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Creating some of the videos I will show you shortly or automating business workflows, codecs. Helps you move projects forward from start to finish. So the latest turn of AI video models, like, they're really, really good. Not just for the high fidelity stuff, which we'll show you some of, but even going Back to like 90s VHS footage, it can edit anything and it doesn't look weird 90% of the time. Sea Dance 2.5. The big update here is that it replaces the whole person, the whole object, as opposed to just a face swap, which it just hits way harder. You'll see. And it matches all the subtle details of the footage so things integrate really nicely. Dylan Patel posted a video of him as Drake in this Cheetah print video over the weekend. And I think a lot of people fell for this. It tricked everyone. I think it tricked a lot of people because it's super high fidelity. Let's play semianalysis. Latest post on X. Dylan Patel as Drake. And what's interesting about this is the video model is really good, but also this Drake video came out a day ago. And so it's not. It hasn't saturated the Internet like a lot of people. A lot of people hadn't seen it. This is the first. Yeah, I saw this video before I saw the actual Drake music video. And of course, the choreography is fantastic in the underlying video. And that drives the motion. Yeah. Maybe mute the audio. Really? Yeah. We're probably going to get fun as it is. But it's so funny to see Dylan walk around. And that first shot really sells it. It really looks like him. Later on, he goes into the mirror, he walks up the stairs. This is what the model's really good at, is even though he's very small and he's behind that chandelier cuts in front of him. There's no aberrations. This part, his face starts to look a little not like him. There's a little bit of Drake sort of sneaking back in on the facial structure. But overall, very, very, like, incredible performance. And it does a good job whether he's looking away from the camera, whether he's big in the frame or small in the frame. And I can't stress enough how funny it is that so many people, like, so many people were dunking on him, saying they thought he does. Wow. This is the top. We're definitely closer to the top than the bottom. Never become the main character. He's not serious. He's not serious. It's like one. Dylan has never had the most, like, serious Brand. He likes to have fun. But two, the fact that it was tricking everyone. Shows that. Shows where we are. Shows where we are. No, seriously, like this is exactly what you want from the semi analysis. You want them to analyze. We just updated you on the state of video models. Yeah. And the idea that Dylan, which. They use so much AI. They use so much AI on anything. Everything. I even texted Dylan recently. I was like, you should get an actual creative director. Maybe use less slop, you know? Um, and. But the idea that he would just like take 48 hours and $100,000 budget to go and film this the day after Drake drops the video is crazy. But if he did, like, he is like, obviously he's in like an analysis business, but he's also an entertainer. He also has to fill the top of funnel newsletter subscribers. Like he has to be front and center. And so it's actually not that crazy. Like even if he did this by himself, I would just be like, respect. Like that. That's a fun project. But of course he's using AI. He's using CDNs 2.5. Higsfield wrapped CDNs 2.5 in. In a model that sort of a harness that sort of makes this a little bit easier. You can use that via the API. It's also available on fall. And there's a couple other ways to interface with it. But it's interesting because it's. It's highly compute intensive. China's obviously way behind on compute. So we. What's going on with the strategy. But before we get to that, it's really fun. So we gotta play some of the more videos that we made. So I had Codex finding famous or funny videos to use as bass clips. I would just say I started with the rap videos, did a couple of those. I think there's one maybe in the timeline. Yeah. Noah in the X chat says no headphones. Obviously fake. Oh, true. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, you gotta have the headphones to make it believable. Dylan Patel. But yeah, let's see if we can play the. The video is. Did that one make it in the production chat? The. Yeah, this one. Because I saw this originally with Elon Musk and Sam Altman rapping and I think we might need it just because of swearing. But what's interesting here is that it does a pretty good job of getting us. But there's moments when I sort of blend into Elon Musk, which is funny because it's not like it's originally an Elon video, but clearly the underlying video that was driving the AI model was the Elon and Sam version. And then our heights kind of changed. Like, I look a little bit more like Elon there. It's very silly, but very, very funny. Gonna fool a lot of people. But also then I was able to just say, like, okay, go make a bunch of tech videos. Like, just find iconic videos from tech. And it did it. And it found, like, sweet baby rays. I didn't tell it to go get that video, but. But it just did it, which was very cool. Some of them came out really well. Some of them didn't do too well. The one that I liked, I think the most, and it's a funny dynamic that we noticed where when you're looking at an AI video of yourself, you're thinking, that doesn't look like me. And then when other people watch it, they're like, wow, that looks exactly like Jordy. Yeah. Yeah. So let's watch Jordy introduce the MacBook Air as Steve Jobs. I don't think, actually Apple kind of bans everything, so we'll see. We'll see if this one gets flagged. But we might be. We might be cooked on this. On this particular one. But I said, video is solved. Roll the dice. The post. Yeah, let's roll the dice on this one. Video is solved. Jordy hayes introducing the MacBook Air. It's already got 350 likes on Axe. Let's play it. Boom. So it didn't change the voice. So you still hear Steve Jobs voice, which is also funny about the Dylan Patel, because it's Drake's voice. So it's like, what did they think happened? He's