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

31:10Yeah, I think a lot of the people that watch TVPN And we're reading that article to learn about these celebrities. Yeah, it's a fascinating world. It's just tucked behind so much obscurity. You don't care about them if you're in the finance world. And so good to see folks like that get some coverage and really educate the audience. No, it was a lot of fun. Over the weekend with the Wall Street Journal, people going back and forth. uh uh joe wasenthal joe wasenthal had the best the best take that uh this is the classic uh cynical pattern i think he said i think he's meaning cyclical pattern back in the mid aughts there was a raft of stories about celebrities dating real estate executives and shipping heirs like stavros nyarkos and paris latzis we got to find what all these guys have in common john we got to find what what they have in common because they're working across so many different industries, right?

32:09But what is the common ground? The industry is booming. Could it be something to do with their fee streams? Well, someone had a much more nuanced take from this, which was that celebrities are becoming like multi-platform, multi-disciplinary. There actually are multiple income streams. And so this was not, I gave a quote too that they didn't use, but someone, someone chimed in and said like, yes, a lot of these people are, a lot of these celebrities are doing, um, much more complex deals, uh, starting brands, starting companies, building, holding companies. And so they actually wind up interacting with like the finance bros much more, much more often.

32:50And it's not so much like, oh, you got set up with someone with money. It's much more like, oh, you work on deals together and you talk about the same things because when you're a celebrity at a certain level, yeah, you're going on set and filming in a movie for a couple of weeks. But you're also talking about your catalog of IP, your royalty stream. No, you actually start thinking like I'm a free person. Yeah, they're often forever, right? Unlike management fees, but 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.

33:25Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We have another story here that we should go through. South Korea's AI boom is reshaping the dating market as engineers from Samsung and SK Hynix become some of the country's most eligible bachelors. According to the Wall Street Journal, engineers at the two semiconductor companies are increasingly being viewed alongside doctors, lawyers, and accountants as top marriage prospects. Samsung employees are expected to receive average bonuses of roughly$400 ,000 this year, While SK Hynix workers could average closer to$500 ,000, chip engineers have historically ranked below more traditional high-status professions in South Korea's highly competitive marriage market.

34:10But local matchmaking agencies now say that 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 to reveal where they work on first dates because they worry potential partners may be more interested in their compensation than in them. Others have increasingly started dating fellow chip industry employees instead. Meeting someone in the fab. A real meet cute. You're carrying a tray of wafers, bump into someone, and it's love at first sight.

34:54You look up as your scattered HBM is being pulled up. It is very funny. They just included a picture of a young woman here that says, Kim Young-won, a photographer in Seoul, laments not having any contacts at Chipmakers. Wow. Really, really fascinating. 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. It's a fun one. Anyway, the other big story is that an AI assistant in Australia hacked a gym's booking system on its own after being given the simple task of reserving a class in what is believed to be the country's first known autonomous cyber attack by an AI agent.

35:43Naughty, naughty indeed. Funny, in college, I built a system that would register for classes automatically, but it was just a Python 4 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 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. Yeah, I think Rune was saying the tennis court booking software in SF is going to be the most battle-hardened.

36:24It'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 softwares on the planet of Earth. I believe it. I believe it. So earlier this year, Andrew Bird, who's the head of AI at Affinda, used an AI agent powered by Opus 4.6 to book a morning class at his gym. Instead of simply filling out the online form, the agent discovered a vulnerability in the gym software that allowed it to reserve classes weeks or months earlier than customers were normally permitted. So you could go in and book your class for two months out, even though by default the web interface would restrict you to just, hey, we only want you booking this week.

37:03The 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 no longer live.

37:40I had to find it in the Wayback Machine, but it's been reported on by ABC News, I believe, in Australia, abc.net.au. So you're saying it's 100 % factual if that's the case. Yeah, it's a question. Like you could also be doing a little bit of content marketing. It's an interesting story. You might have helped it a little bit. All these things are sort of gray areas, But it's certainly a glimpse into sort of like what is possible in the future, especially with these long tail SaaS platforms that probably don't even think that they need to be hardened because who on earth is going to deploy a country of geniuses in a data center to get a gym membership or gym reservation?

38:24But now everyone can. So it's happening. And it's another data point. Greg Brockman is announcing that he's releasing a new model at OpenAI, GPT 5.6 Cyber, and expanding Daybreak to help put frontier intelligence in defenders' hands. This is sort of the reaction to these types of long-tail events. It should become easier for companies to spin up an agent to help them harden their systems, especially if you're giving out tennis reservations in San Francisco because those will be the hot ticket. Anyway. Tyler Cowen has a post this morning. Yeah, what do you say? Just past midnight. He says, I am seeing so much doom and at least severe worries due to the open AI hugging face incident and related stories.

