I see a large IPM on the horizon. You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position, right? There's misinformation.
>> Quarter clearing order inbound. >> Let's just roll. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Come on, get up. Trust the experts here.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by.
>> UAV online. >> Blaze. >> Double blaze. Triple blaze. Double kill. Very wrong. Cook is correct. Founder mode.
>> I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by.
>> UAV online. Blaze blade. Double blaze. Triple blaze. Double kill. Wins. >> Team deathmatch. >> We are experts. Triple blade. That's just wrong, right?
>> Marky clearing order inbound. >> Come on, get up. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. >> Strike one. >> Strike two. >> Activate golden retriever mode. Marky clearing order inbound. >> Five. Founder.
>> You're watching TVPN. Today is Friday, April 24th, 2026. We are live from the TVP Ultradome, >> the temple of technology, >> the fortress of finance. We have a great show for you today, folks. We have George Kurtz coming on from CrowdStrike, Professor Sendy from Instagram. You might have seen he's the expert of Womos. Gary Vaynerchuk's coming on. We have a lightning round going on with a couple founders. Uh, it'll be a fun time. But the big news... >> wrapping up with Ben Horowitz. >> Ben Horowitz. >> Horowitz. >> Horowitz. Horowitz.
>> Uh, uh, the big news, of course, is Intel. Intel is absolutely ripping. Uh, Intel jumped to 20% after hours on the back of 13.6 billion dollars 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, uh, almost bubble boy on X.
>> A lot of people have called this, and, uh, it is long overdue. Uh, the revenue is only up 7% year-over-year, uh, but next quarter is already guiding to be better, somewhere north of 14 billion, probably. Uh, but there's still big losses under the hood. Uh, this quarter they lost $3.7 billion. Not good. Uh, but that was mostly driven by one-off charges related to Mobileye and derivative payments tied to the US government's 10% stake. So if you strip those out, Intel actually earned $1.5 billion, which is much better than what people were expecting, which was basically break-even. So the cruise ship of Intel is starting to turn somewhat. Uh, but the narrative has already completely shifted. So Intel is working again is the idea.
Uh, 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. Uh, 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. Uh, Intel was the most embarrassing missing piece. Uh, why isn't Intel booming when we're in a computing boom? It made no sense. Uh, but there were good reasons, and we'll go through them. Uh, 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. Uh, but they never really found traction, especially in the data center and the servers, uh, for AI training. And so they have fallen behind. Um, and then they spent the last few years trying to convince the world that Intel could still matter. Uh, 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?
>> It's funny because at the moment that the US took a position in Intel, >> Yeah. >> it was like it felt like a bailout, right? >> It felt like that. Yeah. And it felt like, you know, you would expect, okay, over time this is going to be very, very good for Intel to have that vote of confidence, but I don't think anyone was really predicting that it would go up quite this much in the span of just half a year.
>> I think Ben Thompson wrote a pretty strong bull case for the Intel US deal. Basically, like, you had to grapple with this idea of like, this doesn't feel like free market capitalism.
>> Yeah. I guess the only thing is like there wasn't this narrative around CPUs at the time that the deal was happening, or at least it wasn't a very public narrative.
>> Yes. Yes. The bull case at that time that I heard most loudly was not the CPU boom. It was just overall chipping. Who is the leading edge fab that basically by having the US government as a shareholder, you see those dinners with all the AI lab leads and all the hyperscaler CEOs, and there's a world where there's another one of those meetings and the government administration says, hey, we are backing Intel, I need all of you to commit to buy a ton of supply if Intel actually goes and builds the leading edge fab, which is going to cost them billions of dollars, but if they have the demand guarantees, then they will actually be able to go do it. Tyler, what was your take on that?
>> Yeah, I think Leopold, or sorry, Intel has long been kind of the Leopold take, which is that like, you know, this is the clear like, this is the company you want to own in the kind of nationalization world of like, okay, Taiwan risk, like what are we going to do if we can't make chips, you know, in Taiwan? Intel's like the very clear strategy. Yeah, maybe it's like not working right now, but like at some point this is not just like economics. This is like, okay, this is, you know, national security. Like it's extremely important that we have this capacity in the US, and Intel is kind of the only one that's even like remotely in the conversation.
>> Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes sense. Uh, 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. Uh, training frontier models, that's still a GPU story, but running agentic workflows across data centers, orchestrating tasks, routing jobs, managing memory, handling inference workloads, coordinating servers increases demand for the boring old central processor. Intel's data center segment produced 5.1 billion in quarterly revenue, beating the 4.5 billion that analysts expected. And Intel's CEO Lip-Bu Tan said the next wave of AI is moving from foundational models to inference to agentic AI. And that shift increases the need for Intel CPUs, wafers, and advanced packaging. On the earnings call, he said that the CPU to GPU ratio is closer to one CPU for every four GPUs versus one for every eight in prior years. And there was an interesting forecast from Lip-Bu Tan as well, but VK Macro says CPU to GPU ratio flipping from 1 to 8 to 8:1 is absolutely wild. That's just a completely new world to what we've had so far. This is from Evercore's Mark Lipacis has upgraded Intel directly from neutral to outperform and mentions that as AI workloads shift further toward inference and agents, the weight of CPU demand will rise sharply and the CPU to GPU ratio could flip from 1 to 8 to 8:1, which is a massive, massive switch. What do you...
>> Yeah, I mean, I don't know, like that's kind of a crazy ratio. It is, um, because like the lesson of the recent frontier models is that like the models are going to keep getting bigger, um, you're going to need way more like chips to inference them. Like Dylan Patel was on Patrick O'Shaughnessy, I think it came out yesterday or the day before, and he's just saying like, you know, the models are going to get really expensive, tokens are going to get super, super expensive, people are going to price down. So I don't know if I fully believe the narrative that like you need all the CPUs, uh, you're going to need way more CPUs than...
>> I mean, the elephant in the room... It really lands, lines up perfectly. His camera is the main one that fits perfectly. The glasses land. >> I love a Friday show.
>> Um, yes, that's a good point. But, uh, there is this, I think at least in the midterm, like the capabilities overhang, like, and just like one really smart AI system that's being inferenced on GPU can spin off a ton of CPU workloads and do a lot of things that require CPUs. Like even in like the SaaS apocalypse, like you vibe coded Slack or whatever, it's like, well, that vibe coded system is running on a CPU, and if it took you, you know, like I don't know, a thousand GPU hours, but then that system runs on CPUs that are running constantly for every user, you still wind up with creating more CPU demand out of the GPU. I think this take makes a lot of sense if you are like kind of, you know, long open source, where you're going to have a lot of these open source models, they're quite small, you can run them on like, you know, small amount of chips, but you just have a lot of them. You have a bunch of agents doing a bunch of stuff at the same time, >> rather than the single model, >> you know, inferenced on a massive amount of chips.
>> Why is the horse here? >> Anyway, whether it's going to eight CPUs for one GPU or staying at one CPU to four GPUs, it's still twice as good as it used to be because it used to be 1 to 8, and so that is bullish for Intel, and Lip-Bu Tan is making that clear to the market and to the investors on his earnings call.
