974. - Brandon Flowers

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Chris Black** (0:49)
How Long Gone recording in progress. It's Chris Black. I'm coming to you from the beautiful Raffles Hotel in Boston, Jason. I'm on the 17th floor right now.

**Jason Stewart** (0:56)
You said the Raffles Hotel, like a state fair raffle?

**Chris Black** (1:00)
It is spelled in a similar way, but it's a beautiful property. I even had a sauna for me earlier.

**Jason Stewart** (1:06)
I wasn't questioning the beauty of the property. I just wanted to make sure that this hotel you're saying is called Raffles, like Ruffles with an A.

**Chris Black** (1:14)
You've never heard of the Raffles before?

**Jason Stewart** (1:15)
No.

**Chris Black** (1:16)
There are several.

**Jason Stewart** (1:17)
I totally believe you. I don't know why the name of that hotel is tickling me so.

**Chris Black** (1:21)
Well, it's silly.

**Jason Stewart** (1:22)
I'm glad you're up in there. You're in Boston. You're meeting with New Balance? What's up?

**Chris Black** (1:25)
Don't worry about what I'm doing. But I did leave, no, no, no, you're wrong, but I did leave an undisclosed shoe footwear business this morning after a meeting.

**Jason Stewart** (1:38)
Look at this little son of a gun. I don't know. No, no, no. I'm not telling except for this part.

**Chris Black** (1:43)
Best part was the CMO who I met with loves the pod, listens to How Long Gone. So, you know, it's all full circle for me.

**Jason Stewart** (1:50)
Okay. Well, CMO, whoever you are, thank you. I appreciate it.

**Chris Black** (1:55)
Thank you.
Thank you. But yeah, I had a long, yesterday was a long fuck. I didn't get to the hotel till like 1am, 1.30am. So I'm, but I'm recovered now. I'm back to, I'm back to 90%.

**Jason Stewart** (2:07)
You're flying back from San Francisco over to Boston, just kind of skimming along America's hat at the top there. That's, I've never done that run before, but it feels like a good crowd. Was it, was it a good crowd on the plane?

**Chris Black** (2:19)
Let me tell you about something that I've seen only on flights from the Yay area, is there's like a, there's a certain, there's glasses that these guys wear, and they're not meta glasses. There's something, a secret third thing that they wear.
And-

**Jason Stewart** (2:34)
They're not the Snapchats, not the Go-vision pros, okay?

**Chris Black** (2:38)
No, no. They look like, they look like, kind of like an oversized Wayfarer. They're black, and then the screen on their computer or iPad is completely black, and so is their phone. And I believe these guys are high level tech surgeons that are doing work that they can only see in the glasses so that no one can see their screen.

**Jason Stewart** (2:56)
Okay. You said surgeons as in they're good with coding, or are you talking about a literal medical doctor?

**Chris Black** (3:03)
Definitely not medical doctors, I think.

**Jason Stewart** (3:05)
I wasn't sure if you're like, these guys are performing, you know, like drone technology, you know, tracheotomies or something from the road, work from home.

**Chris Black** (3:14)
I'm not going to say that's out of the question, actually, now that you put it like that, but it is a-

**Jason Stewart** (3:17)
But you're saying that that's highly unlikely, more so these people are working, or they're just, you know, gooning, or whatever it may be, they're looking at their websites.

**Chris Black** (3:25)
That's what I would hope.

**Jason Stewart** (3:26)
But I'd like to think that they are, you know, these are Palantir employees who are-

**Chris Black** (3:30)
It's giving more of that than it is anything else, but I can't figure out what they're doing. And it's like, and you really can't, you know, when you get the screen protector, you know, you can't really see it, but this is something beyond that, because I stood right behind the guy and couldn't see his screen.

**Jason Stewart** (3:44)
Because normally the screen covers, it's a bit of a brown out, you can see shapes, you can see, oh, that person's texting, that person's watching a movie, they're in a Google doc. You get a full blackout, zero, zero idea what's going on.
And the problem is that only makes you want to see it more. And I think we're gonna, as that technology continues to persist, we were talking about the muzzle that you put on when you're working in the group, you know, we work space so people can't hear your Claude commands. And you can't see what you call your Claude when you want it to really make no mistakes.