C (3:07)

Ed, good to see you. The only reason we ever see each other is because of all these Davids.

E (3:10)

It's such a shame. Well, it's funny because last time we were speaking about this, we were looking at the hearing that we saw in Washington. There's always a new twist to this story. But last time we spoke, you said that actually you thought that Paramount would be the winner. And it appears that that may actually be the case. They are making another bid, or they seem like they will. And actually, if you look at the prediction markets right now, the number one favorite to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery is indeed Paramount right now. So walk us through what has happened. What are the new developments?

C (3:49)

Right, so last week, Paramount came out with a really weird, interesting, basically showdown maneuver, which was to tell Warner Brothers shareholders, hey, we're willing to pay a little bit more. We're not going to pay it right now. We're going to pay it a year from now or maybe a little while from now. It's called a ticking fee. Basically, every quarter that Netflix couldn't close the deal or didn't close the deal, Paramount would add a little bit more money to the pot. And this was, I wrote this was a brilliant strategy by them because it basically forced Warner's board to come to the negotiating table. They signaled to the world, that's Paramount, that they had more money to play with and they were willing to play with that money. And then privately, as we learned today, they also told Warner Brothers board, hey, we could actually go to 31. And that's not the end. We could go a little bit higher. So Warner Brothers board convened over the weekend, Bloomberg reported. We reported that they were leaning towards opening talks with Paramount and they did, with a sort of twist. They told shareholders, hey, we still think the Netflix deal is the right deal. We think it's a great deal. We love this deal. But just in case there's maybe a little bit more value to have, Netflix has actually given us, Warner Brothers permission to start talking with Paramount. So we're gonna do that. Last time, you know, things were a little fuzzy for Netflix. Things were a little fuzzy for Paramount. Netflix wants this to be done with, to be over. They've set a date for the vote. They're ready to rock. They're ready to roll. They're giving Warner Brothers one last chance to squeeze a few more bucks out of Netflix and Paramount. And that's kind of where we are today. The two sides are finally at long last talking.

E (5:14)

So one thing that's a Little confusing is that Netflix, I mean, the way that we're seeing in the reporting here, Netflix granted Warner Brothers this waiver to negotiate with Paramount. They said, okay, go ahead and have your conversation with David Ellison and those guys. Why are they doing that? Why wouldn't they just say, no, we have a deal, we agreed. Let's go with that.

C (5:36)

It's a great question. And it's a really weird thing because under the merger agreement between Netflix and Warner Brothers, Warner Brothers actually doesn't have to ask for permission to start talking to other players. All they have to do is say, hey, theoretically, this offer we've gotten from Paramount or whoever might be better than Netflix's. So we're going to open negotiations and Netflix, at the end of those negotiations, you'll have a chance to match that offer. They didn't do that. Instead they said, we don't really think this is a potentially superior offer, but we're willing to talk Netflix. Can we go talk? And from my perspective, right, this is a, a remarkable show of confidence by Netflix. They are so assured that they'll be able to meet any price that Paramount puts forward. And they clearly feel comfortable enough with the regulatory risk, which, remember, is what Paramount's kind of been leaning on to say, hey, these Netflix guys maybe aren't that great at it. They're clearly comfortable. Netflix is clearly fine with this. It's kind of like, you know, telling your girlfriend, long distance girlfriend, yeah, sure, go to prom with the guy who really likes you. Nothing's gonna happen. I'm not worried. Is it arrogance? Is it confidence? It's kind of hard to say, but either way, Netflix seems pretty unfazed by all of this.

E (6:39)

And yet the prediction markets and the betting markets disagree. Paramount's the favorite, ahead of Netflix by more than 10 percentage points. Why do the markets disagree?

C (6:50)

