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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're the one to TBPN. Today is Monday, 05/11/2026. We are live from the TBPN ultra dome, temple technology, the fortress finance, the capital of capital.
Speaker 2:Another one.
Speaker 1:We got a banger show for you today, folks. We got a lot of guests coming on. We got two hours of back to back interviews with everyone from Spencer Rascoff, the CEO of Match Group, to Alex Taubman of Long Lake Management. Quaid's coming on from Bezel. He's going to take us deeper on our first story, which is, of course, Adamar Piguet AP is partnering with Swatch to launch a watch that's you could call it a knockoff of the Royal Oak.
Speaker 1:It's certainly it's not a knockoff because it's official.
Speaker 3:It's from
Speaker 4:the actual off.
Speaker 1:They knocked themselves off. And there's a bunch of interesting business business implications of why they did this, what it means, what will happen. Let's pull up the video of the launch first. And you gotta tell me, do you think this is AI or CGI? Because it's a launch video, and in 2026, it's hard to tell the difference.
Speaker 1:So we're gonna play the this is from the official Swatch account. This is something that looked like a like a fake clickbait video, but it's real. Here it is. What do you think? AI or CGI?
Speaker 5:CGI. Precision handmade CGI. Yes. Just like
Speaker 1:watches. Not a transformer in sight the way my grandfather used to like it. There will be interesting pushbacks. I'm like, oh, this this movie is awesome. It only used CGI.
Speaker 1:No AI involved whatsoever. Anyway, so wait. So is it a manual watch? Is it a
Speaker 5:I think it's unclear. Mechanical? Right? So what what there's been a massive amount of of everyone has basically created somewhat realistic looking posters
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:For these. Oh, The actual watch has not been revealed at all. And that's The only thing that's been
Speaker 1:Just based off of the fact that Swatch did a collaboration with a luxury watch brand, the Moon Swatch, which was based on the Moon Watch. Right?
Speaker 5:Oh, yeah. I forgot about.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so the Moonwatch was successful and was a a more accessible entry point to the Moonwatch, which is from Omega, which is sort of in that, like, Rolex tier. And I don't know if the Moonwatch what how they saved cost because there's a certain amount of cost that just goes into making a a movement, a mechanical movement. It's a lot of small pieces. Sure.
Speaker 1:You can put it on a manufacturing line and press them and stuff.
Speaker 5:John learning that Couple $100. Watches have egregious profit
Speaker 1:margin. I know they have egregious profit margins, but still, like like, the the the work to put together all the gears and manufacturing it. Like, I would be surprised if if if it's a mechanical watch, is it really Here's the $5? No. Happy melt away.
Speaker 5:So there's there's the the fake Chinese version Yeah. Of all these Yeah. Popular watches, Nautilus, APs, etcetera. You can get them like you could go on Alibaba Yeah. Get them for in the low hundreds of dollars.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Right? And so it is totally possible to put together a watch
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 5:That has a lot of the same componentry. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I saw Nico Leonard on, who's a great YouTube watch reviewer, fun, very, fun creator, on the iced coffee hour with Graham Stephan. And they gave him this is a fun little, game that they they're they're getting really good at playing games with their guests on this podcast. So they give him six watches and they tell him that three of them are knockoffs and three of them are are authentic. And he has to guess and he nails it. He gets all of them cracked.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Even though some of them were very convincing fakes, especially of Patek.
Speaker 5:Anyway So a lot of people are saying this is
Speaker 1:It's over.
Speaker 5:It's over. They're saying Every Freak out.
Speaker 1:Sell your AP. $500. Rest in peace.
Speaker 5:AP has, you know, consistently done things over the last few years Yeah. To that were provocative. Right? Some of the various partnerships they've had with talent, right, celebrities, etcetera, have been somewhat provocative. But overall, the brand seems healthy.
Speaker 5:Right? It's not gonna be for everyone. I think in some ways this decision could be seen. And again, I'm no watch expert, but fakes are flooding the market globally.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And why not why not just lean into that Mhmm. Basically. And the other thing is they don't have any entry level like the gap between, you know, what I'm sure this this Swatch AP will end up retailing for far more or sorry, not retail, but secondary will be far more than than whatever it goes out at. But the gap even then between that and a real Royal Oak Yep. Will be immense.
Speaker 1:And the gap has been growing because the aftermarket prices have been increasing
Speaker 5:And they faster incomes. They basically were like, oh, this is what our watches are worth aftermarket. Yep. We should price there. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Right?
Speaker 1:So And so you quickly wound up with, like to get in the game, you're in you're at 30 k. And that's just a lot. And there's not as much of a, like, a walk, crawl, run to get into the ecosystem that some brands have. AP certainly has not had that. And now this is You go with
Speaker 5:a code. Go with a code.
Speaker 1:Aren't those like 60? They are. Think they're really expensive. No. I think they're really pricey.
Speaker 1:I don't know. But, yeah, maybe they'll bring down the price on that. But live live monitor, I guess. Live monitor says, spend half $1,000,000 or $500 and you get something that looks pretty similar. Of course, very different materials.
Speaker 1:You can
Speaker 5:get a code eleven fifty nine for low to mid twenties.
Speaker 1:Twenties. Okay. But there's another watch collab that I want your reaction to. You gotta see this. This one's gonna fly off the shelves.
Speaker 1:Potentially selling more units than the Swatch AP collab. It's the Rolex collab. We can pull this up.
Speaker 7:Something you've never seen before and you won't see again. A chrome hearts Rolex Daytona 18 carat gold. Starting offer Mhmm. 370,000. Okay?
Speaker 7:If you want it, there's only one way to get it. I've never seen this watch before, neither have you. That's why I'm showing it to you.
Speaker 1:Do you think this is real or just something someone made randomly?
Speaker 7:Official Rolex over here telling me that the dial might be aftermarket. I don't know. You figure that out.
Speaker 5:I don't I don't follow. It's funny. Encore with a message. Somebody on X over the weekend was assuming that I was into Chrome Hearts because I joked a lot about Chrome Hearts. Yeah.
Speaker 5:But, no, I'm not enough of an expert to
Speaker 1:No. That's Dylan. Dennis is playing off of your joke saying, I tried to buy the Swatch AP Royal Pop collab, but they told me I had to buy this collab first, and it's the code 1159. If you're not familiar with the code 1159,
Speaker 5:it's the
Speaker 1:newest watch from AP, but it has a less distinct silhouette than the Royal Oak and has been not loved by the biggest fans of AP broadly. And so it has been underselling probably relative to the the new Rolex. Which which one's the new Rolex? The Land Dweller, which Yeah. Has been, I think, selling very well.
Speaker 1:And it this one has been the code eleven fifty nine has not been doing as well.
Speaker 5:Well Let's head over to Reddit.
Speaker 1:AP just killed its brand is spiking on Google. But there there was some debate over whether or not
Speaker 5:this This was person is this person is Yeah. Obviously disagreeing with that line by saying like interest is Oh. Proof. Right?
Speaker 1:Oh. Oh. Interest in the quote, AP just killed its brand.
Speaker 5:My my view is Oh,
Speaker 1:because the brand is attention.
Speaker 5:Like, I don't know how many of these they'll sell. I'm assuming they'll sell out. Mhmm. And that's gonna be hundreds of thousands, probably, maybe, you know, tens of thousands at least of people that either already own an AP or they want to someday. And this is they'll wear it every day and and work I'm sure wanna work towards getting
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:The real thing. Let's head head over to Reddit and check out what they're doing there. What are they doing there? They have somebody has figured figured this out I want your reaction, John. Omega on one side but the Omega is strapped to the wrist with a whoop band.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Whoop on the inside, Omega on the outside. It just doesn't feel right. It feels a little unnatural to me. I don't know.
Speaker 1:But I did I have seen a lot of people wearing the WHOOP bands lately. And I think that there's some remarkable data. I was talking to someone who connected their their WHOOP data and and found out that they had sleep apnea by analyzing it with an LLM and which is something you would expect WHOOP to be doing on their side. But for regulatory reasons, it might be slower for WHOOP to roll out that feature of, health monitoring. And so there's a lot of, like, DIY science that comes from it.
Speaker 1:So I don't know. It's weird no matter what because if you have a WHOOP on one end and then and on one hand and then a a watch on the other, that's an odd choice. I feel like isn't there an opportunity to put the whoop band somewhere more discreet? Like, even like a chest monitor would be
Speaker 5:less You can. I think you can.
Speaker 1:The Oura Ring is not very intrusive. And but they should really make the the what do they call it? The the the Boston Fitbit? It's the ankle monitor or something like that. I can say that because I'm Irish.
Speaker 1:But there was some debate over AP's motivations. Ariel Grivner says, as an IP nerd, I love this, AP's trademark loss means they lost the moat around their octagonal bezel and their dial. So what do they do? They launch it. They license its crown jewels to Swatch for a flood of legit affordable royal pop pieces, a master class in damage control.
Speaker 1:And and so the the the this is on this news that AP lost a trademark fight in Japan in 2024 and in The US in 2025. The courts ruled that the bezel and the dial aren't distinctive enough to legally own, but there's some pushback in the community notes.
Speaker 5:Here's the thing. They they have managed to, I think, maintain a trademark around the the octagon?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, there's a trade dress so you can never do a full fit a full knockoff of a direct product, but they couldn't lock down the idea of an an octagon. That was, like, simply too much. So I don't know how much of this was was damage control around the intellectual property but it's certainly certainly an interesting thing. And there's also some people thinking that this is a way to make money.
Speaker 1:You see this gem changer said every unemployed guy with a group chat of equally unemployed friends. This post is for you. The the royal pop drops Saturday, May 16. They're coming out with this quickly. Just one week teaser.
Speaker 1:And it's out. Smart. He says this is the easiest 4 figure week you'll have all year. If you're willing to do something that resembles work resembles work for fourteen hours, if you're willing. Let me lay out exactly what to do.
Speaker 1:Retail is in the $400 range. It's in store only. There's no online sales. They're limiting it to one person one piece per person per store per day, not two. So your hustle is per warm body, not per pair.
Speaker 1:And then there he he shares some some expect some expectation about where this might trade, maybe 12 x retail, maybe five x retail. And so if you go and you wait in line and you buy this and then you sell it online, you might be able to make a pretty penny pretty quickly, but you'll need a bunch of friends. And he gives a bunch of advice on where you should go. Avoid Soho, Times Square, London, Singapore. You got to go to secondary cities.
Speaker 1:Troy, Michigan, King And Prussia, Canoga Park, Honolulu. Going to Honolulu just for this.
Speaker 5:I think this is I think this is gonna be a hit. Yeah. The haters I think the haters are wrong. People love g shocks. Sort of a combination.
Speaker 1:I think so too.
Speaker 5:They'll do well.
Speaker 1:It just seems like a fun a fun watch. And I and I do think it's a nice entry point for someone who's getting into watches, like start with this, then get something else. It's like a striver, like, you know, it's a point along a curve, which I think will be popular. And it's also just like a lot of fun, and and it'll look good. Anyway Let's head over to China.
Speaker 1:What are they doing over in China?
Speaker 5:They're BYD. BYD. Got Daniel Craig as the new face.
Speaker 1:Build your dreams. They're building their dreams. For the Denza luxury EV, James Wood says it's an amazing ad. And Adam Thomas says, trying to use his James Bond for a euro push. The world is changing.
Speaker 1:Let's play this advertisement from BYD.
Speaker 5:He must have had an did he ever have an exclusive with or was that just the James Bond franchise?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't I don't think I've ever seen him in a in a Aston Martin ad. How well
Speaker 5:that to live in a life in a world with the capacity to find change. But just as spring follows a harsh winter and summer looks back on a routine spring, old selves, past identities, they ship. They have to. It's so exciting. Don't you think?
Speaker 5:I mean, doesn't life ask us to step out of the shadows and embrace the new? To evolve on Are there car seats for dogs? Custom for dogs.
Speaker 1:New roads don't think so. I think it gets pretty dangerous. Although, that dog looks like it's wearing some sort of harness that could be tied in.
Speaker 5:What do you think? Yeah.
Speaker 1:See, post James Bond, he has a lot more comedic timing. He's done SNL a few times. He he's done a couple comedies. There's a lot more to it, but he would still just never not be James Bond because he had such a successful run of James Bond performances. He's really driving this car.
Speaker 1:Is this pause.
Speaker 5:Rewind ten seconds.
Speaker 1:Okay. What are we
Speaker 4:listening Listen.
Speaker 5:Because there's some
Speaker 1:Doesn't
Speaker 5:that doesn't that sound like a internal combustion engine Yeah. For a second there?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's played through the speakers while you're driving? Is that an option?
Speaker 5:Maybe.
Speaker 1:I feel like it has to be an option if they're advertising it like that.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But
Speaker 1:who knows? You never know with these with these BYDs if there's actually an internal combustion engine in there somewhere that can activate at a certain point. Like, everything feels like a hybrid these days. But, I mean, it says luxury EVs. I I like the design of that car.
Speaker 1:I think that's cool. It looks kinda like a wagon. It's got like a it's a shooting brake design.
Speaker 5:I love a shooting brake.
Speaker 1:It looks nice. But, yeah, what a what a great what a great partnership and what a great run from Daniel Craig to be able to just, like, cash in on the the aura of being James Bond forever even after the franchise ends and he has to move on things. It really is
Speaker 5:remarkable. Craig.
Speaker 1:If you're Daniel Craig. And it also helped that did you ever see Layer Cake? No. No one's seen Layer Cake here? Oh, such a good movie.
Speaker 1:And he plays he plays like sort of a someone involved in like the drug trade in Europe. But it's a very James Bond esque character. And so even throughout his portfolio of movies when he's and then and then he plays Benoit Blanc from Knives Out. And even that character, though it has a different even though he has a different accent, it still feels like he carries the authority of a James Bond like figure. And so he's always had this same sort of demeanor and aura around him that's been built through his entire cinematic portfolio that he can continue to cash in on.
Speaker 1:And when you're thinking about advertising a particular car like an Aston Martin, like this luxury BYD, your mind goes to him before anyone else really. Anyone else. But
Speaker 5:Do we know what the BYD ZENZA is priced at?
Speaker 1:I don't. Probably like I would have guessed like the equivalent of like $13,000 and it probably goes 0 to 60 in probably one and a half seconds and has, like, a 700 mile range.
Speaker 8:I think European price tag is a 134.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. They're actually getting pricey. Usually, like, when you see these BYD numbers, it's always like, it's the performance of a Ferrari for the price of a Camry.
Speaker 5:Well, so there's the Denza z, which is sick the the estimated price is 60 to 140. And then a lot of the other Denzas are in the 40 to 60 k range.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. Not too bad. Not too bad. Well, you know where I'd like to see Daniel Craig do his next endorsement?
Speaker 1:Cerebras. I would love to see a Super Bowl ad where he He's lamenting the slow speed of AI inference, and he solved his problem in this Super Bowl ad by partnering with Cerebras, firing up some Cerebras chips. The IPO is looking like it's going very, very well. So Cerebras updated their filing according to Reuters. The IPO date will be Thursday, May 14.
Speaker 1:I heard maybe Wednesday, but any day now. And they're offering 30,000,000 shares. That's up from 28,000,000. So they're they're offering more shares than they were expecting to. And they also increased their price range from $1.15 to $1.25 up to $1.51 60.
Speaker 1:And so they're gonna raise instead of 3 and a half billion, they'll be raising 4,800,000,000. And allegedly, the the round is massively oversubscribed to the tune of 20 x demand for that 5,000,000,000. So something like a 100,000,000,000 of demand for that 5,000,000,000, which is remarkable at that price. Now does that mean it's gonna 10 x on day one? No.
Speaker 1:But it's certainly a good sign going into this this IPO. And so that's why I called it like a potential $50,000,000,000 IPO just to sort of have some some parallelism with the $500 watch and the 50,000,000,000,000 of I p of GDP meeting in China that we'll talk about later. So there's a bunch of fud around morning
Speaker 5:says, if you were looking for an I d the ideal time to IPO being a chip company in May 26 is hard to beat.
Speaker 1:It really is. It really is. He had a great piece called the Inference Shift today in Strathecari. Go check it out. There's been a bunch of fun about Cerebras.
Speaker 1:I mean, for for a long time, they were just sort of like building in stealth or talking about the idea. It takes a really long time to to design these chips, tape them out, and then actually produce them. And then the first version is less flexible, less designed collaboratively with the companies that are using them. So there was like one customer that was buying them, and there was a lot of customer concentration. Now the chips have actually been deployed.
Speaker 1:And there was this big narrative about like, okay, well, they're maybe overly optimizing for the transformer architecture. What happens if the AI researchers come out with like, attention is all you actually don't need that much? Attention is nice and useful, but we have a new thing that's better. And that didn't happen. And so attention in transformer based architectures are still dominant and inference costs are extremely important in the age of AI agents.
Speaker 1:And and speed is is so so important. And so demand is, you know, 10 x ing every few months at this point. And there's a very, very clear business story. Tyler, you have anything else to Rebus?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, just like if you use the Rebus chips, like you can use it g p t 5.3 Spark Yeah. In codecs. Yeah. It's like insane how fast
Speaker 1:It's crazy. It's crazy.
Speaker 8:Yeah. It's wild.
Speaker 1:Yeah. If you wanna give it a try and actually demo it, which I think is important with these like with these these these like semiconductor companies, if they're like abstract and you're like, I don't know if it's like a real company or something, you can actually just go download Codex Desktop, pick from the down from the drop down 5.3 Spark, and then you can you don't even have to get it to do code. You can ask it history of the Roman Empire, and it will just instantly tell you a full page of exactly the response with 5.3 level intelligence, which is pretty good. And it's a pretty remarkable experience. And you can imagine this coming to every LLM interface, every AI experience, which has normally been like for any meaningful work, fire it off, come back five minutes later, sometimes two hours later, we'll cut all of that in you know, in half or by 10, and that's where this is going.
Speaker 1:So you can see, you know, significant demand. Even though there's this, like, customer concentration thing, I don't know why there wouldn't be a lot of different customers lining up. Every every lab that has exploding demand, cursor, anthropic, meta and Google, like, unless they have, like, a direct answer to this, I I would see them being a buyer in the near term. So the Cerebras upsized its IPO and top of the new range. Reuters says the IPO drew orders more than 20x the shares available.
