X’s $1M Sweepstakes, Ben Affleck’s viral take on AI, Elon sues OpenAI for $134B | 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. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console -https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn https://graphite.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai https://lambda.ai/ Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid -https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Ramp -https://ramp.com https://ramp.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/welcome/ Shopify - https://shopify.com https://shopify.com/ Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co https://vibe.co/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com 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/@TBPNLiveDiet 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. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console -https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn https://graphite.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai https://lambda.ai/ Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid -https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Ramp -https://ramp.com https://ramp.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/welcome/ Shopify - https://shopify.com https://shopify.com/ Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co https://vibe.co/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com 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.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  We're talking about the article apocalypse that's happening on X. Will it slop up the timeline? Will the algorithm handle the flood of of AI generated content that will be slopped up in the timeline? We will see. We will dig into it. We will discuss it. We'll also try and understand what is going on with Nikita Beer's strategy? What's the strategy at X? Will this growth, uh, this growth hack work? So this all started with Nikita Beer on X. He said, ladies and gentlemen, we are giving $1 million to the top article posted on X. You have two weeks. And very, very different structure.

• 0:37Jordi Hays?

  They thought there's already in, there's, there's so much AI generated essays on X.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 0:44Jordi Hays?

  Why not make AI generated essays lottery tickets?

• 0:47John Coogan?

  Lottery.

• 0:47Jordi Hays?

  Let's turn them into lottery tickets.

• 0:49John Coogan?

  I like it. I mean, they're, they're definitely paying out more than a million dollars in creator payments across all the little hundred dollar, thousand dollar checks that go out to folks. You have to imagine, um, but, but running a sweepstakes, I mean, that's time honored. What's not to like about a sweepstakes? It's great. Nikita's kind of taking two sides to this. He says, it's time to write, but also he tells everyone else, please bear with article Armageddon. Uh, my question was, uh, what's the strategy here and what will the outcome be? The Elon taking over felt like, okay, it's an entirely new day. Everything's moving way faster. Now, some of those projects had actually been, been in the, in the works for months or years before.

• 1:31John Coogan?

  Uh, I think, uh, Community Notes was the big one where the Twitter team had been building that infrastructure for a while, but they were just moving slowly.

• 1:39Jordi Hays?

  People working on it for over five years.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  Probably something like that. 2023 was a big year for expanding character limits. Uh, they'd also previously acquired this Dutch startup, Review, which was a direct competitor of Substack, but that product was shut down in less than two years, like January to January. They only made it two years, never really got it off the, off the ground. And I think it was because it was sort of counter positioned with Twitter. It was kind of like always, oh, well, if we get people on the review platform, they'll leave or they'll take their audience elsewhere. Ever really felt.

• 2:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I don't know that a lot of people had some incredible faith that, hey, I want to build my business on, like a Twitter, uh, like.

• 2:18John Coogan?

  I mean, even pre Elon, there had been companies, startups that had built on the Twitter API, which had gone through a number of version changes. Elon made some more extreme changes to that. But there were plenty of times when people would build businesses like too closely to any platform, really, and then they get steamrolled. Whether you're, you know, Zynga building on, building Farmville on Facebook, and then they changed the algorithm, or they changed the integration, and all of a sudden, your growth engine's just gone. This happened with Teespring. They were selling custom T-shirts. You know, they've been working on, on making X a more literate, long-form platform for a while, 2023.

• 2:53Jordi Hays?

  We need to teach our users the English language. We need them to read more than, you know, 180 characters.

• 2:58John Coogan?

  So they've obviously done a ton in video. They've never really leaned into a video library like YouTube. Like, I used to cross-post my YouTube videos on X. Sometimes there were length limits for a while, then they got rid of those. So I could just actually copy a 25-minute YouTube video, put it on X, and it was cool. People wouldn't watch nearly as much as they did on YouTube. And, and there was no catalog value. That was like the really weird thing, was that on YouTube, like, my old videos that I haven't uploaded in over a year, and my old videos are still probably getting like, I don't know, half a million views a month. Just because people are, every day, they search, like, what's the history of Andorol? Or what's the history of Ramp? Or what's the history of Xi Jinping?