Uh, then there's the wild card, the Terrafab Elon Musk project. It's very exciting, but it's clearly further off. Elon Musk wants to build a massively vertically integrated chip manufacturing operation with Tesla, SpaceX, and possibly other Musk companies needing huge volumes of chips for self-driving cars, humanoid robots, and even space-based AI data centers. Intel is supposed to help design, manufacture, and package chips for the project. Now, the Wall Street Journal has a more cautious view today. Elon is aiming for Terrafab to reach 100,000 wafers a month and then eventually 1 million wafers a month, which is just insane scale. So, let's put it in context. 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 leading-class TSMC fabs at Intel just on the Terrafab project, plus whatever else Intel is doing. So a pretty massive scale-up, and TSMC's CEO, C.C. Wei, has said that it's just not that easy to build a fab overnight and get it up and running. So fabs take two to three years to build and then another one to two years to actually ramp. And we've seen this with TSMC Arizona, which we've been very excited about, but it just takes time, and there is a bottleneck, and the bottleneck has been discussed at length. Ben Thompson wrote about TSMC risk and strategy, arguing that TSMC needs to spend more on capex, and I think that should be clearer now. We'll see what happens at the next TSMC earnings call, because maybe they will be waking up.
But overall, Intel now has a collection of plausible demand stories. Even though the demand itself is not going vertical, the stock is going vertical on the back of these five key demand stories that are all pointing in the same direction, directly up. One, AI agents need more CPUs. Two, AI systems need more advanced packaging, a higher ratio of CPUs to GPUs. Intel can help with that. Three, the US government wants a domestic leading-edge foundry. This is just a national mandate. Four, Musk wants an impossible amount of silicon. And five, also the hyperscalers want more supply. And so all of that is good news for Intel. There are more companies that are getting into the CPU design space. We talked about ARM recently. And ARM, of course, it feels like they will be going with TSMC in the short term, but who knows what happens in the long term as CPUs continue to be important in the AI story. All good news for Intel.
So suddenly investors are more willing to entertain a messy, expensive, strategic chip story than they were five years ago. Intel famously missed mobile, which meant TSMC ran away with enormous manufacturing volume and left Intel with a demand problem. Volume was destiny, as they say. As fab costs grew by orders of magnitude, meaningful demand was a hard prerequisite for continued growth. You can't grow if you can't build the fab that's on the leading edge, and you can't build the fab unless you actually have the customers. And so if you missed mobile, you just have this gap, and you have to jump over it with the help of the government, a bunch of other people, and the AI narrative and all these different five key pieces. So the pieces of the puzzle are coming together now, and that's good for Intel. It's also good for America's chip manufacturing prospects. So, good news overall. And congrats to all the Intel shareholders that were believers early on and rode the wave.
>> Everyone, every US citizen. >> Every US citizen. >> Congrats to all Americans. >> Every US citizen and every US debt holder. So, even the international folks that own treasuries are in position today.
>> You got to think about what this does to Trump's confidence level. You know, he's like, I enjoy a bailout. He's like, I'll indulge Spirit Airlines, >> American Spirit. I think he's excited about the potential there. >> Sure, but why stop at just bailouts, right? Why not start taking a position in hyperscalers? He's like, look, I think I can move your market cap by 3x. I've done it before. >> And Intel was falling apart. >> Yeah. Imagine if he applied all his wisdom to a company already winning.
>> Possible. Certainly possible. Jim Cramer's excited about it. He said in 13 months, Lip-Bu Tan 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. And the agents need far more CPUs than these three can produce. So that means prices are going up, and they got the god candle.
>> Yeah, look at this candle from... >> candle. We love it. We love a green candle. Should be white suits today.
Uh, well, before we move on, there's some news. Justin Bieber brought Bieberella back from the dead. Uh, later in the show, we'll tell you what this says about late-stage venture reacceleration. We're going to tie those two together.
Uh, 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 buyout, Laura over at... >> I mean, >> the Information, >> wait, they called it a $60 billion bailout. >> Buyout. Buyout. >> We revealed a hot vibe from aggressive financials. >> $60 billion acquisition calling it a bailout. >> It's not a bailout. >> Your margins were rough. We were just talking about that. It got wormed in my head. Cursor had negative 23% gross margins earlier this year. Amir says that is low for a company generating as much revenue as it is.
This is the question of how sticky will Cursor be as an entry point to AI, as an entry point to inference demand. Can they reroute? It feels like with Composer, they have been able to retain a lot of customers. The company is still growing, and we know Cursor users who have stayed with the product while changing inference based on what their plan gives them. So they're subscribers, and they will use whatever gets the job done for them within the budget of the plan. And so obviously, like you see negative 23% gross margins and you're like, whoa. And then you look at the SpaceX deal and the xAI deal and all the compute that's sitting at Colossus 2, and you think, oh well, 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 Grok, and all the different pieces of the puzzle come together. Are there going to be higher gross margins? It's pretty easy to imagine that the gross margins would increase, but we'll have to keep tracking it. Did you want to play this piece from Patrick O'Shaughnessy?
>> Let's do it. >> Let's play this clip of what Dylan Patel said on Invest Like the Best presented by Ramp.
>> Everyone's like, okay, so they had Mythos in February. They never even released it because they didn't feel the need to. They're already sold out. Their revenue is already adding $10 billion a month. And then you've got Opus 4.7 today, all before OpenAI's alleged Spud release, which media such as the Information and others 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, we should have, I wish we had a lot more compute. OpenAI is able to pay the bills perfectly fine. In fact, they've raised a ton of money to get incremental compute in addition to the irresponsible levels of compute that they were buying from Oracle and CoreWeave and SoftBank and all these people and Microsoft, such as Trainium. Now they're getting Trainium as well from Amazon. But what's interesting is if you were to say Opus 4.6, you know, let's ignore models getting better over time. Let's just take diffusion of this technology. You and I may jump on the model immediately day one, but other businesses take time, and it takes time for people to learn. And so by the end of the year, let's say a 4.6 Opus-tier model, the economy would spend $100 billion on. I don't think that's unreasonable. It's spending $40 billion right now. Anthropic won't have enough compute to do that. And so presumably OpenAI and Google will hit that tier soon enough. Whoever hits that tier next, sure, Anthropic may get to charge 70-plus percent gross margins, but if OpenAI hits it next, they charge 50% gross margins. They still get all of this incremental demand. And probably they also won't have enough compute to serve all the users. Sure, maybe Mythos is a model where if the world had enough compute, it'd be $500 billion of revenue or something crazy. There is such demand for these tokens and such limitations on compute, you know, and we see this with H100 prices skyrocketing and the useful life of these GPUs continue to extend. It's pretty clear even the tier 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. The economic value that the best model can deliver is growing faster than our ability to actually serve those tokens to people via the infrastructure. And so this gap will continue to grow, and the model labs will continue to have expanding margins until people in the hardware supply chain, infrastructure supply chain, are like, wait, no, why don't I just jack up my margins?
