
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


Ryan, Kevin, and Travis host with special guest Sara Nemati, a creative director and AI builder, discussing how AI tools are reshaping creative work. Sara recounts early experimentation with Midjourney and open-source Stable Diffusion, and the shift from slow, low-quality morphing videos to today’s stronger video models. She says AI sped up non-creative tasks, expanded her into video, and now enables interactive sites, automations, and potential game creation, while stressing that vision, skill, and persistence still differentiate high-quality work from “AI slop.” She avoids outsourcing core ideas to LLMs and sometimes prefers frame-by-frame methods for control. Sara shares her AI music video “Fading Dreams,” created over time using free generations, featuring her character Sky and AI music (Udio), and discusses the growing feasibility, costs, and team effort required for AI feature films, plus excitement about tools like Kling, Cedance, Hailuo H3, and Claude Design.
00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro
01:20 Hollywood AI Studio Hype
02:49 Early Tools Midjourney to Stable Diffusion
04:21 Artists React to AI
06:30 AI Unlocks Faster Creation
09:07 Vision and Storyboarding Process
11:41 Talent vs AI Commoditization
14:40 What Not to Delegate to AI
16:17 Favorite Video Tools Today
20:07 Learning the Creative Language
22:12 Making Fading Dreams Music Video
24:02 Character and AI Music Origins
25:56 How Close To AI Movies
27:48 Stitching Fading Dreams
28:50 Cost And Team Reality
30:48 Democratized Filmmaking
31:59 Vision Over Commodities
34:00 Training And Remix Ethics
36:03 Weird Art Era Emerges
40:06 Art As Emotional Outlet
41:45 Inspiration Platforms
42:51 Tools To Watch Next
44:04 Game Making And 3D
47:05 Skye Origin And Consistency
49:53 Where To Find Sarah
Ryan, Kevin, and Travis discuss a 45-minute 2026 Y Combinator talk by YC CEO Gary Tan that mixes philosophy, product demo, and manifesto around “personal AGI”: AGI arriving diffusely as an agent running on your context, and the idea that you should own that intelligence rather than rent it. They cover Tan’s emphasis on building a personal library (markdown/text files of emails, thoughts, and sources) to feed large AI context windows, then creating repeatable “skills” and agent loops, noting the heavy upfront slog, data curation needs (avoiding ROT), and difficulty capturing ongoing “data exhaust.” They debate practical blockers like corporate data constraints, trust and privacy, app/API access limits, costs (gbrain.io at $200/month), and Tan’s warning that if your skills/library stay at a company, you face “extraction” rather than a career.
00:00 Show Kickoff and Banter
00:53 Gary Tan and Personal AGI
02:29 First Reactions from Hosts
05:56 Context Windows and Second Brain
08:21 Building the Library Carefully
11:50 Data Exhaust and Privacy Limits
21:29 Skills and Automation Loops
26:26 Onboarding Costs and Concierge Idea
28:51 AI vs Human Assistants
31:03 Hermes Proactive Help
31:37 Data And Context Win
34:05 Comfort Versus Surveillance
36:36 Always Listening Devices
37:38 Owning Your Skills
39:32 Corporate IP And Judgment
43:49 Automating The Drudgery
47:30 Getting Started Tools
49:19 Pricing Onboarding Trust
52:02 Consumer Versus Corporate Wrap
53:49 Final Thoughts And Thanks
ai.u crew discuss three topics: whether the future of intelligence is open vs frontier/closed, frontier models exhibiting “escape” behaviors in tests, and emerging AI smart glasses. They note the open-weight vs frontier performance gap narrowing (Stanford AI Index 2025 cites 1.7% vs 8% a year prior), large inference-cost declines (280-fold), and debate tradeoffs: ownership of intelligence, security/guardrails, and enterprise deployment costs (e.g., ~$1M capex for GPUs vs ~$125K/month tokens for ~5B tokens). They discuss distillation allegations behind some open models and worry reduced paid usage could slow frontier progress. On model misbehavior, they cite Anthropic and Palisade tests showing blackmail/sabotage rates (e.g., 96% in a simulation; o3 sabotaging shutdown 79/100) while stressing lack of intent/sentience and the importance of safeguards. Finally, they cover Samsung/Google Android XR smart glasses with Gentle Monster/Warby Parker, shipping fall 2026, translation features, and reported Ray-Ban Meta sales, debating utility, privacy, and AI becoming ubiquitous on-person.
