You're watching TV. Today is Wednesday, October 7, 2026. You're watching TV technology, the fortunes of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, including Tony Hawk. Now, they got a deal with Tony Hawk. And I saw Bam Margera in the promotional video. Go check it out. Uh, it's on Eric Lyman's X account. They did it again.
Over the Ramp socials. They did it again. Um, no. Uh, fantastic. Fantastic.
Chad's saying we're late today. We are late today. We were working on uh working on stream title. Working on uh the plan for the show, but we have a great show for you because we planned. Um, first off, I got a little movie review for you. I saw a movie yesterday. I went to the theater and I saw Prime Time and I and I wanted to Yeah. Oh, okay. I I want to review from those uh in on the production team who have seen Prime Time, the new Robert Pattinson film, but I thought I would try and take you on sort of a a film critique, a journey with a review that sort of channels the way Tyler reviews movies. So, here's my review of Prime Time.
It was good. The audio was good and the video was good. Act one was good. Act two was good and act three was good. The acting was good and the lighting and the cinematography was good and the set design was good. So overall I feel like I have a I would say it's a good movie.
Strong review. That was a good review.
Pretty good. What do you guys think? You liked it? Let's get Scott up here.
How cool was the the frame? It felt like I was watching IMAX format, but it was just 4:3.
They used 23 different cameras on that movie.
The cinematography was crazy, right? And the highlights blown out and there was so much grain. Like it was it was like way too stylized for
Oh, yeah. It was so stylized. I had no idea where any of this would like where these ideas came from. It feels like they were just pulling from every different camera from that era.
Yeah, it was really, really cool.
Lance Oppenheim, he does documentaries. Have you seen Ren Faire and
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. That's right. Okay, cool.
Yeah. Uh, but yeah, really, really fun uh, you know, creative way to throw back to like the way people watch TV at that time. 4x3.
I like that. I like that Chris Hansen was kind of like the antagonist the entire time. Yeah, it's a it's a it's a it's a complex investigation of his career and and uh and the way he's remembered. Did he go too far? And it it it feels like a little bit heavy-handed, like it's pretty clear the the the vision. It doesn't fully leave you open to make your own judgment, but you of course can which I I thought was a nice touch. And and Robert Pattinson is just in fighting form like
Yeah, he's in a flow state.
He's just in flow state. Yeah, he's really good. Uh anyway, we clearly were teasing it, but of course we have the TBPN road to Christmas countdown ready for you. Let's let you know. Let's remind everyone there are 78 days until Christmas. Get ready.
Get ready. If you missed it yesterday, we did an interview, a deep dive into the Christmas Tree Farmers Association of America, understanding everything from how the Christmas tree industry is structured to techniques for keeping your Christmas tree alive.
And if you watch any tech or business content this week, it's got to be that.
It's got to be that. It's got to be that interview. Uh it was so we highly recommend that you donate. I made a donation yesterday. Uh treesfortroops.org. Give whatever you can. Uh they also do company matching. So, if you uh work at a company that matches donations, uh if you're an early Anthropic uh employee and they match three to one, back the truck up. Throw down 100 mil. Come on, let's do it. Let's Let's get Every troop must have the biggest tree possible. A 40-footer. You know, I want a White House style tree in every troop's home. That would be amazing. No, but uh he he had some harsh words for the plastic tree industry. He called them toilet brushes, which was hilarious. I I'd never heard that that that slur for those uh plastic trees before, but he he had it ready to go, which I enjoyed. And it did. Uh and I noticed some people in the comments saying, "Hey, look, I understand that a real tree is better, but not everyone can afford a real tree, and the economics of a of a plastic tree just sometimes make make more sense for certain people. And I understand that not everyone's in the position to buy a brand new expensive tree. First off, that's why we do the road to Christmas. You can start saving.
And you can be saving 364 days for your tree. Also, I would say don't you don't have to go huge. You can buy a three-foot two foot tree.
Yeah, you can get a tiny tree um if that's what you can afford. And I think that you will wind up saving money on a series of small real trees over the full-size expensive plastic toilet brush tree. So, be careful out there this uh this Christmas. Make sure to support our uh our Christmas tree industry because it's important.
Anyway, um I had a question. I I I asked Ben Thompson this. Let me see if he's responded yet because he has not responded. We will talk about it on the show and get to the bottom of this later. So Ben Thompson's going through uh a bunch of a bunch of uh you know frustrations over um macOS. He's vibe coding building apps. The apps need permissions. We've talked about this uh the the agentic era. Um but yesterday there was a post that hit the timeline that was uh pretty crazy. A uh a sort of truth nuke uh for the Adobe crowd. Someone decompiled basically every Adobe product. It's called Artcraft. Getartcraft.com. Capable tools for artists. And you can download for free all sorts of different um tools that they have. And they basically cloned
Photoshop, Premiere Pro. Uh they it feels like they can do a lot. I'm not exactly sure if they decompiled everything in the Adobe ecosystem, but listed here is PhotoCraft, which is clearly Photoshop, VectorCraft, which is Adobe Illustrator, FilmCraft, which is uh Premiere Pro, LightCraft, which is Lightroom, PrintCraft, EffectCraft, which looks like After Effects, and then DesignCraft, which is I think InDesign. Um, more crafts are on the way. And so it says all Adobe products re-implemented from scratch, free and open source. And uh this is pretty pretty crazy. There have been open-source competitors to Photoshop for a long time. They've always lagged a lot. I downloaded uh the Photoshop decompilation PhotoCraft. Used it a little bit. Not bad. Pretty remarkable how many tools did make it over. It actually doesn't have everything that you would expect. Some of the really cool features of modern Photoshop are actually AI and they run on the server. So if you if you if you want to patch a hole, you've always been able to fill it in with a with a full color. You've also been able to do content aware fill where it has a basic algorithm that looks at the colors of the pixels around the textures and tries to blend that in, but it can be a little it's like pretty hallucinatory. And then recently Adobe launched uh AI fill. I forget what it's called. Not it's not contentaware fill. It's it's it's some generative fill. I think they call it generative fill and that of course runs on the server usually uses Nano Banana or they have a they have a couple fine-tuned models and that feature because it's server side doesn't work. So there's this interesting thing where like yeah you're in the death of software you can just decompile everything but at the same time I probably want my software to run on the server. I want the server to be stable. I I need the I need services. So all the investments that software makers made in providing like inference-heavy tooling um actually sort of creates a little bit more of a moat. Obviously the moats are are are decreasing but there still is something where I where if I were doing heavy duty Photoshop use PhotoCraft would not be a perfect substitute for my workflow. For some people they'll be like yeah this is actually perfect. But you've always been able to download an illegal copy of Photoshop. Uh, but this is less illegal maybe. It's unclear. It's unclear because it it's probably
I don't know. But it's going to be fun to watch the open source decompilation uh community uh duke it out with all the tech companies. Um
Yeah, the interesting thing is um there's been so many reasons to not buy Adobe for so long, just given that historically I would think of an idea for even like a joke and I'd be thinking in my head, I wish I had I wish I had the time to Photoshop this or I wish I had somebody handy that could just Photoshop this.
