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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
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 $26,500,000,000 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, a 100% pop, 80% pop. But at at this level of price and demand, you're just seeing a 14% pop, but still a great debut nonetheless.
Speaker 1:The company's American depository receipts opened, the ADR shares, opened at one seventy, 14% above the $1.49 they were offered at, giving x SK Hynix a market cap of roughly $1,030,000,000,000. 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.
Speaker 1:SK Hynix, Samsung, and US based Micron dominate the global memory market, and SK Hynix is Korean listed shares are up over 600% in the past year
Speaker 2:is that good?
Speaker 1: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 gotta go over to KOSPI. You've got go over to the South Korean index instead. Now, you can just head to the Nasdaq and get your ADR shares in SK Hynix. So congratulations to the whole team over there, a massively successful IPO. The Wall Street Journal asks a question.
Speaker 1:They say, why is SK Hynix trading under a temporary ticker symbol? They're currently trading under the temporary ticker SKHYV before reverting to a permanent ticker on Monday, SKHY. The V in the temporary symbol indicates 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 U. S.
Speaker 1:Trading day before the transaction actually settles because they're sort of being eased into the American markets. This is not the case with all ADRs, all American depository receipts, but rather a tool used to close the gap when a transaction has been announced but the actual delivery of the shares hasn't finished. So all in process now to bring SK Hynix to the American markets. And that looks like a lot of red, but the stock is up. It just opened at $1.70, and so the fact that it is flat relative to where it opened does not reflect the 14% pop or 16% pop.
Speaker 1:What was it? The 14% pop from the actual issuance price. Most of the folks that bought shares in the IPO, that $26,000,000,000 that went into the company, Of course, situational awareness, there were a few others. Bailey Gifford all participated early, at least reporting to early news. I assume that those transactions closed.
Speaker 1:They are all sitting up 14% today and we'll be continuing to follow this.
Speaker 2:Kanner in the chat says CERN has only been off for a week, and John is dressing casual.
Speaker 1:Oh, you think it's a conspiracy. I like it. I like it. 5.6 launched yesterday. 5.6 Soul and Soul Ultra, and people are having fun with it.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1:This is the exact opposite of what he wants to see, I imagine, considering that he doesn't even use CGI very often. But this is an incredible demo, although I don't think this will be picking up a billion dollars at the box office anytime soon. But it is incredible that you're able to sort of go from prompt to three d model to rendering so quickly. Very, very cool demo. And it feels like a new meme, a new art form.
Speaker 1:You have to be creative with it. Merely recreating Interstellar is not going to do it. It's not going to do anything other than just be an impressive demo of the technology. But when you look at what people have done with Blender, you can imagine that with creativity added to this and a new storyline and something that leans into the rough edges of this particular
Speaker 3:there's also gonna there's also gonna be
Speaker 2:a whole meta of like, I recreated Interstellar, but I cast Connor McGregor as Yeah. You know.
Speaker 1:And I imagine that this gets even more powerful when you use style transfer and video models on top. I've been seeing a lot of people block out AI videos either just using their iPhone. So they'll just have like, you're playing an actor who's playing like an old character, and then you're reading the lines, you're giving the delivery, and then that is used as the driving video for some of these AI video models. And you get much better results with that. And I've also seen people block out little examples of driving scenes or different mechanical scenes in Blender and then use an AI video model to take it to high fidelity.
Speaker 1:And because the video model has an underlying reference that is deterministic and physically accurate even though it's low fidelity and very blocky, you wind up with a better AI video at the end of the project. So you can imagine someone taking an idea, puppeteering a 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 this 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.
Speaker 1:You have to bring something special to the table. But I'm excited for the inevitable mashups of this, the the Conor McGregor starring in Interstellar or something like that. Also, there's a broccoli farmer that's running his farm on GPT-5.6 apparently. This was in the demo video, but Daniel Tenriro shares a very funny meme showing the I don't even know what aesthetic this is. This is the Descher Zone aesthetic.
Speaker 1:That was the account that shared all of this. The extreme skeleton with the two revolving pistols. Very fun. Danielson Riro shares some more information. He says, we were promised flying cars and instead we got a broccoli farmer running his farm with GPT-5.6.
