You're watching TVPN. 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 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 Dungey 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. No, great show. Great show for you today, folks. Oh, I was leafing through GQ this morning. Tom Cruise is on the cover. It's a good issue. There's a funny anecdote in here that I wanted to share. I need to find it. But they got the whole Tom Cruise spread, lots of photos. 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. He's a course bro. He dropped a course, a private course, and we got to get access to this. 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. 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 to use that frame. Thank you. There's just different layers of storytelling, of structure, but also to understand certain things so that you can forget about it. 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?' 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 there's a lot of journalists that they get documents, they scoop things, they release things. 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 Kevin Roose has the Daramday big blob of compute thesis from 2017, like this leaked PDF sort of on the scaling law and the bitter lesson basically. 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 would violate journalistic ethics to just put a bounty out for a document that you know exists.
For the truth. 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 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 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. I thought it was good. It was very cool. Like the framing of the movie. It's hard to reveal too much. I thought it was very...
Film school. Like this critique is so nuanced. It's remarkable.
I thought it was... I don't want to spoil anything.
Give us like 30 seconds of spoilers. I'll bleep it out.
The bleep organ. 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. Wait, so can he talk over the bleep? Basically, you can hear both. Okay. We're working on a new feature.
The game decompilation thing is going strong. Ben Thompson was writing about it in Stratechery today. There were some more knock-on effects. He took it in a very interesting legal direction about the implications of taking a video game, 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. 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 on ice skates and flicking pucks at zombies. It was pretty good. 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. But 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. 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. And so Ben Thompson goes on to describe a little bit of what's going on. 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. For Halo, that's x86. You've always been able to disassemble machine code into assembly. 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? 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 the lawyers being really excited seeing all these going out because it means full employment. 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. 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.
Is that me or is that... getting hit with a copyright?
Two hours later you'll get hit with a copyright. So you'll have to take it down. There's a couple interesting things. So the actual value of these 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 the training rollout for the AI labs, like the training data that comes from having this fleet of 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 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. Means that I would expect 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. He also just talks about 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 in a world where if you send someone a disc or you send someone an executable binary, 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 this was 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. And so 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.' Or it could be something that they just embrace and go the IP protection route. But 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 in the future. And this is definitely happening. 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.
Tenner gives some more context here. 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 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. Of AAA games, 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. Yeah, it's hard to think that this doesn't go the way of generated text where 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. And the shelling point of like we're playing the same game. Of course, people will do their individual stuff as well, but anyway. 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.
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.
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... it would actually be... 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.
Yeah, we should... we'll do this. This is what superintelligence... because your Nurburgring 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. Anyway, Mustafa says, '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 MI, The Humanist Review of AI. They made a magazine and they have a number of articles and they tapped MIT economist and Nobel Prize winner in economics Daron Acemoglu 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. It's a longer piece but Mustafa Suleiman 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. 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 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. 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, already just a few bullet points in and...
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 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, 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 Daron Acemoglu, the writer, 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, that went bankrupt within months of the purchase with its co-founders later being found guilty of corporate fraud. You hate to see that. Let's hit him with the...
Naughty naughty.
So Dragon was then purchased by ScanSoft, rebranded as Nuance. I actually worked for a startup in college that got acquired by Nuance. Very talented team over there, 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 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 McCur...
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 he's 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. Anyway, 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. 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. I don't know. It does feel like it's a critical moment. There's been so many people building up to like 2027 is 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, which is like RSI, super intelligence, serious move on GDP, serious showing up in the statistics somewhere other than just debt. But I mean at the same time you see like weird things happening in financial markets like gold is spiking and like it's hard to put that on AI but there's still 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. Didn't it in some way make us weaker because we're consuming more grains versus...
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, it's brain rot. Yeah. But a good encapsulation of the thesis. Anyway, 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, Jordi?
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. 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. 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 YouTube... 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.
Yes. Yes. AAM's 40 razor.
Yeah, that is AAM's 40 razor. This is what he's doing. Makes sense. Tier list time.
