Microsoft Builds! SUNO on Fire, AI Roll-Up Roll-Ups, Mysterious Data Centers

I see a large IP on the horizon. You're surrounded by journalists. Watch your position. Overnight success. The place 3000 double blade right there misinformation. Marking clearing order inbound. >> Let's just roll. We are surrounded by general. Hold your position. Come. Get up. Trust the experts here. Five. Focus. We are founder Vood. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. UAV online. Blaze. Double blaze. Triple blades. Double kill. Five. Wrong. Cop is w team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blade. Let's just roll. Right. >> Clearing order inbound. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. >> Strike one. >> Strike two. Activate golden retriever mode. Marky clearing order inbound. >> Five put I see more journalists on the horizon. >> UAV online. >> Another one. >> You're watching TVPN. >> Today's Wednesday, June 3rd, 2026. We are live from the TVP Ultradome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance. Capital of capital. >> Wow, that's loud. ramp.com. >> Time is money. Save both. He's used corporate cards. Go pay accounting. A whole lot more all in one place. >> We're having fun today. Uh >> got the air air horn. >> Yeah, we got a physical air horn. And when Nick fired that thing off unexpectedly, it really did some damage. Uh but once you prepared for it, it it's pretty satisfying. Pretty satisfying. Pretty satisfying. Anyway, uh Microsoft Build is satisfying uh for a number of reasons. They're in the foundation model game. They trained a bunch of models. Uh MAI code one flash MAI thinking one the company's first coding and reasoning models respectively with sever several speakers played up as super efficient on a cost per token basis in the ROI race. You got to be efficient. Microsoft Scout is an agent. their open claw pill now uh powered by openclaw open source technology that operates across cloud desktop and web connecting to teams outlook one drive and shareepoint and to the data that powers your day including chats emails calendar contacts good news if you're all in on the Microsoft ecosystem uh and then we talked about this a little bit with the Jensen announcements from Nvidia they're going into the PC market more uh the Surface RTX Spark dev box is sort of the answer to Apple's Mac Mini custom silicon designed for agentic AI. Um, there's also a new Android based OS operating system uh designed to run agents instead of apps called Project Solar. And there's a pretty cool demo. So, we should play the video. The Verge always does a cutown of these keynotes. They take you through Microsoft Build in 25 minutes, but we're only going to play a couple minutes of this because today that I'm really excited about in order to tap into all this compute power is to expand the scope of Windows ML and Windows AI. We are also announcing two very cool new models uh that are all going to run on Windows uh in box. Okay, let's jump to >> a new 8 minutes because this is where Satcha introduces Project Solara which Ben Thompson said project is to be very clear vaporware at this point although the company did show real devices and has signed up Qualcomm and MediaTek as chip partners. It's also extremely compelling. So Ben Thompson likes it. Let's listen to Sachin Nadell introduce >> two very broad categories. The first is stationary and the second is portable. The first device device is designed for your desk and it's built on MediaTek silicon >> concept cards >> with hello for business walking up to the device securely signs you in giving you direct access to your agent >> and Amazon and Google Home have similar products at this point uh with screens for more smart home >> you think plan and even act by delegating tasks to your agents with a simple tap or just using your voice It even supports experiences like handoff between devices acting as a >> little tricky to imagine when you wouldn't want to use your phone for this uh since people carry their phones everywhere. Firing off an agent isn't the most cumbersome thing. But uh I do love consumer hardware. So I'm excited to see if there's any unique things that you can do only with this product. >> Lightweight form factor designed for agent interactions. >> This is a very interesting thing. It's not a phone. It looks more like a smart key card or badge. >> Yeah, it even has a face on it. Like it's a badge that you wear. >> My fingerprint. I tap to unlock the device and I have access now to all my agents in a secured manner. And would you look at that? I already have a task. And it says, "Gather content for your social media post." >> Sorry if I missed it. Why? >> Do it right now. Right. >> Why would you want this over having an application on your phone? >> Camera is recording. I'm going to pan across. I'm not sure. >> Going to take the shot. >> Yes. Thank you. >> That's a good question. >> Find some good shot. >> Does anyone have an answer? There's there's uh there's a new meme, the two phone meme. You know, maybe some people feel left out. They want a second device. >> There's like the dumb phone route where you don't want everything in the phone, but you do want to kick off agents that go do things for you. You want to be more like delegating instead of like consuming. Like you're not going to be scrolling TikTok on that thing. Uh, but you might be firing off work tasks that you can come to later on your desktop and sort of lock in on >> I don't know. >> Yeah. So, I could I could I could prompt it and say write a 20,000word message to John telling him that I would like to hang out on Saturday afternoon. Make sure it's easy enough to digest so his agent can summarize it into a few bullet points. >> Yeah. Into ideally just one sentence. Want to hang out? Um, let's see. Uh, Ben Thompson broke it down a little bit. He said, "First off, note the framing. The PC is old tech with agents. What about new tech uniquely enabled by agents? And note the classic Microsoft hook. Could that new tech sit on top of a new platform?" So, uh, he says, "There was one brief moment in the promotional video that preceded uh, his appearance that made the concept click for him. The problem with wearable devices is the interaction model. They are only useful when you are interacting with them, when the human is in the loop. that being in the loop with a wearable is annoying and inefficient. What is being de demonstrated here, however, is a brief interaction and then the agent doing work in the background. In other words, the usefulness happens in the cloud without the human needing to be involved because an agent is doing work. That's what Ben Thompson finds compelling. On one hand, you can make the case that of course Microsoft would be interested in a device model that uses the cloud as a platform given that Microsoft doesn't control a mobile device like the iPhone. What occurs to Ben Thompson, however, is that even if Microsoft doesn't succeed with Project Solara, this model where the cloud is the hub and multiple devices are the spoke instead of the phone being at the center is clearly a better one for agents, agents work best in the cloud and across apps and devices. Yes, the phone might be one of those devices, but when it comes to agents, it shouldn't be the hub because it's too locked down. >> And he says, again, this is vaporware and it's very much in Microsoft's interest. So, take Project Solar with an appropriate grain of salt. It's a vision of the future. However, that does make a lot of sense, particularly in an enterprise scenario where all of the context and compute is already in the cloud. And Project Solar is focused on enterprise, not consumer. So, you can mandate effectively that all of your employees carry these as their badges. And then they have a sort of like secure on-ramp to their to their enterprise agents in the cloud that all run in the Microsoft Azure ecosystem in the Microsoft uh 365 ecosystem. uh he says it's also something completely different from the past and fits uh Ben Thompson's thesis that in the age of AI thin is in because the compute is so constrained to the data center uh ondevice compute is maybe going to happen but uh there's a lot that you can do on in the cloud that you can't do locally. So just have a very thin client and that that that little key card device is basically the thinnest client you can have. Uh it it's it's its sole purpose is to just interface. It looks a lot like the Rabbit R1. Sort of that form factor which uh a lot of people were taking a little victory lapse on behalf of the founder of the Rabbit R1 saying he was just a little bit too early because the actual decision to offload all the compute to the cloud, do something useful up there, have a very minimal device that maybe you could take out with you. Uh that could do some basic stuff. But it's always hard because people like the phone. They like being able to just watch a full movie on their phone if they want. And uh you never know. Has anybody been running down uh making a smart AI enabled cowboy hat? >> Cowboy hat, you potentially have a lot of room up here for onboard some local, right? >> Uh maybe you could build a Starlink into it. >> I feel like you would not wear the smart cowboy hat just frying your brain with the the the Mac Mini on your head. You're you're going to be against that. There's no way you're picking that up. Uh >> underexplored underexplored hardware platform. Uh whether you're bullish or bearish on Microsoft, you got to get on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasures, and more with great customer service. Uh Alex Heath, friend of the show, summed up the embrace of Open Claw in a post. Uh Scout is what it's called at Microsoft's first proactive AI agent for co-pilot. Uh buried the news that Sachi Nadell is fully embracing OpenClaw. When Scout is released more widely this summer, it will be powered by OpenClaw and Microsoft will contribute to its security guard rails back to the project's open source ecosystem. A lot of people that got excited by OpenClaw sort of saw the the rough edges and we saw this with the Meta AI uh the Instagram account theft that was going on. Uh you can imagine that if you have something that's as powerful as open cloud but still constrained within your Microsoft ecosystem your your all your cloud accounts uh you could do things that are useful pull together spreadsheets powerpoints databases all this different stuff but not run rough shod over everything and so if you're all in on one walled garden the walls are actually somewhat safe I don't know totally >> so Microsoft getting in bed with open claw makes a lot of sense says Alex Heath you only welcome a growing open frame framework onto your turf when you're confident you can control the ground it stands on. In this case, Microsoft is doing what it does best, being a platform company, rather than trying to own too much of the stack. Microsoft also gets to ride the agent wave in a way its main hardware rival won't. Even with OpenClaw's initial buzz, driving a surge in Mac Mini purchases, it's highly unlikely Apple will create a white glove experience for Microsoft for OpenClaw like Microsoft has with Scout. And so, uh, Apple, you know, you're in the Mac, you're inclaw world. >> One of the primary beneficiaries, the open claw, boom, in terms of >> they really did sell out. They really, they really have sold out all over the place. But >> but not going to embrace it. Not just not enough. >> They just don't have the enterprise motion necessarily. >> Well, that that but also the security, privacy. Yeah. >> But WWC is next week and who knows, maybe we will see an open claw competitor. Maybe we'll see something that's that's, you know, a great leap forward for Apple in the AI and the Apple intelligence uh feature set. Uh I don't know. I I I'm I'm my predictions are something that are look a lot more just like uh okay, Siri works now. It can do the basic shortcut integrations. It can answer questions at a near frontier level. It's running Gemini under the hood. And so it's probably going to be pretty good at just answering basic questions, doing basic things on your phone. I'm not expecting it to go and like worm its way into every other app like Open has. So there's a few other observations that Alex Heath had from Microsoft Build. Uh Nadella is trying to tamp down the data center backlash. Uh you know it's getting bad out there when a Mag 7 CEO is debunking water usage fears. The quote was, "In fact, the daily water usage over the course of the entire year is roughly equivalent to what a single restaurant would use." So, he's giving more context there. Uh, the co-pilot super app is not ready. Uh, uh, Alex Heath showed off um what the new autopilot tab with Scout looks like, but it wasn't shown on stage. So, that is delayed as it rolls out to become the co-pilot super app that will sit alongside all of the Microsoft apps. Um, Microsoft is still not at the frontier. According to Alex Heath, he says it didn't make a big deal out of the benchmarks for its new family of models. There were other comps. They were comping it to older models from Anthropic and OpenAI. There were some obviously some great costbenefit trade-offs. It's important to be in the game. Do you have more context on how these models are performing? Yeah, I think the interesting comparison here is is not with the frontier labs, but I think with meta, right, because they had Muse Spark like pretty recently and uh the thinking model like MI thinking one um is actually like quite competitive with the meta- which is interesting because I feel like I I just have not heard that much about the MAI team like obviously they have they have Mustafa and that's kind of like the big name at Microsoft, but like meta you hear like over and over Nat even Daniel Gross, Alex Wong, you know, you have so many people that have like you have done podcast to have Aura and have clout and the industry coming together. Uh not to mention like the actual researchers that they recruited. >> Yeah. So it's interesting that they're actually like these are pretty the researchers would actually more important than >> Yeah. But but in terms of like building building hype around whatever you're working on like Meta has definitely built the aura of MSL and TBD Labs. There's a whole article about uh Alex Wang and uh and that in the journal or the Financial Times today. Uh, we can get to that later, but uh, Alex, he says, "Agents are the new OS." I'm not sure if an AI access badge with a screen will do it. He's skeptical. Are you putting on the badge? >> I'll throw on the badge. >> I would throw on the badge for a little bit. I wonder how often I would actually reach for it versus a phone. Also, I'm not although I love PCs and I love Windows for gaming, I don't I've never been like a run my whole life in Outlook and Microsoft Teams and all of that. So, uh, I I I feel like I would get 1% of the benefit of that. You like you got to be all in on that ecosystem. >> Got to be all in. You got to be pushing your >> pushing your chips in. >> For sure. For sure. Um, well, we will keep uh tracking that. What else is going on? Okay. Live reading reacting thread from Stoasm. There's a ton to go through on MAI thinking. Was there anything interesting in this thread? uh stocasm says I also have to wonder how much of this report is informed by what they know about IP open AI's IP. So of course they have access to intellectual property from open AI for training and they have access to the models but uh one of the things that would that that kept coming up in this presentation is that uh Microsoft is sort of touting like a very clean pre-training data set so that you as a company who are using this model can be very confident that it's not it's not going to get you in any trouble down the road because if the New York Times doesn't want to be in there or Harry Potter books don't want to be in there, it's not in there because micros Microsoft has done all the hard work to sanitize all the training data. They also made a very big point that they did not distill on another lab which has been accusations that have been thrown around a bunch. Uh during the Elon Musk OpenAI lawsuit, Elon was on the stand and mentioned that he might have or XAI folks might have uh done some distillation on either anthropic or open AAI models at one point. And so that was sort of uh like not the cleanest thing and might lead to problems down the road. Microsoft saying, "Hey, we're getting out in front of this. There's no distillation involved at all." And then they also launched a lot of features for uh companies to be able to fine-tune these models. Uh not slightly different than what Amazon does. Amazon does mid-training. They give you a checkpoint of the pre-train and then you can add data that is relevant to your business and fine-tune it from a mid-training checkpoint. uh Microsoft is offering more of a reinforcement learning RLE post-training step, but all of these lend themselves to there is a model that has a bunch of great capabilities at the baseline and good price performance and it runs on Azure and they've already optimized it for the systems and then you can take it, tweak it, fine-tune it, and then you can deploy it on the same hardware and you know it's going to run, you know how much it's going to cost per token, you're good to go, but it's going to answer your particular questions, work for your particular business a little bit better. At least that is the pitch. That is the hope. We will see what adoption is like. Microsoft clearly has a strong go to market team, strong enterprise sales team. So uh we will hear how this is being deployed in the near future. Before we bring in our first guest of the show, let me tell you about Crowd Strike. Your business is AI. Their business is secure. Crowd Strike secures AI and stops breaches. >> I don't know if you can actually hear that. The the filter might be a little bit too much, but anyway, we can deal with that later. Uh we are very very fortunate to be joined by Mikey from Zuno. Welcome to the show. How are you doing on a massive day? He's here live with us in the TV and Ultradome. Amazing that you can be here. How you doing? >> I'm I'm doing great. I'm excited to be here. This place is awesome. >> Thank you. Uh give us the news. What happened today? Hit the gong. >> Uh I hit >> hit the gong. Tell us what happened >> and then come back and then come back and tell us. >> I like how it shakes the entire camera. Anyway, >> that was by far the strongest hit from a guest. >> Yeah, a lot of people come in and they don't they they they don't want to break the gunk to be it's my me. >> You told me to go at it. I went that was perfect. >> Well, it's a good day for that. That's the new bar. >> So, take us through why are we hitting the gong? >> Uh we're hitting the gong. We raised a little over $400 million uh announced today. Very exciting. Um led by bond a history of investing in really category defining consumer businesses which is really really cool. Um, lots of new investors joining. All of our old investors, uh, participating. So, really, really excited about that. >> IVP, Ferrer, Union Square, Matrix, Quiet, Light Speed, Menllo. Wow. Murderers row. Good job. Uh, what unlocked this round? Why do this round? Are you spending a ton on inference? Are you spending a ton on training? Is there a huge cost? Or is there just so much traction that that unlocked the round? Like, what's the thesis? >> Really, really more the latter. there's been a ton of traction um and a ton of actually progress since the last time uh I was on and so um just to just to zoom out here >> where yeah where is the company right now in terms of the products >> so every time we we release new products we release new models uh more people come to the product but more people stick around and so the engagement metrics that we track say it's >> usage retention uh what fraction of our users come three or more days a week >> uh session time all of these are getting really really good. All of these are up like about 50% in the last 6 months which is huge and this is just like constant making the product better, making more people fall in love with being creative and so it's been incredible to see. Um and uh yeah it's like a lot of hard work from the team but it's >> what is the northstar metric on retention like Dow Mau monthly churn like how are you thinking about actually like what is the correct metric to measure for your particular business >> you know yeah different businesses are going to be different we we like we like retention um I think all of these are kind of very very similar um the thing that's like really important here is just to remember yeah like revenue is is a trailing metric for how good is your product and retention is