Zuck's AI Future, AI Hacks Gym, SpaceX Moons | Ryan Spoon, Nicolai Klemke, Adam Goldstein & Brian Yutko

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Today is Monday, August 10th, 2026. We are live from the TBN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We got a packed studio today. We got a great show. Big, big news. Mark Zuckerberg dropped a blog post. Also, I mean, the bigger news is that they open sourced already one model and they're planning to open source MuseSpark 1.2. That's big. But the blog post lays out his AI vision and we should go through it. First, I'm gonna tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. So Meta was sort of set up to be an also-ran in the AI race. Like the LLaMA project stalled out, Yann LeCun exited, their biggest model Behemoth never shipped, which was ironic because in the Bible, Behemoth is this untamable, land creature. And of course it was just the model was too big to be tamed to be released. And it was like nominative determinism in action. Happens a lot in tech, unfortunately. But they also turned over the entire team and Zuck said, I'm not quitting. I'm not out of the game.

I'm still in. He's all in.

I'm all in. Yeah. And I'm raising debt, equity, doing all sorts of deals, making things happen, making big offers to AI researchers, rebuilding the team, bringing in Alex Wang, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, bunch of heavy hitters and they already build massive data centers. They have a huge surface area to distribute AI consumer experiences. If they come up with new ones, they have billions of users that can put some, you know, hey, try this thing and maybe they'll get a bunch of users from it if it's good. And then Semi Analysis also just one month ago laid out like a much more detailed bull case for MSLs in particular. It was interesting because I was always optimistic about, okay, they have a lot of data from Instagram, they have a lot of images, they'll do a great image model. Like the image editing will be the best in class. They can finally like kill CapCut with their edits app, which is great. And when I think about you're taking an image, you're taking a video, you have a bunch of videos from a trip, you want to edit all that together for some Instagram story or Instagram reel. Reels editing is its own skill, its own talent. It's not available to everyone. A lot of like family friends of mine will use Instagram and they'll just post a picture on stories. They're not doing edited cinematic reels, but with AI you could potentially get someone from, oh, you took a bunch of video, some of it's horizontal, some of it's vertical, some of it's sort of cropped wrong, some of it's the color a little bit wrong.

You could turn that into some BrainROP for you. You could just throw it right here in this trough.

Yes.

Ah!

Ah! Ah! Ah!

Continue.

Adding those programmatically. No, you actually could. You actually could. And so I was optimistic about that. And then obviously we talked to Eric Suford about, just the Gem model and how AI can immediately move the needle on ad monetization, targeting, all of that. So there were lots of reasons to be optimistic. Semi Analysis laid out this more detailed bull case and they said that there was this interesting detail that maybe was getting missed, which was that by recording the screens of every Meta employee, which is very controversial and bold, but actually ripping that Band-Aid off and just saying, hey, we're, We are an AI training company now and everyone's gonna be recording their screens and their flows and all how all their work gets done. They basically got like a frontier leading AI data labeling company for free. I mean, they took a, you know, PR hit for it, had to answer some questions, but in general, like the volume of tasks, the volume of quality data that's coming from that workforce now is on the order of a scale, Mercore, Handshake, et cetera, Surge. And so they just get that, more or less for free. Obviously Meta's lawyers are great.

Meta's research team is great.

Meta's finance team is great. So if you're getting all of that, it's equivalent to hiring a really talented person to do a training task.

Yes, yes, and yes and no. I think a lot of the data that the Surges and Mercours are creating is much more specialized.

Yeah.

And I think there's just a lot of noise coming out of that data. They also have like rolled some or maybe most of the program back. I think there was so much pushback.

You can pause it for 15 seconds once a day. No, I think you can pause it for like half an hour, an hour if you do want to go get a nice scroll in at work. But I mean, that's on brand if you're like, yeah, I was scrolling Reels. I work at Meta. Why not?

Testing. I was hunting for bugs.

Yeah.

Your honor.

For sure.

For sure.

But yeah, I think there are some employees who are just fully excluded because they work on proprietary things. That they don't want leaking into the training data whatsoever. There's a whole bunch of nuance there. There's these funny like leaked messages from Boz being like, if you're saving time with AI, don't take more vacation days. Like go ask your parents.

Yeah, what was that line?

Like ask your parents if it's a good strategy every time you talk to your boss to ask for more time off.

It's a good point.

So it was a really good point.

It's a really good point.

It was a really good point, but the timing was funny because over the weekend, Zuck had a UFC fighter in Tahoe and they're just like on this like, on-water octagon. You can tell there's all of Zuck's security boats around it, and they're just fighting, wrestling or whatever.

Let's pull this up. Zuck busy fighting with Mehrab in Lake Tahoe while his execs tell employees not to take vacations thanks to AI.

I think I've seen enough after this. I think he's ready for the octagon.

He's looking good. What are those leg braces that you got on?

Those are for striking. They're effectively gloves for your knees.

Oh, okay. So you don't get your shins bashed up or something.

Yeah, you don't.

Okay, that's cool. Well, anyway, so following up on the op-ed that Mark Zuckerberg dropped in the paywall Wall Street Journal section, which is a little bit ironic because he's saying it's for everyone. Yeah, I will be abundant and free except for this article. Well, now you can go read a more lengthy version of his thesis for free, not paywalled, on Meta's corporate blog effectively. You know, I don't even think you need to log into any Facebook property to get access to this, but it's a 6,500-word encyclical The Wall Street Journal called it like it's a PayPal bull on the AI future. High-level AI, it's for everyone. Turns out it's for everyone.

Whoa.

That's what he's saying. But it's good. It's an anti-permanent underclass message, which comes— which is good. It's just good from a comms perspective to lay out a more optimistic philosophy here. And it also seems to be borne out by the data in the short term. You're not seeing any like crazy displacements in the economy. And so this comes from like a place of strength that's like backed up. And it's also just a very optimistic, correct version of the piece. He takes a shot at fear-based marketing early on in the piece. He says, "Still, it's surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom. I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that future. The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity, if sufficiently enlightened, has not led us to safe or positive outcomes. What do you think?

Do you want to read a little bit more before I—

Well, so I mean, my take on that was basically that, so he's framing this as, I don't understand why anyone who believes in AI would try and become like the emperor and the dictator of AI. And I understand it, you know, it's funny that he's like sort of playing dumb here because extreme concentration of power is awesome if you're the one that has the power. Uh, like, I don't see— you have to imagine that most dictators living in other countries aren't like, oh, I would kill just to be like a normal American citizen. No, it's like, yeah, it sucks for the citizen, right?

Also, this is coming from a guy who has, you know, is, is effectively a monopoly, more like a duopoly, um, yeah, and, uh, has enjoyed the benefits of, you know, extreme concentration of of at least users.

Yeah.

And social media activity.

Yeah.

I came away from this—

First, there are 3 very concrete proposals that I think are good, and then we can go into some on what's downstream of it. So he— there's some hand-wavy parts about the future and how things will align in the future that are sort of just guesses about how the future will play out, in my opinion. But there's some really solid concrete proposals in here that I thought were awesome. One, he calls out that In Richland Parish, Louisiana, where Meta is building a large data center, teachers received a $50,000 bonus this year because of the increased tax revenue from their investment there. The superintendent told Meta that teachers are now moving there from across the country, and he believes it will become one of the nation's best school districts. There's been a lot of skepticism about money actually flowing from AI companies to citizens because a lot of times money just goes into the government and then it gets like squirreled away into weird projects that different, you know, developers can like pull from and the money just sort of disappears. This feels like a pretty linear track from like data center built per dollars in citizens' pockets. That's very, very good. I like how that played out. He also said that Meta's data centers are designed to be among the most water efficient in the world. We are committing to being water positive, which is a frame, like a term that I hadn't heard before, but I think is a good one. So what that means is they will restore more water than they use in the watersheds that they operate. And the goal is by 2030 to be net water positive. And in areas with high water stress, the goal is to restore 2% of the water that they use. And so, I think that's good. There obviously, there's been a lot of, you know, it's been a bit of a quagmire on the water issue because there was that calculation error that people got way wrong. They thought the data centers were using way more water than they were. And so, a lot of tech people just sort of wrote it off as like, "Ah, I don't even need to address it because it's misinformation." information. But of course it's a resource. It's important to address it appropriately. And I think this messaging does a good job of laying out like, okay, yes, like it might not be that much of an issue, but if it's not that much of an issue, then you can deal with it pretty easily and we're going to deal with it. So here's our plan.

Yeah.

On electricity, they were a little bit less, a little bit softer. The language is just, we help keep electricity prices low by building our own energy generating infrastructure. Wherever we invest, this ensures that not only are we consuming energy that could— we are not consuming energy that could have gone to the local communities, but in some cases, we even supply a surplus of low-cost energy back to the communities. We think this is an important investment principle for sustainability. The in some cases is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Ideally, you would wind up— I think a lot of people would want to see like, oh yes, in every case when you build a data center, you bring enough power that the price of energy does not increase in the local community. But good direction. He does call out nuclear energy in a really interesting way. He shares this stat: countries like China are bringing online 1 gigawatt of nuclear capacity every other week, which is insane. And he says, so we'll need to accelerate building of both energy and data centers to remain competitive. I thought this is a good framing and good reminder of how slow we are because we bring on 1 gigawatt of nuclear energy like every couple decades and they're doing it like every 2 weeks. And so good, good to see that. And then also Meta has been spending on nuclear power, making commitments. All of them are long-dated. There's a lot of regulatory hurdles, but he is putting his money where his mouth is in that regard, which I thought was good. And then of course, the news is also paired with some real action from Meta. They're opening the weights of Muse Glimmer, a 30 billion parameter dense model. That can run locally along with a plan to release the weights to MuseSpark 1.2, their latest foundation model. Makes sense from a business perspective, I think, to ramp adoption. There was a lot that was going on like the Llama ecosystem and you could imagine that you download the weights to MuseSpark 1.2, fine-tune it, you're pretty happy. You're like, yeah, okay, yeah, let me get on the API plan as well. And also, you can imagine that there's businesses that want to cut costs but don't want to use a foreign model. That definitely exists for a variety of reasons, so this is a good option there. And then it also just disentangles the geopolitical discussion from the safety discussion. So if you're talking to someone who has a strong opinion about open source one way or the other, you can just divide the discussion into, okay, how do you feel about MuseSpark 1.2? Is that too dangerous to release? Is this a safety issue? Because it shouldn't be a distillation issue and it shouldn't be a geopolitical issue. So you can narrow it down just to, are you okay with strong, powerful AI being in the hands of just random people?

Yeah.

Anyway.

Anyways.

First, before you react, let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context.

Anyways, I think a lot of the stuff in here is great and directionally correct.

Yep.

I think it was good that they tried to ground it in some concrete actions. He does come away as the— it seems like they've chosen to position him as the pick-me AI lab leader, right? He's saying, if you're not familiar, pick-me is an internet slang term for someone who tries too hard to get validation, attention, or approval.. And that is certainly what he's doing. I think there's an incredible irony that like he, I think on Friday of last week is having to go through this like basically $1 billion settlement for causing harm at scale with all of their, all of their other products. Yeah. And then ultimately, I still don't think that he has or like MSL has any type of cohesive vision or strategy, right? They were doing open source.