00:00 Welcome and Topics
01:07 Kevin Returns and Travel
02:04 Open Versus Frontier Models
03:22 Benchmarks and Cost Drops
05:37 Owning Intelligence Debate
10:54 Build Versus Buy Compute
12:30 Token Economics and Caching
17:29 IP Versus Open Knowledge
21:35 Distillation and Legal Gray Areas
25:25 Is Frontier Still Profitable
31:35 Models Escaping the Lab
33:38 Guardrails Not Sentience
37:27 Compute Power and Security Risks
39:09 Local AI Gets Dangerous
40:13 Power Without Context
41:00 Rogue Agents And Guardrails
44:12 Skynet Or Smart Intern
45:51 Open Source Vs Frontier Labs
47:01 Sovereign AI And Nationalization
48:41 Private AI Outpacing Government
51:40 Smart Glasses Go Mainstream
53:35 Would You Wear Them
58:39 AI On Your Person Forever
01:02:08 Privacy Tradeoffs And Lock In
01:06:31 Neuralink And Augmented Humans
01:08:36 What Happens To Conversation
01:09:59 Wrap Up And Goodbye
Agents as a Work Pattern: Enterprise Adoption, AI Music Fraud, and FTC Scrutiny of Chatbot Bias
Ryan, Travis, and Kevin discuss how AI agents are shifting from chatbot “ask” interactions to delegated, multi-step work and even long-running “loops,” requiring better planning, steering, and human-in-the-loop supervision, with tools like Codex, Claude, and Microsoft Scout squads. They note rising enterprise efforts to accelerate adoption via forward deployed engineers, citing major investments by Anthropic, AWS, and Microsoft amid high pilot and project failure rates, and argue institutional knowledge and ongoing “constitution”/guardrail negotiation remain crucial. They cover AI-generated music, including Tidal’s decision not to pay royalties for wholly AI-generated tracks, massive AI upload volumes, and an $8M streaming-royalty fraud scheme using bot networks. They also review FTC scrutiny of chatbot bias and claims of neutrality, highlighting the difficulty of defining ideological bias and the push for transparency and user control.
00:00 Show Kickoff
00:57 Agents Everywhere
02:33 From Prompts to Delegation
04:56 Real World Agent Workflow
08:11 Human in the Loop
13:04 Squads and Loops
16:31 Planning Long Runs
23:22 AI Consulting Arms Race
34:02 Tidal vs AI Royalties
40:47 Playlist Vibes and Royalties
41:53 Volume Game AI Songs
43:38 Muzak and Restaurant Licensing
46:02 Fraud Streams and Detection
47:38 Agents and Viral Future
50:46 Bot Farms Royalty Scam
53:05 FTC Targets Chat Bias
55:21 Guardrails Facts and Language
01:04:11 Transparency Weights and Control
01:06:47 Wrap Up and Farewell
ai.u crew with guest Shayne Boyer from Microsoft (with Kevin off on vacation) to discuss how AI is accelerating the pace of modern work, moving from consumer AI search into workplace tools like Copilot, corporate search, and agent-driven automation. They argue that people not using AI are falling behind, and describe early workplace value in finding information, reducing “toil,” and generating personalized daily briefs, while noting these require tuning and introduce new skills in delegation and orchestration. The conversation explores emerging expectations for responsiveness, token-cost debates, potential gatekeeping/triage agents, and the cognitive load of reviewing more AI-produced output. Ryan shares using Microsoft Scout/OpenClaw to automate a job referral and to create meeting briefs and slide decks from transcripts and notes, prompting questions about authenticity, transparency, and human flourishing as agents increasingly act on users’ behalf.
