WWDC Reactions, Claude Fable 5 Debuts, McAfee Eyes ESPN Mega Deal | Diet TBPN
8 Jun 2026 · 28 min
John Coogan and co-hosts break down Apple's WWDC AI moves, including Siri's overhaul and private cloud models, then discuss Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 pricing and performance. They also cover Pat McAfee's rumored $60 million-plus ESPN deal and Meta's new data-center workforce academy.
Chapters
Anthropic launched Mythos or Fable. Fable's the main consumer model, but Mythos, there's some details about that as well. More for cybersecurity.
And China is waking up.
China is waking up right on schedule.
The new $295 billion infrastructure fund of sorts.
Tim Cook took his last bow at Apple's showcase event. This is history on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Yeah, he needs a 21-gun salute, a 21-iAirPod salute where you throw them into the water.
Or a 21-point nuke.
21-point nuke. I don't think so. I think the stock's going to do great. So this is actually fascinating. So the focus of Tim Cook's last WWDC was Siri. And reviews are good. They launched a bunch of new features. I think people are going to be very satisfied with it and all the decisions that they made. Did you know Tim Cook's first WWDC was when they announced Siri the first time? 2011. So we can play this clip from full circle, first Apple Siri announcement. Listen to what they actually say, how they talk about Siri, and then look at where we are today.
Just 16 years later, 15 years later, that you're going to be able to talk to technology and it'll do things for us. Haven't we seen this before over and over? But it never comes true. They have very limited capability. It's crazy. Just learn a syntax, call a name, dial a number, play a song. It is such a letdown. What we really want to do is just talk to our device, ask a simple question, "What's the weather going to be like today?" and get a response. In fact, we don't want to be told how to talk to it. We want to talk to it any way we'd like. Someone else might ask, "Will it rain in Cupertino?" Or is the weather going to get worse today? Or do I need an umbrella today? And your device, in this case your phone, will figure out what you mean and help you get what you want done. That's a feature in the iPhone 4S we call Siri. Siri is your intelligent assistant. It helps you get things done just by asking.
Pretty crazy.
Called it.
What happened? But it just took 15 years for the technology to actually catch up. And so I think they launched a functionality. When Siri launched, it was the best voice assistant. It was a great experience.
You didn't have to pay some tax. I don't think it— I mean, it took 15 years for their technology to catch up.
Yes, but it took 13 years or 12 years for the technology industry to catch up. And so they're only 10% behind if you look at it that way. Like it's been a 15-year project from that announcement. It's been 12 years for the leading labs to get there. And so they're 3 years behind. Feels like an eternity in AI world. But it's really only 10%, 10% slower. And they wanted to do it their way. And they got there. It is very interesting to me that they're calling it Siri AI because Siri, the whole pitch was AI. And like Siri, the name Siri comes from SRI International, which was the Stanford Research Institute. And it's from SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center. Like these were Stanford AI researchers who started this company in like 2008 or something like that and grew it and then eventually sold it to Apple as Siri Inc. Acquired October— initially released October 4th, 2011, 14 years ago. But do you know what happened the day after October 4th, 2011? The Let's Talk iPhone WWDC where they announced Siri. Tim Cook was the first. This was his first WWDC as CEO. He obviously hands it off to his colleague to introduce Siri. Steve Jobs passed away the next day. Pretty crazy. And so you have this bookending of Siri on both sides of Tim Cook's career where sort of nothing happened in an interesting way, you know, but the stock did fantastically well. His— Tim Cook created an immense amount of value, but it was this lighter, cheaper, faster, stronger— Look at the stock price. Look at the earnings.
Like, I understand what you're saying. I'm not saying that in a negative way.