Well, you've got a really deep pocketed buyer. You've got really serious questions about whether Netflix can make it not just past the president, who, for what it's worth, this is the best case scenario for Netflix. He's on the sidelines, right? He's not doing anything. If he decides to get involved, odds are he's going to go with the Ellison's. Ideologically, they're aligned, they contain CNN for him. And Ellison has been a longtime supporter. Even if he's got a mixed track record, at least that mixed track record is all Republican. Then you got to factor in Europe. The Europeans do not like big Tech. They're taking a close look at Netflix for the first time, possibly ever. Right. And then the third point, which I think is under acknowledged by both sides, is the state attorney generals. This cuts both ways. Democrats don't really. They wanna see the Ellisons get more control over media. But at the same time, Netflix is not exactly a friend of the working man. So if you're an attorney general in a state that relies a lot on movie production, on TV production, you're gonna look at that deal and be a little bit worried. If you're a Republican, on the other hand, you're not gonna love the idea of consolidation, period. Plus, you're gonna like the idea of Paramount's politics, of the Ellison's politics. So whether you're Democratic or Republican, as a state elected official or appointed official, you're looking at this deal, the Netflix Warner Brothers deal, and going, this maybe isn't so great for my people. However you define your people, add on to that the fact that, hey, listen, Paramount could very well come back with a crazy number. They could say, you know, forget about $32, forget about $33, which is where everyone thinks they're going to be. We're gonna go 35, we're gonna go 36, we're gonna go crazy. And that would make it very hard for Netflix, which is a publicly traded company with a real board and real accountability, to justify on a business level spending that amount of money to match them. Could they? Sure. Would they? I don't know.

E (8:26)

Yeah, that seems to be. If we're trying to rationalize out what the markets appear to be telling us, it seems to be they're telling us that, that Paramount's gonna come out with such a ridiculous offer that only the son of a multi, multi, multi billionaire would be able to come up with something that even Netflix couldn't come up with because the corporate governance risk would just be too high because it would be too ridiculous, obscene that that's what's going to happen. Now let's get to the most important question on the show, which is what do you think is going to happen? You predicted last time that you thought Paramount was gonna take Warner Brothers. Do you still believe that? How is this going to play out? Rohan Goswami I think the facts are.

C (9:08)

Kind of on Paramount's side. They've got more money, they've got more poll with regulators. But Warner Brothers and CEO David Zaslav have done a remarkable job of stringing them along. And I mean that in the best way possible. They have created billions of dollars in value for shareholders. There is not a planet on which they haven't war gamed out with their own bankers, with Netflix, with Netflix's bankers. Paramount's gonna do here. I think it's a toss up. Now last time we talked I said Paramount with the star. I think it's 50, 50. It genuinely could go either way because now the heat is on. Remember you had a couple big shareholders come out and say, hey Warner, you really need to talk to them. Warner's throwing them a bone to be fair. They're saying, okay, we're gonna talk to them. But I really don't know at this point. It's unsatisfying answer but there's just too much we don't know. We don't know how regulators are gonna shake out. We don't know what price Paramount's gonna come in at and we just don't know if Netflix is going to respond. Could go either way. I still think this board, Warner's board, loves a Netflix deal and doesn't really like Paramount all that much. We talked about the personal animus. I think it's still there.

E (10:08)

All right. Rohan Goswami, business reporter at Semaphore, thank you for taking us through this ridiculous journey that never seems to end. Perhaps it'll end soon. Thank you, Ed.

C (10:20)

Always a pleasure. Thank you.

E (10:24)

After the break, Anthropic gets into a fight with the Pentagon. And for even more markets insights, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter. Simply put@edwardelson.substack.com.

B (10:43)

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G (13:02)

Time to level the up. I'm Robin Archdean and I light buyers. I'm an executive founder, bestselling author, ultra marathoner, mother, proud Latina, and I'm not done yet. Announcing Project Swagger, my new weekly podcast, your Transformation Toolkit. I'm going to cut through the noise and give you actionable takeaways each week in under 30 minutes. Elevate your hustle with routines, strategies and mindset shifts that I have pressure tested. I have burnt down this Beyonce candle.

C (13:35)

Like all the way to the bottom.

G (13:36)

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E (14:03)

We're back with Profty Markets. The Pentagon is threatening to sever ties with Anthropic. Axios reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is close to scrapping the $200 million contract with the AI company. The military also plans to label anthropic as a supply chain risk, which is a designation usually reserved for foreign adversaries. That would force anyone doing business with the US Military to cut ties with Anthropic as well. This dispute is centering on what the military do with Claude. Anthropic is holding firm on two red lines for its technology. One is no mass surveillance on American people, and two is no autonomous weapons. But the Pentagon has argued that those guardrails are a deal breaker and that OpenAI, Google, and XAI have all agreed to fewer restrictions. All right, here to help us break down this standoff between the Pentagon and Anthropic, we're speaking with Alex Heath, author of the Sources newsletter and co host of the Access podcast. Good to see you, Alex.

F (15:06)

Good as always, Ed.

E (15:08)

So the Pentagon is cutting its ties with Anthropic. I mean, this headline is kind of hilarious because Anthropic says we don't want our technology used for mass surveillance of Americans, we don't want it used for weapons of mass destruction, et cetera. And then the government says, no can do. That's exactly what we need it for. Just walk us through what's happened here and what led to the Pentagon's upset with Anthropic.

