Google Earnings, Jensen Targeted in Chinese Spy Plot, Ice Cube Joins | Luke Igel, David Rader & Jared Allen, Jake Stauch, Jay Madheswaran, Arthur Querou

0:00 You're watching TBPN. Today is Thursday, 10/29/2026. We are live from the TBPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance.

0:12 The craft of craft of all.

0:13 Oh, what?

0:14 Oh, god. Why why don't you... How do you sound weird today? Are you okay? What were you doing this weekend?

0:19 What are

0:19 you talking about? Oh,

0:20 was surfing this weekend Yeah. Down in Malibu. Yeah. Having a good time down there.

0:24 That's good.

0:25 Yeah. What do you mean?

0:26 You you... It seems like... Or something? Yeah. Something's a little different.

0:30 I don't know I don't know where where to place it, but let me tell you about ramp. I'll try and figure it out. Time is money saved by the way. You can use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more.

0:42 Playing on my racing sim last night, so maybe I'm a bit tired.

0:45 Okay. Yeah. That must be it.

0:47 That must be it.

0:48 How's your phone doing?

0:50 Like the phone?

0:52 Oh, yeah. My phone, it's pretty good. What the heck?

0:55 Who... What the... Who's that? It looks like Tyler is wearing a perfect Jordy mask. Because look at Tyler today.

1:02 Wow. He looks exactly like Jordy. This is crazy. I'm so confused by what's going on right now. No. Of course, course, Tyler is wearing the the Jordy mask, is extremely freaky. When I ran into him this morning, I thought... I didn't clock it as Jordy actually initially. I I just thought it was a guest who was here to hang out or say hi, but it is bizarre. You can't really move your mouth that much.

1:27 Right? That's...

1:27 I can't really move my mouth. I can't breathe through my nose either. It's a bit hard. It's pretty uncomfortable to wear.

1:32 But but do a little spin because the back is pretty solid. They nailed the hair. I think they got it pretty good back there. And I think the sunglasses do a lot of the work. If you take out the sunglasses, you'll give everyone a jump scare.

1:44 Yep. No, it's

1:45 her. Not good.

1:47 I gotta keep those,

1:48 Not good. You gotta keep the sunglasses up. But it's helpful because Jordy wears the sunglasses a lot on the show. I think we're going to sub the real But Jordy back this is an a plus bit. I thoroughly enjoy this.

2:02 Tyler, forgot your laptop. Keep keep it on keep it on.

2:08 It's so hard.

2:09 Tyler, keep it on for the whole show.

2:11 Cool? Do not do that.

2:13 No. Keep it

2:13 on We for the whole we we've tested these masks before and they are so uncomfortable. It feels like you're suffocating. It's absolutely absolutely brutal. But it's a lot of fun. The chat's saying you got Botox over there.

2:29 Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco. Critically interesting for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences. A new value with Cisco. Chip wars going on. There's another spy. There was a spy at OpenAI. Now there's a spy tracking Jensen over at NVIDIA. The wars are waging. Google earnings is today.

2:50 We have Ice Cube joining. We got lots of stuff going on today. We start a little earnings recap and then we'll go into the the NVIDIA story? What do think, Jordan?

2:59 Yeah. Let's do it.

2:59 Cool. So Google stock is cratering. It's down 12 and a half percent. Earnings miss, rare. And here are the results.

3:07 So, revenue. Consensus was $128,000,000,000 came in at 127.6. Like, only a third of a percent miss down. But to the negative, you usually want to be beaten these consensus estimates. Earnings per share, not nearly as good. 30% miss. They were expecting $3 a share, $3.01 came in at $2.12. And so there was a little bit of nuance there because some of the earnings miss was related to owning SpaceX stock which traded down in the interval and so they had to take a little bit of a write down on that. But even if you factor that out, so that was an $8,700,000,000 loss that they technically took on the equity investments. That reduced EPS by $0.55 And so even if you exclude that impact, EPS still would have been $2.67 still below the $3.1 that Wall Street was expecting.

4:04 So you can factor out that nuance and still get to a place where something went slightly awry. There's a lot of good stuff happening, a lot of other worries and that's why the market's reacting the way it is. So the first key takeaway is that cloud is just a monster business. There was very interesting reporting years ago in 2018 that back in 2017, Larry Page had considered pulling the plug on Google Cloud. He was like, we're competing with AWS.

4:33 There's two executives that were sort of fighting at the time. There's too much going on. Maybe we shouldn't even be in this business. Maybe we shouldn't even do cloud and have a cloud platform. Well, that it's a completely different world today because cloud is so important to the business. Revenue doubled to $30,700,000,000 Operating profit tripled to $11,100,000,000 Operating margin is at 36.2%. It's a fantastic business. If it were independent, it would be worth an incredible amount of money. Hundreds of billions, maybe a trillion dollars right there just in that value. And so Google and Alphabet truly have become this diversified portfolio of bets.

5:11 Search is just one of them. They got YouTube. They also have Cloud, obviously. So the Cloud backlog now is $561,000,000,000 of companies, labs that have gone to them. We just saw this with OpenAI buying cloud and TPUs. There is a lot of demand for their services. And what's interesting is that if you look at that number $561,000,000,000, that's a ton. Is that over ten years? So you know, saw in the Anthropic s one, some of these contracts go out, you know, till two But thousand and thirty three, two thousand thirty fifty five percent of that cloud backlog is expected to be recognized as revenue within two years. So even though you have this big number, you're getting half of that $275,000,000,000, something like that, over the next two years.

5:57 That's pretty quick for a business that did 30,700,000,000 in revenue. You're getting $2.50 coming really fast. So that should be driving valuation upwards. Search advertising though, growth slowed. Last quarter was 17%. This quarter came in at 12%. AI is accelerating query volume. So they are seeing a ton of token production. You see that when Sundar steps on stage and shows the progress of their models, the diffusion of Gemini models. Query AI mode is actually taking share.

6:32 People are using it in place of the default search, not really by their choice a lot. It just sort of pops up a lot of the times. But it monetizes less effectively than traditional searches right now. Now, what's interesting is that at the end of the day, it's a person asking a question and getting a bunch of pixels on a screen. And if you're on your phone, it's a vertical screen that's, you know, nine by 16.

6:55 Right?

6:55 Square for some.

6:56 Square for some if you're on the Duo.

6:58 Hey, Mark Garman.

6:59 Hey, Mark Garman. But at the end of the day, as a as a... If you're Instagram, you want to monetize every pixel that you're showing the person while they're on Instagram. If you're Google, when someone asks a question you want to monetize every pixel with ads and that's what has happened with Google Search over the past decade. Right?

7:15 There was a time when it used to be a very clear call out for one sponsored post at the top and now it's been you scroll the whole first page and it's all ads. AI mode isn't that. AI mode might have some monetization going on, but it's not every single sentence is a sponsored ad just yet. They got to get there. They're not going to talk about that because that's rough and that's complicated.

7:37 But it's going to be a hard road to figure out exactly how do we monetize the full response. That we're showing to the viewer should have a lot of things, a lot of links and offers and brand messages that are monetizable, paid for, bidded auction style to really maximize every view that they get. And so, that is the is the coming challenge, but you know, they've been doing this for twenty plus years. And so that is the path that they're on. The last thing, Google is spending $200,000,000,000 on AI infrastructure this year.

8:11 2026 CapEx guidance, 195,000,000,000 to $2.00 $5,000,000,000 right in that $200,000,000,000 range. They are also signaling that they will expect that they expect a significant increase in 2027. Q3 spending alone was 51,400,000,000 so they're already on their $200,000,000,000 run rate. And next quarter should be higher, following quarter should be higher, etcetera. So let's go.

8:34 And then the last thing is that Gemini crossed a billion MAU, monthly active users. The first party AI model, the API is doing 32,000,000,000 tokens a minute. Hard to say what that means in the modern era because there's so many models that are more token efficient and really just getting stuff done, getting answers, satisfying users is what matters. But it's up 40% quarter on quarter. Clearly, they're serving more models.

9:00 More people are using them. And then, of course, they announced Gemini four Carbon, the newest frontier model, the day or before earnings, two days before earnings sort of trying to reassure investors that they are still on the frontier, that they're that the benchmarks look good and that the adoption will come and more importantly that they are vertically integrated. So even if they don't show up on the ramp data and the open router data, just having the frontier model internally is super valuable because it will drive YouTube, it'll drive AI search, it'll drive internal workloads. There'll all be all these things where they aren't going outside for costs and they will be vertically integrated.

9:40 Yeah. Seems like it's gonna it's gonna be incredibly strategic to be able to get Frontier Intelligence at Yeah. 90% low, you know Exactly. Lower than market price.

9:49 Exactly. Exactly. And then there's a whole bunch of other interesting things. They can fine tune their own models. They can optimize them for their infrastructure.

9:56 What do you... The model that works in Google search, it does feel different than a Claude model or a GPT model fast because people expect that from that from the AI search results. And then on YouTube you expect something different. You expect something that can piece, can crawl over all the transcripts of YouTube with no, you know, robot block up, no captchas and whatnot if you're asking for extra context. So lots of lots of optimism there, but rough day in the market at least.

10:30 And a little bit rough for Berkshire who their sort of blended price per share of their recent $10,000,000,000 investment is around $350 per share. They did some part into Class A, some into Class C, down pretty pretty dramatically from that point. Alphabet now sitting at $280 a share in just around six months.

10:58 Got it. Well...

11:00 And yeah. It's like the OG Google bear case is like rearing its head again. Yeah.

11:05 Right? Yeah. That's right.

11:06 And, you know, they've been...

11:09 It became sort of They've

11:11 there there was a viral threat. I'll I'll try to find it. Are you

11:15 talking about from levels.io maybe?

11:19 No. This was... Basically this guy, July 23, Max Anderson says, As someone who has personally spent 500 ks a month on Google Ads for years, I can tell you with certainty this revenue growth in search is artificial and extremely unhealthy for Google's business long term. He goes on to make a bunch of points, which have been refuted in different ways, but Satrini brought it up yesterday. The sufinator at the time pushed back on a lot of this, but either way, it just felt like search was already perfectly optimized.

11:52 I think I was bringing this up probably over a year ago, like, have you actually paid attention to a Google search recently? Where it's like, for certain queries, it's hard to find an organic result. Yeah. Right? Where it's like, ads at the top, first three results are ads, then you have maybe one or two organic results and then a bunch more ads.

12:12 I mean, do understand the structure of like finding a mattress on Google? It got so crazy that first off, there would be Google Shopping callouts that are also paid for. There would be a Google Shopping widget. Then there would be three or four sponsored results. So the links would be specifically this brand, specifically this brand, just directly brand keyword advertising.

12:36 But then you'd go down and you'd get to mattress review sites that were like... And they'd all been purchased by the various mattress companies. So like there was actually no where to end up. There was nothing that you could go to. There was no like Wikipedia. And and yeah, it's been it's been crazy. But but this stuff's just sticky. People are just in their flows still. That's why you only see like slight deceleration. It's not like falling off a cliff or anything like that.

13:02 Yeah. Anyway. One other interesting detail. So Microsoft had earnings as well. Yeah.

13:09 CapEx came in at 38,370,000,000. Estimate was 45,900,000,000. So Google was 51,360,000,000. Estimate was was 55.7. Yeah. This wasn't because they didn't want to spend the money. It was because of delays. Yep. So they're like they're trying to spend Powered shell delays. Yes. Just a variety of

13:26 rumor of like there's a whole bunch of GPUs that are waiting to get because stuff is slow and there's permitting and you're bumping up against the real world, the physical world. It doesn't really matter where demand is. And everyone who's selling tokens is higher is pretty happy to be like, yeah, we wouldn't hate if our margins were good this quarter even though we were delayed on supply. Like Yeah. Supply constraint isn't the end of the world for most people.

13:51 Well, on the on the AI build out and strategy specifically, I'm just new tie, new New? I'm just new at AI, I guess. Has a breakdown of some rumors saying that the internal models reasoning jump comes from more aggressive RL, including training in games and simulated environments. Simulation hypothesis is going strong. Strategies learned their transfer to research mathematics and other fields.

14:21 And obvious Stokes and ETH show the scale of the improvement in anthropics in some similar direction with its internal quad model. Musk's digital optimist hiring explicitly calls for manufacture measuring transfer from games into general computer use. And so Ashley Vance over at Core Memory is saying that does this mean we're just in the midst of Demis Hassabis' original vision of how to get to AGI? After a kind of brief brute force period, the games are the path to AGI. And it is interesting that Google has stayed the course with Genie when a lot of the other labs I mean, Anthropic has famously been like, we're only focused on coding.

15:02 We're not even doing images. OpenAI has done a bunch of like, quote unquote side quests. Some of the side quests were too compute intensive, like Sora. Some of them like computer use. Remember operator? Do you remember operator? Like, it was the original, like, go and computer... Use a computer and a virtual computer to go and click on buttons on a website. And it was pretty janky at the time, but now it's basically solved. And that was actually a good investment on the side.

15:30 And it'll be interesting to see which way Genie goes. Like it could just be, oh, it's only fun and it's really expensive or it could be like, hey, this is a really really great next leg up for training potential and it's a really valuable asset for them to have internally. I think that's what people are debating right now. Anyway, where do you want to go next? Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange.

15:51 Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Want stay

15:58 on News Google or in video world. Yes. Should we start with this this Times piece?

16:04 This is in the New York Times. Although they they had posted something similar a year ago, right? So us through this and then we'll reflect.

16:14 Yeah. Here we go. So in the Times today, NVIDIA chief seen as target of Chinese spy plot. A Chinese businesswoman who had a close relationship with Jensen was found to be passing intelligence to Beijing. President Trump was briefed and took no action.

