TBPN Live - Paramount Strikes Back, Ads In Gemini, Bieber’s Apple Beef | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

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Some big news this morning. Paramount is launching a hostile bid worth $108 billion to acquire WB. Pika says, this is crazy. HBO should make a show about billionaire media tycoons trying to buy other media conglomerate and highlight all the behind-the-scenes drama. My take today was basically like people who are saying that Netflix plus Warner Brothers is the worst possible outcome.

I was talking to you about this on Friday. I think they're sort of overplaying that narrative because I could imagine Warner Brothers and Disney being more monopolistic or Warner Brothers going to Google and YouTube and being like free on YouTube being like way more anti-competitive. And so the Netflix Warner Brothers, like at the very least, it's like the third worst case scenario. Like there just really is so much competition in media because media is cheap.

Anybody can be a media company. Exactly. And there's so many free options. And then there's also video games. And I think you can argue with how. how good some video models are getting and you know audio and voice models like you it's it's going to be even like you're going to be able to make a cartoon as a single individual and make like many many many you know many many episodes seasons right there's going to be more more competition than ever at the actual like in the content layer yeah uh even if some of the platforms consolidate i mean yeah just a lot of people are putting on a they're straight up putting on a two hour podcast instead of a movie regularly except when you're on the plane flying back from New York, then you got to watch The Fugitive with Harrison Ford. I made Jordie watch it. Give me a review. Fantastic film. We don't know, we don't know how to make movies like

that anymore. I would watch movies if all the movies were like that. You should put together your movie list. Yeah. Your movie list. I have one. Like this in the next week or so, so people can watch them while we're, you know, between like, you know, Christmas and New Year's when we're off the air. Have you seen it, Tyler? Oh, wow. Okay. Treat yourself to the fugitive this holiday season. Chris Murphy, U.S. Senator from Connecticut. I thought that was Crypto-Twitter. I thought it was Chris Murphy Crypto Twitter. I don't think so. Chris says the Netflix purchase of Warner Bros. would be a disaster. It's illegal. But there's some quietly rooting for it because a paramount takeover that includes CNN would be worse. A short thread on why that's the

dangerously wrong way to look at this. This deal is a classic antitrust violation. It will Drive-up prices. HBO Max is one of the few things that keeps pricing pressure on Netflix. Hundreds of movie theaters will go under. Writers and production workers in the content. Business will have terms and wages dictated to them. But some will say, well, if the Paramount and Ellison Trump-Cabal gets control of Warner Brothers and the deal include CNN, then Trump would effectively control the bulk of the mainstream media from CBS all the way to CNN. That's worse than Netflix owning Warner Bros.

Yes, it is, but A, a Paramount Warner Brothers deal would be illegal too. Trump shouldn't force us to be for illegal but less corrupt things. B, why do we think Netflix won't agree to the strings Trump puts on this deal? This is about making money, not protecting free speech. Five, tyrants want us to accept blurry moral lines. They want us to accept one level of corruption or illegality, just because there is an alternative level that's much, much worse. But that's how democracy disappears by rules disappearing and constant relativity creeping in.

David Ellison was on CNBC this morning and he was talking and they were asking him about CNN. You own CBS, 60 Minutes, CBS Sunday morning, and clearly a lot of people are like, are you going to put your thumb on the scale politically? Is there like a political angle to the way you will steward these media assets? And I don't think people are that worried about the political bias injected into Foghorn Leghorn or Wiley Coyote or whatever, or even like the Seinfeld. It's not like they're going to like reboot it and it'll be like a right-wing Seinfeld. Like I just don't think that's going to happen. But people do worry about news coverage like CNN, CBS. But the weird thing is that in the Netflix scenario, CNN is left

there in the go ship. It's a go ship. It's a ghost ship. We know this very well from the way tech likes to acquire companies. Yeah, so is there a scenario where Paramount loses Warner Brothers but then still buys the cable business? Yes, I think so. I think so. And they get Shark Week and they get they get a bunch of fun stuff, HDTV, 90-day fiancé. David Allison with Shark. week. I mean, putting the Allison family behind Shark Week, people think the Ellison's or... That might be good for sharks. Yeah, so here's the thing. So we talked with Rich about how like more competition than ever at the content layer, it's very cheap to create and distribute content. It's effectively free.

