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

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

(00:41) - Zuck's AI Future (25:50) - PE Boyfriends (33:42) - Chip Nerds Dominate Dating Scene (35:22) - AI Hacks Gym (41:29) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (44:46) - SpaceX Moons (52:00) - ���� Timeline Reactions (01:02:25) - Ryan Spoon, president of Yahoo Media Group, discusses Yahoo’s strategy for growing its sports, finance, fantasy, and video businesses. He highlights new fantasy formats, emerging sports leagues, multiplatform talent, prediction-market partnerships, and the company’s focus on increasing audience engagement and consumption. (01:23:24) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:33:48) - Nicolai Klemke discusses founding Neural Frames, a profitable, bootstrapped Berlin startup that uses AI to create polished, character-consistent music videos. He explains the company’s rapid growth, opinionated user experience, and approach to combining leading video models with accessible editing tools. (01:47:04) - Adam Goldstein & Brian Yutko. Adam Goldstein, founder and CEO of electric aircraft company Archer, discusses its acquisition of three Boeing businesses and the resulting strategic partnership. He explains how the deal combines Archer’s commercialization focus with Boeing’s autonomous aviation technologies, accelerating advanced air mobility development ahead of Archer’s planned role at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Brian Yutko is the Chief Technology Officer of Boeing, where he leads the company's technology strategy and the development of next-generation commercial aircraft. Previously the CEO of Wisk Aero, he has spent his career advancing autonomous flight, advanced air mobility, and aerospace innovation, with earlier leadership roles at Aurora Flight Sciences and Boeing's future aircraft programs. (01:54:47) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comPublic - https://public.comCisco - https://www.cisco.comConsole - https://www.console.comCrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.comFigma - https://www.figma.comMongoDB - https://www.mongodb.comNYSE - https://www.nyse.comRailway - https://railway.comShopify - https://www.shopify.comCodex - http://openAI.com/codexFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, August 10th, 2026. We're live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital. We've got a PAC studio today. We got a great show. 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 Mews Spark 1.2.

That's big. But the blog post lays out his AI vision, and we should go through it. First, I'm going to tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. He's used corporate cards, bill pay accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. So, meta was sort of set up to be and also ran in the AI race. Like the Lama project stalled out.

Jan Lacoon 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 um they also turned over the entire team and zuck said i'm not quitting i'm not out of the game i'm staying all in i'm all in yeah and i'm raising debt equity doing all sorts of deals uh making things happen making big offers to AI researchers rebuilding the team bringing in alex wang that freedman daniel gross a bunch of heavy hitters um and

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. They can put some, 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 a much more detailed bullcase 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 potentially get someone from, oh, you took a bunch of video, some of its horizontal, some of its vertical, some of its sort of cropped ron, some of its color.

Turn that into some brain rot for it. You can just throw it right here in this trough. Yes. 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 bulk 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 an AI training company now,

and everyone's going to be recording their screens and their flows and 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, Mercor, handshake, et cetera, surge. And so they just get that more or less for free. Obviously, meta's lawyers are great.

Meta's research is great. Meta's finance team is great. great. So if you're 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 Merckhors are creating is much more specialized. 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. I think you can pause it for like half an hour, an hour, if you 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 real. I work at meta. Why not? Testing. I was hunting for bugs, 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 was these funny, like, leaked messages from boss being like, if you're saving time with AI, don't take more vacation days. Like, go ask your parents. 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.

But the timing was funny because over the weekend, Zuck had UFC fighters in Tahoe. And they're just like on this like, you know, on water octagon. Okay. Yeah, yeah. You can tell there's like, you know, all of Zuck's, like, security boats around it. And they're just, like, fighting, like, you know, wrestling or whatever. Let's pull this up. Zuck, busy fighting with Marab 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. Like, they're effectively gloves for your knee. 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. 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 Meadow's corporate blog effectively. 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 papal 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 Com's 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, is, 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, leaves an AI would try and become like the emperor and the dictator of AI. And I, I understand it. You know, it's funny that he's like sort of playing dumb here. Because, uh, 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. Yeah. It's like, yeah, it sucks for the citizen. Also, this is coming from a guy who has you know, is effectively a monopoly, more like a duopoly,

and has enjoyed the benefits of, you know, extreme concentration of, at least users and social media activity. Yeah. I came away from this. First, first, there are three very concrete proposals that I think are good, and then we can go into some on what's downstream of it. So 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 Mehta's 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 Mehta that teachers are now. moving there from across the country and he believes it will become one of our 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 squirled 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

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. 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. 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, we even supply a surplus of low-cost energy back to the communities.

