The Cournot Equation, Micron’s $200B Bet, Hollywood vs. Seedance 2.0 | 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 is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cisco - https://www.cisco.com https://www.cisco.com/ 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 Kalshi - https://kalshi.com https://kalshi.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/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Shopify - https://shopify.com/tbpn 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://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?

  It's the year of the fire horse.

• 0:03Jordi Hays?

  And we get to celebrate it twice. Because I remember we talked about it at the beginning of the year. But the Chinese New Year did not start until today.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  It's Lunar New Year, right? Worshippers burned large incense sticks on Monday outside a temple in Hong Kong to mark the Lunar New Year.

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 0:18John Coogan?

  Which falls on Tuesday. People around Asia celebrate the start of the year of the horse.

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  In the Ultra Dome, it's the year of the horse.

• 0:25John Coogan?

  Perpetual. Every year, I think so. Everyone is talking about the Korno equilibrium, at least Dario, Amodei, and Dwar Kesh Patel are.

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  And you.

• 0:34John Coogan?

  And me, and some folks on the timeline. We're going back and forth and basically trying to get to this question.

• 0:39Jordi Hays?

  I feel like we should give the context on this, on the titling strategy at least. Because we call the run of shit, like, we'll title an essay, "Why is no one talking about the Korno equilibrium?" Because this one guy had this super viral thread like a year or two ago. And the title was, "Why is no one talking about Marc Andreessen?" And we were laughing about it so much because he's one of the most talked about.

• 1:03John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  Investors in venture.

• 1:05John Coogan?

  He's on the Midas list constantly. He's written essays and books.

• 1:09Jordi Hays?

  Everyone's talking about.

• 1:10John Coogan?

  Been viral a million times.

• 1:11Jordi Hays?

  And he's someone that, yeah, he's someone that everyone in the industry has an opinion on already. He's not like a Midas lister.

• 1:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:20Jordi Hays?

  Up there, but not a lot of people. It's like, everyone's talking about it. But in this case.

• 1:24John Coogan?

  The basic idea is that if there's only a few players in a given market, you can think about, you know, any, any specific market, lemonade stands or whatever. And they aren't competing on price, they will compete on supply. And they'll try to predict what their competitors are doing and then respond accordingly. And this is really, really relevant to the AI lab discussion because you can tell that even though all the leaders of the AI labs say, "I don't think about the competition, I don't talk about the competition, I'll use general terms," they're all obsessed with what everyone else is doing and they think about it constantly, very clearly. And if someone's buying 10 billion a compute over here, they're going to counter with eight over there, try and jump to 12. And everyone's sort of keying off of each other. You know, Microsoft pauses, AWS goes all in, there's all these.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  Like horse races. It's why semi-analysis exists and provides great, you know, cross-functional data. Outside of tech, there's this, there's this discussion that I see that's always funny to me where people would be like, the price to earnings ratio.

• 2:23Jordi Hays?

  Brian says they don't want you to talk about.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  They don't want us to talk about it. They don't want us to talk about it for sure. There's this discussion. I saw him say, the price to earnings ratio for OpenAI and Anthropic is just simply too high. And I was like, earnings? These companies are losing money. They don't have a price to earnings ratio. It's divided by zero.

• 2:41Jordi Hays?

  This is gonna blow your mind.

• 2:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's so much worse than you think, right? They're not making any money. The other side of things is the inference factory. So this is essentially a manufacturing business. You have variable costs, so GPUs, power, engineering overhead, and then your revenue is subscriptions, API usage, and enterprise contracts. And so when you just look at inference, you see positive contribution margin. And we can see that because we can compare the cost to inference a model of the GPT-5 class size or the OPUS 4.5 size. You can see, what does it look like to run an open source version of that model on commodity hardware? It's way, way cheaper than what you pay to Anthropic or OpenAI, so they must have good margins.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  And everyone sort of agrees at this point that inference margins are in fact healthy. The question is, how do you balance those two pieces? And when do you risk over-investing? And that's sort of this Kornow game of chicken that everyone's playing. The Kornow equilibrium comes when a small number of labs in oligopoly effectively choose supply at the frontier level, and then the market clears at a high price for frontier access. So choosing supply in this case means how many data centers get built, how many GPUs get ordered, but also how much low-latency capacity is allocated to the top tier. So, you know, right now, they just, OpenAI just did the Cerebrus deal, there's Claude Fast, and there's a whole bunch of different modes

• 4:01John Coogan?

  that will deliver faster inference. And how many of those fast queries you get, how much, how much of the best chips are allocated to a particular tier that you're paying for is an economic question for the labs. There's a ton of developers and knowledge workers who are happy to pay hundreds of dollars a month or more, but they always want the best available model. This is most people in executive roles in startups. Yeah, I got my $200 a month subscription. I'll pay 250 or 100 or whatever, a couple hundred bucks, and it just makes me better at my job. I just do whatever I need to do. But. Don't give me the old thing. I want the best. I want to know that the hallucination rate is as low as possible.

