EV Truck Startup Nikola Runs Out of Juice | E2087

31:36Very elite people. This one is very popular with venture capitalists and startups. Okay. This is a niche podcast. That's a broad-based podcast. And we've been talking about doing this under the all-in brand. Publicly, we've talked about this many times. But you might have seen Phil Hellmuth and you can pull up his tweet. He's 60 years old now. He's one of my best friends in the world, just a stand-up mensch of a guy. And he was lamenting and he basically made an announcement that he will not be playing. He put the announcement on Instagram, but I'm sure it's on his Twitter. He said he's not going to play the main event.

32:10Now, he is the number one tournament poker player in the history of poker. He has 14 bracelets from the World Series of Poker. But what he said is like playing seven days in a row and they play, I think, 12-hour days. Yeah, and you get an hour break for dinner and then like two 20-minute breaks. But he said, you know, at 60 years old, it's an endurance test, not a skill test. And so I saw that he was sharing this. I saw people commenting on it. And let's just play it. If we have sound, we'll just play what he says here. This, I think, is part of it. It's just too tough. It's just too tough. You know, people at home are like, oh, Phil, you could play seven days in a row.

32:51Yeah, try it. Try getting up and playing at noon until midnight. Seven days in a row. And then they're, oh, well, today we have to play until 2 or 3 in the morning, which also happens at the WSOP main event. It's just exhausting, and I can't win, and I think that it really hurts the older players in a much bigger proportion than the younger players. And I'll say this. I had four great players come and tell me that they blew the main event because they got too tired with 50 left, with 30 left, with 100 left. It's turned into an endurance test. I don't think that the World Series Booker main event is measuring.

33:32So anyway, he made this comment. Then Daniel Negreanu, you can look it up as well, a friend of mine, and he was complaining about all these people wearing hats, It's people wearing scarves, masks, sunglasses, and how it just looks ridiculous on television. And you can't read people and it takes something out of it. So I think that resonates with people. And then I made a comment publicly like, you know, a lot of these kids are on speed. So in order to do 12 hour a day, seven days in a row, what's happened in poker is everybody's on speed. Like everybody's on something, Adderall, maybe illegal speed.

34:14I don't know. Everything in between. Um, now I understand people might use these things legally and have a prescription. However, I think it's like performance enhancing, uh, specifically for poker. If you've ever tried any of these things, like you will be focused. And so, who knows, maybe in the eighties and nineties, people were doing cocaine and now they're just doing Adderall and substituting that. And so very vibrantly, uh, or precociously, whatever he said in his post that, Hey, cocaine, they do drug testing for stimulants, whatever. That's pretty controversial. So anyway, this is all shaping up to be really fascinating and interesting.

34:57Excited to be part of it whenever it does happen. I'm assuming it's going to happen because Chamath gets things done. Yeah. I feel like you guys should definitely live stream this. Like the celebrities versus billionaires versus poker stars tournament. Like I know people who would want to watch that. I think it'll be a big hit. the all-in brand is a juggernaut, obviously. We don't need... I'll leave it to Chamath, because I think he's going to spearhead it, obviously. I'll leave it to him to do all the details, obviously, and I'll just show up. But just thinking about the all-in brand's reach, the top 1 % of our audience can play $100 ,000 and up buy-ins.

35:37And then I would say the top 20 % of the audience could play$10 ,000,$25 ,000,$50 ,000, no problem. I mean, the World Series probably was 10 times. Yeah, no. It's a lot of money, but if you're a poker player and you do it 10 times and you think you can cash, you know. And you don't want to make it too low because you don't want amateur casuals playing. You want it to be people who take their poker relatively seriously so they're good matches, you know? Yeah. So we'll see what he comes up with. I'm here to support it. I'm here for it. It sounds like it'd be also a lot of fun. And I tweeted, like, make it eight hours a day of playing.

