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

12:57Vincenzo Landino:You're telling me this baby oil was made from babies?

13:01Max Hodak:That's just weird.

13:03Vincenzo Landino:uh no you're telling me this devil's food cake was baked by the devil i think it kind of this

13:10Max Hodak:is like misunderstanding yeah like what the actual uh prompt is they're all kind of the same

13:15Vincenzo Landino:format it's the same prompt uh yeah you're telling me the the full prompt is can you come up with 10 jokes in the same format as the you're telling me shrimp fried this rice yeah yeah it's almost like

13:24Max Hodak:they're they're they're doing rl to optimize for like more economically valuable tasks and not to just like make endless jokes that will satisfy me because uh it does seem like they're climbing the benchmarks but uh we need comedy bench clearly comedy bench well sometimes people that are the

13:45Vincenzo Landino:most functional in organizations don't have the greatest sense of humor that's true that could be a factor that could be a factor we do need a model that's 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

14:02Max Hodak:that gets kicked out of school expelled expelled expelled uh grok has been on a wild run uh 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 didn't expect open-ended to pull this off who else has something going on poke ai mon pokemon experimenting with GPT 5.4, autonomously editing and rewriting Pokemon, the Pokemon Red ROM, replacing Pokemon with AIs. Details below. That's a fun hack project. I saw someone pointed one of the models at Red Dead Redemption 2.

14:45Max Hodak:Did you see that?

14:46Vincenzo Landino:Yes.

14:47Max Hodak: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...

15:03Vincenzo Landino:Yeah, I saw a lot of vibe coded games. Nick on the team, he made some vibe coded games.

15:08Max Hodak: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... These mashups are what AI is so good at. The Harry Potter Balenciaga moment. And so if you think about like, okay, well, there's a game out there that has really, really solid mechanics for running around and pointing a gun at each other and like doing 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.

15:46Max Hodak: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 just like re-skinning it it seems very like I mean he loves Age of Empires and re-skinning Age of Empires seems very doable I don't know how compact the binary is for Age of Empires 2 I imagine 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.

16:23Max Hodak:We'll have to find some mods.

16:24Vincenzo Landino:Angel over on X one-shotted Minecraft. Pull this up. Took 24 minutes.

16:32Max Hodak:What do you mean they one-shotted Minecraft? How is that possible?

16:35Vincenzo Landino:I think it generated this entire game in HTML or something. Yeah, it's always hard because there are endless examples of Minecraft remakes on GitHub and stuff. Yeah. But it is very cool that it's fully running.

16:47Max Hodak:And truly, 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, cool. Again, to comp it to work that you would do at a company.

17:02Vincenzo Landino: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.

17:18Max Hodak:I talked about there was a drone company that wasn't using Linux. They were like, yeah, like, let's like, like, not, not just like, let's write our own software stack or like now, obviously you should be using like image net and like whatever off the shelf tools are available for slam meta has a bunch of open source stuff. You should be compiling all that together, but to rewrite like the operating system because like you want, you know, full control. Typically, if somebody wants a website, you're gonna be like, let's go, maybe just set up a Shopify if you need that. Set up some sort of hosted site.

17:54Max Hodak:You're not gonna 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 until 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.

18:36Max Hodak: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 like putting them together in an interesting way, where like the game engine's familiar, the content's familiar, but they haven't crossed before and like they can in the world of AI.

18:56Vincenzo Landino:Theo says, been using 5.4 for a week now, absurdly good model, don't really like using anything else anymore.

19:02Max Hodak:He really likes 5.4. He was doing a whole live stream about this. What did the Primeagin, the other streamer...

19:07Vincenzo Landino:Somebody responded to Theo and said, every time a new model released, your statement changes. And he says, that's because newer models tend to be better than older ones. That's hilarious. Theo always has great, great breakdowns of new models. Yeah. I would go over to his account.

19:25Max Hodak: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 Primeegian, 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.

19:49Vincenzo Landino:What's going on? Heading over to Joe Weisenthal.

19:52Max Hodak:In the economy.

19:53Vincenzo Landino:We got a big miss in jobs. The U.S. loses 92 ,000 jobs in February. unemployment rises to 4.4 percent 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 uh the economy has just been shedding jobs since april of 2025 if you factor in yeah the revisions down yeah uh apparently there's a strike in the

20:28Max Hodak: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 two months were revised down by 69 ,000 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. Some jobs had parts that were a pain and now those parts are super easy.

21:10Max Hodak:Some people leaned into AI to stay relevant, still wonder if it will replace them entirely. Well, we will continue to track it. Brent has been 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 at 150.

21:37Vincenzo Landino:Crude is up 11.5 % today.

21:40Max Hodak:Yeah.

21:41Vincenzo Landino:Not good.

21:42Max Hodak:It's very interesting 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 Industrial Average.

21:56Vincenzo Landino:Put it into startup terms.

21:58Max Hodak:Hard tech slid.

21:59Vincenzo Landino:Imagine if your AWS or GCP bill, your Azure bill went up 100 % a week. But it's for the entire economy.

22:10Max Hodak:The NASDAQ slid 0.3%, but the industrial slipped 1.6%, obviously, because industrials are more sensitive to oil because they make things, they build things. And so anything that's sensitive to oil. The interesting question is how will the American oil drillers react? they were at least in the journal earlier this week sort of reflecting on the fact that if this is a short-lived engagement then they might not want to spin up a bunch of new capacity but if it's ongoing and and the price of oil is continuing to rise then obviously that creates an economic incentive to drill more and so we will we will see where like the outputs go where the reserves get tapped, all of that.

22:55Max Hodak: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 neighboring Gulf State investment groups into American venture capital funds?

23:34Max Hodak: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.

24:24Max Hodak: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? Okay, 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.

24:50Vincenzo Landino: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, you know, 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.

25:29So the Financial Times has a story this late yesterday.

25:33Vincenzo Landino:Gulf states could review overseas investments to ease financial strains caused by Iran war. Three leading Middle East economies consider options as U.S.-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 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 three of the four big Gulf economies, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar, had jointly discussed the strains being put on their budget and economies, but they declined to name the states.

26:18Vincenzo Landino: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.

26:56Vincenzo Landino:So a 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 U.S.

27:30Vincenzo Landino:or other Western states may raise the pressure on Trump to seek a diplomatic strategy to bring the war to an end. And 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.

27:50Max Hodak: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, specifically, 11 to 12 % of their GDP is tourism. Saudi Arabia is 7 to 9%. Qatar is 8 to 10%. Of course, they have that big push during the World Cup. Kuwait is 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 -

28:32Vincenzo Landino:There's already reports of people moving money out of Dubai towards Singapore.

28:37Max Hodak: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 bring a clean close to the war as fast as possible and seek a peaceful resolution.

29:11Vincenzo Landino:Yeah, and of course all the Gulf states were encouraging the administration not to enter into a conflict and pursue a diplomatic solution. uh kalaf al-habtor a prominent emirati businessman reflected gulf frustrations he went on x yesterday and said a direct question who gave you the authority to drag a region into a war with iran and on what basis did you make this dangerous decision did you calculate the collateral damage before pulling the trigger and so anyways obvious frustration in other news. Joe Weisenthal 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.

30:06Vincenzo Landino: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 with we should build a man camp here we should we kind of we kind of do I mean we talked about we talked about getting racing simulators and then we ultimately backed off just because when you're at the office you should probably be working I I've tried it

30:33Max Hodak:before and uh like games in the office it's always just weird because like there's all these little interactions where I'm like I'm sort of waiting on you to do something you're waiting on me to do something if you just see me like racing there you're gonna be like uh can't you like you know fix this or there's always something else to do and so it's much better just to do like proper

30:54Vincenzo Landino:off-sites uh proper extremely disappointed right now i mean i don't know it also how much does my

31:01Max Hodak:vote count here you're in favor of racing simulators i 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 and private or if they're there, it's just like, okay, what are you doing here? Maybe it's some sort of shared thing, but the cost is usually much higher to own as opposed to just rent for an offsite. I don't know. I haven't seen enough 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.

31:42Max Hodak:And let me also tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma may have quad code, codex, or a sketch. The Figma canvas is where ideas connect and products take shape. Build in the right direction with Figma.

31:55Vincenzo Landino:OTP says, I agree games in the office are a bad idea, but what about a petting zoo?

31:59Max Hodak:Ooh, a petting zoo is good.

32:02Vincenzo Landino:I like where you're going with this.

32:03Max Hodak: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, a caretaker. The buck has to stop with someone, you know? And so I think that's the way.

32:21Vincenzo Landino: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. I like that. 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 2010, sprawling temporary villages known as man camps.

33:02Vincenzo Landino:These temporary housing villages can vary from wood-framed two-story apartment buildings to containerize modular homes or trailer parks supplied with electricity and water. But to lure in-demand electricians, welders, and pipe fitters, developers are going the extra mile and offering game rooms, 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 U.S.

33:40Vincenzo Landino:It's the largest, most actionable pipeline I've seen.

33:46Vincenzo Landino: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 a year. Not bad at all.

34:16Max Hodak: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 TBPN 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.

35:02Max Hodak:What did you learn about the history of nationalization in the United States?

35:07Vincenzo Landino:Yeah, so it's very interesting. Just immediately. There we go. Nailed it. Okay, so I think, yeah, so whichever way like the the tropic Pentagon stuff like, I think it's very clear that this is not like the last time government deals will be made, right? Like the opening ideal is not the last deal that opening I will make with the government.

35:29Max Hodak:Yeah. And there was already a discussion of like the backstop. And when the backstop gate happened, there was a big question about like, okay, it seems like, you know, bearish, but also like, should there be a backstop? Like maybe if it's an important technology, like we've done this before. So take it. Yeah.

35:45Vincenzo Landino:And I think like all the lab leaders are also, they've been talking about this again and again, right? Yeah. You've seen, I also say in this that, you know, they're always like extremely vague about it, right? Yeah. You know, we all got to figure out. We got to talk about it. We got to figure out what we're going to do about this. We got to talk to the government and the government is like, we got to talk to the AI lab leaders and no one really says.

36:03Max Hodak:Everyone agrees that we should be talking, which is bullish for TBPN because all we do is talk.

36:09Vincenzo Landino:Yeah. But basically like, if you think about like future regulation, right? You have this spectrum of like, we do literally nothing, which is like closer to kind of what we have now. Or you do like full scale nationalization. So there's kind of this spectrum. So I was curious, like, okay, in the past, like, during different events, like what happened?

36:28Max Hodak: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.

36:45Vincenzo Landino:Yeah, I think there's a bunch of different subcontractors that supply the components that ultimately. Yes.

36:51Max Hodak:But what I'm saying is that if we end up in the in the AI is nuclear weapons camp, like you cannot train a foundation model because that's like the nuclear warhead development, essentially. That's like the most extreme.

37:04Vincenzo Landino:Yeah, I think broadly that's that's the most extreme example. That's also what, you know, Leopold in situational awareness. He has the project, right? It's kind of the Manhattan project version of AI, right? Yeah.

37:16Max Hodak:And AI 2027 also sort of predicted nationalization. Yeah, yeah.