Speaker 1:I don't know. It's still relevant to show a demo that is 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.
Speaker 1:What is the equivalent task that I'm doing in my life that I can take? We we we sort of differ on this sometimes. You you think that like a lot of these things are self explanatory. They don't this is Joe Weisenthal position too. He says like AI has no learning curve.
Speaker 1:I I disagree. I I think that it doesn't necessarily have a learning curve, but there is a an educational process that happens when you're presented with a blank box. You can type anything. People need to understand the fringes of their imagination, what is possible, and and then they can go and reach for that tool. But the tools are getting sharper, and sometimes they get sharper without the box actually changing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because it's just a box of what do you wanna build or what do you wanna do?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Not not everyone has a Tyler where Yes. I I I tend to prompt Tyler.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. And then
Speaker 2:goes into Codec.
Speaker 1:Yes. There was another video that was shaking up the timeline. People were going back and forth on how fast this model was building in is this Blender?
Speaker 2:Blender.
Speaker 1:This is Blender. Right? Yeah. So it's building a three d Canon, modeling it and adding different different primitives, different spheres and toruses. And the video is not sped up.
Speaker 1:And Chris says, SOL five 5.6 SOL is or and what I assume is 750 tokens per second in the wild. That is the preview of Cerebras. But this apparently was not actually
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's Soul Ultra on fast mode.
Speaker 1:So we should be seeing even faster rollouts. Although, every time I see this, I think
Speaker 2:And this is just computer use. Yeah. Like, this is not an like an integration. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just
Speaker 2:Yeah. It is an interesting experience watching a machine use Mhmm. Your machine Mhmm. A rate that would be completely impossible unless it was, like, your entire bit online was like, I just use software really fast. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It it is yeah. It it it's a interesting sort of feel the AGI moment.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Packet McCormick is having fun with five point six Soul. He says it one shotted this on its own. He didn't ask for a new logo. It's just like it's just like, look, bro, you need a new logo.
Speaker 2:I actually I actually think you should adopt this.
Speaker 1:It 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 the big talking point is like, they were behind on or the GPT models were sort of behind on front end in design.
Speaker 1:And this is a big leap forward in that. So I'm excited to see
Speaker 2:Nick on the Codex team is asking, is this image gen? I think it might be.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, that that's the thing about Soul and and Codex But it's
Speaker 2:been generating it's been 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
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Which is
Speaker 1:But the really confusing thing is that the image model now has tool use and can scaffold things out in HTML if it needs to and so like all of these different models are sort of blending together at this point. Michael had a very funny interaction where he got banned for 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.
Speaker 1:Codex found that he that it had asked for an API key to his own server. Codex wrote the appeal, submitted the appeal. A few minutes later, the appeal was auto approved by an AI at OpenAI. So he was banned by AI, convicted by AI, defended by AI, and pardoned by AI in about ten minutes. There's a bunch of pushback on the new ChatGPT desktop app because it is the super app.
Speaker 1:It unifies codex. The 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, like, web views, web browsers effectively, as opposed to the 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 a change in the user experience if you're deeply embedded in a particular workflow. The flip side is like, I just don't know how many people were daily driving ChatGPT as a Mac desktop app.
Speaker 1:We've heard from someone on the team that it was effective for cheating and we won't talk who it was, but
Speaker 3:Well, so I I would sometimes use it because it there's like a very nice shortcut.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So it was like a control plus or command plus is is the normal like main search on Mac. But it was like a very easy way to to interact with the models.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wonder if that can just be can that just be like, can that shortcut just be created with the new codecs or ChatGPT work Yeah. App where you just bind that same key shortcut. But, I mean, it is making the user do work, which is always always a tricky thing. But I feel like for most people's workflow, at least for mine, it was the desktop app that I used was Codex.
Speaker 1:And then when I wanted to interact with ChatGPT in a chat flow, I would do a new tab. And then on my phone, I would have the ChatGPT app. And then the ChatGPT app on my phone could talk to Codex on the desktop, but I never actually needed to open the ChatGPT desktop app. But maybe I'm just weird, but I don't know. We'll we'll see as this
Speaker 2:Same flow for me.
