Today is Tuesday, October 6th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN, the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about rent.com. Time is money. Say both. Easy. Use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Also Christmas. How many days until Christmas? That's the question you've been asking. That's the question on everyone's mind today on the show. I believe it's 79 days until Christmas.
There we go. There we go.
Thank you to the graphics team.
And the great thing about this whole bit, yeah, is it will never get old for us.
It's probably getting old for some of you and we're sorry, but we just can't help but feel the Christmas spirit. Also, you asked for more Christmas. We delivered. You asked for more Christmas content. We delivered.
Today on the show, we have Rick Dungy from the National Christmas Tree Association. Let's give it up to Rick. He's the executive director and he's going to break down the real Christmas tree industry, the official White House Christmas tree and trees for troops, all the different things that they're doing over at the national, and how he's thinking about the road to Christmas broadly.
And we're also gonna ask... Christmas really is his Super Bowl.
Yeah, it is. Uh no, great show. Great show for you today, folks. Uh oh, I was leafing through GQ this morning. Tom Cruise is on the cover. It's a good edition. Uh there's a funny anecdote in here that I wanted to share. I need to find it. Um but they got the whole Tom Cruise spread, lots of photos. Uh, but they did a little back and forth interview with him and we recognize that we are having some audio difficulties.
Team is working on fixing it.
Let's test it with some soundboards.
Did that work? Did that fix it? What about this?
Well, we'll talk through this and then we'll move on to other stories and hopefully the audio catches up by then.
Um, he's a course bro. He dropped a course, a private course, and we got to get access to this. Uh, the question from the GQ interviewer: You have mentored a lot of younger actors. Glenn Powell has talked about watching a six-hour instructional video about screen acting that you made, right? And Tom Cruise says it was very basic. It was just something to have people understand, just to have a different concept of lenses and what the lens is and what the frame is. Just the same way as an actor, as an...
Being a global superstar for dummies.
Yeah. Basically, he made a six-hour... that's a course. He made a six-hour video. Uh just the same way as an actor on stage or in the development of cinema where it started and what that frame means and how it... audio that frame.
Uh there's just different layers of storytelling, of structure, but also to understand certain things so that you can forget about it. Uh what else do you tell younger people, other people in your business? I listen first. What do they want? It's not me. I'm more interested in what are their goals? What do they want? And it's not just younger people. This is me when I was a kid. I'm going, 'What are you interested in?' They say, 'Really?' Said, 'Yes. What is this movie about? What is this?' Um there's a bunch of other fun things in here, but I thought it was funny that there's a secret six-hour training video on how to be an actor from Tom Cruise. We got to get access to it. I feel like uh there's a lot of journalists that they get documents, they scoop things, they release things. Uh but I've never seen anyone just be like...
I'm putting down 10 racks for whoever can bring me the six-hour Tom Cruise video, you know?
Yeah, I'm putting it behind a paywall. I'm going to monetize it, but there's a bounty out. Like uh Kevin Roose has the Daramday uh big blob of compute thesis from 2017, like this leaked PDF sort of on the scaling law and the bitter lesson basically. Uh and I've never seen a journalist just be like, I know this document's out there, like Eric Newcomer should just be like, bring me Founders Fund returns. I'll give you five grand if you got them. You know, because it probably maths out at some point.
Maybe more. Maybe more. Yeah. To risk your allocation in the next...
Yeah. I suppose that that would uh violate journalistic ethics to just put a bounty out for a document that you know exists.
And it probably really like I was thinking about the various leaks that go out, like some of them violate NDAs, but if they're secretive enough and they're squirreled away uh via Signal, like they probably don't trace back. They probably don't really trigger anything. Also, some of them just don't really matter. They, you know, companies might not be that frustrated about a particular leak uh if it makes the company look good. But well, speaking of movies, the team saw a movie yesterday. Ben, could we get a review?
I saw it. Who saw? So, we saw Nick said that he was starting to look at his phone after like 40 minutes.
Nick did not enjoy it. I thought it was pretty good. So, basically the reviews are really bad, right? And famously, well, not famously, but like the box office is really bad.
Not all the reviews are bad. I saw Marc Andre gave it a positive review.
He did. Yeah. And that was really one of the only like very positive reviews I saw.
But yeah, I think the budget was like 160 million. First weekend it was 8 million.
Pretty brutal. Uh I thought it was good. It was very cool. Um like the framing of the movie. Um I... it's hard to like reveal too much... you. I thought it was very...
Film school like this. This critique is so nuanced. It's remarkable.
I thought it was... I don't want to spoil anything.
