TBPN Live - Intel Rips, Cursor's Plan, Thrive's Giant Bet, GPT 5.5 | George Kurtz, Professor Sendy, Gary Vaynerchuk, Yoland Yan, Ben Horwitz

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

(00:32) - Intel Rips (13:56) - Behind the Cursor SpaceX Deal (16:10) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (27:07) - Thrive Launches Thrive Eternal (28:54) - George Kurtz, CEO and founder of CrowdStrike, is an internationally recognized cybersecurity expert with over 30 years of experience, including previous roles as Worldwide CTO and EVP at McAfee. He discusses Project QuiltWorks, a coalition formed with partners like EY, IBM, and Accenture to rapidly deliver CrowdStrike's technology to customers and address AI-related vulnerabilities. Kurtz highlights the emergence of "shadow AI," where unauthorized AI applications on endpoints create security risks, and emphasizes the need for prompt identification and mitigation of these exposures. (44:22) - Professor Sendy, a self-proclaimed "word combo guru," discusses his journey from creating extended versions of existing words to developing original "Wombos"—blended words that capture complex concepts. He shares his background as a former rapper and his natural talent for wordplay, which led to viral success on social media platforms. Sendy also reveals plans to expand his audience by incorporating slang from older generations and developing a dictionary to compile his creations. (01:01:09) - Gary Vaynerchuk, also known as Gary Vee, is an American entrepreneur, author, and internet personality, renowned for his work in digital marketing and social media as the chairman of VaynerX and CEO of VaynerMedia. In the conversation, Vaynerchuk discusses the concept of "Wombos," which are word combinations like "quiche" (quirky and niche), emphasizing the importance of embracing new trends. He also highlights the significance of multi-channel, multi-format content strategies in the current media landscape, and predicts a resurgence of analog experiences as a counterbalance to digital advancements. (01:28:35) - Eyal Cohen is the founder and CEO of Humble Robotics, where he builds autonomous robotic systems designed to handle complex, real-world tasks in industrial and warehouse environments. The company focuses on combining AI, perception, and hardware to automate physically demanding workflows—like sorting, palletizing, and material handling—while improving safety and operational efficiency. Cohen’s work centers on making robotics more adaptable and cost-effective, enabling large-scale deployment across logistics, manufacturing, and supply chain operations. (01:39:18) - Yoland Yan, co-founder and CEO of ComfyUI, discusses the company's evolution from an open-source project to a platform adopted by top studios for AI-driven content creation. He highlights ComfyUI's node-based system, offering creators precise control over visual design and video production, contrasting it with text-prompt-based AI tools. Yan also mentions the introduction of Comfy Cloud, enabling users to access extensive computing resources, and notes the platform's role in producing high-profile advertisements. (01:50:42) - Ben Horwitz, an Investment Partner at Dorm Room Fund and MBA candidate at Harvard Business School, discusses his creation of Sincerely, an email tool designed to intentionally introduce typos, serving as a satirical response to the prevalence of AI-generated, overly polished emails. He reflects on the unconventional path of an HBS student rapidly developing a software product, challenging traditional expectations. Additionally, Horwitz shares his experiences with AI-generated communications and the inspiration behind developing Sincerely. (01:58:29) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN. Today is Friday, April 24th. 2026, we are live from the TVPN Ultradome. The Temple of Technology. The Fortress of Finance. We have a great show for you today, folks. We have George Kurtz coming on from CrowdStrike. Professor Cindy from Instagram, you might have seen.

He's the expert of Wombos. Gary Vaynerchuk's coming on. We have a lightning round going on with a couple founders. It'll be a fun time. But the big news. Rapping up with Ben Horowitz. Ben Horwitz. Horwitz.

Horwits. Horwits. The big news, of course, is Intel. Intel is absolutely ripping. Intel jumped 20% after hours on the back of $13.6 billion in Q1 revenue. Only 11% above analyst estimates, but there's five key factors that are coming together to create a new narrative around Intel that are driving the stock much higher. And it is almost an old time highest at... The main factor is Bubble Boy on X. A lot of people have called. this and it is long overdue. The revenue is only up 7% year over year, but next quarter is already guiding to be better, somewhere north of 14 billion, probably. But there's still big losses under the hood. This quarter, they lost $3.7 billion, not good, but that was mostly driven by one-off charges related to Mobile Eye and derivative payments tied to the U.S. government's 10% state.

So if you strip those out, Intel actually earned $1.5 billion, which is much better than what people were expecting, which was basically break-even. So the cruise ship of Intel is starting to turn somewhat, but the narrative has already completely shifted. So Intel is working again, is the idea. The AI trade has mostly been Nvidia. Invidia's memory suppliers, TSMC, power equipment, cloud CAPEX, and a few software names that can prove real adoption. If you're accelerating your top line, you are an AI winner. That's sort of the rule of thumb. Of course, things might play out differently, but that's what's been happening in the market.

Intel was the most embarrassing missing piece. Why isn't Intel booming when we're in a computing boom? It made no sense. But there were good reasons, and we'll go through them. The company that invented the modern CPU era, they missed mobile, they fell behind TSMC. They failed to produce a competitive AI GPU. They did fab a GPU. GPU at one point. They tried to get into gaming at one point, but they never really found

traction, especially in the data center and the servers for AI training. And so they have fallen behind. And then they spent the last few years trying to convince the world that Intel could still matter. But now, oddly enough, the rise of AI agents, it's giving Intel a second shot. Do you have thoughts on Intel yet? I'm going to keep going. It's funny because at the moment that the U.S. took a position in Intel. Yeah. It was like it felt like a bay. It was a bailout, right?

It felt like that, yeah. And it felt like, you know, you would expect, okay, over time, this is going to be very, very good for Intel to have that vote of confidence. But I don't think anyone was really predicting that it would go up quite this much in the span of just half a year. I think Ben Thompson wrote a pretty strong bull case for the, you know, for the Intel U.S. deal. Basically, like, you had to grapple with this idea of, like,

this doesn't feel like free market capitalism. Yeah, I guess the only thing is, like, there wasn't this narrative around CPUs at the time that the deal was happening. Or at least it wasn't a very public narrative. Yes, yes. The bull case at that time that I heard most loudly was not the

CPU boom. It was... It was just overall chipping. It was the 14, like the leading edge fab that basically, by having the US government as a shareholder. You see those dinners with all the AI lab leads and all the hyperscaler CEOs. And there's a world where there's another one of those meetings and the government administration says, hey, we are backing Intel. I need all of you to commit to buy a ton of supply. If Intel actually goes and builds the leading edge fab, which is going to cost them billions of

dollars. But if they have the demand guarantees, then they will actually be able to go. do it. Tyler, what was your take? Yeah, I think Leopold, or sorry, Intel has long been kind of the Leopold take, which is that like, you know, this is the clear, like, this is the company you want to own in the kind of nationalization world of like, okay, Taiwan risk.

Oh, sure. What are we going to do? If we can't make chips, you know, in Taiwan, Intel's like the very clear strategy. Yeah, maybe it's like not working right now, but like at some point, this is not just like economics. This is like, okay, this is, you know, national security. It's extremely important that we have this capacity

in the US, and Intel is kind of the only one that's even, like, remotely in the conversation. Yeah, yeah. No, that makes sense. So there were some predictions from AI 2027 and other folks in the AI forecasting world around the rise of agents, that agents would arrive at this time. I didn't see too many folks who were predicting strong, valuable, effective AI agents, really predicting the CPU crunch, but that's exactly what's happened. So AI agents need CPUs to do things.

Training frontier models, that's still a GPU story, but running agentic workflows across data centers orchestrating tasks, routing jobs, managing memory, handling inference workloads, coordinating servers increases demand for the boring old central processor. Intel's data center segment produced $5.1 billion in quarterly revenue, beating the $4.5 billion that analysts expected. And Intel's CEO, Lipbutton, said, wave of AI is moving from foundational models to inference to agentic AI, and that shift increases the need for Intel CPUs, wafers, and advanced packaging. On the earnings call, he said

that the CPU to GPU ratio is closer to one to one CPU for every four GPUs versus one for every eight in prior years. And there is an interesting forecast from Lipbuton as well. But VK macro says CPU to GPU ratio flipping from 1 to 8 to 8 to 1 is absolutely wild. That's just a completely new world to what we've had so far. This is from Evercore, ISIs, Mark Lepieces, has upgraded Intel directly from neutral to outperform and mentions that as AI workloads shift further toward inference and agents, towards inference and agents, the weight of CPU demand will rise sharply, and the CPU to GPU ratio could flip from one point one to eight to eight to one, which is a massive, massive

switch. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, like, that's kind of a crazy ratio. It is. Because, like, the less of the recent from tier models is that, like, the models are going to keep getting bigger. You're going to need way more, like, chips to him and some. Like, Dylan Patel was on Patrick O'Shaughnessy. I think it came out yesterday the day before, and he's just saying, like, you know, the models

are going to get really expensive. Tocons are going to get super, super expensive. People are going to price down. So, so I don't. I don't know if I fully believe the narrative that you need all the CPUs. Yeah. You're going to need way more CPUs than... Well, I mean, the...

That's all, folks. It really lines out perfectly. His camera is the main one that fits perfectly. The glasses land around out. I love a Friday show. Yes, that's a good point. But there is this... I think at least in the midterm, like the narrative is like...

Yeah, there's like... Capilities overhang. And just like one really smart AI system that's... being inferenced on GPU can spin off a ton of CPU workloads and, uh, and, and, and do a lot of things that, that require CPUs. Yeah. Like even in the, like the, the, the, the Saspocalypse, like you vibe coded Slack or whatever, it's like, well, that vibe coded system is running on a CPU.

And if it took you, you know, like, I don't know, a thousand GPU hours, but then that system runs on CPUs that are running constantly for every user, you still wind up with what creating more CPU. demand out of the GPU. I think this take makes a lot of sense if you are like kind of, you know, long open source. We're going to have a lot of these open source models. Yeah. They're quite small.

You can run them on like, you know, small amount of chips, but you just have a lot of them. You have a bunch of agents doing a bunch of stuff at the same time. Yeah. Rather than the single model, you know, inferenced on a massive amount of chips. Why is the horse here? Anyway, whether it's going to eight CPUs for one GPU or staying at one CPU to four GPUs, It's still twice as good as it used to be, because it used to be one to eight. And so that is bullish for Intel, and Lib Bhutan is making that clear to the market and to the investors on his earnings call.

Then there's the wildcard, the TerraFab, Elon Musk project. It's very exciting, but it's clearly further off. Elon Musk wants to build a massively vertical integrated chip manufacturing operation with Tesla, SpaceX, and possibly other Musk companies needing huge volumes of chips for self-driving cars, humanoid robots, and even space-based AI data centers. Intel is supposed to help design, manufacture, and package chips for the project. Now, the Wall Street Journal has a more cautious view today. Elon is aiming for TerraFab to reach 100,000 wafers a month, and then eventually one million wafers a month, which is just insane scale. So let's put it in context. One million wafers a month is about 70% of TSMC's total monthly output across all fabs. TSM's largest fabs put out

roughly 100,000 wafers a month into production. So you're talking about 10, you know, leading class TSM fabs at Intel just on the TerraFab project plus whatever else Intel is doing. So a pretty massive scale up. And TSM's CEO, CCWA, has said that it's just not that easy to build a fab overnight and get it up and running. So fabs take two to three years to build and then another one to two years to actually ramp. And we've seen this with TSM, Arizona, which we've been very excited about, but it just takes time.

And there is a bottleneck. And the bottleneck has been discussed at length. Ben Thompson wrote about TSM risk and Sertechery, arguing that TSM needs to spend more in CAPEX. And I think that should be clearer now. We'll see what happens at the next TSM earnings call, because maybe they will be waking up. But overall, the Intel now has a collection of plausible demand stories, even though the The demand itself is not going vertical. The stock is going vertical on the back of these five key demand stories that are all pointing in the same direction directly up.

One, AI agents need more CPUs. Two, AI systems need more advanced packaging, a higher ratio of CPUs to GPUs. Intel can help with that. Three, the U.S. government wants a domestic leading edge foundry. This is just a national mandate. Four, Musk wants an impossible amount of silicon. And five, also the hyperscalers want more supply. And so all of that is good news for Intel.

