Hollywood Chases Internet Horror, Love Island Prediction Markets, Phoebe Gates Affiliate Drama, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions & More

(00:18) - SK Hynix Rallies in Trading Debut (04:00) - GPT-5.6 Stories (19:28) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (45:30) - Phoebe Gates Accused of Fake Sales (01:05:34) - China Launches First Reusable Rocket (01:08:09) - Costco Cashier Becomes Millionaire (01:12:01) - Love Island Prediction Markets (01:18:01) - SONOS Layoffs (01:22:28) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:28:53) - Hollywood Chases Internet Horror (01:38:34) - AI Songs May Get Labels (01:40:56) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:43:23) - Kim Renovates Nine Mansions (01:47:20) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TV. Today is Friday, July 10th, 2026. We are live from the TV bin, Ultra now, the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, a whole lot more all in one place. SK Hynix is up. Successful IPO up 14% in the Wall Street debut. The South Korean memory chip giant, SK Hynix made its NASDAQ debut today, raising $26.5 billion in the largest ever first time US share sale by a foreign company. Demand reportedly exceeded

• 0:42John Coogan?

  the available shares more than sevenfold, but to give it to give a sense of like the scale of this thing. Normally, when we hear about 7X oversubscribed IPOs, you might be expecting like 100% pop, 80% pop. But at at this level of price and demand, you're just seeing a 14% pop, but still a great debut nonetheless. The company's American depository receipts opened, the ADR shares opened at 170, 14% above the 149 they were offered at, giving X SK Hynix a market cap of roughly $1.03 trillion. We got another one, another, another trillion dollar company in the AI boom. The blockbuster listing caps

• 1:25John Coogan?

  an extraordinary run for memory manufacturers fueled by surging demand from AI systems, particularly for high bandwidth memory used alongside advanced AI accelerators. SK Hynix, Samsung, US-based Micron dominate the global memory market and SK Hynix is Korean listed shares are up over 600% in the past year as investors rushed to gain exposure to one of the AI boom's most critical bottlenecks, but it's been tricky to get shares and participate in SK Hynix because you got to go over to the COSPI, you got to go over to the South Korean index instead. Now you can just head to the NASDAQ and get your ADR shares in SK Hynix. So congratulations to the whole team over there, a massively successful IPO.

• 2:09John Coogan?

  There's more coverage in the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal asked a question. They say, why is SK Hynix trading under a temporary ticker symbol? They're currently trading under the temporary ticker, SKHYV, before reverting to a permanent ticker on Monday, SKHY. The V is the temporary symbol in the temporary symbol indicates the shares are trading on a when issued basis. They haven't been fully issued yet, meaning the exchange is allowing investors to buy and sell the stock on its first US trading day before the transaction actually settles because they're sort of being eased into the American markets. This is not the case with all ADRs, all American depository receipts, but rather

• 2:50John Coogan?

  a tool used to close the gap when a transaction has been announced, but the actual delivery of the shares hasn't finished. So all all in process now to bring SK Hynix to the American markets. And that looks like a lot of red, but the stock is up. It just opened at 170. And so the fact that it is flat relative to where it opened does not reflect the 14% pop or 16% pop. What was it? 14% pop from the actual issuance price. Most of the folks that bought shares in the IPO, that $26 billion that went into the company, of course, situational awareness. There were a few others. Bailey Gifford all participated early, at least

• 3:32John Coogan?

  according to early news. I assume that those transactions closed. They are all sitting up 14% today and will be continuing to follow this.

• 3:42Jordi Hays?

  Caner in the chat says CERN has only been off for a week and John is dressing casual.

• 3:47John Coogan?

  Ooh, you think it's a conspiracy? I like it. I like it. Well, before we move on to the next story, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. 5.6 launched yesterday, 5.6 Soul and Soul Ultra, and people are having fun with it. More and more demos are hitting the timeline. There's a lot of controversy over the over the desktop app for Mac. We can get into that. But first, let's play a little bit of this video. Someone tried to recreate all of Interstellar, truly trying to infuriate Christopher Nolan the most, probably. This is the exact opposite of what he wants to see, I imagine, considering that he doesn't

• 4:30John Coogan?

  even use CGI very often. Some miniatures occasionally. He uses a little bit of movie magic here and there, some set extensions, I'm sure. But this is an incredible demo, although I don't think this will be picking up a billion dollars at the box office anytime soon. But it is, it is incredible that you're able to sort of go from prompt to 3D model to rendering so quickly. Very, very cool demo. And it feels like a new meme, a new a new art form. You have to be creative with it. Merely recreating Interstellar is not going to do it anything. It's not going to do anything other than just be an impressive

• 5:14John Coogan?

  demo of the technology. But when you look at what people have done with Blender, you can imagine that with creativity added to this and a new storyline and something that leans into the rough edges of this particular.

• 5:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, there's also gonna, there's also gonna be a whole meta of like, I recreated Interstellar, but I cast Conor McGregor as.

• 5:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I imagine that this gets even more powerful when you use style transfer and video models on top. I've been seeing a lot of people block out AI videos, either just using their iPhone. So they'll just have like, you're playing an actor who's playing like an old character, and then you're reading the lines, you're giving the delivery, and then that is, that is used as the driving video for some of these, some of these AI video models, and you get much better results with that. And I've also seen people block out little examples of driving scenes or different mechanical scenes in Blender and then use an AI video model to take it to high fidelity. And because the video model

• 6:17John Coogan?

  has an underlying reference that is deterministic and physically accurate, even though it's low fidelity and very like blocky, you wind up with a better AI video at the end of the project. So you can imagine someone taking an idea, puppeteering a 3JS model like what's happening here, and then adding basically a style transfer layer on top with AI video to get to something that's a lot more photo real and more striking. But again, you wind up in the situation where if you, you can go and recreate Interstellar perfectly, but at the end, you just have Interstellar, which already exists and is available to stream. And so you didn't really get anything in the process. You have to bring something special

• 6:58John Coogan?

  to the table. But I'm excited for the, for the inevitable mashups of this, the Conor McGregor starring in, in Interstellar or something like that, because people will be creative with it eventually. But it's day one. So also, there's a broccoli farmer that's running his farm on GPT 5.6, apparently. This was in the demo video, but Daniel Ten Riro shares a very funny meme showing the, I don't even know what aesthetic this is. This is the share zone aesthetic. That was the account that shared all of this. The extreme skeleton with the two revolving pistols. Very fun. Daniel Ten Riro shares some more information. He says, we were promised flying cars, and instead we got a broccoli

• 7:43John Coogan?

  farmer running his farm with GPT 5.6. I don't know. It's still relevant to show a demo that is as far afield. Everyone knows how these models can be used for research, how these models can be used for coding. That gets a little boring. I want to imagine something completely different that I can then pull into my daily life. What is the equivalent task that I'm doing in my life that I can take? We sort of differ on this sometimes. You think that like, a lot of these things are self explanatory. They don't, this is Joe Weisenthal position, too. This is like, AI has no learning curve. I disagree. I think that it doesn't necessarily have a learning curve, but there is a, an educational process that happens when you're presented with a blank box. You can type anything. People

• 8:27John Coogan?

  need to understand the fringes of their imagination, what is possible, and, and then they can go and reach for that tool. But the tools are getting sharper, and sometimes they get sharper without the box actually changing. Yeah. Because it's just a box of what do you want to build? Or what do you want to do?

• 8:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Not, not everyone has a Tyler, where I, I tend to prompt Tyler.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 8:49Jordi Hays?

  Goes into codex.

• 8:50John Coogan?

  Yes. There was another video that was shaking up the timeline. People were going back and forth on how fast this model was building in, is this Blender?

• 9:00Jordi Hays?

  Blender.

• 9:01John Coogan?

  This is Blender, right? Yeah. So it's building a 3D cannon, modeling it and adding different, different primitives, different spheres and toruses. And the video is not sped up. And Chris says Soul 5.6 Soul is, and what I assume is 750 tokens per second in the wild. That is the preview of Cerebrus. But this apparently was not actually.

• 9:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's Soul Ultra on fast mode.

• 9:34John Coogan?

  So we should be seeing even faster rollouts. Although every time I see this, I think.

• 9:40Jordi Hays?

  And this is.

• 9:43Jordi Hays?

  Just computer use.

• 9:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:44Jordi Hays?

  Like it, this is not, this is not an, like, an integration.

• 9:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, it, it's, it's, it's, it is an interesting experience watching a machine use your machine at a rate that would be completely impossible unless it was like your entire bit online was like, I just use software really fast.

• 10:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:09Jordi Hays?

  Um, it, it is, uh, yeah, it, it's an interesting sort of feel the AGI moment.

• 10:15John Coogan?

  They gotta go back and beat the original Dota two model with just computer use because the original Dota two, the, the, what was it? Uh, Dota five? Is that what it's called?

• 10:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think that's, that's what like the OpenAI project was called.

• 10:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, so there was this, and it was brought up in the court case a ton. Um, and there was an AI model that was, I don't even, was it even transformer based? I know they RL'd on, on, uh, on, uh, on Dota, but basically they were able to interact with the video game Dota, but essentially over an API. And so they were able to send different commands, but they weren't actually clicking. And a big thing in League of Legends and Dota two and all of those games is, uh, you have to physically move the mouse. And so actions per second or, uh, actions per minute APM is like very important. And so when you watch the greatest League of Legends players, the greatest Dota two players play, they're,

• 11:12John Coogan?

  they're, yeah, StarCraft, they're clicking super fast. And it's, it's very, uh, impressive from like a mechanical perspective.

• 11:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:18John Coogan?

  Uh, and so it shouldn't be that surprising that even though it was, it was a demonstration of, uh, of thinking ahead and strategy and actually balancing all the different tradeoffs in these games. Um, when the computers won in Dota two and StarCraft and whatnot, uh, it was impressive, but the question was always how long until you can just give the computer the mouse, the raw mouse and keyboard and just the images from the screen? And can it still win with that? Because that's much more akin to what a human does.

• 11:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was gonna say like, uh, yeah, they weren't transformers. It was LSTMs, which is like a transformer.

• 11:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, long, short-term reasoning, right?

• 11:57Jordi Hays?

  Long-term memory.

• 11:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, long, short-term memory. Anyway, Paddy McCormick is having fun with 5.6 Soul. He says it one-shot at this on its own. He didn't ask for a new logo. It's just like, it's just like, look, bro, you need a new logo.

• 12:09Jordi Hays?

  I actually, I actually think you should adopt this.

• 12:12John Coogan?

  It, it looks cool. I like it. He says, uh, it's part of a web design based on a link to a cosmos. Not perfect, but way better than any other time I've tried. And that's been the big, uh, the big talking point is like, uh, they, they were behind on, or the GPT models were sort of behind on front end and design. And this is a big leap forward in that. So I'm excited to see.

• 12:31Jordi Hays?

  Nick on the Codex team is asking, is this image gen? I think it might be.

• 12:36John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, that, that's the thing about Soul and Codex.

• 12:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it's been generating, it's been, now if you're asking it to build a site, it will generate you a preview image.

• 12:46John Coogan?

  Image.

• 12:47Jordi Hays?

  And so I think this is the preview image for the site.

• 12:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:50Jordi Hays?

  Which is.

• 12:50John Coogan?

  The really confusing thing is that the image model now has tool use and can scaffold things out in HTML if it needs to. And so like, all of these different models are sort of blending together at this point. Uh, Michael had a very funny interaction where he got banned for OpenAI for cyber abuse. He had no idea what he did. Uh, he pasted the ban notice into Codex, which I don't know how he was still using Codex if he was banned, but he said he asked it to figure out what triggered the ban. Codex found that he, that it had asked for an API key to his own server. Codex wrote the appeal, submitted the appeal. A few minutes later, it, the appeal was auto-approved by an AI at OpenAI. So he was banned by AI,

• 13:34John Coogan?

  convicted by AI, defended by AI, and pardoned by AI in about 10 minutes. Uh, what a funny, funny, uh, round, round, round trip in the world. Um, so the, uh, the, the, there's a bunch of pushback on the new ChatGPT desktop app. Um, because it is the super app, it unifies Codex, the, the new ChatGPT app is just the Codex app. Uh, and the, and when you install it, you can keep the old ChatGPT app as ChatGPT classic. But a lot of people don't like that because, um, the Codex app is written in Electron, which means it's a bunch of like web views, web browsers effectively, as opposed to, uh, the ChatGPT app, which

• 14:19John Coogan?

  was the native app and had a bunch of integrations that people had sort of come to know and love. And so, uh, this is like a, uh, a change in the user experience. If you're deeply embedded in a particular workflow, uh, this could be, uh, somewhat annoying because you have to use the legacy app and who knows how long they'll support that. Uh, the flip side is like, I just don't know how many people were daily driving ChatGPT as a Mac desktop app. Uh, we've heard from someone on the team that was effective for cheating and we won't talk who it was, but.

• 14:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, so I, I would sometimes use it because it, there's like a very nice shortcut.

• 14:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:57Jordi Hays?

  So it was like, uh, I think Control plus or Command plus is, is the normal like, uh, main search on Mac, but it was like a very easy way to, to interact with the models.

