Tesla's Flying Roadster vs Porsche's First Supercar: Which Would You Buy?

So on the screen right now, you can see the Tesla flying car, basically the Roadster, which took a long time to unveil, but it's using like these— it's using these like air thrusters basically to flip it around. And then you can see it flying upside down here. And, you know, there's all these like memes happening right now. Everyone's like, oh my God, this is crazy. And then, and then all these people, by the way, it's funny because all the people are saying, oh, Remember, like people are saying, oh, Elon is like a stupid billionaire. He doesn't do anything. Da da da. And then he does stuff like this, and you just can't argue with it, right? And so,

anyway, he's not an engineer.

Yeah, he's not an engineer. He doesn't understand physics. You know, da da da da da. And oh, it's the other people that do it. Okay, well, who hired those people, and who had the vision for this, right? But I just think this is crazy. And I looked at the stock price this morning. Did you look at it?

Last I checked, before market opened, but it wasn't moving much at all.

Yeah, I didn't—

1.1%. Not much at all.

Yeah, yeah, not a big one. But then you look at this one. So Porsche just came out with a car yesterday. They came out with their first supercar and they picked the absolute worst day to reveal it because it's the same day that the Roadster revealed itself.

I actually like the Porsche car. I think it looks pretty sick.

It looks really sick, but would you get it? I wouldn't get it. I'd rather have like a flying car. Like with your kids, what car would you rather play with? You probably You wouldn't fly it with your kids, but what would you do?

Well, first off, let's clarify this. You cannot actually get the Tesla flying car. That is invite only. So very few people are going to have it. Second off, Elon stated that, and to go back to your first question, I would actually get the Porsche, but Elon stated that, and I have a Model Y, so I do love Tesla. And I think the Model Y is a great car and it's very practical. Uh, Elon stated that people are going to think this is AI and fake and like, it's going to be so ridiculous. It was ridiculous. My problem with that Tesla Roadster is the same problem that I have with the Cybertruck. It's not practical. Like, forget the price point, whether he wants to charge $50 grand or $200 grand or $500 grand for the one that can fly or $1 million. It genuinely is not practical. One, it, you know, people are—

Let the McRory, bro. What the fuck? What the fuck? Yo, this thing invented infinite downforce. What the fuck?

Keep going, keep going. I want everyone to see this.

Yep. People are reacting, but the reality is, is when are you going to use all of these features? What I believe, and this is just my hypothesis, it can't really fly and hold you and take you from destination A to B in the air. There's not enough thrust in there. If there was, he would've said you can fly for 30 miles straight, you know what I mean? Or he would've done like for 20 minutes straight or whatever.

Anyway, I just had to show you guys that reaction.

You can't do that. So it's just like doing a backflip in a car or whatever. Like, this is cool. Just go on a roller coaster, do whatever you want, right? But It's just not practical for everyday use. I do believe in Tesla as a company. I think it's cool what they release. I prefer the Porsche design, which is why I would say I would choose a Porsche over the Tesla. And if I was getting a supercar, the one that— I forgot what this one's called again. Roadster, right?

No, the Tesla's a Roadster. Yes.

Yeah. The Roadster is not self-driving. I like Tesla because of the technology and the self-driving capability. You take away that, right? I don't need to do backflips in the car. No offense, Porsche, Mercedes, BMW, a lot of those other manufacturers, they've— and you have a Porsche— they've really fine-tuned the comfort of the car from the seats to the massage features, like all those little things that make it special. They've done, and they do an amazing job. Tesla doesn't do a great job at those kinds of things. They do a great job at the technology. If you can't actually use the flying technology on a daily basis because it's not practical and you're driving it yourself, for me, it's not a car I would buy. But if Tesla wanted to unveil humanoid robots that'll clean your house, mow your lawn, and all this, I would be the first one signing up and putting a deposit or even paying for it upfront, even if you had to wait 5 years. Because to me, that changes people's life. A car that flips upside down doesn't change people's life. Even the downward force, dude, like, when are you really going to use that?

So my take on this one is this. So one, most people aren't going to get the Roadster because it's a very expensive car. It's $250 grand plus, right? It's— right now it's invite only.