Speaker 1:Cerebras makes AI inference chips and lists Amazon and OpenAI among customers. So there was there was a question about, like, was it all OpenAI? And I guess Amazon has jumped on very flexible with regard to the chips that they rack over at AWS. What else is going on here? Polymarket is projecting Cerebras to close above 50,000,000,000 market cap by the end of day one.
Speaker 1:That would be about a 100% above the target valuation of 26,000,000,000 that was previously reported. So preparing for an IPO on the Nasdaq next week under the ticker CBRS. And traditional semiconductor manufacturing works like this. A silicon wafer is fabricated. Wafer is cut into hundreds of smaller chips.
Speaker 1:The chips are packaged individually and connected together in systems. Cerebras took a completely different approach. They used the entire 300 millimeter wafer, 4,000,000,000,000 transistors, 900,000 AI oriented compute cores, and the big thing is the petabits per second of internal bandwidth. So better memory bandwidth for KB caches and everything that you need to do in AI, I think. Something like Benchmark is gonna be absolutely cleaning up.
Speaker 1:They still own over 20% of Cerebras apparently. And if it
Speaker 5:When did they make that investment? Eric First one.
Speaker 1:Visitsra made it. And he
Speaker 5:I'm looking it up.
Speaker 1:Has quite the portfolio in his his his ex account bio. Fireworks, Benchling, Contentful, Cerebras
Speaker 5:So they did it in May 2016? Sunday robotics.
Speaker 1:May 2016? Wow. Overnight success right there. If it trades even half of how Shanghai priced more threads in Cambricon, it will be over 500,000,000,000 in less than two years. Okay.
Speaker 1:That's a big step. It will break the venture model if they hold. Has a shot to deliver the number one fund in VC history. Benchmark on an absolute tear. Quantient says, Cerebras is pretty funny because you can just imagine the origin story being some boomer nontechnical manager going, okay.
Speaker 1:But why can't you just put 50 gigs of l three cash on this chip? And the engineer being put on the spot and going, I guess you could. And I said, someone else in the comments here chiming in. Random history major, had a much less important version of this conversation with my college roommate, fancy engineer, doing computer vision stuff one time and still feel really good about it. Think it helped.
Speaker 1:Just we well, the thing that does that onto the other thing. Have you considered have you considered building the entire plane out of the black box? But it works and the plane goes Mach 10. That's exactly what happened. They should build planes out of
Speaker 5:Co two.
Speaker 1:What's going on with Co two?
Speaker 5:They did the b.
Speaker 1:They did the b.
Speaker 5:That same year.
Speaker 1:Oh. In 2016?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Overnight success.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Back to back rounds in 2016 and then just trough of disillusionment for a decade. Not really. But, yeah, I mean, it was like it it it they were Cerebras was pretty quiet for five or six years. Like, it took a while to actually get to scale.
Speaker 1:And you can see it when you talk to the founder.
Speaker 5:Apparently, did. Yeah. Well, they did the C in 2017. So they were making progress. But Yeah.
Speaker 5:Certainly certainly Yeah. You can imagine some of the investors saying, say, I think. I might have been ten years too early.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, what a good origin story. They they worked together at C Micro, an ultra dense server company. They sold to AMD in 2012 and then they started Cerebras together in 2015. Five industry veterans, Andrew Feldman and some other folks joined.
Speaker 1:Andrew Feldman has been on absolute tear, generational run even. Well, let's move over to China. Donald Trump is meeting with Xi Jinping this week and you were you were sharing some info on how many journalists are going over there?
Speaker 5:They're calling it a field trip.
Speaker 1:It's a field trip.
Speaker 5:They're calling it a field trip because Tim Cook is going, Larry Fink, Steven Schwartzman.
Speaker 4:I thought
Speaker 1:it was journalists, but I guess it's tech people.
Speaker 5:Jane from Citi. Chuck Robbins Yes. Is headed over there. Okay. A friend from Cisco.
Speaker 5:David Solomon.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 5:And a whole bunch of others. I guess Elon is supposedly on the trip as well. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And Hopefully, can get a word in edgewise because the the the vast majority of the discussions will obviously center around the war in Iran. This is from the Wall Street Journal. As the heads of the world's two superpowers meet in Beijing this week, President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping will have another nation looming over their summit, Iran. The long anticipated meeting has been delayed once due to The US and Israel's war against Iran, which led to the closure of the Strait Of Hormuz. Trump is eager to move on from the Middle East war that is sapping his domestic power and straining the global economy.
Speaker 5:The As of this morning, the peace deal was according to Trump on major life support.
Speaker 1:On major life support. Is that good? This is better than it being dead. So hopefully, we get a peace deal because if you're on life support, sometimes you can have a miraculous comeback. I don't know.
Speaker 1:That's what I'm pulling for. He will land in Beijing prepared to push China, which relies on Iran for low cost oil in their transactional relationship to help broker an agreement that ends the conflict. Xi Jinping also wants the fighting to stop as Middle East turmoil restricts China's oil supply and shrinks country's ability to buy Chinese goods. Finding a resolution could raise Xi Jinping's stature as a global statesman who swooped in at the precipice of a possible military escalation. Trump on Friday threatened to resume project freedom, The US led operation, help ships navigate the straits safely, adding this time that the operation would include quote other things.
Speaker 1:Very ominous. So I think there's a few different things. So Trump, the the deal is on life support, but most recently, he rejected Iran's latest response to a US peace proposal. They're going back and forth. Oil prices have climbed amid fears that roughly of a prolonged disruption through a choke point that carries roughly one fifth of global oil flows.
Speaker 1:And the summit is focused heavily on Iran, but also trade deals, specifically Chinese purchases of American agriculture, energy, aerospace products, and some other related investment mechanisms. But the tech industry is obviously hoping to, like, wind down the conflict peacefully and quickly and then move on to discussions of export restrictions, GPUs, the AI supply chain, rare earths, all the different things that go into what the tech industry needs to flourish. But I was thinking we wouldn't get that much movement or that many sound bites from this trip based on how large Iran is looming. But with all of those tech CEOs there, you would imagine that there's some conversation that happens
Speaker 10:You think
Speaker 5:they might be clip farming?
Speaker 1:Potentially. Potentially, ore farming. Potentially frame mugging each other. You never know. Tyler, what do you
Speaker 11:think?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I I think it it would be interesting if it's also, you know, at a higher level than just the supply chain. Because Mhmm. Like last week, there was all the news about CAISI, right, doing the new AI regulation. Right?
Speaker 8:Like what's gonna happen? Yeah. Like what we're are we gonna you you do a
Speaker 12:bunch of tests before
Speaker 8:the models come out. It seems like they're kind of moving away from that, like less kind of safety focused.
Speaker 1:China should be like, send us mythos too. Give us unfettered access. Ideally, like enough to distill it really quickly. And then we will also say whether or not it can be released in China.
Speaker 5:Well, why stop there? Why not just send the weights?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just send the weights. That's that's actually way more
Speaker 5:We'll inspect it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Way more efficient. We'll inspect it. We'll make sure that it's okay for the Chinese population.
Speaker 8:Yeah. But, know, like the we we've talked about this a little bit before.
Speaker 1:Send send all the GPUs I need to run it to. Sorry.
Speaker 8:Like, we've talked about this a little bit, but, there are people in China who are actually worried about, like, the the, you know, very, like, safety pills.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Yeah. But it seems like people going over there like Tim
Speaker 1:Cook Yeah. I mean there's a Chinese Yuan.
Speaker 8:That. These people are not gonna be arguing in favor of like safety. Yeah. So I I it'll be very interesting to see if if if
Speaker 1:Yeah. If we've seen a Chinese Joe Weisenthal. There might be a Chinese Ilya Zorudikowsky. We must find him and surface him. Who knows?
Speaker 1:But no. I mean, of course, some like like, international collaboration there seems very, very important in the long term. Everyone agrees on this. Oh, right.
Speaker 5:Before we get to our first guest. Run through it. We Palmer brings up an important point. It's time for the United States Postal Service to ban junk mail. Oh.
Speaker 5:I love this. Unsolicited spam calls are already prohibited by the FCC. Emails are heavily regulated by the canned spam act of 2003 junk mail is the majority of mail. 100,000,000 trees per year. Enough.
Speaker 5:It really is way too much.
Speaker 1:This is very interesting. I I thought I put all of the all of blame or I guess the credit. I gave all the credit to Google with the fact that like I don't get spam emails. I get emails if I buy something online and I forget to uncheck the box and that's kind of on me. Or if I'm subscribed to a newsletter and it gets boring and I'm like, ah, this is junk.
Speaker 1:I'll need to deal with that. But, like, very rarely do I just get a true spam email. Just like truly slop, junk, like, just complete nonsense. It's pretty, pretty rare. And I think some of that's the filtering, but also the canned spam apps seems to be somewhat effective.
Speaker 1:I wind up getting a lot more spam phone calls and a lot more spam text messages these days than spam emails in terms of, like, cold outreach that's completely undirected. And so, yeah, maybe they need to expand the the can spam act. Shouldn't it be the can't spam act? I don't know why they call it can, but it has been successful at least in email. But I agree with this.
Speaker 1:This is good. Palmer says it's insane that America has given a monopoly on letter delivery to a quasi governmental agency that then uses to flood our homes with useless garbage against our will. America would never allow FedEx, UPS, DHL, or anyone else to force this on us. Even ignoring the wasted taxpayer money, insane moral hazards, and ecological impact, the lost time and productivity is inexcusable. I agree.
Speaker 1:But the average American spends only 30 seconds sorting their mostly spam mail each day looking for the real stuff. That's over $1,000,000,000. Well, earth class mail, Palmer. I think you need a PO box that scans the emails or scans the physical mail and delivers it to an email inbox, throw OpenClaw in front of it and have it decide what's what makes it through. But you definitely don't want
Speaker 5:OpenClaw devour the slop for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. There's actually a button in Earth Class Mail and many of the other virtual mailbox services. You can send it to the shredder. You can say, that is shreddable.
Speaker 1:And you could automate that potentially. But, yeah, people are sharing that there are ways to unsubscribe from junk mail. Opt out prescreen.com, dmachoice.org. Palmer says he's already done it. I still get pounds of junk mail every single day.
Speaker 1:Pounds every day is a lot. I feel like he's high up on the the junk mail delivery. I feel like I get a few pieces a day. Get
Speaker 5:so many. It's it's
Speaker 1:But pounds? You think you get pounds? We need to weigh your junk mail, my
Speaker 5:I junk probably get
Speaker 1:Your junk mail? Probably get a You get junk mail?
Speaker 4:I don't know if
Speaker 8:maybe I get one mail piece of junk mail like a week. Okay. I I don't really check my mail
Speaker 1:Just say you're low LTV, bro.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Think I'm getting like I'm I'm like a quarterback.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. He definitely is not in the market for, you know Random. For a $79 per month, What is this? Dealer mandated vehicles for
Speaker 8:immediate I'm kind of telling on myself here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Someone's advertising a Ford f one fifty here. You're not in the market, I guess. Anyway, what else is going on in the timeline before we move to our first guest? New service for SF retailers and homebuyers.
Speaker 1:I will show up to your open houses wearing OpenAI or Anthropic merch. I charge a 5% commission just to to fully pump up the price. It's called chandelier
Speaker 5:actually help though? Because I think some people
Speaker 1:Would be would be afraid.
Speaker 5:Would just be like, I'm not even gonna
Speaker 1:But I think some some people at the open house tour might see, oh, there's an OpenAI or Anthropic person. I I I should make my offer particularly strong if I want this, even if there even if there isn't that much that much demand. I love the founder railway. It's great. What else is going on here?
Speaker 1:New. Before chat GPT was released, before Microsoft's 1,000,000,000 bet and long before plans for an IPO Over
Speaker 4:here.
Speaker 1:There was the University of Michigan putting 20,000,000
Speaker 8:Go blue.
Speaker 5:In AI. Pull up, Tyler. We Pull up Tyler.
Speaker 1:What what happened here? Like how did this actually happen? There we go. There you go. Nailed it.
Speaker 5:Tyler, your homework Yeah. Learn how to get that more dialed. Because I hit that pretty often for you and every time you go the wrong direction.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because it's reversed. It's reversed on the So
Speaker 5:it's just something to work on. That's just some constructive feedback. I believe that you could be better at this this task.
Speaker 1:Thanks. This feels like the University of Michigan was considering donating and then at some point it just became they they just became aware of like, oh, well, like, could also participate in the for profit. They're like, oh, that sounds better maybe. Like, let's let's put this in. A tiny SpaceX rival has rallied $6,000 and it's powered by a mob of zealots and a stock guru known as the Kook.
Speaker 1:Do you know who this is?
Speaker 5:The Kook.
Speaker 1:Capital LLC. I don't know. I think Oh, this is a s t e. Be a s t s. Right?
Speaker 1:SpaceX rival?
Speaker 5:Tiny Yeah. SpaceX
Speaker 1:rival? Anyway, very, very funny. What else is going on? Oh, we gotta play this next Instagram. This one is so funny.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Don't think you've seen this story. Did I send this to you or no? Okay. Play this play this Instagram.
Speaker 1:The the the title of it is my mom is so bad with technology she literally tried to search up info about energy drinks and accidentally set set our house up as a business.
Speaker 10:What
Speaker 1:is in energy drinks? Can you imagine? Like, starting with a Google search and ending up, like, creating a business on Google Maps for your exact address under the name, what is
Speaker 5:in That's all the time, John.
Speaker 1:And and people think AI will diffuse quickly. Debatable. Debatable. Kathy Wood is posting about SpaceX AI, the new company. Thanks to its deal with Anthropic x AI, now SpaceX AI is pivoting from massive losses at Colossus to significant profitability as Neo Cloud on on an estimated 5 to 6,000,000,000 in annual revenues.
Speaker 1:Brilliant SpaceX move, Elon Musk. And Gwyneth Paltrow.
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 1:Didn't know she was involved. I'm familiar with Gwen Shotwell, but I guess I guess Gwyneth Paltrow also got an early check-in. You know, she is an investor. It's it's totally possible that she has SpaceX allocation at this point. I think it was a I think it was a mis tag.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we have our first guest in the waiting room. Let's bring in Ferdinand from Augustus National Bank. How are you doing, Ferdinand? Good to see you again.
Speaker 12:Hello. Welcome back.
Speaker 5:What's happening? Great to
Speaker 9:be back.
Speaker 5:Big day.
Speaker 1:Big day. You've been on the show before, but remind everyone about yourself, what you do, and then give us the news.
Speaker 3:So I'm I'm I'm Ferdinand. We have been charging a bank called Augustus. Today, we have announced conditional approval for that bank. I can give the I can give the brief intro and the brief speed on the company. Please.
Speaker 3:We have, like because when I come to the show, I have to bring a prop, and a guy a guy, Peter, a guy, Peter Thiel, of course, always said when you have a fintech company, you have to, like, bring the bring the $100 bill.
Speaker 1:Oh, there we go.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Here.
Speaker 3:So I think we can do the same thing where we we always have this little joke where we bring the $100 bill, then we ask, what is the problem with this? Mhmm. Right? But it's a it's a trick question. And in our opinion, there is no problem with this, and the dollar is the is the best product in the history of the world.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Same PMF. Insane PMF.
Speaker 3:Same PMF. Like like sometimes there smart smart people that tell me they're like, water? What about water free? But no. No.
Speaker 3:I think, like, the dollar is the best price of the world, and there's there's quite infinite global demand, for it, especially outside of The United States. Right? And I think there are all kinds of, like, quantitative ways to think about it that that Europe and The US, they contributed 40% to global GDP, but they, they they they contribute 80% to global reserve holdings and global money movement. They're also, like, qualitative ways to think about where I think, like, the the existence and, frankly, commercial success of the stablecoin stack. Right?
Speaker 3:The global dollar account is like, frankly, it might be a pure expression of this thesis where where this is the best product in the history of the world and, and there's infinite global demand. But
Speaker 1:So weird oh, yeah. But
Speaker 3:It does. And it's big but for us, distribution is broken. Right? And we think distribution breaks at the at the clearing bank layer.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Right? And then what is a clearing bank? A clearing bank is the bank that that has the charter and actually has the, account at the Federal Reserve or any other central bank to to to actually move and hold the money. Right? And we think these clearing banks are made of paper.
Speaker 3:Right? We think they're slow. So if you wanna, move money through them, it takes a day. Maybe it takes two days. They're they're closed on the weekends, and they close after 5PM, and they close on Christmas because humans run them.
Speaker 3:And we think they kind of like they come from a different time, and we think with Augustus, the the thesis is there's an opportunity to to rethink that for for the AI era and and build that from scratch in a in a full stack way.
Speaker 5:Okay. I understand. News today?
Speaker 1:The yeah. Approval.
Speaker 3:We got a bank.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We
Speaker 3:have conditional approval from the OEC to to charter Augustus as a US full service national bank.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Alright. So my first question, when did you know that you wanted to name your bank after Augustus to Rico?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I've I've already had someone message me and I think like Oh, yeah. Paul falls down. He can buy the domain for less wrong price or or something like that.
Speaker 1:So so you're bullish on the dollar. I was just watching Ray Dalio. Ray Dalio on Ross Douthat. He's extremely bearish on America, bearish on the dollar. Have you heard any of the popular super cycle theories America is doomed, the ultimate black pills on the dollar, and how do you push back?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I've I've heard a lot of them. I think you you can disagree with some. You can disagree with with the other, but I think it's also, like, it's a question of mission. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Right? Like, what's the future you want to build?
Speaker 5:Sure.
Speaker 3:And I think that what are the alternatives? Right? And I think, in a way, the mission for this company would be much less clear ten or twenty years ago when it was only the euro and the dollar and nothing else mattered, and there was there was no competition on the global stage. Right? But today, there is.
Speaker 3:Right? You've got the adversaries. You've got, like, China building the digital yen and, like, shipping it all into Africa and distributing it pretty nicely. You've got Russia pitching their bricks pay thing every other day and, like, yeah. Like, we're gonna get off the dollar and have our own little clearing thing here.
Speaker 3:And so it's about mission. It's about the question, how can we secure and advance Western currency dominance? Mhmm. Right? And I think, like, one one instrument here is to build better clearing banks to remove friction from the distribution of this amazing product because the product market fit is still there.
