$GME CEO Ryan Cohen, OpenAI vs Elon Musk Continues, U.S. Gets Early Access to AI Models | Harley Finkelstein, Scott Strazik, Brian Elliott, Stephen Balaban & Michel Combes

24:24I think that there is a right sizing going on at Coinbase. And AI is hoping to be an enabler of more efficiency with a leaner headcount. The big question that I had that we were debating was, you know, is this like, how does this reflect on Brian Armstrong as a CEO? As a CEO, is the goal to always have the perfect amount of headcount and never have to do any layoffs? Or is it actually the role of a very aggressive and mature CEO to staff up aggressively during boom times, get the best people, and then when there's a down market, sort of reorganize and keep just the best on the team as you move forward with a leaner organization?

25:11And what does that mean for whether you want to work in an industry that has market cycles like that? You might want to go work at Costco or a tobacco company because those don't go through market cycles really at all. But if you're in crypto, you're probably not new to the idea of market cycles. And you probably were born on a roller coaster. You're born on the roller coaster. You've been on the roller coaster. And you might be moving over to a new roller coaster if you're one of the unfortunate people that will be laid off over the next couple months. But I'm sure there will be many, many more opportunities.

25:43Some folks might even move over into the AI world that is booming and definitely hiring across the board. Was there anything else on the read?

25:55Harley Finkelstein:I would say overall, the positive thing from the response that I've seen so far is a lot of people are not like dooming around this. They're just saying like, hey, look, this is something that Coinbase has done before. cyclical business and no one is saying it's over for white collar work. Yep. So Andrew Young has a little bit of a take here. One takeaway, no pure managers. Every leader has to be working as an individual contributor. The pure people manager role, the one that built most corporate career ladders over the last 50 years, no longer exists at Coinbase. Leaders will have 15 plus direct reports.

26:38That is insane. Previously, managers capped out at six direct reports. I felt like 10 was sort of the platonic ideal there. But Andrew says that would be impossible without AI. And Coinbase is testing one person teams. A single person is the engineer, the designer, and the PM. A pod of one with agents. Org structures are being redesigned in front of our eyes. Derek Thompson has the other side. He says Coinbase is the latest tech company, including Block Salesforce, to announce big layoffs and cite AI coding productivity as a driver. but Derek Thompson is looking at the stock prices of these companies.

27:10Salesforce down 31%, Coinbase down 23%. In the past five years, it's sort of a roller coaster. I don't know if this is a great read because it's sort of flat. I don't know. Anyway, block down a lot. So some right sizing makes sense, but he's calling it AI washing of layoffs. They were coming anyway, and you want to spin them in a positive way. I don't know. TBD, TBD.

27:30Harley Finkelstein:Yeah, I don't think we have any clarity on where, like what kind of, which teams had greater percentages of cuts, right? Because, again, there was some reporting. I don't know how true it ended up being that when Square did their big cuts, engineering was getting laid off. Yeah, I don't know if that was ever confirmed. Yeah, I don't know if it was confirmed, but that does imply that it's actually more grounded in AI productivity. But, again, a lot of teams that we're seeing, their engineers are a lot more effective. they can do a lot more. And so maybe you want more engineers than you need to be for.

28:09Well, lots of strengths in the business, lots of liquidity, very hard. Yeah, you could vibe code Coinbase, but how do you get all the customers and all the liquidity and all the features and all the regulatory and all the other stuff? There are a million reasons to be excited about Brian Armstrong's next chapter at Coinbase. Well, and Ryan Peterson chimed in to sort of push back on Derek Thompson. He says, in the layoff announcement, the CEO literally said that the first reason they were doing layoffs is because crypto is in a bear market. and they need to adjust their cost structure. AI productivity was secondary.

28:38And so I think that's a fair take. Let's go over to Meta. Some debate, people are digesting Meta's earnings. The stock sold off a bunch. Where is Meta today? It's a bargain stock. It's a$1.5 trillion company. And over the past five days, down 10%. It's pretty flat over a year. And over the past five years, it's nearly doubled. So not doing too bad. But the debate is over CapEx. Meta's core ad business is ripping up 33 % in Q1 year over year. Strong ad impressions, strong margins. But the market is worried that the beautiful cash machine is turning into an AI CapEx furnace. $125 to$145 billion in CapEx.

29:24It's a lot of CapEx, especially for a company without a cloud business that can resell capacity if they wind up with extra capacity. If you can't use it all, what do you do with it? Meta doesn't really have an answer to that necessarily. And so that's what has the market worried. And even XAI is having trouble, at least reportedly, driving demand for compute that they have. There was that 11 % number. It seemed like that was a bit of an overstatement. But there's something to be said for when you have a near frontier but slightly lagging model, you need to find a solution to actually have offtake.

30:03And you might just not be able to spin up a cloud platform on day one. Elon took a different route, you know, partnering with Cursor that has a ton of demand and is a front door to AI coding. And so that makes, you know, a reasonable amount of sense for the compute. who's GPU rich, who's GPU poor, let's match them up. Meta doesn't have an obvious dance partner like Google, like Azure, like AWS, right? And so the stock looks cheap now, but investors are unclear about the payoff around AI spend. And there's also some legal and regulatory risk. But every time -

30:36Harley Finkelstein:People at the end of the day are worried that he's going to repeat the metaverse saga. And he's going to spend a lot of money, not get very far. I think that about coming up on, what is it, almost 10-ish months ago, he started talking about personal superintelligence. It sounds cool. What does that mean? Does it mean AI in your meta Ray-Bans, which are selling a lot of units? So that's a bright point. Does it mean creating a consumer LLM like they have with meta AI now? Meta AI now is squarely in the top five. of the App Store rankings, but it is the most competitive category potentially since search, right?

31:24Harley Finkelstein:And so I don't think that even though they have a solid model and they're able to get into that top five, I don't think at least investors are not ready to price in meta AI becoming like a key player in consumer LLMs just yet, right? So it's all the spending and no revenue acceleration associated with that spending. All that being said, Meta has used AI to drive business value historically more effective than almost any other business in the world, right? It is really, really insane to think that there is some scenario where the labs end up going public at evaluations somewhere in the range of Meta while Meta is sitting there with$200 billion of annualized revenue, growing 33 % a year.

32:17Harley Finkelstein:One of the greatest businesses in all of human history. And not really getting full credit for that or their various AI initiatives. Yeah, that's a good point. Obviously, the drop in people, which I think they, what do they call it? Daily active people. Daily active people. They're not users, they're people. Enjoyers. enjoyers um that that's playing playing into this as well but well we have our first guest of the show harley from shopify you got a little preview of him he's in the waiting room but he's now in the tbp and ultradome harley how are you doing welcome back to the show good to uh good to be here great to i love coming on the show yeah it's always great having you uh give us an update on q1 give us an update on where things are going in the shopify world you know uh we had our first hundred billion dollar gmv quarter ever in the history of the company last quarter q4 uh thank you uh and we just had uh a second uh our consecutive quarter gmv growth uh above 101 billion dollars obviously the reason i always start with gmv is as you guys know it's a proxy for how merchants are doing uh revenue was 3.2 billion that was 34 and we had free cash flow of 476 million dollars.

33:39So across all the metrics we beat, which we're really excited about. I think the big story here is that, and this sort of came up a bunch on the call, but the way that merchants are coming to Shopify now is really quite remarkable. We're seeing some of the largest brands on the planet come on. We sign LVMH and Ballman and BevMo and Orvis and Land's End. And in fact, the number of merchants selling more than a hundred million dollars annually on Shopify has nearly doubled in the last two years. So that's really amazing. We're now like 14 % of all US e-com. So we are the second largest online retailer in North America right now, which is amazing.

34:19But then on the other side of the spectrum from like the big brands, I think one thing that I didn't get a chance to mention on the call today, but this is why I do your show here, is that I actually think one thing that people are missing is that I think no group will benefit more than entrepreneurs in sort of this new AI era. It feels to us now that AI is not only making it more accessible, but also it's accelerating a lot faster. I know I think you guys may be the one to introduce me to Grooms. I saw Grooms on your show a year ago. Anyways, I mean, Grooms started on Shopify in 2023. They're doing they're doing nine figures now and they just got acquired by Unilever for a billion bucks.

34:59I mean, it is remarkable that not only the amount of starts happening, but also how big they're getting. So I'm really, really proud of that. And of course, we talked a lot about the agentic stuff on the call, both the AI shopping, but also Shopify sidekick and what we're doing for our merchants. So let's double click on that BevMo Shopify use case or case study because BevMo was acquired by GoPuff. And GoPuff has an app for local delivery. How are they using Shopify? That's an interesting partnership that I wouldn't have expected. BevMo actually has physical stores all over the US. Yes, and so we're powering all their physical stores as well.

35:37The reason actually I really like BevMo is because, go back, this is my 43rd earnings call. If you go back to sort of the early days, right after the IPO 2015, merchants were coming to Shopify for one reason. They were coming, it was small businesses coming for e-com. And then obviously some of the business got much bigger and we went into enterprise. And then eventually we added on things like point of sale and more recently, agent of commerce. I think the interesting part of the current business of Shopify is that there are so many on-ramps into the company that BevMo came to us, a very large company, not a DTC native brand.

36:11They came to us specifically for point of sale across all their physical stores. And actually, our point of sale business is going really, really well too. But BevMo's using us for that. At the same time, we're seeing, obviously, I mentioned Groons, but I just looked at some stats from True Classic Tea, who just put out. This is a company that started on Shopify like five years ago. They're not one of the largest t-shirt companies on the planet. So we're getting a lot of small business getting started every 26 seconds or so. A brand new entrepreneur gets their first sale. And at the same time, we're seeing companies like Land's End or Guild Group or Rag & Bone come to us too.

