Anthropic Drama, Meta Now Tokenminning, Fox's $22B Roku Deal | Diet TBPN

Summary

---

TBPN Podcast Summary

Episode: Anthropic Drama, Meta Now Tokenminning, Fox's $22B Roku Deal | Diet TBPN
Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays
Date: June 16, 2026

Episode Overview

This jam-packed Diet TBPN episode fuses Silicon Valley’s current obsessions into a brisk 30-minute tech talk. Coogan and Hays break down the latest drama at Anthropic, Meta’s big shift in AI resource strategy, and Fox’s headline-making $22B acquisition of Roku. Interspersed: reflections on the cultural power of live events (like UFC Freedom 250 at the White House), as well as lively debate on how tech giants align (or clash) with regulators, investors, and each other.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. UFC Freedom 250 at the White House: Culture Meets Politics

• Why Did It Work?
  • Hosts describe the event as “bread and circuses”—a political move giving the public entertainment in the midst of numerous national troubles.
  • Despite aesthetic concerns, Hays admits: “The bread and circuses, John, it worked on me. Some of the best ever.” (01:39)
• Historical Context:
  • Comparison to Teddy Roosevelt’s White House boxing match 100 years ago.
• Political Strategy:
  • Sporting spectacles seen as powerful, perhaps underused, tools for a politician’s image.
  • “I would actually expect the admin’s overall popularity to go up just based on this event…there were so many iconic images.” (03:08, Hays)
• UFC & Advertising:
  • Comments on the high production value, cultural significance, and the event’s role as a national unifier.

2. Anthropic’s AI Drama: National Security Meets Silicon Valley

• Biggest Tension Points:
  • Anthropic’s absence from the high-profile event was noted (04:03), and contrasted with the presence of Mark Zuckerberg.
  • Disconnection between Anthropic’s cautious, safety-centric brand and the administration's public-facing priorities (“the admin could not be more misaligned aesthetically with Anthropic.” - Coogan, 04:28)
  • Ongoing compliance headaches after U.S. export controls targeted Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models (05:10 onward).
• Timeline Recap:
  • March 4: Department of War supply chain risk letter.
  • April 7: Mythos preview & Project Glasswing.
  • June 9: Fable 5 launch.
  • June 12: Fable 5 suspended following export controls.
• The Jailbreak Debate:
  • Amazon’s Andy Jassy raised “jailbreaking” concerns with officials. Anthropic responded: “We reviewed a demonstration…these vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly available models are able to discover them as well.” (08:52, quoting Anthropic blog)
• Business–Government Complexity:
  • Amazon’s “circular” relationship with Anthropic as both customer, investor, and infrastructure provider makes for a murky alliance.
  • “You can be a lab partnered with a big tech company…that can help you get through to the admin.” (10:16, Coogan)
  • Anticipation of ongoing “4D chess” in Washington as companies and government re-negotiate.

3. Meta’s Shift: From “Token-Maxing” to “Token-Minimizing”

• Lingo Deep Dive:
  • Hosts riff on how “token-maxing” and “token-minning” stem from gaming’s “min-maxing”—optimizing for best results at lowest cost.
  • “You should always have been min-maxing because that is the goal of business at all times, in all things.” (12:03, Coogan)
• Internal Spending Runaways:
  • Rumored Meta engineer spent $90K in a day on AI resources, swiftly fired.
  • “The lesson that will be learned from that is: don’t spend $90,000 a day.” (13:36, Hays)
• Meta Executive Memo:
  • Meta’s new strategy will emphasize budgets and visibility: “Individuals and teams have limited visibility into and control over how they use AI…we expect Meta will move towards managing AI tokens in a more structured way with budgets, allocation decisions and supporting tools.” (16:19, quoting memo read by Coogan)
• Meta’s Product Direction:
  • Internal confusion addressed: “I still don’t know what Meta is actually building, and I think…they should probably communicate that to the market.” (17:44, Hays)
  • Speculation: Is Meta building for internal use (“personal superintelligence”) or preparing external API/tool releases?

