Some Math Problems, Arsenal-2, Porsche Mission S | Walter Russell Mead, Kat Cole, Tarek Alaruri, Tyler Niday, Scott Morton, Josiah Meyer, Aarush Selvan

Walter Russell Mead (0:00)

You're watching TBPN.

John Coogan (0:02)

Today is Wednesday, October 7, 2026

Walter Russell Mead (0:05)

You're watching TBPN.

John Coogan (0:06)

We're on the temple of technology. Go for it, user finance.

Jordi Hays (0:10)

The capital of capital.

John Coogan (0:11)

Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both easy-to-use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, including Tony Hawk now. They got to deal with Tony Hawk, and I saw Bam Margera in the promotional video. Go check it out. It's on Eric Leiman's ex-account. They did it again. It's all over the ramp socials. They did it again.

Fantastic, fantastic.

Jordi Hays (0:34)

Chat's saying we're late today.

John Coogan (0:36)

We are late today. We were working on stream title, working on the plan for the show, but we have a great show for you because we planned.

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 wanted to, yeah, oh, okay. I want a review from those 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 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.

Jordi Hays (1:42)

So overall, I would say it's a good movie.

Strong review. That was a good review.

John Coogan (1:49)

Pretty good. What do you guys think? You liked it?

Let's get Scott up here.

Aarush Selvan (1:55)

Saw that movie.

John Coogan (1:56)

Yeah. You liked it?

Aarush Selvan (1:57)

I loved it. I thought it was great.

John Coogan (1:58)

How cool was the frame? It felt like I was watching IMAX format, but it was just 4.3.

Aarush Selvan (2:04)

They used 23 different cameras on that movie.

John Coogan (2:06)

The cinematography was crazy, right?

Aarush Selvan (2:08)

It was insane.

John Coogan (2:09)

The highlights blown out and there was so much grain.

Josiah Meyer (2:12)

It was way too stylized for it.

Kat Cole (2:15)

It was so stylized.

John Coogan (2:17)

I had no idea where these ideas came from. It feels like they were just pulling from every different camera from that era.

Aarush Selvan (2:24)

Yeah.

John Coogan (2:25)

It was really, really cool.

Aarush Selvan (2:26)

Well, Lance Oppenheim, he does documentaries.

Tyler Niday (2:32)

Have you seen Ren Faire and-

John Coogan (2:33)

Oh, yeah.

Aarush Selvan (2:34)

That's right.

John Coogan (2:35)

Okay, cool. But yeah, really, really fun creative way to throw back to the way people watch TV at that time, four by three.

Josiah Meyer (2:46)

I like that Chris Hansen was the antagonist the entire time. Yeah.

John Coogan (2:50)

It's a complex investigation of his career and the way he's remembered. Did he go too far?

It feels like a little bit heavy-handed. It's pretty clear the vision. It doesn't fully leave you open to make your own judgment, but you of course can, which I thought was a nice touch. Robert Pattinson is just in fighting form.

Kat Cole (3:12)

He's in a flow state.

John Coogan (3:13)

He's just in flow state. Yeah, he's really good. 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. Let's 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.

Jordi Hays (3:52)

If you watch any tech or business content this week, it's got to be that.

John Coogan (3:56)

It's got to be that.

Jordi Hays (3:57)

It's got to be that.

John Coogan (3:59)

So we highly recommend that you donate. I made a donation yesterday, treesfortroops.org.

Give whatever you can.

They also do company matching. So if you work at a company that matches donations, if you're an early anthropic employee and they match three to one, back the truck up, throw down 100 mil, come on, let's do it.

Every troop must have the biggest tree possible, a 40 footer.

I want a White House style tree in every troop's home. That would be amazing. No, but he had some harsh words for the plastic tree industry. He called them toilet brushes, which was hilarious. I'd never heard that slur for those plastic trees before. But he had it ready to go, which I enjoyed. 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. The economics of a plastic tree just sometimes make more sense for certain people. 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 you don't have to go huge. You can buy a three-foot, two-foot tree. Charlie Brown. Yeah, you can get a tiny tree if that's what you can afford. 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 Christmas. Make sure to support our Christmas tree industry because it's important. Anyway, I had a question. 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 is going through a bunch of frustrations over Mac OS, he's vibe coding, building apps, the apps need permissions, we've talked about this, the agentic era. But yesterday, there was a post that hit the timeline that was pretty crazy, a sort of truth nuke 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 tools that they have and they basically cloned.