YouTubers Win at the Box Office, Bernie Wants Public Stake in AI, Anthropic Files S-1 | Diet TBPN

0:02John Coogan:We have some really exciting news. We heard you loud and clear. Loud and clear. You might have noticed on the Chiron. We are back. We are back and we're going to tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate. Starts bill pay. Accounting and a whole lot more. All in one place. That's right. You wanted ads. We are bringing you ads. And we're very excited that we have more. We are. More supporters of the show. Incredibly back. Yes, we're very excited. So expect to hear ads throughout the show. It's funny. We heard over and over and over. I'm not joking. I know I get sarcastic a lot.

0:40But we heard over and over and over that they're a nice palate cleanser. It's like turning the page, right, in between different topics. And we are excited.

0:48John Coogan:And we love these companies. We want to help them grow. We've always been huge fans of the companies that we work with. So we're very excited to have them back. Let's turn over to YouTube and Hollywood. Breakout news in Hollywood. YouTubers winning at the box office, YouTubers finally breaking through to Hollywood. Feels super long overdue. Ben Thompson had a good victory lap post because he predicted this all the way back in 2017. It took a decade to get here, but YouTubers are fully in control of Hollywood and there's a bunch of crazy statistics. But 2026 really is the year that Hollywood and YouTube finally, it feels like they found a way to work together in perfect harmony.

1:25John Coogan:It honestly seems win-win here. Yeah, not total disruption. yeah right no no collaboration actual collaboration and so i mean we all know hollywood's been faced with a ton of challenges i was just listing them off off the top of my head what's this trey says a tbpn without ads is like a human without a heart couldn't say it better myself um i was just ryan says calling in to the waiting room and not the restream waiting room was a crime yes that's true um so i was just listing off like all of the challenges that Hollywood has faced over the past couple decades. And it's so bad. It's piracy. Like you used to just be able for a lot for all through like the mid 2000s, people would just download movies.

2:09John Coogan:Then better TV shows like TV just got so, so much better that that really took a lot of gas out of Hollywood because it used to be if you wanted something cinematic, you had to go to the theater and then Game of Thrones came out and all of a sudden TV, we went through like the era of great TV. Streaming, obviously, that moved a lot of people out of theaters. COVID, that shut down the movie industry entirely. There were strikes, the double strike, writers and directors strike, and a whole bunch of other strikes that went on. There was competition from other production markets, lower cost, and that can sometimes help certain elements of Hollywood, but it also hurts Hollywood, the physical place.

2:47Yeah. Meanwhile, streaming just created such a massive boom in spending on like a bunch of random projects, not necessarily like blockbusters, but just like every platform needed more content. And there was a lot of competition.

3:01John Coogan:Yeah. So throughout all of that, there was sort of a silver lining. I mean, the streaming thing is a big one of that, that there were jobs and projects that were getting greenlit on streaming platforms, but also just the creator economy. Like even though the number, I was looking at the number of like shoot, traditional Hollywood shoot days in Hollywood, it's fallen off a cliff post COVID, never fully recovered. But the number of people working in front of the camera, behind the camera, around the camera, in broadly has obviously gone up throughout the creator economy. Boom. This was always unsatisfying to cinephiles though, because no matter how viral a TikTok goes, or no matter how much money Mr.

3:42John Coogan:Beast or some other creator like makes, it never feels as culturally important as the godfather or some other or the titanic or some some movie that everyone comes together everyone has the shared cultural experience around we were all in these like little bit of these like isolated niches and oh yeah i i'm really into this creator uh but anytime i try and bring it up to anyone they don't know what i'm talking about yeah our our shared our our moment is i see a meme starting to grow yeah and i tell you i make the call to you yeah and and then we just kind of bet on it basically but even those it's very hard for them to break out to such a degree that you can bring it up to anyone your your little nephew or your uncle and they both have an understanding like they did during the titanic era like they did during the godfather era like they did during star wars which is uh at the center of this story because the mandalorian and grogu is the latest star wars project and it's actually been declining in the box office It's been eclipsed and there's been three movies that have been really, really breakout performances.

