YouTubers Win at the Box Office, Bernie Wants Public Stake in AI, Anthropic Files S-1 | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  We have some really exciting news. We heard you loud and clear.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  Loud and clear.

• 0:07John Coogan?

  You might have noticed on the Chyron.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  We are back.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  We are back and we're going to tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate.

• 0:19John Coogan?

  All in one place. That's right. You wanted ads. We are bringing you ads and we're very excited that we have more.

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  We are.

• 0:28John Coogan?

  More supporters of the show.

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  Incredibly back.

• 0:30John Coogan?

  Uh, yes, we're very excited. So expect to hear ads throughout the show.

• 0:33Jordi Hays?

  It's funny. We, we heard over and over and over. I'm not joking.

• 0:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:38Jordi Hays?

  I know I get sarcastic a lot, uh, but we heard over and over and over that they're a nice palate cleanser.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 0:43Jordi Hays?

  It's like turning the page.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 0:44Jordi Hays?

  Right? In between different topics.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 0:46Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, we are excited.

• 0:48John Coogan?

  And we love these companies. We want to help them grow. We've always been huge fans of the companies that we work with. So we're very excited to have them back. Let's turn over to YouTube and Hollywood. Uh, breakout news, uh, in Hollywood. Uh, YouTubers winning at the box office. YouTubers finally breaking through to Hollywood. Feels super long overdue. Ben Thompson had a good victory lap post because he predicted this all the way back in 2017. It took a decade to get here, but, uh, YouTubers are fully in control of Hollywood and there's a bunch of crazy statistics. But 2026 really is the year that Hollywood and YouTube finally, it feels like they found a way to work together in perfect harmony. It honestly seems win-win here.

• 1:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not.

• 1:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28Jordi Hays?

  Total disruption.

• 1:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 1:30John Coogan?

  No, no, no, not that. Actual collaboration. And so, I mean, we all know Hollywood's been faced with a ton of challenges. I was just listing them out. Off the top of my head, what's this?

• 1:39Jordi Hays?

  Trey says a TVPN without ads is like a human without a heart.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  Couldn't say it better myself. Um, I was just.

• 1:46Jordi Hays?

  Ryan says calling in to the waiting room and not the restream waiting room was a crime.

• 1:51John Coogan?

  Yes, that's true. So I was just listing off like all of the challenges that Hollywood has faced over the past couple decades and it's so bad. It's piracy, like you used to just be able to for a lot for all through like the mid 2000s, people would just download movies. Then better TV shows like TV just got so, so much better that that really took a lot of gas out of Hollywood because it used to be if you wanted something cinematic, you had to go to the theater and then Game of Thrones came out and all of a sudden TV, we went through like the era of great TV. Streaming, obviously that moved a lot of people out of theaters. Covid, that shut down the movie industry entirely. There were strikes, the

• 2:33John Coogan?

  double strike, writers and directors' strike and a whole bunch of other strikes that went on. There was competition from other production markets, lower cost and that, you know, that can sometimes help certain elements of Hollywood, but it also hurts Hollywood, the physical place.

• 2:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Meanwhile, streaming just created such a massive boom in spending on like a bunch of random projects, not necessarily like, like blockbusters, but just like every platform needed more content and there was a lot of competition.

• 3:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. So throughout all of that, there was sort of a silver lining. I mean, the streaming thing is a big one of that, that there were jobs and projects that were getting greenlit on streaming platforms, but also just the creator economy. Like even though the number, I was looking at the number of like shoot, traditional Hollywood shoot days in Hollywood, it's fallen off a cliff post Covid, never fully recovered. But the number of people working in front of the camera, behind the camera, around the camera in broadly has obviously gone up throughout the creator economy. Boom. This was always unsatisfying to cinephiles though, because no matter how viral a TikTok goes, or no matter how much money Mr. Beast or some other creator like makes, it never feels as, as

• 3:46John Coogan?

  culturally important as The Godfather or some other, or The Titanic, or some, some movie that everyone comes together, everyone has the shared cultural experience around. We were all in these like little bit of these like isolated niches and, oh yeah, I, I'm really into this creator. But anytime I try and bring it up to anyone, they don't know what I'm talking about.

• 4:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Our, our, our shared, our, our moment is I see a meme starting to grow. And I tell you, I make the call to you.

