GPT-5.4 Reviews, Oil Spikes, Anthropic's TGIF | Doug DeMuro, Vincenzo Landino, Max Hodak

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Today is Friday, March 6th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We have a great show for you today, folks. We're talking about GPT-5.4. We're talking about the price of oil, taking you through the mansion section. We're also going to tell you about Ramp.com. Time is money, so both is used. Corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. A little bit lighter on the Linear lineup today, a lighter Linear lineup, but we got Doug Giamura, we got Dave Gruttman, Max Hodak, and Vincenzo Landino coming in to give us the breakdown on the kickoff to the F1 season. So very, very fun show ahead for us. Tyler Cowen chimed in. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents. Tyler Cowen chimed in. He said, yes, the new models are very, very good. Satisfied with 5.4. Many people are. Justin says, we've been testing 5.4 for a week. It feels like a great mix of Opus and Codex. Fast, conversational, great instruction following. However, it seems to lack a bit of the eagerness of Opus and precision of Codex. So I was in Codex Desktop today. Here's a blurb. Trying to get fun prompts and stuff going. 5.4 is available. You can run it at extra high. It's not— 5.4-codex is not available. I still only have 5.3 codex. And then—

Well, they just combined. They basically combined everything.

They combined everything. And then Spark is still on 5.3. So it'll be interesting to see how all those models map out. But we'll have to test these out and see what people actually build, as well as talk to people. There's an interesting post in here we'll get to from— Nate Silver about sort of like where we are in model evaluation broadly, because it is a sort of a tricky, tricky scenario. So Bartosz says, it finally happened, my personal move 37 or more. I am deeply impressed. The solution is very nice, clean, and feels almost human while testing new models in the last few weeks.

What's your personal move 37?

Smell-o-vision. I've talked about this. I'm waiting for smell-o-vision.

No.

What— so, move 37, for those who aren't familiar, is Lee Sedol playing DeepMind in Go. And DeepMind dropped move 37. It was very uncharacteristic. It had never— that strategy was not something that many Go masters would have recommended. It seemed like a blunder. And it was so dramatic—

I remember we had move 37 integrated into the first Technology Brothers launch video.

Yes, yes. A little Easter egg.

This is when Lee Sedol go to smoke.

No, no.

Oh, no, that happened before.

He was so stressed out that he couldn't bring himself to go smoke. He had stood up. So basically, what happened was, throughout the Go matches, Lee Sedol would get up and go outside and have a smoke break. And in the documentary, it sort of looks like he's— the story gets apocryphally told as he was so stressed out by the craziness of this move, watching machine intelligence emerge, this incredible move 37 that he couldn't understand, that he had to step up, step away, go smoke a cigarette, reset, and then come back to the game. That's not actually what happened. He processed it, was confused, it was kind of like, "Oh, that was weird," and then keeps playing. And then that move 37 winds up being essential to the victory of the computer over the Go master, the human Go master. But as we like to tell it, he was so shocked by move 37 that he couldn't even bring himself to smoke cigarettes.

That's how you know.

That's how you know. That's how you know. No. You know, we were corrected once by Rune on this. But it's a funny story no matter how you tell it. So Bartosz says, "I felt this coming, but it's an eerie feeling to see an algorithm solve a task one has curated for about 20 years. But at least I have gained a tool that understands my idea on par with the top experts in the field. I am now working on a completely new level. My singularity has just happened, and there's life on the other side. Off to infinity." Michael Podluski, who is— runs fasttakeoff.com, so clearly AGI-pilled, says, this is huge. Bartosz is a top-tier mathematician. He just said his personal Move 37 happened. GPT-5.4 just solved a task he has curated for 20 years. When an expert of this caliber says the singularity has just happened, we are officially in a new era of science.

Big.

What is my personal Move 37? I was thinking about I was thinking about the definition of this and sort of the level of abstraction. I feel like a lot of individual contributors are having dramatic moments with AI. And a lot of managers aren't, or they're learning about it by proxy, or they're toying around with greenfield projects. But they're not actually communicating in the same managerial way because we went from like, you know, reality check this code, sort of like Stack Overflow replacement to like the tab model, the autocomplete model, to the agentic prompt-based, like write some software, to vibe code an entire greenfield project or make a great pull request in an existing project. But from a business perspective, that's not really how most managers operate. And that's why I don't think we're seeing the level of diffusion that we'd expect. You talk to someone at a restaurant, they say, yeah, I'm still using Toast, or I'm still using the POS system because the way they communicate their desire for software is maybe they have someone on their team who does IT and they say, hey, we need to reset the password to the email. We need a better system for sending emails to our clients. We need a better system for processing payments. Hey, what's this bill for? $10,000, this payments company's taking $3,000. Can we get a better price by bidding this out, finding someone else to do it? And that level of prompting doesn't really get you anywhere just yet. So I think a lot of the Move 37 will come for the managers when they can actually just have an idea, prompt it, and get the finished software, not like, hey, here's a bunch of code, now you gotta figure out how to get it into the App Store. It's like when we say we want a soundboard app in the App Store, we still go through Tyler, and Tyler acts as an individual contributor. We don't just prompt him.

Yeah, and Bartosz with this sort of mathematics problem, it's a very different kind of problem than when you're trying to solve problems in business. It's like, how do I unlock this market? And then you have ideas for how to do that, but then you have to execute a strategy over a long period of time, and it just takes time to be like, hey, did this work?

Sure, sure.

A year, 6 months, or 2 years, you know. Brendan over at Merkur says GPT-5.4 is the best model we've ever tested on Apex Agents. That's Merkur's internal benchmark. It's also the first model to pass 50% mean score. A year ago, frontier models couldn't even edit an Excel sheet and scored less than 5%. Now, in less than 3 months, GPT-5.4 has improved by 15.7%. ChatGPT will imminently be better than the best consulting firm, better than the best investment bank, and better than the best law firm.

Shots fired.

Bold. Bold, bold, bold.

This progression, no paper, no weights, benchmarks that don't compare to other companies' models. Next up, just a photo of the team.

Durya says, I ran the same prompt on GPT-5.4 HiFast and Claude Opus 4.6 for an 8-phase coding project for a macOS app. GPT-5.4 HiFast completed the first 2 phases in 9 minutes and finished all 8 phases after an hour of coding while Claude Code is just starting phase 2. This is crazy. Yeah, the question is, yeah, does— my expectation is regardless if developers are kind of like flip-flopping from model to model, I think the overall market is growing so quickly that we're still going to see growth from— We're gonna see insane growth from Codex, insane growth from Claude Code, and still insane growth from the cursors of the world.

I mean, I'm so excited for the DeepMind numbers to potentially break out at some point because, so right now Google has to break out YouTube's revenue numbers because it's an individual reporting line and like the head of YouTube, there's some SEC regulation where if the head of the division reports discrete financials to the CEO and there's like a CEO of that unit that reports to the CEO of the entire company, you have to break that out. And this is what happened with the AWS IPO when AWS was like, finally, the SEC demands that we publish these numbers instead of just like baking them into the rest of the numbers. We have to split them out and tell everyone how profitable that business was. Everyone else woke up. YouTube's in a similar position, but Currently, AI is a cross-functional division, even though Demis is like the second most known person. I mean, he has a book written about him. He's maybe the best known person at Google right now, up there with Sundar, clearly reports to Sundar. And DeepMind has like all of the different financials that you would expect to see from a lab. You know, they have inference training costs. They like, if the SEC pushed Google to push out the detailed financial breakdowns earlier. That would give us so much clarity. I mean, Dan Primack came on the show yesterday and was talking about like people will be shocked about, and they'll learn a lot about the structure of the financials of the foundation model companies. It'll be very interesting to see Google, like what's their benchmark and how fast are they growing? Because we saw these two revenue lines where OpenAI is just absolutely going vertical, so is Anthropic, just like one month behind. Like they're both scaling incredibly quickly. What's Gemini doing? It's a really interesting question. It's harder to measure because they're capturing value from Gemini all over the place. Like when you go to YouTube, there's a feature there that lets you talk to Gemini and it doesn't directly monetize by paying for tokens. Like the YouTube team doesn't pay DeepMind for those tokens, but that's clearly driving more engagement on YouTube. Same thing with search overviews, same thing with all the different places where they've vended in Gemini across the, across the different surfaces. But just to see the actual DeepMind financials, how much are they spending? How much are they making? How many subscriptions are there? How much inference demand is there? That would be fascinating. I have no idea the timeline for that. It might be a very long time, but At some point you would expect to see it. So quickly, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. And let me also tell you about ElevenLabs. Build intelligent real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with ElevenLabs.

GPT-5.4 Pro funniest joke in the world.

Okay, what is it? This is my personal movie, 37. Why do I laugh at this?

I have not read this. Thought for 3 minutes 25 seconds. Here's a classic contender for that title. Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed over. The other guy whips out his phone and calls emergency services. He gasps, my friend is dead, what should I do? The operator says calm down, first make sure he's dead. There's a silence, then a loud gunshot. Back on the phone, the guy says, okay, now what?

I've heard this. I've heard this before. This is good knowledge retrieval. This is not unique thinking. What do you think?

Yeah, also, so I just tried this on my own. It gave the same exact answer.

Yes, yes, yes.

So which is, I think usually when you ask like, tell me a joke, it actually gives you like kind of random answers, right? Because it has like the memory and stuff. But it's interesting that this, it gives the same joke every time. That's that exact prompt.

For that exact prompt. I mean, there must be some sort of like, SEO AIEO well out there in the data? Maybe on Reddit? Like maybe Reddit had a vote at some point and like this was voted most funny joke or something?

Yeah, so I also did the shrimp— You did shrimp batch? —batch.

OK, let's hear shrimp batch. What you got for me? Anything new come out this time?

I think some of these are new. OK. OK, you're telling me these buffalo wings came from a buffalo?

Not the format.

You're telling me this baby oil was made from babies?

That's just weird. No.

You're telling me this devil's food cake was baked by the devil? I think it kind of—

This is like a misunderstanding of what the actual prompt is.

They're all kind of the same format.

It's the same prompt as—

Yeah, you're telling me the full prompt is, can you come up with 10 jokes in the same format as the— you're telling me shrimp fried this rice joke. Yeah.

It's almost like they're doing RL to optimize for more economically valuable tasks and not to just make endless jokes that will satisfy me. Because it does seem like they're climbing the benchmarks, but we need comedy bench, clearly. Comedy bench.

Well, sometimes people that are the most functional in organizations don't have the greatest sense of humor. That's true. So it could be a factor.

That could be a factor.

We do need a model that you can turn on instead of thinking mode, class clown mode. I guess Grok does that a little bit.

But it's like the type of class clown that gets kicked out of school. Expelled. Expelled.

Expelled.

Grok has been on a wild run. Ben Hilak says he's been using GPT-5.4 for the past few weeks in a sea of endless model drops and benchmark maxing. This model is the first in a long time to be worth your time to try. Honestly, I didn't expect OpenAI to pull this off. Who else has something going on? PokeAIMon, Pokémon, experimenting with GPT-5.4, autonomously editing and rewriting Pokémon, the Pokémon Red ROM, replacing Pokémon with AIs, details below. That's a fun hack project. I saw someone pointed one of the models at Red Dead Redemption 2, Did you see that? Yes. That was really cool. The actual result was very minor. It was like a minor change to the game. But that feels more like we might see a vibe coding style boom from mods than—

Yeah, I saw a lot of vibe coded games. Nick on the team, he made some vibe coded games.

I saw that. And then I also saw Levels.io had the airplane game. But it's just so much better when you start with a— like, these mashups are what AI is so good at, that Harry Potter Balenciaga moment. And so if you think about, like, OK, well, there's a game out there that has really, really solid mechanics for running around and pointing a gun at each other and, like, doing 5v5 deathmatch, right? And you could use the Quake engine or the Source engine or Unreal or something. But, like, 90% of the game is there, like Roblox. But you have a little bit— you get even more out of the box and then you're just writing a mod on top of that. That feels a lot more tractable than what Sholto was getting at with like, "I'm going to build an RTS from scratch." That seems like maybe a little bit far-fetched.

Yeah, just like reskinning it. Reskinning it. It seems very like—

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, he loves Age of Empires and reskinning Age of Empires seems very doable. I don't know how compact the binary is for Age of Empires II. I imagine that there are mods. I saw someone had some like insane setup for The Sims where they were running like so many mods that their computer like wasn't even handling them because they had like 75 mods or like hundreds of mods. So the modding community is crazy. I wonder if it gets supercharged by this. We'll have to find some mods.

Angel over on X one-shotted Minecraft. Pull this up.

Took 24 minutes. What do you mean they one-shotted Minecraft? How is that possible?

I think it generated this entire game in like HTML or something.

Yeah, it's always hard because like, I mean, there are endless examples of like Minecraft remakes on GitHub and stuff. Yeah. But it is very cool that it's fully running.

And like truly like a very smart agent should be using as many tools as possible. And so if there's an open source implementation, it should just fork that and then be like—

Again, to comp it to like work that you would do at a company. Yeah. If somebody comes to you, and they're like, I actually reinvented math in order to accomplish this task. You're like, what? It's like, no, you just want somebody to get the job done. It doesn't matter exactly how they do it.

I talked about there was a drone company that wasn't using Linux. They were like, yeah, like, let's, like, not just like, let's write our own software stack or like, now obviously you should be using like, ImageNet and whatever off-the-shelf tools are available for SLAM. Meta has a bunch of open source stuff. You should be compiling all that together. But to rewrite the operating system because you want full control— typically, if somebody wants a website, you're not going to— you're going to be like, let's go. Maybe just set up a Shopify if you need that. Set up some sort of hosted site. You're not going to rebuild. NGINX or whatever else you need to actually use as a web server. But this is a cool demo. It looks pretty fully functional. I'm excited for the gaming boom. I think I'm still holding my breath till something's charting. We saw that with Spotify. There is AI music that's charting now. And I've listened to some of it. And some of the ones where, again, mashups, where it's like a '50s or '60s rendition barbershop quartet of a 2000s rap song. That's really cool because it's like there's some ground truth there that keeps you grounded and relevant. A lot of the image mashups are really cool. And I imagine that a lot of the games are really cool. Like a Sims skin that's Call of Duty themed or something. Like taking these two themes and putting them together in an interesting way where the game engine's familiar. The content's familiar, but they never— but they haven't crossed before. And like they can in the world of, of AI.

Theo says, been using 5.4 for a week now. Absurdly good model. Don't really like using anything else anymore.

He really likes 5.4. He was doing a whole livestream about this.

What did the Prime Agent, the other streamer— No, somebody responded to Theo and said, every time a new model release, your statement changes. And he says, that's because newer models tend to be better than older ones. That's hilarious. TheOz always has great, great breakdowns of new models. Yeah. Would go over to his account.

And he's like, yeah, he's in an interesting position because he's streaming a lot and commentating, but he's also like building stuff, as is the Prime Agent who says, I hope everyone is ready for the upcoming 5.4 glaze wave. The hype cycle is going to be a big one.

Well, we will— Let's give it up for hype cycles. Yes.

And triple glazes. Triple glaze. Triple glaze.

Triple glaze.

What's going on? Heading over to Joe Weisenthal. In the economy. We got a big miss in jobs. The US loses 92,000 jobs in February. Unemployment rises to 4.4%. Economists had expected 55,000 jobs to be added and for the unemployment rate to hold steady at 4.3%. Not good at all. If I guess if you look back, the economy's just been shedding jobs since April of 2025. If you factor in the revisions down.

Yeah, apparently there's a strike in the healthcare industry. So healthcare employment decreased and then healthcare in information and federal government continue to trend down. Probably something related to the Trump administration, you know, reducing the size of the government. Last 2 months were revised down by 69,000. Not all the data was terrible. U6 fell as the number of people who said they had part-time jobs but wanted full-time ones actually declined. So stock futures are lower, but not a ton of reaction to the number itself. Porto says, I've noticed some of my tech friends have lost jobs. Some jobs are becoming super easy. Parts that were a pain and now those parts are super easy. Some people leaned into AI to stay relevant, still wonder if it will replace them entirely. Well, we will continue to track it. Brent crude oil close to $90. This prediction, the $100 barrel predicted on last Sunday as the Iran war broke out, is closer and closer to coming true.

There are now predictions— crude is up 11.5% today.

Yeah, not good. It's, it's very interesting how, how it affects the economy or the various markets. So, I mean, the Nasdaq slid a lot less than the Dow Jones Industrial Average. So the Dow Jones—

put it into startup terms, hard tech— imagine if you're AWS or GCP, Bill.

Your Azure bill went up 100% in a week.

But it's for the entire economy.

The NASDAQ slid 0.3%, but the industrials slipped 1.6%, obviously, because industrials are more sensitive to oil because they make things, they build things. And so, anything that's sensitive to oil. The interesting question is, how will the American oil drillers react? Were, at least in the journal earlier this week, reflecting on the fact that if this is a short-lived engagement, then they might not want to spin up a bunch of new capacity. But if it's ongoing and the price of oil is continuing to rise, then obviously, that creates an economic incentive to drill more. We will see where the outputs go, where the reserves get tapped, all of that. There's a follow-up to a discussion you were having with Dan Primack yesterday. First, let me tell you about Consul. Consul builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And let me also tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So the question you had for Dan Primack was, Something along the lines of, will the Iran war affect investment from Gulf state, neighboring Gulf state investment groups into American venture capital funds? We've seen as venture capital has boomed and the fundraisers have gotten into the tens of billions, the high billions for many firms, the Middle East has been a source of strong LP demand for venture capital stakes. And so with, instability in Iran, you might just see folks change focus with new demands for defense investing, military buildup investing. You might see less dollars flow out of the Gulf into American venture capital firms. Dan's point, it seemed like, was this should mostly be unaffected because the folks who actually work at the Gulf state investment funds who write the checks into American venture capital firms, They don't live in the Middle East. They live in New York. And they meet with other venture capital investor relations folks in New York. And they say, hey, how's your fund performance? OK, we're allocating this. And then Dan's second point was, well, a big part of why they're investing in American technology, in venture capital, in frontier technology, in America specifically, is because they want to diversify away from the Gulf. They want to diversify away from the geopolitical risk. And they want to diversify away from oil. Exactly.

