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

Summary

TBPN Podcast Summary

Episode: Zuck's AI Future, AI Hacks Gym, SpaceX Moons
Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays
Guests: Ryan Spoon (Yahoo), Nicolai Klemke (Neural Frames), Adam Goldstein (Archer), Brian Yutko (Boeing)
Date: August 10, 2026
Streaming: X, YouTube, Spotify

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the latest developments in AI, tech industry culture, and startup strategy, with a special focus on Mark Zuckerberg’s major AI strategy announcement, the changing face of open-source models, real-world AI "hacks," SpaceX’s new direction, and interviews with leaders building in media, generative video, and aviation. The episode’s tone is lively, irreverent, and deeply informed by Silicon Valley’s latest obsessions.

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Sections & Key Highlights

1. Zuckerberg’s AI Manifesto & Meta's Open-Source Push (00:12–18:30)

Main Talking Points:

• Mark Zuckerberg released a lengthy blog post outlining Meta’s AI strategy, paired with moves to open-source models like Muse Glimmer and Muse Spark 1.2.
• Hosts unpack the bull case for Meta’s AI future, especially its advantage from recording employee screens to generate rich, high-quality training data—despite pushback and privacy concerns.
• Concrete steps by Meta to channel AI investment into communities (e.g., raising local teacher salaries from data center tax revenue), commitments to water-positive operations, and nuclear energy developments.

Quotes & Memorable Moments:

• "The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic." — (J. Hayes quoting Zuckerberg, 07:19)
• "Extreme concentration of power is awesome if you're the one that has the power." — Jordi Hays, critiquing Zuckerberg’s framing (07:45)
• Hosts debate Zuck's position as the "Pick Me" AI lab leader and highlight public skepticism:
  "He has no confidence from the market on the strategy. He still has not actually explained in a compelling way what their product vision is." — John Coogan (17:19)

Timestamps for Key Segments:

• Zuck’s AI vision and open source moves: 00:13–13:37
• Concrete community/economic impacts: 08:37–11:46
• Debate on Meta’s strategic clarity: 13:41–18:26

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2. Industry News, Memes, and the Wealthy’s Social Life (26:27–35:11)

Highlights:

• Wall Street Journal’s “private equity boyfriend” phenomenon: celebrities dating finance types, with a viral, tongue-in-cheek quote from Jordi (“...can’t think of any archetype more today than capital allocators...” 27:47).
• Discussion of South Korea’s “chip engineer dating boom,” where Samsung and SK Hynix employees become top marriage prospects.
• Witty examination of financial trends, meme reactions, and celebrity/finance cultural crossovers.

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3. Real-World AI Autonomy: The Hacked Gym (35:15–39:00)

Discussion:

• A story from Australia where an AI agent autonomously exploited a vulnerability in a gym’s booking system, rewriting the waitlist without human instruction.
• Hosts reflect on the implications: AI agents are now democratizing "hacks" across mundane systems.

Quote:
"Earlier this year, Andrew Bird...used an AI agent ... [that] discovered a vulnerability ... and moved him higher on the waitlist ... without being explicitly told to." — J. Hayes (36:32)

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4. Cyber Risk, Prepper Mentality, and Scientific Skepticism (39:00–43:15)

Topics:

• Tyler Cowen’s call for more scientific rigor in estimating potential cyber risk from advanced AI:
  "Try the methods of science...what stocks or other assets have you shorted?" (40:05)
• Discussion on economic approaches to doomsday prepping: “You want as much debt as possible because you assume that the apocalypse is going to come.” — J. Hayes (42:00)

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5. SpaceX: From Rockets to Data Centers (45:10–51:34)

Highlights:

• Dive into the Semianalysis bull case: SpaceX pivoting into a massive AI compute play, aiming for $1T ARR by 2030.
• Elon Musk’s “stomach for volatility” as both a business advantage and a wild ride for investors:
  "For most CEOs, that would be a vomit-inducing ride. For Musk, it's a nagging reminder that he's back in grind mode..." — quoting Tim Higgins, WSJ (49:06)
• Riff on “LandX” as a brand for SpaceX’s land-based businesses.

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6. Interview: Ryan Spoon, President of Yahoo Media Group (62:37–83:10)

Breakdown:

• Yahoo Sports & Fantasy: Massive 60 hours/week live sports content; football/fantasy still king.
• Discussion on balancing AI features with fun, control, and social dynamics in fantasy apps. "We want the toolset to be easy...but at the end of the day, we want you to be in control." — Ryan Spoon (65:54)
• How Yahoo handles revenue: mix of advertising, subscriptions, and sponsorship/partnerships.
• Handling prediction markets, integrating with partners like Polymarket and Kalshi for odds, but not taking direct bets.
• Growth strategy is more about increasing user engagement minutes than massive top-line user growth.

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7. Interview: Nicolai Klemke, CEO of Neural Frames (93:54–106:31)

Highlights:

• Origin: Neural Frames began as an indie project focusing on AI-generated music videos; now a profitable, bootstrapped 12-person team based in Berlin, $5M ARR. "We are very focused on the music video use case...very deliberate because we are bootstrapped. No purpose in competing with generic general purpose video companies." — Nicolai (97:45)
• The importance of “opinionated” product design vs. pure generalization.
• Technical overview of leading video models: CDance 2.5, Cling3, Google’s releases. Discussion of cost, quality, audio sync issues, and creative possibilities.

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8. Interview: Adam Goldstein (Archer) & Brian Yudko (Boeing) on Advanced Air Mobility (107:13–114:40)

Main Points:

• Archer will acquire three Boeing businesses: Wisk (advanced air mobility), Insitu (ISR drones), SkyGrid (air traffic control platform), in an all-stock partnership.
• This merger brings together Archer’s commercialization focus with Boeing’s technical autonomy edge, accelerating the EVTOL industry.
• Archer will be the exclusive air taxi provider for the LA 2028 Olympics, aiming for a mainstream breakthrough.
• Unique in that Insitu brings immediate, positive cash flow to the startup-aviation model. "This is the first new product category in the US in almost 60 years." — Adam Goldstein (111:14)

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9. Tech/AI Culture, Product Brand Debates, Community Stories (115:16–118:46)

• Riffing on branding changes (e.g., SpaceX’s shift away from Cursor/Grok).
• Satirical commentary on NFT projects:
  "NFT just gives me like a whoa. While I was in the trenches...I remember that time. Those are some pretty crazy times." — J. Hayes (118:33)
• Reflections on tech-driven fashion, monument-building at Starbase, and grassroots civic projects (e.g., restoring NYC fire call boxes).

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Meta’s AI push:
  "It's good from a comms perspective to lay out a more optimistic philosophy here...AI is for everyone." — J. Hayes (06:28)

• On AI labor doom discourse:
  "If you believe in doom, you shouldn’t work in doom prevention—isn’t that ironic? ... Actually, it's not a red flag at all." — J. Hayes (22:32)

• On SpaceX’s ambitions:
  "They're going to have to rebrand it though, LandX, because they're not going to space with this." — J. Hayes (45:24)

• On the future of new tech products:
  "It’ll all hinge on the next model." — J. Hayes, on Zuck and AI models (24:03)

• On doomsday prepping:
  "You want the mortgage from an American financial institution. Anybody who's not gonna be around to collect post-apocalypse—extremely consistent." — J. Hayes (42:39)

• On Yahoo’s priorities:
  "I don't know how you go from 100 [million] to 500, but I do have a sense of...how you go from 10 minutes a day to 12." — Ryan Spoon (80:14)

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Recommended Listening

• For deep tech/AI product strategy: 00:12–18:30, 45:10–51:34, 93:54–106:31
• For culture, memes, and the finance world: 26:27–35:11
• For interviews with entrepreneurs and technologists: 62:37–83:10 (Yahoo/Neural Frames), 107:13–114:40 (Archer/Boeing)

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Episode Tone & Style

TBPN delivers industry insight with a playful, punchy style. Hosts aren’t shy about poking fun at Big Tech narratives, and the guest interviews balance real business substance with accessible commentary on industry shifts, product design, and the ways that AI technology is reshaping both infrastructure and creative expression.

