AI Video Levels Up, Amazon Blocks Muse, Paramount Stays in CA | 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 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.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  How many days till Christmas? TBN's Road to Christmas started weeks ago. We got 94 days until Christmas.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  Double digits.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  We're so close. Every day, one day closer to Christmas. So get excited, start shopping for presents, start picking out that Christmas tree. How was your weekend?

• 0:20Jordi Hays?

  It was, couldn't have been better.

• 0:22John Coogan?

  It was good. We were off on Friday. We went to Boston and back basically the same day. Sort of a brutal flight back and forth, a little tired.

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  Terrific.

• 0:30John Coogan?

  But I got completely one-shotted by the new AI video model. C-Dance 2.5. Gone are the days of face swaps. I remember when Dreambooth, this paper came out from Google and it allowed you to very realistically swap your face into a photo. Now, this is something you can just do with a single prompt today, but back then you had to go and take 10 or 20 different photos of yourself at different angles, different lighting, usually just dug through your camera roll, got them. Then you had to feed that into like a Python script that was either hosted on Colab. And then the Colab thing was weird because it was a luck of the draw what GPU you got. So you would like sign up and create an instance.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  And then sometimes it would just be like, you got a 1080 Ti. And you'd be like, bah, like I can't do what I need to do because I need a lot of memory to do a particular thing. And then sometimes it would be like, you got an A100, brother, like lock in. Like it was just random provisioning and people would be like so excited when they got one or the other. But there was this musician who was like a guitarist who implemented the paper and then, and then basically distilled it down and figured out how to run. This is a crazy thing, but this guy who was just like a hobbyist machine learning engineer, figured out how to get Dreambooth running on like basically commodity gaming hardware. So then you could go and you could take your face, fine tune it, and then be able to generate new photos in the style of whatever.

• 1:56John Coogan?

  It was all built on that open source one, not Midjourney. The other image generator, Ahmad Mastak was.

• 2:03Jordi Hays?

  Stable Diffusion.

• 2:04John Coogan?

  Stable Diffusion. It was like Stable Diffusion as the base and then this Dreambooth thing on top. And it was super cool because if you actually went through, if you jumped through all those hoops, you basically had access to the magic avatar thing like three months before everyone else. And you could like send one to a friend and be like, oh, this is cool. And then it was just completely commodified. It became an app and then it just became available in every chat app very shortly after. But the AI video has been moving a lot slower. It's very compute intensive, obviously, since opening, I had to shut down Sora. And it just feels like none of the major American labs are as focused on this. So I got completely addicted to this, had a lot of fun doing it. I'll walk through everything that we did. You no longer need to go get a different app or sign up for anything.

• 2:48John Coogan?

  Like I was just texting with Codex remotely. I had a PC that was running this and then I would just be like, I didn't even say, take this video. I would just say like, go find some videos and put Jordy in them. And it would just do that. And I didn't even have to like upload photos of you. I would just say like, go find some reference photography for Jordy across the internet.

• 3:08Jordi Hays?

  And so far, it seems to have made a lot of sense not to focus on video. Given that Codex and Claude can connect into all these other tools and models and just give you what you want as a user without incurring any of the cost of focusing to make great models or the actual cost of serving them and having to allocate GPUs.

• 3:28John Coogan?

  I think people will be having fun. Oh, speaking of Codex, let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, creating some of the videos I will show you shortly, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. So the latest turn of AI video models, like they're really, really good. Not just for the high fidelity stuff, which we'll show you some of, but even going back to like 90s VHS footage, it can edit anything and it doesn't look weird 90% of the time. C-Dance 2.5. The big update here is that it replaces the whole person, the whole object as opposed to just a face swap. It just hits way harder, you'll see. And it matches all the subtle details of the footage. So things integrate really nicely.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  Dylan Patel posted a video of him as Drake in this Cheetah Print video over the weekend. And I think a lot of people fell for this.

• 4:19Jordi Hays?

  It tricked everyone.

• 4:20John Coogan?

  I think it tricked a lot of people because it's super high fidelity. Let's play Semi Analysis latest post on X. Dylan Patel as Drake. And what's interesting about this is the video model is really good, but also this Drake video came out a day ago. And so it's not, it hasn't saturated the internet. Like a lot of people.

