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

You're watching TVBN. Today is Friday, July 10th, 2026. We are live from the TVBN UltraDome, 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 to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and 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 the available shares more than sevenfold. But 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 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 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 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 KOSPI 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. There's more coverage in The Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal asks 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. 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 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 that went into the company, 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 we'll be continuing to follow this.

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

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 unlocks seamless real Real-time experiences, a new value with Cisco. 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, 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. 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 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 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—

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

Yeah. You know, 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 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 could imagine someone taking an idea, puppeteering a Three.js 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. But I'm excited for the inevitable mashups of this, the Conor McGregor starring 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 Tenreiro shares a very funny meme showing the— I don't even know what aesthetic this is. This is the DaShareZone 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. 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. 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. He says 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. 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.

Yeah, not everyone has a Tyler where— yes, I tend to prompt Tyler. Yes, yes, goes into Codex.

Yes. Uh, 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?

Blender.

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 SOL 5.6 SOL is— and what I assume is 750 tokens per second in the wild. That is the preview of Cerebras, but this apparently was not actually, uh, yeah, it's Sol Ultra on fast mode. So we should be seeing even faster rollouts, although every time I see this I think—

and this is just computer use. Yeah, like it— this is not, this is not an, like, an integration. Yeah, just, yeah, yeah, 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. Yeah. It is, yeah. It's an interesting sort of feel the AGI moment.

They gotta go back and beat the original Dota 2 model. With just computer use because the original Dota 2, the, what was it? Dota 5, is that what it's called?

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

So there was this and it was brought up in the court case a ton and there was an AI model that was, I don't even, was it even transformer-based? I know they RL'd 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 2 and all of those games is you have to physically move the mouse. And so actions per second or actions per minute, APM, is very important. And so when you watch the greatest League of Legends players, the greatest Dota 2 players play—

StarCraft.

Yeah, StarCraft. They're clicking super fast, and it's very— impressive from like a mechanical perspective. And so, it shouldn't be that surprising that even though it was a demonstration of thinking ahead and strategy and actually balancing all the different tradeoffs in these games, when the computers won in Dota 2 and StarCraft and whatnot, 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.

Oh yeah, I was gonna say like, yeah, they weren't Transformers. It was LSTMs, which is like pre-Transformer.

Yeah, long short-term reasoning, right?

Long short-term memory.

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

Actually, I actually think you should adopt this.

It looks cool. I like it. He says 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 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—

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

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

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

Image.

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

Yep.

Which is—

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 from OpenAI for cyber abuse. He had no idea what he did. 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, 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 OpenAI. So he was banned by AI, convicted by AI, defended by AI, and pardoned by AI. In about 10 minutes. What a funny, funny round trip in the world. So there's a bunch of pushback on the new ChatGPT desktop app because it is the super app. It unifies Codex. The new ChatGPT app is just the Codex app. 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 the Codex app is written in Electron, which means it's a bunch of web views, web browsers effectively, as opposed to the ChatGPT app, which was a native app and had a bunch of integrations that people had sort of come to know and love. And so this is like a change in the user experience if you're deeply embedded in a particular workflow. This could be somewhat annoying because you have to use the legacy app and who knows how long they'll support that. The flip side is like, I just don't know how many people were daily driving ChatGPT as a Mac desktop app. We've heard from someone on the team that was effective for cheating and we won't dock who it was, but—

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

Yeah.

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

Yeah. I wonder if that can just be— can that just be— can that shortcut just be created with the new Codex or ChatGPT Work app?

Yeah, probably.

Where you just bind that same key shortcut. But I mean, it is making the user do work, which is always a tricky thing. 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 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 see as this—

Same flow for me. The one thing that 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 for 5.6 ChatGPT work on mobile and web, but we also didn't get everything quite right. 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. And then anyways, long story short, reset usage limits are getting reset twice today so people can keep experimenting.

Hammer it. Plan out some sites. There's also some confusion over the difference between ChatGPT Work and ChatGPT GPT Codex. And I wonder—

I just want one place to do things.

Yeah, yeah, the omnibox that can do anything for you.

Yeah.

And I think that's obviously where it goes, but there's a walk, crawl, run. There's integration points, and there's— and people have ingrained experiences and workflows and habits, and there's all sorts of different trade-offs here. 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 dividing line between these two things. And so that's probably where all of this goes ultimately. But I don't know. I was chatting with— 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 mini pop-up for your just general ChatGPT usage when you're in the ChatGPT app, which is now Codex and Work. 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 demoed this today, I was, I was doing some research on the most recent story that we're gonna talk about with Phoebe Gates' 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 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, 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 then you got to mirror that over the phone as well. So I don't know, some potential like growing pains as the as the app evolves and the use cases evolve. What are you laughing at?

Nothing, John.

What?

Should we move on to the next feature?

What are you looking at?

Which one are you laughing at?

The most recent one? How dare you?

Let's move on.

Let's 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 moves projects forward from start to finish.

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

A horse for the mind. So the Meta bull case. Semi Analysis wrote a long piece about 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 activities and sort of an entirely new business line with B2B. GPT sales. And we've 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 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 paid— 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 ad manager.

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

It's kind of a digital good, but yes, I agree with you that it would be exempt from the rule.

Yeah, but it's like eyeballs, right? It's like impressions, which, like, eyeballs, human attention, is not a— digital good. It is like a real-world thing.

