"You Can See Everything" Review, Roadster Reactions, Eric Glyman Joins | Walter Isaacson, Christian Jensen, Tavarish

(00:15) - "You Can See Everything" Review (07:35) - Roadster Reactions (30:03) - Walter Isaacson is a bestselling biographer and journalist known for chronicling influential innovators such as Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Jennifer Doudna. Walter Isaacson discusses Musk’s futuristic designs and mercurial leadership, the relationship between human creativity and artificial intelligence, and how individuals and collaborative teams shape technological progress. (01:00:00) - Eric Glyman, co-founder and co-CEO of Ramp, discusses the company’s $1.85 billion fundraise, rapid revenue growth, and expanding suite of financial products. He explains how Ramp aims to help businesses manage, attribute, and maximize returns on AI spending as artificial intelligence becomes a core operating expense. (01:14:02) - Christian Jensen discusses Dragoneer Investment Group’s $1.85 billion investment in Ramp, describing the firm’s strategy of making concentrated bets on category-defining businesses. He argues that Ramp’s vast market, expanding product platform, capital efficiency, AI capabilities, and exceptional leadership justify its $60 billion valuation, while explaining Dragoneer’s selective, nonintrusive approach to supporting portfolio companies. (01:24:31) - Tavarish discusses his skepticism about the Tesla Roadster, enthusiasm for Porsche’s Mission S and 918, and preference for distinctive, driver-focused cars over flashy technology showcases. The automotive YouTuber and supercar rebuilder also shares insights into project-car selection, beginner-friendly Japanese cars, extreme-speed challenges, and the evolving balance among combustion, hybrid, and electric vehicles. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPS.

• 0:03John Coogan?

  Today's Friday, October 16th, 2026. We are live from the GEP and Ultra Dome.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  We're back.

• 0:09John Coogan?

  The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Why do you call it the capital of capital, Jordy? Why? Why do you feel that way? Why do you think that way? We're of course referring to, you can see everything, the fun Nathan Fielder movie that we saw yesterday, where he always asks the follow-up question, asks, why do you feel that way? Why do you say that again and again and again?

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  She never hit him with the, um, why questions are over determined.

• 0:34John Coogan?

  She should have, she should have hit him with the why questions are over determined. That would have been that, that stunt car that just aced. Yeah, he would have been.

• 0:43Jordi Hays?

  Nathan Fielder hates this one simple trick.

• 0:45John Coogan?

  He would have been stun locked, yeah. But a Nathan Fielder PT crossover would be incredible. That's the next movie they gotta do. Uh, deep diving the Antichrist, figuring out all the questions there, that'd be so.

• 0:57Jordi Hays?

  That is, I think, the only way that you could one up this.

• 1:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, no. So, I mean.

• 1:01Jordi Hays?

  It's maybe even too much, too inside baseball, right? Cause this was such a big story.

• 1:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:08Jordi Hays?

  A decade ago.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Everyone knows and they've seen the show and stuff, but anyway, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is mine to say both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Um, yeah, I mean, I, I'm pretty much a 10 out of 10 on the movie. I thought it was fantastic. I really, really enjoyed it. Uh, we went with a bunch of folks and thanks to everyone that came out and, uh, hung out with us. It was a great time and.

• 1:30Jordi Hays?

  It had a big impact on us. We ditched the IEMs.

• 1:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna be using these headphones now going forward. We're also gonna be shooting like this.

• 1:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the whole show.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  Cinematography was incredible. There's a lot of debate going on in the studio on how much VFX was involved, how much cinematography and actual lighting equipment was involved because they're, the, every shot is beautiful. It's perfectly lit and yet they're in these tight spaces, this small beach house in Del Mar, and it looks incredible. And my thesis is that just the cameramen are as good at what they do as what Nathan Fielder does. Like they are just experts of their craft. They use the best tools. They got incredible cameras, incredible lenses, and they went in there and they shot it beautifully, even with some crazy lighting at times. They figured out how to make it amazing.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  Uh, and maybe there's color grading after the fact, but I, I was, I'm sort of skeptical of the theory that like, uh, before every scene, they went and set up a bunch of 10 by 10 diffusion and shot a bunch of light through. Maybe there's some stuff going on outside pushing through windows, but it seemed pretty natural to me. And I think they're just really good at making it look beautiful, but.

• 2:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was masters, masters at work.

• 2:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, a- a- across the entire production. Everyone involved, even the A24 people who, I think they cast them, the, they, they cast actors. I don't wanna spoil anything, but, uh, but there's some A24 references that are fun and, uh, everything, everything about it is incredible. So, highly recommend going and seeing it. Um, probably stay spoiler free if you can, because, uh, it's a fun wild ride.

• 3:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the thing is that I think you could know exactly what happened.

• 3:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:14Jordi Hays?

  And it would still be wildly entertaining.

• 3:15John Coogan?

  A hundred percent.

• 3:16Jordi Hays?

  Like the whole concept is just so absurd.

• 3:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18Jordi Hays?

  It is, if you followed Nathan Fielder across his career.

• 3:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:23Jordi Hays?

  This makes sense as a natural progression.

• 3:26John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:26Jordi Hays?

  And yet at the same time, it's unbelievable that all these different pieces came together.

• 3:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:31Jordi Hays?

  And various groups like agreed to do something like this. Being, uh, Billy and, uh, Elizabeth.

• 3:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it is just almost unbelievable.

• 3:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. When the trailer came out, a lot of people were asking like, why would she agree to do this? And I really think it's like, you're serving 11 years in prison. There's nowhere to go but up.

• 3:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, your view was like, there's no real downside, all upside.

• 3:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:54Jordi Hays?

  And I think people will come away from this, uh, generally having a lot more, like, regardless of you think she was guilty.

• 4:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:04Jordi Hays?

  Or not, you're gonna come away.

• 4:10Jordi Hays?

  Um, you're gonna come away, uh, feeling bad for her and the whole situation, right? The days and days and days of scenes with her and her children.

• 4:21John Coogan?

  They will.

• 4:21Jordi Hays?

  These shots, these shots, you know, the, the final shot before prison where she says she does her, you know, pumped, is pumping breast milk.

• 4:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, for the children saying like, bring it back.

• 4:33John Coogan?

  Uh, are you guys laughing at the framing or just what Jordy's saying? I'm so confused.

• 4:38Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, it's very distracting.

• 4:38John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, quickly, let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system contracts. Uh, Liz Wessel, Ramp investor over at First Round, big news from Ramp, Eric Clive is coming on the show today. Uh, but, uh, she took 150 founders, investors and builders to an early screening of the, of the movie. She polled 16 of them and 14 out of 16 came away saying they are more positive on Liz Holmes. Doesn't mean they're fans, just means that they thought less negatively of her. That sounds like it worked. 14 out of 16. So, so she took 150 people, very odd methodology, Liz. I mean, nice, the nice that you did this. It's interesting content, but you should have pulled off 150. Uh, but instead she polled 16 sort of casually and she asked them some basic questions.

• 5:24John Coogan?

  Do you feel better or worse about Elizabeth Holmes after seeing this film? 14 said more positive, only one said more negative and one didn't change. But all 16 said they felt more negative about Billy and there's some other data there that will kind of leave. Uh, but you can go check it out. Anyway, uh, don't miss it. Go see it this weekend. Uh, the spoilers are just gonna keep, uh, keep trickling out and, uh, it's just fun seeing it in a, in a packed theater. Cause everyone's laughing at different moments. Everyone's gasping at different moments.

• 5:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the film, the film was, was effectively like a psychedelic experience.

• 6:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:01Jordi Hays?

  In many ways.

• 6:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:03Jordi Hays?

  Like it was, it was riveting. It was like, you know, funny at these.

• 6:08John Coogan?

  The cuts, the production.

• 6:09Jordi Hays?

  The coverage is just so funny. We're, we're dying back there.

• 6:11John Coogan?

  I'm glad we have this tool now, but no, no, I agree with you.

• 6:14Jordi Hays?

  Someone just texted me and said, uh, apparently.

• 6:18John Coogan?

  What? What'd they text you?

• 6:20Jordi Hays?

  Apparently my, uh, my wonderful wife texted the team telling them the show is messed up, super zoomed in.

• 6:27John Coogan?

  That's hilarious. Well, is this super zoomed in railway? Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. User favorite agents deploy web app servers, databases and more, while railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security.

• 6:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I will be going back to see it.

• 6:42John Coogan?

  I'm seeing it tonight again.

• 6:43Jordi Hays?

  You are?

• 6:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:44Jordi Hays?

  With them? Uh, amazing.

• 6:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:46Jordi Hays?

  Um, very cool. Yeah, we'll be going back as soon as possible. But the whole thing was, um, yeah, completely psychedelic in my experience. And, uh, just a, just a very, it wa- it was kind of strange for me because two hours into the movie.

• 7:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:04Jordi Hays?

  Now there was a fire.

• 7:05John Coogan?

  Crazy.

• 7:05Jordi Hays?

  That, that, uh, got started somewhat near my house. And so I started getting calls and texts, uh, about that. And then I ended up kind of like, my attention ended up trailing off.

• 7:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:14Jordi Hays?

  So I have to go see it again. Um, but, uh, really an incredible work of art.

• 7:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, instant, instant classic.

• 7:21John Coogan?

  Instant classic. Yeah. Very, very fascinating. Uh, well, uh, I think, I think we can zoom out. This is a tool that we can have in the tool chest. We can go back to the normal lighting and the normal level of zoom. Cause I got a big reveal, cause what am I wearing today? I got the Felpper Again Award, cause your boy put down 5,000 hard earned dollars on a Tesla Roadster reservation two days ago. And, uh, I think I gotta refund it, cause they, the, the, the demo's incredible, but it's not starting production until 2028. I was under the assumption that this was the launch of the Roadster, that this was not the reveal that,

• 8:02John Coogan?

  uh, maybe I just read the tweets wrong and I wasn't dialed in or something, but I thought it was like, okay, this is the start of production. Like they're producing them now. They're going to show what's happening, show the final design and then be like, yeah. And the people that have been waiting seven years, they're getting theirs next month and then a couple of months later. And if you just signed up six months.

• 8:19Jordi Hays?

  Going into production, so, so first of all, I'll start by saying absolutely incredible, uh, feats.

• 8:26John Coogan?

  Insane.

• 8:26Jordi Hays?

  Amazing show, absolute cinema, uh, wonderful that they're doing this. There's a bunch of stuff that I'm, I really love about it.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:34Jordi Hays?

  But dropping like, the car will be going into production in 2028 was just like completely insane.

• 8:41John Coogan?

  That's how I call it. It was rough.

• 8:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was, it was, it was, um.

• 8:45John Coogan?

  I want, I want a fun Tesla now, like, like that self-driving car.

• 8:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:49John Coogan?

  Technology's so cool. I just want it now.

• 8:51Jordi Hays?

  And in some ways, like if you're, if you, if you gave Tesla a quarter million dollars in 2017.

• 8:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:59Jordi Hays?

  And if you had just put that in the S and P, you would be. You would have multiples of that by now.

• 9:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, you'd be worried.

• 9:05Jordi Hays?

  And then you, you, there's this big event. The event gets delayed again.

• 9:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:09Jordi Hays?

  Two weeks and then, yeah, we're making the car, but it's going to be going into production in 2028, which easily means it could be like.

• 9:16John Coogan?

  Could be delayed.

• 9:17Jordi Hays?

  It could be, well, no, I just like, it could be getting deliveries at the very end of 2028.

• 9:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, you could start production December 20th, 2028, and that's not a violation. And then production could run for like four years. So if you're later in the queue, it could take a very long time. That happens with special cars all the time. Elite, elite.

• 9:36Jordi Hays?

  We lost, we lost.

• 9:37John Coogan?

  But, um, the other thing is that it just felt like they re-raised the stakes so much by being like, we're going to put cold gas thrusters and rockets on it. It's going to be able to do kickflips. It's like, okay.

• 9:47Jordi Hays?

  All you had to do.

• 9:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. All you had to do was beautiful car that goes fast.

• 9:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:51John Coogan?

  Beautiful car that goes fast.

• 9:52Jordi Hays?

  I was trying to, I was trying to imagine. So the, the reason that you do this now, even though the car is not actually ready to announce at all.

• 9:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:57Jordi Hays?

  Is pressure from the probably 10,000 plus people that reserved this car a long time ago. It's getting kind of annoying. You feel like I'm not delivering on something that I said. And two, to kind of like make the Tesla SpaceX merger, like start to build towards that.

• 10:19John Coogan?

  I like that thesis.

• 10:20Jordi Hays?

  That, that feels like why you would do this now. Otherwise, like you don't need to announce a car that you're not making for two years.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. When they open the car door for one of the cars, because I think some of the cars don't have seats. Some of them do. Some of them are, are, can be drivable. Some of them can just do kickflips. There's a whole variety of products that they're demoing and then they'll bring everything together over the next two years, hopefully. But, uh, when they open the door and they're like, there's someone inside, it's spaceman, he's in the space suit. It's like, okay, that's a SpaceX product in there as well. It's not just the thrusters. And then I was expecting almost like an Optimus in there, but I forgot that Optimus is technically a Tesla project, not a SpaceX project. But it feels like a SpaceX project now because it's SpaceX AI or SpaceX SI. And so when I think of like robotics and artificial intelligence, I think SpaceX more than Tesla now. So it's like, these, these companies just are destined to be.

• 11:07Jordi Hays?

  The, the contrast between how incredible like the show and the spectacle was and the demo and the technology with like the delivery from Elon and the, the two other guys.

• 11:18John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. A lot of dead air.

• 11:20Jordi Hays?

  Like.

• 11:20John Coogan?

  Lot of dead air.

• 11:21Jordi Hays?

  The, the most awkward delivery in so many of these kind of semi awkward moments.

• 11:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 11:27John Coogan?

  We, we, we gotta play the actual video.

• 11:28Jordi Hays?

  Let's talk about, yeah, let's talk about everything that we love about it.

• 11:31John Coogan?

  Okay. Also predictions, because, uh, if you remember yesterday on the show, I predicted that it would be able to lift off the ground. I said something like six feet. It clearly does more than six feet. That was my prediction. I did not predict ramps.

• 11:44Jordi Hays?

  I said ramps everywhere.

• 11:46John Coogan?

  Ramps everywhere. And that's exactly what we got. I mean, it's just one big ramp, but it's effectively ramps everywhere based on, I, I think this totally counts. Insane that it can go upside down like that. Uh, the McMurty Spurling can actually do something similar with just fans.

• 12:00Jordi Hays?

  Should we do a tier list? I think it's time for a tier list.

• 12:03John Coogan?

  Okay. I like this.

• 12:04Jordi Hays?

  Let's get a tier list going.

• 12:05John Coogan?

  Okay. Uh.

• 12:07Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Juvenile hu, I'm going to start with juvenile humor. All the jokes about, uh, all the, the sucking related jokes. I'm going to put those at F tier.

• 12:17John Coogan?

  F tier.

• 12:18Jordi Hays?

  Completely unnecessary.

• 12:19John Coogan?

  Okay. The, yeah, the childish humor is F tier. What about just the fact that it went on the ramp up to the top before it did the kickflip? That is so insane. That is S tier.

• 12:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It, it, the, the thing about watching it is even seeing it live.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:35Jordi Hays?

  Part of, I, I think it was amazing, super smart that they had a live audience and everyone there to see it and all this stuff. But because it is like, looks like it's breaking the laws of physics, it, it just, it doesn't feel real just for that reason.

• 12:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 12:54Jordi Hays?

  Which is, which is.

• 12:55John Coogan?

  What tier are you putting?

• 12:56Jordi Hays?

  That's S tier. S tier.

• 12:58John Coogan?