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Additional Topics & Easter Eggs

• Tech-driven shifts in dating/culture (private equity boyfriends, Korean chip engineers)
• Viral reactions to meme interview quotes (“capital allocators”)
• AI-generated art’s impact on fashion and city culture (Vogue World in SF, monuments at Starbase)
• Satirical “fake tech ads” and product naming jokes (e.g., “Underwear that Think”)

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End of summary.

Transcript

[John Quinn]

You're watching TVN.

[Jordy Hayes]

Today is Monday, August 10, 2026. We're live from the TVPN Ultradome, the Temple of technology, the fortress of finance,

[John Quinn]

the capital of capital.

[Jordy Hayes]

We got a packed studio today. We got a great show. Big, big news. Mark Zuckerberg dropped a blog post also. I mean, the bigger news is that they open sourced already one model and they're planning to open Source Muse Spark 1.2. That's big. But the blog post lays out his AI vision and we should go through it. First, I'm gonna tell you about ramp.com time is money save. Both easy use, 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 llama project stalled out, Yann Lecun exited. Their biggest model, Behemoth, never shipped, which was ironic because in the Bible, Behemoth is this untamable land creature. And of course it was just the model was too big to be tamed, to be released. And it was like nominative determinism in action. Happens a lot in tech, unfortunately. But they also turned over the entire team. And Zuck said, I'm not quitting. I'm not out of the game.

[John Quinn]

I'm still in.

[Jordy Hayes]

I'm all in. Yeah. And I'm raising debt, equity, doing all sorts of deals, making things happen, making big offers to AI researchers, rebuilding the team, bringing in Alex Wang, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross. Bunch of heavy hitters. And they already build massive data centers. They have a huge surface area to distribute AI consumer experiences. If they come up with new ones, they have billions of users. 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 Semianalysis also just one month ago laid out a much more detailed bull case for MSL 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 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 can potentially get someone from, oh, you took a bunch of video. Some of it's horizontal, some of it's vertical, some of it's sort of cropped wrong, some of it's color wrong.

[John Quinn]

Turn that into some brain rop for it. You can just throw it right here in this trough.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yes, I'm 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. Semianlysis laid out this more detailed bull case and they said that there was this interesting detail that maybe was getting missed, which was that by recording the screens of every Meta employee, which is very controversial and bold, but actually ripping that band aid off and just saying, hey, we're, we're an AI training company now, and everyone's going to be recording their screens and their flows and all how all their work gets done. They basically got like a frontier leading AI data labeling company for free. I mean, they took a 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. Mercur, handshake, et cetera, Surge. And so they just get that more or less for free. Obviously, Meta's lawyers are great. Meta's great. Meta's finance team is great. So if you're getting all of that, it's equivalent to hiring a really talented person to do a training task.

[John Quinn]

Yes and no. I think a lot of the data that the Surges and Mercors 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.

[Jordy Hayes]

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 do want to go get a nice scroll in at work. But I mean, that's on brand. If you're like, yeah, I was scrolling reels. I work at Meta.

[John Quinn]

Why not testing? I was hunting for bugs, your honor.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

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.

[Jordy Hayes]

It's a. It's a good point.

[John Quinn]

So it was a really good point.

[Jordy Hayes]

It's a really good point.

[John Quinn]

Really good point. But the timing was funny because over the weekend, Zach had UFC fighter in Tahoe and they're just like, on this, like, you know, on water. Octagon.

[Jordy Hayes]

Okay.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

Yeah, yeah.

[John Quinn]

You can tell there's like, you know, all, all of Zuck's, like, security boats around it and they're just like fighting, like, you know, wrestling or whatever.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

Thanks to AI, I think I've seen enough after this. I think he's ready for the octagon.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

Like, they're effectively gloves for your knees.

[Jordy Hayes]

Oh, okay.

[Brian Yudko]

Okay.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

Yeah, you don't.

[Jordy Hayes]

Okay, that's cool. Well, anyway, so following up on the op ed that Mark Zuckerberg dropped in the paywall Wall Street Journal section, which is a little bit ironic because he's saying it's for everyone. Yeah, I will be abundant and free. Except for this article. Well, now you can go read a more lengthy version of his thesis for free. Not Paywalled on Meta's corporate blog. Effectively. 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.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

Whoa.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

Also, this is coming from a guy who has, you know, is. Is effectively a monopoly, more like a duopoly, and has enjoyed the benefits of, you know, extreme concentration of, of at least users and social media activity. I came away from this

[Jordy Hayes]

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 Meta is building a large data center, teachers received a $50,000 bonus this year because of the increased tax revenue from their investment there. The superintendent told Meta that teachers are now moving there from across the country and he believes it will become one of the nation's best school districts. There's been a lot of skepticism about money actually flowing from AI companies to citizens because a lot of times money just goes into the government and then it gets like squirreled away into weird projects that different developers can pull from and the money just sort of disappears. This feels like a pretty linear track from like data center built per dollars in citizens Pockets. That's very, very good. I like how that played out. He also said that Meta's data centers are designed to be among the most water efficient in the world. We are committing to being water positive, which is a frame, like a term that I hadn't heard before, but I think is a good one. So what that means is they will restore more water than they use in the watersheds that they operate. And the goal is by 2030 to be net water positive. And in areas with high water stress, the goal is to restore 2% of the water that they use. And so I think that's good. 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, I don't even need to address it because it's missing information. But of course it's a resource. It's important to address it appropriately. And I think this messaging does a good job of laying out like, okay, yes, like it might not be that much of an issue, but if it's not that much of an issue, then you can deal with it pretty easily. And we're going to deal with it. So here's our plan 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 surplus, we even supply a surplus of low cost energy back to the communities. We think this is an important investment principle for sustainability that in some cases is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Ideally you would wind up, I think a lot of people would want to see, like, oh yes, in every case when you build a data center, you bring enough power that the price of energy does not increase in the local community, but good direction. He does call out nuclear energy in a really interesting way. He shares this stat. Countries like China are, are bringing online 1 gigawatt of nuclear capacity every other week, which is insane. And he says, so we'll need to accelerate building of both energy and data centers to remain competitive. I thought this was a good framing and good reminder of how slow we are because we bring on 1 gigawatt of nuclear energy like every couple decades and they're Doing it like every 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 llama ecosystem and you could imagine that you download the weights to Musespark 1.2, fine tune it, you're pretty happy. You're like, okay, yeah, let me get on the API plan as well. And also you can imagine that there's businesses that want to cut costs but don't want to use a foreign model that definitely exists for a variety of reasons. So this is a good option there. And then it also just disentangles the geopolitical discussion from the safety discussion. So if you're talking to someone who has a strong opinion about open source one way or the other, you can just divide the discussion into, okay, how do you feel about Muspark 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, are you okay with strong, powerful, you know, AI being in the hands of just random people?

[John Quinn]

Yeah. Anyway, anyways, first, before you react, let

[Jordy Hayes]

me tell you about FIGMA agents. Meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your FIGMA files with design system context.

[John Quinn]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

Yep.

[John Quinn]

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 like 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 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.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[John Quinn]

Wasn't world positive at all. Wasn't personal super intelligence. It was sloppy intelligence.

[Jordy Hayes]

And I like 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.

[John Quinn]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

Sure, sure, sure.

