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

28:37Someone should make a TBPN style show. Yes. For whatever you just described. I feel like it would be very cool. That would be cool. If you had maybe a couple of hosts, you know, on-screen graphics and provide kind of live coverage while that was happening. Extremely educational. Well, we have our first guest of the show. George from CrowdStrike is back in the TVP and Ultradome. He's in the waiting room. George, how are you doing? I'm doing well. How are you guys? We're doing fantastically. Welcome to the show. So I would love to kick it off with just an introduction on Project Quilt Works. What's new?

29:12Get us up to speed on CrowdStrike. Well, first, I have to congratulate you guys for your success there. So I got to start with that, but we can get back to that later. But Project Quilt Works is really a coalition that we put together with some of our largest global partners, like EY, like IBM, like Accenture, that's really focused on helping to deliver our technology to customers as well as leveraging some of the frontier models to be able to identify very quickly and help mitigate the exposures that we're seeing with AI. Obviously, we've seen some of the news with Mythos and I'm sure we'll talk about that.

29:53But the fact that there is such a focus now from the CEOs all the way down on where are my exposures, where are my vulnerabilities, and what can I do to mitigate it? So we put together a group of basically some of the largest global security partners that we have to go out and be able to do this because we have to do it very quickly. The window is closing in the time that we have to identify, patch, and remediate and mitigate these issues. Yeah. I mean, we've been tracking a lot of the new data breaches. Some of the startups that we know and love that come on the show have been, there's been vulnerabilities that have led to a variety of security issues.

30:36Supply chain hacks, social engineering. Supply chain hacks, lots of stuff. How much of that do you think is driven by attackers using AI or the internal companies using AI sloppily? sloppily? Like there's sort of a dual dynamic there where the attacker gets stronger, but potentially the defender could also get weaker. Are they both important? How are you grappling with those two sides of the equation? Well, they're both important. And I'm glad you pointed that out because when you think about what actually happens is you're having more and more users consume AI and how they're doing that is leveraging AI through any number of applications.

31:14It could be Cloud Code, Codex, et cetera, 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 enterprises and corporations don't know where it is. Yeah. 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 cloud 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.

31:51So 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 going to find the path of least resistance and deal with what's hot today and where the exposure is. And that's on the endpoint where people consume AI. How have your conversations with lab leaders been going around models getting more powerful and then the natural response? Of course, there's the opportunity to gate the models to companies that can be trusted. But there's also the potential to not let the model be jailbreakable. So it should help me with defense.

32:30But 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 seeing glimmers of confidence in the ability for AI labs to actually contain the model's capabilities as they roll them out to a broader audience? Well, the model capabilities continue to obviously improve and also the capabilities that allow them to provide guardrails and limits on what a user can do.

33:13But that's not going to get you where you need to be, which is one of the reasons why, from a security perspective, companies like ours and others are focused on looking at the prompts, understanding what happens there, and then being able to sort of provide the guardrails at the prompt layer. You want to take care of what you can 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 going to have an interaction with that model and it's going to be via prompt. And whenever you have sort of unstructured data just being sent somewhere and then being executed, if you will, it's right for problems.

33:52And this is one of the time-tested issues that security has had. So putting guardrails on that, we call it AIDR, AI Detection and Response, and it allows companies to look at those prompts and make sure that they're sanitized to and from the LLM. How are you thinking about the threat of open source models? The new DeepSeq R4 preview from yesterday was super impressive. Are you expecting open source models that have really threatening cyber capabilities in something like six months? I think Dario was estimating around six month lag time after Mythos for the lagging edge to catch up. I don't think it's long in a few areas.

34:41I mean, if you look at KB26 that just came out, right? I mean, these are impressive models that are out there. And what you have to realize is even the Frontier models themselves, the ones that are public, are still very, very capable. It is extremely capable. So you can find a lot of vulnerabilities. You can basically chain these together and create sort of an automated attack. And that's what we're seeing. Obviously, some of the private models have the ability to actually chain these sort of vulnerabilities together. More like a human, they've got more reasoning capabilities, which is one of the really powers of their models.

35:18But the other models are not far off, and the open source or the open weight models really are going to be focused on catching up very quickly. So the window, as I said when I started the program with you, is very small. And that's why we started this coalition with QuoteWorks 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. How are you thinking about AI powered, but potentially non-automated cybersecurity risks? I'm just, we were talking to a founder who's working with, you know, engineer recruiting, and he was having luck using AI agents to send outbound emails.

36:09And you can imagine that, you know, 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. And I'm wondering if this is something that we potentially need to be more aware of and not get overly distracted and forget about the human element of security. Well, the human element is really the weakest link. I call it a layer eight problem, right? The problem is between the keyboard and the chair. And that has been the case for a long time. So let's take your example.

36:50One of the most prolific groups, threat actor groups that we actually track is called Silent Chalima, which is North Korea. So North Korea has been very active in getting hired into a company, right? And then basically the laptop that you send them gets sent somewhere in the U.S. to a mule, and that mule takes it to a laptop farm. And then the North Koreans control that. So they already just bypass all of your security because you just handed them a laptop. Wow. Okay. Right. So we're seeing lots and lots of those. And it's funny because we really I started identifying this before anyone even knew about it about two years ago.

37:28And we first started notifying customers like, hey, we think you have a North Korean. It's not really Bob in Texas. It's a North Korean, which obviously is a little dicey when you're talking about an employee that may not be an employee. So we told everybody and then finally they tracked it down. They said, yeah, you're right. and they went to the hiring manager. They told the hiring manager, like, hey, we need to get rid of this person. 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, I mean, I can't make these stories up.

37:58Yeah, wouldn't there be an incentive at some point if they did get somebody on the inside to just actually staff a bunch of super talented engineers like on that one individual employee? So you have like four remote engineers doing the job of one like real employee. Right. So it looks like, wow, this person is like insanely high output. They're working around the clock. We can't. Why would we get rid of them? They're they're incredible. There's no way they're there. There's no way they're just, you know, that's crazy. Farming us out. That's exactly that's exactly what they do. So we're seeing that we're seeing agents go rogue, which is problematic.

38:36One of the one of the big challenges with AI is is goal seeking. So you create an agent. One story is a customer that created like 100 agents. One agent found some issues in code, wanted to fix it, but it didn't have access. So it went back to the Slack channel where the other 99 agents were hanging out and said, hey, I'd like to fix this issue. I don't have access. Who has access? One agent put its hand up and said, I can fix that for you and happily fixed it and basically worked around all the security boundaries. So goal seeking, I don't think we talk enough about goal seeking, because when you put an agent on it, depending on what model you're using and how it's set up in the harness, they just go nuts until they actually get to the goal.

39:16They'll actually steal credentials out of your keychain, even if you didn't give it to them, so they can keep going. Wow. That's what we're seeing. Yeah, because in one way that, you know, if the if the goal is to achieve the task, 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.

39:54Now it is amplified a million fold with artificial intelligence. But are there other maybe more bespoke or soft skill tasks that cybersecurity researchers are able to amplify their efforts with by working alongside AI? Well, AI is going to change the way the SOC works, the Security 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.

40:34The fifth level is it just does everything for you. Now, as an industry, we're a 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 stock analysts and you're turning them into tier three. And that has paid dividends. But the soft skill is it would take one of our customers, give me 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.

41:12And now four days turns into like an hour because it can all be automated using something like Charlotte, which is our agenting capability. So all of those things that were problematic, you can just get through and you let AI do what it's really good at. grind through lots of data, look at lots of sort of information, write reports for you, and then your AI agents can begin to take autonomous action. Some, again, by themselves, some with human in the loop, but it's really going to make the SOC a lot more efficient. Jordan, anything else? More fun question than less scary question. How is AI changing Formula One?

41:52Well, there you go. This is a great question. It's interesting because I think there's different levels of adoption of AI between all the different teams. One team might be spending a ton on inference. Another team is like, we use radios. We're doing it the old-fashioned way. What's interesting is there is some talk, and I'm not sure exactly where it stands, where AI will be part of the cost cap. So if you think about wind tunnel time and all the expenses. So, well, you have an incredible technology that can, you know, dramatically automate things. All of a sudden now it's part of the cost cap and then they're going to have to rein it in.