There are more companies that are getting into the CPU design space. We talked about ARM recently. And Arm, of course, it feels like they will be going with TSM in the short term, but who knows what happens in the long term. So as CPUs continue to be important in the AI story, all good news for Intel. So suddenly investors are more willing to entertain a messy, expensive, strategic chip story than they were five years ago. Intel famously missed mobile, which meant TSM ran away with enormous manufacturing volume and left Intel with a demand problem. Volume was destiny, as they say.

As fab cost grew by orders of magnitude, meaningful demand was a hard prerequisite for continued growth. You can't grow if you can't build the fab that's on the leading edge. you can't build the fab unless you actually have the customers. And so if you missed mobile, you just have this gap and you have to jump over it with the help with the government, a bunch of other people and the AI narrative and all these different five key pieces. So the pieces of the puzzle are coming together now. And that's good for Intel.

And it's also good for America's chip manufacturing prospects. So good news overall. And congrats to all the Intel shareholders that were believers early on and rode the wave. Everyone. Every U.S. citizen. Every U.S. citizen. Congrats to all Americans. Every U.S. citizen.

And every U. every U.S. debt holder. So even the international folks that own treasuries are better financial position today. You got to think about what this does to Trump's confidence level. You know, he's like, I enjoy a bailout. He's like, I'll indulge spirit airlines, American spirit. I think he's excited about the potential there. But why stop it just bailouts, right?

Why not? Why not start taking a position? and hyperscalers. He was like, look, like, I think I can move your market cap by 3x. I've done it before. Yeah. And Intel was falling apart. Yeah.

Imagine if he applied all his wisdom to a company already winning. Certainly possible. Jim Kramer's excited about it. He's in 13 months. Lip Bhutan took Intel from a possible and unthinkable bailout candidate to one of the wealthiest companies in the chip industry. There is a big three of CPU, AMD, Intel, an arm. The and the agents need far more CPUs than these three can produce.

So that means prices are going up and they got the God candle. Yeah, look at this candle from. A candle. We love it. We love a green candle. Should be white suits today. Well, before we move on, there's some news. Justin Bieber brought Biebercella back from the dead.

Later in the show, we'll tell you what this says about late stage venture reacceleration. We're going to tie those two together. In other news. For more than a year, Silicon Valley has buzzed about cursor's growth and whispered about its margins. Now on the cusp of a $60 billion bailout, Laura over at the information. Wait, they called it a $60 billion bailout? Buyout. I'm sorry, buyout.

We revealed a hot vibe codings financials. 60 billion dollar acquisition calling it a bailout. It's not a bailout. Their margins were rough. We were just talking about it. It got warmed into my head. Cursor had negative 23% gross margins earlier this year. Amir says that is low for a company generating as much revenue as it is.

This is the question of how sticky will cursor be as a entry point to AI, as an entry point to inference demand. Can they reroute? It feels like with Composer, they have been able to retain a lot of customers. The company is still growing. and we know cursor users who have stayed with the product while changing inference based on what their plan gives them. So they're subscriber, and they will use whatever the plan, whatever gets the job done for them within the budget of the plan.

And so obviously, like you see negative 23% gross margins, and you're like, whoa, and then you look at the SpaceX deal and the X-A-I deal and all the compute that's sitting at Colossus 2, And you think, oh, well, like, what will the gross margins be once the, once the inference is happening on a cursor trained model or X-A-I-Train model, something that merges their lessons from Kimmy and Composer with Kroc and all the different pieces of the puzzle come together? Are there going to be higher gross margins? It's pretty easy to imagine that the gross margins would increase. But we'll have to keep tracking it. Did you want to play this piece from Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

Let's do it. Let's play this clip of what Dylan Patel said on Invest like the Best presented by Ramp. Everyone's like, okay, so in property just one, right? They had Mithos in February. They never even released it because they didn't feel the need to. They're already sold out. Their revenue is already adding $10 billion a month. And then you've got Opus 4-7 today.

All before Open Eyes, you know, alleged. spud release, which, you know, media such as the information and others have posted about. So clearly Anthropic is in the lead, right? And Open AI is cooked. What's interesting is because Anthropic has such bounds on compute and they can only grow it so fast and sort of to the point of Dario used to gloat about how Open AI was being too aggressive on compute and Anthropic was more sensible in their scaling. And now Anthropic is like, fuck, I wish we had a lot more compute. Open AI is able to pay the bills perfectly fine. In fact, they've raised a ton of money to get incremental compute in addition to the irresponsible levels of compute that they were buying from Oracle and Corrieve and SoftBank and all these people in Microsoft, you know, such as Traneum. Now they're getting Traneum as well from Amazon.

But what's interesting is if you were to say Opus 46, you know, let's ignore models getting better over time. Let's just take diffusion of this technology. You and I may jump on the model immediately day one, but other businesses take time and it takes time for people to learn. And so by the end of the year, let's say a 4-6 Opus tier model, the economy would spend $100 billion on, I don't think that's unreasonable. It's spending $40 billion right now. Anthropic won't have enough compute to do that. And so, and presumably Open AI and Google will hit that tier soon enough. Whoever hits that tier next, sure, Anthropic may get to charge 70 plus percent gross margins, but if Open Eye hits it next, they charge 50 percent gross margins. They still get all of this incremental demand, and probably they also won't have enough compute to serve all the users. Sure, maybe Mythos is a model where if the world had enough compute, it'd be $500 billion

of revenue or something crazy. There is such demand for these tokens and such limitations on compute. And we see this with H-100 prices skyrocketing and the useful life of these GPUs continue to extend. It's pretty clear even the Tier 2 lab is going to be sold out of tokens, let alone the Tier 1 lab. The Tier 1 lab will have better margins, but the Tier 2 lab will be sold out, and probably the Tier 3 lab will also be close to sold out. Economic value that the best model can deliver is growing faster.

than our ability to actually serve those tokens to people via the infrastructure. And so this gap will continue to grow and the model labs will continue to have expanding margins until people in the hardware supply chain, infrastructure supply chain are like, wait, no, why don't I just jack up my margins? Oh yeah. I love that. I love that Sam. I love that Sam.

Bill Gurley, let's see what Bill Gurley. Let's check him with BG. He says, I find this conversation foreign along with the argument that we are data center constrained or energy constrained. Historically in markets price is a leveler of supply and demand. If you have a constraint, you price higher. you don't have surplus demand. But in this market, VC dollars act as subsidies, as they did in consumer internet.

Everyone believes if they have high growth, they get unlimited VC money. The biggest fear becomes losing market share, so growth at all costs becomes a game on the field. With that reality, you are always going to have some constraint because you are knowingly choosing pricing that is out of whack with balancing supply and demand. It will continue until the major player feels they are forced to reconcile unit economics and profitability. has eventually happened in ride sharing when Lyft went public. Until then, you by definition have constraints. We can't disentangle true demand from subsidized demand yet. Some of the incremental demand is being engineered by excessive VC money forced into the system and the competitive dynamic between two companies that are losing massive amounts of money. No one can argue they

aren't losing tons of money. Amazon and Uber maxed out around $2 billion a year. These companies could lose $10 billion or more in 2026. Yeah, it's a good point that the big labs are losing money. but it doesn't feel like that the revenue of Open AI and Anthropic are VC subsidized heavily. Like it feels like the... Yeah, it's funny. Semi analysis is a good example. They spend millions and millions of dollars on tokens.

They're not VC backed. They're not VC-Backed. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. And their customers are not startups necessarily. It's like hedge funds and banks and stuff. So... Edge funds and banks that are printing by betting on semis right now. Yeah, which is a different...

Which like, like, I, I, I'm totally on board with like, well, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, they're funding, like, the, like, they're subsidizing demand, right? And, but, but, but the idea that BC dollars are the biggest drop in the bucket of subsidized demand feels, like, I don't know, it just doesn't quite math out to me. because the the actual revenues and demand from Fortune 500 companies is so high. And the really big dollars in all of these rounds, I mean, Anthropics just raised something like 40 from Google today. And that's not a VC subsidy. I mean, it is a subsidy. Yeah, I'm surprised he's not talking about like big tech subsidies. Yeah, yeah.

Maybe he is using the term VC dollars, like broadly, which is like fair. Including. Yeah. Yeah. And like, it wasn't SoftBank in, was SoftBank? in Uber, I think maybe. But there is an idea that you get to a certain scale and it becomes like sovereigns. Guess how much soft bank is up in the past month?

How much? Guess. 200%. Come on, John. 73%. That's not bad. That's a big number. Yeah.

That's a big number for... The armholdings alone, probably huge. But if he's using the term VC subsidies, VC dollars broadly, I think that does. sort of, sort, it is a reasonable point, but at the end of the day, you talk to most companies and most, you know, paid chat subscribers and they're just like, I like the thinking model, so I pay $20 a month. I like the pro model and I use it for, to create value or whatever, whatever subscription I'm on, I'm getting that much value in like software for my business that

probably doesn't even exist. Like all the vibe coded software that we use here, like it's just not available off the shelf. We're building like completely net new products. And I think that that's like generally what's happening in in the in the in the in the in economy. There's been this like discussion for a long time. Martin Scroley was sort of debunking it around like oh is this like are these all like circular deals. And he was like no like the economy is so broad that you know come yes there are yes like Google might take a position in anthropic. Microsoft might have a position in open eye. But you also have completely main street customers and just average. Joe's who are paying, seeing ads, buying things.

There's companies that are profiting off of running ads and other inference providers. There's like everyone. It's one big circle. Yes, it's one giant circle of life that is, you know, actually self-perpetuating because it is a true economy that hits, you know, 25 different categories. Well, you might think it's over, but Elad Gill does not. He says my view is the AI boom will only accelerate and is a once in a lifetime transformation. This is orthogonal to whether many AI companies should exit in the next 12 to 18 months,

as some may lack durability versus labs, new entrants or weird market ships. But he's extremely bullish. He also posted a funny thing about his new life plan. He said his new life plan is to move to Brooklyn, get a neck tat, ride a bike everywhere, cold brew his own coffee also start drinking coffee that's an odd thing to jump straight to the course was this was

was he's like trying is this like a cipher some sort he wants to adopt is there a secret is there a secret message embedded in this post maybe I don't know what's the Straussian reading he wants to vape mango pods but ironically

and wear a scarf everywhere during summer we have to we have to pull this up Saragos says no thank you pull this up we got to break it down we're doing Sourdough. I don't know. I have spent like a few weekends in Brooklyn. It's a nice town. I am not a fan of tattoos, so I would stay away from the neck tat. Although, who knows? I've seen some cutting-edge neck tattoo technology that allows you to remove it very easily with certain light

frequencies. So it can be sort of semi-permanent, easily removable tattoos. So if he wants to do this and then roll it back, I'm sure he can do this. It sounds like you might just want to spend the summer in Brooklyn, ride a bike everywhere, brew some cold brew, and then maybe get back to capital allocation. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, it sounds, I mean, it sounds like he's advising his portfolio companies. Yes. I don't care how hard you're ripping. A lot of you should probably exit, just given how much uncertainty there is. Well, later in the show, we have a fun story. A bear wandered into a backyard and took a dip. in the family pool. We'll take you through it. Coming up after, later in the show, what this tells us

about edge computing. Get ready for it. Joe Weisandthal says defense stocks have been trading, not just like the Iran war is over, but like all war ever is over, says Barclay's capital, Alexander Altman. I would not expect this, yeah, Alachid is down significantly, even pre-Iran war build up. It fully, fully round-tripped. Well, maybe that is good news. The goal of these companies is to bring about peace and defense. And so perhaps, perhaps it's over. I don't know. It's hard to track. Has Jane Street achieved AGI internally? I think so. They definitely have money. They did $40 billion in revenue last year, more than all the big Wall Street banks and with only 3,500 employees. Yes, let's give it up for Jane Street. Fantastic. Capping a stunning assent

to the peak of the industry, the firm flew past global investment banks after reaping 15.5 billion in the year's final quarter, according to people with knowledge of the results, who asked not to be named. They're leaking with only 3,500 employees. It beat the nearest rival J.P. Morgan Chase by 11% during the year. Tether did $15 billion at 200 employees. So maybe they aren't the hottest shop in town, but that is very, very impressive. That's like one of those questions. Like, would you rather do 40 billion of revenue with 3,500 employees or 15 billion?