Speaker 3:Right? If you talk to people outside of, yes, in many cases, this is the golden standard. This is what the people want most. It's just, like, incredibly hard to get.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Last question. Who's the customer? How do you acquire them?
Speaker 3:So customers are global financial institutions. Okay.
Speaker 1:So not startups. You're not going to individuals or anything like that, at least not yet.
Speaker 3:Exactly. Nothing of that. Yeah. We go to global FIs. So so a bank in South America, bank in Southeast Asia, a financial institution in the global South Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Or or anywhere else, and and we acquire them. Right? And so we we've launched Euro clearing Okay. Like, a while ago and and sold that to many of the largest French institutions. Right?
Speaker 3:So we do, handsome money for companies like Kraken, for example, and process billions of euros for them today. And so now the hope is, of course, that can we that we can be much more useful to these customers with the dollar as we plug that into the platform as well today.
Speaker 1:Well, congratulations on OCC approval, and thanks for stopping by the show.
Speaker 5:Great to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you for fighting the fight. Have a good one. Dollar.
Speaker 5:Yes. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Keep the dollar strong. Great to
Speaker 5:see you dude.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Up next, we have Spencer Rascoff from Match Group. Welcome to the show. Hi. Fantastic entrance.
Speaker 1:Very quick. Sometimes I have to do a whole ramble
Speaker 11:Very sneaky.
Speaker 13:You are.
Speaker 1:But for those who don't know you, please introduce yourself a bit. I'd love to go back a little bit about your career and then I want to see where Match Group is going.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Great to be here and thanks for what you do for technology and also for the LA tech community. Yeah. Is. Fun.
Speaker 11:It's very
Speaker 5:long L. A. Of us to
Speaker 11:do this here. I appreciate it. I grew up here and I've I moved back here about ten years ago and have been all about promoting the L. A. Tech community.
Speaker 11:I started a company called Dot LA which is a media company to promote Oh, wait. LA
Speaker 3:You started that. That's
Speaker 11:Yeah. So, yeah. Quickly about my background. I did some time on Wall Street
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 11:And then broke free from that.
Speaker 1:Thank you for your service.
Speaker 11:Thanks for your
Speaker 5:not enough people.
Speaker 11:Wants to do something more entrepreneurial. My first startup was hotwire.com which we sold to Expedia. Yeah. Then I was at Expedia briefly and then I left to start Zillow. I was the CEO and and co founder of Zillow.
Speaker 11:Ran it for fifteen, sixteen years.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 11:And then kind of retired for a couple years. Angel invested in new startups, incubated new startups mostly with former Zillow Yeah. And then stepped in as CEO of Match Group about a year and a
Speaker 10:half ago.
Speaker 1:What does that recruiting process look like? Like, you know, it's like they could have gone with someone who was actively a CEO. They tried to pull you off the beach in some ways. Like, what's that conversation like? Why you I mean, you're clearly capable and
Speaker 11:Well, was on yeah. I was on the board. Okay. And I'd been on the board for about a year.
Speaker 5:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 11:And when the opportunity presented itself, the board turned to me and said, you know, what do you think? And I immediately jumped at it. So I had been watching the company for more than a year from the boardroom. It's an incredible company doing really important work. I actually I feel very personally motivated by the mission of the company.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. There is a loneliness epidemic. Yep. It is a real global problem. It's existential.
Speaker 11:Yeah. And it impacts longevity and mental health and like everything about how society works. And Match Group is one of the very few companies as the leading dating app company that can do something about And so that's why I got
Speaker 1:So you're on the board you're watching. When you choose to step into the CEO role, are you do you have a ninety day plan? Do you have a big transformation plan? Like, what were you going into? Because it's Yeah.
Speaker 1:Presumably a of showing up tabula rasa here.
Speaker 5:Yeah. A lot of your best ideas. Hopefully, you had been Yeah.
Speaker 1:You've been like, hey, I told you guys to, you know, acquire this company or, you know, change this or whatever.
Speaker 11:I have this this kind of mantra and I I write it on the board. I put it up. There are stickers around the company of it, posters, etcetera. It's great people, properly motivated and properly organized Mhmm. Build great products that are informed by user research that then when properly marketed generate a lot of audience and revenue and profit and then shareholder value.
Speaker 11:So So the entire business. So it starts with people. Yeah. It starts with people and motivation and organization. So that's where I started.
Speaker 11:Yeah. That was the beginning of of the ninety day plan. Who's here? Why are they here? How are they organized?
Speaker 11:And so for example, I immediately started by breaking down silos. Yep. Match Group was basically a roll up.
Speaker 1:I was gonna ask you about it. Feels like the ultimate siloed organization.
Speaker 11:It was. It was. It was basically a holding company and I've transitioned it to being an operating company.
Speaker 5:Okay.
Speaker 11:So Barry Diller's ISC bought the cat know, bought a lot of the companies in the category. Started with match.com in Dallas, then Plenty of Fish in Vancouver, OkCupid in New York, Tinder in LA, Hinge in in New York, Pairs in Tokyo, Meetic in France and on and on. And there are 25 brands that have been assembled. And then it spun out to IAC shareholders about six or seven years ago and a lot of the hard work around integration was never done. So that was where I first focused my attention was on people, organization, motivation, employee engagement, and then we moved on to product.
Speaker 11:And at that point, I took on the role of running Tinder myself.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 11:Because Tinder well, obviously, with a with a great team, but being essentially CEO of Tinder. Yeah. Tinder's the number one dating app.
Speaker 5:Guys, I got this.
Speaker 11:It be? Right? So it's the number one app in a 160 countries.
Speaker 1:And writing marketing copy.
Speaker 11:I haven't gone I haven't gone that far. I I that's that's where I team. We still have a great team. But look, it's it's it's almost 2,000,000,000 of our 3 and a half billion of revenue Yeah. And it's by far the largest dating app worldwide.
Speaker 11:Yet it had sort of lost its way in terms of innovation. Sure. It hadn't been founder led for a long time. Yeah. It hadn't prioritized user outcomes.
Speaker 11:It hadn't had an innovative product road map. Mhmm. And so we recast all of that about six months ago and we've made enormous progress in just six months. And I've shared a lot of the metrics last week on earnings. We are turning around Tinder and it feels great.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. How do you think about de siloing? Because I I I guess my big question is like how important is the are the individual brands? Because I imagine that's the last thing you desilo is like, oh, if you'rea match.com user, like now surprise, you're just it's the Tinder brand because you could do that. Like it's totally possible to acquire a company, change the name, maintain most of the user base.
Speaker 1:But you that feels like the last thing that you would do. But why?
Speaker 11:Yeah. What we've started by doing is integrating a lot of the back ends.
Speaker 1:I'm sure. Like finance, legal, HR, and then also databases.
Speaker 11:But even the back ends of the product. Sure. So so for example BLK, our app for black daters and Chispa, our app for Hispanic daters and match.com. Yep. Like all of these now have an integrated back end.
Speaker 11:Sure. So we launched a new feature Yep. And it goes out across a dozen or so
Speaker 1:different So like one cloud platform, one set of SREs and engineers
Speaker 11:What we haven't done yet Yeah. Is some of the liquidity sharing that I think maybe you're Sure. At which is, you know, should we show a Tinder user to an OkCupid user or a Plenty of Fish user to a BLK user. We've done a little bit of cross sell.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 11:And and that's been very effective. So you'd be on one of our apps and Yeah. You'll get a message that says, hey, you've been invited to join the league. Tap here and now your profile is kind of ported over into the league.
Speaker 1:Got
Speaker 11:it. And now you're searching in league. That's driven a lot of audience growth and revenue cross sell, but that's kind of where we started.
Speaker 1:What is the dynamic of being this roll up? Because is there some sort of adverse selection or some weird market dynamic where there are founders or entrepreneurs out there who basically say, oh, if I start a dating site and I get anything going, I'm gonna be able to sell to these guys because they want everything. Is that something that happens?
Speaker 11:Yes. It does. And I mean, I guess I would describe it this way. Every
Speaker 5:Has has anyone sold multiple companies?
Speaker 11:To us? No. No. Not that I'm aware of. There's no Nikita Beer of
Speaker 1:because there's a couple there's a couple of these serial entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley that do this type of thing. I mean, you'll see it in like cybersecurity or enterprise software where it's like, oh, he sold three companies to Google that do basically the same thing.
Speaker 11:Yeah. And then we haven't had any repeat repeat sellers. But look at Zillow Group Yeah. We bought 17 companies Yeah. During my time as CEO of Zillow Group.
Speaker 11:So far, we've bought kind of one and a half in my year and a half here. So we bought Her, which was the leading lesbian or sapphic app.
Speaker 8:Okay.
Speaker 11:And then we invested last week a $100,000,000 in Sniffies which is the number two app for non heterosexual men.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 11:With a right to buy the rest of that company. Sure.
Speaker 5:Sure.
Speaker 11:We made those two moves so far. But you know there are a lot of startups in this space. There always have been, there always will be because every 15 22 year old starts dating and they think, oh these dating apps are are not great. I can build a better one. And it's easier than ever to build a new app or or website obviously.
Speaker 11:So I think the competition will keep coming. The challenge of course is this is a network effects business and people tend not to want to use a new network because there's a cold start problem. So even if a new app has great functionality There's
Speaker 5:a network effect very clearly but at the same time is there also some advantage that new platforms have?
Speaker 11:It can be sort of a nightclub, know, of a hot goosebumps.
Speaker 5:You're the one there. The first one there, know, big fish in a
Speaker 11:I mean once once you start solving the cold start problem, then I think new brands can take on some momentum, but it's very difficult at the very beginning.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 11:This is of course, you know, the the kind of the put and the take with a brand like Tinder, which is an older brand, has massive brand awareness. Everybody knows Tinder. Everyone also has an opinion about Tinder. And so now we have to work really hard to change the product, improve the marketing to try to regain resonance with Tinder. So features like Double Date, which are doing amazing.
Speaker 11:About a quarter of Gen Z users on Tinder now use Double Date where two friends kind of join up, create a joint account and then link their profiles. Now they're swiping on pairs and then there was four way
Speaker 1:grouper that was doing something similar to that with three and three.
Speaker 11:That's right.
Speaker 1:And I don't know where that wound up
Speaker 5:but So so We didn't buy fascinating. Every company you've mentioned so far seems very demographic focused. How are you thinking about new technology? I feel like there's a bunch of people that are thinking about how to use AI to create dating app experiences. I imagine you guys are already using a bunch of AI.
Speaker 11:We use AI constantly in the product. There are a lot of startups that are creating AI only products and we actually incubated one with Justin McLeod, the founder of Hinge and then spun it out. So we're the largest owner of a company called Overtone which hasn't launched yet but the founder of Hinge is is the founder there and we're the biggest shareholder.
Speaker 5:That's
Speaker 11:building an AI specific product.
Speaker 5:We're like, let's spin it out. We'll buy you back in a few
Speaker 11:So there may be that might be the the first repeat seller. What
Speaker 1:does AI only mean? It means you're dating AIs?
Speaker 11:No. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 11:We we we don't support that. It it means that your experience is one where kind of it's AI guided. So rather than you reviewing lots of people and holding your hand along
Speaker 3:the way.
Speaker 11:We use AI in all of our products in so many different ways.
Speaker 3:Course, even
Speaker 1:just to sort the stack of matches on Yes.
Speaker 11:The recommendation algorithm day one. And ML powered.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Of course.
Speaker 11:We use AI for profile creation. Sure. It can be very daunting to look at kind of a blank. Yeah. Tell us about yourself.
Speaker 11:And and so we use AI to tease out information about your profile.
Speaker 5:Have you gotten pretty good at detecting deepfakes?
Speaker 11:Yes. So that was one of the first things that I focused on is, something called face check where you have to record kind of like a video selfie of yourself and that's reduced interactions with fake accounts or deepfakes by about 60%. So we've rolled that out in almost every country globally across most of them, our brands.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I saw a fascinating video of how people are trying to get around it by having nine fake images, defaked images of some person and then the real person who's operating the account will like style transfer their face to look like a like a renaissance painting and you will just assume that it's like, oh, this hot person that looks exactly like, you know, it's nine AI photos. It's like, oh, they like painting and they happen to paint some random guy. But then that's person that IDs the paycheck. So I imagine it's a cat and mouse game.
Speaker 11:Yeah. It's a cat and mouse game. The bad guys are pretty good but we're better. Yeah. And you know, we have to stay a step ahead.
Speaker 11:We've made a lot of progress and and How
Speaker 1:valuable is like community feedback in that loop? Because I imagine that like if somebody if there's a if there's a system that you build, someone's always going to try and find some edge around. But like I've been surprised that like the community notes system on x has been pretty robust. Yeah. And it's been like you can always just ask the LLM, like, is this real?
Speaker 1:But the community notes often surface things in interesting ways.
Speaker 11:Absolutely. So user reports Yeah. Behavior or fake accounts, that's an important signal for us. And now we have a system that actually kind of cross bands. So if if we detect a fake account on one app, we take it off of all the accounts Mhmm.
Speaker 11:All the apps. So that also improves trust and safety across the whole Match
Speaker 1:Group portfolio.
Speaker 5:I have a buddy, a startup founder probably eight years ago. Thought he'd he'd be cute and try to market the startup that he was working on on one Mhmm. One of the Match group services got banned and then got banned from everything. And so he's like, I guess I'm destined to be alone
Speaker 11:in this cold world. Sorry about that. We don't don't take kindly to to promotional or fake accounts. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what have there been companies that have been trying to sell services on top of your platforms like auto swipers and stuff?
Speaker 11:There are yeah. There are some startups that that try to do that.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't even necessarily call them startups. They're like, You know, I guess sometimes they might be, but they might just be like operations.
Speaker 11:Yeah. There there are. Yeah. We don't allow kind of automated Yeah. Like, you know, scrapers or Sure.
Speaker 11:Auto, you know, auto swipers or those types of things. Sure. So when we find out about those, we take them out. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Do you think the AI boom has hurt LA's prospects as a startup hub?
Speaker 11:Oh, boy. Yeah. It's I mean, we do
Speaker 5:It's like we were sitting around prior to starting the show. We're sitting here like we're we work in tech
Speaker 10:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But we don't want to leave LA.
Speaker 11:Yeah.
Speaker 5:What possible business could we start in LA? It's not hard tech.
Speaker 1:We have this idea, media.
Speaker 11:Media. No. This is this is kind of this is what makes LA LA. Mean, like, couple years ago when creator economy was booming, even even crypto was was, you know, LA had a crypto moment and NFT moment. And then also when direct to consumer and like celebrity food and beverage brands, those types of things when D to C was was hotter, I think LA was booming even more and clearly we've lost a little bit of market share and mind share to the Bay Area Sure.
Speaker 11:As this boom has happened. So it's a bit of a bummer for those of us in LA. But you know, we're we're it's
Speaker 5:a Yeah. Very simple In some ways, number the of LA which is like entertainment, the consumer Yes. Media, hard tech, right, just like sort of continues and it's very hard to But it but I I I think, you know, the the long LA contingent deserves credit in some part for El Segundo.
Speaker 11:Totally. A SpaceX or Andoril IPO will be massive. Service Titan was a was a nice moment. Obviously, the Honey exit was a nice moment. Yeah.
Speaker 11:But, you know, once SpaceX gets public, I think that will be pretty amazing for the ecosystem here. Obviously, much of some of it's moved to Texas, but there's a lot of of pent up wealth which will become recycled into angel investments
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 11:Into the rest of the LA tech ecosystem.
Speaker 1:Yeah. If you look through or you imagine looking through like all the KPIs that you look at over a quarter or a year, are there any metrics that have shown the clear, like, pre AI, post AI, like, kink in the graph? Like, we were looking at the number of books published on amazon.com, and it's gone from 100,000 a month to 400,000 Clear AI effect. You can see it just grow. Now is that good or bad?
Speaker 1:It's probably fine because they have recommendation algorithms that can filter that stuff out. But I'm just wondering if there's any like, okay, we can I imagine you can like see COVID in your chart?
Speaker 11:Oh, for Yeah. You saw COVID and then you saw kind of the the COVID hangover.
Speaker 1:So so COVID was a spike for you because everyone was sitting at home, they're
Speaker 11:on their couch, getting their phones and then lonely and
Speaker 8:Yep. Out of connection.
Speaker 11:Yeah. And then people went back to work
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 11:And kind of dating apps fell out of favor. Well, one internal metric is just pull requests now that I'm we're doing so much internal AI coding. Yeah. Pull requests are up they were up 40% year over year a couple months ago. Now they're up 60% year over year.
Speaker 11:So Yeah. Basically the amount of code that our employees are writing is Yeah.
Speaker 1:Really accidental. The question I have for all the CEOs that are seeing incredible gains with, like, AI agents and coding agents, like, the PRs don't pay the bills, you know? Like, they don't Yeah. Like and I and I'm always wondering, like, you know, Meta was spending, like, billions of dollars token maxing, and I think it's great. But when I open up Instagram, I'm I'm like, is it better?
Speaker 1:Like, I I haven't seen a new button.
Speaker 11:It's a
Speaker 1:great question. And so so I imagine as CEO, you have to sort of grapple with this. I'm super optimistic, obviously, but
Speaker 11:We're all we're all going through this right now. So so our approach to it is we we have to pay for these AI tools some Yeah. Course. You know, for us, it's 5 to $10,000,000 a year that we're spending on AI tools from basically nothing Yeah.
Speaker 1:Eighteen months ago. New opex.
Speaker 11:So we're slowing down hiring somewhat. Yeah. And that's how we're choosing to fund it. Sure. But in terms of when do we start to see the actual benefit, you know, CEOs and CFOs are are starting to ask that question more and more.
Speaker 11:I'm asking it more and more. I I I think we're benefiting from it. It's hard to it's hard to feel it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Feel like the the the optimistic cases that in a few quarters we're seeing case studies like
Speaker 11:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. We had an engineer run a bunch of a b tests, automated, running overnight. And we found out that like the pricing on this page was better this way and it actually created a lift in revenue or something like that.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Or or a SaaS company says, hey, we added this product that was originally going to be we were gonna build it in three years. We built it now and it's ramping revenue and paying for all of this token.