42:33So 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 where it all goes. And obviously, you know, I'm trying to help out the Mercedes team in those areas as well. That'd be great. Yeah. Do you think there will be, you know, five, 10 years from now, do you think there will be like you'll be able to look back and be like, OK, 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?

43:08I think you'll see like a pre and a post. The challenge is you're going to have to run through a lot of the different engineers that have been in Formula One for many years. because just like in the corporate world, you know, there's resistance to, well, what is AI going to do for me? And there's resistance in Formula One and 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. And it doesn't mean they're bad or it's right or wrong. It's just the way they operated for so many years.

43:40So I think just as we see kids coming out of school, they're AI natives, right? They just gravitate towards that. And when you start to see AI native engineers, you're going to see more and more adoption of that in Formula One. That makes a ton of sense. Makes sense. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations for the progress. It has to have been a wild, wild quarter, but come back on soon. It's great progress. We will. Great to see you guys. Great to see you. Congrats again to you. Goodbye. Thank you. After our next guest, we will be diving into the Summer House reunion, which has gone off the rails.

44:13we're going to explain why bravo is the cleanest lens for understanding u.s china decoupling but first we have professor sendy he's a word combo guru he's a wombo guru welcome to the show how are you doing hey well thank you good to see you guys good to see you thanks for having me on i appreciate it we're thrilled we're huge fans we're huge fans honestly i discovered i i think i was pretty early. I will say when I discovered your account on Instagram, I did not have a single other person that I knew following your account. Oh, so you were one of the OGs on the channel. I think I'm an OG and I kept sending them to John and I'm like, this is the funniest thing in the world.

44:58It's so good. And so we've been trying to hear. I love the original fans. You guys are amazing. You guys like really the ones that fueled the fire for me to keep going. So I'm glad. I'm glad. Okay, so let's get right into it. You're the professor. This is a technology-focused show. We've been using Wombos in the show, but a lot of people in our world in the technology industry are not using Wombos very aggressively yet. We think that's going to change. There's this explosion of AI adoption. We're expecting an explosion of Wombos adoption. Let's hope so. That would be amazing to see. You know, I've seen these Wombos be spread amongst not just young people, but, you know, the older generation is starting to use them a little bit, too.

45:45And I'm I'm thinking about expanding it to sort of include some of the older generation slang as well. And I've had some people request that. So I'm trying to expand this and try to make it more universal. Yeah. What was what was the first one? What like what what really drew you to Wombos? What was the first? You know, honestly, I saw a video and I basically just it was they had put the low Kirk Hentilogic, a low state. word together. And I was like, oh, I can just make this longer. And I just went ahead and added a word to it. And then it kind of blew up. It took off. And I was like, okay, I guess I'm pretty good at this.

46:18So 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 I have this crazy long word now that people are trying to learn and it's just grown from there. And now I'm just creating original Wombos. And And I'm sure you guys have seen and everybody's seen that people are using these wombos all over the place, in schools and just out in daily life. And so it's really been a movement that I was not expecting. I love it. Can you one-shot your longest word? Is it on command or do you need to iterate through it? No, I can do it on command.

46:55Do you want to do it? Sure, I'll try it. Okay, here we go.

47:21Wow. Here we go. I wasn't expecting that. I can't believe you pulled that off. Are you actually a professor? What is your background? How did you get into this? Was this just a side hustle that just went mega viral? What is your story? Yeah. Okay. So basically, I'm not a professor in real life, but I have a master's in education, but I don't work in education. Okay. Got it. So I don't have a background in words either. I used to be a rapper a long time ago. People ask me, how are you so good at doing this? How do you put these words together? And I just tell them, it's a natural skill I have. And then I used to do it back in the 90s.

47:58I was like one of the original white rappers from back then before Eminem was even around. That's amazing. Wow. No way. Yeah. And so I've been doing it for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. We were reflecting earlier on. Born too late to explore the earth. Yes. Born too early to explore the stars. Yes. Born just in time to be the leading expert on Wombos. Yes. For sure. That's perfect. Yes. Yeah. We were reflecting on the fact that I'm not sure how familiar you are with this, but like Like the Silicon Valley in particular went through like a series. I mean, they call them portmanteaus back then, but Wombos were very popular.

48:35You have Pinterest, Instacart, Instagram, and there were like a thousand other companies where that was the default pattern for naming a company because the dot com would be available. It would be very hard to go get, you know, Pinterest dot com or, you know, order shopping like, you know, grocery store dot com. but Instacart was available. And so people would sort of mash these up. 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 like revisited and re, uh, re, reignited, or is it all just forward into the crazier and crazier phrases?

49:16You 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 1979 or something like that. Yeah. Um, in terms of calculator, this is a calculator that's a lighter too. Like if you want to smoke while you're doing math calculators and it's got a little lighter thing. Wow. We need, we need one of those. That's amazing. Yeah. And, um, and so another word, so I haven't really visited a lot of older words. Um, honestly, so there was a word that came out in the dictionary the other day, chopel ganger.

49:48So that word is actually not mine. So I'm not, I know, but you Miriam Webster needs to hire you like immediately and start getting I want to get, I want to get Queesh Penimus in there. That's one that I really want to get. Explain that wombo for people. Explain that wombo. Yeah. So, so basically Queesh Penimus is like one of the big ones that people are using. And so that's like quirky niche. And then Penimus is Peak Cinema Analysis. Sorry, I'm like the overachieving student. I studied. So we integrate these words. I personally, I use Quiche Lorraine more. Yes. Quirky niche lore explain. Yeah, that's a handy one.

50:29That's what I learned from you, professor. Yeah, so I love Quiche Lorraine. I actually have a new version of that. I don't know if I can actually say it on your show. I don't know the limits, but so it's Quiche Lorraine-o-visions. Oh, yes. So it's basically like you take Queech Lorraine and then you mix it with anal visions. Which is analysis. I apologize if I can't say that here. We're a pretty family-friendly show, but it's analysis vision, to be clear. Is that right? Yes, it's analysis revision. Revision. So it's basically, if you do one of those, you're basically just doing an analysis revision of it.

50:59Okay. Yes, correct. Yeah. How much time are you spending trying to come up with, like, when I think of Queech and Lorraine, I think of short, usable phrases that actually could work their way into the American vernacular. Whereas with the local technological, I don't think anyone's actually going to pick that up. It's more of like a stunt. It's impressive, but it's a different style of content. I use Lorraine all the time. I'll say, John, Lorraine entails earnings. Yes, yes, yes. But how much time are you splitting between these? Do you think that there's something innate about being terse and short that will actually allow a wombo to break through and ideally make it into the Merriam-Webster's dictionary?

51:43Yeah, I actually have a theory behind how to make effective wombo's like that. So I think, like you're saying, short wombo's are good. Something that sounds good, it has to sound good. So it's like the quiche, it sounds good. I don't know. It sounds nice when you say it. It sounds like a real word. Some words just don't work. Yeah, it's almost like where, you know, the pharmaceutical companies, they come up with these names for the drugs and you're like, that does sound like a thing, but I never would have guessed what that is. And it doesn't sound just like you pounded on the keyboard. You got like Ozempic, which like sounds like a drug for some reason.

52:16It's just like, but it's from nothing. And those things tend to break through. Also, I feel like Chopelganger really jumped straight into Merriam-Webster's because it feels like with a very little amount of work, you can reverse engineer it. And that also seems to be key to getting some Wombos to break through is can someone take a guess and get 80 % of the way there and then sort of, you know, pique their interest and then go a level deeper and understand the whole lore. Talk about the origins of nonchalash out. That's one that we've been using quite a lot. That's a really good one. Once you know that wombo, which is nonchalant crash out, you just see it everywhere.

