Swatch AP Collab, Cerebras IPO, Trump Visits China | Ferdinand Dabitz, Spencer Rascoff, Eric Olson, Matt Lohstroh, Jay Azhang, Amir Sadeghian, Alexander Taubman, Quaid Walker

You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, May 11th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital.

Another one.

We got a banger show for you today, folks. We got a lot of guests coming on. We got 2 hours of back-to-back interviews with everyone from Spencer Raskoff, the CEO of Match Group, to Alex Tubman 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 Adhemar Piguet, AP, is partnering with Swatch to launch a watch that's, uh, you could call it a knockoff of the Royal Oak. It's certainly— it's not a knockoff because it's official.

It's from the actual—

they knock themselves off. And there's a bunch of interesting business, uh, business implications of why they did this, what it means, what will happen. Uh, let's pull up the video of the launch first, and you got to 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. So we're going to play the— this is from the official Swatch account. This is something that looked like, like a fake clickbait video, but it's real. Here it is. What do you think? AI or CGI?

CGI. Precision handmade CGI.

Yes.

Like, yes.

Not a Transformer in sight the way My grandfather used to like it. There will be interesting pushbacks. They're like, oh, this movie is awesome. It only used CGI, no AI involved whatsoever. Anyway, so wait, so is it a manual watch? Is it a mechanical?

I think it's unclear, right? So what— there's been a massive amount of— everyone has basically created somewhat realistic looking posters for these.

Oh, really?

The actual watch has not been revealed at all. And that's the only thing that's been—

Just based off of the fact that Swatch did a collaboration with a luxury watch brand, the MoonSwatch, which was based on the MoonWatch, right?

Oh yeah, I forgot about.

Yeah, and so the MoonSwatch was successful and was 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 MoonSwatch, what, how they saved costs because there's a certain amount of cost that just goes into making a movement, a mechanical movement. It's a lot of small pieces. Sure, you can put it on a manufacturing line and press them and stuff.

John learning that a couple hundred bucks watches have egregious profit margins.

I know they have egregious profit margins, but still, like, the work to put together all the gears and manufacturing it, like, I would be surprised if If it's a mechanical watch, is it really gonna be like $5? No, it's not a Happy Meal toy.

So, there's the fake Chinese version of all these popular watches: Nautilus, APs, etc. You can get them, like, you could go on Alibaba, get them for in the low hundreds of dollars, right? And so, it is totally possible to put together a watch that has a lot of the same componentry.

I saw Nico Leonard on, who's a great YouTube watch reviewer, fun, very fun creator, on the Ice Coffee Coffee Hour with Graham Stephan. And they gave him— this is a fun little game that they— they're getting really good at playing games with their guests on this podcast. So they give him 6 watches, and they tell him that 3 of them are knockoffs and 3 of them are authentic. And he has to guess, and he nails it. He gets all of them correct, even though some of them were very convincing fakes, especially of Patek.

So a lot of people are saying this is Bear.

It's over.

It's over. They're saying, sell everything, freak out, sell all your APs.

So rest in peace.

AP has, you know, consistently done things over the last few years that were provocative, right? Some of the various partnerships they've had with talent, right? Celebrities, etc., have been somewhat provocative. But overall, the brand seems healthy, right? It's not going to 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. And why not? Why not just lean into that, 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, 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 will be immense.

And the gap has been growing because the aftermarket prices have been increasing faster than incomes.

They basically were like, oh, this is what our watches are worth aftermarket, we should price there, right?

So, and so you quickly wound up with like, to get in the game, you're in, you're at $30K. And that's just a lot. And there's not as much of 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 a code. You go with a code.

Aren't those like $60,000?

Oh, they are.

I think they're really expensive. No, no, I think they're really pricey. I don't know. But yeah, maybe they'll bring down the price on that. But Live Monitor, I guess, Live Monitor says spend $500,000 or $500 and you get something that looks pretty similar. Of course, very different materials.

You can get a Code 1159 for low to mid-20s.

20s? Okay. But there's another watch collab that I want your reaction to. You got to see this. This one's gonna fly off the shelves, potentially selling more units than the Swatch AP collab. It's the Rolex collab. We can pull this up.

Something you've never seen before and you won't see again. A chrome hearts Rolex Daytona, 18-karat gold.

Starting offer, 370,000.

Okay, 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.

Do you think this is real or just something someone made randomly?

Official Rolex over here telling me that the dial might be aftermarket.

I don't know, you figure that out.

I don't know, I don't, I don't follow it. It's funny, uh, um, somebody on X over the weekend was, um, assuming that I was into Chrome Hearts because I joked a lot about Chrome Hearts. But no, I'm not enough of an expert, uh, to—

No, that's Dylan. Um, 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, 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, uh, which, which one's the new Rolex? The Land Dweller, which has been, I think, selling very well. And, uh, it— this one has been— the Code 11.59 has not been doing as well.

Um, well, let's head over to Reddit.

AP just killed its brand is spiking on Google. But, uh, there was some debate over whether or not this person is—

this person is obviously disagreeing with that line by saying like, interest is through the roof, right?

Oh, oh, oh, I thought it was interest in the quote, AP just killed its brand.

Yeah, my view is that—

Oh, because the brand is attention.

Like, I don't know how many of these they'll sell. I'm assuming they'll sell out. 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, want to work towards getting the real thing. Uh, let's head over to Reddit and check out what they're doing there.

What are they doing there?

They have, uh, somebody has figured, figured this out ages ago. I want your reaction, John. Omega on one side, but the Omega is strapped to the wrist with a Whoop band.

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. 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 Whoop data and found out that they had sleep apnea by analyzing it with an LLM, 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 like health monitoring. And so there's a lot of like DIY science that comes from it. So I don't know, it's weird no matter what, because if you have a Whoop on one end and then on one hand and then 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 less in your face.

You can, I think you can.

The Oura Ring is not very intrusive. And, but they should really make the, what do they call it? The Boston Fitbit. It's the ankle monitor or something like that. I can say that 'cause I'm Irish. 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 license its crown jewels to Swatch for a flood of legit affordable Royal Pop pieces. A masterclass in damage control. And so 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.

Here's the thing, they have managed to, I think, maintain a trademark around the, the octagon.

[Speaker:JASON] Yeah, well, there's a trade dress, so you can never do a full knockoff of a direct product. But they couldn't lock down the idea of an octagon. That was like simply too much. So I don't know how much of this was damage control around the intellectual property, but it's certainly an interesting thing. And there's also some people thinking that this is a way to make money. You see this, GemChanger said, "Every unemployed guy with a group chat of equally unemployed friends, this post is for you." "The Royal Pop drops Saturday, May 16th." They're coming out with this quickly, just one week teaser, and then it's out. Smart, smart. He says, "This is the easiest four-figure week you'll have all year, if you're willing to do something that resembles work, resembles work for 14 hours. If you're willing, let me lay out exactly what to do. 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. And then he shares some expectation about where this might trade, maybe 12x retail, maybe 5x 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, or Singapore. You got to go to secondary cities, Troy, Michigan, King of Prussia, Canoga Park, Honolulu. Going to Honolulu just for this.

I think this is— I think this is going to be a hit. Yeah, the haters— I think the haters are wrong. People love G-Shocks. Sort of a combination.

I think so too.

It'll do well.

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 Stryver, like, you know, uh, uh, it's a point along a curve, which I think will be popular. And it's also just like a lot of fun and it'll look good.

Anyway, head over to China.

What are they doing over in China?

They're BYD. BYD got Daniel Craig as the new face.

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 China uses James Bond for a euro push. The world is changing. Let's play this advertisement from BYD.

He must have had an exclusive Did he ever have an exclusive with Aston, or was that just the James Bond franchise?

Yeah, I don't think I've ever seen him in an Aston Martin ad. But let's see this. To live in 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 shift. They have to. It's so exciting.

Do you think?

I mean, doesn't life ask us to step out of the shadows and embrace the new, to evolve?

Are there car seats for dogs?

I 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. What do you think? Yeah, see, post-James Bond, he has a lot more comedic timing. He's done SNL a few times. He's done a couple comedies. There's a lot more to it, but he will still just never not be James Bond because he had such a successful run of James Bond performances. He's really driving this car.

Is this in Helsinki or—

Pause, pause.

Rewind 10 seconds.

Okay. What are we listening for?

Listen, because there's some—

Okay. Doesn't that sound like James Bond?

Like an internal combustion engine for a second there.

Yeah.

So they're LARPing.

It's played through the speakers while you're driving. Is that an option?

Maybe.

I feel like it has to be an option if they're advertising it like that.

Yeah.

But who knows? You never know 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 like the design of that car. I think that's cool. It looks kind of like a wagon. It's got like a, it's a shooting brake design.

I love a shooting brake.

It looks nice. But yeah, what a great partnership and what a great run from Daniel Craig to be able to just like cash in on the aura of being James Bond forever, even after the franchise ends and he has to move on to other things. UBI. It really is remarkable.

If you're Daniel Craig.

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. 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 he plays Benoit Blanc from Knives Out. And even that character, even 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. 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 do we know what the BYD Zenza is priced at?

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 1.5 seconds and has like a 700-mile range.

I think European price tag is $134,000.

Oh, okay. They're actually getting pricey. Usually when you see these BYD numbers, it's always like it's the performance of a Ferrari for the price of a Camry.

Well, so there's the Denza Z, which is sick. The estimated price is $60,000 to $140,000. and then, but a lot of the other Denzas are in the $40,000 to $60,000 range.

Okay. Okay. Not too bad. Not too bad. Well, you know where I'd like to see Daniel Craig do his next endorsement? Cerebris. I would love to see a Super Bowl ad where he's lamenting the slow speed of AI inference and he solves his problem in this Super Bowl ad by partnering with Cerebris. 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 14th. I heard maybe Wednesday, but any day now. And they're offering 30 million shares. That's up from 28 million. So they're, they're offering more shares than they were expecting to. And they also increased their price range from $115 to $125, up to $150, $160. And so they're going to raise, instead of $3.5 billion, they'll be raising $4.8 billion. And allegedly, the round is massively oversubscribed to the tune of 20x demand for that $5 billion. So something like a— wait, $100 billion of demand for that $5 billion, which is remarkable at that price. Now, does that mean it's going to 10x on day one? No, but it's certainly a good sign going into into this IPO. And so that's why I called it like a potential $50 billion IPO, just to sort of have some parallelism with the $500 watch and the $50 trillion of GDP meeting in China that we'll talk about later. So there was a bunch of FUD—

Tom Brown this morning says, if you were looking for the ideal time to IPO, being a chip company in May 2026 is hard to beat.

It really is. It really is. He had a great piece called The Inference Shift today in Stratechery. Go check it out. There's been a bunch of FUD about Cerebras. I mean, 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 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 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 and transformer-based architectures are still dominant and inference costs are extremely important in the age of AI agents and speed is so, so important. And so demand is, 10xing every few months at this point. And there's a very, very clear business story. Tyler, you have anything else to say?

Yeah, I mean, just like if you use the 3BIS chips, like you can use it, GPT-5.3 Spark in Codex. It's like insane how fast.

