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

(00:32) - Intel Rips (13:56) - Behind the Cursor SpaceX Deal (16:10) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (27:07) - Thrive Launches Thrive Eternal (28:54) - George Kurtz, CEO and founder of CrowdStrike, is an internationally recognized cybersecurity expert with over 30 years of experience, including previous roles as Worldwide CTO and EVP at McAfee. He discusses Project QuiltWorks, a coalition formed with partners like EY, IBM, and Accenture to rapidly deliver CrowdStrike's technology to customers and address AI-related vulnerabilities. Kurtz highlights the emergence of "shadow AI," where unauthorized AI applications on endpoints create security risks, and emphasizes the need for prompt identification and mitigation of these exposures. (44:22) - Professor Sendy, a self-proclaimed "word combo guru," discusses his journey from creating extended versions of existing words to developing original "Wombos"—blended words that capture complex concepts. He shares his background as a former rapper and his natural talent for wordplay, which led to viral success on social media platforms. Sendy also reveals plans to expand his audience by incorporating slang from older generations and developing a dictionary to compile his creations. (01:01:09) - Gary Vaynerchuk, also known as Gary Vee, is an American entrepreneur, author, and internet personality, renowned for his work in digital marketing and social media as the chairman of VaynerX and CEO of VaynerMedia. In the conversation, Vaynerchuk discusses the concept of "Wombos," which are word combinations like "quiche" (quirky and niche), emphasizing the importance of embracing new trends. He also highlights the significance of multi-channel, multi-format content strategies in the current media landscape, and predicts a resurgence of analog experiences as a counterbalance to digital advancements. (01:28:35) - Eyal Cohen is the founder and CEO of Humble Robotics, where he builds autonomous robotic systems designed to handle complex, real-world tasks in industrial and warehouse environments. The company focuses on combining AI, perception, and hardware to automate physically demanding workflows—like sorting, palletizing, and material handling—while improving safety and operational efficiency. Cohen’s work centers on making robotics more adaptable and cost-effective, enabling large-scale deployment across logistics, manufacturing, and supply chain operations. (01:39:18) - Yoland Yan, co-founder and CEO of ComfyUI, discusses the company's evolution from an open-source project to a platform adopted by top studios for AI-driven content creation. He highlights ComfyUI's node-based system, offering creators precise control over visual design and video production, contrasting it with text-prompt-based AI tools. Yan also mentions the introduction of Comfy Cloud, enabling users to access extensive computing resources, and notes the platform's role in producing high-profile advertisements. (01:50:42) - Ben Horwitz, an Investment Partner at Dorm Room Fund and MBA candidate at Harvard Business School, discusses his creation of Sincerely, an email tool designed to intentionally introduce typos, serving as a satirical response to the prevalence of AI-generated, overly polished emails. He reflects on the unconventional path of an HBS student rapidly developing a software product, challenging traditional expectations. Additionally, Horwitz shares his experiences with AI-generated communications and the inspiration behind developing Sincerely. (01:58:29) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP and today's Friday, April 24th, 2026. We are live from the TVP and Ultra Dome.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  The Temple of Technology.

• 0:08John Coogan?

  The Fortress of Finance. We have a great show for you today, folks. We have George Kurtz coming on from CrowdStrike, Professor Sendy from Instagram. You might have seen, he's the expert of Wombos. Gary Vaynerchuk's coming on. We have a lightning round going on with a couple of founders. It'll be a fun time, but the big news.

• 0:24Jordi Hays?

  Wrapping up with Ben Horowitz.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  Ben Horowitz.

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  Horowitz.

• 0:28John Coogan?

  Horowitz.

• 0:28Jordi Hays?

  Horowitz.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  Horowitz.

• 0:31John Coogan?

  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 at all time highs.

• 0:56Jordi Hays?

  The main factor is Bubble Boy on X.

• 0:58John Coogan?

  A lot of people have called this and it is long overdue. It's, the revenue's only up 7% year over year, but next quarter is already guiding to be better, somewhere north of 14 billion, probably. But there's still big losses under the hood. This quarter, they lost $3.7 billion. Not good, but that was mostly driven by one-off charges related to Mobile Eye and derivative payments tied to the 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

• 1:36John Coogan?

  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 course, things might play out differently, but that's what's been happening in the market. Intel was the most embarrassing missing piece. Why isn't Intel booming when? We're in a computing boom. It made no sense, but there were good reasons and we'll go through them.

• 2:14John Coogan?

  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? You want me to keep going?

• 2:49Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:59John Coogan?

  It felt like that, yeah.

• 3:00Jordi Hays?

  And it felt like, you know, you would expect, okay, over time, this is very, this is going to be very, very good. For Intel to have that vote of confidence, but I don't think anyone was really predicting that it would go up quite this much in this span of just half a year.

• 3:19John Coogan?

  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.

• 3:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess, I guess the only thing is like, there wasn't, 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.

• 3:40John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. The bull case at that time that I heard most loudly was not the CPU boom. It was,

• 3:46Jordi Hays?

  It was just overall chipping.

• 3:47John Coogan?

  It was the 14, like the, the, the, 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, of, 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 gain guarantees, then they will actually be able to go do it. Tyler, what was your take?

• 4:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think Leopold, or sorry, Intel has long been kind of the Leopold take.

• 4:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Which, which is that like, you know, this is the clear, like, This is the company you want to own in the kind of nationalization

• 4:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  world of like, okay, Taiwan risk.

• 4:37John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  What are we going to do if we can't make chips, you know, in Taiwan? Intel's like the very clear

• 4:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  strategy.

• 4:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  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,

• 4:49John Coogan?

  Geopolitics.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  national security. Like, it's extremely important that we have this capacity in the US. And Intel's kind of the only one that's even like remotely in the conversation.

• 4:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. So there were some predictions from AI 2027 and other folks in the AI forecasting world around the rise of agents, that agents would arrive at this time. I didn't see too many folks who were predicting strong, valuable, effective AI agents really predicting the CPU crunch, but that's exactly what's happened. So AI agents need CPUs to do things. Training frontier models, that's still a GPU story, but running agentic workflows across data centers, orchestrating tasks, routing jobs, managing memory, handling inference workloads, coordinating servers increases demand for the boring old central processor.

• 5:40John Coogan?

  Intel's data center segment produced 5.1 billion in quarterly revenue, beating the 4.5 billion analysts expected. And Intel CEO Liputan said, "The next wave of AI is moving from foundational models to inference to agentic AI, and that shift increases the need for Intel CPUs, wafers, and advanced packaging." On the earnings call, he said that the CPU to GPU ratio is closer to one, to one CPU for every four GPUs versus one for every eight in prior years. And there is an interesting forecast from Liputan as well. But VK Macro says, "CPU to GPU ratio flipping from one to eight to eight to one is absolutely wild.

• 6:23John Coogan?

  That's just a completely new world to what we've had so far." This is from Evercore, ISI's Mark Lapisas, has upgraded Intel directly from neutral to outperform, and mentions that as AI workloads shift further toward inference and agents, towards inference and agents, the weight of CPU demand will rise sharply, and the CPU to GPU ratio could flip from 1.1 to eight to eight to one, which is a massive, massive switch.

• 6:53Speaker 02

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

• 6:56John Coogan?

  It is.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  Because like, the lesson from tier models is that like, The models are going to keep getting bigger. Um, you're going to need way more like chips to to him some.

• 7:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Like Dylan Patel was on Patrick O'Shaughnessy. I think it came out yesterday or the day before. And he's just saying like, uh, you know, the models are going to get really expensive. Tokens are going to get super, super expensive. People are going to price down.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  So, so I, I, I don't know if I fully believe the narrative that like you need all the CPUs.

• 7:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  You're going to need way more CPUs than.

• 7:22John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, the.

• 7:26John Coogan?

  It really lines up perfectly. His camera is the main one that's that fits perfectly. The glasses land.

• 7:32Jordi Hays?

  I love a Friday show.

• 7:34John Coogan?

  Um, yes, that's a good point, but, uh, there is this, I, I, I think at least in the midterm, like the, uh, the.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's like capabilities overhang like.

• 7:43John Coogan?

  And, and, and just like one really smart AI system that's being inference on GPU can spin off a ton of CPU workloads. And, uh, and, and do a lot of things that were, that require CPUs.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:56John Coogan?

  Like even in the, even in the like the, 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, you know, like, I don't know, a thousand GPU hours, but then that system runs on CPUs that are running constantly for every user, you still wind up with what creating more CPU demand out of the GPU.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  I think this take makes a lot of sense if you, if you are like, kind of, you know, long open source. We're going to have a lot of these open source models.

• 8:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Uh, they're quite small. You can run them on like, you know, a 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.

• 8:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:32Speaker 02

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

• 8:36John Coogan?

  Why is the horse here?

• 8:39John Coogan?

  Anyway, whether it's going to eight CPUs for one GPU or staying at, uh, one CPU to four GPUs. It's still twice as good as it used to be because it used to be one to eight. And so that is bullish for Intel and Libutan is, uh, making that clear to the market and to the investors on his earnings call. Then there's the wild card, the terra fab Elon Musk project. It's very exciting, but it's clearly further off. Elon Musk wants to build a massively vertical, integrated chip manufacturing. 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.

• 9:23John Coogan?

  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, uh, let's put it in context. 1 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, you know, leading class TSMC fabs at Intel just on the TerraFab project, plus whatever else Intel is doing. So, uh, a pretty massive scale.

• 10:01John Coogan?

  And, uh, and TSMC's CEO, uh, C.C. Way, has said that it's just not that easy to build a fab overnight and get it up to run, uh, 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, uh, there is a bottleneck and the bottleneck has been discussed at length. Ben Thompson wrote about TSMC risk and stratechery, arguing that, uh, TSMC needs to spend more on CapEx. And I think that should be clearer now. We'll see what happens at the next, uh, TSMC earnings call because, uh, maybe they will be waking up. But, uh, overall, the Intel, Intel now has a collection of plausible demand stories,

• 10:45John Coogan?

  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. Uh, one, AI agents need more CPUs. Two, AI systems need more advanced packaging, a higher ratio of CPUs to GPUs. Intel can help with that. Three, the US government wants to direct domestic leading, uh, 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 is good news for Intel. There are more companies that are getting into the CPU design space.

• 11:28John Coogan?

  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.

• 12:13John Coogan?

