Microsoft Chases the Frontier, SUNO on Fire, Project Solara | Mikey Shulman, Samir Chaudry, Tom Farley, Nikesh Arora, Henri Stern, Alex Good

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Uh, Mike's got the air horn.

Yeah, we got a physical air horn. And when Nick fired that thing off unexpectedly, it really did some damage. But once you're prepared for it, it'll grow on you. Pretty satisfying. Anyway, Microsoft Build is satisfying for a number of reasons. They're in the foundation model game. They trained a bunch of models. MAI Code won Flash. MAI Thinking won the company's first coding and reasoning models respectively, which several speakers played up as super efficient on a cost per token basis in the ROI. Race. You gotta be efficient. Microsoft Scout is an agent. They're OpenClaw-pilled now, uh, powered by OpenClaw, open source technology that operates across cloud, desktop, and web, connecting to Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, and SharePoint, 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, the Surface RTX Spark DevBox is sort of the answer to Apple's Mac Mini, custom silicon designed for agentic AI. There's also a new Android-based OS, operating system, designed to run agents instead of apps called Project Solara. And there's a pretty cool demo, so we should play the video. The Verge always does a cutdown of these keynotes. They take you through Microsoft Build in 25 minutes, but we're only gonna play a couple minutes of this because it's a long presentation. 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 that are all going to run on Windows in box. Okay, let's jump to 8 minutes because this is where Satya introduces Project Solara, which Ben Thompson said Project Solar 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 Satya Nadella introduce it. Two very broad categories. The first is stationary and the second is portable. The first device is designed for your desk and it's built on MediaTek silicon. Concept cars. With Hello for Business, just walking up to the device securely signs you in, giving you direct access to your agents. And Amazon and Google Home have similar products at this point 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 companion. Still tricky to imagine when you wouldn't want to use your phone for for this, uh, since people carry their phones everywhere. Firing off an agent isn't the most cumbersome thing, but 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 his face on it, like it's a badge that you'd wear.

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 would you want this over having an application on your phone?

And then now that the camera is recording, I'm going to pan across. I'm not sure. I'm going to take the shot. Yes, thank you. That's a good question. Find some good shots. Does anyone have an answer?

Clean them up.

There's a new meme, the two-phone meme. Yeah. 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, 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 prompt it and say, write a 20,000-word 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. Wanna hang out? Let's see. 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, he says, "There's one brief moment in the promotional video that preceded 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. But being in the loop with a wearable is annoying and inefficient. What is being 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. He says, again, this is vaporware and very much in Microsoft's interest, so take Project Solara 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 Solara 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 secure on-ramp to their enterprise agents in the cloud that all run in the Microsoft Azure ecosystem, in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. He says it's also something completely different from the past and fits Ben Thompson's thesis that in the age of AI, thin is in because the compute is so constrained to the data center. On-device compute is maybe going to happen, but there's a lot that you can do in the cloud that you can't do locally. So just have a very thin client and that little keycard device is basically the thinnest client you can have. Its sole purpose is to just interface. It looks a lot like the Rabbit R1, sort of that form factor, which a lot of people were taking little victory laps 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 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 you never know.

Has anybody been running down making a smart AI-enabled cowboy hat? That'd be a good one. Because with a cowboy hat, you potentially have a lot of room up here for onboard some low-tech compute. Potentially. Right. Actually, 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 Mac Mini on your head. You're going to be against that. There's no way you're picking that up.

Underexplored, underexplored hardware platform.

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, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Alex Heath, friend of the show, summed up the embrace of OpenClaw in a post. Scout is what it's called at Microsoft's first proactive AI agent for Copilot. Buried the news that Satya Nadella 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 guardrails back to the project's open-source ecosystem. A lot of people that got excited by OpenClaw, sort of saw the rough edges. And we saw this with the Meta AI, the Instagram account theft that was going on. You can imagine that if you have something that's as powerful as OpenClaw but still constrained within your Microsoft ecosystem, your, your, all your cloud accounts, you could do things that are useful, pull together spreadsheets, PowerPoints, databases, all this different stuff, but not run roughshod 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 OpenClaw makes a lot of sense, says Alex Heath. You only welcome a growing open 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 Apple, you know, you're in the Mac mini, you're in the OpenClaw world. One of the primary beneficiaries of the OpenClaw boom in terms of Mac mini sales.

They really did sell out. They really have sold out all over the place.

But not gonna embrace it. Not, just not enough.

They just don't have the enterprise motion necessarily. Well, that, but also the security, privacy, Yeah, but WWDC is next week and who knows, maybe we will see an Open Claw competitor. Maybe we will see something that's, that's, you know, a great leap forward for Apple in the AI and the Apple intelligence feature set.

I don't know.

I'm— my predictions are something that look a lot more just like, 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 Claw has. So there's a few other observations that Alex Heath had from Microsoft Build. Nadella is trying to tamp down the data center backlash. You know, it's getting bad out there when a Mag7 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. The Copilot super app is not ready. Alex Heath showed off 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 Copilot super app that will sit alongside all of the Microsoft apps. 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 cost-benefit tradeoffs. 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 Frontier Labs, but I think with Meta. Yeah, because they had MuseSpark pretty recently and the thinking model like MAI-THINKING-1. Yeah, it's actually like quite competitive with Meta, which is interesting because I feel like I just have not heard that much about the MAI team. Like obviously they have Mustafa and that's kind of like the big name at Microsoft, but like Meta, you hear like over and over. 'Cause they went through all the coaching, talent wars.

Yeah, talent wars thing. Yeah, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Alex Huang. You have so many people that have like, you know, have done podcasts to have aura and have clout in the industry coming together. Not to mention like the actual researchers that they recruited.

Yeah, so it's interesting that they're actually like, these are people with models. Yeah, many would say the researchers would actually be more important than—

Yeah, but in terms of like building hype around whatever you're working on, like Meta definitely built the aura of MSL and TBD Labs. There's a whole article about Alex Wang and Meta in the Journal or the Financial Times today. We can get to that later. But 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 I feel like I would get 1% of the benefit of that. You got to be all in on that ecosystem.

Got to be all in. Got to be pushing your chips in.

For sure. For sure. Well, we will keep tracking that. What else is going on? OK, live reading, reacting thread from Stoke Kasm, there's a ton to go through on MAI thinking. Was there anything interesting in this thread? So Kasm says, I also have to wonder how much of this report is informed by what they know about IP, OpenAI's IP. So of course they have access to intellectual property from OpenAI for training and they have access to the models. But one of the things that kept coming up in this presentation is that Microsoft is sort of touting like a very clean, pre-training dataset 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 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 during the Elon Musk OpenAI lawsuit. Elon was on the stand and mentioned that he might have, or XAI folks might have done some distillation on either Anthropic or OpenAI models at one point. And so that was sort of 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 companies to be able to fine-tune these models. 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. 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 per 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 gonna run, you know how much it's gonna cost, burr token, you're good to go. But it's gonna 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 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 CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is security. I don't know if you can actually hear that. The filter might be a little bit too much, but anyway, we can deal with that later. We are very, very fortunate to be joined by Mikey from Suno. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? On a massive day. He's here live with us in the TVPN UltraDome. Amazing that you could be here. How you doing?

I'm doing great. I'm excited to be here. This place is awesome.

Thank you. Give us the news. What happened today? Hit the gong. Hit the gong. Tell us what happened.

And then come back and tell us.

And then come back and tell us.

Woo!

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 gong. It's like you've had a bit of practice. It's my—

you told me to go at it.

I went— I know, that was perfect.

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. Fantastic. A history of investing in really category-defining consumer businesses, which is really, really cool. Lots of new investors joining, all of our old investors participating. So really, really excited about that.

IDP, Forerunner, Union Square, Matrix, Quiet, Lightspeed, Menlo. Wow, murderer's row. Good job. Great. 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? The thesis?

Really, really more the latter. There's been a ton of traction and a ton of actual progress since the last time I was on.

And so just to, just to zoom out here, where is the company right now in terms of the products?

So every time we release new products, we release new models, more people come to the product, but more people stick around. And so the engagement metrics that we track, say it's usage retention, What fraction of our users come 3 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 really paying off.

What is the North Star metric on retention? Like, dao mao, 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 like retention. I think all of these are kind of very, very similar. The thing that's, like, really important here is just to remember, yeah, like, revenue 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.

And are you early? Are you, are you far enough along to see like smiling curves in the retention? 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. And so, um, all signs point to, I think the thing that we've thought about for a long time, which is everybody's creative, everybody will enjoy being creative if we can make the experience right for them. And we've known this deep down because when, You demo the product for somebody, you take out your phone, and you guide them through having that magical moment. Their eyes light up. And so it's really around, how do we let people do that themselves and really feel creative by themselves?

Yeah. Uh, walk me through the paid tier philosophy. A single tier? How— like, do you have— 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 prosumer tool? Uh, enterprise? Like, how— —how striated 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 a long time. And so it might not even be appropriate. But what we have now is there's a free tier. There's a $10 a month tier. There's a $30 a month tier. The $30 a month tier gets you not only more usage, but some different power features. Yep. And then, you know, AI is this weird thing. It doesn't really fit neatly into SaaS pricing. And so a lot of 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 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 want the best product, they're happy to pay, but they come once a month with something.. 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. Yeah. And music models are small. Yeah. And so 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 CoWork 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 wanna 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 paywall?

If, if, if Ben Thompson were here, he'd probably ask you about advertising. I feel like 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 there does seem to be a limit to how many consumers will pay even $10 a month. Are you thinking about trading credits while you're waiting for a song 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. OK. I mean, he's awesome. He's brilliant. But I just think about like 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. I just think that the history here—

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 accounts on Spotify? That doesn't maybe count YouTube?

