September 2026
Chris Williamson says his new Austin studio gives Modern Wisdom a permanent production base after years of recording from bedrooms, rentals, hotels and borrowed facilities while traveling more than 100,000 miles annually. Built to support in-person interviews, remote guests, roundtables and solo work, the studio is meant to keep a complex camera and lighting operation out of sight while allowing the show to rely less on constant travel.
Comedian and writer Matt McCusker argues that much of adult life involves choosing among forms of hardship rather than escaping hardship altogether. Drawing on his years selling drugs, his experience of fatherhood and his changing view of conventional work, McCusker tells Chris Williamson that safety, family and ordinary responsibility became more meaningful after he learned what a life organized around avoiding discomfort could cost. Their discussion also tests that moral framework against severe mental illness, particularly in the Lindsay Clancy case, where explanation and public protection remain in tension.
All-In’s David Sacks, David Friedberg, Chamath Palihapitiya and Jason Calacanis argue that warnings of near-term AI extinction rest on an unproven leap from current models to autonomous self-improvement, while the policy response could concentrate AI control in regulated proprietary platforms. They extend that skepticism to Anthropic’s IPO messaging, OpenAI’s handling of customer data in its Navier–Stokes work, and Nike’s decline, which they attribute to weakened product discipline, distribution decisions and a blurred athletic brand.
John Coogan presents AI 2040 as a managed slowdown of frontier AI development: current models could still be deployed, but large training runs would be licensed, audited and physically constrained until institutions are prepared for superintelligence. His proposed controls—compute inventories, secured research sites and monitored transfers of model weights—rest on the assumption that the hardware needed for the frontier remains visible. Jordi Hays argues that such restrictions could instead concentrate power among approved firms and states while pushing other work into secret, government-backed programs.
Bloomberg’s Chris Welch argues that Apple’s $1,999 iPhone Duo shows the advantage of entering foldables late: instead of merely adding a larger folding screen, Apple has reworked iOS around the device’s shorter, wider shape. In Welch’s early assessment, thumb-accessible controls, a matte 7.6-inch inner display and a barely noticeable crease make the Duo feel more coherent than earlier foldables, though its case rests on refinement rather than a single breakthrough.
OpenAI is exploring whether leading AI labs could jointly slow the development of frontier systems, Bloomberg’s Shirin Ghaffary reports, after Sam Altman raised the possibility in an all-hands meeting. The proposal is not a unilateral pause: OpenAI’s position is that pacing only matters if competing developers participate. Anthropic’s policies on withholding dangerous models and responding to misuse do not establish whether it would join such a development pact.
Bloomberg’s Brody Ford reports that Microsoft is considering a multiyear data-center expansion that could more than triple capacity to 38 gigawatts, as computing shortages force it to turn away AI and cloud customers. The plan, which Microsoft has called inaccurate in its reported details, reflects both the risk of customers shifting workloads to rivals and rising demand for CPU capacity alongside GPUs as AI agents interact with enterprise systems.
Mentava founder Niels Hoven argues that young children who are ready to learn should not be held to an age-based educational pace, and that well-designed software can help preschoolers acquire reading skills independently. In a working session with Tim Ferriss, Hoven describes the company’s phonics-based program and its challenge in selling an advantage parents cannot easily inspect before a trial. Ferriss argues that Mentava should lead with concrete parent results, clarify readiness and fit, and treat its $500 monthly price as qualification rather than obscure it.
Phillip Zelikow, executive director of the 9/11 Commission, argues that the attacks exposed a war the United States had failed to recognize and forced it to confront how transnational threats exploit safe havens, porous travel and identity systems, and divided government agencies. He credits post-9/11 reforms with making another attack harder, while arguing that the underlying lesson now applies to AI-enabled risks, pandemics, cyber threats and criminal networks: institutions built for earlier eras should be reviewed before another crisis dictates the response.
OpenAI has released GPT-Live-1 in its API as a full-duplex voice frontend designed to keep spoken interactions moving through interruptions and background noise. The company positions the model as one layer of a broader application architecture: GPT-Live-1 handles live conversation, while a separately chosen backend provides reasoning, tool use and actions. Its listed price of 5 cents per minute applies only to that voice layer, not to backend inference or tool services.
Chris Williamson and his guests argue that biohacking devices are often adopted on the basis of personal response rather than clinical evidence. They cite the BioCharger and WINBACK as examples of tools whose users report benefits despite unclear mechanisms and sparse data, while presenting roXiva, hyperbaric oxygen and hydrogen as interventions with more defined protocols but similarly experience-led claims.
India cannot make a clean break with Russia while Russian equipment underpins much of its military and Russian oil remains a major import, even as the US is its indispensable export market. Bloomberg shows how that bind grew from a Soviet-era relationship built on technology transfer and licensed arms production, then deepened after the Ukraine invasion as discounted crude made Russia India’s leading seaborne oil supplier.
Wilson Sonsini partner Becki DeGraw argues that startup equity should remain tied to ongoing contribution: founder vesting lets a company recover unearned shares when a co-founder leaves, while advisor grants need objective milestones or active termination when the work stops. She says founders negotiating financing gain their strongest leverage from multiple term sheets, which allow them to weigh vesting, board representation and follow-on capacity alongside valuation.