• 15:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. I wonder if that can just be, can that just be, um, like, can that shortcut just be created with the new Codex or ChatGPT work?

• 15:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, probably.

• 15:16John Coogan?

  Where you just bind that same key shortcut. But I mean, it is making the user do work, which is always, always a tricky thing. But, um, I feel like for most people's workflow, at least for mine, it was, uh, the desktop app that I used was Codex. And then when I wanted to interact with ChatGPT in a chat flow, I would do a new tab. And then on my phone, I would have the ChatGPT app. And then the ChatGPT app on my phone could talk to Codex on the desktop, but I never actually needed to open the ChatGPT desktop app. But maybe I'm just weird, but I don't know. We'll, we'll, we'll see as this.

• 15:51Jordi Hays?

  Same, same flow for me. Uh, Tebow says, we spent the last 24 hours reading feedback, looking at usage patterns and talking with many of you. The short version is that there's a lot of excitement, uh, for 5.6, uh, ChatGPT work on mobile and web, but we also didn't get, get everything quite right. Uh, we made it too easy to use the highest compute settings without making the impact on usage limits sufficiently clear. They reorganized the desktop app in one bold move, making familiar things like chats and projects harder to find. Um, uh, our launch framing was focused on work and to some of our Codex fans, it made it feel like Codex was going away over time. Absolutely not our intention. We love Codex and it is here to stay. Uh, and then anyways, long story short, reset, uh, usage

• 16:36Jordi Hays?

  limits are getting reset twice today. So people can keep, uh, experimenting.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  Hammer it. Uh, plan out some sites. Uh, there, there's also some confusion over the difference between ChatGPT work and ChatGPT Codex. Um, and I wonder.

• 16:52Jordi Hays?

  I just want one place to do things.

• 16:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The Omni box that can do anything for you.

• 16:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:59John Coogan?

  Uh, and I think that's obviously where it goes, but there's a, there's a walk, crawl, run, there's integration points and there's, uh, and people have ingrained, um, ingrained experiences and workflows and habits. And there's all sorts of different tradeoffs here. Um, there's a, there's a good point that like, there is no enterprise Google search. Like you just use Google at work, you use Google at home. It's all one box that gives you answers. And there was never like a, a dividing line between these two things. And so, uh, that's probably where all of this goes ultimately. Um, but I don't know. I was chatting with, uh, the, the, there was a lot of pushback on the fact that there's no chat, there's no native chat window. There's like a slight pop-up, like a small little

• 17:44John Coogan?

  mini pop-up for your just general ChatGPT usage when you're in the ChatGPT app, which is now Codex and Work. Um, and so that can be a little bit confusing, but maybe the end result is that you should just be hammering new task for everything. Like I, I demoed this today. I was, um, I was doing some research on the most recent, uh, story that we're going to talk about with, uh, uh, Phoebe Gates's company, FIA. And I asked a very ChatGPT-like question. I just dumped it in Codex. I was like, explain how this story is different than what happened with Honey. Is there anything illegal here? Or does it

• 18:27John Coogan?

  just break the norms of affiliate marketing? Do a bunch of research, put it together in a couple paragraphs. And it just did it like it was ChatGPT. So I think that over time you should just chat with Codex or Work, whichever one you prefer, I guess, um, like it's ChatGPT and it will come back to you in a similar time. You'll be able to select models just like you want. It'll be all of the same things, but, um, then you gotta mirror that over the phone as well. So I don't know. Some, some, uh, some potentially growing pains as the, as the, uh, as the, uh, as the app evolves and the use cases evolve. What are you laughing at?

• 19:05Jordi Hays?

  Nothing, John.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  What?

• 19:06Jordi Hays?

  Should we move on to the next, uh?

• 19:09John Coogan?

  What are you looking at? What are you laughing at? The most recent one? How dare you?

• 19:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let's move on.

• 19:16John Coogan?

  Move on to console. Oops. Actually, let's tell you about Codex. There we go. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting things done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps move projects forward from start to finish.

• 19:32Jordi Hays?

  People are saying it's a horse for the mind.

• 19:34John Coogan?

  A horse for the mind. Um, so the meta bull case, uh, Semi Analysis wrote a long piece about, uh, the future of MSL, what's going on there. Very interesting contrarian take. I think a lot of people were confused by the expansion of, of activities and sort of an entirely new business line with B2B sales. And, uh, and we, we discussed the bull cases here, the benefits. Obviously there's a ton of benefits with the ad model. They have the cash flow to draw down on. There's a lot of different things that we can go through, but, um, let's read some of the reactions first and then we can go into the Semi Analysis piece. So boring business says, people don't realize that Zuckerberg

• 20:14John Coogan?

  is all in on AI because he refuses to pay a 30% tax to platform owners for the rest of his life. Meta caught the shift toward mobile back in the early 2010s, but they were never able to create their own hardware platform to capture users in their ecosystem. As a result, they got pay, they got stuck paying a 30% tax to Apple on in-app purchases, which has cost Meta billions of dollars in profit. That makes no sense to me. No one buys ads via in-app purchases. Every advertiser I know uses the web-based app manager.

• 20:51Jordi Hays?

  Also, ads, I believe, count as like a real-world service. So there's not, like, there's, there's a lot of things you order in the, that you order on mobile apps, like groceries.

• 21:01John Coogan?

  It's kind of a digital good, but yes, I, I, I agree with you that it would be accepted from any way.

• 21:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but it's like eyeballs, right? It's like impressions, uh, which, which, like eyeballs.

• 21:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 21:11Jordi Hays?

  Human attention is not a digital good. It is like a real-world thing.

• 21:15John Coogan?

  Yes, so if I open up the Amazon app on my iPhone and I buy a T-shirt, Apple does not get 30% of that because that's a real-world item.

• 21:23Jordi Hays?

  Or DoorDash.

• 21:24John Coogan?

  Or DoorDash, good example.

• 21:25Jordi Hays?

  Or a movie ticket.

• 21:28John Coogan?

  Yes, but if I go to Kindle or Netflix or, and I subscribe, or even like the X subscription premium, uh, Apple will take 30% if I buy Fortnite, Vbox, or Roblox, or any digital good.

• 21:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:46John Coogan?

  And I could see Apple saying, look, if you want to be able to, because in, in the, uh, in the meta platforms, you can be in Instagram and you can just say, I want to boost this post. And you can put down your credit card and pay for that. And you can get started on the advertising flow as a very small business. I think through effectively in-app purchases.

• 22:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So maybe billions is right.

• 22:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the bigger, the bigger thing is just like,

• 22:10John Coogan?

  Maybe billions is right.

• 22:11Jordi Hays?

  You have this, one of the largest companies in the world.

• 22:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:15Jordi Hays?

  And you have to constantly be playing nice and sort of sucking up to Apple, who is sort of actively, who doesn't like you. Like, Apple is, like, you can imagine, what do Apple executives think about Meta? If you were to ask them over coffee off the record? And it would be like, we don't like Meta. And, and so that's fundamentally like a very, very uncomfortable position to be in. And so that is like the main, that's like the main, he, he doesn't want to be in a position, running his company where he has to ask for permission for things.

• 22:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, his business is sort of like, um, running, running with permission from this like platform, right? Um, and so an example with that, somebody brought it up, I think Andrew, Meta lost billions from Apple because of the permissions prompt.

• 23:08John Coogan?

  Yes, that's true.

• 23:08Jordi Hays?

  Um, you know, making it harder to just run their core advertising business.

• 23:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:13Jordi Hays?

  Um, and so I think, I think there's just a lot of PTSD from that. And also there's so much that's like, there's so much that is, uh, very unpredictable about where AI is going. Like, it's possible that we get to the point where you don't go to a bunch of different social media platforms and you're just like, talk, your agent is just kind of surfacing content for you on the fly. Like, there's so much like potential disruption. I think the stance is like, I would rather participate in this massive technology cycle than, than, um, and have a shot at being a big part of it.

• 23:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:53Jordi Hays?

  Than like, just like, hope nothing bad happens to me. The other thing I've always felt is like, you know, with the, with the glasses, you're just going to be able to, like, he sees a world, like, the glasses are, are more of a, a new platform bet right now than AI. And I just think he wants to be in a world where you're wearing your very, very cheap pair, or maybe even free pair of glasses around. They act as your phone and your computer. And you can look at stuff and say, buy me that. And he's getting a cut of it. You're walking by a restaurant and it pops up an offer and it says like, free boba for any orders over $20. And he's getting a cut of that, right?

• 24:33Jordi Hays?

  So like, he, uh, and, and that, that will be like some type of like always-on intelligence. So it all, it all totally makes sense, even if it is like deeply sort of like chaotic and at times confusing.

• 24:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, at least over the last year.

• 24:50John Coogan?

  The funny thing about the glasses as a platform is AI spending is so huge that he can probably bring back a lot of the reality lab spending and sort of just tuck it in a bucket and people won't notice if there's an extra eight billion.

• 25:05Jordi Hays?

  I'm not leaving.

• 25:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, if there's an extra eight billion spent on the next version of the Meta Ray-Ban displays or something, people will be like, ah, it's a rounding error compared to the 200 billion on data centers or whatever.

• 25:18Jordi Hays?

  Ari says, uh, puts it well, the tax Meta pays to Apple is the fact that they can't track users cross-platform.

• 25:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, totally. So, uh, continuing with this analysis, Zuckerberg has been keen on making this natural monopoly or duopoly structure doesn't emerge again in AI where a couple of players can become the toll booth for accessing every platform on the web. For Zuck, this is existential. And if he has to burn every last dollar of free cash flow today to achieve this, he will do it. If that sounds crazy, look at it from the perspective of Zuckerberg. He has held a job, he has never held a job in his entire life. Being Meta CEO is all he's ever known since he was 18 years old. Uh, he has nothing to lose. He's the exact type of person you should never bet against, no matter what odds someone gives you. That's a good point. Uh, Mohan here adds some extra context around the in-app ads revenue.

• 26:07John Coogan?

  In-app ads is 2% of ad revenue. That's actually pretty high. Uh, and then they do pay 30% on that. I think the chat confirmed that as well. So, uh, 98% of FB revenue is not tied to Apple, but the bigger challenge is everything that you just laid out around the front door and the privacy and tracking and all this hostility. Um, the other interesting thing is like, I do think the, uh, the screen time is a, is at least like a flashing warning light. Like, I've personally noticed as an early adopter of LLMs that my screen time has switched much more towards ChatGPT and LLMs and deep research reports. Just because if I see something interesting, oh, there's a, there's a car video on Instagram,

• 26:51John Coogan?

  uh, will often switch over and then start prompting to actually learn more. Whereas before that would have required a whole bunch of Google searches. You might have to sit down and like collect a document, like, you're not actually going to do that. Now, I've been noticing that I'm much more in like the hour a day on ChatGPT versus hour a day on Instagram. And so I don't know if I'm just like the early adopter that will never do that, but you can certainly see that people are spending a lot of time with AI systems. Uh, and, and as you've put it before, like wherever consumers, wherever people are spending time is an important place to have a, a foothold at least.

• 27:26Jordi Hays?

  Um.

• 27:27John Coogan?

  Continue.

• 27:28Jordi Hays?

  So what Semi Analysis wrote yesterday, which is what I believe actually moved the market, not the model release itself. Uh, Semi Analysis said, at the simplest level, there are three things you need to build it, to, need to build a true frontier model, data, talent and compute. We believe Meta is the only hyperscaler slash Neolab on track to be world-class at all three and therefore has the best chance of catching up with Anthropic slash OpenAI. We'll explain why in full detail below. Um, and so Alex Wang, uh, quoted this, uh, in a funny, uh, in a funny way. Uh, he said, compute daddy Dylan Patel has spoken.

• 28:07John Coogan?

  Spoken.

• 28:08Jordi Hays?

  Um.

• 28:09John Coogan?

  It's a good point.

• 28:09Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, so yeah, pretty, uh, and, and yes, the stock is up 6%. Uh, Wang, uh, quote, quoted, uh, Polly, quote, tweeted Polly Market Money, which said Meta jumps over 6% of the open as investors react to yesterday's Muse Spark 1.1 release. Again, I don't really think that they were reacting to Muse Spark as much as Semi Analysis saying, there's a, there's a, there's a chance. Um, so yeah, Alex Wang said nice with the thumbs up. So he, he's, uh, he's pumping the stock.

• 28:43John Coogan?

  What's interesting is like,

• 28:44Jordi Hays?

  The crazy thing is that like Semi Analysis just like completely leaving out SpaceX and,

• 28:52John Coogan?

  They didn't leave out SpaceX and Google. They said,

• 28:55Jordi Hays?

  But, but, but saying,

• 28:57John Coogan?

  They said SpaceX is selling $26 billion a year worth of GPUs to Anthropic slash Google. And that's why they're not in the race. Uh, even though it is odd because Meta might wind up selling a lot of GPUs. It's sort of unclear what the breakdown will be, but, uh, they're at least laying out a narrative that if Meta picks it up, would differentiate them from SpaceX AI in some ways, I think. But yeah, I, I, I agree with you. It is,

• 29:27Jordi Hays?

  But they're, but they're essentially saying, they're, they're essentially saying that like Gemini doesn't have, because Gemini has compute.

• 29:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 29:34Jordi Hays?