Speaker 1:The one
Speaker 2:thing TBPN
Speaker 3:says we spent the last
Speaker 2:twenty four 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 Five six ChatGPD work on mobile and web, but we also didn't everything quite right.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Absolutely not our intention. We love Codex and it is here to stay. Long story short, reset usage limits are getting reset twice today. Can So keep experimenting.
Speaker 1:Hammer it. Hit plan out some sites. There's also some confusion over the difference between Chateappity Work and Chateappity Codecs. And I wonder
Speaker 2:I just want one
Speaker 1:One or the other?
Speaker 2:Place to Yeah. Do
Speaker 1:Yeah. The omnibox that can do anything for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think that's obviously where it goes, but there's 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 is no enterprise Google search. You just use Google at work, you use Google at home, it's all one box that gives you answers, and there was never a a dividing line between these two things. And so that's probably where all of this goes ultimately. Let's tell you about Codex.
Speaker 1:Here 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
Speaker 2:People are saying
Speaker 1:moving projects forward from start to finish.
Speaker 2:People are saying it's a horse for the mind.
Speaker 1:A horse for the mind. So the MetaBull 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 of activities and sort of an entirely new business line with b to b sales.
Speaker 1:And and we and we discussed the bull cases here, the benefits. Obviously, there's a ton of benefits with the ad model. They have the cash flow to draw down on. There's a lot of different things that we can go through, but let's read some of the reactions first, and then we can go into the semi analysis piece. So Boring Business says, people don't realize Zuckerberg is all in on AI because he refuses to pay a 30% tax to platform owners for the rest of his life.
Speaker 1:Meta caught the shift toward mobile back in the early twenty tens, but they were never able to create their own hardware platform to capture users in their ecosystem. As a result, they got pay they got stuck paying a 30% tax to Apple on in app purchases, which has cost Meta billions of dollars in That makes no sense to me. No one What's via that in app purchases. Every advertiser I know uses the web based
Speaker 3:Also also You
Speaker 2:know ad what ads, I believe count as like a real world service. So there's not like, there's there's a lot of things you order in the that you order on mobile apps, like groceries.
Speaker 1:It's kind of a digital good, but yes, I I I agree with you that it would be
Speaker 2:but it's like eyeballs. Right? It's like impressions
Speaker 1:which Yes.
Speaker 2:Which like eyeballs Yes. Human attention
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Is not a digital good. It is like a real world thing.
Speaker 1: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 real one DoorDash. Or DoorDash. Good example.
Speaker 2:Or a movie ticket.
Speaker 1:Yes. But if I go to Kindle or Netflix or and I subscribe or even like the x subscription premium, Apple will take 30% if I buy Fortnite V Bucks or Roblox or any digital good. Yeah. And I could see Apple saying, look, if you want to be able to because platforms, you can be in Instagram and you can just say, I wanna boost this post. And you can put down your credit card and pay for that.
Speaker 1:And you can get started on the advertising flow Yep. As a very small business. I think through effectively in app purchases.
Speaker 2:Yep. So maybe the bigger the bigger thing is just like
Speaker 1:Maybe billions is right.
Speaker 2:You have this one of the largest companies in the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you have to constantly be playing nice and sort of sucking up to Apple Mhmm. Who is sort of actively who doesn't like you. Like Apple like, you can imagine, what do Apple executives think about Meta if you were to ask them over coffee off the record? And it would be like, we don't like Meta. And and so that's fundamentally like a very very uncomfortable position to be in.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And so he doesn't wanna be in a position running his company where he has to ask for permission for things. And so an example with that, somebody brought it up, think Andrew Meta lost billions from Apple because of the permissions prompt. Yes. That's true.
Speaker 2:You know, making it harder to just run their core advertising business. Yeah. And also there's so much that's like very unpredictable about where AI is going. Like it's possible that we get to the point where you don't go to a bunch of different social media
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Platforms and you're just like talk your agent is just kind of surfacing content for you on the fly. Like, there's so much like potential disruption. I think the stance is like, I would rather participate in this massive technology cycle and have a shot at being a big part of it Yeah. Than like just like hope nothing bad happens to me. The other thing I've always felt is like, you know, with the with the glasses, you're just gonna be able to like, he sees a world.
