Prof G Markets - Inflation Is Soaring — Here’s What Happens Next

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

Scott Galloway and Ed Elson break down the latest inflation reports and discuss whether there will be an impact on consumer spending. Then, they dive into AI chipmaker Cerebras’ blockbuster IPO and why Scott is skeptical of the company. Finally, they unpack earnings from dating app companies like Match Group and Bumble, and explore why younger Americans are dating less. Subscribe to the Prof G Markets Youtube Channel  Subscribe to the Prof G Markets newsletter  Order "Notes on Being a Man," out now Note: We may earn revenue from some of the links we provide. Follow the podcast across socials @profgmarkets Follow Scott on Instagram Follow Ed on Instagram, X and Substack Send us your questions or comments by emailing [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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He has had an effect on the civic mind that is not going to go away. I'm Prit Barrara, and this week, George Packer of the Atlantic joins me to discuss Trump's lasting effect on the American mind. The episode is out now. Search and follow. Stay tuned with Preet wherever you get your podcasts. Today's number, $109 billion. That's how much Americans spent on lottery tickets last year, more than they spent on movies, books, concerts, and sports tickets combined. Ed, true story, my ex-wife asked if I'd still love her if I won the lottery, and I'd say, yes, of course, sweetheart, I'd miss you, but I'd still love you. I've never bought a lottery ticket, have you?

Whenever my kids have friends over, I go out and I buy a bunch of lottery tickets and I come back and we play scratch. We love it. It's totally fun. Kids love lotto. They love lotto. It is just amazing watching them celebrate me spending $20 so they can win three. So they get the money because I'm imagining this like it's your opportunity to win the lottery and they are allowed to be witness to that. They're just child labor, scratching stuff off.

But they, so they get the money if they win. Is that the deal? Yeah, of course, unless it's big. Unless it's big, then Papa needs to come in and buy a second. Ferrari, let me give you a little, let me give a little tip, right? When you go on a vacation or something and there's kids around, like eight, not eight, like ten, teenagers. Anyone like ten to sixteen, you want to be the cool uncle. Like at some point, your friends will start procreating.

And I was looking for a good joke there. I couldn't think of it. Anyways. And you'll show up. And what you do is you bring lottery tickets for the kids. It's fun. It's a ton of fun. Sort of buy your way into their hearts.

Yeah. That's called being a man, Ed. Well, you don't, you think that's... I agree. I agree. Okay, Mr. Purist. Buying your way into their hearts. I'm just putting loads to it.

I'm with you. you. I'm with you. What do you think you get it on your charm and EQ? Yeah, that's what we do, Ed. That's what we do. I love it. I think it's good advice. Bribed them with lottery tickets, maybe candy. That's what my granddad used to do. He would just give us a bunch of candy and then my mom would get all upset with him because we weren't allowed to be having that. But we loved him for it. It was a hit. That's the way to do it. I think I'll probably employ that strategy as well. I just give up straight up cash. And I like to put it, I like to put it in a rubber band so I feel like a mobster. No, I slip it in their pocket. I'm like, don't tell your dad. Don't tell your dad. Don't tell your dad. I love that.

I genuinely love that. We only have nine days until the property market store kicks off with a sold-out show in San Francisco on May 27th. We're then headed to L.A. on the 28th, Head Sarandos. The CEO of Netflix will be our special guest. And then we head on, we head to Miami for the 30th. and then Chicago on June 1st, where we'll be interviewing Governor J.B. Pritzker, who will be joining us on stage. And on June 2nd, we're finishing things off with the one and only Anthony Scaramucci in New York City. Tickets are still available, but we are going to sell out.

So if you're interested in L.A., Miami, Chicago, and I think we still have a few left in New York City, visit Propgimarkets Tour.com to secure your tickets now. You excited about this, Ed? Very excited. Finally hitting the road. We've got our guests. CEO of Netflix, we're going to ask him, Ted Sarandos, what's happening to Hollywood? Does Hollywood have a future? It'll be very spicy, I'm sure.

I'm sure you will have some hot takes and kind of put him in the hot seat. I'm excited to speak with Governor Pritzker about the future of America, what we should do about AI policy, what we should do about policy related to wealth inequality and income inequality, which has obviously been a huge theme on our show. And then there's nothing better than finishing things off with the mooch, who's just the man I'm very excited, Scott. This is going to be big. It's going to be a lot of fun.

Yeah, it's going to be a good time. Should we get into our stories? Let's do it. Now is the time to buy. I hope you have plenty of the world of all. Two new inflation reports last week painted a very discouraging picture. Consumer prices rose 3.8% in April from a year ago, marking the highest inflation reading in three years,

but perhaps even more notably for the first time in three years, wage growth failed to keep pace with inflation. So real wages are going down. The pressure wasn't just on the consumer side. Producer prices, which measure wholesale inflation, they also climbed 6% year-of-year. That was not only hotter than expected, but it was the biggest increase since 2022. So, Scott, the inflation picture is not looking good. First, we had the tariffs. We had liberation days. We had liberation days. which we said on this show would increase inflation. It was somehow a debate back then. I remember saying,

I think prices are going to write significantly by the end of the year, which is exactly what happened. And I remembered a lot of people saying, oh, really? You think so? Because the Treasury is saying the opposite. The president is saying the opposite.

And now, of course, that's exactly what happened. We went from 2.3%, which rose to 3% in just a matter of months. And then you add on top of it, this war in Iran, which is massively increasing the price of fuel, massively increasing oil prices, and therefore gas prices is probably going to have some more effects on food prices down the line. We're up to 3.8%. And, you know, they say about

the producer price index, the wholesale inflation, that that is really our best indicator of what is to come, because that's sort of the top of the supply chain. That's what businesses are paying for products, and then those businesses are going to pass those on to consumers. So it's probably going to keep going up. And I think there's so much to get into here on what prices could do to not only our economy, but also to markets. I have some thoughts on what the chain reaction might look like, but let's just start with your reactions to these inflation numbers that we just got last week. Trump won re-election, in large part because of his promise to reduce prices, but now his approval on inflation is worse than President Biden's ever was.