We think this is an important investment principle for sustainability. In some cases, it's 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 one 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 one gigawatt of nuclear energy like every couple decades. And they're doing it like every two weeks. And so good, good to see that. And then also met 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 Muse Spark 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 Lama ecosystem, and you could imagine that you download the weights to Muse Spark 1.2, fine-tuning it. You're pretty happy. You're like, 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 same. safety discussion. So if you're talking to someone who has a strong opinion about open source one way or the other, you can you can just divide the discussion into, okay, how do you feel about Mew Spark 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 like a geopolitical issue. So you can narrow it down just to are you okay with strong, powerful, you know, 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 contacts. Anyways, I think a lot of the stuff in here is, like, 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, 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 he,

I think on Friday of last week is having to go through this like basically a billion dollar settlement for causing harm at scale with, 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 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. Yep. 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, options. Like very much, uh, 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. He was just doing the UFC thing. Sure, sure, sure. And wakeboarding and all that kind of stuff. But you, it's too early to be trying to parlay that into like I can be trusted

with, uh, 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 he's trying to move the needle. He needs to be more focused on getting some points on the board. 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 open, make the model open weights if they felt like there was going to 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. I probably hurts AI's public perception even more.

And so. Bernie Sanders now, right? He was included in that? Yeah, yeah, which is amazing for, for meta, MSL, to be included in that group. Yeah. Like, you would think that, like, Elon. I'm not? Or Elon, yeah.

Elon and DeepMind were not included. Elon wasn't. That was just because there were the three cyber incidents. Oh, okay. 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. Yeah. Anyway, so I don't come away with this.

Like, I think he has, he has no confidence from the market on the strategy. He still has not actually explained. I think in a compelling way what their product vision is. They're coming out with a coding harness. They're coming out with coding models.

They're also doing open source. There's the whispers of them getting into the becoming a neocloud. It's just like I think as 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 unbelievable from Microsoft. Like we own GitHub. We were first in GitHub co-pilot. 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 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. Steel man.

What is the steel man? I mean, the steel man is the, is, basically the steel man is like, this could go the deep mind route where they get too, 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 deal. 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 budding 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. 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. And there are really delightful experiences that we run

into all the time. Like Suno is a really cool consumer product. We have the CEO of whatnot on. Like 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 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. Got a lot of compute. Yeah, you got a lot of compute, but actually get people on board to those things.

At the time that there's whispers of selling compute, they're also buying ultra-long-term contracts. Yeah. Yeah, so, you know, I think watching the social network was like formative on all of us. Zuck is a legend in his own way But it's just like Putting this out while it's coming out

Like less than two 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 something 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 relevant would rush to build that. The AI doom over the last two weeks has been around these loss of control incidents,

which are serious. 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.

Like, 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 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 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's like it is logically consistent, even if sometimes it can be seen as like a path to regulatory capture sometimes or a path to, you know, it 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. And, yeah, part of this is like we've met Zuck multiple times. We've had great conversation with him. I like him. I like Boz. I like Adam.

I like a lot of people over at MSL. But this whole strategy continues to confuse. It's deeply unfocused. It's deeply memetic. And it doesn't seem like it's going to get any better anytime soon. Well, I mean, it'll all hinge on the next model and also does the neocloud strategy work. Because people were skeptical about Elon getting into AI. They're like, XAI, really?

Like this deal is so highly valued. The models aren't frontier. And now, you know, semi-analysis last Friday put out this insane bowlcase where they're going to make a trillion dollars in a couple of years. And I don't know, 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 in deploying models. And when you're good at building data centers, that's a huge advantage. There's a lot of companies that aren't.

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 everyone in there is going to 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, nine-figure or even bigger contracts.

And so we're about a year into, like, the major talent rates, right? What happens if the top-ups are 10 billion plus? That's my concern. They might have to be. It might have to be. 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-on-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 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 Rodriguez are all hanging out with finance guys. Jordy chimed in on this. It was remarkable. Every single person got Jordy'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 every, Everyone understood that you were joking. 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. 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. and finance. So I don't know how much 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. When you end up with a private equity guy, your life gets far more interesting. So he, I don't think, was rage baiting. No. I think he... So maybe that's how some people would have taken my quote out of context. And then what did I say? The piece centers around...