That said, there's feels like in some ways more of a monopoly than ever on truth, if that makes sense. So legacy media properties have a monopoly on truth. Yes. If we say something and we have the aesthetics of television. We say, this is true. It doesn't hold the same weight as CNBC or CNN or anything like that because they have, they're actually running, generally running. It's just the brand. Yeah, it's brand. It's just the brand. It's brand. So when the New York Times says something and a substack disagrees with it and says, no, this is what actually happened. Who are people going to believe they're going to believe New York Times 10 times out of 10? Ideally, you would want a lot more kind of like distribution between the networks and these brands that that have a monopoly on the

truth. Yeah, but at the same time, the fact that, uh, that David Ellison is not cheering, like, you see Warner brothers. And if you're in the, in the conspiratorial, the tinfoil hat like David Ellison is trying to control the news narrative that is sort of bubbling up there, the flip side is, is he should be cheering because he's like, wow, they bought everything I don't want. I don't want Batman. But in fact, he does want Batman.

He does. He wants Foghorn, leghorn. He wants it all. He needs Foghorn, leghorn. He wants it all. He needs Wiley Coyote. He needs Porky Pig. The list of as... You don't know Porky Pig? No. How do you not know Porky Pig? Is that a YC startup? It should be. I think there was a YC company in this batch called Piggy Robotics. Yeah, yeah. We saw... No, the YC companies need to keep... New rule. New rule. Every pig-themed startup. Nick, when you're booking, when you're booking YC startups, if it's swine-th

themed. They're on the show. Red alert. What? Pig has rebranded. No. The YC company called Pig. Wow. Spitting in our face. They're now called butter. Butter. It's still like animal themed. It's an animal product. It's an animal product. But analyzing it based on its macros. Is it goat butter? Very heavy on cow butter. Fat, low protein. Okay. Low carb, low protein high fat. We have some news from our flight back from New York. We flew JetBlue again. A couple months ago, we flew JetBlue with the whole team, and we got into a little bit of a situation with JetBlue. They almost had to land the aircraft. They almost had to land the aircraft because we were, Jordy and I were sitting in business class, we were served stakes.

We tried to pass those stakes back to our friends and colleagues who were sitting in economy, and they told us not. They said, stop, you can't. I think someone put their hand on your chest and sit down, sir. So it was even worse. They didn't put their hand on me, the flight attendant, but they grabbed the. dessert. Oh, they grabbed the dessert. You were trying to pass back. And I said, we like to believe in, do I not own this dessert? We like property rights around here. We like the ability to move freely. And I think possession's nine-tenths of the law. You give me the ice cream. You give me the steak. I control it. I own it. I can do it what I want. But on our latest flight, we figured out the ultimate hack for how to pass food back from business class to economy on a jeep. And we proved that this works twice. And we're sharing it with you today.

This is deep alpha, deep alpha. And so we'll hopefully pull up some of the photos. So this is, so in first class, they give you headphones with a case. And so what I was able to do is I was able to take the food. So my food, I bring it over to the case. So we all had dinner before the flight. That's ice cream in the phone case. We had dinner. We had dinner before we last.

So I show up and I'm not hungry, but Ben's a growing boy. And I'm like, we got to get. get, we got to get my dinner back to Ben. And so we put, we, we take the headphone case, we zip it up, I take it back, I pass it. You insisted on the bread roll going in there. Of course I had, I wasn't going to have, he needed the bread. Did you eat the bread? I ate all of it.

Okay, wait, was the bread over buttered, or did it have the appropriate amount of butter? It had a lot of butter. He had a lot of butter, right? Jordie insisted, insisted on giving you the full pat of butter, and I thought maybe half a pat I just wanted you to have optionality. Okay, well, yeah, I guess you had optionality. You could have taken it out. No, but the guy, there was a guy across the aisle from you.

