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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TBPN.
Speaker 2:Today is Friday, 04/24/2026. We are live from the TBPN UltraDome.
Speaker 1:The temple of technology.
Speaker 2:The fortress of finance. We have a great show for you today, folks. We have George Kurtz coming on from CrowdStrike. Professor Sendy from Instagram, you might have seen he's the expert of Wombos. Gary Vaynerchuk's coming on.
Speaker 2:We have a lightning round going on with a couple founders. It'll be a fun time. But the big news
Speaker 1:Wrapping up with Ben Horwitz. Horwitz. Horwitz. Horwitz. Horwitz.
Speaker 2:The big news, of course, is Intel. Intel is absolutely ripping. Intel jumped to 20% after hours on the back of $13,600,000,000 in q one 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 The main factor
Speaker 1:is Bubble Boy on X.
Speaker 2:A lot of people have called this, and it is long overdue. It's the revenue is only up 7% year over year, but next quarter is already guiding to be better, somewhere north of 14,000,000,000 probably. But there's still big losses under the hood. This quarter, they lost $3,700,000,000. Not good, but that was mostly driven by one off charges related to Mobileye and derivative payments tied to the US government's 10% stake.
Speaker 2:So if you strip those out, Intel actually earned $1,500,000,000, which is much better than what people were expecting, which was basically breakeven. 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, NVIDIA'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.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 2: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 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 it that Intel could still matter.
Speaker 2: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 gonna keep going.
Speaker 1:It's funny because at the moment that The US took position in Intel Yeah. It it was like it felt like a bay it was a bailout. Right?
Speaker 2:It felt like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it felt like, you know, you would expect, okay, over time, this is very this is gonna 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
Speaker 2:in
Speaker 1:the span Yeah. Of just half a year.
Speaker 2:I think Ben Thompson wrote
Speaker 3:a pretty strong bull case for the for the Intel US deal. Basically, like, you had to you had to grapple with this idea of, like, this doesn't feel like free market capitalism.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I guess I guess the only thing is like there wasn't there wasn't this narrative around CPUs at the time True. That the deal was happening. True. Or at least it wasn't a very public narrative.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. The bull case at that time that I heard most loudly was not the CPU boom. It was It was just overall It was the 14 like, the the leading edge fab that basically by having The US Government as its 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.
Speaker 2:We are backing Intel. I need all of you to commit to buy, you know, a ton of of of, supply if Intel actually goes and builds the leading edge fab, which is gonna cost them billions of dollars. But Yeah. If they have the demand gain guarantees, then they will actually be able to go do it. Tyler, what was your take
Speaker 4:on that?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I think Leopold or sorry. Intel has long been kind of the Leopold take
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Which which is that, like, you know, this is the clear like, this is the company you wanna own in in the kind of nationalization Sure. World of, like, okay, Taiwan risk.
Speaker 2:Oh, sure.
Speaker 5:What are we gonna do if if we can't make chips, you know, in Taiwan? Intel's, like, the very clear
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Strategy. Yeah. Maybe it's, like, not working right now, but, at some point, this is not just, like, economics. This is, like, okay, this is, you know Geopolitical. National security.
Speaker 5:Like, it's extremely important that we have this capacity in The And U. And Intel's kind of the only one that's even, like, remotely in in the conversation.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 2: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 $5,100,000,000 in quarterly revenue, beating the $4,500,000,000 analysts expected.
Speaker 2:And Intel CEO, Lip Buutan, said the next 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 Lip Buuton as well, but VK Macro says CPU to GPU ratio flipping from one to eight to eight to one is absolutely wild. That's just a completely new world to what we've had so far. This is from Evercore ISI's Mark Lapices 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 1.1 to eight to eight to one, which is a massive, massive switch.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Mean, I don't know. Like, that's kind of a crazy ratio.
Speaker 2:It
Speaker 5:is. Because, like, the less That's the strongest point. Tier models is that, like, the models are gonna keep getting bigger. You're gonna need way more in like chips to to him some
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 5:Like Dylan Patel was on. Patrick O'Shaughnessy think Yep. It came out yesterday or the day before. And he's just saying like, you know, the models are gonna get really expensive, tokens are gonna get super super expensive, people are gonna price down. So so I I I don't know if I fully believe the narrative that like you need all the CPUs.
Speaker 5:Yeah. You're gonna need way more CPUs than CPUs. Woah.
Speaker 2:I mean the Really the elephant, That's all folks. It really lay lines up perfectly. His camera is the main one that fits that fits perfectly. The glasses land on.
Speaker 1:I love a Friday show.
Speaker 2:Yes. That's a good point. But there is this I I I think at least in the midterm like the the Yeah. There's, capabilities overhang And and and just like one really smart AI system that's being inferenced on GPU can spin off a ton of CPU workloads and and and do a lot of things that that require CPUs. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, even in the even in, like, the the SaaS apocalypse, like, 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 creating more CPU demand out of the GPU.
Speaker 5:I think this take makes a lot of sense if you if you are like kind of, you know, long open source. We're gonna 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.
Speaker 5:You have bunch of agents doing a bunch of stuff at the same time
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Rather than the single model, you know, inferenced on a massive amount of chips.
Speaker 2: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 Libbutan 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.
Speaker 2: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 TeraFab to reach 100,000 wafers a month and then eventually 1,000,000 wafers a month, which is just insane scale. So let's put it in context.
Speaker 2:1,000,000 wafers a month is about 70% of TSMC's total monthly output across all fabs. TSMC's largest fabs put out roughly 100,000 wafers a month into production. So you're talking about 10, you know, leading class TSMC fabs at Intel just on the TerraFab project plus whatever else Intel is doing. So a pretty massive scale. And TSMC's CEO, C.
Speaker 2:C. Wei, has said that it's just not that easy to build a fab overnight and get it up to run 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 TSMC Arizona, which we've been very excited about, but it just takes time. And there is a bottleneck.
Speaker 2:And the bottleneck has been discussed at length. Ben Thompson wrote about TSMC risk and Strictory, arguing that TSMC needs to spend more on CapEx. And I think that should be clearer now. We'll see what happens at the next TSMC earnings call because maybe they will be waking up. But overall, the Intel Intel now has a collection of plausible demand stories even though the demand itself is not going vertical.
Speaker 2: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 US government wants to direct domestic leading a domestic leading edge foundry.
Speaker 2:This is just 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.
Speaker 2:We talked about ARM recently. And ARM, of course, it feels like they will be going with TSMC 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 TSMC ran away with enormous manufacturing volume and left Intel with a demand problem.
Speaker 2:Volume was destinies, as they say. As fab costs 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, and 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 of the government and a bunch of other people and the AI narrative and all these different five key pieces. So the pieces of puzzle are coming together now, and that's good for Intel.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 5:Everyone. Every US citizen.
Speaker 2:Every US citizen.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Congrats to all Americans.
Speaker 2:Every US citizen. And every US debt holder. So even the international folks that own treasuries are in better position today.
Speaker 1:You gotta think about what this does to Trump's confidence level. You know, he's like, I I enjoy a bailout. He's like, I'll indulge Spirit Airlines.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:American Spirit. Yep. I think he's excited about the potential Sure. There.
Speaker 6:Sure.
Speaker 1:But why why stop at just bailouts? Mhmm. Right? Why not why not start taking a position in hyperscalers? Yeah.
Speaker 1:He's like, look, like, I think I can move your market cap by three x. Yeah. I've done it before. Yeah. And Intel was Before.
Speaker 1:Intel was falling apart. Yeah. Imagine if I imagine if he applied all all his wisdom to a company already winning.
Speaker 2:Certainly possible. Jim Kramer's excited about it. He said in thirteen months, Lip Buuton 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, and ARM. The and the agents need far more CPUs than these three can produce, so that means prices are going up.
Speaker 2:And they got the God candle.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Look at this candle from The candle.
Speaker 2:Love it. We love a, like, a green candle. Should be white suits today. Well, before we move on, there's some news. Justin Bieber brought Bieberchella back from the dead.
Speaker 2:Later in the show, we'll tell you what this says about late stage venture re acceleration. Gonna tie those two together. Look forward to that. More than a year, Silicon Valley has buzzed about Cursor's growth and whispered about its margins. Now on the cusp of a $60,000,000,000 bailout, Laura over at I mean The information Wait.
Speaker 1:They called it a $60,000,000,000 bailout?
Speaker 2:Buyout. Buyout. Okay. I'm sorry. Buyout.
Speaker 1:I already excited.
Speaker 2:We revealed the hot bod coatings financials.
Speaker 1:$60,000,000,000 acquisition calling it a bailout. Is it it's not a bailout. Is that Their margins were rough.
Speaker 2:We were just talking about it. It got warmed into my head. Cursor had negative 23% gross margins earlier this year. That 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 an entry point to AI, as an entry point to inference demand.
Speaker 2: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 pro with the product while changing inference based on what their plan gives them. So they're a 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 23% gross margins, and you're like, woah.
Speaker 2:And then you look at the SpaceX deal and the XAI deal and all the compute that's sitting at Colossus two. 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 XAI trained model, something that merges their lessons from Kimi and Composer with Croc and all the different pieces of the puzzle come together. Are there gonna be higher gross margins? It's pretty easy to imagine that the gross margins would increase. But we'll have to keep keep tracking it.
Speaker 2:Did you wanna play this this piece from Patrick O'Shaughnessy.
Speaker 1:Let's do it.
Speaker 2:Let's play this clip of what Dylan Patel said on invest like the best presented by ramp.