I almost don't want to read that quote out loud, but you should read my quote. Well, first, let me tell everyone about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of ITHR and finance support, giving him employee's 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 Jordy Hayes co-host of the Technology Industry Talk Show, TBPN. 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 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 assume that it would be quite obvious that it was satire. but let's pull up this four by two by two and we can

walk people 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 zoom out a little bit a little bit more people that understand the joke zoom up or go up

and people that love it these 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. There's some people that just think it's true. Yeah, there's some, and there was a lot, there was a shocking amount of people. Can you guys just zoom fully out and, and 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. But good time, and I thought 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 Ryanstein, 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 Ryanstein of Private Equity from Regiment. I think a lot of the people that watch TVPN were reading that article to learn about these celebrities. Yeah. Yeah, it's a fascinating world. It's just tucked behind, you know, so much obscurity. You don't know about them if you're in the finance world. And so good to see folks like that get, you know, 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 Wisenthall had the best, the best take that this is the classic, cynical pattern? 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 airs like Stavros,

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. But what is the common ground? The industry is booming. Could it be something to do with their

fee streams? Well, you know, 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, 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 film and a movie for a couple weeks. But you're also talking about your all your catalog of IP, your royalty stream. No, you actually start thinking like a 30 percent. Yeah, they're often forever, right? unlike management fees with at some point or another, 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 S.K. Hynix become some of the country's most eligible bachelors. According to the Wall Street Journal, engineers of 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 Hinex 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 gas. 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 meat cute. You're carrying a tray of wafers bump into someone and it's love at first sight. You look up as your scattered HBO is being pulled up, block eyes. 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 chip makers. Wow. Really, really, really, master. 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 journal got a hold of it. That's a fun one. Anyway, the other big story is that an AI assistant in Australia hacked a Jim'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 cyber attack by an AI agent. Noddy, naughty indeed. Funny, in college, I built a system that would register for classes automatically, but it was just a Python four loop that would just refresh the page when the classes would become available because they would go online at like 7 a.m. 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 the admission system or some sort of a 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 Rune was saying, like, the tennis court booking software in SF is going to be the most, like, battle-martin. It'll be like the NSA. You won't be able to break into it.

Yeah, he says the SF tennis reservation system will become one of the most hardened software is 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 two 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 wait list.

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 wait list, moving Andrew from fourth to third 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 actual post that went up, is, has 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, in Australia, ABC.net.net.com. A.U. You're saying it's 100% factual if that's the case. Yeah, it's quite, 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 a 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 defender's 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 Cowan has a post this morning just past midnight. It says, I am seeing so many. so much doom and at least severe worries due to the open AI 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 two or three years from now, we might estimate the additional cybersecurity costs from all the AI break-ins. I'm convinced that the number is not zero, but give me your method, please. If it helps, here's 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. Three, a list of what stocks or other assets you have shorted now. This is an important part. obviously if your answer to number two is sufficiently low you could answer here zero as I would as as I would do oh 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 all so important surely this exercise is worth the effort I I like it a lot of people have, yeah, we're in this funny moment right now where 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 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 time did it a little bit wrong. I'm not exactly sure what happened with the fund. And I saw a funny post that 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. Would you pull it up? 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 options. 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. Clara is not going to come after you. Of course, you don't want to pay with cash up front. You want to be a max debt.

Like, this is actually extremely consistent. Highly leveraged preppers. Yes, yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes. You should have a ranch in Argentina on a 50-year mortgage right now. Like, that's the correct way to, to financially ride out the apocalypse because the bank's not going to come get. But you want the mortgage from an American financial institution? From anybody. Anybody who's not going to 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 want to be doing if you believe in 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 aspirate 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 doom, like, yeah, you... You should be able to express this as 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, I made some snide comments about Tyler's software that we used to run the show. Oh, yeah. He launched 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. That's my first time using it. I'm 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 it's not even an electron app. So call John Gruber. We're getting a pat on the back for going, Native. I got the DMG. I installed it myself. And actually, Tyler was over my shoulder. He helped to install it. But it is rock salt. Tyler was burning the midnight oil. I think one of my comments just pushed him over the edge. And he locked in. Management by begging. He restored his honor. Yeah. Well done, Tyler. SpaceX is up 13% in the past five days, almost certainly in part due to semi-analysis.

major, major, bullish update. Crazy bulkcase. I, yeah, not, they've been contrarian lately, right? Yeah, totally. With meta, now SpaceX. So the headline here, SpaceX turns a compute company into eight quarters, in eight quarters,

turns into a compute company in eight quarters. AI compute goes from nothing to 77% of run rate revenue. and the illustrative 10 gigawatt path. I mean, it's really good at building data centers. And they're predicting that Microsoft will be the largest off-taker. Open-A-A-Aanthropic 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, rebrand it, though. LandX. Because I'm not going to space with this. This is all built just on the ground. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure this is all pre-space data center.

