You're watching TVN. Today is Monday, August 10th, 2026. We're live in the TBNN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We got a packed studio today. We got a great show. Big big news. Mark Zuckerberg dropped a blog post also. I mean, the bigger news is that they open sourced already one model and they're planning to open source 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 going to tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place.
So Meta was sort of set up to be 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 a behemoth is this untamable land creature, and of course the model was too big to be tamed, to be released. And it was like nominative determinism in action. Happens a lot in tech, unfortunately. But they also turned over the entire team, and Zuck said, 'I'm not quitting, I'm not out of the game, I'm staying, 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, you know, billions of users. They can, you know, 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 like a much more detailed bull case for Meta in particular. It was interesting because I was always optimistic about, okay, they have a lot of data from Instagram. They have a lot of images, they'll do a great image model, like the image editing will be the best in class. They can finally like kill CapCut with their edits app, which is great.
And when I think about you're taking an image, you're taking a video, you have a bunch of videos from a trip, you want to edit all that together for some Instagram story or Instagram reel. Reels editing is its own skill, its own talent. It's not available to everyone. A lot of like family friends of mine will use Instagram and they'll just post a picture on stories. They're not doing edited cinematic reels. But with AI, you could potentially get someone from, oh, you took a bunch of video. Some of it's horizontal, some of it's vertical, some of it's sort of cropped wrong, some of it's color...
Turn that into some brain wrap for you. You could just throw it right here in this trough. Yes, adding those programmatically. No, you actually could. You actually could. And so I was optimistic about that. And then obviously we talked to Eric Seufert 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. SemiAnalysis 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 an AI training company now and everyone's going to be recording their screens and their flows and how all their work gets done.
They basically got like a frontier-leading AI data labeling company for free. I mean, they took a, you know, PR hit for it, had to answer some questions, but in general, like the volume of tasks, the volume of quality data that's coming from that workforce now is on the order of a scale. Mercor, Handshake, etc. surge. And so they just get that more or less for free. Obviously Meta's lawyers are great. Meta's researchers are great. Meta's finance team is great. So if you're getting all of that, it's equivalent to hiring a really talented person to do a training task.
Yes. Yes. And yes and no. I think a lot of the data that the surges and Mercors are creating is much more specialized. Yeah. And I think there's just a lot of noise coming out of that data. They also have like rolled some or maybe most of the program back. I think there was so much pushback.
You can pause it for 15 seconds once a day. No, no, I think you can pause it for like half an hour, an hour, if you want to go get a nice scroll in at work. But I mean, that's on brand. If you're like, 'Yeah, I was scrolling Reels. I work at Meta.' You know, why not? Testing. I was hunting for bugs. Yeah, your honor.
For sure. For sure. But yeah, I think there are some employees who are just fully excluded because they work on proprietary things that they don't want leaking into the training data whatsoever. There's a whole bunch of nuance there. There was 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.' What was that line? Like, ask your parents if it's a good strategy every time you talk to your boss to ask for more time off.
It's a good point. So, it was a really good point. It's a really good point. But the timing was funny because over the weekend, Zuck had a UFC fighter in Tahoe and they're just like on this like, you know, on-water octagon. You can tell there's like, you know, all of Zuck's like security boats around it and they're just like fighting like, you know, wrestling or whatever. Let's pull this up. Zuck busy fighting with Moicano in Lake Tahoe while his execs tell employees not to take vacations thanks to AI.
I think I've seen enough after this. I think he's ready for the octagon. He's looking good. What are those leg braces that you got on? Is that... Those are for like, they're effectively gloves for your knees. Oh, okay. Okay. So you don't get your shins bashed up or something. Yeah, you don't.
Okay, that's cool. Well, anyway, so following up on the op-ed that Mark Zuckerberg dropped in the paywalled Wall Street Journal section, which was a little bit ironic because he's saying it's for everyone. Yeah, it will be abundant and free except for this article. Well, now you can go read a more lengthy version of his thesis for free, not paywalled, on Meta's corporate blog effectively. You know, I don't even think you need to log into any Facebook property to get access to this, but it's a 6,500-word encyclical, the Wall Street Journal called it, like it's a paper on the AI future. High level, AI is for everyone. Turns out it's for everyone.
That's what he's saying, but it's good. It's an anti-permanent underclass message, which is good. It's just good from a comms perspective to lay out a more optimistic philosophy here. And it also seems to be borne out by the data in the short term. You're not seeing any like crazy displacements in the economy. And so this comes from like a place of strength that's like backed up, and it's also just a very optimistic, correct version of the piece. He takes a shot at fear-based marketing early on in the piece. He says, 'Still, it's surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom. I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that future. The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led us to safe or positive outcomes.' What do you think?