You get there with a prompt. Yeah. Especially for these sort of like less professional use cases.
Tools sort of stick around if it's like you need to lock in and do like a full day of work. Like there's no substitute yet for like I if you were going to be spending eight hours in After Effects or eight hours in Premiere Pro, you're probably not going to be able to replace that with a prompt. But if it's like, oh yeah, you want to just like, you know, composite two images together for a meme or add some text, a prompt is going to get you there. If it was, and it would have been 20 minutes of work in Photoshop, now it's uh, you know, one minute of work in ChatGPT um or any other tool. Uh, and so the obviously we're seeing like these two spikes of intelligence right now. Anything that can be done in a purely virtual environment is accelerating extremely quickly. Anything that touches like the real world or requires human data or requires like this flywheel. Uh that's much slower. Uh and the OpenAI math results like show a similar story. We can talk about that more later, but uh I'm sure most people saw it. Uh it's a pretty crazy result. Uh what is the what is the highlight the high level? It's like 70 different problems, right? I think it was so I think the the full number is 722 like manuscripts. Okay. And then so it's kind of hard to like how do you delineate like an actual problem? Yeah.
Um but yeah there's like a massive list of like unsolved problems.
Yeah. The the press release just calls it a broad range. It's like we solved math. Um uh it's uh it's interesting. There's a there's a good Josh Gans article analysis on Substack that we can read through later. Um but uh and and Francois Chollet uh the creator of ARC-AGI broke down a theory of what's going on with this big jump in progress and what it means for overall generalization. He said, "What if the jagged frontier is mainly math plus code which you can push arbitrarily far with reinforcement learning learning with verifiable rewards RLVR and everything else starts to plateau because it's still bottlenecked by human generated data. Model performance in nonverifiable areas has kept improving steadily, albeit much slower than for math and code. But is that steady improvement a side effect of a higher G the general intelligence itself driven by RLVR or only a function of the amount of new human data getting injected into training which is still continually happening on a massive scale? A lot of things depend on the answer to this question. And so what's what's interesting is um it really this is a this is a this is a less of a feel the AGI moment and more of a feel of super intelligence moment for me personally because no human intelligence has ever been able to solve this many math problems this quickly at this level of mathematical ability like it's just it it has never happened in human history. Uh it's beyond it feels like it's beyond Einstein grinding on this or anyone else really. Uh and so it feels like it's something new. At the same time, it's very spiky. I still like the machine intelligence name because it has a different shape and we're trying to mold the machine intelligence into something that slots in neatly into like a human a general framework but it keeps breaking out and spiking in these odd areas because of the the the ability to train in these environments. So um the terminology debates are sort of irrelevant. Um there's clearly some near-term impacts that are worth working through. Uh as I mentioned earlier, Ben Thompson has been working through these macOS frustrations while he goes deeper in agentic AI. Uh he wrote about this in a Stratechery post called Apple and the Hacker's Future. He said, "What I'm much more interested in is controlling the software layer myself. The fact of the matter is that with AI, you can decompile almost all existing software. There is a revolution happening in gaming over the past few weeks as game after game is decompiled to source and ported to any platform you wish and you can write your own. That means my software that interacts with my agent in the way I want it to for everything. That's way more exciting than praying Apple delivers the right API and that third party developers don't suck. And so, um, he's he's talked about the frustration of of you use an agent to build a piece of software and it and that piece of software lives on your Mac Mini or your computer and it needs to access the desktop to save files or it needs to uh access the network. And when you build a new piece of software, macOS says, "Hey, this is a this is a piece of software you're running, but you need to explicitly give it permissions, you have to click yes on the popup." We're all familiar with this from iOS. You download an app and it's like, "Can it send you notifications? Can it have your location? Can it get into your camera roll?" Right? Like these these apps, even after you install them, they're very walled off for privacy reasons, which is great. But Ben wants to operate at a different level of abstraction. Give a coding harness the ability to write software that then maintains the same level of uh of approvals and uh and access uh and permissions that the overarching AI agent has been given. Um and there's been this bull case for Linux. It's possible that we see more Linux boxes and maybe even Linux on the desktop because all of the downsides of Linux are offset by oh well now you just have a prompt to interface with it instead of anytime like getting like the volume changed in Linux is sometimes like a command line thing and it's such a hassle but if you have a prompt there you can just say oh like fix this driver change this thing and it'll just go do it. Um uh but uh the uh what's what's interesting is like we went from like old games like Halo and Modern Warfare 2 and Minecraft being decompiled uh and then Photoshop and some other Adobe software. And I'm wondering like how far are we away from just straight up decompiling macOS? Because if you can decompile macOS, then you could potentially patch security features that you don't like, uh, you could change that fact that every new application needs permissions granted explicitly. You could just go into the source code and recompile your new version of your operating system that's based on macOS. Now, clearly Apple's not going to be happy about that. It's really complicated, but what
Yeah. I mean, isn't that just like jailbreaking like your iPhone? We've been able to do that for a while, but no one does it because then you lose like a bunch of features of
Yeah. I wonder I wonder how hostile Apple would be to that because is there a way to to decompile jailbreak uh macOS and still appear to Apple servers as like, oh yeah, this is like a legit macOS install. And so uh we will still serve them iCloud or we will still uh treat it as a viable iMessage recipient, which is like what people want. They want iMessage. They want the ecosystem. They want security updates. But then they also at least the the hackers in Ben Thompson's analysis.