Space data center 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. Yeah. Very, very exciting to see. Yeah, and Elon did say that their internal projections, which they're operating from,

get them to a trillion by 2030. He said, or we may be delusional. 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 the way that he talked about the cyber truck. 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 six-seater, seven-seat, or seven-seater. cyber truck configuration. Like, it's just, I'm, 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. 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 going in there and building their Memphis projects the way that they have. It's been done. Very aggressively. 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. Musk's stomach. First, whether you're long, SpaceX, short SpaceX, do it on public. Investing for those that take it seriously. They've 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 10 years of publicly traded company. By Friday, 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 hyperscalis. 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 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 docs and the cloud. Like, this is going to be easy. Throw some solar panels on the top. You know, build, okay, we'll build a custom chip for the YouTube encoding algorithm. Like, it's no big deal. It's not going to 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 three X every year now. And as a result, the question is, like, Like, can the hypers develop the new data centers internally, or will they have to go to neoclouds, and the SpaceX neocloud sort of fits in there? Anyway, what were you thinking about? 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 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. and Ben was bringing up some recent truth. You know, pre-launched the cyber truck. Had over one million reservations, demand off the charge. They were targeting a quarter million 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 cyber truck. I need the self-driving. Yeah, self-driving is really good. And I am getting more and more bullish on Tesla's car business.

And last year, there were so many reasons to be bearish. But as we've like, I've just talked with enough people in 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 time. You just got to do some more styles or something. The reduction in the portfolio is so rough. No convertible. No off-road vehicle. No SUV. Like 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 Wintor. S.F. 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 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 live stream event. It's very, you know, theatrical. 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 walking the runway in those? Maybe that. Or ditch the, ditch the quiet luxury and go for some loud opulence. I like that. Yeah. I mean, Jensen's got the leather jacket. He's looking good.

I could see, I could see Jensen getting crammed up for this. Yeah, maybe. Maybe. me. What brand does he wear again? Tom Ford. Tom Ford jackets. Yeah. Those are nice. Those are nice. Yeah, we'll be fun. We'll be there. And yeah, I'm excited to cover it. Yeah, it's going to be great. Hopefully it's not the last. And it's like, we can never do this again. No, no. The city has no aura. The beauty of San Francisco is that it really does have such a diverse community of the, you know, you have. of 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. They have intrading and post training. These are the wild communities. You want to hear from them both. They have unique styles for sure. You can clock someone.

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. 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 past with them.

Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Well, there's a little bit more news from the situational awareness story. First, David Sacks 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 when I heard that, I thought it was he buys Micron and 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. Interesting. And, yeah, 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 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 it maybe can self-maintain. But 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 C dance, but through neural frames as like the harness. Uh, but even after generating it in neural frames, which,

has its own editor, this 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 costed me 20 bucks 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 a 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 video generated. 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. I have one more post before our first guess.

Okay, great. So the other story is from Kate Clark, who is over at the Wall Street Journal now, following the money. and Kay Clark reported it 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 back. But there was this question of like, what is the sequence? Because this is very much framed as like a, whoa, okay, situational awareness is back. They, you know, 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 would wire. You think it takes Leopold a month to make a $400 million? At the same time, if there was ever a wedding to Marshall 400 million in one deal and sign and wire in two days, it would have been his wedding. But it's entirely possible that this happened earlier and is just coming out now.

So still not a lot of, like 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 with a private book, might be sitting down, not up 80%, but actually down on their investment, down 80%, down 90%. And how those people are bringing leverage to privates, right?

The way, Mossa is one of the few, the brave, that indulges in leverage in the private markets. 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 so brave. You really learned your lessons. 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. Well, you're the other. boss, I'm just the guy who's right. Now, Paul Graham, apparently is 14-year-old, an 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, 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 weight of 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 watch 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, that'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 Ultronome. Get this button ready. Ah, hoo! You want to open this, Jordy? Honor above. Yeah, well, thank you so much for coming on down.

How are you doing? This is awesome. Thank you. And super appreciative to be here. Please introduce yourself for everyone. Ryan Spoon. I'm president of Yahoo Media Group, which includes Yahoo Finance, Yahoo! Sports and some of our video efforts.