Give us like a... just give us like 30 seconds of spoilers. I'll bleep it out.
The bleep organ. Uh we're still working. We're still working on that.
Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. Um, wait. So, can he talk over the bleep? Basically, you can hear both. Okay. We're working on a new feature.
Uh, the game decompilation thing is going strong. Uh, Ben Thompson was writing about it in Stratechery today. Uh, there were some more knock-on effects. He took it in a very interesting legal direction about the implications of uh taking a video game, uh decompiling it, doing whatever you want with it. Obviously, IP licensors don't like that, but there's not a lot that you can do to control that. And obviously, open source models are coming. Um, there's a bunch of interesting knock-on effects. I saw a really funny one. They're getting funnier, these mashups. I saw one where someone was playing NHL hockey in Resident Evil. Did you see this one? It was really such a good mashup because the guy's just like on ice skates and like flicking pucks at zombies. It was pretty good. Uh I was into it. Again, probably not really something I want to play for five hours, but will I watch a 30-second video of it? Absolutely. Um but uh yeah, Polygon has been breaking this down. If you've been on X over the last few days, you probably noticed that things have gotten very weird when it comes to modded video games. There are clips of Call of Duty operators doing kickflips and other tricks from Skate, people playing Black Ops 1 zombie mode in Skyrim, Miles Morales swinging through Gotham. Uh here's another to add to the list. Someone has gotten the Xbox version of Halo Combat Evolved running in a web browser with multiplayer and split screen support. And the other funny thing is that the Halo community doesn't like the PC release of Halo. So they ported the Xbox version to the cloud browser. It's like you can really do anything you want now. Um and so Ben Thompson goes on to describe a little bit of what's going on. Uh games are written in human readable languages, C, C++. Obviously, they're scripting languages on top of that, but then they're compiled into machine code that's executable by the processor that they're intended for. Uh for Halo, that's x86. You've always been able to disassemble machine code into assembly. Uh because assembly maps almost perfectly to machine code, the difficult part, which takes humans years, is decompiling assembly to C or some human readable language that then you can actually modify. But LLMs are really good at that. And so, is it legal? Uh, the story conflates two different AI capabilities. The Fallout project appears to be a new game. There's no Fallout New York, although using the name Fallout is likely a trademark violation. I think we were joking about uh the lawyers being really excited seeing all these going out because it means full employment. Um, decompiling is not in and of itself illegal. Sega versus Accolade held that disassembling code is fair use if it is the only way to reach unprotected functional elements and there was a legitimate purpose, and Sony versus Connectix extended the same reasoning to reverse engineering the PlayStation's BIOS. Uh however that is likely where protections end. Code that is derived from decompiling is by definition very similar if not identical to the original code which is covered by copyright. So even if you go and decompile a game and then you ship something that's like a mod, you're going to get a DMCA notice. And this is already happening. Like something will go up, it'll go viral and then they'll get hit with a takedown notice. This already happened hours later.
Getting hit with a copyright?
Two hours later you'll get hit by copyright. Uh so you'll have to take it down. Um there's a couple interesting things. So the actual value of these like decompiled games mashups is pretty limited because you basically just get a viral video and you can't really monetize it because you get the takedown notice. But uh the training rollout for the AI labs, like the training data that comes from like having this fleet of like all these different game modders go and spend a bunch of tokens that they're basically paying for. Maybe it's a little subsidized but like they're basically paying for all this decompilation and then also the labs probably have RL environments for this type of work and then there's tools for this as well. Uh means that I would expect like the next version of models that is trained on all the inference that's happening right now because everyone right now in the game modding community is like, let me go point GPT Astra and Opus 5.5 at whatever game binaries I can get. So it's like, oh, I like Skyrim. I like Minecraft. Let's go decompile those. But then they're also doing it with all the long tail. So all of that's going into the next set of training data. So you would imagine that the models get much better at video game development, which is cool. Uh he also just talks about like how things will change over time, similar to what's happened in video. AI seems to exacerbate a lot of trends, including the shift to service-based games. So he talks about like in a world where if you send someone a disc or you send someone an executable binary, like they're just going to decompile it and be able to do whatever they want with it. Maybe you want to stream that game. So you uh this was uh Google had an effort for this. I forget what that was called. It never really took off, but Google had the ability to basically stream you a 1080p...
Stadia, that's right. So they would stream you the video output and you would stream them the controller input and the game would run on the server. So you never saw any code. You just saw video coming back.
This is also how the Meta Quest Xbox edition worked. You were streaming the game in.