Speaker 7:Everyone's like, okay. So Right? And had Meetos in February. They never even released it because they didn't feel the need to. They're already sold out.
Speaker 7:Their revenue is already adding $10,000,000,000 a month. And then you've got Opus four seven today, all before OpenEye's, you know, alleged spud release which, know, media such as The Information and others have have posted about. So clearly, Anthropic is in the lead. Right? And OpenAI is cooked.
Speaker 7: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 OpenAI 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. OpenAI 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're buying from Oracle and Core, even SoftBank, and all these people, and Microsoft, know, such as Tranium. Now they're getting Tranium as well from Amazon.
Speaker 7:What's interesting is if you were to say, Opus 4.6, you know, let's ignore models getting better over time. Let's just take diffusion of this technology. You and I may get jump on the model immediately day one, but other businesses take time, and it takes time for people to learn.
Speaker 8:And so by the end
Speaker 7:of the year, let's say a four six Opus tier model the economy would spend a $100,000,000,000 on. I don't think that's unreasonable. It's spending 40,000,000,000 right now. Anthropic won't have enough compute to do that. And so and and presumably OpenAI and Google will hit that tier soon enough.
Speaker 7:Whoever hits that tier next, sure, Anthropic may get to charge 70 plus percent gross margins, but if OpenAI hits it next, they charge 50% 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 $500,000,000,000 of revenue or something crazy. There is such demand for these tokens and such limitations on compute, you know, and we see this with h 100 prices skyrocketing and the useful life of these g p's continue to extend. It's pretty clear even the tier two lab is gonna be sold out of tokens. Let alone the tier one lab.
Speaker 7:The tier one lab will have better margins, but the tier two lab will be sold out, and probably the tier three 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?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. I love
Speaker 1:that sound. Such a huge I love that sound. Bill Gurley let's see what Bill Gurley let's check-in with BG. What's saying? I find this conversation foreign along with the argument that we are data center constrained or energy constrained.
Speaker 1:Historically, in markets, price is a leveler of supply and demand. Mhmm. If you have a constraint, you price higher. Yeah. You don't have surplus demand.
Speaker 1: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 cost becomes a game on the field. With that reality, you all you are always going to have some constraint because you knowingly 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 as eventually happened in ride sharing when Lyft went public.
Speaker 1: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. I 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.
Speaker 1:Amazon and Uber maxed out around 2,000,000,000 a year. These companies could lose 10,000,000,000 or more in 2026.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a good point that they are that the big labs are losing money, but it doesn't feel like that the revenue of OpenAI and Anthropic are VC subsidized heavily. Like, it feels like the
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's funny. Semi analysis is a good example. They spend millions and millions of dollars They're not tokens.
Speaker 2:But They're not VC backed. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. And their customers are not start ups necessarily. It's like hedge funds and banks and stuff.
Speaker 1:Hedge funds and banks that are printing by betting on semis right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Which is a different which like like I I I am totally I'm totally on board with like, well, know, the the the the mag seven are drawing down on cash flow and issuing debt and doing layoffs and they're funding the, like like sub they're subsidizing demand. Right? And but but the idea that BC dollars are the biggest drop in the bucket of subsidized demand feels like I I don't know. It it just doesn't quite math out to me because the the the the actual revenues and demand from Fortune 500 companies is so high and the and the and the really big dollars in all of these rounds.
Speaker 2:I mean, Anthropic just raised something like 40 from Google today, And that's not a VC subsidy. I mean, it is a subsidy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm surprised I'm I'm surprised he's not talking about like big tech subsidy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. But maybe he is using the term VC dollars like broadly Oh, yeah. Which is like fair.
Speaker 1:Including. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, like, wasn't SoftBank in was SoftBank in Uber? I I I think maybe. But there is an idea that you get to a certain scale and it becomes like sovereigns. SoftBank
Speaker 1:is up in the past month.
Speaker 2:How much?
Speaker 1:Guess.
Speaker 2:200%.
Speaker 1:Come on, John. 73%.
Speaker 2:That's not bad.
Speaker 1:That's a that's a big number.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, that's big number alone, probably huge. But if you know, so so if he's using the term VC subsidies, VC dollars broadly, I I I 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.
Speaker 2:I 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, 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 AI economy.
Speaker 2:There there's been this, like, discussion for a long time. Martin Scully 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 have, you know, come yes. There are yes.
Speaker 2:Like, Google might take a position in Anthropic. Microsoft might have a position in OpenAI. 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 and other inference provider. Like, there's like everyone is It's
Speaker 1:one it's one big circle.
Speaker 2:It's yes. It's one giant circle of life that is, you know, actually self perpetuating because it is a true economy that that hits, you know, 25 different categories. Well Sorry. You might think it's over but Elad Gil does not. He says my view is the AI boom will only accelerate and is a once in a lifetime transformation.
Speaker 2:This is orthogonal to whether many AI companies should exit in the next twelve to eighteen months as some may lack durability versus labs, new entrants or weird market shifts. 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 necktat, ride a bike everywhere, cold brew his own coffee, also start drinking coffee. That's an odd thing to jump straight to the
Speaker 1:Was this was was was he's like trying this like a cipher of some sort? Wants to Is a secret message embedded in this post?
Speaker 2:Maybe. I don't know. What's the Stroussian reading? He wants to vape mango pods, but ironically and wear a scarf everywhere during summer.
Speaker 1:We have to we have to pull this up. Sarah Grosso No.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Pull this up. We gotta break it down.
Speaker 2:Sourdough. Sourdough. I don't know. I have I have spent like a few weekends in Brooklyn. It's a nice town.
Speaker 2:I am not a fan of tattoos. So I I I I wouldn't I would stay away from the neck tattoo. Although, who knows? I've seen some 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.
Speaker 2:So he if wants to do this and then roll it back, I'm sure he can do this. It sounds like he 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.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, it sounds I mean, he he it sounds like he's advising his portfolio companies. Yes. I don't care how hard you're ripping.
Speaker 1:Yeah. A lot of you should probably
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Exit.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just given given how how much uncertainty there is.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 2:Get ready for it. Joe Weisenthal says defense stocks have been trading not like not just like the the Iran war is over, but like all war ever is over, says Barclays capital, Alexander Altman. I would not expect this yeah. Lockheed is down significantly even even pre Iran war buildup. It fully fully round tripped.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 1:Has Jane Street achieved AGI internally?
Speaker 2:I think so. They definitely have
Speaker 1:billion dollars in revenue last year, more than all the big Wall Street banks and with only 3,500 employees.
Speaker 2:Yes. Let's give it up for Jane Street. Fantastic. Capping a stunning ascent to the peak of the industry, the firm flew past global investment banks after reaping 15,500,000,000 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.
Speaker 2:It beat the nearest rival JPMorgan Chase by 11% during the year. Tether did 15,000,000,000 at 200 employees. So maybe maybe they aren't the the hottest shop in town, but that is very, very impressive.
Speaker 1:That's that's like one of those questions. Like, would you rather do 40,000,000,000 of revenue with 3,500 employees or 15,000,000,000
Speaker 2:Mhmm. 200. 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 Thrive 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.
Speaker 2: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 in 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
Speaker 1:Very good.
Speaker 2: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 Wow. They play this game, they sell tickets to the game and that's how the the San Francisco Giants make money and Josh Kushner with is getting on
Speaker 1:the style show Yes. For whatever you just described. I feel like it would be very cool
Speaker 2:That would be cool.
Speaker 1:If you had maybe a couple of posts, you know, on screen graphics and could provide kind of live coverage maybe Extremely while that's educational.
Speaker 2:Well, we have our first guest of the show. George from CrowdStrike is back in Petite and UltraDome. He's in the waiting room. George, how are you doing?
Speaker 6:I'm doing well. How are you guys?
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 6:Well, first, I have to congratulate you guys for your success there. So I gotta start with that, but we can get back to that later. But Project Quiltworks is really a coalition that we put together with some of our largest global partners like 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 the news with Meetos, and I'm sure we'll 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?
Speaker 6:So we put together a group of, you know, 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
Speaker 4:to
Speaker 6:identify, patch, and remediate and mitigate these issues.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, we've been tracking a lot of the new data breaches. We've 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 of security issues.
Speaker 1:Supply chain hacks or
Speaker 2:Supply chain hacks. Lots of stuff. Much of that do you think is driven by by attackers using AI or the internal companies using AI sloppily? Like, there's 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?
Speaker 2:How are you grappling with those two sides of the equation?
Speaker 6: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 and how they're doing that is leveraging AI through any number of applications, could be clawed code
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Codecs, etcetera, right, Cursor, 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 and enterprises and corporations don't know where it
Speaker 2:is. Yeah.
Speaker 6: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 clogged code consumes it, boom. You know, 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, they're human, and they're gonna find the path of least resistance and deal with what's hot today and where the exposure is, and that's on the endpoint where people consume AI.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 2: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 to gate the models to companies that can be trusted. But Right. There's also the potential to not let the model be jailbreakable. So it should help me with defense.
Speaker 2: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 the sort of the silly, you know, jailbreak, say a bad word or do something that it shouldn't say. Now it's getting much higher stakes. But have you been 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?
Speaker 6:Well, the the model capabilities continue to obviously improve and also the capabilities that allow them to provide guardrails and limits on on what a user can do, but that's not gonna get you where you need to be. Okay. 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 and doing it yourself, you're still gonna have an interaction with that model and it's gonna be via prompt.