like lip syncing to it or something. That didn' any sense. But what's really cool about this is that it changes Jordy. The small Jordy and the big Jordy. It. It changes both of them in the same frame. And then even there, you only see a little bit of Steve Jobs mouth. And it was able to change that to Jordy, so it can represent what's going on outside of the frame. And historically, that's been very difficult for AI models. They want the face in the center of the frame. They want to be able to crop it and think reasonably, reasonably about it. But it did a good job there. Jordy S. Jensen taking the GPUs out mass for this one. Yeah, it's very funny when you. When. When. When you use a different person with a different stature, different musculature, like, they. It just comes across differently. But very funny clip iconic When Jensen announced was this. That H100 announcement that a100 audio. It was pretty early, but this is still such a funny gag that Jensen actually did this. I love it. He's really grunting. I mean, that's a heavy rack. It's the world's largest graphics card. Such a funny bit that he just did this in a kitchen. It's so good. Something I got to show you. I got something I got to show you. Jensen's such a. Such a master performer. We saw that on stage at Salesforce Agent Force last week, the last one that I did. And before we pull up the Jordius Steve Ballmer, which is particularly hilarious, let me tell you about console.com, console builds AI agents that automate 70% of it. HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. This one, I specifically told it, like, keep the sweaty shirt. And so I think it did more of a face replacement. So the face is sort of jumping around, but still very funny. The key to industry transformation, the key to success is developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. It really got, like the level of sweat on your face. Pretty cracked, but the face is jumping around. Not. Not quite. Not quite dialed. I think you'll have to perform that one irl and I should. I should run that build at some point. You should. You should bulk to get. To get to that level. For sure. For sure. So, yeah, I mean, downstream of this, obviously there's going to be the it's over for traditional filmmakers, blah, blah, blah. Then obviously a whole bunch of blended work that uses the right tool for the job. Some productions will use this where it helps in urgent scenarios. I think some of the stuff is already actually being used in Hollywood specifically for reshoots. About 10 years ago, Henry Cavill was in. Was. Was in Superman. And he left Superman. They wrapped production. He went to film Mission Impossible. And in Mission Impossible, he has a mustache. So he grew out a real mustache. Was filming Mission Impossible and they were like, we didn't get the shot for Superman. You gotta come back and film another scene as Superman. And he was like, I can't shave my mustache. And they were like, okay, we'll fix it. In post and in the newsletter, there's a photo here that we can pull up of how it came away because they had to remove and reconstruct his lip and his mouth using 2017 technology. And. And it was not good. It was very, very rough, probably very tedious. Very expensive. Isn't A mustache, like the easiest thing to apply. Oh, oh, like fake. Like you should have just shaved it and then put on a fake mustache. Yeah. I don't know. I think Mission Impossible, they want the real thing, so. Yeah. The Superman on the right is Henry Cavill with a mustache that has been removed in post and it was widely critiqued by the VFX community. So you can imagine for stuff like that, these tools will creep in very quickly. For most things, it's going to be okay. Well, if you needed someone to drive the video, why don't you just have the actor do that? Maybe for stunts and stuff you'd do it, but for most performances, I think you'll still be doing it the old way, at least for the time being. What about some of the other more action oriented. Yes. So this was a fun one. I had to go and pull Johnny Knoxville and Steve O clips throughout the. Throughout their filmmaking and TV generational run. Yeah, their entire run. Make about 20 of them. And then put it together into a trailer that we can watch now. And I really enjoyed this. We gotta do that in the office. I think Tyler was thinking about getting that. This one. This one didn't seem that bad to me, but Nick said this was terrifying. Getting in a cactus, I don't know. I've never really been poked by a cactus. The hands on the bikes. I don't know how the guy on the left wins. Of course, a lot of Stevo in that one. A lot of Steve O here too. But I think these work so well because a lot of the underlying footage looks like AI. It looks like this. The prompts. This looks like an AI prompt. Like drive a Jet Ski out of a pool in a luxury house, you know, this looks like this is real, though. This is real. We actually shot this. Yeah, this is real. No, the only thing that's different about this is the suits. We replaced the characters, but the underlying footage is all real. From Johnny Knoxville and crew. The fire hose rodeo. This one. That looks fun. Just dying laughing. The old alligator in the house. Like the old alligator in the house trick. I think they chilled that guy down so he was real slow. And then the bull run slammed. I didn't know rams were so aggressive. The ram just slammed that guy. It's in the name, John. I know, but I think of them, this looks like an AI prompt, too. Boxing match on stilts, but replace the suits. The gag chair that falls apart. That's a classic. All time, all time favorite classic. Then I come up and, hey, don't steal that the old. The old air horn while you're golfing. Classic. No, this is a good one. Going through the window soup. Just asking someone, hey, can you go grab the six bowls of soup on a tray and bring it in? Okay. That's just pure Johnny Knoxville. So, yeah, sometimes you get, like, a blended half, the main character half who you tried to replace. Sometimes it's pretty good. There's a little bit of us in there, but very fun to be able to just do this via text. I'm technically interacting with an API, but I didn't write a line