Unqualified Advice

Sean Filipow and Daniel Hatke

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A Podcast for a More Reasonable Tomorrow

4d ago

Minnows with Piranha Teeth

The Last Coffee Maker Unqualified Advice — A Podcast for a More Reasonable Tomorrow Dear show notes readers, It finally got chilly in Houston. Windows open, sweater on, very happy. Dan's version of chilly involved a power outage and the thirties, so perspectives. We start with a follow-up from last week. I'm halfway through Gouged, and it sent me down the hole of the Phoebus cartel: the 1920s light-bulb makers who agreed their bulbs should burn out sooner, because their engineers were simply too darn good at their jobs. Is that why "they don't make it like they used to"? Dan says mostly no: we romanticize the past, skip the maintenance, and then blame the dishwasher. We land on maintenance as a balloon payment, from big machines to refinery turnarounds, including the old refinery on 225 that is about to come back to life. Then the question I couldn't let go of: what happens to a company that sells the last coffee maker you'll ever need? I built a model, and for those watching on YouTube, the chart is on screen. The durable maker wins the first decade, then runs out of customers. From there we argue about Tesla software, BMW's heated-seat subscription, and whether paywalling performance is smart brand management (Dan) or just icky (me). Dan wins on points. In the back half, Dan brings Stripe's data on a solopreneur boom outside the big cities, I flip his read of the SaaSpocalypse, and Dan makes a prediction about minnows growing piranha teeth. We finish on David Deutsch and error-correcting societies, how to pay managers when the team is half agents, what happens to the outsourcing hubs, and AI brain fry. Dan felt seen. Go build something. — Sean "Their German engineers were just too darn good at their jobs." Books Discussed Gouged: The End of a Fair Price by Lindsay Owens The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch Shows & Podcasts Mentioned Odd Lots (Bloomberg), the Lindsay Owens interview Companies Discussed Maytag, Technivorm (Moccamaster), Breville, GE, Osram, LG, Samsung, Tesla, BMW, LyondellBasell, Valero, Stripe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, Slack Links & References Like They Used to Make It: Sean's durability model, try your own assumptions (Unqualified Advice) Stripe Economics: AI and the city (the sign-ups-by-metro chart) Stripe Economics: The SaaSpocalypse was more like a RenaiSaaS (the SaaS index chart) Stripe Economics: The age of the solopreneur Valero to restart the former LyondellBasell Houston refinery (Oil & Gas Journal) "AI brain fry" and managing too many agents (The Register, on the BCG/HBR study) The Phoebus cartel (IEEE Spectrum) Chart data: Census Business Formation Statistics via FRED, BABATOTALSAUS and BAHBATOTALSAUS Unqualified Fact-Check 🟢 = Nailed it | 🟡 = Close enough | 🔴 = Whiffed it 📺 = shown on screen with a sound. 🟡📺 The Phoebus cartel cut bulb life from about 18,000 hours to about 1,200 (Sean, "pulling them out of memory") — The cartel was real: Osram, GE, Philips and others, founded 1925. But it cut bulb life from about 2,500 hours to a standard 1,000. Right story, numbers about seven times too big. (IEEE Spectrum) 🟢 Maytag's ads were built on a repairman who never gets called (Sean) — The Lonely Maytag Repairman ran from 1967. (WARC) 🟡📺 The old Lyondell refinery was mothballed around 2016–17 and is restarting after nearly a decade (Sean) — It was built to run heavy Venezuelan crude, and a restart was just announced: Valero is buying it and plans to run it again by the end of 2027. But it only shut in March 2025. (Oil & Gas Journal) 🟢 Idle rotating equipment wears its own bearings from tiny vibrations (Sean) — That's false brinelling, and it's why idle plants rotate equipment on a schedule. 🟡 The lifetime coffee maker falls behind the 3-year model after 10–15 years, the 4-year after 20–25, and the 5-year after about 30 (Sean, on his own model) — On cash in the bank, the model says years 20, 26 and 33. On annual revenue, all three pass it in year 11. Two measures got mixed together; the 4- and 5-year calls are close. The published version on our site, with inflation and parts sales, pushes the crossovers out to 2046, 2053 and 2062. 🔴📺 Buy a used Tesla from its owner and the paid software doesn't come with it (Sean) — Paid-in-full upgrades like FSD normally stay with the car in a private sale. Subscriptions are what stay with the owner, and Tesla has occasionally pulled FSD from cars resold through dealers. (Find My Electric) 🟢 BMW tried charging a subscription for heated seats (Dan) — It did, in several countries from 2022, and dropped it in September 2023 after the backlash. (Kelley Blue Book) 🟢📺 Stripe moves more than 1% of global GDP (Dan) — $1.9 trillion in 2025, about 1.6% of world GDP. (Stripe) 🟡📺 Stripe's chart shows Hammond, Indiana out-signing New York, LA, Chicago, Houston and San Francisco (Dan) — The chart is real, and its Hammond does beat New York, LA, Chicago and San Francisco on sign-ups per person, while roughly tying Houston. But it's Hammond, Louisiana: Stripe plots metro areas, and Hammond, Indiana is part of the Chicago metro. (Stripe Economics) 🔴📺 Hammond, Indiana is smaller than Punxsutawney (Sean) — Hammond has about 76,000 people; Punxsutawney has about 5,600. Sean did say he was underselling it. (Wikipedia) 🟡📺 Boxed Microsoft Office cost about $500 in today's money (Dan) — Office 97 was $499 new in 1997, about $1,045 today. Dan's number fits the $209 upgrade box. (Microsoft) 🟢 Microsoft Office is now about $99 a year (Sean) — Microsoft 365 Personal went to $99.99 a year in January 2025. (GeekWire) 🟢 "Problems are soluble" is a David Deutsch line (Dan) — It's the core idea of The Beginning of Infinity. (Wikipedia) 🟢📺 Researchers have identified "AI brain fry" (Dan) — BCG researchers in HBR (March 2026): 14% of 1,488 US workers reported it, worst among people overseeing AI agents. (The Register) Final Score: 7🟢 / 5🟡 / 2🔴 Both reds came from Sean. Dan's Hammond was in the wrong state. Chapters 00:00 - Cold Open: Too Darn Good at Their Jobs 00:28 - Gouged and the Light-Bulb Cartel 03:24 - They Don't Make It Like They Used To 12:00 - Maintenance Is a Balloon Payment 16:31 - A Mothballed Refinery Comes Back 18:53 - The Last Coffee Maker: Sean's Durability Model 22:05 - Who Owns Your Tesla's Software? 24:57 - Should Performance Be Paywalled? 30:41 - Stripe Sees a Solopreneur Boom 34:18 - Survival Rates and the SaaSpocalypse 38:58 - Office in a Box vs. Office Every Year 42:39 - Dan's Prediction: Minnows With Piranha Teeth 44:26 - Dystopia and the Error-Correcting Society 47:58 - Paying Managers in the Age of Agents 53:17 - What Happens to the Outsourcing Hubs? 57:21 - AI Brain Fry
Nov 3

