Astra Reactions, Jobs Print, Cybercab Launch | Diet TBPN
5 Sept 2026 · 33 min
In this episode of the Diet TBPN podcast, host John (Speaker A) and co‑host Jordi Hays discuss a range of tech‑centric news items. They begin with the launch of Astra GPT‑6, highlighting spectacular Blender demos where the model can generate full 3D scenes from a single prompt. They explore Matt Schumer’s “manager‑agent” prompting loop, noting that high‑quality outputs still require iterative refinement. The conversation shifts to the practical impact on motion designers, arguing that while Astra dramatically speeds up 3D asset creation (e.g., real‑estate fly‑throughs, game‑ready environments), it may trigger a Jevons‑paradox style cycle rather than immediate job loss. The hosts critique the relevance of traditional benchmarks and token‑efficiency metrics, proposing a shift toward measuring cost per task and a “vibe‑check” approach that tests models on domains the evaluator deeply understands (the “Gelman amnesia” concept). They then review the U.S. August jobs report, noting the surprise 162,000 jobs added, sectoral gains in food services, local government, manufacturing, and healthcare, and the broader economic narrative about low unemployment and the limited impact of AI on certain job categories. A light‑hearted segment follows on Dyson products, debating design versus functionality and sharing personal experiences with vacuums. The discussion moves to Tesla’s upcoming CyberCab, summarizing public expectations (sub‑$30k price, no steering wheel, 20‑40¢/mile operating cost), the MKBHD head‑shaving bet, and the contrast with the delayed Roadster. They also touch on Tesla’s Smart Summon and a proposed “Banish” feature. Finally, the hosts share surf‑condition forecasts for Malibu, encourage listeners to enjoy the weekend, and close with standard podcast sign‑offs.
Chapters
Big news in the AI world, obviously. Astra GPT-6 launched yesterday. We went through the blog post briefly. It went up mid-show. A bunch of impressive benchmarks. We talked about ArcAGI. We moved the goalposts because ArcAGI V3 is now saturated, which is particularly crazy because of how detailed those games are when you play them. The thing that stuck out to me though was watching the demos of people build 3D scenes in Blender using Astra. Clearly a bunch of people got access to the model before and were able to fire off one prompt, maybe a few prompts. It, it feels like it's very, very capable to just fire up Blender and do a full task and model a whole world.
That said, Matt Schumer, who had a couple of the most impressive examples.
Yeah.
He has been talking about how the art of prompting is back.
Oh, interesting.
And he has, he had a very specific process where you have like a loop, manager agent.
Okay.
And then sub-agents.
Yeah.
And it's, and it's not still not as simple as just like you can get a good output.
Yeah.
Doing, you know, in one shot. But to get some of these really incredible outputs, It does take a little bit of refinement.
Yeah. And I'm sure a lot of that information will propagate across the internet as it already has. I'd love to pull up some of the images from— or the videos from the launch from folks who are actually test driving GPT-6 Astra. First, Sharif said, GPT-6 Astra recreated the Palace of Fine Arts in Blender. This is my favorite building in San Francisco because it was built for the World's Fair in 1914. Oh, I didn't know that. Where the steam locomotive and telephone were showed off.
Wow.
It was a time when technology gave us all a deep sense of optimism for the future. I feel like some of that sense has been lost since, certainly, but I hope models like Astra can help restore it and push us towards a more hopeful future. So if we can play that actual video, you can see. So I imagine that it pulls images from the internet. There's a whole bunch of obviously reference diagrams. There's a whole bunch of different ways that you could ground a 3D modeling exercise. You could even pull the blueprints. There might be free models out there.
Yeah, you could pull the architectural plans.