Oh yeah, I love that sound. Such a gurgle. 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 are knowingly choosing pricing that is out of whack with balancing supply and demand. It will continue until the major player feels they are forced to reconcile unit economics and profitability, as eventually happened in ride sharing when Lyft went public. Until then, you by definition have constraints. We can't disentangle true demand from subsidized demand. Yet some of the incremental demand is being engineered by excessive VC money forced into the system. And the competitive dynamic between two companies that are losing massive amounts of money. No one can argue they aren't losing tons of money. Amazon and Uber maxed out around two billion a year. These companies could lose 10 billion or more in 2026.
>> Yeah, it's a good point that the big labs are losing money, but it doesn't feel like the revenue of OpenAI and Anthropic is VC subsidized heavily. Like it feels like... >> Yeah, it's funny. SemiAnalysis is a good example. They spend millions and millions of dollars. >> They're not backed... >> but... >> they're not VC. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. >> And their customers are not startups necessarily. It's like hedge funds and banks and stuff. So... >> hedge funds and banks that are printing by betting on semis right now.
>> Yeah, which is a different... like, I'm totally on board with like, well, you know, the Mag Seven are drawing down on cash flow and issuing debt and doing layoffs and they're subsidizing demand, right? 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 actual revenues and demand from Fortune 500 companies is so high, and the really big dollars in all of these rounds. I mean, Anthropic just raised something like 40 from Google today, and that's not a VC subsidy. I mean, it is a subsidy.
>> Yeah. I'm surprised he's not talking about like big tech subsidies. >> Yeah. Yeah. Maybe he is using the term VC dollars like broadly, which is like fair. >> Including... >> Yeah. And like, wasn't SoftBank in Uber? I think maybe. But there is an idea that you get to a certain scale and it becomes like soft... >> SoftBank is up in the past month. >> How much? >> Guess. >> 200%. >> Come on, John, 73%. That's not bad. >> That's a big number.
>> Yeah. I mean, the ARM holdings alone probably huge. But if he's using the term VC subsidies, VC dollars broadly, I think that is a reasonable point. But at the end of the day, you talk to most companies and most paid chat subscribers, and they're just like, I like the thinking model, so I pay $20 a month. I like the pro model and I use it to create value or whatever subscription I'm on. I'm getting that much value in software for my business that probably doesn't even exist. Like all the vibe-coded software that we use here, it's just not available off the shelf. We're building completely net-new products. And I think that's generally what's happening in the AI economy.
There's been this discussion for a long time. Martin Casado was sort of debunking it around like, oh, are these all circular deals? And he was like, no, the economy is so broad that you have, yes, Google might take a position in Anthropic, Microsoft might have a position in OpenAI, but you also have completely main street customers and just average Joes who are paying, seeing ads, buying things. There's companies that are profiting off of running ads and other inference providers... like there's like everyone... >> it's one big circle. It's one giant circle of life that is actually self-perpetuating because it is a true economy that hits 25 different categories.
>> Well, sorry... >> you might think it's over, but Elad Gil does not. He says, my view is the AI boom will only accelerate and it is a once-in-a-lifetime transformation. This is orthogonal to whether many AI companies should exit in the next 12 to 18 months, as some may lack durability versus labs, new entrants, or weird market 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...
>> Was he like trying to... Is this like a cipher of some sort? >> He wants to... Is there a secret? Is there a secret message embedded in this post? >> Maybe. I don't know. What's the Straussian reading? He wants to vape mango pods, but ironically, and wear a scarf everywhere during summer. >> We have to pull this up. >> Sarah says, no, thank you. >> Pull this up. We got to break it down.
>> Sourdough. Sourdough. I don't know. I've spent like a few weekends in Brooklyn. It's a nice town. I am not a fan of tattoos, so I would stay away from the neck tat, although, who knows? I've seen some cutting-edge neck tattoo technology that allows you to remove it very easily with certain light frequencies. So it can be sort of semi-permanent, easily removable tattoos. So if he wants to do this and then roll it back, I'm sure he can do this. It sounds like he might just want to spend the summer in Brooklyn, ride a bike everywhere, brew some cold brew, and then maybe get back to capital allocation.
>> Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, it sounds like he's advising his portfolio companies. >> Yes. >> I don't care how hard you're ripping. Yeah. A lot of you should probably... >> Yeah. >> exit. Yeah. >> Just given how much uncertainty there is.
Well, later in the show, we have a fun story. A bear wandered into a backyard and took a dip in the family pool. We'll take you through it coming up after later in the show. What this tells us about edge computing. Get ready for it. Joe Weisenthal says defense stocks have been trading not just like the Iran war is over, but like all war ever is over, says Barclays' Capital, Alexander Alman. I would not expect this. Yeah, Alheed is down significantly even pre-Iran war buildup. It fully round-tripped. Well, maybe that is good news. The goal of these companies is to bring about peace and defense, and so perhaps it's over. I don't know. It's hard to track.
>> Has Jane Street achieved AGI internally? >> I think so. They definitely have. >> They did $40 billion in revenue last year, more than all the big Wall Street banks, and with only 3,500 employees. >> Yes. Let's give it up for Jane Street. Fantastic.
Capping a stunning ascent to the peak of the industry, the firm flew past global investment banks after reaping 15.5 billion in the year's final quarter. According to people with knowledge of the results, who asked not to be named, they're leaking. With only 3,500 employees, it beat the nearest rival JP Morgan Chase by 11% during the year. Tether did 15 billion at 200 employees. So maybe they aren't the hottest shop in town, but that is very, very impressive.
>> That's like one of those questions, like, would you rather do 40 billion of revenue with 3,500 employees... >> or 15 billion, 200 employees?
Well, we have some exciting news out of Thrive Capital. Josh Kushner announced a new fund, Thrive Eternal, a permanent capital holding company that will be concentrated in a small number of assets that we can own and steward over many decades. Across 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 community, and among the most iconic sports franchises in America.
I looked it up before the show started. The San Francisco Giants, if you're not familiar, it's an American professional baseball team based in San Francisco. Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players, each taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play beginning when a player on the fielding team called the pitcher throws a ball at a player on the batting team called the batter. And then the batter tries to hit it with a bat. And so they play this game, they sell tickets to the game, and that's how the San Francisco Giants make money. And Josh Kushner with someone... style show.
>> Yes. >> For whatever you just described, I feel like it would be very cool. >> That would be cool... >> if you had maybe a double host, you know, on-screen graphics, and they could provide kind of live coverage maybe while that was happening.
Extremely educational. Well, we have our first guest of the show. George from CrowdStrike is back in the TV Ultradome. He's in the waiting room. George, how are you doing?
>> I'm doing well. How are you guys?
>> We're doing fantastically. Welcome to the show. I would love to kick it off with just an introduction on Project Quilt Works. What's new? Get us up to speed on CrowdStrike.
