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

Summary

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TBPN Podcast Summary

Episode: Intel Rips, Cursor's Plan, Thrive's Giant Bet, GPT 5.5 | George Kurtz, Professor Sendy, Gary Vaynerchuk, Yoland Yan, Ben Horwitz
Date: April 24, 2026
Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays

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Overview

This jam-packed Friday episode of TBPN explores the tectonic shifts happening across semiconductors, AI software, startup culture, and digital/analog consumer trends. Kicking off with the market-shaking Intel earnings, John and Jordi analyze why Silicon Valley’s fallen giant is suddenly the belle of the AI ball. The episode features a mix of live interviews and lightning rounds with notable guests, including George Kurtz (CrowdStrike), Professor Sendy (Wombo guru), Gary Vaynerchuk, Yoland Yan (ComfyUI), and Ben Horowitz (Dorm Room Fund/Sincerely).

Topics range from Intel’s strategic resurgence and AI agentification, to open source creation tools, marketing in the age of AI, the analog counterculture, practical cybersecurity, and quirky new digital phenomena.

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Table of Contents

1. Intel’s Stock Surge: The Five New Bull Cases
2. Cursor and The Gross Margin Whisper
3. AI Marketplace Dynamics (Patel, Gurley)
4. Analog vs. AI: Thrive’s Bets, Gary Vee, and the Vinyl Resurgence
5. Security in the AI Agent Era: George Kurtz (CrowdStrike)
6. Word Combinations (Wombos): The Viral Linguistic Trend with Professor Sendy
7. Next-Gen Creative Tools: Yoland Yan & ComfyUI
8. Sincerely: The Anti-Grammarly Drop (Ben Horowitz)
9. Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

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1. Intel’s Stock Surge: The Five New Bull Cases

[00:28–13:49]

• Intel jumps 20% after hours off a $13.6B quarter, beating analyst estimates significantly.
  • Despite showing a $3.7B loss, removing one-off charges paints a much better financial picture (“Intel actually earned $1.5 billion, which is much better than what people were expecting...” — Jordan, [01:16])
• Key Drivers Behind the Rally:
  1. AI Agents: New agentic AIs increase the need for CPUs vs. just GPUs. “The CPU to GPU ratio could flip from 1:8 to 8:1, which is a massive, massive switch.” — Jordi ([06:32])
  2. Advanced Packaging Demand: Intel is positioned to capitalize on the higher CPU:GPU needs of inference/agent workloads.
  3. National Security Mandate: US government committed as a 10% stakeholder; need for domestic leading-edge fabs in light of Taiwan geopolitics.
  4. Terrafab (Elon Musk): Ambitious vertical integration, plans for massive wafer scale manufacturing with Tesla/SpaceX/AI.
  5. Hyperscaler Support: Major US cloud players want diversified chip supply.
• Market/Bullish Sentiment: Analysts, including Evercore and Jim Cramer, are re-rating Intel as key to the new agent-centric AI shift. “Jim Cramer’s excited about it—13 months, Intel from bailout candidate to one of the wealthiest.” ([13:15])

Notable Quotes:

• “The rise of AI agents is giving Intel a second shot...agentic workflows across data centers...increases demand for the boring old central processor.” — Jordy ([04:57])
• “Maybe the narrative flips from ‘CPUs are dead’ to ‘CPUs are the new hot thing in AI.’” — John ([07:56])
• “Congrats to all Intel shareholders. Congrats to all Americans, every US citizen, and every US debt holder.” — Tyler, Jordan, John ([12:36])

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2. Cursor and The Gross Margin Whisper

[13:49–16:13]

• Cursor is on the verge of a major $60B buyout (not a bailout!), capturing the industry’s imagination despite gross margins at -23%.
• Questions swirl about long-term stickiness and profitability, especially as it moves beyond being a mere “entry point” to AI workflows toward greater vertical integration.
• The SpaceX/XAI deals are seen as margin lifelines—if Cursor can control their own training/inference, gross margins could normalize.

Quote:

• “Margin were rough. Cursor had minus 23% gross margins earlier this year...this is low for a company generating as much revenue as it is.” — Jordi ([14:38])

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3. AI Marketplace Dynamics (Patel, Gurley)

[16:13–23:08]

• Dylan Patel (clip from [16:19]): Demand for high-tier models now outstrips the available compute even for the best labs; economic value (token spending) is growing faster than infrastructure.
  • “By the end of the year, a 4.6 Opus model, the economy would spend $100 billion on. I don’t think that’s unreasonable...there is such demand for these tokens and such limitations on compute.” — Patel ([16:53])
• Bill Gurley ([18:47]): Argues that VC and “big tech” dollars act as subsidies in the AI supply chain, distorting true market demand: “You are knowingly choosing pricing that is out of whack...until [profitability matters], you’ve always got some constraint.”
• Counterpoint: Hosts push that a lot of demand is “real” and comes from F500s, hedge funds, and direct enterprise users, not just startups or consumer VC subsidies.

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4. Analog vs. AI: Thrive’s Bets, Gary Vee, and the Vinyl Resurgence

[27:07–78:06]

• Thrive Capital’s ‘Eternal’ Fund: Josh Kushner announces a “permanent holding company” focused on assets that can’t be disrupted by AI (e.g., a stake in the San Francisco Giants).
  • “Iconic franchises and cultural institutions rooted in tradition.” — Kushner via Jordy ([27:07])
• Gary Vaynerchuk on Analog Counterculture ([61:03–78:47]):
  • “Explosion of analog: I believe in physical retail, events, venues. The rise of analog is a counter move to extreme AI advancement.” ([69:25])
  • Vinyl records sales hit $1B for the first time this century.
  • Discusses how AI makes standing out digitally harder and predicts a “barbell” world where analog and digital each have their spheres.
  • “The sheer adaptability of the human race is extraordinary. We correct ourselves more than people realize.” ([72:30])
  • Opportunities in non-AI “resistant” assets: sports franchises, restaurants, drive-in theaters, etc.

Sports & Physical Assets:

• “Anyone who doesn’t realize how substantial the analog opportunities are is really missing the plot.” — Gary Vee ([75:05])
• Live commerce and mid-funnel marketing are eating traditional marketing’s lunch.
  • “Your marketing department is wasting 93 cents of every dollar...The mid funnel eats up the whole world and you guys are winning.” ([85:30])

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5. Security in the AI Agent Era: George Kurtz (CrowdStrike)

[29:02–43:53]

• Project Quiltworks: Major CrowdStrike coalition with IBM/Accenture to protect enterprises against new AI-driven vulnerabilities.
  • “The window is closing in the time that we have to identify, patch and remediate and mitigate these issues.” — George ([29:16])
• Attackers vs. Defenders: AI in the hands of both cybercriminals and employees—introduction of “shadow AI” in the enterprise.
• Prompt Security:
  • “One of the reasons why, from a security perspective, companies like ours are focused on looking at the prompts...and being able to sanitize to and from the LLM.” ([33:02])
• Open Source Risks: Rising open source models (DeepSeek, Kiwi) will rapidly close the gap with closed Frontier models, making threats more accessible.
• AI Agentics Day-to-day:
  • “Goal-seeking agents...” can circumvent boundaries and collaborate nefariously: “They just go nuts until they actually get to the goal. They’ll actually steal credentials out of your keychain.” — George ([38:30])
• AI Benefits for Cybersecurity: Envisions fully autonomous Security Operation Centers; SoC “level five” (full AGI) still a ways off, but process automation (e.g., report generation) already delivering major efficiency gains.

Quote:

• “AI is going to change the way the SOC works...You’re really taking all this voluminous info and letting AI agents grind...and you’re elevating Tier 1 analysts to Tier 3.” — George, [41:40]

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6. Word Combinations (Wombos): The Viral Linguistic Trend with Professor Sendy

[44:07–59:08]

• What’s a Wombo?: Word combo viral trend (“Queesh” = quirky + niche, “Lorraine” = lore + gain, “capsolutely” = cap + absolutely).
• The Professor’s Story: Not an actual linguistics professor, but a former rapper who went viral with comically long and clever portmanteaus.
  • “It was just a natural skill...I used to do this in the ’90s as a rapper.” — Professor Sendy ([47:44])
• Why Wombos Work:
  • Short, memorable, paradoxical. (“Liguratively”—literally + figuratively; “nonchalash out”—nonchalant + crash out)
  • The “Hegelian dialectic” of word formation: “Thesis and antithesis, create the synthesis, jam them together, you get some beautiful wombos.” ([55:00])
• Business Potential: Building a dictionary, creating a coffee-table book, possibly brand partnerships.

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7. Next-Gen Creative Tools: Yoland Yan & ComfyUI

[99:52–110:14]

• ComfyUI: Open source, node-based system democratizing control and quality of visual content creation for AI workflows (film, video, ads).
  • “It gives you every bit of control and possibility to adjust the model...That’s why Comfy’s used by top studios. Recent Coca-Cola Super Bowl ad was made using Comfy.” — Yoland Yan ([100:57])
• Evolution of AI Video:
  • Tools like Sea Dance 2.0 are pushing boundaries, but film-length output is rare—short clips are norm because models evolve so quickly.
  • “Longform content is hard—the tech shifts so much mid-production you’d have to restart to use new models.” — Yoland ([104:28])
• Monetization: Launched Comfy Cloud for pro/enterprise customers; recently raised $30M at $500M valuation ([109:13])
• Cultural Impact: Empowering creatives, not replacing them; many job listings now for ComfyUI artists.

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8. Sincerely: The Anti-Grammarly Drop (Ben Horowitz)

[110:57–118:03]

• Sincerely: Satirical Chrome extension that purposefully adds typos to emails, as a pushback against “AI slop” and over-formalization.
  • “It’s the anti-Grammarly. Messes up your emails. I was so sick of AI slop in my inbox.” — Ben ([111:50])
• AI & Authenticity Loop:
  • “People are prompting, then copying to email, then using Sincerely to make their email not sound like AI. Human using AI to make AI more human.” — Ben ([113:46])
• Reception: Started as social commentary/stunt, but has paying customers.
• Harvard/Stanford Student Trends: Some students dropping out to build, others staying for the “business first” approach.

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9. Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Intel’s transformation: “Intel from a possible and unthinkable bailout candidate to one of the wealthiest chip companies out there.” — Jim Cramer quoted by Jordy ([13:19])
• On supply and demand for AI compute:
  • “Economic value the best model can deliver is growing faster than our ability to serve those tokens...Tier 1 lab, Tier 2 lab, even Tier 3 lab will be sold out.” — Dylan Patel ([16:53])
• Gary Vee on new AI/Analog Barbell:
  • “Explosion of analog...the rise of analog is a counter move to extreme AI advancement... sheeer adaptability of the human race is extraordinary.” ([69:25], [72:30])
• Professor Sendy on word formation:
  • “All human behavior is kind of paradoxical. So if you jam opposite words together... you come up with some beautiful wombos.” ([55:00])
• George Kurtz on AI Agents & Cybersecurity:
  • “They just go nuts until they get to the goal...I don’t think we talk enough about goal-seeking. The agents just keep going, working around all the security boundaries.” ([38:30])
• On anti-AI language tools:
  • “Human using AI to make AI more human.” — Ben ([113:46])

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Key Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment | |-----------|-----------------------------------------| | 00:28 | Intel’s earnings; macro analysis | | 13:49 | Cursor’s margins; enterprise AI | | 16:19 | Dylan Patel: Compute constraints | | 18:47 | Bill Gurley: Market subsidies | | 27:07 | Thrive Capital “Eternal”; analog assets | | 29:02 | George Kurtz: CrowdStrike, cyber risks | | 44:07 | Professor Sendy: Wombos | | 61:03 | Gary Vee: Branding, analog, TikTok Shop | | 99:52 | Yoland Yan: ComfyUI, visual AI | | 110:57 | Ben Horowitz: Sincerely, student trends |

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Final Thoughts

This episode captures 2026’s Silicon Valley at its most self-aware: bullish on second acts (Intel, analog), wry about its own fads (Wombos, anti-Grammarly), and unflinching about the major AI, security, and cultural battlegrounds ahead. The show’s high-energy, conversational style draws out tactical insights while staying grounded in the quirks, contradictions, and creativity powering modern tech.