52:59You do. It's constant. It's everywhere. Every time I open X or Instagram or YouTube, someone's having a nonchalash out. Yeah. Yep, pretty much. So yeah, a nonchalash out is basically when you look nonchalant on the outside, but then on the inside, you're crashing out. So, I mean, I think a lot of people can do this. You know, for example, the CEO at McDonald's, you know, when he was eating that burger, I'm pretty sure he was having a nonchalash out when that was happening. He looks pretty calm on the outside, but on the inside, I'm pretty sure he was freaking out a little bit. He was in a dark place, for sure.

53:34So 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. But it has existed probably for, you know, entire human history. This has happened. But how much of it is you see something and you say that deserves a wombo versus you're just sort of grappling with different phrases. And then you find examples. Another example from the professor. Capsolutely. Capsolutely. I would use this personally if I know someone just basically BSing, kind of like lying to me.

54:12I'd say capsolutely. Yes. You know? You want to agree. Well, here's the here's the secret. OK, so I'll let you in on this. So when you when you make a word, if you find an opposite word and you kind of make the word a paradox, so like a nonchalant shot doesn't really make sense. Right. Because it's like, how can you be nonchalant and crash out at the same time? But when you put them together, you really think about it. All human behaviors are kind of paradoxical. They all they all have like, you know, this aspect and this aspect. So like another example would be figuratively. So that's figuratively and literally.

54:42How can something be figurative and literal at the same time? But it's kind of possible if you really think about it. You can literally mean something figuratively or you can figuratively mean something. You can literally mean it halfway. It's the Hegelian dialectic. The thesis and the antithesis create the synthesis. Jam them together and you can really come up with some beautiful wombo's that way. That's really kind of the secret to a lot of it for sure. Where do you want to go with your creator journey? Because I was thinking like Instagram reels notoriously hard to run ads or monetize. I don't know that there's an obvious like Patreon paid podcast play here.

55:22Maybe I would be interested to listen to you talk about etymology and language for hours. But I was thinking like brands should be paying you to create Wombos about their products or their brands. and that would be sort of synergistic with like what the audience expects, what would actually go viral and what you could actually get paid for. But are you early in the creator journey? How are you thinking about this as a business? Yeah, so right now I'm working on a dictionary. So I'm hoping to use that as a stepstone to launching my products. That's great. Yeah, so I'm launching the dictionary. I think coffee table, like a coffee table book, like the great book of Wombos.

56:03something you can proudly place on a coffee table. It's a conversation starter. I want to have a book where I can put it on the table and people can just flip through it. I want it to look real nice and I want it to be a really great item to have. But also, like you said, I want to have some brands that I work with. Like a coffee table dictionary. A coffee dictionary. You're working on these. Sorry. There you go. You're coming up with stuff. I'm working on it. But yeah, what else are you cooking? You've got to keep on going. Yeah, for sure. But no, no, I'm early on in my journey. So I'm looking to, you know, work with some people and I'm looking to make some books and I'm just looking to keep on building what I'm doing right now.

56:39And 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 yeah. Yeah. There's so many opportunities. So it's, it's really looking up. 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 your grasp on the English language is sorely needed among some companies that have very complex product names. And so I see a bright future in a bunch of different ways, but eagerly await about the coffee table book.

57:25Anything else, Jordy? No, this was super fun. We're having Gary Vee on in just a couple minutes, and we'll ask him ideas on how to monetize Professor Sandy in the Wombo universe because I feel like he could – I think he'll have some ideas. Yeah, that would be amazing. Yeah, mention me to Gary Vee. That would be very cool. That's awesome. Yeah, I appreciate that. Do you experience anything different across the platforms? I know we follow you on Instagram. I know you're on TikTok. is there anything that you've learned from like the different platforms? Definitely. So TikTok, I think is more for discovery.

58:02Okay. So if, you know, if you do something that's completely novel, that video can really blow up. Yeah. I think Instagram is much more generous with its views. But I think you can really build a solid base more on Instagram. I just feel like TikTok is more for discovery. Instagram is more for growth and personalization of your brand. Have you put these on YouTube shorts yet? And what's that? Have you put them on YouTube shorts yet? Just because it's a similar platform. I used to do YouTube and I just, I don't know if it's going to fit on that platform. I just, I don't know. I'm hesitant to go there and I've been hesitant to go on Facebook meta.

58:33Oh yeah. Just because I don't know if it'll work. And I just, I used to do that. And so I'm just, I'm not sure about it yet. So we'll see. We'll see. Okay. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join the show. Fantastic. And thank you for all your analysis and teachings. Yes. It has brought, brought both of us so much joy. Yeah. Like not just watching the videos, but using them. We got our lawyer to use Quiche Lorraine once, and we were very, very happy about that. Okay, that's a high compliment. I appreciate that. Thanks for telling me that. It was remarkable. Yeah, Jordy and John, I appreciate you guys having me on.

59:06I really do. Yeah, you're the man. We'll talk to you soon. Great hanging. Have a good rest of your day. All right, thank you. Goodbye. Greg Brockman's apartment is for sale where they started OpenAI. Shiel 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 million. 1 ,800 square feet. It is an incredible piece of lore that OpenAce started in this particular apartment. Yeah, this feels like it will go quickly. Yeah. Like there are so many people in San Francisco that might need a place.

59:56And to just snap up the place that OpenAI was effectively formed. Yeah, I remember some of the early photos. Good times. We should go to this video from Zane Shah. Imagine every pixel on your screen streamed live directly from a model. So this looks like a website. And when I saw this, I thought that it was a website. I saw a URL at the top and I was like, oh, this is a cool demo for some sort of tour of Notre Dame website. Probably vibe coded a testament to what the modern coding models can do. But it's not code. What you are seeing is actually not code. There's no HTML, no layout engine, no code.

1:00:38It 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? Because the chat is doing a bunch of womboes. Oh, OK. We got to work on womboes. We will be integrating those more in the near future. But we have our next guest in the waiting room, Gary Vaynerchuk from VaynerMedia. Gary. How are you doing? Welcome back to the show. Gary, do you know about Wombos?

1:01:18I do not, my friend. You've got to learn about Wombos. You've got to learn about Wombos. They are the next meta. They are the next meta. If you're not doing Wombos in 2026, you're getting left behind. So Wombos are word combos. So the example would be a quiche. It's quirky and niche. You put it together, and that's quiche. Or Lorraine. Lore plus explain. That was a risky start for the first word. Yeah, that's a risky one. Lorraine is a better one. Give me, if I say Lorraine. First and foremost, congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I remember our very first call. I think it was in Q1 of 2025.

1:02:01So we were just maybe like 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 a few times. and you told us, you guys, you said go harder. We were already going pretty hard, but you said go harder. And we certainly did. And go multi-platform. That was really huge too. You were very early in like, why don't you have a newsletter right now? Why aren't you on YouTube in multiple ways? Why aren't you on Instagram yet? And so we did the uncomfortable thing of posting pretty subpar content for a while, but it started the compounding very, very early and now it's really much better.

1:02:42everything starts subpar, right? Like when you start working out or when you start singing or drawing, like, you know, like for everybody who's watching right now, every business, every personal brand, every B2B, every B2C, to not take advantage of the attention media landscape that's in place right now, it's really 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, multi-channel, multi-format, the business outcomes can be extraordinary.

1:03:31And I'm happy to see you guys get one. Yeah. Thank you. Is it funny to you that it feels like in some ways we're like a decade into live streaming and yet people are – Two decades by some measures. Well, yeah, two decades by some measures. But like Twitch has been big for a long time. There's been so much attention there. I mean I wrote this book in 2008. It came out in 2009. Crush it in the back of the book. I talk about Ustream and live streaming. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it ebbs and flows. And to your point, I can't even comprehend the economic impact live social shopping is going to do over the next 10 years for humans and consumer businesses.

1:04:14Yeah, it's all the same stuff, brother. It's always been around forever, and it's always the beginning, right? It's just kind of the way consumer behavior and human behavior works. Yeah, it does surprise me how many more people have not replicated the very basic strategic framework that you guys executed in this genre. Well, the interesting thing is there's easily been a hundred shows that have taken some level of inspiration from what we're doing. It's still very, very hard to break through, right? It's not just the overlay and the format. But I've been very confident. I've said this on podcasts for, you know, we've talked about this going back probably six to eight months ago.

