Davos Reactions, Waymo in the News, WB & Netflix Strike All Cash Deal | Diet TBPN

0:01There's a lot of news happening in Davos. Mainly a lot of it's focused on Trump. A lot of it's focused on Greenland. I'll give you a little tour of the Wall Street Journal. Trump's amped up rhetoric on Greenland puts issue center stage at Davos. Why don't you pull up the cover of the Financial Times, too? The Financial Times. You want me to do this bit? Here we go. Well, you know, the markets are in turmoil. The Dow slid 800 points. Treasury prices are dropping. The front of the Financial Times, it says Trump keeps seizure of Greenland by force on table as trade tensions mount. This is one of the most aggressive images that I can imagine running on the front of a international newspaper.

0:43Now, the Financial Times, of course, is a British paper. So much less just different dynamics with the current American administration. But over in the Financial Times, they print some wild stuff. And they printed this image of a Danish soldier pointing a gun at the camera. So Danish soldiers exercising on great work. Anybody that's been around guns knows that pointing a gun at anyone, even a photographer to get a cool picture, is typically just completely off limits. But they went there. What this says to me is that the Danes said, hey, the head of the army has been flown out to the autonomous territory.

1:26Danish troops are on the ground in Greenland. And we're doing a photo shoot. We're getting a soldier with a sniper rifle or an assault rifle. We're gonna point that at a camera person. We're gonna take that photo and then we're gonna send that to the editor of the Financial Times We're gonna run it on the front We're gonna run the front page of course the Danes don't have the Authority to just put anything on the front page, but they pitched it and clearly they sent the photo and the Financial Times editor Enjoyed it so we put it on the front page But it kind of gives you a little bit of a taste of what's right The Wall Street Journal is also covering it Trump threats on Greenland mobilize allies That is taking center stage at Davos, but this is a technology show This is a business show, and we're focused on what Dario Amadei said at Davos.

2:07Let's pull up the clip of Dario Amadei on stage. He's the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. He calls out Trump's policy around NVIDIA and China. Let's play the clip. When we go out, when we're competing against other companies for enterprise contracts, we see, just honestly and candidly, we see Google and we see OpenAI. Every once in a while, we see a couple other U.S. players. I have almost never lost a deal, lost a contract to a Chinese model. But now you have the Trump administration, and I think you've already protested about this, giving high-speed chips and video chips to the Chinese. That's right, that's right.

2:48The thing that is holding them back, and they've said it themselves. The CEOs of these companies say it's the embargo on chips that's holding us back. They explicitly say this. And now, indeed, you know, there are some policies, and I hope they change their mind, to explicitly send not quite our latest generation of chips, although it was reported that even that was being considered, but the generation of chips that's just won back, that's still extremely powerful. And we are many years ahead of China in terms of our ability to make chips, so I think it would be a big mistake to ship these chips.

3:27You know, the analogy I thought of, if you think about the incredible national security implications of building models that are essentially cognition, that are essentially intelligence, right? I've called where we're going with this a country of geniuses in a data center, right? So imagine 100 million people smarter than any Nobel Prize winner, and it's going to be under the control of one country or another. So I think this is crazy. I think it's a bit like, I don't know, like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and bragging, oh yeah, Boeing made the case. So your friend David Sachs is basically arming the Chinese?

4:11No, I wouldn't refer them to the country. I would just say that. Trying to put words in his mouth. Yeah. Okay, I want Jordy's reaction. I want Tyler's reaction. What's your reaction to that? How do you interpret that? How big of an issue is the China question right now? What are you reading into Dario's rhetoric there? I think it's, like, fairly reasonable if you basically think that AI is going to be AGI. It's going to be this massive, we're going to get 10 % GDP growth. Because at some point, it's like, if it's just, like, economy versus economy, like, we've got to be better. Yeah, that's something that's sort of lost.

4:44Even if you're worried about doom. Yeah. Because there's also the point where it's like... Just competition. Yeah, like, if you're worried about safety also. So there's, like, two ways, right? If you think Asia is going to be massive, economically speaking, and then also on the safety issue, right? Because if you think maybe China is going to be less concerned about safety, they're not going to be as worried about alignment. That's obviously a massive danger. You don't want to give the technology to people who don't worry about the safety aspect. The funny thing about in America, AI could lead to 10 % GDP growth.