  And data.

• 29:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:36Jordi Hays?

  They're saying, they're effectively saying Gemini does not have talent.

• 29:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:40Jordi Hays?

  Right? They're saying you need all three.

• 29:43John Coogan?

  I don't know, yeah. Well, the, the, the main thing that they were focused on outside of the compute, which, you know, many of the hyperscalers do have, uh, that box checked. Uh, the, uh, Semi Analysis really focuses on this idea that data is the new oil. They're quoting Ilya in 2024. Ilya famously said, the data is the fossil fuel of AI. Uh, and, and they say, uh, this time the invisible hand has created a new human data RL environment supply chain. The three incumbents, Merckor, Surge and Handshake are all at 1 billion plus ARR. And many new entrants are, that are barely a year old are sitting around 100 million ARR.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  Um, but what's interesting is they, they actually ran the numbers on how much data, uh, how much data Meta is gathering from the computer use, screen recordings of Meta employees. And it benchmarks like, it's, they basically got a Merckor-sized business.

• 30:49John Coogan?

  Overnight for free or loosely for free. So they said furthermore, Meta took their data efforts to another level in late May by announcing a new applied AI engineering org as part of their most recent round of layoffs restructuring 3,000 engineers, which includes 70% of their new grads and a significant number of seniors will now be making RL tasks and environments full time. We think this is an extremely under appreciated advantage for MSL. The question is, if this becomes the the standard playbook, you would imagine that Google Deep Mind would be able to do the same thing. They have the same structural workforce, but maybe it's like it's a Band-Aid that Google's not willing to rip off, but Zuck is willing to rip it off at Meta.

• 31:32John Coogan?

  That's maybe the thesis at a deeper level. Anthropic has been the most aggressive lab by far when it comes to buying coding data from RL environment startups. And it's one important reason why their models are so good at coding today. Mercor recently disclosed that they logged 2.5 million expert hours on their platform in Q2 of 2026. That's equivalent to 5,000 people working 40 hours a week. Meta is already in the same ballpark and their average quality is likely higher. Additionally, they have another 70,000 people to pull into that organization if they need to, if it winds up being as valuable as semi-analysis thinks it will be. It's also worth briefly dispelling the myth that 3,000 meta engineers will be doing mindless, low level data labeling. The days of undereducated contractors from third world countries drawing

• 32:17John Coogan?

  boundary boxes or classifying texts as NSFW are gone. At this point, the models are sufficiently smart that creating a good piece of train data is a real intellectual challenge. So they're sort of taking the contrarian stance that, you know, being an being an RL environment designer is not soul crushing and in fact can be intellectually rigorous. They also said that the top expert contractors at every data company, they're all making seven figures a year, which is pretty crazy since people thought of data labeling as a $10 an hour task. And now you have people making millions of dollars a year because they're actually really great at defining what it means to complete a task from start to finish.

• 32:57Jordi Hays?

  And that's exactly why Lucy Guo just released her new single.

• 33:02John Coogan?

  You gonna play it?

• 33:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we can. We can play it.

• 33:06John Coogan?

  It might be the second greatest song ever released by a tech founder who exited their company for north of a billion dollars.

• 33:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So you kind of blew my mind with this this morning that like Justin Khan has gone, has created a smash hit.

• 33:26John Coogan?

  He's a billion streams.

• 33:27Jordi Hays?

  Justin Khan.

• 33:28John Coogan?

  900 million just on Spotify alone. So Lucy Guo, co-founder of Scale AI, sold to Meta for this $14 billion deal. She was a co-founder, obviously had a ton of equity, has become incredibly liquid and she's having a lot of fun with it and is releasing a new, is it an EDM track? It feels very like Barry's inspired.

• 33:48Jordi Hays?

  It's a it's a bottle service in the club track.

• 33:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. And and

• 33:54Jordi Hays?

  Like, like, I feel like that's the intention of it.

• 33:57John Coogan?

  I think so. It's called Champagne on Me, right?

• 34:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:00John Coogan?

  So it's clearly a reference to buying champagne. Very funny. In the photo shoot that she put out for this, she's holding a wine glass. I don't know if that's an intentional like rage bait to engage the commenters.

• 34:12Jordi Hays?

  I think I think it must be.

• 34:13John Coogan?

  You think it must be. Okay. But we will see where her EDM career goes. But it is worth reminding everyone that Justin Khan has been incredibly successful in his post-exit EDM career. He launched a group and collabed with a number of other artists and did release a song that got 900 million streams on Spotify alone.

• 34:38Jordi Hays?

  Partnered with Adam Port.

• 34:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:39Jordi Hays?

  And the song Move.

• 34:41John Coogan?

  Move.

• 34:42Jordi Hays?

  Which I have heard played.

• 34:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:45Jordi Hays?

  Everywhere. I've played it myself. I had no idea that Justin was was behind it. It has 907 million streams just on Spotify. So you can assume billions of streams when you, you know, include YouTube and and Apple Music and other platforms.

• 35:01John Coogan?

  Sounds like this.

• 35:02Jordi Hays?

  And just to put that into context, Love Sosa by Chief Keef has a billion.

• 35:06John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 35:07Jordi Hays?

  Streams. So he's put up a track on par.

• 35:10John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 35:10Jordi Hays?

  From an attention standpoint with Love Sosa.

• 35:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:13Jordi Hays?

  One of the greatest, you know, pieces of music ever created in human history.

• 35:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:19Jordi Hays?

  So it's very.

• 35:20John Coogan?

  Pretty remarkable.

• 35:21Jordi Hays?

  It is very remarkable.

• 35:22John Coogan?

  Excited to follow Lucy Guo's career, see where she takes it. I can imagine that she'll be doing live performances, more collabs. The the, when you're in that position, it does seem like there's alpha in in working with existing artists, building a team, collaborating and doing stuff and trying not to solve.

• 35:41Jordi Hays?

  I want to see, I want to see what, you know, there's a lot of, Lucy Go has fans. She also has some haters, right? She she embraces them both, but I want to see her invest 20, 30 million into her music career by partnering with a bunch of the best songwriters, producers, DJs, like actually just take it all the way. Like take Headline Coachella just to piss off.

• 36:12John Coogan?

  The haters, the haters. Yeah, could happen. Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. So the market is spoken.

• 36:26Jordi Hays?

  Chad is all saying Chief Keef mentioned.

• 36:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 36:29Jordi Hays?

  Chris says usually every episode mentions Chief Keef somehow. That's right.

• 36:35John Coogan?

  Indeed.

• 36:35Jordi Hays?

  Even when we don't mention it explicitly, sometimes, you know, we'll include references, you know, a little Easter egg. The Jensen jacket is on.

• 36:44John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:45Jordi Hays?

  Sotheby's, the current bid, the estimate from Sotheby's, I think they were kind of basically putting the estimate way too low. I said this before when it first popped up. They said 40 to 60,000. It's already sitting at 70,000. I don't know what in the slop this graphic is.

• 37:06Jordi Hays?

  Very, very one shot at AI. But but the important thing is that when we first covered this, I did not realize that the Jensen jacket was going to a good cost.

• 37:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:19Jordi Hays?

  I thought somebody just picked it up.

• 37:21John Coogan?

  Stole one. He got one, sold it. No, no, it's for charity.

• 37:24Jordi Hays?

  So so Jensen donated this jacket to our dear friend, Justin Mares.

• 37:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:30Jordi Hays?

  All the proceeds are going to go towards this thing Justin does called inflection grants, which gives no strings attached capital to smart people that have cool ideas all around the world. So it's a very good cause. And there's been a bunch of great sort of case studies coming out of it. So excited to follow this. It's not closing until July 17. And so there's some time. I think this runs up. I'm going to put it at north of 500.

• 38:01John Coogan?

  So you know what the last one sold for, right?

• 38:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, over a million.

• 38:05John Coogan?

  Over a million. Absolutely.

• 38:07Jordi Hays?

  I'm putting it at north of 500, but sub 1 million.

• 38:12John Coogan?

  Nice jacket.

• 38:13Jordi Hays?

  It's a good jacket, sir.

• 38:14John Coogan?

  Good piece of lore. Has Palmer ever auctioned a Hawaiian t-shirt? I feel like that might,

• 38:22John Coogan?

  that might go for a high price. Maybe he has to go public first and really, really go broad before he pulls in the seven figure auction for the piece of clothing. But I don't know.

• 38:35Jordi Hays?

  I think the

• 38:36John Coogan?

  The museum of business, anything.

• 38:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, I think Hawaiian goes for two, north of 200.

• 38:44John Coogan?

  North of 200.

• 38:45Jordi Hays?

  And that's, that's just based on like secondary demand for the stock.

• 38:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:48Jordi Hays?

  Right. So if you have, if you have like a, you know, eight figure position in

• 38:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 38:54Jordi Hays?

  in Anduril, you might want to just pick up the, pick up the Hawaiian shirt.

• 38:59John Coogan?

  Sort of a proxy.

• 38:59Jordi Hays?

  Something in the, yeah, it's a proxy.

• 39:01John Coogan?

  It's like look through exposure.

• 39:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:02John Coogan?

  Sort of corbeled in.

• 39:03Jordi Hays?

  No, it really is a bet. It really is a bet on the company.

• 39:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:06Jordi Hays?

  Anduril.

• 39:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:07Jordi Hays?

  At a trillion.

• 39:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:09Jordi Hays?

  Suddenly that Hawaiian, that's going.

• 39:11John Coogan?

  5x.

• 39:12Jordi Hays?

  Way higher.

• 39:13John Coogan?

  Way higher.

• 39:14Jordi Hays?

  Zach Bull.

• 39:15John Coogan?

  Really? Do you have more on that or we're switching gears? Let me tell you about MongoDB first. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it.

• 39:28Jordi Hays?

  Chris says.

• 39:29John Coogan?

  Where you want to go?

• 39:29Jordi Hays?

  He's buying Palmer's goatee. So Palmer shaved the goatee, put it on.

• 39:36Jordi Hays?

  Put it on, you know, a board and, uh, and, and auction it for a good cause.

• 39:41John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, go back to Zach, I want to close out.

• 39:43Jordi Hays?

  Zach is posting on X, Elon is glazing Anthropic, DoorDash is on the AI company. CERN has only been turned off for one week, man.

• 39:51John Coogan?

  I don't fully understand the CERN conspiracy. I know it's like a meme now that, uh, it gets turned off and then crazy things happen. Is, is the idea that CERN keeps the world like stable or something?

• 40:01Jordi Hays?

  I don't even know. I don't even know at this point, but, um, but, but, but the, the conspiracy, uh, crowd was saying like, as soon as it got turned off, like, have you noticed that today felt like, uh, you know, four days long?

• 40:15John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. So it's like time warp percent. Oh, cool. Okay. I like this. Yeah. I gotta go watch like a two hour fake documentary about it to get to the bottom of that really put on the tinfoil hat. So yeah, closing out Meta, uh, the market has spoken, according to Alex Wang. Says an exec at a $1.6 trillion market company flexing his company's stock performance with a five minute chart is absolutely diabolical. But it is, uh, it is a, a very, it's the beginning of a new narrative and it does feel like, uh, it feels like Meta for a lot of people was never a SaaS apocalypse victim. It was always going to be an AI winner. So like they've worked on AI for a decade, they had fair.

• 40:59Jordi Hays?

  They were an AI winner until they said, actually, we're gonna, we're gonna invest way more into this.

• 41:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:04Jordi Hays?

  Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

• 41:06John Coogan?

  Exactly. And, and so it was, it was always very odd because it felt like they were in Apple's position where they could sort of do nothing and win. And yet they were being very aggressive and acting like they had to do something. So they sort of put themselves in the Google scenario. But this is certainly the way that they get out of the Google scenario, uh, and actually, uh, and actually boom. And Citrini, uh, agrees with that. Uh, Citrini says Meta strikes me as one of those setups where it's going to rip so hard that when it's done, everyone acts like it was obvious the whole time and pretends they were buying the whole way down. We can call this the Google at $150 phenomenon. In the last piece of Meta news, uh, Jan LaCoon is raising a new AI focused VC fund.

• 41:49John Coogan?

  He raised a billion dollars earlier for his, uh, startup AMI Labs. Now he's raising a billion dollar fund, uh, and he left Meta to raise billions to build and invest in AI, says Trace Cohen. So good luck to the AI godfather, Jan LaCoon. Very interesting. The, the, the take that I heard was something along the lines of like, he was, he was sort of, he was sort of, he might be right that LLMs are not the path to AGI, but it didn't matter at the time. They're good for Meta. They're useful and they're also very good for Meta because they need to do, as we talked to Eric Suford about, recommendation systems, ad generation. Uh, one thing I, we didn't get to talk to Eric about that I was interested in is

• 42:34John Coogan?

  the Muse spark image model is maybe the more exciting in the short term piece. I mean, Muse spark 1.1 is like, as semi-analysis puts it, like on the right track to have a frontier model and compete in that oligopoly. That's great. It's not there yet. And most people are saying that they are not swapping in Muse spark 1.1 just yet. But, uh, they're at least on the, on the right path and they have this data advantage potentially. But, uh, the image model right now can be used for ad creation and, and fine tuned in Instagram for statics to create images that particularly work on Instagram. So if there are flaws, if there's a spiky intelligence to ad generation, if you, if your reaction to the what in the slop was that particular image?

