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

29:42I don't know. Yeah. Well, the main thing that they were focused on outside of the compute, which many of the hyperscalers do have that box checked, semi-analysis 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 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 meta is gathering from the computer use screen recordings of meta employees.

30:41And it benchmarks like they basically got a Mercur-sized 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 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.

31:22They have the same structural workforce, but maybe 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.

31:59Additionally, they have another 70 ,000 people to pull into that organization if they need to, if it winds up being as valuable as semi-analysis thinks it will be. It's also worth briefly dispelling this myth that 3 ,000 meta engineers will be doing mindless low-level data labeling. The days of undereducated contractors from third-world countries drawing boundary boxes or classifying texts as NSFW are gone. 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 being an RL environment designer is not soul crushing and in fact can be intellectually rigorous.

32:37They also say that the top expert contractors at every data company, they're all making seven figures a year, which is pretty crazy since people thought of data labeling as a$10 an hour task. And now you have people making millions of dollars a year because they're actually really great at defining what it means to complete a task from start to finish. And that's exactly why Lucy Guo just released her new single. You're going to 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 a billion dollars. Yeah, so you kind of blew my mind with this this morning that like Justin Kahn has created a smash hit.

33:26He's a billion streams. Justin Kahn. 900 million just on Spotify alone. So Lucy Guo, 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 Barry's inspired. It's a bottle service in the club track. Yeah. 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.

34:07I don't know if that's an intentional 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, we partnered with Adam Port. 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.

34:54So you can assume billions of streams when you include YouTube and Apple Music and other platforms. And just to put that into context, Love Sosa by Chief Keefe has a billion streams. So he's put up a track on par from an attention standpoint with Love Sosa, one of the greatest pieces of music ever created in human history. So it's very remarkable. It is very remarkable. We're excited to follow Lucy Guo's career, see where she takes it. I can imagine that she'll be doing live performances, more collabs. when you're in that position, it does seem like there's alpha in working with existing artists, building a team, collaborating and doing stuff and trying not to solve the problem.

35:41I want to see what, you know, there's a lot of, Lucy Go 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, headline Coachella just to piss off. The 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. Chad is all saying, Chief Keef meant it.

36:29So Chris says usually every episode mentions Chief Geek somehow. That's right. Even when we don't mention it explicitly, sometimes we'll include references, little Easter eggs. The Jensen jacket is on Sotheby's. The current bid, the estimate from Sotheby's, I think they were kind of basically putting the estimate way too low. I said this before when it first popped up. They said$40 ,000 to$60 ,000. It's already sitting at 70 ,000. I don't know what in the slop this graphic is.

37:06Very, very one-shotted AI. But the important thing is that when we first covered this, I did not realize that the Jensen jacket was going to a good cost. I thought somebody just picked it up. He got one and sold it. No, it's for charity. So Jensen donated this jacket to your friend, Justin Mares. 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.

37:50It's not closing until July 17th. And so there's some time. I think this runs up. I'm going to put it at north of 500. You know what the last one sold for, right? Yeah, over a million. Over a million. Absolutely. I'm putting it at north of 500, but sub 1 million. Nice jacket. It's a good jacket, sir. Good piece of lore. Has Palmer ever auctioned a Hawaiian t-shirt? I feel like that might go for a high price. Maybe he has to go public first and really, really go broad before he pulls in the seven-figure auction for the piece of clothing. But I don't know. I think the… The museum of business. Anything.

38:38Yeah. No, I think Hawaiian goes for north of$200. North of$200. And that's just based on, like, secondary demand for the stock, right? So if you have like an eight-figure position in Andruil, you might want to just pick up the Hawaiian shirt. Sort of a proxy. Yeah, it's a proxy. It's like look-through exposure. It's sort of equivalent. No, it really is a bet on the company. Andruil at a trillion, suddenly that Hawaiian, that's going 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?

39:22Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Chris says he's buying Palmer's goatee. So Palmer, shave the goatee, put it on a board and auction it for a good cause. Zach Bull says, Zach is posting on Axe. Elon is glazing anthropic. DoorDash is on 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 the idea that CERN keeps the world stable or something? I don't even know. I don't even know at this point. But the conspiracy crowd was saying as soon as it got turned off, have you noticed that today felt like four days long?