How do you wind up in this role? I have spent a lot... It's a good... The Yodel. The Yodel. The Yodel. And so this is... They'd never die.

And so this is, we'll talk about sports. And today's obviously important day for fantasy. But this is our Yahoo Sports, Yahoo! Fantasy. Whoa, there we go. That's great. I love it. So this was started by the gentleman who founded StockX has a company called GhostRite. We made these for our talent.

Oh, very cool. Yeah. And there's a hundred of those in the world. You are now one of those. Incredible. I mean, I love it. Does Yahoo have a long history of, like, deal to? type objects between the button and now this or is this they are related but unrelated the

we we try to create a bunch of things for different parts of the community in fantasy we have 10 million plus people who play fantasy we have a bunch of subscribers and so we've created a bunch of merch chotch to 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 wow and we've created a bunch of We want, 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, breakdown 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. 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 five out of seven days a week, almost two hours a week. And there's something. I bet the winners are using it quite a bit more. I don't know what they're doing taking a couple days off a week. We give them lots of research, lots of videos to consume, draft guides.

But at this point now, there's sports to consume hours a day, every day, and it really is 365 days a year. What do fantasy sports users want on the product side, on the features side? Because obviously there's a way that you stuff AI and every single piece of, 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. 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 a stockfish.

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. 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 tool set to be easy. We want it to make you feel smart or smarter. 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 ways to play. Okay. So last year we introduced something called Death Leagues with Liquid Death. It was a lot of fun. It's a very different way to play. Is that what it sounds like? Somewhat.

Your goal is to not get last every week. Okay. If you get last, you're kicked out. Eliminated fully. Eliminated. And all those players go back to the job. because a lot of times someone comes in last two 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. So how do you use your budget? How do you figure out... Interesting. Two weeks ago, we announced college football fantasy.

Yeah. And that is... That hasn't existed? That feels like... And it's awesome. Or is that on the back of NIL stuff? Or was this just like a technical... Yeah, why so?

I think there's a bunch of things all happening at the same time. First of all, college has never been bigger. The conferences are realigned and now quite large. And so we created a game that has the power for conferences and Notre Dame. Okay. 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 for Zool. Yeah, that's sponsorship. We have lots of sponsorship. That's sponsorship. And you'll see that the same way you do a great job with Reeds and integration and on set. We do that across all of our shows, all of our apps. 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 if everyone in a fantasy league is putting $100 bucks 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 that's regulated? All the above. Okay. We have public leagues. Yeah.

We have private leagues, which are 12 friends or whatnot. Based on your states, we have the ability to play paid leagues. Oh, sure. And that's a lot of fun. Those are very engaged leagues, very active. Yeah. And then we do have the way to kind of manage your league. Yeah.

What we don't do is we stick to fantasy. Sure. 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 some of us. SAT testing facility.

And I can send Tyler over there to take the SAT. No, that's my favorite fantasy. The crew in the front was telling me some of the highs of their wins. and then 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. How do you think about new sports leagues?

We've had people on the show. Our friend Alexis is like a big investor in an all-women's track running league. Do you buy 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.

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

Nisha. 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. Slam ball was Gary V. 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 five million people who've watched that season on Yahoo.

So there's tons of examples of people starting up new, new products. product, if you will. How do you, you're doing 60 hours a week of live content. And smogging, mogging us. 40, 50 in finance. Yeah, absolutely maugging us. We're only, we're barely putting up 15. But how do you, 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's 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. It 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 MagSept,

we need voices tied to those. 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. It's a skill set to be able to do both. to those well as the talent side. That's important. A lot of our folks are also writers, and they also have followings on social. Most

importantly, and I again, think you guys are excellent at this, you just have to have fun. 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 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 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, yeah. And you got to accept it. Sure. Sure. And I spent a lot of years at ESPN.

I spent almost eight 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 Hawani. Yeah. And if you know MMA or UFC, he's. 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 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 he does with his crew, they do a period every, they go live

three hours every day. Sounds familiar. Yep. 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 Yon will do it. 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, have you processed 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 better, I, or trader, predictor. 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 regulatory perspective. How have you experienced the boom? How have you decided to integrate or not? So you raised 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. 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 plus users in sports, 100 million plus people. 100 million plus in finance. Our job is to work with those platforms.

And so we've worked with Polymarket. Kalshi, we talked about Ariel Hwani and Uncrowned. Kalshi provides all the, they vertically have that. You see odds from other platforms. We think that's really important, but we're going to 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? 500's a lot. What's the plan to get to 5 billion? Yeah. Ideas. More sports fans.