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Listen to the full episode or check out TBPN’s Diet editions for the week’s best moments.

Transcript

[Jordy]

You're watching TVPN today's Friday, April 24, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome,

[John]

the Temple of technology, the fortress of finance.

[Jordy]

We have a great show for you today, folks. We have George Kurtz coming on from Crowdstrike. Professor Sandy from Instagram, you might have seen, he's the expert of Wombos. Gary Vaynerchuk's coming on. We have a lightning round going on with a couple founders. It'll be a fun time.

[John]

But the big news wrapping up with Ben Horowitz.

[Jordy]

Ben Horowitz.

[John]

Horowitz.

[Jordy]

Horowitz. Horowitz. Horowitz. The big news of course is Intel. Intel is absolutely ripping. Intel jumped 20% after hours on the back of $13.6 billion in Q1 revenue, only 11% above analyst estimates. But there's five key factors that are coming together to create a new narrative around intel that are driving the stock much higher. And it is almost the main factor

[John]

is bubble boy on X a lot

[Jordy]

of people called this and it is long overdue. The revenue is only up 7% year over year. But next quarter is already guiding to be better. Somewhere north of 14 billion probably. But there's still big losses under the hood. This quarter they lost $3.7 billion. Not good. But that was mostly driven by one off charges related to Mobileye and derivative payments tied to the US government's 10% stake. So if you strip those out, intel actually earned $1.5 billion, which is much better than what people were expecting, which was basically break even. So the cruise ship of intel is starting to turn somewhat but the narrative has already completely shifted. So intel is working again is the idea. The AI trade has mostly been Nvidia. Nvidia's memory suppliers, TSMC power equipment, cloud, capex and a few software names that can prove real adoption. If you're accelerating your top line, you are an AI winner. That's sort of the rule of thumb of things might play out differently, but that's what's been happening in the market. Intel was the most embarrassing missing piece. Why isn't intel booming when we're in a computing boom? It made no sense. But there were good reasons and we'll go through them. The company that invented the modern CPU era, they missed mobile, they fell behind tsmc. They failed to produce a competitive AI gpu. They did fab a GPU at one point. They tried to get into gaming at one point, but they never really found traction, especially in the data center and the servers for AI training. And so they have fallen behind. And then they spent the last few years trying to convince the world that it. That intel could still matter. But now, oddly enough, the rise of AI agents, it's giving Intel a second shot. Do you have thoughts on intel yet? I'm going to keep going.

[John]

It's funny because at the moment that the US took position in intel, it was like, it felt like a. It was a bailout, right?

[Jordy]

It felt like that.

[John]

Yeah. And it felt like, you know, you would expect. Okay, over time, this is very. Is going to be very, very good for intel to have that vote of confidence. But I don't think anyone was really predicting that it would go up quite this much in the span of just half a year.

[Jordy]

I think Ben Thompson wrote a pretty strong bull case for the, for the Intel US Deal. Basically, like, you had to, you had to grapple with this idea of, like, this doesn't feel like free market capitalism.

[John]

Yeah. I guess the only thing is, like, there wasn't this narrative around CPUs at the time that the deal was happening. Or at least it wasn't a very public narrative.

[Jordy]

Yes, yes. The bull case at that time that I heard most loudly was not the CPU boom. It was just overall chippy. It was the 14, like the leading edge fab. That basically by having the US government as a shareholder, you see those dinners with all the AI lab leads and all the hyperscaler CEOs, and there's a world where there's another one of those meetings and the government administration says, hey, we are backing Intel. I need all of you to commit to buy, you know, a ton of supply. If intel actually goes and builds the Leading Edge fab, which is going to cost them billions of dollars, but if they have the demand guarantees, then they will actually be able to go do it. Tyler, what was your take?

[Tyler]

Yeah, I think Leopold. Sorry. Intel has long been kind of the Leopold take, which is that, like, you know, this is the clear. Like, this is the company you want to own in the kind of nationalization world of like, okay, Taiwan risk.

[Jordy]

Sure.

[Tyler]

What are we going to do if we can't make chips? You know, in Taiwan, Intel's like the very clear strategy. Yeah, maybe it's like, not working right now, but like, at some point this is not just like, economics. This is like, okay, this is, you know, national security. Like, it's extremely important that we have this capacity in the US and intel is kind of the only one that's even like, remotely in the conversation.

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. So there were some predictions from AI 2027 and other folks in the AI forecasting world around the rise of agents that agents would arrive at this time, I didn't see too many folks who were predicting strong, valuable, effective AI agents really predicting the CPU crunch, but that's exactly what's happened. So AI agents need CPUs to do things. Training frontier models, that's still a GPU story, but run. Running agentic workflows across data centers, orchestrating tasks, routing jobs, managing memory, handling inference workloads, coordinating servers, increases demand for the boring old central processor. Intel's data center segment produced 5.1 billion in quarterly revenue, beating the 4.5 billion that analysts expected. And Intel CEO Lipp Bhutan said the next wave of AI is moving from foundational models to inference to agentic AI. And that shift increases the need for Intel CPUs, wafers and advanced packaging. On the earnings call, he said that the CPU to GPU ratio is closer to one CPU for every four GPUs, versus one for every eight in prior years. And there is an interesting forecast from Lit Bhutan as well. But VK macro says CPU to GPU ratio flipping from 1 to 8 to 8 to 1 is absolutely wild. That's just a completely new world to what we've had so far. This is from Evercore. ISI's Mark Lapis has upgraded intel directly from neutral to outperform and mentions that as AI workloads shift further toward inference and agents towards inference and agents, the weight of CPU demand will rise sharply and the CPU to GPU ratio could flip from 1.1 to 8 to 8 to 1, which is a massive, massive switch.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

I mean, I don't know. Like, that's kind of a crazy ratio.

[Jordy]

It is.

[Tyler]

Because, like, the lesson to your models is that, like, the models are going to keep getting bigger. You're going to need way more like chips to inference them. Like Dylan Patel was on Patrick o'. Shaughnessy. I think it came out yesterday or the day before. And he's just saying, like, you know, the models are going to get really expensive tokens are going to get super, super expensive. People are going to price down. So I don't know if I fully believe the narrative that, like, you need all the CPUs. Yeah, you're going to need way more CPUs than.

[Jordy]

I mean, the.

[John]

That's all, folks.

[Jordy]

It really lines up perfectly. His camera is the main one. That fits perfectly. The glasses land on.

[John]

I love a Friday show.

[Jordy]

Yes, that's a good point. But there is this, I think at least in the midterm. Yeah. There's like capabilities overhang and just like one really smart AI system that's being inferenced on GPU can spin off a ton of CPU workloads and do a lot of things that require CPUs.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Even in the SaaS apocalypse, like you Vibe coded Slack or whatever, it's like, well, that vibe coded system is running on CPU and if it took you like, I don't know, 1000 GPU hours, but then that system runs on CPUs that are running constantly for every user, you still wind up with creating more CPU demand out of the gpu.

[Tyler]

I think this take makes a lot of sense if you are, you know, long open source. We're going to have a lot of these open source models. They're quite small. You can run them on like, you know, small amount of chips, but you just have a lot of them. You have a bunch of agents doing a bunch of stuff at the same time.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Rather than the single model, you know, inferenced on a massive amount of chips.

[Jordy]

Why is the horse here anyway? Whether it's going to 8 CPUs for 1 GPU or staying at 1 CPU to 4 GPUs, it's still twice as good as it used to be because it used to be one to eight. And so that is bullish for intel. And Libbuton is making that clear to the market and to the investors on his earnings call. Then there's the wildcard, the terrafab Elon Musk project. It's very exciting, but it's clearly further off. Elon Musk wants to build a massively vertical integrated chip manufacturing operation with Tesla, SpaceX and possibly other Musk companies needing huge volumes of chips for self driving cars, humanoid robots and even space based AI data centers. Intel is supposed to help design, manufacture and package chips for the project. Now the Wall Street Journal has a more cautious view. Today, Elon is aiming for terrafab to reach 100,000 wafers a month and then eventually 1 million wafers a month, which is just insane scale. So let's put it in context. One million wafers a month is about 70% of TSMC's total monthly output across all fabs. TSMC's largest fabs put out roughly 100,000 wafers a month into production. So you're talking about 10 leading class TSMC fabs at intel just on the Terrafab project plus whatever else intel is doing. So a pretty massive scale up. And TSMC's CEO CC Way has said that it's just not that easy to build a fab overnight and get it up and running. So fabs take two to three years to build and then another one to two years to actually ramp. And we've seen this with TSMC Arizona, which we've been very excited about, but it just takes time and there is a bottleneck. And the bottleneck has been discussed at length. Ben Thompson wrote about TSMC risk in Sir Techery, arguing that TSMC needs to spend more on CapEx. And I think that should be clearer now. We'll see what happens at the next TSMC earnings call, because maybe they will be waking up. But overall, the intel intel now has a collection of plausible demand stories. Even though the demand itself is not going vertical, the stock is going vertical on the back of these five key demand stories that are all pointing in the same direction, directly up one, AI agents need more CPUs two, AI systems need more advanced packaging. A higher ratio of CPUs to GPUs. Intel can help with that. Three, the US government wants to react domestic leading a domestic leading edge foundry. This is just a national mandate. Four, Musk wants an impossible amount of silicon. And five also the hyperscalers want more supply. And so all of that is good news for Intel. There are more companies that are getting into the CPU design space. We talked about ARM recently and arm, of course it feels like they will be going with TSMC in the short term, but who knows what happens in the long term. So as CPUs continue to be important in the AI story, all good news for Intel. So suddenly investors are more willing to entertain a messy, expensive strategic chip story than they were five years ago. Intel famously missed mobile, which meant TSMC ran away with enormous manufacturing volume and left intel with a demand problem. Volume was destiny, as they say. As fab costs grew by orders of magnitude, meaningful demand was a hard prerequisite for continued growth. You can't grow if you can't build the fab that's on the leading edge. And you can't build the fab unless you actually have the customers. And so if you missed mobile, you just have this gap and you have to jump over it with the help of the government, a bunch of other people, and the AI narrative and all these different five key pieces. So the piece of the puzzle are coming together now. And that's good for Intel. It's also good for America's chip manufacturing prospects. So good news overall, and congrats to all the intel shareholders that were believers early on and rode the Wave everyone.

[Tyler]

Every US Citizen.

[Jordy]

Every US Citizen. Congrats to all Americans, every US Citizen, and every. Every US Debt holder. So even the international folks that own

[John]

treasuries are in better position today. You got to think about what this does to Trump's confidence level. You know, he's like, I enjoy a bailout. He's like, I'll indulge Spirit Airlines, American Spirit. I think he's excited about the potential there.

[Jordy]

Sure.

[John]

But why stop at just bailouts, right? Why not start taking a position in hyperscalers? He's like, look, I think I can move your market capped by 3x. Yeah, I've done it before.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Intel was. Intel was falling apart.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Imagine if I. Imagine if he applied all his wisdom to a company already winning.

[Jordy]

Well, certainly possible. Jim Cramer's excited about it. He said in 13 months, Lip Bhutan took intel from a possible and unthinkable bailout candidate to one of the wealthiest companies in the chip industry. There is a big three of CPU, AMD, intel and Army. And the agents need far more CPUs than these three can produce. So that means prices are going up and they got the God candle.

[John]

Yeah, look at this candle from Candle.