• 4:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:14Jordi Hays?

  And, and then we just kind of bet on it, basically.

• 4:16John Coogan?

  But even those, it's very hard for them to break out to such a degree that you can bring it up to anyone, your, your little nephew or your

• 4:25Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 4:25John Coogan?

  uncle, and they both have an understanding, like they did during the Titanic era, like they did during the Godfather era, like they did during Star Wars, which is at the center of this story because The Mandalorian and Grogu is the latest Star Wars project, and it's actually been declining in the box office. It's been eclipsed, and there's been three movies that have been really, really breakout performances. So also, the Oscars are going to be streamed on YouTube in 2029. It feels like by 2029, this, this whole, this whole trend is going to be in full force. So, look at the stats. So, Kane Parsons Backrooms opened to roughly 81.5 million in North America and 115 million worldwide on a $10 million budget reportedly.

• 5:09John Coogan?

  Currie Barker's Obsession climbed, is climbing in his third weekend and hit 104 million, 104.7 million domestic, becoming Focus Features' highest grossing domestic release from a movie widely reported to have cost around $1 million. That seems

• 5:22Jordi Hays?

  And right now on X, every single day

• 5:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:25Jordi Hays?

  there's a post that goes viral about Obsession's return on their budget.

• 5:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:31Jordi Hays?

  They're like, this million dollar film.

• 5:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:33Jordi Hays?

  You know, it, it's just happening over and over and over.

• 5:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:36Jordi Hays?

  And then, and so like the business story

• 5:38John Coogan?

  Oh, it's huge.

• 5:38Jordi Hays?

  to me is like way more, I mean, is everything.

• 5:41John Coogan?

  Definitely, definitely. And then we also talked about this earlier, and it's sort of looped in with this, but Markiplier, another YouTuber, released Iron Lung, which he financed himself, $3 million production budget reportedly, and opened to 18.2 million domestically before grossing 41.1 million domestic, 51.2 million worldwide. Huge return on investment. And so, it's easy to point to these as sort of the story is, YouTuber with a big audience just converts that audience into ticket sales. But that's not exactly, it's not really that clean, and there's a bunch of counterexamples. So, are you familiar with Ryan's World? Ryan's World is this massive kids YouTube channel.

• 6:22Jordi Hays?

  Oh, is that like a toy unboxing?

• 6:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ryan would unbox toys and it became a huge, huge channel. And they actually made Ryan's World the movie, Titan Universe Adventure, but it grossed only $624,000 on something like a $10 million budget. And so he wasn't able to convert that audience directly over. And I think with someone like Ryan Young.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  Was he encouraging children to take their parents' keys and wallet? And just go down to the movie theater? Because that's part of the issue with these channels and monetizing them is there's somewhat of a, there's a disconnect between the audience and who the actual like buyer is.

• 7:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:03Jordi Hays?

  The person that controls purchasing.

• 7:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:05Jordi Hays?

  Power in the household. So you might have like an eight-year-old kid.

• 7:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:09Jordi Hays?

  Who loves these videos, but anytime they actually want to act on.

• 7:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:12Jordi Hays?

  The content, they have to.

• 7:14John Coogan?

  There's a translation step. Sometimes that can work though, you know, you see the advertisements of the toy on the cereal box and the kids demand the toy. What is different about Backrooms, Obsession and Iron Lung? Is that the filmmakers had, they'd shown, they didn't just have huge audiences, like some of these, Markiplier is a truly large creator, but the folks behind Backrooms and Obsession are in like the single-digit millions. Alone, if they didn't have the creativity, if they didn't have the risk-taking abilities to actually produce something that could sort of, you know, draw attention in theaters, I don't think they could have just converted their subscribers over. Like the conversion rates just don't match up because if you're on 1 million subscribers

• 7:58John Coogan?

  and you did 100 million in box office, the math just doesn't match up. Did some, did everyone, did all of your subscribers go see it five times and pay $20 each time? No way. Like that's not what happened.

• 8:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:08John Coogan?