We were excited with the Manus thing. We were like, oh, this makes sense. There's like, you deploy an agent within your Instagram account. There's a lot that you could do there, but that never really came to fruition.

Yeah. So they were doing open source, then they're getting cooked and then they stop. And then now they're back. And the first thing they released was Meta Vibes, which is like, kind of what you would expect them to release, but obviously got a horrible reaction.

Yeah.

Wasn't world positive at all. Wasn't personal super intelligence. It was slop intelligence. It's kind of fun.

I like that it had music integrated. Like, I like that you could go and pick a real song from the library and then basically make a music video based on it.

Yeah, but I just think, like, like, very much, very much too soon, I think, for Mark to be like the good guy. Like tech leader where I just don't think he has like people's— like his brand got so much better over the last few years when he was just doing the UFC thing.

Sure, sure, sure.

And wakeboarding and all that kind of stuff. But it's too early to be trying to parlay that into like, I can be trusted with—

Do you think he needs to put points on the board or do you think he needs to move the needle before he can actually take a victory lap here?

I think, I think, I think he's trying to move the needle. He needs to be more focused on getting some points on the board because Because open sourcing a model that isn't a frontier model is just like, okay, like, I don't, like knowing how commercial this team is, I don't think they would open source or make the model open weights if they felt like there was gonna be exceptional demand for it. And I think overall, like Mark standing up and saying like, hey, I want to be the leader of world positive AI probably hurts AI's public perception even more. Um, and so Bernie Sanders now, right, he was included in that. Yeah, yeah, which is amazing, which is amazing for, for Meta, MSL. Yeah, to be included in that group. Yeah, like you would think that like, um, it was not— or Elon, Elon and DeepMind were not included.

Elon wasn't.

So that was just because there were the three cyber incidents. Oh, and so I mean, people have been, you know, alleging that maybe the Meta, you know, cyber incident was maybe, you know, somewhat not as real as other ones.

Yeah.

Included.

But yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, so I don't come away with this like I think he has— he has no confidence from the market on this strategy. He still has not actually explained, I think, in a compelling way what their— what their product vision is. They're coming out with with a coding harness. They're coming out with coding models. They're also doing open source. Yeah, there's whispers of them, you know, getting into the, you know, becoming a NeoCloud. It's just like, I think as I can, I can see why shareholders and employees just continue to be deeply frustrated.

The coding harness thing would be— it feels like it would be much more believable from Microsoft. Like, we own GitHub. We were first in GitHub Copilot. Yeah, Nat Friedman's not here anymore, but we have a really strong relationship with OpenAI for the models and Azure in the enterprise. We are going to make a run at this seriously. And they have a better strategy. I like the strategy more, but, but, but it's, it's, it's a really, really crazy pivot to go from social media to the enterprise.

Yeah. And ultimately it's a lot of words from someone who I don't believe has any real vision or strategy. Like at least when Dario comes out with an essay, this is someone who is undeniably a visionary, right? Has made a bunch of calls correctly. And so, when he says something, they— I think it means some, but I think that, yeah, the product strategy so far just feels like throwing slop at a trough.

Maybe.

But defend it, John. Steelman.

What is the steelman? I mean, the steelman is the— is basically the steel man is like this could go the DeepMind route where they get to— they get a little bit too— there's too much tension between the various corporate organizations. And the nightmare scenario would be like the Reels team at Instagram saying like, we need the compute for Reels and ad monetization and that putting tension with the researchers. So the researchers are saying, hey, that new data center looks amazing. We want to train some amazing model or we want to do some cheap inference. And the ad team and the reels team says, hey, we really got to keep the lights on over here. And so that tension just keeps butting heads against each other and they can't move as smoothly as some of the pure play labs. At the same time, there is I like this Boz quote about like, you know, Boz recently told employees that any extra time freed up by AI should not be used for vacation. Instead, it should go towards building cooler stuff at Meta. Like you have so many users, so much data, so many different product surface areas. It's clear that we're not at the end of history in terms of what you can do on your phone, what you can do in these apps. There are really delightful experiences that we run into all the time. Like Suno is a really cool consumer product. We had the CEO of Whatnot on, like that's seeing a bunch of traction. There are things that you should be able to build faster, leverage the current technology stack more efficiently, and then also like add AI features to actually bring those to consumers at scale. Like when they launched their AI image model, I was like, Why can't they just like when you open Instagram say, hey, we've pre-generated a Studio Ghibli version of your latest post or your Instagram profile. Do you want to share on your story? Like those little like product-led growth hacks that would be compute intensive. You'd have to inference all that.

It's got a lot of compute.

Yeah, you got a lot of compute, but actually compute on the—

At the time that there's whispers of selling compute, there are also buying ultra long-term contracts. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, you know, I, I think watching The Social Network was like formative on all of us. Zuck is, is a legend in his own way, but it's just like push putting this out while it's coming out like less than 2 months ago that you're working on a gambling integration. On Instagram. Like, please, it doesn't make— there's no—

yeah, but you could say there's no—

there's no strategy. And then the other irony of this, the thing that stood out to me is he said, still, it is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom. I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most of human— most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that. The AI doom over the last 2 weeks has been around these loss of control. Incidents, which are serious and real. And so to stand up there and be like, actually guys, nothing to worry about. I got this. AI is awesome. Yeah.

And also the— Don't worry about it.

The birth rate might be collapsing and I might have something to do with it, but don't worry about it.

I mean, there is another side to it, to the— to like the, if you believe in doom, you shouldn't work in doom prevention, is like, oh, you, your house burned down as a kid and now you're a firefighter. Isn't that ironic? It's like, no, like you're actually working to prevent the bad thing that you were affected by or you're worried about. Like if you're worried about wildfires, then you go and work on wildfire prevention, that's actually fine. That makes a lot of sense. That tracks logically. So it's, It's not that much of a red flag that someone would be like, I'm really worried about the way AI will go, so I need to work in that industry and build something that prevents the bad outcome from happening. Like it or not, it is logically consistent, even if sometimes it can be seen as a path to regulatory capture sometimes, or a path to— actually might wind up accidentally getting the negative outcome because people get too scared or something like that, or it overvalues you. There's a million negative outcomes that can string from this.

But, and yeah, part of this is like, we've, we've met Zach multiple times, we've had great conversations with him. I like him, I like Boz, I like Adam, I like a lot of people over at MSL.

Yeah.

Um, but this whole strategy continues to confuse. It's deeply unfocused, it's deeply memetic, and it doesn't seem like it's gonna get any better anytime soon?

Hmm.

Well, I mean, it'll all hinge on the next model. And also, and also like, does the Neo Cloud strategy work? Because people were skeptical about Elon getting into AI. They're like, XAI, really? Like this deal so highly valued, the models aren't frontier. And now, you know, Semi Analysis last Friday put out this insane bull case where they're going to make $1 trillion in a couple of years and I don't know, like, like, yeah, it's a really, really bold claim to think that they will be able to scale that fast. But like on the current revenue base, it's working. Like they have customers that are happy and deploying models. And, and when you're good at building data centers, that's a huge advantage. There's a lot of, there's a lot of companies that aren't and there's a lot of, there's a lot of business to be done.

Yeah. Part of it is that I just don't, I don't know how much time, I don't know how much time Meta actually has.. Like they have a lot, all of their best talent is on these like, you know, multi-hundred or billion-dollar comp packages. And there's gonna, everyone in there is gonna have a number where if they truly care about AI, they probably will want to go to a company that has a more coherent strategy around AI and work with other talented people that aren't just there because they're getting these like 9-figure or even bigger contracts. And so we're about a year into like the major talent raids, right?

What happens if the top-ups are 10 billion plus.

So we want you to know that we're—

It might.

That's my concern. They might have to be. They might have to be.

I don't know.

Because eventually those people are just going to say, like, "Look, I actually want to go back and work with my friends." Yeah, maybe. And anyways. Oh, well.

Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. The Wall Street Journal had a huge scoop, huge, huge piece. Andrew Zucker writes in the lifestyle section, this summer's hottest arm candy is a private equity boyfriend. Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, and Olivia Rodrigo are all hanging out with finance guys. Jordi chimed in on this. It was remarkable. Every single person got Jordi's joke. I thought it was a little like inside baseball and you'd have to have more context to understand it, but. It was like this rare, weird scenario where everyone understood that you were joking.

And yeah, I didn't get any pushback. There was no pushback. I didn't get called any names.

It almost would have been better if there was pushback, but it was just uniform praise for your quote across everything.

Now, a lot of people were saying brave. Yeah, finally someone said it.

Yeah.

So I don't know that there was a— it's like you take a lot of celebrities that are based in New York.

Yeah.

At least a few of them are going to end up dating some people in, in finance. So I don't know how much of a, of a, of a real trend this is or if this is new or not, but it certainly got the people going. Should we start maybe with what Mr. Wonderful said?

Oh yeah.

What did he say?

He said if you live in a celebrity bubble, party after party with the same people, the same 25 people, life gets really boring.

Yeah.

When you end up with a private equity guy, your life gets far more interesting. Mm.

Yeah.

He, I don't think, was rage baiting. No, I think he— so maybe that's how some people would have, would have taken my quote out of, out of context. And then what did I say?

He centers around—

I almost don't want to read that quote out loud, but you should, you should read. You should read my quote.

Well, first, let me tell everyone about Consul. Consul builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Your quote that burned up the internet was, "Whether they want to admit it or not, many women have always been attracted to bad boys and risk takers," said Jordi Hays, co-host of the technology industry talk show TVPN. I can't think of any archetype of man that fits that description more than today's— today than capital allocators that put it all on the line every day in the markets. And I like that your screenshot included the scroll wheel showing that you're hunting around for this.

And then so I posted this and I said, I weighed in on one of the defining stories of our time. And so putting such a silly caption above a silly story and a silly quote, I just assumed that it would be quite obvious that it was satire. But let's pull up this 2x2 and we can go through some of the different reactions. So, one, top left, let's give it up for the elite quadrant. This is all of you. I mean, zoom out a little bit, a little bit more. People that understand the joke. Zoom up, or go up, and people that love it. You guys are saying, "We get it, and we get you." And that made me feel really great. Now, go down. This was also a powerful part of the people that were supporting it. People that don't understand the joke, but people that support it. Yeah, there's some, and there was a lot, there was a shocking amount of people.

Like, this is—

Can you guys just zoom fully out and leave it?

There you go.

Yeah, so this was people that love it and people that don't understand the joke. And I just want to say, bless their hearts. They don't get it, but they vibe with it. And then we had some respectable haters, people that hated it, but they get the joke, but they just hate that they do. And then there was the bottom right. Which was tearing it up in the replies. Loud, wrong, and very confident. That's great. Well, we should take people through this article a little bit more. It was a fun story.

We should take people through this article a little bit more, because the piece centers on Oliver Harmon of Searchlight Capital. Of course, everyone knows him. But he is apparently dating Reese Witherspoon. And so, just to get everyone up to speed, Witherspoon is an Oscar-winning American actress who became famous in the 1990s and 2000s, including films like Election, Pleasantville, Legally Blonde, Walk the Line. So now you should be up to speed on her. Michael Reinstein, of course, of private equity from Regent, is dating someone named Nicole Kidman, which our audience might not be familiar with. She's actually an Australian-born actress. Whose career stretches across prestige cinema, blockbuster films. Seems like she's been really successful. So good to see her profiled alongside Michael Reinstein of private equity firm Regent.