Speaker 6:And whenever you have sort of unstructured data just being sent somewhere and then being executed if you will, you're it's right for problems, and this is one of the big 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.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:How are you thinking about the threat of open source models? You know, the the new DeepSeq r four preview from yesterday was was super impressive. Are you expecting, you know, open source models that have, you know, really threatening cyber capabilities in something like six months
Speaker 2:I think Dario is estimating around six month lead Yeah. Lag time after Mythos for the for the lagging edge to catch up?
Speaker 6:I don't I don't think it's long in a few areas. Mean, you look at Kiwi two six that just came out, right? I mean, these are impressive models
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6: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.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Like it is extremely capable, so you can find a lot of vulnerabilities. You can basically chain these together and and create sort of an automated attack, and that's what we're seeing. Obviously, some of the the private models have the ability to actually chain these sort of vulnerabilities together more like a human. They've got more reasoning capabilities, which is one of the, you know, really powers of of their models. But the other models are a, are not far off and the open source or the open weight models really are gonna be focused on catching up very quickly.
Speaker 6:So the window as I said when I started the program with you is very small, and that's why we started this coalition with QuoteWerks to be able to find these at you know, again with 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.
Speaker 2:How are you thinking about AI powered but potentially nonautomated 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, phishing 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.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 6:Well, the human element is really the the the weakest link. I call it a layer eight problem. Right? The problem is between the the keyboard and this chair. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And that has been the case for a long time. So let's take your example. Yeah. One of the most prolific groups, threat actor groups that we actually track is called Silent Cholima, which is North Korea. So North Korea has been very active in getting hired into a company.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Right? And then basically the laptop that you send them gets sent somewhere in The US to a mule, and that mule takes it to 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
Speaker 2:laptop. Wow.
Speaker 6:Okay. So we're seeing lots and lots of those. Yeah. And it's funny because we've 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 you have a North Korean.
Speaker 6:It's not really Bob in Texas, it's a North Korean. Which obviously is always 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.
Speaker 6:They told the hiring manager like, hey, we need to get rid of this person. It's a 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 I mean, I can't make these stories up
Speaker 1:but Yeah. Wouldn't there be an incentive at some point if if they did get somebody on the inside to and and to just actually staff a bunch of super talented engineers like on that 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.
Speaker 1:They're working around the clock. We can't Why would we get rid of them? They're they're incredible. There's no way they're there's no way they're just you know That's crazy. Farming us out.
Speaker 6: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 one of the big challenges where AI is is goal seeking.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:So you
Speaker 6:create an agent. You know, one story is is a customer that created like a 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.
Speaker 6:Who has access? One agent put its hand up and said, I I can fix that for you, and happily fixed it, and basically worked around all the security boundaries. So Woah. 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. Yeah.
Speaker 6:They'll actually steal credentials out of your key chain even if you didn't give it to them so they can keep going.
Speaker 2:Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 6:That's what we're seeing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because in one way that, you know, if the if the goal is to achieve the task, it it succeeded, but at what cost and it needs to know that there are there are rules for a reason. What 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.
Speaker 2: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 Mhmm. By working alongside AI?
Speaker 6:Well, AI is going to change the way the the SOC works, security operations 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 SOC. What I would call level five SOC, right? If we think about car autonomy, you've got five levels. You map that into security, five level.
Speaker 6: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 what you're really good at, and it cuts down time and effort. And then you're elevating these tier one SOC analysts, and you're you're turning them into tier three. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And that has has paid dividends, but the soft skill is it would take one of our customers, give you an example, would take them four days in writing a report to, you know, what they call a sit rep report, the situational kind of response what happened. And now four days turns into like an hour because it can all be automated using something like Charlotte, which is our agentic capability. So all of those things that were problematic, you can just get get through, and you let AI do what it's really good at. Ride 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 gonna make the SOC a lot more efficient.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Jordan, anything else?
Speaker 1:More fun question than than less scary question. How is how is AI changing Formula One?
Speaker 6:Well, there you go. This is a great question. And it's interesting because I I think there's different levels of adoption of AI between teams.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Team might be they might have be spending a ton on inference. Another team is like, we we use radios. We're doing it the old fashioned way.
Speaker 6:Well what what's interesting is that 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 wind tunnel time and all the expenses so when 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 gonna have to rein 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 you know, we'll see we'll see where it all goes and obviously, know, I'm trying to help out the Mercedes team in those areas as well.
Speaker 2:That'd be great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do 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, 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?
Speaker 6:I think you'll see like a pre and a post. The challenge is you're gonna have to run through a lot of the different engineers that are have been in Formula One for many years because Yeah. Just like in the corporate world, you know, there's resistance to well, what is AI gonna do for me? And there's resistance in in Formula One, in some cases from an engineering perspective because, you know, 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.
Speaker 6:And it doesn't mean they're they're bad or it's right or wrong. It's just the way they operated for so many years. So I think just as we see kids coming out of school, they're they're AI natives. Right? They just gravitate towards that.
Speaker 6:And when you start to see AI native engineers, you're gonna see more and more adoption of that in Formula One.
Speaker 2:Makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 1:Makes sense.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on
Speaker 1:Yeah. The has been wild wild quarter but come back on soon. It's great progress.
Speaker 6:We will. Great to see you guys.
Speaker 2:Great to
Speaker 6:see you. Goodbye.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 2:After our next guest, we will be diving into the summer house reunion which has gone off the rails. We're gonna explain why Bravo is the cleanest lens for understanding US China decoupling. But first, we have professor Sendy. He's a word combo guru. He's a Wambo guru.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 4:Hey. Well, thank good to see you guys.
Speaker 2:Good to see
Speaker 8:you too.
Speaker 2:Thanks for
Speaker 4:having me on. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:We're we're thrilled.
Speaker 1:We're huge fans. We're huge fans. Honestly, I discovered I I think I was pretty early. Will say when I discovered your account on Instagram, I I did not have a single other person that I knew following
Speaker 4:one of the OGs on the channel.
Speaker 1:I think I I think I'm an OG and I and I and I kept sending them to John and I Yeah. And I'm like, this is the funniest thing in the world.
Speaker 2:It's so good.
Speaker 1:And so and so we've been
Speaker 2:trying That's
Speaker 4:awesome to hear. I love the 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.
Speaker 9:I'm glad.
Speaker 1:Okay. So Yeah. Let's get right into it. I like you're the professor like 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.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. We think that's gonna change. You know there's this explosion of AI adoption. We're expecting an explosion of WAMMO adoption.
Speaker 4:Let's let's hope so. That that would be amazing to see. You know, I've I've seen these WAMMOs be spread amongst not just young people, but, you know, 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.
Speaker 4:So I'm trying to expand this and try to make it more universal.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What was the first what like what what really drew you to Wombas? What was the first?
Speaker 4:You know, honestly, I I saw a video and I basically just it was they had put the low Kirk entelogica 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 kinda blew up. It took off.
Speaker 4:And I was like, okay. I guess I'm pretty good at this.
Speaker 2:That's good.
Speaker 4: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 now, you know, I have this, you know, the this crazy long word now that, you know, people are trying to learn and and it's just grown from there. And now I'm just creating original Wombos and I'm I'm sure you guys have seen and and everybody's seen that, you know, people are using these Wombos all over the place, in schools and Yeah.
Speaker 5:You know,
Speaker 4:just out in daily life. And so it's it's really been a a a movement that I was not expecting.
Speaker 2:I love it. Do you
Speaker 1: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?
Speaker 4:No. I can do it on command.
Speaker 1:Do you wanna do you wanna do it?
Speaker 4:Sure. I'll try it. Okay. Here we go. Wow.
Speaker 4:There
Speaker 2:we go.
Speaker 4:I wasn't expecting to do that.
Speaker 2:I can't believe we pulled it off. Are are you actually a professor? Like, what is your background? How did you get into this? Was this just a side hustle that just went mega viral?
Speaker 2:Like what what is your story?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Okay. So basically, I I 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.
Speaker 9:Okay.
Speaker 2:Got it.
Speaker 4:So I I don't have a background in words either. I just I used to be a rapper a long time ago. People ask me how how are you so good at doing this? How do you Yeah. Put these words together?
Speaker 4:And I just tell them, you know, I it's a natural skill I have and then I used to do it back in the nineties. I was like one of the original white rappers from back then before Eminem was even around.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. Wow.
Speaker 1:No way. Yeah. And so I I've
Speaker 4:been doing it for a long time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Yeah. We were reflecting earlier on
Speaker 1:Born born too late to explore the earth.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Born too early to explore the stars. Yes. Born just in time to be the leading expert on Wombos.
Speaker 2:Yes. For sure. That's perfect. Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We were reflecting on the fact that I'm I'm not sure how familiar you are with this but like the Silicon 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.com would be available. It would be very hard to go get, you know, pin, you know, interest.com or, you know, order shopping, like, you know, grocerystore.com. But Instacart was available, and so people would sort of match these up.
Speaker 2:And I'm wondering if you've if you've gone back and looked at any historical portmanteaus or Wombos that have broken through and maybe need to be, revisited and re reignited? Or is it all just forward into the crazier and crazier phrases?
Speaker 4:You you know, it's 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 09/1979 or something like that. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I'm interested Is in
Speaker 1:it a calculator that's a lighter too? Like if you wanna
Speaker 4:smoke while
Speaker 2:you're doing math.
Speaker 4:Calculators and it's got a little lighter
Speaker 1:thing amazing.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And 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, choppleganger. So that word is not mine.