39:13But 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 is an estimate of past cyber costs done by top economists. Your current numerical estimate of what those costs might end up being, of course, to be tested against what actually happens over time.

39:48Obviously, 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 do. I expect costs, but not so high that we cannot muddle through and have expected positive stock returns. This would all help to make the discourse more scientific and less like an extended exercise in personal anxiety management. If it is also important, surely this exercise is worth the effort.

40:30I 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 I do think this would be quite helpful. The thing with situational awareness that was so awesome is he just called his shot and he invested against that extremely aggressively. And so 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.

41:16Even if they're trying to like hyperstition a crash, right? I mean, Michael Burry was doing that for a while, for sure. Cassandra. Whatever. But I think maybe timed it a little bit wrong. I'm not exactly sure what happened with the fund. I saw a funny post that was showing a screenshot of radiation pills being sold to true preppers. So in the event. I don't even think true preppers. These were here. I have the post here. Would you have the post? Yeah, pull it up. Okay. I put it in there. Oh, okay. They're selling millennial branded emergency radiation exposure medication pills you take when nuclear war stars to increase your odds of survival with buy now, pay later options.

42:00Yes, 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. Clarita 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 highly leveraged preppers. There's got to be a few. Yes, there's got to be a few. Yes, yes. You should have a ranch in Argentina on a 50-year mortgage right now. Like that's the correct way to financially ride out the apocalypse because the bank's not going to come to you.

42:36But 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 an apocalypse is imminent. You want to be max levered and max debt because no one's going to come back and collect it. 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.

43:13And that is – Have a little faith in our financial system. Come on. Yeah, the asteroid comes and you're like, yes, my puts are paying out. No, I don't know. It's reasonable. but like unless you're full full doom like yeah you should be able to express this as a bad okay quick pause what's up because i we we need to uh say some kind words to tyler yeah last week what happened earlier in the week yeah i made some snide comments about tyler's software that we used to run the show oh yeah he logged in and shipped an entirely new app a native app and this This is our first time using it on the show today.

43:53It is incredible. It's amazing. It's snappy. It's actually amazing. It's well thought through. It's very easy to use. This is my first time using it. No hiccups. It's really good. So fingers crossed. But you cooked. 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.

44:30Native. I got the DMG. I installed it myself. And actually, Tyler was over my shoulder. He helped me install it. But it is. Tyler was burning the midnight oil. I think one of my comments just pushed him over the edge. And he locked in. Management by begging. He restored his honor. Yeah. Well done, Tyler. um spacex is up uh 13 percent uh in the past five days almost certainly in part due to semi-analysis major major bullish updates um i uh yeah not uh they've been contrarian lately right yeah Yeah, totally. With Meta, now SpaceX. So the headline here, SpaceX turns a compute company in eight quarters.

45:21Turns 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, he's really good at building data centers. And they're predicting that Microsoft will be the largest off-taker. Open Ananthropic 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, though. Landex. Because I'm not going to space with this. This is all built just on the ground.

46:05I'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 acts or ground acts. But either way, it's working and very, very exciting to see. Yeah, and Elon did say that their internal projections, which they're operating from, get them to a trillion by 2030, he said, or we may be delusional. I love it. And, yeah, there's certainly 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 Cybertruck. He said, you know, they were going to be selling hundreds of thousands of those units a year.

46:50They've been selling units. I actually ordered one. Yeah, it's so crazy they don't have a six-seater, seven-seater Cybertruck configuration. Like, it's just, I'm thinking about, like, a family. you want one other kid to come with you and it's like okay back in the back in the extended wheelbase suv or back in the minivan like yeah um i was thinking about it one of one of elon's advantages building data centers is that he seems to not care about um 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, right?

47:33It'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's stomach. First, whether you're long SpaceX, short SpaceX, do it on public. Investing for those that take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. So SpaceX may be a rocket company, but nowadays it feels more like a roller coaster, says Tim Higgins in the Wall Street Journal.

48:14This past week alone, chief executive Elon Musk watched as its shares plummeted almost 14 % in one day, which wasn't even the worst performance in SpaceX's short tenure as a publicly traded company. By Friday, the shares had soared more than 20 % from where they began the week. Put another way, that was a more than$300 billion market value swing for most CEOs. That would be a vomit-inducing ride for Musk. It's a nagging reminder that he's back in grind mode having to deliver on all of his high-flying promises for SpaceX's performance. Yeah, I mean, he does have the stomach for it, and it does give a good cover to the other hyperscalers.

48:56This 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 educational 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 docks in the cloud. Like, this is going to be easy.

49:36Throw 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 3x every year now. And as a result, the question is like, can the hyperscalers develop the new data centers internally or will they have to go to 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.

50:10Elon 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 actual internal projections. Ben was bringing up some recent truth. pre-launched the Cybertruck, had over 1 million reservations, demand off the charts. 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.