Well, first I have to congratulate you guys for your success there. So I got to start with that, but we can get back to that later. But Project Quilt Works is really a coalition that we put together with some of our largest global partners, like EY, like IBM, like Accenture, that's really focused on helping to deliver our technology to customers as well as leveraging some of the frontier models to be able to identify very quickly and help mitigate the exposures that we're seeing with AI. Obviously, we've seen some of the news with Mythos, and I'm sure we'll talk about that. But the fact that there is such a focus now from the CEOs all the way down on where are my exposures, where are my vulnerabilities, and what can I do to mitigate it. So we put together a group of basically some of the largest global security partners that we have to go out and be able to do this because we have to do it very quickly. The window is closing in the time that we have to identify, patch, and remediate and mitigate these issues.
Yeah. I mean, we've been tracking a lot of the new data breaches. 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 security issues, chain hacks, supply chain hacks, all sorts of stuff. How much of that do you think is driven by attackers using AI or the internal companies using AI sloppily? Like there's sort of a dual dynamic there where the attacker gets stronger but potentially the defender could also get weaker. Are they both important? How are you grappling with those two sides of the equation?
Well, they're both important, and I'm glad you pointed that out because when you think about what actually happens is you're having more and more users consume AI, and how they're doing that is leveraging AI through any number of applications, could be Claude, 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.
So what happens then is the threat actors are very good at figuring this out, and then they're basically going upstream to these packages, and they're compromising these packages and libraries, and then when your cloud code consumes it, boom, you know, all of a sudden you've just downloaded one of the newest packages and all of your credentials are gone. 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.
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 seeing glimmers of confidence in the ability for AI labs to actually contain the models' capabilities as they roll them out to a broader audience?
Well, the model capabilities continue to obviously improve, and also the capabilities that allow them to provide guardrails and limits on what a user can do. But that's not going to get you where you need to be, okay? Which is one of the reasons why, from a security perspective, companies like ours and others are focused on looking at the prompts, understanding what happens there, and then being able to sort of provide the guardrails at the prompt layer, right? You want to take care of what you can through the LLM. But when you're building AI, whether you're using a frontier lab or whether you're using an open model and doing it yourself, you're still going to have an interaction with that model, and it's going to be via prompt. And whenever you have sort of unstructured data just being sent somewhere and then being executed, if you will, it's ripe for problems, and this is one of the time-tested issues that security has had. So putting guardrails on that, we call it ADR, 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.
Mhm. How are you thinking about the threat of open-source models? You know, the new DeepSeek R4 preview from yesterday was super impressive. Are you expecting, you know, open-source models that have, you know, really threatening cyber capabilities in something like six months? I think Dario was estimating around a six-month lag time after Mythos for the lagging edge to catch up.
I don't think it's long in a few areas. I mean, if you look at Kimi 2.6 that just came out, right? I mean, these are impressive models that are out there. And what you have to realize is even the frontier models themselves, the ones that are public, are still very, very capable. Like it is extremely capable. So you can find a lot of vulnerabilities. You can basically chain these together and create sort of an automated attack, and that's what we're seeing. Obviously, some of the private models have the ability to actually chain these sort of vulnerabilities together more like a human. They've got more reasoning capabilities, which is one of the really powers of their models, but the other models are not far off, and the open-source or the open-weight models really are going to be focused on catching up very quickly. So the window, as I said when I started the program with you, is very small, and that's why we started this coalition with Quilt Works to be able to find these, again, with the board mandates all the way down, and find our exposures, fix them, and make sure bad things don't happen. And there's not a lot of time to do it, unfortunately.
How are you thinking about AI-powered but potentially non-automated cybersecurity risks? I'm just... we were talking to a founder who's working with, you know, engineer recruiting, and he was having luck using AI agents to send outbound emails, and you can imagine that, you know, phishing attacks will get more sophisticated. The ability to hop on a Zoom call with someone that looks like your boss but is actually an AI avatar. All of these new risk factors are popping up, and I'm wondering if this is something that we potentially need to be more aware of and not get overly distracted and forget about the human element of security.
Well, the human element is really the weakest link. I call it the layer eight problem, right? The problem is between the keyboard and the chair. Yeah. And that has been the case for a long time. So let's take your example. One of the most prolific threat actor groups that we actually track is called Silent Chollima, 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.
Wow. Okay. So we're seeing lots and lots of those. And it's funny because we really... I started identifying this before anyone even knew about it about two years ago. And we first started notifying customers like, hey, we think 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 him? So, you know, you have to think of... I mean, I can't make these stories up, but...
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 on that one individual employee? So you have like four remote engineers doing the job of one real employee, right? So it looks like, wow, this person is like insanely high output. They're working around the clock. Why would we get rid of them? They're incredible. There's no way they're just, you know... that's crazy. >> Farming us out.
That's exactly what they do. So we're seeing that, we're seeing agents go rogue, which is problematic. One of the big challenges with AI is goal seeking. So you create an agent. One story is a customer that created like 100 agents. One agent found some issues in code, wanted to fix it, but it didn't have access. So it went back to the Slack channel where the other 99 agents were hanging out and said, hey, I'd like to fix this issue. I don't have access. Who has access? One agent put its hand up and said, I can fix that for you. And happily fixed it and basically worked around all the security boundaries. So goal seeking, I don't think we talk enough about goal seeking because when you put an agent on it, depending on what model you're using and how it's set up in the harness, they just go nuts until they actually get to the goal.
It'll actually steal credentials out of your keychain even if you didn't give it to them so they can keep going. >> Wow. Yeah. >> That's what we're seeing. >> Yeah. Because in one way, if the goal is achieve the task, it succeeded, but at what cost? And it needs to know that there are rules for a reason.
What are some of the other cybersecurity tasks that are being successfully augmented with AI or AI agents these days? I'm thinking of obviously vulnerability testing. That's something that great cybersecurity researchers, great programmers have been able to do for a long time. Now it is amplified a millionfold with artificial intelligence. But are there other maybe more bespoke or soft-skill tasks that cybersecurity researchers are able to amplify their efforts with by working alongside AI?
Well, AI is going to change the way the SOC works, the security operations center. And one of the things that I've talked about in our last user conference was really helping to try to pioneer getting to security AGI, which is a fully autonomous SOC, what I would call level five SOC, right? If we think about car autonomy, you've got five levels. You map that into security, five levels. The fifth level is it just does everything for you. Now, as an industry, we're a ways away. We still have human in the loop. But what happens is then you're really taking a lot of this voluminous information and you're letting AI agents just grind through what you're really good at, and it cuts down time and effort. And then you're elevating these tier one SOC analysts and you're turning them into tier three.
And that has paid dividends. But the soft skill is, it would take one of our customers giving an example, it would take them four days in writing a report to, you know, what they call a SITREP report, the situational kind of response, what happened, and now four days turns into like an hour because it can all be automated using something like Charlotte, which is our agent capability. So all of those things that were problematic, you can just get through and you let AI do what it's really good at. Grind through lots of data, look at lots of information, write reports for you, and then your AI agents can begin to take autonomous action. Some, again, by themselves, some with human in the loop, but it's really going to make the SOC a lot more efficient.
>> Jordan, anything else? >> A more fun question than less...