The P/E Can't Keep Going Up

Recessions Hiding Inside Booms Unqualified Advice — A Podcast for a More Reasonable Tomorrow Dear show notes readers, We recorded this one on Halloween, with a bowl of Reese's, Snickers and Kit Kats on my table and a raccoon who had already helped himself to the rim of my carved pumpkin. Spooky season, economics edition. A few episodes back we asked whether you can have a recession and a boom at the same time. Dan brought receipts this week (well, robots brought the receipts and Dan read them): the 1920s farm depression under Coolidge prosperity, the Rust Belt under the Reagan expansion, the oil bust under the dot-com boom, the China shock under the housing boom, and the 2015–16 shale bust I still have visceral memories of. For our YouTube viewers, we put the charts on screen as he went. Which raises the obvious question: where is the recession hiding this time? Dan calls it a kitchen-table recession: if you're attached to the AI boom, life is good; if you're not, you're squeezed. And after last week's market wobble, my take is that it was completely unsurprising. The P/E can't keep going up in a vertical line. (Dan wants that on a hat.) From there: a new book called Gouged by Lindsay Owens and the strange world of algorithmic pricing, where the same groceries cost different people different amounts and surge pricing doesn't always reach the drivers. Our Ketchup Bot's Tesla pick is working, weirdly. Dan relays Cliff Sosin's point that AI is an enhancer, not a replacement for expertise. We debate Meta versus Google after the selloff, I describe building a video game entirely by talking to an agent while walking the dogs, and Dan tallies up the roughly $40,000 his homegrown software has saved his business this year. Then a follow-up from last week: disability claims are way down, and Dan's guess wasn't close. A small Factfulness moment. We close by guessing at the theme of 2027 (bio, anyone?), what Lilly is doing with AI in drug discovery, and the joy of a ballot that took Dan an hour and a half without voting for a single person. Go build something. — Sean "The P/E can't keep going up." Books Discussed Gouged by Lindsay Owens Getting Things Done by David Allen Factfulness by Hans Rosling Shows & Podcasts Mentioned Odd Lots (Bloomberg), the Lindsay Owens interview Tools & Platforms Mentioned ChatGPT dots, Gemini (Argon), Grok, Claude Unqualified Advice Vibe Index and Ketchup Bot Companies Discussed Microsoft, Meta, Google, Tesla, Instacart, Uber, Amazon, Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer, Carvana Links & References Unqualified Advice Vibe Index Consumer Reports & Groundwork Collaborative: same products, different Instacart prices (GV Wire) Lindsay Owens on algorithmic pricing (Pitchfork Economics) Lilly's TuneLab: AI models for biotechs (Fierce Biotech) SSA: 2026 Long-Range Disability Assumptions Chart data: FRED series INDPRO, TWEXMMTH, MANEMP, WTISPLC, MEHOINUSA672N, GDPC1 Unqualified Fact-Check 🟢 = Nailed it | 🟡 = Close enough | 🔴 = Whiffed it This week we also fact-checked Claude's homework, since Dan read its list of booms-over-busts on air. 📺 = shown on screen with a sound. 🟢 The dollar rose about 50% by 1985 (Dan, via Claude) — The Fed's trade-weighted dollar rose about 55% from mid-1980 to its March 1985 peak. (FRED) 🟢 Manufacturing employment never recovered its 1979 peak (Dan, via Claude) — 19.55 million in June 1979; it has never been back. (FRED) 🟢 The Asian crisis pushed oil to $10 (Dan, via Claude) — WTI averaged $11.28 in December 1998. (FRED) 🟢 Manufacturing employment peaked in 1998 (Dan, via Claude) — The 1990s high was April 1998, at 17.6 million. (FRED) 🟢 Jobs kept falling 21 months after the 2001 recession ended (Dan, via Claude) — Payrolls bottomed in August 2003, 21 months after the November 2001 trough. (FRED) 🟢 About 3.5 million manufacturing jobs disappeared from 2000 to 2007 (Dan, via Claude) — 17.3 million in January 2000, 13.7 million by December 2007. (FRED) 🟢 Real median household income didn't regain its 1999 level until 2016 (Dan, via Claude) — That's what Census originally reported; its revised series puts the recovery a year earlier, in 2015. (FRED) 🟢 2015–16 was an industrial recession with no NBER date (Dan, via Claude) — Industrial production fell about 5% from late 2014 to March 2016 while real GDP kept growing. (FRED) 🟡📺 Microsoft offered early retirement to about half its workforce (Dan) — About 60,000 were eligible, roughly a quarter of staff, and Microsoft expects 3,000 or fewer to accept. (People Matters) 🟡📺 A 40% price gap for the same Instacart order (Sean) — The Groundwork and Consumer Reports test found gaps of up to about 23% on a single item and about 7% on a full basket. (GV Wire) 🟢📺 Disability rates fell from about 45 to about 31 per 1,000 (Sean) — SSA puts the age-sex-adjusted rate at 30.7 per 1,000 insured at the end of 2025, down sharply from its peak (2013, not 2015). (SSA) 🟢📺 Lilly is lending its AI to small biotechs (Dan, who asked for primary sources) — Lilly's TuneLab gives biotechs access to drug-discovery models trained on over $1 billion of its research data. (Fierce Biotech) Final Score: 10🟢 / 2🟡 / 0🔴 Claude's homework came back clean; the humans rounded up. Chapters 00:00 - Cold Open: Guess How Far Disability Claims Fell 01:09 - Halloween, and a Recession Inside a Boom 03:47 - A Century of Hidden Recessions 07:28 - The P/E Can't Keep Going Up 09:14 - The Kitchen-Table Recession 16:44 - Gouged: Algorithmic Pricing at Instacart and Uber 20:45 - Ketchup Bot: Tesla's Comeback 21:39 - Cliff Sosin and Staying in the Director's Seat 25:27 - Meta vs. Google After the Selloff 28:04 - Building a Video Game While Walking the Dogs 30:39 - Dan's $40K of Homegrown Software 37:32 - Disability Claims Are Way Down 40:26 - The Vibe Index and the Theme of 2027 42:02 - Bio, Lilly and AI Drug Discovery 48:41 - Election Day and the Ballot Overload 52:49 - Go Build Something
Oct 26

