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

Episode Date: May 11, 2026

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after.Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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 Bezal. He's going to take us deeper on our first story, which is, of course, Adamar, Pige, AP, is partnering with Swatch to launch a watch that's,

you can 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. 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. Yes. Not a transformer in sight the way my grandfather used to like it. There will be interesting pushbacks. I'm like, oh, this movie is awesome. It only used CGI. No AI involved whatsoever. Wait, so is it a manual watch?

Is it a mechanical? I think it's unclear. So what there's been a massive amount of, of, of, uh, 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 costs, because there's a certain amount of cost that just goes into making a movement, a mechanical movement. It's a lot of small pieces. Sure, you can put it on a manufacturing line and press them and stuff. John, learning that

a couple hundred bucks watches have egregious profit. I know they have egregious profit margins, but still, like, like the work to put together all the gears and manufacturing, Like, I would be surprised if it's a mechanical watch, is it really going to be like $5? No, it's not a happy mill toy. So there's the fake Chinese version of all of these popular watches, Nautilus, PPs, etc. You can get them, like, you could go on Alibaba, get them for, in the low hundreds of dollars. Yeah.

And so it is totally possible to put together a watch that has a lot of the same componentry. Yeah. I saw Nico Leonard on, who's a great YouTube watch. reviewer, fun, very fun creator on the Ice Coffee Hour with Graham Steffen. And they gave him, this is a fun little game that they, they're getting really good at playing games with their guests on this podcast. So they give him 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 Patech. So a lot of people are saying this is bare. It's over. They're saying, sell everything. Freak out, sell all your AP for $500, rest in peace. AP has consistently done things over the last few years that were provocative, right? Some of the various partnerships they've had with talent, right?

Celebrities, et cetera, have been somewhat provocative. But overall, the brand seems healthy, right? It's not going to be for everyone. I think in some ways this decision could be seen, and again, I'm no watchex. 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, this swatch AP will end up retailing for far more, or 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, right? And the gap has been growing because the aftermarket prices have been increasing faster than incomes. They basically were like, oh, this is what our watches are worth aftermarket. We should price there, right? 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 like a walk-crawl run to get into the ecosystem that some brands have. AP certainly has not had that.

And now this is. You go with the code. You go with the code. Aren't those like 60? Oh, they are. I think they're really expensive. No, no. I think they're really expensive.

really pricey. I don't know. But yeah, maybe they'll bring down the price on that. Live monitors 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 clab. We can pull this up. Something you've never seen before and you won't see again. A Chrome Hearts Rolex Daytona 18-carried gold.

Starting offer, $370,000. If you want it, there's only one way to get it. I've never seen this watch before. Neither have you. That's why I'm showing it to you. Do you think this is real or just something someone made randomly? Official Rolex over here. telling me that the dial might be aftermarket.

I don't know. 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. 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. 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 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 WOOP to be doing on their side, but for regulatory reasons, it might be slower for WOOP to roll out that feature of, like, health monitoring. And so there's a lot of, like, DIY science that comes from it. So I don't know. It's weird no matter what, because if you have a Woop on one end and then on one hand and then a watch on the other, that's an odd choice.

I feel like, isn't there an opportunity to put the Woop Band somewhere more discreet? Even like a chest monitor would be less. You can. 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, Aero Grivner says, as an IP nerd, I love this. AP's trademark loss means they lost the moat around their octagonal bezel and their dial. So what do they do? They license its crown jewels to swatch for a flood of legit affordable royal pop pieces, a masterclass in damage control. This is on this news that AP 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 trademarker. the octagon? Yeah, well, there's a trade dress so you can never do a full a full knockoff of a direct product, but they couldn't lock down the idea of an octagon. That was like simply too much. I don't know how much of this was damaged 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 The Royal Pop drops Saturday, May 16th. They're coming out with this quickly, just one week teaser. Smart. And then it's out. Smart. He says, this is the easiest four-figure week you'll have all year.

If you're willing to do something that resembles work, resembles work for 14 hours. If you're willing, let me lay out exactly what to do. Retail is in the $400 range. It's in store only. There's no online sales. They're limiting it to one piece per person 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. You got to go to secondary cities. Michigan, King of Prussia, Canoga Park, Honolulu, going to Honolulu just for this.

I think this is going to 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 and get something else. It's like a striver, 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? B.YD. BYD. Got Daniel Craig as a new face. Build your dreams.

They're building their dreams. For the Denza Luxury EV, James Wood says it's an amazing ad. And Adam Thomas says, China uses James Bond for a euro push. The world is changing. Let's play this advertisement from BYD. The world with a 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 They have to It's so exciting Do you think And doesn't life ask us to step out of the shadows

And embrace the new To evolve on their car seats for dogs I don't think so I think it gets pretty dangerous Although that dog looks like it's wearing some sort of harness that could be tied in. What do you think? Yeah.