  The idea of like this creativity, risk-taking, new IP, this is like at the core of Hollywood successes. I was reading the Hollywood Reporter, they were saying like, this hearkens back to like the 1970s. George Lucas's first film, Ben Thompson has a great analysis that we can read through. But these creators aren't just big influencers with millions of fans. They do have big audiences. But they also stand above their peers in terms of artistic vision. So Curry Barker had a YouTube sketch channel called That's a Bad Idea, where he learned how to quickly and effectively write, act, and edit for a tight audience feedback loop. Backrooms has a similar story. Kane Parsons, who goes by Kane Pixels, produced his original series, The Backrooms, in Blender and After Effects. And the internet myth had laid a bit of the groundwork,

• 8:51John Coogan?

  and we can go into some of the lore of Backrooms. It's a very fascinating story. It all started with like a single image of a furniture store that was being renovated at the time. And that picture just went viral and went and just like kept building lore and became one of these creepy pastas. And then eventually, you know, turned into his YouTube series, which turned into this film. And it's one of these like very interesting origin story behind a piece of intellectual property. Typically, you don't see just a random image go viral and become a movie. But let alone a successful movie. But here we are. Being able to create something engaging for social media virality is probably somewhat important to creating a film that works in theaters. I think there is some stuff that translates.

• 9:34John Coogan?

  We're seeing this with the sort of like YouTube-ification or retention editing on Netflix. But I think the bigger value is being like a full-stack filmmaker. So gone are the days of showing up to Hollywood with a manuscript and just expecting the studio to do the rest for you. I think that the traditionally segmented teams on productions are simply too expensive to be deployed on anything but existing IP. So the dedicated writer, the dedicated cinematographer, the dedicated sound designer, that'll show up for The Mandalorian and Grogu, because they know that there's a certain amount of people that will just see every single Star Wars movie. But to take a risk on new IP from a new creator, you have to understand that that creator is going to be able to leave their fingerprints and actually drive every piece of the production.

• 10:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how do you think the big studio execs are processing, you know, these two films? Because you would think, okay, movies are a hits-driven business. If you have a hundred million dollar budget, like thinking about it like, if you're an early-stage investor, like super early-stage seed, series A, and you have a hundred million dollars to invest, like sometimes the best move would be putting a hundred million dollars into one team.

• 10:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:40Jordi Hays?

  But there's a reason that people say like, hey, we're gonna make- Twenty to thirty investments across this fund, maybe, maybe more, depending on the strategy.

• 10:48John Coogan?

  They're doing a lot more ten million dollar films.

• 10:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and so, and so it feels like it makes so much sense because one film can generate the entire.

• 10:56John Coogan?

  Fund returner.

• 10:57Jordi Hays?

  Can be a fund returner, but at the same time, is it, is it studio execs that just love the rush of just like doing a big deal, right?

• 11:05John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 11:06Jordi Hays?

  Is there some?

• 11:07John Coogan?

  As opposed to the high risk one?

• 11:09Jordi Hays?

  Like direct financial incentive where like there's just something like the status associated with putting together like a blockbuster?

• 11:16John Coogan?

  I don't know. I do think we will see more ten million dollar films, more, more lower budget films. It feels like there's definitely a certain breed of Hollywood executive that their whole skill set is aligned to, how can we put a hundred million, two hundred million to work and actually guarantee a return on that? So they're going to be working on the avatars and the Marvel movies and the DC movies and the, and the Harry Potter movies. But for the next generation, that, that track feels like very much bought in. So there are already more of these sort of like YouTube adaptations in the works. One is from Wesley Wang, who went viral for, interestingly, obsession in backrooms are both horror films, which are notorious for being cheap to produce and potentially very high return.

• 12:02John Coogan?

  He went viral for a non-horror YouTube short called Nothing Except Everything. TriStar picked it up with Darren Aronofsky's Protozoa producing and Wang set to adapt it as writer-director. And then there's also the much sillier but extremely viral Skibidi Toilet, which was created by Alexei Gerasimov in 2023. And that project has been going back and forth, but reportedly Michael Bay was attached at one point. They were thinking maybe TV show, maybe movie. But that, as silly as that sounds and as ridiculous as that series is, it did build like a little bit of a lore world. It captured a lot of people's fascinations and the numbers are really staggering.

• 12:41John Coogan?