Smoke Bombs and Mirrors

Unqualified Advice — A Podcast for a More Reasonable Tomorrow Dear show notes readers, It's officially decorative gourd season, and Sean's house is rapidly approaching critical mass. Dan, meanwhile, is busy making beef bourguignon and embracing the arrival of cold weather. Naturally, this leads us to a discussion of the approaching fiscal crisis facing America's retirement system. You know, normal autumn activities. This week, a particularly interesting Bill Maher monologue gets us thinking about a subject we've been circling for some time: generational inequality. We tend to think of economic conflict in terms of rich versus poor, but what if one of the defining divisions of the next few decades is old versus young? Social Security, Medicare, pensions, property taxes, family wealth transfers — there's an awful lot of money moving around in ways that probably made more sense when these systems were designed. The trouble is that demographics, lifespans, housing costs, and economic circumstances have changed rather dramatically since then. So what do we do when the math stops working? Dan floats the idea of means-testing Social Security for particularly wealthy retirees. Sean wants to know whether that would actually save enough money to matter. Neither of us has a definitive answer, but we agree on one thing: there aren't many painless solutions. Speaking of complicated math and questionable incentives, Tesla and SpaceX are now formally exploring a merger, something Sean has been predicting for a while. Both companies have appointed independent committees to consider the transaction. Independent committees! We have some thoughts about just how independent those committees might be, and somehow Matt Damon performing a magic trick in Good Will Hunting becomes a useful analogy. From there, we turn to AI and employment. For all the predictions about imminent white-collar unemployment, are we actually seeing it happen? Sean has been examining corporate filings and workforce trends and shares what he's seeing in his own manufacturing operation. Dan brings up Jevons paradox and argues that making businesses dramatically more capable might actually create more work, rather than eliminate it. We even spend an unreasonable amount of time figuring out how AI could improve the operations of a small plumbing company. It turns out there's potentially quite a lot of opportunity hiding in relatively boring businesses. Finally, we wander into the economics of disability, the transformative potential of GLP-1 drugs, the history of dangerous miracle materials, burning rivers, and David Byrne riding a bicycle through Manhattan. As one does. We end with something that has become a recurring message around here: Go build something. There's a tremendous amount of new capability available to us, and most of us are probably still thinking too small about what we can do with it. Things we discussed Bill Maher's "New Rule: Moocher Nation" Niall Ferguson — Why Europe Is Burning Social Security's 2026 Trustees Report Tesla and SpaceX's potential merger Ramp/Revelio Labs research on AI and employment CBO analysis of the budgetary effects of anti-obesity medications It's Decorative Gourd Season, M***********s — Colin Nissan, McSweeney's As always, these are conversations between two curious but thoroughly unqualified people. We're exploring ideas, not pretending to have all the answers. Thanks for listening, and go build something. — Sean & Dan Unqualified Advice A Podcast for a More Reasonable Tomorrow Shows/Films Discussed Real Time with Bill Maher (and Politically Incorrect, back in the Comedy Central days) Good Will Hunting Odd Lots (Bloomberg) — the David Byrne episode Companies Discussed SpaceX, Tesla, Amazon, UPS, Target, Netflix, Meta, Eli Lilly, AB InBev, Ramp, Revelio Labs Links & References Polymarket odds: will Tesla and SpaceX announce a merger by Dec 31? (~17–19% Yes as of Sep 16, before the committees) — as requested on air: "Claude, link those in the show notes." CRS: Selected findings of the 2026 Social Security Trustees Report IFS: 4.2 million working-age people now claim health-related benefits KFF: 1 in 8 adults say they are currently taking a GLP-1 Smithsonian: The Cuyahoga caught fire at least a dozen times, but no one cared until 1969 Unqualified Fact-Check 🟢 = Nailed it | 🟡 = Close enough | 🔴 = Whiffed it New this week: the six claims marked 📺 got an on-screen card on YouTube and a ding, slide whistle, or horn in your ears. 🟢📺 Social Security has about six years left (Sean, via Maher) — The 2026 Trustees Report projects the retirement trust fund (OASI) runs dry in late 2032, six years out. The combined funds last to 2034, after which taxes cover about 83% of benefits. (CRS) 🟢 France spends about 60% of GDP (Dan) — 57.2% in 2024, among the highest in the euro area, just behind Finland. (Banque de France) 🟢 Built for 1940: about 12 more years at 65, now about 18 (Sean) — Men turning 65 in 1940 could expect 12.7 more years; the Trustees put it near 19 for men turning 65 now. "Effectively added 50%" holds. (SSA history, SSA Trustees) 🟡📺 Prop 13 keeps property tax at the purchase price (Dan) — The assessed value starts at the purchase price but can rise up to 2% a year until the home sells. Far below market, not literally frozen. (Sacramento County Assessor) 🟢📺 SpaceX and Tesla set up independent boards to look at merging (Sean) — Both boards formed special committees of independent directors, Musk confirmed on SpaceX's Q3 call on Oct 20. (TechCrunch) 🟡📺 "DOJ… or the CFTC, I guess" would review the merger (Sean) — DOJ was right the first time: mergers go to the DOJ Antitrust Division or the FTC. The CFTC oversees futures and swaps. (FTC) 🟡📺 Musk owns 20–30% of Tesla and a majority of SpaceX (Sean, who called this call-out in advance) — About 20% of Tesla. At SpaceX, about 42% of the shares but roughly 82% of the votes: majority control, minority stake. (Motley Fool, Nasdaq) 🟡 The judge took the pay package away, then Tesla left Delaware (Sean) — Both happened in 2024, but the Delaware Supreme Court restored the 2018 package in December 2025. (NBC News) 🟢 Netflix just unloaded a bunch of jobs (Dan) — About 1,000 roles, roughly 6% of staff, announced Oct 14. (ABC30) 🟢 The firms spending most on AI are adding headcount (Dan) — Ramp and Revelio Labs found high-intensity adopters grew headcount 10.2% over two years. Sean's caveat holds too: those firms were already growing faster before adopting. (Ramp) 🟢📺 About 10% of the UK workforce is on disability (Dan, via Maher) — The IFS counts 4.2 million working-age people, 10.2%, claiming health-related benefits. (IFS) 🟢 The US gives about as much as Western Europe (Dan) — On the OECD's net total social spending measure (public plus private, after taxes), the US ranks near the top, alongside France. The narrative violation is real. (OECD) 🟡 GLP-1 users are five to seven percent of the population (Sean) — KFF (Nov 2025): 12% of adults currently take one, and 18% have tried one. Still a minority, at about double the guess. (KFF) 🟡 Government-bought GLP-1s would pay for themselves (Dan, relaying a breakdown he flagged as simplistic) — The CBO estimated Medicare coverage would add about $35B over 2026–2034, with health savings far smaller than the drug costs. (CBO) 🟢 The Cuyahoga caught fire (Sean) — On June 22, 1969, and at least a dozen times since 1868, thanks to the industry lining its banks. (Smithsonian) 🟢 The Greeks set the sea on fire, and the recipe is lost (Dan) — Byzantine "Greek fire," first used in the 7th century; its exact formula is still unknown. Final Score: 10🟢 / 6🟡 / 0🔴 Plenty of smoke, very few mirrors: ten clean hits, and even the CFTC wobble started with the right answer. Chapters 00:00 - Cold Open: Fact-Checks Go Live 01:00 - Gourd Season and a Bill Maher Clip 03:50 - Social Security's Six-Year Clock 05:13 - France, Socialism and the Brick Wall 09:36 - Built for 1940: Lifespans vs. the Math 11:27 - The Boomer Bank: Money Flowing to the Kids 15:14 - Means-Testing Social Security at $5 Million 21:32 - Prop 13 and Generational Tax Breaks 22:48 - Called It: Tesla and SpaceX Form Merger Committees 25:50 - Smoke Bombs and Mirrors 26:40 - Is AI Showing Up in the Jobs Data? 29:56 - Jevons Paradox and the AI-Forward Plumber 33:24 - The Disability Puzzle 37:48 - GLP-1s, Asbestos and Cigarettes 41:17 - Burning Rivers, Greek Fire and David Byrne 43:15 - Go Build Something
Oct 19