50:54I'm trying to get these numbers up. I ordered a Cybertruck. I need the self-driving. Yeah, self-driving is really, really good. And I am getting more and more bullish on Tesla's car business. 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 term.

51:34You 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. There's just so little that you just get blocked into this bland thing. But I don't know. I worked with the iPhone. So who knows? Who knows? Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Vogue World. We got to talk about Vogue World. Here we go. Vogue World is taking place in San Francisco this year. Quote, Vogue believes in celebrating cities and San Francisco is a city like none other, says Anna Wintour.

52:16SF 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. So this is a 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 but it deserves the Vogue treatment for those not familiar, Vogue World will be this live stream event. It's very theatrical. There's going to be celebrations. And I'm excited to see some of our favorite entrepreneurs and investors put on their vests. The Patagonia vests and walking the runway in those?

53:04Maybe that or ditch the quiet luxury and go for some loud opulence. Ooh, I like that. Yeah. I mean, Jensen's got the leather jacket. He's looking good. I could see Jensen getting crumbed up for this. Yeah, maybe. What brand does he wear again? Tom Ford. Tom Ford jackets. Yeah, those are nice. Those are nice. Yeah, this will be fun. We'll be there. I wonder who. And yeah, I'm excited to cover it. Yeah, it's going to be great. Hopefully it's not the last.

53:37And 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 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 test also have the reinforcement learning engineering environment they have a training pre-training and post-training these are the wild communities you want to hear from them both they have unique styles for sure you You can clock somewhere.

54:14No, 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, uh, are starting to look more and more similar because Instagram connects everyone all the time. So a tastemaker around the world, somewhere else in the world might be influencing your style, even though you'll never in your life cross paths with them. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Well, uh, there's a little bit more news from the situational awareness story.

54:51Uh, first David Sachs on the all in podcast had a good take here. Uh, 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.

55:37And so if the trade weakens, you get hurt in both directions. So it's the same effect. But I think it was just an interesting little piece of nuance. Yeah, very interesting. And yeah, it just turned the risk up a lot. The crazy thing is if you look at what the AI companies, the labs are doing, the NeoLabs, 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 can create it quickly and maybe you can self-maintain.

56:23And a lot of these are just like ensemble products. 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, I generated the video using C-Dance, but through neural frames as like the harness. But even after generating it in neural frames, which has its own editor that's web-based that they were clearly able to vibe code very quickly, it works really well. I still wound up installing Premiere Pro for the last step of melding a couple different renders together, getting it all sequenced out, doing the final touches.

57:03And 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, it's costing 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 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.

57:41Now 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. 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.

58:21And ultimately, I landed in Adobe Premiere again, you know, even though they have their own editor. And so it was it was an interesting detail. The other piece of the situational awareness story. Do you want to move on or go back? Go for it. Yeah. One more post before our first guest. OK, great. So the other story is from Kate Clark, who is over at the Wall Street Journal now, following the money. And Kate Clark reported on a scoop. She says, situational awareness made a big bet this week on SourceFoundry, a startup aiming to reinvent the way chips are manufactured. Sequoia is an earlier investor.

58:56They bet$400 on a stealth chip startup after the crash. And so this is, I believe, an ASML competitor. and Situational Awareness now has invested$500 million in total. They have a bunch of Stanford researchers on the team. People are generally very bullish on this company. It seems like a great bet. But there was this question of like, what is the sequence? Because this is very much framed as like a, whoa, okay, Situational Awareness is back. They sold their public book to Citadel and they're already writing new checks. But there is a question about the sequence of events here. In my experience, closing a$400 million round, I've never done a round of that size, but even like a$20 million round might take a few months.

59:38Like 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 round? At the same time, if there was ever a wedding to marshal$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 – 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.

1:00:15Will they be in public companies? Will they be using leverage at all? A whole bunch of questions around rebuilding. 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 for the private book. might be sitting down, not up 80%, but actually down on their investment, down 80%, down 90%. I can see him bringing leverage to privates, right? In a way, Moss is one of the few, the brave, that indulges in leverage in the private market. You think that's what his message was? I'm not going to use leverage in public markets anymore. And they're like, wow, that's so brave.

1:00:50You really learned your lesson. He's like, 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 boss I'm just the guy who's right. Now Paul Graham apparently is 14 year old with 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.

1:01:28Yeah. 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. They're in the suit. I got to go back and watch this entire season, figure out what happened to Tim Urban on wait, of wait, but why you've seen his viral charts. He 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 spotted there in mid-2000s television. I don't know.

1:02:09Did you ever watch The Apprentice? No. 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. Great movie. Great movie. And I think that just about does the job. So anyway, we have our first guest, Ryan Spoon from Yahoo here with us live in the TVP and Ultradome. Get this button ready. Do you want to open this, Jordy? In honor of sports. 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.