  There is a little bit more nuance there because on the IP side, because it was created in Source Filmmaker, which is basically like Half-Life. Or Counter-Strike, so you designed the level and then you can move the camera around through that. He didn't use Blender and he didn't shoot it with a camera. He actually made the whole series in a video game. And a lot of the assets pull from Half-Life 2 or Counter-Strike Source. And so if you want to maintain that, you have to go do a deal with Valve, which, you know, is a private company owned by Gabe Newell. It doesn't necessarily need to just allow someone to do this. And there's already been back and forths on like takedown notices. So that's a whole different negotiation if that winds up making it to the silver screen. But I do think there will be more unpredictable breakouts in the coming years. And I wouldn't

• 13:26John Coogan?

  be surprised if we see Hollywood executives combing through obscure YouTube playlists for new gems. And some members of our production team saw both Backrooms and Obsession, and I want to get some reviews. What do you, what did you guys think? Which one was better? Take us through it.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  My vote's Obsession.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  Obsession.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  Scott, what'd you think?

• 13:44Speaker 03

  Obsession.

• 13:45John Coogan?

  Okay. And what did you like about each one? What did you dislike about each one?

• 13:48Speaker 02

  So Obsession was great. I feel like the filmmakers have gotten too good at making horror movies sometimes recently. Like this, like Ari Aster type wave. I remember leaving Midsommar and just feeling like, like, like gross for like days. And I felt like Obsession like walked it back a little bit. And it was a bit of a comedy too. So it was fun. I felt like the, the memes are all over it, which is great.

• 14:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Backrooms, we all kind of walked out. I love Backrooms. Production design should win an award. But something was missing from the movie, I think.

• 14:15John Coogan?

  Apparently they built 30,000 square feet of actual set for Backrooms. They really designed it. As you said, the production design was fantastic. And that feels like, I mean, the source material is literally in Blender. It would be so tempting just to be like, yeah, just send us the Blender files. Like, we'll just continue using, like, you're already working in CGI. Like, it's not like, oh, this isn't true to the source material. Like, it's actually less true to go build the set. But they did. And clearly, you enjoyed that look and feel and sort of worked out.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I thought it was really fun. Scott, Scott something?

• 14:48Speaker 03

  I want to shout out Haley Johnson, who produced Obsession too. She went to our film school.

• 14:55John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Let's go over to Ben Thompson.

• 14:58Jordi Hays?

  Your guys' class at your film school, I think, no longer exists. Truly insane caliber of talent to come out of that school. Well done.

• 15:08John Coogan?

  So, Ben Thompson reflected on this as well. He was taking this victory lap on calling this in 2017. He said, "In 2017, when the first public allegations were made against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, I wrote goodbye gatekeepers about how the traditional structure of Hollywood, where the supply of people who wanted to make and be in movies far exceeded the demand for movies to be made by Hollywood, created the conditions for his predation." So, he had a lot of power. As he noted in the article, "Similar structure used to be the case in newspapers, which not only gated what news was reported, but also leveraged that gate to monetize via advertising. However, the internet had long since broken down the gate in both regards. Meanwhile, I raised the specter of something similar happening to movies."

• 15:53John Coogan?

  Don't forget YouTube. Video is a zero-sum activity. Time spent watching one source of video is time spent not watching another. And YouTube showed over a billion hours of video every day in 2016.

• 16:04Jordi Hays?

  I've seen Tyler with two phones.

• 16:06John Coogan?

  Watching two things?

• 16:07Jordi Hays?

  Reels on both phones.

• 16:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, Subway Surfers.

• 16:10Jordi Hays?

  On the main screen, just going like this.

• 16:11Speaker 04

  Well, if you have VR, you can have way more screens open. Because you can just...

• 16:14John Coogan?

  You can't. When is Subway Surfers getting an adaptation? That feels like that's due for a trilogy. Subway Surfers, the movie? I think we got something. Are they... We cannot be the first people to think of Subway Surfers.

• 16:28Speaker 04

  Angry Birds is like us, you know.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, they're making a third one or...

• 16:32Jordi Hays?

  No, but I want it to be a movie where you're just like, you're basically just going one direction.

• 16:38John Coogan?

  No, it has to be a gritty horror film that takes place in the Subway Surfers universe. So, Ben Thompson continues. He says, "It's not a surprise that the breakthrough moment for YouTube stars in film took nearly a decade to materialize after that article. I've long noted the sequence through which the internet and digital media has affected media. Text first, then music, then short-form video, etc. Movies, the pinnacle of traditional media, are the hardest to both make and distribute." Particularly if the goal is to make it into theaters. And of course, movies ask the most of customers in return. They actually have to leave the house. Ben Thompson continues, he says, that leads to two true, but ultimately unsatisfying answers as to why YouTube stars might succeed in movies. First is that this is simply a new place to discover talent, and that's certainly true.