And yeah, it's this odd thing where you could use an AI image generator because the AI image generators are knowledgeable about what the Palace of Fine Arts is. It could generate a bunch of images there. So there's all these different ways to triangulate it. And then you can also just go on, I think Sketchfab is one of the big free 3D model purveyors online. And so You could potentially go grab an actual 3D model, build off of that for your scene. So there's all these different ways to solve a problem and Astra seems to be good at actually going and doing it. There's a few more that we should look through. There's one comparison since this is the new Pelican Bench apparently. Same prompt, same goal of creating this fly-through video for a real estate scene. And this feels like something that could be useful. I've already seen on Zillow There is the ability to restyle images. So if you're looking at a house on Zillow, you can see the interior photos and then you can say, I'd like to redecorate this in a modern style or in a contemporary style or in a colonial style. And it will go and use AI image generation on the backend to do that. It's only available on a fraction of Zillow listings. It's clearly some sort of feature that they need to turn on. you could imagine this being something, especially for spec homes that are selling that maybe haven't been, uh, that they don't have the budget to actually go do proper rendering, just be lowering the cost. You get sort of a Jevons paradox moment. There's another one from Thomas. He says Astra is very good at 3D modeling and the lighting is way better than this one. Uh, this is, this is what this actually looks properly ray traced, properly lit, really thoughtfully Uh, designed— maybe that's in the prompt, maybe that's just the way this one turned out based on the photos— from a Blender scene, uh, to then an Unreal Engine 5 walkable experience. So everything becomes translatable. You'll be able to take your tweets, turn them into blog posts, turn them into videos, turn them into 3D games on Steam.
GTA-style video games.
Basically, basically. And so there's a little bit of a prompt, and, uh, Thomas reveals a little bit about his process here.
I would like to see, uh, VCs, if you're gonna put out an AI blog post, you know, a blog post—
Like a market map?
An essay. No, if you're gonna put out an essay that was clearly written by AI, you should be required to put out a video game that accompanies it.
Yeah.
That's sort of playable, that gets the same concept.
Yeah, I'm thinking like instead of a market map, make it a Fortnite map. I wanna be able to play in the different, you know, Town is a popular AI startup, might land on a market map, should land on the virtual Fortnite map. There's some debate over this last one, whether there was like a different harness involved, but same thing, give it a Zillow listing, it can 3D model the house. So this, it's always with these new releases, it's interesting what makes you feel the AGI or not. Realistically, Frontier Math Tier 4, I think they scored 99% on that. Terminal Bench Science 0.1, they're just numbers to me. They don't do anything for me emotionally because I don't have any grounding in how hard those particular things are. And also, I sort of assume that computers are good at math.
And you didn't get past algebra, and look how successful you are, right?
Exactly. Exactly. So those are rarely—
I accomplished all of this off of Algebra 1.
Yeah. Yeah.
Freshman-level math. Olympiad.
Yeah, exactly. So, uh, those are never really feel the AGI moments for me, but this, uh, but I, I've actually spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours in 3D modeling software, uh, mostly in Cinema 4D and Houdini. And it was really fun. I really enjoy making, uh, uh, 3D renders and motion graphics. Uh, and it was also useful when I was making YouTube videos. Uh, but every step in building a scene Uh, requires you got to watch a YouTube tutorial, then you got to look up how all the different functions work. And then ultimately you're tweaking settings in literally 4 dimensions because it's a 3D scene. But then over time you have to map where the camera goes, where the different objects are moving, how things progress every time. And it can also be very compute intensive. So there's, there's a whole bunch of times where just to preview the scene in low res, you might have to cache and load and, and pre-bake certain animations so that you can just see what it looks like. And then you're like, I'm like, ah, it's not there. I gotta go back and change some setting for some sort of smoke simulation or some sort of fracturing that's going on. And so it's fun, but it is extremely cumbersome. And ultimately you're doing this on a 2-dimensional screen and it can be very time-consuming and frustrating. And so by the time I stopped spending time on motion graphics, which is around 2021, I'd been building the YouTube channel and I hired a few editors. Some of them were good at After Effects, some of them learned Blender, Blender was ascendant at that time. So Blender is the open source community-led effort. Cinema 4D is a closed source piece of software, very expensive, was very expensive, was like over $1,000 to get a license that would be good for like a year. Then they eventually went subscription. And so there were pieces of software that were used by Hollywood, but were very expensive, very high barrier to entry. So you didn't have as much of a flourishing ecosystem. Blender in 2021 was clearly on this trajectory where it was going to build this ecosystem. and become very, very popular. And it did. But by 2021, I was able to hire video editors who were able to go do scenes in Blender. But still, it was a huge ask. If I was like, for this YouTube video, I was posting every single week, I'd like a motion graphic to illustrate something. And I did this one where we built a 3D battleship board for this US-China military competition, competitive analysis. And I mean, it's like it sort of ties up an editor for a week while they're working on this. And this just speeds all of that up. So you're going to get back to the, is it over for motion designers that worry about job displacement? I think we've been through enough of these cycles that hopefully we're Jevons paradox pilled at this point. We imagine a world—
Maybe you should just comp it to software engineering.
