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You're watching TVPN. Today's Wednesday, June 3rd, 2026. We are live from the TVP Ultradome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance. Capital of capital.
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We're having fun today. Uh got the air air horn. Yeah, we got a physical air horn. And when Nick fired that thing off unexpectedly, it really did some damage. Uh but once you prepared for it, it it's pretty satisfying. Pretty satisfying. Pretty satisfying.
Anyway, uh Microsoft Build is satisfying uh for a number of reasons. They're in the foundation model game. They trained a bunch of models. Uh MAI code one flash MAI thinking one the company's first coding and reasoning models respectively with several speakers played up as super efficient on a cost per token basis in the ROI race. You got to be efficient.
Microsoft Scout is an agent. Their open claw pill now uh powered by openclaw open source technology that operates across cloud desktop and web connecting to teams outlook one drive and shareepoint and to the data that powers your day including chats emails calendar contacts. Good news if you're all in on the Microsoft ecosystem.
Uh and then we talked about this a little bit with the Jensen announcements from Nvidia. They're going into the PC market more. Uh the Surface RTX Spark dev box is sort of the answer to Apple's Mac Mini custom silicon designed for agentic AI.
Um, there's also a new Android based OS operating system uh designed to run agents instead of apps called Project Solar. And there's a pretty cool demo. So, we should play the video. The Verge always does a cutown of these keynotes. They take you through Microsoft Build in 25 minutes, but we're only going to play a couple minutes of this because today that I'm really excited about in order to tap into all this compute power is to expand the scope of Windows ML and Windows AI. We are also announcing two very cool new models uh that are all going to run on Windows uh in box.
Okay, let's jump to a new 8 minutes because this is where Satcha introduces Project Solara which Ben Thompson said project is to be very clear vaporware at this point although the company did show real devices and has signed up Qualcomm and MediaTek as chip partners. It's also extremely compelling. So Ben Thompson likes it. Let's listen to Sachin Nadell introduce.
Two very broad categories. The first is stationary and the second is portable. The first device device is designed for your desk and it's built on MediaTek silicon concept cards with hello for business walking up to the device securely signs you in giving you direct access to your agent.
And Amazon and Google Home have similar products at this point uh with screens for more smart home you think plan and even act by delegating tasks to your agents with a simple tap or just using your voice It even supports experiences like handoff between devices acting as a little tricky to imagine when you wouldn't want to use your phone for this uh since people carry their phones everywhere. Firing off an agent isn't the most cumbersome thing. But uh I do love consumer hardware. So I'm excited to see if there's any unique things that you can do only with this product.
Lightweight form factor designed for agent interactions. This is a very interesting thing. It's not a phone. It looks more like a smart key card or badge. Yeah, it even has a face on it. Like it's a badge that you wear.
My fingerprint. I tap to unlock the device and I have access now to all my agents in a secured manner. And would you look at that? I already have a task. And it says, "Gather content for your social media post." Sorry if I missed it. Why? Do it right now. Right. Why would you want this over having an application on your phone? Camera is recording. I'm going to pan across. I'm not sure. Going to take the shot. Yes. Thank you. That's a good question. Find some good shot.
Does anyone have an answer? There's there's uh there's a new meme, the two phone meme. You know, maybe some people feel left out. They want a second device. There's like the dumb phone route where you don't want everything in the phone, but you do want to kick off agents that go do things for you. You want to be more like delegating instead of like consuming. Like you're not going to be scrolling TikTok on that thing. Uh, but you might be firing off work tasks that you can come to later on your desktop and sort of lock in on. I don't know.
Yeah. So, I could I could I could prompt it and say write a 20,000-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. Want to hang out?
Um, let's see. Uh, Ben Thompson broke it down a little bit. He said, "First off, note the framing. The PC is old tech with agents. What about new tech uniquely enabled by agents? And note the classic Microsoft hook. Could that new tech sit on top of a new platform?" So, uh, he says, "There was one brief moment in the promotional video that preceded uh, his appearance that made the concept click for him. The problem with wearable devices is the interaction model. They are only useful when you are interacting with them, when the human is in the loop. that being in the loop with a wearable is annoying and inefficient. What is being demonstrated here, however, is a brief interaction and then the agent doing work in the background. In other words, the usefulness happens in the cloud without the human needing to be involved because an agent is doing work." That's what Ben Thompson finds compelling.
On one hand, you can make the case that of course Microsoft would be interested in a device model that uses the cloud as a platform given that Microsoft doesn't control a mobile device like the iPhone. What occurs to Ben Thompson, however, is that even if Microsoft doesn't succeed with Project Solara, this model where the cloud is the hub and multiple devices are the spoke instead of the phone being at the center is clearly a better one for agents, agents work best in the cloud and across apps and devices. Yes, the phone might be one of those devices, but when it comes to agents, it shouldn't be the hub because it's too locked down.
And he says, again, this is vaporware and it's very much in Microsoft's interest. So, take Project Solar with an appropriate grain of salt. It's a vision of the future. However, that does make a lot of sense, particularly in an enterprise scenario where all of the context and compute is already in the cloud. And Project Solar is focused on enterprise, not consumer. So, you can mandate effectively that all of your employees carry these as their badges. And then they have a sort of like secure on-ramp to their to their enterprise agents in the cloud that all run in the Microsoft Azure ecosystem in the Microsoft uh 365 ecosystem.
Uh he says it's also something completely different from the past and fits uh Ben Thompson's thesis that in the age of AI thin is in because the compute is so constrained to the data center uh on-device compute is maybe going to happen but uh there's a lot that you can do on in the cloud that you can't do locally. So just have a very thin client and that that that little key card device is basically the thinnest client you can have. Uh it it's it's its sole purpose is to just interface.
It looks a lot like the Rabbit R1. Sort of that form factor which uh a lot of people were taking a little victory lapse on behalf of the founder of the Rabbit R1 saying he was just a little bit too early because the actual decision to offload all the compute to the cloud, do something useful up there, have a very minimal device that maybe you could take out with you. Uh that could do some basic stuff. But it's always hard because people like the phone. They like being able to just watch a full movie on their phone if they want. And uh you never know. Has anybody been running down uh making a smart AI enabled cowboy hat?
Cowboy hat, you potentially have a lot of room up here for onboard some local, right? Uh maybe you could build a Starlink into it. I feel like you would not wear the smart cowboy hat just frying your brain with the the the Mac Mini on your head. You're you're going to be against that. There's no way you're picking that up. Uh underexplored underexplored hardware platform.