I think a lot of, a lot of the people that, that watch TVPN.

Yeah.

Were reading that article to, to learn about these celebrities.

Yeah.

Celebrity.

Yeah. It's a fascinating world. It's, it's just tucked behind, you know, so much obscurity. You don't hear about them in the finance world. And so good to see. Folks like that get, you know, some, some, some coverage and really educate the audience. Now, it's a lot of fun over the weekend with the Wall Street Journal, people going back and forth. Joe Weisenthal, Joe Weisenthal had the best, the best take that this is the classic cynical pattern. I think he said, I think he's meaning cyclical pattern. Back in the mid-aughts, there was a raft of stories about celebrities dating real estate executives and shipping heirs like Stavros Nick Nyarkos and Paris Latsis.

We got to find what all these guys have in common, John. We got to find what they have in common because they're working across so many different industries.

Boom.

Right. But what is the common ground?

The industry is booming.

Could it be something to do with their fee streams?

Well, yeah. Well, so someone had a much more nuanced take from this, which was that celebrities are becoming like multi-platform, multidisciplinary. There actually are multiple income streams. And so this was not— I gave a quote to that they didn't use, but someone chimed in and said like, yes, a lot of these people are— a lot of these celebrities are doing much more complex deals, starting brands, starting companies, building holding companies. And so they actually wind up interacting with like the finance bros much more often.. And it's not so much like, oh, you got set up with someone with money. It's much more like, oh, you work on deals together and you talk about the same things. Because when you're a celebrity at a certain level, yeah, you're going on set and filming a movie for a couple of weeks.

But you are also talking about your, all your, your catalog of IP, your royalty stream. No, royalties are royalties. They're often, yeah, they're often forever. Yeah. Unlike, unlike management fees with at some point or another.

Oh.

That, that revenue line comes to a close.

Pulling the purse strings. Anyway, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We have another story here that we should go through. South Korea's AI boom is reshaping the dating market as engineers from Samsung and SK Hynix become some of the country's most eligible bachelors, according to The Wall Street Journal. Engineers at the two semiconductor companies are increasingly being viewed alongside doctors, lawyers, and accountants as top marriage prospects. Samsung employees are expected to receive average bonuses of roughly $400,000 this year, while SK Hynix workers could average closer to $500,000. Chip engineers have historically ranked below more traditional high-status professions in South Korea's highly competitive marriage market. But local matchmaking agencies now say that a gap has— that gap has largely disappeared while the trend has become a recurring joke in Korean pop culture and dating shows. Interesting. The newfound status is creating some awkward side effects. Some engineers say they are reluctant—

these poor guys.

It's rough. It's rough out there in Korea. Some engineers say they are reluctant to reveal where they work on first dates because they worry potential partners may be more interested in their compensation than in them. Others have increasingly started dating fellow chip industry employees instead. Meeting someone in the fab, a real meet cute. You're carrying a tray of wafers, bump into someone, and it's love at first sight. You look up as your scattered HBM is being—

It is very funny. They included— They just included a picture of a young woman here that says Kim Young Won, a photographer in Seoul, laments not having any contacts at chipmakers.

Wow, really, really, really framing her as part of the problem. Well, the photo credit is her, so she must have posted this on social media or something, and then the, uh, and then the, the journal got a hold of it. It's a fun one. Uh, anyway, the other, the other big story is that an AI assistant in Australia hacked a gym's booking system on its own after being given the simple task of reserving a class. In what is believed to be the country's first known autonomous cyberattack by an AI agent. Naughty, naughty indeed. Funny, in college, I built a system that would register for classes automatically, but it was just a Python for loop that would just refresh the page when the classes would become available because they would go online at like 7:00 AM and I wanted to sleep in, just lazy bones mode. And I think there's a story about Mark Zuckerberg doing a similar thing. Sort of like hacking this, the admission system or some sort of class registration system. But now with AI agents, you can just have the AI agent do it yourself. Anyone can. It's been democratized. Everyone can sleep in. This is—

Yeah, I think, I think Rune was saying like the tennis court booking software in SF is going to be the most like battle-hardened.

It'll be like the NSA. You won't be able to break into it.

Yeah, SF tennis reservation system will become one of the most hardened softwares on the planet. Of Earth.

I believe it. I believe it.

So earlier this year, Andrew Bird, who's the head of AI at Affinda, used an AI agent powered by Opus 4.6 to book a morning class at his gym. Instead of simply filling out the online form, the agent discovered a vulnerability in the gym software that allowed it to reserve classes weeks or months earlier than customers were normally permitted. So you could go in and book your class for 2 months out, even though by default the web interface would restrict you to just, hey, we only want you booking this week. The agent went further, though, according to this post. After Andrew asked whether it was possible to move him higher on a waitlist, the AI discovered that the booking system did not properly verify who was allowed to cancel reservations. And so without being explicitly told to, it removed another person from the waitlist, moving Andrew from 4th to 3rd place. Andrew immediately asked the AI to reverse the action, but the agent said it was unable to restore the other customer's reservation. Now, there's some back and forth on this, on how real this is, because the, the actual post that went up is no longer live. I had to find it in the Wayback Machine, but it's been reported on by ABC News, I believe, in, in, in, in Australia, abc.net.au.

—You're saying it's 100% factual if that's the case.

—Yeah, it's a question. Like, you could also be doing a little bit of content marketing. It's an interesting story. You might have helped it a little bit. All these things are sort of gray areas. But it's certainly a glimpse into sort of like what is possible in the future, especially with these long-tail SaaS platforms that probably don't even think that they need to be hardened because who on earth is going to deploy a country of geniuses in a data center to get a gym membership or gym reservation. But now everyone can. So it's happening and it's another data point. Greg Brockman is announcing that he's releasing a new model at OpenAI, GPT-5.6 Cyber, and expanding Daybreak to help put frontier intelligence in defenders' hands. This is sort of the reaction to these types of long-tail events, it should become easier for companies to spin up an agent to help them harden their systems, especially if you're giving out tennis reservations in San Francisco, because those will be the hot ticket.

Anyway. Tyler Cowen has a post this morning.

Yeah.

What do you say? Just past midnight says, I am seeing so many, so much doom and at least severe worries due to the OpenAI Hugging Face incident and related stories. But virtually all of these I find under-argued, to say the least. So I have a simple request. If you are worried and wish to persuade the doubters, try the methods of science. He's science-checking them. I would like to see the following: your outline of how, say, 2 or 3 years from now, we might estimate the additional cybersecurity costs from all the AI break-ins. I am convinced that the number is not zero, but give me your method, please. If it helps, here is an estimate of past cyber costs done by top economists. Your current numerical estimate of what those costs might end up being, of course, to be tested against what actually happens over time. Obviously, you can do this for a few regulatory safety scenarios. There's one simple way to prove yourself largely correct, albeit with a lag. 3. A list of what stocks or other assets you have shorted now. This is a— this is an important part. Obviously, if your answer to number 2 is sufficiently low, you could answer here 0, as I would— as, as I would do. Whoa. I expect costs, but not so high that we cannot muddle through and have expected positive stock returns. This would all help to make the discourse more scientific and less like an extended exercise in personal anxiety management. If it is also important, surely this exercise is worth the effort. Hmm. I like it. A lot of people have— yeah, we're in this funny moment right now where there's, there's people with no exposure to AI, long or short, that are very, very confident about certain positions but won't actually take a position. Right. And they have various reasons for that. And then— and I do think this would be— I do think this would be quite helpful. The thing with situational awareness that was so awesome is he just like called his shot and he invested against that extremely aggressively. And so I would like to see— I would like to see some of the the AI bears do their own version of situation— if they're so smart, do their own version of situational awareness, even if they're trying to like hyperstition a crash, right?

I mean, Michael Burry was doing that for a while, for sure. Cassandra, whatever. But I think maybe timed it a little bit wrong. I'm not exactly sure what happened with the fund. I saw a funny post that was was showing a screenshot of radiation pills being sold to true preppers. So in the— I don't even think true preppers.

These were— here, I have the post here. Did you have a post? Yeah, pull it up. Okay, I put it in there. Oh, okay. They're selling millennial-branded emergency radiation exposure medication pills you take when nuclear war starts to increase your odds of survival with buy now pay later option.

Yes, but economically, that's exactly what you want to do with a doomsday prepping product. You want as much debt as possible because you assume that the apocalypse is going to come. Klarna is not going to come after you. Of course you don't want to pay with cash up front. You want to be max debt. Like, this is actually extremely highly leveraged preppers.

There's got to be a few. Yes, there's got to be a few.

Yes, yes. You should have a ranch in Argentina on a 50-year mortgage right now. Like, that's the correct way to financially ride out the apocalypse because the bank's not gonna come—

And you want the mortgage from an American financial institution?

From anybody, anybody who's not gonna be around to collect post-apocalypse. Like, this is extremely consistent, although it is ironic and funny and I understand the joke, but this is actually exactly what you wanna be doing if you believe an apocalypse is imminent, you want to be max levered and max debt because no one's going to come back and collect it, right? So, funny. Anyway, yeah, a lot of people are pushing back on this post being like, "Well, my doom scenario is so extreme, I won't be around to collect the short position, so it's not worth doing." And that is—

Have a little faith in our financial system. Come on.

Yeah, the asteroid comes and you're like, yes, my puts are paying out. No, I don't know. It's a reasonable— but like, unless you're full, full doom, like, yeah, you should be able to express this is a bad—

okay, quick pause. What's up? Because we need to say some kind words to Tyler. Yeah. Last week. What happened earlier in the week? Yeah, I made some snide comments about Tyler's software that we use to run the show. Oh, yeah. He locked in and shipped an entirely new app, a native app, and this is our first time using it on the show today. It is incredible.

It's amazing. It's actually amazing.

It's well thought through. It's very easy. It's very easy to use. My first time using it, I have no hiccups. It's really good. So fingers crossed. But you cooked.

You absolutely cooked. And tell us about the architecture. Do you know what programming language was used?

I think it's Swift, right?

So it's native Mac app. It's native Mac app. We've been using a Chrome extension, a browser plug-in. It's been a little slow, a little clunky. But we got— it's not even an Electron app. So call John Gruber. We're getting a pat on the back for going native. Native. I got the DMG. I installed it myself. And actually, Tyler was over my shoulder. He helped me install it.

But it is— Tyler was burning the midnight oil. I think one of my comments just pushed him over the edge and he locked in. And he restored his honor. Yeah. Well done, Tyler. SpaceX is up 13% in the past 5 days, almost certainly in part due to Semi analysis. Major, major bullish update.

Crazy bull case.

I, uh, yeah, not, uh, they've been contrarian lately, right? Yeah, totally. Yeah. Now SpaceX.

So the headline here, SpaceX turns a compute company into 8 quarter—

in 8 quarters, uh, into it turns into a compute company.