Yeah, exactly.
There's a lot more 3D renders. It seems like everything that's—
The money is unlimited.
Anything that can be rendered will be rendered.
Yep.
And, and it's just, and, and more people are going to try to make something themselves.
Mm-hmm.
And then hit the point where they're like, okay, there's this sort of area where, where the models—
Yeah.
Can't, can't get it to 100%. Now I need to actually go find, you know, find somebody who's an expert.
Yeah.
Work with them.
Yeah, yeah, totally. And so we're back on the, is this AGI question? The Wall Street Journal said yes. We are entering the era of artificial general intelligence. It's in the Journal. They've declared it. Although entering the era, like the door, the house is AGI, the door, and we are entering. We're like almost in the AGI era according to the Wall Street Journal. I don't know. Stripe called it AGI. Didn't they call it AGI Jan 1st? Something like that. And there's been various calls. Tyler Cowen called it AGI like 3 years ago. He was ready to rock. I think that was GPT-4. Something like that. No, it might have been '01. I think '01 he was like, this is a, this is AGI. But it's clearly artificial, clearly intelligent.
And don't, don't you think he'll end up looking like pretty good in the fullness of time on that call?
100%.
Because it clearly is this like, you know, timeline, a spectrum.
Yeah.
I do like to imagine the, the, the stripe, uh, the Collisons just like at, at like just after midnight, you know, there's champagne, maybe some sparklers and fireworks, and they just go, that's it.
It's AGI. It's AGI. But the question is no longer, is it artificial? We know it is. The question's no longer, is it intelligent? We know it is at a lot of different tasks. The question is, how general is it? Because Blender is open source, can be downloaded and copied a million times into reinforcement learning environments. We know that OpenAI bought, quote, tens of thousands of Mac Minis and Mac Studios to do computer use training on. And so the question is, is it only good at Blender? Will it work in Cinema 4D? Will it work in Houdini? Will it work in a small piece of software that does 3D modeling that has fallen by the wayside? Now there's an interesting dynamic here where I was in the boat of, I could see that Blender was going to be the new hot thing, the best tool, that I should have moved, but I already had so many plugins and textures and rendering, and I knew the layout that I downloaded Blender, I opened it up, and I was like, ah, I don't really don't want to have to get over this learning curve, even though I know in 5 years Blender is going to be way better than Cinema 4D. There's this, uh, switching cost. Now you're in this weird world where it's pretty good if you're a software company where the Frontier Labs bullseye lands on you. And I'm thinking about Slack, like Alex Wang at Meta just moved them to Slack off of Teams, or they had like an internal workspace thing. And specifically he said—
Give it up for Benioff.
Give it up for Benioff, truly. And specifically he said Slack is better for work with AI agents. And why is that? Well, it's because the Frontier Labs all use Slack. And so they have Slack as a reinforcement learning environment. And so it got really good at Slack. And I think that even though there are open source Slacks and you can vibe code a Slack competitor, as we have tested, Slack was the logical tool to pull off the shelf for the AI companies, for the AI agents, for the models, and Blender seems to be that. So the interesting thing is that I do wonder if people will wind up shifting from Cinema 4D to Blender because the models are better at Blender, or will the models generalize and say, yeah, this looks a little bit different because it's a slightly different piece of software, but I've trained so many hours in Blender.
Yeah.
