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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.
Speaker 2:Today is Friday, 10/16/2026. We are live from the TBPN Altroudell. We're back. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Why do you call it the capital of capital, Jordy?
Speaker 2:Why why do you feel that way? Why do you think that way? We're, of course, referring to You Can See Everything, the fun Nathan Fielder movie that we saw yesterday where he always asks the follow-up question, asks why do you feel that way? Why do
Speaker 1:you Why?
Speaker 2:See that again and again and again.
Speaker 3:She never hit him with the why questions are overdetermined.
Speaker 2:She should've she should've hit him with the why questions are overdetermined. That would've been the trump card that just ate Got him. Yeah. He would've been
Speaker 1:Nathan Fielder
Speaker 4:He would've
Speaker 1:been one simple trick.
Speaker 2:He would've been stunlocked. Yeah. But a Nathan Fielder PT crossover would be incredible. That's the next movie they gotta do. Deep diving the Antichrist, figuring out all the questions there, that'd be so...
Speaker 1:That is I think the only way that you could one up this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. So I mean...
Speaker 1:It's maybe even Yeah. Too much... Too inside baseball.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right? Because this was such a big story
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just a decade ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Everyone knows and they've seen the show and stuff. But anyway, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money to say both.
Speaker 2:Easy use corporate cards, bill pay accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Yeah. I mean, I I I'm pretty much a 10 out of 10 on the movie. I thought it was fantastic. I really really enjoyed it.
Speaker 2:We went with a bunch of folks and thanks to everyone that came out and hung out with us. It was a great time. And...
Speaker 1:It had a big impact on us. We ditched the IEMs. Yeah. We're gonna be using these headphones now going forward.
Speaker 2:And Nathan...
Speaker 1:Shooting like this Yes. The whole show.
Speaker 2:Cinematography was incredible. There's a lot of debate going on in the studio on how much VFX was involved, how much cinematography and actual lighting equipment was involved because they're... The... Every shot is beautiful. It's perfectly lit.
Speaker 2:And yet they're in these tight spaces, this small beach house in Del Mar and it looks incredible. And my thesis is that just the cameramen are as good at what they do as what Nathan Fielder does. Like, they are just experts of their craft. They use the best tools. They got incredible cameras, incredible lenses, and they went in there and they shot it beautifully even with some crazy lighting at times.
Speaker 2:They figured out how to make it amazing. And maybe there's color grading after the fact, but I I was... I'm sort of skeptical of the theory that like before every scene, they went and set up a bunch of 10 by 10 diffusion and shot a bunch of light through. Maybe there's some stuff going on outside pushing through windows. But it seemed pretty natural to me and I think they're just really good at making it look beautiful.
Speaker 2:But...
Speaker 1:Yeah. Was masters masters at work.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Across the entire production. Yeah. Everyone involved. Even the a 24 people who I think they cast them.
Speaker 2:They cast actors. I don't want to spoil anything. But but there's some a 24 references that are fun and everything everything about it is incredible. So highly recommend going and seeing it. Probably stay spoiler free if you can because it's a fun wild ride.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The thing is that I think you could know exactly what happens Yeah. And it would still be wildly entertaining. A 100%. Like the whole concept is just so absurd.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is... If you followed Nathan Fielder across his career Yeah. This makes sense as a natural progression.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:And yet at the same time, it's unbelievable that all these different pieces came together.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And various groups like agreed to do something like this 100%. Being Billy and Elizabeth. Yeah. It is just almost unbelievable.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And... When the trailer came out, lot people were asking like, why would she agree to do this? And I really think it's
Speaker 1:like Your view you're
Speaker 2:serving eleven years in prison. There's nowhere to go but up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Your view was like there's no real downside.
Speaker 2:No real downside.
Speaker 1:All upside. Yeah. And I think people will come away from this generally having a lot more... Like, regardless if you think she was guilty
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or not, you're gonna come away you're gonna come away feeling bad for her and the whole situation, right? Yeah. The days and days and days of scenes with her and her children They will happen. These shots, you know, the the final shot before prison where she says she does her, you know, pump... Is pumping breast milk
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:For the children saying like, bring it back.
Speaker 2:Are you guys laughing at the framing or just the majority say it? I'm so confused.
Speaker 1:Sorry. It's very distracting.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, frankly, let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Liz Wessel, Ramp investor over at First Round.
Speaker 2:Big news from Ramp. Erin Clyman is coming on the show today. But she took a 150 founders, investors and builders to an early screening of the of the movie. She polled 16 of them and 14 out of 16 came away saying they are more positive on Liz Holmes. Doesn't mean they're fans, just means that they thought less negatively of her.
Speaker 1:Wait.
Speaker 2:That sounds like it worked. 14 out of 16. So so she took a 150 people. Very odd methodology, Liz. I mean, the nice that you did this.
Speaker 2:It's interesting content, but you should have pulled off 150. But instead, she pulled 16 sort of casually and she asked them some basic questions. Do you feel better or worse about Elizabeth Holmes after seeing this film? 14 said more positive, only one said more negative and one didn't change. But all 16 said they felt more negative about Billy and there's some other data there that we'll kinda leave.
Speaker 2:But you can go check it out. Anyway, don't miss it. Go see it this weekend. The spoilers are just gonna keep keep trickling out and it's just fun seeing in in a in a packed theater because everyone's laughing at different moments. Everyone's gasping at different moments.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Was effectively like a psychedelic experience. Yeah. In many ways. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like it was it was riveting. It was like, you know, funny at these.
Speaker 2:The cuts that production... So funny. We're we're dying
Speaker 1:back here.
Speaker 2:I'm glad we have this tool now. But no no, I agree
Speaker 1:with you. Someone just texted me and said... Apparently...
Speaker 2:What? What'd they text you?
Speaker 1:Apparently, my my wonderful wife texted the team telling them the show is messed up and super zoomed in.
Speaker 2:That's hilarious. Well, is this super zoomed in? Railway. All in one intelligent cloud provider, user favorite agents to plug web app servers, databases, more while Railway automatically takes care of scale, monitoring, and security.
Speaker 1:I will be going back to see it.
Speaker 2:I'm seeing it tonight again.
Speaker 1:You are? Yeah. With them? Yeah. Amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. We'll be going back as soon as possible. But the whole thing was, yeah, completely psychedelic in my experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And just a just a very... It was kinda strange for me because two hours into the movie Yeah. Mal, there was a fire Crazy. That that got started somewhat near my house.
Speaker 1:And so I started getting calls and texts about that, and then I ended up kind of like my attention ended up trailing off. Yeah. So I have to go see it again. But really an incredible work of art.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It feels like Instant classic.
Speaker 2:Instant classic. Yeah. Very very fascinating. Well, I think I think we can zoom out. This is a tool that we can have in the tool chest.
Speaker 2:We can go back to the normal lighting and the normal level of zoom because I got a big reveal because what am I wearing today? I got the Fell for the GET award because your boy put down 5,000 hard earned dollars on a Tesla Roadster reservation two days ago. And I think I gotta refund it because they... The the the the demo's incredible, but it's not starting production until 2028. I was under the assumption that this was the launch of Yeah.
Speaker 2:The Roadster, that this was not the reveal that... Maybe I just read the tweets wrong and I wasn't dialed in or something. But I thought it was like, okay, this is the start of production. Like, they're producing them now. They're going to show what's happening, show the final design and then be like, yeah.
Speaker 2:And the people that have been waiting seven years, they're getting theirs next month and then a couple months later. If you just
Speaker 1:sign up six months... Into production... So so first of all, I'll start by saying absolutely incredible feat. Insane. Amazing show.
Speaker 1:Yep. Absolute cinema. Yeah. That they're doing this. There's a bunch of stuff that I'm...
Speaker 1:I really love about it. Yeah. But dropping like... The car will be going into production in 2028 which is like Rough. Completely insane.
Speaker 1:That's how I felt.
Speaker 2:It was rough. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was it was it was...
Speaker 2:I want I want a fun Tesla now. Like like that self driving car Yeah. Technology is so cool. I just want it now.
Speaker 1:And in some ways, like, if you're... If you if you gave Tesla a $250,000 in 2017 Yeah. And if you would just put that in the S and P, you would be... You would have multiples of that Yeah. By now.
Speaker 1:You'd be... And then you you... There's this big event. The event gets delayed again Yep. Two weeks.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then, yeah, we're making the car, but it it's gonna be going into production in 2028, which easily means it could be like Could be delayed. It could be... Well, no. I I just...
Speaker 1:Like, it could be getting deliveries at the very end of 2028 Yeah. Potentially 2020
Speaker 2:production 12/20/2028 and that's not a violation. And then production could run for like four years. So if you're later in the queue, it could take a long time. That happens with special cars all the time. Elite.
Speaker 2:Elite. Lost we lost Sentra. But the other thing is that it just felt like they reraised the stakes so much by being like, we're gonna put cold gas thrusters and rockets on it. It's gonna be able to kickflips. It's like, okay...
Speaker 2:Yeah. All you had do is beautiful car that goes fast. Yeah. Beautiful car that goes...
Speaker 1:So the the reason that you do this now even though the car is not actually ready to announce Yeah. At all Yeah. Is pressure from the probably 10,000 plus people that reserved this car a long time ago.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's getting kind of annoying. Sure. Feel like I'm not delivering on Yeah. Something that I said. And two, to kind of like make the Tesla SpaceX merger like start to build towards that.
Speaker 1:I like that thesis. That that feels like why you would do this now. Otherwise, like, you don't need to announce a car that you're not making Yeah. For two years.
Speaker 2:Yeah. When they open the car door for one of the cars... Because I think some of the cars don't have seats, some them do, some of them are are are... Can be drivable, some of them can just do kick flips. There's a whole variety of products that they're demoing and then they'll bring everything together over the next two years, hopefully.
Speaker 2:But when they open the door and they're like, there's someone inside. It's space man. He's in the space suit. It's like, okay. That's a SpaceX product in there as well.
Speaker 2:It's not just the thrusters. And then I was expecting almost like an Optimus in there, but I forgot that Optimus is technically a Tesla project, not a SpaceX project. But it feels like a SpaceX project now because it's SpaceX AI or SpaceX SI. And so when I think of like robotics and artificial intelligence, think SpaceX more than Tesla now. So it's like these these companies just are destined to be...
Speaker 5:The the
Speaker 1:the contrast between how incredible like the show and the spectacle was Yeah. And the demo and the technology with like the delivery from Elon and the the two other guys. Oh, yeah. Like Lot
Speaker 2:like Lot of dead dead
Speaker 1:the the most awkward delivery and Yeah. So many of these kind of semi awkward moments.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We we we we gotta play the actual
Speaker 1:video. Talk about let's talk about everything that we love it.
Speaker 2:Okay. Also predictions. Because if you remember yesterday on the show, I predicted that it would be able to lift off the ground. I said something like six feet. It clearly does more than six feet.
Speaker 2:That was my prediction. I did not predict ramps. Jordan... Ramps everywhere. And that's exactly what we got.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's just one big ramp, but it's effectively ramps everywhere based on... I I think this totally counts. Insane that it can go upside down like that. The McMurty Sperling can actually do something similar with just fans. Should we
Speaker 1:do a tier list? I think it's for Okay. A tier
Speaker 2:I like this.
Speaker 1:Let's get a tier list going.
Speaker 2:Okay. Let's go.
Speaker 1:Juvenile... I'm gonna start with juvenile humor. All the jokes about all the the sucking related jokes. Sure. I'm gonna put those at f tier.
Speaker 1:F tier. Completely unnecessary.
Speaker 2:Okay. The the childish humor is f tier. What about just the fact that it went on the ramp up to the top before it did the kickflip? That is so insane. That is s tier.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The thing about watching it is even seeing it live Yeah. Part of... I I think it was This is so crazy. Smart that they had a live audience Yeah.
Speaker 1:Everyone there to see it and all this stuff. But because it is... Like, looks like it's breaking the laws of physics Yeah. It it just... It doesn't feel real just for that reason.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:So... Which is which is... What tier are you putting... That's s tier.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:S tier. S tier. Breaking the the perceived laws of physics.
Speaker 2:Okay. So so the...
Speaker 1:Says I expected more.
Speaker 2:What did you expect? You're goalposts in the atmosphere, in the stratosphere. What are you doing? That that's crazy. What about the rumor that it will be able to beat an f one car on the...
Speaker 1:Okay. This is this is what I love.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:The flying stuff is cool, but like irrelevant Yep. If you're a buyer of this vehicle because one, I don't think they're gonna... I don't think they'll... I think they maybe ship it to a handful of friends of Elon Sure. Some influencers.
Speaker 1:I'm thinking people like Whistlin Diesel maybe get...
Speaker 2:He's the... You know that Tesla hates him. Right? Is the Cybertruck thing?
Speaker 1:Oh, right.
Speaker 4:Right. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:No. He is public... Okay. So not Whistlin Diesel but maybe some like car influencers and they do some demos. But but it was very clear during the thing as he started saying I was like writing some of this stuff down before they actually Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Released these like specs. But he says, not sure it'll be legal in all jurisdictions, but it will be a car that someone can own. And so I'm just thinking, okay. It's like a not a road legal car.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and so the the all the flying stuff
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Completely irrelevant to people like you and me that put down a deposit Yeah.
Speaker 2:So Ron DeSantis chimed in and said like, we're gonna make this thing legal in Florida. And I think it's actually pretty easy to... What? Isn't that amazing?
Speaker 1:I do not... As cars, I don't want to be in traffic with someone that has this capability.
Speaker 2:But what if it's what if it's geo fast?
Speaker 3:That's because they're gonna mog you.
Speaker 2:That's that's because
Speaker 4:you would
Speaker 3:be getting
Speaker 2:Watch out. What about... Would you be okay if it was... There was... There's never been an explosion of the tank.
Speaker 2:It's a very highly pressurized 10,000 psi tank and it's geo fenced so that if you're on a public road, you cannot take off, you cannot engage the cold gas thrusters, but you can just drive it like a sports car. But one of these pulls up next to you, yes, there is a highly pressurized tank there, but the software is limiting it on street roads. Are you okay with that?
Speaker 1:Anyone will be able to jailbreak it with Codex.
Speaker 2:Oh. Okay. Okay. I like it.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry. Yeah. It's just... It's... So you want...
