Optimism as Content Strategy: Project Hail Mary and Artemis II + How to Pitch the Media

This week Sonia Baschez and guest Yury Molodtsov discuss Project Hail Mary, which crossed $300M globally in its second weekend — only a 32% drop from opening, which almost never happens. Sonia and Yury get into why space-as-adventure is having a cultural moment, what IMAX has quietly done to become one of the most powerful co-brands in film, and why optimism is a content strategy, not just a tone.

Then: Delve. The YC-backed compliance startup sold SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR certifications to hundreds of startups — and now faces an anonymous Substack exposé alleging the audits were fraudulent. The CEO's response contradicted itself in a single statement. Investors quietly deleted their blog posts. Yury explains why shortcut-to-trust brands are the most fragile in any market, and why "AI-powered" is not a business model.

After that: Sora is dead. OpenAI shut it down after six months, $1M a day in losses, and — somehow — one hour's notice to Disney. Yury's take on why OpenAI's Series B scrappiness and its $100B data center ambitions are fundamentally incompatible when you have institutional partners.

And to close: Yury's State of Media Report 2026. The middle tier of tech media is getting squeezed out. Getting on TBPN is now harder than TechCrunch. And the funding round is the last thing a journalist wants to lead with. Sonia and Yury walk through what it actually takes to get coverage in 2026.

00:00 Project Hail Mary, Artemis II & Optimism as a Content Strategy

15:00 Delve: The $300M Compliance Catastrophe

28:00 Sora Is Dead (and Disney Found Out One Hour Before You Did)

33:30 State of Media 2026 & How to Actually Pitch Press

Yury Molodtsov is a partner at MA Family, a PR firm behind campaigns for JetBrains, Miro, and Flipper Zero. He publishes the State of Media Report, an annual breakdown of how press coverage and the media industry are shifting.