Uh whether you're bullish or bearish on Microsoft, you got to get on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasures, and more with great customer service.
Uh Alex Heath, friend of the show, summed up the embrace of Open Claw in a post. Uh Scout is what it's called at Microsoft's first proactive AI agent for co-pilot. Uh buried the news that Sachi Nadell is fully embracing OpenClaw. When Scout is released more widely this summer, it will be powered by OpenClaw and Microsoft will contribute to its security guard rails back to the project's open source ecosystem.
A lot of people that got excited by OpenClaw sort of saw the the rough edges and we saw this with the Meta AI uh the Instagram account theft that was going on. Uh you can imagine that if you have something that's as powerful as open cloud but still constrained within your Microsoft ecosystem your your all your cloud accounts uh you could do things that are useful pull together spreadsheets powerpoints databases all this different stuff but not run rough shod over everything and so if you're all in on one walled garden the walls are actually somewhat safe I don't know totally.
So Microsoft getting in bed with open claw makes a lot of sense says Alex Heath. You only welcome a growing open frame framework onto your turf when you're confident you can control the ground it stands on. In this case, Microsoft is doing what it does best, being a platform company, rather than trying to own too much of the stack. Microsoft also gets to ride the agent wave in a way its main hardware rival won't. Even with OpenClaw's initial buzz, driving a surge in Mac Mini purchases, it's highly unlikely Apple will create a white glove experience for Microsoft for OpenClaw like Microsoft has with Scout. And so, uh, Apple, you know, you're in the Mac, you're inclaw world.
One of the primary beneficiaries, the open claw, boom, in terms of they really did sell out. They really, they really have sold out all over the place. But but not going to embrace it. Not just not enough. They just don't have the enterprise motion necessarily. Well, that that but also the security, privacy. Yeah.
But WWC is next week and who knows, maybe we will see an open claw competitor. Maybe we'll see something that's that's, you know, a great leap forward for Apple in the AI and the Apple intelligence uh feature set. Uh I don't know. I I I'm I'm my predictions are something that are look a lot more just like uh okay, Siri works now. It can do the basic shortcut integrations. It can answer questions at a near frontier level. It's running Gemini under the hood. And so it's probably going to be pretty good at just answering basic questions, doing basic things on your phone. I'm not expecting it to go and like worm its way into every other app like Open has.
So there's a few other observations that Alex Heath had from Microsoft Build. Uh Nadella is trying to tamp down the data center backlash. Uh you know it's getting bad out there when a Mag 7 CEO is debunking water usage fears. The quote was, "In fact, the daily water usage over the course of the entire year is roughly equivalent to what a single restaurant would use." So, he's giving more context there.
Uh, the co-pilot super app is not ready. Uh, uh, Alex Heath showed off um what the new autopilot tab with Scout looks like, but it wasn't shown on stage. So, that is delayed as it rolls out to become the co-pilot super app that will sit alongside all of the Microsoft apps. Um, Microsoft is still not at the frontier. According to Alex Heath, he says it didn't make a big deal out of the benchmarks for its new family of models. There were other comps. They were comping it to older models from Anthropic and OpenAI. There were some obviously some great cost-benefit trade-offs. It's important to be in the game. Do you have more context on how these models are performing?
Yeah, I think the interesting comparison here is is not with the frontier labs, but I think with meta, right, because they had Muse Spark like pretty recently and uh the thinking model like MI thinking one um is actually like quite competitive with the meta- which is interesting because I feel like I I just have not heard that much about the MAI team like obviously they have they have Mustafa and that's kind of like the big name at Microsoft, but like meta you hear like over and over Nat even Daniel Gross, Alex Wong, you know, you have so many people that have like you have done podcast to have Aura and have clout and the industry coming together. Uh not to mention like the actual researchers that they recruited.
Yeah. So it's interesting that they're actually like these are pretty the researchers would actually more important than Yeah. But but in terms of like building building hype around whatever you're working on like Meta has definitely built the aura of MSL and TBD Labs. There's a whole article about uh Alex Wang and uh and that in the journal or the Financial Times today. Uh, we can get to that later, but uh, Alex, he says, "Agents are the new OS." I'm not sure if an AI access badge with a screen will do it. He's skeptical. Are you putting on the badge?
I'll throw on the badge. I would throw on the badge for a little bit. I wonder how often I would actually reach for it versus a phone. Also, I'm not although I love PCs and I love Windows for gaming, I don't I've never been like a run my whole life in Outlook and Microsoft Teams and all of that. So, uh, I I I feel like I would get 1% of the benefit of that. You like you got to be all in on that ecosystem. Got to be all in. You got to be pushing your pushing your chips in. For sure. For sure.
Um, well, we will keep uh tracking that. What else is going on? Okay. Live reading reacting thread from Stoasm. There's a ton to go through on MAI thinking. Was there anything interesting in this thread? uh stocasm says I also have to wonder how much of this report is informed by what they know about IP open AI's IP. So of course they have access to intellectual property from open AI for training and they have access to the models but uh one of the things that would that that kept coming up in this presentation is that uh Microsoft is sort of touting like a very clean pre-training data set so that you as a company who are using this model can be very confident that it's not it's not going to get you in any trouble down the road because if the New York Times doesn't want to be in there or Harry Potter books don't want to be in there, it's not in there because micros Microsoft has done all the hard work to sanitize all the training data.
They also made a very big point that they did not distill on another lab which has been accusations that have been thrown around a bunch. Uh during the Elon Musk OpenAI lawsuit, Elon was on the stand and mentioned that he might have or XAI folks might have uh done some distillation on either anthropic or open AAI models at one point. And so that was sort of uh like not the cleanest thing and might lead to problems down the road. Microsoft saying, "Hey, we're getting out in front of this. There's no distillation involved at all."
And then they also launched a lot of features for uh companies to be able to fine-tune these models. Uh not slightly different than what Amazon does. Amazon does mid-training. They give you a checkpoint of the pre-train and then you can add data that is relevant to your business and fine-tune it from a mid-training checkpoint. uh Microsoft is offering more of a reinforcement learning RLE post-training step, but all of these lend themselves to there is a model that has a bunch of great capabilities at the baseline and good price performance and it runs on Azure and they've already optimized it for the systems and then you can take it, tweak it, fine-tune it, and then you can deploy it on the same hardware and you know it's going to run, you know how much it's going to cost per token, you're good to go, but it's going to answer your particular questions, work for your particular business a little bit better. At least that is the pitch. That is the hope. We will see what adoption is like. Microsoft clearly has a strong go to market team, strong enterprise sales team. So uh we will hear how this is being deployed in the near future.