1:05:03you should take this format of a live stream and you just add a extra level of production beyond you just have a laptop there and you're hanging out and you apply that the example we'd always talk about is like cooking where all you need is like a cool kitchen 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 3 p.m i'm gonna cook dinner this is what i'm gonna cook here's the schedule you can make dinner with me and i think that that's like an entire niche that you could build around you could integrate great 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 in terms of live streaming um so credit credit to them yeah i mean it's it's it's there for the taking a lot of things are there for the taking yeah uh how are you thinking about uh how branding and marketing will evolve i had this interesting moment this week with the uh gbt images 2 launch where suddenly any brand like basically fully democratized high quality product photography now there's still categories where like i don't want you to ai generate the the product photography like even apparel is actually interesting where like fit matters a lot and so if you generate a bunch of ai images of your shirt and then i buy it and it doesn't fit well like i'm not going to be happy about it but for a bunch of categories 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 because even if somebody is like bootstrapped and scrappy like they would find that friend and say like hey do me a favor help me get some great images and you could kind of categorize like a company that you're seeing online like okay could this person figure out how to get great product photography or not, but now the bar is just so much lower, you're like a couple prompts away from it.

1:06:59And so it feels like it's going to be harder than ever to stand out online. Well, I mean, there's a lot there. I mean, we just got done talking about how hard it is to stand out online, right? Like the cost of entry is zero, but this is a competition. Like, you know, everyone's trying. And so everyone will make content, video, picture, audio at a level that is uncomprehendable to all of us that were born prior to five minutes ago. And this will be another transition. I think, you know, there's, there's always going to be, um, a timing game to this. Right. So right now, you know, like this open claw, you know, allows me to do things that a lot of people aren't thinking about right now.

1:07:54And me knowing that and me playing with that. And then even more interestingly, how creative or strategic am I with the agentic agents and what are they doing for me? And how do I understand them? 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 your home and other people were scared to because there was demons in it or, you know, the car or the, you know, the typewriter is one that I've like been fascinated by the competitive advantages of the companies that actually brought typewriters in versus, you know, putting penmanship on a pedestal, you know, like computers and the Internet and mobile devices and open source versus closed source and social media.

1:08:35now AI, you know, look, this AI thing is no joke. We all know that it's big stakes. There's a lot to it, but you know, I still think whatever that human was to being scrappy to find their friend for the photography, you know, that scrappiness is going to be deployed into something else. Totally. Totally. And so I also think, right. And I also think that we're about to see the explosion of analog right like i think this barbell that i keep thinking 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 and and my argument would be would be and yeah right yeah like to me this bar like i I just, extreme AI, I think, is creating extreme analog.

1:09:32I really do think it's a barbell. I think in the next 10 years, obviously it's 2036, but I feel like it's going to feel like 2050, which actually is bringing the rise of 1950. I couldn't be more impressed with what Ari Emanuel and others are doing that are investing in all these analog businesses. I could not be more interested in physical retail, in event driven businesses, in concerts and venues. And I think the rise of analog, I have a restaurant business, part of a restaurant group. I keep pushing my partners who are really operating. Let's open a restaurant that makes people check in their phone as soon as they walk in.

1:10:09Let's put people in group tables. You know, you see what's happening with flip phones, Gen Alpha buying them. We see vinyl sales. you know I've been very at the forefront of collectibles I felt collectibles was something tangible and was a gateway drug to community if you've never been 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 In five years, if we're having this interview right now, most of the audience is trying to figure out if we're real or not.

1:10:54That is very real and has real substantial counter opportunities. So the photographer who's sad when they hear that, I'm like, no, no, no. You might actually crush in a different way. And so I'm curious to see what the counter scaled moves are going to be of the next decade. And I think for any real entrepreneur, they're not crying about AI killing them. They're curious about what AI at scale is going to create opportunity for them. Okay. Totally. All right. Let's go deeper on analog. I want your reaction to this headline that for the first time this century, vinyl music sales eclipsed$1 billion in a calendar year.

1:11:40say their vinyl records are up something like 10 in 2025 yeah they're effectively like 10 of like global streaming revenue is just vinyl still it's bigger than cds it's making a bigger comeback than other formats uh what what is your what is your reaction is it people looking for wall decorations 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 coming back. 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.

1:12:15I mean, the answer is yes to both. Some of it's happening with decorative. A lot of it's happening with collectibles. Even more is happening with subconscious counter push to extreme digitalization. Sure. Yeah. There are people, this is, by the way, one of the reasons we're not going to see unlimited television commercials and social media content that's just pure AI from the biggest companies in the world is every time they try to go there, you probably have touched on your show, McDonald's, others, they get such backlash because the whole world is so scared that AI is going to take their job that the consumer is pushing against it.

1:12:51And then that's one part. And then the second part is, yeah, people are starting to do counter behavior consciously and unconsciously. And then there's just swings of trends. Like, you know, like music sounds great in a great record player. And like people are like, oh, this is kind of cool too. And like it becomes behavioral. You know, it starts in the same stuff. You know this. It's like the Brooklyn extremists are like, let's go, you know, hippie cool culture. And they get their little thing in the little sub pocket. It bleeds out a little bit. Then the Manhattanites feel like they're not cool anymore.

1:13:24So they do it to keep up with the Brooklynites. And then we have that version everywhere in California, Texas and Florida and everywhere in the world. And so it's just it's normal consumer behavior. But it is clearly a counterpoint to extreme in feed, in digital consumption. And I think that's great. It speaks to the thing I most believe in, which is humans correct themselves at a level that we are unbelievably underestimating. The sheer adaptability of the human race is extraordinary. Let's give it up for us Sports I want to talk about sports Sports are a good example We were talking earlier Josh Kushner is looking to acquire a stake in the Giants out of his new Eternal Fund which is basically will seemingly be a collection of evergreen bets that can't be disrupted by AI because I don't want to watch an AI simulation of the Giants The Sphere is another good example Crazy.

1:14:25Everyone was thinking that that was not going to go well. They were worried about the debt and the stock is up like 3x. It's done very well. How are you thinking about both opportunities in new physical locations like the Sphere and then also in the more legacy brands like the San Francisco Giants, the New York Mets, the different sports franchises out there? Yes.

1:14:55You know, it's really interesting. I'm going to tie a couple things together. This distribution channel that you and I are on right now, right? The fact that there are people watching. Yeah. In a way that 40 years ago, somebody would have to say, you guys are good faces and you look good and you're charismatic and you might get a shot on this distribution. This decentralization of distribution along with this analog and not disrupted by AI thing is why six or seven years ago I started investing very heavily in alternative sports. So I made a big bet on pickleball that I think is going to work out quite well.

1:15:31You know, unrivaled, the three-on-three basketball league, AJ and I, my brother, early investors in that. The wiffleball league, the sailing league, slam ball. So I've been very aggressive on alternative sport investing, Paddle. So I'm very bullish on it. I think Josh obviously plays at a very heavy economic level with his funds and that nature. And everyone like him and others, especially him, I have so much pride in his building because he's done such a great job. And New York City based when we were always like MBS, the best staff. So it's been great to see him thrive, shine. I think all anyone who does not realize how substantial the analog opportunities are is really missing the plot of what's happening.

1:16:15And so it gets exciting. It's exciting to think that you can invest in both something that could get as big as, you know, anthropic in an extreme digital world. But also forget about the obvious ones like the giants or the sphere. I'm talking about people rolling up 900 local restaurants and building up a huge like it compounds to 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.

1:16:56Here's a left field one, like the drive-in movie theater, right? The stuff that dominated the 50s and 60s. when I say that out loud of like, do you think a modern drive-in movie theater, which has done really well and executed super well, do you think that a lot of people would be about that life? I think we can all agree that yes. 100%. Yeah. And then what happens to the person that does 39 of those and has a real business and flips it? So I think it's a really cool time for a lot of us that have watched this show where like, oh crap, we can play on either side of extreme digitalization or analog be creative well yeah the beauty you know give you the example of somebody making like a modern chain of drive-in movie theaters is like you get all the benefits of ai still you get to you get to use it for to instantly respond to any customer message and help solve problems 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.