He was giving me the dirtiest. No way. I thought he was going to say, like, if you don't bring me back food too, I'm telling. You want to, are you going to tell a tail? That is a risk. No, but the real risk when you're running a strategy like this and you need to be highly coordinated is that the flight attendant in the business class section says, where is your cutlery? Yes, yes, yes.

Because your, because it's in the knife and fork are going to be missing. So the real, yeah, you could see Jordy going back to drop it off. I took that photo. We were running plays. So there's another tip here that you don't want to jump the gun. So the food service, the dinner service, it takes place over a couple minutes. All the plates get passed out, and people eat pretty quickly. So typically, the flight attendant, by the time they finish delivering the last plate,

they will go and start picking up the plate from the beginning because it only takes people a couple minutes to eat the food on the plane. But you want to wait them out. You need a couple rounds of them coming by and you have the full meal there. And they're like, are you done with that? And you say, no, I'm still working.

I'm still working. So you've got to say I'm still working a couple times. And then they will go back and sit down. That's your opportunity because that's when they're at their weakest. You almost got caught at one point. I got caught? The flight is a lovely, lovely woman. She came over and said, do you want any tea?

Yeah. And you had a missing, missing company. There was food in the headset. Oh, in the headset case, yeah. I had to close the headset case because you don't want to get caught. NLE CHAPA submitted a last minute bid to buy Warner Brothers $45,000. In 45K in cash, in cash. It's like, it actually is relevant because the other offers are heavily debt-laden.

And so if you care about that, if you want an all-cash offer, this might be. your best get. It's a pretty good option. This is the best option. If you're, if you only want Andy, Andy, who's been on an absolute role lately, says, you're laughing at him, but how much did you put up to buy Warner Brothers? Exactly. Can we pull up Andy? Andy launched, did a, had a launch video like yesterday. Oh, yeah? Andy, of course, is the founder of two cents. Dot money. Hi, this is Osmo. We make films. Two cents founder, Andy Duro, raised three million for his startup and paid us $2.5 million. This was the only direction he gave us. I need this to let like the most expensive launch video ever made.

It has to look like... Why is he in Albania? Albania. The day before our shoot, Andy was still on his investor's boat, chasing a series A. Is this rage bait? I feel like this is giving me like, I'm going to be enraged.

We were under contract to spend the entire production. Here's what we made. I want a scarface montage in a mansion. There we go. Show off our in-house coding models. coding models and they should be coding in rust not just tiny apps but full-scale system architecture the cinematography here is wild like this one it's i want the bathtub scene from the big shore but add more models and like have one of them explaining the value prop of two cents so

basically you know how everyone on social media pretends to be rich the problem is it's all for Then we should have the models reenact that scene from the wolf of Wall Street. You know the one where Leo's boat gets seized by the FBI? Y'all was the lobsters for the right home, you're fucking miserable pricks. I know you can't afford them. What was the bid? He said he spent two and a half million on this. Is that what you're saying?

All right, this is not PG enough, but it's funny. It's funny to basically run through every single launch video bit that there is. Okay, okay, yes. And just be narrating. Yeah, just do that one. Just do that one. And then do that one. Okay.

Bucco is saying the more he reads about the Netflix deal, the more it seems like. One, this is bad for everyone that isn't Netflix. Two, this would be very good for Netflix. And three, it should be blocked if our system still works. So he is a block the deal guy. Ernest says it's extremely pro-consumer. New price is going to be lower than the current standalone Netflix plus max price with superior U.X for subscribers.

And Bucco says, I don't think you can say it's extremely pro-consumer with any sort of confidence. Yeah, this is the one. tremendous pricing power. A few people have said, oh, yeah, like, it's going to be cheaper. And it's like, okay, is it going to be cheaper, like, right away? Is it going to be cheaper in 10 years? No way.