It's crazy. It's crazy. It's wild. Yeah, if you wanna give it a try and actually demo it, which I think is important with these semiconductor companies, if they're abstract and you're like, I don't know if it's a real company or something, you can actually just go download Codex Desktop Pick from the dropdown 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 5 minutes later, sometimes 2 hours later. We'll cut all of that in half or by 10, and that's where this is going. So you can see 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 lab that has exploding demand, Cursor, Anthropic, Meta and Google, like, unless they have like a direct answer to this, I would see them being a buyer in the near term. So Cerebras upsized its IPO and top of the new range. Reuters says the IPO drew orders for more than 20x the shares available. 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 billion market cap by the end of day one. That would be about 100% above the target valuation of $26 billion 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, The wafer's cut into hundreds of smaller chips. The chips are packaged individually and connected together in systems. Cerebras took a completely different approach. They use the entire 300mm wafer, 4 trillion transistors, 900,000 AI-oriented compute cores. And the big thing is the petabits per second of internal bandwidth. So better memory bandwidth for KV caches and everything that you need to do in AI, I think something like that. Benchmark is gonna be absolutely cleaning up. They still own over 20% of Cerebras apparently. And if it—

When did they make that investment?

Eric Vishra made it and he—

I'm looking it up.

He has quite the portfolio in his X account bio. Fireworks, Benchling, Contentful, Cerebras.

So they did it in May 2016.

Sunday Robotics. May 2016. Wow. Overnight success right there. If it trades at even half of how Shanghai priced More Threads and CambriaCon, it will be over $500 billion in less than 2 years. OK, 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. Quantian says, Cerebras is pretty funny because you can just imagine the origin story being some boomer, non-technical manager going, "Okay, but why can't you just put 50 gigs of L3 cache on this chip?" And the engineer being put on the spot and going, "Uh, I guess you could." And someone else in the comments here chiming in, "I, 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. I think it helped. Just weld the thing that does that onto the other thing. 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 black boxes. CO2, what's going on with CO2?

They did the B.

They did the B.

That same year.

Ooh, in 2016? Yeah. Overnight success. Interesting, back-to-back rounds in 2016 and then just trough of disillusionment for a decade. Not really, but I mean, it was like, Cerebras was pretty quiet for 5 or 6 years. Like, it took a while to actually get to scale. And you can see it when you talk to the founder.

Apparently they did, yeah, well, they did the C in 2017, so they were making progress, but certainly, certainly you can imagine some of the investors saying, ah, this AI thing. I might have been 10 years too early.

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. 5 industry veterans, Andrew Feldman and some other folks joined. Andrew Feldman has been on an absolute tear, generational run even. Well, let's move over to China. Donald Trump is meeting with Xi Jinping this week. And you were sharing some info on how many journalists are going over there.

They're calling it a field trip.

It's a field trip.

They're calling it a field trip because Tim Cook is going, Larry Fink, Steve Schwarzman. Oh, okay.

I thought it was journalists, but I guess it's tech people.

Jane from Citi, Chuck Robbins is headed over there, a friend from Cisco, David Solomon.

Interesting.

And a whole bunch of others. I guess Elon is supposedly on the trip as well. Mm-hmm.

Well, hopefully they can get a word in edgewise, because 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 U.S. and Israel's war against Iran, which had 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. The, uh—

As of this morning, the peace deal was, according to Trump, on major life support.

On major life support. Is that good? I guess it's 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. 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. Supply and shrinks countries' 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 to help ships navigate the straits safely, adding this time that the operation would include, quote, other things. Very ominous. So I think there's a few different things. So Trump, 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. 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 soundbites 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 you think they might be clip farming potentially, potentially, or farming potentially framebogging each other. You never know. Tyler, what do you think?

Yeah, I think it would be interesting if it's also, you know, at a higher level than just the supply chain because like last week there was all the news about about CAISI, right, doing the new AI regulation, right? Like what's gonna happen? Like are we gonna, you know, you do a bunch of tests before the models come out. It seems like they're kind of moving away from that, like less kind of safety-focused.

China should be like, send us Mythos 2, 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.

Well, why stop there? Why not just send the weights?

Yeah, just send the weights. That's actually way more easy. Yeah, way more efficient. We'll inspect it and we'll make sure that it's okay for the Chinese population. Yeah, but like, we've talked about this a little bit, but actually send all the GPUs I need to run it to. Sorry.

Like we've talked about this a little bit, but like there are people in China who are actually worried about like the, you know, very like safety pills.

Yeah, yeah.

But it seems like people going over there like Tim Cook.

Yeah.

I mean, there's a chance that these people are not going to be arguing in favor of like safety. So it'll be very interesting to see. If, if, if there was—

Yeah, I mean, we have seen the Chinese Joe Weisenthal. There might be a Chinese Ilyasur Yudakowsky. We must find him and surface him. Who knows? But no, I mean, of course, some, like, international collaboration there seems very, very important in the long term. Everyone agrees on this.

Oh, right. Before we get to our first guest—

Run through it.

Palmer brings up an important point. It's time for the United States Postal Service to ban junk mail.

Ooh, I like that.

Unsolicited spam calls are already prohibited by the CC. Emails are heavily regulated by the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Junk mail is the majority of mail. 100 million trees per year. Enough. It really is way too much.

This is very interesting. I put all of the 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 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, 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 CAN-SPAM app seems to be somewhat effective. I wind up getting a lot more 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 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, 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 it 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. But the average American spends only 30 seconds sorting their mostly spam mail each day looking for the real stuff. That's over a billion dollars. Well, Well, EarthClassMail, 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 makes it through. But you definitely don't want—

Have OpenClaw devour the slop for you.

Yeah. No, there's actually a button in EarthClassMail and many of the other virtual mailbox services. You can send it to the shredder. You can say that is shreddable, and you could automate that potentially. Actually. But yeah, people are sharing that there are ways to unsubscribe from junk mail. optoutprescreen.com, dmachoice.org. And Palmer says he's already done it. I still get pounds of junk mail every single day. Pounds every day is a lot. I feel like he's high up on the junk mail delivery. I feel like I get a few pieces a day. Probably not pounds.

So many, it's—

But pounds? You think you get pounds? We need to weigh your junk mail, my junk mail, your junk mail.

I probably get a quarter.

You get junk mail?

I don't know if I— maybe I get one mail piece of junk mail like a week.

Okay.

I don't really check my mailbox.

Just say you're low LTV, bro.

Yeah, I think I'm getting like, I'm like a quarter pounder.

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 immediate—

Yeah, I'm kind of telling on myself here.

Yeah, someone's advertising a Ford F-150 here. You're not in the market, I guess. Uh, anyway, uh, what else is going on in the timeline before we move to our first guest? Um, uh, new service for SF retailers and home buyers: I will show up to your open houses wearing OpenAI or Anthropic merch. I charge a 5% commission just just to fully pump up the price. It's called chandelier marketing.

Will that actually help though? Because I think some people would be afraid. Would just be like, I'm not even gonna bid.

But I think some people at the open house tour might see, oh, there's an OpenAI or Anthropic person. I should make my offer particularly strong if I want this. Even if there isn't that much demand. I love the founder railway. It's great.

What else?

What is going on here? New, before ChatGPT was released, before Microsoft's $1 billion bet, and long before plans for an IPO, there was the University of Michigan putting $20 million in AI. Go blue.

Pull up Tyler, pull up Tyler.

What happened here? Like, how did this actually happen? There we go. There you go, nailed it.

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.

Yeah, because it's reversed. It's reversed on the camera.

So it's just something to work on. That's just some constructive feedback. I believe that you can be better at this task.

This feels like the University of Michigan was considering donating. And then at some point, they just became aware of like, oh, well, like you could also participate in the for-profit. And they're like, oh, that sounds good. That's better, maybe. 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. Do you know who this is? The Kook Capital LLC? I don't know.

Oh, this is ASTS.

It has to be ASTS, right? SpaceX rival, tiny SpaceX rival. Anyway. Very, very funny. What else is going on? Oh, we gotta play this next Instagram. This one is so funny. Yeah, I don't think you've seen this Jordi. Did I send this to you or no? Okay, play this Instagram. 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 our house up as a business. What 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 in Energy Drinks? Happens all the time, Jon. And people think AI will diffuse quickly. Debatable. Debatable. Cathie Wood is posting about SpaceX AI, the new company. Thanks to its deal with Anthropic XAI, now SpaceX AI is pivoting from massive losses at Colossus to significant profitability as a neocloud on an estimated $5 to $6 billion in annual revenues. Brilliant SpaceX move, Elon Musk. And Gwyneth Paltrow.

Yes.

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 totally possible that she has SpaceX allocation at this point, but I think it was a mistake. I think it was a mistag. 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.

Hello.

Welcome back.

What's happening?

Great to be back.

Big day.

Big day. You've been on the show before, but remind everyone about yourself, what you do, and then give us the news.

Ferdinand, we have been charging a bank called Augustus, and today we've announced conditional approval for that bank. I can give the brief intro and the brief spiel on the company.

Please.

Of course, when I come to the show, I have to bring a prop. And our guy Peter Thiel, of course, always said when you have a fintech company, you have to bring the $100 bill.

Oh, there we go.

I think we can do the same thing. We always have this little joke where we bring the $100 bill and then we ask, what is the problem with this? But it's a trick question. And in our opinion, there is no problem with this. And the dollar is the best product in the history of the world.

Insane PMF.

Insane PMF.

Insane PMF. Like, sometimes there's these smart, smart people that tell me, like, water. What about water? But no, no, I think, like, the dollar is the best product of the world. And there's quasi-infinite global demand for it, especially outside of the United States. And I think there are all kinds of ways to think about it. Europe and the US, they contribute 40% to global GDP, but they contribute 80% to global reserve holdings and global money movement. There are also qualitative ways to think about where I think the existence and frankly, commercial success of the stablecoin stack, right? The global dollar account is like, frankly, might be a pure expression of this thesis where this is the best product in the history of the world. And there's infinite global demand.

Okay. So you're— oh yeah, but, but, and it's big.

But for us, distribution is broken, right? And we think distribution breaks at the, at the clearing bank layer.

Okay.

And 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 actually move and hold the money.

Right.

And we think these clearing banks are made of paper. Right. We think they're slow. So if you want to move money through them, it takes a day, maybe takes 2 days. They're closed on the weekends and they close after 5 PM and they close on Christmas because humans run them. And we think they're kind of like they come from a different time. And we think with Augustus, the thesis is there's an opportunity to rethink that for the era and build that from scratch in a full-stack way.

Okay.

What is the news today?

The approval.

We got a bank.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We have conditional approval from the OCC to charter. Augustus as a US full-service national bank.

Yeah.

All right, so my first question, when did you know that you wanted to name your bank after Augustus Torrico?

Yeah, I've already had someone message me, and I think like, if it all falls down, he can buy the domain for less wrong price or something like that.

So you're bullish on the dollar. I was just watching—

Wow, Augustus.com.

Ray Dalio on Ross Douthat. He's extremely bearish on America, bearish on the dollar. Have you heard any of the popular supercycle theories? America is doomed, the ultimate black pills on the dollar, and how do you push back?

Yeah, I mean, I've heard all of them. I think you can disagree with some, you can disagree with the other, but I think it's also like, it's a question of mission, right? Like, what's the future you want to build?

Sure.

And I think What are the alternatives? Right. And I think in a way, the mission for this company would be much less clear 10 or 20 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.

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 BRICS Pay thing every other day and like, yeah, like we're going to get off the dollar and have our own little clearing thing here. And so it's about mission. It's about the question, how can we secure and advance Western currency dominance? Right. I think one, one instrument is to build better clearing banks, to remove friction from the distribution of this amazing product, because the product market fit is still there. Right. If you talk to people outside the US, in many cases, this is the golden standard. This is what people want most. It's just incredibly hard to get.

Last question. Who's the customer? How do you acquire them?

So customers are global financial institutions.

Okay. So not companies, not startups. You're not going to individuals or anything like that, at least not yet.