1:02:47Ryan 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. The yodel. The yodel. The yodel. They never die. And so this is, we'll talk about sports, and today is obviously an important day for fantasy. but this is our Yahoo Sports Yahoo Fantasy. Whoa, there we go. That's great. So this was started by the gentleman who founded StockX, has a company called GhostRite, and we made these for our talent. Oh, very cool. Yeah, and there's 100 of those in the world. You are now one of those.

1:03:32Incredible. I love it. Does Yahoo have a long history of deal toy type objects between the button and now this? Or is this a couple of them? They are related but unrelated.

1:03:46We 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, chach, to send to those fans. And then we do 60 hours of live shows a week at this point, just sports. And 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. Yeah. Football is king. And we have a heritage around fantasy in particular.

1:04:32And obviously fantasy is biggest around football. So there is cyclicality there. But sports is now almost 365 days. on the obviously you had the World Cup in July you had the Knicks and the Spurs in June but starting September and we're 30 days out now of NFL kickoff fantasy for us is really really critical those users are using the app 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.

1:05:26What do fantasy sports users want on the product side, on the feature side? Because obviously there's a way that you stuff AI in every single piece of the UI. It can get a little bit over the top. At the same time, people can go to any AI app of their choosing and sort of ask the same questions and they get that for free. It's less work for you guys, but there's probably some pull there 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 stock fish.

1:06:05Like, okay. And the beauty of fantasy is you have 12 friends or whatever your number is, and you're chatting, and you're going back and forth. 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. So last year we introduced something called Death Leagues with Liquid Death.

1:06:48It 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 gym. 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. 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.

1:07:23Yeah. 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. 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 um 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 the uh the structure of the revenue base for yahoo fantasy um similar to yahoo sports um 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.

1:08:31And then there's paid partnerships like the Liquid Death thing. 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 reads 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 a hundred 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 it's regulated um 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 um and that's a lot of fun those are very uh engaged uh uh leagues very active yeah and then we do have the way to kind of manage your league What we don't do is we stick to fantasy.

1:09:33So 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 SAT testing facility and I can send Tyler over there to take the SAT. No, that's my favorite fantasy football punishment. 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.

1:10:14Our friend Alexis is a big investor in an all women's track running league. We had the enhanced. Did he 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. 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.

1:10:44Look, 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. And you grow. Yeah. And there's never been a better time to be able to do that, both for the rights holder, the league, and also the athletes. There's some really fascinating stuff. Alexis is involved in a lot of it. There's also TGL, that indoor golf league. Oh, really? It's awesome. Sean White has a snowboard league. Slam ball was Gary Vee, by the way. Oh, that's right. Okay. Got it. Gary is also in pickleball. Yeah, pickleball. There's a lot of emerging sport. Yeah.

1:11:26And part of the reason is the athletes have huge audiences and followings, no different than you have your own audiences and following. And then you're able to construct and to go live. And we, in many cases, there's a, the indoor football league had its semifinals last night. It's not the NFL, but they broadcast on Yahoo. and there's 5 million people who've watched that season on Yahoo. So there's tons of examples of people starting up new product, if you will. How do you – you're doing 60 hours a week of live content. And sports. Mogging us. 40, 50 in finance. Yeah, absolutely mogging us. We're barely putting up 15.

1:12:08That's right. But how do you – There's a lot more than two people doing it. I know. How do you identify talent? How confident are you when you're looking at signing or helping create a show? How confident, like how refined is your kind of forecasting ability to understand if somebody is going to be great? I would love to say it's super refined.

1:12:36The way we've done everything is, I say it's the same North Star just said differently for sports and finance, which is our aim is to deliver smart content, make you a smarter fan, make you a smarter investor. Starts with that. We know what our priorities are. We have to be great in fantasy. And hands down, we have the best fantasy roster. And then sport by sport or category by category, whether it's crypto or it's MagSep, we need voices tied to those. In general, we are looking for people who are multi-platform. So we want, just like you, some days I listen on pods, some days I listen on video.

1:13:23It's a skill set to be able to do both of those well as the talent side. That's important. And 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 Sazie 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.

1:14:05And 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 does the value accrue to Yahoo or not? And so there's this like tension there, but I'm wondering how you've, how you've sorted through that over the time. So I don't think that's a tension. I think it's a reality and you got to accept it. 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.

1:14:48So we have a gentleman named Ariel Hawani. Yeah. And if you know MMA or UFC, he is the voice. Yeah. And he's awesome. He's got a beautiful studio. Yeah. Yeah, we looked at his studio. I was studying his studio setup early on because he does a lot of remote guests. Sure. And 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. It works. It works. And then they have a lot of guests. And a lot of those guests come on video.

1:15:28A 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 Yahoo will do it. But that's a good thing. Same as Brian Sazi, super active on LinkedIn. That's a good thing. 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 eye or trader eye.