• 4:42Jordi Hays?

  1% of the time, it makes a career-ending mistake. So having a product, not just an API business, gives you leverage because at some point, the models are smart enough where you don't need to train them, you don't need to train a model that is 4% better because people are still coming to your application and having a good product experience, right?

• 5:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 5:03Jordi Hays?

  So historically, one of the critiques to Anthropic's business was that they have to just be on this constant, constant fly, you know, sort of hamster wheel of training the best model because they have an API, the majority of their business is this API business.

• 5:18John Coogan?

  They're not an aggregator yet.

• 5:19Jordi Hays?

  Swap it out for a smarter model.

• 5:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 5:21Jordi Hays?

  That said, they have Claude Code now, which gives them some more leverage over the market.

• 5:26John Coogan?

  And the really interesting thing is that Dario is now talking about being near the end of the exponential or maybe producing like the final models because we, we've talked to a few people about this, but it's very unclear if, if it's possible to create like a super intelligence of like 5,000 IQ. It might just be they get good at all knowledge work and they can answer all tasks, but it's like the digital guy. At that point, it does commoditize and you drop out of Korno equilibrium and you become more, customers are more aggressive about switching to cheaper models to cut costs because the frontier is now commoditized in the entire backlog. Everyone is at the frontier, basically. And so in that scenario, you switch over to Bertrand competition,

• 6:11John Coogan?

  which doesn't really mean that profits go to zero, but there is more competition. And it looks a lot more like the hyperscaler cloud market, which is, I think, what people have been sort of signaling towards. And also, it sort of explains why a lot of the VU C firms are getting in multiple companies because they don't think it's going to be winner-take-all anymore. They think it's going to be much more oligopolistic for the long term and there will be competition between the major three or four labs. And it will be much more about how can you marshal enough supply, create a huge barrier to entry. Like you and I could start a native US competitor tomorrow, but it's going to be extremely expensive to bring up. Data centers that just serve web apps everywhere, let alone AI stuff, right? Building all those data centers. You're thinking what I'm thinking? You're thinking, you're thinking AWS contender? People are saying, when does T P P have a product?

• 6:56Jordi Hays?

  I was hanging with my buddy, my buddy Ben on Sunday. We both live in Malibu. He was thinking of just getting some chips and setting up Malibu inference.

• 7:05John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 7:05Jordi Hays?

  Just, just the name alone. Sounds like you could get at least, at least one.

• 7:11John Coogan?

  Malibu inference. It's really funny.

• 7:14Jordi Hays?

  Would, would it be a beautiful name for, for a new cloud?

• 7:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's play the clip of Dwar Keshe Patel and Dari Omadeh discussing the economics of AI labs.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Like we have a, you know, let's just imagine we're, we're in like an economics textbook. We have a small number of firms. Each can invest a limited amount in, or like each can invest some fraction, fraction in R and D. They have some marginal cost to serve. The margins on that, the gross profit margins on that marginal cost are like very high because, because, because inference is efficient. There's some competition, but the models are also differentiated. There's some, there's some, um, you know, companies will compete to push their research budgets up. But like, because there's a small number of players, you know, we have the, what is it called? The Cornell equilibrium, I think is what the, what the small number of firm equilibrium is.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  The point is it doesn't equilibrate to perfect competition with, with, with, with, with, with zero margins. If there's like three firms, if there's three firms in the economy, all are kind of independently behaving, behaving rationally. It doesn't equilibrate to zero. Help me understand that because right now we do have three leading firms and they're not making profit. And so what, what?

• 8:31John Coogan?

