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Voice of the customer, CEO, finance person. Those are the five archetypes. One of the best practices today that I've seen companies using is a notion of a board buddy. What it means is every exec at a company should actually be paired up with a board member who's an expert in the same area. So, for example, I typically will work with the head of product and the head of engineering at the companies I'm on the board of and I meet with them once a month outside of the board meeting. Those meetings are actually really good. I am essentially listening to them in a judgment free zone and trying to be helpful and getting feedback on them. How can we be helpful? And the same is happening with the finance person, the finance oriented board member, they meet with the cfo, the customer board member, they move to the CRO, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that board buddy system I've seen helps dramatically because that's what your board members should be helpful. Not just the CEO, but the exec team. It also helps get exposure for us to the exec team who they are. And as we think about succession planning and stuff like that, we can evaluate who these people are and who should succeed. The CEO or the people. Yeah. What are your forecasts?

And platitudinous that I'm embarrassed almost to repeat it because there's no laws. And everybody I know that is a working documentary filmmaker, meaning they don't have a side teaching gig, you know, to pay the bills that are actually making, you know, living, supporting their families, have all come at it at different ways. And so I realized that there's no set career path the way there might be for a feature filmmaker or a doctor or a lawyer. And so what I tell them is one is Socratic. You gotta know your right, who am I? Film is intensely glamorous for teenagers. And at a college level, the first, you know, the introductory classes are jammed with people. And then all of a sudden next year it's pretty winnowed down. And there ought to be a mechanism within us. This is the Socratic dimension that says, you know what? I don't think I have something to say. I thought this was going to be easier than it actually is. I see how difficult it is. And then the other one has to do with that difficulty that there's way more talented people than there are possibilities of making a film this economy, even with the explosion of documentary films now, and some of it quite direct. So obviously some of those people who didn't deserve to get a budget got one, is that you have to persevere. I mean, I used to keep on my desks two, three ring binders filled with hundreds of rejections just for that first film on the Brooklyn Bridge. Just to remind me, you know, that it doesn't come easy, you know. And that was sitting juxtaposed from a little thing on my door or a quote from a theater impresario in Minneapolis, Globe Theater named Tyrone Guthrie said, we're looking for ideas large enough to be afraid of. Again, not a very good English sentence, but it just means just bite off more than you can chew and learn how to chew. And a lot of that is what I try to impart. When people ask me the questions and I warn them in advance that it's just going to sound like. I'm sure I've just described things that you guys know about what you do. And I'm sure everybody who's listening knows. Yeah, those kind of.

Trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis said, sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time. I'll relate it back to the revolution. George Washington, you know, is the indispensable man. Without him, we don't have a country, period, full stop. And in a world in which we're more interested in bottom up than top down, it's exhilarating to be able to resurrect somebody. But he's also deeply flawed. He owns hundreds of human beings in his lifetime, and as the writer Rick Atkinson says, you know, you can't square that circle. He is rash on the battlefield, risking his life and therefore the entire cause. He also makes some pretty bad tactical mistakes at the largest battle, Long island of the. Of the war. And then later, the same tactic, leaving a flank exposed at Brandywine, which the British take full example of. But. And this is the biggest but, I know he's able to. He's able to hire subordinate talent that's better than him, and he's not threatened by it. He's able to inspire men in the dead of night to fight and to remind them that they're not from New Hampshire or Georgia, but they're a new thing, Americans. He knows how to defer to Congress. He has incredible humility. And more than anything, he just waits it out. He understands he doesn't have to win. He just can't lose. And he does that successfully and defeats the greatest empire on Earth. And even more than that, he gives up his power twice. The second New York is. The British leave New York in November of 1783. That is like eight and a half years after Lexington and Concord. He goes to Annapolis, where the Congress is meeting, and resigns his military commission. He's brought back out of retirement to run the Constitutional Convention, and then is unanimously made president. And after two terms, he walks away from it. And as George iii, the King of England, said, if he did that, then he's truly the greatest character of the age. And so you can have both and a problem in a binary world, in both computers and media. We want to have a black hat and a white hat. We want to say good or bad. And you can't do that in our own personal lives. And we ought to extend that to our history. Yeah, the dialectic. I love it. You have been very fortunate in that it feels like there's no project.

Yeah. What are your forecasts around M and a in 2026? Last year was the year of the, of the licensing zombie acquisition with the Ghost Ship. Yeah, the Ghost Ship acquisition. But it still feels like we could see a lot of activity this year. A lot of cheap companies out there, GoPros at 150. There's a lot of. Well, yeah, in the public markets, but also, but also public companies that want to bolt on fast growing teams. Yeah, I think there's going to be both. I mean you saw for example my fitness pal bought this company Calais and I think it's 18 months old, right? 50 million. And so I think there's going to be a tremendous amount. Why? Because like you said, there's a few things happening. One, software companies are valued, the valuations has gone down. And so I myself in a portfolio have seen if the CEO has courage, they can actually. The stock market is already telling you that the terminal value of your business is zero. So there's really no downside to burning the boats and going all in on AI. And I have a company podium. I mean you should actually get the guy, he's amazing. He's similar to Intercom, very similar to Intercom. He had a business that grew to 200 million, was kind of growing very slowly. And he said, you know what, I'm going to go build an AI agent. It's basically a product for SMBs. And he's basically gone from 0 to 100 million in 24 months and is accelerating by just saying, you know what, I'm not going to worry about the legacy business when it's our new business. So I think. But the assets are there. These companies have great assets, they need that. And so it might be PE buying these companies for cheaper, but the PE can no longer have the playbook of we'll operationalize now. It's not about operationalizing or improving costs. It's about building a new product, a net new product and AI native product. And then like you said, I think there's a tremendous number of. For example, inference clouds are a new thing. Fireworks, modal base 10. There's multiple 5 to 10 billion dollar companies. I have to assume the hyperscalers are not sitting around saying inference in AI is happening on these completely different cloud platforms, different than what I have. What the hell am I? I'm going to be a commodity cloud platform. So almost certainly I think you're going to see one of the hyperscalers buy one of these new clouds. I think Core Weave was one kind of cloud, but there's together. There's like six or seven different next generation cloud companies. So cloud software. You saw chips with Nvidia buying grog. There's a bunch of next gen chips I think you're going to see. And of course the whole Warner Brothers thing at the application level, the consumer side is a tremendous amount. Now that I think we are in an administration which is much more open to this, for lack of a better word, you're going to see. I think there's going to be amazing activity. Do you think that the square. You were at square for almost six and a half years. Do you think the square Rift.

US and know them. So I make films about the US But I also make films about us. You may chat also wants us to ask about AI. I already have an idea of, of your reaction. I appreciate your. Your approach of not letting technology guide the work. But are you at all excited at some point in the future of being able to, you know, know, recreate a scene from history using image or video generation tools? Not really. I don't. I don't think so. I think every once in a while when you're trying to run down a portrait of Benedict Arnold, who's not a popular person in the United States, so there's no real visual evidence left of him, I can be helpful in locating that. You know, I use it when I Google a question. I notice how quickly the AI answer comes up. To take it with a grain of salt. Right now. It's not that it's wrong, it's just you may not be offered all the nuances and possibilities that's going to change and whatever, but not to write a thing or to generate an image, there's a sanctity. I mean, if you say a picture's worth a thousand words, then if you make it up, then what is it? I mean, when everything is permissible, what's true? And I just. That goes back to your question, what is true? And I think it's really important to at least have. You know, it's like a kid. You remember this when you're young, four or five years old, and your mother or your dad sitting on the bench at the park and you're playing. But every once in a while you got to go and touch home bass. I want to be that person. Yeah. Very cool. You mentioned McCullough, and I'm a fan of Robert Caro.