To my knowledge, that's like Spotify, YouTube, Apple, and maybe like 5 others.

There's like a billion vinyl record DAUs now too. Vinyl's gonna make a big comeback.

It is. I mean, I think as we— 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. Yeah. Or you saw 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. I was talking to someone who wanted a job at Suno.. And they were asking me what I thought about the business. And 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. My unsophisticated view was that I told the person, I can easily imagine this as like a $10 billion company. It's hard for me to see the world in which this is a $100 billion company. Why am I wrong? I know you're insanely ambitious. You're not gonna 2x from here and then be like, "Job's done, everybody." No, the job's not done.

I think this is one of those things, actually, I think you've just been hanging around investors too much, you know, which is the thing that, you know, you have to be right for a long time while a lot of people are wrong. And the thing is, 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. 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 inflect up, but we appeal to a broader and broader audience. And so I feel very—

Yeah, I mean, the same, the same thing, uh, would have been said with early creative tools on the internet. Absolutely. It was, you know, how big, you know, with Figma was always how big could Figma be? There's only so many designer, professional designers. Then of course, like the rest of the organization, same thing 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 do design. And then of course, like you make the tools more accessible. And 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 Suno 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 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. It's almost validating to see that people finally think of music as a growth area. Yeah. Again. And so— but again, I think that there's so much room for innovation here. There's so much greenfield 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, what were the key inflection points?

I don't— I don't know is the answer. You know, this is like a song from a creator, and it hits the right, uh, cultural moment and the right vibe. 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. Yeah. And that is really fulfilling to see.

And that 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 are there still people discovering it and getting angry? Because I could imagine there was a wave over the last 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 thrown at it. But I imagine over time people start to realize that these are fun entertainment products and tools. And before you form an opinion, you should just try using it and form an opinion based on your experience, not, you know, Internet comments or things like that. But my expectation is that it will actually become less controversial year over year as it sort of normalizes.

It is definitely becoming less controversial. There are still plenty of people who have preformed opinions and then, you know, actually playing with the product is the best way to change their minds. 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-AI and then they realize that ChatGPT can help them with their homework and they kind of soften a little bit.—

as a useful tool. I mean, Martin Scorsese came out yesterday in a Black Forest Labs video talking about the value of AI in the filmmaking process. But the video demos— we'll watch it later on the show— but it demos sort of like a pre-visualization 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's happening more and more. But I think having a filmmaker like Scorsese step up and say, yeah, this is useful.

I can see this working for me. Absolutely. There's an analog in music, actually, which is that you'll have songwriters make beautiful songs. And instead of making demos for an artist, they can make low-fidelity songs, like low-fidelity productions, which are demos, with Suno so much easier. And it will get ripped out and produced without AI or with minimal AI when it's produced for the last time.

Yeah. But do you think there's still an opportunity for major artists to be a first mover in the space? We were talking, I think a mutual friend of the three of us, and I was telling him he loves Suno, he uses it all the time. And 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 use a bunch of traditional producers, songwriters, et cetera." I think that person will get a lot of credit and potentially 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. We've— there are a few people who are outspoken about it, but I don't know if we've had the moment yet.

I want the project. Somebody has to make a hit record.

There have been— I think what you're going to—

And they have to go out and say. They have to be just very upfront. And what I want is them to document the whole process. I want a video camera.

How much is enough Suno in there, actually?

That's the whole point. 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 Suno, but I would expect for like major artists, even if like the original kind of idea or some element of the song was made on Suno. 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 another kind of individual artist in the room, another instrument in the room that's contributing to the project.

Here's how I think of it. 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 be Suno'd by their fans. Yeah, cool. And 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 Suno's intelligence? I wanna know about the training process.

And we know you have to leave, so final question.

Okay, maybe that's the last question. But there's this like famous story about, I think Andrej Karpathy told it about like GPT-4, 4.1, some iteration where at a certain checkpoint 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's 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, 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 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, like a file corrupt or low-quality sound recording. But 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— the arbiters of that. The thing that's different here also is that 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. Music has no right answers, and so—

Yeah, there's no verified rewards. Not at all.

Not reliable rewards. And so all of those techniques actually don't work nearly as well. Yeah, you can't do 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 chess. You suck at jazz or you suck at country and now we have to go and figure that one out.

Yeah.

OK. Last question, we'll let you get out of here. What about adding on to the viral fuel? When I hear about turn your text messages into a Suno 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-y, see, very like each video format's going to be a whole process for you. It's going to be hard to one-shot the full end-to-end.

But what do you think about it? I personally want the Slack integration. I want a Suno song at the end of each day.

Yeah, why weren't you on the stage at Microsoft Build?

I want the workday at the office summarized. You want a Workday integration? No, I want the Slack summarized. And I want to be able to listen to an hour-long song on my drive home about what's happening at work.

We'll try to make that happen. We're not doing a Workday integration. But I will say, the thing that's amazing is actually this is a platform where people are creative on top of it. Of course. I'm not going to come up with the right cringy text message video, but somebody is going to do that.

Well, that's a challenge for you at home. Go make the cringy 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 to some time lapse. Imagine keeping up at work through music, John. It'd 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 we can talk about— there's a bunch of funny posts in the timeline we got to go through before our next guest, Samir from Colin Samir, joins us to talk about Hollywood. You can tell when a coworker got nothing going on outside of work. Why is that in here?

220,000 people liked this. Is our use— is this— did you put this in to kind of subtweet me, Tyler? I didn't send this in. The team, uh, the team always asks Monday morning, what was it you do this week?

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, uh, 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. 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 far enough, so I, I took it upon myself to generate an even more accurate photo we can pull up. Because I think this is what he should look like. Like if you're gonna AI your photos, just go full, just go all the way. 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 monster.

Yeah, you can claim natural. The typical politician thing to do would be to claim natural.

I'm not on performance-enhancing drugs. I just run every single photo through Images 2 and ChatGPT. People are having fun. It was funny, I thought I was so original for doing this, but if you scroll down the comments, Everyone had the same idea and made him way, way more jacked. If you scroll down, there's 25 others. And there are some—

Simpson says enhanced 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 Philip Johnston, friend of the show, founder of Star Cloud, 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 1, 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. It's, uh, true of a few funds. He says all the VCs are doing some version of this, and if you're not at the top of the list, you're gonna have problems, so it might make sense to delay the raise until you can get closer to the top. So if the frontier models don't approve of your startup pitch, 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 the LLM would, would do a pretty good job of figuring out the relative interest and excitement, right? You can look at— if an agent was running— a pretty interesting metric is headcount growth on LinkedIn, right? Are people leaving? How many people are leaving the company? All these things. So I actually think an agent could get pretty good at—

Has this fund's competitor done another deal and they're excluded from— and that competitor is excluded from Year Round, but they're looking for something in the category?

Yeah, also pedigree, right? Yeah. This is whether you like it or not, a big factor in especially like kingmaking right now. So if you're in a category and you're a smart, talented individual,, but you're at the seed stage. And then there's another seed stage.

You're talking about the pet food company, Pedigree Pet Foods? No. That's what I know of a pet food firm.

Dog food and treats. And you have another company, your same stage, where, you know, all 3 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 gonna do a pretty good job and say like, Hey, VCs very likely might be 3 times more excited to invest in this team than you, and that's just reality.

Okay, so Philip Johnson says, I'm glad I provoked a reaction. This will age badly over the coming few years. He's saying Seth is wrong. He says also, I'm not talking about timing a raise based on AI opinion. I'm talking about actually improving your startup, get more customers, for example, which will at some point point be picked up in the AI rankings, which is a lot of what you were getting at. So I guess the question is, 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 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.

I just don't believe that emotionally. I think that 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 went into making a company.

This is a good point. Yeah. So, early on, there was like a checklist from 0 to 1. Peter Thiel's 0 to want. 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 gonna 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 don't think you're taking it for an answer.

An LLM, a smart enough model would be able to do this if it was trained on enough VC blog posts, maybe, which certainly I think some are quite well trained on PG's blog and others. But I was talking to a founder yesterday, 2-year-old company, has gone through a pivot, figured out a much more interesting opportunity than they originally started with, have a bunch of pilots, a lot of positive momentum. Revenue is growing, but I had to tell the founder, like, look, the VCs that you're going to talk to, if you go out to raise right now, 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, just because they have a limited amount of capital. They want to be making bets against, oftentimes, momentum. That's just the game.

Yeah, and a really, really good model, a really good model could say, look, your startup is very mid, don't even bother pitching founders fund, top tier firms, but I got some guys who, they got crazy ASICs right now, they'd love to invest. So you should definitely DM this person 'cause they've been posting crazy slop on the timeline nonstop, and they're just ripping checks at anything. And so you fit that category, so go get the deal. Go get the bag from them. This is possible. This is possible with superintelligence. 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. Yeah. And we are very lucky to be joined by Samir from Kyle and Samir in the TVP and Altroom. How are you doing?

Cabin in the woods. That's right.

You want to see where I am? It's been too long. I missed you. Can you see the view? Yes, I wanna see the videos. There we go. Everything.

This looks amazing. Take me home.

Take me home. How off the record is this conference? Can you describe what you're actually doing?

Never. Okay. Whenever you come to Montana, you can't tell anyone. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I did just tell you I'm in Montana, but no, I'm actually—

GeoGasser knows exactly where you are. Let's get GeoRainbow on next and we'll dox you fully.