5:13And China's like, oh, you mean what we did in 2007 when we were growing at 14 % GDP growth? Or should we go back to 1970 when we grew at 19 %? Or should we go back to 2004 when we were 10.1 %? Or 1992 when we were growing at 14.3 %? Or even in 2021, they had an 8.6 GDP growth. They know 10 % GDP growth over there. They felt it. They'll do it with or without AI chips. One dynamic that's interesting is China has obviously a massive advantage in robotics. Yes. And right now we have an advantage in the models. Yes. And if that kind of continues, you have a dynamic work. But also the GPUs, like the data centers, like we are GPU rich.

5:54So I'm saying, I guess, like robotic stack, AI stack. Yeah, yeah. And it'll be interesting to see how, because obviously if you have an advantage in one area, that might help you gain an advantage in another area, right? But we'll see which one ends up being more impactful. Let's click it over to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, who shared some commercial lessons of AI on the battlefield. And there's a little Easter egg in this video for the true TBPN ball-knowers, the TBPN fans. I know what you're about to say. Enterprises in general, not all enterprises, tend to want to, over time, become like every other enterprise.

6:31So if you take five, A, enterprise, and B, enterprise, and C, enterprise, they're in the same market. Their tech infrastructure is trying to make them into the same enterprise. They have the same ORCA chart. Sure. They have presumably roughly the same. They don't have the same data infrastructure. And what you learn on the battlefield is that and in life is that that's not particularly valuable. What is very valuable is an enterprise can do something no enterprise in the world can do. And so that is the goal of every single military intelligence service. In fact, all these intelligence service and militaries have their own specialization.

7:06And so when we went to commerce, like what we're saying is, how can we make your insurance the way you underwrite? How can we make that to your tribal knowledge about underwriting? How can we transform this to knowledge everyone has? Okay, go back one second. Okay, it's very hard to see. But behind the guy to the right, behind Alex Karp, there's another man. And behind that man, next to the WEF logo, is a man who has been on the show. Philip Johnston, the co-founder and CEO of StarCloud. Wait, I thought you were talking about Satya Nadella. Wait, what? I think that's Satya in the back. Wait, oh, you think it's Satya?

7:48No, I'm talking about the guy right there that you can see. That's Philip from StarCloud. I saw him going to Davos, and I was like, this guy's on a generational run. This whole time. Is it not? Maybe it's not. I think it is. Okay, I might be getting it wrong too. That looks a lot like you. We might just be seeing things. Let's dive in and dig into what Dr. Karp actually said on the stage at Davos. It's an interesting pitch. It's particularly interesting talking about just more and more custom systems and this idea of software gets built. A whole bunch of companies are doing things a manual way.

8:23One company extracts that and sort of factors out that business process, turns it into enterprise SaaS, is sold to all the different companies. Now what CARP is really saying, it sounds like, is that every company will have some sort of custom implementation that will be way more flexible and way more tuned to their specific businesses. And this is sort of the Palantir pitch. They'll come in and build something that's semi-custom, semi-on-top of their systems that they've already built. Seems like a good pitch. Would be interesting to see how this is like where the rubber meets the road and at what level.

8:58The big question with Palantir right now is they work with the largest companies and organizations in the world. Obviously, the military among them. But will they go down the stack and have more, you know, they have AIP. They're bringing more startups onto the platform. Will there be a world where more sort of mid-market enterprises, sub-10 billion dollar companies are thriving with a Palantir-backed system? On top of being the world's factory, China hopes to become the world's market. Let's watch the Chinese vice-premier. For economy and trade. We never seek trade surplus. On top of being the world's factory, we hope to be the world's market too.

9:37For economy and trade. It was an accident. We didn't mean to do this. It was not our intention to develop a massive trade surplus with the world. I feel like you, I mean, not to go back to 11 Labs, but you have a lot of flexibility with the translator that you choose at one of these events. How are you not going with an Arnold Schwarzenegger? Totally. Yeah. You could have anyone be your translator, so why not throw in a Morgan Freeman? Just any type of really incredible. A Joe Rogan. Yeah, Joe Rogan. He already is announcing UFC. Get him on the microphone. translate it for him and then he reads it out to the audience.

10:17I think this is positive. You know, we were just talking to Matt Grimm yesterday about the West versus China and global competition. And like, I think all of that stuff is important. I think what Dario is saying is important, but I still come back to this idea that like, no one wants war. No one wants, you know, everyone wants positive some relationships. And so it is good to see global leaders coming together better than everyone just being holed up and posting at each other on Redbook and Truth Social. I like an economic forum. I think Davos is back. Davos really, really pulled together a fantastic group this year and is definitely breaking through in the tech community, in the business community, in the political community in a way that I don't remember it being as important in last year.