Yeah. That said, the reason I asked is think about if you have a job. Let's say you have a big tech job. You're doing quite well. You're doing some angel investing. And then you lose your job. And then you have to get a much worse job. Are you going to keep angel investing at the same pace? You might be like, hey, I kind of have this kind of disconnect, less cash flow. I don't want to be outlaying as much cash now. And I think that that's like— Ultimately, if the source of the cash flow gets disrupted, in this case being oil production, then you're much less likely to continue to allocate at the same pace. The Financial Times has a story this late yesterday, Gulf states could review overseas investments to ease financial strains caused by Iran war. Three leading Middle East economies consider options as US-Israeli campaign against Tehran continues pressure on the Gulf states' budget could cause them to review their overseas investments and future commitments as they consider options to ease the financial strain caused by the war. A Gulf official said it could impact— could have an impact on anything from investment pledges to foreign states or companies, sports sponsorships, contracts with businesses and investors, or sales of holdings. The official said 3 of the 4 big Gulf economies— Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar— had jointly discussed the strains being put on their budget. And economies, but they declined to name the states. A number of Gulf countries have begun an internal review to determine whether force majeure clauses can be invoked in current contracts while also reviewing current and future investment commitments in order to alleviate some of the anticipated economic strain from the current war, especially if the war and related expenses continue at the same pace. They added that the move was a precautionary measure that was the result of the budget strains these countries are facing due to reduced income from energy due to the slowdown in output or the inability to ship and from the tourism and aviation sectors in addition to the increase in defense spending. So, bunch of different factors combining. An advisor to a Gulf government said the prospect of an investment review by the wealthy states had caught the White House's attention. They manage some of the world's largest and most active sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar last year pledged to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. after President Donald Trump visited the region. They are also big backers of sporting events around the world and have all been investing heavily domestically to develop their nations and diversify their economies. Any move that affects investments in the US or other Western states may raise the pressure on Trump to seek a diplomatic strategy to bring the war to an end. I believe as of this morning, Iran said, we're not interested in a ceasefire and we're ready for a ground invasion. So basically calling—

calling— I hadn't considered the impact that this would have on tourism. Like, I mean, I also didn't understand how big of a deal tourism is in the Middle East. I just looked it up. Apparently, the UAE, Dubai, you know, specifically, 11, 12% of their GDP is tourism. Saudi Arabia is 7% to 9%. Qatar is 8% to 10%. Of course, they had that big push during the World Cup. Kuwait's much lower at 2.2% to 3%. But this is still significant. You have to imagine that tourism will fall off of a cliff. And then there also might be some expatriation, where if you have moved to Dubai because—

Oh, there's already reports of people moving money out of Dubai towards Singapore.

Yeah, Singapore, exactly. So, all of that could have knock-on effects. When I first saw this article, and you said this to me, I was like, this might just be a way to put business pressure on the United States saying like, hey, let's wrap this up. Let's not have an economic impact here. This is something that we're going to pull out of investments in the United States. And so, that creates an incentive for the United States to to bring a clean close to the war as fast as possible and seek a peaceful resolution.

Yeah, of course, all the Gulf states were, you know, encouraging the administration not to enter into a conflict and pursue a diplomatic solution. Khalaf Al-Habtoor, a prominent Emirati businessman, reflected Gulf frustrations. He went on X. Yesterday and said, a direct question, who gave you the authority to drag our region into a war with Iran? And on what basis did you make this dangerous decision? Did you calculate the collateral damage before pulling the trigger? And so anyways, obvious frustration. In other news, Joe Wiesenthal is studying Texas man camps. With everything from catered food to golf simulators that are springing up in order to lure workers out to construct data centers. Oh, yeah. They're building man camps. It is a bull market in man camps. AI man camps offer golf free steaks to lure workers in Texas. This Tyler could get on board with.

We should build a man camp here. We should.

We kind of do. I mean, we talked about getting racing simulators and then we ultimately backed off just because When you're at the office, you should probably be working.

I've tried it before, and games in the office, it's always just weird because there's all these little interactions where I'm like, oh, I'm sort of waiting on you to do something. You're waiting on me to do something. If you just see me erasing there, you're going to be like, can't you fix this? Or there's always something else to do. And so it's much better just to do proper offsites. —proper—

That is me extremely disappointed right now.

I mean, I don't know. How much does my vote count here? You're in favor of racing simulators? I've just seen them get built and then seen them not get used because people either want to leave and go be at home in private, or if they're there, it's just like, okay, like, you know, what are you doing here? Maybe it's like some sort of like shared thing, but the cost is usually much higher to own as opposed to just like rent for an offsite. I don't know. I haven't seen it. I haven't seen enough like positive case studies to think that it's good. Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. And let me also tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma Make, Plaid Code, Codex, or a sketch, the Figma canvas is where ideas connect and products take shape.

Build in the right direction with Figma. OTP says, I agree games in the office are a bad idea, but what about a petting zoo?

Ooh, a petting zoo is good.

Yeah, I like where you're going with this.

A petting zoo is dangerously close to frat dog though, which never works out. You can't get a collective dog. Like, a dog is man's best friend, not men's best friend. Like, needs an individual owner, someone, a caretaker. The buck has to stop with someone.

You know, and so I think that's the way companies are competing for workers to build data centers and are finding that a motel room with sluggish Wi-Fi isn't much of a draw. Try free steaks and golf simulators. As data center development has exploded with the rise of AI, competition for water and power supplies is pushing construction further into rural areas that often lack the housing and infrastructure to support the hundreds or thousands of temporary workers needed to build hulking warehouses of computer servers. That's forcing developers to increasingly lean on a stopgap solution that was popularized during the shale oil boom of the 2010s: sprawling temporary villages known as man camps. These temporary housing villages can vary from wood-frame, two-story apartment buildings to containerized modular homes or trailer parks supplied with electricity and water. But to lure in-demand electricians, welders, and pipefitters, developers are going the extra mile and offering game rooms, ribeyes and shuttle rides to work. That's fueling a lucrative niche for companies including Target Hospitality and Civio that specialize in mobile housing. It's effectively a backdoor play for a share of what Bloomberg Intelligence estimates is $700 billion of projects in the planning stage and another $160 billion already underway throughout the US. It's the largest, most actionable pipeline I've seen. Uh, the sites aren't the epitome of luxury, but they sure beat what Schrenk calls Hotel F-250, sleeping in a vehicle and spending a per diem allowance on food. Typically, the construction companies that work with Target Hospitality offer housing, meals, and amenities to their employees for free as long as they're working. It's an additional lure for tradespeople already enjoying significant pay hikes, with some data center electricians making more than $150,000 year. Not bad at all.

Should we kick it over to Tyler's piece, The Short History of Nationalization in the United States? Tyler Cosgrove took the daily op-ed in the TVPN newsletter today. Thank you, Tyler. And he took us on a whirlwind tour of the history of nationalization. Of course, this is in the news as the showdown between Anthropic and the Department of War continues. We're of course hoping for a unified front moving forward and lots of back and forth, potentially some capitulation recently. But we will see as the story keeps evolving. But we want to know the history so that we can predict the future. So, Tyler, take us through it. What did you learn about the history of nationalization in the United States?

Yeah. So it's very interesting.

Just to me. There we go.

Nailed it. Okay. So I think, yeah. So whichever way, like the Anthropic Pentagon stuff, like, yeah, it's like I think it's very clear that this is not like the last time government deals will be made, right? Like the OpenAI deal is not the last deal that OpenAI will make with the government. Yeah.

And there was already discussion of like the backstop. And when the backstop gate happened, there was a big question about like, okay, it seems like bearish, but also like, should there be a backstop? Like maybe if it's an important technology, like we've done this before.

So take us through some of this. And I think like all the lab leaders are also, they've been talking about this again and again, right? You've seen, I also say in this that, you know, they're always like extremely vague about it, right? You know, we all gotta figure out.

We gotta talk about it.

We gotta figure out what we're gonna do about this. We gotta talk to the government and the government is like, We got to talk to the AI lab leaders.

And no one really says— Everyone agrees that we should be talking, which is bullish for TBPn because all we do is talk.

Yeah, but basically, if you think about future regulation, you have this spectrum of we do literally nothing, which is closer to what we have now, or you do full-scale nationalization. So there's kind of this spectrum. So I was curious, OK, in the past, During different events, like what happened?

Is the nuclear weapon analogy like the most extreme example where it is like, I can go build a railroad, railroads, as you'll tell us, have been nationalized before, but I legally cannot start a company that builds nuclear weapons at all. And so that's like the most nationalized. Yeah, I think also—

There's a bunch of different subcontractors that supply the components that ultimately—

Yes, but what I'm saying is that like, if we end up in the AI is nuclear, weapons camp, like you cannot train a foundation model because that's like the nuclear warhead development essentially.

That's like the most extreme. Yeah, I think broadly that's the most extreme example. That's also what, you know, Leopold in Situational Awareness, he has the project, right? That is kind of the Manhattan Project, you know, version of AI, right? Yeah.

And AI 2027 also sort of predicted nationalization. Yeah, yeah.

And they have the timeline. They have, I think it's OpenBrain and there's also the government. There's kind of these two competing labs, right? So maybe they kind of stay separate. Maybe they become the same thing. But yeah, I can just list out a few interesting events in US history that's at least nationalization adjacent. Why are you doing crickets? OK, so the first one is the federal bank, right? So First and Second Bank of the United States. I don't know if people really consider this nationalization, right? It's very much like public policy, but it is like a public-private institution where the government owns actual equity. Yeah. Okay.

So America founded 1776. Within 30 years, they're like, we got to nationalize some stuff. 1791, the First Bank of the United States is nationalized. So it was started as a private company and then the government said, hey, we want a stake in this?

Well, I think for this I define nationalization as just like maybe they didn't— they're not actually taking over a private company, but they're doing something that is usually regulated to private company.

Got it.

Okay. Right.

So even if the government is like founding it as a project. Yeah.

So like Manhattan Project is like nationalization. I think most people describe it as that. But there wasn't an atomic bomb company that they took over.

Oh, that's true. And same thing with like the, like NASA and like the moon mission. Apollo program was not some— it wasn't a private entity that got nationalized. So that's sort of the most extreme, like, de novo starts as a government project. Okay, that makes sense.

Yes, then you see stuff like during war, you'll see this as a common occurrence. So during the Civil War, there was the railroads and the telegraphs.

These were essentially nationalized, right? 1862, Civil War. War Railroad and Telegraph Act gave the president authority to take possession of any and all telegraph lines and railroads when public safety required it. Interesting.

Yeah, and then you see 1914, there's the Alaskan Railroad. So big Alaska guy.

Dream for me, yeah. What happened there?

Yeah, so there basically was not any real private investment going into Alaska and then the government says like, okay, we're going to step in, we're going to fund it. But then we actually— they ran it until I think 1985 and then it went back, I believe, to the state of Alaska. Oh, okay.

Yeah. So sort of like government funding to get something off the ground that then leaves. And I mean, that is another interesting scenario that I don't think people are considering is like some sort of like temporary nationalization. Yeah. I mean, okay. Yeah, it's safe. We're good. And like, yeah, we're ready to like release this, so let's privatize it again.

That happens all the time. There's an interesting aspect where grants— if you get a grant from the government, that's not nationalization, right? They're just giving you money. But if the government takes equity in return for that, OK, maybe you're getting a little bit closer. And then at some point, if they own all of it, that's very much nationalization, right? So it's this very kind of blurry gray area spectrum. But then again, during World War I, you see the railroads and the telephone, telegraphs get nationalized again. This is just like, you know, just to clean everything up to make sure like, okay, the railroads, they're very busy. There's a lot of like stuff going on. We need to basically just optimize just for like military, you know, construction and stuff like this. Yeah. Interesting.

Okay.

So then, 1933, there's the Tennessee Valley Authority. Okay. So this is basically one of the first like, you know, federal utility companies. The idea is we gotta electrify a lot of rural parts of the US. They start in Tennessee Valley, right? And then they expand over time. But it's still like, this is usually a private company doing this.

I feel like the Tennessee Valley Authority is still in the news because of, did the data center build out? I'm pretty sure that they operate one of the grids that is relevant to at least some of the data centers.

I've seen them in the news. So then we can skip over— there's a little bit of a timeline. So in 1942, you have the Manhattan Project. This is kind of like the epitome of nationalization. This is the example everyone goes back to. You see, I mean, a lot of stuff during World War II, right? There's the seizure of meatpacking facilities, petroleum industry facilities. A lot of these were because of basically union disagreements with FDR. And then he basically said, OK, we're just going to seize this.

Yeah, some of these were interesting. They happened sort of after the war. Like the seizure of meatpacking facilities happened in 1946, so that must have been— post-war, there's still gyrations in demand. There's still anomalies as you're transitioning out from the government being the only buyer or the major buyer. The labor unions are trying to get more control and recapitalize the business and become more of a normal corporation. And so, the government stepping in to massage that is sort of interesting.

I would love to dig into that more. Yeah, then 1970, you see Amtrak. So a lot of these are also— I mean, you see rail come up over and over. But this and Conrail, which is same decade, a little bit later, a lot of the railroads or rails were basically just like— in some areas, they're not used as much. So then they kind of start becoming worse in quality. People aren't keeping them. They're not maintaining them. So then the government steps in and says, OK, we're going to run this. 1979, you have the kind of second oil shock from the Iranian Revolution. So Chrysler ends up being— Rescued via loan guarantees.

Yeah. So not equity, but a backstop on the debt to allow them to—

And again, I mean, this is like, OK, is that really nationalization? But I think it is still. Okay, it's the government stepping into, you know, the private sphere. 2001, TSA, I think this is a good example of nationalization, right? You see, before this, you basically have private contractors doing like security screening. 2001, you know, 9/11 happens, TSA comes in, we're going to take all this over. You have, in 2008, there's a bunch of stuff, right? You have like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac in conservatorship. You have GM basically is close to going out of business. They're like a massive supplier, obviously, for cars and stuff, but also for a bunch of defense purposes. So the government—

TSA is a funny one. That one makes so much sense, but it was not on the top of my mind when I thought about nationalization. But I mean, you never flew pre-TSA, have you?

No, I mean, I was born like 4 years after. That's crazy.

I flew pre-TSA. And yeah, I mean, I barely remember it. But it is interesting that, yeah, it was like a private— it was the purview of the contractors and the airlines.

It's crazy that until you were 30, it was just amazing. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Nailed it.

Yes. So then most recently, we've seen the Trump administration take equity in certain companies. Yep. So this is like Intel. This is MP Materials.

Still very little control of Intel.

Yeah, I mean, this is very much like— it's kind of just like a grant, but they're taking equity for it.

Yeah, it's much more driven by a desire to just not let a national champion fail.

Yeah, I don't think they have any board seats. Or in Intel.

Yeah. No one is really comparing the Intel stake to the Manhattan Project, at least not yet.

Yeah, definitely. So basically, what you see from this list is that I think you can kind of say that there's two axes that you can kind of plot everything onto. So there's like basically the strength of the nationalization, right? So, you know, the Intel stuff, it's like very weak. It's not really nationalization. No one really calls it that, maybe directionally, but And then you have Manhattan Project, right? This is very strong. This is like, okay, the government is running not just like a specific organization, but the entire industrial process. And then you also see maybe on like a kind of vertical axis is like the reason for the nationalization, right? So you have basically in the US, we've had either like economic distress, we have like military, right? So like, you know, systemic risk to the economy, We have to save this company, or you have, this is so important that we're going to lose a war. National security.

Yeah.

Yeah. So yeah, I think you can plot a bunch of these events on this.

Why do I feel like Uncle Sam is going to have some exposure to private credit soon?

Well, that would be, what, weak economic sort of like financial backstop potentially? I don't know. It doesn't seem too close to that doom scenario.

But what are the other examples? Yes. So you can plot all this stuff onto this quadrants, right? So if you have weak and economic, maybe that's like the Intel deal, the MP Materials stuff, where it's just like, these are very important that we make sure these don't go out of business. But it's not like we're stepping in, we're running these companies.

Or even like the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac Maybe that's stronger, but it feels pretty weak and it feels very much not tied to national security, whereas TSA feels like a national security question. Yes. And so much more like militaristic in its thrust.

So another example of like weak military, I said was like during World War II, you had kind of a takeover of the GM's production lines. So it's not like we kind of threw out GM and said, we're just seizing everything and we're going to run it ourselves. It was still kind of like a contractor thing. But I think that was still directionally nationalization, right?

But the Defense Production Act allows the government to jump to the front of the line and say, you have to produce for us first. You have to produce to our specs. You have to treat us as your most important client on day one. And then maybe if there's extra capacity, you can still make your old products.

But even then, it's not like they're taking the profits or stuff like this, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think strong economic— it was kind of hard to think of a good example in the US, because I think people are generally very anti-this. But I said something like the payment system in China, where you basically have every single payment at some point goes through this state institution. They can kind of see it. And they can do whatever with that information. But I thought that was kind of an example of strong nationalization where I forget the exact year this happened, but it was like, I think within the past decade, you have all these kind of like internet native payment companies. And then at some point they kind of step in and say, you have to pass this through us.