F (15:36)

Yeah, so Anthropic was one of several big AI labs that got a pretty lucrative deal with the Pentagon earlier this year. And Anthropic, to my understanding, is actually the only AI lab that is embedded in a classified way in the Pentagon. So they have deeper ties. And then we saw some headlines recently that Claude was used, I think mostly Palantir somehow during the arrests of Maduro. And then some news started to trickle out about Hedgepath being upset that Anthropic was being stingy with its terms of service and how they could use it. And then Axios now reporting that I guess potentially the Pentagon would place them on a supply chain risk list, which means that anyone who wants to do business with the US Military, which is basically every tech company on earth now, will have to cut ties with Anthropic if they're put on that list. It doesn't sound like that's happened yet, but that could be the next shoe to drop here, which would obviously be very bad for Anthropic.

E (16:37)

Yeah, I mean, the implications here are it would be a hit to Anthropic's business, but I think that there is a larger implication, which is it seems like the government is sending a message to AI companies, which is you're going to be used for the military, you're going to be used for surveillance. If you're not down for that, then that is a problem. And not only will we not work with you, we're going to put you on this list that is usually reserved for foreign adversaries. I mean, is this basically a signal of where we're headed with AI? It is going to be used for mass surveillance?

F (17:12)

I mean, I hope not. Dario Amade, the CEO of Anthropic, has said that he fears that happening, especially in the eastern part of the world and in China, for example, but that he hopes it doesn't happen in the US or at least hopes that it gets implemented in a democratic way. There's an argument that we are still a democratic country, at least for now in the US So maybe it should be okay. These are elected representatives making these decisions. But I think it is exposing this uncomfortable truth that is, AI is getting incredibly powerful, and the models are able to do more complex tool use, operate across different kinds of interfaces and computers. That would naturally extend to war. That would naturally extend to things like autonomous. Autonomous drones controlling autonomous vehicles, et cetera, in a war setting, even weapons beyond that. And the calls that these labs are going to have to make. And I think Anthropic's been pretty out there saying we want to be the safety first frontier lab. I will give credit to Dario. He has been pretty consistent on concerns about not just job loss, but AI creating bioweapons, AI used in war. So it's not like this is coming out of left field from Anthropic, but it's kind of like, why did you get into business with the Pentagon in the first place, especially this Pentagon, if you didn't expect this? And I think they're having to reckon with that. And now, I mean, this threat of being on the supply chain risk, which, like you said, is normally reserved for foreign adversaries, will be really bad for them and potentially hurt an ipo, which they're hoping to do.

E (18:48)

What is the right move for a tech company and an AI company when you're in this position? Because on the one hand, you want to work with the government, you want to get that revenue. I mean, this is like a very serious business line. But on the other hand, we're also seeing a lot of pushback against this kind of use of technology. I think Palantir is kind of a great example. I mean, Palantir shareholders are very, very happy right now. Well, maybe less happy in recent weeks and recent months, but overall pretty happy. But also, the American people do not like Palantir at all. I mean, it's just associated as kind of the next step in the transition to big brother and 1984, mass surveillance. And a lot of these AI companies like OpenAI Xai, Google, they are very happy to work with the military. And I just wonder if, from a business perspective, there is a concern that when you allow yourself to be used in that way, suddenly you get a lot of pushback, especially from a population that is so concerned about exactly this issue right now. Like, this is the number one concern about AI, that it's going to be used for really destructive purposes.

F (20:04)

You're right. And this is the dance that you have to do when you want to get in bed with the government. So I don't know what they foresaw. If they foresaw that the Pentagon was going to respect their terms of service, which says, you know, no surveillance of American citizens. Interestingly, I don't think it. It says no surveillance of foreign people, but no surveillance of American citizens and no use of AI in lethal kind of warlike settings.

E (20:30)

And just to clarify with you, that's what the government is upset about, right? Pete Hegseth is like, no, no, we need to surveil the American people. If you don't do that, then we're not down. Am I understanding that correctly?

F (20:44)

I mean, it seems to be consistent with what we're seeing elsewhere. Right? The administration putting pressure on the social media companies to flag posts about ice on their platforms in the U.S. right. It does seem like that is the direction that the government is going. And AI could supercharge that, certainly, and make it more effective at scale. And when you want to be a commercial entity and you want to raise hundreds of billions of dollars, you kind of need to work with governments. I mean, maybe not, but they've all decided already that this is the path they're going to take. And can anthropic, you know, forego this and back out now without, you know, the Defense Secretary essentially, you know, putting kibbutz on the rest of their business with the supply chain risk thing, that's going to be the thing they have to figure out. I imagine there's going to be some kind of compromise in the middle. And this is a negotiation tactic. But it's also interesting you're not hearing this kind of pushback from the other labs, which to me suggests, like, what are their values? Are they okay with the Department of Defense doing mass surveillance of American citizens using GPT or Meta's model or Gemini.