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, there's nothing, there's nothing more long-term pilled than a public company. Like, they love thinking in decades. And, like, no, I mean, they're like, like, a company like Netflix truly can be like, yes. Like, you know, the price is going to be like $99 a month by, 2035. It might be a steal. It might be a steal at 99 if you're getting Seinfeld and Foghorn Leghorn. December 2010, Time Warner views, this is a New York Times article, Time Warner views Netflix as a fading star. For the past year, executives at big media companies

have watched Netflix with growing resentment for its success and delivering movies and television shows via the internet for its stock price nearly quadrupling, for its chief executive being named Business Person of the Year by Fortune magazine. I imagine at that time they were thinking, Well, it's cool that they can deliver movies, but they'll never be able to make, they'll never be able to make content. And, of course, now, recently, Netflix to buy Warner Bros. It is such a, such a big deal. Like, 83 billion, it's almost, it almost feels like small compared to, like, all the AI valuations and stuff in the, and the, in the hyperscalor valuations. But Netflix is only a $400 billion business by comparison.

So, like, this is 20% of their market cap, essentially. Like it's a serious merger and would be huge, huge integration. I do wonder about that question of like how many movies they would be making per year. Would they try and still make 30 big movies or something like that? If you don't make those big movies, you don't develop the new IP. Like if you look at what Avatar is, Avatar has been, you know, this like incredible undertaking from like just so much money poured into the production there. But it's probably the best chance of getting something that's actually like an

enduring legacy, where it's like, yeah, people are still talking about the avatar multiverse or cinematic universe in five decades, ten decades, you know, in a long, long time. It's very, very hard to be sticky if you're not taking big swings and doing things that are like actually really, really bold. Sammy Gold says, Lina Khan, you can have this one, this one time. I don't really understand why people are so against this. The idea of Netflix owning succession, The Suprano, and the Wire. Well, the TV stuff doesn't seem that bad because that was never in theaters.

I guess I do understand people who are saying, like, they're going to own Lord of the Rings. Seeing Lord of the Rings in theaters was a special thing, and that special thing might not happen anymore because it's incompatible with the modern business model. And so if you're a Lord of the Rings fan and you really like the movies and you did not like the show, well, then it's like, get ready for more shows and less movies, probably. Anybody who's upset because of the impact on traditional cinema and movie theaters? I want to see every single,

I want to see proof of how many movies they've gone to in the last. The revealed preference is crazy. No one goes. Apple is changing of the guard. It feels like a ton of executives are leaving,

ton of executives are turning over and everyone's kind of speculating that potentially this is the beginning of the next major executive leadership team coming in, that there'll be some sort of

before and after maybe we're exiting the Tim Cook era. I think you just got to double, triple, maybe 10x Tim Cook's pay and you're good. I remain, I remain positive on Tim Cook's leadership. I think he got the big things right. And I think he missed the hot things, but missing the hot trend that's actually not that existential to the business. You could argue they haven't missed yet. Yeah, you could argue they haven't missed it. And you could argue that AI was not existential to them, at least in the short term. But this Justin Bieber

post is insane because you read me this and I, and I, and I, and I, didn't hear you say, this is from Justin Bieber's account. And I was like, oh, that's funny. There's someone who's mad at Apple. But it's way funny here coming from Justin Bieber. Put Justin Bieber as a product manager at Apple. And I genuinely believe the products across the board would improve. Justin says, if I hit this dictation button after sending a text and it beeps and stops my music one more time,

I'm going to find everyone at Apple and put them in a rear naked chokehold. even if I turn off dictation I somehow hit the voice note thing the send button should not have multiple functions in the same spot I couldn't agree more this is so I mean it's just absolutely insane because the issue

is yeah one this happens a lot this happens to me and then it's always nerve wracking because if you have somebody pulled up on tax and you happen let's say I'm like hey this person is wanting to change the time of this meeting to this other point

And I'm actually, I'm like, what do you think? What should we do? And then it just like happens to be like recording. And then you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, I don't want to. Apparently we have to issue a correction. Taylor's over there putting us in the truth zone. Apple doesn't have product managers? That makes sense.