[Jordy]

We love a green candle. Should be white suits today. Well, before we move on, there's some news. Justin Bieber brought Bieber Chella back from the dead. Later in the show will tell you what this says about late stage venture re acceleration. Tie those two together. For more than a year, Silicon Valley has buzzed about Cursor's growth and whispered about its margins. Now on the cusp of a $60 billion bailout. Laura over at the information.

[John]

Wait, they called it a $60 billion bailout.

[Jordy]

Buyout. Buyout. I'm sorry, Buyout. We reveal the hot Vibe Financials $60

[John]

billion acquisition, calling it a bailout.

[Jordy]

It's not a bailout.

[John]

Margins were rough.

[Jordy]

We were just talking about it got wormed into my head. Cursor had minus 23% gross margins earlier this year. That Amir says that is low for a company generating as much revenue as it is. This is the question of how sticky will Cursor be as a entry point to AI, as an entry point to inference demand? Can they reroute? It feels like with Composer they have been able to retain a lot of customers. The company is still growing and we know Cursor users who have stayed with the product while changing inference based on what their plan gives them. So their subscriber and they will use whatever the plan, whatever gets the job done for them within the budget of the plan. And so obviously you see negative 23% gross margins and you're like, whoa. And then you look at the SpaceX deal and the XAI deal and all the compute that's sitting at Colossus 2 and you think, oh, well, like what will the gross margins be once the inference is happening on a cursor trained model or XAI trained model, something that merges their lessons from Kimmy and Composer with Crock and all the different pieces of the puzzle come together, Are there going to be higher gross margins? It's pretty easy to imagine that the gross margins would increase, but we'll have to keep tracking it. Did you want to play this piece from Patrick o'? Shaughnessy?

[John]

Let's do it.

[Jordy]

Let's play this clip of what Dylan Patel said on Invest like the Best presented by Ramp.

[Dylan Patel]

Everyone's like, okay, so Anthropic just won, right? Mythos in February. They never even released it because they didn't feel the need to. They're already sold out. Their revenue's already adding $10 billion a month. And then you've got Opus4.7 today, all before OpenAI's, you know, alleged spud release, which, you know, media such as the Information and others have, have posted about. So clearly Anthropic is in the lead, right? And OpenAI is cooked. What's interesting is because Anthropic has such bounds on compute and they can only grow it so fast and sort of to the point of Dario used to gloat about how OpenAI was being too aggressive on compute and Anthropic was more sensitive in their scaling. And now Anthropic is like, fuck, I wish we had a lot more compute. OpenAI is able to pay the bills perfectly fine. In fact, they've raised a ton of money to get incremental compute in addition to the irresponsible levels of compute that they were buying from Oracle and Core, Reeve and Softbank and all these people in Microsoft, such as Trainium. Now they're getting Trainium as well from Amazon. But what's interesting is if you were to say, Opus 4.6, let's ignore models getting better over time. Let's just take diffusion of this technology. You and I may jump on the model immediately, day one, but other businesses take time and it takes time for people to learn. And so by the end of the year, let's say a 4, 6 opus tier model, the economy would spend $100 billion on. I don't think that's unreasonable. It's spending 40 billion. Right now, anthropic won't have enough compute to do that. And so, and presumably OpenAI and Google will hit that tier soon enough. Whoever hits that tier next. Sure, Anthropic may get to charge 70 plus percent gross margins, but if OpenAI hits it next, they charge 50% gross margins. They still get all of this incremental demand. And probably they also won't have enough compute to serve all the users. Sure, maybe Mythos is a model where if the world had enough compute, it'd be $500 billion of revenue or something crazy. There is such demand for these tokens and such limitations on compute, you know, and we see this With H100 prices skyrocketing and the useful life of these GPUs continue to extend, it's pretty clear even the Tier 2 Lab is going to be sold out of tokens, let alone the Tier 1 lab. The Tier 1 lab will have better margins, but the Tier 2 lab will be sold out. And probably the Tier 3 lab will also be close to sold out. Economic value that the best model can deliver is growing faster than our ability to actually serve those tokens to people via the infrastructure. And so this gap will continue to grow and the model labs will continue to have expanding margins until people in the hardware supply chain, infrastructure, supply chain are like, wait, no, why don't I just jack up my margins?

[Jordy]

Oh yeah, I love that.

[John]

I love that sound. Bill Gurley. Let's see what Bill Gurley, let's check in with bg says. I find this conversation foreign along with the argument that we are data center constrained or energy constrained. Historically in markets, price is a leveler of supply and demand. If you have a constraint, you price higher, you don't have surplus demand. But in this market, VC dollars act as subsidies, as they did in consumer Internet. Everyone believes if they have high growth, they get unlimited VC money. The biggest fear becomes losing market share. So growth at all costs becomes a game. The field. With that reality, you are always going to have some constraint because you knowingly. You are knowingly choosing pricing that is out of whack with balancing supply and demand. It will continue until the major player feels they are forced to reconcile unit economics and profitability, as eventually happened in ride sharing when Lyft went public. Until then, you by definition have constraints. We can't disentangle true demand from subsidized demand. Yet some of the incremental demand is being engineered by excessive VC money forced into the system and the competitive dynamic between two companies that are losing Massive amounts of money. No one can argue they aren't losing tons of money. Amazon and Uber maxed out around 2 billion a year. These companies could lose 10 billion or more in 2026.

[Jordy]

Yeah, it's a good point that they are. The big labs are losing money, but it doesn't feel like that. The revenue of OpenAI and Anthropic are VC subsidized. Have like, it feels like the.

[John]

Yeah, it's funny. Semianalysis is a good example. They spend millions and millions of dollars.

[Jordy]

They're not, but they're not vc.

[John]

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

[Jordy]

And their customers are not startups necessarily. It's like hedge funds and banks and stuff.

[John]

So hedge funds and banks that are printing by betting on semis right now.

[Jordy]

Yeah, which is a different. I'm totally on board with like. Well, the Mag 7 are drawing down on cash flow and issuing debt and doing layoffs and they're funding. They're subsidizing demand. Right. But the idea that B.C. dollars are the biggest drop in the bucket of subsidized demand feels like. I don't know, it just doesn't quite math out to me because the actual revenues and Demand from Fortune 500 companies is so high and the really big dollars in all of these rounds, I mean, Anthropic just raised something like 40 from Google today. And that's not a VC subsidy. I mean it is a subsidy.

[John]

Yeah. I'm surprised he's not talking about big tech subsidies.

[Jordy]

Yeah, maybe he is using the term VC dollars broadly, which is like fair including.

[John]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jordy]

And like wasn't SoftBank in. Was SoftBank in Uber? I think maybe. But there is an idea that you get to a certain scale and it becomes like sovereigns.

[John]

SoftBank is up in the past month.

[Jordy]

How much?

[John]

Guess.

[Jordy]

200%.

[Yoland Yan]

Come on, John.

[John]

73%.

[Jordy]

That's not bad.

[John]

That's a big number.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I mean that's a big numbers alone. Probably huge. But. But so if he's using the term VC subsidies, VC dollars broadly, I think that does sort of. It is a reasonable point. But at the end of the day you talk to most companies and most paid chat subscribers and they're just like, I like the thinking model. So I pay $20 a month, I like the pro model and I use it to create value or whatever subscription I'm on. I'm getting that much value in like software for my business that probably doesn't even exist. Like all the vibe coded software that we use here. It's just not Available off the shelf. We're building like completely net new products. And I think that that's like generally what's happening in the AI economy. There's been this discussion for a long time. Martin Shkreli was sort of debunking it around like, oh, is this like, are these all like circular deals? And he was like, no. Like the economy is so broad that you have, you know. Yes, there are, yes. Like Google might take a position in Anthropic, Microsoft might have a position in OpenAI, but you also have completely Main street customers and just average Joes who are paying, seeing ads, buying things. There's companies that are profiting off of running ads and other inference providers. Like there's like everyone.

[John]

It's one big circle.

[Jordy]

Yes. It's one giant circle of life that is, you know, actually self perpetuating because it is a true economy that, that

[Ben Horowitz]

hits, you know, 25 different categories.

[Jordy]

Well, sorry, you might think it's over, but Elad Gil does not. He says, my view is the AI boom will only accelerate and is a once in a lifetime transformation. This is orthogonal to whether many AI companies should exit in the next 12 to 18 months as some may lack durability versus labs, new entrants or weird market ships. But he's extremely bullish. He also posted a funny thing about his new life plan. He said his new life plan is to move to Brooklyn, get a neck tat, ride a bike everywhere, cold brew his own coffee, also start drinking coffee. That's an odd thing to jump straight to the.

[John]

Was this, was he like trying. Is this like a cipher of some sort of.

[Jordy]

He wants to.

[John]

Is there a secret, is there a secret message embedded in this post?

[Jordy]

Maybe, I don't know. What's the Straussian reading? He wants to vape mango pods, but ironically and wear a scarf everywhere during summer.

[John]

We have to, we have to pull this up.

[Jordy]

Sarah Guo says, no thank you.

[John]

Pull this up. We gotta break it down.

[Jordy]

Sourdough. I don't know. I have. I've spent like a few weekends in Brooklyn. It's a nice town. I am not a fan of tattoos, so I would stay away from the neck tat. Although, who knows? I've seen some cutting edge neck tattoo technology that allows you to remove it very easily with certain light frequencies. So it can be sort of semi permanent, easily removable tattoos. So if he wants to do this and then roll it back, I'm sure he can do this. It sounds like he might just want to spend the summer in Brooklyn, ride a bike everywhere. Brew some cold brew and then maybe get back to capital allocation.

[John]

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, it sounds, I mean it sounds like he's advising his portfolio companies.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yes.

[John]

I don't care how hard you're ripping, a lot of you should probably exit just given how much uncertainty there is.

[Jordy]

Well, later in the show we have a fun story. A bear wandered into a backyard and took a dip in the family pool. We'll take you through it coming up after. Later in the show, what this tells us about edge computing. Get ready for it. Joe Weisenthal says defense stocks have been trading not just like the Iran war is over, but like all war ever is over, says Barclays Capital Alexander Altman. I would not expect this. Yeah, Lockheed is down significantly. Even pre Iran war buildup, it fully round tripped. Well, maybe that is good news. The goal of these companies is to bring about peace and defense and so perhaps it's over. I don't know. It's hard to track.

[John]

Has Jane street achieved AGI internally?

[Jordy]

I think so. They definitely have.

[John]

$40 billion in revenue last year, more than all the big Wall street banks. And with only 3,500 employees. Employees, yes.

[Jordy]

Let's give it up for Jane Street. Fantastic. Capping a stunning ascent to the peak of the industry, the firm flew past global investment banks after reaping 15.5 billion in the year's final quarter. According to people with knowledge of the results who asked not to be named. They're leaking. With only 3,500 employees, it beat the nearest rival, JPMorgan Chase, by 11% during the year. Tether did 15 billion at 200 employees. So maybe, maybe they aren't the hottest shop in town, but that is very, very impressive.

[John]

That's like one of those questions, like, would you rather do 40 billion of revenue with 3,500 employees or 15 billion with 200 employees?

[Jordy]

Well, we have some exciting news. Out of Thrive Capital, Josh Kushner announced a new fund, Thrive Eternal, a permanent holding company that will be concentrated in a small number of assets that we can own and steward over many decades. Across Thrive Capital and Thrive holdings, we are building and investing through a moment of exponential change, backing emerging technologies, the infrastructure that powers them and the businesses they can transform. Increasingly, he sees a fourth category. These are assets with qualities that cannot be replicated by technology. Iconic franchises and cultural institutions rooted in tradition. And he says his first partnership is expected to be with the the San Francisco Giants, an institution built on more than a century of shared identity and community. And among the most iconic sports franchises In America. I looked it up before the show started. The San Francisco Giants, if you're not familiar, it's an American professional baseball team based in San Francisco. Baseball is a bat and ball sport played between two teams of nine players, each taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play beginning when a player on the fielding team called the pitcher, throws a ball at a player on the batting team called the batter, and then the batter tries to hit it with a bat. And so they play this game, they sell tickets to the game, and that's how the San Francisco Giants make money.