I'm just— So you have like, Tim Cook operationalizing the company, making so much money from the App Store, building the business. But at the same time, he just happened to be the CEO during the greatest AI winter ever, basically from 2011 to 2022, 2023, when we started getting LLMs, started getting chatbots. And it did take them a few years because they'd lived through a decade of like, okay, So the Siri team, have you guys got it better? And they're like, not yet. The technology is not moving fast enough. Like we haven't invented anything new. So we are the best of a very mediocre category. And Siri sort of slowly fell behind. But even when people say, even if you go back to 2019, pre-ChatGPT, pre-AI, pre-LLMs, and you ask the question of like, is Siri good? People would say like, ah, nah. It's not really delivering the promise of like, talk to your phone, it does whatever. Like, people have the idea of the C-3PO, the agent, the computer. Yeah, it's not delivering there. It's not like people were switching in droves to Android because Google Assistant had a better voice assistant, or Alexa was so much better. Alexa was the same system. I'm sorry, I'm triggering a whole bunch of smart home devices, but you're triggering every— oh, this is interesting. So during the keynote for, uh, at WWDC, they Whenever the keyword SIRI was mentioned, they took out the 4 kHz, 6 kHz, a few different spaces so it wouldn't trigger the at-home devices. Anyway, so they were like sort of behind, but it didn't really matter because they wouldn't, they weren't getting their lunch eaten until the dawn of the LLM, the dawn of the chat app, ChatGPT, and other apps that came out and became like superpowered relative to Siri's capabilities. Today, they're catching up. And it's a very interesting bookend on the Tim Cook era at Apple where he was incredibly effective, but the technology was just— was not at an inflection point at any time during his career basically until the very, very end. And yeah, they got, you know, they were a little bit behind the ball, but ultimately they did catch up. There are a bunch of interesting other things in here. The facts first we should go through. So Apple spent roughly 12 minutes yesterday detailing the expansion of its child safety and parental control features. This was interesting because it was a notably short keynote. It wasn't a particularly long keynote. I think they spent like 15 minutes talking about products and then 12 minutes on parental features. Sort of gives you an idea of where the energy, where the, where the focus is, where they want to—
Yeah, potentially what you were saying yesterday. I think people, more and more people are waking up to maybe phones are causing systemic issues in society.
Yes, yes. Brain rot, utility stuff. And so that's what I wrote about today in the TPN newsletter. Quick on the facts: child accounts with built-in age protections like limiting adult websites and showing age-appropriate media— good. Ask to Browse, which asks for the parent's approval before the child can visit a new website. So any— so the child can say, hey, I gotta go to this website for my homework, click a button, and it sends a notification to the parent's phone and they approve and they say, yeah, that's fine. So you can really lock it down. Communication controls allow parents to manage who their child talks to and will ask for confirmation before their child can add a new contact. Apple also unveiled a new photo editing tool. This is separate, but spatial reframing. So if you don't like the angle of the photo you were taking, you took it over this way, you can with AI reframe it so that it's more straight on. This is a very cool feature. I think this is awesome for a few reasons. One is that it doesn't feel like full gen AI to me where it's like going to slop it up. It's more just like a nice feature that's in the actual camera app, photo roll, camera roll. I thought that was cool. And also this doesn't feel like, oh yeah, this is something that every— that there was already a startup doing and it was already baked into Instagram. And so Apple's just rolling it out and they're like behind the ball. This feels like the first time I've seen this. Seems really obvious. You could probably one-shot this in Images or Nanobanana or any of the image models. But it was cool. And it wasn't like, oh yeah, this is a startup and they're just like rolling it in. This feels like Apple's DNA of like understanding the technologies and then doing something cool with it and unique was on display here. So I thought it was cool. What was interesting—
I think some of the pushback is that a lot of this kind of functionality had been available in other apps, like post-production apps, and now bringing this— basically bringing it into effectively the realm of the camera. Sure. Where the computer is now the camera. It does feel notable to me.
But so notable how? Like pushback? Because there was pushback, which was interesting. People were saying that like, this is too much AI.
Like, I just view this— I just view this as a—
as a capture.