really the best way to think about people are coming to my product over and over again. They're falling in love with it. There's no real hacking that basically. >> Yeah. And are you early or you are you far enough along to see like smiling curves in the retention curve? >> Yeah, for sure. So, it's been it's been really exciting. So, there's also there's two retentions. There's usage retention, there's paid retention. So, remember we have a pretty generous free tier. And so, uh our free users are also still coming back over and over again. I think we've created them through having that magical moment, their eyes light up. And so it's it's really around how do we let people do that themselves and really feel creative by themselves. >> Uh walk me through the paid tier philosophy, a single tier. How like like do you have uh like are you thinking or do you already have like ultimate pro plans where someone can spend a lot of money if they're using this as like more of a proumer tool? Uh enterprise like how how uh how how how striated is the is the monetization at this point? >> It's a great question. I think the short answer is we haven't really changed our pricing all that much in in a long time. And so uh it might not even be appropriate. But what we have now is there's a free tier, there's a $10 a month here, there's a $30 month here. $30 month tier gets you not only more usage um but some different power features y um and then >> you know AI is this weird thing. It doesn't really fit neatly into SAS pricing and so a lot of sub companies are trying different things >> a lot like everyone else when you reach your cap you can buy overages and so we've got lots of people who >> they spend hours and hours a day on it and they hit their caps and and they keep paying for more. Yeah, it's such a weird dynamic in the modern era where you will have customers that are effectively gross margin negative potentially depending on exactly where you set the thresholds and then you will have customers that are they they want the best product. They're happy to pay but they come once a month with something and uh and they're probably much higher gross margin and there's just this blend because we're in this like you know real marginal cost era no longer the zero marginal cost era. you know, a few things there, like actually our margins are pretty okay and music models are small and so um it's not really the same cost structure, but the other thing is it's really interesting. There's not really a lot of consumer businesses being built right now and certainly not a lot of consumer entertainment businesses being built right now. And there's a real different I think interaction that the average user has when I'm sitting down at co-work and my boss is paying for it. And so I don't really think or care about how much money this is costing me. And when you're building for consumer entertainment and you're paying for it and it's not for doing a task, it's actually for enjoying yourself. Um, you actually do think a lot about it. And so, a, it makes our jobs harder. We actually have to deliver more. But B, you you you want to make sure that you provide the right experience where you're not constantly thinking about, oh gosh, how many credits do I have left before I hit the pay wall? >> If uh if if Ben Thompson were here, he'd probably ask you about advertising. I feel like uh consumers want to be entertained. they don't necessarily want to be productive. It's very hard to get consumers to pay at scale. Obviously, the AI era is like a big narrative violation of that because there's tens of millions of consumers that are paying for AI tools across the entire industry. But, uh there does seem to be a limit to how many consumers will pay even $10 a month. Are you thinking about uh trading credits while you're waiting for a song to to generate ads? How are you thinking about that? We're not thinking at that scale yet. I actually kind of disagree with Ben here, which is I mean he's he's he's awesome. He's brilliant. But I just I just think about like uh 800 million people about stream music. >> A little less than half of them pay for it. That's actually a lot of people. Like 300 million people pay for streaming music. That's a lot. >> Yeah. >> Um >> I just think that that like the history here. >> So So there's billions and billions of people that don't listen to music online whatsoever. Is it really only 800 million? accounts >> or is that like accounts on Spotify that doesn't maybe count YouTube? >> That's uh to my knowledge that's like Spotify, YouTube, Apple, and maybe like five others. >> There's like a billion records now too. >> Vinyl is going to make a big comeback. And um I mean I think as we um change the place of music and culture, as the product gets better, we change the place that music has in culture. We see these creative moments happening. And so you see them digitally now where maybe you saw the Puerto Rico song or you saw um an amazing creative trend where people are making like their cringy text messages into songs and they go viral on TikTok. And I think you'll start to see that penetrate actually the IRL world as well. And so I yeah I'm long vinyl. >> Yeah. Uh, I was talking to someone who wanted a job at Sunso and they were uh they were asking me what I thought about the business and uh obviously I've been bullish for a long time like this new entertainment form factor, people love the product, you guys have real revenue, you're growing really quickly. Uh the my unsophisticated view was that I I told the person I can easily imagine this as like a10 billion company. It's hard for me to see the world in which this is a hundred billion dollar company. Uh why am I why am I wrong? I know you're insanely ambitious. You're not gonna you're not going to 2x from here and then be like job's done everybody. >> No, the job the job's not done. I think um this is one of those things actually. I think you've just been hanging around investors too much, you know, which is um the thing uh that you know you have to be right for a long time while while a lot of people are wrong. And the thing is every every revenue scale we hit, every usage scale we hit, the question is like, but how many people really want to create? And that was we got those questions at $100,000 in revenue and we get those questions at $100 million in revenue. And the lived experience we have playing with the product with people, but also the metrics and looking at our growth curves and seeing that every time we make the product better, yes, things inlect up, but we appeal to a broader and broader audience. So I feel very >> I mean the same the same thing would have been said with early creative tools on the internet which was you know how big you know with Figma was always how big could Figma be you know there's only so many designer professional designers then of course like the rest of organizations same thing with with Canva I'm sure a lot of people passed early on because they just thought like yeah there's just not that many people relatively that uh that do design and then of course like you make the tools more accessible uh and And so so anyways, >> so yeah, and so there's a couple things here. One is I think actually we'll have a very large fraction of those 300 million subscribers to streaming also subscribe to Zuno in the long run. But the other thing that's amazing is that for the first time in a long time in music, there's innovation on the end user experience. And so you can have something where there are multiple products out there like right now the end user experiences for music all look the same. They all look like a a streaming provider, right? It's just like I have all of the world's music living on my phone and I can listen to it and that's it. In the future when you can do more things and play with it, you probably subscribe to multiple video games. You probably subscribe to multiple video streaming platforms. Why can't you subscribe to multiple music things? And I think the answer is in 10 years you will. >> Yeah. >> Do you think Apple would ever make a play in this space? >> I think lots of people are going to make plays in the space. Uh it's almost validating to see that people finally think of music as a growth area uh again. And so, but again, I think that there's so much room for innovation here. There's so much green field to build upon that I'm actually really excited. >> Yeah. >> Can you take me through the story of the Puerto Rico song? What happened there? Like like what were the key inflection points? Actually, >> I don't I I don't know is the answer. You know, this is like a song from a creator and and it hits the right uh cultural moment and the right vibe and and I don't want to say it's a good song or it's a bad song, but it is a platform where so many people can be creative on top of it. And that is really fulfilling to see. And that's stuff that it's like new use cases for music that haven't been around for a minute. >> Is AI music becoming less controversial or there still people discovering it and getting angry? because I could imagine there was a wave over the last uh 2 years where people were like, "Wait, they're making music with AI. This is a this is meant to be a human creative pursuit or whatever criticisms they've they've thrown at it." But I imagine over time people start to realize that these are fun entertainment products and tools and uh before you form an opinion, you should just try using it and form an opinion based on your experience, not um you know, internet comments or things like that. But my expectation is that uh it will actually become less controversial year overyear as it sort of normalizes. >> It is definitely becoming less controversial. There are still plenty of people who have pre-formed opinions and then you know actually playing with the product is the best way to change their minds. Um the thing that has become apparent in the music industry is that so many people are using it without talking about it. And as people realize that everybody knows that everybody knows it certainly normalizes there. And then as a consumer, either when you play with the product and you realize how fun it is, or when you realize actually there's some AI music in the music that I love, all of a sudden you're not so anti-AI. I think this is a lot like people being anti-AII and then they realize that chat GPT can help them with their homework and they kind of soften a little bit >> as a useful tool. I mean Martin Scorsesei came out yesterday in a Black Forest Labs video talking about the value of AI in the film making process but the video demos we'll watch it later on the show but it it demos um sort of like a previsualization step almost like a storyboarding step. He's describing this alpine town and it's generating visuals for him. He's not taking it end to end. Of course, that that that that's happening more and more, but uh but he that I I think uh having a filmmaker like Scorsese kind of step up and say like, "Yeah, this is useful. I can see this working." >> Absolutely. There's an analog in music actually, which is that you'll have songwriters um make beautiful songs and instead of making demos for an artist, they can make lowfidelity songs like lowfidelity productions which are demos with so much easier. Yeah. and it will get ripped out and produced without AI or with minimal AI when it's produced for the last time. But >> do you think there's still an opportunity for major artists to be a first mover in the space? We were talking uh I think a mutual friend of the three of us and I was telling him uh he loves he uses it all the time. And uh I was telling him like why don't you just be the first one to take like a proper leap and do this and like the first person that goes and says like hey this is okay it's not so scary I used it in the creative process we still used a bunch of you know uh traditional producers sing you know songwriters etc. Um, I think that person will get a lot of like credit and potentially, you know, a lot of attention. It will obviously be polarizing, but then the fourth, fifth, sixth mover won't really get any potential benefit. It'll just be normalized by that point. >> I think that's totally possible. Like, we've, you know, there are people, there are a few people who are outspoken about it, but I don't know if we've had like the moment yet. >> I want like the project like somebody has to make like a hit record. There have been I think what what you're >> and they have to they have to go out and say they have to be just very upfront and I what I want is them to document the whole process like I want a video camera. >> How much is enough suno in there? Actually >> that's the that's the whole point. It's like like a guitar might have only been like one little riff in a song and it could have been some originally like somebody recorded it on their phone and then they brought it into the studio and then like maybe it got transformed and made with a different Yeah, exactly. And so to me to me there just needs to be >> it's it's always going to be a spectrum, right? There's going to be songs that are heavily Sununo, but I would expect for like major artists, even if like the the original kind of idea or um some element of the song was made on Sunno, like you said, it'll just get transformed and adapted and evolved. And so I think it's just positioning it as not like a replacement for anything, but uh another kind of individual artist in the room, another instrument in the room uh that's contributing to the project. Here's how I think of it. We we we haven't hit that moment, but at some point somebody will really document and celebrate the use of these tools in making things like we're already in a lot of very popular music, but at some point somebody will really do that actually proactively and that will be a huge cultural moment. And then the next amazing cultural moment will be an artist releases an album that is meant to beed by their fans. Yeah. >> And um this is the new format. This is the thing that will pull people in that deepens the artist fan connection and that will be a very very important moment. >> How spiky is Sunno's intelligence? I want to know about the training process. There's >> we know you have to leave. So final maybe that's the last question. Um but uh the uh there's this like famous story about uh I think Andre Carpathy told it about like GPT4 41 some iteration where at at a certain checkpoint uh it was terrible at chess and then all of the AI researchers just were really interested in chess and they were like there's no reason it should be bad at chess and so they added a bunch of chess training data and then all of a sudden the models got pretty good at chess and it seems like we're in this spiky intelligence race where coding is really valuable. There's a lot of money there. So, the models are getting better at coding, but if you look at the models, like it doesn't really feel like they're getting that much better at copywriting right now because that's not where the boom is. They're getting really good at coding. And I'm wondering if you're seeing like, okay, there's an opportunity for us to nail jazz in the next iteration or us to nail EDM in this iteration. like is it is like what fingerprints is the team leaving on the model versus just we're scaling up and it's getting better at everything and there's surprises and it's very indeterminate. We we actually try not to leave our fingerprints on it. And we have a like the approach is we should not be the arbiters of good and bad music, you know, like a file corrupt or or lowquality sound recording, but like um you can go and you can listen to a song that has 10,000 YouTube plays or 10 million YouTube plays and you won't actually be able to tell the difference. And so we should not be uh the arbiters of that. The thing that's different here also is that um in the chess and the coding examples, there are objective right answers. And that's why the models are so good at getting spiky there. Yeah, music has no right answers. And so >> there's no verified rewards, verifiable >> rewards. And so um all of those techniques actually don't work nearly as RLVR. >> So we're actually in the regime where it's much less spiky. And actually when we find a hole, an anti-spike, then we actually try to fill that in. Like it's not like we're amazing at jazz. It's like you suck at jazz or you suck at country and now we have to go and figure that one out. >> Okay, last question. We'll let you get out of here. Uh, what about uh adding on to the viral fuel? When I hear about turn your text messages into a pseudo song, I think why can't I just screenshot my text messages and then you edit the video for me and I get a viral format. That feels like very tool you see very like each video format is going to be a whole process for you. It's going to be hard to like oneshot the full end to end. But what do you think about personally? I want the Slack integration. I want a pseudo song at the end of each day. Then >> yeah, why weren't you on the stage at Microsoft Build? >> I want my I want the workday at at the office summarized. >> You want a workday integration? >> No, I want I want the Slack summarized and I want to be able to listen to an hourong song on my drive home about what's happening at work. >> We'll try we'll try to make that happen. We're not doing a workday integration, but I will try. The thing that's amazing is actually this is a platform where people are creative on top of it. And so we're not going to come up with the right cringy text message videos. Somebody is going to do that. Well, uh, that's a challenge for you at home. Go make the cringey text message. Go make the workday integration. Prove Mikey wrong. He says he won't build it. You can. You can go and build. >> You can go and build the workday integration yourself. >> Well, I want to react. Imagine keeping up >> at work. >> Yeah. >> Through music, John. >> Be fantastic. >> What's more powerful than that? >> You know what's more powerful than that? Console.com. console builds AI agents that automate >> 70% of IT HR and finance support >> giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. So, uh we can talk about uh the there there's a bunch of funny posts in the time that we got to go through before our next guest uh Samir from Colin Samir joins us to talk about Hollywood. Uh you can tell when a co-orker got nothing going on outside of work. Why did Why is that in here? 220,000 people this >> is are you is this did you put this in to kind of subtweet me Tyler >> I didn't I didn't send this in this in >> the team always asks Monday morning what you do this weekend I always have the same answer million views uh anyway uh there's some news on the timeline about GOP rep and Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers there's an actual photo from the campaign trail and then a photo put out by the staffer let's compare these It's one of those can you tell can you spot the differences video. They made him a little bit bulkier. They they just added just a couple pounds of muscle. >> Just a couple. >> He looks huge in this in this photo. >> I mean, he looks like he's ready for the Olympia. >> Yeah. Uh I don't think they went f far enough. So, I I took it upon myself to generate an even more accurate photo we can pull up. Uh because I think this is what he should look like on the like if you're going to AI your photos just go full just go stringer. >> Yeah. Get yourself in the stringer >> and make sure you're looking like you walked off of the Olympia stage >> and still claim natural >> absolute mass absolute mass monster. Yeah. You can >> typical politician thing to do would be >> I'm not on performance drugs. I just run every single photo through images too and Chad GBT. Um people are having fun. It was funny. I thought I was so original for doing this, but if you scroll down the comments, uh, everyone had the same idea and made him way way more jacked. If you scroll down, there's 25 others. And there are >> says enhanced uh, politics. Jack says the enhanced Senate. >> Yeah, there are some that are absolutely crazy here. The enhanced Senate. Okay, we got a debate on our hands. We got a debate on our hands. So uh Philip Johnston, friend of the show, founder of StarCloud says, "Founders, before you go out and raise, ask all the best AI models this play the role of a venture capitalist and give each startup in the XYZ category of your startup space a ranking from 1 to 10 on how much they would want to invest in them with one don't want to invest at all and 10 desperately want to invest. Do deep research and give reasons. All the VCs are doing some version of this." He's claiming that the VCs are just AI psychosis, letting AI do their job. Maybe it's true. >> We don't know. Maybe >> but uh >> advice uh he says all the VCs are doing some version of this and if you're not at the top of the list, you're going to have problems. So might make sense to delay the raise until you can get closer to the top. So if if the frontier models don't approve of your startup pitch, take go back to the drawing board, build a little bit more before you go out on that fundraising journey. Seth Bannon at 50 years says, "Founders, do not listen to this. You should in no way time your raise based on how an LLM ranks you. The best VCs are not sitting around asking AI, who should I invest in and then doing that?" Well, that's a different question. Are you trying to raise or are you trying to raise from the best VCs? These are two different things. >> Yeah, I think LM the LM would would do a pretty good job of of figuring out like the relative interest and excitement, right? You can look at uh you could if an agent was running uh a pretty interesting uh metric is like you know headcount growth on LinkedIn right uh are are people leaving you know how many people are leaving the company yeah uh all these things so I actually think >> has this fund has this fund's competitor done another deal and they're excluded from uh and that competitor is excluded from your round but they're looking for something Also also also also you know pedigree right this is whether you like it or not a big factor in uh especially like kingmaking right now. So if you're in a category >> and uh you're you're a smart uh individ talented individual uh but you're you're at the seed stage and then there's another >> pet food company pedigree pet foods. No, >> that's what I know about petform >> dog food and treats. and you have another company your same stage uh where you know all three founders just came out of SpaceX after being there for 10 years and you're both competing you know in some adjacent category right like I actually think the model is going to do a pretty good job and say like hey VCs very likely might be you know three times more excited to invest in this team >> than you and and that is just that's just reality Okay, so Philip Johnson says, uh, I'm glad I provoke I'm glad I provoked a reaction. This will age badly over the coming few years. He's saying Seth is wrong. Uh, he says, also, I'm not talking about timing arrays based on AI opinion. I'm talking about actually improving your startup, get more customers, for example, which will at some point be picked up in the AI rankings. Uh, which is a lot of what you were getting at. So I I guess the question is um should you delay a raise based on AI opinion and would you actually listen to a clanker tell you how your business is doing or are you going to say I know better. What do you think? I I I I think you're arguing it's a good source of feedback. It's worthwhile. But at the same time I can't see you doing this. I can't see you actually going to a model and being like, "Yeah, they're right. I am washed. No way. No way. Zero shot. Like >> I think when I was I think I was emotionally I I think that uh >> earlier in my a decade ago, this actually would have been super helpful. >> Yeah. >> Because I wasn't fully aware of all the different factors that made that went into that went into making a company. >> This is a good point. Yeah. So early on early on I like there was like a checklist from zero to one. Peter Teal 0 to one. you and you could go through it and say like, okay, do I have defensibility? Am I building something that will have staying power? How many of these boxes do I check? Because when I go out to raise, a lot of the VCs are going to be thinking the same thing. It's worthwhile and and an AI can sort of help you do that checklist. So, that's valuable. Another another thing I was talking I I >> I don't think you're taking not an LLM uh a smart enough uh model would be able to do this if it was trained on enough VC blog posts maybe uh which which certainly uh I think some are quite are quite well trained on on PG's blog and others but I was talking to a founder yesterday uh 2-year-old company has gone through a pivot figured out a much more interesting opportunity >> than they originally started with >> uh have a bunch of you know pilots a lot of positive momentum uh revenue is growing but I had to tell the founder like look you are the VCs that you're going to talk to if you go out to raise right now >> are are uh are are talking to companies that are adding what the revenue you will add in the next year they're going to add it in the next 30 days. So even though you have a super exciting opportunity, it's going to be really hard to invest right now be just because there's they have a limited amount of capital. They want to be making bets against, you know, oftent times momentum and that's just that's just the game. >> Yeah. And a really really good model a really good model could say, look, >> your startup is very mid. You're don't even bother pitching founders fund top tier firms, but I got some I got some guys who they got crazy ASA right now. They they'd love to invest. So, you should definitely DM this person because they've been posting crazy slop on the timeline non-stop and they're they're just ripping checks at anything and so you fit that category. So, go get the go get the bag from them. >> This is possible. This is possible with super intelligence. Anyway, our next guest is in the waiting room. But first, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. >> And we are very lucky to be joined by Simeon from Carl and Samir in the TV Ultra. How are you? >> Cabin in the woods. >> That's right. It's been where I am. >> It's been too long. I missed you. >> Can you see the view? >> Yes. I want to see the view of everything. This looks amazing. >> Take me home. Take me home. are how off the record is this conference. Can you describe what you're actually doing? >> Never. Whenever you come to Montana, you can't tell anyone. >> Yeah. >> I mean, I did I did just tell you I'm in Montana, but no, I'm actually geoc knows exactly where you are. Let's get over. >> Let's get geo rainbow on next and we'll do you fully. >> What happens in the woods stays in the woods. >> I imagine I imagine you're you're there for good reason. Uh hopefully there's been someone there that has uh provided more context on a story that we've been hunting around >> first. Thank you again for hosting us at your event last week. Press publish LA was amazing group of people incredible. >> Uh thank you guys for coming. Also ex extremely relevant weekend you know to to to have that event. I mean we knew Back Rooms was coming out the next day but obviously we'll get into that. What a what a time for Hollywood and creators. >> Yeah. Yeah. And uh yeah, it was it was funny because I was telling you uh oh yeah, the Markiplier story is so cool. And you're like, I just talked to him on on the stage. And so obviously you've been tracking this for basically your entire career. You've seen this coming. But has it felt overdue to you? Ben Thompson was taking a victory lap saying he sort of predicted this in 2017. It's been a decade and it feels like this intersection of YouTube and Hollywood, it's been very combative. But my my takeaway is that this feels like the first moment when we're seeing glimmers of real cooperation between the two separate communities and a way that that traditional Hollywood can work with YouTubers in a way that's mutually beneficial within the current system. Uh but how are you processing this? How overdue is this? Like how have you been processing the current moment? I don't know if it's overdue or if it's just happening as it's unfolding like in in real time where you know Kane when I started on YouTube Kane was 5 years old. >> So like you know these are internet native filmmakers. >> Yeah. >> And and I think there's three reasons why it's happening right now. You know what one really important thing when we think about back rooms is back rooms you guys talked about this back room started as a 4chan image that then became like a collaborative story. I think the reality is is Gen Z IP is not legacy IP like the Mandalorian. It's IP that is collaboratively created on the internet. >> So back rooms feels like something that everybody on the internet had a hand in creating, right? Or millions and millions of people on the internet had a hand in creating. So when that comes out in theaters, >> I want a thing that I had a hand in. Yeah. I I I think the other thing is that cutting your teeth as an internet filmmaker um it teaches you a lot about how to earn attention. Curry Barker, the director of of Obsession, talked about this in an interview. They said, "What did YouTube teach you about directing movies?" He said, um, "The reality is when you make something for the internet, the audience is begging and you have to convince them to stay." M >> and I think historically in Hollywood there's been an entitlement of hey we have George Clooney in the movie we spent a lot on marketing you're going to buy a ticket and you're just going to sit and enjoy it. Um but I think internet filmmakers know when you're making something for YouTube that like the audience can click away at any moment to something more interesting. So I better tell you a a great story that's unfolding frame by frame. Yeah. And the third thing is >> third thing because I know we both we all love lists. Uh and the third thing will blow your mind by the way. uh shock you. >> The third thing is that Hollywood talent is I actually think like the lynch pin in this moment in time that there's a lot of talent that's available that are like crafts people in Hollywood who have focused on specific crafts whether those are DPS or um screenwriters when >> or set designers like when that is paired with the acumen of internet storytelling it's it's it's proven to be very powerful. Mhm. >> So I I think there's been this like narrative of course Hollywood is dying, but I think it just looks very different now. Like we didn't know theaters were available. Like Markiplier put his movie himself. He picked up the phone and put his movie in 4600 theaters. Theaters are available and they're they're great. Um you know like Hollywood talent is available. They don't have other jobs and they're great. So I think these worlds finally coming together. Um there's there's been a lot that's happened but it's it's super exciting to see. >> Yeah. Yeah, I look at it as like the last 15 years has been a story. There was collaboration happening, but it was overwhelmingly a disruption story. You look at the market cap, uh the value creation of the platforms, you know, the the YouTubes, the the Instagrams, etc. How much how much uh the explosion of enterprise value in these new platforms, the overall reduction in EV in some of these sort of like more legacy entertainment? Sure. >> But now we're meeting at a point where there can both sides can say like, "Hey, we've we've now is the opportunity to figure out how to both win because clearly there's a place for both, right? We still we still want to see the I mean, I don't, but John would like to see the the blockbuster. >> Jord's going to see movies. You're going to see you're going to see this is going to be the tipping point because you were never a movie guy, but once the new creators once there's a wombo film and a whole cinematic universe around Professor Cendi, you're going to be >> I'll be there. But uh but yeah, so so this is the moment where I think the I I expect digital platforms to consume more and more and more and more attention. That just seems to be they're frictionless, right? Uh they're free. They're available everywhere. But now is a moment of hey both sides should be you know actively trying to do more and more stuff together. >> Yeah. The reality is also it's important to note that this has all happened in horror right and this has happened once before with the Rocka Rocka brothers uh you know signing with A24 and making talk to me for about 4 million bucks that ended up making just about 100 million. These are outsized returns like Curry Barker making something for a million dollars. You know Obsession was made for about a million dollars. Focus purchased it for around 15 million and then generating $148 million not even a month in is uh absolutely insane. And so horror has historically been cheaper to produce, right? If even if you remember in the '90s the Blair Witch Project was like this cheap indie horror movie that ended up exploding. Mhm. >> And I think um there's something to to explore about like the absurdity of horror and the absurdity of these movies and the absurdity of our world right now and maybe the comfort in going to see something that is more absurd than the world around you. >> That's just a hypothesis I have around, you know, horror, but horror has historically been cheap to make. I think we're about to see every agent in Hollywood ping their creator talent and say, "Do you have a horror script?" because uh it is that moment that's going to happen. There will be likely an overreaction. Yeah. Um you know to this in Hollywood. But I do think like what was proven over this past month is that >> uh internet native storytellers can tell a story that reaches millions of people that fills theaters um and potentially better than you know the the storytellers that >> cost you in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The Mandalorian costs $265 million all in and it's made $247 million right now. So, it's like it's super hard to make a big blockbuster movie like that. >> And, you know, even Markiplier making something like he made independently for under $5 million, you know, is is is pretty incredible. >> Okay. Uh, talk about the state of horror on YouTube or fiction on YouTube. It's somewhat interesting to me that I would put back rooms like the the the actual content as it's horror and the movie is a direct adaptation of that. The original backroom series on YouTube is creepy, but uh Obsession Curry Barker that was comedy and Markiplier was horror but video gaming. He wasn't creating the fiction himself. And so I'm wondering about how if we will see a shift. Does this give does this basically does this give YouTubers permission to do things that are more fictionbased versus explainer videos, podcast interviews, reactions, commentary, which is like the bread and butter of most YouTube comedy as well. Um or or or or will we see more people pulling, okay, this person's talented, but horror is ROI positive, so we should just give them a crack at this, even though they're a commentary channel, as opposed to someone coming through. Okay, they've been telling love stories in a fictional context. They have a romcom series on YouTube. Let's let them make a romcom. >> I I think animation will be the other space outside of horror, and it's already happening. The Amazing Digital Circus is a great example from an animation studio called Glitch. Um, you know, their first few episodes crossed half a billion views of of Amazing Digital Circus. They didn't know that was going to happen, but but it did and a community, you know, gathered around them. Um, I think horror and animation and and anything video game adjacent works really well on YouTube. >> Um, I think some of the other stuff is harder. I think that stuff may emerge more on like Instagram and Tik Tok and whether it can be adapted into uh feature length stuff I think will be up up for debate. But I do think both things will happen. I think YouTube will be looked at now as a real incubator of IP and a real incubator of talent. And I think that's always been like a concept, but it was never like like I think when you meet with Hollywood execs, they're like, "Yeah, but we can't make any money off of it." Right? like, yeah, they can make money through brand deals and a couple million bucks here and there, but like we can't make real money. These movies have proved you can make real money. And so, I think that's where both things will be true. I think creators who upload to the platform and, you know, incubate IP backrooms was found by a 27-year-old, you know, uh, basically staffer, um, who was just poking around and seeing what was going on on YouTube and Reddit. I think that will be like everybody will have a young person just perusing Reddit and YouTube to go what's catching and I think if I was giving advice to those people I would say really take a hard look at Reddit and see where things are being built in real time by big communities. Another great example of this is like in the Minecraft community years and years ago the Dream SMP >> Yeah. >> was this like collaborative Minecraft story that had so much lore to it that a bunch of people were involved in. So I think the reason why video games is such a right place for IP to build is because it's interactive storytelling and interactive world building that a lot of people are involved in and that then more than just a like audience that >> guarantees like a mobile audience cuz they're invested in it. >> And then there's there's uh red versus blue with Halo and GTA RP. like there are rich sources and it's interesting there's been so many uh video game adaptation flops basically Detective Pikachu is the only one I think that has a Metacritic score above 80 Last of Us did well so it feels like we're hitting a tipping point there but you go back to the original like Doom adaptation a lot of the Resident Evil films some of them made money but none of them were critically acclaimed or really became like cultural moments in the way the video games did but if you have a creator who actually really deeply understands the community, the content, the lore, and then they build their audience on top of the IP, potentially some of these video game companies that are maybe not as internet, not as like not as linear storytelling native. If they have someone in the mix who's already sort of prevetted, this can work as a two-hour film, then they can unleash them, turn them loose. But of course, it's an IP negotiation. Is there any missing part of the stack right now to meet this moment? You have the, you know, the CAS, the talent, you know, the talent agencies that can, you know, wear a lot of different hats and help make plays. You have production companies, but is there any uh is there any part is there like financing component missing? uh maybe it's too risky to create uh some type of vehicle just to back creatorled uh films but at the same time maybe having domain expertise would be uh actually >> I think the missing piece and this has been historic in our uh industry is development. I think there's a lot of assumption that creators with big audiences know what works and part of that is true but you know Kane got signed at 16 years old and A24 kind of mentored him from from the age of 17 to the age of 20. Um and I think you know 824 has a history of making great movies that are culturally relevant and knowing how to make something iconic, knowing how to make us all feel something. And so that I think should not be overlooked is the development step. Like surround me if I'm a filmmaker, surround me with people who have done this before. Help me write the script, which Kane did have a lot of help in in in screenwriting. He's looking for a collaborator for for part two. But give me the the development support to make it long lasting IP or big global IP. And I think that happened with Kane. I think Curry is like a a really great talent and uh what he's done in in comedy historically has led him here. But I think development is going to be the missing step because what's going to happen is it's going to be a very quick reaction. Let's get creators with scripts. Let's put money behind them. Let's move fast so we can also make $150 million. But you know, you have to remember this is years and years and years of these storytellers cutting their teeth and having good people around them to help them learn how to tell a good story. So I think um the financing will not be a problem because you can finance create creators know how to make stuff for cheap. >> Uh last last question. >> 20 days Zachary made that movie, which is crazy. >> Uh, somewhere out there, someone is sitting in a dark room for like 18 hours a day trying to prompt their way to >> uh, a hit movie. I don't know if I don't know if the models are good enough yet. >> I have a feeling they might be. And it really is about figuring out the storytelling component and piecing it all together to be cohesive. But do you have any sort of personal timeline to that kind of moment where some one individual takes you know an idea through a you know even a 30 minute film that actually gets a you know positive reaction from critics or you know something like 20 million views something like that. >> I mean I you know obviously we all live in LA. I feel