• 17:23John Coogan?

  The analogy I would draw is to the impact of AWS had on venture capital. Cloud computing reduced the cost of starting a company to nothing more than the opportunity cost for the founder's time and perhaps a bit of seed funding for a few engineers. And that created an entirely new asset class of angel investors. Venture firms, meanwhile, didn't evaluate companies based on a PowerPoint to fund sun servers, but rather on actual products and market signals. So it is with this new wave of talent, the cost of production has plummeted such that a creator can be evaluated on their creations, not just their ideas. That's what I was talking about. The YouTube growth and the YouTube product and the YouTube series that gets 82 million views in the example of Backrooms, like that is the audition tape that gets you the production

• 18:06John Coogan?

  workforce behind Hollywood to actually marshal behind you. And that's the same thing with, you know, the startup that shows up on Sand Hill Road raising a Series A that already has a product and some distribution and some customers and ARR. And all of that is possible because you don't need $10 million to do a single prototype. You can just build it. More true than ever in the age of AI.

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  Ben, Scott, how do films actually get funded? I've been pitched, like, invest in my movie before, but given that I don't watch movies, didn't feel like it was really my strike zone. But how does it typically get structured? Like, if a film needs a million dollar budget, are the investors getting, like, an independent film needs a million dollar budget? How does equity work? Any rough ideas?

• 18:55John Coogan?

  Typically, there's a series of buyers and investors.

• 18:58Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, I'm distracting you guys from running the show.

• 19:00John Coogan?

  Very similar to.

• 19:01Jordi Hays?

  We'll do it live.

• 19:02John Coogan?

  So.

• 19:03Jordi Hays?

  Scott's job is to change.

• 19:05John Coogan?

  Oftentimes, a screenwriter will sell an option to make a movie to a producer, some sort of production team. They are, the production company is. is oftentimes the investor, they buy it and then they might invest more money to bring on revisions, other script writers. They might attach a, they might go pitch a, do the deal to, to bring on a star. And then from there, they go to another producer. And then the last, the last time, the last moment is, is the actual like marketing phase. And so those dollars are the biggest. So when you go and you get Universal or Disney to be the distributor, they're putting in a ton of money because they're going to buy the billboards. And like the Super Bowl ads, and that's really expensive. The movie has to be made at that point.

• 19:48John Coogan?

  But there's a series of sort of gates in the typical Hollywood fashion. And so when Markiplier says he spent $3 million, that means he spent $3 million paying the actors.

• 19:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, cause even with obsession.

• 20:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:01Jordi Hays?

  I was seeing obsession billboards everywhere around LA.

• 20:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:06Jordi Hays?

  Like at least a million dollar campaign.

• 20:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:08Jordi Hays?

  Right when the videos were coming out saying like obsession just turned 750K into a hundred million dollars. And so I was like, well, this doesn't make sense.

• 20:18John Coogan?

  That might happen after the fact.

• 20:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's an after, there's more money being spent to like, you know, it's like, hey, we have a hit now, let's like.

• 20:24John Coogan?

  And then, and then basically at every phase, there can be sort of an in-kind investment. Where you, they call it like points on the back end, basically, but it's basically like the, the most famous example of this is probably Robert Downey Jr. In Iron Man, he, he took a very low salary upfront, cash upfront, but he got a huge stake in the downstream cash flows from that series.

• 20:47Jordi Hays?

  Saying he's goaded.

• 20:48John Coogan?

  He's goaded. There's also a, a cool video here of the history of liminal spaces. We should pull up because Backrooms, of course, is pulling from a lot of interesting videos. Let's play this. Can we zoom in this at all? There we go. Truman Show, haven't seen it? I've seen it, it's great.

• 21:08John Coogan?

  I can't believe you've never seen Truman Show, it's so good.

• 21:09Jordi Hays?

  Should we get some liminal spaces here in the Ultra Dome?

• 21:12John Coogan?

  The, the Ultra Dome is a little bit of a liminal space. We should make it more of a liminal space. There are some, there are some podcasters that have liminal space type setups.