40:15Oh, okay. So it's like time warp. Oh, cool. Okay. I like this. Yeah. I got to go watch like a two-hour fake documentary about it to get to the bottom of that, really. Put on the tinfoil hat. So, yeah. Closing out meta. The market has spoken, according to Alex Wang. He says, an exec at a$1.6 trillion market company flexing his company's stock performance with a five-minute chart is absolutely diabolical. But it is 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 Sasspocalypse victim. It was always going to be an AI winner. So like they've worked on AI for a decade.

40:58They had fair. They were an AI winner until they said, actually, we're going to invest way more into this. Yeah. 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 Satrini agrees with that. Satrini 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.

41:37We can call this the Google at$150 phenomenon. on. In the last piece of meta news, Jan LeCun is raising a new AI-focused VC fund. He raised a billion dollars 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, Jan 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 at the time. They're good for meta. They're useful.

42:23And they're also very good for meta because they need to do, as we talked to Eric Suford about recommendation systems, ad generation. Uh, one thing I, we didn't get to talk to Eric about that I was interested in is the MuseSpark image model is maybe the more exciting in the short-term piece. I mean, MuseSpark 1.1 is, as Semi-Analysis puts it, 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 right path, and they have this data advantage potentially.

42:59But the image model right now can be used for ad creation 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 your reaction to the what in the slop was that particular image, 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 and infographics. So they might want to actually fine tune their model on what's working 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.

43:42Like there are clearly people that are sick of the turns of phrase used by LLMs broadly. You're absolutely right. All the Claude-isms and then ChatGPT is that 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 weeks and people get annoyed by it. And it seems like there's actually an opportunity for Meta to create an LLM that's just really good at writing advertising copy. And it's not necessarily as focused on deep research reports or agentic coding. But it's like it's super powering the ad platform and figuring out should they be using emojis?

44:25How many emojis? Should they be using bullet points? When? And RL on those ads. Yeah, and if you're going after business customers, why not build something that your business customers would use and love? And I'm sure that every business that's running ads on Meta right now is going to ChachyPT 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 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 five thousand dollars i'll teach you everything i know about e-commerce give it away for free you're gonna spend a lot more than that but yeah the zuck the zuck course generates really hard billions yeah it would it would Anyway, let's move on to our next story.

45:21But first, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. So we've got to talk about FIA Gate. Thea Gate, the story that is at the center of Phoebe Gates' life. Her company, Thea, is in Bloomberg today with some accusations of misattribution in the e-commerce world. Thea, the buzzy shopping app co-founded by Bill Gates' daughter, Phoebe, is claiming credit for online sales that didn't actually drive a Bloomberg investigation found.

46:04You can read the exclusive story. Let's click into this and sort of understand what's going on. Real quick, Ari's putting us in the truth zone on Meta. He says they have a product like that in the ad builder. Why would they make that external? Oh, yeah. I more think that 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 Meta AI, which is just a standalone app. and there's tons and tons of people online building businesses that aren't necessarily running like meta ads yet, right? They're not necessarily even set up in the ads manager, but they're thinking about like website copy and things like that.

46:46But you could see it going either way. But I mean, we already know 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 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 clears up. Ari says, OK, I want to talk about FIA gate, not Meta.

47:20Sorry to distract. All good. All good. I appreciate the comments. An advertising startup co-founded by Phoebe Gates, daughter of billionaire Microsoft Corp co-founder Bill Gates, builds itself as a personal shopping assistant that helps users find the lowest prices on a broad range of clothes and fashion accessories. You download the FIA tool onto a web browser. It's a Chrome extension, basically. Use it while shopping, and voila, the so-called extension can quickly find discount codes for products. We've seen these with Honey. And isn't calling it so-called extension is kind of a low blow. Like it is certainly an extension.

47:56Yeah. Like you can't, I mean, I guess, I guess the really aggressive take would be like, this is just, this is just malware. This is just anything. This is, you know, software. Okay. So businesses like these known in industry parlance as affiliate marketing programs, typically collect commission from retailers that make the resulting sale. But according to Ben Edelman, an independent researcher and consultant who studies affiliate marketing as well as Capital One Shopping, which makes a competing browser extension, FIA is claiming credit for online sales that didn't actually drive in violation of many digital platforms policies.

48:35Bloomberg tested the FIA mobile browser extension across more than 50 websites and found that during the checkout process, FIA opened a background tab without user interaction and injected its own referral code that overrode legitimate referrals from other publishers. These findings were consistent with Capital One Shopping and Edelman's independent testing and code review. 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.