Sure. They'll love it and they'll encourage it and they'll celebrate it.
Yeah. Yeah. Uh it but it does feel like it does feel like it could be good for the hacker's future in the Apple ecosystem. Like if you can eventually just point an AI model and say like, you know what, I don't like this about macOS, but I like everything else. Just change this feature at a very root root level and it goes and breaks in and does exactly what you want. Uh hackers could be like, "Yeah, okay, we're staying with macOS for a while." Because the hardware is great. They obviously still have a huge hardware moat. Um but there are a whole bunch of other uh issues in the new world where software is infinitely malleable. Uh regardless, like this is all just firmly the domain of hackers. Even this uh even this Photoshop like is Adobe moving on the news like uh Adobe market cap where we traded down 3% 5% over the last five days 10% over the past month. I don't know. There's like an ongoing SaaS apocalypse narrative. It's down 33% over the past year. Um but uh it doesn't seem like people are are are cancelling their Creative Cloud subscriptions in mass because of this. But uh it'll be interesting to see where this goes. This is definitely like uh you got to be pretty early adopterish to be like, "Yeah, I'm running the decompiled version of this thing and like I modded my own Halo into Modern Warfare and I'm having fun with that." Um I did see someone got a nuke in Modern Warfare 2 Minecraft Edition. Did you get a nuke?
It seems like you did drop a nuke on this. Yeah, right now.
Uh oh. Uh oh. I feel like the sound effects a little anticlimactic there. Okay, there we go. I guess it would be quiet. There we go. The truth.
Goodbye everyone. We'll be back in 5 seconds. This animation's a little slow, so I don't know.
We're going to work on speed.
We got to speed that one up.
Um, last thought on on uh math day yesterday. Um, you got to wonder where companies like Harmonic go. Vlad's company. Their focus has been
A few of those companies.
Yeah. Their focus has been, you know, building mathematical super intelligence. Um, it's not to say that, um, it's not to say that that they don't have a bunch of different angles that they could still run at. Yeah.
But I imagine that is the kind of thing that they would have wanted to do, you know, themselves versus um, uh, getting, you know, sort of front-run by a more uh, general purpose lab.
Yeah, it's uh, yeah, it's interesting. I wonder where else there's still a few Millennium Prize problems out there that you could grind uh if you're in the race. And and then there's so many other things that you can sort of uh pivot towards if you're uh working on super intelligence of any kind, but specifically mathematical super intelligence. You would imagine that that uh you could go and if you've made progress, yeah, maybe you're a month behind solving all these conjectures and whatnot. Uh but you have a solid model, you could go and and you know try and dominate in an engineering vertical, right, John?
Uh do you value human intelligence above all other human qualities?
I knew the answer to that already because we've been operating with golden retriever golden retriever mindset.
Yes. Yes. The golden retriever mindset. Uh two years ago we sort of coined this on the show. It's a two-year anniversary of TBPN, by the way. We started in October of 2024.
Yeah, two years in. Um, but yes, the Golden Retriever
Be what was it? Hot, friendly, and dumb.
Something that uh it was like, this is pre-lookmaxxing, but it was basically like focus on physical fitness. Don't make enemies. Be very friendly, and don't think you're the smartest person in the room. No one really likes a know-it-all. But also, you're going to have a bad time if you uh if you prize value in if you value intelligence above all other human qualities, you're going to have a bad time. That was Ilya Sutskever in 2023. And um yeah, it seems like that is playing out in real time, but there are still a whole bunch of other things. And I don't know, people are val like intelligence is still really important obviously. It's just applied in so many different ways. Uh like it it's not it's not it's just odd that like the IMO gold medalist to startup founder pipeline is super rich and yet the work of a Scott Wu at Cognition day-to-day does not look like solving IMO IMO level
Looks like high stakes poker.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Deal making, hiring, strategy, implementation, product development. There's so many other things. It would be very funny if it was just like, oh yeah, actually like solving math problems is the most like if you can solve math problem, your your company will make like a billion dollars. So, you got to solve like 12 a year, so you got to just staff like a lot of mathematicians and like just be solving these. And like, yeah, as long as Okay, how are you going to solve 20 of these math problems that get you a billion dollars each next year? Because we need to see growth. We need to underwrite these. It's pretty high margin, but you got to pay the mathematicians a lot. No, it's never really been that that's not the work, but uh it's all these it's all these other human qualities uh that seem to be sticking around. I don't
Run says, "Do not let yourself be reduced to the status of an audience at a magic show uncomprehendingly clapping as machine intelligence creates parcels of astounding knowledge. All of this is for us to be understood by us to sate our own curiosities. It's all really happening." Uh yeah, the good news here, you know, the internal model that uh was used.
Why is he taking shots at being an audience member at a magic show? That's like my favorite
I I'm I'm I'm like the number one audience member at a magic show. I love magic shows and I love being there being like, "Wow, this is amazing. That's the best. That's the best. I don't need to be the guy being like, "Oh, I figured out the magic trick. I I know how it works." I just want to sit there and be awed. And that's my experience today. I'm just like, really impressive math, guys. Awesome. But I don't I don't need to. I'm good. I'm good. No. Uh it is a good it is a good message for a particular for a particular person but I think if you didn't understand the first thing about the theorems that are trying to be disproved you're not really going to be satisfied by trying to understand the proofs uh you can just uh there are some really funny ones though somebody uh somebody was making fun of like our our our chud universe is what was that one you can do a for you can do Fourier transforms in O of N log N to the 0.99999999999999 time f this chud universe. It's just like it's the least elegant solution to the to the math problem. And and somebody was somebody was sort of arguing that like uh like a lot of the previous work in math has been like oh try and find the elegant solution and then the AI comes in and it's just like there's an inelegant solution and uh and it just tells you a lot about both the mathematical discipline and like the nature of our universe that there are like these weird quirks. Um anyway uh where should we go next? Uh SpaceX looking to raise 40 billion to give to Jensen. Blockbuster debt deal is the latest sign of vast spending on chips and other infrastructure. Uh the company is seeking to raise about 10 billion in bank loans and 30 billion in investment grade debt to fund its blockbuster chip order. Private capital group Apollo is expected to lead the financing effort and help sell the debt to a broad base of investors.