Speaker 9:So Okay.
Speaker 1:I'm not know, but Merriam Webster needs to hire you Yeah. Like immediately and start getting
Speaker 4:I think they do. You know, I I wanna get I wanna get quiche penis in there. Yeah. That's
Speaker 1:that wombo.
Speaker 2:Explain that Wambo.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So so basically Quiche Penemas is like one of the big ones that people are using and so that's like quirky niche and then Penemas is peak
Speaker 1:I'm like the overachieving student, you know. I studied. So so we we we integrate these words. Yeah. We personally I use I Quiche Lorraine more.
Speaker 1:Yes. Quirky niche lore explain.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a handy one. Professor?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I love Cuislerain. I actually have a new version of that. I don't know if I can actually say it on your show. I I I don't know the the limits but so it's Cuislerainal Visions.
Speaker 2:Oh, yes.
Speaker 4:So so it's basically like you take Cuislerain and then you mix it with anal visions and I analysis I can't say that here.
Speaker 1:Show but it's analysis vision to be clear.
Speaker 4:Analysis revisions.
Speaker 2:If you
Speaker 4:do one of those, you're basically just doing an analysis revision of
Speaker 9:it. Okay.
Speaker 4:That's correct.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How how much time are you spending trying to come up with like, when when I think of Quiche and Lorraine, I think of, you know, short usable phrases that actually could work their way into the American vernacular. Whereas Yeah. With with the Loker and the Logical, I I don't think anyone's actually gonna pick that up. It's more of like
Speaker 6:a stunt.
Speaker 2:It's it's impressive, but it's a different style of content. How much I
Speaker 1:use I use Lorraine all the time. I'll say, John, Lorraine Intel's earning.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Yes. But how much time are you splitting between these? Like, do you think that there's something innate about being terse and short that will actually allow a Wambo to break through and ideally make it into the Merriam Webster's dictionary?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I actually have a theory behind like how to make effective wombos like that. So I think like you're saying short wombos are good. Yeah. Something that sounds good.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It has to sound good. Yeah. So it's like the quiche, it sounds good. I I I don't know.
Speaker 4:It just it sounds
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Nice when
Speaker 2:you say like a real word. Just don't work. Yeah. It's almost like, where, you know, the the the pharmaceutical companies, they come up with these names for the drugs and you're like Yeah. 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.
Speaker 2:You got like Ozempic, which like sounds like a drug for some reason. It's just like but it's from nothing and and those things tend to break through. Also, feel like Choppelganger really jumped straight into Merriam Webster's because it's it feels like like with the with the very little amount of work, can you can reverse engineer it. And and that also seems to be key to getting some Wambos to break through is is can someone take a guess and get 80% of the way there and then sort of, you know, peak their interest and then go a level deeper and understand the whole
Speaker 1:the whole lore. Talk about talk about the origins of nonchalash out. That's one that we've been keeping. That's a really good Once you know that wombo Yeah. Which is nonchalant crash out, you just see it everywhere.
Speaker 2:You do.
Speaker 1:It's constant. Yeah. Every time I open x or Instagram or YouTube, someone's having a nonchalant out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yep.
Speaker 4:Pretty much. So, yeah. A nonchalant 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 can do this. Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, for example, that that the CEO in McDonald's, you know, when he was eating that burger, I'm pretty sure he was having a nonchalash out when that was happening.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:And he looks pretty calm on the outside but on the inside I'm pretty sure he was
Speaker 3:freaking out
Speaker 4:a lot.
Speaker 1:He was in a dark place
Speaker 2:for sure. With something like nonchalash out or any of these other examples, how much of it is there is a phenomenon that because a nonchalash out is a thing that we didn't have a word for in English before. It 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 find examples.
Speaker 1:Another example from the professor caps olutely. I would use this personally if I know someone just basically both, you know, b s ing Yeah. Kinda like lying to me, I'd say capsolutely.
Speaker 2:Yes. You know? But you want to agree.
Speaker 4:Well, here's the here's the secret. Okay. So I'll I'll let you in on this. So when you when you make a word, if you find an opposite word and you kinda make the word a paradox, so like a nonchalant out doesn't really make sense.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 4:Because it's like how can you be nonchalant and crash out at the same time? Mhmm. But when you put them together, you really think about it, all human behaviors are kind of paradoxical. They all they all have like, you know, this aspect and this aspect. So like Yeah.
Speaker 4:Another example would be leguratively. So that's figuratively and literally. How can something be figuratively and literal at the same time?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:But it's kind of possible if you think about it. You can like literally mean something figuratively or you can figuratively mean something
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Or you can literally mean it halfway, you know.
Speaker 2:It's the Hegelian dialectic. The thesis and the antithesis create the synthesis. Right.
Speaker 4:Jam them together and Yeah. You can really come up with some beautiful wombos that way. That's that's really kind of the secret to a lot of it. Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 2:Where do you want to go with your creator journey? I 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 and language for hours. I was thinking like brands should be paying you to create Wombos about their products or their brands and 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.
Speaker 2:But are you early in the creator journey? How are you thinking about this as a business?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So right now I'm working on a dictionary so I'm hoping to use that as a That's cool. You know, as a step stone to launching my products.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So I'm I think I think coffee table
Speaker 1:like a coffee table book. Yeah. Like the great book of wombos. Yes. Something you can proudly place on a coffee table.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I wanna have a book like where I can put it on the table and and people can just like flip through it. I want it to look real nice and I want it to be like a really great item to have. But also,
Speaker 2:you know table dictionary. A coffee dictionary. We're working on these. Sorry.
Speaker 4:You're coming up with stuff.
Speaker 2:I'm working on it. But well, yeah.
Speaker 4:What else gotta keep on going. Yeah. For sure. But but no. No.
Speaker 4:I'm early on in my journey, so I'm I'm looking to, you know, work with some people and I'm I'm looking to make some books and
Speaker 2:Cool.
Speaker 4: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 barely there at in January, and so it's just exploded. So it's it's still kind of the beginning right now. So
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. There there are so many opportunities, so it's it's really looking up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We had someone on the show whose 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, you you though, your your grasp on the English language is sorely needed among some companies that have very complex product names. And so the the the the I I see like a a bright future Yoland in a bunch of different ways, but eagerly await about the the the coffee table book.
Speaker 2:Anything else, Jordy? No. This was super fun. Yeah. We're having Gary Gary
Speaker 1:in just a couple minutes. Yeah. And we'll ask him ideas on how to monetize professor Sendy in the Wombo universe because I feel like he could I think I think he'll have some ideas. Do
Speaker 4:you Yeah. That would be amazing. And yeah. And if you're yeah. Mentioned me to Gary Vee, that would be very cool.
Speaker 4:That's awesome. Yeah. I appreciate that.
Speaker 2:Do do you experience anything different across the platforms? I know we follow you on Instagram. I know you're on TikTok. Yeah. Is there anything that you've learned from like the different platforms?
Speaker 4:Definitely. So TikTok, I think is more for discovery.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:So if, you know, if you do something that's completely novel, that video can really blow up.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I think Instagram is much more generous with its views. But I think you can really build a solid base more Instagram. I just feel like TikTok's more for discovery. Instagram's more for growth and personalization of your brand.
Speaker 2:Have put these on YouTube shorts yet?
Speaker 4:What's that?
Speaker 2:Have you put them on YouTube shorts yet? Just because it's a
Speaker 4:support platform? I used to do YouTube and I just I don't know if it's gonna fit on on that platform. I just I don't know. I'm I'm hesitant to go there and I've been hesitant to go on Facebook meta
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 4:Just because I don't know if it'll work. And I just I I used to do that and so I'm just I'm not sure about it yet.
Speaker 2:So Yeah.
Speaker 4:We'll see. We'll see.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join the show. Fantastic to talk to
Speaker 1:And thank you for all your analysis and teachings.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:I it has brought brought both of us so much joy. Yeah. Like not just watching the videos but using them.
Speaker 2:We got our lawyer to use Quiche Lorraine once and we were very very
Speaker 4:that is that's a high compliment. I appreciate that. Thanks for telling me that.
Speaker 2:It was it was remarkable.
Speaker 4:Jordy and John, I appreciate you guys having me on. I really do.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You're the man. We'll talk to
Speaker 2:you soon.
Speaker 1:Great hanging.
Speaker 4:Have a good
Speaker 2:Greg Brockman's apartment is for sale where they started OpenAI. Sheila Monat says, I do not think there is an opportunity to build an OpenAI 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, $1,545,000. 1,800 square feet.
Speaker 2:It is a it is an incredible piece of of lore that OpenAI started in this particular apartment.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This this this feels like it will go quickly. Yeah. Like, there are so many people in San Francisco that would be that that might need a place and to just snap up the place that OpenAI was effectively formed.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I remember some of the really photos. Good times. We should go to this, video from Zane Shaw. Imagine every pixel on your screen streamed live directly from a model.
Speaker 2: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, you know, tour of Notre Dame website, probably vibe coded, a testament to what the modern coding models can do. But it's not code. This is what you are seeing is actually not code.
Speaker 2: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 very early glimpse into sort of what the future of generative UI might look like. Jordy, why are you laughing?
Speaker 1:Because the chat is doing a bunch of wombos.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. We gotta work on Wombos. 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?
Speaker 2:Welcome Do back to the
Speaker 1:you know about Wombos?
Speaker 8:I do not, my friend.
