Show Notes
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