That's right. That's right. And I think Xbox has stayed with the cloud gaming a little bit longer, but gamers have always sort of pushed back on that. I don't like the latency. What if my Wi-Fi goes out? I'm just trying to play a single player game, blah blah blah. Um, and so, uh, it's possible that this is something where the game industry comes together and they're like, 'We really got to fight these hackers. We got to hide our code more behind more of a firewall, like that cloud streaming firewall.' Uh, or it could be something that they just embrace and go the IP protection route. Um, but uh, yeah, to the extent it dooms AAA standalone games, that is only because it accelerates what was already happening. There's no reason to be sad. However, the real intrigue about AI is not the fact that it can recreate what was already made, it's that it can create entirely new worlds and do so for the individual. The real analogy might be video, but not Netflix, rather TikTok and Reels. And the fact that everyone gets to choose their own adventure. So, you get to make your own video games uh in the future. And this is definitely happening. Uh there's... Whoa, they even actually took down the video of this one. GTA 5 in the browser for free. Bbomb posted this. playgta5.com. Got 8,600 likes. And I have a screenshot of it running, but when we pull it up, not live, that's the actual tweet today. It says media not displayed. Not only did they take down the website, but they took down the images and the videos that were shared on X. That's pretty crazy.
Uh Tenner gives some more context here. Uh this got taken down within hours, but it's starting now within a few months. Instead of sketchy sites with pop-up ads hosting torrents of the latest AAA games, uh, a few days post release, we're going to have sites hosting fully playable free WASM... I forget what WASM...
Web Assembly versions. Yeah, that's right. Uh, of AAA games, uh, whole libraries of them. They're just at a click. Zero download required. Zero risk of viruses, zero effort or thought. I would call this an existential threat to the gaming industry if it weren't for the fact that every input to previously 100 million to 200 million dollar AAA games is effectively dropping by orders of magnitude in cost and time. Instead, it's more of a Cambrian explosion. Uh yeah, it's hard to think that uh this doesn't go the way of generated text where like people still care about the posts and where they come from, effectively intellectual property. The instantiation of the actual product is less relevant than the story around it and the people behind it. Um and the shelling point of like we're playing the same game. Of course, people will do their individual stuff as well, but anyway. Um, let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Stretch this out.
What else we have going on, John?
Well, I'm so glad to be past that subject.
Cuz you just don't like video games.
Uh, I had enough. I had enough.
What about the racing days, a video game?
Yeah. You're going to be able to race anywhere you want.
Uh Mustafa, be able to put your morning commute in a video game and try and get your lap time down to six minutes. Do you think you could make it from Malibu to the Ultra Dome in six minutes?
Six minutes in a hypercar. An LMP2 with the road cleared.
Yes. I think it's... um... what is... it would actually be... it would actually be... 15... it would probably... I assume you're going 200 miles an hour on the... okay... and you could find a pretty straight line, like there wouldn't be that many, you'd be able to be hauling... um yeah, we should... we'll do this. This is what superintelligence...
Because your Nürburgring time is already in the impressive category. I think you got the raw skills to take it to the next level.
Turning your hour commute into 10 minutes. It would be pretty... Yeah, that's a fun game. Uh anyway, Mustafa says, 'Uh, coming in with a major white pill. AI won't take your job anytime soon. In 10 years, only 5% of what humans do will be replaced by AI.' Let's see what he has to say about that.
They're doing new media over at MIT, The Humanist Review of AI. They made a magazine and they have a number of articles and uh they tapped MIT economist and Nobel Prize winner in economics Daron Acemoglu uh to write a piece about how AI will diffuse. And it's interesting because in this one it's total white pill, but then he was on 60 Minutes and he's a little bit more blackpilled. So we'll have to go back and forth. I think it's the...
Wait, that's the same guy.
Yeah. Yeah, it's sort of an odd... we'll have to reconcile this. Okay, so let's see what Daron Acemoglu says in the Humanist Review. Um he... it's a longer piece but Mustafa Suleiman uh summarized it here. He said he argues that we need to stop building AI to replace people and start building it to make them better at their jobs. 52% of Americans are worried about AI's impact on their jobs. The fear is overblown and it's steering how we build AI. I like the 48% of just confident people. Like good luck.
Good luck. I'd like to see the work I do.
Yeah. I'm not in the training data. There's no RL environment for what I do. Um AI isn't in the productivity statistics yet. This was the famous line about the internet. It shows up everywhere except the productivity statistics. Most firms using AI aren't seeing real gains yet. Expect roughly 1.5% added to GDP over 10 years. Not a revolution. Electricity took decades to spread. There's so...