of code. All on your phone? Yeah, all on my phone. So very, very fun. I think these things will sort of burn through pretty quickly. Everyone will be like, oh, yeah, that's the capability. Everyone did their version of the meme, and then. And then it becomes more of a tool, melts into the background. Yeah, you already saw this with all the Young Lean music videos. Yeah, it's kind of made the same thing. And now. And now it's, like, played out. But a very impressive demo. Tip of the hat. Tip of the hat to Young Lean, but a very impressive demo because it's able to replace multiple people and do it very consistently, even through some really aggressive motion. So I thought that was pretty cool. So the whole pipeline here was I was running codecs on my PC, interacting with that from my phone, the ChatGPT app. Then I had Codex go and generate reference Images with just ChatGPT images, because it's pretty good at that, and then use those to swap through CDance, which was actually rendered via Higgs Field. Higgs Field, Amazing. In terms of just delivering the assets as an API, extremely confusing as a product because they basically have two ways to give them money. You can. You can load up API credits, and then you can, like, buy a plan. And so at one point, I ran out of API credits, and it was like, time to upgrade to the plan. And I was like, okay, cool, I'm having a good time. I'll do more of this. Click the button. Like, okay, yeah, you loaded up a couple hundred bucks in here with, like, the ultimate plan or whatever. And then it's like, those credits are not available in the API. And I was like, great, thanks. And then it was like, okay, time to add some credits to your plan. I was like, okay, this is what I need to do. I add credits to the plan. It's like, those credits are on your plan. Those aren't API credits. Those are plan credits. And so I have, like, so much random money stuck in various Pieces of Higgsfield. Well, and I think that's been a massive complaint. Higgs Field has faced a bunch of, I think, various allegations over the last year. I mean, the website looks like a gambling company. It'll be like, Countdown 10 minutes to claim 75% discount on your next credits. Like, it's totally optimized for, like, brain rot as you go through the flow being like, oh, buy. You gotta buy. Yeah, I had seen stuff of like, you can't, you know, not. Not being able to actually cancel your plan. So now that you have a plan that you can't use for anything, it's over. It's over for me. It's over. You're a customer for life. But the products. Great entertainment. Great entertainment. And I do think, yeah, I think I might try fall again as more of like a cleaner API that's a little more intelligible. But, yeah, I think once you set up the bindings and get them all dialed in in Codex, I think Ellie says, looking mighty sus and mysterious today, chaps. Well, well, this is the era that we're in. This is the era that we're in. You got to take safety era. You got to take a hat. Serious safety era. Anyway, John, once a week, John's like, I think fedoras are gonna come back. I think fedoras are gonna come. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the hat. I do think the hat work if it's styled properly. I think it goes better with a suit. I think it goes better with some sunglasses and a pumpkin jacket. John says, my safety. No, I mean, obviously, the fedora is often maligned as. As not particularly stylish, not particularly modern. But if you go back to old state James Bond, there was a way to make us to make a fedora look very stylish. Now we are wearing relatively cheap fedoras. I think you drop a couple thousand dollars on a Bottega Roman weave fedora, it's a different conversation, different story. Different story. No, I think it can be done. I think it can be done properly, but it requires discerning eyes, some taste. Taste is the new moat in AI. The Doro will be a piece of that story. Anyway, let me tell you about public investing. For those that take it seriously, they got stocks, options, bonds, crypto treasuries, and more with great customers.

AI is just going to be good at doing all these complex things. And so I think that moat disappears. So what's the mode? I believe the moat will be trust in a company that develops trust with consumers. And that's where matter has a huge disadvantage. So the trust will be the mode that'll be important. I also think completion is going to be really important. Consumers will be loyal to products that get their shit done. Excuse the language. It's true. It's a good point. It's that simple. I mean, it's like we miss it a lot, but if you look at the Wajo agent, you don't need to know what it's doing, but it knows when it's stuck. Most agents then just tell you they're stuck or don't even tell you that they're just stuck. The VAJO agent, for example, will pull a human in as a tool. Use a human to complete your task. Interesting. The idea of trust. First, your information, your most private information. What you like, what you don't, what you buy, what your preferences are. That's trust. Then there's completion. If you can get all my stuff done, I'll be loyal to you. For the very large companies, it's really hard to have humans in the loop. Oh, sure, sure.

The right agent won't be an app. Just where do most people live? They live in their email, they live in text messaging, they live in Slack, they live in other channels. And so agent has to operate primarily with all those channels and the app, if there's one and there may not be one, it's just in the background. So you don't have to open the app. You just text message your agent like you do with FO from Voyager and it takes care of it. Or sometimes you just pick up the phone and do that. And sometimes the agent just has to pick up the phone and have a conversation with the merchant. Yeah. So you know, meeting the consumer where they are. The consumer experience is really, really important. Not get stuck in redo text only. We do browser only. You have to be in our app. Users don't like those constraints. How do you think about I don't want to install one more app on my phone. Yeah. It's reflected in the app store. It's all just AI apps. How do you.