What happens in the woods stays in the woods.

I imagine you're— You're there for good reason. Hopefully there's been someone there that has provided more context on a story that we've been hunting around.

Well, first, thank you again for hosting us at your event last week.

Press Publish LA was fantastic.

Amazing group of people. Dude, it was amazing. Incredible execution.

Thank you guys for coming. Also extremely relevant weekend, you know, to have that event. I mean, we knew Backrooms was coming out the next day, but obviously we'll get into that.

Yeah.

What a time for Hollywood and creators.

Yeah, yeah. And yeah, it was fun. It's funny, 'cause I was telling you, "Oh yeah, the Markiplier story's so cool," and you're like, "I just talked to him 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 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 traditional Hollywood can work with YouTubers in a way that's mutually beneficial within the current system. 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 real time where, you know, Cain, when I started on YouTube, Cain was 5 years old. So like, you know, these are internet native filmmakers.

Overnight success. Yeah.

And I think there's 3 reasons why it's happening right now. You know, one really important thing when we think about Backrooms is Backrooms, you guys talked about this, Backrooms started as a 4chan image that then became like a collaborative story. I think the reality is Gen Z IP is not legacy IP like The Mandalorian. It's IP that is collaboratively created on the internet. So Backrooms feels like something that everybody on the internet had a hand in creating. 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. I think the other thing is that cutting your teeth as an internet filmmaker, it teaches you a lot about how to earn attention. Cory Barker, the director of Obsession, talked about this in an interview. They said, what did YouTube teach you about directing movies? He said, the reality is when you make something for the internet, the audience is bent they're gonna leave and you have to convince them to stay. 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 gonna buy a ticket and you're just gonna sit and enjoy it." 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 great story that's unfolding frame by frame. I think the third thing is— Third thing, 'cause I know we all love lists, and the third thing will blow your mind, by the way.

It'll shock you.

It'll shock you. The third thing is that Hollywood talent is, I actually think, like the linchpin in this moment in time, that there's a lot of talent that's available that are like craftspeople in Hollywood who have focused on specific crafts, whether those are DPs or screenwriters. Or set design. Or set designers. When that is paired with the acumen of internet storytelling, it's proven to be very powerful. Powerful. So I, I think there's been this like narrative, of course Hollywood is dying, uh, 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 4,600 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, uh, There's been a lot that's happened, but it's super exciting to see.

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, the value creation of the platforms, you know, the YouTubes, the Instagrams, et cetera, how much the explosion of enterprise value in these new platforms in terms of the overall reduction in EV in some of these sort of like more legacy entertainment. But now we're meeting at a point where there can, both sides can say like, hey, we've, now is the opportunity to figure out how to both win because clearly there's a place for both, right? We still want to see the, I mean, I don't, but John would like to see the blockbuster. Jordi's gonna see movies.

You're gonna see, you're gonna see movies. This is gonna be the tipping point because you were never a movie guy, Once the new creators, once there's a Wambo film and a whole cinematic universe around Professor Sendy, you're gonna be—

I'll be there. But yeah, so this is the moment where I think the, I expect digital platforms to consume more and more and more and more attention. That just seems to be, they're frictionless, right? They're free, they're available everywhere. But now is the moment of, hey, both sides should be, 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 Rocca Rocca brothers, you know, signing with A24 and making "Talk to Me" for about $4 million that ended up making just about $100 million. These are outsized returns, like Cory Barker making something for $1 million. You know, "Obsession" was made for about $1 million. Focus purchased it for around $15 million, and then generating Making $148 million not even a month in is absolutely insane. And so horror has historically been cheaper to produce, right? If you even remember in the '90s, "The Blair Witch Project" was like this cheap indie horror movie that ended up exploding. And I think there's something 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?" 'Cause it is that moment that's gonna happen. There will be likely an overreaction, you know, to this in Hollywood. But I do think like what was proven over this past month is that internet-native storytellers can tell a story that reaches millions of people, that fills theaters, and potentially better than, and you know, the storytellers that cost you in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The Mandalorian cost $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 pretty incredible.

Okay, talk about the state of horror on YouTube or fiction on YouTube, it's somewhat interesting to me that I would put Backrooms, like the actual content, as it's horror and the movie is a direct adaptation of that. The original Backrooms series on YouTube is creepy. But 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 fiction-based versus explainer videos, podcast interviews, reactions, commentary, which is like the bread and butter of most YouTube, comedy as well? Or will we see more people pulling, "Okay, this person's talented, but horror is ROI positive." So we should just give 'em 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 rom-com series on YouTube, let's let them make a rom-com.

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. You know, their first few episodes crossed half a billion views of Amazing Digital Circus. They didn't know that was gonna happen, but it did, and a community, you know, gathered around them. I think horror and animation and anything video game adjacent works really well on YouTube. Yeah. I think some of the other stuff is harder. I think that stuff may emerge more on like Instagram and TikTok, and whether it can be adapted into feature-length stuff, I think will be 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, basically staffer 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. Yeah. So I think the reason why video games is such a ripe place for IP to build is because it's interactive storytelling and interactive world building that a lot of people are involved in. Yeah. And that then more than just a like large audience, that guarantees like a mobile audience 'cause they're invested in it.

And then there's Red vs. Blue with Halo and yeah, 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 pre-vetted this can work as a 2-hour power film, then they can unleash them, turn them loose, but of course, there's an IP negotiation.

Is there any missing part of the stack right now to meet this moment? You have the, you know, the CAAs, 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, is there any part, is there like financing component missing? Maybe it's too risky to create some type of vehicle just to back creator-led films, but at the same time, maybe having domain expertise would be actually—

I think the missing piece, and this has been historic in our industry, is development. I think there is 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 the age of 17 to the age of 20. And I think, you know, A24 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 Caine did have a lot of help in screenwriting. He's looking for a collaborator for part 2, but give me the development support to make it long-lasting IP or big global IP. And I think that happened with Caine. I think Curry is like a really great talent, and what he's done in comedy historically has led him here. But I think development's gonna be the missing step because what's gonna 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 the financing will not be a problem because you can finance creators. Creators know how to make stuff for cheap. Curry, last question. Curry was 20 days. Wow.

Made that movie, which is crazy. Wow. Somewhere out there, someone is sitting in a dark room for like 18 hours a day trying to prompt their way to a hit movie. 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. 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 like the first thing that comes to mind for me is the Spencer Pratt mayoral ads 'cause those are like a lot of AI-generated.

Ads are so much easier to make. It's a glimmer.

They're much easier to make, but I'm saying that's where we are in the timeline, right? Like those ads 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 if you look at that, I think maybe it'll be in a year or two, and I think it'll start in animation with short films, 'cause we'll accept that more. But I don't know, 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. I think maybe I'm just overstepping there, but I do feel it. I personally feel it.

We were starting to see it in the data with Gen Z screen time finally sort of dropping off a little bit after spiking.

Yeah, yeah, it's thought about. Like running over my phone with my car on purpose just to have a little bit of forced time offline.

So like the models are really good. Like we've been playing around with Gemini Omni. Obviously we had them at Press Publish LA, but like they're really good models. They're crazy good. You know, whether you can, that'll probably happen in the next 2 years.

We'll probably watch something like that. One somewhat related cut on this that I want your reaction to is I found it very interesting 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 are shared so the community can build around it. And the assumption, if you are worried about the relentless march of technology, is like, well, of course they had everything modeled. They already had the Blender assets. Sets, like, just hand that off to the VFX team, and you got yourself a CGI movie. Put all Chiwetel Ejiofor on a green screen, and it's done. But they didn't do that. They built 30,000 square feet of physical set design. And it's interesting that I feel like the CGI wound up being like the audition for actually building and underwriting the build-out 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 sort of went light on CGI when you think the fans of Backrooms 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 reason why it's an event is because of all that. And I think A24— 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 tapped in an event, that's interesting.

360 experience. I like that.

I've seen 5 movies, but I can tell when— I can tell just based on with hardly paying any attention, I can tell when a movie's 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 A24 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.

The internet's powerful and 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 can't tell you how great this looks to me. Yes. Thank you. I'll give it up for that. I'm thrilled.

It really is part of the brand. It's part of the brand.

It is part of the brand. Do you have time for one more question?

Yeah, I got time, man. I'm just here in Montana. You guys have to go probably.

Doing mysterious things.

—things. Next question, "Where are you?" and "Don't dodge the question." 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, thumbnail, hook, the format, 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 passion project, their series,— 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 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 actual 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 think monetizing your passion projects is almost like an oxymoron, right? Like 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 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. High call, right? You add a bunch of— Yeah, yeah, you go— 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. 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 I think too much money can kill creativity very quickly and it just becomes a product, of course. And so I would caution, yeah.

I have one last hot take that I want your reaction to. We need to bring the host-read mid-roll ad to the cinema. Movies should have host-read mid-roll because if you look at the budgets of some of these films, $750,000, $1 million, if you're watching "Obsession" just at the 1-hour mark, and then you get an ad for Chase Sapphire Reserve.

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 read ad. I agree and disagree with you.

Okay, 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 Yeah, and deliver—

because 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, 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. I'm happy to have the theatrical run sponsored by someone, like Chase. If you have a Chase Sapphire card, you get in for free. Treat. 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 2-hour movie. Like, I just cannot do it. Um, I would prefer like 90 minutes and under. I got time for— yeah, 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 gonna—

John and I, 20 bucks. But I, I, you know, I checked the box. I saw a movie. Yeah, I went to the theater. That would be good.

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— 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—

focused on breaking down 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 appreciate it.