4:48John Coogan:So also the Oscars are going to be streamed on YouTube in 2029. It feels like by 2029, this this whole this whole trend is going to be in full force. So look at the stats. So Kane Parsons Backrooms opened to roughly 81.5 million in North America and 115 million worldwide on a 10 million dollar budget. Reportedly. Curry Barker's obsession climbed, uh, is climbing in his third weekend and hit 104 million, 104.7 million domestic becoming focus features, highest grossing domestic release from a movie widely reported to have cost around 1 million. That seems right now on X every single day. Yeah. There's a post that goes viral about obsessions return on their budget.

5:30John Coogan:Yeah. They're like this million dollar film. Yeah. You know, it's just happening over and over and over. Yeah. And then, and so like the business story, to me is like way more, I mean, is everything. Definitely, definitely. And then we also talked about this earlier and it's sort of looped in with this, but Markiplier, another YouTuber, released Iron Lung, which he financed himself, $3 million production budget reportedly and opened to 18.2 million domestically before grossing 41.1 million domestic, 51.2 million worldwide, huge return on investment. And so it's easy to point to these as sort of the story is a YouTuber with a big audience just converts that audience into ticket sales.

6:12John Coogan:But that's not exactly, it's not really that clean. And there's a bunch of counter examples. So are you familiar with Ryan's World? Ryan's World is this massive kids YouTube channel. Oh, is that like a toy unboxing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ryan would unbox toys and it became a huge, huge channel. And they actually made Ryan's World, the movie, Titan Universe Adventure. but it grossed only$624 ,000 on something like a$10 million budget. And so he wasn't able to convert that audience directly over. And I think with someone like Ryan Young... Was he encouraging children to take their parents' keys and wallet and just go down to the movie theater?

6:54Because that's part of the issue with these channels and monetizing them is there's somewhat of a, there's a disconnect between the audience and who the actual buyer is, the person that controls purchasing power in the household. So you might have like an eight-year-old kid who loves these videos, but anytime they actually want to act on the content, they have to -

7:14John Coogan:There's a translation step. Sometimes that can work though. You know, you see the advertisements of the toy on the cereal box and the kids demand the toy. What is different about Backrooms, Obsession and Iron Lung is that the filmmakers had, they'd shown, they didn't just have huge audiences. like some of these Markiplier is a truly large creator, but the folks behind Backrooms and Obsession are in like the single digit millions. Alone, if they didn't have the creativity, if they didn't have the risk taking abilities to actually produce something that could sort of, you know, draw attention in theaters, I don't think they could have just converted their subscribers over like the conversion rates just don't match up.

7:55John Coogan:Because if you're on 1 million subscribers and you did a hundred million in box office, the math just doesn't match up. Did some, did everyone go, did all of your subscribers go see it five times and pay$20 each time? No way. Like that's not what happened. The idea of like this creativity risk-taking new IP, this is like at the core of Hollywood successes. I was reading the Hollywood Reporter. They were saying like, this harkens back to like the 1970s, George Lucas's first film, Ben Thompson has a great that we can read through. But these creators aren't just big influencers with millions of fans.

8:27John Coogan:They do have big audiences, but they also stand above their peers in terms of artistic vision. So Curry Barker had a YouTube sketch channel called That's a Bad Idea where he learned how to quickly and effectively write, act, and edit for a tight audience feedback loop. Backrooms has a similar story. Kane Parsons, who goes by Kane Pixels, produced his original series, The Backrooms, in Blender and After Effects. And the internet myth had laid a bit of the groundwork and we can go into some of the lore of backrooms it's a very fascinating story it all started with like a single image of a furniture store that was being renovated at the time and that picture just went viral and went and just like kept building lore and became one of these like creepy pastas and then eventually you know turned into his youtube series which turned into this film and it's one of these like very interesting origin story behind a piece of intellectual property.

9:18John Coogan:Typically, you don't see just a random image go viral and become a movie, let alone a successful movie. But here we are. Being able to create something engaging for social media virality is probably somewhat important to creating a film that works in theaters. I think there is some stuff that translates. We're seeing this with the sort of like YouTubification or retention editing on Netflix. But I think the bigger value is being like a full stack filmmaker. So gone are the days of showing up to Hollywood with a manuscript and just expecting the studio to do the rest for you. I think that the traditionally segmented teams on productions are simply too expensive to be deployed on anything but existing IP.