37:20Vincenzo Landino:And they have the timeline. They have, I think it's Open Brain, 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. Okay. Yeah. But yeah, I can just list out a few interesting events in U.S. history that's at least nationalization adjacent.

37:39Max Hodak:Why are you doing crickets?

37:41Vincenzo Landino:Okay, 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.

38:01Max Hodak: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?

38:19Vincenzo Landino:I think for this, I define nationalization as just like, maybe they're not actually taking over a private company, but they're doing something that is usually regulated to private companies. Got it.

38:29Max Hodak:Okay. So even if the government is founding it as a project?

38:32Vincenzo Landino:Yeah. So Manhattan Project is nationalization. I think most people describe it as that, but there wasn't an atomic bomb company that they took over.

38:39Max Hodak:Oh, that's true. And same thing with like the, like NASA and like the moon mission, like Apollo program was not some pro, it wasn't a private entity that got nationalized. So, so that's sort of the most extreme, like de novo starts as a government project.

38:53Vincenzo Landino:Okay. Yes. That makes sense. Yeah. So 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?

39:08Max Hodak:1862 Civil 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.

39:21Vincenzo Landino:Yeah, and then you see 1914, there's the Alaskan Railroad. So, big Alaska guy.

39:27Max Hodak:Dream for me, yeah. What happened there?

39:30Vincenzo Landino:Yeah, so there basically was not any real private investment going into Alaska. And then the government says, okay, we're going to step in. We're going to fund it. But then they ran it until, I think, 1985. And then it went back, I believe, to the state of Alaska.

39:47Max Hodak:Oh, okay. So sort of like government funding to get something off the ground that then leaves. And 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 and we're good. And like, yeah, we're ready to like release this. So like, let's privatize it again.

40:05Vincenzo Landino:That happens all the time. There's like an interesting aspect where like, like grants, if you get a grant from the government, that's not nationalization, right? No, no, no. They're just giving you money. But if the government takes equity in return for that, okay, maybe you're like getting a little bit closer. And then at some point, if they own all of it, like that's very much nationalization, right? So it's this very kind of like, you know, blurry gray area spectrum. But then again, during World War I, you see the railroads in the telephone telegraphs get nationalized again. This is just to clean everything up to make sure, like, okay, the railroads, they're very busy.

40:42Vincenzo Landino:There's a lot of stuff going on. We need to basically just optimize just for military construction and stuff like this. Yeah, interesting. 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. Yeah. The idea is, like, we've got to electrify a lot of, like, rural parts of the U.S. Okay. They start in, you know, Tennessee Valley, right? Yep. And then they expand over time. But it's still, like, this is usually a private company doing this.

41:12Max Hodak:I feel like the Tennessee Valley Authority is still in the news because of, like, did the data center build out? Like I'm pretty sure that they operate one of the grids that is relevant to at least some of the data centers

41:24Vincenzo Landino:I mean we can skip over the 1942 you have Manhattan project. This is kind of like the Epidemi of nationalization. This is the example everyone goes back to you You see I mean a lot of stuff during World War two right there's the seizure of like meat packing facilities petroleum industry facilities a lot of these were because of basically like union disagreements with FDR. Huh. And then he basically said, like, okay, we're just going to seize this.

41:52Max Hodak:Yes, 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, like, gyrations in demand. There's still, like, anomalies as you're transitioning out from the government being the only buyer or, like, the major buyer. the labor unions are trying to like get more control and and recapitalize the business and become more of like a normal corporation and so the government stepping in to sort of like massage that is sort of interesting I would love to dig into that more yeah then 1970 you see Amtrak

42:30Vincenzo Landino:yeah so a lot of these are also like I mean you see rail come up over and over yeah but this was this and Conrail which is you know same decade a little bit later yeah a lot of the railroads or or like rails where basically just like, in some areas they're not used as much. So then they kind of start like, you know, becoming worse in quality. People aren't keeping them, they're not maintaining them. So then the government steps in and says, okay, we're gonna run this. 1979, you have the like kind of second oil shock, right? From the Iranian revolution. So Chrysler ends up being...

43:08Max Hodak:Rescued via loan guarantees. So not equity, but a backstop on the debt. Yes.

43:15Vincenzo Landino:And again, I mean, this is like, okay, is that really nationalization? But I think it is still like, okay, it's the government stepping into 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 the security screening. 2001, 9-11 happens, TSA comes in, we're going to take all this over. you have in 2008 there's a bunch of stuff 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

43:57Max Hodak: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 But I mean, you never flew pre-TSA, have you?

44:13Vincenzo Landino:No, I mean, I was born like four years after. That's crazy.

44:16Max Hodak: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.

44:26Vincenzo Landino:It's crazy that until you were 30, it was just amazing.

44:30Max Hodak:Yeah, yeah, exactly. Nailed it.

44:32Vincenzo Landino:Yes. So then most recently we've seen the Trump administration take, you know, equity in certain companies. Yep. Right. So this is like Intel. This is MP Materials. Yeah.

44:43Max Hodak:Still very, very little like control. Yeah.

44:46Vincenzo Landino:Yeah. I mean, this is very much like, you know, it's kind of just like a grant, but they're taking equity. Yeah. You know, for it.

44:55Max Hodak:Yeah, it's much more driven by a desire to just not let a national champion fail.

45:03Vincenzo Landino:Yeah, I don't think they have any board seats in Intel.

45:07Max Hodak:Yeah. No one's really comparing the Intel stake to the Manhattan Project, at least not yet. Yeah, definitely.

45:15Vincenzo Landino: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 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, you know. 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?

45:47Vincenzo Landino:So you have basically in the U.S. we've had either like economic distress, we have like military, right? So like, you know, systemic risk to the economy. You have to save this company. Or you have, you know, this is so important that we're going to lose a war.

46:02Max Hodak:National security. Yeah. Yeah.

46:05Vincenzo Landino:So, yeah, I think you can plot a bunch of these events. Why do I feel like Uncle Sam is going to have some exposure to private credit soon?

46:15Max Hodak:Well, that would be, what, weak economic, sort of like a financial backstop, potentially? I don't know. It doesn't seem too close to that doom scenario. But, yeah, what are the other examples?

46:30Vincenzo Landino:Yes. So you can plot kind of all this stuff onto this, like, quadrants, right? So if you have, like, weak and economic, maybe that's, like, the Intel deal, the MP material stuff, where it's just, like, these are very important. Yeah. that we make sure these don't go out of business, but it's not like we're stopping in, we're running these companies.

46:49Max Hodak: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.

47:08Vincenzo Landino: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, you know, we kind of throw out GM and say we're just seizing everything and we're going to run it ourselves. It was still, you know, kind of like a contractor thing. But I think that was still like, you know, directionally nationalization, right?

47:31Max Hodak: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.

47:47Vincenzo Landino:Yeah, but even then, it's not like they're taking the profits or stuff like this. So I think strong economic. It was kind of hard to think of a good example in the U.S. 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, you know, do whatever with that information. But I thought that was kind of an example of like 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.

48:30Max Hodak:And there were discussions around that, a CBDC, Central Bank Digital Currency, a Fed coin, something along those lines was discussed, but never really got off the ground. And so the USDC, the United States dollar-backed stable coins 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.

48:57Vincenzo Landino:Yeah. And then in the strong military, you have the Manhattan Project, right? This is a pretty obvious.

49:02Max Hodak:canonical example.

49:03Vincenzo Landino: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. You're going to need some response to that. if it's the government, like, okay, if you're going to do some sort of UBI, like, where do you get the money from? You need some kind of involvement of the AI company.

49:39Vincenzo Landino:So I think he can...

49:40Max Hodak:Maybe, maybe. You can just tax, right? You can just tax profits, potentially.

49:44Vincenzo Landino:Sure, yes. But yes. Yeah, you know, this is all, like, very... 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.

49:57Max Hodak:Yeah, I wonder... I wonder...

50:03Max Hodak: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. Yes.

50:29Vincenzo Landino: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.

50:40Max Hodak:Yeah.

50:40Vincenzo Landino:So I think for that reason, I kind of put him over there. Obviously, like this is very, you know, it's unclear.

50:45Max Hodak:I mean, it is in the context of the economy. But at the same time, when he discusses giving NVIDIA GPUs to China, he says that's akin to giving nukes to North Korea. And so he 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 put him on this chart in some way. Because I think he actually has considered all of these. And 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.

51:34Max Hodak: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.

51:43Vincenzo Landino:Well, I can't wait to watch his new interview with The Economist, which is sponsored and presented by Anthropic.

51:51Max Hodak:That was a funny move. But do we have a video we want to pull up?

51:56Vincenzo Landino:Well, it just came out a couple hours ago.

51:59Max Hodak:Okay. 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 Anthropics 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.

52:36Max Hodak:And so we can pull up this clip from The Economist in the timeline and play this for the audience.

52:44Doug DeMuro:Dictator-style praise on President Trump. Do you regret having said that? ED HARRISON So, yeah, I want to completely apologize for this memo. So I want to make sure that people understand, right? This was something written on Friday after the following three 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 broader version of the designation than the one that ultimately ended up actually being applied. And then there was this deal between, you know, between one of the other AI model providers and the Department of War that I think even that model provider later described as, I don't remember the exact words, but, you know.

53:30Doug DeMuro:Opportunistic. Yeah, I was going to say confusing, right? So, you know, so basically all these three things said happened in within a few hours, you know, in kind of sequence, you know, in kind of sequence from each other. We didn't know ahead of time what was going to happen, when it was going to happen. So it was among the most disorienting times in kind of Anthropik's history. The other side of it is, you know, I think Anthropik 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.

54:08Doug DeMuro:And the culture within the company is that I'm very free. and it's not like a considered, it's not like a really considered or refined version of my thinking, right? It's not what I would say on reflection.

54:23Vincenzo Landino:You've been very clear now, you've apologized for the memo. Have you apologized to President Trump? Will you apologize to him?

54:28Doug DeMuro:I've apologized to the people that I've talked to within the DOW. 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 I'm really happy to, to, you know, I'm really happy to speak to anyone.

54:46Max Hodak: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...

55:01Vincenzo Landino:One thing that's interesting is externally, he will never say open AI. and yet in the internal comms there's clearly an insane obsession with OpenAI externally he'll always say another model AI model provider and then internally it's just like heavily he'll never say Sam's name externally and then internally it's just entirely fixated on Sam I want to hold comments until I watch the whole thing

55:33Max Hodak:there was a lot of drama 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 Stratechery and had a fantastic conversation with Ben Thompson. Allen is a senior advisor at the Wadani AI Center and at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., a nonpartisan think tank that was founded in 1962. He also worked at the DOD for a while. And he closed the interview with a very interesting quote and a perspective that I hadn't thought of that was really calling for unity and just...

56:19Max Hodak:He has a desire for the government to work through this in a positive way and get to 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 damaging to Silicon Valley's national security relations in a way that I just cringe at.

57:05Max Hodak:Because if you can get somebody like Dario enthusiastic about national security, if Dario can get thousands of anthropic employees who five years ago were probably 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 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 is, of course, referencing to Project Maven, where Google was working with the Department of Defense in a much more limited way.

57:46Max Hodak:And there was this employee revolt and there was this big divide between the employees and the leadership. And an 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. 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.

