The SaaSpocalypse is Cancelled, WB Back in Play, Zuck Grilled in LA Trial | Diet TBPN

0:01In case you were wondering how to shake hands with your friend or with your enemy, it works. It's the same. It's the same process. You grab the hand with great force. Yes. And lift up. Underrated, you can establish dominance. You can handshake, clearly. Huge missed opportunity for Sam and Dario not to... To crush each other's hands to the point where the other one is bleeding and crying. And that would have really set the tone. They have to rely on voice transcript. Exactly. Exactly. It would have been much better to just watch crushing in the hand. You know, you do those like strength training for a reason.

0:34That's right. Right. Every once in a while, you don't want to get caught lacking. Anyway, there's big news today. We're canceling the Sasspocalypse. It's over. RIP Sasspocalypse. It occurred from January, 2026 to February, 2026. And it's over now. We're declaring it over. No, it's not entirely over. Who knows where the market will go. In many ways, it's just getting started. But I do think we're starting to see a bifurcation in the sloppable companies and the unsloppable companies. there should be some divergence between companies that have figured out how to integrate with AI, how to retool their business model, or just show that their business model was strong all along.

1:09And we'll go through that. Well, yeah, there's a category of SaaS that is SaaS, but they will be AI beneficiaries. Yep. Should we watch? Have you seen Pacific Rim? No. We got to watch this pump up speech. Let's do it. Because this gets me fired up. We're canceling the apocalypse. It's movie night again in class. So, the storyline. Aliens, giant alien Godzilla-like creatures called Kaijus have descended upon Earth. And only robots that are as big as the Godzilla's can fight back. But you need two people. It's much like us. You need two pilots because the mental load of driving the robot, being in the drift, is too intense for a single person.

1:49It will drive you crazy. So, two pilots, two Jaeger pilots must pilot the ship together and share the load. Very cool. And so they both punch, and then the robot punches. It's amazing. It's a great film. Everyone! He's got to give a speech. You're known for giving great speeches just like this. This is a Geordie Hayes original right here. Yes, movie day. Again, welcome to the stream, Ryan. Today. At the edge of our hope. At the edge of our hope. Things aren't looking good at this point. At the end of our time. the end of our time AI is upon us not only to believe in ourselves but in each other we must believe in the stocks of the sass company is not a man nor woman in here that shall stand alone no no public company shareholder will stand alone we stand with you we face the monsters that are at our door and bring the fight to them we're bringing the fight to the foundation labs we're canceling the apocalypse we're canceling the sasspocalypse

2:58and then the greatest soundtrack ever i love it i only i only really had to ever give one speech like that yeah last year but it hit it hit the team needed it and that we did and we got through critical moment we powered through we powered through so anyway we've lost a lot of good soldiers a lot of good market cap out there during the SaaSpocalypse,$2 trillion, something like that, maybe. It's been rough. But, and I mean, truthfully, like the narrative does make sense. Like, agentic AI systems, co-pilots, foundation models, like these are disruptive innovations. Fundamentally, they're counter-positioned against traditional seat-based SaaS pricing.

3:37We know this. Legacy companies will be caught in a jam because pivoting the entire business model is difficult. You can't just flip a switch and start charging customers in a completely different way. Your investors will freak out because your finances will be deeply unprofitable all of a sudden. Company cultures and organizational structures are aligned around particular incentives. And so you have to rewire everything for a different business model. And that's really hard. And that's why people are sounding the, this is a disruptive innovation. This is not a sustaining innovation like mobile or cloud.

4:05The SaaSpocalypse was always a little bit of an indiscriminate hammer. It felt like, I mean, there was one article in the journal that was like, Anthropic launched a legal tool and that caused the sell-off. And it's like, well, it could be that, or it also could be Claude Code, or it could be OpenClaw or Codex or Spark. There's a million different things going on in the AI world. That one just kind of took hold. But I think we will soon be finding out what companies are truly unslappable, as you put it, and actually benefit in the AI future. And there's a bunch of early signals, so let's run through them.

4:37First, Google's comeback. I mean, this was the first victim of the apocalypse. This one happened like a year or two ago. why would anyone search Google ever if an LLM could get you a better answer and fewer clicks of course Google quickly caught up to the frontier they launched AI overviews they flexed deep minds research previews they showed off the power of the TPU core businesses surviving and thriving do in part to Gemini helping understand intent so they can deliver ads on longer more complex searches so Google's been doing fine there they've sort of already building back from the sas-pocalypse they experienced then you have meta will mute will user minutes migrate over to llms will sora destroy instagram overnight uh will slop clog the feeds maybe but not before meta's transformer based gem model absolutely destroys ad targeting and just makes everything so much better and re-accelerates revenue and we've talked to a lot of folks about that uh and so meta's doing very well even though they haven't like figured out their ai strategy rolled out any of the new crazy frontier models from msl like the business This is great.