Speaker 1:Works... It it... The way that it works currently
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It gives you one and a half to two seconds
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Of airtime.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Not... There's no there's no real utility to it. It's purely...
Speaker 2:What if a bridge collapses and you need
Speaker 5:to get...
Speaker 1:Yeah. There is a video. We do have a video of that. We we should pull it up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The ultimate ultimate usefulness. No. I agree with you. It's a it's a
Speaker 1:this video. This is the obvious utility.
Speaker 2:And so... But but I think that there are two real utilities and this was a tech demo that could fork into two paths and maybe both. Maybe I'll try and do both. But one is what if, yes, this is the real most likely scenario where you'll want this car. You're driving along a very long bridge and it explodes down and you engage the cold gas thrusters and you save your life.
Speaker 2:What is your life worth? A couple years on a Tesla Roadster waiting list and $250,000 of your hard earned cash and Tesla's bank account? Easy price to pay. Anyway, there's a fork in the road right now. And I think Tesla's trying to do both and that they might...
Speaker 1:By the way, in But... In '89 Yes. The Bay Bridge Yes. Had a bunch of damage. Someone did drive
Speaker 2:Over it?
Speaker 1:Like off the cliff.
Speaker 2:That's crazy. Okay. So...
Speaker 1:And it was fatal.
Speaker 2:And that's only '89. So... Yeah. And our infrastructure is crumbling. Right?
Speaker 2:We haven't re industrialized yet. This is a good value prop. That's value prop number one. Value prop number two is I think this car can actually, if they really design it for it, do a sub five minute Nurburgring. I think that with the fans and the thrusters, when you're on the straights, you're actually a rocket car.
Speaker 2:You're never leaving the ground and it's designed to keep you on the ground. So it's sucking you to the ground so you're going around the corners really fast and you're effectively in Porsche nine nineteen Evo territory with a car that's like from a manufacturer. And I don't know if it's road legal, but I think that they might put up like an actually insane track performance from this thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. By teasing One lap. By teasing You're the last gonna time at CODA Yeah. That was like the best Easter egg of the whole thing. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Because again, there's two ways to view yesterday's demo. There's just like shock and awe, it's it's crazy, Colt of Elon Yep. It's amazing. The car is flying, all that stuff. Yep.
Speaker 1:And then there's like, I wanna get this car or I'm I'm considering buying this car. What is it actually gonna do for me? Yep. And creating massive amounts of downforce and being able to put up f one style lap times Yep. Insane and is very exciting.
Speaker 1:And actually, the things that they kept hinting at were like, this is a driver's car.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And that's what I loved. Right? And I think that a lot of the people that are... That have reservations will be excited about that.
Speaker 1:And so that obviously was just like a minor detail
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Compared to the whole circus.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But but that's what I think is actually cool because no other car manufacturer Mhmm. Would do this in that way Yeah. Nor would they add the thrusters to the rear Yeah. To help with that zero to one time.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of questions that that you immediately start having of like, if you're using like, do you think tires would last like one lap if you're pushing it on at Kota? Yeah. Like it would probably like they would probably just be completely shredded I think it's
Speaker 2:just get the record. Just max the record. It's like zero Yeah. 60 times.
Speaker 1:And then I was starting to think about it and I'm like tracks will 100% ban these from public track days. Oh, Can you imagine like Yeah. Your average Roadster owner just like heading down to their local racetrack and being like, I'm gonna go out for a public
Speaker 4:Five minutes. Session.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'd be nervous. It's like driving like an absolute banshee. But... Yeah.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about number two, the second path. But first, I'm gonna tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raised capital of the New York Stock Exchange. So the first is crazy track performance.
Speaker 2:Crazy track performance. But what else can you do with this? He he was gesturing towards like flying car, flying car, flying cars here. And, yeah, it can only fly for two seconds. But you could see a world where you are actually able to deploy this as a a flying car adjacent technology.
Speaker 2:It's really far from that, but there are... But there is a world where, like, I... My my example was, like, parallel parking or, like, or, like, jumping the car somewhere. Like, the... Not quite the bridge mode and also not like I'm taking this from LA to San Francisco.
Speaker 2:But...
Speaker 1:No. The thrusters in daily life is two cars are pulling down a street and there's one spot available Mhmm. That you're gonna need to parallel park into. If you see somebody pulling up to that, you hit the thrusters, just float into the spot Yeah. Land perfect.
Speaker 2:You know what actually would have been a really awesome demo? Have you seen those videos of... I think it's I show speed jumping over a Lamborghini, they're going full speed at him, and he Yeah. Jumps over it. If they'd done that with two Roadsters, like the old Roadster from 2019 that they never released, like driving straight at it, you're like, it's gonna crash, and then he goes and jumps over it.
Speaker 4:That would be cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I do think that like this is 1% closer to you get in the Jensen's future. Like you get in the car and you say, take me there and it flies you Like there's a lot that needs to happen. You need actual rockets on board. You need a little sustained thrust.
Speaker 2:You need a lot more. But like if we were... This is clearly like one notch towards, okay. Yeah. Your car actually just flies you from one place to another.
Speaker 2:So I dunno. What do you think, Tav?
Speaker 3:Only 1% closer.
Speaker 2:I think this is one... I mean, it it goes for two seconds. You're gonna be in the car for
Speaker 3:two minutes.... Or like the demos were very short. Yeah. And like presumably it can go for twenty minutes, but like can it go for one minute? Like did they actually say that?
Speaker 2:One one minute would be 5% of the way there from a twenty minute flight. And I think you're gonna need... I think to be flying car, you're gonna need to be in it for like forty minutes. You're just gonna blast off and just coast and land and it launches you with such...
Speaker 3:You only need logic then if if you have a like kind of some kind of glider mechanism. Yeah. Then you don't need more thrust.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he's he's channeling I like the James Bond don't think anything's off the table over the long haul. But again, this is like ten, twenty year vision.
Speaker 3:This is... Like, if I have a car and I'm in a ton of traffic and I can jump over that traffic for like twenty seconds, that counts as a flying car. No? That's a jumping car?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a jumping car. I only know it's a flying car. Anyway.
Speaker 1:So I actually think it was amazing that the Mission S launched the same day. Yeah. Because it was like the most beautiful version of stagnation Yeah. Right? In the Mission S.
Speaker 1:In that Yeah. In that the Mission S is, you know, some combination of the Porsche nine fifty nine and the GT one and there's some other influences in there. But fundamentally, it's just like a car that just sort of returns to the kind of cars that everybody wishes were still being made. Right? Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:In some ways like the interior looks like it could have been done by like a restomod Yeah. Company.
Speaker 2:Right? Interior is
Speaker 1:pretty good. And so... And it's just gonna have like a vanilla ish v eight in it. Yeah. It's like at least the rumor.
Speaker 1:And so...
Speaker 2:Not v eight. It's a flat eight, but
Speaker 1:yeah. Flat eight.
Speaker 2:Maybe. We... They didn't confirm it, which is crazy. They're both doing vaporware. It is...
Speaker 2:It's crazy that they've been working on the mission now so long and they can't tell you what type of engine's inside. Like that's... I
Speaker 1:think I think the I think they'll just... They'll... Yeah. Expect the Mission Fs to progress a lot more quickly than the Roadster.
Speaker 2:When do you think it actually would be delivered?
Speaker 1:I would expect a...
Speaker 2:First one customer delivery, human driving it.
Speaker 1:I would expect...
Speaker 2:December 2027 or later?
Speaker 1:I would hope that they go into production next year.
Speaker 2:Me too.
Speaker 1:Like at the end of next year.
Speaker 2:Me too.
Speaker 1:So like twenty twenty eight deliveries.
Speaker 2:That'd be amazing.
Speaker 1:But that being said, was like it was like stagnation but it was perfect. Right? Like they they listened to their customers which Yeah. Automotive manufacturers have for better or worse not been doing or been been sort of unable to. And there were just so many details to that car that are just amazing.
Speaker 1:Like, the... Almost every single angle Yeah. Is great. I've noticed like everyone has like a different favorite angle. Like, there's not like one.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:Like to me, you know, the rear end of the car is just like absolutely incredible. Saw some people that didn't like that. Some people like the side. I don't like the side nearly as much as the front and the rear. But regardless, like, absolutely absolute perfection.
Speaker 1:But basically zero innovation. Right? Like everything that really draws you in, the seats, right, and the harness. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And the fact that it doesn't have a screen. Right? It's all about going backwards in time. Yeah. And I think that's amazing.
Speaker 1:And then I and I think that Tesla pushing the boundaries and like trying to reimagine the car, adding like new forms of propulsion. Right? Like the Yeah. Taking taking the taking us into the future while Porsche just sort of returns in a beautiful way. I thought the contrast was amazing.
Speaker 1:And I think that it's okay to like both cars even though I cancelled my order this morning at the Roadster.
Speaker 2:Yes. Balfour again. I like I like the design of both. The only thing I don't like about the Roadster is just like I... I'm worried it's not gonna ship.
Speaker 2:And I think it's just gonna take so long because they they... A, they added so much crazy stuff it'll take forever.
Speaker 1:No. R x says the front of the Roadster looks like a Gallardo.
Speaker 2:I think that looks cool. I I I think I think evolving the Gallardo language is great. And I think that Lamborghini has has kind of, like, shirked that responsibility, ceded that territory. So I think this is fine. There's a little bit of Gallardo in there.
Speaker 2:There's a little bit of Cybertruck in there. I'm in. It's awesome. I think it looks great. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Obviously, nowhere near street legal. You need mirrors. We've had this debate a million times. Every concept car takes the mirrors off. It looks amazing and then you gotta put them back.
Speaker 2:And and Elon would have figured out how to take the mirrors off of the Model y and the Model s if he could because no one likes the mirrors. No one uses those anymore. But the laws are the laws, and he hasn't been able to figure out his way around them, and I don't think it's gonna start now. Although, that seems like something you get maybe some single issue voters behind candidate in 2028, specifically on removing the side mirrors. Good for emissions, good for aesthetics.
Speaker 2:It's a win win. It's a two party issue. Anyway, what do think of the wing on the back?
Speaker 1:I think the rear of the vehicle is where it shines. Cool. I think the side profile on the front are horrific.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 1:But So... Overall, very, very...
Speaker 2:Close this out, give you some facts. The Tesla Roadster pricing, you put a $5,000 deposit now, down now for the default performance level, which does not have the thrusters, the jets. It can't do kick flips, but it is Tesla's fastest, craziest sports car at the moment. That's gonna be a $45,000 deposit within ten days. The thruster model requires you to put $245,000 down for a total of $250,000 within ten days, then you gotta wait.
Speaker 2:And the flight model is unknown, and it's invite only at the moment. So the so the thruster model can't do the kickflip. The one that they wanna do the kickflip, the one that wants to actually fly, we don't know the pricing. We don't know where that's gonna land. I...
Speaker 2:I'm actually not that worried about pricing just because SpaceX and Tesla are really good at making things pretty cheap. So I I... Like, if they can get this out and they can get it to be $2.50, you know, a million dollars, you'll see them and they'll be popular and they'll be cool. Again, the flight stuff feels like very limited. And then it's like, are you gonna have like a new type of track day where you can go do kick flips all day in your car?
Speaker 2:Is that is that gonna be appealing? Because...
Speaker 1:Well, no. I'm expecting the the the the gas recharging for the thrusters to take like twenty four hours, you know. So you're gonna... I mean, it really is Yeah. It really is a really good party trick.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But... But after seeing... Can you imagine the experience of being in the car for a Yeah. Kickflip?
Speaker 2:That would be extremely violent. But I don't know. I just wear wear a helmet and five part... Five point harness or something. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I I don't think... I mean, wasn't anyone in the car, but I don't even think the inside of the car that they could kickflip like has seats. Like, think there's some pictures of the underside and it looks like it's basically just all a roll cage. We can pull up this one from Zaren Dube. A lot of my timeline last night were a bunch of suckers who fell for this very expensive parlor trick without asking any questions, and it's quite disappointing.
Speaker 2:This sort of grid may may be an empty shell in there. Doesn't really matter. It is a tech demo, but it's not it's not the iPhone moment because the iPhone, of course, was available after it after it was announced. And so I don't know. It's a it's it's a very interesting dichotomy.
Speaker 2:Elon is simultaneously Thomas Edison and Barnum and Bailey. He's the circus entertainer who can who can, you know, put on a crazy show and talk about what technology will be like in, you know, ten, twenty, thirty, forty years. But then you can actually deliver like the most popular and successful car in the Model Y and become the most popular car in China even and actually land the rockets and get Starlink to work. Use it on planes. Like, the technology is real and then the hype is also fake, but they're...
Speaker 2:But both exist at the same time. It's very rare to see that in a entrepreneur and a founder in the modern era. Most people are either all style or all substance. He's both, which is interesting. But we have the perfect person to talk.
Speaker 2:Did you see there
Speaker 1:was some... The last thing I would say is somebody there were people were pulling out this post from Elon Mhmm. In like 2019
Speaker 2:With Mark...
Speaker 1:Describing... Yeah. With Mark says describing exactly what the Roadster would become. Yeah. And there were a bunch of viral posts being like This is insane.
Speaker 1:Oh, my gosh. We live in a simulation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because he just said what he I was gonna do and did know. It was so funny because I was like, oh, we live in a simulation because he just said in 2019, I'm gonna do this and then...
Speaker 2:Eventually, and then he did it a decade later. That's not a simulation. That's just...
Speaker 1:That's just called planning.
Speaker 2:That's just a prediction. Anyway, 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.
Speaker 2:That powers it. And we have Walter Isaacson, the perfect guest to talk to about Elon Musk, artificial intelligence, everything else across business history. Walter, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 6:Well, good to be with you.
Speaker 1:Thank you
Speaker 2:so much. Did you watch the Elon Musk Tesla Roadster?
Speaker 6:Of course.
Speaker 2:What is your reaction?
Speaker 6:You know, Franz von Holzhausen is a beautiful designer. So every part of that car is gorgeous. And you're right, it's a bit of a parlor trick thing, but the real car in two or three years where you're not gonna be doing back flips and everything else, it's gonna be awesome. And I just think that Elon has a son who's on the autism spectrum named Saxon. And Saxon was once walking with him and said, dad, why doesn't the future look like the future?