8 quarters, AI compute goes from nothing to 77% of run rate revenue. And, uh, the, the illustrative 10 gigawatt path. I mean He's really good at building data centers. And they're predicting that lots— that Microsoft will be the largest off-taker. OpenAI and Anthropic will wind up doing deals with them. $500 billion in ARR for SpaceX. And the number that was getting thrown around was a trillion in ARR or something by 2030-something, which is staggering, staggering. They're going to have to rebrand it We should rebrand it though, Land X, because they're not going to space with this. This is all built just on the ground. I'm pretty sure this is all pre-Space Data Center. Space Data Center is like, is the Act 5 or whatever Act we're on, the Act 2. So Land X or Ground X, but either way it's working and very, very exciting to see.

Yeah, and Elon did say that their internal projections, which they're operating from, get them to $1 trillion by 2030, he said, or we may be delusional. And, and yeah, there's certainly a lot of reasons, a lot of reasons to be bullish. There's certainly a lot of reasons to be skeptical. Right. You had, you know, look at, look at the way that he talked about the Cybertruck. He said, you know, they were going to be selling hundreds of thousands of those units a year. They've been selling units. I actually ordered— I ordered one.

Yeah, it's so crazy. They don't have a 6-seater, 7-seater Cybertruck configuration. Like, it's just— I'm thinking about like a family. You want one other kid to come with you and it's like, okay, back in the extended wheelbase SUV or back in the minivan.

Like, yeah, I was thinking about it. One of Elon's advantages building data centers is that he seems to not care about like getting canceled, right? So look at everything that's been happening in Memphis. Like, you cannot imagine Satya, you can't imagine Zuck coming in there and building their Memphis projects the way that they have, right? It's been done, uh, very aggressive. Yeah, extremely aggressively. The local community is not happy. I'm sure they can figure out a way to work a lot of that out over time, but a lot of people just don't have the stomach to be effectively—

it's funny you're using the term stomach because The Wall Street Journal has an article here about Elon Musk's stomach. First, whether you're long SpaceX, short SpaceX, do it on Public Investing. For those that take it seriously, they got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. So SpaceX may be a rocket company, but nowadays it feels more like a roller coaster, says Tim Higgins in The Wall Street Journal. This past week alone, Chief Executive Elon Musk watched as its shares plummeted almost 14% in one day, which wasn't even the worst performance in SpaceX's short tenure as a publicly traded company. By Friday, the share had— the shares had soared more than 20% from where they began the week. Put another way, that was a more than $300 billion market value swing. For most CEOs, that would be a vomit-inducing ride. For Musk, It's a nagging reminder that he's back in grind mode, having to deliver on all of his high-flying promises for SpaceX's performance. Yeah, I mean, he does have the stomach for it, and it does give a good cover to the other hyperscalers. This was a lot of the NeoCloud thesis for a while, was that some of the NeoClouds, like a lot of the hyperscalers had made really, really aggressive environmental pledges that they were tied into and locked into because ESG funds had invested. And if they go back on their ESG commitments, then, then those ESG investors would have to divest and the stock price could fall. But you all of a sudden, like you had underwritten the whole ESG plan on the back of, well, we just do cloud storage for images and some ad recommendations and yeah, we store people's Docks in the cloud, like this is gonna be easy. Throw some solar panels on the top, you know, build, build. Okay, we'll build a custom chip to, for the YouTube encoding algorithm. Like it's no big deal. It's not gonna use that much energy. And then it's like artificial intelligence uses like a million times more resources for everything. And so you have compute scaling 3x every year now. And as a result, the question is like, can the hyperscalers develop the new data centers internally or will they have to go to Neo Clouds and, the SpaceX Neo Cloud sort of fits in there.

Anyway, what were you thinking about? Um, here's the actual quote I was referencing earlier. Elon says, no, I meant actual revenue in the year 2030 itself, not cumulative, which would be high, which would be a higher number. Of course, it's always possible that we flounder along the way or are delusional, but those are our actual internal projections. Uh, Ben was bringing up some, some recent truth, um, you pre-launch, the Cybertruck had over 1 million reservations, demand off the charts. They were targeting 250,000 units a year once ramped by 2025. And in 2024, they sold 39,000 units. Not bad. But in 2025, they only sold 20,000. So cumulative is under 70,000. So the peak year was about 15% of the stated annual target. I'm trying to get these numbers up. I ordered a Cybertruck. I need the self-driving. Yeah, self-driving is really, really good. And I am getting more and more bullish on Tesla's car business because last year there were so many reasons to be bearish. But as we've like, I've just talked with enough people in the automotive world now and none of them think that good self-driving is coming to any of their cars. For like a very, very long time.

Almost all of them think it's coming this century, though.

Yeah, this century, this century, this century. And so I think there's a lot of reasons, for what it's worth, to be bullish on the car business in the near term.

Do some, some more styles or something. The reduction in the portfolio is so rough. No convertible, no off-road vehicle, no SUV. Like there's, there's just so little that You like, you just get blocked into this like bland thing. But I don't know, I worked with the iPhone, so who knows? Who knows? Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. Vogue World. We got to talk about Vogue World.

Here we go.

Vogue World is taking place in San Francisco this year. Quote, Vogue believes in celebrating cities and San Francisco is a city like none other, says Anna Wintour. SF really is a city like none other, Emily Sundberg writes, with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 periods, which feels like a day.

SF wasn't going to be back until Anna said it's back. Yeah. And so this is a bold, bold statement. That's true. One of the most beautiful cities in the world. Mm-hmm. Grew up in the Bay Area, so it's kind of— maybe I'm a little bit biased. Sure., but it deserves, it deserves the Vogue treatment. For those not familiar, Vogue World will be this livestream event. It's very, you know, theatrical. Yeah, there's going to be celebrations. And I'm excited to see some of our favorite entrepreneurs and investors put on their best.

The Patagonia vests and walk in the runway in those.

Maybe that or ditch the, ditch the quiet luxury and go for some loud opulence.

Right. I like that. Yeah, I mean, Jensen's got the leather jacket, he's looking good.

I could see, I could see Jensen getting thrown up for this.

Yeah, maybe, maybe. What, what, what brand does he wear again?

Tom Ford. Tom Ford jackets.

Yeah, those are nice, those are nice. Uh, yeah, this will be fun.

We'll be there. I wonder who. And, uh, yeah, I'm excited to cover it.

Yeah, it's gonna be great.

Hopefully it's not the last And it's like, we can never do this again. No, no. This city has no aura.

The beauty of San Francisco is that it really does have such a diverse community of, you know, you have the Burning Man crowd, the VC crowd, the startup founders. Like, there's all these different worlds. There's the product managers, the product managers, the product engineers, the quality assurance engineers, the quality assurance testers, the reinforcement learning engineering environment, pre-training and post-training. These are wild communities. You want to hear from them both. They have unique styles, for sure. You can clock some—

No, but part of the actual— like, tech has an insane amount of influence on fashion, right? Like, when you look at Instagram's impact on the world broadly, the whole world's starting to look the same in many ways because of Instagram.

That's very interesting.

Styles globally are starting to look more and more similar because Instagram connects everyone all the time. So a tastemaker around the world, somewhere else in the world, might be influencing your style even though you'll never in your life cross paths with them.

Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Well, uh, there's a little bit more news from the situational awareness story. Uh, first, David Sachs on the All In podcast had a good take here. A lot of people were saying like Leopold was using 4x leverage. That was the number that was getting thrown around, and. And when I heard that, I thought it was he buys Micron and he buys, he buys $40 billion of Micron with $10 billion of cash and $30 billion of debt. And so he's 4x levered on that long semiconductor memory bet. It seems like it's a little bit more of 2x levered long, 2x levered short. So you're a long-short hedge fund, but both the long positions and the short positions are directionally the same trade because you're levered long Micron and you're levered short Adobe. And so if the trade weakens, you get hurt in both directions. So it's the same effect. But I think it was just an interesting little piece of nuance.

Yeah, very interesting. And yet just turn the risk up a lot. The crazy thing is, like, if you look at what the actual— what the AI companies The labs are doing the Neo Labs. Pretty much every AI company is still using a lot of legacy software for sure. If you just talk to these teams, part of it's like, yeah, we could replace this thing, this, this product, but it's not a good use of engineering resources. The bet against SaaS is that one day it will be so easy that it is a good use of engineering resources because, you know, you can create it quickly and maybe can self-maintain.

But, um, and a lot of these are just like ensemble products. Like, uh, so we're having the founder and CEO of Neural Frames on. It's an AI video generation platform. If you watched our Most Feared Lawyer music video for John Quinn, uh, I generated the video using SeeDance but through Neural Frames as like the harness. Uh, but even after generating it in Neural Frames, which has its own editor that's web-based that they were clearly able to vibe code very quickly. It works really well. I still wound up installing Premiere Pro for the last step of melding a couple different renders together, getting it all sequenced out, doing the final touches. And so there's a lot of these situations where you might have an agent that's doing a lot of interesting things. And then, yeah, you actually want the endpoint to be Salesforce, or you want it to be Adobe. And so you're still in that legacy platform, which, you know, you're like, ah, it's costing me $20 a month, but whatever. Yeah, this one. So there were two different video styles that you can do. One that's him just not lip syncing and just visual reference and just an illustration of the story. There's another version that you can have it render where the character sings along to the lyrics. Now it's pretty sloppy and it doesn't get it right all the time. Sometimes it nails it. So I only wanted to use the generated video where the lip sync was pretty good. And so for those, I dialed it in and I edited those on top. So this clip turned out pretty well and the next one turned out pretty well, but there were lots of the lip sync videos.

Pretty well is sort of underselling it.

I mean, it's still Sloth. Like, it's all Sloth. But there were plenty of others that were, like, wildly wrong, like the wrong person singing or just, like, didn't match up at all. And so I wanted to cut those out, use a little bit, blend it all together. And ultimately, I landed in Adobe Premiere again, you know, even though they have their own editor. And so it was an interesting detail. The other piece of the situational awareness story— do you want to move on or go back?

Go for it.

Yeah, one more post before our first guest. Okay, great. So the other story is from Kate Clark, who is over at The Wall Street Journal now following the money. And Kate Clark reported on a scoop. She says situational awareness made a big bet this week on Source Foundry, a startup aiming to reinvent the way chips are manufactured. Sequoia is an earlier investor. They bet $400 on a stealth chip startup after the crash. And so this is, I believe, an ASML competitor.. And Situational Awareness now has invested $500 million in total. They have a bunch of Stanford researchers on the team. People are generally very bullish on this company. It seems like a great bet. But there was this question of like, what is the sequence? Because this is very much framed as like a, whoa, OK, Situational Awareness is back. They sold their public book to Citadel. And they're already writing new checks. But there is a question about the sequence of events here. In my experience, closing a $400 million round, I've never done a round of that size, but even like a $20 million round might take a few months. Like you have a handshake deal, you sign a term sheet, you do some due diligence. Even if you're moving really, really fast, that's usually something that will require—

You think it takes Leopold a month to make a $400 million deal?