Speaker 1:You gotta learn about Wombos. You gotta learn about Wombos. They are the next meta. They are the meta. If you're not doing Wombos in 2026, you're getting left So
Speaker 2:Wombos are word So the example would be a quiche is quirky and niche. You put it together and that's quiche. Or Lorraine. Lore plus That's
Speaker 8:a that's a that was a risky start for the first word. Yeah. Lorraine
Speaker 1:is a better one. Give me if I say Lorraine
Speaker 8:First first and foremost, congratulations.
Speaker 2:Thank
Speaker 1:you. Thank you.
Speaker 10:I really Thank you.
Speaker 1:I appreciate it. Remember I remember our very first call. I think it was in 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 very small. I think we had maybe just gone live Yeah.
Speaker 1:A few times And you told us
Speaker 2:Go harder.
Speaker 1:You guys you you said go harder. Yeah. And we were already going pretty hard, but you said go harder. And we certainly did. So
Speaker 2:And go multi platform. That was really too. You you you were 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?
Speaker 2: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 it's really much better.
Speaker 8:Everything starts subpar, right? Like when you start working out, or when you start singing, or like, you know, for everybody who's watching right now, every business, every personal brand, every b to b, every b to c, to not take advantage of the attention media landscape that's in place right now, it's really uncomprehendable 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, multichannel, multi format, the the business outcomes can be extraordinary, and I'm happy to see you guys get one.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, what
Speaker 1:is it is it is it funny that, 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 people
Speaker 2:are some measures.
Speaker 1:Well, two decades by some measures. But like Twitch has been big for a long time. There's been so much attention there.
Speaker 3:I mean, I mean,
Speaker 8:I wrote this book in 2008. It came out in 'nine, Crush It! In the back of the book, I talk about youth stream and live streaming.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, you know, with ebbs and flows, and to your point, like, I mean, I can't even comprehend the economic impact live social shopping is going do over the next ten 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.
Speaker 8:Right? Like, it's just kind of the way consumer behavior and human behavior works. Yeah. It does it does surprise me how many more people have not replicated the very you know, basic DG framework that you guys executed in this genre.
Speaker 1:Well the
Speaker 8:It's available
Speaker 1:for the interesting the interesting thing is we've there's there's easily been a 100 a 100 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
Speaker 8:just it's not just
Speaker 1:the overlay and the format. But I have been I I've been very confident. I've said this on podcasts for you know, we've talked about this going back probably six six to eight months ago. You should take this format of a livestream 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.
Speaker 1:The example we'd always talk about is like cooking where all you need is like a cool kitchen. You're That's your set. You have a couple of cameras so you have different angles and then you just say, hey, every day at 3PM, I'm gonna cook dinner. This is what I'm gonna cook. Here's the schedule.
Speaker 1:You can make dinner with me. And I think that that's like an entire niche
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That you could build around. You could integrate guests into something like that too, so you have different Conversations. 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 Yeah.
Speaker 1:In terms of live streaming. So credit credit to them.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Mean, it's it's it's there for the taking. A lot of things are there for the taking.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How are you thinking about how branding and marketing will evolve? I had this interesting moment this week with the GBT images two 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 the product photography. Like even apparel is actually interesting where like fit matters a lot.
Speaker 1:And so if Yeah. 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 gonna be Sure. Happy about it. But for a bunch of categories, it's cool. And I always 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.
Speaker 1: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 kinda 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 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.
Speaker 8:Well, mean, there's a lot there. I mean, it's just got done talking about how hard it is to stand out online. Right? Like, the cost of entry is zero. Yeah.
Speaker 8: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 incomprehendable 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, 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 agent agents, and what are they doing for me, and how do I understand?
Speaker 8:Blah 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 their 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 pedestal. You know, like Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:It's just
Speaker 8: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.
Speaker 8: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.
Speaker 1:Totally. And
Speaker 8: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 of.
Speaker 1:Totally. I 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?
Speaker 8:And 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.
Speaker 8:I really do think it's a barbell. I think in the next ten 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 retail, in event driven businesses, in concerts, and venues. Think the rise of analog I have a restaurant business, part of a restaurant group.
Speaker 8: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 you see what's happening with flip phones.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8: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
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And was a gateway drug to community. If you've never been to 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. Like Yep.
Speaker 8:In five years, if we're having this video, this interview right now
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Most of the audience is trying to figure out if we're real
Speaker 2:or not.
Speaker 8:That is that is very real and has real substantial counter opportunities. So Yeah. You know, the photographer who's sad when they hear that, I'm like, no. No. No.
Speaker 8:You might actually crush in a different way. And so I'm curious to see what the counter scaled moves are going to 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.
Speaker 2:Okay. Totally. Alright. Let's go deeper on analog. I want your reaction to this headline that for the first time this century, vinyl music sales eclipsed $1,000,000,000 in a calendar year.
Speaker 1:Say Yeah. They're effectively
Speaker 2:are up something like 10% in 2025.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're effectively like 10% of like global streaming revenue is just vinyl still.
Speaker 2:It's bigger than CDs. It's making a bigger comeback than other formats. Yep. What what is your what is your reaction? Is it people looking for wall decorations?
Speaker 2:Are they actually listening to the vinyl? Do you have any idea of, like, what we should read into that idea of this nostalgic format
Speaker 8:Are you
Speaker 2:are you
Speaker 8:are you doing your I mean, do you see my shelves here? Like, 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. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Some of it's happening with decorative. A lot of it's happening with collectibles.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Even more is happening with subconscious counter push to extreme digitalization.
Speaker 2:Sure. Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 7:There are people
Speaker 8: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 Sure. 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 gonna 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 and and then there's just swings of 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.
Speaker 8:Like Yeah. It becomes behavioral. It 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 a little sub pocket.
Speaker 8:It bleeds 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 I it is clearly a counterpoint to extreme in feed, in digital consumption, and I think that's great. It it's it speaks to the thing I most believe in, which is humans correct themselves at a level that we are unbelievably underestimating.
Speaker 8:The the sheer adaptability of the human race is extraordinary.
Speaker 1:Let's give it up for us. Sports. Well well said.
Speaker 2:I wanna talk about sports.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mean, are a good example. We were talking earlier, a friend of the show, Josh Kushner, is looking to acquire a stake in in the Giants and out of his new Eternal fund, is basically a a 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 wanna watch And then the fear. Simulation of giants. The fear is another good example.
Speaker 2: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 the the the more legacy brands like the San Francisco Giants, the New York Mets, the different sports franchises out there?
Speaker 8:Yes. I I you know, it's really interesting to tie a couple things together. This distribution channel that you and I are on right now, right? The fact that people watching
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:In in a way that forty 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 with this analog and not disrupted by AI thing, is why six or seven years ago I started investing very heavily in alternative sports. Mhmm. So, made a big bet on pickleball that I think is going to work out quite well.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:You know, unrivaled the three on three basketball league, AJ and I, my brother Cool. Early investors in that. The Wiffleball League, the Sailing League, Slam Ball.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:So I've been very aggressive on alternative sport investing, Padel. Yeah. 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, New York City based when we were always like, NBA is the best set. So it's been great to his him thrive, shine.
Speaker 8:I think all anyone who does not realize how substantial the analog opportunities are is 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 like, it it compounds two x what anyone in PE 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.
Speaker 8:Here's a left field one like the drive in movie theater. Right? The stuff that dominated the fifties and sixties. When I say that out loud of like, do you think a modern drive in movie theater, which has done really well
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8: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.
Speaker 2:100%. Yeah.
Speaker 8:And then what happens to the person that does 39 of those and Yeah. Has a real business and flips it? So I I think it's a really cool time for a lot of us that watch this show
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Where like, oh, crap. We can play on either side of extreme digitalization or analog. Yeah. Be creative.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. The the beauty, you know, give you the example of somebody making like a a modern chain of drive in movie theaters is like you get all the benefits of AI still. Get to you get to use it for to instantly respond to any customer message and help solve problems.
Speaker 8:But 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?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh, that's good thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I could see I could see doing that for kids. Yeah. You know, like, maybe slightly lower bar, but you create your own kind of kids kids content.
Speaker 8:That's again, a lot of things I do Yeah. Get more obvious later. I got made fun of writing that book. Yeah. Anyone can personal brand on Twitter.
Speaker 8:Now it doesn't look so funny.
Speaker 2:No. I mean
Speaker 1:Who's laughing now? Who's laughing now?
Speaker 8:Yeah. But when I started building VeeFriends and, like, building this Pokemon Sesame Street thing
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Yes, there was a lot of blockchain in it, but it was a lot of my smartest friends in Silicon Valley five years ago, like, this AI thing is percolating. You know, was a little more slang for machine learning.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And then it obviously got accelerated real quick. Yeah. But like, yeah, I believe in a lot of this stuff.
Speaker 2: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 Serhant or Ryan Holiday or maybe Ryan Harwood? Do any of these names conjure any interesting stories or Yeah. Life
Speaker 8:The Ryan Mafia is good. I mean, Ryan Harwood, I've learned nothing from. Zero. Absolutely nothing. I'll just put that one to death.
Speaker 8:You know, Ryan Holiday was definitely the individual that I was like, finally put a word to kinda how I was living my life. Right? I that 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.
Speaker 8:But when Ryan Holiday started talking about being a stoic, and stoicism, was like, oh. Like, you know, like I was like, oh, shit. That sounds like, oh, that, that, that's interesting. Yeah. And so I think that that's one for him.
Speaker 8:Sirhan, you know, is a fun one for me because a lot You know, he's obviously playing at such a big personal brand level now, and then he had that TBP show on Bravo, and then it was off the air. You know, his curiosity and 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.