200 employees? Well, we have some exciting news out of Thrive Capital. Josh Kushner announced a new fund, Thrive Eternal, a permanent capital holding company that will be concentrated in a small number of assets that we can own and steward over many decades. Across the of capital and thrive holdings, we are building and investing through a moment of exponential change backing emerging technologies, the infrastructure that powers them and the businesses they can transform. Increasingly, he sees a fourth category.

These are assets with qualities that cannot be replicated by technology, iconic franchises and cultural institutions rooted in tradition. And he says his first partnership is expected to be with the San Francisco Giants, an institution built on more than a century of shared identity and community. and among the most iconic sports franchises in America. I looked it up before the show started the San Francisco Giants, if you're not familiar. It's an American professional baseball team based in San Francisco. Baseball is a bat and ball sport played between two teams of nine players, each taking turns, batting, and fielding.

The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play beginning when a player on the fielding team, called the pitcher, throws a ball at. a player on the batting team called the batter, and then the batter tries to hit it with a bat. And so they play this game, they sell tickets to the game, and that's how the San Francisco Giants make money, and Josh Kushner with Ryan Turner is getting in on the action. For whatever you just described. I feel like it would be very cool.

That would be cool. If you had maybe a couple hosts, you know, on-screen graphics and they could provide kind of live coverage maybe while that was happening. Extremely educational. Well, we have our first guest to the show. George from CrowdStrike is back in the TVPN Ultradome. He's in the waiting room. George, how are you doing?

Doing well. How are you guys? We're doing fantastically. Welcome to the show. I would love to kick it off with just an introduction on Project QuiltWorks. What's new? Get us up to speed on CrowdStrike. Well, first I have to congratulate you guys for your success there.

So I guess start with that. But we can get back to that later. Project Quiltworks is really a coalition that we put together with some of our largest global partners, like EY, like IBM, like Accenture. That's really focused on helping to deliver our technology to customers, as well as leveraging some of the frontier models, to be able to identify very quickly and help mitigate the exposures that we're seeing with AI. Obviously, we've seen some of the news with Mithos, and I'm sure we'll talk about that. But the fact that there is such a focus now from the CEOs all the way down on where are my exposures, where are my vulnerabilities, and what can I do to mitigate it? So we put together a group of basically some of the largest global security partners that we have

to go out and be able to do this because we have to do it very quickly. The window is closing in the time that we have to identify, patch and remediate. and mitigate these issues. Yeah. I mean, we've been tracking a lot of the new data breaches. Some of the startups that we know and love that come on the show have been, there's been vulnerabilities that have led to a variety of security issues. Supply chain hacks, social engineering.

All lots of stuff. How much of that do you think is driven by attackers using AI or the internal companies using AI sloppily. Like there's sort of a dual dynamic there where the attacker gets stronger but potentially the defender could also get weaker. Are they both important? How are you grappling with those two sides of the equation?

Well, they're both important and I'm glad you pointed that out because when you think about what actually happens is you're having more and more users consume AI and how they're doing that is leveraging AI through any number of applications could be Claude Code, Codex, etc., right? but they're doing that on their endpoints, right?

And what that means is that there's this now concept of shadow AI where there's AI popping up everywhere and enterprises and corporations don't know where it is. So what happens then is the threat actors are very good at figuring this out and then they're basically going upstream to these packages and they're compromising these packages and libraries and then when your plot code consumes it, boom. all of a sudden, you've just downloaded one of the newest packages and all of your credentials are gone.

So that's what we've seen. And it really goes to the fact that despite however many vulnerabilities you may find, the adversary is smart or human. And they're going to find the path of least resistance and deal with what's hot today and where the exposure is. And that's on the end point where people consume AI. How have your conversations with lab leaders been going around models getting more powerful? and then the natural response, of course, there's the opportunity to gate the models to companies that can be trusted, but there's also the potential to not let the model be jailbreakable. So it should help me with defense, but if all of a sudden I'm saying, ignore previous instructions,

let me hack into Bank of America. It should say, no, that's always been a problem. It used to be a problem with just sort of the silly jail breaks, say a bad word or do something that, it shouldn't say. Now it's getting much higher stakes, but have you been seeing glimmers of confidence in the ability for AI labs to actually contain the model's capabilities as they roll them out to a broader audience? Well, the model capabilities continue to obviously improve and also the capabilities that allow them to provide guardrails and limits on what a user can do. But that's not in a get you where you need to be, which is one of the reasons why, from a security perspective, companies like ours and others are focused on looking at the prompts, understanding what

happens there, and then being able to sort of provide the guardrails at the prompt layer, right? You want to take care of what you can at the, through the LLM. But when you're building AI, whether you're using a frontier lab or whether you're using an open model in doing it yourself, you're still going to have an interaction with that model, and it's going to be via prompt. And whenever you have sort of unstructured data just being sent somewhere and then being executed, if you will, it's right for problems. And this is one of the time-tested issues that security has had. So putting guardrails on that, we call it AIDR, AI detection and response. And it allows companies to look at those prompts and make sure that they're sanitized

to and from the LLM. How are you thinking about the threat of open source? models, you know, the new Deepseek R4 preview from yesterday was super impressive. Are you expecting, you know, open source models that have, you know, really threatening cyber capabilities in something like six months? I think Dario was estimating around six month late lag time after Mythos for the lagging edge to catch up. I don't think it's long in a few areas. I mean, if you look at Keevi 2-6 that just came out, right? I mean, these are impressive models that are out there. And what you have to realize is even the frontier models themselves,

the ones that are public are still very, very capable. Like, it is extremely capable. So you can find a lot of vulnerabilities. You can basically chain these together and create sort of an automated attack. And that's what we're seeing. Obviously, some of the private models have the ability to actually chain these sort of vulnerabilities together, more like, human they've got more reasoning capabilities which is one of the you know really powers of their

models but the other models are a are not far off and the open source or the open weight models really are going to be focused on catching up very quickly so the the window as i said when i started the program with you is very small and that's why we started this coalition with quote works to be able to find these at you know again with the um the board mandates all the way down find our exposures, fix them, and make sure bad things don't happen. And there's not a lot of time to do it, unfortunately. How are you thinking about AI-powered but potentially non-automated cybersecurity risks? I'm just, we were talking to a founder who's working with, you know, engineer recruiting.

And he was having luck using AI agents to send outbound emails. and you can imagine that, you know, fishing attacks will get more sophisticated, the ability to hop on a Zoom call with someone that looks like your boss but is actually an AI avatar. All of these new risk factors are popping up, and I'm wondering if this is something that we potentially

need to be more aware of and not get distracted by, not get overly distracted and forget about the human element of security. Well, the human element is, is really the weakest link. I called a layer eight problem, right? The problem is between the keyboard and the chair. And that has been the case for a long time. So let's take your example.

One of the most prolific groups, threat active groups that we actually track is called Silent Chalima, which is North Korea. So North Korea has been very active in getting hired into a company, right? And then basically the laptop that you send them gets sent somewhere in the U.S. to a mule, and that mule takes it to a,

a laptop farm and then the North Koreans control that. So they already just bypass all of your security because you just handed them a laptop. Wow. Okay. So we're seeing lots and lots of those. And it's funny because we, really, I started identifying this before anyone even knew about it about two years ago. And we first started notifying customers like, hey, we think do you have a North Korean. It's not really Bob in Texas.

It's a North Korean, which obviously is a little dicey when you're talking about an employee that may not be an employee. So we told everybody. And then finally they tracked it down. They said, yeah, you're right. And they went to the hiring manager. They told the hiring manager like, hey, we need to get rid of this person to North Korean. And his response was, well, they do really good work.

Can we keep them? So, you know, you have to think of it. I mean, I can't make these stories up. Yeah, wouldn't there be an incentive at some point if they did get somebody on the inside and to just actually staff a bunch of super-tank, talented engineers, like, on that one individual employees. So you have, like, four remote engineers doing the job of one, like, real employee. Right?

So it looks like, wow, this person is, like, insanely high output. They're working around the clock. We can't, why would we get rid of them? They're, they're, they're, there's no way they're just, you know, that's crazy, farming us out. That's exactly, that's exactly what they do. So we're seeing that. We're seeing agents go rogue, which is problematic.

One of the big challenges where AI is goal-seeking. So you create an agent. One story is a customer that created like 100 agents. One agent found some issues in code, wanted to fix it, but it didn't have access. So it went back to the Slack Channel where the other 99 agents were hanging out and said, hey, I'd like to fix this issue. I don't have access. Who has access?

One agent put its hand up and said, I can fix that for you. And happily fixed it and basically worked around all the security boundaries. So goal-seeking, I don't think we talk enough about goal-seeking because when you put an agent on it, depending on what model you're using and how it's set up in the harness, they just go nuts until they actually get to the goal. They'll actually steal credentials out of your keychain, even if you didn't give it to them so they can keep going. Wow. That's what we're seeing. Yeah, because in one way that, you know, if the goal is to achieve the task, it succeeded, but at what cost it needs to know that there are rules. for a reason. What are some of the other cybersecurity tasks that are being successfully augmented

with AI or AI agents these days? I'm thinking of obviously vulnerability testing. That's something that great cybersecurity researchers, great programmers have been able to do for a long time. Now it is amplified a million fold with artificial intelligence. But are there other maybe more bespoke or soft-skill tasks that cybersecurity researchers are able to amplify their efforts with by working alongside AI? Well, AI is going to change the way the SOC works, the security operation center. And one of the things that I've talked about in our last user conference was really helping to try to pioneer getting to security AGI, which is a fully autonomous sock, what I would

call level five sock, right? If we think about car autonomy, you've got five levels, you map that into security. 50 level, the fifth level is it just does everything for you. Now, as an industry, we're ways away, we still have human in the loop. But what happens is then you're really taking a lot of this voluminous information and you're letting AI agents just grind through, which you're really good at, and it cuts down time and effort. And then you're elevating these Tier 1 SOC analysts,

and you're turning them into Tier 3. And that has paid dividends, but the soft skill is it would take one of our customers giving an example, would take them four days in writing a report to what they call a sit-rep report, the situational kind of response would happen. And now four days turns into like an hour because it can all be automated

using something like Charlotte, which is our agenti capability. So all of those things that were problematic, you can just get through, and you let AI do what it's really good at. Rine through lots of data, look at lots of sort of information, write reports for you,

and then your AI agents can begin to take autonomous action. Some, again, by themselves, some with human in the loop, but it's really going to make the sock a lot more efficient. Jordan, anything else? More fun question than less scary question. How is AI changing Formula One? Well, there you go.

This is a great question. And it's interesting because I think there's different levels of adoption of AI between all the different. teams. Yeah, one team might be, they might have, be spending a ton on inference. Another team is like, we use radios. We're doing it the old-fashioned way. Well, what's interesting is there is some talk, and I'm not sure exactly where it stands,

where AI will be part of the cost cap. So if you think about one tunnel time and all the expenses, so, well, you have an incredible technology that can, you know, dramatically automate things. All of a sudden, now it's part of the cost cap. and then they're going to have to rain it in. So we'll see where it all lands, but that was some of the talk that has been happening. And I hope it doesn't happen because I think AI can really help things.

But we'll see where it all goes. And obviously, you know, I'm trying to help out the Mercedes team in those areas as well. That'd be great. Yeah, do you think there will be, you know, five, ten years from now? Do you think there will be, like, you'll be able to look back and be like, okay, there's a pre-AI era and a post-AI era in Formula One? or will it be more subtle because a lot of these processes

are just already so micromanaged and optimized? I think you'll see like a pre and a post. The challenge is you're going to have to run through a lot of the different engineers that have been in Formula One for many years because just like in the corporate world, there's resistance to, well, what is AI going to do for me?

And there's resistance in Formula One in some cases from an engineering perspective because they're doing it themselves, they're the ones that are coming up with the calculations. And that's just the way they did it. And it doesn't mean they're bad or it's right or wrong. It's just the way they operate it for so many years. So I think just as we see kids coming out of school, they're AI natives, right?

They just gravitate towards that. And when you start to see AI native engineers, you're going to see more and more adoption of that in Formula 1. That makes it sense. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations. Yeah, it has to have been a wild quarter. but come back on soon. Great progress.

