In this episode, Dr. Jim plays a game called “Who’s the Biggest A-hole?” and puts three names up for consideration: Ryan Breslow, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Cuban.
The through line is simple: whether it’s gutting a workforce, dodging meaningful taxes, or standing next to authoritarian power for a business opportunity, the billionaire and tech elite keep showing us exactly who they are. And in Dr. Jim’s view, none of it should be excused just because someone wraps their behavior in innovation, efficiency, or public good.
Chapters:
00:00 – Who is the biggest a-hole?
00:19 – Ryan Breslow, Bolt, and cutting HR
02:07 – Bezos, taxes, and the teacher in Queens
03:00 – Why Mark Cuban is contestant three
04:10 – Discount drugs do not excuse bad alliances
04:29 – Who should win the biggest a-hole game
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Dr. Jim: On most days, it's hard for me to figure out who I hate more, the billionaire crowd or the tech bro crowd. Oftentimes, it's a dead heat.
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[00:00:19] First, we have Ryan Breslow, and for those of you who don't know who he is, he's a 30-something CEO of a tech company called Bolt. Now, Bolt lost 10 billion in its valuation, and that's when Breslow sprang back into action have after a couple year hiatus.
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[00:00:57] Now, after doing that, he hit [00:01:00] the reset button in his organization, and he said people had a 90-day period to readjust to what the new normal was. He stripped out all of the benefits that the organization had, and turned it into a complete hellscape. And shocker, a lot of people didn't survive that transition. Now he says that his organization is operating with a quarter of the staff and has much more energy, and it's a younger team. If this isn't the most egregious example of an uninformed and out-of-touch tech bro doing tech bro things, I don't know what is.
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[00:01:48] Billionaire POS Bezos: These people sometimes say that that, I don't pay taxes. It's not true. I pay billions of dollars in taxes, and it's a perma- again, if people want me to pay more billions- ... then let's have that debate, but don't [00:02:00] pretend, that this, that's gonna solve the problem. You could double the taxes I pay, and it's not gonna help that teacher in Queens.
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[00:02:40] So my solution to all of this is tax anyone with a net worth over $20 million at 95%, and that should return us to a society that is well-functioning and a government that works for all the people, not just the billionaire class. So we have Jeff Bezos as contestant [00:03:00] number two.
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[00:03:25] Well, because there's money to be made. So the diapered orange dementia patient had a press conference about his Trump RX site, and Cuban was standing alongside of him in helping push the scheme forward. And because he saw a money-making opportunity, he decided to throw his principles out the window and stand alongside the Nazi in chief.
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[00:04:10] But that didn't matter to Cuban. He saw an opportunity to get his discount drug platform out there as a way to reduce the cost of prescriptions for the general public. Now, while that's a good cause, it's not something that requires you to stand alongside a Nazi to push it forward.