It's a camera. Yeah, this is a way to capture reality. Sure. And now in the reality capture device, you can use AI to—
Yeah, so Apple has long prided themselves on like what you see is what you get in the camera app, but that started to change with the artificial depth of field, the tone mapping that happens. There's a lot of things that you can do.
Yeah, there's a lot of like upscaling and sometimes you see images, people are like, oh, that's AI, but it's actually just upscaled Apple image.
Yeah, yeah, especially if it's low light, noisy image, it'll clean all that up. I think it's fine. You could just not do it if you want to not have your photos reframed. But it was interesting seeing that, that there's a lot of folks that do land in that camp of Apple is the, is not going too hard into AI, they're not stuffing AI everywhere. And then here's a feature that feels very on the nose in terms of AI. We'll see, we'll see. And there's mixed feelings on the timeline about spatial reframing with some calling it one of Apple's most exciting AI features while others are expressing concern about the, direction AI-generated imaging is headed because you can— I mean, Apple's been mediocre at like the remove trash in the background feature like Gemini or I guess Android AI, like the AI camera on Android devices has been smoking them there. They're probably going to get better at that. But pretty soon it's like you take the photo in super low light, it up-reses it, camera filter, color grade, spatial reframing, remove everyone else, and you get a totally different photo.. And I think that's fine. I don't have a problem with that. But like, I understand why people would be—
I mean, it's a little bit strange because you're just—
Take the normal photo. Like, just turn off all these features.
At least, yeah. No, I think a lot of people—
It's an option. You can always pull it into Photoshop and just do whatever you want with it.
Yeah. It'll just be interesting. But a dinosaur. We're going to enter an era where people's memories of their lived experience are different than—
The Joe Weisenthal view of the future. Joe Wiesenthal got in some hot water because he said that, "Why do you need to store any photos in the cloud when you could just embed them all and then on demand, like, show me a photo of my kid riding a dinosaur when he was 5." And it just shows you a photo of that. And people were like, "That is not the world I want to live in, Joe." It was very funny. Yeah.
We're just not that far off from, "Hey Siri." Your phone's in your pocket. Yeah. And you just have your AirPods in. You say, "Hey Siri, make sure to generate some images of my time at Disneyland today." Mm, okay. Yeah. I am interested to see what's gonna happen on Instagram. Yeah. And if there ends up being divide between accounts that are constantly getting the tag, like the AI tag on them.
Oh yeah.
And people that just say like, "Nope, no AI ever." Yeah. And I think there'll be a pretty clear split.
Yeah. And when do you apply that tag? Little spatial reframing?
No, I think Instagram, I think they do the tagging.
But would they for a color grade? Would they cut? Would they?
Yeah, they'll have to figure out what the line is, but to me—
If you take a photo and you pass through a neural network to say, make it black and white, does that count?
Spatial reframing is slightly— because it's capturing a picture that never existed, whereas a filter is just sort of like enhancing color.
I think it's kind of just separating the layers, rearranging them. I don't know. It's clearly like a blurry line. —but it's the blurriest we've ever seen. But no one thinks Midjourney is not AI. —to make it less blurry. Yeah. And that's literally what they do because you can see that the rest of the space is sort of blurry and then it puts together.
Tyler, what do you think about this? Yeah, I was just saying I was kind of surprised that they didn't release more like AI detection kind of features around this. Like, I would imagine that— like, I assume there will be some metadata if you do the reframing that says that it used the reframing.
But then you just take a screenshot and you're good.
AI true, but it's like— Yeah, that's true.