49:15Edelman spoke to Bloomberg after reviewing FIA's code, which is public because it's an extension. You download it and install it and testing how the extension interacts with retailers, websites and affiliate networks at Bloomberg's request. The rules don't allow fake clicks, simulated clicks, imaginary clicks or hypothetical clicks. Only a real click will do. 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 FIA's fake clicks or cookie stuffing.

49:50It attached videos that it said showed FIA's 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. Yeah, sites like Dupe are affected. Yes. We've had Bobby on from Dupe. He gave some good coverage. So why don't you give us the backstory on Honey and why Nollies says this is what Honey got killed for doing.

50:27Sort of, but it's potentially worse than what happened with Honey. So you're saying FIA is potentially worse than Honey. Yes. So you have to think of 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 you search, I want a horse. You go to horsereviews.com. And you go to horsereviews.com and they've got thousands, maybe even millions of stallions available. Yeah, and they recommend you at Clydesdale from Clydesdalesonline.com. And you click from horsereviews.com over to bestclydesdales.com, Clydesdalesdirect.com, and you land on Clydesdalesdirect.com.

51:14And at that moment, the URL almost certainly on that button that you clicked on horsereviews.com is to Clydesdalesdirect.com question mark UTM equals horsereviews.com. So when you land on Clydesdalesdirect.com, the actual e-commerce site that will sell you the horse, horsereviews.com gets attribution. They get credit for referring you. This will just show up in your Google Analytics. It's very nice. It's a very nice thing to see. Oh, I'm getting a lot of traffic from this. Maybe I should, you know, engage with that group or maybe I should pay them. Maybe I have to pay them or maybe they'll swap out the link to some other site.

51:55And so there's a whole host. Yeah, because like a lot of the a lot of the the purchase decision making is happening on horsereviews.com. Exactly. You're comparing and contrasting the wire cutter for horses. Yes, exactly. Maybe this is maybe we got a business. Maybe maybe maybe this is something, you know, we should build. Obviously, a lot of sites, you know, venture capitalists as well as journalists would be all over this thing. Yes, we've got to spin this up. So 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.

52:31They go through the checkout flow, hopefully hosted on Shopify. Let me tell you about Shopify really quickly before we continue. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces and now with AI agents. So you're going through the Shopify flow and this 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 buyer had Honey. Yes. So the best scenario with Honey is that you're on horsereviews.com.

53:11You 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 is too expensive. 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.

53:49We 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 horsereviews.com. I did 90 % of the work. You just gave him a coupon code. Why are you getting all the credit? That's up for debate, but that's generally okay.

54:33Honey got in trouble because they started for a time period updating the cookies without people actually cooking. They were being a little piggy. 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 in 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 Mr. Beast had worked with Honey. Marcus Brownlee had worked with Honey. They had run a lot of scaled YouTube ads because it was a great business.

55:12If you just got someone to install this free Chrome extension, they would save money. It's the best offer ever because you just say download this Chrome extension. You just save money. Most people don't realize that Honey is 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 creator. Yep. And sometimes there'd be like a small creator. All of a sudden they would have like hundreds of purchases through their code.

55:55I'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 promote with a particular advertiser and they would be saying, use code ROGEN10 and then the person would show up, put ROGEN10 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 is getting the credit instead of, and it makes it hard to track who's actually working.

56:30Many founders' new company is called Pi, not Pig. Correct. Yes, Pi. Vindicated. Vindicated, true. So let's get into why, what he is being accused of and why it is potentially, if this is what they're doing. We don't know, again, if it's an accident or it's intentional, but why it's potentially even more predatory than honey. So Megalag, the YouTuber that did the Honey expose, 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.

57:17And then if they had also promoted Honey, Honey was stealing their AG1 affiliate revenue. And so the creators were sort of promoting their own demise in some way. So it was like this very viral, very ironic situation eventually got sorted out. Honey's broader scandal also involved allegation that it suppressed better coupons and deliberately evaded affiliate network stand-down checks. Nothing comparably extensive has yet been established about FIA. But FIA's reported implementation may actually be cruder. Here, Honey generally created the overwrite when the shopper interacted with its checkout prompt, even if only to dismiss it.