1:16:14Predictor. Predictor. I like to just have a clear number. Yeah. Like, oh, okay. 20 % chance that America wins this or whatever. It's an easy way to understand a line and what experts are thinking. At the same time, complicated from a regulatory perspective, how have you experienced the boom? How have you decided to integrate or not? So you raised two very important but I think separated points. The first, and I 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.

1:17:00It'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. So I think it's actually really important that we do it and we do it right and safely from a storytelling perspective. 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.

1:17:50our job is to work with those platforms. And so we've worked with Polymarket, CalShea. We talked about Ariel Hawani and Uncrowned. CalShea 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 is a lot. What's the plan to get to$5 billion? More sports fans. We need those leagues to all become.

1:18:34Mark Zuckerberg was like, we need to put internet in Africa if we're going to get. No, an example. You're somewhat the best marketing for Yahoo is probably the leagues doing well. there being like riveting storylines and it is it has been interesting um uh the ufc has had a couple big moments this year but um the league has like from my point of view and again i'm i'm a casual but from my point of view the league has somewhat struggle struggled to cultivate american superstars or or western superstars which is where a lot of the the you know which is important for the league um overall and so yeah it's this interesting dynamic where like how much you can only do so much without these big moments happening you have to be ready for those big moments and it's it's interesting the we want to drive fandom yeah and we don't play in the live rights you know we're not licensing uh that's a very different game we play a different game than espn but all of us benefit from fandom generally growing.

1:19:49And so while the UFC bout will not occur on Yahoo, the pregame, the postgame, we want to be the game around the game, the discussion around and drive the fandom. I'll give you a slight pivot on the how do we grow. And yes, we do want to grow. And yes, we are growing. Of course. I actually spend more time thinking about usage. Sure. And one of the takeaways from being at a TV world was priority number one is grow minutes, which is a very kind of TV term. But we look at overall consumption in minutes. And there's two ways to grow that. Get new people coming in and get them to do more things. And that's why things like fantasy are so important is we introduced college football.

1:20:39It'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 eight screens. You get to pick, okay, I want the Odyssey. That's really expensive.

1:21:12box office yeah your box office you create a theoretical box office then when the numbers come in you see who ranks i got all my friends playing for like one season but the season doesn't really end because there's never enemies yeah it's yearly but uh people have a lot of fun with that the niche yeah i always i always wish there was so fun yeah i wish there was fantasy private markets yeah but but one of the challenges when i think one of the challenges is like attention spans like there's companies right now that i just know are like obvious shorts yeah i would love to express that. Not publicly, not publicly, but...

1:21:44They're going to hang out at their current valuation for a decade, like, realistically. 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, it sounds incredible. But I just don't think the, I don't know if the attention spans are there because sometimes a company like is actively failing, but will take a long time. A long time. No, 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.

1:22:24But also, I want something to play today versus a season 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. Yeah. We have daily games, which we've done for WNBA. We've done for F1. And that's a way to watch a game, make some 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.

1:23:04Thank you so much. Thank you for the gift. Yeah. We appreciate it. We need to make some of those ourselves. We love this. Thank you very much. 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.

1:23:36I 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 copypasta. That's a true breakthrough. It's so good. That's a badge of honor. That's a badge of true virality. Wow. Tell me about the 118 Wally Power designed by Lazzarini Pickering Architetti in 2003. So, yeah, incredible. I'm so 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.

1:24:21I'm kind of going to go out on a limb and say that, like, the Cybertruck maybe was inspired by this. Like, it looks, if you just put them up side by side, it looks very, very, very similar. 118 feet long. Oh, interesting. And it is quick. Michael Bay used it in a movie, I believe, The Island. If you scroll down in the comments, there's some shots from the movie where they're illustrating there's a whole city inside. Very cool shot. Crazy. But yeah, looking at these pictures, I want to get on it with my friends and family and just head out. The cyber yacht. Yeah. Yeah. The inspo. Potentially the stealth icon.

1:25:07$115 billion. Joe Weisendhal, famous vibe coder, has hit the timeline dropping Lange? Lange. Lange. No, I don't know. Play chess against a computer of any rating and talk with a tutor while doing so. The guy's shipping. He's shipped more. He's shipped more than, honestly, a lot of actual engineers in the last year. A lot of people say they're going to ship a game, and then they show a cool demo, and then they 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.

1:25:52he 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 he actually remarks that like it like that the fundamental ai models might be the uh the like the thing holding this product back but uh yeah pretty cool um yeah yeah 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 the tech ads.

1:26:34Oh, 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 uh you vertically integrate all the way into hardware and i want a a physical version of this product yeah all right pull up this video what video the video of oh yeah more fake tech ads we love these guys underwear underwear that think underwear the think grieving trade on it with wake market really dark that sounds unfortunately real what's this one froggle is now brian cloud-based safety just got personal i has anyone actually done hire everyone on earth without doing anything meat gravy hr it's the best grandfather the first wearable that's just a direct shot of friend that's just friend idea light bulb dashboard that is the perfect you have an idea we turn it into a womby A womble.

