GPT-5.6 Reactions, Phoebe Gates’ Phia Drama, Hollywood Chases Internet Horror | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. 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/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/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.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  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 the available shares more than sevenfold. But to give a sense of the scale of this thing, normally when we hear about 7X oversubscribed IPOs, you might be expecting like 100% pop, 80% pop. But at this level of price and demand, you're just seeing a 14% pop, but still a great debut nonetheless.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  The company's American depository receipts opened, the ADR shares, opened at 170, 14% above the 149 they were offered at, giving SK Hynix a market cap of roughly $1.03 trillion. We got another one, another Another one. Another trillion dollar company in the AI boom. The blockbuster listing caps 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, and US-based Micron dominate the global memory market. And SK Hynix's Korean listed shares are up over 600% in the past year.

• 1:29Jordi Hays?

  Tyler's that good.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  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've got to go over to the COSPI, you've 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. 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 in the temporary symbol indicates that the shares are trading on a when-issued basis. They haven't been fully issued yet,

• 2:15John Coogan?

  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 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 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

• 3:00John Coogan?

  that went into the company, of course, situational awareness. There were a few others, Bailey Gifford all participated early, at least according to early news. I assume that those transactions closed. They are all sitting up 14% today and will be continuing to follow this.

• 3:17Jordi Hays?

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

• 3:22John Coogan?

  Ooh, you think it's a conspiracy? I like it, I like it. 5.6 launched yesterday, 5.6 Sol and Sol Ultra, and people are having fun with it. More and more demos are hitting the timeline. There's a lot of controversy 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 even use CGI very often. 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.

• 4:07John Coogan?

  But 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 art form. You have to be creative with it. Merely recreating Interstellar is not going to do it. It's not going to do anything other than just be an impressive 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

• 4:43Jordi Hays?

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

• 4:50John 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 used as the driving video for 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.

• 5:32John Coogan?

  And because the video model 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 to the table.

• 6:15John Coogan?

  But I'm excited for the inevitable mashups of this, the Conor McGregor starring in Interstellar or something like that. Also, there's a broccoli farmer that's running his farm on GPT-5.6, apparently. This was in the demo video, but Daniel Tenreiro 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 Tenreiro shares some more information. He says, "We were promised flying cars, and instead we got a broccoli 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.

• 6:58John Coogan?

  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 a lot of these things are self-explanatory, they don't. This is Joe Weisenthal position too. It's just like, "AI has no learning curve." I disagree. I think that it doesn't necessarily have a learning curve, but there is an educational process that happens when you're presented with a blank box. You can type anything. People need to understand the fringes of their imagination, what is possible, and then they can go and reach for that tool.

• 7:41John Coogan?

  But the tools are getting sharper, and sometimes they get sharper without the box actually changing. Because it's just a box of what do you want to build or what do you want to do?

• 7:48Jordi Hays?

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

• 7:54John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 7:55Jordi Hays?

  Goes into codex.

• 7:56John 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?

• 8:05Jordi Hays?

  Blender.

• 8:06John Coogan?

  This is Blender, right? Yeah, so it's building a 3D cannon, modeling it and adding different primitives, different spheres and toruses. And the video is not sped up. And Chris says 5.6 Sol 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

• 8:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's Sol Ultra on fast mode.

• 8:39John Coogan?

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

• 8:45Jordi Hays?

  And this is just computer use?

• 8:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:48Jordi Hays?

  Like, this is not like an integration?

• 8:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, 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.

• 9:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:09Jordi Hays?

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

• 9:14John Coogan?

  Anyway, Paddy McCormick is having fun with five point six soul. He says it one shotted 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.

• 9:25Jordi Hays?

  I actually, I actually think you should adopt this.

• 9:28John 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 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.

• 9:45Jordi Hays?

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

• 9:48John Coogan?

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

• 9:51Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 9:58John Coogan?

  Image.

• 9:59Jordi Hays?

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

• 10:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:02Jordi Hays?

  Which is.

• 10:02John Coogan?

  But 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. Michael had a very funny interaction where he got banned for open AI 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, the appeal was auto approved by an AI at open AI. So

• 10:44John Coogan?

  he was banned by AI, convicted by AI, defended by AI and pardoned by AI in about 10 minutes. There's a bunch of pushback on the new chat GPT desktop app. Um, because it is the super app, it unifies Codex. The, the new chat GPT app is just the Codex app. And when you install it, you can keep the old chat GPT app as chat GPT classic. But a lot of people don't like that because 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 chat GPT app, which 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

• 11:29John Coogan?

  embedded in a particular workflow. The flip side is like, I just don't know how many people were daily driving chat GPT 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.

