You're watching TBPN. Today's Friday, October 16th, 2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultra.
We're back. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Why do you call it the capital of capital, Jordi? 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?
She never hit him with the um, why questions are overdetermined.
She should have, she should have hit him with the why questions are overdetermined. That would have been the trump card. That just, yeah, he would have been... Nathan Fielder, this one simple trick. He would have been stun locked. Yeah, but a Nathan Fielder PT crossover would be incredible. That's the next movie they got to do. Uh, deep dive in the Antichrist, figuring out all the questions there. That'd be so fun.
That is, I think, the only way that you could one up this.
Yeah. No. So, I mean, it's maybe even too much too inside baseball.
Yeah, right. Because this was such a big story a decade ago.
Yeah. Yeah. Everyone knows and they've seen the show and stuff. But anyway, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Um, yeah. I mean, 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 hung out with us. It was a great time and it had a big impact on us. We ditched the IM.
Yeah, we're going to be using these headphones now going forward. We're also going to be shooting like this.
Uh, the whole show cinematography was incredible. Well, 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 every shot is beautiful. It's perfectly lit and yet they're in these tight spaces, this small beach house in Delmar, 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 at their craft. They used 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. Uh, and maybe there's color grading after the fact, but I'm sort of skeptical of the theory that like before every scene they went and set up a bunch of 10x10 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 yeah, it was masters. Masters at work.
Yeah. Across the entire production. Everyone involved, even the A24 people who I think they cast them, they cast actors. I don't want to spoil anything, but uh, there's some A24 references that are fun. And uh, 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.
Yeah. The thing is that I think you could know exactly what happened and it would still be wildly entertaining. Like the whole concept is just so absurd.
Yeah. It is if you followed Nathan Fielder across his career.
Yeah. This makes sense as a natural progression. Totally.
And yet at the same time, it's unbelievable that all these different pieces came together. And various groups like agreed to do something like this, being uh, Billy and Elizabeth.
Yeah. Uh, it is just almost unbelievable.
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 serving 11 years in prison. There's nowhere to go but up.
Yeah. Your view was like there's no real downside, all upside. And I think people will come away from this uh, generally having a lot more like regardless if you think she was guilty or not, you're going to come away um, you're going to 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, these shots, these shots, you know, the final shot before prison where she says she does her, you know, pump is pumping breast milk. Yeah. Uh, for the children saying like bring it back. Uh, are you guys laughing at the framing or just what Jordi's saying? I'm so confused.
Sorry, it's very distracting.
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. Air Climate is coming on the show today. Uh, but uh, she took 150 founders, investors, and builders to an early screening of the movie. She pulled 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 she took 150 people. Very odd methodology, Liz. I mean, nice you did this. It's interesting content, but you should have polled all 150. Uh, but instead, she pulled 16 sort of casually and she asked them some basic questions. Do you feel better or worse about Elizabeth Holmes after seeing this film? 14 said more positive. Only one said more negative and one didn't change, but all 16 said they felt more negative about Billy. And there's some other data there that we'll 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 going to keep trickling out. And uh, it's just fun seeing it in a packed theater because everyone's laughing at different moments. Everyone's gasping at different moments.
The film was effectively like a psychedelic experience.
Yeah. Like it was riveting. It was like, you know, funny at these... the cuts, the production is just so funny. We're dying back.
I'm glad we have this tool now. But no, no, I agree with you.
Someone just texted me all over the place.
Apparently, what? What'd they text you?
Apparently my uh, my wonderful wife texted the team telling them the show is messed up and super zoomed in.
That's hilarious. Well, is this super zoomed in? Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.
Uh, I will be going back to see it.
I'm seeing it tonight again.
You are with... Amazing. Yeah.
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 very... it was kind of strange for me because two hours into the movie, there was a fire that 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 so I have to go see it again. Um, but uh, really an incredible work of art.
Yeah, it feels instant classic.