• 4:40Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people hadn't seen it.

• 4:41John Coogan?

  This is the first, yeah. I saw this video before I saw the actual Drake music video. And of course, the choreography is fantastic in the underlying video and that drives the motion. He's using AI, he's using C-Dance 2.5. Higgs Field wrapped C-Dance 2.5 in, in a model that sort of a harness that sort of makes this a little bit easier. You can use that via the API. It's also available on Fall and there's a couple of other ways to interface with it. But it's interesting because it's, it's highly compute intensive. China's obviously way behind on compute. So what's going on with the strategy? But before we get to that, it's really fun. So we got to play some of the more videos that we made. So I had Codex finding famous or funny videos to use as base clips. I would just say, I started with the rap videos, did a couple of those.

• 5:26John Coogan?

  I think there's one maybe in the timeline.

• 5:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Noah in the X chat says, no headphones, obviously fake.

• 5:31John Coogan?

  Oh, true. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, this one, because I saw this originally with Elon Musk and Sam Altman rapping. And I think.

• 5:40Jordi Hays?

  Muted just because of swearing.

• 5:42John Coogan?

  But what's interesting here is that it does a pretty good job of getting us, but there's moments when I sort of blend into Elon Musk, which is funny because it's not like it's originally an Elon video, but clearly the underlying video that was driving the AI model was the Elon and Sam version. And then our heights kind of changed, like I look a little bit more like Elon there. But also then I was able to just say like, okay, go make a bunch of tech videos, like just find iconic videos from tech. And it did it and it found like Sweet Baby Ray's. I didn't tell it to go get that video, but it just did it, which was very cool. Some of them came out really well, some of them didn't do too well. The one that I liked, I think the most.

• 6:25Jordi Hays?

  And it's a funny dynamic that we noticed where when you're looking at an AI video of yourself, you're thinking, that doesn't look like me. And then when other people look, watch it, they're like, wow, that looks exactly like Jordy.

• 6:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. So let's watch Jordy introduce the MacBook Air as Steve Jobs. I don't think, actually, Apple kind of bans everything. So we'll see, we'll see if this one gets flagged, but we might be, we might be cooked on this, on this particular one. But let's play. I said video is solved.

• 6:50Jordi Hays?

  Roll the dice.

• 6:51John Coogan?

  The post, yeah, let's roll the dice on this one. Boom. So it didn't change the voice. So you still hear Steve Jobs' voice, which is also funny about the Dylan Patel thing because it's Drake's voice. So it's like, what did they think happened? He's like lip syncing to it or something? That didn't make any sense. But what's really cool about this is that it changes Jordy, the small Jordy and the big Jordy. It changes both of them in the same frame. And then even there, you only see a little bit of Steve Jobs' mouth and it was able to change that to Jordy. So it can represent what's going on outside of the frame. And historically, that's been very difficult for AI models. They want the face in the center of the frame. They want to be able to crop it and think reasonably, reasonably about it, but it did a good job there.

• 7:34John Coogan?

  Jordy as Jensen taking the GPUs out of the oven.

• 7:39Jordi Hays?

  Added some mass for this one.

• 7:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's very funny when you, when, when you use a different person with a different stature, different musculature, very funny clip, iconic when Jensen announced. Was this, is that H100 announcement, the A100 announcement? It was pretty early, but.

• 7:58John Coogan?

  This is still such a funny gag that Jensen actually did this. I love it.

• 8:05John Coogan?

  He's really grunting. I mean, that's a heavy rack.

• 8:12John Coogan?

  Such a funny bit that he just did this in a kitchen. It's so good. I got something I gotta show you. Jensen's such a, such a master performer. We saw that on stage at Salesforce, Agent Force last, last week. Funny.

• 8:49John Coogan?

  It really got like the level of sweat on your face, pretty correct? But the face is jumping around. Not, not quite, not quite dialed. I think you'll have to perform that one IRL. Some productions will use this where it helps in urgent scenarios. I think some of the stuff is already actually being used in Hollywood, specifically for reshoots. About 10 years ago, Henry Cavill was in, was, was in Superman and he left Superman, they rap production. He went to film Mission Impossible. In Mission Impossible, he has a mustache. So he grew out a real mustache, was filming Mission Impossible. And they were like, we didn't get the shot for Superman. You gotta come back and film another scene as Superman. And he was like, I can't shave my mustache.