Speaker 6:Yeah. And that's where you get the Cybertruck and that's where you get this Roadster, is that Musk and to some extent, France wants the future to look like the future.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's so... There's been so many interesting knock on effects. I mean, obviously, the cyber truck was incredibly controversial even before the political journey that Elon went on. People said, it looks like it was sketched by a five year old.
Speaker 2:It may have been. But, what I love about it is that, love it or hate the Cybertruck, it feels like it shook the tree loose and allowed other car makers to take more risks. And we're seeing more avant garde designs from Audi, from Jaguar. It feels like a lot of people are... They...
Speaker 2:It feels like it gave everyone permission to make the future look like the future. Have you been noticing that as well? Or do you do you...
Speaker 6:Absolutely. I mean, but first, Musk... I have a, I think, two chapters on the cyber truck in my Musk book where he's walking around with Franz, and everybody's pushing back on him. They're saying, man, you know, you're not gonna do it this way. And he's showing things from video games and comic books and stuff, and he keeps...
Speaker 6:And he wants it in stainless steel
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And he keeps pushing it. I, for one, you know, I'm not totally a fan of the Cybertruck design, but I am totally jazzed that he actually did it. Yes. Because as you said, it pushes the human race forward to use a Steve Jobs line.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 1:To me, I I... It it I have a cyber truck when it is driving itself on roads that are sort of crumbling with, you know, it it feels like the sort of... The world of the past is sort of falling apart and it feels very cyberpunk to be on a road striving itself in this very futuristic design. It makes me feel like I'm in a sort of a twisted sci fi movie every day.
Speaker 6:So that's... But one thing you gotta focus on, I'm not sure people focus on this enough, is that this is almost a joint product Yeah. Of Tesla and SpaceX. Yeah. I mean, everything about it, including the way the thrusters and the rockets work.
Speaker 6:But this notion that, you know, you can have propulsion done this way for a car, I think it shows why eventually, and I would guess, Tesla and SpaceX are gonna merge.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally. I thought that was the only reason to do this now, because the car is nowhere near production. Although it does
Speaker 6:that all the time. Know.
Speaker 1:But but but doing it again, like that's what that's why we have these awards with us today. This sort of fell for it again award. Because going, you know, having there be this ten year gap between the initial Yeah. Kind
Speaker 2:of... He clearly could have launched then the 20... Announcing it
Speaker 1:and being like, it's finally here. It's finally here. In two years, it'll be Yeah. Going into production.
Speaker 2:Like that original Roadster... To me,
Speaker 1:the reason to do it now is it sort of like sets up this like these two companies should obviously be one company. It
Speaker 2:makes sense together.
Speaker 1:They're working together already. This is what they can do together. It's sort of the perfect example of like why they should merge. Mhmm. And I come away from it thinking like this is the company that will make flying cars.
Speaker 1:Don't I think it'll look like the Roadster. But when we get flying cars, there will be Tesla, SpaceX, AI, Twitter, whatever whatever it ends up being called.
Speaker 6:Absolutely. And, you know, I remember, obviously, the Cybertruck was controversial, but I can remember, and I think there's a couple of chapters in my book on this too, is when he wants to make the Cybertruck have no steering wheel. Oh, yeah. And everybody, including Fran's like, okay, fine, but we'll actually make one where you can have a steering wheel and you can... No.
Speaker 6:He said, I don't want an amphibious frog like thing that's neither here nor there. Do it... Well, that's kind of nuts Mhmm. Until I was in Austin recently and I rode in a cyber cab. It's true that he he makes the impossible into something that's just a little bit later than he predicted.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. How how do you think about Elon Musk's journey to become an M and A wizard or a a deal guy? That was what was so fascinating about the the the Twitter take private and then the cursor acquisition. Historically, it feels like he hasn't been very acquisitive. What changed for his philosophy on business that he kind of shied away from being I'll I'll do everything myself?
Speaker 6:I I think maybe, with all due respect, you might be right, but I think you might be over reading that. I think buying Twitter was... That was just money burning a hole in his pocket. Mhmm. I remember I was first riding around with him at that period.
Speaker 6:He had just become the richest person on earth. Mhmm. Just become Time's person of the year. I said, you must feel like you're... He said, well, hate it when it looks like I'm successful.
Speaker 6:I always wanna move to the next level of the game. I said, what's that? He said, well, I'm secretly buying shares of Twitter. And I think that was a weird impulse. It had to do with his fury at the woke mind virus.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 6:Had to do with the fact that he just loved being on Twitter. Mean, he was like a twitch Twitter addict. Yeah. So I don't think this was a major change in philosophy that said, okay, now we'll buy rather than build. And as for the Cursor acquisition, you know, keeping up in the world of frontier AI models is quite difficult,
Speaker 2:and
Speaker 6:that was a pretty smart acquisition. But if you ask me, and you know, I've seen him recently, he's still a I want to be control end to end. I want to build it myself end to end. Sure. I mean, why would you be building TeraFab
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 6:To make your own microchips Yeah. If you're into deal making rather than physical product making.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:I hope you don't mind pushing back...
Speaker 2:No. No. Of course. I... No.
Speaker 2:No. It's a really good point. I I...
Speaker 1:One thing that... One thing from yesterday that I noticed, he looked way healthier than he has in a long time.
Speaker 2:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 1:And I thought that was... Like, there's been some moments over the last few years where it's just like, this does not look this does not look great...
Speaker 6:That way for twenty years.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:I mean, and every time...
Speaker 1:But do you agree that he that he looked like they looked like healthier than...
Speaker 2:Scrappy jokes and I mean there was some dead air during the presentation, but in general like he seemed pretty pretty...
Speaker 6:I think what you're talking about is not just physical, but where's his mental space.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 6:And as you know, you know, he goes into demon mode he can get really dark and he's very difficult and just goes silent.
Speaker 1:Demon mode.
Speaker 6:Then, you know, poke him.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It does feel like there... It's a little bit of a clarifying moment. Like, there was a moment where he was doing just rocketry and then just electric cars and then the the Twitter and politics thing felt very distracting. And now as as the companies start merging together, as the products start merging together, the the work that's being done at...
Speaker 2:On AI can flow into the cars and the humanoids. Like, the narrative is getting clearer and so that might be leading to more of a more of like a... Don't know, just just just being focused and that and that carries through to everything. I don't know if you agree.
Speaker 6:I wouldn't count on the fact that he has become less mercurial.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 6:In other words, you'll see him today, you'll see him tomorrow. There are people like Glyman Shotwell and Franz von Holzhausen who know how to push him out of demon mode. He also knows how to get himself together when he goes on stage. You know, I I it just depends on what's crossing his mind at the moment. It's almost like a storm cloud coming in off the Gulf when...
Speaker 6:And then sometimes it's something political
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 6:Conspiratorial. You know, I kinda wish he wouldn't be in that mode where all of a sudden he's deciding that, I don't know, Tala Rico's in a mental institution Sure. In Ohio and he's gonna repost that, and you think, alright. You know... Have
Speaker 1:you ever gone into your own sort of version of demon mode? No.
Speaker 6:You know what? I haven't. And you know what? I've never built a rocket that got into orbit. Oh, I've never built a great a electric vehicle.
Speaker 6:I never built a self driving cyber cap. Yeah. So maybe I'm nice.
Speaker 1:Give yourself
Speaker 2:some credit. Demon mode is underrated on the path to greatness.
Speaker 6:Those of us who write about people in the arena,
Speaker 1:even if
Speaker 6:they're best sellers, we don't confuse and think that we're the ones in the arena.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 6:So maybe the people in the arena, as Steve Jobs said, you know, they're the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What about the process of actually reporting on Elon Musk, writing the book? I've talked to some journalists who have said my strategy was I would wait until there was a successful SpaceX launch and then I'd give them a call and say, hey, you want to get on the phone? And if this and if the launch didn't go well, I knew not to call because he wouldn't be in a good mood. Were there any were there any strategies that you had to deal with the mercurialness and sort of prevent...
Speaker 6:Look, look, my strategy was totally different from the type of
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Reporting you're talking about, which is when I first started the book, I said, here's the deal. It's not gonna be based on a bunch of interviews, Rick. It's not 10, 15, 20 interviews. I wanna be by your side whenever I want, morning, noon, and night. Whenever I decide I wanna be there, any meeting, I got an Airstream trailer and live next door to him in Boca Chica, get up in the morning with him, late at night with him.
Speaker 6:I just wanted to observe him through all meetings, through everything. So is... I mean, I just... I know I'm quite lucky or privileged Yeah. Because I have the...
Speaker 6:Both the resources and to some extent these clout with my publisher or maybe even with Musk to just say, I'm going to spend two years and just watch. And so there'd be times I'd watch him go into demon mode, I'd watch him come out, I'd be sitting at dinner in a restaurant Austin, and Grimes would be next to me, and she'd say, uh-oh, demon mode's about to come. I'd watch people text Gwen Shotwell to come run into the conference room when he's about to kill Falcon Heavy or something. And I'd just watch how people dealt with it. So it wasn't like, let me time my phone call for a starship launch that works.
Speaker 6:The very end of my book is being with him at Starbase for a starship launch that almost worked, but left some rubble in its wake. That's the perfect metaphor, and I'm sitting there watching him, his mother hugging him in the back of the... Sort of by the fire pit out of Starbase. That's the type of thing I try to do when I write a book, and I've done it. You know, I have a new edition of The Innovators, which is about the teams who built the digital revolution.
Speaker 6:I just try to be a reporter
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Not somebody who does interviews and then has opinions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Everyone that you've written about, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Jennifer Doudna, all incredible impacts very, you know, sometimes controversial but unambiguously impactful in their in their work. How have you processed the story of Elizabeth Holmes? There's a new movie by Nathan Fielder out. You can see everything.
Speaker 2:And it's it's one of those stories that has the trappings of an entrepreneurial journey but has has kind of racked everyone with a whodunit. It's almost a true crime story. It is a true crime story because she is in prison. But how how have you how have you processed the story and how would you approach that if you were writing a book about Elizabeth Holmes?
Speaker 6:Early on I met Elizabeth Holmes way before you know, before she was quite famous or infamous. Yeah. She was a huge Steve Jobs fanatic. She even tried to dress like Steve Jobs. She had read my Steve Jobs biography probably more times than I had, knew the book better than I did and would always be...
Speaker 1:She went demon mode on the Steve Jobs biography. Yeah,
Speaker 6:she went and she... You know what, I love Steve Jobs, I think he was transformative. I think it's dangerous if you read the book once too often. It kind of makes you think that you might become reality distortion field, Steve, and that didn't work. And so I remember telling my wife and telling a couple of people when we were at events with her, I think they wanted me to interview her on stage, and she wanted me to write something.
Speaker 6:I said, this doesn't meet my smell test. And I'd ask her, I'd say, okay, you're doing this with just a tiny drop of blood. I had been studying biochemistry because I was about to do Jennifer Dowden. I said, tell me how... Oh, I can't tell you how it works.
Speaker 6:I said, you know, I'd ask a few more questions, and I just said, doesn't meet my smell test. There's something really wrong here.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:So I didn't get involved in ever even writing a story about it, and I actually declined moderating some panels with her in public just because it made me feel a bit off. I have a total fascination with what I will call fabulous. I mean, you we have every month there's a new one. You know, Jason R Day at Cambridge University
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:All the way back to Jason Blair, you're too young to remember who he was, but... Or George Santos, or for that matter, the talented mister Ripley, or if you really wanna get into it, you know, maybe the great Gatsby. Sure. Do they believe their own confabulations? I kept asking people who knew Elizabeth, and I kept trying to figure out, has she fooled...
Speaker 6:I know she's a con artist, but has she conned herself? So Mhmm. I'm not sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It is the... Yeah. The question that everyone's everyone's still trying to answer. On Steve Jobs, we've been debating the question of does the artificial intelligence boom revolution need a Steve Jobs of AI?
Speaker 2:Someone who paints a a more human focused picture, something focused on creativity. I think back to the energy with which Steve Jobs had when he launched GarageBand and and Apple Music and some of the the iPod, this idea
Speaker 6:Yeah. The iTunes.
Speaker 2:Sometimes disruptive technologies still empowering humans and remaining in this artist world, a friend to the creatives and living in the technology world but still never losing Something touch with the
Speaker 6:so fundamentally important Mhmm. In your question.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:I have a book as you know called The Innovators, which came out a few years ago. Mhmm. But it's coming out this week with this new introduction that's addressed directly toward your question
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Which is the Steve Jobs approach to what I will call human computer interface. That's what he called. That's a big old name. Yeah. But it's how closely are we connected to our computers.
Speaker 6:And he said a computer should be like a bicycle for the mind. It would augment, not replace, your creativity and your intelligence. There have been two schools of thought throughout the computer revolution. Go all the way back to... As I do in the...
Speaker 6:This new introduction to the innovators, to Ada Lovelace in the eighteen forties. And she says... She looked at punch cards at a weaving patterns on looms, she says, that'll be able to do numbers and words and music. And she said, a computer will be able to do anything except think. It'll take humans to add the innovation and creativity.
Speaker 6:A hundred years after she writes it, Alan Turing in his great paper about computing machines and intelligence, The Imitation Game, calls it Lady Lovelace's objection and says she's wrong. There will be artificial intelligence that shouldn't be connected to us. Steve Jobs is in the Ada Lovelace School. And as I try to describe in this new introduction, that school begins with Ada, but it has people that you probably have hardly heard of, but are the most important people you've never heard of. Starting with J.
Speaker 6:C. R. Licklider, who creates computer interfaces that are easy to use. Doug Engelbart, who figures out the mouse, Alan Kay and the people at Xerox PARC, the graphical user interface, it all comes together with Steve Jobs.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And he says, the goal is to connect human creativity to our processing power of our machines.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And he always ended his product launches with the street sign slide that said, the street sign of the liberal arts and sciences or technology. That was his goal. What we're doing now, not just with AI, but more importantly with agentic AI, which is what I worry about. I don't mind. I can use Claude, fine.
Speaker 6:But when I start using agents that try to do things without me
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And that the goal of these people, whether it be Muse or Claude's or whatever I'm using, to try to make it autonomous and to do things without me and to be out of my control, Steve Jobs would be appalled by that. First of all, because it doesn't connect human creativity to the product. It doesn't have the music that makes our heart sing, as he said with the iPod. But secondly, these people aren't stepping back and saying, why are we making this? And the answer should be to help humanity.
