Swatch & AP Collab, Cerebras Boosts IPO Price, Trump to Visit China | Diet TBPN

0:01John Coogan:We got a banger show for you today, folks. We got a lot of guests coming on. We got two hours of back-to-back interviews with everyone from Spencer Raskoff, the CEO of Match Group, to Alex Tubman of Long Lake Management. Quaid's coming on from Bezel. He's going to take us deeper on our first story, which is, of course, Atomar Piguet. IAP is partnering with Swatch to launch a watch that's, you could call it a knockoff of the Royal Oak. It's certainly, it's not a knockoff because it's official. They knock themselves off. They knock themselves off. And there's a bunch of interesting business implications of why they did this, what it means, what will happen.

0:39John Coogan:Let's pull up the video of the launch first. And you got to tell me, do you think this is AI or CGI? Because it's a launch video. And in 2026, it's hard to tell the difference. So we're going to play the, this is from the official Swatch account. This is something that looked like a fake clickbait video, but it's real. Here it is. What do you think? AI or CGI? CGI. Precision, handmade CGI. Yes. Just like watches. Not a transformer in sight the way my grandfather used to like it. There will be interesting pushbacks. Oh, this movie is awesome. I mean, only use CGI, no AI involved whatsoever. Wait, so is it a manual watch?

1:26John Coogan:Is it a mechanical? I think it's unclear. So there's been a massive amount of everyone has basically created somewhat realistic looking posters for these. Oh, really? The actual watch has not been revealed at all. And that's the only thing that's been revealed. just based off of the fact that Swatch did a collaboration with a luxury watch brand, the Moon Swatch, which was based on the Moon Watch, right? Oh, yeah, I forgot about it. Yeah, and so the Moon Swatch was successful and was a more accessible entry point to the Moon Watch, which is from Omega, which is sort of in that like Rolex tier. And I don't know if the Moon Swatch, how they saved cost, because there's a certain amount of cost that just goes into making a movement, a mechanical movement.

2:14John Coogan:It's a lot of small pieces. Sure, you can put it on a manufacturing line and press them and stuff. John learning that watches have egregious profit margins. I know they have egregious profit margins, but still, the work to put together all the gears and manufacturing it, I would be surprised if it's a mechanical watch, is it really going to be like$5? No, it's not a Happy Meal toll, right? So there's the fake Chinese version of all of these popular watches, Nautilus, APs, et cetera. You can get them, like you could go on Alibaba, get them for in the low hundreds of dollars, right? And so it is totally possible to put together a watch that has a lot of the same componentry.

2:58John Coogan:I saw Nico Leonard on, who's a great YouTube watch reviewer, fun, very fun creator, on the Ice Coffee Hour with Graham Stephan. And they gave him, this is a fun little game. They're getting really good at playing games with their guests on this podcast. So they give him six watches, and they tell him that three of them are knockoffs, and three of them are authentic. And he has to guess, and he nails it. He gets all of them cracked. Even though some of them were very convincing fakes, especially of Patek. So a lot of people are saying this is bearish. It's over. It's over. They're saying sell everything.

3:33Freak out, sell all your APs. $500, rest in peace. AP has consistently done things over the last few years that were provocative. Some of the various partnerships they've had with talent, celebrities, et cetera, have been somewhat provocative. But overall, the brand seems healthy. It's not going to be for everyone. I think in some ways this decision could be seen, and again, I'm no watch expert, but fakes are flooding the market globally. And why not just lean into that, basically? And the other thing is they don't have any entry level, like the gap between, you know, I'm sure this Swatch AP will end up retailing for far more.

4:20Or sorry, not retail, but secondary will be far more than whatever it goes out at. But the gap even then between that and a real Royal Oak will be immense.

4:30John Coogan:And the gap has been growing because the aftermarket prices have been increasing faster than incomes. They basically were like, oh, this is what our watches are worth aftermarket. We should price there. And so you quickly wound up with like to get in the game, you're at$30K. And that's just a lot. And there's not as much of a walk, crawl, run to get into the ecosystem that some brands have. AP certainly has not had that. You go with the code. You go with the code. Aren't those like 60? Oh, they are. I think they're really expensive. No, I think they're really pricey. I don't know. But yeah, maybe they'll bring down the price on that.