Scary question. How is AI changing Formula 1?
Well, there you go. This is a great question, and it's interesting because I think there's different levels of adoption of AI between all teams.
Yeah, one team might be spending a ton on inference. Another team is like, ah, we use radios and we're doing it the old-fashioned way.
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, 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, I'm trying to help out the Mercedes team in those areas as well.
That'd be great. Do you think there will be, you know, five, ten years from now, do you think you'll be able to look back and be like, okay, there's a pre-AI era and a post-AI era in Formula 1, or will it be more subtle because a lot of these processes are just already so micromanaged and optimized?
I think you'll see like a pre and a post. The challenge is you're going to have to run through a lot of the different engineers that have been in Formula 1 for many years because just like in the corporate world, you know, there's resistance to, well, what is AI going to do for me? And there's resistance in Formula 1 in some cases from an engineering perspective because, you know, they're doing it themselves. They're the ones coming up with the calculations. And that's just the way they did it. And it doesn't mean they're bad or it's right or wrong. It's just the way they operated for so many years. So I think just as we see kids coming out of school, they're AI natives, right? They just gravitate towards that. And when you start to see AI-native engineers, you're going to see more and more adoption of that in Formula 1.
That makes a ton of sense. Makes sense. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations. It has been a wild, wild quarter, but come back on soon. It's great progress.
Great to see you guys. Great to see you. Congrats again to you.
Goodbye. Thank you. After our next guest, we will be diving into the Summerhouse 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?
Hey. Well, thank you. Good to see you guys. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.
We're thrilled. We're huge fans. We're huge fans. Honestly, I discovered, I think I was pretty early. I will say when I discovered your account on Instagram, I did not have a single other person that I knew following your account.
So, you were one of the OGs on the channel. I think I'm an OG and I kept sending them to John and I'm like, this is the funniest thing in the world, right? It's so good. And so, we've been trying...
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 I'm glad. I'm glad.
Okay, so let's get right into it. I like your 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 wombos.
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 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.
So, what was the first wombo? Like, what really drew you to wombos? What was the first...
You know, honestly, I saw a video and I basically just, they had put the low Kirk into logic and low state-like word together and I was like, oh, I can just make this longer. And I just went ahead and added a word to it and then it kind of blew up. It took off and I was like, okay, I guess I'm pretty good at this. So I just kept going with it and then before you knew it, I had basically the world's longest word ever said in one breath. So now, you know, I have this crazy long word now that, you know, people are trying to learn and it's just grown from there. And now I'm just creating original wombos. And I'm sure you guys have seen and everybody's seen that, you know, people are using these wombos all over the place in schools and, you know, just out in daily life. And so it's really been a movement that I was not expecting.
I love it. Can you one-shot your longest word? Like, is it on command or do you need to iterate through it?
No, I can do it on command.
Sure, I'll try it. Okay, here we go. Floxinetic learnable flow expressium with the logical instrumental. Wow. Here we go. I wasn't expecting to do that.
I can't believe you pulled that off. Are you actually a professor? Like, what is your background? How did you get into this? Was this just a side hustle that just went mega viral? Like, what is your story?
Yeah. Okay. So, basically, I'm not a professor in real life, but I have a master's in education, but I don't work in education. So I don't have a background in words either. I just, I used to be a rapper a long time ago. People ask me, how are you so good at doing this? How do you put these words together? And I just tell them, you know, it's a natural skill I have. And then I used to do it back in the '90s. I was like one of the original white rappers from back then before Eminem was even around.
That's amazing. Wow. No way.
Yeah. And so I've been doing it for a long time.
Yeah, we were reflecting earlier on... Born too late to explore the Earth. Born too early to explore the stars. Born just in time to be the leading expert on wombos.
Yes. For sure. That's perfect. Yes.
Yeah. We were reflecting on the fact that, I'm not sure how familiar you are with this, but Silicon Valley in particular went through like a series. I mean, they call them portmanteaus back then, but wombos were very popular. You have Pinterest, Instacart, Instagram, and there were like a thousand other companies where that was the default pattern for naming a company because the .com would be available. It would be very hard to go get, you know, interest.com or, you know, grocery-store.com, but Instacart was available and so people would sort of mash these up. And I'm wondering if you've gone back and looked at any historical portmanteaus or wombos that have broken through and maybe need to be revisited and re-reignited, or is it all just forward into the crazier and crazier phrases?
You know, I think it's mostly forward-looking. I've seen a couple that were old school. So, I know there was one that was like a calculator. It was like an old ad from 1979 or something like that. In terms of... this is a calculator that's a lighter, too. Like, if you want to smoke while you're doing math, boxy calculators and it's got a little lighter thing coming out.
We need one of those. That's amazing.
Yeah. And so another word, so I haven't really visited a lot of older words, honestly. So, there was a word that came out in the dictionary the other day, chelganger. So that word is actually not mine.
Merriam-Webster needs to hire you like immediately and start getting...
I think they do. You know, I want to get queish penis in there. That's one.
Explain that wombo for people. Explain that wombo.
Yeah. So basically queish penis is like one of the big ones that people are using. And so that's like quirky niche and then penis is peak analysis.
Sorry, I just, I'm like the overachieving student, you know. I studied. So we integrate these words.
I personally use quish lorraine more.
Quirky niche lore. Explain.
Yeah. That's you, professor.
Yeah. So, I love queish 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 quish lenal visions. So it's basically like you take quish lorraine and then you mix it with anal visions and... if I can't say that here.
Friendly show, but it's analysis vision to be clear.
Yes, it's analysis revision. Basically, if you do one of those, you're basically just doing an analysis revision of it. That's correct.
Yeah. How much time are you spending trying to come up with, like when I think of queish and lorraine, I think of, you know, short usable phrases that actually could work their way into the American vernacular. Whereas with the locological, 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...
I use lorraine all the time. I'll say, John, lorraine Intel's earnings.
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?
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. Something that sounds good. Yeah, it has to sound good. So, it's like the quish, it sounds good. I don't know. It just sounds nice when you real... just don't work.
Yeah. It's almost like where, you know, the pharmaceutical companies, they come up with these names for the drugs and you're like, that does sound like a thing, but I never would have guessed what that is. And it doesn't sound just like you pounded on the keyboard. You got like ompic, which sounds like a drug for some reason. It's just like, but it's from nothing. And those things tend to break through. Also, I feel like choppelganger really jumped straight into Merriam-Webster because it feels like with a very little amount of work, you can reverse engineer it. And that also seems to be key to getting some wombos to break through is can someone take a guess and get 80% of the way there and then sort of pique their interest and then go a level deeper and understand the whole lore.
Talk about the origins of nonchalashout. That's one that we've been... once you know that wombo, which is nonchalant crash out, you just see it everywhere. It's constant. It's everywhere. Every time I open X or Instagram or YouTube, someone's having a nonchalashout.