9:57John Coogan:So the dedicated writer, the dedicated cinematographer, the dedicated sound designer, that'll show up for The Mandalorian and Grogu because they know that there's a certain amount of people that will just see every single Star Wars movie. But to take a risk on new IP from a new creator, you have to understand that that creator is going to be able to leave their fingerprints and actually drive every piece of the production. Yeah. How do you think the big studio execs are processing these two films? Because you would think, OK, movies are a hits driven business. If you have a hundred million dollar budget, like thinking about it, like if you're an early stage investor, like super early stage seed series A and you have a hundred million dollars to invest.

10:36like sometimes the best move would be putting a hundred million dollars into one team yeah but there's a reason that people say like hey we're gonna make 20 to 30 investments across this fund maybe maybe more depending on the strategy they're doing a lot more 10 million dollar films yeah and so and so it feels like it makes so much sense because one film can generate the entire fund return can be a fund returner but at the same time there is it is it studio execs that just love the rush of just like doing a big deal right oh is it is is there some as opposed to not like not basically like direct financial incentive where like there's just something like the status associated with putting together like a blockbuster i don't know i do think we will see more 10 million

11:19John Coogan:dollar films more more lower budget films um it feels like there's definitely a certain breed of Hollywood executive that their whole skill set is aligned to how can we put a hundred million, 200 million to work and actually guarantee a return on that. So they're going to be working on the avatars and the Marvel movies and the DC movies and the Harry Potter movies. But for the next generation, that track feels like very much bought in. So there are already more of these sort of like YouTube adaptations in the works. One is from Wesley Wang, who went viral for, interestingly, Obsession and Backrooms are both horror films, which are notorious for being cheap to produce and potentially very high return.

12:01John Coogan:He went viral for a non-horror YouTube short called Nothing Except Everything. TriStar picked it up with Darren Arvinovsky's Protozoa producing, and Wang set to adapt it as writer-director. And then there's also the much sillier but extremely viral Skibbity Toilet, which was created by Alexei Gerasimov in 2023. And that project has been going back and forth but reportedly Michael Bay was attached at one point they were thinking maybe tv show maybe a movie but that as silly as that sounds and as ridiculous as that series is it did build like a little bit of a lower world it captured a lot of people's fascinations and the numbers are really staggering there is a little bit more nuance there because on the ip side because it was created in source filmmaker which is basically like half-life or counter-strike So you design the level and then you can move the camera around through that He didn't use blender and he didn't shoot it with a camera.

12:57John Coogan:He actually made the whole series in a video game And a lot of the assets pull from Half-Life 2 or Counter-Strike Source And so if you want to maintain that you have to go do a deal with Valve Which you know is a private company owned by Gabe Newell It doesn't necessarily need to just allow someone to do this and there's already been back and forth sound like takedown notices So that's a whole different negotiation if that winds up making it to the silver screen But I do think there will be more unpredictable breakouts in the coming years. And I wouldn't be surprised if we see Hollywood executives combing through obscure YouTube playlists for new gems.

13:31John Coogan:And some members of our production team saw both Backrooms and Obsession. And I want to get some reviews. What do you guys think? Which one was better? Take us through it. My vote's Obsession. Obsession. Scott, what did you think? Obsession. Okay. And what did you like about each one? What did you dislike about each one? So Obsession was great. I feel like the filmmakers have gotten too good at making horror movies sometimes recently. Like this Ari Aster type wave. I remember leaving Midsommar and just feeling gross for days. And I felt like Obsession walked it back a little bit. And it was a bit of a comedy, too.

14:05So it was fun. I felt like the memes are all over it, which is great. Back rooms. We all kind of walked out. I love back rooms. Production design should win an award. But something was missing from the movie, I think.

14:15John Coogan:Apparently they built 30 ,000 square feet of actual set for back rooms. They really designed it. As you said, the production design was fantastic. And that feels like, I mean, the source material is literally in Blender. It would be so tempting just to be like, yeah, just send us the Blender files. Like, we'll just continue using, like, you're already working in CGI. Like, it's not like, oh, this isn't true to the source material. Like, it's actually less true to go build the set. But they did, and clearly you enjoyed that look and feel and sort of worked out. Yeah, I thought it was really fun.