36:45It feels like this is Shopify firing all cylinders. Go for it. Yeah, just what are people looking for on agentic commerce? It feels like there's a big opportunity. The models are getting better and better. The capabilities there. Are people looking for acceleration of agentic behavior within the online commerce world or actual growth of e-commerce? Is agentic commerce the thing that gets more people to use the internet to buy things that are in retail? Okay, so I think that's exactly the right question to ask. So hopefully now I've been on the show enough times. And if anyone who's watching is a merchant or a partner or just someone to follow Shopify story, we've set ourselves up to really be at the epicenter in sort of this AI era.

37:37So just in terms of AI-powered shopping, we've started building all this infrastructure years ago to connect demand and merchants on Shopify. We are currently the only platform that is selling inside of ChatGBT, Copilot, and Google. And what we're seeing is that these channels are actually becoming a very serious discovery engine. I'll give you some proof points. We have seen for Q1 of this year, we've actually seen orders from AI searches are up nearly 13x year on year. And new buyer orders from AI searches are occurring at twice the rate of traditional organic search. So not only are more people obviously using agentic shopping, but in terms of new buyers, which to your point, are we bringing in more people?

38:21Like e-com as a percentage of total retail is still under 20 % in the US. It's even lower here in Canada. I think it's about 25 % in the UK. So I think we're actually introducing like more people to, you know, modern digital commerce through this as well. And I think the way it's happening is they're starting with things like research or looking up a recipe and then very quickly ended up, you know, buying from like our home, our place or, or one of these, you know, amazing DTC brands that we have on Shopify. And we now have about a billion products in the catalog and so that means that every Shopify merchant SKU is fully syndicated.

39:01The other thing I think that hopefully is now pretty clear is UCP. We co-developed UCP with Google. I think I announced it on the show actually during NRF but it has now become the industry standard. Last week, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce and Stripe all joined the UCP Tech Council and so it looks like that's going to be the open standard that is going to win, which we're really excited about because we think it's the open standard that actually thinks about the entire commerce experience. Okay, go deeper on the implications of agentic commerce because I have this thesis that agentic commerce will be most acceleratory in higher ticket, more considered purchases.

39:47Because when I think about just buying a T-shirt, Maybe I need to run a deep research report for that to land on. I forget what shirt brand you use. It's nice. But true classic tea. True classic teas. But when I think about the process of like buying a car, there's so many more tradeoffs. It's so much more complicated. That's something that someone is probably noodling on with an LLM for weeks before they actually go and purchase. And I'm wondering if you're.

40:18Harley Finkelstein:Yeah, I'll give you. it really, I think, comes down to the difference of like considered purchases versus like pure utility purchases. So like when I think about, I don't right now, I can't imagine myself using Chachi Bt to like go grocery shopping. Maybe that changes in the future. But if I'm like ordering food to be delivered to my house, I kind of want to just see a catalog of a bunch of pictures and go through. And maybe that more of that sort of moves into the sort of agent experience over time but if i i was like i needed to find i wanted to find a cowboy hat a lot of sun i wanted to hide from the sun yeah so i'm searching like okay i want a cowboy hat brand that's been around for over 50 years right and so i land on like stetson or yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah or uh or tekovis hopefully that's a brand we love so i'm not sure so i i'm not sure i fully agree, at least not yet.

41:11I do believe that the more research you do, I think that these agentic services, these chats are places you will go to do deep research. So a car is a good example. You do weeks out as well. On the flip side though, what's amazing about agentic commerce, I think in general, is that unlike search-based commerce, where you can put your thumb on the scale through advertising and ad dollars, it's agentic is more merit-based and because it's more merit-based. So most people watching, maybe, I don't know if this is true, but most people watching may not have heard of true classic tea, but they may have done a bunch of research in previous conversations.

41:54In fact, maybe over, over many months where they're talking about, you know, their, their typical price of a t-shirt. Um, today I'm wearing a James purse t-shirt, which is more expensive than true classic. So it knows that I look for, I love James Purse. I've talked to him about James Purse. Where can I buy it? What's the GSM weight and all that stuff. Will this be good for this particular trip I'm taking? I actually think that it'll bias smaller brands that you may not have heard of over larger brands. Because again, it has a full contextual history of every conversation you've ever had. And if it's merit-based, then it's going to surface brands you may have not otherwise have heard of before.

42:34Whereas if you go to type in on any search engine, you type in sneakers, you're probably going to get to Foot Locker pretty quickly. I don't think you get to Foot Locker through an agentic conversation. I think you end up with some sort of direct to consumer brand, especially if it knows you like on running and you're looking for like you might tennis shoes and now you're looking for hiking boots. It may show you, it should show you based on merit, an on-running pair of hiking boots. Yeah, the long tail getting fatter. Which again, we'll see what happens. The reason I also, I like these proof points.

43:08Again, like orders are up. Traffic though, if you look at just AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores, that has grown 8X year over year. So I don't want to be hand-wavy anymore about Agentic. I think there's enough hand-waving happening around that. I think actually looking at like, okay, how many people are coming? What is the search traffic like? What are the conversion rates looking like? I think right now, it is getting real. I also think that, probably some recent headlines, but you saw ChatGPT has now moved into this in-app browser for their checkout, which is literally the Shopify checkout.

43:43We are really happy about that. We think actually what that allows is that it means that as a merchant who set up their loyalty and their subscriptions and their merchandising and their shipping components, their tax. Now, the experience inside agentic commerce is as good as it would be on the online store, which is kind of what I think consumers want. Like it needs to feel effortlessly similar to what your normal experience is, even though you're sitting in a conversation window.

44:14Harley Finkelstein:Yeah, that's something. It was interesting last year watching a bunch of AI-led browsers get built when the entire time my thought was like LLMs effectively are web browsers. They were becoming browsers, right, where you're having a conversation, but then it can pull in stuff from the traditional web. Very cool. Yeah, I think this is also where you'll see. I mean, I don't have any great examples yet, but I assume next time I'm on the show, I'll be able to bring some examples of these breakout SMBs who effectively, you know, like I love the Grun story going from zero to a billion dollar acquisition three years.

44:50We just haven't seen that before very often. I think you'll see way more of that. I also think what you'll end up with is you'll just have more people starting businesses that otherwise may have not. So the entry, like the Barrett entry is further down. And then their ability to scale is also going to be just bigger than that before. I mean, we were talking to the Collison brothers about exactly that. They're seeing a ton more formation on Atlas. Yeah, I saw that crazy slide of Atlas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Incorporation is like way, way up. And that makes so much sense. It's gotten so easy. But it's not, I think the first phase is making it easy to get started.

45:24I think where this really gets interesting is how many more brands exist that we love, the consumers love, because they're able to scale much, much faster. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congrats on the progress and looking forward to the next one. Always great to see you. We'll talk to you soon. See you guys soon. See you next quarter. Goodbye. Up next, we have the CEO of GE Vernova, Scott Strasik. AI data center. Electricity demand is expected to double or triple by 2035, and we have the perfect person to talk to about it. Nice to meet you. Thank you so much for coming on down.

45:56Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I would love to start a little bit with your background because GE Vernova is, I mean, we can go through a little bit of the history there, but you've been with the company since before the creation of the company. You're older than the company you work for. The practical reality, my adult life. Yes. I was with GE and ultimately GE Vernova. Yeah. But I started with General Electrocratic at a college. And I've lived through quite a few chapters. That's amazing. Some humbling. Yes. Some less humbling. And this one is invigorating? It's a moment that we're going to take advantage of.

46:26Okay. We see the purpose of what we're doing every day very clearly. Yeah. Both in driving economic growth, AI, national security. You know, energy security is very much national security. in a lot of parts of the world right now. So we've got a real opportunity to serve, and that's exactly what we're going to do. So I think most people will know, you know, natural gas turbine for a data center, but the business is bigger than that. Like, zoom out for us and walk us through, you know, the shape of the business because, you know, massive workforce, 85 ,000 people, something like that? You bet, 85 ,000.

46:56Yeah, remarkable. So walk me through the mechanics of the business, and then we will double-click on the AI story, of course. Sounds great. I mean, you take a step back, About a third of the world's electricity every day is created with our equipment through our customers. If we exclude China. So it's substantial. And even with China, it's 25%. No pressure, by the way. It's an obligation. It's a responsibility. It's like the Jamie Dimon of energy. It's a big deal, right? So that's just keeping the lights on, notwithstanding what we need to do to then add the growth for where there is today. And that install base, that's gas turbines.

47:31That's nuclear power plants. That's wind turbines. It's a lot of the electrical equipment. That's actually our fastest growing business is everything associated with electrification and the grid and trying to make the grid more efficient and smarter. Because frankly, in some ways you can make more progress there quicker than you can build a new power plant. So all those variables are parts of the business. and an economic opportunity where we need a little bit of everything and applying the right technologies where the right resources exist to drive better economic answers and more resilient electrons.

48:05Yeah. It seems like the market or just the stories that I hear are that you're sold out, you have this massive backlog, and it's more of the same. There's demand for more of the same. But it feels like you're also working on R &D. You bet. Talk to me about the tradeoff versus just scaling what's already working, what's worked for years, I imagine decades in many cases, versus a focus on research and development, the next technology. So the end product in some cases may look the same coming out of the factory. What we're producing or how we're producing it to scale and make more is changing drastically.

48:39So you think about gas turbines right now. We're adding a lot of production workers to build more gas turbines. We're also adding 400 machines this year to automate a lot more in the process. Frankly, more of the innovation right now may be how do we scale faster and in a more economic way so we can win the affordability game while simultaneously investing for the future. Can you explain like I'm five, some of those machines that you're buying, some of your supply chain? People know 3D printers or CNC machines or different, you know, you just hammer it out yourself or whatever. But I imagine it's very complicated.