Speaker 8:And Horwitz is is just a dear actual friend. He's family, not even friends. And so I he's taught me that
Speaker 1:I'm glad you circled I'm glad you circled back because I was like, damn, he's taking shots.
Speaker 8:You know what? And, 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 I think literally from from 1985 to 2,000 Yeah.
Speaker 8:98% of the words out of my best friend's mouths was highly disrespectful in my direction.
Speaker 2:Of course. That's the best. That's the only way to do it. Ryan Holiday wrote, trust me, I'm lying, confessions of a media manipulator at 25. Should more young people write books?
Speaker 2:I talked 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 and needs to come with being forty, fifty, 60 Yeah.
Speaker 1:Get a lot of but part of it is like you're generating wisdom through writing Yeah. Thinking deeply. Do you I feel like
Speaker 8: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
Speaker 2:it. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 8:And then, so, I don't know, for me, speaking for myself, again, back to the books, when I look back at that, I'm like, how and I'm pretty like, I don't feel good about myself. We have 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 nest 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. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Because much like I had in my youth, I saw things others couldn't see because I wasn't playing by yesterday's 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.
Speaker 8: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.
Speaker 9:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:You partnered up with Masterclass.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Tell us about it.
Speaker 1:Tell us about it.
Speaker 8:You know, I fifteen years ago, anything that looked like Masterclass, like selling stuff, was really scammy. Like, I grew up in the web one o era, and like, stayed away from a lot of subscription Patreon, OnlyFans, master class. Like, selling information was really dirty in $9,948 ebook that was straight garbage. I want to give Masterclass some flowers. When they first kind of hit the scene around that era, we were just getting into the earliest stage of where we are now, where premium content, you know, Substack, Beehive.
Speaker 8: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 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 MBA from a high class university that you 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.
Speaker 8: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 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 gonna be ROI positive.
Speaker 8:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Makes sense.
Speaker 2: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?
Speaker 8: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.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Everybody who's watching is highly invested in big companies that spend a lot of money on marketing. Your marketing department is wasting 93¢ of every dollar they spend.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 8:We are living in such a radical transformation of the mid funnel dominating not the upper funnel, the lower funnel. Sure. Us three right now are on mid funnel. Yeah. We are producing
Speaker 5:I was
Speaker 1:born in the mid funnel.
Speaker 8:I mean, look, I mean, this is what's going on in my view. I'm good. Right? This this is a production day.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:This will be post produced into creative that will go in the mid funnel, organic social.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 8:And the things that do well will go up for brand and down for performance.
Speaker 9:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Every brand on earth should be spending, they would be 20% of their entire marketing budget just on social media organic production Mhmm. Because the mid funnel of 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. Mhmm. And then when I tell you, every Fortune 5,000 company is still doing guessing on the upper funnel, sponsorships, ridiculous shit, And then the lower funnel, twenty sixteen AB testing, beta, or Merx, when the mid funnel ate up the whole world, and you guys are winning, and Ruins is winning, and any personal brand, and many other businesses. And so that doesn't even get into the AI of it all.
Speaker 8:That to me is tooling and infrastructure to be great at what I just said.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8: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.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:I I I can't stand
Speaker 2:waste of Yeah. Marketing It makes my blood boil. Well, thank you so much for your
Speaker 1:time to
Speaker 2:come chat with us. Congrats.
Speaker 1:We barely got to talk about live commerce.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's a lot more. We'll do that next time.
Speaker 8: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 in stuff sold. And TikTok shop and whatnot are doing real numbers in The US.
Speaker 8:Mhmm. 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.
Speaker 1:Sorry. I know you got to leave, but give me your thirty second outlook on TikTok post kind of acquisition, change in ownership. How's the platform changing, what's your outlook?
Speaker 8:There's I felt nothing. I haven't done any real homework on any like corporate structure or what is going be the vibe.
Speaker 1:I know. But will the new owner will the new owners be willing to like subsidize TikTok shop is kind of what I'm getting at?
Speaker 8:They they don't need to. It actually works on merit.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 8:You only need to subsidize shitty shit.
Speaker 9:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Always a good time. Thank you so much for coming on. Great to see you. We'll talk to you soon, Gary. Goodbye.
Speaker 2:Later in the show, we'll be telling you about a local man who grew a 900 pound pumpkin in his backyard and will tell you what it means for AI scaling laws. But up next, we have Humble Robotics. The founder and CEO is in the waiting room. Let's bring in Ayall Cohen to the TBPN UltraDome. How are you
Speaker 3:doing?
Speaker 1:What's going on?
Speaker 9:Great. How are you doing, guys? We're doing
Speaker 1:we're having we're having a
Speaker 2:great day. A show.
Speaker 1:What's going on in the background?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Take us on a little tour.
Speaker 1:What's going on? What's going on? You
Speaker 9:can see the truck that we built. Oh. The vehicle that we built Okay. Is a class a electric autonomous vehicle for moving freight.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:But actually, I wanna hear about this 900 pound pumpkin. When you elaborate that that's actually.
Speaker 2:It applies to your business. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. In order the
Speaker 2:equivalent of a 45 pound pumpkin. Maybe that truck in the back is of 300 pound pumpkin but this is all in service of getting to the 900 pound pumpkin, the elusive 900 pound And you raised some money to help you Mhmm. Build that vision. How much did you raise? Who's it from?
Speaker 2:Tell me about the round.
Speaker 9:Yes. Okay. So we raised $24,000,000 and Keep it. A
Speaker 3:lucky clearing order. Continue.
Speaker 9:I'm so sad. It's it's so satisfying, really. It's great. Okay. We we raised 24,000,000.
Speaker 9:The lead investor was Eclipse.
Speaker 2:Fantastic.
Speaker 9:We also had we also had EIP in there as well as some other other friends. So That's great. Yeah. It was a great round for us.
Speaker 1:Okay. 24,000,000 Yeah.
Speaker 2:You're That's one
Speaker 1:of the highest signal Yeah. Probably the highest signal if you're building in robotics.
Speaker 2:Yeah. At the same time, you're building something big in robotics. $24,000,000. That's great for a seed, but how how much does it cost to build one of these? What what are the comps?
Speaker 2:Like, what what what will the next couple years like be like of actually getting these on the road?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So 24,000,000 is the start. Right? Yeah. It's we are we're doing hardware.
Speaker 9:We're doing robotics. We're doing autonomy software. That that does cost money, but it costs way less than it used to. I think, you know, you look at some of the the 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?
Speaker 9:A lot of work has been done in this space. I've been working in this space for ten or eleven years now on autonomous freight and six. We We get we get the benefit. I love We get the benefit of of of a lot of work that's been done in many in 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.
Speaker 2:Okay. Talk about the key trade offs. No cab. No driver. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Are you pro LiDAR? Are you pro teleoperation? Like, what are you gonna do a crawl, walk, run thing? Is it a straight shot to full self driving? What's the thesis?
Speaker 9: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 could use at any moment.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Most of my career has been spent working on LiDAR technology, but actually where we see vision based tech on cameras is incredible right now, think especially in the last year or two.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:This is a this I always joke with our head of Tommy. I have seven startups under my belt now. Wow. Is the second one I founded, And so we've been kinda doing a lot over the many years. This the first time the company has really been vision camera focused in autonomy for me.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. And what I'm seeing on that side is incredible. It's like it just it's it's honestly kinda magic. Yeah. But if we still take the same approach that you see in autonomy.
Speaker 9:Right? It is a it is a, what did you say, crawl walk crawl walk run? Yeah. We we take that approach too. Right?
Speaker 9:First, you test in private roads and tracks. You you get you validate the hardware and the software together, And then you from there, you 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 that's the idea.
Speaker 2:Average 18 wheeler costs something like 120,000, $200,000, maybe $2.75 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.
Speaker 2:So the the the the cost of the vision stack has to be pretty low, but is the are there GPUs on board? Are you doing on device inference? Like, what's the economic balance? How is this how should a customer even think about this in a different mindset?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So so what what do you get from removing the cab? Right? What's the benefit of having a cab less vehicle other than it's it's cool? I think when we were conceiving the project, the question was, how do we move freight?
Speaker 9:Given where technology is, how do we move freight at the lowest possible cost? Right? And the lowest possible cost to me was, okay. We we think about making it well, it's autonomous. Right?
Speaker 9:So we could save about a dollar per mile there. We we make it electric. Right? So that that lowers the maintenance cost. And now especially with, like, some of the volatile fuel issues, you know, we get benefit there.
Speaker 9:Right? And, you know, the cab itself is is cost to the equipment that is necessary in autonomous world.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9: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 wanna have the equipment 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 it's it's both the the semi truck part and the trailer part in combination. Right?
Speaker 9:And this and this for the 40 foot version of it that we're looking at. Yeah. So we want the equipment cost to be comparable, and then the cost per mile is just dramatically lower. That's the idea.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How do you think about supporting infrastructure? I mean, there was a massive build out of charging infrastructure as Tesla ramped. That beneficial? Is that enough?
Speaker 2: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 cab less delivery and doesn't have, you know, the wrong configuration to be able to puzzle piece in the the the container.
Speaker 9:Yeah. That's right. And actually, part of the reason that we launched I mean, the company is very young. We're we're we started about eight months ago. Right?
Speaker 9:We built this vehicle very quickly. Yeah. So, yeah, we have a we have an absolutely killer team. They're they're the most fantastic people I've ever worked with. And we we try to move very quickly, and we launched, you know, pretty early in the journey.