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 thing. Or DoorDash. Good example.

Or a movie ticket.

Yes. But if I go to Kindle or Netflix 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.

Yeah.

And I could see Apple saying, look, if you want to be able to— because in the Meta platforms, you can be on 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, Yeah.

So, yeah, I mean, the bigger, the bigger thing is just like billions, right? You have this one of the largest companies in the world.

Yeah.

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 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 doesn't want to be in a position running his company where he has to ask for permission for things. His business is sort of like running, running with permission from this like platform, right? And so an example with that, somebody brought it up, I think Andrew, Meta lost billions from Apple because of the permissions prompt.

Yes, that's true.

You know, making it harder to just run their core advertising business. Yeah. 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 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, and have a shot at being a big part of it.

Yeah.

Then like just like hope nothing bad happens to me. The other thing I've always felt is like, you know, with the glasses, you're just gonna be able to, like, he sees a world, like the glasses are more of 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 he, and that will be like some type of like always-on intelligence. So it all totally makes sense even if it is like deeply sort of like chaotic and at times confusing, at least over the last year.

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 Labs spending and sort of just tuck it in a bucket and people won't notice if there's an extra—

I'm not leaving.

Yeah. I mean, if there's an extra $8 billion spent on the next version of the Meta Ray-Ban displays or something, people will be like, oh, it's a rounding error compared to the $200 billion on data centers or whatever.

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

Yeah, yeah, totally. So 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 is held He's never held a job in his entire life. Being Meta CEO is all he's ever known since he was 18 years old. 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. Mohan here adds some extra context around the in-app ads revenue. In-app ads is 2% of ad revenue. That's actually pretty high. And then they do pay 30% on that. I think the chat confirmed that as well. 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. The other interesting thing is like I do think the, 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, I 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. And, 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. Continue.

So what Semi Analysis wrote yesterday, which is what I believe actually moved the market.

Yes.

Not the model release itself. Semi Analysis said, at the simplest level, there are 3 things you need to build— 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 3, and therefore has the best chance of catching up with Anthropic/OpenAI. We'll explain why in full detail below. And so Alex Wang quoted this in a funny in a funny way. He said, "Compute daddy, Dylan Patel has spoken." Spoken. It's a good point. So, yeah, pretty— and yes, the stock is up 6%. Wang quote quoted Poly— quote tweeted PolyMarketMoney, which said Meta jumps over 6% at the open as investors react to yesterday's MuseSpark 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 chance here. So yeah, Alex Wang said nice with the thumbs up. He's pumping the stock.

What's interesting is like—

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

They didn't leave out SpaceX and Google.

They said— But saying—

He said SpaceX is selling $26 billion a year worth of GPUs to Anthropic/Google, and that's why they're not in the race. 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. But yeah, I agree with you. It is.

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

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

Right? They're saying you need all three.

I don't know. Yeah. Well, the main thing that they were focused on outside of the compute, which, you know, many of the hyperscalers do have that box checked. SemiAnalysis really focuses on this idea that data is the new oil. They're quoting Ilya in 2024. Ilya famously said that data is the fossil fuel of AI. And they say this time the invisible hand has created a new human data RL environment supply chain. The three incumbents, Mercore, Surge, and Handshake are all at $1 billion $1 billion-plus ARR, and many new entrants that are barely a year old are sitting around $100 million ARR. But what's interesting is they actually ran the numbers on how much data, 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 Merck Corp size business 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. Tasks and environments full-time. We think this is an extremely underappreciated advantage for MSL. The question is, if this becomes the standard playbook, you would imagine that Google DeepMind 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. 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. Mercore 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 Semianalysis thinks it will be. 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 text as NSFW are gone. At this point, the models are sufficiently smart that creating a good piece of training data is a real intellectual challenge. So they're sort of taking the contrarian stance that that being an RL environment designer is not soul-crushing and in fact can be intellectually rigorous. They also say that the top expert contractors at every data company, they're all making 7 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.

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

You gonna play it?

Yeah, we can play it.

It might be the second greatest song ever released by a tech founder who exited their company for north of $1 billion.

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

He's a billion streams. Justin Khan, 900 million just on Spotify alone. So Lucy—

and to put that in there—

co-founder of Scale AI sold to Meta for this $14 billion deal. She was the 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 berries and It's a bottle service in the club track. Yeah.

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

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

I think it must be.

You think it must be. Okay. But we will see where her EDM career goes. But it is worth reminding everyone that Justin Kahn 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.

Yes, he partnered with Adam Porte.

Yep.

And the song "Move," which I have heard played everywhere, I've played it myself. I had no idea that Justin was behind it. It has 907 million streams just on Spotify. So you can assume billions of streams when you include YouTube and Apple Music and other platforms.

Sounds like this.

And just to put that into context, "Love Sosa" by Chief Keef has a billion. Dreams. So he's put up a track on par from an attention standpoint with Love Sosa, one of the greatest, you know, pieces of music ever created in human history.

Yeah.

Um, so it's very pretty remarkable. Well, it is very remarkable.

Excited to follow Lucy Guo's career, see where she takes it. I can imagine that she'll be, uh, doing live performances, more collabs. Uh, 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—

Yeah, I want to see, I want to see what, you know, there's a lot of— Lucy Goh has fans. She also has some haters, right? 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 haters.