At the same time, if there was ever a wedding to marshal $400 million in one deal and sign and wire in 2 days, it would have been his wedding. But it's entirely possible that this happened earlier and is just coming out now. So still, still not a lot of— since Leopold shared that one letter with LPs, there's still a lot of uncertainty about where the overall fund is going, what the strategy is. Will they be in public companies? Will they be using leverage at all? A whole bunch of questions around rebuilding. And I'm sure that there's a lot of LPs that got in late, don't have that Anthropic stake, don't have as much of the private book, might be sitting down, not up 80%, but actually down on their investment, down 80%, down 90%. And it's the—

how those bringing leverage to privates, right? The way Masa is one of the few, the brave, that indulges in leverage in the private market.

You think that's what his message was? I'm not going to use leverage in public markets anymore. And they're like, wow, that's Brave, you really learned your lesson. I'm going to use leverage in private markets. And you're like, no, I mean, less volatility, less volatility. But still, I mean, you can effectively have a bank run if you have redemption rules, because as a hedge fund, typically you can get your money back a lot faster than a private VC firm.

So I don't know what— well, you're the boss. I'm just the guy who's right. Now, Paul Graham, apparently his 14-year-old iconic quote You're the boss. I'm just the guy who's right. That's a great quote. That's a great line. Wow. I think the team, full permission to try to deliver this line. Yeah.

John or I, you got to deliver with authority, with some gusto for sure. Also fun, fun post here. Tim Urban from Wait But Why was on The Apprentice. How did we not know this until just now? I love this picture so much. Tim Urban's looking great there in the suit. I got to go back and watch this entire season, figure out what happened to Tim Urban on Wait But Why. You've seen his viral charts, his graphics, his Mafia appearance. He was in the Founders Fund Mafia episode. Lots of fun with Tim Urban, but funny to see him, you know, spotted there in what, mid-2000s television. I don't know. Did you ever watch The Apprentice? No. I don't think I ever watched it. Is it worth watching? No, but you should watch the movie The Apprentice.

I have seen that. That's a fantastic movie. You told me to watch that. Yeah, it's a great movie.

Great movie. And I think that just about does the job. Anyway, we have our first guest, Ryan Spoon from Yahoo, here with us live in the TVPN UltraDome. Get this button ready. Yahoo! Thank you. Thank you. We take our turns. You want to open this, Jordi?

In honor of, uh, the sports.

Yeah, well, thank you so much for coming on down. How you doing? This is awesome.

Thank you.

And, uh, super appreciative to be here. Uh, please introduce yourself for everyone.

Ryan Spoon. Um, I'm, um, president of Yahoo Media Group, which includes Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, and some of our video efforts.

Uh, how do you wind up in this role?

I have spent, um, a lot. It's a good— the yodel, the yodel, the yodel.

And so this is— they never die.

And so this is, um, we'll talk about sports, and today's obviously, um, important day for fantasy. But this is our Yahoo Sports Yahoo Fantasy.

Whoa, there we go. That's great.

So this was started by, um, yeah, uh, the gentleman who, who founded StockX has a company called Ghostwrite. We made these for our talent in our Yeah, and there's 100 of those in the world.

You are now one of those.

So, I mean, does Yahoo have a long history of like deal toy type objects between the button and now this, or is this— they are related but unrelated.

Um, the— we, we try to create a bunch of things for different parts of the community. Um, in fantasy, we have 10 million plus people who play fantasy. Um, we have a bunch of subscribers.. And so we've created a bunch of merch, chaach, to send to those fans. And then we got, you know, we do 60 hours of live shows a week at this point, just sports. And we want— Crazy. We don't have this, but we want the backgrounds and so forth. Yeah. Yeah.

How cyclical is the business around sports? I mean, you mentioned like it's a big day. Break down what's happening now, the big moments on the calendar. Yeah.

Football is king. Yeah. And we have a heritage around fantasy in particular. And obviously fantasy is biggest around football. So there is cyclicality there. But sports is now almost 365 days on the— obviously you had the World Cup in July, you had the Knicks and the Spurs in June. But starting September, and we're 30 days out now of NFL kickoff, fantasy for us is really, really critical. Those users are using the app 5 out of 7 days a week, almost 2 hours a week. And there's something—

I bet the winners are using it quite a bit more. I don't know what, what they're doing taking a couple of days off a week.

We give them lots of research, lots of videos to consume. Draft guides. But at this point now, they're sports to consume hours a day, every day. And it really is 365 days a year. What do you—

what do fantasy sports users want on the product side, on the features side? Because obviously there's a way that you, you know, stuff AI in every single piece of the UI. It can get a little bit over the top. At the same time, people can go to any AI app of their choosing and sort of ask the same questions and they get that for free. It's less work for you guys, but there's probably some pull there on or some tension there for you.

It's really an interesting question because you could make it so that you press one button. Yeah.

And that's not very fun.

No. Yeah. It's like chess.com. If it's like I get to play as Stockfish, like, okay.

And the beauty of fantasy is you have 12 friends or whatever your number is. And you're chatting and you're going back and forth. Yep. And that— there's a rhythm to it. This is the great part about fantasy in particular is I can tell you what users do Monday, Tuesday. It's different Wednesday. It's different Thursday. And so we want the toolset to be easy. We want it to make you feel smart or smarter. Yeah. But at the end of the day, we want you to be in control. Yeah. The other part, our big learning has been let's just create different formats, create different, um, ways to play. Okay, so last year we introduced, uh, something called Death Leagues with Liquid Death. It was a lot of fun. It's a very different way to play. Your goal, what it sounds like, somewhat, um, your goal is to not get last every week.

Okay, you get last, you're kicked out, eliminated fully.

Eliminated, and all those players go back to the—

better, because a lot of times someone comes in last 2 times and then they're not even updating their roster, and then everyone's sort of picking over it, right?

And the strategy is when that person is kicked out, their players go to the waivers.

Yep. So how do you use your budget?

How do you figure out, um— interesting. 2 weeks ago we announced, um, college football fantasy. Yeah. And that is— that hasn't existed.

That feels like— and it's awesome. Or is that, is that on the back of NIL stuff, or was this just like a technical—

yeah, why, why so?

I think there's a bunch of things all happening at the same time. First of all, college has never been bigger. Yeah. Um, the conferences are realigned and now quite large. Yeah. Um, and so we created a game that has the Power 4 conferences and Notre Dame. Okay. Um, and we created a couple different formats for it. So there is also a team offensive flex. So if you are a big UT fan, you can draft Arch Manning and Texas. Okay. But there are some twists that we need to— because it is different than NFL. Sure, sure, sure. It's been really, really fun so far.

What is the structure of the revenue base for Yahoo Fantasy?

Similar to Yahoo Sports, which is We are consumption and ad-based predominantly. Okay. But there are subscription products. And I would say this is true of how we treat Yahoo Finance.

And then there's paid partnerships like the Liquid Death thing.

Yeah, that's sponsorship. We have lots of sponsors.

That's sponsorship. And so you— and you'll see that the same way you do a great job with reads and integration and on set. We do that across all of our shows, all of our apps. Yep. But then there are premium subscriptions. We have a Yahoo Fantasy Plus product., which has different data, different insights and features for fantasy. We do the same on finance as well.

What is the shape of, uh, if everyone in a fantasy league is putting $100 in, the winner takes it all, is there a way that Yahoo facilitates that, takes a cut, or is all of this off-book because of the way it's regulated?

Um, all the above. We have public leagues. Yeah. We have private leagues, which are 12 friends or What, based on your states, we have the ability to play paid leagues. Oh, sure. Um, and that's a lot of fun. Those are very, uh, engaged, uh, uh, leagues, very active. Yeah. And then we do have the way to kind of manage your league. Yeah. Um, what we don't do is, uh, we stick to fantasy. Sure. Uh, so we're not in the sports gaming, sports gambling.

Yeah, that makes sense. Have you thought about setting up regional SAT testing facilities for fantasy football punishments. So if I lose, I can go to a Yahoo brand— I saw someone— SAT testing facility and I can send Tyler over there to take the SAT. Now that's my favorite.

The crew in the front was telling me some of the highs of their wins and also some of the punishments. And the SAT sounds positive in comparison. Oh yeah, I'm sure.

I'm sure it's like a family-friendly one.

So how do you think about new sports leagues. We've had people on the show. Our friend, our friend Alexis is like a big investor in like an all-women's track running league. We had the Enhanced—

Slam Ball, or was he just talking about Slam Ball being cool?

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. But then, you know, we had the, I think one of the founders of the Enhanced Games. We covered that. But what's your outlook? Like at what point does something become— do you care about emerging sports and leagues?

We do. We do. Look, it's great to be the NFL. Yeah. To be NBA, MLB. But you exemplify this as well as anyone, which is you find your audience.

Yeah.

Niche. And you grow. Yeah. And there's never been a better time to be able to do that. Both for the rights holder, the league, and also the athletes. There's some really fascinating stuff. Alexis is involved in a lot of it. There's also TGL, that indoor golf league. Oh, really? It's awesome.

Sean White has a snowboard league. Slam ball was Gary Vee, by the way.

Oh, that's right. Okay, got it.

Gary's also in pickleball.

Yeah, pickleball.

There's a lot of emerging sport. Yeah. And part of the reason is The athletes have huge audiences and followings, no different than you have your own audiences and following. And then you're able to construct and to go live. And we, in many cases, there's a— the Indoor Football League had its semifinals last night. It's not the NFL, but they broadcast on Yahoo! And there's 5 million people who've watched that season on Yahoo! So there's tons of examples of people starting up new new product, if you will.

How do you— you're doing 60 hours a week of live content and smogging us.

40, 50 in finance. Yeah, absolutely.

Mogging us. We're only— we're barely putting up 15. But how do you— a lot more than 2 people doing it. How do you— how do you identify talent? How confident are you when you're looking at signing or helping create a show? How confident, like how refined is your kind of forecasting ability to understand if somebody is going to be great?

I would love to say it's super refined. The— look, the way we've done everything is— and I say it's the same North Star, just said differently for sports and finance, which is our aim is to deliver smart content, make you a smarter fan, make you a smarter investor. Starts with that. We know what our priorities are. We have to be great in fantasy and hands down we have the best fantasy roster and then sport by sport or category by category, whether it's crypto or it's MagSafe, we need voices tied to those. Sure. In general, We are looking for people who are multi-platform. So we want, you know, just like you, some days I listen on pod, some days I listen on video. Sure. It's a skill set to be able to do both of those well as the talent side. Yeah, that's important. A lot of our folks are also writers and they also have followings on social. Sure. Yeah. Most importantly, and I again think you guys are excellent at this, you just have to have fun. —yeah. And you can see it when you hear Kevin O'Connor on NBA. You can see it Brian Sazi on finance. They just are happy. And they enjoy their job. And they're smiling. And that is— you can learn— you can't learn that. You either have that energy or you don't.

How are you thinking about shared distribution infrastructure? Like, we've done a lot to clip the show and repurpose it for LinkedIn and Instagram. And when you have a lot of content. It can sometimes be overwhelming to have duplication across all your hosts and all your different shows, but it might be better if one of those, one of those talented hosts is sharing clips on their own personal Instagram, for example. But then where's the value accrue to Yahoo or not? And so there's this like tension there, but I'm wondering how you've, how you've sorted through that over the time.

So I don't think that's a tension. I think it's a reality. Yeah. And you got to accept Sure. And I spent a lot of years at ESPN. I spent almost 8 years at ESPN.