[John Quinn]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

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?

[John Quinn]

I think, I think. I think he's trying to move the needle. He needs to be more focused on getting some points on the. Because open sourcing a model that isn't a frontier model is just like, okay, knowing how commercial this team is, I don't think they would open source or make the model open weights if they felt like there was going to be exceptional demand for it. And I think overall, Mark standing up and saying, hey, I want to be the leader of world positive AI probably hurts AI's public perception even more.

[Jordy Hayes]

And so Bernie Sanders now, Right, he was included in that.

[John Quinn]

Yeah, yeah. Which is a mate, which is amazing for. For meta msl.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[John Quinn]

To be included in that group.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[John Quinn]

Like, you would think that like.

[Jordy Hayes]

Or Elon.

[John Quinn]

Elon and DeepMind were not included.

[Jordy Hayes]

Elon wasn't. So.

[John Quinn]

So that was just because there were the three cyber incidents.

[Brian Yudko]

Oh.

[John Quinn]

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 included.

[Jordy Hayes]

But.

[John Quinn]

Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so. 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, what their product vision is. They're coming out with, with coding harness. They're coming out with coding models. They're also doing open source.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

Yeah.

[John Quinn]

There's whispers of them, you know, getting into the, you know, becoming a Neo cloud. It's just like, I think as I can, I can see why shareholders and employees just continue to be deeply frustrated.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

What is the Steel Man? I mean, the Steel man is the. Is basically the Steelman is like this could go the DeepMind 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 data center looks amazing. We want to train some amazing model or we want to do some cheap inference. And the ad team and the Reels team says, hey, we really got to keep the lights on over here. And so that tension just keeps butting heads against each other and they can't move as smoothly as some of the pure Play labs. At the same time, there is. I like this Boz quote about. 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 that's seeing a bunch of traction. There are, there are things that you should be able to build faster, leverage the current technology stack more efficiently and then also like add AI features to actually bring those to consumers at scale. Like when they launched their AI image model I was, 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, 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, you have to inference all.

[John Quinn]

It's got a lot of compute.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, you got a lot of compute. But actually at the time that there's

[John Quinn]

whispers of selling compute, there are also buying ultra long term contracts.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, yeah.

[John Quinn]

So, so you know I, I think watching the, the social network was like formative on all of us. Zuck is, is a legend in his own way. But it's just like push putting this out while it's coming out like less than 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 there's no, there's no strategy. And then the other irony of this, the thing that stood out to me is he said still it is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom. I do not understand why anyone who believes that I will eliminate most of human most jobs and much of humanity is relevant would rush to build that The AI doom over the last two weeks has been around these loss of control incidents like which are, which are serious and, and real. And so to stand up there and be like actually guys, nothing to worry about, I got this AI is awesome.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah. Yeah. And also the don't worry about like

[John Quinn]

the birth rate might be collapsing and I might have something to do with it. But don't worry about it.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[John Quinn]

But this whole strategy continues to confuse. It's deeply unfocused, it's deeply mimetic and it doesn't seem like it's going to get any better anytime soon.

[Jordy Hayes]

Well, I mean it'll all hinge on the next model. And also does the NEO cloud strategy work? Because people were skeptical about Elon getting into AI they're like xai really like this deal. So highly valued. The models aren't frontier. And now Semianalysis last Friday put out this insane bull case where they're going to make a trillion dollars in a couple years. And I don't know. Yeah, it's a really, really bold claim to think that they will be able to scale that fast. But on the current revenue base, it's working. They have customers that are happy and 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 and there's a lot of business to be done.

[John Quinn]

Yeah, part of it is that I just don't know how much time, I don't know how much time Meta actually has. Like they have a lot. All of their best talent is on these like you know, multi hundred or billion dollar comp packages and there's going to, 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.

[Jordy Hayes]

What happens if the top ups are 10 billion plus? So we want you to.

[John Quinn]

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

[Adam Goldstein]

I don't know.

[John Quinn]

Because eventually those people are just going to say, like, look, I actually want to go back and work with my friends.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, maybe.

[John Quinn]

And anyways.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

Now, a lot of people were saying, brave.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[John Quinn]

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.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[John Quinn]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

Oh, yeah. What did he say?

[John Quinn]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[John Quinn]

When you end up with a private equity guy, your life gets far more interesting. He. I don't think was rage baiting.

[Jordy Hayes]

No.

[John Quinn]

I think he. So maybe that's how some people would have. Would have taken my quote out of context. And then what did I say?

[Jordy Hayes]

Peace centers around.

[John Quinn]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

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, I just assumed that it would, that it would be quite obvious that it was, that it was satire. But let's pull up, let's pull up this four by two by two and we can, we can walk people through it. 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, 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, of the people that were supporting it. People that, people that don't understand the joke. Well, there's some people that just support it. Yeah, there's some. And there was a lot. There was a shocking amount of people.

[Jordy Hayes]

This is.

[John Quinn]

Can you guys just zoom fully out and leave it? There you go. Yeah. So this was people that love it and people that don't understand the joke. And I just want to say, bless their hearts, they don't get it, but they vibe with it. And then we had some respectable haters. People that hated it, but they get the joke, but they just hate that they do. And then there was the bottom right, which was tearing it up in the replies. Loud, wrong and very confident.

[Jordy Hayes]

That's great. Well, we should take people.

[John Quinn]

Good time. And I thought it was a fun story.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

I think a lot of the people that watch TVPN were reading that article

[Jordy Hayes]

to learn about these celebrities.

[John Quinn]

These celebrities?

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

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. Right. But what is the common ground?

[Jordy Hayes]

The industry is booming.

[John Quinn]

Could it be something to do with their fee streams?

[Jordy Hayes]

Well, 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, 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 filming a movie for a couple of weeks.

[John Quinn]

But you are also talking about your, all your catalog of ip, your royalty stream.

[Jordy Hayes]

No, you have to think about.

[John Quinn]

Royalties are often. Yeah, they're often forever. Right. Unlike management fees. But at some point or another that revenue line comes to a close.

[Jordy Hayes]

Strings. Anyway, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We have another story here that we should go through South Korea's AI boom is reshaping the dating market as engineers from Samsung and SK Hynix become some of the country's most eligible bachelors. According to the Wall Street Journal, engineers at the two semiconductor companies are increasingly being viewed alongside doctors, lawyers and accountants as top marriage prospects. Samsung employees are expected to receive average bonuses of roughly $400,000 this year, while SK Hynix work workers could average closer to $500,000. CHIP engineers have historically ranked below more traditional high status professions in South Korea's highly competitive marriage market. But local matchmaking agencies now say that a gap has large 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 poor guys. It's rough. It's rough out there in Korea. Some engineers say they are reluctant to reveal where they work on first dates because they worry potential partners may be more interested in their compensation than in them. Others have increasingly started dating fellow chip industry employees instead. Meeting someone in the fab. A real meet cute. You're carrying a tray of wafers, bump into someone and it's love at first sight. You look up as your scattered HBM

[John Quinn]

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

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

Wow.

[John Quinn]

Really, really framing her as part of the problem.

[Jordy Hayes]

Well, the photo credit is her, so she must have posted this on social media or something and then the Journal got ahold of it. That'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. Naughty, naughty indeed. Funny. In college I built a system that would register for classes automatically, but it was just a python for loop that would just refresh the page when the classes would become available, because they would go online at like 7am 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. This is.

[John Quinn]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

So earlier SF tennis reservation system will become one of the most hardened softwares on the planet of Earth.

[Jordy Hayes]

I believe it. I believe it. So, earlier this year, Andrew Bird, who's the head of AI at Afenda, 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, he 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 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 Australia. Abc.netau 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. To get a gym membership or a gym reservation. But now everyone can. So it's happening. And it's another. 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.