1:27:46Payroll. Now in pill form. Payroll in pill form. 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 email's father gave your calendar's father five goats. One of the goats cannot produce milk.

1:28:19Wow, the most tank heavy milk one ever. 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 done. I'm sold. Okay, what else is going on in the timeline? Uh, the Atelier Missore folks are building Prometheus, 50 feet tall, holding the torch of the West in Starbase, Texas. I, everyone accused these guys of being AI, but it feels like they're actually out there building stuff. They just went to Starbase and these guys are just building a monument. People have been, you know, demanding monuments in the timeline for a long time, 29 ,000 likes on this.

1:29:07and yet it feels like maybe like a stated preference, revealed preference thing where people say they want a big statue but no one actually wants to go and buy the big statue. I don't know. We'll see how this is received. It's certainly cool that they're doing all this metal work. I think it's fun to watch. I wonder if they'd turn this into a real business. You think people will buy this? You think there's a startup here? You think they can SPAC this? There's no way they're doing this for free for Elon? You don't like wouldn't be the first time someone put six figures on the line for Elon. You know, people have done crazier bills.

1:29:43Possible. This is like some type of Trojan horse. They're putting. Oh, you think so? They're putting some of Elon's enemies inside. Potentially blue origin engineer with a little spyglass looking out, understanding the way star starship is built. Never seen this before. Or a 5th century Byzantine gambling machine? Inform anyone familiar? Someone in the team chat just said, Ty Morse is inside. Ty Morse is inside? Ty Morse is inside Prometheus. Starbase. That would be really good. He deserves it. Give him the interview. Give him the interview. He worked so hard for that. He went into debt for that interview.

1:30:26I 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. So there's a can inside and then string runs like underground basically? 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 maybe against the rules. I don't know. I would hope that this is well-received and it doesn't face any pushback because the end result is remarkable.

1:31:09And 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've got to send someone out and see the progress. But this is something that I think should be the example that Troy Stevens gives for civil service. 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 I do think that you give any enterprising young person a couple cans of paint, a couple tutorials.

1:31:57They 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 painted? Fresh, please. And yeah, it might get scuffed up again. Send somebody else out. Do it weekly if you have to. That's right. I love it. I don't know. 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.

1:32:33Nice motion blur. Someone comments, is this AI generated? And the original poster just says, yep. Wow. Two on the nose. Two on the nose. But Anna Wintour is changing this. That's true. Yeah. Bringing Vogue World to SF. Vogue World will actually look like that or even more striking. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And we need to play our intro video, The Most Feared Lawyer, the video that I produced in Neural Frames because we have a founder and CEO from Neural Frames. 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.

1:33:18There 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. I was able to edit it together.

1:33:40Whole room kneels and billion-dollar scars appear. 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 are 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 every 20 minutes.

1:34:23And I'm like, how is John doing this? Now we know he's 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 as AI music video director I'm sure. I think so I think so. Well no I mean going to this about like it's not it's not a broadly like amazing video it's only funny in this context of like there's like 50 people that think that's funny that understand Quinn Emanuel but you would never be able to underwrite making a full music video for a random corporate lawyer but you can now and I think that's what's actually interesting about this product and AI video generally, but give us the history of the company.

1:35:10Sure. So, yeah, I'm Nico, founder and CEO of Neural Frames. 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 build something myself in the real world and not only in physics labs basically was looking for a startup to build and um in the end of 2022 played around with ai animation based on stable diffusion which has just kind of come up um and i deeply fell in love with creating these animations it was so much fun i had a model fine-tuned on myself and then i you know there was an image to image to image loop and i could just steer the animations with my own words and that was so much fun i loved it i thought like i cannot be the only one who enjoys this and I didn't really have a clear use case in mind, let's say, but just hacked together a prototype, launched in January 2023.

1:36:08It kind of went viral on Hacker News and Reddit and then just grew from there. Fast forward to today, we are a platform focused on music videos. We are a team of 12 people at the moment in Berlin. Yeah, we are bootstrapped still. We are profitable. I don't know if you hit the gong for bootstrapped companies. We definitely hit the gong for profitability.

1:36:32Those are our favorite gongs to hit. Yeah, it's the best. This is my live stream coming true, John. Thank you very much. I mean, we're doing 5 million and your run rate. We grew 6X here and so we are very excited for this to come. Yeah, yeah. With 10 people, I'm sure it's going very well. Yeah, so I mean. King 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 ChatGPT and saying, like, I have a Suno song. I want to make an AI music video, and I want to do not a lot of work. Like, what do you recommend?