Speaker 11:Our our best example would be, the January, we decided to to as part of the Tinder turnaround to focus on in real life events. We know that young people in particular really want to meet people in person. They want to get off their phones, get off the apps. And so January, we made that decision. March 12, we had a product event Mhmm.
Speaker 11:Here in LA that demoed all these new changes to Tinder. And between the January and March 12, so in just a couple months, we went from a standing start because of AI Mhmm. To shipping
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:In app, in real life events Yeah. In LA, and we never could have pulled that off without AI. Yeah. Was an AI sprint that made a product launch in Yeah. Two or three months, which would have taken six or twelve traditionally.
Speaker 1:Is that productivity improvement changing your or potentially changing your thoughts around like incubating new properties? Like I'm imagining you could go much more niche. You mentioned a few of the niches. Yeah. But there's like famously like Farmers Only, which I don't know if you own.
Speaker 5:Like We
Speaker 11:don't own that one.
Speaker 1:We don't own that one. The
Speaker 5:one that got away. But
Speaker 1:that's an example of like a much more niche community Yes. That the maintenance and the OpEx associated with running it at Match Group probably too high. But if you drop that by 10 x with AI, then maybe you can go after like, you know, like Hollywood media executive dating site or something.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Mean, Upward is an example of this. So Upward is our our Christian brand but also kind of traditional values, which is something that obviously has a huge addressable market
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:But it's not a 100% of the population mainstream.
Speaker 12:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 11:Hinge, for example
Speaker 5:Sure.
Speaker 11:Which we own goes after kind
Speaker 1:of Yeah. Yeah. All of And was that homegrown?
Speaker 11:And Upward was an incubation Hinge. But now because of AI Yep. We're able to put more resources into it Yep. And accomplish a lot with five, ten, 15 people
Speaker 1:Yeah. Which And then it just becomes an audience acquisition problem which you have solved because basically everyone
Speaker 11:Yes. We can cross sell people into it but we also can have a pretty innovative road map Yep. With a small team Yep. Because of AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you can actually roll out
Speaker 5:all of Is Instagram Hinge's biggest competitor?
Speaker 11:No. I think well, if by Instagram you mean people meeting each other on Instagram? No. If by Instagram you mean people sitting on their couch and Oh. Doom scrolling and choosing not to get out there and date.
Speaker 11:Yes. So I mean our biggest competitor at Match Group is is just inertia. It's just people's loneliness and you know, sort of doom scrolling on TikTok or Instagram or other social media, even Netflix or YouTube. Yeah. We need people to put their phone down and put themself out there and go try to meet new people.
Speaker 11:That to us is a you know, would be a flip of a headwind into a tailwind. And generationally, that's a little difficult. A lot of Gen Z is is pretty nervous about meeting new people or or isn't sure it's worth the return on their time or or maybe in some cases didn't develop the social skills because the pandemic caused them to miss a couple critical years and so it doesn't come as naturally. So this is starting to change and the double date is an important part of this. In real life events are an important part of it.
Speaker 11:That's why they've been so central to the Tinder turnaround.
Speaker 5:Have you thought about making products in the wedding category at all? Would you ever do wedding registries? Prenups.
Speaker 1:We We got the pipeline.
Speaker 6:So Dabores is a new member.
Speaker 11:Welcome back. A new member of our board of directors is is Reyna Moskowitz who's the CEO of the Knot Worldwide. Yeah.
Speaker 5:You go.
Speaker 11:You So so no, we're Matchgroup isn't doing it but we're very lucky to have Reyna's expertise as as the leading
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:If you reactivate an account on any of the platforms after ten years, divorce support.
Speaker 1:Add on. What about advertising? I mean, I know many of the platforms have pro plans or paid plans. But what is unique about you have a lot of attention, you have a lot of eyeballs. What's the story been with
Speaker 11:with We a pretty relatively speaking small advertising business considering how big our audience is. Yeah. We make less than a $100,000,000 on advertising Yeah. Out of our almost 4,000,000,000 of revenue.
Speaker 5:It's We love advertising. I'm sorry.
Speaker 11:You know, I mean the way we make most of our money, almost all of our money is subscription revenue where users pay for extra features, extra You know, some of our competitors have really leaned into advertising and I think advertising can improve the user experience but sometimes it can't.
Speaker 1:You need to be very careful. There's two classic deals on ad monetization. Like one is that, you know, like Twitter never got good at ads because people aren't in that like lean back shopping mentality. And then the other take is like it's an engineering problem. And if they just had the meta engineers building that matching algorithm, do you see one of those being more important than the other?
Speaker 11:I mean, I think from my Zillow experience, when we had a pretty big ad business at Zillow. Yeah. And when we had endemic advertisers Yeah. The, you know, the the moving companies Yeah. The mortgage companies, the title insurance companies Yeah.
Speaker 11:Tightly integrated into the product, that was, you know, that was ads as product
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 11:Ads as improving user experience. In this category, we also have done some of that. Sure. And the ads, for example, on Tinder are integrated in so you right swipe on an ad, you left swipe on an ad the same way you would right swipe or left swipe on a user. So it because it's endemic in that way and it's it's pretty tightly integrated, the ads perform very well.
Speaker 11:But we're much more focused on driving user outcomes and getting people out on dates. Yep. And so the subscription revenue
Speaker 1:More aligned with
Speaker 11:the user. Is more aligned with user Yeah.
Speaker 5:Did you ever invest or do anything around the housing problem we have in this country given that you're at Zillow?
Speaker 1:Quickly, can you solve the housing crisis for us?
Speaker 5:No. No. I mean, I I I would like I would like you to take a run at that at some point. Yeah. You know how much demand there is.
Speaker 11:You know, if there's obviously an affordability crisis, there's mortgage rate lock in. If we could find a way to make mortgages transferable Oh,
Speaker 1:yeah.
Speaker 11:That would be massive. Tons of people are kind of stuck in their homes at two to 3% mortgages. They're not in the right home that's right for them anymore
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:They can't afford to fit two to 5%
Speaker 5:or six Right?
Speaker 1:If you bring the mortgage with you?
Speaker 11:I mean, it's you basically can't do it. You have to there are some startups that have tried. I looked at incubating some startups to do it. But you all the stars have to align. The buyer has to match your credit.
Speaker 11:It can't be done essentially in the current regulatory environment. That would be a massive unlock. More real estate development, so just more builder friendly legislation would be very important. That's something that some other states, not California, have done a better job of. California has been a laggard in that way.
Speaker 11:You know, I have incubated and invested in a lot of startups that help real estate agents use AI to be more productive.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:I do think that's a bit of a limiter as well. There's one called House Whisper which I started with several former Zillow people which makes an AI assistant basically for real estate agents and and gives them incredible AI superpowers. So that's a part of the unlock as well. But, know, we don't have a demand issue. We have a supply issue in The US.
Speaker 11:So we need more supply. We need more houses built. We're missing about a million homes
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:That basically weren't built after the financial crisis. This goes all the way back to to '20 to 2008. Yeah. Builders were building a million homes a year and they went down to two or 300,000 for four or five years.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:And so there are a million homes missing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's rough. Well, thank you so much for taking the time.
Speaker 5:Thanks, guys. Great great to
Speaker 6:finally have you on
Speaker 3:the show.
Speaker 10:Thank you.
Speaker 11:You all. Thanks.
Speaker 5:Come back soon.
Speaker 1:Our next guest is Eric Olson from Consensus back on the show with an exciting fundraising announcement. He's in the waiting room. So we'll bring him in to the TBPN Ultradome.
Speaker 8:Eric, how
Speaker 1:are you doing?
Speaker 9:Well, it's fantastic. How are you guys doing?
Speaker 5:We're doing great.
Speaker 1:Please reintroduce yourself and the company for the for the listeners and then we can go into the news today.
Speaker 9:Love it. So I'm Eric, the cofounder of Consensus. Yeah. We're building AI for academic and scientific researchers.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 9:To date, the product's been very search focused, focused on the literature review use case, people finding references for whatever work they're doing, and we are announcing a $30,000,000 series b today led by Great Point Ventures. Take the product beyond search, move into more of a workspace for researchers.
Speaker 1:How how has the actual go to market been? Obviously, you're raising more money, so I imagine there's been traction. What's the response been like? What's the customer acquisition strategy?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I mean, that has been far and away the best part of this entire process is the amazing work we get to see our users doing. I mean, these are people who are genuinely changing the world from the research they're doing. Like most AI products, you know, we've gone mostly straight to consumer. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:There's so much on the ground demand for tools like this that we're really growing mostly organically. You know, we're in the business where so many people are doing work in a lab or at a university, and there's tons of networks affect sharing. So we've leaned into that above all else. And then more and more recently over the last year, we now work with over a 100 universities where we sell usually directly to the library, and then they'll distribute the product to students themselves.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Smart. Where are the models or the existing tools sort of falling down? Because it feels like anything that has a very, very short reinforcement, you know, reinforcement loop like research or coding can be automated like very quickly. You can get really great results.
Speaker 1:But stuff like fill up that test tube, throw it in the centrifuge, even if that just takes a few minutes, it's harder to actually close the loop there quickly. And so that's always been my thesis for why we're seeing such rapid advancement in cyber security because you can run it in simulation, video games. But stuff in the offline world, anything that needs IRL feedback is slowed. Do you have an opinion about where all this goes?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I mean, there are people who are going after full autonomous scientists. Yeah. You push a button, discoveries come out. We're kind of betting against that.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. You know, I think, like you said, there are many parts of a research process that can be automated. Mhmm. We want to focus on those parts.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But there
Speaker 9:are many things that happen outside of that that are very uniquely human. Mhmm. And it isn't just the putting the atoms together or putting the thing in the test tube. There's lots of, you know, taking things from different domains, understanding the connections between them, talking to people, working through ideas and coming up with these new ideas. That is the essence of science.
Speaker 9:It isn't just what's in the test tube. And, you know, despite how good these models have gotten, still not great at drawing connections between things and coming up with a new idea. So we wanna focus on the things that are actually automatable, like searching for papers and running many iterative searches and finding the right materials, and let humans and scientists focus on the things that are still core to science in that collaboration, in that inquiry, in that discussion.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Is the bar being raised on college campuses? Like, our our students and researchers, now that they have AI just expected to do two, three times as much work in a given period?
Speaker 9:I mean, to some degree, absolutely. At the same time, you also will see lots of professors that will put up lots of, you know, blockers to people using AI and forcing them to do, you know, proctor tests and making sure that they're doing things that are not AI enabled. So I think that there are certain parts of it that are sped up immensely, then there's other parts of it where professors are putting lots of safeguards up to ensure that everything is being done in the classroom exactly the way that they want. So I think it's kind of a little bit of a mix of both.
Speaker 1:How do you think about harnesses, wrappers, just SaaS that can accelerate different pieces of the research puzzle to sort of create that operating system? Like, are you drawing from the analogy of like the IDE, the coding agent, know, Silicon Valley has moved really aggressively towards like coding agents are all you need, but cursor is still doing really well. So, you know, a lot of code review will still happen even in a world where AI is writing a lot of the code. So walk me through sort of how you're thinking about the future of research where there's a huge AI portion but the researcher still remains in the cockpit.
Speaker 9:I think IDE is a really great corollary because you want there to be these things where you have this harness where it can do these airative loops. You can give it feedback to say, you know, go down that path or that path and pull in the things you're looking for. I think the one difference between us and maybe a coding use case is there are very discrete steps that happen sequentially. So maybe you're in a searching use case, but typically then you're moving to like, oh, now I'm writing this paper. Now I'm deeply analyzing this data.
Speaker 9:So it's kind of like two actually different surfaces than just one ID.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:So you wanna be able to build a workspace that makes it a really easy transition from, I'm in this search, I'm in this learn discovery mode, but now I need to transition to this new task. Yeah. That same thing is still present. You wanna be able to iterate with a model and say, hey, take me down this path. I wanna explore this idea.
Speaker 9:I wanna write this. I wanna edit it. Okay. But now I wanna go back to search because I just wrote this paragraph, but now I need to find references that support that paragraph. Maybe you're taking that paper and then you're going to the next step, which could be you're running some real life experiment.
Speaker 9:Maybe you're getting off of your surface you're in. So, like, I think it is each sequence is very similar. I think the difference between us and a lot of other use cases is that there are these very distinct surfaces you need to build for each part of a research process.
Speaker 1:How are you thinking about integration with lab notebooks? Is that gonna be important at some point? Is it already important? I've been, there's been a big push for, like, cursor for bio, but I've always had struggle I've always struggled to understand that pitch because there is no Versus code for bio. All of the electronic lab notebooks, the ELN market is closed source typically.
Speaker 1:And so but I imagine that with the right API integration, the right partnership, you can still partner with those. Is that in the roadmap? Is that in the sweet spot or something maybe down the road?
Speaker 9:Absolutely. But I think you're bringing up another great point that even in each one of those, like, broad buckets, so now if you're moving to, like, some sort of writing note taking use case
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 9:There are different surfaces for different types of research.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 9:Like, there's your bench links for biotech Mhmm. And then there's, you know, just word in Google Docs if you're a graduate researcher or something. Yeah. We wanna both create APIs that integrate with those so you can do it directly in those services. We also think we can build our own dedicated services too.
Speaker 1:What about for What about for scientists that use sort of like hosted iPython notebooks that might be on like Google Collab or something like that. Some light hosted. Do you want to build that stack so you can sort of provide that or or do you want to partner with the existing tools?
Speaker 9:Why not both?
Speaker 1:Why not both? Okay. Well, you have the money to do both. So good luck and congratulations and thank you for stopping by the show.
Speaker 5:Talk to soon. Update, Eric. Good to see you. Have a good one. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You too.
Speaker 5:Congrats.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Our next guest is Matt from Giga Energy. He made news recently because Giga Energy has scaled to $350,000,000 in revenue vertically integrating AI infrastructure while raising just $3,400,000 of equity funding. It's a amazing amazing story of what's possible in the AI era in hard tech. People say it's hard.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's not so hard. I don't know. Matt will tell us. How are doing?
Speaker 4:Howdy. How are doing?
Speaker 5:What's going on?
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for taking the time to jump on the I heard the story, heard a little bit of the news, but I'd love to go back and start with your origin story, how you got into this business, and then walk us through the shape of the business today. So where'd you get started?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I started this business back at Texas A and M with a couple buddies from college almost seven years ago. Okay. Business kind of started around flared natural gas, bitcoin mining and quickly evolved into supply chain constraints.
Speaker 1:And and then And was your your your team, were there was the back were you guys studying engineering or or were you just interested in crypto? Like, what was the business? I don't know. What was the background?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yes. I'm just super interested in Bitcoin, like, trying to find any way to get into it. Yeah. I was, like, out of desperation.
Speaker 4:Large oil and gas college. My co founder's generation oil and gas. Impetus was, hey, can you find us a well and can we mine Bitcoin on it? And then from there, just kind of went on YouTube and and little by little learned three phase power.
Speaker 1:No way. So we what was the first thing you built?
Speaker 4:So the first thing we ever built was a 50 kilowatt
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:Modular data center in in Southeast Texas that mines yeah. Just like, I don't know, maybe 4 to bitcoin a month or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and what does that actually look like? So there's a there there's a deposit of natural gas in the ground, and it's being flared and it and some of it would be wasted, but then you're converting it. Like, how much did you have to buy? What what what does what's the am I looking at something that's like a shipping container size or like building size or like washing machine size?
Speaker 4:Like twenty twenty foot ship container. Okay. Like tiny, like nothing nothing massive at at scale. And then, yeah, you have natural gas generator on-site. You're pulling from the wellhead.
Speaker 4:Okay. Stuff's going down, breaking all the time. And basically, in terms of scaling that business, the rate limiter was infrastructure. So very quickly, we said, how can we build our own Bitcoin boxes? Yeah.
Speaker 4:And then Bitcoin, 85% drop back. Next thing you know, we're selling more Bitcoin boxes and picks and shovels than we weren't mining the Bitcoin.
Speaker 1:Interesting. And then these Bitcoin boxes, are they GPUs? Are they a $6.04 4 Bitcoins? Like, where were we in the story of, like, Bitcoin mining at that point?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So your 2019, you're still at, 14 nanometer Okay. Chips with ASICs Okay. At time. So very rudimentary in the field, flies and dust everywhere.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. But they but they aren't repurposable because they're Bitcoin ASICs. So you wind up selling a lot of those as the market deteriorates. When do you start thinking about AI?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So and it's on about 1.2 gigawatts of those modular data centers over, a four year tenure.
Speaker 1:That's a lot.
Speaker 4:Then little by little. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We we So so yeah. Wait. Wait. Really quickly. Like, you're selling 1.2 gigawatts of these modular data centers.
Speaker 1:Like, what is your supply chain like? How vertically integrated are you versus more of like a systems integrator that then is delivering that to a buyer?
Speaker 4:Man, it was incremental. It was everything from like building it at Home Depot to now, you know, restoring manufacturing back in the And then just like little by little over a seven year period, bringing it back.
Speaker 5:Amazing. And and what's the typical what was the typical buyer back in that era?
Speaker 4:Everyone. I mean, we captured I mean, we kinda had a nice niche, like lower market, middle market, public markets. You name it, we're selling to them. We're the guys with the Bitcoin boxes.
Speaker 1:Okay. So so But what what we so one of these companies that wants to they they they purely see it as like a economic opportunity. They're putting dollars in and getting Bitcoin out, and they think that the ROI will go up as they they have a Bitcoin price target. They come to you, buy it, and then they also have to go and get the land that has the access to the natural gas line, basically?
Speaker 4:Yep. Yeah. And and also on grid utility. Okay. And and so, yeah, kinda like, basically, we we got a really good mousetrap.
Speaker 4:We're selling it, making great margin. We realized everyone we're selling them to, why can't we do what they're doing if we got, you know, great margins?
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:So I started going down the pipeline, figuring out how do we get powered land, how do we get cheap power. Yep. In the same vein, started introducing new product lines, so transformers and switchgear in '24, we introduced. Yeah. Started selling that in in in at Nauseam and Nen.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Mid twenty four, we built a go to market function around C and I, renewables, electrical, and just started selling to non Bitcoin miners, realizing that our electrical equipment was was fungible.