49:15What does your supply chain look like? Big castings, big forging that we get inside the factory that need to machine down to the right, put the right material sciences, the right coatings. When you think about a gas turbine, it's got to be very heat resistant because it's a fire that really is spinning inside that gas turbine to create the electrical power ultimately. Yeah. On the demand side, I I have been hearing about the absolute knockout drag out fight for energy. And in many cases, I don't know if it's relevant to you, but in many cases we've heard about, you know, folks involved in the AI build out putting in orders for more than they need.

49:54And then sort of dialing it back because they know that certain things won't get permitted. Certain things will get delayed. Does that happen to you? Are your customers coming to you and saying that they need twice what you think they need? And there's this like battle of back and forth. I wouldn't say so. So what I see happening more frequently is many of our customers are developing a number of projects, acknowledging that not all those sites are going to be chosen. And the actual supply is a little bit liquid and they can move it around. And that's more what's happening. So sometimes we'll see press releases on leases canceled or sites that customers walk away from.

50:29That's typical development, really. Sure, sure. What's really happening is our customers are buying at a realization rate, knowing they're only going to ultimately develop a certain proportion of those sites. But we don't see any of our customers walking away from what they're securing today. Got it. Not at all. Yeah, that makes sense. Um, what, uh, what, what are your roadblocks? What roadblocks do you see to scaling either inside your business or at sort of the macro political level, permitting approvals, regulatory, like what is on your short list of, uh, what America needs to do, what the industry needs to do to get right to actually continue to scale.

51:08In some ways, what we do is a little bit easier, candidly, because our equipment is built in a controlled factory. The hardest part in some ways is actually building the plant itself, the construction, because every plant in different parts of the country, different parts of the world, everyone's a little bit different. In getting that craft labor to those locations where a lot of the data centers and a lot of the electrification demand is, is often very remote. And that is going to take us some time. So for me, every gas turbine, wind turbine that I build, I'm using the same workforce every day.

51:40Same people coming in Monday through Friday. We can meet the moment from an equipment demand perspective, but we need out in the field for those plants to be built so they're ready for our pedestals when they come out of the factory. Getting that orchestra right, that the site is ready when our equipment is ready, is going to be a challenge. And we're going to have to keep investing in craft labor in these locations to do the build. What does investing in craft labor look like? I mean, we've heard about re-skilling, retraining trade schools. Is there a drought? Are people already seeing the news and seeing the stock price and re-training and re-skilling?

52:20Or is this more of like a decade-long process for America? We've been successful so far. We've added about 1 ,800 production workers in the last 15 months. We'll keep growing that number from here. You work to make the jobs more attractive. Part of how you do that is you take out the dull, dirty, unsafe work. and that's where you automate. And then you allow these workers to thrive doing what they want to do. But the reality is they have a lot of pride in what they're doing every day. We put the customer name, where the project is going with everything we build, so they understand the impact they're having.

52:56So it's not just a piece of electrical equipment. They know how they're providing light and a middle-class growth to Vietnam or economic expansion in the U.S. And I think they see it as real. Have you considered engraving the signature of the technician on the engine like Mercedes does? Exactly. But I think making personal matters. Yeah, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So there's a lot of pride. What else is in the portfolio? I mean, you mentioned wind. I think nuclear you mentioned briefly. Walk me through the scope of your ambitions in energy generation broadly for the business. Yeah, but nuclear is important.

53:34We're building small modular reactors today. I think 300 megawatt machines that can be, they're big, but they're built inside an American football field. Yeah. So that's 300 ,000 U.S. homes that can be powered from one small modular reactor that is within a U.S. football field. Yeah. So that's very. 300 megawatts and that still qualifies as small and modular? Relative to what used to be for nuclear. Okay. And it used to be a gigawatt plus. Yeah, like a big Westinghouse development, multiple years. Precisely. Built on-site, massive concrete structures. Now we're trying to build a lot of them within this construct so that we can come down the cost curve.

54:15Because the reality is every nuclear plant historically was a snowflake. And that's why the industry never really became economically competitive. Yeah, no standardization. And we're fixing that. So that's important. And what is the regulatory approval process for that? I mean, I've heard that there's this famous line around like the NRC hasn't approved a new design in decades. Is that what you're feeling? Does it feel like there's a shift?

54:41Harley Finkelstein:Yeah, I guess the question is like when like we're now about two years and a month since the spin out. Yes. Was was small modular reactors on the roadmap when the spin out. Yes. Occurred. And then and then the opportunity has got more compelling from a regulatory standpoint since then. Yeah, we're in construction on the first plant right now. It's in Canada, outside of Toronto. We will get NRC approval for the first plant in the U.S. I think this summer. We'll be in construction, and we've committed to the administration that as soon as we get the approval, we'll be ready to work on day one. And then from when we start construction, it's about a four-year cycle from the beginning to getting to commissioning.

55:22So this can start to happen, and that's where the comparison to the large block, it's more of a 10-year construction cycle. That's a long time to wait for new electrons. But even if you want 1.2 gigawatts, the beauty of the small modular reactors is you can do them in blocks. And every two years after you get the first one built, add 300 megawatts, which also then meets a lot of our customer expectations to grow with the electrons. So this is going to be an important part of the equation for us. Are those two completely separate divisions, or is there some fluidity across the workforce? On the front end of the business.

55:59Commercially, there certainly is with customer relationships. But from a manufacturing and an engineering perspective, they're pretty distinctly different. Yeah, that makes sense.

56:08Harley Finkelstein:What has been surprising to you about where the sort of energy infrastructure build out is at today relative to the AI boom versus what was predictable when the spin out first happened? Certainly in the U.S., the demand has accelerated greatly in the last two years and one month, no question about it. But weren't you seeing that? Don't you feel like you had a— Early stages. Early stages. What I'd say that has surprised us, though, is there was probably concern that as the U.S. markets started to take off, it would price out a lot of other markets in the world from even being capable of buying the equipment.

56:46Harley Finkelstein:Interesting. The reality is we still see very strong demand signals from a lot of other markets in the world. I mean, in the first quarter, we had very strong demand in Vietnam, in Mexico, in Canada, in Saudi, in Kuwait. So the global dynamic is still driving real growth above and beyond the AI dynamic. The reality is AI-specific, it's about 20 % of our backlog today. Interesting. And those international projects? I guess due to having 30 % of the global market, right? You've got that responsibility. The scale is just already so immense that even if you have a massive acceleration via new technology cycle.

57:27And I think with a lot going on in the world today, more countries just realize for just national security reasons, they need a diverse portfolio of solutions to electrify and energize their country. And that really goes back to really the war in Ukraine. And it's only been accentuated over the last five years.

57:45Harley Finkelstein:How have you processed some of the writing coming out of places like San Francisco? I'm thinking, you know, Leopold situational awareness, where if you look back over the last couple of years, he's been right over and over and over. At the time, a lot of people reading that even in AI would think like, hey, this seems pretty aggressive. But to date, he's been quite accurate. Even some more sci-fi kind of exercises like AI 2027 have been relatively accurate up until this point. But how did you process, you know, basically kind of the analysis coming out of the AI community and SF going back a few years?

58:31It's hard for me to kind of decipher how this is going to play out and who are going to be winners and losers and how that plays. but it's very hard when you take a step back in this country and really throughout the world to not believe we don't need a lot more infrastructure build for communities and economies to thrive. So at the end of the day, we're deeply investing in these businesses to meet this moment. And we think we're pretty early in this journey and are going to keep investing into it. Is sovereign AI driving any of the international demand that you mentioned? You start to see some of the hyperscalers evaluate more build out in Southeast Asia, as an example.

59:13So they'll try to use exactly Malaysia, Indonesia, natural gas, but adjacent to Singapore for law. Sure. So in that regard, that's happening. Certainly Taiwan's one of our biggest markets. That's because of TSMC. Interesting. So we're commissioning almost 10 gigawatts of power primarily for TSMC. So that's AI. Not for data centers, but for fabs. For the fabs, for the chip factories. I had no idea they were so electricity intensive. So significant demands in Taiwan for that adjacency. Yeah. And that's happening in the U.S. too. Yeah, yeah. As you think about some of the chip fab factories that are being built.

59:52So it's not just the AI factories. Yeah. It's the infrastructure around it that needs the electron. Okay. Help me understand some of the less sexy or less obvious maybe pieces of the grid that need to be modernized, need to scale up. If we're familiar with the turbine, we're familiar with the nuclear reactor. These are very tractable things, but I'm sure there's so many other pieces of the electron delivery supply chain that are important and you're involved in. I mean, if you just take a step back, the system is really, is built, was built for a coal plant to, in one direction, flow electrons towards a house or a factory.

1:00:32And that was a 24-7 flow, very stable. Exactly. And then you still had peak demand during the day or during the summer. Exactly. So that was where we started. Now you have all these variable forms of generation. On top of that, you have electrons that are going in multiple directions because you have people selling their electrons back into the grid on their roof. And the system is not optimizing all those electrons. So we have an old machine for all intents and purposes that is not doing a great job matching the supply with where the demand is. Part of that is for boring reasons, like we have islanded grids in the U.S.

1:01:15It's not one connected machine to project things to where it needs to be. Is that possible? Yes. Given the geographic diversity and like how spread out the United States is? Is it possible that I could sell electrons in California and it could wind up in New York? Certainly in the 48 states, for sure. I mean, there's no reason we shouldn't be able to build a meshed grid that works. Today, we don't have that. Now, I think in this regard, the federal government's pushing hard on historical precedent to try to drive efficiency because that's a faster way to incremental electrons in some way than simply building more plants.