  That's a good question.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. What, what is changing? Yeah. So the, the, again, the gross margins right now are very positive. What's happening, what, what's happening is a combination of two things. One is we're still in the exponential scale up phase of compute. Yeah. So what, basically what that means is we're training, like a model gets trained. Yeah. It costs, you know, let's say a model got trained that costs. A billion dollars last year. And then this year it produced four billion dollars of revenue and cost one billion dollars to to to inference from. So, you know, again, I'm using stylized number here, but you know, there'll be seventy five percent.

• 9:15John Coogan?

  These aren't my numbers. I'm just picking random numbers.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  Gross gross margins and you know, this this twenty five percent tax. So that model as a whole makes two billion dollars. But at the same time, we're spending ten billion dollars to train the next model because there's an exponential scale up. And so the company loses money. Each model makes money, but the company loses money. The equilibrium I'm talking about is an equilibrium where we have the country of geniuses. We have the country of geniuses in a data center, but that that model training scale up has equilibrated more. Maybe maybe it's still it's still going up. We're still trying to predict the demand, but it's more it's more leveled out.

• 9:55John Coogan?

  There is another fun clip that we should watch from A Beautiful Mind. Jordy, have you seen A Beautiful Mind?

• 10:01Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 10:01John Coogan?

  It won the Oscar for Best Picture, I believe. It's about the mathematician John Nash. Have you seen A Beautiful Mind?

• 10:08Jordi Hays?

  I've not.

• 10:08John Coogan?

  Wow. Unc. Status over there.

• 10:11Jordi Hays?

  You would have you would have. I was I was walking on the beach with Senra.

• 10:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:16Jordi Hays?

  And we walked by an incredibly famous, one of the top movie directors of the last probably ten years.

• 10:24John Coogan?

  Wait, really?

• 10:24Jordi Hays?

  And Senra was like, do you see that? And I was like, see what? It's a guy with a dog.

• 10:28John Coogan?

  That's hilarious. I feel like that your beach tours have been really star studded lately. This is different from the previous one you mentioned, correct?

• 10:38Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 10:39Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 10:39John Coogan?

  That's remarkable. Well, let's pull up the clip.

• 10:46John Coogan?

  It's from A Beautiful Mind.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  Nash, you might want to stop shuffling your papers for five seconds.

• 10:52Jordi Hays?

  Is that Eric Climon?

• 10:56John Coogan?

  Yes, it's Eric Glennon. In the, in the ramp biopic, we got, we got, we got our cast right here.

• 11:04John Coogan?

  This is the original, like, looks maxi movie.

• 11:09Speaker 04

  Will she want a large wedding, you think?

• 11:11Speaker 03

  Should we say swords, gentlemen? Pistols at dawn.

• 11:13Speaker 05

  Have you remembered nothing? Recall the lessons of Adam Smith, the father of modern economics.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  In, uh, in competition, individual ambition serves the common good. Exactly. It remained for himself, gentlemen. And then those who strike out are stuck with their friends.

• 11:29Speaker 05

  I'm not gonna strike out.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  You can lead a blonde to water, but you can't make her drink.

• 11:33Speaker 05

  I don't think you said that.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  Alright, nobody move. She's looking over at him.

• 11:36Speaker 04

  Right, she's looking at Nash.

• 11:38Speaker 05

  Oh god. Alright, he may have the upper hand now, but wait until he opens his mouth.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  I guess that was in the history books.

• 11:52John Coogan?

  I think this, this is very, very stylized and completely apocryphal. Like, he definitely thought of this theory, but, uh, not at a bar.

• 12:04Speaker 05

  We block each other. Not a single one of us is gonna get her. So then we go for her friends.

• 12:13Speaker 05

  But they will all give us the cold shoulder because nobody likes to be second choice. What if no one goes for the blonde?

• 12:22Speaker 05

  We don't get in each other's way, and we don't insult the other girls.

• 12:27Speaker 05

  That's the only way we win.

• 12:31Speaker 05

  That's the only way we all get laid.

• 12:36John Coogan?

  So he's describing the prisoner's dilemma.

• 12:39Speaker 05

  Adam Smith said.

• 12:40John Coogan?

  Where everyone must work together.

• 12:41Speaker 05

  Best result comes from everyone in the group doing what's best for himself, right? That's what he said, right? Incomplete, incomplete.

• 12:48John Coogan?

  Incomplete, incomplete.

• 12:50Speaker 05

  Because the best result would come from everyone in the group doing what's best for himself. And the group.

• 12:59Speaker 04

  Nash, this is some way for you to get the blonde on your own. You can go to hell.