Yeah, 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 has spoken.

Chat is all saying Chief Keef mentioned.

Yes, Chris.

Says usually every episode mentions Chief Keef somehow. That's right, even when we don't mention it explicitly, sometimes, you know, we'll include references, you know, little Easter eggs. Uh, the Jensen jacket is on— oh yeah, Sotheby's. Uh, 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 $40,000 to $60,000. It's already sitting at 70,000. I don't know what in the slop this graphic is. Very, very one-shotted 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 cause. Yeah, I thought somebody just picked it up and got one. Sold it.

No, no, it's for charity.

So, so Jensen donated this jacket to our dear friend. Yeah, just for charity. Mares. Yeah, that 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 17th. And so there's some time. I think this runs up. I'm gonna put it at, uh, north of $500,000.

So what the last one sold for, right?

Yeah, over a million.

Over a million. Absolutely.

I'm putting it at north of $500,000 but sub-$1 million.

Nice jacket.

It's a good jacket, sir.

Good piece of lore. Has, uh, Palmer ever auctioned a Hawaiian t-shirt? I feel like that might That might go for a high price. Maybe he has to go public first and really, really go broad before he pulls in the 7-figure auction for the piece of clothing. But I don't know.

I think the—

The Museum of Business. Anything.

Yeah. No, I think Hawaiian goes for north of $200 million. And that's just based on, like, secondary demand for the stock. If you have an 8-figure position in Anduril, you might want to just pick up the Hawaiian shirt. It's a proxy.

It's like look-through exposure. It's equivalent.

No, it really is a bet on the company. Anduril at $1 trillion, suddenly that Hawaiian— Yeah, get a 5x. Way higher. Way higher. Zach Bull.

Do you have more on that or are we 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.

Chris says—

Where do you want to go?

He's buying Palmer's goatee. So Palmer, shave the goatee, put it on a board. And auction it for a good cause.

Okay.

Yeah.

Go back to Zach. I want to close out.

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

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

I don't even know. I don't even know at this point. 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, 4 days long? Oh, okay.

So it's like time warp. Oh cool. Okay. I like this. Yeah. I gotta go watch like a 2-hour fake documentary about it to get to the bottom of that. Really put on the tinfoil hat. Um, 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 5-minute chart is absolutely diabolical. But it is, it is a very— it's the beginning of a new narrative. And it does feel like it feels like Meta for a lot of people was never a SaaSpocalypse victim. It was always going to be an AI winner. So like they've worked on AI for a decade, they had FAIR.

They were an AI winner until they said, actually, we're going to invest way more into this. Yeah. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Exactly. And so 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. And actually boom. And Citrini agrees with that. 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, Yann LeCun is raising a new AI-focused VC fund. He raised $1 billion earlier for his startup AMI Labs. Now he's raising a billion-dollar fund and he left Meta to raise billions to build and invest in AI, says Trace Cohen. So good luck to the AI godfather, Yann LeCun. Very interesting. 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. But turns out they're pretty 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. One thing we didn't get to talk to Eric about that I was interested in is the MuseSpark image model is maybe the more exciting in the short-term piece. I mean, MuseSpark 1.1 is like, as Semianalysis 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 MuseSpark 1.1 just yet, but they're at least on the, on the right path and they have this data advantage potentially. But 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 were, if your reaction to the what in the slop was that particular image, 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. 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 ChatGPT has the, it's not this, it's that, or did until they sort of worked that piece out. And then a new one pops up every couple of weeks and people get annoyed by it. And it seems like there's actually a an opportunity for Meta to create 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 it's superpowering the ad platform and figuring out should they be using emojis, how many emojis should they be using, bullet points when, and RL.

And if you're going after business customers.

Yeah.

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

And I'm sure that every ad, every ad, every business that's running ads on Meta right now is going to ChatGPT and Claude and saying, generate me 50 different lines of copy that I can use for my ads. 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—

I know where you're going with this.

What are you thinking?

Zuck drops an e-commerce mastermind course to help fund the CapEx?

Yeah, I love it.

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

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

The Zuck course generates— It would go really hard.

—billions. Yeah, it would. It would. Anyway, let's move on to our next story. But first, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Sounding good. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, app, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. So we got to talk about— I think we should talk about FiaGate. FiaGate, the story that is at the center of Phoebe Gates's life. Her company Fia is in Bloomberg today with some accusations of misattribution in the e-commerce world. Via 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. You can read the exclusive story. Let's click into this and sort of understand what's going on.

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

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

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

Yeah.

And there's tons and tons of people online building businesses. Yeah. That aren't necessarily running like Meta ads yet. Yeah, right. They're not necessarily even set up in the ads manager, but they're thinking about like website copy and things like that. But yeah, yeah, could see it going either way.

But I mean, we already know that, that Zuck doesn't like talking about the ads business.. And so that's the whole discussion of like you want to talk about the agent decoding capabilities of the new model, even if I wouldn't be surprised if that model, if that functionality that you're talking about got better in the last month. Obviously it did. It's just something that's not top of mind for people and maybe it should. But honestly, I think the AI opportunity is so big that the market might just love this.

I mean, the market already says, okay, I want to talk about FIA gate, not Meta. Sorry to distract. All good, all good. I appreciate the comment.