Can you give us a brief history of cyber warfare with Iran? Yeah. The Iranians have a long history of executing advanced cyber warfare attacks against the United States and our allied partners as well. So the cyber companies love to give the Iranian cyber warfare groups all these cute names like Hydro Kitten and all this shit. But at the end of the day, they are a well known advanced nation state cyber warfare outfit on the same level as kind of Russia, GRU or PLA cyber warfare units, DPRK cyber warfare units. They were really not happy when Stuxnet was a thing. So back in 2010, for anyone who doesn't know, Stuxnet was kind of the first, hey, let's have a cyber thing that can be implanted in a physical system and then have kinetic effects in the physical world. So that thing went into the, the nuclear enrichment facilities and, or the one facility that it was targeting and then made the centrifuges rotate to the point where the, the hardware just broke down. Right. So that was the first equivalent, that was the first kind of example of that. The Iranians took that as an inflection point, kind of ramped up their offensive cyber capabilities. And you know, for the past, I'd say 15 years, they've been, you know, on a, on a campaign to of bring those capabilities to bear, targeting US Government and private sector entities pretty much across the board. So all of that happens, and it not only happens with Iran, it happens with Russia, it happens with North Korea, it happens with China. It kind of all happens as this cosmic background radiation against which the regular commercial industry and private sector operates. And there's very few people that actually realize that there's all these nefarious characters in the background that are continually targeting our organization, whether through external cyber attacks, whether through trying to flip insiders, corporate espionage, or what have you. And so there is a cyber cold war going on. Iran has been a key player in it, and despite decades of trying, it took, let's call it for what it is, an administration that said enough is enough and we're going to put some bombs on target. So hilariously, the Cloudflare founder tweeted out a few days ago that basically the Iranian cyber warfare outfits activities have ceased completely since the strikes have, have gone down. So we'll see what happens. Yeah. Wow. Well, good luck out there and congrats on all the projects.

Provide on the gpu. So it goes from the diamond to a heatsink and then that goes to air. Yeah. And so people that might have done a. Built a gaming PC, you put something directly on the cpu. Is that copper? Typically like what, what? That's typically copper. And by the way, with a diamond cool server, you don't need to have your air conditioning on. You can literally turn off the AC in the room and the room can get as hot as 120 degrees Fahrenheit. And the servers literally, like. Because it's shuffling it away so fast. Correct. Got it. Okay. So fast into the ambience and you'd be fine. We just released today a server made with an AMD chip. Yeah. That is cooled by diamond and that can operate at 120 degrees Fahrenheit. And you would not need any liquids. No air conditioning. And it would just be. The computations would still be fine. Okay, what, how much, how much actual diamond is like, what is the cost? Is it like one very thin diamond or are we talking about something that could fit on a ring? I love your questions. Yes, it is a very thin layer of diamond that we place on the material on the gpu. And to your question about cost. So the effect of this diamond cooling is that it generates about a million dollars, by our conservative calculations, about a million dollars of revenue and some cost savings to the operator of the gpu. And that's over typically a life lifetime use of around three to four years. Yeah. So we're not just giving you compute, we're giving you cash. So roughly about a million. And so we take a slice of that to add on to the cost of a traditional server. So our servers, the cost of our servers don't compare to the million dollars that you would get back in. In returns. Yeah. So I imagine you're literally you're icing out the gpu'. So I imagine that.

If somebody came to you and wanted to vibe code DoorDash, what advice would you give them about the challenges that they might face on building a competitor? You know, I'll give you a story. I'll give you two stories actually. Assume it's June 2028, right? Which is what I think Citrini had for 30% drop in stock. Assume you're hungry, you open your phone, you ask Claude, say, or whatever your new startup is, the food ordering startup to order your sandwich with gluten free bread. It routes the order directly to the restaurant because it's figured out how to connect to all the restaurants and it saves you $2. But it takes an hour and a half to show up. It was cold and they forgot to make the bread gluten free so you can't eat it anymore. Who owes you a refund? Does Anthropic have a customer service number? No. So basically you open DoorDash, the sandwich is first recommendation, you tap on it, 90 minutes later you're holding your sandwich still fresh and guess what? They remember the gluten free bread. So that's one story where if something goes wrong in the physical world, who does? Who takes care of it? DoorDash is a managed marketplace. I'll get back to that. The better, more pertinent story is run from 2016 or 2017, Google launched a product called Google Food Ordering. You would have seen this Google Food order. You can actually order from a restaurant and it literally it was driving at that point multiples of traffic to any restaurant compared to what DoorDash was driving. Because Google still massive back then. It was massive. You could search for a restaurant you could order from directly from Google. However, the retention of people who ordered Google Food Ordering was basically zero. It was negligible. Why? Because after you place the order, there are tons of things that go wrong in the physical world. And you couldn't really call Google. The restaurant didn't take responsibility there. So that product doesn't exist today. And I think that's the fundamental reason. There are things that happen in the digital world that are not enough to replicate something like DoorDash. DoorDash manages not just aggregation and supply of restaurants, it manages everything afterwards. It manages figuring out how to get you out of the right right dasher. It manages how to basically refund if there's something that goes wrong. It manages customer support in case you want to use a collection of systems that work together. Discovery is something that I think Agentix will do well and hopefully DoorDash will incorporate many of those. But discovery is not enough. If you think about Google and what did Google disintermediate? What do we use Google for today? It did really well with Expedia and flights and hotels and also things like mortgages. So the types of marketplaces that Google has been able to disrupt a search are things that are more lead gen or just I would call light marketplaces. Where payment happens to Google, you can book hotels or flights to Google, you don't have to take care of what happens afterwards. But a managed marketplace in the physical world is the most durable thing. It is not a piece of software. This is the thing I think people get wrong about. Dodash Doordash, the first piece of software they built after the website, if you remember, DoorDash had a palo Alto delivery. It had this website with a PDF the first year. The software they built was not a consumer app, it was a Dasher app. It was the app for Dashers because that was what was needed to get the food properly, to make sure the dasher got the order, accepted the order, picked up the food, delivered it before the consumer. Can you talk.

To see. I think there's going to be amazing activity. Do you think that the square, you were at square for almost six and a half years. Do you think the square riff from last week will be an anomaly, or are you expecting 40% to be the new 10% riff? The latter. I'm almost certain there's going to be multiple 20 to 30% cuts, maybe even 40. The reality is nobody's hiring. I think almost every public company has basically net new hiring is almost zero. Why? Because you can do much more. Every function can do more with AI. So it's equal to a 30% boost in productivity. And that's the first year. If you get another 30% boost, you need 30 people. So over 18 months, almost certainly every public company is going to have a 30%. If they don't, I question, I question the leadership. So, yeah. So a lot.

Fun things. But, yeah, I mean, it's been a wild moment in Hollywood for the past five years. Basically, it's a time of tremendous change, tremendous disruption. A lot of people are really scared and don't know what's gonna happen. So it's. I mean, it's been interesting, for sure. Is that just a combination of like, Covid plus streaming plus consolidation plus AI, or is there like one story that sticks out to you? You can throw in a pretty crippling labor strike in the middle of that, and it's been one thing after another. About five years ago, the end of the peak TV era, the Netflix correction, where the market decided that Netflix had to make money streaming subscribers was not the end all, be all that created an absolute correction. And pretty much, I would call it a content recession within Hollywood. And that's trickled down throughout the industry. Fewer jobs, fewer productions. You add that in with the flight of productions overseas, the. Everything from the strike that happened in 2023, which gave these companies an excuse to really reevaluate the level of production, throw in the LA fires that disrupted so many different people, and you guys are in la. It's a really interesting and for many people, scary time. Yeah.

I'm sure you get asked this question all the time, but walk me through some of the advice that you give for aspiring documentarians. It's really so bad and platitudinous that I'm embarrassed almost to repeat it because there's no laws. And everybody I know that is a working documentary filmmaker, meaning they don't have a side teaching gig, you know, to pay the bills that are actually making, you know, living, supporting their families, have all come at it at different ways. And so I realized that there's no set career path the way there might be for a feature filmmaker or a doctor or a lawyer. And so what I tell them is one is Socratic. You got to know yourself, right? Who am I? Film is intensely glamorous for teenagers. And at a college level, the first, you know, the introductory classes are jammed with people. And then all of a sudden next year it's pretty winnowed down. And there ought to be a mechanism within us. This is the Socratic dimension that says, you know what? I don't think I have something to say. I thought this was going to be easier than it actually is. I see how difficult it is. And then the other one has to do with that difficulty that there's way more talented people than there are possibilities of making a film in this economy, even with the explosion of documentary films now, and some of it quite direct. So obviously some of those people who didn't deserve to get a budget got one is that you have to persevere. I mean, I used to keep on my desks two, three ring binders filled with hundreds of rejections just for that first film on the Brooklyn Bridge, just to remind me, you know, that it doesn't come easy, you know. And that was sitting juxtaposed from a little thing on my door or a quote from a theater impresario in Minneapolis, Globe Theater named Tyrone Guthrie, said, we're looking for ideas large enough to be afraid of. Again, not a very good English sentence, but it just means just bite off more than you can chew and learn how to chew. And a lot of that is what I try to impart. When people ask me the questions and I warn them in advance that it's just going to sound like. I'm sure I've just described things that you guys know about what you do. And I'm sure everybody who's listening knows, yeah, those kind of apply to what I do. And so I think there's. Basically in his essay on Self Reliance, Emerson says, do whatever inly rejoices you need to actually figure out what this thing is. That is you say I to of which there are millions of I's, and which one is the authentic. And how do you proceed to do whatever inle rejoices, as he said. Is it refreshing to change centuries? Do you think your life would be different? Do you?