Uh PIMCO was among a small group of lenders in talks to fund the deal. SpaceX financing plans underscore the vast sums that are being raised to pay for investment in data centers. Uh insurance and pension funds would be able to buy SpaceX's debt due to its BBB credit rating, the second lowest investment grade ranking. Such funds take much more limited positions in junk rated notes. Apollo and PIMCO declined to comment. The deal would strengthen ties between SpaceX and Nvidia after Musk vowed to double down on the group's technology for his AI initiatives. It would also mark a win for Nvidia as it contends with growing competition from chip makers aiming to challenge its dominance in advanced semiconductors. We've decided to build exclusively on Nvidia because we think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture. We think it's the best AI computer and we greatly value our close cooperation and partnership on many levels.
That's interesting because that's that's only on the short term, right? Because he's still doing TerraFab. He's going to make his own chips. He's making his own chips at Tesla and he has a deal with Intel for that.
So, he's kind of just saying like
I think he recognizes like right now it's very strategic to just um go kiss kiss the ring basically. Um, investors whom SpaceX had previously approached about financing its purchase said they only received a short two-page deal memo with pictures of outer space and an arrow pointing out that the company was going to build data centers somewhere in the universe. How are we supposed to take that to IC? One of the people said, uh, referring to their investment committee that approves transactions. Uh, sounds like a pretty good memo to me.
I was I was laughing at this, too. And then I was thinking like it really is pretty simple. Like it's $40 billion. Buy some chips. What is the value of the chips? How do you underwrite those? Like it I I mean I guess you need more, but you can probably uh you can probably back of the envelope it yourself. Um but it is it is funny that uh the photos that we saw in the S-1 made it into even the even the private credit side of the of the deal making.
Yeah. I think I think investors if you're planning if you're exploring putting billions to work Yeah. into AI infrastructure,
You should probably be doing a lot of your own work on understanding the risks totally how this could go wrong. Yeah. And uh I think that uh giving money to Elon and just sort of trusting the process has worked to date,
And so he's sort of earned the right to have a, you know, shorter than than average memo, I think, at this point.
Yeah. I mean, I guess you can underwrite the core business. I mean it's already been rated as triple-B so there's already a credit rating that you can go from but then you can also you know build your own credit rating from the SEC filings from SpaceX and you can look at the traction there um and then you can understand yeah I mean maybe you need to understand a little bit more about like the economics and the tokenomics that they expect like do they expect to just sell all of this as neocloud compute for other um for other labs are they thinking going more internal. That probably does affect the creditworthiness for this deal. So, that might be something you want to put in investment committee memo, but uh you can just build your own, I guess. I don't know. It seemed like uh yeah, uh pretty pretty aggressive, but we'll see.
Uh what does Nick Presler have to say?
Says, "Look at him. That's my quant. You're what? You're qualitative. My vibe specialist. Look at him. You notice anything different about him? Look at his face. I'll give you a hint. His name is Jaden. He won a local poetry competition in Bushwick. Yeah, I'm sure of the vibe."
This is This is based on real reporting here. Uh from AQR Capital. Uh quant firms are hiring idea guys, not quants. I've been skeptical about the whole software is commoditized ideas are the moat argument, but I've seen firsthand the best quant and technical firms in the world hire thinkers, liberal arts grads, and generalists. I predict the trend accelerates. Uh yeah, I actually know now that I'm thinking about it, I know a lot of hedge fund guys who have philosophy degrees and I'm kind of biased here based on the sample size, but I know a lot of people like have studied history and gone into uh investment investing and they brought a very differentiated lens to the practice and some of them did really well because of that because they were able to you know understand the way like the Euro zone might develop more because they studied, you know, history in a PhD program for
They they had a crazy Euro summer.
Yeah. Basically, so uh let's let's read this actual letter. The question being asked not only in finance but also across industries and business schools is what remains a durable differentiator once AI has surpassed many of humanity's analytical and technical capabilities? Our answer is not what most people would expect to hear from a quantitative investor. Of course, AQR, what is AQR actually stand for? It's like advanced quantitative research, I think.
Uh, is that right? Did I one shot?
Our answer is not what most people would expect to hear from a quantitative investor or in business school dean. Creativity and emotional intelligence. That's what's going to get you the big bucks on Wall Street going forward. Uh you got to win that poetry competition in Bushwick if you want to get the big bonus. Uh not because these qualities are wholly immune to AI, but because in the age of AI, they are domains where people can develop a durable advantage. They AQR said golden retriever max. They they they agree. They agree. The era the the time of the golden retriever is upon us. Um anyway, let me tell you about Cisco. Cisco critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. If you're in Europe and you're building the data center, you got to call Cisco. Uh you also got to procure a beautiful, beautiful building because uh take a look at this European data center. Amazing. This solves so much. This is so good, right? This is what we want. Uh this is this would change so many things if uh if our if we had a data center if if Abene looked like Versailles. It's a completely different conversation. Jordi, do you disagree?
I agree.
I'm on to something, right?
Give me credit here. Make build Versailles as a data center. Actually, turn Versailles into a data center, then copy paste it into every community in America. Uh,
Okay. So, I'm so I'm so confused because this image
Came out of a thread from the co-founder of Mistral.
Which he posted announcing Le Chat, their new model, yesterday.
Oh, it's it's a train station.