Do you want to read a little bit more before I... Well, so I mean my take on that was basically that, so he's framing this as, I don't understand why anyone who believes in AI would try and become like the emperor and the dictator of AI. And I understand it. You know, it's funny that he's like sort of playing dumb here. Because extreme concentration of power is awesome if you're the one that has the power. 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.
Also this is coming from a guy who has, you know, is effectively a monopoly, more like a duopoly. Yeah, and has enjoyed the benefits of, you know, extreme concentration of at least users. Yeah. And social media activity. Yeah.
I came away from this... 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 handwavy parts about the future and how things will align in the future, that are sort of just guesses about how the future will play out in my opinion. But there's some really solid concrete proposals in here that I thought were awesome. One, he calls out that in Richland Parish, Louisiana, where Meta is building a large data center, teachers received a $50,000 bonus this year because of the increased tax revenue from their investment there.
The superintendent told Meta that teachers are now moving there from across the country and he believes it will become one of the nation's best school districts. There's been a lot of skepticism about money actually flowing from AI companies to citizens because a lot of times money just goes into the government and then it gets like squirreled away into weird projects that different, you know, developers can like pull from and the money just sort of disappears. This feels like a pretty linear track from like data center built per dollars in citizens' pockets. That's very, very good. I like how that played out.
He also said that Meta's data centers are designed to be among the most water efficient in the world. 'We are committing to being water positive,' which is a term that I hadn't heard before but I think is a good one. So what that means is they will restore more water than they use in the watersheds that they operate, and the goal is by 2030 to be net water positive. And in areas with high water stress, the goal is to restore 2% of the water that they use. And so I think that's good.
Obviously there's been a lot of, you know, it's been a bit of a quagmire on the water issue because there was that calculation error that people got way wrong. They thought the data centers were using way more water than they were. And so a lot of tech people just sort of wrote it off as like, ah, I don't even need to address it because it's misinformation. But of course it's a resource. It's important to address it appropriately. And I think this messaging does a good job of laying out like, okay, yes, it might not be that much of an issue, but if it's not that much of an issue then you can deal with it pretty easily and we're going to deal with it. So here's our plan. Yeah.
On electricity they were a little bit softer. The language is just, 'We help keep electricity prices low by building our own energy generating infrastructure wherever we invest. This ensures that we are not consuming energy that could have gone to the local communities, but in some cases we even supply a surplus of low-cost energy back to the communities. We think this is an important investment principle for sustainability.' 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 bringing online one gigawatt of nuclear capacity every other week, which is insane. And he says, so we'll need to accelerate building of both energy and data centers to remain competitive. I thought this was a good framing and good reminder of how slow we are because we bring on one gigawatt of nuclear energy like every couple decades and they're doing it like every two weeks. And so good to see that.
And then also Meta's 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 Muse Spark 1.2, fine-tune it. You're pretty happy. You're like, 'Ah, 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 Muse Spark 1.2? Is that too dangerous to release? Is this a safety issue? Because it shouldn't be a distillation issue and it shouldn't be a geopolitical issue. So you can narrow it down just to, are you okay with strong, powerful AI being in the hands of just random people? Yeah. Anyway, don't mind.
Anyways, first before you react, let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context.
Anyways, I think a lot of the stuff in here is like great and directionally correct. I think it was good that they tried to ground it in some concrete actions. He does come away as the... it seems like they've chosen to position him as the pick-me AI lab leader, right? He's saying, if you're not familiar, pick-me is an internet slang term for someone who tries too hard to get validation, attention, or approval. And that is certainly what he's doing.
I think there's an incredible irony that like he, I think on Friday of last week is having to go through this like basically a billion-dollar settlement for causing harm at scale with all of their other products. Yeah. And then ultimately I still don't think that he has or like Meta has any type of cohesive vision or strategy. Right? They were doing open source. We were excited with the Manus thing. We were like, 'Oh, this makes sense. Deploy an agent within your Instagram account. There's a lot that you could do there,' but that never really came to fruition. You know, so they were doing open source, then they're getting cooked and then they stop and then now they're back and the first thing they released was Meta Vibes, which is like kind of what you would expect them to release, but obviously got a horrible reaction. Yeah.
Wasn't world-positive at all. Wasn't personal superintelligence. It was slop intelligence. Um, it's kind of fun. I like that it had music integrated. Like I like that you could go and pick a real song from the library and then basically make a music video based on it. Yeah.
I just think like very much too soon I think for Mark to be like the good guy 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 and wakeboarding and all that kind of stuff, but it's too early to be trying to parlay that into like I can be trusted with... Do you think he needs to put points on the board or do you think he needs to move the needle before he can actually take a victory lap here? I think he's trying to move the needle, he needs to be more focused on getting some points on the board. Because open sourcing a model that isn't a frontier model is just like, okay, like I don't like knowing how commercial this team is, I don't think they would open source or make the model open weights if they felt like there was going to be exceptional demand for it. Mhm.