Representing the consumer's interest and acting on their behalf as if it was an omnipotent personal assistant is what matters. And personal is the key. It's for them, the consumer, not for some company. How do you think about moats in this era of personal agents? There's a thesis that's percolating right now that says once you install a personal agent, once you've given one personal, maybe people won't trust meta. Certain people obviously will. But the people that do, and they go in that bucket and they start daily driving that particular personal agent, they give it access to their calendar, their email, their text messages. They are not going to move to another agent, even if it's a little bit better. At the same time, I feel like there's a risk of if you're on instinct, you can go to Muse and say, hey, just off board me from instinct and set up Muse or vice versa. And so it might be a little bit less of a hassle to off board. Not quite as strong of a moat as traditional social networking. But how do you see the moats question playing out in the era of personal agents? I think offboarding will be possible. A little bit clumsy, but then if you have a good agent, you tell it to do the offboarding. Yeah. And the onboarding onto the new one. Yeah, we saw that with OpenAI and anthropic saying, hey, go dump this prompt in the other chat app to get all your memories coming and paste it over here. And they were fighting over that because it was possible to move from one LLM to the others. I would say is the complexity of tasks, especially as companies make it hard to offboard, will no longer be a barrier. If I had to look at all my information on Google or Meta and figure it out. It's complex. If I want to know, I don't want Google to know where I was on September 3rd at 5pm they probably know and I can probably disable that, but it's hard. It's just going to be good at doing all these complex things. And so I think that moat disappears. So what's the moat? I believe the moat will be trusting in a company that develops trust with consumers. And that's where meta has a huge disadvantage. The trust will be the mode that'll be important. I also think completion is going to be really important. Consumers will be loyal to products that get their shit done. Excuse the language. It's true. It's a good point. It's that simple. I mean, it's like we miss it a lot but if you look at the Vago agent, you don't need to know what it's doing, but it knows when it's stuck. Most agents then just tell you they're stuck, or don't even tell you that they're just stuck. The Vajo agent, for example, will pull a human in as a tool. Use a human to complete your task. Interesting. So the idea of trust. First, your information, your most private information. What you like, what you don't, what you buy, what your preferences are, that's trust. Then there's completion. If you can get all my stuff done, I'll be loyal to you. In for the very large companies, it's really hard to have humans in the loop. Oh, sure, sure. Yeah. You need to scale it. I mean, it's.

From the consumer's point of view with all the assault on the consumer the marketing assault I should say from AI and all the AI is ganging up on changing shades of blue which meta does to make you click more or other things TikTok plays do you want to be subject to the consumer or or fight all the AIs video your personal AI that does only has your interests at heart and I think that's a very very large and important category I think I talked about this first about four years ago the largest opportunity being protecting the consumer against all the AI assaults and getting all their work done without it being biased Today you can't even look at the reviews without understanding whether it was paid for by whoever is marketing it. Yeah so representing the consumer and having an AI that loyal to the consumer not to a particular company, a particular product a particular point of view is going to be very very important so so Silicon Valley as long said consumers consumers won't pay for things at scale There's.

I don't know of a single company still being run the way that it was run maybe, you know, 18 months ago. I mean, everybody is, is, you know, running insanely fast into the future. And then I think we're, we're, you know, there still will clearly be some parts of the market that don't capture as much of the value as they did previously. And then there are going to be some parts of the market that capture actually a ton more value than they did previously because of, of what agents can do. I mean, you look at, at infrastructure providers as an example, like the cloud flares of the world, totally on fire, because agents need sandboxes, they need compute, they need network, they need gateways. Great business. If you look at databricks or snowflake, agents need to be able to triage against large sets of data that you need to be able to pull together in one kind of common system. So doing fantastically well for us, we have re accelerated growth far past our internal plans because it turns out that enterprises need core systems to be able to manage their unstructured data. And agents need to be able to work with that unstructured data to make decisions or move information through a workflow, whether it's all of your contracts or your research materials or marketing assets or financial documents. And again, it might be easy in a personal productivity sense to be like, okay, well I can just have that data in some cloud system or even on my local device. Now imagine an enterprise with 10,000 employees. How do you ensure that those agents continue to go after the actual canonical records, the actual documents that, that are the real sources of truth and that are the authoritative versions of that data. That means you need platforms and we're obviously competing for how do you become the platform for all of this unstructured data. But I think there's a lot of value being created really across these ecosystems. And I would say right now my view would be it is unequivocally been a net positive for software, even with some of the spaces being under pressure, simply because how much more work agents are doing on these systems and the need to be able to provide the guardrails and be able to be the traffic cop for what those agents are doing and to be able to deploy these agents natively within your own agent harness in your own system of record and all of that is creating more value for these platforms. At a system level, what is the.