An advertising startup co-founded 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. You download the FIA tool onto a web browser. It's a Chrome extension, basically. Use it while shopping and voilà, the so-called extension can quickly find discount codes for products. We've seen these with Honey.

And isn't calling it so-called extension is kind of a low blow. Like, it is certainly an extension. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you can't— I mean, I guess, I guess the really aggressive take would be like, this is not even— this is just malware.

Doesn't actually extend anything.

This is, you know, software. Okay.

So businesses like these known in industry parlance affiliate marketing programs typically collect a commission from retailers that, 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 it didn't actually drive, in violation of many digital platforms' policies. Bloomberg tested the FIA mobile browser extension extension across more than 50 websites and found that during the checkout process, Theia 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. Uh, 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 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. 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 in an email sent Tuesday to retailers that raised concerns about what it said were FIAS fake clicks or cookie stuffing. It attached videos that it said showed FIAS extension silently opening 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 Wirecutter is affected. That's owned by The New York Times.

This is a PR nightmare. Sites like Dupe are affected. Yes, we've had, we've had Bobby. Yes, from Dupe. He gave some good coverage. So why don't you give us the backstory on Honey? Yes. And why? Nollies says this is what Honey got killed for doing.

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

So you're saying, uh, FIA is potentially worse than Honey?

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 and you—

so, so you search, I want a horse. You go to horserewiews.com.

You go to horserewiews.com and they've got thousands, maybe even millions of stallions available.

Yeah, yeah, and they recommend you a Clydesdale from ClydesdalesOnline.com and you click from horserewiews.com over to Clydesdale Review— BestClydesdales.com, ClydesdalesDirect.com, and you land on ClydesdalesDirect.com. And at that moment, the URL almost certainly on that button that you clicked on horserewiews.com is to ClydesdalesDirect.com?utm=horserews.com. So when you land on ClydesdalesDirect.com, the actual e-commerce site that will sell you the horse, horserews.com gets attribution. They get credit for referring 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 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. And so there's a whole host of sites.

Yeah, because like a lot of the purchase decision-making is happening on horserews.com. Exactly. You're comparing and contrasting. Sort of the Wirecutter for horses. Yes, exactly. Maybe this is— Maybe we got a business here. Maybe this is something, you know, we should build.

Obviously, a lot of— ChatGPT sites, you're thinking what I'm thinking.

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

Yes, we got to 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, 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.

But what happens, John? Yes, back in the day, the, the, the buyer had Honey. 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. Yeah. And so you click on Honey.

It's about 10% more than you want to pay.

And they got a coupon code for you. Clydesdales20 or something, or Budweiser50. 50% off your Clydesdale. It's a Budweiser partnership. Who knows?— 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 affirmatively. You can't just do nothing. You click, and the affiliate— 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 horserews.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? 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 clicking.

You're being a little piggy.

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. But the violation and why Honey went so viral, there's this YouTube video, The Problem with Honey has 20 million views. It was attacking a lot of creators because MrBeast had worked with Honey. Marques 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 say download this, download this, 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 a lot of it so they can pay the YouTube influencers to promote their product.

Yeah, anyway, 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 specific creator. And sometimes there'd be like a small creator, all of a sudden they would have like hundreds of purchases through their code. I'd be like, wow, they either have insane engagement or it leaked to Honey and then you check. And usually these codes—

Honey would set up their own sometimes. They would set up their own in your affiliate system. There were a bunch of annoying things where you would, yeah, you would promote with a 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 makes it hard to track who's actually—

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

Anyway. Vindicated. Vindicated. True.

And so let's get into why— what he is being accused of and why it is potentially— yes, if this is what they're doing. Yes. We don't know again if it's an accident or it's intentional, but why it's potentially even more predatory than—

than Honey. 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 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 ways. 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 and deliberately evaded affiliate network stand-down checks. Nothing comparably, 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, so give this to me in horse terms.

So you go from horserews.com over to Clydesdale's Direct. You merely have FIA installed as an extension, you don't notice any—

you don't, you don't know that FIA has been a part of the interaction at all. You don't know. You just click through, but you have the software running in your browser that is inserting effectively attribution for FIA without you knowing. Stealing potential revenue from HorseReviews.com. Yes. And HorseReviews.com probably had to run ads. Yep. On Google to get people to horserews.com to educate them on the horse market, to get them to Clydesdales Direct, to get them to close. And so they're sitting here being like, hey, we did all this work to get ClydesdalesDirect.com a new customer and we're not being compensated for it.

And say, well, normally I'm sending a check to horserews.com. I, I guess I'm sending a I'll accept a fiat now, whatever. As long as I'm getting customers, I'm fine.

Ari. Yes. The world champion of the chat today says, OK, this is like old-school ad fraud. So one of the concerning things here is that I think this had been running since like January or December, as the article said. And so they had some software update that was pushed. This started happening. So it's been happening for, let's say, around 6 months.— and you would assume that they would have figured this out, that, hey, if it genuinely was an error and corrected it, right? Yeah. But maybe it's possible that it, you know— I don't know. A lot of—

I mean, 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, 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 rolls up to a big number, $12 million-plus in sales driven, but the actual commission might be 3%. So you might be looking at like $300K or something like that of actual money that moved to the wrong place there. Bloomberg's not actually 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 user action. Apple also requires Safari affiliate redirects to be disclosed. Civil theories such as deceptive practices, unjust enrichment, interference with contracts, and unauthorized intentional 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, everyone on the timeline was preying on Phoebe's downfall way before— 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. The villain arc. The villain arc, potentially. But seriously, there is a question about what happens from here. And I think that there's a huge opportunity to go bigger, 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, I think she's Joe way big Bloomberg. I don't know, that might not be for sale.