58:36Max Hodak:Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And let me also tell you about Vibe.co, where DTC brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, measure sales just like on Meta.

58:51Vincenzo Landino:It's time for the mansion section.

58:53Max Hodak:Don't we have special lights? Wait, we're going green today? I thought the mansion section was purple. Anyway. 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 Smoketree Ranch in Palm Springs, they usually trade between family and friends. But Eric Ellenbogen is testing the open market. At Smoketree Ranch in Palm Springs, homes usually trade quietly between family members and friends. But for former Marvel Enterprises CEO Eric Ellenbogen.

59:34Max Hodak: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, Eric Ellenbogen clearly has done very well. He purchased the oldest home.

59:49Vincenzo Landino:It's now called Marvel Entertainment. It used to be called Marvel Enterprises. Amazing.

59:53Max Hodak:Amazing. So he purchased this house at Smoketree in 2021 for$3.95 million. Now it's hitting the market. They were giving it away. It's bucking the trend by listing the house publicly. Quote, we felt strongly that offering the property on the open market would provide the greatest opportunity to identify the right architectural steward. You got to be an architectural steward to pick this one up. uh i love i love when people like go to sell their houses and then they have a bunch of strings attached you know uh we talked to the the guy or we we read the story about the the singer from kiss the rock band and he was like i don't want to sell to anyone who drinks alcohol

1:00:36Vincenzo Landino:it's like which is crazy yourself in the house like the most like it was the most like crazy

1:00:41Max Hodak:over the top bachelor pad yeah yeah it was total party house in the hollywood hills and kiss is a rock band. Like they definitely had the wildest times or I mean at least that was like the aesthetic. I don't know if they were maybe they were straight edge the whole time but this house at Smoketree 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.

1:01:15Max Hodak: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 to 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 feed 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 guy. I know you're a beach guy.

1:01:48Max Hodak:I like the forest.

1:01:49Vincenzo Landino:I'm, I consider myself a bit of a desert. You like the desert, but I'm not, I'm not feeling this house at all.

1:01:55Max Hodak:You're not feeling this house.

1:01:56Vincenzo Landino:Not one bit. Not one bit. Oh, how much would you pay for it?

1:02:01Max Hodak:What's the fair price?

1:02:03Vincenzo Landino:What price are you like? I don't think it's fair for me to, I don't think it's fair for me to price it because I really don't, 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.

1:02:12Max Hodak:Oh, you would, you, you, you would change this into a, into a 20 story apartment complex immediately.

1:02:17Vincenzo Landino:In general, I like, I like, I like ranch style houses, single story. I like this layout around, around the pool, this courtyard. I like homes that, that kind of face in right towards, towards kind of like a communal space, but But I'm not loving anything. Unpack it.

1:02:36Max Hodak:Like, what don't you like about it? I mean, just the textures.

1:02:40Vincenzo Landino:Okay. The colors. Okay. 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. Yeah, yeah. But this looks like nothing has been. like this feels like living in uh you know like you'd be living in like a kind of like a like a hollywood a set right yeah not like a home that's been i feel like the materials are a little

1:03:14Max Hodak:mixed in some of these cases like the hardwood cabinets combined with like sort of the furry chairs like the the materials aren't aren't feeling 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 company.

1:03:33Vincenzo Landino:Okay, this is absolutely brutal. This, this, this. Look at those furry chairs. What's going on here?

1:03:38Max Hodak:In the hardwood with the wooden ceiling.

1:03:40Vincenzo Landino:Those chairs with the wood on wood on wood on wood on wood is absolutely brutal.

1:03:45Max Hodak:Dan Ratliff says it looks like a grandparent's house. Yeah. The pictures make it look mid. Well, I don't know.

1:03:50Vincenzo Landino: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.

1:03:58Max Hodak:That tile is criminal. Yeah, the chat is not. Yeah, Ryan says full gut at minimum. Yeah, yeah, full gut.

1:04:07Vincenzo Landino:I agree, I agree.

1:04:08Max Hodak:Absolutely 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.

1:04:26Vincenzo Landino:uh so i just gotta 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 oh i don't know how so i don't know if you've been stewarding

1:04:37Max Hodak:that well yeah yeah so is your read on it that like everyone from the community was like yeah we'll love to take this off your hands and like completely renovate it and they're like we got to find a crazy person that likes this particular style and so they got to spread their they got to spread the aperture they got to open the aperture i think you guys are being too hard

1:04:53Vincenzo Landino:I think if you just add like two or three more floors, you go vertically, I think it could be pretty sick.

1:04:58Max Hodak:Yeah. I would also dig down. Build 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.

1:05:14Vincenzo Landino:That's a real project. That's a real project. They're like, it's perfect.

1:05:19Max Hodak:It's a teardown in your opinion.

1:05:22Vincenzo Landino:I don't know about a teardown.

1:05:24Max Hodak:Teardown to the studs. Got it. Okay, well, let's head over to New York because Catherine Clark at The Wall Street Journal got a coveted invitation to see New York's most secretive condo project. This is A.D. Clarkson. The sales, they're over$1 billion now. With minimal marketing, little press until now, little coverage until we discuss it on TBPN. But in a sun-filled room, stone flooring. 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 the sparkling water is thrust into my hand.

1:06:01Max Hodak: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 Zillow or Street Easy. 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.

1:06:35Max Hodak: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. He's done multiple deals there. Counterintuitive though it may seem, the secrecy surrounding A.D. 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 A.D. Clarkson. If it closes, the transaction will set a record for downtown Manhattan, shattering the previous high watermark of$60 million.

1:07:11Max Hodak:They're going twice as expensive as the previous high watermark. It's a 7 ,400 square foot apartment. 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 square feet.

1:07:41Vincenzo Landino:Yeah, it's not 7 ,000 square feet.

1:07:43Max Hodak: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?

1:07:57Vincenzo Landino:What do you think? I think it's not really my style, but in general, I think it's...

1:08:08Vincenzo Landino:I think it's in general... You can grate your teeth. You can grate your teeth. Some mixture of classic New York interior styling brought into the modern era. The golden ticket. I think it's nice.

1:08:25Max Hodak: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, you're sold. I'm sold. Walking distance to trapeze lessons. Walking distance. Maybe you gotta do trapeze. I don't know. Despite all the cloak and dagger, the gallery itself is subdued and stayed. 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.

1:09:06Max Hodak:It is an experience that channels the Zeckendorf's 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 walked through the sales galleries, a series of showrooms are slowly revealed. The first, accessed through doors emblazoned with detailed bronze panels, is almost vacant except for a scale model of the building.

1:09:40Max Hodak:Around the corner is a movie theater-style screen where the team can present renderings of the project. Another scale model shows the building's amenities with drawers that pull out to reveal aerial views of features such as a spa, gym, golf simulator. 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 Paddle? and what's that other one called? Pickle. Pickleball?

1:10:09Vincenzo Landino:No, Pickle is out in its own world. Okay, Pickle is F tier. Pickle is F tier.

1:10:15Max Hodak:Tennis is S tier. Give me a little tier list. Give me squash. Where's that? A, B, C, B, F? I don't know.

1:10:23Vincenzo Landino:I've never lived somewhere that people were big into squash.

1:10:26Max Hodak:Have you ever worked anywhere that had a bunch of squash courts?

1:10:30Vincenzo Landino:I have. Gotcha. Got me.

1:10:32Max Hodak:So where are you putting? We never played. We didn't ever play.

1:10:35Vincenzo Landino:You never played. B tier? Really, badminton is the only S tier. Badminton above tennis? I hate to say it.

1:10:42Max Hodak:Wow, hot take. What about golf?

1:10:48Vincenzo Landino:Man, I've really tried to get into golf, but I can't get past nine 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 nine?

1:11:02Max Hodak:Yeah.

1:11:03Vincenzo Landino: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. Getting out of there. It actually is. Yeah. No.

1:11:20Max Hodak:What about...

1:11:22Vincenzo Landino:We should do a Friday episode sometime. Okay. 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.

1:11:33Max Hodak:Yeah.

1:11:33Vincenzo Landino:were just shanking balls left and right.

1:11:36Max Hodak:My swing is not very good. So if pickle balls – Trey 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 said it gets boring after 45 minutes. Is that right? Sporting clays. Oh, yeah. Yeah? Very repetitive. I like it. So you're bad at it, though.

1:11:59Vincenzo Landino:No, I think he's saying he's just so good, he just never misses. Many people have said Brandon never misses.

1:12:05Max Hodak:Yeah, that's true. That's true. Racing simulator. Where does that go on the tier list of amenities?

1:12:11Vincenzo Landino:I think fantastic. I don't know anywhere that actually has that as an amenity, though. Yet. Yet. What about spa?

1:12:24Max Hodak:Indoor lap pool?

1:12:25Vincenzo Landino:The odds that your apartment spa is actually going to be elite are low.

1:12:30Max Hodak: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. Content creation studio is hilarious. There's such demand for, maybe I'll start a podcast, that they're building it into luxury apartments at this point.

1:12:54Vincenzo Landino:That just sounds like they had an empty room.

1:12:56Max Hodak:If you have$75 million to buy an apartment and that's your podcasting strategy, you're cooked. 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 unboxings. Basically, they get a whole bunch of stuff sent to them. 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.

1:13:31Max Hodak:Well, when we were looking for this,

1:13:33Vincenzo Landino:this studio, we did look at some other places. If you remember where we just walked in and in, in every single studio, it was, they were just doing unboxings. They just have like a ring light. That's right.

1:13:45Max Hodak:Yeah. It was like some Timu TikTok. It's like a TikTok shop. Yeah.

1:13:49Vincenzo Landino:That whole world.

1:13:50Max Hodak:It was crazy.

1:13:51Vincenzo Landino:People that are big into that world.

1:13:52Max Hodak:Yeah. That was wild. the path not traveled by us, I suppose.

1:13:59Vincenzo Landino:Somebody took a ride down a four-story slide. I love this. Before we move on to the next one,

1:14:04Max Hodak: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 four-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.

1:14:39Max Hodak: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 four-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. Catherine 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 four stories, spitting me out in a dramatic all-white foyer.

1:15:17Max Hodak:As apartment tours go, this one is unusual. This penthouse at 150 Nassau Street in Lower Manhattan has been the subject of local lore for almost two decades, largely thanks to the presence of this snaking silvery slide. Now, the four-bedroom home known as Sky House is coming on the market for just$20 million. What a steal. We got to browbeat some of our guests who live in New York into picking this up. I want to 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.

1:15:55Max Hodak:First order business, four-story slide. 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.

1:16:14Vincenzo Landino:Do you think it's possible that they built a skyscraper over 110 years before you were born?

1:16:22Max Hodak:That's crazy.

1:16:23Vincenzo Landino:Like, come on. I don't think they had cloud code. Make it make sense.

1:16:26Max Hodak: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. Kristen is a former Facebook and Google executive. This is amazing.

1:16:50Vincenzo Landino:Let's give it up for big tech.

1:16:52Max Hodak:Let's give it up for big tech. And honestly, Google has a very wonderful, quirky culture. And this is a very wonderful, quirky house. I love that a four-story slide is something that I bet I could find on the Googleplex campus. If I really looked around and found it, they put it in their house. So respect to them. After buying the unit, they tapped Hudson and 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, a column for rock climbing, and a series of secret ladders and entryways.