• 9:33John Coogan?

  And they were like, okay, we'll fix it in post. And in the newsletter, there's a photo here that we can pull up of how it came away because they had to remove and reconstruct his lip and his mouth using 2017 technology. And it was not good. It was very, very rough, probably very tedious, very expensive.

• 9:51Jordi Hays?

  Isn't the mustache like the easiest thing to apply?

• 9:54John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, like fake? Like you should have just shaved it and then put on a fake mustache?

• 9:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:59John Coogan?

  I don't know. I think Mission Impossible, they wanted the real thing. But the Superman on the right is Henry Cavill with a mustache that has been removed in post and it was, yeah, widely, widely critiqued by the VFX community. So you can imagine for stuff like that, this, these tools will creep in very quickly. For most things, it's going to be, okay, well, if you needed someone to drive the video, why don't you just have the actor do that? Maybe for stunts and stuff, you'd do it, but for most performances, I think you'll still be doing it. The old way at least for the time being.

• 10:30Jordi Hays?

  What about some of the other more action oriented?

• 10:33John Coogan?

  Yes. So this was a fun one. I had to go and pull Johnny Knoxville and Steve-O clips throughout the, throughout their filmmaking and TV.

• 10:42Jordi Hays?

  Generational run.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  Their, yeah, their entire run. Make about 20 of them and then put it together into a trailer that we can watch now. And I really enjoyed this. We gotta do that in the office. I think Tyler was thinking about getting that.

• 11:07John Coogan?

  This one, this one didn't seem that bad to me, but Nick said this was terrifying getting in a cactus. I don't know. I've never really been poked by a cactus. The hands on the bikes. I don't know how the guy on the left wins. Of course, a lot of stevo in that one. A lot of stevo here, too.

• 11:25John Coogan?

  But I think these work so well because a lot of the underlying footage looks like AI. It looked like this. This looks like an AI prompt, like, like drive a jet ski in a pool, in a luxury house, you know?

• 11:39Jordi Hays?

  This is real, though. This is real. We actually shot this.

• 11:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is real. No, the only thing that's different about this is the suits. We replaced the characters. But the underlying footage is all real from Johnny Knoxville and crew. The fire hose rodeo. This one, that looks fun.

• 12:02Jordi Hays?

  The old alligator in the house?

• 12:04John Coogan?

  The old alligator in the house trick. I think they chilled that guy down, so he was real slow.

• 12:12John Coogan?

  And then the bull run. But a very impressive demo because it's able to replace multiple people and, and do it very consistently, even through like some really aggressive motion. So I thought that was pretty cool. So the, the, the whole pipeline here was I was running Codex on my PC, interacting with that from my phone, the ChatGPT app. And then I had Codex go and generate reference images with just ChatGPT images, because it's pretty good at that, and then use those to swap through Seadance, which was, uh, which was actually rendered via Higgs field. Higgs field, uh, amazing in terms of just delivering the assets like as an API. Extremely confusing as a product because they basically have two ways to give them money.

• 12:55John Coogan?

  You can load up API credits and then you can like buy a plan. And so at one point I ran out of API credits and it was like time to upgrade to the plan. And I was like, okay, cool. I'm having a good time. I'll do more of this. Click the button like, okay, yeah, you loaded up a couple hundred bucks in here with like the ultimate plan or whatever. And then it's like, those credits are not available in the API. And I was like, great, thanks. And then, and then it was like, okay, time to add some credits to your plan. And I was like, okay, this is what I need to do. I add credits to the plan. It's like, those credits are on your plan. Those aren't API credits. Those are plan credits. And so I have like so much random money stuck in various pieces of Higgs field.

• 13:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, and I think that's been a massive complaint. Uh, the Higgs field has faced a bunch of, I think, various allegations over the last year.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  I mean, the website looks like a gambling company. It'll be like countdown 10 minutes to claim 75% discount on your next credit. It's like, it's totally optimized for like brain rot as you go through the flow being like, oh, buy, you gotta buy.

• 13:56Jordi Hays?