Yeah, yeah, easy. So this was my wildcard topic yesterday. Maybe they'll talk about something related to the fertility crisis or something. And this feels like 3 steps away from it, but I like the direction that they went for a few reasons. So we got a bunch of new AI features, especially the new Siri technology and UI patterns are mature. We talked about this, so it's easy for Apple to nail. Also, as I predicted, they're giving Siri an app and the models are strong enough that I expect random hallucinations to be basically completely acceptable from a daily use perspective. But my wildcard was that something in the presentation loosely would link to the topic of the fertility crisis that Derek Thompson has been covering recently. There was that article in the Financial Times, our phones causing brain rot or problems, like how do you address this? The correlation isn't perfect for sure, but there's enough evidence that reasonable people are start— are starting to put phones in like the probably linked bucket of reasons why there's a modern fertility decline. It's just one of them. I think Derek Thompson says like, he's maybe 30% of the reason, something like that. But what's interesting here is that Apple is not a fear-based marketing company. So their execs don't go on podcasts and make freewheeling proclamations about doom scenarios. They identified environmental concerns about fossil fuels and energy use early. And you cannot find a clip of Tim Cook talking about like climate apocalypse, we're all gonna die because The sea levels are going to rise. That's not— he wasn't saying that for years and then figured out how to do clean energy for Apple's data centers. That's not what they did. They just, they just worked privately and then started talking about the solutions in their marketing materials. They didn't put the cart before the horse. And it seems like they're doing the same thing here with parental controls, phone addiction. Instead of giving a long speech about how bad endless scrolling can be and how it might lead to a less flourishing life down the road, they only talk about solutions, parental controls. 12 minutes of content in a notably short keynote. I think many parents are very hesitant to give kids smartphones these days, so it's also a good business reason to say, "Hey, you can buy your kid an iPhone because there are so many controls that you are fully in control. You know what's gonna happen. You're safe with us." Uh, and there's already a whole niche market in these dumb phone devices for kids. There's this watch that has GPS and the ability to call home, but not much else. There's no screens. There's no social media. And so being proactive about building solutions and then only talking about the solutions is just extremely refreshing to me. And I think it's a good move. Anyway, the timeline was in turmoil and we'll take you through it after I tell you about Cisco critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. We got Gruber versus German, two of our best friends from the show. We love both of these guys.
The Germanator versus the Gruberator. The Gruberator.
It's rough, but we'll take you through it. What happened? So, John Gruber and Mark Gurman threw the timeline in turmoil over the rollout of Apple's new Siri integration strategy. Here's the play-by-play.
Citizen says again, this all sounds complicated. Just generate your kids.
Generate your kids. Back in March of 20— March 26th, 2026. So 4 months ago, 3 months ago, Mark Gurman reported in Bloomberg that Apple plans to open up Siri to rival AI assistants in iOS 27 update. And so that was the headline. He got some scoops and he says the company's working on developing new tools to allow AI chatbot apps installed via the App Store to integrate with the Siri AI assistant. The chatbots also work with upcoming Siri app and other features in the Apple Intelligence platform. That means for instance, if you have Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT installed, they'll be able to send those queries to those services within the Siri voice assistant just like they have been able to do with ChatGPT since Apple Intelligence launched in 2024. But as of yesterday, according to John Gruber, Apple has not fully announced exactly that, at least according to John Gruber who says, quote, "Maybe Apple ran outta time today and will announce this tomorrow." That was yesterday. "Maybe they forgot to announce it. Maybe they scrapped the next generation Siri that existed 2 months ago and in the last month rebuilt an entirely new next generation Siri. I'll bet something like that is what happened." So he's taking shots, he's putting Mark Gurman in the truth zone, but Gurman fired back and said, here's some screenshots of integrations that basically match his original reporting. And so Gurman's saying, no, no, you can actually go— there's a model picker in the Siri app. You can configure Siri to work with other apps. But there's a deeper question here. I think they're sort of quibbling over minor leaks and rumors and the interpretation of these things. And I actually think there's enough of a gap here that it's not totally unreasonable for both of their interpretations to be roughly correct.
But someone in the X chat says, I feel like I'm watching this in 2x speed. Hey, 0.5x button's right there, buddy.
0.5x button's right there. I actually don't know if it's on livestream.
This is great. This is a feature, not a bug. Yeah, I'm sorry, Humble.
You got to warm up for DALL-E every once in a while. Okay.
