A Six-Hour Tom Cruise Acting Course, Decompiled Video Games, and a Nobelist’s Contradictory AI Predictions

TBPN’s latest episode roams from a leaked Tom Cruise training video to the legal chaos of LLM-powered game decompilation, a Nobel-winning economist’s split personality on AI’s labor impact, Warren Buffett’s YouTube rabbit holes, and Mistral’s new trillion-parameter model. The through-line is less a single thesis than a mood: AI is advancing fast enough to make weird things possible, but diffusion, regulation, and corporate history keep tripping it up.

Tom Cruise’s Secret Six-Hour Acting Course and the Bounty Question

The episode opens with an anecdote from GQ’s Tom Cruise interview. Cruise revealed he made a six-hour instructional video about screen acting — covering lenses, framing, and the difference between stage and cinema storytelling. “It was very basic,” Cruise said. “Just to have people understand what the lens is and what the frame means, so that you can forget about it.” The hosts immediately floated a bounty: “I’m putting down 10 racks for whoever can bring me the six-hour Tom Cruise video,” one said, before noting that journalists rarely put cash bounties on known documents. “Eric Newcomer should just be like, bring me Founders Fund returns, I’ll give you five grand.” They acknowledged that such a practice would “violate journalistic ethics,” but the id