Instant classic. Yeah. Very, very fascinating. Uh, well, uh, I think we can zoom out. This is a tool that we can have in the tool chest. We can go to normal lighting and the normal level of zoom because I got a big reveal because what am I wearing today? I got the fell for it again award because your boy put down $5,000 hard-earned dollars on a Tesla Roadster reservation two days ago and uh, I think I got to refund it because the demo is 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 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 months later. And if you're just going into production, so first of all, I'll start by saying absolutely incredible. Uh, feet in amazing show, absolute cinema. Uh, wonderful that they're doing this. There's a bunch of stuff that I really love about it, but dropping like the car will be going into production in 2028 was just like completely insane.
Um, that's how I felt. It was rough.
Yeah, it was um... I want a fun Tesla now. Like that self-driving car technology is so cool. I just want it now. And in some ways, like if you gave Tesla a quarter million dollars in 2017, and if you had just put that in the S&P, you would have multiples of that by now. Um, and then there's this big event. The event gets delayed again. Yeah. 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...
It could be... Well, no. I just like it could be getting deliveries in the very end of 2028 potentially. 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 really long time. That happens with special cars all the time. Elite, elite, we lost. But um, the other thing is that it just felt like they 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 kick flips. It's like, okay. Yeah. All you had to do is beautiful car that goes fast. Beautiful car that goes fast.
I was trying to imagine. So the reason that you would do this now, even though the car is not actually ready to announce at all, is pressure from the probably 10,000 plus people that reserved this car a long time ago and it's getting kind of annoying. You feel like I'm not delivering on something that I said. Um, and two, to kind of like make the Tesla SpaceX merger like start to build towards that.
I like that thesis. 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.
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 can be drivable. Some of them can just do kick flips. There's a whole variety of products that they're demoing and then they'll bring everything together over the next two years hopefully. Um, but uh, when they open the door and they're like there's someone inside, it's a 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 companies just are destined to be...
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 two other guys like awkward, like a lot of dead air, the most awkward delivery and so many of these kind of semi-awkward moments. We got... let's talk about, yeah, let's talk about everything that we love about it. Okay, also predictions because uh, if you remember yesterday in the show, I predicted that it would be able to lift off the ground. I said something like 6 feet. It clearly does more than six feet. That was my prediction. I did not predict ramps. Jordan said nitro service 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 think this totally counts. Insane that it can go upside down like that. Uh, the McMurtry Spéirling can actually do something similar with just fans.
Should we do a tier list? I think it's time for a tier list.
Okay, I like this. Let's get a tier list going. Okay. Uh, okay. Juvenile humor. I'm going to start with juvenile humor. All the jokes about uh, all the sucking related jokes. I'm going to put those at F tier. F. Completely unnecessary.
Okay. 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 kick flip? That is so insane. That is S tier. That's S tier. The thing about watching it is even seeing it live.
Yeah. Part of... I think it was super smart that they had a live audience and everyone there to see it and all this stuff, but because it looks like it's breaking the laws of physics.
It just doesn't feel real just for that reason.
What tier are you putting?
That's S tier. Okay. Breaking the perceived laws of physics. Okay. Uh, so Mark in the chat says, 'I expected more.' What did you expect, dude? Goalpost in the atmosphere, in the stratosphere. What are you doing? That's crazy. Uh, what about the rumor that it will be able to beat an F1 car on the...
Okay, this is what I love. Okay, the flying stuff is cool, but like irrelevant if you're a buyer of this vehicle because one, I don't think they'll... I think they maybe ship it to a handful of friends of Elon, some influencers. I'm thinking people like WhistlinDiesel maybe get...
You know that Tesla hates him, right? It's the Cybertruck thing.
Oh, right. Oh, yeah. No, he is.
Okay, so not WhistlinDiesel, but maybe some like car influencers and they do some demos. But it was very clear during the thing as he started saying, I was like writing some of the 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 saying, okay, it's like not a road-legal car.
And so all the flying stuff, completely irrelevant to people like you and me that put down a deposit to actually... 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?