That I can also do Cinema 4D or also do Houdini. Because some of those other softwares are better at certain things. Some of them are better at smoke simulations. Some of them are better at water simulations. There are advantages to each piece. I don't want to degrade any particular piece of 3D software. I love them all equally.
I think there are some reports that it's quite effective at video editing.
Cool. So I'd be interested to take it for a spin. I wonder— the interesting thing is that most video is still edited in Adobe Premiere. It's a closed source Adobe, you know, they have their guardrails. They probably, they might not want to, you know, say, oh yeah, sure, take 10,000 licenses, no problem, pay us $10 a month for that. They might, they may have a different opinion. They may want an AI agent that's internal. There might be all sorts of different things. But then again, there are probably, I mean, I know that there are open source video editing suites out there I think that they lag a little bit, but there are some that are free or open source at least. The other interesting thing, I mean, video editing, like all these things, like taste is so important in these. It's often less about the exact instructions and more about telling the right story, using the right tools, not creating slop, whether you're doing it yourself or with an AI agent. But I think that gets to the core question of how do you evaluate these model launches, we were discussing the idea that the benchmark era might be coming to a close in some way because as soon as the benchmark's created, it's hill-climbed very, very quickly and then it's at 99 or 100% pretty quickly and everyone's sort of, their eyes start glazing over in benchmark discussions. And it just goes back to the vibe check. I think the best thing to do when a model comes out is Just take it for a spin and mostly point it at something that you know really well because you don't want to be in the— you want to expose the model's— what's the— what's the Gelman amnesia? That's the one I'm thinking of. You basically want to test if Gelman amnesia is triggered by you using the model. So, point it at something that you intimately understand. And see if you're impressed. And then, yeah, because if you point at something—
horses.
What? Yes, exactly.
Horses.
Yeah, yeah, we got to do the horse bench again. We have a couple, couple more benches. Let's see comedy. I want to, I want to see some new jokes. Shrimp, shrimp fried rice bench. Oh, there are other reactions to Astro we should go through in the timeline. The big one comes from Joe Weisenthal. He says, you're never going to believe it, but someone one-prompted the new model to make a completely new and immersive 3D game. Yes, the bar has already been raised. The goalposts have been moved. It's not enough to make a game. It has to be funny, entertaining. And I don't know, I know how I feel like a lot of people are taking the easy way out with these web-based games. Playing a game on a MacBook Pro in a Chrome tab, that's not real gaming. It's got to be, it's got to be running in Steam. On a PC, on Steam, or on a PS5. 5 or on an Xbox. It's got to have more to it than just some fun game that you can play around with in the browser. There's also some updates. Token pricing is effectively meaningless now. The benchmarks are meaningless. The token pricing charts are meaningless. Everything's meaningless. No. So Steven Heidel is sharing the cost efficiency, how you should think about cost efficiency in the modern era. So 3.8 Flash looks 13 times cheaper when measured per token, but Astra is cheaper per task since it's far more efficient. Measure your cost per task, not per token. So interesting. Will we see a decline in— if models get more token efficient, will we see a decline? I mean, we probably won't see an actual decline in token volumes, but we've seen Sundar Pichai from Google and Alphabet stand on stage and talk about the exponential increases in token volumes. But you might see a kink in that graph or like a deceleration to some extent if models just get way more token efficiency. Like if the next version of Gemini or 3.8 Flash is 100x more token efficient, you might see a little bit less growth in token volumes. But they might be doing more valuable work than ever. So sort of an interesting nuance. You got to adapt to the modern times, I suppose.
Jack Altman saw the benchmarks and said, Sam, exclamation point, I guess even a blind squirrel can find a nut sometimes.
Congrats. That's good. That's good. We should move on to the jobs report because even though AI is getting better, so is the US employment picture. The US added 162,000 jobs in August. Sheesh, that is a lot of jobs. Also, what's interesting is that the Wall Street Journal had an op-ed— had an op-ed just— I mean, it just printed today. It went to print online yesterday, but saying why we'll have to get used to meh job reports. The economy doesn't need to generate all that many jobs to keep the labor market steady, but that won't keep low job growth from feeling dissatisfying. So economists think, or they thought, that Friday's jobs report will show the U.S. added seasonally adjusted 53,000 jobs in August. The number came back 162,000, 3 times what these economists— what were the economists doing, asleep at the wheel? They're on summer vacation maybe, who knows. That would be a step up from July's unexpected loss of 23,000 jobs, which of course was now revised upward, so we actually did Oh, we got an upwards revision. Upwards revision.