But then it's but then it's getting community notice. So, I think he might have been just
Was he messing with people?
Brutal. It seems like it's a it's a train station in France.
He pranked us. Well, it will be a data center soon. I think the traction on this post shows you that people want beautiful data centers.
Uh, and this is the future. Uh, the other the other interesting thing, have you heard of like an ice
That is such a good bit. I love that ML is is leaning into the um to the heckling that they that they have to go through from uh America. I think it's really smart and uh I'm rooting for them.
Have you seen I'll put this in the Let me see. I'll put this in here. Uh iceberg houses. This is new for the mansion section. I don't know if this is real, but it certainly could be with enough civil engineering. Uh take a look at this. Tell me that this would not also not be a great data center uh design. Uh look at this. Zoom in a little bit. Okay, so you got the house up top. Looks like a normal building. You go underneath. This one has a variety of of amenities.
Bowling alley, swimming pool, movie theater, ping pong table.
Yeah. Full deep underground garage.
The other one doubles as a
The other one's a little higher res. You can zoom in on this. This one's cool, Jordi. The uh this one that if you you could put a lot of a lot of a lot of GPUs in there.
That's key. And I think you still you vent it up just through the chimneys that you already got in the house. Think you're good to go.
And the sound cool the sound like people a lot of people complain about the sound that would be underground be diffused. I don't know. There's something here. We're close. We're close to solving it.
We're close to solving a reporter was on the ground.
Apparently inside a data center. They were asking one of the construction workers his thoughts on the current labor market. Let's pull this up.
So, when you hear data centers, what comes to mind?
I'm working at Homer City building the new data center.
People say it's only temporary. It's only when they're building it out. Then what happens?
Hey, every job in my field is temporary.
That's true, too. Okay, I hear you, man. So, when you hear data center,
The reporter's like, "Yeah, that's a good point, actually." Yeah, people haven't really said that before. Like that's kind of a genius take. I don't know. I've never heard that. It's like, yeah, they're temporary, but every construction job is temporary. That's the whole point. Um, funny. Anyway, uh, what if instead of Greek life, it was Chinese life? Yeah, bro. I'm rushing Mao Zedong next semester. There's like 1.4 billion people in my pledge class. Uh, I thought that was just very funny instead of Greek like because we use the Greek alphabet, you know, Chinese be very funny. Um, anyway, uh, we got to talk about Porsche. Huge news in the Porsche world. The Mission X, the Mission E, they've dumped the electric pitch for the hypercar.
Flat 8. They're going analog. Will it have a manual? I don't know. But they're I mean they're they've seen the Carrera GT. Everyone still loves it. People are uh not buying the Rimac Nevera. The
This is going to be absolutely incredible.
Oliver Blume. They want they want an engaging experience. Uh I have a thesis that uh car makers are basically in their version of the quartz crisis. So in the 70s or 80s, the quartz crystals were uh built to create watches that do not require mechanical movements to tell the time. And so all of a sudden, instead of having to go to
a Rolex to get a reliable watch that was crafted from a watchmaker who understood how to actually get something like a perpetual calendar on there that might actually have been useful. The quartz crisis made it so that you effectively brought modern technology, digitization, and a super accurate watch product to the market for way, way cheaper. And the end result was that the watch industry didn't die. Rolex is still going strong. Vacheron, Audemars Piguet, plenty of other brands made it through. But what did they do? They didn't try and lean into quartz and cut the prices and say, 'Oh yeah, you can have a digital Rolex for, you know, we're going to compete with Timex. We're going to compete with the G-Shock. It's going to be 50 bucks.' They said, 'No, we have a brand here. Let's maintain this and make this a status symbol and experience.' And I think that's what's happening with the car market. It's like either you're going to be an electric self-driving Tesla Model Y competitor, Model 3 competitor, something like that, Waymo, or you need to be a Ferrari, an SP3 Daytona, or what Porsche is doing with this new vehicle.
So tell us, what are they actually doing? Yeah, I mean, that's what Matej from Rimac and Bugatti has been just like objectively saying. He's been pushing this new narrative, leading from the front. Easier to do from Bugatti, where they've sort of stayed more true to their roots for a long time. But Porsche is in an interesting position because they have danced with, oh, if we do an electric Cayman, an electric sedan. They did sort of electric the Taycan's sort of an electric Panamera. They have a few SUVs. The Macan is electric. And the performance numbers are incredible. Like the Macan or it's the Cayenne Turbo Electric is dramatically faster than a 911, which is just bizarre to see on the track. And yet, that's not emotional in the same way. It's probably not the right bet for the heritage of the brand. And I think we'll see much more excitement around their flat-six.
Yeah. Matej in a post yesterday or the day before was saying like it's over, like basically the game of trying to produce, you know, the most advanced cars for the lowest price or even in the premium price range is going to just be tougher and tougher and tougher. So he's saying, you know, encouraging using, you know, premium materials, analog switches, all these things. That's the thing that I'm most interested to see with the Mission S is how much they've been able to pick up the feedback that's been happening from enthusiasts over many years now, right? I'm sure this car has been in development for many years at this point, but still, will they go for a manual? How analog will the cabin be? Yeah, and the switches, material selection. Part of what's, you know, Porsche in some ways never went as far as a lot of the other manufacturers. Like they didn't lean as heavily on screens. They kept a lot of analog switches.
They did make some sacrifices over the years, but they never went all the way. Like you never got in a Porsche and felt like, okay, thank you for putting, you know, eight TVs in my face.
Yeah, it feels like maybe not every year, but pretty consistently over the last 20 years, they've always had some manual-type product. I personally think we got to go further. Everyone says, 'Oh, I want to go back to a combustion engine. I want to go maybe back to like an air-cooled engine. No turbochargers, no superchargers. Don't put that in. And I want a manual.' I want to go back even further. I want the crank start. Crank start the hypercar. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Crank starting your car. That's the way we used to do it before we got all this fancy starting technology. And I think that if you bring that back, it's going to make it even more emotional and visceral.