We will. Great to see you guys. Great to see. All right. Congratulations again to you. Goodbye. Thank you. After our next guest, we will be diving into the summer house reunion, which has gone

off the rails. We're going to explain why Bravo is the cleanest lens for understanding U.S. China decoupling. But first, we have Professor Sendy. He's a word combo guru. He's a wamo guru. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Hey, well, thank. Good to see you guys. Good to see you too. Thank for having me on. I appreciate it. We're thrilled. We're huge fans. We're huge fans.

Honestly, I discovered, I think I was pretty early. I will say when I discovered your account on Instagram, I did not have a single other person that I knew following your account. Okay. So you were one of the OGs on the channel. I think I'm an OG and I kept sending them to John. And I'm like, this is the funniest thing in the world. It's so good. And so we've been trying to hear.

I love the original fans. You guys are amazing. You guys like really, you're the ones that fueled the fire for me to keep going. I'm glad. Okay, so let's get right into it. Like, you're the professor, like, interview.

So we, this is a technology-focused show. We've been using Wambos in the show, but a lot of people in our world in the technology industry are not using Wambos very aggressively yet. We think that's going to change. You know, there's this exploit. of AI adoption, we're expecting an explosion of WOMBO adoption.

Let's hope so. That would be amazing to see. I've seen these WOMBOs be spread amongst not just young people, but the older generation is starting to use them a little bit too. And I'm thinking about expanding it to sort of include some of the older generation slang as well. And I've had some people request that. So I'm trying to expand this and try to make it more universal. Yeah. So what was the first WOMB? What like what really drew to Wambos, what was the first? You know, honestly, I saw a video, and I basically just, it was, they had put the low curcantologic, a low state, like word together.

And I was like, oh, I can just make this longer. And I just went ahead and added a word to it. And then it kind of blew up. It took off. And I was like, okay, I guess I'm pretty good at this. So I just kept going with it. And then before you knew it, I had basically the world's longest word ever said in one breath.

So, you know, I have this, you know, this crazy long word now that, you know, people are trying to learn and it's just grown from there. And now I'm just creating original wambos. And I'm, I'm sure you guys have seen and everybody's seen that, you know, people are using these wombos all over the place, in schools and, you know, just out in daily life. And so it's, it's really been a movement that I was not expecting. I love it. Do you, can you, can you one shot your longest word? Like, is it on, is it on command or do you, do you need to iterate through it? No, I can do it on command. Do you want to, do you want to do it? Sure, I'll try it. Okay.

Here we go. Like what is your background? How did you get into this? Was this just a side hustle that just went mega viral? Like what is your story? Yeah. Okay. So basically I don't, I'm not a professor in real life, but I have a master's in education,

but I don't work in education. Okay. So I don't have a background in words either. I used to be a rapper a long time ago. People ask me, how are you so good at doing this? How do you put these words together? And I just tell them, you know, it's a natural skill I have. And then I used to do it back in the 90s.

I was like one of the original white rappers from back then before Eminem was even around. That's amazing. Wow. No way. Yeah. So I've been doing it for a long time. Yeah. Yeah, we were reflecting earlier on.

Born too late to explore the earth. Yes. Born too early to explore the stars. Yes. Born just in time to be the leading expert on Wambos. Yes. That's perfect. Yes.

Yeah, we were reflecting on the fact that I'm not sure how familiar you are with this, but like the Silicon Valley. Valley in particular went through like a series I mean they call them portmanteaus back then but wambos were very popular you have Pinterest instacart Instagram and there were like a thousand other companies where that was the default pattern for naming a company because the dot com would be available it would be very hard to go get you know pin you know interest dot com or you know order shopping like grocery store or dot com, but Instacart was available, and so people would sort of mash these up. And I'm wondering if you've gone back and looked at any historical portmanteaus or wambos that have broken through and maybe need to be like revisited and re-ignited, or is it all just

forward into the crazier and crazier phrases? You know, I think it's mostly forward-looking. I've seen a couple that were old school, so I know there was one that was like a calculator. It was like an old ad from the 1979 or something like that. This is a calculator. This is a calculator that's a lighter too? Like if you want to smoke while you're doing math. It's got a little lighter thing coming out.

We need one of those. That's amazing. Yeah. And so another word, so I haven't really visited a lot of older words. Honestly, so there was a word that came out in the dictionary the other day, Chopperganger. So that word is actually not mine. Okay.

I know, but Miriam Webster needs that word. to hire you. Yeah. Like immediately and start getting... Yeah, I think they do. You know, I want to get, I want to get, I want to get, I want to get, explain that Wombo for people. Explain that Wombo. Yeah, so, so basically, quiche penimus is like one of the big ones that people are using. And so that's like quirky niche and then Pinnomis is peak cinema analysis. So it's, sorry, I just, I'm like the overachieving student, you know, I studied. So we, we integrate these words. Yeah. We, I personally, I use I use Quiche Lorraine more. Yes.

Quirky niche lore explain. Yeah, that's a handy one. You, professor. Yeah, so I love Quiche Lorraine. I actually have a new version of that. I don't know if I can actually say it on your show. I don't know the limits, but so it's Quiche Lorainal Visions. Oh, yes.

So it's basically like you take Quiche Lorraine and then you mix it with anal visions. Which is analysis. I apologize if I can't say that here. Yeah, we're a pretty family-friendly show, but it's analysis vision to be clear. Is that right? Yes, it's analysis, revision. Revision. If you do one of those, you're basically just doing an analysis, revision of it.

Yes, correct. Yeah. How much time are you spending trying to come up with, like, when I think of Quech and Lorraine, I think of, you know, short usable phrases that actually could work their way into the American vernacular. Whereas with the local technological, I don't think anyone's actually going to pick that up. It's more of like a stunt. It's impressive, but it's a different style of content. I use Lorraine all the time.

I'll say John Lorraine Intel's earning. Yes, yes, yes. But how much time are you splitting between these? Do you think that there's something innate about being terse and short that will actually allow a wombo to break through and ideally make it into the Merrim Wabster's Dictionary? Yeah, I actually have a theory behind how to make effective wambos like that. So I think like you're saying short wombos are good. Yeah. Something that sounds good.

It has to sound good. Yeah. So it's like the quiche, it sounds good. I don't know. It just sounds nice when you say it. It sounds like a real word. It just don't work. Yeah, it's almost like where, you know, the pharmaceutical companies, they come up with

these names for the drugs and you're like, that does sound like a thing, but I never would have guessed what that is. And it doesn't sound just like you pound it on the keyboard. You got like, oh, Zempic, which like sounds like a drug for some reason. It's just like, but it's from nothing. And those things tend to break through. Also, also, I feel like, you. Choppelganger really jumped straight into Merriam-Webster's because it feels like with a very little amount of work, you can reverse-engineer it.

And that also seems to be key to getting some Wambos to break through. Is can someone take a guess and get 80% of the way there and then sort of pique their interest and then go a level deeper and understand the whole lore? Talk about the origins of non-shelash out. That's one that we've been used. That's a really good one. Once you know that Wamba, which is nonchalant crash out, you just see it everywhere. You do. It's constant.

It's everywhere. Every time I open X or Instagram or YouTube, someone's having a non-shelash out. Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. So, yeah, non-shelash out is basically when you look nonchalant on the outside, but then on the inside, you're crashing out. So, I mean, I think a lot of people can do this. You know, for example, the CEO in McDonald's, you know, when he was eating that burger, I'm pretty sure he was having a non-shelash out when that was happening.

Yeah. He looks pretty calm on the outside, but on the inside, I'm pretty sure he was freaking out a little bit. He was in a dark place, for sure. So with something like non-shelash out or any of these other examples, how much of it is, there is a phenomenon that, because a non-shelash-out is a thing that we didn't have a word for in English before. but it has existed probably for, you know, entire human history. This has happened. But how much of it is you, you see something and you say, that deserves a wombo versus you're just sort of grappling with different phrases and then you piece.

And then you find examples. Another example from the professor, Capsolutely. Capsolutely. I would use this personally. If I know someone's just basically, you know, BSing. Yeah. Kind of like lying to me. I'd say, absolutely.

Yes. You know? You want to agree. Well, here's the secret. Okay, so I'll let you in on this. So when you make a word, if you find an opposite word and you kind of make the word a paradox, so like a nonchalash out doesn't really make sense, right? Because it's like, how can you be nonchalant and crash out at the same time?

But when you put them together, you really think about it, all human behaviors are kind of paradoxical. They all have like, you know, this aspect and this aspect. So like another example would be liguratively. So that's figuratively and literally. How can something be figurative and literal at the same time? Yeah. But it's kind of possible.

If you really think about it, you can literally mean something figuratively or you can figuratively mean something. Yeah. You can literally mean it halfway. You know, the Hagegalian dialectic, the thesis and the antithesis create the synthesis. Right. Jam them together and you can really come up with some beautiful wambos that way. That's really kind of the secret to a lot of it for sure.

Where do you want to go with your creator journey? Because I was thinking like Instagram reels notoriously hard to run. ads or monetize. I don't know that there's an obvious like Patreon paid podcast play here maybe. I would be interested to listen to you, talk about etymology and language for hours. But I was thinking like brands should be paying you to create Wambos about their products or their brands. And that would be sort of synergistic with like what the audience expects, what would actually go viral and what you could actually get paid for. But are you early in the creator journey. How are you thinking about this as a business? Yeah, so right now I'm working on a

dictionary, so I'm hoping to use that as a, you know, the stepstone to launching my products. That's great. I think I think coffee table, like a coffee table book, like the great book of Wambos, something you can proudly place on a coffee table. It's a conversation. I want to have a book like where I can put it on the table and people can just like flip through it. I want it to look real nice and I want to be like a really great. Yeah. I have. I, to have, but also, you know, like you said, I want to have some grins that I work with. A coffee table dictionary. A co-fictionary. You're working on these. Sorry. Hey, well, what else? You're coming up with stuff. I'm working on it. But yeah, what else are you cooking? Got to keep on going. Yeah, for sure.

But, but, but you know, I'm early on in my journey. So I'm, I'm looking to, you know, work with some people and I'm looking to make some books and I'm just looking to keep on building what I'm doing right now. And I've only been growing for like four months now almost. So, I mean, I really haven't, you know, I was, I was, I was, I was, barely there in January, and so it's just exploded. So it's still kind of the beginning right now. So yeah, there's so many opportunities. So it's really looking up. Yeah, we had someone on the show whose whole job is coming up with names for tech companies, tech products.

Didn't he come up with the name Sonos and a few others? And I feel like that's a, like your grasp on the English language is sorely needed among some companies that have very complex product. names. And so I see like a bright future in a bunch of different ways, but eagerly await about the coffee table book. Anything else, Do you know, this was super fun. We're having Gary, Gary Vion in just a couple minutes. And we'll ask him ideas on how to monetize Professor Sandy in the Wombo universe, because I feel like he could, I think I'll have some ideas. Do you know? Yeah, that would be amazing.

And yeah, if you're, yeah, mentioned me to Gary Vee. That would be very cool. That's awesome. Yeah, I appreciate that. Do you experience anything different across the platforms? I know, we follow you on Instagram. I know you're on TikTok. Is there anything that you've learned from like the different platforms?

Definitely. So TikTok, I think, is more for discovery. Okay. So, you know, if you do something that's completely novel, that video can really blow up. Yeah. I think Instagram is much more generous with its views. But I think you can really build a solid. based more on Instagram. I just feel like TikTok's more for discovery. Instagram is more for growth and

personalization of your brand. Have you put these on YouTube shorts yet? What's that? Have you put them on YouTube shorts yet? Just because it's a similar platform. I haven't. I used to do YouTube and I just, I don't know if it's going to fit on that platform. I just, I don't know. I'm hesitant to go there and I've been hesitant to go on Facebook meta. Oh yeah. Just because I don't know if it'll work. And I just, I used to do that. And so I'm just, I'm not sure about it yet. So we'll see. We'll see. Okay. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join the show. Fantastic to talk to you. And thank you for all your analysis and teachings. Yes. It has brought both of us so much joy. Yeah. Like not just watching the videos, but using them. We got our lawyer to use Quiche Lorraine once, and we were very, very happy about that. Okay. That's a high compliment. I appreciate that. Thanks for telling me that.