You don't see that much.
No.
Usually—
Narrative violation.
Usually— Yeah.
That's a narrative violation. There's a whole bunch of interesting dynamics going on in the economy. The Wall Street Journal has been doing a great job highlighting the Main Street millionaire, the small-town entrepreneur, what's happening in the broader real economy, not too focused on what's happening in tech and tech jobs. Where obviously a very small employee base can create a really outsized outcome. Nothing shows that better than Hugging Face. Couple hundred employees, $12 billion outcome. That's not the nature of the US economy. That is the power law. That is the outlier. But it's easy to track and say, oh, well, like if you're making a $12 billion business with just a couple hundred people, there's not gonna be any more jobs. But that's not the way the actual US economy works. So, what is going on with the U.S. economy? The August jobs report is out and it is good. It blew past expectations with the U.S. adding 162,000 jobs. Economists polled by the Wall Street Journal said that the U.S. would add 53,000. That comes after both the June and July jobs reports were revised up to 31,000 and 21,000 respectively. So, the unemployment rate remained at 4.1%, which is historically low. Which indicates that we generally have a healthy labor market. The jobs added were fairly broad-based from the Wall Street Journal. Food services and drinking places were a standout. Let's go. With an increase of 59,000 jobs. And people were worried about this post-World Cup slump. You remember this?
Yeah.
Yeah. And so it seems like whatever happened there, whatever gyrations happened, people are still dining out, people are still going to bars, and so they're hiring.
I think it's quite possible that recent model advances are allowing people to have more power lunches.
Yes.
It might have historically been a Friday thing. Maybe now they're adding Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.
Sort of a let Astra take the wheel scenario after 1:00 PM in many offices across the country. Could be a thing.
Could be that.
Similarly, Local government education gained 42,000 jobs after losing 58,000 jobs in the prior months. Manufacturing was among the sectors registering job gains, as was healthcare, as has always been the case. Healthcare continues to boom. The information and finance sectors shed jobs while economists are divided over how artificial intelligence will divide the market. Those sectors are generally viewed as among the most exposed to technology. At a minimum, The report is an argument against the Fed lowering rates in September. Before the report, markets have been roughly divided on the prospect of a hike. It also seems that the AI jobs apocalypse is still on hold, at least for another month. And of course, we'll discuss this on the show. The great Dyson debate. TJ Parker kicked it off. He said, apparently unpopular opinion, Dyson products are generally not Very good. Strongly agree, though my girls love their air wraps, says Bryce Roberts. A couple other people saying, yep, my wife got a vacuum. It was terrible. Felt like a total psyop. A lot of people are upset. The Matic founder's chiming in. I got an alternative for you.
Oh, he's saying that it's likely ruining your rug/carpet.
Oh, interesting. Dyson rugs shed and Dyson suction is very adept at making it shed faster than necessary.
Interesting. Okay, I'll start with what I think the Dyson business is incredible. The story is incredible. I think that the making things that look like Halo weapons for stuff around the home is a very cool way to differentiate, and I appreciate the over-engineering everyday objects. I'm not saying I'm buying into it, but I appreciate that that someone's doing it. Somebody needs to make a $500 toothbrush.
Okay.
But that being said, I saw this and I was like, you know what? That does resonate because every time I have a Dyson vacuum at home and I've had various Dyson products over the years, vacuum in particular, it just feels a little bit like it's creaky. It feels a little bit cheap. And I always want to put it away because I don't like this, like, Halo weapon, you know, home cleaning device doesn't exactly fit into the overall design.
Just say you don't live at the Citadel. Just say your house doesn't look like it would be welcoming to the Flood. Come on, you gotta design your whole house to fit the aesthetic.
Yeah, that's true.
You gotta have a Banshee out front.