Before we bring in our first guest of the show, let me tell you about Crowd Strike. Your business is AI. Their business is secure. Crowd Strike secures AI and stops breaches. I don't know if you can actually hear that. The the filter might be a little bit too much, but anyway, we can deal with that later. Uh we are very very fortunate to be joined by Mikey from Zuno. Welcome to the show. How are you doing on a massive day? He's here live with us in the TV and Ultradome. Amazing that you can be here. How you doing?
I'm I'm doing great. I'm excited to be here. This place is awesome.
Thank you. Uh give us the news. What happened today? Hit the gong. Uh I hit hit the gong. Tell us what happened and then come back and then come back and tell us. I like how it shakes the entire camera. Anyway, that was by far the strongest hit from a guest. Yeah, a lot of people come in and they don't they they they don't want to break the gunk to be it's my me. You told me to go at it. I went that was perfect. Well, it's a good day for that. That's the new bar. So, take us through why are we hitting the gong?
Uh we're hitting the gong. We raised a little over $400 million uh announced today. Very exciting. Um led by bond a history of investing in really category defining consumer businesses which is really really cool. Um, lots of new investors joining. All of our old investors, uh, participating. So, really, really excited about that.
IVP, Ferrer, Union Square, Matrix, Quiet, Light Speed, Menllo. Wow. Murderers row. Good job. Uh, what unlocked this round? Why do this round? Are you spending a ton on inference? Are you spending a ton on training? Is there a huge cost? Or is there just so much traction that that unlocked the round? Like, what's the thesis?
Really, really more the latter. there's been a ton of traction um and a ton of actually progress since the last time uh I was on and so um just to just to zoom out here where yeah where is the company right now in terms of the products so every time we we release new products we release new models uh more people come to the product but more people stick around and so the engagement metrics that we track say it's usage retention uh what fraction of our users come three or more days a week uh session time all of these are getting really really good. All of these are up like about 50% in the last 6 months which is huge and this is just like constant making the product better, making more people fall in love with being creative and so it's been incredible to see. Um and uh yeah it's like a lot of hard work from the team but it's what is the northstar metric on retention like Dow Mau monthly churn like how are you thinking about actually like what is the correct metric to measure for your particular business you know yeah different businesses are going to be different we we like we like retention um I think all of these are kind of very very similar um the thing that's like really important here is just to remember yeah like revenue is is a trailing metric for how good is your product and retention is really the best way to think about people are coming to my product over and over again. They're falling in love with it. There's no real hacking that basically.
Yeah. And are you early or you are you far enough along to see like smiling curves in the retention curve?
Yeah, for sure. So, it's been it's been really exciting. So, there's also there's two retentions. There's usage retention, there's paid retention. So, remember we have a pretty generous free tier. And so, uh our free users are also still coming back over and over again. I think we've created them through having that magical moment, their eyes light up. And so it's it's really around how do we let people do that themselves and really feel creative by themselves.
Uh walk me through the paid tier philosophy, a single tier. How like like do you have uh like are you thinking or do you already have like ultimate pro plans where someone can spend a lot of money if they're using this as like more of a proumer tool? Uh enterprise like how how uh how how how striated is the is the monetization at this point?
It's a great question. I think the short answer is we haven't really changed our pricing all that much in in a long time. And so uh it might not even be appropriate. But what we have now is there's a free tier, there's a $10 a month here, there's a $30 month here. $30 month tier gets you not only more usage um but some different power features y um and then you know AI is this weird thing. It doesn't really fit neatly into SAS pricing and so a lot of sub companies are trying different things a lot like everyone else when you reach your cap you can buy overages and so we've got lots of people who they spend hours and hours a day on it and they hit their caps and and they keep paying for more.
Yeah, it's such a weird dynamic in the modern era where you will have customers that are effectively gross margin negative potentially depending on exactly where you set the thresholds and then you will have customers that are they they want the best product. They're happy to pay but they come once a month with something and uh and they're probably much higher gross margin and there's just this blend because we're in this like you know real marginal cost era no longer the zero marginal cost era.
You know, a few things there, like actually our margins are pretty okay and music models are small and so um it's not really the same cost structure, but the other thing is it's really interesting. There's not really a lot of consumer businesses being built right now and certainly not a lot of consumer entertainment businesses being built right now. And there's a real different I think interaction that the average user has when I'm sitting down at co-work and my boss is paying for it. And so I don't really think or care about how much money this is costing me. And when you're building for consumer entertainment and you're paying for it and it's not for doing a task, it's actually for enjoying yourself. Um, you actually do think a lot about it. And so, a, it makes our jobs harder. We actually have to deliver more. But B, you you you want to make sure that you provide the right experience where you're not constantly thinking about, oh gosh, how many credits do I have left before I hit the pay wall?
If uh if if Ben Thompson were here, he'd probably ask you about advertising. I feel like uh consumers want to be entertained. they don't necessarily want to be productive. It's very hard to get consumers to pay at scale. Obviously, the AI era is like a big narrative violation of that because there's tens of millions of consumers that are paying for AI tools across the entire industry. But, uh there does seem to be a limit to how many consumers will pay even $10 a month. Are you thinking about uh trading credits while you're waiting for a song to to generate ads? How are you thinking about that?
We're not thinking at that scale yet. I actually kind of disagree with Ben here, which is I mean he's he's he's awesome. He's brilliant. But I just I just think about like uh 800 million people about stream music. A little less than half of them pay for it. That's actually a lot of people. Like 300 million people pay for streaming music. That's a lot. Yeah. Um I just think that that like the history here. So So there's billions and billions of people that don't listen to music online whatsoever. Is it really only 800 million? accounts or is that like accounts on Spotify that doesn't maybe count YouTube? That's uh to my knowledge that's like Spotify, YouTube, Apple, and maybe like five others. There's like a billion records now too. Vinyl is going to make a big comeback. And um I mean I think as we um change the place of music and culture, as the product gets better, we change the place that music has in culture. We see these creative moments happening. And so you see them digitally now where maybe you saw the Puerto Rico song or you saw um an amazing creative trend where people are making like their cringy text messages into songs and they go viral on TikTok. And I think you'll start to see that penetrate actually the IRL world as well. And so I yeah I'm long vinyl.