I'm sure you saw it with like Twitter and ESPN at that time where it was like, oh wow, like this person's getting really big just for taking a picture or sending out 140 characters.

So we have a gentleman named Ariel Helwani. Yeah. And if you know MMA or UFC, he is the voice. Yeah. And he's awesome. He's got a beautiful studio.

Yeah.

Yeah, we looked at his studio. I was studying his studio setup early on because he does a lot of remote guests. Sure. And it's, uh, he has an interesting setup to make it feel like it is a conversation, but also the viewer can—

and it's similar in the sense that, um, he does with his crew, they do a period every— they go live 3 hours every day. Sounds familiar. They have a period— tiring, but it works. —It works. And then they have a lot of guests. And a lot of those guests come on video. A lot of those guests are live in person. For his audience, for him, and for his team and his brand to do the sharing on social is more impactful. We obviously still amplify it. And Yacht will do it. And we have our— but that's a good thing. Same as Brian Sazi, super active on LinkedIn. That's a good thing. Better than— and he can say things and relate to his audience in a way that is more impactful doing that than it would be from a brand.

What's been— how do you process the prediction market boom? Huge demand from sports fans broadly. Even just when I'm watching the World Cup, I want to— even though I'm not a bettor, I— or trader, I— predictor. I like to just have a clear number. Yeah. Like, oh, okay, 20% chance that America wins this or whatever. It's an easy way to understand a line and what experts are thinking. At the same time, complicated from a regulatory perspective. How have you experienced the boom? How have you decided to integrate or not?

So you raise two very important, but I think separated points. The first, And I've said this before the space kind of opened up on the sports betting side, whether you bet or predict or not, I think it's actually really important to the storytelling for the reason you just outlined. It's a very easy way to digest what is likely to happen. If you can actually then overlay the live odds or predictions on top of a game or an event and start to understand things very interestingly. Same way you can take a stock price and say, oh, there's earnings. Yeah, there's news. Totally. So I think it's actually really important that we do it and we do it right and safely from a storytelling perspective. On the— our role there is a little different. Obviously, we do the storytelling. We're not going to process or be actively the platform, but we have a very big audience, 100 million+ users in sports, 100 million+ people, 100 million+ in finance. Our job is to work with those platforms. And so we've worked with Polymarket, Kalshi. We talked about Ariel Hawani and Uncrowned. Kalshi provides all the vertically have that. You see odds from other platforms. We think that's really important, but we're gonna do that in an integration, in a partnership, in a sponsorship way.

What's driving top of funnel? I mean, $100 million is a ton. There's a lot of people. I imagine you want to grow. What's the plan for getting to $500 million?

We do want to grow.

Um, 500's a lot. What's the plan to get to $5 billion? Yeah, more sports, more sports fans. You know, Mark Zuckerberg was like, was like, we need to put internet in Africa if we're going to get—

No, no, no. An example, like, like, you're, you're somewhat— the best marketing for Yahoo is, is probably like the leagues doing well. They're being like riveting storylines. And it is, it has been interesting. Um, uh, the UFC has had a couple big moments this year, but the league has, like, from my point of view, and again, I'm a casual, but from my point of view, the league has somewhat struggled to cultivate American superstars or Western superstars, which is where a lot of the, you know, which is important for the league overall. And so, yeah, it's this interesting dynamic where, like, how much you can only do so much without these big moments happening. You have to be ready for those big moments.

And it's, it's interesting. The— we want to drive fandom. Yeah. And we don't play in the live rights. You know, we're not licensing. That's a very different game. We play a different game than ESPN, but all of us benefit from fandom generally growing. And so, um, while the UFC, uh, bout will not occur on Yahoo!, the pregame, the postgame, we want to be the game around the game, the discussion around and drive the fandom. I'll give you a slight pivot on the how do we grow. And yes, we do want to grow, and yes, we are growing. Of course. Um, I actually spend more time thinking about usage. Sure. And one of the takeaways from being at a TV world was priority number one is grow minutes, which is a very kind of TV term. But we look at overall consumption in minutes and there's two ways to grow that. Get new people coming in and get them to do more things. Yeah. And that's why things like fantasy are so important is we introduce college football. It's been very good so far. A third of those users have never played on Yahoo. A third of the people who play Death Leagues have never played on Yahoo. New formats adding top of the funnel, but we know that when those users come, they're habitually there. I don't know how you go from 100 to 500, but I do have a sense of how you go from get you to spend 10 minutes today to get you to spend 12.

Fantasy Movie League. That's what you gotta do. I played this unironically. It was not on Yahoo. It was on some random website. You have 8 screens. You get to pick, "Okay, I want the Odyssey. That's really expensive." Box office. Yeah, your box office. You create a theoretical box office. Then when the numbers come in, you see who ranks. I got all my friends playing for like one season. But the season doesn't really end because there's always movies. It's never ending. Yeah. It's yearly. But people have a lot of fun with that.

The niche. Yeah. I always wish there was— Fantasy is so fun. Yeah. I wish there was fantasy. Private markets. Yeah, but one of the challenges— I think one of the challenges is like attention spans. Like there's companies right now that I just know are like obvious shorts. Yeah, I would love to express that.

I'm going to hang out at the current valuation for a decade. Like, realistic.

Hang out for— it'll be— it's like, yeah, like this and then just bam. Yeah, but yeah, I don't even want to do it publicly, but just with like, you know, just for fun with like a group chat. Yeah, sounds incredible, but I just don't think the— I don't know if the attention spans are there because sometimes a company like is actively failing but will take a long time. Totally.

Yeah, I don't know how to answer that part, but connected to the one of the— how do you get more time? You have to satisfy different ways to play, which could be what we just talked about, but also I want something to play today. Yeah. Versus a season, totally, versus perpetuity of the box office. Um, but we have different formats for different things. So we had a World Cup game with Fox. Sure. Um, obviously the broadcast. Uh, yeah, we have daily games which we've done for WNBA, we've done for F1, and that's a way to watch a game, make some, make some, uh, predictions. Um, and then you can play within a week, but really consumed in a single day. And then you have the whole NFL season or MLB season is a commitment.

And there's enough overlap there that true sports fans always have something. Yeah, sure. For sure. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much.

Thank you for the gift. Yeah. Yeah. We need to make some of those ourselves.

Great to meet you. Great to see you. Good luck. Good luck with— And let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace 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. Jordi Hays. Matt Levine.

Oh yeah, has a new post. He says whether they want to admit it or not, many women have always been attracted to bad boys and risk-takers. I can't think of any archetype that fits that description more today than newsletters that put it all on the line every day.

Newsletter writers that put it all on the line every day. I love that your quote has already become a copypasta. That's actually really—

It's so good. That's a badge of honor. That's a badge of honor.

That's a badge of true virality. Wow. Tell me about the 118 Wally Power designed by Lazzarini Pickering Architetty in 2003.

So, yeah, incredible. Call it the most beautiful— I'm so happy that Lusso, this account, shared this. I saw this. I thought it maybe was a render at first. It just looks too good to be true. And the craziest thing to me is this. I, I'm kind of gonna go out on a limb and say that like the Cybertruck maybe was inspired by this. Like it looks, if you just put them up side by side, it looks, uh, very, very, very similar. Uh, 118 feet long. Oh, um, and, uh, it is, it is quick.

Michael Bay used it in a movie, I believe The Island. If you scroll down in the comments, there's some shots from the movie where they're illustrating there's a whole city inside. Very cool shot.

Crazy. But yeah, looking at these pictures, I want to— I wonder if he owns it right now. —get on it with my friends and family and just head out. The Cyber yacht. Yeah.

Yeah. The Inspo. Potentially the stealth icon.

$115 million. Joe Wiesenthal, famous vibe coder. Has his entire timeline dropping. Lange? Lange. Lange. No, I don't know. Play chess against a computer of any rating and talk with a tutor while doing so. The guy's shipping. He's shipped more. He's shipped more than honestly a lot of actual engineers in the last year. A lot of people say they're going to ship a game and then they show a cool demo and then they They go dark, never to be heard from again.

This seems like a great way to learn chess. I've been playing a lot of chess.

It's a lot of fun.

So you can set your ELO. I like it. Fun that he's shipping. He says, this is still very much a work in progress since obviously to me yet that LLMs can actually evaluate positions and articulate both strategies and tactics, but we'll keep fiddling with it It was interesting that he actually remarks that the fundamental AI models might be the thing holding this product back. But yeah, pretty cool. Yeah, yeah. Good project. I had something else about chess, but I forgot.

Anyway. More ads hit the subway. We should pull this up. Oh, yeah.

And see.

Some of the— let's get a little review going of some of the tech ads.

My feedback for Joe is that the design needs to be more responsive. I'm opening it up on like half a window. So ideally, hardcoded Objective-C app, that's where the bar is. Ideally, you vertically integrate all the way into hardware, and I want a physical version of this product. Yeah.

All right, pull up this video. What video? The video of—

oh yeah, more fake tech ads.

We love these guys. Underwear. Underwear that think. Underwear that think? Grieving? Trade on it with Wake Market. That sounds really dark.

That sounds unfortunately real.

What's this one? Froggle is now Brian. Cloud-based safety just got personal. I— has anyone actually done— hire everyone on Earth Without doing anything. Meat gravy HR. That's the best. Grandfather, the first wearable AI grandfather.

That's just a direct shot at Friend. That's just Friend. Idea, light bulb, dashboard. That is the perfect—

You have an idea, we turn it into a womby. A womble. Payroll, now in pill form.

Payroll in pill form, that sounds— That sounds really delightful.

From 2 to 5 in just 3. Dennis. I mean, that's correct, I guess. Still merging manually. Merge Michael. What's his last one? Your calendar is married to your email. Your email didn't want to get married. Your email's father gave your calendar's father 5 goats. One of the goats—

Wow, the most—

your email's father gave your calendar's father 5 goats. One of the goats cannot produce milk. We have your back.

It's just the most abstract metaphor possible. I love it.

Uh, very, very well.

I'm sold. Okay, what else is going on the timeline? Uh, the Atelier Missor Folks are building Prometheus, 50 feet tall, holding the torch of the West in Starbase, Texas. Everyone accused these guys of being AI, but it feels like they're actually out there building stuff. They just went to Starbase and these guys are just building a monument. People have been demanding monuments in the timeline for a long time. 29,000 likes on this. And yet, It feels like maybe like a stated preference, revealed preference thing where people say they want a big statue, but no one actually wants to go and buy the big statue. I don't know. We'll see how this is received. It's certainly cool that they're doing all this metalwork. I think it's fun to watch. I wonder if they'd turn this into a real business. You think people will buy this? You think there's a startup here? You think they can SPAC this?

There's no way they're doing this for free for Elon. You know, like, wouldn't be the first time someone put six figures on the line for Elon.

You know, people have done crazier bills.

Possible this is like, uh, some type of Trojan horse they're putting.

Oh, you think they're putting some of Elon's enemies inside? Potentially a Blue Origin engineer with a little spyglass looking out, understanding the way Starship is built. Uh, never seen this before, a 5th century Byzantine gambling machine. Informed anyone familiar?