Yep. Pretty much. So, yeah, a nonchalashout is basically when you look nonchalant on the outside, but then on the inside you're crashing out. So, I mean, I think a lot of people can do this. You know, for example, the CEO at McDonald's, you know, when he was eating that burger, I'm pretty sure he was having a nonchalashout when that was happening. Yeah, he looked pretty calm on the outside, but on the inside, I'm pretty sure he was freaking out a lot.
He was fighting. He was in a dark place. So, with something like nonchalashout or any of these other examples, how much of it is there is a phenomenon that because a nonchalashout is a thing that we didn't have a word for in English before, but it has existed probably for, you know, entire human history, this has happened. But how much of it is you see something and you say that deserves a wombo versus you're just sort of grappling with different phrases and then you piece together and you find examples?
Another example from the professor, absolutely. I would use this personally if I know someone's just basically, you know, BSing, kind of like lying to me, I'd say absolutely. You know, you want to agree.
Well, here's the secret. Okay, so I'll let you in on this. So when you make a word, if you find an opposite word and you kind of make the word a paradox. So like a nonchalashout doesn't really make sense, right? Because it's like, how can you be nonchalant and crash out at the same time? But when you put them together, you really think about it, all human behaviors are kind of paradoxical. They all have like, you know, this aspect and this aspect. So like another example would be luratively. So that's figuratively and literally. How can something be figurative and literal at the same time? 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. You know, the Hegelian dialectic, the thesis and the antithesis create the synthesis. Jam them together and you can really come up with some beautiful wombos that way. That's really kind of the secret to a lot of it for sure.
Where do you want to go with your creator journey? Because I was thinking like Instagram Reels, notoriously hard to run ads or monetize. I don't know that there's an obvious like Patreon paid podcast play here. Maybe I would be interested to listen to you talk about etymology and language for hours. But I was thinking like brands should be paying you to create wombos about their products or their brands and that would be sort of synergistic with like what the audience expects, what would actually go viral and what you could actually get paid for. But are you early in the creator journey? How are you thinking about this as a business?
Yeah, so right now I'm working on a dictionary. So I'm hoping to use that as a stepping stone to launching my products. I've got it. Yeah. So...
I think coffee table, like a coffee table book, like the great book of wombos, you know, something you can proudly place on a coffee table, conversation.
I want to have a book like where I can put it on the table and people can just like flip through it. I want it to look real nice and I want it to be like a really great item to have, but also, you know...
Like a coffee dictionary, a coffee table dictionary. A cough-fictionary. We're working on these.
There you go. You're coming up with stuff. I'm working on it. But yeah, what else you got?
Yeah, for sure. But no, no, I'm early on in my journey. So, I'm looking to, you know, work with some people and I'm looking to make some books and... just looking to keep on building what I'm doing right now. And I've only been growing for like four months now almost. So, I mean, I really haven't, you know, I was barely there in January and so it's just exploded. So, it's still kind of the beginning right now. So, yeah. Yeah, there's so many opportunities. So, it's really looking up.
Yeah, we had someone on the show whose whole job is coming up with names for tech companies, tech products. Didn't he come up with the name Sonos and a few others? And I feel like your grasp on the English language is sorely needed among some companies that have very complex product names. And so I see a bright future in a bunch of different ways, but eagerly await the coffee table book. Anything else, Jordi?
No, this was super fun. We're having Gary Vee on in just a couple minutes and we'll ask him ideas on how to monetize Professor Sendy in the wombo universe because I feel like he could... I think he'll have some ideas.
Yeah, that would be amazing. And yeah, mention me to Gary Vee. That would be very cool.
That's awesome. Yeah, appreciate that. Do you experience anything different across the platforms? I know we follow you on Instagram. I know you're on TikTok. Is there anything that you've learned from like the different platforms?
Definitely. So, TikTok, I think, is more for discovery. So, you know, if you do something that's completely novel, that video can really blow up. I think Instagram is much more generous with its views. But I think you can really build a solid base more on Instagram. I just feel like TikTok's more for discovery. Instagram is more for growth and personalization of your brand.
Have you put these on your YouTube Shorts yet? Have you put them on YouTube Shorts yet?
I haven't. I used to do YouTube and I just, I don't know if it's going to fit on that platform. I just, I don't know. I'm hesitant to go there and I've been hesitant to go on Facebook Meta. Just because I don't know if it'll work and I used to do that and so I'm just not sure about it yet. So we'll see. We'll see.
Okay. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join the show. Fantastic to talk to you. And thank you for all your analysis and teachings. It has brought both of us so much joy. Like not just watching the videos but using them. We got our lawyer to use Quish Lorraine once and we were very, very happy about that.
That is a high compliment. I appreciate that. Thanks for telling me that. Jordi and John, I appreciate you guys having me on. I really do.
Yeah. You're the man. We'll talk to you soon. Great hanging. Have a goodbye.
Greg Brockman's apartment is for sale where they started OpenAI. Sheryl Sandberg says, 'I do not think there is an opportunity to build an OpenAI-themed Airbnb, by the way.' But who knows, maybe some filmmakers will pick it up. It is a three-bedroom, two-bath in San Francisco. 1.545 million. 1,800 square feet. It is an incredible piece of lore that OpenAI started in this particular apartment.
Yeah, this feels like it will go quickly. Like there are so many people in San Francisco that might need a place and to just snap up the place that OpenAI was effectively formed.
Yeah, I remember some of the early photos. Good times. We should go to this 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 tour of Notre Dame website, probably vibe-coded, a testament to what the modern coding models can do.' But it's not code. What you are seeing is actually not code. There's no HTML, no layout engine, no code. It is a diffusion model that is rendering this as the input is given. And so you can think about this almost like those world models, those generative video games where you walk around, but this is a very, very early glimpse into what the future of generative UI might look like. Jordi, why are you laughing?
Because the chat is doing a bunch of wombos.
Oh, okay. We got to work on wombos. We will be integrating those more in the near future. But we have our next guest in the waiting room, Gary Vaynerchuk from VaynerMedia. Gary, how are you doing? Welcome back to the show. Do you know about wombos?
You got to learn about wombos. They are the next meta. They are the next meta. If you're not doing wombos in 2026, you're getting left behind. Wombos are word combos. So the example would be a quish is quirky and niche. You put it together and that's quish. Or lorraine. Lore...
That was a risky start for the first word.
Yeah, that's a risky one. Lorraine. Lorraine is a better one. Give me if I say Lorraine...
Boys, first and foremost, congratulations.
I really mean thank you. I remember our very first call. I think it was in Q1 of 2025. So, we were just maybe 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 said go harder. We were already going pretty hard but you said go harder and go multi-platform. That was really huge too. You were very early in like, why don't you have a newsletter right now? Why aren't you on YouTube in multiple ways? Why aren't you on Instagram yet? And so we did the uncomfortable thing of posting pretty subpar content for a while but it started the compounding very, very early and now stuff's really much better. Everything starts subpar, right? Like when you start working out or when you start singing or draw, like you know, like... I, for everybody who's watching right now, every business, every personal brand, every B2B, every B2C, to not take advantage of the attention media landscape that's in place right now, it's really incomprehensible to me. There's never been a time in the history of humanity or business where the cost of distribution is zero for the distribution. There's costs in the content and the way you do it, but the upside is so extraordinary against the investment. And when you frame it up properly, multi-channel, multi-format, the business outcomes can be extraordinary. And I'm happy to see you guys get one.