16:28 That's interesting. American spy agencies had gathered striking intelligence, a top executive at a Singapore based data center. Company was under scrutiny for possibly steering advanced NVIDIA AI chips to China, and now American officials had concluded that she was a Chinese intelligence asset funneling information to Beijing. But what came next was even more alarming. Surveillance of the executive Alice Wong, a Chinese citizen revealed that she had developed a close relationship with Jensen.

16:54 For years, Washington had worked to deny China the technology needed to match or surpass The United States in the intense global competition for superiority in AI. The discovery that Beijing was getting reports from someone with direct access to Mr. Huang, one of the most powerful figures in the AI revolution, as well as an influential ally, President Trump, set off alarms at the White House. Roughly a year ago, mister Trump was briefed about the intelligence findings, which have not been previously reported, and chose not to do anything with the information. So, good opportunity to rewind and talk about a show that we did on October 10 where we talked about this company and the CEO Mega Speed.

17:34 Mega Speed. And You called it a great name.

17:36 I mean it is a great name.

17:38 Gave her a round of applause for being a The

17:39 name is fantastic. That's, know, it's always good to say something nice. Yeah. So the name is fantastic. Totally.

17:46 So I asked Chad to kind of summarize our discussion.

17:50 Yes. I did a

17:51 question and a finding. So did you discuss Alice Huang, the CEO, accused spy? Finding, yes. Did you discuss her access to Jensen? Yes.

18:02 Did you highlight her Chinese state media background? Yes. So she had been a reporter Yeah. For Chinese state media prior to starting a sort of Malaysian Singaporean hyper...

18:14 Is non Chinese state media?

18:17 We question Mega Speed's activities?

18:19 Don't have independent media. Right? So if you were... If you do anything in the media, it's by definition you're working for the government?

18:26 No. I mean, I I don't think that's like actually how they're defining it.

18:29 Okay. Oh, this is like the central state media. It.

18:33 Yeah. Can make the argument that all their media is gonna come under the influence Yeah. Of the state.

18:38 This is like... Yeah. Is it is it working for...

18:40 Let let me let me continue. You discuss Alice Wong? Yes. Did you discuss her access to Jensen? Yes.

18:46 Did you highlight her Chinese state media background? Yes. Did you question Mega Speed's activities? Yes. Did you explicitly suggest she was a spy? No. Could the discussion be interpreted as raising suspicions? Yes. So it was too early to go out and say like

19:02 Yeah.

19:02 You know, we didn't have any real details around the situation but the whole situation was so suspicious that it was hard to... I'm surprised it's taken this long for it to kind of bubble up.

19:13 Yeah. Yeah. No. It's very very tricky. Yeah.

19:15 Mean it seems like at at the very least it's like she is being accused of being deployed to figure out how to gain access to advanced AI chips. So how can how can more NVIDIA chips land in Malaysia? Right? Because the more more chips that get to Malaysia, the more inference that will be available for Yeah. China, essentially.

19:37 Matthew's in the chat pretty much saying what we're all thinking, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, you get fooled. Can't get fooled again.

19:45 That's a great quote.

19:45 George W Bush. One of the best quotes in

19:48 One of the best.

19:49 White House history.

19:50 Yeah. That's good. Well, Jensen has not responded to this. He has not actually posted since October

19:57 But here's the thing. 20 Have they had interactions over the last

20:03 We've been butchered together. Right?

20:05 The last year though.

20:06 Oh, interesting. This might be like kind of old.

20:08 I think it might be I think it might be old news.

20:12 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You'd imagine if like the New York Times is on the hunt that like the CIA would also be like, hey, you gotta stop talking to this person. They are trying to get information out of you.

20:23 Something like that. I don't know. But it'll be it'll be interesting to see what happens with mega speed with Malaysia in general. Like, it's kind of a canary in the coal mine, that chart of compute by country. If Malaysia continues to ramp compute capacity, it's like we don't know the cause, but we know that there's a problem.

20:48 You know? It's kind of like if you're if you're measuring a like an athlete and you're and you're noticing like insane blood glucose levels or something. Like you might notice that there's a problem before you can diagnose it. Malaysia seems to be in that camp of like, it's odd if they're scaling dramatically. Yeah.

21:11 Given the local the local economy.

21:14 It's suspicious.

21:15 Yeah. And so, I don't know. I mean, there's there's a whole bunch of chip sanction, chip control legislation that could be expanded, reworked, changed. There's also, I mean, the incentive is just so high. We've heard about people taking hair dryers and removing labels from servers to get them across the cross borders.

21:38 It's it's an extremely was... Valuable

21:40 that was called super micro?

21:41 I think it was super micro. But anytime that there's these geopolitical walls, there's just such an incentive for arbitrage. I remember hearing about people that in the Russia Ukraine war would take basically like a first class fight to a western democracy, buy a DJI drone at like a Best Buy for a thousand dollars or buy a bunch of them, put them in their suitcase, fly them into the closest country, hop on a train or a bus, get into the conflict zone, and be able to sell them for like $10,000 apiece. And so that arbitrage is just like, okay, one trip, if I have 10 drones with me, I make a 100... I make $90,000 in profit.

22:19 Yeah. People do that. It's the same thing NVIDIA GPUs. So there's going to be an... A huge incentive not just to steal them and divert the cargo and do whatever you can, but also get close to the CEO, see what you can do, learn what is their actual process for making sure that chips aren't diverted. Right? How how can we mitigate the diversion as much as possible or divert as much as possible. Right? And so it's an ongoing ongoing battle. But another another example of the the the high geopolitical stakes of the AI race.

22:53 Is this the moment that AI 2027 was talking about? China wakes up. Wakes up and starts spying. Like starts going more aggressively.

23:05 Wouldn't that... They've they've been doing

23:06 this for a couple of years then. Yeah. This is the New York Times wakes up. New York Times wakes up to what's going on with the with the geopolitical spying.

23:16 No. But there was articles about this.

23:18 Last year?

23:19 Last year.

23:19 No. I know.

23:19 Like so

23:20 that's why... I mean if you look at the New York Times masthead...

23:24 The revelation... Maggie

23:26 Haberman, Anna Swanson. It's like they brought out their a team, six people, seven people on on this this byline. Like it's a big deal. Yeah. Were there any other call outs that were driving conversations?

23:40 I mean, we we already read the Ryan Mac screenshot, I believe. But it is never never more important to be careful around mega speed CEOs, I suppose. Yeah. Odd. Funny funny name for a company. Anyway. Yeah.

24:02 Should we go down the rabbit hole?

24:04 Yes. We should. Let's see. Simulated markets. The simulation hypothesis.

24:09 So this... I went down this rabbit hole a couple days ago because you got served this video too on Instagram. Right? You saw...

24:17 Well, we have the exact same...

24:18 We have the exact same feed. For some reason, Instagram doesn't show us any ads and sends us the exact same videos at the same time. I mean, is just the nature of like things that go viral. Everyone sees them. But let's...

24:29 No.

24:29 But we specifically are sending posts back and forth all day.

24:32 So it's like you guys like the same thing?

24:33 Yeah.

24:33 So there's this video.

24:35 Yeah. We have the... We'll we'll each send the same video

24:38 Yeah.

24:39 To each other.

24:39 And I'm just like like we're just like Scroll up. Up. Sends the same video. But there's Two reels

24:48 passing in the night.

24:49 That has the title losing our house because Really? Day Really, Tyler? What happened? I had to take it off.

25:00 Oh, you... To take it off. Wow.... Sitting here in the capital of show business Yeah. And you got a little bit uncomfortable with with with your...

25:11 That backlink behind you over your shoulder. He looks like a little angel on your shoulder. I like the way it's framed right now. It's great. Let me tell you about Console.

25:19 Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT HR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. So this this video came up and it says losing our house because of day trader. Did you notice this? Not because of day trading, but because of day trader. So already odd grammatical error.

25:43 But play this video because it's designed to sort of rage bait you and go go viral. And it has this saxophone getting louder song. And it's the whole family. This would normally be a tragedy. Like, you're losing your family home. But

26:03 Yeah. Really dark.

26:04 What's... It's super dark and you're like, this is awful. Like, what is going on? But if you dig into this person's if you dig into this person's account, the next video is like is like, I lost my house day trading and like, here's how I'm planning to win it all back. And then it's like, click my link in bio.

26:25 And then you click on the link in bio and it's like here's my trader trading mastermind. I have a free course and then I have a $49 course and then I have a $100 course. And so, all of this is actually a funnel to an info product. And this is designed to go viral. And I don't know if they lost the house or not.

26:42 Like, I I I have no idea. It could be that they're doing better than ever because they're not actually trading at all.

26:48 Very very counterintuitive way to market an info product. Being like, I just lost my house because I was bad at something. Now, follow me as Yes. I run it back up.

27:01 Maybe. It's

27:01 I don't It's it's it's again, it's like it's I saw it and it made me very sad.

27:07 Yeah. Totally. Like that is the correct emotional response. But the nature of the algorithm and negativity bias on social media is this is something that you see and you're like, this is horrific. I can't look away.

27:19 And then a lot of... There's just a funnel. And some people click and they watch another video. They're like, oh, this is this is inspiring. She's she's working her way back up. And they're they're they're staying in the game. They're they're not they're not, you know, hanging up their jersey, I guess, or whatever you wanna...

27:35 They're not quitting right before they hit it big.

27:36 Basically, that's the pitch. And it's really really dark. So so I I I started going down this because I was like, okay. Who's on the side of the pitch?...

27:48 Because it just like it it it sticks in your mind because it is such a tragic scenario. Totally. But then what's interesting is they're just like spinning it as, oh, yeah. Well, it's all good. We're...

28:01 I'm sticking... I'm... Yeah. I'm not... We're not giving up yet. Yeah.

28:05 Yeah. So it's very, very odd. But there's actually something very interesting going on because when you see that, you think casino style gambling, you think that somebody took their capital if they have their nest egg, their kid's college fund. Like, when I was a kid, like the the don't gamble meme was he gambled away his kid's college fund. Like, that was the most degenerate thing you could do as a father.

28:31 Would be gambling away money that was in your retirement, money that was saved, your nest egg, your rainy day fund was gambled away. Usually at a physical casino because you couldn't resist the temptation of blackjack or poker or slots or something. Then, we came to the era of the phone and all of a sudden it became sports betting, offshore betting casinos, crypto casinos. People were losing money on crypto. But again, crypto is a moment where you have to put capital at risk.

29:00 Like, you have to have the nest egg. This is different. This is people that are... So there are people that are getting fleeced and losing money, but what's interesting is that it's not that they're taking a nest egg and putting it in a stock that then goes down and they pick the wrong stock. That's not exactly what's happening.

29:19 Oftentimes, what they're doing is they're signing up for subscriptions to trade fake stocks. It's a simulated market that gives them the the feeling of, okay, maybe one day they will be able to get good enough at day trading that they will have access to capital.

29:37 Well, and these platforms pitch it as do your simulated trading with us Yes. And if you're good Yes. Then we will give you... Then we will stake you. Yes.

29:47 And we'll give you capital that you can trade. We'll basically turn you into a mini hedge fund.

29:51 Yes. Exactly. Exactly.

29:53 And we did a little bit of research on these companies and they're shockingly large.

29:59 And there's

29:59 a lot

30:00 of them.

30:00 And there's a lot of them. Yeah. We found one that has done hundreds of millions of of fees Yeah. Which for them is like clearly like better than software margins. Right?

30:12 Because they just have... They basically have like a fake trading app. Yeah. And they're like, yeah, place your trades. It's tied to real data. Yeah. But then they just promise this, pay the $100 a month, prove that you're good at trading, and if you're good, we'll give you capital. Right? Yes. Because it it'll be a win win.

30:31 But, of course, over time a lot of these companies have been exposed as Ponzi schemes.

30:39 Where

30:39 Oh, they take other customers money and and basically, like, you're doing the simulated trading, and they're they're like, you get an attaboy, like, you did a good job, and then we're giving you like a reward. And so they'll pay them, which I think is part of what makes this process addicting, which has driven some of these people to go and get a bunch of subscriptions. Yeah. Which is just like very very strange because every subscription could be a $100 a month. Yep.

31:06 Multiplying that out, it's like you could just be investing. But when you're investing, nobody nobody says good job. Yeah. If you do a little bit better Yeah. I'll give you a bunch of capital to invest. Yeah. Right? Because people like LPs are not sitting around being like, how do I back the next like stay at home day trader?

31:23 Yeah. Yeah.

31:23 You know? Like...

31:26 No. 100 percent. Like, these were so like jarring to me because I saw multiple reels from people who were like, I I have a prop trading account or I'm working with a prop firm or I blew my account or I blew an account or several accounts. And I was just like, you are not working with Citadel or Jane Street. Like this is just...

31:48 This does not compute. Like you're not on the phone. Like your counterparty is not a hedge fund. Like something else is going on. And it turns out that the counterparty is basically a SaaS product that shows virtual trades that are completely simulated. And it's... And the crazy thing is that I I originally said this, I was like, imagine, like, look at this horrific story. Imagine being at like Citadel or Jane Street watching this and being like, this is the person on the other side of the trades. Right? But it's not They're not.

32:16 It's actually not the hedge fund that's making money off of this. It's the independent...

32:20 Hedge funds would love to be trading. They would love to be trading against these people.

32:23 Yeah. They're like, get in the real market. Go on a real...

32:27 Don't scared. Yeah. Don't be scared.

32:29 Come on. And and we'll make a penny every time you make a trade. Like, we're happy with with doing market making, you know. But instead, it's it's these firms that are that are actually just taking a $100 a month from people. They'll do it on credit cards.

32:42 And so that's where you get people. Again, we don't know if this one's real or not, but there are actual people who who will put multiple $100 a month subscriptions for these simulated trading challenges on their credit cards and they're not even putting any capital in the market. So there's actually no chance of like, oh, you actually did get into a good stock and it did well. Yeah. It's it's purely fake.