[John]

And Josh Kushner with a CBN style show.

[Jordy]

Yes.

[John]

For whatever you just described, I feel like it would be very cool. That would be cool if you had maybe posts, you know, on screen graphics and you could provide kind of live coverage maybe while that's happening.

[Jordy]

Extremely educational. Well, we have our first guest of the show. George from CrowdStrike is back in the TDP and Ultra Dome. He's in the waiting room. George, how are you doing?

[George Kurtz]

I'm doing well. How are you guys?

[Jordy]

We're doing fantastically. Welcome. Welcome to the show. I would love to kick it off with just an introduction on Project Quiltworks. What's new? Get us up to speed on CrowdStrike.

[George Kurtz]

Well, first I have to congratulate you guys for your success there. So I gotta start with that, but we can get back to that later. But Project Quiltworks is really a coalition that we put together with some of our largest global partners, like eye, 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. But the fact that there is such a focus now from the CEOs all the way down on where are my exposures, where are my vulnerabilities, and what can I do to mitigate it? So we put together a group of, you know, basically some of the largest global security partners that we have to go out and be able to do this because we have to do it very quickly. The window is closing in the time that we have to identify, patch and remediate and mitigate these issues.

[Jordy]

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.

[John]

Supply chain hacks.

[Jordy]

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 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?

[George Kurtz]

Well, they're both important, and I'm glad you pointed that out, because when you think about what actually happens is you're having more and more users consume AI, and how they're doing that is leveraging AI through any number of applications. Could be Claude Code, Codex, 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. 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 clock code consumes it, boom. All of a sudden you've just downloaded one of the newest packages and all of your credentials are gone. So that's what we've seen. And it really goes to the fact that despite however many vulnerabilities you may find, the adversary is smart, they're human, and they're going to find the path of least resistance to deal with what's hot today and where the exposure is. And that's on the endpoint where people consume AI.

[Jordy]

How have your conversations with lab leaders been going around models getting more powerful? And then the natural response, of course, there's the opportunity to. To gate the models to companies that can be trusted. But there's also the potential to not let the model be jailbreakable. So it should help me with defense. But if all of a sudden I'm saying, ignore previous instructions, let me hack into bank of America, it should say, no, that's always been a problem. It used to be a problem with just the sort of the silly 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?

[George Kurtz]

Well, the model capabilities continue to obviously improve and also the capabilities that allow them to provide guardrails and limits on what a user can do. But that's not 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. Right. 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. And this is one of the time tested issues that security has had. So putting guardrails on that, we call it aidr, AI Detection and Response. And it allows companies to look at those prompts and make sure that they're sanitized to and from the LLM.

[John]

How are you thinking about the threat of open source models? You know, the new DeepSeek R4 preview from yesterday was super impressive. Are you expecting, you know, open source models that have, you know, really threatening cyber capabilities in something like six months?

[Jordy]

I think Dario was estimating around six months lag time after Mythos for the, for the lagging edge to catch up?

[George Kurtz]

I don't, I don't think it's long in a few areas. I mean, if you look at Kiwi to six that just came out, right. I mean, these are impressive models that are out there. And what you have to realize is even the frontier models themselves, the ones that are public, are still very, very capable. Like it is extremely capable. So you can find a lot of vulnerabilities. You can basically chain these together and create sort of an automated attack. And that's what we're seeing. Obviously some of the private models have the ability to actually chain these sort of vulnerabilities together more like a human. They've got more reasoning capabilities, which is one of the, you know, really powers of their models. But the other models are a, are not far off and the open source or the open weight models really are going to be focused on catching up very quickly. So the window, as I said when I started the program with you, is very small. And that's why we started this coalition with Quiltworks to be able to find these at, you know, again with the, 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.

[Jordy]

How are you thinking about AI powered but potentially non automated cybersecurity risks? I'm just. We were talking to a founder who's working with, you know, engineer recruiting, and he was having luck using AI agents to send outbound emails. And you can imagine that, you know, 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 distracted by. Not get overly distracted and forget about the human element of security.

[George Kurtz]

Well, the human element is really the weakest link. I call it a layer eight problem. Right. The problem is between the. The keyboard in his chair. And that has been the case for a long time. So let's take your example. One of the most prolific groups, threat actor groups that we actually track, is called Silent Chilema, 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 US To a mule, and that mule takes it to a laptop farm. And then the North Koreans control that, so they already just bypass all of your security because you just handed them a laptop.

[Jordy]

Wow, okay.

[George Kurtz]

So we're seeing lots and lots of those. And it's funny because we buy. We really. I started identifying this before anyone even knew about it about two years ago. And we first started notifying customers, like, hey, we think you have a North Korean. It's not really Bob in Texas, it's a North Korean. Which obviously goes 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

[John]

up, but yeah, wouldn't there, wouldn't there be an incentive at some point if they did get somebody on the inside to and 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.

[George Kurtz]

We can't.

[John]

Why would we get rid of them? They're incredible. There's no way they're. There's no way. They're just, you know, that's crazy. Farming us out.

[George Kurtz]

That's exactly, that's exactly what they do. So we're seeing that. We're seeing agents go rogue, which is problematic. One of the, one of the big challenges where AI is, is goal seeking. So you create an agent. You know, one story is a customer that created like 100 agents. One agent found some issues in code, wanted to fix it, but it didn't have access. So it went back to the Slack channel where the other 99 agents were hanging out and said, hey, I'd like to fix this issue. I don't have access. Who has access? One agent put its hand up and said, I can fix that for you, and happily fixed it and basically worked around all the security boundaries. So goal seeking. I don't think we talk enough about goal seeking because when you put an agent on it, depending on what model you're using and how it's set up in the harness, they just go nuts until they actually get to the goal. They'll actually steal credentials out of your keychain, even if you didn't give it to them. So they can keep going.

[John]

Wow.

[George Kurtz]

Yeah, that's what we're seeing.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Because in one way that, you know, if the goal is achieve the task. It succeeded, but at what cost? It needs to know that there are rules for a reason. What are some of the other cybersecurity tasks that are being successfully augmented with AI or AI agents these days? I'm thinking of, obviously, vulnerability testing. That's something that great cybersecurity researchers, great programmers, have been able to do for a long time now. It is amplified a million fold with artificial intelligence. But are there other, maybe more bespoke or soft skill tasks that cybersecurity researchers are able to amplify their efforts with by working alongside AI?

[George Kurtz]

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. The 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 SOC 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 giving an example would take them four days in writing a report to what they call a SITREP report. The situational kind of response, what happened? And now four days turns into like an hour because it can all be automated using something like Charlotte, which is our agenti capability. So all of those things that were problematic, you can just get through and you let AI do what it's really good at, ride through lots of data, look at lots of sort of information, write reports for you, and then your 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.

[John]

Jordan, anything else more fun question than less scary question. How is it AI changing Formula one?

[George Kurtz]

Well, there you go. This is a great question and it's interesting because I think there's different levels of adoption of AI between all teams.

[John]

Yeah. One team might be. They might have. Be spending a ton on inference. Another team is like, we use radios. We're doing it the old fashioned way.

[George Kurtz]

Well, what's interesting is they. 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 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. So we'll see where it all lands. But that was some of the talk that has been happening and I hope it doesn't happen because I think AI can really help things. But. But we'll see where it all goes. And obviously I'm trying to help out the Mercedes team in those areas as well.

[Jordy]

That'd be great.

[John]

Yeah. Do you think there will be five, ten years from now? Do you think there will be. You'll be able to look back and be like, okay, there's a pre AI era and a post AI era in Formula one, or will it be more subtle? Because a lot of these processes are just already so micromanaged and optimized.

[George Kurtz]

I think you'll see like a pre and a post. The challenge is you're going to have to run through a lot of the different engineers that have been in Formula One for many years, because just like in the corporate world, there's resistance to, well, what is AI going to do for me? And there's resistance in Formula 1 in some cases, from an engineering perspective, because they're doing it themselves. They're the ones that are coming up with the calculations, and that's just the way they did it. And it doesn't mean they're. They're bad or it's right or wrong. It's just the way they operate it for so many years. So I think just as we see kids coming out of school, they're. 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.

[Jordy]

That makes a ton of sense.

[John]

Makes sense.

[Jordy]

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations.

[John]

Yeah, you guys, it has been a wild, wild quarter. But come back on soon.

[Jordy]

It's great progress.

[Ben Horowitz]

We will.

[George Kurtz]

Great to see you guys.

[Jordy]

Great to see you.

[George Kurtz]

Congrats again to you.

[Ben Horowitz]

Goodbye.

[John]

Thank you.

[Jordy]

After our next guest, we will be diving into the Summer House reunion, which has gone off the rails. We're gonna explain why Bravo is the cleanest lens for understanding us. China decoupling. But first we have Professor Sendi. He's a word combo guru. He's a wombo guru. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

[John]

Hey.

[Professor Sandy]

Well, thank you. Good to see you guys.

[Jordy]

Good to see you on.

[Professor Sandy]

I appreciate it.

[Jordy]

We're thrilled. We're huge.

[John]

We're huge fans. Honestly, I discovered, I think I was pretty early, I will say, when I discovered your account on Instagram, I did not have a single other person that I knew following your account.

[Professor Sandy]

One of the OGs on the channel, I think.

[John]

I think I'm an OG. And I. And I. And I kept sending them to John and I'm like, this is the funniest thing in the world.

[Ira]

Right?

[Jordy]

It's so good.

[John]

And so we've been trying to hear.

[Professor Sandy]

I love the original fans. You guys are amazing. You guys, like, really? You're the ones that fueled the fire for me to keep going.

[Jordy]

I'm glad. I'm glad.

[John]

Okay, so let's get right into it. You're the professor. So 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. Aggressively yet. We think that's going to change. You know, there's this explosion of AI adoption. We're expecting an explosion of Wombo.

[Professor Sandy]

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. And I'm. I'm thinking about expanding it to sort of include some of the older generations 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.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Ira]

What.

[John]

So what was the first womb. What, like, what. What really drew you to wombas? What was the first.

[Professor Sandy]

You know, honestly, I saw a video and I basically just. It was. They had put the low curcantologic, a low state, like, word together, and I was like, oh, I can just make this longer. And I just went ahead and added a word to it, and then it kind of blew up. It took off, and I was like, okay, I guess I'm pretty good at this. So I just kept going with it. And then before you knew it, I had basically the world's longest word ever said in one breath. So now, you know, I have this, you know, this crazy long word now that, you know, people are trying to learn and it's just grown from there. And now I'm just creating original Wombos. And I'm sure you guys have seen and everybody's seen that, you know, people are using these Wombos all over the place in schools and, you know, just out in daily life. And so it's really been a movement that I was not expecting.

[Jordy]

I love it.

[John]

Do you. Can you. Can you. One shot. Your longest word. Like, is it on? Is it on command? Or do you. Do you need to iterate through it?

[Professor Sandy]

No, I can do it on command.

[John]

Do you want to. Do you want to do it?

[Professor Sandy]

Sure, I'll try it. Okay, here we go.

[Yoland Yan]

Wow.

[George Kurtz]

There we go.

[Professor Sandy]

I wasn't expecting to do that.

[Jordy]

I can't believe you pulled that off. Are you actually a professor? Like, what is your background? How did you get into this? Was this just a side hustle that just went mega viral? And, like, what is your story?

[Ira]

Yeah.

[Professor Sandy]

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.