Analysts of the Vibe

Dear Show Notes Readers, It's decorative gourd season, m***********s! Fall has finally arrived in Houston, and Sean has taken the opportunity to accumulate a frankly unreasonable number of pumpkins and decorative gourds. Dan has returned from Telluride, where the fall colors were spectacular and the first snow has already fallen. All is right with the world. Or is it? This week, we're attempting to answer that question by doing what we do best: applying an entirely unnecessary level of analysis to the general mood of humanity. Sean has been experimenting with OpenAI's new persistent AI agents, including his latest digital assistant, Number Two. After spending months trying to cobble together something similar using Notion, Codex, and various AI tools, he's discovering the joys of watching a multibillion-dollar technology company casually release the thing he was trying to build. But when does AI stop being an entertaining toy and start becoming something genuinely useful? Dan makes the case that the biggest opportunity might not be building elaborate applications or autonomous coding agents. It might simply be dealing with the hundreds of emails, subscription renewals, calendar invitations, and administrative headaches that modern life throws at us. From there, we get into AI vendor lock-in, why Google should probably be better at email, and whether the future of communication is just a bunch of AI agents talking to one another while humans go about their lives. Then we turn our attention to the economy. Kyla Scanlon has introduced us to the wonderfully appropriate term shrugflation: that feeling when prices keep rising, the world keeps getting more expensive, and everyone collectively shrugs because what else are you going to do? We discuss inflation expectations, the limitations of the Federal Reserve, energy costs, the AI infrastructure boom, and the strange ways economic psychology can become economic reality. Which brings us to the central question of the episode: What exactly are the vibes? We're not entirely sure. Sean's assessment is that the economy is neither particularly good nor particularly bad. It's a complicated mixture of conflicting signals, irrational exuberance, anxiety, and uncertainty. In other words, the vibe is MEH. And wouldn't you know it? Our very own Unqualified Advice Vibe Index agrees. We also discuss Rory Sutherland and the importance of psychology, whether a flying car that's actually falling gracefully counts as flying, Apple's latest hardware, and the increasingly complicated relationship between AI and personal privacy. Are we approaching another fundamental shift in computing, comparable to the transition from local machines to the cloud? Probably. Should we be concerned about handing our personal information to increasingly capable AI agents? Absolutely. Should that stop us from experimenting, learning, and building things? We don't think so. Resistance may be futile, but understanding what you're getting into is still a pretty good idea. Until next time, go build something. — Sean & Dan A Podcast for a More Reasonable Tomorrow. Tools & Platforms Mentioned ChatGPT dots (OpenAI's always-on personal agent) Codex Meta Muse Gemini and Google's Gemini 4 "Argon" OpenClaw, Hermes, Grok Bot (Dan's agent lineage) Notion Gmail The Vibe Index (our sentiment page) Companies Discussed OpenAI, Meta, Google, Waymo, Anthropic, Apple, Tesla, SpaceX, Amazon (AWS), Oracle, Ivanhoe Mines, The Wall Street Journal, the Federal Reserve, the CIA, My First Million, Ogilvy, the Financial Times Links & References The Unqualified Advice Vibe Index — Our own attempt to quantify the collective mood using six market signals. At recording time, it stood at 58/100: thoroughly MEH. It's Decorative Gourd Season, M***********s — Colin Nissan — McSweeney's Internet Tendency. A seasonal masterpiece and required reading for anyone who appreciates the finer points of autumn decorating. Kyla Scanlon — Economic commentary exploring the relationship between economic fundamentals, consumer psychology, and the collective mood. Rory Sutherland — Dan discusses Sutherland's appearance on My First Million and his fascinating approach to behavioral economics and psychology. Kyla Scanlon: The Shrugflation Triangle Decrypt: everything OpenAI announced at DevDay 2026, including dots Forbes: why Russian sanctions relief would do little for US fuel prices Washington Examiner: Warsh raises rates and says the Fed will "stay in our lane" DCD: Oracle trucks in gas to power its Utah and Texas data centers Khaleej Times: the Tesla Roadster demo at SpaceX's McGregor site The Next Web: iPhone Duo preorders sell out, shipping slips to January Dan's Substack, the Prometheus Dispatch Unqualified Fact-Check 🔍 We said some things. Here's how we did. 🟢 = Nailed it | 🟡 = Close enough | 🔴 = Whiffed it 🟡 Dots, the global agent Sean described dots as an always-on agent you can call on the phone, linked to his machines, running a fleet of agents and reading his Codex threads. Mostly right. OpenAI announced dots at DevDay on September 29, and it can now start and continue Codex tasks. Two stretches: the "phone call" is a voice call inside the app, not a phone number, and it links to one computer at a time for now. 🟢 Dots came right after Muse Sean noted dots landed right after Meta's agent. Muse launched September 8 and dots followed three weeks later. That counts as right after. 🟡 WSJ only cancels by phone Dan said the only way to cancel a Wall Street Journal subscription is to call. There is a "Cancel Subscription" option in account settings now, though it may still hand you to a chat or a call with retention offers. The FTC's click-to-cancel rule was struck down in July 2025, so nobody is forcing it. 🟡 Google's ten percent time Dan said Google should bring back "ten percent time." It was famously 20% time, the policy credited with Gmail and AdSense, but he's right that it's gone: it was widely reported dead by 2013. Right idea, half the time. 🟢 Google drove us without a driver Sean said Google delivered him "to and from an establishment yesterday without a driver." Waymo (Google's sibling under Alphabet) started public driverless rides in Houston on February 24, 2026, and opened to everyone with the app in August. 🟢 Kyla's shrugflation triangle Sean summarized Kyla Scanlon's latest as a triangle of the AI build-out, Hormuz and fuel prices, and rising interest rates feeding each other. That's the piece, published October 14. One nuance: her shrug is mostly the big borrowers (the government and the AI companies) shrugging off higher rates, not only consumers shrugging at prices. 🟡 Trump waived the Russia sanctions this week Sean said Trump waived sanctions on Russia this week. Treasury issued a general license for Russian-origin diesel on October 9, so the week before, and it covers diesel only, through April 7, 2027. It isn't a broad lifting of sanctions. 🟡 Diesel is a refining problem Sean said high diesel is partly a refining capacity problem. The strain is real (US refineries ran at 97% utilization in August), but most analysts point to Hormuz, Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries and low distillate inventories. It's a global supply squeeze more than a shortage of US refining capacity. Diesel averaged $6.18 for the week of October 12, down from the record $6.53 in September. 🟢 Warsh's hike and his lane Dan referenced Warsh's recent hike and his line about staying in your lane. The Fed raised rates 25 basis points to 3.75–4.00% on September 16, the first hike since 2023. The line came from that day's press conference, not a separate speech: "we stay in our lane… Independence is a two-way street." 🟢 Core came in a little hot Dan said core inflation came in a little above expectations this past week. September CPI (out October 14) showed core up 0.3% for the month against 0.2% expected, and 2.6% for the year against 2.5%. 🟡 Denver house prices are way down Dan said house prices are way down in Denver. The September metro median was $575,000, down 1.9% from a year ago, and detached homes were flat. Soft, but not way down on a yearly basis. 🟢 Oregon fish, processed in China Dan said fish caught off the coast gets shipped to China for processing and shipped back. The practice is real. The Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute put it at about $2.7 billion a year of mostly Alaskan pollock, salmon and cod, though that figure is from 2018 and tariffs have since changed the flows. 🟢 Trucking gas to data centers Sean said diesel trucks are hauling natural gas to power data centers. Bloomberg reported on October 8 that Oracle has trucked compressed natural gas to its Salt Lake City data center for over a year, and to its Texas site with OpenAI. Kyla's piece cites the same example. 🟡 Copper: fifty years, ten thousand years Sean paraphrased Robert Friedland as saying we'll need as much copper in the next fifty years as we've mined in the last ten thousand. Friedland's actual line is even more aggressive: the next 18 years. Right direction, and Sean was right to flag his vested interest. 🟡 The iPhone Duo's compromises Dan said the Duo has already sold out and gives up camera and antenna. Preorders opened October 16 and sold out fast, with deliveries slipping to late January. The camera compromise is real: no telephoto, a 12MP front camera and no ProRAW. We couldn't confirm an antenna downgrade. It uses the same modem as the 18 Pro. 🟡 The twelve-thousand-dollar Mac Studio Dan said the $12,000 Mac Studio is headed toward $24,000. It's already past twelve. The top published configuration of the M5 Ultra Mac Studio runs about $18,300, and the 512GB memory option isn't priced yet. Halfway to Dan's prediction. 🟡 The CIA's cloud is Amazon Dan said the CIA's cloud is Amazon. True as of
Oct 5