As pejorative. You just see it as inevitable friction to be overcome, like picking up that step and making another step. After the adoption of digital editing, what was the next technological advance that you found useful? I don't know. I'm a Luddite. I don't know what I'm doing on your show, But I'm really glad you reduced. I'm really glad you reduced it to initials. Because you know what? There's nothing people say pbs, nothing could be less, you know, sexy than that. But technology, business programming, network, I mean, KFC has behind it Kentucky Fried Chicken. You know, I knew all my life, for most of my life, what it was. Now it's kfc, and I kind of. But this is a really good move. No, I, I, I went reluctantly to digital editing because during the 90s, a lot of the interns that would come and work for us, they could see working in analog as some sort of badge. But about halfway through the 90s, I realized these kids want to be race car drivers, and I'm telling them how to shoe a horse. It just doesn't make any sense. And so eventually, almost for them, we switched to digital editing. It's been incredibly interesting. There are still some things, you know, stuff I might tell my editor that I knew would take two weeks, now take, you know, two days. And things that took two days take two hours. And things that took two hours now take two minutes. And there's. You think there's salvation in that way, Running to daylight there. But there are as many traps as many places of quicksand. So you just want to be sort of careful about how you approach it. What is.

Part of it, to be able to painstakingly do that sort of stuff has been really terrific. Can you tell me the story of the Ken Burns effect? Yeah, sure. It's pretty interesting. I got a call in November of 2002 from a guy claiming to be Steve Jobs. And I went, okay, yeah, right. And then I realized very quickly it was Steve Jobs. And he said, I live in rural New Hampshire. I said, okay, okay. He said, would you come and visit me? And I said, yeah. So a few weeks later, in early December of 2002, I visited him in Cupertino at Apple headquarters. And he ushered me into a room with two engineers, and he showed me this stuff. And as I said, if I'm a Luddite now, you can imagine what I was like in 2002. I could barely do word processing. And he said, so look, we figured out a way to download or upload whatever it is your pictures that you take and that we can do all this. And they showed it to me. I was kind of like, okay. A fairly superficial version of what I've tried to do to wake up the past, not just visually, to explore energetically the surface of the photograph you're doing. In a way, the feature filmmaker I used to want to be has a master shot, a long shot, a medium shot, a close, a tilt, a pan, a reveal, insertive details. But here was just a very simple sort of panning, zooming through stuff. You could add it. You press a button and add a music thing. And I said, you know, okay, cool. You know, whatever. And he said, well, you know, next month, In January of 2003, every Mac computer from now on will have this. I said, okay, cool. And then he said, and we want to keep the working title. And I said, what's that? And he goes, the Ken Burns effect. I said, I don't do commercial endorsements. And he went, what? And the two engineers kind of blanched. I think they were aware of this Titanic temper, which I never saw. And he come with me. So we go back to his. His office, we talk for a while, and we end up becoming friends till the rest of his life. And when I was in the Valley, I'd stay at his house on the futon above the garage and the plats at Palo Alto, and knew his wife and his daughter. We even gave an internship to his daughter Lisa, the famous Lisa. And, you know, it was a terrific friendship. But what I did is I walked out an hour later with about a million dollars worth of hardware and soft, which I turned around and gave to nonprofits, usually final cut pro to schools that needed it, you know, computers, that nonprofits needed it. I think a couple fell off the truck because we needed a computer, but 99.9% of it went to a good cause. And I think he was intrigued that somebody in a world in which it was all a 1 or a 0 for him or somebody would say, okay, I'm going to, you know, you should charge. And the world tells me, oh, you should have charged him for this, I said. Then he called it the pan and zoom effect. I wasn't interested in having my name on it insofar as it could help other stuff. And it ended up giving me way too short in that regard, a really good friendship with not arguably one of the five most important people in the United States in the last 150 years. That's remarkable. What is your process.

We had a lot of fun. So talk about the reaction. I know that we talked to Ashley Vance, who's documentary filmmaker, and he was voicing a little bit of worry that if Netflix acquired Warner Brothers Discovery, that there would be one less buyer. And is this any better for the average filmmaker who wants to go out and get the best price for their product for their film that they've been working on? Are we still telling the same consolidation narrative, or is this somehow structurally a little bit different? It depends who you talk to. But I would argue that this is actually worse for creatives because this is the actual smushing together of two legacy studios. When you talked about Netflix buying Warner Brothers, Netflix is not in the theatrical movie distribution business. Currently, they do not do movie theaters. So there was a certain class of movie that was going to remain a Warner Brothers movie. Now, Netflix makes a lot of movies on its own, but those are often small, smaller. They are not. They don't have as much ambition as the big theatrical movies. They do some of those, too. But that Netflix was at least positioning it as, we are going to leave Warner Brothers alone. They also were not in the production business in television, for other buyers, everything that Netflix made was for Netflix, whereas Warner Brothers makes shows for its own platform, hbo, Max, but also for Apple and. And for Netflix and for many other different platforms. So they claim that that would be at least another opportunity for buyers here, with Paramount buying Warner Brothers, this is going to be the combination of two television studios, the combination of two film studios. And ultimately down the line, that is going to mean fewer jobs. Now, if you talk to the Paramount people, they say they are committed to making 15 movies, 14, four theaters for each Warner Brothers and Paramount. That's 30 movies a year, which would be an escalation for both of those companies. So they're saying they're going to be more. But the history of the movie business has shown that when two studios merge, ultimately the output is reduced and that trickles down to creators. What do you think about Netflix's future theatrical plans, Ted Smart?

Scary time. Yeah. Explain the overseas thing because I'm familiar with Atlanta and I believe Toronto, but are productions really moving to other continents now? Oh, yeah. I mean, the UK has been extremely aggressive. They have for many productions a 40% incentive and they're willing to give you incentives on what's called above the line costs. Those are the actor, director, writer, those are the main talents in the film. That is a huge incentive because it essentially subsidizes you for Tom Cruise of the salary, Ryan Gosling salary. And even in some of the more aggressive US States, you won't get that in California. So, you know, it just, it's a game changer when they are doing the line. I just reported on this movie today, Project Hail Mary, an Amazon movie that's coming out in two weeks. The gross budget for that movie is $248 million. The actual net budget is a little under 200. Okay, so you're saving 25% by shooting this movie overseas. Interesting. And. And do those come as like tax credits upfront or is it more like tax deduction on profits where if the, if the movie costs 250 to make and it makes 500, then I'm saving 25% or do I just get the money basically upfront? It's a rebate. I'm actually not sure. I think it depends on when you actually receive it. Sure. But it's a rebate for the qualified spend in the jurisdiction that is giving the incentive. Yeah. So if you are going to get an incentive from the uk, you actually have to have the work done in the uk and that means hiring local crews. It means using a sound stage in the UK and having the production actually shoot there. And you can have films with multiple incentives from multiple jurisdictions for multiple aspects of the production. Everything from the post production to visual effects, those can be subject to incentives for doing the work in a particular jurisdiction really quickly. I think we have the wrong MIC selected.