Exactly. Nothing of that. Yeah, we go to global FIs. So, so a bank in South America, banks of East Asia, a financial institution in the Global South or anywhere else, and we acquire them. Right. And so we've launched euro clearing kind of like a while ago and sold that to many of the largest financial institutions. Right. So we do. Payments for companies like Kraken, for example, and process billions of euros for them today. And so now the hope is, of course, that we can be much more useful to these customers with the dollar as we plug that into the platform as well today.

Well, congratulations on OCC approval and thanks for stopping by the show.

Great to see you.

We'll talk to you soon.

Thank you for fighting the fight.

Have a good one.

Our dollar.

Yes.

Cheers.

The dollar strong.

Great to see you, dude.

Goodbye. Up next, we have Spencer Raskoff from Match Group. Welcome to the show. Fantastic entrance, very quick. Sometimes I have to do a whole ramble.

Very sneaky.

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.

Yeah, great to be here, and thanks for what you do for technology and also for the LA tech community. Yeah, it is fun. It's great to be here.

Very long LA of us to do this here.

You've been LA for a long time.

I appreciate it. I grew up here, and I've been, you know, I've I moved back here about 10 years ago and have been all about promoting the LA tech community. I started a company called.LA, which is a media company to promote LA tech. Oh, no way, you started that? That's amazing. Yeah, so yeah, quickly about my background. I did some time on Wall Street and then broke free from that.

Thank you for your service.

Thank you.

Not enough people.

Wanted to do something more entrepreneurial. My first startup was Hotwire.com, which we sold to Expedia. Then I was at Expedia briefly, and then I left to start Zillow. I was the CEO and co-founder of Zillow, ran it for, 15, 16 years.

Yeah.

And then kind of retired for a couple of years, angel invested in new startups, incubated new startups, mostly with former Zillow folks.

Yeah.

And then stepped in as CEO of Match Group about a year and a half ago.

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, yeah, really capable.

And I was on— I was on the board and I'd been on the board for about a year.

Okay. Okay.

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. There is a loneliness epidemic. It is a real global problem. It's existential.

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 it. And so that's why I jumped in.

So you're on the board, you're watching. When you choose to step into the CEO role, are you, do you have a 90-day plan? Do you have a big transformation plan? Like what were you going into? Because it's, you're showing up tabula rasa here.

You had a lot of your best ideas. Hopefully you had been—

Yeah, you'd been like, hey, I told you guys to, acquire this company, or change this, or whatever.

I have this kind of mantra, and I write it on the board. I put it up. There are stickers around the company of it, posters, et cetera. It's great people, properly motivated and properly organized, 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. So what is—

It's like the entire business.

So it starts with people.

Yeah.

It starts with people, and motivation, and organization. So that's where I started. That was the beginning of the 90-day plan.

Who's here?

Why are they here? How are they organized? And so, for example, I immediately started by breaking down silos. Match Group was basically a roll-up.

I was going to ask you about— it feels like the ultimate siloed organization.

It was.

It was.

It was basically a holding company. And I've transitioned it to being an operating company. So Barry Diller's IAC bought the cat— you 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 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 6 or 7 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. And at that point, I took on the role of running Tinder myself.

Yeah.

—because Tinder— well, obviously with a great team, but being essentially CEO of Tinder. Tinder's the number one dating app.

Hey, guys, I got this.

With the team, right? So it's the number one app in 166 countries.

And actually, you buy stock in it, and writing marketing copy.

I haven't gone that far. That's where I— There's a great team. We still have a great team. But look, it's almost $2 billion of our $3.5 billion of revenue. And it's by far the largest dating app worldwide. Yet it had sort of lost its way in terms of innovation. It hadn't been founder-led for a long time. It hadn't prioritized user outcomes. It hadn't had an innovative product roadmap. And so we recast all of that about 6 months ago, and we've made enormous progress in just 6 months. And I shared a lot of the metrics last week on earnings. We are turning around Tinder, and it feels great. That's amazing.

How do you think about desiloing? Because I guess my big question is like, how important are the individual brands? Because I imagine that it's the last thing you desilo silo is like, oh, if you're a 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. But that feels like the last thing that you would do.

But why? Yeah, what we've started by doing is integrating a lot of the backends.

I'm sure, like finance, legal, HR, and then also databases.

But even the backends of the product. Sure. So for example, BLK, our app for Black daters, and Chispa, our app for Hispanic daters, and Match.com. Like, all of these now have an integrated backend. So we launch a new feature, and it goes out across a dozen or so different—

So like one cloud platform, one set of SREs and engineers that work across everything.

What we haven't done yet is some of the liquidity sharing that I think maybe you're getting at, which is, 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. Okay. And, and that's been very effective. So you'd be on one of our apps and 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. Got it. And now you're searching in League. That's driven a lot of audience growth and, and revenue cross-sell. But that's, that's kind of where we started.

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 going to be able to sell to these guys because they want everything. Is that something that happens? Yes, it does.

And I mean, I guess I would describe it this way. Every—

Has anyone sold multiple companies? To us?

No, no, not that I'm aware of.

There's no Nikita Beer of—

Because there's a couple of these serial entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley do this type of thing. I mean, you'll see it in like cybersecurity or enterprise software where it's like, oh, he sold 3 companies to Google that do basically the same thing.

Yeah, I know. We haven't had any repeat, repeat sellers, but look at Zillow Group. Yeah, we bought 17 companies during my time as CEO of Zillow Group. So far we've bought kind of 1.5 in my year and a half here. So we bought Her, which was the leading lesbian or sapphic app. And then we invested last week $100 million in Sniffies, which is the number 2 app. For non-heterosexual men. Sure. With a right to buy the rest of that company. Sure, sure. So we made those two moves so far. But, um, you know, there are a lot of startups in this space. There always have been, there always will be, because every 15- to 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. 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 a network effect very clearly, but at the same time, is there also some advantage that new platforms have?

It can be sort of a nightclub, you know, kind of a hug in the first round.

You're the first one there. You're the first one there, you know, big fish in a—

Yeah, I mean, 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. Yeah. This is, of course, you know, 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, 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 a four-way chat.

There was a YC company, Grooper, that was doing something similar to that with three and three. That's right. And I don't know where that wound up, but we didn't buy it.

But fascinating idea. 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.

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 the founder there, and we're the biggest shareholder that's building an AI-specific product.

Like, let's spin it out, we'll buy you back in a few years.

So there may be— that might be the first repeat seller.

Yeah. Why? Otherwise, I only mean it means you're dating AI.

No, no, no, no, no. We don't support that. It means that your experience is one where a kind of— it's AI guided. Oh, so rather than you reviewing lots of people, sure, sure. Holding your hand along the way. We use AI in all of our products in so many different ways.

Even just to sort the stack of matches. Yes.

The recommendation algorithm.

That's been AI since day one.

And ML powered. But yeah, of course we use AI for profile creation. Sure. It can be very daunting to look at kind of a blank. Yeah, yeah. Tell us about yourself. And so we use AI to tease out information about your profile.

Have you gotten pretty good at detecting deepfakes? Yes.

So that was one of the first things that I focused on is something called FaceCheck, where you have to record 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 of our brands.

Yeah. I saw a fascinating video of how people are trying to get around it by having 9 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 Renaissance painting. And you will just assume that it's like, oh, this hot person that looks exactly like, you know, it's 9 AI photos. It's like, oh, they like painting and they happen to paint some random guy. But then that's the person that IDs the paycheck. So I imagine it's a cat and mouse game.

Yeah, it's a cat and mouse game. The bad guys are pretty good, but we're better. And you know, we have to stay a step ahead. We've made a lot of progress.

And how valuable is like community feedback in that loop? Because I imagine that like if somebody, if there's a system that you build, someone's always gonna try and find some edge around. But like, I've been surprised that like the community notes system on Axie has been pretty robust. And it's been like, you can always just ask like the LLM, like, is this real? But the community notes often surface things in interesting ways. Absolutely.

So user reports of bad behavior or fake accounts, that's an important signal for us. And now we have a system that actually kind of cross-bans. So if we detect a fake account on one app, we take it off of all the accounts, all the apps. So that also improves trust and safety across the whole Matterport portfolio.

I have a buddy, a startup founder, probably 8 years ago, thought he'd be cute and try to market the startup that he was working on, on one, 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 in this cold world. Sorry about that.

We don't, we don't take kindly to promotional or fake accounts. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What have there been? Companies that have been trying to sell services on top of your platforms, like auto swipers and stuff?

There are, yeah, there are some startups that, that try to do that.

I wouldn't even necessarily call them startups. They're like, um, you know, I guess sometimes they might be, but they might just be like operations.

Yeah, there, there are, you know, we don't allow kind of automated, uh, yeah, like, uh, you know, scrapers or, you know, auto swipers or those types of things. So when we find out about those, yeah, you We take them out, but yeah.

Do you think the AI boom has hurt LA's prospects as a startup hub?

Oh boy, yeah, it's, I mean, we do.

'Cause like we were sitting around prior to starting the show, and we're sitting here like, we work in tech, but we don't wanna leave LA. What possible business could we start in LA that's not hard tech?

And we had this idea, media, media.

No, this is, this is kind of, this is what makes LA, LA. I mean, like a couple years ago when creator economy was booming, even, even crypto was, was, you know, you know, LA had a crypto moment and an NFT moment. Um, and then also when direct-to-consumer and like celebrity food and beverage brands, those types of things, when D2C 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 as this AI boom has happened. So it's a bit of a bummer for those of us in LA, but, you know, we're, it's a very tech-positive city.

[Speaker] Yeah, in some ways, the gravity of LA, which is like entertainment, the consumer, media, hard tech, right? Just like sort of continues and it's very hard to, but I think, you know, the long LA contingent deserves, credit, uh, in some part for El Segundo. Totally.

Look, a SpaceX or Anduril IPO will be massive. Uh, ServiceTitan was a, was a nice moment. Obviously the Honey exit was a nice moment. Yeah. But, um, 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. Sure. Into the rest of the LA tech ecosystem. 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 a month. Clear AI effect. You can see it just grow. Now, is that good or bad? 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. Oh, for sure. Yeah.

You saw COVID and then you saw kind of the COVID hangover. So, so COVID was a spike for you because everyone was sitting at home, they're on their couch looking at their phones and lonely and connection. Yeah. And then people went back to work. Yeah. Kind of dating apps fell out of favor. Well, one internal metric is just pull requests. Now that I'm doing so much internal AI coding. Pull requests are up. They were up 40% year over year a couple months ago. Now they're up 60% year over year. So basically the amount of code that our employees are writing is going exponential.

The question that 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, like, and I'm always wondering like, you know, Meta was spending like billions of dollars token maxing I think it's great. But when I open up Instagram, I'm like, is it better? Like, I haven't seen a new button. It's a great question. And so, so I imagine as CEO, you have to sort of grapple with this. I'm super optimistic, obviously, but we're all, we're all going through this right now.

So, so our approach to it is we have to pay for these tools. Some, you know, for us it's $5 to $10 million a year that we're spending on AI tools from basically nothing. Yeah, it's new OpEx. 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 starting to ask that question more and more. I'm asking it more and more. Yeah, I think we're benefiting from it. It's hard to— it's hard to feel it.

Yeah. I feel like the optimistic case is that in a few quarters we're seeing case studies like, 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, something like that.

Yeah, or a SaaS company says, hey, we added this product that was originally going to be— we were going to build it in 3 years. We built it now, and it's ramping revenue and paying for all of this token.

Our best example would be the first week of January, we decided 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 first week of January, we made that decision. March 12th, we had a product event here in LA that demoed all these new changes to Tinder. And between the first week of January and March 12th, so in just a couple months, we went from a standing start because of AI to shipping in-app, in-real-life events in LA. And we never could have pulled that off without AI. It was an AI sprint that made a product launch in 2 or 3 months, which would have taken 6 or 12, traditionally.