See, post James Bond, he has a lot more comedic timing. He's done Assel 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, pause. Rewind, 10 seconds. Okay, what do we listen for? Listen, because there's some... Okay. Doesn't that sound like an internal combustion engine for a second there? Yeah.

So they're LARPIC. 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 BIDs if there's actually an internal combustion engine in there somewhere

that can activate at a certain point. Like, everything feels like a hybrid these days. But, I mean, it says luxury EVs. 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. 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, and then he plays Benoit Blanc from Knives Out. And even that character, 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. 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, okay.

They're actually getting pricey. Usually, like, 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 six, the estimated price is 60 to 140. It's a big range. Other Denzas 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? 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 is 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 increase their price range from 115 to 125 up to 150, 160. And so they're going to raise, instead of $3.5 billion, they'll be raising $4.8 billion. and allegedly the round is massively oversubscribed to the tune of 20x demand for that 5 billion. So something like a 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 a $500 watch on the $50. trillion of GDP meeting in China that we'll talk about later. So there was a bunch of fud around. Ben Thompson this morning says if you were looking for an ID, 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 Stratory. Go check it out. There's been a bunch of fud about cerebrus. I mean, for a long time, they were just sort of like building in stealth or talking about the idea. It takes a really long time to design these chips, tape them out, and then actually produce them. And then the first version is less flexible, less designed collaboratively with the companies that are using them. So there was like one customer that was buying them and there was a lot of customer concentration.

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

And so demand is, you know, 10xing every few months at this point. And there's a very, very clear business story. Tyler, you have anything on Surrebus? Yeah, I mean, just like if you use the Threbus chips, like you can use it, GPT 5.13 Spark in Codex. Yeah. It's like insane. It's crazy.

It's wild. Yeah. Yeah. If you want to give it a try and actually demo it, which I think is important with these like, with these, these, 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 down and load Codex desktop, pick from the drop-down, 5.3 Spark, and then you can, you don't even have to get it to do code. You can ask it, history of the Roman Empire, and it will just instantly tell you a full page of exactly the response with 5.3 level intelligence, which is pretty good. And it's a pretty remarkable experience. And you can imagine this coming to every LLM interface, every AI experience,

which has normally been like for any meaningful work, fired off, come back five minutes later, sometimes two hours later, will 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 like a direct answer to this, I would see them being a buyer in the near term. 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 open AI among customers. So there was a question about like, was a question about, like, was it all open AI and I guess Amazon has jumped on. Very flexible with regard to the chips that they

rack over at AWS. Polymarket is projecting Cerebrus 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 weekend of the ticker CBRS and traditional semiconductor manufacturing works like this. A silicon wafer is fabricated. The wafer is cut into hundreds of smaller chips. The chips are packaged individually and connected together in systems. Cerebris took a completely different approach. They used the entire 300 millimeter wafer. Four trillion transistors, 900,000 AI-oriented compute cores.

And the big thing is the PETA bits per second of internal bandwidth. So better memory bandwidth for KV caches and everything that you need to do in AI, I think, something like that. Benchmark is gonna be absolutely cleaning up. They still own over 20% of Cerebris, apparently. If it trades even half of how Shanghai priced more threads in CamberCon, it will be over 500 billion in less than two years.

Okay, that's a big step. It will break the venture model if they hold. It has a shot to deliver the number one fund in VC history. Benchmark on an absolute tear. Quantian says, cerebrus 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 said someone else in the comments here chiming in I I random history major had a much less important version of this conversation with my college roommate fancy engineer doing computer vision stuff one time and still feel really good about it I think it helped just we well the thing that does that on to the other thing have you considered building the entire 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 time of people. Jane from City. Chuck Robbins is headed over there. A friend from CIS. David Solomon. 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 around the war in Iran. This is from the Wall Street Journal. As the heads of the world's two superpowers meet in Beijing this week, President Trump and Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, will have another nation looming over their summit, Iran. The long-anticipated meeting has been delayed once due to the U.S. and Israel's war against Iran, which 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. As of this morning, the peace deal was, according to Trump, on major life support. On major life support. Is that good? I guess it's better than it being dead. So hopefully we get a peace deal, because if you're on life support, sometimes you can have a miraculous comeback. I don't know. That's what I'm pulling for. He will land in Beijing, prepared to push China, which relies on a Iraq.