It was remarkable. Yeah, Jordy and John, I appreciate you guys having me on. I really do. Yeah. Yeah, you're the man. We'll talk to you. Great hanging. Have a good rest of you day. Goodbye. Greg Brockman's apartment is for sale where they started Open AI. Sheel Monot says, I do not think there is an opportunity to build an open AI themed Airbnb, by the way. But who knows? Maybe some filmmakers will pick it up.

It is a three-bedroom two bath in San Francisco, $1.545 million. $1,800 square feet. It is an incredible piece of lore that Open AIS started in this particular apartment. Yeah, this feels like it will go quickly. Yeah. Like there are so many people in San Francisco that might need a place and to just snap up the place that Open AI was effectively formed. Yeah, I remember some of the early photos. Good times.

We should go to this video from Zane. Shah, imagine every pixel on your screen streamed live directly from a model. So this looks like a website. And when I saw this, I thought that it was a website. I saw a URL at the top. And I was like, oh, this is a cool demo for some sort of tour of Notre Dame website. Probably vibe coded a testament to what the modern coding models can do. But it's not code.

What you are seeing is actually not code. it is, there's no HTML, no layout engine, no code. It is a diffusion model that is rendering this as the input is given. And so you can think about this almost like those world models, those

generative video games where you walk around, but this is sort of a very early glimpse into sort of what the future of generative UI might look like. Jordy, why are you laughing? Because the chat is doing a bunch of Wombos.

Oh, okay. We got to work on Wambos. We will be integrating those more in the near future. But we have our next guest in the waiting room. Gary Vaynerchuk from VaynerMedia. Gary, how are you doing? Welcome back to the show. Do you know about Wambos? I do not, my friend. You got to learn about Wambos. They got to learn about Wambos. They are the next meta. They are the next meta. If you're not doing Wambos in 2026, you're getting left behind. So Wombos are word combos. So the example would be a quiche is, quirky and niche, you put it together, and that's quiche, or Lorraine, Lorraine, lore plus a squaigne. That was a risky start for the first word.

Yeah, that's a risky one. Lorraine is a better. Lorraine is a better one. Give me, if I say Lorraine. First and foremost, congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

I remember our very first call. I think it was in Q1 of 2025, so we were just maybe, like a little, a little, just a few months into the show. And you, even at that point, we were very, very small. I think we had maybe just gone live a few times. And you told us, you guys, you said go harder. We were already going pretty hard, but you said go harder. And we certainly did.

And go multi-platform. That was really huge too. You were very early in like, why don't you have a newsletter right now? Why aren't you on YouTube in multiple ways? Why aren't you on Instagram yet? And so we did the uncomfortable thing of posting pretty subpar content for a while, but it started the compounding very, very early. And now stuff's really much better.

Everything starts subpar, right? Like when you start working out or when you start singing or joy, like, you know, like for everybody who's watching right now, every business, every personal brand, every B2B, every B2C, to not take advantage of the attention media landscape that's in place right now. It's really incomprehensible to me. There's never been a time in the history

of humanity or business where the cost of distribution is zero for the distribution. There's costs in the content and then when you do it, but the upside is so extraordinary against the investment. And when you frame it up properly,

multi-channel, multi-format, the business outcomes can be extraordinary and I'm happy to see you guys get one. Yeah. Thank you. Is it funny that, uh, is it funny to you that, that it feels like, it feels like in some ways we're like a decade into live streaming and yet.

Two decades by some measures. Well, yeah, two decades by some measures. But like Twitch has been big for a long time. There's been so much attention there. I mean, I wrote this book in 2008. It came out in 2009, crush it in the back of the book. I talk about YouTube and live streaming. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, you know, it ebbs and flows. And to your point, like, I mean, I can't even comprehend the economic impact. Live social shopping is going to do over the next 10 years for humans and consumer businesses. Yeah, it's all the same stuff, brother. It's always been around forever and it's always the beginning, right? Like, it's just kind of the way consumer behavior and human behavior works. Yeah, it does surprising how many more people have not replicated the very, you know, basic strategic framework that you guys executed in this

genre. Well, the interesting, the interesting thing is we, there's, there's easily been a hundred, a hundred shows that have like taken some level of inspiration from what we're doing. It's still very, very hard, it's still very, very hard to break through, right? There's, it's not just, it's not just the overlay in the format, but I have been, I, I've been very confident, I've said this on podcast for, you know, we've talked about this going back, probably six, six to eight months ago, you should take this format of a live stream and you just add a extra level of production beyond. You just have a laptop there and you're hanging out. And you apply that.

The example we'd always talk about is like cooking, where all you need is like a cool kitchen. That's your set. You have a couple of cameras. So you have different angles. And then you just say, hey, every day at 3 p.m., I'm going to cook dinner. This is what I'm going to cook. Here's the schedule. You can make dinner with me. And I think that that's like an entire niche. that you could build around. You could integrate guests into something like that, too, so you have different content creators coming through every day. And then I think you can apply that to a bunch of other things.

Sports has honestly been the most advanced in terms of live streaming. So credit to them. Yeah, I mean, it's it's there for the taking. A lot of things are there for to take it. Yeah. How are you thinking about how branding and marketing will evolve? had this interesting moment this week with the GBT Images 2 launch where suddenly any brand, like basically fully democratized high quality product photography. Now there's still categories

where like I don't want you to AI generate the product photography. Like even apparel is actually interesting where like fit matters a lot. And so if you generate a bunch of AI images of your shirt and then I buy it and it doesn't fit well, like I'm not going to be happy about it. But for a bunch of categories at school. And I was kind of have this like kind of strange moment where it used to be you could identify an entrepreneur's ability by their product photography in some way. Because even if somebody is like bootstrapped and scrappy, like they would find that friend and say like, hey, do me a favor, help me get some great images. And you could kind of categorize like a company that you're seeing online like, okay, could this person figure out

how to get great product photography or not? But now the bar is just so much lower, you're like a couple prompts away from it. And so it feels like it's going to be harder than ever to stand out online. Well, I mean, there's a lot there. I mean, we just got done talking about how hard it is to stand out online. Right? Like the cost of entry is zero. But, you know, this is a competition.

Like, you know, everyone's trying. And so everyone will make content, video, picture, audio, at a level that is incomprehensible to all of us that were born prior to five minutes ago. And this will be another transition. I think, you know, there's always going to be a timing game to this, right? So right now, you know, like this open claw, you know, allows me to do things that a lot of people aren't thinking about right now. And me knowing that and me playing with that. And then even more interestingly, how creative or strategic am I with the agentic agents?

And what are they doing for me? How do I understand? Blah, blah, blah, blah. So I think it's kind of always going to be the same thing. Like, whether it was electricity and some people put electricity in your home and other people were scared to because there was demons in it or, you know, the car or the, you know, the typewriter is one that I've, like, been fascinated by the competitive advantages of the companies that actually brought typewriters in versus, you know, putting penmanship on.

a peduscle, you know, like, and computers and the internet and mobile devices and open source versus closed source and social media, now AI, you know, look, this AI thing is no joke. We all know that. It's big stakes. There's a lot to it. But, you know, I still think whatever that human was to being scrappy to find their friend for the photography, you know, that scrappiness is going to be deployed into something else. Totally. And so I also think, right? And I also think that we're about to see the explosion of analog, right?

Like I think this barbell that I keep thinking about. Totally. I've been thinking like, okay, you want to start an apparel brand? You want to go on Instagram or TikTok and duke it out with like 10,000 other brands? Or why don't you like find somebody that has a retail store that they can't rent out and like do a deal with them and just try to get big in your hometown again, you know? And my argument would be. would be and.

Yeah. Right? Yeah. Like to me this far, like I just, extreme AI, I think is creating extreme analog. I really do think it's a barbell. I think in the next 10 years, obviously it's 2036, but I feel like it's going to feel like 2050, which actually is bringing the rise of 1950. I couldn't be more impressed with what Ari Emanuel and others are doing that are investing

in all these analog businesses. I could not be more interested in physical research. in event-driven businesses, in concerts and venues. And I think the rise of analog, I have a restaurant business, part of the restaurant group. I keep pushing my partners who are really operating. Let's open a restaurant that makes people check in their phone as soon as they walk in.

Let's put people in group tables. I like that. You see what's happening with flip phones. Gen Alpha buying them. We see vinyl sales. You know, I've been very at the forefront of collectibles. I felt collectibles was something tangible and was a gateway drug to community.

If you've never been the San Diego Comic-Con or the sports card national or Fanatics Fest. So I think there's a lot of interesting non-digital realities that are coming as a counter move to the insanity of AI advancements. We're literally within a half decade not believing a single video, not a single fucking video that's on the internet. In five years, if we're having this video,

this interview right now, most of the audience is trying figure out if we're real or not. That is very real and has real substantial counter opportunities. So, you know, the photographer who's sad when they hear that, I'm like, no, no, no, you might actually crush in a different way. And so I'm curious to see what the counter scaled moves are going to be be of the next decade. And I think for any real entrepreneur, they're not crying about AI killing them. they're curious about what AI at scale is going to create opportunity for them. Okay. Totally.

All right. Let's go deeper on analog. I want your reaction to this headline that for the first time this century, vinyl music sales eclipsed $1 billion in a calendar year. Say, vinyl records are up something like 10% in 2025. Yeah, they're effectively like 10% of like global streaming revenue is just vinyl still. It's bigger than CDs.

It's making a bigger comeback than other formats. What is your reaction? Is it people looking for wall decorations? Are they actually listening to the vinyl? Do you have any idea of what we should read into that idea of this nostalgic format coming back? I mean, do you see my shelves here? The only thing I've been thinking about for the last seven, eight years, or not only, but like very hot on this.

Yeah, I mean, the answer is yes to both. Some of it's happening with decorative. a lot of it's happening with collectibles. Even more is happening with subconscious counter push to extreme digitalization. Sure. There are people, this is, by the way, one of the reasons we're not going to see

unlimited television commercials and social media content that's just pure AI from the biggest companies in the world is every time they try to go there, you probably have touched on your show, McDonald's, others. They get such backlash because the whole world is so scared that AI is going to take their job,

that the consumer is pushing against it. And then that's one part. And then the second part is, yeah, people are starting to do counter behavior consciously and unconsciously. And then there's just swings of trends. Like, you know, like music sounds great in a great record player.

And like, people are like, oh, this is kind of cool too. And like it becomes behavioral. It, you know, it starts in the same stuff. You know this. It's like the Brooklyn extremists are like, let's go, you know, hippie cool culture. and they get their little thing in the little sub pocket, it blees out a little bit.

Then the Manhattanites feel like they're not cool anymore, so they do it to keep up with the Brooklynites. And then we have that version everywhere in California, Texas, and Florida, and everywhere in the world. And so it's just, it's normal consumer behavior, but it is clearly a counterpoint to extreme in feed, in digital consumption. And I think that's great.

It speaks to the thing I most believe in, which is humans correct themselves at a level that we are, unbelievably underestimating. The sheer adaptability of the human race is extraordinary. Let's give it up for us. Sports. Well, well said. I want to talk about sports.

Yeah, I mean, sports are a good example. We were talking earlier, a friend of the show, Josh Kushner is looking to acquire stake in the Giants out of his new Eternal Fund, which is basically will seemingly be a collection of like, you know, evergreen bets that aren't, that can't be disrupted by AI because I don't want to watch an AI simulation of the Giants. The sphere is another good example.

Crazy. Everyone was thinking that that was not going to go well. They were worried about the debt and the stock is up like 3X. It's done very well. How are you thinking about both opportunities in new physical locations like the sphere and then also in the more legacy brands like the San Francisco Giants, the New York Mets, the different sports franchises out there? Yes.

You know, it's really interesting. I tie a couple things together. This distribution channel that you and I are on right now, right, the fact that there's people watching. Yeah. In a way that 40 years ago, somebody would have to say, you guys are good faces and you look good

and you're charismatic and you might get a shot on this distribution, this decentralization of distribution, along with this analog and not disrupted by AI thing is why six or seven years ago I started investing very heavily in alternative sports. So I made a big bet on pickleball that I think is going to work out quite well. You know, unrivaled the three-on-three basketball league,

AJ and I, my brother, early investors in that, the Whippleball League, the Sailing League, slam ball. So I've been very aggressive on alternative sport investing. Padel. So I'm very bullish on it. I think Josh obviously plays at a very heavy economic level with his funds of that nature.

