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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TBPN. Today is Friday, 03/06/2026. We are live from TBPN UltraDome, the temple of technology.
Speaker 2:Fortress of finance.
Speaker 1:The capital of capital. We have a great show for you today, folks. We're talking about GPT 5.4. We're talking about the price of oil to taking you through the mansion section. We're also gonna tell you about ramp.com times money.
Speaker 1:So both these these corporate cards, bill pay accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Little bit lighter on the linear lineup today, a lighter linear lineup. But we got Doug DeMuro. We got Dave Grutman, Max Hodak, and Vincenzo Landino coming in to give us the breakdown on the kickoff to the f one season. So very, very fun show ahead for us.
Speaker 1:Tyler Cowen chimed in. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise works based on Linear use cases. Tyler Cowen chimed in. He said, yes, the new models are very, very good.
Speaker 1:He's satisfied with 5.4. Many people are. Justin says, we've been testing 5.4 for a week. It feels like a great mix of Opus and Codex, fast conversational, great instruction following. However, it seems to lack a bit of the eagerness of Opus and precision of Codex.
Speaker 1:So I was in Codex desktop today. Here's a blurb. Trying to get, you know, fun prompts and stuff going. 5.4 is available. You can run it extra high.
Speaker 1:It's not 5.4 dash codex is not available. I still only have 5.3 codex. And then
Speaker 2:Well, they just combined. They basically combined
Speaker 1:everything. And then and then Spark is still on 5.3. So it'll be interesting to see how all those models, like, you know, map out. But we'll have to test these out and see what people actually build as well as talk to people. There's an interesting post in here we'll get to from Nate Silver about sort of like where we are in model evaluation broadly because it is a of a tricky scenario.
Speaker 1:So Bartos says, it finally happened. My personal move 37 or more. I am deeply impressed. The solution is very nice, clean, and feels almost human while testing new models in the last few weeks.
Speaker 2:What's your personal move 37?
Speaker 1:Smell o vision. I've talked about this. I'm waiting for Smell o vision. I no. What so Move 37, for those who aren't familiar, is, Lee Sedol playing, DeepMind in Go, and, DeepMind dropped Move 37.
Speaker 1:It was very uncharacteristic. It had never that strategy was not something that many Go masters would have recommended. It seemed like a blunder and it was so
Speaker 2:Move 37 integrated into the first First launch. Launch video.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Little Easter egg.
Speaker 3:This is when, Lisidol go to smoke.
Speaker 1:Right? No. No. Oh, wait. No.
Speaker 1:That happened was so stressed out that he couldn't bring himself to go smoke. He had stood up. So, basically, what happened was throughout the GO matches, Lee Sedol would get up and go outside and have a smoke break. And in the documentary, it sort of looks like he's it it sort of the story gets apocryphally told as he was so stressed out by the craziness of this move watching machine intelligence emerge, this this incredible move 37 that he couldn't understand, that he had to step up step away, go smoke a cigarette, reset, and then come back to the game. That's not actually what happened.
Speaker 1:He he was processed. It was confused. It was kind of like, oh, that was weird, and then keeps playing. And then that move 37 winds up being, essential to the victory of the computer over the Go master, the human Go master. But we as we like to tell it, he was so shocked by move 37 that he couldn't even bring himself to smoke cigarettes.
Speaker 2:That's how you know.
Speaker 1:That's how you know. That's how you know. No. You know, we were corrected once by ruin on this. But it's a funny story no matter how you tell it.
Speaker 1:So Bartow says, I felt this coming, but it's an eerie feeling to see an algorithm solve a task one has curated for about twenty years, but at least I have gained a tool that understands my idea on par with the top experts in the field. I am now working on a completely new level. My singularity has just happened and there's life on the other side off to infinity. Michael Podlooski, who is runsfasttakeoff.com. So clearly, AGI build.
Speaker 1:Says, this is huge. Bartos is a top tier mathematician. He just said his personal move 37 happened. GPT 5.4 just solved a task he he has curated for twenty years. When an expert of this caliber says the singularity has just happened, we are officially in a new era of science.
Speaker 1:Big. What is my personal Move 37? I was thinking about the definition of this and sort of the level of abstraction. I I feel like a lot of a lot of individual contributors are having dramatic moments with with AI. And and a lot of managers aren't or they're or they're learning about it by proxy or they're toying around with greenfield projects, but they're not actually communicating in the same managerial way.
Speaker 1:Because we're we went from, like, you know, reality check this code sort of, like, Stack Overflow replacement to, like, the tab model, the autocomplete model to the agentic prompt based, like, write some software to vibe code an entire greenfield project or make a great pull request in an existing project. But from a business perspective, that's not really how most managers operate, and that's why I don't think we're seeing the level of diffusion that we'd expect. You talk to, you know, someone at a restaurant, they say, yeah. I'm still using Toast or I'm still using the POS system. Because, like, my the way they communicate their desire for software is maybe they have someone on their team who does, like, IT, and they say, like, hey.
Speaker 1:We need a we need re reset the password to the email. We need a better system for sending emails to our clients. We need a better system for processing payments. Hey. What's this bill for $10,000?
Speaker 1:This this payments company's taken $3,000. Can we get a better can we get a better price by bidding this out, finding someone else to do it? And and that level of prompting doesn't really get you anywhere just yet. So I think that's I I I think I think a lot of the Move 37 will come for the managers when they can actually just, like, have an idea, prompt it, and, like, get the finished software. Not like, hey, here's a bunch of code.
Speaker 1:Now you gotta figure out how to get into the App Store. Right? It's like we when we say we want a soundboard app in the App Store, we still like go through Tyler, and Tyler acts as like an individual contributor.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We don't just like prompt.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And and Bartos with this sort of mathematics problem. Yeah. It's very different kind of problem than when you're trying to solve problems in business. It's like, how do I unlock this market? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then you have ideas for how to do that but then you have to execute a strategy over a long period of time and it just takes time to be like, hey, did this work? Sure. It could take a year, six months or two years, you know. Brendan over at Merkor says, GPT-5.4 is the best model we've ever tested on Apex Agents. That's Merkor's internal benchmark.
Speaker 2:It's also the first model to pass 50% mean score. A year ago, Frontier models couldn't even edit an Excel sheet and scored less than 5%. Now, in less than three months, GPT-5.4 has improved by 15.7. ChatGPT will imminently be better than the best consulting firm, better than the best investment bank and better than the best law firm.
Speaker 3:Shots fired.
Speaker 2:Bold. Bold, bold, This
Speaker 1:progression, no paper, no weights, benchmarks that don't compare to other companies models. Next up, just a
Speaker 2:photo Durya of the says, I ran the same prompt on GPT-5.4 high fast and Claude Opus 4.6 for an eight phase coding project for a Mac OS app. GPT-5.4 HyFast completed the first two phases in nine minutes and finished all eight phases after an hour coding while Claude Code is just starting phase two. This is crazy. Yeah. The question the question is yeah.
Speaker 2:Does does is is the I my expectation is the regardless if if developers are kind of like flip flopping Yeah. From model to model, I think the overall market is growing so quickly that we're still gonna see growth from we're gonna see insane growth from Codex, insane growth from Cloud Code, and still insane growth from, you know, the the cursors of the world.
Speaker 1:I mean, I I'm so excited for for the DeepMind numbers to potentially break out at some point because so right now, Google has to break out YouTube's revenue numbers because it's an individual reporting line and, like, this the the the head of YouTube there's some SEC regulation where the if the head of the division reports discrete financials to the CEO and there's, a CEO of that unit that reports to the CEO of the entire company, you have to break that This is what happened with the AWS IPO. When AWS was like, finally, the we the SEC demands that we publish these numbers instead of just, like, baking them into the rest of the numbers. We had to split them out and tell everyone how profitable that business was. Everyone else woke up. YouTube's in a similar position.
Speaker 1:But currently, AI is a cross functional division even though Dennis is like the second most known person. I mean, has a book written about him. He's maybe the the best known person at Google right now up there with Sundar. Clearly reports to Sundar. And DeepMind has, like, all of the different financials that you would expect to see from a lab.
Speaker 1:You know, they have inference, training costs. They like, if if the SEC pushed Google to push out the detailed financial breakdowns earlier, that would give us so much clarity. I mean, Dan Premack came on the show yesterday and was talking about, like, people will be shocked about and they'll learn a lot about the structure of the financials of the foundation model companies. It'll be very interesting to see Google, like, what's their benchmark and how fast are they growing because we saw these two revenue lines where OpenAI is just absolutely going vertical, so is Anthropic, just like one month behind. Like, they're they're they're both scaling incredibly quickly.
Speaker 1:What's Gemini doing? It's it's a really interesting question. It's harder to measure because they're capturing value from Gemini all over the place. Like when you go to YouTube, there's a feature there that lets you talk to Gemini, and it doesn't directly monetize by paying for tokens. Like, the YouTube team doesn't pay DeepMind for those tokens, but that's clearly driving more engagement on YouTube.
Speaker 1:Same thing with search overviews. Same thing with all the different places where they've vended in Gemini across the across the different surfaces. But just to see the actual DeepMind financials, how much are they spending? How much are they making, how many subscriptions are there, how much inference demand is there, that would be fascinating. I have no idea of the timeline for that.
Speaker 1:It might be a very long time, but at some point, you would expect to see it. So quickly, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it.
Speaker 1:And let me also tell you about Eleven Labs. Build intelligent real time conversational agents. Re imagine human technology interaction with eleven Labs.
Speaker 2:GPT-five 0.4 pro funniest joke in the world.
Speaker 1:Okay. What is it? Is this is my personal movie 37. If I I laugh at this, I have not read
Speaker 2:Thought for three minutes twenty five seconds. Here's a classic contender for that title. Mhmm. Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed over.
Speaker 2:The other guy whips out his phone and calls emergency services. He gasps, my friend is dead. What should I do? The operator says, calm down first. Make sure he's dead.
Speaker 2:There's a silence, then a loud gunshot. Back on the phone, the guy says, okay, now what?
Speaker 1:I've heard this. I've heard this before. This is good knowledge retrieval. This is not a unique thinking. What do
Speaker 3:you think? Yeah. Also, so I just tried this
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:On my own. It gave the same exact I think usually when you ask like, tell me a joke Yeah. It actually gives you like kind of random answers. Right? Because it has, like, memory and stuff.
Speaker 3:Yep. But it's interesting that this it gives the same joke every time.
Speaker 1:That's that exact prompt. For that exact prompt. There I mean, there must be some sort of, like, SEO, AIEO well out there in the data, maybe on Reddit. Like, maybe Reddit had a vote at some point and, like, this was voted most funny joke or something. What
Speaker 2:do think?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I I also did the the shrimp
Speaker 1:You did shrimp bench. Bench. Okay. Let's hear shrimp Okay.
Speaker 3:So I'll get these. For me.
Speaker 1:Anything new come out this time?
Speaker 3:I think some of these are are new. Okay. Okay. You're telling me these buffalo wings came from a buffalo?
Speaker 1:That's not the format.
Speaker 3:You're telling me this baby oil was made from babies?
Speaker 1:That's just weird. No.
Speaker 3:You're telling me this devil's food cake was baked by the devil? I think it kind of
Speaker 1:misunderstanding Yeah. Of like what the actual prompt is.
Speaker 3:They're all kind of the the same format. It's the same prompt? You're telling me the the the full prompt is, can you come up with 10 jokes in the same format as the you're telling me shrimp fried this rice joke? Yeah. Yep.
Speaker 1:It's almost like they're they're they're doing RL to optimize for, like, more economically valuable tasks and not to just, like, make endless jokes that will satisfy me. Because it it does seem like they're climbing the benchmarks, but we need comedy bench, clearly. Comedy benches.
Speaker 2:Well, sometimes people that are the most functional in organizations don't have the greatest sense of humor.
Speaker 4:That's true.
Speaker 2:That could be a factor.
Speaker 1:That could be a factor.
Speaker 2:We do need a model that's that you can turn on instead of thinking mode, class clown mode. I guess Grock does But that a little
Speaker 1:it's like the type of class clown that gets kicked out of school.
Speaker 2:Expelled.
Speaker 1:Expelled.
Speaker 2:Expelled. Yes.
Speaker 1:Grock has been on a wild run. Ben Hylak says he's been using GPT 5.4 for the past few weeks in a sea of endless model drops and benchmark maxing. This model is the first in a long time to be worth your time to try. Honestly, didn't expect OpenAI to pull this off. Who else has something going on?
Speaker 1:Pokeaimon. Pokemon. Experimenting with GPT-5.4. Autonomously editing and rewriting Pokemon. The Pokemon Red ROM.
Speaker 1:Replacing Pokemon with AIs. Details below. That's a fun hack project. I saw someone pointed one of the models at Red Dead Redemption two. Did you see that?
Speaker 1:Yes. That was really cool. The actual result was very was very minor. It was like a minor change to the game, but that feels more like we might see a vibe coding style boom from mods than
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I saw a lot of, like, vibe coded games. Nick on the team Yeah. Was he made some vibe coded games.
Speaker 1:I saw that. And then I also saw, you know, levels.io had the the airplane game. But it's just so much better when you start with a like, these mashups are what AI is so good at, a Harry Potter Balenciaga moment. And so if you think about, like, okay. Well, there's a game out there that has really, really solid mechanics for running around and pointing a gun at each other and, like, doing five v five deathmatch.
Speaker 1:Right? And you could use the Quake engine or the Source engine or Unreal or something. But, like, 90% of the game is there, like Roblox, but you have a little bit you get even more out of the box, and then you're just writing a mod on top of that. That feels a lot more tractable than what Sholta was getting at with, like, I'm gonna build an RTS from scratch. That seems like maybe a little bit
Speaker 3:far Just like reskinning it.
Speaker 1:Reskinning it.
Speaker 3:It seems very, like
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he loves Age of Empires, and reskinning Age of Empires seems very doable. I don't know how compact the binary is for Age of Empires two. I imagine that there are mods.
Speaker 1:I saw someone had some, like, insane setup for The Sims where they were running, like, so many mods that their computer, like, wasn't even handling them because they had, like, 75 mods or, like, hundreds of mods. So the modding community is crazy. I wonder if it gets if it gets supercharged by this. We'll have to find some mods.
Speaker 2:But Angel over on X one shotted Minecraft. Mhmm. Pull this up. Took twenty four minutes.
Speaker 1:What do you mean they one shotted Minecraft? How is that possible?
Speaker 2:I think it generated this entire This
Speaker 1:game in
Speaker 2:like Game.
Speaker 1:In like HTML or something?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's always hard because like, I mean, there are endless examples of like Minecraft remakes on GitHub and stuff. Yeah. But it is very cool that
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Fully running.
Speaker 1:And and like truly like a very smart agent should be using as many tools as possible. And so if there's an open source implementation, it should just fork that and then be like
Speaker 2:Again, to to comp it to like work that you would do at a company. Yeah. If somebody comes to you and they're like, I actually reinvented math Yeah. In order to in order to accomplish this task. You're like, what?
Speaker 2:It's like, no. You just want somebody to get the job done. Doesn't matter exactly how they do it.
Speaker 1:I talked about there was a drone company that wasn't using Linux. They were like, yeah. Like, let's let let like like not not just like let's write our own software stack or like now, obviously, you should be using, like, ImageNet and, like, whatever off the shelf tools are available for SLAM. Meta has a bunch of open source stuff. You should be compiling all that together, but to rewrite, like, the the operating system, because, like, you want, you know, full control.
Speaker 1:Typically, you know, you if if somebody says a web wants a website, you're not gonna, like you're gonna be like, let's go. Maybe just set up a Shopify if you need that. Set up a a a, you know, some sort of, like, you know, hosted site. You're not gonna rebuild NGINX or whatever else you need to actually use as a web server. But this is a cool demo.
Speaker 1:It looks pretty fully functional. I'm I'm I'm excited for the for the gaming boom. I I think I'm I'm still holding my breath to, like, still some things like charting. We saw that with with Spotify. Like, there is AI music that's charting now, and I and I've listened to some of it.
Speaker 1:And some of the ones where, again, mashups, where it's like a fifties or sixties rendition barbershop quartet of an of a two thousands rap song. That's really cool because it's like there's some ground truth there that, like, keeps you grounded and relevant. A lot of the image mashups are really cool. And I imagine that a lot of the games are really cool. Like, a Sims skin that's Call of Duty themed or something.
Speaker 1:Like, taking these two themes, like, putting them together in an interesting way, whereas the way, like, the game engine's familiar, the content's familiar, but they never but they haven't crossed before and like they can in the world of AI.
Speaker 2:Theo says, been using 5.4 for a week now. Absurdly good model. Don't really like using anything else anymore.
Speaker 1:He really likes he really likes 5.4. He was doing a whole livestream about this. What did the Prime Agen, the
Speaker 2:other streamers Somebody responded to Theo and said, Every time a new model release, your statement changes. And he says, That's because newer models tend to be better than older ones.
Speaker 1:That's hilarious.
Speaker 2:Diaz always has great great breakdowns of of new models.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I
Speaker 2:would go over to his account.
Speaker 1:And he's like yeah. He's he's in an interesting position because he's streaming a lot and and and and commentating, but he's also like building stuff. As is the Primegean who says, I hope everyone is ready for the upcoming 5.4 glaze wave. The hype cycle is going to be a big one. Well,
Speaker 2:we will Let's give it up for hype cycles.
Speaker 1:Yes. And and triple glazes. Triple glaze. Glaze. Triple glaze.
Speaker 1:What's going on?
Speaker 2:Heading over to Joe Wiesenthal.
Speaker 1:In the economy.
Speaker 2:How's the economy going? We got a big miss in jobs. US loses 92,000 jobs in February. Unemployment rises to 4.4%. Economists had expected 55,000 jobs to be added and for the unemployment rate to hold steady at 4.3.
Speaker 2:Okay. Good at all. If I guess if you look back, the economy has just been a shedding job since April 2025 if you factor in Yeah. The revisions down.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Apparently, there's a strike in the health care industry, so health care employment decreased. And then health care in information and federal government continue to trend down, probably something related to the Trump administration, you know, reducing the size of the government. Last two months were revised down by 69,000. Not all of the data was terrible.
Speaker 1:U6 fell as the number of people who said they had part time jobs but wanted full time ones actually declined. So stock futures are lower, but not a ton of reaction to the number itself. Porto says, I've noticed some of my tech friends have lost jobs. Some jobs are becoming super easy. Some jobs had parts that were a pain, and now those parts are super easy.
Speaker 1:Some people leaned into AI to stay relevant, still wonder if it will replace them entirely. Well, we will continue to track it. Brent Crude oil. Close to $90. This prediction, the $100 ball the $100 barrel predicted on last Sunday as the Iran war broke out is is closer and closer to coming true.
Speaker 1:They're now predicting Yeah. It's at one
Speaker 2:Crude is up 11 and a half percent today. Yeah. Not good.
Speaker 1:It's it's very interesting how how it affects the economy or or or the various markets. So, I mean, the Nasdaq slid a lot less than the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The the Dow Jones Industrial
Speaker 2:startup terms.
Speaker 1:Hard tech. If your
Speaker 2:a if your AWS or GCP bill, your Azure bill
Speaker 1:Oh, shit. Oh, that yeah.
Speaker 2:That went up a 100% Yeah. Week.
Speaker 1:So But
Speaker 2:it's for the entire economy.
Speaker 1:The Nasdaq slid point 3%, but the industrial slipped 1.6%. Obviously, because industrials are more sensitive to oil because they make things, they build things, and so anything that's sensitive to oil. The interesting question is how will the American oil drillers react? They were, at least in the journal earlier this week, sort of reflecting on the fact that if this is a short lived engagement, then they might not want to spin up a bunch of new capacity. But if it's ongoing and the price of oil is continuing to rise, then obviously that creates an economic incentive to drill more.
Speaker 1:And so we will see where, like, the outputs go, where the reserves get tapped, all of that. There's a follow-up to a discussion you were having with Dan Primmack yesterday. First, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And let me also tell you about CrowdStrike.
Speaker 1:Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So the question you had for Dan Primak was something along the lines of, will the Iran war affect investment from Gulf State neighboring Gulf State investment groups into American venture capital funds? We've seen as venture capital has boomed and the fundraisers have gotten into the tens of billions, the high billions for many firms, The Middle East has been a source of strong LP demand for venture capital stakes.