Nathan Labenz, host of The Cognitive Revolution, argues that U.S. policy should treat China as an enduring AI power and pursue what he calls a “Pax Robotica” rather than a race for technological dominance. He contends that export controls may slow China’s progress but also accelerate technical separation and mutual opacity, raising the risk of militarized AI competition. His alternative is selective re-engagement: permit safety research collaboration, trade controlled chip access for reciprocal industrial ties, and build auditing and autonomous-weapons norms that keep both countries’ AI systems legible.
OpenAI’s Charlie Guo presents the Agents API as a hosted Codex harness for production agents, with OpenAI handling orchestration, sessions and context management while builders control instructions, tools, data access and execution environments. In a fictional checkout incident, the API is used to connect observability and code tools through MCP, filter large log datasets, run parallel investigation tasks and produce an evidence-backed handoff. The example is designed to recommend a mitigation with stated uncertainty, not to make a production change autonomously.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman argues that Apple’s $1,999 iPhone Duo is designed to make foldables feel less like an unfinished category, with a less visible crease, stronger construction and resistance to water and dust, despite trade-offs in telephoto capability and battery life. He says Apple is containing the headline U.S. price while looking to higher storage tiers and international pricing to protect margins, and is positioning the larger iPhone within an AI strategy that makes the phone the center of a user’s devices, data and context.
Bloomberg’s Kiel Porter reports that Elon Musk’s Boring Co. has raised $3 billion from the United Arab Emirates and affiliated investors at a $23 billion valuation, four times its previous level. The funding backs a broader tunnel expansion effort, but Porter says the company’s delivery record leaves its 2027 targets for a 60-mile Las Vegas network and Nashville’s 10-mile Music City Loop looking unlikely.
MiniMax argues that video generation’s separate tools for motion, subjects, frames and audio can be consolidated into H3, a model that takes text, image, video and audio references in a single generation. Presented by ElevenLabs in its ElevenCreative platform, H3 produces five- to 15-second clips with generated audio, timecoded multi-shot prompts and a 2K regeneration pass that retains the original instructions and references. H3 Max, built by fal from MiniMax’s published weights, trades that 2K option for a claimed roughly three-second generation time for a five-second 768p clip.
Rhodium Group’s Logan Wright argues that China’s financial system, once the engine of its economic rise, now locks capital into unproductive state firms and investment while starving households and private businesses of the income and credit needed for a new growth model. In a discussion with Elizabeth Economy, he says Xi Jinping’s centralization has made it harder to absorb losses or reverse policy, leaving Beijing reliant on exports as domestic consumption and employment weaken. A genuine shift, Wright contends, would require conspicuous fiscal transfers, financial restructuring and a willingness to accept slower growth.
Bloomberg’s Ed Ludlow reports that Apple has launched the iPhone Duo, its first foldable handset, starting at $1,999 and reaching $3,199—$700 above the entry price of the iPhone 18 Pro Max. In his first keynote as chief executive, John Ternus positioned the device as both a new premium tier and part of Apple’s push to make the iPhone an “intelligence personal hub,” while Apple’s case for arriving late to foldables rests on durability and a crease designed to be barely visible when opened.
Dr Gabrielle Lyon, Ben Greenfield and healthcare entrepreneur Brigham Buhler argue that longevity medicine should begin with physical capacity—muscle, cardiovascular fitness, protein intake and mobility—rather than experimental interventions. They regard GLP-1 drugs, hormone replacement, peptides, stem cells and plasmapheresis as potentially useful but distinct tools whose evidence, product quality, dosing and oversight require more careful judgment. Their central concern is that medicine not reduce health to weight loss, a lab threshold or access to the newest treatment.
Rapelang Rabana argues that Africa’s learning crisis cannot be solved by trying to reproduce Western-style school systems: staffing classrooms to ideal ratios alone would require 15 million additional teachers and nearly $40 billion a year. Her alternative, through Imagine Worldwide, is offline, solar-powered adaptive learning software embedded in public schools, giving children individualized literacy and numeracy practice in overcrowded classrooms. Rabana says the model is designed with governments and local conditions in mind, rather than as a standalone technology rollout.
David Neumark argues that minimum-wage increases are a poor anti-poverty tool because they can reduce jobs and hours for lower-skilled workers while directing gains to many people outside poor households. He contends that the Earned Income Tax Credit better targets low-income working families by supplementing their earnings without raising employers’ cost of hiring.
Two Minute Papers host Károly Zsolnai-Fehér reports that OpenAI has released a claimed proof that three-dimensional Navier–Stokes flows can develop a finite-time singularity, answering the Millennium Prize Problem’s existence-and-smoothness question in the negative. He says the construction uses external forcing to produce an inward-spiraling vortex whose velocity becomes unbounded despite finite total energy, while stressing that it is a mathematical counterexample rather than a prediction of physical infinities. Zsolnai-Fehér also raises unresolved questions over credit, given related prior work by Levent Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster, and over whether proprietary-model use may have contributed data to OpenAI’s systems.