Anyway, so John's on a tear. Let him cook.
I think the core question is about expectations versus reality. There was some hope from hardcore AI users that the Siri button— me— the Siri button would be able to fully remap to their AI model of choice. So you're deeply integrated in ChatGPT and it knows a bunch of things about you. You're confident with that model. You know what keywords to use when you have the integration set up, you press the Siri button and you wind up getting that model by default. Currently you have to say, hey Siri, go ask ChatGPT to do this for me. And then it gives you this little pop-up with this button. You have to click okay. Yeah, you're playing telephone. It's— yeah, you're playing telephone. It's not good. Now there are screenshots of a model picker dropdown in the Siri app, but it's unclear if that resets on some regular cadence, like maybe every query, or if it's a permanent change. And I'm sure we'll learn more. Marques Brownlee had an interesting thing that they're calling— what was it? Maybe like the new operating system is called Golden Gate. And he was saying that like the nominative determinism of calling something Golden Gate is like it's a golden gate in the sense that they are maintaining their gated walls, their walled garden, and producing endless gold from mining what's inside the gates. It could just be that they like San Francisco. But I like— Well, it's just one or the other. As someone who— as someone who loves nominative determinism, I thought it was a fun, it was a fun take. Brian MacDuff shares exactly what's going on with the cleanup feature, drastically improved in iOS 27. This feels like it might be nano banana under the hood or something fine-tuned on that under the hood. It was very rough in iOS 26. There's also this interesting detail that I got more information on the private cloud. So the private cloud has been extended into Google Cloud. So for AFM, which is Apple Foundation Models, AFM 3, this is the third iteration, AFM 3 Cloud Pro, which is their reasoning model that's fine-tuned of Gemini or some trained on Gemini. They say they worked with Google and NVIDIA to extend private cloud compute, which they've put a bunch of resources into securing and branding into onto NVIDIA GPUs in Google Cloud while maintaining the same guarantees to protect our user privacy. Apple's been very privacy forward. They have a ton of trust. People put everything on their iPhones. They're very, very confident in that. And Apple's bringing that, but they're vending it into Google, which is like the advertiser, the dangerous one, the one that is listening to you. Not really. It's actually like Facebook that's more of like the listening one. But back in 2023, I said, with all these incredible advances in conversational AI chatbots, I'm willing to put down a firm prediction. By the year 2043, Siri will be usable. And I think it came true. I was correct. I think Siri's usable now.
Well, you haven't been able to verify this.
Ahead of schedule. Oh yeah, it doesn't release yet. It's not live for a couple more months.
Okay, I'm downloading the beta.
Let's go. Okay.
At one point I actually replaced— You're your archive of posts.
I know, I know. You gotta know this lore. At one point I replaced Siri with ChatGPT via an iOS shortcut. January 8th, 2023.
2023. Yeah, early. The most complicated shortcut.
Yeah. So you'd go in and it would take an API key. You would trigger this with a shortcut. You'd say, hey Siri, trigger Siri Pro Mode or something, or you'd ask Siri Pro Mode a message and then it would route that to ChatGPT. Before they had the integration, you had to do this manually and it would— you'd have to set all this up, but it was pretty easy to copy and paste that. But important Apple history. Siri was an acquisition. M&A for AI is in Apple's DNA. This is a reminder from last year when Apple met with Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI, to discuss a potential deal for her new AI startup Thinking Machines Lab. The talks never progressed to an advanced stage. What a different fork in the road moment. They went with Gemini, but they could have had Thinking Machines Lab inside Apple, all of those incredible engineers and that, that talented team. But they would have had to pay through the nose. And Apple, you You know, Siri was, I think, a couple hundred million dollar acquisition. It was not in the billions.
Yeah, I think it was $200 million.