I do not... As much as I want flying cars, I don't want to be in traffic with someone that has this capability.
But what if it's geofenced?
That's just 'cause they're going to mug you. That's 'cause you would be getting mugged.
Watch out. Um, what about, would you be okay if 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?
Uh, anyone will be able to jailbreak it with Codex.
I'm sorry. Um, yeah. It's just not... it works the way that it works currently.
It gives you one and a half to two seconds of air time.
There's no real utility to it. It's purely...
What if a bridge collapses and you need to get...
Yeah, there is a video. We do have a video of that. We should pull it up.
Yeah. The ultimate usefulness. Uh, no, I agree with you. It's a...
Pull up this video. This is the obvious utility.
And so, 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, 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 years on a Tesla Roadster waiting list and $250,000 of your hard-earned cash in 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 that they might...
By the way, in '89, yes, the Bay Bridge had a bunch of damage. Someone did drive over it uh, like off the cliff.
That's crazy. Okay, so...
And that's only '89. So yeah, and our infrastructure is crumbling, right? Where 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.
Yeah. By teasing that time at COTA, that was like the best Easter egg of the whole thing. Exactly. Because again, there's two ways to view yesterday's demo. There's just like shock and awe. That's crazy. Cult of Elon is amazing. The car is flying. All that stuff. And then there's like I want to get this car or I'm considering buying this car. What is it actually going to do for me? And creating massive amounts of downforce and being able to put up F1-style lap times is insane and is very exciting. And actually, the things that they kept hinting at were like this is a driver's car. And that's what I loved, right? Um, and I think that a lot of the people that have reservations will be excited about that. And so that obviously was just like a minor detail compared to the whole circus.
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 0-to-60 time.
Yeah. There's a lot of questions that you immediately start having of like if you're using... do you think tires would last like one lap if you're pushing it on at COTA? Like it would probably... they would probably just be completely shredded after a single lap.
I think it's just get the record, just max the record. It's like 0-to-60 time.
And then I was starting to think about it. I'm like, tracks will 100% ban these from public track days 'cause can you imagine like...
Yeah. Your average Roadster owner just like heading down to their local racetrack and being like, I'm gonna go out for a public... like driving like an absolute banshee.
But yeah, uh, let me tell you about number two, the second path. But first, I'm going to 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 car is 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 is a world where like my example was like parallel parking or like jumping the car somewhere like not quite the bridge mode and also not like I'm taking this from LA to San Francisco but...
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 going to need to parallel park into. If you see somebody pulling up to that, you hit the thrusters, just float into the spot. Yeah. Land perfect.
You know what actually would have been a really awesome demo? Have you seen those videos of I think it's IShowSpeed jumping over a Lamborghini that's going full speed at him and he jumps over it. Uh, if they had 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 going to crash and then he goes and jumps over it. That would be cool.
Yeah. 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 on board. You need a 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, Dad?
Only 1% closer. I think this is one... I mean, it goes for two seconds. You're going to be in the car for two seconds.
Do we know that? Or like the demos were very short. And like presumably it can't go for 20 minutes, but like can it go for one minute? Like what did they actually say that...
One minute would be 5% of the way there from a 20-minute flight? And I think you're going to need... I think to be a flying car, you're going to need to be in it for like 40 minutes. I think you're just going to blast off and just coast and land at the... it launches you with such force. You only need... then if you have some kind of glider mechanism then you don't need more thrust.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean 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...
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.
Yeah. That's a jumping car. I don't think that's a flying car.
Uh, anyway, so I actually think it was amazing that the Mission S launched the same day. Yeah, because it was like the most beautiful version of stagnation, right, in the Mission S. 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? The interior and so... and it's just going to have like a vanilla-ish V8 in it is like at least the rumor.
Not V8, flat-8, but yeah.
Flat-8. Maybe we 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 engine's inside. Like that's...
They'll... Yeah, I expect the Mission S to progress a lot more quickly than the Roadster.