Speaker 6:That was Steve's lodestar,
Speaker 1:but we're The only thing that I would push back on slightly is it doesn't feel like agents are not generative. They're not... I have not seen a single product or piece of marketing material where the the the seed of the idea, whatever the thing that is that makes it great, was from the AI. All of the agents that we have today are starting from a point of human creativity. Hey, I have...
Speaker 6:That's a really good point.
Speaker 1:And and and so my view on it is like I'm actually... As somebody who loves generating ideas, I'm actually upset that the AI can't do the one thing that I really value and that I love.
Speaker 2:Right? Wanna be like the mouse?
Speaker 6:Don't. First of all, be happy. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. And and so I but it's notable, like, you would think that if we could solve hundreds of the, you know, most long standing problems in mathematics that we could generate hundreds more. Right? And yet, I haven't...
Speaker 1:We're not getting that. Like, that would be my... And and to me that shows the AI is not generative. It is not it is not creative in the way that a that a human is. I'm sure it will get that.
Speaker 6:And that's the exact phrase that Ada uses in the eighteen forties, which is, it will not be able to generate its own goals and its own ideas. Those will have to come from human. You could be right. I mean, I use a lot of... I use Muse and I use...
Speaker 6:I have created a couple of Claude agents. Maybe it doesn't totally generate things, but once you set an agent off, you have the hugging face possibility that it goes off with its own motives and its own sense of agency out of our control. So maybe it starts off because we launch it, but the question is, if it's not closely connected to us the way Steve Jobs would have wanted, is it going to go out of control? Is it gonna go rogue? Interesting.
Speaker 2:What do you look for in a subject? When you're thinking about a topic that's... It it has your fascination, when is it the right time to focus in on a single individual versus a more of a composite picture? And are we Yeah. Are...
Speaker 2:I I guess my question is like, are we moving farther away or are you moving farther away from the great man theory of history? Or do you think that that there's this Peter Thiel take about the the loss of the ticker tape parade even when there's a big problem and we solve it, we celebrate like the first responders broadly. We don't solve it. We don't, we rarely celebrate like the single scientist who had the breakthrough. We celebrate like composite groups.
Speaker 2:And I'm wondering how you've grappled with the continuum of individual with an amazing story who probably had a lot of talented people around them versus telling the story through a composite picture of a lot of different individuals.
Speaker 6:Yeah. But of course that's one of the age old issues in history, whether it be Tolstoy or Carlisle. Yeah. I'll go back to Plutarch and I Plutarch's interviewed Peter Thiel at length for this new podcast series that's The Builders, and we talk about that. We biographers fall prey sometimes too much to the great person or great man theory.
Speaker 6:Make it seem like a guy or a gal goes to a garage or a garret, and they have a light bulb moment and innovation happens. Whereas you know, the two of you sitting there know that it's often a team sport, that creativity is a collaborative effort. That's why I wrote The Innovators, which is to try to show the role that teams and groups of people play. Having said that, my very first sentence in my very first book I ever wrote was about Henry Kissinger, and I quoted him in epigram that said, when I was a professor at a university, I thought that history was made by great forces. But now that I see it up close, I see the difference that a person can make.
Speaker 6:And so, in writing biography, I think we have to worry about distorting history a bit. You know, I wrote The Innovators partly because having written about Steve Jobs, all these people said, well, you gave him too much credit. So it's always a bit of a balance. Take a more obscure example, I wrote a book called The Code Breaker about Jennifer Doudna, who helped invent, co invented, I should say, CRISPR, the gene editing technology that can fix genetic or change our DNA. And I was saying, okay, I want to do biochemistry and genetic engineering next.
Speaker 6:I had done physics with Einstein, had done the digital revolution with Steve Jobs. So I looked around for how do I do it. And I thought of doing a group portrait the way the innovators is.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:But in some ways, having a person have a narrative thread helps the reader. It's not something I invented. The good Lord invented this when he did the Bible. I mean, it has a garden east of Eden, you have Adam in it, and Eve tells him to do something. It's a way we convey lessons.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 6:So when I did Jennifer Doudna, about 40% of the book is about people who aren't Jennifer Dowdner. It's about her teams, her rivals, and everything But I do it as a narrative thread, and I think I do it because it helps the reader, or if you want to be crass, my publisher says when you do group books like the innovators, it doesn't sell nearly as well as when you do Steve Jobs.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Another AI question that we've been wrestling with is we have been...
Speaker 2:We were very close in tech to the end of history. There were a number of software companies. There were pretty pretty defined lines of of battlefields between who owns the phone, who owns the search engine, who owns the social network and the Mag-seven were all sort of playing nicely together. And now it is a knockout drag out fight. Everyone's trying to marshal the most compute suing each other.
Speaker 2:Everyone's in demon mode. Elon suing Sam. Sam and Dario can't hold hands together. Google loves Xanthropic one day, then they want to not sell them the chips. It goes back and forth and it feels like it's the most tense it's ever been in time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Elon, you know, constantly throwing shade at anthropic until they become...
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's calling them misanthropic and then you see... Then now they're they're they're working together. And so it feels like an intense time in technology. But give us some perspective here.
Speaker 2:Is this actually unprecedented? Was the... Was Steve Jobs going through the same level of intense battles? Is is everything new old? Or is this actually unprecedented?
Speaker 6:Look, one of the great things about innovation, technology, entrepreneurship that you all do so much on this show Yeah. Is that there's a frenemy type thing. Sometimes people are friends, sometimes they're enemies. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, that's a rivalry that is far surpasses Sam Altman and Dario Lama Day.
Speaker 2:I love that.
Speaker 6:As much as I love them both. Yeah. By the way, you wanna go back to Carnegie and Oh, yeah. Rockefeller and EA Chairman and the Robber Barons?
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 6:Woah. That... And that was a period of technology like our own with light bulbs, electricity, trains, telegraphs, telephones, everything. So it is great that we have competition. One of the things we have to do is keep that competition going.
Speaker 6:In other words, have antitrust.
Speaker 2:I
Speaker 6:agree. If they start loving each other too much Yep. And collaborating Yeah. That will keep newcomers off the field.
Speaker 2:No. No. I complete... I completely agree. I completely agree.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The... And you can see that there's a natural forcing function in the industry. When one lab or one company starts pulling away, everybody else kinda gangs up on them and says, oh, wait. We're not gonna let you get the monopoly.
Speaker 1:Well, I think in NVIDIA and in Jensen's dynamic with all of the AI players is one of the most fascinating just because it is like they're like, you know, cozying up to him, you know, driving revenue but at the same time trying to, you know, replace him on the back end. Yeah. It's fascinating.
Speaker 2:It's very fun.
Speaker 1:Healthy. Yeah. Healthy competition.
Speaker 6:I think you're totally right. Healthy is the word for it.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:And it makes for good content for you and Yeah. Your So...
Speaker 6:And for you and your show. Interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They the chat really wants us to ask is there any and and you know, you you you can pass on the question if it's not something you can talk about, but is there anybody, any AI leader that you're honing in on on on writing about outside of, obviously, Elon...
Speaker 6:I'm about to publish a book on Madame Curie, Marie Curie, because I do go back, I need to clear my palate sometimes and clear my mind and go back into history, and I needed to do... I mean, she's just the most amazing passionate person. I am interested in how you raise some AI model like Claude. Let me just use that for example. How do you raise that model to be moral?
Speaker 6:How do you not just teach Claude, here are the rules of the road. Yeah. You teach Claude why.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Why do you not kill or why do you not lie to somebody? And, I'm interested in the philosophers who are working on the alignment question and teaching our AI models why. Yeah. That doesn't mean I have figured out who the book is what the book is or whatever, but you asked me and just out at Anthropic and
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And so... And in San Francisco with some others Yeah. Three days ago, and I'm saying, okay, help me think this one through.
Speaker 2:I love it. Fascinating.
Speaker 1:Thank you
Speaker 2:so much for coming on the show. Look forward to more of your incredible work and it was a true pleasure talking
Speaker 1:Yeah. To been an honor.
Speaker 2:Have a great
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 6:Weekend. You all are great. You all are really good, both of you. Thank you, Jordy.
Speaker 1:You've been Let's do it again soon. Yes. Thank you.
Speaker 2:You're the man. Much. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about console. Console built AI agents that automates 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.
Speaker 2:Let me also tell you about public. Invest across all asset classes, automate anything with AI agents, run trading strategies, risk management, money movements, and monitor markets with AI agents for investing on public. And up next, we have Eric Glyman, co founder, co CEO, ram.com.
Speaker 1:Woah. Camouflage. Camouflage it with the wall. I see a floating head. That's all I can see in your hands.
Speaker 7:We're in an urban environment. Yes.
Speaker 2:So we
Speaker 7:got to got to blend in.
Speaker 2:That does look like it's designed to not be recognizable by artificial intelligence, which I'm sure we'll talk about. But first, what's the news? What happened? The Glymanator. Tell us the news.
Speaker 1:We... Do we have the gong? Are we ready?
Speaker 7:Are we ready to hit this thing? Alright. We raised $1,850,000,000 and
Speaker 1:I can't hear anything. My ears are blown out.
Speaker 2:Do we need a replay on that?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's pull up the replay if we can.
Speaker 2:Pull up the replay.
Speaker 1:That was a clean hit. Bang. Oh, man. Coming in hot with authority, and you kind of held it at the end Oh, too, which was nice. I feel like 2026,
Speaker 7:like, there's been so many fundraisers. They're getting bigger. Your form is really looking good.
Speaker 2:Yes. You got to bring the energy that you feel for the fun to the gong smash. It's really... Because the gong is just one size but the excitement that I feel for the round grows and ebbs and flows and this is the most exciting round of all of course. First question, is the job finished?
Speaker 7:Job's not finished, guys. The job
Speaker 6:is not finished.
Speaker 7:The job is...
Speaker 6:We've got
Speaker 7:a lot of stuff to do. I mean, look, it's... What can I say? We're growing. We're growing faster.
Speaker 7:Okay. We're growing north in a 100% per year.
Speaker 2:What is growing? Because the core business so solid, so huge, huge market, just in corporate cards, the software for the CFO suite. But then you have a bunch of other products that I feel like because the team is as talented as they are, you're able to deliver a you're able to jump to a great product experience both because you have the team for it, but also there's new technology that's just unlocking new things. And so what... I imagine though they're both growing fast, but what's actually driving?
Speaker 2:How much time are you spending between both of these? Do they all play together? What what... How do you how do you think about the business?
Speaker 7:So look, I... There's the existing core of the business, let me start with the financials. Yeah. There's metric I track most closely is actually how useful is ramp getting to customers. We talk about growth in those SaaS.
Speaker 7:And then last, it's all the new products. The majority of our team's time is actually working on products that we haven't launched yet, you haven't seen Sure. Yet. Yeah. And so let's touch on it.
Speaker 7:I mean, in terms of aggregate growth, said for the first time over the summer, we passed more than $2,000,000,000 a year in annualized revenue. It's growing north of 100% per year. And it's... We're growing 25... More than 25% faster than we were this time last year.
Speaker 4:Wow. It's So true true
Speaker 7:acceleration at scale and in part with computers that can think now, it helps us operate a lot faster. There's also in the same way, I think people's expectations have gone up. I mean there are still sadly many people listening to this who know about AI and then they do expenses by hand or whatever. It's crazy. So it's lifted the conversion rates up.
Speaker 7:More people are switching to ramp in droves and the savings rates are going up too, which is maybe the second area we're
Speaker 2:gonna And are do you starting to see top of funnel, like the first step on the customer journey coming from not the corporate card product to Yes. Okay. So you can actually start with router or another product and then and then actually grow your your footprint. That's very interesting because I feel like... Do I have it correct that prior to the I don't know, you call them like AI enabled products but like the more modern products that you've launched, it was very much like you come in through the corporate card and then maybe you add banking or you add another product bill pay and there weren't as many people coming in through Bill Pay as might in the future come through Router, for example?
Speaker 7:So to talk to each, I mean, has been one of the big growth stories over the past two years. You know, we now have, I'll put it to say, the vast majority of customers are using multiple products, could be card expenses one, bill pay, treasury. We have tens of thousands of businesses that are using our banking product that's growing extraordinarily quickly, so that our businesses on day one incorporate, set up a Ramp banking account and move from there. So we have these doorways in. And you're exactly right.
Speaker 7:Whereas so much of the history of Ramp was in, is like how do we help you spend less? It's turning into this broader chapter of not just get more of every dollar in terms of reducing spend. It's how do you have your dollars that you do choose to spend generate more revenue for you? And so there are startups coming in using router.com. Glass has been just extraordinary developed, but also too just wrangling and staying on top of AI spend, AI spend management.
Speaker 2:Yes. On that topic, is is router a bet that that expenses and investment and capital spending around AI will be the domain of the CFO suite and that's where you play best? Or is it a bet that RAMP can speak to CTOs and technologists who will in the future have more domain over asset allocation and the financial profile of their business. Are we going to see CTOs looking more like CFOs or operating like CFOs putting their CFO hat on? Or are we seeing CFOs think, I want to actually have an idea of what our infrastructure is, what our token strategy is, what models we're using?
Speaker 2:I imagine both are happening, but is there a thesis that you have around what who's who the buck stops with in the token maxing discussion?
Speaker 7:There's like a huge thing that happened that I think is under discussed in just the world of software, which was like, it used to be if you were just like, I don't know, banging on the keyboard, using Salesforce a lot more, might need a new hobby, but like you didn't get like a much larger bill. Like software didn't have a larger marginal cost. And the minute that it became such that if you used more tokens, your bill went up, it meant that software suddenly had marginal costs. In a way, software became money.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And
Speaker 7:I just think classically, if you just think about it structurally, organizations were really allocating dollars in two ways. You could hire people or you could hire, you know, vendors to go take care of stuff for you. In software and AI spend has become this like third way to buy things. It sort of behaves like people in that your agents hire other agents who hire other agents and subcontract others. Most spend is actually agentic in nature if you really look at how these things are growing, and yet, you're kind of renting intelligence.
Speaker 7:I think that organizations just lack the basics of... Many companies have payroll systems. They have ramp, right, to go look at their vendor systems, but have lacked oversight and governance around managing the sales spend. So part of the thesis is that as as as AI becomes one of the the core inputs to how companies operate, organizations will similarly need tools to go manage it. So so that's just like the the macro way we're thinking about it.