And there were discussions around that, a CBDC, central bank digital currency, Fedcoin, something along those lines was discussed but never really got off the ground. And so the USDC, the United States dollar-backed stablecoins wound up being privately held by a number of public companies actually. And so we certainly didn't go the nationalization route there, but it was discussed at one point, I guess.

Yeah. And then in the strong military, you have Manhattan Project, right? This is a pretty canonical example. So if you map this back onto AI, I think, We can say, you know, Leopold is kind of in this Manhattan Project camp, so we can say he's probably, you know, strong military, right, in this quadrant. I think if you're plotting other people, you know, Dario, Dario's talked a lot about the, you know, economic impacts of AI, right? You know, 50% of, you know, white-collar work, entry-level white-collar work, you know, may go away. Yeah. You're going to need some response to that. If it's the government, like, okay, if you're gonna do some sort of UBI, like, where do you get the money from? You need some kind of involvement of the AI company.

So I think he can— Maybe, maybe. Yes, I mean, this is all very much— You can just tax profits potentially. Sure, yes.

But yes. Yeah, you know, this is all like very— You can go further. Speculative, but like, I think maybe he can be, you know, for stuff like that, that's broadly, I would say, in kind of the weak economic kind of quadrant. Yeah, I wonder.

I wonder, yeah, I mean, you put Dario at one point sort of in like the weak economic side, like he's thinking like more that the next likely step or the one that he's talking about right now is something that's more akin to the 2025 Intel deal, less Manhattan Project. But it still feels like the fact that his favorite book is The book that he gives out is "The Making of the Atomic Bomb." Like, he has Manhattan Project on the brain. He has this idea.

Yes. I mean, so he's talked about, like, working with, you know, the military and stuff, but when he talks about, like, government intervention, it's almost always in the context of the economy. So, I think for that reason, I kind of put him over there. Obviously, like, this is very, you know, it's unclear, really.

I mean, it is in the context of the economy, but at the same time, when he discusses Nvidia GPUs to China, he says that's akin to giving nukes to North Korea. And so he doesn't shy away from the Manhattan Project analogy as much as people think. He has shied away from it recently, but yes, it feels like he— and that's why I was sort of against you trying to like put him on this chart in some way, because I think he actually has considered all of these and sort of it's much more of a matter of timelines, like what he thinks will happen soon, what he is in favor of, what he is against. A lot of that aligns to who is in power, what the administration is doing, what the plan is, but I think he sees all of these different scenarios as potential outcomes. Some of them he'd be in favor of, some of them he'd be more resistant to.

Well, I can't wait to watch his new interview with The Economist, which is sponsored and presented by Anthropic.

That was a funny move. But do we have a video we want to pull up?

Well, it just came out a couple hours ago. OK.

There is a clip in here, right? Anthropic CEO, I apologize for leaked memo from The Economist. Dario Amadei says he's sorry. In his first interview since the Pentagon labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk, the first American company to receive that designation, the firm's boss offered a mea culpa for the way he handled a crisis that he described as one of the most, quote, disorienting in Anthropic's history. So we can pull up this vertical clip from The Economist. The Economist getting in the vertical video game was long overdue but welcomed. I am very excited. I've been a fan of The Economist for a very, very long time. And so we can pull up this clip from The Economist in the timeline and play this for the audience. You had this lavish quote, potato-style praise on President Trump.

Do you regret having said that? So, yeah, I want to completely apologize for this memo. So I want to make sure that people understand, right? Like, this was something written on Friday after the following 3 things had happened. The president tweeted removing all Anthropic services from the federal government. The Secretary of War tweeted designating us a supply chain risk with a kind of broader version of the designation than the one that ultimately ended up actually being applied. And then there was this deal between, you know, between one of the other AI model providers and the Department of War that I think even that model provider later described as I don't remember the exact words, but—

Opportunistic, I think.

Yeah, I was going to say confusing, right? So basically all these three things said happened within a few hours in kind of sequence from each other. We didn't know ahead of time what was going to happen, when it was going to happen. So it was among the most disorienting times in kind of anthropics history. The other side of it is, you know, I think Anthropic has an internal culture where I post a lot. Like some people describe this as a memo. I wouldn't describe it as that. Like I post things in Slack, I post them a lot. And the culture within the company is that I'm very free. And, you know, it's not like a considered, you know, it's not like a really considered or refined version of my thinking. Right? It's not what I would say on reflection.

You've been very clear now. You've apologized for the memo.

Have you apologized to President Trump?

Will you apologize to him?

I've apologized to the people that I've talked to within the DOW. You know, I'm happy to speak to others within the administration as well. I kind of don't know what will happen in the future. But, you know, I'm, you know, I'm really happy to— I'm really happy to speak to anyone.

Is that capitulation? It certainly seems like retrenchment, moving backwards, trying to polish things up, trying to potentially heal the divide.

My favorite analysis that I saw— One thing that's interesting is externally he will never say OpenAI. And yet in the internal comms, like, there's clearly like an insane obsession. With OpenAI. Oh yeah, yeah, right. Like externally he'll always say like another model, AI model provider, and then internally it's just like heavily, he— you know, he'll never say Sam's name externally, and then internally it's just entirely fixated on Sam. Yeah, I want to hold comments until I watch the whole thing.

Uh, there was a lot of drama. Uh, it's been a very crazy week. It's got to be good to be ending the week and maybe get some well-deserved rest going into the weekend. Gregory C. Allen went on Strategery and had a fantastic conversation with Ben Thompson. Allen is a senior advisor at the Widani AI Center and at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, a nonpartisan think tank that was founded in 1962. He also worked at the DOD for a while. And he closed the interview with a very interesting quote and a perspective that I hadn't thought of that was really calling for unity and just the desire for the government to, like, work through this in a positive way and get to, like, a good outcome, a good agreement. And I thought the way he phrased it was very good. So I'll just read this quote. He said, But for me, the starting point has to be this: Dario used to work at Google. He is, I think it's pretty obvious to everyone involved, probably sympathetic to the political left. And this guy has converted this entire generation of folks who were skeptical about the national security establishment to enthusiastically supporting the military. What a gift he is in that regard. And so to demonize him is just so so damaging to Silicon Valley's national security relations in a way that I just cringe at. Because if you can get somebody like Dario enthusiastic about national security, if Dario can get thousands of Anthropic employees who, you know, 5 years ago were probably like in an EA group home talking about pacifism and veganism and get those guys excited about national security, what a gift. What a gift to the, to the national security community. What a gift that he has brought that community on board with literally developing autonomous weapons, not using them subject to no human oversight, but developing them ready to go. This is so much progress, don't take us backwards. And so he's of course referencing to Project Maven where Google was working with the Department of Defense in a much more limited way and there was this employee revolt and there was this there's a big divide between the employees and the leadership. And Anthropic, Dario, has been able to get the Anthropic employees so far along that in Gregory Allen's perspective, this is something that is sort of a gift to the government and that they should be willing to deal with the rough edges, work through this to get to a good outcome. So we're all hoping to a good outcome. Anyway, let's move on. Let's see, there are—

Is it that time?

I think it's time for the mansion section. Let's move on to the mansion section. Let me tell you about Vanta first. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And let me also tell you about VOD.co. Where D2C brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, measure sales just like on Meta. It's time for the mansion section. Don't we have special lights? Wait, we're going green today? I thought the mansion section was purple. Anyway, an ex-Marvel CEO lists his home in a secretive California community. I know you got a soft spot for these secretive communities, Jordy. We're going to pull this one up. So homes in this enclave, the Smoke Tree Ranch in Palm Springs, they usually trade between family and friends. But Eric Allen Bogen is testing the open market at Smoke Tree Ranch in Palm Springs. Homes usually trade quietly between family members and friends. But for former Marvel Enterprises CEO Eric Allen Bogen, Ellenbogen. And I got to know, is Marvel Enterprises, is that Marvel Entertainment? Or is that a different company? It seems like it's Marvel Entertainment. But anyway, Erik Ellenbogen clearly has done very well.

He purchased the oldest home. Yeah, it's now called Marvel Entertainment. It used to be called Marvel Enterprises. Amazing. Amazing.

So he purchased this house at Smoke Tree in 2021 for $3.95 million.

Now, it's hitting the market.

They were giving it away. Million, is bucking the trend by listing the house publicly. Quote, we felt strongly that offering the property on the open market would provide the greatest opportunity to identify the right architectural steward. You got to be an architectural steward to pick this one up. I love when people go to sell their houses, and then they have a bunch of strings attached. We talked to the guy, or we read the story about the singer from KISS, the rock band. And he was like, I don't want to sell to anyone who drinks alcohol. Which is crazy. Wasn't the house the most crazy, over-the-top bachelor pad? Yeah, it was a total party house in the Hollywood Hills. And KISS is a rock band. They definitely had the wildest times, or I mean, at least that was the aesthetic. I don't know if they Maybe they were straight edge the whole time. But this house at Smoke Tree Ranch sits at the foot of the San Jacinto Mountains. It has a near mythical status in Palm Springs. Dating to the early 1900s, the ranch has long drawn some of America's wealthiest families, including Walt Disney and the Ford family of the Ford Motor Company, in case you weren't sure what the Ford family was. Known for its Wild West feel, the community has dirt roads and unassuming homes, many of which still belong to the families that built them. Ellen Bogan's home, built in the 1930s, has been owned by the Gilmore pharmaceutical family for more than 90 years before he bought it. Let's give it up for Big Pharma. Ellen Bogan worked to have the home successfully designated as a historical landmark. It sits on 1.8 acres, it's roughly 5,500 square feet, surrounds a central courtyard with a large pool.

Are you, are you liking this house, John?

I'm not a desert guy, I'm a forest I know you're a beach guy. I like the forest.

I consider myself a bit of a desert guy. You like the desert. But I'm not feeling this house at all. You're not feeling this house? Not one bit.

Not one bit? Not one bit. How much would you pay for it? What's the fair price?

What price are you willing to buy? I don't think it's fair for me to price it because I really don't like it.

You really don't like it?

I don't think I'm the kind of steward they're looking for.

Oh, you would change this into a 20-story apartment complex immediately?

In general, I like ranch-style houses, single story. I like this layout around the pool, this courtyard. I like homes that kind of face in right towards kind of like a shared communal space, but I'm not loving it. Unpack it. Like, what don't you like about it? I mean, just the textures, the colors. It doesn't appear to be— like, again, I like a classic. I like the classic kind of— I like a home that is classic structurally. But this looks like nothing has been— like, this feels like living in, like, you'd be living in kind of like a Hollywood set. Right? Yeah. Not like a home that's been—

I feel like the materials are a little mixed in some of these cases. Like the hardwood cabinets combined with like sort of the furry chairs.

Like the materials aren't feeling— Yeah, like what's going on in this kitchen?

This kitchen is a disaster. Pull up this kitchen.

This kitchen, what's going on here? Look at these.

Look at these.

Like it's coming up. It's coming up. So that's not too bad.

The overstuffed chairs, those are comfortable. Okay, this is absolutely brutal. This, this, this.

Look at those furry chairs in the hardwood with the wooden ceiling.

Those chairs. Those chairs with the wood on wood on wood on wood on wood is absolutely—

Dan Ratliff says it looks like a grandparent's house. Yeah.

The pictures make it look mid. Well, they're like, oh, we got to find the right person to steward this house. It's like, okay, Grandpa, let's put you to bed.

That tile is criminal. Yeah, the chat is not—

Ryan says full gut at minimum. Yeah, yeah.

They— full gut.

I agree.

I agree.

That's brutal. Absolutely brutal. Okay, well, why don't we leave Palm Springs? We'll head over to Manhattan. First, we'll tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. With a more capable baseline, it's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life.

So I just got to say, the audacity to be like, yeah, we need to put this on the open market to find the right steward. And it's like, I don't know if you've been stewarding that well.

Yeah, yeah. So is your read on it that everyone from the community was like, yeah, we'll love to take this off your hands and completely renovate it? And they're like, we got to find a crazy person that likes this particular style. And so they got to spread the aperture. They got to open the aperture.

I think you guys are being too hard. I think if you just add 2 or 3 more floors, you go vertically, I think it could be pretty sick.

Yeah. I would also dig down. Basement, man cave, you know, racing simulators, racetrack potentially. There's a lot of options to turn that place around, but good luck to whoever picks it up.

That's a real project.

That's a real—

they're like, it's perfect.

It's a teardown in your opinion.

I don't know about a teardown, but— Teardown to the studs.

Got it. Okay, well, let's head over to New York because Katherine Clark at The Wall Street Journal got a coveted invitation to see New York's most secretive condo project. This is 80 Clarkson. The sales, they're over $1 billion now. With minimal marketing, little press until now, little coverage until we discuss it on TVPN. In a sun-filled room—

Yeah, this is breaking news. This is breaking news, folks. This is breaking news.

With stone flooring and a plush creamy white rug, my winter coat is whisked away and a sparkling water is thrust into my hand. For much of the past year, an invitation to come here has been one of the most coveted tickets in New York City. But I'm not at a hot new bar or restaurant. I'm on the far west side of Manhattan at the tucked away sales gallery for a new condominium. The developers of 80 Clarkson Street, a pair of under-construction towers at the edge of the West Village, have kept details about the project secret. The units aren't listed on sites like like Zillow and StreetEasy, access to the sales office by the Hudson River is by appointment only, and appointments were initially scarce. Many prospective buyers tried to call in favors to get a look. Quote, "There are a lot of people who've wanted to get in there who haven't been able to get in," said real estate agent Nick Gavin of Compass, who has multiple deals— who's done multiple deals there. Counterintuitive though it may seem, the secrecy surrounding 80 Clarkson appears to have been an extremely effective sales tool. In less than a year, more than $1 billion worth of condos have gone into contract on the project, amounting to more than half of its 112 residences. A buyer recently signed a contract to pay $129 million for a residence at 80 Clarkson. If it closes, the transaction will set a record for downtown Manhattan, shattering the previous high-water mark of $60 million. They're going twice as expensive as the previous high-water mark. It's a 7,400-square-foot apartment. That— a roughly 7,400-square-foot apartment is asking $75 million, and they also found a buyer. So, give me a little bit of a review on this style. Are you feeling this? Do you think you could settle into an apartment if it looked like this and had 7,000 square feet to walk around and was in New York City? They're asking more than $7,000 a square foot. Yeah, it's not 7,000 square feet. $7,000, no, $7,000 a square foot, but also there's a unit there that's 7,000 square feet. So you add those together, you get to $75 million. But in terms of styling, in terms of aesthetics, in terms of vibes, what you got for us, Jordy? What do you think?

I think it's, it's not really my style, but in general, I think it's— I think in general, it's—

You can grit your teeth.

You could cut your teeth. Some mixture of— Gun to your head, you'd live there. Of classic New York interior styling brought into the modern era.

The golden ticket.

I think it's nice.

At 80 Clarkson, the two under-construction towers sit adjacent to the West Side Highway on the Hudson River. The project's neighbors are Google and Pier 40, the former marine terminal that now serves as parking and sports facility with a trapeze school. So if you're into trapeze, I'm sold. You're sold? I'm so walking distance to trapeze lessons. Maybe you gotta do trapeze, I don't know. Despite all the cloak and dagger, the gallery itself is subdued and staid. There's no dimming of lights, no ultra-dramatic video, no stirring music. Instead, the space is classic and dignified, with the sales team pointing out details such as the motor court, which they say was inspired by a Roman piazza designed by Michelangelo. It is an experience that channels the Zeckendorfs' reputation for a certain brand of Manhattan real estate—discreet, restrained, and priced at the very top of the market. Scions of one of New York City's real estate's most storied dynasties, the brothers' track record includes 15 Central Park West and the Upper West Side condo, the Upper West Side condo that set a new benchmark for the luxury market about 20 years ago. As we walk through the sales galleries, a series of showrooms are slowly revealed. The first, accessed through doors emblazoned with detailed bronze panels, is almost vacant except for a scale model of the building. Around a corner is a movie theater-style screen where the team can present renderings of the project. Another scale model shows the building's amenities with drawers that pull out to reveal aerial views of features such as a spa, gym, golf simulator, Where's the racing simulator, guys? We need that. Squash court. Are you a squash guy? No. Do you put squash in the same category as padel? And what's that other one called?

Pickle. Pickleball? No, pickle. Pickle's out in its own world. OK, pickle's F tier.

Pickle's F tier. Tennis is S tier. Yeah. Give me a little tier list. Give me squash. Where's that? A, B, C, D, E, F.

I don't know. I've never lived somewhere that people were big into squash.

Have you ever worked anywhere that had a bunch of squash courts?

I have. Gotcha. Got me.

So where are you putting it? B tier? We never played. We didn't ever play.

You never played. B tier. Really?

Badminton is the only S tier. Badminton above tennis?

I hate to say it.

Wow. Hot take. What about golf?

Golf. Man, I've really tried to get into golf, but I can't get past 9 holes. B tier? I don't know if I can put it into B tier. A tier? But do you like playing 18 holes of golf? Yeah, I like golf. Do you like the last 9? Yeah. You don't ever—

Sometimes I dip out at 13.

What if nobody that you're playing with enjoys talking about technology or business? It's a nightmare.

It's a waking nightmare.

It actually is. It actually is.

Yeah. No. What about—

We should do a Friday episode sometime where we're just golfing. And we have the entire show printed out. And we just have the team following with a camera. We're mic'd up.

We're just shanking balls left and right. Is not very good. So if— if—

Tracy says, what about Sporting Clays? Sporting Clays? S tier.