No, no, it's $50,000.

The Roadster.

It's $50,000 starting. Go to their website. Go to their website right now. It's $50,000.

Roadster price.

Roadster Performance is $50,000. 0 to 60, I think—

So, so the AI overview on Google says this, right? And I'm not saying this is right. So look at this. Estimated price of $200K. And then 4 hours ago, Tesla Roadster price, $250K tops, but the highest level, right? And Tesla's releasing 3 different versions and the cost reserve is—

Here, let me share my screen.

Just look at this over here. I have $50,000 to reserve.

Let me share my screen.

You have $50,000 performance today. What it takes to reserve on $250,000 is thrust.

Performance reserve due today, due within 10 days is $50,000. The thrust—

To reserve it.

I thought you had to pay for the whole thing.

No, to reserve it. It's a privilege to reserve it.

Reservations are not, are not final until payment is received. Reservation is subject. If payment is not completed within 10 days, refunds or modifications will not be issued. I'm pretty sure you're paying for the whole thing upfront. It's $50,000 for the whole thing. No, it's—

I will— I don't think so. That's not how I'm reading this. And this is too nice to be only $50,000.

No, no, but the performance version doesn't have thrust.

Yeah, I don't— I just don't think it's $50,000. I don't think he's trying to make something affordable. I think he's trying to— it's a marketing stunt, in my opinion, right? Like, to me, you don't— to your point, like, I don't think you need— nobody needs thrust, right? But to show it off where everyone's like, oh my God, this and that, right? It's a marketing stunt. And I think he's done a great job with the marketing stunt. So while the Porsche might be a little more practical, I don't think it's practical either because it's a supercar. Um, but I just think it brings— he— it brings him into the conversation. It's a mindshare type of situation. That's what I think it is. And I know you're focused on the numbers right now, but I think that's a lesson for everyone. Sometimes you have to come out with a good start.

Yeah, and you are right, at least according to Google AI Overviews, which they're pulling from Tech Insider. The $50,000 performance version is an upfront reservation payment, typically broke down by a $5,000 initial card payment followed by a $45,000 wire in 10 days. Uh, they, they have not announced the actual price. So my other issue with this This is just my personal 2 cents. I don't think they're clear on the pricing. Like when you reserve some of the other cars, you at least know what you're going to pay in total. I thought you would actually know what you're getting yourself into, which kind of sucks, but it's fine. Yeah. I think a lot of people don't mind it at all. The reason I like the Porsche is, again, if I'm self-driving, you're not really going to use 0 to 60 in 1 second or 2 seconds or 3 seconds. Like I have the performance version of the Model Y. It's pretty fast. My 0 to 60 is usually like 8 or 10 seconds or 12 seconds because Los Angeles has traffic and it doesn't matter what time of the day you drive. It's very rare that you're not, you don't have the ability to drive fast, right?

Yep.

And I think the Porsche design, for me personally, I think it looks cooler, but I agree with you. I think Elon did an amazing marketing stunt. The reason the stock isn't moving is Most people don't care, um, at least the financial people. And the reason being is it's not practical for people to pay based on the pricing that you're saying and the internet's paying. And 2, it only fits 2 people. 3, people aren't going to use the features like a thruster. It's just like, I have a Maybach, you know, the Maybach SUVs.

Yep. Yep.

Right. My wife has one and mother-in-law has one. You know, they bounce, right?

Yep. I didn't know that, but I didn't even know you had 2 of them.

Uh-huh, I have 2. They're the same exact color too. They bounce and they have that feature, like, so when you're going off-roading, you can get rid of the sand. So some people use it like when they're driving up Rodeo Drive because they just drive slowly and the car just bounces because it's hydraulics. But like, no one really uses that feature. It's just coming back to, if people barely use that, who the heck is going to use a car that flips upside down? You know, like,

who's

going to use those features?