  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 in the AI narrative and all these different five key pieces. So the pieces of puzzle are coming together now and that's good for Intel. It's also good for America's chip manufacturing prospects. So good news overall and congrats to all the Intel shareholders that were believers early on and rode the wave. Everyone, every US citizen. Every US citizen. Congrats to all Americans. Every US citizen and every, every US debt holder. So even the international folks that own treasuries are in a better financial position today.

• 12:49Jordi Hays?

  You gotta 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.

• 13:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 13:04Jordi Hays?

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

• 13:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:16Jordi Hays?

  And Intel was, Intel was falling apart.

• 13:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:19Jordi Hays?

  Imagine if I, imagine if he applied all his wisdom to. A company already winning.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  Certainly possible. Jim Cramer is excited about it. He said in 13 months, Lip Bouton took Intel from a possible and unthinkable bailout candidate to one of the wealthiest companies in the chip industry. There is a big three of CPU, AMD, Intel, and ARM. The, and the agents need far more CPUs than these three can produce. So that means prices are going up and they got the god candle.

• 13:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, look at this candle from.

• 13:51John Coogan?

  Candle. We love a, 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, we'll tell you what this says about late-stage venture reacceleration. We're going to tie those two together. In other news, for more than a year, Silicon Valley has buzzed about Cursor's growth and whispered about its margins. Now, on the cusp of a $60 billion bailout, Laura over at the information.

• 14:25Jordi Hays?

  Wait, they called it a $60 billion bailout?

• 14:28John Coogan?

  Buyout, buyout.

• 14:30John Coogan?

  We revealed the hot vibe coatings financials.

• 14:34Jordi Hays?

  $60 billion acquisition, calling it a bailout. Look.

• 14:37John Coogan?

  It's not a bailout.

• 14:37Jordi Hays?

  Their margins were rough.

• 14:39John Coogan?

  We were just talking about it. It got warmed into my head. Cursor had negative 23% gross margins earlier this year. That, Amir says that is low for a company generating as much revenue as it is. This is the question of how sticky will Cursor be as 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, with the product while changing inference based on what their plan gives them. So they're subscriber and they will use whatever the plan, whatever gets

• 15:23John Coogan?

  the job done for them within the budget of the plan. And so, obviously. Like you see negative 23% gross margins and you're like, whoa. And then you look at the SpaceX deal and the XAI deal and all the compute that's sitting at Colossus too. 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 Kimi and Composer with Croc 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, keep tracking it.

• 16:05John Coogan?

  Uh, did you want to play this, uh, this, uh, this piece from, uh, from Patrick O'Shaughnessy? Let's do it. Let's play this clip of what Dylan Patel said on Invest Like the Best presented by Ramp.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  Everyone's like, okay, so Anthropic just won, right? You know, they had Methos in February. They never even released it because they didn't feel the need to. They're already sold out. Their revenue is already adding $10 billion a month. Uh, and then you've got Opus 4.7 today, all before OpenAI's, you know, um, 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 sensible in their scaling. And now Anthropic is like, fuck, we should have, I wish we had a lot more compute. OpenAI is able to pay the bills perfectly fine.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  In fact, they raised a ton of money to get incremental compute in addition to the irresponsible levels of compute that they were buying from Oracle and CoreWeave and SoftBank and all these people and Microsoft. Uh, you know, such as Tranium, now they're getting Tranium as well from Anth- Amazon. But what's interesting is if you were to say Opus 4.6, You know, let's ignore models getting better over time. Let's just take diffusion of this technology. You and I may get, jump on the model immediately day one, but other businesses take time and it takes time for people to learn. And so by the end of the year, let's say a four, six 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.

• 17:49Speaker 03

  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% in 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 two lab is going to be sold out of tokens, let alone the tier one lab. The tier one lab will have better margins, but the tier two lab will be sold out and probably the tier three lab will also be close to sold out. Economic value that the best model can deliver is growing faster

• 18:33Speaker 03

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

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  I love that sound. I love that sound. Bill Gurley, uh, let's see what Bill Gurley, let's check in with BG. He says, I find this conversation foreign along with the argument that we are data center constrained or energy constrained. Historically in markets, price is a leveler of supply and demand. If you have a constraint, you price higher. You don't have surplus demand. But in this market, VC dollars act as subsidies as they did in consumer internet. Everyone believes if they have high growth, they get unlimited VC money. The biggest fear becomes losing market share. So growth at all costs becomes a game on the field. With that reality, you are always going to have some constraint because you knowingly, you are knowingly choosing pricing that is out of whack with balancing supply and demand. It will continue until the major player feels

• 19:28Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 19:59John Coogan?

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

• 20:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's funny. Semi Analysis is a good example. They spend millions and millions of dollars on tokens. But...

• 20:17John Coogan?

  They're not VC backed.

• 20:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

• 20:19John Coogan?

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

• 20:25Jordi Hays?

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

• 20:29John Coogan?

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

• 21:14John Coogan?

  And that's not a VC subsidy. I mean, it is a subsidy.

• 21:17Jordi Hays?

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

• 21:21John Coogan?

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

• 21:26Jordi Hays?

  Including, yeah.

• 21:27John Coogan?

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

• 21:39Jordi Hays?

  SoftBank is up in the past month.

• 21:40John Coogan?

  How much?

• 21:41Jordi Hays?

  Guess.

• 21:42John Coogan?

  200%.

• 21:44Jordi Hays?

  Come on, John. Seventy-three percent.

• 21:46John Coogan?

  That's not bad.

• 21:46Jordi Hays?

  That's a, that's a big number.

• 21:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:48Jordi Hays?

  That's a big number for-

• 21:49John Coogan?

  The arm holding is alone, probably huge. But, uh, if, yeah, so if he's using the term VC subsidies, VC dollars broadly, uh, I, I, I think that does sort of, sort, it is a reasonable, uh, point. But, uh, at the end of the day, you talk to most companies and most, you know, paid chat subscribers and they're just like, I like the thinking model. So I pay $20 a month. I, I like the pro model and I use it for, to create value. Or whatever, whatever subscription I'm on, I'm getting that much value in like software for my business that probably doesn't even exist. Like all the vibe coded software that we use here, like it's just not available off the shelf. We're building like completely net new products.

• 22:32John Coogan?

  And I think that that's like generally what's happening, uh, in, in the, uh, in the, in the AI economy. There, there's been this like discussion for a long time. Martin Scully was sort of debunking it around like, oh, is this like, are these all like circular deals? And he was like, no, like the economy is so broad that you have, you know, come, yes, there are, yes, 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, and other inference providers. Like, there's like, everyone is-

• 23:08Jordi Hays?

  It's one big circle.

• 23:09John Coogan?

  It's, yes, it's one giant circle of life that is, uh, you know, actually self-perpetuating because it is, uh, a true economy that, that hits, you know, 25 different categories.

• 23:24John Coogan?

  Well, 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 trans- uh, 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 shifts." But he's extremely bullish. He also posted a funny thing about his new life plan. He said, "His new life plan is to move to Brooklyn, get a 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-

• 24:03Jordi Hays?

  Was this, was, was, was he's like trying, is this like a cipher of some sort?

• 24:08John Coogan?

  He wants to adopt a 12-year-old straight tat.

• 24:10Jordi Hays?

  Is there a secret message embedded in this post?

• 24:14John Coogan?

  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.

• 24:21Jordi Hays?

  We have to, we have to pull this up.

• 24:22John Coogan?

  Sarah Guo says, no, thank you.

• 24:24Jordi Hays?

  Pull this up. We gotta break it down.

• 24:27John Coogan?

  Sour dough. I don't know. I have, I've spent like a few weekends in Brooklyn. It's a nice town. Um, I am not a fan of tattoos, so I, I, I, I would, I would stay away from the neck tat. Although, who knows? I've seen some, I've seen some cutting edge neck tattoo technology that allows you to remove it very easily, uh, 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.

• 25:05Jordi Hays?

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

• 25:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:11Jordi Hays?

  I don't care how hard you're ripping.

• 25:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:14Jordi Hays?

  A lot of you should probably

• 25:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:17Jordi Hays?

  exit.

• 25:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:18Jordi Hays?

  Just given, given how, how much uncertainty there is.

• 25:21John Coogan?

  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. Uh, what this tells us about edge computing. Get ready for it. Joe Weisenthal says, defense stocks have been trading not like, not just like the, the Iran war is over, but like all war ever is over, says Barclays Capital, Alexander Altman. I would not expect this, yeah, Lockheed is down significantly, even, even pre-Iran war buildup. Uh, it fully, fully round tripped. Uh, well, maybe that is good news. The goal of these companies is to bring about peace and defense.

• 26:03John Coogan?

  And so perhaps, perhaps it's over. I don't know. It's hard to track.

• 26:08Jordi Hays?

  Has Jane Street achieved AGI internally?

• 26:11John Coogan?

  I think so. They definitely have.

• 26:13Jordi Hays?

  They did forty billion dollars in revenue last year, more than all the big Wall Street banks, and with only thirty-five hundred employees.

• 26:19John Coogan?

  Yes, let's give it up for Jane Street. Fantastic. Capping a stunning ascent to the peak of the industry, the firm flew past global investment banks after reaping 15.5 billion in the year's final quarter, according to people with knowledge of the results, who asked not to be named their leaking. With only 3,500 employees, it beat the nearest rival JP Morgan 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.

• 26:55Jordi Hays?

  That's, 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?

• 27:06John Coogan?

  Well, we have some exciting news out of Thrive Capital. Josh Kushner announced a new fund, Thrive Eternal, a permanent capital holding company that will be concentrated in a small number of assets that we can own and steward over many decades. Across Thrive Capital and Thrive Holdings, we are building and investing through a moment of exponential change backing emerging technologies, the infrastructure that powers them and the businesses they can transform. Increasingly, he sees a fourth category. These are assets with qualities that cannot be replicated by technology, iconic franchises and cultural institutions rooted in tradition. And he says, his first partnership is expected to be with the San Francisco Giants, an institution built on more than a century of shared identity and

• 27:51John Coogan?

  community, and among the most iconic sports franchises in, in, in America. I looked it up before the show started, the San Francisco Giants, if you're not familiar, it's an American professional baseball team, 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, the San Francisco Giants

• 28:33John Coogan?

  make money, and Josh Kushner with Thrive Eternal is getting in on the action.