1:01:53we're working on that. Part of that is making new connections that bring islands together. Part of it is also, and this is frankly the harder part, different regulatory structures and market practices to allow different players to get paid in that. And that is sometimes harder, but we're working our way through that. Talk about nuclear timelines. We've seen a bunch of announcements from hyperscalers. It feels like 2030, 2032, you see 2035. Even stepping aside from your business, just broadly, I think a lot of us tracked Vodal. That took decades. When do you think we'll be getting new electrons from a new nuclear plant in America?

1:02:36You bet. I mean, I start with the fact that we've got about 56 existing plants in the US that can add five gigawatts of power by operating what's already running. That can happen this And that counts. Yeah. And that'll happen soon. So that's the first step. Sure. New incremental plants. Yep. 2032, 2031. That's about right. Yep. But then we can scale. And in the next decade, this can become a much more meaningful part of the equation for the country and the world. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Is that going to be deeply CapEx intensive at some point? Once that 2032, there's a rationalization, a realization that it's working.

1:03:13But we in order to 10x, 100x the nuclear production, there's going to be some sort of CapEx boom in a delay in the investment before it gets recouped and starts generating electricity. Nuclear is definitely capex heavy, but then it lasts forever. So the life cycle cost of nuclear can be very compelling, but there is a significant upfront cost. Talk about some of the other initiatives that are happening broadly around electrification and just grid reliability. We've talked to companies that are doing home batteries to try and release some of the, there's the Tesla Powerwall, there's Base Energy, there's a few other companies that are working in that space.

1:03:52Are there any other sort of near term between now and 2032 steps that you think America or the grid should be taking to just modernize and create more efficiency and more electrical abundance? I do think in most applications, you're going to continue to see storage grow in the system. We historically think about storage primarily with solar. Yeah. The reality is storage is going to start to be attached to many power generation sources to create more optionality for us. Yeah. And that's a good thing. And that attached with software can ensure that we get more of the electrons where it's needed.

1:04:28Yeah. You mentioned solar. What is the bull case for an American solar dominant industry? It feels like China is very cost competitive. There's discussions of, hey, if they're cheap, maybe we should just buy them all and install them. We have a friend who has that take. There's other folks who are more on the tariff and let's, you know, put some barriers in place to give our indigenous industries a chance. Yeah. Where do you fall on what it takes to roll out, I guess, as much solar as we need? Yeah, I'd say stationary equipment, solar panels or batteries. China's ahead by by by a lot where they struggle still to a larger extent is with rotating equipment that requires another level of.

1:05:16material sciences. That means tracking the sun? Well, no, outside of solar. So I'm shifting in the comparison to a turbine, a wind turbine, although they're competitive, they're nuclear. It requires another level of heat resistant technology that we still have quite a lead on. But on the stationary equipment like a solar panel or storage, it's going to be tough. The investments that have been made in those factories to automate and the CapEx required, that is a challenge. But the reality is the country has a lot more resources than China has. We have very inexpensive gas. We have a much more advanced nuclear industry here.

1:05:59We have plenty of land that has good wind and solar to take advantage of in a grid that we can do more with that already exists versus having to create it from scratch. So we have a lot going for us. But in this regard, we do need to build in a different way going forward than the way we have the last 25 years. Albeit there wasn't a lot of electricity demand growth the prior 25 years. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

1:06:24Harley Finkelstein:Lots of Silicon Valley companies today building in energy. How are you thinking about M &A over the long term? I think a lot of these teams are very talented. Many of them will probably create interesting innovations. but a lot of them won't necessarily get to real scale and maybe be a standalone public company, let's say, but could be an interesting tuck-in for a platform like GEV. How are you thinking about M &A? Are you meeting these companies? Do you ever invest in them? It's a big part of our future. I mean, we try to lean into the ventures game more and more, but we want to be thought of as a partner that these companies come to because we do know how to industrialize things at scale.

1:07:09We have very strong relationships with the end customers. And part of why I appreciate opportunities to come and talk with you guys is that's the company we want to be seen as, as a partner of choice, whenever they choose that. It doesn't have to be M &A and an acquisition. It can be an alliance in different ways because it's going to take many different partnerships and many different structures for us collectively as a country to meet the moment. Vinova also doesn't have all the answers. There's a lot of stuff we know how to do, but there's a lot in this ecosystem that we've got to get better at, which is why, to some extent, one of the big pluses for us right now is as our customers have shifted more to Silicon Valley, and it's about 20 % of our backlog today, they're making us better because they think about innovation differently, risk and reward a little bit differently.

1:07:57And timelines, maybe. Timelines for sure. Timelines for sure. And I think that's good for everybody. Totally. Totally. It's good.

1:08:04Harley Finkelstein:Right now, everyone's frustrated because they want it now. But at the same time, just increasing that innovation cycle will be better for everyone in the long run. Did you feel like you went through a culture reset process during the spin out? What did you take from GE versus what did you try to build from the ground up? The fact that I had been there, have been 25 years, it's because I always liked the ambition of the company, and I always loved the people. At the same time, we always didn't perform as well as we could have, which really comes back to focus. And the beauty of the spin-out is it got us focused on one purpose every day.

1:08:45We weren't competing with a health care business or an aircraft engine business for capital. Our board wasn't diversified to solve many problems. we're here to lead and expanding the electric power system and ultimately decarbonizing the world in the process. And I think that focus, as much as anything, is also helping us attract another level of talent.

1:09:07Harley Finkelstein:Totally. Because I think a lot of young people see climate change as an example, one of their generation's biggest challenges. And there's no confusion that Vernova can be a company that can move that needle at scale. So it's helping us just perform better with focus. It's also helping us attract another level of talent and create our own culture while still protecting for the ambition and what was a great people culture. But we were a big company inside GE and sometimes too many goals or no goals at all. I love that you're like, it's so nice being at a small company now of 85 ,000. I have two final quick questions.

1:09:45One, I would love to know what a year in the life looks like for you. Like, where are you spending time? Where's headquarters? When are you on site? When are you with customers? Like, are you flying around the world constantly? What's your day-to-day look like over the course of a year? Yeah, I mean, our headquarters is in Cambridge, Mass., in Austin. And we put the headquarters there because we did want to attract those young people that believe climate change matters and to give them a platform to start their career. And in that regard, it's worked. All that said, I'm not there much. You know, I've spent 10 weeks so far this year outside the U.S.

1:10:23Wow. That's a lot in May. But the reality is this is a unique moment. Yep. There's a lot of complexity from a geopolitical perspective where governments are very engaged on power generation build out. Yeah. So you have to show up. Yep. And have those adult conversations in person. Sure. So this year has been very heavy international travel. Sure. I'm on the West Coast multiple times a month. Yeah. That's a given. I'm admittedly more in Northern California and Seattle than LA. But right now we need to be consistently co-creating with our customers because they're learning every day what they really need.

1:11:02And this has shifted from what it once was of buying a power purchase agreement and then just getting the electrons to asking us not just for an electron, but to build an integrated system that allows them to run their end application the way that they want. And frankly, every customer has somewhat different strategies for what they want if it's AI for what that AI factory needs to do. We need to co-create with them if we're going to serve them. So we're showing up and I need to show up. And then last question. It seems like an incredibly AGI-proof company or beneficiary. Your business is huge and diversified.

1:11:44What does it take to get a job at GE Vernova today? Humility, intellectual interest, and a real belief in the purpose. We are a company that's hiring a lot of people right now. Take our neighbors at MIT. We've got 69 kids starting with us in July. You took the whole class practically. It's a lot, 69. That's fun. Because we need to complement those production workers with young engineers that get excited about building something. And that's one of the things we're excited about. I think sometimes we talk so much on the risks of job loss through AI. Of course. We're going to build a lot of cool stuff and be proud of it.

1:12:22And that takes a combination of a lot of different types of people. and we want them to be with Vernova. That's amazing.

1:12:29Harley Finkelstein:Do the hyperscaler CEOs whine and dine you? No. No? There's that apocryphal story about, what is it, Larry Ellison and Elon Musk begging Jensen for GPUs and it's hotly debated. Are people debating, they're not begging you yet? We're working hard to serve them every day and showing up with as much humility as we can and working to meet this moment. That's great, that's great. Well, thank you so much, Scott. Thanks for having me. Great to meet you. Thank you. Appreciate it. This is fantastic. Our next guest is already in the waiting room. We have Brian Elliott from Blitzy. He is the CEO with a huge fundraising announcement coming in to the TBPN UltraDome.

1:13:11Let's bring in Brian. How are you doing?

1:13:13Harley Finkelstein:Here we go. Hey, guys. How are you? Quick transition. Thank you so much for taking the time. Please, since this is the first time on the show, introduce yourself and the company. Yeah, so Blitzy, we're announcing the$200 million financing at a$1.4 billion valuation today. Nice. Thanks, guys. Appreciate the love. So we're an autonomous software development platform specifically designed for complex enterprise use cases. So we serve banks, insurance companies, anyone with huge amounts of code. And we do autonomous work, meaning the system will run for days to weeks autonomously, recursively improving the code using all the foundational models together and you know open ai gemini and anthropics models um yeah it's fascinating so what is the go-to-market motion for you i mean you're focused on the biggest companies uh like do you have like tell me about the shape of your sales force like what the process is like to actually deliver value because i imagine that a lot of times you're going up against like the build versus buy question almost like should we just build something like this internally should we just use the tools directly the models directly, but you clearly have a fantastic value proposition because you've seen a lot of traction.

1:14:21Yeah. So we go in direct, right? It's very much like a Palantir-like motion. Yeah. So we're going to go in direct. We're going to show you quickly. We're going to reverse engineer your code base, oftentimes 30, 50 million lines of code. And we're going to do all that within 48 hours of installing Plytese. Or else. And so we get to wow. It sounds like a threat. But yeah, no, I mean, obviously that's valuable. I mean, that's the case with all these coding agents. is like the first thing is like understanding what actually is the business problem, what's actually going on. How are you confronting like the diffusion question broadly?