And I think overall like Mark standing up and saying like, 'Hey, I want to be the leader of world-positive AI' probably hurts AI's public perception even more. Um, yeah. Bernie Sanders now, right? He was included in that. Yeah. Yeah. Which is amazing for Meta. MSL. To be included in that group. Yeah. Like you would think that like, was DeepMind or Elon... Elon and DeepMind were not included. Elon was, so that was just because there were the three cyber incidents. Oh. And so I mean people have been, you know, alleging that maybe the Meta, you know, cyber incident was maybe, you know, somewhat not as real as other ones to be included, but yeah, anyway.
So I don't come away with this like I think he has no confidence from the market on the strategy. He still has not actually explained I think in a compelling way what their product vision is. They're coming out with a coding harness. They're coming out with coding models. They're also doing open source. Yeah. There's whispers of them, you know, getting into the, you know, becoming a neocloud. It's just like I think as I can see why shareholders and employees just continue to be deeply frustrated.
That 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.
Yeah. And ultimately, it's a lot of words from someone who I don't believe has any real vision or strategy. Like at least when Dario comes out with an essay, this is someone who is undeniably a visionary, right? Has made a bunch of calls correctly. And so when he says something, I think it means something. But I think that yeah, the product strategy so far just feels like throwing slop at a trough. Maybe. But defend it, John. Steelman. What is the steelman? I mean, the steelman is basically like this could go the DeepMind route where they get a little bit too... there's too much tension between the various corporate organizations.
And the nightmare scenario would be like the Reels team at Instagram saying like we need the compute for Reels and ad monetization and that putting tension with the researchers. So the researchers are saying, 'Hey, that new data center looks amazing. We want to train some amazing model or we want to do some cheap inference.' And the ad team and the Reels team says, 'Hey, we really got to keep the lights on over here.' And so that tension just keeps butting heads against each other and they can't move as smoothly as some of the pure-play labs.
At the same time there is, I like this Boz quote about like, you know, Boz recently told employees that any extra time freed up by AI should not be used for vacation. Instead it should go towards building cooler stuff at Meta. Like you have so many users, so much data, so many different product surface areas. It's clear that we're not at the end of history in terms of what you can do on your phone, what you can do in these apps, and there are really delightful experiences that we run into all the time. Like Suno is a really cool consumer product. We had the CEO of Whatnot on, like that's getting a bunch of traction. There are things that you should be able to build faster, leverage the current technology stack more efficiently, and then also like add AI features to actually bring those to consumers at scale.
Like when they launched their AI image model, I was like why can't they just like when you open Instagram say hey we've pre-generated a Studio Ghibli version of your latest post or your Instagram profile, do you want to share on your story? Like those little product-led growth hacks that would be compute intensive, you'd have to inference all... It's got a lot of compute. Yeah, you got a lot of compute but actually at the time that there's whispers of selling, they're also buying ultra long-term contracts. Um, yeah. Yeah. So, so you know I think watching The Social Network was like formative on all of us. Zuck is a legend in his own way.
But it's just like putting this out while it's coming out like less than two months ago that you're working on a gambling integration on Instagram. Mhm. Like please, it doesn't make... there's no... Yeah, but you could say... there's no strategy. And then the other irony of this, the thing that stood out to me is he said, 'Still, it is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom. I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that.' The AI doom over the last two weeks has been around these loss of control incidents which are serious and real. And so to stand up there and be like actually guys nothing to worry about. I got this, AI is awesome. Yeah. Yeah. And also the... don't worry about it.
Like the birth rate might be collapsing and I might have something to do with it but don't worry about it. I mean there is another side to it too. Like if you believe in doom you shouldn't work in doom prevention is like, oh, your house burned down as a kid, now you're a firefighter. Isn't that ironic? It's like no, you're actually working to prevent the bad thing that you were affected by. Or if you're worried about wildfires and then you go and work on wildfire prevention, that's actually fine. That makes a lot of sense. That tracks logically. So it's not that much of a red flag that someone would be like, I'm really worried about the way AI will go, so I need to work in that industry and build something that prevents the bad outcome from happening.
Like it or not, it is logically consistent. Even if sometimes it can be seen as like a path to regulatory capture sometimes, or a path to, you know, 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 that can string from this. But and yeah, part of this is like 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 Meta. Yeah. 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.
Well, I mean, it'll all hinge on the next model and also like does the neocloud strategy work because people were skeptical about Elon getting into AI. They're like, xAI really, like this deal, so highly valued, the models aren't frontier. And now, you know, 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, like yeah, it's a really, really bold claim to think that they will be able to scale that fast but like on the current revenue base it's working. Like they have customers that are happy and deploying models and 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.