1:37:09It recommended Neural Frames, and then I went there. And I'm 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 Hole's fingerprints on every image that's generated. And that could be a criticism because it's not this broad platform that's AGI doing everything, but there's an immense amount of value in having an opinionated product at this moment in time. And I'm wondering, do you think you'll stay there or do you want to broaden out or do you want to go more opinionated?

1:37:45Great, that's a very interesting question. I mean, so we are very focused on the music video use case, which is already kind of a niche by itself, right? we are very deliberate there because we are bootstrapped. So there's no purpose in competing with like generic, 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 bit our harness so that people get kind of high quality, at least like the highest possible quality with the lowest amount of clicks out there.

1:38:29They kind of try to follow what they type in. You can actually use the service for non-music videos. I found a very weird story in my hometown of like a fraud case that there was only like one article about this, this particular case. in like the LA Times, but I was able to take that into ChatGPT, turn it into a deep research report, turn that into a script for a Netflix-style true crime documentary, then take that into Suno, make voiceover, and then I took that into Neural Frames and it basically made like a AI-generated six-minute Netflix documentary. Neural Frames initially got a little confused because it was like expecting beats, I think.

1:39:16and 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 uh there's still a really like the 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, 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.

1:39:58And so I'm wondering about how you're thinking about the progress in AI video models, the cost, and what you're seeing across the landscape. So, I mean, first of all, one year ago, we were, I think, to the best of my knowledge, the first music video tool out there that had character consistency. Oh, yeah. Right. Just to tell you where we're coming from. So, like, one year ago, it was impossible to have character consistency, basically. Then we added three character consistency. And now, I mean, the lawyer was, with all the criticism that you had, it was a pretty consistent person. And we're actually very proud of, like, the character consistency.

1:40:35You can even upload yourself and create. Yeah. Yeah. And it's easy. You just take a couple screenshots, upload it, it creates a character, and then you just tag it. And it's very, very simple to actually create some consistent character. Of course, if you imagine, AI video models create usually 5, 10 second clips, right? Now C-Dance 2.5 can even go up to 30 seconds, but that's very new. And our kind of challenge is, the main challenge of music video generation, okay, you have a 3, 4, 5, 6 minute song, and we need to create all the images and videos that kind of match the beat, match the mood of the song, right?

1:41:12Match 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're 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 tradeoff between UI and sort of really surfacing the feature versus baking everything down into a text box?

1:41:53Because 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. I didn't know the character consistency was an option until there was a little button there. And I was like, oh, what's that? And then I see, and then I go down that flow. oh, if it's just a blank box, it's harder to do the user education?

1:42:35Yeah, this is a very interesting question and one that we are debating at least every few 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.

1:43:10But 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 a multi-shot feature, so it doesn't create one long 30-second clip, but multiple shots at the same time, which NeuroFrames kind of does for all models already, but in Cedence, it's kind of integrated.

1:43:50You 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 and sometimes doesn't. What about Kling? 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 VO 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 Nano Banana Lite 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 a affordable and very fast.

1:44:57And then they also released Gemini Omni Flash, I think it's called. It's a video model that allows also editing. It's also very good, but in our experiments doesn't quite reach the quality of C-Lens 2. Have a lot of marketers discovered neural frames? Can I imagine people just saying like, yeah, well, they made it for music videos, but if you want to make a Facebook ad and you want... I think the Facebook ads should be music videos. More likely to stop scrolling. We had a cosmetic brand using Neuroframes. They kind of created an AI influencer that then created songs with one of the AI music to it and then music videos with Suno also with Neuroframes.

1:45:42We're also seeing musicians themselves running ads on Instagram or Facebook that then link to their Spotify playlist. So that's also an interesting use case, I think. Yes, that's fun. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, very cool. Do you have anything else? No. Have a great day. Thank you for providing so much entertainment. We're having a good time with it. 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. These things are still infancy. Yeah, belly laughs aren't free.

1:46:19Priceless. Yeah. There's no such thing as a free belly laugh. That's true. That's true. That's true. Great to meet you. Yeah, and congratulations on the progress. Thank you so much. Keep it up and come back on the show when there's more news. 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. Unlocks 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.

1:46:55But I just think if you create an opinionated product that's really delightful to use, has good NPS, you can carve out a fantastic business as they have. Anyway, our next guests are Adam Goldstein and Brian Yutko from Archer and Boeing. We're very excited to talk to them about this partnership. What's going on? Welcome to the show. And welcome back. What's up, guys? How are you doing? Good to see you again. Good to be here. Can you kick us off with some introductions and then set up the partnership for us? Yeah, sure. I'm Adam Goldstein, founder and CEO at Archer. I'm Brian Yutko. I lead product development for Boeing.