[Jordy]

Okay, got it.

[Professor Sandy]

So I don't have a background in Words either. I just. I used to be a rapper a long time ago. People ask me, how are you so good at doing this? How do you put these words together? And I just tell them, you know, it's a natural skill I have. And then I used to do it back in the 90s. I was like one of the original white rappers from back then, before Eminem was even around.

[Jordy]

That's amazing. Wow.

[John]

No way.

[Professor Sandy]

Yeah, so I've been doing it for a long time.

[Jordy]

Yeah. We were reflecting earlier on.

[John]

Born too late to explore the earth, Born too early to explore the stars. Born just in time to be the leading expert on Wombos.

[Jordy]

Yes, for sure.

[Professor Sandy]

That's perfect. Yes.

[Jordy]

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

[Professor Sandy]

You know, I think it's mostly forward looking. I've seen a couple that were old school, so I know there was one that was like a calculator. It was like an old ad from the 1979 or something like that.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

This is a calculator. This is a calculator. That's a lighter, too. Like if you want to smoke while

[Professor Sandy]

you're doing math, calculators. And it's got a little lighter thing.

[John]

We need one.

[Jordy]

That's amazing.

[Professor Sandy]

Yeah. And. And so another word. So I haven't really visited a lot of older words, honestly. So there was a word that came out in the dictionary the other day, Chapel ganger. So that word is actually not mine, so I'm not.

[John]

I know, but Merriam Webster needs to hire you.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Like immediately. And start guessing.

[Ben (Sincerely)]

They do.

[Professor Sandy]

You know, I want to get. I want to get quiche pinamus in there. Yeah, that's.

[Ira]

Explain that.

[John]

Wombo for people.

[Jordy]

Explain that one.

[Professor Sandy]

Yeah. So, so basically, queesh Pinnamus is like one of the big ones that people are using. And so that's like quirky niche and then penomous is peak cinema analysis.

[John]

Sorry, I just. I'm like the overachieving student, you know, I studied, so. So we integrate these words.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

I personally, I use quiche Lorraine more.

[Jordy]

Yes.

[John]

Quirky niche lore. Explain.

[Jordy]

Yeah, that's a handy one, professor.

[Professor Sandy]

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. Ol visions.

[Jordy]

Oh, yes.

[Professor Sandy]

So it's basically like you take quiche Lorraine and then you mix it with anal vision, which is analysis. I apologize if I can't say that

[Jordy]

here,

[John]

but it's analysis, vision, to be clear.

[Ira]

Is that right?

[Professor Sandy]

Yes, it's analysis, revision. Revision. If you do one of those, you're basically just doing an analysis, revision of it.

[Jordy]

That's correct, yeah. How much time are you spending trying to come up with. When I think of Queesh and Lorraine, I think of short, usable phrases that actually could work their way into the marriage vernacular. Whereas with the local. 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.

[John]

How much I use Lorraine all the time. I'll say, John. Lorraine. Intel's earning.

[Jordy]

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. The Merriam Webster's Dictionary.

[Professor Sandy]

Yeah. I actually have a theory behind, like, how to make effective wombos like that. So I think, like, you're saying short wombos are good.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Professor Sandy]

Something that sounds good. Yeah, it has to sound good.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Professor Sandy]

So it's like the quiche. It sounds good. I don't know, it just. It sounds.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Professor Sandy]

Nice.

[Jordy]

It sounds like a real word.

[Professor Sandy]

Just don't work.

[Jordy]

Yeah. It's almost like where, you know, the. 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 sounds like a drug for some reason. It's just like. But it's from nothing and those things tend to break through. Also. I feel like Chapelganger really jumps 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 pique their interest and then go a level deeper and understand

[John]

the whole lore Talk about the origins of non shell lash out. That's one that we've been using. That's a really good one. Once you know that wombo, which is nonchalant crash out. You just see it everywhere. You do, it's constant. It's everywhere. Every time I open X or Instagram or YouTube, someone's having a nonchalash out.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Professor Sandy]

Yep, pretty much. So, yeah, nonchalant shout 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, that the CEO in McDonald's, you know, when he was eating that burger, I'm pretty sure he was having a nacho lash out when that was happening. He looks pretty calm on the outside, but on the inside, I'm pretty sure

[John]

he was freaking out, he was fighting. He was in a dark place for sure.

[Jordy]

So with something like non shelash out or any of these other examples, how much of it is there is a phenomenon that. Because a non chalash out is a thing that we didn't have a word for in English before, but it has existed probably for entire human history. This has happened. But how much of it is you. You see something and you say that deserves a wombo versus you're just sort of grappling with different phrases and then you piece together and then you find examples.

[John]

Another example from the professor, capsolutely. I would use this personally if I know someone's just basically, you know, BSing.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Kind of like lying to me. I'd say capsolutely.

[Jordy]

Yes. You know, you want to agree.

[Professor Sandy]

Well, here's the, here's the secret. Okay, so I'll know you let. 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 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 liguratively. So that's figuratively and literally. How can something be figurative and literal at the same time? Yeah, but it's kind of possible if you really think about it. You can, like, literally mean something figuratively, or you can figuratively mean something. You can literally mean it halfway.

[Jordy]

You know, the Hegelian dialectic, the thesis and the antithesis, create the synthesis, jam

[Professor Sandy]

them together, and you can really come up with some beautiful wombos that way. That's. That's really kind of the secret to

[Ben (Sincerely)]

a lot of it.

[Jordy]

Yeah, for sure. Where do you want to go with your creator journey? Because I was thinking like, like Instagram reels, notoriously hard to run ads or monetize. I don't know that there's an obvious, like, Patreon paid podcast play here. Maybe I would be interested to listen to you talk about etymology and language for hours. But I was thinking, like, brands should be paying you to create 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?

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Professor Sandy]

So right now I'm working on a dictionary, so I'm hoping to use that Aston to launching my products. I've got it. Yeah.

[John]

I think coffee table. Like a coffee table book. Like the Great Book of Wombos, something you can proudly place on a coffee table.

[Professor Sandy]

Yeah, I want to have a book, like, where I can put it on the table and people can just, like, flip through it. I want it to look real nice and I want to be, like, a really great item to have, but also, you know, like a coffee.

[Jordy]

Coffee table dictionary, a coffee fictionary. Working on these. Sorry. There you go.

[Professor Sandy]

You're coming up with stuff.

[Jordy]

I'm working on it, but yeah. What else are you coming?

[Professor Sandy]

Gotta 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. And I've only been growing for, like, four months now almost, so, I mean, I really haven't. You know, I was. I was barely there in January, and so it's just exploded. So it's. It's still kind of the beginning right now, so.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Professor Sandy]

Yeah. There's so many opportunities, so it's really looking up.

[Jordy]

Yeah, we had someone on the show whose whole job is coming up with names for tech companies, tech products, didn't he come up with the name Sonos and a few others? And I feel like that's like your grasp on the English language is sorely needed among some companies that have very complex product names. And so I see, like, a bright future in a bunch of different ways. But eagerly await. About the coffee table book. Anything else to.

[Ira]

To refer.

[John]

No. This was super fun. We're having Gary, Gary V. 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. I think he'll have some ideas.

[Professor Sandy]

Yeah, that would be amazing. And. Yeah, and if you're.

[George Kurtz]

Yeah.

[Professor Sandy]

Mention me to Gary Vee. That would be very cool. That's awesome. Yeah.

[Jordy]

Do you experience anything different across the platforms? I know. Okay. We follow you on Instagram. I know you're on TikTok. Is there anything that you've learned from, like, the different platforms?

[Professor Sandy]

Definitely. So TikTok, I think, is more for discovery.

[John]

Okay.

[Professor Sandy]

So if you do something that's completely novel, that video can really blow up. 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's more for discovery. Instagram is more for growth and personalization of your brand.

[Jordy]

Have you put these on YouTube shorts yet?

[Professor Sandy]

What's that?

[Jordy]

Have you put them on YouTube shorts yet? Just because it's a similar.

[Professor Sandy]

I haven't. I used to do YouTube and I just. I don't know if it's going to fit on that platform. I just. I don't know. I'm hesitant to go there and I've been hesitant to go on Facebook. Meta.

[Jordy]

Oh, yeah.

[Professor Sandy]

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.

[Jordy]

Okay, well, thank you so much for taking the time to join the show.

[John]

Fantastic talking and thank you for all your analysis and teachings.

[Jordy]

Yes.

[John]

It has brought both of us so much joy, like, not just watching the videos, but using them.

[Jordy]

We got our lawyer to use Quiche Lorraine once and we were very, very happy about that.

[Professor Sandy]

That's a high compliment. I appreciate that. Thanks for telling me that.

[Jordy]

It was remarkable.

[Professor Sandy]

Jordy and John, I appreciate you guys having me on. I really do.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Yeah. You're the man.

[Jordy]

We'll talk to you soon.

[John]

Great hanging.

[Jordy]

Have a good rest of you. Bye. Greg Brockman's apartment is for sale where they started OpenAI. Sheil Monot 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, 1800 square feet. It is an incredible piece of. Of lore that OpenAI started in this particular apartment.

[John]

Yeah, this feels like it will go quickly. Like there are so many people in San Francisco that might need a place and to just snap up the place that OpenAI was effectively formed.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I remember some of the early photos. Good times. We should go to this video from, from Zane Shah. Imagine every pixel on your screen streamed live directly from a model. So this looks like a website. And when I saw this, I thought that it was a website. I saw a URL at the top and I was like, oh, this is a cool demo for some sort of tour of Notre Dame website. Probably vibe coded. A testament to what the modern coding models can do. But it's not code. What you are seeing is actually not code. It is. There's no HTML, no layout engine, no code. It is a diffusion model that is rendering this as the input is given. And so you can think about this almost like those world models, those generative video games where you walk around. But this is sort of a very, very early glimpse into sort of what the future of generative UI might look like. Jordy, why are you laughing?

[John]

Because the chat is doing a bunch of Wombos.

[Jordy]

Oh, okay. We gotta work on Wombos. We will be integrating those more in the near future. But we have our next guest in the waiting room, gary Vaynerchuk from VaynerMedia. Gary, how are you doing?

[John]

Welcome, Gary. Welcome back to the show. Do you know about Wombos?

[Ira]

I do not, my friend.

[Jordy]

You gotta learn about Wombos.

[John]

You gotta 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.

[Jordy]

So wombos are word combos. So the example would be Queesh is quirky and niche. You put it together and that's queesh or Lorraine Lore plus A.

[Ira]

That was a risky start. For the first word.

[John]

Yeah, that's a risky start. Lorraine is a better. Lorraine is a better one. Give me. If I say Lorraine, first and foremost, congratulations. Thank you, thank you.

[Ira]

I really thank you.

[John]

I remember, I remember our Very first call, I think it was in Q1 of 2025. So we were just maybe like a little, A little just a few months into the show and you. Even at that point we were very, very, 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 so.

[Jordy]

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

[Ira]

Everything starts subpar, right? Like when you start working or when you start singing or like, you know, like for everybody who's watching right now, every business, every personal brand, every B2B, every B to C. The to. 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. It's. There's costs in the content and the way you do it, but the upside is so extraordinary against the investment. And when you frame it up properly, multi channel, multi format, the. The business outcomes can be extraordinary. And I'm happy to see you guys get one.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Well, are you.

[John]

Is it, is it, is it funny that, Is it funny to you that, that it feels like, it feels like in some ways we're like a decade into live streaming and yet two people

[Jordy]

are by some measures.

[John]

Well, yeah, two decades by some measures. But like Twitch has been big for a long time. There's been so much attention there.