5:04John Coogan:Live monitors is spend half a million dollars or$500. And you get something that looks pretty similar. Of course, very different materials. You can get a code 1159 for low to mid 20s. 20s. Okay. But there's another watch collab that I want your reaction to. You got to see this. This one's going to fly off the shelves, potentially selling more units than the Swatch AP collab. It's the Rolex collab. We can pull this up. Something you've never seen before and you won't see again. A Chrome Hearts Rolex Daytona 18 karat gold. Starting offer,$370 ,000. If you want it, there's only one way to get it.

5:48I've never seen this watch before. Neither have you. That's why I'm showing it to you. Do you think this is real or just something someone made randomly? Official Rolex over here telling me that the dial might be aftermarket. I don't know. I don't know. I don't follow it. It's funny. Somebody on X over the weekend was assuming that I was into Chrome Hearts because I've joked a lot about Chrome Hearts. But no, I'm not enough of an expert to.

6:17John Coogan:That's Dylan. Dennis is playing off of your joke saying, I tried to buy the Swatch AP Royal Pop collab, but they told me I had to buy this collab first. And it's the Code 1159. If you're not familiar with the Code 1159, it's the newest watch from AP, but it has a less distinct silhouette than the Royal Oak and has been not loved by the biggest fans of AP broadly. And so it has been underselling probably relative to the new Rolex. Which one's the new Rolex? The Landweller, which has been, I think, selling very well. And this one has been, the code 1159 has not been doing as well. Let's head over to Reddit and check out what they're doing there.

6:59John Coogan:What are they doing there? Somebody has figured this out ages ago. I want your reaction, John. Omega on one side, but the Omega is strapped to the wrist with a whoop band. Yeah, whoop on the inside, Omega on the outside. It just doesn't feel right. It feels a little unnatural to me. But I did, I have seen a lot of people wearing the Whoop bands lately. And I think that there's some remarkable data. I was talking to someone who connected their Whoop data and found out that they had sleep apnea by analyzing it with an LLM, which is something you would expect Whoop to be doing on their side. But for regulatory reasons, it might be slower for Whoop to roll out that feature of health monitoring.

7:39John Coogan:And so there's a lot of DIY science that comes from it. So I don't know. It's weird no matter what, because if you have a whoop on one hand and then a watch on the other, that's an odd choice. I feel like, isn't there an opportunity to put the whoop band somewhere more discreet? Like even like a chest monitor would be less in your face. I think you can. The aura ring is not very intrusive, but they should really make the, what do they call it? The Boston Fitbit? It's the ankle monitor. I can say that because I'm Irish. But there was some debate over AP's motivations. Ariel Grivner says, as an IP nerd, I love this.

8:17John Coogan:AP's trademark loss means they lost the moat around their octagonal bezel and their dial. So what do they do? They license its crown jewels to swatch for a flood of legit, affordable royal pop pieces, a masterclass in damage control. This is on this news that AP He lost a trademark fight in Japan in 2024 and in the U.S. in 2025. The courts ruled that the bezel and the dial aren't distinctive enough to legally own. But there's some pushback in the community notes. Here's the thing. They have managed to, I think, maintain a trademark around the octagon. Yeah, well, there's a trade dress. So you can never do a full knockoff of a direct product.

9:01John Coogan:But they couldn't lock down the idea of an octagon. That was simply too much. I don't know how much of this was damage control around the intellectual property, but it's certainly an interesting thing. And there's also some people thinking that this is a way to make money. You see this gem changer said, every unemployed guy with a group chat of equally unemployed friends, this post is for you. The royal pop drops Saturday, May 16th. They're coming out with this quickly, just one week teaser and then it's out. He says, this is the easiest four-figure week you'll have all year. if you're willing to do something that resembles work for 14 hours, if you're willing.

9:39John Coogan:Let me lay out exactly what to do. Retail is in the$400 range. It's in-store only. There's no online sales. They're limiting it to one piece per person per store per day, not two. So your hustle is per warm body, not per pair. And then he shares some expectation about where this might trade, maybe 12x retail, maybe 5x retail. And so if you go and you wait in line and you buy this and then you sell it online, you might be able to make a pretty penny pretty quickly, but you'll need a bunch of friends. And he gives a bunch of advice on where you should go. Avoid Soho, Times Square, London, Singapore.