Speaker 9:We were public about what we're doing, and the reason is that you wanna 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 and how they operate. So we we're being public about what we're doing because it's our message to our our our customers that we work with them on 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.
Speaker 9:It's like we could put cameras behind it. We could back up into docks. Right? And so how do we how do we organize that kind of effort with them? How do we think about charging?
Speaker 9:How do we think about, you know, plugging into their their software, right, which, you know, sometimes every shipper has a different software stack that we have to work with. So we we're starting those conversations really early. And, yeah, as a company, just moved very fast.
Speaker 2:What's it gonna take to get you on Axe?
Speaker 9:On Axe. I actually I actually signed up for an Axe account right before the launch.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 9:I'm on it. I just I just need to figure out how to use it. But but I'm there.
Speaker 2:I'm there. I'm I'm here. Win, we'll tell Nikita. One more user. More user
Speaker 9:Nikita. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Where is the company based? Where what does actually scaling the company look like? Mhmm. Are you gonna make Detroit great again?
Speaker 2:Can we do something over there? Motor City? What we thinking?
Speaker 9:We're in San Francisco. Okay. 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?
Speaker 9:But, you know, we're we're in San Francisco. That's that's where I live. That's where I'm based. That's where I've been working on tech for the last twenty years. And it makes sense.
Speaker 9:Of as a scale out
Speaker 2:and and Yes. Prototyping hub, but you have a you have a warehouse, but you don't have a Gigafactory yet, and that might be something. Correct. Got it.
Speaker 9:Yeah. And that can and that can happen anywhere in The US, but we're designing in The US. We're building in The US. We're part of the reindustrialization movement of The US. So that's that's the plan.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 9:So I started 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 twenty years as that shifted out of not only just the Bay, but out of The US entirely. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 9:And I I and now you see the sort of the rush to get it back, and I think I think there is it takes time, but there are a lot of smart people that have working in this space for a long time, and there's a lot of excitement and capital pouring into this. You know, our backers at Klipsch are just the most phenomenal people you could be working with, and they get this, and they they understand it. And you'll just see a lot more investments in this space in general as we grow. And, yeah, the I think the supply chain's coming back here. It just it's it takes time like like everything.
Speaker 9:It's just gonna come back in automated automated factories this time around.
Speaker 2: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 it. Have you read this? Are you familiar with this story?
Speaker 9:I I'm a little bit familiar with the story. That's actually how
Speaker 1:they put together the money for the first round for a
Speaker 2:couple of No. No. No.
Speaker 1:No. No.
Speaker 2:That's not what happened here. But I mean, it is something that that 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.
Speaker 9:Well the way that we did.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you
Speaker 2:so much.
Speaker 1:I am just based on this conversation, I'm extremely confident that this company will be wildly successful. Yep. And I'm glad you're doing Yeah. Terrific.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for coming on soon. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 9:We'll see you soon.
Speaker 2:Bye. After missed it. There we go.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2: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 after our next guest.
Speaker 4:That's a narrative violation.
Speaker 2:We have Yoland Yan 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?
Speaker 2:Let's fucking go.
Speaker 3:Please.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:I'm surprised no one's ever pulled off an entrance like this.
Speaker 2:No. No. This is exquisite. Please introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about what's going on.
Speaker 3:My name's Yoland. I'm the co founder and CEO of Confui. I apologize. I've been instructed that I can be anything but boring for this show. So Okay.
Speaker 3:Here I am.
Speaker 1:That's true. You know, you you studied. You studied.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I did. I did.
Speaker 1:What what tell us your entire life story from inception. Now what be be
Speaker 6:I think there's too
Speaker 3:many points for you to start over here. Let let me remove the distraction for you for now.
Speaker 2:What is the distraction? Give us the backstory, like why that creature. The
Speaker 3:distraction is a character created by my co founder. It's actually the origin of this tool. Yeah. Yeah. If it weren't for this character, we wouldn't be raising and becoming a half billion dollar company today.
Speaker 3:So Congratulations. Shout out to the Fennec character.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So for those who don't know, Comfy UI, node based workflow for visual design, video production, know, DaVinci Resolve level performance, but for the modern era, is that roughly correct? How how are you thinking about introducing the company?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Comfy is a note based system that aim to give the highest leverage of control and quality for content creation. Yeah. 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.
Speaker 3: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 Comfy ended up being adopted by these top studios around the world. The recent Coca Cola ad or Super Bowl ads were all made using Comfy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then also inject a level of deterministic and programmatic variation into the generative AI workflow 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
Speaker 1:I'm getting
Speaker 2:five minutes. Yeah. Actually parallelize Yes. That makes sense. Yeah.
Speaker 2: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 and how do you how are you making money from all of this so far?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Great question. It started first as open source project. Actually, it's a personal project to begin with.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And then originally, a lot of the companies actually just ended up using it, running on their own hardware most of the time locally. Yep. We introduced Comfy Cloud as a product about five months ago. Oh, cool.
Speaker 3: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. It's incredibly difficult to stitch everything together to provide this infrastructure level of support, especially for, like, you know, professional creative companies or Totally. Studios. So, yeah, that's kind of, like, you know, how we monetize off of it.
Speaker 2:How big of a deal is CDance two point o? The videos that I saw were incredible. It felt a little bit inaccessible. Is it diffusing rapidly?
Speaker 3: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 closed source model.
Speaker 3:But just to comment on the progress over here, we're super excited to see, like, you know, where the trend goes towards to
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:When these CDance model gets launched onto Comfy platform. You see people kind of building on top of creating even better workflow using these models. And I can't wait for, you know, one day we'll just have Avatar being created in someone's, you know, bedroom and backyard.
Speaker 2:Okay. When? Over on your 282028.
Speaker 1:Give us your Hollywood predictions.
Speaker 2:When can I actually watch a two hour movie? An hour a ninety minute movie because I've seen some incredible short films, some incredible vibe reels Not even short thirty seconds. I've seen yeah. Maybe two minutes, three minutes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Everybody's now seeing like
Speaker 2: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 ten minutes, then twenty minutes, and then ninety minutes.
Speaker 2:And when the ninety minute thing happens, I think a lot of people are going be like, wow.
Speaker 3: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 a content, the model has shifted so much that you're 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.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:So a lot of
Speaker 3:times, people focus on short clips in terms of the content. Yeah. 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 enter the previous portion.
Speaker 1:Oh, It
Speaker 3: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 three d CG rendering using AI on the system in Comfy. 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.
Speaker 2: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. Yeah. But very different paths.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I believe the visual ecosystem is quite different. Okay. The main differentiation is there's a huge amount of taste. Even if someone can prompt Sea Dance thirty point zero to generate a feature film tomorrow, and it gets to 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 gonna be a very iterative process.
Speaker 3: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, know, ah, is this piece of code actually good enough? But in the visual world, you absolutely care the camera angle, the the facial feature, the the control layer, and that's, in my opinion, what differentiates the, you know, the AI slots from the comfy ecosystem of creation. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:What's the easiest AI feature to pitch to a Hollywood AI skeptic?
Speaker 3:The easiest way I would say from our perspective, this is might not be for everyone, is the fact that 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 case scenario, when people are using Comfy as a tool, it is actually empowering the creatives to do their work, to skip all of these boring stuff of colorization, of upscaling, downscaling manually in a traditional process. It enables you. So those are the world where we're not actually taking jobs, we're creating jobs.
Speaker 3:If anything, you go search on any job site today, there's actually a huge amount of people hiring for comfy UI, artists and specialists.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I I think like the the 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?
Speaker 2:What if your color grade was on your dailies as well? There's a whole bunch of interesting places where you can plug Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I've I've said this before and and at least some people were trying were calling me an idiot online. But I've had this idea that I think AI could actually help Hollywood. We're 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.
Speaker 1:And it just feels like we're we're gonna 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, you know, short film film, make beautiful advertisements, whatever they wanna do. So I think we will enter into a golden age of human human powered
Speaker 3:Creativity.
Speaker 1:AI powered humans doing incredible creative work.
Speaker 2:You mentioned that you're currently valued at half $1,000,000,000. How much did you raise? Tell us about the funding news.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We raised $30,000,000 from oh, man. Been looking forward to do this. Yeah. We raised $30,000,000.
Speaker 3:The round was led by a craft venture. Huge fan of folks out there. They've been tracking us for a while.
Speaker 2:Good job.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Been amazing working with them so far.
Speaker 2:Good job.
Speaker 3:Super excited. We're here to destroy our enemies and make open source creative tooling win. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Love it. Imagine imagine being your enemy right now logging on Oh,
Speaker 2:I think we talked to his enemy earlier this week. I'm not gonna say who it was, but I think we know who he's coming for and I'm rooting for
Speaker 1:him. Well, imagine Oh, it's over for me.
Speaker 2:But It's over for me.
Speaker 3:Idea because we in our mind, we don't really have enemy. The only enemy is
Speaker 2:Oh, no. I'm not talking about I'm not talking about startup competitors.
Speaker 3:Oh, I see.
Speaker 2:I'm talking about Adobe. Bloody. Never heard
Speaker 10:of that word.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But congratulations. Thank you for everything you do. Incredibly cool tool. If you haven't already checked it out, go go download Comfy UI, make some cool stuff.
Speaker 2:It's a lot of fun. And have a great rest of your day. Goodbye.
Speaker 1:Thanks, Great. Hanging.