4. Fox Acquires Roku: $22–25 Billion Bet on Ad-Supported Streaming

• Deal Details:
  • Conflicting reports: $22B (CNBC) vs $25B (Wall Street Journal).
  • Fox integrating Roku to strengthen its presence in ad-supported streaming; Tubi already a “home run” for Fox (21:03, Hays).
  • “Roku is a platform. They have over 20% market share in connected TVs…over 40% of the engagement with connected TVs.” (24:05, Hays)
• Advertising Opportunity:
  • Younger demos, “prime years as consumers.”
  • “With the right ad driven approach, I think it'll pay off.” (25:28, Hays)
• Rebundling Desired:
  • Hays hopes Fox/Roku can “rebundle” fragmented streaming platforms for consumer convenience.
• Competitive Dynamics:
  • Discussion of “windowing,” content exclusivity, and whether Roku can serve as a neutral platform for premium content.

5. Anthropic, Government, and the Geopolitics of AI

• Tyler Cowen’s Constraints (shared by Coogan, 26:53):
  1. U.S. needs AI labs’ business health/IPOs to go well.
  2. Difficulties for U.S. firms recruiting foreign AI talent due to export controls.
  3. Using model access as a diplomatic lever—balancing soft/hard power.
  4. The challenge of enforceable national use controls; concerns about traitorous citizens and espionage.
  5. Debate over whether the U.S. could “nationalize” the labs and still remain effective.
  6. China’s open source AI pace seems to be slowing, perhaps due to compute, research bottlenecks, or data constraints.
• Historical Parallels:
  • Reference to Virgil Griffith’s arrest: “The crypto community…maintain that math should not be illegal. The government side is the helping.” (29:14, Coogan)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It really felt like a bread and circuses moment. But the bread and circuses, John, it worked on me.” (01:39, Jordi Hays)
• “There is just a really, really broad gap between these two organizations. And so everyone’s hoping that things resolve quickly.” (05:10, John Coogan)
• “If a model doesn’t let you hack a system, just have the model build you an unrestricted model that does let you hack that system.” (06:55, Coogan)
• “You should always have been min-maxing because that is the goal of business at all times, in all things.” (12:03, Coogan)
• “The lesson that will be learned from that is don’t spend $90,000 a day.” (13:36, Hays)
• “With the right ad driven approach, I think it’ll pay off.” (25:28, Hays)
• “The US needs to stay ahead of China in the AI race. That is a big question.” (28:14, Coogan, paraphrasing Tyler Cowen)

---

Highlight Timestamps (MM:SS)

• UFC White House Spectacle: 01:10–03:27
• Anthropic Drama Recap and Timeline: 05:10–10:16
• Meta’s Token Management and Min-Maxing Rant: 11:43–13:59
• Meta’s Internal Strategy & Product Direction: 16:19–18:50
• Fox Acquires Roku Analysis: 19:18–26:53
• Tyler Cowen’s Six Constraints on U.S. AI Strategy: 26:53–31:36
• Export controls, international talent, China–Open Source Pace: 27:39–32:25

---

Overall Tone & Style

Conversational, punchy, clever, and informed—Coogan and Hays blend sharp analysis with banter and Silicon Valley inside jokes. Throughout, the tone remains brisk and irreverent: “I’m a stochastic parrot,” quips Coogan, even as the conversation grazes thorny issues of geopolitics, corporate intrigue, and the future of tech.

---

For more, find TBPN episodes weekdays at 11am PT and full archives at tbpn.com.

Transcript

[A]

Obviously Mistral is in the news. Incredibly bullish for Mistral. Obviously very unfortunate drama happening in the anthropic world. We'll go through all of that. But if the sovereign AI thesis could not get any stronger right now, this weekend really showed a lot of countries. Hey, maybe we do want a national champion. Hey, maybe we do want someone that will provide us models forever. SpaceX IPO. We have Gavin Baker joining in 30 minutes and we're recapping UFC Freedom 250. It happened at the White House last night. Jordy, take us through your reactions. Introduce our first guest of the show.

[B]

Okay, quick intro on the event. Overall, I am a UFC fan.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

It's one of the few sports, maybe the only sport where I actually know the names of the people that are competing. Our guest in just a few minutes is one of those people.

[A]

Now, are you more of a fan of the UFC or more of a fan of the government? Because a lot of people were watching just because they're fans of the government and they said, oh, I will watch any. I watch C Span all day. I watch anything that happens if it involves the government. This was an interesting crossover.