• 28:37Jordi Hays?

  Someone should make a TVN-style show?

• 28:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:40Jordi Hays?

  For whatever you just described, I feel like it would be very cool.

• 28:43John Coogan?

  That would be cool.

• 28:44Jordi Hays?

  If you had maybe a couple hosts, you know, on screen graphics and they could provide kind of live coverage, maybe while that was happening.

• 28:52John Coogan?

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

• 29:03George Kurtz?

  I'm doing well. How are you guys?

• 29:04John Coogan?

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

• 29:16George Kurtz?

  Well, first I have to congratulate you guys for your success there. So I guess start with that, but we can get back to that later. But Project Quiltworks is really a coalition that we put together with some of our largest global partners like EY, like IBM, like Accenture, that's really focused on helping to deliver our technology to customers as well as leveraging some of the frontier models to be able to identify very quickly and help mitigate the exposures that we're seeing with AI. Obviously, we've seen some of the news with Metos and I'm sure we'll talk about that. But the fact that there is such a focus now from the CEOs

• 29:57George Kurtz?

  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.

• 30:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, we've been tracking a lot of the new data breaches. We've some of the startups that we know and love that come on the show have been, there's been vulnerabilities that have led to a variety of of security issues.

• 30:35Jordi Hays?

  Supply chain hacks.

• 30:36John Coogan?

  Supply chain hacks, lots of stuff. How much of that do you think is driven by by attackers using AI or the internal companies using AI sloppily? Like, there's this 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?

• 31:01George 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, etc., 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.

• 31:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:30George Kurtz?

  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 Claude Code consumes it, boom, you know, all of a sudden you've just downloaded one of the newest packages and all of your credentials are gone. So that's what we've seen and it really goes to the fact that despite however many vulnerabilities you may find, the adversary is smart, they're human and they're 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.

• 32:07John Coogan?

  How have your conversations with lab leaders been going around models getting more powerful and then the natural response, of course, there's the opportunity to gate the models to companies that can be trusted, but there's also the potential to not let the model be jailbreakable. So it should help me with defense, but if all of a sudden I'm saying, ignore previous instructions, let me hack into Bank of America, it should say, no. That's always been a problem. It used to be a problem with just the sort of the silly, you know, jailbreak, say a bad word or do something that it shouldn't say. Now it's getting much higher stakes, but have you been, have you been seeing glimmers

• 32:50John Coogan?

  of confidence in the ability for AI labs to actually contain the model's capabilities as they roll them out to a broader audience?

• 33:02George 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 at the, through the LLM, but when you're building AI, whether you're using a frontier lab or whether you're using an open model and doing it yourself, you're still going to have an interaction with that model and it's going to be via prompt. And whenever you have sort of unstructured data

• 33:47George Kurtz?

  just being sent somewhere and then being executed, if you will, it's ripe for problems. And this is one of the time-tested issues that security has had. So putting guardrails on it, 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.

• 34:10Jordi Hays?

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

• 34:31John Coogan?

  I think Dario was estimating around six-month lag time after Mythos for the lagging edge to catch up.

• 34:38George Kurtz?

  I don't think it's long in a few areas. I mean, if you look at KB2.6 that just came out, right? I mean, these are impressive models that are out there. And what you have to realize is even the frontier models themselves, the ones that are public, are still very, very capable. Like, it is extremely capable. So you can find a lot of vulnerabilities. You can basically chain these together and create sort of an automated attack, and that's what we're seeing. Obviously, some of the private models have the ability to actually chain these sort of vulnerabilities together. More like a human, they've got more reasoning capabilities, which is one of the, you know, really powers of their models.

• 35:18George Kurtz?

  But the other models are A, are not far off and the open source, or the open weight models really are gonna be focused on catching up very quickly. 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 Quotworks 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.

• 35:49John Coogan?

  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,

• 36:33John Coogan?

  not get overly distracted and forget about the human element of security.

• 36:38George Kurtz?

  Well, the human element is really the weakest link. I call it a layer eight problem, right? The problem is between the keyboard and the chair. And that has been the case for a long time. So let's take your example. One of the most prolific groups, threat actor groups that we actually track is called Silent Chalima, which is North Korea. So North Korea has been very active in getting hired into a company. Right? And then basically the laptop that you send them gets sent somewhere in the 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.

• 37:16John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 37:17George Kurtz?

  Okay. So we're seeing lots and lots of those. And It's funny because we really, I started identifying this before anyone even knew about it about two years ago. And we first started notifying customers like, hey, we think you have a North Korean. It's not really Bob in Texas, it's a North Korean. Which obviously is always a little dicey when you're talking about an employee that may not be an employee. So we told everybody and then finally they tracked it down. They said, yeah, you're right. And they went to the hiring manager. They told the hiring manager like, hey, we need to get rid of this person. It's a North Korean. And his response was, well, they do really good work. Can we keep them? So, you know, you have to think, I mean, I can't make these stories up.

• 37:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, wouldn't there be an incentive at some point if they did get somebody on the inside to just actually staff a bunch of super talented engineers like on that one individual employee? So you have like four remote engineers doing the job of one like real employee, right? So it looks like, wow, this person is like insanely high out, but they're working around the clock. 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, farming us out.

• 38:30George 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 a hundred 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,

• 39:14George Kurtz?

  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.

• 39:23John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 39:23George Kurtz?

  That's what we're seeing.

• 39:24John Coogan?

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

• 40:06John Coogan?

  are able to amplify their efforts with by working alongside AI?

• 40:13George 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 a 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 you're turning them into tier three.

• 40:58George Kurtz?

  And that has has paid dividends. But the soft skill is it would take, one of our customers, give you an example, would take them four days in writing a report to, you know, what they call a sit rep report, the situational kind of response to what happened. And now four days turns into like an hour because it can all be automated using something like Charlotte, which is our agenty capability. So all of those things that were problematic, you can just get get through and you let AI do what it's really good at, grind through lots of data, look at lots of sort of information, write reports for you, and then your AI agents can begin to take autonomous action. Some, again, by themselves, some with human in the loop, but it's really going to make the SOC a lot more efficient.

• 41:40John Coogan?

  George, anything else?

• 41:43Jordi Hays?

  More fun question than than less scary question. How how is how is AI changing Formula One?

• 41:53George 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 different teams.

• 42:03Jordi Hays?

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

• 42:13George Kurtz?

  Well, what's interesting is that there is some talk, and I'm not sure exactly where it stands, where AI will be part of the cost cap. So if you think about wind tunnel time and all the expenses, so when you have an incredible technology that can 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, you know, we'll see, we'll see where it all goes. And obviously, you know, I'm trying to help out the Mercedes team in those areas as well.

• 42:48John Coogan?

  That'd be great.

• 42:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Do you think there will be, you know, five, 10 years from now, do you think there will be, like, you'll be able to look back and be like, 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?

• 43:07George Kurtz?

  Um, 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, you know, there's resistance to, well, what is AI going to do for me? And there's resistance in, in Formula One, in some cases from an engineering perspective, because, you know, they're doing it themselves. They're the ones that are coming up with the calculations. And that's just the way they did it. And it doesn't mean they're, they're bad, or it's right or wrong. It's just the way they operated for so many years. So I think just as we see kids coming out of school, they're, they're AI natives, right? They just gravitate towards that. And when you start to see AI native engineers, you're going to see more and more adoption of that in Formula One.

• 43:51John Coogan?

  That makes a ton of sense.

• 43:52Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense.

• 43:53John Coogan?

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

• 43:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it has to have been a wild, wild quarter, but come back on soon.

• 44:01John Coogan?

  It's great progress.

• 44:01George Kurtz?

  We will. Great to see you guys.

• 44:03Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 44:03George Kurtz?

  All right. Congrats again to you.

• 44:04John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 44:06John Coogan?

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

• 44:30Speaker 05

  Hey, welcome. Good to see you guys.

• 44:31John Coogan?

  Good to see you too.

• 44:32Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

• 44:33John Coogan?

  We're thrilled. We're huge fans.

• 44:36Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 44:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 44:49Speaker 05

  So you were one of the OGs on the channel.

• 44:51Jordi Hays?

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

• 44:58John Coogan?

  It's so good.

• 44:58Jordi Hays?

  And so we've been trying to...

• 45:01Speaker 05

  That's awesome to hear. I love the original fans. You guys are amazing. You guys like really, you're the ones that fueled the fire for me to keep going, so.

• 45:08John Coogan?

  I'm glad, I'm glad.

• 45:09Jordi Hays?

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

• 45:32Speaker 05

  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 thinking about expanding it to sort of include some of the older generation's 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.

• 45:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So what was the first wombo? What like, what really drew you to wombos? What was the first?

• 48:20Speaker 05

  That's perfect, yes.

• 48:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were reflecting on the fact that, uh, I'm not sure how familiar you are with this, but, uh, like the Silicon Valley in particular went through like a series, I mean, they call them portmanteaus back then, but, uh, 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, you know, uh, pin, you know, interest dot com or, you know, order shopping, like, you know, grocery store dot com, but Instacart was available and so people would sort of mash these up. And I'm wondering if you've, if you've gone back and looked

• 49:04John Coogan?

  at any historical portmanteaus or Wombos that have broken through and maybe need to be like revisited and re, uh, re, reignited? Or is it all just forward into the crazier and crazier phrases?

• 49:17Speaker 05

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

• 49:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:27Jordi Hays?

  Wait, this is a calculator, this is a calculator that's a lighter too? Like if you want to smoke.

• 49:32John Coogan?

  Smoke while you're doing math?

• 49:33Speaker 05

  Foxy calculators and it's got a little lighter thing coming out of it.

• 49:37Jordi Hays?

  Wow, we need, we need one of those.

• 49:38John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 49:39Speaker 05

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

• 49:51Jordi Hays?

  I know, but you, Merriam-Webster needs to hire you.

• 49:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:54Jordi Hays?

  Like immediately and start getting some.

• 49:56Speaker 05

  I think they do, you know, I want to get, I want to get queesh penumus in there.

• 49:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:59Speaker 05

  That's one that I really want to get.

• 50:00Jordi Hays?

  And explain, explain that Wombo for people.

• 50:01John Coogan?

  Explain that Wombo.

• 50:02Speaker 05

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

• 50:13Jordi Hays?

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

• 50:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:22Jordi Hays?