33:06 It's crazy. Crazy. Yeah.

33:08 And what's interesting is these these prop trading firms

33:11 Yeah.

33:13 They would end up having to classify like a bunch of people as independent contractors because they're not actually putting capital at risk. So if they're gonna get a payout Yeah. They're getting paid as like a freelancer. Mhmm. I know at one point there was some...

33:28 There was coverage around deal supporting some of these companies. They ultimately, I think pretty quickly exited the market Sure. Because they realized and there there was basically the... I think I don't know if it's the... I think it's the SEC that's come after some of these

33:46 I'm sure.

33:46 Companies Yeah. Because they're they're again like simulating simulating trading but there's real money on the line and then of course the the Ponzi dynamic. So Yeah.

33:56 So Bloomberg had a breakdown of this back in December fifteenth of last year and it's fascinating. Somehow somehow we missed it at the time. I'm I'm so glad it exists because they did some they did some great journalism here To kind of show you the full picture of what's going on, we can read through a little bit of this. First, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI.

34:16 Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So Bloomberg says, the pitch is enticing. Learn to trade like a Wall Street master of the universe. Pay a fee typically starting below a $100, just $99 maybe, and manage thousands in fictional funds in simulated markets for stocks, currencies, commodities.

34:40 If you stick to the strict rules and meet your profit target, you can become a funded trader for the firm. That means you could receive payouts as of as much of 90% of the ersatz profits you make. If you fail, you can keep trying by paying the fee again. More than 400 companies offer forms of these challenges up from about 10 just five years ago, according to FPFX Technologies, a Florida based software provider for the industry. So, there's actually a SaaS company that's powering all of these different like prop firms that do the simulated trading because, of course, you need to take real market data and then create a front end for the end customer.

35:28 And they are effectively reselling a skinned version of that software, which is fascinating. Three of the biggest are FTMO Group, Funding Pips Corp and Alpha Capital Group. That's a great name. Alpha. You want to go with Alpha Capital. That sounds serious. They have about 6,000,000 customers collectively. Personally,

35:47 would choose Sigma. Sigma.

35:49 Two Sigma.

35:50 No. Just

35:51 Just one sigma. Lone sigma. Is the problem. If you've been following the drama two sigma, it makes sense because you never want to start a firm with two sigmas. It's impossible.

35:58 They're boring. You know this. Right? They're actually boring. The founders of two sigma are for for are two lone wolves that never works out. An alpha and a sigma, an alpha and a beta, but never two sigmas. That's not going to work. So they do actually disclose that the trading is simulated. The companies describe what they offer as proprietary or prop trading, a finance term for managing a firm's own capital. Quote, enhance your skills with modern prop trading firm.

36:32 FTMO's website says, manage a trading account a trading account of significant size without risking your hard earned money, Funding Pip says. A global leader

36:41 That's in such a crazy Pip.

36:43 Crazy. Crazy. Some customers complain that they've paid high fees. While the chances of winning rewards are slim, only four percent of users get any payout based on their trading according to FPFX. In social media posts, people describe themselves as prop firm customers claim to have lost thousands on fees.

37:04 So, they've done these $100 a month challenges, a couple of them for a full year, and they never got a payout because they never won the challenge. So because it's very hard if you're just an average stay at home trader. What was your stay at home day trader? One of them, Sameem Sharif, 28, an accountant from London, estimates he's paid about $10,000 to simulated trading firm PipFarm since last year. When you have a bad streak, it's easy to think, I'll just buy one more.

37:34 Before you know, you've racked up a lot in losses. Sharif says he's lost trading challenges because the rules are so strict. Simulated trading customers are paid only if they adhere to certain conditions which the companies say they spell out in advance. They vary from firm to firm, but most of them stipulate a profit target, daily loss limits, a minimum number of trading days, and leverage restrictions. Some require profits to be earned consistently rather than in one large trade.

38:01 Trading around news events can be banned, and many don't allow positions to be held over weekends. Pipbarm says Sharif failed dozens of challenges by exceeding the amount of losses a trader can sustain in a day. A PIP is a price move in foreign exchange trading for reference. When he eventually passed the hurdle, the company introduced a 1% risk per trade limit for him, he and the company say. That means a customer can't risk more than 1% of his capital in a single transaction.

38:33 The company calls it a standard industry practice for traders with an unsustainable approach, a restriction Sharif says is unfair. Sharif and PipFarm say the company recently committed to making some payouts based on his successful trades. So you can't just find one stock, bet it, and win. You have to be diversified into over 100 positions potentially to actually deploy all your capital, I guess. Adam Khalil, a former operations employee at Singapore based Pit Farm, says the majority of users breach the rules and end up repeatedly paying sign up fees.

39:07 People lose one time. They wanna make the money back, so they buy another challenge, he says. So this is the I blew my account. Like, you you zeroed your account. You you lost your $100. You gotta buy back in. It's like a casino with a with a ticketed at the door or something. It's crazy.

39:24 It's so it's so fascinating.

39:28 Okay.

39:28 Yeah. Like, why would you just not...

39:31 Dollar cost average into the Russell two thousand?

39:34 No. Why would you just not take the money? Why why why... I mean, I I understand it.

39:40 It's because... Dream of... You will be given a $100,000 to manage and you could five x that and we will give you a portion of those profits and you could win $400,000.

39:52 So

39:52 the pitch is definitely a $100 to try this. If you're good, you could make a $100,000 very quickly. So

40:02 needless to say, all of these should be banned from operating in their current form.

40:09 Channeling the the soccer and jetty deep down. No. It it seems rough at the very least like stronger FTC regulation around, like, how these are marketed, all the influencer workflows that are happening. Because it's very clear that the info products lead you to a sign up form that has a referral fee attached to it. So Yeah.

40:29 So they will go put out those viral videos that are bleak, then it's it's buy my free trading course, then it becomes sign up. For this particular prop firm, I get $40 when you when you when you go in the door. And so lots of lots of odd stuff going on. Anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is a commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell insights online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

40:55 What's going on at the top of the App Store? Jordy, I know you watch the top of the App Store like a hawk.

41:01 New camera called Chromograph

41:03 Okay.

41:03 Camera. Is it good? Rocketed to the top.

41:06 Seems like it must be good.

41:07 Created by Ryan Johnson.

41:10 Oh, that's amazing. Yeah.

41:11 He said, I recently badgered my cinematographer Steve Yedlin into making my ideal iPhone still camera app. It shoots raw, bypasses the iPhone's look processing, and instead uses the same image processing we use on our movies. Went super viral. Cool. This thing is like clearly printing.

41:30 I think it's $13 to download it. Oh.

41:33 I didn't pick this up. This looks pretty attractive.

41:35 I picked it up. I haven't really been able to

41:37 Okay.

41:38 Properly use it yet.

41:40 Yeah. No. I've I've been really excited about the the the prospect of taking raw photos with the iPhone camera and then having a different way to manipulate them, potentially some AI in there, but not AI image generation like AI fine tuning all the knobs of like contrast and levels and color grading and all of that stuff. I don't know how much it does that. Yeah.

42:06 There's some of the photos here from Brendan Hodges you can pull up. I took the app for a test run. Looks great to me. I I I think these are cool.

42:12 Yeah. It ends up looking like it was taken on a a a Yeah.

42:15 And I think a lot of people have gone through the Instagram filter era on the low res iPhone and then sort of migrated to just stock iPhone photos, which all have the same look. And it's cool to sort of bring back that more filtered, more aesthetic, more Yeah. More taste driven look. Cool. Exciting to see people having fun with this.

42:39 Nishi, now wishing I took more raw. I'm in love. These are some nice photos of a pool and whatnot. So go check it out. Go check it out. Tyler, you're on very thick ice, bro. I love you. That's just such a funny post. Telling someone that they're thick on a on thick ice, on very thick ice instead of on thin ice. I thought that was funny.

43:03 Anything else before we bring in our first guest of the show, Jordan?

43:06 No. It's time.

43:07 It's time for MongoDB. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI app, the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI.

43:17 Own the data platform that powers it.

43:19 Triple blades.

43:20 And we have Luke from Kino, building collaborative video editor. Luke, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

43:30 Doing amazing. Happy to be on.

43:31 Keno. Great Great. Name for a business. Great name. Powerful Absolutely.

43:38 I imagine

43:38 if it wasn't called that, it would be much worse.

43:40 Totally.

43:40 Introduce the product. Like, at what level of abstraction do you see the modern video editor operating?

43:47 Yeah. We've all seen the videos, including my launch video co director Donald's, where Opus 5.5 by itself can create unimaginably good motion graphics plus videos. In general, combining motion graphics, real life footage, and everything that Val AI can give you. Yeah. We are giving that a home in all of the things that you need to do real work where all of your teammates' footage and all of your teammates' edit decisions are in one place and to prove that this is something that is worthwhile.

44:14 Donald, my colleague, and I, we spent the past few days living in one giant editor timeline, Figma style, while swarms of my agents and swarms of his agents all just chipped away at the same mega timeline.

44:27 That's cool.

44:28 A thing that we've been working on for a while.

44:29 Awesome. Cool. How do you see the how do you see the business positioning between building a harness and building like a SaaS workspace where AI work gets done? Like, these are blurring, but there are definitely companies... I'm thinking of like Slack with Slackbot is AI powered, but it's still mostly a software product.

44:52 Most people would not refer to Slackbot as a as a harness, but then you have, like, a like a cognition, a Devon, which is like a harness on top of the of the coding agents. How are you seeing the positioning of your product?

45:07 We are a managed service through and through in a way that is very similar to Cognition and Devon, but I would think what makes us different is that we really want you to use your subscriptions Mhmm. For OpenAI, for Cloud Code, for everything. Yeah. Because we think that if you use $10,000 of Cloud Code tokens, which is not hard to go through, it would mean a lot if you were to spend those doing productive work in video in our platform. Yeah.

45:29 That means that what can we do to help? Agents make a lot of mistakes if they are left to their own devices in this weird and odd domain, and nothing really has a URL. We had to have to be the ones to make a URL for every single timeline item and media item, and we have to be the ones to manage this long tail of problems. You cannot drag and drop the video the video files that come off of your guys' cameras into Chrome. Yeah.

45:54 So we had to make it so that you can... We had to build all of that... Those custom decoders.

45:57 Yeah.

45:58 You know, everything from black magic to red to a few more one... A few more fun ones. But there's a long tail of tasks that go into video editing from colorization to really in... Intense performance engineering that we're here to do for you. That's why we consider ourselves managing.

46:14 Yeah. Video is an interesting domain because it's it's like not... You can't just one shot it. Right? Because you could hire the most talented, like video team in the world.

46:25 Mhmm. Like, and you can tell them, here's my objective. Mhmm. Here's my influences. This is what I want it to look like. This is what I want it to do. And no matter how good they are, you're gonna have a bunch of feedback and things that you wanna change. And I feel like that's quite different than some of these other domains where you can one shot like like

46:43 You

46:43 define goal. You can you can... There's a lot of different things in software that you can effectively one shot. Yeah. Basically say like, this is the feature, this is what it needs to do, this is how it should interact with the rest of the software.

46:54 And then it just does it and it's like, okay, it functions. Whereas like, video is so is a... It it can... There's always... You're always gonna wanna change things or at least for a lot of different

47:06 Yeah.

47:06 Formats and outputs.

47:08 Talk a

47:08 little bit about Cinema.

47:09 Yeah. Cinema.

47:10 Talk a little bit about, like, how close is Chrome to actual, like, app performance? Because a lot of just rendering out a timeline can be vastly different if you're GPU accelerated versus doing it on the CPU. Like, there's a lot of when you're when you're deep in the Premiere or Blackmagic rabbit hole, you actually wind up starting to think about the specs of your computer a little bit more than I think most creatives would like to. But Chrome feels like there's been a lot of progress there with WebGL and Assembly. But is it 90% of the way there?

47:51 Is it a 100%? Like, where where are we?

47:54 Well, there's this new... Just like our WebAssembly allowed new businesses like Figma and many others. Web codecs is what I... Is... It's what allowing this formulation of our business.

48:03 Okay.

48:03 It is like FFmpeg in the browser, fully GPU accelerated if you want, which means that it's here. Like, we we could not have done this business in 2024.

48:13 Interesting.

48:13 This has all been here pretty recently,

48:15 and Yeah.

48:15 We're building on top of that to do the really crazy stuff where, you know, vintage camcorders that people in Bushwick love to use, that works in Keynote now because we built those decoders on top of this new technology that every browser has now.

48:28 Wait. But what what... What's different about a vintage cam... Is it doesn't just give you an m p four at the end of the day?

48:33 A lot of stuff is from the pre m p four era, of course, even kind of fancy podcast sets, they're not exporting h two six four. You have to do the ProRes and everything. I think the much more profound thing is that performance. If people scrub back and forth and it feels crappy, they're just not going to use us. Yeah.

48:48 Yeah. And that's what we've been grinding along, grinding on, and just pulling people in. We talked to Tyler last year when we were much earlier in our Cool. His very early feedback was so useful.

48:59 That's awesome.

48:59 And I'm very grinding towards where we come.

49:01 Yeah. That's amazing. How are you thinking about integrating AI video generation, more generative AI tooling? It feels like we're oddly still in the slop era. There's some projects that I'm seeing coming on the pipe where it's like, okay.

49:19 This might be the time when we all sit down and collectively watch an AI generated film and think it's good. But we're still not there yet. Like, Harry Potter Balenciaga was like three or four years ago. And then there's there's an AI movie, The Gods Must Be Challenged or something. I forgot what the name is.