36:15instead of 12, and then do three 20-minute breaks, no dinner breaks. So you start at 11, you're done by eight. Then you can go to dinner, or you can choose to go to bed. And then in the morning, you can work out, you can hit the pool, you can have a nice leisurely breakfast, and you can show up at 11, 11, 30, 12. Some people show up late for these tournaments, and they'll lose a couple of blinds, but they'd rather be fresh. All right, let's get into some of our main topics for the day. Number one, Yeah. Nikola files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. This is, of course, the electric truck maker that at one time they were going to be Tesla for semi trucks.

36:50Once valued at$30 billion, they've now filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. They failed to find a buyer or raise funds to sustain operations. So now the plan is auction off assets. Big turning point in the history of this company, of course, launched to a lot of fanfare. Wall Street got briefly excited. They launched on the stock market before they even had sold a single truck. So this was always people were very conceptually excited about this. But founder and original CEO Trevor Milton, there was a scandal around his leadership of the company. He was convicted in 2022 for securities and wire fraud after misleading investors.

37:28A lot of it comes down to what's known as the rolling truck video, where he claimed the Nikola truck was driving under its own power. It was actually rolling downhill in the video. It was purely sort of fraudulent. So the SEC settlement cost the company about$125 million in penalties. That was basically the beginning of the end for them. They only have$47 million in cash left for bankruptcy proceedings with liabilities between $1 and$10 billion and 1 to 5 ,000 outstanding creditors. So they are in a lot of trouble. and they're part of a broader shakeout in the EV sector. Lordstown Motors in 2023, Arrival in 2024, Canoe already this year have all sort of gone belly up and Rivian and Lucid are still afloat, but uncertain futures.

38:20They're struggling as well at the moment. Yeah, I mean, Rivian and Lucid are learning just how hard it is to scale manufacturing. You remember it almost killed Elon in the Model 3. I spent some time with him in the, I mean, I basically went to see him do a mental health check on my guy during the Model 3 because, you know, I was talking to him and he's like, yeah, I'm at the factory. And I was like, wait, it's like 11 o 'clock. Like, let's go get a steak or something. He's like, yeah, I got to stay here. I was like, all right, I'm going to bring you a burger. Where are you? I came out to see him.

38:49Like he was literally sleeping in the conference room while he was trying to get that Model 3 out the door. And he did. And it became actually, I think the best-selling car in the EV category. You're correct. The Model 3 was the world's all-time best-selling electric car as of 2021. It's since been topped by the Model Y. You're correct. Okay. So I got it exactly right. Sometimes I get things right here. Sometimes you nail it. Well, I mean, I read a lot and I get prepared for the show. And then when I'm wrong, people pile on. I mean, my Lord, there's a large number of MAGA folks who are waiting for me to make a mistake and they just dunk on me, which I like actually.

39:27Call me if I get something wrong. And so it's really hard to scale manufacturing. Anybody can make a hundred cars. Anybody can make a thousand cars. When you want to make a thousand a week, 5 ,000 a week, you know, now you got a real challenge. I knew Milton was a fraud. You know, I got a pretty good eye for this. There are people who are delusional and I would say not thoughtful. And then there are people who are delusional and incompetent. And I love me the latter, but incompetent delusional people, I mean, they just incinerate money. Competent delusional people change the world and they might incinerate some money.

40:06But, you know, if you think, hey, I'm going to put a computer on everybody's desk and you're Bill Gates and you're competent and you make good software and you're aggressive and you understand distribution and whatever, you know, like you might just make it happen. And that's what we do all day long as venture capitalists. We're looking for those delusional, another word would be ambitious, competent people. And it's important, my only second point here is that I want all founders to understand what securities fraud is at its core. You make a claim, and then somebody buys a share of stock from you, whether you're a private company or a public company.

40:45so you make a claim and then they buy a share if you make a claim that you know is false or you are reckless you know in a in a repeated way and you know this is a spectrum here and that's why we have courts what elizabeth holmes did in covering up these wild claims and then raising money, that's where the wire fraud comes in. So securities fraud, you told the story. We're just talking about Bill Ackman telling a story, right? We talked about storytelling. Yeah, you can spin a yarn all day long, but the facts have to be correct as you know them. And then your predictions need to be clearly predictions.