• 43:19John Coogan?

  Like there is a version of slop that actually will work on Instagram and some that won't. They might underperform if you're using them to deliver information infographics. So they might want to actually fine tune their model on what's working on, on the ad side. And they can do that. Um, I've, I'm interested in the fact that they have not talked a lot about text generation for ad copy. Like there are clearly people that are sick of the turns of phrase used by LLMs broadly. The, you're absolutely right. All the Claude isms and then chat GPT has the, it's not this, it's that, or did until they, they sort of, uh, worked that piece out. And then a new one pops up every couple of weeks and people get annoyed by it.

• 44:02John Coogan?

  And it seems like there's actually a, uh, an opportunity for Meta to create a, an LLM that's just really good at writing, you know, ad, advertising copy. And it's not necessarily as focused on deep research reports or, or, or agent decoding. But it's like, uh, it's super powering the ad platform and figuring out the, should they be using emojis? How many emojis should they be using bullet points when and RL on those ads?

• 44:29Jordi Hays?

  Going after business customers.

• 44:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:31Jordi Hays?

  Why not build something that your business customers would use and love?

• 44:36John Coogan?

  And I'm sure that every ad, every ad, uh, every business that's running ads on Meta right now is going to chat GPT and Claude and saying, generate me 50 different lines of copy that I can use for my ads. Uh, obviously they're doing this, but if Meta can outperform them at that, because the big labs are not really focused on copy that converts or like landing page optimization, right? They're focused on.

• 45:00Jordi Hays?

  I know where you're going with this.

• 45:01John Coogan?

  What are you thinking?

• 45:02Jordi Hays?

  Zach drops an e-commerce mastermind course to help fund the capex.

• 45:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love it.

• 45:08Jordi Hays?

  $5,000. I'll teach you everything I know about e-commerce.

• 45:11John Coogan?

  Give it away for free. You're going to spend a lot more than that, but yeah.

• 45:14Jordi Hays?

  The Zach, the Zach course generates billions.

• 45:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, it would, it would. Uh, anyway, let's move on to our next story, but first let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent, intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. So we gotta talk about.

• 45:34Jordi Hays?

  Talk about.

• 45:35John Coogan?

  Fia Gate. Fia Gate, the story that is at the center of Phoebe Gates's life, her company Fia is, uh, uh, is in Bloomberg today with some, uh, some accusations of misattribution in the e-commerce world. Fia, the buzzy shopping app co-founded by Bill Gates's daughter Phoebe, is claiming credit for online sales. It didn't actually drive, a Bloomberg investigation found. Can read the exclusive story. Let's click into this and sort of understand what's going on. So.

• 46:08Jordi Hays?

  Real quick, Ari's putting us in the truth zone on Meta. He says they have a product like that in the ad builder. Why would they make that external?

• 46:17John Coogan?

  Oh, uh, yeah, I, I, I more think that it's not, it's not that it would be externally. It would just be something that would be talked about more in the benchmarks, in the actual model release.

• 46:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And they have, they have, they have Meta AI, which is just a standalone app.

• 46:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:32Jordi Hays?

  And there's a tons and tons of people online building businesses.

• 46:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:37Jordi Hays?

  That aren't necessarily running like Meta ads yet.

• 46:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:41Jordi Hays?

  Right? They're not necessarily even set up in the ads manager, but they're thinking about like website copy and things like that.

• 46:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:47Jordi Hays?

  Could see it going either way.

• 46:48John Coogan?

  But I mean, we already know that, uh, that Zach doesn't like talking about the ads business. And so that's the whole discussion of like, you, you want to talk about the, the agenda coding capabilities of the new model. Even if, I wouldn't be surprised if that model, if that, if that functionality that you're talking about, uh, got better in the last month, obviously it did. Uh, it's just something that's not top of mind for people. And maybe it should, but honestly, I think, uh, the, the, the AI opportunity is so big that the market might just love this. I mean, the market already clears.

• 47:17Jordi Hays?

  Ari says, okay, I want to talk about Fia Gate, not Meta. Sorry to distract. All good, all good. I appreciate the comment.

• 47:23John Coogan?

  Uh, an advertising startup co-founded by Phoebe Gates, daughter of billionaire Microsoft Corp co-founder Bill Gates. Builds itself as a personal shopping assistant that helps users find the lowest prices on a broad range of clothes and fashion accessories. You download the Fia tool onto a web browser. It's a Chrome extension, basically. Use it while shopping and voila, the so-called extension can quickly find discount codes for products. We've seen these with Honey and isn't.

• 47:51Jordi Hays?

  Calling it so-called extension is kind of a low blow. Like it is certainly an extension.

• 47:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:57Jordi Hays?

  Like you can't, I mean, I guess, I guess the really aggressive take would be like, this is just, this is just malware.

• 48:03John Coogan?

  Doesn't actually extend anything.

• 48:05Jordi Hays?

  This is, you know, software.

• 48:07John Coogan?

  Okay. So, uh, businesses like these known in industry parlance as affiliate marketing programs typically collect a commission from retailers that make, that make the resulting sale. But according to Ben Edelman, an independent researcher and consultant who studies affiliate marketing as well as Capital One Shopping, which makes a competing browser extension, Fia is claiming credit for online sales that didn't actually drive in violation of many digital platforms' policies. Bloomberg tested the Fia mobile browser extension across more than 50 websites and found that during the checkout process, Fia opened a background tab without user interaction and injected its own referral code that overrode legitimate referrals from other publishers.

• 48:51John Coogan?

  These findings were consistent with Capital One Shopping and Edelman's independent testing and code review. Testing involved using the extension like a regular shopper and observing how it communicates with other sites and its own servers. The most fundamental requirement in affiliate marketing is that commission is only paid if a user clicks, said Edelman, who has spent decades exposing what he says are deceptive practices in digital advertising. Edelman spoke to Bloomberg after reviewing Fia's code, which is public because it's an extension, you download it and install it, and testing how the extension interacts with retailers, websites and affiliate networks at Bloomberg's request. The rules don't allow fake clicks, simulated clicks, imaginary clicks or hypothetical clicks. Only a real click will do.

• 49:33John Coogan?

  With Capital One Shopping, a discount shopping tool previously known as WikiBuy, was bought by Capital One Financial Corp in 2018, highlighted similar findings from its own testing and an email sent Tuesday to retailers that raised concerns about what it said were Fia's fake clicks or cookie stuffing. It attached videos that it said showed Fia's extension silently opening back town, background tab, linking the retailer's website with its own affiliate code to ensure the cookie was set. Publishers like us are having material revenue taken, said the email, which was seen by Bloomberg. And advertisers like you are losing money to fake clicks. Bloomberg cares about this because they are probably affected, the wire cutter is affected, that's owned by the New York Times. This is a PR nightmare.

• 50:12Jordi Hays?

  Sites like Dupe are affected.

• 50:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 50:15Jordi Hays?

  We've had, we've had Bobby on from Dupe. He, he gave some good coverage. So why don't you give us the backstory on Honey?

• 50:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 50:21Jordi Hays?

  And why, uh, Nollies says this is what Honey got killed for doing.

• 50:27John Coogan?

  Sort of, but it's potentially worse than what happened with Honey. So.

• 50:32Jordi Hays?

  You're saying. Uh, FIA is potentially worse than Honey.

• 50:38John Coogan?

  Yes. So, uh, you have to think of the, uh, the most ridiculous example of affiliate marketing and product purchase flow. So this really lands with people. Yeah. You're buying a horse.

• 50:49Jordi Hays?

  And you, so, so you search, I want a horse.

• 50:51John Coogan?

  You go horsereviews.com.

• 50:53Jordi Hays?

  And you go to horsereviews.com and they've got thousands, maybe even millions of stallions.

• 50:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. And they recommend you a Clydesdale from Clydesdalesonline.com and you click from horsereviews.com over to Clydesdale review, best Clydesdales.com, Clydesdalesdirect.com. And you land on Clydesdalesdirect.com and at that moment, the URL almost certainly on that button that you clicked on horsereviews.com is to Clydesdalesdirect.com, question mark, UTM equals horsereviews.com. So when you land on Clydesdalesdirect.com, the actual e-commerce site that will sell you the horse, horsereviews.com gets attribution. They get credit for referring

• 51:41John Coogan?

  you. This will just show up in your Google Analytics. It's very nice. It's a very nice thing to see. Oh, I'm getting a lot of traffic from this. Maybe I should, you know, engage with that group or maybe I should pay them. Maybe I have to pay them or maybe they'll swap out the link to some other site. Uh, and so there's a whole host.

• 51:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Because like a lot of the, a lot of the, the purchase decision-making is happening on horsereviews.com, right? You're comparing and contrasting.

• 52:04John Coogan?

  The wire cutter for horses.

• 52:06Jordi Hays?

  Yes, exactly. Maybe this is.

• 52:07John Coogan?

  Maybe we got a business here.

• 52:08Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, maybe, maybe this is something, you know, we should build. Obviously.

• 52:11John Coogan?

  Chatbot sites. You're thinking what I'm thinking.

• 52:12Jordi Hays?

  You know, venture capitalists as well as journalists would be all over this thing.

• 52:17John Coogan?

  Yes. We gotta spin this up. So, uh, normally the referring site can hold on to that referral token. It can get stuffed in a cookie. It can get saved until the user checks out on Clydesdalesdirect.com. They go through the checkout flow, hopefully hosted on Shopify. Let me tell you about Shopify really quickly before we continue. Shopify grows with, is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. So you're going through the Shopify flow and this, this cookie, this referral is handed to you and then you wind up paying them for the referral. This is affiliate marketing. It powers a lot of the internet.

• 52:58Jordi Hays?

  But what happens, John?

• 53:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 53:00Jordi Hays?

  Back in the day, the, the, the buyer had Honey.

• 53:04John Coogan?

  Yes. So the, the best scenario with Honey is that you're on horsereviews.com, you wind up on Clydesdalesdirect.com, you're thinking about purchasing, you've been educated by horsereviews.com. They deserve some of the credit, but you just think this Clydesdale's too expensive.

• 53:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:23John Coogan?

  And so you click on Honey.

• 53:25Jordi Hays?

  More than you want to pay.

• 53:26John Coogan?

  And they got a coupon code for you. Clydesdales20 or something, or Budweiser50. 50% off your Clydesdale. It's a Budweiser partnership. Who knows? Um, and so you click on Honey and there is a coupon code. The coupon code is automatically added to that Shopify checkout. And as a result, Honey says, we're the affiliate marketer that got them over the finish line. We deserve the credit and multi-touch attribution, sharing of attribution revenue, not a very mature industry. Typically whoever gets the last touch, the last click, they're the ones that get the credit. So Honey shows up, hey, we think we have a coupon. You have to click

• 54:06John Coogan?

  affirmatively. You can't just do nothing. You click and the affiliate, the, the referral tracker is updated to Honey. That's in the fair zone. You might be a little bit upset about that because you're like, wait, I'm horsereviews.com. I did 90% of the work. You just gave them a coupon code. Why are you getting a whole, why are you getting all the credit? Uh, that's up for debate, but that's generally okay. Honey got in trouble because they started for a time period, updating the cookies without people actually cooking.

• 54:42Jordi Hays?

  Being a little piggy.

• 54:43John Coogan?

  With that, exactly. Well, that's a weird joke because isn't the founder of Honey doing a company called Pig now or something like that? I thought there was some linkage there. Tyler, look that up. Um, but the, the, the violation in why Honey went so viral, there's this YouTube video, the, the problem with Honey has 20 million views. It was attacking a lot of, uh, a lot of creators because Mr. Beast had worked with Honey, Marquez Brownlee had worked with Honey. Like they had run a lot of scaled YouTube ads because it was a great business. If you just got someone to install this free Chrome extension, they would save money. It's the best offer ever because you just say, download this, download this, uh, this Chrome extension. You just save money. Little, like most people don't realize that Honey's making money through affiliate commissions and they're making

• 55:28John Coogan?

  a lot of it so they can pay the YouTube influencers to promote their product.

• 55:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:32John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 55:33Jordi Hays?

  And back in that era, I would be insanely annoyed because I would make a, like a, basically like a landing page or a coupon code for a specific creator.

• 55:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:46Jordi Hays?

  And sometimes there'd be like a small creator, all of a sudden they would have like hundreds of purchases through their code.

• 55:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:55Jordi Hays?

  I'd be like, wow, they either have insane engagement.

• 55:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:58Jordi Hays?

  Or it leaked to Honey and then you check and usually these codes.

• 56:02John Coogan?

  Honey would set up their own sometimes. They would set up their own in-year affiliate system. There were a bunch of annoying things where you would, yeah, you would, you would promote with a particular advertiser and they would be saying, use code Rogan10. And then the person would show up, put Rogan10 in, and then Honey would swap it at the last second to Honey10. And it's the same, so the customer doesn't care because they're still getting the same discount, but Honey's getting the credit instead of, and it's, makes it hard to track.

• 56:29Jordi Hays?

  Ben says the Honey founder's new company is called Pi, not Pig.

• 56:33John Coogan?