• 3:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, and they're evergreen content, so it just continuously gets served.

• 3:41John Coogan?

  Exactly. And then, once someone watches one of my videos, they watch five more.

• 3:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, and part of that, if you want to be a serious video platform, you need to be like, have, you know, actually incentivizing people to watch on TV. Like, so much of YouTube watch hours happen on TV.

• 3:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:55Jordi Hays?

  And X, I think, has a streaming TV app. But it's certainly not, doesn't get a lot of love.

• 4:00John Coogan?

  Continuing with the long post journey that X has been on. 2023 was a massive year. February took it from 280 characters to 4,000 characters. That's more than I need for most of my posts. I don't think I've ever posted anything longer than that. April expanded it to 10,000 characters. And finally, in June, they maxed it out at 25,000 characters. That's longer than most blog posts. That's around 4,000 words, maybe a little bit more. And you can still thread these posts together. So I was always wondering, like, why does articles exist if long posts are so long that you can put 4,000 words there? And now I think that, essentially, articles... Or first-class citizens in the algorithm.

• 4:44John Coogan?

  And there's really no downside.

• 4:46Jordi Hays?

  Zach Vole had a great idea. He said, Grok, summarize this article in 280 characters or less. Don't make any mistakes. Thanks. So if you, if you really yearn for the days, the pre-artikel era, just respond and tag Grok under every post and have it turn it back into just regular old-fashioned.

• 5:03John Coogan?

  140 characters, or even shorter. So when articles launched in March of 2024, it didn't really hit for me. Like, I was not like, oh, I gotta jump on this. I gotta post. You know, we started doing the newsletter in 2025. Mid-year, we started crossposting. Articles were available. I think we might have tested one or two as an article. Didn't really see a difference, so just kind of stuck with the long posts. So my pieces are usually around 5,000 characters. They fit fine in a long post. Oh, yeah, we're getting 10x more views now that we're using articles. It's kind of the same thing, but it does seem like an interesting format that maybe they will surface.

• 5:36Jordi Hays?

  I think it's a better experience as a reader.

• 5:39John Coogan?

  If you take advantage of the formatting, maybe. But, and you're doing bullet points and bolding and italics. Like, you can write.

• 5:46Jordi Hays?

  Embedding posts.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, embedding posts is cool and also images in the. I saw one that had like graphics and it read almost like a, like a Stratechery piece. It had embedded images and stuff. It was cool. So strategically, this big article push, it feels like another shot at Substack. But I, I, I don't know that anyone's gonna be rushing to get off of Substack based on this because the value of Substack, the, the value prop is that you own your email list. So you have a direct relationship with your, your audience. And you could take that anywhere. You could leave at any time. You can even take your Stripe account with you, which is a crazy thing. It's so creator-friendly. And Substack's made that their brand and they've built a great business around it.

• 6:29John Coogan?

  And long-term, I think Substack should probably figure out how to build some sort of ads product that can run across all of the different Substacks because that would probably.

• 6:40Jordi Hays?

  Be a total TBPN victory.

• 6:42John Coogan?

  It would, it would.

• 6:43Jordi Hays?

  They've been very, very anti-app.

• 6:45John Coogan?

  Anti ads, anti ads. But I just see, like, what does it take to get Substack into the Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit category, sort of like Dacacorn category? And you imagine that for a lot of these, like, if you're, they're clearly trying to push people into the Substack app, but even just embedding. Ads here and there. It could be done tastefully. I think it could be done in a way that's not too abrasive, but I think just from a business perspective, it would make sense and really open them up to some big, big dollars.

• 7:13Jordi Hays?

  You had kind of a rough theory that maybe there was some logic to doing this just for having new

• 7:20John Coogan?

  Training data. Yeah. So, so there's this idea that

• 7:22Jordi Hays?

  Somebody untitled YouTube chats, the data is worth 10x more than one

• 7:27John Coogan?

  There were a few people that were, that were mentioning this.

• 7:29Jordi Hays?

  Talk about a company that feels very immune to vibe coding. You don't want, you don't want the, if somebody comes to you and they're like, I got plat, but I'm going to charge you half as much.