• 13:02Speaker 03

  Governing dynamics, gentlemen. Governing dynamics. Adam Smith.

• 13:07Speaker 03

  He's wrong.

• 13:14Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 13:16John Coogan?

  Anyway, very fun.

• 13:17Jordi Hays?

  Dave says, "Just joined the stream. We watching a movie."

• 13:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, lots of game theory going on in the AI wars right now. Everyone's trying to figure out how far to push it. There's a fair amount of risk. There's still the Korno game of chicken around who will invest the most in advancing the frontier. But the end state looks a lot more durable than pure model commoditization and the perfectly competitive situation that many were predicting a few years ago.

• 13:42Jordi Hays?

  Puko Capital says, "I thought Dorkesh had a good point that software engineering is the only job where the full context needed to do the job is available to an AI agent via the codebase. And I didn't think Dari had a good answer for why automating other jobs will be as easy." This got a bunch of, a lot of people kind of reacting, kind of disagreeing generally that all of the full context needed to do the job is available. But I do think something we need to figure out.

• 14:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were debating this because there was a post that was just sort of like a Wojak reaction that was just making fun of this. And it wasn't clear if they were saying that, like, that they were agreeing or disagreeing. But basically, my take was, well, it's possible that a lot of the, you know, the full context needed to do the job of a lot of different white collar jobs is in fact logged. It's just logged in the final product, which is like a deck or spreadsheet or a decision, and then a whole bunch of emails, a whole bunch of slacks, and then a whole bunch of Zoom calls that's recorded. And so, yes, if you're running a business where a lot of work gets done in smoky bars

• 14:49John Coogan?

  late at night and, you know, back alley deal making, sure, that's going to be harder to automate. But in the world where it's someone sitting in front of a computer and there's a screen recorder running, like, you should be able to pull up most of the context. At the same time, you can't just snap your fingers and go back and get every decision that was made in the 80s that allowed Coca-Cola to become a dominant soda maker. But you can with Linux. You literally can with Linux.

• 15:16Jordi Hays?

  If you get people on calls just being like, knowing the call's being recorded and used to train something to replace them, they're just like, "I'll tell you offline."

• 15:24Jordi Hays?

  I'm not speaking this secret.

• 15:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, golf this weekend?

• 15:28Jordi Hays?

  Debate around the posture.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:32Jordi Hays?

  Drakesh, his posture was absolutely excellent.

• 15:35John Coogan?

  He looks fantastic. And I love this sweater. The crew deck works really well. The pushed up sleeves is a particular choice. Didn't translate into that Chad Wojcicki, but he looks fantastic here. Lot of fun on the timeline, looking at the looks mogging or whatever, the looks maxing. I don't even know. I can't frame mogging.

• 15:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. He kept bringing up the example of a video editor.

• 16:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  Saying, yeah, but when will the models be good enough to edit videos well?

• 16:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:10Jordi Hays?

  Pick out moments?

• 16:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:11Jordi Hays?

  And give me two years and another 500 billion.

• 16:15Jordi Hays?

  We've tried every tool there is. They can't do it yet.

• 16:18John Coogan?

  Crikey, I don't know. I don't know what's.

• 16:21Jordi Hays?

  And it's not even that we're not trying the tools to replace the people on our team. We're trying to make them have higher output.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  One interesting thing is that the, there isn't, there aren't a lot of open source, like premiere profiles. Like I've edited a ton of videos for YouTube. There's a whole bunch of cuts in there. What I cut out, what I didn't, you could have that record, but it's not stored in GitHub. Like it's just, you can't necessarily train on it. You can train on the final product and understand, but you don't understand what actually got left on the cutting room floor. There's this whole concept of like, kill your darlings. Like when you're in the edit, like you need to be cutting more. You're like, I like that shot. So cinematic, so cool, but does it actually advance the story? No, so you cut it down. I was watching The Matrix this weekend and there's this amazing shot of when Neo and Morpheus are going to visit the Oracle.

• 17:13John Coogan?