On. On the Engagement, but also the series B. How are things going? What's new in your world? How much rain are you making these days? Yeah, well, first of all, the, the $100 million that we raised. I'm super grateful to have done that with, with some great partners. Thank goodness. We keep. We keep. We're going to need a bigger gong. The next round we've been with. I feel like we've been riding with you for every round to date, day one. And yeah, time to upgrade for us. No, you were there. You were there early. I, I was wondering whether $100 million bag was big enough for the size. Gone. But sure. Oh, for sure. The reality is it's, it's, it's a drop in the bucket relative to what the Chinese Meteorological Administration is spending. Say again? Yeah. What. What are they spending? Order of magnitude. So they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on their weather program because they understand that water and the weather is a strategic capability and resource. We talk about critical minerals, we talk about oil and natural gas. Water is this fundamental input to our industrial economy, to our ag, to healthy agricultural and food. And if we don't produce more. And cloud seeding is the foremost option to produce more, the Colorado river, the Great Salt Lake, the bodies of water across the United States are going to be impaired to the point of mass evacuation. So we need to make more for the sake of the strategic health of the country and then also for our allies overseas that need more water, like Jordan, in the Middle east, like Morocco and so on. Did you get saved by data center backlash? Because there was some backlash brewing to your crazy scheme to make it rain. And then I feel like it's been real quiet since the data center started sucking all the air out of the discourse. Well, the data centers have been sucking water out of our reservoirs. How real is that from your perspective? You're the water expert. Talk to data center people. They'll be like, it's closed loop. It's like a car wash. Yeah, we use water, but we recycle it at the same time. You know, water usage, it's low, but everyone's saying we're going to build a thousand times more data centers. So at a certain point, might be significant. What's your take on it? Well, the reality is, yes, American agriculture is using far more water orders of magnitude more than data centers. So does municipal use, the showers that we take, the dishes that we wash? Orders of magnitude more water than data centers. But data centers do consume water. And when you have as great a shortage of supply as we do in the American West. Do you want to give water to computer or to your shower and your faucet? Probably computer. Probably computer. Especially playing video games all weekend, generating AI. If it's generating AI videos and playing video games, I'll skip the shower. I'll walk in. But John Jordy, you can have AI slot videos in the shower if you just make in via cloud seating. I can have my cake and eat it too. With cloud seating. Precisely. Is there actually any closed, any near term flywheel there where cloud seeding can alleviate water usage from data centers? Or is that like further out? Rainmaker already has one deal closed with hyperscaler, and we're in negotiation and engineering feasibility with multiple others, offsetting their consumption and riding the wave of hyperscalers to produce more water for the American interior. That's a spectacular positive externality that those businesses can provide. And so I look forward to that. Maybe not as much as I do the ski resorts that we're negotiating with, but keep an eye out for the cantons of Switzerland and your favorite resorts around there in this upcoming winter. That's cool.

We can share. You look like you're about to release a book on fear and doom. How optimistic are you about the world? How are things going in your world? Are you a doomer? Are you an optimist? Are you an accelerationist? Are you cautious optimist? Getting right into right. Right with the heart? Yeah, it's always interesting to start from, where are you? Because something I've noticed is that there are no doomers at the application layer there. There are no doomers in the infrastructure trade. There are no doomers are only at the model layer. And there's a good reason, because that's where AGI and super intelligence is emerging from. Reason. I actually, I think this is maybe a hot take here. I actually think that. So I think part of the problem right now is that the like whole AI safety conversation, risk, whatever, it's like five or six different things all muddled up into one totally. There's like, yeah, there's like climate change from data centers is getting looped into like bioembisc. Exactly. Very different things. There's like, there's like the whole sycophancy thing, how it affects people's mental health. There's like a bunch of different things. And I do think that for some of them, not necessarily the bioweapon thing or the data center thing, but like, for a lot of. Like a lot of the things I think about are at the application layer. They are like the. That's where people meet models. And there is a risk there that a people at Frontier Labs don't really care about or think about, but we work with Fortune 100 companies that their products are used by millions of people and then affect even more people. And so, well, start there, reintroduce the product, Explain you're here with fundraising news and product news, but give us the high level again. Raindrop is a agent reliability product. So we detect issues happening in production and we prevent those issues from happening. So the product we just announced recently, which I'm really, really excited about, is simulations. So when people make changes to their agents, we simulate what those changes are going to do in the real world and can show people things they wouldn't have even ever expected to happen. Sure. So, yeah,