Thing for sure is that. Is that just a combination of like Covid plus streaming plus consolidation plus AI or is there like one story that sticks out to you? You can throw in a pretty crippling labor strike in the middle of that. And it's been one thing after another. About five years ago, the end of the peak TV era, the Netflix correction, where the market decided that Netflix had to make money, streaming subscribers was not the end all be all that created a, an absolute correction. And pretty much, I would call it a content recession within Hollywood. And that's trickled down throughout the industry. Fewer jobs, fewer productions. You add that in with the flight of productions overseas, the everything from the strike that happened in 2023 which gave the these companies an excuse to really re evaluate the level of production, throw in the LA fires that disrupted so many different people and it's, you know, you guys are in la. It's a really interesting and for many people scary time. Yeah. Explain the overseas thing because I'm familiar with Atlanta and I believe Toronto, but.

I can spend that, right? Isn't that how that works? Exactly. Meta Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla chan have paid $170 million for an under construction mansion on Miami's sought after Indian Creek Island. The deal closed Monday. The purchase set a record in one of the country's most expensive to date. The current US record is held by billionaire Ken Griffin. He spent $238 million for an apartment. That is a crazy amount of money for an apartment, but I guess it's in a good building. This is a lot of apartments. The Florida record was set last year when a waterfront compound in Naples traded for 225 million. I feel like this isn't counting Ken Griffin's compound that he's building. Because he's building. Yeah, because it's multiple properties. He's bought multiple properties. Okay. Here's where it gets crazy though. Sellers are Dr. Aaron Rollins, a cosmetic surgeon to the star, and his wife, real estate agent Maureen Rowlands. The Rollinses paid more than 30 million for the roughly 2 acre site in 2020. Wow. Flip. And not real estate agent Flip. Don't want to go up against them. They know what they're doing. Plans called for a nine bedroom home measuring about 30,000 square feet with a dock and a swimming pool. Amenities were to include gym, hair salon and massage room, as well as a 1500 gallon aquarium and library with a secret passageway. Zuck does need a hair salon in his house because he's always changing his hairstyle. Sometimes he's got the Caesar going. He's got the free. This is the Gen Z. This is elite for him. Who knows what'll go next. Maybe he'll have long flowing locks like Fabio. That would be the good next move for him, I think. How many gallons is the aquarium? 1500. Is that a lot? It doesn't seem like that much. What can you put in there? Can you put a shark in there? No way. Some fish? No way. How big is Keith's aquarium is massive in Miami. You can scuba dive in it to clean it up. Anyway, congratulations to the Zuckerbergs on their new property. It looks beautiful. And without further ado, we have.

That are surface level. Where they are going to be lightweight, which are two kinds. One of them are lightweight, C based, easy to rip and replace. Example I always say I don't want to pick on them is Zendesk. Zendesk is customer support software.