10:19John Coogan:You gotta go to secondary cities, Troy, Michigan, King of Prussia, Canoga Park, Honolulu. Going to Honolulu just for this. I think this is gonna be a hit. I think the haters are wrong. People love G-Shocks. Sort of a combination. I think so too. It just seems like a fun watch. And I do think it's a nice entry point for someone who's getting into watches. Like start with this, then get something else. It's like a Stryver, like, you know, it's a point along a curve, which I think will be popular. And it's also just like a lot of fun and it'll look good. Anyway, let's head over to China. What are they doing over in China?

10:56BYD. BYD. Got Daniel Craig as the new face.

10:59John Coogan:Build your dreams. They're building their dreams for the Denza Luxury EV. James Wood says it's an amazing ad. And Adam Thomas says, China uses James Bond for a euro push. The world is changing. Let's play this advertisement from BYD. A world with the capacity to find change. Just as spring follows a harsh winter and summer looks back on a routine spring. Old selves, past identities, they ship. I have to. It's so exciting. Do you think? Doesn't life ask us to step out of the shadows and embrace the new? Are there car seats for dogs? I don't think so. I think it gets pretty dangerous. Although that dog looks like it's wearing some sort of harness that could be tied in.

11:49John Coogan:What do you think? Yeah. See, post James Bond, he has a lot more comedic timing. He's done SNL a few times. He's done a couple comedies. There's a lot more to it, but he will still just never not be James Bond because he had such a successful run of James Bond performances. He's really driving his car. Is this an SUV or a wagon? Pause, pause, pause. Rewind 10 seconds. Okay. What are we listening for? Listen, because there's some... Okay.

12:27Doesn't that sound like an internal combustion engine for a second there? Yeah. So they're LARPing.

12:33John Coogan:It's played through the speakers while you're driving? Is that an option? Maybe. I feel like it has to be an option if they're advertising it like that. Yeah. But who knows? You never know with these BYDs if there's actually an internal combustion engine in there somewhere that can activate at a certain point. Everything feels like a hybrid these days. But I mean, it says luxury EVs. What a great partnership and what a great run from Daniel Craig to be able to just like cash in on the aura of being James Bond forever, even after the franchise ends and he has to move on to other things. It really is remarkable.

13:07John Coogan:If you're Daniel Craig. If you're Daniel Craig. And it also helped that, did you ever see Layer Cake? No one's seen Layer Cake here? Oh, such a good movie. And he plays, he plays like sort of a, someone involved in like the drug trade in Europe. But it's a very James Bond-esque character. And so even throughout his portfolio of movies when he's and then and then he plays Benoit Blanc from Knives Out. And even that character, even though it has a different even though he has a different accent, it still feels like he carries the authority of a James Bond like figure. And so he's always had this same demeanor and aura around him that's been built through his entire cinematic portfolio that he can continue to cash in on.

13:48John Coogan:And when you're thinking about advertising a particular car like an Aston Martin, like this luxury BYD, your mind goes to him before anyone else, really. European price tag is 134. Oh, OK. They're actually getting pricey. Usually when you see these BYD numbers, it's always like it's the performance of a Ferrari for the price of a Camry. Well, so there's the Denza Z, which is the estimated price is 60 to 140. It's a big range. But a lot of the other densas are in the 40 to 60K range. Okay, okay. Not too bad. Not too bad. Well, you know where I'd like to see Daniel Craig do his next endorsement?

14:25John Coogan:Cerebris. I would love to see a Super Bowl ad where he's lamenting the slow speed of AI inference, and he solves his problem in this Super Bowl ad by partnering with Cerebris, firing up some Cerebris chips. the IPO is looking like it's going very, very well. So Cerebra has updated their filing. According to Reuters, the IPO date will be Thursday, May 14th, I heard maybe Wednesday, but any day now. And they're offering 30 million shares, that's up from 28 million. So they're offering more shares than they were expecting to. And they also increased their price range from 115 to 125 up to 150, 160.