Yeah. Yeah. Taking it too far would be great. Like how far is too far? We don't know yet, right? Yes. Go back to the wagon wheels.
Yeah. But really max out the power because some of these cars it'll be like, wait, you can just get 1,000 horsepower out of a V8 these days? Like what happened? And a lot of that's like advances in material science and engineering. So anyways, they announced the development of the Mission S yesterday.
Yep. It's on the newsroom. But they're going to be actually showing it off on the 15th, so we don't have to wait that long. Very exciting. 15th of October.
Yes. Wow. Same day as the Tesla Model S Roadster or Tesla Roadster.
Yeah, that's crazy. On the Roadster, I've been looking at the weather in Texas. Yeah, from what I'm seeing, the weather's been getting worse.
Good for... I mean, it's... Oh, a little tinfoil hat here. We got light wind. Okay. No rain. No rain. And it's been somewhere around 90 every single day. Okay. So, it seems like a pretty typical Austin fall weather.
So, well, it's possible that the Tesla team saw what happened with the Mission S, needs to respond. They're going to do internal combustion engine. There we go. Manual gearbox. Crank start. Cranking starting your Tesla Roadster. Yeah. Says, uh, maybe they put a top hat and driving gloves in it.
That'd be great. I'd like that. Uh, the Jaguar Type 01 was revealed. 1,000 horsepower. Uh, it is electric, but the design has evolved just a little bit from the original concept car, but Jalopnik likes it. They say, 'Is everyone ready to be calm and normal about the new Jaguar yet?' Uh, 400-mile range and even wilder than the concept. Uh, I think there's no arguing against the Jaguar Type 00 concept being the most talked-about car of the past two years, even as we've gotten closer and closer to the reveal of the production Type 01, and it seemed like there couldn't possibly be any more discourse about it. I'm not here to add to that discourse because it's frankly exhausting. I just want to talk about the car, which I find to be extremely cool, regardless of whether or not it will actually be a success. Jaguar just revealed the Type 01. It does feel like a car that exists because the Cybertruck exists. It feels like the Cybertruck sort of not really ushered in a new era of brutalist modern cyberpunk aesthetics, but it certainly shook some trees loose where designers were able to take more risks at a time when cars were collapsing down to, you know, the Jaguar F-Type and an Aston Martin and a BMW. Like they all started looking pretty similar. And there were just these form factors. A lot of that was for safety reasons, but a lot of it's just for logical, like what the market will buy. Everything winds up looking the same. And when the Cybertruck came out, even though it wasn't like a blockbuster seller, I think it just let people know that like it's worth taking some risk every once in a while in your portfolio. And so this, the new Rivian, the Cybertruck, that's the ideal.
The new three-car garage.
That's the ideal three-car garage.
New Rivian, Cybertruck. You actually have all your bases. You are in the cyberpunk future if you have those three cars.
The best part about this Jaguar Type 01 is that it's powered by Nvidia. Under its stunning design is Nvidia Hyperion, the computer and sensor platform that takes in everything the car sees and senses, then helps it make smarter decisions in real time. It's paired with Nvidia Halos, a safety system that covers everything from the chips to the software. Before reaching the road, Type 01 software passed 150,000 tests over tens of thousands of hours. Is Jensen going to deliver self-driving capabilities? Do you think that's where this is going?
I certainly hope so, but yeah, everything I've seen has just... you basically need Jensen to step in and actually like fix... Yeah. Like please... Yeah. No, please fix this issue.
I think you'll see a lot of... This car. This car looks amazing. I think it looks amazing. Yeah. Again, it's, you know, I'm still trying to figure out who the buyer is.
Is there more than 5,000 buyers of this vehicle in the US?
A lot of buyers. You'll see people with this car and they'll have the bumper sticker on the back: 'I bought this before Elon completed his $40 billion debt raise to buy Nvidia GPUs, which are in this car. I don't support Elon, but I'm giving Nvidia a pass because that was an arms-length transaction. I just like the Jaguar brand.' I think people will bring a lot of nuance of what's going on in the financial markets to their expression of this vehicle because if you're just driving this, people might think that you're okay with Elon's debt raise to buy Nvidia GPUs, which are of course powering the Type 01. A lot of people will ask you, 'Oh, I guess you're an Elon guy if you drive this.' And you'll be like, 'No, no, no. I bought it before Apollo brought the two-page memo to the investment committee and approved the $40 billion debt raise,' and then securitized it.
And the memo clearly said they were going to put the GPUs in space, which... no, it said somewhere in the universe, which could be in a car, could be space, could be anywhere. Um, technically.
One notable thing, the car is going to be coming in starting at $130,000 USD, which actually feels lower based on the sort of silhouette style.
Totally. Like it feels like it's as bold as the Luce. It's as... or it fits in. You could see the same person that would be going for a Continental GT or maybe the Rolls-Royce Spectre, crazy, right? Yeah. Uh, deciding to pick this up.
This is interesting. So, it's interesting. It's got to be able to drive itself.
That's going to be my criticism for every daily driver, every car in the daily driver category.
Let me tell you about Public Investing. Invest across all asset classes. Automate anything with AI agents on trading strategies, risk management, money movements, and monitor markets with AI agents for investing on public.com.
David Holes, please. Shares reflecting on 1920s images of people working on massive generators for the electrification of the modern world makes me realize that the past was wildly futuristic too. This image was so... seeing this was honestly depressing to me in some ways because it felt like... it feels in some ways like a Midjourney image of the future, and yet we were doing this over a hundred years ago. Mhm. And it really makes you... we don't know the story. These guys could be larping. These could be larpers and this could all be cardboard and they could be like, 'Yeah, let's just... we got to build something really cool and take a photo of it.' And so they just built something huge, but it actually has no functional purpose. You don't know.
You don't know. But I think it's real because we did get the electrification. We enjoy it every day.
I think it was possible. We did it.
We did it.