41:34You can make the most outlandish prediction you want. if it's framed as a prediction. And I'll just give you an example of this. And this will be an amalgamation of startups because I never like to talk specifically about one startup because people might be able to unpack it and then, you know, it's a bad look for me to be criticizing a founder since my mission in life is to support founders and inspire innovation. Imagine you pitch a bunch of investors, angel investors, and you put on a slide for your team somebody who you made an offer to but who had not accepted the offer. Now, imagine on your next slide, you talk about customers.

42:12Customers, pretty well-defined term of art. It's not even a term of art. It's a term. Yeah, it's very binary. Like they bought something from you or they have. Exactly. And then there's people on unpaid trials. There are people who have tested your product. There are free users. And then there's something in sales called your pipeline. I have seen, imagine the same, you know, composite of a founder. They took their customer lists, which had one customer, let's say, and their pipeline, which had nine customers. And they put it on a slide that said, our customers. And those nine people had clicked on a link and used the product as in they logged into it maybe, or they touched it in some way.

43:00But they didn't actually put a credit card in or get an invoice or actually use it meaningfully. Now that same angel investor finds out that these facts they were pitched on weren't right and they saved your documents and they, you know, wrote notes. And then they come back to you and say, by the way, I'd like my money back. Company's failing, trying to raise a new rent. But it's got some money left in the bank and say, you know what, I'd like my 50 ,000 back. Founder says, well, you know, you made the investment. He says, yeah, but you committed securities fraud. This person never worked at the company.

43:32And I called three of these customers. They have no idea who you are. So I know that these three aren't customers. If you were that founder, what would you do with your last$100 ,000? You pay that guy off. Yeah, quite. Don't go to jail. Fight him up. Yeah. Yeah. And then, because if not, that person, literally, all they have to do is just email the SEC and say, I suspect fraud. So the SEC is filled with people who have given up jobs, Lon, that are high paying in the private sector in order to do what they believe is noble, important work in markets. And they might be doing it to get a bigger payday later.

44:11OK, whatever. Sure. But they are sacrificing for a couple of years to go do this kind of thing. And Trevor, I think, and the courts found knowingly committed securities fraud. I kind of saw it. There was a really interesting moment when I interviewed him on Twist. And I don't know if we have a clip ready, but... We do. I just... Okay. So this is... I did this over Zoom from our studio. And I just want to just give a trigger warning here. You're going to see Fat J-Cow. So be careful, folks. I'm pretty chubby here. I know you see the shvelteness and you see the cannons and, you know, the muscle definition here.

44:47He was trying his best. Listen. Yeah. But Fat J-Cow is going to ask a question to Trevor Milton. The problem is, is 90 % of Americans will never own a semi-truck. And so your portfolio of investors can be very limited. And we wanted to go and build a company that's going to be worth$500 billion, trillion dollars over, say, 10 or 15 years. And if you're limiting yourself to 10 % of the market, you'll never do it, no matter how good your numbers are. The reason why people love Apple, everyone touches their product. Why do they love Google? Everyone touches their product. So what I did is I knew day one, once we started coming out, we had all this gravy train coming in from the semi-truck program.

45:22my question was okay that's great but i'll never touch the average consumer so therefore 90 of investors will probably never invest in me so i needed to touch the consumer and so that the truck is for the profit the semi truck the pickup trucks for the consumer and the consumer is the one who is part of the robin hood so i heard this and i just okay got it um i had asked him why are you creating the badger he he was doing the premise of nicola was they would have they would rent trucks to Anheuser-Busch by the mile, trucking as a service, and they would have a complete stack of, I don't know, hydrogen, electric, everything.

45:59But then they released a badger to compete with the F-150, Nikola, and the Cybertruck. And he explains to me that he's doing this to bait Robinhood, in my estimation, I'm using the term bait, but to get retail investors to buy the stock. And he says to make a trillion dollar market cap company. yeah he explicitly says that he's like he's trying to do apple like people invest in apple because they love their products people will love this product they'll invest in me my understanding is that clip was used in the criminal case against wow yeah so if you if you look up the criminal case and somebody in the you know one of our producers i'm gonna have a uh uh crowdsource producers here if you want to get extra bonus points from jcal i'll follow you and maybe i'll send you a twist mug or something if you uh correct us or do research in advance there'd be some kind of benefit i don't know what it is yet we'll brainstorm it but uh he um the kindest interpretation here was he wanted to raise awareness i don't think so he i don't know how anybody could ever justify what he said it was absolutely clear to me that he was trying to manipulate or bait.