Speaker 1:Interesting. And so what was the scale of the company in '24 when you start doing that? I mean, you have like hundreds of employees?
Speaker 5:Wait. And when did you when did you raise that Yeah. Few million bucks?
Speaker 1:Just through the fundraising.
Speaker 4:Yeah. No. So that that the funny thing, that 3,400,000 didn't really, you know, go to any of our growth. They just like kinda kept us alive for a couple of year period figuring out, you know, our product market fit. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:So we raised like a million bucks in 2021 Mhmm. And we raised the remaining amount in March '22.
Speaker 1:Wow. And then just and then just sales come in.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's profitable business.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Was there was it were there any like
Speaker 5:Did you get thrown out of any VC office for being profitable at any point?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Wasn't in them.
Speaker 1:Sounds like it didn't even stop by. But in in in terms of the cash conversion cycle, did you ever have to use debt or payment terms? Because I imagine if somebody comes to you and says, like, I want a Bitcoin box, you still have to go make it. There's like supply chain. Like, the like, your work your your your your working capital could explode if you're not careful.
Speaker 4:It was all payment terms. So we we were able to convince customers to use thirty, forty, 50% down and then match our payment milestones relative to cash out the door. And and just kind of continue rolling forward. Yeah, our customers finance the whole business.
Speaker 1:Okay. So then take me through, like, the growth of the actual workforce, like, much is in in house? How how big is the the team at at various points? Like, how did you scale the workforce?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So we had about 90 employees end of last year approximately, maybe a 100. We're up to about 200 now Yeah. This year by the end of the quarter. Really kind of continuing to continuing to scale it throughout '24.
Speaker 4:We got into renewables, C and I, electrical division. Yep. Selling to churches, prisons, hospitals, transformers, switchgear systems, and then ended up getting a massive barfque with an AI data center, and that's like just kind of led us back to the watering hole in terms of, you know, how how big the opportunity was. Next thing you know, we're selling transformer switchgear to everyone in the AI space.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Where do you want this to go? Are you going to raise money at some point, or do you want us to continue to grow it profitably?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So Giga has now kind of again, we went through the cycle of like, we're selling the picks and shovels. Yeah. Wait. The guys who were selling the picks and shovels to are making a ton of money.
Speaker 4:Why can't we do that? Mhmm. Same thing's happening again on the AI side. We got the powered land. Have massive pipeline, multi gigawatts in terms of our capacity.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:We have we have healthy margins, and so Giga today really exists around rapid data center deployment.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:We build all the main all we manufacture all the long lead time equipment items build the data center, and we build the data center with our own picks and
Speaker 1:shovels. Okay.
Speaker 5:And What kind of what what kind of challenges are you facing on on the ground? Specifically with like local Yeah. Where's your community opposition?
Speaker 4:Yeah. There's a lot of that. Yeah. We got town hall meetings all the time talking to people and kind of walking them through, know, hey, this is gonna use less water than than your golf course does with an area. There's lot of noise concerns.
Speaker 4:So a lot of this is kind of sitting down with the residents walking through what does this practically look like in your backyard.
Speaker 5:On the noise front, what's what do you believe what do you believe is the solution there? I think there's every single day there's videos on x circulating where you could Yeah. Posting like, you know, this is what it sounds like if you're living in this, you know, suburb and it's like a low from the generators. You've you've been continuously making new hardware, you know, innovations and products. Do you think there's a hardware solution to noise or is it just put them farther away from people?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, the unfortunate thing is like almost all the setups are in compliant with local laws. Right? They're probably going be below that 65 decibel threshold, but that kind of low is still very irritating. The extent that, you know, you can kind of continue to to innovate around the products and get lower decibels, put up sound walls, dirt mounds further away, but also, I mean, in my opinion, it's a bit of a easy thing to latch onto when just, you know, opposing the general concept of an AI data centering record.
Speaker 9:Oh, sure. So it's sort of like
Speaker 1:a straw man. Like, that's not what people actually care about. They care about the bigger picture, bigger question.
Speaker 5:Why don't they dig putting them underground? Is that a is that a solution? I've I've seen a bunch of people posting like very creative ideas around these things. It sounds like a lot of work to dig a big enough hole in the ground, but maybe it's
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I mean, on top of trying to build a data center nine months, putting one in the ground is is not on on the highest priority, I would say.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just too too too fast. Well, what about energy for local, like local energy prices? There's been the rate payer production pledge signed by a lot of hyperscalers. Like, how how real is that?
Speaker 1:How are you working through those those those talking points when they come up at a town hall meeting?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Right. Every utility or electrical tariff relative to a municipality can be different. Even within our card, right, you have different center point or encore. Right?
Speaker 4:Two different systems, two different ways of calculating that method. There is the ability to ensure that consumers don't receive increased pricing relative to that. And there's a lot of education in terms around what soft load or front load looks like. You get backup diesel gensets on on-site, but also at the end of day, gotta be pulling, you know, four four five nines of uptime. So the LMP pricing or local marginal pricing of these sites probably will go up a marginal amount unless the hyperscalers are willing to
Speaker 1:step in. Yeah. How far do you wanna go up the stack? You're building actual data centers now. Are you going to be the one racking the GPUs, or are you going to partner with Neo Clouds?
Speaker 1:Are you going to be, you know, networking everything together and offering an API for a particular LLM? Like, you could go very, very deep in the integration if you wanted to, but what's on the near term goal set?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think near term. Right? Gays are very much a ground up company.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Right? Manufacturing the stuff from the ground up with our own CAD file sets. Yeah. Moving the dirt, putting up the building, and energizing the facility. We stop at the rack level currently, and and that's really what we're excellent.
Speaker 4:Very much the top down approach of heavy financial systems or, you know, Yeah. Whatnot. We we view our our bottom up approach very novel.
Speaker 1:So I I mean, do you do you is there is there a different financial like like underwriting procedure or thought process around actually acquiring GPUs and racking them because it sounds like you would have a tenant that brings in their own equipment and Yeah. Runs whatever they
Speaker 4:Yeah. Exactly. Right? So for us, value proposition is, hey. You need to burn these chips.
Speaker 4:We can get you fifty, hundred megawatts of IT online in nine months.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And we've seen that from Sadeghian Alexander at Microsoft. He says, we actually have the chips. We just don't have enough powered shells. That's why you're in the powered shell business.
Speaker 1:That makes a lot of sense. Fascinating. What else goes into delivering a data center in nine months? Feels like is there a secret to not getting hung up in permitting? Is it the fact that you have a more fluid workforce that can travel across the country?
Speaker 1:We've heard stories of like plumbers going on private jets. I don't know what else you can tell me about like bringing your 200 person employee base to bear in a particular region that might not be right next to your headquarters.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So our mantra is building in the factory, not in the field.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:And we did this kind of implicitly in the Bitcoin mining world. We were able to turn on Bitcoin sites in almost sixty days Yeah. From bare pieces of dirt to energized racks. Yeah. In the AI space, nine months is done because we do majority of the commissioning and the integration at the factory in a controlled environment.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:We've got a 95% reduction in the the need for on-site labor at these data centers because of our modular design and the prefabrication going in. And that's really much the focus upfront.
Speaker 1:Tents versus buildings. We heard that Meta recently shifted to tents to speed up the time to deploy their data centers. Do you have a opinion on the structure that should hold the the GPUs, the racks?
Speaker 4:The whole industry should be focused on time to token. Right? What what gets us online as fast as possible? Whether that's a tent, whether that's a pre pre engineered metal building on-site. If all, you know, 15 different companies could be aligned on time to token, that's really what we need right now.
Speaker 5:What city has been the most welcoming to data centers in America that you've come across yet? Like any any anybody standing up the whole town just just saying You
Speaker 4:know, I mean, it's hard to make everyone happy, I would say. The I couldn't name a particular place that I would say is a 100% on board.
Speaker 1:Are you worried about any of the potential regulatory or political shifts in the next twelve months?
Speaker 4:I mean, I have to imagine at some point, this becomes a federal issue. Yeah. Like, where, you know, sign sign an order, you know, saying, you know like, there's no reason, like, we should have random municipalities blocking, like, AI inference coming online. It's just, like, not in any way shape or form in terms
Speaker 1:of what
Speaker 4:we're trying to march forward. So I think that's gotta come at some point. How soon? I I don't know.
Speaker 5:Yeah. How are you thinking about space? Feels like Giga has been very adaptable to date around different trends. Could we see you guys building satellites in the future? Data centers on board?
Speaker 4:You know, we're we're we're focused on the dirt. We're focused on we're we're we're not the most high-tech. We're not the largest. We're very much focused on on speed. And at the end the day, I think that that is is is the difference.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Well, congratulations on the progress. Thank you so much for taking the time to
Speaker 5:talk Great
Speaker 1:meet you finally. Great to meet you.
Speaker 5:Congrats to the team on the Thanks for having us.
Speaker 1:Have a good one.
Speaker 4:Take care.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon. Up next, we have Jay from n of one. He is the founder. This is his first appearance. Building trading agents that may be the next AI interface.
Speaker 1:What's going on? What's going on, guys? Welcome to the show, Jay. How are doing?
Speaker 2:I'm great. How are you guys?
Speaker 1:Good. First time on the show. Please introduce yourself and the company a bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So my name is Jay. I'm the founder of NF1. We're an AI research lab focused on financial markets.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So we're taking a big bet on on markets as the next environment that that leads to training models that are, you know, better at trading and better at domains that require like adaptive intelligence.
Speaker 1:What's your background? How'd you get into this?
Speaker 2:I have I've I've kind of got gone back and forth between public market investing and software building software companies. So it's kind of like bringing together the two sides of my experience.
Speaker 1:Sure. Do you think Renaissance Technologies secretly discovered the transformer back in the nineties? This is a conspiracy theory.
Speaker 2:I I don't I don't think so. We actually just hired someone from Renaissance. No. And, yeah, I I don't think so.
Speaker 1:It seems it seems unlikely given their their their compute bill over the years. I think we would know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There be signs.
Speaker 1:There would be signs. There would be signs. But what is working in terms of financial performance in the AI world? There's two weird dichotomies, which is like a lot of the best and most profitable financial firms have been using machine learning for decades or a year
Speaker 8:or Yeah.
Speaker 5:Or the other side, you could say Jane Street is an AI lab.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And they've invested in custom hardware and computer infrastructure for a very long time. They wrote their own programming language. Okay. Like, they've been investing in this for a long time.
Speaker 1:And then on the on the flip side, you have the best frontier models when someone gives them a benchmark of, like, try and trade this portfolio. We haven't seen good results. So where is the the the delta in your opinion?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It it really depends on what your goals are. I think, you know, Jane Street is their goal is to make money, to make as much money per quarter or or year as possible. Our goal is to train models that can generalize across markets and eventually eclipse, you know, the best human traders and algorithmic trading systems in the world over the a very long time horizon. And
Speaker 1:for the fur
Speaker 2:but for the first part of our goal, it's to to make trading agents a thing, and that's mostly an infrastructure. They're honestly kind of like coding agents for markets. So we're building a consumer facing platform, not a hedge fund. And so our goals are are pretty different. We we we kind of see hedge funds as having a more short term goal of making money and and us having a much more long term goal of, you know, trying to use markets as a learning environment for AI in general
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Which leads to totally diff building a totally different type of company, hiring totally different types of people. Yeah. There's not many hedge funds that we know of that are trying to train models where their goal is generalization versus just, you know, making as much money as possible.
Speaker 5:I know. Talk about the consumer experience. Someone signs up, they deposit funds, your model start trading it. Is that is that roughly what you're aiming for?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So to take a a short step back, basically, our view is that trading agents are about to go through the same sort of adoption curve as coding agents. From basically no one using them today to basically everybody using them in the next couple of years. So like two or three years from now, we believe that trading without a trading agent will be like coding without a coding agent or a cursor
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Or feel like. You could do it, but you know, why why would you? And yeah. So that's like the sort of inflection that we see coming. It's like the next big platform shift in investing that we see.
Speaker 2:And, you know, you people have lots of ideas today around trading strategies or, you know, low resolution DCs they might have, where executing that is kind of hard. So whether it's a a systematic trading strategy or, like, some more complex discretionary one, you might have an idea, but, you know, it's just impractical to put it on unless you're good at coding and have a bunch of data and other things. So, yeah, basically, you'll be able to come onto this platform, you'll be able to describe a thesis or an idea in natural language, and then the models that we that we are developing will be able to get you from that natural language to a fully deployed trading agent that expresses or embodies your your viewpoint.
Speaker 1:I think there's someone in the chat who knows you. Do you know Moon from stable diffusion? You and Pedro kicked off his career? I don't know. He's he's excited that you're here.
Speaker 1:Anyway, I
Speaker 2:have no idea who that is. Sorry.
Speaker 1:Tell me about what the important pieces to build are for because you can, in theory, use OpenClaw or an AI agent to interact with, like, an interactive broker's API, sort of set up a trading strategy, work through that. How like, what are the pieces of the scaffold that you need to build to, like, give a great customer experience?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a great question. So there's a lot. The first hardest you know, the hardest part in many ways is the data. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:You need to have really good live data coming in from basically every market anyone wants to trade. So we spent a lot of time really hammering out all the different providers and cleaning and preparing and getting it ready to be consumed by agents. So that's a huge piece of it. Like, if you don't have all the necessary data, it's it's hard to to build a real trading strategy. The second piece is, like, the guardrails.
Speaker 2:You you know, LMs, like, a big a big part of our point and and why we launched Alpha Arena as as and maybe you guys saw Mhmm. Is to prove that LMs aren't quite there yet when it comes to trading. The the models aren't very good at at autonomous trading tasks, basically. So we developed like a harness and put a lot of our energy into to developing like a a world class harness for trading and deep research queries for markets. So you get all of that on our platform.
Speaker 2:And then all the DevOps and server management and basically all the infrastructure that you need to do that well, even on something like OpenClaw, we've take we take care of that as well. But, yeah, it's it's there's a lot. And then the execution, and then if you want to do paper trading or simulate out possible ideas or, you know, kind of, you know, go through a lot of iteration and refining your strategy. It's it's it's not it's not super easy to do to do all this stuff well. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That that's
Speaker 5:Would you ever would you ever partner with the Publix or the Robinhoods of the world and and integrate this into their platform where they can effectively create some type of tab where they can type you can type in a thesis and then execute it within your existing brokerage or do you wanna own the own the end customer?
Speaker 2:Yeah. As of right now, we're integrating with all the brokerages. So you'll be able to connect to whatever brokerage you use, or if you don't have a brokerage, you can just onboard through one that we set up for you like Alpaca or or MBKR. But yeah, we're we're right now, we're just a layer on top of all the brokerages.
Speaker 5:Got it. Cool. Well, thank you so much for coming. You have some news. You have some news.
Speaker 5:You raised some money.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:We just raised a $15,000,000 round. Thank
Speaker 5:you, Jordy. Almost forgot. Almost forgot. Well Great stuff.
Speaker 1:Have a great day. Congratulations.
Speaker 2:Thanks, guys.
Speaker 3:And we'll talk to
Speaker 1:you soon.
Speaker 3:Have a good one.
Speaker 1:See you. We have Amir from Astrocade coming in in just a few minutes, but we have to talk about Laurel Supply. This is you you were This is important. Everyone out there was if you were complaining that Erawan was too cheap, you're gonna love Laurel Supply because they made an expensive version of Erawan. This is from Andrea.
Speaker 5:People are
Speaker 2:Guess some people are
Speaker 5:saying that it's, yeah, more of like a TikTok studio
Speaker 6:Okay.
Speaker 5:Grocery store.
Speaker 1:Okay. I want to know about the flow of like how the what the go to market works looks like because we should have went mega
Speaker 5:should high have gone
Speaker 8:It's close. I think I drive by it every day.
Speaker 1:Okay. But let's sit the table and try and understand what's actually going on here.
Speaker 5:Moral supply Before we duck this, probably $1.01 and a half years ago Yes. The point John is saying like, okay, well obviously, know, Erwan's this hit. Yes. But obviously the opportunity
Speaker 1:You introduced me to Erwan. Really? Yeah.
Speaker 5:Because I would come in every day with
Speaker 1:because you were were such a diva, would insist on only eating heroin and I was like, can we just throw in McDonald's once? Maybe a Jack in the Box. Maybe a You said that a couple Maybe a Chick fil A.
Speaker 5:And then you piped down. Yeah. I did You piped down.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But you but you you brought me the gospel of Erewhon. Yeah. I just make
Speaker 5:remake Erewhon but make it two to three times more expensive.
Speaker 1:And no one would think that. Everyone everyone would come into and say, what if Erawan but cheaper? Tyler said,
Speaker 5:called this before John.
Speaker 1:Wait. What? I I
Speaker 8:have a tweet from 01/00/2025. I say there's definitely a market
Speaker 5:for ultra high end You probably heard that on
Speaker 1:I think you heard that
Speaker 9:on the show.
Speaker 1:No. Wait. What is this? Can we pull up Tyler's tweet? Where is this?
Speaker 1:We need to put this in here. Said okay. So Tyler says there's definitely a market for an for an high ultra end? For an ultra high end. For an ultra high end grocery store that doesn't use plastic anywhere and tests the products for tons of stuff.
Speaker 1:Erohon meets plastic. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Sorry, Tyler. Took you
Speaker 8:you overheard tweet probably and then took it.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 3:I don't
Speaker 8:know when you said it.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I think I riffed it. I was this was right around the time that I was riffing it on the show. So like
Speaker 8:Well, maybe so only possible. This was a reaction to Nat Friedman, I think
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah. Under the plastic No. No. I I So maybe
Speaker 1:I might have to give you this one. I don't know. January 6.
Speaker 8:I don't think this is a very original idea.
Speaker 5:Okay. What is is Lohstroh? Like a lot of the products they're selling
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 5:Clearly, they're just like packaging them Okay. On-site.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So they have flowers here. They have whole bunch of like nuts and spices and all sorts of things, but they are sold in individual jars, very aesthetic. Like the view, there's just so much less
Speaker 5:Nick Shower says they should call it Whole Foods. So this is the beauty of of capitalism. Yes. How so? The which is that every great idea Yeah.
Speaker 5:Eventually can be usurped by doing the exact same thing but just doing it slightly.