  And they reach for the doorknob and the doorknob has this perfect reflection. And the reflection shows Neo and Morpheus. And they had to do this crazy VFX shot to hide the camera in what looks like Morpheus's coat. Because if you point a camera at a mirror, you see the camera. And you don't want to see the cameraman there. That ruins the shot. And so they did all this crazy stuff to like, to like, you know, cover up the camera. And I'd seen the behind the scenes and been like, wow, that's really impressive. And in my memory, I thought it was like, oh, it's such an important shot. They probably lingered on that for like, five seconds to really let it sink in. Like, they're pulling a trick on the audience. It's beautiful. It's like half a second. And they did all this work. And then they knew that like, from a storytelling perspective, you don't want to hang out and watch a picture of a doorknob for five seconds.

• 17:57John Coogan?

  And so, all these decisions, like, they sort of get chronicled, but they don't get neatly organized in the way that a GitHub log does with pull request discussions and what happens. So, it'll be, it'll be difficult. So maybe two years and another five billion dollars does it. But it's coming, so we'll, we'll keep monitoring it.

• 18:14Jordi Hays?

  Andrew Reid says, "Horses don't stop, they keep going."

• 18:18John Coogan?

  Wait, did he actually say that?

• 18:19Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 18:19John Coogan?

  No way.

• 18:20Jordi Hays?

  Yes, in response to 2026 being the year of the horse.

• 18:24John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 18:25Jordi Hays?

  One of the greatest lyrics of all time.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  Originally, to explain the joke, it's a Young Thug song. And the actual lyric is, "Hustlers don't stop, they keep going." But it sounds like horses. And so people put, "Horses don't stop, they keep going." And they show the AI-generated image of the horse bench pressing. And it's incredibly inspiring.

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of Young Thug songs that are hard to decipher.

• 18:50John Coogan?

  100%.

• 18:51Jordi Hays?

  Let's hit the size gong for this Pennsylvania Girl Scout. Six years old, breaks record selling 87,000 boxes of cookies. She's unstoppable.

• 19:03John Coogan?

  Unstoppable. Wait, how much is that? What's the ARR?

• 19:06Jordi Hays?

  Estimating that it's somewhere around $600,000 of sales.

• 19:11John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 19:11Jordi Hays?

  At only six years old. Really incredible stuff. Heartwarming.

• 19:14John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 19:15Jordi Hays?

  India's Adani Group to invest $100 billion in AI infrastructure.

• 19:19John Coogan?

  We gotta hit the gong again.

• 19:20Jordi Hays?

  Hit it again. The Indian conglomerate's investment may boost the country's ambitions to become an AI power. India's Andoni Group, an energy and logistics giant, said it would invest $100 billion to develop large-scale data centers by 2035, the largest such commitment in India so far. Tyler, what do you think about the timing here? Is this gonna be too late? Are the clankers gonna, like, is 2035? How are we looking there? Is that post-singularity? Yeah, I'm very bullish on the clankers coming pretty early, so, you know, time will tell, I guess. I'll see. I cannot wait to pull up this clip.

• 19:54John Coogan?

  It is, it is a big number that I feel like a lot of countries have been teasing big numbers, but this is like-

• 20:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're kind of mugging Micron.

• 20:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is like a really big number. You see a bunch of like multi-billion dollar deals, multi-billion dollar releases, but this is like a serious, serious, uh, serious investment. So, you know, good, good news.

• 20:17Jordi Hays?

  Micron is spending 200 billion. So congratulations for saying the biggest number, Micron. Micron is spending 200 billion to break the AI memory bottleneck. For decades, memory chips were low-margin commodity products. Now the industry can't make enough to satisfy data centers' hunger.

• 20:34John Coogan?

  Just like, this one company is like, yeah, we're gonna spend twice as much as India.

• 20:40Jordi Hays?

  Micron Technology is the largest American maker of memory chips, the tiny slices of silicon that store and transfer data and help power everything from smartphones and car computers to laptops and data centers. Micron is rushing to add manufacturing capacity to avert the biggest supply crunch the memory industry has seen in more than 40 years.

• 20:56John Coogan?

  Did you hear that the PS6, the PlayStation 6, is now delayed because of memory shortages? 2029, pretty, pretty big delay to 2029. They really don't refresh-

• 21:09Jordi Hays?

  You just created a trillion gamer. No, seriously, I think adding insult to injury-

• 21:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:17Jordi Hays?

  To-

• 21:18John Coogan?

  The gamers might actually be-

• 21:19Jordi Hays?

  Rise up.

• 21:20John Coogan?

  Gamers might rise up. They might be an important voting bloc. A lot of them are- A lot of them are of age to vote and a lot of them would rather have new gaming hardware than, you know, necessarily AI slop in the feed. They're like, yeah, I can't afford the new PC that I wanted. What do you think?