5:39I certainly argue they have an AI strategy. Totally. Use AI ML to make really good ads. They've been doing it for a decade. But it's more on the product side, right? So is it the Manus? Is it NetNew product? Is it Meta AI? Yep. It gets more interesting when you go to the smaller companies, not super small, but Spotify doesn't really need to invest in generative AI. I heard a good analogy that was like, should Spotify have like released a guitar so that people can make more music? Like, no, because people will pick whatever tool is available and then they will release that music on Spotify. These artists, if they're using AI tools or maybe they're just prompters, whatever you want to call them, they will bring AI music to the platform.

6:18It'll be filtered by algorithms. Slop will be in the trough, but only the most delicious slop will bubble to the top. Current data shows AI music currently underperforms dramatically on a percentage basis. like the number of ai songs is huge but the number of like actual minutes watched and is is low even if that flips spotify still benefits let's switch over to shopify you can definitely vibe code an e-commerce website now but shopify is not a major cost driver for most businesses that use it you're you're talking maybe like a thousand dollars a month for some companies and it's a lot of headache that they just don't have to even think about and then there's a whole bunch of advantages that Shopify should benefit from in the AI era.

7:00It's very full-featured, so it's actually hard to replace. Setting up a new store is faster than waiting for a prompt to return, like it's all pre-built. And then AI tools benefit from all the context and data that Shopify has across the entire platform. And then lastly, Agentic Commerce doesn't replace Shopify checkout. It's just a front-end to the checkout. Much more like mobile or social. Checkout, payment, post-purchase. So if it's driving activity, that's actually a net benefit. And so there's a whole bunch more examples. Lastly, you got to consider Salesforce. Mark Benioff has been duking it out with Jim Cramer on CNBC over seat-based pricing in an AI era.

7:34And it's 100 % true that there are some amazing AI native CRM startups that are aggressively trying to eat off Benioff's plate, but Anthropic is hiring a Salesforce admin. They're growing so fast and so big that they need someone just to be full-time job, manage their internal Salesforce. And so there's growth all over the SaaS ecosystem and things don't seem to be decelerating or slowing down. It's definitely go time though. And it's time to revisit sources of strength. It's wartime. It's time to become unsloppable. It is wartime. It's founder mode time. Yeah. So going back to the fax machine example in 1999 was the first year that showed a significant drop in the sale of physical fax machines.

8:15They dropped by 10 % in a single year. When was that? In 1999. 1999. That is not a, okay, growth just started slowing. It had been slowing up until that point, but it was slowing and then it like fell off a cliff. Should we read through this Goodwill hunting meme? This sums up the Sasspocalypse. Of course, that's your contention. You're a first time Sassbear. You just got finished listening to some podcasts, Dario and Dwarkesh probably. Now you think it's the end of white collar work and seat based pricing is screwed. You're going to be convinced of that till tomorrow when you get to something big is happening.

8:49Then you'll install Clodbot on a Mac Mini Vibe-coded dashboard on top of a Postgres database and say we're all just a couple Ralph loops away from building a Salesforce competitor. That's going to last until next week when you discover context graphs. And then you're going to be talking about how the systems of record will be disintermediated by an agentic layer and reposting OAI marketing graphics. Well, as a matter of fact, I won't because ultimately the application layer is just business logic on top of a CRUD database. You got that from Satya's appearance on the BG2 pod. December 2024, right?

9:21Yeah, I saw that too. Were you going to plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter or is that your thing? You get into the replies of anyone posting a sass ticker, you watch some podcasts, then pawn it off as your own idea to impress some VCs and embarrass some Anans who's long sass. See, see the sad thing about a guy like you is in a couple of years you're gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you're gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One, don't do that. And two, you drop 30 grand on Mac minis and LLM API calls to come up with the same conclusions you could have got for free by following a handful of VC accounts.

9:54It's great. Roasted. Matthew McConaughey hit variety this morning. What do you say? And commenting on AI, Brandon just shared it. He said, it's coming. It's already here. Don't deny it. It's not going to be enough to sit on the sidelines and make the moral plea that, no, this is wrong. It's not going to last. There's too much money to be made, and it's too productive. AI acceleration. So I say own yourself voice likeness, etc. Trademark it, whatever you got to do. So when it comes, no one can steal you. Yeah, yeah, makes sense. The Matthew McConaughey voice, I mean, that's an iconic voice. I think there's definitely a huge deal to be done.