47:14I don't know what the word is. I'm trying to think of a good word here. Help me out. I'll fill in. U.S. Attorney Damian Williams has had this to say. Quote, Trevor Milton lied to investors again and again on social media, on television, on podcasts, and in print. So that seems to be an explicit shout out to appearances just like that one we saw this week at Startup. My understanding is they played the clip in the courtroom. that was crazy that would make sense if there if he's if he's going in his big comment he's like this little these lies happened on podcast yeah that would be part of his case would be showing here's one of those podcasts yeah i think it's gross when people do this kind of stuff is he out of jail i think he's out of jail and the company's out of business yeah i think he did three years of uh like supervise i i don't even know if he was in like federal prison or if it It was just like house arrest or something.

48:06But, oh no, four-year prison sentence. So maybe he's not out yet. I just want to let founders know the system is rigged for founders in the United States. That's why every founder in the world wants to come here. The system is so rigged in your favor already. You can build a company here,

48:25fail magnificently, go down like Humane did, blowing hundreds of millions of dollars, have your products shut down. You know what the next discussion is? What's your next idea? When somebody fails in our portfolio, I say to them where they have like an acqui-hire and Raul from Superhuman is a perfect example. He did a company called report. If he sold it to LinkedIn, you know, he tripled our money. I put in 25 or 50K. I got back 150K. I was kind of bummed because I wanted it to, he had some big plans that I thought were very interesting. Long story short, I said, I'm okay with this because, you know, the major investors or all investors, you got to get them to sign.

49:00Sure. Like, okay, I'm willing to sell my share. So, So, you know, it's that moment in time, hey, we're selling. It didn't work out as well as we wanted to, but I need you to sign this piece of paper that says you're not going to sue or you're cool with the sale so that the other person is cool with the acquisition. You want to get what's called unanimous consent for the sale. And so all shareholders, you want ideally all shareholders to do it. If not, you got to get the majority and then you pull the minority shareholders who are not willing to sell and they have no choice. I said to him, just please promise me that when you do your next company, I'll be the first phone call that you get.

49:35I kid you not, two years later, he texts me on a Sunday. I said, where are you right now? I can't wait to hear the idea. He said, you know, I'm a Noe or whatever. I said, I'm in Pack Heights or Cow Hollow. I'm getting bagels. I'll meet you at the house. How quickly can you get here? He said, I'll be there at 11. I went and got bagels. We sat there. He pitched me on a Gmail competitor. That one is superhuman. I just looked at my returns for superhuman for my first fund. My Lord, if I sold my shares right now, I would return, I think, I don't know, maybe another two times, one or two times, depending on the valuation I got, maybe one even to three times because it's, you know, valuations have gone up and down.

50:16It's been an incredible investment. So second time, third time, third time founders, they always do great. We actually have a story about Superhuman ready to go today. You've done the most masterful segue in twist history without even knowing it. Superhuman, they released a video introducing new AI features aiming to help users better organize and categorize their emails. Some of these features include auto labeling. The AI will sort your emails into categories for you. You can even create custom categories that you'd like to sort into. Auto archive, instantly hiding emails so they don't clutter your inbox.

50:56AI follow-ups, they'll let you know, hey, you didn't respond to this one yet, and even auto-draft a follow-up in your voice. Split inbox upgrade, you can use AI labels alongside existing filters to split your inbox into different groups to make things easier for you. And coming soon, they want to auto draft full replies and even schedule meetings for you based on your calendar, all working sort of automatically in the background. We do have a little clip from Rahul introducing some of these new ideas. Oh, looking good. He got the leather jacket. is now constantly working beside you, organizing your inbox, making sure you never drop the ball, writing, and if you want, sending fully written emails on your behalf.