like I the first thing that comes to mind for me is the Spencer Pratt mayoral ads cuz those are like a lot >> AI generated >> ads >> but I'm just saying to make >> it's a glimmer they're they're much easier to make but I'm saying that's that's where we are in the timeline right like >> that those ads are are clearly AI but they got shared a lot and they did do millions of views and >> people just accepted them for the story that he was telling I think >> and so I think um if you look at that like maybe it'll be in a year or two and I think it'll start in animation with short films cuz we'll accept that more. >> But I don't know all all things. I think another element of this whole story is I do think maybe you guys feel this, maybe you don't. I think there's a bit of internet fatigue that is allowing theaters to come back. >> Yeah, >> I think um maybe I'm just overstepping there, but I do feel it. I personally feel the Gen Z screen time finally sort of dropping off a little bit after spiking. like running over my phone with my car on purpose to have a little bit of forced time offline. >> So, like the models are really good. Like I even playing around with Gemini Omni. Obviously, we had them at at Press Publish LA, but like they're really good models. They're crazy good. >> Uh you know, whether you can that'll probably happen in the next two years. We'll probably watch something like that. Uh, one somewhat related cut on this that I want your reaction to is I found it very interesting that backrooms started as a purely CGI VFX effort and uh in Blender and After Effects and it and what's interesting is there's actually a whole discord for modeling different 3D models that that are shared so the community can build around it and the assumption if you are worried about the relentless march of techn technology is like, well, of course they had everything modeled. They already had the Blender assets. Like, just hand that off to the VFX team and you got yourself a CGI movie. Put all chew edge of four on a green screen and it's done. But they didn't do that. They built 30,000 square feet of physical uh set design. And it and it's interesting that >> I feel like the the CGI found up wound up being like the audition for actually building and underwriting the the the buildout of that set. And I imagine that that might happen in AI where you get someone that has some interesting idea that they were able to prompt and then they take that into a CGI that's a little more polished and then they can go build the actual sets and it's all just this extra underwriting process. But I was wondering if there was anything else that stuck out to you about the fact that they that they sort of went light on CGI when you think the fans of back rooms are they're already Blender. They love Blender. Like they're not upset about CGI. But if it was CGI, then I would be like, just make it for YouTube. Like the the reason why it's an event is because of all that. And I think 24 and you know, I don't know who >> Yeah. I don't know who whose call it was, but A24 is very good at making things iconic. All the interviews of the cast are done in the back rooms. There was a DJ set from the back rooms. There was people who visited the back rooms. Like the fact that it was tactile in an event 360 experience. I like that. Yeah, >> I've seen five movies, but I can tell when I can tell just based on with hardly paying any attention, I can tell when a movie is an A24 movie from like the first video that I see, the first 15 seconds of a trailer. Like there's just something >> about it. >> Yeah. It's the same with you guys. Like you can like there's you know countless shows that try and be TPBN but you can see TP you could I could like see something for a split second even without you guys on screen and know if it's TPBN and I think 824 has that >> and that is really hard to do. It takes a lot of focus and it takes a lot of discipline, but um you know I think A24 has done it again like this is this is incredible and and pulling someone like Kane into this and beating Marty Supreme which had like a crazy marketing push >> uh shows you the power of the internet. >> Yeah, they overpowered the blimp. >> Powerful, man. Uh the internet's powerful and and uh the communities are powerful. >> Okay, last question. I'm assuming we're about to leave and I just wanted to say I'm thrilled to see ads back. I couldn't tell you uh how great this looks to me. >> Uh yeah, I'll give it up for that. I'm thrilled. >> It really is part of the ads. We love >> It's part of the brand. >> It is part of the brand. Uh do you have time for one more question? >> Yeah, I got time, man. I'm just here in Montana. You You guys have to go probably doing mysterious things. >> Yes. Uh next question. Where are you? And don't dodge the question. No. Uh uh I want advice for YouTubers in the context of passion projects. There's a lot of YouTubers that have grown off of a single format. They know what works, the title, the thumbnail, hook, the format, the the the structure of the video. They know they can put up a million views for every video that they do in that series, but they get sort of bored and they want to do their their passion project, their series. Uh and then they do it, they take the time off and then it just doesn't quite perform. Maybe the 200,000 true fans show up, but it's not getting the viral hooks. I I noticed this with Johnny Harris did this fantastic series on Cyprus and he went around these islands, but it just it wasn't financially the same as all the other videos that he does. And I'm wondering if there's a new format where you should sort of give YouTubers the permission to keep that special project in their back pocket and take it to a different place, take it to Hollywood where that type of project can live and flourish and go through development as opposed to trying to stuff it down the same funnel that is very optimized for a particular type of video. >> I I think monetizing your passion projects is almost like an oxymoron, >> right? Like if if if it's if it's a passion project, you care about it. You should not get other people involved. Like we are in the business of media. You can sell media. You can you can come up with your media product. You can sell your media product. You can sell your ad integrations into your YouTube videos. But you have something you deeply care about that you just know how to make it. You know what it should be. >> I call you add a bunch of Yeah. Yeah. You or you have a financier that you trust. Yeah. You got a financier that you trust that's not going to hinder it. And again, Curry, I think the danger with these creators now is actually having too much money. Um, you know, like Curry making that for 750 is what makes it special. It's what actually gets less strings attached. Yeah. >> Uh, and why it's good. Markiplier making something no strings attached. Like that's just his money. Um, >> he gets to make something really special. So I think Markiplier is a great example like when you have a passion project you you ideally have the cash to do it or can get it from someone you trust who's not going to >> uh intervene with it. But I think that is a danger. I think too much money can kill creativity very quickly. Um and it just becomes a product of course >> uh and so I I would caution. Yeah. >> I have I have one last hot take that I want your reaction to. Uh, we need to bring the host red midroll ad to the cinema. >> Movies should have host red midroll because if you look at the if you look at the budgets of some of these films 750 a million dollars if if you're watching Obsession and then just at the 1 hour mark and then you get an ad for Sapphire Chase Sapphire Reserve. >> Not just product placement. I want the I want the characters to sit down. >> No, no, no, no, no, no. The whole point is that it's not product placement because everyone goes to product placement movies. This is this is separate. This is a host red separate from the cont. I want the characters to sit down and not just use like a Chase Sapphire card to pay. I want them to look at the camera and deliver. >> I'm actually sick of seeing James Bond use the Samsung Galaxy S26. I'm I would rather just James Bond tell me about it separately and then I can go back to enjoying the movie with whatever phone he would use than whatever phone the character would normally use. >> I love you guys and I love how you speak about advertising. I disagree wholeheartedly. I don't want that at all. Uh I'm happy to have the theatrical runs sponsored by someone like Chase if you have a Chase Sapphire card you get in for free and like you get perks for something if you have a Chase Sapphire card. Um, the one thing, my hot take is I want movies to be like 90 minutes and under again. I don't I I can't do the two-hour movie. Like I just cannot do it. Um, I would prefer like 90 minutes and under I got time for 2 hours feels like and I think all of our attention spans are being trained to like be way shorter than that. Even an hour and a half is like working out. Like it's hard. >> Maybe go shorter. 90 second movie >> vertical. >> Well, John and I are John and I are going to start >> 20 bucks is 20 bucks. But I I you know I checked the box. I saw a movie. Yeah. I went to the theater 90 seconds and about. >> That'd be good for me. >> That'd be great for you. You'd be able to catch up. You'd be like, "Yeah, I've seen hundreds of movies." >> Yeah. Well, we can agree to we can agree to disagree on ads. John and I will start a media buying company called Fourth Wall. And it's just focused >> fourth wall. >> Focus on real agency. >> Breaking down the fourth wall and delivering ad impressions >> during your most sacred moments of entertainment. >> Yes. Yes. Yes. The next Godfather will be sponsored fully. Uh anyway, Enjoy Montana. Thank you so much for taking the time on a busy day to come chat with us. >> Great to see you, dude. >> Great to see you >> again. Not that busy, but I appreciate it. >> Okay. Activities. >> Goodbye. >> Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless realtime experiences and new value >> with Cisco. >> Hey team, is this uh Ben, is this real? >> What is real? >> Did you take a screenshot of >> What happened? >> What is this? >> Look, look in the chat. >> No. No way. >> He found the target. >> Uh just off that one screenshot, our our intern Ben was able to find Samir's exact location. >> Okay, we will knock. We do know exactly where it is potentially. I don't know. This might be hallucinated, but it looks pretty it looks pretty accurate. Anyway, we've been keeping our next guest waiting. We have Tom Fairley from Bullish in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP Ultradome. How are you doing? What's going on, Tom? >> Good to meet you. Welcome to the show. Can you hear us? >> Cannot hear us. >> Okay, we're turning on the audio. Hopefully, we'll hear him in the meantime. Let's go to this debate. Okay, Becky Quick at CNBC is getting in trouble because she claimed that GLP1s are responsible for school budget shortfalls. When I saw this, I was like, what could possibly be the connection? Uh, and Bioin Investment 5 said she's so misinformed. She fact checked it. Turns out it's true. >> School budgets are paying for GLP1s. They're very expensive and so that's driving up health care costs in a lot of in a lot of schools. >> Welcome to the show. Anyway, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time. How you doing? >> Sorry about the sorry about the audio issue and uh I I found the uh the little bit about Becky interesting. She she's about to speak about somebody else, somebody on a on a different network, but uh she's a pro. She's a serious journalist. huge fans of everyone at CNBC. We love the Squawk crew. They pioneered this whole format, invented television over there. Anyway, uh let's go to you. Tell us about Bullish. Give us the update. Take us through what's recent in the business. And uh let's get started. >> Yeah, sure. Just uh before I do, just to follow on on that, you said you're a fantasy NBC. I I too am a fan of NBC, but also we have our own media business here. No way. And I've watched with some as as both both a practitioner and and a fan of some somebody who's done a lot of it. I've watched with some astonishment the success that you guys have met with by just creating a a fresher, more interesting format. You guys do an awesome job. Thanks. Thanks for having me on. >> Thanks for saying that. It's a lot. Yeah. It's been a really wild ride. Really fun. And uh best part is getting to talk to people like you all day long like and uh and and again and again and and talking to six people a day. Uh, a lot of people start podcasts because they want to talk to interesting people, but then they talk to one a week. We get to talk to seven a day. It's great. >> Yeah. Yeah. Super cool. I'm uh I'm happy for you and happy for me. Yeah. What can we talk about? >> Uh, well, why don't you uh take us through like the shape of the business currently and then some of the new deals that you've been working on. >> Wait, can we get some backstory first? >> Oh, yeah. Yeah. Let's start there. That's >> You were at uh you're at NY, right? >> Yeah. I was uh I was born in Buoie, Maryland, just outside of uh DC. I was going to say I was born on the stock exchange. >> I was born on the floor home. >> On the trading floor. >> That would be amazing. Lore. >> I actually didn't know like I wasn't born with any like pre uh any any destiny. I didn't I didn't know. >> I always I was always interested in business and money and uh no I wasn't it nothing was pre-ordained. But so >> grew up in uh >> a lot of people are afraid to say that. I was never afraid to say that. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. No, I could tell my mother would shake her head sometimes. My mom my mom was a nun for five years and uh >> and uh worked in uh you know, I grew up in a place called PG County and and she worked at Elizabeth Seat in high school, which you know, by and large had kids from a different socioeconomic strata than me. And then she would come home and I would talk about making money and uh you know, she looked at me like, "Oh, he's the black sheep." >> Yeah. >> But um met my met my wife at Georgetown. I need a dollar to buy Gatorade. And um she lent it to me and now we have we have three kids in in New York City and I just fell in love with business. And uh first couple years I I did like banking and private equity. Honestly, I love that too. But when when I really kind of hit got got my mojo is is in the markets industry cuz it's the intersection of tech and business and that to me is is my happy place and I've been there ever since. I I started when I was in my 20s. I'm I'm like granddad now in the digital asset space. I'm I'm 50 and I've been right there at that kind of overlap of the the ven diagram of of technology and markets. I um I I I had I had these friends, the Romero, and uh and I love them. I love them all. Stay in touch with all of them. There's four brothers and and they're all super smart, super successful, and three of them are just like meattheads, like you know, always had their shirts off and and wrestling and playing playing hoops. And then Danny was always like reading Java coding for for dummies when he was like 10 years old. And I would always keep an eye on him. And so in 2013, I'm like, "Danny, are you going back to Duke?" And he said, "No, I'm going out west to start a blockchain company." >> And I'm like, "All right, I don't know what the hell that is, >> but if you're doing it, I want in." And >> you know, a few days later, uh, New York Stock Exchange, where I was at the time, we we agreed to put $10 million into a a little bitty, maybe pre-revenue company called Coinbase. >> And so I got this bird's eye view of the digital asset space. Dan Romero. >> Yep. >> Whoa. Yeah, we know him well. He's been on the show. >> That's a crazy That's a deep cut. >> That's so good. >> Oh, it was great. It was great. Literally, Literally, I'm like, Danny, going back to Duke. He's like, no. He's like, "No, Tom, I actually graduated this past May. You're a year off. I'm starting this blockchain company." Meanwhile, I know I'm going in to run the New York Stock Exchange. He does not. >> And I'm like, "Hey, dude. You got you got a couple minutes. Come sit on the porch." And he comes up >> and he starts telling me about blockchain. And I'm like, "Wait, I'd heard of Bitcoin, but this is early, right? It's like smart contracts." And and I'm like, "But what but but what use is there for these smart contracts?" He's like, "Oh, it's going to be amazing. It's going to disintermediate. It's it's this layer of programmable finance. that's going to disintermediate all the kind of big institutions like the New York Stock Exchange. And I'm like, wait, what? What are you What are you talking about? It can't be. And so I said, I I got to put some money in. He said, oh, well, my roommate Fred is going to be in New York tomorrow. Why don't you meet with him? And so I I met Fred Ers. I ended up meeting with with with Fred at at Union Square. >> And we put that dough in. And it was like the best money we we ever invested. And we got lucky on the return. Just dumb, you know, just dumb luck. Is this like this series A stage? Like >> I don't know. I can't remember last Tuesday. I let alone 2013. I could Google but early. >> I mean, Coinbase was in my YC batch in 2012 and summer 2012. So, I think Ced or Series A was right around. >> We should punch We should punch it in, you know. >> Anyway, it was a long time ago. Punch in New York Stock Exchange, Coinbase. It'll come up. >> That's crazy. That must have been what what kind of reaction did you get on Wall Street from that investment at the time? I don't know how public it was, but I imagine you still had some some of your peers that were saying, you know, what what the heck is Tom up to? >> You know, was actually I think if if you asked Brian or or Fred um or or Fred at Union Square, I I think they would all say um with humility, it has nothing to do with me. it has to do with the NYC brand that it that it was hugely valuable for Coinbase. It was not only public, it was massively public. >> So, in other words, if you were to look it up, you're going to find story after story after story after story, which is, hey, traditional bellweather uh a traditional bellweather, you know, firm, New York Stock Exchange, validates crypto firm Coinbase. Yeah. >> So on the on the west coast it was it was like a a lot of celebration and you know hey this is finally the coming together of these two worlds. On the east coast it was like what the hell is this? You know what a weird investment from these guys. Yeah. >> Uh and it and it wasn't as it wasn't as celebrated. I I will say just my thesis was this was a programmable layer of finance for institutions. >> Yeah. Like that was the thesis. It was dead wrong if if I'm honest. You know, there were no institutions in until >> Yeah. Was that just a You had the timing wrong. You didn't >> Yeah. But pretty darn wrong, right? Pretty darn wrong. >> Um >> Yeah. >> Yeah. But you're only off by only off by what, a decade? >> A decade plus. >> And just miss But miss that retail would be the the the early adopters. >> Yeah. >> And even some of the late adopters. Yeah, I guess how do you synthesize the fact that uh crypto did not disrupt the traditional finance system like entirely like you know JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, these firms still exist. They're chugging along. New York Stock Exchange is still chugging along. NASDAQ and many others uh and yet crypto firms have been very successful. It was sort of a like heads win tails you lose situation like both both sides did well. there was not total destruction of the traditional financial uh infrastructure and in institutions um but crypto was a was you know wound up flourishing like what does that say about everyone's preconceptions I guess because there were two sides a decade ago either crypto is a zero or it's going to take over everything and it and we we wound up with the middle road >> yeah I don't I agree Agree. I agree. And I'm going to challenge it a little bit. The >> I'm not sure it was it it has been up to this point such a big win for crypto. >> There's actually uh relative relatively for all the money and attention and time and and and you know, ink spilled and for all that has gone into digital assets, there's actually relatively few um successful companies. >> Yeah. And uh certainly the disruption to traditional finance has been relatively small and very small actually. >> I I and and and look, it hasn't always been great. Just I'm not a cheerleader. I call it I call I call balls and strikes. Like not only were there winters, but