57:56So 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 give this to me in horse terms. so you go from horse reviews.com over to Clydesdale's direct you merely have FIA install 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 yep a a effectively attribution for FIA without you knowing yep stealing potential revenue from horsereviews.com.

58:42Yes. And horsereviews.com probably had to run ads on Google to get people to horsereviews.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. sales direct and say, well, normally I'm sending a check to horsereviews.com. I, I guess I'm sending a, uh, a check to FIA now, whatever, as long as I'm getting customers, I'm fine. Ari. Yes. The, the, the world champion of the chat today says, okay, this is like old school ad fraud.

59:23So, so one of the concerning things here is that I think this has been running since like January or December is 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 six months. And you would assume that they would have figured this out that, hey, if it was if it genuinely was an error and corrected it. Right. Yeah. But maybe it's possible that 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.

1:00:06And 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. Bloomberg's not actually alleging a particular crime. If the facts are accurate, the behavior appears far beyond mere rudeness though.

1:00:53Affiliate 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 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 alteration of tracking data are therefore quite plausible. Deliberate forced click cookie stuffing can even become wire fraud.

1:01:33The 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.

1:02:13And 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. Maybe it's not in media. Maybe it's in something else. But I think you should buy 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 and certainly a terrible day on the internet to be the FIA team.

1:03:04You know, we don't need to assume their intentions yet. But yeah, it's obviously like very rough situation. I think 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 uncanny, but, you know, no. So rough situation. And, yeah, you can tell that she just wanted to be respected for being an independent, you know, entity and like company, right? I think she talked about not raising money from her dad and doing it independently.

1:03:59I think she's going to get$50 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. It leans in. I mean, somebody was putting it like you're damned if you do, damned if you don't, if you're in that situation. and just no matter what capital-raising strategy you wind up doing, people are going to say stuff either way. So why not just lean in and marshal as much capital as possible and just jump straight to the top of the stack and start putting together mega deals? I don't know. I've just been so impressed with the David Ellison strategy of just going absolutely huge.

1:04:41And I don't know. 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-improvement. And the AI decided that in order to accumulate more capital, it should use some of the existing rails it already had. And so why not just run this sort of background program to start stealing revenue and accumulating power internally without the FIA team even being aware? It could have been creating offshore accounts, things like that. So this is possible that they've unlocked a sort of dark super intelligence and it is going to be born through this shopping assistant.

1:05:25We don't know. We don't know much yet. Yeah. But this will be a story to follow. We can't rule it out. 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. China has successfully launched a reusable rocket in a win for their space program. Interesting. And there's a video of this. I want to watch this video. China launched and partially recovered a rocket, state media said. A milestone for Beijing's space program as it competes with the U.S. and Elon Musk's SpaceX. The Long March 10B. Long March is a good name.

1:06:03It'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 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.

1:06:50What are the cues to you? It's always hard to like actually. You're just like full cup. 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's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, said it would be a big deal if China's program can regularly recover and reuse parts of its rockets. 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.

1:07:28He 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 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.

1:08:05Giant net. What an interesting. Did 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 401k 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 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, Barzar stayed with the company, regularly contributing a small portion of his paycheck to his 401k and has now accumulated more than a million dollars.

1:08:58But Barzar's story reflects Costco's longstanding philosophy of paying workers more than most retailers. The company's founders believed higher wages and benefits would reduce turnover, lower training costs and improve customer services. The strategy appears to have worked. One-year employee turnover is about 7%, far below normal retail levels. Meanwhile, Costco's business has boomed with annual sales growing for nearly two decades and the stock rising more than 2 ,000 % since the depths of the 2008 financial crisis. What a logical buy. What a logical stock to buy in the depths of the financial crisis.

1:09:34You're like, okay, we're in a financial crisis. People might be pulling back on luxury jewelry, but they're certainly going to be going to Costco more frequently. Let me just buy Costco and then you hold it and you get a 20 X over 15 years. Not bad. Wow. Pretty interesting. The value of Costco's benefits became clear when Barzhar's wife of 26 years was diagnosed with stage three brain cancer. Horrific. Costco's health insurance covered the full cost of her three brain surgeries. He took nearly a year of paid leave to care for his family and he used the company's therapy benefits to cope. This year he returned to work part-time saying the pay and benefits are a major reason why he stayed with Costco for nearly four decades.

1:10:13And it's interesting, 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, bring 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. Yeah. And to give you an idea of typical turnover in retail, it can be for full-time hourly store staff, according to Mercer's 2025 survey, is sitting around 40 % to 70 % a year.