It's striking. Obviously, the Iran war is driving a very visible price, and that is energy. And specifically, that was responsible for 40% of last month's inflation increase. Gas is over $4.50 cents nationwide in California, it's over $6. What's interesting or what I find is interesting is that this type, people, I think people are too focused on from a societal standpoint, unemployment. Unemployment is 4.5%. At some point, at some point, we got to start. someone has to acknowledge that this whole AI job apocalypse has been a bunch of fucking bullshit, but that doesn't mean we're off the hook. Because if you look at societal unrest,

it's not when people aren't working that they revolt. It's when people are working, and yet they're hungry. And that's exactly what's happening now. We don't, basically, inflation is outpacing wages, which means your quality of life goes down. So someone who's out of work is depressed, but someone who's working two fucking jobs and can't pay for their health insurance, they're angry. And so I do think this is, this is really going to haunt the president and, um, and the Republicans in the midterms. This is when people get very, very angry is they think, okay, I can't take a vacation this year, despite the fact, I just took on another evening shift on the weekends. No, I think the political impacts are

plain to see. We're already seeing a consumer sentiment, which is in a lot of ways of political poll hitting record lows, his approval ratings just tanking. We're definitely going to see this show up at the midterms and maybe even the next election too. I mean, the political implications are just enormous. I think what is interesting is the markets so far, as we've discussed, then investors aren't so worried about this. There's the political implications, then there's the market implications. And one of the things that we've been talking about is, yes, these higher prices impact the real economy, it impacts consumers. But increasingly, that doesn't matter when you look at stock prices because the stock market is largely a reflection of big tech and also the spending

habits of the top 10 percent. And those people and those companies aren't really affected by inflation. They're not really affected by gas prices going up. This stuff doesn't really matter. Something I'm beginning to think, though, and bear with me on this, because I'm going to go through kind of like a chain reaction of events that could occur here, that I think that investors should really be considering and perhaps even pricing in. I think we are underestimating the possibility that we're going to see an impact on consumer spending as a result of inflation, which will be semi-material to these big tech companies, but will be very material to the stock market. So the reason I think this is because it feels very much like what happened in 2022. And what happened in

2022 was you had this unbelievable inflation, which had an impact on consumer spending, but it wasn't gigantic. Essentially what you had was you had very, very strong consumer spending growth in 2021. And then as inflation started to show up and people started to really feel the pain of that, consumer spending still grew, but the growth was a lot smaller. It was 3% versus 9% the year before. So consumer spending growth fell 70%, around 6% percentage points. So you saw a deceleration in consumer spending. Now, that sounds like not a big deal.

That probably doesn't matter. But what it led to was something really interesting, which I think we could be in for in 2026, which was a deceleration in marketing budgets and advertising. budgets. And people kind of forget this, but this was the thing that really killed the tech sector in 2022, which, by the way, fell around 30% that year. It was a lot, it was a lot bigger drop than the S&P, which fell around 20%, which is its worst year since 2008. But all the tech stocks just got crushed, META got crushed, Google got crushed. And a big reason why that happened was because

suddenly consumers didn't have as much money to spend. They weren't spending as much or they weren't the trajectory of their spending wasn't as fast and accelerating as it used to be. And as a result, advertisers decided to stop spending. And this was an SEC filing from Meta back in 2022, which I think has a lot of similarities to what we're seeing today. They said, quote, as macroeconomic pressures reduce the likelihood of consumer purchases of discretionary goods and services,

advertisers are more likely to reduce their spending as they anticipate a lower return on investment. The company also believes that marketers have reduced spend as a result of pressures on their advertising budgets by factors such as inflation, rising interest rates, and related market uncertainty. So that was their diagnosis, that you had inflation, which was affecting the marketing budgets, which was affecting their revenues. And indeed, that is exactly what we saw. META's revenues declined. They declined by about 4% by the end of the year. We saw the same thing with Google's ad business.

Revenue declined 2%, YouTube ad revenue fell 8%. The Google ad network, their revenue fell 9% by the end of the year. And so essentially what you had was this small little moment of inflation, not reducing consumer spending overall, but just having an impact on the growth. It had a material impact on the advertising ecosystem, which then had a material impact on the businesses of big tech. And then, of course, we saw meta comes out, and they say, hey, we're struggling.

right now, and so we're going to be a lot more efficient. We're going to pull back on our spending. We issued these very large CAPX guidance numbers, and we're going to reduce them now because now we need to get serious because we're seeing that our growth isn't as exciting as we used to see. This feels very much like what could happen this year. The entire market is dependent on the cap-ex guidance of a few companies. We're now seeing inflation, which I believe is here to stay, because I don't think we're getting out of Iran anytime soon. And as soon as that, impacts consumer spending such that it impacts advertising budgets and digital ad dollars, I do believe that could have a serious impact on the tech companies and as a result,

how much money they're willing to spend on AI, and therefore sentiment and excitement and momentum as it relates to the AI trade, which, as we have discussed, is essentially propping up this entire market. I'm not saying that is going to happen, but I think that is a series of events that could happen. I apologize for the long explanation. But I do think it's important that is at least on my mind right now. Your narrative is a logical one. The two things that I think will probably, you know, again, along the lines of what could go right, I think that you likely will see a reduction in consumer advertising because of a decrease in consumer spend

because of inflationary pressures and sort of this no-hire, no-fire environment, and a lowering in consumer confidence. the only thing that I think will buttress the ad market, and I'm seeing this firsthand, the AI companies are going to spend tens of billions of dollars on marketing. And that's money that didn't exist even two, three years ago. Because between Open AI and Anthropics, they're in a celebrity death match, and then Gemini, all of these guys, there's literally trillions of dollars up for grabs, at least their view is that whoever establishes leadership or the number two spot. Whoever is the leader gets a trillion more in market cap, whoever's the number two gets $500 billion more than the number three. You know, they just

traded higher multiples and then down and down and down. So they're going to, as I think they hit technical parity, I think they're going to massively increase their traditional marketing or budgets. And whereas in those line items didn't even exist before, we're starting to get advertisers from AI that I just had never heard before. Because the rate. is so fast. It's like a 98-99 when I raised money for red envelope. We just spent so much. We're drunk sailors. It was like, okay, got to get brand awareness because we're going public in 99 or 2000. So we're buying pages and condoned asked. By the way, I just went to see the devil was product too. You can save your money. They all look very hot. I will give them that. But it took me back to