Is that productivity improvement changing your, or potentially changing your thoughts around incubating new properties? I'm imagining you could go much more niche. You mentioned a few of the niches, but there's famously Farmers Only, which I don't know if you own, but—

We don't own that one.

You don't own that one, but—

The one that got away.

But that's an example of a much more niche community that the maintenance and the OpEx associated with running it at Match Group is probably too high. But if you drop that by 10x with AI, then maybe you can go after like, you know, like Hollywood media executive dating site or something.

Yeah, I 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, but it's not 100% of the population mainstream. Hinge, for example, which we own, goes after kind of—

yeah, all of it. Was that homegrown?

And Upward was an incubation. But now because of AI, we're able to put more resources into it and accomplish a lot with 5, 10, 15 people, which, you know, and then it just becomes an audience acquisition problem, which you have solved because basically everyone— yes, we can, we can cross-sell people into it, but we also can have a pretty innovative roadmap with a small team because of AI. Yeah.

Yeah. So you can actually roll out—

is Instagram Hinge's biggest competitor?

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 doomscrolling and choosing not to get out there and date, yes. So I mean, our biggest competitor at Match Group is just inertia. It's just people's loneliness and, you know, sort of doomscrolling on TikTok or Instagram or other social media, even Netflix or YouTube. We need people to put their phone down and put themself out there and go try to meet new people. That to us is, 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 pretty nervous about meeting new people or isn't sure it's worth the return on their time 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. That's why they've been so central to the Tinder turnaround.

Have you thought about making products in the wedding category at all? Would you ever do wedding registries, prenups? We, we have a pipeline.

Well, so divorce is a new— welcome back.

A new member of our board of directors is Raina Moskowitz, who's the CEO of The Knot. Worldwide. Yeah, there you go. So, so no, Match Group isn't doing it, but we're very lucky to have Reina's expertise as the leading—

Yeah. If you reactivate an account on any of the platforms after 10 years, divorce support. 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— we have a pretty, relatively speaking, small advertising business considering how big our audience is. We make less than $100 million on advertising out of our almost $4 billion of revenue. It's— we love advertising here.

I'm sorry.

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 powers. You know, some of our competitors have really leaned into advertising and And I think advertising can improve the user experience, but sometimes it cannot. So you need to be very careful.

So there's two sort of— it feels like— all classic takes 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?

I mean, I think from my Zillow experience, when we, we had a pretty big ad business at Zillow and when we had endemic advertisers, the, you know, the, the, the moving companies, the mortgage companies, the title insurance companies tightly integrated into the product, that was, you know, that was ads as product, 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 because it's endemic in that way and it's pretty tightly integrated, the ads perform very well, but we're much more focused on driving user outcomes and getting people out on dates. And so the subscription revenue— More aligned with you. Is more aligned with user outcomes. Yeah.

Did you ever invest or do anything around the housing problem biggest problem we have in this country, given that you're at Zillow.

Quickly, can you solve the housing crisis for us?

No, no. I mean, I would like to— I would like you to take a run at that at some point. You know how much demand there is.

You know, it's— there's obviously an affordability crisis. There's mortgage rate lock-in. If we could find a way to make mortgages transferable, that would be massive. Tons of people are kind of stuck in their homes at 2% to 3% mortgages. They're not in the right home that's right for them anymore. But they can't afford to flip it to a 5% or 6%.

But that's bad for banks, right, if you bring the mortgage with you?

I mean, 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 all the stars have to align. The buyer has to match your credit. 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. You know, I have incubated and invested in a lot of startups that help real estate agents use AI to be more productive. I do think that's a bit of a limiter as well. There's one called House Whisperer, which I started with several former Zillow people, which makes an AI assistant basically for real estate agents and gives them incredible AI superpowers. So that's a part of the unlock as well. But You know, we don't have a demand issue. We have a supply issue in the US. So we need more supply. We need more houses built. We're missing about 1 million homes that basically weren't built after the financial crisis. This goes all the way back to 2008. Yeah. Builders were building 1 million homes a year and they went down to 200,000 or 300,000 for 4 or 5 years. Yeah. So there are 1 million homes missing.

Yeah, it's rough. Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

Thank you. Great.

Great to finally have you on. Thank you. You're welcome.

Thanks. Come back soon. Our next guest is Erik Olsen from ConsenSys, back on the show with an exciting fundraising announcement. He's in the waiting room, so we'll bring him in to the TVPN UltraDome.

Erik, how are you doing? What's going on?

It's fantastic, guys. How are you guys doing?

We're doing great. Please reintroduce yourself and the company for the listeners, and then we can go into into the news today.

Love it. So I'm Eric, the co-founder of Consensus. We're building AI for academic and scientific researchers. To date, the product's been very search-focused, focused on like the literature review use case, people finding references for whatever work they're doing. And we are announcing a $30 million Series B today led by Great Point Ventures. Take the product beyond search, move into more of a workspace for researchers.

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?

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 direct-to-consumer. There's so much on-the-ground demand for tools like this that we're really growing mostly organically. You know, we're in a business where so many people are doing work in a lab or at a university, and there's tons of network effect 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 100 universities where we sell usually directly to the library. And then they'll distribute the product to students themselves. 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, 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 cybersecurity, 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?

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. You know, I think, like you said, there are many parts of a research process that can be automated. We want to focus on those parts, but there are many things that happen outside of that that are very uniquely human. And it isn't just the putting the atoms together, 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. Like, that is is the essence of science. It isn't just what's in the test tube. And, you know, despite how good these models have gotten, it's still not great at drawing connections between things and coming up with a new idea. So we want to 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.

Yeah.

Is the bar being raised on college campuses? Like, are students and researchers, now that they have AI, just expected to do 2, 3 times as much work in a given period?

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.

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? You know, Silicon Valley has moved really aggressively towards like coding agents are all you need, but Cursor's still doing really well. And 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 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.

I think IDE is a really great corollary. 'Cause you want there to be these things where you have this harness where it can do these iterative loops. You can give it feedback to say, no, go down that path or that path. You can 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 Hackathon sequentially. So maybe you're in a searching use case, but typically then you're moving to like, well, now I'm writing this paper, now I'm deeply analyzing this data. So it's kind of like two actually different surfaces than just one IDE. Yeah. So you want to 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 want to be able to iterate with a model and say, hey, take me down this path, I want to explore this idea, I want to write this, I want to edit it. Okay, but now I wanna go back to search 'cause I just wrote this paragraph and 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. 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] How are you thinking about integration with lab notebooks. Is that going to 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 and I've always struggled to understand that pitch because there is no VS Code for bio. All of the electronic lab notebooks, the ELN market is closed source typically. 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?

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, there are different surfaces for different types of research. Sure. Like there's your Benchlings for biotech and then there's, you know, just Word and Google Docs if you're a graduate researcher or something. 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.

What about for scientists that use sort of like hosted IPython notebooks? They might be on like Google Colab or something like that, some light hosted. Do you wanna build that stack so you can sort of provide that or do you wanna partner with the existing tools?

Why not both? Why not both?

Okay. Well, you have the money to do both. Good luck and congratulations and thank you for stopping by the show.

Great to get the update, Eric. Good to see you. Have a good one.

Yeah, you too. Congrats. Goodbye. Our next guest is Matt from Giga Energy. He made news recently because Giga Energy has scaled to $350 million in revenue vertically integrating AI infrastructure while raising just $3.4 million of equity funding. It's an amazing, amazing story of what's possible. In the AI era in hard tech. People say it's hard, maybe it's not so hard, I don't know. Matt will tell us.

How you doing? Howdy, how you doing?

What's going on? Thanks so much for taking the time to jump on the show. 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? Yeah, so started this business back at Texas A&M with a couple buddies from college almost 7 years ago. Business kind of started around flare natural gas Bitcoin mining and quickly evolved into supply chain constraints.

And then was your, your team, where that was the back, were you guys studying engineering or were you just interested in crypto? Like, what was the business? I don't know, what was the background?

Yeah, I'm just super interested in Bitcoin, like trying to find any way to get into it. I was like out of desperation, large oil and gas college. My co-founder's third generation oil and gas. The impetus was, hey, Hey, can you find us a well and can we mine Bitcoin on it? And then from there, we just kind of went on YouTube and little by little learned three-phase power.

No way. So yeah, what was the first thing you built?

So the first thing we ever built was a 50-kilowatt modular data center in Southeast Texas that mined, yeah, just like, I don't know, maybe 4 Bitcoin a month or something.

Yeah, and what does that actually look like? So there's a deposit of natural gas in the ground and it's being, flared and some of it would be wasted, but then you're converting it. Like how much did you have to buy? What's the scale? Am I looking at something that's like a shipping container size or like building size or like washing machine size?

Like 20-foot shipping container. Okay. Like tiny, like nothing massive at scale. And then yeah, you got natural gas generator on site. You're pulling from the wellhead. Okay. Stuff's going down, breaking all the time. And basically in terms of scaling that business, the rate limiter was the infrastructure. So very quickly we said, how can we build our own Bitcoin box? Boxes. And then Bitcoin, 85% drawback. Next thing you know, we're selling more Bitcoin boxes and picks and shovels than we were mining the Bitcoin.

Interesting. And then these Bitcoin boxes, are they GPUs? Are they ASICs for Bitcoins? Like, where were we in the story of like Bitcoin mining at that point?

Yeah, so you're 2019, you're still at like 14-nanometer chips with ASICs at the time. So very rudimentary in the field, like flies and dust everywhere.

Yeah, yeah. But they aren't repurposable because they're Bitcoin ASICs. So you wind up selling selling a lot of those as the market deteriorates. When do you start thinking about AI?

Yeah, so I ended up selling about 1.2 gigawatts of those modular data centers over like a 4-year tenure. That's a lot. Then little by little, yeah, yeah.

Wait, wait, so, so yeah, wait, wait, really quickly, like you're selling 1.2 gigawatts of these modular data centers. Like what is your supply chain like? How vertically integrated are you versus more of like a systems integrator of the fence delivering that to a buyer?

Man, it was incremental. It was everything from like building it at Home Depot to now, you know, restoring manufacturing back in the US. Wow. And then just like little by little over a 7-year period, bringing it back.

Amazing. And what's the typical, what was the typical buyer back in that era?

Everyone. I mean, we captured, I mean, we kind of had a nice niche, like lower market, middle market, public markets, you name it, we were selling to them. We were the guys with the Bitcoin boxes.

Okay. So. So one of these companies that wants to, they purely see it as like an economic opportunity. They're putting dollars in and getting Bitcoin out. And they think that the ROI will go up as 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?

Yep, yeah, and also on-grid utility. And so, kind of like, basically we got a really good mousetrap, we're selling it, making great margin. Then we realized everyone we're selling them to Why can't we do what they're doing if we got great margins? Sure. So started going down the pipeline, figuring out how do we get powered land, how do we get cheap power. In the same vein, started introducing new product lines. So transformers and switchgear in '24, we introduced. Yeah, started selling that at Mazium. And then mid-'24, we built a go-to-market function around C&I, renewables, electrical, and just started selling them on Bitcoin miners, realizing that that kind of our electrical equipment was fungible.

Interesting. And so what was the scale of the company in '24 when you start doing that? I mean, do you have like hundreds of employees?

Wait, and when did you raise that few million bucks?

Yeah, just through the fundraising.

Yeah, so the funny thing, that $3.4 million didn't really go to any of our growth. It just like kind of kept us alive for a couple-year period figuring out, you know, our product-market fit. So we raised like a million bucks in 2021 and we raised, the remaining amount in March of '22.

Wow. And then just sales come in? Yeah, just profitable business, yeah. Were there any like—

Did you get thrown out of any VC office for being profitable at any point? Yeah, exactly.