Yeah. Is this real cause for optimism for the entertainment industry in L. A? Is there, is there, is there already plenty of cause for optimism living here? I don't, I don't, you know, when I, when I talk to folks, I don't get this sort of sense that like they're super excited about the state of things, but maybe it's. It's darkest before dawn. Well, the last few years have been pretty rough, right. There was kind of an unprecedented explosion, particularly on the television side, kind of starting around Netflix and House of Cards. But really, look, the TV business was a cash machine for the, for decades. Streaming seemed like a really great business for, for a lot of these people. And then around 22, 23, there has been this kind of correction or rightsizing and from which the industry has never fully recovered. So, yeah, you're right that most people who work in Hollywood don't feel great about it. I don't think that they believe that this deal is going to be the solution for that. Right. They're looking at what will likely be thousands in job cuts and the combination of two of the original six Hollywood studios. But other people feel great because it means they think that David Ellison will finally be the one to kind of create a scaled player to compete with Netflix and Amazon and Disney. Look, Warner Brothers has traded hands a lot over the last decade. It got bought by AT&T, then it got bought by Discovery, now it's getting bought by David Ellison. Everyone has said that they're going to be the ones to figure out how to make HBO kind of a real competitor in streaming. They haven't done it so far, but maybe David Ellison will have the magic touch. How is Hollywood processing the. It seems like TVs in a rough spot, but it feels like it's starting to be a good year for movies, at least financially. I mean, we had the three breakout, sort of like crossover YouTubers, Obsession, Iron Lung backrooms. Then you have $2 billion outcomes with the Odyssey and Spider man. And then you're going into the back half of the year, it's tech focused and you get the Theranos Elizabeth Holmes documentary. There's an OpenAI movie, there's another Facebook movie. Like, at least from my world. I feel like there's more stories around the movie business. But how is Hollywood perceiving this year? Will this be remembered as like a good year for the moviemaking business? Potentially? I think it depends on who you ask. Top line, it's the highest grossing year since before the pandemic, since 2019. You have the second most billion dollar movies ever. You know, you had the Odyssey, you had the Spider man movie, you had Toy Story 5, you had a new Super Mario Brothers movie. And then a lot of the ones that you referenced, whether it kind of the YouTube breakouts or even Devil Wears Prada 2 was a big hit. I think where people counter that is that if you look just in terms of ticket sales, ticket sales are still down a lot. The reason that grosses are stronger is in part because going to the movies is just more expensive. And so we've entered a phase where moviegoing as a habit is just not what it used to be. But yeah, I think this is. If you talk to people in the movie business, they feel better about it this year than they have since before the pandemic closed theaters. And the question that they all have is, is this going to continue? How do we make sure that this isn't a blip and we actually are back on a growth trajectory which the business hasn't really been on? Yeah, I've seen some crazy stats about moviegoing before the dawn of television. I think in like the 40s and 50s, like the average American bought like something like 10 or 20 movie tickets a month. It was like the only thing to do. And so everyone was going to movies constantly. And then once people could watch. Gotta get your screen time somehow. Well, you think about it. Think about when you. Yes, there's what happened, you know, before television where it was like, yes, it was pretty much. It was that or reading books or playing playing cards. But even when, when you were growing up, going to the movies on a Friday night was something that. Correct every weekend. And that's just not the case now. Right. You go when there is an event, a movie is competing with TikTok, it's competing with YouTube, it's competing with live sports, it's competing with concerts, it's competing with, you know, anything and everything. And so it has to be loud and it has to feel like something one needs to leave the house to go see. And that's something that the movie business struggles with because they were in the habit of people just showing up on a Friday night and saying, what do I want to see?

We just set up our next guest. I think it'd be worth talking about Paramount. Let's get a quick tip of the hat for the hat friends over at Raindrop. Yes, yes, yes, of course. So Paramount is officially not leaving California. It's been a back and forth. The company going through an acquisition with Warner Brothers Discovery has been duking it out with AG attorneys general in California, the company said Monday. That's Paramount said that it has reached a settlement with the states challenging its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery, clearing what had become the last major obstacle to the deal. California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a coalition of other states sued Paramount in July, arguing that combining the two companies would give a single entertainment giant too much control over major film studios, cable networks and other media properties. To resolve the case, Paramount agreed to several conditions. The combined company will create an independent board of journalists intended to protect the editorial autonomy of CNN and CBS News, commit to releasing at least 30 movies theatrically each year, and spend an additional $1.5 billion on film production over the next five years. Paramount did not agree to more structural changes. They're not selling CNN or divesting one of the movie studios. Once completed, the merger will bring Paramount and Warner Bros. Under the same roof, along with Paramount plus HBO Max, cbs, CNN and franchises and films including Superman, Minecraft and Sinners. Paramount has argued that the scale is necessary to compete with increasingly powerful technology and streaming companies like Netflix. If you subscribe to every Paramount Warner Brothers Discovery premium service now, you're probably giving them like 60 bucks a month, maybe more if you HBO Max is an independent subscription. Paramount plus that gets pricey if you get the don't they have UFC now? CBS I think has an all access. CNN launched something but I think they shuttered it anyway. The settlement also follows months of political pressure surrounding Paramount's future in California. The company had warned that it could move significant production and thousands of jobs out of the state if the acquisition were blocked and had reportedly begun exploring studio space in Nashville. Governor Gavin Newsom publicly warned that losing Paramount would damage California's standing at as the center of the entertainment industry. With the lawsuit now headed for resolution, one of the more serious recent threats of a major Hollywood company pulling back from Los Angeles appears to have receded. So this is extremely bad news for everyone. That was hoping that the Paramount lot would be converted into a data center in part of Los Angeles. A lot of the pro data center crowd were optimistic about a large scale data center coming in to Los Angeles using up a lot of the water, a lot of the energy here in Los Angeles, but looks like they're going to be making movies instead. Well, let's check in with.