There's so many. This is this new software every time I open an app made by Apple. There's a new bug. Apple executives have floated the idea of combining hardware engineering and hardware technology's divisions as one combined group under Shroji in order to retain him. So this is, of course, Apple's chip chief, John, Johnny Shroji, hopefully I'm pronouncing that correctly. Chip chief. The Chip Chief.

Informed CEO Tim Cookie is seriously considering leaving the company and would likely continue his career elsewhere rather than retire. Apple is urgently pushing to keep him. He remains, at least for now. The designer of the Apple Watch just released a new watch himself. Oh. And it is mechanical. and costs only $60,000. That's a video, by the way.

Play this. This is a crazy video. Look at this. The dial is spinning and, yeah, wow. It really looks like UFO inspired. It's $60,000 jumping straight into the Holy Trinity tier, I suppose. I think it looks very cool. I've never thought I want a watch that looks like it's in the same universe as the Apple Watch.

Sure. But at the same time, I can really respect. I really, I think this looks very cool and I think there's a consumer out there where they were like, finally somebody made a watch for me. I love this. We've got to pull this video up of Bill

Ackman in Japan. Is that Bill Ackman? Yes. Japanese TV? Japanese TV, see, TV. The graphics package is electric. Okay, we saw the Did that woman just pull a Japanese, may I meet you on him?

Yes, 100%. All quiet on the frontal lobe. That's very funny. Prediction markets will replace buying stuff. I want someone to bring Kiwis to my house. I make a prediction market about whether someone will deliver four Kiwis to my doorstep and load $15 into no. A guy with an e-bikes sees it and picks up some Kiwis.

Before dropping them off on my doorstep, he bets, yes. drops them off, the market resolves to yes, and he gets $15. Rest in peace, Amazon, DoorDash, Uber Eats, etc. Sela comes in and says, Prediction Markets will replace relationships. I have a crush on your girlfriend. I make a prediction market about whether she will leave you for me and load $15 to know.

She sees this and drives over to my place. Before texting me, she's here. She bets yes. She comes inside. The market resolves to yes, and she gets $15. Rest in peace, Tinder, bumble, hinge, dry, bars, restaurants, etc. It's so insane. Such a good copy pasta.

And I can only imagine the quote tweets on this post just being like an endless, an endless stream of iterations of this exact template. I've been asked, what do I think of Colchian Polymarket? These are still very early days. My vision, which I started to articulate in the 90s, is of a world, is of a world very different from both the world then and the world of today, a world where markets are accepted as offering more accurate estimates on far more useful topics. So I'm mostly interested in the potential of stuff today to enable and cause that future vision. The politics, policy questions on polymarket and Kalshi trending now seem plausibly like topics where some people might find their estimates

useful in making personal or collective choices, but I don't have great confidence in that or know who these people are. So I think that we saw a glimmer of this in the sense that if you were running a business that stood to benefit from the Trump administration or hurt because of the Trump administration, maybe tariffs or something like, if you were manufacturing T-shirts in China and you were like, okay, if Trump wins,

they'll probably be more tariffs, probably another trade war, what's the probability that Trump wins? What's the probability that I have to do a red, the fire drill, a code? dread to move my manufacturing to Singapore or something, um, you could make a business decision based on that. I agree with him. Like, I don't really know how many people were doing that seriously. And also the prediction markets were like 55%, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't like 90%. It wasn't like, oh, everyone just knows what's going to happen. It was like, oh, yeah, like, you know, slight edge this way. But yeah, I mean, if you're trying to plan for like a

a forthcoming Trump administration, it's not like you could go to prediction markets four months earlier and get like a definitive correct answer. Like that's just not the way, that's just not the way it played out. But if these systems continue to grow in size and to attract users and competitors, they could lower many of the costs of creating and managing such markets,

allowing a lot more experimentation with markets like those, I find more promising, re my long-term vision. Of course, if these systems induce a backlash that gets them outlawed or drag, drastically shrunk, that may plausibly block or at least long delay my vision. I don't personally mind people having fun knowingly betting on sports on actions that celebrities can influence or on topics where insiders have big info advantages like mentioned markets. But I see many people complaining about these things and I fear a new prudish temperance

movement may shut them down and as a side effect shut down the more promising markets that I've envisioned. I think it's a really big, it's a really big question on the prediction markets. It's not, like there's, there's the, there's a positive and a normative side of these things. So in economics, there's positive questions, normative. Normative is like what should happen. Yeah. And positive is what will happen. They're debating, uh, prediction markets on moral grounds, on what should happen. They, they, they, they have a thesis on, uh, I believe that that, that this is great and, and this is good and it should, it should proliferate. Or, or, or, I think it's bad, and it should be shut down immediately.