Okay, activities. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless Real-time 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 intern Ben was able to find Samir's exact location.

Okay, we will not dox him, but we do know exactly where it is, potentially. I don't I don't know, this might be hallucinating, but 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 TVPN UltraDome. How are you doing? What's going on? Good to meet you. Welcome to the show.

Can you hear us? Cannot hear us, but I can—

Okay, we're turning on the audio. Hopefully we'll hear him. In the meantime, let's go to this debate. Jackie Quick at CNBC is getting in trouble because she claimed that GLP-1s are responsible for school budget shortfalls. When I saw this, I was like, what could possibly be the connection? And BioInvesting5 said she's so misinformed. She fact-checked it. Turns out it's true. School budgets are paying for GLP-1s. They're very expensive. And so that's driving up healthcare 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 this. Sorry about the audio issue. And, uh, I, I found the, uh, the little bit about Becky interesting. She's interesting about somebody else, somebody on a different network, but, uh, she's a pro. She's a serious journalist.

Everyone at CNBC, we love the Squawk Box crew. They pioneered this whole format, invented television over there. Anyway, Anyway, let's go to you. Tell us about Bullish. Give us the update. Take us through what's recent in the business and let's get started.

Yeah, sure. Just before I do, just to follow on on that, you said you're a fantasy NBC. I too am a fantasy NBC, but also we have our own media business here. No way. And I've watched with some, as both a practitioner and a fan of somebody who's done a lot of it, I've watched with some astonishment the success that you guys have met with.

Thank you.

By just creating a fresher, more interesting format. You guys do an awesome job. Thanks. Yeah, thanks for having me on.

Thanks for saying that.

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 6 people a day. Uh, a lot of people start podcasts because they want to talk to interesting people, but then they talk to 1 a week. We get to talk to 7 a day. It's great. Yeah, yeah, super cool.

Anyway, I'm happy for you and happy for me. Yeah, what can we talk about?

Well, why don't you 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? Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, let's start there.

You were at NYSE, right?

Yeah, I was born in Bowie, Maryland, just outside of DC.

I thought you were gonna say you were born on the stock exchange.

I was born on the floor, home birth.

On the trading floor.

That would be amazing lore. I actually didn't know, like I wasn't born with any like pre, any destiny. I didn't know. I was always interested in business and money and no, it wasn't, nothing was preordained, but so. Yeah. Grew up in—

A lot of people are afraid to say that. I was never afraid to say that.

Yeah, no, I could tell my mother would shake her head sometimes. My mom, my mom was a nun for 5 years and, uh, and, uh, worked in, uh, you know, I grew up in a place called PG County, and she worked at Elizabeth Seton 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 needed a dollar to buy a Gatorade. And she lent it to me. And now we have 3 kids in New York City, and I just fell in love with business. And first couple years I did like banking and private equity. Honestly, I love that too, but when I really kind of hit, got my mojo is in the markets industry, 'cause it's the intersection of tech and business. And that to me is my happy place. And I've been there ever since. I started when I was in my 20s. Granddad now in the digital asset space. I'm 50. And I've been right there at that kind of overlap of the Venn diagram of technology and markets. I have these friends, the Romeros, and I love them. I love them all, stay in touch with all of them. There's 4 brothers, and they're all super smart, super successful. And 3 of them are just like meatheads, like always had their shirts off and wrestling and playing hoops. And then Danny was always like reading Java Coding 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 a few days later, New York Stock Exchange, where I was at the time, we agreed to put $10 million $100 million into a little bitty, maybe pre-revenue company called Coinbase. Let's go. And so I got this bird's eye view of the digital asset space. Dan Romero.

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, 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. Change. He does not. Yeah. 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, you know, I'd heard of Bitcoin, but this is early, right? It's like smart contracts. And yeah, and I'm like, but what, but what use is there for these smart contracts? He's like, oh, it's gonna be amazing. It's gonna disintermediate. It's, it's this layer of programmable finance. It's gonna disintermediate all the kind of big institutions like the New York Stock Exchange. And I'm like, wait, what? What are you talking about?

It can't be.

And so I said, I gotta put some money in. He said, oh, well, my roommate Fred is gonna be in New York tomorrow. Why don't you meet with him? And so I met Fred Ursam. I ended up meeting with Fred at Union Square. And we put that dough in and it was like the best money we ever invested. We got lucky on the return, just dumb luck.

Was this like this Series A?

Stage, like, I don't know, I can't remember last Tuesday, let alone 2013. I could really—

but early, I mean, Coinbase was in my YC batch in 2012, and summer 2012. So I think seed or Series A was right around—

we should punch it, we should punch it in, you know. Yeah, anyway, it was a long time ago. Punch in New York Stock Exchange Coinbase, it'll come up. That's crazy.

But 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 of your peers that were saying, what the heck is Tom up to?

I think if you ask Brian or Fred, or Fred at Union Square, I think they would all say, with humility, it has nothing to do with me, it has to do with the NYC brand, 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 bellwether, a traditional bellwether firm, New York Stock Exchange validates crypto firm Coinbase. So on the West Coast, it was like a lot of celebration and, hey, this is finally the coming together of these two worlds. On the East Coast, most. It was like, what the hell is this? You know, what a weird investment from these guys. Yeah. Uh, and it wasn't as— it wasn't as celebrated. 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 I'm honest. You know, there were no institutions.

There weren't— was that just until— yeah, was that You had the timing wrong.

You didn't— Yeah, but pretty darn wrong, right?

Yeah, pretty darn wrong.

Yeah, but you're only off by, what, a decade?

A decade plus.

But missed that retail would be the early adopters. Yeah. And even some of the late adopters.

Yeah, I guess. Exactly. How do you synthesize the fact that crypto did disrupt the traditional finance system 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. And yet crypto firms have been very successful. It was sort of a heads I win, tails you lose situation. Like both sides did well. There was not total destruction. Of the traditional financial infrastructure and institutions, but crypto 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 gonna take over everything. And we wound up with the middle road. Yeah.

I agree, I agree, and I'm going to challenge it a little bit. I'm not sure it has been up to this point such a big win for crypto. There's actually relatively— for all the money and attention and time and ink spilled, and for all that has gone into digital assets, there's actually relatively few successful companies. Yeah. And 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 yeah, 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. 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. 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've been battle-hardened. Yeah. And regulators have now come around, and, and you've seen broad acceptance of blockchain rails sales for serious use cases in Asia, in Hong Kong and Singapore, in Europe, in Brussels, Europe, but then in the individual countries. And now in the US, not just with Genius, which is the state that ratifies stablecoins, kind of gives them papal blessing, but hopefully the Clarity Act. We can talk about how to handicap that. But if that gets passed, that'll be perhaps the biggest regulatory 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. And that's a $270 trillion market. So there's no mission accomplished banner behind me in terms of crypto up to this point, but it's coming and it's coming in real time. That's kind of how I think about it.

That's how I view it. Yeah, crypto, the cycles and the hype cycles are so vicious, and yet it keeps creating these opportunities where the true believers, if you just maintain that conviction, like this window right now, where there's some, at least, we primarily cover private markets, So there's some interest at the intersection of AI and crypto. There's been a decent amount of investment there, but I don't see hundreds of new companies focusing at the intersection of what you guys are doing, which is that true institutional adoption across global equity markets and other asset classes. And so I do, And 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 be in the foxhole and focus on the opportunity.

Yeah, and I think agentic commerce will intersect with blockchain technology. And I'm not one of those who says, oh, and 100% of agentic commerce is gonna happen on blockchain rails. Fiat, fiat rails will see their share. But that's, that's going to be a big driver as well. But you're absolutely right, Jordi Hays, and thanks for doing the prep work and learning up on bullish because you're absolutely right. We are focused on institutions, really institutions exclusively in our exchange business. Over in our CoinDesk and ConsenSys business, of course, we're a media business. So we service all sorts of people and customers. But we focus on institutions exclusively.

Yeah, I'm reflecting on the question of like the, should there be a mission accomplished banner behind you? And I take your point. 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 coins themselves, but there's a number of very successful companies, yours is among them. But I'm interested in where you think we are in 2026. A lot of the prices are— we're not in some insane falling knife scenario, but stablecoin volumes are sort of stable, even though they were growing very quickly. The Bitcoin price is fairly stable, which is—

what? Fairly stable.

MicroStrategy started selling. But it just doesn't— it doesn't feel like, oh, there's— this is the FTX moment all over again. Like 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.

Yeah, well, it's mature, but still feels like there's an opportunity for pretty parabolic growth as you get get real institutional adoption, not just, hey, we're going to hold some Bitcoin on our treasury, et cetera.

So yeah, it's a very smooth movement.

I agree with everything you both just said. I think what John said kind of feels like a more ordinary industry. And by ordinary, I don't mean that in a pejorative sense. But it's no longer based on hype. It's based on real use cases, like stablecoins. Stablecoins are being used for trading, and stablecoins are being used for payment, and stablecoins are being used for lend-borrow, and they've gone from zero to $300 billion. And the whole industry is now $2.7 trillion. And yes, Bitcoin's more stable now. We happen to be sitting here at a moment in time when Bitcoin's down 15% over the last 2 weeks or something of that nature.

But still— But there were times when the whole crypto industry is down 50% and like people are actually penning the take, everything's going to zero. And it's being debated seriously. And that's not happening right now. And so it is a different time.