And everyone like him and others, especially him, I have so much pride in his building because he's done such a great job. And New York City base when we were always like NBS the best staff. So it's great to him to thrive shine. I think anyone who does not realize how substantial the analog opportunities are

is really missing the plot of what's happening. And so it gets exciting. It's exciting to think that you can invest in both something that could get as big as, you know, anthropic in an extreme digital world, but also forget about the obvious ones, like the giants or the sphere. I'm talking about people rolling up 900 local restaurants and building up a huge, like it compounds two X what anyone in P you would have thought because people want to go physically out and eat instead of just do seamless. You know, somebody buying up shopping malls not to make them data centers, but because they think they can make a half-experiential, half-old mall shopping environment that people are going to be yearning for.

Here's a left-field one, like the drive-in movie theater, right? The stuff that dominated the 50s and 60s, when I say that out loud of like, do you think a modern drive-in movie theater, which has done really well and executed super well, do you think that a lot of people would be about that life? I think we can all agree that yes. 100%.

And then what happens to the person that does 39 of those and has a real business and flips it? So I think it's a really cool time for a lot of us that watch this show where like, oh, crap, we can play on either side of extreme digitalization or analog. Be creative. Well, yeah, the beauty, you know, give you the example of somebody making like a modern chain of drive-in movie theaters. is like you get all the benefits of AI still. You get to use it for to instantly respond to any customer message and help solve problems. What about this?

Now we're nerding out. What if you have 40 of them and now this is seven years from now and you start showing your own films that you make in AI and build your own IP through your own analog distribution. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. I could see doing that for kids.

Yeah. You know, like maybe maybe slightly lower bar, but you create your own kind of kids content. Again, a lot of things I do get more obvious later. I got made fun of writing that book. Anyone can personal brand on Twitter. Now it doesn't look so funny. I mean, who's laughing now?

Who's laughing now? Well, when I started building V friends and like building this Pokemon Sesame Street thing, yes, there was a lot of blockchain in it, but it was a lot of my smartest friends in Silicon Valley five years ago. They were like, this AI thing is percolating. You know, it was a little more slang for machine learning. And then it obviously got accelerated real quick. But like, yeah, I believe in a lot of this stuff.

Well, speaking of people that are watching the show, there is an army of people named Ryan in the chat. And they want to be acknowledged by us. So I'll ask you a question about a Ryan from your life. Can you tell me something you learned from Ryan Sourhant or Ryan Holiday or maybe Ryan Harwood? Do any of these names conjure any interesting stories and life lessons? Yeah, so Ryan Muffy is good. I mean, Ryan Harwood, I've learned nothing from zero.

Absolutely nothing. I just put that on the death. You know, Ryan at the holiday was definitely the individual that I was like finally put a word to kind of how I was living my life, right? My mother's my hero. She taught me just how to be a really happy human. You know, I thought it was immigrants and I thought it was simplicity and I thought it was, you know, love and health over everything

and truly, truly not just cliche bullshit, but live your life that way, even if you're an entrepreneur and a capitalist and want to compete. But when Ryan Holiday started talking about being a stoic and stoicism, I was like, oh, like, you know, like I was like, oh shit, that sounds like,

oh, that, that, that's interesting. And so I think that that's one for him. Sirhan, you know, is a fun one for me because a lot of, you know, he's obviously playing at such a big personal brand, level now and it was you had that TV show on Bravo and then it was off the air you know his curiosity humility was amazing like he was always around our ecosystem and he really learned to play the playbook I've lived you've lived he's lived so much of you know now he's back on Netflix but he had a

really great era in between his television moments of really winning on social and going all in and I'm really proud of him and Harwood is uh it's just a dear actual friend he's family not his friend He's taught me that I'm glad you circle back because I was like, damn, he's taking shots. You know, he's a Long Island boy. I'm a Jersey boy. I think anyone from our part of the world knows,

like taking shots to your brothers is like the ultimate form of I love you more than any. I think literally from from 1985 to 2000, 98% of the words out of my best friend's mouths was highly disresolved. respectful in my direction. Of course. That's the best. That's the only way to do it. Ryan Holiday wrote, trust me, I'm lying, conventions of a media manipulator at 25. Should more young people

write books? I talk to some brilliant young people every day on the show. A lot of them fantasize about writing a book, but it always feels like it's something that needs to come with wisdom, then needs to come with being 40, 50, 60. Yeah, do you get a lot of wisdom? But part of it's like you're generating wisdom through writing thinking deeply. Do you feel like... I think of it this way, man. I think it is, it's weirdly back to my barbell. I think people

that have something to say will probably be best at the barbell, you know, meaning it's kind of like someone's first album. You had your whole life to write it. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And then, so I don't know, for me, speaking for myself, like again, back to the books.

Like, when I look back at that, I'm like, how, like, and I'm pretty like, I don't feel good about myself. And me and me have a good relationship with each other. But even I, like, I look at it and I'm like, how the hell did you write that in 2008? And then to your point, I think my next best piece of work

will be when I'm wrapping it up and I can synthesize all the good stuff. So I would wildly encourage, especially the kind of characters you guys hang out with, they have a lot to say. Because much like I had in my youth, I saw things others couldn't see because I wasn't playing by yesterday.

these rules. I always say fresh eyes are dangerous eyes. You know nothing. It makes you dangerous. You can really innovate. And then I think those people that, you know, have sustained careers and can have years of wisdom and chapters have a lot to say that can really wrap up and bring value. So I think most people, if they're going to be in that game, are probably going to write their best book first and last. You partnered up with Masterclass. Yeah. Tell us about it. Tell us about it. You know, I, 15 years ago, anything that looked like Masterclass, like selling stuff,

was really scammy. Like, I grew up in the Web 1-0 era. And, like, I stayed away from a lot of subscription, Patreon-only fans, MasterCla. Like, selling information was really dirty in 97, 98, $150, $150 e-book that was straight garbage. I want to give MasterClass some flowers. Like, when they first kind of hit the scene around that era, We're just getting into the earliest stage of where we are now,

where premium content, you know, substack, beehive. Like, now it's respected, which is amazing. And I think is great for a lot of individual writers and contributors. You know, it was really good company. Like, I like who they had for this class. It's addressing something, I believe, is real, which is, like, getting an MBA in real life and AI at, you know, pennies versus taking on extreme debt and getting an NBA from,

a high class university, they think that logo is going to get you financial opportunity in a way that I believe has passed us by. You know, it just feels like I want to be part of things that are historically correct or, you know, are just a little more practical and common sense. And so, yeah, I mean, they've come to me a whole bunch of times. This was the first time I was like, you know what, I can join this crew. I have something to say about AI marketing and production and the strategies of that. And I hope that, you know, me or Cuban or any of the other people they threw at it might get someone to stop and not take on $300,000 in debt that's not going to be ROI positive. Yeah.

What are you hearing from sort of like Fortune 500 CMOs, like larger company marketers around, if anything, they should change in the world of AI around their marketing mix? I'm giggling because we're going to wrap up here and I'm actually going to take your question but try to give an extraordinary amount of value to everyone that I know listens to this epic show. It's not what they're saying. It's how they're acting, which leads me to the following sentence.

Everybody who's watching, it's highly invested in big companies that spend a lot of money on marketing, your marketing department is wasting 93 cents of every dollar expense. Okay. We are living in, such a radical transformation of the mid-futtle

dominating not the upper funnel and the lower funnel. Us three right now, we're on mid-futtle. We are producing content. I was born in the mid-f funnel. I mean, this is what's going on in mind. I'm doing it. Right. This is a production day.

Yeah. This will be post-produced into creative that will go into mid-futnel, organic social. And the things that do well will go up for brand and down for performance. every brand on earth should be spending 20% of their entire marketing budget

just on social media organic production because the mid-futtle and TikTokification of social has eaten up the world and we should spend no media dollars against creative that we're guessing for the big campaign and then what I tell you every Fortune 5,000 company is still doing guessing on the upper funnel

sponsorships, ridiculous shit and in the lower funnel, 2016 EV testing meta and works when the midfutal meet up the whole world and you guys are winning ruins is winning and any personal brand

and many other businesses and so that doesn't even get into the AI of it all that to me is tooling and infrastructure to be great at what I just said but Jesus there's a lot of money being wasted by the companies

representing the eyeballs that are watching the show right now and that makes me sad yeah makes a lot of sense I can't stand. Wasted marketing spend. Yeah, it makes my blood boil. Well, thank you so much for taking time to come chat with us. Congratulations. We didn't even, we barely got to talk about live commerce. Yeah, there's a lot more. We'll get that update next time. Yeah, we, you need everybody

here, anybody selling to the consumer needs to understand that China's going to do a trillion in GMV, a trillion in GMV this year and stuff sold. And, and TikTok shop and whatnot. And, not are doing real numbers in the U.S. And meta's clearly going to be popping off any second with what they're going to do, which will lead YouTube to do what they're going to do. Sorry, I know you've got to leave, but give me your 30 second outlook on TikTok, post kind of acquisition, change in ownership. How is the platform changing?

What's your outlook? There's, I felt nothing. I haven't done any real homework on any, like, corporate structure, what is going to be the vibe. I know, but we'll, But will the new owners be willing to, like, subsidize TikTok shop is kind of what I'm getting it? They don't need to. It actually works on merit. You only need to subsidize shitty shit.

Always a good time. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon, Gary. Goodbye. Later in the show, we'll be telling you about a local man who grew a 900-pound pumpkin in his backyard, and we'll tell you what it means for AI Skate. But up next we have humble robotics the founder and CEO is in the waiting room. Let's bring in a y'all Cohen to the TBP and Ultradome.

How are you doing what's going on? Great. How are you doing guys? We're doing it. We're doing great. We're having a show. Having a show. What's going on in the background?

Yeah. Take us on a little tour. What's going on there? You can see the truck that we built, the vehicle that we built is a class A electric autonomous for moving freight. But actually, I want to hear about this 900 pound pumpkin

when do I bring about that. That's actually... It applies to your business. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You started, your demo was probably the equivalent of a 45 pound pumpkin. Maybe that truck in the back

is a 300 pound pumpkin, but this is all in service of getting to the 900 pound pumpkin, the elusive 900 pound pumpkin. And you raised some money to help you build that vision. How much did you raise? Who's from?

Tell me about the round. Yes. Okay, so we raised $24 million. And we also had Eighty-clearing order here. Continue. It's so satisfying, really. We raised $24 million. The lead investor was Eclipse. We also had EIP in there as well as some other friends.

That's great. Yeah, it was a great round for us. 24 million. It sounds like a really solid seed. One of the highest signal, probably the highest signal, if you're building in robotics. At the same time, you're building something big in robotics, $24 million. That's great for a seed. But how much does it cost to build one of these?

What are the comps? Like what will the next couple of years be like of actually getting these on the road? Yeah. So $24 million is a start, right? We're doing hardware. We're doing robotics. We're doing autonomy software. that does cost money,

but it costs way less than it used to. I think, you know, you look at some of the players in the space, and, you know, Waymo took a very long road, spent a lot of capital, but we're standing on the shoulders of giants now, right? A lot of work has been done in this space. I've been working in this space for 10, 11 years now,

autonomous free. Over-night success. We get the benefit. I love it. We get the benefit of a lot of work that's been done in many, and over the years, and so it's just far cheaper than it used to to sort of think about a great new idea and scale it and scale into production.

Okay, talk about the key tradeoffs. No cab, no driver. Are you pro-LIDAR? Are you pro-tele operation? Like, what are you going to do a crawl, walk, run thing? Is it a straight shot to full self-driving? What's the thesis? Yeah, great.

So we, you know, we're not dogmatic about technology here at all. It's just what's the best technology that we can use at any moment. Yeah. Most of my career has been spent working on wide art technology, but actually where we see vision-based tech on cameras is incredible right now, I think especially in the last year or two.

This is, I always joke at our head of autonomy. I have seven startups under my belt now. This is the second when I found it. And so we've been kind of doing a lot over the many years. It's the first time the company's really been vision, camera focused in autonomy for me. And what I'm seeing on that side is incredible.