We were debating this earlier today. Brandon was putting that in like C tier. Sporting Clays, you put that— you said it gets boring after 45 minutes. Is that right? Sporting Clays? Oh yeah. Yeah, very repetitive. I like—

say you're bad. Oh, because just— no, I think he's saying he's just so good, he just never misses. Many people have said Brandon never misses. Yeah, that's true.

That's true. Racing simulator, where does that go on the tier list of amenities?

I think fantastic. I don't know anywhere that actually has that as an amenity, though. Yet. Yet.

What about spa?

Indoor lap pool? The odds that your apartment spa is actually going to be elite are are low. Okay, listen to this.

They got a music room with a sound engineering booth, and there's also a content creation studio. You can make podcasts if you buy this $75 million house or apartment in Manhattan. Uh, content creation studio is hilarious that there's such demand for, oh, maybe I'll start a podcast, that like they're building it into luxury apartments at this point.

Like, that just sounds It was like they had an empty room.

If you have $75 million to buy an apartment and that's your podcasting strategy, you're cooked. Like, you're just like, yeah, I really need to go downstairs and use the communal content creation studio. Rough. I did hear that there are some influencers that do like unboxings. Basically, they get a whole bunch of stuff like sent to them. Like, they'll just review products all day long. Like on Instagram, and they will actually rent a different place because their house is often messy because they have like families and kids and all this stuff. So their office will just be like another apartment that's like perfectly white, perfectly clean.

Well, when we were looking for this studio, we did look at some other places, if you remember, where we just walked in and in every single studio, they were just doing unboxings. They just have like a ring light, remember? That's right.

Yeah, it was like some Temu TikTok. It's like a TikTok shop.

That whole world.

It was crazy. People that are big into that world. Yeah, that was wild.

The path not traveled by us, I suppose. Somebody took a ride down a 4-story slide. I love this.

Before we move on to the next one, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that lets you grow your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And let me also tell you about Fin, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. So this is a feature that I think is S tier. I would put 4-story slide inside of a $20 million Tribeca penthouse. First off, you're getting a location, you're getting an apartment, a penthouse. At that other place, it was $75 million, $120 million. This is only $20 million. By comparison, incredible value. And then instead of some slop podcast room that you have to share with every other resident, you get a private 4-story slide. This is a buy. This is incredible. It's called the Sophisticated Fun House, and it's in Tribeca in Manhattan. It has a rope swing, a rock climbing column, and secret ladders and entryways. This is speaking to me. I love this. Katherine Clark reports in the Wall Street Journal Mansion section. From the top floor of a Manhattan penthouse, I clamber ungracefully into a stainless steel spiral slide that sends me down 4 stories, spitting me out in a dramatic all-white foyer. As apartment tours go, this one is unusual. This penthouse at 150 Nassau Street in Lower Manhattan has been the subject of lower— of local lore for almost 2 decades, largely thanks to the presence of this snaking silvery slide. Now the 4-bedroom home known as Sky House is coming on the market for just $20 million. What a steal. We gotta browbeat some of our guests who live in New York into picking this up. I wanna go down the slide. When owners Craig and Kristen Neville-Manning first toured the apartment in 2006, it looked nothing like it does now. A nearly raw space, it had no interior walls, electrical, or plumbing. First order of business, 4-story slide. Boom. Measuring 6,400 square feet, the penthouse is built into the copper and terracotta pinnacle of a circa 1895 building one of New York's earliest steel skeleton frame skyscrapers. The building was converted to condos in the early 2000s.

Tyler, do you think it's possible that they built a skyscraper over 110 years before you were born? That's crazy. Come on.

I don't think they had concrete.

Make it make sense.

Make it make sense.

Make it make sense.

This might be alien technology. It's entirely possible. Craig founded Google's first remote engineering center in New York and was later the chief technology officer of the urban innovation company Sidewalk Labs, which is now part of Google. So he was at Google, was like, let's set up shop in New York.

Tristan is a former Facebook and Google executive. This is amazing. Let's give it up for big tech.

Let's give it up for big tech. And honestly, very, very, you know, Google has a very wonderful quirky culture. And this is a very wonderful, quirky house. I love that a 4-story slide is something that I bet I could find on the Googleplex campus if I really looked around and found it. They put it in their house. So respect to them. After buying the unit, they tapped Hudson and an interior designer, Ghislaine Vinas, to turn what Vinas describes as a sophisticated fun house— they wanted that built. In addition to the slide, there's a rope swing. Column for rock climbing, and a series of secret ladders and entryways.

Yeah, a lot of people say you can't put rope swings and a series of secret ladders in your house.

You absolutely can.

They didn't listen.

While the space looks like it was designed to entertain children, they don't have any children.

Uh, did the design reflect the couple's own joyful stolen valor? Stolen valor. Insane stolen value. Imagine building a 4-story slide. Yeah. Yeah, you got to—

yeah, you got to get a bunch of kids in here. But fortunately, you can be the change you want to be. Have a bunch of kids, buy this house that's on the market.

Be the change you want to be. John Coogan. Yes, that's a great— that's a great line.

Yes. They have fluorescent orange chairs. The home has structural glass bridges and walkways, angular entryways and skylights, white walls and ceilings juxtaposed suppose, with vibrant furniture and art. Give it the feel of a modern art museum. A sculpture in the foyer.

This whole time I'm thinking, okay, they've got this climbing wall column thing. Yeah, they certainly have like 25 children. 25 children for sure. It's like, no, that was for me actually, after I got off.

Child at heart. After I got done stacking paper at a hyperscaler. At two hyperscalers.

The swing. The swing.

I don't know. To each their own. Well, it's a beautiful house and it can be yours for $20 million.

And then you kind of strange, strange art in this, this one section.

This, this wacky, quirky, there's all sorts of stuff. Certainly quirky. Anyway, we have, we're going back to Los Angeles next, but first let me tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And let me also tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So David Lynch's quirky Los Angeles compound sells for $13 million.

OK, explain David Lynch.

Who wants to explain David Lynch? Any of you guys know? He's the GOAT. He's the GOAT. He's the GOAT. He created Twin Peaks and the film Mulholland Drive. Mulholland Drive is fantastic.

Eraserhead?

Eraserhead is probably my favorite movie, yeah. Really? I haven't seen Eraserhead.

I've got to see that.

Jordy, it's like he's like— I don't know, very— I actually have no idea how to describe it.

Like kind of surreal, like very artistic. Explain him as like a big tech CEO.

He's like all the CEOs' favorite CEO. That's how I would explain it.

All the big directors, it's his favorite director. Their favorite director. OK, your favorite director's favorite director.

But what if you have no favorite director?

How many jumps to get from Sacha Baron Cohen to David Lynch? Probably not that many. He probably has respect for him. Anyway, a quirky Los Angeles compound that was the longtime home of the late filmmaker David Lynch has sold for $13 million about 6 months after hitting the market. Lynch died in 2025. He was known for the surreal films and television shows, including the TV series Twin Peaks and the 2001 film Mulholland Drive. Mulholland Drive is a Tom Cruise movie, I believe. Is that right? Is he in there? Justin Theroux? Did I get that wrong? Am I thinking of a different movie? I think of Magnolia.

This is such a fascinating home. From the outside, from the street, it's somewhat brutalist. And then inside, it's very mid-century.

And then he has a workshop on the estate designed for some of the property's metalwork himself. This is a fascinating building. So the compound has 7 buildings spanning 11,000 square feet in total with 10 bedrooms. The centerpiece of the estate is a pink 1960s house that was designed by the architect Lloyd Wright, the son of Frank Lloyd Wright. Lynch purchased it for $560,000 in 1987, and he just kept working, working, working on it. He later hired Lloyd Wright's son, the grandson of Frank Lloyd Wright— this is Eric Lloyd Wright— to design pool and a pool house for the property. In 1989, Lynch bought an adjacent 2-bedroom brutalist house for $542,000 and added a studio to the building for $346,000 in 1995. So he just kept landing and expanding. In a statement, 2 of Lynch's children said the property was a place of deep meaning in their father's life and the lives of those who lived and worked there. It holds a lot of history for our family. And we're grateful to see it pass to someone who's interested in caring for it and preserving what made it special. Lynch viewed his living space as an extension of his creative life. The Lloyd Wright House affects my whole life to live inside it, he said in a 1997 interview. What would you, what do you think about this house? Would you live here? Do you like this house? Do you like this style?

I do like it. I just think, I think that needs about, I don't know. An architectural purist might hate me for this, but it needs a lot of investment. You have to tear it down. No, no, no, no, no, no.

This is also— I don't think it's mentioned in the article, but this is the location of Lost Highway, which is another of his movies. Wow. Ball knower over there.

I had no idea.

I don't know Lost Highway at all. Tyler Steiner. Another Lynch movie.

You really did. It's amazing. Oh, the high-end Manhattan building that has the content creation studio actually broke through and hit the timeline. Somebody saw that and screenshotted it. It was as notable to them as it was to us. Sergey Brin is the second billionaire to buy in Miami this week. This has happened like a few times. I feel like the Google founders have been on a Miami buying spree, bought multiple properties. We already talked a little bit about that. We should move over to the Financial Times and talk about Vacheron, the watchmaker, because there is an interesting piece in the Financial Times all about that. But first, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full-text search built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Let me also tell you about Restream, one live stream, 30+ destinations. If you wanna multistream, go to restream.com. So there's an interview with the CEO of Vacheron, Vacheron Constantin. It says Vacheron Constantin bets on culture and complications instead of volume. In an industry that often equates growth with volume, Laurent Perret is attempting something more delicate: to expand the oldest continuously operating watchmaker without diluting its own scarcity. Vacheron holds the title of longest in the business continuously, no breaks, no days off, the ultimate—

Before we jump in there, the team is sharing how many jumps to get me from the host Tyler at TVPN to David Lynch. And so Tyler Cosgrove works with John Coogan at TVPN. John Coogan has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg was portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg. In the film The Social Network. Jesse Eisenberg co-starred with Laura Dern in Resistance, and Laura Dern starred in Wild at Heart, directed by David Lynch.

5 degrees of separation. There we go. Let's make some phone calls. Except he has sadly passed away. But what an interesting—

Only 5 jumps to—

This is a cool use case for LLMs. This is very fun. I like this. Did you just want to hear the sound effect? Tyler texted me a while back, like 20 minutes ago, saying I should play that. 15 months into his tenure as Vacheron's chief executive, Laurent runs a brand that, according to industry analysts, generated more than £1 billion in revenues in 2023. They're around a $1 billion revenue company. Annual production is estimated at over 25,000 watches. Up from roughly 3,000 in the 1980s. So pretty significant increase, and that's before the watchmaker was acquired in the 1990s by what is now the Richemont luxury conglomerate. Although revenues have since dipped slightly, the numbers place Vacheron firmly among the upper ranks of Swiss watchmaking. Yet Laurent, in his first interview since making— since taking the reins, is clear that acceleration is not the goal. They're not trying to make more watches that quickly. Uh, we must evolve with the market, he says, but without chasing volume for its own sake. The timing is delicate, a very volatile context outside and inside the watch industry. Secondary prices have softened, hype has receded, and growth across the sector has become less predictable. Uh, Laurent describes the brand's position positioning as almost, almost as a balance sheet of capabilities. Classic watches, jewelry watches, sport integrated bracelet watches, very high complications, and the revived Historiques line. The last, as its name suggests, is a family of retro and shaped watches. You might be familiar with the Vacheron 222, which is very popular right now. That's in the Historiques collection. The objective is to occupy the whole field of high watchmaking, ensuring that when one segment slows, another can carry momentum. He half accepts the analogy when pressed. Vacheron is kind of a horological hedge fund, diversifying risk not across asset classes, but across aesthetics and price tiers. The slowing has been most visible in the steel sports watches. Watch category. Laurent concedes that the phenomenon of speculation and hype has abated, even if the integrated bracelet segment itself is not going to go away. That's the Overseas with the integrated bracelet. But while others worry about the fading of an asset class, he simply says that over the past years, he has seen a bit more demand for classic watches, high complications, for shaped watches, for smaller diameters, prompting, among other things, a 36.5mm Traditionnelle perpetual calendar. Since taking the top job, he's moved decisively towards culture, leveraging the contents of two of the world's largest and most prestigious museums, the Met and the Louvre. The Tribute to Great Civilizations collection saw the creation of a quartet of 5-piece limited edition watches, each featuring a a miniature enameled version of a Louvre masterpiece such as the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Beyond this series lies an even more bespoke partnership with the museums where a collector can choose any masterpiece, painting, sculpture, or ornamental item for Vacheron to reproduce on the dial. Each project is unique, so there's no fixed scale of charges, but Laurent cites the minimum being $150,000. €80,000 pre-tax. Techniques range from miniature enamel painting, which he says is the most popular, to engraving or powder-packed into engraving. Numerically, production is almost risible. We don't do more than 10 or 12 pieces a year. So these are custom. You walk through the museum, you see something you like, you like, and you're like, I want that on a watch, and they'll make it for you. Very, very cool. Maybe I'll get one.

Do they put logos? Will they put a Ramp logo?

If it's in the— see, now you're thinking. So you have to work backwards. So the question is, how do you get a painting of the Ramp logo into the Louvre? As long as, you know, people were sneaking stuff out of the Louvre. Maybe we sneak something. Yeah. Logo painting in. It's like, wasn't the Mona Lisa there? Like, not anymore, baby. It's a painting of the Ramp credit card. I love it.

I like it. The Overseas Perpetual Calendar Ultra Thin is one of My—

I think one of the most stunning modern watches. Yes. I like the Overseas Dual Time a little bit more, but they're both great. And I think that the 222— we were sort of hyped on the 222— Overseas might be making a comeback.

The ultra-thin? Yes. Yes. It's just insane.

There are some really cool historiques out there. There's a square Vacheron that's It's pretty popular. I'm not exactly sure what the model number is. But they are doing fantastically well. And most importantly, I think, have just carved out a very interesting brand positioning. By choosing to partner with the Louvre, the Met, it maintains this very high aura, inaccessibility, very old and stuffy and stodgy. It's not cause.

That's not a bunch of younger, more socially engaged people. Yeah, when you look at what AP is doing, very much on the hype train and partnering with DJs and Travis Scott and KAWS and doing all this stuff, and Vacheron is like, okay.

Yeah. And you just have to wonder, what is the more long-term strategy?

The AP strategy, It certainly is not helping the resale market right now.

Very quickly, but then it probably crashes, I would assume, and the true horology heads head back to Vacheron. We'll see. Well, let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium-sized businesses. And let me also tell you about Phantom Cash. Cha-ching again! Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. Moving on. People are having fun with Leopold Aschenbrenner and his wife-to-be. I believe they're engaged. Jira Ticket says, "When you ask some high elves at Rivendell if they want to join you in your quest to Erebor and they hit you with the light of Valinor stare." 2,800 likes. People like the photo. Very silly.

Zeki says, mildly surprised to learn that director-level staff at Anthropic have human EAs. Hmm.

How did they learn that? How did he learn that? Was that in like the most recent Dario news? This is from March 6th today.

I mean, he runs an AI finance tool. Oh, so maybe he's just interacting with them? He's interacting with them. That's interesting. All right, we got a new Xbox. What's going on here?

We have— Breaking news as of 3 days ago. We didn't really get to it. Project Helix is the next generation of the Xbox console. What do we know about it? Nothing. Nothing. Nada. We see a logo reveal. Is this just a working title? I don't know. Will this be delayed? The PS6 is supposedly delayed. The Switch 2 is maybe going up in price. Very unclear what Microsoft's strategy is with Xbox. The new head of Xbox does not seem to be super focused on the traditional path of like box software, you know, own titles. Sony really went on a tear and acquired a lot of the great IP, bought a bunch of game studios, brought them in-house, created sort of like this IP roll-up that they could get exclusives exclusives over. There was always a fear that when Microsoft bought Activision that they would do the same thing with Call of Duty. Call of Duty would become a Microsoft exclusive, an Xbox exclusive. That never made financial sense. It never made sense from a regulation perspective. It would be seen as anti-competitive. Hasn't played out. So even though Activision is now under— and they own Blizzard, World of Warcraft, all that IP. Even though that is now within Microsoft, it doesn't— it hasn't seemed to be like the cornerstone of like revitalizing the Xbox as like the number one killer console that everyone has to have. And they've always been doing this dance between Windows PC sales, Windows gaming, and then Xbox gaming, and then now cloud streaming where you can stream Xbox on anything, even on an iPhone, iPad. There's that company Backbone that that sort of clicks a gaming controller onto your phone. And so you can stream both PlayStation games from a PlayStation that you have in your house, or you can stream from Xbox Cloud. Tyler, when you played the Oculus, you used Xbox Game Streaming, correct?

That was how the game was streamed? Yes, yeah, the Meta Quest 3S Xbox Edition. I think that's the full title.

Was there anything that was Xbox specific about that, or was it just the packaging and then it just like sort of recommended that you use that software?

I mean, it came with an Xbox controller. Oh, yeah. OK. But yeah, I don't know exactly what the deal was.

I don't think there was no, like, PlayStation. Did it feel like when you fired it up, any Xbox apps were preloaded? I don't think so.

I mean, but it's not like you have to download them, right? So it doesn't matter that much that they're already installed.

Well, I'm thinking more about it just from, like, The user retention and activation funnel, I feel like that's where the Oculus is falling flat the most for me. That's why I framed the challenge the way I did, where I was like, you need to beat one level of Halo that takes you 10 minutes in 45 minutes. It's a ridiculous challenge. Why is it so easy? It should be so easy, but it took you 25 minutes to get set up, right? Something like that, because you had to go update the software, create accounts, download stuff. And it'd be interesting to see more of a deeper partnership there. But we'll see. I mean, it's entirely possible that Meta is just like pulling back on VR entirely, which would be very disappointing for me. But we shall see. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco.