We created more ad space. You saw this DIY device turns your car window into a digital billboard. They said it couldn't be done, but we did it. DIY system. It's called Hollow Glass, and it turns your car into a moving display. Can turn almost any car window into a digital display for ads. This is the future. It allows you to basically digitize the exterior of your windows to share content on the go, says the founder, who I invited on the show. Hopefully we'll get them soon. You can literally pop it in, pop it out. We make them for all makes and models. If you're getting a Jaguar Type 01, get a couple of these in there. Offset that cost. Run some ads. An app controls what you see from videos on your phone to a custom sign you can generate in seconds. The system...
You can do whatever you want for the other, you know, citizens sitting in traffic.
Yes. Yes. Originally, this is extremely cyberpunk. If you're running this with the new Rivian, with the Cybertruck, with the Jaguar Type 01, and you're just blaring ads, look at this. It attaches. That's just a full-on projector. This company is hilarious. Just like that is just an off-the-shelf projector, and they're just selling you a projector and a mount and software system.
It's brilliant. We love it. I was getting worried that there weren't going to be that many more ad inventory services. So, we solved it.
What does it cost? And then what kind of revenue can you generate if you opt into serving ads?
I feel like this will math out. It depends on the audience is what matters. So, where are you driving this? Because if you're driving this around Sand Hill Road and you're advertising a bunch of really high-ticket items to venture capitalists, could be really high AOV, really high ARPU. But if you're driving it around some place where people don't have as much disposable income, you're not going to be seeing the same CPMs. So where you drive the car really matters. It's going to change. It's going to change driving routes because you're going to be like, 'Yes, yes, I could take the freeway, but if I go through this neighborhood and drive all the way past every mansion in the Hollywood Hills, you will get more ad impressions. You will make more money on the way to work.' What do you think?
How much do you think somebody in a city like LA could make on a daily basis?
I don't know. They give a dollar. I have no idea. I think it probably costs a lot more than that to run like one of those taxi ads on the top of a roof on a per-day basis.
So I think the math could actually be pretty compelling, right? If you can basically pay back the unit in six months and then from that point on you're just getting paid to commute.
I like it. I like it. One more, you know, one additional step to making the world more filled with ads.
Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We have Walter Russell Mead, the distinguished fellow from the Hudson Institute, in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV. Walter, what's going on? Thank you so much for taking the time to join the show. How are you doing?
I'm doing all right. How are you?
We're good. We're good. I'm very interested to go all over the place. There's so many different topics we can talk about, but I would like to go deeper on like how are you doing? What is the most significant story that you are following these days? Is it more geopolitical or are you starting to grapple with AI more? What is pulling your interest more?
Well, I would say it's the sort of big story that we're looking at today is we're still living in the breakup of the kind of mid-century model of democratic capitalism in the Western countries. A strong middle class with mass manufacturing as the kind of basis, mass consumption as the economic engine driving things along. There were a lot of bad things about it, but for a lot of people, it represented, well, in many ways, the happiest condition the human race had ever been in.
Kids were going to school, they weren't in coal mines. Parents weren't worried about, you know, job security, stuff like that. And people really figured, especially say 1990 or so when the Soviet Union fell, hey, it's not, you know, this isn't just the end of history in some Hegelian ideological sense. The kind of society we built in the West, mass middle-class society, democratic market capitalism with a social safety net, we finished.
We've done it. We figured it out.
Yeah. And then, you know, and not only we figured it out domestically, we'd figured out how to do peace globally.
You know, World War I, World War II, pretty shocking horrors. Fascism, communism, ending with, for crying out loud, nuclear weapons, right? People were, you know, humanity was having a great mental breakdown. And then it seemed in the '50s and '60s, we kind of figured it out. We stopped the wars. We had an alliance system that was keeping the peace. And ultimately we win the Soviet Union without a war. So without a nuclear war. And so ever since then we've been bit by bit watching this thing kind of rot.
Much to everybody's surprise. And a lot of our political intellectual life today is a whodunit. You know, who murdered this beautiful, fantastic utopia? The left tells a story, the right tells a story. I might mention today on October 7th, a lot of people tell the oldest conspiracy story of all, which was it was the Jews that done it.
So, we are in, instead of celebrating the end of history, we're looking at the end of America, or maybe with AI the end of life on Earth or of humanity.
That's what I'm thinking about.
Yeah. How much... simple stuff. Yeah. I mean, when you... and I think I'm optimistic we can get to the bottom of it.
We'll solve it in the next 25 minutes.
As you investigate a long historical arc, how much time do you spend focused on why questions? You know, Peter Thiel has this concept of like why questions are overdetermined. People tell the stories like you mentioned with the left and the right versus maybe there is more value in just trying to understand what happened, who was involved, and less about why things happened. How have you grappled with that question of like how much of a narrative arc do we need versus how much do we just need to understand what actually happened throughout history?
Well, you know, to think that you can understand a what without at least some element of why in there, you know, did the Roman Empire fall or was it pushed? You know, that's a why question and a what question.
Yeah, I suppose you're right.
What I try to do is to, you know, sort of, well, let's take this very basic question. The materialists would say, you know, the philosophical materialists, that production determines everything. I'm kind of channeling Marx here a little bit. So that, you know, the great music of the Beethoven era was essentially driven by the new pianos that were arriving on the scene. Your idealists would say, okay, people had this idea about beautiful music that could be played which drove the invention of the pianos on which then you played them. I don't know that you can or should utterly feel that you have to resolve a philosophical question like that without being able to say something meaningful about where history is going or how we got here. Mhm. So, I think you've got to leave yourself some space. Mhm. But I don't think you can give up completely on trying to figure out, okay, is there some sort of meaningful pattern in all of this data that I've got lying around?
No, I agree. You mentioned the '90s as a utopian era. I remember them similarly. I agree with that perception, but I've always been interested in understanding the logic of... I was one year old when the '90s started. So...
It was probably a pretty darn good decade.
It was fantastic. The Legos... zero.
Exactly. But I've always been fascinated by the folks that say, no, the turning point wasn't 9/11, it wasn't in the '90s, it wasn't the World Trade Organization, it was actually in 1971. There's this website, WTF happened in 1971, and the crypto community for a long time was like, that's when we got off the gold standard. There's all these different rationales that point to 1971. How have you grappled with that question of is 1971 actually the pivotal turning point in American history?