[B]

No, more seriously, I, as a UFC fan and as an American, I'm excited for the. For the UFC to do well. I'm excited for the fighters to have a platform. I was a little bit wary of this event overall just because the aesthetics of putting on this crazy party high stakes in this moment when there is a ton to black pill about.

[A]

Yeah, not FPS, interest rates, less FPS, all this other stuff going on and.

[B]

Yeah, so war raging, gas prices are high, house prices are high, rates are going up. A lot of people in America are not having a. Having a good time. And it really felt like a bread and circuses moment. But the bread and circuses, John, it worked on me.

[A]

Top notch.

[B]

It worked on me. Some of the best ever. It was. It was.

[A]

Why was it so good compared to a normal UFC event?

[B]

Well, you didn't watch, so I guess it's. I guess it's hard.

[A]

Was it the aesthetics or the actual.

[B]

Well, so one. The production value. One. The card was absolutely stacked. It was eight fights, no filler.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Wall to wall. Really, really fights that had a lot of. They carried a lot of weight. Right. So like the main title fight, Gaethje vs. Ilia Topuria, that changed both fighters careers like full stop. Right. And even with Bo Nickel joining in just a few minutes, you know, Bo, that was the biggest possible stage that any athlete could be on and especially in the ufc, at least here in America. So anyways, going into it, I thought the aesthetics were bad. I was excited to watch the fights. Turned out it was just really cool. And sure, there's still gonna be people that are upset that the president and the admin is platforming something like this. Turned out to be really fun. It was a cool night, and I think America kind of needed it. Yeah, A lot of people are saying

[A]

unprecedented because Teddy Roosevelt held a boxing match in the White House almost 100 years ago around that time. And apparently he fought in the boxing match, which is.

[C]

Yeah, he was big. Big boxer.

[A]

He was a big boxer. And so imagine. So this is like a light. A light crazy president.

[C]

Anyway.

[B]

But anyways, yeah, I, you know, the event was. Was incredible. And I came away thinking that big parties and sporting events are potentially the most underutilized political. Political strategy. Right. I would actually expect the admin's, like, overall popularity to go up, approval rating to go up based on. Based just on this event because there were so many iconic images. Funny enough, the most iconic image is of a Brazilian named Diego Lopez, which we had up on the screen there,

[A]

standing up on that.

[B]

But anyways, really, really wild.

[A]

So the other big topic over the UFC was the fact that Dario Amadei was not in attendance. He wasn't front row. Mark Zuckerberg was. And it sort of underscores this odd situation that Anthropic's in where, like, they just got dealt this weird hand where, like, they're doing so well and the admin could not be more misaligned aesthetically with Anthropic.

[B]

Their whole brand.

[A]

Yeah, with their whole brand. They're very, very different.

[B]

And I was, you know, I read the article yesterday that Anthropic staff were going to Washington, D.C. some people were like, oh, this is, you know, this is bad. Like, if it was. If they could solve the issue easily, they could do it over the phone. Not how this works. Serious issue. Everybody goes, you know. Yeah, you would obviously go. But going to. Washing, flying to Washington, D.C. to try to solve an issue on a Sunday. There was not a worse.

[A]

They'll be here, they'll be there.

[B]

No, no, I know, but you can imagine, you land there, you're like, okay, where is everyone? Let's, like, meet is a big issue. Let's meet figurative. This is important. The national security is on the line. Like, let's figure this out. And they're like, where is everyone?

[A]