49:37 But there's there's an AI movie that's coming that people are optimistic about, but we're not quite there. But it feels like a hybrid solution is fully embraced where it's green screen replacement, background, set extension, that type of stuff. How are you thinking about integrating those tools seamlessly?

49:55 Like like so much knowledge work, I think LLMs are are gonna be just so important here. Seeing how Astra is such a good collaborator in things like Blender

50:03 Yeah.

50:03 Is exactly what I experienced alongside the people I made this video with where we just did crazy amounts of visual effects that I never knew how to do before this. Right? And if I could choose between some magical lab who could give me a model, a diffusion model that could make a Pixar like movie or a, I would say, coding agent that could use RenderMan and Blender and video editors to make a Pixar like movie, would I choose the LLM every single time. Mhmm. There's a level of controllability that I think all real artists clearly want.

50:32 I think the method... The model of AI movies as you type into a text prompt, and then you get a beautiful movie at the end. Just kinda feels like the apocalypse for a lot of people and for good reason. And there's a there's a kinda positive vision that we're really excited to demonstrate here where it's like, no. Everything is code.

50:49 Everything is... But at the same time, everything is what you remember, the... This part we're seeing right here.

50:53 Yeah.

50:53 We just had Kino reskin all of Kino itself.

50:57 Sure.

50:57 We downloaded the ISO of macOS Leopard and then reskinned Kino to look like that. Wow. And then my friend interrupts me and asks me if I'm gonna stop goofing around and ship the video and

51:07 Yeah.

51:08 All that.

51:08 So how much of that was made in Kino?

51:11 All of that was Okay. All

51:13 Kino. And are you starting with raw footage, a cut down, a rough cut and then using AI tooling in Kino more for that final level of edit and polish? Or are you starting with a prompt and saying, hey, like, I just plugged in my Sony FX3. Like, go grab the files and start assembling. You do the rough cut.

51:38 Where do you lean into AI versus where do you want to dip in, dip out, etcetera?

51:46 Well, I consider my friend Donald has got me to do this. I don't even prompt anymore. I just feed my granola link to Keynote. And the granola link contains me and Donald brainstorming about what the video should be.

51:55 Sure.

51:55 And so Donald says, I'm gonna... Let's do a scene where I throw the hard drive off the rooftop in our office. Granola, which had enough context of us talking to each other about what the scene should become, is what was used by Keno to then lay out the rough cut alongside a storyboard that we also did in Kino.

52:11 And then did you wind up generating the video of you throwing the hard drive off off the roof, or did you wind up doing that?

52:16 That was a nightmare. We... A brand new C Dance model came out

52:20 Okay.

52:20 This weekend, and we begged everyone we knew to get access. And the video only came together because they gave us access to this like new checkpoint.

52:27 So how much of that

52:27 Should have just thrown a real hard drive off off of the right Yeah.

52:31 Then I had

52:31 to catch it. It'd a little bit dangerous.

52:33 True. Yeah. Catching it's tricky. Yeah. So how much of that is is AI generated versus AI produced motion graphics that are deterministically rendered versus shot with a camera captured in real life?

52:49 Well, what you just saw is all of them. So it starts... That base plate

52:53 Yep.

52:53 That's motion graphics. That's real footage.

52:54 Yep.

52:55 That's CDance doing its

52:55 CDance. Yep.

52:58 And then when you see my laptop screen, if you go a little bit further when I can picture the Waymo, that's not real.

53:03 That's not real?

53:04 Rotoscoped my laptop screen to be something completely different.

53:07 Okay. It is there is a there is a a an actual footage plate of you in... You with your hands on the computer.

53:15 Yes. This

53:16 is fine. I like the game of figuring what's real and what's not.

53:21 Before you bounce, how's how's growth been?

53:24 It's been good. We have been completely in closed beta until this morning. And so we're really excited. Right.

53:32 For some reason, thought... For some reason, again, I thought you were gonna launch... I thought you'd launch yesterday, but that but that's right. It was this morning. So I'm sure it's gonna be tremendous and I'm sure someone will try to buy this company by Mhmm.

53:45 You know, the end of the week as well. You guys are clearly like insanely tapped in and Yeah. And headed skating to where the puck is going. So great to meet you. And That's fantastic. We're excited to to play around with him more Yeah. Here at the Ultra Dome.

54:00 Have a good day. We'll talk Goodbye. To you Let me tell you about public.com. Invest across all asset classes, automate anything with AI agents, run trading strategies, risk management, money movements, and monitor markets with AI agents for investing on public. Our next guest is Ice Cube, the co founder and CEO of Big Welcome to the show, Cube.

54:22 How are you doing?

54:23 Doing good. How are you doing?

54:25 We're doing fantastically. Thank you so much for taking the time. Get us up to speed on Big Three. Can you take us back in time? How did this get started?

54:35 Just as a fan. Yeah. I wanted more basketball. I I missed I missed Kobe's last game. He scored 60 points.

54:44 I wasn't there. I was a little, you know, PO because I wasn't there. So I was like, man, it's it's a shame that there's nowhere else for this guy where I could see this guy play.

54:58 Okay.

54:58 And why? And looking around, there's nothing there. No other pro basketball, you know Yeah. Is around the world, but not in The United States. And so...

55:16 And and and then, you know, being at the time forty seven years, going through forty seven summers between basketball and NFL, you know, I used to have a... I used to hibernate. So...

55:33 You're like, I'm not... I can't do this again. Nobody's... I don't another summer And in

55:38 there's gotta be millions of people out there just like me.

55:42 Yeah.

55:43 That needs more hoops after the finals. You know, we have the we have the finals hangover. We just... We need more. And we found, like, a void in the industry because three on three was sitting there.

56:00 Like Yeah. Why isn't it professionalized? We looked at what Fever was doing, and it was very amateurish. And we was like, we can do 10 times, a 100 times better than what they're doing with the game of three on three. And so me and my partner, Jeff Quandtnitz, we we we just tried to figure out... We spent a year trying to figure out how to professionalize three on three.

56:26 So what was the first step? Was it you built a deck? You made some phone calls? Are you calling athletes or investors or stadiums or locations? Like, what's the sequence of events to actually get this off the ground?

56:39 I mean, first step was coming up with cool rules Oh, yeah. That were cooler than what you see in three on three. Yeah. And why, you know, why was the FIBA game... Why did it feel so like a backyard playground game when we're trying to create a pro sport?

56:58 Yeah.

56:59 So it was just to build a better mousetrap, so to speak, and make our game more fun to play and fun to watch, to make it bite size where you can watch a big three game in a in a hour Mhmm. Where, you know, most games are three hours. So those kind of things, making a game faster. So rules was... And we argued, you know, back and forth on, you know, the intricacy of the rules and and how we're gonna make our game, you know, great for the public to watch.

57:37 What was the most contentious rule or or what rule were you... When you found it, you were like, this is the secret. This is the rule that's gonna that's gonna make it work.

57:48 First to 50 win.

57:49 Yeah.

57:50 Meaning this was a sprint. No garbage minutes. Okay. Because there are no minutes. And and, you know, there's a fourteen second shot clock though.

58:01 Yeah. So you can't play around with the ball. You gotta get a shot up.

58:05 Yeah.

58:05 So those rules, that was to me, every game, there's a winning shot. Yeah. You know, there's always a game winning shot in every big three game. And so to eliminate the clock was to eliminate lazy play. Yeah.

58:22 And people just watching the clock, oh, we got a big lead. Let the game. Let the time run out. No. You have to score 50 points. So it's an all out sprint to the finish line.

58:34 Yeah. How did you think about marketing promotion of the league? Obviously, of deep roots in media broadly, but what do you think was going to be the key to raising awareness, getting attendance up, getting distribution in the modern era or through traditional channels?

58:55 I mean, we looked at a lot of leagues and, you know, what what fueled them. You know, we we had to look at Vince McMahon, Dana White.

59:07 Yeah.

59:09 Leagues that had personalities that could, you know, evangelize the league to the public and and and show the public why they should be interested in professional three on three. And yours truly was the guy, you know, passionate guy and... Founder. Build. Build up, you know, decades of credibility of, you know, I'm not gonna steer you wrong when it comes to, you know, hopefully music and movies and the things that I say are cool.

59:49 Usually, you know, people agree. So, you know, we had that. And then it was connecting with the history of basketball. You know, some of the greatest names, Doctor. J been with the league ten years. Clyde Drexler been with the league ten years. Iceman George Girvin just retired, but he was with the league eight years. Now he's in the front office in our Detroit franchise. Gary Payton been with the league ten years. Nancy Lieberman, eight years.

1:00:27 So it's been, you know, connecting with those great basketball greatness and having them endorse what we're doing, overseeing what we're doing, making sure we're doing it the right way so the athletes are, taken care of. And, you know, everybody's happy coaches. We want everybody to have fun with the big three and and and make it an enjoyable experience.

1:00:59 How are you attracting new talent, new athletes? Because I can imagine if somebody who's in the NBA sees you calling, they're going to pick up. But at the same time, they might say, hey, I got a couple more years in me. I'm I'm not ready to move on. What what has it been like building the talent pipeline?

1:01:17 What's been, you know, awesome. We've had some of the greatest players that ever played a game come through our league, you know, for as first round picks,

1:01:25 all

1:01:27 stars, champions, you know, even hall of famers, you know, when you look at, you know, people like, Allen Iverson playing in the big three. So, you know, we don't have a problem attracting the talent. The thing is, you know, we wanna offer more. We we we have eight teams. We need to expand that.

1:01:48 We need 12 teams. Mhmm. We need 16, 20 teams. You know, we always have a pool of players who, you know, wanna play in the big three but can't because it's a numbers game. So this is this is what, you know you know, this IPO is gonna allow us to do is expand and to really, you know, grow and have a bigger footprint, which is more attractive to sponsors.

1:02:17 Yeah.

1:02:17 You know, what's holding us back is we only got 10 games. You know, if we had 20 games or 25 like the NFL, you know, we could really expand, you know, our sponsors, you know, what we can offer to, you know, platform broadcast and media deals. You know, we just gotta offer more of this good stuff.

1:02:39 Yeah. So, yeah, what else are you using the capital for as you scale the business? Are cities receptive to bringing new teams to town? Is it is it easy to get up and running if you have the if you have the the the capital to go and do a new team in a new city?

1:02:58 Without a doubt, you know, it's pretty turnkey because we owned all the teams Yeah. For so long, even 12, you know. So we were able to make that work and, you know, we're able to, you know, get new owners, you know, and and kinda walk them through and and help them get up to speed and then let them take over. Cities have been extremely receptive everywhere we go. They want the big three.

1:03:23 You know, we've been to London. We've been to Toronto. You know, we see this as a global league. We want teams in London and Toronto, Mexico City, Puerto Rico. You know, we see this as not just, you know, stuck in The US, but, we can expand, the league.

1:03:42 Yeah.

1:03:43 So, sky's the limit. You know, we we wanna shore up. We've been a lean and mean league, which has been great because we've been cost effective with how we operate. But we wanna, you know, hire the best people to help us shore up the foundation of the league and, you know, really work on the growth of the league. You know, we we talking to some smart peep...

1:04:09 Talking to some very smart people across the board, and they're just in the wings waiting, for the opportunity to help us, you know, kinda exploit and take out the opportunities that's out there. Look. If you look at this, we can own three on three all over the world. Not only just at the pro level, but the youth level. You can have the...

1:04:31 Playing three on three all over the world. Big three rules, big three colors, and the public can help us do it. It's amazing opportunity. Yeah.

1:04:42 Yeah. How... What... What's the team like today? You're slated for a SPAC.

1:04:49 Mhmm. Are you are you excited for the public markets for your first earnings call?

1:04:55 I am. It's really about giving people who love sports and a unique opportunity that don't come around... You know, it's a once in a lifetime thing. You know, if you look at the history of sports, it's been an exclusive club.

1:05:12 Yeah.

1:05:13 You gotta be part of the club to get in. You know, here, you just gotta, you know, wanna be part of the league in a bigger way than just buying merch or watching a game or, you know, you wanna be part of the growth of the league and and participate on the upside when when we do, you know, start rolling downhill. Yeah. If you look around, nobody else is emerging. Nobody else has, you know, nine seasons proven that we have a great fan base and this works.

1:05:46 We just gotta add some fuel to the fire.

1:05:49 Building that fan base, how important is it that, players have personal social media presences? We were talking to Eli Manning about the intense pressure of young rookies in the NFL to start a podcast or start doing media or be in movies. You've obviously been in entertainment for years. I'm interested in how you're talking to players about grappling those trade offs. Is there is there...

1:06:16 Because of the nature of the league, is there more flexibility to go and build your own fan base and then bring them along for the ride?

1:06:23 Without a doubt. You know, when we set to build the big three in 2016

1:06:29 Yeah.

1:06:30 We wanted to do things better than the other leagues. Mhmm. You know, the other leagues, they lean into their sports, but, you know, music and culture, you know, kinda is is is kinda like a byproduct.

1:06:43 Yeah.

1:06:43 But here, it's the perfect intersection. You know, there's sports which we take extremely serious, the game, But we also understand that there's culture, music, and this is an intersection of that. Mhmm. So we wanna do... We wanna have more fun than the other leagues.

1:07:04 We want our fans to have more fun Yeah. With the game. And so we wanna do things a little different. We wanna create more of a festival, more

1:07:15 of an

1:07:15 interactive experience with the fans and the and the players and the coaches. Yeah. And we wanna do things that, like I said, other leagues are not doing. And, you know, there's nothing stopping us

1:07:31 Yeah.

1:07:31 From doing that.

1:07:32 Last year... I want

1:07:33 you to be really honest with me. So John is six eight, never had a run-in basketball, but I'm wondering if You got a chance? Way that he could walk on. If there's a

1:07:44 way that... Yeah. What does it take to actually...