15:08John Coogan:And so they're gonna raise, instead of three and a half billion, they'll be raising 4.8 billion. And allegedly the round is massively oversubscribed to the tune of 20X demand for that 5 billion. So something like, wait, 100 billion of demand for that 5 billion, which is remarkable at that price. Now, does that mean it's going to 10X on day one? No, but it's certainly a good sign going into this IPO. And so that's why I called it like a potential$50 billion IPO, just to sort of have some parallelism with the$500 watch and the$50 trillion of GDP meeting in China that we'll talk about later. So there was a bunch of FUD around.

15:49John Coogan:Ben Thompson this morning says, if you're looking for the ideal time to IPO, being a chip company in May 2026 is hard to beat. It really is. It really is. He had a great piece called The Inference Shift today in Stratechery. Go check it out. There's been a bunch of FUD about Cerebris. I mean, for a long time, they were just sort of like building in stealth or talking about the idea. It takes a really long time to design these chips, tape them out, and then actually produce them. And then the first version is less flexible, less designed collaboratively with the companies that are using them. So there was like one customer that was buying them and there was a lot of customer concentration.

16:24John Coogan:Now the chips have actually been deployed. And there was this big narrative about like, okay, well, they're maybe overly optimizing for the transformer architecture. What happens if the AI researchers come out with like attention is all you actually don't need that much. Attention is nice and useful, but we have a new thing that's better. And that didn't happen. And so attention and transformer based architectures are still dominant. And inference costs are extremely important in the age of AI agents. And speed is so, so important. And so demand is, you know, 10xing every few months at this point.

16:56John Coogan:And there's a very, very clear business story. Tyler, you have anything on Cerebus? Yeah, I mean, just like if you use the Cerebus chips, Like you can use it GPT 5.3 Spark in Codex. It's like insane. It's crazy. It's crazy. It's wild. Yeah. If you want to give it a try and actually demo it, which I think is important with these like semiconductor companies, if they're like abstract and you're like, I don't know if it's like a real company or something like you can actually just go download Codex desktop, pick from the drop down 5.3 Spark. And then you don't even have to get it to do code. You can ask it, history of the Roman Empire, and it will just instantly tell you a full page of exactly the response with 5.3 level intelligence, which is pretty good.

17:37John Coogan:And it's a pretty remarkable experience. And you can imagine this coming to every LLM interface, every AI experience, which has normally been like for any meaningful work, fire it off, come back five minutes later, sometimes two hours later. We'll cut all of that in half or by 10. and that's where this is going. So you can see significant demand, even though there's this customer concentration thing, I don't know why there wouldn't be a lot of different customers lining up. Every lab that has exploding demand, Cursor, Anthropic, Meta, and Google, unless they have a direct answer to this, I would see them being a buyer in the near term.

18:20John Coogan:So the Cerebus upsized its IPO and top of the new range. Reuters says the IPO drew orders for more than 20x the shares available. Cerebus makes AI-inference chips and lists Amazon and OpenAI among customers. So there was a question about, like, was it all OpenAI? And I guess Amazon has jumped on. Very flexible with regard to the chips that they rack over at AWS. Polymarket is projecting Cerebus to close above$50 billion market cap by the end of day one. That would be about 100 % above the target valuation of$26 billion that was previously reported. So preparing for an IPO on the NASDAQ next week under the ticker CBRS and traditional semiconductor manufacturing works like this.

19:03John Coogan:A silicon wafer is fabricated. The wafers cut into hundreds of smaller chips. The chips are packaged individually and connected together in systems. Cerebris took a completely different approach. They use the entire 300 millimeter wafer, four trillion transistors, 900 ,000 AI oriented compute cores. And the big thing is the petabits per second of internal bandwidth. So better memory bandwidth for KB caches and everything that you need to do in AI, I think, something like that. Benchmark is going to be absolutely cleaning up. They still own over 20 % of Cerebrus, apparently. If it trades at even half of how Shanghai priced more threads in Cambricon, it will be over 500 billion in less than two years.

19:47John Coogan:Okay, that's a big step. It will break the venture model if they hold. Has a shot to deliver the number one fund in VC history. Benchmark on an absolute tear. Quantia says, Cerebris is pretty funny because you can just imagine the origin story being some boomer, non-technical manager going, okay, but why can't you just put 50 gigs of L3 cash on this chip? And the engineer being put on the spot and going, I guess you could. And I said, someone else in the comments here chiming in, I, random history major, had a much less important version of this conversation with my college roommate, fancy engineer, doing computer vision stuff one time and still feel really good about it.