And, like, if you take safety seriously, cybersecurity seriously, biosecurity seriously, Export control, seriously, like UFC could not be less aligned with that. The stakes there. And so like, there is this big gap between the administration and Anthropic. And I think that everyone should, like every American should care about bridging this gap. Like private enterprises should be able to flourish in the United States. Everyone agrees with that. And the government should be able to enact reasonable regulations to protect America's interests. And both of those need to find a way to play together. But there is just a really, really broad gap between these two organizations. And so everyone's hoping that things resolve quickly. And it seems like the right wheels are in motion. The flights have been booked or already taken and things are moving along. But just a recap on the play by play. March 4, Anthropic received a Department of War supply chain risk letter that, of course, got rolled back eventually. April 7th was the Mythos preview announcement alongside Project Glasswing. June 9th was the Fable 5 launch. Last Monday, Mythos with guardrails around Cyber, Bio and AI research. And on June 12, just five days after the end of the week, Fable 5 gets suspended after the Commerce Department issues an export control directive. So Anthropic explained in a blog post that the US government is restricting both Fable 5 and Mythos 5 from being used by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the US including foreign national Anthropic employees. And so that's a huge compliance burden, very sudden. And that led Anthropic to completely suspend the use of those models for all users, not just foreign national employees, because they need to, at least if they want to comply with this. Do all the KYC understand how different organizations are using the model? Who at those organizations has access? If something's being vended through an API and it's showing up in another product, does that product do all of the proper authorizations? And so it's a big wrench in the gears of the rollout of this model. Then the information reported that Andy Jassy at Amazon had raised concerns with the senior administration officials about jailbreaking, the risk of jailbreaking Fable and getting access to all of Anthropic. Anthropic countered in their blog post, saying, quote, we reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass. So they're saying this isn't that big of a jailbreak. This isn't that big of a deal, we can move forward safely. We've taken safety seriously. But that is the debate that's going on between the admin and Anthropic. So, as everyone knows, the rollout of Fable 5 has been a bit rocky. Incredible demos, incredible benchmarks, but offset by the odd decision to silently degrade the quality of answers related to frontier AI development instead of just refusing the request like cyber and bio prompts, which that was the main thing that everyone was really confused about. The actual rationale behind AI development refusal is pretty sound like people are upset about that if they're working on machine learning systems, recommender systems, anything that requires instantiating an AI product, let alone if you're just, hey, I'm just doing open source AI research and I'd love to use the latest and greatest models to help me now. It's not an option, but at the same time, just think about the logic. If a model doesn't let you hack a system, just have the model build you an unrestricted model that does let you hack that system. And so clearly in that scenario it makes sense to restrict. If you want to restrict hacking or bio, you also have to restrict the tool that makes the tool that hacks the system or develops the bioweapon in theory. But the choice to silently degrade responses was not well received. These are important issues. And there's another timeline where AI leaders are cut from the same cloth as America's elected officials. But we're in a world where Anthropic has to make their case for safety in an age of RSI during a UFC fight on the White House lawn. It's a very bizarre timeline, but here, here we are. Most of the big tech CEOs, they have figured out how to work with the administration effectively, showing up to large dinners, photo ops, the occasional movie screening to make their case about hot topics. Many of these CEOs also have business relationship with Anthropic, either on the customer side or on the investor side. And that's what's really complicated about the Amazon relationship. Obviously Amazon uses Anthropic models, also is an investor in Anthropic, also provides compute to Anthropic. And so they have a very hairy, complex circular relationship. And so that clouds the discussion over whether or not is Anthropic going to try and help Anthropic get through this? Are they doing everything above board at the same time? You know, people were sort of putting out that like, oh, did, did Amazon like spike the ball on this? And at the same time. If the government comes to you and asks like, hey, you're a big tech company. You've been using this model a lot.

[B]

Like close partner to a close partner.

[A]

Were you able to jailbreak it at all? And your security team just issued a report like, yeah, we actually were able to jailbreak it a little bit. Like, you're not going to withhold that from the government. You're going to turn that over. That's different than calling and saying, hey, I really think it's dangerous. You got to put pressure on them. So there's this wide range of levels of interaction that can go both ways. You can be a lab partnered with a big tech company. That big tech company can have a really established government relations group that is actually helping you get through to the admin. On the flip side, you could have a big tech company that is competing with you or frustrated by your business and is actively trying to put their thumb on the scale the other way. So I'm sure we'll learn more in the future. Many of these CEOs have business relationships with Anthropic, so we'll see how all of this develops. And they're always renegotiating these contracts too, which makes things more complex. And they're competing across multiple markets. So expect the 4D chess to be on full display all summer long in Washington anyway. What else is going on? Meta is doing a 180, according to Amir over at the Information, trying to be the vanguard of token minimizing. I think the token maxing. Token minimizing thing is so silly because do you know where maxing comes from really? Like it comes from gamer lingo usually

[B]

adopted by looksmaxing community.

[A]

I don't know if looksmaxing community was the first one. They certainly made it really, really viable.

[B]

They popularized like I feel like through effectively through clavs. Clipping.

[A]

Yeah, that language.