You got to miss a couple. This was interesting from former Meta employee Nikita Beer says, how important is AI to Meta? Here's one easy tell. One of the launch features of the Muse app was auto negotiating for stuff on Facebook. Marketplace. The poor product manager who owns Marketplace knows that millions of bots lowballing sellers will eventually kill the product. But this was escalated to zuck by the Muse team, and he said, okay, we'll poison Marketplace just a little. Wait, why will that kill the product? I mean, think about the experience. If you tell your bot like, hey, I'm interested in these types of items. Go anytime one of them appears, auto negotiate. Yeah, but wouldn't someone have a bot on the other side dealing with a negotiation? You can do the outbound, too. You can go outbound. Yeah, yeah. Yes. Message everyone on Facebook. Yes, I got a Dodge Hellcat. If you know, you know. I got one pair of keys and I saw you were posting. You like to post from the Dodge Hellcat community. Would you be interested in purchasing this? I'll need cash. Don't ask questions. Don't ask questions. Let me tell you about Crowdstrike. Your business is AI. Their business is super.

The hallucination problem kind of went away, but it's coming back in full force. David here said instinct made up his middle name, and he can't board his flight because he tried to use his agent to book a flight. And it just made up David Bom Chang Choi, which I guess is not his middle name. And I've had that before where I find it a little hard. Well, we know why hallucinations would be happening, which is, like, if you're serving a product for free at scale, you have to figure out a way to do it really cheaply. And so they're certainly using older models. And again, trying to. Someone figured out the model. Was it Kimmy? I think it's Kimi. Running openclaw. Right. But it's hosted in the cloud, and so you get an OpenClaw instance Cloud hosted. Yeah. That said, I've been in situations where my name was misspelled on, like, flight details, and this is pretty easy to. To. To resolve, so hopefully. Oh, oh, you think it's not that big of a deal because, like, you can just get on the board. You can just talk to them. They'll be like, here's my id. I made a mistake. Totally, totally fix it. And they'll give you a new boarding pass. Yeah, yeah. They might kick you out of security line. So if you're running really late, as I like to do you, you might. You might. You might struggle to get on the plane. You might miss your flight, but that's okay. You got to miss a couple this.

Amazon came down with the ban hammer. Buco Capital says Amazon cuts off Muse. While I am bullish Meta and Muse, I think many people are overlooking the digital knife fight that's about to occur. Nobody wants to get commoditized or layered here. Let the games begin. Amazon says it has cut off Meta's new Muse personal AI agent from shopping on Amazon.com on behalf of customers after attempting unsuccessfully to get the Facebook parent company to voluntarily exclude the e commerce site from the experience. The problem, Amazon says, is that it never agreed to any of it. Meta didn't tell Amazon that Muse would access its store. The agent itself doesn't identify itself when it browses and it appears to capture and store customer credentials, which the company says create privacy and security risks. As of Sunday night, people trying to use Muse to shop on Amazon, we're seeing the pop up. Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's conditions of use, to which our customers have agreed. Interesting. I wonder how Walmart will respond because Walmart was always. Overlap is higher than I think most people think. So I think Walmart had always been more friendly with chat apps, specifically ChatGPT. And that's the kind of thing that you do when you're not, you know, when you're not the leader in the space, you're more willing to, yeah. Experiment. I think they wound up rolling their own. I think they have Sparky and Amazon has Rufus. And so there's two dog named AI agents that do the shopping and then, and then most recently Tyler's been dailying Rufus, by the way. Yeah, just for everything. For everything. Just. Just psychology. Yeah. Getting close to solving another millennium. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rufus underrated. Yeah, yeah, I know. Amazon wound up finding sort of an equilibrium with OpenAI by plugging in their ad network into ChatGPT instead of letting ChatGPT like check out. This is the whole Eric Suefert agent of commerce is a mirage. Instead, Amazon is vending in their ads. So ChatGPT brings the data and says, okay, this person's looking for this thing. Do you want to buy an ad on it? And so there's the transaction value, but I don't know how to plan it play out. Yeah, I saw a couple seemingly smart investors say that are using Muse and excited about it, say, why is Amazon banning Muse? This is so short sighted. And then I actually saw two in two instances they deleted because of course they immediately were getting comments about Amazon's ad business, which is obviously what they're looking to protect. You can't serve Ads to news agents or Instinct or Chat or any of these other things. And Amazon's ad business is actually dramatically bigger than both anthropic and OpenAI. Oh, just last month. Yeah. So they've done 76 billion in the last 12 months through Q2 of 2026. So obviously they're going to protect this. Obviously they're going to protect this. I think consumers would love to be able to check out with, with other services. It is pretty gnarly to navigate Amazon.com as amazing as the services overall. Describing UX experience. No, it's, it's just being a UX researcher at Amazon they're calling it gnarly. It is fairly gnarly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, but, but you can see that there's. And again Peter, who effectively