Speaker 1:At three x the price. Is it actually three x the price? No.
Speaker 5:Don't think so.
Speaker 1:We gotta go and understand. So Michael Mirafloor has a post here. Says, important to note that this is on Holloway Drive on the same street as Holloway House or Soho House Holloway, whatever the official name is now, and it's right next to Barneys Beanery. This corridor is going to become one of the cool person destinations, completely insufferable, must visit if from out of town influencer destinations in LA. Another pink wall, if you will.
Speaker 1:Interesting. I remember the pink wall. Did you ever take a photo at the pink wall? No. I drove by it a couple times.
Speaker 1:I saw people taking photos. I never stopped. I knew that AI would be able to make a pink wall behind me if I wanted one on demand. The street is also a staging site of sorts for delivery robots. So yeah, lots happening.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Okay. So inside Laurel Supply, the new grocery store, luxury grocery store that just opened in West Hollywood. There is a video. Should we watch this or do you have another take, Jordy?
Speaker 1:What do want to break down?
Speaker 5:There's a video inside the store?
Speaker 1:There's a one minute and thirty three from seconds Mike, Make LA Great Again Inside Laurel Supply. And we can play this video. It looks like it's a download of a TikTok.
Speaker 5:First
Speaker 1:look, Laurel Supply. And it's a popular new American restaurant, Laurel Hardware. There's a couple others. It's so overpriced, says Chant. Erewhon down the street is so much better.
Speaker 1:It's making Erewhon look cheap. Okay. Let's play this. Turn this up.
Speaker 13:All the fruits and vegetables are a 100% organic and meticulously taste. You'll find an organic smoothie, juice, coffee, and matcha bar with plenty of indoor seating or you can just enjoy them while you shop. Immediately to the left, you'll find the health and beauty section and this is a little grocery stores. And she showed us products from all around the world. This runway product caught my eye because, you know, devil wears Prada.
Speaker 13:But one of the most unique things about Laurel Supply is this stone mill. It was imported from Ukraine, and it allows them to control the production of their in store goods. You know how you can go to Europe and eat all the baked goods like a heifer and not gain any pounds? A lot of people say it comes down to those specific ingredients like flour, so that's what they're trying to opening, I don't have a lot of images of the prepared food, but it's a farm.
Speaker 2:If you
Speaker 13:have a sweet tooth, you've been warned because there's a wide selection of gelato. There are food options such as sushi, and they have an organic butcher. You'll immediately know all the attention to details such as this live olive tree that they have inside and how they incorporate natural light. That was one of the big things I noticed walk in. I was also told they offer valet for shoppers.
Speaker 13:So those that were concerned about parking situation, that should help alleviate it. At the time of this posting, they should be officially open. Let me know what you think when you go check it out and follow me for place that actually matters.
Speaker 5:I gotta say, personally, valet for Grocery? Places that you go to a lot is a bug, not a feature.
Speaker 1:Why?
Speaker 5:I just I just like parking my own car. I don't want random, you know, don't I don't I don't need I don't need or want random people Driving my driving my car all the time. Especially for I'm saying for a grocery store
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Or a gym. But I I do think it's funny. So they're like, okay. So we're we're we're we're blatantly cloning Erwan. Let's just all admit that.
Speaker 5:Let's just all admit that. We're blatantly cloning Erwan, but we gotta do something different.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:They rack their brains
Speaker 6:What do
Speaker 5:they do? For hours. We're gonna mill the flour in the house.
Speaker 1:Is that the only thing? Yeah. I I there seemed like No.
Speaker 5:I think so. So it looks it looks fantastic. Yeah. I like the logo. Yeah.
Speaker 5:It looks cool. I will I will happily shop here.
Speaker 1:Will you or will you just be like, oh, it's not the same. I'm an Eirwan diehard. You're gonna switch up on your day ones. You're gonna switch up on
Speaker 5:totally depends on location.
Speaker 1:You'd be driving to Eirwan but I'm gonna go the other
Speaker 5:I am a reserve member at Arrowhead.
Speaker 1:I don't even know what that means but it sounds expensive. That's hilarious. So funny. Well, what else is in the timeline? So Will and I just had an absolute banger today to the tune of 12,000 likes.
Speaker 5:Oh, last thing because Yes. Dylan Yeah. Our very own Scotto Yeah. Texted.
Speaker 1:What did he
Speaker 5:say? Very smart. He said he said they should open in The Bay or New York not where Air One already is.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 5:Very, very smart. So Air One has been some they has had so much opportunity to expand within LA. Yep. They've done a very good job. You can't really drive fifteen minutes without running into one Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Which is a great feature if you wanna just pop in for lunch or whatever. But they've
Speaker 1:been Ben says they should do a points match. Like when you're leaving like American Airlines or United, they'll they'll they'll status match you. If if Laurel Supply status matches you on day one, they might win you over.
Speaker 5:Maybe. But this is smart. They've been relatively slow to expand. There's a new there's a store
Speaker 9:I don't know.
Speaker 5:Mike on the name in New York that beat them to at least beat Laurel Supply to cloning in New York. But but yeah, the thing about Laurel Supply is it is it looks incredibly well done and I'm sure the experience will be great. Mhmm. I I will happily go check it out. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:But it doesn't add anything new to grocery in LA really at all.
Speaker 6:Don't
Speaker 1:Unless they do what we were talking about, which is the whole brand is you go in here and there is no plastic in the store whatsoever. Like that was the original pitch that we were talking about was not not, oh, it's organic the of other the pitch was
Speaker 5:ditch the old like brown grocery bags and do like
Speaker 1:Solid gold bags.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Effectively turn the bag into like a Hermes Birkin bag. And so an influencer can take a photo of it. Somebody who gets the bags can take them at at home, take a photo and everyone knows, oh you got the fancy groceries. I gotta have those fancy groceries. That's the that's the hack.
Speaker 1:I still think launching in LA is good for like go to market in terms of like the influencer economy getting you don't think so? No. You think New York and SF?
Speaker 5:Oh, mean, Dylan said Marin. Marin would crush.
Speaker 1:Marin maybe, but I still think the total amount of views will be higher in Los Angeles than Marin. I think there are some maybe But there's way more celebrities and whatnot. Like, there's But congratulations
Speaker 5:to the Laurel Supply team Yeah. On the launch. Welcome on the show. We love talking I
Speaker 1:want have the CEO on the show. Anyway, we have our next guest. We've been keeping waiting in the waiting room. Here he is in the TBPN Ultra down the mirror from Astrohade.
Speaker 6:How are
Speaker 1:you doing?
Speaker 10:Hey, guys. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Joining. To the show. It's great
Speaker 5:to meet you.
Speaker 1:Great to the progress. Introduce the product, then we can talk about the fundraising. But how are you describing what you're building right now?
Speaker 10:Yeah. Astrohade basically is a social entertainment platform where anyone, and I mean anyone, can create games via just natural language. Very similar to how you problem chat GPT, you can make games. For example, you can say a car racing that is happening under the water and the driver is an elephant or a candy crush that instead of popping the balls with color, you can form basically words. Something like that.
Speaker 10:And then with a few clicks, we can just publish it to our feed and then there are millions of players right now that play your games. Yeah. And I think the part that I'm the most excited is our mission, is sharing fun with the world. Mhmm. I think what we are building is pretty cool for people to use and be happy.
Speaker 1:This seems Love it. I don't know, like almost obvious. I I don't want to degrade it but it feels like there's been this vibe coding boom. I see a ton of really fun games. We've made like simulators and whatnot.
Speaker 1:We always buy a domain name and then the question's like how do you drive traffic to it? You can't really go viral. So then you wind up making a viral video about the game and you try and get people to go to the.com.
Speaker 5:Well, here's the thing. So games that we've been creating
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Are only funny to like a very and fun Yes. Like a very small group of people.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 5:But they're not really fun to play.
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 5:And so what I wonder what I wonder is like is the is like reskinning a bigger opportunity than like generating entirely new games because there's certain game mechanics that are just sort of tried
Speaker 1:I would argue that that's how that's how Instagram started. Like the original Instagram was like share your picture of your run with your close friends. That's what we're doing with the simulators that we build. But eventually there's game mechanic
Speaker 5:at all.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. What I'm just saying is like in terms of the actual application like like we we like we are doing the we are doing the you know, the the Instagram post that's just like, hey, I ran a marathon and 10 friends like it. We are not creating the viral Instagram that will be like loved by everyone.
Speaker 6:We're
Speaker 1:not Yeah. Professor Sendy making wombos All all of
Speaker 5:I'm saying is like the the social aspect, the sharing aspect is very cool. But if I'm making a first person shooter, there's probably some like out of the box mechanics
Speaker 1:that would be
Speaker 5:great and reskinning like putting the team I
Speaker 1:think probably a lot of harness. Like, yeah, tell us about how people are actually using it.
Speaker 10:You are actually making all the good points. First of all, and you mentioned this, it's actually obvious. When we started three years ago, we also I was like convinced that such a thing should happen. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 10:It's very hard to also predict the future, but if you look at the past, the past twenty years, Twenty years ago when Twitter launched, basically, what happened is they made creation tool of text accessible to everyone with the keyboard, all these things, right? Again, and almost everyone is the writer now on Twitter. They do a lot of rage baiting on a day to day basis or whatever. But everyone is right there. And the pattern, what we see here is, once the creation tool becomes accessible to everyone, great generational companies appear, right?
Speaker 10:Same thing. Four years after Twitter, Instagram. When the camera, iPhone four launched with a good camera, everyone became a photographer.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:And it's great, but also, like, thanks to my wife, I don't have any more privacy and I think you guys would do that too. TikTok, same thing. And like with the videos, all you see the pattern basically is a creation tool became accessible and what you guys pointed out is like creators from diverse backgrounds started creating this content. First person shooter thing. A lot of people remix new games, but also, the beauty of large numbers is a lot of people actually invent new kind of mechanics.
Speaker 10:It's like one of the interesting genres for us that we saw that got super viral is you have to wash wash things. So you have something, you go wash Mona Lisa's painting, then you go wash a car, you have to clean it. And like, it's actually pretty addicting when you play it. It's so shocking.
Speaker 1:That's funny. And and and on Instagram, you'll see viral videos of people power washing old rugs that are so dirty. There's a whole genre of this time lapse of people cleaning rugs and then it's very satisfying because you're you're watching something they cleaned which I think is satisfying but then also it's revealed to you what is the what the rug looks like and it's very satisfying Exactly. To
Speaker 10:When you see things happen, you're like, oh, oh, it's so so obvious, but then like, you know, you need people to create these things.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I
Speaker 10:think that was exciting. The the biggest the I think the biggest advantage of Astrohade, which I really love, is the core of the experience. So number one, first of all, like our platform compared to other platforms is it's You play things rather than consumption. Majority of the social platforms right now are consumption. Engagement is just so much better.
Speaker 10:It's like hearing a story versus experiencing a story. Yeah. Right? Number two, which is kind of also our mission, just it's more fun. We are living in a world of a lot of the brain rot happening and I think this is just more creative.
Speaker 10:You come out of it super happy when you play Astrohid and, like, you use actually your brain. So that's very, very important for us. And I think the reason Azhang I believe has the possibility to become a generational company is games are so innate to humans. I have a two year old and he's just always playing. He's learning to play, Right?
Speaker 10:They were like, what? I think the latest stats I read was the 3.4, 3,500,000,000 people playing video games right now, just almost half of half of humans.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 10:Right? And I
Speaker 5:think That's not this second, right? That's like day to day, generally, 3.4.
Speaker 10:Overall, I think that no.
Speaker 5:It's not be pretty worried.
Speaker 1:Speak for yourself. I'm gaming right now.
Speaker 5:Half of humanity is is live playing first person shooters right now.
Speaker 1:But brain rot's not gonna be an issue. Don't worry about that.
Speaker 5:There must be is there a crazy power law with games? Like, YouTube, the power law would be like most videos
Speaker 1:Gangnam Style has like A views or billion views that the average YouTube video gets. The medium YouTube video is like 10 views.
Speaker 10:A 100% there's always. With all these creation platforms, there is a power law. Yeah. A lot of like like some portion of creators, like 12% of the creators get a lot of plays and like they get super viral and then there are other creators that get they don't get viral but they get at least thousands of plays on their games. Yeah.
Speaker 10:We actually, like, we launched the platform like publicly around seven, eight months ago. The numbers are actually crazy, guys. The stats is our MAU is like 5,000,000 right now. Wow. Hundreds of thousands.
Speaker 10:Hundreds of thousands of creators are now creating games. Hundreds of thousands. Obviously, like, you guys are part of the Internet, you guys are happy. We we we actually processed trillions of tokens Hey. Make this happen.
Speaker 10:Like, it's completely free. Yeah. People people
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Okay. Free. Free.
Speaker 5:Free.
Speaker 1:That doesn't sound like it's going make any money. How how will you make money? Ads or subscriptions or both?
Speaker 10:Potentially, we want to do ads. Right now, our creators are, like, it's completely free. Between all these, like, all the vibe coding platforms, we are we are the only one that is completely free.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. Won't won't you want to make allow creators to turn on monetization at some point? Like, I I feel like you're going to have people that are like nine years old that create some hit game and and, you know
Speaker 1:It's the it's the Alex Zhu from Musically philosophy of like social networks are two sided marketplaces. You have to create liquidity and like the faster you can start paying people to post, you get more professional creators and I'm sure you're thinking about that, but Yeah.
Speaker 10:We're we're exactly. Like, I think we get inspired a lot by YouTube also. Like, almost of them, almost all these social platforms are doing that. Right? They they don't monetize their creators, actually build tools for their creators to monetize their games.
Speaker 10:Sure. And we are gonna do something similar. We still haven't started monetization. Are focusing on the user growth. But we are gonna build tools that companies can do ads on Astrocade, also creators do microtransactions and the regular type of business model that gaming has been doing all these years.
Speaker 10:I think that gaming is just generally a good business, it's very profitable, it's one of the largest Yeah. Like segments of entertainment, larger than movies and all these things combined. Right? So I'm not so worried about monetization. We just wanna make a great experience for everyone.
Speaker 10:You guys should actually play a game.
Speaker 1:People people people the video game industry to the to Hollywood or the movie industry and and it does dwarf it. But I wonder what the actual revenue split between like passively consumed content is versus actively played games. Because I think if you take YouTube and Netflix and Spotify and TikTok and Instagram, that's probably a bigger pie. To be clear, massive, massive market, massive opportunity, very bullish on this. This makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 1:It it is interesting that there is some there is some sort of dynamic where, like, yes, 3,000,000,000 people are playing games, but probably more people are still watching passive things. There's probably more watch hours on passive content. But that doesn't make, you know, playing games any less important. People enjoy world.
Speaker 10:You're you're right. Yeah. There so that's why I I always not I don't say normally games. We call it playable content because there's actually, like, very diverse set of content. They're not only games.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 10:You know? It's like Yeah. Stable experiences. Yeah. I think from the content point of view is we are heavily towards actually ultra we we call it ultra casual, not even Yeah.
Speaker 10:Hyper casual. Yeah. Ultra casual. When you go to We
Speaker 6:got casual.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what what's the average, like, playtime? Because, like, Final Fantasy might be, like, a hundred hours. GTA might be five a hundred And then some, you know, small game might be a couple hours, but I imagine this is, on the order of minutes?
Speaker 10:Exactly. In the it's exactly on the order of minutes.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 10:So it's shorter form. Actually, my wife only my wife is one of the hardest critics. She only plays Astrogate games. She does it when she's watching a movie, she also is playing the games. Yeah.
Speaker 10:It's because it's just so like, it's it's still like engaging and interactive, but you don't need to also necessarily to focus full on versus a lot of triple a games, you have to do that. And I think that's gonna happen with the gaming industry. There is gonna be still bigger studios Yeah. Triple a studios like basically Hollywood and Yeah. There is gonna be Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, in same year, we got Oppenheimer and Barbie. We also got like, 12 other MrBeast videos. Are you are you based
Speaker 5:in LA? We are
Speaker 10:in Palo Alto, actually. Dang.
Speaker 6:Okay. We're
Speaker 10:down from Palo Alto.
Speaker 5:I looked at that building is so I thought I was
Speaker 1:recreated Los Angeles up north. It's crazy. Talk about the technical side of things. I imagine this is heavily powered by like WebGL and WebAssembly. But like all of this is delivered in an app.
Speaker 1:And so I'm wondering like where you're bumping into like Apple's rules of the road because there's so many cool functionalities like haptics and gyro and cameras. And like when I think about what a really robust mobile game does, it's usually using a lot of the different APIs. And some of those are probably available. Are they all available? What's that been like?
Speaker 10:Yeah. So we are completely right now web based.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 10:And the games are HTML games. Okay. Super lightweight. It's super fast to load those games.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 10:Technologically wise, I think we had multiple, like, challenges across the way. We knew this is possible, but it's actually very hard to build such a platform. Just generally, platforms are very hard to build. The first biggest challenge which we overcome and it's still ongoing is just creation tool. Yeah.
Speaker 10:How do you build this agentic system that can make everyone a game creator?
Speaker 5:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 10:Right? Remove all the skill because these games are being like, one of the games I was showing to experts and they were saying this is a million dollar budget for a month of Yeah, the
Speaker 1:of course.
Speaker 10:Right? It is on our platform, like $20, $10. So that was one thing and it's all going and it's we call it like, it's a like, Astrohkit is a platform where we our AI is learning how to generate fun. Yeah. It's a big thing.
Speaker 10:AI learning fun is a big
Speaker 11:thing in the AI
Speaker 3:community. Yeah.
Speaker 5:So it's not a very seemingly at least very deterministic problem. Right? Because you have these games like, you know, I don't know. Why would a why would a window window washing game be fun? And yet, if the mechanics say you've
Speaker 1:never washed a window. Say you've never turned for the mines. Why would why would Minecraft be fun?
Speaker 10:You go to the floor state. Yeah. When you start washing the window, you get to the floor state.
Speaker 1:So I mean, does that mean that there's going be some sort of like, you know, crazy deal to be done between you and Apple at some point? Because I imagine that your consumers, you as a company, will want access to the full iOS API suite. And Apple's going to say, this is an app that makes other apps. We're not really cool with it and you're going to have to discuss that. Like what how does that play out?