1:14:54Like there are so many systems that be a like complete code. Oh, it's the beautiful, you know, end to end engineered system. And then you realize that, oh wait, actually, like if this person doesn't fill out this form at this time, like the whole system grinds to a halt because that's just the way this organization was designed years ago. Yeah. So these are the like complex use cases that Blitz is designed for. So we designed this for the messy brownfield legacy code base where the system is going to come in, it's going to create a knowledge graph and we're building and running the application, right?

1:15:22And so inside of a VM, we are building around the application, looking at what's going on. And then we've invented a proprietary way to store and then have agents be able to traverse a graph, understand what's going on and then build large amounts of work on top of it.

1:15:35Harley Finkelstein:How did you talk about the category overall during your fundraise? Every single day, there's a new company in this space. And everything we've seen so far is that there's just such overwhelming demand that almost every company is doing well. And almost every company would have been seen as best in class if it was in another category based on their growth a few years ago, but how are you talking about the category? How do you see it evolving when everyone kind of wants to do everything, at least in the fullness of time? So I'm curious how you pitched it. Yeah. So we really focus on autonomy, right?

1:16:16So if you look at what's out there today, there are things that run for a half hour, things that run for a day continuously without a human in the loop. Our system is at its core defined to run for long periods of time. We're the most inference compute intensive platform out there, driving up code quality. So like we'll have our system, it can run for weeks on end, improving the quality of code, specifically focused on those large, large brownfield code bases. So that's where we found our sweet spot inside of the enterprise. No one else is as laser focused from a technology perspective as we are in large brownfield, large scale autonomy.

1:16:50And as the models get better, we continue to rise up and take advantage of that. So we are a long transformer and want as much CapEx investment into the category as possible. From other people. Yeah. We want everyone to keep throwing models at it.

1:17:04Harley Finkelstein:And it's clearly a compelling pitch because you raised the$200 million. But it is, I mean, I think it's notable that I would say that. Would you say that is quite a similar pitch to many of the other companies in the space? Or are they saying they're focused on autonomy, but they're really not? and it's more point solutions or models? The world has looked at being able to have a system run continuously for a day as autonomy. And what we've done is we've redefined that to weeks at a time, doing hundreds of thousands or millions of lines of code that have been end-to-end tested ahead of it getting back to the human.

1:17:49So we've set a new benchmark for what's possible against these large-scale code bases. We're basically setting the frontier for autonomous software development. Okay, I can't find it, but I saw Meta put out a new benchmark today, and the benchmark was basically take the Frontier model and try and recreate an entire repo, an entire piece of software from scratch, and all the Frontier LLMs were performing very poorly. Like, they were 0%, 3 % maybe. It was very rough. You see a similar dynamic with ArcGIS V3. The Frontier models, the most amazing models are at like 0.2%, 0.5%. And then at the same time, you have people with like, you know, AI agent psychosis and vibe coding, tons of things and like incredible results from the models and like incredible revenue ramps from all the labs.

1:18:38And I'm wondering how you square these. Like what are the models still bad at? How are you processing the question of like spiky intelligence? Where are you getting the most value and where are you seeing, okay, it's not quite there yet? So you see a rapid depreciation of intelligence after you exceed like 100K context window, right? And so they're advertising a million, 10 million. There's someone subcupid out 12 million, you know, context window. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that, but continue. Yeah, like they're using sparse attention beyond that point, right? And so you can kind of get it right sometimes.

1:19:13The academics will call this context pressure. And so what's important is that you limit the LLM's ability to look within its effect of context window just in time every time to do the right amount of work. So as the code bases scale, like you see results depreciate pretty dramatically, right? And so you have to be able to have a system level approach, not just throw a model at it with a slightly larger advertised context window to solve these large scale problems. And so that means like orchestrators and like teams of agents, like there's one agent on this 100K token chunk of code and it's very good at that.

1:19:45And then it's coordinating with another agent. Is that the solution? Yeah, but code is relational, not serial. And so you can't just say the serial 100K tokens, which is like 10 ,000 lines of code, but you have to cut it in half to account for prompts and tools. So now we're talking about a minuscule view, but the entire relational aspect of, well, it's something way over here in this service that's actually relationally relevant to what's going on just in time. So you have to be able to understand, you have to create an ability to understand code, which people used to do with language-specific version-specific ASTs.

1:20:17We've invented a language-agnostic version-agnostic way to understand code. Well, congratulations on the round. Congratulations on the progress. Yeah, great to meet you, Brian. Keep on blitzing. We'll talk to you soon. Sounds good, guys. Great to meet you. Have a good one. Cheers. Goodbye. Up next, we have Stephen Balaban from Lambda, co-founder, and the new CEO, Michelle, from Lambda, in the waiting room. Welcome to the show. How are you guys doing? Wow, look at this setup. Look at this setup.

1:20:44Harley Finkelstein:Suited up. Suited up. Suited up. Okay. Reintroduce yourself, Stephen. Introduce yourself, Michelle. Michelle. No, because we're very excited for today. John and Jordy, so good to be back. Thank you so much, and congratulations. It's been a while since we've seen each other, and so much has happened in your world, too. So I'm Stephen Balaban. I'm the co-founder and founding CEO, but now chief technology officer, CTO. And we've welcomed on Michelle Combs as our new chief executive officer. and I'm passing the baton after 14 years. This really feels like we're putting a new quarterback in. This feels like proper TBPN SportsCenter.

1:21:26I love it. And it was such an awesome opportunity to like, this is the first thing that we're doing right after announcing it to the company and to the world. And I think that one thing you guys are going to really like here. So Michelle has obviously a very, very long history in telecommunication infrastructure, whether it's being the former CEO of Sprint, former CEO of SoftBank International, associated with and with the McLaren team, also on the board of Philip Morris. No way. Oversaw the acquisition of Swedish Match. I understand that I have some competitors. Yes, yes, yes. So maybe we should speak about it outside of it.

1:22:13Yeah, we should. so it's not zine what is it i don't know this is the company i started before the show i know the the uh the uh the the the tagline we have now is look there's telecommunication infrastructure yeah racing infrastructure nicotine infrastructure and ai infrastructure it all comes together it all makes sense more ingredients to a flourishing civilization i think you're right you know we're We're really excited to have Michelle on board. And it's an honor to be able to do this as a founder, to be able to bring on somebody with such experience. Yeah, this is very, very excited to be there.

1:22:58I guess I would never have been invited without you, Stephen. So thanks to you, I am a cool guy. I'm on this nice show. So I really love it. So we just announced it to our employees a little while ago. So very, very excited, fascinating industry, amazing company, amazing founder that I have discovered in the past two months. And I guess that we are going to have a lot of fun in order to build the next step of this company and continue our leadership in this industry. So I love it. And that's really exciting. Huge industry, huge growth rates, hugely successful company thus far. What is the major goal?

1:23:41What are the KPIs? How do you manage a company like this over the next year, over the next decade?

1:23:48Harley Finkelstein:When the GPUs are on fire. Well, I guess that's the name of the game is scale. Scale is what matters. So Steve and team have built an amazing platform in the past few years. And we can really start from this foundation and turbo boost the growth. So I am really coming in order to help Steve to unlock the growth of this company. Sky has no limit. So we know that. So it's just about scale, scale in terms of capital formation. So that's something, and you will have seen that we are strengthening the team also in this side, on this dimension, in order to be able to raise the right level of capital, whether it's equity, whether it's debt, whatever is needed, in order to accelerate our growth and scale also in terms of operations.

1:24:34So it's about, let's say, finding the right sides, finding, of course, the right GPUs, and just making sure that we can assemble all of that in order to have the best service, the best quality, the best quantity of compute, and the most efficient computing power for our customers. So that's really about executing, in fact, the dream of Stephen, which has started the dream, which has put all the ingredients together, and my role is just to accelerate that with my partner in crime, Steve, I love the idea to partner with a founder. As you can see, I'm a little bit older than the founder. I have an experience which is a little bit outside of the founding place.

1:25:17I'm a serial executive, but I have worked with many founders in my previous lives, for example, at SoftBank. And so I really enjoy, I really like to team with a founder, and especially a founder like Steven. So that's already very fun. Look how he's dressed. He's dressed like a French guy. He's dressed for your job. So look, he has already a tie. I'm surprised. I got a Charvet tie. I picked up in Paris. And, you know, that's a good premonition for... Stephen, where do you want to focus? Sorry for the French guy. We should just look at his shoes. So he made a mistake there. He made sneakers with his suit.

1:25:56So now we can take it from there. But I just wanted to show you that there was an issue there.

1:26:01Harley Finkelstein:Wouldn't be an AIC with, like, proper dress shoes. Made in America, New Balance. There we go. Oh, there we go. Stephen, where do you want to, like, obviously, you're going to be focused on technical responsibilities now. Where do you want to focus? Where do you see the opportunity for you to have the highest impact? Yeah, so I am going to be continuing to lead product vision, technology direction, and working on just really high impact, high velocity products at the company. I mean, one of the things that I've done historically, even just in the past couple of months, is really spit up a ton of agents, really show how software engineering is supposed to work in the new world.

1:26:42And on top of that, I'm just still deeply involved in standing up new infrastructure. So whether that's like hiring and recruiting really great, amazing technical data center experts, you know, assisting with the strategy around how do we go from leasing data center space to owning and operating data center space. I'm just going to be involved in wherever is like the highest impact for me. You know, when I was thinking about these roles, I kind of looked at the people who I really looked up to in business. And, you know, the CTO role is the one that's kind of styled after somebody who I really look up to, which is Larry Ellison.