1:07:45 What actually does take? He's got...

1:07:47 Are there open tryouts?

1:07:48 He's got at least at least, you know, a few thousand people that really wanna see him ball.

1:07:54 For sure.

1:07:55 Any way he could walk on? Maybe like a Uh-huh. Celeb shot?

1:08:02 Well, you know, we definitely can have him in our celebrity game. Okay.

1:08:08 Know, be better to do a podcast or game.

1:08:11 Oh, yeah. Yeah. We can get Rogan and Gyrbanon in there.

1:08:16 No. We we have a... If you're invited to our combine, you know, know some people that Mike can get you in there.

1:08:22 Okay. I'm not even... Yeah. I'm not really asking for like, you know, an easy way in. I just want them to have a chance.

1:08:27 Okay.

1:08:28 Well, that's

1:08:28 not easy.

1:08:31 It's not easy. No.

1:08:32 Getting to the... You know, going through the combine, you know, you got over a 100

1:08:37 Yeah.

1:08:38 Guys, you know, maybe a 120 guys going for like 23 spots. So...

1:08:45 They've and they've mostly played basketball before unlike me?

1:08:49 Definitely. You know,

1:08:50 they played all over the world. I think I'll be at a disadvantage.

1:08:53 They played all over the world. Yeah. You need to come. Just come, you know, kick it with me on the front row.

1:09:00 Yeah. I think I'll be in the stands actually now that I think about it. That's probably my The owner. My idea is... An owner might be more suited for me.

1:09:07 Yes. Yes. But it'd be fun. It'd be fun. I I... You you mentioned sponsors. You mentioned the the revenue ramp. I'm interested in how you've been thinking about prediction markets, betting sites. We saw last year like every league was sort of are they going call share? Are they going poly market? DraftKings? Have you solved that puzzle? Are you still thinking about bringing those markets into the league in some way? Is there demand for that? How have you how have you personally sort of grappled with the last year of, like, the rise of prediction markets?

1:09:42 Yeah. I mean, we we've been talking to them all, seeing which one is ready to be, you know, a real partner Mhmm. With the big three. Cool. You know, you can you can definitely, you know, I guess, gamble on on those sites or or have fun with those sites with the big three.

1:10:00 Yeah. But we wanna, you know, be a part of it Sure. In some way, shape or form. Mhmm. But it gotta be the right partner and the right commitment.

1:10:10 Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Jordan, do you have anything else?

1:10:15 No. This was great.

1:10:15 Yeah. This is fantastic.

1:10:16 Very cool, Jordan.

1:10:17 Congrats on the on the progress, the the the the s four filing and the SPAC merger with Graph Global Group. I'm sure it'll be a huge a huge run ahead of you. I mean, amazing.

1:10:28 Public company CEO. Multiple you

1:10:30 know, years and years of hard work to get here, years and years of hard work ahead of you, but we're extremely optimistic.

1:10:37 Do yourself a favor.

1:10:38 Yeah?

1:10:38 Buy t o n t.

1:10:40 Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Querou.

1:10:42 And not financial advice though.

1:10:43 Right? Financial advice. Have a great one. Cheers. Talk to you soon.

1:10:48 See you.

1:10:49 Have a good one. You know, more startup founders should do that. You know, you get somebody coming on from a Databricks or a a base 10, they should say just throw out the ticker. Throw out the... Invest in the private markets.

1:11:04 Why not? Why not? There there there's some more there's a debate about the cyber security news. The Pentagon is treating a rash of freezer malfunctions that affected refrigeration and freezer units at commissaries that serve several US military bases in August as a as a suspected cyber attack. People are saying IoT was a mistake all along.

1:11:27 A lot of people are just asking me a question like, how are the refrigerators connected to the Internet at all? That's sort of crazy. But, of course, you might want to see the the the system. Like, is... Like, I want an alert on my phone if the refrigerator is not at the right temperature. So officials said that they've been in touch with French counterparts about a similar attack that hit more than 350 French supermarkets this... Earlier this month. On a at least six on base commissaries were affected in late August per Reuters' review of the base's social media posts. In at least one case, the cooling unit's temperatures were raised overnight reporting and resulting in spoiled food. Script kitty, could be a true cyber attack from a geopolitical rival.

1:12:09 Crazy, crazy times. But overall, I was listening to Sam Allman on Cheeky Pint this morning, and he said he was he was he was sort of pleasantly surprised by the progress around the PHP exploit and the fact that the industry responded so quickly and so effectively. What do you think, Jordy? What are you laughing at? What what...

1:12:28 GR says, but John, my refrigerator needs WiFi cameras and a two terabyte a month data usage limit.

1:12:34 You gotta be able to tweet from it for sure. Now, return to the the old thing, the ice box. You want the you want the gentleman stopping by in a in a gas powered vehicle to deliver you a cube of ice that you will use to refrigerate your milk. Maybe they'll come back in milkman. Maybe that's maybe that's what Did happens

1:12:53 you see that Weil, Gotchel and Mann Mann? I don't I don't actually... I'm not familiar with this firm, but a very large wall Mhmm. Law firm gone has bankrupt.

1:13:03 It's on the cover of The Wall Street Journal. Yes. I saw it.

1:13:07 Can you pronounce it?

1:13:08 Storied law firm, we'll go shawl to a close. I just kind of steamrolled that one. Let's see.

1:13:15 Turner Novak says, I'm genuinely curious how does a law firm go bankrupt? They literally just sit at computers and charge people 1 to 10,000 per hour to do things that AI is now automating. No offense at all, there's a lot of expertise required to do this. How does that not print money? John Wu followed up and said, it's confusing why a multi...

1:13:33 A major multibillion dollar law firm is going bankrupt, so I talked to a bunch of lawyer friends about why Wheel could suddenly be insolvent. Unintuitively, law firms are basically fixed cost businesses. Revenue comes from a concentrated core group of rainmakers. Let's give it up for rainmakers. Those rainmakers carry the whole business while the rest of the business basically drags a word I'm not gonna say.

1:13:58 Junior partners or rainmakers in training, they can't yet bring in huge load bearing dollars. Interesting placement of load bearing. Everyone else, associates, back office staff comprises one gigantic fixed cost center, not to mention basic overhead like offices, revolver, interest, etcetera. The problem with law firms in particular as opposed to other advisory businesses like banking, consulting, accounting is that the clients are inherently portable, so any partner can take their team and clients and leave. Doing so de leverages the rest the partnership because a small number of partners carry most of the revenue while leaving behind fixed costs.

1:14:37 Once there's a crisis of confidence, it no longer makes sense for partners to stay because they're now getting underpaid in profit share relative to their revenue potential. If they were to leave for a mega firm like Herklin, they'd be properly compensated for their earning potential instead of being saddled by rising fixed costs as a percent of revenue. There's not much IP or brand moat in a law firm. Clients follow partners and the process of crafting exceptional judgment is mostly in partners heads. And lastly, the partners are the equity in the firm.

1:15:05 Law firms have no terminal value. So when the partners leave, it's as if a huge chunk of the firm equity walks out the door. TLDR offer bankruptcy is basically a crisis of partner confidence, and the resulting departure spiral saddles anyone remaining with the gigantic fixed overheads of running a billion dollar business. So good explanation.

1:15:24 To be clear, this is not a bankruptcy. I think that I think that's why there's a lot of confusion on the timeline about this. They're just winding down the operations. It's more akin to like a a venture capital firm not raising the next fund. It's not that they went bankrupt and had some sort of, you know, balance sheet issue.

1:15:41 It's just that they don't want to continue with the current firm structure. Those lawyers will diffuse Yeah. To other firms, start their own practices, do all sorts of stuff. But it's not it's not bankruptcy. Like they're not going... They're winding down the firm. Which is still surprising. Like it's on the front page of the Wall Street Journal...

1:15:59 But they're working with restructurings.

1:16:01 Yes. But that's but that's not it's not bankruptcy. It's like it's like every partner has a different stake on the equity. There is value there and how you decide where that goes, that's the... That's why you bring in a restructuring firm.

1:16:13 It's not that it's like in the hands of creditors like the... I believe the partners will own the the assets. I would be very surprised if it's like they're... I mean, don't know.

1:16:24 Abandon pretends as great succession planning by the greedy boomers.

1:16:28 Just shut down? What does that mean?

1:16:30 No. I mean, like, you know, one read on this is that the the the partners, the rainmakers

1:16:36 Mhmm.

1:16:37 Like the the the sort of legacy partnership Oh, they weren't able had a ton of exposure still. Yeah. And if you're a rainmaker and you feel like you're saddled with all these legacy basically owners of the firm, they make it... Could make a lot of sense to bounce.

1:16:53 Yeah. I mean, that happens all the time in in hedge funds...

1:16:55 And this is happening real time with like various venture firms

1:16:59 Totally.

1:16:59 Where you have Young stars... Partners that are that have effectively been retired that are still not making

1:17:06 a lot

1:17:06 of and millions of dollars every every year in in fees. And that fee stream is not exactly being handed over to the next generation on any short time scale. So the great the great investors are moving on and starting their own firms. What else is in the timeline? Let me tell you about Figma.

1:17:24 Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context.

1:17:31 We gotta talk about Snow Flake

1:17:35 Oh, yeah.

1:17:36 And Databricks. What's going on? Pretty crazy exchange.

1:17:42 We've had both of these folks on the show.

1:17:47 Ben Horowitz posted something about just a blog post about Databricks. Databricks is an incredible company. Obviously, Ali is just is is future hall of famer

1:18:01 Yeah.

1:18:01 Hands down.

1:18:02 Basically said my boy wicked smart. That's And what he

1:18:08 Shridhar says, release all the numbers. Does 80% year over year become 65% when you remove pass through inference? What does it become when you remove AI natives and how much of it is from one time software license versus a service transition? Ask for a bunch of other metrics. Curious, people want to know.

1:18:27 PS, Ali, happy for your success. The world is big and lifelong.

1:18:32 He's

1:18:33 just like And of course, so so basically

1:18:34 I wish I was private.

1:18:36 Yeah. So Databricks has the benefit. Yeah. Databricks is an incredible business and has the benefit of being able to selectively release numbers and not doesn't have report things quarterly.

1:18:46 They don't have to release

1:18:47 any numbers. That's gotta

1:18:48 be Some leaks. They don't have to release anything.

1:18:51 That's what I'm saying. Even to invest Selectively leaking.

1:18:53 Yeah. Yeah.

1:18:53 And...

1:18:56 Shridhar.

1:18:57 Shridhar is is is I think probably genuinely curious, right?

1:19:01 Yeah. Totally. Yeah. It's actually

1:19:03 good point. There there's part of that, but it but it came across as Yeah. As, you know, antagonistic. That's definitely one way to put it. Ali responds in that and says, I don't think we should fight.

1:19:16 The two companies are complimentary since you're not doing this AI stuff. Shots fired. I really think Snowflake should consider getting its AI tokens through Databricks. You can get both cheap open source models as well as Frontier from our platform. It all goes through Unity Gateway, has smart routing budgets and access.

1:19:33 You can even use Omnigen, which with any harness including Cocoa, which is Snowflake's harness. Most of our customers use this to reduce token spend 30%

1:19:44 Yeah.

1:19:44 Last few months while token count went up. Genie lets you then track all your financial...

1:19:50 So elite. This is so elite. If you're if you're in a little a little spat on the old Twitter, get Salon. I love it. But I think you are right about your take that he's like just genuinely curious because Snowflake is all at almost all time highs.

1:20:07 It's a $115,000,000,000 company. It's not down over the last week. It's not down over the last month. It's doing fantastically. It actually rebounded very very significantly since like mid last year. And so the business has been doing fantastically. The low was was a $120 a share April tenth of this year. It's up at $320 a share. So every once in a while you will see a private markets company lamenting what's going on in the public markets or vice versa and it's kind of motivated by the the valuation shifts that are happening in one or the other. This doesn't feel like that but it's

1:20:46 funny that

1:20:46 Holly is just pitching. I love it. Anything else on this?

1:20:51 Yeah. I mean, I thought I thought for for people wanting this to be a Drake versus Kendrick, this was relatively tame and Yeah.

1:20:58 Yeah. It could have gotten a lot dirtier. They could have taken the gloves off, throw him down, start fighting. But... Oh, well.

1:21:05 Maybe next time. We get...

1:21:07 Says generous. Was asking about the revenue, not about contributing to it. Anyways, good good fun. Well Good fun.

1:21:18 Next guests are already here. We have two. We have David Rader and Jared Allen. Welcome to the show, guys. How are you both Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

1:21:29 Oh, good. Thanks for having us.

1:21:31 Please.

1:21:31 Great to have you guys.

1:21:33 Tell us about about how you guys work together, introduce both of yourselves and then we'll go into the story today.

1:21:40 Well, it's Sure. You alright, David?

1:21:43 Sounds good. It's, it's great to to to be on you guys. Thank you. David Rader. I'm one of the the, founders and principals at Unisports Group.

1:21:51 We're an investment group that, looks primarily at emerging sports Mhmm. Where we do control and and high influence, investments, across sports. So, we're investing today. We announced, our investment in in the Querouling Group

1:22:06 Yeah.

1:22:06 Where we're working alongside Jared. Jared, jump in.

1:22:09 Yeah. So I'm just a retired football player. And...

1:22:13 We're gonna

1:22:13 hit the gong for you for this...

1:22:18 We're very excited. We gotta we gotta make gongs a sport. We gotta work on this.

1:22:22 Gong smashing? Gong smashing. Baseball players might have a...

1:22:25 I think you'd you'd out compete us. Sorry sorry to interrupt. You announced the investment I needed rotation

1:22:30 right there. Know, you got

1:22:30 horse right there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

1:22:32 It was like going to Gong smash.