It sounds like you didn't even stop by. But 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 someone says like, I want a Bitcoin box, you still have to go make it. There's like supply chain, like your working capital could explode if you're not careful.

It was all payment terms. So we were able to convince customers to do 30, 40, 50% down and match our payment milestones relative to cash out the door, float factories, and just kind of continue rolling forward. So yeah, our customers financed the whole business.

Okay, so then take me through like the growth of the actual, workforce, like how much is in-house, how big is the team at various points? Like how did you scale the workforce?

Yeah, so we had about 90 employees end of last year, approximately, maybe 100. We're up to about 200 now this year by the end of the quarter, really kind of continuing to scale it throughout '24. We got into renewables, C&I, electrical distribution, selling to churches, prisons, hospitals, transformer switchgear systems, and then ended up getting a massive RFQ 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 big the opportunity was. And next thing you know, we're selling transformer switchgear to everyone in the AI space. That's amazing.

Where do you want this to go? Are you going to raise money at some point or do you want to continue to grow it profitably?

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 we're selling the picks and shovels to are making a ton of money. Why can't we do that? Same thing's happening again on the AI side. We got the powered land, we have massive pipeline, multi-gigawatts in terms of our capacity. Yeah, we have, we have healthy margins. And so Giga Today really exists around rapid data center deployment. Okay. We build all the, all we manufacture, all the long lead time equipment items to build a data center and we build the data center with our own picks and shovels.

Okay.

What kind of challenges are you facing on the ground, specifically with like local— Where's your community opposition? Yeah, there's a lot of that.

Yeah, we got town hall meetings all the time, talking to people, kind of walking them through, you know, hey, this is gonna use less water than your golf course does within the area. There's a lot of noise concerns. So a lot of it's just kind of sitting down with the residents, walk them through what does this practically look like?

In your backyard. On the noise front. Yeah. What do you believe is the solution there? I think there's every single day there's videos on X circulating where you can, you know, people 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 hum from the generators. You've been continuously making new hardware innovations and products, do you think there's a hardware solution to noise or is it just put them farther away from people?

Yeah, I mean, the unfortunate thing is like almost all the setups are in compliant with local laws, right? They're probably gonna be below that 65 decibel threshold, but that kind of low hum is still very irritating. The extent that, you know, you can kind of continue 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 is a bit of an easy thing to latch onto when just opposing the general concept of an AI data center in Beckerd.

Oh, sure. So it's sort of like a straw man, like that's not what people actually care about. They care about the bigger picture, bigger question.

Why don't they dig, putting them underground? Is that a solution? 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—

Yeah, I mean, on top of trying to build a data center in 9 months, putting one in the ground is not on the highest priority, I would say.

Yeah, just too fast. Well, what about energy for local, like local energy prices? There's been the ratepayer protection pledge signed by a lot of hyperscalers. Like how real is that? Are you working through those talking points when they come up at a town hall meeting? Yeah, right.

Every utility or electrical tariff relative to the municipality can be different. Even within ERCOT, right, you have different Centerpoint or Oncor, right? 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. There's a lot of education in terms around what soft load or firm load looks like. You have backup diesel gensets on, on site, but also at the end of the day, you got to be pulling 4, 5 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 step in.

How far do you want to 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? Are you going to be 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?

Yeah, I think near-term, right? Gaze is very much a ground-up company, right? Manufacturing the stuff from the ground up with our own CAD file sets, moving the dirt, putting up the building, and energizing the facility. We stop at the rack level currently, and that's really what we're excellent at. Very much the top-down approach of heavy financial systems or, you know, whatnot. We view our bottom-up approach very novel.

So, I mean, do you— is there a different financial 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 runs whatever they want.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly, right? So for us, the value proposition is, hey, you need to burn these chips. We can get you 50, 100 megawatts of IT online in 9 months.

Yeah, and we've seen that from Satya Nadella at Microsoft. He says, we actually have the chips, we just don't have enough powered shells That's why you're in the PowerShell business. That makes a lot of sense. Fascinating. What else goes into delivering a data center in 9 months? It 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? 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?

Yeah, so our mantra is building in the factory, not in the field. Okay. And we did this kind of implicitly in the Bitcoin mining world. We were able to turn on Bitcoin sites in almost 60 days from bare piece of dirt to energized racks. Yeah. And then AI space, 9 months is done because we do majority of the commissioning and the integration at the factory. Controlled environment with about a 95% reduction in the need for onsite labor at these data centers because of our modular design and the prefabrication going in. And that's really much the focus up front.

Tents versus buildings. We heard that Meta recently shifted to tents to speed up the time to deploy their data centers. Do you have an opinion on the structure that should hold the, the, the GPUs, the racks?

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-engineered metal building on site. Um, if all, you know, 15 different companies could be aligned on time to token, that, that, that's really where, what we need right now.

What, uh, what city has been the most welcoming to data centers in America that that you've come across yet? Like any, any, anybody standing up, the whole town just, just saying, you know, I mean, it's hard to make everyone happy.

I would say that I couldn't name a particular place that I would say is 100% on board.

Are you worried about any of the potential regulatory or political shifts in the next 12 months?

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 practical in any way, shape, or form in terms of what we're trying to march forward. So I think that's got to come at some point. How soon, I don't know.

Yeah, uh, 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?

You know, we're, we're focused on the dirt. We're focused on— we're not the most high-tech, uh, we're not the largest. We're very much focused on, on speed. And at the end of the day, I think, uh, that, that is, is the difference.

Well, congratulations on the progress. Thank you so much for taking the time. Yeah, great to meet you. Great to meet you.

Congrats to the team.

Thanks for having Thanks, Thomas. Cheers. Have a good one.

Take care. 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.

What's going on?

What's going on, guys? Welcome to the show, Jay. How are you doing? I'm great. How are you guys? Good. First time on the show. Please introduce yourself and the company a bit.

Yeah, so my name's Jay. I'm the founder of N of One. We're an AI research lab focused on financial markets. So we're taking a big bet on markets as the next environment that leads to training models that are, you know, better at trading and better at domains that require like adaptive intelligence. What's your background?

How'd you get into this?

I have— I've kind of 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.

Sure. Do you think Renaissance Technologies secretly discovered the transformer back in the '90s? This is a conspiracy theory.

I don't think so. We actually just hired someone from Renaissance. And yeah, I don't think so.

It seems unlikely given their compute bill over the years. I think we would know.

Yeah, there would be signs. 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. Yeah.

Or the other side, you could say Jane Street is an AI lab.

Yeah. And they've invested in custom hardware and, you know, computer infrastructure for a very long time. They wrote their own programming language, OCaml. Like they've been investing in this for a long time. And then 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 delta? In your opinion?

Yeah, it, it really depends on what your goals are. Um, I think, uh, you know, Jane Street is— their goal is to make money, uh, to make as much money per quarter or, or year as possible. Uh, our goal is to, uh, train, uh, models that can generalize across markets and eventually eclipse, um, you know, the best human traders and algorithmic, uh, trading systems in the world over the— a very long time horizon. And for the first— but for the first part of our goal, it's 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 pretty different. We, we kind of see hedge funds as having a more short-term goal of making money and us having a much more long-term goal of you know, trying to use markets as a learning environment for AI in general, which leads to totally 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. Yeah.

So, yeah, talk about the consumer experience. Someone signs up, they deposit funds. Your model start trading it? Is that roughly what you're aiming for?

Yeah. So to take 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 2 or 3 years from now, we believe that trading without a trading agent will be like coding without a coding agent or cursor or feel like you could do it. But you know, 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. And, you know, people have lots of ideas today around trading strategies or you know, low-resolution thesis they might have, um, where executing that is kind of hard. So whether it's a systematic trading strategy or like some more complex discretionary one, um, you might have an idea, but you know, it's just impractical to put it on unless you're good at coding, um, and have a bunch of data and other things. Uh, 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 are developing will be able to get you from that natural language to a fully deployed trading agent that expresses or embodies your viewpoint.

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 excited that you're here.

I have no idea who that is. Sorry.

Tell me about what the important pieces to build are for, because you can, in theory, use Open Claw or an AI agent to interact with like an Interactive Brokers 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?

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. 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, you know, LLMs. A big part of our point and why we launched Alpha Arena, as maybe you guys saw, is to prove that LLMs aren't quite there yet when it comes to trading, that the models aren't very good at autonomous trading tasks, basically. So we developed like a harness and put a lot of our energy into developing like a world-class harness for trading. And deep research queries for markets. So you get all of that on our platform and then all the DevOps and server management and basically all the infrastructure that you need to do that well, even on something like Open Claw. We've taken care of that as well. But yeah, 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 not It's not super easy to do all this stuff well. Yeah, that's—

Would you ever partner with the Publics or the Robinhoods of the world 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 want to own the end customer?

Yeah, as of right now, we're integrating with all the brokerages. 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 IBKR. But yeah, right now we're just a layer on top of all the brokerages.

Got it, cool.

Well, thank you so much for coming. Wait, you have some news. You have some news. You raised some money.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

We just raised a $15 million round.

Thank you, Jordi Hays.

Almost forgot, almost forgot. Well, great stuff.

Have a great day. Congratulations. Thanks, guys, and we'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. See ya. Uh, 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 Erewhon was too cheap, you're gonna love Floral Supply because they made an expensive version of Erewhon. Uh, this is from Andrea. Some people are—

yes, some people are saying that it's, uh, yeah, more of like a TikTok studio. Okay, grocery store.

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 viral going there.

We should have gone.

It's close. I think I drive by it every day.

Okay, but let's sit at the table and try and understand what's actually going on here.

So Floral Supply Before we dive in, probably 1, 1.5 years ago at this point, John is saying like, okay, well obviously, you know, Erewhon's this hit. Yes. But obviously the opportunity—

You introduced me to Erewhon. Really? Yeah.

'Cause I would come in every day with—

'Cause you were such a diva, you would insist on only eating Erewhon. And I was like, can we just throw in McDonald's once? Maybe a Jack in the Box. Maybe a Taco Bell. You said that a couple times.

Maybe a Del Taco.

You said that a couple of years ago, and then you piped down. Yeah, I did.

Eventually you piped down.

Yeah, but you, but you, you brought me the gospel of Arawan. I became a convert.

Make remake Arawan, but make it 2 to 3 times more expensive.

And no one would think that. Everyone, everyone would come into it and say, what if Arawan but cheaper? Tyler, this before John—

wait, what? I have a tweet from January of 2025.

I say there's definitely a market for ultra high-end You probably heard that.

I think you heard that on the show. Wait, what is this? Can we pull up Tyler's tweet? Where is this? Uh, we need to put this in here. He said— okay, so Tyler says there's definitely a market for an— for an high ultra end, or an ultra high end, or an ultra high end grocery store that doesn't use plastic anywhere and tests the products for tons of stuff. Erwan meets plastic.

I'm sorry, Tyler, you took—

you, you overheard this tweet probably, and took it. I don't know. I don't know when you said it. I don't know.

I think I rifted— I was— this was right around the time that I was riffing it on the show. So like, well, maybe—

so this was a reaction to Nat Friedman, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hunded the plastic.

No, no, I, I, so maybe, uh, I might have to give you this one. I don't know. January 6th.

I don't think this is a very original idea. Okay.

Anyway, what is cool is like a lot of the products they're selling, yes, uh, clearly they're They're just like packaging them on site.

Yeah, so they have flowers here. They have a 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 chaos.