1:18:04Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. I could see, I could see doing that for kids, you know, like maybe slightly lower bar, but you create your own kind of kids, kids content. Again, a lot of things I do get more obvious later. I got made fun of writing that book. Anyone can personal brand on Twitter. Now it doesn't look so funny. I mean, I started building V friends and like building this Pokemon Sesame street thing. Yes, there was a lot of blockchain in it, but it was a lot of my smartest friends in Silicon Valley five years ago. Like this AI thing is percolating. You know, it was a little more slang for machine learning.

1:18:41And then it obviously got accelerated real quick. But like, yeah, I believe in a lot of this stuff. Well, speaking of people that are watching the show, there is an army of people named Ryan in the chat and they want to be acknowledged by us. So I'll ask you a question about a Ryan from your life. Can you tell me something you learned from Ryan Serhant or Ryan Holiday or maybe Ryan Harwood? Do any of these names conjure any interesting stories or life lessons? Yeah, the Ryan Mafia is good. I mean, Ryan Harwood, I've learned nothing from. Zero. Absolutely nothing. I just put that on the desk. you know Ryan Holiday was definitely the individual that I was like finally put a word to kind of how I was living my life right my mother's my hero she taught me just how to be a really happy human you know I thought it was immigrant 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.

1:19:44But when Ryan Holiday started talking about being a stoic and stoicistism, I was like, oh. Like, you know, like I was like, oh, shit, that sounds like, oh, that, that, that's interesting. And so I think that that's one for him. Serhan, you know, is a fun one for me because a lot of, you know, he's obviously playing at such a big personal brand level now. And he had that TV show on Bravo and then he 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 and hardwood is uh it's just a dear actual friend he's family not even friends so i uh he's taught me that uh i'm glad you sir I'm glad you circled back because I was like, damn, he's taking shots.

1:20:45You 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 anything. I think literally from from 1985 to 2000, 98 percent of the words out of my best friend's mouths was highly disrespectful in my direction. Of course, that's the best. That's the only way to do it. Ryan Holiday wrote, trust me, I'm lying. Conventions of a media manipulator at 25. Should more young people write books? I talk to some brilliant young people every day on the show. A lot of them fantasize about writing a book, but it always feels like it's something that needs to come with wisdom and needs to come with being 40, 50, 60.

1:21:32Yeah, do you get a lot of wisdom? But part of it's like you're generating wisdom through writing and thinking deeply. Do you feel like... I think of it this way, man. I think it is, it's weirdly back to my barbell. I think people that have something to say will probably be best at the barbell. You know, meaning it's kind of like someone's first album. You had your whole life to write it. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And then, so I don't know, for me, speaking for myself, like again, back to the books, like when I look back at that, I'm like, and I'm pretty like, I don't feel good about myself. and me and me have a good relationship with each other.

1:22:10But even I, like I look at it and I'm like, how the hell did you write that in 2008? And then to your point, I think my next best piece of work will be when I'm wrapping it up and I can synthesize all the good stuff. So I would wildly encourage, especially the kind of characters you guys hang out with, they have a lot to say. Because much like I had in my youth, I saw things others couldn't see because I wasn't playing by yesterday'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.

1:22:52So I think most people, if they're going to be in that game, are probably going to write their best book first and last. You partnered up with Masterclass. Yeah. Tell us about it. Tell us about it. You know, 15 years ago, anything that looked like Masterclass, like selling stuff, was really scammy. Like I grew up in the Web 1.0 era. And like I stayed away from a lot of subscription, Patreon, OnlyFans, Masterclass. Like selling information was really dirty in 97, 98,$150 e-book that was straight garbage. I want to give Masterclass some flowers. like when they first kind of hit the scene around that era, we were just getting into the earliest stage of where we are now, where premium content, you know, sub stack be high.

1:23:41Like now, now it's respected, which is amazing. And I think is great for a lot of individual writers and contributors. You know, it was really good company. Like I like who they had for this class. It's addressing something I believe is real, which is like getting an MBA in real life and AI at a, 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.

1:24:22And so, yeah, I mean, they've come to me a whole bunch of times. This was the first time I was like, you know what, I can join this crew. I have something to say about AI marketing and production and the strategies of that. And I hope that me or Cuban or any of the other people they threw at it might get someone to stop and not take on$300 ,000 in debt that's not going to be ROI positive. Yeah. What are you hearing from sort of like Fortune 500 CMOs, like larger company marketers around if anything they should change in the world of AI around their marketing mix? I'm giggling because we're going to wrap up here, and I'm actually going to take your question but try to give an extraordinary amount of value to everyone that I know listens to this epic show.

1:25:13It's not what they're saying. It's how they're acting, which leads me to the following sentence. Everybody who's watching is highly invested in big companies that's spent a lot of money on marketing. your marketing department is wasting 93 cents of every dollar they spend okay we are living in such a radical transformation of the mid funnel dominating not the upper funnel and the lower funnel sure us three right now we're on mid funnel yeah we are producing i was born in the mid funnel i mean look i mean this is what's going on in my mind i'm doing right this this is a production day. This will be post-produced into creative that will go into mid-funnel, organic social, and the things that do well will go up for brand and down for performance.

1:26:01Every brand on Earth should be spending 20 % of their entire marketing budget just on social media organic production because the mid-funnel and TikTokification of social has eaten up the world, and we should spend no media dollars against creative that we're guessing for the big campaign. And then what I tell you, every Fortune 5000 company is still doing guessing on the upper funnel, sponsorships, ridiculous shit. And then the lower funnel, 2016 EV testing meta frameworks when the mid funnel made up the whole world. And you guys are winning. Bruins is winning. And any personal brand and many other businesses.

1:26:37And so that doesn't even get into the AI of it all. That to me is tooling and infrastructure to be great at what I just said. Yeah. but Jesus there's a lot of money being wasted by the companies representing the eyeballs that are watching the show right now and that makes me sad yeah makes a lot of sense I can't stand wasted marketing spend yeah it makes my blood boil well thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us we barely got to talk about live commerce yeah there's a lot more we'll get that update next time yeah we you need everybody here anybody selling to the consumer needs to understand that china's going to do a trillion in gmv a trillion in gmv this year and stuff sold and tiktok shop and whatnot are doing real numbers in in the u.s and meta's clearly going to be popping off any second with what they're going to do which will lead youtube to do what they're going to do.

1:27:39Sorry, I know you got to leave, but give me your 30 second outlook on TikTok post kind of acquisition, change in ownership. How's the platform changing and what's your outlook? There's, I felt nothing. I haven't done any real homework on any like corporate structure. What is going to be the vibe? But will the new owner, will the new owners be willing to like subsidize TikTok shop is kind of what I'm getting at. They don't need to. It actually works on merit. You only need to subsidize shitty shit.

1:28:17Always a good time. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to see you. We'll talk to you soon, Gary. Goodbye. Later in the show, we'll be telling you about a local man who grew a 900-pound pumpkin in his backyard and we'll tell you what it means for AI scaling laws. But up next, we have Humble Robotics. The founder and CEO is in the waiting room. Let's bring in Ayol Cohen to the TBP and Ultradome. How are you doing? What's going on? Great. How are you doing, guys? We're doing great. We're having a great day. Having a show. What's going on in the background? Yeah. Take us on a little tour.

1:28:53What's going on? What's going on? You can see the truck that we built, the vehicle that we built. It is a class A electric autonomous vehicle for moving freight. But actually, I want to hear about this 900-pound pumpkin. When do I bring that up? That's actually... It applies to your business. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You started, your demo was probably the equivalent of a 45-pound pumpkin. Maybe that truck in the back is a 300-pound pumpkin. But this is all in service of getting to the 900-pound pumpkin, the elusive 900-pound pumpkin. And you raised some money to help you build that vision. How much did you raise?