  I, I had seen stuff of like not being able to actually cancel your plans. And now that you have a plan that you can't use for anything, it's over for you.

• 14:02John Coogan?

  It's over for me.

• 14:03Jordi Hays?

  It's over. You're a customer for life.

• 14:04John Coogan?

  My question's about Seadance 2.5. I was like, how is China winning? They have one fifth the compute, one.

• 14:11Jordi Hays?

  No rules.

• 14:13John Coogan?

  Is it that simple? And then also, why aren't they open sourcing? They love open sourcing everything. They're like, we love open sourcing, except when we're on the frontier.

• 14:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  And there's a weird dynamic there. So first off, did some digging, got some answers. Let's dig into it. At a high level, intellectual property rules are somewhat flexible over there. That's true. But the models are insanely compute intensive. Like it is, even if you're like, I don't care about Hollywood IP, come sue me in China. Good luck. There's still a finite amount of compute. And so why aren't you on the RSI trajectory? Why aren't you working on coding models? Like, why don't you just take that compute and put it on the next GLM run or the next Kimmy run, right? Well, there are reasons for that. First is that ByteDance has a more natural flywheel here than the leaders in America.

• 15:04John Coogan?

  So Anthropic and OpenAI do not have good surfaces to deliver video, AI or not video. Like OpenAI tried with Sora, got a decent amount of people to use it. But it's, but it was not the obvious flywheel that ByteDance has. And so over in China, ByteDance is a, is a big company leading and they have TikTok, Douyin, CapCut, ads, e-commerce, recommendation systems, tons of immediate benefits to the core business, without needing to pull together a new demand surface for video. This sort of exists in America with Meta and Google slash YouTube, right? But AI slop is deeply unpopular in America, although debate whether or not this is, this is slop. This is, this is sloppier than some of the videos we showed you.

• 15:47John Coogan?

  But both companies, DeepMind and, uh, and, and MSL, they are on the RSI trajectory. They're focusing on agentic workflows, personal agents, knowledge retrieval, coding, recursive self-improvement, AGI. They are, it feels like they are more AGI pill than ByteDance, which is like, look, we got a good thing going with Douyin and TikTok. We got a lot of video space. Let's dominate there because we have an op, uh, because we have a, an opportunity. And also like the, the AI, the IP infringement thing is not actually dead to rights. They haven't necessarily been caught in any major way. It's just that the, when the model comes out, people are like Tom Cruise and it's like perfectly Tom Cruise. And so it's like, what's going on here?

• 16:30John Coogan?

  So some of that could be the, the outputs and the harness that actually like reviews outputs. There is an argument on fair use for training to include everything, especially when you think about TikTok. So people go to TikTok and they upload clips from movies. Some of those are fair use. Some of those are transformational. Like you can actually make a vibrio from, from Top Gun that is transformational and passes the fair use test, which is that it's not a replacement. So you're not like, why would I watch Top Gun when I could watch 30 seconds of Top Gun edited? Like a crazy hyperlapse edit. So it's not, it's not competitive in that way. It is transformative and it provides some commentary layer on top.

• 17:12John Coogan?

  So that is actually okay. You can use clips from movies if you're comment, if you're commenting on the lighting and you're trying to explain the lighting. All that means is that, that some of that data goes on to TikTok and lives there forever. And Hollywood can't say anything about that. Same thing with YouTube, same thing with Instagram. There are plenty of, of film criticism channels that post fairly long clips from movies completely acceptably. And they don't even need to share revenue because it is transformational. It is open. Uh, it is fair use. So they have a lot of data to train all this, um, but they're not open sourcing. They're not doing open weights. They're certainly not open sourcing the, the training data set. Uh, and it's a little bit of a narrative violation from the default Chinese AI strategy. Uh, there are a few reasons for this. First, no one wants to open source when they're in the lead.

• 17:57John Coogan?