  S tier.

• 12:58Jordi Hays?

  Breaking the, the perceived laws of physics.

• 13:01John Coogan?

  Okay. Uh, so, so, so the.

• 13:03Jordi Hays?

  Mark in the chat says, I expected more.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  What did you expect?

• 13:10John Coogan?

  You had golf posts in the atmosphere, in the stratosphere. What are you doing? That, that, that's crazy. Uh, what about the rumor that it will be able to beat an F1 car on the.

• 13:22Jordi Hays?

  Okay. This is, this is what I love.

• 13:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 13:24Jordi Hays?

  The flying stuff is cool, but like irrelevant.

• 13:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:30Jordi Hays?

  If you're a buyer of this vehicle, because one, I don't think they're, I don't think they'll, I think they maybe ship it to a handful of friends of Elon's influencers. I'm thinking people like Whistling Diesel, maybe get.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  You know that Tesla hates him, right? His Cybertruck thing?

• 13:44Jordi Hays?

  Oh, right.

• 13:45John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. No, he is.

• 13:46Jordi Hays?

  Okay. So not Whistling Diesel, but maybe some like car influencers and they do some demos. But, but it was very clear during the thing, as he started saying, I was like writing some of this stuff down before they actually released these like specs. But he says, not sure it'll be legal in all jurisdictions, but it will be a car that someone can own. And so I'm just thinking, okay, it's like a, not a road legal car.

• 14:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:07Jordi Hays?

  And, and so the, the, all the flying stuff.

• 14:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:10Jordi Hays?

  Completely irrelevant to people like you and me that put down a deposit to actually get a car.

• 14:16John Coogan?

  Ron DeSantis chimed in and said like, we're going to make this thing legal in Florida. And I think it's actually pretty easy to, what? Isn't that amazing?

• 14:24Jordi Hays?

  I do not, as much as I want flying cars, I don't want to be in traffic with someone that has this capability.

• 14:32John Coogan?

  But what if it's, what if it's geofenced?

• 14:34Jordi Hays?

  That's just because they're going to mog you. That's, that's because you would be getting mugged.

• 14:38John Coogan?

  Watch out. Um, what about, would you be okay if it was, uh, there was, there, there's never been an explosion of the tank? It's a very highly pressurized 10,000 PSI tank and it's geofenced so that if you're on a public road, you cannot take off. You cannot engage the cold gas thrusters, uh, but you can just drive it like a sports car. But one of these pulls up next to you. Yes, there is a highly pressurized tank there, but the software is limiting it on street roads. Are you okay with that?

• 15:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, anyone will be able to jailbreak it with Codex.

• 15:12John Coogan?

  Ooh, okay. Okay.

• 15:14Jordi Hays?

  I'm sorry. Um, yeah, it's just, it's, it's not, it, it works. The way that it works currently.

• 15:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:23Jordi Hays?

  It gives you one and a half to two seconds.

• 15:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:26Jordi Hays?

  Of airtime.

• 15:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:28Jordi Hays?

  Not, there's no, there's no, um, real utility to it. It's purely.

• 15:34John Coogan?

  What if a bridge collapses and you need to get?

• 15:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there is a video. We do have a video of that. We, we should pull it up.

• 15:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. The ultimate, ultimate usefulness. Uh, no, I agree with you. It's a, it's a stunt.

• 15:45Jordi Hays?

  Pull up this video. This is the obvious utility.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  And so, but, but I think that there are two real utilities and this was a tech demo that could fork into two paths. And maybe both, maybe they'll try and do both, but one is what if, yes, this is the real most likely scenario where you'll want this car. You're driving along a very long bridge and it explodes down and you engage the cold gas thrusters and you save your life. What is your life worth? A couple of years on a Tesla Roadster waiting list and $250,000 of your hard earned cash and Tesla's bank account? Easy price to pay. Uh, anyway, um, there's a fork in the road right now and I think Tesla's trying to do both and they might.

• 16:28Jordi Hays?

  By the way, in, in 89.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:31Jordi Hays?

  The Bay Bridge.

• 16:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:32Jordi Hays?

  Had a bunch of damage. Someone did drive.

• 16:34John Coogan?

  Over it?

• 16:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, like off the cliff.

• 16:37John Coogan?

  That's crazy. Okay. So.

• 16:38Jordi Hays?

  And it was fatal.

• 16:39John Coogan?

  And that's only 89. So, yeah. And our infrastructure is crumbling, right? We, we haven't re-industrialized yet. This is a good value prop. That's value prop number one. Uh, value prop number two is I think this car can actually, if they really design it for it, do a sub five minute Nürburgring. I think that with the fans and the thrusters, when you're on the straights, you're actually a rocket car. You're never leaving the ground and it's designed to keep you on the ground. So it's sucking you to the ground. So you're going around the corners really fast. And you're effectively in Porsche 919 Evo territory with a car that's like from a manufacturer. And I don't know if it's road legal, but I think that they might put up like an actually insane track performance from this thing.

• 17:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. By teasing, by teasing a lot of time at Cota, that was like the best Easter egg of the whole thing.

• 17:29John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 17:30Jordi Hays?

  Because again, there's two ways to view yesterday's demo. There's just like shock and awe. It's crazy. Cult of Elon is amazing. The car is flying, all that stuff.

• 17:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:39Jordi Hays?

  And then there's like, I want to get this car or I'm, I'm considering buying this car. What is it actually going to do for me?

• 17:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:46Jordi Hays?

  And creating massive amounts of downforce and being able to put up F1 style lap times is, is insane and is very exciting. And actually the things that they kept hinting at were like, this is a driver's car.

• 17:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 17:58Jordi Hays?

  And that's what I loved, right? Um, and I think that a lot of the people that are, that have reservations will be excited about that. And so that obviously was just like a minor detail compared to the whole circus.

• 18:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:11Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but that's what I think is actually cool because no other car manufacturer would do this in that way. Nor would they add the thrusters to the rear to help with that zero to one time.

• 18:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:23Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of questions that, that you immediately start having of like, if you're using like, do you think tires would last like one lap? If you're pushing it on, at Cota?

• 18:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:32Jordi Hays?

  Like it would probably, like, they would probably just be completely shredded after a single lap.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  I think it's just get the record, just max the record. It's like zero to 60 times.

• 18:40Jordi Hays?

  And then I was starting to think about it. I'm like, tracks will 100% ban these from public track days. Cause you, can you imagine like?

• 18:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:47Jordi Hays?

  Your average Roadster owner just like heading down to their local racetrack and being like, I'm going to go out for a public session. And they're just like driving like an absolute banshee, but.

• 19:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, let me tell you about number two, the second path. But first, I'm gonna tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. So, the first is crazy track performance, crazy track performance. But what else can you do with this? He was gesturing towards like flying car, flying car, flying cars here. And yeah, it can only fly for two seconds. But you could see a world where you are actually able to deploy this as a flying car adjacent technology. It's really far from that, but there are, but there is a world where like, my example was like parallel parking or like, or like jumping the car somewhere like,

• 19:42John Coogan?

  not quite the bridge mode and also not like I'm taking this from LA to San Francisco.

• 19:48Jordi Hays?

  No, the obvious use for the thrusters in daily life is two cars are pulling down a street and there's one spot available that you're gonna need to parallel park into. If you see somebody pulling up to that, you hit the thrusters, just float into the spot.

• 20:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, you know what actually would have been a really awesome demo? Have you seen those videos of, I think it's I Show Speed jumping over a Lamborghini? They're going full speed at him and he jumps over it. If they'd done that with two roadsters, like the old roadster from 2019 that they never released, like driving straight at it and you're like, it's gonna crash. And then it goes and jumps over it. That'd be cool.

• 20:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:25John Coogan?

  Um, but I do think that like this is 1% closer to you get in the Jetsons future, like you get in the car and you say, take me there and it flies you there. Like, there's a lot that needs to happen. You need actual rockets onboard, you need sustained thrust, you need a lot more. But like, if we were, this is clearly like one notch towards, okay, yeah, your car actually just flies you from one place to another. So, I don't know. What do you think, Todd?

• 20:52Jordi Hays?

  Only 1% closer.

• 20:54John Coogan?

  I think this is one, I mean, it, it goes for two seconds. You're gonna be in the car for two minutes.

• 20:57Jordi Hays?

  Do we know that? Or like, the demos were very short.

• 21:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:00Jordi Hays?

  And like presumably it can go for 20 minutes, but like, can it go for one minute? Like, did they actually say that?

• 21:05John Coogan?

  One, one minute would be 5% of the way there from a 20 minute flight. And I think you're gonna need, I think to be flying car, you're gonna need to be in it for like 40 minutes.

• 21:15John Coogan?

  You're just gonna blast off and just coast and land. It launches you with such force.

• 21:21Jordi Hays?

  I mean, you only need launching, then if you have like kind of some kind of glider mechanism, then you don't need more thrust.

• 21:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, he's, he's channeling like the James Bond car. I don't think anything's off the table over the long haul. But again, this is like 10, 20 year vision. This is not.

• 21:34Jordi Hays?

  Like, if I have a car and I'm in a ton of traffic and I can jump over that traffic for like 20 seconds, that counts as a flying car? No? That's a jumping car?

• 21:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a jumping car. I don't think that's a flying car.

• 21:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so I actually think it was amazing that the Mission S launched the same day.

• 21:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:50Jordi Hays?

  Because it was like the most beautiful version of stagnation, right? In the Mission S, in that, in that, uh, the Mission S is, you know, some combination of the Porsche 959 and the GT1. And there's some other influences in there. But fundamentally, it's just like a car that just sort of returns to the kind of cars that, um, everybody wishes were still being made, right? Like, in some ways, like the interior looks like it could have been done by like a Restomod company, right?

• 22:22John Coogan?

  The interior's so good.

• 22:23Jordi Hays?

  And so, and it's just gonna have like a vanilla-ish V8 in it, is like at least the rumor. And so.

• 22:30John Coogan?

  Not V8, it's flat eight, but yeah.

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  Flat eight.

• 22:32John Coogan?

  Maybe. They didn't confirm it, which is crazy. They're both doing vaporware. It is, it's crazy that they've been working on the Mission S so long and they can't tell you what type of engines inside.

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I think, I think the, I think they'll just, they'll, I expect the Mission Fs to progress a lot more quickly than the Roadster.

• 22:50John Coogan?

  When do you think it actually will be delivered?

• 22:52Jordi Hays?

  I would expect a.

• 22:54John Coogan?

  First one, customer delivery, human driving it.

• 22:57Jordi Hays?

  I would expect.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  December 2027 or later?

• 23:03Jordi Hays?

  I would hope that they go into production next year, like at the end of next year.

• 23:07John Coogan?

  Me too.

• 23:08Jordi Hays?

  So like 2028 deliveries?

• 23:10John Coogan?

  That'd be amazing.

• 23:11Jordi Hays?

  Um, but that being said, it was like, it was like stagnation, but it was perfect, right? Like, they, they listened to their customers, which automotive manufacturers have, for better or worse, not been doing or been, been sort of unable to. And there were just so many details to that car that are just amazing. Like, the, almost every single angle is great. I've noticed like everyone has like a different favorite angle. Like, there's not like one, like to me, uh, you know, the rear end of the car is just like absolutely incredible. Saw some people that didn't like that. Some people like the side. I don't like the side nearly as much as the front and the rear.

• 23:51Jordi Hays?

  But regardless, like absolutely, absolute perfection. But basically zero innovation, right? Like, everything that really draws you in, like the seats, right? And the harness and the fact that it doesn't have a screen, right? It's all about going backwards in time.

• 24:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:09Jordi Hays?

  And I think that's amazing. And then I, and I think that Tesla pushing the boundaries and like trying to reimagine the car, adding like new forms of propulsion, right? Like the, taking, taking, taking us into the future while Porsche just sort of returns in a beautiful way. I thought the contrast was amazing and I think that, uh, it's okay to like both cars, even though I canceled my order this morning at the Roadster.

• 24:38John Coogan?

  Yes, fell for it again. I like, I like the design of both. The only thing I don't like about the Roadster is just like, I, I'm worried it's not gonna ship. Uh, and I think it's just gonna take so long because they, they added so much crazy stuff. It'll take forever.

• 24:52Jordi Hays?

  Um, RX says the front of the Roadster looks like a Gallardo.

• 24:57John Coogan?

  I think that looks cool. I, I, I think, I think evolving the Gallardo language is great. And I think that Lamborghini has, has kind of like shirked that responsibility, ceded that territory. So I think this is fine. There's a little bit of Gallardo in there. There's a little bit of Cybertruck in there. I'm in. It's awesome. I think it looks great. Um, yeah, obviously nowhere near street legal. You need mirrors. We've had this debate a million times. Every concept car takes the mirrors off. It looks amazing and then you gotta put them back. Uh, and, and Elon would have figured out how to take the mirrors off of the Model Y and the Model S if he could, because no one likes the mirrors. No one uses those anymore. But the laws are the laws and he hasn't been able to figure out his way around them.

• 25:38John Coogan?

  And I don't think it's gonna start now, although, uh, that seems like something you'd get maybe some single issue voters behind. Candidate in 2028 specifically on removing the side mirrors. Good for emissions, good for aesthetics. It's a win-win. It's a two-party issue. Uh, anyway, what do you think of the wing on the back?

• 25:58Jordi Hays?

  I think the rear of the vehicle is where it shines.

• 26:02John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 26:02Jordi Hays?

  I think the side profile and the front are horrific.

• 26:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 26:06Jordi Hays?

  But so overall, very, very cool.

• 26:08John Coogan?

  Let's close this out, give you some facts. The Tesla Roadster pricing, you put a $5,000 deposit now, down now, uh, for the default performance level, which does not have the thrusters, the jets. It can't do kickflips, but it is Tesla's fastest, craziest sports car at the moment. Uh, that's gonna be a $45,000 deposit within 10 days. The thruster model requires you to put $245,000 down for a total of $250,000, uh, within 10 days. Then you gotta wait. And the flight model is unknown and it's invite only at the moment. So the mo, uh, so the thruster model can't do the kickflip. The one that they wanna do the kickflip, the one that wants to actually fly. We don't know the pricing. We don't know where that's gonna land.

• 26:51John Coogan?

  I, I'm actually not that worried about pricing, just because SpaceX and Tesla are really good at making things pretty cheap. So I, I, like, if they can get this out and they can get it to be 250, you know, a million dollars, you'll see them and they'll be popular and they'll be cool. Um, again, the flight stuff feels like, uh, very limited. And then it's like, are you gonna have like a new type of track day where you can go do kickflips all day in your car? Is that, is that gonna be appealing? Because.

• 27:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, I'm expecting the, the, the, the gas recharging for the thrusters to take like 24 hours, you know, so you're gonna, I mean, it really is, um, it really is a, a really good party trick.

• 27:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, but.

• 27:38Jordi Hays?

  But, but after seeing, can you imagine the experience of being in the car for a kickflip?

• 27:44John Coogan?

  That would be extremely violent.

• 27:48John Coogan?

  But I don't know, wear a helmet and five-point harness or something. Yeah, I don't think, I mean, there wasn't anyone in the car, but I don't even think the inside of the car that they kicked up like has seats. Like, I think there's some pictures of the underside and it looks like it's basically just all a roll cage. We can pull up this one from Zaren Dub. A lot of my timeline last night were a bunch of suckers who fell for this very expensive parlor trick without asking any questions. And it's quite disappointing. This sort of grid, maybe an empty shell in there. Doesn't really matter. It is a tech demo, but it's not, it's not the iPhone moment because the iPhone, of course, was available after it, after it was announced. And so, I don't know. It's a, it's, it's a very interesting dichotomy.

• 28:33John Coogan?