I'm just, I think my whole thing is I like the design of both the Porsche or the Roadster, right? So he has a good design team, a good engineering team, and just combining together. And then this is also a precursor to me that he's going to combine the 2 companies at some point. Yes. I remember when he did an All-In interview recently, he's like, oh yeah, you know, at some point, right? And like, yeah, he's for sure going to combine the companies. But this makes me even more bullish on the stuff that he's building with the Tesla or SpaceX. But look, I think it's a great marketing stunt. I think he has the mindshare right now. I think it's unfortunate for Porsche that they launched on the same day because they have more mindshare now. Now, Porsche will be more— I think Porsche will be fine. I mean, they didn't do well as a company this year, but I think he did a great job from a marketing standpoint. So that's what it is.

You know why Porsche didn't do well?

Well, I know the profitability is low. What happened? The economy's not doing well.

Economy's part of it, but the problem with Porsche is it stopped becoming as exclusive as a car. They started mass-producing a lot of different models. It wasn't as special, so they're going back to it. Nike has the same problem with Air Jordans. Now, Nike's Air Jordan brand was their flagship. You know what they did with Nike Air Jordans, right? Everyone has Air Jordans because they made them more affordable and they put Air Jordans on pretty much a lot of shoes and just mass-produced it. It went from people waiting in line to wanting Air Jordans to, oh, They're just putting the Air Jordan label on any type of Nike shoe and just mass-producing it. And it's all the way from really cheap to really expensive. And it made the brand lose the appeal. It doesn't mean that you can't recover, right? Louis Vuitton once had an issue in marketing and they eventually ended up fixing it. This is reversible, but these things take time.

You know what brand became cool again? Freaking Meta. I think Meta has become a cool brand again because Muse is great. I think Alexander Wang and then Mark Zuckerberg are doing the podcast circuit now. And they're like, they have a frontier model. Um, you know, Muse is great. You know, their VR glasses are coming out too. And I think from like a year ago, they weren't doing that well, right? Now they're making a comeback. Google is making a— making a— Google is always doing well, but they're occupying more mindshare now because they're back on the frontier, right? Um, so I think a lot of this stuff is just mindshare. It's like you go up and down, up and down, up and down. Um, and like, you know, a year ago, I think Tesla was showing us robots. Now it's showing us these flying cars, right? So it's always like the next thing, the next thing. The marketing is always the next thing. As Seth Godin has always said, today's amazing is tomorrow's whatever, basically. And that's how marketing has always been. So by the way, Neil, did you see this? I'm basically wearing this On branding, right? So this is from MetaMuse.

Don't mess up on their marketing. I thought you had issues with the delivery.

I did. But so they gave me— so my agent took care of it, took care of the whole thing end to end, got me 40% off, and then got me another 40% off coupon, right? So now, um, our mutual friend Yaniv, I'm here in Arizona, he's like, dude, are you sponsored by them? I was like, MetaMuse handled it. And then you see that backpack over there? That backpack is my tennis backpack, right? You see my 2 rackets over there? So he saw it the other day and he's like, this is amazing. So he had his Instinct agent buy it for him yesterday. The Instinct did all the research and found him a 20% off coupon and bought it for him. So it's the beginning of agentic commerce. Um, and I think it's been great. So. Real quick, if you want to acquire customers faster and more efficiently this year with the latest strategies and tactics, Then check out singlegrain.com. That is my ad agency. Again, www.singlegrain.com. Check it out. And if it seems like a fit, we'll get in touch and help you with a free marketing plan.