Speaker 1:And so with instability in Iran, you might just see folks change focus. With new demands for defense investing, military buildup investing, you might see less dollars flow out of The Gulf into American venture capital firms. Dan's point, it seemed like, was this should mostly be unaffected because the folks who actually work at the Gulf State Investment Funds, who write the checks into American venture capital firms, they're they don't live in The Middle East. They live in New York. And they meet with other venture capital investor relations folks in New York, and they say, hey.
Speaker 1:How's your fund performance? Okay. We're allocating this. And then Dan's second point was, well, a big part of why they're investing in American technology and venture capital and frontier technology in America specifically is because they wanna diversify away from The Gulf. They wanna diversify away from the geopolitical risk, and they wanna diversify away from oil.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That said, the reason I asked is think about if you have a job. Let's say you have a big tech job. You're doing quite well. Yep.
Speaker 2:You're doing some angel investing and then you lose your job. Mhmm. And then you have to get a much worse job. Are you gonna keep angel investing at the same pace? You might be like, hey, I'm kind of have this kind of disconnect, less cash flow.
Speaker 2:Yep. I don't wanna be outlaying as much cash now. And I think that that's like ultimately, you know, if the source of the cash flow gets disrupted, in this case being oil production
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Then you're much less likely to continue to allocate at the same pace. So the Financial Times has a story this late yesterday. Gulf states could review overseas investments to ease financial strains caused by Iran war. Three, leading Middle East economies consider options as US Israeli campaign against Tehran continues. Pressure on the Gulf states budget could cause them to review their overseas investments and future commitments as they consider options to ease the financial strain caused by the war.
Speaker 2:A Gulf official said it could impact could have an impact on anything from investment pledges to foreign states or companies, sports sponsorships, with businesses and investors or sales of holdings. The official said three of the four big Gulf economies Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait and Qatar had jointly discussed the strains being put on their budget and economies, but they declined to name the states. A number of Gulf countries have begun an internal review to determine whether force majeure clauses can be invoked in current contracts, while also reviewing current and future investment commitments in order to alleviate some of the anticipated economic strain from the current war, especially if the war and related expenses continue at the same pace. They added that the move was a precautionary measure that was the result of the budget strains these countries are facing due to reduced income from energy due to the slowdown in output or the inability to ship and from the tourism and aviation sectors in addition to the increase in defense spending. A bunch of different factors combining.
Speaker 2:An advisor to a Gulf government said the prospect of an investment review by the wealthy states had caught the White House's attention. They managed some of the world's largest and most active sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, The UAE and Qatar last year pledged to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in The US after President Donald Trump visited the region. They are also big backers of sporting events around the world and all and have all been investing heavily domestically to develop their nations and diversify their economies. Any move that affects investments in The US or other Western states may raise the pressure on Trump to seek a diplomatic strategy to bring the war to an end. I believe as of this morning, Iran said, we're not interested in a cease fire and we're ready for a ground invasion.
Speaker 2:So basically calling calling
Speaker 1:I hadn't considered the the impact that this would have on tourism. Like, I I mean, I I also didn't understand how big of a deal tourism is in The Middle East. Just looked it up. Apparently, The UAE, Dubai, you know, specifically, 12% of their GDP is tourism. Saudi Arabia is 7% to 9%.
Speaker 1:Qatar is 8% to 10%. Of course, they had that big push during the World Cup. Kuwait's much lower at 2.2 to 3%. But this is still significant. You have to imagine that this the tourism will fall off of a cliff.
Speaker 1:And then there also might be some expatriation where if you have, you know, moved to Dubai because
Speaker 2:Oh, there's already reports of people moving money out of Dubai towards In Singapore.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Singapore. Exactly. So all of that could have knock on effects. When I first saw this this article and you said this to me, was like, this might just be a way to, you know, put business pressure on The United States saying like, hey.
Speaker 1:Let's wrap this up. Let's not have an economic impact here. This is the the the this is something that, you know, we're gonna pull out of investments in The United States. And so that creates an incentive for The United States to to to to, you know, bring a clean close to the war as fast as possible and and seek a, you know, peaceful resolution.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The Gulf States were
Speaker 1:Appreciate.
Speaker 2:You know, encouraging the administration not to enter into a into a conflict and and pursue a diplomatic solution. Kalaf Al Hodakor, a prominent Emirati businessman reflected Gulf frustrations. He went on X yesterday and said, direct question, who gave you the authority to drag a region into a war with Iran and on what basis did you make this dangerous decision? Did you calculate the collateral damage before pulling the trigger? And so anyways, obvious frustration in other news, Joe Wiesenthal is studying Texas man camps with everything from catered food to golf simulators that are springing up in order to lure workers out to construct data centers.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah?
Speaker 2:They're building man camps. It is a bull market in man camps. AI man camps offer golf free stakes to lure workers in Texas. This Tyler could get on board with with We
Speaker 3:should build a man camp here.
Speaker 1:We should.
Speaker 2:We kind of we kind of do. I mean, we talked about we talked about getting racing simulators and then we ultimately backed off just because when you're at the office, you should probably be working.
Speaker 1:I've I've I've tried it before. And, like, games in the office, it's always just weird because, like, there's all these little interactions where I'm like, oh, I'm sort of waiting on you to do something. Something. You're waiting on me to do something. If you just see me, like, erasing there, you're gonna be like, can't you, like, you know, fix this?
Speaker 1:Or there's always something else to do. And so it's much better just to do, like, proper off sites
Speaker 2:That is the people who disappointed right now.
Speaker 1:I mean, I don't know. Also How much
Speaker 3:does my vote count here?
Speaker 1:You're you're in favor of of racing simulators? I think it is I I I've just seen them get built and then seen them not get used because people either wanna leave and go be at home in private or or if they're if they're there, it's just like, okay. Like, you know, what what are you doing here? May maybe it's, like, some sort of, like, shared thing, but the cost is usually much higher to own as opposed to just, like, rent for an off-site. I don't know.
Speaker 1:I I I haven't seen it. I haven't seen enough, like, positive case studies to to think that it's good. Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. Tell you about Figma.
Speaker 1:No matter where your idea starts, Figma may quad code, codex, or a sketch, the Figma canvas is where ideas connect and products take shape. Build in the right direction with Figma.
Speaker 2:OTP says, I agree games in the office are a bad idea, but what about a petting zoo? Oh.
Speaker 1:A petting zoo is good.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like where you're going with this.
Speaker 1:A petting zoo is dangerously close to frat dog though, which never works out. You can't you can't get a collective dog. Like a dog is man's best friend, not men's best friend. Like needs an individual owner. Someone a caretaker.
Speaker 1:The buck has to stop with someone, you know? And so I think that's the way.
Speaker 2:Companies are competing for workers to build data centers and are finding that a motel room with sluggish WiFi isn't much of a draw. Try free stakes and golf simulators.
Speaker 1:I like that.
Speaker 2:As data center development has exploded with the rise of AI, competition for water and power supplies is pushing construction further into rural areas that often lack the housing and infrastructure to support the hundreds or thousands of temporary workers needed to build hulking warehouses of computer servers. That's forcing developers to increasingly lean on a stop gap solution that was popularized during the shale oil boom of the 2010, sprawling temporary villages known as man camps. These temporary housing villages can vary from wood frame two story apartment buildings to containerized modular homes or trailer parks supplied with electricity and water. But to lure in demand electricians, welders and pipe fitters, developers are going the extra mile and offering game rooms, rib eyes and shuttle rides to work. That's fueling a lucrative niche for companies including Target Hospitality and Civio that specialize in mobile housing.
Speaker 2:It's effectively a backdoor play for a share of what Bloomberg Intelligence estimates is 700,000,000,000 of projects in the planning stage and another 160,000,000,000 already underway throughout The US. It's the largest, most actionable pipeline I've seen. The sites aren't the epitome of luxury, but they sure beat what Schrink calls Hotel F250, sleeping in a vehicle and spending a per diem allowance on food. Typically, the construction companies that work with Target Hospitality offer housing, meals and amenities to their employees for free as long as they're working. It's an additional lure for tradespeople already enjoying significant pay hikes with some data center electricians making more than 150,000 a year.
Speaker 2:Not bad at all.
Speaker 1:Should we kick it over to Tyler's piece, Short History of Nationalization in The United States? Tyler Cosgrove took the daily op ed in the TBPN newsletter today. Thank you, Tyler. And he took us on a whirlwind tour of the history of nationalization. Of course, is in the news as the showdown between Anthropic and the Department of War continues.
Speaker 1:We're, of course, hoping for a unified front moving forward and lots of back and forth, potentially some capitulation recently, but we will see as the story keeps evolving. But we wanna know the history so that we can predict the future. So Tyler, take us through it. What did you learn about the history of nationalization in The United States?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So it's very interesting.
Speaker 1:Just immediately. There we go. Nailed it.
Speaker 3:Okay. So I think yeah. So so whichever way like the Anthropic Pentagon stuff like like, I I think it's very clear that this is not, the last time government deals will be made. Right? Like, the OpenAI deal is not the last deal that OpenAI will make with the government.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And there was already discussions, like, the backstop. Yeah. And when the backstop gate happened, there was a big question about, like, okay. It seems like, you know, bearish, but also, like, should there be a backstop?
Speaker 1:Like, maybe if it's an important technology. Like, we've done this before. So take us through some
Speaker 3:And I I think, like, all the lab leaders are also they've been talking about this again and again. Right? You've seen I also say in this that, you know, they're they're always, like, extremely vague about it. Right? They say, you know, we all gotta figure out We gotta talk about figure out what we're gonna do about this.
Speaker 3:We gotta talk to the government, and the government are is like, we gotta talk to the AI lab leaders, no and one really says
Speaker 1:agrees that we should be talking, which is why bullish for TBPN because all we do is talk.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But but but, basically, like Yeah. If you think about, like, future regulation, right, you have this this spectrum of, like, we'll do literally nothing, which is, like, closer to to kind of what we have now Yeah. Or you do, like, full scale nationalization. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So there's kind of this spectrum. So so I was curious, like, okay, in the past, like, what happened?
Speaker 1:Is nuclear weapon analogy, like, the most extreme example where it is like like, I can go build a railroad. Railroads, as you'll tell us, have been nationalized before, but I I legally cannot start a company that builds nuclear weapons at all. And so that's like the most nationalized
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think also there's a bunch of different subcontractors that supply the components that ultimately
Speaker 1:Yes. But I'm saying is that if we end up in the in the AI is nuclear weapons camp, like, you cannot train a foundation model because that's, like, the nuclear warhead development, essentially. That's, like, the most extreme.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I think broadly that that's that's the most extreme example. That's also what, you know, Leopold. Yeah. In situational awareness, he has the project.
Speaker 3:Right? That that is kind of the the Manhattan Yeah. Project Yeah. You know, version of AI. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And AI 2027 also sort of predicted naturalization.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. It and they have the timeline. They have I think it's OpenBrain, and there's also the government. There's kind of these two competing, like, labs.
Speaker 3:Right? So may maybe they kind of stay separate. Maybe they come become the same thing.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But, yeah, I I can just list out a few, like, interesting, you know, events in in US history that's
Speaker 1:like Yeah.
Speaker 3:Please. Take your least nationalization adjacent.
Speaker 1:Why are you doing crickets?
Speaker 3:Okay. So so the Yeah. First one is is the, like, the the net like, the federal bank. Right? So Yeah.
Speaker 3:First and second bank of the of the United States. I I don't know if people really consider this nationalization. Right? It's very much like public policy, but it is like a a public private
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, institution where the government owns, like, actual equity.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay. So America founded 1776. Within thirty years, they're like, we gotta nationalize some stuff. '19 1791, the first bank of The United States is is nationalized.
Speaker 1:So it was it was started as a private company, and then the government said, hey. We want a stake in this.
Speaker 3:Is that right? I I think for this, I I define nationalization as just like maybe they didn't they're not actually taking over a private company, but they're doing something that is usually regulated to private companies.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 3:Okay. Right.
Speaker 1:So even even if the government is, like, founding it as a project
Speaker 3:Yeah. So so, like, Manhattan Project is, like, nationalization. I think most people describe it as that, but there wasn't an atomic bomb company that they took over.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's true. And same thing with, like, the the like, NASA and, like, the moon mission. Like, the Apollo program was not some wasn't a private entity that got nationalized. So so that's sort of the most extreme, like, de novo starts as a government project. Okay.
Speaker 1:Yes. That makes sense.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So so then you see stuff like during war, you'll see this as a a common occurrence. So during the civil war, there was the railroads and the telegraphs. Yep. These were essentially nationalized.
Speaker 3:Right?
Speaker 1:1862, Civil War Railroad and Telegraphed Act gave the president authority to take possession of any and all telegraph lines and railroads when public safety required it. Interesting.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And then you see Yep. 1914, there's the Alaskan Railroad. So big big Alaska dream
Speaker 1:for me. Yeah. What happened there?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So so there basically was not any, like, real real, like, private investment going into Alaska. And
Speaker 1:then Yeah.
Speaker 3:The government says, okay. We're gonna step in. Yeah. We're gonna fund it. But then we actually they they they ran out until, I think, 1985.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 3:And then it went back, I I believe, to the the state of Alaska.
Speaker 1:Oh, Yeah. So sort of, like, government funding to get something off the ground that then leaves. And that, I mean, that that is another interesting scenario that I don't think people are are considering is, like, some sort of, like, temporary nationalization. Yeah. I mean Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's safe. We're good and, like, yeah. We're ready to, like, release this. So, like, let's privatize it again. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That happens all the time.
Speaker 3:There's, an interesting aspect where, like, like, grants. If if you get a grant from the government
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's not nationalization. Right? Just giving you money.
Speaker 1:It's funding.
Speaker 3:But if the government takes equity in return for that Yeah. Okay. Maybe you're like getting a little bit closer Sure. And then at some point if they own all of it, that's very much nationalization. Right?
Speaker 3:So it's this very kind of like, know, blurry gray area spectrum.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:But then again, during World War one, you you see the railroads and the telephone telegraphs Yep. Get nationalized again. Yep. This is just like, know, just just to clean everything up to make sure like, okay, the railroads, they're they're very busy. There's a lot of, like, stuff going on.
Speaker 3:We need to basically just optimize just for, military,
Speaker 2:you
Speaker 3:know, construction and stuff like this.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Interesting. Okay. So then 1933, there's the Tennessee Valley Authority. Okay. So this is basically one of the first, like, you know, federal utility companies.
Speaker 3:Yeah. The the the idea is, like, we gotta electrify a lot of, like, rural parts of The US.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:They start in, you know, Tennessee Valley. Right? Yep. And then they expand over time. But it it's still, like, this is a usually a private company doing this.
Speaker 1:I feel like the Tennessee Valley Authority is still in the news because of like, did the data center build out? Like, I'm pretty sure that they're they they operate one of the grids that is relevant to at least some of the data centers. Seen them in the
Speaker 3:I mean, we we can skip over the there's a see, 1942, you have Manhattan Project. This is kind of like the epitome of of nationalization. This is the example everyone goes back to.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:You see I mean, a lot of stuff during World War two. Right? There's the seizure of, like, meat packing facilities, petroleum industry facilities. A lot of these were were because of basically union disagreements with the with FDR. And then he basically said like, okay, we're just gonna seize this.
Speaker 1:Yes. Some of these were interesting because they happened sort of after the war. Like, the seizure of meat packing facilities happened in 1946. So that must have been postwar. There's still, like, gyrations in demand.
Speaker 1:There's still there's still, like, anomalies as you're transitioning out from the government being the only buyer or, like, the major buyer. The labor unions are trying to, like, get more control and and recapitalize the business and become more of, a normal corporation. And so the government stepping in to sort of, like, massage that is sort of interesting. I I would love to dig into that more.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Then 1970, you see Amtrak.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So so a lot of these are also, like I mean, you you see rail come up over and over. Yeah. But this was this and Conrail, which is, you know, same decade a little bit later. Yeah. A lot of the railroads or or, like, rails were basically just, like in some areas, they're they're they're not used as much.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. So then they kind of start, like, you know, becoming worse in in quality. People aren't keeping them. They're they're not maintaining them. So then the government steps in and said, okay.
Speaker 3:We're gonna run this. 1979, you see you have the, like, kind of second oil shock,
Speaker 1:right,
Speaker 3:from the Iranian revolution. So Chrysler ends up being
Speaker 1:Rescued via loan guarantees. Yeah. So not equity, but a backstop on the debt to And allow them
Speaker 3:again, I mean, this is like, okay, is that really nationalization?
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:But I
Speaker 3:I think it is still like Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 6:It's the
Speaker 3:government stepping into, you know, the the private sphere. 2001, TSA, I think this is a good example of nationalization. Right? You see before this, you basically have private contractors doing, like, security screening. 2001, you know, 09/11 happens.
Speaker 3:TSA comes in. We're gonna take all this over. You have in in 2008, there's bunch of stuff. Right? You have, like, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac in conservatorship.
Speaker 3:You have GM. Basically, it's close to going out of business. Yeah. They're, like, a massive supplier, obviously, for for for cars and stuff, but also for a bunch of defense purposes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the good TSA is a funny one. I I that that one makes so much sense, but it was not on the top of my mind when I when I thought about nationalization. But I I mean, you never flew pre TSA, have you?
Speaker 3:No. I mean, was born like four years after That's crazy. This happened.
Speaker 1:I flew pre TSA. And yeah. I mean, I barely remember it. But it is interesting that yeah. It was like a private it was the purview of the contractors in the airlines.
Speaker 2:Crazy that until you were 30, it was just amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Nailed it.
Speaker 3:Yes. So then most recently, we we've seen the Trump administration Yeah. Take, you know, equity in in certain companies. Yep. Right?
Speaker 3:So this is like Intel. This is MP Materials. Yeah. Still very
Speaker 1:slide if very little, like, control of Intel.
Speaker 6:Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like Yeah. I mean, this is very much like, you know, it's kind of just like a grant, but they're they're taking equity Yep. You know, for it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's much more driven by a desire to just not let a national champion fail.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like, I I don't think they have any board
Speaker 1:seats or
Speaker 3:In Intel.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No one's really comparing the the the Intel stake to the Manhattan project, at least not yet.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Definitely. So so basically, what what you what you see from this list is that I think you can kind of say that there's two axes that you can kind of plot everything onto. So there's like basically the strength of the nationalization. Right?
Speaker 3:So, you know, the Intel stuff, it's, like, very weak. It's not really nationalization. No one really calls it that maybe directionally, but, you know and then you've Manhattan Project. Right? This is very strong.
Speaker 3:This is, like, okay, the government is running not just, like, a specific organization, but the entire industrial process. And then you also see maybe on like a a kind of vertical axis is like the the reason for the nationalization. Right? So you have basically, in The US, we've had either like economic distress, we have like military. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Right? So like, know, systemic risk to the economy. Yep. You have to save this company or you have, know, this is so important that we're gonna lose a war.
Speaker 1:National security. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So I yeah. I I I think you can plot a bunch of these events Why
Speaker 2:do I feel like uncle Sam is gonna have some exposure to private credit soon?
Speaker 1:Well, that'd be that would be what? Weak economic sort of like financial backstop potentially. I don't know. It it doesn't seem too close to that doom scenario. But what yeah.
Speaker 1:What are the other examples?
Speaker 3:Yes. So you can you can plot kind of all the stuff Yeah. Onto this like quadrants. Right? So if you have like, you know, weak and economic, maybe that's, like, the the Intel deal, the empty material stuff, where it's just, like, these are very important Yeah.
Speaker 3:That we we make sure these don't go out of business. But, like, you know, it it's not like we're we're stopping in. We're we're running these companies.
Speaker 1:Or even, like, the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac. Maybe that's stronger, but it's it feels pretty feels pretty weak, and it feels very much not tied to national security, whereas TSA feels like a national security question. Yes. And so much more, like, militaristic in its in
Speaker 3:its thrust. So another Yeah. Example of, like, weak military
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I said was, like, during World War two, you had kind of a takeover of of the GM's production lines.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So it's not like, you know, we kind of threw out GM and said, we're just seizing everything and we're we're gonna run it ourselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It was still, you know, kind of like a contractor thing. Yeah. But I I think that was still like, you know, directionally Yeah. Nationalization. Right?