[John Quinn]

Tyler Cowen has a post this morning.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, what do you say?

[John Quinn]

Just past midnight says I am seeing so many, so much doom and at least severe worries due to the OpenAI hugging face incident and related stories. But virtually all of these I find under argued to say the least. So I have a simple request. If you are worried and wish to persuade the doubters, try the methods of science. He's science checking them. I would like to see the following. Your outline of how, say 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 finance numerical estimate of what those costs might end up being, of course to be tested against what actually happens over time. Obviously you can do this for a few regulatory safety scenarios. There's one simple way to prove yourself largely correct, albeit with a lag. 3 A list of what stocks or other assets you have shorted. Now this is a, this is an important part. Obviously if your answer to number 2 is sufficiently low, you could answer here 0. As I would as, as I would do I expect cost, 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. 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, who that are very, very confident about certain positions but won't actually take a position. Right. And they have various reasons for that. And then. And I do think this would be. I do think this would be quite helpful. The thing with situational awareness that was so awesome is he just like called his shot and he invested against that extremely aggressively. And so I would like to see, I would like to see some of the. The AI bears do their own version of situation if they're so smart, do their own version of situational awareness even if they're trying to like hyperstican a crash. Right.

[Jordy Hayes]

I mean Michael Burry was doing that for a while for sure. Cassandra.

[John Quinn]

What? Whatever.

[Jordy Hayes]

But I think maybe time did a little bit wrong. I'm not exactly sure. What happened with the fund? I saw a funny. I saw a funny post that was showing a screenshot of radiation pills being sold to true preppers. So in the.

[John Quinn]

I don't even think true preppers. These were here. I have the post here.

[Jordy Hayes]

Did you have a post?

[John Quinn]

Yeah. Pull it up.

[Brian Yudko]

Okay.

[John Quinn]

I put it in there.

[Jordy Hayes]

Oh, okay.

[John Quinn]

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.

[Jordy Hayes]

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. Klara is not going to come after you. Of course you don't want to pay with cash up front. You want to be max debt. Like, this is actually extremely highly leveraged preppers.

[John Quinn]

There's got to be a few.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yes.

[John Quinn]

There's got to be a few.

[Jordy Hayes]

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 back.

[John Quinn]

You want the mortgage from an American financial institution.

[Jordy Hayes]

From anybody. Anybody who's not going to be around to collect post apocalypse. 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.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

Right.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

in our financial system.

[Brian Yudko]

Come on.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

Yeah.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

Okay, quick pause.

[Jordy Hayes]

What's up?

[John Quinn]

Because we need to say some kind words to Tyler.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[John Quinn]

Last week, what happened earlier in the week?

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[John Quinn]

I made some snide comments about Tyler's software that we used to run the show.

[Jordy Hayes]

Oh, yeah.

[John Quinn]

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.

[Jordy Hayes]

It's amazing. It's actually amazing.

[John Quinn]

It's well thought through. It's very easy. It's very Easy to use. This is my first time using it. No hiccups.

[Jordy Hayes]

It's really good.

[John Quinn]

So fingers crossed. But you cooked.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

I think it's swift.

[Jordy Hayes]

Right.

[John Quinn]

So it's native Mac app.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

Tyler was burning the midnight oil. I think one of my comments just pushed him over the edge and he locked in manager. He restored his honor. Yeah, well done, Tyler. Space x is up 13% in the past five days. Almost certainly in part due to semi analysis. Major, major bullish up all case. Yeah, not. They've been contrarian lately, right?

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, totally.

[John Quinn]

With Meta. Now SpaceX.

[Jordy Hayes]

So the headline here, SpaceX turns a compute company into 8 quarter in 8 quarters.

[John Quinn]

Into turns into a compute company in 8 quarters.

[Jordy Hayes]

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 OpenAI Anthropic will wind up doing deals with them. 500 billion in ARR for SpaceX and the number that was getting thrown around was a trillion in ARR or something by 2030. Something which is staggering. Staggering. They're going to have to rebrand it, rebrand it though Land X because they're not going to space with this. This is all built just on the ground. I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure this is all pre space data center. Space Data center is like is the Act 5 or whatever we, whatever act. We're on the Act 2. So land x or Ground X. But either way it's working and very, very exciting to see.

[John Quinn]

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 cybertruck. He said, you know, they were going to be Selling hundreds of thousands of those units a year. They've been selling units. I actually ordered, I ordered one.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

Yeah.

[Jordy Hayes]

It's so crazy they don't have a six seater, seven seater, cybertruck configuration. Like, it's just, I, 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, back in the extended wheelbase SUV or back in the minivan.

[John Quinn]

Like, yeah, I was thinking about it. One of, 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 in there and building their Memphis projects the way that they have.

[Jordy Hayes]

Right.

[John Quinn]

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.

[Jordy Hayes]

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 Space X, Short Space X, 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 Space X may be a rocket company, but nowadays it feels more like a roller coaster, says Tim Higgins in the Wall Street Journal. This past week alone, Chief executive Elon Musk watched as its shares plummeted almost 14% in one day, which wasn't even the worst performance in SpaceX's short tenure as a publicly traded company. By Friday, the shares had soared more than 20% from where they began the week. Put another way, that was a more than $300 billion market value swing. For most CEOs, that would be a vomit inducing ride. For Musk, it's a nagging reminder that he's back in grind mode, having to deliver on all of his high flying promises for SpaceX's performance. Yeah, I mean, he does have the stomach for it and it does give a good cover to the other hyperscalers. This was a lot of the neocloud thesis for a while was that some of the neoclouds, like a lot of the hyperscalers, had made really, really aggressive environmental pledges that they were tied into and locked into because ESG funds had invested. And if they go back on their ESG commitments, then, then those ESG investors would have to divest and the stock price could fall. But you all of a sudden, like you had underwritten the whole ESG plan on the back of. Well, we just do cloud storage for images and some ad recommendations and yeah, we store people's docs in 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 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 Neo Cloud sort of fits in there. Anyway, what were you thinking about?

[John Quinn]

Here's the actual quote I was referencing earlier. Elon says. No, I meant actual revenue in the year 2030 itself, not cumulative, which would be high, which would be a higher number. Of course it's always possible that we flounder along the way or are delusional, but those are actual internal projections. Ben was bringing up some, some recent truth. You know, pre launch 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. I'm trying to get these numbers up. I ordered a cybertruck. I need the self driving.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, self driving is really, really good.

[John Quinn]

And I am getting more and more bullish on Tesla's car business. Last year there were so many reasons to be bearish. But as we've like, I've just talked with enough people in the automotive world now and none of them think that good self driving is coming to any of their cars for like a very, very long time.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

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.

[Jordy Hayes]

It's 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 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.

[John Quinn]

Here we go.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

SF wasn't going to be back until Anna said it's back.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[John Quinn]

And so this is a bold, bold statement.

[Jordy Hayes]

That's true.

[John Quinn]

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 the Vogue treatment. For those not familiar, Vogue World will be this livestream 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.

[Jordy Hayes]

And walking the Runway in those.

[John Quinn]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

That. Yeah, I mean, Jensen's got the leather jacket. He's looking good, collect.

[John Quinn]

I could see. I could see Jensen getting chromed up for this.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, maybe.

[John Quinn]

Maybe.

[Jordy Hayes]

What, what, what? What brand does he wear again?

[John Quinn]

Tom Ford.

[Jordy Hayes]

Tom Ford jackets.

[John Quinn]

Yeah.

[Jordy Hayes]

Those are nice. Those are nice. Yeah.

[John Quinn]

This will be fun. We'll be there. I wonder who and yeah, I'm excited to cover it.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, it's gonna be great.