• 21:37Speaker 06

  I don't know. I mean, I feel like this says a lot about how good the PS5 is, right? Because they can like afford to just like postpone the PSX. Like what games?

• 21:45Jordi Hays?

  Oh, now you don't want technological progress?

• 21:47John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 21:48Speaker 06

  I want it to go to the data centers. I don't care about like the next game graphics have like, have they gotten that much better in the past like five years? Like, yeah, maybe, but it's like, for the actual gameplay, is it that important if like the actual pixels are?

• 21:59John Coogan?

  Realistically, a lot of this stuff should be moving to the cloud soon if it's not already. And then if you're running in the cloud, you can upgrade the hardware. And in theory, you should be able to run like a gen AI up ressing pass to make it more photoreal. And I feel like that's going to be where more of the juice is squeezed out of the graphics than just continuing on the traditional path of like more pixels, more ray tracing. It'll be make a really beautifully, you know, designed video game that works really well, really tight deterministic interactions. So it's satisfying and then give it a layer.

• 22:36Jordi Hays?

  We gotta have like a ram trader on the show, like really somebody that's in the thick of, of deal making in this space. Moving on, Lucas Shaw was on a tear over the weekend reporting on the Warner Brothers Paramount conversations. He says this morning Warner Brothers is going to resume talks with Paramount after two months of rejecting them playing mind games. The company still says it's committed to Netflix, but needs to find out just how much the Ellison's will offer. He originally reported on this Sunday, but it's being confirmed today. Again, we kind of knew this was going to happen if the Ellison's had been saying, we're making it, we're giving you a big number, but it's not our biggest number. It's not our best and final.

• 23:22Jordi Hays?

  So no surprise here.

• 23:23John Coogan?

  Let's flip over to Claude Bot. Kent Dodd says, "Name's the thing Claude Bot." Claude asks for a rename, renames to OpenAI, buys it. Legendary, legendary couple of weeks. No confirmation on buying. It's an open source project. They're keeping it open source. There's a whole bunch of different.

• 23:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Dave, Dave Moran, I remember reading, is gonna step in to, I believe, run the foundation that will, that will kind of steward the open source project. And then Peter's obviously joining OpenAI. "I'll take this day off to figure out this whole OpenClaw thing every entrepreneur on President's Day weekend." We've talked about this on the show before. Long weekends are really good for AI progress and AI diffusion.

• 24:11John Coogan?

  Petition for three day weekends to speed up AGI timelines. Probably would work, for sure. Fumblegate, fumblegate. Did Anthropic fumble OpenClaw?

• 24:21Jordi Hays?

  Will Brown says, "Honestly crazy that OpenClaw sold for 1 billion." Like, he's really the first solo $5 billion founder. "Time will tell if it's worth 15 billion that OpenAI spent on the acquisition, but it's pretty wild that you can just vibe code an open source project and make 40 billion in a couple of months now."

• 24:39John Coogan?

  It really, really nails it, because everyone jumped immediately to a billion, immediately.

• 24:44Jordi Hays?

  Off of nothing.

• 24:45John Coogan?

  Off of nothing, off of like, one rumor. It's very, very funny. Who knows? Alex Cohen breaks it down for Gen Z, if you're wondering what happened today. Claude was mugging OpenAI for weeks, then this gym cell dev ships Claude Bot, which was the fastest growing open source thing ever. Absolute looks max for the whole ecosystem. Anthropic tries to dairigoon him with legal. Dev renames to OpenClaw. OpenAI slides in like a void pulling Chad with acquisition interest. OpenClaw gets acquired by OpenAI. Now Anthropic is getting jester gooned by the entire timeline and OpenAI is giga maxing off their fumble. Anthropic could have just let them cook him, cook. Instead, they went full Moid and got outframed by the jester maxers at OpenAI. The looks max lingo is really, it feels...

• 25:31John Coogan?

  Like hilarious, I do wonder the half-life. I feel like it's

• 25:35Jordi Hays?

  I think it's over.

• 25:35John Coogan?

  It's gotta be, it's gotta be towards the end in this boom, but the rise of, of the, of the kick streamers is certainly the story of the year. Certainly the story of the year.

• 25:46Jordi Hays?

  What did Claude do?

• 25:48John Coogan?

  What did Claude do?