  We've just seen this time and time again. And second, with coding models, open weights are a play to build a Chinese tech stack. And so you, you open source the, the coding model, build the developer ecosystem. And then maybe that helps Huawei stay competitive. Maybe that, you know, reduces the amount of dominance of the American technology stack. And so there's, there's a little bit of like public incentive to build up, uh, the indigenous supply chain that comes from that. Less so in video where they are vertically integrated and have everything down to the distribution surface. So, uh, in general, if you are a challenger that needs an ecosystem, you want to open up.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  We saw this with the early meta stuff, uh, and, and then, uh, if you're an incumbent and you have distribution, you want to close down. So, uh, there's some interesting knock on effects mainly around a speculative future value of video models and training humanoid robots. Like China also seems to be doing really well in humanoids. If AI video becomes really important in sim to real translation and training these AI, training humanoid robots with simulated video, then this could be like part of the bigger picture. But I think that's farther out. I think for the next month, we're just going to be talking about memes and funny videos. Anyway.

• 19:15Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Meta on a tear. Meta's up 27% this month, according to Sheal. Monot, almost entirely thanks to Muse. Uh, this makes sense, right?

• 19:26John Coogan?

  Is that almost entirely thanks to Muse? I mean, the semi-analysis.

• 19:30Jordi Hays?

  Basically, when you have a company that's spending hundreds of billions of dollars on something without much to show for it, and then you have something to show for it, then the market's going to react positively.

• 19:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna, they're saying, so you're saying there's a fighting chance here.

• 19:43John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 19:44Jordi Hays?

  And the feedback on the product is incredible. There's a lot of investors that have tried it and they're like, hey, this is a good product.

• 19:49John Coogan?

  And, and, and interestingly, like they are in the lead in a subcategory where they have never been the lead before. Like Google had Nano Banana, which like, there was a moment where it was like, oh, Nano Banana is the best. Uh, obviously Anthropic had best coding models for a while, like, like crowns have changed, but Meta's never really held the best model in knowledge retrieval. Or when they did vibes, that was not the best version of that. Uh, but this is at this moment in time, the best version of, of, of what they have. And it's building off of a model that's not on the frontier, but able to deliver an experience that puts them in first place for the subcategory, which is exciting.

• 20:28Jordi Hays?

  And can immediately be incredibly integrated across everything else that they do.

• 20:32John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 20:32Jordi Hays?

  Shopping, messaging, all these different things.

• 20:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:35Jordi Hays?

  Shopify and Muse announced a partnership this morning, counter positioning a little bit against Amazon. Amazon came down with the ban hammer. Buco Capital says, Amazon cuts off Muse while I am bullish. Meta and Muse, I think many people are overlooking the digital knife fight that's about to occur. Nobody wants to get commoditized or layered here. Let the games begin. Amazon says it has cut off Meta's new Muse personal AI agent from shopping on amazon.com on behalf of customers. After attempting unsuccessfully to get the Facebook parent company to voluntarily exclude the e-commerce site from the experience. The problem, Amazon says, is that it never agreed to any of it. Meta didn't tell Amazon that Muse would access its store.

• 21:16Jordi Hays?

  The agent itself doesn't identify itself when it browses and it appears to capture and store customer credentials, which the company says create privacy and security risks. As of Sunday night, people trying to use Muse to shop on Amazon were seeing the pop up. Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's conditions of use to which our customers have agreed.

• 21:35John Coogan?

  Interesting. I wonder how Walmart will respond.

• 21:38Jordi Hays?

  I think Walmart had always been more friendly with chat apps, specifically ChatGPT. And that's the kind of thing that you do when you're not, when, when you're not the leader in the space, you're more willing to.

• 21:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:49Jordi Hays?

  Experiment.

• 21:50John Coogan?

  I think they wound up rolling their own. Uh, I think they have Sparky and Amazon has Rufus. And so there's two dog named, uh, AI agents that do the shopping. And then, and then most recently.

• 22:01Jordi Hays?

  Tyler's been daylaying Rufus, by the way.

• 22:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, just for everything.

• 22:04Jordi Hays?

  For everything.

• 22:05John Coogan?

  Just, uh, psychology.

• 22:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, getting close to solving another millennium.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:11Jordi Hays?

  Rufus underrated.

• 22:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, I I I know Amazon wound up finding sort of an equilibrium with OpenAI by plugging in their ad network into ChatGPT instead of letting ChatGPT like checkout. This is the whole Eric Sufer agentic commerce is a is a mirage. Instead, Amazon is vending in their ads. So ChatGPT brings the data and says, okay, this person's looking for this thing. Do you want to buy an ad on it? And so there's the transaction value. But I I don't know.