No, I don't, you know, I'm sure a lot more facts will come out. Yeah, certainly a terrible day on the internet, uh, to be the, the FIA team, uh, you know, we don't need to assume their intentions yet Yeah, but, but yeah, it's obviously like very rough situation.

I mean, it's totally possible. It's just a bug.

Yeah, it's possible. And yeah, it'll be interesting to see where they go from here. I think people should stop speculating that this is like related to CERN, right? You know, the timing is, is uncanny. Uncanny. But, you know, no. So rough Rough situation. And yeah, you can tell that she just wanted to be respected for being an independent entity and like company, right? Like, she, I think, talked about not raising money from her dad and doing it independently. So, I think—

$3 billion from Bill and start buying some of the greatest American assets that are out there.

I like that play.

I just like the David Ellison playbook. He 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 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 as possible and just jump straight to the top of the stack and start putting together mega deals. I don't know. I've just been so impressed with the David Ellison strategy of just going absolutely huge. And I don't know, it's working.

William says maybe Fable did it. It is possible that they were building this personal AI shopping assistant, but then they accidentally cracked recursive self- self-improvement. And so 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 FIA team even being aware? Yeah, like it could have been creating offshore accounts, essentially things like that. So this is possible, possible that, you know, they, they've unlocked this sort of dark super intelligent and, and, uh, it is going to be born through this shopping assistant. We don't know, we don't know much yet. Yeah, but this will be a story. We can't rule it out.

But we can tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Anyways, China has successfully launched a reusable rocket in a win for their space program. Interesting. And there's a video of 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 the U.S. and Elon Musk's SpaceX. The Long March 10B— Long March is a good name, it's a good name— and its maiden flight was launched into orbit around noon Friday from southern Hainan Province. Minutes later, a giant net caught caught the rocket's booster upon its descent. So that's a giant net in a cube. What an interesting strategy. Sort of a version of their 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.

Yeah, if you really zoom in, you can kind of see the cables that are holding it. This video also looks kind of like AI-generated. I don't think it is, but it kind of has that feel.

What are the cues to you?

I don't know. It's always hard to like actually—

You're just like full cope. It must be AI-generated. It might be. They do have incredible video capabilities over there, but 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 Technologies, 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. 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 December failed. Giant net. What an interesting— do we know that they were going to work on this? This is pretty crazy. I like this. Anyway, in other news, thousands of Costco employees have quietly become millionaires thanks to the retailer's generous pay, benefits, and a long-running 401 program. The Wall Street Journal profiled an individual who makes $33 an hour and yet has still become a millionaire just from working at Costco. Tucson cashier Tony Bazar, or Barzar, 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, Barzahr stayed with the company, regularly contributing a small portion of his paycheck to his 401 and has now accumulated more than $1 million. Barzahr'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, 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 2 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, OK, we're in a financial crisis. People might be pulling back on luxury jewelry, but they're certainly going to I'm 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. Wow, pretty interesting. The value of Costco's benefits became clear when Barzahr's wife of 26 years was diagnosed with stage 3 brain cancer. Horrific. Costco's health insurance covered the full cost of her 3 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 4 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 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. And so the investment has clearly paid off.

So yeah, and give you an idea of typical turnover in retail, it can be for full-time hourly store staff, Yeah. According to Mercer's 2025 survey is sitting around 40 to 70% a year.

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

College? I would go to Costco.

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

I figured out at some point that they were doing the rotisseries at like as a loss leader. Yes. And I was like, You're not going to get me. So I'd go in there and I'd just only get the grocery.

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

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

That's fake news. That's fake news. But yes, if you're trying to save money, I mean, you don't necessarily need to work at Costco, but certainly, Certainly shopping at Costco, hugely advantageous. Before we move on to the next one, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. And we can move on.

Do you want to tell us about— Did you know, did you know, John, that Love Island is suddenly driving a surge of women to the prediction market? Kalshe. 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.

Yeah, I would've expected the first kind of breakout media property in that would really be driving net new people into platforms like this would've been the Turnt It Down Cinematic Universe, right? You bet on that. Betting, did he turn it down? And if so, how much did Big Boogie? How much did he turn down? 15, 10, 5. And then you could also bet on, well, how long did they want him to be there? Was it actually a decade? Was it actually a decade?

Right. Was it a standard 4-year term?

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 of KALSHI between June 8th and June 28th, compared with a 54% increase among men. Love Island markets have now generated roughly $52 million in trades, and they have 3 times as many female traders as male traders. The show's format, format makes it almost perfectly designed for this. Episodes air 6 days a week, are released close to real time.

6 days a week? How many episodes in a season?

I would assume it was once a week. Wait, so they're airing it in real time, so it's close to live.

Or close to real time.

I think there's a new episode every day, and it goes for like 6 or 8 weeks. Whoa. And how many seasons do they do a year? Uh, I think it might be every, like, season? It's either like summer and winter, or summer, winter, fall, spring.