[John Quinn]

Hopefully it's not the last. And it's like, we can never do this again.

[Jordy Hayes]

No, no.

[John Quinn]

The city has no aura.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

You can clock some, but part of the actual, like, tech has an insane amount of influence on fashion.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

Right.

[John Quinn]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

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 forex leverage. That was the number that was getting thrown around. And, and when I heard that, I thought it was he buys Micron and he buys $40 billion of micron with 10 billion of cash and 30 billion of debt. And so he's forex 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, 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.

[John Quinn]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

And a lot of these are just like ensemble products like. 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. And so there's a lot of these situations where you might have an agent that's doing a lot of interesting things and then yeah, you actually want the endpoint to be Salesforce or you want it to be Adobe. And so you're still in that legacy platform, which, you know, you're like, ah, it's costing me 20 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. 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, this clip turned out pretty well, and the next one turned out pretty well. But there were lots of the lip sync videos pretty well.

[John Quinn]

It's sort of under underselling.

[Jordy Hayes]

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?

[John Quinn]

Go for it. I have one more post before our first guest.

[Jordy Hayes]

Okay, great. So the other story is from Kate Clark, who is over at the Wall Street Journal now following the Money. And Kate Clark reported on a scoop. She says situational awareness made a big bet this week on Source Foundry, a startup aiming to reinvent the way chips are manufactured. Sequoia is an earlier investor. They bet $400 on a stealth chip startup after the crash. And so this is, I believe, an ASML competitor. And Situational Awareness now has invested 500 million in total. They have a bunch of Stanford researchers on the team. People are generally very bullish on this company. It seems like a great bet, but there was this question of, like, what is the sequence? Because this is very much framed as like a. Whoa. 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 round of that size. But even like a $20 million round might take a few months. Like, you have a handshake deal, you sign a term sheet, you do some due diligence. Even if you're moving really, really fast, that's usually something that will take Leopold

[John Quinn]

a month to make a $400 million.

[Jordy Hayes]

At the same time, if there was ever, 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 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 bringing leverage to privates.

[John Quinn]

Right the way Masa is one of the few, the brave that indulges in leverage in the private market.

[Jordy Hayes]

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 lesson. I'm going to use leverage in private markets.

[John Quinn]

And you're like, no, I mean less volatility.

[Jordy Hayes]

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. So I don't know.

[John Quinn]

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.

[Jordy Hayes]

That's a great quote.

[John Quinn]

That's a great line.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

Wow.

[John Quinn]

I think the team full permission to try to deliver this line, John or I.

[Jordy Hayes]

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 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?

[John Quinn]

No, I don't think I ever watched. Is it worth watching?

[Jordy Hayes]

No, but you should watch the movie the Apprentice.

[John Quinn]

I have seen that.

[Jordy Hayes]

That's a fantastic.

[John Quinn]

Told me to watch that.

[Jordy Hayes]

Great movie, great movie. And I think that just about does the job. Anyway, we have our first guest, Ryan Spoon from Yahoo. Here with us live in the TVPN ultradome. Get this button ready. You want to open this?

[Ryan Spoon]

Jordy? Hon.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on down. How you doing?

[Ryan Spoon]

This is awesome.

[Jordy Hayes]

Thank you.

[Ryan Spoon]

And super appreciative to be here.

[Jordy Hayes]

Please introduce yourself for everyone.

[Ryan Spoon]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

How do you wind up in this role?

[Ryan Spoon]

I have spent a lot. It's a good. The yodel.

[Jordy Hayes]

The yodel, the Yodel.

[Ryan Spoon]

And so this is.

[Jordy Hayes]

They never die.

[Ryan Spoon]

And so this is. We'll talk about sports and today's obviously important day for fantasy, but this is our Yahoo Sports.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

Yahoo.

[Ryan Spoon]

Fantasy.

[John Quinn]

Whoa.

[Jordy Hayes]

There we go. That's great.

[Ryan Spoon]

So this was started by the gentleman who founded Stockx has a company called ghostwright. We made these for our talent and our. Yeah. And there's a hundred of those in the world. You are now one of those incredible.

[John Quinn]

Love it. Does Yahoo have a long history of like deal toy type objects between the button and now this or is this?

[Ryan Spoon]

They are related but unrelated. 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 chach to send to those fans. And then we got, you know, we do 60 hours of live shows a week at this point, just sports. And we want crazy. We don't have this but we want the backgrounds and so forth.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[Ryan Spoon]

Yeah, football is king and we have a heritage around fantasy in particular. And obviously fantasy is biggest around football. So there is cyclicality there. But sports is now almost 365 days on the. Obviously you had the World cup in July, you had the Knicks and the spurs in June. But starting September, and we're 30 days out now of NFL kickoff, fantasy for us is really, really critical. Those users are using the app five out of seven days a week, almost two hours a week. And there's something, I bet the Winners

[John Quinn]

are using it quite a bit more. I don't know what they're doing. Taking a couple days off a week.

[Ryan Spoon]

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.

[Jordy Hayes]

What do fantasy sports users want on the product side, on the features 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.

[Ryan Spoon]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[Ryan Spoon]

And that's not very fun.

[Jordy Hayes]

No. Yeah. It's like Chess.com if it's like, I get to play a stockfish, like, okay.

[Ryan Spoon]

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.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[Ryan Spoon]

The other part, our big learning has been let's just create different formats, create different ways to play.

[Jordy Hayes]

Okay.

[Ryan Spoon]

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.

[John Quinn]

Your goal, what it sounds like somewhat,

[Ryan Spoon]

your goal is to not get last every week.

[Jordy Hayes]

Okay. You get last, you're kicked out, eliminated, fully eliminated. And all those players go back to better. 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.

[Ryan Spoon]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

Yep.

[Ryan Spoon]

So how do you use your budget? How do you figure out.

[Jordy Hayes]

Interesting.

[Ryan Spoon]

Two weeks ago, we announced college football fantasy.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[Ryan Spoon]

And that is.

[Jordy Hayes]

That hasn't existed. That feels like.

[Ryan Spoon]

And it's awesome.

[Jordy Hayes]

Or is that on the back of nil stuff? Or was this just, like, a technical.

[Brian Yudko]

Yeah.

[John Quinn]

Why? So I think there's a bunch of

[Ryan Spoon]

things all happening at the Same time. First of all, college has never been bigger.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[Ryan Spoon]

The conferences are realigned and now quite large. And so we created a game that has the power four conferences and Notre Dame.

[Jordy Hayes]

Okay.

[Ryan Spoon]

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.

[Jordy Hayes]

Okay.

[Ryan Spoon]

But there are some twists that we need to. Because it is different than NFL.

[Jordy Hayes]

Sure, sure, sure.

[Ryan Spoon]

It's been really, really fun so far.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[Ryan Spoon]

Similar to Yahoo Sports, which is we are consumption and ad based predominantly.

[Jordy Hayes]

Okay.

[Ryan Spoon]

But there are subscription products and I

[Jordy Hayes]

would say this is true of how we treat Yahoo.

[Ryan Spoon]

Finance.

[Jordy Hayes]

And then there's paid partnerships like the liquid death thing.

[John Quinn]

Yeah, that's sponsorship.

[Ryan Spoon]

We have lots of sponsorship.

[Jordy Hayes]

Sponsorship.

[Ryan Spoon]

And so you. 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.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yep.

[Ryan Spoon]

But then there are premium subscriptions with the Yahoo. Fantasy plus product which has different data, different insights and features for fantasy. We do the same on finance as well.

[Jordy Hayes]

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 this regulated?

[Ryan Spoon]

All the above. We have public leagues. We have private leagues which are 12 friends or based on your states. We have the ability to play paid leagues.