Nick Schauer says they should call it Whole Foods. So this is the beauty. The tree inside the jars. This is the beauty of capitalism. Yes. Oh, yeah? How so? But the— which is that every great idea eventually can be usurped by doing the exact same thing, but just doing it slightly—

At 3x the price. Is it actually 3x the price? No, I don't think so. We got to go and understand. So Michael Miraflore has a post here. He 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 "Next to Barney's 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." Interesting, I remember the pink wall. Did you ever take a photo at the pink wall? Yeah. I drove by it a couple times. 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. 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, Jordi? What do you wanna break down?

There's a video inside the store?

There's a 1 minute and 33 second video from Mike, Make LA Great Again. Inside Laurel Supply, and we can play this, this video. It looks like it's a download of a TikTok. Uh, first look, Laurel Supply, uh, and, uh, it's a popular new American restaurant. Laurel Hardware, there's a couple others. It's so overpriced, says Shant. Erawan down the street is so much better. It's making Erawan look cheap. Okay, let's play this. Maybe turn this up.

Refrigerator. All the fruits and vegetables are 100% organic and meticulously placed. 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— traditional grocery store. She showed us products from all around the world. This Runway product caught my eye cuz, you know, devil wears Prada. 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 mimic. So they make flour on site? I don't have a lot of images of the prepared food, but it's—

they're just like reinventing a farm.

If you have a sweet tooth, you've been warned because there's a wide selection of gelato, their food options such as sushi, and they have an organic butcher. You'll immediately know all the attention to detail, 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 immediately when you walk in. I was also told they offer valet for shoppers, so those that were concerned about the 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 updates that actually matter.

I got to say I personally, valet for places that you go to a lot is a bug, not a feature. Why? I just like parking my own car. I don't want random, you know, I don't need or want random people driving my car all the time. Especially for, I'm saying for a grocery store or a gym. But I do think it's funny. So they're like, okay, so we're blatantly cloning Erewhon. Let's just all admit that. Let's just all admit that. We're blatantly cloning Erowan, but we got to do something different. Yeah, they rack their brains. What do they do for hours? We're gonna mill the flour in the house.

Is that the only thing? Yeah, I, there was a lot of stuff there that seemed like Erowan.

No, I think so. So it looks, it looks fantastic. Yeah, I like the logo. Yeah, it's cool. I will, I will happily shop here.

Will you, or will you just be like, ah, it's not the same. I'm an Erowan diehard. You're gonna switch up on your day one. You're gonna switch up on Air One?

It totally depends on location.

You'd be driving to Air One, but, ah, I'm gonna go the other direction.

I am a reserve member at Air One.

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, Wilman, I just had an absolute banger today to the tune of 12,000 likes.

Oh, last thing, because Dylan, Yeah. Our very own Scotto texted. What'd he say? Very smart. He said they should open in the Bay or New York, not where Erewhon already is. Oh, that's right. Very, very smart. So Erewhon has been some, has had so much opportunity to expand within LA. They've done a very good job. You can't really drive 15 minutes without running into one, which is a great feature if you wanna just pop in for lunch or whatever. But they've been—

Someone says they should do a points match, like when you're leaving American Airlines or United, they'll status match you. If Laurel Supply status matches you on day one, they might win you over.

Maybe. No, but this is smart. They've been relatively slow to expand. There's a new— there's a store— I don't know. —blanking on the name, in New York, that beat them to— at least beat Laurel Supply to cloning in New York. But yeah, the thing about Laurel Supply is It looks incredibly well done and I'm sure the experience will be great and I will happily go check it out, but it doesn't add anything new to grocery in LA really at all.

I don't really— 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, it's all plastic-free.

You know, the other part of the pitch was ditch the old like brown grocery bags and do like— Solid cartons. Old bags.

Effectively, turn the bag into, like, an Hermès Birkin bag. And so an influencer can take a photo of it. Somebody who gets the bags can take them at home, take a photo, and everyone knows, oh, you got the fancy groceries. I got to have those fancy groceries. That's the hack. I still think launching in LA is good for, like, go-to-market in terms of, like, the influencer economy. You don't think so? You think New York and SF?

Oh, I mean, Dylan said Marin. Marin would crush.

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 it's a starting point. But there's way more celebrities and whatnot. Like there's—

But congratulations to the Laurel Supply team on the launch. Welcome on the show. We love talking grocery.

I'd love to have the CEO on the show. Anyway, we have our next guest. We've been keeping waiting in the waiting room, but here he is in the TVP and Altshuler on the mirror. From Astrocade. How are you doing?

Hey guys, thank you for having me.

Thanks for joining. Welcome to the show.

Great to meet you.

Congratulations on the progress. Introduce the product, then we can talk about the fundraising. But, uh, how are you describing what you're building right now?

Yeah, Astrocade basically is a social entertainment platform where anyone, and I mean anyone, can create games, um, via just natural language. Yeah, very similar to how you prompt ChatGPT, you can make games games. And 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. And then with a few clicks, you can just publish it to our feed. And then there are millions of players in that right now that play your games. And I think the part that I'm the most excited is our mission. Mission, which is sharing fun with the world. I think what we are building is pretty cool for people to use and be happy.

This seems— I don't know, like almost obvious. I, I don't want to degrade it, but, uh, 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. 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 go to the dot-com. Well, here's the thing.

So the games that we've been creating are only funny to like a very— and fun— like a very small group of people, right? But they're not really fun to play. That's right. And so 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 and true.

I would argue that that's how Instagram started. It. 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 people may start—

But there's no game mechanic at all. No, no, no.

What I'm just saying is like, in terms of the actual application, like we are doing the, you know, the Instagram post that's just like, hey, I ran a marathon and 10 friends like it. We are not creating the viral mural Instagram that will be like loved by everyone. We're not Professor Sendy making Wombos.

All, all, all, what 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 that would be great and reskinning, like putting the team—

I, I think there's a lot, there's, I think there's probably a lot of harness, like yeah, tell us about how people are actually using it.

You guys are actually making all the good points. First of all, you mentioned is actually obvious. When we started 3 years ago, we also— I was like convinced that such a thing should happen. Yeah. Right. It's very hard to also predict the future. But if you look at the past, the past 20 years, right? 20 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 a writer now on Twitter. They do a lot of rage baiting on a day-to-day places or post about their lunch, but everyone is writing. And the pattern, what we see here is once the creation tool becomes accessible to everyone, great generational companies appear, right? Same thing, 4 years after Twitter, Instagram. When the camera iPhone 4 launched with a good camera, everyone became a photographer. And it's great, but also like, thanks to my wife, I don't have any more privacy. And I think you guys would deal with 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 background 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. 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. That's funny.

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. Rugs, and then it's very satisfying because you're, you're watching something get 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.

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. Yeah. And I think that was exciting. The biggest— the— I think the biggest advantage of AstroCAD, 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 engaging. You play things rather than consume. The majority of the social platforms right now are consumption. Engagement, engagement just is just so much better. It's like hearing a story versus experiencing a story. Yeah, right. Number two, which is kind of also our mission, is just it's more fun. You know, we are living in a world of a lot of the brain rot happening. And I think this is just more creative. You come out of it super happy when you play AstroKid and like you use actually your brain. So that's very, very important for us. And I think the reason I believe AstroKid has a possibility to become a generational company is games are so innate to humans. I have a 2-year-old and he just always playing. He's learning through play, right? They were like, what? I think the latest stats I read was 'cause there are 3.4, 3.5 billion people playing video games right now, which is almost half of humans, right?

And I think that— That's not this second, right? That's like day to day generally, 3.4?

No, overall I think that, no, it's not—

'Cause I'd be pretty worried if— Speak for yourself, I'm gaming right now. Half of humanity is live playing first-person shooters right now.

But brain rot's not gonna be an issue, don't worry about that.

Is there, there must be, Is there a crazy power law with the games? Like on YouTube, the power law would be like most videos—

Yeah, Gangnam Style has like a billion views, but the average YouTube video gets, or the median YouTube video gets like 10 views.

100%, there's always, with all this creation platform, there is a power law. A lot of like, some portion of creators, like 1, 2% 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. We actually, like, we launched the platform like publicly around 7, 8 months ago. The numbers are actually crazy, guys. The stats is our MAU is like 5 million right now. Wow.

Hundreds of thousands. Thank you. Yeah.

Hundreds of thousands of creators are now creating games. Games, hundreds of thousands. Obviously, like, you guys are part of OpenAI, you guys are happy.

We actually process trillions of tokens to make this happen. Like, it's completely free. People— Okay, okay, free, free, free. That doesn't sound like it's going to make any money. How will you make money? Ads or subscriptions?

Donations or both? Potentially we want to do ads. Right now our creators are like, yeah, it's completely free. Between all these, like all the vibe coding platforms, we are the only one that is completely free. Wow. Yeah. Well, so as you—

Yeah. Won't you want to make, allow creators to turn on monetization at some point? Like I feel like you're going to have people that are like 9 years old that create some hit game and, you know—

It's the Alex Zhu from Musical.ly 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 in your own terms.

Yeah, we are, exactly. Like, I think we get inspired a lot by YouTube also, or like, almost all these social platforms are doing that, right? They don't monetize necessarily, their creators. They actually build tools for the creators to monetize their games. Sure. And we are going to do something similar. We still haven't started monetization. We are focusing on the user growth. But we are going to build tools that kind of like companies can do ads on AstroKade, but also creators do microtransaction and the regular type of business model that gaming has been doing all these years. I think that gaming is just generally is a good business, is very profitable, is one of the largest, um, like segments of entertainment, larger than movies and all these things combined, right? Um, so I'm not so worried about monetization. We just want to make a great experience for everyone. You should actually play the game.

People— yeah, people, people comp the, uh, the video game industry to the, to Hollywood or the movie industry, and, uh, and it does dwarf it, but I wonder what the actual, uh, 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. But it is interesting that there is some— there is some sort of dynamic where like Yes, 3 billion 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 playing games any less important. People enjoy it a lot.

No, I think you're completely— you're right. Yeah. So that's why I always not— I don't say normally games. We call it playable content because there's actually a very diverse set of content. They're not only games. You know, it's like playable experiences. I think from the content point of view is we are heavily towards actually ultra, we call it ultra casual, not even hyper casual.

Ultra casual when you go to Ultra Casual. Yeah, what's the average like playtime? 'Cause like Final Fantasy might be like 100 hours, GTA might be 100 hours, and then some, you know, small game might be a couple hours, but I imagine this is like on the order of minutes? Minutes. Exactly.

And it's exactly on the order. Yeah. Okay. Um, so it's shorter form. Um, actually, my wife only— my wife is one of the hardest critics. She only plays Astro Gate games. And like, she does it when she's watching a movie. She also is playing the games. It's just so like, it's, it's still like engaging. Yeah. And interactive, but you don't need to also necessarily to focus full on versus a lot of AAA games you have to do that. And I think that's going what happened with the gaming industry. There is gonna be still big studios, like AAA studios, like basically Hollywood, and there's gonna be—

Yeah, I mean, in the same year we got Oppenheimer and Barbie, we also got like 12 other MrBeast videos.

Are you based in LA?

We are in Palo Alto, actually. Oh, dang.

We're down from Palo Alto. I looked at that, that building is so ugly, I thought it was in Portland.

They 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. 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?

Yeah, so we are completely right now web-based. Okay. Uh, and the games are HTML games. Okay. Um, super lightweight, it's super fast to load those games. Okay. Um, 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. Um, the first biggest challenge we— which we overcome and it's still ongoing, is just creation tool. Yeah. How do you build this agentic system that can make everyone a game creator? 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 a team. No, of course. Right. On our platform, it's like $20, $10. So that was one thing and it's all going and we call it like, it's a, AstroKade is a platform where our AI is learning how to generate fun. It's a big thing.