Should we do it? Do you want to rate it or do you want me to rate it?
Okay, we got a tier list. First, Glenn Close clips. I'm kicking it off with C tier. It's a little old for me. Not into it. Commercials from the 1950s, though. I'm going A tier.
Commercials from the 1950s, you're going to learn a lot. It's going to be an interesting time capsule, and they lend themselves very well to YouTube videos. Paul Anka videos. I'm not a huge Paul Anka fan. I would go D tier with that. Berkshire Hathaway videos studying. He's watching game footage. So I go S tier with Berkshire Hathaway videos. Also deeply emotional. His business partner. It's a way to remember him. Makes a ton of sense. Amateur musical performances, including... See, I liked Frank Sinatra's My Way. An amateur cover needs to have a twist. It needs to be a heavy metal rendition of My Way to get A tier for me.
Or some like if he's watching early Justin Bieber performances, you know, somebody that's about to go on a generational ride.
That's good, too. Yeah, that's good, too. Roy Cohn documentary, fascinating. If you haven't seen The Apprentice, it's a biopic about Roy Cohn. I would definitely watch that documentary. I'd go A tier with the Roy Cohn documentary. International talent shows, never really dipped my toe in that pool.
Don't knock it until you try it, John.
I just need to put it in the C tier because I don't have an educated opinion here. Railroad videos, on the other hand, fascinating. Tons of lessons to be learned about the modern era. I'd go S tier. He also owns a railroad, so he's again studying game film effectively. Big band era content, little dated. I would put it C tier. Let's do Charlie Munger speeches. Of course, that's in the Berkshire video category. That goes S tier.
12 Angry Men. I like that he was watching this on Turner Classic Movies. He was watching the whole film. So I'd put that A tier for TCM movies generally, but I noticed that when they mentioned Bill Murray movies and clips, Lost in Translation, I'm not a big clip movie watcher. I'd rather just watch the trailer and then the whole film. I don't really like the whole clip, although I do get sucked into them every once in a while. For movie clips, I would go B tier.
Do you agree with that roughly?
Okay. Our tier list for today.
Yeah. At the end of this article goes into... I'll just read it. Lately, Buffett has been turning to YouTube to remember Munger, who died in 2023. He's been viewing Munger's speeches, including a 2018 talk at the University of Michigan. Marveling at his wit and wisdom, colleagues and friends say. You feel the bond between the two of them as he watches Charlie. It's really quite something. And when we were reading this earlier, we almost started shedding. Yeah, it's emotional. Truly one of the greatest partnerships in history.
Hands down the greatest partnership.
It's hard to think of anything else that even comes close, but fun that we're getting more color commentary on the Warren Buffett life. Everyone knows the McDonald's habit and the house and the indefensible plane and stuff, but this is a fun different spin in the modern era. It shows you that he's not entirely a Philistine. There's a whole version of the lore that could have been, oh, he still only reads the newspaper. He doesn't use the computer at all. And that would have been somewhat predictable. So I like that this is like a left turn for his brand.
Yes. Good for chess. Yes. Fooling. Well, yeah. We'll have to ask Greg.
Been a guest on the show before.
Yes. He is speaking some truth that's going to be very controversial. I'm going to read it. He said, 'If you do hardcore knowledge work, you are likely severely underestimating how much sugar you need to sustain peak performance. Protein alone cannot sustain a full day of system two thinking.' He follows it up and says, 'Allowing myself to drink sweet drinks while working has been the most profound performance enhancement in the past 5 years for me. For the past two weeks, I've been outputting at 50% higher focus, longer, one power nap at my desk per day. I'm able to do 12-hour days the way I used to be able to when I was younger. I don't have any crash. I crashed much worse end of day when I was avoiding sugar. I'm not sure why this is the case. It seems contrary to most of what I've read. Hypothesis one: I burn a lot of energy working at a computer and easy fuel gets burned off quickly like a runner. I was in a calorie deficit that was hurting my performance previously. Same reason chess players consume chocolate milk while playing. Hypothesis two: I have diabetes. Any other ideas?' Sugar is a superfood.