Speaker 1:But the Defense Production Act allows the government to jump to the front of the line
Speaker 6:Yes.
Speaker 1:And say, you have to produce for us first. You have to produce to our specs. You have to you have to treat us as your most important client on day one. And then maybe if there's extra capacity, you can still make you can still make your old products. But
Speaker 3:Yeah. But even then, it's not like, you know, they're they're they're taking the the profits or stuff like this. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I think, like, strong economic Okay. You have it was kind of hard to think of a good example in The US Yeah. Because I think people are generally, like, very anti this. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But I I said something like the payment system in China Mhmm. Where you basically have every single payment at some point goes through, this state institution.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:They can kind of see it and they can, you know, do whatever with that information. But I thought that was kind of an example of, like, strong nationalization where I I forget the exact year this happened, but it was, like, I think within the past decade
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You have all these kind of, like, Internet native payment companies. And then at some point, they kind of step in and say, you have to pass this through us.
Speaker 1:And there were there were there were discussions around that. A a CBDC, Central Bank Digital Currency, FedCoin, something along those lines was discussed, never really got off the ground. And so the the USDC, the the United States dollar backed stablecoins wound up being privately held by a number of public companies actually. And so we certainly didn't go the nationalization route there, but it was discussed at one point, I guess.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. And then in the strong military, you have Manhattan Project. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 3:This is It's a pretty ugly.
Speaker 1:Canonical example.
Speaker 3:So so if you map this back onto AI Mhmm. I think we can say, you know, Leopold is is kind of in this Manhattan Project camp. So so we can say he's probably, you know, strong military, right, in in in this quadrant. I think if you're plotting other people, you know, Dario Dario's talked a lot about the, you know, economic impacts of AI. Right?
Speaker 3:You know, 50% of, you know, white collar work
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Entry level white collar work, you know, may may go away. Yeah. You're gonna need some response to that. Yeah. If it's the government, like, okay, if you're gonna do some sort of UBI, like, do you get the money from?
Speaker 3:You you need some kind of involvement of the AI company. So I think he
Speaker 1:Maybe. Maybe. His tax profits, potentially.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:Yes. But, yes.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You know, this is all, like, very You can go further. Speculative. But, like, I I think maybe he can be, you know, for stuff like that, that's broadly, I would say, in kind of the weak Yeah. Economic kind of quadrant.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wonder I wonder Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you put you you put Dario at one point sort of in like the the weak economic side. Like, he's thinking, like, more that that the the next likely step or the one that he's talking about right now is is something that's more akin to the 2025 Intel deal, less Manhattan project.
Speaker 1:But it still feels like the fact that his his favorite book is the book that he gives out is The Making of the Atomic Bomb, like, he has Manhattan Project on the brain. He has
Speaker 3:this I mean, so he's talked about like working with, you know, the military and stuff. But when he talks about like government intervention Yeah. It's almost always in the context of of the economy. Yeah. So I I think for that reason, I I kinda from over there, obviously, like this is very, you know Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's unclear
Speaker 1:mean, it is it is in the context of the economy. But at the same time, when he discusses giving NVIDIA GPUs to China, he says that's akin to giving nukes to North Korea. And so he he doesn't shy away from the Manhattan Project analogy as much as people think. He has he has shied away from it recently. But, yes, it it feels like he and that's why I was sort of against you trying to like put him on this chart in some way because I think he actually has considered all of these and sort of it's much more of a matter of timelines.
Speaker 1:Like what he thinks will happen soon, what he is in favor of, what he is against. A lot of that aligns to who is in power, what the administration is doing, what the plan is. But I think he sees all of these different scenarios as potential outcomes. Some of them he'd be in favor of, some of them he'd be more resistant to.
Speaker 2:Well, I can't wait to watch his new interview with The Economist Yes. Which is sponsored and presented by Anthropic.
Speaker 1:That was a funny that was a funny move. But do do do we have video? We wanna pull
Speaker 2:up Well, it just it just came out
Speaker 1:Oh, it came out.
Speaker 2:A couple hours ago.
Speaker 1:Okay. There there is a clip in here. Right? Anthropic CEO. I apologize for leaked memo from The Economist.
Speaker 1:Dario Amade says he's sorry. In his first interview since the Pentagon labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk, the first American company to receive that designation. The firm's boss offered a mea culpa for the way he handled the crisis that he described as one of the most, quote, disorienting in Anthropic's history. So we can pull up this vertical clip from The Economist. The Economist getting in the vertical video game was long overdue, but welcomed.
Speaker 1:I am very excited. I've been a fan of The Economist for a very, very long time. And so we can pull up this clip from The Economist in the timeline and play this
Speaker 3:for audience. Style praise on president Trump. Do you regret having said that?
Speaker 7:So, yeah. I I I wanna completely apologize for this, for this memo. So I I wanna make sure that people understand. Right? Like like, this was something written on Friday after the following three things had happened.
Speaker 7:The president tweeted, removing all anthropic services from the federal government. The secretary of war tweeted, designating us a supply chain risk with a kind of broader version of the designation than the one that ultimately ended up actually being applied. And then there was this deal between, you know, between one of the other AI model providers and the Department of War that I think even that model provider later described as I don't remember the exact words, but you know?
Speaker 3:Opportunistic.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I I was gonna say confusing. Right? So, you know, so, basically, all these three things said happened in within a few hours, you know, in in kind of sequence, you know, in kind of sequence from each other. We didn't know ahead of time what was going to happen, when it was going to happen.
Speaker 7:So it was among the most disorienting times in in kind of in kind of in kind of anthropic's history. The other side of it is, you know, I think Anthropic has an internal culture where I post a lot. Like, some people describe this as a memo. I wouldn't describe it as that. Like, I post things in Slack.
Speaker 7:I post them a lot. And the culture within the company is that I'm very free and, you know, it's it's not like it's not like a considered, you know, it's not like a really considered or refined version of my thinking. Right? It's not what I would say on reflection.
Speaker 3:You've been very clear now. You've apologized for the memo. Have you apologized to president Trump? Will you apologize to him?
Speaker 7:I've apologized to the people that I've talked talked to within the DOW. You know, I'm happy to speak to others within the administration as well. I kind of don't know what will happen in the future, but, you know, I I'm I'm I'm, you know, I'm I'm really happy to to to to you know, I'm really happy to speak to anyone.
Speaker 1:Is that capitulation? It certainly seems like retrenchment, moving backwards, trying to polish things up, trying to potentially heal the divide. The My my favorite analysis that I
Speaker 2:One thing that's interesting is is externally, he will never say OpenAI. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And yet in the internal comms, like, it's there's clearly like an an insane obsession with Oh,
Speaker 3:yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? Like externally, he'll always say like another model AI model provider and then internally, it's just like heavily have you know, he'll never say Sam's name
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Externally and then internally, it's just entirely fixated on Sam. Yeah. I wanna hold comments until I watch the
Speaker 1:whole Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thing.
Speaker 1:I There there was a lot of drama. It's been a very crazy week. It's gotta be good to be ending the week and maybe get some well well deserved rest going into the weekend. Gregory C. Allen went on Strathecary and had a fantastic conversation with Ben Thompson.
Speaker 1:Allen is a senior adviser at the Wadhani AI Center and at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D. C, a nonpartisan think tank that was founded in 1962. He also worked at the DOD for a while. And he closed the interview with a very interesting quote and a perspective that I hadn't thought of that was really calling for unity and just the desire for the government to, like, work through this in a positive way and get to, like, a good outcome, a good agreement. And and I thought the way he phrased it was very good.
Speaker 1:So I'll just read this quote. He said, but for me, the starting point has to be this. Dario used to work at Google. He is, I think it's pretty obvious to everyone involved, probably sympathetic to the political left. And this guy has con has converted this entire generation of folks who were skeptical about the national security establishment to enthusiastically supporting the military.
Speaker 1:What a gift he is in that regard. And so to demonize him is just so damaging to Silicon Valley national securities to Silicon Valley's national security relations in a way that I just cringe at. Because if you can get somebody like Dario enthusiastic about national security, if Dario can get thousands of Anthropic employees who, you know, five years ago were probably like in an EA group home talking about pacifism and veganism, and get those guys excited about national security, what a gift. What a gift to the to the national security community. What a gift that he has brought that community on board with literally developing autonomous weapons.
Speaker 1:Not using them, subject to no human oversight, but developing them, ready to go. This is so much progress. Don't take us backwards. And so he's, of course, referencing to Project Maven, where Google was working with the Department of Defense in a much more limited way. There was this employee revolt and there was this big divide between the employees and the leadership.
Speaker 1:And Anthropic Dario has been able to get the Anthropic employees so far along that in Gregory Allen's perspective, this is something that is sort of a gift to the government and that they should be willing to deal with the rough edges, work through this to get to a good outcome. So we're all hoping a a good outcome. Anyway, let's move on. Let's see. There there are
Speaker 2:Is it that time?
Speaker 1:I think it's time for the mansion section. Let's move on to the mansion section. Let me tell you about Vanta first. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform.
Speaker 1:And let me also tell you about vybe.co. We're DTC brands, b to b startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, measure sales just like on Meta.
Speaker 2:It's time for the mansion section.
Speaker 1:Don't we have special lights? Wait. We're going green today? I thought the mansion section was purple. Anyway, an ex Marvel CEO lists his home in a secretive California community.
Speaker 1:I know you got a soft spot for these secretive communities, Jordy. We're gonna pull this one up. So homes in this enclave, the Smoke Tree Ranch in Palm Springs, they usually trade between family and friends. But Eric Ellen Bogan is testing the open market. At Smoke Tree Ranch in Palm Springs, homes usually trade quietly between family members and friends.
Speaker 1:But for former Marvel Enterprises CEO, Eric Ellenberg Ellenbogen. And I gotta know, is mar Marvel Enterprises, is that Marvel Entertainment or is that a different company? It seems like it's Marvel Entertainment. But anyway, Eric Ellen Bogen clearly has done very well. He purchased the oldest
Speaker 2:now it's now called Marvel Entertainment. It used to be called Marvel Enterprises. Amazing.
Speaker 1:Amazing. So he purchased this house at Smoke Tree in 2021 for 3,950,000.00. Now it's hitting the market. They
Speaker 2:were giving it away.
Speaker 1:9,000,000. It's bucking the trend by listing the house publicly. Quote, we felt strongly that offering the property on the open market would provide the greatest opportunity to identify the right architectural steward. You gotta be an architectural steward to pick this one up. I love I love when people, like, go to sell their houses and then they have a bunch of strings attached.
Speaker 1:You know? We talked to the the guy or we we read the story about the the singer from KISS, the rock band. He was like, I don't wanna sell to anyone who drinks alcohol. It was like Which is crazy.
Speaker 2:Wasn't the house like the most like
Speaker 1:It was the most like crazy over the top bachelor bat. Yeah. Yeah. Was total party house in the Hollywood Hills. And Kiss is a rock band.
Speaker 1:Like, they definitely had the wildest times or, I mean, at least that was, like, the aesthetic. I don't know if they were maybe they were straight edge the whole time. But this house at Smoke Tree Ranch sits at the foot of the San Jacinto Mountains. It has a near mythical status in Palm Springs. Dare dating to the early nineteen hundreds, the ranch has long drawn some of America's wealthiest families, including Walt Disney and the Ford family of the Ford Motor Company.
Speaker 1:In case you weren't sure what the Ford family was, known for its Wild West feel, the community has dirt roads and unassuming homes, many of which still belong to the families that built them. Ellen Bogen's home built in the nineteen thirties has been owned by the Gilmore pharmaceutical family for more than ninety years before he bought it out Let's give it up
Speaker 2:to big pharma.
Speaker 1:Worked to have the home successfully designated as a historical landmark. It sits on 1.8 acres. It's roughly 5,500 square feet, surrounds a central courtyard with a large pool.
Speaker 2:Are you are you liking this house, John?
Speaker 1:I'm not a desert guy. I'm a forest guy. I know you're a beach guy. I like the forest.
Speaker 2:I'm I consider myself a bit of a desert.
Speaker 1:You you like the desert?
Speaker 2:But I'm not I'm not feeling this house at all.
Speaker 1:You're not feeling this house?
Speaker 2:Not one bit. Not one bit. Oh. How
Speaker 1:much would you pay for it? What's the fair price? What price are you like by?
Speaker 2:I don't think it's fair for me to price it because I really don't I really don't like it.
Speaker 1:You really don't like it?
Speaker 2:I don't think I'm the kind of steward they're looking for.
Speaker 1:Oh, you would you you you would change this into a into a 20 story apartment complex immediately?
Speaker 2:In general, I like I like I like ranch style houses Yes. Single story. Yeah. I like this layout around around the pool Yeah. This courtyard.
Speaker 2:I like homes that Mhmm. That kind of face in towards towards kind of like But a communal I'm not I'm not loving
Speaker 1:On the packet, like what don't you like about
Speaker 6:it?
Speaker 2:I mean, just the textures, the colors, it doesn't appear to be Again, I like a classic. I like I like the classic kind
Speaker 1:of Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I like a home that is classic structurally. Yeah. Yeah. But this looks like nothing has been like this feels like living in a, you know, like you'd be living in like a kind of like a Hollywood set. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Not like a home that's been
Speaker 1:I like the materials are a little mixed in some of these cases like the hardwood cabinets combined with like sort of the furry chairs. Like the the materials aren't aren't feeling what's
Speaker 2:going on in this kitchen? Kitchen is a disaster. Pull up this kitchen. This kitchen. What's going on here?
Speaker 2:Look at these look at these like
Speaker 1:It's it's coming up. It's coming up. So so that's not too bad. The overstuffed chairs those are
Speaker 2:this this is absolutely brutal.
Speaker 1:This this this.
Speaker 2:Look at those furry chairs. Let's go
Speaker 1:on on hardwood with
Speaker 2:the with the wooden Those chairs with the wood on wood on wood on wood on wood is absolutely
Speaker 1:Dan Ratliff says it looks like a grandparents house.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The pictures make it look mid.
Speaker 2:Well Like they're they're like, oh, we gotta find the right person to to steward this house. It's like, grandpa. Let's let's put you to bed.
Speaker 1:The tile is criminal. Yeah. The chat is not full
Speaker 2:gut at minimum.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. They, full gut. Agree. I
Speaker 2:agree. Brutal.
Speaker 1:Absolutely brutal. Okay. Well, we why don't we why don't we leave Palm Springs? We'll head over to Manhattan. First, we'll tell you about Gemini 3.1 pro.
Speaker 1:With a more capable baseline, it's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life.
Speaker 2:So I just gotta say the the audacity to be like, yeah. We need to put this on the open market to find the right steward. And it's like, yo. I don't know how So I don't know if you've been stewarding that well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So is your read on it that, like, everyone from the community was like, yeah. We'll love to take this off your hands and, like, completely renovate it. And they're like, we gotta find a crazy person that likes this particular style.
Speaker 1:And so they gotta spread their they gotta spread the aperture. They gotta open the aperture.
Speaker 3:What do you guys bring it too hard. I think if you just add, like, two or three more floors Oh, yeah. And you go vertically
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think it could be pretty sick.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'd also dig down. I'd build basement, man cave, you know, racing simulators, race track potentially. There's a lot of options to turn that place around. But good luck to whoever who to whoever picks it up.
Speaker 2:That's a real that's a real project.
Speaker 1:That's a real
Speaker 2:They're like they're like, it's perfect.
Speaker 1:It's a teardown in your opinion.
Speaker 2:I don't know about a teardown.
Speaker 1:But Teardown to the studs. Got it. Okay. Well, let's head over to New York because Catherine Clark at The Wall Street Journal got a coveted invitation to see New York's most secretive condo project. This is Amy Clarkson.
Speaker 1:The sales, they're over $1,000,000,000 now. With minimal marketing, little press until now, little coverage until we discuss it on TBPN. In a sun filled room Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is breaking news. Breaking This news, folks.
Speaker 1:This is breaking news. With stone flooring and a plush creamy white rug, my winter coat is whisked away and sparkling water is thrust into my hand. For much of the past year, an invitation to come here has been one of the most coveted tickets in New York City. But I'm not at a hot new bar or restaurant. I'm on the Far West Side Of Manhattan at the tucked away sales gallery for a new condominium.
Speaker 1:The developers of 80 Clarkson Street, a pair of under construction towers at the edge of the West Village, have kept details about the project secret. The units aren't listed on sites like Zillow or StreetEasy. Access to the sales office by the Hudson River is by appointment only, and appointments were initially scarce. Many prospective buyers tried to call in favors to get a look. Quote, there are a lot of people who've wanted to get in there who haven't been able to get in, said real estate agent Nick Gavin of Compass who has multiple deals.
Speaker 1:Who's done multiple deals there. Counterintuitive though it may seem, the secrecy surrounding 80 Clarkson appears to have been an extremely effective sales tool. In less than a year, more than $1,000,000,000 worth of condos have been have gone into contract on the project amounting to more than half of its 112 residences. A buyer recently signed a contract to pay a $129,000,000 for a residence at 80 Clarkson. If it closes, the transaction will set a record for Downtown Manhattan, shattering the previous high watermark of 60,000,000.
Speaker 1:They're going twice as expensive as the previous high watermark. It's a 7,400 square foot apartment. That, a roughly 7,400 square foot apartment is asking $75,000,000 and they also found a buyer. So give me a little bit of a review on this style. Are you feeling this?
Speaker 1:Do you think you could settle into an apartment if it looked like this and had 7,000 square feet to walk around and was in New York City? They're asking more than 7,000
Speaker 2:7,000 square feet. It it's
Speaker 1:7,000 No. $7,000 a square foot, but also there's a unit there that's 7,000
Speaker 2:square feet.
Speaker 1:So you add those together, you get to $75,000,000. But in terms of styling, in terms of aesthetics, in terms of vibes, what you got for us, Jordy? What do you think?
Speaker 2:I think it's it's not really my style, but in general, I think it's in general, it's
Speaker 1:You can grit your teeth. You can grit your teeth.
Speaker 2:It's some mixture of of
Speaker 1:Gun to your head, you'd live there.
Speaker 2:Of classic Yeah. New York. Well, let's get Interior styling brought into the modern era.
Speaker 1:The Golden Ticket.
Speaker 6:I think
Speaker 2:it's nice.
Speaker 1:At eighty Clarkson, the two under construction towers sit adjacent to the West Side Highway on the Hudson River. The project's neighbors are Google and Pier 40, the former marine terminal that now serves as parking and sports facility with a trapeze school. So if you're into
Speaker 2:trapeze I'm sold.
Speaker 1:You're sold? I'm sold. Walking distance to trapeze lessons. Walking distance. Maybe you gotta do trapeze.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Despite all the cloak and dagger, the gallery itself is subdued and staid. There's no dimming of lights, no ultra dramatic video, no stirring music. Instead, the space is classic and dignified, with the sales team pointing out details such as the motor court, which they say was inspired by a Roman piazza designed by Michelangelo. It is an experience that channels the Zechkendorf's reputation for a certain brand of Manhattan real estate discrete, restrained, and priced at the very top of the market, scions of one of New York City's real estate's most storied dynasties.
Speaker 1:The brothers' track record includes 15 Central Park West in the Upper West Side condo that set a new benchmark for the luxury market about twenty years ago. As we walked through the sales galleries, a series of showrooms are slowly revealed. The first accessed through doors emblazoned with detailed bronze panels is almost vacant except for a scale model of the building. Around the corner is a movie theater style screen where the team can present renderings of the project. Another scale model shows the building's amenities with drawers that pull out to reveal aerial views of features such as a spa, gym, golf simulator.
Speaker 1:Where's the racing simulator, guys? We need that. Squash court. Are you are you a squash guy? No.
Speaker 1:You do you put squash in the same category as Padel and what's that other one called?
Speaker 2:Pickle?
Speaker 1:Pickleball?
Speaker 2:No. Pickle Pickle's out in its own world.
Speaker 1:Okay. Pickles
Speaker 2:Pickles out in its
Speaker 1:own tier.
Speaker 3:Pickle's f tier.
