Fast Hours

Two Midjourney obsessives

Fast Hours began with two people who could not stop talking about Midjourney. Drew Brucker found the image generator in its V4 era, late in 2022, as a new dad looking for a way back into photography; Rory Flynn found it through viral posts on Twitter, and his first viral Midjourney post was a made-up dog-collar brand that drew about 500,000 impressions^[6]. On the first episode they explain that they started the show because they kept having the same conversation, and wanted a long-form, unscripted alternative to quick-fire AI news clips^[6].

Rory is the founder of Systematiq AI and is based in Brooklyn; Drew is an AI creative consultant and the founder of Brainchild Lab^[2]. Each records from his own camera, so the show is a remote split screen with a lot of screen sharing, and most episodes run between one and two hours^[34][3]. The feed credits both hosts as the show's owners^[15].

Midjourney Fast Hours, 2024

The first episode went out on 2 July 2024 under the name Midjourney Fast Hours, a joke about the fast hours of GPU time you burn in Midjourney's Fast Mode^[4][6]. On Ep. 87 the hosts thanked listeners who had followed them since their LinkedIn Live days, which suggests the conversation started there before it became a podcast, though the dates of that era are not public^[12].

The first summer produced the channel's most durable hits. A 56-second Short pairing Rory's Midjourney stills with their Runway animations, a raven, a waterfall and an army on the march, went out on 14 August 2024 and has 236,663 views, more than any other Fast Hours video^[19]. Eleven days later, Ep. 8 explained Midjourney's style references (--sref) from top to bottom and has 32,692 views^[32]. Then Ep. 12, a listener Q&A on 29 September, became the most watched long-form episode of all, at 41,465 views^[20].

The first guest was AI LIVE's Chris Branch

For its first ten episodes the show was just the two hosts. The first guest interview, Ep. 11 on 22 September 2024, was Chris Branch, now co-host of AI LIVE^[7]. The three talked about how Chris got free early access to Midjourney in 2022 through a Discord moderator, the speculative Coca-Cola concept that turned into a paid partnership (at 32:37), and an AI exhibition for the Frida Kahlo Foundation built with Magnific upscales (at 38:44)^[7].

You gotta create something that people haven't seen before or something that's gonna shock them.

Drew Brucker, Ep. 11^[7]

Less than a month later Chris was back for Gen AI for Creators: Pulse Check, a livestream of nearly two hours on Midjourney, Runway, Minimax, Krea and Flux, broadcast with the AI LIVE logo in the corner and a title card reading Midjourney : Fast Hours Podcast with Rory & Drew^[8][9].

From Midjourney to everything

Through 2025 the show stayed close to Midjourney: mood boards, tokens, personalisation, the V7 launch and the long wait for V8, with guests including Superside's Phil Maggs, YouTuber Tim Simmons of Theoretically Media, early Sora tester Minh Do, Julie Wieland and Allar Haltsonen^[18]. The feed marks the milestones: 20,000 YouTube subscribers in June 2025, noted in Ep. 43, and 30,000 in December, celebrated at the top of Ep. 58^[15].

By 2026 the conversation had spread to Claude, agents and vibe coding, and on 26 April 2026, with Ep. 67, the show dropped the Midjourney and became Fast Hours^[10][4]. The episode description jokes that the rebrand lasts about four minutes before the hosts are testing GPT Image 2^[10].

30,000 to 100,000 in ten months

The broader show grew faster. A run of guest interviews in the summer of 2026 leaned into the business of AI creative work: Salma Aboukar, Finn McKenty, BLVCKL!GHT, Rourke Sefton-Minns and Jamey Gannon^[18]. Ep. 79, a live build in Figma Weave about the workflows brands pay five figures for, reached 28,753 views, and Ep. 83 with Ingi Erlingsson, who sold the studio Golden Wolf to Doodles before going all in on AI, became the most watched guest episode at 29,391^[24][31].

Ep. 84 went further, with Claude Opus 5.5 rendering editable video as code, including a one-minute Fast Hours promo cut from a single prompt^[11]. On 18 October 2026, Ep. 87 opened by celebrating 100,000 YouTube subscribers, about ten and a half months after the show passed 30,000^[12][15]. Two weeks later the channel stood at 107,000^[3].

A show run by agents

Ep. 87 was also a tour of how the show now makes itself. A Riverside MCP pulls each recording; a YouTube skill system writes titles, descriptions, chapters and tags, then drafts the LinkedIn and X posts; a clip engine picks moments and adds motion graphics; a thumbnail system built on locked-in show characters cut thumbnails from about six hours to thirty minutes; and Cloudflare-hosted agents run the weekly publishing routine^[12]. Claude turned 86 back-catalogue episodes into web pages in about an hour and a half^[12].

Six months later, we don't need to really hire anyone because we've built the tools that we need to service this thing.

Rory Flynn, Ep. 87^[12]

The website those agents publish, fasthourspodcast.com, carries a summary, takeaways, chapters, quotes and an FAQ for every episode, full transcripts, guest and topic pages, a ledger of 45 tools with the hosts' stance on each, and an llms.txt file for AI crawlers^[4][5]. In its first week, the hosts said, someone asked an AI about the show 54 times and Meta's crawler visited about 20,000 times^[12].

Audience and sponsors

The show's partner page describes an audience of creative directors, agency owners, art directors, marketing leaders, founders and brand teams: 94,800 YouTube views in 28 days, 76% of viewers aged 25 to 44, and 218,000 LinkedIn followers between the two hosts, as of September 2026^[14]. It invites tools to apply and says the show only partners with tools it would actually use^[14]. The first episode labelled as sponsored was Ep. 88 on 25 October 2026, with Ron Baranov of Figma Weave^[13].

Fast Hours and AI LIVE

The two shows have stayed close since Chris Branch's 2024 appearances. On AI LIVE, Chris has credited Rory with getting the show into node-based tools by telling him to try Flora (Ep. 98), called him the Dave of Demos (Ep. 107) and rated him the best builder of node workflows he has seen (Ep. 112)^[25][26][27]. AI LIVE played Rory's one-prompt Opus 5.5 promo on Ep. 132, with the Fast Hours account posting the stack in the chat, and opened Ep. 134 with his Lord of the Rings paper craft film^[28][29].

On Ep. 135, on 20 October 2026, Drew dropped into the AI LIVE chat, Chris congratulated the show on 100,000 subscribers, and both sides said a joint AI LIVE and Fast Hours episode was on the cards. As of this page it is a plan, not a date^[30].