51:41It can even execute complete workflows end to end. Amazing. I mean, this is the holy grail. He's very good on camera, Rahul. Like we were saying before the show. He is now. Very polished presentation there. And I think, you know, I invited him to come on the pod, so I think he's coming on the pod next Wednesday. Correct. And I think Vlad from Robin Hood is going to come on soon. Also correct. We've got a lot of cool bookings in process behind the scenes. We're going on some more. Well, here's the thing. And it's interesting that those two are both coming on next Wednesday. So we've got big Wednesdays, big Wednesday energy, big hump day energy.

52:17Hump day, yeah. I mean, that's like two all-stars. And what I'll say about both of them, I don't know if we're going to overlap them on the live show. It might be good to overlap them for five or ten minutes to ask them a question. Both of these individuals are obsessed with product. And Vlad, and you look at Robin Hood, world-class design, and product velocity, and a customer obsession. Then you look at Raul from Superhuman, customer obsession, unbelievable world-class design, and they just have product velocity. These are three of the things in my playbook for investing in companies. Product and customer-obsessed individuals.

52:54I'll just say customer obsessed because that leads to product. So if you're customer obsessed, world-class design, and product velocity, these three things I don't think you can lose in your lifetime if you have these three. How do I know this? I've always had them. You've worked with me, Lon. How much of a design snob am I? How often do I'm like, this design needs to be better? A lot. A lot. A lot. Yes, you're always thinking about that every time something's really like a lot of companies I've worked for. You kind of come up with, here's how the thumbnails look. Here's how the blog posts look.

53:33Here's how the descriptions are written. And then that's it. It's automated. People are just doing it from then on. When you work for a Jason company, every time you do a new post, it's like, let's take a beat. Is this as good as it could be? Maybe we replace that line with this one. Yeah, why not look at it with a critical eye and say, I'm channeling the customer right now. Am I confused? What is the point of being here? What's the purpose of this product, service, blog post, tweet? What's the purpose of it? On the start of the show, I said the purpose of this show is to inspire founders and to help them grow their companies.

54:08And that's what we focus on. That's the purpose of this. You do have to think with purpose about these things. And this is a very important lesson for founders. If you are not focused on the design of your product, obsessed with your customers, and you're not shipping product on a regular cadence, you're not worthy of venture dollars or running a company. You should get out of the way, let somebody else be the CEO, and then ask yourself deeply, why can't I get product velocity? be oh you don't have that chip on your shoulder where you're just absolutely perturbed angry that that things are not getting better in the world the people who i've invested in who have actually changed the world have that chip lon they have that anger they have that fire in their belly that it's got to be better it's got to be better and most people in the world i think and it's not a criticism of those people necessarily.

55:08I'm not saying they're worthless and weak and they don't deserve to exist. They're just content to punch that clock, collect that check. And then there's other things in their life that I'm sure they're passionate about. Some people might be passionate about beer, football, their family, horseback riding, guns, whatever. Mazel tov. My best suggestion for a career is if you find yourself, God, you find yourself not having that passion, then look at what you're passionate about off duty and make that your startup. If you're passionate about horseback riding, when you're working at your desk, you're just thinking about the horseback riding, quit that job, shut that startup down, pivot it, and then go work on what you're actually obsessed with.

55:56And shout out to my friend, Raul, who just replied to us on X. Oh, nice. Very nice. I guess somebody live, I guess we're live tweeting the show now a bit too. As part of Lon being here, we've been looking at the show with fresh eyes. I'm like, why can't we live tweet this and like mention who we're talking about? Raul's amazing. Yeah, I'm not doing that today. That's Maddie behind the scenes. Thank you, Maddie. Maddie's got great potential. And co-host the show. No, no, no, no, no, no, not possible. Do you want to jump into our startup guessing game? Do you want to do one more story? Oh, it's back.