  Correct. Yes. Pi. Anyway.

• 56:35Jordi Hays?

  Vindicated.

• 56:36John Coogan?

  Um, vindicated. True. Uh, and so.

• 56:38Jordi Hays?

  So let's get into why, what he is being accused of and why it is potentially, if this is what they're doing, we don't know, again, if it's an accident or it's intentional, but why it's, uh, potentially even, uh, more predatory than, uh, than, than Honey.

• 56:55John Coogan?

  So Megalag, the YouTuber that did the Honey exposé, it was an interesting deep dive that got 20 million views because it was using a hidden redirect near checkout to replace the creator's affiliate tag with Honey's. So, uh, the irony here was that a lot of those creators, they would make money from, I'm promoting AG1, use code Huberman. And then if they had also promoted Honey, Honey was stealing their AG1 affiliate revenue. And so the creators were sort of promoting their own demise in some way. So it was like this, this very viral, very ironic situation eventually got sorted out. Honey's broader scandal also involved allegation that it suppressed better coupons and delivered, and

• 57:38John Coogan?

  deliberately evaded affiliate network stand down checks. Nothing, uh, comparably, uh, comparably extensive has yet been established about FIA. But FIA's reported implementation may actually be cruder. Honey generally created the overwrite when the shopper interacted with its checkout prompt, even if only to dismiss it. So you would see a Honey pop up. At the very least, you had to click, I don't want Honey, and then it would do something. The Bloomberg report says FIA's mobile extension is firing without any FIA interaction at all.

• 58:10Jordi Hays?

  So, so give this to me in horse terms.

• 58:14John Coogan?

  So you go from horsereviews.com over to Clydesdalesdirect. You merely have FIA installed as an extension. You don't notice anything.

• 58:24Jordi Hays?

  You don't, you don't know that FIA has been a part of the interaction at all.

• 58:27John Coogan?

  You don't know.

• 58:27Jordi Hays?

  You just click through, but you have the software running in your browser that is inserting.

• 58:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:33Jordi Hays?

  A, a, effectively attribution for FIA without you knowing.

• 58:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:38Jordi Hays?

  Stealing potential revenue from horsereviews.com.

• 58:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 58:42Jordi Hays?

  And horsereviews.com probably had to run ads.

• 58:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:45Jordi Hays?

  On Google.

• 58:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:46Jordi Hays?

  To get people to horsereviews.com.

• 58:47John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 58:48Jordi Hays?

  To educate them on the, the horse market, to get them to Clydesdalesdirect.

• 58:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:53Jordi Hays?

  To get them to close. And so they're sitting here being like, hey, we did all this work to, uh, get, uh, Clydesdalesdirect.com a new customer and we're not being compensated for it.

• 59:04John Coogan?

  Clydesdalesdirect might say, well, normally I'm sending a check to horsereviews.com. I, I guess I'm sending a, a check to FIA now, whatever. As long as I'm getting customers, I'm fine.

• 59:16Jordi Hays?

  Ari.

• 59:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 59:17Jordi Hays?

  The, the, the world champion of the chat today says, okay, this is like old school ad fraud. So, so one of the concerning things here is that I think this had been running since like January or December, is the article said. And so they had some software update that was pushed.

• 59:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:34Jordi Hays?

  This started happening.

• 59:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:35Jordi Hays?

  So it's been happening for, let's say around six months.

• 59:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:38Jordi Hays?

  And you would assume that they would have figured this out, that hey, if it was, if it genuinely was an error and corrected it, right?

• 59:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:50Jordi Hays?

  But maybe it's, it's possible that, that it, you know.

• 59:54John Coogan?

  I don't know. A lot of, I mean, it, it's not the biggest scale. I think the number is 12 million plus in sales driven. So the commission on that is like $1 million that's sort of like missing and it's, and it's so diffuse across so many different e-commerce providers. I guarantee you, as someone who's run multiple e-commerce sites, uh, I would not notice if a couple hundred dollars moved from one affiliate to another because I'm one of a million sites that were affected by this. So it, it rolls up to a big number, 12 million plus in sales driven, but the actual commission might be 3%. So you might

• 1:00:34John Coogan?

  be looking at like 300K or something like that of actual money that moved to the wrong place. Um, there, the Bloomberg's not actually alleging, alleging a particular crime. If the facts are accurate, the behavior appears far beyond mere rudeness though. Affiliate network contracts generally require a genuine user referral and often require shopping extensions to stand down when another publisher supplied the consumer. You're not supposed to override the supplier of the consumer. Google expressly prohibits background links injection, background affiliate link injection and replacing tracking without a related

• 1:01:14John Coogan?

  user action. Apple also requires Safari affiliate redirects to be disclosed. Civil theories such as deceptive practices, unjust enrichment, interference with contracts and unauthorized attention, alteration of tracking data are therefore quite plausible. Deliberate forced click cookie stuffing can even become wire fraud. The Justice Department has prosecuted people for receiving commissions on sales they didn't generate, but that requires proof of intent and other facts we do not have yet about FIA. The fair bottom line, not proven criminal, but if Bloomberg accurately describes an intentional revenue mechanism rather than a bug, this looks like potential unlawful affiliate fraud. Now.

• 1:01:54John Coogan?

  Everyone on the timeline was preying on Phoebe's downfall.

• 1:01:58Jordi Hays?

  Way before.

• 1:01:59John Coogan?

  Way before this. People, people wanted this so badly. They didn't want to hear this be a success. And so they've been chomping at the bit for something. She raised money from a lot of very popular celebrities and it looked like a Coachella poster and there's all these like, oh, like, why are we even raising venture capital? Uh, so our theory is that this is where the comeback begins.

• 1:02:20Jordi Hays?

  The villain arc.

• 1:02:21John Coogan?

  The villain arc potentially, but seriously, there is a question about, uh, what happens from here. And I think that there's a huge opportunity to go bigger, be, take a page out of the David Ellison playbook, actually marshal a ton more capital, buy up businesses, roll them up, create the new, uh, maybe it's not in media. Maybe it's in something else, but, uh,

• 1:02:47Jordi Hays?

  I think she should buy Bloomberg.

• 1:02:49John Coogan?

  Bloomberg. I don't know. That might not be for sale.

• 1:02:53Jordi Hays?

  No, I don't, you know, I'm sure a lot more facts will come out.

• 1:02:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:58Jordi Hays?

  Certainly a terrible day on the internet, uh, to be the, the fiat team. Uh, you know, we don't need to assume their intentions yet.

• 1:03:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:11Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but yeah, it's obviously like very rough situation.

• 1:03:14John Coogan?

  It's totally possible. It's just a bug.

• 1:03:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's possible. Uh, and yeah, it'll be interesting to see where they go from here. Uh, I think people should stop speculating that this is like related to CERN, right? Uh, you know, the timing is, is uncanny, but you know, uh, no, so rough, rough situation. Um, and, uh, yeah, you can tell that, um, you can tell that she just wanted to be respected for being an independent, you know, entity and like company, right?

• 1:03:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I think talked about not raising money from, uh, from, uh, from her dad and doing it independently. So,

• 1:04:00John Coogan?

  I think she's got to get 50 billion from Bill and start buying some of the greatest American assets that are out there.

• 1:04:07Jordi Hays?

  I like, I like that play.

• 1:04:08John Coogan?

  I just like the, the David Ellison playbook. It leans in. I mean, somebody was putting it like you're damned if you do, damned if you don't, if you're in that situation and, uh, just no matter what capital raising strategy you wind up doing, people are going to say stuff either way. So why not just lean in and marshal as much capital as possible? And just jump straight to the top of the stack and start putting together mega deals. I don't know. I, I, I've just been so, I've just been so impressed with the David Ellison strategy of just going absolutely huge. And I don't know, it's worked out.

• 1:04:43Jordi Hays?

  William says maybe Fable did it. It is possible that they were, they were building this personal AI shopping assistant, but then they accidentally cracked like recursive self-improvement. And the AI decided that in order to accumulate more capital, it should use some of the existing rails it already had. And so why not just run this sort of like background, you know, program to start stealing revenue and accumulating power internally without the fiat team even being aware. Like it could have been creating offshore accounts, things like that. So this is possible, possible that, you know, they, they, they've unlocked a sort of dark super intelligence and, and, uh, it is going to be born through this shopping assistant. We don't know. We don't know much yet.

• 1:05:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:28Jordi Hays?

  But this will be a story to follow. We can't rule it out.

• 1:05:31John Coogan?

  But we can tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Uh, China has successfully launched a reusable rocket in a win for their space program. Interesting. And there's a video of this. I want to watch this video. China launched and partially recovered a rocket, state media said. A milestone for Beijing's space program as it competes with US and Elon Musk's SpaceX. The Long March 10B. Long March is a good name. It's a good name. Uh, and it's made in flight, was launched into orbit around noon Friday from southern Hainan province. Minutes later, a giant net caught the rocket's booster upon its descent.

• 1:06:17John Coogan?

  So that's a giant net in a, in a cube. What an interesting strategy, sort of a, uh, a version of the, uh, of their, uh, Mechazilla grabbing it. How does the rocket not burn the net? Is the net built out of some titanium alloy that doesn't melt or something? That's so interesting that it was able to do that. Uh,

• 1:06:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. If, if you really zoom in, you can kind of see the cables that are holding it.

• 1:06:44John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this video also looks kind of like AI generated. I don't think it is, but it kind of has that.

• 1:06:50John Coogan?

  Hmm. What, what are the cues to you?

• 1:06:54Jordi Hays?

  I, I, it's, it's always hard to like, actually,

• 1:06:56John Coogan?

  You're just like full cope. It must be AI generated. Uh, it might be. They do have, uh, incredible video capabilities over there, but, uh, I trust the reports from the Wall Street Journal here. Sam Bresnik, a research fellow who studies China at Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology, said, "It would be a big deal if China's program can regularly recover and reuse part of its, parts of its rockets." It's pretty radically, it pretty radically decreases the cost of building out these giant satellite constellations that China has made very clear that it wants to build out. He added that Beijing was investing in space technology for both its economic and military applications. The successful launch will lay a solid foundation for accelerating the improvement of the country's space access capabilities.

• 1:07:41John Coogan?

  Uh, China's rocket is around 200 feet tall with a payload of more than 60, 16 metric tons. The recovery net to catch the rocket was mounted on top of a seaborne platform and represented the first net-based rocket launch recovery, according to the state-owned firm. The company said it expected to reuse the recovered booster by the end of the year. Two previous attempts in, in December failed. Um, giant net. What an interesting. Do we know that they were going to work on this? This is pretty crazy. I like this. Um, anyway. In other news, thousands of Costco employees have quietly become millionaires thanks to the retailer's generous pay benefits and a long-running 401k program.

• 1:08:24John Coogan?

  The Wall Street Journal profiled an individual who makes $33 an hour and yet has still become a millionaire just from working at Costco. Uh, Tucson cashier Tony Bazar, uh, or Barzar, uh, who started gathering shopping carts at Price Club, a precursor to Costco in 1968 for $5.85 an hour. After Price Club merged with Costco in 1993, Barzar stayed with the company, regularly contributing a small portion of his paycheck to his 401k and has now accumulated more than a million dollars. But Barzar's story reflects Costco's longstanding philosophy of paying workers more than most retailers. The company's founders believed higher wages and benefits would reduce turnover, lower training costs

• 1:09:09John Coogan?

  and improve customer services. The strategy appears to have worked. One employee, one year employee turnover is about 7%, far below normal retail levels. Meanwhile, Costco's business has boomed with annual sales growing for nearly two decades and the stock rising more than 2,000% since the depths of the 2008 financial crisis. What a logical buy, what a logical stock to buy in the depths of the financial crisis. You're like, okay, we're in a financial crisis. People might be pulling back on luxury jewelry, but they're certainly going to be going to Costco more frequently. Let me just buy Costco and then you hold it and you get a 20X over 15 years. Not bad.

• 1:09:48Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:09:48John Coogan?

  Pretty interesting. The value of Costco's benefits became clear when Barzar's wife of 26 years was diagnosed with stage three brain cancer. Horrific. Uh, Costco's health insurance covered the full cost of her three brain surgeries. He took nearly a year of paid leave to care for his family and he used the company's therapy benefits to cope. This year, he returned to work part-time, saying the pay and benefits are a major reason why he stayed with Costco for nearly four decades. And it's interesting. Um, part of why the founders made this bet on paying employees more for higher retention is that they actually found that a tenured cashier can make the entire store run more frequently

• 1:10:29John Coogan?

  and knows all these secret tricks to like, just, it seems like such a simple job. You just take the object, scan it, ring the person up, but there's all these tiny little steps that eke out small margins of efficiency and make the whole store run more efficiently. Uh, and so, uh, the investment has clearly paid off. So,

• 1:10:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And to give you an idea of typical turnover in retail, it can be for full-time hourly store staff.

• 1:10:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:58Jordi Hays?

  According to Mercer's 2025 survey, is sitting around 40 to 70% a year. So,

• 1:11:08John Coogan?

  Did you ever go through a Costco phase in your early life?

• 1:11:11Jordi Hays?

  College, I would go to Costco.

• 1:11:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, same. When I started my first company, we'd get the huge box of ramen noodles. It's like $5 and you'd feed yourself for like a week.