14:48Scott's got something. I want to shout out Haley Johnson, who produced Obsession, too. She went to our film school.

14:55John Coogan:Fantastic. Let's go over to Ben Thompson. Your guys' class at your film school, which I think no longer exists, truly insane caliber of talent to come out of that school. So well done. So Ben Thompson reflected on this as well. While he was taking this victory lap on calling this in 2017, he said, in 2017, when the first public allegations were made against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, I wrote goodbye gatekeepers about how the traditional structure of Hollywood, where the supply of people who wanted to make and be in movies far exceeded the demand for movies to be made by Hollywood, created the conditions for his predation.

15:35John Coogan:So he had a lot of power. As he noted in the article, a similar structure used to be the case in newspapers, which not only gated what news was reported, but also leveraged that gate to monetize via advertising. However, the internet had long since broken down the gate in both regards. Meanwhile, I raised the specter of something similar happening to movies. Don't forget YouTube. Video is a zero-sum activity. Time spent watching one source of video is time spent not watching another. And YouTube showed over a billion hours of video every day in 2016. with two phones watching two things on both phones yeah subway surfers screen yeah just going like this well if you have vr you can have way more screens open because you can just you can't when is subway surfers getting an adaptation that feels like that's due for a trilogy subway surfers the movie i think we got something are they have they has we cannot be the first people to think of subway surfers angry birds is like us you know oh yeah they're making a third No, but I want it to be a movie where you're just like, you're basically just going one direction.

16:38John Coogan:No, it has to be a gritty horror film that takes place in the Subway Surfers universe. So Ben Thompson continues. He says, it's not a surprise that the breakthrough moment for YouTube stars in film took nearly a decade to materialize after that article. I've long noted the sequence through which the Internet and digital media has affected media. Text first, then music, then short form video, et cetera. movies the pinnacle of traditional media are the hardest to both make and distribute particularly if the goal is to make it into theaters and of course movies ask the most of customers in return they actually have to leave the house john thompson continues he says that leads to two true but ultimately unsatisfying answers as to why youtube stars might succeed in movies first is that uh this is simply a new place to discover talent and that's certainly true the analogy i would draw is to the impact of aws had on venture capital uh cloud computing reduced the cost of starting a company to nothing more than the opportunity cost for the founders time and perhaps a bit of seed funding for a few engineers and that created an entirely new asset class of angel investors venture firms meanwhile didn't evaluate companies based on a powerpoint to fund sun servers but rather on actual products and market signals so it is with this new wave of talent the cost of production has plummeted such that a creator can be evaluated on their creations not that not just their ideas that's what i was talking about the youtube growth and the youtube product and the YouTube series that gets 82 million views in the example of back rooms.

18:02John Coogan:Like that is the audition tape that gets you the production workforce behind Hollywood to actually marshal behind you. And that's the same thing with, you know, the startup that shows up on Sand Hill Road, raising a series A that already has a product and some distribution and some customers and ARR. And all of that is possible because you don't need$10 million to do a single prototype. You can just build it. more true than ever in the age of AI. Ben, Scott, how do films actually get funded? I've been pitched, like, invest in my movie before, but given that I don't watch movies, I didn't feel like it was really my strike zone, but how does it typically get structured?

18:44Like, if a film needs a million-dollar budget, are the investors getting, like, an independent film needs a million-dollar budget?

18:50John Coogan:Yeah. How does equity work? Any rough ideas? Typically, there's there's a series of buyers and investors. Sorry, I'm distracting you guys. Very similar. Very similar. We'll do it live. So, so, so, so, so, so, oftentimes a screenwriter will sell an option to, to make a movie to a producer, some sort of production team. They are the, the, the production company is oftentimes the investor. They buy it and then they might invest more money to bring on revisions, other script writers. they might attach a they might go pitch a do the deal to to bring on a star and then from there they go to another producer and then the last the last time the last moment is is the actual like marketing phase and so those dollars are the biggest so when you go and you get universal or disney to be the distributor they're putting in a ton of money because they're going to buy the billboards and like the super bowl ads and that's really expensive the movie has to be made at that point.