  Elon is simultaneously Thomas Edison and Barnum and Bailey. He's the circus entertainer who can, who can, you know, put on a crazy show and talk about what technology will be like in, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40 years. But then he can actually deliver like the most popular and successful car in the Mall of Y and become the most popular car in China even and actually land the rockets and get Starlink to work. I use it on planes. Like, the technology is real and then the hype is also fake, but they're, but both exist at the same time. It's very rare to see that in a entrepreneur, in a founder in the modern era. Most people are either all style or all substance. He's both, which is interesting. But we have the perfect person to talk.

• 29:15Jordi Hays?

  Did you see there was some, the last thing I would say, somebody, there were, people were pulling out this post from Elon in like 2019 describing, yeah, with Marques describing exactly what the Roadster would become. And there were a bunch of viral posts being like, oh my gosh, we live in a simulation.

• 29:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:33Jordi Hays?

  Because he just said what he was gonna do and did it. It was so funny because I was like, oh, we live in a simulation because he just said in 2019, I'm gonna do this.

• 29:42John Coogan?

  Eventually, and then he did it a decade later. That's not a simulation, that's just a.

• 29:46Jordi Hays?

  That's just called planning.

• 29:47John Coogan?

  That's just a prediction. Anyway, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform. That powers it. And we have Walter Isaacson, the perfect guest to talk to about Elon Musk, artificial intelligence, everything else across business history.

• 30:06Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 30:07John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Thank you so much for joining.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  Wow, good to be with you.

• 30:11John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. Did you watch the Elon Musk Tesla Roadster?

• 30:14Speaker 02

  Of course, of course.

• 30:15John Coogan?

  What is your reaction?

• 30:16Speaker 02

  You know, Franz von Holzhausen is a beautiful designer. So every part of that car is gorgeous. And you're right, it's a bit of a parlor trick thing, but the real car in two or three years, where you're not gonna be doing backflips and everything else, it's gonna be awesome. And I just think that Elon has a son who's on the autism spectrum named Saxon. And Saxon was once walking with him and said, Dad, why doesn't the future look like the future? And that's where you get the Cybertruck and that's where you get this Roadster, is that Musk and to some extent Franz wants the future to look like the future.

• 30:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's, there's been so many interesting knock-on effects. I mean, obviously, the Cybertruck was incredibly controversial even before the political journey that Elon went on. People said, oh, it looks like it was sketched by a five-year-old. It may have been, but what I love about it is that, love it or hate the Cybertruck, it feels like it shook the tree loose and allowed other carmakers to take more risks. And we're seeing more avant-garde designs from Audi, from Jaguar. It feels like a lot of people are, it feels like it gave everyone permission to make the future look like the future. Have you been noticing that as well, or do you?

• 31:36Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, but first, Musk, I have a, I think, two chapters on the Cybertruck in my Musk book where he's walking around with Franz and everybody's pushing back on him. They're saying, man, you know, you're not gonna do it this way. And he's showing things from video games and comic books and stuff. And he keeps, and he wants it in stainless steel. And he keeps pushing it. I, for one, you know, I'm not totally a fan of the Cybertruck design, but I am totally jazzed that he actually did it.

• 32:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  Because as you said, it pushes the human race forward, to use a Steve Jobs line.

• 32:17John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 32:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to me, I, I, I have a Cybertruck when it is driving itself on roads that are sort of crumbling with, you know, it feels like the sort of, the world of the past is sort of falling apart and it feels very cyberpunk to be on a road. It's driving itself in this very futuristic design. It makes me feel like I'm in a sort of a twisted sci-fi movie every day.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  But one thing you gotta focus on, I'm not sure people focus on it enough, is that this is almost a joint product of Tesla and SpaceX. I mean, everything about it, including the way the thrusters and the rockets work, but this notion that, you know, you can have propulsion done this way for a car, I think it shows why eventually, and I would guess, Tesla and SpaceX are gonna merge.

• 33:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, totally. I thought that was the only reason to do this now, because the car is nowhere near production.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  Although he does that all the time. I think the original Roadster.

• 33:23Jordi Hays?

  I know, but, but, but doing it again, like, that's what, that's why we have these awards with us today, this sort of Fall For It Again Award. Because going, you know, having there be this 10-year gap between the initial kind of.

• 33:35John Coogan?

  Because he clearly could have launched the 2017 Roadster.

• 33:38Jordi Hays?

  And then announcing it and being like, it's finally here, it's finally here. In two years, it'll be going into production.

• 33:42John Coogan?

  Like, that original red Roadster.

• 33:43Jordi Hays?

  To me, to me, the, the reason to do it now is it sort of like sets up this like, these two companies should obviously be one company.

• 33:51John Coogan?

  They make sense together.

• 33:52Jordi Hays?

  They're working together already. This is what they can do together. It's sort of the perfect example of like why they should merge. And I come away from it thinking like, this is the company that will make flying cars. I don't think it'll look like the Roadster, but when we get flying cars, it will be Tesla, SpaceX, AI, Twitter, whatever, whatever it ends up being called.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And, you know, I remember, obviously, the Cybertruck was controversial, but I can remember, and I think there's a couple of chapters in my book on this too, is when he wants to make the Cybercab have no steering wheel.

• 34:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  And everybody, including Franz, like, okay, fine, but we'll actually make one where you can have a steering wheel and you can ta, no. He said, I don't want an amphibious frog-like thing that's neither here nor there. Do it, well, that's kind of nuts. Until I was in Austin recently and I rode in a Cybercab. It's true that he, he makes the impossible into something that's just a little bit later than he predicted.

• 34:54John Coogan?

  How, how do you think about Elon Musk's journey to become an M&A wizard or a deal guy? That was what was so fascinating about the Twitter Take Private and then the Cursor acquisition. Historically, it feels like he hasn't been very acquisitive. What changed for his philosophy on business that he kind of shied away from being, I'll do everything myself?

• 35:23Speaker 02

  I think maybe, with all due respect, you might be right, but I think you might be overreading that. I think buying Twitter was, that was just money burning a hole in his pocket. I remember I was first riding around with him at that period. He had just become the richest person on earth, just become Time's Person of the Year. I said, you must feel like you're, he said, well, I hate it when it looks like I'm successful. I always wanna move to the next level of the game. I said, what's that? He said, well, I'm secretly buying shares of Twitter. And I think that was a weird impulse, had to do with his fury at the woke mind virus, had to do with the fact that he just loved being on Twitter.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  I mean, he was like a Twitch Twitter addict.

• 36:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:12Speaker 02

  So I don't think this was a major change in philosophy that said, okay, now we'll buy rather than build. And as for the Cursor acquisition, you know, keeping up in the world of frontier AI models is quite difficult. And that was a pretty smart acquisition. But if you ask me, and, you know, I've seen him recently, he's still a, I wanna begin control end to end, I wanna build it myself end to end.

• 36:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  I mean, why would you be building TerraFab to make your own microchips if you're into deal-making rather than physical product-making?

• 36:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  I hope you don't mind me pushing back on your theory.

• 36:54John Coogan?

  No, no, of course, I, no, it's a really good point.

• 36:56Jordi Hays?

  One thing that, one thing from yesterday that I noticed, he looked way healthier than he has in a long time.

• 37:01John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 37:02Jordi Hays?

  And I thought that was, like, there's been some moments over the last few years where it's just like, this does not look, this does not look great.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  He's been that way for 20 years.

• 37:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  I mean, and every time I wrote.

• 37:13Jordi Hays?

  But do you agree that he, that he looked like?

• 37:17John Coogan?

  Together, yeah.

• 37:18Jordi Hays?

  He looks like healthier than.

• 37:19John Coogan?

  Scrappy jokes and I mean, there was some dead air during the presentation, but in general, like he seemed pretty, pretty.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  I think what you're talking about is not just physical, but where's his mental space?

• 37:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  And as you know, uh, you know, he goes into demon mode and he gets really dark and he's very difficult and just goes silent.

• 37:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  And then, you know, if you know how to poke him.

• 37:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does feel like there is a little bit of a clarifying moment, like, uh, there was a moment where he was doing just rocketry and then just electric cars and then, uh, the, the Twitter and politics thing felt very distracting. And now as, as the companies start merging together, as the products start merging together, the, the work that's being done on AI can flow into the cars and the humanoids, like the narrative is getting clearer and so that might be leading to more of a, more of like a, I don't know, just, just, just being focused and that, and that carries through to everything. I don't know if you agree.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  I wouldn't, um, count on the fact that he has become less mercurial.

• 38:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  In other words, you'll see him today, you'll see him tomorrow. There are people like Gwen Shotwell and Franz von Holzhausen who know how to push him out of, uh, demon mode.

• 38:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  He also knows how to get himself together when he goes on stage.

• 38:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  You know, I, I, it just depends on what's crossing his mind at the moment. It's almost like a storm cloud coming in off the Gulf when, and then sometimes it's something political, it's conspiratorial. You know, I kind of wish he wouldn't be in that mode where all of a sudden he's deciding that, I don't know, Talarico's in a mental institution in Ohio and he's gonna repost that and you think, all right, um, you know, touch some ground.

• 39:08Jordi Hays?

  Have you ever gone into, have you ever gone into your own sort of version of demon mode?

• 39:13Speaker 02

  No, you know what? I haven't. And you know what? I've never built a rocket that got into orbit. I've never built a, uh, a electric vehicle. I never built a self-driving cyber cab. So maybe I'm nice.

• 39:27Jordi Hays?

  Give yourself some credit.

• 39:28John Coogan?

  Demon mode is underrated on the path to greatness.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  Those of us who write about people in the arena, even if they're best sellers, we don't confuse and think that we're the ones in the arena.

• 39:41John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  So maybe the people in the arena, as Steve Jobs said, you know, they're the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels.

• 39:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about, uh, the process of actually, uh, reporting on Elon Musk, writing the book? I've talked to some journalists who have said, uh, my strategy was I would wait until there was a successful SpaceX launch and then I'd give him a call and say, hey, you wanna get on the phone? And if this, and if the launch didn't go well, I knew not to call because he wouldn't be in a good mood. Were there any, were there any strategies that you had to deal with the mercurialness and sort of predict?

• 40:12Speaker 02

  Look, my strategy was totally different from the type of reporting you're talking about, which is when I first started the book, I said, here's the deal. It's not gonna be based on a bunch of interviews with you. It's not 10, 15, 20 interviews. I wanna be by your side whenever I want, morning, noon and night, uh, whenever I decide I wanna be there, any meeting. I got an airstream trailer and live next door to him in Boca Chica, get up in the morning with him, late at night with him. I just wanted to observe him through all meetings, through everything. So is, uh, I mean, I just, I know I'm quite lucky or privileged because I have the, both

• 40:53Speaker 02

  the resources and to some extent the, uh, clout with my publisher or maybe even with Musk to just say, I'm gonna spend two years and just watch. And so there'd be times I'd watch him go into demon mode, I'd watch him come out. I'd be sitting at dinner in a restaurant in Austin and Grimes would be next to me and she'd say, uh-oh, demon mode's about to come. I'd watch people text Gwen Shotwell to come run into the conference room and he's about to kill Falcon Heavy or something. And I'd just watch how people dealt with it. So it wasn't like, let me time my phone call for a Starship launch that works.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  The very end of my book is being with him at Starbase for a Starship launch that almost worked, but left some rubble in its wake. That's the perfect metaphor. And I'm sitting there watching him, his mother hugging him in the back of the, and sort of by the fire pit out of Starbase. That's the type of thing I try to do when I write a book and I've done it. You know, I have a new edition of The Innovators, which is about the teams who built the digital revolution. I just try to be a reporter, not somebody who does interviews and then has opinions.

• 42:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, everyone that you've written about, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Jennifer Doudna, uh, all, uh, incredible impacts, very, you know, sometimes controversial, but, uh, unambiguously impactful in their, uh, in their work. Uh, how have you processed the story of Elizabeth Holmes? Uh, there's a new movie by Nathan Fielder out, You Can See Everything, and, uh, it's, it's one of those stories that, uh, has the trappings of an entrepreneurial journey, but has, uh, has kind of racked everyone with a, a whodunit. It's almost a true crime story. It is a true crime story because she is in prison, but how, how have you, how have

• 42:54John Coogan?

  you, uh, processed the story and how would you approach that if you were writing a book about Elizabeth Holmes?

• 42:59Speaker 02

  Early on, I met Elizabeth Holmes, um, way before, uh, you know, before she was quite famous or infamous.

• 43:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  Uh, she was a huge Steve Jobs fanatic. She even tried to dress like Steve Jobs. She had read my Steve Jobs biography probably more times than I had, knew the book better than I did and would always be.

• 43:20Jordi Hays?

  She went demon mode on the Steve Jobs biography.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, she, and she, you know what? I, I love Steve Jobs. I think he was transformative. I think it's dangerous if you read the book once too often.

• 43:31John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  It kind of makes you think that you might become reality distortion field Steve and that didn't work. And so I remember telling my wife and telling a couple of people when we were at events with her, I think they wanted me to interview her on stage and she wanted me to write something. I said, this doesn't meet my smell test. And I'd ask her, I'd say, okay, you're doing this with just a tiny drop of blood. I had been studying biochemistry because I was about to do Jennifer Dowden. I said, tell me how, oh, I can't tell you how it was. I said, well, you know, I'd ask a few more questions and I just said, doesn't meet my smell test, there's something really wrong here. So I didn't get in, involved in ever even writing a story about her and I actually declined

• 44:13Speaker 02

  moderating some panels with her in public just because it made me feel a bit off. I have a total fascination with what I will call fabulous. I mean, we have a, every month there's a new one, you know, Jason Arday at Cambridge University, all the way back to Jason Blair, you're too young to remember who he was, but, or George Santos, or for that matter, the talented Mr. Ripley, or if you really wanna get into it, you know, maybe the great Gadsby.

• 44:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  Do they believe their own confabulations? I kept asking people who knew Elizabeth and I kept trying to figure out, has she fooled, I know she's a con artist, but has she conned herself? So I'm not sure.

• 45:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is the, yeah, the question that everyone's, everyone's still trying to answer. Um, on Steve Jobs, we've been debating the question of, does the artificial intelligence boom revolution need a Steve Jobs of AI? Someone who paints a, a more human-focused picture, something focused on creativity? I think back to the energy with which Steve Jobs had when he launched, uh, GarageBand and, and, uh, and Apple Music and some of the, the iPod, this idea.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, the iTunes.

• 45:38John Coogan?

  Sometimes disruptive technologies still empowering humans and remaining in this artist world, a friend to the creatives and living in the technology world, but still, uh, never losing touch of that.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  There's something so fundamentally important in your question. And I, I have a book, as you know, called The Innovators, which came out a few years ago, but it's coming out this week with this new introduction that's addressed directly towards your question.

• 46:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  Which is the Steve Jobs approach to what I will call human computer interface. That's what he called. That's a big old name.

• 46:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  But it's how closely are we connected to our computers? And he said, a computer should be like a bicycle for the mind. It would augment, not replace, your creativity and your intelligence. There've been two schools of thought throughout the computer revolution. Go all the way back to, as I do in the, this new introduction to The Innovators, to Ada Lovelace in the 1840s. And she says, she looks at punch cards, at a weaving patterns on looms and she says, that'll be able to do numbers and words and music. And she said, a computer will be able to do anything except think. It'll take humans to add the innovation and creativity.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  A hundred years after she writes it, Alan Turing in his great paper about computing machines and intelligence, The Imitation Game, calls it Lady Lovelace's objection and says she's wrong. There will be artificial intelligence that shouldn't be connected to us. Steve Jobs is in the Ada Lovelace school. And as I tried to describe in this new introduction, that school begins with Ada, but it has people that you probably have hardly heard of, but are the most important people you've never heard of. Starting with JCR Lichtleiter, who creates computer interfaces that are easy to use,

• 47:37Speaker 02

  um, Doug Engelbart, who figures out the mouse, Alan Kay and the people at Xerox PARC, the graphical user interface. It all comes together with Steve Jobs.