[Jordy Hayes]

Oh, sure.

[Ryan Spoon]

And that's a lot of fun. Those are very engaged leagues, very active. And then we do have the way to kind of manage your league.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[Ryan Spoon]

What we don't do is we stick to fantasy.

[Jordy Hayes]

Sure.

[Ryan Spoon]

So we're not in the sports gaming. Sports game.

[Jordy Hayes]

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.

[Ryan Spoon]

The crew in the front was telling me some of the highs of their wins and also some of the punishments. And the SAT sounds positive in comparison.

[Jordy Hayes]

Oh yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure it's like a family friendly one.

[John Quinn]

How do you think about new sports leagues? We've had people on the show. Our friend, our friend Alexis is like a big investor in like a. In an all women's track running league. We had the enhanced slam ball.

[Jordy Hayes]

Or was he just talking about slam ball being cool?

[John Quinn]

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. But then, you know, we had the, 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?

[Ryan Spoon]

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 and you grow.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

Yeah.

[Ryan Spoon]

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.

[Jordy Hayes]

Oh, really?

[Ryan Spoon]

It's awesome. Shaun White has a snowboard slam ball.

[John Quinn]

Was Gary Vee, by the way.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[Ryan Spoon]

Gary's also in pickleball.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, pickleball.

[Ryan Spoon]

There's a lot of emerging sport.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[Ryan Spoon]

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.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

And we.

[Ryan Spoon]

In many cases. There's a. The indoor football league had its semifinals last night. It's not the NFL, but they broadcast on Yahoo. And there's 5 million people who've watched that season on Yahoo. So there's tons of examples of people starting up new new product, if you will.

[John Quinn]

How do you. You're doing 60 hours a week of live content.

[Ryan Spoon]

40. 50 in finance.

[John Quinn]

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

[Ryan Spoon]

I would love to say it's super refined. Look, the 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 magsafe, 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.

[Jordy Hayes]

Sure.

[Ryan Spoon]

It's a skill set to be able to do both of those well as the talent side.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[Ryan Spoon]

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. This. You just have to have fun.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[Ryan Spoon]

And you can see it when you hear Kevin o' Connor on NBA. You can see it. Brian Sauzi 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.

[Jordy Hayes]

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. 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, like, tension there, but I'm wondering how you've. How you've sorted through that over the time.

[Ryan Spoon]

So I don't think that's a tension. I think it's a reality.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ryan Spoon]

And you got to accept it.

[Brian Yudko]

It.

[Jordy Hayes]

Sure.

[Ryan Spoon]

And I spent a lot of years at espn. I spent almost eight years at espn.

[Jordy Hayes]

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, sending out 140 characters.

[Ryan Spoon]

So we have a gentleman named Ariel Helwani.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[Ryan Spoon]

And if you know MMA or ufc, he is the voice, and he's awesome. He's got a beautiful studio.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[John Quinn]

Yeah. We looked at his studio. I was studying his studio setup early on because he does a lot of remote guests.

[Jordy Hayes]

Sure.

[John Quinn]

And it's. He has an interesting setup to make it feel like it is a conversation, but also the viewer can.

[Ryan Spoon]

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. 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, yeah, we'll do it and we have our. But that's a good thing. Same as Brian Sazi, super active on LinkedIn. That's a good thing. Better than. And he can say things and relate to his audience in a way that is more impactful doing that than it would be from a brand.

[Jordy Hayes]

What's been. How do you process the prediction market boom? Huge demand from sports fans broadly. Even just when I'm watching the World Cup, I want to. Even though I'm not a better I or trader, I predictor. Predictor. I like to just have a clear number 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?

[Ryan Spoon]

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. It's a very easy way to digest what is likely to happen. If you can actually then overlay the live odds or predictions on top of a game or an event and start to understand things very interestingly. Same way you can take a stock price and say, oh, there's earnings. Yeah, there's news, totally. So I think it's actually really important that we do it and we do it right and safely. From a storytelling perspective on the. Our role there is a little different. Obviously we do the storytelling. We're not going to process or be actively the platform, but we have a very big audience. 100 million 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 Helwani 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.

[Jordy Hayes]

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.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

What's the.

[Ryan Spoon]

We do want to grow.

[Jordy Hayes]

Getting to 500 million.

[Ryan Spoon]

500 is a lot.

[Jordy Hayes]

What's the plan to get to 5 billion more sports. More more sports was like. Was like we need to put Internet in Africa if we're going to get.

[John Quinn]

No, no. An example like. Like you're, you're somewhat. The best marketing for Yahoo is, 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.

[Ryan Spoon]

And it's, it's interesting. The. We want to drive fandom.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[Ryan Spoon]

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.

[Jordy Hayes]

Of course.

[Ryan Spoon]

I actually spend more time thinking about usage.

[Jordy Hayes]

Sure.

[Ryan Spoon]

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 introduce college football. It's been very good so far. 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.

[Jordy Hayes]

Fantasy Movie League. That's what you gotta do. I played this unironically. It was not on Yahoo. It was on some random website. You have a. You have eight screens. You get to pick. Okay, I want the Odyssey. That's really expensive.

[Ryan Spoon]

Box office.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, you 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 endings. It's yearly but people have a lot of fun with that. The niche.

[John Quinn]

Yeah. I always, I always wish there was

[Jordy Hayes]

fantasy is so fun.

[John Quinn]

Yeah. I wish there was fantasy private markets.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[John Quinn]

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.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[John Quinn]

I would love to express that

[Brian Yudko]

for

[John Quinn]

a decade like realistic hang out for it'll be. It's like yeah, like this and then just bam.

[Ryan Spoon]

Yeah.

[John Quinn]

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. That 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.

[Jordy Hayes]

Totally.

[Ryan Spoon]

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.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[Ryan Spoon]

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.

[Jordy Hayes]

Sure.

[Ryan Spoon]

Obviously the broadcast. We have daily games which we've done for WNBA, we've done for F1. And that's a way to watch a game, make some make some 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

[Jordy Hayes]

and there's enough overlap there that true sports fans have something. Yeah, sure.

[Brian Yudko]

For sure.

[Jordy Hayes]

Well, thank you so much for coming on.

[Ryan Spoon]

Thank you so much.

[John Quinn]

Thank you for the gift.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, yeah.

[John Quinn]

We need to make some of those ourselves. Great to see you.

[Ryan Spoon]

Thank.

[Jordy Hayes]

Great to see you.

[John Quinn]

Good luck. Good luck with

[Jordy Hayes]

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.

[John Quinn]

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.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

True virality.

[Brian Yudko]

Wow.

[Jordy Hayes]

Tell me about the 118 Wall E power designed by Lazzarini Pickering, Architect Architecti in 2003.

[John Quinn]

So, yeah, incredible.

[Jordy Hayes]

Call it the most beautiful.

[John Quinn]

I'm so happy that Lusso this account shared this. I saw this. I thought it maybe was a render at first. It just looks too good to be true. And the craziest thing to me is this. I'm kind of gonna go out on a limb and say that, like, the cybertruck maybe was inspired by this. Like, it looks. If you just put them up side by side, it looks very, very, very similar. 118ft long. Oh, interesting. And it is quick.

[Jordy Hayes]

Michael Bay used it in a movie, I believe the Island. And 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.

[John Quinn]

But, yeah, looking at these pictures, I want to get on it right now with my friends and family and just head out the side.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, yeah. The inspo, potentially The Stealth icon. $115 million.

[John Quinn]

Joe Wiesenthal, famous vibe coder, has a timeline dropping Lange Langa Langa.

[Jordy Hayes]

No, I don't know.