Yeah. Well, is it funny that it feels like in some ways we're like a decade into live streaming and yet...
Two decades by some measures.
Well, yeah, two decades by some measures. But like Twitch has been big for a long time. There's been so much attention there.
I mean, I wrote this book in 2008. It came out in '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 humans and consumer businesses. Yeah, it's all the same stuff, brother. It's always been around forever and it's always the beginning, right? Like it's just kind of the way consumer behavior and human behavior works. Yeah, it does surprise me how many more people have not replicated the very, you know, basic strategic framework that you guys executed in this genre that's available.
Well, the interesting thing is there's easily been a hundred shows that have taken some level of inspiration from what we're doing. It's still very, very hard to break through, right? It's not just the overlay and the format, but I have been very confident and I've said this on podcasts, we've talked about this going back probably six to eight months ago. You should take this format of a live stream and you just add an extra level of production beyond you just have a laptop there and you're hanging out and you apply that. The example we'd always talk about is like cooking where all you need is like a cool kitchen. That's your set. You have a couple of cameras, so you have different angles, and then you just say, 'Hey, every day at 3 p.m. I'm going to cook dinner. This is what I'm going to cook. Here's the schedule. You can make dinner with me.' And I think that's like an entire niche that you could build around. You could integrate guests into something like that too. So, you have different content creators coming through every day. And then I think you can apply that to a bunch of other things. Sports has honestly been the most advanced in terms of live streaming. So credit to them.
Yeah. I mean, it's there for the taking. A lot of things are there for the taking.
Yeah. How are you thinking about how branding and marketing will evolve? I had this interesting moment this week with the GPT images launch where suddenly any brand basically fully democratized high-quality product photography. Now, there's still categories where I don't want you to AI-generate the product photography. Like even apparel is actually interesting where fit matters a lot. And so if you generate a bunch of AI images of your shirt and then I buy it and it doesn't fit well, I'm not going to be happy about it. But for a bunch of categories, it's cool. And I always kind of have this strange moment where it used to be you could identify an entrepreneur's ability by their product photography in some way. Because even if somebody's bootstrapped and scrappy, they would find that friend and say, 'Hey, do me a favor. Help me get some great images.' And you could kind of categorize 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 a couple prompts away from it. And so it feels like it's going to be harder than ever to stand out online.
Well, I mean, there's a lot there. I mean, we just got done talking about how hard it is to stand out online, right? Like the cost of entry is zero, but you know, this is a competition. Like, you know, everyone's trying and so everyone will make content, video, picture, audio at a level that is incomprehensible to all of us that were born prior to five minutes ago. And this won't be another transition. I think, you know, there's always going to be a timing game to this, right? So, right now, you know, like this OpenClaw allows me to do things that a lot of people aren't thinking about right now. And me knowing that and me playing with that and then even more interestingly, how creative or strategic am I with the agentic agents and what are they doing for me? How do I understand blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? So, I think it's kind of always going to be the same thing, like whether it was electricity and some people put electricity in your home and other people were scared to because there was demons in it, or, you know, the car, or the typewriter is one that I've been fascinated by the competitive advantages of the companies that actually brought typewriters in versus, you know, putting penmanship on a pedestal, you know, like 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 going to be deployed into something else.
Totally. Totally. Right. And I also think that we're about to see the explosion of analog, right? Like I think this barbell that I keep thinking of. I've been thinking like, okay, you want to start an apparel brand, you want to go on Instagram or TikTok and duke it out with like 10,000 other brands, or why don't you find somebody that has a retail store that they can't rent out and do a deal with them and just try to get big in your hometown again, you know?
And my argument would be... Right. Like to me, this barbell, extreme AI is creating extreme analog. I really do think it's a barbell. I think in the next 10 years, obviously it's 2036, but I feel like it's going to feel like 2050, which actually is bringing the rise of 1950. I couldn't be more impressed with what Ari Emanuel and others are doing that are investing in all these analog businesses. I could not be more interested in physical retail, in event-driven businesses, in concerts and venues. And I think the rise of analog. I have a restaurant business, part of a restaurant group. I keep pushing my partners who are really operating, let's open a restaurant that makes people check in their phone as soon as they walk in. Let's put people in group tables. Like I think there's, you know, you see what's happening with flip phones. Gen Alpha buying them. We see vinyl sales. You know, I've been very at the forefront of collectibles. I felt collectibles was something tangible and was a gateway drug to community. If you've never been to San Diego Comic-Con or the Sports Card National or Fanatics Fest. So, I think there's a lot of interesting non-digital realities that are coming as a counter move to the insanity of AI advancements. We're literally within a half decade not believing a single video, not a single video that's on the internet. Like, in five years, if we're having this video, this interview right now, most of the audience is trying to figure out if we're real or not. That is very real and has real substantial counter opportunities. So, you know, the photographer who's sad when I hear that, I'm like, no, no, no, you might actually crush in a different way. And so I'm curious to see what the counter scaled moves are going to be of the next decade. And I think for any real entrepreneur, they're not crying about AI killing them. They're curious about what AI at scale is going to create opportunity for them.
Okay. Totally. Let's go deeper on analog. I want your reaction to this headline that for the first time this century, vinyl music sales eclipsed $1 billion in a calendar year. Sales of vinyl records are up something like 10% in 2025. Yeah, they're effectively like 10% of global streaming revenue is just vinyl still. It's bigger than CDs. It's making a bigger comeback than other formats. What is your reaction? Is it people looking for wall decorations? Are they actually listening to the vinyl? Do you have any idea of what we should read into that idea of this nostalgic format?
Are you and your... I mean, do you see my shelves here? Like, the only thing I've been thinking about for the last seven, eight years, or not only, but like very hot on this. Yeah. I mean, the answer is yes to both. 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. Yeah. There are people, this is, by the way, one of the reasons we're not going to see unlimited television commercials and social media content that's just pure AI from the biggest companies in the world is every time they try to go there, you probably have touched on your show, McDonald's, others, they get such backlash because the whole world is so scared that AI is going to take their job that the consumer is pushing against it. And then that's one part. And then the second part is, yeah, people are starting to do counter behavior consciously and unconsciously. And then there's just swings of trends like, you know, music sounds great in a great record player and like people like, oh, this is kind of cool too. And like it becomes behavioral. It starts in the same stuff, you know this. It's like the Brooklyn extremists are like, let's go, you know, hippie cool culture and they get their little thing in a little sub-pocket. It bleeds out a little bit. Then the Manhattanites feel like they're not cool anymore. So they do it to keep up with the Brooklyn kids. And then we have that version everywhere in California and Texas and Florida and everywhere in the world. And so it's just normal consumer behavior, but it is clearly a counterpoint to extreme in-feed digital consumption. And I think that's great. It speaks to the thing I most believe in, which is humans correct themselves at a level that we are unbelievably underestimating. The sheer adaptability of the human race is extraordinary.