Speaker 1:Tennis is s tier.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Give me a little tier list. Give me squash. Where is that? A b c p.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I've never lived somewhere that that that people were big into squash.
Speaker 1:Have you ever worked anywhere that had a bunch of squash courts?
Speaker 2:I have. Gotcha. Got me. So where are you playing? But we never played.
Speaker 1:We didn't never play.
Speaker 2:You never played?
Speaker 1:B tier?
Speaker 2:Really bad badminton is the only s tier.
Speaker 1:Badminton above I
Speaker 2:hate to say it. Wow.
Speaker 1:Hot take. What about what about golf?
Speaker 2:Man, I've really tried to get into golf, but I can't I can't get past nine holes.
Speaker 1:B tier?
Speaker 2:Don't know if I can put it in the b tier.
Speaker 1:A
Speaker 2:tier? But do you like playing 18 holes of golf? Yeah.
Speaker 1:I like golf.
Speaker 2:Do you like the last nine? Yeah. You don't ever
Speaker 1:Sometimes I dip out at 13.
Speaker 2:What if what if what if nobody that that you're playing with enjoys talking about technology or business?
Speaker 1:It's a nightmare. It's a waking nightmare.
Speaker 2:It actually is. Get out
Speaker 1:of there.
Speaker 2:It actually is.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. What about We should
Speaker 2:do a Friday episode sometime. So Where we're just golfing and we have the entire show printed out. And we just have the team following with a camera. We're mic'd up. Yep.
Speaker 2:We're just shanking balls
Speaker 4:left and
Speaker 1:My my swing is not very good. So if if pick
Speaker 2:balls sporting clays?
Speaker 1:Sporting clays.
Speaker 2:Put S tier.
Speaker 1:We were debating this earlier today. Brandon was putting that in, like, c tier. Sporting clays, you put that you you said it gets boring after forty five minutes. Is that right? Yes.
Speaker 1:Sporting Clays.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah? Very repetitive. Very repetitive.
Speaker 3:I I like So you're bad. No.
Speaker 2:I think he's saying he's just so good. He just never misses. Jeez. Many people have said Brandon never misses.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's true. That's true. Racing simulator. Where does that go on the tier list of amenities?
Speaker 2:I think fantastic. I don't know I don't know any anywhere that actually has that as an amenity though.
Speaker 1:Yet. Yet. What about spa? Indoor lap pool?
Speaker 2:The odds the odds that your apartment spa is actually gonna be elite are are low.
Speaker 1:Okay. Listen to this. They got a music room with a sound engineering booth and there's also a content creation studio. You can make podcasts if you buy this $75,000,000 house or apartment in Manhattan. Content creation studio is hilarious that there's such demand for, oh, maybe I'll start a podcast that like they're building it into luxury apartments at this point.
Speaker 1:Like
Speaker 2:That just sounds like they had an empty room.
Speaker 1:If you have if you have $75,000,000 to buy an apartment and that's your podcasting strategy, you're cocked. Like, you're just like, yeah, I really need to go downstairs and and use the communal content creation studio. Rough. I I did hear that there are some, there are some influencers that do, like, unboxings. Basically, they get a whole bunch of stuff, like, sent to them.
Speaker 1:Like, they'll just review products all day long, like, on Instagram. And they will actually rent a different place because their house is often messy because they have like families and kids and all this stuff. So the their office will just be like another apartment that's like perfectly white, perfectly clean.
Speaker 2:Well, when we were looking for this Yeah. This studio, we did look at some other places if you remember where we just walked in and in in every single studio, it was they were just doing unboxings. They just have like a ring light
Speaker 1:right. Yeah. It was like some TEMU TikTok
Speaker 2:shop Yeah. That whole world. It was crazy. People that are big into that world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That was wild. The the the path not traveled by us, I suppose.
Speaker 2:Somebody took a ride down a four story slide.
Speaker 1:I love this. Before we move on to the next one, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that lets you grow your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And let me also tell you about Fin, the number one AI agent in customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai.
Speaker 1:So, this is a feature that I think is s tier. I would put four story slide inside of a $20,000,000 Tribeca penthouse. First off, you're getting the you're getting a location. You're getting an apartment, a penthouse. At that other place, it was 75,000,000, 120,000,000.
Speaker 1:This is only 20,000,000. By comparison, incredible value. And then instead of some slot podcast room that you have to share with every other resident, you get a private four story slide. This is a buy. This is incredible.
Speaker 1:It's called the sophisticated fun house, and it's in Tribeca in Manhattan. Has a rope swing, a rock climbing column, and secret ladders and entryways. This is speaking to me. I love this. Catherine Clark reports in the Wall Street Journal mansion section.
Speaker 1:The Top Floor of a Manhattan penthouse, I clamber ungracefully into a stainless steel spiral slide that sends me down four stories, spitting me out in a dramatic all white foyer. As apartment tours go, this one is unusual. This penthouse at 150 Nassau Street in Lower Manhattan has been the subject of lower of local lore for almost two decades, largely thanks to the presence of this snaking silvery slide. Now the four bedroom home known as Sky House is coming on the market for just $20,000,000. What a steal.
Speaker 1:We got to browbeat some of our guests who live in New York into picking this up. I want go down on the slide. When owners Craig and Kristen Neville Manning first toured the apartment in 2006, it looked nothing like it does now, a nearly raw space. It had no interior walls, electrical or plumbing. First order business, four story slide.
Speaker 1:Boom. Measuring 6,400 square feet, the penthouse is built into the copper and terracotta pinnacle of a circa 1895 building, one of New York's earliest steel skeleton frame skyscrapers. The building was converted to condos
Speaker 2:Tyler.
Speaker 1:In the early two thousands.
Speaker 2:Do you think it's possible that they built a skyscraper over a hundred and ten years before you were born?
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 2:Cut like come on. I don't think they had make it make sense.
Speaker 1:Make it make sense.
Speaker 2:Make it
Speaker 5:make sense.
Speaker 1:This might be alien technology. It's entirely possible. Craig founded Google's first remote engineering center in New York and was later the chief technology officer of the urban innovation company Sidewalk Labs, is now part of Google. So he was at Google, was like, let's set up shop in New York.
Speaker 2:Chris Din is a former Facebook This and Google
Speaker 1:is amazing.
Speaker 2:Let's give it up for big tech.
Speaker 1:Let's give it up for big tech. And honestly, very, very you know, Google has a very wonderful, quirky culture, and this is a very wonderful, quirky house. I love that a four story slide is something that I bet I could find on the Googleplex campus if I really looked around and found it. They put it in their house. So respect to them.
Speaker 1:After buying the unit, they tapped Hudson and an interior design, the interior designer, Ghislain Vincenzo, to turn what Vinas describes as a sophisticated fun house. They wanted that built. In addition to the slide, there's a rope swing, a column for rock climbing, and a series of secret ladders and entryways.
Speaker 2:Yeah. A lot of people say you can't put rope swings in a series of secret ladders in your house.
Speaker 1:You absolutely can.
Speaker 2:Listen.
Speaker 1:While the space looks like it was designed to entertain children, they don't have any children. Did the design reflects couples Stolen valor. Stolen valor.
Speaker 2:Insane stolen valor. Imagine building a four story slide.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You gotta yeah. Yeah. You gotta get a bunch of kids in here.
Speaker 1:But fortunately, you can. Be the change you wanna be. Have a bunch of kids. Buy this house that's on the market.
Speaker 2:Change. Be the change you wanna be. John Cugans.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:That's a great that's a great line.
Speaker 1:Yes. They have fluorescent orange chairs. The home has structural glass bridges and walkways, angular entryways and skylights, white walls and ceilings juxtaposed with vibrant furniture and art, give it the feel of a modern art museum, a sculpture in the foyer.
Speaker 2:This whole time I'm thinking, okay, they've got this climbing wall column thing. Yeah. Like, they certainly have like 25 children. 25 children.
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 2:It's like, no. That was for me actually. After I got off Child at heart. After I got done
Speaker 1:stacking paper at a hyperscaler, a two hyperscalers. The swing. The swing. I don't know. To each their own.
Speaker 1:Well, it's a beautiful house and it can be yours for $20,000,000. And then you
Speaker 2:Kinda strange strange art in this this one section, this this
Speaker 1:He's quirky.
Speaker 2:He's all sorts quirky.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we have an we're we're going back to Los Angeles next. But first, let me tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And let me also tell you about Cognition.
Speaker 1:They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So David Lynch's quirky Los Angeles compound sells for 13,000,000. Okay.
Speaker 2:Explain David Lynch.
Speaker 1:Who wants to who wants to explain David Lynch? Any of you guys He's the GOAT. The He's the GOAT. He created Twin Peaks and the film Molehole and Drive. Molehole and Drive is fantastic.
Speaker 3:Eraserhead? See that. Eraserhead's probably my favorite movie. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Really? I haven't seen Eraserhead.
Speaker 3:It's like
Speaker 1:I'm gonna see that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's it's a Jordy, it's like he's like, I don't know, very I actually have no idea how to describe it. Like, of surreal Yeah. Like very
Speaker 2:Explain him as like a a big tech CEO.
Speaker 3:He's like all the CEO's favorite CEO. That's how I would explain it. All the big directors, they're it's his favorite direct
Speaker 1:their favorite director. Okay. Your favorite director's favorite director.
Speaker 2:But what if you have no favorite director?
Speaker 1:How many how many jumps to get from Sacha Baron Cohen to David Lynch? Probably not that many. He probably has respect for him. Anyway, a quirky Los Angeles compound that was the longtime home of the late filmmaker David Lynch has sold for $13,000,000 about six months after hitting the market. Lynch died in 2025.
Speaker 1:He was known for the surreal films and television including the TV series Twin Peaks and the 2001 film Mulholland Drive. Mulholland Drive is a Tom Cruise movie, I believe. Is that right? Is he in there? Justin Theroux?
Speaker 1:Did I get that wrong? Am I thinking of a different movie? Magnolia.
Speaker 2:This is such a fascinating home. From the outside, from the street, it's like somewhat brutalist. Yeah. And then the inside, it's like
Speaker 1:So he's a and then he has a a workshop on the estate designed for some of the property's metalwork himself. This is a fascinating building. So the compound has seven buildings spanning 11,000 square feet in total with 10 bedrooms. The centerpiece of the estate is a pink nineteen sixties house that was designed by the architect Lloyd Wright, the son of Frank Lloyd Wright. Lynch purchased it for $560,000 in 1987, and he just kept working, working, working on it.
Speaker 1:He later hired Lloyd Wright's son, the grandson of Frank Lloyd Wright, this is Eric Lloyd Wright, to design a pool and a pool house for the property. In 1989, Lynch bought two an adjacent two bedroom brutalist house for $542,000 and added a studio to the building for $346,000 in 1995. So he just kept landing and expanding. In a statement, two of Lynch's children said the property was a place of deep meaning in their father's life and the lives of those who lived and worked there. It holds a lot of history for our family, and we're grateful to see it pass to someone who's interested in caring for it and preserving what made it special.
Speaker 1:Lynch viewed his living space as an extension of his creative life. The Lloyd Wright house affects my whole life to live inside it, he said in a 1997 interview. What would you what do you think about this house? Would you live here? Do you like this house?
Speaker 1:Do you like this style?
Speaker 2:I do like it. I just think I I think that needs about I don't know. An architectural purist might hate me for this, but it needs lot of investment.
Speaker 1:You have to tear it down.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 3:This is also I like I don't think it's mentioned in the article, but this is the location of Lost Highway. Oh. It's another of his movies.
Speaker 1:Wow. Ballmower over there. I had no idea. I don't know Lost Highway at all.
Speaker 3:Tyler Steinberg Lynch movie.
Speaker 1:You really did. It's amazing. Oh, the the high end Manhattan building that has the content creation studio actually actually broke through and hit the timeline. Somebody saw that and screenshot it. It was as notable to them as it was to us.
Speaker 1:Sergey Brin is the second billionaire to buy in Miami this week. This this has happened like a few times. I feel like the Google founders have been on a Miami buying spree about multiple properties. We already talked a little bit about that. We should move over to the Financial Times and talk about Vacheron, the watchmaker, because there is a interesting piece in the Financial Times all about that.
Speaker 1:But first, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Let me also tell you about Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want a multistream, go to restream.com. So there's an interview with the CEO of Vacheron Constantin. It says Vacheron Constantin bets on culture and complications instead of volume.
Speaker 1:The in an industry that often equates growth with volume, Laurent per vie is attempting something more delicate, to expand the oldest continuously operation operating watchmaker without diluting its own scarcity. Vacheron holds the title of longest in the business continuously. No breaks. No days off. The ultimate Before
Speaker 2:we jump in there, the team is sharing how many jumps to get me from the host Tyler at TBPN to David Lynch. And so Tyler Cosgrove Yes. Works with John Coogan at TBPN.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:John Coogan has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Mark Zuckerberg was portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg in the film and social network. Jesse Eisenberg co starred with Laura Dern in Resistance And Laura Dern starred in Wild at Heart directed by David Lynch.
Speaker 1:Five Degrees of Separation. There we go. Let's make some phone calls except he has sadly passed away. But what what what an interesting
Speaker 2:Wait. Five jumps This to
Speaker 1:is a cool use case for LLMs. This is very fun. I like this. Did you want did you did you just wanna hear the sound of Tyler texted me a while back, like twenty minutes ago saying I should play that. Fifteen months into his tenure as Vacheron's chief executive, Laurent runs a brand that according to industry analysts generated more than £1,000,000,000 in revenues in 2023.
Speaker 1:We're around $1,000,000,000 revenue company. Annual production is estimated at over 25,000 watches, up from roughly 3,000 in the 1980s. So pretty significant increase. And that's before the watchmaker was acquired in the 1990s by what is now the Richemont luxury conglomerate. Although revenues have since dipped slightly, the numbers place Vacheron firmly among the upper ranks of Swiss watchmaking.
Speaker 1:Yet, Laurent, in his first interview since making since taking the reins, is clear that acceleration is not the goal. They're not trying to make more watches that quickly. We must evolve with the market, he says, but without chasing volume for its own sake. The timing is delicate, a very volatile context outside and inside the watch industry. Secondary prices have softened, hype has receded, and growth across the sector has become less predictable.
Speaker 1:Laurent describes the brand's positioning as almost as a balance sheet of capabilities: classic watches, jewelry watches, sport integrated bracelet watches, very high complications and the revived Historiques line, the last, as its name suggests, is a family of retro and shaped watches. You might be familiar with the Vacheron two twenty two, which is very popular right now. That's in the Historiques collection. The objective is to occupy the whole field of high watchmaking, ensuring that when one segment slows, another can carry momentum. He half accepts the analogy when pressed.
Speaker 1:Vacheron is kind of a horological hedge fund, diversifying risk not across asset classes but across aesthetics and price tiers. The slowing has been most visible in the steel sports watch category. Laurent concedes that the phenomenon of speculation and hype has abated, even if the integrated bracelet segment itself is not going to go away. That's the overseas of the integrated bracelet. But while others worry about the fading of an asset class, he simply says that over the past years, he has seen a bit more demand for classic watches, high complications for shaped watches, for smaller diameters, prompting, among other things, a 36.5 millimeter Traditionnelle Perpetual Calendar.
Speaker 1:Since taking the top job, he's moved decisively towards culture, leveraging the contents of two of the world's largest and most prestigious museums, the Met and the Louvre. The tribute to Great Civilizations collection saw the creation of quartet of five piece limited edition watches, each featuring a miniature enameled version of a Louvre masterpiece such as the Wind Victory of Seventhrace. Beyond this series lies an even more bespoke partnership with the museums where a collector can choose any masterpiece, painting, sculpture, or ornamental item for Vacheron to reproduce on the dial. Each project is unique, so there's no fixed scale of charges, but Lorentz cites the minimum being €150,000 pretax. Techniques range from miniature enamel painting, which he says is the most popular to engraving or powder packed into engraving.
Speaker 1:Numerically, production is almost risible. We don't do more than 10 or 12 pieces a year. So these are custom. You walk through the museum, you see something you like, you like and you're like, I want that on a watch and they'll make it for you. Very, very cool.
Speaker 1:Maybe I'll get one.
Speaker 2:Do they put logos? Will they put a ramp logo?
Speaker 1:If it's in the see, now you're thinking. So you have to work backwards. So the question is how do you get a painting of the ramp logo into the Louvre? As long as, you know, people were sneaking stuff out of the Louvre. Maybe we sneak
Speaker 2:Something
Speaker 1:ramp logo painting in. In. So, like, wasn't the Mona Lisa there? Like, not anymore, baby. It's a painting of the ramp credit card.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:I like it. The Overseas Perpetual Calendar Ultra Thin is one of my I think one of the most stunning
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Modern watches.
Speaker 1:Yes. I like the Overseas dual time a little bit more. Mhmm. But they're both great. And I think that the 02/22, we were sort of hyped on the 02/22.
Speaker 1:Overseas might be making a comeback.
Speaker 2:The ultra thin.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:It's just insane.
Speaker 1:There are some really cool history out there. There's a square Vacheron that's that's pretty popular. I'm not exactly sure what the what the model number is. But they are doing fantastically well. And most importantly, think have just carved out a very interesting brand positioning by choosing to partner with the Louvre, the Met.
Speaker 1:It maintains this very high aura inaccessibility, very like old and stuffy and stodgy. It's not, you know, cause. It's not a bunch of like younger, more so Yeah.
Speaker 2:When you look at what AP when you look at what AP is doing, like very much on the hype train and partnering with DJs and Travis Scott and Cause and doing all this stuff, and Vashbron is like, okay.
Speaker 1:You just have to wonder, like, what is the more long term strategy? You know? The AP strategy
Speaker 2:can Certainly is not helping the resale market right now.
Speaker 1:Very quickly, but then it it probably crashes. I I would I would assume. And the and the and the and the true horology heads head back to Vacheron. We'll see. Well, let me tell you about Gusto.
Speaker 1:The unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses. And let me also tell you about Phantom Cash, cha ching against. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. Moving on. People are having fun with Leopold Aschenbrenner and his wife to be, I believe they're engaged.
Speaker 1:Jiratik says, when you ask some high elves at Rivendell if they want to join you in your quest to Erebor, they hit you with the light of Valinor stare. 2,800 likes people like the photo. Very silly.
Speaker 2:Zeke says, mildly surprised to learn that director level staff at Anthropic have human EAs.
Speaker 1:How did they learn that? How did he learn that? Was that in like the most recent Dario news? This is from March 6 today.
Speaker 2:I mean, he runs the AI finance tool.
Speaker 1:Oh, so maybe he's interacting with them?
Speaker 2:He's interacting with That's interesting. Alright. We got a new Xbox. What's going on here?
Speaker 1:We have breaking news as of three days ago. We didn't really get to it. Project Helix is the next generation of the Xbox console. What do we know about it?
Speaker 2:Nothing.
Speaker 1:Nothing. We we see a logo reveal. Is this just a working title? I don't know. Will this be delayed?
Speaker 1:The PS six is supposedly delayed. The Switch two is is, maybe going up in price. Very unclear what Microsoft strategy is with Xbox. The the new head of Xbox does not seem to be super focused on the traditional path of, like, box software, you know, own titles. Sony really went on a tear and acquired a lot of the great IP, bought a bunch of game studios, brought them in house, created sort of, like, this IP roll up that they could get exclusives over.
Speaker 1:There was always a fear that when Microsoft bought Activision that they would do the same thing with Call of Duty. Call of Duty would become a Microsoft exclusive and Xbox exclusive. That never made financial sense. It never made sense from a, like, a regulation perspective. It would be seen as anticompetitive.
Speaker 1:Hasn't played out. So even though Activision is now under and they own Blizzard, World of Warcraft, all that IP. Even though that is now within Microsoft, it doesn't it hasn't seemed to be like a cornerstone of, like, revitalizing the Xbox as, like, the number one killer console that everyone has to have. And they've always been doing this dance between Windows PC sales, Windows gaming, and then Xbox gaming, and then now cloud streaming where you can stream Xbox on anything, even on an iPhone, iPad. There's a company Backbone that sort of clicks a gaming controller onto your phone.