there were frauds and scams and >> you know, like I'm not in it for the fart coins and monkey drawings. I'm just not. And I respect it and I understand why they're there. And and just to pivot to that, like the nice thing is they've brought a lot of attention into the industry, a lot of money into the into the industry. And I think it's all been a warm-up act. >> Mhm. >> And you know, remember like >> blockchain's going down >> in some in some cases once a day. >> Yeah. >> And none of that happens anymore. and they they've been battleh hardened >> and regulators have now come around and and you've seen broad acceptance of blockchain rails for serious use cases in Asia in Hong Kong and Singapore in Europe in you know in Brussels Europe but then in the individual countries and now in the US not just with Genius which is the st you know it ratifies stable coins kind of gives them papal blessing but hopefully the cryp the uh clarity act >> we can talk about >> how to handicap that but if that gets passed that that'll be perhaps the biggest regulatory or or or legislative step ever. And so I am very very optimistic that I come on this show a decade from now and the global securities market is it's on blockchain rails. Yeah. >> And that's a $270 trillion market. So I I I there's no mission accomplished banner behind me in terms of crypto >> um up to this point, but it's it's coming and it's it's coming. It's coming in in real time. That's kind of how I view it. Yeah, crypto, you know, the the the cycles and the the hype cycles are so vicious and yet it keeps creating these opportunities where the true believers if you just maintain that conviction uh like this window right now where >> there's some at least you know we we primarily cover priv private markets and so there's so there's some interest at the intersection of AI and and crypto there's There's been a decent amount of investment there, but I don't see, you know, hundreds of new companies focusing at the intersection of what you guys are doing, which is that like true institutional adoption across, you know, global equity markets and and other asset classes. And so I do I can I can you know thinking on that 10 year time horizon I very much can see how the best days are yet to come and huge opportunity to just like you know be in the foxhole and and focus on the opportunity. >> Yeah. And I and I I think aentic commerce will intersect with blockchain technology. you know, I'm not one of those who says, "Oh, and 100% of, you know, Agentic Commerce is going to happen on blockchain rails and, you know, fiat fiat rails will will see their share." Um, but that's that's going to be a big driver as well. But you're absolutely right, Jordy, and thanks for doing the prep work and learning up on bullish cuz we you're absolutely right. We we are focused on institutions really uh institutions exclusively in our exchange business over in our CoinDesk and consensus business. Of course, we're a media business, so we service all sorts of people and and customers, but we focus on on institutions exclusively. >> Yeah, I I'm I'm reflecting on the the the question of like the should there be a mission accomplished banner behind you and I I I take your point. Uh at the same time, yeah, there has been a lot of success in crypto, trillions of dollars in market cap. A lot of that captured by the the coins themselves, but there's a number of very successful companies. Yours is among them. Um, but I'm interested in in where you think we are in 2026. A lot of the prices are we're not in some insane falling knife scenario, but uh stable coin volumes are sort of stable even though they were growing very quickly. Uh the Bitcoin price is fairly stable, which is >> what >> fairly stable. micro strategy started selling. >> But but it just doesn't it doesn't feel like oh there's this is the FTX moment all over again like the crypto is about to fall into zero and like people are panicking. It's more just like, you know, this is a mature, stable industry that's, you know, there's some there's some growth. There's some companies that are beating earnings. There's all sorts of different stuff happening. It feels very mature. And so I'm wondering um >> Yeah. Well, it's mature, but still feels like there's an opportunity for pretty parabolic growth as you get real institutional adoption, not just, hey, we're going to hold some >> Yeah. >> you know, Bitcoin on our treasury. >> Yeah. etc. >> So, yeah. >> I agree with every everything you both just said. I I think uh you know what John said is kind of feels like a more or ordinary industry. And by ordinary, I don't mean that in a pjorative sense, but it's no longer based on hype. It's based on real use cases like stable coins. And stable coins are being used for trading and stable coins are being used for payment. And stable coins are being used for for lend borrow. And they've gone from zero to 300 uh uh billion. And you know the whole industry is now uh 2.7 trillion and yes Bitcoin's more stable. Now we happen to be sitting here >> uh at a moment in time when Bitcoin's down you know 15% over the last two weeks or something of that nature. Um but still >> times when these when when like there's like the whole crypto industry is down 50%. And and like people are actually penning the take everything's going to zero and and it's being and it's being debated seriously and that's not happening right now. >> No. So it is a different time. >> And then what and what Jordy said that I agree with. So you know you mentioned John that crypto is a couple trillion. The last time I looked coincidentally uh I'm not that good at math in my head. It made the numbers made it real easy. 2.7 trillion and the global securities market is 270 trillion. >> Oh yeah. >> So and that and that is coming right. Money market funds have already moved on to blockchain rails. uh US equities have already moved on to blockchain rails. You know, you look at all the industry bigwigs from the new, you know, my old haunt the New York Stock Exchange or DTC the clearer or many of the electronic brokers, Kraken or Binance put out an announcement yesterday. They're all tokenizing stocks. You're seeing more uh examples of tokenizing fixed income. And so you're looking at the the parabolic growth that Jordy referred to, I believe, is going to come from the so-called tokenization of the global securities industry. >> What's more important there, cost or speed? Because uh and when I mean speed, I guess I mean like 247 trading. Uh that seems like it's crazy. We don't have that yet everywhere. It seems like a purely technical issue. And yet I've talked to folks at hedge funds that are like, "Yeah, like we actually can't get traders who want to work at 2 a.m. Eastern on a Sunday." Uh it's hard to recruit the best to actually make that market and provide liquidity at that point in time. Uh but then on the other side, you have, you know, fees and all of the different things that happen with uh with crypto potentially dropping costs like what are the different pieces of adoption? Yeah, the the 247 what what people miss sometimes is actually the investing demand especially for the most liquid US-based securities like think Nvidia stock >> comes come the incremental buyer comes from abroad and you know Singapore where we have an office is 12 hours away >> and they don't want to trade some crappy derivative or they don't want to trade some like IOU they want to trade the actual stock and so by going 24/7 you can bring on new liquidity which drives down the the cost of equity of the of of of those companies. And so there's there's a real incremental benefit. I I think to answer your question like what what is the benefit that's most attractive? You have to look at the particular constituent. the issuers they hate little things like when you know I say little they're not little to them but like this issue of naked short selling which is illegal uh but as possible in a world where trading is obuscated in a Russian series of Russian dolls of of brokers or other intermediaries with blockchain rails there is no naked short selling you just look are the are the shares in a wallet or are they not in a wallet like it's it's done but also issuers want the ability to pay stable uh uh dividends and stable coins issuers ers want the ability to be able to reward long-term holders. Imagine you you're a company say, "Hey, we're going to pay a dividend of a dollar, but we're going to give an extra penny for every quarter you've held our stock." >> Um, it's it's there was there was a whole exchange on the West Coast that started that was really great. I remember long-term stock exchange, right? >> Yeah, exactly. Mark Andre introduced me to Eric Reese maybe >> 10 years ago, 15 years ago. And I remember the first meeting I had with him, I thought, "This guy's on to something." Like, "Yeah, we should we should reward that. We should reward long-term holders." Well, it turns out you can't do it if you don't know who owns the damn thing and it's buried within, you know, five Russian dolls. Well, blockchain technology, again, you just >> you just look at it. >> Oh, they own it. It's in that wallet. It hasn't moved. So, um, so for the issuer, it's it's actually incremental functionality as opposed to cost or speed. And then for for the investors, it's just the ability to do things at a at a lower cost. So I guess that's more uh that's that's more cost, but then on the on the speed perspective, being able to settle instantly is interesting. Um so it kind of depends depends which constituent looking. >> Short on time. Couple questions. Uh people on the west coast who know nothing about finance have been uh excited about compute futures markets or treat treating compute like >> uh like a like you know treating it like a commodity. Uh is that something you know how how do you think about that you know potential market? Is that something that you think could start on um on blockchain rails because it is a a new type of commodity in some way? >> Um yeah, two two questions embedded in that. One is will compute futures act actually be a successful product? I I think it will be um the the issue is standardizing it and commoditizing it. um successful the the real successful futures contracts with lots and lots of open interest all come down to the question of are you able to standardize it and commoditize it and come up with the cheapest deliver that has value in the world and everybody agrees upon. So that's not going to be dead easy. It's still probably going to take a couple years but I suspect that that will happen. Uh the second question is >> because is that because like an onion is an onion but a GPU is not necessarily a GPU like an an A100 is not a is not a blackwell. So then do you need you know >> exactly and and the providers >> submark you know basically submarkets >> yeah and the providers have a vested interest in not being commoditized um so sometimes it it takes time for for the market to commoditize but it's it's ex it's exactly what what you just described. >> Got it. >> Um >> go ahead. >> One more random question. Uh Friday IPOs. We're looking at a a SpaceX IPO next Friday. Uh my my my sense is like that's does that not introduce like more chaos because you have like one you know real trading day there's going to be so much retail activity and then you go into a a weekend of course you know people will be trading it over the weekend in different ways but uh I know there was Alibaba and Uber that both went out on on the NY on Fridays. How did how did those go? Does that make it, you know, more complicated or chaotic or is it is, you know, are the exchanges set up to handle that? >> I uh that was one the Alibaba IPO in particular was one of the best days of my career, maybe even my life. Um, but it was also >> coming from the guy who as a young boy knew he loved money. I I also was so faking nervous that honestly when you just said that I like was tingling remembering it. I was I was we were in our beautiful uh ballroom that morning and Jet Lee was there, Masa and Jack and and Jimmy Lee who's who's departed um who's a iconic and legendary JP Morgan banker. He kind of cidled up to me. He's like, "Hey, uh Tom, did you guys test this thing at all? Like, is this actually going to work? Cuz you're about to get a gazillion retail orders. Good god, next Friday. It It's going to make Alibaba look like child's play. So, uh, Adena at the NASDAQ is fantastic and the NASDAQ is fantastic. Oh, man. It still makes me nervous. Um, but to answer your question, I think a Friday is fine. There there will be awesome price discovery on Friday and you're going to see extreme volatility for the first hour. It's that's nobody's fault. That's that's called markets. Could it be better? Could there be better mechanisms that could be put in place to smooth it out? Yes. And we should all strive to get there. I just went through an IPO. I have a thousand things that need to change. I think blockchain technology can be very, very helpful in the future. And I think you're going to see more capital formation on blockchain rails because it can do just that. But high volatility to be expected. It's going to calm down dramatically through the day and it won't be a problem getting through the weekend because there's not going to be any substantive substantive new news. >> Right. >> Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Maybe you should come back on. Maybe you should come back on on next Friday. We got fun. Uh this was super fun. >> This is fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. >> Yeah. Great. Great to meet you. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy your web apps, servers, databases, and more well railway. Automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Our next guest is Nicash Aurora from Palato Networks. He's the chair and CEO, friend of the show. Welcome back, Nash. Great to see you. How are you doing? >> I'm doing great, gentlemen. How are you? >> We're doing well as as we're doing great. >> It's been to see those watches. Uh, I have a Rolex Submariner in TBPN green on. We got them for the whole team. >> Yeah. Not going to be happy. >> What about your favorite guests? >> Our favorite guests. We We We do have some of those. But >> we do. We do. I actually I can't wear watches when I'm using a computer. I It's too annoying to me to have it clacking against uh >> It's just I can't do it. Total skill issue. >> Total skill issue. >> Total skill issue. Well, um, >> no skill issues over at Palo Alto Networks, thankfully. Incredible progress. Take us through it. What's the latest in your world? >> Well, I think the good news is we can officially declare the sassocalypse dead for cyber security. >> Why Why is it like uh did were you surprised that it that it took so long? It it it uh it obviously has only been what a couple months but still >> Oh, the good news it gave every one of our happy shareholders a buying opportunities is good. >> Yeah. So >> there you go. >> It took a few months because I think look the general tendency in the market was AI is going to eat every piece of software and it's going to be amazing. It's going to take care of it. Now AI is good >> but even now the false positive rate on unaded models is 25%. Right. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> So if I don't explain the harness, if I don't explain the context, if I don't explain what the code is trying to do, the model still gets one out of four wrong. >> In cyber security, our business will get everything right. I'm getting one out of four wrong. I don't think I'm going get replaced anytime soon. >> Yeah. >> It's like it's like having your car driven by OpenAI because I don't need a Whimo. I don't need to have all the machine learning code that tells you everything. So just stick a model in a new car and go drive off. It doesn't work like that. So I think what the market is beginning to realize is cyber security is going to get enabled with AI. >> Yeah. >> And if you want to get it enabled, you have to go with the people who have been doing this for a long time who sit at various enforcement points because we sit at north of 125 million enforcement points. You need AI to enable the enforcement points with new techniques to go sus things out that allows us to do a better job. But it's not going to come away and take my enforcement point away and replace me. So are we going to use the future? Yes. There's an alternate reality where the world wakes up to AI being good at, you know, hacking computer systems and all of the cyber stocks just like rip like off of that news. But it was interesting >> uh interesting. >> Well, I if you saw, you know, one of the core skills of Mitsos is is ability to daisy chain vulnerabilities and develop an attack. So, yes, it is not >> an alternate reality. It's not hypothetical. It is true. it is the capability exists and that's why they were being so careful rightfully so in making sure they don't release the model at large because they know the model unconstrained has the ability of determining attacks based on vulnerabilities so I think it's the right thing for them to do is to make sure they do that in a measured fashion but what you're beginning to see more and more capabilities getting embedded in the core models openai has one now and anthropic has another one I'm sure Google has one too so just play this movie you forward six to nine months from Now it'll be impossible to put the genie back in the bottle or constrain them. >> We have 6 to9 months to make sure that if somebody's able to use AI to attack somebody, the infrastructure on the customer end is equally fast to be able to repel it or block it at the same speed. >> Yeah. >> Now you don't get that without modernizing your stack without of course buying a lot of Palo Alto and having us help you get to place where we can defend in real time just the way AI can attack in real time. So uh the the cancellation of the SAS apocalypse is clearly uh it was a referendum on >> for cyber security for cyber security for cyber security. Uh but but but but the the claim was uh AI will make Palo Alto Network's business worse and I think that's been disproven. We've discussed that. Uh the bigger question I have is how does AI make your business better? Is it just the demand side because there are more threats than ever so people have to buy more PaloAlto or are there other things happening internal to the organization that are making you more efficient higher growth like what are the other levers that are being pulled in the AI era >> well AI will impact in multiple places right the first place is >> the amount of buildout that's happening across the world on AI require means that more bits are going to be traveling across networks right everybody's trying to deploy AI collect more data. Remember, cyber security is the inspection business. We inspect every bit. >> We're the TSA of the internet, right? Every bit has to go through a firewall. Every bit has to go through a product that looks at the bit say, "Good bit, bad bit. Bad bit stay away. Good bit can go." >> If you're going to explode the amount of traffic in technology in the world, you're going to need more cyber security capabilities. That's one that drives more more traffic drives more demand. I think the other part is capability. >> AI models are good at certain things. The question is how can we take them take their false positive rate from 25% down to zero and leverage them in what I do what we do and that's happening right now. We're all looking at how to take certain categories of cyber security embed AI into them to make sure we build a better product for the customer from a protection perspective. And of course like you said there's a third aspect where we can all use AI internally in our business to make it much more efficient. And I always maintained as I said perhaps last time I was with you that AI will democratize intelligence. >> Yeah. which means the average. >> Yeah. Yeah. You said you said efficient. Efficient. And it feels like you're a leader in this efficiency moment where so many companies are token maxing. We've saw $500 million bills going out. When I saw the Palo Alto Network's headline of using AI, using Mythos to uh to find critical bugs, the bill was token minned. I don't know what happened, but you only spent a million bucks. Uh what's going on? Is is this a cultural thing? Are you already looking at ROI? Are you head of the ball there or are you being is it more like a scalpel? You use it just where you need like what is the actual token maxing, token leaderboard, token ROI maxing. What are you doing? >> Well, remember we have we have we have parsed our efforts into what is extremely critical and crown jewels. >> Sure. >> And we can't let open-source models open