Blaze. Double kill. Five kill. Raw. Cup is up. Wins. Team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blades. Let's just. Wrong. Right. Market clearing order inbound. Come on, get up. You're surrounded by gentlemen. Hold your position. Strike 1. Strike 2. Activate. Go. Golden retriever mode. Market clearing order inbound. Vi. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Founder, You're watching TVPN. Today's Tuesday, March 3rd, 2026. We are live from the TVN Ultra on the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com time is money saved. Both easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a lot more all in one place. And you know who's going to be the Ramp card? David Ellison. Because he owns Warner Brothers now. So, David, if you're listening, just. Just do it. Just onboard to Ramp. We have a fantastic show for you today, folks. Let's pull up the linear lineup because we got It's Hollywood Day basically on tvpn. We got Matthew Bellamy from Puck, he's the founding partner, coming on to help us understand David Ellison's mission with Warner Brothers, Discovery, Paramount, hbo, cnn. He's got cbs, he's got everything. Now then Ken Burns is coming on to talk about his whole career in filmmaking. And of course we have a fantastic and explain film. Film. For anyone listening that might be like myself quickly. Linear is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents. Film is the process of capturing images digitally or using celluloid. Do you know about celluloid? No. This is right, right, right. The filmmakers in the back know. So you used to. Used to need a specific chemical process. You'd probably be very hands off on this process. But you used to create a strip of film, thin, clear, and you put some chemicals on it. And then when light hits what, what does it do? It makes, if a lot of light hits it, it makes it black. And then that's the negative and they flip that around by shining light through it to then expose the final picture. And then you get a beautiful movie that you get to watch at the cinema. Interesting to know how Netflix will change their tune on theaters. So Ted Sarandos has been basically trash talking movie theaters for a long time, being like, netflix is the future, tech is the future. He hasn't been super rude or anything, but he's been like, it's not really key to our strategy. Then as soon as he was in the deal for Warner Brothers, he was like, yeah, the theater is amazing. It's not going anywhere. Like, we're, we're excited to invest. And we will, we will talk to Matt Bellany about how long that lasts until he starts talking trash again. But he's already Netflix is up 22%. Oh, yeah, the stock. The shareholders hated the idea. They hated the idea. Loves marketing enemy to overpay for a handful. A basket of legacy assets. There is another thesis on why Netflix stock has mooned. And it's mostly around this concept that Ted Sarandos just stunned in a pair of jeans at the SAG Awards. So look at this. I mean, you see this. How can you not want to buy the stock? This is not financial advice. But you see a guy pull up in a fit like that, you're like, this is going to moon. I got to get in. I'm going turbo long. I'm top blasting. You're buying the dip. If it's dipping, you're top blasting and you're buying the dip. When you see a man pull up in $2.8 billion jeans. Because that's the amount of money that Netflix got wired because of this deal. That was the breakup fee. For some reason, I had it in my head that the breakup fee would be the other way, but not too shabby. In fact, Netflix got paid and Matthew Bellamy got a thousand likes on this post. So my question is, there's a ton of debt going into this deal. Will I be able to watch the Sopranos on Netflix? Will I be able to watch the Dark Knight on Netflix? It's a complicated question because content licensing deals are not. They're not one size fits all. They're subject to windowing and certain markets. So if Netflix has really high penetration in Germany and HBO doesn't, it might make sense to license it there, but not elsewhere. But I just want to know broadly, like, what do we expect from Paramount, Skydance, Warner Brothers, Discovery, cbs, cnn? Like, what is it? I think they have Shark Week now, right in Discovery. They got the Food Network, hgtv. You can watch the Property Brothers maybe on Netflix one day, who knows? But this is like the most extreme scenario. And we talked about a post where someone was like, oh, like masterful 3D chess. They got Netflix, got Paramount to overpay for this, and now they're going to be indebted because the deal got so big that they're just going to have to come to us and license 100% of the catalog on day one. I don't know if that's true, so I wanted to dig into it. Let's talk about it. So just to recap and set the table, David Ellison, who is the chairman and the CEO of Paramount Skydance, agreed to raise his offer for Warner brothers discovery to $31 a share. A lot of people, myself, somewhat included, thought that Netflix was at least going to counter a little bit, but they folded immediately. And so the CO CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, they didn't counter. And they said, you got it. Wire us the 2.8B. And they did. So the result is that David Ellison is handing over $111 billion in exchange for Warner Brothers, HBO, Max, CNN and the other cable networks. There was this whole political angle in D.C. about how interested would Trump be in the deal. And apparently as soon as he found out that that Netflix was not interested in the cable TV assets, he became less interested in the deal. Because I think he watches a lot of news, but he probably doesn't watch a lot of Batman reboots and doesn't really care what happens there. And so, you know, it's just like a different thing. It's like, you know, he's not turning on the latest DC Cinematic Universe film and be like, they're taking shots of me. But if he turns on CNN and they're taking shots at him, he's like, I care about that. Right? So in terms of the financial situation, they're levering up. They took our advice when we started the show, we told everyone, rule number one is lever up. And they did. So Paramount is already levered. 10 billion to the gilt. Yeah, to the gilts. 10 billion of net debt. It's like 13 billion, but they have 3 billion in cash. So 10 billion in net debt, 3 billion of adjusted EBITDA with which to service that debt. Reasonable, but still pretty high leverage. 3x Paramount will be adding 60 billion of debt. So all combined the company will have something like 70 billion of net debt, 79 billion of total debt with roughly 12 billion of adjusted EBITDA. And so when you're operating north of 6x leverage, that leads to different decision making, higher discount rates, higher interest rates. It can shift the focus to near term cash. So Netflix is a logical counterparty here because it can pay, it has the cash. It has a lot of cash flow to pay for global rights at scale, and has a long history of paying top dollar to deploy capital to known franchises. And also Netflix is in a particularly interesting financial position. So they've been an incredible case study for operating leverage. A true overnight success. Something like 20 years. Grinding up, grinding up the subscribers, grinding up the Revenue investing more and more in content. And if we can pull up the chart either scrolling down on the tvpn.com newsletter or going to the third post in the timeline, you will see the small bar, the red bars are the revenue. And the. And the little dots that have the numbers on them, which you can't really see, show how much they're investing in content. And so for a long time, for something like almost from 2002 to 20, 2018, so 16 years, Netflix was like, we made 100 million. Let's make $100 million worth of content. Let's buy $100 million worth of content. And then they were like, wait, we made a billion dollars? You're never gonna guess what we're gonna spend on content. Exactly $1 billion. And then they were like, okay, we made $10 billion. This is going to shock you, but we're spending $10 billion on content. And so they would just spend exactly what they made on content. But that changed. That changed in 2019, 2020, Covid, the amount of subscribers spiked. The amount of revenue spiked. Then they launched the ad model. Took them a while to figure that out, but eventually worked. And the business kept growing, the top line kept growing, but they ran out of stuff to buy, they ran out of stuff to make. And even though they were paying, you know, top dollar for all these different assets, they sort of held their content budget flat, their revenue went up. And that's, of course, operating leverage. So profits, profits to pay for Warner Brothers Discovery assets potentially. And so they have the money to spend, but also their direct competitors in streaming with Power Mount plus and HBO Max. And so there's a question about how friendly will they be. You know, if you license all the good HBO stuff, people will unsubscribe from hbo. Yeah. Or Paramount. Or Paramount. Yeah, exactly. It just makes the Paramount subscription offering less competitive. Totally, totally. So it's this delicate balance. There's also potentially, and this was from the president, Fox, there's potentially this idea that regulators might attach a condition to the deal or at least signal or put pressure that the combined entity should maintain its, its tradition of licensing and selling content. Yeah. Lachlan yesterday said. This is Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch expects that regulators will impose a third party content licensing condition on Paramount and Warner Brothers discovery. $110 billion merger. He said, we wish them the best of luck. We've seen this. Regardless of whether it was Netflix acquiring Warner Brothers