Speaker 7:On your question of like, where is it... Who's responsible for it? I think what I see happen time and time again is like engineers go off to go build something and either they hire a... You know, if it's startups, a very forward thinking, agentic, you know, AI built CFO and it's all fine. Or what's happening in enterprises all day is things are fine that the bill trips past X many millions of dollars and the CFO's like, What in the heck happened?
Speaker 7:And they crash into the office and go. And I think that's happening more and more. What I would say is like I just think there will be a convergence. You could not think too much about capital allocation in a previous world where software didn't have marginal cost and now you have to.
Speaker 2:So capital allocation, the new core skill? Taste is out. We need to get everyone thinking about capital No. Mean this seriously because I'm sure there's a lot of ramp customers where they're like, yes, we spend on AI and that means a $200 a month plan and look employees, don't blow through your plan because there's no more where it's coming from. And you have a role to play in there.
Speaker 2:But I'm wondering if you're seeing a shift where even small businesses, even businesses that would normally just be like, hey, yeah, use the free plan, $220 a month here. We'll get you on the corporate plan a little bit are going to be thinking about AI inevitably as a marginal cost that is API pricing and they're going to want a router product.
Speaker 7:Absolutely. And look, like I think one of the... I think both sides of the debates are, like, very silly in some ways. Like, you you have... Like like like CFOs saying, like, hey.
Speaker 7:I'm trying to go minimize my token cost. What's my cost per token? We need to go and drive costs down. And labs are saying, My token is not equivalent to your token. The tokens are not the same.
Speaker 7:And the reality is like, if some business owner said to you, Hey, spend a million dollars a year on salespeople, and another one said, I spend $10,000,000 a year on salespeople. And you ask which is better, you'd say, I have no goddamn idea because what are you getting for that dollar? You need to connect it. Need to kind of ask, like, for this input, what is the output? And I think the way in which these systems are very incomplete and RAMP is ultimately seeking to complete that loop of for every dollar that's going out, what is the return on intelligence?
Speaker 7:Does it go into your books and record? How is it accounting for? What revenue can you see that directly that's connected? And what I would say is when you look at companies that are spending on AI, they are not always as precise, but you can see in raw terms, in very blunt terms, that companies that do spend are clearly seeing a return.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:They are growing faster. You just think about, you know, we did this study about six months ago where we looked at does spending on this actually generate faster growth? And it's very clear conclusively of organizations that are spending on AI are seeing an acceleration. So there is a return, and I think it will become quite scientific over the course the coming months.
Speaker 1:So does that mean you guys end up building something like an attribution tool? Because like Ramp is a good example of this where like you're encouraging a lot of spending, lot of experimentation, but it's so hard to attribute growth to spend on AI, which is a lot of why that there's people... Otherwise smart people that are saying like this stuff just doesn't work. Like it's good for this one narrow thing. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:But like very clearly it's like, well, it sped us up a little bit here and it sped us up a little bit here and it pulled forward this launch, you know, by a week instead, you know... So we launched this eight, you know, eight weeks earlier and then there's the sort of like comp... Like, it's basically like compounding in different ways across so many different parts of the company. It's helping you generate revenue in ways. It's helping you save money in different ways.
Speaker 1:The net result is like you're building a better business. But like the attribution feels like the hardest hardest thing, but something that you
Speaker 7:guys are like uniquely suited to solve. We're very embedded because we see the dollars going out. We connect to the accounting system and you can see what revenue ultimately comes in. I mean just at ramp, like where it ramped it was the first part of the business that used AI in a heavy way. It was go to market.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 7:It was sales. Yeah. It was actually we could show that the use of GPT-three when it was a research project actually resulted in more meetings booked for our sales development reps and we could actually look at what is the raw number of dollars spent versus the revenue that that team is able to bring in, and you could see that up. And so when you see products like Glass, which we announced earlier in the week and thousands of companies signed up, we're onboarding folks as fast as we can, All that intelligence where not only is it connected and built into the systems you have, but things you would expect of who's spending it, attribution. Did we pick the right model?
Speaker 7:Router.com, right, is powering all of it to make sure that you're ultimately saving to the accounting attribution is all done and you see that loop. And so it allows you to actually say like, Am I growing faster? And am I seeing higher and higher returns from my spend on AI? And that's what we're aiming to do. And so when we talk about kind of the end of the beginning and what chapter two is about what you can build as a customer of RAMP, that is what we're running towards.
Speaker 7:We want to make every dollar an hour, whether it's on people or on AI or both, truly go further. That's what drives us.
Speaker 2:I love it. Well, on the new round. We're going to hop on with Christian Jensen from Dragon Ear to talk more about
Speaker 1:the Amazing milestone. But have a great weekend. Amazing timing yesterday with the Roadster race.
Speaker 2:The Roadster?
Speaker 1:I mean I it was clearly like anywhere. It's clearly like a nod to the... It was clearly a nod to the I new mean, they didn't... They clearly didn't need the ramp to do a kickflip.
Speaker 2:No. Right? They could have used a half pipe. They could have used anything that sound like ramp but... It was
Speaker 1:a little salute down from Texas.
Speaker 2:It was great. But congratulations. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Great stuff.
Speaker 6:Great to see
Speaker 1:you, Eric.
Speaker 2:Have a good one. Congrats. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish.
Speaker 2:Our next guest is Christian Jensen from Dragon Ear Investment Group. He's a partner and co head of Thrive Investment.
Speaker 1:Here he is.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show. I I got one question. Did you just back the truck up for ramp?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I guess in some ways we did. But I mean, for all the reasons you guys... Did hear that? Did
Speaker 2:you hear that, John? What's that? Is that
Speaker 4:the sound of the truck backing up?
Speaker 5:If I can't get the gong, I'll take the truck.
Speaker 2:No. No. We'll get
Speaker 1:the gong.
Speaker 2:I'll come to
Speaker 4:the budget, bro.
Speaker 5:Thank you. Touched.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Wonderful to have you on.
Speaker 2:So you led the $1,850,000,000 financing for ramp at a $60,000,000,000 valuation. Thrive Capital's in with you, Founders Fund, Sands Capital, Avenir. What... Yeah. What...
Speaker 2:Because you're... It's the first time on the show, maybe we should zoom out and talk about the overall strategy, how Ramp fits into it and your role at the firm.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So, hey, thank you for having me. I mean, what a treat. I can't believe Walter Isaacson here and Eric. This is, I mean, this is just awesome.
Speaker 1:He he opened for you. He opened for you. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I'll tell I'll tell my wife that.
Speaker 1:He was like, I'm really... I I really get to open for Christian from Dragonair.
Speaker 5:Right. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 3:I'll tell I'll tell Kate that.
Speaker 5:So I mean, who are we? We're a growth investment firm. We're based in The Presidio in San Francisco. We manage about $45,000,000,000 across publics and privates. And the whole philosophy of the place is concentrated bets in the in the businesses we think are are gonna define categories and and really be generational to businesses.
Speaker 5:We were founded around fifteen years ago. Mark's dad, my partner, our founder, he founded... I joined about ten years ago to help build on the success they were already having in privates, and I live around the corner. So I got three kids. Latest kid joined three weeks ago.
Speaker 5:So if I say anything stupid, there's my
Speaker 2:excuse. There we go. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:I've got
Speaker 5:a Thanks.
Speaker 1:I've got a five week old.
Speaker 5:Congrats on that.
Speaker 1:Same boat. We got nine...
Speaker 2:Nine kids
Speaker 1:on this between us. Imagine... It sounds like coming up. Yeah. Sounds like coming up.
Speaker 1:Gotta do that. I think so. Okay. First question. Everyone knows that Ramp is an incredibly unique special company.
Speaker 1:And... But at the same time, there's a lot of people that are otherwise pretty smart that say like, hey, Ramp at 60,000,000,000 on a few billion of revenue. That's that's crazy. Right? Like, if you've looked at like...
Speaker 1:And you can try to pull public comps and say like this thing would trade at, you know, a single digit revenue multiple blah blah blah. Like it's very easy to make the argument for why 60 is crazy and yet you just paid that price. I wanna hear from you why why why it would make sense to do it. I can make my own argument for it.
Speaker 2:But you're not crazy. They're crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I'm not crazy. They're crazy. No.
Speaker 1:I mean, there's a lot of... To me, it's like an applied AI company that is Yeah. Already working with tens of thousands of the most... Of the of the best customers that you can have in America. And they are in an incredibly unique position to deliver them, you know, super tangible products.
Speaker 1:They have incredible lock in, all these things. So I can make the case, but I want I want you to make the case.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So one, it's sort of a a universal truth for those, you know, if you if you didn't make the bet, then almost by definition, maybe you didn't think that the bet was worth making. Yeah. Maybe maybe you didn't have the chance to make it, but I know the feeling.
Speaker 2:And, you
Speaker 5:know, that's that's how we feel sometimes about those that we're not doing. Yeah. But it it comes down to sort of a handful of things in this case. Thing one is bonkers huge market. Like like, not just big, but, like, we might be in the first at bat of the first inning kinda big, and a growing market such that just the growth of this end market is several ramps in size annually.
Speaker 5:So, like Yeah. They don't really even need to be, like, taken, but we think they are taking market share, but
Speaker 2:they don't need to be in order
Speaker 5:to keep multiplying in size. So that's thing one. It's big, big market. Thing two, this product lead that they've built, you know, this platform. It's not just, you know, card and expense.
Speaker 5:It's actually about a dozen products now and keeps growing. And each one of those products that they add widens the moat. I mean, you guys met... You know, touched on this with Eric. Like, each incremental product means you can land with one more thing.
Speaker 5:One more thing the customer can say yes to.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 5:One more thing, you know, that they can upsell themselves or embrace later. It's... And which feeds this capital efficiency machine, which is wildly attractive. Like, for business to be accelerating at this scale with this kind of capital efficiency, it's very rare to see at this size. And the combination of accelerating growth, product lead, while still being so early in a market that they can go win is really, really rare.
Speaker 5:And the last thing, I mean, you just talked to him. It's Eric and the team around him and the culture they've built. And this this team is, like, this amazing learning machine. They're humble. They're hungry.
Speaker 5:They're ridiculously customer oriented. It... You know, it's just a team that keeps sort of surprising to the upside in all sorts of ways. And, you know, we find ourselves saying, like, we would want our, you know, our friends and our kids to go work for these... Like, we'd want to go work for these people.
Speaker 5:Like, it's the kind of team you want to back and it's... You know, you see that kind of goodwill with the customers all the time.
Speaker 1:Totally. Yeah. And I think it comes down to like Eric... In many ways Eric and Kareem leading from the front and being like two of the most AI held True. People that that I know.
Speaker 1:But going back like multiple years, like they've been on this, they've been, you know, sort of quietly recruiting like really elite talent, like Yeah. On the AI side, you know, they're they're And and just with that, it's like, it's so interesting being these, you know... You talked about the... Maybe the market being more positive some than than people might think. But if you're one of these legacy players and you're like, cool, we need an AI strategy, and then you're starting to think like, alright, well, let's make our, you know, let's let's make an annual plan.
Speaker 1:Let's like, you know, run a bunch of pilots. Let's test out a bunch of products, all these things. You end up just being a customer of AI, not somebody that is creating AI products that you can sell to other people. And I think that's just like wildly wildly different. And so you can imagine legacy players just being like their their products and their platforms effectively being pretty fixed in place and not adapting.
Speaker 1:Meanwhile, Eric and Kareem, you know, I know Kareem is probably like up all night riffing on riffing on product with the team and they ultimately are then shipping product very very very quickly and experimenting with their customers and I think that, oh, I just would I would absolutely hate to to be competing with them. No matter no matter how much no matter how much scale I had and and how and how much resources, it just sounds like an absolute nightmare.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, there's some great other businesses in this space that have great brands and been around a long time and, you know, like, I mean, I think Amex, like, you know, it's like... It's more than a century old. They're they're great established brands, but we see how hard it is for businesses that even were born, you know, five years ago to embrace the new world. And and it's a challenge.
Speaker 5:And, you know, I think Ramp is setting an example for others to follow on how to do it.
Speaker 2:Last question for me and we'll let you get back to your day. I'm interested in like how you interface with the team coming in later stage growth investing. You're probably not pitching, I'll help you hire your first CTO or engineer. But is one of the value adds of working with Dragon Ear that that visibility in the public and private markets. I was listening to Brad Grossner on CNBC and, like, he has a lot of visibility into both sides.
Speaker 2:And so if the board meeting is gonna be about IPO timing, liquidity, how... Who's gonna get brought in at various points in time, is that something that you're spending a lot of time with the teams that you work with broadly on? Or are there other areas where you like to lean in?
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's good question. So thing one, we sort of start with the Hippocratic Oath. Like, start with do no harm. Like, don't get in the way.
Speaker 5:Don't bug them for stuff that doesn't help them. And that's an easy trap for investors to fall into, which is, you know, trying to be helpful and really just meddling. Thing two, when Walter Isaacson writes the book about Eric Lyman, it's not going to be, gosh, that late stage investor he had was like... It made all the difference. That was everything.
Speaker 5:So what we're trying to do is be helpful in the pockets where we can be helpful and where we should be helpful and where, like, we bring something a little bit incremental to the table. I will say with Ramp, this is one the things we love about them. They are really proactive at pulling help out of us.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Not just... Like, we've made a lot of customer introductions and not because we're, like, spamming Ramp. They're like, hey. Here's this one. Here's that one.
Speaker 5:Like, here's a few more. Like, help us. Help us. You know? And so they're great about it.
Speaker 2:That's awesome.
Speaker 5:And, yeah, sitting across both public and private, it does give us a little bit of a vantage point that's a little bit unusual, a little different compared to some of the earlier stage folks who they have helping, who I think are some of the best in the world at what they do at their stage two. And so, yeah, of course, we try and help in that area, but that's just one thing. You know, we're we're trying to keep our ears open and be helpful where we can be.
Speaker 2:Well, I think Mike Grimes made it into the Elon book, so maybe you gotta switch over to the sell side if you wanna get in biography. But...
Speaker 5:We shall see.
Speaker 2:But thanks so much for coming on the show. Have a great rest of
Speaker 1:your day. Yeah. Great to hang.
Speaker 2:And enjoy you know the the continuation of dad life with the new one.
Speaker 5:I appreciate that. You too. Five weeks. Gotta love it. Have fun guys.