When do you think it actually will be delivered?
I would expect a first one, customer delivery, human driving it. I would expect...
I would hope that they go into production next year.
Like at the end of next year.
2028 deliveries. That'd be amazing. Um, but that being said, it was like stagnation, but it was perfect, right? Like they listened to their customers, which automotive manufacturers have, for better or worse, not been doing or been sort of unable to. And there was just so many details to that car that are just amazing. Like almost every single angle is great.
I've noticed like everyone has like a different favorite angle. There's not like one... like to me, you know, the rear end of the car is just like absolutely incredible. Saw some people that didn't like that. Some people like the side. I don't like the side nearly as much as the front and the rear. But regardless, like absolutely absolute perfection, 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.
And I think that's amazing. And then I think that Tesla pushing the boundaries and like trying to reimagine the car, adding like new forms of propulsion, right? Like 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 cancelled my order this morning of the Roadster.
Yes. Fell for it again. I like the design of both. The only thing I don't like about the Roadster is just like I'm worried it's not going to ship. Uh, and I think it's just going to take so long because they added so much crazy stuff it'll take forever. Um, RX says the front of the Roadster looks like a Gallardo. I think that looks cool. I think evolving the Gallardo language is great and I think that Lamborghini 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 got to put them back. Uh, 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 his way around them. And I don't think it's going to start now. Although, uh, that seems like something you get maybe some single-issue voters behind a 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?
I think the rear of the vehicle is where it shines. I think the side profile and the front are horrific.
But overall, very, very cool.
Let's close this out. Give you some facts. The Tesla Roadster pricing, you put a $5,000 deposit down now uh, for the default performance level, which does not have the thrusters, the jets, it can't do kick flips, but it is Tesla's fastest, craziest sports car at the moment. Uh, that's going to 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 got to wait. And the flight model is unknown and it's invite-only at the moment. So the thruster model can't do the kickflip. The one that they want to do the kickflip, the one that wants to actually fly, we don't know the pricing. We don't know where that's going to land. I'm actually not that worried about pricing just because SpaceX and Tesla are really good at making things pretty cheap. So 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 going to have like a new type of track day where you can go do kick flips all day in your car? Is that going to be appealing? Because...
Well, no. I'm expecting the gas recharging for the thrusters to take like 24 hours, you know? So you're going to... I mean, it really is um...
Yeah, it really is a really good party trick.
Yeah. But after seeing... Can you imagine the experience of being in the car for a kickflip?
Oh, it'd be extremely violent.
But I don't know, you wear a racing helmet and a 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 did the kickflip 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 uh, Xarin Doob. Uh, 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. Um, this sort of grid... maybe an empty shell in there. Doesn't really matter. It is a tech demo. Uh, but it's not the iPhone moment because the iPhone of course was available after it was announced. And so um, I don't know, it's a very interesting dichotomy. Elon is simultaneously Thomas Edison and Barnum & Bailey. He's the circus entertainer who can um, 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 Model 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 both exist at the same time and it's very rare to see that in an 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...
Did you see there were some... the last thing I would say is somebody there, people were pulling out this post from Elon in like 2019 describing... Yeah. 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 because he just said what he was going to do and did it.'
I know. It was so funny because I was like, 'Oh, we live in a simulation.' Because he just said in 2019, I'm going to do this and then eventually... and then he did it a decade later. That's not a simulation. That's just...
That's just called planning.
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. Walter, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Thank you so much for joining.
Wow, good to be with you.
Thank you so much. Uh, did you watch the Elon Musk Tesla Roadster?
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 going to be doing backflips and everything else, uh, it's going to 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.
Yeah, 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 5-year-old.' It may have been, but uh, what I love about it is that uh, love it or hate the Cybertruck, it feels like it shook the tree loose and allowed other car makers to take more risks. And we're seeing more avant-garde designs from Audi, from Jaguar. It feels like a lot of people are... 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...