56:25Guess the fake startup is back. I'll give you a guest a fake startup for you if you want to jump in. I'm going to describe, give you the log line and a basic description of three startups. Two of these startups are real. You could go invest in them. You could go look at their websites. They exist. They are real companies. One of these startups I made up with my own mind, and it does not exist on any level. We want you and the folks watching at home, everybody, I'm going to give you a chance. I'm going to describe all three startups. You let us know which one you think is the fake startup. Now, for people who are in the chat, don't ruin it.

56:56I'm not looking at the chat right now. I just went full screen, so I don't see the chat. Don't go look for the startups. Yeah, don't Google. Don't really try to figure it out yourself. Try to play along. Enjoy it. Okay, here we go. Startup number one. Okay. Bargle. Bargle. The name is a combination of barter and haggle. The idea is that it's going to use AI to help you get the best deal when you're shopping at vintage stores, yard sales, when you're antiquing, so you can take a photo of the item you like, search for similar items that have been purchased in your area recently, scope out what other people are paying for them, and get a sense for the relative quality.

57:33Like, how does this one I'm looking at stack up against other similar items that people in my area are buying? Okay. Bargle. Bargle. Startup number one. Combination of bartering. Yeah. Barger and haggle. Bargle. Got it. Bargle. Startup number two. Canary, but spelled canary. This startup is building the world's first nose to computer neural interface for animals. So a scent detecting animal, this is a neural implant that will interpret and decode everything that they smell. It enhances human and animal working relationships. If you've got a bomb sniffing dog, a drug sniffing dog, some other kind of animal that a human has to interact with, this makes it easier than having to read the animal's cues.

58:19You can get a little written, here's what the animal is detected. so it understands what's going if this is norling for drug sniffing dogs or fruit sniffing dogs right yeah contraband animals that look for contraband exactly that is out there that's an out there concept which is making me lean towards it's real it's so far out there keep going all Right. Number three, Reflect Orbital. This is a solar energy startup. They have a master plan. They're going to install a string of giant mirrors into orbit over the earth. These mirrors will then reflect sunlight down to solar farms on the planet's surface.

59:03That will allow them to collect and distribute power even overnight. Okay. This has got to be real. I know this because there are so many companies that have been talking about this kind of concept and it's easier to get stuff into space so i do know that reflecting from space energy is a real vertical now i could be getting double faked by you right now since i you know that i know that would be impressive that would be very impressive but it would also be kind of lame because we know there's a whole category here and we would just be taking a real startup and just slapping a different name on it to be like, ha ha.

59:41Mm-hmm. I think that's real. So then I'm back to the other two. I got a 50-50 shot at them. Yeah, Bargle versus Canary. Now, Canary, spelt wrong. That was a key piece of this. There's an E there that should not be there. But, Gargle, Bargle, Gargle, is such a clever name. And then one is misspelled. They're both decent concepts, actually. I would like a haggling, bartering kind of website. We haven't had a good one of those since Groupon. I like that. This was a very old, I feel like when smartphones in their current generation were new, there were a lot of these price comparisons, take a photo of a product and then get information, but nobody ever nailed it to the wall.

1:00:33And it's got the AI angle. So as we were talking about earlier in the program, the why now is there. So why bring Groupon back now? Well, AI. Why bring eBay back now? AI. Exactly. Because if you think about it, if I, let's say I took a picture of, you know, a lamp or something for my house, but if I didn't tag it correctly, the old apps wouldn't be able to find it. Whereas today, AI is smart enough to go, oh, you're looking at a lamp. Here's other lamps. But it feels almost too well constructed. feels very well constructed. It feels so well constructed that it's almost as if somebody constructed it to be so well constructed that it was real.

1:01:16But it did not yet exist. And I think if you were going to bring Guess the Fake Startup back after a 10-year hiatus, you'd want to come out with an idea so strong and well constructed. The person doing this, you, Lon, would want to do it well. and the misspelled one I think is so obvious that it's going to exist because Neuralink exists and Neuralink has a dozen competitors actually just don't hear about them because they think they're behind and they don't have the same team as prominent as a leader as prominent as a team so I think I'm going to go with the fake startup being the one that is In fact, the most well-constructed, I think the fake startup is Bargo.