• 11:44Speaker 02

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

• 11:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  So it was like a 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.

• 11:55John 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 chat GPT work?

• 12:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably.

• 12:06John 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 I feel like for most people's workflow, at least for mine, it was the desktop app that I used was Codex. And then when I wanted to interact with chat GPT in a chat flow, I would do a new tab. And then on my phone, I would have the chat GPT app. And then the chat GPT app on my phone could talk to Codex on the desktop, but I never actually needed to open the chat GPT desktop app. But maybe I'm just weird, but I don't know. We'll, we'll, we'll see as this.

• 12:39Jordi 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 five, six, uh, chat GPT 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. 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. Long story short, reset, uh, usage limits are getting reset twice today. So people can keep, uh, experimenting.

• 13:23John Coogan?

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

• 13:35Jordi Hays?

  I just want one place to do things.

• 13:38John Coogan?

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

• 13:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  Uh, and I think that's obviously where it goes, but there's a, there's a wall 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 trade offs here. 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. 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.

• 14:24Jordi Hays?

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

• 14:27John Coogan?

  A horse for the mind. 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 B to B sales. And, uh, and 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 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 is all in on AI because

• 15:06John Coogan?

  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.

• 15:40Jordi Hays?

  Also, also, I, I add 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.

• 15:51John Coogan?

  Kind of a digital good, but yes, I, I, I agree with you that it would be.

• 15:54Jordi Hays?

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

• 16:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:00Jordi Hays?

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

• 16:05John 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.

• 16:14Jordi Hays?

  DoorDash.

• 16:14John Coogan?

  Or DoorDash. Good example.

• 16:15Jordi Hays?

  Or a movie ticket.

• 16:17John Coogan?

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

• 16:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:34John 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.

• 16:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:55John Coogan?

  So maybe, maybe billions is right.

• 16:56Jordi Hays?

  The bigger thing is just like.

• 16:57John Coogan?

  Maybe billions is right.

• 16:58Jordi Hays?

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

• 17:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:02Jordi 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, 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 he doesn't want to be in a position running his company where he has to ask for permission for things. And so an example with that, somebody brought it up, I think Andrew Meta lost billions from Apple because of the permissions prompt.

• 17:39John Coogan?

  Yes, that's true.

• 17:40Jordi Hays?

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

• 17:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:44Jordi Hays?

  And also there's so much that's like 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 and have a shot at being a big part of it.

• 18:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:13Jordi 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? So like, that will be like some type of like always on intelligence. So.

• 18:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:58Jordi Hays?

  It all, it all totally makes sense, even if it is like deeply sort of like chaotic and at times confusing.

• 19:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:05Jordi Hays?

  Uh, at least over the last year.

• 19:06John 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.

• 19:22Jordi Hays?

  I'm not leaving. I'm not leaving.

• 19:27John Coogan?

  I'm not leaving.

• 19:31John 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.

• 19:43Jordi Hays?

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

• 19:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, totally. 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, 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

• 20:28John Coogan?

  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. And as you've put it before, like, wherever consumers, wherever people are spending time is an important place to have a foothold at least.

• 20:47Jordi Hays?

  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/Neolab on track to be world-class at all three, and therefore has the best chance of catching up with Anthropic/OpenAI. We'll explain why in full detail below." 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."

• 21:17John Coogan?

  He's spoken.

• 21:18Jordi Hays?

  Um, and yes, the stock is up 6%. Wang, uh, quote, quoted, uh, quote tweeted "Poly 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 a thumbs up. So he, he's pumping the stock.

• 21:47John Coogan?

  What's interesting is like, the-

• 21:48Jordi Hays?

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

• 21:55John Coogan?

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

• 21:59Jordi Hays?

  But, but, but saying-

• 22:01John Coogan?

  They said SpaceX is selling $26 billion a year worth of GPUs to Anthropic/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 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. Yeah, I, I, I agree with you. It is-

• 22:29Jordi Hays?

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

• 22:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:35Jordi Hays?

  And data.

• 22:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:36Jordi Hays?

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

• 22:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  Right? They're saying you need all three.

• 22:43John Coogan?

  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, underappreciated advantage for MSL. The question is, if this becomes the, the standard playbook, you would imagine that Google DeepMind would be able to do the same thing. They have the same structural, uh, 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, rip, rip it off at Meta. That's maybe the, the thesis at a deeper level. Uh, Anthropic has been the most aggressive

• 23:24John Coogan?