  I, I personally, I use, I use, uh, I use queesh lorraine more.

• 50:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 50:26Jordi Hays?

  Quirky niche lore explained.

• 50:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a handy one.

• 50:29Jordi Hays?

  From you, professor.

• 50:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I love Quech 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 Quech Lorraine visions.

• 50:40John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 50:42Speaker 05

  So it's basically like you take Quech Lorraine and then you mix it with anal visions.

• 50:45John Coogan?

  Which is analysis.

• 50:47Speaker 05

  I can't say that here.

• 50:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're trying to give it a little. Friendly show, but it's analysis vision, to be clear.

• 50:52Speaker 05

  Yes, it's analysis revision. So it's basically if you do one of those, you're basically just doing an analysis revision of it. Yes, correct.

• 50:59John Coogan?

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

• 51:22Jordi Hays?

  I use Lorraine all the time. I'll say, John, Lorraine entails earning.

• 51:26John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. But how much time are you splitting between these? Like, do you think that there's something innate about being terse and short that will actually allow a wombo to break through and ideally make it into the Merriam-Webster's dictionary?

• 51:43Speaker 05

  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.

• 51:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:49Speaker 05

  Something that sounds good.

• 51:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:51Speaker 05

  It has to sound good.

• 51:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:53Speaker 05

  So it's like the Quech, it sounds good. I don't know. It just, it sounds nice when you say it. Some words just don't work.

• 51:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's almost like where, you know, the pharmaceutical companies, they come up with these names for the drugs and you're like, that does sound like a thing, but I never would have guessed what that is. And it doesn't sound just like you pounded on the keyboard. You got like Ozempic, which like, sounds like a drug for some reason. It's just like, but it's from nothing. And those things tend to break through. Also, I feel like Choppelganger really jumped straight into Merriam-Webster's because it feels like, like with the, with the very little amount of work, you can, you can reverse engineer it. And, and that also seems to be key to getting some wombos to break through is, is can someone take a guess and get 80% of the way there and then sort of?

• 52:44John Coogan?

  You know, pique their interest and then go a level deeper and understand the whole, the whole lore.

• 52:48Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, talk about the origins of nonchalash out.

• 52:54Jordi Hays?

  Once you know that wombo, which is nonchalant crash out, you just see it everywhere.

• 52:59John Coogan?

  You do.

• 52:59Jordi Hays?

  It's constant, it's everywhere. Every time I open X or Instagram or YouTube, someone's having a nonchalash out.

• 53:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:08Speaker 05

  Yep, pretty much. So yeah, nonchalash out is basically when you look nonchalant on the outside, but then on the inside you're crashing out. So. I mean, I think a lot of, uh, people can, can do this. Uh, you know, for example, that, like the CEO at McDonald's, you know, when he was eating that burger. I'm pretty sure he was having a nonchalash out when that was happening.

• 53:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:27Speaker 05

  Now, he looks pretty calm on the outside, but on the inside, I'm pretty sure he was freaking out.

• 53:32Jordi Hays?

  He was in a dark place.

• 53:33John Coogan?

  So, so with something like nonchalash out or any of these other examples, how much of it is, there is a phenomenon that, because a nonchalash out is a thing that we didn't have a word for in English before, uh, it, but it has existed probably for, you know, entire human history, this has happened. Uh, but, uh, 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.

• 54:03Jordi Hays?

  Another example from the professor, cap-solutely.

• 54:06John Coogan?

  Cap-solutely.

• 54:07Jordi Hays?

  I would use this personally, if I know someone's just basically bull, you know, BSing.

• 54:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:11Jordi Hays?

  Kind of like lying to me, I'd say cap-solutely.

• 54:13John Coogan?

  Yes. You want to agree.

• 54:16Speaker 05

  Well, here's the, here's the secret. Okay. So I'll, I'll let you in on this. So when you, when you make a word, if you find an opposite word and you kind of make the word a paradox, so like a nonchalash out doesn't really make sense, right? Because it's like, how can you be nonchalant and crash out at the same time? But when you put them together, you really think about it. All human behaviors are kind of paradoxical. They all, they all have like, you know, this aspect and this aspect. So like, uh, another example would be figuratively. So that's figuratively and literally. How can something be figurative and literal at the same time?

• 54:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:45Speaker 05

  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.

• 54:54John Coogan?

  The Hegelian dialectic, the thesis and the antithesis create the synthesis.

• 55:00Speaker 05

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

• 55:06John Coogan?

  Uh, where do you want to go with your creator journey? I, because I, I was thinking like Instagram reels notoriously hard to run ads or monetize. Uh, I don't know that there's an obvious like Patreon paid podcast play here. Maybe I'd be interested to listen to you talk about etymology and, and language for hours. But, uh, I was thinking like brands should be paying you to create wombos about their products or their brands and, and, and that would be sort of synergistic with like what the audience expects, what would actually go viral and what you could actually get paid for. But are you early in the creator journey? How are you thinking about this as a business?

• 55:49Speaker 05

  Yeah. So right now I'm working on a dictionary. So I'm hoping to use that as a, you know, as the step stone to launching my products.

• 55:55John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 55:57Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I'm, I'm watching the dictionary.

• 55:58Jordi Hays?

  I think coffee table, like a coffee table book, like the great book of wombos. Something you can proudly place on a coffee table.

• 56:07Speaker 05

  Yeah. I want to have a book like where I can put it on the table and, and people can just like flip through it. I want it to look real nice and I want it to be like a really great item to have. But also, you know, like I said, I want to have some brands that I work with.

• 56:18John Coogan?

  Coffee table dictionary, a coffee dictionary.

• 56:20Jordi Hays?

  A dictionary.

• 56:23John Coogan?

  Sorry. What else?

• 56:24Speaker 05

  You're coming up with stuff.

• 56:25John Coogan?

  I'm working on it, but we have, what else are you cooking?

• 56:28Speaker 05

  Got to keep on going. Yeah, for sure. But, but no, no, I'm early on in my journey. So I'm, I'm looking to, you know, work with some people and I'm, I'm looking to make some books and 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. Yeah, 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,

• 56:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:51Speaker 05

  Um, yeah, there, there's so many opportunities. So it's, it's really looking up.

• 56:55John Coogan?

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

• 57:27Jordi Hays?

  No, this was super fun. We're having Gary, Gary Vee on in just a couple of minutes.

• 57:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:33Jordi Hays?

  And we'll ask him ideas on how to monetize Professor Sendy in the Wombo Universe because I feel like he could, I think, I think he'll have some ideas.

• 57:42John Coogan?

  Do you?

• 57:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, that would be amazing. And yeah, and if you're, yeah, mentioned me to Gary Vee, that would be very cool. That's awesome. Yeah, I appreciate that.

• 57:49John Coogan?

  Uh, do you experience anything different across the platforms? I know, we follow you on Instagram. I know you're on TikTok. Uh, is there anything, uh, that you've learned from like the different platforms?

• 57:59Speaker 05

  Definitely. So TikTok I think is more for discovery.

• 58:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 58:02Speaker 05

  So if, you know, if you do something that's completely novel, that video can really blow up.

• 58:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:07Speaker 05

  I think Instagram is much more generous with its views. Um, but I think you can really build a solid base more on Instagram. I just feel like TikTok's more for discovery. Instagram's more for growth and personalization of your brand.

• 58:18John Coogan?

  Have you tried, have you put these on YouTube Shorts yet?

• 58:22Speaker 05

  What's that?

• 58:23John Coogan?

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

• 58:26Speaker 05

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

• 58:33John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:34Speaker 05

  Um, just because I don't know if it'll work and I just. I I used to do that and so I'm just I'm not sure about it yet. So we'll see. We'll see.

• 58:41John Coogan?

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

• 58:45Jordi Hays?

  And thank you for all your analysis and teachings.

• 58:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 58:48Jordi Hays?

  I uh it has brought brought both of us so much joy.

• 58:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:52Jordi Hays?

  Like not just watching the videos, but using them.

• 58:54John Coogan?

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

• 59:00Speaker 05

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

• 59:03John Coogan?

  It was it was remarkable.

• 59:04Speaker 05

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

• 59:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're the man.

• 59:08John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 59:08Jordi Hays?

  Great hanging.

• 59:09John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 59:10Speaker 05

  All right, thank you.

• 59:12John Coogan?

  Uh Greg Brockman's apartment is for sale where they started OpenAI. Uh Shiel Monat says, I do not think there is an opportunity to build an OpenAI themed Airbnb, by the way. Uh but uh who knows, maybe some filmmakers will pick it up. Uh it is a uh three bedroom, two bath in San Francisco. One point five four five million dollars, uh eighteen hundred square feet. Uh it is a it is an incre- incredible piece of uh of lore that uh OpenAI started in this particular apartment.

• 59:45Jordi Hays?

  Um yeah, this this this feels like it will go quickly.

• 59:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:50Jordi Hays?

  Like there are so many people in San Francisco that would be that that might need a place. And to just snap up the place that OpenAI was effectively formed.

• 1:00:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember some of the early photos. Good times. Uh we should go to this uh video from Zane Shaw. 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 uh you know, tour of Notre Dame website. Probably vibe coded a testament to what the modern coding models can do. But it's not code. This is what you are seeing is is actually not code. Uh it is, there's no HTML, no layout engine, no code. Uh it is uh it is a diffusion model that is rendering this uh as the input is given.

• 1:00:44John Coogan?

  And so you can think about this almost like those world models, those generative video games where you uh walk around. But this is uh sort of a very, very early glimpse into sort of what the future of generative UI might look like. Jordi, why are you laughing?

• 1:01:01Jordi Hays?

  Because the chat is doing a bunch of wombo's.

• 1:01:03John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. We got to work on wombo's. We will be integrating those more in the near future, but we have our next guest in the waiting room, Gary Vaynerchuk from Vayner Media. Gary, how are you doing? Welcome back to the show.

• 1:01:16Jordi Hays?

  Do you know about wombo's?

• 1:01:18Speaker 06

  I do not, my friend.

• 1:01:19John Coogan?

  You got to learn about wombo's.

• 1:01:20Jordi Hays?

  You got to learn about wombo's. They are the next meta. They are the next meta. If you're not doing wombo's in 2026, you're getting left behind.

• 1:01:27John Coogan?

  So wombo's are word combos. So the example would be a queesh is quirky and niche. You put it together and that's queesh or Lorraine lore plus.