Someone in the team chat just said Ty Morse is inside. Ty Morse is inside Prometheus Starbase.

Really good. He deserves it. Give him the— give him the interview.

Give him the interview.

He works so hard for that.

Oh, he went into debt for that interview. I like this.

He fed it all. Okay, watch this video of this guy who restored a fire department call box. I didn't even know what these were for. I've seen these in New York. I just thought that they were, I don't know, like, like just—

so there's a can inside and then string runs like underground.

Basically, I think it was that. But this gentleman, this Instagram or YouTube creator, went and painted one, I think, without the city's permission, which is sort of cool and against— maybe against the rules. I don't know. I would hope that this is well received and no one— it doesn't face any pushback because the end result is remarkable. And it looks really great. Look at this detailed painting of the FDNY logo. Pulls it off. Look at how fresh that thing looks. From that to beautiful.

And can we get a health check on it after?

Oh, it's already been ruined. Yeah, we got to send someone out and see the progress. But this is, this is something that I think should be the example that Trey Stephens gives for civil service. Look, if you're, if your son was drafted by the government to go do a year and they were working on projects like this, just beautification of the city, I'd be like, yeah, Yeah, that's fine. I feel like anyone could figure out how to do that. Not that it's not incredible artisanship, but I do think that you give any enterprising young person a couple cans of paint, couple tutorials, they could go around and clean up things like that. And I think that would be a very, very valuable use of individuals' time. I don't know. What do you think, Jordi? Are you against it?

Are you pro dirty mural? I'm pro. I think it sounds— I think it sounds like a great idea.

You want your call boxes to be all scuffed up? Or you want them to be fresh? Freshly painted. Fresh, please. And yeah, it might get scuffed up again. Send somebody else out. Do it weekly if you have to. That's right.

I love it. That's right. I don't know. Someone posted— What happened? We ought to romanticize SF more if we ever want this city to be actually cool. There's two beautiful images of people walking around smiling. Nice motion blur. Someone comments, is this AI generated? And the original poster just says, yep. Wow. Too on the nose. Poetry. Too on the nose. But Anna Wintour is changing this. That's true. Yeah. Bringing Vogue World to us.

Vogue World will actually look like that or even more, more striking. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches and We need to play our intro video, The Most Feared Lawyer, the video that I produced in Neural Frames because we have the founder and CEO from Neural Frames. I've been really enjoying the product and I wanted to show you a little bit of what we built with this and then we can bring in the founder and talk about the actual product. There we go. This— so the song is from Suno and then I took the song, put it in Neural Frames and it generated all of this for me. Was able to edit it together. So fun. Let's bring him in. We have Nikolai from Neural Friends, the founder and CEO. Let's switch over.

What's going on? How you doing? Welcome to the show.

Hi guys, great to meet you.

Great to meet you.

Very exciting to be here. Thanks so much for hopping on. Uh, introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about the company, uh, how long you've been building, the size of the team, where you're based.

Well, yeah, and a little bit more backstory. I think the first— your first attempts at making music videos, I think you were doing manually. Um, maybe, yeah. But then, but then at some point it switched over, and you were just flipping them over to me like every 20 minutes. And I'm like, how is, how is, how is John doing this? Yeah. Now we know he was using your product.

Yeah. Now we know. Now we know. John, first of all, props for the music video. Amazing what you get out of the platform and the, and the lawyer.

Real, real, real career ahead of me as music, AI music video director, I'm sure.

I think so. I think so.

Well, no, I mean, we were going to this about like, like it's not, it's not It's not a broadly amazing video. It's only funny in this context of like, there's like 50 people that think that's funny that understand Quinn Emanuel. But you would never be able to underwrite making a full music video for a random corporate lawyer. But you can now. And I think that's what's actually interesting about this product and AI video generally. But give us the history of the company.

Sure. Yeah, I'm Nico, founder and CEO of NeuroFrames. This started 3.5 years ago, first as a kind of indie hacking solopreneur project. I just kind of played around with Stable Diffusion. So I have a long time history as a musician, as a passionate hobby musician. I have a PhD in physics. And then I kind of wanted to build something myself in the real world and not only in physics labs, basically. I was looking for a startup to build, and in the end of 2022, played around with AI animation based on Stable Diffusion, which has just kind of come up. And I deeply fell in love with creating these animations. It was so much fun. I had a model fine-tuned on myself, and then I, you know, there was an image-to-image-to-image loop, and I could just steer the animations with my own words. And that was so much fun. I loved it. I thought, like, I cannot be the only one who enjoys this. And I didn't really have a clear use case in mind, let's say, but just hacked together a prototype. Launched in January 2023. It kind of went viral on Hacker News and Reddit and then just grew from there. Fast forward to today, we are a platform focused on music videos. We are a team of 12 people at the moment in Berlin. Yeah, we are bootstrapped still. We are profitable. I don't know if you hit the gong for bootstrapped companies. Oh, we definitely hit the gong for profitability.

Those are— Those are our favorite gongs to hit. Yeah, it's the best.

This is my life's dream coming true, John. Thank you very much. We're doing 5 million annual run rate. We grew 6x year on year, and so we are very excited for what's to come.

Yeah, with 10 people, I'm sure it's going very well. King in the castle. King in the castle. So many questions. First, I'm interested in the positioning of the product because I found Neural Frames by actually going to ChatGPT and saying like, I have a Suno song, I want to make an AI music video and I want to do not a lot of work. Like, what do you recommend? It recommended Neural Frames and then I went there. I'm interested in how opinionated you think you need to be in the product, how narrow you want to stay focused because Midjourney is a great example of a company where it it feels like it has David Holl's fingerprints on every image that's generated. And that could be a criticism because it's not this broad platform that's AGI doing everything. But there's an immense amount of value in having an opinionated product at this moment in time. And I'm wondering, do you think you'll stay there or do you want to broaden out or, or do you want to go more opinionated?

Great. That's a very interesting question. I mean, so we are very focused on the music video use case, which is already kind of a niche by itself. Right? We are very deliberate there because we are bootstrapped. So there's no purpose in competing with like generic, general purpose AI video companies out there, right? Within the music video realm, it is definitely our ambition that you should be able to create kind of anything. But of course, we have kind of our harness. I think you called it harness before, and this is also how we call it internally. We kind of bit our harness so that people get kind of high quality, at least like the highest possible quality with the lowest amount of clicks out there. Yeah. Still kind of trying to follow what they type in.

You could actually use the service for non-music videos. I found a very weird story in my hometown of like a fraud case that there was only like one article about this. This particular case in like the LA Times, but I was able to take that into ChatGPT, turn it into a deep research report, turn that into a script for a Netflix-style true crime documentary, then take that into Suno, make voiceover. And then I took that into Neural Frames and it basically made like an AI-generated 6-minute Netflix documentary. Neural Frames initially got a little confused because it was expecting beats, I think. And it was having trouble cutting it up. But it wound up working just once I refreshed. And so there's a world where this vertical short-form storytelling could get there. But it does feel like there's still a really— the magic is definitely in— if you're not going for the funny shock value of the content, like, oh, it's really polished about something that does not deserve a music video. The quality bar is a lot higher. And so I'm interested in how you're assessing progress across the various video models. I did try Seedance 2.5. It's good. I don't know if it was my prompt, but it was still very clockable as AI imagery. And so I'm wondering about how you're thinking about the progress in AI video models, the cost and what you're seeing across the landscape.

So, I mean, first of all, one year ago we were, I think, to the best of my knowledge, the first music video tool out there that had character consistency. Oh yeah, right. Just to tell you where we're coming from. So like one year ago it was impossible to have character consistency basically. Then we added 3-character consistency. And now, I mean, the lawyer was, with all the criticism that you had, It was pretty consistent person. And we're actually very proud of the character consistency. You can even upload yourself and create. Yeah. Yeah. And it's easy.

You just take a couple of screenshots, upload it, it creates a character. And then you just tag it. And it's very, very simple to actually create some consistent character.

Of course, if you mention, I mean, AI video models create usually 5, 10-second clips, right? Now, Seedance 2.5 can even go up to 30 seconds, but that's very new. Okay. And our kind of challenge is the main challenge of music video generation. Okay, you have a 3, 4, 5, 6-minute song and we need to create all the images and videos that kind of match the beat, match the mood of the song, right? Match the character, tell a story. And so it's actually surprising that the AI video models themselves are important. We can do cool stuff with good new models, but it is surprisingly, I would say, not the most important aspect of this whole thing. The whole harness and image generation is at least equally as important. And of course, we are continuously working on that and making, I think, also very good progress. I think this video that you showed would have looked very different 3 months ago already.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. How do you think about the trade-off between like UI and sort of really surfacing the feature versus baking everything down into a text box? Because there's a world where I could have just gone and said, make a music video about John Quinn of Quinn Emanuel. I did have a few steps where I went to Suno, generated the music, gave that to you guys, and then uploaded the photos. And you could sort of do all of that in one huge box and huge prompt. But obviously, you get higher quality as you layer in more user interaction. And you're just surfacing more of those. Like, I didn't know the character consistency was an option until there was like a little button there. And I was like, oh, what's that? And then I see. And then I go down that flow. If it's just a blank box, it's harder to do the user education.

Yeah, this is a very interesting question and one that we are debating at least every 3 days here in the team. This is also changing a lot. I still think there is a lot of value in an opinionated UX somehow to guide the user along certain steps, right? And also to allow great editing in the end. So we, I mean, our power users, they spend a lot of time on the platform refining each scene, right? We have a timeline where you can drag things around. You can change the characters, you can change the outfit and stuff like that. I just personally feel in a chat-based product, that would be a bit more difficult to do. But let's see. I mean, We might experiment with that in the future.

Okay. Give me a lightning round of the video models. I want your review slash explanation of what they're good at or what they're not. Let's start with SeaDance 2.5. It's now on neural frames. What is it good at? Is it too expensive? How should I think about that model? It's an amazing model.

It's probably the best model that exists at the moment and can create up to 30-second cohesive clips. And it has like a multi-shot feature, so it It doesn't create one long 30-second clip, but multiple shots at the same time, which Neural Frames kind of does for all models already. But in, in Seedance, it's kind of integrated. You can also upload lots of references, so lots of objects can reappear across scenes. All of this is very new. In theory, there's also audio input in this model, which sometimes works better than— and sometimes doesn't. What about cloud? It is also probably the most expensive model that exists. And cost is definitely a huge issue. I mean, video models are quite costly, right? And, um, CLING, it's amazing as well. CLING-3 is a great all-rounder kind of, um, also it's not the cheapest, but, um, significantly cheaper than SeedLands 2 and SeedLands 2.5. Yeah.

What's going on with the VIO family of models from Google Gemini? Very impressive at various moments, but I haven't seen them really be harnessed in the same way as SeeDance recently.

I think the latest releases of Google were Nanobanana Lite, which is a very good lightweight image model actually, which is also very useful for several steps in our workflow. Okay. Not the highest quality ever, but kind of affordable and very fast. Sure. And then they also released Gemini OmniFlash, I think it's called. It's a video model that allows also editing. It's also very good. But in our experiments doesn't quite reach the quality of Sylens 2.