1:29:30Who's it from? Tell me about the round. Yes. Okay. So we raised$24 million. And. Amazing. I'll keep clearing order here. Continue. It's so satisfying. Really. It's great. We raised$24 million. The lead investor was eclipsed. Fantastic. We also had EIP in there as well as some other friends. So, yeah, it was a great round for us. $24 million, it sounds like a really solid seed. Eclipse is one of the highest signals, probably the highest signal, if you're building in robotics. At the same time, you're building something big in robotics,$24 million. That's great for a seed, but how much does it cost to build one of these?

1:30:13What are the comps? What will the next couple of years be like of actually getting these on the road? Yeah, so 24 million is a start, right? We are doing hardware, we're doing robotics, we're doing autonomy software. That does cost money, but it costs way less than it used to. I think, you know, you look at some of the players in the space and Waymo took a very long road, spent a lot of capital, but we're standing on the shoulders of giants now, right? A lot of work has been done in this space. I've been working in this space for 10, 11 years now on autonomous freight. Overnight success. We get the benefit.

1:30:51I love it. We get the benefit of a lot of work that's been done over the years. And so it's just far cheaper than it used to, to sort of think about a great new idea and scale it and scale into production. Okay. Talk about the key trade-offs. No cab, no driver. Are you pro LiDAR? Are you pro teleoperation? Like, are you going to do a crawl, walk, run thing? Is it a straight shot to full self-driving? What's the thesis? Yeah, great. So we're not dogmatic about technology here at all. It's just what's the best technology that we can use at any moment. 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.

1:31:34I think especially in the last year or two. I always joke with our head of autonomy. I have seven startups under my belt now. This is the second one I founded. And so we've been kind of doing a lot over many years. This is the first time the company's really been vision camera focused in autonomy for me. and what I'm seeing on that side is incredible. It's honestly kind of magic. But we still take the same approach that you see in autonomy, right? It is a, what did you say, crawl, walk, run? Yeah. We take that approach too, right? First you test in private roads and tracks, you validate the hardware and the software together and then from there you start pilots, you supervise those pilots.

1:32:15But we will take any technology that is beneficial for the project, for the program, and we'll apply it. That's the idea. Average 18-wheeler costs something like$120 ,000,$200 ,000, maybe$275 ,000 at the high end. Do you need to be at that price point? Can you go higher? Do you have flexibility there? And then the actual autonomy package, I feel like you could literally strap an iPhone to every possible vantage point. And you don't need to do that because you can just buy the actual lenses and cameras. So the cost of the vision stack has to be pretty low. But are there GPUs on board? Are you doing on-device inference?

1:32:59What's the economic balance? How should a customer even think about this in a different mindset? Yeah. So what do you get from removing the cab? What's the benefit of having a cabless vehicle other than it's cool? I think when we were conceiving the project, the question was, how do we move for it? Even where technology is, how do we move freight at the lowest possible cost? And the lowest possible cost to me was, okay, we think about making it autonomous, right? So we can save about a dollar per mile there. We make it electric, right? So that lowers the maintenance cost. And now, especially with some of the volatile fuel issues, we get benefit there, right?

1:33:35And the cab itself is cost to the equipment that is necessary in an autonomous world. And so by removing the cab, you make the whole vehicle wider and you make the vehicle less expensive. And so for me, the target is we want to 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 both the semi-truck part and the trailer part in combination, right? And this for the 40-foot version of it that we're looking at. So we want the equipment cost to be comparable, and then the cost per mile is just dramatically lower.

1:34:08That's the idea. Yeah. How do you think about supporting infrastructure? I mean, there was a massive build out of charging infrastructure as Tesla ramped. Is that beneficial? Is that enough? Is there a lot more that needs to be done? I imagine even if I just have a warehouse, I might need to check if my warehouse is compatible with a cab list delivery and doesn't have the wrong configuration to be able to puzzle piece in the container. Yeah, that's right. And actually, part of the reason that we launched, I mean, the company is very young. We started about eight months ago, right? And we built this vehicle very quickly.

1:34:44So, yeah, we have an absolutely killer team. They're the most fantastic people I've ever worked with. And we tried to move very quickly. And we launched, you know, pretty early in the journey. We were public about what we were doing. And the reason is that you want to build with your customers. It's really important in Freight to operate within the constraints of the logistics space and understand what people need and how they operate. So we're being public about what we're doing because it's our message to our customers that we work with them on that front. And that goes from everything from how does this vehicle load go back up into a docking area?

1:35:17It's one of the advantages of our vehicle, by the way. It's like we could put cameras behind it. We can back up into docks, right? And so how do we organize that kind of effort with them? How do we think about charging? How do we think about plugging into their software, right? which sometimes every shipper has a different software stack that we have to work with. So we're starting those conversations really early. And as a company, we just move very fast. What's it going to take to get you on X? On X. I actually signed up for an X account right before the launch. I'm on it. I just need to figure out how to use it.

1:35:52But I'm there. I'm there. I'm here. Win. We'll tell Nikita one more user. One more user. Let's make it happen. One more user for Nikita. Yeah. Where's the company based? What does actually scaling the company look like? Are you going to make Detroit great again? Can we do something over there? Motor City? What are we thinking? We're in San Francisco. We're in downtown San Francisco. And actually, when you walk into this warehouse, you're greeted by this 40-foot vehicle, which is like, before we were public, 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?

1:36:28But we're in San Francisco. that's where I live. That's where I'm based. That's where I've been working on tech for the last 20 years. And it makes sense as an R &D and prototyping hub. You have a warehouse, but you don't have a gigafactory yet. And that might be somewhere else. Got it. Yeah. And that can happen anywhere in the U.S. But we're designing in the U.S. We're building in the U.S. We're part of the reindustrialization in the middle of the U.S. So that's the plan. What have you learned about the reindustrialization efforts that are talked about a lot specific to the supply chain of autonomy components, electric vehicle components.

1:37:03I'm sure you're grappling with all of this, but what has surprised you to the upside? What has surprised you to the downside? Give me some white pills and black pills. So I started, I started my career working in electrification, electric vehicles, and actually a lot of that technology was here in the Bay. A lot of it, developing battery packs, Motors. And we've watched over the last 20 years as that shifted out of not only just the Bay, but out of the U.S. entirely, right? And now you see sort of the rush to get it back. And I think it takes time, but there are a lot of smart people that have been working in this space for a long time.

1:37:37And there's a lot of excitement and capital pouring into this. Our backers at Clips are just the most phenomenal people you could be working with. And they get this and they understand it. And you'll just see a lot more investments in this space in general as we grow. And yeah, I think the supply chain is coming back here. It just takes time, like everything. It's going to come back into automated factories this time around. Yeah. We are at time, but you need to read this deep dive in The New Yorker about these insurance scams that are happening in New Orleans around 18-wheelers where people are crashing.

1:38:13Have you read this? Are you familiar with this story? I'm a little bit familiar with the story. That's actually how they put together the money for the first round. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not what happened here. But, I mean, it is something that would be at least easier to fight back against in terms of fraud if there were cameras all the way around the vehicle. So a little bit of a knock-on effect to the positive. It's part of the reason we decided the way that we did. Thank you. And thank you so much. I am just based on this conversation. I'm extremely confident that this company will be wildly successful.

1:38:47And I'm glad you're doing this. Yeah. Terrific. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Hope to have you back on soon. We'll talk to you soon. We'll see you soon. Bye. 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 that's a narrative violation we have yolande yan from comfy in the waiting room with an iconic entrance let's take a look what are you holding here uh please introduce yourself and the company what are we looking at let's fucking go

1:39:41please welcome to the show i'm surprised no one's ever pulled off an entrance like this no no this is exquisite uh please introduce yourself tell us a little bit about what's going on my name's yolan i'm the co-founder and ceo of comfyui um i i apologize uh i've been instructed that I can be anything but boring for this show. So here I am. That's true. You know, you studied. You studied. Yeah. I did. I did. What, what, tell us your entire life story from inception. Now, what, since it is your first. I think there are too many points for you to start over here. Let me remove the distraction for you for now.