• 21:23John Coogan?

  Unbox Therapy is a famous one.

• 21:25Jordi Hays?

  You guys haven't seen it, but do you know like the tape on the wall? Do you know what that is?

• 21:27John Coogan?

  No, what's that?

• 21:29Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I guess no spoilers, but.

• 21:30John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 21:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. We can put tape on the wall. People have seen it, will know what that means.

• 21:35John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 21:38John Coogan?

  We can just vibe out to liminal spaces for the rest of the show. Let's see what Dan Shipper has to say. This will happen two with AI in about a decade. Studio executives and producers are racing to find movie material in corners of the internet they once dismissed as some of the greatest threats to their business, from YouTube to anime to video games. We talked about subway surfers. We're seeing the tide shift from these more conventional Hollywood narratives to something that feels more organic. Ooh, all the simulators, maybe there will be data center simulator of the movie. Can you imagine? We got data center simulator. Or what was the other one? Coconut simulator? You gotta get coconut simulator of the movie. Realistic mode.

• 22:21Jordi Hays?

  Capybara simulator, the movie.

• 22:23John Coogan?

  That's just a nature documentary. Get David Attenborough in there, you're done. Well, Bernie Sanders is talking about taking a stake in the AI labs. He says AI is built on humanity's collective knowledge. The wealth it generates must benefit humanity, not just Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or other AI oligarchs. That's why I'll be introducing the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act to give the public a direct ownership stake. And he penned a full op ed in the New York Times. Senator Bernie Sanders proposing a one-time 50% tax directly in stock from the AI labs, which will be used to fund the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund.

• 23:05John Coogan?

  This would give the government voting rights and board seats and then directly pay a dividend to the American citizens. That's interesting because, so you take 50%, like, when would these companies actually produce a dividend? I mean, it takes many tech companies, like, decades to actually return cash to shareholders. They're known for stock buybacks.

• 23:24Jordi Hays?

  Maybe he wants to just be fire selling.

• 23:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:27Jordi Hays?

  After the IPOs.

• 23:29John Coogan?

  He's just like, this is the

• 23:31Jordi Hays?

  I didn't tell you how there was gonna be a dividend.

• 23:34John Coogan?

  Dividend in, in, in sales.

• 23:37Jordi Hays?

  No, it's, I mean, the, the positioning, I'm, I'm trying to get into the New York, into my New York Times account too, but the positioning blank is built on humanities collective knowledge.

• 23:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:46Jordi Hays?

  What is not built on humanities collective knowledge?

• 23:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was looking at a lot of

• 23:51Jordi Hays?

  TBPN is built on, TBPN is built on humanities collective knowledge.

• 23:56John Coogan?

  True.

• 23:56Jordi Hays?

  If, if humanity hadn't figured out wheels and roads and combustion engines.

• 24:02John Coogan?

  Hey, be careful what you say. The, the United States, American citizens might own 50% of TBPN soon. You never know with this.

• 24:09Jordi Hays?

  You never know. You just never know.

• 24:11John Coogan?

  You're tempting fate here.

• 24:13Jordi Hays?

  But, uh.

• 24:14John Coogan?

  Bad example.

• 24:15Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, the, the, the other thing is, um, you know, we, we have.

• 24:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. AI 2027 talks about this. I think that's a, it, it is, it is right in line. He's clearly in the milieu of that crew and, uh, we'll see, we'll see where all this goes, you know? I don't know. We'll see. Um, it's, uh, a lot of people are sort of framing it as like

• 24:35Jordi Hays?

  Rather have universal basic tokens.

• 24:37John Coogan?

  Hmm. Maybe that would be the dividend. I don't know.

• 24:40Jordi Hays?

  But it's interesting. So he's trying to ban data centers with the data center moratorium.

• 24:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:45Jordi Hays?

  Act, but then he also wants half.

• 24:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:48Jordi Hays?

  Those two things feel like, like it feels like he's just kind of throwing stuff at the wall.

• 24:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Dean Ball pointed out this sort of like, uh, you know, misalignment here. He says, uh, I am so confused by the Bernie Sanders stance on AI. Is AI an existential risk that needs to be banned or a public good that should be redistributed? He wants to have it both ways, which is the tell that his flirtation with AI safety is mostly for show. This is about capital. Interesting. At the same time, I, I think that there is a world where if you, if you do think AI is an existential risk, having a board seat, having control, having votes over that does enable, especially if you have a board seat over every AI lab.