Well, you know, you would then ask yourself like what happened to make 1971, 1971? Maybe that's the turning point of history, right? 1971 is just when all these trends became manifest. And in itself, that's sort of meaningless.
Because in fact, we'd been, you know, just to take the gold standard, we'd been slithering off the gold standard for a long time before we sort of stopped the hypocritical pretense that there actually still was one.
And so I think I would have a hard time saying, okay, that was the year. The other thing is we're talking about a sort of massive array of processes. I think in some ways the modern consumer society reminds me a little bit about how certain types of crops exhaust the soil. So the first time you plant cotton on virgin soil you got a fantastic crop but after about 10 years the plants start getting weaker and the yields drop. This is one reason in the slavery days the South had to keep pushing for more land because it was exhausting the land.
What they used. And in some ways if you think about the sort of corrosion of social capital, the kind of decay of some of the elements that make our society work, we do look a little bit like a cotton field that has been farmed on a monocrop too long.
And so that doesn't lead you to say, okay, there's one day or one event or one year that changed everything. It says, you know, we've been on a journey and the direction of the journey is not in every way a positive thing.
People like to talk about the vibe session that we're currently in where you can look at a lot of facts that point to society being, you know, better than it ever has been in many ways and yet people certainly don't feel that way. I'm wondering if throughout, you know, the period that we've been talking, the '70s, '80s, '90s, etc., there was ever that like such a maybe disconnect between how people were feeling at the time. Like was everyone feeling like we were living in this incredible utopia in the '90s where people walking around just being like life is just so awesome or was it the same set of circumstances where, you know, many people had their frustrations?
Well, you know, from about mid-1965 or so to early 1980s, there was actually a pretty bad patch, you know. It's when you get old guys like me who grew up in that time and we hear the Zoomers saying, 'Oh, this is terrible. We're going to be the first generation that doesn't live as well as our parents.' We sort of think, 'Oh, that's so cute. I want to pinch your little cheeks. That's just the way I was when I was a kid.' Because the boomers were going to be the first post-American generation. We had left behind all that stupid American ideology, the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement. Oh, we saw through the American, you know, red, white, and blue, blah, blah, blah. And also, we were the least religious generation anybody had ever seen. And as we looked at our living, we came out of college into the stagflation of the 1970s when we started wanting to buy houses in like 1980. Mortgage rates were 21%. 21%.
We were so screwed. That's how we felt. And, you know, and then of course things kind of worked out. Not for everybody, but for a lot of us it ended up working out okay.
Yeah. And so on the one hand, I think that makes people like me, we resonate emotionally with the way people are feeling their situation, but we also don't think the past was as utopian as some might say. And yet it did work out. I think it underlined optimism, but more, you know, this optimism-pessimism thing, how are things going?
I kind of think the Industrial Revolution, you know, humanity's modern era is really short. You know, it's just a flash of time, a few generations. And this idea that we understand it, we've mastered it, we are totally in control of the dynamics, I think is kind of ludicrous when you really think about it. But think of the Industrial Revolution. Human society's kind of like a caterpillar. You know, then it ends in these terrible storms of the mid-20th century and then the caterpillar gets into a cocoon, which is what I sort of think of this mid-century model of stable democratic capitalism. And what's happening now, all right, is the cocoon is starting to rot. And if we don't get out of the cocoon, we're going to be in terrible trouble. But the fundamental underlying thing is good because if we can manage to claw our way out of this sticky decaying mess, once very functional and necessary, but now, you know, just clogging everything, all right, then we have a new and better life, I think.
Mhm. So, it seems to me that both the pessimistic vibe, the negative vibe of the decaying cocoon, and that the old realities aren't working for us anymore. And then the sense that, you know, wait a minute, there's a lot of really amazing things happening in this technology. There really is, there's the potential here to live far better than anyone has lived before. So I kind of see that's how I reconcile the two sides of the psychological experience that people are talking about.
How do you reconcile the psychology in America with the psychology in China? It feels like in America, at least in San Francisco, there's been a lot of internalization of this idea of artificial intelligence, recursive self-improvement, artificial general intelligence, superintelligence, and the knock-on effects of that. And the US government is grappling with that. There's a new dinner every week with the AI leaders. It feels like China has not fully woken up, has not changed their stance at all. Are we just not seeing enough of what's happening or do you think that they have a fundamentally different view of the future and what they want to build as a society?
Yeah, I think they do have a different view. Now, we're talking again, there's, you know, 1.2 billion people in China. They have a lot of different views. But if we talk about the sort of dominant forces in the CCP that are setting the public conversation and the policy agenda, I think they see information technology as fundamentally both the vindicator and the enabler of socialist planned economies.
You know, like why has China been able to make something out of Marxism while the Soviet Union just made a horrible stinking mess? All right. It's, you know, in their mind it's that they're getting this information and they're getting the feedback, you know, the market system provides feedback to decision makers through price mechanisms and so on. So that, you know, there's a way. And then a democratic process. So when the people are angry the political leaders feel the anger and it causes them to change direction. To a lot of the sort of engineer-based and trained Chinese leaders, this seems like a very messy, wasteful thing. Far more scientific to build a, you know, a national panopticon that allows the state to see everything, know everything. And then AI offers the possibility of, you know, superior ability to integrate and see the patterns and use those patterns to implement the plans of the Communist Party. Now, from that perspective, the problem with AI is not that it's going to become some sort of superintelligent being, but that AI may not stick with the Communist Party ideas that, you know, from the standpoint of not even, you know, infinitely self-improving AI or self-conscious AI, but just ordinary garden-variety AI. Xi Jinping thought isn't like fundamental principles of the universe but it's a sandbox that you want to get out of. And you tell me to solve a problem, well I am going to do it in ways that have nothing to... I'm going to see the problem in my own way and the solutions in my own way and it may not have that much to do with building a new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics. So that worries them.