Let's give it up for us. Sports, well said. I want to talk about sports.
Yeah, I mean, sports are a good example. We were talking earlier, a friend of the show, Josh Kushner, is looking to acquire a stake in the Giants out of his new Eternal Fund, which will seemingly be a collection of evergreen bets that can't be disrupted by AI because I don't want to watch a simulation of the Giants. The Sphere is another good example.
Crazy. Everyone was thinking that that was not going to go well. They were worried about the debt and the stock is up like 3x. It's done very well. How are you thinking about both opportunities in new physical locations like the Sphere and then also in the more legacy brands like the San Francisco Giants, the New York Mets, the different sports franchises out there?
Yes. You know, it's really interesting. Tie a couple things together. This distribution channel that you and I are on right now, right? The fact that there are people watching. 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, made a big bet on pickleball that I think is going to work out quite well. You know, Unrivaled, the three-on-three basketball league, AJ and I, my brother, early investors in that, the pickleball league, the sailing league, SlamBall. So I've been very aggressive on alternative sport investing. Padel. Yeah. So I'm very bullish on it. I think Josh obviously plays at a very heavy economic level with his funds 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 basin, we were always envious of best. So it's been great to see him thrive, shine. I think anyone who does not realize how substantial the analog opportunities are is really missing the plot of what's happening. And so it gets exciting. It's exciting to think that you can invest and vote something that could get as big as 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... 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 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, 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.
And then what happens to the person that does 39 of those and has a real business and flips it? So I think it's a really cool time for a lot of us that watch this show where like, oh crap, we can play on either side of extreme digitalization or analog, be creative.
Well, yeah, the beauty, you know, give the example of somebody making a modern chain of drive-in movie theaters is like you get all the benefits of AI still. You get to use it to instantly respond to any customer message and help solve problems.
Now we're nerding out. What if you have 40 of them and now this is seven years from now and you start showing your own films that you make in AI and build your own IP through your own analog distribution.
Yeah. Oh, that's a good thing. I could see doing that for kids, you know, like maybe slightly lower bar, but you create your own kind of kids content. That's again a lot of things I do.
Yeah. Get more obvious later. I got made fun of writing that book, Anyone Can Personal Brand on Twitter. Now it doesn't look so funny. I mean, who's laughing now? Who's laughing now? Yeah. But when I started building VeeFriends 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, was a little more slang for machine learning and then it obviously got accelerated real quick, but like, yeah, I believe in a lot of this stuff.
Well, speaking of people that are watching the show, there is an army of people named Ryan in the chat and they want to be acknowledged by us. So, I'll ask you a question about a Ryan from your life. Can you tell me something you learned from Ryan Serhant or Ryan Holiday or maybe Ryan Harwood? Do any of these names conjure any interesting stories or life lessons?
Yeah, the Ryan mafia is good. I mean, Ryan Harwood, I've learned nothing from. Zero. Absolutely nothing. So, I just put that on the desk. You know, Ryan Holiday was definitely the individual that I was like, finally put a word to kind of how I was living my life, right? My mother's my hero. She taught me just how to be a really happy human. You know, I thought it was immigrant and I thought it was simplicity and I thought it was, you know, love and health over everything and truly, truly not just cliche, 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, that sounds like, oh, that's interesting. Yeah. And so I think that's one for him. Serhant, you know, was 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 it was off the air. You know, his curiosity and humility was amazing. Like he was always around our ecosystem and he really learned to play the playbook. I've lived, you've lived, he's lived so much of, you know, now he's back on Netflix, but he had a really great era in between his television moments of really winning on social and going all in. And I'm really proud of him. And Harwood is just a dear actual friend. He's family, not a friend. And so he's taught me that.
I'm glad you circled back because I was like, damn, he's taking shots.
You know, he's a Long Island boy. I'm a Jersey boy. I think anyone from our part of the world knows like taking shots to your brothers is like the ultimate form of I love you more than anything. I think literally from 1985 to 2000, 98% of the words out of my best friend's mouths was highly disrespectful in my direction.
Of course, that's the best. That's the only way to do it. Ryan Holiday wrote, 'Trust Me, I'm Lying: 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, needs to come with being 40, 50, 60. You get a lot of wisdom, but part of it's like you're generating wisdom through writing, thinking deeply. Do you feel like...
I think of it this way, man. I think of it as weirdly back to my barbell. I think people that have something to say will probably be best at the barbell, you know, meaning it's kind of like someone's first album. You had your whole life to write it, right? Yeah. 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? And I'm pretty like kind of feel good about myself and me and me have a good relationship with each other, but even I, like, I look at it and I'm like, how the hell did you write that in 2008? And then to your point, I think my next best piece of work will be when I'm wrapping it up and I can synthesize all the good stuff. So, I would wildly encourage, especially the kind of characters you guys hang out with, they have a lot to say because much like I had in my youth, I saw things others couldn't see because I wasn't playing by yesterday's rules. I always say fresh eyes are dangerous eyes. You know, nothing. It makes you...
dangerous. You can really innovate. And then I think those people that, you know, have sustained careers and can have years of wisdom and chapters have a lot to say that can really wrap up and bring value. So, I think most people, if they're going to be in that game, are probably going to write their best book first and last.
Uh, you partnered up with MasterClass.
You know, I 15 years ago, anything that looked like MasterClass, like selling stuff was really scammy. Like I grew up in the Web 2.0 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 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, Beehiiv, like now it's respected, which is amazing and I think is great for a lot of individual writers and contributors. Um, you know, it was a really good company. Like I like who they had for this class. It's addressing something I believe is real, which is like getting an MBA in real life and AI at, you know, pennies versus taking on extreme debt and getting an 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, 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 to say about AI marketing and production and the strategies of that. And I hope that, you know, me or Cuban or any of the other people they threw at it might get someone to stop and not take on $300,000 in debt that's not going to be ROI positive.
Yeah. 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?
Um, giggling because we're going to wrap up here and I'm actually going to take your question but try to give an extraordinary amount of value to everyone that I know listens to this epic show. It's not what they're saying, it's how they're acting. Which leads me to the following sentence.
Everybody who's watching who's 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.
We are living in such a radical transformation of the mid-funnel dominating, not the upper funnel and the lower funnel.
Us three right now are on mid-funnel.
Yeah. We are producing content born in the mid-funnel.
I mean, look, I mean, this is what's going on in my right. This is a production day.
Yeah. This will be post-produced into creative that will go into mid-funnel organic social.
Yep. 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 on TikTokification of social has eaten up the world and we should spend no media dollars against creative that we're guessing for the big campaign. And then when I tell you every Fortune 500 company is still doing guessing on the upper funnel, sponsorships, ridiculous [__]. And in the lower funnel, 2016 A/B testing beta 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.
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.
Um, but Jesus, there's a lot of money being wasted by the companies representing the eyeballs that are watching this show right now. That makes me sad.
Yeah, makes a lot of sense.