• 22:40Jordi Hays?

  I saw a couple.

• 22:41John Coogan?

  Play out.

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I saw I saw a couple seemingly smart investors say that that are using Muse and excited about it, say, why is Amazon banning Muse? This is so short sighted. And then I actually saw it in two instances they deleted because of course they immediately were getting comments about Amazon's ad business, which is obviously what they're looking to protect.

• 23:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:00Jordi Hays?

  Serve ads to Muse agents or Instinct or or chat or any of these other things. And Amazon's ad business is actually dramatically bigger than both Anthropic and OpenAI.

• 23:12John Coogan?

  Oh, just have revenue.

• 23:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:14John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 23:14Jordi Hays?

  So they've done seventy six billion in the last twelve months through Q two of twenty twenty six. So obviously, they're going to protect this. Obviously, they're going to protect this. I think consumers would love to be able to check out with other services.

• 23:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:30Jordi Hays?

  It is pretty gnarly to navigate.

• 23:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:32Jordi Hays?

  Amazon dot com, as amazing as the services overall.

• 23:37John Coogan?

  Describing a UX experience in gnarly.

• 23:39Jordi Hays?

  No, it's it's.

• 23:40John Coogan?

  Just being a UX researcher at Amazon, they're calling it gnarly.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  It is fairly gnarly.

• 23:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:48Jordi Hays?

  The knife fight already took place. It ended a year ago when I wrote the first entry in my agentic commerce is a mirage series. Amazon began blocking agents last July. It's currently suing perplexity over autonomous shopping with Comet. Amazon won't capitulate. It doesn't have to. Alexa for shopping.

• 24:05John Coogan?

  Rufus.

• 24:06Jordi Hays?

  Generated twelve billion in incremental revenue.

• 24:11John Coogan?

  Every time I hear Rufus or Sparky.

• 24:14Jordi Hays?

  Walmart's Sparky has generated similarly significant commercial traction for the company. Agentic commerce is already a reality, but it takes place on site, not through independent agents. ChatGPT launched ads in February twenty twenty six and shortly thereafter shuttered instant checkout. The affiliate model is economically suboptimal relative to advertising. ChatGPT has already demonstrated that.

• 24:36John Coogan?

  Yep. Advertising is the dominant business model. Yeah, it'll be interesting. I mean, when the open cloth stuff came out, I was like, it feels like Napster. It feels like the Napster moment. Like, yeah, you can go check out on an e-commerce website, but like, nobody wants you to do that that way. And like, you're gonna have to write some API binding and then like, scrape the front end and then rewrite it every time you go and check out because they're constantly going to be fighting you. And you are sort of like playing this like game of cat and mouse, which you can play. And for certain for certain e-commerce sites, they're gonna be very open to that. Other ones are going to be a huge hassle to deal with.

• 25:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the question is, can agents monetize with advertising? I saw someone, a pretty viral post, somebody frustrated with Instinct. Instinct coming and they did basically a blast that says, hey, you have a bunch more invites. You can invite a bunch of people. And the user was pretty frustrated with that because they're like, hey, you work for me. Why are you advertising? So even though they're not paying for the product and they're incurring a lot of costs, product's free to them, they're still mad that that they feel like the agent is doing something that's purely in the agent's benefit, not in their.

• 25:40John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, I wonder if we'll live in a world where you know how ChatGPT has like those recommended agentic actions? If like one of those could be like sponsored, like, hey, like, want me to go shopping for you right now? Like.

• 25:54Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, no. And that's important because companies will happily pay for incremental demand.

• 25:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:59Jordi Hays?

  But the issue with agents is if you're saying, go to Amazon and buy this thing.

• 26:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:04Jordi Hays?

  The user already wanted to go to Amazon.

• 26:05John Coogan?

  Totally. But if I'm if I'm an industry coalition of surfboard wax makers, I might choose to send you a notification when you open up ChatGPT that says like, hey, want to go surfing? Want to take it to the next level? Isn't that what happened?

• 26:21Jordi Hays?

  Basically.

• 26:22John Coogan?

  You got one, one recommendation.

• 26:25Jordi Hays?

  ChatGPT recommends.

• 26:26John Coogan?

  What was it?