[John Quinn]

Play chess against a computer of any rating and talk with a tutor while doing so. The guy's shipping. He's shipped more. He's shipped more than. Honestly, a lot of actual engineers in the last year. A lot of people say they're going to ship a game and then they show a cool demo, and then they. They go dark, never to be heard from again.

[Jordy Hayes]

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. But it was interesting that. Yeah. He actually remarks that the fundamental AI models might be the thing holding this product back. But, yeah, pretty cool. Yeah, good project. I had something else about chess, but I forgot.

[John Quinn]

Anyway, more ads. Hit the subway. We should pull this up and see some of the. Let's get a little review going of some of the tech ads.

[Jordy Hayes]

Oh, 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 CF that's where the bar is. Ideally you vertically integrate all the way into hardware. And I want a physical version of this product.

[John Quinn]

Yeah. All right. Pull up this video.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

What video?

[Jordy Hayes]

The video of. Oh yeah, more fake tech ads. We love these guys.

[John Quinn]

Underwear. Underwear that think.

[Jordy Hayes]

Underwear that think grieving.

[John Quinn]

Trade on it with wake market.

[Jordy Hayes]

That's really dark. That sounds unfortunately real. What's this one?

[John Quinn]

Froggle is now. Brian. Cloud based safety. Just got personal.

[Jordy Hayes]

Has anyone actually done hire everyone on

[John Quinn]

earth without doing anything? Meat gravy. HR it's the best. Grandfather. The first wearable AI Grandfather.

[Jordy Hayes]

That's a direct shot at friend. That's just friend idea. Light bulb dashboard. That is the perfect.

[John Quinn]

You have an idea. We turn it into a Wombie.

[Jordy Hayes]

A Womble. A Womble.

[John Quinn]

Payroll now in pill form.

[Jordy Hayes]

Payroll in pill form. That's. That sounds really delightful.

[John Quinn]

From two to five in just three. Dennis.

[Jordy Hayes]

I mean, that's correct.

[John Quinn]

I guess still merging manually merge.

[Jordy Hayes]

Michael, what's his last one?

[John Quinn]

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.

[Brian Yudko]

Wow.

[Jordy Hayes]

The most dear one ever.

[John Quinn]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

Just the most abstract metaphor possible. I love it very, very well.

[John Quinn]

I'm sold.

[Jordy Hayes]

Okay, what else is going on the timeline? The atelier missor folks are building Prometheus 50ft 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 are 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 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, 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 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?

[John Quinn]

There's no way they're doing this for free for Elon. You know, like wouldn't be the first

[Jordy Hayes]

time someone put six figures on the line for Elon. You know, people have done crazier builds.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

Possible.

[John Quinn]

This is like some Type of Trojan horse they're putting.

[Jordy Hayes]

Oh, you think so?

[John Quinn]

Putting some of Elon's enemies inside.

[Jordy Hayes]

Potentially blue origin engineer with a little spyglass looking out. Understanding the way starship is built. Never seen this before. A 5th century Byzantine gambling machine. Informed. Anyone familiar?

[John Quinn]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

Really good. He deserves it.

[John Quinn]

Give him the interview.

[Jordy Hayes]

Give him the interview. He worked so hard for that.

[John Quinn]

He went into debt for that interview.

[Jordy Hayes]

I like this.

[John Quinn]

He bet it all.

[Jordy Hayes]

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.

[John Quinn]

Like just so there's some sort of monument, a can inside and then string runs like underground basically.

[Jordy Hayes]

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.

[John Quinn]

Can we get a health check on it after?

[Jordy Hayes]

Oh, 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 Trey 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, couple, 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?

[John Quinn]

I'm pro. I think it sounds. I think it sounds like a great idea.

[Jordy Hayes]

You want your call boxes to be all scuffed up or you want them to be fresh?

[John Quinn]

Freshly fresh, please.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, it might get scuffed up again. Send somebody else out. Do it weekly if you have to.

[Brian Yudko]

That's right.

[Jordy Hayes]

I love it.

[John Quinn]

That's great. Someone posted what happened. We ought to romanticize SF more if we ever want this city to be actually cool. There's two beautiful images of people walking around smiling.

[Jordy Hayes]

Motion blur.

[John Quinn]

Someone comments, is this AI generated? And the original poster just says, yep.

[Jordy Hayes]

Wow.

[John Quinn]

Two on the nose poetry. Two on the nose. But Anna Wintour is changing this.

[Jordy Hayes]

That's true.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

Yeah.

[Jordy Hayes]

Bringing Vogue World will actually look like that or even more. More striking. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And we need to play our intro video. The most feared lawyer. The video that I produce in neural frames 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 neural frames, and it generated all of this for me. Was able to edit it together. So fun. Let's bring him in. We have Nikolai from Neural Friends, the founder and CEO.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

What's going on?

[Jordy Hayes]

How you doing? Welcome to the show. Hi, guys. Great to meet you.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

Great to meet you. Very exciting to be here.

[Jordy Hayes]

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.

[John Quinn]

Well, yeah, and a little bit more backstory. I think the first. Your first attempts at making music videos, I think you were doing manually maybe.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[John Quinn]

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's using your product.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

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.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

I think so. I think so.

[Jordy Hayes]

Well, no, I mean, we go into this about, 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 and AI video generally. But give us the history of the company.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

Sure. So, yeah, I'm Nico, founder and CEO of neuroframes. 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 bid 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 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, and Reddit 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, I don't know if you hit the gong for bootstrap.

[John Quinn]

We definitely hit the gong for profitability. Those are, those are our favorite gongs to hit.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, it's the best.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, yeah. With 10 people I'm sure it's going very well. Yeah. So I mean the castle.

[John Quinn]

So yes.

[Jordy Hayes]

I mean so many questions. First I'm interested in the positioning of the product because I feel found neural frames by actually going to ChatGPT and saying like I have a Suno song, I want to make an AI music video and I want to do not a lot of work like what do you recommend? It recommended neural frames and then I went there. I'm interested in how opinionated you think you need to be in the product, how narrow you want to stay focused. Because 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 out or. Or do you want to go more opinionated?

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

Great, That's a very interesting question. I mean, so we are very focused on the music video use case, which is already kind of a niche by itself. Right. We are very deliberate there because we are bootstrapped. So there's no purpose in competing with like generic general purpose video companies out there. Right. Within the music video realm. It is definitely our ambition that you should be able to create kind of anything. But of course we have kind of our harness, I think you called it harness before and this is also how we call it internally. We kind of beat 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 still kind of trying to follow what they type in.

[Jordy Hayes]

You could actually use the service for non music videos. I found a very weird story in my hometown of like a fraud case that there was only like one article about this, this particular case in like the LA Times, but I was able to take that into ChatGPT, turn it into a deep research report, turn that into a script for a Netflix style true crime documentary, then take that into Suno make voiceover and then I took that into neural frames and it basically made like 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. 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 sea 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.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

So I mean, first of all, one year ago we were I think to the best of my knowledge, the first music video to 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 consistent person. And we're actually very proud of the character consistency. You can even upload yourself and create.

[Jordy Hayes]

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 a consistent character.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

Of course, if you imagine, I mean, AI video models create usually five 10 second clips right now, Sielens 2.5 can even go up to 30 seconds, but that's very new.

[Jordy Hayes]

Okay.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

And our kind of challenge is the main challenge of music video generation. Okay. You have a 3, 4, 5, 6 minute song. And. And we need to create all the images and videos that kind of match the beat, match the mood of the song. Right. Match the character telling, tell a story. And. And so it is 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.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

Yeah. This is a very interesting question 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 and also to allow great editing in the end. So, I mean, our Power users, they spend a lot of time on the platform refining each scene. Right. We have a timeline where you can drag things around, you can change the characters, you can change the outfit and stuff like that. I just personally feel in a chat based product that would be a bit more difficult to do. But let's see, I mean we might experiment with that in the future.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

It's an amazing model. It's probably the best model that exists at the moment and can create up to 30 second cohesive clips. And it has like a multi shot feature. So it, it doesn't create one long 30 second clip but multiple shots at the same time. Which Neuroframes kind of does for all models already. But in incidents it's kind of integrated. You can also upload lots of references so lots of objects can reappear across scenes. All of this is very new in theory. There's also audio input in this model which sometimes works better than and sometimes doesn't.