Speaker 1:Because I want I feel like everyone wants this to be a thing but Apple's just sort of operating from a place of fifteen years ago in terms of like what the technology was capable of.
Speaker 10:We haven't. We haven't got there yet. We haven't launched that, by the way. Know. It's fully on the web.
Speaker 10:Yeah. We have to see how when we cross. No. I think this is actually pretty good for Apple too.
Speaker 1:It should be.
Speaker 6:Because we're bringing
Speaker 10:massive distribution also. Yeah. Like, they they provide a distribution.
Speaker 1:But they make a lot money on games right now. If you're saying that we're just going to do ad supported and it's all going to be in our platform and all of a sudden it's like, well, we were making $2 off of the window washing game every time someone clicked the in app purchase and now you have a different business model that could be an issue.
Speaker 10:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I don't know.
Speaker 9:I'm sure you'll saw
Speaker 10:that. It's right. This is not our biggest problem. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Yeah. Now, the things that we are focusing right now on the technology side is like another thing, by the way, is very hard problem. It's harder, honestly, than some of our AI problems Yeah. Is the recommendation system.
Speaker 1:Interesting. I was wondering if that was off the shelf. Is it not?
Speaker 10:No. It's actually pretty challenging. I don't think anybody has built such a large scale recommendation system for this type of content.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 10:Right? We have a kind of recommendation system for videos, we have recommendations for images. Games, Sure. First of all, are a lot of them are open ended. So you don't know exactly like video, you know.
Speaker 10:I watched the whole 50% Yeah. Games is like a lot of other features or features of extracting features from the videos are
Speaker 1:Could be satisfying because you were able to finish it in ten seconds as opposed to if you're watching a ten minute YouTube video and you click out of it in ten seconds, you didn't win the goal. So you have to bake that into the weights as well. Like this person was able to destroy this game but they enjoyed it and then they might not always give you the thumbs up, thumbs down signal. So interesting.
Speaker 10:Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. That's been one of the hardest problems, by the way, you're trying to solve. Yeah.
Speaker 10:The recommendation system. And then platform, like, do you manage the platform so players are happy, the creators are happy. Yeah. Yeah. This is the first time that, like, this large scale week, like, in few months, we've got more than 75,000 games on our platform created.
Speaker 10:Wow. How do you distribute these games to millions of people from diverse backgrounds and skills? Right? So there's a lot of like technical challenges. Serving is another infrastructure you need to build
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:To basically efficiently serve these games
Speaker 1:to Yeah. I'm doing some back of the envelope trying to pull data out of you. You said, like, ten to twenty dollars per game inference, 75,000 games. That's like 1,500,000 in inference. Like, are are you are you actively looking at, like, what pieces of the puzzle you can move to cheaper models really quickly?
Speaker 10:We do that. We do that, actually. We we for some tasks, do cheaper models. Yeah. More complicated tasks, we do it's the thing is the cost of intelligence is coming down.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Right? The cost of these tokens are not because you always want to go with the best And
Speaker 1:the value of networks is gonna keep going up.
Speaker 5:Feature feature requests. I wanna be able to go on astrocade.com and navigate based on like popularity of different games by year. So like I wanna find all the games that were popular when I was like five Oh in like 2000 like 2005, right? I remember some of these like web based games and were like, what was that game where you're on a little bike and these Line Rider. Line Rider, you know.
Speaker 5:Rider.
Speaker 1:We didn't
Speaker 10:have that. Actually have something similar
Speaker 1:to that. Yeah. But I mean to the point about the recommendation algorithm, like is the user trained to search for that and then is your search algorithm going to match with that? If it's an abstract representation and the user didn't put the keyword line writer in their description or something. Interesting challenge.
Speaker 1:Interesting challenge.
Speaker 5:For the rest of the show today, I'll be playing
Speaker 1:Yeah?
Speaker 5:Line Rider. So if you want to keep if you keep watching after you leave, you'll see I'm completely distracted.
Speaker 10:It's actually it's pretty calming also. It like puts you in the flow state and
Speaker 5:You know what else is calming?
Speaker 9:Rolling flashbacks. The
Speaker 1:flashbacks not calming. That's extremely disorienting.
Speaker 5:It's very calming to me.
Speaker 1:Say you Just want to play tell them remake COD.
Speaker 5:Very common to me.
Speaker 10:That was true. That was true.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Amir, it's an honor to have you on the I'm excited to play Astrocade and at this rate, I'm sure you'll be back on very very soon.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. I appreciate
Speaker 10:you guys. Say hi to Nick for me.
Speaker 1:I will. We
Speaker 5:will. Thank you so much. Cheers. Take it. Goodbye.
Speaker 5:Have a good one. Bye.
Speaker 1:Our next guest is coming in in a few minutes, I believe. So we will click over to this very odd viral post from Will Menidas. So apparently fiber optics on the battlefield, we've talked about this before, drones in the war in Ukraine will be hardwired via thin fiber optic cables so that there's no chance of jamming them or disrupting any sort of radio signal. So this has been a popular technique on the battlefield for years now, I believe. But apparently, it's extremely pricey now.
Speaker 5:Yeah. This is so insane. Yeah. Apparently, the price used to be fifth for 50 kilometers spool was $300. Yeah.
Speaker 5:So that seemed that's way I used to always wonder about the the economics Yeah. Of of just because you're assuming, okay, this drone is taking off, it's flying miles and miles and miles. Yeah. How could that make sense? But it's clearly very cheap.
Speaker 5:$300. You have a drone that's, you know
Speaker 1:And they started with like DJI drones that were like Mavic four's used that were maybe like a couple $100 and there were actually some people that would buy these drones like on Craigslist or or Facebook marketplace in America or somewhere else and then fly to Ukraine, take them and resell them at a profit. But still, the average cost of the drone was like in the thousands of dollars. Well, now 50 kilometers of fiber optics is $2,500. So a massive increase in price. And Will Mineta says AI data centers skyrocketing fiber prices leading to Ukraine, Russia being priced out of using drones to do lively atrocities as a scale of marketplace solution that sounds schizophrenic on the outset.
Speaker 1:But it is a bizarre obviously he's sort of playing around with the concept. But it is a bizarre second order effect of fiber demand in America, if that's actually what's going on here. Who knows? Who knows? Well, David Sack shared some back of the envelope numbers for a one gigawatt data center.
Speaker 1:We talked to Giga Energy about
Speaker 5:it. Gonna I'm gonna quickly jump in. I think this is napkin math.
Speaker 1:Oh. You don't think he went you don't think he bought out the envelope
Speaker 5:This for screams napkin math.
Speaker 1:You don't think you don't think he used an envelope for this?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think he was writing 50. Okay. 20,000,000,000. 25 to 30.
Speaker 1:And wait. So when he says all in CapEx, that's the amount of money that you spend sponsoring the all in podcast. What is that? What is all in CapEx? Because he says
Speaker 5:they spend mean, hey, the the number one tech podcast in the world
Speaker 1:price to pay for
Speaker 5:one gigawatt data center.
Speaker 3:Exactly.
Speaker 1:No. Of course, he's talking about the total amount of CapEx, but he did use his brand name there. All in CapEx, 50,000,000,000. Enterprise revenue generated, dollars 25,000,000,000 to $30,000,000,000 a year. Electricity cost, 1,000,000,000 to $2,000,000,000 a year.
Speaker 1:Two year payback. The boom is real. Grock fact checked it. What did Grock have to say? Mostly accurate.
Speaker 1:You know what Grock called it? Didn't call it napkin math. It called it back of the envelope. I'm not
Speaker 5:Well, I'm going have to fact check Grock.
Speaker 1:Grock, is this more back of the envelope calculation or napkin math? Fact check from Grock says CapEx is 50,000,000,000 per gigawatt aligned with NVIDIA's estimate revenue. It matches high end infrastructure as a service, cloud leasing. Energy is roughly correct. Two year payback is realistic.
Speaker 1:There were some other folks that were pushing back saying that there's a lot more that goes into it, but it seems directionally correct.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I guess the question is like, don't OpenAI doesn't OpenAI and Anthropic have access to like somewhere in the range of two and a half to 3,000,000,000 or sorry, two and a half to three gigawatts of compute? Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 5:Right? And they certainly don't have a 150,000,000,000
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 5:Each. So, yeah. So the the I I feel like the numbers seem incredibly optimistic.
Speaker 1:It's more like forward looking.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Looking at looking at CoreWeave. This is not at all Sure. What we're seeing with with CoreWeave. Yeah.
Speaker 5:What happened with CoreWeave? But we will we will see
Speaker 1:so There's a breakdown here of CoreWeave. Yeah. 31,000,000,000 of in service PP and E as of 03/31/2026. They leased their data centers. 1,400,000,000 of operating lease expense for this year, active data centers.
Speaker 1:Let's assume the leasing market is 10% cap rates of cost equivalent to lessors 14,000,000,000. If they had 45,000,000,000 of all in CapEx generating revenue of one gigawatt active power, it's close to SAX numbers. Let's be very generous and assume they need to put no additional CapEx in service to hit the revenue guide. The assumption is wrong. The revenue guidance is 12,000,000,000 to $13,000,000,000 so Core Weaves all in CapEx to revenue is 3.6 x.
Speaker 1:Saks back of the envelope CapEx revenue is 1.8 at midpoint. So either Core Weave really sucks at this or these numbers are 50% off before we even get to margins. Interesting. Well, there's more pitches for beautiful data centers. Doesn't seem like it's on the road map for many data center builders.
Speaker 1:But Meltem Demirrors says, you said make data centers beautiful. There are some good ideas in this post. Which one do you think is the most beautiful, Jordy, of these beautiful data centers?
Speaker 5:Let's see. I personally think that the actual image of the data center they use is beautiful, but only in a
Speaker 1:big mound? The mirror one
Speaker 5:No. No. No. I'm saying at the top of the substack. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Once you click in. Yeah. Like the actual data center it looks kind of
Speaker 1:Yeah. Job sort of finished there. Why why change something that's that looks like a like a blank black cube? It's good enough. Let's see.
Speaker 1:Kevin O'Leary is proposing to build a data center in Utah that will require nine gigawatts of energy to function when fully built.
Speaker 5:Yeah. This one is getting insane levels of
Speaker 1:Now we're putting energy use in atomic bombs units? It will dump around 23 atomic bombs worth of thermal load on the environment every day. The 23 atomic bombs talking point is complete BS. By the same math, the sunlight that hits the 40 acre property this data center will be built on already produces over 50 atomic bombs worth of heat energy daily. This is a misinformation campaign we are walking we are watching in full time.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Interesting. People are continue to be upset about the data center stuff and putting it in ever more complex comparisons. Well, I
Speaker 5:should have our next guest, Alex.
Speaker 1:Alex from Long Lake.
Speaker 5:Long Lake. He recently bought a business that you very well know and likely have used at
Speaker 1:one Yes. Point or
Speaker 5:That's right. Him in.
Speaker 1:Oh. He's here? Fantastic. Is he here? We got him.
Speaker 1:Over in the colors. Oh, we do
Speaker 6:have him.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. How are doing?
Speaker 5:There he is.
Speaker 6:Welcome to the guys. How are you?
Speaker 5:Great to see you. Great to see you.
Speaker 1:Thank you and congratulations. But since it is your first time on the show, why don't you give us a little bit of the news? What happened?
Speaker 5:Intro first. Intro first.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Thank you guys for having me. I'm a big fan of the show. Thanks. Excited to be here for the first time.
Speaker 6:So on Monday of last week, Long Lake announced that we intend to acquire American Express Global Business Travel for $6,300,000,000.
Speaker 1:Fantastic.
Speaker 5:Long
Speaker 6:Lake is an acquisitive company that's bringing applied AI to services sectors globally. Prior to this, we'd acquired 30 businesses across various sectors of the services economy and we've built a world class Applied AI team, operations team, and an M and A team to help kind of bring AI to the real economy.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, there's 30 deals. Like, what was the shape of them? Because this feels bigger than anything you've looked at previously, but is that roughly correct? Are we is this an order of magnitude bigger? Two orders of magnitude bigger?
Speaker 6:Yeah. This is definitely our largest deal so far. We we have pretty big ambitions and we we see our target market as really the entire services TAM, which is over 20,000,000,000,000 in The US alone and and much larger globally, so
Speaker 8:I'd love to see that I'd love to
Speaker 5:see that slide in in the deck by the way.
Speaker 6:We well you know, it's a great fit for us this particular transaction. So it is our largest deal so far, but it's also probably you know, every deal we've done has been high conviction, but this is very high conviction as to what we can do in terms of adding value for the customers, for the suppliers, for the entire ecosystem.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What do you think makes the business special and durable? Obviously, you're optimistic about the future of AI, but not so optimistic that people will just be prompting a self hosted LLM to do everything in their business travel, I imagine.
Speaker 6:Yeah. That's right. So our vision is, and we talked about this in the press release, we basically want to give all the team members of MXGBT superpowers, and particularly the travel counselors who are interfacing with the clients. We basically have seen this in the 30 acquisitions we've done to date, but AI really does make, it does make sort of our human team members you know, able to service customers better, able to provide faster response time, more better accuracy, more products and services to the clients. And you know, we think that is going to drive better retention, better customer experience and better growth.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:30 acquisitions. How many months have you guys been in business?
Speaker 6:Months? Let's see. I guess we we we started talking about the company you know roughly twenty eight months ago. And started so
Speaker 5:talking about the company.
Speaker 6:I know I guess we incorporated the company twenty eight months ago. We started talking about it maybe maybe a few months before that. But yeah, we're roughly coming up on our two and a half year anniversary here soon.
Speaker 5:And and obviously, you know, you've built out an incredible team with a lot of experience but talk about I guess like building that muscle and that capability. I'm assuming you weren't were you buying one company a month roughly right away or have you ramped up? What does that look like?
Speaker 6:Yeah, so we tend to cluster in service verticals. So we started in residential services with HOA management which we've talked about publicly. We made a lot of acquisitions in that space in partnership with our partners there, our operating leadership there. And we do tend to, know once we've sort of helped you know take, we have our Nexus applied AI platform which is our proprietary platform that we've been investing in heavily for the last two and a half years. And once we sort of do the work to deploy Nexus into an industry, we find that each incremental acquisition you know makes that much more sense, right?
Speaker 6:We can basically integrate them more quickly into that platform, you know help our team members become more productive quickly, improve the customer experience right away. And so we then tend to sort of pick up a pretty good cadence of acquisitions. So I think roughly one a month is the number looking back, and you know I would expect that to accelerate as we enter into you know additional service lines I would think. Now some businesses obviously are more fragmented than others, and there's more acquisition activity in some industries than others, but we do expect, you know, over time to to sort of be increasing our rate of acquisition.
Speaker 1:How do you think about financial engineering in these deals? Is this sort of like the classic leverage buyout playbook or are you taking a different strategy or approach? How how do you think about structuring all of these deals?
Speaker 6:Yeah. We've traditionally been under levered. Okay. So our existing businesses, you know, have very little debt, almost no debt. We will be using you know financing as part of this acquisition, as in the press release you can see JP Morgan and others.
Speaker 6:But typically we can afford to be, we're more growth oriented than traditional We're investing in the products and services pretty heavily, especially in the early years as we sort of, we want every business that partners with us to have world class customer experience and technology, and that requires you know a multi year horizon. That's why we're set up as a permanent capital operating company and not as a fund. We see this as a long term you know a long term strategy that requires upfront investment of time and energy and capital. So being under leveraged relative to some of our private equity peers is a big advantage, allows us to move faster. But over time, you know this is a capital intensive strategy, so driving down our cost of capital, this is when we start to think out in the future several years.
Speaker 6:We think hopefully Long Lake will go public. That will help our cost of equity and potentially help our cost of debt as well as we become a public debt issuer.
Speaker 1:So on the equity side, how is it I I I think you've partnered with a number of venture capital firms. They have particular they have a nonpermanent capital time horizon. How are you communicating with them? How they can participate while still benefiting their LPs? Is there overlap with with with VC's LPs?
Speaker 1:Like how do you think about the timeline
Speaker 5:Well, going public would be helpful there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I suppose. But but but is there anything that that Yeah. Wait. Like I I guess like this it feels like an incredibly exciting business. Very cool.
Speaker 1:I I completely buy the pitch, but there's a little bit of, like, oh, this might be in not like not every LP agreement or there might have had to be an extra conversation. I'm wondering if you can just give me more color around that conversation.
Speaker 6:Well you know, VCs tend to have longer hold periods in general. I mean VC is a power law business, and when you have great companies, you obviously want to keep compounding with them for a long time. Yeah. So I think our partners, know, and then there's a list of them in the press release, we have extraordinary partners, And their investors in turn, they really, you know, they kind of see the vision here, and I think they do, they want to be partnered with us for the long term. I think many of their, you know, investments take ten plus years to play out, and that's obviously very different than the traditional three to five year private equity roadmap.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:So I think in general your starting point is much longer term in nature. And as you know, know the public markets may solve this and providing everybody liquidity for our shareholder base over time. But even the private markets now have become very liquid and, you know, there's a lot more sort of liquidity we had even as a private company.
Speaker 1:If I didn't know the label like service oriented business, like what what financial KPI would I look to to understand if a if a company fits in that bucket?
Speaker 6:Fits for for Long Lake?
Speaker 1:For Long Lake or just like a service oriented business broadly. Is that like particularly like low CapEx or low revenue per employee, so it's highly leveraged to the operating expenses? Like what metrics are typically like popping out at the businesses you look at relative to, you know, some super like ARM, like super clean, like like I imagine that ARM is the exact opposite. Right?
Speaker 6:Well, look, first of all, this is like US is a services economy, it's kind of like 80% of the businesses would fall in this category. Okay. But second of all, know, what we look for really is business quality. That's kind of our orientation at Long Lake. So within the services sector, we're looking for businesses that have many decades of established customer trust
Speaker 4:Sure.
Speaker 6:High customer retention. Yeah. You know, we typically on our businesses see 100% plus net dollar retention. And these are ten, fifteen, twenty plus year customer relationships typically across our portfolio. And you know obviously, MXGBT is over a hundred and eleven year old business at this point founded in 1915 to help American Express travelers check customers get out of Europe.
Speaker 6:Yeah. That's amazing. World War One. Wow. And actually they bought a business called CWT Yeah.