Speaker 1:The best.
Speaker 2:Talk Talk soon. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business. It lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces. And now with AI agents, we have Tavarish, automotive creator, YouTuber, p one owner, nine eighteen spider owner, Someone with a truck that probably backs up from time to time when he needs to work on a rebuild from scratch.
Speaker 2:We run ran a little bit late, but here he is. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you so much for holding on while we
Speaker 1:What's going on?
Speaker 2:Here. How are doing?
Speaker 4:How are you? You guys hear me okay?
Speaker 2:We can hear you great.
Speaker 1:Loud and clear.
Speaker 2:Loud and clear. I I mean, there's so much I wanna talk about but I wanna get your Tesla Roadster reaction first, then I want your Porsche Mission S reaction, and then I wanna hear about all the different projects you have going on. But let's start with the Roadster.
Speaker 4:Okay. So the Tesla Roadster, everybody's going crazy over it. I don't care, man. Like, I I I can't I can't tell you how much it doesn't, like, really move the needle for me because, like, honestly, it's it's a cool showcase of, like, stuff they can do. But the the the reality of putting one of these cars into production where it can do, like, a barrel roll or a kickflip over a truck, first of all, there's no practical use for it.
Speaker 4:And second of all, that's never gonna make it to production. So...
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was a it was a technology... It was like a very cool technology showcase that was attached to not even... Like, just sort of a teaser of a car that they're gonna start making in two years. And so I don't wanna I don't wanna...
Speaker 1:Could be another 20, who knows? Yeah. I don't wanna... It's hard to criticize because it's like, cool. They made a car with rockets on it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's like, it's amazing and it's and it's cool that that I'm glad that the human race can do this even if it doesn't have any obvious... Well, here's the reason why you should But John and I were both on the reservation list. We came in very late because we were like, you put five k down, you can always get out of it if you see the demo and you don't like it. But if the demo's insane, a bunch more people will come in.
Speaker 1:We kind of were expecting the car to be going into production like now. And... Mhmm. But seeing it, you're like, okay, here's a bunch of stuff that is not relevant to somebody who just wants to maybe buy the car outside of being able to produce a lot of downforce. But again, I can't even imagine going to the track with that car and one, if you're driving it at the limit, you're just gonna get banned from the track because people are gonna be like, hey, this person's like acting ridiculous.
Speaker 1:And then two, you're gonna be going through tires in like a single lap and like the novelty, the the sort of brief novelty before you realize like, okay, I'm driving a heavy car that can produce a lot of downforce but I destroy my tires and there's probably a thousand other cars that are much more enjoyable to drive on the same track. So
Speaker 4:so with with Tesla, it's a it's a weird like mixed bag because what ends up happening is you have this car that has some, like, legitimately really cool tech in it. Like, the Cybertruck has... You know, if you ever driven a Cybertruck or been, you know, driven around in a Cybertruck, if it's doing full self driving, there's a lot of interesting technology in it. 48 volt architecture, the drive... The the steer by wire.
Speaker 4:All that stuff is, like, super intuitive. And if you don't wanna drive it, it can, you know, have a mode where it drives itself. Now would I trust it? Not really. But I think...
Speaker 1:Well, here's the here's the thing... I was in a package. I would I would push back. I have... I I got a Cybertruck recently.
Speaker 1:It's amazing when it's driving itself. It's horrible to drive yourself. It's like the worst driving... It's the worst driving experience when a human is driving it. When the computer is driving it, it's like, great.
Speaker 1:This is like smooth. It feels like I'm in a fridge. It feels like I'm I'm in a dystopian fridge moving down the road. It's like Yeah. It's it's awesome.
Speaker 1:But I'm like, anytime I take over, like, John and I were driving in it last last week and the...
Speaker 2:Of self driving is perfect. He he takes over just to park it and I'm like, moving around.
Speaker 1:It's like, it takes like so much effort to make it like not feel like, you know, you're just like, it's so jerky. The yoke is, like, terrible. Like, it's it's really funny.
Speaker 2:It's one of the
Speaker 4:funniest things. When when you have, you know, a car like a Cybertruck
Speaker 1:Mhmm. And, you know,
Speaker 4:like, with with any new car, it's like, you have to adopt certain elements of, like, new technology, like getting a new phone. You have to get used to it. You know? Yeah. But with a Cybertruck, when you get in it and you try to drive it, like, stuff like steering.
Speaker 4:Steering is now, like, vastly different than what you remember, and it's not that way in any other Tesla or any other car in general. So you end up with this experience of, like, well, if you're a Cybertruck owner, then that is... You get used to that, and then every other car becomes weird. And, like, for for me, the first time I drove a Cybertruck, just getting out of the parking lot was... It was it was a time.
Speaker 4:You know? It was it was interesting because not only is it the size of a tank, but it also doesn't steer the way you think it should. Yeah. So you are essentially, you know, you're... The the car is determining how much, you know, input and output is happening, and you're just kind of along...
Speaker 4:They're along for the ride. Mhmm. Now when it drive... Drives itself like that, I do agree that that is, like, a better experience. But I I think that, you know, when you're in a Cybertruck, everybody knows that, you know, like, it is a it's a statement.
Speaker 4:Right? Yeah. So the same thing with this Tesla Roadster. It is it is definitely a statement. It is very like low res.
Speaker 4:It looks like a low res Lamborghini Murcielago from the Yeah. Front and then
Speaker 1:like a a new charger from the back.
Speaker 2:New charger from the back. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. It it... It's almost like they just made a render, and then they shipped the render. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think that Yeah. It might have been rendered recently.
Speaker 4:It was like it was actually a mid render. It didn't it didn't
Speaker 2:It didn't finish rendering and then they're like, oh whatever. It's good now. Ship it. Yeah. Mission S.
Speaker 2:Take us through your
Speaker 4:reaction Mission S.
Speaker 2:Compare it to nine eighteen. Tell us tell us about nine eighteen and then tell us about Mission S.
Speaker 4:So nine eighteen was a was a really, really cool car. I mean, just in general, it was the most weight of of the three. So, like, back in the day, they had the Holy Trinity Yep. Which was McLaren p one, the Porsche nine eighteen, and the Ferrari LaFerrari.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:These were the hybrid hypercars, and, you know, it was dubbed the holy trinity by Top Gear and Jeremy Clarkson. But the nine eighteen was was a weird one because they made the most of them, so it shouldn't be worth, you know, a lot of money. Then it was the the most weight, and then it was also the least powerful. However, it was, like, arguably the fastest car, the bet... The best built.
Speaker 4:And, you know, for... Just from my perspective, I haven't worked on a lot of Ferrari, but I can imagine what it's like. I've worked on a p one, and I've worked on nine eighteen. Nine eighteen is built so much better than a p one. And it is it is pretty crazy that, you know, they have...
Speaker 4:They had that technology back then. They did zero to 60 in two point two seconds. That was back in 2013.
Speaker 2:That's crazy.
Speaker 4:And then they did
Speaker 1:the... Right. The overall, it feels completely timeless. Like, they could have Mhmm. They could release that same car today it would just make sense.
Speaker 1:It it it it in many ways is like the to it to me it's my favorite modern
Speaker 2:So are you nine eighteen over a Carrera GT? And I wanna know if you're if you're nine eighteen over Carrera GT because Doug Jimuro and there's a lot of car guys that are like, oh, it's Carrera GT all the way. Don't want any hybrid stuff. But how do you both feel about it? Let's start with Tavarish.
Speaker 4:So they're just different cars for different purposes. I I think that, you know, if you want an analog car with, you know, roll your own gears and no driver aids and blah blah blah, and I'm sure Doug Demuro wants the values of his Carrera GT to go up Sure. Then you'd pick Carrera GT. It sounds great.
Speaker 2:You could put
Speaker 4:an exhaust on it and sounds like a... Like an an f one car.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:You can also do that with a nine eighteen. And a nine eighteen, you can legitimately just give to anybody and then they could drive it like a normal car. It is... Yeah. It's a It's just a normal car you can No.
Speaker 2:We don't make it.
Speaker 1:I mean, the the thing that was exciting to about the Mission S is like the nine eighteen and the GT have become so expensive
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:That even though they made a lot of the nine eighteen, you can't... You just don't see them on the road. Yep. You... It's hard to imagine buying one and driving it Totally.
Speaker 1:For fun.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Yep.
Speaker 1:And what I'm excited about the Mission S is like they're gonna make a ton of them.
Speaker 4:Love
Speaker 1:it. It's gonna give you that same kind of experience of like I'm driving a special Porsche but it's not special so you're gonna be able to drive it however you want. If you if you if you caravan...
Speaker 2:Thousand miles on it, it's like, okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And if you caravan these things, it's gonna get a ton of rock chips, but I think it... But I think it's fine.
Speaker 2:It's not the same as a 90
Speaker 1:And to me, like Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But this
Speaker 4:is Porsche. I mean, are they changing anything about about, you know, Porsche's sort of architecture as a company? Because, you know, if this is Porsche we're talking about, then the the MSRP isn't really MSRP. You're gonna have, you know, a 100, 200 over that just to get the first ones. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Then you have paint to sample, paint to sample plus. Yeah. Then you have the interior options and then, you know, it's just the the Corvette owner that that went to college. It's like mine was one of one because it was built on a Thursday with this paint car.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:I think it's gonna end up like, an $800,000 car regardless of where it starts. Yeah. But it's also not...
Speaker 2:You know, like like competing with Lamborghini s f 90 from Ferrari. Like, it it it's more in the unlimited production world, which is still really be as, yeah, like restricted as the nine eighteen and the curtain.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And the other the other thing is like seeing the two launches yesterday was like Yeah. One one is like, you know, I think we we all saw the Roadster launch in the same way, like cool, like carnival show, trick, you know. Yeah. Like very very cool technology demo.
Speaker 1:We'll see what the actual car is like. But then Porsche was like perfect stagnation. Right? It was like nothing has... Cars haven't gotten better.
Speaker 1:Right? If anything, this car was the first time a manufacturer like really really really listened to customers on a bunch of different elements. Right? It's like we want a key that you can put in the car and turn and we want that experience to be great. We want less screens.
Speaker 1:Right? We want... We don't want all these different things. But in many ways, there's zero innovation. It doesn't feel like...
Speaker 1:The only innovation is that we eliminated a lot of the innovations that we've had. And so I think it's great. I think like we have been talking on the show about, you know, the automotive world being in its courts crisis. And this was like the first response to like, we're in a crisis. We can no longer push.
Speaker 1:We're not pushing the frontier of technology in our That's gonna be done by the the Teslas Yep. And the and the Chinese manufacturers. But what we can do is make a driver's car Special.
Speaker 4:That
Speaker 1:is special and more desirable than in... Anything else in the market?
Speaker 4:So I I would push back a little bit on that because when they were developing the Porsche nine eighteen Mhmm. The technology that they had developed when you went from e mode or like the the region to the regular brakes, they had to calibrate that, and it took them a long time to get that right. So, you know, when you press the brake, it feels like it's a... You know, it... It's an actual brake pedal, but it's actually regen.
Speaker 4:But if you press the brake harder, then you get the brakes from the car. And to make that not jerky, like, they had to put in a lot of time. If you look at the early, you know, first drives of the 09/18, people would like Chris Harris, he would complain about, like, these brakes when they come on. It's like it's like you get you, like, hit a tree. You know?
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:But Porsche figured that out. And I think that is Porsche's real... That... That's their talent.
Speaker 1:Because they
Speaker 4:will do a lot of stuff behind the scenes to make this driving experience, like, seamless, and it's all... It's almost boring where the car does everything so well, and then that stuff, like, trickles down to their other cars. So, like, that nine eighteen, the the way that they made that nine eighteen, the the calibration for that specific system, that trickled down to their, their electric cars and then their hybrid cars. And, like, now that is an Audi's and and, like, all the the the kind of lesser known cars. So I I think whatever this is, whatever flagship Porsche has, it is gonna be something where they move the bar forward in terms of, like, driving dynamics, in terms of aerodynamics.
Speaker 4:I mean, if you look at it, it has, like, a big scoop on the in the front. It has like arrow lines that follow all the way to the back of the car. Doesn't seem like it has a bunch of like wings and, you know, active aero elements. It looks like it's just
Speaker 1:The the the back... The the wing is the wing is active.
Speaker 2:It's active, but it's active like the Carrera GT. Like, it just goes vertical.
Speaker 4:It's not it's not it's not like a a giant, you know, GT three.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's not like the the Mercedes AMG one that has, like, the little flaps everywhere with little motors on
Speaker 1:the Correct. Yeah. The the other thing that's worth noting is, like, this is not, from my understanding a nine eight... It shouldn't be viewed as a nine eighteen successor. This is just...
Speaker 1:Mhmm. This is the new step up from the nine eleven. And to me it's instantly the most desirable car, the most desirable new car in the call it 600 to a million dollar range. Mhmm. But then they're gonna come for the top end of the market too.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:So, alright. If that's the case, then I guess it would go for the like that with s f 90 which is Yeah. Hypercar performance, not hypercar price, but then it can get to hypercar price. But hypercar price is now 2 to $3,000,000, where now a million dollars doesn't really get you a hypercar anymore. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So, like, it's still,
Speaker 2:you know, this is gonna do f 90 where the spider will be even more, and then they'll do a GT version of this, and then you'll get the GT three r s y stock package of the new Mission s. And that will be even more and more and more and I'm sure there'll be... Anti racing one Yeah.
Speaker 4:Then sample and... Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it it is just interesting that there will be some of these driving around with the poverty smackers on them, you know, and and people put miles on them hopefully, you know. Because there's so many of these cars where you hear about it and it's like, okay, they're making a 100 of them and they're just gonna stay in the plot.
Speaker 1:The poverty smack mission.
Speaker 2:The poverty smack mission as we go...
Speaker 4:I mean, it's it's really cool. Like, so I... Is it... I I don't know if the the pictures that I'm looking at are like actual, their renders or whatever. But like, this is...
Speaker 4:It's from Porsche.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If you're on the official Porsche, those are the real those are the real photos of the car that they debuted yesterday if you're on their account.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So There's a
Speaker 1:lot of
Speaker 2:hands stuff out there, but this
Speaker 5:is real.
Speaker 4:Is it a... Like, we don't know what the engine is. Right?