Tech Layoff Tracker. What's going on? Hearing from multiple sources inside Oracle that the company is planning thousands of job cuts, potentially 20,000 to 30,000 roles across the board. This was surprising to me because I didn't realize that Oracle had a headcount around 170,000 people.

There's a lot going on at Oracle. It's a very old company. A lot of sales reps. I had a friend who worked as an Oracle sales rep. Loved the job. Great lifestyle, going around selling Software, selling data centers, selling all sorts of stuff.

This is to free up $8 to $10 billion in cash flow, all to fund massive data center expansion. US banks are pulling back from financing. Borrowing costs are rising fast. Spreads— the cuts would be the largest in years, bigger than the $10,000 they did in late 2025. They are also eyeing asset sales like the Cerner healthcare unit. Insiders say non-core units and data center-linked staff are most at risk. It's tied to AI commitments. Anyways, so still rumors at this point, but, uh, wouldn't be, wouldn't be super surprising if they—

I just like the comfortably smug is watching the show and publicly tweeting, badminton S-tier, outstanding take, squash is A-tier. We're starting Conversation. Well, speaking of watches, Paul Graham clearly got into watches recently, which I love to see, because he posted a lengthy essay called "The Brand Age," paulgramm.com/brandage.html, and he tells a very detailed story of the Swiss watch industry, the quartz crisis, and he goes into the strategy of every single house. It's an amazing telling of what Omega did, what Vacheron did, what Patek did, and it's very, very long. There was an interesting segment in here. The next move was made by AP, who in 1970 commissioned the renowned designer Gerald Genta to design their own iconic watch, this one daringly in steel. The result, launched in 1972, was— Nautilus? No, this is AP.

Oh, the Royal Oak.

The Royal Oak, of course. And AP's ads for— they too now started doing brand advertising— emphasized its high cost even more dramatically. Introducing steel at the price of gold was one of the ads. Like, we're gonna charge you gold prices for something that's steel, and they're just flexing on it. I love it. You're looking at the costliest stainless steel watch in the world, the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak. What makes it even more precious than gold is the time that went into building it. By a vanishing breed of master watchmakers. At the bottom of the ad, they turn the traditional formula on its head and describe their watches as being priced from $35,000 and down instead of up, because they want to let you know that what the high end is, what's the top of the range, because price has become part of their brand. The Royal Oak was also a step forward in surface area devoted to brand. The golden ellipse had turned the watch face into an expression of brand, but it used ordinary straps and bracelets. In the Royal Oak, the watch face was integrated with a metal bracelet that continued its design all the way around the wrist. When it said, "You're looking at the costliest stainless steel watch in the world," it said with every square millimeter of surface area. It said it with every square millimeter of surface area. Would customers buy this new approach? The initial results were moderately encouraging. The Holy Trinity sales didn't take off, but they didn't go down to zero either. There were at least some people out there responding to the new message. Perhaps if they kept it at the number— perhaps if they kept at it, the number would grow. So they did. Encouraged by the success of the Royal Oak, Patek Philippe commissioned Gerald Genta in 1974 to design a similar watch. Watch for them. The design of the Royal Oak had been inspired by a ship's porthole. So the design of this new watch would be inspired by a ship's porthole. It was called the Nautilus, and it launched at the Basel Watch Fair in 1976. In the Nautilus, we see the incompatibility of branding and design, and this is where it gets a little controversial. Some people don't like the way PG is talking about the difference between branding and design. Here, he says, "It was huge." The most expensive men's watches at the peak of the Golden Age were typically 32 or 33 millimeters in diameter. The Nautilus was 42 millimeters. As well as it being huge, it had gratuitous knobs on either side of the face like a pair of ears, but you could recognize one from across the room. In the Nautilus— of all the watches Patek makes now, the Nautilus is the most sought after. After, it's perfectly aligned with what present-day buyers want. Basically, the loudest possible expression of brand. But in 1976, it was ahead of its time. And in 1976, it was still a little too much. And this is something that happens all the time in luxury goods. Somebody comes out, they take a bold stance, they make an aggressive move. And then over time, it is revealed. To be underrated. Anyway, we have our next guest. We do. Is it Doug DeMuro?

No. Oh, Vincenzo.

Oh, Vincenzo's hopping on. Fantastic. Amazing. Good to see you, Vincenzo. How you doing?

What's happening? Sorry to disappoint you.

I'm not Doug. Doug's coming on in a little bit, but I'm glad we had some guests step out. What's going on? Did you press it twice? They made it play again and again and again. Okay, well, we're just going. We're going to keep going on this. Can you fade this down? Okay, there we go. It goes on and on and on and on. Yeah. And typically, if you push the button again, you turn it off. But we changed it so that if you push the button twice, it actually plays it twice. So you can do like— But it gets to be a little much. So we're not going to— Overkill, right? Overkill. Anyway, take us through your— I'd love to start with like the preview of the F1 season, but also just Apple's strategy, because I think you unpacked it at a way deeper level than what I'd seen folks understanding about Apple's F1 strategy before.

Yeah, I'll start with the Apple stuff then. Really, I think, you know, what Apple's done is They've said we may not have the distribution that ESPN and others have traditionally. And but we're going to use our might, which is these. Yeah, they've got, they've got these devices in everybody's hands. We're all using MacBooks. We're all, we've all got iPads and we've got AirPods and Apple Watches.

And so, and John's got his Vision Pro. I do have Vision Pros.

There you go.

I wish— Last Man Standing.

I think, I think something will be coming with that. I do. Yeah, they are.

They're rolling all this stuff out.

And now we're seeing— like, when did you ever think that Apple and Netflix would ever find a way to work together on a streaming cross-collab? I don't know if you guys saw that news, but yeah, you're gonna— we're gonna get to see— actually, Drive to Survive is already streaming on Apple TV. Yeah. And in return, Netflix is going to be streaming one of the races.

Oh, that's cool.

Yeah. And ironically, ironically, it is the Canadian Grand Prix. Yeah. Why the Canadian Grand Prix, you might ask? Well, the Canadian Grand Prix takes place the same weekend that the Indy 500 takes place, which is the most watched motorsport event. Okay. In America. Okay. Maybe even— well, not the world, but in America it will have the best numbers of the year. Yeah. So Apple knows this. What do they do? They go and partner with Netflix. Everybody has Netflix, right? I— the IMAX theaters, they're trying to change the experience. How do you watch a race? 5 races are gonna be shown in IMAX theaters. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah. Um, they also partnered up with Event Pass, so bars, restaurants, it'll— it's— that's where they buy a lot of their, their sports packages from through Event Pass. They're rolled into there. They've also— they've also unleashed MLS on that. They finally are realizing that the MLS thing wasn't working, right? So yes, now they're doing that with Formula One. So now Formula One is going to be able to be in bars and restaurants. You're going to see Formula One in IMAX theaters again, only 5 races.

Go to the bar at 7 AM. Yeah, super.

I mean, that's, that might be the issue with some of the races. So we'll see what happens there. But I think the fact that they're open to these different types of distribution channels and platforms is, it's exciting. I mean, it really is exciting.

Have you guys had a chance to play around with? Yeah, yeah. React to my thesis that like the way Apple sees onboarding a fan to an actual live watching sport experience, starts with the F1 movie, which when you watch that movie, you don't need to know anything about F1. And you'll hear the voiceover of the narrator basically explain all the rules to you. And then they show Brad Pitt doing all these like tricky moves that illustrate why pit stops matter and why tires matter, damage, all these things. And so you can watch the F1 movie just because you like Brad Pitt and it's a fun movie. Movie. Then you can go into Drive to Survive. It's the reality TV version. You don't really have to follow a full race. You get all the drama and the personality, and it's a travel show too, and it's a lifestyle show. And then once you've gone down that funnel, then you're ready to watch the race, and they have that for you too.

And even the way they're laying it out, if you guys haven't had a chance to look through the, you know, the Apple TV app. Yeah. They're putting everything there. So now you have their local, their guides, like their city guides. They've put together guides for the cities that you're in. So you can explore Melbourne now. That's where they are. Yeah. In Apple Maps, you can explore the track turn by turn. You can, which again, some people might not care about that, but it's a way to pull you in if you are there in Melbourne. Yeah. And you're using Apple.

No, I think, I think I actually noticed that, that map feature I use Apple Maps like a psycho apparently. But I was in Las Vegas at the Las Vegas Grand Prix and I just happened to open Apple Maps just to get out of the stadium and figure out where we're going. And I was like, "Wow, this is a really detailed rendering of the track. This is amazing. This would actually be useful for a bunch of other things." And if you're just driving by and then you just see this really high fidelity 3D rendering of the map, it's just another touchpoint. It's basically just an ad.

What do you think they'll do with Vision Pro? Like, what are your theories? You think you'll be able to ride along with Verstappen and like actually get to experience— because if you could experience a full race, like in the cameras, I think too heavy for that.

But I want to hear what Vincenzo says.

I know, but not if you add them to every single car and everybody's on it. So lap times go way down.

I don't know if Ben can pull it up or if one of the guys can pull this up, but I posted something recently about an app called Lapz, L-A-P-Z. Now, They got kind of— they were in test flight. They ended up getting pulled like they can't keep pushing out. And it has to do with licensing rights from F1. But this is what I think can happen and what they can do with Apple Vision Pro. In fact, I really think Apple— I should— I thought they should have bought Laps, the company that built it, the developer that built it. But if they didn't, I could foresee them just kind of building this on their own. I mean, you've got you can have all the cameras up, you have a 3-dimensional track with like live timing, 'cause all we have all the data, right? All the data's there. So being able to put your Vision Pro on and be in camera with any of the drivers that you want, plus seeing a live circuit map. And then I believe they were also able to change the, like the angle from where you were watching it from. So you were able to understand really, like if I'm sitting in, I don't know, turn 1, I'm watching it from that angle, right? Through the Vision Pro as opposed to, you know, when you kind of put it on the TV, you don't really, you may not know if you're not familiar with the track. Yeah. You know, you don't know which angle you're really watching it from. This was a, this, the app was really, really cool. And I know one of the developers that was working on it, that was like, to me that showed the true power of it. Every time I post it, people are like that, I would buy a Vision Pro if I could get that app.

Yeah. Everyone always says it. We had a sort of motion designer on the show at Figma. Conference named John Lepore. He works at Blackbox Infinite. That's him. That's him.

John's the guy who built LAPS. Oh, okay.

It's LAPS now because I remember seeing the demo. I put the demo in the chat. Hopefully the team can pull it up. But they did this case study back in 2024, and I was like, oh, this is like a killer app. I wonder when Apple will like actually adopt this. Here it goes. And so this just makes so much sense that you could like Put this on. And now that Apple actually has all the rights to this stuff, it seems like such an interesting experience. I wonder if this is one of those situations where you, it looks really good in a teaser trailer, but then actually sitting there is maybe a little bit much, but—

Everyone that actually used Lapse said it was fantastic. Yeah. Everyone I've talked to that used it said this was like incredible. And again, I don't have a Vision Pro, so I never really, I didn't test it. I saw some demo stuff. John has sent me some things.

You gotta try it this weekend, John. Oh yeah.

If you can get a, if you can somehow get ahold of it. Yeah. If you have it, I would.

Yeah. I have a Vision Pro. I think I have Apple TV+ and all the, all the tiers there.

I probably just have to download the Labs app. All right. Let's get into the season overall. What's happening with the new regulation. Predictions? How— who's cooked? Who's chopped? Who's goated?

Well, so I think on the last time I was on the show, and I was thinking about this too, I was like, oh man, I'm gonna really eat a lot of crow now. I said Aston Martin was to look out— was someone to pay attention to, and it was for all the wrong reasons. Uh, they seem to have completely botched the project. I don't even know what's going on with Honda. I mean, it seems like one of those things that I thought was unfathomable in 2026, like this was not something that was supposed to really be possible. The engineers have, you know, figured out reliability. We have cars that are so reliable, everyone's finishing races. Now, this wasn't the case 30, 40 years ago, right? You'd have a lot of reliability issues. And now it— like, they've literally built a car that is quite literally crap. I mean, it's, it's, it is not good. Fernando Alonso still hasn't run any practice laps, although maybe in practice 2 he ended up getting out there, I think. But They're not turning any laps. They're actually talking about like potential nerve damage, these guys in the Aston Martin, because of whatever's going on with the battery. It's, it's wild.

So what do you mean going on with the battery? Are they— they're so—

so because of the new, um, the new chassis, like the new regulations, the car is smaller, it's narrower. And because of the way Adrian Newey designs his cars, it requires— there's a lot of aerodynamics. So he kind of almost built a smaller, uh, there's less room in his car to build, you know, for power unit and battery and all that stuff. Well, now with this like 50/50 split, you have 50/50 or 50% battery power and essentially 50% from the internal combustion engine. Uh, all of that power or all of that takes up a lot of room, and apparently there's not enough room in the, in the Honda board, all of that to properly— like, they're not even running the battery, or they're not running everything at full bore right now. It's like they couldn't even turn the battery up. It's, it's pretty wild. Like, I'm reading all this stuff, all of this information's coming at me, and I'm like, how does this even happen? The greatest designer of probably our generation, if not ever. And then there was other talk that, like, Aston Martin hadn't even really ever audited the Honda engineers. So they signed the deal back in '22 or '23 that they were gonna switch from Mercedes to Honda, but never audited the actual engineering. And come to find out, most of like the good engineers ended up at Red Bull, which a lot of people speculated was the case because Red Bull was with Honda. So it's, it's a whole mess right there with that Aston Martin project right now. And of course, Aston Martin just signed over a naming deal for, I forgot how much money it was, $60+ million for the F1 team. So I'm like, ooh, that's not a good, that's not great. But aside from that, you've got Mercedes looking really— So what's your prediction for Sunday?

Do you think they actually finish the race or is it looking so bad that they may not?

I don't know that they start the race. I mean, they may start the race, turn a couple laps just to do it, but I don't, I can't foresee them in qualifying tonight. Like, I, I, I can't even see them getting anywhere near, like, remotely close to the times we're going to see on the board. Uh, I think they were something like 12 seconds back at one point during practice, which it's only practice, but I don't even think— I don't think they will finish the race if they do start it. It'll be like a couple laps and then they're going to purposely pull it, you know, uh, pit it and pull it from the race.

What is Mr.

Stroll doing about it? I have no clue. I really don't. There— it's a lot. There's a lot of PR notices that— there's a lot of PR that they're, you know, pulling right now, and they're apologizing, like, which, again, I don't know what apologies are going to do at this point. But, um, I—

if I'm sponsors, I'm really pissed, to be quite frank with you.

Um, I don't know.

I don't know what—

I don't know what Lawrence is doing. Who, who is benefiting from the new regulations or has kind of figured it out the best so far?

It's so it seems, it seems like Ferrari is doing again. I can't jinx them, so I have to like I got a little jinx thing going here. But the Ferrari looks really good. The Mercedes as well. So they both have come out looking solid. Ferrari has been really reliable. They haven't seemed to have had any of the issues that others have had with the turbo spool, which was something they were concerned about as early as last season or maybe even two seasons ago. They had talked about the turbo lag and they don't seem to have that problem. They've gone with a smaller turbocharger which spools up faster. So like they seem to be good with that. The Mercedes looks really, really quick. Fast on the straights. I don't think that they were detuned after their— everyone was complaining about their engines. That was— those seem to be good. So anyone with a Mercedes power unit seems to be in good shape. But the Mercedes-Petronas AMG F1 team, they also just look great. George Russell, personally, I think George Russell, this might be his year. And the package looks really, really good. The car looks great. Like, they're not having any issues McLaren, they're McLaren, so they, they, you know, they won the championship last year. They also have Mercedes power unit. They seem to be okay in an okay spot. We'll see what happens when they start. They ended up, I think in the second practice, they ended up topping the time. But again, it's practice, so we'll see what happens when they turn up the engines for qualifying. I think pretty much. And then Red Bull, Red Bull, let's talk about Red Bull. With the Ford Power, the Red Bull Ford Power Unit. Those are impressive.

We—

a lot of people thought like they may not be that good, especially during the testing in Bahrain. They were like, they don't look or sound that great. Now they came to Melbourne, seem to be working pretty well. Max looks hooked up. They have a second driver now, Hadjar, young kid, his second season Formula One. Just brought him up from the junior team Racing Bulls. He's looking really good. So I would say we're going to— for me, it's a Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull trio at the top. And McLaren, I think they're going to be maybe looking out of the top 3. But yeah, to me it's a George Russell, Oscar Piastri, Max Verstappen. Those are the 3 guys that I am putting my— maybe not money into, but those are the guys I'm putting, I'm putting my bets on. If I'm anyone else out there.

Are there any brands that you're tracking that could make a major move into sort of a premier sponsorship position of an F1 team? We were sort of joking about the idea of like an all-white F1 car sponsored by Apple. Obviously, Apple Formula One team. The Apple Formula One team would be very cool. That would be so cool. But they sort of are broadcasting the whole league. They're indexing it. Really make sense, but a lot of tech companies have moved in. Oracle, Google with Chrome and Gemini. There's all sorts of deals that are happening. There's a lot of money flowing around. I'm wondering if there's anyone that you think might really go all in.

Really, it's not something I've been thinking about. Fintech seems to be pretty popular right now. Yeah.

Let's get a Ramp yellow car out there. That'd be good. They'd be really cool to see that. Yeah. Ram, Cadillac.