the aughts when I was just spending a shit ton of money trying to build e-commerce companies. And e-commerce companies were spending money like drunk and sailors. And I think you're going to see that for the next 12 or 24 months, I just think that hyperscalers are going to spend, I don't think Anthropic even has a CMO right now. They're going to spend so much money on marketing over the next 24 months, once they actually get a CMO, who comes to them who will be someone who wears black and looks cooler than they and gets invited to cooler parties and starts talking about brand and intangibles and associations and feelings and bringing. up the Sophie ad, Google search ad that made everyone cry. And they will talk Dario Amode into spending $20 billion on branding that did not exist before. In addition, the thing your analysis doesn't incorporate is that Andreessen Horowitz, two or three years ago, spent $0 on elections. This year, they're going to spend $115 million. The midterms are coming up. We're about to see the most

obnoxious, unhealthy, anti-democratic tsunami of money going to these elections, and it's all going to flow through podcasts, print ads, direct mail, local TV, local news stations, and I think that will be another crazy sugar high. So I'm actually, I think I'm less bearish on the ad market than you are. It'll be very interesting. I'm going to Cannes next month to get their read. no one ever really talks about anything. We just drink rosé and then we go see like the killers at the Spotify beach party. But I'll try and track down someone who knows what they're talking about to ask them about the ad market. But my sense is the hyperscalers are about to become entirely new spenders in this space.

So I think that's a really interesting point. And I just want to be clear on where I stand on this. I'm not necessarily bearish on the ad market as a whole. But I think that there is a philosophy in the markets right now. that if inflation rises, all of these tech companies are just completely protected from it. And I think that we're being a little bit too,

I don't know, lenient, resting on a laurels, whatever the phrase may be to describe. Just this idea that it's not going to affect the tech companies. And my point is, we have seen inflation and consumer spending affect the tech companies before. Now, your point, which is an interesting one,

is that AI marketing budgets will essentially save the advertising ecosystem if we were to see a pullback in spending on advertising in 2026 or in 27. I think that's plausible and that's a really interesting point. I would point out, though, we're continuing to put all of our eggs in this one basket of AI, where we're not only depending on the hyperscalers

to increase our GDP growth, which, as we know, AI was responsible for a third of GDP growth last year. We're then saying we need AI companies to prop up the advertising market too. And at a certain point, you start to run out of AI companies to do that. I mean, you've got Anthropic,

you've got OpenAI. But if we're waiting on alphabet to be the primary advertiser, well, we're waiting on alphabet to advertise on its own platform being Google. So we're becoming like dangerously concentrated and dependent and if that is the dynamic that we think is going to play out,

again, very dependent on these AI companies to be sort of the rising tide that lifts all boats. And we should just recognize, I mean, these companies are still very dependent on advertising as a business. Meta, it makes up 97% of their overall revenues still. For Google, it's about 75%. I mean, these companies still need people regular people to spend money such that advertisers go out there and buy ad slots. So I think your point

is interesting. I think it's point taken. I would just clarify, I'm not necessarily bearish. I just think this is a dynamic that is worth acknowledging. And I don't think we can say that big tech and the top 10 stocks are completely protected from what might happen in the real economy, what might happen in inflation. If we do see a consumer spending pullback, that could be a problem. Some people would say, well, the difference between 2026 and 2022 is that now we have these gigantic companies like Nvidia and Broadcom and they don't need the advertising dollars. But what I would also point out is that half of their revenue was coming from those five same customers, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle. I mean, those companies are still dependent.

Those are still the big tech companies. And they're propping up the entire business. So we're kind of going back to this circular issue that we've discussed before. And my only warning, I don't think you can assume that inflation won't hurt these players. I think it can and we'll start to see it if it does in the form of lower growth in their biggest businesses, which is digital advertising. So to your point, if you look at from November of 21 to I think it was September of 22, there was a slowdown in meta. It wasn't a collapse.

I think it slowed down. I think you said their decline was 5%. But when the market is pricing that you'll continue to grow 23% a year and you don't, your stock collapses. And in that 12-month period, META shed 77% of its market value. It lost three quarters of its value. So there's the actual gross dollar volume slow down, and then there's the impact, a small gross dollar decrease. I mean, meta has been, these stocks are sort of priced to perfection. And they are huge companies growing at 20% a year. And their stocks reflect that. So say the ad market

doesn't collapse, but people kind of pulling the reins a little bit. If meta doesn't continue to grow with 20%, say, if meta announced we only grew 4%, you know, or 8%, I think the stock gets cut in half. So price discovery and stocks that are trading at this kind of multiple, you know, you don't need to have a decline in the business. You just have to register a deceleration in the growth and the stock will, the stock will throw up. So I think you could see, I wouldn't be surprised of some of the bigger players. I still think Google is incredibly well positioned. I'd be a little scared to hold matter right now because of what you're saying. although Instagram just feels like such a freaking juggernaut. It does. And we should also recognize that Met is priced pretty well right now. So, I mean... It looks reasonable, doesn't it, for the first time in a while?

Yeah. I'm on Instagram and on Reels all the time. I'm either watching an economist or some other stuff, which we won't get into. Don't ask to see my Explorer page, Ed. We're going to do it one day. We should do it at the live show. We should airplay your phone onto the screen. That'll get a lot of views.

Well, that's one way to end. livelihood when you go back to the Princeton. You'll be famous at your Princeton reunion. She'll just be much less wealthy. They're like, oh yeah, what half that guy? Wow. So it's Prop G. Markets with Ed Elson and Anthony Scaramucci. That's a good show. I'm bullish on that. It would be a good show. Don't get any ideas. I know what you're up to. It's like when my kids are, Dad, can I see your phone? No! Anyways, where were we? Meta, yeah. These companies are juggernauts, so just to slowdown would significantly impact their stock prices. Yeah, absolutely. The slowdown is a really important point.

Some of these businesses, like they, I mean, Google's revenue did grow that year, but it was a single-digit growth in Q3. And that was enough to freak everyone, completely freak them out, completely shake investors' confidence. And if we saw that, that is certainly what would happen again. And then the other thing that we should just recognize in terms of this inflation point, rate hikes. I mean, that was the other big force in 2022, is that we entered this extremely aggressive rate hiking cycle. And I will just point out what we saw on Kalshi. At the beginning of the year, the odds of having any rate hikes in 2026 were less than 10%. Today, after we've gotten these inflation numbers, the odds have risen to 32% on Kalshi.