11:02And so a little bit of a comeback. You love to see it. Lisan Al-Ghaib is quoting Dario at Davos, who also said we don't need to maximize engagement for a billion users, of course. Taking shots. Taking shots. Okay, so. Of folks over at OpenHand. I threw this question to both of you earlier today. What is the probability? It's funny that this is a shot, too, because it's like he is acknowledging that they've developed an ad. Is he anti-ads? Yeah, Anthropic is against slopping ads. He said he's anti-ads. Wow. Boo. This is hard. I was falling in love with Dario. I love so much about his rhetoric. Obviously the models are fantastic, but he has to come and stab me in the back like that with a shot on my favorite, favorite piece of the global economy, the advertising industry.

11:47He did a Wall Street Journal Q &A this morning. Okay. He thinks we're going to have very high GDP and very high unemployment inequality. 10 % GDP growth for America. That would be unprecedented, massive. We're typically at like 2 % to 3%. 10 % would be a significant acceleration. Yeah, and then for the unemployment, it was like 10 % to 20%. That's a lot. Yeah, and then he said there's going to have to be some role for the government to intervene on some macro level to help with this displacement of labor. He says ideology will not survive this technology. Ideology will not survive this technology.

12:20Yeah, it's kind of vague. A bit of a vague pose. Except his ideology. He's like, actually, mine is kind of got a straight shot here. What could be more ideological than being against advertising? He's a zealot. He's an anti-advertising zealot. he said uh ai is uniquely well suited uh to autocracy yeah this was in the context of like why he's kind of anti-giving chips to china yeah ai is communist crypto is libertarian that take yeah yeah and then he he said google and open ai are like firmly in consumer it's kind of this existential like battle between them uh and anthropic is firmly in enterprise he's he's very happy with that decision he doesn't have to you know monetize the billion users or whatever or monetize free users yeah he can just sell like things he's like i'm so i'm so happy i don't have to worry about monetizing a billion users.

13:07Some companies are essentially led by people who have a scientific background. That's my background. That's Demis' background. Some of them are led by a generation of entrepreneurs that did social media, taking shots. Dario is like, he's on one. Bold statement, jab. Yeah. Bold statement, jab. And then also people will hit him with the hard questions and he'll kind of be like, he'll acknowledge, he'll very quickly tell the interviewer, I know where you're going with that and I'm not going there. but in like a fun way that's not really adversarial. He says, there's a long tradition of scientists thinking about the effects of the technology that they built, of thinking of themselves as having responsibility for the technology they built, not ducking responsibility.

13:46They are motivated in the first place by creating something for the world. So they worry in the cases that something can go wrong. I think the motivation of entrepreneurs, particularly the generation of social media entrepreneurs, are very different. The way they interacted, you could say manipulated consumers is very different. I think that leads to different attitudes. He's taken some shots, potentially at Sam Altman, although Sam Altman not really a social media entrepreneur, but I get that he's in that generation. Let's talk about Waymo. So today I wrote a quick piece. It was a reaction to a reaction because David Zipper went in Bloomberg and he wrote a piece, said, we still don't know if robo taxis are safer than human drivers.

14:25Then Kelsey Piper went over to the argument and wrote a response to that, saying, yes, we do know. And her interesting point was that what David Zipper is doing is he's lumping all of the different robotaxis together. So Waymo and Cruise and Tesla and Kama and Zoox. And there's a whole bunch of other data that can go into this bucket. And they're not all created equal. Waymo has been doing it for decades at this point. They have insane CapEx and insane OpEx. And it's just like the most advanced team. It seems like it's, you know, the most advanced technology stack. There's a lot of advantages.

15:02And that's actually showing up in the data. And so her main dispute with Zipper is over what data, you know, she's including. He's including in making this claim that, you know, hey, we don't know if robo taxis are actually safer than human drivers. She says, imagine someone writes a piece and they say, we don't know if airplanes are safe. Some people say that crashes are extremely rare, and others say that crashes happen every week. And when you investigate this claim further, you learn that what's going on is that commercial aviation crashes are extremely rare. This is true. While general aviation crashes, small personal planes, including ones that you can build in your own garage, are quite common.