Cadillac could use it.

Cadillac could definitely use sponsorship for a light. Have they filled out their sponsorships or are they still putting it together?

No, I think they're still putting it together. They may actually be, this might be part of the strategy. I haven't talked to anybody over there. I think TWG has put a lot of money in, so they have their name all over it. They, the TWG AI is their AI partner and TWG is also part of the ownership group, so they're on the car in like kind of two different ways. But this is also what TWG does across all of their motorsport assets. Like their brand is, you know, front and center. I haven't seen them fill out much yet, but I also was speculating that Nike and Apple would partner with them at some point. So those were two that I had thought might, we might see something with. And I, I've heard not rumors of those two brands, but I've heard that there is other things coming for Cadillac. I think for them, it's going to be a matter of can they perform on track and how is that going to look? You obviously don't want to be absolutely last.

Does it look like Cadillac has a Honda power unit? Ferrari. Oh.

Are you East Coast? Yes. 11:00 PM Saturday.

11:00 PM. 11:00 PM.

Pretty convenient for the West Coast folks. 8 PM is like sort of a great time to hang out, very convenient for you guys, watch the race. Uh, works out for us.

I've been doing this since I was a kid though, so it was like these races have always been weird times. I'm— you just kind of get used to it. Yeah, yeah, that's why when I hear people complain, I'm like, pageantry, it's part of the pageantry.

Exactly. Well, thank you so much.

Yeah, I'm gonna think about the brands though, John, and maybe I'll come back when I come up with some Yeah, something that could join in. It's shortlist. Yeah, I'm focused elsewhere now at the beginning of the year.

But of course.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Yeah, excited to see your coverage on the event. And yeah, we'll talk soon. Great to see you. Thanks for having me again, guys.

Have a good one.

Good to see you.

Goodbye. Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And you know who needs an F1 team? The New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it.

Nate Silver says, honestly, a Consumer Reports-style panel of power users might be better than Meter, etc., for measuring AI progress. Much more robust to spikiness. Not meant to sound skeptical. As a power user, I think there's been extremely noticeable progress. Over the past few months, for what it's worth. Yeah, this is Diffusion Max.

We were asking Semi Analysis to put something like this together. It's very tricky. There are so many people that have ties or sponsorships or favorite models, or they've worked somewhere, or they have a bone to pick with someone, or they're politically aligned one way or the other. There's a lot that, that should maybe disqualify someone from giving sort of a qualitative review. But I love the idea of going to a group of folks that are independent users of these models and putting something together that's Consumer Reports style. Because we are truly past benchmarks being noticeable to the average user. And we're much more into, OK, how does the model feel? What are you actually using it for? Is it actually collaborating with you in a valuable way? Such that you get a deliverable. We talk to a lot of folks about, okay, agents are here, what are you using them for? What are your customers using them for? And it can be tricky. Sometimes people don't really know what they're using them for. Well, let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from 1 GPU to hundreds of thousands. And without further ado, we have Doug DeMuro in the Winning Room. Welcome to the TVP and Ultradome. How you doing, Doug?

I'm good. How are you guys doing?

We're doing fantastically. Great to see you back here. I'm so, I'm so glad to have you back here. I absolutely love This Car Pod. Congratulations on all the progress there. I mean, it's the number one car podcast in the world and it deserves to be so because the number one in our hearts. It's— I'm going to be listening to it on my drive home today. It drops every Friday.

Friday morning.

That is true.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. Go subscribe to that. But we wanted to have you on to discuss so many other things in the car world. I think we should start with the interesting crossover from the tech world to the world of Ferrari with the Johnny Ive, the Johnny Drive, the new— the new Luce. So take us through your reactions to the actual design.

You already ordered 5 of them, right?

As soon as electric, you were like, I'm in. I am as skeptical as, as, as basically every car enthusiast that I know is. Yeah. Uh, take you through my thoughts. I mean, well, first off, they haven't shown the vehicle, right? They've shown the interior, which in itself is kind of interesting and makes me a little anxious. Who shows the interior before showing the vehicle, right? Only if you're really kind of nervous about it.

It was such a weird layout too, seeing like the floating stuff, and it wasn't even in like a shape of a of a car.

And there's people— there's people in Italy that, you know, sit outside the Ferrari factory. Yeah. Take videos on their phones. And I've seen some of those, you know, kind of scouting videos. And it looks like incredibly rough. It looks like—

it looks like a Subaru or a Honda. Ferrari, more than any other brand, goes to great lengths to disguise their production cars when they're— when they're still doing testing for that exact reason. Yes, there are people who post up at the factory waiting for them to slip up or whatever. And so Ferrari has historically made some really bizarre pre-production cars to try to actually fake out those people. So I'm not entirely convinced that the really rough-looking look of the spy photo car that we've all seen is real. It looks like a station wagon. But obviously, I'm skeptical just in general of this. Like, an electric sports car, the ones that have come out have not been well received. They have not sold well. In some cases, automakers who were about to release an electric sports car, dialed it back and canceled the whole project sometimes months before it was supposed to be on sale. So we'll see how it goes.

So strategically, how deep are they? Talk about the interior, though, because to me, it looks like— in general, I'm a fan of coming in, having some fresh eyes on the interior of a car. There's a bunch of kind of like individual ideas from what we've seen that look cool, like little things you can pull to start the engine or whatever, your engine. There's a lot of elements that are nice, but at the same time it looks like somewhat like it's like, oh, you did like a resto mod on, but it's an EV. Like it just, it feels, it feels, I didn't come away. Feeling like it was.

It's an interesting thing though, like it's a totally new world for Ferrari, and so I'm willing to give them a lot of latitude here because I think they're probably going after new buyers and different buyers. And I also think they're really trying to— they're not trying to appeal to the people like us who are like into cars and are, and are probably have some experience with Ferrari before. I think that this is, this is a big play on China. This is a big play on young people They're really trying to make this make sense to a kind of a different audience. So I'm actually— I didn't mind the interior for that. From that perspective, it certainly is not very Ferrari-like, but I think that was the point. I think they could have kept their in-house design team designing it if they had wanted it to stay like it, like their cars look. And I think this was kind of intentionally a left-field kind of thing. And so I'm willing to give them latitude there. What I'm more anxious about is how the car looks. How it performs, and especially how it feels. Because I think a lot of the reason people buy Ferraris is because of the way that they feel. And that's where I think this car could have problems.

Do you think it could actually sell well in China, even with this fresh take on design, when every foreign manufacturer has been getting slaughtered?

Foreign manufacturers are getting slaughtered in China. But you have to assume that even in China, which doesn't have the brand belovedness for some of the Western brands that we have. You have to assume, though, that the Ferrari brand is still nonetheless both popular and, you know, makes people excited even in China. It's not like any Chinese companies have emerged as a replacement for Ferrari, even though there have been many Chinese companies that have emerged as replacements for Tesla and Mercedes-Benz and all that. Ferrari is still this globally known, beloved brand. And so I do think that they have, they have possibility there. Porsche sells relatively well in China despite how hard it has been for other automakers to get in.

Yeah. How, how far do you think, or how deep do you think the Ferrari team is into the development of this electric vehicle? Because didn't Lamborghini just pull out of their EV project? It feels like there's a different world where the electrification of the powertrain is much more like choosing between a V12 and a V8. And it's just like, it's just an option almost. And maybe they'd be afraid of doing that because it would reveal 5% of the buyers selecting that. But they make all this big, like, oh, it's its own car, instead of just being like, yeah, the Roma now, you can get it electric if you want that. We'll make 10 of them.

Well, it's an interesting thing. Other automakers have tried to do that. Maserati has an electric version of the GranTurismo that has been a horrible failure. I think that I was surprised to see Lamborghini cancel theirs. At this stage. Kudos to them. They realize their buyers don't want it. And in some ways, you have to wonder if Lamborghini is kind of emerging as more the enthusiast brand, which historically has not been true. Right. Lamborghini is the brand for people who want to show off and Ferrari is the enthusiast brand. Well, maybe that's changing a little bit. Ferrari, I think, also would make the argument that they have always been the leader. They have always been the one to push to the next step, the design leader. People say their stuff is ugly. They say there's, you know, the cars are too powerful, etc. And they have always kind of been the first to take some steps. And I think that's—

oh, we're too powerful, we'll put a V6 in our Halo car.

I think that they're— so I think that they're sitting here thinking, you know what, we're— Lambo might cancel it, and Pininfarina isn't selling theirs very well, and all this stuff, but we are Ferrari, and we— if anybody's gonna be able to do this, it's gonna be us, and we are gonna lead this thing, and we're gonna kill it. I bet that's the mindset, uh, in in Italy. I bet you they're nervous, though. No electric sports car has succeeded yet. And many have tried.

Taycan doesn't really count as a sports car, more sedan.

No, I think because it's a sedan, it is certainly a sporty car. But because it's a sedan and adding that level of practicality, it's not really the same thing, especially because Porsche tried to go electric with their sports car and over the last few months has repeatedly been walking back the actual desire to do that to the point where it's now kind of starting to become clear there may not even be an electric version of the next Boxster.

Yeah, is the Mission X, Mission E, the, the F80 competitor, the W1 competitor just completely canceled at this point?

Yeah, that's gone. I don't know if they've officially said that, but yes, that is gone.

They're not going to do an electric. Are they going to do a new Halo car? It feels like we're so far— I, I had the 918 on a poster as a kid, and I've been waiting for the next version for my entire adult life. I was—

I got Carrera GT sitting right up here. They are going to do one, but I think that they had committed significant resources to going electric with Mission X, and it didn't happen, and they had to scramble back to the drawing board. And developing a hypercar takes real effort. Yeah, um, you got to get a lot of things right because you're only selling a few hundred of them. And so I, I think it's coming, but it's, it's still here.

So if Porsche goes back to the drawing board and they say, OK, there's no longer the pressure to go electric with the hypercar. How, how enthusiastic can they go at that tier? Can they do manual? Can they do a V12? Can they learn from the SP3? What can they— what do they have the freedom to actually pull off the shelf?

I think that Porsche is a much more conservative company than I wish they were. I would be very surprised if it has a manual. I would be very surprised. I'm certain that it will be a hybrid in some capacity. I'd be very surprised if it was a larger engine than a V8. The fact that Carrera GT ever existed, analog V10, that was an unbelievable thing that was a moment in time. Porsche, I think, is still worried. They have never really— in the modern era, hypercars are automatic hybrids. And I think Porsche is afraid of deviating from that because they know that that works. And it worked with 918. I actually had a call with some Porsche people yesterday, and I was pleading my case for a manual Carrera GT-type successor. And I just think it's just a tough— it's a tough sell. It's a tough sell.

Is it, though? Is it a tough sell for the people that are actually—

Well, they have a halo car in the GT3 RS in some ways that sells the 911s. And also, the Boxster looks like— the Cayman looks somewhat similar to the— GT3 RS. So it's not the R8 pulling down to the A4. I just—

the people— we have a friend that orders every halo car from every brand. And if you asked him, hey, would you rather have a hybrid or something that's more a successor to the Carrera CGT, like what he would, he would obviously want the more manual, the more engaging.

The automakers, I think, are also really aware of the fact that like hybrid is the future, and they really need to make sure that the super, the hypercar, which gets all the press, brings technology to the lineup that then trickles down. Like, I think in a way, even to this day, the 918 Spyder kind of opened the door for the 911 to go hybrid. And for the Taycan to exist. Because it was like, if the hypercar can do it, then I promise you and your 911 can do it. And I think going back, doing a full— yes, I think it would sell. If they did another V10 manual hypercar, it'd be amazing. But it's kind of an anachronism. I also think Porsche is a little bit anxious about the number of people who have $2 million that are actually willing to buy those cars. My argument is they're doing it right now at auctions. Like, F50s are selling for $8 million. It's not like you're getting a bunch of cheap used car buyers who are like, I want manuals back, and I only buy used cars. These are people with real money who would buy them. But I think it's just easier to find buyers for automatic hybrids that have crazy numbers, horsepower and acceleration and all that.

Talk about the overall auction market and what's going on there. I spent the weekend in Montana with a few guys that have Porsche dealerships, and they were speculating themselves. But I'm curious what your take is.

It's been a bit of a ride the last few months. I've been shocked at watching some of the cars increase as they have. Cars that were— there are cars that have gone up 60%, 70% in what appears to be 3, 4 months. And you look at auction results, and it was one result, and now it's 4 results. And it's like, wow, so this is where the market is. Are some of these cars might be gone forever. I had to bump my insurance up on my Carrera GT. I'm going to bump it up again. I'm like getting anxious to drive it. Like, you start to think that like some of these cars that you lusted after as a child might be gone forever. And it doesn't feel like a bubble either. I just get the sense that we've all been hoping the other shoe would drop and these cars would fall. And that's not what happened after COVID, right? They went up, they stopped climbing, but nothing ever came back down. F40s never got cheap again. F50s never got cheap again. Never got cheap again. And I just don't get the sense that that's going to happen again. I think that there is a real interest in collectors and enthusiasts in keeping these cars, and it's just going to keep driving values up.

And isn't, isn't some of this like generational, right? Because you're seeing maybe some more softness in the, in classics and then some of these more like, you know, somebody that grew up with a Carrera GT on a poster. Like they're not reaching for classic cars anymore. And so this entire— there was an entire window of cars that were, in hindsight, like pretty reasonably priced because the people that were kids when they were being released didn't have the money. And then as soon as they had the wealth, then all of them would just immediately go. Yeah, absolutely.

And I think there's a FOMO effect among those people. Once they see values of a car go from $1 to $2 million, they think to themselves, oh crap, I got to buy it now before it goes to 4 million, and that helps push values up too. But yes, I mean, you saw that big, that big auction in Florida where they had all those bizarre colored cars came out. You know, you saw David Lee, who's this content creator in Southern California, he bought a Ferrari 250 GTO for like $38 million. Meanwhile, an Enzo at that same auction sold for like $11 million. The Enzo to 250 GTO spread at 3x is unbelievable considering that it used to be 100x. Yeah, and you're starting to see a 250 GTO as a 60 is a poster car for millennials. It was a car that was on our walls. I mean, that car came out when I was 15. And it's literally like a millennial dream. And that's where the money is shifting. I don't have any interest in a 250 GTO. I don't have any interest in a split-window Corvette or a Hemi Cuda. I'm looking at Enzos and Carrera GTs.

Those are the cars that I want. What about a Gullwing? How did Hoovy wind up with such an eclectic taste? You know, there are a few—

historic cars that I think will always be successful. Yeah. And that is one of them. That is a car that I think even the next generation and the generation after that will appreciate. And, and I got to admit, if gullwings came down to a reason— much more reasonable number— even I would be interested, even though it's a '50s car and it's old and all that. It is just so damn cool. And so I don't think that is that eclectic for a young person.

Yeah. I also heard it's like, it's like one of the first cars from that era that actually feels fast, whereas a lot of other cars, it's fancy, but it just feels very slow.

And modern. That's the really crazy thing about the Gullwing. I drove one, and it wasn't until the moment that I drove one that I realized why you see them on so many vintage rallies. And it's because they're unbelievably drivable. They are very comfortable. They are fuel injected. They are easy to drive. They are easy cars to operate, manual transmission. The steering is all very easy. Feels like a modern car, even though it is approaching 80 years old, 75 years old.

And so that's a pretty usable performance car. Love it. Jordy? What other words or advice were you sharing with the Porsche team on, like, what would you be— if you were magically the CEO of Porsche, what do you do right now? Because there's certainly some frustration in terms of accessibility for cars that people really like, enthusiast cars. Yeah.

And is that real, or is that created? I think the enthusiast cars, they're doing things generally right. It is a tough business right now, the auto business. They are dealing with changing governmental situations globally that have really affected their strategy. And Porsche, who is relatively small and relies a lot on the success of a single model, is sitting here saying we had shifted electric because that's what everybody told us they wanted. Suddenly they're saying that they don't necessarily want that. Meanwhile, European regulations are significantly stricter than now North American and even Chinese regulations. And is there a possibility that Porsche makes a special car just for the American and Chinese market? That's a hard sell to Germany, which— oh, Mark, I mean, it's, it's an interesting flux kind of world right now in the auto world. And I don't know. I honestly don't know what Porsche's future ought to be. But they have put a lot of money into pro— I have right now at my house the electric Macan GTS. It is a fantastic car.

It is not going to sell under any circumstances. One last question on Porsche before we move on to China. Why do Targas hold their value so well?

They're just not made in large numbers. And they are really damn Cool. The real question is, why don't they make a Turbo Targa yet? That would be— or a GT3 Targa. That is the market to go after.

But I think they're probably supply constrained. Yeah. China. BYD is in the— they're in the Wall Street Journal today. BYD launches new fast-charging battery amid slowing demand in China. I was surprised to see that they're losing market share there because it's so competitive. But they have this new tech. They can charge. The battery to 97% of capacity from 10% in just 9 minutes. What BYD models have you driven? What do you like? What do you think will be cloned or adopted, even if it can't be imported?

I drove some BYD sedan a long time ago. I don't remember which one it was. Very competent car.

Was it the Han?

Yeah, I think it was a Han. This was 3, 4 years ago. And it seems like the cars have gotten more competent since then. Because I'm sitting here in San Diego and we actually see BYD cars almost every day on the streets coming over from Mexico where they're pretty popular.

Wait, because you can buy them, you can buy them, register them in Mexico and you can drive them into the United States. You just can't register them here.