1:02:09You are correct. The fake startup is Bargo. Oh, my God. You nailed it again. You nailed it. Boom. I'll tell you, this one, I actually, I started with the name. I came up with the name first, and then I reverse engineered what the app would be based on how good a name I thought that was. Wow. And if you go watch the old episodes. I mean, my ability to deconstruct this. You're very good. You're tough to stump you. It's tough to stump Jacob. It's tough. Tough to stump Jacob. Because I think if this was a random panel, they wouldn't know that reflecting sunlight down to the Earth's surface for solar farms is real.

1:02:49That sounds made up. Like when I was looking at the website, I was like, this is science fiction. I can't believe they're even telling people I mean, it basically is Moonraker or something. It feels like it's a James Bond. There is a James Bond movie where they're using a mirror in space to, like, you can target people and blow them up, I think. I mean, it's kind of Death Star-esque. It's Death Star-lite to, like, put an energy beam down to the planet. This is for good. Yeah. The only thing I'm a little worried about is if you miss the relay down at the planet, I mean, something's turned into a desert.

1:03:21I think this was also Superman 3. Yeah. With Richard Pryor. Yo, that is 3. You're right. Richard Pryor Superman 3 the thing I like about Superman 3 is it was such a mess that they made like 15 different edits you can watch different versions of this but I just like the fact that Superman gets 5 o 'clock shadow and he gets dark and like I think there's a scene where he goes to a diner that's 3? I think that's 3 where like somebody's mouthing off to him that might be 2 but anyway there's this diner scene it's been a while Or somebody's mouthing off to him and he gets his butt kicked. Yeah. But then he comes back.

1:04:01Because he's lost his powers in two, right? Is that it? Yeah. No, but that's Superman two. But the bad kryptonite that turns him into a jerk is Superman three. Right. That's it. Yeah. They're right. The personality shift is three, but losing his powers, that's Lex Luthor in two. And he gets punched. Remember, he gets punched by somebody and he bleeds. This is Superman two. This is Superman two. That's Superman two. The dying fight scene where he gets beat up is two. Okay. So once again, if you were to rank the trilogy, for me, it's 2-1-3. Wow, it's crazy if you say that. I'm a huge Superman 2 fan.

1:04:35I agree with you. I think that's the best one. It's 2-1-3. A lot of people disagree. Oh, by the way, what do they do for Star Wars? 2-1-3. Yeah, I agree with that too. I like Superman 2 the best. Richard Lester, the great Richard Lester. And you like Empire the best. I do. And then you do it for Terminator. It's also 2-1-3. I like Terminator 1 a lot. I don't know. Because why? It's acoustic and raw? Yes. It's more like a horror. It's like sci-fi horror. It's like a stalker movie. And Schwarzenegger is really scary in it. And I feel like 2 is much more epic. And the action is amazing. But it loses the horror angle, I think.

1:05:12But 2 is better. I mean, as a film. They're both cool movies. But 2, come on. I think 2 is so iconic with the water scene with the trucks. I mean, it's a visual effects history, too, is a really important milestone because it was some of the first computer generated animation being integrated into live action scenes. It doesn't hold up for Jaws. On a level nobody had ever done before, like the liquid metal Terminator coming out of the floor. That was super groundbreaking. It doesn't hold up for Jaws. Jaws is one, two, three. Yeah. Oh, yeah. None of the Jaws sequels are that good. I mean, Jaws is like, that's one word.

1:05:47Well, Spielberg didn't come back, so you can't count that. Yeah. I've never done this for the Alien series. We'll do more of this kind of stuff now that Lon's back because people like this kind of stuff. All right, everybody. Couple of programming notes. Lon will be with us again Friday and next week while Alex is out on the town. And my lord, is it right? Is Alien 213? I'm going to have to get back to you on that because I can't remember. I think Alien's for sure 213. But there's four and then there's all those other sequels. Yeah, but we're just doing the first three here. Yeah, you're just talking the first one.

1:06:24I actually like Alien 3 more than most people. David Fincher did that one, but the effects were not, it doesn't hold up visually as well as the other ones. We'll see everybody on Friday. Bye-bye.