1:27:19And, you know, when he transitioned to a full-time CTO position and when Safra Katz and Mark Hurd became co-CEOs of Oracle. And so I figured that was an apropos title given that I look up to him so much. That's amazing. How are you thinking about focus right now? People know Lambda as a way to lease compute on a short-term basis. We've seen other companies expand into everything from buying land and building supercomputers to training their own foundation models and offering APIs. It feels like there's always a question of, do you want to do more? But if the current thing is working, do you stay focused?

1:28:04How are you thinking about these trade-offs? Michelle and I are exactly on the same page, which is focus, focus, focus, focus. We are building a generational company that is going to last for 100 years, and we're going to do that by having the most compute at the lowest cost basis, offer those at the lowest prices in the most flexible terms so that we can delight both the largest, most important model builders in the world, like OpenAI and the developer. You can't forget the developer who have built the entire industry and ecosystem that surrounds this company. I mean, Lambda is really the developer's cloud.

1:28:47You know, it's founded by a software engineer. It's built for people like me. And so we're going to have that combination of both of those and focus on that. Well, congratulations. And thank you so much for coming on the show. can't wait to catch up with you soon you guys look fantastic this is fantastic we'll have you

1:29:04Harley Finkelstein:both back on soon talk to you soon john jordy congratulations guys you take care goodbye guys cheers bye just yesterday ryan cohen uh of gamestop offered a 55 billion dollar unsolicited bin for ebay targeting 2 billion in cost cuts and we have him joining the show with us now Ryan Cohen, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time. How are you doing? How are you guys? Great to see you. We're doing fantastically. I would love an update. What can you share with us on the situation as things have developed since yesterday, just to sort of set the, obviously this is moving very quickly.

1:29:44Where are we right now? What's happening? We made an offer yesterday, 125 bucks a share. half cash half stock that was funny wasn't it have you considered 49 cash is a why did you get to half cash half stock can you unpack that a little bit at least well i mean frankly when you think about me going and running the ebay business what we're proposing is for existing shareholders to take half of their investment off the table. And that would be us providing them with$28 billion, which is like a 40 % premium from when we started buying the stock. And then they would be getting roughly, I mean, it depends on ultimately when the transaction closes, but they would be rolling the rest into the combined company of GameStop and eBay.

1:30:51Frankly, with me running eBay, I think that the company, the earnings power of the company is going to increase substantially, as well as the ability to grow. The platform stagnated over the last decade, and I could do a lot with eBay. I love it. That's a very strong business and that's right up my alley. Take us through the big vision. Like in five years, you're at the helm. Like how big can this business be? Are you expanding it? Obviously there's an operational efficiency point, but what is the big picture? What's the blue sky, pie in the sky vision for the combined entity? So where we've had success at GameStop and where eBay has had success, is in collectibles, trading cards, collectibles.

1:31:43The founder of your show was talking about his Mont Blanc pen. And like, that's a good example. That's a perfect item to go and buy on eBay. But you're always concerned that is it going to be real in the trust? And that's something that using GameStop 1600 stores, we can immediately authenticate that item. The seller can ship it or we can ship it, but we've got 1 ,600 access points that we can do live authentication. So we can go deep in collectibles, leveraging our physical infrastructure. We can increase intake by bringing a lot more product onto the platform. And then there's a lot of other categories that I can grow in.

1:32:34And then, you know, you look at live commerce as an example. I mean, eBay has 130 million users and they're getting crushed by competitors in live commerce. So an owner's mentality, you know, I can I want to I want to own eBay forever. Like I love that business. It's run like a public utility. It should have been wiped out, but it hasn't been.

1:33:00Harley Finkelstein:Yeah, it's been remarkably resilient. How many companies, how many startups have gone after a specific category on eBay, raised$100 million plus, and yet eBay has remained resilient? It shows that it's a really powerful platform. That's why I love it. And the website still looks the same as it did in 1995. but everyone's tried to kill this thing and it's still making over$2 billion a year. So that goes to show you the durability of the business. Talk about live commerce more. Would that be just a better integration with TikTok, Instagram streaming, Twitch streaming? Do you need to go and partner with big creators?

1:33:48Do you need to find your own platform for that? How does that actually play out in a world where eBay and you are making a bigger push into live commerce? It makes a lot of sense, but I'm wondering, how does it actually work? Yeah, it would be partnering with creators. I mean, they've got the platform. We would improve the platform so it looks better and more consistent with the kind of UI that you have at competitors. But there's the user base, and so it's not something you have to market. It's building out better tech and partnering with creators. Yeah, and the correct incentive structure for those creators.

1:34:26Because I bet you right now, you could probably go get some referral code or something, but it's not deeply integrated in a way that you can really accelerate on a social platform.

1:34:35Harley Finkelstein:Why do you think eBay, has eBay been a target of any type of deal like this in the past? I'm not familiar with any off the top of my head, but why do you think maybe it hasn't been more of a target? And I guess, like, why do you think you can get more efficiency out of it than maybe some other potential buyers who I'm sure see their costs? You know, marketing is something that people gravitate towards. But I'm sure you're seeing other efficiencies as well. So in terms of the competitive landscape on an acquisition, I think there was some people circling around a few years ago. Nothing happened.

1:35:17And the strategics can't really do it because I don't think that they would be able to clear antitrust. So any of the large competitors wouldn't be able to acquire it.

1:35:33And, you know, I don't think that we would have any regulatory issues getting clearance on on on a merger. in terms of the efficiencies. GameStop is a good example. Like GameStop is a dog and it could have been dead. And we've breathed a lot of life into this thing. You have. Right? And you look at SG &A, we've pulled out, we've dropped SG &A by 47%, $800 million by making marketing more efficient. almost turning off marketing. I mean, everyone knows GameStop. Everybody knows eBay. So you talk to the marketing people that tell you like it's going to tank revenues and all of this. And the reality is most of that marketing spends isn't making money, but everyone's trying to protect their jobs.

1:36:29And there's kickbacks. There's all kinds of perverse incentives. And so I'm running the business like a family business. You know, it's really not that complicated. And You look at eBay spending$2.5 billion to grow 1 million users,$2 billion in cost cuts between sales and marketing and corporate overhead. It's not a lot. It's not something that's going to take a few years. It's something that is going to happen fast, fast, fast because I'm putting leverage on this thing, and I don't want to run a leverage business. I'm not going to run it hot. I'm going to pay down the leverage, and I'm going to increase earnings.

1:37:13they're spending$5.5 billion on operating expenses, on an$11 billion business that has no inventory and its asset light. So there's 11 ,500 employees, and it doesn't make sense. You don't need it. I could run that business from my house. Like it's eBay. It looks the same as it did in 1995. They need 11 ,500.

1:37:40Harley Finkelstein:So is the Elon Twitter take private somewhat of an inspiration here? There's been a number after that happened. In many ways, the business suffered, but maybe it wasn't because of the deep cuts that he did to the team. The service kept working. Yeah, the service kept working. It's still a great product. uh we've been surprised that more ceos and management teams haven't done something like that with businesses that are household names but somewhat stagnated uh is that an inspiration at all yeah and twitter is a good example i mean what really happened at twitter was that the advertisers you know i don't know what the situation is now but they pretty much conspired against him.

1:38:27And, you know, it had nothing to do, my understanding is it really had nothing to do with the cost cuts, more of just the advertisers conspiring against him because of the demented political landscape and the fact that people apparently are against freedom of speech. And so like you look at the usability of the platform and the teams, the engineering teams are much smaller and they're innovating a lot faster. So it's actually the opposite. The more people you add, it, the more you slow things down. And the fewer people you have, the more it's like a startup. You've got to always be in startup mode and you build big teams and nothing gets done anymore.

1:39:06Harley Finkelstein:Do you think LLMs will be a tailwind for eBay over the next decade? It feels like for the long tail of commerce, you're trying to find really specific items. It feels like LLMs and people doing research in these products could be a catalyst for the business. Maybe there's things on eBay that would be tough to find. But if I'm really getting precise around prompting or running these sort of agentic searches, maybe I have a higher likelihood of purchasing something. Yeah, I mean, I think about all of the things that can disrupt the business in the future. And, you know, I think that eBay is the kind of business where the future of the business model is more certain than most tech businesses.

1:39:59And that's why it's done so well. And there's been such a lack of innovation, yet it hasn't been able to be disrupted. So I would expect that to continue to be the case. If it doesn't materialize as an M &A, are you looking at a board seat? You have a position. will you be more active in a non-M &A scenario? Yeah, I mean, I'm going to do whatever we need to do to protect our investment and to improve the business. But the goal here isn't to be an activist. The goal is, I want to own eBay. I want to run eBay. I want that to be my baby. I want to build something much larger and cost cutting, frankly, is the way to make the business more efficient to pay down the debt and innovate.

1:40:53But when I think about what I can do with eBay in the future, like look at Chewy, you know, the eBay is like Chewy on steroids. And so, um, there's so much more runway and it's global. Yeah. I mean, it seems like a huge opportunity. How do you want to be comped based on performance 100 is there any tension between you and the shareholders how do you actually create alignment there it would be my current compensation plan is tied uh really lofty metrics and it's based on the the first tranche i've got to double market cap as an example just to hit the first tranche and the 10x it in order for it to fully vest so i'm not interested in yeah i i haven't taken uh a dollar of salary or any bonuses and you know it's funny actually i just got a call from my team today that said this is how i know they hate me they're not happy about this by the way the game stop this is the game stop team eBay.