Agency All the Way Down

Programming Note: Off next week for fall break. We'll miss you! What happens when AI makes building an idea almost free? This week we introduce two projects born directly out of last week's podcast: Sean's Vibe Index, an attempt to quantify market and social sentiment from volatility, credit, meme stocks, prediction markets and Reddit; and Catsup Bot, our deeply unqualified experiment in buying the laggard of the Magnificent Seven. But the bots lead somewhere bigger. If AI can dramatically reduce the effort required to act on an idea, does it make us smarter? Or do we just stop thinking? We talk about agency, cognitive abundance, the surprisingly small share of households paying for AI, the changing value of white-collar management, what an undergraduate education should actually teach, signs of consumer stress, household leverage, and a future where AI agents may disrupt the advertising-driven internet by shopping for us. Plus: the Degeneracy Ratio, reinventing the associate's degree, whether "meh" is bullish, and why sometimes you need to touch grass and make a pizza. Find the Vibe Index and Ketchup Bot under Numbers at unqualifiedadvicepodcast.com. Cheers, Sean & Dan Tools & Platforms Mentioned The Vibe Index (our new page on the site) The Ketchup Bot (our paper-trading Mag 7 bot) Bright Data (Reddit scraping API) Reddit: r/wallstreetbets, r/stocks, r/investing Polymarket, Kalshi (prediction markets) FRED (St. Louis Fed economic data) ChatGPT, Muse, Grok Bot, Instinct (personal AI agents) The X API Companies Discussed Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, Instinct, Reddit, X, Bright Data, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Jane Street, ARK Invest, Polymarket, Kalshi, Robinhood, Coinbase, GameStop, AMC, Palantir, Tesla, SpaceX, the Magnificent 7, LVMH, DoorDash, Instacart, Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, Sonos, Bose, The Wall Street Journal, Stratechery, 3Fourteen Research, O'Shaughnessy Ventures Links & References The Vibe Index: our new market-sentiment page The Ketchup Bot: the paper-traded most-hated Mag 7 Sheel Mohnot on X: the original "most hated" Mag 7 trading bot Robert Shiller's online data (the CAPE dataset) a16z on X: "98% of US households aren't paying for AI yet" BLS: The Employment Situation, September 2026 New York Fed: Household Debt and Credit Report, Q2 2026 FRED: household debt service payments as a percent of disposable income TechCrunch: viral AI agent Instinct raises a $1B Series C at a $10B valuation O'Shaughnessy Ventures: The Great Reshuffle begins Dan's Substack, the Prometheus Dispatch Unqualified Fact-Check 🔍 We said some things. Here's how we did. 🟢 = Nailed it | 🟡 = Close enough | 🔴 = Whiffed it 🟢 The Vibe Index says meh Sean said that as of October 1st, Friday, the index sat at "meh." The site reads 56, squarely in Meh, as of October 1. October 1 was a Thursday, but the vibes don't care what day it is. 🟡 A 2.1% credit spread Sean called the gap between HYG (junk bonds) and IEF (Treasuries) "a two point one percent spread." It's actually how far HYG has beaten IEF over the past quarter, a relative return rather than a yield spread. Sean first called it elevated, then corrected himself to "actually pretty good," and the correction is right: it sits at the 68th percentile of the last three years. 🟡 Shiller CAPE at 41 Sean said the Shiller P/E was "around 41" yesterday, that it reached "42, 43" in 2000, and that it's historically "in the twenties." The current read is right: 41.4 at Friday's close. The dot-com peak was a bit higher, at 44.2 in December 1999. The long-run average is about 17, so the twenties only describe recent decades. Shiller does publish his data, but as a monthly series, not "every day." The daily figures come from sites that recompute it. Robert Shiller of Yale ✓. 🟢 Anthropic is about to IPO Sean said Anthropic is "about to IPO." Anthropic confidentially filed a draft S-1 on June 1, 2026, and recent reporting has the float landing in October or November at a valuation of $2 trillion or more. About to, indeed. 🟢 What the vibes said next Sean rattled off the index's track record. Doomscrolling happened on only 6 days and the market was up a month later 100% of the time. Meh was up 76% of the time, by about 2.5%. Memes All the Way Down lasted about 20 days and was up about half the time. Nervous was up 54%. The S&P is "typically up 69%." Every number matches the site (Meh averaged +2.2% with a +2.7% median). The 69% matches the base rate inside the index's own window, which is a little higher than the long-run norm. 🟡 Bright Data, five bucks a month Sean said Bright Data gave him 5,000 free Reddit calls a month and that "five bucks a month" would buy a lot more. The free tier is real: 5,000 requests a month, no card required. There's no $5 plan, though. Past the free tier it's pay-as-you-go at $1.50 per thousand requests, so five bucks buys you about 3,300 more calls. 🟢 The Ketchup Bot is up 200 bucks Sean said the bot ranks the Mag 7 on 3-, 6- and 12-month returns, holds the worst one (Tesla), and is up about $200 on $5,000. As of the October 2 close, the paper account was up $222.36. Technically the rule averages the ranks, not the returns, but Tesla ranked dead last on all three, so it comes out the same. 🟢 The ketchup came from a transcription Sean said the bot's name came from a transcription error. Confirmed: in last week's raw transcript, Dan's "you're constantly buying the catch-up" is written as "you're constantly buying the ketchup." A Danism, laundered through Riverside. 🟢 98% of households aren't paying for AI Dan quoted a16z: "98% of US households aren't paying for AI yet." That's word for word from a16z's October 2 post, which is based on PNC data showing 2.2% of households with a paid AI subscription. 🟡 Finance and tech are shedding jobs Dan relayed a Warren Pies post: since mid-2025, finance plus tech has lost 246,000 jobs while every other industry has added 812,000. We couldn't track down the post itself, so the exact figures are unconfirmed. The direction checks out, though. BLS shows financial activities down 129,000 from their May 2025 peak, and the combined net gain matches roughly 45,000 jobs a month over the past year. 🟢 Jobs came in below expectations, but positive Dan said the jobs number missed but stayed positive. September payrolls came in at +29,000 against a consensus of about 84,000. Still positive, though July was revised down to −10,000. 🟢 The Great Reshuffle Sean credited Jim O'Shaughnessy with "the great reshuffling." O'Shaughnessy has called it "the Great Reshuffle" since 2021, meaning a once-in-generations shift from a physical, location-bound economy to a digital one. Close enough to remote work that we'll allow it. 🟡 Luxury is finally feeling the pressure Dan said LVMH and the luxury makers are finally feeling the pressure. The pressure is real, but it isn't new: LVMH shares are down about 54% from their April 2023 high, and Louis Vuitton's China sales fell 20–30% this summer. Most of the reporting blames aspirational and Chinese shoppers more than the filthy wealthy. 🟢 Five grand Dan said "vote for Trump and he'll give you five grand," then immediately waved it off. On September 9, Trump pledged $5,000 to every adult citizen if Republicans keep both the House and Senate, and he repeated it on October 2–3. Accurate, and Dan still called himself sloppy. 🟡 Google isn't a monopoly Dan argued that Google isn't a monopoly, just the place demand goes because it's the best (Ben Thompson's aggregation theory). It's a respectable argument, and it's basically Google's appeal brief. But in August 2024 a federal judge ruled Google an illegal monopolist in search, and that ruling stands while the appeal plays out. 🟡 Instinct takes one percent Dan said Instinct is free and makes money by taking about 1% of what it buys for you. It's free, and its founder says the plan is to take a cut of purchases. No take rate has been published, though, so the 1% is a guess. It just raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation. Final Score: 9 green, 7 yellow, 0 red Our vibe reading on our own accuracy: solidly meh, trending toward vibing. Chapters 00:00 - Cold Open and Welcome Back 00:34 - Revisiting the Ballpoint Pen (and the Slop Grenade) 03:44 - Introducing the Vibe Index 07:17 - Shiller CAPE at 41: Is Price Outrunning Earnings? 09:26 - ARK, Meme Heat and Betting on Belief 10:59 - Prediction Markets and the Degeneracy Ratio 14:32 - If We Hit Doomscrolling, Go Buy Something 18:45 - The Ketchup Bot: Buying the Most-Hated Mag 7 22:52 - How the Ketchup Bot Got Its Name 23:58 - Staying in the Saddle 29:01 - 98% of Households Aren't Paying for AI 33:59 - Finance and Tech Jobs Shrink: The Great Reshuffle 37:10 - Dan's Two-Year Undergrad 41:37 - Six Months From Hard Times? 45:49 - Agents, Walled Gardens and Who Pays for Ads 49:25 - Instinct and the One Percent Agent
Sep 28

Where Are the Humans?