You need those. You know, Mark Zuckerberg was like, we need to put internet in Africa if we're going to get. No, an example. Like, like, you're somewhat the best marketing for Yahoo is probably like, the league's doing well, they're being like riveting storylines. And it is, it has been interesting. 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 interesting. 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 while the UFC bout will not occur on Yahoo, the pregame, the post game, 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. 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 with that. Get new people coming in and get them to do more things.

And that's why things like fantasy are so important is we, choose 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 got to do. I played this unironically. It was not on Yahoo. It was on some random website. You have a You have eight screens.

You get to pick, okay, I want The Odyssey. That's really expensive. A box office. You have 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 only movies.

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. I would love to express that. Not publicly, not publicly, but. Not publicly, but. Not publicly, but not. Like, realistic.

Hang out for it'll be, it's like, 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 we'll take a long time.

a long time. No, 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 of 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. But we have different formats for different things. So we had a World Cup game with Fox. Sure. Obviously the broadcast. We have daily games, which we've done for WMBA. We've done for F1.

And that's a way to watch a game, make some predictions. And then you can play within a week, but really it's 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. The true sports fans have something. Yeah. For sure. For sure.

Well, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much. Thank you for the gift. Yeah. We appreciate it. We need to make some of those ourselves. this. Great to see you.

Good luck. Good luck with the... 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. Jordy. Matt Levine 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, that 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 copy pasta. That's a true breakthrough. That's a badge of, that's a badge of honor. True virality. Wow. Tell me about the 118 Wallie Power designed by Lazarini Pickering architect, architect in 2003. So, yeah, incredible. I call it the most beautiful. I'm so, I'm

happy that Luso 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'm kind of going to go out on a limb and say that like the cyber truck maybe was inspired by this like it looks if you just put them upside by side it looks very very very similar hundred and eighteen feet long. Oh, interesting. And 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, there's some shots from the movie where they're illustrating that there's a whole city inside. Very cool shot. Crazy. But yeah, looking at these pictures, I want to get on it right now. With my friends and family and just head out. The cyber yacht. Yeah.

Yeah, the inspo. potentially the stealth icon $115 million. Joe Wisenthall famous vibe coder has hit the timeline dropping Lange Lunga. 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, you know, they show a cool demo and then 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 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, yeah, he actually remarks that, like, the fundamental AI models might be the, like, the thing holding this product back. But, yeah, pretty cool. Yeah, yeah.

Good, good, 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 some. of the tech ads.

Yeah, 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, hard-coded 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. Underware. Underwear that think. Underwear the think? Grieving, trade on it with wake market. That's really dark.

That sounds unfortunately real. What's this one? Froggle is now Brian. Cloud-based safety just got personal. Has anyone actually done? H.H. Mead gravy, HR. It's the best.

Grandfather, the first wearable AI grandfather. That's just a direct shot in France. That's just friend. Idea? Light bulb? Dashboard. That is the perfect... You have an idea.

We turn it into a wambi. A wumble. A wumble. Payroll. Now in pill form. Payroll in pellform. That sounds... That sounds really delightful. From two to five and just three.

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 emails,

your email's father gave your calendar's father five goats. One of the goats cannot produce. Wow. The most tag-havenil, one of them. Your email's father gave your calendar's father five goats. One of the goats cannot produce milk. We have your back. It's just the most.

abstract metaphor possible. I love it. Very, very well. I'm sold. Okay, what else is going on the timeline? 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, they're just building a monument.

people have been you know 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 or people say they want a big statue but no one actually wants to go and buy the big statue I don't know it it will see how this is how this is received certainly cool that they're doing all this metal work I think it's a I think it's fun to watch I wonder if they turn this into a real business you think people will buy this you think there's a startup here You think you can spack this? There's no way they're doing this for free for Elon?

You don't, like... Wouldn't be the first time someone put six figures on the line for Elon? You know? You've lived on crazier builds. It's possible this is like some type of Trojan horse. And they're putting... Oh, you think so? You'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. Never seen this before a fifth century Byzantine gambling machine informed anyone familiar? Someone in the team chat just said, Ty Moors is inside. Ty Moors is inside. Time Morse is inside Prometheus, Starbase. It would be really good. He deserves it.

Give him the interview. Give him the interview. He works so hard for that. He went into debt for that interview. I like this. He bet 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, just some sort of monument. It's a cannon side 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. Can we get a health check on it after?