is the founder of Muse because he obviously Muse is based entirely on Open Claw and they built an amazing sort of effectively almost like. And I think Instinct too has some open claw lineage. Is that correct? Yeah. Peter says the beauty of running a claw yourself, they cannot block you. Oh, they're gonna block me when I say claw. Open 10,000Amazon windows on my desktop. Open up 5,000 Chrome tabs of Amazon so the sufinator you can get banned even if you're running it locally. This has happened to me. This is not a full solution. But he is right that there will be more sovereignty and the users might win. That's what we were talking to John Quinn about was that Amazon versus Perplexity Computer. The ruling was that Amazon can't block it if it's not. If it's running on the person's computer because it's like yeah, yes, yes. I told the agent to open the Chrome tab, but it's my Chrome tab on my computer. And so you shouldn't be able to block that because it's not a third party company. It's not corporate warfare. You're coming to me, the consumer, the customer's always. I can, I can see that being the ultimate outcome. I do think that's a bit, I mean you basically. I think Amazon's ad business, at least, at least their search ad business is something that eventually you might need to underwrite like cable television where it's like you're basically saying that there's a terminal value here. People aren't going to use their assistance to shop. That does. But some amount of people are just going to keep going to Amazon.com right now. It is. Amazon has made it quite easy to buy things on Amazon.com it's not like it's that much easier with an assistant. But something I've found is it's actually really nice having a single interface for all the things that you do right. So I like going to one place. Agent, push the order burrito button. That's really. The Soufinator has had some of the best commentary on this, which actually dates back to. He says the knife fight already took place. It ended a year ago when I wrote the first entry in my Agent to Commerce is a Mirage series. Amazon began blocking agents last July. It's currently suing Perplexity over autonomous shopping with Comet. Amazon won't capitulate. It doesn't have to. Alexa for shopping. Rufus generated 12 billion in incremental revenue. Every time I hear Rufus or Sparky Walmart Sparky has generated similarly significant commercial traction for the company. Agentic commerce is already a reality, but it takes place on site, not through independent agents. ChatGPT launched ads in February 2026 and shortly thereafter shuttered Instant checkout. The affiliate model is economically suboptimal relative to advertising. ChatGPT has already demonstrated that. Yep, advertising is the dominant business model. Yeah, it'll be interesting. I mean, when the openclaw stuff came out, I was like, it feels like Napster. It feels like the Napster moment. Yeah. You can go check out on an e commerce website, but nobody wants you to do that that way. And you're gonna have to write some API binding and then scrape the front end and then rewrite it every time you go and check out. Because they're constantly gonna be fighting you and you are sort of like playing this game of cat and mouse, which you can play. And for certain e commerce sites, they're gonna be very open to that. Other ones are gonna be a huge hassle to deal with. Yeah. The question is, can agents monetize with advertising? I saw someone, a pretty viral post, somebody frustrated with Instinct Instinct coming, and they did basically a blast that says, hey, you have a bunch more invites. You can invite a bunch of people. And the user was pretty frustrated with that because they're like, hey, you work for me. Why are you advertising? Even though they're not paying for the product and they're incurring a lot of costs, products free to them, they're still mad that. That they feel like the agent is doing something that's purely in the agent's benefit. Sure. Not in their. Sure. Yeah. I wonder if we'll live in a world where you know how ChatGPT has like those recommended agent actions, if, like one of those could Be like, sponsored. Like, hey, like, want me to go shopping for you? Like, well, yeah, no. And that's important because. Because companies will happily pay for incremental demand. But the issue with, with agents is if you're saying, go to Amazon and buy this thing. The user already wanted to go to Amazon. But if I'm an industry coalition of surfboard wax makers, I might choose to send you a notification when you open up ChatGPT that says like, hey, want to go surfing? Want to take it to the next level? Isn't that what happened? Basically, you got one. One recommendation. ChatGPT recommends various agentic workflows for me. Yes, I sent it earlier. It recommended setting up an agent to give me one realistic next step for my surfing each week. Yep, that's great. It's like every problem is, I know exactly. I know exactly what I need to do. Raj Veer called out something interesting, which is that threads started free falling in the charts right as Muse started growing. Yeah. Today on Instagram, there's a hero story that's a full bleed ad for Muse. So they're pushing it. They're pushing it. And yeah, they're probably saying, like, let's funnel it over to Muse. And it makes sense. The monetization on Muse, I would expect to be way higher than Threads. Threads, you get some display ads, it's text that Surface has never monetized as well as Instagram. So the best case was like, you get something half as valuable as Instagram, a quarter tenth as valuable, whereas Muse is like a new Surface area where there's a whole bunch of different monetization opportunities and they already have the whole small business community. So I think it makes a ton of sense to funnel the attention over there. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than.