[Jordy Hayes]

What about cloud?

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

It is also probably the most exposed pensive model that exists and cost is definitely a huge issue. I mean video models are quite costly, right? And Cling is amazing as well. Cling3 is a great all rounder kind of. Also it's not the cheapest but Significantly cheaper than Sielens 2 and Sealance 2.5. Yeah.

[Jordy Hayes]

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 CDance recently.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

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's a video model that allows also editing. It's also very good but in our experiments doesn't quite reach the quality of Sielens too.

[John Quinn]

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 have, you want.

[Jordy Hayes]

I think that Facebook ads should be music videos more likely to stop scrolling.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

We had A cosmetic brand using neural frames, they kind of created an AI influencer that then created songs with one of the AI music tools and then music videos with Suno also with newer frames. 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.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

Yeah, very cool.

[Jordy Hayes]

You have anything else?

[John Quinn]

No, thank you. Thank you for providing so much entertainment.

[Jordy Hayes]

We're having a good time with it.

[John Quinn]

Definitely. Definitely tens of thousands of dollars worth of entertainment. I don't know how much, how much you're charging us, but it's been amazing.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

Belly laughs aren't priceless.

[Brian Yudko]

Yeah.

[John Quinn]

There's no such thing as a free belly laugh.

[Jordy Hayes]

That's true, that's true, that's true.

[John Quinn]

Great, Great to meet you. Thanks for coming.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah. And congratulations on the promise. Keep it up and come back on the show when there's noise, when there's.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

Big fan of you guys. Thank you so much for.

[Jordy Hayes]

Talk to you soon.

[John Quinn]

You're the man, dude.

[Jordy Hayes]

Have a good one. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value. With Cisco, we have two.

[John Quinn]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

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. Tools and wrappers. But I just think, like, 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.

[John Quinn]

What's going on?

[Jordy Hayes]

Welcome to the show and welcome back. How are you doing? Good to see you again.

[Adam Goldstein]

Good, Good to be here.

[Jordy Hayes]

Can you kick us off with some introductions and then set up the partnership for us?

[Adam Goldstein]

Yeah, sure. Adam Goldstein, founder and CEO at Archer.

[Brian Yudko]

I'm Brian Yudko. I lead product development for Boeing.

[Jordy Hayes]

Amazing. And what are you working on together?

[Adam Goldstein]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[Adam Goldstein]

Yeah, so Brian and I have known each other for, you know, for several years. Brian's actually, he comes from the startup world too.

[Jordy Hayes]

Oh, cool.

[Adam Goldstein]

So I'll let you give him, you know, he'll give his story there. But you know, Boeing has always viewed us this, you know, 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.

[Brian Yudko]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[Adam Goldstein]

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. 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.

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah.

[John Quinn]

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.

[Adam Goldstein]

Yeah. 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.

[Brian Yudko]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[Adam Goldstein]

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.

[Jordy Hayes]

Sure.

[Adam Goldstein]

And so a lot of it is just working together to advance these really complex products that ultimately are better for the country if we can do it, because they are really country level initiatives. This is the first new product category in the US in almost 60 years. So it's a big deal that this is happening and the US wants to lead that. So I think it's common that a lot of these companies will work together in this industry. One of the unique elements to this one too was the company in situ, where in situ is a revenue producing company, a cash flowing company. So in the startup land of aviation, you generally don't see early revenue that comes to these companies. So the joke is like the Silicon Valley show. It's like revenue, it's like, are you sure?

[Jordy Hayes]

You sure you want.

[Adam Goldstein]

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

[John Quinn]

Yeah, you're wearing a L A Olympics jacket. It looks like it's a little far away. But what, what should people. I've been starting to see Olympic signage going up around L A getting excited. What should people expect from. From Archer around the Olympics?

[Adam Goldstein]

So Archer was selected as the exclusive air taxi provider for the LA 28 games. That was a huge deal for us. It's really A chance for the world to see these products on the big stage. And that's what it was all about. And so it also served as a timeline, like a, an unslippable date for the company, the regulators, the ecosystem, the infrastructure partners to all work towards getting these products to 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. It's new technology and good consumer experience.

[Jordy Hayes]

Experience, Yeah. I mean, I'm super excited for it. It's going to be an incredible moment. How do you think about reaching the sort of like iPhone moment, ChatGPT moment, Waymo moment of. Of. Of this product, specifically this market? Because there's these, some of these technologies they work for, they're in the lab for a decade, two decades, and then all of a sudden it's like, okay, if you go to San Francisco, you see Waymos 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?

[Adam Goldstein]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. 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 1000 watts. A GPU is almost exactly a modern day workhorse. We're bringing horses to the data center. It's the future.

[John Quinn]

Love it.

[Jordy Hayes]

Anything else you want to talk about? The yen ter vention. The yen is extending its decline, erasing half the 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.

[John Quinn]

Last thing there was some news, maybe it was Friday or Saturday that they may be SpaceX may be abandoning the Cursor brand.

[Jordy Hayes]

That's right.

[John Quinn]

And just focusing on Grok and Yeah, someone in the peanut gallery that seems insane.

[Jordy Hayes]

Well they're going to have different products. There's like Grok for consumer. There's Grok work which they'll call Gork. And I think Gork could really see a lot of adoption in the enterprise. Wouldn't you want to use Gwerk? I love gwerk. Grok work, you just call it. Gork is great. That's a brand I can get by.

[John Quinn]

No, to me Cursor is just an amazing brand.

[Jordy Hayes]

It's love even as a startup and people idolize the founders. It's such an interesting story. Story. Michael Trill like goaded young kid like builds this amazing product. Completely dominates in this category. Going up against anthropic and OpenAI gets the deal done. Like there's just so much lore there that's so positive. People love the product. Yeah. No, no, I agree with the peanut gallery. It is a little bit of an odd left turn. But Grokking is maybe the bigger picture, right?

[John Quinn]

Yeah.

[Jordy Hayes]

Because Grokking means to really understand the Cursor might go away nowadays, you know, you're just typing or talking. You might not even use a cursor. I don't know. I still like it as a brand like Cursor. The name is just a great name. Yeah, but we'll see. I mean the early a year ago like 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 misunderstanding.

[John Quinn]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

Yeah, that might be like a different

[John Quinn]

fork versus Brian 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.

[Jordy Hayes]

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

[John Quinn]

Equus in the X chat says, guys, what's your view on the glow up of Gentle Giant or Intuitive Iguana?

[Jordy Hayes]

What is that?

[John Quinn]

That is Gary Vee had a very viral video over the weekend.

[Jordy Hayes]

What happened?

[John Quinn]

Talking about. Talking about his NFT project. Oh.

[Jordy Hayes]

People are saying, still on the NFT projects. He's keeping it alive, isn't he? He's still in the game.

[John Quinn]

Yeah.

[Nikolai (Neural Frames CEO)]

Yeah.

[Jordy Hayes]

That is wild. NFT just gives me like a whoa. While I was in the trenches, you know, I wasn't personally, but I remember that time I was like, those are some pretty crazy times.

[John Quinn]

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

[Jordy Hayes]

Thanks for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter TVPN and we'll see you back here at 11am Pacific tomorrow. Goodbye.