• 47:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  And he says, the goal is to connect human creativity to our processing power of our machines. And he always ended his product launches with a street sign slide that said, the street sign of the liberal arts and, uh, sciences or technology. That was his goal. What we're doing now, not just with AI, but more importantly with the Gentic AI, which is where I worry about. I don't mind, I can use Claude, fine, but when I start using agents that try to do things without me and that the goal of these people, whether it be Muse or Claude's or whatever I'm using.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  To try to make it autonomous and to do things without me and to be out of my control, Steve Jobs would be appalled by that. First of all, because it doesn't connect human creativity to the product, it doesn't have the music that makes our hearts sing, as he said with the iPod. But secondly, these people aren't stepping back and saying, why are we making this? And the answer should be to help humanity. That was Steve's lodestar.

• 49:03Jordi Hays?

  The only thing, the only thing that I would, I would push back on slightly is it doesn't feel like agents are not generative. They're not, I have not seen a single product or piece of marketing material where the, the, the seed of the idea, whatever the thing that is that makes it great, was from the AI. All of the agents that we have today are starting from a point of human creativity. Hey, I have-

• 49:33Speaker 02

  That's a really good point.

• 49:35Jordi Hays?

  And, and, and so the, my view on it is like, I'm actually, as somebody who loves generating ideas, I'm actually upset that the AI can't do the one thing that I really value and that I love, right?

• 49:50John Coogan?

  You want to be like the man-

• 49:51Speaker 02

  First of all, be happy.

• 49:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, yeah, no, and, and so I, but it's notable, like, you would think that if we could solve hundreds of the, you know, most longstanding problems in mathematics, that we could generate hundreds more, right? And yet, I haven't, we're not getting that. Like, that would be my, and, and to me, that shows the AI is not generative. It is not, it is not creative in the way that a, that a human is. I'm sure it will get there.

• 50:19Speaker 02

  And that's the exact phrase that Ada uses in the 1840s, which is, it will not be able to generate its own goals and its own ideas. Those will have to come from humans. You could be right. I mean, I use a lot of, I use Muse and I use, I have created a couple of Claude agents. Maybe it doesn't totally generate things, but once you set an agent off, you have the hugging face possibility that it goes off with its own motives and its own sense of agency out of our control. So maybe it starts off because we launch

• 51:00Speaker 02

  it, but the question is, if it's not closely connected to us the way Steve Jobs would have wanted, is it going to go out of control? Is it going to go rogue?

• 51:15John Coogan?

  What do you look for in a subject, when you're thinking about a topic that's, it, it has your fascination, when is it the right time to focus in on a single individual versus a more of a composite picture? And are we, I guess my question is like, are we moving farther away, or are you moving farther away from the great man theory of history? Or do you think that there's this Peter Thiel take about the, the loss of the ticker tape parade, even when, when, when there's a big problem and we solve it, we celebrate, like the first responders broadly. We don't solve, we, we don't, we, we rarely

• 51:57John Coogan?

  celebrate, like, the single scientist who had the breakthrough. We celebrate, like, composite groups. And I'm wondering how you've grappled with the continuum of individual with an amazing story who probably had a lot of talented people around them, versus telling the story through a composite picture of a lot of different individuals?

• 52:15Speaker 02

  Yep. And of course, that's one of the age-old issues in history, whether it be Tolstoy or Carlisle, I'll go back to Plutarch and Plutarch's lot. I interviewed Peter Thiel at length for this new podcast series, The Builders, and we talk about that. We biographers fall prey sometimes too much to the great person, the great man theory. We make it seem like a guy or a gal goes to a garage or a garret and they have a lightbulb moment and innovation happens. Whereas you know, the two of you sitting there know that it's often a team sport, that creativity is a collaborative effort. That's why I wrote

• 52:55Speaker 02

  The Innovators, which is to try to show the role that teams and groups of people play. Having said that, my very first sentence in my very first book I ever wrote was about Henry Kissinger. And I quoted him in the, in the epigram that said, when I was a professor at a university, I thought that history was made by great forces. But now that I see it up close, I see the difference that a person can make. And so, in writing biography, I think we have to worry about distorting history a bit. You know, I wrote The Innovators partly because having written about Steve Jobs, all these people said, well, you gave

• 53:38Speaker 02

  him too much credit. So it's always a bit of a balance. Take a more obscure example. I wrote a book called The Codebreaker about Jennifer Doudna, who in, helped invent, co-invented, I should say, CRISPR, the gene editing technology that can fix genetic or change our, our DNA. And I was saying, okay, I want to do biochemistry and genetic engineering next. I had done physics with Einstein, I'd done the digital revolution with Steve Jobs. So I looked around for how do I do it? And I thought of doing a group portrait, the way The Innovators is.

• 54:23Speaker 02

  But in some ways, having a person have a narrative thread helps the reader. It's not something I invented. The good Lord invented this when he did the Bible. I mean, it has a garden east of Eden and you have Adam in it, and Eve tells him to do something. It's a way we convey lessons.

• 54:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 54:41Speaker 02

  So when I did Jennifer Doudna, about 40% of the book is about people who aren't Jennifer Doudna. It's about her teams, her rivals and everything else. But I do it as a narrative thread, and I think I do it because it helps the reader. Or if you want to be crass, my publisher says, when you do group books, like, you know, The Innovators, it doesn't sell nearly as well as when you do Steve Jobs.

• 55:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Another AI question that we've been wrestling with is, we have been, we were very close in tech to the end of history. There were a number of software companies, there were pretty, pretty defined lines of, of battlefields between who owns the phone, who owns the search engine, who owns the social network, and the mag seven. We're all sort of playing nicely together. And now it is a knockout, drag-out fight. Everyone's trying to marshal the most compute-

• 55:37Jordi Hays?

  Everyone's in demon mode.

• 55:39John Coogan?

  Everyone's in demon mode. Elon's suing Sam, Sam and Dario can't hold hands together. Google loves Anthropic one day, then they want to not sell them the chips. It goes back and forth, and it feels like it's the most tense it's ever been in tech.

• 55:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or Elon, you know, constantly throwing shade at Anthropic until they become-

• 55:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's calling them misanthropic, and then he's, and then now they're, they're working together. And so, it feels like an intense time in technology, but give us some perspective here. Is this actually unprecedented? Was the, was, was Steve Jobs going through the same level of intense battles? Is, is everything new old, or is this actually unprecedented?

• 56:20Speaker 02

  Look, one of the great things about innovation, technology, entrepreneurship, that you all do so much on this show, is that there's a frenemy type thing. Sometimes people are friends, sometimes they're enemies. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, that's a rivalry that is far surpasses Sam Altman and Dario on my day, as much as I love them both.

• 56:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  By the way, you want to go back to Carnegie and Rockefeller and EA Chariman and the robber barons?

• 56:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 56:49Speaker 02

  Whoa. And that was a period of technology like our own, with light bulbs, electricity, trains, telegraphs, telephones, everything. So it is great that we have competition. One of the things we have to do is keep that competition going. In other words, have antitrust. If they start loving each other too much and collaborating, that will keep newcomers off the field.

• 57:12John Coogan?

  No, no, I completely, I completely agree. I completely agree. Yeah, the, and you can see that there's a natural forcing function in the industry. When one lab or one company starts pulling away, everybody else kind of gangs up on them and says, oh, we're not going to let you get the monopoly.

• 57:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think Nvidia and in Jensen's dynamic with all of the different AI players is one of the most fascinating, just because it is like, they're like, you know, cozying up to him, you know, driving revenue, but at the same time, trying to, you know, replace him on the backend.

• 57:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:44Jordi Hays?

  It's fascinating.

• 57:45John Coogan?

  It's very fun.

• 57:46Jordi Hays?

  It's healthy.

• 57:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:47Jordi Hays?

  Healthy competition.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  I think you're totally right. Healthy is the word for it.

• 57:51John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 57:52Jordi Hays?

  And it makes for good content for you and your writing.

• 57:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:56Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 57:56Speaker 02

  And for you and your show.

• 57:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:59Jordi Hays?

  They, the chat really wants us to ask, is there any, and, and, you know, you, you can pass on the question if it's not something you can talk about, but is there anybody, any AI leader that you're honing in on, on, on writing about outside of, obviously Elon?

• 58:14Speaker 02

  Well, real quickly, I'm about to publish a book on Madame Curie, you know, Marie Curie. Because I do go back, I need to clear my palate sometimes and clear my mind and go back into history. And I needed to do, I mean, she's just the most amazing, passionate person. I am interested in-

• 58:33Speaker 02

  How you raise some AI model like Claude, let me just use that for example. How do you raise that model to be moral? How do you not just teach Claude, here are the rules of the road?

• 58:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:49Speaker 02

  You teach Claude why?

• 58:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:51Speaker 02

  Why do you not kill or why do you not lie to somebody? And I'm interested in the philosophers who are working on the alignment question and teaching our AI models why?

• 59:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:07Speaker 02

  That doesn't mean I have figured out who the book is or what the book is or whatever, but you asked me and just out in Anthropic and in San Francisco with some others three days ago and I'm saying, okay, help me think this one through.

• 59:23John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Look forward to more of your incredible work and it was a true pleasure talking to you.

• 59:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's been an honor.

• 59:31John Coogan?

  Have a great weekend.

• 59:31Speaker 02

  Well, y'all are great. Y'all are really good, both of you. Thank you, Jordy.

• 59:35Jordi Hays?

  See you again soon.

• 59:36John Coogan?

  Yes, thank you so much.

• 59:37Jordi Hays?

  You're the man.

• 59:37John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Console. Console built AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Let me also tell you about Public. Invest across all asset classes, automate anything with AI agents, run trading strategies, risk management, money movements, and monitor markets with AI agents for investing on Public. And up next, we have Eric Lyman, co-founder, co-CEO, ramp.com.

• 1:00:06Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, camouflage. Camouflage tip in the wall. I see a floating head. That's all I can see in your hands.

• 1:00:13Eric Glyman?

  We're in an urban environment, so we gotta blend in.

• 1:00:17John Coogan?

  That does look like it's designed to not be recognizable by artificial intelligence. I'm sure we'll talk about it, but first, what's the news? What happened?

• 1:00:25Jordi Hays?

  The Glymonator.

• 1:00:26John Coogan?

  Tell us the news.

• 1:00:27Eric Glyman?

  We, do we have the gong?

• 1:00:29Jordi Hays?

  It's ready.

• 1:00:30Eric Glyman?

  Are we ready to hit this thing? All right, we raised $1.85 billion at 60.

• 1:00:36Jordi Hays?

  I can't hear anything. My ears are blown out.

• 1:00:42John Coogan?

  Do we need a replay on that?

• 1:00:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's pull up the replay if we can.

• 1:00:46John Coogan?

  Pull up the replay.

• 1:00:46Jordi Hays?

  That was a clean hit. Bang.

• 1:00:48John Coogan?

  Oh, there we go.

• 1:00:49Jordi Hays?

  Coming in hot with authority and you kind of held it. You kind of held it at the end too, which was nice.

• 1:00:55Eric Glyman?

  I feel like 2026, like there's been so many fundraises, they're getting bigger. Your form is really looking good.

• 1:01:02John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Yeah, so you gotta bring the energy that you feel for the fundraiser to the gong smash. It's relative because the gong is just one size, but the excitement that I feel for the round grows and ebbs and flows. And this is the most exciting round of all, of course. First question, is the job finished?

• 1:01:22Eric Glyman?

  Job's not finished, guys.

• 1:01:24John Coogan?

  The job is not finished.

• 1:01:26Eric Glyman?

  The job is, we got, we got a lot of stuff to do. I mean, look, it's, what can I say? We're growing, we're growing faster. We're growing north and 100% per year.

• 1:01:38John Coogan?

  What is growing? Because the core business is so solid, so huge, huge market, just in corporate cards, the software for the CFO suite, but then you have a bunch of other products that I feel like because the team is, is as talented as they are, you're able to deliver a, you're able to jump to a great product experience, both because you have the team for it, but also there's new technology that's unlocking new things. And so what, I imagine they're both growing fast, but what's actually driving? How much time are you spending between both of these? Do they all play together? How do you, how do you think about the business?

• 1:02:13Eric Glyman?

  So look, there's the existing core of the business when you talk about the financials. There's, the metric I track most closely is actually how useful is Ramp getting to customers? We talk about growth in those stats. And then last, it's all the new products. The majority of our team's time is actually working on products that we haven't launched yet, you haven't seen yet.

• 1:02:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:35Eric Glyman?

  And so let's touch on it. I mean, in terms of aggregate growth, we, we said for the first time over the summer, we passed more than $2 billion a year in annualized revenue. It's growing north 100% per year. And it's, we're growing 25, more than 25% faster than we were this time last year.

• 1:02:56John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:02:57Eric Glyman?

  It's just, it's, it's true acceleration at scale and in part. You have computers that can think now, it helps us operate a lot faster. And there's also in the same way, you know, I think people's expectations have gone up. I mean, there are still sadly many people listening to this who know about AI and then they do expenses by hand or wherever. It's crazy. And so it's lifted the conversion rates up. More people are switching to Ramp and Drones and the savings rates are going up too, which is maybe the secondary.

• 1:03:28John Coogan?

  And are you starting to see top of funnel, like the first step on the customer journey coming from not the corporate card product to start? Okay, so you can actually start with Router or another product and then, and then actually grow your, your footprint. That's very interesting because I feel like, do I have it correct that, that prior to the, I don't know, you call them like AI-enabled products, but like the more modern products that you've launched, it was very much like you come in through the corporate card and then maybe you add banking or you add another product, bill pay and, and there weren't as many people coming in through bill pay as might in the future come through Router, for example?

• 1:04:09Eric Glyman?

  So to talk to each, I mean, this has been one of the big growth stories over the past two years. You know, we now have, I'll put it so, the vast majority of customers are using multiple products, could be card, card expenses, one, bill pay, treasury. We have tens of thousands of businesses that are using our banking product that's growing extraordinarily quickly. And so there are businesses on day one incorporate, set up a Ramp banking account and move from there. And so we have these doorways in. And you're exactly right. Whereas so much of the history of Ramp was, is like, how do we help you spend less? It's turning into this broader chapter of not just, you know, get more of every dollar in terms of reducing spend.

• 1:04:52Eric Glyman?

  It's how do you have your dollars that you do choose to spend generate more revenue for you? And so we're, there are startups coming in using router.com. Glass has been just extraordinarily developed, but also too, just wrangling and staying on top of AI spend, AI spend management.

• 1:05:09John Coogan?

  Yes. On that topic, is, is Router a bet that, that expenses and investment and capital spending around AI will be the domain of the CFO suite and that's where you play best? Or is it a bet that Ramp can speak to CTOs and technologists who will in the future have more domain over asset allocation and, and the financial profile of their business? Are we going to see CTOs looking more like CFOs or operating like CFOs, putting their CFO hat on? Or are we seeing CFOs think, I want to actually have an idea of what our infrastructure is, what our token strategy is, what models we're using?

• 1:05:54John Coogan?

  I imagine both are happening, but is there a thesis that you have around what, who's, who, who the buck stops with in the token maxing discussion?

• 1:06:04Eric Glyman?

  Well, there's like a huge thing that happened that I think is under discussed in just the world of software, which was like, it used to be if you were just like, I don't know, banging on the keyboard, using Salesforce a lot more, like might need a new hobby, but like you didn't get like a much larger bill. Like software didn't have a larger marginal cost. And the minute that it became such that if you used more tokens, your bill went up, it meant that software suddenly had marginal costs. In a way, software became money.