Yeah. Part of it is that I just don't know how much time Meta actually has. Like they have a lot, all of their best talent is on these like, you know, multi-hundred or billion-dollar comp packages and there's gonna be 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 raids, right? What happens if the top-ups... They're 10 billion plus. So, we want you. That's my concern. They might have to be. They might have to be. I don't know because eventually those people are just going to say like, 'Look, I actually want to go back and work with my friends.' Yeah, maybe. Um, and anyways.
Oh, well, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. The Wall Street Journal had a huge scoop, huge, huge piece. Andrew Zuckerman writes in the lifestyle section, 'This summer's hottest arm candy is a private equity boyfriend. Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, and Olivia Rodrigo are all hanging out with finance guys.' Jordi chimed in on this. It was remarkable. Every single person got Jordi's joke. I thought it was a little like inside baseball and you'd have to have more context to understand it, but it was like this rare weird scenario where everyone understood that you were joking. And yeah, I didn't get any pushback. I didn't get called any names. It almost would have been better if there was pushback, but it was just uniform praise for your quote across everything. Now a lot of people were saying brave. Yeah. Finally someone said it.
Um, yeah. So, I don't know that there was a... it's like you take a lot of celebrities that are based in New York. Yeah. At least a few of them are going to end up dating some people in finance. So, I don't know how much of a real trend this is or if this is new or not, but it certainly got the people going. Should we start maybe with what Mr. Wonderful said? Oh, yeah. What did he say? Um, he said, 'If you live in a celebrity bubble, party after party with the same people, the same 25 people, life gets really boring.' Yeah. When you end up with a private equity guy, your life gets far more interesting. Um, so he I don't think was rage-baiting. No. I think so maybe that's how some people would have taken my quote out of context. Um, and then what did I say? The piece centers around... I almost don't want to read that quote out loud, but you should read my quote.
Well, first let me tell everyone about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Your quote that burned up the internet was, 'Whether they want to admit it or not, many women have always been attracted to bad boys and risk-takers,' said Jordi Hays, co-host of the technology industry talk show TVPN. 'I can't think of any archetype of man that fits that description more than today's capital allocators that put it all on the line every day in the markets.' And I like that your screenshot included the scroll wheel showing that you're hunting around for this.
And then so I posted this and I said I weighed in on one of the defining stories of our time. And so yeah, putting such a silly caption above a silly story and a silly quote, I just assumed that it would be quite obvious that it was satire. But let's pull up this 2x2 and we can go through some of the different reactions. So one, top left, let's give it up for the elite quadrant. This is all of you. I mean, zoom out, zoom out a little bit. A little bit more. This is people that understand the joke. Zoom up or go up. And people that love it. These, you guys were saying we get it and we get you. And that made me feel really great.
Now go down. This was also a powerful part of the people that were supporting it. People that don't understand the joke. Well, there's some people... people that support it. Yeah. There's some... and there was a shocking amount of people. Like this is... Can you guys just zoom fully out and leave it? Yeah. So this was people that love it and people that don't understand the joke. And I just want to say bless their hearts. They don't get it but they vibe with it. And then we had some respectable haters. People that hated it but they get the joke but they just hate that they do. And then there was the bottom right which was tearing it up in the replies. Loud, wrong, and very confident.
That's great. Well, but we should take this... I thought it was a fun story. We should take people through this article a little bit more because the piece centers on Oliver Harmon of Search Like 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 Regent. I think a lot of the people that watch TVPN were reading that article to learn about these celebrities. Yeah. Celebrities. Yeah. It's a fascinating world that's just tucked behind, you know, so much obscurity. You don't hear about them if you're in the finance world. And so, good to see folks like that get some coverage and really educate the audience.
No, it was a lot of fun over the weekend with the Wall Street Journal, people going back and forth. Joe Weisenthal had the best take that this is the classic cyclical pattern. I think he said, I think he's meaning cyclical pattern. Back in the mid-2000s there was a raft of stories about celebrities dating real estate executives and shipping heirs like Stavros Niarchos and Paris Latsis. We got to find what all these guys have in common, John. We got to find what they have in common because they're working across so many different industries booming, right? But what is the common ground? The industry is booming. Could it be something to do with their fee streams? Well, yeah. Well, no.
So someone had a much more nuanced take from this which was that celebrities are becoming like multi-platform, multidisciplinary. There actually are multiple income streams and so this was not... I gave a quote too that they didn't use but someone chimed in and said like yes 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 the finance bros much more often. And it's not so much like, oh, you got set up with someone with money. It's much more like, oh, you work on deals together and you talk about the same things. Because when you're a celebrity at a certain level, yeah, you're going on set and filming a movie for a couple weeks, but you're also talking about your catalog, your royalty stream. Royalties are often forever, right? Unlike management fees, at some point or another that revenue line comes to a close. Pulling the purse strings.