A Banshee out front would fix me.
I think you forget how bad it was before Dyson.
Yeah.
It was so bad. Vacuums were so rattly and clanky and like they used to have bags on the back that you would have to like take out and they'd have this felt inside and the stuff would be going everywhere. Like, this is such a step forward. Maybe you could say that like it's plasticky and it doesn't feel like super rock solidly built now, but it moved the whole category so far forward and so far into the future. Just the fact that you don't have to plug it in. It has a battery. That was an innovation. Like, most vacuums, you would have to take it out and then you would unwind this long cable. And I think they still make some of these, but you would have to find the nearest plug, plug the vacuum in, and then you could only vacuum as far as the cable would go. And then you'd wanna move to another room. So one of my early chores, I think, I don't know why I have so many memories of this, but I guess I vacuumed a lot.
I have formative memories of like—
Vacuuming.
Trying to get to a spot.
Yeah, and you're like, oh, and you're trying to extend it, and then you have to like get the floorboard or something else.
And as a kid, you're trying to be as efficient as possible.
Yeah, of course. You don't want to move the board on the 2 seconds.
There's 4 plugs in the house that you need to hit to vacuum the whole house.
And so you got to optimally— it's a traveling sales problem all of a sudden. It's NPR. Like, you got to plug in over here, reach under there, get under the couch, go over there, then you got to move the cord over the couch so you can get to the other side, then you got to move the cable all the way to the other side of the room so you can get the other side of the room. Huge problem, completely solved, one-shotted by James Dyson, one of the greatest to ever do it, and put some respect on his name. What is going on with the CyberCab? Is, uh, there's an interior tour here with Whole Mars Catalog, and IB says—
The doors go up, John.
The doors go up.
Did you know the doors go up?
Yes, I saw that. Uh, this will completely replace Uber for me. Holy mackerel. I like this. There's a couple other data points about the CyberCab rollout. So famously, YouTuber and electronics reviewer Marques Brownlee attended the previous CyberCab event and came away impressed and optimistic about the future of self-driving, but skeptical of the timeline. And he said that if Elon could make good on his forecast, which was for sale By the end of 2026, for under $30,000, no steering wheel, full self-driving, you can just put it out in the world and it will go do tasks and earn you money. That was the pitch. And Marques said, I think that's too aggressive.
Does for sale mean they're being delivered?
Yes.
Okay.
For sale.
Because they did throw up— they did throw up like a—
Yeah, preorder doesn't count. You got to pay the $30,000. You got to get the CyberCab by December 31st. And so if you get—
Elon took that personally.
Elon took that personally.
Yeah.
He has a preorder where you can buy a whole stack of them for $1 million and run a fleet. But I think Marques is looking good. The stakes were high. Marques Brownlee said that he would have to— he would shave his head if this happened on Elon's original schedule. And of course, every time there was a CyberCab that was spotted, I actually saw one here in LA. Every time there was an update about the progress of the CyberCab program, people would respond with an AI image of bald Marques, which is very funny. But the—
Should we be making predictions with head shaving as a consequence?
Yeah. If Elon doesn't ship this by the end of the year, I'll shave Tyler's head. I'm willing to do that if Elon doesn't.
OK. Is that— do we have a deal? Yeah.
Wait, if he doesn't ship it? If he doesn't ship the CyberCab for under $30,000 by the end of the year—
Actual deliveries—
No steering wheel and it drives itself.
Vehicles that can do economically viable tests.
So I'm inverse Marques Brownlee. No.
No.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh.
No, no, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If he doesn't do it. Yeah, you're the opposite of Marques. If he doesn't do it, you shave. In the world where he does do it, then you don't have to shave your head. I do like the head shaving as a, as a bet. I don't know exactly—
When's the last time you had a buzz cut?
High school football season. I would shave it before the season started, easier to put on the helmet, and then I would grow it out all year and I had long flowing hair.
Electric. I will pay a lot of money for pictures of John.