1:11:07so did you ever go through a costco phase in your early life college i would go to costco yeah same when i started my first company we get the huge box of ramen noodles it's like five dollars and you feed yourself for like a week i 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 gonna get me yes so i'd go in there and i just only get the 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.

1:11:43That'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 shopping at Costco, hugely advantageous. Before we move on to the next one, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it and we can move on. Do you want to tell us did you did you know did you know john that love island is suddenly driving a surge of women to the prediction market calci i feel like we predicted this i feel like this was something we talked about a year ago or something but uh it's not surprising to me but it's interesting to see it show up in the data but tell me more yeah uh i would have expected the first kind of breakout like media property in that would really be driving net new people into platforms like this would have been the turnt it down cinematic universe, right?

1:12:37Did you bet on that? Betting, did he turn it down? And if so, how much did Big Boogie, how much did he turn down, right? 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? Or was it a standard of 30-year term? And so there's a lot of markets there. But the show Love Island, a reality dating competition where singles live together in a villa, a 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 Calci between June 8th and June 28th, compared with a 54 % increase among men.

1:13:21Love Island markets have now generated roughly 52 million in trades, and they have three times as many female traders as male traders. The show's format makes it almost perfectly designed for this. episodes air six days a week are released close to real time six days a week how many episodes in a season i 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 six or eight weeks whoa and how many how many seasons do they do a year uh i think it's might be every like season it's either like summer and winter or uh summer winter fall spring we're clearly experts on this.

1:14:05Okay. Okay. I need a market on how long until there's an insider trading scandal on Love Island. For sure. And market manipulation. There's no contact to the outside world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what happens when somebody airdrops in the facility skywriting over the carrier pigeon? I need my emotional support pigeon. And then you find out that they're writing. I just lost. And it's like you can just tell, like, if somebody was, you know, a high potential candidate, they could tell their family, bet everything, bet, you know, I'm going to look great until I don't even know the plot of this show.

1:14:52I 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 just fall apart, right? And so I think almost certainly there will be an insider trading scandal on 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 two of those per year. So that's three. Raghav says production staff has their phones. It's just the contestants that don't. Oh, so the production staff could do it.

1:15:31Yeah. 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? In a broad scheme. I don't know how he did, but you can pull up a photo. Should he be running a Love Island hedge fund? Prediction Markets hedge fund? Maybe. Maybe. What happened? the former club promoter and model was dumped from the villa on day 19 since his reality tv stint he's become one of the uk's most successful podcasters you know he went on a generational run with modern wisdom uh he entered the 2015 series as an original cast member on day one during his time in the villa he had a brief coupling arrangement with danielle lauren richardson Zoe.

1:16:17Ultimately, 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 and later interviews, Williams described it as a slightly surreal and boring experience. He noted that the environment forced him to confront his need for external validation and made him realize he didn't belong in the party boy persona he was portraying. And of course, he's done a fantastic job with Modern Wisdom. We're huge fans. Very, very interesting. Oh, this is interesting.

1:16:58Yeah, not that. Get this off the screen. Look at Chris. Call sheet prediction market on his body fat percentage. Bars have started treating Love Island like a live sporting event, including Tom's Watch bar in Sacramento where one watch party reportedly generated$30 ,000 in a single night during an otherwise slow sports season. The Love Island USA finale airs Sunday, July 12th in two days. We'll see if Kalshi can keep up. Yeah, it does feel like there's an opportunity in sports bars for reality TV now that the category is so mature, people are betting on it. Well, yeah, 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, like is there enough content?

1:17:52Whereas 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 had been there for a decade. Of course, there's a lot of criticisms about the UX specifically.

1:18:24And a 15-year veteran who helped 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 so many smart speakers delivered to folks. It's like a way to bootstrap with a big partnership or an acquisition or something.

1:19:05It'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, you know, things have been slowing down and the company is in a rougher position. 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.

1:19:44That was a rough period of time. Yeah, I am very, very curious if within the next two 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, 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, and so, so anyways, just to give you an idea of how smart the smart home system is, I, you're, you're supposed to be able to tell it to like set the, set the AC.