[Ira]

I mean, I wrote this book in 2008, it came out in 09. Crush it. In the back of the book I talk about you stream and live streaming. Yeah. I mean it ebbs and flows and to your point, like, I mean, I can't even comprehend the economic impact live social shopping is going to do over the next 10 years for humans and consumer businesses. Yeah, it's all the same stuff, brother. It's always been around forever and it's always the beginning. Right. Like, it's just kind of the way consumer behavior and human behavior works. Yeah, it does. It does surprise me how many more people have not replicated the very, you know, basic framework that you guys executed in this genre.

[John]

Well, the interesting, the interesting thing is there's easily been 100 shows that have like taken some level of inspiration from what we're doing. It's still very, very hard. It's still very, very hard to break through. Right there's. It's not just, it's not just the overlay and the format. But I have been surprised, I've been very confident. I've said this on podcasts for, you know, we've talked about this going back probably six, six to eight months ago. You should take this format of a live stream and you just add a extra level of production beyond. You just have a laptop there and you're hanging out and you apply that. The example we'd always talk about is like cooking, where all you need is like a cool kitchen. That's your set. You have a couple of cameras, so you have different angles. And then you just say, hey, every day at 3pm 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 guests into something like that too. So you have different conversations, creators coming through every day. And then I think you can apply that to a bunch of other things. Sports has honestly been the most advanced in terms of live streaming, so credit, credit to them.

[Ira]

Yeah, I mean it's, it's, it's there for the taking. A lot of things are there for the taking.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

How are you thinking about how branding and marketing will evolve? I had this interesting moment this week with the GPT Images 2 launch, where suddenly any brand, like basically fully democratized, high quality product photography. Now there's still categories where like, I don't want you to AI generate the product photography, like even apparel is actually interesting where, like fit matters a lot. And so if you generate a bunch of AI images of your shirt and then I buy it and it doesn't fit well, 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, you're like a couple prompts away from it. And so it feels like it's going to be harder than ever to stand out online.

[Ira]

Well, I mean, there's a lot there. I mean, it's, we just got done talking about how hard it is to stand out online, right? Like, like the cost of entry is zero. But you know, this is a competition. Like, you know, everyone's trying and so everyone will make content, video, picture, audio at a level that is 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 always going to be a timing game to this, right. So right now, you know, like this open claw, you know, allows me to do things that a lot of people aren't thinking about right now. And me knowing that and me playing with that and then even more interestingly, how creative or strategic am I with the agentic agents and what are they doing for me and how do I understand? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I think it's kind of always going to be the same thing, like whether it was electricity and some people put electricity in their home and other people were scared to because there was demons in it or you know, the car or the, you know, the typewriter is one that I've like been fascinated by the competitive advantages of the companies that actually brought typewriters in versus, you know, putting penmanship on a pedestal, you know, like, and computers and the Internet and mobile devices and open source versus closed source and social media. Now I, you know, look, this I think 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.

[John]

Totally, totally.

[Ira]

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.

[John]

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,

[Ira]

you know, and, and my argument would be, would be, and yeah, right.

[John]

Yeah.

[Ira]

Like to me this part like I just extreme, I, I think is creating extreme analog. I really do think it's a barbell. I think in the next 10 years, obviously it's 2036, but I feel like it's going to feel like 2050, which actually is bringing the rise of 1950. I couldn't be more impressed with what Ari Emanuel and others are doing that are investing in all these analog businesses. I could not be more interested in physical retail, in event driven businesses in concerts and venues. And I think the rise of analog. I have a restaurant business, part of the restaurant group. I keep pushing my partners who are really operating. Let's open a restaurant that makes people check in their phone as soon as they walk. Let's put people in group tables like 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 on the Internet like in five years if we're having this video, this interview right now. Yeah, most of the audience is trying to figure out if we're real or not. That is, that is very real and has real substantial counter opportunities. So you know the photographer who's sad when they hear that, I'm like no, no, no, you might actually crush in a different way. And so I'm curious to see what the counter scaled moves are going to be 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.

[John]

Okay, totally.

[Jordy]

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. Sales records are up, up something like 10% in 2025.

[John]

Yeah, they're effectively like 10% of like global streaming revenue is just vinyl still.

[Jordy]

It's bigger than CDs. It's making a bigger comeback than other formats. What is your reaction? Is it people looking for wall decorations? Are they actually listening to the vinyl? Do you have any idea of like what we should Read into that idea of this nostalgic format coming back.

[Ira]

I mean, do you see my shelves here? Like, only thing I've been thinking about for the last seven, eight years or not only, but like, very hot on this.

[Dylan Patel]

Yeah.

[Ira]

I mean, the answer is yes to both. Some of it's happening with decorative. A lot of it's happening with collectibles. Even more is happening with subconscious counter push to extreme digitalization.

[Jordy]

Sure.

[Ira]

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 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 I'm going to take their job, that the consumer is pushing against it. And then that's one part. And then the second part is, yeah, people are starting to do counter behavior consciously and unconsciously. And then there's just swings of. Swings of trends. Like, you know, like, music sounds great in a great record player. And like people like, oh, this is kind of cool too. And like, it becomes behavioral. It, you know, it starts in the same stuff. You know, this. It's like the Brooklyn extremists are like, let's go, you know, hippie cool culture. And they get their little thing in a little sub pocket. It bleeds out a little bit. Then the Manhattanites feel like they're not cool anymore, so they do it to keep up with the Brooklyn Knights. And then we have that version everywhere in California, Texas and Florida and everywhere in the world. And so it 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 extremely extraordinary.

[John]

Let's give it up for us Sports. Well said.

[Jordy]

I want to talk about sports.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

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

[Ira]

Yes. You know, it's really interesting tie a couple things together. This distribution channel that you and I are on right now. Right. The fact that people watching.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Ira]

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. With this analog and not disrupted by AI thing is why 6 or 7 years ago I started investing very heavily in alternative sports. So I made a big bet on pickleball that I think is going to work out quite well. You know, unrivaled. The three on three basketball league. AJ and I, my brother, early investors in that. The wiffle ball league, the sailing league, slam ball. Very aggressive on alternative sport investing. Padel. Yeah. So I'm very bullish on it. I think Josh obviously plays that at a very heavy economic level with his funds of that nature and everyone like him and others especially him. I have so much pride in his building because he's done such a great job and New York City base when we were always like envious. The best sav so the greatest his him and Ride Shine. I think all. Anyone who does not realize how substantial the analog opportunities are is really missing the plot of what's happening. And so it gets exciting. It's exciting to think that you can invest in both something that could get as big as, you know, anthropic in an extreme digital world. But also forget about the obvious ones like the Giants or the Spear. I'm talking about people rolling up 900 local restaurants of building up a huge like 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. Here's a left field one. Like the. 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.

[Jordy]

Yes, 100%. Yeah.

[Ira]

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 are watch this show, we're like, oh, crap. We can play on either side of extreme digitalization or analog. Be creative.

[John]

Well, yeah, the beauty, you know, give 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 you need to build.

[Ira]

Now we're nerding out. What if you have 40 of them and now this is. 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?

[Jordy]

Yeah. Oh, that's interesting.

[John]

I could see doing that for kids, you know, like maybe slightly lower bar, but you create your own kind of kids content.

[Ira]

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'm so.

[John]

Who's laughing now? Who's laughing now?

[Ira]

Yeah, but when I started building V friends and like, building this Pokemon Sesame street thing, yes, there was a lot of blockchain in it, but it was a lot of my smartest friends in Silicon Valley five years ago. Like, this AI thing is percolating. You know, it was a little more slang for machine learning, and then it obviously got accelerated real quick. But, like, yeah, I believe in a lot of this stuff.

[Jordy]

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 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?

[Ira]

Yeah, the Ryan mafia is good. I mean, Ryan Harwood, I've learned nothing from zero. Absolutely nothing. Let's 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 immigrants, and I thought it was simplicity, and I thought it was, you know, love and health over everything. And truly, truly, not just cliche bullshit, but live your life that way, even if you're an entrepreneur and a capitalist and want to compete. But when Ryan Holiday started talking about being a stoic and stoicism, I was like, oh, like, you know, like, I was like, oh, shit, that sounds like. Oh, that.

[Yoland Yan]

That.

[Ira]

That's interesting. And so I think that that's one for him. Sirhan, you know, is a fun one for me, because a lot, you know, he's obviously playing at such a big personal brand level now, and he had that TV show on Bravo and then. And it was off the air. You know, his curiosity, humility was amazing. Like, he was always around our ecosystem, and he really learned to play the playbook. I've lived. You've lived. He's lived so much. You know, now he's back on Netflix. But he had a really great era in between his television moments of really winning on Social and going all in. And I'm really proud of him. And Harwood is. This is a dear, actual friend. He's family, not even friends. And so I. He's taught me that.

[John]

I'm glad you circled you circled back, because I was like, damn, he's taking shots,

[Ira]

you know. You know, he's a Long island boy. I'm a Jersey boy. I think anyone from our part of the world knows, like, taking shots to your brothers is like the ultimate form of I love you more than anything. I think, literally, from from 1985 to 2000, 98% of the words out of my best friend's mouth was highly disrespectful in my direction.

[Jordy]

Of course. That's the best. That's the only way to do it. Ryan Holiday wrote, trust me, I'm Lying. Confessions of a media manipulator. At 25, should more young people write books? I talked to some brilliant young people every day on the show. A lot of them fantasize about writing a book, but it always feels like it's something that needs to come with. Wisdom needs to come with being 40, 50, 60.

[John]

Yeah, you get a lot of wisdom, but part of it's like you're generating wisdom through writing and thinking deeply.

[Ira]

Do you feel like I think of it this way? Man, I think it is 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?

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Yeah.

[Ira]

And then. And 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 we have, me and me have a good relationship with each other. But even I like, I look at it and I'm like, how the hell did you Write that in 2008? And then to your point, I think my 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, of wisdom and chapters have a lot to say that can really wrap up and bring value. So I think most people, if they're going to be in that game, are probably going to write their best book first and last.

[John]

You partnered up with Masterclass?

[Ira]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Tell us about it.

[John]

Tell us about it.

[Ira]

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

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

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 on their marketing mix.

[Ira]

Giggling because we're going to wrap up here and I'm actually going to take your question but try to give an extraordinary amount of value to everyone that I know listens to this epic show. It's not what they're saying, it's how they're acting. Which leads me to the following sentence. Everybody who's watching highly invested in big companies that spend a lot of money on marketing. Your marketing department is wasting 93 cents of every dollar.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[Ira]

We are living in such a radical transformation of the mid funnel dominating not the upper funnel and the lower funnel.

[Jordy]

Sure.

[Ira]

Us three right now we're on mid funnel.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

We are producing content on in the mid funnel.

[Ira]

I mean look, I mean this is what's going on in my right. This is a production day.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Ira]

This will be post produced into creative that will go into mid funnel organic social and the do well will go up for brand and down for performance. Every brand on earth should be spending 20% of their entire marketing budget just on social media organic production because the toxic vacation 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 when I tell you every Fortune 5000 company is still doing guessing the upper funnel sponsorships ridiculous shit. And then the lower funnel 2016 B testing better frameworks. When the mid funnel eat up the whole world and you guys are winning bruins is winning any personal brand and many other businesses. And so that doesn't get into the air of it all. That to me is tooling and infrastructure to be great at what I just said.

[John]

Yeah.

[Ira]

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.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Makes a lot of sense.

[John]

I can't stand wasted marketing spend.

[Jordy]

Yeah. It makes my blood boil. Well, thank you so much for so great time to come chat with us. Congrats.

[John]

We barely got to talk about live commerce.

[Jordy]

Yeah, we'll get that next time.

[Ira]

Yeah. Everybody, anybody selling to the consumer needs to understand that China is going to do a trillion in gmv. A trillion in GMV this year in stuff.

[John]

So.

[Ira]

And TikTok Shop and whatnot are doing real numbers in the US and that is clearly going to be popping off any second with what they're going to do, which will lead you to, to do what they're going to do.