AI learning fun is a big thing in the AI community. Yeah, so it's not a very, seemingly at least, a very deterministic problem, right? Because you have these games like, you know, I don't know, why would a window washing game be fun? And yet if the mechanics make it—

Say you've never washed a window. You say you've never yearned for the mines? Why would Minecraft be fun? You go to the flow state. Yeah, when you start washing the window, you get to the flow state. So, I mean, does that mean that there's gonna 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 gonna say, this is an app that makes other apps, we're not really cool with it, and you're gonna have to discuss that? Like, how does that play out? Because I feel like everyone wants this to be a thing, but Apple's just sort of operating from a place of 15 years ago in terms of like what the technology was capable of.

We haven't got there yet. We haven't launched that, by the way. Yeah, yeah, no, I know. It's fully on the web. We have to see how when we cross. No, I think this is actually Actually pretty good for Apple too. It should be, yeah, massive distribution also.

Like, they, they provided distribution, but they make a lot of money on games right now. And 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. So yeah, I don't know, I'm sure you'll solve it.

No, it's This is not our biggest problem right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The things that we are focusing right now on the technology side is like another thing, by the way, is very hard problem and it's harder honestly than some of our AI problems. Yeah. Is the recommendation system.

Interesting. I was wondering if that was off the shelf. Is it not? No, it's actually pretty challenging.

I don't think anybody has built such a large-scale recommendation system for this type of content. Sure. Right? We have a kind of recommendation system for videos, we have recommended images. Games, first of all, a lot of them are open-ended, so you don't know exactly like video, you know, I watched the whole 50%. Games is like a lot of other features of extracting features from the videos.

Yeah, it could be satisfying because you were able to finish it in 10 seconds as opposed to if you're watching a 10-minute YouTube video and you click out of it in 10 seconds, you didn't win the goal, so you have to bake that into the weights as well, the recommender. 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.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. That's been one of the hardest problems, by the way, we're trying to solve. Um, the recommendation system and then platform, like how do you manage the platform? So players are happy, the creators are happy. This is the first time that like this large scale, we like in few months, we've got more than 75,000 games on our platform created. Wow. 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, the infrastructure you need to build to basically efficiently serve these games to—

Yeah, I'm doing some back of the envelope trying to pull data out of you. You said like $10 to $20 per game inference, 75,000 games, that's like $1.5 $5 million in inference. Are you actively looking at what pieces of the puzzle you can move to cheaper models really quickly?

We do that. We do that actually. For some tasks, we do cheaper models. For more complicated tasks, we do— They say— It's the thing is the cost of intelligence is coming down, right? But the cost of these tokens are not because you always want to go with the best.

And the value of networks is going to keep going up.

Future request, I want to be able to go on astrocade.com and navigate based on like popularity of different games by year. So like I want to find all the games that were popular when I was like 5 years old and like 2000, like 2005. Right. I remember some of these like web-based games that were like, what was that game where you're on a little bike in these Line Rider, Line Rider, you know, Line Rider.

Do we have that?

We actually have something similar 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 Rider in their description or something? Interesting challenge. Interesting challenge.

For the rest of the show today, I'll be playing Line Rider. So if you want to keep— if you keep watching after you leave, you'll see I'm completely distracted. It's actually—

it's pretty calming also. It's like puts you in the flow state.

And you know what else is calming? Rolling flashbacks.

The flashbang's not calming. That's extremely disorienting.

It's very calming to me.

Just say you want to play COD. Just tell them remake COD. Very calming to me.

Yeah, uh, Amir, it's an honor to have you on the show. Uh, I'm excited to play Astrocade, and, uh, at this rate, I'm sure you'll be back on very, very soon.

Congratulations. Say hi to Nick for me. I will.

We will.

Thank you so much. Cheers. Goodbye.

Have a good one.

Bye. Our next guest is coming in in a few minutes, I believe. So we will click over to this very odd viral post from Wilmanitis. 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.

This is so insane. Yeah, apparently the price used to be $50 for 50 kilometers spool was $300. Yeah. So that seemed— that's way— I used to always wonder about the economics of of just 'cause you're assuming, okay, this drone's taking off, it's flying miles and miles and miles. How could that make sense? But it's clearly very cheap.

300 bucks.

You can have a drone that's, you know.

And they started with like DJI drones that were like Mavic 4s used that were maybe like a couple hundred dollars. And there were actually some people that would buy these drones like on Craigslist 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, uh, 50 kilometers of fiber optics is, uh, $2,500. So a massive increase in price. And Will Manitas says AI data centers skyrocketing fiber prices leading to Ukraine, Russia being priced out of using drones to do lively atrocities is a scale of marketplace solution. That's, that's It sounds schizophrenic on the outset, 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 1-gigawatt data center.

We talked to Giga Energy about it. I'm going to quickly jump in. I think this is napkin math.

Oh, you don't think he bought out the envelope for this?

This screams napkin math.

You don't think he used an envelope for this?

Yeah, I think he was writing 50. OK. $20 billion. $25 to $30.

And wait, so when he says all-in CapEx, that's the amount of money that you spent sponsoring the All In podcast? What is that? What does all-in CapEx mean? Because he says all-in CapEx.

Well, I mean, hey, the number one tech podcast in the world.

$50 billion is a small price to pay for a 1-gigabyte data center. No, of course he's talking about the total amount of CapEx, but he did use his brand name there. All in CapEx, $50 billion. Enterprise revenue generated, $25 to $30 billion a year. Electricity cost, $1 to $2 billion a year. 2-year payback. The boom is real. Grok fact-checked it. What did Grok have to say? Mostly accurate. You know what Grok called it? Didn't call it napkin math. It called it back of the envelope.

Well, I'm going to have to fact-check Groq.

Groq, is this more back-of-the-envelope calculation or not? Napkin math. Fact-check from Groq says CapEx is $50 billion per gigawatt, aligns with NVIDIA's estimate. Revenue, it matches high-end infrastructure-as-a-service cloud leasing. Energy is roughly correct. Two-year payback is realistic. 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.

And yeah, I guess the question is like, don't OpenAI— doesn't OpenAI and Anthropic have access to like somewhere in the range of 2.5 to 3 billion, or sorry, 2.5 to 3 gigawatts of compute? Yeah, that's right. Right. And they certainly don't have 150 billion. Oh yeah. Each. So yeah, so the— I feel like the numbers seem incredibly optimistic. It's more of like Forward-looking. Yeah, looking at CoreWeave, this is not at all what we're seeing with CoreWeave. Yeah, what happened with CoreWeave? But we will see.

There's a breakdown here of CoreWeave. Yeah. $31 billion of in-service PP&E as of March 31st, 2026. They lease their data centers. $1.4 billion of operating lease expense for this year, active data data centers. Let's assume the leasing market is 10% cap rate, so cost equivalent to lessors, $14 billion. If they had $45 billion of all-in capex generating revenue of 1 gigawatt active power, it's close to SACS 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 to $13 billion, so CoreWeave's all-in capex to revenue is 3.6x. SACS, back of the envelope, capex revenue is $1.8 billion at midpoint. So either CoreWeave really sucks at this or these numbers are 50% off before we even get to margins. Interesting. Hmm. Well, there's more pitches for beautiful data centers. Doesn't seem like it's on the roadmap for many data center builders, but Meltam Demirors says, "You said make data centers beautiful. There are some good ideas in this post." Which one do you think is the most beautiful, Jordi, of these beautiful data centers?

Let's see. I personally think that the actual image of the data center they use is beautiful, but only in a— the big round, the mere one. No, no, no, I'm saying at the top of, um, the Substack. Yeah, once you click in. Yeah, like the actual data center, it looks kind of—

yeah, job sort of finished there. Why, why change something? That looks like a blank black cube. It's good enough. Let's see. Kevin O'Leary is proposing to build a data center in Utah that will require 9 gigawatts of energy to function when fully built.

Yeah, this one is getting insane levels of—

Now we're putting energy use in atomic bombs units? As they say, it will dump around 20 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 watching in full time. Interesting, interesting. People are, continue to be upset about the data center stuff and putting it in ever more complex comparisons.

Well, we should have our next guest, Alex.

Alex from Long Lake.

Long Lake. He recently bought a business that you very well know and likely have used at one point or another. Oh yes, yes, that's right. Him in. Oh, he's here. Fantastic. Is he here? We got him all over in the colors.

Oh, we do got him. Fantastic.

Alex, how you doing? There he is.

Welcome to the show, guys.

How are you? Great to see you. Great to see you. Thank you, and congratulations.

Uh, but since it is your first time on the show, um, why don't you give us a little bit of the news? What happened?

Intro first. Intro first. Yeah. Thank you guys for having me.

I'm a big fan of the show. Excited to be here for the first time. So on Monday of last week, Long Lake announced that we intend to acquire American Express Global Business Travel for $6.3 billion.

Fantastic.

Long 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 operations team and an M&A team to help kind of bring AI to the real economy.

And yeah, those 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?

Yeah, this is definitely our largest deal so far. We have pretty big ambitions and we see our target market as really the entire services TAM, which is over $20 trillion in the US alone. And much larger globally.

So I'd love to see that. I'd love to see that slide in the deck, by the way.

We— well, you know, it's, 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.

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. 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, of MXGPT superpowers, and particularly the travel counselors who are interfacing with the clients. We basically have seen this in the 30 acquisitions we've done today. 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.

Jordi Hays.

30 acquisitions. How many months have you guys been in business?

Months? Let's see. I guess we started talking about the company, you know, roughly 28 months ago and started talking about the company. I know. I guess we incorporated the company 28 months ago. We started talking about it maybe, maybe a few months before that. But yeah, we're roughly coming up on our 2.5-year anniversary here soon.

Amazing. 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?

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, you 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 2.5 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? 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 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 sort of be increasing our rate of acquisition.

How do you think about financial engineering in these deals? Is this sort of like the classic leveraged buyout playbook, or are you taking a different strategy or approach? How do you think about structuring all of these deals?

Yeah, we've traditionally been underlevered, 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. But typically we can afford to be, you know, we're more growth-oriented than traditional PE. We're investing in the products and services pretty heavily, especially in the early years as we sort of We want every business, you know, 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 underleveraged 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, you know, this is when we start to think out in the future several years. 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, you know, a public debt issuer.

So on the equity side, how is it— I think you've partnered with a number of venture capital firms. They have particular— they have a non-permanent capital little time horizon. How are you communicating with them how they can participate while still benefiting their LPs? Is there overlap with VCs' LPs? Like, how do you think about the timeline?

Well, going public would be helpful there.

Yeah, I suppose. But is there anything that— Yeah. I guess, like, this feels like an incredibly exciting business. Very cool. I completely buy the pitch, but there's a little bit of like, oh, this might be in like not every LP agreement, or there might've had to be an extra conversation. I'm wondering if you can just gimme more color around that conversation.

Well, you know, VCs tend to have longer hold periods in general. I mean, VC's a power law business. And when you have great companies, you obviously wanna keep compounding with them for a long time. So I think our partners, you know, and then there's a list of them in the press release.

We have extraordinary partners.

And their, and their investors in turn, they really, you know, they, 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 10-plus years to play out, and that's obviously very different than the traditional 3 to 5 year private equity roadmap. Yep. So I think in general your starting point is much longer term in, in nature. Um, and as you know, you know, the, the, the public markets may solve this 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 to be had even as a private company.

If I didn't, 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? Fits for Long Lake? For Long Lake or just like a service-oriented business broadly? Is that particularly low CapEx or low revenue per employee, so it's highly leveraged to the operating expenses? What metrics are typically popping out at the businesses you look at relative to some super— like Arm, like super clean— like I imagine that Arm is the exact opposite, right?