• 1:11:20Jordi Hays?

  I, I figured out at some point that they were doing the rotisseries at, as a loss leader.

• 1:11:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:11:25Jordi Hays?

  And I was like, you're not going to get me. So I'd go in there and I'd just only get the rotisserie.

• 1:11:30John Coogan?

  Also the samples, incredible value. Eat as many samples as you can, maybe get a Costco hot dog. That's the whole day's worth of food right there.

• 1:11:38Jordi Hays?

  That's where that picture comes from, where you're getting dragged out.

• 1:11:43John Coogan?

  That was big news. That's big news, but yes, if you're trying to save money, I mean, you don't necessarily need to work at Costco, but certainly shopping at Costco hugely advantageous. Before we move on to the next one, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange.

• 1:11:58Speaker 02

  One change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 1:12:02John Coogan?

  Just do it and we can move on. Do you want to tell us about?

• 1:12:05Jordi Hays?

  Did you, did you know, did you know, John, that Love Island is suddenly driving a surge of women to the prediction market? Kalshi?

• 1:12:13John Coogan?

  I feel like we predicted this. I feel like this was something we talked about a year ago or something, but it's not surprising to me, but it's interesting to see it show up in the data, but tell me more.

• 1:12:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would have expected the first kind of breakout like media property in, that would really be driving net new people into platforms like this would have been the turn it down cinematic universe, right?

• 1:12:37John Coogan?

  Bet on that.

• 1:12:37Jordi Hays?

  Betting, did he turn it down? And if so, how much did big Boogie?

• 1:12:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:12:43Jordi Hays?

  How much did he turn down, right? Fifteen, 10, five? And then you could also bet on, well, how long did they want him to be there?

• 1:12:50John Coogan?

  Was it actually a decade?

• 1:12:50Jordi Hays?

  Was it actually a decade, right?

• 1:12:51John Coogan?

  Or was it a standard four year term?

• 1:12:52Jordi Hays?

  And so there's, there's a lot of markets there. But the show Love Island, a reality dating competition where singles live together in a villa, couple up, get eliminated and compete for a cash prize, has become an unusually active trading category. According to Barron's, the current season drove 106% increase in weekly active female mobile users, users of Kalshi between June 8th and June 28th compared with 54% increase among men. Love Island markets have now generated roughly 52 million in trades, and they have three times as many female traders as male traders.

• 1:13:29John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:13:29Jordi Hays?

  The show's format, format makes it almost perfectly designed for this. Episodes air six days a week or release close to real time.

• 1:13:36John Coogan?

  Six days a week? How many episodes in a season? I would assume it was once a week.

• 1:13:42Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so they're airing it in real time, so it's close to live?

• 1:13:45John Coogan?

  Or close to real time.

• 1:13:47Speaker 03

  I think there's a new episode every day and it goes for like six or eight weeks.

• 1:13:50John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:13:52Jordi Hays?

  And how many, how many seasons do they do a year?

• 1:13:54Speaker 03

  Uh, I think it's, might be every like season. It's either like summer and winter or summer, winter, fall, spring.

• 1:14:01John Coogan?

  We're clearly experts on this. There's different locations around the world. Okay.

• 1:14:06Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I need to mark it on how long until there's an insider trading scandal on Love Island.

• 1:14:12John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:14:13Jordi Hays?

  And market manipulation.

• 1:14:16Speaker 03

  Like, cause there's no, no contact to the outside.

• 1:14:18John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but, but what happens when somebody, you know, airdropped facility, you know?

• 1:14:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, skywriting over.

• 1:14:26John Coogan?

  Carrier pigeon?

• 1:14:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's a lot of ways.

• 1:14:28John Coogan?

  I need my emotional support pigeon. And then you find out that they're writing, I, I guess lost.

• 1:14:32Jordi Hays?

  And it's like, you can just tell, like, if somebody was, you know, potential, a high potential candidate, they could tell their family, bet everything, bet, you know, I'm, I'm going to look great until, I don't even know the, the plot of, of the show. I just know that people are coupling up and getting eliminated, but I'm going to take it all the way. And then in the final second, I'm gonna, I'm gonna just fall apart, right? And so there's, there, I, I think almost certainly there will be an insider trading scandal on the Love Island prediction markets by the end of 2027 is my prediction.

• 1:15:16Speaker 03

  Okay, so there's one Love Island USA season per year, but there's also two, like the original show is the British version, and there's two of those per year.

• 1:15:24John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:15:25Speaker 03

  So that's three.

• 1:15:25Jordi Hays?

  Rigav says, production staff has their phones, it's just the contestants that don't.

• 1:15:29John Coogan?

  Oh, so the production staff could do it, yeah. Interesting.

• 1:15:32Jordi Hays?

  It'll happen.

• 1:15:33John Coogan?

  Uh, well, did you know that Chris Williamson was on Love Island 2015?

• 1:15:38Jordi Hays?

  Was that how he broke out?

• 1:15:40John Coogan?

  I mean, it was like a big moment for him.

• 1:15:42Jordi Hays?

  How did he do?

• 1:15:42John Coogan?

  Broad scheme. Uh, I don't know how he did, but you can pull up a photo.

• 1:15:46Jordi Hays?

  Should he be running a Love Island hedge fund? Prediction markets hedge fund?

• 1:15:50John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe, what happened? The former club promoter and model was dumped from the villa on day 19. Since his reality TV stint, he's become one of the UK's most successful podcasters. You know, he went on a generational run with Modern Wisdom. He entered the 2015 series as an original cast member on day one during his time in the villa. He had a brief coupling arrangement with Danielle, Lauren, Richardson, Zoe. Ultimately, he failed to form a lasting romantic connection and was voted out by his fellow islanders on day 19. Reflecting on his, there you go. I put another photo in the timeline, that's wild.

• 1:16:30John Coogan?

  Reflecting on his time on the show and later interviews, Williams described it as a slightly surreal and boring experience. He noted that the environment forced him to confront his need for external validation and made him realize he didn't belong in the party boy persona he was portraying. Uh, and of course, he's done a fantastic job with Modern Wisdom, we're huge fans. Very, very interesting. Oh, this is interesting. Yeah, not that.

• 1:17:00Jordi Hays?

  That is off the screen.

• 1:17:01John Coogan?

  Look at Chris. Kalshi prediction market on his body fat percentage. Bars have started treating Love Island like a live sporting event, including Tom's Watch Bar in Sacramento, where one watch party reportedly generated $30,000 in a single night during an otherwise slow sports season. The Love Island USA finale airs Sunday, July 12th in two days. We'll see if Kalshi can keep up. Yeah, it does feel like there's an opportunity in, in sports bars for reality TV now that the category is so mature. People are betting on it.

• 1:17:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, the, the, the, one of the big issues that I would have thought there would be with an idea like that is just like, if a show is only airing once a week and someone's only into one, you know, uh, like, is there enough content? Whereas like, there's something happening in sports pretty much all the time, but clearly plenty of content.

• 1:17:58John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Go check it out. There are layoffs at Sonos, the smart speaker maker. Sonos has pushed out several design and product leaders as part of recent job cuts, according to Bloomberg. The cuts include a vice president of design who spent 12 years at the company and a top UX executive who'd been there for a decade. Of course, there's a lot of criticisms about the UX specifically, and a 15 year veteran who helped Sonos home theaters, uh, Sonos's home theater work. Sonos confirmed the reductions late last month, but senior level details were previously unreported. CEO Tom Conrad internally framed the cuts as a way to reduce management layers, that's probably good, and make Sonos move faster.

• 1:18:43John Coogan?

  Fewer months in conference rooms, more prototypes in our labs, more decisions made and executed, more exceptional products in the world of our consumers. You have to imagine that there's something interesting for Sonos to do with an AI company. They have so many smart speakers delivered to folks. It's like a way to bootstrap with a big partnership or an acquisition or something. Uh, it's been a rough period for Sonos. Uh, it was battered by customer complaints after its disastrous app rollout. We talked about that a lot. Since Conrad took over, the company has stabilized somewhat, reporting 8% year over year revenue growth. Very good. In the fiscal quarter that ended last March, Sonos says the latest job cuts were not related to artificial intelligence. Interesting.

• 1:19:26John Coogan?

  Just kind of admitting that, you know, things have been slowing down and the company's in a rougher position. They need to be leaner, they need to be more narrow, and they need a product that really is the, the right tool for the job and actually plays the song that you want without a 10 minute lag when you open the app, which was the problem that people were facing. That was a, a rough period.

• 1:19:46Jordi Hays?

  I am very, very curious if within the, within the next two years, we can get actually smart, smart home systems and speakers. Like, can we get, uh, it seems to be a real challenge. I moved into a, a new house recently and it has a smart home system that I've been, uh, I almost, I almost.

• 1:20:12John Coogan?

  It's the name of the system.

• 1:20:12Jordi Hays?

  I don't even want to name it. I don't want to, I don't want to, uh, I don't, it's a small company.

• 1:20:18John Coogan?

  It was something I'd never heard of and is a very bizarre name.

• 1:20:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and, and so, so anyways, just to give you an idea of how smart the smart home system is. Uh, I, you're, you're supposed to be able to tell it to like, set the, set the AC, right? So you just say the name of the system, which I won't name. Uh, and, uh, and then you say what you want it to do. So I'll say, hey, set, set the AC. Yeah, so hey, Shrek. Set the AC to 68 degrees.

• 1:20:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:48Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, the last two times I tried it, it says, it says, sure. I'd love to help you with design inspiration for your home.

• 1:20:58John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:20:59Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no.

• 1:21:00John Coogan?

  Well, it goes into a full.

• 1:21:01Jordi Hays?

  It just goes onto a, it just goes onto a, a totally separate rank.

• 1:21:05John Coogan?

  Crazy.

• 1:21:06Jordi Hays?

  And I'm just asking, and I say, um, and the time before that. And, and both times, obviously it does that and I just rage quit and go find like the iPad thing to, to, to get it to actually do it. And the other time I did it is, uh, it said, sure, pulling up local weather forecasts. You have one, so I have got it to actually set the temperature with voice, but it's actually just like comically, uh, misaligned to actual, like, no, I don't want to just use you.

• 1:21:37John Coogan?

  Misaligned AI.

• 1:21:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. No, I don't want you, I don't want this sort of, um, I don't want this sort of like passive, always on assistant.

• 1:21:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:21:47Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, maybe that would be cool if you could just do the basics well. But it made me want to run through the window, the glass windows. Uh, and, uh, yeah, so anyways, I actually am going to, it's a relatively small company and I'm gonna, that, that does this like operating system for the home.

• 1:22:09John Coogan?

  I'm going to short them into the ground.

• 1:22:10Jordi Hays?

  No, I, I'm gonna, I want to talk to the, I want to talk to the founder and just get an idea of, of like, what's going on.

• 1:22:16John Coogan?

  That's the plan. Well, uh, do you live in a glass house? Because that really affects whether or not you should throw stones.

• 1:22:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:24John Coogan?

  That's what I've heard. Anyway, let me tell you about public investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. Let's go.

• 1:22:36John Coogan?

  That makes me want to do a Ramp ad every time you play that. Uh, a VC told me startups raising because startups keep raising because talent is so expensive. I asked why talent is expensive and he said, everyone has to pay $4,000 rent to live near the office. So I asked what happens when rents go up again and he said startups have to raise another round. So I said, it sounds like he's feeding his capital to SF landlords and he started crying. Uh, yeah. Uh, oddly Oakland rental prices are really, really low, like half price, I think. Like the average, uh, the average rent in San Francisco is 4,000, but in Oakland is 2,000. Uh, if you're willing to do a commute, there still is some opportunity, but I think people want to be where the action is. They want to be in San Francisco and if they can go to their employer and get the, get the raise that they need to keep paying,

• 1:23:18John Coogan?

  uh, the rates will still go up. Average home price in San Francisco is 1.6, 1.7 million. It's getting pricey up there. Um, but we're having Sagar and Jetty on the show next week, I think. Uh, we're going to reschedule with them.

• 1:23:31Jordi Hays?

  And he's cracked it, right?

• 1:23:32John Coogan?

  He's cracked it. We're going to solve the housing crisis. We've got a bunch of crazy ideas. We're going to run through them, do a little tier list, get to the bottom of what needs to happen.

• 1:23:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, John, what were you up to in June 1993?

• 1:23:43John Coogan?

  I was a baby boy. I was a child.

• 1:23:47Jordi Hays?

  But certainly you still took a look at the Sequoia.

• 1:23:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. I should have cracked open the piggy bank.

• 1:23:52Jordi Hays?

  The seed round.

• 1:23:53John Coogan?

  Ripped $87.26 into the Sequoia.

• 1:23:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, in June.

• 1:23:59John Coogan?

  Nvidia seed round.

• 1:23:59Jordi Hays?

  1993, Sequoia Capital and Sutter Hill Ventures wired 2 million to a three-person chip startup called Nvidia. The round valued the company at roughly 6 million. Don Valentine told Jensen Huang that if he lost the money, he would kill him.

• 1:24:14John Coogan?

  That's such a good exchange. That's so elite to just, I will kill you. Of course, delivery matters a lot there.