[John]

Sorry, 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?

[Ira]

There's. I felt nothing. I haven't done any real homework on any like corporate structure. What is going to be the vibe?

[John]

I know, but will the new owner, will the new owners be willing to like subsidize TikTok Shop is kind of what I'm getting at.

[Ira]

They don't need to. It actually works on merit.

[John]

Okay.

[Ira]

You only need to subsidize shitty shit.

[Jordy]

Always a good time. Thank you so much for coming on.

[John]

Great to see you.

[Jordy]

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 Ayal Cohen to the TVPN ultradome.

[Ira]

How are you doing?

[John]

What's going on?

[Jordy]

Great.

[Ben Horowitz]

How are you doing guys?

[Jordy]

We're doing great. We're having a great time, having a show.

[John]

What's going on in the background?

[Jordy]

Yeah, take us on a little tour. What's going on?

[Ben Horowitz]

You can see the truck that we built. The vehicle that we built 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 up that that's actually.

[Jordy]

It applies to your business?

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You started.

[Jordy]

Your demo was probably the equivalent of a 45 pound pumpkin. Maybe that truck in the back is a 300 pound pumpkin. But this is all in service of getting to the 900 pound pumpkin. The elusive 900 pound pumpkin. And you raised some money to help you build that vision. How much did you raise? Who's it from? Tell me about the round.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yes. Okay, so we raised $24 million and

[Jordy]

amazing bulky clearing order here.

[John]

Continue.

[Ben Horowitz]

It's so satisfying, really. We raised 24 million. The lead investor was Eclipse. We also had, we also had EIP in there as well as some other other friends. So that's great. Yeah, it was A great round for us.

[Jordy]

24 million. It sounds like a really solid one

[John]

of the highest signal. Yeah, probably the highest signal. If you're building in robotics at the

[Jordy]

same time you're building something big in robotics. $24 million. That's great for a seed. But how, how much does it cost to build one of these? What, what are the comps like? What, what, what will the next couple years like be like of actually getting these on the road?

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah. So 24 million is a start. Right. We're doing hardware, we're doing robotics, we're doing autonomy software that does cost money, but it costs way less than it used to. I think you 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. A lot of work has been done in this space. I've been working in this space for 10, 11 years now. Autonomous frame. And we get the benefit. I 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.

[Jordy]

Okay, talk about the key trade offs. No cab, no driver. Are you pro lidar? Are you pro teleoperations? And like what are you going to do a crawl walk run thing? Is it a straight shot to full self driving? What's the thesis?

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, great. So we, you know, we're not dogmatic about technology here at all. It's just what's the best technology that we could use at any moment? Yeah, 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. I think especially in the last year or two, this is a. 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 the many years. It's the first time the company's really been vision camera focused in autonomy for me. And what I'm seeing on that side is incredible. It's like just, it's honestly kind of magic. But we still take the same approach that you see in Atomy.

[Jordy]

Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

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. But we will take Any technology that is beneficial for the project, for the program, and we'll apply it. That's the idea.

[Jordy]

Average 18 Wheeler costs something like 120,000, $200,000, maybe $275 at the high end. Do you need to be at that price point? Can you go higher? Do you have flexibility there? And then the actual autonomy package, I feel like you could literally strap an iPhone to every possible vantage point. And you don't need to do that because you can just buy the actual lenses and cameras. So the cost of the vision stack has to be pretty low. But are there GPUs on board? Are you doing on device inference? What's the economic balance? How is this, how should a customer even think about this? In a different mindset?

[Ben Horowitz]

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 freight? Given 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, we could save about a dollar per mile there. We make it electric, right. So that lowers the maintenance costs. And now, especially with some of the volatile fuel issues, we get benefit there. And 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 lighter 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. That's the idea, yeah.

[Jordy]

How do you think about supporting infrastructure? I mean, there was a massive build out of charging infrastructure as Tesla ramped up. 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. Less delivery and doesn't have the wrong configuration to be able to puzzle piece in the container.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, that's right. And actually part of the reason that we launched, the company's very young. We started about eight months ago and we built this vehicle very quickly. So 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 pretty early in the journey. We were public about what we're doing. And the reason is that you want to build with your customers. It's really important to operate within the constraints of the logistics space and understand what people need and how they operate. So we're being public about what we're doing because it's our message to our customers that we work with them on that front. And that goes from everything from how does this vehicle load? Go back up into a docking area. It's one of the advantages of our vehicle, by the way. It's like we could put cameras behind it. We can back up into docks. 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, 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.

[Jordy]

What's it going to take to get you on X?

[Ben Horowitz]

On X. I actually signed up for an X account right before the launch. I'm on it. I just need to figure out how to use it. But I'm there.

[Jordy]

I'm there. Win. We'll tell Nikita. One more user.

[John]

One more user

[Ben Horowitz]

for Nikita.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Where's the company based? Where? 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?

[Ben Horowitz]

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? But you know, we're in San Francisco. That's where I live. That's where I'm based. That's where I've been working on tech for the last 20 years.

[Jordy]

And it makes sense as you scale out and prototyping. Hub, you have a, you have a warehouse, but you don't have a gigafactory yet. And that might be somewhere else.

[Ben Horowitz]

Correct.

[Jordy]

Got it.

[Ben Horowitz]

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'm part of the re industrialization movement of the U.S. so that's the plan.

[Jordy]

What have you learned about the reindustrialization efforts? That are talked about a lot specific to the supply chain of autonomy components, electric vehicle components. I'm sure you're grappling with all of this. But what has surprised you to the upside, what has surprised you to the downside? Give me some white pills and black pills.

[Ben Horowitz]

I started my career working in electrification, electric vehicles. Actually. A lot of the technology was here in the bay, a lot of it developing battery packs, motors. And we watched over the last 20 years as that shifted out of not only just the bay, but out of the US Entirely. Right.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[Ben Horowitz]

And I. Now you see the sort of the rush to get it back. And I think. I think there is. It takes time. But there are a lot of smart people that are working in the space for a long time and there's a lot of excitement and capital pouring into this. You know, our backers eclipse our 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. I think the supply chain is coming back here. It takes time. Like everything, it's just going to come back in automated factories this time around.

[Jordy]

We are at time, but you need to read this deep dive in the New Yorker about these insurance scams that are happening in New Orleans around 18 wheelers where people are crashing. Have you read this? Are you familiar with this story?

[Ben Horowitz]

I'm a little bit familiar with the story.

[John]

That's actually how they put together the money for the first round for humble.

[Jordy]

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not what happened there. 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 novel knock on effect to the positive. Well, part of the reason we died

[Ben Horowitz]

the way that we did.

[Jordy]

Thank you and thank you so much.

[John]

I am just based on this conversation, I am extremely confident that this company will be wildly successful. And I'm glad you're doing this.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, perfect.

[Jordy]

Thank you so much for coming back on soon. We'll talk to you soon.

[Ben Horowitz]

We'll see you soon. Bye.

[Jordy]

After. Missed it completely. There we go. After our next guest, we will be taking you into a story about Coachella. It ran past curfew and it got fined. You will learn why music festivals may be the best way to understand data center permitting risk after our next guest. That's a narrative violation. We have Yoland Yan from Comfy in the waiting room with an iconic Entrance. Let's take a look. What are you holding here? Please introduce yourself and the company. What are we looking at? Let's fucking go.

[Ira]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Please welcome to the show.

[John]

I'm surprised no one's ever pulled off an entrance like this.

[Jordy]

No, no. This is exquisite. Please introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about what's going on.

[Yoland Yan]

My name's Yoland. I'm the co founder and CEO of ComfyUI. I apologize. I've been instructed that I can be anything but boring for this show. So here I am.

[John]

That's true. You studied. You studied.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I did.

[John]

Tell us your entire life story from inception. Now what is there too many points

[Yoland Yan]

for you to start over here? Let me remove the distraction for you for now.

[Jordy]

What is the distraction? Give us the backstory. Like why that particular creature.

[Yoland Yan]

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 shout out to the Fennec character.

[Jordy]

Yeah. So for those who don't know, comfyUI node based workflow, workflow for visual design, video production, you know, DaVinci resolve level performance, but for the modern era. Is that roughly correct? How are you thinking about introducing the company?

[John]

Yeah, yeah.

[Yoland Yan]

Comfy is a no based system that aim to give the highest leverage of control and quality for content creation. I think if you guys think of, you know, let's say mid Journey or tech text prompt based content creation using AI, it's the polar opposite. It gives you every bit of control and possibility to adjust the model and control the camera angle, control the posture. And that's exactly why 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.

[Jordy]

Yeah. And then also inject a level of deterministic and programmatic variation into the generative AI workflows. So that if you want to create multiple assets and you want to swap out a bear for a cat for a dog, you can do that in a way that doesn't just require you sitting there prompting, waiting five minutes. Prompt again, five minutes. Actually parallelized. Yes, that makes sense. Yeah. If you're working with big companies, are they just for 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?

[Yoland Yan]

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 Comfy Cloud as a product about five months ago and the main differentiation in our world is that you can actually tap into a large cluster of compute that we provide in the back end. It's incredibly difficult to stitch everything together to provide this infrastructure level of support especially for like you know, professional creative companies or studios. So yeah, that's kind of like how we monetize off of it.

[Jordy]

How big of a deal is Sea Dance 2.0? The videos that I saw were incredible. It felt a little bit inaccessible. Is it diffusing rapidly?

[John]

Yeah, yeah.

[Yoland Yan]

The entire visual AI ecosystem is evolving very rapidly. These foundation models are making amazing progress and you can access all of these models on our platform as well. We are generally agnostic in terms of whether it's open or closed source model. But just to comment on the progress over here, we're super excited to see like you know where the trend goes towards to when these 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, you know, bedroom and backyard.

[Jordy]

Okay, when over? Under 28.

[John]

20, 28. Give us your Hollywood predictions.

[Jordy]

When can I actually watch a two hour movie? An hour? A 90 minute movie? Because I've seen some incredible short films, some incredible vibe reels. Not even 30 seconds. I've seen. Yeah, maybe two minutes, three minutes.

[John]

Yeah, everybody's now seen like there's probably

[Jordy]

longer stuff out there. I haven't gotten sucked into anything. I did watch all of Harry Potter Balenciaga. That was great. You know, know but like I'm waiting for something that's Harry Potter Balenciaga level entertainment. Like hold my attention to the end but 10 minutes, then 20 minutes and then 90 minutes. And when the 90 minute thing happens I think a lot of people are going to be like wow. Yeah.

[Yoland Yan]

This is actually a part of an insight that most people don't really understand right now. It's one on the quality side of the area. People don't want to create long form content because by the time when you finish a feature film length of content, the model has shifted so much that you are, you're running into this James Cameron problem of like oh shit, I have to go back and then you know, like 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 of studios and agencies using Comfy. What it doesn't do is it doesn't become production. It just enter the previs portion, enable people to rapidly iterate and then create these content right away that you might have someone acting in a pure green screen and and then the output of it in five minutes you see the entire 3D CG rendering using AI on the, on the system in Comfy. And in that world it's already influencing the direction or how they act. It just doesn't necessarily get to the quality where it completely could become a film production level of content.

[Jordy]

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.

[Yoland Yan]

Yeah, I believe the visual ecosystem is quite different. The main differentiation is there's a huge amount of taste. Even if someone can prompt Sea 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, ah, is this piece of code actually good enough? But in the visual world you absolutely care. The camera angle, the facial feature, the control layer. And that's in my opinion, what differentiates the, you know, slops from the Comfy ecosystem of creation.

[Jordy]

What's the easiest AI feature to pitch to a Hollywood AI skeptic?