• 7:40John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:41Jordi Hays?

  It's like, well, I'll take the, I'll take the real one. For storing and processing my customers' financial information.

• 7:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:48Jordi Hays?

  Noah in the chat says, I don't want to read Substack without ads. So that's

• 7:52John Coogan?

  There we go. Thank you.

• 7:53Jordi Hays?

  That's advertising's strongest soldier.

• 7:55John Coogan?

  So the question is like, you, you put out this million dollar bounty. How many people will show up? How many articles will actually get posted? I am seeing a lot of articles in the, in the feed. It's also hilarious when you see like a Fortune 500 CEO post an article. She's like, oh damn, are you really down and you need to mill? Like, what's going on buddy? And it's like, no, they're just like, they're just posting news and they just need to get something out. So they use an article, but it's funny to imagine that they're like, oh man, the million would change everything for me. Yeah. It's what I need. It's what I need. But

• 8:25Jordi Hays?

  Tim, Tim Cook starts ripping articles.

• 8:27John Coogan?

  He's just like, actually.

• 8:29Jordi Hays?

  I need, I need to, I can't be like within the same.

• 8:33John Coogan?

  We're not going to do a keynote this year for the new iPhone. We're dropping an article. And we're releasing it nine months early. The question is, is the data valuable? So a million dollars? How many people will show up? How many people will play the game? How many people will buy a lottery ticket? Buy writing original articles that go viral?

• 8:52Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I've been seeing, I've been seeing so many people quoting articles, sharing them and say, you need to read this. It's incredibly well-written.

• 9:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 9:00Jordi Hays?

  And then I tap in and it's just obviously slop.

• 9:03John Coogan?

  Doesn't seem like anyone's going to be bailing on Substack today to move over, but there is just valuable. And then there's also the question of like, so you're probably not going to get your own audience list on X, but Will you even be able to monetize with subscriptions? X does have subscriptions, but Substack has a way more like built out.

• 9:24Jordi Hays?

  I wonder what the, I wonder what the monthly revenue is for the person that's utilizing subscriptions the best.

• 9:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:31Jordi Hays?

  Who's the highest earning subscription driven creator.

• 9:34John Coogan?

  But the interesting thing is that Substack offers more than just a one time subscription monthly. You can pay annually, get a discount, participate in a live stream, get the, get the chat. And then there's also like business plans, group plans. So they just have a way more mature product catalog when it comes to monetizing a, a, a customer list or an email list. And then obviously you can take them elsewhere. If you're like, look, my newsletter product has grown so much that I have like enterprise level needs. I have to be off Substack. You can go and build something from scratch that does exactly what you want.

• 10:06Jordi Hays?

  How did you conclude? What was your takeaway?

• 10:07John Coogan?

  My, my question was, so I don't see anyone who's a writer online who's on Substack being like, okay, now's the moment. A million dollars is on the table. I'm shutting down my Substack and I'm going over to X exclusively. But a lot of people cross post. That's what we do. I think a lot of people, if you have a free, if you have a Substack that's part free, part paid, post the free part on X. Why not? Like it's all upside. It's just more attention that can actually get you into funnel. I believe that the posting of the articles on X has been additive to our Substack list. I think this has been net growth. I don't think people have been like, oh, I'm unsubscribing from TVPN's newsletter because I'm getting it on John's random Twitter feed that may or may not surface to me in the algorithm. So I don't think X needs writers to go all in.

• 10:50John Coogan?

  I just think that they want more copies of the best writing to make their way to X. And so if you have a great YouTube video, they want you to share it on X as well. So then they can surface that to people. If you have a great piece of writing, put it on X as well. And I think this does that and I think they'll be successful there.

• 11:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the question, I mean, if you're, if they're really successful and you have like YouTube for long form writing, like the UGC platform for long form writing, it's probably a solid business, but it's not going to be a juggernaut like YouTube specifically because it's not going to monetize nearly as well.

• 11:23John Coogan?