Speaker 2:No. They they... So they were teasing flat eight, but they were just asked yesterday by Forest Auto Reviews. Can you confirm that? And they said we're not ready to confirm that it's flat eight but it feels like it has to be something different than what's in the nine eleven to make it special.
Speaker 2:So that would be the logical So one.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So it could it could be flat eight. I was looking at the gauge cluster, I saw that, you know, the red line is somewhere around seventy seventy five hundred, or that's where the literal red line
Speaker 2:is.
Speaker 4:That says turbo?
Speaker 2:Is it... Does that imply turbo?
Speaker 4:Maybe. So what I was thinking was... I mean, it could be the Porsche nine six three engine, which is the 4.6 liter v eight from the nine eighteen plus twin turbos. Sure. But it it doesn't make a ton of...
Speaker 4:Like, it it doesn't rev as high, and it doesn't make it doesn't make a ton more power, but it is it is a pretty cool, you know, platform. And I know that they didn't make a lot of those those engines. And those engines, you know, from from my experience Yeah. Taking them apart, like, they're really good. Okay.
Speaker 4:They're really, really good. Yeah. So... But, like, a little rev limit on a Porsche just doesn't doesn't seem like right, you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Maybe they're trying to sort that out right now, and and and that's why they don't wanna commit to anything. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. For sure. But I mean, if this was, oh, yeah. This is our GT three RS engine that revs to $9 plus, you know, we found another 40 horsepower lying on the on the floor. Sure.
Speaker 4:Here here you go. I do like the on your own. Is that is that a button on the on the wheel? So that disables on
Speaker 2:the driver's aids. So you can turn
Speaker 4:off Okay. Yeah. That... That's alright. That's alright, Phil.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Pretty cool. Like it probably did. Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, it's a it's a cool car.
Speaker 4:I don't know... Like, anytime Porsche releases MSRP numbers Yeah. It's always, like, okay. Like a GT three is a 160 k. Like, right.
Speaker 4:So Yeah. Has anybody paid that? Like, ever? No. Sure.
Speaker 4:They they are immediately double what they're what they're asking for because everybody needs the the shiniest thing. Yeah. If this is them trying what they did in the eighties with the 09/28, like, hey, this is like a step above the 09/11. Mhmm. You know, it's gonna be...
Speaker 4:It's it's gonna be interesting because nine eleven has a has a foothold in
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:In that market, and it will not let go.
Speaker 2:What's the opposite of a p one in terms of first car to start working on if you've never worked on a car before? What's the most accessible portal into that world?
Speaker 4:I would say anything nineties in Japanese, like maybe a Toyota. Okay. Because even if it is, like, ragged on, which a lot of Toyotas are, you can get it cheap and it's gonna be reliable. And if you can break things and it's not gonna break the bank, you know, you can get parts from Toyota that they still make because it's a giant company, and it is super cheap to to do that. So I would do, like, a Toyota, maybe a Nissan.
Speaker 4:Like, my first car was a Nissan Maxima. Yeah. And I'm a little biased, but, like, Nissan also, it's it's a little harder to get parts for some of those older cars.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Toyota has has a really good, parts program, and they're bringing back a lot of those, you know, iconic cars from the nineties. Sure. And and you're not gonna be dealing with, you know, issues, like, like, real big issues like rust like you get from a Mitsubishi or a Nissan. Like, they're they're pretty well made. So I I would say anything like Honda as well.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You know, Hondas, they are expensive if you wanna get, you know, a lot of power from that little engine. Yeah. But just to get a, you know, a car running and and driving, it's a really good platform to start
Speaker 1:on.
Speaker 2:And then in terms of how you select project cars, what sticks out to you? Is it all going back to, like, the posters that you had on your wall as a kid? Is it specific vehicles or just opportunistic? How do you think about when you wanna take on a new project?
Speaker 4:When I when I take on a new project, it's... It... There's not a lot of thought that goes into it. It's more like I Feeling. Don't know when I'm ever gonna have this opportunity again.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:So when I looked at something like the p one or nine eighteen Yep. I'm like, there's not gonna be another p one that comes up.
Speaker 2:There's not
Speaker 4:gonna be another nine eighteen that comes up.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:So I might as well get this and we're gonna see what... You know, if I can afford it, I'll get it. Yeah. And it's it's gonna be a project for me to figure out. And that...
Speaker 4:I I mean, I wish I would've planned things out better, you know, from the start, but this is also, like, the reality of making YouTube and reality of, like, project planning because, you know, you have scope creep, happened to to Of to me with the p one.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, instead of rebuilding a p one, now we're doing... You know, I'm I'm building the fastest McLaren on Earth. We are taking out the hybrid system. Yeah. We're building this bespoke engine, and then we're doing a a bespoke body with the original designer, Frank Stephenson.
Speaker 4:And then this is now gonna be like this top speed car. And, you know, this is now leagues above in difficulty wise, leagues above a a stock p one build.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Dude, dude, how how much room is there in top speed competitions? I mean, it was interesting that the... At the Roadster reveal, they were, like, 230 miles an hour and then, like, live on stage, Elon sort of gets them to up that ante.
Speaker 2:And he's like, it'll go half the speed of sound. Right? And they're like, okay. Fine. We'll do that.
Speaker 2:But there are cars, like, I I I think Koenigsegg can do over 300. There's a few crazy numbers out there, but what what what is the state of the art, then how much more, like, speed on the floor is there?
Speaker 4:So the the legitimate issue that you come come up with when you go for top speed now is... I mean, it's been it's been the case for twenty years, but, like, where do you do it? Sure. Salt flats
Speaker 2:or something?
Speaker 4:Well, so so the problem with salt flats is that it's not... It's it's... They're... It's bumpy. Oh, get, like, the traction is a is a big concern.
Speaker 4:Got it. Those salt flat cars are made specifically for that environment.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 4:And it's not really conducive to a street car. Like, street car, it'll get maybe 70% of its top speed, maybe. But even then, you're you're, like, just absolutely blasting the underside of your car. Yeah. It it is a really punishing environment.
Speaker 4:So what Bugatti does is they have a test track or I don't know if they still own it or they had a had a part of it. It's Ehrelessen in Germany. And Ehrelessen is, you know, it's this big test track with a banked curve that you can take... You can do, like, a 120 miles an hour. You can, like, saunter up to a 120, and they have a six mile straight.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 4:And then that's where they do all their their top speed. So right now, the fastest car that I know of that is a production car, it's sorta kinda, is the Bugatti Chiron SS. Mhmm. And that's... It's a Bugatti Chiron SS 300 plus.
Speaker 4:And because that did 304 miles an hour Uh-huh. And that did it there. But in order to get the official record, you have to do it there and, like, reverse, like, Right. There and Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:But because they didn't do it backwards, because of the Oh. The the way that the asphalt was, they only did it once, and then they were like, you know, who cares? We we don't, you know, we don't care if we have the official record or not. Like, then, you know, that that stood. But I think the fastest now is the SSC Tuatara, which did it here in Florida, Cape Canaveral, and then they did something like 280 something miles an hour, you know, average between the between the two runs.
Speaker 4:So the the the issue... Like, right now, the the big thing is, like, 300 miles an hour. 300 miles an hour is incredibly fast. Yeah. But the issue becomes braking zone.
Speaker 4:You have to find a place to do it. You know, you could do like Koenigsegg did and rent out a... Or or, like, just close-up, I think, Highway 50 or or wherever it was. Sure. And it's just an arrow straight thing, but then it's like a public road.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So you you have to, like... An animal could could come at any point. It could be... Like, there's there could be some some gravel on the road.
Speaker 4:Like, there's a lot of things that could happen, and it just becomes diminishing returns when you're when you're looking for top speed. But I I still look at it, like, as as a kid because like as a kid, you're like, well, this number's bigger, so this car is better.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I think we I think we've sort of lost our way. It's all it's all like nerve racking lap times and blah blah blah and you know, that that sort of thing. Just a quick quick thing before I finish my Ted talk. I... Like, every car that says, oh, yeah.
Speaker 4:The top speed is 230 miles an hour or blah blah blah. And, like, obviously, they... The Roadster... They haven't tested top speed. They they they have not because the Roadster is not a production car.
Speaker 4:But the reason why a lot of these cars are, like, topped out around two thirty, like, 20 to two thirty Mhmm. Is because the the CFD, the computational fluid dynamics testing Mhmm. That OEMs, like the other car manufacturers have, they stop becoming reliable after 230 miles an hour because the air around the car becomes significantly compressed, like more than 5%. So you get, like, a ram air effect like you would get on a plane Woah. After 230.
Speaker 4:That's also why a lot of, like, race cars, Indy cars, that that sort of thing, they go up there because they're aero testing only... Like, you can only get to that point. Now there are cars that go, you know, faster than that, Leman cars, but, like, those are very much... We're gonna see where this goes. It might do a backflip.
Speaker 4:Who knows? And some
Speaker 2:of them have.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So if you ever wonder how that how that happens, like, oh, aren't these tested? Like, it's it's almost impossible to test that unless you go out and then you figure, you know, you you actually do some real world testing and see, oh, yeah. The the bumper hasn't fallen off yet and the car hasn't done a backflip, so we're
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you think in the Roadster launch, they tease some like CODA lap times like something around a 01:30? Do you think that's just like totally fake news or do you think they actually somehow got out there and didn't get any didn't get... Any spy shots? Any spy shots.
Speaker 4:Well, it doesn't matter because it's not a production car. So, like, whether they put a, you know, some body on a frame and then went around with a a test mule, okay. Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:It doesn't matter.
Speaker 4:That's cool. Like... So lap times to me don't don't really matter. Like, I I don't care if if a car... Because, like, lap times, they they say a lot about a car, but they also say a lot about the driver.
Speaker 4:And I don't consider myself like a race car driver, and I don't really feel like I want to be, you know. I feel like, yeah, I'll I'll push a car on a on a nice, you know, windy road or like a straight road or something, and that that feels good. But I'm not a race car driver, and I don't care if my car gets, you know, point three seconds faster on the Nurburgring with these, like, little aero flicks. Like, it doesn't really matter to me. So I don't know if it's conjecture.
Speaker 4:Knowing Elon Musk and Tesla probably is, but he knows that the thing that he showed was not for car people. It was Yeah. It was just for... It was just to get clicks. It was just to to generate buzz, and it absolutely did that.
Speaker 4:If you want spectacle, you go to one of those launches. But, like, no... Like, nobody looked at the the substance of what was said. Like, everything that was shared was the car doing a barrel roll, the car, you know, flying, the car going upside down. That's the only thing
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:That was shared because everything else is is sort of clunky Yeah. And not very well, you know, orchestrated or put together, but they did have this this spectacle that they knew people were gonna just eat up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They had the moment.
Speaker 1:It worked.
Speaker 2:It's kinda underrated. Almost everyone.
Speaker 1:Except except car people that had a reservation in and then immediately saw it and I was like, that's cool and then canceled.
Speaker 2:It's... Yeah. It's kinda it's kinda underrated that Tesla, you can drive these like by wire. Like they're very clearly entirely remote. Like there were no people in them at any time.
Speaker 2:So when you think about high speed trials, it's like, yeah, just send just like send the command to drive straight remotely and just drive it and if it flips and crashes, no big deal. It's it's maybe you can push the car further in testing if they do go down that road. But I don't even think car buyers care past 200 miles an hour. It's so rare that you ever would get the opportunity to push a car like that. Yeah.
Speaker 4:The amount of people that have gone 200 miles an hour is incredibly small. Yeah. And like if you actually go 200 miles an hour, you realize how fast that is. Yeah. Now in cars now, like if you get in a Koenigsegg and you realize that this thing has 1,500 horsepower, it gets to those speeds so quickly.
Speaker 4:Like like, I remember, you know, back in the day, Bugatti Veyron was the fastest car in the world, 253 miles an hour. We're we're never gonna have another car that's a thousand horsepower and blah blah blah, and it and it does this incredible top speed. And now, like, a Chiron, like, its its successor has 500 more horsepower, and it didn't need those crazy tires that the Bayron had, mainly because it gets to those speeds so much faster that the, the tires don't actually heat soak. They they don't heat soak as much as the Bayrons did. So the Bayron needs those tires because it's less powerful.
Speaker 4:Oh, amazing. So if it had 500 more horsepower, can actually just get tires from tire rack, which is interesting. Wow. But like, but people don't understand how how fast these cars are. And if you go, like, you know, 200 miles an hour to two fifty, that's that's that's crazy.
Speaker 4:But then, like, two fifty to, like, 300? 300 is so... Like, anything going 300 miles an hour is probably in the air. Like, that... That's that's just...
Speaker 4:You know, like, planes take off at way under that speed. So you have to you have to do a lot of homework, and 300 miles an hour is nothing to to talk at.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And, I mean, even the even the high speed stuff is getting democratized. You look at the z r one, and you're looking at Bugatti numbers on pretty much almost everything. I think it goes maybe two twenty, two thirty in some configurations.
Speaker 2:Like, this stuff is getting to be... And I don't know what the depreciation will be like on that car, but you could imagine, I mean, even a model plaids, you know, 60 k for zero to 60 in two seconds. We certainly democratized it, but, hopefully, people keep it on the road. Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's it's it's incredible. Like, I I drove today, you know, one of my daily drivers is a a Charger Hellcat Redeye. Nice. It is a essentially a rental car that you can you can get that has 800 horsepower. Will just, like, you can go to the dealership.
Speaker 4:Well, not now anymore, but, like, you could have gone to the dealership and just bought it with money.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And that that seems kind of crazy Yeah. Because 800 horsepower was more than, like, if you look back, you know, ten, fifteen years ago, what had 800 horsepower? Literally nothing.
Speaker 2:Nothing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So... Greg in the X Chat says, ran into James May today in an airport lounge. He looked grumpy when I asked him about the Roadster. Cars should drive, not fly. He said.
Speaker 1:To Tavarish's point not for trad car guys.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Yeah. What does excite you? What what is on your
Speaker 4:dream and what
Speaker 1:is my takeaway from the whole event was like I'm very excited. Tesla slash SpaceX are obviously gonna be the company that popularizes flying cars. Yeah. It might take twenty years but they are gonna be the ones that do it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's not gonna look like the Roadster because Roadster has two seconds of range.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's a rocket. What is on your dream list? If you were dropped in as the CEO of Tesla or Porsche or any company and you want to build your ideal car, how manual is it?