15:44And so, yes, if you lump that together, you're going to get this muddy picture of aviation, but you shouldn't use that to sort of fear monger about getting on a 747. You got to watch out. Ask any recreational pilot if they've ever gotten into any hairy incidents. Totally. Tell you like, oh yeah, well this time I was flying and the wind came on super strong and I landed and I was basically, you know, 90 degrees. And a lot of times that counts as a crash. Like, I mean, Harrison Ford has like crash landed on a golf course and no i believe no one was injured i think i think this happened multiple times actually um by harrison ford harrison ford yeah he flies his own planes but he flies like old planes and stuff like he's like a true enthusiast in the last 25 years the actor has been involved in several incidents involving emergency landings rescues and runway incursions exactly like it happens 13th of february 2017 santa anna california single engine aviat husky flown by Harrison Ford was cleared to land on runway 20L.

16:46Ford's aircraft reportedly landed on a parallel taxiway overflying American Airlines 737 that was holding short of runway 20L. 5th of March 2015, Santa Monica. Ford was a pilot and sole occupant of Ryan ST3KR Recruit, a two-seat open cockpit aircraft that was used extensively. Open cockpit. Open cockpit. Think about that. You're flying and the wind's in your hair. Like, that's not a normal experience. That's not coach on American Airlines. Used extensively as a training aircraft by the U.S. military in World War II. According to a preliminary report, Ford reportedly reported a loss of engine power shortly after taking off and was attempting to return to Runway 3.

17:27So he ended up crashing into like a field. It looks like Ford chose to land on a nearby golf course, clipping the top of a tree before landing. I actually have a friend who's been on the show. I'm not going to dox them, but we have two friends, both of them fly. One of them is extremely serious, has, you know, IFR rating. So there's VFR, which is visual flight rules. That's like, you take the plane up, it has to be clear because if you get into clouds, you're not trained for that. You can't fly at night. Exactly. IFR is you're flying on the instruments, instrument flight rules. We have one, we have one friend who's like super by the book, super safe.

18:02And then we have another buddy who's a little bit wilder, VFR, and he will rent like the cheaper planes. And one time, like the dial lights went out and he was landing at night. Shouldn't be flying at night at all. Just like botched the schedule and didn't check sunset. And he has to use his phone flashlight while he's landing to look at the dials as he's coming in on this rickety like old plane. People get crazy out there. Waymo is funny to write about because there's still a class of people that are writing the stories about like, hey, Waymo is actually safe. And I'm like, I I completely buy it.

18:36I'm in. Roll the Waymos out everywhere. I've been in them. I feel safe in them. I've seen the data. I think they're safe. I'm just like, my eyes glaze over when someone's like, I'm going to blow your brain out. I'm going to blow your mind. Waymos are safe. Robot, car, safer. I'm like, yeah, I'm in. I'm totally in. What happens if you further segment the human driver population? So we need to segment robotaxis into Waymo and everyone else because Waymo is so good. But how does Waymo compare against the best human drivers? The best data that we have on Waymo is any injury crashes per million miles.

19:11For the average human, it's about four any injury crashes. So any injury that counts, four per million miles. Waymo is way better, way better. 0.75, so about five times safer. But there's one very specific case where humans, I believe, are safer. A married 60-year-old woman who's college educated and is driving a large luxury SUV in Massachusetts on a Tuesday morning is closer to 0.5 injury crashes per million miles. Is the Tuesday morning part real? Yes. The most dangerous time to drive, and I'll flip it around, the most dangerous time to drive is midnight on Saturday because that's when people are at the bars.

19:51They leave. They're drinking. And so it's dark. It's the weekend. There's a lot more people on the road. they're driving much faster they're getting places they might be inebriated or under the influence of something and so uh tuesday morning is the safest time to drive so none of this should take away uh anything it is none of this should take away feels like a nathan fielder episode in the making of like studying the the women in massachusetts yeah like what do they do drivers on the planet just interviewing all of them married 60 year old college educated women like the exact wrong conclusion oh yeah yeah it's the married 60 year old women that need to be the taxi drivers everywhere in the world.

20:27They need to be, it's like, instead of Waymo, he starts like a competitor to Waymo. Ride hailing, that's just them. Yeah, that's just them. Clearly, Waymo's are very safe. Rolling them out nationally would be a huge safety upgrade for our society broadly. But it's worth noting that the Massachusetts married women still got it. But if you want to know, if you want to flip this around and find the hypothetically riskiest driver profile, it's Very funny. It's an 18 year old single male with a DUI driving a Dodge Challenger at midnight on a Saturday in rural Mississippi. I have to say I love that Waymo operates from San Francisco to the South Bay.