Yeah. Uh, I was talking to someone who wanted a job at Sunso and they were uh they were asking me what I thought about the business and uh obviously I've been bullish for a long time like this new entertainment form factor, people love the product, you guys have real revenue, you're growing really quickly. Uh the my unsophisticated view was that I I told the person I can easily imagine this as like a10 billion company. It's hard for me to see the world in which this is a hundred billion dollar company. Uh why am I why am I wrong? I know you're insanely ambitious. You're not gonna you're not going to 2x from here and then be like job's done everybody.
No, the job the job's not done. I think um this is one of those things actually. I think you've just been hanging around investors too much, you know, which is um the thing uh that you know you have to be right for a long time while while a lot of people are wrong. And the thing is every every revenue scale we hit, every usage scale we hit, the question is like, but how many people really want to create? And that was we got those questions at $100,000 in revenue and we get those questions at $100 million in revenue. And the lived experience we have playing with the product with people, but also the metrics and looking at our growth curves and seeing that every time we make the product better, yes, things inlect up, but we appeal to a broader and broader audience. So I feel very I mean the same the same thing would have been said with early creative tools on the internet which was you know how big you know with Figma was always how big could Figma be you know there's only so many designer professional designers then of course like the rest of organizations same thing with with Canva I'm sure a lot of people passed early on because they just thought like yeah there's just not that many people relatively that uh that do design and then of course like you make the tools more accessible uh and And so so anyways, so yeah, and so there's a couple things here. One is I think actually we'll have a very large fraction of those 300 million subscribers to streaming also subscribe to Zuno in the long run. But the other thing that's amazing is that for the first time in a long time in music, there's innovation on the end user experience. And so you can have something where there are multiple products out there like right now the end user experiences for music all look the same. They all look like a a streaming provider, right? It's just like I have all of the world's music living on my phone and I can listen to it and that's it. In the future when you can do more things and play with it, you probably subscribe to multiple video games. You probably subscribe to multiple video streaming platforms. Why can't you subscribe to multiple music things? And I think the answer is in 10 years you will.
Yeah. Do you think Apple would ever make a play in this space?
I think lots of people are going to make plays in the space. Uh it's almost validating to see that people finally think of music as a growth area uh again. And so, but again, I think that there's so much room for innovation here. There's so much green field to build upon that I'm actually really excited.
Yeah. Can you take me through the story of the Puerto Rico song? What happened there? Like like what were the key inflection points? Actually, I don't I I don't know is the answer. You know, this is like a song from a creator and and it hits the right uh cultural moment and the right vibe and and I don't want to say it's a good song or it's a bad song, but it is a platform where so many people can be creative on top of it. And that is really fulfilling to see. And that's stuff that it's like new use cases for music that haven't been around for a minute.
Is AI music becoming less controversial or there still people discovering it and getting angry? because I could imagine there was a wave over the last uh 2 years where people were like, "Wait, they're making music with AI. This is a this is meant to be a human creative pursuit or whatever criticisms they've they've thrown at it." But I imagine over time people start to realize that these are fun entertainment products and tools and uh before you form an opinion, you should just try using it and form an opinion based on your experience, not um you know, internet comments or things like that. But my expectation is that uh it will actually become less controversial year over year as it sort of normalizes.
It is definitely becoming less controversial. There are still plenty of people who have pre-formed opinions and then you know actually playing with the product is the best way to change their minds. Um the thing that has become apparent in the music industry is that so many people are using it without talking about it. And as people realize that everybody knows that everybody knows it certainly normalizes there. And then as a consumer, either when you play with the product and you realize how fun it is, or when you realize actually there's some AI music in the music that I love, all of a sudden you're not so anti-AI. I think this is a lot like people being anti-AII and then they realize that chat GPT can help them with their homework and they kind of soften a little bit as a useful tool.
I mean Martin Scorsesei came out yesterday in a Black Forest Labs video talking about the value of AI in the film making process but the video demos we'll watch it later on the show but it it demos um sort of like a previsualization step almost like a storyboarding step. He's describing this alpine town and it's generating visuals for him. He's not taking it end to end. Of course, that that that that's happening more and more, but uh but he that I I think uh having a filmmaker like Scorsese kind of step up and say like, "Yeah, this is useful. I can see this working."
Absolutely. There's an analog in music actually, which is that you'll have songwriters um make beautiful songs and instead of making demos for an artist, they can make low-fidelity songs like low-fidelity productions which are demos with so much easier. Yeah. and it will get ripped out and produced without AI or with minimal AI when it's produced for the last time. But do you think there's still an opportunity for major artists to be a first mover in the space? We were talking uh I think a mutual friend of the three of us and I was telling him uh he loves he uses it all the time. And uh I was telling him like why don't you just be the first one to take like a proper leap and do this and like the first person that goes and says like hey this is okay it's not so scary I used it in the creative process we still used a bunch of you know uh traditional producers sing you know songwriters etc. Um, I think that person will get a lot of like credit and potentially, you know, a lot of attention. It will obviously be polarizing, but then the fourth, fifth, sixth mover won't really get any potential benefit. It'll just be normalized by that point.
I think that's totally possible. Like, we've, you know, there are people, there are a few people who are outspoken about it, but I don't know if we've had like the moment yet. I want like the project like somebody has to make like a hit record. There have been I think what what you're and they have to they have to go out and say they have to be just very upfront and I what I want is them to document the whole process like I want a video camera. How much is enough suno in there? Actually that's the that's the whole point. It's like like a guitar might have only been like one little riff in a song and it could have been some originally like somebody recorded it on their phone and then they brought it into the studio and then like maybe it got transformed and made with a different Yeah, exactly. And so to me to me there just needs to be it's it's always going to be a spectrum, right? There's going to be songs that are heavily Sununo, but I would expect for like major artists, even if like the the original kind of idea or um some element of the song was made on Sunno, like you said, it'll just get transformed and adapted and evolved. And so I think it's just positioning it as not like a replacement for anything, but uh another kind of individual artist in the room, another instrument in the room uh that's contributing to the project.
Here's how I think of it. We we we haven't hit that moment, but at some point somebody will really document and celebrate the use of these tools in making things like we're already in a lot of very popular music, but at some point somebody will really do that actually proactively and that will be a huge cultural moment. And then the next amazing cultural moment will be an artist releases an album that is meant to beed by their fans. Yeah. And um this is the new format. This is the thing that will pull people in that deepens the artist fan connection and that will be a very very important moment.
