model is the word, right now, they're going to collect a lot of words, a lot of conversations, a lot of sentiment among the users, and maybe we'll come back to this. I just want to kick it back and get people's thoughts on the product. But already, by my estimate, if these guys get to 100 million, which it looks like they may be able to get to tonight, based upon the monetization that Twitter has, that's already a business that's doing something like two and a half billion dollars in revenue, if they chose to monetize it, 1.2 or 1.5 billion in EBIT, apply their current multiple to that, that's about a $20 billion increase in enterprise value built by, if rumors are true, 20 people over a course of six months.

Yeah, it's pretty impressive. I remember in the early days of friendster and Myspace and then even Facebook, these social networks launched and everyone thought it was going to be a conversational system. And so much of the usage and the page views and the minutes spent ultimately accrued to photos and over time, video. And now it's almost like this interesting reversion back to the origin that it's back to this conversational system. But these systems always seem to kind of evolve to, hey, just images are what win and what kind of gather