19:48John Coogan:But there's a series of sort of gates in the typical Hollywood fashion. And so when Markiplier says he spent$3 million, that means he spent$3 million paying the actors. Yeah, because even with Obsession, I was seeing Obsession billboards everywhere around LA. Yeah. Like at least a million dollar campaign. Yep. Right when the videos were coming out saying Obsession just turned$750K into$100 million. dollars. And so I was like, well, so a lot of times that might happen after the fact that's an after there's more money being spent to like, you know, it's like, hey, we have a hit now. Let's like and then and then basically at every phase, there can be sort of an in kind investment where you get they call it like points on the back end, basically.

20:32John Coogan:But it's basically like the most famous example of this is probably Robert Downey Jr. in Ironman. He took a very low salary up front cash up front but he got a huge stake in the downstream cash flows from that series saying he's goaded he's goaded there's also a cool uh video here of the history of liminal spaces we should pull up because backrooms of course is pulling from a lot of interesting videos let's play this can we zoom in this at all there we go truman show haven't seen it i've seen it it's great I can't believe you've never seen Truman Show. It's so good. Should we get some liminal spaces here in the Ultradome?

21:13John Coogan:The Ultradome is a little bit of a liminal space. We should make it more of a liminal space. There are some podcasters that have liminal space type setups. Unbox Therapy is a famous one. You guys haven't seen it, but do you know the tape on the wall? Do you know what that is? No. What's that? I mean, I guess no spoilers. Oh, okay. Yeah. We can put tape on the wall. People who have seen it will know what that means.

21:38John Coogan:Anyway, we can just vibe out to liminal spaces for the rest of the show. Let's see what Dan Shipper has to say. This will happen too with AI in about a decade. Studio executives and producers are racing to find movie material in corners of the internet they once dismissed as some of the greatest threats to their business from YouTube to anime to video games. We talked about subway surfers. We're seeing the tide shift from these more conventional Hollywood narratives to something that feels more organic. Ooh, all the simulators? Maybe there will be Data Center Simulator the movie. Can you imagine?

22:12John Coogan:We got Data Center Simulator. Or what was the other one? Coconut Simulator? We got to get Coconut Simulator the movie. Realistic mode. Capybara Simulator the movie. That's just a nature documentary. Get David Attenborough in there. You're done. Well, Bernie Sanders is talking about taking a stake in the AI labs. He says, AI is built on humanity's collective knowledge. The wealth it generates must benefit humanity, not just Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or other AI oligarchs. That's why I'll be introducing the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act to give the public a direct ownership stake. And he penned a full op-ed in the New York Times.

22:55John Coogan:Senator Bernie Sanders is proposing a one-time 50 % tax directly in stock from the AI labs, which will be used to fund the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund. This would give the government voting rights and board seats and then directly pay a dividend to the American citizens. That's interesting because so you take 50%, like when would these companies actually produce a dividend? I mean, it takes many tech companies, like decades, to actually return cash to shareholders. They're known for stock buybacks. Maybe he wants to just be fire selling after the IPOs. He's just like, this is the top. I didn't tell you how there was going to be a dividend.

23:33John Coogan:A dividend in sales. No, I mean, the positioning, I'm trying to get into my New York Times account too, but the positioning blank is built on humanity's collective knowledge. What is not built on humanity's collective knowledge? Yeah, I was looking at a lot of the bio. TBPN is built on humanity's collective knowledge. It's true. If humanity hadn't figured out wheels and roads and combustion engines. Hey, be careful what you say. The United States American citizens might own 50 % of TBPN soon. You never know with this. You never know. You just never know. You're tempting to pay here. Bad example.

24:15But yeah, the other thing is, you know, we have.

24:19John Coogan:Yeah, AI 2027 talks about this. I think it is right in line. He's clearly in the milieu of that crew. And we'll see where all this goes. I don't know. We'll see. A lot of people are sort of framing it as that. Ryan says, we'd rather have universal basic tokens. Maybe that would be the dividend. I don't know. But it's interesting. So he's trying to ban data centers with the Data Center Moratorium Act. But then he also wants half. Yeah. Those two things feel like like it feels like he's just kind of throwing stuff at the wall. Yeah. So Dean Ball pointed out this sort of like, you know, misalignment here.