• 25:30John Coogan?

  You could actually do the thing where you say, we're all gonna slow down simultaneously. That's a lot easier to implement if you have 50% control over everything. Uh, Tyler, what do you?

• 25:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, but you can just do like the AI FDA.

• 25:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:42Speaker 04

  You, you don't need like actual equity.

• 25:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:44Speaker 04

  Okay, this is my kind of contrarian take.

• 25:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 25:46Speaker 04

  But this seems like extremely bullish, right? Because Bernie, you don't think of him as being this kind of classically capitalist person.

• 25:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:52Speaker 04

  But impulsively saying like, these are gonna be the biggest.

• 25:56John Coogan?

  He's saying that the stock's underrated.

• 25:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. Under value. These are gonna be the biggest.

• 25:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, because, because if all the stocks were going to zero.

• 26:02Speaker 04

  They're so big that this is gonna be like disruptive to the economy.

• 26:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 26:04Speaker 04

  Like, this seems like he's extremely AGI-pilled.

• 26:07John Coogan?

  It seems like it, yeah.

• 26:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like this seems like he's, he's basically saying like,

• 26:10Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so.

• 26:11Speaker 04

  The data center stuff is like probably not gonna work out. I'm not gonna be able to ban these things.

• 26:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Mark in the chat says, Mr. Sanders is your crazy uncle that your mom and dad use as a babysitter babysitter when there are no other options.

• 26:24John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 26:27Jordi Hays?

  You think that Bernie has been getting his AI takes from Jason Oppen?

• 26:33John Coogan?

  I, I, I'm not going there yet. We'll get there. Uh, but, uh, first off, uh, I mean, the big news today, Anthropic is, uh, confidentially filed for IPO. They should be out. SpaceX is going public. Google's public. OpenAI. There's rumors of, of, of an IPO.

• 26:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and that's what, that's what gets really crazy here, right? Because is, is Google, Google's a leading lab.

• 26:55John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 26:55Jordi Hays?

  Does Bernie, Bernie want?

• 26:57John Coogan?

  But then, yeah, but then is, is Salesforce an AI company?

• 27:01Jordi Hays?

  Is Meta?

• 27:02John Coogan?

  Is Meta? Yeah, Meta is certainly spending like they are.

• 27:05Jordi Hays?

  We were talking about this earlier. Mark would quickly be like, me? Trying to build personal super.

• 27:10John Coogan?

  I'm not, I'm not an AI company. You're not gonna take half my company.

• 27:14Jordi Hays?

  I'm not an AI lab.

• 27:15John Coogan?

  I'm just doing some experiments.

• 27:16Jordi Hays?

  I got these GPUs to recommend better videos to you.

• 27:20John Coogan?

  That we're creating is just recommendations.

• 27:21Speaker 04

  He's gonna take half of all birds.

• 27:23John Coogan?

  Oh, no. Uh, we talked about the dueling narrative. So Anthropic is IPO-ing, or, or they have, they have confidentially submitted a draft S1 registration statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Pending completion of SEC review, this gives us the option to pursue an initial public offering. Uh, there's a race between, uh, SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, to get out, hoover up those public market dollars. Um, meanwhile, it was so over for the, all the SaaS companies, but, uh, the SaaS apocalypse might be canceled. That's what we're seeing. A lot of companies are up. Some of them are up on Anthropic Holdings, but others are just up on continued traction in their traditional business.

• 28:03Jordi Hays?

  Mark's gotta be feeling good. He invested 50 million into Anthropic, I think in 2023 or 2024.

• 28:09John Coogan?

  Cheeky 100x?

• 28:10Jordi Hays?

  Very cheeky, very cheeky.

• 28:12John Coogan?

  I think he's at 5 billion.

• 28:13Jordi Hays?

  He's now gonna deploy 2 billion euros.

• 28:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 28:15Jordi Hays?

  Into France.

• 28:16John Coogan?

  Love it. Our strong team of.

• 28:18Jordi Hays?

  He has 1,800 employees in France.

• 28:21John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 28:21Jordi Hays?