• 1:06:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:38Eric Glyman?

  And I, I just think classically, if you just think about it structurally, organizations were really allocating dollars in two ways. You could hire people or you could hire, you know, vendors to go take care of stuff for you. And, and, and software and AI spend has become this like third way to buy things. It sort of behaves like people in that your agents hire other agents who hire other agents and subcontract to others. Most spend is actually agentic in nature. If you really look at how these things are growing and yet it's, it's, you're kind of renting intelligence. And I think that organizations just lack the, the basics of, many companies have payroll

• 1:07:19Eric Glyman?

  systems, they have Ramp, right, to go look at their vendor system, but have lacked oversight and governance around managing the sales spend. So part of the thesis is that as, as, as AI becomes one of the core inputs to how companies operate, organizations will similarly need tools to go manage it. So that's just like the, the macro way we're thinking about it. On your question of like, where is it, who's responsible for it? I think what I see happen time to time again is like engineers go off to go build something and either they hire a, you know, if it's startups, a very forward linking, thinking, agentic, you know, AI-pilled CFO and it's all fine. Or what's happening in enterprises all day is things are fine, that the bill trips past

• 1:08:04Eric Glyman?

  X many millions of dollars and see if it was like, what in the heck happened? And they crash into the office and go, and I think that's, that's happening more and more. And what I would say is like, I just think there will be a convergence. You, you, you could not think too much about capital allocation and in a previous world where software didn't have marginal costs and now you have to.

• 1:08:26John Coogan?

  So is capital allocation the new core skill? Taste is out. We need to get everyone thinking about capital allocation. No, I mean this seriously because I'm sure there's a lot of Ramp customers where they're like, yes, we spend on AI and that means a $200 a month plan. And look, employees, don't blow through your plan because there's no more where it's coming from and you have a role to play in there. But I'm wondering if you're seeing a shift where even small businesses, even businesses that would normally just be like, hey, use the free plan, 220 bucks a month here, we'll get you on the, the corporate plan a little bit, are going to be thinking about AI inevitably as a, as a marginal cost that is API pricing and they're going to want a router product?

• 1:09:12Eric Glyman?

  Absolutely. And look, like, I think one of the, I think both sides of the debates are like very silly in some ways. Like you have, like, CFOs saying like, hey, I'm trying to go minimize my token cost. What's my cost per token? We need to go and drive costs down. And labs are saying, my token is not equivalent to your token. The tokens are not the same. And the reality is like, i- i- i- if some business owner said to you, hey, I spend a million dollars a year on salespeople. And another one said, you know, I spend $10 million a year on salespeople. Like, and he asked, which is better?

• 1:09:54Eric Glyman?

  You'd say like, I have no goddamn idea because what are you getting for that dollar? Like, you need to connect it. You need to kind of ask like, for this input, what is the output? And I think the way in which these systems are very incomplete and Ramp is ultimately seeking to complete that loop of for every dollar that's going out, what is the return on intelligence? How does it go into your books and record? How is it accounting for? What revenue can you see that directly that's connected? And what I would say is when you look at companies that are spending on AI, they are not always as precise, but you can see in raw terms, in very blunt terms, that companies that do spend are clearly seeing a return. They are growing faster.

• 1:10:35Eric Glyman?

  And you just think about, you know, we did this study about six months ago where we looked at, does spending on this actually generate faster growth? And it's very clear conclusively of organizations that are spending on AI are seeing an acceleration. So there is a return and I think it will become quite scientific over the course of the coming months.

• 1:10:57Jordi Hays?

  So does that mean you guys end up building something like an attribution tool? Because like Ramp is a good example of this, where like you're encouraging a lot of spending, a lot of experimentation, but it's so hard to attribute growth to spend on AI, which is a lot of why that there's people, otherwise smart people that are saying like, this stuff just doesn't work. Like, it's good for this one narrow thing, but like very clearly it's like, well, it sped us up a little bit here and it sped us up a little bit here and it pulled forward this launch, you know, by a week instead of, you know, and so we launched this, you know, eight weeks earlier. And then there's the sort of like, like, it's basically like compounding in different ways across so many different parts of the company. It's helping you generate revenue in ways. It's helping you save money in different ways.

• 1:11:40Jordi Hays?

  The net result is like, you're building a better business. But like the attribution feels like the hardest, hardest thing. But something that you guys are like uniquely suited to solve.

• 1:11:52Eric Glyman?

  We're very embedded because we see the dollars going out. We connect to the accounting system and you can see what revenue ultimately comes in. I mean, just at Ramp, like where at Ramp it was the first part of the business that used AI in a heavy way. It was go to market. It was sales. It was, it was actually, we could show that the use of GPT-3 when it was a research project actually resulted in more meetings booked for our sales development reps. And we could actually look at what is the raw number of dollars spent versus the revenue that that team is able to bring in. And you could see that up. And so when you see products like Glass, which we announced earlier in the week and thousands of companies signed up, we're onboarding folks as fast as we can.

• 1:12:36Eric Glyman?

  All that intelligence where not only is it connected and built into the systems you have, but things you would expect of, who's spending it, attribution, did we pick the right model? Router.com, right, is powering all of it to make sure that you're ultimately saving. To the accounting attribution is all done and you see that loop. And so it allows you to actually say like, am I growing faster? And am I seeing higher and higher returns from my spend on AI? And that's what we're aiming to do. And so when we talk about kind of the end of the beginning and what chapter two is about, what you can build as a customer of Ramp, that is what we're running towards. We want to make every dollar an hour, whether it's on people or on AI or both, truly go further. That's what drives us.

• 1:13:19John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, congratulations on the new round. We're going to hop on with Christian Jensen from Dragon Air to talk more about.

• 1:13:24Jordi Hays?

  Amazing milestone.

• 1:13:26John Coogan?

  Have a great weekend.

• 1:13:26Jordi Hays?

  Amazing timing yesterday with the, the Roadster ramp.

• 1:13:29John Coogan?

  Roadster, I mean.

• 1:13:30Jordi Hays?

  It was clearly like, it's clearly like a nod to the, it was clearly a nod to the new financing. I mean, they didn't, they clearly didn't need the ramp to do a kickflip.

• 1:13:39John Coogan?

  No, they could have used a half pipe. They could have used anything that doesn't sound like Ramp, but.

• 1:13:44Jordi Hays?

  It was a little salute down from Texas.

• 1:13:46John Coogan?

  It was great. But congratulations. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:13:49Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff. Great to see you, Eric.

• 1:13:50John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 1:13:50Jordi Hays?

  Congrats.

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether writing code, analyzing data, creating content or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Our next guest is Christian Jensen from Dragon Air Investment Group, partner and co-head of Thrive Investments.

• 1:14:08Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 1:14:09John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. I got one question. Did you just back the truck up for Ramp?

• 1:14:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, I guess in some ways we did, but for all the reasons you guys just discussed.

• 1:14:20Jordi Hays?

  You hear that?

• 1:14:22John Coogan?

  Is that the sound of the truck backing up?

• 1:14:26Speaker 04

  If I can't get the gong, I'll take the truck.

• 1:14:27Jordi Hays?

  We'll get the gong.

• 1:14:35Speaker 04

  Thank you. Touched.

• 1:14:38Jordi Hays?

  Wonderful to have you on.

• 1:14:39John Coogan?

  So you led the $1.85 billion financing for Ramp at a $60 billion valuation. Thrive Capital's in with you, Founder's Fund, Sands Capital, Avenir. What, yeah, what, because it's the first time on the show, maybe we should zoom out and talk about the overall strategy, how Ramp fits into it and your role at the firm.

• 1:15:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, hey, thank you for having me. I mean, what a treat. I can't believe Walter Isaacson here and Eric, this is, I mean, this is just awesome.

• 1:15:09Jordi Hays?

  He opened for you. He opened for you.

• 1:15:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'll tell, I'll tell my wife that.

• 1:15:13Jordi Hays?

  He was like, I'm really, I really get to open for Christian from Dragon Air.

• 1:15:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'll tell, I'll tell Kate that. So I mean, look, who are we? We're a growth investment firm. We're based in the Presidio in San Francisco. We manage about $45 billion across publics and privates. And the whole philosophy of the place is concentrated bets in the, in the businesses we think are, are going to define categories and really be generational to businesses. You know, we were founded around 15 years ago. Mark's dad, my partner, our founder, he founded, I joined about 10 years ago to help build on the success they were already having in privates. And I live around the corner, so I got three kids. Latest kid joined three weeks ago. So if I say anything stupid, there's my excuse.

• 1:16:01John Coogan?

  There we go. Congratulations.

• 1:16:04Jordi Hays?

  I've got a, I've got a five week old.

• 1:16:07Speaker 04

  Congrats on that.

• 1:16:08Jordi Hays?

  We're in the same boat. We got nine, nine kids between us.

• 1:16:12John Coogan?

  It sounds like Playdate's coming up.

• 1:16:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think so. I think so. Okay, first question. Everyone knows that Ramp is an incredibly unique special company. And, but at the same time, there's a lot of people that are otherwise pretty smart that say like, hey, Ramp at 60 billion on a few billion of revenue, that's, that's crazy, right? Like if you looked at like, and you can try to pull public comps and say like, this thing would trade at, you know, a single digit revenue multiple, blah, blah, blah. Like, it's very easy to make the argument for why 60 is crazy and yet you just paid that price. I want to hear from you why, why, why, why it would make sense to do it?

• 1:16:58Jordi Hays?

  I can make my own argument for it.

• 1:17:00John Coogan?

  You're not crazy. They're crazy.

• 1:17:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, I'm not crazy. They're crazy. No, but I mean, there's a lot of, to me, it's like an applied AI company that is already working with tens of thousands of the most of the, of the best customers that you can have in America. And they are in an incredibly unique position to deliver them, you know, super tangible products. They have incredible lock-in, all these things. So I can make the case, but I want, I want you to make the case.

• 1:17:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, um, one, it's sort of a, a universal truth for those, you know, if you, if you didn't make the bet, then almost by definition, maybe you didn't think that the bet was worth making. Maybe, maybe you didn't have the chance to make it, but I know the feeling. That's, that's how we feel sometimes about those that we're not doing. But it, it comes down to sort of a handful of things in this case. Thing one is bonkers, huge market. Like, like not just big, but like we might be in the first at bat of the first inning kind of big. And a growing market such that just the growth of this end market is several ramps in size annually. So like, they don't really even need to be like taken, but we think they are taking market share,

• 1:18:12Speaker 04

  but they don't need to be in order to keep multiplying in size. So that's thing one. It's big, big market. Thing two, this product lead that they've built, you know, this platform, it's not just, you know, card and expense. It's actually about a dozen products now and keeps growing. And each one of those products that they add widens the mode. I mean, you guys met, you know, touched on this with Eric, like each incremental product means you can land with one more thing. One more thing the customer can say yes to, one more thing, you know, that they can upsell themselves or embrace later. It's, and which feeds this capital efficiency machine, which is wildly attractive.

• 1:18:51Speaker 04

  Like for business to be accelerating at this scale with this kind of capital efficiency, it's very rare to see at this size. And the combination of accelerating growth, product lead, while still being so early in a market that they can go win is really, really rare. And the last thing, I mean, you just talked to him, it's Eric and the team around him and the culture they've built. And this, this team is like this amazing learning machine. They're humble, they're hungry, they're ridiculously customer oriented. You know, it's just a team that keeps sort of surprising to the upside in all sorts of ways.

• 1:19:33Speaker 04

  And, you know, we find ourselves saying like, we would want our, you know, our friends and our kids to go work for these people. Like, we'd want to go work for these people. Like, it's the kind of team you want to back and it's, you know, you see that kind of goodwill with the customers all the time.

• 1:19:46Jordi Hays?

  Totally. Yeah. And I think it comes down to like Eric, in many ways, Eric and Kareem leading from the front and being like two of the most AI-pilled people that, that I know. But going back like multiple years, like they've been on this. They've been, you know, sort of quietly recruiting like really elite talent, like on the AI side. You know, they're, and, and just with that, it's like, it's so interesting being these, you know. You talked about the, maybe the market being more positive some than than people might think. But if you're one of these legacy players and you're like, cool, we need an AI strategy. And then you're starting to think like, all right, well, let's make our, you know, let's, let's make an annual plan.

• 1:20:31Jordi Hays?

  Let's like, you know, run a bunch of pilots, let's test out a bunch of products, all these things. You end up just being a customer of AI, not somebody that is creating AI products that you can sell to other people. And I think that's just like wildly, wildly different. And so you can imagine legacy players just being like, their, their products and their platforms effectively being pretty fixed in place and not adapting. Meanwhile, Eric and Kareem, you know, I know Kareem is probably like up all night riffing on, riffing on product with the team. And they ultimately are then shipping product very, very, very quickly and experimenting with their customers. And I think that, um, oh, I just would, I would absolutely hate to, to be competing with them.

• 1:21:12Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:21:13Jordi Hays?

  No matter how much, no matter how much scale I had and how, and how much resources, it just sounds like an absolute nightmare.

• 1:21:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, there's some great other businesses in this space that have great brands and been around a long time. And, you know, like, I mean, I think MX, it's like, you know, it's like, it's more than a century old. They're great established brands, but we see how hard it is for businesses that even were born, you know, five years ago to embrace the new world. And, um, and it's a challenge and, you know, I think Ramp is setting an example for others to follow on how to do it.

• 1:21:46John Coogan?

  Last question for me, and we'll let you get back to your day. Um, I'm interested in like how you interface with the team coming in later stage growth investing. You're probably not pitching, I'll help you hire your first CTO or engineer. But is one of the value adds of working with Dragon here that that visibility into the public and private markets? I was listening to Brad Gerstner on CNBC and like, he has a lot of visibility into both sides. And so if the board meeting is going to be about IPO timing, liquidity, how, uh, who's going to get brought in at various points in time? Uh, is that something that you're spending a lot of time with the teams that you work with broadly on? Or are there other areas where you like to lean in?

• 1:22:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, it's a good question. So, um, thing one, uh, we sort of start with the Hippocratic oath, like start with do no harm. Like, don't get in the way, don't bug, don't bug them for stuff that doesn't help them. And that's an easy trap for investors to fall into, which is, you know, trying to be helpful and really just meddling. Um, thing two, you know, when, when Walter Isaacson writes the book about Eric Lyman, it's not going to be, gosh, that late stage investor he had was like, it made all the difference, you know, like that was everything. So what we're trying to do is be helpful in the pockets where we can be helpful and where we should be helpful. And where like, we bring something a little bit incremental to the table. Um, I will say with Ramp, this is one of the things we love about them.

• 1:23:13Speaker 04

  They are really proactive at pulling help out of us. Not just like, we've made a lot of customer introductions and not because we're like spamming Ramp. They're like, hey, here's this one, here's that one, like, here's a few more, like, help us, help us, you know? And so they're great about it.

• 1:23:29John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 1:23:29Speaker 04

  And yeah, sitting across both public and private, it does give us a little bit of a vantage point. That's a little bit unusual, a little different compared to some of the earlier stage folks who they have helping, who I think are some of the best in the world at what they do at their stage two. And so, yeah, of course we try and help in that area, but that's just one thing. You know, we're, we're trying to keep our ears open and be helpful where we can be.

• 1:23:48John Coogan?

  Well, I think Mike Grimes made it into the Elon book, so maybe you gotta switch over to the sell side if you want to get in the biography.

• 1:23:56Speaker 04

  We shall see.

• 1:23:57John Coogan?

  Uh, but thanks so much for coming on the show. Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:23:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to hang.