[B]

That's the idea of like doing anything like, oh, I'm computer maxing today.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Isn't it from like min maxing.

[A]

Min maxing. And that's what I'm getting at. Like you shouldn't be token maxing or token minning. You should be token min maxing. And the idea of min maxing is when you're in a video game, you want to get the most resources for the lowest cost. So if you're playing League of Legends, you're going to put just the right amount of gold into this particular item or this particular stat point in an RPG and you're going to try and find the optimal build Based on your resources. You have confined resources. And somehow it feels like tech and all these companies went through some sort of hallucinatory period where they lost sight of that. They should always have been min maxing because that is the goal of business at all times, in all things. You would never say like, oh yeah, we're ad maxing this quarter. We're going to buy as many ads as possible. Oh, no, it didn't work. We spent way too much on ads. They were not effective. We need to admin spend as little as possible on marketing. It's like. And there you always want to be spending. You always want to be getting the most return on ad spend.

[B]

The highest leverage output there was. And again, unsubstantiated post.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

But somebody was saying they talked to somebody of Meta and there was one engineer that spent $90,000 in one day and was quickly terminated. Really terminated within three days. So again, could just be entirely fake news, but it seems somewhat informed.

[A]

The crazy thing is that, like, the

[B]

lesson from that, this guy's like, I'm not getting fired. I'm going to use AI more than anyone else in the whole company.

[A]

Riding loops.

[B]

$90,000, bill.

[A]

I mean, so the lesson that will be learned from that is don't spend $90,000 a day. But the super bowl is literate for a marketer. The super bowl is spend 5 million in one day. And it works sometimes. And sometimes super bowl ads deliver $20 million.

[B]

But what do teams do when they run super bowl ads? Right, we ran our super bowl ad.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

We trained our own model in order to. Yeah, no, but no, we made sure

[A]

that ours was ROI positive. And we only bought the ad in a small market. And we did it before the game.

[B]

We renew.

[A]

Our audience was. And so for a very low cost, we were able to get a very high value. So I believe we got a very high return on investment. We min. Maxed the Super Bowl. Now, there were some companies that sort of just super bowl maxed and they just spent a ton of money. And when you looked at the data on how they were received by audiences, it seemed like, oh, they definitely didn't get $5 million in brand value back. In fact, maybe that ad was poorly received. Some of the AI generated ads.

[B]

I got to give it up to the UFC for the, for the. For the level of advertising during the event yesterday.

[A]

They're running full ads in the middle.

[B]

No. So one. The interesting thing with the new Paramount deal, there's a lot of ads, but one Dana White was in a lot of the ads that were running. So, like Dodge was doing a TRX ad. It was Dana White driving. That's cool. There was another ad. I forget the brand. I guess it was a bad ad. But Dana White was. They faked a podcast set where it was with an insurance company and Dana was having a conversation about business insurance with the CEO of the company.

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

So it looks like a podcast, so I thought it was interesting they were casting Dana and all them then. Second, the level of advertising just in the octagon was out of this world. There was so many different ways to gamble. There was like, there's no, like, UFC cannot do like a gambling exclusivity deal with anyone. Right. Cause it's like they have. It's crypto.com, it's polymarket, it's bet 365. Any possible way that you could wanna gamble.

[A]

Bet 365. So the only day you're taking off is leap day. Every four years, you take one day off of gambling.

[B]

That's kind of like the company.

[A]

One day off every four years.

[B]

And then Kalshi's running ads during the event.

[A]

Oh, so Kalshee and Polymarket are doing.

[B]

So Polymarket is in the Octagon, but Kalshi's running a bunch of ads against it.

[A]

And they're buying directly through Paramount because you streamed it on Paramount, Is that correct?

[B]

Yeah, I don't.

[A]

Did you have to pay for it in addition to.

[B]

No, no, no.

[A]

Okay. So you pay for Paramount on a monthly basis and then you get UFC for free. Got it. Gambling is just min maxing done poorly. That's true. So the news around Meta is. Meta's doing a 180, trying to be the vanguard of token minimizing. Two months ago, Meta epitomized token maxing on trend, on track to spend billions a year on Claude, et cetera. We've seen an exponential increase in AI usage and we are tracking to spend billions on internal use alone in 2026. The memo said at the same time, individuals and teams have limited visibility into and control over how they use AI. In 2027, we expect Meta will move towards managing AI tokens in a more structured way with budgets, allocation decisions and supporting tools. That makes sense. You have a marketing budget. You should also have a token budget as part.