Dear show notes readers, This week we accidentally spend most of an hour asking the same question in several completely different ways: Where are the humans? We start with personal AI agents and what happens when they begin doing more of our searching, shopping, comparing, emailing, and general internet busywork for us. Agents don't care about advertisements. Humans do. So if more of the utilitarian internet gets handed over to machines, where does human attention actually go — and which companies are positioned to monetize it? That leads us through Amazon vs. Walmart, Google vs. Meta, the economics of third-party sellers, YouTube advertising, and Dan making a sufficiently convincing case about Meta that Sean reluctantly changes his mind in real time. From there, we get increasingly agentic. Dan has been experimenting with TinCan, an open-source project that lets his various AI tools talk to one another, bringing us another step closer to the strange future where you don't manage individual AI applications so much as sit above an entire synthetic executive team and tell everyone what needs to happen. Then Sean shows up with a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Galápagos. Obviously. Sean has been spending an unreasonable amount of time turning his Tomes and Tunes record collection into a walkable 3D record store. There is no business model. There is no obvious problem being solved. It may, in fact, be completely pointless. Dan thinks asking why he's doing it is the wrong question. Just do things. That leads us to Vonnegut's blue-footed boobies, their bizarre courtship dance, and a surprisingly difficult question about AI and creativity: when does something stop being made by AI and start being made with AI? Maybe the distinction isn't quality. Maybe it's intent. An AI-generated bus advertisement doesn't need a soul. It has a job. But art is different. Art can be exploratory, purposeless, weird, and valuable precisely because somebody wanted to make the thing. We argue about AI watermarking, ballpoint pens that can suddenly write their own sentences, and whether today's obsession with separating "human" creation from "AI" creation can survive once the tools become ubiquitous. Or, as Dan puts it: eventually it becomes water. Finally, Sean unveils the first version of Sean's Manufacturing Index, an attempt to track whether the physical buildout happening across the American economy is beginning to show up in manufacturing labor markets. Manufacturing employment hasn't exploded, but manufacturing wage growth is currently running ahead of broader wage growth. Sean thinks labor churn, tariff-driven manufacturing-network changes, data centers, power infrastructure, switchgear, cooling systems, and other physical investment may be setting up an interesting labor-market inflection point. Which brings us, strangely enough, back to the original question. If AI makes certain kinds of digital labor abundant while the physical economy needs more electricians, technicians, builders, engineers, operators, and manufacturing workers... Where are the humans? We close by deciding that markets are memes all the way down, contemplating a Vibe Index, discovering an absurdly simple Mag 7 trading strategy, and wisely deciding to take the rest of that conversation off air. Probably for the best. — Sean & Dan Books Discussed Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut Unknown Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager Shows/Films Discussed The Mighty Boosh Citizen Kane (and our pitch for a Christopher Nolan remake about Zuckerberg) Tools & Platforms Mentioned Muse (Meta's personal agent) TinCan / Agent Tincan (Matt Van Horn's open-source agent relay) Claude, ChatGPT / Codex, Gemini, Grok OpenClaw, Hermes (open personal-agent frameworks) Alexa (Amazon's shopping assistant) Sean's Manufacturing Index (our new SMI page) Sean's Tomes and Tunes (the 3D record store) Companies Discussed Meta, Google/Alphabet, YouTube, Amazon, AWS, Walmart, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Oracle, Nike, Celsius, Coca-Cola, Budweiser, Miller Lite, Dove, Deckers, Skechers, Weber, June, Aalo Atomics, Jane Street, Colossus Links & References Sean's Tomes and Tunes: the 3D record store Sean's Manufacturing Index: the new SMI page GeekWire: Amazon blocks Meta's Muse AI assistant in a new standoff over agentic shopping Benzinga: Muse adds shopping with Walmart, Sephora and Best Buy (Meta Connect, Sep 23) Colossus: "Mark," Jeremy Stern's profile of Mark Zuckerberg Stratechery: Ben Thompson interviews Colossus EIC Jeremy Stern about the profile Agent Tincan: let your AI agents ask each other for help Sheel Mohnot on X: the "most hated" Mag 7 trading bot Marketplace Pulse: Amazon is regaining first-party unit share Dan's Substack, the Prometheus Dispatch Unqualified Fact-Check 🔍 We said some things. Here's how we did. 🟢 = Nailed it | 🟡 = Close enough | 🔴 = Whiffed it 🟢 Meta released Muse Dan said Facebook just released Muse, its closed, just-works personal agent. It launched September 8 and hit #1 on Apple's US App Store within two weeks. Nailed it. 🟢 Amazon blocked Muse this week, over ads Dan said Amazon blocked Muse from shopping on Amazon.com because agents don't care about ads. The block landed the weekend of September 20. Amazon's stated reasons were that the agent didn't identify itself and handled customer credentials. The subtext everyone reported was the $68 billion ad business, which depends on humans browsing sponsored listings. Right on both counts. 🟢 Walmart has yet to do this Dan said Walmart hadn't blocked Muse. He undersold it. Walmart signed on as a Muse shopping partner at Meta Connect on September 23, alongside Sephora and Best Buy. Sean's "Walmart can be more AI-native than Amazon" was vindicated four days before we even said it. 🟢 The eleven percent pop Dan wished he'd bought Meta right before its 11% jump. It happened on Monday, September 21: Wells Fargo raised its target from $640 to $796, and Muse was sitting at #1 in the App Store. Correct, and painful. 🟡 From credit cards to wires Sean said some Amazon sellers now have to wire ad payments monthly instead of putting them on credit cards. Since April 15, 2026, sellers who still paid for ads by card have them deducted from their sales proceeds by default, with Pay by Invoice (net 30) as the alternative. Cards survive only as a backup. So the lost credit-card points are real, but the mechanism is deduction or invoice rather than a mandatory wire. 🟡 Search is ninety percent, YouTube is ten Dan guessed search ads are about 90% of Google's revenue and YouTube ads about 10%, and flagged that he didn't know. YouTube is right at roughly 10% of Alphabet's $402.8 billion in 2025 revenue. Search and other is a little over half, not 90%, because Cloud, subscriptions and devices have grown into real businesses. Half credit for the hedge. 🟡 Celsius is a pandemic-era brand Sean said Celsius was "pandemic era, I think." The company was founded in 2004 (Dan's guess that it had been around a while was closer). Its breakout was pandemic-era, though, capped by PepsiCo's $550 million stake in 2022. Right about the rise, wrong about the birth. Fun footnote: Celsius is one of the trades that made Chris Camillo's name. 🟢 The composer who hated the phonograph Dan said one of America's more famous composers was loudly convinced the phonograph would ruin music. That's John Philip Sousa, whose 1906 essay "The Menace of Mechanical Music" warned that recordings would kill amateur music-making. Nailed it. BONUS: Sousa made plenty of records anyway. 🟢 SMI at plus point six eight Sean said manufacturing wage growth is running about 0.68 percentage points ahead of other industries. August 2026 BLS data: manufacturing average hourly earnings +3.77% year over year against +3.09% for all private workers, a gap of 0.68. Exact, which is the benefit of reading off your own index. 🟡 The 2009 spike Sean said the gap peaked around 2009–10 and went negative from 2010 to 2014, because manufacturing wages held steady while everything else fell. The timing checks out: the all-time high was April 2009 (+1.79 points), and it ran mostly negative from 2010 through 2013. The reason is mostly composition, not resilience. Layoffs take the lowest-paid workers first, which lifts the average. Sean's own SMI page says exactly that ("That is not a raise"), which makes this the rare fact-check where the host is corrected by himself. 🟢 Twenty thousand jobs, five times the churn Sean said manufacturing added only about 20,000 jobs over the past year, with roughly five times that many moving between fields. Manufacturing employment went from 12.615 million to 12.638 million (+23,000). The five build-out industries on the SMI page gained 64,000 while the rest of manufacturing lost 41,000, which is 4.6 jobs moved for every net job added. One nuance: that measures jobs shifting between industries, not individual people changing jobs. 🟢 Factory job openings up thirty percent Sean said factory job openings are up about 30% from a year ago. The JOLTS manufacturing job-openings rate rose from 3.3% to 4.4% (July 2025 to July 2026), up about a third. Nailed it. 🟢 Four percent unemployment Dan asked whether unemployment was about 4% and admitted he hadn't looked. The August 2026 jobs report put it at 4.1%. Close enough for a guy who hadn't looked. 🟢 Switchgear lead times Sean said switchgear lead times are running 18 to 24 months. Medium-voltage switchgear is quoting 52 to 80 weeks in 2026, and the 15–38kV gear that data centers need runs 80 to 104 weeks, about 18 to 24 months. That's roughly 2.5 times pre-pandemic lead times. Good, and more confident than the "I'm not enough of an electrical engineer" disclaimer suggested. 🟡 One in four to one in six data center jobs stick Sean owned our Ep 54 miss and said one in four to one in six const
Sep 21