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

Okay. Okay. I need a market on how long until there's an insider trading scandal on Love Island. For sure. That's— and that's a market manipulation. Like, because there's no contact with the outside world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what happens when somebody, you know, airdrops in that facility? You know, skywriting over that?

Carrier pigeon? Yeah, they're— I need my emotional support pigeon. And then you find out that they're writing, I—

yeah. And it's like, you can just tell, like, if somebody was, you know, potentially a high potential candidate, they could tell their family, bet everything, bet, uh, you know, I'm, I'm gonna look great until— I don't even know the, the plot of, of this 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 going to, I'm going to just fall apart. Right. And so there's— there, 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. 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 2 of those per year. So that's 3. Upregov says production staff has their phones. It's just the contestants that—

oh, so the production staff could do it. Yeah. Interesting. It'll happen. Well, did you know that Chris Williamson was on Love Island 2015?

Was that how he broke out?

I mean, it was like a big moment for him. How did he do? Broad scheme? I don't know how he did, but you can pull up—

should he be running a Love Island hedge fund? Prediction Markets hedge fund. Maybe, maybe.

What happened? Uh, 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. Uh, he entered the 2015 series as an original cast member on day 1. 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. Reflecting on his time on the show in 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. And of course, he's done a fantastic job with Modern Wisdom. We're huge fans. Inspiring. Very, very interesting. Oh, this is interesting. Yeah, not that. That is off the screen. Look at Chris. Kalshe prediction market on his body fat percentage. Percent. Um, 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 2 days, we'll see if Kalshe can keep up. Uh, yeah, it does feel like there's an opportunity in, uh, in sports bars for reality TV now that the category is so mature, people are betting on it.

Well, yeah, the, 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.

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 helps Sonos home theaters— Sonos' 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. 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 have so many smart speakers delivered to folks. It's like a way to bootstrap with a big partnership or an acquisition or something. It's been a rough period for Sonos. 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. Just kind of admitting that things have been slowing down and the company's in a rougher position and they need to be leaner, they need to be more narrow, and they need a product that really is 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— overcraft? Yeah, I am very, very curious if within the next within the next 2 years we can get actually smart, smart home systems and speakers? Like, can we get— it seems to be a real challenge. I moved into a new house recently and it has a smart home system that I've been— I almost— I almost—

the name of the system, I don't even want to name it.

I don't want to. I don't want to. I don't. It's a small company.

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

And so anyways, just to give you an idea of how smart the smart home system is, I— you're supposed to be able to tell it to like set the AC, right? So you just say the name of the system, which I won't name, and then you say what you want it to do. So I'll say, hey, set the AC. Yeah. So, hey Shrek, set the AC to 68 degrees. Yeah. And the last 2 times I tried it, it says, it says, sure, I'd love to help you with design inspiration for your home. No way. No, no, no.

It goes into a full—

it just goes on to a totally separate rant. Crazy. And I'm just asking and I say, and the time before that. Yeah. And both times, obviously it does that and I just rage quit and go find like the iPad thing to get it to actually do it. Yeah. And the other time I did it is it said, sure, pulling up local weather forecast. No, you have one. So I have got it to actually set the temperature. Yeah. But it's actually just like comically misaligned to actual like, no, I don't want to just use you. It's misaligned AI. Yeah, yeah. No, I don't want you. I don't want this sort of, I don't want this sort of like passive always-on assistant. Yeah, totally. Maybe that would be cool if you could just do the basics well. Yeah, yeah. But it made me want to run through the window, the glass windows. And yeah, so anyways, I actually am going to It's a relatively small company, and I'm going to— that does this operating system for the home.

I'm going to short them into the ground.

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

That's the plan. Well, do you live in a glass house? Because that really affects whether or not you should throw stones. Yeah. 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. 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. Yeah, oddly, Oakland rental prices are really, really low, like half price, I think. Like the average rent in San Francisco is $4,000, but in Oakland it's $2,000. 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 raise that they need to keep paying, the rates will still go up. Average home price in San Francisco is $1.6, $1.7 million. $1.7 million. It's getting pricey up there. But we're having Sagar and Jetty on the show next week. I think we're going to reschedule with—

he's cracked it, right? He's cracked it.

We're going to solve the housing crisis. We 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.

John, what were you up to in June 1993? I was a baby boy. I was a child. But certainly you still took a look at the Sequoia Yeah, I should have cracked open the piggy bank.

The seed round ripped $87.26 into the Sequoia.

In June, the seed round, 1993, Sequoia Capital and Sutter Hill Ventures wired $2 million to a 3-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.

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

Jensen took that to heart.

Yeah, he returned it.

Great. What do we know?

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

About a $5 trillion company. Yeah, it's close enough.

What's a trillion among friends? Sun Valley profile in Vanity Fair, 1994. Wilman Ayers loves posting this. It's a great set of photos. David Geffen on a private jet. Ted Turner on a horse. Barry Diller. Is this— oh, this is a profile of people who went to Sun Valley, but they were photographed elsewhere.

Ovitz.