1:22:34 Gong smash. Anyway,

1:22:36 so I got into curling on a bet ago, like, to make the Olympics.

1:22:40 Okay.

1:22:41 I'll love with the sport. Right. Met our CEO of the curling group, Nick Selsky, up at an event in Toronto. Yeah. Him and I started talking about how basically, underfunded, under, you know, promoted

1:22:56 Yeah.

1:22:56 As curling is, and it has this kind of this this crazy sports niche sport game that that is... Takes incredible athletic ability, but no one kinda knows about it. And there's a bunch of really smart people that play it, but it's always kinda like, you know, been the side job of everybody.

1:23:11 Yeah.

1:23:12 And just all the different opportunities that the fan base, how loyal it is, and and and all the content creation around it. And then with Nick's background in in in gambling and and stuff like that. In gaming, it was like, man, the opportunities for that was like a whole another level of all the different all the different metrics that come into a curling shot. Right? All the different measurables.

1:23:32 But but more importantly, it's it's these athletes that don't get a credit for being elite level. I mean, you're talking about throwing a stone a 140 feet and having to hit, like, a millimeter or a centimeter of of a rock to to make certain shots. And so it really is fascinating, the athleticism to sweep on ice. If you watched our very first grand slam of curling in United States, you'll see I snapped a broom. So it's not it's

1:23:53 not always the easiest...

1:23:54 There you go. Mean, hey, hey, we break these mallets all the time.

1:23:57 So we're we're we're familiar. Yeah. We...

1:24:01 So we got together. I was one of the founders of the group and it's done a great job of taking it and you know, we we bought the grand slams of curling. We've got the rock league and now with with people like David coming on board, it really... It pushes the sport to the next level. Yep.

1:24:18 It it when, you know, as an athlete, I always tell people, you know, football, basketball, all that stuff would be nothing without the outside support, without the media attention, without the influx of revenue from people other than athletes. The the game wouldn't be wouldn't be what it is today. And that's what we're trying to create with the curling group and the rock league. And that's why people, you know, like David are so important to to see that dream, to see the the the business side of things, to to create that, to bring exposure to those athletes, and and to create revenue based around it is is fantastic.

1:24:48 Yeah.

1:24:49 We covered that story of an American guy who's like a lawyer Yeah. I believe who was competing in the Olympics and is kind of like a... I believe acts as somewhat a father figure for the team. I really really enjoyed that. And then and then...

1:25:04 I to

1:25:05 ask That's one of my old teammates.

1:25:06 Go away.

1:25:07 Awesome. He seems seems like a legend. And then and then talk about the talk about like the the drama in the sport because I remember there was also this last Olympics. There was like a bunch of cheating scandal. It seemed seemed like Oh, you're cheating happening and they were like catching them in four

1:25:24 k. No.

1:25:26 They were catching him in four k.

1:25:27 Oh, yeah. They were. I remember that.

1:25:29 I I don't know. I think it was pretty black and white.

1:25:31 Double touch.

1:25:32 Yeah. I don't... You know what? Listen. I don't know why...

1:25:35 I think it was Jacob. Brad Jacobs was a team candidate. I think he was the one that was involved with it with Switzerland. You know, you look at Sophie Cunningham, she got all the attention for, you know, pointing and sticking her tongue out. I'm like, Brad Jacobs did it first in curling.

1:25:47 Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

1:25:51 All sports are downstream of curling.

1:25:53 Yeah.

1:25:55 Well, Jared brings up a good point of of the... You know, about the drama and and all of that. Yeah. There's there's... It's coed.

1:26:02 Right? There's there's women involved. There's men involved and and on the same team, on the same ice at the same time. It's one the things we love about it and I think it it drives the the excitement. It drives a a whole different audience for it. The... You know, these these kinds of scandals and and and, you know, the the drive to to win is what gets people excited. Yeah. We actually... You know, the the the numbers are fantastic.

1:26:25 The interest from from women is actually... It's actually outdrawing men. The audience is more female than male for the most recent grand slam event, and it's it's... To Jared's point, like, it's because it's exciting and and and the drama from from any of it really really gets people going and gets a good mix of an audience.

1:26:47 Yeah. How are you thinking about the revenue mix over time? Is it like a third tickets, a third merch, a third ads and sponsorships? Like, give me a rough feel... Feeling for like how these businesses evolve.

1:27:01 Yeah. So so, look, we invest in a lot of emerging sports. Yeah. We we have an investment in the in the X Games League Sure. Which is is super fun.

1:27:09 That's pretty interesting.

1:27:10 We love the X We

1:27:11 won the

1:27:12 championship over the summer for for Club New York. And and a lot of these these sports have a similar model where it's Yeah. Look, we're gonna we're gonna sell a bunch of tickets. We're gonna have you... You could see the the audience, the excitement for audience.

1:27:25 Yeah. But you also make a ton of the money on sponsorship. Sure. And it's it's the brands that are that are excited to to connect with these these audiences. And so when you have a team that, like we said, has has a lot of drama, appeals to both men and women. It appeals to a younger audience. You're gonna get more, more sponsors, more interesting sponsors, and a good mix of of all of those kinds of things. Then you add an incredible live experience, and that's that's what it is. Jared can tell you about the... Just the fun of being at at some of these events.

1:27:55 You go there and you got live music going. You've got a fun crowd. You have a couple of drinks. You have have have, you know, some excitement on the ice. I mean, it's an amazing experience, and that's why people wanna go. And then you add the third layer, which is really the media deal. So Mhmm. The current group just announced, you know, part of our thesis as we got in was announcing three hundred plus hours of of content on CBC in Canada on an annual basis. CBC is investing not just for... You know, in the short term, but it's actually a five year deal replacing Canada...

1:28:29 Hockey night in Canada on many of the programs up there. So we're gonna be all over TV. You're gonna love it if you're a sponsor. The fans are gonna wanna be there, and and the and the the revenue mix will come from that. But they're already... It's already growing. The the numbers are kinda off the charts. It was like 400 plus percent growth, over a 100,000,000 social views on social. Incredible. Just just from the first event.

1:28:58 Yeah. I wanna talk about that. It feels like curling... Sorry. Ahead.

1:29:00 Sorry. I I... It feels like curling is like uniquely great for social media in that one throw is the perfect length. It's it's actually a vertical ice even like it frames up well. And I'm interested in like are you are you having fruitful conversations with sponsors around, hey, we're going to bring you on social media and your logo will be there and maybe even, you know, ad reads, overlays, stuff like that to monetize that attention that might be a little bit more passive but still extremely valuable.

1:29:31 And obviously, it's a funnel to going deeper with the sport, but are advertisers comfortable yet saying, okay, I'm getting a lot of impressions just on social media?

1:29:40 Yeah. I mean, you're right. You want to come be our head of sponsorship?

1:29:44 Yeah. No.

1:29:45 We love this. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

1:29:49 We love

1:29:50 we love clipping and bringing the advertisers with us. You can see the advertisers at the bottom

1:29:53 corner right here.

1:29:55 If this goes out.

1:29:56 One sec before David answers But so to your point

1:29:59 Yeah.

1:29:59 That was one of the the things that excited when Nick and I were talking about this. So curling is one of these rare sports that actually shows better on TV. Yep. Right? Because you can you can reach such a broader audience.

1:30:10 Mhmm. Because if you're live, you need to have education. When you got four or five games going on on one seat or on on one sheet of ice Yep. At one time, you have to know what you're watching. Right? Yep. So it's great in Canada. It's great in Europe because the fact that they're highly educated audience members. In The US, we're building on that. Right?

1:30:25 Yep. But what's great and the numbers always supported, you know, is the Olympics through the roof. Right? Mhmm. Curly Night in America, we used to have it. Numbers were through the roof because you had educated commentators, right, that could tell people what they were watching. Mhmm. And so with this with this kind of content driven sports and media driven, revenue basis that a lot of sports rely on, Curling fits that model perfectly because it shows so well on TV. Because you have commentators telling people what they're watching, and then they understand the complexity of each shot. So that was one of our real...

1:30:57 You know, when we decided to go full into this, that was one of the big deals is because we're like, we we don't have to create content for this sport. The sport was actually built for TV, built for socials, and built for for generating content, you know, around the globe. Mhmm.

1:31:11 Do fights ever break out?

1:31:14 Well, so let me tell you, that was my... That was the toughest thing I had to learn about, you know, getting into curling. There's this whole concept called in the spirit of curling.

1:31:31 I think they must have created that just to nerf you. Yeah. They're like, we can't have this Jared coming in.

1:31:40 I will say though, there's some of the old timers talk about some some brooms getting snapped in dressing rooms and

1:31:46 There you go.

1:31:46 You know, in in in a game where the the winners have to buy the losers a beer, it doesn't really, you know Sure. Quite defining.

1:31:53 Yeah.

1:31:54 But I think some of the old timers would get a little more surly. I wish there were some more cross checking on the ice with those things.

1:32:00 That'd be great. How

1:32:01 do you how do you guys think about building building up like stars? Like, it feels like it feels like the sport, like, from a marketing standpoint as you guys think about growing the platform, figuring out somebody that... It's like you're you're thinking should be like, what's the timeline to getting one of our players on Joe Rogan? Right? Like sort of the the pinnacle of modern media.

1:32:25 Who's who's that person gonna be? Right? How do think about that? Like, do they need to have some like crazy, like, do they need to spend time in LA and get caught up in like the fast life, you know? Like, I think there needs to be this like, you know, allure like, yeah, these curlers... Need a boy. Yeah. Spotted with Alex

1:32:48 and I I'll be honest.

1:32:51 Don't know

1:32:51 if some of these people could handle some of these old time curlers. Mean, you take the Kevokoois of the world. Mhmm. I mean, the amount of the amount of drinks these guys can put down, it's like how how do they get up and function the next day? Yeah.

1:33:02 These these... Some of these old timers, you get around them and I mean, they can still just absolutely be three sheets to the wind and put one right on the right on the pin. You're just like, this doesn't even make sense. Yeah. But I think I think what it's coming to nowadays is is a lot of these athletes are realizing that it is...

1:33:18 You have to be... You have to have a professional mindset. Like Scotland has a massive curling facility out there. Right? I mean, dumped millions and millions of dollars into this sport for their national teams and all that stuff to to train just specifically this sport. And so I think this younger generation is realizing, listen, this isn't rec league anymore. You know, we can't go do what our grandfathers did. But at the same time, you you definitely, I think you're right. You have to have people that are gonna have an edge about themselves. You gotta have people that are gonna be intimidating on the on

1:33:46 the race because that's what as fans we

1:33:48 want to see. Right? You you almost want it, it's like NASCAR. You wanna know... See when that wreck's gonna happen.

1:33:52 Mhmm. Or, you know, you look at Rockleague. So for example, we we paired, you know, Jacobs from King Canada was paired against one of the... Or, yeah, Swiss players in the very first Rockleague match ever, And those dudes dang near went to fisticuffs in the in the locker room during the Olympics. Right?

1:34:08 When things were getting heated. Yeah. You gotta have those moments. Right? You gotta have those rivalries in the sports. You gotta have those personalities that clash because that's what make competitive sports fun is when you got, you know, when you got... It's like two, you know, two magnets pushing against each other. Right?

1:34:22 Has there been a like a doping scandal at any point in curling's history? Or is that...

1:34:27 No. Mean, might be... If they tested some if they tested some of

1:34:30 these guys back in the day for drinking beforehand,

1:34:32 that might be,

1:34:33 you know, that might have been the whole scam. What about...

1:34:35 Some people are pretty wholesome.

1:34:37 What about the fan experience? You've mentioned being a fan, having a couple drinks. Is hackling approved? Is it that in poor taste? How how far could you go?

1:34:46 You're you're you're good to have some hackling on the... From the stands?

1:34:49 Yeah. There's... I I I welcome all of it. There Okay. Could be more of it.

1:34:52 Okay. And and problem is like we had a guy in in, I think it was like nowadays people on social media get paid to heckle people. Right? Mean, it's like they just it's, you know. Yeah. So I I think I think you

1:35:03 need more authentic heckling Yeah.

1:35:05 Not people out there for clicks. Sure. And that really happens when you start building up fandom.

1:35:09 That's the

1:35:09 cool part about having teams. Right? When you have teams, you build up fandoms, build up rivalry. Storyline. Absolutely.

1:35:14 There needs to be more heckling on the ice. People need to let you know when you're great and they need to let you know when you suck. That's what's fun about sports.

1:35:20 Yeah. Imagine if we could do

1:35:22 that business. Imagine if you if your

1:35:23 CEO made a really bad call, could walk in and

1:35:25 be like, you suck today. No. You

1:35:31 should see our team after the show. They go pretty hard on us sometimes.

1:35:35 Yeah. Sorry. You you had something to say, David?

1:35:38 Yeah. Yeah. I was just gonna point to to some some similar sports. Like, you look at like the Waste Management Open and Yeah. Kind of notoriously in in golf.

1:35:46 It's the same kind of sport, right, where, you you know, you're trying to concentrate and all that, but but but the fans are having a good time and they may... They... They'll they'll let you have it if if you're not. And it's such a good sport where, you know, you can be mic'd up and you can have... You can get to know these these athletes as they're doing it, and that's how you build them into stars and you build through the league.

1:36:07 And again, look, we're gonna be on TV. Three hundred hours is is a ton, and that's on CBC in Canada and it's on ESPN plus and and some coverage on ESPN in The US. You're just naturally... You're gonna get to know these people. It's it's more hours than than than almost any other sport is is on television, and they're mic'd up.

1:36:24 They're they're doing things. We're pushing it on social. Like I said, that social engagement is just off the charts in terms of the growth and the the the interest from from fans. So you're gonna see a lot of these athletes starting to become bigger stars, and you're gonna see them being being built up by their sponsors, by the league, by the by the sheer amount of content

1:36:44 Yeah.