Absolutely. I mean, but first Musk, I have I think two chapters on the Cybertruck in my Musk book where he's walking around with uh, Franz and everybody's pushing back on him. They're saying, 'Man, yeah, you know, you're not going to 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 uh, jazzed that he actually did it. Yes. Because as you said, it pushes the human race forward to use a Steve Jobs line.
Yeah. To me, I have a Cybertruck when it is driving itself on roads that are sort of crumbling with uh, 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. You know, but one thing you got to focus on, I'm not sure people focus on this 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 uh, 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 going to merge.
Yeah, totally. I thought that was the only reason to do this now because the car is nowhere near production.
Although he does that all the time. The original.
I know. But doing it again, like that's why we have these awards with us today. This sort of fell for it again award because going, you know, having there be this 10-year gap between the initial kind of... because he clearly could have launched and then announcing it and being like it's finally here. It's finally here. In two years it'll be going into production. Like that original to me, the reason to do it now is it sort of like sets up this like... these two companies should obviously be one company together. 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.
Absolutely. And uh, 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. Oh yeah. And everybody including Franz's like okay fine but we'll actually make one where you can have a steering wheel and you can take... No. He said I don't want an amphibious frog-like thing that's neither here nor there. Uh, 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 uh, he makes the impossible into something that's just a little bit later than he predicted.
How uh, how do you think about Elon Musk's journey to become an M&A wizard or a deal guy? Uh, 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'?
I think maybe with all due respect you might be right, but I think you might be overreading that. I think buying Twitter was... there 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 want to 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. Uh, had to do with his fury at the woke mind virus. Had to do with the fact that he just loved being on Twitter. I mean he was like a Twitter addict. Yeah. Uh, 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 want to build it end to end. I want to build it myself end to end.' Sure. I mean, why would you be building Dojo to make your own microchips if you're into deal-making rather than physical product-making?
I hope you don't mind me pushing back.
No, no, of course. No, no, it's a really good point. One thing from yesterday that I noticed, he looked way healthier than he has in a long time. I thought that was um... like there's been some moments over the last few years where just like this does not look great. Been that way for...
Do you but do you agree that he looked like... they looked like healthier than... cracking jokes and I mean there was some dead air during the presentation but in general like he seemed pretty...
I think what you're talking about is not just physical but where's his mental space. And as you know uh, you know he goes into demon mode and he can get really dark and he's very difficult and just goes silent.
Yeah. Then you know if you know how to poke him. Yeah, it does feel like there it's a little bit of a clarifying moment like there was a moment where he was doing just rocketry and then just electric cars and then uh, the Twitter and politics thing felt very distracting and now as the companies start merging together as the products start merging together 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... I don't know, just being focused and that carries through to everything. I don't know if you agree but...
I wouldn't um, count on the fact that he has become less mercurial.
In other words, you'll see him today, you'll see him tomorrow. There are people like when Shotwell and Franz von Holzhausen who know how to push him out of uh, demon mode. He also knows how to get himself together when he goes on stage. Yeah. You know, 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, Taylor Rico's in a mental institution in Ohio and he's going to repost that and you think, all right, um...
You know, some... Have you ever gone into your own sort of version of demon mode?
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 an electric vehicle. I never built a self-driving Cybercab. So maybe I'm nice. Demon mode is underrated on the path to greatness. Those of us who write about people in the arena, even if they're bestsellers, we don't confuse and think that we're the ones in the arena. So maybe the people in the arena, as Steve Jobs said, you know, they're the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels.
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 them a call and say hey you want to get on the phone and if the launch didn't go well I knew not to call because you wouldn't be in a good mood. Were there any strategies that you had to deal with the mercurialness and sort of...
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 going to be based on a bunch of interviews with you, it's not 10, 15, 20 interviews. I want to be by your side whenever I want, morning, noon and night, uh, whenever I decide I want to be there, any meeting. I got an Airstream trailer and live next 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 it's a... I mean I just I know I'm quite lucky or privileged because I have both the resources and to some extent the uh, clout with my publisher or maybe even with Musk to just say I'm going to spend two years and just watch. And so there'd be times I'd watch him go into demon mode. I'd watch him come out of it. I'd be sitting at dinner at 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 Gwynne Shotwell to come run into the conference room when he's about to kill Falcon Heavy or something. And I just...