1:20:33Right. So you just say the name of the system, which I won't name. Yep. And and then you say what you want it to do. So I'll say, hey, set the AC. Yeah. So hey, set the AC to 68 degrees. Yeah. And the last two 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 just goes on. It just goes on to a totally separate range. And I'm just asking, and I say, and the time before that, and both times obviously it does that, and I just rage quit and go find the iPad thing to get it to actually do it. And the other time I did it is it said, sure, pulling up local weather forecasts.

1:21:26No. You have one. So I have got it to actually set the temperature of my voice, 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 window. And yeah, so anyways. I actually am going to, it's a relatively small company and I'm going to, that does this like operating system for the home.

1:22:09I'm going to short them into the ground. No, I'm going to, I want to talk to the founder and just get an idea of like what's going on. 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. A VC told me 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.

1:22:50So 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.

1:23:20The average home price in San Francisco is$1.6 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 him. And he's cracked it, right? He's cracked it. We're going to solve the housing crisis. We've got a bunch of crazy ideas. We're going to run through them, do a little tier list, get to the bottom of what needs to happen. 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.

1:23:53He ripped$87.26 into the Sequoia seed round. In June 1993, Sequoia Capital and Sutter Hill Ventures wired$2 million to a three-person chip startup called NVIDIA. The round valued the company at roughly$6 million. Don Valentine told Jensen Huang that if he lost the money, he would kill him. 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. Do we know what book? One million fold gain, right? It's about a$6 trillion company. So a million X gain on that investment. About a$5 trillion company.

1:24:42Yeah, it's close enough. What's a trillion among friends? Sun Valley Profile and Vanity Fair 1994. Will Manais 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 Alamy 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 they a lot of the a lot of people are focused on the billionaires the tech titans who are making a making a statement at at at Sun Valley they all look great everyone's lost way GLP ones are flowing you know but nothing impresses like having an absolute mass monster flying line them up exactly it's a new status symbol and so whoever is pictured with the bulkiest and largest security guard security hasn't won at least the Arnold a couple times.

1:25:50I think that's the new status symbol. Everyone shows up on the exact same private jet. Oh, really? Another Gulf Stream? Cool. Yeah, the whole parking lot's filled with Gulf Streams. It's all Gulf Streams. 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 whole stream from Sun Valley, 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 arbitrage cheeseburgers at the Barcelona airport oh that's because the double cheeseburger is five euros you can just get two and stack them you can just get two and stack them you should just get two regular cheeseburgers for$1.70 each and be set up there selling them each yeah just set up a stand outside and start moving units What they don't show you is what's to the left because there's something psychological about setting the middle option high.

1:26:55You see this at a lot of movie theaters. The small popcorn will be$3. The large popcorn will be$7. And then the medium popcorn will be$6.50. And so you're like, oh, well, I really just want a medium, but it's$6.50. For 50 cents more, I'll get the large. And sometimes they don't even stock the medium size. If you actually order the medium, they'll just say, oh, we're out of mediums. I'm just going to upgrade you to a large and charge you the medium price. But psychologically, they got you thinking that$7 for a large is cheaper. So it's possible 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.

1:27:39I 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. You've had both. You fell for it. The real alpha is that you can actually, there's a different item called the McDouble, which is a double cheeseburger, but there's only one piece of cheese. Only one piece of cheeseburger? This is way cheaper, yeah. That's just some alpha for everyone in chat. Crazy finance. Use this next time. Oh, here we got a photo of a particularly bulky bodyguard at Sun Valley flanked by Bill Gates. This guy's looking huge in the flannel.

1:28:12that's making a statement at Sun Valley everyone's going to be wearing the same clothes flying the same jets everyone's going to be looking the same but you can stand out with a bulky security guard like this guy, look at that Jordy, look at that guy making a statement there we go there we go

1:28:31looks good right let's see

1:28:38what else is in the timeline we've gone through a number of things the u.s fed tapped xbox ceo asha sharma who just laid off 3200 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 that's real okay let's go over to movies hollywood's horror meme gold rush is minting millionaires we talked about this with uh back rooms the uh 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 whore meme genre, and they're all getting scooped up.

1:29:24That was Hormosey, by the way. It did look like Hormosey. It did look like Hormosey. So the creator of a monster called Siren Head scores a rich deal as studios hunt for the next backroom-style hit in the Wall Street Journal. Trevor Henderson drew a faceless monster called Siren Head eight years ago. That's pretty creepy. I'm not a fan. Eight years ago and watched it spawn YouTube films, knock off 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 sold the Siren Head movie rights to Warner Brothers for more than a million Pretty cool that he just illustrated this weird thing and then made so much money.