• 26:27Jordi Hays?

  Various agentic workflows for me.

• 26:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 26:30Jordi Hays?

  It recommended setting up an agent to give me one realistic next step for my surfing each week.

• 26:35John Coogan?

  Yep, that's great. It's like everything else.

• 26:38Jordi Hays?

  Problem is, I know exactly. I know exactly what I need to do.

• 26:42John Coogan?

  Uh, this is actually.

• 26:43Jordi Hays?

  Raj Veer.

• 26:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 26:45Jordi Hays?

  Called out something interesting.

• 26:46John Coogan?

  What'd you say?

• 26:46Jordi Hays?

  Which is that threads started free falling in the charts right as Muse started growing.

• 26:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Today, on on Instagram, there there's a there's a hero story that's a full bleed ad for Muse. So they're pushing it. They're pushing it.

• 26:59Jordi Hays?

  This was interesting from former Meta employee Nikita Beer. Says, how important is AI to Meta? Here's one easy tell. One of the launch features of the Muse app was auto negotiating for stuff on Facebook Marketplace. The poor product manager who owns Marketplace knows that millions of bots lowballing sellers will eventually kill the product, but this was escalated to Zuck by the Muse team. And he said, okay, we'll poison Marketplace just a little.

• 27:23John Coogan?

  Wait, why will that kill the product?

• 27:25Jordi Hays?

  I mean, think about the experience if you tell your bot, like, hey, I'm interested in these types of items. Go anytime one of them appears, auto negotiate.

• 27:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, but wouldn't someone have a bot on the other side dealing with a negotiation?

• 27:36Jordi Hays?

  You can do outbound, too.

• 27:38John Coogan?

  You can go outbound.

• 27:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 27:40Jordi Hays?

  Message everyone on Facebook.

• 27:41John Coogan?

  Yes, I got a Dodge Hellcat. If you know, you know. I got one pair of keys. And I saw your post, you liked a post from the Dodge Hellcat community. Would you be interested in purchasing this? I'll I'll need cash.

• 27:54Jordi Hays?

  Don't ask questions.

• 27:56John Coogan?

  So Paramount is officially not leaving California. It's been a back and forth. The company going through an acquisition with Warner Brothers Discovery has been duking it out with AG, Attorney General in California. The company said Monday, that's Paramount, said that it has reached a settlement with the states challenging its one hundred and eleven billion dollar acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery, clearing what had become the last major obstacle to the deal. California Attorney General Robbanta and a coalition of other states sued Paramount in July, arguing that combining the two companies would give a single entertainment giant too much control over major film studios, cable networks and

• 28:39John Coogan?

  other media properties to resolve the case. Paramount agreed to several conditions. The combined company will create an independent board of journalists intended to protect the editorial autonomy of CNN and CBS News, commit to releasing the at least thirty movies theatrically each year, and spend an additional one point five billion dollars on film production over the next five years. Paramount did not agree to more structural changes. They're not selling CNN or divesting one of the movie studios. Once completed, the merger will bring Paramount and Warner Brothers under the same roof, along with Paramount Plus, HBO Max, CBS, CNN, and franchises and films, including Superman, Minecraft, and Sinners. Paramount has argued that the scale is necessary to compete with increasingly powerful technology and streaming

• 29:21John Coogan?

  companies like Netflix. The settlement also follows months of political pressure surrounding Paramount's future in California. The company had warned that it could move significant production and thousands of jobs out of the state if the acquisition were blocked and had reportedly begun exploring studio space in Nashville. Governor Gavin Newsom publicly warned that losing Paramount would damage California's standing as the center of the entertainment industry. With the lawsuit now headed for resolution, one of the more serious recent threats of a major Hollywood company pulling back from Los Angeles appears to have receded. So this is extremely bad news for everyone that was hoping that the Paramount lot would be converted into a data center and part of Los Angeles. A lot of the pro data center crowd were optimistic about a large scale data center coming in

• 30:03John Coogan?

  to Los Angeles, using up a lot of the water, a lot of the energy here in Los Angeles. But looks like they're going to be making movies instead. So.

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  And that's our show, folks.

• 30:12John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for tuning in to TBPN. We'll see you tomorrow, eleven AM Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com.

• 30:24Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  Goodbye.