[B]

I also saw something. They have like meta code, which is their internal.

[A]

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, they're like catching up to the frontier with.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, you talked about this. There's a bunch of like these Leaked calls where Zuck is like, you know, you should imagine that Met employees are going to be better than the average open source contributor. So it's like the basically quality of coding data within Meta should be super good. You can train Model on that.

[A]

It's the same pitch as take a frontier model. Bring them in through some sort of consulting partner, they fine tune on your business workflow, they automate your business process. But your business process in this case, if your Meta is generating code that makes your social networks better.

[C]

Yeah. It's especially good because like in Meta, all of the like, you know, internal business, like whatever data, it's already in like code format. You don't have to like scan in a bunch of papers into, you know,

[B]

I still don't know what Meta is actually building and I think there comes a time soon that they should probably communicate that to the market.

[A]

Personal superintelligence, baby. What's not to. What's there not to understand?

[B]

No, it's just $1.5 billion. What does that mean?

[A]

75% as valuable as SpaceX, buddy. Come on. It's crazy.

[B]

SpaceX, well, SpaceX is 2.3. Well, if things keep going the way they're going, we'll see even more of a divergence. No, but I think like it's so unclear.

[A]

You should be able to put a lot of the SpaceX bull case on Meta. Right. It's like sure, they. Maybe Colossus was built a little bit faster, but Meta's pretty fast.

[B]

I think they're wildly. I think they're. There couldn't be more different with Meta right now. It's the bull case is it's potentially the greatest business in the history.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

That is not threatened by AI.

[A]

Totally.

[B]

Totally. That actually is accelerated by AI.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And. And I don't think any anyways, but I do think, I do think I would expect some communication from Meta around what their real strategy is.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Over the next month or so. Because it's killing them that they just keep saying, oh, we're personal super intelligence. But wait, they're building like a coding harness and they're working on coding. Like are they gonna sell that externally or is it gonna be internal coding? Are they gonna. Are they gonna try to Coding?

[A]

Seems like it makes sense. Like they're sponsoring.

[B]

Are they gonna try to sell their model on an API and get into enterprise? The big question is, do they take the leap? They kind of did that with Manus, but that's getting unwound.

[A]

Fox is buying Roku, the streaming service for $25 billion. It's in the Wall Street Journal.

[B]

25 or 22.

[A]

25 billion in the Wall Street Journal. Here, let me refresh the page, see if they updated it. It still says 25. Weird. I'll read through it.

[B]

Reporting $22 billion.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

But who knows?

[A]

Somewhere in the north of a billion sub hundred billion. Let's be very conservative with our estimates.

[B]

Yeah, CNBC also 22 billion. Weird that the Journal is the Journal.

[A]

I mean I have inside information given that it's a News Corp Property related there. Right. Anyway, let's read through the Journal piece. Let me just give you some facts and then you can sort of give me some takes and contextualize it with more information. So Fox Corp. Said it's acquiring Roku in a deal valued around 25 billion. So the Wall Street Journal saying around is 22 around maybe making a major bet on the future of ad supported streaming. Ad supported streaming. Obviously Netflix pivoted to ads after saying we don't. We're not going to do ads. Turned out to be a great business. Ads are undefeated and more people want down with ads. They're just down with ads. Especially if they're good ads. Anyway, the Fox the Deal. The deal is Fox's largest to date. It brings together a media company known for its live news and sports programming with the biggest provider of streaming platforms for connected TVs. It will add scale to Fox's streaming business, currently home to free ad support streaming service Tubi, which the company bought for 400 million in 2020. And subscription based Fox One and Fox Nation in addition to Tubi, from my

[B]

understanding has been a home run. Yes, like I don't remember exactly what the revenue is, but they bought it for 400. It's in the billions now.