1:17:30Vincenzo Landino:Yeah, a lot of people say you can't put rope swings and a series of secret ladders in your house.

1:17:35Max Hodak:You absolutely can. They didn't listen. While the space looks like it was designed to entertain children, they don't have any children. The design reflects the couple's own joyful... Stolen valor. Stolen valor.

1:17:47Vincenzo Landino:Insane. Stolen valor. Imagine building a four-story slide.

1:17:52Max Hodak:Yeah. 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.

1:18:04Vincenzo Landino:Be the change you want to be. John Coogan. Yes. That's a great line.

1:18:09Max Hodak:Yes. They have fluorescent orange chairs. The home has structural glass bridges and walkways, angular entryways and skylights. White walls and ceilings juxtaposed with vibrant furniture and art. Give it the feel of a modern art museum. A sculpture in the foyer.

1:18:24Vincenzo Landino:This whole time I'm thinking, okay, they've got this climbing wall column thing. They certainly have like 25 children. 25 children. For sure. It's like, no, that was for me actually. after I got off after I got done

1:18:38Max Hodak:stacking paper at a hyperscaler the swing I don't know to each their own well it's a beautiful house and it can be yours for 20 million dollars

1:18:51Vincenzo Landino:kind of strange art in this one section this bedroom certainly quirky anyway

1:19:02Max Hodak: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 Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So, David Lynch's quirky Los Angeles compound sells for 13 million.

1:19:25Vincenzo Landino:Okay, explain David Lynch.

1:19:27Max Hodak:Who wants to explain David Lynch? Any of you guys know? He's a goat. He's the goat. He's the goat. He created Twin Peaks and the film Mulholland Drive. Mulholland Drive is fantastic.

1:19:38Vincenzo Landino:Eraserhead? Eraserhead is probably my favorite movie, yeah.

1:19:41Max Hodak:Really? I haven't seen Eraserhead.

1:19:42Vincenzo Landino:It's like, yeah, it's a, Jordy, it's like, he's like, I don't know, very, I actually have no idea how to describe it. Like kind of surreal. Yeah. Like very, 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. Okay, okay, okay.

1:19:59Max Hodak:Your favorite director's favorite director.

1:20:00Vincenzo Landino:But what if you have no favorite director?

1:20:03Max Hodak: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 six 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'm thinking of Magnolia.

1:20:37Vincenzo Landino:This is such a fascinating home. Outside from the street, it's like somewhat brutalist.

1:20:43Max Hodak:Yeah.

1:20:44Vincenzo Landino:And then inside, it's like very mid-century. So he has a private screening room,

1:20:48Max Hodak: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 seven 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 a pool and a pool house for the property. In 1989, Lynch bought an adjacent two-bedroom Brutalist house for$542 ,000 and added a studio to the building for$346 ,000 in 1995.

1:21:39Max Hodak:So he just kept landing and expanding. In a statement, two of Lynch's children said the property was a place of deep meaning in their father's life and the lives of those who lived and worked there. It holds a lot of history for our family, and we're grateful to see it pass to someone who's interested in caring for it and preserving what made it special. 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 do you think about this house? Would you live here? Do you like this house? Do you like this style?

1:22:15Vincenzo Landino:I do like it. I just think it 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 like, I don't think it's mentioned in the article, but this is the location of Lost Highway, which is another of his movies.

1:22:36Max Hodak:Wow, Ball Knower over there. I had no idea. I don't know Lost Highway at all.

1:22:41Vincenzo Landino:Tyler's another Lynch movie.

1:22:42Max Hodak: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 screenshoted 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.

1:23:20Max Hodak:But first, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search, It's built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Let me also tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to restream.com. So there's an interview with the CEO of Vacheron Constantin. It says, Vacheron Constantin bets on culture and complications instead of volume. In an industry that often equates growth with volume, Laurent Pervé is attempting something more delicate to expand the oldest continuously operating watchmaker without diluting its own scarcity.

1:24:00Max Hodak:Vacheron holds the title of longest in the business continuously. No breaks, no days off, the ultimate lockout.

1:24:08Vincenzo Landino:Before we jump in there, the team is sharing how many jumps to get me from the host Tyler at TBPN to David Lynch. And so Tyler Cosgrove works with John Coogan at tbpn okay john coogan has interviewed mark zuckerberg mark zuckerberg was portrayed by jesse eisenberg in the social network jesse eisenberg co-starred with lord dern and resistance and lord dern starred in wild at heart directed by david lynch five degrees of separation there

1:24:39Max Hodak:we go let's make some phone calls except he has sadly passed away but uh what a what an interesting Play five jumps to - This is a cool use case for LLMs. This is very fun. I like this. Did you just want to hear this 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 one billion pounds 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.

1:25:25Max Hodak: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 taking the reins, is clear that acceleration is not the goal. They're not trying to make more watches that quickly. We must evolve with the market, he says, but without chasing volume for its own sake. The timing is delicate. A very volatile context outside and inside the watch industry. Secondary prices have softened, hype has receded, and growth across the sector has become less predictable.

1:26:12Max Hodak:Laurent describes the brand's positioning as almost as a balance sheet of capabilities. Classic watches, jewelry watches, sport integrated bracelet watches, very high complications, and the revived Historiques line, the last as it names 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.

1:27:02Max Hodak:The slowing has been most visible in the steel sports watch category. Laurent concedes that the phenomenon of speculation and hype has abated even if the integrated bracelet segment itself is not going to go away. That's the overseas 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 36.5 millimeter tradition now 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.

1:27:51Max Hodak:The tribute to Great Civilizations collection saw the creation of quartet of five-piece limited-edition watches, each featuring a miniature enameled version of a Louvre masterpiece such as the Winged Victory of Semithrace. Beyond this series lies an even more bespoke partnership with the museums where a collector can choose any masterpiece, painting, sculpture, or ornamental item for Vacheron to reproduce on the dial. Each project is unique, so there's no fixed scale of charges, but Lorentz cites the minimum being 150 ,000 euros 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 rissable 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're like you like and you're like i want that on a watch and they'll make it for you

1:28:46Vincenzo Landino:very very cool maybe i'll get one do they put logos will they put a ramp logo if it's in the

1:28:53Max Hodak: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 Ramp logo painting in. It's like, wasn't the Mona Lisa there? Like, not anymore, maybe. It's a painting of the Ramp credit card. I love it.

1:29:15Vincenzo Landino:I like it. The Overseas Perpetual Calendar Ultra Thin is one of my, I think, one of the most stunning modern watches. Yes.

1:29:23Max Hodak: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.

1:29:36Vincenzo Landino:The ultra thin.

1:29:38Max Hodak:Yes, yes.

1:29:39Vincenzo Landino:It's just insane.

1:29:40Max Hodak:There are some really cool historiques out there. There's a square Vacheron that's pretty popular. I'm not exactly sure what the model number is, but they are doing fantastically well. And most importantly, I think I've just carved out a very interesting brand positioning, you know, by choosing to partner with the Louvre, the Met. It maintains this very high aura in accessibility, very like old and stuffy and stodgy. It's not, you know, cause. It's not a bunch of like younger, more.

1:30:15Vincenzo Landino:Yeah, when you look at what AP is doing, like very much on the hype train, partnering with DJs and Travis Scott and Cause and doing all this stuff, and Vashron is like, okay.

1:30:27Max Hodak:Yeah, and you just have to wonder, like, what is the more long-term strategy? You know, the AP strategy can certainly build a ton of hype 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 Ochenbrenner Morschenbrenner and his wife-to-be, I believe they're engaged.

1:31:15Max Hodak:Jirotika says, when you ask some high elves at Rivendell if they want to join you in your quest to Erebor, they hit you with the light of Valinor stare. 2.8 thousand likes, people like the photo. Very silly.

1:31:31Vincenzo Landino:Zeke says, mildly surprised to learn that director-level staff at Anthropic have human EAs.

1:31:37Max Hodak: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.

1:31:43Vincenzo Landino:I mean, he runs the AI finance tool. Oh, so maybe he's just interacting with them? He's interacting with them.

1:31:49Max Hodak:That's interesting.

1:31:50Vincenzo Landino:All right, we got a new Xbox. What's going on here?

1:31:53Max Hodak:We have breaking news as of three days ago. We didn't really get to it. Project Helix is the next generation of the Xbox console. What do we know about it?

1:32:04Vincenzo Landino:Nothing.

1:32:04Max Hodak:Nothing. Zonada. 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 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 over. There was always a fear that when Microsoft bought Activision that they would do the same thing with Call of Duty.

1:32:53Max Hodak:Call of Duty would become a Microsoft exclusive and Xbox exclusive. That never made financial sense. It never made sense from a regulation perspective. It would be seen as anti-competitive. It 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 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.

1:33:36Max Hodak:There's a company Backbone 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? Yes.

1:33:55Vincenzo Landino:The MetaQuest 3S Xbox Edition. I think that's the full title.

1:33:59Max Hodak:Was there anything that was Xbox-specific about that, or was it just the packaging and then it just sort of recommended that you use that software?

1:34:06Vincenzo Landino:It came with an Xbox controller. Oh, yeah. I don't know exactly what the deal was. There was no PlayStation. Did you feel like when you

1:34:16Max Hodak:fired it up, any Xbox apps were like preloaded?

1:34:22Vincenzo Landino: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.

1:34:29Max Hodak: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. This is 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 like go update the software, create accounts, download stuff. And it would be interesting to see more of a deeper partnership there. But we'll see.

1:35:02Max Hodak: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.

1:35:17Vincenzo Landino: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.

1:35:37Max Hodak: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 um you know going around selling software selling data centers selling all sorts

1:35:51Vincenzo Landino:of stuff uh this is to free up eight to ten billion in cash flow all the fun massive ai data center expansion u.s banks are pulling back from financing borrowing costs are rising fast cds 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 health care unit insiders say non-core units and data center link staff are most at risk. It's tied to AI commitments. Anyways, so still rumors at this point, but wouldn't be super surprising.

1:36:31Max Hodak:I just like the comforts of being smug is watching the show and publicly tweeting, badminton S tier, outstanding take, squashes A tier. I love that we're starting a conversation. Well, speaking of watches, Paul Graham clearly got into watches recently, which I love to see because he posted a lengthy essay called The Brand Age, paulgram.com slash brandage.html. And he tells a very detailed story of the switch watch industry, the quartz crisis. And he goes into the strategies of every single house. It's an amazing telling of what Omega did, what Vacheron did, what Patek did. And it's very, very long.

1:37:19Max Hodak: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? Uh, Nautilus? No, this is AP. Oh, 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 going to 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.

1:38:18Max Hodak: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 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.

1:39:02Max Hodak: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 for them.

1:39:42Max Hodak: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.

1:40:23Max Hodak:It had gratuitous knobs on either side of the face like a pair of ears, but you could recognize one from across the room. In the Nautilus, of all the watches Patek makes now, the Nautilus is the most sought after. It's perfectly aligned with what present-day buyers want, basically the loudest possible expression of brand. 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 have 40 they make an aggressive move and uh and and then over time it is uh it is revealed to uh uh to be underrated anyway we have our next guest we do uh is it doug jamero no no vincenzo Oh, Vincenzo's hopping on.