There aren't that many people that are actually thinking clearly right now about what will happen. How big will these markets be? How prevalent will they be? You know, sports betting has gotten a lot easier, but, you know, it hasn't taken over everyone. Like, I know a lot of people that don't sports bet. I don't personally sports bet.

Yeah, it's also possible to get to the future that he's envisioned since the 90s. You need to have sports markets. I think so many people are just absolutely sick of the marketing. and just the feuding between Kalshi and Polly Market. Like if we were on X and like Fanduil and Draft Kings, we're just constantly going at each other all day long, everyone would just be like, please leave. Speaking of presents under the Christmas tree,

the Google team is cooking up a present for me in 2026. They're going to put ads in Gemini. Let's go. Hit the gong. Finally, finally. We've been asking for it. I hear the sleigh bells ringing. We've been asking for it.

Ads in LLMs. We talked to the founder of perplexity about it. We asked Arvind, why are you going to put ads? We want ads in perplexity. And he said, maybe. And the tech groups wrote a whole article about it. They got really bad. I'll let Google jump first.

I'll let Google jump first. We've talked to Sarah Fryer. We've talked to the Open AI team about how badly we want ads in chat, GBT, how badly you want ads in LLMs. They said maybe we're going to do it, maybe we're not. They've been sitting on their hands, but now. I don't know how you can, I love listening to your voice. It's good.

It's good. We need a backup track. This feels like very Google to just be like, yeah, we're, we're the ad business. We're going to do ads. We're going to do them first. We're probably going to do them better than anybody else, at least initially. A lot of people are, are wondering, like, hey, there's a, there's a world where Gemini doesn't, have ads and he's free for two years and it just completely puts the screws to every other

you know l-lm provider i always look back to what would the instagram business look like if they were forced to monetize it independently like it's an amazing platform that's perfectly suited for to monetize with ads yeah and yet you can imagine meta ramped ad spend on the platform 10 20 times faster than maybe an independent operator would have because they just had been uh they had all the customer relationships. They had all the, uh, they had a strong sense of who the person was already because they were probably on Facebook as well. So I, I don't think, I don't think ads cause failure to adopt a new product. I would be, I don't know, we'd have to look through the, the, the product graveyard, but I feel like of, of things that die, they rarely die because

people are, people are, people are acting like ads and LMs are going to be like the biggest deal and are going to be the biggest issue. And I just don't think it's going to be, I think they're going to, I In many ways, they could make the product better or more, like, sticky in the sense that you're, like, looking at stuff, doing shopping in there. And personally, I want every LLM to have a lot of ads so that I can swap between all of the best models without feeling like I need to sign up. There's this company Half Time, which won the GROC hackathon that happened over the weekend. Yes. Halftime dynamically weaves AI-generated ads into the scenes that you're watching. So breaks feel like part of the story instead of interruptions.

It just makes you second-guess every output you get from the model. We have to pull up the video that's at the bottom of the timeline. They just reinvented the Star Wars Cervesa Kristol ads. Have you seen these? You fought in the Clone Wars? Look at this. Yes. I was once a Jedi Knight the same as your father.

I wish I'd known him. He was the best star pilot in the galaxy. And a cunning warrior. I understand you've become quite a good pilot yourself. And he was a good friend. Which reminds me. I have something here for you. Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough.

It's the best. It's like pure art. AI could never. It's so good. Thank you for hanging out with us today. Thank you, everyone. We love you all. dearly.

We'll talk to you soon. Have an amazing evening. We will see you tomorrow. Goodbye. Cheers.