[A]

And all the metrics about actual audience size are huge and getting to tens of millions of dollars in revenue. Hundreds of millions of dollars in ad sales against a big audience like the Tubi viewership. When you have the Fox machinery behind it makes a ton of sense. In addition to distributing other streaming services through connected TVs and devices, Roku has its own ad supported Roku channel. The combined company will better compete with the likes of Amazon.com and Netflix for ad dollars. Quote Bringing these two companies together will really help define the future of television in the United States and in many other markets around the world. Fox chief executive Lachlan Murdoch told investors on a call Monday. Fox will pay around $160 per share, 96 in cash and 0.996,93 Fox Class A shares. The deal is valued at around 22 billion on an enterprise basis. Fox expects to fund the cash portion of the transaction with 12 billion in new debt as well as cash on hand. The combined company expects to cut around 400 million in annual costs. Fox plans to keep Tubi and the Roku channel as separate offerings. Consumers are increasingly opting for free and lower cost ad supported streaming options as the cost of subscriptions marches ever higher. Ad supported streaming plans now represent almost 50% of all premium subscription ad video on demand signups in the US up from 39% just two years ago. More than 100 million global households stream with Roku. Roku is the largest streaming platform for connected TVs with 25% market share. Samsung's Tizen is number two at 23 and then I'm sure probably Amazon's Fire TV is not far behind. Fox remained on the sidelines during the heady early days of streaming boom, pouring money instead into programming for its cable channels and buying up sports rights. It launched Fox Nation in 2018 and introduced direct to consumer Fox One, which includes sports and Fox News last year. Fox said last month that Tubi had nearly 100 million monthly active users and its revenue had grown by 23% in the fiscal third quarter. And so Fox's stock is down today, Roku is down 0.2%, something like that. And the market doesn't like it. Take him has a take here. We can read through his opinion. He says, I don't understand how this Roku deal makes any sense. Bringing together the most valuable live.

[B]

I'll tell you how it makes sense.

[A]

How does it make sense?

[B]

No, so I think it makes sense. One Fox, they have a great product in Tubi, right? It's again there, there are certain people that are, that are happy with their, with their HBO or Netflix or whatever. But Tubi has, has a great niche. It's been a great acquisition for Fox. North of a billion dollars of revenue. That is a product. Roku is a platform. They have over 20% market share in connected TVs. I was looking at the data. They have over 40% of the engagement with connected TVs. So when you think about it from an advertising potential, right, it's not just that they have 20% of the connected TV market. They have over 40% of like the watch time effectively, right. So looking at the potential from an advertising standpoint and how many dollars are still yet to shift from traditional television to connected tv. So from that lens, I think it's great. Roku's also a much younger demo. So like a lot of media properties, right, especially television related are going to be older demos that are eventually going to be aging out at least of like prime consumers. But these are consumers that are in their prime earning years, prime years as consumers. And so ultimately I think it makes sense. I think it makes sense for Fox next. The thing that I hope that they can do as a consumer is rebundle, right? We've gone through this era of unbundling and the fact that you get a new TV and you're like, okay, great, let me log into 15, 10 different services, something like that. I would like to see them do. I would like to see them do something in bundling for consumers. So again, looking at it from the lens of having north of 40% of watch time, that is a super valuable property. And with the right ad driven approach, I think it'll pay off.

[A]

I wonder how windowing fits into this. When I grew up I didn't have cable, but you would get a prestige movie played on ABC like once a week. And for a while that was the flow on Netflix. And HBO was like its own premium subscription. You could open up the HBO app, it's all premium series and movies, and then some of that would trickle down. But then it feels like the ecosystem sort of branched a little bit where Netflix stopped getting like the James Cameron library for a while and and Disney started hoovering up some of that, keeping some of the really popular movies, the Marvel franchise, off of Netflix even for later run a year or two after because there was more competition from the actual different pieces of the different studios. So I wonder if Roku will be able to provide some sort of like neutral territory in some ways where viewers can pick up something that's in the premium end, something that's a sequel to a franchise that they know and love. But it's not seen as as competitive as Disney versus HBO or whatever.

[B]

We will see overall real platform. They already have a product that sits on top of it, tons of advertising potential. And I think that regardless of whatever the market reaction is today, I expect that people will get it over time.