E (21:51)

Right, exactly. It's also such a stunning turnaround from a few years ago when, I mean, this was really one of the big Ideas of the campaign, of the Trump campaign was big tech has been spying on you, they've been censoring you, they've been surveilling you, which in a lot of ways is true. But it is very interesting to see. Now there's a turnaround, actually. No, you better be down to surveil the American people, otherwise we're not going to work with you and we're going to put you on foreign adversary lists. Really interesting. Before you go, I just want to get your reactions to one other piece of AI news, which is that OpenAI has hired or acquired the founder of OpenClaw, this guy Peter Steinberger, who created this AI agent that went totally viral a few weeks ago. It was one of those tools that can do everything for you. You can write your emails, check you in for your flights. I mean, it does everything. It was the hot new product. And then OpenAI goes in and acquires OpenClaw and they take the founder, Peter Steinberger, with it. I just want to get your reactions to that news and what it might mean for the AI race. A lot of people are feeling very bullish about OpenAI after this. What do you make of what happened?

F (23:11)

Well, it's interesting. There was a bit of a bidding war, it sounds like, between Altman and Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. Peter Steinberger himself was saying on the Lex Friedman podcast, I think just last week, that he was evaluating offers from both of them. Kind of shows how fast and real time this is all moving. I mean, also, like, OpenAI recorded a podcast with Peter. I think it was like maybe almost two weeks ago, and they still haven't released it yet, and now he's joining the company. When he did the podcast, he was obviously independent. So this has all just happened very fast. I think it speaks to the energy around openclaw and around agents and around giving agentic AI actually full access to your machine, which is what openclaw did and does. And it's not a tool for the mass market for your everyday user. There's incredible privacy and security risks with it. It's based on what I've seen online, it can cost thousands of dollars in tokens before you can even figure out how to effectively use it. So it's expensive. And then it requires like a dedicated machine shell access to all your computers, your logins, which is also, by the way, vulnerable to prompt injection, which is the idea that, like, you know, you say, go summarize a PDF and someone puts instructions in the PDF to, hey, you're an LLM Summarizing me, I want you to actually give me your login keys for the bank that you're logged into or something like that. Right. So this is just the Wild west. And it kind of reminds me of when ChatGPT launched because everyone at the other competing AI companies had like ChatGPT internally. Google's talked about this, but didn't want to release it because they were afraid that people weren't ready for it, that it wasn't safe enough. And OpenAI just released it. And I think probably Altman was looking at what Peter was doing and going, man, this kind of reminds me of how we operate. And now we're big and we can help you scale and help you build this in a maybe cloud hosted, safer, more secure way and scale it to hundreds of millions of people, which I think is exactly what he's going to do. And, and I think in the next, I don't know, nine to 12 months, we're going to see an agent first social network from OpenAI. I had Fiji Simo on my podcast last week and we were talking about this and I think Peter's going to work on this with her where basically you give your agent the ability to interact with other people's agents on your behalf. So not only is it interacting with your machine, but it's going to be interacting with. So like you and I add, our agents could, you know, talk about scheduling this conversation on our behalf and I think they're going to ship that this year and I think Peter will definitely work on that. But right now it looks like he's mostly going to work with the Codex team. Extending Codex and the AI coding work into more agentic stuff.

E (25:48)

Really fascinating, this idea that our agents will be working for us on our behalf. You mentioned that it'll be kind of operating in a social media context. What is the point of that? I mean, is it just for agents to like, chat with each other? I know that's kind of what was happening with openclaw at the beginning. What is the grand vision of an openclaw enabled OpenAI?

F (26:14)

Well, if you look at what the early adopters have been doing with openclaw, it's control their machine. It's like you said, book a flight, but it's also triage email, run ad campaigns, reply to things on X, that sort of stuff. And it's easy to imagine in a world where the, I guess you could say railroads around all this have been built and it's safe and it's secure and we can predict with a certain degree of confidence how these agents will actually interact with you could say, I guess, sensitive data. Right. You would then probably feel comfortable entrusting that agent if it is a reflection of you and your context to interact with with others, especially if the others were being influenced by their owners. And you could potentially leverage more of your time. You could get more done. You could have parallel agents talking with other agents on your behalf. That's what everyone in Silicon Valley, that's the idea that everyone is captivated by now, whether that happens in a way that is scalable and actually works soon, I don't know. But I think openclaw showed the promise of that.