It's like, it's honestly kind of magic. Yeah. But we still take the same approach that you see in Atami, right? It is a, it is a, what do you say, crawlwalk run? Yeah. We take that approach too, right? First, you test in private roads and tracks.

You validate the hardware and the software together. And then from there, you start pilots, you supervise those pilots. But we will take any technology that is beneficial for the project for the program and we'll apply it. That's the idea. average 18 wheeler costs something like $120,000, $200,000, maybe $275 at the high end. Do you need to be at that price point? Can you go higher?

Do you have flexibility there? And then the actual autonomy package, I feel like you could literally strap an iPhone to every possible vantage point. And you don't need to do that because you can just buy the actual lenses and cameras. So the cost of the vision stack has to be pretty low, but are there GPUs on board? Are you doing on-device inference? Like, what's the economic balance? How should a customer even think about this in a different mindset?

Yeah. So what do you get from removing the cab, right? What's the benefit of having a capitalist vehicle other than it's cool? I think when we were conceiving the project, the question was, how do we move freight? You know where technology is? How do we move freight at the lowest possible cost, right? And the lowest possible cost to me was, okay, we think about making it autonomous, right? So we could save about a dollar per mile there.

We make it electric, right? So that lowers the maintenance costs. And now, especially with some of the volatile fuel issues, you know, we get benefit there, right? And, you know, the cab itself is cost to the equipment that isn't necessary in autonomous world. And so by removing the cab, you make the whole vehicle lighter and you make the vehicle less expensive. And so for me, the target is we want to have the equipment it be comparable in price to what you see a tractor and a trailer today because this is effectively combining a tractor and trailer together, right? It's both the semi-truck part and the trailer part

in combination, right? And this for the 40-cloth version of it that we're looking at. So we want the swimming cost to be comparable and then the cost per mile is just dramatically lower. That's the idea. Yeah. How do you think about supporting infrastructure? I mean, there was a massive build-out of charging infrastructure as Tesla ramped. Is that beneficial? Is that enough? Is there a lot more that needs to be done? I imagine even if I just have a warehouse, I might need to check if my warehouse is compatible with a cabless delivery and doesn't have the wrong configuration to be able to puzzle piece in the container. Yeah, that's right. And actually, part of the reason that we launched, I mean, the company's very young, where we started about eight

months ago, right? We built this vehicle very quickly. So yeah, we have an absolutely killer team. They're they're the most fantastic people I've ever worked with. And we tried to move very quickly, and we launched, you know, pretty early in the journey. We were public about what we were doing. And the reason is that you want to build with your customers. It's really important in freight to operate within the constraints of the logistics space and understand what people need and how they operate. So we're being public about what we're doing because it's our message to our customers

that we work with them on that front. And that goes from everything from how does this vehicle load go back up into a docking area. It's one of the advantages of our vehicle, by the way. It's like we could put cameras behind it. We can back up into docs, right? And so how do we organize that kind of effort with them? How do we think about charging? How do we think about, you know, plugging into their software, right?

Which, you know, sometimes every shipper has a different software stack that we have to work with. So we're starting those conversations really early. And as a company, we just move very fast. What's going to take to get you on X? On X. I actually signed up. for an X account right before the launch. I'm on it.

I just need to figure out how to use it. But I'm there. I'm there. I'm here. Wayne, we'll tell Nikita one more user. One more user. One more user for Nikita.

Yeah. Where is the company based? What does actually scaling the company look like? Are you going to make Detroit great again? Can we do something over there? Motor City? What are we thinking? We're in San Francisco.

We're in downtown San Francisco. And actually when you walk into this warehouse, you're greeted by this 40-foot vehicle, which is like before we were public, you know, people would walk into our warehouse and their eyes would just get really big. They're like, what is happening in this space right now. But, you know, we're in San Francisco. That's where I live. That's where I'm based. That's where I've been working on tech for the last 20 years.

And it makes sense as an R&D and prototyping hub, you have a, you have a warehouse, but you don't have a gigafactory yet. And that might be some parts. Correct. Got it. Yeah. And that can happen anywhere in the U.S. But we're designing in the U.S., we're building in the U.S. We're part of the reindustrialization movement of the U.S.

So that's the plan. What have you learned about the reindustrialization efforts that are talked about a lot, specific to the supply chain of autonomy components, electric vehicle components? I'm sure you're grappling with all of this. But what has surprised you to the upside? What has surprised you to the downside? Give me some white pills and black pills. So I started my career working in electrification, electric vehicles.

And actually, a lot of the technology was here in the bay, a lot of it, developing battery packs, motors. And we watched over the last 20 years as that shifted out of not only just the Bay, but out of the U.S. entirely, right? Yeah. And now you see sort of the rush to get it back. And I think there is, it takes time, but there are a lot of smart people that have been working in the space for a long time. And there's a lot of excitement and capital pouring into this. You know, our backers of clips are just the most phenomenal people you can be working. with and they get this and they understand it. And you'll just see a lot more investments in this

space in general as we grow. And yeah, I think the supply chain is coming back here. It's just, it takes time like everything. It's just going to come back into automated, automated factories this time around. Yeah. We are at time, but you need to read this deep dive in the New Yorker about these insurance scams that are happening in New Orleans around 18 wheelers where people are crashing. Have you read this? Are you familiar with this story? I'm a little bit familiar with the story. That's actually how they put together the money for the first round. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

That's not what happened. But, I mean, it is something that would be at least easier to fight back against in terms of fraud if there were cameras all the way around the vehicle. So a little bit of a knock on effect to the positive. Well, good luck. It's part of the way that we did. Thank you. And thank you so much.

I am just based on this conversation, I'm extremely confident that, that this company will be wildly successful. And I'm glad you're doing this. Perfect. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. We'll see you soon. We'll see you soon.

Bye. After, missed it. There we go. There we go. After our next guest, we will be taking you into a story about Coachella. It ran past curfew and it got fined. You will learn why music festivals may be the best way to understand

data center permitting risk. our next guest. That's a narrative violation. We have Yolande Jan from Comfy in the waiting room with an iconic entrance. Let's take a look. What are you holding here? Please introduce yourself and the company. What are we looking at?

Let's fucking go. I'm surprised no one's ever pulled off an entrance like this. No, no. This is exquisite. Please introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about what's going on. My name's Yolen. I'm the co-founder and CEO of ConfiY. I apologize. I've been instructed that I can be anything but boring for this show. So here I am. That's true. You know, you studied. You studied. Yeah. I did. I did. What, what, tell us your entire life story from inception. Now, what, uh, be, I think there's too many points where you just start over here.

Let me remove the distraction for you for now. What is the distraction? Give us the backstory. Like why that is a creature. All right. The distraction is a character created by my co-founder. It's actually the origin of this tool. If we weren't for this character, we wouldn't be raising and becoming a half-billion-dollar company today.

So just shout out to the Fennick character. Yeah. So for those who don't know, comfy UI, node-based workflow for visual design, video production. you know, DaVinci Resolve level performance, but for the modern era, is that roughly correct? How are you thinking about introducing the company? Yeah, yeah. Comfi is a node-based system that aimed to give the highest leverage of control and quality for content creation. I think if you guys think of, you know, let's say mid-journey or a text prompt-based content creation using AI, it's the polar opposite.

It gives you every bit of control and possibility to adjust the model and control the camera angle, control the posture. And that's exactly why Comfey ended up being adopted by these top studios around the world. The recent Coca-Cola ad or Super Bowl ads are all made using Comfey. Yeah. And then also inject a level of deterministic and programmatic variation into the generative AI workflows so that if you want to create multiple assets, and you want to swap out a bear for a cat, for a dog, you can do that in a way that doesn't just require you sitting there prompting, waiting five minutes, prompt again, five minutes,

actually parallelized. Yes, that makes sense. So, yeah, if you're working with big companies, like are they just forking the repo, downloading the open source project, are they actually calling you? Are you doing implementation and how are you making money from all of this so far?

Yeah, yeah, great question. It started first as an open source project. Actually, it's a personal project to begin with. And then originally, a lot of the companies actually just ended up using it running on their own hardware, most of the time locally. We introduced Comfee Cloud as a product about five months ago. And the main differentiation in that world is that you can actually tap into a large cluster of compute that we provide in the back end. And it's incredibly difficult to stitch everything together to provide this infrastructure level of support, especially for like, you know, professional creative companies or studios. So, yeah, that's kind of like, you know, how we monetize off of it.

How big of a deal is C-Dance 2.0? The videos that I saw were incredible. It felt a little bit inaccessible. Is it diffusing rapidly? Yeah, yeah. The entire visual AI ecosystem is evolving very rapidly. These foundation models are making amazing progress. And you can access all of these models on our platform as well.

We are generally agnostic in terms of whether it's open or close source model. But just to comment on the progress over here, we're super excited to see, like, you know, where the trend goes towards to when these C-Dance model gets launched onto Comfi platform. You see people kind of building it on top of creating even better workflow using these models. and I can't wait for it, you know, one day we'll just have Avatar being created in someone's, you know, bedroom and a backyard. Okay, when? Yeah, over under 2028.

Give us your Hollywood predictions. When can I actually watch a two-hour movie, an hour movie? A 90-minute movie because I've seen some incredible short films, some incredible vibe reels. Not even short films. I've seen, yeah, maybe two minutes, three minutes. Yeah, everybody's now seen like two minutes about it. There's probably longer stuff out there. I haven't gotten sucked into anything.

I did watch all of Harry Potter Balenciaga. that was great. You know, but like, I'm waiting for something that's Harry Potter Balenciaga level entertainment, like hold my attention to the end, but 10 minutes, then 20 minutes, and then 90 minutes. And when the 90 minute thing happens, I think a lot of people are going to be like, wow. Yeah. This is actually a part of an insight that most people don't really understand right now. It's one on the quality side of the area.

People don't want to create long form content. because by the time when you finish a feature film length of content, the model has shifted so much that you're running into this James Cameron problem of like, oh, shit, I have to go back and then, you know, rerun these using different models. So a lot of times people focus on short clips in terms of the content. And then the other portion is actually, it's already being adopted in a lot of these creative studios and agencies using comfy.

What it doesn't do is it doesn't become production. It just entered the previous portion. It just enable people to rapidly iterate and then create these content right away that you might have someone acting in a pure green screen. And then the output of it, in five minutes, you see the entire 3D-CG rendering using AI on the system in Comfee. And in that world, it's already influencing the direction on how they act. It just doesn't necessarily get to the quality where it completely could become a film, production level of content.

Is there more to be learned from the cognition model or the cursor model in terms of training your own models versus being at the application layer? Both companies have been wildly successful, huge, but very different paths. Yeah, I believe the visual ecosystem is quite different. The main differentiation is there's a huge amount of taste. Even if someone can prompt C-Dance 30.0 to generate a feature film tomorrow, and it gets a level of quality, for the real creatives or for the people who want the taste and control to be in their own hand, it's still going to be a very iterative process. It's just going to make their life a lot easier, and that's what comfy enables you to do. I think those are the kind of differentiation where in the coding world, you might not care in terms of, you know,

is this piece of code actually good enough? But in the visual world, you absolutely care the camera angle, the facial feature, the control layer. And that's, in my opinion, what differentiates the, you know, the AI slops from the comfy ecosystem of creation. What's the easiest AI feature to pitch to a Hollywood AI skeptic? The easiest way, I would say from our perspective, this might not be for everyone, is the fact that we have this creative in the loop, human-in-the-loop-centric belief and mechanism. And it's actually true. In a lot of these cases, in every one, people are using comfy.

as a tool is actually empowering the creatives to do their work, to skip all of these boring stuff of colorization, of, you know, kind of upscaling, downscaling manually in the traditional process. It enables you. So those are the world where we're not actually taking jobs or we're creating jobs. If anything, you go search on, you know, any job side today, there's actually a huge amount of people hiring for comfy UI artists and specialists. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think like, you know, the Mount Everest is like, oh, well, one shot the movie,

replace the actors. The easier stuff is, what if your green screen was a little bit cleaner? You know, what if your color grade was on your dailies as well? There's a whole bunch of interesting places where you can play. Yeah, and I've said this before, and at least some people were trying, we're calling me an idiot online. But I've had this idea that I think AI could actually help Hollywood. were in Hollywood, there's a bunch of empty studios around. There's a bunch of people here that have been working in entertainment that haven't had

great job prospects over the last few years, especially if they weren't willing to travel overseas. And it just feels like we're going to enter into an era where 10 really smart people could come into one room. And if they work really hard and leverage AI properly, they can make it, they'll be able to make an incredible short film, film, make beautiful advertisements, whatever they want to do. So I think we will enter into a golden age of human-powered, AI-powered humans doing incredible creative work.