[A]

Tyler Cowen shared some more thoughts on the recent mythos Brewha good term. This was all over. We talked about this earlier, but he says according to not yet confirmed but likely true reports, it was shown that the model could be jailbroken. There's debate over this now. The released mythos already restricted bio and AI improvement queries rather than strictly in fact, rather strictly in fact. So now we are back to the model not being available. Here are a few of the constraints on the US government. Not the only ones, I might add. 1. It needs for the main companies to stay in business. On top of that, it wants their IPOs to go reasonably well. And it's now much harder for the top companies to recruit foreigners, which is a significant share of their highest quality workforce. Demis, Ilia, Andre for a start, are all international engineers. It is much harder for the main competitors to drum up foreign business in a credible manner and sustainable manner. That's interesting. We haven't seen many breakout charts of how much revenue is domestic versus international, but we have seen reports of OpenAI and anthropic doing big deals with international companies. Some of these companies, Fortune 500, they just have global footprint, so they got to use the models everywhere, ideally, unless they do all of their software engineering in Silicon Valley. 1b. How are American multinationals operating abroad supposed to use top systems moving forward? That's literally what I just said. I just predicted the next line. Oops, I am. I'm a stochastic parrot. It wants to use model access as a tool of both hard and soft power. So model access has to be possible at some level, but it is very hard to control what foreign agents will do with partial model access when they get it in the future. 3. The US needs to stay ahead of China in the AI race. This is a big question. We have Air Aaron Ginn from HydraHost joining in just 10 minutes. We'll ask him for his perspective on this. 4. The US needs to issue restrictions that are actually enforceable and US citizens only doesn't fit that bill. That's a good point. Furthermore, markets and everything, it is easy enough to hire a traitorous American to access tools of wrongdoing. That's a really good point. How can you verify that every American is loyal? Or for a matter, it is not that difficult to fake citizenship in various ways.

[B]

Yeah, there's been people over the last 50 years that have gotten caught like passing on or basically selling secrets around our various military aircraft, for example.

[A]

Yeah, there's a very controversial story of Virgil Griffith, cryptocurrency researcher, who I actually met once. He worked at Caltech, was deep in math and very excited about cryptocurrency. And he went and gave a talk on crypto cryptocurrency in North Korea, explaining how cryptocurrency works and how cryptography works. And that was seen as a violation of export controls and he was sent to prison. And the crypto community is very upset about that because they maintain that math should not be illegal, this information should not be illegal. The government side is the helping.

[B]

Was he like thinking that he was going to liberate the North Korean people by giving them access to effectively or explaining how code can be used to

[A]

create a store of value that, that is, that is unsanctionable, essentially. And so it was seen as a violation, violation of sanctions by the US Government.

[B]

And more importantly, they have a North Korean stable coin.

[A]

I don't know. I don't know.

[B]

Calling it the most sanctioned stablecoin, potentially, Potentially.

[A]

This one, number five by Tyler Cowen was a little bit controversial. He says the US government cannot nationalize these companies and then proceed to run them effectively. And people were debating that, saying that it might be possible for the US government to own the labs in some way and leave them to their own devices to actually roll these things out.

[C]

What do you. I mean, if you're like super RSI pilled, right, you don't need the employees at all because the AI just improved the system.

[A]

So the government just says continue to improve.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And that's it.

[C]

So you don't actually, you know, the extreme scenario.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And then on the other side it's that, okay, these systems are actually extremely complex. You look at the uptime of some of these systems, the guardrail, the research taste, in fact, you need so many employees to make these products effective. You actually need the international employees as well because they come up with great ideas. And so, yeah, those are the two sort of sides of the debate. Six is Chinese and open source models do in fact improve at some reasonable pace, even though they are right now considerably behind them at best, proprietary models. And that's something that I want to dig into more. It does seem like the pace of open source development in China is slowing. I'm not entirely sure what's driving it. It feels like there's a number of different things. Gavin Baker said it's about compute and they're turning their backs on the Blackwells that they had the opportunity to buy. I think it might be research ideas that are more locked down now in tighter controlled circles. And San Francisco, it also might be the data might be, but you'd have to imagine that they have lots of people that are writing code, lots of people that are inferencing those models and then full data and information capturing of those rollouts. There are a number of different reasons why that pace might be slowing. And we'll see. Maybe there's a big jump in the graph. Maybe we have another deep seq moment in the next couple months. We'll see Clearing order leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter tbpn.com and we will see you tomorrow at 11am

[B]

Pacific Goodbye Technology's Daily Show.

[A]

Technology in Motion.