  I want your take on. Whether on the actual article experience, I was chatting with some folks who are really, really big on Twitter, a little group of folks who are all well over 100K. I've gotten there back in like the thread era. They were like thread guys, basically. And they were saying like, I don't think Naval's how to get rich without getting lucky thread would have worked as an article. That the fact that it was all these bite sized pieces, like that's, that's, that was what was special. I think personally that meta has sort of died and we haven't seen that work. What do you think?

• 11:56Jordi Hays?

  Coming back and just unironically ripping threads?

• 11:59John Coogan?

  Why not?

• 12:01Jordi Hays?

  Do you miss threads?

• 12:03John Coogan?

  You mean just like?

• 12:04Jordi Hays?

  Like, do you miss that era at all? Is it, can you remember any iconic threads other than Lulu's and Naval's?

• 12:11John Coogan?

  Naval is the main one that I remember. I probably scrolled a few threads. I actually did have a thread that actually blew up my account. So I was at 10,000 followers.

• 12:21Jordi Hays?

  Is this the Alaska one?

• 12:22John Coogan?

  No, that was not, that, that got me unfollows because I posted about bringing tech, you know, I was early on the let's leave California train. I said, we gotta go to Alaska. We're not going to Miami. We're not going to Texas. We're going to Alaska because if you have runaway global warming, it's going to be beachfront property up there, baby. It's going to be 72 and sunny every day in Alaska.

• 12:43Jordi Hays?

  Palm trees.

• 12:44John Coogan?

  Alternatively, if we solve global warming, we will have unlimited nuclear power. You will be able to heat, air condition, do whatever you need in your Alaska compound because you will have a one megawatt nuclear reactor dropped on your doorstep and you will have unlimited power and you'll be lounging in a beautiful scenic mountain retreat, perfectly temperature controlled.

• 13:04Jordi Hays?

  And Alaska did not like that.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  They did not like that. I got a lot of DMs from a lot of people showing me their guns, saying, if you come up here, California boy, there will be consequences. And it was a rough day on the internet. I had to lock my account. So I closed out saying that, you know, maybe there's a, you know, article apocalypse. I'm not really seeing it. I think the algorithm is pretty well equipped to handle stuff like this. People always seem grumpy with X generally and honestly Nikita specifically a lot of times.

• 13:31Jordi Hays?

  We should talk about XAI.

• 13:33John Coogan?

  Oh, yes. What's going on with XAI?

• 13:34Jordi Hays?

  So Ty Morse.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 13:37Jordi Hays?

  Did a podcast with Sulawon Khan Gori.

• 13:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:40Jordi Hays?

  Who was previously, at the time when the podcast was done.

• 13:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 13:44Jordi Hays?

  He of course was working at XAI. He came in, he talked about WTF is happening at XAI predicting bottlenecks.

• 13:52Jordi Hays?

  Bootstrapping off the Tesla network, how Elon deals with fires, what it's like working at XAI, Cybertruck bet with Elon, how they built Colossus, how XAI hires, experimentation, how Elon recalibrated his timeline estimates. No one tells me no, that's important.

• 14:10John Coogan?

  It's a wild one.

• 14:11Jordi Hays?

  Why the fuzziness between teams is an advantage, testing human emulators as employees, biggest blunders, what a meeting with Elon is like, how Elon gives feedback.

• 14:21John Coogan?

  It's telling.

• 14:22Jordi Hays?

  Figuring out what is truth for Grokpedia, what happens when Elon sees wrong Grok outputs on X.

• 14:27John Coogan?

  Massively viral, by the way, four million views just on X.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  I'll start by saying that this is fantastic content.

• 14:34John Coogan?

  Beautifully shot.

• 14:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, that, very well done and great content, right? People are so curious about what's happening at XAI, right? We want to understand, you know, how they're approaching different problems.

• 14:44John Coogan?

  And Elon talks about it in such high level. He's talking about AI, AGI, super futuristic, and then he'll give little details on like some massive build out that he's working on, but he's not really nitty gritty.

• 14:56Jordi Hays?

  One small problem.

• 14:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 14:58Jordi Hays?

  Usually, a $200 billion company likes to control who's going to go out and do a tell-all about the company, right?

• 15:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:06Jordi Hays?