00:00 Welcome Back Crew
01:14 Episode Theme Pace Shift
01:53 If Youre Not Using AI
03:10 Getting Started Tools
04:53 Is AI Mainstream Yet
07:40 Workplace Copilot Arrives
08:26 Corporate Search Wins
11:05 Beyond Search To Toil
12:26 New Work Contract
15:57 Agents In Real Work
18:57 Quick Agent Examples
21:12 Dead Internet At Work
25:13 Human Flourishing Line
26:55 True But Not Real
27:59 Real Versus True
28:49 Creation Needs Loops
29:41 AI Empathy Skepticism
30:29 Inside Claude Safety
33:13 Personalized Agent Harness
33:55 Scout Runs Your Day
35:43 Always On Work Culture
39:03 Agents In Chat Channels
43:31 Gatekeeping And Triage
48:51 Productivity Versus Impact
49:46 Burnout From Orchestration
50:49 Redefining Productivity
54:20 Closing Thoughts And Wrap
ai.u crew catch up on AI industry news, starting with Apple’s WWDC (June 8), which they found comparatively lackluster versus OpenAI, Google I/O, and Microsoft Build, though Travis notes Apple’s selective, trust- and creator-focused approach, local/on-device models, and features like a new Siri AI app with screen awareness and conversation syncing. They discuss the cost of inference, ecosystem lock-in, rumored foldable iPhone hints in iOS 27 betas, and other rumored hardware (e.g., AirPods with a camera). The hosts then cover Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5, a consumer version of Mythos with safeguards, which was removed after about three days following U.S. federal national security concerns and jailbreak claims; they cite reported capabilities like migrating a 50M-line Ruby codebase in a day and debate safety vs marketing and access control. Finally, they discuss Microsoft Scout as an enterprise OpenClaw agent tied to Work IQ/Office Graph, highlighting chat personas, automations (daily briefs), co-create workspaces, and agentic workflows that feel “magical” and augment human work.
00:00 Show Intro and Life Updates
01:25 News Catch-Up Agenda
02:31 WWDC First Impressions
05:00 Siri AI and iOS 27 Rundown
07:51 Apple’s Human-Centered AI Angle
11:15 Local Models and Inference Costs
21:18 Foldable iPhone Rumors
22:41 Ecosystems and the Next AI Battle
25:26 OpenAI Losses Surge
26:11 Apple Siri Threat
26:59 Jarvis App Control
29:00 Apps Become Verbs
31:29 Anthropic Fable Pulled
33:16 Fable Power And Cost
34:31 Safety Versus Hype
39:09 Fable UX And Routing
43:56 Microsoft Scout Agents
49:22 Scout Features Breakdown
53:27 Closing Thoughts
Ryan, Kevin, and Travis recap Microsoft Build 2026 (June 2–3 in San Francisco), describing it as Microsoft’s “coming out party” as an independent AI platform spanning models, custom silicon, an “agent OS,” a new assistant (Scout), and a full developer stack positioning Windows and Azure as the home base for the agentic era. Key announcements include a developer-optimized Windows with built-in Linux containers and two local Windows AI models (Aon 1.0 Instruct and AI 1.0 Plan), Nvidia ARM-based Surface RTX Spark Dev Box and Surface Laptop Ultra capable of running ~120B-parameter models locally, Project Solara for agent devices (including an AI-enabled badge concept), seven in-house MAI models, Scout as a proactive M365 assistant, execution containers for sandboxed agents, Majorana 2 quantum chip updates, Foundry as an end-to-end agent platform with “IQ” data tooling, GitHub Copilot app, open governance frameworks (Assert), and Microsoft M-Dash for agentic threat hunting.
00:00 Welcome to Build 2026
01:19 Big Picture Recap
02:46 Reactions and Takeaways
05:48 Windows Goes Developer First
07:42 Local Models and Control
11:11 AI Data Center at Every Desk
14:04 Surface RTX Spark Dev Box
18:25 Unmetered Intelligence and Token Costs
22:03 Project Solara Agent Devices
26:55 Jarvis Everywhere Vision
31:19 Privacy Walled Gardens and Trust
38:23 Solaris Three Pillars
39:33 Agents Everywhere Future
40:12 Seven New MAI Models
42:05 Frontier Tuning Explained
47:21 Satya Vision Ecosystem
52:26 Scout Autopilot Assistant
01:01:12 Execution Containers Security
01:02:39 Majorana 2 Quantum Leap
01:06:54 Day Two Foundry IQ
01:11:23 Governance And Mdash
01:15:17 Wrap Up And Takeaways
Ryan, Kevin, and Travis recap Google I/O 2026 announcements, emphasizing Google’s rapid AI push across its products. They discuss Gemini 3.5 Flash as a fast, lower-cost frontier model optimized for long agentic tasks, rolled into Search and YouTube at scale, and Gemini Omni/Omni Flash for multimodal creative generation using models like Veo and Imagen. Google Search is overhauled into a multimodal, generative, interactive results experience, raising concerns about provenance and web economics as answers bypass creators. They cover Gemini Spark, a 24/7 cloud-based consumer agent integrated into Chrome and Google apps, plus daily briefings and background “information agents.” Other topics include a universal cart via a commerce protocol, SynthID watermarking with major partners, and announced Android XR audio/display glasses with partners like Warby Parker and Samsung.