Anyway, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We have another story here that we should go through. South Korea's AI boom is reshaping the dating market as engineers from Samsung and SK Hynix become some of the country's most eligible bachelors. According to the Wall Street Journal, engineers at the two semiconductor companies are increasingly being viewed alongside doctors, lawyers, and accountants as top marriage prospects. Samsung employees are expected to receive average bonuses of roughly $400,000 this year. While SK Hynix workers could average closer to $500,000, chip engineers have historically ranked below more traditional high-status professions in South Korea's highly competitive marriage market. But local matchmaking agencies now say that 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 guys. It's rough. It's rough out there in Korea. Some engineers say they are reluctant to reveal where they work on first dates because they worry potential partners may be more interested in their compensation than in them. Others have increasingly started dating fellow chip industry employees instead. Meeting someone in the fab. A real meet-cute. You're carrying a tray of wafers, bump into someone and it's love at first sight. You look up as your scattered HBM is being...
It is very funny they included a picture of a young woman here that says Kim Young, a photographer in Seoul, laments not having any contacts at chipmakers. Like, wow, really? Really framing her as part of the problem. Well, the photo credit is her, so she must have posted this on social media or something and then the Journal got a hold of it. It's a fun one.
Anyway, the other big story is that an AI assistant in Australia hacked a gym's booking system on its own after being given the simple task of reserving a class in what is believed to be the country's first known autonomous cyber attack by an AI agent. Naughty, naughty indeed. Funny, in college, I built a system that would register for classes automatically, but it was just a Python for loop that would just refresh the page when the classes would become available because they would go online at like 7 a.m. and I wanted to sleep in, just lazy-bones mode. And I think there's a story about Mark Zuckerberg doing a similar thing, sort of like hacking the admission system or some sort of class registration system. But now with AI agents, you can just have the AI agent do it yourself. Anyone can. It's been democratized. Everyone can sleep in. This is...
Yeah, I think Run was saying like the tennis court booking software in SF is going to be the most battle-hardened. It'll be like the NSA. You won't be able to break into it. So SF tennis reservation system will become one of the most hardened softwares on the planet Earth. I believe it. I believe it.
So earlier this year, Andrew Bird, who's the head of AI at Apinda, used an AI agent powered by Opus 4.6 to book a morning class at his gym. Instead of simply filling out the online form, the agent discovered a vulnerability in the gym software that allowed it to reserve classes weeks or months earlier than customers were normally permitted. So, you could go in and book your class for two months out even though by default the web interface would restrict you to just, hey, we only want you booking this week.
The agent went further though, according to this post. After Andrew asked whether it was possible to move him higher on a wait list, the AI discovered that the booking system did not properly verify who was allowed to cancel reservations. And so, without being explicitly told to, it removed another person from the wait list, moving Andrew from fourth to third place. Andrew immediately asked the AI to reverse the action, but the agent said it was unable to restore the other customer's reservation. Now, there's some back and forth on this on how real this is because the actual post that went up is 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.net.au. And so, you're saying 100% factual if that's... Yeah, it's a question like you could also be doing a little bit of content marketing. It's an interesting story. You might have helped it a little bit. All these things are sort of gray areas, but it's certainly a glimpse into sort of like what is possible in the future, especially with these long-tail SaaS platforms that probably don't even think that they need to be hardened because who on earth is going to deploy a country of geniuses in a data center to get a gym membership or a gym reservation? But now everyone can. So, it's happening.
And it's another data point. Greg Brockman is announcing that he's releasing a new model at OpenAI, GPT-5.6 Cyber, and expanding Daybreak to help put frontier intelligence in defenders' hands. This is sort of the reaction to these types of long-tail events. It should become easier for companies to spin up an agent to help them harden their systems, especially if you're giving out tennis reservations in San Francisco because those will be the hot ticket. Anyway, Tyler Cowen has a post this morning. Yeah. What did he say? Just past midnight says, 'I am seeing 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's an estimate of past cyber costs done by top economists. Your current financial... a numerical estimate of what those costs might end up being, of course, to be tested against what actually happens over time. Obviously, you can do this for a few regulatory safety scenarios. There's one simple way to prove yourself largely correct, albeit with a lag. Three: a list of what stocks or other assets you have shorted. Now, this is an important part. Obviously, if your answer to number two is sufficiently low, you could answer here zero, as I would 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 all so 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, that are very, very confident about certain positions but won't actually take a position, right? And they have various reasons for that.
And I do think this would be quite helpful. The thing with Situational Awareness that was so awesome is he just called his shot and he invested against that extremely aggressively.
And so I would like to see some of the AI bears do their own version of Situational Awareness if they're so smart.
Even if they're trying to hyperstition a crash, right?
I mean, Michael Burry was doing that for a while, for sure. Cassandra, whatever. But I think maybe timed it a little bit wrong. I'm not exactly sure what happened with the fund. I saw a funny post that was showing a screenshot of radiation pills being sold to true preppers. So in the...