The problem is like going back to our conversation uh with Sean Frank yesterday from Ridge. This is a company that's over 10 years old right now, growing 50% this year, using AI across the entire business from demand planning to creative to a number of other things and the business is performing pretty much as well as it ever has. The thing is, AI is impacting the whole business in different ways.
In big ways and small ways, but you can't really pin it on... you can't give AI credit for the growth because there's so many factors contributing, right? New products, push into retail, all these different things.
Yeah. Um, but I think you can still say that maybe most firms aren't using it to see real gains, but when you say that electricity took decades to spread, I just don't view AI as... it's not the kind of technology that takes a long time to spread when it works.
Right? And that's because we can use the internet, which pretty much everybody that's productive has access to, to spread AI.
So, um, already uh just a few bullet points in and uh...
But the Nobel Prize winning economist has another example to push back on you with. He says, if you don't like the electricity example, here's another one. Speech recognition. He said turning speech into text has been an aspiration since the 1930s. And this is a harder one to grapple with than electricity because a lot of what was in place for AI is also in place... a lot of the things that you're saying about why diffusion should be faster for AI was true for speech recognition. So uh people have been trying to do speech recognition, you talk the computer types, since the 1930s, going on a hundred years of pursuing this. It became a huge step closer to reality thanks to the work by the American husband and wife team James and Janet Baker starting in the 1980s when they founded the iconic company Dragon Systems. Dragon truly revolutionized voice recognition and it would not be an exaggeration to say that everything else that has followed in voice recognition since then is thanks to the Bakers. Their breakthrough was to eschew previous attempts to build speech recognition systems based on syntax and meaning and instead deploy machine learning techniques in order to build a pure prediction system which would map speech onto the best match text. Already in 1997, the year Dragon launched Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the first program that was capable of voice recognition from natural continuous speech, the momentousness of this was obvious. So, in previous software, uh, including the previous product from Dragon, Dragon Dictate, you had to pause in between each word to let it process the gap between words. You no longer needed to do that with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. This was 1997. I can vouch for all of this because uh Daron Acemoglu, the writer, uh after developing repetitive strain injury in both arms in '97, he was an early user. Even with the very slow processors of the time, Dragon NaturallySpeaking was like magic. It would score close to 95% accuracy. I didn't know at the time that I would be a user of their products for the next 30 years. But what I immediately knew was that as the processing power of computers improved, I could have access to much more powerful voice recognition software, enabling me to carry out my work despite a continued inability to type. By 2000, everything was going as I and others had predicted. The software had gotten better, and with better computer chips, accuracy and functionality were improving at a fast pace. What nobody could predict was that in the next two decades, despite advances in the underlying technology, consumers would see little of the gains thanks to a series of corporate disasters. Dragon was acquired in 2000 by a Belgian company, Lernout & Hauspie, uh that went bankrupt within months of the purchase with its co-founders later being found guilty of corporate fraud. Uh you hate to see that. Um let's hit him with the...
So Dragon was then purchased by ScanSoft, rebranded as Nuance. I actually worked for a startup in college that got acquired by Nuance. Uh very talented team over there. Uh which progressively deprioritized the consumer in favor of medical and enterprise markets. If you walk into a hospital today, you will see a lot of doctors and nurses dictating notes uh even before the Whisper revolution that just recently happened. Microsoft acquired Nuance in 2022 and continued the same model. The result, voice recognition software on PCs today is only marginally better than what was available in 2000. Far less progress than the underlying technology would have led me to expect. So this disappointing history lesson is one of the reasons why even greater caution is warranted when making predictions about the fast diffusion of AI models today. Breakthroughs in the infrastructure of a new technology need to go hand in hand with the right kinds of applications built on this infrastructure. And then of course you need the right marketing structure to reach potential customer base as well as inputs from consumers to act as the impetus for modifications and improvements of the applications. This is what we are not seeing for AI. This is what was completely bungled for voice recognition. What do you think?
Whole lot of mumbo jumbo, John.
Okay, let's move over to 60 Minutes because Daron Acemoglu takes the other side of his own argument, arguing against himself with Brendan Foody from Mercor.
Job category on LinkedIn. And just as machinists once replaced artisans, Brendan Foody insists he's creating a career of the future. Out of work? Fear not. Come train AI. Literally all of the top 20 economists in America, they would say the exact same thing, which is that there's going to be more jobs in 10 years than there are today.
You're a top economist in America. What say you?
One of the greatest edits. How that could happen.
What we are living through with AI is unprecedented. The first phase of the industrial revolution...