It's already been ruined. Yeah, we got to send someone out and see the progress. But this is something that I think, should be the example that Tri-Stevens gives for civil service. Like, 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, that's fine. I feel like anyone could figure out how to do that. Not that it's not incredible artisanship, but like, I do think that you give any enterprising young person a couple cans of paint, a 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, Jordy? Are you against it? Are you pro? I'm pro. 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

free. 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.

Someone posted, 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. Motion blur. Someone comments, is this AI generated? And the original poster just says, yep. Wow. Two on the nose. Poetry. Two on the nose. But Anna Wintour is changing this. That's true. Yeah. Bring 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 secure. 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 Neuroframes, because we have the founder and CEO from Neuroframes. I've been really enjoying this 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. So the song is from Suno, and then I took the song,

put it in Neuroframes, 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.

Introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about the company, how long you've been building the size of the team where you're based on. Well, yeah, and a little bit more backstory. I think your first attempts at making music videos, I think you were doing, manually?

Maybe, yeah. 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 John doing this? 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 lawyer. Real career ahead of me is music. A.I. Video director, I'm sure. I think so. I think so. Well, no, I mean, we can go into this about like, like, like, in the, like, 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 in AI video generally. But give us the history of the company.

Sure. So yeah, I'm Nico, founder and CEO of NeuroFrams. This started three and a half 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 bid something myself in the real world and not only in physics labs, basically. What 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 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 read it, and then just grew from there. Fast forward to today, we are 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 bootstrap companies, John, but... Oh, we definitely hit the gong for profitability. Those are our favorite gongs to hit. Yeah, that's the best. This is my live stream coming too, John. Thank you very much.

I mean, we're doing 5 million and year run rate. We grew 6 XX on year. And so we are very excited for us to come. Yeah, yeah, with 10 people. I'm sure it's going very well. Yeah, so I mean... King in the castle. In the castle.

So, yes, I mean, so many questions. First, I'm interested in the positioning of the product because I found neural frames by actually going to chat GPT 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. Good. interested in how opinionated you think you need to be in the product, how narrow you want to stay focused, because Mid Journey is a great example of a company where it feels like it has David Holes 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 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 have bootstrapped, so there's no purpose in competing with like a general purpose AI video companies out there, right? Within the AI 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 bid 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. Stay kind of trying to follow what they what that happened. You can actually use the service for non-music videos. I found a very weird story in my hometown of like. 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 chat GPT, 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 a AI-generated six-minute Netflix documentary. Neural frames initially got a little confused because it was like expecting beats, I think, and like it was having trouble cutting it up. But it wound up working just like once I refreshed. And so there's a world where this like vertical short form storytelling could get there.

But it does feel like there's still a really like the magic is definitely in. If you're not going for the funny shock value of like the content like, oh, it's really polished about something that does not deserve a music video. know, 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 C-Dance 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, 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 three character consistency, and now, I mean, the lawyer was, with all the criticism that you had, it was pretty a consistent person. And we're actually very proud of, like, the character consistency.

You can even upload yourself and create. Yeah. Yeah. You just take a couple screenshots, upload it, it creates the character, and then you just tag it, and it's very, very simple to actually, like, create some consistent character. Of course, like, if you imagine, I mean, AI video models create usually five, 10 second clips, right? Now C-Dens 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 three, four, five, six-minute song, and we need to create all the images and videos that kind of... 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 three months ago already. Oh, 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 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 and one that we are debating at least every three days here in the team. This is also changing a lot. I still think there is a lot of value in 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, refinding 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 C-Dance 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 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 Cidance, 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 in some. sometimes doesn't. 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 Kling is amazing as well. Kling 3 is a great all-rounder kind of. Also, it's not the cheapest, but significantly cheaper than C-Lens 2 and C-Lens 2.5. What's going on with the VEO 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 C-Dance recently. I think the latest releases of Google were Nanobanana Light, which is a very good lightweight image model, actually, which is also very useful for several steps in our workflow.

Not the highest quality ever, but kind of affordable and very fast. And then they also released Gemini Omni Flash, I think it's called it. It's a video model that allows also editing. I think it's also very good, but in our experiments doesn't quite reach the quality of students too. Have a lot of marketers discovered neural frames? Can I imagine people just saying like, yeah, well, they made it for music videos, but, you know, if you want to make a Facebook ad, you know, and you have, you want. I think the Facebook ad should be music videos, more likely to stop scrolling.