1:41:14Max Hodak:Fantastic. Amazing. Good to see you, Vincenzo. How are you doing?

1:41:20Doug DeMuro:What's happening? Sorry to disappoint you. I'm not Doug.

1:41:22Max Hodak:Doug's coming on in a little bit, but I'm glad. We had some guest stuff out. What's going on? Did you press it twice? They made it. Oh, 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? Okay, there we go.

1:41:37Doug DeMuro:It goes on and on and on and on.

1:41:39Max Hodak: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. Overkill, boys. Overkill, right? Overkill. Anyway, take us through your... I'd love to start with 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.

1:42:14Doug DeMuro:Yeah, I'll start with the Apple stuff then. Really, I think what Apple's done is they've said, we may not have the distribution that ESPN and others have traditionally. but we're going to use our might, which is these. They've got these devices in everybody's hands. We're all using MacBooks. We've all got iPads, and we've got AirPods and Apple Watches. And John's got his Vision Pro. I do have Vision Pro. There you go. I wish. Last man standing. I think something will be coming with that. I do. Yeah. 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?

1:43:06Doug DeMuro:I don't know if you guys saw that news, but we're going to get to see, actually, Drive to Survivor is already streaming on Apple TV. And in return, Netflix is going to be streaming one of the races.

1:43:18Max Hodak:Oh, that's cool.

1:43:21Doug DeMuro:And ironically, it is the Canadian Grand Prix. 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 in America. Maybe even, well, not the world, but in America, it will have the best numbers of the year. So Apple knows this. What do they do? They go and partner with Netflix. Everybody has Netflix, right? The IMAX theaters, they're trying to change the experience. How do you watch a race? Five races are going to be shown in IMAX theaters.

1:43:56Max Hodak:Yeah.

1:43:57Doug DeMuro:That's pretty cool.

1:43:58Max Hodak:Yeah.

1:43:59Doug DeMuro:They also partnered up with Event Pass, so bars, restaurants. That's where they buy a lot of their sports packages from through Event Pass. They're rolled into there. 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 five races now, seven AM. I mean, that's that, that might be the issue with some of the races. So we'll see what happens there. But I think the fact that they're open to these different types of distribution channels and platforms is it's exciting.

1:44:44Doug DeMuro:It really is exciting. Have you guys had a chance to play around with?

1:44:48Max Hodak: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. Then you can go into Drive to Survive. It's the reality TV version.

1:45:27Max Hodak: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.

1:45:43Doug DeMuro:And even the way they're laying it out, if you guys haven't had a chance to look through the Apple TV app, they're putting everything there. So now you have 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. 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 and you're using Apple, you should be able to.

1:46:14Max Hodak:I think I actually noticed 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 were 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 touch point it's basically just an ad

1:46:43Vincenzo Landino:What do you think they'll do with Vision Pro? What are your theories? Do you think you'll be able to ride along with Verstappen and actually get to experience. Because if you could experience a full race in VR.

1:46:53Max Hodak:The cameras are, I think, too heavy for that. But I want to hear what had been changed. I know, but not if you add them to every single car.

1:46:59Vincenzo Landino:And everybody's going to get it. So lap times go away.

1:47:02Doug DeMuro: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 Laps, L-A-P-Z. Now, they were in test flight. They ended up getting pulled. 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 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 can have all the cameras up.

1:47:42Doug DeMuro:You have a three-dimensional track with live timing because we have all the data, right? all the data is 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, uh, like if I'm sitting in, I don't know, turn one, I'm watching it from that angle, right? Through the vision pro, as opposed to, you know, when you kind of put it on the TV, you don't really you may not know if you're not familiar with the track uh you know you don't know which angle you're really watching it from this was a this the app was really really cool um 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

1:48:32Max Hodak:about a year ago we had uh a sort of motion designer on the show at figma uh conference named John Lepore. He works at Black Box Infinite.

1:48:43Doug DeMuro:That's him. John's the guy who built Laps. That's exactly him. Oh, okay.

1:48:45Max Hodak: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 actually adopt this. Here it goes. And so this just makes so much sense that you could 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 it looks really good in a teaser trailer, but then actually sitting there is maybe a little bit much.

1:49:23Doug DeMuro:Everyone that actually used LAPS said it was fantastic. Everyone I've talked to that used it said this was incredible. And again, I don't have a Vision Pro, so I didn't test it. I saw some demo stuff. John has sent me some things.

1:49:38Vincenzo Landino:You got to try it this weekend, John.

1:49:40Doug DeMuro:Oh yeah. If you can get it, if you can somehow get ahold of it, if you have it, I would. Yeah.

1:49:46Max Hodak:I have a vision. I think I have Apple TV plus and all the, all the tiers there. Um, I probably just have to download the laptop.

1:49:53Vincenzo Landino:All right. Let's get into the season overall. What's happening with the new regulations, how, who's cooked, who's chopped, who's goaded.

1:50:02Doug DeMuro:Well, 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 going to 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. 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 figured out reliability. We have cars that are so reliable. Everyone's finishing races.

1:50:34Doug DeMuro:Now, this wasn't the case 30, 40 years ago, right? You'd have a lot of reliability issues. And now, like, they've literally built a car that is quite literally crap. I mean, it is not good. Fernando Alonso still hasn't run any practice laps, although maybe in practice, too, he ended up getting out there, I think. But they're not turning any laps. 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 wild. What do you mean going on with the battery? So because of the new regulations, the car is smaller.

1:51:11Doug DeMuro:It's narrower. And because of the way Adrian Newey designs his cars, there's a lot of aerodynamics. So he kind of almost built a smaller – there's less room in his car to build 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. All of that power or all of that takes up a lot of room. And apparently there's not enough room in the Honda for 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.

1:51:54Doug DeMuro:It's pretty wild. I'm reading all this stuff. All of this information is 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 Aston Martin hadn't even really ever audited the Honda engineers. So they signed the deal back in 22 or 23 that they were going to switch from Mercedes to Honda, but never audited the actual engineering. and come to find out most of 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 a whole mess right there with that Aston Martin project right now.

1:52:33Doug DeMuro:And, of course, Aston Martin just signed over a naming deal for, I forgot how much money it was,$60-plus million for the F1 team. So I'm like, ooh, that's not great. But aside from that, you've got Mercedes looking really strong.

1:52:49Vincenzo Landino:What's your prediction for Sunday? Do you think they actually finished the race, or is it looking so bad that they might?

1:52:59Doug DeMuro: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 can't foresee them in qualifying tonight. I can't even see them getting anywhere near, like remotely close to the times we're going to see on the board. 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, pit it and pull it from the race.

1:53:33Vincenzo Landino:What is Mr. Stroll doing about it?

1:53:36Doug DeMuro: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 pulling right now and they're apologizing, which, again, I don't know what apologies are going to do at this point, but if I'm sponsors, I'm really pissed, to be quite frank with you. I don't know.

1:53:57Vincenzo Landino:I don't know what Lawrence is doing. Who is benefiting from the new regulations or has kind of figured it out the best so far? 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.

1:54:18Doug DeMuro: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 turbo charger, which spools up faster. So 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 everyone was complaining about their engines.

1:55:00Doug DeMuro:Those seem to be good. so anyone with a Mercedes power unit seems to be in good shape but the Mercedes Patronus 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 you know they won the championship last year They also have a 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.

1:55:42Doug DeMuro: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. A lot of people thought, like, they may not be that good, especially during the testing in Bahrain. They were like, eh, 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, Hajar, young kid. His second season, Formula One, just brought him up from the junior team, racing bulls. He is looking really good.

1:56:20Doug DeMuro: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 three. But yeah, to me, it's a George Russell, Oscar Piastri, Max Verstappen. Those are the three guys that I am putting my, maybe not money into, but those are the guys I'm putting my bets on if I'm anyone else out there.

1:56:45Max Hodak: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 is taking one.

1:57:04Vincenzo Landino:The Apple Formula One team.

1:57:05Max Hodak: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. It doesn't 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.

1:57:26Doug DeMuro:Really, it's not something I've been thinking about. You know, FinTech seems to be pretty popular right now.

1:57:33Max Hodak:Yeah. Let's get a ramp yellow car out there.

1:57:36Doug DeMuro:That'd be good.

1:57:37Max Hodak:They'd be really cool to see that.

1:57:38Doug DeMuro:Yeah, ramp Cadillac. Cadillac could use it. Cadillac could definitely use.

1:57:43Vincenzo Landino:Have they filled out their sponsorships or they're still putting it together?

1:57:48Doug DeMuro: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. The TWG AI is their AI partner, and TWG is also part of its ownership group, so they're on the car in kind of two different ways. But this is also what TWG does across all of their motorsport assets. Their brand is 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 we might see something with.

1:58:31Doug DeMuro:And 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.

1:58:45Vincenzo Landino:Doesn't Cadillac, Cadillac has a Honda power unit? Ferrari. Oh.

1:58:50Max Hodak:Are you East Coast? Yes. 11 p.m. Saturday. 11 p.m. 11 p.m. Pretty convenient for the West Coast, folks. 8 p.m. is sort of a great time to hang out, have dinner, watch the race. Works out for us.

1:59:06Doug DeMuro:I've been doing this since I was a kid, though, so it was like these races have always been weird times. You just kind of get used to it.

1:59:13Max Hodak:Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why when I hear people complain, I'm like...

1:59:15Doug DeMuro:It's part of the pageantry. It's part of the pageantry. Exactly. Well, thank you so much. Yeah, I'm going to think about the brands, though, John, And maybe I'll come back when I come up with some that could join in. I'm focused elsewhere now at the beginning of the year. Yeah, of course.

1:59:30Max Hodak:Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

1:59:32Vincenzo Landino:Yeah, excited to see your coverage on the event. And yeah, we'll talk soon. Great to see you. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Thanks for having me again, guys. Have a good one. Good to see you. Cheers.

1:59:41Max Hodak: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.

2:00:01Vincenzo Landino: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.

2:00:19Max Hodak: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 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 report style because we are truly past benchmarks being noticeable to the average user.

2:01:01Max Hodak:And we're much more in to, okay, 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, you know, like, okay, like 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 super intelligence cloud building the AI super computers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And without further ado, we have Doug DeMuro in the Restrean Waiting Room.

2:01:37Max Hodak:Welcome to the TBP and Ultradome. How are you doing, Doug? I'm good. How are you guys doing? We're doing fantastically. Great to see you. 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. The number one in our hearts. I'm going to be listening to it on my drive home today. It drops every Friday, correct?

2:02:03Doug DeMuro:Friday morning, that is true. Yes, yes, yes.

2:02:06Max Hodak: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 Luce. So take us through your reactions to the actual design.

2:02:27Vincenzo Landino:You already ordered five of them, right?

2:02:29Max Hodak:As soon as electric, you were like, I'm in.

2:02:32Doug DeMuro:I am as skeptical as basically every car enthusiast that I know is. Take you through my thoughts. 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 how the vehicle is. It was such a weird layout, too, seeing the floating stuff.

2:02:56Max Hodak:It wasn't even in a shape of a car.