• 1:01:39Speaker 06

  That was a risky start for the first word.

• 1:01:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's a risky one. Lorraine is a better. Lorraine is a better one. Give me, if I say Lorraine.

• 1:01:49Speaker 06

  First, first and foremost, congratulations.

• 1:01:52John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:01:53Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 1:01:54Speaker 06

  That really made me happy.

• 1:01:55John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:01:56Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:02:22John Coogan?

  And go multi-platform. That was really huge, too. You, you, you were, you were very early in like, why don't you have a newsletter right now? Why aren't you on YouTube in multiple ways? Why aren't you on Instagram yet? 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.

• 1:02:42Speaker 06

  Everything starts subpar, right? Like when you start working out 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 B2C, to not take advantage of the attention media landscape that's in place right now. It's really uncomprehendable to me. There's never been a time in the history of humanity or business where the cost of distribution is zero for the distribution. There's costs in the content and then when you do it, but the upside is so extraordinary against the investment.

• 1:03:23Speaker 06

  And when you frame it up properly, multi-channel, multi-format, the business outcomes can be extraordinary and I'm happy to see you guys get one.

• 1:03:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:34Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:03:45John Coogan?

  Two decades by some measures.

• 1:03:47Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:03:53Speaker 06

  I mean, I wrote this book in 2008. It came out in 09, Crush It. In the back of the book, I talk about Ustream and live streaming. Yeah, I mean, you know, it ebbs and flows and to your point, like, I mean, I can't even comprehend the economic impact live social shopping is going to do over the next 10 years for human 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 strategic framework that you guys executed in this genre.

• 1:04:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, the, well, the interesting, the interesting thing is we, there's, there's easily been a hundred, a hundred shows that have like taken some level of inspiration from what we're doing. It's still very, very hard, it's still very, very hard to break through, right? There's, it's not just, it's not just the overlay and the format, but I have been surprised, I, I've been very confident, I've said this on podcasts for You know, we've talked about this going back probably six, six to eight months ago. You should take this format of a live stream and you just add a extra level of production beyond. You just have a laptop there and you're hanging out and you apply that. The example we'd always talk about is like cooking where all you need is like a cool kitchen. You're, that's your set.

• 1:05:18Jordi Hays?

  You have a couple of cameras, so you have different angles. And then you just say, hey, every day at 3 P M. I'm gonna cook dinner. This is what I'm gonna cook. Here's the schedule. You can make dinner with me. And I think that that's like an entire niche that you could build around. You could integrate guests into something like that, too. So you have different content creators coming through every day. And then I think you can apply that to a bunch of other things. Sports has honestly been the most advanced in terms of live streaming. So credit, credit to them.

• 1:05:48Speaker 06

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

• 1:05:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, how are you thinking about, uh, how branding and marketing will evolve? I had this interesting moment this week with the, uh, G P T images to 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 A I generate the, the product photography. Like even apparel is actually interesting where like fit matters a lot. And so if you generate a bunch of A I images of your shirt and then I buy it and it doesn't fit well, like I'm not gonna 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, uh, it used to be you could identify

• 1:06:36Jordi Hays?

  an entrepreneur's ability by their product photography in some way. Cause 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 gonna be harder than ever to stand out online.

• 1:07:05Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, there's a lot there. I mean, it's, oh, we just got done talking about how hard it is to stand out online. Right, like, like, the, the, the cost of entry is zero. But, you know, this is a competition. Like, you know, everyone's trying, and so everyone will make content, video, picture, audio, at a level that is incomprehensible to all of us that were born prior to five minutes ago. And this will be another transition. I think, you know, there's, there's always going to be, um, a timing game to this, right?

• 1:07:44Speaker 06

  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 them? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, I think it's kind of always gonna 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.

• 1:08:27Speaker 06

  You know, like, it's just, and computers, and the internet, and mobile devices, and open source versus closed source, and social media, now AI. You know, look, this AI thing is no joke, we all know that. It's big stakes, there's a lot to it. But, you know, I still think, whatever that human was to being scrappy, to find their friend for the photography, you know, that scrappiness is gonna be deployed into something else, right?

• 1:08:55Jordi Hays?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:08:56Speaker 06

  And so, I also think, right? And I also think that we're about to see the explosion of analog, right? Like, I think this barbell that I keep thinking about-

• 1:09:04Jordi Hays?

  Totally. I, I've been thinking, like, okay, you wanna start an apparel brand? You wanna 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?

• 1:09:20Speaker 06

  And, and my argument would be, would be, and. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Like, to me, this bar, like, I just, extreme AI, I think, is creating extreme analog. I really do think it's a barbell. I think in the next 10 years, obviously, it's 2036, but I feel like it's gonna feel like 2050, which actually is bringing the rise of 1950. I couldn't be more impressed with what Ari Emanuel and others are doing that are investing in all these analog businesses. I could not be more interested in physical retail, in event-driven businesses, in concerts and venues. And I think the rise of analog, I have a restaurant business, part of a restaurant

• 1:10:02Speaker 06

  group, I keep pushing my partners who are really operating, let's open a restaurant that makes people check in their phone as soon as they walk in. Let's put people in group tables. I like that. You know, you see what's happening with flip phones. Yeah. Gen Alpha buying them, you see vinyl sales. You know, I've been very at the forefront of collectibles. I felt collectibles were something tangible. And was a gateway drug to community. If you've never been to San Diego Comic-Con, or to the Sports Card National, or Fanatics Fest. So I think there's a lot of interesting non-digital realities that are coming as a counter move to the insanity of AI advancements. We're literally within a half decade not believing a single video, not a single fucking video, that's on the internet.

• 1:10:46Speaker 06

  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, uh, scaled moves are gonna 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.

• 1:11:26Jordi Hays?

  Okay, totally.

• 1:11:26John Coogan?

  All right, let's go deeper on analog. I want your reaction to this headline that for the first time this century, vinyl music sales eclipsed $1 billion in a calendar year.

• 1:11:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're effectively-

• 1:11:42John Coogan?

  Vinyl records are up something like 10% in 2025.

• 1:11:45Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:11:50John Coogan?

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

• 1:12:08Speaker 06

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

• 1:12:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:12:30Speaker 06

  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 AI is going to take their job, that the consumer is pushing against it. And then that's one part. And then the second part is, yeah, people are starting to do counter behavior consciously and unconsciously. And then there's just swings of, swings of trends, like, you know, like, music sounds great in a great record player. And like, people go, oh, this is kind of cool, too. And like, it becomes behavioral. It, you

• 1:13:11Speaker 06

  know, it starts in the same stuff. You know this. It's like the Brooklyn extremists are like, let's go, you know, hippie cool culture. And they get their little thing in the little subpocket, it bleeds out a little bit. Then the Manhattanites feel like they're not cool anymore, so they do it to keep up with the Brooklynites. And then we have that version everywhere in California, Texas, and Florida, and everywhere in the world. And so it's just, it's normal consumer behavior, but it is clearly- A counterpoint to extreme in-feed, in-digital consumption. And I think that's great. It speaks to the thing I most believe in, which is humans correct themselves at a level that we are unbelievably underestimating. The sheer adaptability of the human race is extraordinary.

• 1:13:56Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for us.

• 1:13:58John Coogan?

  Sports.

• 1:13:58Jordi Hays?

  Well, well said.

• 1:14:00John Coogan?

  I want to talk about sports.

• 1:14:01Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:14:21John Coogan?

  And then the sphere.

• 1:14:22Jordi Hays?

  Simulation of the Giants. The Sphere is another good example.

• 1:14:24John Coogan?

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

• 1:14:48Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:14:55Speaker 06

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

• 1:15:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:05Speaker 06

  In a way that 40 years ago, somebody would have had to say, you guys are good faces and you look good and you're charismatic and you might get a shot on this distribution. This decentralization of distribution, along with this analog and not disrupted by AI thing, is why six or seven years ago, I started investing very heavily in alternative sports. So I made a big bet on pickleball that I think is going to work out quite well.

• 1:15:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:31Speaker 06

  You know, unrivaled the three-on-three basketball league, AJ and I, my brother, early investors in that, the wiffleball league. The Sailing League, Slam Ball. I've been very aggressive on alternative sport investing, Padell. So I'm very bullish on it. I think Josh obviously plays at a very heavy economic level with his funds and that nature. And everyone like him and others, especially him, I have so much pride in his building because he's done such a great job. And New York City basement, we were always like, MB is the best F. So it's great to see him thrive, shine. I think all, anyone who does not realize how substantial the analog opportunities are,

• 1:16:13Speaker 06

  is really missing the plot of what's happening. And so it gets exciting. It's exciting to think that you can invest in both something that could get as big as, you know, anthropic in an extreme digital world. But also, forget about the obvious ones like the Giants or the Sphere. I'm talking about people rolling up 900 local restaurants and building up a huge, like it compounds 2X 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

• 1:16:53Speaker 06

  that people are going to be yearning for. Here's a left field one, like the drive-in movie theater, right? The stuff that dominated the 50s and 60s. When I say that out loud of like, do you think a modern drive-in movie theater, which has done really well and executed super well, do you think that a lot of people would be about that life? I think we can all agree that yes. 100%. Yeah. And then what happens to the person that does 39 of those and has a real business and flips it? So I think it's a really cool time for a lot of us that are watch this show. We're like, oh crap, we can play on either side of extreme digitalization or analog, be creative.

• 1:17:33Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:17:51Speaker 06

  What about, what about this? Now we're nerding out. What if you have forty of them and now this is seven years from now? And you start showing your own films that you make in AI and build your own IP through your own analog distribution?

• 1:18:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:18:06Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:18:13Speaker 06

  That's again, a lot of things I do get obvious later. I got made fun of writing that book. Anyone can put a personal brand on Twitter. Now it doesn't look so funny. I mean.

• 1:18:25Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:18:28Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, when I started building V Friends and like building this Pokemon Sesame Street thing. Yes, there was a lot of blockchain in it, but it was a lot of my smartest friends in Silicon Valley five years ago, 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.

• 1:18:47John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of people that are watching the show, there is an army of people named Ryan in the chat and they want to be acknowledged by us. So I'll ask you a question about a Ryan from your life. Can you tell me something you learned from Ryan Serhant or Ryan Holiday? Or maybe Ryan Harwood? Do any of these names conjure any interesting stories or life lessons?