So the odds of a rate in 2026 have tripled. And that is also striking because you'll remember one of the big themes coming into the year for 20206. We pointed out some of the concerns going into the year, some of the issues about maybe there's an AI bubble. That was maybe a problem. There was some uncertainty around AI's impact on the job market, et cetera. But what we all knew is that we were entering a rate cutting cycle and you don't want to bet against the markets when you're experiencing rate cuts. suddenly that has changed because of these inflation numbers. And I would also add, it basically all goes back to Iran.

It's like, how long are we going to stay there? Is this going to be another month or is it going to be another year? If it's the latter, then suddenly you're dealing with a completely different inflationary picture, which will have a completely different interest rate environment, which will have a completely different impact on the stock market. So I do believe we're getting to a point now where inflation could be a real problem from the investment perspective. And I don't have any decisions to make yet. But I think if you're an investor, this is something to start taking seriously.

Agreed. We'll be right back after the break. And if you're enjoying the show so far, send it to a friend. And please follow us on YouTube or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Support for the show comes from Quince. finding the right clothes isn't always easy. Either you pay out the nose for some designer wear or you cheap out on clothing that falls apart before the end of summer.

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the stock opened at $350 a share and then later rose to $385 per share. It raised roughly $5.5 billion in the IPO markets. And investors are already looking ahead to what could be an even bigger wave of offerings with SpaceX, Anthropic and Open AI all reportedly preparing for IPOs in the coming months. So, Scott, we have got our first really big AI. IPO, cerebris, cerebris is this chip company, just a little bit about what their actual offering is. They're known for having these chips that are essentially really big. They're about the size of a dinner plate. You can actually fit 57 H100 chips, that's the Nvidia chip, onto a cerebris chip.

And as a result of that, they are reportedly very fast. They are reportedly 15 times faster than other GPUs when carrying out standard tasks, reportedly over a thousand times faster for highly specialized tasks, not to get too technical, but essentially the reason that they are faster, reportedly. Again, I'm not an AI expert. But the reason that they are reportedly faster is because they take the compute and the memory and they put it all on one piece of silicon all in one place. And compared to a standard GPU and Nvidia GPU,

where you have compute and memory in different places in separate chips, which are stacked next to a processor, essentially means that you have to move the digital. data across these chip boundaries. For the cerebrous chips, you don't have to do it because it's all in one place and because it's this giant chip where it all sits together. So that's why investors at a very, very broad level are excited about this company. Also, just an incredible time to be a chip company, because as we've discussed, Intel is skyrocketing, AMD, micron, sandis, all of these chip companies are just on a tear right now. So you couldn't really imagine a better time to IPO as a

company. Having said that, there are some red flags here, which we should get into. But first, just your reactions to this flagship AI IPO and perhaps what this might mean for the IPO market going forward. I fucking hate this company. Why? We have never seen in the history of the markets a sector accelerate as fast this quickly is the chip sector. I think the chip sector is literally up 60% in the last 45 days. An entire sector is up 60%. This company, as far as I understand it, its revenues are, it's increased less than 2x, but its valuation has increased sixfold. I think it went public at a $40 billion valuation.

Now it's trading it, I think, 60 or 70. It's trading at 100 times revenues, and it's doubled its revenues. Invidia trades at 26 times revenues and still controls 85% of the chip market. They were going to go public in 2024, but at the last minute, over intense scrutiny of its heavy reliance on a single customer, it would drew. It still has that reliance. Emeradi AI firm G42. What the fuck is that? Which accounted for over 85% of its revenue in the first half of 24, so they got, they canceled the IPO.

Their revenue is still concentrated in the same foreign state actor. Group 42 accounted for 24% of revenue last year and state-owned UAE University. accounted for 62% of its revenue. This feels like one of those Chinese companies that the moment it had anything resembling an audit, you found out there was nothing there? Well, the investors disagree, and I just want to point out exactly what you're saying here

with this G-42 point, because it's so important. Because last year you and I discussed this company, and we pointed out that they were getting 85% of their revenue from G-42, which is this UAE state-backed AI firm that sort of burst under the seam kind of randomly, basically because the UAE has a bunch of sovereign wealth money to just put this AI company together. Investors agreed, and there was a lot of scrutiny. They were like, hey, 85% from one company. This year, they say, don't worry, we've reduced our G42 revenue exposure to 24%, one from 85 to 24, so don't worry about it. But to your point,

62% of revenue now comes from a new customer, which is Mohammed bin Zayed University of AI, which is the UAE state-backed research university based in Abu Dhabi, which means 86% of their revenue is still coming from one customer, which is the sovereign wealth fund of the UAE. So they didn't fix the problem, to your point. Like, that is striking. It's not only revenue mix, but the incentives of the customers, So when both your customers are in the UAE, and I imagine the UAE wants to some point transition out of fossil fuels and start having to like, you know, kiss the ass of Iran and move into an information and technology economy and a tourism economy, they want some of that AI pixie dust. And someone there said, I know if this company succeeds, you know, this bodes well for us.

So it's not only revenue mix, but it's quality of customers. When I sold L2 and when I sold profit, the reason we got another couple turns on revenue when we sold was the quality. We had Nike, P&G, Toyota's clients. And when you look at the customer mix here, I mean, this is crazy town. This literally is crazy town. And so I look at this thing. It's trading at 322 right now. this is pets.com out of the UAE.

I just don't. This thing makes, they doubled their revenues and they reduced their revenues from one UAE entity to another government-owned UAE entity. And then bragged that they had diversified their revenues. That's the part that really bugs me is that they're lying about what's changed since last year.

Nothing's changed. In fact, they're more reliant. It was 85% lossy and now was 86%. All I know is somewhere in this thing, we're going to find out that either Stephen Whitkoff or Jared Kushner is a shareholder. That's the only thing I'm fairly certain of here. I think that's probably a good point.

Just to expand on the issue of customers. So one thing just to sort of steal man cerebrus, from what I understand, and granted, I'm not, again, I'm not an AI expert, so I can't tell you how great their chips really are. but from what I understand, hearing it from AI leaders, their technology is pretty good. That's my understanding of the situation. Whether I should believe these people, I'm not sure that's a different story. But supposedly the technology is pretty exciting and impressive.