Get it through your head, John. Get it through your thick skull.
I know you like sugar, but not enough.
Not enough sugar. I could be gone.
You know, people have been told that it's evil and bad for you and all these different things, but for the listeners at home, if you haven't already, it's time to study Dr. Ray Peat. That's really all I'll say. Go down the Ray Peat rabbit hole tonight on YouTube, Warren Buffett style. Spend a few hours listening to Ray Peat talk about sugar and metabolism and a bunch of other topics in that whole orbit. I've probably talked about it on the show before, but I just started drinking a classic Coca-Cola every day years ago. It's still almost a daily habit.
I try to fit it in every afternoon.
Every afternoon. It has some caffeine in it, so I don't want to do it too late, but it's tasty. You feel good before, during, and after. And I can't recommend it enough. And a prediction. I'll say it on the show. I've said it off air many times. I think in the same way that salt became one of the hot supplements of the last few years, sugar is the next one. Every single new drink...
Getting the stick packs that are like LMNT, but it's just sugar in the raw.
No, that's... I mean, it's basically... I'm not going to go that far, but all we've been through 10 years, 15 years now of like all these fake...
What is in Liquid IV? Is that sugar?
That was pretty high sugar and they always got flamed for it.
But the truth is that proper hydration requires some sugar. Yeah. Good. So anyways, I'm glad that we are about to exit the...
Slog that we've been through of all these different artificial sugars that one taste inferior, don't give you energy. Yeah. And often are bad for your gut or have other negative long-term impacts. So sugar's coming back. You heard it here first.
There's a really good source of sugar that literally comes from mother earth. It comes from corn. It's like high fructose corn syrup. If you go and you go to 7-Eleven, you get a big gulp. It has literally like mother nature created the corn. They extract the syrup. It's like as American as it gets. You put it on pancakes and you just chug that down and you're good to go.
Okay. Well, I want to see you just with some high fructose, just a bottle of high fructose corn syrup.
Chugging that. I'll have superfood. You said it, not me.
Not quite. Not quite. Stick to good old-fashioned cane sugar. Folks, let me tell you about console.com. Console available AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.
All right, John. Do you think, what's the right amount to spend on your office per employee? Because Castle Hook Partners, an 11 billion hedge fund, is paying around $600,000 a year in rent per employee.
That seems pretty cool. Whoa, that's really a lot. Okay, that's really, really high. Okay. Castle Hook Partners, the 11 billion hedge fund founded by former Soros Fund Management investor David Rogers, signed a New York City record of paying 350 to 400 a square foot. That's for the top two floors of the new 625 Madison Tower. Castle Hook, which is backed by Stanley Druckenmiller, will pay 21.2 million for 53,000 ft of penthouse space overlooking Central Park. Castle Hook has just 35 employees. Are they expecting to scale up a lot and change that? You know, hopefully not. I mean, you don't think this setup's going to deliver alpha? You're like, it's a beautiful space. Yeah. You know, they need to scale AUM. They need to deliver returns. Otherwise, they're going to be thrown out of the building.
I mean, it's wait, it's 21 mil a year. Yeah. Okay. 21. I don't think it's unreasonable given their scale.
Yeah. I mean, it also probably makes sense for clients that want to come by. There's just not that a lot of hedge fund stuff just over the fountain like well given their fee base.