2:02:58Vincenzo Landino:And there's people in Italy that sit outside the Ferrari factory and take videos on their phones. And I've seen some of those kind of scouting videos. And it looks incredibly rough. It looks like a Subaru or a Hyundai.

2:03:13Doug DeMuro:Although Ferrari, more than any other brand, goes to great lengths to disguise their production cars 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, you know, 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.

2:03:53Doug DeMuro:They have not sold well. In some cases, automakers who were about to release an electric sports car dialed it back and canceled the whole project, you know, sometimes months before it was supposed to be on sale. So we'll see how it goes.

2:04:08Vincenzo Landino: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, or 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 um i didn't come away feeling you know it was it's an interesting thing though like it's a totally new world for

2:04:55Doug DeMuro: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 probably have some experience with Ferrari before. I think 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 kind of a different audience. So I'm actually, I didn't mind the interior from that perspective. It certainly is not very Ferrari-like, but I think that was the point.

2:05:25Doug DeMuro:I think they could have kept their in-house design team, designing it if they had wanted it to stay 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 interested about is how the car looks, how it performs, and especially how it feels. Because I think a lot of the reason people buy Ferraris is because of the way that they feel. And that's where I think this car could have problems.

2:05:52Vincenzo Landino: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?

2:06:03Doug DeMuro: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 possibility there.

2:06:35Doug DeMuro:Porsche sells relatively well in China, despite how hard it has been for other automakers to get in there.

2:06:41Max Hodak:Yeah. 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.

2:07:18Max Hodak:We'll make 10 of them.

2:07:19Doug DeMuro:Well, it's an interesting thing. Other automakers have tried to do that. Maserati has an electric version of the Gran Turismo that has been a horrible failure. I think that 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. 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. But Ferrari, I think, also would make the argument that they have always been the leader.

2:07:54Doug DeMuro:They have always been the one to push to the next step, the design leader. People say their stuff is ugly. They say the cars are too powerful, et cetera. And they have always kind of been the first to take some steps.

2:08:05Vincenzo Landino:They're like, oh, we're too powerful? We'll put a V6 in our halo car.

2:08:11Doug DeMuro:So I think that they're sitting here thinking, you know what? Lambo might cancel it, and Pininfarina isn't selling theirs very well, and all this stuff. but we are Ferrari. And if anybody's going to be able to do this, it's going to be us, and we are going to lead this thing, and we're going to kill it. I bet that's the mindset in Italy. I bet you they're nervous, though. No electric sports car has succeeded yet, and many have tried.

2:08:35Max Hodak:Taycan doesn't really count as a sports car, more sedan.

2:08:38Doug DeMuro:No, I think because it's a sedan, it is certainly a sporty car, but because it's a sedan, adding that level of practicality, it's not really the same thing, especially because Porsche tried to go electric with their sports car, and over the last few months has repeatedly been walking back the actual desire to do that to the point where it's now kind of starting to become clear there may not even be an electric version of the next box. Yeah.

2:08:59Max Hodak:Is the mission X, mission E, the F80 competitor, the W1 competitor just completely canceled at this point?

2:09:07Doug DeMuro: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

2:09:13Max Hodak:a new halo car it feels like yeah so far i had the 918 on a poster as a kid and i've been waiting for the next version for my entire life i was i got career gt sitting right up here

2:09:27Doug DeMuro:they are going to do one but i think that they had committed significant resources to going electric with fish and eggs and it didn't happen and they had to kind of scramble back to the drawing board and developing a hyper car it takes real effort yeah um you're going to get a lot of things right because you're only selling a few hundred of them. And so I think it's coming, but it's still yours.

2:09:46Max Hodak:So if Porsche goes back to the drawing board and they're saying, okay, there's no longer the pressure to go electric with the hypercar, how enthusiast can they go at that tier? Can they do manual? Can they do a V12? Can they learn from the SP3? What do they have the freedom to actually pull off the shelf?

2:10:07Doug DeMuro: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 Carrer 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 eras, hypercars are automatic hybrids. And I think Porsche is afraid of of deviating from that because they know that that works and it worked with nine 18.

2:10:42Doug DeMuro:I actually had a call with some Porsche people yesterday and I was pleading my case for a manual career GT type successor. And I just think it's just a tough, it's a tough sell. It's a, it's a sell. Is it, is it though?

2:10:53Vincenzo Landino:Is it a tough sell for the people that are actually, well,

2:10:57Max Hodak:they have a, they have a halo car in the GT three RS in some ways that sells the nine 11s. And also the Boxster looks like the Cayman looks like somewhat similar to

2:11:08Vincenzo Landino:the gt3 rs so it's not the ra pulling down to the a4 i just i just the the the people we we have a friend that gets every orders every halo car from every brand and if you and if you asked him like hey would you rather have like a hybrid yeah or or something that's like more more a successor to the career CGT, he would obviously want the CGT.

2:11:38Max Hodak:The more manual experience, the more engaging experience.

2:11:40Doug DeMuro:The automakers, I think, are also really aware of the fact that hybrid is the future. And they really need to make sure that the hyper car, which gets all the press, brings technology to the lineup that then trickles down. 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 hyper car can do it then I promise you and your 911 can do it and I think going back doing a full I yes I think it would sell if they did another v10 manual hyper car it'd be amazing but it's it's kind of an anachronism I also think Porsche was a little bit anxious about the number of people who have two million bucks that are actually willing to buy those cars my argument is they're doing it right now at auctions like where yeah that's a million f50s are selling for eight 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.

2:12:33Doug DeMuro:Like 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.

2:12:44Vincenzo Landino:Let's 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.

2:13:00Doug DeMuro: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. There are cars that have gone up 60%, 70 % in what appears to be three, four months. And you look at auction results, and it was one result, and now it's four results, and it's like, wow, so this is where the market is. Some of these cars gone forever. I had to bump my insurance up on my career 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.

2:13:38I just get the sense that we've all been hoping the other shoe would drop and these cars would fall.

2:13:43Doug DeMuro: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. Courageous 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.

2:14:02Vincenzo Landino:And isn't some of this generational, right? Because you're seeing maybe some more softness in classics. And then some of these more, like, you know, somebody that grew up with Carrera GT on a poster, like, they're not reaching for classic cars anymore. And so there was an entire window of cars that were, in hindsight, 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.

2:14:37Doug DeMuro:Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's a FOMO effect among those people. Once they see values of a car go from$1 million to$2 million, they think to themselves, oh, crap, I've 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 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 South 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 250 GTO spread at 3X is unbelievable considering that it used to be 100X.

2:15:10Doug DeMuro:And you're starting to see a 250 GTO as a 60s car. An Enzo is a poster car for millennials. It was a car that was on our walls. I mean, that car came out when I was 15. And I am, you know, 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. You know, I'm looking at Enzo's and Carrera GTs. Those are the cars that I want.

2:15:33Max Hodak:What about a Gullwing? How did Hoovy wind up with such an eclectic taste?

2:15:38Doug DeMuro:You know, there are a few historic cars that I think will always be successful. 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 I got to admit, if Goldwings came down to a 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.

2:16:03Max Hodak:Yeah. I also heard 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.

2:16:13Doug DeMuro:And modern. That's the really crazy thing about the Gullway. 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. It 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.

2:16:42Vincenzo Landino:Jordan? What other words or advice were you sharing with the Porsche team? 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.

2:17:05Doug DeMuro: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.

2:17:42Doug DeMuro:and is there a possibility that Porsche makes a special car just for the American and Chinese market that's a hard sell to Germany which is the home market I mean it's it's an interesting flux kind of world right now in the auto world and I don't know I honestly don't know what what what Porsche's future ought to be but they have put a lot of money into product I have right now at my house the electric Macan GTS it is a fantastic car it is not going to sell yeah under any circumstances.

2:18:09Max Hodak:One last question on Porsche before we move on to China. Why do Targas hold their value so well?

2:18:17Doug DeMuro: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 it. Or a GT3 Targa. That is the market to go after. But I think they're probably supply constrained.

2:18:30Max Hodak: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?

2:19:01Doug DeMuro:I drove some BYD sedan a long time ago. I don't remember which one it was. Very competent car. Yeah, I think it was a Han. This was three, four years ago. And it seems like the cars have gotten more competent since then. Because I'm sitting here in San Diego 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.

2:19:22Max Hodak:Register them in Mexico and you can drive them into the United States. You just can't register them here or in the world.

2:19:27Doug DeMuro: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 live in San Diego, you see Mexican cars on the road more than any U.S. state. And a lot of them are electric because they're selling a lot of them there. And 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.

2:20:00Doug DeMuro:Ultimately, these countries like cheap, good cars. And a lot of those cars are cheap and good.

2:20:05Max Hodak:And Tata never really had that success coming out of India. Maybe just too short.

2:20:11Doug DeMuro:I don't know what happened with Tata. They had that crazy tiny car. 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 in India, you know, when Tata was really trying to blow up 20 years ago, it was pre-EVs. And, you know, that's a competitive advantage that the Chinese clearly have right now is their EV technology.

2:20:41Max Hodak:Okay. Killer feature I saw out of China. I want to 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?

2:20:57Doug DeMuro:Oh, God, you can imagine some real liability. That hasn't gone in front of attorneys in the United States, I'll tell you. I don't think so. But it is interesting. The technology that they are developing is interesting. Charging a battery in nine minutes, that is a huge deal, right? Because I think that still to this day, the primary reason people don't want to adopt 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 crazy fast charging, that would probably be the last excuse.

2:21:33Max Hodak:Have you seen the show – the HBO show Silicon Valley? No. Have you seen any of this? So there's this character who's loosely based on Mark Cuban, Russ Hanneman. And in the show, he brags about how he has a car with doors that go up. 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 an hour. They're cheap. They're cheap.

2:22:06Vincenzo Landino:You'll be able to get one for$20 ,000 in just a few years, too, I'm sure.

2:22:10Max Hodak: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.

2:22:29Doug DeMuro: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.

2:22:37Max Hodak:Every stoplight. Do it. Should he buy one that's already been wrapped and crashed in crypto?

2:22:47Doug DeMuro:Because for some reason, he will wrap and crash it if he doesn't buy one that's going to crash?

2:22:51Max Hodak: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?

2:23:13Doug DeMuro:I mean, that is up there. That's up there, 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, and this looks like a concept car. And I know it's not that fast. I know it doesn't drive great. It's got a three-cylinder engine. But holy crap, this thing looks so cool. It looks insane. It's been 10 years, and it still looks just as cool. It still looks cool.

2:23:41Max Hodak:He was asking me, he was like, three cylinders, so are they in a V shape? And I was like, no, it's not a V3.

2:23:47Doug DeMuro:But also, 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 don't worry about the two-cylinders. Brutal.

2:23:58Max Hodak:Just to defend him, I was pitching him this. I was pitching him this. But I still think it's a great buy.

2:24:03Doug DeMuro:It's a really flex car, but it is a hell of a flex.

2:24:07Max Hodak:Yes. What else is in that category if you maybe double the budget, triple the budget, but you still want just ridiculousness for the price?

2:24:16Doug DeMuro:I am surprised to see how cheap McLarens are getting. And the early McLarens, the MP412Cs, 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 Viz, 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, three-second or less, 0 to 60 type of fast. Those are pretty impressive cars for that money. You're still always worried every day, you know, though.