How spiky is Sunno's intelligence? I want to know about the training process. There's we know you have to leave. So final maybe that's the last question. Um but uh the uh there's this like famous story about uh I think Andre Carpathy told it about like GPT4 41 some iteration where at at a certain checkpoint uh it was terrible at chess and then all of the AI researchers just were really interested in chess and they were like there's no reason it should be bad at chess and so they added a bunch of chess training data and then all of a sudden the models got pretty good at chess and it seems like we're in this spiky intelligence race where coding is really valuable. There's a lot of money there. So, the models are getting better at coding, but if you look at the models, like it doesn't really feel like they're getting that much better at copywriting right now because that's not where the boom is. They're getting really good at coding. And I'm wondering if you're seeing like, okay, there's an opportunity for us to nail jazz in the next iteration or us to nail EDM in this iteration. like is it is like what fingerprints is the team leaving on the model versus just we're scaling up and it's getting better at everything and there's surprises and it's very indeterminate.
We we actually try not to leave our fingerprints on it. And we have a like the approach is we should not be the arbiters of good and bad music, you know, like a file corrupt or or low-quality sound recording, but like um you can go and you can listen to a song that has 10,000 YouTube plays or 10 million YouTube plays and you won't actually be able to tell the difference. And so we should not be uh the arbiters of that. The thing that's different here also is that um in the chess and the coding examples, there are objective right answers. And that's why the models are so good at getting spiky there. Yeah, music has no right answers. And so there's no verified rewards, verifiable rewards. And so um all of those techniques actually don't work nearly as RLVR. So we're actually in the regime where it's much less spiky. And actually when we find a hole, an anti-spike, then we actually try to fill that in. Like it's not like we're amazing at jazz. It's like you suck at jazz or you suck at country and now we have to go and figure that one out.
Okay, last question. We'll let you get out of here. Uh, what about uh adding on to the viral fuel? When I hear about turn your text messages into a pseudo song, I think why can't I just screenshot my text messages and then you edit the video for me and I get a viral format. That feels like very tool you see very like each video format is going to be a whole process for you. It's going to be hard to like oneshot the full end to end. But what do you think about personally? I want the Slack integration. I want a pseudo song at the end of each day. Then yeah, why weren't you on the stage at Microsoft Build? I want my I want the workday at at the office summarized. You want a workday integration? No, I want I want the Slack summarized and I want to be able to listen to an hourong song on my drive home about what's happening at work.
We'll try we'll try to make that happen. We're not doing a workday integration, but I will try. The thing that's amazing is actually this is a platform where people are creative on top of it. And so we're not going to come up with the right cringy text message videos. Somebody is going to do that.
Well, uh, that's a challenge for you at home. Go make the cringey text message. Go make the workday integration. Prove Mikey wrong. He says he won't build it. You can. You can go and build. You can go and build the workday integration yourself. Well, I want to react. Imagine keeping up at work. Yeah. Through music, John. Be fantastic. What's more powerful than that? You know what's more powerful than that? Console.com. console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT HR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.
So, uh we can talk about uh the there there's a bunch of funny posts in the time that we got to go through before our next guest uh Samir from Colin Samir joins us to talk about Hollywood. Uh you can tell when a co-orker got nothing going on outside of work. Why did Why is that in here? 220,000 people this is are you is this did you put this in to kind of subtweet me Tyler I didn't I didn't send this in this in the team always asks Monday morning what you do this weekend I always have the same answer million views uh anyway uh there's some news on the timeline about GOP rep and Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers there's an actual photo from the campaign trail and then a photo put out by the staffer let's compare these It's one of those can you tell can you spot the differences video. They made him a little bit bulkier. They they just added just a couple pounds of muscle. Just a couple. He looks huge in this in this photo. I mean, he looks like he's ready for the Olympia. Yeah. Uh I don't think they went f far enough. So, I I took it upon myself to generate an even more accurate photo we can pull up. Uh because I think this is what he should look like on the like if you're going to AI your photos just go full just go stringer. Yeah. Get yourself in the stringer and make sure you're looking like you walked off of the Olympia stage and still claim natural absolute mass absolute mass monster. Yeah. You can typical politician thing to do would be I'm not on performance drugs. I just run every single photo through images too and Chad GBT. Um people are having fun. It was funny. I thought I was so original for doing this, but if you scroll down the comments, uh, everyone had the same idea and made him way way more jacked. If you scroll down, there's 25 others. And there are says enhanced uh, politics. Jack says the enhanced Senate. Yeah, there are some that are absolutely crazy here. The enhanced Senate. Okay, we got a debate on our hands. We got a debate on our hands.
So uh Philip Johnston, friend of the show, founder of StarCloud says, "Founders, before you go out and raise, ask all the best AI models this play the role of a venture capitalist and give each startup in the XYZ category of your startup space a ranking from 1 to 10 on how much they would want to invest in them with one don't want to invest at all and 10 desperately want to invest. Do deep research and give reasons. All the VCs are doing some version of this." He's claiming that the VCs are just AI
psychosis, letting AI do their job. Maybe it's true. We don't know. Maybe. But uh, advice uh he says all the VCs are doing some version of this and if you're not at the top of the list, you're going to have problems. So might make sense to delay the raise until you can get closer to the top. So if 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 do a pretty good job of figuring out like the relative interest and excitement, right? You can look at uh you could if an agent was running uh a pretty interesting uh metric is like you know headcount growth on LinkedIn right uh are people leaving you know how many people are leaving the company yeah uh all these things so I actually think
has this fund's competitor done another deal and they're excluded from uh and that competitor is excluded from your round but they're looking for something. Also also also also you know pedigree right this is whether you like it or not a big factor in uh especially like kingmaking right now. So if you're in a category
and uh you're a smart uh talented individual uh but you're at the seed stage and then there's another
pet food company pedigree pet foods. No, that's what I know about pet food, dog food and treats. And you have another company your same stage uh where you know all three founders just came out of SpaceX after being there for 10 years and you're both competing you know in some adjacent category right like I actually think the model is going to do a pretty good job and say like hey VCs very likely might be you know three times more excited to invest in this team than you and that is just that's just reality.