But the trouble, you do have to look at the customer base, and you do have to look at the financials. The financials are not great. I mean, they doubled their revenue. Okay, great, but in the AI world, that's actually not that impressive. and it's about half a billion dollars, which is certainly not that impressive in the AI world specifically, and it doesn't warrant the valuation

that we're seeing right now. But you talk about there are the customer. The other potential customer that is in the pipeline that everyone is excited about is open AI. They have this deal with Open AI where Open AI is going to deploy

750 megawatts of Cerebris chips, and this is very exciting because if they ramp it up to full capacity, it essentially means that Cerebris is going to generate around $7 billion in annual revenue from Open AI. Everyone's very excited about that because that is, of course, more than 13 times their 20-25 total.

So, like, they're going to make a ton of money in the future with Open AI. But this gets back to the classic AI question. It's like, how confident are you really that Open AI is actually going to make good on that contract? They've promised to spend $1.5 trillion. The number goes up and down. And this entire company is basically a bet on Open AI making good on that contract. And the contract's very important because they also have an exclusivity agreement in there, which says that you can't sell your chips to these other competitors.

They don't name them, but we can assume it's probably Google XAI Anthropics. So they're so dependent on OpenAI. And again, in the backdrop of that Ronan Farrow article, which says that board members at OpenAI say that Sam Altman is unconstrained by the truth, the fact that he is a serial liar. That's what they say. It's not a fact. It's a rumor.

They say that he's a serial liar. That's important when it comes to these financial contracts. And there's another strange detail here, which is that OpenAI just gave a $1 billion loan to Cerebrus at 6% interest. And my question is, why, I mean, why aren't you just paying for their services? Why is the customer giving out a loan to the provider and then monetizing that loan? Like, that's a very strange relationship. In addition, by the way, Open AI is going to receive stock warrants in Cerebrus. So that's the other weird part of the deal.

Like, we'll have this contractual relationship, but then also we'll get equity in your company. This goes back to the problem with the circular revenue in AI. It's like Open AI is now a customer, a lender, a shareholder in the company, which just adds more fuel to the fire, which is like these deals and these contracts are very confusing and a little shady. and there certainly is not something that you want to rely on or could project any sort of meaningful, consistent cash flows in the future. He just can't really trust these contracts. It's kind of like the press release thing with Trump.

He just says that we have a deal, but is it really a deal? I'm not so sure. They want to jump the line to buy those chips in case on the odd chance they actually have an application or a use case, loan them a billion dollars. They just raised a certain amount of money. I get, I'm debt, so I'm top of the capital stack, so I'll get my money back.

And should these chips actually have an application, I have another potential supplier. So is this an overvalued company? May it go away? Yeah, but is it worth the least a billion dollars, which I get back because I'm on the capital stack with debt? I understand that, absolutely. This thing just, it just smells to high heaven. It feels really sketchy. and I can't wait until this thing has options.

This is, I won't be able to resist going, buying way out of the money. You're going to short it. Oh, yeah. This feels, this feels ridiculous to me. And by the way, do not try this at home. I won't short it because your losses are technically, this company could go to 2000, right? What I'll do is I'll buy puts, way out of the money puts, because then I know my losses are limited to the, to the money I purchase. So I usually like to write.

Yeah, explain that. Well, if you buy it, okay, so there's different ways to short a stock. If you short it, you're technically loaning it to someone else, and you agree to buy it back at the current price, meaning if it triples, you have to go into the market and buy a stock at triple the price and then deliver it to it at the price. So, technically, your losses are unlimited. You can also write calls, and that is you can say, okay, in this stock, the calls are going to be very expensive because there's a lot of all. So you could be on the side where you write calls to people who are buying calls. And you could get, you get some premium that way. You also have unlimited losses if the stock goes to $1,000, $2,000, $3,000, if it becomes a meme stock. If you want to limit your losses, and it doesn't have the same sort of asymmetric premium, you would buy puts. So you might buy puts struck at, say, I don't know, September trading, you know, with a strike price of $2.50, meaning that if it goes below $2.50, you're

in the money and you'd have to pay to buy those things, but then you know your downside is limited to what you spent on those puts. Options are a really great way to lose money because it's so much has to go right in terms of timing and there's huge transaction costs and even when you win it's short-term capital gains. So it's not something to be done at home. I do it because I have an addiction to gambling and I try to limit it to playing options, which makes me feel like I'm not gambling but investing, which is a total lie. Done right. Yeah. I sequester it to a small portion of my portfolio, so it's more like fun.

It's more consumption for me and the way I look at it. But this thing is just, this thing is just, this is insane. This is crazy town. We'll be right back. And for even more markets content, sign up for our newsletter at profjeemarkets.com. Support for the show comes from Laredin. Executives are being asked to justify AI, spend, manage risk, and show ROI. often without the right visibility. CFOs and CIOs are basically being told make AI pay off and do so safely.

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look forward in your change. We're back with Profi Markets. The romantic recession doesn't seem to be letting up. Recent earnings from Match Group and Bumble showed continued weakness in dating apps with paying users declining across the board. Match groups, total paying users fell 5%. Bumbles dropped 21%.

At the same time, dating itself is getting more expensive. According to a survey from BMO's Real Financial Progress Index, the average cost of a date in the US has climbed nearly 13% year over year to $189. America's are now going on fewer dates overall, roughly 12 a year now, down from 14 a year in 2025. So, Scott, I mean, the earnings here are interesting. The match group, which owns Tinder, hinge, OKCupid.

Their paying users fell. However, I would also note that their revenue per user also rose, and as a result, their overall revenue did rise. Not great, but they rose 4% year of a year. So that is interesting, probably relates to the K-shaped, but Bumble, I mean, just a flat-out loss. Total paying users fell 21%. Revenue fell 14%. There are a lot of questions around, are these businesses sustainable in a market where young people seem to be kind of opting out of dating. They seem to be just getting tired of swiping. what do you make of these earnings and the fact that dating itself might potentially be dying?