1:36:44 That's out there. And so you you have some of that and you have the the opportunity to kind of turn them into into household names at least at least amongst the the the right fan groups.

1:36:55 What's been the the curling group strategy on prediction markets? Last year, it felt like every league was picking aside poly market, call sheet. Have you have you consult... Have you figured out a strategy? Do you want to go all in with one, be diversified?

1:37:11 How how do you think about maximizing the potential of the league there?

1:37:15 Yeah. I think it's I think it's an, you know, a little bit of everything kind of a kind of an approach. I think we want to be open and and have those conversations with with all of them. I think the interest there, it's a great sport for, for for for betting markets and for people, who are interested. Our...

1:37:34 I wanna be clear. Our... We didn't underwrite this deal as a... You know, for the betting side. It's something that we we think there's an opportunity on.

1:37:42 Yeah. It's more incremental to revenue overall in the long term.

1:37:44 Yeah. Exactly.

1:37:45 Yeah. It does feel like there's like a fever pitch last year of like every league's got a payoff or whatever. But then we will a... We we will enter like a more stable equilibrium with that as a revenue... What

1:37:55 what is what what's the what's the bottlenecks to growth in The US? I I wouldn't know where to go. I don't have a place that like I'm coming out of this interview. I'm fiending to get my hands on a rock.

1:38:05 Stable center. Do or crypto arena, sorry. Does ice

1:38:09 hockey do you need to make sure that like on on for the for The US side and growth here, do you need to... Or is there a pathway to making sure there's like a curling center, you know Yeah. Within every major metro area or at least at least, you know, promising areas?

1:38:26 Yeah. So I think there's there's a a few answers to that. One is participation is definitely key and and helpful. And I think they're... That that curling in general is growing in terms of...

1:38:37 In certain markets. It tends to be in the Midwest. It tends to be in in northern markets where, you know, it's obviously cheaper and easier to to have, have ice. So there's some of that. I think it's also bringing events to The US and showing how fun it can be to go to this. So, we've got events in in Rock League coming up in, in Kalamazoo, Michigan and in Utica, New York, to, to start the season. And so you're gonna get people, and people are gonna go, and I think they're gonna go, and they're gonna have a blast, and they're gonna start to love it. We love... The way the way the Querouling League is is, the Querouling Group, sorry, is taking Rock League out to different markets, on a... You know, there are smaller markets that don't necessarily have, the...

1:39:22 You know, where where where you're you're not in as much competition for, for attention. So you go to these markets and they're doing it in Canada, we'll do it in The US as well. And it's like, hey. This is freaking cool. Look at look at what the current group is doing, and it's it's, look what we can go do and have a have a really fun time.

1:39:40 It's the only show in town. So you're gonna get some grassroots excitement through that. You're gonna build it up through that. You're gonna see the the social media, I think, continue take off and have more of a... Of an impact on that, and I think that's gonna unlock a lot of the growth in The US. I think the growth in Canada is gonna be... It's enough to support the investment to begin with.

1:39:59 Awesome. Yeah.

1:40:00 Because there's such opportunity, and you go from limited TV to three hundred plus hours, and you go with the the growth numbers that we've already seen from the first events and everything that's happening there. We see this as something that's got a a long history in Canada, and that's kind of the the floor and and the... What make this a good investment because the downside is so covered by by the existing market. And then the growth is is by, yeah, by by building it up, turning it into the league. Same thing the x games just did, and we just saw huge growth in that in season one where you take an existing property and you add a new layer that's more interesting, gives fans a reason to stay to stay involved, to stay engaged, and gives them different things to root for.

1:40:43 You're gonna see a lot more sustained growth. By the way, 80%... Almost 80% growth year over year for the x games, we we think, and we're seeing similar kinds of numbers early for for currently.

1:40:54 That makes me so that makes me so happy. Like, in my household growing up, like, x games was the pinnacle. That was, like, the thing that that that was that was peak. Like, every other every other sporting event was secondary to the x games. Love it.

1:41:08 We... We're we're getting ready. Aspen in in January to start the winter season. We'll, we'll we'll have to get you out there.

1:41:16 Yeah. Would love that. We'd love that. We're trying to get more extreme sports happening in San Francisco.

1:41:21 Yeah.

1:41:21 Right? We want... If you wanna bring if you wanna bring x games to San Francisco, we're your guys....

1:41:30 Credit. I mean, of the most extreme sports is just trying to navigate downtown. Yeah.

1:41:35 Could help set you up for it, for sure.

1:41:38 Yeah. The the OG extreme sport...

1:41:40 I can attest to that.

1:41:41 Driving driving stick in San Francisco for me is... Was that was extreme as a 16 year old just just trying to survive.

1:41:48 You're booked.

1:41:50 Yeah. That's crazy. Congrats, guys.

1:41:52 Awesome, guys. Yeah. Great to hang. Excited to follow along. And, yeah, hopefully we can get out there for one the events soon.

1:41:59 Thanks so much for coming on the Cheers,

1:42:01 guys. Thanks for

1:42:01 having us. Have a

1:42:02 good one.

1:42:02 Great stuff. Bye.

1:42:05 Very appropriate to talk about curling while we're just days away from Christmas. Totally. I think of it a very Christmas y sport. How many days are we away from Christmas? Just a couple now.

1:42:16 Just a few. Just hours.

1:42:19 Fifty six.

1:42:19 Fifty six. Just hours away.

1:42:21 Please assume.

1:42:22 Then if we get

1:42:23 to 56 years old. Just fifty six more days. We're we're on the homestretch. We really are on the homestretch. I got a I got a pitch for, you know, if we want to take curling really really big, fix global warming, global cooling, create a new ice age, freeze over Lake Castaic.

1:42:44 Me and you are curling out there every week.

1:42:45 Every day.

1:42:46 What do think?

1:42:46 Yeah. Every day.

1:42:47 Yeah. Tahoe could freeze over. If they froze Tahoe over, you get Zuck out there. He's curling instead riding the wakeboard. Yep.

1:42:55 You get all the other tech people out there. They could get into curling if Tahoe freezes over in an extreme global cooling scenario. Who knows? Well, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app service, database, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Our next guest is here from Serval, the cofounder and CDO, Jake Stauch. Welcome to the show. How are doing? I'm great.

1:43:27 How are you? Great to be here. Great to see you. Congratulations on the new round. How have you been since you came on Great to

1:43:34 have you.

1:43:34 Came on my birthday last.

1:43:36 I... Was it your birthday?

1:43:36 That was great to hear.

1:43:37 I I am great. I am hoarse today. I've been talking a lot So far.

1:43:40 Part of

1:43:40 this announcement.

1:43:41 That's what happens. That happens. Take us through it. How much did you raise? I wanna hit the gong.

1:43:45 Jordy hit

1:43:45 the gong. Let's do it.

1:43:46 150,000,000 out of three.

1:43:52 Woah. What unlocked the gong that we What unlocked the new round besides Kevin Koo on your team?

1:44:00 Oh, Kevin's a beast. Kevin is of a whole cast of characters that made it possible. So a lot of traction with large enterprises, companies like Fox, Live Nation, WVP, doing massive transformations, adopting Circle, ripping out legacy platforms.

1:44:15 Mhmm.

1:44:15 Bad day to be a legacy platform. Absolute nightmare situation. Checking the news this morning as a legacy platform and just seeing that you guys have a bunch of fresh capital.

1:44:26 Yeah. Yeah. Stock price is having a rough day.

1:44:33 How's it

1:44:33 how's it actually doing? Know. I'm... Only down. It's only We should pull

1:44:37 it out.

1:44:37 Only down 26%.

1:44:38 Okay. Okay. Good.

1:44:40 Quarter. We'll

1:44:40 do that next time. That is crazy. What is the what is the go to pitch for a large enterprise? Is it come in, we'll do everything? Is it bring us in as a point solution for one specific use case?

1:44:51 Like how narrow are CIOs, Fortune 500 CEOs thinking when they come to you in that first discussion versus how broad do you want to go? Like, what's the right size of the prize?

1:45:04 It's it's a broad enterprise automation platform, so we can start narrow. But honestly, people come to us and they actually want to rip out their existing system of record. Okay. They want to rip out their enterprise service management platform. We give them a path to do that.

1:45:17 Mhmm. We're the first to give them a path off of tools like ServiceNow Mhmm. In in over a decade. Wow. And so that's where most customers want to start. Now, that might take some time so we can plug in as this enterprise automation layer on day one Mhmm. While we migrate the system record over time.

1:45:31 Mhmm. What do you say to someone who's like, I don't like my existing provider. You might be better but I'm worried that you're going to turn in to the previous legacy provider in a couple years. And then, yes, I I maybe have it good for a couple years but then I'm back to headache world.

1:45:48 Yeah. It's it's something I get asked about a lot. I was actually at a CIO meeting this morning and they asked me that exact question. I think it starts with talent. The first leading indicator of how a company is going to perform are the kinds of people you bring in.

1:46:00 Yeah.

1:46:00 And by focusing on keeping that talent density really really high, that's how we can avoid becoming the thing that we set out to destroy.

1:46:08 How front and center is cyber security in these discussions today, this week, this month versus a year ago, five years ago, something like that?

1:46:19 It's always been front and center for our customers because Servo ends up getting access to so many critical things.

1:46:24 Yeah.

1:46:24 So it hasn't really changed how our customers evaluate us. They always looked at us through a very critical lens. Yeah. Luckily, our focus on these deterministic workflows that are audited, that are code based, that have approval, and and permission checks has always been an advantage for us. That's becoming even more important to our customers today.

1:46:43 We have doubled down like others on security internally. We recently acquired a cybersecurity company and brought in the leader there as our head of security. So we're really passionate about locking down the platform because our customers rely on this for so many mission critical workflows.

1:46:57 What if you run into a CIO who's like a hipster and they're like, I just like old PHP. I just wanna do everything in old PHP. You say too bad? You gotta use the latest and greatest, the secure thing?

1:47:07 Yeah. I don't know if there's going to be a market for artisanal

1:47:10 Artisanal organic software. I think that might actually completely die off. Get the people with the wired headphones, the vinyl records. I think that the old PHP might just truly be forgotten forever and...

1:47:24 It'll be like pottery. It'll be like a really nice skill that you learn in a class

1:47:28 Yes.

1:47:28 On weekends as a hobby.

1:47:29 Yes. Yes. Yes. I agree. I agree.

1:47:31 How personal is competing in this market for you? The way that you talk about ServiceNow, it seems it seems like very personal.

1:47:39 Gloves off. I think you have

1:47:41 to know who you're competing with and you you have to have fun with the competition. So it's not personal. It's just we're trying to build a bigger company. And that starts with what we've done, which is build a better product. But now we've got a lot to do to execute on that and and turn it into a much bigger company.

1:47:55 Well, you've certainly done that.

1:47:57 You're playing with your food a little bit. But... Yeah. I love it. Very cool.

1:48:01 That's what

1:48:01 a serval cat does.

1:48:03 Yeah. That's... I was aiming for something like that.

1:48:06 Yeah. Yeah. That's That's good. Good. Well, congratulations on the funny round.

1:48:10 Thank you so much for coming on the show.

1:48:11 Yeah. Great stuff. Thanks, We'll see you back here soon.

1:48:13 Talk to you soon, Jake. Have a good one. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Codex.

1:48:17 Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Our next guest is Jay, the cofounder and CEO of Eve. More than 350,000 plaintiff cases run on Eve now, up 75% since June. That's incredible.

1:48:41 June of this year. What's driving the growth?

1:48:45 The product's working.

1:48:46 Okay.

1:48:46 You know, we're helping we're helping people that are kind of back against the wall get second chances. Right? When they're using Eve, they just get seen much quicker. They get their life back on track much quicker, and that is just starting to happen at scale now. So we're starting to grow a bit more.

1:49:04 How how... What's the go to market motion? You sell to lawyers directly? Do you sell to, like, IT professionals who work in large law firms? Like, what is the actual motion that

1:49:15 you use? No. So we're... Yeah. It's a good question.

1:49:16 So we're there for lawyers that represent people. So real people, not institutions. And we basically help them service that client all the way from the very first time they talk to them all the way to the end, right? And on this side, I guess the main difference compared to in house legal or big law is that it's not really billable hour based. They basically get paid more when they represent client...

1:49:42 More clients and win more for them. Yeah. So incentives are really aligned, and they've been using Eve now to scale their own business, and that's part of what led us to growing so rapidly to being able to serve more than 350,000 individuals at this point.

1:49:57 Is your is your long term view of the legal profession, the legal industry? Like what's going to grow? I mean it feels like cases are going to be resolved faster. We understand that will drive to settlement faster. But in the limit, I was thinking about like if I drink Jordy's orange juice, I owe him a dollar.

1:50:16 He... His agent autonomously sues me. I... We settle. We don't even know that this happened but the money is exchanged or something. Like how crazy does this get in the limit of are we going to see an explosion like a 10 x the number of cases, 10 x the number of settlements, 10 times the number of lawyers? Like, what are the vectors of change that you're seeing in the data?

1:50:39 I think the biggest one that we're seeing happen already, which I'm really excited about, is... You know, historically, I think we've dealt with in America the fact that if you have more money, you do get better legal outcomes

1:50:51 Mhmm.

1:50:51 For the same set of facts. Yeah. And the reason for that is lawyers need to get paid, and historically representing one person might require ten hours of work, twenty hours of work. But now with AI and even general, that is now like a constant time amount of work, right? So like representing an additional person is not really getting that much more expensive, so they're able to represent a lot more people.