• 1:19:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, the Ryan mafia is good. I mean, Ryan Harwood, I've learned nothing from zero, absolutely nothing. I just put that on the deck. Uh, you know, Ryan Holiday was definitely the individual that I was like, finally put a word to kind of how I was living my life, right? My mother's my hero. She taught me just how to be a really happy human. You know, I thought it was immigrant and I thought it was simplicity and I thought it was, you know, love and health over everything. And truly, truly not just cliché 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.

• 1:19:52Speaker 06

  That sounds like, oh, that, that, that's interesting. Um, and so I think that, uh, that's one for him. Uh, Serhant, 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 he was off the air. You know, his curiosity and humility was amazing. Like, he was always around our ecosystem. And he really learned to play the playbook. I've lived, you've lived, he's lived so much of, you know, now he's back on Netflix. But he had a really great era in between his television moments of really winning on social and going all in. And I'm really proud of him. And Harwood is a, is just a dear actual friend. He's family, not even friends.

• 1:20:37Speaker 06

  And so, he's taught me that.

• 1:20:39Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:20:46Speaker 06

  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 mouths was highly disrespectful in my direction.

• 1:21:08John Coogan?

  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 talk to some brilliant young people every day on the show. A lot of them fantasize about writing a book, but it always feels like it's something that needs to come with wisdom, that needs to come with being 40, 50, 60.

• 1:21:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, do you get a lot of wisdom? But, but part of it's like you're generating wisdom through writing, thinking deeply. Do you feel like?

• 1:21:39Speaker 06

  I think of it this way, man. I think it is, it's weirdly back to my barbell. I think people that have something to say will probably be best at the barbell. You know, meaning it's kind of like someone's first album. You have your whole life to write it. Right?

• 1:21:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:21:55Speaker 06

  And then, so, I don't know, for me, speaking for myself, like, again, back to the books, like, when I look back at that. I'm like, how, like, and I'm pretty like, I don't feel good about myself. 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, and then to your point, I think my next, 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. Cause much like I had in my youth, I saw things others couldn't see because I wasn't playing by yesterday's rules.

• 1:22:36Speaker 06

  I always say, fresh eyes are dangerous eyes. You know, nothing, it makes you dangerous. You can really innovate. And then I think those people that, you know, have sustained careers and can have years of wisdom and chapters, have a lot to say that can really wrap up and bring value. So I, I think most people, if they're going to be in that game, are probably going to write their best book first and last.

• 1:23:01Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you partnered up with MasterClass.

• 1:23:04Speaker 06

  Yeah. Tell us about it.

• 1:23:06Jordi Hays?

  Tell us about it.

• 1:23:07Speaker 06

  You know, I, 15 years ago, anything that looked like MasterClass, like selling stuff was really scammy. Like, I grew up in the Web 1.0 era and like, I stayed away from a lot of subscription, Patreon, OnlyFans, MasterClass. Like, selling information was really dirty in 97, 98, $150 ebook that was straight garbage. I, 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, BeHive. Like, now, now it's respected, which is amazing. And I think is great for a lot of individual writers and contributors.

• 1:23:49Speaker 06

  You know, it was really good company. Like, I like who they had for this class. It's addressing something I believe is real, which is like getting an MBA in real life and AI. At a, you know, pennies versus taking on extreme debt and getting an MBA from a high-class university that you think that logo is going to get you financial opportunity in a way that I believe has passed us by. Um, you know, it just feels like I want to be part of things that are historically correct or, you know, are just a little more practical and common sense. And so, um, 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

• 1:24:31Speaker 06

  to say about AI marketing and, 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.

• 1:24:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:47John Coogan?

  Uh, what are you hearing from sort of like Fortune 500 CMOs, uh, like larger company marketers around how, if anything, they should change in the world of AI around their marketing mix?

• 1:25:02Speaker 06

  Um, 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 they spend.

• 1:25:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:25:30Speaker 06

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

• 1:25:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:25:39Speaker 06

  Us three right now are on mid-funnel.

• 1:25:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:41Speaker 06

  We are producing content.

• 1:25:42Jordi Hays?

  I was born in the mid-funnel.

• 1:25:44Speaker 06

  I mean, look, I mean, this is what I'm saying, right? This, this is a production day.

• 1:25:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:53Speaker 06

  This will be post-produced into creative that will go into mid-funnel, organic social.

• 1:25:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:57Speaker 06

  And the things that do well will go up for brand and down for performance. Every brand on earth should be spending 20% of their entire marketing budget just on social media organic production because the mid funnel Tik Tok application 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 what I tell you, every Fortune 5000 company is still doing guessing on the upper funnel, sponsorships, ridiculous shit. And in the lower funnel, 2016 A B testing, Meta, frameworks, when the mid funnel ate up the whole world and you guys are winning, Bruins is winning, and any personal brand and many other businesses.

• 1:26:37Speaker 06

  And so that doesn't even get into the AI of it all. That to me is tooling and infrastructure to be great at what I just said. But Jesus, there's a lot of money being wasted by the companies representing the eyeballs that are watching the show right now. And that makes me sad.

• 1:26:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Makes a lot of sense.

• 1:26:58Jordi Hays?

  I can't stand.

• 1:27:00John Coogan?

  Wasted marketing spend. Yeah, it makes my blood boil. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 1:27:07Jordi Hays?

  We barely got to talk about live commerce.

• 1:27:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:10Jordi Hays?

  We'll get that up next time.

• 1:27:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, you need everybody here, 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 sold.

• 1:27:26Speaker 06

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

• 1:27:39Jordi Hays?

  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?

• 1:27:51Speaker 06

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

• 1:27:58Jordi Hays?

  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?

• 1:28:06Speaker 06

  Um, they don't need to. It actually works on merit.

• 1:28:09Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:28:09Speaker 06

  You only need to subsidize shitty shit.

• 1:28:17John Coogan?

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

• 1:28:20Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:28:20John Coogan?

  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 TBP and UltraDumb. How are you doing?

• 1:28:43Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:28:44Speaker 07

  Great. How are you doing, guys?

• 1:28:46John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastic.

• 1:28:47Jordi Hays?

  We're having, we're having a great day.

• 1:28:49John Coogan?

  Having a show.

• 1:28:50Jordi Hays?

  What's going on in the background?

• 1:28:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Take us on a little tour. What's going on there?

• 1:28:54Speaker 07

  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 did I forget? That's actually...

• 1:29:07John Coogan?

  It applies to your business.

• 1:29:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:10John Coogan?

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

• 1:29:33Speaker 07

  Yes. Okay, so we raised $24 million and...

• 1:29:44Jordi Hays?

  Continue.

• 1:29:45Speaker 07

  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, yeah, it was a great round for us.

• 1:29:57John Coogan?

  24 million, it sounds like a really solid seed.

• 1:30:00Jordi Hays?

  Eclipse is one of the highest signal, probably the highest signal if you're building in robotics.

• 1:30:05John Coogan?

  At the 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 are the comps? Like, what, what, what will the next couple of years like, be like of actually getting these on the road?

• 1:30:22Speaker 07

  Yeah, so 24 million is a start, right? It's a, we are, we're doing hardware, we're doing robotics, we're doing autonomy software. That does cost money, but it costs way less than it used to. I think, you know, you look at some of the, the players in the space and, you know, Waymo took a very long road, spent a lot of capital, but we're standing on the shoulders of giants now, right? A lot of work has been done in this space. I've been working in this space for 10, 11 years now on autonomous freight. For a night's success. We get, we get the benefit, I love it. We get the benefit of, of, of a lot of work that's been done in many, and over the years. And so it's just far cheaper than it used to, to sort of think about a great new idea and scale it and scale it to production.

• 1:31:02John Coogan?

  Okay, talk about the key trade offs. No cab, no driver.

• 1:31:08John Coogan?

  Are you pro LiDAR? Are you pro tele-operation? Like, what, are you gonna do a crawl, walk, run thing? Is it a straight shot to full self-driving? What's the thesis?

• 1:31:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, great. So, uh, we, you know, we're not dogmatic about technology here at all. It's just what's the best technology that we can use at any moment?

• 1:31:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:27Speaker 07

  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, this, I always joke at 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, it's just, it's honestly kind of magic.

• 1:31:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:53Speaker 07

  But we still take the same approach that you see in autonomy, right? It is a, uh, it is a, what'd you say, crawl, walk, crawl, walk, run?

• 1:32:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:02Speaker 07

  Um, we, we take that approach too, right? First you test in private roads and tracks. You, you get, you validate the hardware and the software together. And then you, from there, you, uh, 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 still, that's the idea.

• 1:32:24John Coogan?

  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 is there, are there GPUs onboard? Are you doing on-device inference? Like, what's the economic balance? How is this, how should a customer even think about this in a different mindset?

• 1:33:05Speaker 07

  Yeah. So what do you get from removing the cab, right? 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, right? And the lowest possible cost to me was, okay, we, we think about making it autonomous, right? So we could save about a dollar per mile there. We, we make it electric, right? So that, that lowers the maintenance cost. And now, especially with like some of the volatile fuel issues, you know, we get benefit there, right? And, you know, the cab itself is, is cost to the equipment that is necessary in an autonomous world. And so by removing the cab, you make the whole vehicle wider and you make the vehicle less expensive. And so for me, the target is, we want to have

• 1:33:47Speaker 07

  the equipment be comparable in price to what you see a tractor and a trailer today, because this is effectively combining a tractor and trailer together, right? It's, it's 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.

• 1:34:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about supporting infrastructure? I mean, there was a massive build out of charging infrastructure as Tesla ramped. Is that beneficial? Is that enough? Is there a lot more that needs to be done? I imagine even if I just have a warehouse, I might need to check if my warehouse is compatible with a cabless delivery and doesn't have, you know, the wrong configuration to be able to puzzle piece in the, the container.

• 1:34:37Speaker 07

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

• 1:35:21Speaker 07

  Right? And so how do we, how do we organize that kind of effort with them? How do we think about charging? How do we think about, you know, plugging into their, their software, right? Which, you know, sometimes every shipper has a different software stack that we have to work with. So we were starting those conversations really early. And as a company, we just move very fast.

• 1:35:41John Coogan?

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

• 1:35:44Speaker 07

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

• 1:35:54John Coogan?

  Good. Yes. When we'll tell Nikita, one more user.

• 1:35:58Speaker 07

  One more.

