There Is No Such Thing As Free Admission

Talking to God for a Couple of Days Hello dear show notes readers! I came into this one buzzing. I'd just stood in a roaring crowd at the World Cup fan fest in Houston watching Team USA put four past Paraguay, and I wanted to talk about what that kind of communal energy actually costs — who pays for the security (FEMA and Texas, it turns out, which means we already did), who rakes in the revenue (FIFA), and why it's so hard to manufacture that "everyone shoulder to shoulder" feeling in a country built for cars. Dan and I wander from European piazzas to American sprawl to whether self-driving cars will quietly make sprawl worse, and land on a thing we keep circling back to: the third place, and how fragile and expensive it's become to just be around other people. From there it's a proper grab-bag. We get into the great game of mega-event ticket pricing — why you can't repeal supply and demand no matter how unfair $10,000 nosebleeds feel — and Dan points everyone at a Maxinomics video on the Ticketmaster antitrust mess. Then we turn to the SpaceX IPO I missed by four days: tiered lockouts, a two-trillion-dollar price tag at a hundred times sales, and the eternal tension between voting with your heart and weighing with your head. Dan walks through a lockout-timed options play that's paid him before, and we both agree that the people who buy on IPO day, look like dummies through a 90% drawdown, and just hold tend to win in the end. And then the part that gave the episode its name. For about two days, a handful of institutions and government agencies got their hands on Fable — the nerfed-and-released version of Anthropic's Mythos model, the most powerful thing anybody's built — before the government clawed it back. Dan burned something like eighteen thousand dollars of tokens in forty-eight hours and lived to tell the tale. We get into what it means to treat a model like a munition, why the diffusion happens anyway, and why both of us are increasingly tempted to just put a box in the basement and run an open-source model we actually own. The model is the commodity. The hardware is the value. Cheers, and as always — go build something that lets you touch more grass. Sean Books Discussed • Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefèvre — the source of "the first eighth and the last eighth are always the most expensive." Shows / Films Discussed • The Wizard of Oz — invoked as the "man behind the curtain" metaphor for how hiding something only makes people want it more. Tools & Platforms Mentioned • Claude Code — agent coding tool; the remote-control workflow we get into at the end. • Codex — OpenAI's coding agent; also supports remote/mobile control. • Qwen — Alibaba's open-source model family; what we'd run locally. • NVIDIA DGX Spark — the "put it in the basement" home AI box. • WEC (FIA World Endurance Championship) — Dan's subscription for watching the 24 Hours of Le Mans. • Maxinomics — Phil Andrews' data-driven economics channel; the Ticketmaster/Live Nation antitrust video. Links & References • Maxinomics on YouTube — the Live Nation/Ticketmaster breakdown Dan recommends. • 2026 FIFA World Cup — 104 matches across the US, Canada, and Mexico, June 11–July 19, 2026. • Triple Crown of Motorsport — Monaco GP, Indy 500, and the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Unqualified Fact-Check 🟡 "It goes through July eleventh, I think… a hundred and four games." — The match count is right: the 2026 World Cup is 104 games. But the tournament runs June 11 through July 19, 2026 (final at MetLife Stadium), so "through July 11" is off by about a week. The "almost a month" instinct is correct — it's closer to five and a half weeks. 🟡 "FIFA's gonna rake in about twelve billion dollars." — In the right ballpark, depending on what you're counting. Tournament-specific revenue estimates land around $9–11B; the full 2023–2026 four-year cycle is projected near $13B. So $12B is a fair splitting-of-the-difference, just worth knowing it blends two different figures. 🟢 "The first eighth and the last eighth are always the most expensive." — Correctly attributed to Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (the Jesse Livermore-inspired classic). The idea: don't try to catch the exact bottom or top; the extremes cost you the most. 🟢 "The Triple Crown is Monaco, Indy, and Le Mans." — Correct. The Triple Crown of Motorsport is the Monaco Grand Prix, the Indianapolis 500, and the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Graham Hill remains the only driver to have won all three. 🟢 "Porsche put the ignition on the left so drivers could start the engine while running to the car." — True. Porsche's left-side ignition is a genuine nod to the old Le Mans running starts, where drivers sprinted across the track, jumped in, and fired up. 🟢 "Mercedes left Le Mans after their car went airborne." — True. After the Mercedes CLR flipped at speed in 1999, Mercedes pulled its factory effort from Le Mans prototypes for a long stretch. 🟡 "Amazon and Facebook had 80–90% drawdowns and you'd be filthy rich if you'd just held from IPO day." — Directionally true and a great point, but the specifics are loose. Amazon did fall ~90%+ in the dot-com bust and recover spectacularly. Facebook/Meta's worst stretches were closer to ~50–75% (2012 post-IPO and 2022), not a clean 90%. The lesson holds; the matching percentages don't quite. 🟡 "Toby Lütke races an LMP2 car on a bronze license." — Lütke (Shopify's founder) is a real and serious amateur racer, so the spirit is right. We're less certain about the exact class and license detail, so call it broadly true pending confirmation. Note: the SpaceX IPO mechanics (tiered lockouts, ~$2T valuation, ~100x sales) and the Fable/Mythos/Project Glasswing storyline are live, fast-moving items we were reacting to in real time — treat the specific numbers as our best read on the day, not gospel. Score: 5 🟢 / 4 🟡 / 0 🔴. A clean week — the misses are date-and-decimal stuff, not blown calls. Mostly we got our facts right and our jokes righter. Chapters • 0:00 — World Cup in Houston: USA Stuns Paraguay • 4:57 — The Economics of a Mega-Event (FEMA, FIFA's $12B) • 10:21 — Ticket Pricing, Maxinomics & the Taylor Swift Problem • 13:41 — Third Places, Piazzas & American Sprawl • 21:34 — The Trillion-Dollar Light-Rail Joke • 24:20 — Why Le Mans? Endurance Racing & the Triple Crown • 30:42 — The SpaceX IPO & Tiered Lockouts • 35:16 — Playing the Lockout: Dan's DocuSign Put Strategy • 38:50 — Voting Machine vs. Weighing Machine • 43:47 — Staring at the Tape & the Three-Body Market • 45:09 — Talking to God: The Fable Five Nerf • 49:14 — Build Your Own LLM in the Basement • 54:23 — ITAR, Operation Fury & the TAM Question • 57:02 — Alien Documents & the Wizard of Oz • 58:13 — Touch Grass, Build Something