And then what Jordi said that I agree with. So, you know, you mentioned, John, that crypto is a couple trillion. The last time I looked, coincidentally, 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 is coming, right? Money market funds have already moved on to blockchain rails. US equities have already moved on to blockchain rails. You look at all the industry bigwigs from 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 examples of tokenizing fixed income. And so you're looking at the parabolic growth that Jordi 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— and when I mean speed, I guess I mean like 24/7 trading. That seems like it's crazy. 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, we actually can't get traders who want to work at 2:00 AM Eastern on a Sunday. It's hard to recruit the best to actually make that market and provide liquidity at that point in time. But then on the other side, you have fees and all of the different things that happen with crypto potentially dropping costs? Like, what are the different pieces of adoption?

Yeah, the 24/7, what people miss sometimes is actually the investing demand, especially for the most liquid US-based securities, like think NVIDIA stock. Yeah. 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 cost of equity of the, of those companies. And so there's, there's real incremental benefit. I think to answer your question, like, what is the benefit that's most attractive? You have to look at the particular constituent, the issuers. They hate little things like when I say little, they're not little to them, but like this issue of naked short selling, which is illegal, but it's possible in a world where trading is obfuscated in a Russian series of Russian dolls of brokers or other intermediaries. With blockchain rails, there is no naked short selling. You just look, are the shares in a wallet or are they not in a wallet? Like it's done, but also issuers want the ability to pay stable dividends and stablecoins. Issuers 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 a, there was a whole exchange on the West Coast that started that was really great.

Eric Reese Long-Term Stock Exchange, right?

Exactly. Mark Andreessen introduced me to Eric Reese maybe 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and I remember the first meeting I had with them. I thought And I thought, this guy's onto something. Like, yeah, 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 5 Russian dolls. Where blockchain technology, again, you just look at it. Oh, they own it. It's in that wallet, it hasn't moved. So for the issuer, it's actually incremental functionality as opposed to cost or speed. And then for the investors, it's just the ability to do things at a lower cost. That's more cost, but then on the speed perspective, being able to settle instantly is interesting. So it kind of depends, depends which constituent you're looking at.

Short on time, couple of questions. People on the West Coast who know nothing about finance have been excited about compute futures markets or treating compute like a Like stock. trading it like a commodity, is that something, how do you think about that potential market? Is that something that you think could start on blockchain rails because it is a new type of commodity in some way?

Yeah, two questions embedded in that. One is, will compute futures actually be a successful product? I think it will be. The issue is standardizing it and commoditizing it. Successful— 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 that easy. It's still probably going to take a couple of years, but I suspect that that will happen.

The second question is— is that because like an onion is an onion, but a GPU is not necessarily a GPU? Like an A100 is not a Blackwell. So then do you need, you know— Exactly, and the providers— Submarket, you know, basically submarkets.

Yeah, and the providers have a vested interest in not being commoditized. So sometimes it takes time for the market to commoditize, but it's exactly what you just described.

Got it. Yeah. Go ahead. One more random question. Friday IPOs, we're looking at a SpaceX IPO next Friday. My sense is like, does that not introduce like more chaos because you have like one, you know, real trading day, there's gonna be so much retail activity and then you go into a weekend, of course, you know, people will be trading it over the weekend. In different ways, but I know there was Alibaba and Uber that both went out on the NYSE on Fridays. How did those go? Does that make it more complicated or chaotic, or is it— are the exchanges set up to handle that?

The Alibaba IPO in particular was one of the best days of my career, maybe even my life. But it was also—

Coming from the guy who, as a young boy, knew he loved money.

I also was so friggin 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 Li was there, Masa and Jack and, and Jimmy Lee, who's, who's departed, um, who's an iconic and legendary JPMorgan banker. He kind of sidled up to me. He's like, hey, uh, I'm like, did you guys test this thing at all?

Like, is this actually gonna work?

'Cause you're about to get a gazillion retail orders. Good God, next Friday, it's gonna make Alibaba look like child's play. So Adena at the Nasdaq is fantastic, and the Nasdaq is fantastic. Oh man, it still makes me nervous. But to answer your question, I think a Friday's fine. There will be awesome price discovery on Friday, and you're going to see extreme volatility for the first hour, that's nobody's fault. 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 1,000 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, 'cause there's not gonna be any substantive new news.

Right. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, it was fun.

Maybe you should come back on next Friday. Yeah, we gotta do it. This was super fun. This was fantastic.

We'll talk to you soon. Yeah, great to meet you. All right, guys. 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 while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Our next guest is Nikesh Arora from Palo Alto Networks. He's the chairman and CEO, friend of the show. Welcome back, Nikesh. Great to see you. How are you doing?

I'm doing great, gentlemen. How are you?

We're doing well. We're doing great. It's been too long. Let me see those watches. Watches? Ooh, I have a Rolex Submariner in TBPN green on.

We got them for the whole team. Yeah, not going to be happy to see that.

What about your favorite guests?

Our favorite guests, we do have some of those. We do.

We do. I actually, I can't wear watches when I'm using a computer. Really? It's too annoying to me to have it clacking against. It's just, I can't do it. Skill issue.

Total skill issue. Well, 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 SASE-ocalypse dead for cybersecurity. SASE-ocalypse dead! There we go. Why?

Why is it dead? Like, were you surprised that it took so long? Who killed it? It obviously has only been, what, a couple of months, but still.

Oh, the good news, it gave every one of our happy shareholders a buying opportunity. It was 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 unaided models is 25%., right? 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 1 out of 4 wrong. Yeah. In cybersecurity, our business is to get everything right. Yeah. If I'm getting 1 out of 4 wrong, I don't think I'm gonna get replaced anytime soon. Yeah. It's like having your car driven by OpenAI because I don't need a Waymo, I don't need to have all the machine learning code that tells you everything. So let's 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 cybersecurity 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 those enforcement points with new techniques to go suss 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 replaced me.

So, yeah, 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. Yeah, interesting.

Well, if you saw, you know, one of the core skills of Mitos is, is ability to daisy chain vulnerabilities and develop an attack. So yes, it is It's 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. Yeah. 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 capability is getting embedded in the core models. OpenAI has one now. Anthropic has another one. I'm sure Google has one too. So just play this movie forward 6 to 9 months from now. It'll be impossible to put the genie back in the bottle or constrain them. We have 6 to 9 months to make sure that if somebody is 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, you don't get that without modernizing your stack, without, of course, buying a lot of Palo Alto and having us help you. To get to a place where we can defend in real time just the way AI can attack in real time.

So the cancellation of the SaaS-pocalypse is clearly— it was a referendum on— For cybersecurity. I like my— not speaking about other— Yes, for cybersecurity. But the claim was AI will make Palo Alto Networks business worse. And I think that's been disproven. We've discussed that. 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 Palo Alto, 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, like AI will impact in multiple places, right? The first place is the amount of buildout that's happening across the world on AI. AI require— means that more bits are going to be traveling across networks, right? Everybody's trying to deploy AI, collect more data. Remember, cybersecurity 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 bits, say good bit, bad bit. Bad bit, stay away. Good bit can go. Yeah. If you're going to explode the amount of traffic in technology in the world, you're going to need more cybersecurity capabilities. That's That drives more— more traffic drives more demand. I think the other part is capability. Yeah, 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 key categories of cybersecurity, 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, As I 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 find critical bugs. The bill was token min'd. I don't know what happened, but you only spent $1 million. What's going on? Is this a cultural thing? Are you already looking at ROI? Are you ahead 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're using our own open source sequestered model, which can't talk talk to the external world. Got it. So we know it's safe. Oh. 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% or 90% there. And that's okay.

I'll go deal with that. And on that, is inference cost an issue yet? Are you burning GPUs to the max and dealing with a half billion dollar bill?

No, no. We're just using trained models to run it through. Okay. Because we're using for tasks. We're not using them to go generate 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 many users. So we've got to get up the learning curve and we'll get there. I think 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. 80 in the middle. Good news is if I train my model right with all my marketing data, I can increase the average intelligence of all 100 of them to 95%. 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 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. Jordi, do you have something or can I keep going?

What's your point of view on AI psychosis in the enterprise? John and I have been talking, there's a handful of our friends that we believe do have AI psychosis. They're heavy users of the tools and you ask them what they do they've actually made and they can't give you a good answer. Now, certainly there's an entire other category that is being very productive making useful things, but there's sort of a—

Like Tyler on our team. Tyler is extremely productive. Very low AI psychosis.

You ask him for something, he just builds it immediately and it's there.

Useful, tangible.

But it feels like— But there's a lot of make-work. Yeah, there's at least one model that has created a sort of psychosis. In the enterprise over the last 6 months. And but— Don't tell me which one. We don't need to name the specific model, but there's like, there's the same maybe sycophancy that you saw with 4.0 with a consumer, I think has touched the enterprise in an interesting way.

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 sycophantic way, oh yeah, you're making a major breakthrough. You're making a huge impact at this company. And it's just shuffling spreadsheets around, recontextualizing data, building analyst 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. Are my employees using AI tools effectively? It's another question on just the effectiveness of embedding these tools. Yeah, 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 where they are. But when it comes to enterprise efforts, we're past the stage that, you know, we've got one great tool. Tyler. I'm sure Tyler is amazing, but I have 21,000 people. You know, one great Tyler doesn't change my— move the needle for 21,000 people in the company.

So I think he could. I'm going to take the other side of that, but I, I take your point.

You don't want me to take Tyler away, so that's why you don't tell me about him.

Told me last time, don't take my boy. Keep your hands off.

Right. So I'm sure we have our own Tyler. 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. What 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 want when you get the data? What data does the customer have to give? So it's reimagining 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 it with machine learning. They're complementing with new knowledge bases. They're complementing with new data that comes from my product. So I'm trying to I want 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, a lot of programming goes around it. 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 harnesses, building context.