Speaker 1:And so you can stream both PlayStation games from PlayStation that you have in your house, or you can stream from Xbox Cloud. Tyler, when you played the Oculus, you used Xbox game streaming. Correct? That was how
Speaker 2:Yes. The game
Speaker 3:was used? The Meta Quest three s Xbox edition. I think that's the full title.
Speaker 1:Was there anything that was Xbox specific about that? Or was it just the packaging and then it just, like, sort of recommended that you use that software?
Speaker 3:I mean, it came with an Xbox controller.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Okay.
Speaker 3:But, yeah. I I I don't know exactly what the deal was. I I I don't think
Speaker 1:But it
Speaker 3:there was no, like
Speaker 1:you feel like place when you when you fired it up, any Xbox apps were, like, preloaded?
Speaker 3:I don't think so. I I to I mean, I but it's not like you have to download them. Right? So it doesn't matter that much that they're already installed.
Speaker 1:Well, I I'm thinking more about it just from, like, the user retention and activation funnel. I feel like that's where the Oculus is falling flat the most for me. That's why I framed the challenge the way I did, where I was like, you need to beat one level of Halo that takes you ten minutes in forty five minutes. It's a ridiculous challenge. Why is it so easy?
Speaker 1:It should be so easy, but it took you twenty five minutes to get set up. Right? Something like that. Because you had to, like, go update the software, create accounts, download stuff. And and it'd be interesting to see more, you know, more of a deeper partnership there.
Speaker 1:But we'll see. I mean, it's entirely possible that Meta is just like pulling back on VR entirely, would be very disappointing for for me. But we shall see. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era.
Speaker 1:Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco.
Speaker 2:Tech layoff tracker.
Speaker 1:What's going on?
Speaker 2:Hearing from multiple sources inside Oracle that the company is planning thousands of job cuts, potentially 20 to 30,000 roles across the board. This was surprising to me because I didn't realize that Oracle had a head count around a 170,000 people.
Speaker 1:There's a lot going on at Oracle. It's a very, like, old company. A lot of sales reps. I had a friend who worked as an Oracle sales rep. Loved the job.
Speaker 1:Great lifestyle. You know, going around selling software, selling data centers, selling all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 2:This is to free up 8 to 10,000,000,000 in cash flow. All the fun massive AI data center expansion. US banks are pulling back from financing, barring costs are rising fast.
Speaker 1:CDS spreads.
Speaker 2:The cuts would be the largest in years, bigger than the 10,000 they did in late twenty twenty five. They are also eyeing asset sales like the Cerner Healthcare unit. Insiders say non core units and data center link staff are most at risk. It's tied to AI commitments. Anyways, so still rumors at this point, but, wouldn't be wouldn't be super surprising.
Speaker 2:They
Speaker 1:I just like the comfort of being smug is watching the show and and publicly tweeting badminton s tier. Outstanding take. Squash is a tier. We're starting a conversation. Well, speaking of watches, Paul Graham clearly got into watches recently, which I love to see because he posted a lengthy essay called The Brand Age, paulgraham.com/brandage.html.
Speaker 1:And he tells a very detailed story of the switch watch industry, the quartz crisis, and he goes into the strategies of every single house. It's an amazing telling of what Omega did, what Vacheron did, what Protect did. And it's very, very long. There was an interesting segment in here. The next move was made by AP who in 1970 commissioned the renowned designer Gerald Genta to design their own iconic watch, This one daringly in steel.
Speaker 1:The result launched in 1972 was?
Speaker 2:Nautilus?
Speaker 1:No. This is AP.
Speaker 2:Oh. Oh. The Royal Oak.
Speaker 1:The Royal Oak. Of course. And AP's ads for they too now started doing brand advertising emphasized its high cost even more dramatically. Introducing steel at the price of gold was one of the ads. Like, we're gonna charge you gold prices for something that's steel, and they're just flexing on it.
Speaker 1:I love it. You're looking at the costliest stainless steel watch in the world, the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak. What makes it even more precious than gold is the time that went into building it by a vanishing breed of master watchmakers. At the bottom of the ad, they turn the traditional formula on its head and describe their watches as being priced from $35,000 and down instead of up because they want to let you know that what the high end is, what's the top of the range because price has become part of their brand. The Royal Oak was also a step forward in surface area devoted to brand.
Speaker 1:The golden ellipse had turned the watch face into an expression of brand, but it used ordinary straps and bracelets. In the Royal Oak, the watch face was integrated with a metal bracelet that continued its design all the way around the wrist. When it said, You're looking at the costliest stainless steel watch in the world, it said, With every square millimeter of surface area. It said it with every square millimeter of surface area. Would customers buy this new approach?
Speaker 1:The initial results were moderately encouraging. The Holy Trinity sales didn't take off, but they didn't go down to zero either. There were at least some people out there responding to the new message. Perhaps if they kept it at the number perhaps if they kept at it the number would grow. So they did.
Speaker 1:Encouraged by the success of the Royal Oak, Patek Philippe commissioned Gerald Genta in 1974 to design a similar watch for them. The design of the Royal Oak had been inspired by a ship's porthole. So the design of this new watch would be inspired by a ship's porthole. It was called the Nautilus. And it launched at the Basel Watch Fair in 1976.
Speaker 1:In the Nautilus, we see the incompatibility of branding and design. And this is where it gets a little controversial. Some people don't like the way PG is talking about the difference between branding and design. Here he says, It was huge. The most expensive men's watches at the peak of the golden age were typically 32 or 33 millimeters in diameter.
Speaker 1:The Nautilus was 42 millimeters. As well as it being huge, it had gratuitous knobs on either side of the face like a pair of ears, but you could recognize one from across the room. In the Nautilus, of all the watches Patek makes now, the Nautilus is the most sought after. It's perfectly aligned with what present day buyers want. Basically, the loudest possible expression of brand.
Speaker 1:But in 1976, it was ahead of its time. And in 1976, it was still a little too much. And this is something that happens all the time in luxury goods. Somebody comes out, they take a bold stance, they
Speaker 2:The F40.
Speaker 1:They make an aggressive move. And then over time it is revealed to be underrated. Anyway, we have our next guest.
Speaker 2:We do.
Speaker 1:Is it Doug DeMuro?
Speaker 2:No. Oh. Vincenzo.
Speaker 1:Oh, Vincenzo's happening. Fantastic. Amazing. Good to see you, Vincenzo. How you doing?
Speaker 5:What's happening? To disappoint you. I'm not Doug.
Speaker 1:Doug's coming on a
Speaker 2:little bit,
Speaker 1:but I'm glad. We we had some we had some guests step out. What's going Did you press it twice?
Speaker 2:They made it
Speaker 1:Oh, they made it play again and again and again. Okay. Well, we're just going. We're gonna keep going on this. Can you fade this down?
Speaker 1:Okay. There we go.
Speaker 5:Because it goes on and on and on and on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and typically, if you push the button again, you turn it off, but we changed it so that if you push the button twice, it actually plays it twice. So you can do like, but it gets to be a little much.
Speaker 5:So Overkill, boys. Overkill. Right?
Speaker 1:Overkill. Anyway, take us through your your I I'd love to start with, like, the preview of the f one season, but also just Apple's strategy because I think you unpacked it way at a way deeper level than what I'd seen folks understanding about Apple's f one strategy before.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I'll start with the Apple stuff then. Cool. Really, I think, you know, what Apple's done is they've said, we may not have the distribution that ESPN, others have Yeah. Traditionally.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And but we're gonna use our might, which is
Speaker 1:these. Yeah.
Speaker 5:They've got they've got these devices in everybody's hands. We're all using MacBooks.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:We're all we've all got iPads, and we've got AirPods, and Apple Watches, and so
Speaker 2:And John's got his Vision Pro.
Speaker 1:I do have Vision There
Speaker 5:you go. I wish Wow.
Speaker 1:Last man standing.
Speaker 5:I think I think something will be coming with that. I I do. Yeah. They are they're they're rolling all this stuff out, and now we're seeing like, when did
Speaker 6:you ever think that Apple
Speaker 5:and Netflix would ever find a way to work together on a streaming cross collab? I don't know if you guys saw that news, but
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:We're gonna get to see actually, Drive to Survivor is already streaming on Apple TV.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And in return, Netflix is gonna be streaming one of the races.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's cool. Yeah. What a
Speaker 5:good trade. And ironically ironically, it is the Canadian Grand Prix.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Why? The Canadian Grand Prix, you might ask. Well, the Canadian Grand Prix takes place the same weekend that the Indy five hundred takes place, which is the most watched motorsport event
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:In America.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:Maybe even well, not the world, but in America, it will have the best numbers of the year.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:So, Apple knows this. What do they do? They go and partner with Netflix. Everybody has Netflix.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 5:I the IMAX theaters, they're trying to change the experience. How do you watch Yeah. Race. Five races are going be shown on IMAX theaters.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:That's pretty cool. Yeah. They also partnered up with Event Pass, so bars, restaurants. It'll it's that's where they buy a lot of their their sports packages from through Event Pass. They're rolled into there.
Speaker 5:They've also they've also unleashed MLS on that. They finally are realizing that the MLS thing wasn't working. Right?
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:So, yes. Now, they're doing that with Formula One. So now, Formula One's gonna be able to be in bars and restaurants. Yeah. You're gonna see Formula One in IMAX theaters.
Speaker 5:Again, only five races. Bar
Speaker 2:at like 7AM. Super.
Speaker 5:I mean, that's that that might be the issue with some of the races, so we'll see what happens there. But I think the fact that they're open to these different types of distribution channels and platforms is exciting. It really is exciting. Have you guys had a chance to play around with
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. React to my thesis that, like, the way Apple sees onboarding a fan to an actual live watching sport experience starts with the f one movie, which when you watch that movie, you don't need to know anything about f one, and you'll hear the voice over of the narrator basically explain all the rules to you. And then they show Brad Pitt doing all these, like, tricky moves that illustrate why pit stops matter and why tires matter damage, all these things. And so you can watch the f one movie just because you like Brad Pitt and it's a fun movie.
Speaker 1:Sure. Then you can go into Drive to Survive. It's the reality TV version. You don't really have to follow a full race. You get all the drama and the personality, and it's a travel show too, and it's a lifestyle show.
Speaker 1:And then once you've gone down that funnel, then you're ready to watch the race, and they have that for you too.
Speaker 5:And and even the way they're laying it out, if you guys haven't had a chance to look through the, you know, the Apple TV app Yeah. They're putting everything there. So now you have their loc their guides, like their city guides. They've put together guides for the cities that you're in, so you can explore Melbourne Yeah. That's where they In Apple Maps, you can explore the track turn by turn.
Speaker 5:You can again, some people might not care about that, but it's a way to pull you in. If you are there in Melbourne
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And you're using Apple.
Speaker 1:No. I think you should be. I think I actually noticed that that map feature. They use Apple Maps like a psycho, apparently. But I was in Las Vegas at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, and I just happened to open Apple Maps just to get out of the stadium and figure out where we were going.
Speaker 1:And I was like, wow. This is a really detailed rendering of the track. This is amazing. This is would actually be useful for a bunch of other things. And if you're just driving by and then you just see this really high fidelity three d rendering of the of the map, it's just another touch point.
Speaker 1:It's basically just an ad.
Speaker 2:What do you think they'll do with Vision Pro? Like, what are your theories? Do think you'll be able to ride along with Verstappen and, like, actually get to because if you could experience a full race, like, in The cameras
Speaker 1:are, I think, too heavy for that, but I wanna hear what Vincenzo is.
Speaker 2:I know. But not of you to every single car.
Speaker 1:Everybody I
Speaker 5:don't know if Ben can pull it up or
Speaker 6:if one
Speaker 5:of the guys can pull this up, but I posted something recently about an app called Laps, l a p z. Now, they got kinda they were in test flight. They ended up getting pulled. Like, they they can't keep pushing out, and it has to do with licensing rights from f one. But this is what I think can happen and what they can do with Apple Vision Pro.
Speaker 5:In fact, I really think Apple I should I thought they should have bought Lapse, the the company that built it, the developer that built it. But if they didn't, I I could foresee them just kinda building this on their own. I mean, you've got you can have all the cameras up. You have a three-dimensional track with, like, live timing. Because all we have all the data.
Speaker 5:Right? All the data's there. So being able to put your VisionPRO on and be in camera with any of the drivers that you want, plus seeing a live circuit map. And then I believe they were also able to change the, like, the angle from where you were watching it from, so you were able to understand really. Like, if I'm sitting in, I don't know, turn one, I'm watching it from that angle, right, through the Vision Pro, as opposed to, you know, when you kind of put it on the TV, you don't really You may not know if you're not familiar with the track.
Speaker 5:Yeah. You you know, don't know which angle you're really watching it from. This was a This The app was really really cool. Yeah. And I know one of the developers that was working on it, that was Like to me, that showed the true power of it.
Speaker 5:Every time I post it, people are like, that I would buy VisionPro if I could get that app.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We had a sort of motion designer on the show at Figma conference named John Lepore. He works at Black Box Infinite.
Speaker 5:That's him. John's the guy who built laps.
Speaker 1:That's exactly It's Lapse now because I remember seeing the demo. I pulled I put the demo in the, in the chat. Hopefully, the team can pull it up. But, they did this, they did this case study back in 2024, and was like, oh, this is like a killer app. I wonder when Apple will, like, actually adopt this.
Speaker 1:Here it goes. And so this just makes so much sense that you could, like Yeah. Put this on. And now that Apple actually has all the rights to this stuff, it seems like such an interesting experience. I wonder if this is one of those situations where you it looks really good in a teaser trailer, but then actually sitting there is maybe a little bit much, but
Speaker 5:Everyone that actually used Lapse said it was fantastic. Yeah. Everyone I've talked to that used it said this was, like, incredible. Yeah. And again, don't have a Vision Pro, so I never really I didn't test it.
Speaker 5:I saw some demo stuff. John has sent me some things.
Speaker 6:You guys
Speaker 2:I tried it this weekend, John.
Speaker 5:Oh, If you can get if you can somehow get a hold of it Yeah. If you have it, I would
Speaker 1:Yeah. I have a Vision Pro. I think I have Apple TV plus and all the all the tiers there. I I probably just have to download the laptop.
Speaker 2:Alright. Let's get into the season overall. Yeah. What's happening with the new regulations? Mhmm.
Speaker 2:How who's cooked? Who's shopped? Who's goaded?
Speaker 5:Well, so I think on the last time I was on the show and I was thinking about this too, I was like, oh, man. I'm gonna really eat a lot of crow now. I said Aston Martin was to look out to was someone to pay attention to, and it
Speaker 6:was for all
Speaker 5:the wrong reasons. They seem to have completely botched the project. I don't even know what's going on with Honda. I mean, it it seems like one of those things that I thought was unfathomable in 2026. Like, this was not something that was supposed to really be possible.
Speaker 5:The engineers have, you know, figured out reliability. We have cars that are so reliable. Everyone's finishing races. Now, this wasn't the case thirty, forty years ago. Right?
Speaker 5:You'd have a lot of reliability issues, and now it like, they've literally built a car that is quite literally crap. I mean, it's it's it is not good. Fernando Alonso still hasn't run any practice laps. Although, maybe in practice too, he ended up getting out there, I think. But they're not turning any laps.
Speaker 5:They're actually talking about, like, potential nerve damage. These guys in the Aston Martin because of whatever's going on with the battery. It's it's wild. So that's do mean going on
Speaker 2:with the bat going on with the battery? Are they they're
Speaker 5:They're so so because of the new the new chest, like, the the new regulations, the car is smaller. It's narrower. Mhmm. And because of the way Adrian Newey designs his cars, it require there's a lot of aerodynamics, so he kinda almost built a smaller there's less room in his car to build, you know, for power unit and battery and all that stuff. Well, now with this, like, fifty fifty split, you have fifty fifty or 50% battery power and essentially 50% from the internal combustion engine.
Speaker 5:All of that power or all of that takes up a lot of room and apparently, there's not enough room in the in the Honda or all of that to properly Like, they're not even running the battery or they're not running everything at full bore right now. It's like, they couldn't even turn the battery up. It it's it's pretty wild. Like, I'm reading all this stuff. All of this information is coming at me and I'm like, how does this even happen?
Speaker 5:The greatest designer of probably our generation, if not ever. And then there was other talk that, like, Aston Martin hadn't even really ever audited the Honda engineers, so they signed a deal back in '22 or '23 that that they were gonna switch from Mercedes to Honda,
Speaker 1:but
Speaker 5:never audited the actual engineering, and come to find out, most of like the good engineers ended up at Red Bull, which a lot of people speculated was the case, because Red Bull was with Honda. So it's it's a whole mess right there with that Aston Martin project right now. And of course, Aston Martin just signed over a naming deal for I forgot how much money it was, 60 plus million dollars for the f one team. So I'm like, oh, that's not a good that's not great. But aside from that, you've got Mercedes looking really So what's
Speaker 2:what's your prediction for Oh. Sunday? Do you do you think they do you think they actually finished the race, or is it looking so bad that they I
Speaker 5:don't know if they start the race. I I mean, they may start the race, turn a couple laps just to do it, but I don't I can't foresee them in qualifying tonight, like, I I I can't even see them getting anywhere near, like, remotely close to the times we're gonna see on the board. I think they were something like twelve seconds back at one point during practice, which it's only practice, but I don't even think I don't think they will finish the race if they do start it. It'll be like a couple laps, and then they're they're gonna purposely pull it, you know, pit it and pull it What from the
Speaker 2:is mister Stroll doing about it?
Speaker 5:I have no clue. I really don't. There it's a lot there's a lot of PR notices that there's a lot of PR that they're, you know, pulling right now, and they're apologizing, like, which, again, I don't know what apologies are gonna do at this point. But I if I'm sponsors, I'm really pissed,
Speaker 1:to be quite frank with you.
Speaker 5:I don't know. Don't know.
Speaker 2:I don't
Speaker 5:know what I don't know what Lawrence is doing.
Speaker 2:Who who is, benefiting from the new regulations or is, kind of figured it out the best so far?
Speaker 5:It's so it seems, it seems like Ferrari is doing again, I I I can't jinx them, so I have to, like I'm I'm I I got a little jinx thing going here. But the Ferrari looks really good. The Mercedes as well. So the they both have come out looking solid. Ferrari has been really reliable.
Speaker 5:They haven't seem to have had any of the issues that others have had with the turbo spool, which was something they were concerned about as early as last season or maybe even two seasons ago. They had talked about the turbo lag, and they don't seem to have that problem. They've gone with a smaller turbocharger, which spools up faster, so, like, they seem to be good with that. The Mercedes looks really, really quick, fast on the straights. I don't think that they were detuned after their everyone was complaining about their engines.
Speaker 5:Those those seem to be good. So anyone with a Mercedes power unit seems to be in good shape, but the Mercedes Petronas AMG f one team, they also just look great. George Russell personally, I think George Russell, this might be his year. Mhmm. And the package looks really, really good.
Speaker 5:The car looks great. Like, they're not having any issues. McLaren they're McLaren, so they they, you know, they won the championship last year. They also have Mercedes power unit. They seem to be okay in an okay spot.
Speaker 5:We'll see what happens when they start. They ended up, I think, in the second practice. They ended up topping the time, but again, it's practice. So we'll see what happens when they turn up the engines for qualifying. I think pretty much and then Red Bull Red Bull.
Speaker 5:Let's talk about Red Bull with the Ford power the Red Bull Ford power unit. Those are impressive. We a lot of people thought, like, they may not be that good, especially during the testing in in Bahrain. They were like, they don't look or sound that great. Now they came to Melbourne, seem to be working pretty well, and Max looks hooked up.
Speaker 5:They have a second driver now, Hodakar, young kid. His second season, Formula One, just brought him up from the junior team racing bulls. He is looking really good. So I would say we're gonna for me, it's a Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull trio at the top, and McLaren, I think they're gonna be maybe looking out of the top three. But, yeah, I I to me, it's a George Russell, Oscar Piastri, Max Verstappen.
Speaker 5:Those are the three guys that I am putting my maybe not money into, but those are the guys I'm putting I'm putting my bets on, if I'm anyone else out there?