2:24:49Doug DeMuro:When you're driving a 40 ,000-mile McLaren that was probably on Turo for three and a half years, it's still always a little bit worried, right? Yeah.

2:24:59Vincenzo Landino:On Turo for that long. It's rough. What are you most excited for release-wise this year?

2:25:07Doug DeMuro: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. because 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 than I've been excited for.

2:25:41Doug DeMuro:And I think R2, to me, especially from a consumer retail car industry perspective, to me, probably the most interesting car coming out.

2:25:49Vincenzo Landino:What's going on with Scout Motors? Is that taking some of Rivian's IP? I'm just kind of speculating here, but VW Group is a big investor in Rivian. And I think they got IP rights through that investment to try to bring it over to the rest of the fleet. and then Scout is kind of like expanding off of what Rivian's done. What's the relationship there?

2:26:17Doug DeMuro:It'll be an interesting thing to see because, yeah, Volkswagen is an investor in Rivian, but also basically owns Scout. And it's like, wait a minute, you know, these cars are really similar. Like they're both these kind of boxy off-road electric vehicles. One interesting distinction is that Scout is 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 worry if you're actually out in the middle of the desert or the mountains or whatever.

2:26:44Doug DeMuro: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, two years ago? Now they're saying it'll be another two 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 two brands sort of against each other. And I am curious how that will end up shaking down.

2:27:15Max Hodak:Yeah. Is there a word for those like reverse hybrids where it's mostly an electric car, but it has a gas engine that you can fill up to charge the battery? I saw a demo from a Chinese car, but that feels like something that for the overlander, for the camper, for somebody who wants to go off grid and not have the range anxiety, but still have all the benefits of the electric powertrain.

2:27:36Doug DeMuro:Yeah, that is. I think that would be almost like a generator. Yeah, basically. I think that would be great. 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 eight of my neighbors have Rivian R1Ss. Like these people aren't actually overlanding, right? These are cars, the three-row SUVs, they're going to take their kids around. And I think that you can't do too much development for the overlanding crowd, which isn't real. There's not a lot of people in the overlanding world willing to spend$120 ,000 on a brand new vehicle anyway.

2:28:10Doug DeMuro:Mostly you've got to think about who's actually going to buy these, which is parents.

2:28:14Max Hodak:Do you have expectations around 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 technology is like there.

2:28:27Vincenzo Landino:Yeah, I was talking to these 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.

2:28:49Doug DeMuro:Yeah, I think about that a lot. I have been surprised at autonomous technology. There was a lot of talk about it for a long time. And then the last two 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, 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 we've kind of forgotten about like autonomous cars.

2:29:28Doug DeMuro: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 Kanyans and Panameras, those are not necessarily being sold to people who like love to drive. And so those cars also will have to do that. That's just going to have to be what they do. I'm pumped for it.

2:29:48Max Hodak:Yeah, Mercedes seemed really close with a level three system that you could actually watch a YouTube video on the center console.

2:29:55Doug DeMuro:And they even said at some point they would be willing to take liability. But like, where is that?

2:29:59Max Hodak: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, you know, level three plus. Right. But it just never really played out.

2:30:10Doug DeMuro:They all went all in on EV and spent a lot of money and time developing that. And 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 a ton of us. I think most people would rather have a ton of us.

2:30:22Max Hodak:Yeah, definitely.

2:30:23Vincenzo Landino:How do I get one of these new Unimogs from Mercedes?

2:30:28Doug DeMuro:The story I read was that they're building precisely one. Did you read that? No. They're building one.

2:30:33Vincenzo Landino:That was what I was afraid of. Because you look at this thing and it looks like a concept car. When I first saw it, I was like, okay, this is cool, but it's obviously AI. And then Mercedes was posting it from their actual account. I'm like, okay, it's real, but it's a partnership with this other kind of like commercial truck company. I forget the name. So I'm not going to get one, you're saying. And you're not going to review one?

2:30:56Doug DeMuro:No. I mean, even if they did make them, the Unimogs, especially modern Unimogs, have almost completely been restricted to not the U.S. There's all sorts of regulations and trucks. Importing trucks to the U.S. is hard. But it'd be cool as hell. It looks incredibly cool. Oh, no.

2:31:12Vincenzo Landino:You have to do the G650 Land Elay instead. What's the most elite big family SUV to buy this year? I'm in the market.

2:31:22Doug DeMuro: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 it's it's not really that.

2:31:57Doug DeMuro:But I think I like the if you know, you know, cars better. The LX, specifically the Overtrail LX, like the off-road version, is like a very, it's a three-row, but it's like a very capable off-roader. And it's expensive and not that many people are buying it. Those are special cars.

2:32:12Max Hodak: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. that 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,

2:32:33Vincenzo Landino:I think it was the two of us were suggesting. This is our idea.

2:32:36Max Hodak:Again, this is our idea. But is there a better car for a group of young men in Los Angeles to share for first dates than a Lamborghini Urus?

2:32:48Vincenzo Landino:Do we have a budget here? Well, I mean, we're talking about eight or so guys. There's eight or so guys.

2:32:53Max Hodak:So they're going to all be paying a normal car payment of a couple hundred dollars. But you add that up, you get into like three grand. You get into like three grand a month.

2:33:00Vincenzo Landino:Potentially lease like a Rolls Royce. A Rolls Royce.

2:33:03Max Hodak:But that's not maybe the right date car. So yeah, the team's right there if you want to take a look.

2:33:07Doug DeMuro:It gives me, I would get a Bentayga for that same money. But it depends on the type of lady or man that you're trying to attract. There's a certain type of lady or man that is interested in an Urus driver. 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.

2:33:25Vincenzo Landino:Your wife is not going to be attracted to the URIS. But Antega, she might appreciate.

2:33:31Max Hodak:Yeah. Well, that's why Turo exists. We will need a Turo each and run the proper A-B test for the...

2:33:36Doug DeMuro: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.

2:33:44Max Hodak:Yeah.

2:33:45Doug DeMuro:You have to come clean and be like... Why don't you run with the URIS tonight?

2:33:48Vincenzo Landino:Well, the best thing, a 24-hour Turo rental, you potentially can squeeze in two dinners, a breakfast and a lunch, and then maybe even a late lunch before you've got to return the car.

2:33:59Doug DeMuro:Many years ago, I did ads for Turo 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.

2:34:23Vincenzo Landino:The brutal thing for me is I was watching your videos and I became a Turo client, but I was in my early 20s. I couldn't get any of the good stuff. I'd just be like, okay, I can get a boxer.

2:34:38Max Hodak:Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Thank you. Great to catch up. Thanks for having me back. I appreciate it. Everyone, go follow Cars and Bids. Go to carsandbids.com. Listen to this car pod. Yeah, sort by most expensive. Buy that car. That's what you want. Exactly right. There you go. Thank you, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about app-loving. 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.

2:35:14Max Hodak:Secure every agent. Secure any agent with Okta. Without further ado, Max Hodak is back on the show. Max, good to see you. How are you doing?

2:35:24Vincenzo Landino:We do not have audio, but you look fantastic. You look fantastic.

2:35:28Max Hodak: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?

2:35:45Vincenzo Landino:I can hear you.

2:35:46Max Hodak:Yeah. Yes. I can hear a little bit. Great. So give us the, maybe reintroduce the company and then give us the news today.

2:35:54Vincenzo Landino:Yeah. I mean, it's been a crazy, crazy couple months. Yeah. So we're a medical technology company really focused on the brain. It's just when you engage directly with the brain, when you get these back to size 16. You don't really see ulcer in medicine. Our lead product is a retinal process of the chip that plants it in the back of the eye. That we finished a major clinical trial last year on age-related macular degeneration. It's one of the main reasons people go blind. That's not inherited. 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.

2:36:25Vincenzo Landino: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.

2:36:35Max Hodak:We're still having some audio errors. 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 Jordi 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 agentic commerce is going to be a little bit more brand focused. Potentially, I saw some news about that.

2:37:02Vincenzo Landino:Agenda Commerce is different than the ads product.

2:37:08Max Hodak:Yes, yes.

2:37:10Vincenzo Landino:Agenda Commerce is like you search for a product, a Shopify retailer has opted into this.

2:37:16Max Hodak:There was a question about how many people would be opted in.

2:37:17Vincenzo Landino:I think a big part of it is just focus. It seems like over the last couple months, my interpretation of OpenAI strategy is like, hey, let's focus on our core business, consumer. Let's focus on enterprise, go gen, and let's just like get back to basics.

2:37:36Max Hodak:My big question is, is I wonder if there will be an opportunity to, uh, to run more targeted ads on those more considered purchases like a car. Like I have hit chat GPT 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?

2:38:17Max Hodak:Is this like, here's my budget, what should I be looking for in a family car? Like the questions that you asked Doug DeMiro, we're fortunate that we get to ask him directly about R8s and I8s and all sorts of Bentegas 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.

2:38:57Vincenzo Landino:By the way, I just asked ChadGPT 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 with a Y-Soc package.

2:39:10Max Hodak:See, nailed it. And so the thing 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 a thousand bucks or a couple thousand bucks. And that could be a very different shape of advertiser, I think.

2:39:36Vincenzo Landino:Yeah, it's hard to handle the attribution.

2:39:40Max Hodak: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 YSoc 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 LLM review the contract, right? Like you might have – you might 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.

2:40:20Max Hodak:Or how do I put this in track mode? and then it knows that you actually got the GT3 RS with the YSOC 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. Yes, I think so. Much better.

2:40:41Max Hodak:Let's restart with the reintroduction. Start over from the beginning because I could hardly hear you,

2:40:46Vincenzo Landino:but what I was hearing, I was quite excited about.

2:40:48Max Hodak:Yes.

2:40:49Vincenzo Landino:So we make brain implants. Our main one is a retinal prosthesis. So it's a chip implanted in the back of the eye. I finished a major clinical trial last summer in age-related macular degeneration, which is one of the leading causes of blindness. And in the trial, 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.

2:41:11Max Hodak:Oh, that's insane. So couldn't recognize faces. that means that like if I'm trying to imagine what that looks like it's effectively take a picture of what I'm seeing and then just blur blur blur until I can't even recognize a face is that

2:41:25Vincenzo Landino:is that 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 slot splotch so it's like a little bit more 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 uh destroyed in this disease geographic attribute and so we have a chip that we implant under where the dead retina is it 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.

2:42:12Vincenzo Landino:And if we can get the signal into the cable, then you can get vision into the brain.

2:42:15Max Hodak:Wow, that's remarkable. How much is the device that you implant like a camera sensor that I would see in an iPhone?

2:42:24Vincenzo Landino:So there's a wearable. So the patients wear glasses. On the glasses, there's two parts. The implant, but then there's the glasses. And the glasses have a camera that is just like an iPhone camera. 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. And so it 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 red.

2:42:55Wow.

2:42:57Max Hodak: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?

2:43:15Vincenzo Landino:Yeah, I mean, this is done by human surgeons. It's done by vitro retinal surgeon. 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 in 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 the uh it's it's really not a big deal it's about an hour and a half and the patient goes home

2:43:40Max Hodak:and a day later there they can take a band-a-jaw that's remarkable um and so so uh 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 worked but uh are you giving them the normal like eye test what's What are all the different batteries that you use to understand the effect of the device?