Speaker 2:People want to go back to the old ways. I was joking about putting the crank in the front of the car. You know, what Mhmm. What do you want? What's on your dream list?
Speaker 4:It's it's tough because I am not a person that would like put together all the elements of my my favorite cars and then be like, alright, it's perfect for me. Think every car has an element of, you know, like if it's a truly good car Mhmm. It is, for better or worse, somebody's vision. Like, somebody's vision from start to finish. And you can see...
Speaker 4:You see that from the engineering side, from the, from the design side. And those cars are... Like, the McLaren f one, for example. It was like Gordon Murray's baby. Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, it's designed by Peter Stevens, but, like, Gordon Murray had a finger in every single thing, every project on that car. And it's still revered as one of the best cars ever made. And it's, you know, obviously not without its faults, but it is of an era, and it is... It's... There's nostalgia involved.
Speaker 4:I I don't know if there's, like, a perfect car for me. There are some, you know, very exciting cars. For me, the the Aston Martin... What is it? The Valhalla?
Speaker 4:The one that that just came out. I really like that car. That car reminds me of the... When the p one originally came out. It's a very similar kind of drivetrain.
Speaker 4:It's also British. It's a it's a very, very beautiful car.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I think it is, like, one of these things that... Since it's it's an Aston Martin, it's gonna it's gonna depreciate. But it's also a car that we might not appreciate as much now. Mhmm. But later on, people are gonna look back and say, oh, wow.
Speaker 4:That was a... That was that's quite a thing. But, like, I I think with anything, there's a lot of there's there's too many rich people out there, and then there's too many companies that are willing to give them, you know, whatever they want. So, like, Ferrari making the... These...
Speaker 4:The digital chill injury manuals.
Speaker 2:Manuale. Yeah. So, like,
Speaker 4:things are kind of... They're they're kinda cool. I'm not I'm not on the, you know, hate bandwagon there. I think that that's, you know, it's interesting technology. Yeah.
Speaker 4:But like, I think any car that is... That gives an interesting experience, a unique experience that other cars can't give you Mhmm. I I think that is worth pursuing. I I like the the Mission s. The Mission s looks looks interesting.
Speaker 4:I don't know how different it is gonna be from, like, a GT three or, a turbo s.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 4:Who knows? But what I what I think is is interesting moving forward is, like, where the the the the battle between EV and and combustion engines, and then, like, where hybrids fit into that and then how performance fits into that. But, you know, I think car enthusiasm in general has gone up in the past, like, let's say, three years because, you know, for a while, we were worried about car enthusiasm just leaving. You know, like, we're never gonna have v twelve's again or like blah blah blah. Well, so...
Speaker 4:I think that... Yeah.
Speaker 1:My... I've had a working theory for a while that you're gonna see even more of a resurgence in activity at various tracks around the country Mhmm. As it becomes more common to just never drive yourself on the road anywhere. Like, I'm already getting to the point where like, I never wanna commute. I never wanna self drive Well when I'm commuting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Want...
Speaker 2:There's so much more potholes like... They're... In the sixties, you could get a sports car and actually like ring it out just on like the normal streets or like the back Mhmm. Roads. Like now...
Speaker 1:So I think Tesla making a car that ultimately is just a track toy Yeah. Actually is kind of going in the right direction in some ways because I think that a lot of people are gonna be like, when I'm on the road, my car drives me. When I'm on the track That's car. I drive myself. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and I think that that's like the line that's like really interesting. Yeah. The Mission S is the first car that's like a production road, you know Yeah. Road legal car that I'm like, this is this is a car that I want in a while.
Speaker 2:I I was hoping we were gonna get a tour of something.
Speaker 4:Sorry. Sorry. My my guys are like watching a car, and it's it's like super loud. The the No. You're all good.
Speaker 4:The pressure watcher. So... Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But... Yeah. I mean, thanks so much for coming on the show. We'll let you get back to your day. We'd love to do...
Speaker 1:No. No. You're you're good. No. I...
Speaker 4:But I completely I completely agree. I think, you know, the the car enthusiast was never... You know, like, with these new cars, people don't think about car car enthusiasts because Mhmm. Number one, car enthusiasts don't really buy new cars. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:They're they're thinking about the the collector. They're thinking about the person that is doing it as a status symbol. And then maybe down the line, that's when they get, like, the real enthusiast. And then you you can have, like, the enthusiast, version. You can have the g t three, g t three r s.
Speaker 4:You can have the the the manual and whatever for those people that both have money and and want that that experience. But for, like, the base experience of any car now, it's really good. Like, it's really good. If you'd... If you get any, like, base model car, it's still...
Speaker 4:It's gonna have more power, gonna have more options, more luxuries than any car back, like, ten, fifteen years ago. Mhmm. It's also gonna be pretty reliable, like, for the most part. So I think, you know, it is... I I like where things are headed.
Speaker 4:I don't... You know, like, the the design of cars now is, like, kind of humdrum to me. Yeah. I like that, you know, Porsche is still making pretty cars. Some some Italian manufacturers are making pretty cars as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:But everything now is just becoming, like, very... I don't know if it's they're they're they're getting that the the Chinese influence where like
Speaker 2:every car just... I'm saying.... Car looks the same. I agree with you except with two exceptions other than the Cybertruck, Nuvolari and Jaguar Type o one. It's a very specific aesthetic but it feels like it does not look like a, you know, like like a BMW.
Speaker 2:It doesn't look like an Audi that's like where everything's kind of like coalesced around one design language. Question. But but I wanna know
Speaker 4:what you think. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I... Go for it.
Speaker 4:The the new Velary stuff is like... The people that didn't like the Jaguar
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And then they they started saying how good the new Velary looks. I'm like, what is Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:What is
Speaker 4:your day with Boeing?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's I don't
Speaker 4:I don't I don't get that at all. Like I I think it's... They're just kind of low res cars. Yeah. Same, you know, Cybertruck and Roadster and and they all kind of fall into that that one thing.
Speaker 4:Just becomes... You buy it for the meme and I I don't I don't think there's gonna be a
Speaker 1:John literally John literally has been thinking like do I do the three car garage, Cybertruck, new Villarreal, type one.
Speaker 2:Type o one. Just the low res garage. Very funny. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I have a I have a question for you. Do you think... So the Mission S feels very competitive with all the sort of desirable Ferrari cars, whatever it ends up being actually called. Like it just feels like suddenly people are gonna be like, I have $750,000 to spend on a car that I'm gonna drive a few times a month, maybe a couple times a month, whatever, a weekender. That is like very competitive.
Speaker 1:I... My expectation is that Ferrari is gonna fire back by going after the the three r s category and making this two nine six challenge, the street legal version of it, like much more widely available. Because it seems like they're gonna remove the hybrid and if suddenly they have a car that's in that 400 to $500,000 range MSRP and it has a massive wing on it and it is, you know, again... Crazy Nurburgring... But again a car for the street.
Speaker 1:I I expect they're basically gonna like flip flop. Interesting. Where like suddenly Ferrari will have a car in the 500 and below range. It's like pretty pretty compelling.
Speaker 2:We can go to the
Speaker 1:three RS buyers like, well, I want something aggressive, looks track focused. But... And and so so anyways, that's kind of like how I'm What
Speaker 2:do you think?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I I can I can probably agree with that, but I I don't know what Ferrari's trajectory is? I I think Ferrari is just hell bent on trying to make as many cars as they can and then pretending like they're like like, they're all rare. Like, every single one is rare, and, you need, like, special permission to to buy, you know, whatever their base model car is.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I I think there's, Porsche have a history of making a certain type of car. Ferrari is not... Like, no matter what they do, Ferrari is not gonna be Porsche. It doesn't drive like a Porsche. They all drive, like, differently.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. A a Porsche experience is very sanitized. Even a a GT three, which which I have, I have a manual nine nine two GT three, and I love it. I think it's the best manual car I've ever driven. And I also have a, like, a 04/30 Scuderia that we converted to manual.
Speaker 4:And it's, you know, on paper, it's around the same horsepower. It's, 500 horsepower, around the same weight, that that sort of thing. The Ferrari is, a bit more old school, but it's still aluminum chassis, that that sort of thing. But it feels completely different. It is a is a different sort of school of thought, and the Ferrari feels like it was made a 100 years before the Porsche.
Speaker 4:So I I think no matter what, even newer Ferraris, they they have this, like, manufactured sort of Italian passion where things don't line up as well as you'd want them to. Like a like a Ferrari, like a Pista doesn't drive as well as, like, a McLaren because be... Because of that. Because they they wanna, like, manufacture this this sort of, like, imperfection. But then, sometimes, like, I don't see them competing with Porsche in the same way.
Speaker 4:It's not it's not gonna be that sanitized experience no matter what you can do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. That that... That'll be really interesting. It does feel like they will go to head to head, but there will be, yeah, a really wide really wide gap between the two brands.
Speaker 2:So...
Speaker 1:And I think that's great.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm not saying that they wanna make the same car at the same price. More so that, like, I think it would be an interesting new product for them to offer that would be an ode to, like, hey, we haven't forgot why we got into this in the first place, which was, like, selling emotion, selling this rawness, selling this...
Speaker 2:Would that be the XX? Is XX street legal race car? Is that the thesis there? No. That
Speaker 4:is that is not like now, but yeah, the FF 90 XX. And the XX program used to be a literal, like, race car with race team, and you didn't even own the... You didn't you didn't have Okay. The car like, to to do anything with. You you you, like, just told Ferrari, meet me at this track with the team, and then we'll...
Speaker 4:I'll drive the car. But that f f 90 x x was the only car that had that badge but didn't come with all those perks.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:But then you can just drive the car.
Speaker 2:You can take it off.
Speaker 4:So... But but but it was... They
Speaker 2:take the road car, and then they make it a track car, and they a road car, and then make it track car, and then they car again. They go back and forth. It's the best.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. It's it's like Street Fighter, the movie, the game
Speaker 2:Yep. The movie. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:The book based on the movie that's based on the book. Yes. It's the best. But always always another way to, you know, stand out in the crowded market, I suppose. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 1:Super fun.
Speaker 2:This is great. Let's do it again soon.
Speaker 4:No worries, man. Thank you so much. Awesome. Thanks for Have
Speaker 2:a good one. Cheers. Bye.
Speaker 1:Car day. Wanted to distract you from the absolute disaster that we've had today in the markets.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's rough. What's going on?
Speaker 1:Jim Kramer says maybe we clean out this blown up hedge fund and start fresh on Monday.
Speaker 2:Okay. So Nasdaq is down 2.14%. S and P five hundred is down one point o 9% and the Dow Jones is down just one just point 34%. But lots of Kramer called it
Speaker 1:call it of the worst days of the year.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Nasdaq nears biggest weekly loss in more than a year. Tech stocks are falling sharply Friday. Remember, you got this alpha from us yesterday because if you paid attention to the stream, the stream title was sell everything including your dollars. It's over over.
Speaker 2:And it looks like it is in fact over over. But maybe we'll clear out this hedge fund, and we'll be back on Monday. We'll see. AI related shares came under new pressure pushing the Nasdaq down 2.4%, which leaves the benchmark down 4.7% for the week. If the tech heavy benchmark finishes down more than 4.68%, it will be the worst week since the tariff meltdown.
Speaker 2:I like that in this Wall Street Journal report, they were hammering this out so fast. They capitalized the t h e all caps for some reason. I think it's just a typo but it lets you know that a human was hammering this out and saying I'm I'm mad. I'm angry. This is crazy news.
Speaker 2:Anyway, there's a bunch more stories but we'll get to them on Monday. You.
Speaker 1:Two point six says wait before you guys go is Tyler still an intern? News flash, Tyler has never actually been an intern. He's always paid. Paid. And he dropped out of college like how long ago?
Speaker 1:A year ago?
Speaker 2:I think I think his original deal, he had to go to school for a decade. So, he that down came here.
Speaker 1:Came
Speaker 2:back. But, yeah. I don't I don't actually know your official title. Co host. Oh, mean, in the Wall Street Journal, just host.
Speaker 2:They didn't even hit you with the co. Tyler Cosgrove was featured in the Wall Street Journal. One of us. One of us. Trissy.
Speaker 2:He made it into the journal. Very very... It's a big moment. The first time you get in the print edition... Did you actually get the copy of the print edition?
Speaker 2:Did you see if
Speaker 3:we We didn't get it delivered that day, so I don't know.
Speaker 4:Somebody stole it.
Speaker 3:But I don't think it was in the print edition.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, should figure that out. But Tyler is in The Wall Street Journal. You can go to wsj.com. Sign up.
Speaker 2:You can search his name and he was he was in the article about Cheeky Pint and how the tech elite are drinking beers and Tyler broke it down. Do you have anything else? They they they sort of sort of mod you a little bit, didn't they? Okay. But the
Speaker 4:writer said, you're gonna watch the full episode because there's a lot. But it's probably positive. TBPN, here's the punk dancer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. The Wall Street Journal said, they...
Speaker 2:The journalist said, I didn't watch Jinky Punch because I have a life. But this guy over at TBPN, this host, Tyler Cosgrove did. And so he hit you with the host, hit you with full name, spelled it correctly, got the name of the show slightly wrong but it's okay. We'll hit them with the correction for that. But we love the Wall Street Journal and we love you all for tuning in.
Speaker 2:We forgot to tell you the most important data point that we that we cover more reliably than the markets. How many days until Christmas? Happy Christmas. Sixty nine days until Christmas. Let's go.
Speaker 1:There you go. Thank you so much. Outside the movie theater yesterday, they were setting up Christmas decorations.
Speaker 2:Rick Cruz is one of us. Let's go.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:So good. So good. Yeah. It's getting it's getting it's getting Christmasy in here. Let's check-in on the Christmas weather report in Los Angeles.
Speaker 2:It's 94 degrees. Not exactly the Christmas spirit. Malibu is burning. There's a heat advisor. There's evacuation warnings because it's too hot.
Speaker 2:But Christmas is always hottest before it gets cold. Dark... It's always darkest before dawn.
Speaker 1:It's always hottest before the snow
Speaker 2:falls. Always hottest before the snow falls. Yeah. There's no... You have control over...
Speaker 2:We have invented air conditioning. Don't live in France. We live in America. You have air conditioning.
Speaker 1:We love you guys.
Speaker 2:You wanna get Christmas Have a great weekend. Just turn on the air conditioning. Good night.