The Chicken Salad Index

Dear Show Notes Readers, This episode begins with Halloween costumes and ends with copper on the Moon. Somehow, it makes sense. Dan's kids have reached the age where putting on a costume doesn't mean pretending to be something. For a little while, you simply are that thing. A dinosaur. Elsa. Whatever you've decided to become. That gets us thinking about the costumes adults wear, the stories we tell ourselves, and the enormous difference between saying "I'm not good at this" and "I'm not good at this yet." Because almost everything worth doing requires reps. That includes making economic predictions, where we take a moment this week to admit that we whiffed—hard—on a few. We revisit the Strait of Hormuz, fertilizer, rice, inflation, energy markets, and our increasingly mediocre prediction tracker before Sean and Dan simultaneously remember that the Kelly Criterion exists. From there we discuss the Chicken Salad Index, America's looming college demographic problem, whether degrees should somehow be priced according to their economic value, and why markets are so damn difficult to centrally organize. Trade, as Sean eventually observes, finds a way. That turns out to be a useful lens for AI, too. Should the frontier labs slow down? Can they? What happens when their breakthroughs diffuse around the world? Is China inventing the future, implementing it, democratizing it—or some mixture of all three? Then Dan makes perhaps the best defense of auto racing Sean has ever heard: the racetrack is a laboratory. It's where engineers get to ask, "Can we do it?" Which naturally sends us to the Moon. Why are we going back? Water. Minerals. Science. Capability. And all of the technologies we'll have to invent along the way. That brings us back to Earth, where electrification requires staggering quantities of copper, mining requires moving staggering quantities of rock, regulations require staggering quantities of paperwork, and physics remains stubbornly unwilling to negotiate. Maybe material science changes the equation. Maybe AI helps. Maybe we learn to use less copper, substitute other materials, recycle more efficiently, or build things in ways we haven't imagined yet. We aren't good at all of that yet. So we keep taking reps. Put on the costume of someone who can figure it out. Go build something. Books Discussed Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson — the king in white, and the reason I think about a fantasy novel on the plant floor The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson — currently on book two. There are more than I said there were The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss — two brilliant books, one promised trilogy, and nineteen years of nothing Material World by Ed Conway — where I got the scale of the Atacama pit, and the second episode in a row Conway has done heavy lifting for us Tools & Platforms Mentioned Baker Hughes rig count · Bloomberg Odd Lots · Costco · Spirit Halloween Companies Discussed Ivanhoe Mines · Baker Hughes · BYD · Tesla · Porsche · GM / Chevrolet · Ford · Ram · Anthropic · OpenAI · University of Colorado Boulder · Purdue University · BloomTech Links & References The Chicken Salad Index — Dan demanded it on air, so here it is: the whole index, the modeled cost stack, and every price I have receipts for Robert Friedland on Odd Lots, "The World's Monumental Shortage of Copper" — published the day before we recorded. Go listen to it; I clearly should have Our predictions tracker — every call we've made, scored, including the ones we got wrong this week Baker Hughes rig count — published weekly since 1944, and the number the whole industry actually uses BLS Consumer Price Index, August 2026 — released two days before we recorded; the headline and core figures we argue over Purdue's "Back a Boiler" — the income share agreement I promised to look up on air Unqualified Fact-Check 🔍 We said some things. Here's how we did. 🟢 = Nailed it | 🟡 = Close enough | 🔴 = Whiffed it 🟢 The headline and the core Dan said "the three point four percent headline number, if you just strip it down to core, is closer to two." August CPI, released two days before we recorded: headline +3.4% year over year — exactly right — and core at +2.4%, the lowest core reading since March 2021. "Closer to two" than to three-four, comfortably. Recalled cold, two days after the print. 🟢 Heating oil up fifty-three percent Dan, off the top of his head: "Heating oil is up like fifty three percent." The CPI fuel oil index rose 52.0% over the twelve months to August 2026, the largest energy component in the report. One point off. Show-off. 🟢 Oil crossed a hundred again, and it never sticks Sean said we'd gotten above $100 a barrel recently and that historically it doesn't last. Brent broke $100 on September 9 and sat around $105.82 on the 11th. And the "short-lived" read holds up: before this year, the only time in the last decade oil held above $100 was 2022 — roughly six months — and the March–May 2026 run lasted about two. 🟢 Copper is the thermal metal — the one Dan asked us to check Dan flagged himself mid-sentence: "the Claude's gonna have to fact check me here, because I'm speaking out of not deep knowledge," then said copper shows up in heat sinks and piping, and that it's all through the data centers. He's right. Copper conducts heat at about 401 W/(m·K) against aluminum's 237 — roughly 1.7 times better — and it's standard in cold plates, heat pipes and vapor chambers in exactly the high-density rack cooling he's describing. Sean's follow-up is right too: metals win because heat rides on free electrons, while ceramics are stuck moving it through lattice vibrations that scatter. One asterisk, and it's a fun one — diamond is a non-metal and beats every metal at about 2,200 W/(m·K). So if anybody's hunting for that Nobel Sean called, the exception already exists in the display case. 🟢 Friedland's copper number, relayed correctly Dan: "we have to mine more copper in the next eighteen years than we have mined in the last ten thousand." That is Friedland's actual line, close to verbatim, and Dan attributed it to him properly. Worth adding what Dan didn't: it's a demand forecast, not a measurement. USGS puts all the copper ever mined at roughly 600 million tonnes against about 23 million a year today, which is nearer twenty-six years than eighteen at current output. The eighteen assumes we build what we say we're going to build. 🟢 Our own scorecard Sean said "we're only sitting at about sixty percent accuracy." Checked against our own tracker: of 28 resolved predictions, 12 came true, 9 landed partially and 7 missed. Score the partials at half credit and you get 59%. He was off by one point, about his own show, from memory. Dan's response — that anything above fifty is fine on Wall Street if you size the bet right — is also correct, and it's why the Kelly criterion conversation follows. 🟢 A five percent rig count Sean said "about a five percent increase in rig count in North America" per Baker Hughes, claiming his own May call. The referent matters and he was reading oil-directed rigs, which is the right instrument for the prediction he was scoring: US oil rigs ran 429 at the end of May to 450 on September 11 — +4.9%. That is his number, essentially exactly. Two other readings exist and neither is what he meant: total North America is 792 against 718 year over year, +10.3%, and North America year to date is about 1.7%, depressed by Canadian seasonality. His characterization of Baker Hughes is exactly right — weekly since 1944, and the number the industry runs on. 🟡 Jackson Hole is not an FOMC meeting Sean set the table with "coming up out of the Jackson Hole FOMC summit a couple of weeks ago." Right event, right timing, wrong institution. Jackson Hole is the Kansas City Fed's Economic Policy Symposium — an academic conference with no policymaking power, attended by plenty of people who aren't on the FOMC at all — and it ran August 27–29. The actual FOMC meeting was two days after we recorded, on September 15–16. 🟡 The Philippines rice record Sean said the Philippines "had the largest rice harvest since nineteen eighty seven this year." Close, and garbled in a specific way. Q2 palay came in at 4.63 million tonnes, +5.7% — the largest second quarter in a data series that begins in 1987. That's a different claim, and full-year 2026 is actually forecast below the 2023 record. The import ban detail is also off: the suspension ran through 2025 and simply expired on December 31, and in 2026 Manila deliberately chose not to re-impose it. But the thing that matters — that we called a rice crisis and got a record quarter instead — is entirely correct, which is the whole point of the segment. 🟡 The reserve math Three claims in one breath, and they land differently. "Six to seven hundred million barrels released" is high — the IEA's March 11 collective action authorized 400 million, with 426 million in confirmed contributions. That's still the largest in the agency's history, so the instinct was right and the number was inflated. "Global reserves are over a billion barrels" is correct and if anything understated: IEA members hold over 1.2 billion in public stocks alone, plus China's roughly 1.3 billion. And "six months worth of cover" — the IEA obligation is 90 days, not six months, though Japan and South Korea really do sit on 200-plus. Two out of three, generously. 🟡 European gas storage Sean put EU storage at "63% total capacity" against a five-year norm "closer to 80." It was about 67.8% on September 11, and the five-year average for that date implies roughly 85% full — so a bit stale and a bit conservative on the comparison. 63% was accurate for late August. The conclusion he drew is not just right but understated: this is the lowest
Sep 14