  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. Merckor 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. Uh, it's also worth briefly dispelling this myth that 3,000 Meta engineers will be doing mindless, low-level data labeling. The days of undereducated contractors from third-world countries drawing boundary boxes or classifying texts as NSFW are gone.

• 24:08John Coogan?

  At this point, the models are sufficiently smart that creating a good piece of train data is a real intellectual challenge. So, uh, they're sort of taking the contrarian stance that, uh, you know, being a, being an RL environment designer is not soul-crushing and in fact can be intellectually rigorous. He, they also say that the, 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. We gotta talk about-

• 24:45Jordi Hays?

  Time to talk about FIA Gate.

• 24:47John Coogan?

  FIA Gate. The story that is at the center of Phoebe Gates's life, her company FIA, is, uh, in Bloomberg today with some accusations of misattribution in the e-commerce world. FIA, the buzzy shopping app cofounded by Bill Gates's daughter Phoebe, is claiming credit for online sales it didn't actually drive. An advertising startup cofounded by Phoebe Gates, daughter of billionaire Microsoft Corp co-founder Bill Gates, bills itself as a personal shopping assistant that helps users find the lowest prices on a broad range of clothes and fashion accessories. Businesses like these known in industry parlance as affiliate marketing programs typically collect commission from retailers that make, that

• 25:32John Coogan?

  make the resulting sale. 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. These findings were consistent with Capital One Shopping and Edelman's independent testing and code review.

• 25:54Jordi Hays?

  Let's get into why, what FIA 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.

• 26:11John 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 allegations that it suppressed better coupons and delivered,

• 26:53John Coogan?

  and 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. So you go from horsereviews.com over to Clydesdale's Direct, you merely have FIA installed as an extension, you don't notice anything.

• 27:35Jordi Hays?

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

• 27:38John Coogan?

  You don't know.

• 27:38Jordi Hays?

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

• 27:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:44Jordi Hays?

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

• 27:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:49Jordi Hays?

  -stealing potential revenue from horsereviews.com.

• 27:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 27:53Jordi Hays?

  And horsereviews.com probably had to run ads-

• 27:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:56Jordi Hays?

  -on Google-

• 27:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:57Jordi Hays?

  -to get people to horsereviews.com-

• 27:58John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 27:59Jordi Hays?

  -to educate them on the, the horse market, to get them to Clydesdale's Direct-

• 28:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:04Jordi Hays?

  -to get them to close.

• 28:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:05Jordi Hays?

  And so they're sitting here being like, "Hey, we did all this work to, uh, get, uh, Clydesdale's Direct.com a new customer, and we're not being compensated for it."

• 28:15John Coogan?

  And Clydesdale's Direct 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."

• 28:27Jordi Hays?

  So, so one of the concerning things here is that I think this had been running since like, January or December, and so they had some software update that was pushed.

• 28:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:36Jordi Hays?

  This started happening.

• 28:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:37Jordi Hays?

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

• 28:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:40Jordi Hays?

  And you would assume that they would have figured this out, but maybe it's, it's possible that, that it, you know?

• 28:48John 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. Now, everyone on the timeline was preying on Phoebe's downfall.

• 29:21Jordi Hays?

  Way before.

• 29:21John 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?" So our theory is that this is where the comeback begins.

• 29:42Jordi Hays?

  The villain arc.

• 29:43John Coogan?

  The villain arc, potentially. But seriously, 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 $100 million, I believe, but there are many more pieces of intellectual property in the horror meme genre, and they're all getting scooped up.

• 30:12Jordi Hays?

  Chat saying that was, uh, Hormozzi, by the way.

• 30:13John 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. 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 $1 million. Pretty cool that he just illustrated this weird thing and then made so much money. According

• 30:58John Coogan?

  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. 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. 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 the kind of dogfights for buzzy scripts that used to be common in Hollywood during the 80s and 90s. Eleven studios recently bid on the film rights to the psychological horror YouTube series, The Mandela Catalog. Amazon-owned United Artists and Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment ultimately agreed to pay millions

• 31:43John Coogan?

  of dollars and let the video's 22-year-old creator, creator Alex Kister, direct the movie." That's very interesting.

• 31:51Jordi Hays?

  Daniel says, "What's the obsession with horror? There's something wrong with you if you're into that." Totally agree. I, I never gravitated to horror movies, but my theory was always, "If I don't watch them, I will not, I won't be afraid walking at night." Like, I grew up in the coun, I grew up in the country, you know, teenager in the country, you know, you're going around on adventures, stuff like that.

• 32:13John Coogan?

  Don't watch this. You're gonna be terrified. 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.