[Yoland Yan]

The easiest way I would say from our perspective this is 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 scenarios 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 upscaling down, downscaling manually in the traditional process. It enables you. So those are the world where we're not actually taking jobs, we're creating jobs. If anything, you go search on any job site today, there's actually a huge amount of people hiring for ComfyUI artists

[Jordy]

and specialists yeah, 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, you know, what if your color grade was on your dailies as well? There's a whole bunch of interesting places where you can plug.

[John]

Yeah, I've said this before and

[George Kurtz]

at

[John]

least some people were calling me an idiot online, but I've had this idea that I think AI could actually help Hollywood. We're in Hollywood. There's a bunch of empty studios around. There's a bunch of people here that have been working in entertainment that haven't had great job prospects over the last few years, especially if they weren't willing to travel overseas. And it just feels like we're going to enter into an era where 10 really smart people could come into one room and if they work really hard and leverage AI properly, they can make it. They'll be able to make an incredible short film, film, make beautiful advertisements, whatever they want to do. So I think we will enter into a golden age of human powered, AI powered humans doing incredible creative work.

[Jordy]

You mentioned that you're currently valued at half a billion dollars. How much did you raise? Tell us about the funding news.

[Yoland Yan]

Yeah, we raised $30 million from. Oh man, been looking forward to this. Yeah, we raised $30 million. The round was led by a crowd craft venture. Huge fan of folks over there. They've been tracking us for a while.

[Jordy]

Good job.

[Yoland Yan]

Yeah, been amazing working with them so far.

[Jordy]

Good job.

[Yoland Yan]

Super excited. We're here to destroy our enemies and make open source creative tooling win.

[Ira]

I love it.

[John]

Imagine being your enemy right now, logging on.

[Jordy]

Oh, I think we talked to his enemy earlier this week. I'm not going to say who it was, but I think we know who he's coming for and I'm rooting for him.

[John]

Well, imagine logging on to xbox.com and Mr. Yan and just being like, oh, it's over for me.

[Jordy]

But

[Yoland Yan]

we have no idea because in our mind we don't really have enemy. The only enemy is.

[Jordy]

Oh no, I'm not talking about startup competitors. Oh, I see. I'm talking about Adobe.

[Yoland Yan]

Never heard of that word.

[Jordy]

But congratulations. Thank you for everything. Everything you do. Incredibly cool tool. If you haven't already checked it out. Go download Comfyui, make some cool stuff. It's a lot of fun and have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Thanks.

[John]

Great hanging.

[Jordy]

See ya later in the show. Did you hear about the cow that got loose on the highway and backed up traffic for miles?

[Tyler]

I did.

[Jordy]

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. He's 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.

[Ben Horowitz]

How are you doing?

[Ben (Sincerely)]

Hey, guys, thanks for having me on.

[Professor Sandy]

Love the show.

[Jordy]

Thanks for having me on. Also an MBA at hbs, so. Oh, yes, people are taking a victory

[John]

lap on that soon to be master of business.

[Jordy]

They thought it was impossible for an HBS grad to start a business, but you're proving everybody wrong.

[Ben (Sincerely)]

Thank you. Yeah, Twitter flamed me a little bit for it, but I'm still happy I'm here.

[John]

Wait, wait, so why were people upset?

[Jordy]

Oh, it's like a non technical thing probably, right?

[Ben (Sincerely)]

Yeah, I think Gary talked about it too, a little bit. Yeah.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Just the idea. Like, I mean, HBS grads have started so many amazing companies, but it's.

[John]

Oh, I thought you were talking about the product.

[Jordy]

But, but the HBS thing is typically not like the go and build a software product in a weekend or in a week. Very quickly that's been more like, oh, you're a CS grad and you're a dropout and then you go do yc. That's been the more established path, but you're bucking the trend. Tell us what you built.

[Ben (Sincerely)]

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. Yeah, I. 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.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Ben (Sincerely)]

And I was so sick of AI slop in my own inbox. Oh, yeah, 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.

[John]

You're talking about like CEOs that have terrible grammar because they're just typing quickly and it doesn't really matter.

[Jordy]

Well, there's the famous story about Ron Conway types in all caps. There's a whole bunch of these Examples

[John]

Typing in all caps.

[Jordy]

All caps is elite because it just sounds like someone's yelling at you.

[Ben (Sincerely)]

It's kind of the anti gen Z in a lot of ways. The all caps. Yeah, we don't have a Ron Conway mode yet though.

[Jordy]

Yeah, but I had, I had this, I had this, had this experience maybe a year ago where someone sent me a very lengthy 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 this, turn these bullet points into paragraphs and then the other person on the other end saying turn the paragraphs into bullet points. Are people using this specifically to write emails or is there an email summarization feature coming? Where do you see this going?

[Ben (Sincerely)]

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.

[Ira]

Right?

[Ben (Sincerely)]

It's human using AI to make AI more human.

[Jordy]

And that's why. And that's why intel is up 20% for this specific use case. No, they're more useful, they're more important use cases. But we were talking about this.

[John]

Was this a fun stunt or.

[Jordy]

Yeah, somebody called it a drop and I think it's a business. What do you think?

[Ben (Sincerely)]

I think it started as social commentary. This is like, it's satire and playful and I didn't want to pay for everyone's token. But like I do 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. So you know there's a 4 99amonth 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.

[Jordy]

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.

[Ben (Sincerely)]

I learned a lot in this process, as you might have imagined. I'm a huge fan of CrowdStrike too. We have pushed a few security fixes and just made sure that people know what they're getting themselves into when they download this. But ultimately, like, this is a satire meets something real. So I hope that people get it.

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah. That's the nature of, like, doing fun things on the bleeding edge of the Internet. We all went through this with open claw and understanding. Okay. There's some real 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.

[John]

What is sentiment like in your current HBS class?

[Jordy]

Oh, yeah.

[John]

How are people thinking are, like, with the acceleration in AI, are there people thinking about dropping out like. Or are they like. I'm actually glad I'm in school right now because it seems kind of gnarly out there.

[Ira]

Yes.

[Ben (Sincerely)]

I have friends who have dropped out for YC and friends who have stayed for the exact same reason. It's kind of, you know, swim or sink. I think that people are building. They're not building funny things. I would say they're really trying to build things in the HBS sort of business first way. And my girlfriend's at gsb, so maybe there's a little bit of a different comparison that you could ask her about.

[John]

Uniting the great houses.

[Jordy]

Do you think there will be a sway? 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 like we saw Josh Kushner announced. Thrive Eternal. He's taking a stake in the Giants. And there's a whole different world where you take the HBS learnings and playbooks and you go apply them to things that are extremely AI resistant. But maybe like, they weren't. They haven't been trendy over the past decade, but maybe they're going to come back in style in a big way. If you're, you know. Yeah, yeah. I went to HBO and now I'm like, you know, VP at GE Vernova. That's probably a pretty good gig. Yeah.

[Ben (Sincerely)]

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 H Vacs and putting AI in the back of H Vac.

[Jordy]

At least it's not a roll up. It's not a roll up. The true hbs.

[John]

Why has no one identified the opportunity in H Vac?

[Jordy]

H Vac is important. Have you ever not had air conditioning One hot day in the Studio and

[John]

I think it's great.

[Jordy]

I demand H Vac. It is universal.

[Ben (Sincerely)]

It's sort of. That's another loop that's tricky though, right? Like, are we making the world warmer?

[Jordy]

Are we cooling it off?

[Ben (Sincerely)]

Are we putting AI in the back of H Vac?

[Jordy]

It's all an AI play at the end of the day. Interesting, interesting. What were you doing before hbs?

[Ben (Sincerely)]

I started a company with my friend Reid that was a sort of like a philanthropic robo advisor, like wealth front or betterment. We sold that to Charity Navigator and I worked there.

[George Kurtz]

Wow.

[Ben (Sincerely)]

And yeah, hopefully I'm a free agent in like three weeks, so heading to SF and fulfilling my manifest destiny in three weeks.

[Jordy]

Is that HBS graduation?

[John]

You're saying you're finishing your earn out or hbs?

[Ben (Sincerely)]

Yeah, finishing hbs, the proverbial debt earnout. I don't know what you call it.

[Professor Sandy]

That.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome.

[Jordy]

That makes sense.

[John]

All right, well, it was really great to meet you and please let us know when you figure out what you're

[Jordy]

working on and let us know when the next drop's happening. I feel like you got more of these in the can.

[Ben (Sincerely)]

I can tell we have something really funny coming up. By we, I mean royalty.

[Jordy]

Amazing.

[John]

Thanks, guys. Yeah, let's talk about it.

[Jordy]

Yeah, have a good one. We'll see you soon.

[Ben (Sincerely)]

Thanks, guys.

[Jordy]

Goodbye. There is a ton more news. What should we go through? Sports says. What's the charge? Front running an overseas coup d'. Etat. A succulent Venezuelan coup d'. Etat. This was a crazy story. Brandon Guerrell, 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. This is when the betting on yourself meme goes wrong, right? You should always be betting on yourself, but not literally if it's against the law. If you are involved in a government capacity, you should probably not be gambling on the outcome of your government work. Shame on you. But still, even Trump was like, he

[John]

was betting on himself. And then he like referenced some baseball player that isn't in the hall of fame because he was betting on himself. But Trump was seemingly implying that that wasn't so bad.

[Jordy]

But anyways, people are really, really having fun with the new image gen model.

[John]

I don't even know if we should

[Jordy]

pull this up because it's so rude, but this guy's effectively playing Minecraft through ChatGPT because he has it generate him an image of Minecraft. He says of course he's doing the island in Little St. James, the very controversial one. And then he says.

[John]

And then he says, okay, walk closer and it just generates a new scene.

[Jordy]

Pull it off.

[John]

I'm sure there's some kids out there that are. That have figured out how to. How to play Minecraft in ChatGPT. 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.

[Jordy]

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 gotta get him on the show. But this is a congratulations moment for Cohere and Aleph Alpha.

[John]

I think I'm saying that correctly. GPD 5.5 yes. 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 make sense.

[Jordy]

Wait, what?

[John]

Like it just immediately clocks it.

[Jordy]

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

[Ben Horowitz]

0.

[Jordy]

The letter R is not known for its berry storage. These are good answers. The Being a helpful assistant but simultaneously rejecting nonsense is particularly been difficult for LLM. So good progress here. We'll figure out more about what went into this and what the next generation of AI impacts are from this.

[John]

Tyler Hodge says is found a post five and a half years ago. Elon says the rate of improvement from the Original GPT to GPT3 is impressive. At this rate of improvement, improvement continues. GPT5 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. A lot has changed. But he was accurate in his prediction.

[Jordy]

Funniest outcome is the most likely.

[John]

And then the last.

[Jordy]

The last thing I wanted best bros and do a buddy cop film together.

[John]

The last thing there is a new app from X Chat. XCHAT and I'm excited to try this out because the current. Yeah, the DMs on X have been pretty brutal. Yeah, right.

[Jordy]

I haven't had that much of a problem. I do have this weird bug where when I click the chat button on desktop, it sort of loads and then it resources after it loads and sometimes if I haven't been in it in a long time, it needs to reshuffle several, several times. And so that can be a little jarring. But overall it seems like they made the migration to encryption. I haven't. I don't know, I seem to get messages. It seems to work fine. It's cool that there's a new app. I probably need to be better about answering DMs. I have a lot of them that are unread. So having a dedicated app for that, that sounds good. Cool. People were taking shots because the Everything app supposed to be everything in one place. Instead it's three apps to get everything in the everything app. Sort of silly. Who cares? More apps the better. I like apps. So go download it. Go check it out and go like Nikita's post because he's been on a generational run. Also, GPT 5.5 is available in the API. Now that's breaking news, I guess, from Greg. So anyway, we will see you on Monday. Have a great, great weekend. Enjoy the weekend. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our [e-mail] and we'll see you tomorrow. Flashbang.

[John]

Have an incredible weekend.