You know, the Sun Valley photos are starting to trickle out on alum me stock Getty Images, 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 because a lot of people are focused on the billionaires, the tech titans who are making a statement at Sun Valley. They all look great. Everyone's lost weight. GLP-1s are flowing, you know, but nothing impresses like having an absolute mass monster flanking. You want to line them up. Exactly. It's a new status symbol. And so whoever is pictured with the bulkiest and largest security guard hasn't won at least the Arnold a couple times. I think that's the new status symbol. Everyone shows up on the exact same private jet. 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. I was surprised to see IShowSpeed doing a, doing a whole stream from, from Sun Valley. But, but he's really on the rise.

I can see it. I can see it. What is this cheeseburger arbitrage? Did you put this in here, Tyler? What's going on with this? You can, you can arbitrage cheeseburgers at the Barcelona airport. Oh, that's because the double cheeseburger is 5 euros. €5.

You can just get 2 and stack them.

You can just get 2 and stack them. You should just get 2 regular cheeseburgers for $1.70 each and then be set up there selling them.

Yeah, just set up a stand outside.

Well, start moving units. 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 gonna 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 to a $5.25 triple cheeseburger and skip the more affordable single cheeseburger entirely.

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

Yeah.

Which one did you buy in the past? Yes, I think I've had both. I mean, you've had both.

You felt like—

the real alpha 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.

Only one piece?

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

Crazy. Use this next time. 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 gonna be wearing the same clothes. Flying the same jets, everyone's gonna be looking the same, but you can stand out with a bulky security guard like this guy. Look at that, Jordi. Look at that guy making a statement.

There we go. Yeah, there we go.

Looks good, right? Let's see, um, what else is in the timeline? We've gone through a number of 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. That seems like fake news.

It's from PC Gamer.

No, it's real. Mm-hmm. That's real.

Okay, let's go over to movies. Hollywood's horror meme gold rush is minting millionaires. We talked about this with Backrooms, the originally 4chan 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.

That was Hormozy, by the way.

It did look like Hormozy. It did look like Hormozy. So the creator of a monster called Siren Head, Scores a rich deal as studios hunt for the next Backrooms-style hit in the Wall Street Journal. Trevor Henderson drew a faceless monster called Siren Head 8 years ago. That's pretty creepy. I'm not a fan. 8 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 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 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 by franchises like Marvel, Harry Potter, Jurassic World, which are owned or controlled by major studios. But Backrooms was based on an internet meme and obsession as an original film from a director who became famous online. Chris says, that's the 5G cell tower in my backyard. That is—

maybe there's something— describe the 5G tower as a indie horror film character.

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 they have an aversion to this. Naturally, 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 De Luca, 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 that used to be common in Hollywood during the '80s and '90s. 11 studios recently bid on the film film rights to the psychological horror YouTube series The Mandela Catalogue. 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.

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 AM. As I'm getting in my car, I realize 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— I would be excited because you're like, I'm in a horror movie. This has been my dream. Maybe, maybe.

But instead I just looked at them and I saluted. I gave them a whistle.

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 UFC? You had headlock for the coyote?

There was clearly like a level of mutual respect that was special to be a part of. I just looked at them, salute, nod. One of them actually just climbed over the fence, just fully climbing. That was a little kind of creepy. I was like, I didn't know dogs could climb like that. But it was good. But yeah, my theory growing up, I never gravitated to horror movies, but my theory was always, if I don't watch them, I won't be afraid walking at night. Like, I grew up in the country, you know, teenager in the country, you know, you're going around on adventure stuff like that.

The team has made a— or found—

No, this is a real movie. This is real. It's a real movie. Coyotes.

Jordi Hays, watch this. You're going to be terrified. Oh, take it down. What is it? Take it down.

You're scaring me. It's called Sleep is the Enemy. Sleep is the Enemy.

Don't fall asleep if you're a coyote.

I woke up this morning.

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

That sounds crazy. Yeah. Jack said there were just 3 dogs this morning. Not two coyotes and a man.

My, my take is, well, first, 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, Jordi? He's locked in.

I was just looking at the video. I did take a couple of videos of the coyotes. That's fine. Immersion therapy, you're not a believer? No, I just know I wasn't going to do something I didn't enjoy doing that I felt like had very little potential value.

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 it's not a mortal fear.

It's not like— You're thinking what I'm thinking?

No, you're going to do that thing where you like attach to me off You've seen those pranks where they take the rubber snake and then they clip it onto the person's jacket. And they're like, "Go on, go hit the gong." Go hit the gong, and then, "Ah, snake on you." No, I'm not a fan of snakes, but I feel like the fear of snakes is somewhat rational because they have poison, they're small, they actually can damage you in a meaningful way. Whereas there's fears of other things that are maybe a little bit less found in reality. Like less dangerous. But I don't know. At the same time, if you look at the actual statistics on snake injuries in California, it's probably extremely low. So, you should probably just get over it. The real IP unlock— so right now, everyone's going after horror. There's a funny quote in here. "Producer Aaron Coons made another movie with a YouTube creator 2 years ago called Shelby Oaks 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, Coons and his partner started eliminating studios that didn't seem to be familiar with the material. And he has a funny quote 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. 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 if you've been on Instagram.

A heartwarming story of a young man. A Bill Dungy who walked away, walked away from money.

Maybe $10, maybe $5 million. To run it up even harder.

Yes, and the right way. Just to grind from the right.