  And specifically with Elon companies, if you hadn't noticed, there's not a lot of people that work for Elon companies.

• 15:11John Coogan?

  No.

• 15:12Jordi Hays?

  That go and do the podcast circuit, go talk about everything going on. The funny thing is, I didn't catch all the interview, but they talk about like how like HR in general is like not super formalized at the company.

• 15:25John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 15:26Jordi Hays?

  And so you can also imagine that like PR and the media relations team is not super active.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:31Jordi Hays?

  Maybe nobody in HR said, hey, don't go do it an hour-long podcast. What happened? Ultimately, Suliman.

• 15:39John Coogan?

  He said he's left XAI. We don't actually know what happened, but it is odd to go do a, to go do an hour-long interview and then quit.

• 15:47Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so I think like good intentions potentially took the concept which he talks about in here, no one tells me no, a little bit too far. I posted earlier, you can't even share the internal secrets of your AI lab on a cinematic podcast in this country anymore.

• 16:02John Coogan?

  The speculation is that this is the result of the interview he gave where he said XAI intends to run 1 million human emulations, a digital version of Optimus for online work. Which will be powered by leasing compute from Tesla owners when the car is parked and charging. That's an interesting development that we actually haven't heard about before. This idea that you have the, you know, a pretty advanced AI chip doing self-driving in the Teslas. They're just sitting there overnight. Why not do some inference and lease that back?

• 16:34Jordi Hays?

  Why is it a digital version of Optimus? Is it gonna be sitting there in the corner like flippy?

• 16:38John Coogan?

  I mean, I think realistically, it's probably just like agentic rollouts. So if it's for online work, it's like, what are a bunch of tasks that that you could you could like turn Grok loose on? Everything from like, you know, the classic like order DoorDash in a simulation, try and buy something on Amazon in a simulation, all these things that require moving around on a screen, doing computer work, using Excel, building stuff, writing code. So a life lesson there.

• 17:06Jordi Hays?

  Let's go over to Ben Affleck.

• 17:08John Coogan?

  Ben Affleck. He went on Joe Rogan and gave some very good takes on AI. There's some discussion over how good of takes they are, but I ran into somebody that said that they met Ben Affleck, they were like a proper AI researcher and they said that they met Ben Affleck and he used compute as a noun. And they were like, yeah, that was impressive. Like he's talking about like scaling compute. He's actually very, very deep in this. Ben Affleck is not a doomer. He's actually pretty white-pilled and it seemed like a really good interview.

• 17:35Jordi Hays?

  Ryan says, what if he's just acting?

• 17:37Speaker 02

  If you try to get ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini to write you something, it's really shitty. And it's shitty because by its nature, it goes to the mean, to the average. And it's and it's not reliable and it's, I mean, I just can't even stand to see what it writes. Now, it's a useful tool if you're a writer and you're going, ah, what's the thing? I'm trying to set something up or somebody sends someone a letter, but it's delayed two days and gets, and it can give you some examples of that. I actually don't think it's very likely that it can, it's gonna be able to write anything meaningful, or, and in particular, that it's gonna be making movies like from Holcroft, like Tilly Norwood, like that's bullshit. I don't think that's gonna happen. I think it's not, I think it actually, it turns out the technology is not progressing in exactly

• 18:21Speaker 02

  the same way they sort of presented it. Um, and really what it is, is gonna be-

• 18:25John Coogan?

  He's plateau pilled.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  Just like sort of visual effects.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  There was a line in here where-

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  He's studying Sutton.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was a line in here where I was like, that is a Carpathian line. Like, he definitely heard this from Carpathian. Like, he's listening to Dark Ash for sure.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  For money. I can't. You can sue me, period. It kind of feels to me like, I think we were talking about earlier, where there's a lot more-

• 18:42John Coogan?