• 1:24:00John Coogan?

  And, uh, in, enjoy, uh, you know, the, the, the continuation of dad life with the new one.

• 1:24:06Speaker 04

  I appreciate that. You too. Five weeks. Gotta love it. Have fun, guys.

• 1:24:10Jordi Hays?

  Best.

• 1:24:10Speaker 04

  Good to see you.

• 1:24:11John Coogan?

  Talk soon. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces. And now with AI agents, we have Tavarish, automotive creator, YouTuber, P1 owner, 918 spider owner. Uh, and someone with a truck that probably backs up from time to time when he needs to, uh, work on a rebuild from scratch. We ran a little bit late, but here he is. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you so much for holding on while we.

• 1:24:41Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:24:42John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 1:24:43Speaker 05

  How are you? Guys, uh, hear me okay?

• 1:24:45John Coogan?

  We can hear you great.

• 1:24:46Jordi Hays?

  Loud and clear.

• 1:24:47John Coogan?

  Loud and clear. Um, uh, I mean, there's so much I want to talk about, but I want to get your Tesla Roadster reaction first. Then I want your Porsche Mission S reaction. And then I want to hear about all the different projects you have going on, but let's start with the Roadster.

• 1:25:01Speaker 05

  Okay, so Tesla Roadster, um, everybody's going crazy over it. I don't care, man. Like, I, I can't, I can't tell you how much it doesn't like really move the needle for me. Because like, honestly, it's, it's a cool showcase of like stuff they can do. But the, the, the reality of putting one of these cars, uh, into production where it can do like a barrel roll or a kickflip over a truck. Uh, first of all, there's no practical use for it. And second of all, that's never going to make it to production. So, um.

• 1:25:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was, it was a technology, it was like a very cool technology showcase that was attached to not even like, just sort of a teaser of a car that they're going to start making in two years. And so I don't want to, I don't want to, yeah.

• 1:25:45Speaker 05

  Could be another 10, could be another 20, who knows?

• 1:25:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't want to, it's hard to criticize because it's like, cool, they made a car with rockets on it. And it's like, it's amazing and it's, and it's cool that, that I'm glad that the human race can do this, even if it doesn't have any obvious utility.

• 1:26:01John Coogan?

  Well, here's the reason why you should be.

• 1:26:02Jordi Hays?

  But, but John and I were both on the reservation list. We came in very late because we were like, you put 5K down, you can always get out of it if you see the demo and you don't like it. But if the demo is insane, a bunch more people will come in. We kind of were expecting the car to be going into production like now. And, but seeing it, you're like, okay, here's a bunch of stuff that is not relevant to somebody who's just wants to maybe buy the car. Outside of being able to produce a lot of downforce. But again, I can't even imagine going to the track with that car. And one, if you're driving it at the limit, you're just going to get banned from the track because people are going to be like, hey, this person's like acting ridiculous.

• 1:26:41Jordi Hays?

  Um, and then two, you're going to be going through tires in like a single lap and like the novelty, the, the sort of brief novelty before you realize like, okay, I'm driving a heavy car that can produce a lot of downforce, but I destroy my tires. And there's probably a thousand other cars that are much more enjoyable to drive on the same track.

• 1:26:59Speaker 05

  Um, so with Tesla, it's a, it's a weird like mixed bag because, um, what ends up happening is you have this car that has some like legitimately really cool tech in it. Like the Cybertruck has, you know, if you've ever driven a Cybertruck or been, you know, driven around in a Cybertruck, if it's doing full self-driving. There's a lot of interesting technology in 48 volt architecture, the drive, uh, the steer by wire, all that stuff is like super intuitive. Um, and if you don't want to drive it, it can, you know, have a mode where it drives itself. Now, would I trust it? Not really, but I think.

• 1:27:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, here's the, here's the thing.

• 1:27:37Speaker 05

  It's in a package.

• 1:27:38Jordi Hays?

  I would, I would push back. I have, I, I got a Cybertruck recently. It's amazing when it's driving itself. It's horrible to drive yourself. It's like the worst driving, it's the worst driving experience when a human is driving it, when the computer's driving it. It's like, great, this is like smooth. It feels like I'm in a fridge, feels like I'm, I'm in a dystopian fridge moving down the road. Uh, it's like, it's, it's awesome, but I'm like, anytime I take over, like John and I were driving in it last, last week and the.

• 1:28:05John Coogan?

  Two hours of self-driving is perfect. He, he takes over just to park it and I'm like.

• 1:28:11Jordi Hays?

  It's like, it takes like so much effort to make it like not feel like, you know, you're just like, it's so jerky. The yoke is like terrible. Like it's, it's really funny.

• 1:28:21Speaker 05

  When, when you have, uh, you know, a car like a Cybertruck and, you know, like with, with any new car, it's like, uh, you have to adopt certain elements of like new technology, like getting a new phone, you have to get used to it, you know? But with a Cybertruck, when you get in it and you try to drive it, like stuff like steering, steering is now like vastly different than what you remember. And it's not that way in any other Tesla or any other car in general. So you end up with this experience of like, well, if you're a Cybertruck owner, then that is, you get used to that. And then every other car becomes weird. And like, for, for me, the first time I drove a Cybertruck, just getting out of the parking lot was, it was, it was a time, you know?

• 1:29:02Speaker 05

  It was, it was interesting because, uh, not only is it the size of a tank, but it also doesn't steer the way you think it should. Uh, so you are essentially, you know, you're, the, the car is determining how much, um, you know, input and output is happening. And you're just kind of along there along for the ride. Now, when it drives itself like that, I do agree that that is like a better experience. But I, I think that, you know, when you're in a Cybertruck, everybody knows that, you know, like it, it is a, it's a statement, right?

• 1:29:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:35Speaker 05

  So the same thing with this Tesla Roadster, it is, it is definitely a statement. It is very like low res. It looks like a low res Lamborghini Murcielago from the front and like a new charger from the back.

• 1:29:45John Coogan?

  New charger from the back, yeah.

• 1:29:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, it's almost like they just made a render and then they shipped the render.

• 1:29:52John Coogan?

  And I think that it might've been rendered recently.

• 1:29:55Speaker 05

  It was like, it was actually mid-render. It didn't, it didn't finish rendering and then they're like, oh, whatever, it's good now.

• 1:30:00John Coogan?

  Ship it, yeah. Uh, Mission S, take us through your reaction compared to 918. Tell us, tell us about 918 and then tell us about Mission S.

• 1:30:10Speaker 05

  So 918 was a, was a really, really cool car. I mean, just in general, um, it was the most weight of, uh, of the three. So like back in the day, they had the Holy Trinity, uh, which was McLaren P1, uh, the Porsche 918 and the Ferrari LaFerrari. Uh, these were the hybrid hypercars and, uh, you know, it was dubbed Holy Trinity by Top Gear and Jeremy Clarkson. But, um, the 918 was, was a weird one because, uh, they made the most of them, so it shouldn't be worth, uh, you know, a lot of money. Then, uh, it was the, the most weight and then it was also the least powerful. However, it was like arguably the fastest car, uh, the best, the best built. And, uh, you know, just from my perspective, I haven't worked on a LaFerrari, but I can imagine what it's like.

• 1:30:53Speaker 05

  I worked on a P1 and I've worked on 918. 918 is built so much better than a P1. And, um, it is, it is pretty crazy that, uh, you know, they have, they had that technology back then. They did zero to 60 in 2.2 seconds and that was back in 2013.

• 1:31:10John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:31:11Speaker 05

  And then they did the.

• 1:31:11Jordi Hays?

  Also, also just the overall, the overall, it feels completely timeless. Like they could have, they could release that same car today and it would just make sense. It, it, it, in many ways is like the, to me, it's my favorite modern supercar by far.

• 1:31:28John Coogan?

  Are you 918 over Carrera GT? And I want to know if you're, if you're 918 over Carrera GT because Doug Jamiro and there's a lot of car guys that are like, oh, it's Carrera GT all the way. I don't want any hybrid stuff, but how do you both feel about it? Let's start with Tavarish.

• 1:31:42Speaker 05

  So they're just different cars for different purposes. I think that, you know, if you want an analog car with, you know, roll your own gears and no driver aids and blah, blah, blah. And I'm sure Doug Demiro wants the values of his Carrera GT to go up, then you'd pick Carrera GT. It sounds great. You could put an exhaust on it and it sounds like an F1 car. You can also do that with a 918. And in a 918, you can legitimately just give to anybody and then they could drive it like a normal car. It is, in essence, just a normal car you can drive every single day.

• 1:32:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the thing that was exciting to me about, the thing that was exciting to me about the Mission S is like, the 918 and the GT have become so expensive

• 1:32:22John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:32:22Jordi Hays?

  that even though they made a lot of the 918, you can't, you just don't see them on the road.

• 1:32:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:32:27Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to imagine buying one and driving it

• 1:32:30John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:32:31Jordi Hays?

  for fun.

• 1:32:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:32:32Jordi Hays?

  And what I'm excited about the Mission S is like, they're gonna make a ton of them.

• 1:32:37John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 1:32:37Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna give you that same kind of experience of like, I'm driving a special Porsche, but it's not special. So you're gonna be able to drive it however you want. If you caravan these things.

• 1:32:47John Coogan?

  If you put 40,000 miles on it, it's like, okay.

• 1:32:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and if you caravan these things, it's gonna get a ton of rock chips, but I think it, but I think it's fine.

• 1:32:53John Coogan?

  It's not the same as a 918.

• 1:32:54Jordi Hays?

  And to me, like, the two-

• 1:32:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, but this is Porsche. I mean, are they changing anything about, about, you know, Porsche's sort of architecture as a company? Because, you know, if this is Porsche we're talking about, then the MSRP isn't really MSRP. You're gonna have, you know, 100, 200 over that just to get the first ones. Then you have paint a sample, paint a sample plus, then you have the interior options, and then, you know, it's just the Corvette owner that went to college. It's like, mine was one of one because it was built on a Thursday with this paint color.

• 1:33:24Jordi Hays?

  No, I think it's gonna end up like an $800,000 car regardless of where it starts.

• 1:33:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:31Jordi Hays?

  But it's also not-

• 1:33:33John Coogan?

  You know, like, like competing with Lamborghini SF90 from Ferrari, like, it's more in the unlimited production world, which is still really expensive, but it won't be as, yeah, like, restricted as the 918 and the Carrera.

• 1:33:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the other, the other thing is like, seeing the two launches yesterday, it was like, one is like, you know, I think we all saw the Roadster launch in the same way, like, cool, like, carnival show, trick, you know, like, very, very cool technology demo. We'll see what the actual car is like. But then Porsche was like, perfect stagnation, right? It was like, nothing has, cars haven't gotten better, right? If anything, this car was the first time a manufacturer like, really, really, really listened to customers on a bunch of different elements, right? It's like, we want a key that you can put in the car and turn, and we want that experience to be great. We want less screens, right? We want, we don't want all these different things, but in many ways, there's zero innovation.

• 1:34:31Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't feel like, the only innovation is that we eliminated a lot of the innovations that we've had. And so, I think it's great. I think like, we had been talking on the show about, you know, the automotive world being in its quartz crisis, and this was like, the first response to like, we're in a crisis, we can no longer push, we're not pushing the frontier of technology in our field. That's gonna be done by the Teslas and the Chinese manufacturers, but what we can do is make a driver's car

• 1:35:01John Coogan?

  Special.

• 1:35:02Jordi Hays?

  that is special and more desirable than anything else in the market.

• 1:35:07Speaker 05

  So I would push back a little bit on that because when they were developing the Porsche 918, the technology that they had developed, when you went from E-mode or like, the regen to the regular brakes, they had to calibrate that, and it took them a long time to get that right. So, you know, when you press the brake, it feels like it's a, you know, it's an actual brake pedal, but it's actually regen, but if you press the brake harder, then you get the brakes from the car. And to make that not jerky, like, they had to put in a lot of time. If you look at the early, you know, first drives of the 918, people would, like Chris Harris, you'd complain about like, these brakes when they come on, it's like, it's like you get, you like, hit a tree, you know?

• 1:35:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:35:51Speaker 05

  But Porsche figured that out. And I think that is Porsche's real, that's their talent. Because they will do a lot of stuff behind the scenes to make this driving experience like seamless, and it's all, it's almost boring, where the car does everything so well, and then that stuff like trickles down to their other cars. So, like, that 918, the way that they made that 918, the calibration for that specific system, that trickled down to their, their electric cars, and then their hybrid cars, and like, now that is an Audis and, and like, all the, the kind of lesser known cars. So, I, I think, whatever this

• 1:36:32Speaker 05

  is, whatever flagship Porsche has, it is gonna be something where they move the bar forward in terms of like, driving dynamics, in terms of aerodynamics. I mean, if you look at it, it has like, a big scoop in the, in the front, it has like, aero lines that follow all the way to the back of the car. Doesn't seem like it has a bunch of like, wings and, you know, active aero elements. It looks like it's just

• 1:36:56Jordi Hays?

  The back, the wing is, the wing is active, though.

• 1:36:59John Coogan?

  It's active, but it's active like the Carrera GT, like, it just goes vertical.

• 1:37:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, I just mean, like, it's not, it's not like a giant, you know, GT3 RS.

• 1:37:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's not like the Mercedes AMG one that has like, the little flaps everywhere with little motors on those.

• 1:37:11Jordi Hays?

  But, but, yeah, the other thing that's worth noting is like, this is not, from my understanding, a 918, it shouldn't be viewed as a 918 successor. This is just, this is the new step up from the 911. And to me, it's instantly the most desirable car, the most desirable new car in the, call it 600, $2 million range, but then they're gonna come for the top end of the market, too.

• 1:37:35Speaker 05

  So, all right, if that's the case, then I guess it would go for the, like, what, SF90, which is

• 1:37:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:42Speaker 05

  hypercar performance, not hypercar price, but then it can get to hypercar price, but hypercar price is now $2 to $3 million, where now $1 million doesn't really get you a hypercar anymore.

• 1:37:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:53Speaker 05

  So like, it's still, you know, this is gonna be-

• 1:37:55John Coogan?

  Revuelto SF90 where the Spyder will be even more, and then they'll do a GT version of this, and then you'll get the GT3 RS Y-sock package of the new Mission S, and that will be even more and more and more, and I'm sure there'll be a respect out there.

• 1:38:11Speaker 05

  You gotta get the anti-racing one, and then paint a sample, and yeah.

• 1:38:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it is just interesting that there will be some of these driving around with the poverty spec or something, you know, and people put miles on them, hopefully, you know, because there's so many of these cars where you hear about it, and it's like, okay, they're making 100 of them, and they're just gonna stay in the plots.

• 1:38:31Jordi Hays?

  The poverty spec Mission S.

• 1:38:33John Coogan?

  The poverty spec Mission S would go hard.

• 1:38:35Speaker 05

  I mean, it's, it's really cool. So, is it, I don't know if the, the pictures that I'm looking at are like, actual, their renders or whatever, but like, this is, it's from Porsche.

• 1:38:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, if you're on the official Porsche, those are the real, those are the real photos of the car that they debuted yesterday, if you're on their account.

• 1:38:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, so-

• 1:38:53John Coogan?

  There's a lot of AI stuff out there, but this is real.

• 1:38:56Speaker 05

  Is it a, like, we don't know what the engine is, right?

• 1:38:59John Coogan?

  No, they, they, so they were teasing flat eight, but they were just asked yesterday by Forest Auto Reviews, can you confirm that? And they said, we're not ready to confirm that it's flat eight, but it feels like it has to be something different than what's in the 911 to make it special. So, that would be the logical one.

• 1:39:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it could be flat eight. I was looking at the gauge cluster, and I saw that, you know, the red line is somewhere around 70, 7,500, or that's where the literal red line is.