models touch them because we don't want our code to ever train anything in the public domain. It doesn't matter if whatever they tell us, I don't want my code training public domain. So for that, we built our own harness. We built our own we using our own open- source sequestered model which can't talk to the to the external world. So we know it's safe. >> So half our code is going through that. We're not paying anyone for it. We're using it ourselves and built it ourselves. Is it going to be 100% of what's out in the public domain? Probably not, but it's probably 85 to 90% there and that's okay. I'll go deal with that. >> And on that, is is inference cost an issue yet? Are you burning GPUs to the max and dealing with a half million bill? >> We're just using trained models to run it through because we're using for tasks. We're not using them to go generate new stuff. Right? Got it. So that's one part of it. The other part is when it's stuff that is I don't need to spend expensive tokens for an IQ of 180 to solve a customer support problem. I can use a smaller language model. I can use an open source model to solve that problem because it's task specific. So we're trying to be judicious about the use of AI. But at the same time, I think we're not using it as well as we should be using it. I don't think anybody in the world except unless you're a Frontier AI model company has got it perfectly right in terms of how we need to use it. So, we've got to get up the learning curve and we'll get there. I think the the part which I was trying to say to you earlier, I think it's a very important point. What AI is doing for me internally is, as I said, is democratizing intelligence. The biggest risk in businesses is you hire 100 marketing people, not all of them are equally good. So you all gravitate towards the 10 good ones and you got to find a way to deal with the 10 really at the other end of the spectrum and you know 80 in the middle. Good news is if I train my my in model right with all my marketing data I can increase the average intelligence of all 100 of them to 95%. >> Mhm. >> Then I just need the judgment of the 5% from them which means you know it's a rising tide lifting all boats from an average average intelligence perspective. If I can get the outcomes of 3,000 customer support people to be amazing and there's no disparity, no standard deviation, I become highly effective, highly efficient, and pretty good at what I do. >> Yeah. Uh Jordy, do you have something or can I keep going? >> Uh what's your what's your point of view on AI psychosis in in the in the enterprise? John and I have been talk there there's a handful of our friends that we believe do have AI psychosis. they're uh heavy heavy users of the tools and you ask them what they've actually made and they can't give you a good answer. Now certainly there's an entire other category that uh is being very productive making useful things but uh there's sort of a uh >> like Tyler on our team Tyler is extremely productive very low AI psychosis you ask him for something just builds it immediately and it's there usable tangible >> but it feels like uh there's a lot of certain there yeah there's at least one model that has created a sort of psychosis in the enterprise over the last 6 months >> uh and but tell me which Mhm. >> Uh we don't need to name the specific model, but there's like um there's a there's the the same maybe sycophincency that you saw with 40 with a consumer. Uh I think is touch the enterprise in an interesting way. Uh >> well there's just this risk of having the AI model an employee goes to an AI model says help me with this and then the AI model responds in a sickopantic way. Oh yeah, you're you're you're you're making a major breakthrough. you're making a huge impact at this company and it's just shuffling, you know, spreadsheets around re recontextualizing data, building endless dashboards. It's not actually moving the needle. Again, it gets back to the ROI question and I feel like as a leader of a large organization that's very AI forward. This is something that you'll have to contend with. Uh, you know, are my employees uh using AI tools effectively? It's another question on just the effectiveness of embedding. >> That's a great question. I think we're past that stage at Palo Alto. So what we did was we let people use AI models and AI tools to experiment >> to understand the art of the possible train themselves. Thankfully we did it without token maxing. So people have a good sense. They use all kinds of tools to understand what they are. But when it comes to enterprise efforts we're past the stage that you know we've got one great Tyler. I'm sure Tyler is amazing. I have 21,000 people. You know one great Tyler doesn't change my moves the needle for 21,000 people in the company. So, good. I'm going to take the other side of that, but I I take your point. >> Well, you don't want me to take dollar away. So, what's told me last time I was like, don't take my boys. Exactly. So, >> right. So, I'm sure we have our own towers. Don't worry about that. We'll be fine. >> But the more important part I'm trying to make is that now we sit and understand what are the 20 things we could do and how much scale impact would they have. >> Yeah. >> Right. When if I say let's refactor customer support. I have 3,000 people. Let's train model, let's train intelligence, let's build harnesses, let's build diagnostic agents, let's understand the problem using AI instead of human beings trying to diagnose it. Now that that's not a usable model. That's almost like a business transformation project. >> What data do I need to do? How should my product behave? You know, what's the first agent that you run when you get the data? What data does the customer have to give? So, it's re-imagining how we do the whole activity is a business transformation project. I've got 30 people working on it. They're not using AI tools. They're embedding the LLM in a certain place. They're they're sort of complementing with machine learning. They're complementing with new knowledge bases. They're complimenting with new data that comes from my product. So I'm trying to reduce my false positive down to low single digit. Right. I can't run an enterprise business AI with high false positive. So to get it to low single digits and a lot of programming goes around it. >> Yeah. >> So So the psychosis works or happens if you're just randomly arbitrarily using models to do certain things. We're not doing we're building. >> Most importantly, the psychosis sets in when you're letting the AI evaluate itself or tell you if it did a good job instead of you knowing the ground truth. If you know that what it you're looking at a false positive, you're going to remain in reality. If you ask it, is it a false positive? It says, "No, it's not a false. This is the best." >> Dude, yesterday I was doing my earnings. Okay. I had Gemini up in for my script. I don't like the way it reads. Can you just give me alternate ways to say this? >> So it has this feature called refine. So I had to look at it. I said refine and I'm reading both of them. My team had written that in we simulated a cyber attack and it was possible in 24 minutes using new for models. >> When I refined it, he said we attacked in 24 minutes. I'm like [ __ ] that's not what I'm going to say, >> right? So I can't let AI lose and not pay attention to what it's doing. I still need the human supervision. I need the guardrail. Yeah. Yeah. You have to know the ground thing that it can do wrong. >> Yeah. Exactly. um talk to me about um not not the crazy AI doom terminator scenario but just I think that there is some anxiety around AI and cyber security where you you see these powerful models they're able to to to create find vulnerabilities effectively and there's a fear that there might just be you know a rash of exploits that result in like your some emails leaking or some social network data leaking and just just a leakier internet that causes auses people to be like upset. But my white pill on this and I don't know if this is correct is that the gap between private uh closed source frontier models and open source models appears to be widening and that feels like there's going to be an incre maybe it's 6 months right now that you have access to the frontier models before it commoditizes. If if that grows, that gives me more confidence because I know you're going to go and clean up the internet and police it and be the TSA um for longer. If that gap was closing and all of a sudden it was, you know, open s closed source model, you know, gets a new capability and the hackers have it next week, I'm a little bit worried. I I think you could do it in a week, but I it's much better to have you have six months. But is that is am I interpreting that information correctly? should how how afraid should normal people be about the risk to a leakier internet, a less safe, less cyber seccure internet in the future? >> So let let's let's step back. You know, >> please >> all of us test our software on a constant basis before we launch it. We don't want to have vulnerability in our software. Now, you know, guess what? Humans write bad code sometimes. >> Yeah. >> Surprise, surprise. So what AI is doing is discovering that bad code and we've been testing our products and so is everybody else in the industry and every company does that and you know on average we used to find four or five issues every month and we'd go build a patch and we'll fix you know 108 products we'll fix the patch every every month and put a patch out there. What we found in the last 6 weeks was would have taken us five to seven years to find right so a huge deluge of vulnerabilities. Now of course we have people we redirected them we patched them we had to put out a bigger patch and go patch all of our customers. So, and the the point of that is that there'll be a lot of testing happening in the next 3 to 6 months. There already is with Opus 4.8 or so, you know, OpenAI 5.5 and other models out there. There's a lot of testing going on in the industry across the board. Everybody's testing their code. All that code is going to get patched in the next few weeks, months, that's what have you. Now, there'll be huge influx of patches to every IT department because you got to patch everything right away cuz everybody showed up with all these patches. So, it's going to be bumpy, but I think what we're going to be doing in the next 3 to 6 months is paying off a lot of technical debt we've accumulated over the last many years. >> Mhm. >> It's bumpy, but it's a better starting point 6 months from now than it is today. >> Mhm. >> So, I'm an optimist. I think if you're a better starting point 6 months from now, the next model is going to find a lot fewer things than the last one found because we had to deal with all the stuff that we found. >> Will the next one find something? I'm sure it will, >> right? But it may go back to finding five. And we seem to have survived in a in a world where there were five vulnerabilities found every month by software vendors. >> Yeah. >> Now the second problem like you said is AI might be able to concatenate them or daisy chain them and find a way to attack them faster. >> Yeah. >> For that it's a different problem. You know the vulnerabilities already always exist. When somebody attacks you the question becomes how quickly can you find it and shut it down? >> Mhm. Now, that is a slightly longer term problem because that requires to have a much more modern stack. Requires you to have way more data to analyze anomalous behavior and be able to defend against it. But we'll get there. >> Pay down all the technical debt. Start building technical equity. I like to hear it. Um, >> well, it's I mean like this is why AI is so exciting. You can do five to seven years of work in a month. >> Months. Yeah. >> It's amazing. I think it's amazing. The only thing we have is we have to find a way of getting 21,000 people transformed without AI psychosis to amazing leveragers of AI so they're using it in the day-to-day life and trying to treat it as their assistant as opposed to be afraid of it. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> I love it. Uh last question. Um uh I don't want to get too uh geopolitical but I want to know about uh America's compute advantage or the AI race in the context of cyber security because there has been this debate over our are our our data centers the nuclear bombs or are the weights the nuclear bombs if the if the weights were stolen by a North Korean hacker firm uh they could wreak havoc but I don't know if that's real because I think you have to actually go and inference these massive models you millions of times and test every little system to find the actual exploits to actually do the hacking. And so uh another maybe white pill for you know America and the American internet remaining secure is that as we build more infrastructure, more data centers, more uh GPU racks, we are able to do more of good guy inference, more cyber security, more testing and our systems become more secure relative to the nearpeer competitors that might want to hack us but are have not invested enough in energy and compute capacity. Well, let's back up. Like look, we're all internal technology optimists, right? We all Silicon Valley, we hang out here. >> 99% of use cases we talk about AI are good use cases. AI is doing amazing things. It's going to do drug discovery. It's going to do a whole bunch of positive stuff. It's going to get rid of mundane things that we don't have to do. So, generally being an AI optimist is a good thing. >> Does America has an advantage? Yes. We are building on the last lead in the technological revolution from last round go around. Right? Where all the hyperscalers live? Where do all the large consumer tech companies live? Where do all the cyber security companies live? 90% live in the United States. Right? So, we have the core of building the next wave of technology on the back of the last amount of success we've had. And I think all the efforts you're seeing, whether you're seeing it from the recent executive order on cyber security, whether you're seeing it around investment in chips, whe you're seeing it around investment in electricity, everything else, we are trying to build the underpinnings of building an amazing future with AI in with us. Now does it mean there will be an edge case of you know single-digit percentage where people will try and use for bad things? >> Sure. >> Every technology every invention has had people using it for bad things. >> U can we protect cases? Yes, we will have protection. Will there be some notable mishaps? Most likely you know it's happened. We have 2,000 ransomware attacks a year. Why don't we move on? We go solve them. Life moves on. We fix them and we move through it. So I think you have to take an optimistic outlook. Now can models be distilled? Yes. Can weights get reappropriated? Doesn't look like you need to because every 3 months somebody seems to build the same capability open source. They're picking it out. So, and do they need the three month advantage or not? I think they'll get the advantage. I think the key is going to be is we have to keep sort of marching along and making sure that our infrastructure is up to speed so we can actually match sort of defense with the speed at which offense can happen. And it's always been an asymmetric battle. Cyber security always had to be right 100% of the time and the bad guys have right once. They don't need a lot of compute. They can go rent compute and come after an enterprise if they so choose to do so. And this game of cat and mouse will continue. >> Last question. How much of your time is spent on quantum? >> A lot. So what's interesting is we launched a capability where we can assess people's quantum cryptography readiness. >> Yeah. And we built capability where we can wrap your traffic with quantum secure keys. So even if you haven't upgraded your infrastructure to quantum yet, there's a fear that quantum is succumbing and there are nation states who might be collecting data which they're going to harvest later when quantum becomes reality hoping they can hang on to classified data and break the keys afterwards. So we're already wrapping the traffic now. >> Yes, >> that's really cool. >> If you know there's classified data and you can start sucking the data. I don't know what's in it, but it's classified, but I'm going to break it as soon as quantum's ready. And I'm pretty sure nation states will have quantum capability much before it's commercially available. >> Wow, that's amazing. I I love that you're already working on that. That's so >> We have a quantum rapper. You can buy a wrapper from us. You can go look at do full cryptographic inventory. We can encrypt the traffic with quantum secure today across your sort of traffic nodes and make sure that your data can be intercepted. >> I love it. Thank you. Thank you for doing that. And then also thank you for coming on the show. It's fantastic to catch up with you. Congratulations on all the progress and thank you for cancelling the SAS apocalypse. At least in cyber security. We're going to cancel a SAS apocalypse everywhere. We're going to cancel all apocalypses eventually. >> Sounds sounds like a plan. >> Have a great rest of your day. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Speaking of a company that canled the SAS apocalypse, we got Bigma. Meet agents. Meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. And we got a timeline post here somewhat related to Figma design. Teddy said he couldn't decide on art to hang on his apartment walls, so he built a drawing machine to decide for him. This is a very cool little hack project, I guess, that uh it will move the weights so that it can draw on an X and Y axis. It can generate an image and then it can draw it with a pencil or a pen that you reload uh and it can pick an image and draw uh a different thing every day. Thought that was >> calling it a generative pen train transformer. >> Yeah. Theodore.net. What a good domain name for just a an individual like solo uh creator. It's a generative pre-trained uh transformer. Penrained transformer of course. Uh we'll go check it out. Um, but we have our next guest in the waiting room. We have Henry Stern from Privy back on the show. Welcome back. How you doing? >> Are you at the Rainforest Cafe? >> Are you at the Rainforest Cafe? I'm >> at the Rainforest Cafe. Um, I'm I'm in Europe because in fact TVPN is the TVPN of Europe. >> But I'm calling in from Amsterdam. >> Uh, yeah. >> Fantastic. What What brings you to Amsterdam? >> Uh, money 2020. >> Okay. Uh, and uh, >> this is a fintech conference. Yes. And I imagine you're speaking networking. >> I Yes. All of the above. We uh we we we we launched a few products. We had a great launch with uh with deal today to enable contractors to basically receive stable coins globally and do a number of things with them. >> Uh and then uh speaking, meeting customers, all that. >> Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Deal's been really ahead of curve on that. >> Been so dealing with stable coins for quite a long time. >> Oh, yeah. Did they have their own like in-house solution? Like what what Yeah. What what what is the nature of the partnership? How does it change? Like what what what was the what was the before era like? >> So I I think the before era they they they had done a few products to enable people to um I believe uh they'd experimented a lot in the space but this is basically the coming together I think of uh the full package where they're doing three things really. One is enabling any business to pay out their contractors in stable. if the contractor so chooses, they can receive basically stable assets as a payment no matter where they are. And they're starting roll out in Argentina, but moving a lot from there. Two is they're basically putting out a wallet app. Doesn't look like that at all. It just looks like an account where you can receive um your payment, but that allows you to basically hold a balance, earn on the balance, so really a savings account in many ways. >> Um and then basically spend uh uh from the balance. Uh and so this is you know sort of the whole package coming together in an exciting way. And then the third thing is um is that they are actually issuing their own stable coins so they can have a lot more control over how the underlying treasury is managed and so on and so forth. And so um from the previous standpoint I've been very focused on the wallets and how do you connect all of these pieces together but then obviously across Stripe we've been we've been working with them on a number of products. So uh it's been kind of fun to watch all these products coming together really well. >> Yeah. So I imagine >> this