21:05So great. Some folks say the freeway driving is so so. The antidote to that is I get into an Uber and do the same drive. It's literally life threatening. I was driving with Paul the other day, and I heard he was telling me about the different modes that Tesla has. I've never owned a Tesla, so I wasn't familiar. But did you know that Tesla actually has something called Mad Max mode for the autopilot, where it'll drive it roughly around 85 on the freeways? If you're in the fast lane and you come up to somebody, it will merge over into the lane to the right, make a pass, and go back to 85. That's insane.

21:44somehow somehow feels uh slightly illegal but uh i like it we have an update in the in the warner brothers netflix deal netflix they're going all cash all cash deal uh netflix had said to paramount hey what we want is an all cash deal david ellison and the paramount crew they brought netflix uh they brought warner an all cash deal and netflix or warner was still saying hey we're going with Netflix. Now Netflix has upgraded. So we can read through a little bit of this from the Wall Street Journal. Warner Brothers Discovery and Netflix said Tuesday they struck a new all cash deal for Netflix to buy Warner Brothers Studios and HBO Max.

22:23Warner also released financial details on the cable network's business. It plans to spin off the all cash deal of$27.75 per share replaces Netflix's previous cash and stock deal. The sweetened offer comes as rival bidder Paramount continues pushing its all cash offer for all of Warner Discovery. The value of Netflix's offer remains$72 billion. Warner and Netflix said they expect the new structure to enable Warner shareholders to vote on the deal by April. The change could also help sway some shareholders who might be weighing its bid against Paramount's. There's also another, the next kind of thing that I was going to get to is interesting.

22:58CNN is doing$600 million in profit on revenue of$1.8 billion. So they are truly newsmaxing quick size for CNN. Congratulations to everyone in saying that. Not bad at all. Absolute dog. Somebody, you know, I was saying yesterday that maybe AI could save Hollywood. Yes. I knew that was going to piss a lot of people off for a lot of reasons. One of the critiques was like, you know, interesting to say that L.A. is dying as you're building a media business from L.A. Yep. And my response is that we are in a huge complex. We were recording the show from a huge complex and every other building in the complex is empty pretty much every single day.

23:41Like there's no, there's nothing going. There's the, when I, when I said LA is like dying, I was specifically talking about the context of the entertainment. Yeah. I mean, there's that, there's that wall street journal report that just shows sound stages were, you know, typically leased 90 % of the time. And it's just way off, off peak down to like 60%. And so there is like a broad trend. And then just in general, like, I don't think we're necessarily at a phase in our life where we're like, okay, tabula rasa, where's the best place to build this business? Let's go find that. It's like we live here.

24:18Yeah, we didn't. We're not like, okay, we should go to Atlanta or something. We certainly didn't say like, let's start a media company because we live in LA. The current struggles that LA is having are not going to hold us back. If anything, it's going to be easier because we can get space and hire people. Ten years ago, this space would have been like two, three times the price to rent. There are these blips in industry towns that have happened many times. New York, famously in the 70s and 80s, went through a really rough patch. San Francisco, during COVID, everyone was moving out. And there was a real vibe of like, oh, is San Francisco going to be less relevant in tech?

24:56And then it came roaring back with the AI labs. And I think most people don't debate that cities go through rough patches and then can come back. We certainly hope that L.A. comes back. It would be fantastic. But there are a lot of changes that need to be made. And this has been said by a number of famous people in Hollywood and Hollywood actors who have talked about different tax regimes, different incentives, different changes structurally to the way content is made and distributed. There's a lot of different elements that are contributing to L.A. having a rough go. So at the same time, it's a fantastic city.

25:29It's where I was born and raised. I love it. I'm not going anywhere. You're going to have to pull me out of here. He's not leaving. He's not leaving. Yeah. And again, I mean, it just feels like I'm so curious to see how this works out because it felt like the Ellisons were just putting on this absolute master class and then this one and then kind of ran into a brick wall with this, right? Yeah. You could argue they overpaid by a ton for the UFC, which made sense if you had this. again, like if you have all these assets under one roof, it is going to be a really compelling consumer product, consumer subscription, but currently kind of unclear who this kind of platform is really going to be for.