  More committed than ever to driving innovation and agentic growth across the country. And I love this new meta. I think this picture is this is the new this is the new vibreal meta. So anytime you do a business transaction,

• 28:36John Coogan?

  Or a farm.

• 28:37Jordi Hays?

  Snap a selfie with your business partner, post it. You don't need to make a video with a bunch of, you know, sort of videos throughout history of, of, you know, hypersonic jets and rockets and things like that. Just take a selfie, post it, you're good to go. Much more efficient.

• 28:54John Coogan?

  Okay, so.

• 28:55Jordi Hays?

  And I'm dropping after this partnership, I just got to say I'm we're cancelling my personal beef with France.

• 29:02John Coogan?

  Oh, that's great.

• 29:03Jordi Hays?

  This is a fantastic progress.

• 29:06John Coogan?

  Benioff won you over.

• 29:07Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, if they have Benioff's full faith, they have my full faith. And already this two billion euros, I think is significantly more than their their the previous investment that they announced. That created the original beef.

• 29:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Beef squash. It's good to see. Good to see. Well, Benioff gave some more context on Salesforce's progress. The fiscal year 27 Q1 results, record revenue 11.13 billion, up 13% year over year. This is a very mature company, still growing very quickly. Very good news. Operating cash flow of 6.7 billion. Agent Force crossed 1 billion ARR or yeah ARR. Combined with Data 360 and Informatica now at 3.4 billion in AI data ARR. We're not just talking about the here.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  We're not just talking about the agentic future. We're delivering it. The number one agentic CRM powering the shift to agentic enterprises at scale. The momentum is real. The future is unstoppable. Bio emoji.

• 30:15John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's go through what Brandon Grayle summarized from Jensen Wong's Computex 2026 keynote. Nvidia CEO made several announcements during his keynote speech at Computex, Taiwan's annual technology expo. I guess it's their CES, but more enterprise focused even. He introduced the RTX, Nvidia RTX Spark Super Chip, an ARM-based chip for PCs designed to process AI workloads locally. He announced that the enterprise variable CPU is now in full production, and he announced several foundation models, a world model, an open weight flagship AI model. That seems like big news, open weight flagship AI model. We heard that he was investing billions of dollars in that, but I think everyone's very

• 31:00John Coogan?

  interested to see where it benchmarks against the 5.5s, the, what is it, 4.8 now? And, and the 3.5s from Google, like the closed source models have been on the frontier, and there's been the chart showing that the open source models from China have been sort of decelerating, or they're just, they're, they're growing more linearly than the, than the American closed source models. So is there a gap there? Where does Nvidia fit in with their open weight model? That's an interesting question. And he also released a model specifically designed for humanoid robots. A lot of the attention from the keynote came, is going to the RTX Spark, which is being viewed as Microsoft's attempt to create its own Apple silicon moment, and Microsoft coordinated

• 31:43John Coogan?

  its announcements of its new Surface Laptop Ultra, which will be optimized for RTX Spark and will be released this fall. Well, we can close with Will Monitis. He says, "I don't think any of you understand what is about to happen in the market. We are about to live through the craziest five-year run in techno-capital history. God help us all. I pray that when the judgment comes, he can see all that we did to ensure efficient price discovery." He's bullish.

• 32:07Jordi Hays?

  He's flipped extremely bullish recently, which I don't know if that's bullish or...

• 32:12John Coogan?

  Him being bullish? Barish. If he's bearish, he should be bullish. Be bullish when other people are bearish. Be fearful when other people are greedy. Who knows? Do your own research, make your own decisions. Adam Faez also hired a sketch artist for a party. He said, "I'm so tired of how many experiences of my life have now been taken over by phones and content. So for my birthday party this year, I told my friends to leave their phones at home and had a sketch artist capture the night instead." I thought this was very, very cool. Wildly different and like, all of these can be printed or framed. I mean, I guess they're, they're physical pieces of art, but they could also be replicated for the partygoers. Very, very cool analog.

• 32:55John Coogan?

  This is why vinyl records are at an all time high. There is demand for both the content barbell.

• 33:01Jordi Hays?

  This is very cool.

• 33:01John Coogan?

  And the slop and the artisanal handcrafted sketch artists from Adam Faez. Very, very cool. And we will see you.

• 33:09Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor.

• 33:09John Coogan?

  Tomorrow.