  So, the, the, the whole idea of like, these models being mid, that's not quite true. I, I mean, it's hard with like, to develop a reinforcement learning environment with a verified reward for like, a, a great script that will break through, because even the great script writers have flops that are unexpected. Literally, everyone thinks it's great, and then it goes out and it just, uh, is a box office bomb. Later, he actually makes a stronger case, I think, because they're talking about Dwayne The Rock Johnson in the film, The Smashing Machine. And Matt Damon is recalling an interview that he did with Dwayne Johnson about, you know, one of the most climactic scenes in The Smashing Machine. It's very emotional. And he asks Dwayne, you know, "How did you pick this,

• 19:27John Coogan?

  you know, motion?" He, he pulls up a sheet, because he's sad, and like, "What were you conjuring? What were you drawing on to create that experience as an actor and bring that emotion to the screen?" Because Matt Damon's saying like, "I love that, I love that scene. I loved your performance. Where'd that come from? Because you're-"

• 19:44Jordi Hays?

  Was he thinking about content without ads, in order to draw on the sort of like, deep sad-

• 19:49John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. That might be what does it for you, but, I mean, uh, Dwayne Johnson gave like, a very emotional response about a family member who was diagnosed with cancer, and he was in the room when she got the news. And so, her reaction, he was like, channeling that. It was very emotional. And then, the other one was, I think, uh, about another family member who had substance abuse issues. And so, it was just this very unique blend of human experiences that he was able to bring to bear. And I, I continue to think that the, the lore and the storytelling that happens outside of a piece of content is as important as the actual content in many cases. This was the same thing with, with art and, uh, and the NFT boom. It's not, the scarcity is important, but-

• 20:33John Coogan?

  The storytelling behind the art piece is a lot of it. Like, people like a Van Gogh because they know about him cutting off his ear and then all this history and he's in all the history books and everyone just knows Van Gogh. And, yes, you could go and recreate.

• 20:45Jordi Hays?

  Even with cars, right? It's, uh, a car is worth more if the prior, if the previous owner had, was significant in some way.

• 20:53John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. A Steve McQueen is gonna, is gonna sell for more. And I think that, that for certain storytelling elements, for certain stories, that lore of like who this person is and their likeness. And then, and then he also makes a really good point that it's like, yes, you can, I mean, you can obviously generate something that looks exactly like a Van Gogh right now. You can paint it with someone who knows exactly how to paint like Van Gogh. It's not gonna have anywhere near the value. And when he gets to the idea of, uh, just AI generating a Dwayne Johnson movie, it's like, well, he'll sue you immediately. And that's very easy. And you've been able to Photoshop Dwayne Johnson into marketing materials for years. And we've had a system for counteracting that. Like, you have to pay licensing fees and that will happen. Uh, so he has a good, he has a good balance.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  And it's, and it's, I don't think it's very likely that it can, it's gonna be able to write anything meaningful. Or, and in particular, that it's gonna be making movies like from whole cloth, like Tilly Norwood. Like, that's bullshit. I don't think that's gonna happen.

• 21:50John Coogan?

  If you pause this, he doesn't think that, like, an iconic, amazing movie is gonna be generated by AI. And I sort of agree with that, but I think it's important to consider, like, what are we defining as a movie? Because we don't really watch movies anymore anyway. People watch content. And if you think about it, like, you know, decades ago, people might see one movie a month, or one movie a week. And that's like, two to eight hours a month of screen time. Well, now people are doing two to eight hours of screen time a day. But, but it's these fragmented pieces. And so if AI seeps into the cracks of, within the cracks, within the cracks, and it's, the goal is not to create the experience of a

• 22:33John Coogan?

  two-hour movie that you show in a theater and you get everyone to come and buy tickets.

• 22:36Jordi Hays?

  Joe Rogan's really turned into Dwar Cash for A-listers. Just come on and talk about AI, right? McConaughey is talking about wanting this like personal LLM.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:48Jordi Hays?