Yes. So I was talking to my team. I was in Madrid yesterday and I got back and I was talking to my team and we were talking about LLMs and marketers because what's happening right now in marketing is At least a lot of people and marketers are just like, they're using all these LLMs to help them get a lot of tasks done. But when you look at the models that Claude has been releasing recently, at least when I'm talking to marketers, right? Forget engineers, and this is just specifically marketing. They're not really seeing improvements that impact their life anymore. Sometimes they're actually switching to older models because some of the older models are doing some of the marketing tasks a little bit better than the newer models. And what I'm getting at with this is when I look at LLMs, I don't look at people paying for ChatGPT, and this is marketing specific. In marketing, I don't look at people paying for ChatGPT or Claude the future. I see them paying for agents that just help them get the tasks done. We don't really care about the models, right? Like just in reality, As a marketer, if you have tasks done, your objective is to grow traffic or revenue or boost conversions. You don't really care about the model. You just want the objective achieved. And what you really want is an agent that is just good at achieving the task. And I think marketers, when you fast forward 2, 3 years, it's going to get away from models and them talking about it. And then there's focusing on agents. And the reason I say focusing on agents is most agents really do suck. And we were talking about agents a year ago in marketing. They really aren't that great. And even right now, they're better, but they're not that great. And I'll give you a real-life example because most people right now in marketing are using agents not to get complex marketing tasks done. They're using it more like a personal assistant that's helping them just get basic stuff done. So I introduced Eric to a physical therapist, right, a few weeks ago. Mm-hmm. And Eric has an appointment. I was there in person getting physical therapy done by Jovan, right? He was pushing on my neck and back and all that kind of stuff while your agent was messaging him to book an appointment. And he was breaking down his schedule and your agent was like, this is what time slots work for him. And he was just like, oh, these slots don't work. And the agent wasn't bad. It wasn't amazing. I saw the interaction firsthand. He's like, yeah, this isn't working out. He's like, I think he's using some AI or something to message me back.

Just, just to help you here, I, I never used an agent with him. That was just with him and I. There's no agent involved.

Oh, there was no agent?

It was just me. So apparently I'm an idiot. Yeah.

No, no, no, but— or maybe his team did not understand, or he didn't understand, but eventually he figured it out because they just moved calendar. But he thought it was an agent.

Yeah.

And then I was just like, oh, this makes sense. I'm like, yeah, Eric uses agents and AI all the time. And they're like, oh yeah, it's probably his AI. I'm like, yeah, this makes sense.

But Neil, to your point there, like that, that, so that is, that, that is a good point because I'm not using an agent there because I know it's not— I'd rather just schedule it directly in some cases. And it's not reliable. It's like, for example, I'm going to be in Turkey in 2 weeks, right? So I'm trying to schedule tennis. Um, and they keep hanging up on the agent, right? Or I tried to book my dad and I for his birthday, like next week. And I think they booked a res— I think it booked a reservation, but I'm not sure if it did.

So to your point, it's

not as reliable as

Yes. And the crazy part when it comes with agents is it can be off. Like we had it book a reservation for Abra for me because I do a lot of my meetings at Abra in Beverly Hills. It booked a reservation for Abra in New York City. Hmm. And we said Abra Beverly Hills. Abra New York City is not Abra Beverly Hills. There's not 2 in Beverly Hills. There's only one. And you know how I found out? I went to Avra, like, we don't have a reservation. I'm like showing them, right? Because, you know, I looked at it and then I'm like, wait, this is actually New York. It's my fault for not double-checking.

You know what it is when it comes to all this stuff, right? Whether it's agent or like, you know, human to human or whatever, it just comes down to humans just want things to get done for them, right? And from a business standpoint, Humans just want people to either make money for them or save money from them from a business standpoint, right? But it's interesting because I was sitting in a meeting with some of our engineers earlier this week, right? And we had the 15-year-old in the meeting and the 17-year-old in the meeting, right? I was like, hey, 15-year-old, I was like, so what are you seeing, right? He's like, I see low agency in this room. I was like, I love it, right? So he's seeing that people aren't moving fast enough. He called it out himself at age 15, right? And then I went to the 17-year-old. I was like, hey, So what should we do about this? And you know what he said? He said, just effing do it. And I was like, exactly, just effing do it right now. I just thought that's funny because it comes from such young people that have such high agency. But what I wanted to show you, Neal, is this tweet from Andrej Karpathy. So I actually made something.