Yeah, and Thinking Machines would have been $10 million or something. It would have been a lot to actually get that deal across based on where they were. Gaussian splatting is coming to Apple Maps. This is very cool. Wow, it looks so much better. Look at this. Wow. Normal Apple Maps— no, that is what looks good right there. Once it gets the color grade, I like that. Uh, I don't know when you would use this. Maybe if you're looking around a town, I don't know.
I feel like this would be very cool if you were in a new city and you were trying to kind of like learn orientation, right? Yeah. Like let's say you check into a hotel in a city you've never been to before and you can navigate around and kind of get a feel.
Or like you could do this at Disneyland with your AI-generated kids and you could pick the particular region of Disneyland that you want to generate a fake image of your fake kids. And then you could post that on your fake social network. And you can just slop it up from start to finish. This one's crazy. The North Korean economy becomes the world's most unlikely success. We've been talking up Pyongyang for a while. We've been saying a lot of people raise from PIF. That's usually the Public Investment Fund from Saudi Arabia. But if you just tell people I raised from PIF and it turns out it's the Pyongyang investment fund, you might go to jail because they're sanctioned, but you might be able to sneak it across the finish line. But they are booming. Tyler, you read this story. You had, you had some takeaways. What'd they do? How many? Oh, they built 10,000 homes. Yeah. Which I believe is more than Los Angeles.
Los Angeles. Yeah. How are they beating us? So they're kind of— I think they read Abundance, right?
Yeah. Derek Thompson's. Yeah, that makes sense. They got Abundance filled. And then they said, "Yeah, we gotta build housing." I mean, it's like, if they're doing it over there, it's like, what are we doing here? Like, the most sanctioned and locked-up economy. But they are making money. They're selling arms to Russia and China. They have lots of nuclear weapons. They're building more by the day. And so they're on track. Leopold also made it to the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
Congrats. There we go. Claude Fable 5 is out. We mentioned it earlier in the show. Bunch of feedback coming in. People on X having— have had access to the model for a while now. Dan Shipper over at M3.
What's the information have against it? They called it a neutered version of Mythos. That's like, it's sort of— I think they said dropping is not framing it as neutered. They're framing it as more safe. It's a safer and more reliable for certain things and probably cheaper.
I don't know. Yeah, absolutely crushes the benchmarks. Dan Shipper is doing a live vibe check right now. He had access to the model. We will summarize all the posts from today, get them into—
The pricing is $10 per input millions of tokens, $50 of output per millions of tokens. So if you're token maxing, get ready to pay. But the capabilities— But still, yeah, quite a bit more. People are talking about, like, running it for 9 hours straight, running it over the weekend for just long, long time without getting confused. Very exciting model. Noam Brown had an interesting piece on the implications of large-scale test-time compute that I thought tied to this a little bit. And there was a very interesting quote in here where he said, frequently when I discuss this, people ask why we don't just evaluate a harness that pushes test-time compute until performance plateaus. The problem is that empirically the plateau is very far out. Sometimes we may not observe a plateau at all within practical budgets. You can just spend, spend, spend. So Karpathy, Andrej Karpathy, saw this in the AutoResearch experiment where the performance continues to improve even after hundreds of experiments. He, he goes on to talk about benchmarks a little bit, but at one point he says that a model might run for longer than it takes to train the next run, which I thought was such an interesting, such an interesting concept. Just this idea that you launch a product, you're running it, you say, go do a job. And then before it completes that job, you got the next model ready and released, which is a crazy, crazy world to be living in and something I don't think people predicted, but more and more compute, more and more inference, more and more reasoning all across the board. Meta launched a workforce academy to train workers to build data centers. A 5-week program which is free of charge guarantees a job, follows the recent layoffs of 8,000 employees. This is the learn to weld meme in real life. Forget learning to code. Meta Platform says it's time to pick up a wrench. The company is starting a workforce academy to train Americans to build its data centers. Skilled— skilled trade workers become sought-after commodity. 5-week training program in partnership with CBRE and the Associated Builders.