I'll find an old one. It was, it was a good— it was a wild look. It was a lot of fun. It was also just like easier. Lazy bones. I'm actually really bullish on the CyberCab. I've tested a Model S recently and I ordered a Model YL and the self-driving capability is 100% ready to rock like it is. You know, Brandon on our team was saying that he's at 95% of the miles that he's driven in the car have been in full self-driving mode. You had a little bit of teleop for that 5 That's not there. And with a cab, you don't have to negotiate driveways and drop-off points and valets as much.
Yeah.
It's solved. Like, truly, the only time you're driving a Tesla, if you have the Full Self-Driving on the latest hardware, is you pulling into your garage or negotiating a parking lot, something like that. Interestingly, Tesla has a feature, Smart Summon, It can pull out of a parking space and come and pick you up. It's a little janky right now, not quite there. You have to sort of puppeteer it yourself. But they don't have a banish mode. And there's huge demand for banish, which is the inverse of summon. And Brandon just coined this. And I was like, that's actually great. And he was like, yeah, that's probably what they'll call it. And I was like, yeah, I guess. But I wouldn't have thought of that. I don't know.
Seems like a very Elon—
Yeah. So I love the idea of being able to take the full self-driving vehicle, get out of it just on the curb, actually at your destination, and say, Banish, go pay for parking if you want to pay for parking. Go find a spot on the road. Go drive around until you find something. I'm going to be here for an hour. Deal with it. Deal with it, AI. That's what everyone wants. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Anyway, what did Elon actually say about CyberCab? He said, 20 cents a mile to run, 30 or 40 with taxes. And yes, you can buy one for under $30,000. Get ready to shave your head, MKBHD. Somebody's shaving their head. It's either Tyler or MKBHD. We'll see. I think the cost of autonomous transport will be so low that you can think of it like individualized mass transit. The average cost of a city bus per mile, not the The ticket price, because that is subsidized, is about $1 a mile. The operating cost of a CyberCab will be around $0.20 a mile, including taxes and everything else, probably $0.30 or $0.40 a mile. Yes, you'll be able to buy one. We expect the cost below $30,000. It is crazy that I'm in a world where I think they're going to ship CyberCab before Roadster, because they announced Roadster a decade ago.
I know, but we were expecting something around the Roadster in August.
Right? Yeah, flying. And he told Rogan he was It was going to show a demo that was going to blow everyone's mind.
Yeah, so I would expect that hopefully this month.
So you think you'll be able to buy a Roadster and get it delivered before you'll be able to buy a CyberCab and get it delivered?
I never said I thought you could ever get a Roadster delivered.
You just think it's never going to come?
No, no, no. But I would assume if they're going to do a demo, then we're still over a year out from delivery, at least.
I mean, just from a financial position, CyberCab makes so much more sense. of business than Roadster. Roadster, I mean, even at $250,000 for the crazy specs, like, it's still like there aren't that many buyers that want that. A lot of people that are spending $250,000, they want a manual, they want an experience, they want a weekender. They don't necessarily want—
There's going to be so many buyers for the Roadster.
There will be.
At least where we are.
There will be. But we're talking about so many buyers, oh, 10,000 cars a year or something. It's not the way people get around every day. Like, Taxis, you know, like it's just completely different TAM, completely different situation in general. So I don't know, I might go— well, I'm shaving this side of the head if it's CyberCab first, this side of the head if it's Roadster first. And I think I'll have a head of hair for over a year.
The National Weather Service forecasts dangerous beach conditions for the Malibu Coast. Dangerous starting today.
Dangerous for novices or dangerous for someone At your level, that's impossible. Dangerously good surf conditions.
Dangerously, absolutely electric surf conditions heading into this weekend. Hope to see the TBPN nation in SoCal taking advantage of this hurricane swell. We're going to have back-to-back days of phenomenal activity in here on the Pacific. So I'm thrilled. I'm excited. Hope to get you out there, John. I would love to see you.
I might be tinkering with Astra. Who knows? Have a happy Labor Day.
Have a wonderful 3-day weekend.
And we will see you.
Zeke says great weekend to get out on the pontoon in Malibu. Pontoon would be insane.
Yeah.
Pontoon might flip it. Love you guys. We'll see you Tuesday.
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