Okay, so Philip Johnson says, uh, I'm glad I provoked a reaction. This will age badly over the coming few years. He's saying Seth is wrong. Uh, he says, also, I'm not talking about timing raises based on AI opinion. I'm talking about actually improving your startup, get more customers, for example, which will at some point be picked up in the AI rankings. Uh, which is a lot of what you were getting at. So I guess the question is um should you delay a raise based on AI opinion and would you actually listen to a clanker tell you how your business is doing or are you going to say I know better. What do you think? I think you're arguing it's a good source of feedback. It's worthwhile. But at the same time I can't see you doing this. I can't see you actually going to a model and being like, 'Yeah, they're right. I am washed.' No way. No way. Zero shot. Like
I think when I was I think I was emotionally I think that uh earlier in my a decade ago, this actually would have been super helpful. 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 I like there was like a checklist from zero to one. Peter Thiel 0 to 1. And you could go through it and say like, okay, do I have defensibility? Am I building something that will have staying power? How many of these boxes do I check? Because when I go out to raise, a lot of the VCs are going to be thinking the same thing. It's worthwhile and an AI can sort of help you do that checklist. So, that's valuable. Another thing I was talking I I
I don't think you're taking not an LLM uh a smart enough uh model would be able to do this if it was trained on enough VC blog posts maybe uh which certainly uh I think some are quite well trained on PG's blog and others but I was talking to a founder yesterday uh 2-year-old company has gone through a pivot figured out a much more interesting opportunity than they originally started with uh have a bunch of you know pilots a lot of positive momentum uh revenue is growing but I had to tell the founder like look you are the VCs that you're going to talk to if you go out to raise right now are 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, you know, oftentimes momentum and that's just the game.
Yeah. And a really good model could say, look, your startup is very mid. You don't even bother pitching founders fund top tier firms, but I got some guys who they got crazy AUM right now. They'd love to invest. So, you should definitely DM this person because they've been posting crazy slop on the timeline non-stop and they're just ripping checks at anything and so you fit that category. So, go get the bag from them. This is possible. This is possible with super intelligence. Anyway, our next guest is in the waiting room. But first, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.
And we are very lucky to be joined by Simeon from Carl and Samir in the TV Ultra. How are you?
That's right. It's been where I am.
It's been too long. I missed you.
Yes. I want to see the view of 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. Whenever you come to Montana, you can't tell anyone.
I mean, I did just tell you I'm in Montana, but no, I'm actually—Geo knows exactly where you are. Let's get over.
Let's get Geo Rainbow on next and we'll do you fully.
What happens in the woods stays in the woods.
I imagine 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.
First, thank you again for hosting us at your event last week. Press Publish LA was an amazing group of people, incredible.
Thank you guys for coming. Also an 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. What a time for Hollywood and creators.
Yeah. And it was funny because I was telling you, oh yeah, the Markiplier story is 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 in 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, Kane, when I started on YouTube, Kane was five years old. So like, you know, these are internet-native filmmakers.
And I think there's three 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, right? Or millions and millions of people on the internet had a hand in creating. So when that comes out in theaters,
I want a thing that I had a hand in. Yeah. I think the other thing is that cutting your teeth as an internet filmmaker, it teaches you a lot about how to earn attention. Curry 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 begging 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 going to buy a ticket and you're just going to 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. Yeah. And the third thing is—
Third thing, because I know we all love lists. And the third thing will blow your mind, by the way. 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 designers. Like when that is paired with the acumen of internet storytelling, it's proven to be very powerful.
So I think there's been this like narrative of, course, Hollywood is dying, but I think it just looks very different now. Like we didn't know theaters were available. Like Markiplier put his movie himself. He picked up the phone and put his movie in 4,600 theaters. Theaters are available and they're great. 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. There's been a lot that's happened, but it's super exciting to see.
Yeah. Yeah, I look at it as like the last 15 years has been a story. There was collaboration happening, but it was overwhelmingly a disruption story. You look at the market cap, the value creation of the platforms, you know, the YouTubes, the Instagrams, etc. How much the explosion of enterprise value in these new platforms, the overall reduction in EV in some of these sort of like more legacy entertainment? Sure. But now we're meeting at a point where both sides can say like, 'Hey, 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.
Jord's going to see movies. You're going to see—this is going to be the tipping point because you were never a movie guy, but once the new creators, once there's a Wombo film and a whole cinematic universe around Professor Cendi, you're going to be—
I'll be there. But yeah, so this is the moment where I think I expect digital platforms to consume 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 a moment of, hey, both sides should be, you know, actively trying to do more and more stuff together.
Yeah. The reality is also it's important to note that this has all happened in horror, right? And this has happened once before with the RackaRacka brothers, you know, signing with A24 and making Talk to Me for about four million bucks that ended up making just about 100 million. These are outsized returns, like Curry Barker making something for a million dollars. You know, Obsession was made for about a million dollars. Focus purchased it for around 15 million and then generating 148 million not even a month in is absolutely insane. And so horror has historically been cheaper to produce, right? Even if you 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?' because it is that moment that's going to 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, you know, the storytellers that cost you in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The Mandalorian costs 265 million all in and it's made 247 million right now. So it's like it's super hard to make a big blockbuster movie like that. And, you know, even Markiplier making something like he made independently for under five 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 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 basically 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 them a crack at this, even though they're a commentary channel, as opposed to someone coming through, okay, they've been telling love stories in a fictional context, they have a 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 going to 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. 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—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 was this like collaborative Minecraft story that had so much lore to it that a bunch of people were involved in. So I think the reason why video games is such a right place for IP to build is because it's interactive storytelling and interactive world building that a lot of people are involved in and that then guarantees like a loyal audience because they're invested in it.
And then there's Red versus Blue with Halo and GTA RP. Like there are rich sources and it's interesting there's been so many 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 two-hour film, then they can unleash them, turn them loose. But of course, it's an IP negotiation. Is there any missing part of the stack right now to meet this moment? You have the, you know, the CAA, 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 a 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's a lot of assumption that creators with big audiences know what works, and part of that is true, but you know, Kane got signed at 16 years old and A24 kind of mentored him from 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 Kane did have a lot of help in screenwriting. He's looking for a collaborator for part two. But give me the development support to make it long-lasting IP or big global IP. And I think that happened with Kane. I think Curry is like a really great talent and what he's done in comedy historically has led him here. But I think development is going to be the missing step because what's going to happen is it's going to be a very quick reaction. Let's get creators with scripts. Let's put money behind them. Let's move fast so we can also make $150 million. But you know, you have to remember this is years and years and years of these storytellers cutting their teeth and having good people around them to help them learn how to tell a good story. So I think the financing will not be a problem because you can finance creators, creators know how to make stuff for cheap.