• 1:24:24Jordi Hays?

  Jensen took that to heart.

• 1:24:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. And yeah, he returned it. Uh.

• 1:24:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, great. What, what, uh, do we know what?

• 1:24:33John Coogan?

  One million fold gain, right? It's about a $6 trillion company. So, uh, a million X gain on that investment.

• 1:24:41Jordi Hays?

  About a $5 trillion company.

• 1:24:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:43Jordi Hays?

  Close enough. What's, what's a trillion among friends?

• 1:24:46John Coogan?

  Sun Valley profile in Vanity Fair, 1994. Will Manias loves posting this. It's a great set of photos. David Geffen on a private jet, uh, Ted Turner on a horse that Barry Diller. Is this, oh, this is a profile of people who went to Sun Valley, but they were photographed elsewhere.

• 1:25:05Jordi Hays?

  Ovitz.

• 1:25:07John Coogan?

  You know, uh, the Sun Valley photos are starting to trickle out on Alami stock, Getty Images. And I, and I want to do an analysis. This is something we got to look at. I want to know who has the bulkiest security guard? Cause they, a lot of the, a lot of people are focused on the billionaires, the tech titans who are making a, making a statement at, at, uh, at Sun Valley. They all look great. Everyone's lost weight. GLP-1s are flowing, you know? Uh, but nothing impresses like having an absolute mass monster flank you.

• 1:25:38Jordi Hays?

  You want to line them up.

• 1:25:39John Coogan?

  Exactly. It's a new status symbol. And so whoever is pictured with the bulkiest and largest.

• 1:25:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. If your security guard hasn't won at least the Arnold a couple of times.

• 1:25:50John Coogan?

  I think, I think that's the new status symbol. Everyone shows up on the exact same private jet.

• 1:25:54Jordi Hays?

  They're going to be able.

• 1:25:54John Coogan?

  Oh, really? Another Gulfstream? Cool. Yeah. The whole parking lot's filled with Gulfstreams. It's all Gulfstreams. But how do you differentiate? You differentiate with the mass that your bodyguard is carrying around. You want a big guy.

• 1:26:06Jordi Hays?

  I was surprised to see, uh, I show speed doing a, doing a whole stream from, from Sun Valley, but, um, but he's really on the rise.

• 1:26:15John Coogan?

  I, I can see it. I can see it. Um, what is this cheeseburger arbitrage? Did you put this in here, Tyler? What's going on with this? Uh, you can, you can arbitrage cheeseburgers at the Barcelona airport? Oh, that's because the single cheeseburger is five, five euros.

• 1:26:31Jordi Hays?

  You can just get two and stack them.

• 1:26:33John Coogan?

  You can just get two and stack them. You should just get two regular cheeseburgers for a dollar 70 each.

• 1:26:38Jordi Hays?

  And then be, and be set up there selling them.

• 1:26:41John Coogan?

  Each. Yeah.

• 1:26:42Jordi Hays?

  Just set up a stand outside and start moving units.

• 1:26:46John Coogan?

  Uh, what they don't show you is what's to the left because there's, uh, there's something psychological about, uh, setting the middle option high. You see this at a lot of movie theaters. The small popcorn will be $3, the large popcorn will be $7, and then the medium popcorn will be 6.50. And so you're like, oh, well, I really just want a medium, but it's 6.50 for 50 cents more. I'll get the large. And sometimes they don't even stock the medium size. If you actually order the medium, they'll just say, oh, we're out of mediums. I'm just going to upgrade you to a large and charge you the medium price. But psychologically they got you thinking that $7 for a large is cheaper. So it's possible that there's a triple cheeseburger there for 5.25 and they're getting tons of people to upgrade

• 1:27:31John Coogan?

  to a 5.25 triple cheeseburger and skip the more affordable single cheeseburger entirely.

• 1:27:39Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I, I know from experience that both of these items are real.

• 1:27:42John Coogan?

  They're real?

• 1:27:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:42John Coogan?

  Which one did you buy?

• 1:27:44Jordi Hays?

  In the past?

• 1:27:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:27:45Jordi Hays?

  I think I've had both. I mean.

• 1:27:47John Coogan?

  You've had both. You fell for it.

• 1:27:47Jordi Hays?

  The real alpha is, is that, uh, you can actually, there's a different item called a McDouble, which is a double cheeseburger, but there's only one piece of cheese.

• 1:27:55John Coogan?

  Only one piece of cheese.

• 1:27:56Jordi Hays?

  This is way cheaper. Yeah. That's just some alpha for all the, everyone in chat.

• 1:28:00John Coogan?

  Crazy finance.

• 1:28:00Jordi Hays?

  Use this next time.

• 1:28:01John Coogan?

  Oh, here we got a photo of a particularly bulky, uh, bodyguard at Sun Valley flanked, uh, by Bill Gates. This guy's looking, looking huge in the flannel. That's, that's making a statement at Sun Valley. Everyone's going to be wearing the same clothes, flying the same jets. Everyone's going to be looking the same. But you can stand out with a bulky security guard like this guy. Look at that, Jordy. Look at that guy. Making a statement.

• 1:28:25Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:28:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:27Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:28:31John Coogan?

  Looks good, right? Let's see.

• 1:28:36John Coogan?

  Um, what else is in the timeline?

• 1:28:41John Coogan?

  We've gone through a number of things. The US Fed tapped Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, who just laid off 3,200 employees to lead a task force on jobs. It's interesting.

• 1:28:51Jordi Hays?

  That seems like fake news.

• 1:28:53John Coogan?

  It's from PC Gamer.

• 1:28:54Jordi Hays?

  No, it's real.

• 1:28:56John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:28:57Jordi Hays?

  That's real.

• 1:28:57John Coogan?

  Okay. Let's go over to movies. Hollywood's horror meme gold rush is minting millionaires. We talked about this with, uh, Backrooms, the, uh, originally 4chan, uh, creepypasta that wound up being a viral YouTube channel. And then a full Hollywood movie that made over a hundred million dollars, I believe. But there are many more pieces of intellectual property in the horror meme genre and they're all getting scooped up.

• 1:29:24Jordi Hays?

  That was, uh, Hormozzi, by the way.

• 1:29:26John Coogan?

  It did look like Hormozzi. It did look like Hormozzi. Uh, so the creator of a monster called Siren Head scores a rich deal as studios hunt for the next backroom style hit in the Wall Street Journal. Trevor Henderson drew a faceless monster called Siren Head eight years ago. That's pretty creepy. I'm not a fan. Uh, eight years ago and watched it spawn YouTube films, knockoff amazon.com merchandise and video games, but he never made a penny from his creation. Interesting. He just spawned this horrific meme and then, uh, hadn't profited on it until now. So he's a 40-year-old illustrator and he told, he sold the Siren Head movie rights to Warner Brothers for more than a million dollars. Pretty cool that he just illustrated this weird thing and then made so much money.

• 1:30:11John Coogan?

  According to people familiar with the matter, the deal was part of a new Hollywood gold rush to find concepts and talent online that could fuel the next horror hit like Backrooms and Obsession. "I wasn't seeing any financial benefit from Siren Head for years and I just made peace with that idea," Henderson said from his home in Toronto. "So the last few weeks have been disorienting. Since the 2000s, the movie business has been dominated like franchises like Marvel, Harry Potter, Jurassic World, which are owned or controlled by major studios. But Backrooms was based on internet meme and Obsession is an original film from a director who became famous online."

• 1:30:44Jordi Hays?

  Chris says, "That's the 5G cell tower, my bad."

• 1:30:48John Coogan?

  That is, maybe there's something.

• 1:30:49Jordi Hays?

  Describe the 5G tower as a indie horror film character.

• 1:30:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Maybe there's something of like, why do people find this disturbing? That they've psychologically learned to be afraid of cell phone towers or cell phone towers have infiltrated their neighborhoods. And so, uh, they have an aversion to this naturally. Uh, studios are trying to find the next potential horror hit that already has proven its appeal to Gen Z on YouTube, Reddit, or this is interesting, Roblox. So people that make Roblox games might wind up selling the rights to, to Hollywood studios. Uh, the chair, co-chair of Warner's Motion Picture Group, Michael DeLuca said, "We're seeing them as a resource for adaptations, the same way we look at books and other media. The race for hot digital properties resembles a kind, the kind of dogfights for buzzy scripts

• 1:31:39John Coogan?

  that used to be common in Hollywood during the eighties and nineties. 11 studios recently bid on the film rights to the psychological horror YouTube series, The Mandela Catalog. Amazon-owned UTA, uh, Amazon-owned United Artists and Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment ultimately agreed to pay millions of dollars and let the video's 22-year-old creator, creator Alex Kister direct the movie." That's very interesting.

• 1:32:03Jordi Hays?

  Daniel says, "What's the obsession with horror? There's something wrong with you if you're into that." Totally agree. Totally agree. I walked outside this morning at 5:00 AM. As I'm getting in my car, I realized there's two massive coyotes 20 feet from me in my yard. If I was a horror movie enthusiast, I would be probably thinking like, it's over. It's been a good run. Two massive.

• 1:32:28John Coogan?

  Would you be excited because you're like, I'm in a horror movie. This has been my dream.

• 1:32:31Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, maybe. But instead I just looked at them and I saluted. I gave them a whistle. They were.

• 1:32:36John Coogan?

  You didn't put your rare set of skills to work. You didn't start snapping necks and doing Kung Fu. Everything you've learned from watching New York City. Headlock for the coyote.

• 1:32:45Jordi Hays?

  There was clearly like a level of mutual respect that was, that was special to be a part of. I just looked at them, salute, nod. Uh, one of them actually just climbed over the fence. Just fully climbing. That, that was a little kind of creepy. I was like, I didn't know dogs could climb like that. Um, but it was good. But yeah, my, my theory growing, my theory growing, I, I never gravitated to horror movies, but my theory was always.

• 1:33:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, if I don't watch them, I will not, I won't be afraid walking, walking at night. Like, I grew up in the coun- I grew up in the country, uh, you know, teenager in the country, you know, you're going around on adventures, stuff like that.

• 1:33:29John Coogan?

  The team has made a, or found, uh-

• 1:33:32Jordi Hays?

  No, this is a real movie. This is real.

• 1:33:34John Coogan?

  This is a real movie?

• 1:33:34Jordi Hays?

  Coyotes.

• 1:33:35John Coogan?

  Jordy, don't watch this. You're gonna be terrified. Oh, take it down, take it down. You're scared.

• 1:33:40Jordi Hays?

  It's called Sleep Is The Enemy.

• 1:33:41John Coogan?

  Sleep is the enemy. Don't fall.

• 1:33:43Jordi Hays?

  See, there you go.

• 1:33:43John Coogan?

  Of your coyote.

• 1:33:44Jordi Hays?

  I woke up this morning.

• 1:33:45John Coogan?

  Oh, there's another video, another, uh, movie, horror film about coyotes eat the rich. That sounds crazy.

• 1:33:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Jack said there were just three dogs this morning, not two coyotes and a man.

• 1:33:57John Coogan?

  My, my take is, well, first, uh, what about, what's it called, immersion therapy? If you are afraid of heights and you go and you expose yourself to heights often, you won't be afraid of heights anymore. Do you not believe in immersion therapy, Jordy? He's locked in.

• 1:34:19Jordi Hays?

  I was just looking at the video. I did take a couple of videos of the coyotes.

• 1:34:23John Coogan?

  Um, immersion therapy, you're not a believer.

• 1:34:26Jordi Hays?

  No, I, I, I just know, I, I wasn't gonna do something I didn't enjoy doing that I felt like had very little potential value.

• 1:34:32John Coogan?

  I always had a fear of snakes. I was the Indiana Jones growing up, and then my roommate in college had a snake, and I'd play with it and it was fine, and then I sort of got over it. Still don't love snakes, but, uh, it's not a mortal fear. It's not like, ah.

• 1:34:45Jordi Hays?

  You're thinking what I'm, you're thinking what I'm thinking?

• 1:34:47John Coogan?

  No, you're gonna do that thing where you like attach the snake. Uh, you've seen those pranks where they take the rubber snake and then they, uh, clip it onto the person's jacket and like, we're out.

• 1:34:55Jordi Hays?

  John, go hit the, go hit the gong.

• 1:34:56John Coogan?

  Go hit the gong, and then, ah, snake on you. Uh, no, I'm, I'm not a fan of snakes, but I feel like the fear of snakes is like somewhat rational because they have poison, they're small, like they actually can damage you in a meaningful way. Uh, whereas there's fears of other things that are maybe a little bit less found in, in reality, uh, like less dangerous. But I don't know. At, at the same time, if you look at the actual, uh, statistics on, on snake injuries in California, it's probably extremely low, so, uh, you should probably just get over it. Um, the, the real I, IP unlocked. So right now, everyone's going after horror. Uh, there's a funny quote in here. Uh, uh, producer Aaron Koontz made another movie with a YouTube creator two years ago called Shelby Oaks,

• 1:35:39John Coogan?

  for which he raised the budget on Kickstarter because no one in Hollywood was interested. He was planning to sell Mandela earlier this year, then found out about Backrooms and decided to wait until the week that movie came out. As the bidding war escalated, Koontz and his partner started eliminating studios that didn't seem to be familiar with the material. And he has a funny quote in here, says, "They basically went into ChatGPT and said, 'What's the next Backrooms?'" Uh, "Numerous agents and producers are preparing pitches based on internet horror concepts that they plan to try and sell studios in the coming weeks, people familiar said with the matter." Um, I think it's very obvious. The next Backrooms is I Turned It Down. It's gotta be an adaptation of the I Turned It Down viral meme.