is like the announcement from their side is really they have they're in consumer fintech now. >> Exactly. >> Very cool. >> I I imagine internationally there aren't like spending the stable coins. I I understand uh you know receiving for contractor payments makes a ton of sense. Earning on the on the money that's in the account that makes a ton of sense. But I imagine actually living your life in uh any country even in America it is still hard to go and spend stable coins or is it not because there's credit card infrastructure that can be tied in very quickly like what does it actually take to like run your life if you're a contractor in Brazil or Egypt or Thailand and you make money from deal they pay you in stable coins you winds up in a wallet you're very happy with your uh your interest that you're getting But then you want to go live your life. You want to pay your rent. You also want to you effectively want to be able to send wires and and pay peer-to-peer payments and also buy food and buy, you know, get money from an ATM at some point. Like what how does that all work? >> Yeah, it's a great question and I think this is the part that's very exciting is is kind of how the whole space is is getting stitched together. Um so it's at a high level at this point there's just a huge explosion in the usage of uh stable coin cards that enable you basically to settle directly on uh you know traditional rails like Visa and Mastercard uh from your stable coin balance directly. So for the you know merchant accepting it uh they don't have to think about this at all. It's a same experience as if they were getting a purchase from anyone else. And then obviously in reverse we're doing a ton of work at Stripe to make sure that merchants can also accept stable coins directly if the user has you know the balance and so on. So we're kind of working on on uh the platform from both angles to make sure it's completely multimodal. >> How high is the great wall of great firewall in China? Like is there any stable coin penetration in China? Are people doing VPN stuff or is it because there were some tech Apple obviously wound up working with China effectively Airbnb was over there for a while as if you wanted to rent a place because you know it's not like the countries are actively fighting it's you know it's a tense rivalry but uh there are companies that have been successful there at the same time Facebook not successful Google not successful uh Uber sort of uh you know was unable to get a foothold there Tesla doing very great model Y sell over there. So what is stable coin adoption? Does China have their own ecosystem or is there some crosspollination? >> No. So today I I I think the situation has has changed over time but basically today um very much verboten in a sense and uh and not an active part of of what's happening. So we don't um for for this particular you know speaking for privy um we we don't have customers that that that we serve there in terms of stable coins because very specifically um it isn't something that's running. So it's a it's a it's a you know the approach is very much the technology itself in a sense this is a file format for money right you're kind of sle your your fiat into uh a digital asset and the way I like to think about it is like different you know stable coins are like different formats so you know we accept JPEGs and PGs just the same uh but then ultimately uh getting currency on the ground in every country uh depends on the local regulation and in this case uh China is is is very much not open stable coins today. >> Interesting. >> Yeah. More and more and more capital controls. >> Yeah. I mean, yeah, makes makes a ton of sense because you load up a bunch of stable coins and then you transfer all your money out of the country. Uh are are you tracking any like uh is there like an a mirror industry like an indigenous Chinese like digital yuan effort that's getting traction? Because like there's been a whole, you know, open source AI movement. I'm wondering if there's, you know, Chinese versions of crypto projects that are actually maybe, you know, six months behind. >> It's a great question. I mean, to to be honest, I don't know. I I think the the the honest take is is is twofold, which is one, we've seen a ton of adoption um in the US since uh Genius and and and and you know, with with a lot of what's happening around clarity. And so that's kept us quite busy. Likewise, you know, in Europe, and then the adoption in Latam and other parts of Southeast Asia is huge. There's a really vibrant set of communities in Singapore, in Korea. So, there is a lot happening um in the region generally, but uh but I just haven't seen that much by way of companies um working in mainland China um doing this sort of thing. So, I I couldn't tell you to be honest. >> So, in terms of maybe other countries that are uh the the fastest adopters, it feels like America is on the frontier here. uh clear regulation, some more coming down the pipe. Uh a lot of the companies are based here. Uh is there who's in second? Like what what country is leaning in the most to stable coins broadly? >> It's a it's a great question and I think part of it is that today by nature at least it's a very crossber technology. So it ends up being pairs basically as you go along and so there's very good corridors. For example, um US to Mexico, we serve a company called Felix Bago that's doing like 5% of the US to Mexico remains corridor. I think that's like $60 billion a year. Um, so it's a really meaningful the the the entire quarter is $60 billion a year, but it's a it's a really meaningful uh pair. Likewise, I talked to a company not too long ago that was trying to help with instances from the UAE to India. Uh, and so you've basically got these these pairs as you go. Uh, the most leaned in though, Mexico is doing a lot and there's a lot of clarity uh there and then we're seeing just generally a lot of activity in LATAM. So that's where a lot of the the the the the volumes are happening. >> Very cool. Well, what does uh new startup formation look like uh in uh in stable coin in in the stable coin market broadly look like at this moment in time? Uh, I'm sure you get pitched all the time as an angel, but for a lot of these, it feels like in a lot of these categories, there is now a category leader and maybe less opportunity even though we're getting so much adoption. >> Yeah, it's a great question. I I think basically there's like two types, right? there's very pure software uh plays and I think I think privy was was was such a company in that we run you know cryptographic uh infra to to enable people to do things and then there's a lot of people who want to take care of like the data piping on the ground in various countries so I you know I think of these as money pipes in a sense and you've got the software layer and then you've got the uh uh connections into local banking systems and so we are seeing a lot of uh things happening trying to build like better APIs better abstractions on top of the huge gap in localized partnerships. So that's one and then the other frankly is we're seeing a lot of stuff around aentic commerce with people basically trying to build better control systems for agents to actually uh take these assets and uh and pay with them. So this isn't actually stable coin specific. There's a lot happening in fiat as well and and Stripe's doing a ton in the space, but it's you know broadly around like service discovery. how can you find what you can pay for um and actually connecting to it. It's around the actual protocols for uh delivering payment really easily via you know sort of agenic interfaces, LLMs and so on. And it's about um being able to actually sort of meter spend so you don't get wrecked if your agent hallucinates. So those are probably like two of the super active areas that we're seeing. Um and then we're seeing just a lot more adoption is something that struck me at this this this you know money 2020 in Amsterdam which is uh a lot more institutional adoption including from like larger banks and and and players who historically have been uh have been kind of waiting to come in. >> Amazing. Well, enjoy the conference. Thank you so much for calling in. I'm sure it's late there. >> Enjoy the Rainforest Cafe. >> Enjoy the Rainforest Cafe and we'll talk to you soon. >> Great to see you, Henry. >> Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. >> Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds in online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. You know, I think the AI uh agentic commerce could be big because if you get hit with like a $500 million bill for your agentic AI, you might not it might be over the wire limit. So, you might need to use you might need to transfer like tens of thousands of Bitcoin, low fees. This is valuable. That's the future of agent commerce potentially. for all the for all the people getting hit with half a billion dollar bills. >> It happens to the best of us sometimes. Well, our next guest is Alexander Good from Post Fiat. Welcome to the show. How you doing? >> What's happening? >> Hey, what's up? >> Not too much. Great to have you on a Wednesday. >> Man, I can't hear you guys. >> Okay, we'll try and fix that. I will tell everyone about MongoDB in the meantime. >> What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. And let's see if >> Alexander can hear us. >> We can hear you. >> We can hear you. He can't hear that. We need to put up text on the screen that says that we can hear him >> and then he will know. We need to update the Chiron. We can hear you. >> Joe Weisenthal is tracking the popularity of various running shoe brands. He says on r/running shoe geeks, one out of 18 posts mentioned a major Chinese running shoe brand. Just last quarter, it was one out of 40. Lee Ning is the big one. >> Uh Lee Ning, of course, signed a shoe endorsement contract with uh >> Golden State Warrior star Steph Curry. >> Uh very interesting. I mean, haven't the basketball shoes been made in China for a long time? That was like the whole Nike thing, but I guess it's like the brand now is is bigger. Yeah, that's a big that's it's it's it's uh >> Chinese companies have acquired you know a bunch of brands like Arcterics things like that >> uh and the next step is to actually get meaningful brands >> consumer brand in America the one that Americans like the most that comes from China >> it's got to be DJI right >> y >> drone videographer was like >> Bernie was using >> I know it's a controversial company because People see it as industrial capacity, but if you're just like, I I my only I don't think about geopolitics, but I like that my wedding video had a drone in it and it was a DJI drone, you think about that very positively. Has sort of a GoPro aspirational brand. Is there anything else that pops up as Chinese brands that are loved in America? I can't really think of anything in particular. Obviously, tons of stuff gets made there, but anything on the top of your mind? every product on Amazon that has a name that >> Yeah, but that's not Yeah, I I was going to say hoverboards, but they didn't have a brand. Uh, and a lot of the cars aren't here. I believe that they would be popular if you could get a hyper car for $20,000 like that they make over there. >> Kimu or Shien? >> Are those like really loved brands in the same way like DJI feels a lot closer to like a Nike brand or an Apple brand than Shien or Teimu? Uh, Teimu seems more like a Walmart brand. I I I agree with you. It's popular. Like it's certainly brand recognition is there, but in terms of brand admiration, I don't know. Can we play this video from Instagram explaining the new Call of Duty map format? They're getting into generative level design. It's not Gen AI. It's not fully Transformer based, but they're they're creating a whole bunch of different pieces of the pie and they remix them. Let's play it. >> Any other like slabs and we're able to randomize that at runtime when you're playing >> three slabs on the map. They randomize them every time you load into the map. >> We have that is 100. We have the content to do upwards of 900. >> When you play a multiplayer game for a while, like you have this sense of discovery each time you play a new map, but that kind of quickly fades, right? You've played that map maybe 5 10 times. You're like, I get it. I know all the places. that never fades with Kill Block. >> I I I see this as an existential risk. I think this might be the end of TBPN. I think that once this goes live and we're playing this in the Ultra Dome, we're not going to remember to go live because we're just going to be gaming too much. It's entirely possible. >> I don't know. I keep coming back to Rust. >> Yeah. >> If it ain't broke, don't fix it. >> I'm so happy. >> Okay. >> Like Rust for me is like a vacation destination that you have so many good memories. >> Yeah. You don't want it remixed >> and you're just like, "No, I'm good. I like going to this beach, this place." >> Okay. >> And I'm happy to keep going back. >> He's a lite. He's a lite folks. Uh anyway, we have Alexander Good in the waiting room. Let's bring him in and see if he can hear us. How you doing? >> Doing well. Can you hear me? >> Yeah. Fantastic. How you doing? >> And fantastic uh green screen background or Zoom background. >> Yeah, it's it's the new AI. It's uh it's very powerful. Um, great to finally have you on the show. I've enjoyed your your uh posts and for a long time and some of your rants, your your you have some of the best rants on the internet. >> Um, appreciate that. I've been been looking forward to this. >> Yeah. Uh, h how would you introduce yourself these days? Like how much of uh just uh I I mean I guess set the table for people. Give us a little bit of backstory uh and uh and your thesis right now. >> Cool. Um yeah, I used to be an army. Uh I worked at uh Cityroup, Palunteer, Balazny, started a company, sold it, and then I got into crypto. Um and AI changed a lot of obviously what I was working on and what many people were working on. And uh I was really just trying to figure out how to, you know, I I got very very pilled early on on the idea that AI would just destroy people's work product. Um, and a lot of people are getting on that train now, but I I guess I was on it in 2023. So, a lot of the rants were uh coming from processing that and going through my my own AI psychosis. And now I'm like now I'm like post psychosis. Now I'm just like in a co I'm in a codeex terminal uh working on uh building a protocol uh that hopefully can um move the needle for uh for people who who own it and uh also you know just our investors. a lot of money like flow a lot of like attention money everything flowed from crypto to AI there was even that meme like if you're in crypto pivot to AI has has AI strengthened your belief in crypto like what do you think the intersection is because a lot of people jump to like well the agents will need they would couldn't possibly figure out Stripe so they'll have to use a token and I've never really believed that fully I think that there's some opportunity there but it feels like the AI trends. You're a believer in that, but also your faith in crypto broadly has not been shaken and you haven't like pivoted or like gone to like the hot thing, which is not it's just less common these days, I think. >> Yeah. I mean, let's be honest. Uh the intersection of crypto and AI has not been a particularly good intersection so far. There's been a lot of, you know, hacking events. Um, every human piece of code that's ever been written is being evaluated by agents right now, which is obviously created like an acceleration in hacking. >> Um, X42 has kind of like gotten exploited. Uh, right. So, you know, there's been, you know, there's this kind of uh, you know, you can prompt engineer agents to send you money and that's like not a good thing if you're running a protocol. So, it's like, do you really want a protocol that can just like send people money? Um, I think the thing that's kind of kept me in the space or kept me excited about the space is I was always kind of fundamentally in this because of something I call the doom thesis, which is that, you know, AI might not cause productivity productivity to accelerate. It might actually accelerate, you know, the kind of onset of the surveillance state um or, you know, basically uh a type of world where capital is going to flee the system. Um, and I think that thesis is very much intact. I think that's why you're seeing a lot of crypto like Zcash uh run very very aggressively. Um and I think that's going to continue to be uh a story. Um you know I think that's why Teal moved to Argentina. I think it's sort of like um you know it's in motion. >> Where are you on Bitcoin versus other coins? I mean obviously you mentioned Zcash. Like how strong do you think the Bitcoin thesis is these days? um and how how much maxiness needs to be considered in that thesis. >> Uh the the Bitcoin thesis is getting weaker uh by the day. Um you have privacy coins accelerating in terms of their adoption. Uh I think it's notable also you know the European Union and other countries tried to kill Monero and were not successful at that. um you know the tornado cash uh rulings in the United States have given clarity to to coins like rail gun which are smaller uh but are good tech and Vitalic uses it and you know their big privacy summits and bitcoin is fundamentally not uh private technology and it also has the unfortunate sort of leverage concentration from Michael Sailor uh who has you know issued a lot of uh preferred and complex convertible uh financial instruments on top of it which have kind of concentrated the ownership and the liquidity profile um and now is kind of driving a market downturn, right? So, so today's STRC drop as well as Micro Strategies equity situation are driving down moves in Bitcoin and unfortunately like it's hard to see that uh structurally reversing. Um, >> do you know if there's been a material impact on crypto from not just the the the capital markets moving around and and founders and employees pivoting to AI, but the actual mining operations pivoting to AI because a lot of the a lot of the neoclouds that we know, they got their start in crypto mining and they're sort of out of that uh market. Is that actually affecting crypto in any way? I haven't really followed it. Yeah, I mean it's interesting. Cororeweave um you guys might know uh Vance at Framework, you know, he had a fantastic return for his fund partly because uh you know Cororeweave literally pivoted out of crypto into AI. Um and they're the OG pivot story. So they they were like prejason calacanis. They they did it they did it um >> um >> yeah you know the JCAL post the if you're in crypto pivot to AI in like 2023. It was post chat GBT so it was a little bit late. Um but it turned out to be you know cracked for a lot of people. >> Yeah. >> A lot of companies launched very well >> difference. >> Um so yeah I mean like there is an there is an interesting thing going on right now. Um you guys are probably going to hear about something called Pearl >> uh relatively soon. Um it's aggressively backed. There's rumors that Thrive is in it. uh uh and you know the TLDDR is that it's a proofof work AI coin and basically there's a paper that came out in late 2025 um by SG Lang which talks about determinism uh in in basically GPUs which allows you to use AI to mine cryptocurrency. And so this is something my my brother started working on with Ambient which got backed by A16Z and then Pearl uh is an Israeli team which is doing something kind of like similar. They're using map wool mining and they have a partnership with together AAI that got tweeted out. Um right and so so you know essentially the the the argument that a lot of these crypto AI protocols increasingly are trying to make is is something called useful proof of work uh which is the idea that um you know you have a minor that can also deploy a service. So, you know, my brother is delivering verified inference. And then the pearl argument is that you can basically buy uh GLM uh not GLM, it's uh Gemma um on Together AI for a 25% discount because the miners are subsidizing it. Okay. >> Now, the funky thing is that like you can also buy it for like 50% less than their subsidized version on Open Router, right? So, so you're like you're kind of like market cap dependent. you need this thing to really really move in order for it to provide a meaningful subsidy. Um, but you know there's an argument that uh I think the the the comp compelling zoomed out argument is that you know TSMC back in 2017 or 2018 you know 10% of their of their product was Bitcoin AS6 and now it's like way less than 1%. And so if you're like okay you want to secure money with proof of work very