20 days Zachary made that movie, which is crazy.
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, I don't know if the models are good enough yet.
I have a feeling they might be. And it really is about figuring out the storytelling component and piecing it all together to be cohesive. But do you have any sort of personal timeline to that kind of moment where some one individual takes, you know, an idea through a, you know, even a 30-minute film that actually gets a, you know, positive reaction from critics or, you know, something like 20 million views, something like that.
I mean, I, you know, obviously we all live in LA. I feel like the first thing that comes to mind for me is the Spencer Pratt mayoral ads because those are like a lot of AI-generated ads, but I'm just saying 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, like maybe it'll be in a year or two, and I think it'll start in animation with short films because 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.
Yeah, I think maybe I'm just overstepping there, but I do feel it. I personally feel the Gen Z screen time finally sort of dropping off a little bit after spiking. Like running over my phone with my car on purpose to have a little bit of forced time offline.
So, like the models are really good. Like I even playing around with Gemini Omni. Obviously, we had them at 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 two 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 that Backrooms started as a purely CGI VFX effort in Blender and After Effects, 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. Like, just hand that off to the VFX team and you got yourself a CGI movie. Put all the actors 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 buildout of that set. And I imagine that that might happen in AI where you get someone that has some interesting idea that they were able to prompt and then they take that into a CGI that's a little more polished and then they can go build the actual sets and it's all just this extra underwriting process. But I was wondering if there was anything else that stuck out to you about the fact that they sort of went light on CGI when you think the fans of Backrooms, 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 whose call it was, but A24 is very good at making things iconic. All the interviews of the cast are done in the Backrooms. There was a DJ set from the Backrooms. There was people who visited the Backrooms. Like the fact that it was tactile in an event 360 experience. I like that. Yeah.
I've seen five movies, but I can tell when a movie is an A24 movie from like the first video that I see, the first 15 seconds of a trailer. Like there's just something about it.
Yeah. It's the same with you guys. Like you can, there's, you know, countless shows that try and be TPBN, but 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, you know, I think A24 has done it again. Like this is incredible and pulling someone like Kane into this and beating Marty Supreme, which had like a crazy marketing push, 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 couldn't tell you how great this looks to me.
Yeah, I'll give it up for that. I'm thrilled.
It really is part of the ads. We love it. 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.
Yes. Next question. Where are you? And don't dodge the question. No. I want advice for YouTubers in the context of passion projects. There's a lot of YouTubers that have grown off of a single format. They know what works, the title, the thumbnail, hook, the format, the 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, he did this fantastic series on Cyprus and he went around these islands, but it just wasn't financially the same as all the other videos that he does. And I'm wondering if there's a new format where you should sort of give YouTubers the permission to keep that special project in their back pocket and take it to a different place, take it to Hollywood where that type of project can live and flourish and go through development as opposed to trying to stuff it down the same funnel that is very optimized for a particular type of video.
I 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. Or you have a financier that you trust. 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. Like Curry making that for 750 is what makes it special. It's what actually gets less strings attached. And why it's good. Markiplier making something no strings attached. Like that's just his money. He gets to make something really special. So I think Markiplier is a great example, like when you have a passion project you ideally have the cash to do it or can get it from someone you trust who's not going to intervene with it. But I think that is a danger. 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 midroll ad to the cinema. Movies should have host-read midrolls because if you look at the budgets of some of these films, 750, a million dollars, if you're watching Obsession and then just at the one-hour mark, and then you get an ad for Sapphire, Chase Sapphire Reserve. Not just product placement. I want the characters to sit down. No, no, no, no, no. The whole point is that it's not product placement because everyone goes to product placement movies. This is separate. This is a host-read separate from the content. I want the characters to sit down and not just use like a Chase Sapphire card to pay. I want them to look at the camera and deliver. I'm actually sick of seeing James Bond use the Samsung Galaxy S26. I would rather just James Bond tell me about it separately and then I can go back to enjoying the movie with whatever phone he would use than whatever phone the character would normally use.
I love you guys and I love how you speak about advertising. I disagree wholeheartedly. I don't want that at all. I'm happy to have the theatrical runs sponsored by someone like Chase, if you have a Chase Sapphire card you get in for free and like you get perks for something if you have a Chase Sapphire card. The one thing, my hot take is I want movies to be like 90 minutes and under again. I can't do the two-hour movie. Like I just cannot do it. I would prefer like 90 minutes and under. I got time for two 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 going to start... 20 bucks is 20 bucks. But I, you know, I checked the box. I saw a movie. Yeah.
went to the theater 90 seconds and about.
That'd be great for you. You'd be able to catch up. You'd be like, "Yeah, I've seen hundreds of movies."
Yeah. Well, we can agree to we can agree to disagree on ads. John and I will start a media buying company called Fourth Wall. And it's just focused
Breaking down the fourth wall and delivering ad impressions
during your most sacred moments of entertainment.
Yes. Yes. Yes. The next Godfather will be sponsored fully. Uh anyway, Enjoy Montana. Thank you so much for taking the time on a busy day to come chat with us.
again. Not that busy, but I appreciate it.
Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless realtime experiences and new value
Hey team, is this uh Ben, is this real?
Did you take a screenshot of
Uh just off that one screenshot, our our intern Ben was able to find Samir's exact location.
Okay, we will knock. We do know exactly where it is potentially. I don't know. This might be hallucinated, but it looks pretty it looks pretty accurate. Anyway, we've been keeping our next guest waiting. We have Tom Fairley from Bullish in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP Ultradome. How are you doing? What's going on, Tom?
Welcome to the show. Can you hear us?
Okay, we're turning on the audio. Hopefully, we'll hear him in the meantime. Let's go to this debate. Okay, Becky Quick at CNBC is getting in trouble because she claimed that GLP1s are responsible for school budget shortfalls. When I saw this, I was like, what could possibly be the connection? Uh, and Bioin Investment 5 said she's so misinformed. She fact checked it. Turns out it's true.
School budgets are paying for GLP1s. They're very expensive and so that's driving up health care costs in a lot of in a lot of schools.
Welcome to the show. Anyway, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time. How you doing?