• 1:35:58John Coogan?

  Let's make it happen.

• 1:35:59Speaker 07

  One more user for Nikita, yeah.

• 1:36:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. Where's the company based? Where, what does actually scaling the company look like? Are you gonna make Detroit great again? Can we do something over there? Motor City? What are we thinking?

• 1:36:14Speaker 07

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

• 1:36:34John Coogan?

  And it makes sense as an R and D and, and prototyping hub, that you have a, you have a warehouse, but you don't have a giga factory yet. And that might be some.

• 1:36:43Speaker 07

  Correct.

• 1:36:43John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:36:44Speaker 07

  Yeah. And that can, and that can happen anywhere in the US. But we're designing in the US. We're building in the US. We're part of the reindustrialization movement of the US. So that's, that's the plan.

• 1:36:52John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:37:12Speaker 07

  So I started, I started my career working in electrification, electric vehicles. And actually, a lot of that technology was here in the Bay, a lot of it, developing battery packs, motors. And we've watched over the last 20 years as that shifted out of not only just the Bay, but out of the US entirely, right? And I, and now you see the, sort of the rush to get it back. And I think, I think there is, it takes time, but there are a lot of smart people that have been working in this space for a long time. And there's a lot of excitement and capital pouring into this. You know, our backers at Eclipse are just the most phenomenal people you could be working with, and they get this and they, they understand it. And you'll just see a lot more investments in this space in general as we grow. And yeah, I think the supply chain's coming back here. It's just, it takes time, like, like everything.

• 1:37:57Speaker 07

  It's just going to come back in automated, automated factories this time around.

• 1:38:01John Coogan?

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

• 1:38:15Speaker 07

  I, I'm a little bit familiar with the story.

• 1:38:17Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:38:21John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, no, no. That's how it happened. But I mean, it is something that, that would be at least easier to fight back against in terms of fraud if there were cameras all the way around the vehicle. So a little bit of a knock on effect to the positive. Well, good luck.

• 1:38:38Speaker 07

  The way that we did. Thank you.

• 1:38:39John Coogan?

  And thank you so much.

• 1:38:40Jordi Hays?

  I am, just based on this conversation, I'm extremely confident that this company will be wildly successful.

• 1:38:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:38:47Jordi Hays?

  And I'm glad you're doing this.

• 1:38:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:49Speaker 07

  Terrific.

• 1:38:50John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:38:52Jordi Hays?

  Have you back on soon?

• 1:38:52John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:38:54Speaker 07

  We'll see you soon. Bye.

• 1:38:55John Coogan?

  After a mystic complaint. There we go.

• 1:39:00John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:39:16Speaker 07

  That's a narrative violation.

• 1:39:18John Coogan?

  We have Yoland Yan from Comfy in the waiting room with an iconic entrance. Let's take a look.

• 1:39:25Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:39:26John Coogan?

  What are you holding here? Please introduce yourself and the company. What are we looking at?

• 1:39:33Jordi Hays?

  Let's fucking go.

• 1:39:40John Coogan?

  Please, welcome to the show.

• 1:39:43Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:39:46John Coogan?

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

• 1:39:52Speaker 08

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

• 1:40:03Jordi Hays?

  That's true. You know, you studied. You studied.

• 1:40:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:07Speaker 08

  I did.

• 1:40:09Jordi Hays?

  What, what? Tell us your entire life story from inception. Now, what?

• 1:40:15Speaker 08

  I think there are too many points for you to start over here. Let me remove the distraction for you for now.

• 1:40:20John Coogan?

  What is the distraction? Give us the backstory, like why that is a creature.

• 1:40:23Speaker 08

  The distraction is a character created by my co-founder is actually the origin of this tool. If it weren't for this character, we wouldn't be raising and becoming a half billion dollar company today. So just shout out to the fantastic character.

• 1:40:39John Coogan?

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

• 1:40:55Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah. Comfy is a node-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 a text prompt-based content creation using AI, it's the polar opposite. It gives you every bit of control and possibility to adjust the model and control the camera angle, control the posture. And that's exactly why 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.

• 1:41:34John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:41:54Speaker 08

  Getting, yeah.

• 1:41:55John Coogan?

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

• 1:42:12Speaker 08

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

• 1:42:52Speaker 08

  creative companies or studios. So, yeah, that's kind of like, you know, how we monetize off of it.

• 1:42:59John Coogan?

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

• 1:43:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, the entire visual AI ecosystem is evolving very rapidly. These foundation models are making amazing progress. And you can access all of these models on our platform as well. We are generally agnostic in terms of whether it's open or closed source model. But just to comment on the progress over here, we're super excited to see like, you know, where the trend goes towards to when these C dance model gets launched onto comfy platform. You see people kind of building on top of creating even better workflow using these models. And I can't wait for, you know, one day we'll just have avatar being created in someone's, you know, bedroom and backyard.

• 1:43:49John Coogan?

  Okay, when, over, under 2028?

• 1:43:52Jordi Hays?

  Give us your Hollywood predictions.

• 1:43:54John Coogan?

  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 and 30 seconds. I've seen, yeah, maybe two minutes, three minutes.

• 1:44:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, everybody's now seen like.

• 1:44:06John Coogan?

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

• 1:44:27Speaker 08

  Yeah, this is actually a part of insight that most people don't really understand right now. It's one on the quality side of the area. People don't want to create long form content because by the time when you finish a feature film length of a content, the model has shifted so much that you're, you're running into this James Cameron problem of like, oh shit, I have to go back and then, you know, 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 studios.

• 1:45:07Speaker 08

  An agency is using Comfy. What it doesn't do is, it doesn't become production. It just entered the previous portion.

• 1:45:14John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:45:14Speaker 08

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

• 1:45:44John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:46:00Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:46:00John Coogan?

  Uh, but very different paths.

• 1:46:03Speaker 08

  Yeah, I believe the visual ecosystem is quite different.

• 1:46:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:46:08Speaker 08

  The main differentiation is there's a huge amount of taste. Even if someone can prompt C-Dance 30.0 to generate a feature film tomorrow, and it gets to a level of quality. For the real creatives or for the people who want the taste and control to be in their own hand, it's still going to be a very iterative process. It's just going to make their life a lot easier. And that's what Comfy enables you to do. Um, 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.

• 1:46:51Speaker 08

  And that's, in my opinion, what differentiates the, you know, AI slops from the Comfy ecosystem of creation.

• 1:47:00John Coogan?

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

• 1:47:09Speaker 08

  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, a human in the loop centric belief and mechanism. And it's actually true. In a lot of these cases, when people are using Comfy as a tool, it's actually empowering the creatives to do their work, to skip all of these boring stuff of colorization, of, you know, kind of upscaling, downscaling manually in the traditional process. It enables you. So those are the world where we're not actually taking jobs, we're creating jobs. If anything, you go search on, you know,

• 1:47:52Speaker 08

  any job site today, there's actually a huge amount of people hiring for Comfy UI artists and specialists.

• 1:47:59John Coogan?

  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 in.

• 1:48:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I've said this before, and at least some people were trying, were calling me an idiot online, but I've had this idea that I think AI could actually help Hollywood. We're in Hollywood, there's a bunch of empty studios around, there's a bunch of people here that have been working in entertainment that haven't had great job prospects over the last few years, especially if they weren't willing to travel overseas. 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, you know, short film, film, make beautiful advertisements,

• 1:48:55Jordi Hays?

  whatever they want to do. So I think we will enter into a golden age of human, human-powered, AI-powered humans doing incredible creative work.

• 1:49:07John Coogan?

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

• 1:49:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we raised $30 million from.

• 1:49:18Speaker 08

  Oh man, I've been looking forward to this. Yeah, we raised thirty million dollars. The round was led by Kraft Venture. A huge fan of folks over there. They've been tracking us for a while.

• 1:49:29John Coogan?

  Good job.

• 1:49:29Speaker 08

  Yeah, been amazing working with them so far.

• 1:49:32John Coogan?

  Good job.

• 1:49:33Speaker 08

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

• 1:49:40Jordi Hays?

  I love it, dude. Imagine being your enemy right now, logging on to X.com.

• 1:49:45John Coogan?

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

• 1:49:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, imagine logging on to X.com and seeing Mr. Yan and just being like, "Oh, it's over for me."

• 1:49:58John Coogan?

  But, uh... Real, real balling.

• 1:50:00Speaker 08

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

• 1:50:05John Coogan?

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

• 1:50:07Speaker 08

  Oh, I see. Gosh.

• 1:50:08John Coogan?

  I'm talking about like...

• 1:50:09Jordi Hays?

  Adobe.

• 1:50:12Speaker 08

  Never heard of that word.

• 1:50:14John Coogan?

  Uh, but congratulations. Thank you for everything you do. Incredibly cool tool. If you haven't already checked it out, go download Comfy UI, make some cool stuff. It's a lot of fun. And have a great rest of your day. Goodbye.

• 1:50:27Jordi Hays?

  You guys too. Great hanging.

• 1:50:28John Coogan?

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

• 1:50:35Jordi Hays?

  I did.

• 1:50:36John Coogan?

  You did? Well, we're gonna tell everyone what the AI industry can learn from that story about supply chain bottlenecks. But, up next, we have Ben Horowitz from Dorm Room Fund. He's an investment partner and is the creator of Sincerely Misspelled. You'll have to figure out how to spell it yourself if you wanna go check it out, but we'll let Ben introduce himself now. How are you doing? Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on. Love the show. Thanks for having me on. I'm also an MBA at HBS, so... Oh, yes. People were taking a victory lap on that.

• 1:51:06Jordi Hays?

  Dude, soon to be master of business.

• 1:51:08John Coogan?

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

• 1:51:15Speaker 09

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

• 1:51:19Jordi Hays?

  Wait, wait. So why were people upset?

• 1:51:22John Coogan?

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

• 1:51:24Speaker 09

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

• 1:51:27John Coogan?

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

• 1:51:34Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I thought you were talking about the product.

• 1:51:35John Coogan?

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

• 1:51:50Speaker 09

  Yeah. So I built Sincerely. It's spelled with two E's, so S-I-N-C-E-E-R-L-Y. And it's really like the anti-grammarly. So I am naturally a terrible typist. I don't know if I can cuss, but I mess up my emails all the time. And I found that people really reply to them. I don't think it's just because of the typos, but it's definitely a factor.