And most importantly, the psychosis sets in when you're letting the AI evaluate itself 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 gonna 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 scripts. 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. Yeah. And I'm reading both them, my team had written that we simulated a cyber attack and it was possible in 24 minutes using Nuke for generative AI models. When I refined it, he said, "We attacked in 24 minutes." I'm like, "Shit, that's not what I'm gonna 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 guardrails.

So— Yeah, yeah, you have to know the ground truth, the reality.

That's the basic thing that it can do wrong.

Yeah, exactly. Talk to me about not the crazy AI doom Terminator scenario, but just, I think that there is some anxiety around AI and cybersecurity where you see these powerful models, they're able to find vulnerabilities effectively. And there's a fear that there might just be, you know, a rash of exploits that result in like some emails leaking or some social network data leaking. And just, just a leakier internet that causes 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 closed source frontier models and open source models appears to be widening. And that feels like there's going to be an increase. Maybe it's 6 months right now that you have access to the frontier models before it commoditizes. 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 for longer. If that gap was closing and all of a sudden it was, you know, open source— closed source model, you know, gets a new capability and the hackers have it next week, I'm a little bit worried. I think you could do it in a week, but it's much better to have you have 6 months. But is that— am I interpreting that correctly? Interpreting that information correctly? How afraid should normal people be about the risk to a leakier internet, a less safe, less cybersecure internet in the future? So 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. Code. And we've been testing our products and so has everybody else in the industry. And every company does that. And on average, we used to find 4 or 5 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 what would have taken us 5 to 7 years to find. Right. So a huge deluge of vulnerabilities. And 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 point of that is that there'll be a lot of testing happening in the next 2 to 6 months. Already is with Opus 4.8 or, 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 gotta patch everything right away 'cause everybody showed up with all these patches. So it's gonna 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. It's bumpy, but it's a better starting point 6 months from now than it is today. 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. Yeah, well, the next one finds something. I'm sure it will. Yeah, right. But it may go back to finding 5. And we seem to have survived in a world world where there were 5 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? Now, that is a slightly longer-term problem because that requires to have a much more modern stack, requires you to have 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. Well, it's— I mean, like, this is why AI is so exciting. You can do 5 to 7 years of work in a month. 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 leverages of AI. So they're using it in their day-to-day life and trying to treat it as their assistant as opposed to be afraid of it.

Yeah. Yeah. I love it. Last question. I don't want to get too geopolitical, but I want to know about America's compute advantage or the AI race in the context of cybersecurity, because there has been this debate over our are data centers the nuclear bombs or are the weights the nuclear bombs? If the weights were stolen by a North Korean hacker firm, 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 know, millions of times and test every little system to find the actual exploits to actually do the hacking. And so another maybe white pill for, for, you know, America and the American internet remaining secure is that as we build more infrastructure, more data centers, more GPU racks, we are able to do more of good guy inference, more cybersecurity, more testing, and our systems become more secure relative to the near-peer competitors that might want to hack us but have not invested enough in energy and compute capacity. Capacity?

Well, let's back up. Like, look, we're all eternal technology optimists, right? We all— Silicon Valley, we hang out here. 99% use case we talk about AI are good use cases. AI is doing amazing things, going to do drug discovery, it's going to do a whole bunch of positive stuff, is 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 have an advantage? Yes, we are building on the last lead in the technological revolution. Institutions on the last round— go round, right? Where all the hyperscalers live, where do all the large consumer tech companies live, where do all the cybersecurity 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 cybersecurity, whether you're seeing it around investment in chips, or whether you're seeing it around investment in electricity, everything else, we are trying to build the underpinnings of building an amazing future with AI 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. Yeah. Can we predict cases? Yes, we will have protected. Will there be some notable mishaps? Most likely. You know, it's happened. We have 2,000 ransomware attacks a year. Yeah. And we move on, we go solve them. We fix them, we move through it. So I think you have to take an optimistic outlook. Now, can models be distilled? Yes. Can weights get reappropriated? No, it doesn't look like you need to because every 3 months somebody seems to build the same capability open source. They're figuring it out. So, and do they need the 3-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 match sort of defense with the speed of his offense can happen. And it's always been an asymmetric battle. Cybersecurity has always had to be right 100% of the time. And the bad guys are 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, 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 infrastructure to quantum yet, there's a fear that quantum is coming and there are nation states who might be collecting data, which they're gonna harvest later. Yeah. When quantum becomes reality, hoping they can hang on onto 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 gonna 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 love that you're already working on that.

That's so cool. So we have a quantum wrapper. You can buy a wrapper from us. You can go look at, do full cryptography inventory, we can encrypt the traffic with Quantum Secure today across your sort of traffic nodes and make sure that your data can't 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 canceling the SaaSpocalypse, at least in cybersecurity. We're going to cancel the SaaSpocalypse everywhere. We're going to cancel all apocalypses. SaaS-pocalypse eventually. Sounds like a plan. Have a great rest of your day. Nice to see you, Nick. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Speaking of a company that canceled the SaaS-pocalypse, we got Figma. 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 wall. Walls, so he built a drawing machine to decide for him. This is a very cool little hack project, I guess, that 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 and it can pick an image and draw a different thing every day.

I thought that was a cool hack project. Calling it a generative pen-trained transformer. Yeah.

Theodore What a good domain name for just an individual, like solo creator. It's a generative pre-trained transformer, pen-trained transformer, of course. We'll go check it out. But we have our next guest in the waiting room. We have Henry Stern from Krimi 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.

Café. I'm in Europe because in fact, TVPN is the TVPN of Europe. Oh, it is? But I'm calling in from Amsterdam.

Yeah. Fantastic. What brings you to Amsterdam? Work. Money 2020. Okay. And— This is a fintech conference. Yes. And I imagine you're speaking, networking? Yes. All of the above.

We launched a few products. We had a great lunch with, with Deal today to enable contractors to basically receive stablecoins globally and do a number of things with them. And then speaking, meeting customers, all that.

Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Deal's been really ahead of the curve on that.

So Deal's been dealing with stablecoins for quite a long time.

Oh, yeah. Did they have their own in-house solution? Like, well, yeah. What is the nature of the partnership? How does it change? Like, what was the— what was the before era like?

So I think the before era, they had done a few products to enable people to— I believe they'd experimented a lot in the space, but this is basically the coming together, I think, of the full package where they're doing 3 things really. One is enabling any business to pay out their contractors in stables. If the contractor so chooses, they can receive basically stable assets as payment no matter where they are. And they're starting rollout 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 your payment. But that allows you to basically hold the balance, earn on the balance, so really a savings account in many ways, and then basically spend from the balance. And so this is sort of the whole package coming together in an exciting way. And then the third thing is that they are actually issuing their own stablecoins so they can have a lot more control over how the underlying treasury is managed, and so on and so forth. And so, from the Privy 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 working with them on a number of products. So, it's been kind of fun to watch all these products coming together really well.

Yeah, so I imagine—

So this is like the announcement from their side is really, they're in consumer fintech now.

Exactly. Very cool. I imagine internationally, there aren't like spending the stablecoins. I understand receiving for contractor payments makes a ton of sense, earning on the money that's in the account, that makes a ton of sense. But I imagine actually living your life in any country, even in America, it is still hard to go and spend stablecoins, 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 stablecoins, it winds up in a wallet, you're very happy with your interest that you're getting, but then you wanna go live your life, you wanna pay your rent, you also wanna, you effectively wanna be able to send wires and peer-to-peer payments. And also buy food and buy, you know, get money from an ATM at some point? Like, how does that all work?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think this is the part that's very exciting is kind of how the whole space is getting stitched together. So it's at a high level at this point, there's just a huge explosion in the usage of stablecoin cards that enable you basically to settle directly on, you know, traditional rails like Visa and MasterCard from your stablecoin balance directly. So for the merchant accepting it, they don't have to think about this at all. It's the 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 stablecoins directly if the user has the balance and so on. So we're kind of working on the platform from both angles to make sure that it's completely multimodal.

How high is the— the Great Wall of— Great Firewall in China? Like, is there any stablecoin penetration in China? Are people doing VPN stuff? Or is it— because there were some tech companies, 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 there are companies that been successful there. At the same time, Facebook, not successful. Google, not successful. Uber sort of, you know, was unable to get a foothold there. Tesla doing very great. Model Y sell over there. So what is stablecoin adoption? Does China have their own ecosystem or is there some cross-pollination?

No.

So today, I think the situation has changed over time, but basically today, very much remote in the in a sense, and not an active part of what's happening. So we don't— for this particular, speaking for Privy, we don't have customers that we serve there in terms of stablecoins because very specifically, it isn't something that's running. So the approach is very much— the technology itself, in a sense, this is a file format for money, right? You're kind of sleeving your fiat into a digital asset. And the The way I like to think about it is like different stablecoins are like different formats. So we accept JPEGs and PNGs just the same. But then ultimately, getting currency on the ground in every country depends on the local regulation. And in this case, China is very much not open to stablecoins today.

Interesting. Yeah. More and more and more capital controls.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, makes a ton of sense because you load up a bunch of stablecoins. Coins, and then you transfer all your money out of the country. Uh, are you tracking any— like, uh, is there like a mirror industry, like an indigenous Chinese, like, digital yuan effort that's getting traction? Because they— 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, 6 months behind.

It's a great question. I mean, to be honest, I No, I think the honest take is twofold, which is one, we've seen a ton of adoption in the US since Genius and with a lot of what's happening around Clarity. And so that's kept us quite busy. Likewise 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 in the region generally. But, but I just haven't seen that much by way of companies working in mainland China doing this sort of thing. So I couldn't tell you, to be honest.