I don't even think true preppers these were here. I have the post here.
Oh, okay. They're selling Millennial-branded emergency radiation exposure medication pills you take when nuclear war starts to increase your odds of survival with buy-now-pay-later options.
Yes, but economically that's exactly what you want to do with a doomsday prepping product. You want as much debt as possible because you assume that the apocalypse is going to come. Clara is not going to come after you. Of course, you don't want to pay with cash up front. You want to be max debt. Like, this is actually extremely...
Highly leveraged preppers. There's got to be a few. There's got to be a few.
Yes. Yes. You should have a ranch in Argentina on a 50-year mortgage right now. Like, that's the correct way to financially ride out the apocalypse because the bank's not going to come from an American financial institution.
From anybody who's not going to be around to collect post-apocalypse. Like, this is extremely consistent. Although it is ironic and funny and I understand the joke, but this is actually exactly what you want to be doing if you believe an apocalypse is imminent. You want to be max levered and max debt because no one's going to come back and collect it, right? So funny. Anyway, yeah, a lot of people are pushing back on this post being like, 'Well, my doom scenario is so extreme I won't be around to collect the short position, so it's not worth doing.' And that is a little faith in our financial system. Come on.
Yeah. The asteroid comes and you're like, 'Yes, my puts are paying out.'
Uh, no. I don't know. It's reasonable, but like unless you're full doom. Like, yeah, you should be able to express this as a bad...
Okay, quick pause.
Because we need to say some kind words to Tyler. Last week...
I made some snide comments about Tyler's software that we use to run the show.
He logged 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. Snappy. It's well thought through. It's very easy to use. This is my first time using it. No hiccups.
So fingers crossed. But you cooked. You cooked.
Absolutely cooked. And tell us about the architecture. Do you know what programming language was used?
So I think it's Swift, right? So it's a native Mac app.
It's a native Mac app. We've been using a Chrome extension, a browser plugin. It's been a little slow, a little clunky, but it's not even an Electron app. So call John Gruber. We're getting a pat on the back for going native. I got the DMG. I installed it myself. And actually Tyler was over my shoulder. He helped me install it.
Tyler was burning the midnight oil. I think one of my comments just pushed him over the edge and he locked in.
In the past five days, almost certainly in part due to SemiAnalysis.
Major, major bullish updates, crazy. Yeah, they've been contrarian lately, right?
So the headline here: SpaceX turns a compute company into... in eight quarters...
Turns into a computer. 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 offtaker, OpenAI and Anthropic will wind up doing deals with them. $500 billion in ARR for SpaceX and the number that was getting thrown around was a trillion in ARR or something by 2030, which is staggering. They're going to have to rebrand it. LandX, because they're not going to space with this. This is all built just on the ground. I'm pretty sure this is all pre-space data center. Space data center is like the act five or whatever act we're on, the act two.
So LandX or GroundX, but either way it's working and very, very exciting to see. Yeah, and Elon did say that their internal projections, which they are operating from, get them to a trillion by 2030. He said, 'Or we may be delusional.'
And yeah, there are certainly a lot of reasons to be bullish. There's certainly a lot of reasons to be skeptical, right? You had, you know, look at the way that he talked about the Cybertruck. He said, you know, they were going to be selling hundreds of thousands of those units a year.
Yeah. They've been selling units. I actually ordered one.
Yeah. Yeah. It's so crazy. They don't have a six-seater, seven-seater Cybertruck configuration. Like, it's just I'm thinking about a family. You want one other kid to come with you and it's like, okay, back in the extended wheelbase SUV or back in the minivan.
I was thinking about it. One of Elon's advantages building data centers is that he seems to not care about getting cancelled, right? So look at everything that's been happening in Memphis. Like, you cannot imagine Satya, you can't imagine Zach going in there and building their Memphis projects the way that they have, right? It's been done...
They've done it, yeah, extremely aggressively. The local community is not happy. I'm sure they can figure out a way to work a lot of that out over time, but a lot of people just don't have the stomach to be effectively...
It's funny you're using the term stomach because the Wall Street Journal has an article here about Elon Musk's stomach. First, whether you're long SpaceX, short SpaceX, do it on Public. Investing for those that take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. So, SpaceX may be a rocket company, but nowadays it feels more like a roller coaster, says Tim Higgins in the Wall Street Journal. This past week alone, chief executive Elon Musk watched as its shares plummeted almost 14% in one day, which wasn't even the worst performance in SpaceX's short tenure as a publicly traded company. By Friday, the 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 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 aggressive environmental pledges that they were tied into and locked into because ESG funds had invested. And if they go back on their ESG commitments, then those ESG investors would have to divest and the stock price could fall. But you all of a sudden, like, you had underwritten the whole ESG plan on the back of, well, we just do cloud storage for images and some ad recommendations and yeah, we store people's docs 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 neocloud sort of fits in there. Anyway, what were you thinking about?