  Where you can log the data in.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, that one was a little bit rougher than this. Think it's not, I think it actually turns out the technology is not progressing in exactly the same way they sort of. Rich Sutton. Presented it. And really what it is, it's gonna be a tool, just like sort of visual effects. And yeah, it needs to have language around it. You need to protect your name and likeness. You can do that. You can watermark it. Your, those laws already exist. You can't, I can't sell your fucking picture for money. I can't. You can sue me, period. I might have the ability to draw you, to make you in a very realistic way, but that's already against the law. Yeah. And the unions are gonna, I think the guilds are gonna manage this where it's like, okay, look, if this is a tool that actually helps us. For example, we don't have to go to the North Pole, right? We can shoot the scene here in our parkas and, you know, whatever it is.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  And, but then make it appear very realistically as if we're in the North Pole. It'll save us a lot of money, a lot of time. We're gonna focus on the performances and not be freezing our ass off out there and running back inside.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  Small chance that AI saves Hollywood as, as a place, right?

• 23:52Speaker 02

  You're getting claps.

• 23:52Jordi Hays?

  As a place.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:53Jordi Hays?

  And the reason for that is, one of the issues right now is filming is so expensive in LA. There's so much red tape. That people have to go to Atlanta, Canada, Europe, whatever, international.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:03Jordi Hays?

  And, but all the, all the talent, the writers, directors, producers, the platforms, they're still here. It's very depressing. It's a bad vibe. All the restaurants are shutting down. Everything's cooked. But if you can start to generate the content here, just on your computer, there's a chance that you see a kind of resurgence uh, in, in Hollywood, the place, right?

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:25Jordi Hays?

  And I think that realistically, that is the strategy that, that the industry should take. Because like having this concentration here, there's already so much talent, keeping it here. And actually embracing AI is much more likely to revitalize the city.

• 24:40John Coogan?

  Ben Affleck on AI software. I suspect many AI native software companies are misrepresenting their growth and quality of revenue. Use of credits, annualizing proof of concept revenue and lack of annual contracts lowers the overall quality of revenue and ultimately the multiple.

• 24:55Jordi Hays?

  I mean, he's not that, I mean, this is a joke. He didn't actually say that, but he's not that far off from what he's actually saying.

• 25:02John Coogan?

  This is a great template. I hope this meme runs way further because it's so good.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  Early AI, the line went up very steeply and it's now sort of leveling off. I think it's because, and yes, it'll get better, but it's going to be really expensive to get better. And a lot of people were like, fuck this, we want ChatGPT four because it turned out like the vast majority of people who use AI are using it to like, as like companion bots to chat with at night. So there's no work, there's no productivity, there's no value to it. I would argue there's also not a lot of social value to getting people to like focus on an AI friend who's, you know, telling you that you're great and listening to everything you say and.

• 25:41John Coogan?

  Let's give Tyler a rebuttal.

• 25:43Jordi Hays?

  Defend AI.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  I think most of these takes are like pretty outdated. Like writing is actually AI writing, you can still tell that it's AI, but it's like, it's good.

• 25:51John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Sell a screenplay then. Sell a screenplay.

• 25:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Shop a screenplay.

• 25:57Jordi Hays?

  Do it.

• 25:57John Coogan?

  Do it. Just prompt it.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  But why would I, why would I sell a screenplay? I could just make the whole movie myself.

• 26:01John Coogan?

  Okay. Just make the movie.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  He has this idea like.

• 26:04John Coogan?

  Just make the finished movie, call on Netflix and get a million dollar advance for your movie.

• 26:08Speaker 03

  Instead of filming in Antarctica, you can just get in the Parkas and film it here, right? You don't need the Parkas either because you can just have them be in normal clothes.

• 26:15John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  And then it's like, well, you don't actually need the people, right? Because you can just maybe fine tune a model so you get consistent characters.

• 26:21John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 26:21Speaker 03

  And then.

• 26:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I will say, I will say just in the last two weeks, I am getting served AI content. That's pretty good.

• 26:29John Coogan?

  Pretty good. There's some pretty good stuff out there.

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  I would, I would push back a little bit on Ben saying like, you're not just going to be able to generate a film.

• 26:35John Coogan?

  You will, but it won't be a film in the sense that it won't be Titanic, it won't be something that everyone goes to the movie theater, sits down, watches the same film. It will be a lot of films that are for different people. I don't think there'll be anything that's

• 26:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I'm just saying like, people are gonna, people are gonna create like insane fanfiction style, hero's journey, kind of standardized plot, but for a specific sub-community, you'll have like one subreddit where everyone has watched it.