2:44:10Vincenzo Landino:Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch. We were looking at both efficacies or things like how many letters can they read on the iCard. And improvement in that, that was one of the main trial endpoints. We wanted at least two lines of improvement that 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's not on is there residual vision because many of these patients have residual peripheral vision that they can use to walk around it's just that they can't 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 is a standard test.

2:44:57Vincenzo Landino:We use that as an efficacy endpoint.

2:45:00Max Hodak:Sorry, Jareem.

2:45:02Vincenzo Landino:You've raised a bunch of new money. What is this going to go towards? Is it continuing to focus on the core product? Walk us through. Yeah, so we announced just that we raised $230 million a series. Bring the total amount of capital to a little under half a billion. It's like a lot of money. A lot of money. A lot of money for an incredible cause. Congratulations. We have bought ourselves the privilege of working really hard. Yeah.

2:45:37Max Hodak: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.

2:46:05Vincenzo Landino:So we have three programs at Science. There's our work in the retina. There's our bio-hybrid neural interface technology, which is a general purpose, kind of what people think of as like a neural interface. but a little bit different than what most other people do. And then we have improvements in critical care life support technologies. I 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?

2:46:39Vincenzo Landino:It's become kind of synonymous for many people with paralyzed people controlling computers. That's what many of the companies are doing. But we think that cochlear implants are BCIs. Those have been around for decades.

2:46:54Vincenzo Landino:So the retinal prosthesis is really in the tradition of cochlear implants. There's a million people plus with those out there. It's just until recently the technology hasn't really worked. So when you think about what is the most valuable BCI product that has 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 when we're storing the division to the blind as a quest humanity has been on for thousands of years. And then if you were to do that, when I looked at when me and my co-founders looked around at the state of the world in early 2021, we, it was pretty easy for us to build a conviction that one way or another by stimulating either the optic nerve directly or the layer of cells in the right.

2:47:36Vincenzo Landino:And just before that, using either a gene therapy or an electrical stimulator, one way or another, you kind of have these like four boxes. It's really like three boxes of those trade-offs. One of those would work. And we went out and did an exhaustive survey of the state of the art in kind of each of those three options and zeroed in on what we're doing now. 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. The next step is capital. 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.

2:48:23Max Hodak: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?

2:48:54Vincenzo Landino:It's important to understand that only the central couple degrees of your visual field is high acuity color. You're constantly looking around to try to reduce the uncertainty of the brain. You don't see the image on the retina directly. What you experience is a world model constructed by the brain. It's highly semantic. You can look at something and know, will that be hard or soft if I touch it? That isn't obviously what you're experiencing in this world model. As the eye is moving around, it's filling in areas of uncertainty. The implant, you're right. We're not restoring high-resolution color vision today.

2:49:31Vincenzo Landino:But it is, what we are getting is this, this secluded form image that patients can look at. They can, it strings together shapes into letters and letters of words and they bring and apprehend that intuitively. And that had never really been done before. And so that is like a really clear statement that we're on the right track. But the next step is to make the implant larger. So that this, the device that's now is two millimeters by two 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 pixelated they see it as sharp but they only get a small amount of detail at once now it does better than you would expect for that for the number of electrodes because as the eye moves around it's in this information and so it really it's a little bit That's fascinating.

2:50:21Vincenzo Landino: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. And hopefully every two 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. Based on the kind of early patients, like how do you expect this market to evolve and how quickly people that suffer from blindness will adopt something like this once you continue to prove out the product?

2:51:07Vincenzo Landino: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 veneration as a whole is big. 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 a number. For very late state, both eyes, large area of atrophy, that's the population that's really relevant for the product as it is right now.

2:51:51Vincenzo Landino:We think that's like 6 ,500 people a year in the U.S., a backlog of maybe 150, 200 ,000 people across the U.S. and Europe. And with the next version of the device with a larger field of view on a smaller electrode, that expands to probably 5 million people. And these are huge. We're not going to plan. If the next several years we're doing 1 ,000 a year, those would be big numbers.

2:52:20Vincenzo Landino:So right now, like I said, it's not high-resolution color vision, but is this powerful distance 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 or percepts will be able to at least get red and green. You'll be able to get native acuity. You're not going to go, sometimes people ask like, okay, well, 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.

2:52:49Max Hodak: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?

2:53:10Vincenzo Landino:I mean, this gets to a fairly deep question of just like, how do you capture the structure of any phenomenal mode? Like, different hearing are different. Smell is different. Somaticization is different. So how do you capture, like we can write down images and audio files to Twitter, and so we have a format that captures them, but that doesn't really tell you about like the like a wave 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 it's a chemical sensor it spans the space of molecules you can get this decomposition of the space of molecules um but this is yeah smell has been very um there's a lot of companies that have worked on growing up neurons express single factory receptors to try to do a chemical step because like dog noses are like there are like some of those chemical most sensitive chemical detectors in the universe yeah and i actually was talking to a company the

2:54:04Max Hodak:other day that is training dogs that attack cancer yeah and i went into the pitch like i don't believe

2:54:09Vincenzo Landino:you and i came out oh like i get like that actually is like i could see it yeah and the trick was the really interesting thing just really shortly what wasn't not it's not that they're picking up some chemical that is present if you have cancer. It's that there's thousands of chemicals that are constantly just like being emitted that are in your blood that are being leaked out. And if you can train a dog under reinforcement, what it does is it kind of upregulates some receptors, downregulates some other receptors, the brain wires together to pick out that part of chemical space. And so it can pick out this exquisite balance of hundreds or thousands of chemicals to say when these are present in these proportions, you should get it.

2:54:45Max Hodak: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.

2:55:02Vincenzo Landino: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 not used dogs.

2:55:07Max Hodak:I love it. I love it. Well, thank you so much, and congratulations on the progress. Thank you for everything you do. what...

2:55:14Vincenzo Landino:Yeah, how, last question from my side, how, like, talk about the significance of this milestone. You obviously raised a lot of money out the gates, but is this like, like, hey, we actually, like, is, like, becoming a real company now and moving, moving beyond? Because everybody talks about big, you know, there's a lot of big numbers that get thrown around in our industry. 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.

2:55:53Vincenzo Landino:Yeah, I mean, our focus, like I really believe that there needs to be businesses in this industry. And you can find an infinite amount of money just on our research. I mean, it's an infinite wealth of research. I mean, this is like, there's so much grant money that goes into neuroscience and engineering. But we, I don't know, I mean, I, I, I just like strongly feel it's like I were suffering from this like money cancer that every now and then you kind of goes into a mission and you raise around it and it comes back and like, it the feeling won't go away until you have a sustainable life. business where there's revenue coming in.

2:56:25Vincenzo Landino:And I think that we're hopefully pretty, like we're not, we're close to it. 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, to lots of people that allow this to become sustainable. And then it's a question of how fast do you grow rather than like, is, is UCI going to have a winner?

2:56:48Max Hodak:Yeah. Thanks.

2:56:50Vincenzo Landino:Very cool. Well, Well, thank you for coming on and sharing and for the work that you're doing.

2:56:54Max Hodak:Yeah. Have a great rest of your day. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon, Max.

2:56:58Vincenzo Landino:Yeah, I'm sure Max has very relaxing weekends.

2:57:01Max Hodak:Yeah. Nothing going on at the office. Now, good luck with all the hard work ahead of you. Thank you for everything you do. Great to catch up. 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, ROL 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 team.

2:57:35Vincenzo Landino: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 return from the holiday weekend to an all-hands meeting with a slide deck titled Wartime.

2:57:47Max Hodak:Wartime.

2:57:48Vincenzo Landino: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.

2:57:57Max Hodak:Yeah, what a wild ride over the last two weeks with Cursor. I mean, the company is still growing and ARR is at$2 billion, potentially raising at$50 billion. But at the same time, 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, you know, maybe there's a shift in the business. Do they go more into training models? Do they go deeper into certain enterprises that are maybe stickier or harder to get to? Do they become more forward deployed, helping with transformation, doing actual projects? They can become a consulting firm.

2:58:31Max Hodak:Like, where is the next act two for that company will be an interesting question. Well, hopefully, they're not reliant on building Cursor using Mac Studios with 512 gigs of RAM because those apparently are no longer available. due to the DRAM shortage. This is for Mac rumors. The Mac Studio with the maximum amount of RAM that you can use to inference large models locally, well, it's 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.

2:59:14Max Hodak:because I imagine that 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.

2:59:30Vincenzo Landino: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 from the Freddy's CEO. Another one? Enter the chat from Freddy's, John.

2:59:42Max Hodak:Freddy's?

2:59:43Vincenzo Landino:You don't know about Freddy's?

2:59:43Max Hodak:I've never heard of Freddy's. Has Volta done one of these? Can we get some audio here? Has Volta done one? We need one from John Fio. Let's see it. Here we go. On the real.

2:59:54Doug DeMuro: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.

3:00:08Max Hodak:This is such a funny little trend for the CEOs of...

3:00:13Vincenzo Landino:I would like to see SAS CEOs do this. Here I am. I'm using. All right, how do I poke around here? Eating burgers.

3:00:26Max Hodak:Is this a different company now?

3:00:29Vincenzo Landino:Thanks, bud. There are so many of these. Tacos. Freddy's has tacos, too.

3:00:34Max Hodak:You got to go with the hot honey cheese curd. Hot honey, a 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 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.

3:01:26Max Hodak:So head over to transportation and grounds service. I was confused by the transportation thing because like the self-driving cars, like that's happening, that's coming. Like 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 Roos has a mnemonic to know about, to learn about the labor market. He says, jobs in the red, it's dead. Jobs in the blue, join a construction crew.

3:02:01Max Hodak:and someone else was saying that this could have just been a bar chart but 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 a final post?

3:02:22Vincenzo Landino:I have a post. Scott Sumner from GMU. I think he's retired but macro goat. He has a new subsec post. It's called Freak Out.

3:02:31Max Hodak:Freak out?

3:02:32Vincenzo Landino:Yeah.

3:02:33Max Hodak:No way.

3:02:33Vincenzo Landino:So he's blackpilling.

3:02:34Max Hodak:Really?

3:02:35Vincenzo Landino:Yep.

3:02:35Max Hodak:Wasn't he just on Macro Musings?

3:02:38Vincenzo Landino:Pretty recently, yeah. Great episode.

3:02:40Max Hodak:Okay.

3:02:40Vincenzo Landino:Nomenal GDP level targeting.

3:02:42Max Hodak:We got to read through this. Sumner, okay.

3:02:46Vincenzo Landino:When is it time to panic?

3:02:48Max Hodak: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. Okay, 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 the Mercatus Center. Anyway, thank you for tuning in to TBPN on Friday. Thanks for coming. Go have a wonderful weekend. Have a wonderful weekend.

3:03:22Max Hodak: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. I can't wait. Anyway, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to our newsletter, tbpn.com, and we will see you on Monday.

3:03:37Vincenzo Landino:Weekend of your life. Love you. That's all, folks.

3:03:40Max Hodak:Good.