Speaker 2:Like, the glasses are are more of a a new platform bet
Speaker 1:Really?
Speaker 2:Right now Yeah. 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. Mhmm.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And he's getting a cut of that. Mhmm. Right? So like that will be like some type of like always on intelligence. So Yeah.
Speaker 2:It all it all totally makes sense even if it is like deeply sort of like chaotic and at times confusing
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:At least over the last year.
Speaker 1:The funny thing about the glasses as a platform is AI spending is so huge that he can probably bring back a lot of the reality lab spending and sort of just tuck it in a bucket and people won't notice if there's an extra
Speaker 2:I'm not leaving. I'm not leaving. I'm I'm not Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, if there's an extra $8,000,000,000 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 200,000,000,000 on data centers or whatever.
Speaker 2:Ari says, the tax Meta pays to Apple is the fact that they can't track users cross platform.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Totally. 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 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 car video on Instagram, we'll often switch over and then start prompting to actually learn more.
Speaker 1: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 ChattyPN versus hour a day on Instagram. And so I don't know if I'm just like the early adopter that will never do that, but you can certainly see that people are spending a lot of time with AI systems. And as you've put it before, like, wherever consumers, wherever people are spending time is an important place to have a Yeah.
Speaker 1:A foothold at least.
Speaker 2:Semi analysis said, at the simplest level, there are three things you need to build to need to build a true frontier model, data, talent, and compute. We believe Meta is the only hyperscaler slash neo lab on track to be world class at all three and therefore has the best chance of catching up with Anthropic slash OpenAI. We'll explain why in full detail below. And so Alex Wang quoted this in a funny in a funny way. What did you say?
Speaker 2:He said, compute daddy, Dylan Patel has spoken. Spoken. And yes, the stock is up 6%. Wang quote quoted poly quote tweeted Polymarket money, which said meta jumps over 6% of the open as investors react to yesterday's Muse Spark 1.1 release. Again, I don't really think that they were reacting to Muse Spark as much as semi analysis saying, there's a there's a
Speaker 1:There's a really
Speaker 2:good chance there. Yeah. So, yeah. Alex Wang said nice with the thumbs up. So he's he's pumping the stock.
Speaker 1:What's interesting is like
Speaker 2:The crazy thing is that like semi analysis just like completely leaving out SpaceX and
Speaker 1:They leave out SpaceX and Google. They said
Speaker 2:But but but saying
Speaker 1:They said SpaceX is selling $26,000,000,000 a year worth of GPUs to Anthropic slash 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. Yeah. I I I agree with you.
Speaker 1:It is
Speaker 2:But they're But they're essentially saying, like, Gemini doesn't have because Gemini has compute
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And data. Yeah. They're saying they're effectively saying Gemini does not have talent. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:They're saying you need all three.
Speaker 1: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. 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.
Speaker 1: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. Merkor recently disclosed that they logged 2,500,000 expert hours on their platform in q two of twenty twenty six. That's equivalent to 5,000 people working forty hours a week. Meta is already in the same ballpark, and their average quality is likely higher.
Speaker 1:Additionally, they have another 70,000 people to pull into that organization if they need to if it winds up being as valuable as semi analysis thinks it will be. It's also worth briefly dispelling 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 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 being an RL environment designer is not soul crushing and in fact can be intellectually rigorous.
Speaker 1: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. We've to talk about 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. Phia, the buzzy shopping app cofounded by Bill Gates' daughter Phoebe, is claiming credit for online sales it didn't actually drive. An advertising startup cofounded by Phoebe Gates, daughter of billionaire Microsoft Corp cofounder 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.
Speaker 1:Businesses like these, known in industry parlance as affiliate marketing programs, typically collect commission from retailers that that make the resulting sale. Bloomberg tested the FIA mobile browser extension across more than 50 websites and found that during the checkout process, FIA opened a background tab without user interaction and injected its own referral code that overrode legitimate referrals from other publishers. These findings were consistent with Capital One Shopping and Edelman's independent testing and code review.
Speaker 2:Let's get into why what Yes. Is being accused of and why it is potentially Yes. If this is what they're doing. Yes. We don't know again if Yes.