Discovery or Paramount acquiring Warner Brothers Discovery, there will be conditions put on this transaction and which would require A producer of that size to continue to sell their content to third party platforms. This was yesterday up in SF. Yeah. So I ballparked it at like maybe 70% chance that in the next two years there's some sort of meaningful content licensing deal between Paramount, Warner Brothers, Discovery and Netflix. And so. But I do think that there will be limited windows, some selection in markets where content is available and pretty much everything will be non exclusive. So if some like the original Dark Knight trilogy goes on Netflix, it'll probably still be on hbo, on Paramount. Plus the real key brand assets like the Sopranos and the DC universe properties, those are much less likely to be licensed. And there's basically no world where Netflix gets the first streaming rights to like tent poles. You want to maintain those. You want to give the super fans a reason to stay subscribed to begin a subscription on your now two streaming platforms. There is a lot of potential upside for the Ellison empire. I think of this like buying a house and then getting a roommate like you, you're levered up, you got a crazy mortgage. That's such a good example. Right. You buy, you're living large, but, but you got a roommate. Yeah. And the roommates Netflix and they're paying the rent to you. You pay the mortgage and you kind of hate your roommate. You kind of hate your roommate. But, but you're long the real estate market. And then as you get promotions, as you get more cash flow, as you get more adjusted ebitda, you can pay your mortgage. And as you pay your mortgage down, you wind up with a really cool asset, which is this nice house that actually has the extra bedroom. They're like, look, we had a good run. Yeah. I really love the way you would put dishes in the sink. Do them. I really love the way you would watch movies loud into the night and yell, yeah, but I think it's time, it's time for you to move out. And I'm going to take the mortgage myself. I'm going to, I'm good for the full, the full, full bill every month. I'm good. But, but there are a lot of similarities, right. Because what are you getting with Warner Brothers? You're getting a whole library of IP that's very valuable potentially for like 100 years. Porky Pig is from 1935 and I still know this guy's name and I know like I could draw a picture if I needed to. And so, and so if you believe that intellectual property will have a very, very long lifetime lifespan and it's, and it's Incredibly valuable. But you. But you have to finance it with debt. You have to work really hard to pay the bills. In the short term, you could wind up with a really great asset, even if you have that roommate for the short term. The other interesting question was, what does this reveal about the Ellison family's worldview for the future? Because on the one end of the spectrum, you have Larry Ellison, who seems incredibly AGI pilled. He's going crazy into AI data centers. You disagree with this? Well, I think. Remember, I think we did like the chart of who's the most AGI is AGI versus AGI pilled. So he needs AGI, but he's not AGI pilled. Why is he not AGI pilled? Oh, just because of his rhetoric. And he just get him on door cash. Yeah, yeah. We'll see what he says. Maybe his timelines, like ASI next month, you know, who knows? Yeah, you need to sit down. Your family today is obviously very AGI pilled. Does he have a Mac Mini? That's the real question. Funding data centers is generally aligned with a future where AI is an important technology. Levering up massively, right? Yes. Levering up is going to be big, right? Yes. Yeah, exactly. He believes AI is going to be big, but then he also believes, or in concert with David, his son, believes that AI will not destroy legacy Hollywood assets that, like, no matter how many dollars you have, no matter how much compute you have, no matter how many generations you can use the latest video model, you will not just be able to create a superhero that kids will dress up as at Halloween. And I think that's true. And I believe both of these. You don't. You're going to be dressing up as Slop Man. Next. Next Slot Man. Next Hollywood Slot Man. You're going to be like, oh, you don't know this superhero that. I prompted myself and no one knows but me. It's a. It's a highly. Don't you know? The Internet's highly personalized now, but you can dress up as, like, a superhero who has, like, these black ears and, like, looks very similar to Batman, but it's not Batman. Not the non. IP infringing Batman. I think the. Yeah. Literally describing Sl. Slot Man. Yeah, Slot Man. You're gonna dress up as the knockoff Slot Man. I don't think anyone's gonna do that. I think Batman suit. I think broadly, media becomes, like, every piece of media that the audience gets smaller and smaller. Everything becomes more. More and more personalized, maybe. Yeah. Like, I think ap. IP still has like a fairly big role in that. But you wanna be on the cutting edge, I think, like shelling points and like things that like, yes, I can have a video that's perfectly tailored to me. But I like talking about movies with Ken Burns. They're calling you Temu Batman. Yeah, Temu Batman over here. Get out of here. Temu Batman. I don't know. But, but. So maybe that's not your worldview, Tyler, but it's clearly the worldview of the Ellison family because they believe in this barbell effect. They believe in the value of. Yeah, I would, I would, I would. You know, another way to look at it is like you could get this hyper personalization, but it could be around existing ip. So you get to, yeah, watch a personalized version of Batman content that's targeted just for you individually, but the kids are still dressing up as Batman. And we've already seen a glimpse of this with video games. There are video games that leverage existing intellectual property, but allow you to customize your character in some way. Put more skill points into intelligence and cast spells versus strength and use a sword. Right. You can have your own experience if you play even like the Arkham Batman series. It's pretty linear, but you can play it more aggressively, you can play it more stealthily, and you can experience a Batman world that is more stealth focused or more fighting game focused. And that allows you to experience something that is unifying and we can discuss. Okay, you played the same game as me, you understand the same character as me, but we had a different experience. And I think AI accelerates that and makes it more valuable, not less. I don't know. I'm somewhat pilled on this, but I respect your differing worldview that you will be enjoying. Slot man. Enjoy. So by the loosest counts, this is the ninth or tenth time that Warner Brothers has changed hands since it became an independent Movie Studio in 1980. There's some of those acquisitions that have been like divestitures or reorganizations within other companies, but just like a fascinating thing. And I do think that David Ellison is going to go the long distance with this. I think with a little careful financial management and probably a few content licensing deals like this might be the last one. He might be running this organization for his entire career. He's been working in, in Hollywood since he was a kid and has been very dedicated to this particular industry for a very long time. And so I don't think he's going anywhere. And so get ready for a whole bunch more content. Apparently they're gonna make like 30 movies a year, like, which is a dramatic step up. I think that they're gonna try and actually ramp up the production. Are you sure that's not per day? I hope so. With AI, it's totally possible. As long as Tyler over there is buying tickets to to See slotman number 17 Revenge of the Slot Man, I think that there's money to be printed. Let me tell you about Revenge. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputer for training and inference that scale from 1 GPU to 100. Slot Man 2 Revenge of the Trough. Revenge of the Trough is going to hit kind of bricks for sure. Let me also tell you about Vibe Co, where DTC brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales, just like on Meta. And if you are inspired by the whole Netflix Warner Brothers saga, you should head over to the Goodwill in downtown Brooklyn. Tom from Vanity Fair says for 14.99 you can Zaslav Max. This spring they're selling a nice Port Authority puffer vest from Warner Brothers Discovery. That is a good pickup. Zaslav is a deals guy, hall of famer for sure. He was involved in launching CNBC. He also helped create MSNBC, became the CEO of Discovery in 2006 and just a whole bunch of other crazy deals. Love to have him on the show once all this settles down. His full career is fascinating and he's been loved, he's been hated, he's been everything in between. Lots of people have of a lot opinions, but there's no way to be unhappy if you've been riding with him as a shareholder because he got every penny out of this thing. He certainly did. According to the Washington Post, there was a researcher skeptical of Havana syndrome, so he tested a secret weapon on himself. In 2024, Norwegian researchers, skeptical that pulsed energy weapons could do damage to human brains, built a device and tested it on himself. It didn't go well. This is crazy. He built it, tested it. Working in secrecy, working in strict secrecy, a government scientist in Norway built a machine capable of emitting powerful pulses of microwave energy. And in an effort to prove such devices are harmless to humans, in 2024, he tested on himself. He suffered neurological symptoms similar to those of Havana Syndrome, the unexplained malady that has struck hundreds of US spies and diplomats around the world. We don't know how to make scientists like this anymore. This is glad they're still out there. Extremely bullish for the tinfoil hat industry because I believe that the actual underlying basis for the idea of a tinfoil hat, of course, we use it somewhat sarcastically here when we're discussing hypothetical conspiracy theories, but the tinfoil hat is supposed to eliminate microwave radiation and various EMF pulses. And so if you're worried about getting Havana syndrome, maybe pick up an EMF proof tinfoil hat or maybe just some sort of other. There's probably a better way than just tinfoil around a ball cap. But startup idea, startup idea. Build a real tinfoil hat that actually protects you from Havana syndrome. That's the real American dynamism. Startup. Thomas Maxwell says we have to stop this. I'm not eating a quote. Jacob, eat a Jacob. I haven't seen this one before. It's 20 grams of grass fed protein, no seed oils, nothing artificial. Sweetened with organic honey. This definitely resonated. 