1:47:29Amazing. 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, InSitu, which is their ISR drone platform, and SkyGrid, which is their air traffic control product. Wow. How long have you guys been working together, talking about potentially doing some sort of deal? What's the story behind this story? Yeah, so Brian and I have known each other for several years. Brian's actually, he comes from the startup world too. Oh, cool. And so I'll let you give him, he'll give his story there.

1:48:06But Boeing has always viewed us as this big company that we all know that has amazing products 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.

1:48:41So 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 eVTOLs, it's a pretty small universe, right? And so there hasn't been a scenario here where two companies have come together like this. So this is kind of like shaking it up in our industry. 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.

1:49:16So we both had 12 sets of engines and six propellers that will tilt and six propellers that are stationary. So a 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.

1:49:54Yeah. So the deal is actually an all-stock transaction. So it makes us partners now. And so Boeing locked up the stock. There's some incentives for us to collaborate together. And they're really this kind of mutually aligned roadmap that we're working on. And so we're both trying to go build the future of aviation and it just aligns us to be able to do it together and we can do it now as partners. I think it's a really great example of kind of a large institutional company being really creative in deal space, you know, in advanced technology. Because, you know, frankly, you know, we see an opportunity here where we can take some of the pioneering capabilities that we developed for autonomous aviation.

1:50:29We 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 mobility market. And then at the same time, through our relationship, we can build, we can bring some of those advanced capabilities back to our core products as we go off and start trying to win the future on that kind of next wave of commercial aviation. What can you tell us about Archer's overall surface area or theory around partnerships? I've been seeing a bunch of these. Obviously, the Anderil one happened recently. How do you think about the overall structure of partnerships right now?

1:51:04Like 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.

1:51:35One of the unique elements to this one, too, was the company InSitu, where InSitu is a revenue producing company, a cash flowing company. So in the startup land of aviation, you generally don't see early revenue that comes to these companies. So the joke is like the Silicon Valley show. It's like revenue. It's like, are you sure? Are you sure you want that revenue? So 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.

1:52:13You're wearing a LA 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 LA. getting excited. What should people expect from Archer around the Olympics? So Archer was selected as the exclusive air taxi provider for the LA28 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.

1:52:55It's important for the administration to see America leading in aviation. So we're really trying to help create those forcing functions to do that. So the goal is to be flying at the games, lots of aircraft flying around, people see this new technology, but really you can think about it as an industry promotion to help show it's safe, it's new technology and good consumer experience. Yeah. I mean, I'm super excited for it. It's going to be an incredible moment. How do you think about reaching the iPhone moment, Chachiput moment, Waymo moment of this product specifically, this market? Because some of these technologies, 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.

1:53:44It's here. How are you? 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 EBITOL 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.

1:54:19But 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 meet you, Brian. Congrats on the transaction. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, guys. Goodbye. See ya. Let me tell you about Shopify.

1:54:45Shopify 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-tervention. 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.

1:55:30Who knows? Last thing, there was some news. News, maybe it was Friday or Saturday, that SpaceX may be abandoning the cursor brand. Man, that's right. And just focusing on Grok. Yeah. 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 Gwork could really see a lot of adoption in the better than the enterprise. Wouldn't you want to use Gwork? I love Gwork. Gwerk, Gwerk Work, you just call it Gwerk, is great. That's a brand I can get by. No, to me, Cursor is just an amazing brand.

1:56:09It's love, even as a startup, 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 Anthropoc, and gets 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 grokking is maybe the bigger picture, right? Because grokking means to really understand the cursor might go away. Nowadays, you just type in or talking. You might not even use a cursor.

1:56:46I don't know. I still like it as a brand. Cursor, the name, is just a great name. But we'll see. I mean, the early, a year ago, like the, there was some crazy reporting that showed that I think Grok 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? There were misalignment. I don't think they've solved that just judging by some of the viral posts that Grok has made. Yeah, that might be like a different fork versus. Brian says it worked for Twitter.

1:57:23I would still push back. I've tried to be respectful to the company and say the word X. But Twitter, to me, again, iconic brand. I think that eventually will be an unctel a little bit. You'll be revealing how old you are when you're calling it Twitter. Yeah, that's true. But with Cursor and Grok, they're the same age. And so it's not like people... If they sunset the cursor brand and everyone goes grok or gork or whatever they want to call it, it won't be the same thing where it's like, oh, I can't stop calling it cursor. Because it's like, oh, well, you only used 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.

1:58:12Equus in the X chat says, guys, what's your view on the glow up of gentle giant or intuitive iguana? What is that? That is Gary Vee had a very viral video over the weekend. What happened? Talking about his NFT project. Oh, people are still on the NFT projects. He's keeping it alive, isn't he? He's still in the game? Yeah, yeah. That is wild. NFT just gives me like, whoa, I was in the trenches. 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.

1:58:55Sign up for our newsletter at tpbn.com, and we'll see you back here at 11 a.m. Pacific tomorrow. Goodbye.