AI’s Economic Impact, Warren Buffett Discovers YouTube, Mistral Launches “Le Chonk” | Diet TBPN

John Coogan (0:01)

I was leafing through GQ this morning. Tom Cruise is on the cover. It's a good edition. There's a funny anecdote in here that I wanted to share. I gotta find it.

But they got the Tom Cruise spread, lots of photos.

But they did a little back and forth interview with him, and he's a course bro. He dropped a course, a private course. And we gotta get access to this. The question from the GQ interviewer, you have mentored a lot of younger actors. Glenn Powell has talked about watching a six-hour instructional video about screen acting that you made, right? And Tom Cruise says, it was very basic. It was just something to have people understand, just to have a different concept of lenses, and what the lens is, and what the frame is, just the same way as an actor on stage.

Jordi Hays (0:51)

Being a global superstar for dummies.

John Coogan (0:53)

Yeah, basically, he made a six-hour, that's a course. He made a six-hour video, just the same way as an actor on stage, or in the development of cinema, where it started, and what that frame means, and how to understand that frame.

SPEAKER_4 (1:08)

Woo! Thank you, Tim.

John Coogan (1:09)

There's just different layers of storytelling, of structure, but also to understand certain things, so that you can forget about it. What else do you tell younger people, other people in your business? I listen first. What do they want? It's not me. I'm more interested in, what are their goals? What do they want? It's not just younger people. This is me when I was a kid. I'm going, what are you interested in? They say, really? Yes. What is this movie about? What is this?

There's a bunch of other fun things in here. But I thought it was funny that there's a secret six-hour training video on how to be an actor from Tom Cruise. We got to get access to it. I feel like there's a lot of journalists that they get documents, they scoop things, they release things. But I've never seen anyone just be like, I'm putting down 10 racks for whoever can bring me the six-hour Tom Cruise video. I'm putting it behind a paywall, I'm gonna monetize it, but there's a bounty out. Kevin Roos has the Dari Ahmade big blob of compute thesis from 2017, like this leaked PDF, sort of on the scaling law and the bitter lesson, basically. And I've never seen a journalist just be like, I know this document's out there. Eric Newcomer should just be like, bring me Founders Fund returns.

I'll give you five grand if you got them, because it's probably math's out at some point.

Jordi Hays (2:29)

Five million.

John Coogan (2:30)

Maybe more, maybe more. Yeah.

Jordi Hays (2:32)

To risk your allocation in the next.

John Coogan (2:34)

Yeah, I suppose that that would violate journalistic ethics to just put a bounty out for a document that you know exists.

Jordi Hays (2:41)

I will bribe you for the truth.

John Coogan (2:43)

And it probably really, I was thinking about the various leaks that go out, some of them violate NDAs, but if they're secretive enough and they're squirreled away via signal, they probably don't trace back, they probably don't really trigger anything. Also, some of them just don't really matter. They might not be that frustrated about a particular leak if it makes the company look good.

Jordi Hays (3:08)

But speaking of movies, the team saw a movie yesterday. Ben, could we get a review? Oh, you didn't go.

Tyler (3:14)

Ben didn't come.

Jordi Hays (3:15)

Wow, Tyler, review.

Tyler (3:16)

I saw it.

John Coogan (3:17)

Who saw it? So we saw it bigger.

Jordi Hays (3:18)

Nick said that he was starting to look at his phone after 40 minutes.

John Coogan (3:22)

Wait, what?

Tyler (3:22)

Nick did not enjoy it. I thought it was pretty good. And so basically the reviews are really bad, right? Yeah. And famously, well, not famously, but like the box office is really bad.

John Coogan (3:30)

Not all the reviews are bad. I saw Mark Andreessen gave it a positive review.

Tyler (3:33)

He did, yeah. And that was really one of the only like very positive reviews I saw. But yeah, I think the budget was like 160 million. First weekend, it was like 8 million.

John Coogan (3:40)

8 million, yeah.

Tyler (3:41)

Pretty brutal. I thought it was good. It was very cool.

Like the framing of the movie.

Jordi Hays (3:50)

It's hard to like reveal too much.

John Coogan (3:52)

Did you go to film school? This critique is so nuanced. It's remarkable.