Watch how people dealt with it. So it wasn't like, 'Let me time my phone call for a Starship launch that works.' 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 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.
Yeah. Everyone that you've written about — Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Jennifer Doudna — all incredible impacts, very, you know, sometimes controversial but unambiguously impactful in their work. How have you processed the story of Elizabeth Holmes? There's a new movie by Nathan Fielder out, You Can't See Everything, and it's one of those stories that has the trappings of an entrepreneurial journey but has kind of racked everyone with a whodunit. It's almost a true crime story. It is a true crime story because she is in prison. But how have you processed the story and how would you approach that if you were writing a book about Elizabeth Holmes?
Early on, I met Elizabeth Holmes way before she was quite famous or infamous.
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...
She went demon mode on the Steve Jobs biography.
Yeah, and she — you know what, I love Steve Jobs. I think he was transformative. I think it's dangerous if you read the book once too often.
Sure. 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 asked her, I said, 'Okay, you're doing this with just a tiny drop of blood.' I had been studying biochemistry because I was about to do Jennifer Doudna. I said, 'Tell me.' 'Oh, I can't tell you how it works.' 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 involved in ever even writing a story about her. And I actually declined moderating some panels with her in public just because it made me feel a bit off. I have a total fascination with what I will call fabulous.
I mean, we have a — every month there's a new one. You know, Jason Arder at Cambridge University, all the way back to Jayson Blair — you're too young to remember who he was — or George Santos, or for that matter, The Talented Mr. Ripley, or if you really want to get into it, you know, maybe The Great Gatsby.
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.
Yeah, it is the — yeah, the question that everyone's still trying to answer. On Steve Jobs, we've been debating the question of does the artificial intelligence boom revolution need a Steve Jobs of AI? Someone who paints a more human-focused picture, something focused on creativity. I think back to the energy with which Steve Jobs had when he launched GarageBand and Apple Music and some of the iPod. This idea — yeah, the iTunes — sometimes disruptive technologies still empowering humans and remaining in this artist world, a friend to the creatives and living in the technology world, but still never losing touch. Something so fundamentally important in your question.
And 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, which is the Steve Jobs approach to what I would call human-computer interface. That's what he called it. That's a big old name, 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 have been two schools of thought throughout the computer revolution. Go all the way back, as I do in this new introduction to The Innovators, to Ada Lovelace in the 1840s. And she looks at punch cards at 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.
A hundred years after she writes it, Alan Turing, in his great paper about computing machines and intelligence, the imitation game, calls it Lady Lovelace's objection and says she's wrong. There will be artificial intelligence that shouldn't be connected to us. Steve Jobs is in the Ada Lovelace school, and as I try to describe in this new introduction, that school begins with Ada, but it has people that you probably have hardly heard of, but are the most important people you've never heard of. Starting with J.C.R. Licklider, who creates computer interfaces that are easy to use. Doug Engelbart, who figures out the mouse. Alan Kay and the people at Xerox PARC, the graphical user interface. It all comes together with Steve Jobs. 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 sciences or technology. That was his goal. What we're doing now, not just with AI, but more importantly with agentic 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 Claudes or whatever I'm using, to try to make it autonomous and to do things without me and to be out of my control, Steve Jobs would be appalled by that.
First of all, because it doesn't connect human creativity to the product. It doesn't have the music that makes our 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.
The only thing that I would push back on slightly is it doesn't feel like agents are generative. They're not. I have not seen a single product or piece of marketing material where the seed of the idea, whatever the thing 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...'
That's a really good point.
And so my view on it is like I'm actually, as somebody who loves generating ideas, I'm actually upset that the AI can't do the one thing that I really value and that I love. Right.