There is definitely what they're calling a sex recession, and I think it's a lot of different things. These guys have been beaten down so badly. If you're just looking from a market perspective, I actually think they're a good buy, they're the cheapest they've been, and they're actually expanding internationally. But there's something, there's just something more upsetting here, and that is three quarters of young single women and nearly two-thirds of young single men have not dated or dated only a few times in the last year and nearly 40% of single women age 22 to 35 never go on dates

especially 62% of men in the UK under the age of 30 aren't aren't even trying to date. I think the entity or the elephant in the room here that people aren't seeing is AI and that is especially young men I think a lot of men are slowly but surely being sequestered from traditional relationships and entering into frictionless relationships with character AI. And then you layer in porn on top of that. And that is, I think men who, for whatever reason, I've said this,

I think we need to embrace young men's horniness. And I think young men need to do a better job of trying to modulate frictionless relationships with character AIs and porn. Because I think wanting to have your own romantic relationships is a tremendous motivator for trying to be a better man. Because oftentimes the hard thing and the right thing are the same thing and the most rewarding things in life are relationships and they're really hard. It is really hard to establish contact, endure rejection, persevere, figure out what a woman wants, quite frankly, and have physical intimacy, maintain the relationship. It's just very hard. And that's why it's so wonderful.

That's what real victory feels like. And I think a lot of men, I worry, are now opting for control over connection. And that is, when they're with an AI or speaking to an AI or observing porn, they never feel rejected. They never feel insecure. I mean, we've all had those feelings. We've all texted people and not heard back and wondered, what did I do wrong? or we've had our sort of heart trampled on, or we feel insufficient or insecure,

or like we can't compete in a mating market, or we just, or we don't have the money to go out, or we enter into a relationship, and we're totally fucking a basket case about it because we're insecure about the dynamic of the relationship. And then props up AI and says, okay, you can have a reasonable facsimile of life without any friction. And it is such a hollow, empty promise.

So I wonder if the air being sucked out of the room here is that a lot of young people are deciding, I'd rather have a frictionless relationship with an algorithm in the screen, much less go on a dating app, which don't have incentives to pair people up, but for people to constantly be being back on the apps, maybe spending a little bit more and finding out, oh, there's a bigger, better deal. So I find all of this data really alarming. I think it requires some sort of government response around subsidized. third spaces where people can meet. The good news is I do see,

or you do see evidence of a trend of young people recognizing there's a problem and doing meetups and run clubs and stuff like that, that they are, in fact, getting out of touching grass more. But this whole, I think there's something much bigger

than a mid-cap company struggling here. I think this is a veneer or an indication of a much deeper problem in our society. I 100% agree with that, just to go back to these struggling mid-cap companies. And to your point,

the story isn't that Bumble and Match Group are struggling. The story is that dating appears to have been gamified, and then people are now just opting out of dating entirely. That has far larger implications just on a human level,

but also even on a societal and economic level. But I would like to just, discuss this AI in dating dynamic, what we are seeing is that these CEOs of these dating companies are looking to embrace AI as much as possible. So the Match Group CEO, Spencer Raskoff, he said that he is looking into AI curated dating. The Bumble CEO, Whitney Wolf heard,

she said they're going to try to scrap the swipe dynamic entirely and try to just lean on AI and have this personal AI dating assistant. But then she also is saying something which seems a little absurd. She's floating this idea of having AI bots, dating each other's AI bots. She talked about this. I just want to play this clip and get your reaction. You could in the near future be talking to your AI dating concierge.

And you could share your insecurities. I just came out of a breakup. I have commitment issues. and it could help you train yourself into a better way of thinking about yourself and then it could give you productive tips for communicating with other people. If you want to get really out there,

there is a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierge. No, no, truly. And then you don't have to talk to 600 people. It will just scan all of San Francisco for you and say these are the three people you really ought to meet. No, no, truly. While the interviewer laughs in her face,

What do you make of that, Scott? Well, nothing says romance like outsource flirting performed by stochastic parrots trained on Reddit therapy language. It's just, and I think she's with Bumble. That's right. I think Bumble should be for people who want to get laid and don't have friends. Like, you're supposed to go to your friends for this type. I don't, this is all so nihilistic. I don't, you know, and I'm virtue signaling right now, but remember the process.

V-G avatar that was up for about six hours. Anything that takes you away from the motivation to ask your friends for advice, ask your mom, your dad for advice, convince you that maybe you should go to a bar, get a little bit fucked up, develop some courage, and when you see someone go up and say, I like your dress, where are you guys from? I had this whole attitude. And then, and you know where this is going to go. We have a special avatar that finds hot women for $49.95 a month.

I mean, they're immediately going to start pricing in dumb versus smart versus better AI. I mean, this whole thing, I like marketplaces. One out of three relationships begin on dating apps, so there's a role for them. But I'm now, and again, I see the glasses half empty now. There are some good things about AI in terms of partnership for seniors. I use AI all the time. I'm fascinated by it. One of the benefits of AI is it is creating political.

moderation, where social media creates political extremism, because AI is so vanilla and so worried about offending or upsetting you, it tends to take extremist views and move them and moderate them, which is, I think, a good thing. But the idea that you're going to begin outsourcing advice and your representative, I mean, I'm convinced when you're on your first date, it's not you, it is an avatar of you. You're sitting there, especially in your 20s, people don't go on dates. They don't show up, the representative shows up. And at some point, at some point sooner than later, the other person is going to find the real you. Right. So, and I couldn't figure that out. Whenever I was dating, when I was your age, I think you're a lot more secure than I am.

Most of it goes, you're better looking more successful and have, and have better parents than me. That other than that, also you're better educated. Other than that, there was no reason for me to be less secure. But when I was in my 20s dating, I was constantly trying to figure out, how do I get them to like me? As trying to figure out how I like me and show up and decide if someone likes me. Right. You just don't. Which is a real, I mean, that's the real problem in the dating world and continually to this day. It's a really important point. I mean, I'm now believing we should begin to subsidize third places. Any, yes. I want to reverse, I'm writing a book called renewal about public policies. I think we should have a

reverse footloose, and that is any venue that has dancing gets tax subsidies. Because dancing involves alcohol, typically men and women, and hooking up. And I would love to see a return. I'm an atheist. I think we need way more religious institutions. That is one of the cheapest forms of Bumble in the world. Because it doesn't matter what church, temple, and mosque you're at, all the older people start going, okay, who are the single people here? Who are the single men? Here are the single woman. They're approximately in each other's weight class.

You know, Moisha, come over here and meet Sarah, right? It just, they're good at pairing people up. And they don't, and then they don't, they don't see on a screen every other temple in the Upper East Side and who's hotter and who has the best filters to show off their abs or pretend they're richer than they are. and you start are constantly thinking that you can do better. Anyway, I'm very, I worry that when you see the destruction and rights of passage, whether it's going to prom, and some of it's been politically correct bullshit, they've canceled a lot of the rights of passage. The father-daughter dance prom at some schools was canceled because they saw it as shaming people who weren't so.