Yeah. No, no, no, they can clearly afford it. But the question is like what are the knock-on effects other than just like when you go to work you feel great. There are certain businesses where it's like oh well like if you're VC and entrepreneurs come and pitch you and they see a nice building they're like oh this is a serious firm I should work with them. But hedge funds oftentimes like the CEO isn't going by the hedge fund's office all that much. And same thing for the clients. They might not actually be going and doing a pitch in person, although I'm sure that happens. So, it just depends. I don't know. Pretty cool. I want to see a video tour. It looks like these windows are really, really big, but it feels like the top two floors, it looks a little lower than some of the renders that I've seen from taller skyscrapers in Manhattan. Can you be too high in Manhattan? I haven't been yet. No, no fear of heights or anything. I feel like if you have a clear view, like I mean I guess you always leave yourself open to a taller building popping up and blocking your view and that's one of the advantages of being extra high, but I feel like a view like this looks a little bit lower. But maybe I just have the perspective all wrong. I don't know. Let me know. What do you think of the new Passport?
People were going back and forth on it. Paul McGregor was saying, 'If I was redesigning the cover of what is arguably the country's most important public document, I'd first hire both the best typographer and crest designer money can buy, then fiddle about with the layouts probably.' And Joe Gibbia fires back, 'Hi, when you're done finding, when you're done fiddling, please send me resume of top crest designer. Make sure they can do better than the 1782 official national anthem.' It looks like a very national emblem.
National emblem. Yeah, the redesign looks like a very tasteful and moderate iteration. Like I think people are reacting to this like it's like now it's all gold and it has like a bear and an eagle fighting on it and it features like the UFC octagon, which like is sort of where people's expectations are for these types of things. But this feels like...
I'm surprised that there's no UFC branding on the passport.
Yeah, no ads is a big step backwards. But yeah, seems like a pretty moderate iteration here. I don't know.
Yeah, they made the eagle a little bit older.
And also I think the eagle is like the exact same design, right? It's just bigger. I think this is cool. And I like that the United States of America is bigger. Said make the eagle bold.
Bold the eagle. And I mean, just, I'm no typography expert, but in the previous passport, passport was the biggest word, but everyone knows what a passport looks like, but they don't know what country it's from. So if you pull out a book at the airport, it's very obvious that you're pulling out a passport, but it's not obvious what country it's from. So putting the name of the country bigger makes more sense. Right? Am I crazy or is this like design 101?
I think you might be on to something.
Okay. So I think the new iteration makes a lot of sense. It's just like put the name and put the logo bigger so that you can see that and everyone knows that it's a passport, so put passport smaller.
Yeah. I will say that the passport text where it's kind of sans serif all caps and there's like spacing, that does look like AI slop kind of.
This is like very common when you just have too much, too wide of kerning is your problem.
Okay. The kerning needs some work. Yeah, it does read a little odd.
That's pretty high stakes graphic design.
You're like, 'Yeah, we're going to make this, you know, pamphlet for a conference and nobody's going to read it.' And if they do, they'll look at it for a second. The passport's like, 'We're going to make a hundred, you know, 100 million of these and then they're going to carry them for a decade.'
Representing the country globally.
They will be inspected many times. I'm not into passports. I don't want to leave America. It's like not a good thing. They could just get rid of them. Just stay here.
When you hit the button that just like ended the US passport and...
Yeah, just wind down the program. Just go to Alaska if you want it to be cold. Go to Arizona if you want it to be hot. Problem solved.
Go to Hawaii if you want to go to the tropics.
Why do you need to go to another country? We got everything you want right here.
Mike Isaac, he's out of the New York Times. That's right.
Do you think there's anything to that rumor that he had amassed an immense amount of soft power and was considering a CEO coup?
I think he was making a run for it.
He might have. And then he was ousted, defenestrated for becoming too powerful.
That seems like Occam's razor in this scenario. It also could be that he just wanted to go to the Atlantic and write, you know, longer, different pieces in a different style, have a fresh look. But I do like that we caught him via the paparazzi. It's very good.