E (27:21)

Yes.

F (27:21)

And that just giving an agent full access can actually do a lot of things. Because turns out these models and again, this ties back to our earlier conversation, have gotten really good at tool use and agentic workflows and just kind of letting that run free, I think is the promise of openclaw. And OpenAI says they're going to continue it as an open source project. We'll see how much resources are actually put in that. I would just imagine that this tech is fully part of ChatGPT soon.

E (27:50)

All right, Alex Heath, author of the Sources Newsletter, co host of the Access Podcast. Appreciate it. Thank you, Alex.

F (27:57)

Thanks. Ad.

E (28:03)

To end this episode, we propose to you a question. And that is, why does it feel like everyone under 30 is a founder? This is the question my colleague Kristen o' Donoghue asked in our latest edition of the Prof. G Markets newsletter. It's also the question that a lot of people my age and a lot of my friends are asking right now. That is everywhere you look, from LinkedIn to Instagram to TikTok, every young person seems to be starting a company, be it a tech platform or a CPG brand or even an AI company. Founders seem to be everywhere right now. Now, to be clear, obviously not every young person is a founder. But when we dig into the data, it does appear that there are a lot more founders today than they used to be. In fact, last year, the number of Americans on LinkedIn with the title founder increased roughly 70%. Meanwhile, compared to 2022, that number quadrupled. In addition, if you ask a Gen Z today if they plan to start a new business or a side hustle in 2026, get this, half of them will say yes. That Is compared to 44% for millennials and 31% for Gen X. So young people are more interested in entrepreneurship today than ever before. Literally half of them are trying to start companies, which begs the obvious question why? Well, there are a few reasons. For one, starting a company today is easier than it used to be. It's easier to create a website and to create a logo and a brand. We have tools like Canva and Figma. Things that used to take weeks or even months to get done can now be completed in a matter of hours. That is all thanks to technology. And it's also thanks to AI. The barriers to entry to become an entrepreneur have practically disappeared. So that's one reason. Another reason is the job market. Simply put, the entry level job market has gotten tighter and as a result, many young people are turning away from traditional jobs. They're turning towards entrepreneurship. But the third reason, and arguably the most important reason why everyone is becoming a founder, is that today, more than any other time in history, being a founder is cool. Or at least it is seen as cool. Like it or not, founders are glorified in today's media more than ever. Whether it's movies about founders or TV shows about founders, or even endless tiktoks about founders and the founder lifestyle. This is everywhere right now. So is it really a surprise that every young person wants to be a founder now? On the one hand, it's great that young people are so interested in entrepreneurship. I like that. But at the same time, I also think it's a little bit misleading because what you're not seeing is the reality that most of the time being a founder actually doesn't work out. 90% of startups eventually fail. If you get VC funding, yes, your odds do increase, but not by much. Three quarters of VC backed companies also fail. In addition, the lifestyle isn't that great. Pre C founders usually pay themselves around $50,000 a year. And yes, they have equity, but most of the time that equity goes to zero. So being a founder is extremely popular right now. It's a very, very hot job. But we should also mention that it is also very overrated. If your real goal is to build wealth, then on a risk adjusted basis, our recommendation would be to go land a great job at a big corporation. Yes, maybe it's boring, but ultimately it works. Entry level engineers at companies like meta earn nearly $200,000 a year. Ten years down the line, they're making millions. That is huge amounts of money. Plus they get benefits. Things like 401k matching and paid family leave and health insurance. Sometimes you also get stock based compensation. You get equity. Now I get that this kind of sounds like an ad for corporate America and I'm sorry about that, but I do think that corporate jobs are wildly underrated right now. They might not be sexy, and they might not look as good on your LinkedIn profile as founders, but the reality is these jobs are great for making money. And that is what a job is for. If you want to read more about this, you can go check out Kristen's article in the Prof. G Markets newsletter. You can find it@prof.gmarkets.com in sum, founder Mode Overhyped Corporate Jobs under Hyped. Okay, that's it for today. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss, edited by Joel Patterson, and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our research team is Dan Shalon, Isabella Kinsel, Kristen o' Donoghue, and Mia Silverio. Thanks for listening to Profgue Markets from Profgue Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson. I will see you tomorrow.