Well, that's the whole point. You're supposed to have pressure to ask a girl. out. Otherwise, you never do it. You know, the only reason I went to my ninth grade junior prom with Lynn Sugamora was my friend was going and I was, like, freaked out that I wasn't going to go. I mean, you just had, you did these things. I don't know where I'm going with this at. I just don't like it. I think it's really important. I think there's another question, like you're talking about subsidizing these third places, which I love that idea. I do wonder if the market's going to just reward third places itself, because this is something we were talking about last week when it comes

drinking, where we're seeing a lot more interest, a lot more investment going into these in-person physical community-based events, like we talked about these running clubs and these sauna raves. I mean, all of these products and services that are all about getting people together in a room and rubbing elbows and meeting each other. I do wonder if people are so fed up with the online experience that the market's just going to sort of correct itself and the money's going to flow into those experience, those in-person physical experiences. But if not, I agree, we should do something about it on a policy level because it is getting insane. The loneliness epidemic is such a problem at this point where, you know, we've gone through the data before,

but 17% of Americans say they have zero close friends whatsoever today. That is a real problem that clearly you need to do something about it. Shifting over for a moment to this expense problem, I mentioned the fact that the cost of a date has gone up nearly 13% year over year. I will also mention that Gen Z is spending more on average on dates than any other generation spending roughly $205 per date today. That is according to the source that I read above this real financial progress index from BMO. And this sort of reminds me of something that Derek Thompson told us on the podcast on the Daily last week, which is that Gen Z is the most materialistic generation,

that young people are obsessed with money more so than other generations. I'm not sure if it's necessarily true, but this data makes me think that maybe it is. Oh, I think it is. And then I saw this clip recently go viral, which I'd like to get a reaction to. This guy isn't Gen Z, but this is Logan Paul's co-host on his podcast. Very popular podcast.

This guy, Mike Maylack, he's this YouTuber, and he was on someone else's podcast, and they were asking him how much he spends on his dates. And here's what he said. He's not representative of everyone, but it seems to be indicative of where we're headed. How much on average do you spend on a first date?

Thousands. This a visa trip, there's like 10 girls coming on it, and probably 150,000 spent on just that. Oh, wow. I got a hotel yesterday so that she could change before Nobu and we didn't stay at it.

She couldn't change in the restroom? I don't know why I did that. I think we should pair him with the CEO of Bumble, and they should be the first people to go to Mars. I think we'd solve a lot of problems if those are the two first people on SpaceX's initial mission to Mars. You don't like the hotel room before Nobu to get changed in? No, I know guys like that. They're called douchebags.

They're called 50-year-old dudes or 40-year-old dudes that hit it big, who never had any game. And so they want to surround themselves. It's their money they can do what they want. That's a totally different ecosystem. It happens in Ibiza, Micanos, and St. Bartz, where a guy gets a jet. He invites three of his good friends, and then 12 ridiculously or six ridiculously hot young women. They pay for everything, and that's their only currency. When I was in college, the only currency for losers was cocaine.

Now it's just straight up money where they can just, hey, do you want to go to a beef, nancy, black coffee? Sure, you know, who wouldn't? And also, there's a lot of, Instagram has fucked up everything. Everybody thinks, when I got a lot of. out of college. I was working my ass off. Morgan Stanley, I was living with my mom. I got out of business school, did know what I want to do in my life, started a consulting company living in Oakland, living in a $280 a month apartment. My life was not that fabulous. And that was okay. I was happy. I had a girlfriend. We were totally into each other. I was trying to make money. I was enjoying what I was

doing, running a strategy firm at the age of 27. I was happy. And then I started getting some clients in New York, And I came back to New York, and I went to places like Pangia and Lotus. And I got invited by some rich guys I met to St. Bartz. And I'm like, Jesus Christ, I didn't even know this shit was out there this life. Like, I had never been exposed to it. So being the mature person I was, I went home and said, I want a divorce. And I moved to New York to live the full douchebag lifestyle. And this is a little bit reductive.

And it's extraordinary. my ability to bring everything back to me. Well, no, this is useful. This is informative. But being exposed, everyone every day is exposed to a 0.1% life. Everyone is exposed to Santropay or to staying at the almond in Utah or going and getting artist passes at Coachella. And they think, I need to be part of that. And the currency for that is either being ridiculously hot and young as a woman or being

ridiculously rich as a guy who is willing to spend that kind of stupid money to have what I'd call fake, not I want to call fake friends. And by the way, it's a, it's an, I want to be clear. It's an empty and meaningless experience. But as far as empty and meaningless experiences go, it's pretty fucking good. I don't want to, I don't want to lie. I see the attraction. I've participated in it. I'm not going to lecture it anyone not to do it. But there's not a lot of what I'd call real lasting connection in it. And there's a real downside to it. And that is 99% of people are not, or 90% are not going to have access to that ecosystem. And it makes them feel worse about themselves. They're just at home wondering why I didn't get invited to the Hamptons or I don't

have the money. The woman I want, some women, and by the way, we always, I call men douchebags, women have become increasingly materialistic, and a lot of men, younger men, feel insecure about their ability to attract a quality mate if they aren't making a shit ton of money. So I'm not one of these people that it's, as always, it's all men's fault. It's not.

The problem, you know, there is a certain amount of materialism, unreasonable expectations, and generally, like, low character behavior from both genders around this shit. Yeah. And what we're missing is, you know, I don't know the answer here, but I believe that in-person work, in-person school,

more religious institutions, tax subsidies for places where people can get together, mandatory national service where young people meet each other in the agency of doing something more productive other than seeing Diplo and Micanos that gives people a chance to kind of to find people who love them for who they are. Because I think the pressure being placed on young women to be ridiculously hot and in the right environment all the time, in the right clothes, and also to be fucking superwomen. Women are expected to have it all. Oh, wait, but she doesn't have a job. She's just a party girl. Well, okay. How is she supposed to look like that and take off from Micanos on three days notice of checks has a fucking job? That is the job, yeah.