1:42:03No, eBay is not. Oh, the eBay team. Okay. Yeah, after this interview, they're really not going to like me. Because they're going to find out I'm cutting marketing spend. And the board already isn't going to like me because I'm calling out all the board fees. But I get a call and I say, they're calling out your personal assistant. I said, what are you talking about? And they said they went on the GameStop's career page and they saw that there's a listing for the personal assistant. And it's all kinds of personal stuff. And that's basically a CEO benefit. And, you know, it's basically not you're using company resources personally.

1:42:41I pay for my personal assistant personally. I don't even pay for the company doesn't pay for my personal assistant. So they're already starting to get there. They're doing whatever they can. They want to fight.

1:42:57Harley Finkelstein:Have you, has any major eBay shareholders reached out to you? Have you had, you know, what is the general sentiment? You know, how do you think, what do you think it'll look like if you take this directly to the shareholders?

1:43:14I don't know. I mean, I would want to, I want to own eBay at$125 a share. We're proposed, there's tax advantages to rolling it. But when I think about what eBay could be worth, if I'm running this business, I believe it's a heck of a lot more than$125 a share. And so I would roll 100 percent of the of the equity. But, you know, we'll we'll see. We'll we'll see what happens. Yeah.

1:43:42Harley Finkelstein:What do you think of Michael Burry's critiques? A lot of people were talking about him exiting yesterday. he doesn't believe have you guys chatted I haven't chatted with Michael in a long time I've seen he's more active than he says his investing philosophy so I figured the you know his risk appetite and you know the leverage we're putting on just it didn't make sense for him but it seemed as though it was more of a trade more so than, than anything. Yeah. It looking at the price action yesterday, is that reflective of sort of like a shakeout of non-believers and you feel like you have the right people around the table now?

1:44:35I am when I think back to Chewy, every single day was a shakeout. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. It's hard to diagnose the shareholder base. And I'm I'm focused on what I could build over a long period of time. And if I got my hands on eBay, I can build something worth a lot and much larger than it is.

1:45:06Harley Finkelstein:Was Paramount at all an inspiration? I was going to ask. I've looked at it.

1:45:14What they did is really interesting, too. Just because smaller company buying a much larger company, but the deal still went through, the capital was marshaled. That was something that I think was unclear yesterday for some people, was half cash, half stock. Where's it coming from? How much of this is just an ongoing conversation? And as you work through this process, you'll engage with other, you know, pools of capital or financiers to actually put together the final package. Do you have a date that you want this to, like, be done by? I mean, we have the cash. I mean, we have the cash accounted for today in terms of a highly confident letter from our bank for the$20 billion.

1:46:03plus we've got$9 billion of cash. And the rest would be them rolling the equity into the combined company. Sure.

1:46:12Harley Finkelstein:Yeah, I think the rolling of the equity was the thing that, if it had got into the viral clip from CNBC yesterday, it would have made a lot more sense. So I'm glad we're getting it in now. Yep. Is there, I guess, how much of your critique of eBay is specifically around the current management team. They've done a decent job. Look, it's anyone. When you've got perverse financial, they're not operating like owner. When you've got it all on the line, you're going to do whatever it's going to take. 20-hour days, seven days a week, you're not going to stop. And when equity is given out to you, like candy, I mean, it's all companies.

1:46:59So, you know, the directors, board of directors make$4 million, like$350 ,000 to$450 ,000 per director. There's been no insider buying at the company. I mean, like, it's not a surprise. They're not going to light the money on fire. They're not going to light the world on fire. But you've got a bunch of professionals in the board and a professional management.

1:47:23Harley Finkelstein:yeah so if this deal goes through roughly what percentage of your personal net worth will be tied to it well um i i haven't done the math but if things go correctly then it better be the majority otherwise i'm wasting my time yeah what was your first memory using ebay were you a power seller back in the day it's a very good question i bought and sold dj equipment on ebay back in like 2003 it was amazing i don't remember my first transaction but uh i'm gonna have to get back to you on that one okay uh with gamestop last time we talked you were mentioning a little bit of expansion into uh digital goods less physical material and stuff.

1:48:18Do you think that there's an opportunity for eBay to play in a digital marketplace or in a world where certain collectibles or certain goods become digital or the market shifts towards more digital goods? And would you like to see eBay expand into that? Yes and yes, in terms of a digital marketplace. And they're already doing it to a certain extent. I mean, like all kinds of Roblox digital items are bought and sold. But and I've actually bought them for my kids. And there's so much fraud on the platform. Like we're buying stuff. It's not a real item. End up having to do a chargeback. But then it ended up getting delivered.

1:49:02So you can't do a chargeback. So like they've got the basics of it, but it's not being done well. So like digital gaming. Totally. That's a huge opportunity to dig into.

1:49:19There's so much potential. On digital stuff, I guess, you're obviously interested in cutting costs. Are you optimistic that stable coins might be a path to reducing costs? It's a high volume transaction business. Obviously, a lot of credit card fees. Maybe there's a way around that with stable coins. We hear that from a lot of stablecoin founders. Haven't heard it from as many operators. What do you think? I don't have a point of view on that. I haven't looked into it.

1:49:52Harley Finkelstein:So I think the sellers would probably be eating the cost, but potential option. Yeah. I don't know. Do you have any sense of how eBay is using AI internally today? Have they spoken about it much? Do you believe they're getting very much leverage out of the models? Do you think there could be quite a bit more? I've seen that they've made listings easier in terms of just generating product descriptions and stuff like that. So I think they're kind of like doing the super easy stuff. Still, there's a lot of friction to sell a product on eBay. Like it's, it just, it's not easy. So the benefit of our 1600 stores is we have the ability to increase intake, but I would go through it and I would make it as simple as possible to have a real item for sale as a seller.

1:51:00And there's a lot of steps. It's just, it's a pain in the ass. It's too difficult. Yeah. 1 ,600 stores in the world where you combined eBay and GameStop, do you expect that number to increase, decrease, stay the same?

1:51:20It's a good question. I mean, our footprint is a moving target. We have, this was part of what appealed to me originally when I went into GameStop was the leases were short term. So they're like two to three year leases. And as we see how the business performs, we decide whether or not it makes sense to renew the store. So, I mean, it's going to be dependent on the utility of the store. It's like if there is traffic and if profitability is increasing, we'll keep the stores open. And if it's not the case, then we'll shrink the store base. Okay, a couple other scenarios. In a world where an M &A doesn't happen, is there a business partnership to be done where verification of rare collectibles can happen at GameStop physical retail stores for a price and eBay is paying GameStop for that service?

1:52:18Is that something you've explored? Is that something that's at all likely to happen? well that would so yes and it would basically take zero dollars in capex in order to something like that and it's a good idea um i hope that doesn't want that doesn't happen because i want to i want to run the entire thing but if it doesn't then i mean there's there's a partnership option i reached out to ebay like i don't know maybe a year or two years ago to talk to them about partnering and they didn't engage seriously. Everyone's on vacation. Everyone's always on vacation. They're not available. They have assistance.

1:52:58I'll get back to you next week. And it's like, let's go. It's getting done now. Then they never get back to you. Then you're following up. There's no sense of urgency at that company. There's no sense of urgency, frankly, at most companies. So it never gained any traction. Okay. Etsy is trading at 6 billion. Is that a target if the eBay plan doesn't come together?

1:53:27Harley Finkelstein:No collectibles action there. It was in the chat. I got to ask. eBay is just such a natural fit for the collectibles, leveraging our store footprint, but then also like my ability to cut costs and build something much larger at the company. So everything else is, if it doesn't work out, we could find something else. But I like eBay. It brings me back to my roots. What's something that eBay is not doing today that you think they could expand into? Or is that even the right question? Do you think the core business is just so great and they're so dominant in many of these categories that you just want to pour fuel on the fire.

1:54:19Harley Finkelstein:Live commerce. Yeah. But to me, to me, that's an extension, right? Because they have a lot of inventory. It's just a new selling channel. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, in terms of doing that well, accelerating revenue growth, you know, I think that that is, that's big. And so going much deeper into collectibles and luxury trading cards, there's, there's a lot of runway there. Do you have a position on international capital providers? A lot of these big deals, uh, the, you know, maybe they started 50 at half cash, half stock. They wind up being more leaning cash. That's what we saw with the paramount, Warner Brothers deal.

1:55:03Are you interested in talking to international sovereign wealth funds, that type of capital provider? We're looking at a variety of different options currently. Makes sense.

1:55:20Harley Finkelstein:Mutual friend of the show and GameStop Mod Retro, they've been pretty aggressively pushing into this retro gaming category. How do you see that growing? Our team at the office recently got an old Xbox 360, fired it up. I can see retro gaming just getting more and more popular. But what's your view on the category right now? And where do you think it's going? We are, we've, we have, the return rates are kind of high, but we're building out the retro business in our stores currently. So that's a, it's still small, but it's a growing category for us. What do you want to see the rest of this week?

1:56:08Harley Finkelstein:How do you see it playing out?

1:56:18Harley Finkelstein:I don't know. It's a good question. Balls in their court? Pretty much, yeah. Balls in their court. Yeah. Well, we'll let you get to it. I'm sure you have more calls. Thanks for jumping on. Thanks for jumping on. You're welcome to join anytime. Anytime you need us for here. As the story progresses, but we're enjoying following along. And if anybody out there wants more information, it's on the website. Yeah. It's on the website. If anybody asks you how he's paying for it, just tell him half cash, half stock. You got the beginning and the end of the interview. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

1:56:51Harley Finkelstein:Great to see you, Ryan. Have a great rest of the week. Good luck out there. Goodbye. Oh, what a fun interview. It's on the website. I like the thesis. I keep coming back to I like the thesis. I was confused about the financing. I feel like an idiot now. A friend of mine who's an investment banker was like, yeah, this could totally happen just the way he's describing. And everyone who's sort of reposting the clips, thinking that it's crazy, it actually makes a lot of sense. And it could happen if the shareholders decide to roll forward. We'll see how it plays out. We'll see what happens. Obviously, with Warner Brothers, there was like an incredible pushback against any stock and it wound up being all cash at the end of the day.