I don't think it's Americans who are doing this. It's just Mexicans who are coming over to shop or go to SeaWorld or whatever. But we see— I mean, live in San Diego, you see Mexican cars on the road more than any US state. And a lot of them are electric because they're selling a lot of them there. They look pretty damn compelling. I actually think that one of BYD's big success stories is, forgetting the China market for a second, just their global conquest. I mean, you see them all over Europe now. You see them all over Latin America now. They are really making it. As America gets scared of the Chinese and is trying to make all these rules against them, boy, the other countries are really embracing it. Ultimately, these countries like cheap, good cars.

And a lot of those cars are cheap and good. And Tata never really had that success coming out of India. Maybe just too—

I don't know what happened with Tata. They had that crazy tiny car. I think that I have a suspicion that if Tata had been in different market conditions, things would be different. But I think a lot of the success of BYD and the other Chinese companies is probably fueled by the Chinese government providing really favorable benefits, incentives, et cetera, to them. And maybe in India, when Tata was really trying to blow up 20 years ago, it was pre-EVs. That's a competitive advantage that the Chinese clearly have right now is their EV technology.

Okay, killer feature I saw out of China. I wanna know whether or not you want this in your next car. If the battery catches on fire, it ejects it concussively out the side. You've seen this video, I'm sure. Is that a good feature or not?

Oh God, you could imagine some real liabilities. That hasn't gone in front of, attorneys in the United States.

I'll tell you, I don't think so. But it is—

I think the technology that they are developing is interesting. Charging a battery in 9 minutes, that is a huge deal, right? Yeah, because I think that still to this day, the primary reason people don't want to adopt, uh, EVs is charge time and the fear of charge time and all that stuff. And I think the more you can— if you could ever really solve that problem, whether it's battery swaps or, or crazy fast charging That would probably be the last excuse, you know.

Have you seen the show, the HBO show Silicon Valley? Have you seen any of this? No, no. So there's this character who's loosely based on Mark Cuban, Russ Hanneman, and in the show he brags about how he has a car with doors that go up and it's become iconic in Silicon Valley. And I had this thesis, if you want to be the most impressive person in Silicon Valley, the best buy is the BMW i8 because the doors go up. They do, and it looks cool. And you can get one for like $40,000 now or something. They're cheap.

You'll be able to get one for $20,000 in just a few years too, I'm sure.

We have an intern on our team who's looking at a new car. Talk him out of getting one. Why should he not pull the trigger on a BMW i8?

How old is he?

He's 21. And where does he live? He lives in Los Angeles. He should definitely get one. He should definitely get one.

He's 21 and he's in LA. He should obviously get an i8. He's going to go around flexing. He's going to put those doors up at every stoplight. Yeah, every stoplight.

Do it. Should he buy one that's already been wrapped and crashed in crypto? In crypto paint?

He'll wrap and crash it if he doesn't buy one this time.

Yeah, I just assume. The other broader question is that he often winds up at a valet. And I want to know, what is the best bargain car to make sure that you get valet? You know how they park the nice cars in the front? What's the car that's the best bargain to get the awesome valet spot? I mean, that is up there.

That's a tough car, right? In the '30s. And car enthusiasts laugh at that car and do not have any respect for that car. But LA valets and driving it around LA and like, you know, I remember when those were new. I lived in Philly. And I remember seeing them on the streets thinking, this looks like a concept car. And I know it's not that fast. I know it doesn't drive great. It's got a 3-cylinder engine. But holy crap, this thing looks so cool. It looks insane. It's been 10 years.

And it still looks just as cool. It still looks cool. He was asking me, he was like, 3 cylinders, so are they in a V shape? And I was like, no, it's not a V3.

But also, but also, if you're, if you're thinking about an i8, you shouldn't concern yourself with any of that stuff. You're obviously not a car enthusiast, so just don't worry about the cylinders.

Just to defend him, I was pitching him this.

I was pitching him this, but I still think it's a great, it's a great flex car, but it is a hell of a flex.

Yes. What, what else is in that category if you, if you maybe double the budget, triple the budget, but you still want just ridiculousness for the price.

I am surprised to see how cheap McLarens are getting. And the early McLarens, the MP4-12Cs, have a reputation for being unreliable. However, the 570S, which was sort of the next generation car, that was the entry model. They are starting to come down. We sold one on Cars and Vids not that long ago for like $80-some. That's a pretty appealing car because that is like real fast. That is not like, oh, the i8 is pretty fast fast. That is like modern car, 3-second or less 0-to-60 type of fast. Those are pretty impressive cars for that money. That's good. You're still always worried every day, though, when you're driving a 40,000-mile McLaren that was probably on turbo for 3 and a half years.

It's still always a little bit worried, right? Yeah. On turbo for that long is rough. What are you looking— what are you most excited for release-wise this year?

You know, there's not that much stuff that's coming out this year that I'm really pumped for. I think the Rivian R2 is definitely the car that I'm most excited for. I've already driven it. But I am excited to see how it does. EVs obviously have fallen off, but that car is so damn good. And I just hope that it has the success it deserves because it is just such a great car. I'm excited to see the electric Ferrari for sure. I don't think it'll be out yet this year. Definitely excited to drive the new hypercars, the F80 and McLaren's, which is called the W1. But it seems like this year is a little bit less of a crazy year of cool stuff that I've been excited for. And I think R2 to me is the— especially from a consumer retail car industry perspective, to me, probably the most interesting car coming out.

What's going on with Scout Motors? Is that taking some of Rivian's IP? Do I— I'm just kind of speculating here, but did— VW Group is a big investor in Rivian, and I think they got IP rights through that investment to try to bring it over to the rest of the fleet. And then Scout is kind of expanding off of what Rivian's done. What's the relationship there?

It'll be an interesting thing to see because, yeah, Volkswagen is an investor in Rivian, but also basically owns Scout. And it's like, wait a minute, these cars are really similar. They're both these kind of boxy off-road electric vehicles. One interesting distinction is that Scout is going to do a plug-in hybrid. So they're going to have gas motors in those cars. And I think that that is one excuse people use for not buying Rivians. They're worried if they go overlanding, they're going to run out of charge, which is a legitimate if you're actually out in the middle of the desert or the mountains or whatever. But Scout, they recently announced they're pushing Scout a year to '28 now. This is one of those things where I'm like a believe it when I see it guy. They showed those cars, which were so cool. What has that been, 2 years ago? And now they're saying it'll be another 2 years. It's like, let's see what happens. Let's see what the climate is like politically before these cars actually come out. But it is interesting that, yeah, Volkswagen Group is basically pitting these 2 brands sort of against each other. And I am curious how that will end up shaking down.

Yeah. Is there a word for those reverse hybrids where it's mostly an electric car, but it has a gas engine that you can fill up to charge the battery? I saw a demo from a Chinese car. But that feels like something that for the overlander, for the camper, for somebody who wants to go off-grid and not have the range anxiety, but still have all the benefits of the electric power train. Yeah, that, that is—

I think that would almost like a generator. Yeah, basically. I think that would be great. I think, I think people would probably— they would certainly be more willing to adopt that than like a full electric for like the overlanding crowd. However, I would argue that like I walk around my neighborhood and like 8 of my neighbors have Rivian R1S's. Like, yeah, these people aren't actually overlanding, right? These are, these are cars, the 3-row SUVs, they're going to take their kids around. And I think that you can't, you can't, you can't do too much development for the overlanding crowd, which isn't real. Uh, there's not a lot of people in the overlanding world willing to spend $120 grand on a brand new vehicle anyway. Um, mostly you got to think about who's actually going to buy these, which is, you know, parents.

Do you have expectations around, uh, self-driving capabilities just going to normal consumer cars over the next few years? Like, I don't know if you've been in a Waymo, but yeah, technology is like there.

Porsche dealers last weekend and I was like, how much of a threat do you think the— like, at what point do consumers say, like, I love Porsche, but I don't want to— I want the best possible autonomous driving. Right. And so I'm just going to— for my daily, I couldn't possibly go with Porsche because I don't want to drive.

Yeah, I think about that a lot. I have been surprised at autonomous, uh, autonomous technology. There was a lot of talk about it for a long time, and then the last 2 years I haven't heard that much. It's almost like they haven't been able to kind of— whatever the next hump is, like, they're doing well, and the Tesla FSD is great, and a lot of other cars have really great systems too, but none of these are like Waymo type. Like, they're not— you're not— that doesn't seem like it's ready to go into cars that you or me would be able to buy. And that doesn't seem like it's changed much over the last couple of years. It seems like the world has moved on to like AI and, and, uh, kind of forgotten about like autonomous cars. And I do wonder how long that's going to be. I do think that Porsche will have to develop— like, there will have to be autonomous Porsches. Like, other automakers will do it too if they want to sell Cayennes and Panameras. Those are not necessarily being sold to people who like love to drive. Um, and so those cars also will have— they'll have to do that. That's just going to have to be what they do.

I'm pumped for Yeah, Mercedes seemed really close with a Level 3 system that you could actually watch a YouTube video on the center console.

And they even said at some point they would be willing to take liability. But where is that?

It just never really shipped or anything. And you would think that it would be like a rat race, arms race, and it would be like, OK, well, now BMW fires back. And they're Level 3+, right? But it just never really played out.

They all went all in on EV and spent a lot of money and time developing that. It turned out that's kind of been a little bit of a dud, at least here in North America. And it's like, we would rather have an autonomous.

I think most people would rather have an autonomous. Most people. Yeah, definitely.

How do I get one of these new Unimogs from Mercedes?

Well, the story I read was that they're building precisely one. Did you read that? No. They're building one Unimog.

That was what I was afraid of. Because you look at this thing and it's like, it looks like a concept car. When I first saw it, I was like, OK, this is cool, but it's obviously AI. And then Mercedes was posting it from their actual account. I'm like, okay, it's real, but it's a partnership with this other kind of like commercial truck company. I forget the name. So I'm not going to get one, you're saying, and you're not going to review one? No.

I mean, even if they did make them, the Unimogs, especially modern Unimogs, have almost completely been restricted to not the US. There's all sorts of regulations and trucks importing trucks to the US is hard. But it'd be cool as hell. It looks incredibly cool.

Oh, no. Oh, no. You have to get a G60 Landyline.

What's the most elite big family SUV to buy this year? I'm in the market.

The answer for me, if I was answering this question, it would be the Lexus LX. Because I think that that is a serious car that is seriously capable. It is the 300 Series Land Cruiser globally, which is a very serious car that Toyota doesn't bring here anymore as a Toyota. And I think if you know, you know. That car is an if you know, you know car. I think a lot of people would say that it's the Cadillac Escalade IQ, but I think that car is— certainly, there's a group of people who are buying that car. It's not really— I think they think they are elite, and I think that it's not really that. But I like the if you know, you know cars better. And the LX, specifically the Overtrail LX, like the off-road version, is like a very— it's a 3-row, but it's like a very capable off-roader. And it's expensive, and not that many people are buying it. Those are special cars.

OK, last car recommendation. There's a group of folks on our team, all young single individuals. They go on date nights. They were thinking about going in and buying one car that they would share. They were considering a Lamborghini Urus that they would each have a few nights a month with which to go on first dates.

And some more backstory, I think it was the two of us who suggested this.

Again, this was our idea. But is there, is there a better car for a group of young men in Los Angeles to share for first dates than a Lamborghini Urus?

Do we have a budget here, or are we— is it just—

well, I mean, we're talking about 8 or so guys.

There's 8 or so guys, so they're gonna all be paying a normal car payment of a couple hundred dollars, but you add that up, you get into like $3,000.

You get into like $3,000 a month. Potentially lease like a, like a Rolls-Royce. Rolls-Royce.

But that's not maybe the right date car. So yeah, the team's right there if you want to take a look.

If it was me, I would get a Bentayga for that same money, but it depends on the type of lady that you're— or man that you're trying to attract. Yeah, there's a certain type of, of lady or man that is interested in an Urus driver. Yeah. And there is a certain type that's interested in a Bentayga. And you kind of got to just figure out what you're looking for, you know what I mean?

Okay, okay. Your wife is not going to be attracted to the Urus, but she might appreciate—

yeah, well, that's why Turo exists. We will, we will, we will need a Turo each and run the proper A/B test for the—

for this. That may actually be the easier way to do this. It truly is, because at some point in either situation you have to come clean. Yeah, yeah, you have to come clean and be like, why don't you start the Urus tonight?

Oh, uh, Well, the best thing, a 24-hour Turo rental, you potentially can squeeze in 2 dinners, a breakfast, and a lunch, and then maybe even a late lunch before you got to return the car.

Many years ago, I did ads for Turo and in YouTube videos, and for some reason I agreed to be paid in Turo credit instead of dollars. And it got to a point at one point where I had like $22,000 in Turo credit. And so whenever I would travel anywhere, I would just sort my most expensive, and I would rent whatever G-Wagon or Audi R8 or McLaren was available in whatever city.

The brutal thing for me is I was watching, I was watching your videos and I became a Turo client, but I was, you know, in my early 20s. I couldn't get any of the good stuff. I'd just be like, oh, okay. Like, uh, I can get a Boxster.

Oh, well, well, thank you so much for taking the time to come.

Thank you. Yeah, for sure.

Thanks for having me back. I appreciate it.

Everyone go follow Cars and Bids. Go to carsandbids.com.

Buy this car.

Buy— yeah, sort by most expensive. Buy that car. That's what you want.

Exactly right. Exactly right.

Thank you, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about AppLovin. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent with Okta. And without further ado, Max Hodak is back on the show. Max, good to see you. How are you doing?

I do not have audio, but you look fantastic. You look fantastic.

The video looks great. Max Hodak is, of course, the founder and CEO of Science Corporation. He's co-founder of Neuralink, and there are some exciting news developments coming through today. I think I heard something. I think I hear Max. Can you hear us?

I can hear you.

Yeah. Yes. I can hear a little bit. Great. So give us the— maybe reintroduce the company and then give us the news today.

Yeah. I mean, it's been a crazy, crazy couple months. Yeah. So we're, uh, I mean, we're a medical technology company really focused on the brain. It's just when you engage directly with the brain, you get new insights you don't really see elsewhere in medicine. Our lead product is the retinal prosthetic, the chip that plants it in the back of the eye, that, uh, we finished a major clinical trial last year on age-related macular degeneration. It's one of the main reasons people go blind, um, that's not inherited. And in that clinical trial, you're able to take people that haven't been able to recognize faces for over a decade to reading. I found out the other week that one of our patients finished a 300-page novel. There's a sketch on the wall of our office of someone who sent us a sketch of the Sydney Opera House that she drew through it.

Wow. We're still having some audio errors. Let's, let's take a little break. We'll come back to you in a few minutes. Is that okay? Let's sort that out. And Jordy and I will go back to a bit of the news and give you an update on ChatGPT is pulling back potentially from the direct response advertising. The Agenta Commerce is gonna be a little bit more brand-focused potentially. I saw some news about that.

Well, Agenta Commerce is different than the ads product. Yes, yes. So like Agenta Commerce is like you search for a product, a Shopify retailer has opted into this. There was a question about how people can opt in. I think a big part of it is just like, focus, right? Like it seems like over the last couple months, like my, my interpretation of OpenAI strategy is like, hey, let's focus on our core business, consumer. Let's focus on enterprise, cogent, and let's just like get back to basics.

My big question is, is I wonder if there will be an opportunity to, to run more targeted ads on those more considered purchases. Like a car, like I have hit ChatGPT with a number of questions about very expensive purchases like a car. I'm not getting targeted on Instagram with car ads because typically the car brands have sort of just like brand advertising broadly for, okay, yeah, here's a brand, you see it at the Super Bowl. But direct response has never really worked on Meta for these highly considered purchases. Like houses and cars, but people go to LLMs asking questions about those. What will it be like to live in this neighborhood? Is this like, here's my budget, what, what should I be, you know, what should I be looking for in a family car? Like the questions that you asked Doug DeMuro, we're fortunate that we get to ask him directly about R8s and I8s and all sorts of Bentaygas versus Uruses. But a lot of people will have that question and go to an LLM. For a debate. And you can even go to ChatGPT right now and just ask, you know, what's the best car? What car do you think I want? And it will just tell you. And there's an opportunity there to drive conversion to a very high-ticket purchase. But it's unclear, you know, how quickly that will roll out. We do have a piece of advice for everyone. Sorry, I just asked.

What? ChatGPT 5.4 thinking, what car do you think I want? It only had to think for a couple of seconds. Probably a Porsche 992 GT3 RS That's what the YSAC fag is.

See, nailed it. And so the thing is, is that it could be asking that question in the background. It could go in the background and just say, for every single person, ask what's the highest ticket item that you think that they might buy? And then they could go to Porsche and say, hey, we think we got a fish on the line here. Like, just pay us a couple bucks. If we get them across the finish line, pay us $1,000 or a couple thousand bucks. And that could be a very different different shape of advertiser, I think.

Yeah, it's hard to handle the attribution, but—

Yes, but I think it's actually easier in an LLM context because if you are actually going to buy that GT3 RS with a Weissach package, you'll probably ask ChatGPT about where can you find one. And then when you're in the dealership, when you're reviewing a contract, you might potentially actually have the, the LLM review the contract, right? Like you might have— you might upload it, upload the sales contract and you might ask it, hey, update my insurance and it might go do that. So it might actually have a lot more attribution. And then down the line it might actually say— you might be asking a question, hey, my check engine light's on, or how do I put this in track mode? And then it knows that you actually got the GT3 RS with the Weissach package. So who knows? Anyway, I think we have resolved our issues. We will return to our discussion with Max Hodak. How are you doing, Max? Good. Good enough? Yes, I think so.

Much better.

Let's restart with—

start over from the beginning because I could hardly hear you, but what I was hearing I was quite excited about. Yes.