I

do see it. This is like only 6 billion people have barely touched an LLM, right? They're like using it for like very rudimentary stuff. Okay, six billion people. Then you have one to two billion people, twenty percent. They use it as like a glorified Google, right? And then if you zoom in a little more, Neil, you see twenty million people, point two percent of the world. They use the frontier. They they use agents to ship weeks of work, right? A lot of it's coding tasks. But then only five thousand people in the world, so point zero zero zero zero zero six, have internal frontier access. So swarms of agents that help like things with things like cancer, for example, right? So this whole thing is a funnel. $6 billion, $1 to $2 billion, $20 million, and then $5,000. And so, it just goes to show you there's a massive gap when it comes to this stuff and most people aren't going to look at the latest models, right? This ambition, access, and all this stuff. And so, keep in mind, like even if you're top 0.2% right now, which I would consider myself to be in, there's still like a— there's a tier above it, right? Which is only 5,000 people that are at the frontier. So anyway, I took Andrej Karpathy's tweet. And I decided to just make like a little game, like video from it. And this is what I came up with. So food for thought.

Yeah. On a side note, I actually know why he thought your stuff was an agent or his team thought. You probably sent him a calendar link or like a link with your schedule.

Yeah, I sent him a booking. I sent him a Reclaim link, which is not like AI or anything.

So yeah, but most people outside of tech or don't know, right?

Oh, okay.

Maybe he eventually figured it out, but it was either his team or him, you know, because I know they were talking about like his availability. But yeah, going back to this, when it comes to the frontier models, dude, even as me as a marketer, it's too overwhelming now. I don't want to pay attention to all the latest releases. It's not that I don't want to learn and get better. It's at a point where it's just too overwhelming. Just give me the tool or the agent, whatever you want to call it, that just completes the task. To me, I just look at this as very similar as SaaS. Software as a service typically was you pay for some tool that will help you with reports or tracking or CRM or chatting with your team. Now I want to pay for software. You can call it agents, you can call it AI or machine learning or whatever. I just want to pay for software that actually just helps me complete the task. I don't need as many visuals. I don't need as many reports. Let me just type in what I want done and go and do it and do it correctly. But I think we're actually very far off from the agents being good in marketing and it's taking time. And what we're seeing internally, because I was talking to my EMEA team when I was in Europe because I did Romania and I did, or I did Bucharest and I did Madrid. The big issue that we're having internally is we're paying for the tech, people are using it. Sometimes the tech, even though it's really powerful, it's creating so much slop even with humans in the loop because it's just doing a, it's doing it wrong, which they had to go and redo it or check the work, fix it, redo it, and that's causing more time than if they just did it manually in the first place.

Yeah, so I think, um, you know, with any of this AI stuff, right, like even if I show you a new agent or if I show you a new technology, if it's not reliable, people will just ignore it. So for example, OpenCLAW. OpenCLAW was cool in the beginning, but it came really It became really unreliable. Now, MetaMuse again was built off of OpenClaw. Their whole thing is they needed to make it reliable because once it becomes unreliable, people just stop using it, right? Like I've sent a lot of this stuff to the team, but they just don't use it anymore because it's unreliable right now. I think what's going to happen, Neil, is that you might inject your marketing taste because you've been doing marketing for a while. Same thing for me as well. And we're going to be selling workflows as a service so people can either rent our workflows or rent our workflows to them, or we can manage it for them, which I think a lot of people are still going to want you to manage it for them. Because again, 6 billion plus people are barely using this stuff. 1 to 2, like 7 to 8 billion people are barely scratching the surface. And so if you're in the top 0.2%, like of course they're going to want your help, right? That's why Mark Cuban is so bullish on how, you know, he would just help people with AI implementation. He wouldn't even raise money today, right? And then Jason Fried retweeted that. He's like, if I wasn't working on Basecamp right now, I honestly would just be helping people with that. Whether it's AI marketing or AI implementation, whatever it is exactly. Because the world is so behind. So workflows as a service, I think that's going to become more and more of a thing. That's why GrokBot is paying so many people right now to reveal their bots to the public, like $500 if you tweet about it every month, right, for each bot that you tweet. And then I think Twitter is also— X is also paying people $5,000 if you post 15 videos in the next, like, you know, 15 days or whatever it is, or 30 days, because they want more people to post videos, right? So it's Money's a good incentivizer. That's a side note too. Anyway, all right guys, so that is it for today. Um, we hope you have a great day and we will see you tomorrow.