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 toids and then music videos with Suno also, with neuroframes. We 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, that's fun. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, very cool. You have anything else? No. Have a great thing. Thank you 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 you're charging us, but 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. Great to me. Yeah. And congratulations on the progress. Thank you so much. Keep it up and come back on the show when there's no more.

Big fan of you guys. Thank you so much for having me. We'll talk to you soon. You're the man, dude. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical Infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco.

Up next, we have two. I'm surprised that Mikey hasn't come in with the maxed-out offer yet. Yeah, yeah. The other side of that is that it's going to be a very competitive market, and there's a lot of different tools and wrappers. But I just think, like, if you create an opinionated product, it's really delightfully use, has good NPS, you can carve out a fantastic business as they have. Anyway, our next guest are Adam Goldstein and Brian Yutko 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. Good to be here. Can you kick us off with some introductions and then set up the partnership for us? Yeah, sure. Adam Goldstein, founder and CEO at Archer. 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 three businesses from Boeing. WISC, which is their advanced air mobility platform, in situ, 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've known each other for, you know, for several years.

Brian's actually, he comes from the startup world too. Oh, cool. And so I'll let you give him, you know, he'll give his story there. But, you know, Bowling has always viewed as this, you know, this big company that we all know that has amazing product we fly in every day. But they do a lot of really cool, innovative stuff too. And Brian's the guy that leads a lot of that projects. Yeah, thanks, Adam. Yeah, 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, 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 revenue or profit? How are you thinking about integrating these new products and companies? Yeah, in the world of Evital's, 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. 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 six propellers that will tilt and six 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 unless this is goodbye, I imagine you're going to be doing a lot more work together. Yeah, so the deal is actually in 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 build it together and we do it now as partners. I think it's a really great example of kind of a large institutional company being really creative in 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 develop 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 neuromobility market. And then at the same time, through our relationship, 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 Anderol one happened recently. 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. 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 U.S. in almost 60 years. So it's a big deal that this is happening, and the U.S. wants to lead that. So I think it's common that a lot of 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-loin 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, are you sure? Are you sure you want that revenue?

It's kind of like this funny 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 a L.A. Olympics jacket. It looks like. It's a little far away. But what should people, I've been starting to see Olympics signage going up around L.A. Getting excited. What should people expect from Archer around the Olympics?

So Archer was selected as the exclusive air taxi provider for the L.A. 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 an unslippable date for the company, the regulators, the ecosystem, the infrastructure partners to all work towards getting these product to markets. 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. its 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, chat GPT moment, Waymo moment 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's on the road and you know that self-driving is a real thing. It's here. How do you think that moment will happen for you? So we've been working on this project together as an industry called the EIPP or EBITAL 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. WISC 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 WISC thing, but it's an industry thing 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 me, Brian.

Congrats on the transaction. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, guys. Bye. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the 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. Love it. Anything else you want to talk about? The yen intervention.

The yen is extending its decline, erasing half 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. 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 grok for consumer. There's grok work, which they'll call gwork. And I think Gwark could really see a lot of adoption than the better in the enterprise. Wouldn't you want to use Gwark? I love Gwark. Gwark work. You just call it Gwark work?

It's great. That's a brand. I can get by it. No, to me, cursor is just an amazing brand. It's a lot. Even as a startup, and people idolize the founders. It's such an interesting story. Michael Trill, like a goaded young kid, like builds this amazing product, completely dominates in this category going up against anthropic and open the deal. 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 grocking is maybe the bigger picture, right? Yeah. Because grocking means to really understand the cursor might go away. Nowadays, you know, you're just type in 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 the, there was some crazy reporting that showed that I think GROC 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 it going to say?

something inappropriate. Was it going to go off the rails? I don't think they've solved that, just judging by some of the viral posts that GROC has made. Yeah, that might be like a different fork versus. Ryan says it worked for Twitter. I would still push back. I've tried to be respectful to the company and say the word X. But Twitter to me, again, iconic.

I think that's, I think that eventually will be, you know, like an tunk tell a little bit. Like you'll be revealing how old you are when I'm calling at Twitter. Yeah, it's true. But with cursor and grok, like they're the same age. And so it's not like people,

like 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 a cursor. Because it's like, oh, well, you only use that for two years. Whereas with Twitter, it's like for 20 years people were saying Twitter.

and then all of a sudden it went away. 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 V 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. I was in the trenches or something.

I wasn't personally, but I remember that time. 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 five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Signed for a newsletter at TBPN.com. We'll see you back here at 11 a.m. Pacific tomorrow.

Goodbye.