10:29And the AI voices, although we're in a boom right now, I remember being able to go on Waze and pick, I think Snoop Dogg had a deal, but there were a number of celebrities that had, you can imagine like an Arnold Schwarzenegger, get to the chopper, but then also like take a left and it's like fun. And they would just pre-record all of the different lines like keep going straight, bear left, take a hard left, and you record like 20 different lines and then the program just picks the audio file for the correct moment because there's only like 20 different things you could possibly say in a navigation app.

11:04But those types of things, there's clearly a framework for that and all the agencies and all the unions understand this. So I feel like we're in this weird, bizarro world where people think that, oh, IP law doesn't exist and we aren't gonna be able to deal with this. It's like, no, there's decades of lawyers who are foaming at the mouth being like, I can't wait to sue ByteDance, this is gonna be awesome. We're gonna get a great settlement. Yeah, the only thing is that it's gonna require real cooperation from platforms. The platforms are ready to cooperate. I disagree. Really? I don't think they're cooperating that hard.

11:40There's so much content of a bunch of individuals on YouTube, on Meta, that is using their name and likeness and putting them in situations that they would never, ever, ever agree to. And you can argue that it's not good for their brand, but it's incredibly entertaining. And so the platforms leave the content up. By the time you do a takedown request, it's got 200 ,000 likes. You don't need to do a takedown request. You just need to pay me, pay me. That's what people want. They want to be paid. The message in that Matthew McConaughey post is not like, it's super critical that no one ever uses an image of me or my voice ever.

12:20It's that, look, if somebody's profiting off it, that's my IP. That's my mind. I read his comment more around making movies, saying don't use AI to make this scene that would normally take four weeks in some exotic location and a thousand people. Obviously, AI is going to be used for that. I think there's a separate issue of people generating Matthew McConaughey doing and saying things that he would never agree to that are sort of compromising or, again, putting him in situations or having him say things that he wouldn't ever agree to, even if he was getting paid. Michael Burry is going off on Karp.

13:00Okay. Palantir CEO Alex Karp has his head in the cloud, saying he's a frequent flyer. And they get into some of his business and personal travel expenses. During the years ended December 31st, 2025 and 2024, the company incurred expenses related to the use of the executive aircraft of$17.2 million and$7.7 million, respectively. It's quite the feat to spend$17 million in a year on business and personal travel, particularly when the jet's not even the rental. Jeffrey's analyst, Brent Hill, he's got a bone to pick, runs the numbers. Assuming use of a midsize jet with an estimated operating cost of$7 ,000 per hour, this implies roughly 2 ,400 flight hours or about 28 % of the year in the air, even under a more conservative assumption of a high-end jet such as the G650 at an estimated$15 ,000 per hour.

13:52The$17 million still equates to approximately 1 ,147 flight hours or 13 % of the year. Notably, this 17.2 figure is more than double CARP's executive aircraft expense in 2024. And appears elevated relative to peers with Meta CEO spending$1.8 million and Palo Alto Network CEO spending$2.4 million. Terrible comps. Why? Like, CARP is obviously constantly traveling all over the world. He's an international businessman. Yeah. I know podcasters that do, like, 250 hours a year. Oh, yeah. Like you're talking about going from somebody who travels a good amount at, let's say, 200 hours a year. To me, yeah, I might catch some flack for defending private aviation.

14:37But it just doesn't seem that crazy. The entire reason that Palantir is growing the way it is is like they're doing deals in Japan. They're doing deals in the Middle East. That's true. It's just like this guy is a global deal maker. and if you really wanted to do an analysis on this, you should look at all the international deals that they've done, maybe ignore the US and see if CARP is actually delivering. Jira Ticket says, do you think he has monetization on? Who's he talking about? Khamenei. Khamenei's been putting up insane numbers on X. Quite the tense geopolitical situation. I hope that we're not starting a new war in the Middle East But if Khamenei does have monetization on it, it certainly is going to be a real revenue line item on the – I have to imagine, does X sanction accounts?

15:28I think creator payouts are probably geographically limited to certain countries where the payment rails work, if a country's sanctioned. Like, I actually get my X creator payouts just straight up through Stripe. Yeah. It just comes through Stripe. In fact, I think I had to set up a Stripe account to receive it. I think I said Prime Intellect was like the prototypical Neolab. Okay. So he's really, yeah, putting me in the chest. It's a funny camera angle. What's going on here? Okay, I like that. Different. Switching it up. Over the shoulder. I'm interviewing you. I'm getting to the bottom of it.