And Tyler Contractor has already been accepted into the program with a disguise and a fake name. He will be learning to weld. Huge news. That would be fun. We should consider it. We got to talk about flock safety. Okay, can we pull up this video? An admitted criminal discussing the impact of flock.
Okay, let's play it. On just crime in San Francisco, period. That shit over with, brother. Oh my mama, nigga, they got drones. TPP unsafe. We need to bleep this before we play it.
Okay, we're gonna summarize it for you because I didn't realize that there were so many, uh, swear words.
But basically they say you can't do crime in San Francisco anymore, and these two gentlemen are, are admitting to have previously participated in illegal activity. Exactly. And so they are actually—
they say basically they're sort of thought leaders. If you steal a car, a drone will start following you immediately. Yes. And it will just trail you from thousands of feet up. Yes. You won't even necessarily know that it's following you. Yeah. And, uh, and so they won't—
gentlemen posting— so you won't have a chance to like run away from a cop that finds you because they'll just wait until you're actually parked or stopped and then they'll box you in.
And then the host of the podcast says, "So can you even steal a car, run up on your ops, and ditch the car after?" And they say no. And so—
He doesn't just say that. He describes it as the classic steal a car, run up on your ops, and then ditch the car. Like it's a thing that's generally accepted. Not to lay out a bare case for Flock, but has anyone considered listening to podcasts where criminals criminals admit to crimes and going and arresting them. It seems like there's a— Talk about their methods. It seems like there's a dearth of these podcast clips, but who knows.
Yeah, I mean, these aren't even just like random petty criminals. They're listed as— the gentleman on the left is one of the most prolific criminals in all of San Francisco. Wow. So presumably, like, yeah, someone in the police force can just be like, oh, that's an interesting tweet.
Just Google it. This guy's name is— This guy's complaining that he can't even do drive-bys anymore.
Wow. That, that is a wild— that is a wild time. Anyway, let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workforce for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Where should we go next? Pat McAfee is negotiating a new deal that can pay him over $60 million a year for, for ESPN. This is in The Athletic. Big news for one of our biggest role models. ESPN and representatives for Pat McAfee are discussing an extension to his contract that would pay him more than $60 million per year. Deal's not completed yet, and if an agreement can be reached, it could be a sliding scale based on his new responsibilities. McAfee, already omnipresent, could be on the air even more with a bigger role in NFL coverage. I'd love that.
And last night he had a, like, watch-along, like, on actual TV for the Knicks game.
That's super cool. Yeah. And, uh, and he's been brought into the college football ecosystem and been a really important voice there. He's 39, 2 years remaining on his current contract, and he's a College GameDay panelist and has various appearances on other, on other programs. The makeup of the new deal would be similar in structure. ESPN's viewed the arrangement as a production contract and a separate talent agreement, differentiating it from the deals with most of the on-air personalities. Hosts a 3-hour daily show with his crew, The Pat McAfee Show. The first 2 hours are on ESPN, all 3 are on YouTube. Very interesting split there. Stay sane out there. Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. See you tomorrow. Goodbye.
More from John
Shifts In The Creator Economy, Kylie Jenner x Meta, GPT 5.6 Limited Release | Diet TBPN
Snap Specs, Taste, Midjourney Hardware | Eric Newcomer, Merrill Lutsky, Carter Reum, Swami Sivasubramanian, Thomas Suarez, Mark Gurman, Ryan Daniels, Isaiah Granet
Midjourney Medical, AI Talent Wars 2.0, Jake Paul Joins | Derek Thompson, Rene Haas, Robert Slaughter, Rob Reid, Thais Castello Branco, David Senra, Jake Paul & Geoffrey Woo
YC Demo Day Lightning Round, New Snap AR Glasses, SpaceX Rips | Garry Tan, Andrew Lee, Stamatios Floratos, Hugo Frisk, Efraín Torres, Russell Smith, Payton Case, Akshay Trikha, Diana Hu, Harj Taggar, Connor Hayes, Luke Burgis, Anda Gansca