24,000 people agree. But I think there's. Tyler, you should, you should do a taste test of all the different protein bars. All the bars named after just regular dudes. David Bar, the Jacob Bar. There's probably more. You gotta get on it. There are a lot of these. The. Yeah, the name, I mean, Lucy named after a person. It was a whole trend for a while. It was. Cursor would like a word. Yeah, this was staggering. This was great. They came out yesterday. They had. They had heard the FUD on the timeline around Cursor. They came out yesterday and Bloomberg got some of their data. Their annual revenue topped 2 billion in February, according to a source, a figure that underscores the fast growth of the coding assistant. Sasha summed it up well, he said Cursor sees the timeline turning against them. Quietly give Bloomberg a 2 billion-ARR press release. No post from the company where founders haters squashed True Comms masterclass. And Michael Trul actually did come out this morning and says we believe Cursor discovered a novel solution to problem six of the first Proof Challenge, a set of math research problems that approximate the work of Stanford, mit, Berkeley. Cursor's solution yields stronger results than the official human written solution. Notably, we use the same harness that we built a browser for from scratch a few weeks ago. It ran fully autonomously without nudging or hints for four days. This suggests that our technique for scaling agent coordination might generalize beyond coding. So very, very cool to see the progress from them and clearly doing something right in the enterprise. Right. Just because everything that you see on the timeline is so many, so many enthusiasts. One of my buddies is Kyle Russell. I worked with him like a decade Ago he's at a company called Valen and he posted. So Valen, they make SaaS for mortgage services. He says it's very boring. But we're basically getting them all to flip from legacy software and are rate limited by biz ops people being able to onboard them. So we're going to try instead to think about it in terms of what tokens do we need to extract from the org in order to deploy deploy fast. So he's in this like AI deployment lead role and he went I think pretty viral. Saying this morning one person of his team said, hey, can you unsub me from cursor? And somebody says, done. And then a bunch of people said, same, same, like I don't need it. I'm like, I'm happy with another program. And Kyle said, today we announced we're removing 90 cursor seats because they haven't had any use in two weeks. And it is like it's flipped from like the, the most cutting edge thing to like, it's clearly very sticky because you see, you see the ARR numbers that this like ultra frontier, coolest, hottest thing is getting some like fud. And then Sasha broke this down where he was like, the timeline's turning. Turning. Yes. And so you have to provide some evidence that like you're not cooked because like the timeline is very much like, oh well, like you're not the hottest thing anymore. You're not the coolest thing little thing for like the people that are on the most frontier. And so no, you know, just squashing the haters with a 2 billion ARR number, which is fantastic, up from 1 billion in Q4, which is, which is just insane. Yeah. And so, yeah, I mean, I think like there's just something about the. It goes back to diffusion. We were, I was debating this with Tyler last night about, you know, how much of, how much of AI adoption is just actually getting the forward deployed engineer in actually getting people to change their workflows, onboarding. There are certain people that will just bounce from the most frontier thing. Oh, this model is better. I'm on Codex, I'm on Claude. I'm on Codex, I'm on Claude. Back and forth. But for a lot of companies, they need a little bit more handholding. And so there's a whole massive chunk of the economy that can be transformed by developing great products and then actually getting them in the hands of businesses. R4 Rock is hearing cursor, maybe in the midst of a new raise at 50 billion. That's crazy. Meaningful markup. From 30 where they were sitting again in Q4. Yeah. What does DD say? Everyone in the tech X bubble thinks they are wholesale ditch and cursor. But enterprise diffusion is glacial. Most of the world just got a hold of it. That's a good point. It's a very good point. Well, in some good news, Mark Zuckerberg has purchased a mansion in Miami for $170 million. This was such big news that we had to pull it forward from the mansion section on Friday to talk about today. But there is a little bit of a black pill here. We can go into it. First, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web app servers, databases and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. And let me also tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Seamless unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. So of course Mark got this because of California's wealth tax, which feels like if it goes through he would still be subject to at least a one time yes payment, you know, which. Which would get litigated. Of course. What we need now is a picture of him in his backyard recreating the Ben Affleck smoking meme we wipe. Because there's this new national wealth tax that Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders are pushing. So he's like, he just moved. He just got this new place across the country. Probably overpaid to a degree. People are just going to be like, actually I live in international waters full time. I don't live in America. I don't live in any country. Actually I live in space. I live on the International Space Station or something. Very, very tricky. $170 million sounds staggering by a 5% tax on Mark Zuckerberg's wealth over $11 billion. That should have been his shopping budget because in dude math, if you save money, you just have a free license to spend it. So you're like, by moving to Florida, I'm effectively saving myself 11 billion. I can spend that, right? Isn't that how that works? Exactly. Meta Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla chan have paid $170 million for an under construction mansion on Miami sought after Indian Creek Island. The deal closed Monday. The purchase set a record in one of the country's most expensive to date. The current US record is held by billionaire Ken Griffin. He spent $238 million for an apartment. That is a crazy amount of money for an apartment, but I guess it's in a good building. This is a lot of apartments. The Florida record was set last year when a waterfront compound in Naples traded for 225 million. I feel like this isn't counting Ken Griffin's compound that he's building. Because he's built. Yeah, because it's multiple properties bought multiple properties. Okay, here's where it gets crazy. Sellers are Dr. Aaron Rollins, a cosmetic surgeon to the star, and his wife, real estate agent Marine Rollins. The Rollins is paid more than 30 million for the roughly 2 acre site in 2020. Wow. Flip. And not real estate agent Flip. Don't want to go up against them. They know what they're doing. Plans called for a nine bedroom home measuring about 30,000 square feet with a dock and a swimming pool. Yeah. Amenities were to include gym, hair salon and massage room, as well as a 1500 gallon aquarium and library with a secret passageway. Zuck does need a hair salon in his house because he's always changing his hairstyle. Sometimes he's got the Caesar going, He's got the fro going. So this is the Gen Z. This is elite for him. Who knows what'll go next? Maybe he'll have long flowing locks like Fabio. That would be. That would be the good next move for him, I think. How many gallons is the aquarium? 1500. Is that a lot? It doesn't seem like that much. What can you put in there? Can you put a shark in there? No way. Some fish. How big is. How big is Keith's? Keith's aquarium is massive in Miami. You can. You can scuba dive in it to clean it up. Anyway, congratulations to the Zuckerbergs on their new property. It looks beautiful. And without further ado, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And we have Matthew Belling from Puck. How are you doing? What's going on? Doing great. Thanks for having me. Thanks for hopping on. Great to meet. I enjoyed your podcast with Dylan earlier today, and I wanted to dig further into the actual merger. I mean, it seems like we're sort of done now, but how is. How has the process of covering this been for you? What were the key turning points? What was most exciting for you? Well, I'm learning a lot. Certainly didn't know what a ticking fee was until covering this deal. Learning a lot about the debt market. Learning a lot about the contours of raising money in the Middle East. All sorts of fun things. But yeah, it's been a wild moment in Hollywood for the past five years.