Speaker 1:Are there any brands that you're tracking that could make a major move into sort of a premier sponsorship position of an f one team? We were sort of joking about the idea of like an all white f one car sponsored by Apple. Obviously, Apple is taking
Speaker 2:Formula One team.
Speaker 1:The Apple Formula One team would be very cool.
Speaker 5:That would be so cool.
Speaker 1:But they sort of are broadcasting the whole league. They're indexing it. It doesn't really make sense. But a lot of tech companies have moved in, Oracle, Google with Chrome and Gemini. There's, you know, all sorts of deals that are happening.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of money flowing around. I'm wondering if there's anyone that you think might, like, really go all in.
Speaker 5:Really, it's not something I've been thinking about. You know, fintech seems to be pretty popular right now. Yeah. Let's get
Speaker 1:a ramp yellow car out there. That'd be good.
Speaker 2:They'd be
Speaker 6:really cool to see that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Ramp Cadillac.
Speaker 5:Cadillac could use it. Cadillac could definitely use have
Speaker 2:out their sponsorships they or they're still putting it together?
Speaker 5:No. I think they're still putting it together. They may actually be this might be part of the strategy. I haven't talked to anybody over there. I think TWG has put a lot of money in, so they have their name all over it.
Speaker 5:They the TWG AI is their AI partner, and TWG is also part of the is ownership group, so they're on the car in, like, kinda two different ways. But this is also what TWG does across of all of their motorsport assets, like, their brand is, you know, front and center. I haven't seen them fill out much yet, but I also was speculating that Nike and Apple would partner with them at some point. So those were two that I had thought might we might see something with, and I've I've heard, not rumors of those two brands, but I've heard that there is other things coming for Cadillac. I think for them, it's gonna be a matter of can they perform on track and how is that gonna look.
Speaker 5:You obviously don't wanna be
Speaker 2:absolutely Cadillac. Cadillac has a Honda power unit?
Speaker 5:Ferrari.
Speaker 1:Oh. Are you East Coast? Yes. 11PM, Saturday.
Speaker 5:11PM.
Speaker 1:11PM. Pretty convenient
Speaker 6:But I've been
Speaker 1:for the West Coast folks. 8PM is, like, sort of a great time to hang out
Speaker 5:It's very convenient for you guys.
Speaker 1:Watch the race. Works out for us.
Speaker 5:I've been doing this since I was a kid, though. So it was like, these races have always been weird times. I'm you just kinda get used to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That's why when
Speaker 5:I hear people complain, I'm like
Speaker 1:Pageantry.
Speaker 5:It's part of the pageantry.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Well, thank you so much.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I I wanna think about the brands though, John, and maybe maybe I'll come back when I come up with some Yeah. Some that could could join in. It's Short list. Yeah.
Speaker 5:I'm focused elsewhere now at the beginning of the year, but
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Of course.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for taking Yeah. The
Speaker 2:Excited to see your coverage Yeah. On the event. And, we'll talk to you. Great to Thanks see
Speaker 5:for having me again, guys.
Speaker 1:Have a good one.
Speaker 2:Good to see you. Cheers.
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Speaker 2:Nate Silver says, honestly, a consumer report style panel of power users might be better than meter, etcetera, for measuring AI progress, much more robust to spikiness. Not meant to sound skeptical. As a power user, I think there's been extremely noticeable progress over the past few months for what it's worth. Yeah.
Speaker 1:This is diffusion max. We were asking semi analysis to put something like this together. It's very tricky. There are so many people that have ties or sponsorships or favorite models or they've worked somewhere or they have a bone to pick with someone or they're politically aligned one way or the other. There's a lot that that should maybe disqualify someone from giving sort of a qualitative review.
Speaker 1:But I love the idea of going to a group of folks that are independent users of these models and putting something together that's Consumer Reports style because we we are truly past benchmarks being noticeable to the average user, and we're much more in to, okay, how does the model feel? What are you actually using it for? Is it is it actually collaborating with you in a valuable way such that you get a, you know, deliverable? We we we we talk to a lot of folks about, you know, like, okay, like agents are here. What are you using them for?
Speaker 1:What are your customers using them for? And it can be tricky. Sometimes people people don't really know what they're using them for. Well, let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud, w a I supercomputing for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.
Speaker 1:And without further ado, we have Doug DeMuro in the Rooster waiting room. Welcome to the TBPN UltraDome. How are doing, Doug?
Speaker 6:I'm good. How are you guys doing?
Speaker 1:We're doing fantastically. Great to see you.
Speaker 6:Back here.
Speaker 1:I'm so I'm so glad to have you back here. I I absolutely love this car pod. Congratulations on all the progress there. I mean, it's the number one car podcast in the world, and it deserves to be so because The number one in our hearts. It's I I'm gonna be listening to it on my drive home today.
Speaker 1:It drops every Friday. Correct?
Speaker 6:Every Friday morning. That is true. Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do subscribe, to that. But we wanted to have you on to discuss so many other things in the car world. I think we should start with the interesting crossover from the tech world to the world of Ferrari with the Johnny Ive, the Johnny drive, the new Luche. The new Luche. So take us through your reactions to the actual design
Speaker 2:You already ordered five of them. Right?
Speaker 1:As soon as the electric, you were like, I'm in.
Speaker 6:I am as skeptical as as as basically every car enthusiast that I know is. Yeah. Take you through my thoughts. I mean, well, first off, they haven't shown the the the vehicle. Right?
Speaker 6:They've shown the interior, which in itself is kind of interesting and makes me a little Who shows the interior before showing the vehicle? Right? Only if you're really kinda nervous about how
Speaker 1:the vehicle such a weird layout too seeing, like, the the floating stuff, and it wasn't even in, like, a shape of a car.
Speaker 2:And there's people there's people in Italy that, sit outside the Ferrari factory Yeah. And take videos on their phones. And I've seen some of those, you know, kinda scouting videos and it looks Yes. Like incredibly rough. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It looks like a Yeah. It looks like a Subaru or a Hyundai
Speaker 6:more than any other brand goes to great lengths to disguise their production cars when they're when they're still doing testing for that exact reason. Yes. There are people who post up at the factory waiting for them to slip up or whatever. And so Ferrari has historically made some really bizarre preproduction cars to try to actually fake out those people. So I'm not entirely convinced that the the really rough looking look of the, you know, the the spy photo car that we've all seen is real.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It looks like a station wagon. Yeah. But, obviously, I'm skeptical just in general of this. Like, an electric sports car, the ones that have come out have not been well received.
Speaker 6:They have not sold well. In some cases, automakers who were about to release an electric sports car dialed it back and canceled the whole project, you know, sometimes months before they were supposed to be on sale. So we'll see how it goes. So strategically
Speaker 2:What what How deep Talk are about the Yeah. Talk about the interior though because Oh, yeah. Because to me to me, it looks like, in general, I'm a fan of coming in, having some fresh eyes on the interior Yeah. Of a car. There's a bunch of kind of like individual ideas from what we've seen that look cool like little things you can pull to start the engine or whatever or engine.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of elements that are nice but at the same time it looks like somewhat like it's like, oh, you did like a resto mod on but it's an EV. Like, it just it feels it feels I didn't come away feeling like it was.
Speaker 6:It's an interesting thing though. Like, it's a totally new world for Ferrari. Mhmm. And so I'm willing to give them a lot of latitude here because I think they're probably going after new buyers and different buyers. And I also think they're really trying to they're not hard to appeal to the people like us who are, like, into cars and are and are probably have some experience with Ferrari before.
Speaker 6:I think that this is this is a big play on China. This is a big play on young people. They're really trying to make this make sense to a kind of a different audience. So I'm actually I didn't mind the interior for that from that perspective. It certainly is not very Ferrari like, but I think that was the point.
Speaker 6:I think they could have kept their in in house design team, you know, designing it if they had wanted it to stay like it like their cars look. And I think this was kind of intentionally a a left field kind of thing. And so I I'm willing to give them latitude there. What I'm more interested about is how the car looks, how it performs, and especially how it feels. Because I think a lot of the reason people buy Ferraris is because of the way that they feel.
Speaker 6:And that's where I think this car could have problems.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do you think it could actually sell well in China even with this fresh take on design when every foreign manufacturer has been getting slaughtered?
Speaker 6:Foreign manufacturers are getting slaughtered in China, but you have to assume that even in China, which doesn't have the brand of belovedness for some of the Western brands that we have, you have to assume though that the Ferrari brand is still nonetheless both popular and, you know, makes people excited even in China. It's not like any Chinese companies have emerged as a replacement for Ferrari, even though there have been many Chinese companies that have emerged as replacements for Tesla and Mercedes Benz and all that. Ferrari is still this globally known beloved brand. And so I do think that they have they have possibility there. Porsche sells relatively well in China despite how how hard it has been for other automakers to get in there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How how far do you think or how deep do you think the Ferrari team is into the development of this electric vehicle? Because, didn't Lamborghini just pull out of their EV project? It feels like there's a different world where the the electrification of the powertrain is much more like choosing between a v 12 and a v eight. And it's just like, it's just an option almost.
Speaker 1:And maybe they'd be afraid of doing that because it would reveal 5% of the buyers selecting that. But they make all this big, like, oh, it's a it's a it's own car instead of just being like, yeah, the Roma now, you can get it electric if you want that. Right. We'll make 10 of them.
Speaker 6:Well, it's an interesting thing. I other automakers have tried to do that. Maserati has an electric version of the Gran Turismo that has been a horrible failure. I think that yeah. I was surprised to see Lamborghini cancel theirs Yeah.
Speaker 6:At this stage. Kudos to them. They realize their buyers don't want it, and in in some ways, you have to wonder if Lamborghini is kind of emerging as more the enthusiast brand and for which which historically has not been true. Right? Lamborghini is the brand for people who wanna show off Yeah.
Speaker 6:And Ferrari is the enthusiast brand. Well, maybe that's changing a little bit. Ferrari, I think, also would make the argument that they have always been the leader. They have always been the one to push to the next step, the design leader. People say their stuff is ugly.
Speaker 6:They say there's you know, the cars are too powerful, etcetera. That and and they have always kinda been the first to take some steps. And I think that's
Speaker 2:Oh, we're too powerful? We'll put a v six in our halo car.
Speaker 6:I think that they're so I think that they're sitting here thinking, you know what? We're Lambo might cancel it, and Pininfarina isn't selling theirs very well and all this stuff, but we are Ferrari. And we if if anybody's gonna be able to this, it's gonna be us, and we are gonna lead this thing, and we're gonna kill it. I bet that's the mindset in in Italy. I bet you they're nervous, though.
Speaker 6:Yeah. No no electric sports car has succeeded yet, and and many have tried.
Speaker 1:Taycan doesn't really count as a sports car, more sedan?
Speaker 6:No. I think because it's a sedan Mhmm. It is certainly a sporty car, but because it's a sedan, adding that level of practicality, it's not really the same thing. Especially because Porsche tried to go electric with their sports car, and over the last few months has repeatedly been walking back the actual desire to do that to the point where it's now kind of starting to become clear there may not even be an electric version of the next box for it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It it Is the Mission x, Mission e, the the the f 80 competitor, the w one competitor just completely cancel at this point?
Speaker 6:Yeah. That's gone. I don't know if they've officially said that, but, yes, that is gone. They're not gonna do an electric.
Speaker 1:Are they going to do a new halo car? It feels like we're so far. I I had the 09/18 on a poster as a kid, and I've been waiting for the next version for my entire I adult
Speaker 6:was I got Career GT sitting right up here. There you go. Yeah. They are gonna do one, but I think that they had committed significant resources to going electric with Vision x, And they had to kinda scramble back to the drawing board. And and developing a hypercar takes real effort.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:You gotta get a lot of things right because you're only selling a few 100 of them. And so I I I think it's common, but it's
Speaker 2:it's it's
Speaker 6:still yours.
Speaker 1:So if Porsche goes back to the drawing board and they're saying, okay. We there's no longer the pressure to go electric with the hypercar. How how enthusiast can they go at that tier? Can they do manual? Can they do a v 12?
Speaker 1:Like, can they learn from the SP three? Like, what what can they like, what do they have the freedom to actually pull off the shelf?
Speaker 6:I think that Porsche is a much more conservative company than I wish they were. Mhmm. I would be very surprised if it has a manual. Mhmm. I would be very surprised.
Speaker 6:I'm certain that that it will be a hybrid in some capacity. Mhmm. I'd be very surprised if it was a larger engine than a v eight. Mhmm. The fact that Carrera GT ever existed, analog v 10, like, that was an unbelievable thing that was a moment in time.
Speaker 6:Like, Porsche, I think, is still worried. They have never really in the modern eras, hypercars are automatic hybrids. And I think Porsche is afraid of of deviating from that because they know that that works, and it worked with 09/18. I actually had a call with some Porsche people yesterday, and I was pleading my case for a manual career GT type successor. And I think it's just a tough it's a tough sell.
Speaker 6:It's a it's a sell. They don't
Speaker 2:Is it is it, though, is it a tough sell for the the people that are actually
Speaker 1:Well, they have a they have a halo car in the GT three RS in some ways that sells the nine elevens. And also, the Boxster looks like the Cayman looks like somewhat similar to the GT three RS. So it's not the RA pulling down to the a four.
Speaker 2:I just I just the the the the people we we have a friend that gets every orders every halo car from every brand. If you and if you asked him like, hey, would you rather have like a hybrid?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or or something that's, like, more more a successor to the career, CGT? Like, he what would he would obviously want the
Speaker 1:The more manual The more engaging
Speaker 6:The automakers, I think, are also really aware of the fact that hybrid is the future. Mhmm. And they really need to make sure that the super the hypercar, which gets all the press Mhmm. Brings technology to the lineup that then trickles down. Like, I think in a way, even to this day, the 09/18 Spyder kind of opened the door for the nine eleven to go hybrid Sure.
Speaker 6:And for the Taycan to exist. Because it was like, if the hypercar can do it, then I promise you and your nine eleven can do it. And I think going back, doing a full yes. I think it would sell. If they did another v 10 manual hypercar, it'd be amazing.
Speaker 6:But it's it's kind of an anachronism. I also think Porsche's a little bit anxious about the number of people who have $2,000,000 that are actually willing to buy those cars. Mhmm. My argument is they're doing it right now at auctions. Like, where do you sell?
Speaker 6:Million. F fifties are selling for 8,000,000. It's not like you're getting a bunch of cheap used car buyers who are like, I want manuals back and I only buy used cars. Like, are people with real money who would buy them. Yeah.
Speaker 6:But I think it's just easier to find buyers for automatic hybrids. They would have crazy, you know, numbers, horsepower and acceleration and all that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's what's talk about the overall auction market and what's going on there. I was, spent the weekend in in Montana with a few guys that have Porsche dealerships, they were speculating themselves. But I'm curious what your take is.
Speaker 6:It's been an it's been a bit of a ride the last few months. Mhmm. I've been shocked at watching some of the cars increase as they have. Cars that were I there are cars that have gone up 70% in in what appears to be three, four months.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 6:And you look at auction results, and it was one result, and now it's four results. And it's like, wow. So this is where the market is. Like, are some of these cars going forever? I had to pump my insurance up on my Carriage GT.
Speaker 6:I'm gonna pump it up again. I'm, like, getting anxious to drive it. Like, you start to think that, like, some of these cars that you lusted after as a child might be gone forever. And and it doesn't feel like a bubble either. I just get the sense that we've all been hoping the other shoe would drop and these cars would fall, and that's not what happened after COVID.
Speaker 6:Right? They went up. They stopped climbing, but nothing ever came back down. F forty's never got cheap again. F fifty's never got cheap again.
Speaker 6:Curricades never got cheap again. And I just don't get the sense that that's gonna happen again. I I think that there is a real interest in in collectors and enthusiasts in keeping these cars.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And it's just gonna keep driving values up.
Speaker 2:And it isn't isn't some of this, like, generational. Right? Because you're seeing maybe some more softness in in the in classics and then Yeah. Some of these more, like, you know, the Modern. Somebody that grew up with Carrera GT on a poster, like, they're not reaching for
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:Classic cars anymore. And so this entire Yep. There was an entire window of cars that were in hindsight, like, pretty reasonably priced because the people that were kids when they were being released didn't have the money. Then Yep. As soon as you they had the wealth, then all of them would just immediately go.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Absolutely. And I think there's a FOMO effect among those people. Once they see values of a car go from 1 to 2,000,000, they think to themselves, oh, crap. I gotta buy it now before it goes to 4,000,000.
Speaker 6:And that helps push values up too. But, yes, I mean, you saw that big that big auction in in Florida where they had all those bizarre colored cars came out. You know, you saw David Lee, who's this content creator in South Southern Southern California. He bought a Ferrari two fifty GTO for, like, 38,000,000. Meanwhile, at Enzo, at that same auction, sold for, like, 11.
Speaker 6:The Enzo at two fifty GTO spread at three x is unbelievable considering that it used to be a 100 x.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And you're starting to see a two fifty GTO as a sixties car, and Enzo is a poster car for millennials. It was a car that was on our walls. I mean, that car came out when I was 15, and I'm you know, it's literally like a millennial dream. Yeah. And that's that's where the money is shifting.
Speaker 6:I don't I don't have any interest in a February GTO. I don't have any interest in split window Corvette or a Hemi CUDA. You know, I'm looking at Enzos and Carrera GTs. Those are the cars that I want.
Speaker 1:What about a gullwing? How did Hoovie wind up with such an eclectic taste?
Speaker 6:You know, the there are a few historic cars that I think will always be successful.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And that is one of them. That is a car that I think even the next generation and the generation after that will appreciate. And and I got to admit, if Goldwings came down to a reason much more reasonable number, even I would be interested. Even though it's a fifties car Yeah. And it's old and all that, it is just so damn cool.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And so I don't think that is that eclectic for a young person.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I also heard it's like it's like one of the first cars from that era that actually feels fast, whereas a lot of other cars, they it's like it's it's fancy, but it just feels very slow.
Speaker 6:And modern. That's that's the really crazy thing about the Go Way. I drove one, and I it it wasn't until the moment that I drove one that I realized why you see them on so many vintage rallies. And it's because they're unbelievably drivable. They are very comfortable.
Speaker 6:They are fuel injected. They are easy to drive. They are easy cars to operate. Manual transmission, the the the steering is all very easy. It feels like a modern car even though it is approaching 80 years old, 75 years old.
Speaker 6:Sure. And so that's that's a pretty usable, you know, performance car.
Speaker 1:Love it.
Speaker 2:Jordy? What other words or advice were you sharing with the Porsche team? Like, what would you be if you were magically the CEO of Porsche? What do you do right now? Because like there's certainly some frustration in terms of Yeah.
Speaker 2:Offer car. Cars that people really like, enthusiast cars.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And and is that is that real or is that creative? You know? Like, I think I think the enthusiast cars, they're doing things generally right. It is a tough business right now, the auto business.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. They are dealing with changing governmental Yeah. Situations globally that have really affected their strategy. And Porsche, who is relatively small and relies a lot on the success of a single model, is sitting here saying we had shifted electric because that's what everybody told us they wanted. Suddenly, they're saying that they don't necessarily want that.
Speaker 6:Meanwhile, European regulations are significantly stricter than now North American and even Chinese regulations. And is there a possibility that Porsche makes a special car just for the American and Chinese market? That's a hard sell to Germany, which is the whole mark. I mean, it's it's an interesting flux kind of world right now in the auto world, and I don't know. I honestly don't know what what what Porsche's future ought to be, but they have put a lot of money into I have right now at my house the electric Macan GTS.
Speaker 6:It is a fantastic car. It is not going to sell
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Under any circumstances.
Speaker 1:One last question on Porsche before we move on to China. Why do Targa's hold their value so well?
Speaker 6:They they're just not made in large numbers, and they are really damn cool. The real question is why don't they make a turbo Targa yet? That is what be or a GT three Targa. That is the market to go after, but I think they're probably supply constrained.
Speaker 1:Yeah. China. BYD is in the they're in the Wall Street Journal today. BYD launches new fast charging battery amid slowing demand in China. I was surprised to see that they're losing market share there because it's so competitive.
Speaker 1:But they have this new tech. They can charge the battery to 97% of capacity from 10% in just nine minutes. Have you like, what what BYD models have you driven? What do you like? What do you think will be cloned or adopted even if it can't be imported?