• 27:01John Coogan?

  And I mean, there, there is a lot of just slop movie content on streaming platforms right now. You can just go and watch.

• 27:08Jordi Hays?

  Gap year Tyler, put Aflac in the truth zone.

• 27:11Speaker 03

  In, in Hollywood at least, like I like a lot of movies, like there's certain writers that I like.

• 27:16Jordi Hays?

  Okay, you like movies? Wait, you said you like movies? Name every film. Name every film on the TVPN chat best film list.

• 27:24John Coogan?

  Movie list.

• 27:25Speaker 03

  Okay, but you, you always hear about like certain writers, they have a hard time getting their films made because maybe it's like kind of a weird concept or something like it's, it's hard to market. But this is like AI is actually much better for them, right? Cause if you have someone who's like actually has some like unique look at the world or they're like very creative or something like AI is like super good for them, but kind of only for them, right? So maybe in the industry, it's not super great, but for the people like, if there's a certain director that I like really love, they're gonna be, you know, they're gonna be able to make way more of their movies or whatever, you know, instantiate all their ideas.

• 27:55Jordi Hays?

  Chad is calling Tyler based zoomer.

• 27:59John Coogan?

  He's a zoomer. It's good, good times. There's an update to the Elon Musk OpenAI lawsuit, which is sitting at about 60% chance that Elon wins on Kalshi right now on the prediction market. So on the day that the Brockman files went out, started going viral, OpenAI put out a, a, a release, they, they countered some of the narratives, added some more context, but they also sent out a letter to their investors saying, hey, look, we think it's going to be $34 million or something at worst.

• 28:27Jordi Hays?

  We think this is the most, but it could be more.

• 28:30John Coogan?

  It's going to be $134 billion in damages is what Elon is seeking. Musk's legal team argues that his early funding and involvement materially contributed to OpenAI's rise, which is now valued at 500 billion, and he wants a slice. The lawsuit says OpenAI has become a for-profit company entitling Musk to compensation tied to the value created from his early contributions. When asked about the lawsuit, Elon Musk responded, "I've lost a few battles over the years, but I've never lost a war."

• 29:00Jordi Hays?

  So, great line.

• 29:02John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 29:02Jordi Hays?

  But I don't think this lawsuit is the war.

• 29:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 29:06Jordi Hays?

  I think it's a battle in a longer war.

• 29:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 29:09Jordi Hays?

  And I think that it may play a role.

• 29:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 29:14Jordi Hays?

  In how this sort of like war between XAI and OpenAI or Elon versus Sam evolves. But ultimately, like this judge is not going to make, you know, the judge and jury are not going to make a decision that just like decides the war. The war is going to be won by overwhelming domination in the categories that they compete.

• 29:30John Coogan?

  If he gets that, it's like over 25% of the company, something like that.

• 29:34Jordi Hays?

  And that's going to be, and that's going to be hard, again, depending, I'm sure it'll come out how much Sam owns exactly in this, in this, in the case.

• 29:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:43Jordi Hays?

  But it's going to be hard to justify that he deserves more than Sam, given, given their.

• 29:49John Coogan?

  And also just play out what happens if Elon does get all 134 billion. It's like, you're not CEO, you're not, you don't have board control, you don't have super voting shares, but you're a massive shareholder that can just constantly do shareholder lawsuits. And so that's going to be incredibly annoying and very bad. But at the same time, like maybe a distraction, how do you actually get to control if that's what Elon's going for? We will, we will see what the judge thinks of the, and where the damages land if he wins, which is still, you know, not guaranteed by any means. It could, it could wind up being a Fieric victory for Elon. It could be something where he wins the, he wins the battle, but he loses the war in the, in the sense that like, it's a distraction, there's going to be a ton of discovery, it'll

• 30:34John Coogan?

  be, you know, ultimately, even if he gets 100 billion, he's worth 700 billion. It's like, you know, a drop in the bucket. We'll see you tomorrow.

• 30:41Jordi Hays?

  See you tomorrow, folks. Have a great MLK day. Thanks for hanging out.

• 30:45John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 30:46Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.