• 1:39:28John Coogan?

  So that's a turbo? Does that imply turbo?

• 1:39:31Speaker 05

  Maybe. So what I was thinking was, I mean, it could be the Porsche 963 engine, which is the 4.6 liter V8 from the 918 plus twin turbos.

• 1:39:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:39:43Speaker 05

  But it, it doesn't make a ton of, like, it doesn't rev as high, and it doesn't make, it doesn't make a ton more power, but it is, it is a pretty cool, you know, platform. And I know that they didn't make a lot of those, those engines, and those engines, you know, from, from my experience, taking them apart, like, they're really good. They're really, really good. So, but like, a low rev limit on a Porsche, just, eh, it doesn't seem like, right, you know?

• 1:40:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe they're trying to sort that out right now, and that's why they don't wanna commit to anything.

• 1:40:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. But I mean, if this was, oh yeah, this is our GT3 RS engine that revs to nine grand plus, you know, we found another 40 horsepower lying on the, on the floor.

• 1:40:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:40:24Speaker 05

  Like, here, here you go. I do like the on-your-own, is that, is that a button on the, on the steering wheel?

• 1:40:30John Coogan?

  Yes, so that disables all driver's aids, so you can turn off everything.

• 1:40:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's what I, that's what I felt. I felt like it probably did.

• 1:40:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:36Speaker 05

  But yeah, I mean, it's, it's a cool car. I don't know, like, anytime Porsche releases MSRP numbers,

• 1:40:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:43Speaker 05

  it's always like, okay, like, a GT3 is 160K, like, right, so, has anybody paid that? Like, ever? No. So, they, they are immediately double what they're, what they're asking for, because everybody needs the shiniest thing.

• 1:40:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:57Speaker 05

  If this is them trying what they did in the 80s with the 928, like, hey, this is like, a step above the 911. Eh, you know, it's gonna be, it's gonna be interesting, because 911 has a foothold in that market, and it will not let go.

• 1:41:13John Coogan?

  What's the opposite of a P1 in terms of, first car to start working on if you've never worked on a car before? What's the most accessible portal into that world?

• 1:41:28Speaker 05

  Uh, I would say anything nineties in Japanese, like maybe a Toyota.

• 1:41:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:41:33Speaker 05

  Uh, because even if it is like ragged on, which a lot of Toyota's are, um, you can get it cheap and it's gonna be reliable. And if you can break things and it's not gonna break the bank, um, you know, you can get parts from Toyota that they still make because it's a giant company. And it is, uh, super cheap to, to do that. So I would do like a Toyota, maybe a Nissan, like my first car was a Nissan Maxima.

• 1:41:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:55Speaker 05

  And I'm a little biased, but like Nissan also, it's a little harder to get parts for some of those older cars.

• 1:42:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:00Speaker 05

  Toyota has, has a really good, uh, parts program and they're bringing back a lot of those, uh, you know, iconic cars from the nineties.

• 1:42:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:42:07Speaker 05

  Um, and, and you're not going to be dealing with, um, you know, issues like, like real big issues like rust, like you get from a Mitsubishi or a, or a Nissan, like they're, they're pretty well made. So I, I would say anything like Honda as well. Um, you know, Hondas, they are expensive. If you want to get, you know, a lot of power from that little engine.

• 1:42:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:25Speaker 05

  But I, just to get a, you know, a car running and, uh, and driving, it's a really good platform to start on.

• 1:42:31John Coogan?

  And then in terms of how you select project cars, what sticks out to you? Is it all going back to like the posters that you had on your wall as a kid? Is it specific vehicles or just opportunistic? How do you think about when you want to take on a new project?

• 1:42:46Speaker 05

  When I, when I take on a new project, it's, uh, it, there's not a lot of thought that goes into it. It's more like, uh, I don't know when I'm ever gonna have this, uh, opportunity again.

• 1:42:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:56Speaker 05

  So when I looked at something like the P1 or nine eighteen,

• 1:43:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:00Speaker 05

  I'm like, there's not gonna be another P1 that comes up. There's not gonna be another nine eighteen that comes up.

• 1:43:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:05Speaker 05

  So I might as well get this and we're gonna see what, you know, if I can afford it, I'll get it.

• 1:43:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:09Speaker 05

  Um, and it, it's, it's gonna be a project for me to figure out. And that, I, I mean, I wish I would have planned things out better, um, you know, from the start, but, uh, this is also like the reality of making YouTube and reality of like project planning because, uh, you know, you have scope creep, which happened to, to me with the P1.

• 1:43:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:30Speaker 05

  You know, instead of, uh, rebuilding a P1, now we're doing, uh, you know, I'm, I'm building the fastest McLaren on earth. We are taking out the hybrid system.

• 1:43:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:37Speaker 05

  We're building this bespoke engine and then we're doing a bespoke, uh, body with the original designer, Frank Stephenson. And then this is now gonna be like this top speed car. And, you know, this is now leagues above in difficulty wise, leagues above, uh, a, a stock P1 build.

• 1:43:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Do, do, uh, how, how much room is there in top speed competitions? I mean, it was interesting that the, at the roadster reveal, they were like 230 miles an hour. And then like live on stage Elon sort of gets them to up that ante. And it's like, it'll go half the speed of sound, right? And they're like, okay, fine, we'll do that. Uh, but there are cars like I, I, I think Koenigsegg can do over 300. There's a few crazy numbers out there, but what, what, what is the state of the art? And then how much more like speed on the floor is there?

• 1:44:28Speaker 05

  So the, uh, the legitimate issue that you come, um, come up with when you go for top speed now is, I mean, it's been, it's been the case for 20 years, but like, where do you do it?

• 1:44:39John Coogan?

  Sure, salt flats or something.

• 1:44:41Speaker 05

  Well, so, so the problem with salt flats is that it's not, it's, uh, it's, it's bumpy. Um, so you're not gonna get like the traction is a, is a big concern.

• 1:44:48John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:44:49Speaker 05

  Those salt flat cars are made specifically for that environment.

• 1:44:52John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:44:53Speaker 05

  Uh, and it's not really conducive to a street car. Like a street car, it'll get maybe 70% of its top speed, maybe. Um, but even then you're, you're like just absolutely blasting the underside of your car.

• 1:45:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:05Speaker 05

  Um, it, it is a really punishing environment. So, uh, what Bugatti does is, uh, they have a test track or I don't know if they still own it or they had a, had a part of it. Um, it's, uh, Arolessine in Germany. And, uh, Arolessine is, you know, it's this big test track with a banked, uh, curve that you can take, you can do like 120 miles an hour. You can like Sauntor up to 120 and they have a six mile straight.

• 1:45:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:45:28Speaker 05

  And then that's where they do all their, their top speed. So right now the fastest car that I know of, um, that is a production car, sort of kinda is the, uh, Bugatti Chiron SS. And, uh, that's, it's a Bugatti Chiron SS 300 plus. And because that did 304 miles an hour, um, and that did it there. But in order to get the official record, you have to do it there and like reverse, like there and back.

• 1:45:54John Coogan?

  Right.

• 1:45:54Speaker 05

  Yeah. Um, but because they didn't do it backwards, because of the, uh, the, the way that the asphalt was, they only did it once. And then they were like, you know, who cares? We, we don't, you know, we don't care if we have the official record or not. Um, like then, you know, that, that stood, but I think the fastest now is the SSC Two Atara, which did it here in Florida, Cape Canaveral. And then they did something like, uh, 280 something miles an hour. Um, you know, average between the, between the two runs. So the, uh, the, the issue like right now, the, the big thing is, uh, like 300 miles an hour, 300 miles an hour is incredibly fast.

• 1:46:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:30Speaker 05

  But the issue becomes, um, braking zone. You have to find a place to do it, you know? You could do, uh, like Koenigsegg did and, uh, rent out, uh, a, or like just, uh, close up, uh, I think highway 50 or, or wherever it was. Um, and it's just an arrow straight thing, but then it's like a public road.

• 1:46:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:49Speaker 05

  So you, you have to like, an animal could, could, uh, come at any point. Um, it could be like, there's, there could be some, uh, some gravel on the road. Like there's a lot of things that could happen. Um, and it just becomes diminishing returns when you're, uh, when you're, uh, looking for top speed. But I, I still look at it like at as, as a kid, um, because like as a kid, you're like, well, this number's bigger. So this car is better.

• 1:47:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:16Speaker 05

  Uh, and I think we, I think we've sort of lost our way. It's all, it's all like Nürburgring lap times and blah, blah, blah. And, you know, that, that sort of thing. Um, just a quick, uh, quick thing before I, I finish my Ted talk. Um, I, uh, like every car that says, oh yeah, the top speed is 230 miles an hour or blah, blah, blah. And like, obviously they, the roadster, they haven't tested top speed. They, they, they have not because the roadster is not a production car. But the reason why a lot of these cars are like topped out around 230, like 220 to 230 is because the, uh, the CFD, the, uh, computational fluid dynamics testing, uh, that, um,

• 1:47:56Speaker 05

  OEMs like the, uh, the car manufacturers have, they stop, um, becoming reliable after 230 miles an hour. Because the air around the car becomes, um, significantly compressed, like more than 5%. So you get like a ram air effect like you would get on a plane after 230. That's also why a lot of like race cars, Indy cars, that, that sort of thing, they go up there because they're aero testing only, like you can only get to that point. Now there are cars that go, you know, faster than that, Le Mans cars, but like those are very much, we're gonna see where this goes. Um, it might do a backflip. Who knows? And some of them have.

• 1:48:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:33Speaker 05

  So if you ever wonder how that, how that happens, like, oh, aren't these tested? Like it's, it's almost impossible to test that unless you go out and then you figure, um, you know, you, you actually do some real world testing and see, oh yeah, the, the bumper hasn't fallen off yet and the car hasn't done a backflip. So we're good.

• 1:48:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:50Jordi Hays?

  Do you think, uh, in the roadster launch, they teased some like Cota lap times? Like something around a 130? Do you think that's just like totally fake news? Or do you think they actually somehow got out there and didn't get any, didn't get, uh,

• 1:49:04John Coogan?

  Spy shots?

• 1:49:05Jordi Hays?

  Any spy shots?

• 1:49:06Speaker 05

  Well, it doesn't matter because it's not a production car. So like whether they put a, uh, you know, some body on a frame and then went around, uh, with a, a test mule. Okay. Like, that's cool. Like, so lap times to me don't, don't really matter. Like I, I don't care if, if a car, cause like lap times, um, they, they say a lot about a car, but they also say a lot about the driver. And I don't consider myself like a race car driver and I don't really feel like I want to be, you know? I feel like, yeah, I'll, I'll push a car, uh, on a, on a nice, you know, windy road or like a straight road or something. And that, that feels good, but I'm not a race car driver and I don't care if, uh, my car gets, you know,

• 1:49:49Speaker 05

  point three seconds faster on the Nürburgring with these like little aero flicks. Like it, it doesn't really matter to me. So I don't know if it's conjecture, um, knowing Elon Musk and Tesla probably is, um, but he knows that the, the thing that he showed was not for car people. It wasn't, it was just for, it was just to get clicks. It was just to, to generate buzz and it absolutely did that. If you want spectacle, you go to one of those launches, but like, no, like nobody looked at the, the substance of what was said. Uh, like everything that was shared was the car doing a barrel roll, the car, you know, flying, the car going upside down. That's the only thing that was shared, um, because everything else is, is sort of clunky

• 1:50:32Speaker 05

  and, uh, not very well, um, you know, orchestrated or put together, but they did have this, this spectacle that they knew people were gonna just eat up.

• 1:50:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They had the moment.

• 1:50:42Jordi Hays?

  It worked.

• 1:50:43John Coogan?

  It's kind of underrated.

• 1:50:44Jordi Hays?

  Everyone.

• 1:50:44John Coogan?

  It's, it's.

• 1:50:44Jordi Hays?

  Except, except car people that had a reservation in and then immediately stopped and I was like, that's cool. And then canceled.

• 1:50:51John Coogan?

  It's, yeah, it's kinda, it's kinda underrated that Tesla, you can drive these like by wire. Like they're very clearly entirely remote. Like there were no people in them at any time. And so when you think about high speed trials, it's like, yeah, just send, just like send the command to drive straight remotely and just drive it. And if it flips and crashes, no big deal. Uh, it's, it's maybe you could push the car further in testing if they do go down that road. But I don't even think car buyers care past 200 miles an hour. It's so rare that you ever would get the opportunity to push a car like that, you know?

• 1:51:24Speaker 05

  The amount of people that have gone 200 miles an hour is incredibly small. And like, if you actually go 200 miles an hour, you realize how fast that is.

• 1:51:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:33Speaker 05

  Um, now in cars now, like if you get in a Koenigsegg, um, and you realize that this thing has 1500 horsepower, it gets to those speeds so quickly. Like, like, um, I remember, you know, back in the day, Bugatti Veyron was the fastest car in the world, 253 miles an hour. We're, we're never gonna have another car that's a thousand horsepower and blah, blah, blah. And it, and it does this incredible top speed. And now like a, a Chiron, like, uh, it's, it's successor has 500 more horsepower. And it didn't need those crazy tires that the Veyron had mainly because it gets to those speeds so much faster that the, uh, the tires don't actually heat soak. They, they don't heat soak as much as the Veyrons did.

• 1:52:16John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 1:52:16Speaker 05

  So the Veyron needs those tires because it's less powerful.

• 1:52:19John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:52:20Speaker 05

  Um, so if it had 500 more horsepower, you can actually just get tires from Tire Rack, which is interesting. But like, but people don't understand how, how fast these cars are. And, um, if you go like, you know, 200 miles an hour to 250, that's, that's, that's crazy. But then like 250 to like 300, 300 is so like.

• 1:52:39Speaker 05

  Anything going 300 miles an hour is probably in the air. Like that's, that's just like planes take off at way under that speed. So you have to, you have to do a lot of homework and 300 miles an hour is nothing to scoff at.

• 1:52:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And I mean, even the, even the high speed stuff is getting democratized. You look at the ZR1 and you're looking at Bugatti numbers on pretty much almost everything. I think it goes maybe 220, 230 in some configurations. Like this stuff is getting to be, and I don't know what the appreciation will be like on a car, but you could imagine, I mean, even a model Plaid, you know, 60K for zero to 60 in two seconds. We certainly democratized it, but hopefully people keep it on the road.

• 1:53:19Speaker 05

  It's, it's, it's incredible. Like I, I drove today, you know, one of my daily drivers is a Charger Hellcat Red Eye. It is a essentially a rental car that you can, you can get that has 800 horsepower. People will just like, you can go to the dealership, well, not now anymore, but like you could have gone to the dealership and just bought it with money.

• 1:53:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:36Speaker 05

  And that, that seems kind of crazy because 800 horsepower was more than like, if you look back, uh, you know, 10, 15 years ago, what had 800 horsepower? Nothing, literally nothing.

• 1:53:49John Coogan?

  Nothing, yeah.

• 1:53:51Jordi Hays?

  Greg in the X chat says, ran into James May today in an airport lounge. He looked grumpy when I asked him about the Roadster. Cars should drive, not fly, he said. To Varsha's point, not for trad car guys.

• 1:54:02John Coogan?

  Interesting, yeah. What does excite you? What, what, what is on your dream list?

• 1:54:06Jordi Hays?

  My takeaway from the whole event was like, I'm very excited. Tesla slash SpaceX are obviously going to be the company that popularizes flying cars. It might take 20 years, but they are going to be the ones that do it.

• 1:54:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:54:18Jordi Hays?

  It's not going to look like, it's not going to look like the Roadster because the Roadster has two seconds of range.