1:57:36But that was the Netflix thing. The real question is, do we see a dark horse Netflix style bid for this eBay company? I can see it. I can see it.

1:57:44Harley Finkelstein:I think a lot of people just weren't thinking about eBay too much. And now that they see this business has been immune, not necessarily immune, but face an onslaught of competition, vertical competition in every single category from watches to collectibles to sneakers to fashion over and over and over. So much venture funding has gone into attacking their business. And yet they have remained remarkably durable. It is very immune to AI, especially collectibles. Right. no amount of AI-led abundance can generate more rookie cards from 20, 30 years ago. So it seems like a great business. I think Ryan has a strong vision.

1:58:24Harley Finkelstein:I would not be surprised for some other players to also get excited about the opportunity now that he has so pretty eloquently explained it to the world in his own words. And thank you to the chat for hanging out. you guys uh the GameStop crew you guys really are a family uh we've had we've had thousands of guests on the show and no one no one shows up shows up like uh you guys they're the real deal and uh they were asking us about some jargon that I didn't understand I'm sorry if we didn't get to your questions we tried to get the ones that sort of fit into this story uh I don't have the full context on everything that's happened in the GME ecosystem so uh good we'll work on uh we'll work on getting Ryan back on.

1:59:10We'll get him back on. We'll talk as there's more news. Um, he did have an interesting point that he says that he doesn't think any of the larger e-commerce players can make a bid because of antitrust considerations. I think he's thinking about Amazon, maybe Shopify. I don't know who else would be in that category of potential buyer, but then, uh, regulatory FTC, I don't want to dip my toe in. Um, but when I think about Shopify is an interesting one. Yeah. Shopify.

1:59:39Harley Finkelstein:eBay really is a platform, right? It's another, it's another. It makes any sense together. I'm not sure that it does either, but you can imagine they would be able to, you know, we got to get Harley back on the screws to them. I was just thinking more like these scaled PE funds that, Oh yeah. That's not a regulatory issue. No, no, I know that's what, but I'm saying that's a potential dark horse. Totally. Totally. And specifically cause like they don't, they're kind of paralyzed, right? They're, they're worried about investing in, in SAS. that they'd be sitting on a bunch of SaaS companies that they can't exit for reasons we all know.

2:00:11Yeah, and this one might be more durable. I'm just thinking about the Amazon. Like, who is the Netflix of this story? If he's the Paramount and eBay is the Warner Brothers, it's the$10 billion company going after the$50 billion,$100 billion company. Who's the Netflix in that story? It feels like it would be Amazon, but Amazon's so dominant in e-commerce, maybe a Shopify,

2:00:34Harley Finkelstein:Yeah, the thing I kept coming back to, too, is we've always said it has been shocking that the Elon Twitter playbook hasn't been applied to more companies. Again, the Twitter acquisition didn't go well, but that was because the reason that Ryan talked about, which was the advertiser bailing. So if ad spend on the platform craters, but you have these companies that have real network effects like Twitter, like eBay. I do think you can cut pretty dramatically and still have a thriving platform. At least, you know, my experience on X, we went through a period where stuff was pretty buggy, but I think they figured it out.

2:01:16Yeah, it's funny. Talking to him, I get the GME Army's love. Like, I get the thesis, the way he thinks about things, the way he talks about things. Obviously, tons of ups and downs in the journey. but like the basic thesis of the combination.

2:01:35Harley Finkelstein:Yeah, the other thing I'm excited about, there's so much stuff in my house that would sell on eBay. I just never find the time to go out. I don't want to deal with photographing it. If I could just take a car full of stuff, take it to eBay, they can say, I will take this, donate this stuff. I would happily do that. And I think that the integration with their existing retail footprint is interesting. I don't think they probably need 1 ,400 stores. 1 ,600. 1 ,600. Yeah, I agree. It's unclear. I mean, obviously, he's going to cut the ones that aren't performing well and add ones that are obvious.

2:02:11But what is the net effect? I don't know. I actually don't know where stores have gone over the past six years while he's been running that business. I would love to know how many stores did GameStop have before Ryan came in as CEO. Maybe we can look that up. But in Amazon news, the number of monthly releases of e-books on Amazon is going vertical. We are in the fast takeoff of AI slot books, apparently. That is the conclusion. John Arnold just says, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. And it does look like the rate of publishing on Amazon is going absolutely vertical.

2:02:53Harley Finkelstein:Explaining this to somebody in 2022, there's going to be a renaissance. Four years from now, there's going to be 350 ,000 books being published every month on Amazon. And they're like, you're not going to be happy with why, though. Yeah, it is crazy. I mean, if you had asked me to guess how many books were being released every month on Amazon in the pre-AI era, I don't know if I would have put it at 100 ,000. That's a lot of books. I feel like we talk to a lot of authors. I see the hyped books. I see the New York Times bestseller list. I don't really see the 999 or 99 ,900 books that don't make the cut in the given month.

2:03:36I maybe hear about five or 10 new books every month. But lo and behold, they were, in fact, churning out 100 ,000 books. Now it's over 300 ,000 books every month on Amazon. Bullish for Amazon. If you like slop, it's good for you too. I don't know. Maybe there's some good stuff on there. It all depends. The models are getting better. They're getting less sloppy. and I think people will wind up liking them. There's some AI videos that I like out there. You know there's going to be one book that's fully AI generated that is of high quality. Tyler, did you get the stat on GME stores pre-buyout? I would love to know.

2:04:10You don't need to cut to him while he's looking it up. Brutal. We can come back to that.

2:04:19Harley Finkelstein:In other buyout news, Long Lake. Long Lake. Very under the radar company, but has been on an absolute tear over the last couple of years. This is a wild deal. Is taking Amex, GBT, Global Business Travel, private. I could see Long Lake being kind of interested in eBay, too. They've maybe got their hands full with Amex, GBT, but incredibly talented team. Been really unlocking the power. So it's a$6 billion take private. It's also interesting because General Catalyst, Mark Vergara, is sort of talking about the story of Long Lake. He says, we had the first Long Lake team retreat at my home in Miami just two and a half years ago when the company was getting started.

2:05:01It's been incredible to watch the talent and team have brought together to transform the services industry into one of growth and abundance with AI. Excited for yet another milestone. General Catalyst is honored to be the partner from beginning and excited to continue the strategy of backing what we believe are the best AI investments. And interesting because General Catalyst is also an investor in Ramp, I believe. And so there's a question about like Ramp has a travel product. How different is Amex Global Business Travel from Ramp Travel? Obviously, there's some overlap there, but there might be some synergies since there's board members in common now.

2:05:35Who knows where this goes? But at$6.3 billion, that's a small slice compared to Ramp, which has been on an absolute tear.

2:05:42Harley Finkelstein:Another big race before we close out for the day. 11 laps. That's a big one for Matty. Across five, half a billion dollars. Welcome new investors. BlackRock, Wellington, NVIDIA, Samson Dare, Jamie Foxx. Is this a raise or is this just a flex? They're just flexing the ARR. Yeah, they welcome some new investors. Okay, they got some new investors. I don't know that they announced their new valuation. Well, lead with the good stuff. Mitchell and Green would be very happy. If you have ARR, that's what you report. If you don't, you report the valuation. And they are making some serious progress on the commercial side.

2:06:15Yeah, some serious institutions coming in. To the team over there. Tyler, I think Tyler has an answer. Yes. Wait, wait, Jordy. Do you think the number of GameStop stores has increased or decreased or stayed the same since Ryan Cohen's tenure? What do you think? Back of the envelope. What do you think?

2:06:31Harley Finkelstein:I would assume that it decreased, but because you're asking me, I would maybe. You're going increase. Lock it in. Final answer. I'm going decrease. You're going decrease. Okay, what do you got? What are you going? I got to take the other side. I'm going increase now. Okay. So 2021, January 30, 2021. Yeah. They were at 4 ,800 worldwide worldwide. Okay. This past January, they were at 2 ,200. Okay. Yeah. I thought you were asking me if I thought you were trying to trick. No, I wasn't trying to trick you. I was just trying to get you to lock in a random guess. Ryan Cohen is such a savage operator.

2:07:04Harley Finkelstein:Ivex store count. Ivex store count in a retail apocalypse. No, clearly he made it much more, much more, you know, efficient. and everything. And the chat's really helping here. They're at massive decrease. Obviously, everyone knows. As Elon said, your questions are meant to trick me. Yeah. Anyway. Well, speaking of retail, McDonald's. This is fake. It's fake. There's so much fake news in the timeline. I saw a funny debunk of there was someone on Instagram who was reacting to goats, a video of goats on mountains and was like making fun of the goats on the mountains. and then there was someone debunking that, saying that that's AI goats.

2:07:44But goats do, in fact, climb mountains. And so you could do the same funny video, but you should have used the National Geographic video. Every post requires a deep dive on, like, is this real? But maybe the future, with all that XAI capacity, they can just do grok, is this real, on every post before it goes out. Generate the community note before I even head send. If I'm posting fake news, just let everybody know.

2:08:07Harley Finkelstein:Community note singularity. Well, folks, thank you for tuning in today. Thank you for tuning in. It's been an honor. We are at a conference tomorrow and Thursday. We'll be back Friday, but we might have some special reporting from the field. We have a lot more planned, and we will, of course, be posting plenty over this week. Thank you for tuning in. We will see you on Friday. Have a good week. Goodbye. Love you. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It's time for our newsletter, TBPN.com. Goodbye.

2:08:43Norah