You want to be like the... First of all, be happy because...
Yeah. No. And so, but it's notable, like you would think that if we could solve hundreds of the most long-standing 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 to me that shows the AI is not generative. It is not creative in the way that a human is. I'm sure it will get there.
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 human. You could be right. I mean, I use a lot of — I use Muse and I have created a couple of Claude agents. Maybe it doesn't totally generate things, but once you set an agent off, you have the Hugging Face possibility that it goes off with its own motives and its own sense of agency out of our control. So maybe it starts off because we launch it. But the question is, if it's not closely connected to us the way Steve Jobs would have wanted, is it going to go out of control? Is it going to go rogue?
Interesting. What do you look for in a subject when you're thinking about a topic that has your fascination? When is it the right time to focus in on a single individual versus more of a composite picture? And are we — I guess my question is, 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 loss of the ticker tape parade, even when there's a big problem and we solve it, we celebrate the first responders broadly. We rarely celebrate the single scientist who had the breakthrough. We celebrate 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.
Yep. And of course that's one of the age-old issues in history, whether it be Tolstoy or Carlyle or go back to Plutarch in Plutarch's Lives. 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 or great man theory. We make it seem like a guy or a gal goes to a garage or garret and they have a light bulb moment and innovation happens, whereas the two of you sitting there know that it's often a team sport, that creativity is a collaborative effort. That's why I wrote The Innovators, which is to try to show the role that teams and groups of people play.
Having said that, my very first sentence in my very first book I ever wrote was about Henry Kissinger, and I quoted him in the epigraph 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 him too much credit.' So it's always a bit of a balance. Take a more obscure example. I wrote a book called The Code Breaker about Jennifer Doudna, who helped invent — co-invented, I should say — CRISPR, the gene-editing technology that can fix genetic or change our DNA.
And I was saying, okay, I want to do biochemistry and genetic engineering next. I had done physics with Einstein. I had done the digital revolution with Steve Jobs. So I looked around for how do I do it? And I thought of doing a group portrait the way The Innovators is.
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 the way we convey lessons.
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.
Yeah, that makes sense. Another AI question that we've been wrestling with is we were very close in tech to the end of history. There were a number of software companies. There were pretty defined lines of battlefields between who owns the phone, who owns the search engine, who owns the social network. And the Mag 7 were all sort of playing nicely together. And now it is a knockout dragout fight. Everyone's trying to marshal the most compute. 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.
Or Elon, you know, constantly throwing shade at Anthropic until they become — calling them misanthropic. And then now 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 Steve Jobs going through the same level of intense battles? Is everything new, old, or is this actually unprecedented?
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 far surpasses Sam Altman and Dario on my day. As much as I love them both, by the way, you want to go back to Carnegie and Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan and the robber barons.
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.
No, no, I completely agree. I completely agree. Yeah, 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, wait, we're not going to let you get the monopoly.'
Well, I think in 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 cozying up to him, driving revenue, but at the same time trying to replace him on the back end.
It's fascinating.
I think you're totally right. Healthy is the word for it.
And it makes for good content for you and your writing.
And for you and your show.
The chat really wants us to ask — and 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 writing about outside of obviously Elon?
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 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 the rules of the road? You teach Claude why? 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. That doesn't mean I have figured out who the book is or what the book is or whatever. But you asked me, and I was just out at Anthropic and in San Francisco with some others three days ago, and I'm saying, 'Okay, help me think this one through.'
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.
Y'all are great. Y'all are really good, both of you. Thank you, Jordi. Let's do it again soon.
Yes. Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.
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Camouflage, camouflage with the wall. Oh, I see a floating head. That's all I can see in your hands.
We're in an urban environment, so we got to blend in.
That does look like it's designed to not be recognizable by artificial intelligence, which I'm sure we'll talk about. But first, what's the news? What happened?
We do. We have the gong. Are you ready to hit this thing?
All right. We raised $1.85 billion at 16.
All right. I can't hear anything. My ears are blown out.