Sorry about the sorry about the audio issue and uh I I found the uh the little bit about Becky interesting. She she's about to speak about somebody else, somebody on a on a different network, but uh she's a pro. She's a serious journalist. huge fans of everyone at CNBC. We love the Squawk crew. They pioneered this whole format, invented television over there. Anyway, uh let's go to you. Tell us about Bullish. Give us the update. Take us through what's recent in the business. And uh let's get started.
Yeah, sure. Just uh before I do, just to follow on on that, you said you're a fantasy NBC. I I too am a fan of NBC, but also we have our own media business here. No way. And I've watched with some as as both both a practitioner and and a fan of some somebody who's done a lot of it. I've watched with some astonishment the success that you guys have met with by just creating a a fresher, more interesting format. You guys do an awesome job. Thanks. Thanks for having me on.
Thanks for saying that. It's a lot. Yeah. It's been a really wild ride. Really fun. And uh best part is getting to talk to people like you all day long like and uh and and again and again and and talking to six people a day. Uh, a lot of people start podcasts because they want to talk to interesting people, but then they talk to one a week. We get to talk to seven a day. It's great.
Yeah. Yeah. Super cool. I'm uh I'm happy for you and happy for me. Yeah. What can we talk about?
Uh, well, why don't you uh take us through like the shape of the business currently and then some of the new deals that you've been working on.
Wait, can we get some backstory first?
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Let's start there. That's
You were at uh you're at NY, right?
Yeah. I was uh I was born in Buoie, Maryland, just outside of uh DC. I was going to say I was born on the stock exchange.
I was born on the floor home.
That would be amazing. Lore.
I actually didn't know like I wasn't born with any like pre uh any any destiny. I didn't I didn't know.
I always I was always interested in business and money and uh no I wasn't it nothing was pre-ordained. But so
grew up in uh
a lot of people are afraid to say that. I was never afraid to say that.
Yeah.
Yeah. No, I could tell my mother would shake her head sometimes. My mom my mom was a nun for five years and uh
and uh worked in uh you know, I grew up in a place called PG County and and she worked at Elizabeth Seat in high school, which you know, by and large had kids from a different socioeconomic strata than me. And then she would come home and I would talk about making money and uh you know, she looked at me like, "Oh, he's the black sheep."
But um met my met my wife at Georgetown. I need a dollar to buy Gatorade. And um she lent it to me and now we have we have three kids in in New York City and I just fell in love with business. And uh first couple years I I did like banking and private equity. Honestly, I love that too. But when when I really kind of hit got got my mojo is is in the markets industry cuz it's the intersection of tech and business and that to me is is my happy place and I've been there ever since. I I started when I was in my 20s. I'm I'm like granddad now in the digital asset space. I'm I'm 50 and I've been right there at that kind of overlap of the the ven diagram of of technology and markets. I um I I I had I had these friends, the Romero, and uh and I love them. I love them all. Stay in touch with all of them. There's four brothers and and they're all super smart, super successful, and three of them are just like meattheads, like you know, always had their shirts off and and wrestling and playing playing hoops. And then Danny was always like reading Java coding for for dummies when he was like 10 years old. And I would always keep an eye on him. And so in 2013, I'm like, "Danny, are you going back to Duke?" And he said, "No, I'm going out west to start a blockchain company."
And I'm like, "All right, I don't know what the hell that is,
but if you're doing it, I want in." And
you know, a few days later, uh, New York Stock Exchange, where I was at the time, we we agreed to put $10 million into a a little bitty, maybe pre-revenue company called Coinbase.
And so I got this bird's eye view of the digital asset space. Dan Romero.
Whoa. Yeah, we know him well. He's been on the show.
That's a crazy That's a deep cut.
Oh, it was great. It was great. Literally, Literally, I'm like, Danny, going back to Duke. He's like, no. He's like, "No, Tom, I actually graduated this past May. You're a year off. I'm starting this blockchain company." Meanwhile, I know I'm going in to run the New York Stock Exchange. He does not.
And I'm like, "Hey, dude. You got you got a couple minutes. Come sit on the porch." And he comes up
and he starts telling me about blockchain. And I'm like, "Wait, I'd heard of Bitcoin, but this is early, right? It's like smart contracts." And and I'm like, "But what but but what use is there for these smart contracts?" He's like, "Oh, it's going to be amazing. It's going to disintermediate. It's it's this layer of programmable finance. that's going to disintermediate all the kind of big institutions like the New York Stock Exchange. And I'm like, wait, what? What are you What are you talking about? It can't be. And so I said, I I got to put some money in. He said, oh, well, my roommate Fred is going to be in New York tomorrow. Why don't you meet with him? And so I I met Fred Ers. I ended up meeting with with with Fred at at Union Square."
And we put that dough in. And it was like the best money we we ever invested. And we got lucky on the return. Just dumb, you know, just dumb luck.
Is this like this series A stage? Like
I don't know. I can't remember last Tuesday. I let alone 2013. I could Google but early.
I mean, Coinbase was in my YC batch in 2012 and summer 2012. So, I think Ced or Series A was right around.
We should punch We should punch it in, you know.
Anyway, it was a long time ago. Punch in New York Stock Exchange, Coinbase. It'll come up.
That's crazy. That must have been what what kind of reaction did you get on Wall Street from that investment at the time? I don't know how public it was, but I imagine you still had some some of your peers that were saying, you know, what what the heck is Tom up to?
You know, was actually I think if if you asked Brian or or Fred um or or Fred at Union Square, I I think they would all say um with humility, it has nothing to do with me. it has to do with the NYC brand that it that it was hugely valuable for Coinbase. It was not only public, it was massively public.
So, in other words, if you were to look it up, you're going to find story after story after story after story, which is, hey, traditional bellweather uh a traditional bellweather, you know, firm, New York Stock Exchange, validates crypto firm Coinbase. Yeah.
So on the on the west coast it was it was like a a lot of celebration and you know hey this is finally the coming together of these two worlds. On the east coast it was like what the hell is this? You know what a weird investment from these guys. Yeah.
Uh and it and it wasn't as it wasn't as celebrated. I I will say just my thesis was this was a programmable layer of finance for institutions.
Yeah. Like that was the thesis. It was dead wrong if if I'm honest. You know, there were no institutions in until
Yeah. Was that just a You had the timing wrong. You didn't
Yeah. But pretty darn wrong, right? Pretty darn wrong.
Um
Yeah.
Yeah. But you're only off by only off by what, a decade?