There's some drama at the Atlantic though. We had the CEO of the Atlantic on our show. He has a podcast. This is Nicholas Thompson, Atlantic CEO. He was talking to the media about the media business on Vox Channels podcast last month when host Peter Kafka — I did Peter Kafka's show, but I didn't think it was called Channels. Maybe he has a second show. Peter Kafka asked him, 'How was the magazine's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, feeling about the growing success of Thompson's personal podcast?' So, he's the CEO, but his podcast is blowing up because he's getting really great guests. And then there's also a tension here. He says, 'We make a lot of money on the stuff I do.' Okay, this doesn't seem controversial anymore. I don't know why they're writing about this. Just giving him a victory lap. What is this? This is such a puff piece. This is insane. Insane puff piece in Semaphore about Nicholas Thompson just printing on his podcast. Okay, we get it.
he says, 'Jeff likes it when we make money.' Thompson's response ricocheted around the Atlantic's newsroom. Thompson's podcast, The Most Interesting Thing in AI, has emerged as a source of tension between the magazine's business and editorial teams. Journalists have complained that the lucrative and high-profile show is not subject to the Atlantic's editorial rules, input, or oversight. Yet, a casual listener could easily take it for an Atlantic editorial product. I did see some people going back and forth when he did the Zuckerberg interview. People were like, 'Is this a sponsored podcast?' Because he opens with like a pretty soft question just being like, 'What are you launching today?' And then he does ask a bunch of really hard questions later in the interview, but I think people just keyed off of the fact that it was the moment when Meta was in the depths of like they're screen recording everyone, and so that was the question you got to ask in that interview. He did ask it, but just later in the interview, and people were like, 'Oh, he didn't ask it up front, that's not enough.' Anyway, Thompson's show is made by the magazine's business side and like any number of contemporary podcasts. Yes. Features interviews with technologists and business leaders interspersed with sponsored content. When the podcast launched in 2024, the newsroom raised no objections, but now that it's printing, they got an issue. The Atlantic has featured a robust paid content arm for years through its creative marketing studio and custom events business. They got to go further. You know, if they're doing sponsored content, I think that they should be auctioning off the guest slots, but they should also be auctioning off the host slots. So it should just be like, okay, you can just post whatever you want on our channel if you pay enough.
But also sell ad slots. So it's like, okay, Zuck wants to do some SpawnCon, but Alex Wang also wants to. They're going to talk to each other on the Atlantic podcast, but then there's going to be ads in the feed too.
But it's presented by Anthropic.
Yes, exactly. Exactly. Maximal financial things. Anyway, they're going back and forth on that. We'll see where that goes. What else is going on?
What else we got? What else we got? Oh, Le Chat from Mistral.
Lechon. They're calling it Lechonk.
Lechon. Yes. They're leaning into the jokes. Mistral AI, the French neolab.
Is it fair to call them a neolab or are they just a lab?
They're just a lab, right? They're pre-neolab.
Yeah, I would say so. They're kind of...
Would we call them pre-neolab specifically?
Let me actually consult our nomenclature.
Okay. Oh, I think they were like national lab or something like that up there with Lawrence Livermore.
But they launched Mistral Large 4, aka Lune, one trillion parameters natively, made it multimodal. 49 billion active parameters. It is the best open-weight model from US or Europe on aggregated benchmarks. State-of-the-art on critical workloads including cyber defense, manufacturing and finance, and it surpasses closed frontier models on visual grounding. Forged in Europe. End-to-end deployable from Europe via our own Mistral cloud infrastructure, available to all via API today, working with cybersecurity partners privately. Open weights release end of October. So presumably they'll release the open weights for like the cyber-nerfed version. I would imagine something like that. I don't know. Anyway, what is your review, Tyler? Do you have any other data to share about Mistral's progress?
Yeah, I mean it looks very good. I think it's like very much on par with the kind of frontier of the open source. So like the Chinese labs, it's like very much a contender. It's not necessarily like destroying all of them on every benchmark, but it's like certainly if people are worried about using Chinese open source models because maybe downstream there's going to be some like legal ramifications or whatever. Yeah, like this is a very good choice.
It really does change the open source closed source debate because yeah, I think Mistral and Reflection, which is kind of the American open source lab.
Like we're now starting to see like, okay, these models are actually like quite competent.
And Reflection came out with, it's called Beam yesterday.