Speaker 2: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 gonna tell everyone what the AI industry can learn from that story about supply chain bottlenecks.
Speaker 2:But up next, we have Ben Horwitz from Dorm Room Fund. He's an investment partner and is the creator of Sincerely, misspelled. You'll have to figure out how to spell it yourself if you wanna go check it out. But we'll let Ben introduce himself now. How are you doing?
Speaker 10:Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on. Love the show.
Speaker 2:Thanks
Speaker 10:I'm for having also an NBA at HBS.
Speaker 2:So Oh, yes. People are
Speaker 1:taking a victory lap
Speaker 2:on that.
Speaker 1:Soon to be master of business.
Speaker 2:They thought it was impossible for a for a an HBS grad to start a business, but you're proving everybody wrong.
Speaker 10:Thank you. Yeah. Twitter flamed me a little bit for it, but I'm still happy I'm here.
Speaker 1:I Wait. Wait. So why were people upset? I don't
Speaker 2:I don't Oh, it's like a non technical thing probably. Right?
Speaker 10:Yeah. I think Gary talked about it too a little bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Just the idea like I mean, HBS grads have started so many amazing companies but
Speaker 1:it's Oh, thought you were talking about the product.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So I built Sincerely. It's spelled with two e's. So s I n c e e r l y. Yes.
Speaker 10:And it's really like the anti grammarly. So I am naturally a terrible typist. Yeah. 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.
Speaker 10:Yeah. And I was so sick of AI slop in my own inbox.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 10: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 grammar release, something that really messes up emails.
Speaker 1:Are you you're talking about like CEOs that have terrible grammar because they're just typing quickly and it doesn't really matter.
Speaker 2:Well, there's the famous story about Ron Conway types in all caps. There's a whole bunch of these examples.
Speaker 1:Typing in all caps is
Speaker 2:All caps is elite because it just sounds like someone's yelling at you.
Speaker 10:It's kind of the anti gen z in a lot of ways, the all caps. Yeah. We don't have a Ron Conway mode yet though.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I had 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 this, turn these bullet points into paragraphs and then the other person on the other end saying turn the paragraphs into bullet points. Are are people using this specifically to write emails or is there an email summarization feature coming?
Speaker 2:Where do you see this going, I guess?
Speaker 10: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.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 10:And then they're using sincerely to make their email not sound like AI. And that's a crazy loop.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 10:Like, humans using AI to make AI more human. That's why like
Speaker 2: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 are you were talking about this
Speaker 1:Was this was this a a fun stunt? Or
Speaker 2:Yeah. Somebody called it a drop.
Speaker 5:Called the business.
Speaker 2:And I think it's a business. What do you think?
Speaker 10:I think it started as social commentary. This is like it it's satire and playful and I didn't want to pay for everyone's token, but like I do like I love making products that make people think twice about technology.
Speaker 4:Sure.
Speaker 10: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,
Speaker 3:you can pay me. Okay.
Speaker 10:I think it's probably double digit people who are paying and not using their own key,
Speaker 8:but it could be a business
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 10: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. Yeah. But ultimately, like, this is a it's satire meets something real.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So I hope that that people get it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That 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 trade offs 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.
Speaker 1: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? Like, or are they like, I'm actually glad I'm in school right now because it seems kinda gnarly out there.
Speaker 10:Okay. Yes. I have friends who who have dropped out for for YC and friends who have stayed for the exact same reason. Yeah. It's kind of, you know, swim or or sink.
Speaker 10:I think that people are building they're not building funny things, I would say. They're they're really trying to build things in the HBS sort of business first way. And my girlfriend's at GSB, so maybe there's a little bit of a different comparison Yeah. That you could ask her about.
Speaker 1:Inviting great houses.
Speaker 2:Do you think there will be a I mean, you go back to HBS in like the eighties 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 swing back. Like we saw Josh Kushner announce Thrive Eternal. He's taken 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.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I went to HBS and now I'm like, you know, VP at GE Vernova. That's probably a pretty good gig.
Speaker 10:Yeah. I mean the friends who I'm thinking about who actually dropped out to go do YC, you're gonna laugh, are focused on HVACs. Oh. And putting in the back
Speaker 2:of HVACs. Indeed. It's not
Speaker 1:a roll up. It's not a
Speaker 2:roll up. They the true HBS
Speaker 1:means Why has no one identified the opportunity in HVAC?
Speaker 2:HVAC is important. Have you ever not had air conditioning? No. One hot day in this studio and I demand HVAC. It is universal.
Speaker 10:It is sort of that's another loop that's tricky though. Right? Like, are we making the world warmer?
Speaker 1:Are we cooling it off? Are we putting
Speaker 10:AI in
Speaker 2:the back of HVAC? It's all an AI play at the end of the day. Interesting. Interesting. What were you doing before HBS?
Speaker 10:I started a company with my friend Reed that was a sort of like a philanthropic robo advisor, like Wealthfront or Betterment.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Yeah. And we sold that to Charity Navigator and I worked there.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 10:And not yeah. Hopefully, I'm a free agent in like three weeks.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 10:So heading to SF and and fulfilling my manifest destiny.
Speaker 2:So three weeks, is that HBS graduation
Speaker 1:You're saying you're finishing your earn out or or HBS? Yeah.
Speaker 10:Finishing HBS. The proverbial debt earn out. I don't know if you call it
Speaker 3:that.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome.
Speaker 2:That makes sense.
Speaker 1:Alright. Well, it was really great to meet you. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Great to
Speaker 1:And please let us know when you figure out what you're working
Speaker 8:on.
Speaker 2: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
Speaker 10:have something really funny coming out.
Speaker 2:I can tell Amazing.
Speaker 1:Thanks, guys. Yeah. Let's talk about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Have a good one. We'll see you soon.
Speaker 9:Thanks, guys.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. There is a ton more news. What should we go through? Spore says, what's the charge? Front running an overseas coup d'etat, a succulent Venezuelan coup d'etat?
Speaker 2:But this is a crazy story. Brandon Guerrelle and our team was obsessed with it. A US special forces soldier involved in the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolas 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?
Speaker 2:You you you 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 of your government work. Shame on you. But still
Speaker 1:He was betting on himself, and then he he he, like, referenced some 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
Speaker 2:People are really really having fun with the the new image gen model. Oh. This up because it's so rude. But this guy's effectively playing Minecraft through ChatGPT because he has to generate him an image of Minecraft. Says Mine?
Speaker 2:Of course, he's doing the island in Little Saint James, the very controversial one. And then he says And then
Speaker 1:he says, okay. Walk closer and it just generates a new scene.
Speaker 2:Pull it off. But
Speaker 1:sure I'm sure there's some kids out there that are that have figured out how to, how to play Minecraft in in chat GBT, but this is very funny. I found this post when it had 40 likes Oh. This morning. Sniped. Sniped.
Speaker 1:Invested early like game hunter on this. Coher is merging with a German AI Cool. Lab called Aleph Alpha.
Speaker 2:Biggest fan of Coher. I love Aiden Gomez. Transformer paper alum, Death Grips enjoyer, what's not to like about the legend Aiden Gomez. We gotta get him on the show. This is a congratulations moment for Cohere and Aleph Alpha.
Speaker 2:I think
Speaker 1:I'm saying it correctly. 5.5. Yes. Kits is saying Can I do AGI because if you ask it, bro, the car wash is five minutes away? Should I walk to it or go by car?
Speaker 1:And says, car bro, it's a car wash. Let the let the plot make sense.
Speaker 2:Wait. What?
Speaker 1:That's Like it just immediately clocks it.
Speaker 2:Oh, I like that it's hey, I've seen this exact test done in normal language like with a proper prompt, not the casual bro slang. Yeah. And and it's 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.
Speaker 2:That feels very remarkable. It also got the r's in strawberry correct, Craig? And how many strawberries in the letter r zero? The letter r is not known for its berry storage. These are good answers.
Speaker 2:The the the 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 the next generation of AI impacts are from this.
Speaker 1:Tyler Yeah. Hajj says Is found a post Oh. Five and a half years ago. Elon says the rate of improvement from the original GPT to GPT three is impressive. If this rate of improvement continues, GPT five or six could be indistinguishable from the smartest humans.
Speaker 1:Just my opinion, not an endorsement. I left OpenAI 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.
Speaker 2:Funniest outcome is the most likely.
Speaker 1:And then the last the last
Speaker 2:Best thing I wanted bros and do a buddy cop film together.
Speaker 1:The last thing, there is a new app from X. Oh, yeah. X Chat.
Speaker 2:X Chat.
Speaker 1:And I'm excited to try this out because the current yeah. The the DMs on X have been pretty brutal. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:Haven't had that much of problem. I do have this weird this weird bug where when I click the chat button on desktop, it sort of loads and then it resorts after it loads. And 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.
Speaker 2: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 new app. I probably need to be better about answering DMs.
Speaker 9:I I have a lot
Speaker 2:of them that are unread. So having a dedicated app for that, That sounds cool. People were taking shots because the Everything app is supposed to be everything in one place instead of three apps to get everything in the Everything app. Sort of silly. Who cares?
Speaker 2:More apps the better. I like apps. So go download it. Go check it out and go go like Nikita's post because he's been on a generational run. Also, GBT 5.5 is available in the API now.
Speaker 2:That's breaking news, I guess, from Greg. So anyway, we will see you on Monday. Have a great weekend. Enjoy the weekend. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Speaker 2:Sign up for a newsletter at tbpn.com, and we'll see you tomorrow. Flashbang out. Incredible.