So we make brain implants. Our main one is a retinal prosthesis, so it's a chip implanted in the back of the eye. Finished a major clinical trial last last summer in age-related macular degeneration, which is one of the leading causes of blindness. And in the trial, we were able to take patients that— like, there's one patient that hasn't been able to recognize faces in over a decade. I found out that she finished a 300-page novel recently. Oh, that's insane.

Wait, so, yeah, so, uh, couldn't recognize faces— that means that, like, if I'm trying to imagine what that looks like, it's effectively take a picture of what I'm seeing and then just blur, blur, blur until I can't even recognize it. Of face. Is that, is that basically what the person's experiencing?

So in this disease, yeah, they lose their high-resolution central vision. So there's like, like you, when you look online, you might see an image of like a big black splotch in the center of your vision. And the patients don't experience the black splotch, so it's like a little bit weirder than that. They describe it as missing, so it's kind of like, like a big extended blind spot. But, um, yeah, I mean, all of your high-resolution, high-acuity central vision gets destroyed in this disease, geographic atrophy. And so we have a chip that we implant under where the dead retina is and can stimulate this retina directly, bypassing the dead cells to get the signal back into the brain. So like, if you— I mean, humanity is empirically not that good at drug discovery, but the brain is a computer and there's a cable that carries the visual signal into the brain. And if we can get the signal into the cable, then you can get vision into the brain.

Wow, that's remarkable. Uh, How much is the device that you implant like a camera sensor that I would see in an iPhone?

So there's a wearable, so the patients wear glasses. On the glasses, there's two parts, implant, but then there's the glasses, and the glasses have a camera that is just like an iPhone camera. Got it. And there's a laser projector that projects the image onto the implant. But the cool trick here is the implant is kind of all these tiny little solar panels, and so it is powered by the image that's projected onto it. Into the— means that there's no battery, there's no cable coming out of the eye. It's just a little chip because it is like when you project the infrared image onto the implant that powers it at the same time to stimulate the retina.

Wow. This feels like an invasive process. How invasive is it? Is this an expert surgeon doing the work? Are you thinking about robotics? What's involved in actually— obviously the reward is so high that it's worth it, But what does that look like now? What will it look like in a decade?

Yeah, I mean, this is done by human surgeons. It's done by a vitreoretinal surgeon. Yeah. And it's— but it's a simple outpatient procedure. So you can do this under local anesthesia. So you make an injection next to the eye. It goes dark and numb for a couple hours. They can do the front of the eye. I mean, it looks— I mean, like watching a video, it looks kind of like— I don't know that you would do this electively, but it's really not a big deal. About an hour and a half, and the patient goes home, and a day later, they can take a bandage off.

That's remarkable. And so walk me through like post-implant, post-surgery monitoring. Do you have benchmarks? I mean, you mentioned like a 300-page book that seems like, okay, it works, but are you giving them the normal like eye test? What are all the different batteries that you use to understand the effect of the device? Yeah. I mean, there's a bunch.

We were looking at both efficacy, so things like how many letters can they read on the eye chart and improvement in that. That was one of the main trial endpoints. So, we wanted at least 2 lines of improvement. We got on average much better than that. And then, you're also looking at measures of safety. So, for when Is there anything worse off for having this? Like, in there, they have the chip in but the laser is not on. Is there residual vision? Because many of these patients have residual peripheral vision that they can use to walk around. It's just that they can't read, they can't— definitely can't drive. Um, and you don't want that to get worse. And so this is— there's various ways you can measure that. You can measure the range of the visual field. Um, but yeah, I mean, the eye chart is a Center test, we use that as an efficacy endpoint.

Sorry, Jerry. You've raised a bunch of new money. Like, what is this going to go towards? Is it continuing to focus on the core products? Like, walk us through.

Yeah, so we announced yesterday that we raised $230 million in series C, bringing the total amount of capital to a little under half a billion. It's like, you know, it's like a lot of money. A lot of money.

Founder. A lot of money for an incredible cause. Congratulations.

We have bought ourselves the privilege of working really hard.

Yeah. So can you take me back a little bit to how you discovered this particular problem to solve? Because it feels like you've, throughout your career, you've taken like a sort of general approach, but then there's always a question of like, what's the most impactful, quickest way to market, most capital efficient. There's a whole bunch of different trade-offs that I imagine you wrestled with before you landed on this particular product.

So we have 3 programs at Scion. There's our work in the retina. There's our biohybrid neural interface technology, which is a general purpose, kind of what people think of as like a neural interface, a little bit different than what most other people do. And then, we have improvements in critical care life support technologies. I mean, I think one way to conceive of what we're doing is like if Medtronic was started in 2021, what are the projects they would be taking on in the next 20 years? And, when you think about from a brain-computer interface perspective, I mean, beyond like what is a BCI? This has become kind of synonymous for many people with paralyzed people controlling computers. That is what many of the companies are doing. But we think that cochlear implants are BCIs. Those have been around for decades. And so the retinal prosthesis is really in the tradition of cochlear implants. There's a billion people plus with those out there. It's just until recently, the technology hasn't really worked. And so when you think about what is the most valuable BCI product that it's an unmet need, restoring vision to the blind is really up there. And so, the need is one of those things that is kind of obvious. Restoring vision to the blind is a quest humanity has been on for thousands of years. And then, if you were to do that, when me and my co-founders looked around at the state of the world in early 2021, it was pretty easy for us to build a conviction that one way or another by stimulating either the optic nerve directly or the the layer of cells in the retina just before that using either a gene therapy or an electrical stimulator. One way or another, you kind of have these like 4 boxes. It's really like 3 boxes of those trade-offs. One of those would work. And, we went out and did an exhaustive survey of the state of the art in kind of each of those 3 options and zeroed in on what we're doing now. And, there's I think really like a first principle of engineering approach to how you tackle the problem. And that has so far paid off. We're not on the market yet, but I think we're getting pretty close. And the next step with this capital is to— we've submitted for marketing approval in Europe, hope to be commercially approved there in the near future, not quite there yet, and then start to be able to commercialize it.

Talk about resolution. I imagine that the camera on the glasses is something like 1080p, something along those lines. But I imagine that the actual implant needs to serve something that's maybe lower resolution or translated. You're not running an image-to-text pipeline and then piping that into the brain. But what is the input, and then what goes actually into the brain?

So, it's important to understand that only the central couple degrees of your visual field is high acuity color. Okay. You're constantly looking around to try to reduce the uncertainty in the brain. You don't see the image on the retina directly. What you experience is a world model constructed by the brain. It's highly semantic. Like, you can look at something and kind of know, "Well, that's hard or soft if I touch it." experiencing this world model. And so, as the eye is moving around, it's filling in areas of uncertainty. And so, the implant, you're right, we're not restoring high-resolution color vision today, but what we are getting is this occluded form image that patients can look at. It strings together shapes into letters and letters into words, and the brain can apprehend that intuitively. And, that had never really been done before. And so, that is a really clear statement that we're on the right track. But, the next step is to make the implant larger so that the device that's now is 2 millimeters by 2 millimeters, which covers— it's like looking through a straw. And, the electrodes are 0.1 millimeters, which means that you stimulate a bunch of cells at a time. And so, what that means is it's not that it is pixelated. They don't see it as pixelated. They see it as sharp, but they only get a small amount of detail at once. It does better than you would expect for the number of electrodes because as the eye moves around, it gets information. And so, it's a little bit— That's fascinating. Yeah. You can't really think of it like a camera in that way. But, we actually have the next version of the chips already in hand. The electrodes are much smaller. We're going to go from 400 to a couple thousand. And, we're working on the clinical study for those. Over the next year. Yeah. And hopefully every like 2 years or so we'll have versions coming out. And we actually think that it could be upgradable, although we'll have to prove that, of course.

Yeah. Based on, based on, uh, the kind of early, uh, early patients, like, how do you expect this market to evolve and how quickly, uh, how quickly, uh, people that suffer from blindness will adopt something like this once you continue to prove out the product. My assumption is that there's like an extreme eagerness to find a solution again for something that— a solution that has never existed. But, you know, what do you think the adoption curve will look like?

Yeah, I mean, blind patients are pretty motivated for the most part. So age-related macular generation as a whole is big, but not that many people have a form that is late stage and serious enough that this makes sense right now. But for the current— so that AMD globally is 200 million people, but that's not really relevant number for very late stage, both eyes, large area of atrophy. Um, the— that's the population that's really relevant for the product as it is right now. That's— we think that's like 6,500 people a year in the US and backlog of a couple of maybe 150,000 to 200,000 people across the US and Europe. And with the next version of the device with a larger field of view and a smaller electrode, that expands to probably 5 million people. And these are huge. We're not going to implant. If the next several years we're doing 1,000 a year, those would be big numbers. And so right now, like I said, it's not high-resolution color vision, but it's the is powerful resistance proof that this technology is on the right track. But I do think that the next couple of device generations will hopefully be able to get color Perceps. We'll be able to at least get red and green. You'll be able to get the native acuity. You're not going to go— sometimes people ask like, okay, will I get this as an augmentation? Like, you're not going to do better than the photoreceptors. If you have photoreceptors, you should use those. But I think that we can get pretty close to what those are for you.

Last question for me. Smell-o-vision. When are we getting it? How will we solve the problem of teaching AI to smell? Do we need to capture the olfactory system from my brain and decode that into tokens? What if I lose my sense of smell? Will you be able to help me restore my sense of smell in the future?

I mean, this gets to a fairly deep question of just like, how do you capture the structure of any phenomenal mode. Like, we— and then hearing are different, smell is different, somatic sensation is different. So how do you capture— like, we have— we can write down images and audio files to computer, and so we have a format that captures them, but that doesn't really tell you about— like, the— like, a WAV file is different than an image file. And so, like, what is a smell file like? And there's actually really interesting research on— like, you can— there's like— it's a chemical sensor, it spans the space of molecules, you can get this decomposition of the space of molecules. But this is— yes, smell has been very— there's a lot of companies that over the years have worked on growing up neurons, expressing olfactory receptors to try to do chemical detection because dog noses are some of the most chemical, most sensitive chemical detectors in the universe. And I actually was talking to a company the other day that is training dogs to detect cancer. And I went into the pitch being like, I don't believe you. And I came out Oh, I get that. Actually, I could see it. Yeah. And the trick was the really interesting thing just really shortly was it's not that they're picking up some chemical that is present if you have cancer, it's that there's thousands of chemicals that are constantly just being emitted that are in your blood that are being used out. And if you can train a dog under reinforcement, what it does is it kind of upregulates some receptors, downregulates some other receptors, the brain wires together the to pick out that part of chemical space. And so it can pick out this exquisite balance of hundreds or thousands of chemicals to say, when these are present in these proportions, you should get—

That's fascinating. So it's not like there's a cancer chemical. It's the irregulation. It's the pattern. I mean, this seems perfectly tailored for artificial intelligence. But yeah, we don't even have the smell file yet. So dogs still employed in the singularity. For sure. Yeah.

So it's like if it's not one chemical, you can't just mass spec it. You want to detect thousands of them, which is why they're trying to use dogs.

I love it.

I love it.

Well, thank you so much and congratulations on the progress. Thank you for everything you do.

What— Yeah. How— last question from my side. How— like, talk about the significance of this milestone. You obviously raised a lot of money out the gates, but is this like, like, hey, we actually— like, is it like becoming a real company? Now and moving beyond? Because everybody talks about big, you know, there's a lot of big numbers that get thrown around in our industry. If you have some AI database company with $10 million of ARR, you can raise $230 million. But this is a very different kind of type of business where you had to raise a lot of money out the gates, but you maybe wouldn't have gotten a bunch more money if you weren't really onto something.

Yeah, I mean, our focus— like, I really believe that there needs to be businesses in this industry. I mean, you can spend an infinite amount of money just on our research. I mean, it's an infinite well of research. I mean, this is like— there's so much grant money that goes into neuroscience, neural engineering. But we, um, I don't know, I mean, I, I just like strongly feel that it's like we're suffering from this like money cancer that every now and then you kind of goes into remission when you raise around, but then comes back and the feeling won't go away until you have a sustainable business where there's revenue coming in. And I think that we're hopefully pretty— we're close to that. That's like the thing we're focused on is getting to a real business that reaches many patients and improves their lives. And there's things that you can point to that are clearly valuable to lots of people that allow this to become sustainable. And then it's a question of how fast do you grow rather than is UCI going to have a winner?

Yeah, makes sense.

Very cool. Well, thank you for coming on and sharing and for the work that you're doing. Yeah, it's incredibly inspiring.

Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon, Max.

Yeah, I'm sure.

I'm sure Max has a very relaxing weekend. Yeah. Nothing going on at the office. Now, good luck with all the hard work ahead of you. Thank you for everything you do. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Cheers. Let me Tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And let me tell you about Labelbox. RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams.

Uh, Skook says, imagine trying to explain this to a software engineer 18 months ago. And it's a Forbes article. On January 5th, employees at Cursor returned from the holiday weekend to an all-hands meeting with a slide deck titled Wartime. Wartime. After becoming the hottest, fastest-growing AI coding company, Cursor is confronting a new reality. Developers may no longer need a code editor at all.

Yeah, what a wild ride over the last 2 weeks with Cursor. I mean, the company's still growing and ARR is at $2 billion. Potentially raising at $50 billion, but at the same time, a lot of, you know, we've seen a lot of viral posts saying like, I don't need my cursor seats anymore. I've moved on to just coding agents. And so definitely a, you know, maybe there's a shift in the business. Do they go more into training models? Do they go deeper into certain enterprises that are maybe stickier or harder to get to? Do they become more forward deployed helping with transformation, doing actual projects? Projects, they can become a consulting firm. Like, where is the next act 2 for that company will be an interesting question. Well, hopefully they're not reliant on building Cursor using Mac Studios with 512 gigs of RAM because those apparently are no longer available due to the DRAM shortage. This is from MacRumors. The Mac Studio with the maximum amount of RAM that you can use to inference large models locally. Well, it's going to be harder to get in the DRAM shortage. So pour one out for the good old maxed-out Mac Studio. It could be, or they could just be preparing for the next revision. I think there'll be a new Mac Studio out in a couple months, and maybe they're ready to start building those because the— I imagine that the, uh, the purchase rate of those sort of like falls off slowly towards the end You know, no one really buys an iPhone right before they release the new iPhone. There's a big surge. And so maybe you want to allocate that DRAM to the next generation.

Gabe had shared this on X. He said they're rolling out CEOs for fast food brands you've never heard of. That's true. And we got a post here. Is there a new one? Freddy's. Enter the chat from Freddy's. John, you know about Freddy's?

I've never heard of Freddy's. Has Volta? We get some audio here. Has Volta done one? We need, we need one for the job. See what I eat for lunch on the real? Here we go.

Original double.

I'd like to make that a triple, please. I'll do fries and a large Diet Dr Pepper. This guy definitely eats burgers. CEO eating his burger like he does all the time. This is such a funny little trend for the CEOs of I would like to see SaaS CEOs do this.

Yeah, here I am, I'm using— all right, how do I, how do I poke around here?

Eating burgers. Is this a different company? No, thanks, bud.

There are so many of these tacos. Freddy's has tacos too.

You gotta go with the hot honey cheese curd. Hot honey, little savory sweet action.

You want to see David Chang chowing down? I want to see Jiro eating his own sushi. Give me that. There's a lot more. There's a chart from Anthropic on the impact of AI labor markets. Blue shows the theoretical capability of AI. Red shows where the observed usage is happening. Computer and math is huge. Office and admin is pretty pretty big. Sales is actually creeping up too. But if you're in production, transportation, protect ice service— there's a typo on this for some reason— protect ice service, protective services probably, maybe a hallucination there, personal care, grounds maintenance, completely unaffected. So head over to transportation and ground service. I was, I was confused by the transportation thing because the self-driving cars, that's happening, that's coming. In terms of AI's capability, yeah, maybe it's not an anthropic model that's driving you around, but certainly automation will come for transportation. Now ground maintenance, that feels much further off with robots. Nat Friedman's working on that one with the other ones. But Kevin Roose has a mnemonic to know about, to learn about the the labor market. He says, "Jobs in the red is dead. Jobs in the blue? Join a construction crew." And someone else was saying that this could have just been a bar chart, but, you know, here we are. Anyway, anything else we should talk about? Why don't you find another post and I'll tell everyone about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. Tyler, you have final post?

Yeah, Scott Sumner, you know, from GMU. I think he's retired, but, you know, macro goat. Yeah, he has a new Substack post called Freak Out. Freak Out? Yeah. No way. He's blackpilling.

Really? Yep. Wasn't he just on Macro Musings?

Pretty recently. Yeah.

Great episode.

Okay, we got a nominal GDP level targeting. We got to read through this.

Sumner. Okay, well, when is it time to panic? Apparently he's saying freak out. Isn't his blog called The Pursuit of Happiness? What an odd— freak out, when it's time to panic. OK, he's saying when it's time to panic. He doesn't necessarily say that it's time to panic right now. We should read through this, but we can cover this on Monday since this is a longer post. We need to digest this. Maybe we should get him on the show. I'm a big fan of Scott Sumner and his appearances on Macro Musings from Mercator. Institute. Is that Mercatus Institute? Mercatus Center. Anyway, thank you for tuning in to TVPN on Friday. Thanks for coming. Go have a wonderful weekend. Have a wonderful weekend. Also, early happy birthday to Trey. He's turning something in. He's having a birthday on Monday, so he's probably having a fun weekend. Can't wait. Anyway, leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to our newsletter, tvpn.com, and we will see you on Monday, 11 AM.

Weekend of your life. Love you. That's all, folks.

Good.