Well, look, first of all, this is like— the US is a services economy, so it's kind of like 80% of the businesses would fall in this category. But second of all, you 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 and high customer retention. You know, we typically on our businesses see 100% plus net dollar retention. And these are 10, 15, 20-plus-year customer relationships typically across our portfolio. And, you know, obviously Amex GBT is over 111-year-old business at this point, founded in 1915 to help American Express Traveler's Check customers get out of Europe. Yeah, during World War I. And actually they bought a business called CWT, Carlson Wagonlite, which is actually over 150 years old. So these are These are very, you know, we were joking about this, but in terms of managing tech transformations, uh, Amex GBT literally was created before the invention of the airline, uh, or around the time of the invention of the airline.

So there's this new platform, we think it's going to be big. It's like they're, they're like birds, but you can, you can fly in them as a human.

Yeah, exactly. So in terms of managing tech transformations, you know, these businesses have already managed You know, many of them. 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. 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 20, 30, 40% more productive, which is what we're seeing in our existing 30 businesses, um, then that actually allows you to deliver more customer value, deliver more goods and services, different products and services to the customers, uh, which allows you to sort of grow your revenue per employee over time. 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 5 to 10 years, we think will start to play out there as well.

How do you, how do you think about your advantage of starting the business 28 months ago? Like you said, 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 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 dropped dramatically.

You're talking about older companies.

Yeah, I was talking about— I'm thinking—

I'm thinking it's like a sweet spot story.

Yeah, no, 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 over the last 20 years. You're now sitting there, and you've got a bunch— you want to think about the future, but you're like, How do we, how do we exit all of these positions or in some cases, you know, turn them back to— Turn the cruise ship. Private credit. It's tough.

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, 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. 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, um, and, and our co-founder and CTO Rasmus Wismann, who's world-class and has built our whole team, uh, from the beginning for this purpose. And then on top of that, you, you need sort of a really core function in change management and growth growth, which we've also built out. And then of course M&A, world-class M&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, etc. 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 be, you know, partner with the companies themselves the way that we do here. Yeah. And then on the finance side, folks, you know, from Blackstone, TPG, GTCR, HIG, some of the very best firms. Uh, and, uh, you know, I think part of what we've been able to do at Long Lake is by focusing on this core mission from day one. It's a pretty exciting mission, which is basically bring AI to the real world, um, and help drive the, the mythical AI GDP growth. Yeah. Um, you know, that's what's been able to attract, bring people together.

Last question. The prophecy. Fulfill the prophecy. The prophecy. Truly. We're relying on Satya Nadella's prophecy of 10% GDP growth. Show me the numbers. Last question for me. 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 I want more competition in your sector, but it feels like there, there might be a thesis there. Is that misformed? Do we not expect that to happen for some structural reason, or do you think it will maybe happen at some point?

You know, it's interesting.

I wouldn't be surprised. I do think there's a convergence happening, and, and whether it's services companies buying software or software, you know, buying services, um, 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. Yeah. You know, I think if you're an existing software company, you have your own set of vested interests around your existing customer base. And are you then competing with your customers? 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 strong advantage in our, in our focus. Amazing.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

It's an honor to finally have you on the show. It is. And let's make it a thing. Every time you maybe announce a new— well, you, you like to announce— yeah, once a month. But, uh, no, you like— I'm assuming you like to announce that you've been in a category after you're already done with said category. But, uh, you can just come on here to take victory laps. So, yeah. Well, thank you guys.

It's, it's an honor to be here.

Thanks for having me. Great. Have a great day. Cheers. Talk to you later. You too. Bye, guys. Bye-bye. Up next, we have Quaid from Bezel. You know him. We love him. He was one of the first TBPN sponsors, good friend of ours, and here he is to break down the big news. How you doing, Quaid? Hey guys, how you doing? What's happening? Wait, okay, quick question. Are you— do you have the same name as your father, grandfather, and great-grandfather?

Do I have the same name? 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. And then if you have the same name as your father and your grandfather, you'll be known as a Tripp. So if you ever meet somebody who's like, oh, my name's Tripp, sometimes their name might be like John III. And some Quades apparently are the fourth John, like I'm John IV, but I go by Quade. Anyway, that was a dumb question.

Uh, tell us about AP. Yeah, it's, uh, it's an interesting week right now. Obviously, I think everyone in the watch world, or the watch world adjacent, has heard about the collab with Swatch, and everyone's sitting around speculating and using AI to render examples of what they think it's going to be. And so we're all waiting until, I believe, the 16th to learn what the deal is.

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 wildcard scenario where it's something entirely different?

Different. So, so we watched a, a reveal video that looked 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 and AI, is that right? Exactly.

So I think clues that we have are, uh, they use the Royal Oak font. Okay. So indicating that it's like it's going to be something derivative of a Royal Oak. Okay. There's been the Swatch Pop, 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, uh, 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. Um, and then you saw some of the packaging and the boxes, and then you saw the System 51 movement. 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 Blancpain 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 3D rendered and 3D printed. And so like they don't do repairs on it, for example. Like they just— it's like more efficient for them to replace the entire movement. Okay. So it's a mechanical movement, 90-hour power reserve, like it has some impressive stats, but it's like very 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/lanyard device with an automatic movement. It's kind of all we know today. And then there's several, several colorways that are starting to come out.

Got it. Yeah. Can you quickly reset on the terminology? Because you just said movement, automatic, is there a battery, is it quartz? Like, do a little bit terminology for everyone.

Yeah, so quartz would mean like it has a battery that runs. An automatic movement would mean like it's a set of gears that are powering the watch. Typically, like in high horology these days, 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 on the secondary market, like a, you know, Journe Elegante, for example. But largely, like, people are out here lusting for the automatic movements. That's why it's interesting they did that with the collab with Blancpain. They went with the automatic movement, and it's like moving a bit upmarket in that sense. And so they're, they're in that snapshot, they're basically saying like, we're doing the same thing here.

Yep. We were talking about cost. People have been speculating $300 to $500. And we were sort of going back and forth on, like, if it is an automatic movement, even if it's 3D printed, it seems like that's not a dollar. Do you have any sort of benchmark for, like, what something like this would even cost the two companies to make? Obviously, the margins are great across all sectors of the watch economy.

Yeah, cost and then— price estimate, and we're gonna come back to this on Monday, so you better be— you better nail it.

Yeah, I'm certainly not the guy to give you the breakdown there, but I will say if you look at this, the MoonSwatch launched, I think it was the $285 retail, that's a quartz example. Yeah, uh, Blancpain, I think they launched that in the $400s, and that's theoretically the same movement that would be powering this. And so I think the speculation of somewhere in the $400s— 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. Oh yeah. And this is the only one that's external to the Swatch Group. And obviously like AP is in a bit of a different level from a, like, a rarefied air perspective. So I don't know how much like using that brand factors into the profit sharing. But it's super interesting. I don't know, it's like, I think a lot of people are torn. Yeah, 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 I think is like $30,000 at retail and certainly more in the secondary market.

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 $30,000, 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, I'm just really saving up for a Code 1159, like, I gotta have it. Whereas I do know a lot of people that are, like, very excited that, you know, to get an AP At some point.

With Patek, like, some people are like, yeah, I'll start with a dress watch, a Calatrava. Like, I'm not that upset about that because it has a lineage, it has a story, and it's probably 3 to 5x cheaper than a Nautilus. And if it gets me on that track, I'm okay. But AP hasn't had that. Sorry.

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 because there's a lot of people out there that'd be like, well, 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, I was gonna get, you know, a stainless steel Royal Oak, but now I'm just gonna get the Swatch AP, 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 have worn a G-Shock or something like that. So I think it's pretty smart.

Um, but, uh, but what do you think, Wade?

That said, I did text you this morning and say it's over.

I think it'll come down to how much, you know, it devalues the ownership of the $30,000+ Royal Oak, right? I think like The pro side argument is that, to your point, Jordi Hays, 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, does it in some way detract from the ownership that you have? There's a lot of these arguments on the internet of like, you don't see Ferrari out here collaborating with Toyota to make a— there's a lot of those commentaries.

Yeah, but another, I guess, something I go to is like if a Porsche owner pulls up to grab a coffee on a Sunday morning in a GT3 RS and they see someone with a Carrera T, they're not sitting there like, "Oh, that Carrera T is devaluing my GT3 RS." They're thinking, "Mogged." Damn, mogged.

That's the equivalent of like, you know, someone pulling up with, you know, an openwork ceramic Royal Oak, and then someone's walking in with a 15450 37mm starter Royal Oak, right? Like, I think you're still in that same realm. This would be like, you know, if you show up in your, you know, GT3 Touring and someone else pulls up with the Toyota collab that, you know, with the badge.

No, just a Camry with the badge.

The badge. Yeah, with the badge. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I don't know.

Even the chat says they should. Toyota makes a good car. I agree. I agree. I want the Porsche badge BYD. Yeah.

No, the real move is down badging. Get the Carrera GT, throw the Boxster on the back. See if anyone notices. 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?

It's an interesting time because 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. I think the same thing happened when the MoonSwatch came out. Like, we had everything from like, you know, professional athletes to regular people asking for like big boxes of these MoonSwatches, and we don't traditionally sell them. Oh, sure. Uh, we did some interesting concierge stuff there. It was an 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 Royal Oak catalog, there's like, you know, you can get a 15300, it's a 39mm, oftentimes argued better size for in the low 30s, right about where retail is. You can get a 15400 and 15500, and, you know, then now you're at the 15510. Like, those examples trade above retail. There's a lot of them that are trading at retail or around. And like, synthetically, they are kind of, you know, you're getting a Royal Oak out of that offer. Um, and so we're seeing a lot of people buy Royal Oaks and getting great deals on them right now in market. 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 waitlist for this thing that I'm lusting for. I'll buy this watch, and now that 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, $33,000 or whatever that is. Mm-hmm.

Well, what else is new in the watch world? What's the next event on the calendar that everyone fans, uh, has their eyes towards?

I think the next big one is, uh, Geneva Watch Days is in, is in, uh, September. Um, so that's a big fun one, but I think everyone's still reeling from Watches and Wonders.

Yeah, uh, that still happened. Who won? Who won?

Oh yeah, I don't know if anyone won.

I think there's a lot of great—

come on, come on, the salmon, the salmon, ultra thin overseas.

Yeah, I would say big fan of the Overseas Salmon. I'm a sucker for a salmon dial. Big fan of the kind of 38mm Nautilus. But I think there's been sneaky winners. Like, I think the UN Super Freak was incredible, and like being there in person and checking all of it out was really awesome. A 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.

Fantastic. Amazing.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thank you. Thank you for the intel. Excited to see the launch. Are you gonna be camping out at any Swatch stores this weekend, or you got better things to do?

I will not be doing that, unfortunately, but I look forward to getting the coverage of it and seeing— I'm sure we'll— I'm sure we will be placing some examples into some clients' hands as soon as it pops up. It'll probably be very desirable in the very beginning.

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much. Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon. 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. People are constantly trying to map this boom to the dot-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. 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. If you benchmark and fit the graph and change the y-axis and the x-axis perfectly, you got the perfect pattern. The, the, uh, the chartologists in the chat are are going wild. Anyway, we'll have to dig.

We're going to find out where we are exactly.

From here, I do think I would predict that the market's either going to go up or down over the next couple of years. Like one of those two outcomes for sure.

I think a 50% chance.

50/50 up. It goes up. 50 up, 50 down.

I don't want to be too, you know.

Historically, it's gone up more than it's gone down. And so you should actually be like 51% up or 52% up if you wanna be historically accurate. Anyway, thank you for tuning in. Have a great day. Leave us 5 stars in Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com. Goodbye.