1:40:20What is the distraction? Give us the backstory. Like why that is a creature. The distraction is a character created by my co-founder. is actually the origin of this tool. If it weren't for this character, we wouldn't be raising and becoming a half-billion-dollar company today. So just shout out to the Fennec character. Yeah. So for those who don't know Comfy UI, node-based workflow for visual design, video production, DaVinci Resolve-level performance. But for the modern era, is that roughly correct? How are you thinking about introducing the company? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Comfy is a node-based system that aimed to give the highest leverage of control and quality for content creation.

1:41:05I think if you guys think of, let's say, Mid Journey or text-based content creation using AI, it's the polar opposite. It gives you every bit of control and possibility to adjust the model and control the camera angle, control the posture. and that's exactly why 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. Yeah, and then also inject a level of deterministic and programmatic variation into the generative AI workflows so that if you want to create multiple assets and you want to swap out a bear for a cat for a dog, you can do that in a way that doesn't just require you sitting there prompting, waiting five minutes, prompt again.

1:41:53And getting five minutes actually parallelized. Yes, that makes sense. So, yeah, if you're working with big companies, like are they just forking the repo, downloading the open source project? Are they actually calling you? Are you doing implementation? And how are you making money from all of this so far? Yeah, yeah, great question. It started first as a open source project. Actually, it's a personal project to begin with. And then originally, a lot of the companies actually just ended up using it running on their own hardware, most of the time locally. We introduced ComfyCloud as a product about five months ago.

1:42:34And the main differentiation in that world is that you can actually tap into a large cluster of computes that we provide in the backend. And it's incredibly difficult to stitch everything together to provide this infrastructure level of support, especially for professional creative companies or studios. So yeah, that's kind of how we monetize off of it. How big of a deal is C-Dance 2.0? The videos that I saw were incredible. It felt a little bit inaccessible. Is it diffusing rapidly? Yeah, yeah. The entire visual AI ecosystem is evolving very rapidly. These foundation models are making amazing progress.

1:43:16and 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. But just to comment on the progress over here, we're super excited to see where the trend goes towards to 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. Okay, when? Over or under 2028? Give us your Hollywood predictions. When can I actually watch a two-hour movie, a 90-minute movie?

1:43:57Because I've seen some incredible short films, some incredible vibe reels. Not even short films. I've seen, yeah, maybe two minutes, three minutes. Yeah, everybody's now seen like two minutes. 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. But I'm waiting for something that's Harry Potter, Balenciaga level entertainment. Hold my attention to the end. But 10 minutes, then 20 minutes, and then 90 minutes. And when the 90 minute thing happens, I think a lot of people are going to be like, wow. Yeah. This is actually a part of an insight that most people don't really understand right now.

1:44:32It'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 running into this James Cameron problem of like, oh shit, I have to go back and then rerun these using different models. So a lot of times people focus on short clips in terms of the content. And then the other portion is actually, it's already being adopted in a lot of these creative studios and agencies using Comfy. What it doesn't do is it doesn't become production. It just entered the previous portion.

1:45:14It just enabled people to rapidly iterate and then create these content right away that you might have someone acting in a pure green screen. And then the output of it in five minutes, you see the entire 3D CG rendering using AI on the system in 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. Is there more to be learned from the cognition model or the cursor model in terms of training your own models versus being at the application layer? Both companies have been wildly successful, huge, but very different paths.

1:46:03Yeah, I believe the visual ecosystem is quite different. The main differentiation is there's a huge amount of taste. Even if someone can prompt C-Dance 30.0 to generate a feature film tomorrow and it gets 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 going to be a very iterative process. It's just going to make their life a lot easier. And that's what Comfy enables you to do. I think those are the kind of differentiation where in the coding world, you might not care in terms of, you know, is this piece of code actually good enough?

1:46:44But in the visual world, you absolutely care the camera angle, the facial feature, the control layer. And that's, in my opinion, what differentiates the, you know, AI slops from the Comfy ecosystem of creation. What's the easiest AI feature to pitch to a Hollywood AI skeptic? The easiest way, I would say, from our perspective, this might not be for everyone, is the fact that we have this creative in the loop, human in the loop centric belief and mechanism. And it's actually true. in a lot of these case scenario when people are using Comfy as a tool is actually empowering the creatives to do their work, to skip all of these boring stuff of colorization, of kind of upscaling, downscaling manually in the traditional process.

1:47:44It enables you. So those are the world where we're not actually taking jobs or we're creating jobs. If anything, you go search on any job site today, there's actually a huge amount of people hiring for comfy UI artists and specialists. Yeah, I think like 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? What if your color grade was on your dailies as well? There's a whole bunch of interesting places where you can play. Yeah, and I've said this before, and at least some people were calling me an idiot online, But I've had this idea that I think AI could actually help Hollywood.

1:48:29We'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. And it just feels like we're going to enter into an era where 10 really smart people could come into one room, and if they work really hard and leverage AI properly, they'll be able to make an incredible short film, film, make beautiful advertisements, whatever they want to do. So I think we will enter into a golden age of human, human powered, AI powered humans doing incredible creative work.

1:49:07You mentioned that you're currently valued at half a billion dollars. How much did you raise? Tell us about the funding news. Yeah, we raised$30 million from Oh man, we've been looking forward to this. Yeah, we raised$30 million. The round was led by a craft venture. Huge fan of folks out there. They've been tracking us for a while. Good job. Yeah, been amazing working with them so far. Good job. Super excited. We're here to destroy our enemies and make open source creative tooling win. I love it, dude. Imagine being your enemy right now, logging on to x.com. Oh, I think we talked to his enemy.

1:49:46earlier this week. I'm not going to say who it was, but I think we know who he's coming for, and I'm rooting for him. Well, imagine logging on to X because he's calm and seeing Mr. Yan and just being like, oh, it's over for me. It's over for me. We have no idea because in our mind, we don't really have enemy. The only enemy is ourselves. Oh, no, I'm not talking about startup competitors. Oh, I see. Gotcha. I'm talking about Adobe. Never heard of that word. But congratulations. Thank you for everything you do. Incredibly cool tool. If you haven't already checked it out, go download Comfy UI. Make some cool stuff.

1:50:23It's a lot of fun. And have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. You guys too. Great hanging. See ya. Later in the show, did you hear about the cow that got loose on the highway and backed up traffic for miles? I did. You did? Well, we're going to tell everyone what the AI industry can learn from that story about supply chain bottlenecks. But up next, we have Ben Horowitz from Dorm Room Fund. He's an investment partner and is the creator of Sincerely Misspelled. You'll have to figure out how to spell it yourself if you want to go check it out. But we'll let Ben introduce himself now. How are you doing?

1:50:59Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on. Love the show. Thanks for having me on. I'm also an MBA at HBS. Oh, yes. People are taking a victory lap on that. Soon to be master of business. They thought it was impossible for an HBS grad to start a business. but you're proving everybody wrong. Thank you. Yeah. Twitter flamed me a little bit for it, but I'm still happy I'm here. Wait, wait. So why were people upset? Oh, it's like a non-technical thing probably, right? Yeah. I think Gary talked about it too a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Just the idea that like, I mean, HBS grads have started so many amazing companies, but it's - Oh, I thought you were talking about the product.

1:51:35But the HBS thing is typically not like the, like go and build a software product in a weekend or in a week, like very quickly. Like that's been more like, oh, you're a CS grad and you're a dropout and then you go do YC. Like that's been the more established path. But you're bucking the trend. Tell us what you built. Yeah, so I built Sincerely. It's spelled with two E's. So S-I-N-C-E-E-R-L-Y. And it's really like the anti-grammarly. So I am naturally a terrible typist. I don't know if I can cuss, but I mess up my emails all the time. And I found that people really reply to them. I don't think it's just because of the typos, but it's definitely a factor.