So in terms of maybe other countries that are the fastest adopters, it feels like America is on the frontier here. Clear regulation, some more coming down the pipe. A lot of the companies are based here. Is there— who's in second? Like, what country is leaning in most to stablecoins broadly?

It's a great question. And I think part of it is that today, by nature at least, it's a very cross-border technology. So it ends up being pairs, basically, as you go along. And so there's very good corridors. For example, US to Mexico, we serve a company called Felix Pago. It's doing like 5% of the US to Mexico remittance corridor. I think that's like $60 billion a year. So it's a really meaningful— the entire corridor is $60 billion a year, but it's a It's a really meaningful pair. Likewise, I talked to a company not too long ago that was trying to help with remittances from the UAE to India. And so you've basically got these, these pairs as you go. The most leaned in though, Mexico is doing a lot and there's a lot of clarity there. And then we're seeing just generally a lot of activity in LATAM. So that's where a lot of the volumes are happening.

Very cool. Well, what does Newstart startup formation look like in stablecoin, in the stablecoin market broadly look like at this moment in time? 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 think basically there's like two types, right? There's very pure software plays. And I think Privy was such a company in that we run cryptographic infra to enable people to do things. And then there's a lot of people who want to take care of the data piping on the ground in various countries. So I think of these as money pipes in a sense, and you've got the software layer and then you've got the connections into local banking systems. And so we are seeing a lot of things happening trying to build like better APIs, better abstractions on top of the aggregation. But I think there's actually a huge gap in building localized partnerships, 'cause this is really hard, obviously, in any of the individual countries that you can do. So that's one. And then the other, frankly, is we're seeing a lot of stuff around agentic commerce with people basically trying to build better control systems for agents to actually, take these assets and pay with them. So this isn't actually stablecoin-specific. There's a lot happening in fiat as well, and Stripe's doing a ton in the space. But it's broadly around service discovery. How can you find what you can pay for and actually connect into it? It's around the actual protocols for delivering payment really easily via agentic interfaces, LLMs, and so on. And it's about being able to actually 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. And then we're seeing just a lot more adoption is something that struck me at this, you know, Money 2020 in Amsterdam, which is a lot more institutional adoption, including from like larger banks and players who historically 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.

The Rainforest Cafe. Thank you. 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 e-commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. You know, I think the AI 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 to commerce potentially. Who knows?

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 are you doing? What's happening? Hey, what's up? Not too much. Great to have you on a Wednesday.

Oh, man, I can't hear you guys.

OK. 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 update the Chiron. We can hear you.

Joe Wiesenthal is tracking the popularity of various running shoe brands. He says on r/runningshoogeeks, 1 out of 18 posts mentioned a major Chinese running shoe brand. Just last quarter, it was 1 out of 40. Li Ning is the big one. Li Ning, of course, signed a shoe endorsement contract with Golden State Warriors star Steph Curry.

Very, 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 big.

No, that's a big— it's— Chinese companies have acquired a bunch of brands like Arc'teryx, things like that. And the next step is to actually get meaningful—

What is the best Chinese consumer brand in America? What's the one that Americans like the most that comes from China? It's gotta be DJI, right? Yep. Drone, videographer.

Yeah, Bernie was using— Bernie was using—

I know it's a controversial company 'cause people see it as industrial capacity, but if you're just like, 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. As 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— I was going to say hoverboards, but they didn't have a brand. And a lot of the cars aren't here. I believe that they would be popular if you could get a hypercar for $20,000. Like, do they make over there? Temu or Shein? Are those like really loved brands in the same way that like— Marketplace. DJI feels a lot closer to like a Nike brand or an Apple brand than Shein or Temu. Temu seems more like a Walmart brand. 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? Video from Instagram explaining the new Call of Duty map format. They're getting into generative level design. It's not GenAI, 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.

Other 3 like slabs. Look at this.

And we're able to randomize that at runtime when you're playing.

3 slabs on the map. They randomize them every time you load into the map.

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 Killblock.

I, I see this as an existential risk. I think this might be the end of TVPN. I think that once this goes live and we're playing this in the UltraDome, 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'm like going to this beach, this place. Okay. And I'm happy to keep going back.

He's a Luddite. He's a Luddite, 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?

Can you hear us now? 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 I've enjoyed your posts and some of your rants. You have some of the best rants on the internet. Appreciate that. I've been looking forward to this.

Yeah. How would you introduce yourself these days? Like how much of just, I mean, I guess set the table for people, give us a little bit of backstory and your thesis right now.

Cool. Yeah, I used to be an Army. I worked at Citigroup, Palantir, Valley ASMI, started a company, sold it, and then I got into crypto. And AI changed a lot of, obviously, what I was working on and what many people were working on. And I was really just trying to figure out how to— I got very, very pilled early on on the idea that AI would just destroy people's work product. And a lot of people are getting on that train now, but I guess I was on it in 2023, so a lot of the rants were coming from processing that and going through my own AI psychosis. And now I'm like post-psychosis. Now I'm just like in a Codex terminal working on building a protocol that hopefully can move the needle for people who own it and also just our investors.

A lot of money, like, flow— a lot of attention, money, everything. Everything flowed from crypto to AI. There was even that meme, like, if you're in crypto, pivot to AI. 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 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 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, 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. Every human piece of code that's ever been written is being evaluated by agents right now. Which has obviously created an acceleration in hacking. X.402 has kind of gotten exploited. So there's this kind of— you can prompt engineer agents to send you money. And that's not a good thing if you're running a protocol. So it's like, do you really want a protocol that can just send people money? 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 that AI might not cause productivity to accelerate. It might actually accelerate the onset of a surveillance state, or basically, a type of world where capital is going to flee the system. And I think that thesis is very much intact. I think that's why you're seeing a lot of crypto, like Zcash, run very, very aggressively. And I think that's going to continue to be a story. I think that's why Thiel moved to Argentina. I think it's sort of like, it's in motion.

Where are you on Bitcoin versus other coins? I mean, obviously, you mentioned Zcash. How strong do you think the Bitcoin thesis is these days? And how much maxi-ness needs to be considered in that thesis?

The Bitcoin thesis is getting weaker. By the day. You have privacy coins accelerating in terms of their adoption. I think it's notable. So the European Union and other countries tried to kill Monero and were not successful at that. The Tornado Cash rulings in the United States have given clarity to coins like Railgun, which are smaller, but are good tech. And Vitalik uses it. And there are big privacy summits. And Bitcoin is fundamentally not private technology. And it also has the unfortunate leverage concentration from Michael Saylor who has issued a lot of preferred and complex convertible financial instruments on top of it, which have concentrated the ownership and the liquidity profile, and now is driving a market downturn. So today's STRC drop, as well as MicroStrategy's equity situation, are driving down moves in Bitcoin. And unfortunately, It's hard to see that structurally reversing.

Do you know if there's been a material impact on crypto from not just the capital markets moving around and founders and employees pivoting to AI, but the actual mining operations pivoting to AI? Because a lot of the neo clouds that we know, they got their start in crypto mining, and they're sort of out of that. That market, is that actually affecting crypto in any way? I haven't really followed it.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. CoreWeave, you guys might know Vance at Framework. He had a fantastic return for his fund, partly because CoreWeave literally pivoted out of crypto into AI. And they're the OG pivot story. So they were like pre-Jason Calacanis. They did it.

Yeah, you know the JCal post, the, if you're in crypto, pivot to AI in like 2023.

It was post-ChatGPT, so it was a little bit late, but it turned out to be, you know, correct for a lot of people. Yeah. A lot of companies launched it.

Impressive. Very well. So yeah, I mean like there is an interesting thing going on right now. You guys are probably gonna hear about something called Pearl relatively soon. Soon. It's aggressively backed. There's rumors that Thrive is in it. And the TL;DR is that it's a proof-of-work AI coin. And basically, there is a paper that came out in late 2025 by SG Ling, which talks about determinism 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 is an Israeli team, which is doing something similar. They're using mapmole mining. And they have a partnership with Together AI that got tweeted out. And so essentially, the argument that a lot of these crypto AI protocols increasingly are trying to make is something called useful proof of work, which is the idea that you have a miner that can also deploy a service. So my brother is delivering Verified Inference. And then the pearl argument is that you can basically buy GLM, not GLM, it's GEMA on Together AI for a 25% discount because the miners are subsidizing it. Now, the funky thing is that you can also buy it for 50% less than their subsidized version on OpenRouter. So you're kind of market cap dependent. You need this thing to really, really move in order for it to provide a meaningful subsidy. But there's an argument that— I think the compelling zoomed-out argument is that TSMC back in 2017 or 2018, 10% of their product was Bitcoin ASICs. And now, it's way less than 1%. And so if you're like, OK, you want to secure money with proof of work, very, very high level, it's like, why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you secure it with GPUs? There are 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 separate is this from the Render token, Render Network from Octane, where individual computers or folks with computers compute 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 put it on a network that was sort of transacted with a coin, intermediated by that coin. It sounds like this is at a much lower level. Is that correct?

It's at a— yeah, it's an architecture level. One, render and of these coins, including BitTensor, actually, are stake coins, right? So they're not actually secured by the operation of a GPU. So this is kind of like— this Pearl thing is a regime shift. And it's trading at like a $2 billion FDV on private. There's token sales. So it's starting to move. It's a relatively new story in crypto AI. My protocol is like a completely different bet. You know, my essential— I think 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 Codex or you use these AI agents, they are like phenomenally good at crypto work because it's in the training data and it's all open source. So if you screw something up, you can just be like, hey, can you just double I'll check this with Railgun's 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 a totally different network.