1:51:15 And ultimately, what law exists for is advocacy. Like, you're an individual person, you have your own circumstances, and you're trying to get, you know, represented for those circumstances. And what I see happening over time is that type of representation gets easier and easier. And I don't think this means more lawsuits. I think it just means people have an avenue to get represented.

1:51:39 Interesting.

1:51:40 Have you bought any billboards with your face on them saying call call Jay to get in front of lawyers. Maybe not the most efficient, but basically take their ad space from them and they're like, who took my standing billboard on this freeway?

1:51:56 I will.

1:51:56 And then they'll chase you down.

1:51:59 You know, we have... Our attorneys are much more attractive and handsome than I am. So we leave it up to them to get onto the billboards. Yeah. But we we do help them.

1:52:08 So, like, now what's happening is, Eve actually has a component which you're able to take calls on behalf of law firm. So for example, like, if you're calling in at 9PM, most law firms aren't staffed to handle that call because it costs so much more. Mhmm. Now Eve can actually handle that call. Mhmm.

1:52:24 And how that's gonna change their business is now on Google reviews and Google phones, they're getting ranked much higher for their marketing spend because it's able to pick up the call instantly. Mhmm. So this is kind of the way it's starting to trickle itself down to the marketing side as well because, you know, the sad truth is, like, until today, everything in how you represent a client has been so labor constrained, including even things you don't think about, like marketing.

1:52:49 Yeah. What are the other pieces that are less automatable? I'm thinking about, like, the investigation discovery just, you know, if there's some like evidence needs to be collected in a lot of these. There might need to be interviews that happen. Like what what is still the domain of the human investigator, the contractor that's hired by the plaintiff's attorney?

1:53:12 What else is is the is the picture that's complementary to your business but maybe not in the in the sights just yet?

1:53:19 I think in in general, today we're still very much on behalf of the law firm. So law firm still has case managers.

1:53:26 Yeah.

1:53:26 They still have attorneys and paralegals, and we're just making that more efficient.

1:53:31 Yeah.

1:53:32 Today, I think Voice AI isn't quite at the spot where it needs to be Yeah. To fully automate things like client outreach and talking to them, getting there. Those are features we have, but in terms of how far it can go, I still think you need a human element.

1:53:47 Yeah.... Dial you would turn on voice. I mean Jack Dorsey launched a voice model like last week and it was like way more casual and it didn't feel like chatting with a super intelligent model but that was kind of the point and people were wowed by that. Are are you are you interested in latency or intelligence or reliability or or tonality? Like what are you searching for in the next great voice model that you will be celebrating when it comes when it's released?

1:54:13 For us, it's still latency and Latency. Intelligence. Like, the latency intelligence combo

1:54:18 Yep.

1:54:18 Is really important for us because we're actually trying to boil down the attorney knowledge right into the intake call itself. Sure. Which has been historically impossible. Like, you're not gonna be paying $500 an hour for someone to take phone calls.

1:54:30 Yeah. No. That makes no sense.

1:54:32 So that's what we're doing. And I think we're close, but not there yet. Probably the next model, hopefully, will get us there.

1:54:40 Cool. Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great... And we'll talk to you soon.

1:54:45 See you again soon, dude. Alright.

1:54:46 Goodbye. Congrats. We have Arthur from Vibe coming back on. I... If if you wanna if you wanna market Eve, what do you think about this?

1:54:53 Go to the hospital, find all the Mercedes s classes, put pamphlets under the windshield wiper, chase the ambulance chasers. I think that's the way you you build that business. No?

1:55:03 Wait. Why are the... Oh.

1:55:04 Because all the lawyers are in the s classes in the hospital parking lot because the... Because they're chasing the ambulances to get the to get the personal injury attorney. This is the famous ambulance chaser joke. Any...

1:55:14 Blah blah blah blah blah.

1:55:15 We got Arthur. Come vibe. Welcome back to the show, Arthur. Nice Hey, to see

1:55:22 guys. How

1:55:23 you doing? Always good to catch up with you. What's the latest? What's the latest? Look.

1:55:29 Are you here to correct the record about your your your fake joke quitting? You gotta set the record straight that you do in fact still...

1:55:36 I got in so trouble. Got in so much trouble. First tweet I do, post acquisition from Quiz Boulevard, billion dollar acquisition, I say, quit. Yep. They freaked out.

1:55:46 They freaked out. I freaked out because I read it I read it just randomly in the timeline. Was like, oh, wow. Like Arthur's out and then I didn't... I was sitting right here like...

1:55:54 It's obviously a joke.

1:55:55 Obviously a joke. It was like perfect meme if you're in tech you understood that as a reference to Jacob Coxen, the AI researcher who quit Anthropic and went on national news tour for it. But yes, lots of people didn't have all of that context. So good to correct the record. Still going strong in Vibes, still going strong at Walmart.

1:56:13 Separate are the are the two organizations today? Are you in the same building? Are you are you moving things together? What's what's the day to day like for you?

1:56:21 No. We're still in our building. Still some kind of an independent... Castle. Castle.

1:56:26 But but we're supercharged by Walmart and it's been pretty amazing. It's always scary to join such a large...

1:56:36 They're backing the truck up for you. I like it. We needed that. We needed that.

1:56:41 So yeah, it's great. And so today we're announcing the Yeah. Walmart audiences.

1:56:44 Okay. Yep. Fantastic. Congratulations.

1:56:47 Okay. So what does that what does that mean? Bring it down. Does that mean for for business owners? Yeah.

1:56:51 So... How do we make

1:56:52 money off of this? How do we make money off of this? I have a d to c brand. Am I going to use Walmart audiences to grow my brand? How how do I profit?

1:57:03 Yeah. So basically, this is some kind of a meta advertising moment. Yeah. Walmart audiences... So you know, Walmart has half a billion SKUs in their catalog.

1:57:12 Yeah.

1:57:12 And now, all these buying signals, whether it is people who have intent to buy or people who are regular buyers of product, you can target them based on what they've bought directly on streaming TV.

1:57:22 Mhmm.

1:57:22 So that gets like hyper precision for performance marketers. Our mission has always been to transform TV advertising as an acquisition channel for performance marketers, and now it's even more real. Yeah. So it's super, super exciting. This is the first time in history that TV is so enabled by commerce signals.

1:57:38 So if you're... If you have a DTC brand, you can now target, like, competitors, product, those kind of things. It opens up to tons of crazy and super cool use cases for TV advertising.

1:57:49 Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. There's, a bunch of companies that I'm gonna send this Yeah.

1:57:53 How excited are you about... I know you probably can't speak specifically for Walmart's strategy here but just you're on the team that's open for business in the AI agent to commerce era and it feels like there's clearly a world where you're doing connected TV advertising, you see something, there might be a QR code but it's a lot easier to text your agent, go buy that for me and Walmart's open for business. Is this exciting for you? I don't... I I'm not trying to get I know you're

1:58:23 not very going be exciting. What I what I what I can say is that AI leadership is led by Daniel Denker. Yeah. And so it's super exciting to have someone so experienced, so knowledgeable on the on the topic. I know Walmart released their agentic profiles to open up agentic commerce Cool.

1:58:42 A few days ago.

1:58:43 Yeah.

1:58:44 And so, that shows the kind of vision they have and super cool ambition they have around AI in general and being part of such a such actually a tech company. Yeah. Think this is what the most surprising thing about Walmart, it's a tech company at the end of it.

1:58:55 Yeah. Yeah. No. Totally.

1:58:57 And so being part of them is really awesome.

1:59:00 Yeah. It feels like there's probably a lot of interest. Like like, Vibe is a very tech native company, like a true startup. Right? And then you go into a company that's, very old but it has leaned in especially in the AI agentic commerce era.

1:59:15 Are you having opportunities to merge different teams or do little sprints with folks from your team that might bring some fresh blood to a Walmart team, hop in a group and discuss what you're seeing from your perspective and merge that with them and bring that. Has that been one of the add ons of the acquisition?

1:59:35 Absolutely. Absolutely. We... So right now, we mostly work with the Walmart Connect people

1:59:39 which is

1:59:40 the advertising division from Walmart. Cool. This is exactly what's been happening and we share our best practices. They also have, you know, a lot of power behind them and firepower, so we kind of merge that. And it's, like, it's super exciting right now.

1:59:55 And they have been really thoughtful about how to integrate the company and not just tell us, like, you're now part of Walmart and you work the way we do. They're more in the way of like help us transform the company. So it's crazy exciting.

2:00:06 What take us through like the the overall health of the TV because we're we're we're all watching Google earnings today being like, the the default bear case of like people are going to stop searching. It's like people are sort of feeling that today. There's obviously people a lot of time on their phones. The iPhone Duo gives you even more screen for more screen time maybe. But is TV still growing?

2:00:32 Is it still dominant? Like, what metrics do you use to ground the conversations that you're having at Walmart around how much you should be investing in connected TV generally?

2:00:42 Yeah. What's funny is that there are two worlds in television right now. There is the big advertisers who have always been on TV. They all pretty much moved their dollars, their advertising dollars from linear and cable TV to streaming TV and are still in progress of doing that.

2:00:56 Sure.

2:00:56 This is not much a given, and this is not necessarily like the biggest growth momentum that TV, that streaming TV is seeing because

2:01:02 it's Mhmm.

2:01:03 At the end of the day, it's still the same dollars. But what we're seeing and what we've been leading, is that new market of smaller brands were wanting to scale outside of just like search and social. They wanna do more, and TV has the reach. TV has the targetability, especially now with the commerce signals. It has the measurability as well, which which has been the big issue of television for years.

2:01:26 And so, now, everyone in DTC, in performance marketing in general, is starting to realize that, oh my god, there is reach. I can spend a lot of money and I can get a lot of performance from there. So they are putting more and more money and this is where the most of the growth from that market is coming from.

2:01:40 Are you talking to early stage founders? I mean, I I remember there was someone on a podcast who was like, if you only have your first million dollars to spend, you got to do it on meta or whatever which is sort of like, you know, the default D to C playbook. But how early are you seeing founders and entrepreneurs who are starting like a small Shopify site and they just want to get their first customers? Are they coming in as soon as they're spending $10,000 a month advertising? A 100,000?

2:02:08 Like, what is the sweet spot to sort of get into this market?

2:02:12 I'll put it differently. When you start advertising Yeah. You should focus on capturing the high intent. Yeah. So this is why Google has been so great.

2:02:20 This was Meta has been so great as

2:02:22 well. Yeah.

2:02:23 And, TBP was liking that a bit, like, even if we do performance, it was for a later stage when you had maxed out search, when you had maxed out social, and this is why we're so excited about today's announcement with this audience, because we have that super high intent. If you sell lipstick, I... Well, you can now target... Someone with reps. Sorry.

2:02:44 The the intent is here. The intent is here and you can target it.

2:02:47 Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Well, congratulations on the launch.

2:02:50 Amazing launch. Yeah. Great to

2:02:52 catch up with you.

2:02:53 Yeah. I'm gonna send this to at least a few founders that I think should get on it. For sure. Big big breakthrough. Yeah.

2:02:58 Please do. Thank you so much Have

2:02:59 a great rest of your day.

2:03:00 Good to see you.

2:03:01 Goodbye. And that is most of our show. Jordy, is there any other breaking news? Anything we got to go through? Any bangers?

2:03:10 Any breaking news? Anything? Revenue? I like Asha, CEO of Xbox sharing some some like not great news but just being very upfront about it. Saw this. She said in q one Xbox revenue declined 2% year over year compared with a 10% decline a quarter ago while our accountability margin improved. Minecraft and Wow forever set records. Call of Duty has most acclaimed release in more than a decade. And our PC platform revenue grew double digits. Console sales remain constrained by supply with more demand than consoles available.

2:03:43 We're working to get more consoles into players' hands through including through our expanding refurbishment program. We're making progress with a lot more work ahead. Sort of just a like a tell it like it is moment going direct. I thought this was interesting especially because Asha has to speak to two audiences on X. It's both the investor community, the tech community and the gaming community.

2:04:06 Yeah. And so very very hard line to walk but I thought this post was like, yeah, was like honest and informative and gets me up to speed and it's not it's not just completely astroturfing. Oh, everything's better. It's the best it's ever been when like, no, revenue's still declining a little bit. There's a

2:04:26 lot of

2:04:26 work to be done, but be... Leading with that, not burying that. That was good corporate comps. I liked it.

2:04:31 Intel down 19% after hours.

2:04:35 What's

2:04:35 happening? They had earnings.

2:04:37 Mhmm.

2:04:37 And, yeah, Bubble Boy, who was, you know, the big Intel bull, is in in some hot water this week. Mhmm. But I... It's... It looked like he is out of jail because his account got deactivated.

2:04:55 Wait. Deactivate or reactivate?

2:04:58 Yesterday, it looked allegedly like Yeah. He had been booked in jail.

2:05:05 But his account was active?

2:05:06 His account was active.

2:05:07 Oh, so you're saying if you go to jail, you can't deactivate your account?

2:05:10 That could be tough.

2:05:11 Oh, interesting. Yeah. In my mind, it's like the first thing you do when you go to jail is they deactivate your account. They ban you. But that's not how it works.

2:05:17 We're not in the cyberpunk future yet. Where you're eliminated from the social media world. Fascinating. Well, I mean, the market overall is in a rough spot. The NASDAQ is down 1.3%. The Dow is down point 25%, the headline. Alphabet sheds 500,000,000,000 in market value in the stock's worst day ever. These best day ever, worst day ever headlines are are increasingly common. The swings are are crazier than they've ever been. There's a lot going on.

2:05:49 But we'll cover it here on the show. So thank you for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Tyler, you wanna take us out with the truth nuke? You didn't get much time on the show today, honestly. Other than As yourself. Gang. Yeah. Sort of LARPing Jordy over there. But we got Drew the new Flashback.

2:06:07 We will see you tomorrow at 11AM. Bye.