Foreign. Today's Tuesday, March 3, 2026. We are live from the TV and Ultra on the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com time is money save both easy use, corporate cards, bill pay accounting and a lot more all in one place. And you know who's going to be the ramp card? David Ellison. Because he owns Warner Brothers now. So, David, if you're listening, just, just do it. Just on board to Ramp. We have a fantastic show for you today, folks. Let's pull up the linear lineup because we got It's Hollywood Day, basically on tvpn. We got Matthew Bellamy from Puck. He's the founding partner, coming on to help us understand David Ellison's mission with Warner Brothers, Discovery, Paramount, hbo, cnn. He's got cbs, he's got everything. Now then Ken Burns is coming on to talk about his whole career in filmmaking. And of course we have a fantastic explain film. Film, yes. For anyone listening that might be like myself, quickly. Linear is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear using agents. Film is the process of capturing images digitally or using celluloid. Do you know about celluloid? No. This is right, right, right. The filmmakers in the back know. So you used to need a specific chemical process. You'd probably be very hands off on this process. But you used to create a strip of film, thin, clear, and you put some chemicals on it. And then when light hits it, what does it do? If a lot of light hits it, it makes it black. And then that's the negative and they flip that around by shining light through it to then expose the final picture. And then you get a beautiful movie that you get to watch at the cinema. Interesting to know how Netflix will change their tune on theaters. So Ted Sarandos has been basically trash talking movie theaters for a long time, being like, netflix is the future, tech is the future. He hasn't been super rude or anything, but he's been like, it's not really key to our strategy. Then as soon as he was in the deal for Warner Brothers, he was like, yeah, the theater is amazing. It's not going anywhere. Like, we're, we're excited to invest and we will, we will talk to Matt Bellany about how long that lasts until he starts talking trash again. But he's already. Netflix is up 22%. Oh yeah, the stock. The shareholders hated the idea. They hated the idea. Love, yeah. Market Enemy to overpay for a handful a basket of legacy assets. Yes. There is another Thesis on why Netflix stock has mooned. And it's mostly around this concept that Ted Sarandos just stunned in a pair of jeans at the SAG Awards. So look at this. I mean, you see this. How can you not want to buy the stock? This is not financial advice. But you see a guy pull up in a fit like that, you're like, this is going to moon. I got to get in. I'm going turbo long. I'm top blasting, you're buying the dip. If it's dipping, you're top blasting and you're buying the dip. When you see a man pull up in two points, Billion dollar jeans. Because that's the amount of money that Netflix got wired because of this deal. That was the breakup fee. For some reason, I had it in my head that the breakup fee would be the other way, but not too shabby. In fact, Netflix got paid and Matthew Bellagnet got 1000 likes on this post. So my question is, there's a ton of debt going into this deal. Will I be able to watch the Sopranos on Netflix? Will I be able to watch the Dark Knight on Netflix? It's a complicated question because content licensing deal are not, they're not one size fits all. They're subject to windowing and certain markets. So if Netflix has really high penetration in Germany and HBO doesn't, it might make sense to license it there, but not elsewhere. But I just want to know broadly, like, what do we expect from Paramount, Skydance, Warner Brothers, Discovery, cbs, cnn, like, what is tnt? I think they have Shark Week now, right in Discovery. They got the Food Network, hgtv. You can watch the Property Brothers maybe on Netflix one day, who knows? But this is like the most extreme scenario. We talked about a post where someone was like, oh, like, you know, masterful 3D chess. They got Netflix, got Paramount to overpay for this. And now they're going to be so indebted because the deal got so big that they're just going to have to come to us and license 100% of the catalog on day one. I don't know if that's true, so I wanted to dig into it. Let's talk about it. So just to recap and set the table, David Ellison, who is the chairman and the CEO of Paramount Skydance, agreed to raise his offer for Warner brothers discovery to $31 a share. A lot of people, myself somewhat included, thought that Netflix was at least going to counter a little bit, but they folded immediately. And so the co CEOs, Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, they didn't counter and they said, you got it. Wire us the 2.8B. And they did. So the result is that David Ellison is handing over $111 billion in exchange for Warner Brothers, HBO, Max, CNN and the other cable networks. There was this whole political angle in D.C. about how interested would Trump be in the deal. And apparently as soon as he found out that Netflix was not interested in the cable TV assets, he became less interested in the deal because I think he watches a lot of news, but he probably doesn't watch a lot of Batman reboots and doesn't really care what happens there. And so it's just like a different thing. He's not turning on the latest DC Cinematic Universe film and be like, they're taking shots of me. But if he turns on CNN and they're taking shots at him, he's like, I care about that. Right. So in terms of the financial situation, they're levering up. They took our advice when we started the show, we told everyone, rule number one is lever up. And they did. So Paramount is already levered. 10 billion in debt. Yeah, to the Gilts. 10 billion of net debt, it's like 13 billion, but they have 3 billion in cash. So 10 billion in net debt, 3 billion of adjusted EBITDA with which to service that debt. Reasonable, but still pretty high leverage. 3x Paramount will be adding 60 billion of debt. So all combined the company will have something like 70 billion of net debt, 79 billion of total debt, with roughly 12 billion of adjusted EBITDA. And so when you're operating north of 6x leverage, that leads to different decision making, higher discount rates, higher interest rates, it can shift the focus to near term cash. So Netflix is a logical counterparty here because it can pay, it has the cash, has a lot of cash flow to pay for global rights at scale, and is has a long history of paying top dollar to deploy capital to known franchises. And also Netflix is in a particularly interesting financial position. So they've been an incredible case study for operating leverage. A true overnight success, something like 20 years. Grinding up, grinding up the subscribers, grinding up the revenue, investing more and more in content. And if we can pull up the chart either scrolling down on the tvpn.com newsletter or going to the third post in the timeline, you will see the small bars, the red bars are the revenue, and the little dots that have the numbers on them, which you can't really see, show how much they're investing in content. And so for a long time, for something like almost from 2002 to 2018, so 16 years, Netflix was like, we made 100 million. Let's make $100 million with the content. Let's buy $100 million worth of content. And then they were like, wait, we made $1 billion? You're never going to guess what we're going to spend on content. Exactly $1 billion. And then they were like, okay, we made, we made $10 billion. This is going to shock you, but we're spending $10 billion on content. And so they would just spend exactly what they made on content. But that changed. That changed in 2019, 2020 Covid, the amount of, the amount of subscribers spiked. The amount of revenue spiked. Then they launched the ad model. Took them a while to figure that out, but eventually worked. And the business kept growing, the top line kept growing, but they ran out of stuff to buy, they ran out of stuff to make. And even though they were paying, you know, top dollar for all these different assets, they sort of held their content budget flat. Their revenue went up. And that's of course, operating leverage. So profits, profits to pay for Warner Brothers Discovery assets potentially. And so they have the money to spend, but also their direct competitors in streaming with Paramount plus and HBO Max. And so there's a question about how friendly will they be if you license all the good HBO stuff, People will unsubscribe from hbo. Yeah, or Paramount. Or Paramount. Yeah, exactly. It just makes the Paramount subscription offering less competitive. Totally, totally. So it's this delicate balance. There's also potentially, and this was from the president, Fox, there's potentially this idea that regulators might attach a condition to the deal or at least signal or put pressure that the combined entity should maintain its tradition of licensing and selling content. Yeah, Laughlin yesterday said. This is Fox CEO Laughlin Murdoch expects that regulators will impose a third party content licensing condition on Paramount and Warner Brothers discovery. $110 billion merger. He said, we wish them the best of luck. We've seen this. Regardless of whether it was Netflix acquiring Warner Brothers Discovery or Paramount acquiring Warner Brothers Discovery, there will be conditions put on this transaction which would require a producer of that size to continue to sell their content to third party platforms. This was yesterday up in SF. Yeah. So I ballparked it at like maybe 70% chance that in the next two years there's some sort of meaningful content licensing deal between Paramount, Warner Brothers Discovery and Netflix. And so. But I do think that there will be limited Windows, some selection in markets where content is available, and pretty much everything will be non exclusive. So if you know some, you know, like the original Dark Knight trilogy goes on Netflix, it'll probably still be on hbo, on Paramount. Plus the real key brand assets like the Sopranos and the DC Universe properties, those are much less likely to be licensed. And there's basically no world where Netflix gets the first streaming rights to, like, tent poles. You want to maintain those. You want to give the super fans a reason to stay subscribed to begin a subscription on your now two streaming platforms. There is a lot of potential upside for the Ellison empire. I think of this like buying a house and then getting a roommate like you, you, you, you're levered up. You got a crazy mortgage. That's such, such a good example, right? You, you buy a house, you live in large, but, but you got a roommate. Yeah. And the roommate's Netflix, and they're paying the rent to you. You pay the mortgage and you kind of hate your roommate. You kind of hate your roommate. But, but you're long the real estate market. And then as you get promotions, as you get more cash flow, as you get more adjusted ebita, you can pay your mortgage. And as you pay your mortgage down, you wind up with a really cool asset, which is this nice house that actually has the extra bedroom. They're like, look, we had a good run. I really love the way you would put dishes in the sink and not do them. I really love the way you would watch movies loud into the night and Yellow. But I think it's time, it's time for you to move out. And I'm going to take the mortgage myself. I'm good for the full, the full bill every month. I'm good. But there are a lot of similarities, right? Because what are you getting with Warner Brothers? You're getting a whole library of IP that's very valuable, potentially for like 100 years. Porky Pig is from 1935. And I still know this guy's name and I know I could draw a picture if I needed to. And so if you believe that intellectual property will have a very, very long lifetime lifespan and it's incredibly valuable, but you have to finance it with debt. You have to work really hard to pay the bills. In the short term, you could wind up with a really great asset, even if you have that roommate for the short term. The other interesting question was, what does this reveal about the Ellison family's worldview for the future? Because on, on the one end of the spectrum, you have Larry Ellison, who seems incredibly AGI pilled. He's going crazy into AI data centers. You disagree with this? Well, I think. Remember, I think we did like the chart of who's the most AGI. Who's AGI versus AGI pilled. So he needs AGI, but he's not AGI pilled. Why is he not AGI pilled? Oh, just because of his rhetoric. And he. He just doesn't do that. Any podcasts get him on door cash? Yeah, yeah. We'll see what he says. Maybe his timelines, like ASI next month, you know, who knows? Yeah, you need to sit down. Your family today is obviously very AGI pilled. Does he have a Mac Mini? That's the real question. Funding data centers is generally aligned with a future where AI is an important technology. Levering up massively, right? Yes. Levering up is going to be big, right? Yes. Yeah, exactly. He believes AI is going to be big, but then he also believes, or, you know, in concert with David, his son believes that. That AI will not destroy legacy Hollywood assets that, like, no matter how much. No matter how many dollars you have, no matter how much compute you have, no matter how many generations you can use the latest video model, you will not just to be able to create a superhero that kids will dress up as at Halloween. And I think that's true. And I believe both of these. You don't. You're gonna be dressing up as Slop man next Slot man next Halloween. Look at Slop Man. You're gonna be like, oh, you don't know this superhero that. I prompt, and no one knows but me. It's a. It's a highly. Don't you know the Internet's highly personalized? No, but you can dress up as, like, a superhero who has, like, these black ears and, like, looks very similar to Batman. But it's not. Not the non. IP infringing Batman. I think the. Yeah. Literally describing Slot Man. Yeah, Slot Man. You're going to dress up as the knockoff Slot Man. I don't think anyone's going to do that. I think. I think Batman super important. I think broadly, media becomes like every piece of media that the audience gets smaller and smaller. Everything becomes more. More and more personalized. Like maybe. Yeah. Like, I think IP still has, like, a fairly big role in that. But you want to be on the cutting edge. I just think of, like, shelling points and, like, things that, like, yes, I can have a video that's perfectly tailored to me. But I like talking about movies with Ken Burns. They're calling you Temu Batman. Yeah, Temu Batman over here. Get out of here. Temu Batman. I don't know. So maybe that's not your worldview, Tyler, but it's clearly the worldview of the Ellison family because they believe in this barbell effect. They believe in the value of. Yeah, I would. You know, another way to look at it is like you could get this hyper personalization, but it could be around existing ip so you get to watch a personalized version of Batman content that's targeted just for you individually. But the kids are still dressing up as Batman. And we've already seen a glimpse of this with video games. There are video games that leverage existing intellectual property, but allow you to customize your character in some way. Put more skill points into intelligence and cast spells versus strength and use a sword. Right. You can have your own experience. If you play even like the Arkham Batman series, it's pretty linear, but you can play it more aggressively, you can play it more stealthily, and you can experience a Batman world that is more stealth focused or more fighting game focused. And that allows you to experience something that is unifying. And we can discuss. Okay, you played the same game as me, you understand the same character as me, but we had a different experience. And I think AI accelerates that and makes it more valuable, not less. I don't know. I'm somewhat pilled on this, but I respect your differing worldview that you will be enjoying. Slop Man. Enjoy. So by the loosest counts, this is the ninth or tenth time that Warner Brothers has changed hands since it became an independent Movie Studio in 1923. There's some of those acquisitions that have been like divestitures or reorganizations within other companies, but just like a fascinating thing. And I do think that David Ellison is going to go the long distance distance with this. I think with a little careful financial management and probably a few content licensing deals, like this might be the last one. He might be running this organization for his entire career. He's been working in Hollywood since he was a kid and has been very dedicated to this particular industry for a very long time. And so I don't think he's going anywhere. And so get ready for a whole bunch more content. Apparently they're going to make like three 30 movies a year, like, which is a dramatic step up. I think that they're going to try and actually ramp up the production. Are you sure that's not per day? I hope so. With AI it's totally possible as long as Tyler over there is buying tickets to see slop man number 17, revenge of the Slop man, I think that there's money to be printed. Let me tell you about Revenge Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from 1 GPU to to 100 slot man to revenge of the trough. Revenge is going to bricks for sure. Let me also tell you about Vibe Co where DTC brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta. And if you are inspired by the whole Netflix Warner Brothers saga, you should head over to the Goodwill in downtown Brooklyn. Tom from Vanity Fair says for 1499 you can Zaslav Max this spring they're selling a nice Port Authority puffer vest from Warner Brothers Discovery. That is a good pickup. Zaslav is a deals guy, hall of famer for sure. He was involved in launching CNBC. He also helped create MSNBC, became the CEO of Discovery 2006 and just a whole bunch of other crazy deals. Love to have him on the show once all this settles down. Like his full career is fascinating. And he's been loved, he's been hated, he's been everything in between. Lots of people have opinions, but there's no way to be unhappy if you've been riding with him as a shareholder because he got every penny out of this thing. He certainly did. According to the Washington Post, there was a researcher skeptical of Havana Syndrome, so he tested a secret weapon on himself. In 2024, Norwegian researchers skeptical that pulsed energy weapons could do damage to.

Used to need a specific chemical process. You'd probably be very hands off on this process, but you used to create a strip of film, the thin clear, and you put some chemical.

There is another thesis on why Netflix stock has mooned and it's.