So like some Fortran code that's locked in some old financial institution, it's never seen the light of day, not gonna be in the training set whatsoever. Exactly.

And so there's like an OpEx efficiency argument in crypto because historically crypto has been like a very wasteful industry. There's a lot of money spent on conferences and just like the Ethereum Foundation is a good example of how not to run a company. And it's sort of like there's a lot of waste in crypto and AI is like, crypto is like the ultimate software industry where you're like, okay, I could credibly reduce engineering by like 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 climbed their way out? True.

A true Luddite versus the white-pilled, got through the trough of disillusionment is in the plateau. No, it's the trough of—

It's like the trough of— Of sloth. Illumination. Yeah, something, I don't know.

But how are you thinking about it? Where's it cropping up? Where is it bad? What does it take to get out of it? 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 TVP gen where there's like two AI avatars that are doing a better job than you guys. I mean, maybe the new A16Z one is that and we just don't realize it, right? It could just be that those guys are running a really, really advanced AI system. There's some evidence of that. I think there's some evidence of that. I'm not going to discount the possibility. But essentially, you're like, all right, 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 mess up. So the way that you get out of the 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 there's a pretty robust community with my crypto project. And we have what we call the data lake. And the data lake is basically hundreds of contributors who are doing tasks all day. And then their aggregate intelligence gets summed up by an AI. And it comes up with actionable trade ideas. And it's sort of like, you're like, OK, you can make all kinds of alt data now. I think Palantir kind 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 strat— you know, uh, we have the best demand story in history to take unstructured data and turn it into structured data. And like, okay, that's cool in a corporate and government context, but like, nobody's ever done that with our WallStreetBets, right? Or like, nobody's ever done that with trading information. And like, okay, like, I'm just going to do that. I'm going to take, you know, the Palantir 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 of 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, you need to have a story for how you use AI to get out.

That's the short answer. Yeah, it's interesting. We're sort of at this moment where, yeah, the AI is replacing a lot of things, but I mean, at least as an entrepreneur, like, I don't know that the moats have actually changed because people are saying like, oh, like SaaS-pocalypse, like your big pile of code is no longer a moat. But if you go back and look at the literature, whether it's "Zero to One" or Hamilton Morris, and Helm 7 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 SaaS, and you've accumulated so much technology and software that that is your moat. It was always something else. But I don't know, how are you thinking about entrepreneurship outside of trading, outside of just like the startup ecosystem?

Before I wanted to ask how you think market cycles are evolving. We were joking in Q4 of last year that we were like, great, like the bears win, like the bubble, the bubble didn't pop, right? It did feel like it deflated. You had a big sell-off and then you got a new paradigm. That came, you know, it came at the right moment and kind of reignited a lot of excitement and revenue and all the good things that you wanna see during a technology cycle. But it feels like everything's been massively sped up, but I'm wondering 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 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. It is the most boring company in the world. 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 shows you, you know, this is like a tieback, like 70-year-old guys, like, wearing, you know, nothing against wearing suits or anything, but, you know, it wasn't an exciting story. Now it's like, OK, now it has triple-digit data center growth. And the things that are going up are kind of historically stocks that retail would have never thought of. And a lot of them, like SanDisk and Micron, you know, I know one woman who's like, you know, I inherited an account. Account from my grandparents that had a ton of Intel, Micron, and SanDisk in it. I'm like, yeah, it's literally like 75-year-old people were owning these stocks because they thought they were reliable bellwethers, and these are the things that are up 300%. So I think just the market composition is really different. If you look at Coinbase, it's got substantial sequential revenue deceleration. So, you know, people are not investing in Solana, they're investing in HPE. And so, you know, the sort of B2B focus of the markets has completely changed. And I think that's going to continue to be the case. Like, 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. And I think that benefits like a lot— for example, in my industry, I think it is going to benefit coins with more complex technology stories. I think Zcash is a good example, where it's like, okay, there are encryption technologies that are moving forward that are esoteric, that are hard to understand, that wouldn't have generated engagement before. But now, the UX of the user interacting with it is like, I just copy-pasted this into Claude, and it says it's the best.

Sure, sure. How does lore play into those stories? I feel like I heard, I don't know if it was Zcash, but there was one about like, they brought 8 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-filled, even the Vitalik story. Story is like, you know, build something you want. Like, and it feels like starting the perpetual motion machine of some of these projects is important. How does that change?

You know, I wanna say lore becomes less important just because the stories that I just shared with you, you know, like HPE or some of the Intel, like nobody knows who Intel CEO is, right? And it's like nobody is like, what are you talking about?

Are you saying they still think Pat Gelsinger's running the place or what?

I think people just don't know, right? I think that's 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. And so for example, you know, one of the— there's a lot of AI stuff about Harry Potter distills, right? So you can like extract 98% of Harry Potter out of Deepseek or Claude 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 was a big multibillion dollar payout. But it's like that kind of multi-billion dollar payout creates a strong incentive to kind of have IP treatment. Sure. 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. Yeah. And actually, like, what you get from like AMD or where, why 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 because they're like, yeah, 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 would-be— the most intense competitors he could have, have had to just deprioritize entertainment because it might be a $20 billion market instead of a $2 trillion market.

Yeah, and that's sort of like the interesting Jeevons paradox argument, in my opinion, is that right now, for example, Nintendo is down down, you know, 40% over the last year, right? Or, or, you know, Take-Two is like getting— even though they're, you know, they'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 is, given the cost structures right now and the bottlenecks, you're like, okay, 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 $6 per game session, and that's not a good investment. And as AI gets cheaper, that story is actually going to change, right? So I think that's like an interesting kind of like where we're going is I actually think we're going to get like a big acceleration in entertainment stuff because as the cost of AI stuff is gonna go down.

Yeah, you'd have to imagine that like the most like mildly bullish take on Take-Two would just be like, yeah, the next GTA game's gonna take 7 years instead of 10, or like our DLC is gonna be pulled forward by 3 months and that's gonna accelerate earnings. Like that seems very, that seems very believable. But yeah, people have been caught up in all sorts of, oh, maybe you'll just generate it all, maybe it'll all go to some foundation model. But that does seem further away even when we see, you know, amazing demos from Google. But again, it's like 6 seconds here and there, very expensive, not really persistent. A lot of flaws to do that.

Yeah, how was Roblox done over the last year? 'Cause that was always my thesis there. Yeah. It was just, it's gonna be a lot easier for somebody to figure out how to make it make compelling games, but, uh, down 50% in the last 6 months.

Yeah, not good.

Yeah, these things are very, very bleak.

Very bleak. Shouldn't be. Anyway, hopefully they build back. I'm optimistic. I like Roblox. Uh, well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Yeah, it was 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.

All right, see you. Have a good one. Cheers. Goodbye. Uh, There's one more announcement we gotta share. Unreal and NASCAR are teaming up to sell a $14,000 VR racing rig simulator. Palmer Luckey's back in the VR business. 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, 3 days after I just put down a deposit on my own sim.

Really? Yeah. Actually?

No way. But I don't think that's going to be— that's going to be very specific, I imagine, for, I imagine, NASCAR simulation, right? Because that's where they're focused. But 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 it Agentic 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.

Yeah, bots are now, according to Cloudflare, 57.5%.

Every time you fire something off, it's hundreds of pages. You see it in the reasoning traces and the tool calls. Just watched 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 auditable. 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 video for this, practically produced. I believe this is all shot with an actual camera. They got these actual pieces. They filmed this. Not CGI. Not AI.

And accuracy are not negotiable. These one-off experiments—

such a calming voice. I love Eric doing the VO.

It's great.

One secure place to orchestrate AI co-workers for accounting from day one.

This has been the vision of RAMP since since they launched, and it feels like, oh, this is the moment, of course they have to do an AI thing, but they've been like pitching this exact thing since what, 2020, 2019? And working on it longer, honestly. You go back to Parabens. And it learns over time, always giving you the final say before anything gets posted.

And every action it takes is fully recorded and audited. Auditable. The more you build, the lighter the work gets, and the more clients you can take on. Stack.

Ramstack. They're saying it's god mode.

It's god mode for the product.

It's literally god mode. Well, go check it out. We should also watch this one last video from Martin Scorsese, Black Forest Labs. I alluded to it earlier. I saw this on Instagram and I really enjoyed it. 30 seconds of Martin Scorsese, storied filmmaker. Jordi, name your favorite Martin Scorsese movie. Doesn't feel modern. A town, not a village, not a city. Uh, uh, Mafia. The movie Mafia. Yeah. Isn't there— is it The Godfather? There is a movie.

Is it The Godfather?

No, that's, uh, uh, you're thinking The Irishman maybe? That is like a like a mafia movie, uh, Gangs of New York. Or maybe Casino or Goodfellas. Goodfellas. Goodfellas. Anyway, storyboard, play this. Sorry, I was not paying attention.

Let's try it and we'll go from, from what you think.

You need a place that doesn't feel modern, a town, not a village, not a city, almost medieval. Even the, the streets are narrower, cobblestoned. The main road through the town is twisting and turning, put the camera higher looking down. DeMille 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, what a way to like, you know, hammer— obviously filmmaking's deeply controversial, but you get Martin Scorsese Jordi Hays talking about it, and he's at least gonna perk up people's ears and they're gonna 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 gonna 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. 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 AM Pacific. Sharp. Sharp. And leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com, and we will see you tomorrow.

We love you. Have a wonderful evening. Goodbye.