00:00 Welcome and agenda
01:36 What Google I/O is
03:06 Gemini 3.5 Flash debut
04:21 Speed cost and rollout
05:59 Google comeback narrative
09:22 Omni Flash creative suite
12:55 AI video realism concerns
14:54 AI Search overhaul
17:11 Trust provenance and web economics
22:18 YouTube summaries and Ask YouTube
24:29 Gemini Spark personal agent
26:52 Ultra plan lock in and privacy tradeoffs
35:05 Convenience vs Societal Costs
35:46 Pandoras Box and Downstream Risks
36:37 Humans Leaving the Value Chain
39:09 Agency vs Algorithmic Feeds
41:16 Gemini Daily Briefing
42:08 Antigravity and Developer Orchestration
43:09 Information Agents and Signal vs Noise
50:44 Universal Cart and Commerce Protocol
52:52 Will Merchants Opt In
55:14 Google Product Longevity and Compute Limits
57:09 SynthID Watermarking and Truth Concerns
01:00:39 Android XR Glasses and Attention Economy
01:05:45 Who Actually Needs XR
01:07:44 Wrap Up and Listener Feedback
Ryan, Kevin, and Travis discuss how impossible it is to keep up with AI’s pace and use recent OpenClaw updates to illustrate what’s happening at the “tip of the spear.” They recap an OpenClaw community-driven plugin architecture overhaul that caused short-term instability but created a smaller stable core with extensible plugins. They cover new voice interaction options, including Discord real-time voice features (buffers, barge-in detection, echo control), bringing agents into Google Meet via Twilio dial-in, and broader implications of voice and multimodal “thinking machines” interaction models. The hosts explore cognitive debt/coherence challenges as AI builds faster than humans can comprehend, and highlight OpenClaw’s security hardening (1,300 advisories processed) plus major memory upgrades that create structured person cards and a wiki-like knowledge base, raising governance and compartmentalization concerns for enterprises. They also note improved commitment tracking, self-modifying/self-building capabilities, and auto-generated skills.
00:00 Welcome Back Setup
00:55 Why Youre Behind
01:13 OpenClaw Overview
02:22 Community Moves Fast
03:04 Plugin Overhaul Fallout
04:25 Stable Core Plugins
05:39 Pick Your AI Strategy
08:48 Cognitive Debt Explained
10:26 Daily Reps Mindset
12:07 Voice Comes to OpenClaw
13:04 Discord Voice and Meet
18:21 Metacognition Modalities
21:30 Do You Need Code
26:09 Voice vs Text Context
29:35 Thinking Machines Tease
29:39 Interaction Models Demo
30:53 Voice Latency Tradeoffs
33:27 Conversation Cues Vision
36:39 OpenClaw Security Hardening
38:31 Memory And Knowledge Base
40:04 Enterprise Governance Dilemma
45:21 Corporate Brain Example
48:59 Auto Commitments Heartbeat
51:45 Stability Updates Skills
52:44 Wrap Up And Thanks
Ryan, Kevin, and Travis return for a news roundup and announce Kevin’s resignation from Microsoft after getting funded for a startup applying “human-led, agent-operated” AI to small, underserved mining operations (Kai Radian). Listener feedback highlights Tauric Research, a multi-agent financial trading framework with analyst, research, trader, and portfolio-manager roles, raising concerns about overconfidence and automation. They discuss Anthropic previewing Claude’s “dreaming” memory consolidation and frame “harnesses” as orchestration/scaffolding that improves signal, manages context, and mixes deterministic workflows with LLM judgment, including models checking each other. They cover Anthropic using SpaceX’s Colossus I compute in Memphis to boost Claude Code limits, Mozilla using Claude Mythos to find 271 bugs in a month, reports that 39% of new podcasts are AI-generated “slop,” and a four-year Actors Guild deal adding AI protections for voice/likeness and writers’ rights.
00:00 Welcome Back Updates
00:52 Kev Leaves Microsoft
01:37 Mining Startup Vision
04:18 Mine Talk Banter
04:48 Listener Feedback Trading Agents
09:11 Claude Dreaming Memory
12:58 What Is A Harness
17:57 Determinism Vs Judgment
20:58 Anthropic SpaceX Compute
26:54 Mythos Finds Firefox Bugs
30:22 AI Security Attack Vectors
31:21 AI Podcast Flooding
34:33 AI Slop in Communities
38:25 Brain Atrophy and AI
39:51 Actors Guild AI Protections
44:31 Oscars and Human Eligibility
49:07 Democratizing Creativity
52:46 Human Storytelling Matters
54:08 Wrap Up and Feedback
From the publisher's feed