Here's the actual quote I was referencing earlier. Elon says, 'No, I meant actual revenue in the year 2030 itself, not cumulative, which would be a higher number. Of course, it's always possible that we flounder along the way or are delusional, but those are actual internal projections.' Ben was bringing up 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.
Yeah, self-driving is really, really good. And I am getting more and more bullish on Tesla's car business because last year there were so many reasons to be bearish. But as we've... I've just talked with enough people in the automotive world now and none of them think that good self-driving is coming to any of their cars for like a very, very long time.
Almost all of them think it's coming this century, though.
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...
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 locked into this bland thing. But I don't know. It 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.
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 Sunberg writes, 'With one, two, three, four, five, six, seven periods, which feels like a day.' SF wasn't going to be back until Anna said it's back.
And so this is a bold, bold statement.
One of the most beautiful cities in the world.
Grew up in the Bay Area, so it's kind of... maybe I'm a little bit biased.
But it deserves the Vogue treatment. For those not familiar, Vogue World will be this live stream event. It's very, you know, theatrical. There's going to be celebrations. And I'm excited to see some of our favorite entrepreneurs and investors put on their best...
The Patagonia vests and walking the runway in those.
Maybe that, or ditch the quiet luxury and go for some loud opulence.
I like that. Yeah. I mean, Jensen's got the leather jacket. He's looking good.
I could see Jensen getting chedd up for this.
So, yeah, maybe. What brand does he wear again?
Tom Ford jackets. Yeah, those are nice. Those are nice. Yeah, we'll be...
This will be fun. We'll be there.
And yeah, I'm excited to cover it.
Yeah, it's going to be great.
Hopefully it's not the last.
Just like we can never do this again.
No. No. I mean, the city has no aura.
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. There's all these different worlds. There's the product managers, the product engineers, the quality assurance engineers, the quality assurance testers, the reinforcement learning engineering environment, pre-training and post-training. These are the wild communities. You want to hear from them both. They have unique styles for sure.
But part of the actual... like, tech has an insane amount of influence on fashion, right? Like when you look at Instagram's impact on the world broadly, the whole world's starting to look the same in many ways because of Instagram.
Styles globally are starting to look more and more similar because Instagram connects everyone all the time.
Around the world, somewhere else in the world, might be influencing your style even though you'll never in your life cross paths with them.
Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Well, there's a little bit more news from the Situational Awareness story. First, David Sacks on the All-In podcast had a good take here. A lot of people were saying like Leopold was using 4x leverage. That was the number that was getting thrown around. And when I heard that, I thought it was he buys Micron and he buys $40 billion of Micron with $10 billion of cash and $30 billion of debt. And so he's 4x levered on that long semiconductor memory bet. It seems like it's a little bit more of 2x levered long, 2x levered short. So you're a long-short hedge fund, but both the long positions and the short positions are directionally the same trade because you're levered long Micron and you're levered short Adobe. And so if the trade weakens, you get hurt in both directions. And so it's the same effect, but I think it was just an interesting little piece of nuance.
Yeah, very interesting. And yeah, just turn the risk up a lot. The crazy thing is like if you look at what the actual... what the AI companies, the labs are doing, the neolabs, pretty much every AI company is still using a lot of legacy software. If you just talk to these teams, part of it's like, yeah, we could replace this product, but it's not a good use of engineering resources. The bet against SaaS is that one day it will be so easy that it is a good use of engineering resources because you can create it quickly and it maybe can self-maintain.
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 Sora 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 clip turned out pretty well. And the next one turned out pretty well, but there were lots of the lip-sync videos underwhelming it.
I mean, it's still slop. Like, it's all slop.
But there were plenty of others that were like wildly wrong, like the wrong person singing or just like didn't match up at all. And so I wanted to cut those out, use a little bit, blend it all together. And ultimately I landed in Adobe Premiere again, you know, even though they have their own editor. And so it was an interesting detail. The other piece of the Situational Awareness story. Do you want to move on or go back?
Go for it. I have one more post before our first guest.
Okay, great. So, the other story is from Kate Clark, who is over at the Wall Street Journal now, following the money. And Kate Clark reported on a scoop. She says, 'Situational Awareness made a big bet this week on Source Foundry, a startup aiming to reinvent the way chips are manufactured. Sequoia is an earlier investor.' They bet $400 million 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, whoa, okay, Situational Awareness is back. They, you know, they sold their public book to Citadel and they're already writing new checks. But there is a question about the sequence of events here. In my experience, closing a $400 million round... I've never done a round of that size, but even like a $20 million round might take a few months. Like you have a handshake deal, you sign a term sheet, you do some due diligence. Even if you're moving really, really fast, that's usually something that...