very high level it's like why wouldn't you secure it with GPUs? um um you know there there arguments why you wouldn't right because you're like it's because you're literally burning GPUs which are productive assets to secure this thing which is even worse than burning energy for Bitcoin mining but that's kind of a separate argument right >> how how separate is this from uh the render token render network from Octane where uh individual computers or or folks with compute would would render CGI frames and then earn a token. it was not nearly as decentralized. And then I know Prime Intellect was working on this as well, trying to sort of wrap spare compute and and put it on a on a network that was uh sort of transacted with a coin uh intermediated by that coin. Uh it sounds like this is at a much lower level. Is that correct? >> It it's at a Yeah, it's an architecture level. One render and a lot of these coins including Bitensor actually, okay, are are stake coins, right? So, so they're not actually secured by the operation of a GPU. So, so this is kind of like this Pearl thing >> is a regime shift. Um, and it's trading at, you know, like a $2 billion FTV on on private, you know, there's there's there's token sales. So, it's starting to move. It's a it's a relatively new story in crypto AI. >> Um, >> you know, I my my protocol is like a completely different bet. you know, my essential I think the there are some interesting intersections of crypto and AI that people are probably less focused on which is that you know all of crypto is open source. So actually when you use codecs or you use these AI agents they are like phenomenally good at uh you know crypto work because it's in the train because it's in the training data. It's all open source. So if you screw something up, you can just be like, "Hey, can you just double check this with rail guns implementation to make sure that we're doing the same thing and then like you know 5 minutes later you have like a working, you know, orchard shielded transaction on >> some forran code that's locked in some old financial institution. It's never seen the light of day, not going to be in the training set whatsoever. >> Exactly. And and so there's like an opex efficiency argument in crypto because historically crypex crypto has been like a very wasteful industry. uh you know there's like a lot of money spent on conferences and and just like you know the Ethereum Foundation is like a good example of like how not to run a company and it's it's sort of like >> uh there's a lot of waste in crypto and AI is b like crypto is like the ultimate software industry where you're like okay I could credibly reduce engineering by like you know 60% here. >> How are you thinking about AI psychosis? You said you went through it, you got to the other side. Like what's the state of AI psychosis? Where's it showing up? >> Is it bearish if someone hasn't fallen in and then climb their way out? >> True. A true lite versus the, you know, white pill got through the trough of disillusionment is in the plateau of the trough of uh >> illumination. Yeah. Something I don't know. But how are you thinking about it? Where where is it cropping up? Where is it bad? What does it take to get out of it if you're in it? Well, you kind of converge on this like conclusion, right? You start with a we start with a psychosis and the threat of the psychosis is that my work is not meaningful and that everything that I've done is basically meaningless because an AI will be able to do it better. >> Sure. >> And then you actually start encountering the tools and you're like, okay, in the areas I don't understand, AI is really good, but in the areas I deeply understand, AI is like pretty bad, right? You know, there's not like a TVPN where uh there's like two AI avatars that are doing a better job than you guys. I mean, maybe the new A16Z1 is is that and we just don't realize it, right? It could just be that those guys are are are running a really really advanced uh AI system. Um uh there's some evidence. I think I I think it's there's some evidence of that. I'm not going to discount the possibility. Um but >> but you know, essentially you're like, "All right, >> this is a this is kind of directionally going to obsolete my work." >> Yeah. And so I better be the first person to obsolete it, right? Like that's sort of where you end up. >> So the way that you get out of AI psychosis is you say like the only way out is through, right? So you're like, all right, how do I how do I literally automate everything that I did before and then how do I also just like >> start to think about network effects that were impossible previously. Um so so I'll give you an example like um you know I'm working with uh there's a pretty robust community with my crypto project and we have what we call the data lake um and the data lake is basically like you know hundreds of contributors who are doing tasks all day and then their aggregate intelligence gets kind of like you know summed up by an AI and it comes up with actionable trade ideas right and and it's it's sort of like you're like okay you can make all kinds of alt data now I I think you know palunteer kind of inspired me originally when they started talking about how well they're doing with corporates when they're like, "Hey, like we have the biggest, you know, uh we have the best demand story in history to take unstructured data and turn it into structured data." >> And I'm like, "Okay, that's cool in a corporate and government context, but like nobody's ever done that with our Wall Street bets, right? Or like nobody's ever done that with trading information." And I'm like, "Okay, like >> I'm just going to do that. I'm gonna take, you know, the palunteer ontology method and apply it to, you know, a group of individuals who create, you know, market alpha. And so then that's how you get out an AI psychosis. You you can sort of identify like what new capability does AI enable that allows you to generate the the type of edge that you would have historically just with a new kind of data primitive. So it's like okay, like it you need to have a story for how you use AI to get out. That's the the short answer. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I mean we're sort of at this moment where yeah the AI is is replacing a lot of things but I mean at least as an entrepreneur like I don't know that the moes have actually changed because people are saying like oh like SAS apocalypse like your big pile of code is no longer a moat but if you go back and look at the literature whether it's 0ero to one or Hamilton Helmer seven powers like big pile of code was never a moat it was always cornered resource brand network effect complex coordination like these other things that were not just oh yeah you were the first person to build a lot of momentum around a piece of SAS and you've you've accumulated so much technology and and software that that is your mode it was always something else but I don't know how are how are you thinking about entrepreneurship outside of trading outside of uh the startup >> before I wanted to ask how you think market cycles are evolving Uh we were joking in Q4 of last year that uh we were like great like the Bears win like the bubble the bubble did pop right. It was it did feel like it deflated. You had a big sell-off >> and then you got a new paradigm that >> that came you know it came at the right moment uh and kind of re reignited a lot of you know um excitement and you know revenue and and all the all the good things that you want to see during a technology cycle. Um but it feels like you know everything's been massively sped up. Um, but I'm wondering uh I'm wondering how how your what your kind of mental model is for market cycles today. >> Well, the interplay of of AI and the market itself is kind of accelerated. So, the way that people interact with markets has changed. So, they're now very commonly pasting a transcript or pasting a company's earnings release into uh an AI system. And those AI systems have biases, right, that are quite separate from the biases that humans have. So, I'll give you an example. Like the the company ASML um is extremely complex. Like as a human listener to the earnings call, you would be asleep halfway through the earnings call. If you paste that into Claude Opus 4.8, it loves it. It's like, wow, this is like the most interesting cutting edge. Like, I don't even believe this is true. Let me web search that. you know, Claude is highly engaged with ASML in a way that a human kind of wouldn't be. And the really esoteric bottleneck >> Well, there are there are humans that would be. There's just like a very small number of them in the world. And now there's effectively infinite, right? >> There are. And and so some of these stocks that are that are pumping like HPE, you know, like I used to trade this thing back when I was at a hedge fund is the most boring company in the world. and and this guy David Gills who lives down the street from me, you know, it's like we were trading meme stocks and now he's trading HPE, right? And so it it shows you, you know, this is like a buyback like 70-year-old guys like, you know, not nothing against wearing suits or anything, but you know, it it wasn't an exciting story. Now it's like, okay, now it has tripledigit, you know, data center growth and um it's it's the things that are going up are kind of um historically stocks that retail would have never thought of. And a lot of them like SanDisk and like Micron, you know, I I know one woman who's like, you know, I inherited uh an account from my my grandparents that had a ton of Intel, Micron, and SanDisk in. I'm like, yeah, it's like literally like, you know, 75year-old people were owning these stocks because they thought they were like reliable bellweathers and these are the things that are up, you know, 300%. So, so I think I think just like the market composition is is really different. Um, you know, if you look at Coinbase, it's like got substantial sequential revenue deceleration. So, you know, people are not investing in Salana, they're they're investing in HPE. >> Um, and so, you know, the the sort of B2B uh focus of the markets has completely changed. And I think that's going to continue to be the case. Like, I think I think people are going to continue to engage with extremely complex equity stories in like a way that they just never would have before. Um, and I think that benefits like a lot of, you know, for example, in my industry, I think it is going to benefit coins with more complex technology stories. I I think Zcash is a good example. Um, where it's like, okay, like their encryption technologies that are moving forward that are esoteric, that are hard to understand, that wouldn't have generated engagement before, but now like the UX of the of the user interacting with is like, I just copy pasted this into Claude and it says it's the best. >> Sure. Sure. Uh, how does lore play into those stories? I feel like I heard I don't know if it's Zcash, but there was one about like they brought eight people together and they all had different pieces of the key and they were all like they brought a journalist with and there were different computers and they broke the computers and it was like building all this lore. Obviously, the Satoshi story is like extremely lore fililled. Even the Vitalic story is like you know build something you want like and it feels like the like starting the perpetual motion machine of some of these projects is important. How does that change? you know, I I want to say lore becomes uh less important um just because the the stories that I just shared with you, you know, like HPE or some Intel, like nobody knows who Intel CEO is, right? It's like and the it's like nobody is like invested in this story, right? >> Are you saying they still think Pat Gellzinger's running the place or what? >> I I think people just don't know, right? I think that's the the sort of real story is that Micron like I don't think people know what Micron does. It's like a trillion dollar, you know, memory bottleneck company. And >> um >> uh so I think lore becomes less important in one way. The the more contrarian view that I have is that IP universes become a lot more valuable. >> Um and so for example, uh you know, one of the there's a lot of AI stuff about Harry Potter distills, right? So you you can like extract 98% of Harry Potter out of Deep Seek or Quad if you're if you're motivated. And so it's like it wasn't supposed to train on it. There's the big libgen settlement with Anthropic like they did train on it and there's a big multi-billion dollar payout. >> But it's like that kind of uh multi-billion dollar payout creates an a strong incentive to kind of have IP treatment. >> Sure. >> Um in a proper way going forward. And so, you know, Games Workshop, for example, has, you know, the cinematic universe, which is World of Warcraft that becomes infinitely generative when you combine it with an AI system. >> And actually, like what you get from like AMD or where where this is, I think, interesting is that you've seen like a big structural crowding out of entertainment because of the enterprise focus of AI. So, Anthropic, for example, like if you listen to Dario, he's like, "Yeah, I'm not going to ever generate videos or images because like that's just a waste of time, right?" like he's not or you know OpenAI shut down Sora >> we had we had Mikey we had Mikey from Suno on today announcing a big round but he has had the blessing of a lot of his wouldbe you know the the the most intense competitors he could have have had to just dep prioritize entertainment because it might be a 20 billion market instead of a you know$ two trillion dollar market. >> Yeah. And and that's sort of like the interesting Givvon's paradox argument in my opinion is that like >> uh right now for example Nintendo is down you know 40% over the last year right or or you know take 2 is like getting even though there you know we've got a new GTA game it's it's getting smoked and there was a narrative that like for a while that you know video games would be a big beneficiary of AI because intuitively we see all these like like wow like what if all NPCs were you know LLMs or you know what if you had in-game generative content and the reality reality is given the cost structures right now and the bottlenecks, you're like, "Okay, um that's just not affordable, right? You can't generate real time generative characters and expect to break even on that because that would be like, you know, $6 per game session and that's not a good investment." >> And as AI gets cheaper, that that story is actually going to change, right? So, so I think that's like an interesting kind of like like where we're going is I actually think we're going to get like a big acceleration in entertainment stuff because the cost of AI stuff is going to go down. >> Yeah, you'd have to imagine that uh like the the the the most like mildly bullish take on Take 2 would just be like, yeah, the next GTA game is going to take seven years instead of 10 or like our DLC is going to be pulled forward by three months and that's going to accelerate earnings. like that seems very that seems very believable but uh yeah people have been caught up in all sorts of oh maybe it'll just generate it all maybe it'll all go to uh some foundation model but that does seem further away uh even when we see you know amazing demos from Google but again it's like six seconds here and there very expensive not really persistent lot >> how was that how was Roblox done over the last year because that was always my thesis there was just it's going to be a lot easier for somebody to figure out how to make compelling games, but uh >> down 50% in the last 6 months. Not good. >> Yeah, the these things are are very very bleak. >> Very bleak. >> Shouldn't be. Anyway, hopefully they build back. I'm I'm optimistic. I like Roblox. Uh well, thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Great. Great to finally have you on. It was great. Let's do it. Let's do it again. Let's do it again soon. See you. Have a good one. Cheers. Goodbye. >> Uh there's one more announcement we got to share. And NASCAR are teaming up to sell a $14,000 VR racing rig simulator. Uh Palmer Lucky's back in the VR business. Uh I mean, he already was with the Eagle Eye headset, but he's back in the consumer entertainment VR industry with this. Of course, he's not making the actual headset. I believe it is a >> really three days after I just put down a deposit on my own sim. >> Really? >> Yeah. >> Did you actually? >> Yeah. >> No way. Uh but but I I don't think that's going to be >> that's going to be very specific I imagine. >> Yeah. >> For I imagine NASCAR simulation, right? Because that's that's where they're focused. But >> very >> um very very cool. Matthew Prince over at Cloudflare says, "Well, that happened faster than I predicted. thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but a Gentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the internet's history. >> That's crazy. Lots of agents running around on the internet. >> Um, >> yeah, bots are now, according to Cloudflare, 57 and a half%. >> Every time you fire something off, it's it's hundreds of pages. You see it in the reasoning traces and the tool calls. Uh, let's watch this demo from Eric Lyman, friend of the show, sponsor of the show. Introducing Stack, the AI operating system that lets accounting firms take on more clients without hiring, learns your firm's process, runs the close, posts the journals, fully audit all auditable. Uh, we're living through the biggest shift in accounting since the spreadsheet. That's a good way to frame it. And they did a very cool uh video for this. All practically produced. I believe this is all shot with an actual camera. They got these actual pieces. They filmed this. Not CGI and accuracy are not negotiable. These one-off experiments. >> Such a common voice. >> I love Eric doing the VO stack. >> It's great. >> One secure place to orchestrate AI co-workers for accounting from day one. >> This has been the vision of RAMP since they launched. And it and it feels like, oh, this is the moment. Of course, they have to do an AI thing, but they've been like like pitching this exact thing uh since what 2020 2019 >> working on it longer honestly. >> We go back to parab and it learns over time always giving you the final say before anything gets posted and every action it takes is fully recorded and auditable. The more you build the lighter the work gets and the more clients you can take on. Stack >> ram stack. They're saying it's god mode. It's god mode for accountants. >> God mode for the >> It's literally god mode. Uh well, go check it out. Uh we should also watch this one last video from Martin Scorsesei, Black Forest Labs. I alluded to it earlier. I saw this on Instagram and I really enjoyed it. 30 seconds uh of Martin Scorsesei, storied filmmaker. Jordy, name your favorite Martin Scorsesei movie. >> Doesn't feel modern. A town, not a village, not a city. Medieval >> Mafia. The movie Mafia. So, >> isn't there Isn't it Godfather? >> There is a movie. >> Isn't it Godfather? The Godfather? No. >> Uh, you're thinking The Irishman, maybe that is like a mafia movie. >> Uh, Gangs of New York >> or maybe Casino or Good Fellas. >> Good Fellas. >> Good Fellas. >> Actually, storyboard. >> Play this. Sorry, I was not paying attention. >> Let's try it and we'll go from from what you think. I need a place that doesn't feel modern. A town, not a village, not a city, almost medieval. Even the the streets are narrower, cobblestone. The main road through the town is twisting and turning. Put the camera higher looking down. Deill would have his production designers do oil paintings. This is that in a sense conveys a cinematic a cinematic intelligence. >> Cinematic intelligence is a good tagline for Black Forest Labs. I thought that was I thought it was really really good. Uh and yeah, what a what what a way to like, you know, hammer obviously in film making's deeply controversial, but you get Martin Scorsese talking about it and uh he's at least going to >> perk up people's ears and they're going to listen to what he has to say. Yeah. >> And think about it. Is it a tool? Could it be useful in a workflow? Could it speed something up? Is it going to make the next Martin Scorsese movie? Probably not this year. But will he potentially be using it when he's thinking about what to work on next? Sure. Uh so fun fun project and very cool video from Black Forest Labs. Anyway, tomorrow we have a special show, but we will still see you at 11:00 a.m. Pacific. >> Sharp >> sharp. And leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbp.com, and we will see you tomorrow. >> We love you. Have a wonder evening. Flashbang.