15:58You answer me. You answer me, Tyler. Okay, okay. We get it. Production team got some new PTZ cameras. We get it, guys. We have news on the Warner Brothers Netflix Paramount front. Netflix is open to raising their bid for Warner Brothers. there's a 35 % chance that Netflix - That's falling like a stone. They were at like 70%. Yeah. Netflix apparently has ample room to increase their offer. It's a better position generally. It's a$325 billion company, Netflix. I think everyone believes that they're good for it. Yeah. Netflix has ample cash and could bump up its offer for HBO Max owner Warner Brothers Discovery if competing bidder Paramount Skydance increases its own offer.

16:42The two media giants have been locked in a heated rivalry. Oh, you see what they did there? That's a new popular show, Heated Rivalry. It's about hockey. Over Warner Brothers and its storied catalog, which includes iconic franchises like Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, DC Comics, and Superman. Though Warner Brothers is moving forward with a March 20th shareholder vote on Netflix's offer, it has given Paramount a week to come up with a more compelling bid. Netflix has bid$27.75 a share, or$82.7 billion, for Warner Brothers studio and streaming businesses. while Paramount has offered$30 a share or$108 billion for the whole company.

17:15The creator of Stranger Things is sitting on a lot of dry powder that gives it some flexibility to up the ante, holding about$9 billion in cash and cash equivalents on its balance sheet as of December 31st. Warner Brothers rejected Paramount's latest hostile takeover bid on Tuesday, but gave the rival studio until the end of Monday to submit a best and final offer. We're going into the final rounds now. Price will likely be the deciding factor. Warner Brothers. Concerns around funding and regulatory risk are real, but at a high enough number, they become secondary. You got it. David Zaslav must just be over the moon right now.

17:52A bidding war. He's been working. The bidding war of his dreams. Yeah, it's great. Every CEO that is flipping an asset dreams of a bidding war like this. It's great. Britsman expects Netflix will counter with any improved offer from Paramount. But the real twist is that these deals were never apples to apples, and it may ultimately come down to how much value the board and shareholders assign to the network business that Netflix would leave behind. So you need to do a sum of the parts. What's the value of just CNN, HGTV, the linear TV channels? Put that in because Netflix doesn't want that stuff.

18:29They just want the IP and HBO. The Paramount said it would continue to push the tender offer it has launched for the studio, opposing the inferior Netflix merger and still plans to nominate directors for the upcoming Warner Bros. annual meeting. All eyes are now on whether the CBS parent improves its offer, which Netflix is allowed to match under the terms of the merger agreement. I don't see how Netflix actually gets approved on this one. You think they're cooked? I think if Trump is souring on it, it's over. I was so pilled on the whole YouTube is the real competitor here. Watch time matters more.

19:06Think about screen time. Roblox is a competitor to Netflix. TikTok's a competitor to Netflix. Fortnite's a competitor to Netflix. But I don't think a lot of people think like that. It's a very tech-focused view. Yeah, you have to think about the entertainment industry, the core industry, people that make television shows and movies, things that you have watched. Yeah, things that I have watched. Meta has obtained a patent for an AI system that could simulate deceased users by analyzing their historical data, allowing the account to keep posting, messaging, and even making video calls in their behavioral style.

19:43You thought I would stop posting after you killed me. Nice try. Nice try. I will continue dropping daily essays. You just created a billion John Guggen. You just created a billion John Guggen posts, both satirical and 500 words. Yeah, a family member sent me this this morning. Disturbed? Saying, is this real? I'm surprised you can patent this. This is just like a thing that happens. Is this meta thinking out you got population collapse? Oh. And obviously it's pretty hard to monetize a bot. But if you're driving. In an AI doom scenario where all humans are dead, you want to still keep your services up.

20:20You got to simulate all the dead people maybe. I don't know. Is this doom pill? Dan says, true posters keep posting after death. There was a 4chan post apparently from a few years ago where somebody was like, I'm an engineer at Meta. And they basically fully, I only saw a screenshot. It may or may not have been real, but it appeared to be from a few years ago. And they were saying, like, I'm working on this feature. It seems bad. Interesting timing. Obviously, Mark has been in L.A. this week. He got grilled for us. Wait, that was in L.A.? I thought that was in D.C. Oh, yeah. Kind of rude, rude not to stop by the ultradome before you get disposed.