Speaker 2:It's an accident or it's intentional, but why it's potentially even more predatory than Yeah. Than Honey. Than Honey.
Speaker 1:So Megalag, the YouTuber that did the Honey expose, it was an interesting deep dive that got 20,000,000 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 AG one affiliate revenue. And so the creators were sort of promoting their own demise in some way. So it was like this this very viral, very ironic situation eventually got sorted out.
Speaker 1:Honey's broader scandal also involved allegation that it suppressed better coupons and deliver 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.
Speaker 1:At the very least, you had to click, I don't want Honey, and then it would do something. The Bloomberg report says, FIA's mobile extension is firing without any FIA interaction at all. So you go from horsereviews.com over to Clydesdales Direct, You merely have FIA installed as an extension. You don't
Speaker 2:notice check anything. Don't you don't know that FIA has been a part of the interaction at all.
Speaker 1:You don't know.
Speaker 2:You just click through, but you
Speaker 1:have the
Speaker 2:software running in your browser that is inserting Yep. A a effectively attribution Yep. For FIA Yep. Without you knowing Yep. Potential revenue from horsereviews.com.
Speaker 2:Yes. And horsereviews.com probably had to run ads Yep. On Google Yep. To get people to horsereviews.exactly. Educate them on the the horse market to get them to Clydesdales Direct Yep.
Speaker 2:To get them to close. Yep. And so, they're sitting here being like, hey, we did all this work to get clydesdalesdirect.com a new customer
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And we're not being compensated for And
Speaker 1:say, well, normally, I'm sending a check to horsereviews.com. I I guess I'm sending a check to FIA now, whatever. As long as I'm getting customers, I'm fine.
Speaker 2:So so one of the concerning things here Mhmm. Is that I think this had been running since, like, January or December. Mhmm. And so they had some software update that was pushed. Yeah.
Speaker 2:This started happening. Yeah. So it's been happening for, let's say, around six months. Yeah. And you would assume that they would have figured this out.
Speaker 2:But maybe it's it's possible that that it, you know
Speaker 1:I don't know. A lot of I mean, it it it's not the biggest scale. I think the number is 12,000,000 plus in sales driven. So the commission on that is like $1,000,000 that's sort of like missing. And it's and it's so diffuse across so many different ecommerce providers.
Speaker 1:I guarantee you, as someone who's run multiple e commerce sites, I would not notice if a couple $100 moved from one affiliate to another. Now, everyone on the timeline was preying on Phoebe's downfall.
Speaker 2:Way before this.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 2:The villain arc.
Speaker 1:The villain arc, potentially. But seriously okay. Let's go over to movies. Hollywood's horror meme, Gold Rush is minting millionaires. We talked about this with Backrooms, the originally 4chan creepypasta that wound up being a viral YouTube channel, and then a full Hollywood movie that made over a $100,000,000, I believe.
Speaker 1:But there are many more pieces of intellectual property in the horror meme genre, and they're all getting scooped up.
Speaker 2:Was whore mosey, by the way.
Speaker 1:It did look like whore mosey. It did look like whore mosey. 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.
Speaker 1: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 told he sold the Siren Head movie rights to Warner Brothers for more than a million dollars.
Speaker 1: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. Studios are trying to find the next potential horror hit that already has proven its appeal to Gen Z on YouTube, Reddit, or this is interesting, Roblox. The chair co chair of Warner's Motion Picture Group, Michael DeLuca, said, we're seeing them as a resource for adaptations the same way we look at books and other media. The race for hot digital properties resembles the kind of dogfights for buzzy scripts that used to be common in Hollywood during the eighties and nineties.
Speaker 1:Eleven Studios recently bid on the film rights to the psychological horror YouTube series, The Mandela Catalogue. 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.
Speaker 2:Daniel says, what's the obsession with horror? There's something wrong with you if you're into that. Totally agree. I I never gravitated to horror movies Mhmm. But my theory was always If I don't watch them, I will not I won't be afraid walking at night.
Speaker 2:Like, I grew up in the I grew up in the country. You know, teenager in the country, you know, you're going around on adventures, stuff like that.
Speaker 1:Or watch this. You're gonna be terrified. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com, and have a great weekend. We'll see you Monday.
Speaker 1:We for one flashback.