1:30:11According to people familiar with the matter, the deal was part of a new Hollywood gold rush to find concepts and talent online that could fuel the next horror hit like Backrooms and Obsession. I wasn't seeing any financial benefit from Siren Head for years, and I just made peace with that idea, Henderson said from his home in Toronto. So the last few weeks have been disorienting. Since the 2000s, the movie business has been dominated like franchises like Marvel, Harry Potter, Jurassic World, which are owned or controlled by major studios. But Backrooms was based on an internet meme and obsession as an original film from a director who became famous online.

1:30:44Chris says, that's the 5G cell tower in my backyard. That is, maybe there's something. Describe the 5G tower as an 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 Hollywood studios.

1:31:24The co-chair of Warner's Motion Picture Group, Michael DeLuca, said, we're seeing them as a resource for adaptations the same way we look at books and other media. The race for hot digital properties resembles the kind of dogfights for buzzy scripts that used to be common in Hollywood during the 80s and 90s. Eleven Studios recently bid on the film rights to the psychological horror YouTube series, The Mandela Catalog. Amazon-owned United Artists and Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment ultimately agreed to pay millions of dollars and let the video's 22-year-old creator, Alex Kister, direct the movie.

1:32:01That'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 a.m. 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. But would you 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?

1:32:38You didn't start snapping necks and doing kung fu? Everything you've learned from watching UFC? 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. My theory growing, I never gravitated to horror movies, but my theory was always if I don't watch them, I won't be afraid walking Walking at night Like I grew up in the country I grew up in the country You know, teenager in the country You know, you're going around on adventures Stuff like that The team has made a Or found No, this is a real movie This is real This is a real movie Coyotes, 2014 Jordy, don't watch this You're going to be terrified Oh, take it down, take it down You're scared It's called Sleep is the Enemy Sleep is the Enemy Don't fall asleep See, there you go I woke up this morning Oh, there's another video, another movie, horror film about coyotes eat the rich.

1:33:51That sounds crazy. Yeah, Jack said there were just three dogs this morning, not two coyotes and a man.

1:34:00My 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, Jordy? He's locked in. I was just looking at the video. I did take a couple videos of the coyotes. Immersion therapy, you're not a believer. No, 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.

1:34:41I still don't love snakes, but it's not a mortal fear. It's not like, ah, I'm a jackpot. You're thinking what I'm thinking? No, you're going to do that thing where you attach the snake. Snakes in the office. You've seen those pranks where they take the rubber snake and then they clip it onto the person's jacket. John, go hit the gong for the snake. Go hit the gong. And then, ah, snake. 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.

1:35:16But 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 on lock. So right now everyone's going after horror. There's a funny quote in here. producer Aaron Koontz made another movie with a YouTube creator two 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.

1:35:51Koontz 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 chat gpt and said what's the next back rooms uh numerous agents and producers are preparing pitches based on internet horror concepts that they plan to try and sell studios in the coming weeks people familiar said with the matter um i think it's very obvious the next back rooms is i turned it down yeah it's got to be an adaptation of the i turned it down viral meme a heart a heartwarming story of a young man a bill dung's room who walked away walked away from money, maybe 10, maybe 5 million to run it up even harder.

1:36:28Yes. Just to grind from the eight mile style story. Very interesting. I think we have something here. If you've been on Instagram and you've watched one, I turned it down video, you will be served every possible permutation of the, I turned it down meme. Uh, we should pull some of them up, but they're a lot of, they're a lot of fun. Uh, the other filmmaker who's in the news is Uwe Boll. Uh, and we have to revisit him. He has a 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 journalist who had written a negative review about his movies to fight him physically in a boxing ring.

1:37:15Sounds ridiculous. Sounds like, oh, that's just him throwing out some crazy claim. Certainly no one's going to take him up on it, especially not a film writer who doesn't even really care about this director and doesn't have any boxing experience. Well, five 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. And we can play a little bit of this because... Do we have sound on the... Blood Rain and Alone in the Dark. His movies are bad.

1:37:56They're terrible. They're awful. They're hypnotically bad. But they're so bad on such a gigantic, huge operatic scale. Such an 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 funny. Anyway, moving on. Record companies are pushing to label AI songs on streaming platforms.