21:01A little warm up on TVPN before you go in front of the big guy. Yeah. So he spent six hours yesterday. We call Mark Zuckerberg to the stand. Thus began Wednesday's nearly six hours of testimony from the Meta Platform CEO in a trial of a lawsuit brought by a young woman against several... And this was about benchmark hacking in Lama 3? Is that what he's on trial for? No. No? Not as bad as that. Contending that social media... Potential weakness in the ad model? Is that what it's about? No. Wait, overspending on the metaverse. Concerns about distillation, I think. Oh, distillation. Yeah, that's why he'd be on trial for that.

21:35Yeah, that makes sense. Contending that social media causes depression. Okay. It's a guy, Mark Lanier. Lanier? The plaintiff's attorney. We've got to ask for it. In the landmark case who spoke with a faint Texas twang, showed the courtroom dozens of internal emails and chats from meta employees and executives over the years, debating decisions like whether to ban the beauty filters teen used teens use on instagram to mimic the results of plastic surgery so anyways there's a bunch of the features like that are kind of the focus of the case there's also there's also a cover a story on the cover of the walsh journal today social media bans for youth gain momentum worldwide and it does feel like a parenting skill issue a little bit.

22:15It is possible to keep kids away from social media if you are an active parent, but at the same time... The only thing I would say, we don't have children with phones yet. Yeah, but that's deliberate. Yeah, that's deliberate, but at a certain point, like what? They would love phones. Sure, sure. They just will not be having them. I mean, I know my plan. I will give my son a disassembled iPhone 1. And when he can assemble it and piece it together and manufacture it himself here in America, then he can use it. And we already ran this on Tyler. 20 years later. And then we did get Tyler a phone. This was a good benchmark.

22:55We got Tyler. Didn't we get you a real phone because of that? We did, right? Yeah. Yeah, that was the reward. Well, that was also because I installed the new iOS when it was still in data. And it totally destroyed my old phone. We got to do another prank on Tyler soon. They're so good. Yeah, chat, if you have any good prank ideas, let us know. Yeah, he's like, no, no, no, definitely not. eBay is buying Depop secondhand. Thanks, Andrew. That's a good one. Andrew is the king of VC dad jokes. He loves it. He loves it. That's fantastic. So eBay is buying Depop from Etsy for$1.2 billion. And this is in the Wall Street Journal.

23:33The addition of Depop to its portfolio would boost its footprint while also expanding its presence in the fashion market. We are confident that as a part of eBay, Depop will be even more well positioned for long term growth, benefiting from our scale, complimentary offerings and operational capabilities. eBay plans to cross list Depop products on its platform and expects the acquisition will expand its market share. Depop seller and buyer cohorts will gain access to eBay's financial services, shipping and cross border trade solutions, as well as its authenticity guarantee. guarantee young consumers are a key demographic for eBay as Gen Z and millennial shoppers are driving secondhand commerce.

24:08Depop is also more popular as an app than a website, unlike eBay, which might bring in a new user base. So good luck. Yeah. eBay is still such a force, but it is certainly not cool. Depop is cool. eBay has struggled. Jordy has spoken. Great business. not not cool but do you know why they call it ebay uh no because it was founded in east oh by some east bay rationalists yeah yeah yeah for sure it was sort of a less wrong project it's right there with anthropic rs says we have a definitive answer now ai will affect the labor market starting with freelancers first paper to use business level data to track ai versus labor New paper from Ramp finds businesses are shifting spend from freelancers to AI.

24:55More than half of the businesses using freelancers in 2022 have stopped entirely. The companies that used to spend the most on freelancers shifted to AI the fastest, 97 % savings for the businesses that spent the most on freelance. That is wild. Generally makes sense. I mean, the whole premise of freelance is like you probably get paid a lot better on an hourly basis. Maybe you can capture more value on a dollar basis by spreading your talents across multiple companies. But obviously, the flexibility comes with little to no lock-in. And so businesses can much more easily shift spend around. So not super surprising.

25:40The vibes have really shifted. Yes. A terminally online engineer posted Dario's speech at the AI Impact Summit in India. Let's pull it up. Yeah, let's watch this. Energy and ambition in this room and across India are incredible. I've been spending the last few days meeting with Indian builders and enterprises, and the energy to build together here is palpable, unlike anywhere else. This is the fourth AI Summit we've held since the tradition was initiated at Bletchley Park. back in 2023, which I still remember. And in those 2.5 years, the advances in the technology have been absolutely staggering.