• 25:49Jordi Hays?

  Pentagon has said that Anthropic will pay a price. There was reporting last week that Claude was leveraged in some way during the Maduro planning, the planning of the Maduro

• 26:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 26:01Jordi Hays?

  Raid. I was imagining in my head Dario as Walter White, you know, in the SUV, just being like

• 26:09John Coogan?

  No.

• 26:10Jordi Hays?

  Watching, watching the logs and seeing Pete Hegseth running a deep research report on Maduro.

• 26:15John Coogan?

  Who is?

• 26:16Jordi Hays?

  Who is Nicholas Maduro? He's just like, no!

• 26:20John Coogan?

  No, don't do it.

• 26:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very, very unclear how, how it was used, but a lot of pushback. SAG-AFTRA

• 26:30John Coogan?

  What happened?

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  Put out a statement on Seedance 2.0 and

• 26:36John Coogan?

  It's not a comment, it's a statement.

• 26:37Jordi Hays?

  The Chinese, yeah, no, the Chinese are, have been quivering in fear ever since

• 26:43John Coogan?

  Oh no.

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  SAG came after them.

• 26:45John Coogan?

  What'd they say?

• 26:45Jordi Hays?

  SAG stands with the studios in condemning the blatant infringement enabled by ByteDance's new AI video model, Seedance 2.0. The infringement includes the unauthorized use of our members' voice and likenesses. This is unacceptable and undercuts the ability of human talent to earn a livelihood. It is kind of interesting that just in this statement, they're admitting to saying like, it's so good, you're gonna make it impossible for our members to earn a living. Which doesn't actually

• 27:11John Coogan?

  It says undercuts.

• 27:13Jordi Hays?

  Undercuts.

• 27:14John Coogan?

  It didn't say eliminates.

• 27:15Jordi Hays?

  Seedance 2.0 disregards law, ethics, industry standards, and basic principles of consent.

• 27:20John Coogan?

  Hit that boom. AI development demands responsibility that is non-existent here. Completely correct. Some of the Seedance videos are insanely infringing. It's just like, wow, it's Larry David. Beginning of the end, so's growing, so's growing Daniel.

• 27:36Jordi Hays?

  Disney, as expected, sent a cease and desist letter to ByteDance over Seedance 2.0. I wonder

• 27:44John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 27:44Jordi Hays?

  I wonder how ByteDance will actually react to this pushback. Obviously, they expected it.

• 27:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:49Jordi Hays?

  They know that they're not abiding by a number of different US laws. Whether or not they care is another thing.

• 27:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:57Jordi Hays?

  Like if you, if you make an AI version of Andrew Huberman and you get in a fresh ad account, you can probably start spending money before the Huberman Lab team finds out what you're doing.

• 28:08John Coogan?

  I would disagree. I think Rob's on top of it. I think he's goaded. So, but anyone else, any other team would be cooked.

• 28:14Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I mean, he might respond faster than, than, than the others, but this is certainly happening. So this is interesting. If, if you're already like an A-list massive superstar, I think you see some stuff like this and you're actually like, great, I'm going to be able to shoot a movie in a week from LA. I'm not going to have to travel to these insane exotic locations and spend a week in the desert filming all these clips. So if you're like a Timothy Chalamet, this is maybe like, yes, you're worried for the overall industry, but at the same time, you're thinking, okay, my name and likeness is now infinitely scalable. I can still like restrict the supply to some degree, right? I'm not

• 28:56Jordi Hays?

  going to tell any, any movie studio, hey, you can make a movie with me, whatever. You're still going to kind of restrict it. The question becomes new, new talent that's emerging, trying to build their brand. At what point do studios say, we're just going to make a character, we're going to make a new actor out of thin air, place him across different movies, build them up over time. You could imagine, I don't think a company like CAA would do this because all their talent would be like, what are you doing? Like you're, you're taking our job. But I could imagine a group trying to make like a little Michaela style actor that you build up over time.

• 29:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 29:33Jordi Hays?

  One thing that we'll find out is how much does the actual actor's real life matter in the context of their career? Like if Timothy Chalamet is dating Kylie Jenner, does that like increase his appeal on the big screen?

• 29:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:50Jordi Hays?

  And I would say yes, probably, right? There's so much fixation on the lives of all this talent. I can't wait for tomorrow.

• 29:56John Coogan?

  And two tomorrow at 11 AM sharp, Pacific.