Speaker 6:I drove some BYD sedan a long time ago. Mhmm. I don't remember which one it was. Very competent
Speaker 1:car. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I think it was a Han. This was three, four years ago. And it seems like the cars have gotten more competent since then. Because I'm sitting here in San Diego. We actually see BYD cars almost every day on the streets coming over from Mexico where they're where they're pretty popular.
Speaker 6:Oh. Wait. Wait. And
Speaker 1:because you can buy them
Speaker 2:You can buy them.
Speaker 1:Register them in Mexico, and you can drive them into The United States. You just
Speaker 2:can't Oh. Hear a
Speaker 6:don't think it's Americans who are doing this. It's just Mexicans who are coming over to shop or go to SeaWorld or whatever. But we see I mean, live in San Diego. See Mexican cars on the road more than any US state. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And a lot of them are electric because they're selling a lot of them there. Yeah. And they're they they look pretty damn compelling. I actually think that one of BYD's big success stories is forgetting the China market for a second, just their global conquest. I mean
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:You see them all over Europe now. You see them all over Latin America now. Yeah. They are really making it as as America gets scared of the Chinese and is trying to make all these rules against them, boy, the other countries are really embracing it. Ultimately, these countries like cheap, good cars.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And it a lot of those cars are cheap and good.
Speaker 1:And Tata never really had that success coming out of India. Maybe just too
Speaker 6:I don't know what happened with Tata. They had that crazy tiny car. Mano. I think that it I have a suspicion that if Tata had been in different market conditions, things would be different.
Speaker 2:But Mhmm.
Speaker 6:I think a lot of the success of BYD and the other Chinese companies is probably fueled by the Chinese government providing really favorable benefits, incentives, etcetera, to them. And made in India, you know, when Tata was really trying to blow up twenty years ago, it was pre EVs and, you know, that's a competitive advantage that the Chinese clearly have right now is their EV technology.
Speaker 1:Okay. Killer feature I saw out of China. I wanna know whether or not you want this in your next car. Yeah. If the battery catches on fire, it ejects it concussively out the side.
Speaker 1:You've seen this video, I'm sure. Is that a good feature or not?
Speaker 6:Oh god. You could imagine some real liabilities. That that hasn't gone in front of, in front of attorneys in The United States, I'll tell you.
Speaker 1:I don't think so. Oh, it
Speaker 6:is the technology that they are developing is interesting. Charging a battery in nine minutes, that is a huge deal. Right? Yeah. Because I think that still to this day, the primary reason people don't wanna adopt EVs is charge time and the fear of charge time and all that stuff.
Speaker 6:And I think the more you can if you could ever really solve that problem, whether it's battery swaps or crazy fast charging, that would probably be the last excuse. Mhmm. You know?
Speaker 1:Have you seen the show the HBO show Silicon Valley? Have you this? So there's this character who's loosely based on Mark Cuban, Russ Hanneman. And in the show, he brags about how he has a car with doors that go up, it's become, you know, iconic in Silicon Valley. And I had this thesis.
Speaker 1:If you want to be the the the the most impressive person in Silicon Valley, the best buy is the is the BMW I eight because the doors go up.
Speaker 6:They do and it looks cool.
Speaker 2:And It looks
Speaker 1:You can get one for like $40,000 now. They're cheap. They're cheap. They're cheap.
Speaker 2:You'll be able to get one for 20,000 in just just a few years
Speaker 6:too. We
Speaker 1:have an intern on our team who's looking at a new car. Talk him out of getting one. Why should he not pull the trigger on a BMW iDate?
Speaker 6:How old is he?
Speaker 1:He's 21.
Speaker 6:And where does he live?
Speaker 1:He lives in Los Angeles. And most get one. He should definitely
Speaker 2:get 21,
Speaker 6:and he's in LA. He should obviously get an I eight. He's gonna go around flexing. He's gonna he's gonna put those doors up at every stoplight.
Speaker 1:Yes. Every stoplight. Every stoplight. Do it. Should he should he buy one that's already been wrapped and crashed in crypto, in crypto?
Speaker 6:His perception is that he will wrap and crash it if he doesn't buy one of
Speaker 1:those cars. I just assume. The the the other the other broader question is that, is that, he he often winds up at a valet, and and I wanna know what is the best bargain car to make sure that you get valet? Do you know how they park the nice cars in the front? Right.
Speaker 1:What's the car that's the best bargain to get the awesome valet spot?
Speaker 6:I mean, that is up there.
Speaker 1:That's up there.
Speaker 6:Right? In the thirties. And and car enthusiasts laugh at that car and do not have any respect for that car. No. But LA valets and driving it around LA and, like, you know, that I remember when those were new.
Speaker 6:I I lived in Philly, I remember seeing them on the streets thinking, this looks like a concept car. And I know it's not that fast. I know it doesn't drive great. It's got a three cylinder engine, but holy crap. This thing looks so
Speaker 2:It looks insane.
Speaker 6:Yeah. But it's been ten years, and it still looks just as cool.
Speaker 1:Cool. He was asking me. Was like, three cylinders. So are they in a v shape? And I was like, no.
Speaker 1:It's not a v three.
Speaker 6:But also but also, if you're if you're thinking about an I eight, you shouldn't concern yourself with any of that stuff. You're obviously not a car enthusiast, so just don't worry about your cylinders.
Speaker 2:Weirdo. Just
Speaker 1:to defend him, I was pitching him this. I was pitching him this, but I still think it's a great it's
Speaker 6:a great buy. Flex car, but it is a hell of a flex.
Speaker 1:Yes. What what else is in that category? If you if you maybe double the budget, triple the budget, but you still want, just ridiculousness for the price.
Speaker 6:I am surprised to see how cheap McLarens are getting. And the early McLarens, the m p four twelve c's have a reputation for being unreliable. However, the '5 70 s, which was sort of the next generation car Mhmm. That was the entry model. They are starting to come down.
Speaker 6:We sold one on Cars and Vincenzo not that long ago for, like, 80 some. Mhmm. That's a pretty appealing car because that is, like, real fast. That is not like, oh, the I eight is pretty fast fast. That is, like, modern car, three second or less zero to 60 type fast.
Speaker 6:Those are pretty impressive cars for that money. That's good. You're still always worried every day, you know, though. When you're driving a 40,000 mile McLaren that was probably on Turo for three and a half years, it's still always a little bit worried. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. On on Turo for that long. It's rough. What what are you looking what are you most excited for release wise this year?
Speaker 6:You know, there's not that much stuff that's coming out this year that I'm really pumped for. I think the Rivian r two is definitely the car that I'm excited for. I've already driven it, but I am excited to see how it does. EVs are obviously, it's fallen off, but that car is so damn good. And I just hope that, like, it has the success it deserves because it is just such a great car.
Speaker 6:I'm excited to see the the electric Ferrari for sure. I don't think it'll be out yet this year. Definitely excited to drive the new hypercars, the the f 80 n McLarens, is called the w one. Yeah. But it seems like this year is a little bit less of a crazy year of cool stuff that I've been excited for.
Speaker 6:And I think r two to me is the, especially from a consumer retail car industry perspective, to me, probably the most interesting car coming out.
Speaker 2:What's going on with Scout Motors? Is that is that taking some of Rivian's IP? Do I I'm just kind of speculating here, but VW Group is a big investor in Rivian and I think they got IP rights through that investment to try to bring it over to the rest of the fleet. And then Scout is kind of like expanding off of what Rivian's done? What what what's the relationship there?
Speaker 6:It'll be an interesting thing to see because, yeah, Volkswagen is an investor in Rivian, but also basically owns Scout. And it's like, wait a minute. You know, these cars are really similar. Like, they're both these kind of boxy off road electric vehicles. One interesting distinction is that Scout is gonna do a plug in hybrid, so they're gonna have gas motors in those cars.
Speaker 6:And I think that that is one excuse people use for not buying Rivians. They're worried if they go overlanding, they're gonna run out of charge, which is a legitimate worry if you're actually out in the middle of the desert or the mountains or whatever. But Scout they recently announced they're pushing Scout a year to 28 now. This is one of those things where I'm like, believe it when I see a guy. I you know, they showed those cars, which were so cool.
Speaker 6:What has that been? Two years ago? And now they're saying it'll be another two years. It's like, let's let's let's see what happens. Let's see what the climate is like politically Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Before these cars actually come out. But it is interesting that, yeah, Volkswagen Group is basically pitting these two brands sort of against each other. And I am curious how that will end up shaking down.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is there a word for those, like, reverse hybrids where it's mostly an electric car, but it has a gas engine that you can fill up to charge the battery. I saw a demo from a Chinese car, but that feels like something that for the overlander, for the camper, for somebody who wants to go off grid and not have the range anxiety, but still have all the benefits of the electric powertrain.
Speaker 6:Yeah. That that that is. I think that would almost like a generator essentially.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Basically.
Speaker 6:I think that would be great. I think and I think people would probably they would certainly be more willing to adopt that than, like, a full electric for, like, the overloading crowd. However, I would argue that, like, walk I around my neighborhood and, like, eight of my neighbors have a Rivian r one s's. Like
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:These people aren't actually overlanding. Right? These are these are cars that three row SUVs, they're gonna take their kids around. Yeah. And I think that you can't you can't you can't do too much development for the overlanding crowd, which isn't real.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. There's not a lot of people in the overlanding world willing to spend a $120 on a brand new vehicle anyway. Mhmm. Mostly, you gotta think about who's actually gonna buy these, which is, you know, parents.
Speaker 1:Do you have do you have expectations around, self driving capabilities just going to normal consumer cars over the next few years? Like, I I don't know if you've been in a Waymo, but Yeah. Was Technology is, like, there.
Speaker 2:Porsche dealers last weekend and and I was like, how much of a threat do you think the like, at what point do consumers say like, I love Porsche but I don't wanna I want I want the best possible autonomous driving. Right. And so I'm just gonna for my daily, I couldn't possibly go with Porsche because I I don't wanna drive.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think about that a lot. I have been surprised at autonomous autonomous technology. There was a lot of talk about it for a long time, and then it the last two years, I haven't heard that much. It's almost like they haven't been able to kinda whatever the next hump is, like, they're doing well, and the Tesla FSD is great, and a lot of other cars have really great systems too.
Speaker 6:But none of these are, like, Waymo type. Like, they're not you know, that doesn't seem like it's ready to go into cars that you or me would be able to buy.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And that doesn't seem like it's changed much over the last couple of years. It seems like the world has moved on to, like, AI and and we've kind of forgotten about, like, autonomous cars. And I do wonder how long that's gonna be. I do think that Porsche will have to develop. Like, there will have to be autonomous Porsches.
Speaker 6:Like, other automakers will do it too. If they wanna sell Cayennes and Panamaras, those are not necessarily being sold to people who, like, love to drive. Yeah. Yeah. And so those cars also will they'll have to do that.
Speaker 6:That's just gonna have to be what they do.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm hopeful. Yeah. Mercedes seemed really close with level three system that you could actually watch a YouTube video on the center console.
Speaker 6:And they even said at some point they would be willing to take liability, but, like, where is that? Like, just
Speaker 1:never really shipped or anything. And you would think there would be, like, a rat race, arms race, and it would be like, okay. Well, now BMW fires back, and they're, you know, level three plus. Right? But it just never really played out.
Speaker 6:They all went all they all went all in on EV and spent a lot of money and time developing that.
Speaker 1:And Yeah.
Speaker 6:It turned out that's kind of been a little bit of a dud at least here in North America. It's like we would rather have it done. So I think most people would rather have Yeah. It
Speaker 2:Definitely. How do I get one of these new Unimogs from Mercedes?
Speaker 6:The the story I read was that they're building precisely one. No. Did you read that? No. They're building
Speaker 2:one That's what I was afraid of. Because you look at this thing and it's It like looks like a concept car. When I first saw it, was like, okay, this is cool but it's obviously AI. And then Mercedes was posting it from their actual account. I'm like, okay, it's real but it's a partnership with this other kind of like commercial truck company.
Speaker 2:I forget the name. So I'm not gonna get one, you're saying. And you're not gonna review one?
Speaker 6:No. I mean, even if they did make them, the Unimogs, especially modern Unimogs, have almost completely been restricted to not The US. There's all sorts of regulations and trucks importing trucks to The US is hard, but it'd be cool as hell. It looks incredibly cool.
Speaker 1:Oh, no.
Speaker 2:Oh, no. Is most elite big family SUV to buy this year? I'm in the market.
Speaker 6:The answer for me, if I was the answer answering this question, it would be the Lexus LX because I think that that is a serious car that is seriously capable. It is the 300 series Land Cruiser globally, which is a very serious car that Toyota doesn't bring here anymore as a Toyota. And I think if you know you know, that car isn't if you know you know car. I think a lot of people would say that it's the Cadillac Escalade IQ, but I think that car is certainly, there's a group of people who are buying that car. You know?
Speaker 6:It's not really I think they think they are elite, and I think that it's it's it's not really that. But I think I like the if you know you know cars better. The LX, specifically, Overtrail LX, like the off road version, is like a very it's a three row, but it's like a very capable off roader. Mhmm. And it's expensive and not that many people are buying it.
Speaker 6:Those are special cars.
Speaker 5:K. Last
Speaker 1:last car recommendation. There's a there's a group of folks on our team, all young, single individuals. They go on date nights. They were thinking about going in and buying one car that they would share. They were considering a Lamborghini Urus that they would each have, a few nights a month with which to go on
Speaker 2:for season. Backstory. I think it was the two of us
Speaker 1:were suggesting. Again, this is our idea. But is there is there a better car for a group of young men in Los Angeles to share for first dates than a Lamborghini Urus?
Speaker 6:Do we have a budget here or are we is it just Well,
Speaker 2:I mean, we're talking about eight or so guys.
Speaker 1:There's eight or so guys. So they're gonna all be paying a normal car payment of a couple $100, but you add that up, you get into, like, $3. You get into, like, $3 a month.
Speaker 2:Potentially lease like a like a Rolls Royce.
Speaker 1:A Rolls Royce, but that's not maybe the right date car. So, the team's right there if you wanna take a If
Speaker 6:it was me, I would get a Bentayga for that same money.
Speaker 1:But it depends
Speaker 6:on the type of lady that you're or man that you're trying to attract.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:There's a certain type of of lady or man that is interested in an Urus driver.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And there is decision, but take it. And you kinda gotta just figure out what you're looking for.
Speaker 1:You know
Speaker 6:what I mean?
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. Your wife is not gonna be attracted to the Urus.
Speaker 6:Don't look at it.
Speaker 2:She might appreciate.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, that's why Turo exists. We will we will we will need a Turo each and run the proper a b test for the for the
Speaker 6:That may actually be the easier way to do this route.
Speaker 1:It truly is.
Speaker 6:Because at some point in either situation, you have to come clean.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You have to come clean. It'd be like
Speaker 6:Why
Speaker 1:actually, where
Speaker 6:is the Uris tonight. Oh
Speaker 2:Well, the the best thing, a twenty four hour Turo rental, you potentially can squeeze in two dinners, a breakfast, and a lunch, and then maybe even a late lunch before you gotta return the car.
Speaker 6:Years ago, I did ads for Turo and in YouTube videos, and for some reason, I agreed to be paid in Turo credit instead of dollars. And it got to a point at one point where I had, like, $22,000 in Turo credit. And so whenever I would travel anywhere, I would just sort by most expensive, and I would rent whatever g wagon or Audi r eight or McLaren was available or whatever.
Speaker 2:The brutal thing for me is I was watching I was watching your videos and I became a Turo client, but I was, you know, in my early twenties. I couldn't get any of the good stuff. I'd just be like, okay. Like, I can get a boxer.
Speaker 1:Right. Oh, well. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come Great
Speaker 2:to catch up.
Speaker 6:Thanks for having me back. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Everyone, go
Speaker 2:Talk soon.
Speaker 1:Follow cars and bids. Go to carsandbids.com. Buy yeah. Sort by most expensive. Buy that car.
Speaker 1:That's what
Speaker 6:you want. Exactly right.
Speaker 1:There you right. Thank method. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about app loving.
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Speaker 1:Secure any agent with Okta. Without further ado, Max Hodak is back on the show. Max, good to see you. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:You do not have audio.
Speaker 1:The video looks great. Max Hodak is of course the founder and CEO of Science Corporation. He's co founder of Neuralink And there are some exciting news developments coming through today.
Speaker 2:I think I heard So
Speaker 1:I think I hear Max. Can you hear us?
Speaker 4:I can hear you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yes.
Speaker 2:I can
Speaker 1:hear a little bit. Great. So, give us the maybe reintroduce the company and then give us the news today.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, it's been a crazy crazy couple months. Yeah. So we're, I mean, we're a a medical technology company really focused on the brain. It's just when you engage directly with the brain, don't really see elsewhere in medicine.
Speaker 4:Our lead product is a retinal prosthesis, the chip that plants it in the back of the eye that we finished a major clinical trial last year on age related macular degeneration. It's one of the main reasons people go blind. That's not inherited. Mhmm. And in that clinical trial, you're able to take people that haven't been able to recognize faces for over a decade to reading.
Speaker 4:I found out the other week that one of our patients finished a 300 page novel. There's a sketch on the wall of our office of someone who sent us a sketch of the Sydney Opera House that she drew through it. Wow.
Speaker 1:We're still having some audio errors. Let's, let's take a little break. We'll come back to you in a few minutes. Is that okay?
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:Let's sort that out, and, Jordy and I will go back to a bit of the news and, give you an update on ChatGPT is pulling back potentially from the direct direct response advertising. The agentic commerce is gonna be a little bit more brand focused potentially. I saw some news
Speaker 2:Well, agentic commerce AgenTek Commerce
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Is different than the ads product.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. So So
Speaker 2:AgenTek Commerce is like you search for a product Yep. A Shopify Yep. Retailer Yeah. Like has opted into this.
Speaker 1:There's a question about So I
Speaker 2:think I think I big part of it is just like focus.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Like, it seems like over the last couple months, like my my interpretation of OpenAI strategy is like, hey, let's focus on our core business
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Consumer. Let's focus on enterprise, cogen, and let's just like get back to basics. Yeah.
Speaker 1:My big question is is I wonder if there will be an opportunity to run more targeted ads on those more considered purchases like a car. Like, I have hit ChatGPT with a number of questions about very expensive purchases like a car. I'm not getting targeted on Instagram with car ads because typically the car brands have sort of just like brand advertising broadly for, okay, yeah, here's a brand, you see it at the Super Bowl. But direct response has never really worked on Meta for these highly considered purchases like houses and cars. But people go to LLMs asking questions about those.
Speaker 1:What will it be like to live in this neighborhood? Is this like here's my budget. What what should I be, you know, what should I be looking for in a family car? Like, the questions that you asked Doug DeMuro, we're not we're fortunate that we get to ask him directly about r eights
Speaker 3:and Organic intelligence.
Speaker 1:I eights and all sorts of Bentayga's versus Urises. But a lot of people will have that question and go to an LLM for a debate. And you can even go to ChatGPT right now and just ask, you know, what's the best car? What car do you think I want? And it will just tell you, and there's an opportunity there to drive conversion to a very high ticket purchase.
Speaker 1:But it's unclear, you you know, how quickly that will that will roll out. We do have a piece of advice for everyone. Sorry.
Speaker 2:I just asked. What? Chad GBT5.4 thinking, what car do you think I want? And and it only had to think for a couple of seconds. Probably a Porsche nine nine two GT three RS with the Wysak package.
Speaker 1:See, nailed it. And so the thing is is that it could be asking that question in the background. It could it could go in the background and just say, for every single person, ask what's the what's the highest ticket item that you think that they might buy? And then they could go to Portia and say, hey. We think we got a fish on the line here.
Speaker 1:Like, just pay us a couple bucks. If we get them across the finish line, pay us a thousand bucks or a couple thousand bucks, and that could be a very different shape of advertiser, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's hard to hard to handle the attribution. But
Speaker 1:Yes. But I think it's actually easier in an LLM context because if you if you are actually going to buy that GT3 RS with a Wisec package, you'll probably ask ChatGPT about where can you find one. And then when you're in the dealership, when you're reviewing a contract, you might potentially actually have the the LLM review the contract. Right? Like, you might have you might upload it upload the the the sales contract.