1:52:14And I was so sick of AI slop in my own inbox. People would email me. It all looks the exact same. And that, coupled with the news about how other people have been emailing across social strata, inspired me to basically create the anti-grammarly, something that really messes up emails. You're talking about CEOs that have terrible grammar because they're just typing quickly and it doesn't really matter. Well, there's the famous story about Ron Conway types in all caps. There's a whole bunch of these examples typing in all caps all caps is a elite because it just sounds like someone's yelling at you It's kind of the anti Gen Z in a lot of ways the all caps.

1:52:50Yeah, we don't have a Ron Conway mode yet Yeah, but I had I had this I had this this experience maybe a year ago where someone Sent me a very lengthy You know multi paragraph deep dive on some topic and I could tell that it was AI generated and I said you should just send me the prompt because I can also do the instantiation. I can also expand bullet points into paragraphs in my head. And so just send me the bullet points. And there was also that meme of like, oh, turn these bullet points into paragraphs. And then the other person on the other end saying, turn the paragraphs into bullet points.

1:53:25Are people using this specifically to write emails or is there an email summarization feature coming? Where do you see this going? I guess. I think what's kind of crazy is people are copy pasting. First they're prompting, then they're copy pasting their prompt into email and then they're using sincerely to make their email not sound like AI. And that's a crazy loop, right? Like it's humans using AI to make AI more human. 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, we were talking about this history. Was this, a fun stunt or yeah somebody called it a drop and i think it's a business what do you think i think it started 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 and in this case it's also a little bit like the pushback on how we're using technology today.

1:54:27So, you know, there's a$4.99 a month model that if you want to not bring your own key, you can pay me. I think it's probably double digit people who are paying and not using their own key, but it could be a business for sure. We were talking to George from CrowdStrike earlier. Are you ramping up security? What are you doing to make sure this is enterprise grade ASAP? Because when I download a vibe coded viral stunt, I want it rock solid. I learned a lot in this process, as you might have imagined. I'm a huge fan of CrowdStrike, too. We have pushed a few security fixes and just made sure that people know what they're getting themselves into when they download this.

1:55:07But ultimately, satire meets something real. So I hope that people get it. Yeah, that's the nature of 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. What is sentiment like in your current HBS class? How are people thinking? With the acceleration in AI, are there people thinking about dropping out? Or are they like, I'm actually glad I'm in school right now because it seems kind of gnarly out there?

1:55:47Yes. I have friends who have dropped out for YC and friends who have stayed for the exact same reason. It's kind of swim or sink. I think that people are building – they're not building funny things, I would say. They're really trying to build things in the HBS sort of business first way. And my girlfriend's at GSB, so maybe there's a little bit of a different comparison that you could ask her about. Uniting the great houses. Do you think there will be a swing? I mean, you go back to HBS in like the 80s and you imagine that it was churning out like oil and gas executives probably. And I'm wondering if you think there'll be a swing back.

1:56:28Like we saw Josh Kushner announced Thrive Eternal. He's taking a stake in the Giants. And there's a whole different world where you take the HBS learnings and playbooks and you go apply them to things that are extremely AI resistant. but maybe like they weren't, they haven't been trendy over the past decade, but maybe they're going to come back in style in a big way. If you're, you know, yeah, yeah. I went to HBS and now I'm like, you know, VP at G vernova. That's probably a pretty good gig. Yeah. I mean, the friends who I'm thinking about who actually dropped out to go do YC, you're going to laugh, are focused on HVACs.

1:57:03Oh, putting AI in the back of HVACs. It's not a roll up. It's not a roll-up. They're like, why has no one identified the opportunity in HVAC? HVAC is important. Have you ever not had air conditioning? No. One hot day in the studio and I demand HVAC. It is universal. That's another loop that's tricky, though, right? Are we making the world warmer? Are we cooling it off? Are we putting AI in the back of HVAC? It's all an AI play at the end of the day. Interesting. Interesting. What were you doing before HVAC? I started a company with my friend Reed that was a sort of like a philanthropic robo-advisor, like Wealthfront or Betterment.

1:57:46And we sold that to Charity Navigator and I worked there. And yeah, hopefully I'm a free agent in like three weeks. So heading to SF and fulfilling my manifest destiny. So in three weeks, is that HBS graduation? You're saying you're finishing your earn out or HBS? Yeah. Finishing HBS. The proverbial debt earn out. I don't know if you call it that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome. That makes sense. All right, well, it was really great to meet you. Yeah, great. And please let us know when you figure out what you're working on. And let us know when the next drop's happening. I feel like you got more of these in the can.

1:58:19I can tell. We have something really funny coming out. I can tell. There's good stunts. Amazing. Thanks, guys. Yeah, let's talk about it. Yeah. Have a good one. We'll see you soon. Thanks, guys. 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. This was a crazy story. Brandon Gurel and our team was obsessed with it. A U.S. 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.

1:58:56This is when the betting on yourself meme goes wrong, right? You should always be betting on yourself, but not literally if it's against the law. If you are involved in a government capacity, you should probably not be gambling on the outcome of your government work. Shame on you. But still, even Trump was like he was betting on himself. And then he like referenced a baseball player that isn't in the Hall of Fame because he was betting on himself. But Trump was seemingly implying that that that wasn't so bad. but anyways people are really really having fun with the new image gen model I don't even know if we should pull this up because it's so rude but this guy is effectively playing Minecraft through ChatGPT because he has to generate him an image of Minecraft of course he's doing the island in Little St.

1:59:51James the very controversial one and then he says okay walk closer and then just generates a new scene I'm sure there's some kids out there that have figured out how to play Minecraft in chat GBT, but this is very funny. I found this post when it had 40 likes this morning. Sniped. Invested early. Cohere is merging with a German AI lab called Aleph Alpha. I am the biggest fan of Cohere. I love Aiden Gomez. Transformer paper alum, Death Grips enjoyer, what's not to like about the legend Aiden Gomez. We've got to get him on the show. but congratulations moment for cohere and a left alpha i think correctly gbd 5.5 yes uh kits is saying it might be agi because if you ask it bro the car wash is five minutes away should i walk to it or go by car and says car bro it's a car wash let the plot let the plot make sense wait what like it just immediately clocks it 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 uh 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 that feels very uh remarkable it also got the r's and strawberry correct, right?

2:01:23And how many strawberries in the letter R? Zero. The letter R is not known for its berry storage. These are good answers. The being a helpful assistant but simultaneously rejecting nonsense has particularly been difficult for LLM. So good progress here. We'll figure out more about what went into this and what the next generation of AI impacts are from this. Tyler Hodge says found a post five and a half years ago Elon says the rate of improvement from the original GPT to GPT-3 is impressive if this rate of improvement continues GPT-5 or 6 could be indistinguishable from the smartest humans 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 has changed but he was accurate in his prediction funniest outcome is the most likely and then the last the last thing I wanted best bros and do a buddy cop film together the last thing there is a new app from X oh yeah X chat X chat and I'm excited to try this out because the current yeah that the DMs on X have been pretty brutal yeah right oh I don't know I do have this weird with this weird bug where when I click the chat button on desktop, it sort of loads and then it resorts after it loads.

2:02:56And sometimes if I haven't been in it in a long time, it needs to reshuffle several, several times. And so that can be a little jarring. But overall, it seems like they made the migration to encryption. I haven't, I don't know. I seem to get messages. It seems to work fine. It's cool that there's a new app. I probably need to be better about answering DMs. I have a lot of them that are unread. So having a dedicated app for that, that sounds cool. People were taking shots because the everything app supposed to be everything in one place instead of three apps to get everything in the everything app.

2:03:25It's sort of silly. Who cares? More apps, the better. I like apps. So go download it, go check it out and go like Makita's post because he's been on a generational run. Also, GBD 5.5 is available in the API now. That's breaking news, I guess, from Craig. So anyway, uh, we will see you on Monday. Have a great weekend. Enjoy the weekend. Leave us five stars on Apple podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for a newsletter at tbpn.com and we'll see you tomorrow. Flashbang. Have an incredible weekend.

2:04:02Thank you.