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

TL;DR

• 1

  YouTubers are suddenly posting studio-level box office returns: TBPN highlights Curry Barker's Obsession crossing $104.7 million domestic on a budget widely reported around $1 million, Kane Parsons' Backrooms opening to about $81.5 million in North America and $115 million worldwide on a $10 million budget, and Markiplier's Iron Lung reaching $51.2 million worldwide on a $3 million budget.

• 2

  Audience size alone is not the story: Ryan's World could not turn a giant kids audience into ticket sales, with Ryan's World the Movie grossing only about $624,000 on a roughly $10 million budget, which the hosts use to argue that artistic vision and buyer alignment matter more than raw subscribers.

• 3

  The new Hollywood bet is the 'full stack filmmaker': The episode argues studios now want creators who can write, edit, direct, build an audience, and prove demand before a studio spends real money, similar to how startups now raise with a working product instead of a slide deck.

• 4

  Bernie Sanders' AI proposal is both anti-big-tech and strangely bullish: His American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act would take a one-time 50 percent stock tax in AI labs, give the public voting rights and board seats, and eventually pay dividends, which TBPN notes only makes sense if these companies become enormously valuable.

• 5

  Anthropic's confidential S-1 filing signals the public market race is on: The hosts frame Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX as competing to absorb public market capital, while also noting that the feared SaaS wipeout may be fading as companies like Salesforce keep growing.

• 6

  Jensen Huang keeps pushing Nvidia deeper into the platform stack: From Computex 2026, TBPN calls out the RTX Spark super chip for local AI workloads, the Vera Rubin CPU entering full production, and Nvidia's planned open-weight flagship model as signs Nvidia wants a larger role in both enterprise AI and robotics.