Speaker 6:Carlson Wagonleet, is actually over a 150 years old.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 6:So these are these are very, you know, we were joking about this, but in terms of managing tech transformations, AmexGBT literally was created before the invention of the airline or around the time of the invention of the airline.
Speaker 5:There's this new platform. We think it's going be big. It's like they're they're like birds, but you can can fly in them as a human.
Speaker 6:Yeah, exactly. So in terms of managing text transformations, know these businesses have already managed you know many of And but yeah, so coming back to your question, I think what you typically see is even though these are really extraordinary businesses with incredible customer trust and decades or century plus of operating history, you know the margin structures in these services businesses traditionally have been you know have been lower than software.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And I think what we're seeing is a convergence basically of services and software characteristics over time. Where if you can make your team twenty, thirty, 40% more productive, which is what we're seeing in our existing 30 businesses, then that actually allows you to deliver more customer value, deliver more goods products and services to the customers, which allows you to sort of grow your revenue per employee over time. Mhmm. And then you can grow much more easily, and you can, and delivering you know more operating leverage as you scale, which has historically been what's more associated with software companies and that's why software companies historically were so highly valued and we see that trend as starting to, you know, now in the services market in the next five to ten years we think will start to play out there as well.
Speaker 5:How do you think about your advantage of starting the business twenty eight months ago? Like you said, I I imagine a lot of the other groups and firms that would be in the running to buy the same kind of companies that you are or trying to lean in and and benefit from AI, they're dealing with these big portfolios full of companies that they bought without thinking about what would happen if the cost of producing software
Speaker 1:You're talking about older companies. Yeah. We're talking younger ones too. It's like a sweet spot story.
Speaker 5:Yeah, It's an incredible sweet spot where if you're I won't name any names. Let's say you were buying SaaS companies for billions and billions of dollars, you know, over the last twenty years you're now sitting there and you've got a bunch of you can't you want to think about the future but you're like how do we exit all of these positions or in some cases you know turn them back to Turn the cruise private credit. It's tough.
Speaker 6:Well I think it is a big advantage to be purpose built. We have our entire focus is on our you know partner companies in our existing business. We didn't have any legacy portfolio to have to focus on. So being purpose built, that's one advantage. But the other big advantage is I think it's actually quite hard to do this.
Speaker 6:You really need to bring together world class team across applied AI engineering which Long Lake was founded with, and our founding team actually was primarily applied AI engineers and our co founder and CTO, Rascoff Lohstroh who's world class and has built our whole team from the beginning for this purpose. And then on top of that you need sort of a really core function in change management and growth which we've also built out. And then of course M and A, world class M and A. And we've got folks that have joined us you know, just to give you a flavor, folks from Palantir, Ramp, Glean, you know Robinhood, etcetera. Many many of our tech folks actually were founders before, and you know it turns out it's pretty hard to sell software into these industries, and we have a dynamic of if you actually want to go and change these industries it's easier to do it from from the inside and actually you know partner with the companies themselves the way that we do here.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And then on the finance side folks you know from Blackstone, TPG, GTCR, HIG, some of the very best firms. And you know, I think part of what we've been able to do along with this by focusing on this core mission from day one, it's a pretty exciting mission which is basically bring AI to the real world and help drive the mythical AI GDP growth. Yeah. You know, that's what's been able to attract bring
Speaker 10:people together.
Speaker 1:That's accurate. Last question.
Speaker 5:The prophecy. Fulfill the prophecy.
Speaker 1:The prophecy. Truly.
Speaker 5:We're relying on
Speaker 1:Satya Nadella's prophecy of 10% GDP growth. Show me the numbers. Last question for me. Do you are you surprised that we haven't seen SaaS companies that are getting sort of beaten up make a services acquisition? Or do you expect that, that would change, not that there I want more competition in your sector, but it it it feels like there there might be a thesis there.
Speaker 1:Is that misformed? Do we do we not expect that to happen for some structural reason, or do you think it will maybe happen at some point?
Speaker 6:You know, it's interesting. I wouldn't be surprised. I do think there's a convergence happening, and whether it's services companies buying software or software, you know, buying services Yeah. It wouldn't surprise me. But I do think there's a distinct advantage in being, you know, having a singular focus and being purpose built for our strategy.
Speaker 6:Yeah. You know, think if you're an existing software company, you have your own set of vested interests around your existing customer base, are you then competing with your customers?
Speaker 11:Yep.
Speaker 6:I think it could get a little tricky. Some people I'm sure will navigate that and find find great acquisitions to do, but I think we have a a strong advantage in our in our focus.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking
Speaker 5:the It's time to come on the an honor to finally have you on the show.
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 5:And let's make it a thing every time you maybe Well, announce a new you you like to Once announce
Speaker 1:a month then.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Once a month. But no, you like I'm I'm assuming you like to announce that you've been in a category after you're already done with said category. Mhmm. But you can just come on here to take victory laps.
Speaker 5:So Well,
Speaker 6:thank you guys. It's it's an honor to be here. Thanks for
Speaker 1:having me.
Speaker 2:Great to see Have
Speaker 5:a great day. Cheers.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you later.
Speaker 5:You too. Bye, guys.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Up next, we have Quaid from Bezl. You know him. You love him. He was one of the first TBPN sponsors.
Speaker 1:Good friend of ours. And here he is to break down the big news. How are you doing, Quaid?
Speaker 12:Hey, guys. How are doing?
Speaker 5:What's happening?
Speaker 1:Wait. Okay. Quick question. Are you do you have the same name as your father, grandfather and great grandfather?
Speaker 12:Do I have the same name?
Speaker 1:No. The same first name? No. Because some Quaids are the fourth. So oftentimes if you're if you have the same name as your father, you'll be known as Junior.
Speaker 1:And then if you have the same name as your father and your grandfather, you'll be known as a Trip. So if you ever meet somebody who's like, oh, my name's Trip, sometimes their name might be like John the third. And some Quaids apparently are the fourth John. Like I'm John the fourth but I go by Quaid. Anyway, that was a dumb question.
Speaker 1:Tell us about AP.
Speaker 12:Yeah. It's it's an interesting week right now. Obviously, I think everyone in in the watch world or the watch world adjacent has heard about the the collab with Swatch and everyone sitting around speculating and using AI to render examples of what they think it's going to be. And so we're all sitting and waiting until I believe the sixteenth to learn what the deal is.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So so what is your prediction right now? Do you think it's gonna be a plastic Royal Oak? Do you think it there's a wild card scenario where it's something entirely different?
Speaker 1:Wait. So so so we watched a reveal video that would look like CGI of some gears coming together. But I guess that video didn't actually show us what the design is. Correct? So all of the all of the colored royal oaks that I'm seeing that look like they're plastic, that's fake in AI.
Speaker 1:Is that right?
Speaker 12:Exactly. So I I think truths that we have are they use the Royal Oak font Okay. And like so indicating that it's like it's going to be something derivative of a Royal Oak.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 12:There's been the Swatch Pop Yeah. Which is referenced in Swatch Pop historically as a model that is both a watch, but could also be popped into a lanyard of sorts. So and then you saw a rendering from Swatch of a lanyard, like a little clip of some colored lanyard. So I think that's, like, indicating that that's the direction they're moving. And then you saw some of the packaging in the boxes, and then you saw the system 51 movement.
Speaker 12:And so what that indicates is just that it's going to be an automatic movement. The system 51 movement is Swatch's movement. It's what's in the Blancpawn collaboration. And the cool part about the movement is that it's it's theoretically like a fully disposable movement in the sense that it's it's completely three d rendered and three d printed. And so, like, they don't do repairs on it, for example.
Speaker 12:Like, they just it's, more efficient for them to replace the entire movement.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 12:So it's a mechanical movement, ninety ninety hour power reserve. Like, it has some impressive stats. Yeah. But it's like pretty much Swatch's movement. And so what it looks like happening is there's gonna be some flavor of a Royal Oak in some watch slash lanyard device with an automatic movement.
Speaker 12:It's kind of all we know today. And then there's a there's several color ways that are starting to come out.
Speaker 8:Got it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Can you quickly reset on the terminology? Because you just said, you know, movement automatic. Is there a battery? Is it quartz? Like like, do do do a little bit terminology for everyone.
Speaker 12:Yeah. So quartz would mean, like, it has a battery that runs an automatic movement. It would mean, it's a set of gears that are powering the watch. Okay. Typically, like, in high horology these
Speaker 1:days,
Speaker 12:an automatic movement is indicative of, like, a, you know, a traditional wristwatch the way that you would think about it. There are a few quartz watches that trade really well in the secondary market like a, you know, Jor and Elagance, for example. But largely, like, people are out here lusting for the automatic movements.
Speaker 1:Automatic movements.
Speaker 12:That's why it's interesting. They did that with the collab with Blancpain. They went with the automatic movement. Yeah. And it's like moving a bit up market in that sense.
Speaker 12:And so they're they're they're in that snapshot, they're basically saying like we're doing the same thing here.
Speaker 1:Yep. Were talking about cost. People have been speculating 300 to 15 to $500. And we were sort of going back and forth on like, if it is an automatic movement, even if it's three d printed, it seems like that's not a dollar. Like do you have any sort of benchmark for like what something like this would even cost the two companies to make?
Speaker 1:Obviously the margins are great across all specters of the watch economy. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Cost and then price estimate. And we're gonna come back to this on Monday. So you better be you better nail it.
Speaker 12:Yeah. I'm certainly not the guy to give you the breakdown there, but I will say if you look at this the Moonswatch launch, I think it was the $285 retail. That's a quartz example. Yeah. Blancpain, I think they launched that in the April.
Speaker 12:Okay. And that's directly the same movement that would be powering this. So I think the speculation is somewhere in the 4 hundreds. The only interesting, like, morsel here that's that's nuanced is, obviously, the two high horology brands they they collabed with previously are, like, part of the Swatch Group.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 12:And this is the only one that's external to the Swatch Group. Obviously, like, AP is in a bit of a different level from a, like, a Rarefied Air perspective.
Speaker 5:So I don't
Speaker 12:know how much, like, using that brand factors into the profit sharing. Mhmm. But it's super interesting. I don't know. It's like, I think a lot of people are torn
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Because in many ways, it's a fun accessible moment to engage with a brand that's otherwise like the, you know, you know, to get a base model Royal Oak today, think is like 30,000 at retail and and certainly more in the secondary market.
Speaker 5:Yeah. To me to me, it's it's strategic because they're they are dealing with fakes. There's no desirable the fake there's a fake problem and then there's the fact that there's not a super desirable AP in my view under $30. Right? Because nobody that's like, I don't know any I don't know any like, you know, I don't have any friends that are like, oh, I'm just really saving up for a code 1159 like I gotta have it.
Speaker 5:Whereas I do know a lot of people that are like very excited that, you know, to
Speaker 1:Also like with
Speaker 5:like get an AP at some
Speaker 1:point With Patek, like some people are like, yeah, I'll start with a dress watch of Calatrava. Like, I'm not that upset about that because it has a lineage, it has a story and it's probably three to five x cheaper than a Nautilus. If it gets me on that track, I'm okay. But AP hasn't had that. Sorry.
Speaker 1:What else?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So so to me, I don't by doing this, they're in in in some ways, like, I feel like counteracting the flood of fakes because a lot of people out there that'd be like, well, I'll I you know, I'm not gonna get the Royal Oak yet, but I'll get I'll get one of these AP Swatches if it does end up being a wristwatch, and I think I think that could be cool, and it and it provides an entry point into the brand. I don't think there's people out there that are like, well, was gonna get, you know, a stainless steel Royal Oak, but now I'm just gonna get the the Swatch Right? Like it doesn't I don't think it cannibalizes them at all. In fact, like a lot of people that already have a Royal Oak, a real one will be like, well, I'll get one of these to wear to the beach because like I maybe would would have worn a G Shock or something like that.
Speaker 5:So I think it's pretty smart. But But what do you think, Wade? That said,
Speaker 4:I text
Speaker 5:you this morning
Speaker 1:and say It's over.
Speaker 4:Let's I
Speaker 3:think it
Speaker 12:comes down to how much, you know, it devalues the ownership of the $30,000 plus Royal Oak. Right? I think, like, the the pro side argument is that, to your point, Jordy, it's an interesting entry point. It allows people to kind of aspirationally engage with the product before they can buy the product. I think the con is if you see a bunch of people wearing a $400 example of the watch that you spent $30,000 for it, is it in some way detract from the ownership that you have?
Speaker 12:There's a lot of these arguments in the Internet of like, you don't see Ferrari out here collaborating with Toyota to make a candidate. There's a lot of those commentaries.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But another another I I guess I can something I go to is like if a Porsche owner pulls up to grab a coffee on a Sunday morning in a GT three RS and they see someone with a Carrera T, they're not sitting there like, oh, that Carrera T is devaluing my g g three r s. They're thinking Mogged.
Speaker 12:That's the that's the equivalent of, like, you know, someone pulling up with, you know, an open work ceramic
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Royal Oak, and then someone's walking in with a fifteen four fifty thirty seven millimeter starter Royal Oak. Right? Like, I think you're still in that same realm.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:This would be like, you know, if you show up in your, you know, GT three Touring and someone else pulls up with the Toyota collab that
Speaker 6:you know With a
Speaker 5:badge? No. Just a Camry with a badge.
Speaker 1:The badge. Yeah. With the badge.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I don't why in
Speaker 5:the chat says they should. Toyota makes a good car. I agree.
Speaker 1:I agree. I Okay.
Speaker 5:Porsche badge. I want the Porsche badge BYD.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. The real the the real move is down badging. Get the Carrera GT, throw the Boxster on the back. See if anyone anyone notices.
Speaker 1:Are you noticing any movement on bezel yet? Any early signs of weakness in the traditional AP or Royal Oak Market or just an increase in listings even?
Speaker 12:It's an interesting time because I I haven't seen a response to this yet other than, like, a lot of people asking us questions. And a lot of people, like, want access to that. Think the same thing happened when the Moon Swatch came out. Like Mhmm. We had everything from, like, you know, professional athletes to regular people asking for, like, big boxes of these Moon Swatches, and we don't traditionally sell them.
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 12:sure. We did some interesting concierge stuff there. It was interesting time, though, where I think there's a funny thing happening in the Royal Oak market, right, generally right now where there's a lot of, like, really cool discontinued examples that are available that are trending kind of at retail or less than retail. And so, you know, if you look back on the rocks on the Royal Oak catalog, there's, you know, you can get a fifteen three hundred. It's a 39 millimeter, oftentimes, arguably better size for in the low thirties right about where retail is.
Speaker 12:You can get a $15,415 500 and, you know, and now you're at the fifteen five ten. Like, those examples trade above retail. There's a lot of them that are trading at retail over time. And, like, synthetically, they're kind of you know, you're getting a Royal Oak out of that offer. And so we're seeing a lot of people buy Royal Oaks and getting great deals on them right now in market.
Speaker 12:And so it'll be really interesting to see if this release, like, generally just elevates all Royal Oaks and it's just hype in the market and everyone wants them. Or if it does the inverse where you start to realize, like, oh, maybe I don't need to wait on this wait list for this thing that I'm lousing for. I'll buy this watch, and now it opens my mind to, like, you know, maybe I'll buy the older example for $28,000 versus waiting for the new one for, you know, 33 or whatever that is.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Well, what else is new in the watch world? What's the next event on the calendar that everyone's has their eyes towards?
Speaker 12:I think the next big one is Geneva Watch Days is in is in September. So that's a big fun one. But I think everyone's still reeling from watches and wonders. Yeah. That that still happened quite
Speaker 5:recently. Who won?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 12:I don't know if anyone won. I think there's a lot of great examples. The The
Speaker 5:salmon the salmon ultra That's overseas.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:I would say big fan of the overseas in salmon. I'm a I'm a good sucker for a salmon dial, big fan of the kind of 38 millimeter Nautilus. Mhmm. But I think there's been sneaky winners. Like, I I think the UN super freak was incredible and, like, being there in person and checking all of out was really awesome.
Speaker 12:Lot of cool releases and it was super fun being there. So, you know, just another nothing like, wow. I didn't expect this, but just a lot of, like, really great stuff that makes me excited to buy and sell watches.
Speaker 5:Fantastic. Amazing. Well, thank you
Speaker 1:so much for coming on
Speaker 9:the show.
Speaker 5:You for the for the intel. Always a good time. Excited to see the launch. Are you gonna be camping out at the any Swatch stores this weekend or you got better things to do?
Speaker 12:I I will not be doing that unfortunately, but I look forward to to getting the coverage of it and and see. I'm sure we'll I'm sure we'll be placing some examples into some clients' hands as soon as it it pops up. It'll it'll probably be very desirable in the very beginning for sure.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, thank you so much. Have a great week. You, Craig. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 12:Awesome. Thanks, guys.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. We can pull up this post from simplifying stocks. We got another chart, maybe a chart crime. We'll decide. We'll put Tyler on the case.
Speaker 1:People are constantly trying to map this boom to the .com boom. Does it look exactly like it? Simplifying stocks certainly seems like it does match up perfectly. It feels like 1999. Yes, it does.
Speaker 1:They took the 2026 stock market overlaid it. It looks perfect. It looks like we're due for a crazy, crazy breakout. What will happen? I don't think anybody knows, but we'll let you decide.
Speaker 1:If you benchmark and fit the graph and change the y axis and the x axis perfectly, you got the perfect pattern. The chartologists and the chatter going wild. Anyway, we'll have
Speaker 5:to dig We're gonna find out
Speaker 7:We're gonna find
Speaker 5:where we are exactly
Speaker 1:From here, I do I do think time. I I I would predict that the market's either gonna go up or down over the next couple years. Like like one of those two outcomes for sure.
Speaker 5:I think a 50% chance.
Speaker 1:Fifty fifty up?
Speaker 5:It goes up.
Speaker 1:50 up, 50 down.
Speaker 5:I don't wanna be too, you know You know I don't wanna Historically,
Speaker 1:it's gone up more than it's gone down. So you should actually be like 51% up or 52% up if you want to be, you know, historically accurate. Anyway, thank you for tuning in. Have a great day. Leave us five stars in Apple Podcast and Spotify.
Speaker 1:Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com. Goodbye.