Sort of an 8 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. We should pull some of them up, but they're a lot of fun. The other filmmaker who's in the news is Uwe Boll, and we have to revisit him. He has a 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 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 up on it, especially not a film writer who doesn't even really care about this director and doesn't have any boxing experience. Well, 5 of them showed up, and Uwe Boll defeated them all. He invited them. 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. We can play a little bit of this because, uh, do we have sound on the— BloodRayne and Alone in the Dark.

His movies are bad. They're terrible. They're awful. They're hypnotically bad, but they're so bad on such a gigantic, huge, operatic scale.

Operatic scale. And he actually got sponsored. There's a gambling website that sponsored this whole event and everyone's having a very rough time. I don't know what they were thinking. Apparently he promised to give them some sort of training beforehand and he didn't and they were upset about that, but they still got in the ring with him and got completely destroyed. It's an absolutely insane, insane story. Very, very Very funny. Anyway, moving on. Record companies are pushing to label AI songs on streaming platforms. We discussed this a little bit with YouTube. Where is the line? Should AI content be flagged? 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 a little flag that pops up. Some people really like AI content, some people don't. Most people don't. But it's 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 a one-shot output from Suno, a fully gen AI transformer-based, you know, music synthesizer system, that's obviously going to be AI. And an acoustic recording of people playing instruments and singing into actual microphones with no processing is not going to be AI. Where it gets fuzzier is if you're using Ableton or some DAW to modify and autotune. And there's a huge debate right now around, uh, "Rubbers," a song by a rapper that everyone believes AI, and he's denying it, saying that he did use Auto-Tune. And it's possible that he's not lying, but Auto-Tune updated with a generative AI filter that makes it sort of super Auto-Tune. And so the producer maintains that the track was produced with a production system, 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 Phoenix Flexin is the artist. Within the song is Rubbers. John Caramanica over at NYT's PopCast has done a great job talking about it, and it's a fascinating—

so fascinating. 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 do it in his sleep.

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

Yeah, play it. Do we have it?

Yeah, it's in the timeline. It's in section I. Yeah, look at this. Oh my God. So you got to be familiar with the original meme. But Big Boogie's a rapper. He went on a podcast, interviewed, and basically lied. Potentially lied. Sounds like a lie. Lie that he was offered $15 million or $5 million to go to a big school in Jacksonville for a decade and play drums, which is something that doesn't really happen ever. Um, exotic.

Whoa, it's always education. Did you read this, dude?

You got a full ride, a scholarship, a scholarship, honey!

We at Big College in Jacksonville are thrilled to offer you 15-something Like $10 million? $5 million? Something like that?

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

But not $5 million. They're offering you $5 million to play the drums? Is it a scholarship? What the fuck are we doing here?

It says, "I gotta go to school for like this next Friday." We are so proud of you. But the lighting here, the directing, everything here is just fantastic. Level of production value and so, so fun. He's about to turn it down.

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 like how many times can you actually do that number of iterations if you're doing the traditional process? Yeah. 10 years, maybe you're making 10 movies. On spec. That'd be a lot. Whereas if somebody just starts taking every single breakout internet meme and saying, I'm going to make a 5-minute sort of cinematic film around this idea, you can get the reps down.

And that's literally what the Backrooms guy did in Blender. He just took this meme and turned it into, you know, a series of YouTube videos, built the lore, built the audience, 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 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.

Well, in part because there's an account on Instagram that's just Turn It Down Daily. Yeah, they just post the same video every day, so it just keeps going viral.

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 9 of the North Korean dictator's luxury compounds. 9? This is, this is the future. This is why we spend so much money getting to space to put 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 9 at once, or do 9 at once. He probably has more than 9. He's flaunting spending power created by an economic revival. The country is doing well. They're building housing. Things are on the up and up.

They're abundant. Abundance pill, remember?

Abundance pill, that's right. But the 42-year-old dictator isn't bragging about the mansion. Maintenance and 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 9 of Kim's palatial residences started construction between late May and early June, according to recent satellite imagery analysis by NKPro, a research surveillance service specializing in the Kim regime. It's like the semi-analysis of North Korea, I guess. We got to get him on. I think so. The North Korean leader.

What is their sovereign AI strategy?

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—

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

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 undergoing roof work, roof work, is a private beachfront complex on North Korea's eastern coastal city of Wonsan. That is where his $7 million yacht yacht is typically docked during his summer visits. I think we got to 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 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 fractal pattern of housing. It just—

let's add one more room. Bigger. Okay, one more.

Yeah, one more, one more. Um, absolutely interesting. Uh, 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 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 Swatch watch on his visit to Beijing in September. So he's getting around those sanctions. He and his wife have installed German-made 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 a factory tour. Very, very interesting. There's a There's another, uh, there's another interesting thing. Uh, Paul Graham was sharing a chart from a Brown professor at Brown University. He 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 3 cheated on the midterm. And you got to 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 No, they gotta grind and they improve their score by 4%. 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. Maybe they're just AGI pills. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, maybe they're like, I don't— why would I ever not have access to ChatGPT? I always will have access, therefore I don't need to learn anything. It's so brazen to cheat that much. At least some of the midterm cheaters, you know, 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 person, probably. You didn't study at all. Not— you couldn't put up one point on the board. Absolutely savage. Why are you pointing at Ben? He's not guilty. We got a picture of Tyler Bucky's. That's the show, folks.

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