You're positive this is the same guy that... in this article that we read. Wait, I don't think these two things are incompatible.
Because he's saying 5% of the things humans do are at risk.
No, he's saying that right now if we keep building AI the same way it will replace workers, but we need to build it a different way that empowers workers. That's what the headline of the article is. Will AI replace workers? Not if we build it right.
They're saying like right now...
On the course that we're doing right now it's going to replace workers. Got it. So we need to shift courses. Okay.
And his argument from an economic perspective is like that will actually increase productivity, that will be better not just because higher employment is good but also higher economic growth is good. So we should be trying to solve problems that cannot be solved by people right now with AI as opposed to just...
Just displacing. Yeah. Just moving stuff around versus doing net new things.
I believe that's what position saying.
That's a pretty good position. But that is such a funny edit. You're a top economist. What do you say? No. One of the greatest. Uh anyway, um let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco.
And here's the thing. Yeah.
Top economists have never been wrong on anything. So, you know, literally 100% hit rate.
Yeah. You can find a take for anything. Yeah.
Find the fast takeoff, the slow takeoff. Uh, never better summarized than by I believe it was the Financial Times, not The Economist, that had the chart, which was either things are going to go completely asymptotic upwards, completely asymptotic downwards, or completely the same, which is the best analysis possible. Um, I don't know. It does feel like it's a critical moment. There's been so many people building up to like 2027's going to be the crazy year. 2026 is going to be the last normal year. Like something has to happen in 2027 that will answer a lot of the questions that have been being asked over the last five years, you know, since GPT-3 basically, uh which is like RSI, super intelligence, serious move on GDP, serious like showing up in the statistics somewhere other than just uh debt. But I mean at the same time you see like weird things happening in uh financial markets like gold is spiking and like it's hard to put that on AI but there's still like pockets of like okay there's something odd happening that you might in retrospect attribute to the AI boom. Anyway, what do you think of Jeremy's take? What agriculture did to our bodies AI will do to our brains. Make us stronger and taller.
I think he's being negative.
I think he's being negative. Didn't it in some way make us like, you know, weaker because we, you know, consuming more grains versus, you know...
Yeah. I mean, some agriculture made us a lot taller and stronger, but then made us fatter for sure because we overconsumed. And so, yeah, if you're overconsuming information, uh, it's brain rot. Yeah. But a good encapsulation of the thesis. Anyway, um let me tell you about Railway. 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.
Where you want to go next, Jordy?
Uh we got to talk about Warren Buffett because he's just like you.
He's just like you, folks. A viewer's guide to Warren Buffett's nightly trips down the YouTube rabbit hole. Uh Glenn Close clips, 1950s commercials. Uzbekistan's version of America's Got Talent. The legendary investor can't resist the algorithm either. Feeling guilty about spending hours each day watching YouTube? Don't be. Warren Buffett is right there with you. Glenn Close clips, commercials from the 1950s. Paul Anka videos. The famed investor can't get enough. Buffett enjoys speeches by complete unknowns. He's a fan of Berkshire Hathaway's own content, too. Proud of how it performs on the video platform. He watches it all nearly every evening, usually from a recliner in his Omaha home. Warren's range is broad, says Sharon Osberg, a close friend and frequent viewing companion. It can be the silliest things. Buffett also goes down random rabbit holes just like us. The next day, he'll come into his office gushing over a moving amateur rendition of My Way. In August, Osberg visited Buffett's home in Omaha. They spent hours on YouTube grinding. We watched a really good documentary on Roy Cohn, she says, and the Uzbekistan version of America's Got Talent. That would be Uzbekistan Got Talent. It's easy to remember, somewhat predictable. Uh it's unclear if Buffett is one of the channel's 34,500 subscribers. Buffett, who recently turned 96 and stepped down as Berkshire's chairman, declined to comment on his YouTube habits. What's up with Sharon just blowing up his whole routine?
Like, if I invite you into my home to watch... like, if I invite a friend to my home, I'll go do something. If I invite a friend to my home to watch YouTube videos with me for hours and hours and hours and go down the YouTube rabbit hole and then a week later you're calling up the journal spilling the truth about my rabbit hole habits.
I feel like Buffett had to be like, I want you to tell the journal.
You think it's astroturf?
Yeah. I think I want you to take this.
You think he's paying attention? I think he's trying to...
I think he's as locked in as ever. I don't think he's doing anything for entertainment. He wants the other allocators to get comfortable. You know, I can spend a few hours on YouTube every night. Meanwhile, he's studying the blade every single night and all of this.
Giving him the benefit of 4D chess.