1:38:47We 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 music synthesis system, That's obviously going to be AI.

1:39:33And 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 auto-tune. And there's a huge debate right now around Rubbers, a song by a rapper that everyone believes is AI. And he's denying it, saying that he did use auto-tune. and it's possible that he's not lying, but the 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.

1:40:19The 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 Karamanica over at NYT's Popcast has done a great job talking about it and it's a fascinating story. 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 didn't 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 uh it's uh in section i yeah look at this oh my god so you got to be familiar with the original name but uh big boogie rapper he went on a podcast interviewed and basically lied potentially lied sounds like a lie that he was offered 15 million or five million dollars to go to a big school in jacksonville for a decade and play drums which is something that doesn't really happen ever exotic well it's always Did you read this?

1:41:27Dude 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, five million, something like that. Wait, wait, wait, but not five million dollars. They're offering you five million dollars to play the drums? Is it a scholarship? What the fuck are we doing here? It says I have to go to school for like... language and writing. We are so proud of you. But the lighting here, the directing, everything here is just a fantastic level of production value.

1:42:10And so, so fun.

1:42:15He's about to turn it down. But yeah, this made me think, if you're a young filmmaker and you're trying to break out, the issue with making actual movies is it takes months and months and months and then it's this really long iteration cycle. And it's like, how many times can you actually do that number of iterations if you're doing the traditional process? 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 five minute sort of cinematic film around this idea, you can get the reps.

1:42:54And that's literally what the back rooms guy did in Blender. Like he just took this meme and turned it into, you know, a series of YouTube videos, built the lore, built the audience. And then there was demand for that. I don't know if there's actually demand for that. 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 turned it down daily. And they just post the same video every day.

1:43:26So it just keeps going viral. Well, out of North Korea, there's some news. Kim Jong-un has a summer project. He's renovating his mansions. Satellite imagery has revealed upgrades to at least nine of the North Korean dictator's luxury compounds. Nine? 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 nine at once or do nine at once. He probably has more than nine. He's flaunting spending power created by an economic revival.

1:44:09The country's doing well. They're building housing. Things are on the up and up. They're abundance-pilled, remember? They're abundance-pilled. That's right. But the 42-year-old dictator isn't bragging about the mansion maintenance in state media, revealing his luxurious lifestyle would shatter the state's propaganda that Kim suffers alongside his people, nearly half of whom are malnourished. That's terrible. At least nine of Kim's palatial residences started construction between late May and early June, according to recent satellite imagery analysis by NK Pro, a research service specializing in the kim regime it's like the semi-analysis of north korea i guess uh 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 been at the frontier of crypto hacking yeah uh they own more than a dozen luxurious estates across the impoverished nation.

1:45:11Having 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' ongoing roof work is a private beachfront complex on North Korea's eastern coastal city of Wansan. That is where his$7 million yacht is typically doxed during his summer visits. I think we got to send Tyler to go check it out in person. and 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.

1:45:51He probably maintained the high level of taste. Zoom in on this thing because it's like a fractal pattern of housing. Let's add one more room. 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 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 been spotted wearing a luxury switch watch on his visit to Beijing in September.

1:46:42So he's getting around those sanctions. He and his wife have installed German-made saunas inside their residences, South Korea's spy agency said in 2015. Very interesting. His younger sister carries around Dior handbags costing more than$7 ,000. His daughter, Kim Joo Ai, 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 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 three 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.

1:47:49Clearly just very talented, didn't cheat. But then you go down to student number 22, 55 on the midterm, 59 on the final. Dumb as rocks, but doesn't cheat. That person's going some places. They know they got to 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 got to 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 peeled maybe yeah maybe they're like i don't i why would i ever not have access to jgbt i i always will have access therefore i don't need to learn anything the It's so brazen to cheat that much.

1:48:44At least some of the midterm cheaters, they're putting up 95s. They're getting 33s on the final. Very reasonable. They learn something. But to actually put up the 100 on the midterm and walk into the final, know that you had some advance notice that the final was in person probably. You didn't study at all. 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 Buc-ee's. That's the show, folks. Thanks for watching. Thanks for watching. We'll be back Monday at 11 a.m. sharp. Thanks so much for watching. Only a few more sleeps.

1:49:28Yeah, a few more sleeps. Only a few more sleeps till we're back. I can't wait. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. And have a great weekend. See you Monday. Goodbye.