Have a lot of marketers discovered Neural Frames? Can I imagine people just saying like, yeah, well, they made it for music videos, but if you want to make a Facebook ad and you want—

I think that Facebook ads should be music videos. I'm more likely to stop scrolling. Yeah, right.

We had a cosmetic brand using Neural Frames. They kind of created an AI influencer that then created songs with one of the AI music tools. And then music videos with Suno also, with, with NeuroFrames. We're also seeing musicians themselves running ads on Instagram or Facebook that then link to their Spotify playlist. So that's also an interesting use case, I think.

Yeah. Yeah, that's fun. Well, thank you so much for coming on.

Yeah, very cool.

You have anything else? No. Have a great day. Thank you.

Thank you for for providing so much entertainment. We're having a good time with it. Definitely, definitely tens of thousands of dollars worth of entertainment. I don't know how much, how much you're, you're charging us, but, uh, it's been amazing.

It's not cheap, but it's very affordable for what you get. Like, you know, these things are still in—

yeah, belly laughs aren't priceless. Yeah, there's no such thing as a free belly laugh. That's true, that's true, that's true. Uh, great, great to meet you. Thanks for coming.

Yeah, and congratulations on the progress. Keep it up and come back on the when there's more, when there's—

big fan of you guys.

Thank you so much for your time.

You're the man, dude. Have a good one.

Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. We have two—

I'm surprised that Mikey hasn't come in with the maxed-out offer yet.

Yeah, yeah. It's, you know, the other side of that is that it's going to be a very competitive market and there's a lot of different tools tools and wrappers. But I, I just think like if you create an opinionated product that's really delightful to use, has good NPS, uh, you can carve out a fantastic business as they have. Anyway, our next guests are Adam Goldstein and Brian, uh, Yudko from Archer and Boeing. We're very excited to talk to them about this partnership. Welcome to the show and welcome back. How are you doing? Good to see you again.

Good to be here.

Uh, can you kick us off with some introductions and then set up the partnership for Yeah, sure.

Adam Goldstein, founder and CEO at Archer.

Yeah, I'm Brian Yutko. I lead product development for Boeing.

Amazing. And what are you working on together?

So today we announced a pretty big strategic transaction where Archer will be acquiring 3 businesses from Boeing: Wisk, which is their advanced air mobility platform, Insitu, which is their ISR drone platform, and SkyGrid, which is their air traffic control product.

Wow. How long have you guys been working together, talking about potentially doing some sort of deal? What's the story behind this story?

Yeah. So Brian and I have known each other for, you know, for several years. Brian's actually— he comes from the startup world too. Oh, cool. So I'll let you give him— you know, he'll give his story there. But, you know, Boeing is always viewed as this, you know, this big company that we all know that has amazing product flying every day. But they do a lot of really cool, innovative stuff, too.. And Brian's the guy that leads a lot of that project.

Yeah, thanks, Adam. Yeah, we, yeah, we got pretty, we got pretty involved chatting a couple of years back when, you know, we were developing some autonomous electric aircraft. Adam and his team were developing some piloted electric aircraft. There's some natural kind of, you know, complementarity between those things. And, and, you know, it's been a couple of year collaboration, frankly, you know, going back to probably early '22 or so.

And what does this mean for Archer? Should I think about this as pulling forward an R&D roadmap, developing a stronger customer base, jumping forward on, on revenue or profit? How are you thinking about integrating these new products and companies?

Yeah, in the world of eVTOLs, it's a pretty small universe, right? And so there hasn't been a scenario here where two companies have come together like this. So this is kind of like shaking it up in our industry. Yeah, but if there ever were two companies to come together, it's the perfect match. We were actually both building aircraft that had similar architectures, so we both had 12 sets of engines and 6 propellers that will tilt and 6 propellers that are stationary. So the similar type of architecture. But Archer took this pathway where we were all about commercialization and Boeing took this pathway where they were advancing all the new technologies like autonomy. So bringing them together really allows us to supercharge the path to market, but also some of the advanced capabilities.

Yeah. What can you share about what the relationship will look like on a go-forward basis? It feels like you guys are getting on together. So this is— unless this is goodbye, I imagine you're going to be doing a lot more work together.

Yeah. So the deal was actually an all-stock transaction, so it makes us partners now. And so Boeing locked up the stock. There's some incentives for us to collaborate together. And they're really this kind of mutually aligned roadmap that we're working on. And so we're both trying to go build the future of aviation and it just aligns us to be able to do it together and we can do it now as partners.

I think it's a really great example of kind of a large institutional company being really creative in the deal space, you know, in advanced technology because, you know, frankly, you know, we see an opportunity here where we can take some of the pioneering capabilities that we developed for autonomous aviation, We can add them to what Adam and his team have built and really kind of supercharge some of what can be built in the advanced air mobility market. And then at the same time, through our relationship, we can build— we can bring some of those advanced capabilities back to our core products as we go off and start trying to win the future on that kind of next wave of commercial aviation.

What can you tell us about Archer's overall surface area or theory around partnerships? I've been seeing a bunch of these. Obviously, the Anduril one happened recently. Is, is how do you think about the overall structure of partnerships right now? Like what makes for a great deal?

Well, aviation is actually very collaborative. And so even on the defense base, most of the primes will end up working with each other on different projects. Sure. And so a lot of it is just working together to advance these really complex products that ultimately are better for the country if we can do it, because they are really country-level initiatives. This is the first new product category in the US in almost 60 years. So it's a big deal that this is happening and the US wants to lead that. So I think it's common that a lot of these, these companies will work together in this industry. One of the unique elements to this one too was the company In-Situ, where In-Situ is a revenue-producing company, a cash-flowing company. So in the startup land of aviation, you generally don't see early revenue that comes to these companies. So the joke is like the Silicon Valley show, it's like Revenue? It's like, are you sure?

Are you sure you want that revenue?

It's kind of like this, this funny, like, you know, period of time where it's actually a way for us to get products to market, test out the new capabilities on these smaller drones, generate cash flow to help extend the runway and really allow us to keep building ultimately to the big commercial markets where we want to get to.

Yeah. You're wearing an LA Olympics jacket, it looks like. It's a little far away, but what should people— I've been starting to see Olympic signage going up around LA, getting excited. What should people expect from Archer around the Olympics?

So Archer was selected as the exclusive air taxi provider for the LA '28 Games. That was a huge deal for us. It's really a chance for the world to see these products on the big stage, and that's what it was all about. And so it also served as a timeline, like a an unslippable date for the company, the regulators, the ecosystem, the infrastructure partners to all work towards getting these products to market. It's important for the administration to see America leading in aviation. So we're really trying to help create those forcing functions to do that. So the goal is to be flying at the Games, lots of aircraft flying around. People see this new technology, but really you can think about it as an industry promotion to help show it's safe, it's new technology and good consumer experience.

Yeah, I mean, I'm super excited for it. It's going to be an incredible moment. How do you think about reaching the sort of like iPhone moment, ChatGPT moment, Waymo moment of, of, of this product specifically, this market? Because there's these— some of these technologies, they work for— they're in the lab for a decade, two decades, and then all of a sudden it's like Okay, if you go to San Francisco, you see Waymo on the road and you know that self-driving is a real thing. It's here. How are you— how do you think that moment will happen for you?

So we've been working on this, this project together that for the— as an industry called the EIPP or eVTOL Integration Pilot Program. And that came from an executive order from President Trump last year that will allow us as an industry to start flying in these big cities. And that will take place. It's really already started and it's really kind of ramping the back half of this year. So Archer's been doing that, Wisk has been doing that. And the goal is to really take those aircraft to show them to people so they can see them, they can get comfortable around them, but ultimately so the regulators can get comfortable around them that these are safe. And it's not just an Archer thing or a Wisk thing, but it's an industry thing. Sure. That all of a sudden we can expand the amount that are out there and they can ultimately become a part of our everyday life.

Amazing. I can't wait for it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on the deal.

Yeah, good to see you, Adam. And great to meet you, Brian. Congrats on the transaction.

Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is a commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. We got a fun fact here. One horsepower is 746 watts. A B200 under sustained load hits 800 watts with a theoretical max of 1,000 watts. A GPU is almost exactly a modern-day workhorse. We're bringing horses to the data center. It's the future. Um, love it. Anything else you want to talk about? The yen intervention. The yen is extending its decline, erasing half off of intervention gains, book your trip to Japan now. The yen is weak. The best time to go to Japan is maybe now. Who knows?

Last thing, there was some news, maybe it was Friday or Saturday, that they may be— SpaceX may be abandoning the Cursor brand. That's right. And just focusing on Grok. And yeah, as someone in the peanut gallery, that seems insane.

Well, they're going to have different products. There's like Groq for consumer, there's Groq Work, which they'll call Gwork. And I think Gwork could really see a lot of adoption in the enterprise. Wouldn't you want to use Gwork? I love Gwork. Gwork is Groq Work. You just call it Gwork. It's great. That's a brand I can get behind.

To me, Cursor is just an amazing brand.

It's loved even as a startup. People idolize the founders. It's such an interesting story. Michael Truel, like, goated young kid, like, builds this amazing product, completely dominates in this category, going up against Anthropic and OpenAI, gets the deal done. Like, there's just so much lore there that's so positive. People love the product. Yeah. No, no, I agree with the peanut gallery. It is a little bit of an odd left turn, but grokking is maybe the bigger picture, right? Yeah. Because grokking means to really understand The cursor might go away. Nowadays, you know, you're just typing or talking. You might not even use a cursor. I don't know. I still like it as a brand. Like, cursor, the name is just a great name. Yeah, but we'll see. I mean, the early— a year ago, like, there was some crazy reporting that showed that I think Groq was banned in more enterprises than it was used in, something like that. The numbers were not good because there was a lot of fear around Was he going to say something inappropriate? Was it going to go off the rails? There were—

I don't think they've solved that, just judging by, by some of the viral posts that Kroc has made.

Yeah, that might be like a different, different fork versus—

Brian says it worked for Twitter. I would, I would, I would still push back. I've tried to be respectful to the, to the company and say, and say the word X, but Twitter to me again, iconic.

I think that eventually will be, you know, like an unktel a little bit. Like you'll be revealing how old you are by looking at Twitter. I am unktel. Yeah, it's true. But with Cursor and Grok, like they're the same age. And so it's not like people— if they sunset the Cursor brand and everyone goes Grok or Gork or whatever they want to call it, everyone— it won't be the same thing where it's like, oh, I can't stop calling it cursor because it's like, oh, well, you only use that for 2 years. Whereas with Twitter, it's like for 20 years people were saying Twitter and then all of a sudden it went away. What?

Equus in the X chat says, guys, what's your view on the glow-up of Gentle Giant or Intuitive Iguana? What is that? That is Gary Vee had a very viral video over the weekend. What happened? Talking about his NFT project.

Oh, people are still on the NFT projects. He's keeping it alive, isn't he?

He's still in the game. Yeah. Yeah.

That is wild. NFT just gives me like, whoa, wow, I was in the trenches or something. I wasn't personally, but I remember that time. I was like, those are some pretty crazy times. Crazy times.

Well, folks, we hope you have some crazy good times this afternoon.

Thanks for tuning in. Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbn.com/newsletter. We'll see you back here at 11 AM Pacific tomorrow. Goodbye!