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 country's ability to buy Chinese goods. Finding a resolution could raise Xi Jinping's stature as a global statesman who swooped in at the precipice of a possible military escalation. Trump on Friday threatened to resume Project Freedom, the US-led operation 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. And the summit is focused heavily on Iran, but also trade deals. specifically Chinese purchases of American agriculture, energy, aerospace products, and some other related investment mechanisms. But the tech industry is obviously hoping to like wind down the conflict peacefully and quickly and then move on to discussions of export restrictions, GPUs, the AI supply chain, rare earths, all the different things that go into what the tech industry needs to flourish. But I was thinking we wouldn't get that much movement or that many soundbites from this trip based on how large Iran is looming, but with all of those tech CEOs there, you would imagine that there's some conversation that happens around. Do you think they might be clip farming?

Potentially, potentially aura 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 like last week there was all the news about CAA, SI, right, doing the new AI regulation, right? Like what's going to happen? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are we going to do much tests before the models come out? It seems like they're kind of moving away from that, like less kind of safety focused.

China should be like, send us mythos too, give us unfettered access, ideally like enough to distill it really quickly. And then we will also say whether or not it can be released in China. Well, why stop there? Why not just send the weights? Yeah, just send the weights. That's actually way more easy. We'll inspect it. We'll inspect it and we'll make sure that it's okay for the Chinese population.

Yeah, but you know, like we've talked about this a little bit. Actually, send all the GPUs I need to run it to. Sorry. We've talked about us a little bit, but there are people in China who are actually worried about, like, the, you know, very, like, safety-pilled. Yeah, yeah. But it seems like people going over there, like Tim Cook. Yeah, I mean, there's a Chinese-J-Yelon.

Elon. These people are not going to be arguing in favor of, like, safety. Palmer brings up an important point. It's time for the United States Postal Service to ban junk mail. Ooh, I love it. Unsolicited spam calls are already prohibited by the FCC. Emails are heavily regulated by the canned spam active 2003 junk mail. is the majority of mail.

100 million trees per year. Enough. It really is way too much. This is very interesting. I haven't, I thought I put all of the blame or I guess the credit. I gave all the credit to Google with the fact that like I don't get spam emails. I get emails if I buy something online and I forget to uncheck the box and that's kind

on me or if I'm subscribed to a newsletter and it gets boring and I'm like, ah, this is junk. I'll need to deal with that. But like, very rarely do I just get a true spam email, just like truly slop, junk, like, just complete nonsense. It's pretty, pretty rare. And I think some of that's the filtering, but also the can spam app seems to be somewhat effective. I wind up getting a lot more spam phone calls and a lot more spam text messages these days than

spam emails in terms of like cold outreach that's completely undirected. And so, yeah, maybe they need to expand the can spam act. Shouldn't it be the Can't Spam Act? I don't know why they call it Can, but it has been successful at least an email, but I agree with this. This is good. Palmer says, it's insane that America has given a monopoly on letter delivery to a quasi-governmental agency that then uses it to flood our homes with useless garbage against our will. America would never allow FedEx, UPS, DHS, or anyone else to force this on us, even ignoring the wasted taxpayer money, insane moral hazards and ecological. impact, the lost time and productivity is inexcusable, I agree.

But the average American spends only 30 seconds sorting their mostly spam mail each day looking for the real stuff. That's over a billion dollars. Well, Earth-class mail, Palmer, I think you need a PO box that scans the emails or scans the physical mail and delivers it to an email inbox. Throw open claw in front of it and have it decide what makes it through. New service for SF retailers and homebuyers. I will show up to your open houses wearing open AI or anthropic merch.

I charge a 5% commission just to fully pump up the price. It's called chandelier. Will that actually help, though? Because I think some people would just be like, I'm not even going to bid. But I think some people at the open house tour might see, oh, there's an open AI or anthropic person. I should make my offer particularly strong if I want this, even if there isn't that much, that much demand.

I love the founder of Railway. That's great. What else is going on here? New, before CHAPT release, before Microsoft's $1 billion bet and long before plans for an IPO, there was the University of Michigan putting $20 million. Go blue. Pull up, Tyler. Pull up Tyler.

What happened here? Like, how did this actually happen? There we go. There you go. Nailed it. Tyler, your homework, learn how to get that more dialed. because I hit that pretty often for you. And every time you go the wrong direction.

So there's something to work on. That's just some constructive feedback. I believe that you can be better at this task. This feels like the University of Michigan was considering donating. And then at some point, they just became aware of like, oh, well, like, you could also participate in the for-profit. And they're like, oh, that sounds better, maybe.

Let's put this in. My mom is so bad with technology. She literally tried to search up info about energy drinks and accidentally set our house up as a business. What is in energy drinks? Can you imagine? Like, starting with the Google search and ending up, like creating a business on Google Maps for your exact address under the name, what is in energy drinks. John. And people think AI will diffuse quickly.

Debatable. debatable. Leave us five stars and Apple Podcasts. And Spotify, sign up for our newsletter, TBPN.com. Goodbye.