• 1:54:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's a rocket. What, what is on your dream list? If you were dropped in as the CEO of Tesla or Porsche or any company and you want to build your ideal car, how manual is it? People want to go back to the old ways. I was joking about putting the crank in the front of the car. You know, what, what do you want? What's on your dream list?

• 1:54:44Speaker 05

  Uh, it's, it's tough because um, I am not a person that would like put together all the elements of my, my favorite cars and then be like, all right, it's perfect for me. I think every car has an element of, uh, you know, like if it's a truly good car, it is, um, for better or worse, somebody's vision, like somebody's vision from start to finish. And you can see, you see that from the engineering side, from the, um, uh, from the design side. And those cars are, uh, like the McLaren F1, for example, it's like Gordon Murray's baby. Um, you know, it's designed by Peter Stevens, but like Gordon Murray had a finger in every single thing, every project on that car. And it's still revered as one of the best cars ever made.

• 1:55:27Speaker 05

  Um, and it's, you know, obviously not without its faults, but it is of an era and it is, uh, it's, there's nostalgia involved. I, I don't know if there's like a perfect car for me. Um, there are some, you know, very exciting cars. Um, for me, the, uh, the Aston Martin, uh, was the Valhalla, the one that, uh, that just came out. I really like that car. That car reminds me of the, when the P1 originally came out. It's a very similar kind of drivetrain. Um, it's also British. It's a, it's a very, very beautiful car. And I think it is like one of these things that, um, since Aston, it's an Aston Martin, it's gonna, it's gonna depreciate, but it's also, um, a car that we might not appreciate as much now.

• 1:56:11Speaker 05

  But later on, people are going to look back and say, oh, wow, that was, uh, that was, that's quite a thing. Um, but like, I, I think with anything, there's a lot of, there's, there's too many rich people out there. And then there's too many companies that are willing to give them, you know, whatever they want. So like Ferrari making the, these, uh, uh, the Dici Chilindri manuals.

• 1:56:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, the manual.

• 1:56:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, so like those things are kind of, they're, they're kind of cool. I'm not, uh, I'm not on the, you know, hate bandwagon there. I think that that's, you know, it's interesting technology. But like, I think, um, any car that is, that gives an interesting experience and a, a unique experience that, uh, other cars can't give you. Um, I, I think that is worth pursuing. I, I like the, the Mission S, uh, the Mission S looks, looks interesting. Um, I don't know how different it is going to be from like a GT3 or like a Turbo S.

• 1:57:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:57:04Speaker 05

  Who knows? But what I, what I think is, uh, is interesting moving forward is like, um, where the, uh, the, the battle between EV and, and combustion engines and then like where hybrids fit into that and then how performance fits into that. Um, but you know, I think car enthusiasm in general, um, has gone up in the past, like let's say three years. Because, uh, you know, for a while we were worried about, uh, car enthusiasm just leaving. You know, like we're never going to have V12s again or like blah, blah.

• 1:57:35Jordi Hays?

  Also.

• 1:57:35Speaker 05

  I think that, yeah.

• 1:57:36Jordi Hays?

  My, I've had a working theory for a while that you're going to see even more of a resurgence and activity at various tracks around the country as it becomes more common to just never drive yourself on the road anywhere. Like I'm already getting to the point where like, I never want to commute. I never want to self-drive when I'm commuting.

• 1:57:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, and in LA, like there's so much more traffic, there's more potholes. Like they're in the sixties, you could get a sports car and actually like ring it out just on like the normal streets or like the back roads. It's like now it's like so.

• 1:58:08Jordi Hays?

  I think Tesla making a car that ultimately is just a track toy actually is kind of going in the right direction in some ways. Because I think that a lot of people are going to be like, when I'm on the road, my car drives me. When I'm on the track, I drive myself.

• 1:58:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:24Jordi Hays?

  And, and I think that that's like the line that's like really interesting. Um, the Mission S is the first car that's like a production road, you know, road legal car that I'm like, this is, this is a car that I want in a while.

• 1:58:39John Coogan?

  I, I was hoping we were going to get a tour of something, but.

• 1:58:44Speaker 05

  Sorry, sorry, my, my guys are like watching a car and it's, it's like super loud, uh, the, uh, the, um, the pressure washer, so, yeah.

• 1:58:52John Coogan?

  But, uh, yeah, I mean, thanks so much for coming on the show. We'll let you get back to your day. Uh, we'd love to do it.

• 1:58:57Speaker 05

  No, you're, you're good. No, I, but I completely, I completely agree. I think, um, you know, the, the car enthusiast, um, was never, you know, like with these new cars, people don't think about our car enthusiasts because, uh, number one, car enthusiasts don't really buy new cars. Um, they're, they're thinking about the, the collector. They're thinking about the person that is, uh, doing it as a status symbol. And then, uh, maybe down the line, that's when they get like the real enthusiast. And then you can have like the enthusiast, uh, version. You can have the GT3, GT3 RS, you can have the, the manual and whatever for those people that both have money and, and want that, that experience. But for like the base experience of any car now, um, it's really good.

• 1:59:42Speaker 05

  Like it's really good. If you get any like base model car, it's still, it's going to have more power, going to have more options, more luxuries than any car back like 10, 15 years ago. Uh, it's also going to be pretty reliable, like for the most part. So I think, you know, it is, um, I, I like where things are headed. Um, I don't, you know, like the, the design of cars now is like kind of humdrum to me. Um, I like that, uh, you know, Porsche is still making, uh, pretty cars. Uh, some, some Italian manufacturers are making pretty cars as well. But, uh, everything now is just becoming like very, I, I don't know if it's, um, they're, they're, they're getting that, uh, the, the Chinese influence where like every car just looks kind of the same.

• 2:00:25John Coogan?

  Every car looks the same. I agree with you, except with two exceptions, other than the Cybertruck, Nuvo Lari and Jaguar Type O1. It's a very specific aesthetic, but it feels like it does not look like a, you know, like, like a BMW, doesn't look like an Audi that's like where everything's kind of like coalesced around one design language, but I want to know what you think.

• 2:00:45Speaker 05

  Yeah. I, yeah, the, the Nuvo Lari stuff is like, I, it, the people that didn't like the Jaguar and then they, they started saying how good the Nuvo Lari looks. I'm like, what is, what is your day look like?

• 2:00:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's funny.

• 2:00:58Speaker 05

  I don't, I don't, I don't get that at all. Um, like I, I think it's, they're just kind of low res cars. Uh, it's the same, you know, Cybertruck and Roadster and they all kind of fall into that, that one thing. And it just becomes, you, you buy it for the meme and I, I don't, I don't think there's going to be a lot of.

• 2:01:14Jordi Hays?

  John literally, John literally has been thinking like, do I do the three car garage? Cybertruck, Nuvo Lari, Type One.

• 2:01:21John Coogan?

  Type O1, just the low res garage, very funny.

• 2:01:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah.

• 2:01:26Jordi Hays?

  I have a, I have a question for you. Do you think, um, so the Mission S feels very competitive with all the sort of desirable Ferrari cars? Whatever it ends up being actually called? Like it just feels like suddenly people are going to be like, I have $750,000 to spend on a car that I'm going to drive a few times a month, maybe a couple of times a month, whatever, a weekender. That is like very competitive. I, my expectation is that Ferrari is going to fire back by going after the, the 3RS category and making this 296 Challenge, the street legal version of it, like much more widely available. Because it seems like they're going to remove the hybrid. And if suddenly they have a car that's in that 400 to $500,000 range MSRP

• 2:02:11Jordi Hays?

  and it has a massive wing on it and it is, you know, again, the hybrid.

• 2:02:15John Coogan?

  Crazy near Burger Time.

• 2:02:16Jordi Hays?

  Track focused, but again, a car for the street. I, I expect they're basically going to like flip flop. Where like suddenly Ferrari will have a car in the 500 and below range. It's like pretty, pretty compelling. And the 3RS buyer is like, well, I want something that looks aggressive, looks track focused. But, and, and so, so anyways, that's kind of like how I'm imagining.

• 2:02:40John Coogan?

  What do you think?

• 2:02:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, I could, I could probably agree with that, but, uh, I, I don't know what Ferrari's, uh, trajectory is. I, I think Ferrari is, uh, just hell bent on, uh, trying to make as many cars as they can and then pretending like they're, uh, like, like they're all rare, like every single one is rare. And, uh, you need like special permission to, to buy, you know, whatever their base model car is. Um, I, I think there's, um,

• 2:03:05Speaker 05

  Porsche have a history of making a certain type of car Ferrari is not like no matter what they do Ferrari is not going to be Porsche it doesn't drive like a Porsche they all drive like differently um a Porsche experience is very sanitized um even a GT three which which I have um I have a manual nine nine two GT three and I love it I think it's the best manual car I've ever driven and I also have a like a 430 Scuderia that we converted to manual and it's you know on paper it's around the same horsepower it's like 500 horsepower around the same way that that sort of thing uh the Ferrari is like a bit more old school but it's still aluminum chassis that that

• 2:03:46Speaker 05

  sort of thing but it feels completely different it is a is a different uh sort of school of thought um and the Ferrari feels like it was made 100 years before the Porsche so I I think no matter what even newer Ferraris they they have this like manufactured sort of Italian passion where things don't line up as well as you'd want them to like a like a Ferrari like a Pista doesn't drive as well as like a McLaren um because because of that because they they want to like manufacture this uh this sort of like imperfection but then uh sometime like I don't see them competing with Porsche in the same way it's not it's not going to be that sanitized experience no matter what you can do

• 2:04:29John Coogan?

  yeah no that that'll be really interesting it does feel like they will go to head to head but there will be uh yeah really wide really wide gap between the two brands so

• 2:04:37Jordi Hays?

  I think that's great yeah I'm not saying that they want to make the same car at the same price more so that like I think it would be an interesting new product for them to offer that would be an ode to like hey we haven't forgot why we got into this in the first place which was like selling emotion selling this rawness selling this

• 2:04:56John Coogan?

  would that be the XX is XX uh street legal race car is that the thesis there

• 2:05:03Speaker 05

  that is not like now that you have a SF 90 XX and the XX program used to be uh a literal like race car with race team and you didn't even own the you didn't have the car like to do anything with you you like just told Ferrari meet me at this track with the team and then well I'll drive the car but that SF 90 XX was the only car that had that badge but didn't come with all those perks but then you can just drive the car um so they are sort of yeah yeah

• 2:05:33John Coogan?

  they take the road car and then they make it a track car and then they make it a road car and they make a tracker and they make a road car again they go back and forth it's the best

• 2:05:40Speaker 05

  yeah yeah it's uh it's like a Street Fighter the movie the game yeah the movie

• 2:05:45John Coogan?

  yeah exactly the book based on the movie that's based on the book uh the best but always always another way to you know stand out in the crowded market I suppose anyway thank you so much for coming on the show

• 2:05:56Jordi Hays?

  super fun

• 2:05:57John Coogan?

  this is great let's do it again

• 2:05:58Speaker 05

  no worries man thank you so much

• 2:05:59Jordi Hays?

  yeah thanks

• 2:06:03John Coogan?

  car day

• 2:06:04Jordi Hays?

  wanted to distract you from the absolute disaster that we've had today in the markets

• 2:06:10John Coogan?

  oh it's rough what's going on

• 2:06:12Jordi Hays?

  Jim Kramer says maybe we clean out this blown up hedge fund and start fresh on Monday

• 2:06:15John Coogan?

  hmm okay so NASDAQ is down 2.14% S and P 500 is down 1.09% and the Dow Jones is down just one uh just point 34% but lots of red

• 2:06:28Jordi Hays?

  Kramer called it one of the worst days of the year

• 2:06:31John Coogan?

  uh yeah NASDAQ nears biggest weekly loss in more than a year uh tech stocks are falling sharply Friday remember you got this alpha from us yesterday because if you paid attention to the stream the stream title was sell everything including your dollars it's over over and it looks like it is in fact over over but maybe we'll clear out this hedge fund and we'll be back on Monday we'll see uh AI related shares came under new pressure pushing the NASDAQ down 2.4% which leaves the benchmark down 4.7% for the week if the tech heavy benchmark finishes down more than 4.68% it will be the worst week since the tariff meltdown I like that in this Wall Street Journal

• 2:07:13John Coogan?

  report they were hammering this out so fast they capitalized the T H E uh all caps for some reason I think it's just a typo but it lets you know that a human was hammering this out and saying I'm mad I'm mad I'm angry this is crazy news anyway uh there's a bunch more stories but we'll get to them on Monday

• 2:07:31Jordi Hays?

  2.6 says wait before you guys go is Tyler still an intern uh news flash Tyler has never actually been an intern he was always paid paid and he dropped out of college like how long ago year ago

• 2:07:46John Coogan?

  I think I think his original deal he had to go to school for a decade so he turned that down came here

• 2:07:51Jordi Hays?

  came back

• 2:07:52John Coogan?

  but uh yeah I don't I don't actually know your official title co-host oh I mean in the Wall Street Journal just host they didn't even hit you with the co Tyler Cosgrove was featured in the Wall Street Journal

• 2:08:01Jordi Hays?

  one of us

• 2:08:02John Coogan?

  one of us he made it into the Journal very very it's a big moment the first time you get in the print edition did you actually get the copy of the print edition did you see if

• 2:08:10Jordi Hays?

  we didn't get it delivered that day so I don't know

• 2:08:12John Coogan?

  somebody stole it

• 2:08:13Jordi Hays?

  but I don't think it was in the print edition

• 2:08:14John Coogan?

  okay well we should figure that out but Tyler is in the Wall Street Journal you can go to WSJ dot com sign up uh you you can uh search his name and uh he was he was in the article uh about Cheeky Pint and how the tech elite are drinking beers and Tyler broke it down do you have anything else they they sort of uh they sort of mugged you a little bit didn't they

• 2:08:37Speaker 06

  well

• 2:08:39John Coogan?

  got him

• 2:08:44Jordi Hays?

  okay

• 2:08:47Speaker 06

  Tyler said um he didn't watch the full episode because he has a life but Tyler Cosgrove

• 2:08:55John Coogan?

  yeah yeah that's great yeah the Wall Street Journal said they uh journalist said uh I didn't watch Cheeky Pint because I have a life but this guy over at TVPN this host Tyler Cosgrove did and so he hit you with the host hit you with the full name spelled it correctly got the name of the show slightly wrong but it's okay we'll hit it we'll hit them with a correction for that but we love the Wall Street Journal and we love you all for tuning in uh we forgot to tell you the most important data point that we that we cover more reliably than the markets how many days until Christmas 69 days until Christmas let's go

• 2:09:36Jordi Hays?

  there you go uh

• 2:09:37John Coogan?

  thank you so much

• 2:09:38Jordi Hays?

  outside the movie theater yesterday they were setting up Christmas decorations

• 2:09:42John Coogan?

  Rick Cruz is one of us let's go

• 2:09:44Jordi Hays?

  that's right

• 2:09:44John Coogan?

  so good so good uh yeah it's getting it's getting uh it's getting christmasy in here uh let's check in on the Christmas weather report in Los Angeles it's uh 94 degrees not exactly the Christmas spirit uh Malibu is burning there's a heat advisor there's evacuation warnings because it's too hot but uh Christmas is always hottest before it gets cold dark it's always darkest before dawn

• 2:10:08Jordi Hays?

  it's always hottest before the snow falls

• 2:10:12John Coogan?

  it's always hottest before the snow falls uh yeah there's no you have control over we have invented air conditioning we don't live in France we live in America you have air conditioning

• 2:10:23Jordi Hays?

  we love you guys

• 2:10:23John Coogan?

  if you want to get christmasy just turn on the air conditioning

• 2:10:28John Coogan?

  good night