• 1:52:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:14Speaker 09

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

• 1:52:18John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:52:18Speaker 09

  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.

• 1:52:33Jordi Hays?

  Are you, you're talking about like CEOs that have terrible grammar because they're just typing quickly and it doesn't really matter?

• 1:52:37John Coogan?

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

• 1:52:42Jordi Hays?

  Typing in all caps is

• 1:52:43John Coogan?

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

• 1:52:47Speaker 09

  It's kind of the anti Gen Z in a lot of ways, the all caps.

• 1:52:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:50Speaker 09

  We don't have a Ron Conway mode yet, though.

• 1:52:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. But I had, I had this, I had this, this experience maybe a year ago where, where someone sent me a very lengthy, you know, multi-paragraph deep dive on some topic. And I could tell that it was AI-generated. And I said, you know, you should just send me the prompt because I can also do the instantiation. Like, I can also expand bullet points into paragraphs in my head. And so just send me the bullet points. And there was that also, that meme of like, oh, turn this, turn these bullet points into paragraphs. And then the other person on the other end saying, turn the paragraphs into bullet points. Are people using this specifically to write emails? Or is there an email summarization feature coming? Where do you see this going, I guess?

• 1:53:32Speaker 09

  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.

• 1:53:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:53:39Speaker 09

  And then they're using Sincerely. To make their email not sound like AI. And that's a crazy loop, right?

• 1:53:46John Coogan?

  That's a crazy loop.

• 1:53:47Speaker 09

  Using AI to make AI more human.

• 1:53:50John Coogan?

  And that's why, and that's why Intel is up 20% for this specific use case. No, there are more useful, there are more important use cases, but I, I, we were talking about this.

• 1:54:01Jordi Hays?

  Was this, was this a fun stunt or?

• 1:54:03John Coogan?

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

• 1:54:07Speaker 09

  I think it started as social commentary. This is like, it, it 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.

• 1:54:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:54:21Speaker 09

  And in this case, it's also a little bit like the pushback on how we're using technology today. So, you know, there's a $4.99 a month model that if you want to not bring your own key, you can pay me. Um, 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.

• 1:54:40John Coogan?

  Uh, 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.

• 1:54:53Speaker 09

  Uh, I learned a lot in this, in this process, as you might have imagined, and a huge fan of CrowdStrike too. Um, we have pushed a few security fixes and just made sure that people know what they're getting themselves into when they download this.

• 1:55:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:08Speaker 09

  But ultimately like this is a satire meets something real. Um, so I hope that, that people get it. Um, yeah.

• 1:55:17John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:55:29Jordi Hays?

  What is sentiment like in the current age, in your current HBS class?

• 1:55:33John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:55:33Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:55:46Speaker 09

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

• 1:56:14Jordi Hays?

  Uniting the great houses.

• 1:56:15John Coogan?

  Do you think there will be a sway? I mean, you go back to H B S in like the eighties and you imagine that it was churning out like oil and gas executives probably. And I'm wondering if you think there'll be a swing back like we saw Josh Kushner announce Thrive Eternal, he's taken a stake in the Giants and there's a whole different world where you take the H B S learnings and playbooks and you go apply them to things that are extremely A I 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 H B S and now I'm like, you know, V P at G E Vernova, that's probably a pretty good gig.

• 1:56:54Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, the friends who I'm thinking about who actually dropped out to go do Y C, you're gonna laugh, are focused on H Vacs.

• 1:57:02John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:57:03Speaker 09

  And putting A I in the back of H Vacs.

• 1:57:07John Coogan?

  That's literally the meme. It's not a roll up, it's not a roll up. They're like.

• 1:57:12Jordi Hays?

  True H B S meme. Why has no one identified the opportunity in H Vacs?

• 1:57:16John Coogan?

  H Vac is important. Have you ever not had air conditioning?

• 1:57:19Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:57:20John Coogan?

  One hot day in the studio and I demand H Vac, it is universal.

• 1:57:24Speaker 09

  It's sort of, that's another loop that's tricky though, right? Like, are we making the world warmer? Are we cooling it off? Are we putting A I in the back of H Vacs?

• 1:57:33John Coogan?

  It's all an A I play at the end of the day. Interesting, interesting. What were you doing before H B S?

• 1:57:38Speaker 09

  I started a company with my friend Reed that was a sort of like a philanthropic robo-advisor, like Wealthfront or Betterment.

• 1:57:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:47Speaker 09

  And we sold that to Charity Navigator and I worked there.

• 1:57:49John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:57:50Speaker 09

  And yeah, hopefully, I'm a free agent in like three weeks.

• 1:57:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:57:55Speaker 09

  So, heading to SF and fulfilling my manifest destiny.

• 1:57:58John Coogan?

  So, in three weeks, is that HBS graduation?

• 1:58:00Jordi Hays?

  You're saying you're finishing your earn-out or HBS?

• 1:58:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:04Speaker 09

  Finishing HBS. The proverbial debt earn-out. I don't know if you call it that.

• 1:58:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome. All right, well, it was really great to meet you.

• 1:58:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, great hanging out.

• 1:58:13Jordi Hays?

  And please let us know when you figure out what you're working on next.

• 1:58:16John Coogan?

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

• 1:58:20Speaker 09

  We have something really funny coming out.

• 1:58:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, I can tell.

• 1:58:23Speaker 09

  And by we, I mean we're all in.

• 1:58:24John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:58:25Speaker 09

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:58:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's talk about it.

• 1:58:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have a good one. We'll see you soon.

• 1:58:30Speaker 09

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:58:31John Coogan?

  Goodbye. There is a ton more news. What should we go through? Spore says, "What's the charge? Front-running an overseas coup d'etat? Succulent Venezuelan coup d'etat?" This is a crazy story. Brandon Gorrell and our team was obsessed with it. A US Special Forces soldier involved in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was arrested for allegedly betting on that operation, netting him $400,000 in profits. This is when the betting-on-yourself meme goes wrong, right? 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.

• 1:59:15John Coogan?

  Shame on you, but still, an interesting story.

• 1:59:18Jordi Hays?

  Even Trump was like, he 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...

• 1:59:30Jordi Hays?

  That wasn't so bad, but anyways.

• 1:59:34John Coogan?

  People are really, really having fun with the the new ImageGen model.

• 1:59:37Jordi Hays?

  Oh, this was so.

• 1:59:38John Coogan?

  I don't even know we should pull this up because it's so rude, but uh this guy's effectively playing Minecraft through ChatGPT because he has to generate him an image of Minecraft.

• 1:59:47Jordi Hays?

  He says.

• 1:59:48John Coogan?

  Uh, of course, he's doing the island in Little St. James, the very controversial one.

• 1:59:52Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:59:57John Coogan?

  Pull it up, but.

• 1:59:57Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure, I'm sure there's some kids out there that are that have figured out how to uh how to play Minecraft in in ChatGPT, but this is very funny. I found this post when it had forty likes.

• 2:00:08John Coogan?

  Woo.

• 2:00:09Jordi Hays?

  This morning.

• 2:00:09John Coogan?

  Sniped.

• 2:00:10Jordi Hays?

  Sniped, invested early.

• 2:00:12John Coogan?

  Game Hunter on.

• 2:00:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Cohere is merging with uh a German AI.

• 2:00:18John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:00:19Jordi Hays?

  Lab called Aleph Alpha.

• 2:00:21John Coogan?

  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. Uh. Is that correctly?

• 2:00:40Jordi Hays?

  GPT five point five.

• 2:00:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:00:42Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Kits is saying it might be AGI because if you ask it, bro, the car wash is five minutes away. Should I walk to it or go by car? And says, car, bro, it's a car wash.

• 2:00:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:52Jordi Hays?

  The plot, the plot makes sense.

• 2:00:54John Coogan?

  Wait, what?

• 2:00:57Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that's good. It just immediately clocks it.

• 2:00:59John Coogan?

  Oh, I like that it's, hey, I've seen this exact test done in normal language, like with a proper prompt, not the casual bro slang.

• 2:01:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:07John Coogan?

  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 uh remarkable. It also got the the Rs in strawberry correct, right? And uh, how many strawberries in the letter R? Zero. The letter R is not known for its berry storage. These are good answers. Uh, the the uh, the the being a helpful assistant, but simultaneously rejecting nonsense has particularly been difficult for LLM. So good progress here. We'll figure out more about uh what went into this and what uh the next, the next generation of AI impacts are from this.

• 2:01:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Tyler.

• 2:01:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:51Jordi Hays?

  Hodge says uh is. Found a post from five and a half years ago. Elon says the rate of improvement from the original GPT to GPT-3 is impressive. If this rate of improvement continues, GPT-5 or 6 could be indistinguishable from the smartest humans. Just my opinion, not an endorsement. I left OpenAI two to three years ago. I'm a neutral outsider at this point. Greg says, "Thank you." A lot, a lot has changed, but he was accurate in his prediction.

• 2:02:21John Coogan?

  Funniest outcome is the most likely.

• 2:02:23Jordi Hays?

  And then the last, the last thing I wanted-

• 2:02:25John Coogan?

  They wind up between best bros and do a buddy cop film together.

• 2:02:28Jordi Hays?

  The last thing, there is a new app from X.

• 2:02:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:02:33Jordi Hays?

  It's called XChat.

• 2:02:33John Coogan?

  XChat.

• 2:02:34Jordi Hays?

  And I'm excited to try this out because the current, yeah, the DMs on X have been pretty brutal.

• 2:02:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:42Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 2:02:43John Coogan?

  Uh, I haven't had that much of a problem. I do have this weird, this weird bug where when I click the chat button on desktop, it sort of loads and then it re-sorts after it loads. And, and sometimes if I haven't been in it in a long time, it needs to reshuffle several, several times. And so that can be a little jarring. But overall, it seems like they made the migration to encryption. 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, a new app. I probably need to be better about answering DMs. I have a lot of them that are unread. So having a dedicated app for that, that sounds cool. People were taking shots because the everything app's supposed to be everything in one place. Instead, it's three apps to get everything. And the everything

• 2:03:25John Coogan?

  app is sort of silly. Who cares? More apps, the better. I like apps. So go download it, go check it out and go, go like Makita'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 weekend. Enjoy the weekend. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbp.com and we'll see you tomorrow. Flashbang.

• 2:03:54Jordi Hays?

  Have an incredible weekend.