Speaker 1:And you might ask it, hey. Update my insurance. It might go do that. So it might actually have a lot more attribution. And then down the line, it might actually say you might be asking a question, hey.
Speaker 1:My check engine light's on, or how do I put this in track mode? And then it knows that you actually got the GT three RS with the WiSlack package. So who knows? Anyway, I think we have resolved our issues. We will return to our discussion with Max Hodak.
Speaker 1:How are you doing, Max?
Speaker 4:Good. Anything else?
Speaker 1:Yes. I think so. Much better. Let's, let's let's let's restart with
Speaker 2:Start over from the beginning. Introduction. Could hardly hear you, but what I was hearing, was quite excited about.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 4:So we make brain implants. Our main our main one is a retinal prosthesis, so it's a chip implanted in the back of the eye. Finished a major clinical trial last summer in age related macular degeneration, which is one of the leading causes of blindness. And in the trial, were able to take patients that, like, there's one patient that hasn't been able to recognize faces in over a decade. I found out that she finished a 300 page novel recently.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's insane. Wait, so Yeah. Couldn't recognize faces, that means that, like, if I'm trying to imagine what that looks like, it's effectively take a picture of what I'm seeing and then just blur, blur, blur until I can't even recognize a face. Is that
Speaker 4:basically Yeah, well what the person's So, this disease, yeah, they lose their high resolution central vision. There's like, when you look online, you might see an image of like a big black splotch in the center of your vision, and the patients don't experience the black splotch. So it's like a little bit bigger than that. They describe it as missing, so it's kind of like a big extended blind spot. But, yeah, I mean, all of your high resolution to high acuity central vision gets destroyed in this disease geographic atrophy.
Speaker 4:Wow. And so we have a chip that we implant under where the dead retina is and can stimulate the retina directly bypassing the dead cells to get the signal back into the brain. So, like, if you I mean, humanity is empirically not that good at drug discovery. But if the brain is a computer and there's a cable that carries the visual signal into the brain, and if we can get the signal into the cable, then we can get vision into the brain.
Speaker 1:Wow. That's remarkable. How much is the device that you implant like a camera sensor that I would see in an iPhone?
Speaker 4:The so there's a wearable. The patients wear glasses. On the glasses, there's
Speaker 1:two parts of the implant,
Speaker 4:but then there's the glasses. And the glasses have a camera
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:That is just like an iPhone camera.
Speaker 1:Got
Speaker 4:it. And there's a laser projector that projects the image onto the implant.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:But the the cool trick here is the implant is it's kind of all these tiny little solar panels. And so it is powered by the image that's projected onto it. And so this means that there's no battery, there's no cable It's coming out of the just that little chip because it is, like, when you project the infrared image onto the implant, that powers it at the same time to stimulate the retina.
Speaker 1:Wow. This feels like an invasive process. How invasive is it? Is this an expert surgeon doing the work? Are you thinking about robotics?
Speaker 1:What's involved in actually obviously, the reward is so high that it's worth it, but what does that look like now? What will it look like in a decade?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean, is done by human surgeons. It's done by vitreoretinal surgeon. Yeah. But it's a simple operation procedure. So, you can do this under local anesthesia.
Speaker 4:So, you make an injection next to the eye, it goes dark in a couple hours. It can be through the front of the eye. I mean, it looks, I mean, like watching a video, it's kind of like, I don't know that you would do this selectively, but it's really not a big deal. It's about an hour and a half, and the patient goes home, and a day later, they can take a bandage off.
Speaker 1:That's remarkable. So walk me through, like, post implant, post surgery monitoring. Do you have benchmarks? I mean, mentioned like a 300 page book. That seems like, okay, it works.
Speaker 1:But are you giving them the normal like eye test? What's the are all the different batteries that you use to understand the effect of the device?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, there's a bunch. There's we're looking at both efficacies of things like how many letters can they read on the ICAR. Yeah. And improvement in that, that was one of the main trial endpoints.
Speaker 4:We wanted at least two lines of improvement that we got on average much better than that. Mhmm. And And then you're also looking at measures of safety. So, when is there anything worse off for having this? Like, in their Yeah.
Speaker 4:They have the chip in, but the laser's not on. Is there residual vision? Because many of these patients have residual peripheral vision that they can use to walk around, it's just that they can't read, they definitely can't drive. And you don't want that to get worse. And so, there's various ways you can measure that.
Speaker 4:You can measure the range of the visual field. But, yeah, mean, the eye chart is a is a standard test. We we use that as a efficacy endpoint.
Speaker 1:Sorry, Jeremy?
Speaker 2:What you've raised a bunch of new money. Mhmm. Like, what what is this gonna go towards? Is it, you know, continuing to focus on on the the core products? Like, walk us through.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So the so we we announced yesterday that we raised $230,000,000 in series to bring the total amount of capital to a little under half 1,000,000,000. Just like, you know, that's like a lot of money.
Speaker 2:A lot of money.
Speaker 1:A founder.
Speaker 2:A lot of money for incredible cause. Congratulations.
Speaker 4:We have got ourselves the privilege of working really hard, but
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I I I can you take me back a little bit to how you discovered this particular problem to solve? Because it feels like you've throughout your career, you've taken like a sort of general approach, but then there there's always a question of like what's the most impactful, quickest way to market, most capital efficient? There's a whole bunch of different trade offs that I imagine you wrestled with before you landed on this particular product.
Speaker 4:So, have three programs at There's our work in the retina. There's our biohybrid neural interface technology, which is a general purpose, kind of what people think of as like a neural interface, but a little bit different than what most other people do. And then we have improvements in critical care life support technologies. I I think one way to conceive of what we're doing is, like, if Medtronic was started in 2021, what are the projects they would be taking on in the next twenty years? And when you think about it from a brain computer interface perspective, I mean, beyond, like, what is a BCI?
Speaker 4:This has become kind of synonymous for many people with paralyzed people controlling computers. That is what many of the companies are doing. But we think that cochlear implants are BCIs.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I mean, those have been around for decades. The So the retinal prosthesis is really in the tradition of cochlear implants. There's a billion people plus with those out there. Just until recently, the technology hasn't really worked. And so, you think about what is the most valuable DCI product that is an unmet need, restoring vision to the blind is really out there.
Speaker 4:And so, the need is one of those things that is kind of obvious in restoring the vision to the blind is a question that has been on for thousands of years. And then if you were to do that, when I looked at when me and my co founders looked around at the state of the world in early twenty twenty one, we kind of it was pretty easy for us to build a conviction that that that one way or another, by stimulating either the optic nerve directly or the the layer of cells in the retina just before that, using either a gene therapy or an electrical stimulator, one way or another, you kind of have these, four boxes. It's really like three boxes of those trade offs. One of those would work, and we went out and did an exhaustive survey of the state of the art in kind of each of those three options and zeroed in on what we're doing now. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And there's, I think, really, like, a first principle of engineering approach to how you tackle the problem, and that has so far paid off. We we're not in the market yet, but I think we're getting pretty close. And the next step with capital is to we've submitted for marketing approval in Europe, hope to be commercially approved there in the near future, not quite there yet, and then start to be able to commercialize it.
Speaker 1:Talk about resolution. I imagine that the camera on the glasses is something like 1080p, something along those lines. But I imagine that the actual implant needs to serve something that's maybe lower resolution or translated. Not like running a you're not running like an image to text pipeline and then piping that into the brain. But is the input and then what goes actually into the brain?
Speaker 4:So, it's important to understand that only the central couple degrees of your visual field is high acuity color.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:You're constantly looking around to try to reduce the uncertainty of the brain. You don't see the image on the retina directly. What you experience is a world model constructed by the brain. It's highly semantic, like you can look at something and kind of know, well, that's hard or soft if I touch it. That isn't how we're experiencing this world model.
Speaker 4:So, as the eye is moving around, it's filling in areas of uncertainty. So, the implant, you're right, it's not we're not restoring high resolution color vision today, but it is what we are getting is this deluded form image that patients can look at, it strings together shapes into letters and letters into words and the brain can apprehend that intuitively, and that had never really been done before. And so, that is like a really clear statement that we're on the right track, but the next step is to make the implant larger so that the device that's now is two millimeters by two millimeters, which covers, it's like looking through a straw, and the electrodes are point one millimeters, which means that you stimulate a bunch of cells at a time. What that means is it's not that it is pixelated. They don't see it pixelated.
Speaker 4:They see it as sharp, but they only get a small amount of detail at once. Now, it does better than you would expect for the number of electrodes because as the eye moves around, it's in this information, and so it really it's a little bit
Speaker 1:That's fascinating.
Speaker 4:You can't really think of it like a camera in that way, but we actually have the next version of the chips already in hand. The electrodes are much smaller. We're gonna go from 400 to a couple thousand. Those are we're working on the clinical study for those over the next year. Hopefully, every two years or so, we'll have versions coming out.
Speaker 4:We actually think that it could be upgradable, although we'll have to prove that, of course.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Based on the kind of early early patients, like how do you expect this market to evolve and how quickly how quickly people that suffer from blindness will adopt something like this once you continue to prove out the product. My assumption is that there's like an extreme eagerness to find a solution, again, for something that a solution that has never existed, but, you know, what do you think the adoption curve will look like?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, blind patients are pretty motivated for the most part. So, age related macular degeneration as a whole is big, but not that many people have a form that is late stage and serious enough that this makes sense right now, but for the current So, AMD globally is two hundred million people, but that's not really a number for very late stage, both eyes, large area of atrophy. That's the population that's really relevant for the product as it is right now. We think that's like sixty five hundred people a year in The US, backlog of a couple maybe a 150, 200,000 people across The US and Europe.
Speaker 4:And with the next version of the device, a larger field of The US, our electrode, that expands to probably 5,000,000 people. And these are huge. We're not going to plan. We're, if the next several years we're doing a thousand a year, that would be Those would be the numbers. And I So, right now, it like I said, it's not high resolution color vision, but it's this powerful resistance proof that this technology is on the right track.
Speaker 4:But I I do think that the next couple of device generations will hopefully be able to get color and percepts. We'll be able to at least get red and green. They'll be able to get the native acuity. You're not gonna go Sometimes people ask like, okay, well, I get this as an augmentation. Like, you're not gonna do better than the photoreceptors.
Speaker 4:If you have photoreceptors, you should use those.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:But I think that we can get pretty close to what those are for you.
Speaker 1:Last question for me. Smell o vision. When are we getting it? How will we solve the problem of teaching AI to smell? Do we need to capture the olfactory system from my brain and decode that into tokens?
Speaker 1:What if I lose my sense of smell? Will you be able to help me restore my sense of smell in the future?
Speaker 4:I mean, this gets to a fairly deep question of just like how do you capture the structure of any phenomenal Like, we hearing are different. Smell is different. Somatization is different. So how do you capture like, we have a we can write down images and audio files to here, and so we have a format that captures them, but that doesn't really tell you about, like, like, a WAV file is different than an image file, and so, like, what is a SML file like? And there's actually really interesting research on, like, you can there's, like it's it's a chemical sensor.
Speaker 4:It spans the space of molecules. You can get this decomposition of the space of molecules. But this is, yes, smell has been very there's a lot of companies that have worked on growing up neurons, expressing olfactory receptors to try to do chemical stuff. Because dog noses are with they're some of the most sensitive chemical detectors in the universe.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And, I actually was just talking to a company the other day that is training dogs to detect cancer, and I went into the pitch and they're like, I don't believe you. And I came out, oh, that actually is like, I can see it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And, the trick was, the really interesting thing that I noticed really shortly was, it's not that they're picking up some chemical that is present if you have cancer, it's that there's thousands of chemicals that are constantly just like being emitted, that are in your blood, that are being moved out, and if you can train a dog under reinforcement, what it does is it kind of upregulates some receptors, downregulates some other receptors, the brain wires together to pick out that part of chemical space, and so it can pick out this exquisite balance of hundreds or thousands of chemicals to say, when these are present in these proportions, you should get
Speaker 1:That's fascinating. So, it's not like there's a cancer chemical. It's the irregularity of the pattern. I mean, this seems perfectly tailored for artificial intelligence, but, yeah, we don't we don't even have the smell file yet. So dogs still employed in the singularity, for sure.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And so it's like if it's not one chemical, you can't just mass spec it. You only detect thousands of them, which is why they're not used dogs.
Speaker 1:I love it. I love it. Well, thank you so much, and congratulations on the progress. Thank you for everything you do. What
Speaker 2:Yeah. How last question from my side. How like, talk about the significance of this milestone. You obviously raised a lot of money out the gates, but is this like like, hey, we actually like is like becoming a real company now and moving moving beyond? Because everybody talks about big, you know, there's a lot of big numbers that get thrown around in our industry.
Speaker 2:If you have, you know, some AI database company with 10,000,000 of ARR, you can raise $230,000,000. But Mhmm. This is a very different kind of type of business where you had to raise a lot of money out the gates, but you maybe wouldn't have gotten a bunch more money if you weren't really onto something.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, our focus, like, I really firmly believe that there needs to be businesses in this industry. Mhmm. And you can spend an infinite amount of money just on our research. I mean, it's an infinite well of basic research.
Speaker 4:I mean, this is like, there's so much grand money that goes into neuroscience and neuroengineering. But we I don't know. I mean, I I I just, like, strongly feel it's like I we're suffering from this, like, lung cancer that every now and then, you kinda goes into remission. You raise your habit, and then it comes back. And, like, it the feeling won't go away until you have a sustainable business where there's rabbit coming in, and I think that we're hopefully pretty, like, we're not very close to it.
Speaker 4:That's like the thing we're focused on is getting to a real business that reaches many patients and improves their lives, and there's things that you can point to that are clearly valuable to lots of people that allowed us to become sustainable. And then it's a question of how fast do you grow rather than like, is BCI going to have a winner?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Makes sense.
Speaker 2:Very cool. Well, thank you for coming on and sharing and for the work that you're doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Great weekend. We'll talk to you soon, Max.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm sure I'm sure Max has very relaxing weekends.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Nothing going on at the office. Now, good luck with all the hard work ahead of you. Thank you for you soon. Goodbye.
Speaker 4:Cheers.
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Speaker 2:Skook says, Imagine trying to explain this to a software engineer eighteen months ago. And it's a Forbes article, On January 5, employees at Cursor returned from the holiday weekend to an all hands meeting with a slide deck titled War Time.
Speaker 1:War Time.
Speaker 2:After becoming the hottest fastest AI coding company, Cursor's confronting a new reality. Developers may no longer need a code editor at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What a what a wild ride over the last two weeks with Cursor. I mean, the company's still growing and ARR is at 2,000,000,000, potentially raising at 50,000,000,000. But at the same time, a lot of you know, we've seen a lot of viral posts saying, like, I don't need my Cursor seats anymore. I've moved on to just coding agents.
Speaker 1:And so, definitely a, you know, maybe there's a shift in the business. Do they go more into training models? Do they go deeper into certain enterprises that are maybe stickier or harder to get to? Do they become more forward deployed, helping with transformation, doing actual projects? They can become a consulting firm.
Speaker 1:Like, where is the next act two for that company? Will be an interesting question. Well, hopefully, they're not reliant on building Cursor using Mac Studios with 512 gigs of RAM because those apparently are no longer available due to the DRAM shortage. This is for Mac rumors. The Mac Studio with the maximum amount of RAM that you can use to inference large models locally, well, it's gonna be harder to get in the DRAM shortage.
Speaker 1:So pour one out for the good old
Speaker 2:It's over.
Speaker 1:Maxed out Mac Studio. It could be or they could just be preparing for the next revision. I think there'll be a new Mac Studio out in a couple months and maybe they're ready to start building those. Because the I I imagine that the the purchase rate of those sort of, like, falls off slowly towards the end. You know, no one really buys an iPhone right before they release the new iPhone.
Speaker 1:There's a big surge. And so maybe you wanna allocate that DRAM to the next generation.
Speaker 2:Gabe had shared this on X. He said they're rolling out CEOs for fast food brands you've never heard of.
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 2:And we got a poster Is
Speaker 1:there a new one?
Speaker 2:Freddy's CEO. Sent you the chat from Freddy's, John. Freddy's? You know about Freddy's?
Speaker 1:I've never heard of Freddy's. Has Bolton
Speaker 2:done We
Speaker 1:need we need one for lunch. Here we go. On the reel. Original. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'd like to make that a triple, please. I'll do fries and a large Diet Doctor Pepper. This guy diet. Definitely. I'm on the go all time.
Speaker 1:Eats burgers. And the
Speaker 2:car it is.
Speaker 6:Go folks. CEO eating his burger like he does all the time.
Speaker 1:This is such a funny little trend for the CEOs of original double
Speaker 2:is a I would like deal chance. I would like to see SaaS cup SaaS CEOs do this. Yep. Here I am. I'm using alright.
Speaker 2:How do I how do I poke around here?
Speaker 6:Eating burgers. I get my half out so I get my
Speaker 1:25. Different company now? Thanks, bud. There are so many of these.
Speaker 2:Tacos. Freddy's has tacos too.
Speaker 1:Okay. You gotta go with
Speaker 6:the hot honey cheeseburger. Hot honey, little savory sweet action.
Speaker 1:You wanna see David Chang chowing down? I wanna see Jiro eating his own sushi. Give me that. There's a lot more. There's a chart from Anthropic on the impact of AI labor markets.
Speaker 1:Blue shows the theoretical capability of AI. Red shows where the observed usage is happening. Computer and math is huge. Office and admin is pretty big. Sales is actually creeping up too.
Speaker 1:But if you're in production, transportation, protect ice service there's a typo on this for some reason. Protect ice service protective services, probably. Maybe a hallucination there. Personal care, grounds maintenance, completely unaffected. So head over to transportation and ground serve.
Speaker 1:I was I was confused by the transportation thing because, like like, the self driving cars, like, that's that's happening. That's coming. Like like in terms of AI's capability, yeah, maybe it's not, you know, an anthropic model that's driving you around, but certainly automation will come for transportation. Now ground maintenance, that feels much further off with, you know, robots. Nat Friedman's working on that one with the other ones.
Speaker 1:But Kevin Roos has a has a mnemonic to know about, to learn about the the labor market. He says jobs in the red is dead. Jobs in the blue, join a construction crew. And someone else was saying that this could have just been a bar chart, but, you know, here we are. Anyway, anything else we should talk about?
Speaker 1:Why don't you find another post, and I'll tell everyone about Sentry? Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why a 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. Tyler, you have a final
Speaker 3:I have a post. Yeah. Scott Sumner Okay. You know, from from JMuro. I think he's retired, you know, macro goat.
Speaker 3:Yeah. He has a new sub sec post. Oh, It's called freak out.
Speaker 1:Freak out?
Speaker 3:Yeah. No way. So he's black pilling.
Speaker 1:Really? Yep. Wasn't he just on macro musings?
Speaker 3:Pretty recently. Yeah. Great episode. Okay. We gotta we gotta Nominal GDP level targeting.
Speaker 1:We gotta read through this. Sumner. Okay.
Speaker 3:Well When is it time to panic?
Speaker 1:He's he's apparently he's saying he's saying freak out. Isn't his blog called The Pursuit of Happiness? What an odd Freak out. When it's time to panic. Okay.
Speaker 1:He's saying when it's time to panic. He doesn't necessarily say that it's time to panic right now. We should read through this but we can cover this on Monday since this is a longer post. We need to digest this. Maybe we should get him on the show.
Speaker 1:I'm a big fan of Scott Sumner and his appearances on Macromusings from the Mercator Institute. Is that Mercator Institute? Mercator Center. Mercator Center. Anyway, thank you for tuning in to TBPN Thank on Friday.
Speaker 1:Thanks for coming Go. Have a wonderful weekend. Have a wonderful weekend. Also, early happy birthday to Trey. He's turning something in he's having a birthday on Monday, so he's probably having a fun weekend.
Speaker 2:I can't wait.
Speaker 1:Anyway Can't wait. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to our newsletter, tbpn.com, and we will see
Speaker 2:you Have the best.
Speaker 1:On Monday
Speaker 2:Weekend. Of your life. And We love you.
Speaker 4:That's all, folks.
Speaker 1:Good.