20:29John Coogan:I think it helped. Just weld the thing that does that onto the other thing. Have you considered building the entire plane out of the black box? But it works and the plane goes Mach 10. That's exactly what happened. Well, let's move over to China. Donald Trump is meeting with Xi Jinping this week. And you were sharing some info on how many journalists are going over there. They're calling it a field trip. It's a field trip. They're calling it a field trip because Tim Cook is going, Larry Fink, Stephen Schwartzman. I thought it was journalists, but I guess it's tech people. Jane from Citi, Chuck Robbins is headed over there, a friend from Cisco, David Solomon.

21:06John Coogan:Interesting. And a whole bunch of others. I guess Elon is supposedly on the trip as well. Well, hopefully they can get a word in edgewise because the vast majority of the discussions will obviously center on the war in Iran. This is from the Wall Street Journal. As the heads of the world's two superpowers meet in Beijing this week, President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping will have another nation looming over their summit, Iran. The long anticipated meeting has been delayed once due to the U.S. and Israel's war against Iran, which led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Trump is eager to move on from the Middle East war that is sapping his domestic power and straining the global economy.

21:45John Coogan:As of this morning, the peace deal was, according to Trump, on major life support. On major life support. Is that good? I guess it's better than it being dead. So hopefully we get a peace deal because if you're on life support, sometimes you can have a miraculous comeback. I don't know. That's what I'm pulling for. He will The land in Beijing prepared to push China, which relies on Iran for low-cost oil in their transactional relationship, to help broker an agreement that ends the conflict. Xi Jinping also wants the fighting to stop as Middle East turmoil restricts China's oil supply and shrinks countries' ability to buy Chinese goods.

22:19John Coogan:Finding a resolution could raise Xi Jinping's stature as a global statesman who swooped in at the precipice of a possible military escalation. Trump on Friday threatened to resume Project Freedom. The U.S.-led operation helped ships navigate the straits safely, adding this time that the operation would include, quote, other things. Very ominous. So I think there's a few different things. So Trump, the deal on life support, but most recently he rejected Iran's latest response to a U.S. peace proposal. They're going back and forth. Oil prices have climbed amid fears of a prolonged disruption through a choke point that carries roughly one fifth of global oil flows.

23:00John Coogan:And the summit is focused heavily on Iran, but also trade deals, specifically Chinese purchases of American agriculture, energy, aerospace products and some other related investment mechanisms. but the tech industry is obviously hoping to like wind down the conflict peacefully and quickly and then move on to discussions of export restrictions, GPUs, the AI supply chain, rare earths, all the different things that go into what the tech industry needs to flourish but I was thinking we wouldn't get that much movement or that many sound bites from this trip based on how large Iran is looming but with all of those tech CEOs there you would imagine that there's some conversation that happens around tech.

23:41John Coogan:Do you think they might be clip farming? Potentially. Potentially ore farming. Potentially frame-mogging each other. You never know. Tyler, what do you think? Yeah, I think it would be interesting if it's also at a higher level than just the supply chain. Because last week, there was all the news about CAI, SI, doing the new AI regulation. What's going to happen? Are we going to do a bunch of tests before the models come out? It seems like they're kind of moving away from that, less safety-focused. China should be like, send us Mythos 2, give us unfettered access, ideally enough to distill it really quickly, and then we will also say whether or not it can be released in China.

24:16John Coogan:Well, why stop there? Why not just send the weights? Yeah, just send the weights. That's actually way more easy. We'll inspect it. Yeah, way more efficient. We'll inspect it, and we'll make sure that it's okay for the Chinese population. Yeah, but we've talked about this a little bit. Actually, send all the GPUs I need to run it to. Sorry. We've talked about this a little bit, but there are people in China who are actually worried about like the you know very like safety pills yeah yeah um but it seems like people going over there like tim cook yeah i mean there's jensen elon these people are not going to be arguing in favor of like uh safety palmer brings up an important point it's time for the united states postal service to ban junk mail unsolicited spam calls are already prohibited by the fcc emails are heavily regulated by the canned spam act of 2003 junk mail is the majority of mail 100 million trees per year enough.