And dudes at 28 are expected to be making a million bucks a year so they can drop $120,000 on a summer rental in Amagance it. I think this is, you're hitting on something important, which is that's the problem with clips like that goes. viral. That clip did go viral. We're arguably making it more viral by discussing it on this podcast. But the thing that isn't being said is that isn't normal and it also isn't cool. But the trouble is when you see more and more of these clips, which go viral because they're so absurd, I think it's starting to make people think that it is normal to spend thousands of dollars on a date, that it is normal to go to Mekanos and fly out 10 different women and spend $150,000 on this experience.

the more that we start seeing people saying that, the more we think that that is happening, the more we think that that is standard, normal, and cool. And so that seems to be a big reason why people seem to be spending so much money on these dates because they think that that is something that you have to do. I want to be like these famous influences. I want to be like these rich YouTubers.

I want to spend lots of money on these dates. And then I'm sure that it affects both men and women in the same way. Women start to expect it. Oh, he didn't spend enough money on this date. I saw this clip of this guy spending thousands of dollars. Clearly, this guy isn't a baller. Clearly, he doesn't care enough about me. He doesn't respect me enough.

And then the same thing goes for men. It's like, oh, I need to spend thousands of dollars on this date because real men, that's what real men do. That's what Mike Maylach does. So I'm a loser if I don't. And it's sort of like just this vicious cycle where we're going to spend more and more money. And I feel like we need people to speak out and say,

hey, one, this isn't normal. And two, it isn't actually cool. Like, you're actually admitting to being, I love what you said, cocaine was the currency for losers in college, and now for people today, it's just pure money. You're outing yourself potentially as a loser by saying that you need to spend tens of thousands of dollars for your date to go right. I just wish we could sort of like, I don't know, we shouldn't glorify that behavior. So I've said this before. I think men should pay for everything.

I think the fertility window of women is much shorter. The downside of sex is much greater for them. the downside of pregnancy is much greater for them. In some, when a woman, a young woman who is of childbearing age is spending time with you, quite frankly, her time is more valuable than yours. In addition, for her to show up in most relationships, she's spent two, three, four hundred bucks before she's walked through the door. That's Sephora, getting waxed, getting an outfit to compete with increasing expectations. She spent more money on the date before she's even showed up. Well, I've spent all the money on peptides, so.

My entire beauty routine when I was your age was occasionally splashed water on my face. Anyways. So men pay for everything. But in addition, it's not just paying for everything. It's demonstrating excellence and it's demonstrating effort. And every mammal, there is a courtship where the male tries to throw out its feathers or sing a song or fly around or bring the owl, a rat or something that he wants to have sex with. There's a courtship ritual across all mammals where the male tries to impress the female and to believe that isn't here. is not true. Unfortunately, impressing a woman in a capitalist age with Instagram has just become all

about fucking money. And what I would offer to men is that you can replace money with effort. If you try to think it's something cool to do, you're cultured, you know what's going on, you know a cool little bar. You, you know, I'm not that guy because I'm, I'm lame, but I hear about dates. I hear about young men. My son, my oldest son, was saying that he was going to take a date to see that cheap student tickets to that 3D thing of Abba. And I'm like, he gets it. He gets it. He's making an effort.

He's showing up and saying, I put some thought into this, and we're going to do something really cool. And he got student tickets in the middle of the week, so it wasn't a lot of money. And I thought to myself, that, you know, he gets it. He's going to be just fine. And my other son wants to borrow my black card to take his girlfriend to like. He also gets Taylor Swift. So they get it just on different ends of the barbell. But do you realize the amount of dating amongst high schoolers has been cut in half?

I mean, I was six to 140 pounds with bad skin, and I dated. Everyone dated. I mean, not a lot. But I did date. And now it just appears that no one's dating. Anyways, I find the whole thing. I find the whole thing. I'd like to find a company that is, I don't know, I wonder if we should.

Actually, this is probably the good time to announce that Prophechee Media is IPOing as the world's first semiconductor company powered entirely by podcasts, charisma, and EBITDA adjusted vibes, Ed. Anyways, I attempted to segue out of my, how discouraged I'm about young people. people not getting drunk and having sex. I thought it was encouraging. I really like your point about effort, and I think it's true. I think it goes a long way. I hope so. Get out there. Get used to rejection. That's right.

Get out there. Drink more. Drink more. Get used to know. Take peptide. Do you really take peptides? No. Okay. That makes me feel better. Take the Wolverine peptide, and I want to see if you grow a third arm. Let's take a look at the week ahead.

We will see earnings from Home Depot, Lowe's, Target, Walmart, and NVIDIA. We will also see the minutes from the Federal Reserve's last meeting and consumer sentiment for May. Scott, do you have any predictions? Sarah Bruce, below 50 bucks in 12 months. It makes no fucking sense. At some point, sanity will creep in. I'm not, don't buy, don't play the markets on this. This thing's crazy.

It could become a meme stock. It could go to a thousand. I think there's a much greater probability. It's below 50 bucks. This is a state run. The UAE trying to prop up a company in a hot area. It's got no legitimate customer base. It's trading at a greater multiple than Nvidia.

This just feels like late stage chip capitalism. My prediction is inflation is only going to get worse. We're at 3.8% today. Don't think we're going to get out of Iran anytime soon. I think oil prices are going to continue to rise. I think that we could see close to 4.5% inflation by the end of the year. I guess my prediction is COVID-level inflation by the end of the year. Your prediction should be a rate hike, then, if you think that's going to happen?

Well, depends on this new guy, Kevin Walsh. Is he going to bow to the king, or is he going to have a spine? Again, the media is missing the mechanics of how the FOMC works and how rates are increased or decreased. And that is they think it's all about one guy. He's one. It's the board. That's right. He's one of 11 votes.

He sets the agenda. He's the spokesperson. There's no fucking way the governors of the Fed right now would vote for a rate increase. No way. No, a rate decrease. I'm sorry. Did I say rate increase? You said rate increase. They wouldn't vote for a rate cut today. No shot. I agree with that. If your prediction is true, then you're much more likely to see rate increases than decreases. Yes, 100%. So maybe I'll tack that on. And this speaks to the power and the beauty of what's called an intransigent government and the sand in the gears of authoritarianism, and that is checks and balances.

We want, we want, what is it, 11 or 12 governors deciding this. We don't want one person deciding this. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weisson, engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Jorge Carty. Our research team is Dan Chalon, Isabella Kinsel, Chris and O'Donoghue, and Mia Silverio. Jake McPherson is our social producer. Drew Burroughs is our technical director, and Catherine Dillon is our executive producer. Thank you for listening to Profty Markets from Proffield Media.

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