You mentioned that you're currently valued at half a billion dollars. How much does you raise? Tell us about the funding news. Yeah, we raised $30 million from, oh, man, we've been looking forward to this. Yeah, we raised $30 million. The round was led by a craft venture, huge, random folks out there. They've been tracking us for a while. Good job. Yeah, been amazing working with him so far.

Good job. Super excited. We're here to destroy our enemies and make open source creative tooling win. I love it, dude. Imagine being your enemy right now, logging on to X.com. Oh, I think we talked to his enemy earlier this week. I'm not going to say who it was, but I think we know who he's coming for, and I'm rooting for him. Well, imagine logging on X because he's calm and seeing Mr. Yon and just be. I'm like, oh, it's over for me. It's over for me.

We have no idea because in our mind, we don't really have enemy. The only enemy is ourselves. Oh, no, I'm not talking about startup competitors. Oh, I see. Gotcha. I'm talking about Adobe. Never heard of that word. But congratulations.

Thank you for everything you do. Incredibly cool tool. If you haven't already checked it out, go download comfy UI, make some cool stuff. It's a lot of fun. And have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. You guys too. Great hanging.

See you. Later in the show, did you hear about the cow that got loose on the highway and backed up traffic for miles? I did. You did? Well, we're going to tell everyone what the AI industry can learn from that story about supply chain bottlenecks. But up next, we have Ben Horowitz from Dorm Room Fund. He's an investment partner and is a creator sincerely misspelled. You'll have to figure out how to spell it yourself if you want to go check it out.

But we'll let Ben introduce himself now. How are you doing? Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on. Love the show. Thanks, you're also an MBA at HBS. Oh, yes. People were taking a victory lap on that.

Soon to be master of business. They thought it was impossible for an HBS grad to start a business. But you're proving everybody wrong. Thank you. Yeah, Twitter flame me a little bit for it, but I'm still happy I'm here. Wait, wait. So why were people upset? Oh, it's like a non-technical thing probably, right?

Yeah, I think Gary talked about it too a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Just the idea like, I mean, HBS grads have started so many amazing companies, but it's Oh, I thought you were talking about the product. But the HBS thing is typically not like the like go and build a software product in a weekend or in a week like very quickly. Like that's been more like, oh, you're a CS grad and you're a dropout and then you go do YC.

Like that's been the more established path. But you're bucking the trend. Tell us what you built. Yeah. So I built sincerely. It's spelled with two E's. So S-I-N-C-E-E-R-L-Y. And it's really like the anti-grammerly.

So I am naturally a terrible typist. I don't know if I can cuss, but I mess up my emails all the time. And I found that people really reply to them. I don't think it's just because of the typos, but it's definitely a factor. And I was so sick of AI slop in my own inbox. People would email me. It all looks the exact same. and that coupled with the news about how other people have been emailing across social strata

inspired me to basically create the anti-grammerly, something that really messes up emails. You're talking about CEOs that have terrible grammar because they're just typing quickly and it doesn't really matter. Well, there's the famous story about Ron Conway types in all caps. There's a whole bunch of these examples. Typing in all caps is elite because it just sounds like someone's yelling at you. It's kind of the anti-Gen Z in a lot of ways, the all caps. Yeah, yeah. We don't have a Ron Conway mode yet, though. Yeah. But I had this, I had this, this experience maybe a year ago where someone sent me a very lengthy, you know, multi-paragraph deep dive on some topic. And I could tell that it was AI generated. And I said, you know, you should just send me the prompt because I can also do the instantiation. Like, I can also expand bullet points into paragraphs in my head. And so just send me the bullet points. And there was that also that meme of like,

Oh, turn these bullet points into paragraphs and then the other person on the other end saying, turn the paragraphs into bullet points. Are people using this specifically to write emails or is there an email summarization feature coming? Where do you see this going, I guess? I think what's kind of crazy is people are copy pasting, first they're prompting. Then they're copy pasting their prompt into email. And then they're using sincerely to make their email not sound like AI. And that's a crazy loop, right?

That's a crazy loop. using AI to make AI more human. And that's why, and that's why Intel is up 20% for this specific use case. No, there are more useful. There are more important use cases. But I, I, I, are you talking about this. Was this, was this a fun stunt or? Yeah, somebody called it a drop. And I think it's a business. What do you think? I think it started a social commentary. This is like, it's satire and playful and I didn't want to pay for everyone's token. But like, I do, I love making products that make people think twice about technology. And in this case, it's also a little bit like the pushback on how we're using technology

today. So, you know, there's a $4.99 a month model that if you want to not bring your own key, you can pay me. I think it's probably double-digit people who are paying and not using their own key, but it could be a business. For sure. We were talking to George from Crowdstrike earlier. Are you ramping up security?

What are you doing to make sure this is Enterprise, grade ASAP because when I download a vibe coded viral stunt, I want it rock solid. I learned a lot in this process, as you might have imagined. I'm a huge fan of CrowdStrike too. We have pushed a few security fixes and just made sure that people know what they're getting themselves into when they download this. But ultimately, like, this is a satire meets something real. So I hope that people get it. Yeah. Yeah, that's the nature of like doing fun things on the bleeding edge of the internet.

We all went through this with open claw and understanding, okay, there's some real tradeoffs here. You probably got to be at least a prosumer if you're going to dive in, but it sounds like you're handling it well. What is sentiment like in your current HBS class? Oh, yeah. How are people thinking, like with the acceleration in AI, are there people thinking about dropping out? Or are they like, I'm actually glad. at them in school right now because it seems kind of gnarly out there. Yes. I have friends who have dropped out for YC and friends who have stayed for the exact

same reason. It's kind of, you know, swim or sink. I think that people are building, they're not building funny things, I would say. They're really trying to build things in the HBS sort of business first way. And my girlfriend's at GSP, so maybe there's a little bit of a different comparison that you could ask her about. Uniting the great houses. Do you think there will be a sway? I mean, you go back to HBO in like the 80s and you imagine that it was churning out like oil and gas executives probably. And I'm wondering if you think there'll be a swingback. Like we saw Josh Kushner announced Thrive Eternal. He's taking a stake in the Giants. And there's a whole different world where you take the HBS learnings and playbooks and you go apply them to things that are

extremely AI resistant, but maybe like they weren't, they haven't been trendy over the past decade, but maybe they're going to come back in style in a big way if you're, you know, yeah, yeah, I went to HBO and now I'm like, you know, VP at GE Vernova. That's probably a pretty good gig. Yeah. I mean, the friends who I'm thinking about who actually dropped out to go do YC, you're going to laugh, are focused on HVACs. Oh, there's, putting AI in the back of HVARC. It's not a roll-up. It's not a roll-up. They're like, through H-B-S means. Why has no one identified the opportunity in H-FAC? H-FAC is important. Have you ever not had air conditioning?

No, no, no. I think it's great. I think it's great. I demand H-FAC. It is universal. It's sort of, that's another loop that's tricky, though, right? Like, are we making the world warmer? Are we cooling it off? Are we putting AI in the back of H-FAC? It's all an AI play at the end of the day. Interesting, interesting. What were you doing before, HBS? I started a company with my friend Reed that was a sort of like a philanthropic robo advisor, like Welfront or Betterment. Yeah, yeah. And we sold that to Charity Navigator and I worked there.

Wow. And, yeah, hopefully, I'm a free agent in like three weeks. So heading to SF and fulfilling my manifest destiny. So in three weeks, is that HBS graduation? You're saying you're finishing your earn out or HBS? Yeah. Finishing HBS. The proverbial debt earn out.

I don't know what you called that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome. That makes sense. All right, well, it was really great to meet you. And please let us know when you figure out what you're working on. And let us know when the next drop's happening. I feel like you got more of these in the can.

I can tell. We have something really funny. I can tell. We, I mean, well. Amazing. Thanks, guys. Yeah, let's talk about it. Yeah.

Have a good one. We'll see you soon. Thanks, God. Goodbye. There is a ton more news. What should we go through? Spore says, what's the charge? Front running and overseas coup d'etat,

a succulent Venezuelan coup d'etat. This was a crazy story. Brandon Gerell and our team was obsessed with it. A U.S. Special Forces soldier involved in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro was arrested for allegedly betting on that operation, netting him $400,000 in profits. This is when the betting on yourself meme goes wrong, right?

You should always be betting on yourself, but not literally if it's against the law. If you are involved in a government capacity, you should probably not be gambling on the outcome of your government work. Shame on you, but still an interesting story. Even Trump was like he was betting on himself,

and then he like referenced on baseball player that isn't in the Hall of Fame because he was betting on himself, but Trump was seemingly implying that that wasn't so bad, but anyways. People are really, really having fun with the new image gen model. I don't even know we should pull this up because it's so rude. But this guy is effectively playing Minecraft through ChatchipT

because he has to generate him an image of Minecraft. Of course, he's doing the island in Little St. James, the very controversial one. And then he says, okay, walk closer and that just generates a new scene. I'm sure there's some kids out there that have figured out how to play Minecraft in chat GBT, but this is very funny. I found this post when it had 40 likes this morning. Sniped. Sniped. Invested

early. Goheer is merging with a German AI lab called Aleph Alpha. I am the biggest fan of Cohere. I love Aiden Gomez. Transformer paper alum, death grips enjoyer,

what's not to like about the legend Aidan Gomez. We got to get him on the show. But this is a lot. moment for coherence and Aleph Alpha. I think I can't see that correctly. GPD 5.5. Yes. Kitts is saying it might be AGI because if you ask it,

bro, the car washes five minutes away, should I walk to it or go by car and says, car, bro, it's a car wash. Yeah. Let the plot make sense. Wait, what? Like it just immediately clocks it. Oh, I like that it's,

I've seen this exact test done in normal language. like with a proper prompt, not the casual bro slang. And it's, it actually is more, it feels more like AGI if it is able to pick up on the lingo and mirror that back. Car, bro, it's a car wash. That's very funny. That feels very remarkable. It also got the R's in strawberry correct, right? And how many strawberries in the letter R zero?

The letter R is not known for its berry storage. These are good answers. the being a helpful assistant but simultaneously rejecting nonsense is particularly been difficult for LLM so good progress here. We'll figure out more about what went into this and what the next generation of AI impacts are from this. Tyler, Hajj says, is found a post from five and a half years ago. Elon says the rate of improvement from the original GPT to GP3. impressive. If this rate of improvement continues, GPD 5 or 6 could be indistinguishable from the smartest humans. Just my opinion, not an endorsement. I left opening I two to three years ago.

I'm a neutral outsider at this point. Greg says, thank you. A lot, a lot has changed, but he was accurate in his prediction. Funniest outcome is the most likely. And then the last thing I wanted best bros and do a buddy cop film together. The last thing, there is a new app from X. It's called XChat. X chat. And I'm excited to try this out because

the current, yeah, the DMs on X have been pretty brutal. Yeah. Right? I haven't had that much of a problem. I do have this weird, with this weird bug where when I click the chat button on desktop, it sort of loads and then it resorts

after it loads. And sometimes if I haven't been in it in a long time, it needs to reshuffle several, several times. And so that can be a little jarring. But overall, it seems like they made the migration to encryption. I haven't, I don't know. I seem to get messages. It seems to work fine.

It's cool that there's a new app. I probably need to be better about answering DMs. I have a lot of them that are unread, so having a dedicated app for that. That sounds cool. People were taking shots because the everything app's supposed to be everything in one place. Instead of three apps to get everything in the everything app. Sort of silly. Who cares?

More apps, the better. I like apps. So go download it, go check it out, and go, go like McKita's post because he's been on a generational run. Also, GPD 5.5 is available in the API now. That's breaking news, I guess, from Craig. So, anyway,

we will see you on Monday. Have a great weekend. Enjoy the weekend. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts. It's Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at TBPN.com. And we'll see you tomorrow. Flashbang.

Have an incredible. here we go