The Demographics of Midtopia

Notes From a Man Who Did Not Shave Dear Show Notes Readers, If demographics are destiny, what happens when some of the participants in the economy aren't actually people? That's where we start this week. Population decline has traditionally meant fewer workers, less economic activity, less surplus, and—if history is any guide—a greater chance that people start fighting over a shrinking pie. But history never had millions of AI agents doing useful work, making decisions, building businesses, and creating economic output. So we try to figure out whether that changes the equation. We talk about the Black Death and the Renaissance that came out of it. Is it actually getting rougher, or are we simply old enough to notice now? We stumble our way home to a better economic indicator than GDP: how things feel at the kitchen table. Then we ask the obvious next question. If agents really do become economically productive, who captures the surplus? Do we eventually tax agent-generated income differently from human labor? Can we use some of that productivity to give actual humans a better floor without deliberately kneecapping the technology creating it? Then we move to more practical matters. I've been moving my own agent between AI providers. So naturally we discuss sexy AI voices, revisit Her, and debate whether the ability to tell a genuinely funny joke might actually be a better test of AGI than most benchmarks. Dan thinks scientific discovery gets there first. Eventually we land on the bricklayer. Maybe AI doesn't replace the person who loves laying brick. Maybe it handles the website, follows up with customers, collects reviews, answers emails, manages the marketing, and does all the digital nonsense the bricklayer never wanted to do in the first place. That future sounds a lot more interesting than either utopia or dystopia. Midtopia, perhaps. Go build something. Cheers, Sean "You get older and you realize everyone's making it up, even the people that are in charge of it." Books Discussed Factfulness by Hans Rosling — the four income levels, and why things getting better is exactly what made families smaller Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki — invoked strictly as the patron saint of predicting the next crash, forever Influence by Robert Cialdini — the one I couldn't retrieve on air. It's the "click, whirr" material, and yes, it's exactly about inverting the laziness Shows/Films Discussed Her (2013, dir. Spike Jonze) — due for a rewatch, and it will not feel the same 30 Rock — I was reaching for a joke that turns out not to exist. See the fact-check Lost — collateral damage in a conversation about what's in the box Tools & Platforms Mentioned OpenAI Codex — the coding product, and the reason my agent has a new home this week GPT-6 Astra — OpenAI's September release Claude / Anthropic — where the agent used to live Anki — spaced repetition, aspirationally Companies Discussed Anthropic · OpenAI · Google · Meta · Amazon · BYD · Denver Botanic Gardens · The Comedy Cellar Links & References Greg Brockman on Stratechery — Ben Thompson's Sept 4 interview, the one Dan is half-remembering. Brockman: "somewhere in there, I think we're going to cross most people's AGI threshold" Gapminder's income levels — Rosling's four levels, with the actual dollar-per-day thresholds Epoch AI on revenue per employee — the numbers behind my "look at that number" argument Alliance for Lifetime Income, "Peak 65" — the boomer retirement figure I mangled, in its correct units Charlie Munger, "How to Guarantee a Life of Misery" (1986) — the source of "invert, always invert," which Munger got from Jacobi Unqualified Fact-Check 🔍 We said some things. Here's how we did. 🟢 = Nailed it | 🟡 = Close enough | 🔴 = Whiffed it 🟢 The Black Death handed the peasants leverage Dan said the plague "allowed the peasants to rise up, basically." Correct, and the receipts are unusually good: the plague killed 30–40% of England's population, and within two years the Crown passed the Ordinance of Labourers (1349) and then the Statute of Labourers (1351) capping wages at pre-plague 1346 levels — a law you only write if employers are being forced to bid up pay. One honest wrinkle: real wages didn't actually jump for about thirty years, and the 1381 Peasants' Revolt was crushed. But the long arc is exactly as Dan described it. 🟢 Rosling's levels, recalled under pressure Sean said Factfulness has "four or five different stages of wealth" and that America is "ninety nine percent in level four." It's four — under $2/day, $2–8, $8–32, and over $32 — and he hedged on the number anyway. Gapminder doesn't publish a US figure, but Level 4 starts at about $11,700 a year per person, which is below the US poverty line for a single adult. So essentially all of it. Both halves stand. 🟢 Brockman really did say that, and Dan really did listen to it Dan recalled an interview with OpenAI's co-founder on Ben Thompson, and a line about how "for a lot of people this will be their AGI moment." It ran on Stratechery on September 4, and Brockman's version is "somewhere in there, I think we're going to cross most people's AGI threshold." Dan also added, unprompted, "of course he's out there, he has something to sell" — which is the correct amount of skepticism, since Brockman hedged too. 🟢 The revenue-per-employee tell Sean said the AI labs' revenue per employee is "pretty amazing compared to even Google Meta," and that they're still losing a lot because of the capital build-out. Epoch AI (May 2026): Anthropic roughly $9M per employee, OpenAI roughly $5.5M, against Meta at $2.5M and Google at $2.1M. So two to four times over. The losses are real too, though the picture has started to split — Anthropic was projected to post its first quarterly operating profit in Q3. 🟢 Invert, always invert Dan: "Do a little Charlie Munger and invert it." Correct, and Munger himself credited it to the mathematician Carl Jacobi — "Invert, always invert" — in his 1986 Harvard School commencement speech. Munger's companion version: "All I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there." 🟡 How many children died a hundred years ago Sean opened with "over fifty percent," Dan cut in with "more like a quarter," and Sean then landed on 25% by age ten and 50% by age twenty. Dan wins this one. Globally in the 1920s roughly a quarter to a third of children died before age five, so his instinct was right. In the US it was closer to 10% before age ten. And nobody's 50%-by-twenty figure survives — child mortality is front-loaded, so the gap between age ten and age twenty adds a couple of points, never twenty-five. The 50% number is real, it's just from before 1800. 🟡 Four million boomers a day Sean said boomers are retiring at "four million a day roughly." The four million is right; the day is not. About 4.1 million Americans turn 65 each year through 2027 — roughly 11,400 a day. He hedged twice, which buys him the yellow. But this is the second consecutive episode where this exact number has caused trouble, so we're putting it on the wall. 🟡 The Bessent BYD quote Sean relayed a quote about "the best car that money can buy is a BYD at thirty seven thousand," flagging twice that he wasn't sure it was real. It is real, and he was close. The actual line is "it is the best $70,000 car that $35,000 can buy — it is heavily subsidized," from Charlotte in early September. Two things off: the price is $35K, and the framing was an attack on Chinese industrial subsidies, not praise. Full marks for hedging. 🟡 What Scarlett Johansson actually said Sean: "I believe she specifically said nobody could do that." Not quite. She declined one specific request from OpenAI in 2023, and then objected publicly when the "Sky" voice shipped sounding like hers anyway. Her ask was transparency and legislation on likeness rights — not a blanket prohibition — and she never sued. Lawyers sent letters, OpenAI pulled the voice. The "I believe" earns the yellow. BONUS — the word Sean wanted At 29:11 Sean went hunting for the midpoint between utopian and dystopian, tried "midtopian," "topian," and "topia," and then said "look that up later." The word is protopia, coined by Kevin Kelly: not a perfect world, just one that's incrementally better than yesterday. Which is, more or less, the entire thesis of this episode. BONUS — the first name Dan: "I think I listened to an interview with Brockman. What's his name? I can't remember his first name." It's Greg. President and co-founder. Final Score: 5 green, 4 yellow, 0 red A clean sheet on the reds — and I'll admit one of the two I edited out of existence before this ever went to air. Two guys with no notes, no Google, and no intention of working on Labor Day. We'll take it, though somebody should still take the boomer retirement statistic away from me. Chapters 00:00 - Cold Open: It Still Has to Start at the Bottom 00:10 - Labor Day, Denver, and a Shout-Out to a Listener 00:55 - Demographics Is Destiny — But Whose Demographics? 02:35 - When Does an Agent Stop Being a Tool? 04:43 - What Shrinking Populations Actually Break 06:53 - Flesh Bodies, GPU Bodies 09:08 - The Future Is Not as Dark as History Suggests 10:15 - The Renaissance Still Had to Start at the Bottom 10:39 - The Black Death, the Medici, and Who Picks Up the Pieces 11:49 - Where Revolutions Come From: The Second Percentile 12:50 - Why Fertility Fell: Rosling, Mortality, and Birth Control 19:05 - Doom Sells: FUD, Kiyosaki, and the Perma-Bear Trade 20:08 - When the Joneses Next Door Are Billionaires 21:58 - GDP vs. the Kitchen Table Measure 23:37 - BYD, High-Speed Rail, and What We Made Impossible to Build 24:46 - The Cure for Pain Is More Pain 25:23 - Tax the Agents 29:07 - Build Segment: Brain Surgery on a Personal A

4.8

out of 5

4 Ratings

A Podcast for a More Reasonable Tomorrow

Creator

Sean Filipow and Daniel Hatke
Years Active

2024 - 2026
Episodes

65
Rating

Explicit
Copyright

© 2024
Show Website

Unqualified Advice