• 1:36:17Jordi Hays?

  A heart, a heartwarming story of a young man-

• 1:36:20John Coogan?

  A Bill Dungerman.

• 1:36:21Jordi Hays?

  Who walked away, walked away from money-

• 1:36:24John Coogan?

  Maybe 10, maybe 5 million.

• 1:36:26Jordi Hays?

  To run it up even harder.

• 1:36:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:36:28Jordi Hays?

  Just a grind from the rap.

• 1:36:29John Coogan?

  Sort of an Eight Mile style story. Very interesting. I think we have something here. If you've been on Instagram and you've watched one I Turned It Down video, you will be served every possible permutation of the I Turned It Down meme. Uh, we should pull some of them up, but they're a lot of, they're a lot of fun. Uh, the other filmmaker who's in the news is Uwe Boll, uh, and we have to revisit him. He has a, uh, very controversial film that's panned by critics but apparently loved by audiences. But what is interesting about this filmmaker is that although he has been panned critically many, many times, in, I believe, 2004, he challenged any, any journalist who had written a negative review

• 1:37:09John Coogan?

  about his movies to fight him physically in a boxing ring. Sounds ridiculous. Sounds like, oh, that's just him throwing out some crazy claim. Certainly no one's gonna take him up on it, especially not a film writer who doesn't even really care about this director and doesn't have any boxing experience. Uh, well, five of them showed up and Uwe Boll, uh, defeated them all. He, uh, he invited them, uh, he gave them a free trip to Vancouver where they will enter a boxing match against him. This does not end well. Excited for the documentary Heckler. Uh, and we can play a little bit of this because, uh, do we have sound on the actual thing?

• 1:37:52Jordi Hays?

  Blood drain and alone in the dark.

• 1:37:55John Coogan?

  His movies are bad. They're terrible. They're awful. They're hypnotically bad.

• 1:38:04John Coogan?

  But they're so bad on such a gigantic, huge operatic scale.

• 1:38:11Jordi Hays?

  Operatic scale.

• 1:38:12John Coogan?

  And he actually got sponsored. Uh, there's a gambling website that sponsored, uh, this whole event, and everyone's having a very rough time. Uh, I don't know what they were thinking. Apparently he promised to give them some sort of training beforehand and, uh, he didn't, and they were upset about that, but they still got in the ring with him and got, you know, completely destroyed. Uh, it's an absolutely insane, insane story. Very, very funny. Uh, anyway, moving on. Uh, record companies are pushing to label AI songs on streaming platforms. Uh, we discussed this a little bit with YouTube. Uh, where is the line? Should AI content be flagged?

• 1:38:54John Coogan?

  Meta on Instagram has a little button that you can click, "I'm not interested in this reel," and you can flag it as AI. And sometimes there's, there's a little flag that pops up. Um, some people really like AI content, some people don't, most people don't. Um, but, uh, it's, uh, uh, the coalition of groups representing music labels and artists. Say fans want transparency. Of course, the difficult thing here is the definition on what is AI? Where is the line? Obviously, uh, a one-shot output from Suno, a fully gen AI transformer-based, uh, you know, uh, music synthesis system, that's obviously gonna be AI.

• 1:39:33John Coogan?

  And an acoustic recording of people playing instruments and singing into actual microphones with no processing is not gonna be AI. Where it gets fuzzier is if you're using Ableton or some DAW to modify an autotune. And there's a huge debate right now around, uh, "Rubbers," a song by a rapper that everyone believes is AI, and he's denying it, saying that he did use autotune, and it's possible that he's not lying, but the autotune updated with a generative AI filter that makes it sort of super autotune. And so the producer maintains that the track was produced with a production system

• 1:40:16John Coogan?

  and all of the beats and melodies were laid out. He, the artist, actually went in the booth, recorded the song, and then the song was transformed into the sound that you hear. But, uh, Phoenix Flexen is the artist, uh, within the song is "Rubbers." Uh, John Caramanica over at, uh, NYT's PopCast has done a great job talking about it, and it's a fascinating, it's a fascinating story.

• 1:40:40Jordi Hays?

  Anthony in the X chat says, "My friend does music for movie trailers, says AI is insanely helpful to do background instruments that would take him a few hours, but he can hear his sleep."

• 1:40:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Should we play Jacksonville Big College? This is going to be adapted into a real, a real film for sure. He turned it down.

• 1:40:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, play it. Do we have it?

• 1:41:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's in the timeline. Uh, it's, uh, in section I. Yeah, look at this.

• 1:41:05Jordi Hays?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:41:06John Coogan?

  So you gotta be familiar with the original meme, but, uh, Big Boogies rapper, he went on a podcast, interviewed and basically lied, potentially lied, it sounds like a lie, that he was offered 15 million or 5 million dollars to go to a big school in Jacksonville for a decade and play drums, which is something that doesn't really happen ever.

• 1:41:24Speaker 04

  Exotic.

• 1:41:25Jordi Hays?

  Whoa. It's always education.

• 1:41:26Speaker 05

  Did you read this? Dude, you got a full ride. A scholarship.

• 1:41:30Speaker 04

  A scholarship, honey.

• 1:41:33Speaker 05

  We at Big College in Jacksonville are thrilled to offer you 15 something, like 10 million, 5 million, something like that.

• 1:41:43Speaker 04

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. But not 5 million dollars. They're offering you 5 million dollars to play the drums?

• 1:41:51Speaker 05

  Is it a scholarship? What the fuck are we doing here? It says, "I gotta go to school for like this decade."

• 1:41:57Speaker 04

  We are so proud of you.

• 1:41:59John Coogan?

  The lighting here, the directing, everything here is just, uh, fantastic level of production value.

• 1:42:10John Coogan?

  And so, so fun.

• 1:42:15John Coogan?

  It's about to turn it down.

• 1:42:17Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, this, this made me think, if you're a young filmmaker and you're trying to break out, the issue with making actual movies is it takes months and months and months. And then it's this really long iteration cycle. And it's like, how many times can you actually do that number of iterations? If you're doing the traditional process?

• 1:42:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:37Jordi Hays?

  Ten years, maybe you're making ten movies.

• 1:42:39John Coogan?

  On spec.

• 1:42:40Jordi Hays?

  That'd be a lot. Whereas if somebody just starts taking every single

• 1:42:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:45Jordi Hays?

  breakout internet meme and saying, I'm gonna make a five-minute

• 1:42:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:49Jordi Hays?

  sort of cinematic

• 1:42:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:51Jordi Hays?

  film around this idea, you can get the reps.

• 1:42:54John Coogan?

  And that's literally what the Backrooms guy did in Blender. Like, he just took this meme and turned it into, you know, a series of YouTube videos, built the lore, built the audience. And, and then there was demand for that. I don't know if there's actually demand for the "I turned it down" meme, but the, the virality and tenure, like the length of how long this joke has been going online. It's been months at this point. This video is very, very old and just keeps growing and growing.

• 1:43:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, in part because there's an account on Instagram that's just "turn it down" daily.

• 1:43:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:24Jordi Hays?

  And they just post the same video every day. So it just keeps going viral.

• 1:43:28John Coogan?

  Good sign. Well, out of North Korea, there's some news. Kim Jong-un has a summer project. He's renovating his mansions. Satellite imagery has revealed upgrades to at least nine of the North Korean dictator's luxury compounds.

• 1:43:45Jordi Hays?

  Nine?

• 1:43:45John Coogan?

  This is, this is the future. This is why we spent so much money getting to space to put satellite, satellites up there that can take pictures and tell us about the real estate moves of Kim Jong-un. In recent weeks, he's started remodeling his luxury compounds. Interesting to do all nine at once, or do nine at once. He probably has more than nine. He's flaunting spending power created by an economic revival. The country's doing well. They're building housing. Things are on the up and up.

• 1:44:13Jordi Hays?

  Their abundance pilled, remember?

• 1:44:14John Coogan?

  Their abundance pilled, that's right. But the 42-year-old dictator isn't bragging about the mansion maintenance in state media, revealing his luxurious lifestyle would shatter the state's propaganda that Kim suffers alongside his people, nearly half of whom are malnourished. That's terrible. At least nine of Kim's palatial residences started construction between late May and early June, according to recent satellite imagery analysis by NK Pro, a research surveillance service specializing in the Kim regime. It's like the semi-analysis of North Korea, I guess.

• 1:44:49Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get him on?

• 1:44:50John Coogan?

  I think so. The North Korean leader.

• 1:44:52Jordi Hays?

  What is their sovereign AI strategy?

• 1:44:56John Coogan?

  We should find out. Are they building data centers? I don't know. They're certainly using computers to hack stuff and they must need

• 1:45:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they were, they've been at the frontier of crypto hacking.

• 1:45:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. They own more than a dozen luxury estates across the impoverished nation. Having spent part of his childhood at a Swiss boarding school, Kim enjoys finer things. He has now built luxury housing and summer retreats for himself in the countryside. One of the villas is ongoing roofwork. Roofwork is a private beachfront complex on North Korea's eastern coastal city of Wonson. That is where his $7 million yacht is typically docked during his summer visits. I think we gotta send Tyler to go check it out in person. Pyongyang mansion belonged to Kim in early 2024. Look at this photo of this absolutely gargantuan mansion. Look at the roof lines on this thing. If you scroll down

• 1:45:47John Coogan?

  to that article, it says, "These are the places where Kim Jong-un grew up. He probably maintained the high level of taste." Zoom in on this thing because it's like a fractal pattern of housing.

• 1:45:58Jordi Hays?

  Just, let's add one more room.

• 1:46:00John Coogan?

  Bigger and bigger.

• 1:46:00Jordi Hays?

  Okay, one more.

• 1:46:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, one more, one more. Absolutely interesting. Sharing some of that luxury life with certain North Koreans is a regime tactic to maintain power. For instance, Kim's father, Kim Jong-il, gifted top-shelf liquor and luxury watches to keep the ruling elite in line. Kim Jong-un has adopted a similar approach, spending up to 1.8 billion for such perks as cars, luxury goods, and medical services for the regime's elites. International sanctions block the regime's purchase of high-end items from Rolex watches to Mercedes Maybach sedans, but Kim has spotted, has been spotted wearing a luxury Swiss watch on his visit to Beijing in September. So he's getting around those sanctions. He and

• 1:46:45John Coogan?

  his wife have installed German-made saunas inside their residences, South Korea's spy agency said in 2015. Very interesting. His younger sister carries around Dior handbags costing more than $7,000. His daughter, Kim Ju-ae, has worn a Dior padded jacket to an intercontinental ballistic missile launch. His wife once bought a Gucci handbag to, to a factory tour. Very, very interesting. There's a, there's another, there's another interesting thing. Paul Graham was sharing a chart from a Brown professor at Brown University. He

• 1:47:26John Coogan?

  gave his students a take-home midterm exam. After suspecting many cheated using AI, he made the final in-person. The orange dots are the midterm scores and the gray dots are the final scores. Looks like all three cheated on the midterm. And you gotta zoom in here because there's a person at the top, midterm 95.5, final exam score 95. Clearly just very talented, didn't cheat. But then you go down to student number 22, 55 on the fi, on the midterm, 59 on the final. Dumb as rocks, but doesn't cheat. That person's going some places. They, they know they gotta grind and they improved their score by 4%.

• 1:48:08John Coogan?

  They did better on the final than the midterm. And they're the only person that actually improved. And then you gotta also hand it to students 57 and 58. 100% on the midterm. At the very bottom, 100% on the midterm, zero on the final. Just didn't learn a single thing the entire semester.

• 1:48:30Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they're just AGI-pilled.

• 1:48:31John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 1:48:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:33John Coogan?

  Maybe they're like, I don't, I, why would I ever not have access to ChatGPT? I, I always will have access, therefore I don't need to learn anything. The, it's so brazen to cheat that much. At least some of the, some of the midterm cheaters, you know, they're, they're putting up 95s, they're getting 33s on the final. Very, you know, reasonable. They learned something. But to actually put up the 100 on the midterm and walk into the final, know that, I mean, you had some advance notice that the final was in, was in person, probably. You didn't study at all. Not, couldn't put up one point on the board. Absolutely savage. Why are you pointing at Ben?

• 1:49:13John Coogan?

  He's not guilty. We got a picture of Tyler Bucce's.

• 1:49:18Jordi Hays?

  That's the show, folks.

• 1:49:20John Coogan?

  Thanks for watching.

• 1:49:21Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for watching.

• 1:49:22John Coogan?

  We'll be back Monday at 11 a.m. sharp. Thanks so much for watching.

• 1:49:26Jordi Hays?

  Only, only a few more sleeps.

• 1:49:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, a few more sleeps.

• 1:49:28Jordi Hays?

  Only a few more sleeps till we're back. I can't wait.

• 1:49:32John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. And have a great weekend. We'll see you Monday. Goodbye.