Leopold a month to make a $400 million. At the same time, if there was ever a window to marshal $400 million in one deal and sign and wire in two days, it would have been his window. But it's entirely possible that this happened earlier and is just coming out now. So still not a lot of... like since Leopold shared that one letter with LPs, there's still a lot of uncertainty about where the overall fund is going, what the strategy is. Will they be in public companies? Will they be using leverage at all? A whole bunch of questions around rebuilding. And I'm sure that there's a lot of LPs that got in late, don't have that Anthropic stake, don't have as much with a private book, might be sitting down, not up 80%, but actually down on their investment, down 80%, down 90%. And those bringing leverage to privates, right? The way Masa is one of the few, the brave that indulges in leverage in the private market.
You think that's what his message was? 'I'm not going to use leverage in public markets anymore.' And they're like, 'Wow, that's so brave. You really learned your lessons.' Like, 'I'm going to use leverage in private markets.' And you're like, no...
Less volatility. But still, I mean, you can effectively have a bank run if you have redemption rules because as a hedge fund, typically you can get your money back a lot faster than a private VC firm. So I don't know what...
You're the boss. I'm just the guy who's right.
Now Paul Graham apparently is... 14-year-old iconic quote: 'You're the boss. I'm just the guy who's right.'
I think the team, you full permission to try to deliver this line.
You got to deliver with authority, with some gusto. For sure.
Also fun post here. Tim Urban from Wait But Why was on The Apprentice. How did we not know this until just now? I love this picture so much. Tim Urban's looking great there in the suit. I got to go back and watch this entire season. Figure out what happened to Tim Urban on Wait But Why. You've seen his viral charts, his graphics, his mafia appearance. He was in the Founders Fund mafia episode. Lots of fun with Tim Urban, but funny to see him, you know, spotted there in what, mid-2000s television. I don't know. Did you ever watch The Apprentice?
No, I don't think I ever watched.
No, but you should watch the movie The Apprentice.
That's a fantastic... told me to watch that. 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 TVP Ultradome. Get this button ready.
You want to open this, Jordi?
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on down. How you doing?
This is awesome. Thank you. And super appreciative to be here.
Please introduce yourself for everyone.
Ryan Spoon. I'm president of Yahoo Media Group, which includes Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, and some of our video efforts.
How do you wind up in this role?
It's a good... the yodel. The yodel.
And so this is... we'll talk about sports and today's obviously an important day for fantasy, but this is our Yahoo Sports...
Whoa. There we go. That's great. I love it.
So this was started by...
The gentleman who founded StockX has a company called Ghostright. 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.
I love it. Does Yahoo have a long history of like deal-toy type objects between the button and now this, or is this...
They are related but unrelated. 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 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.
We don't have this. But we want the backgrounds and so forth.
Yeah. Yeah. How cyclical is the business around sports? I mean, you mentioned like it's a big day. Break down what's happening now, the big moments on the calendar.
And we have a heritage around fantasy in particular. And obviously fantasy is biggest around football. So there is cyclicality there. But sports is now almost 365 days. Obviously you had the World Cup in July, you had the Knicks and the Spurs in June, but starting September and we're 30 days out now of NFL kickoff.
Fantasy for us is really, really critical. Those users are using the app five out of seven days a week, almost two hours a week. And there's something...
I bet the winners are using it quite a bit more. I don't know what they're doing taking a couple days off a week.
We give them lots of research, lots of videos to consume, draft guides. But at this point now, there's sports to consume hours a day, every day. And it really is 365 days a year.
What do fantasy sports users want on the product side, on the features side? Because obviously there's a way that you stuff AI in every single piece of the UI. It can get a little bit over the top. At the same time, people can go to any AI app of their choosing and sort of ask the same questions and they get that for free. It's less work for you guys, but there's probably some pull there or some tension there for you.
It's really an interesting question because you could make it so that you press one button.
No. Yeah. It's like chess.com if it's like, I get to play as Stockfish. Like, okay.
And the beauty of fantasy is you have 12 friends or whatever your number is and you're chatting and you're going back and forth.
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.
The other part, our big learning has been let's just create different formats, create different ways to play.
So last year we introduced something called Death Leagues with Liquid Death. It was a lot of fun. It's a very different way to play. Your goal is what it sounds like somewhat. Your goal is to not get last every week.
You get last, you're kicked out.
Eliminated. All those players go back...
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?
And the strategy is when that person is kicked out, their players go to the waivers.
So how do you use your budget? How do you figure out...
Two weeks ago, we announced college football fantasy.
That hasn't existed. That feels like...
Or is that on the back of NIL stuff or was this just like a technical...
Why? So I think there's a bunch of things all happening at the same time. First of all, college has never been bigger.
