Just yesterday, Ryan Cohen of GameStop offered a $55 billion unsolicited bid for eBay targeting 2 billion in cost cuts. And we have him joining the show with us now. Ryan Cohen, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time. How are you doing? How are you guys? Great to see you. Fantastically. I would love an update. What can you share with us on the situation as things have developed since yesterday? Just to sort of set, obviously this is moving very quickly. Where are we right now? What's happening? We made an offer yesterday, 125 bucks a share, half cash, half stock. That was funny, wasn't it? Have you considered 49% cash? Why did you get to half cash, half stock? Can you unpack that a little bit at least? Well, I mean, frankly, when you think about me going and running the ebay business, what we're proposing is for existing shareholders to take half of their investment off the table. And that would be us providing them with 28. With $28 billion, which is like a 40% premium from when we started buying the stock. And then they would be getting roughly. I mean, it depends on ultimately when the transaction closes, but they would be rolling the rest into the combined company of GameStop and eBay. Frankly, with me running ebay, I think that the company, the earnings power of the company is going to increase substantially as well as the ability to grow. The platform stagnated over the last decade and I could do a lot with ebay. I love it. That's a very strong business and that's right up my alley. Take us through the big vision. Like in five years, you're at the helm, like, how big can this business be? Are you expanding it? Obviously there's an operational efficiency point, but what is the big picture? What's the blue sky pie in the sky vision for the combined entity? So where we've had success at GameStop and where eBay has had success is in collectibles, trading cards, collectibles. The founder, your show was, was talking about his Mont Blanc and I'm like, that's a good example. That's perfect item to go and buy on ebay. But you're always concerned that is it going to be real and the trust. And that's something that using GameStop 1600 stores, we can immediately authenticate that item. The seller can ship it or we can ship it, but we've got 1600 access points that we can do live authentication so we can go deep in collectibles, leveraging our physical infrastructure. We can increase intake by bringing a lot more product onto the platform. And then there's a lot of other categories that I can, I can grow in. And, you know, you look at live commerce as an example. I mean, eBay has 130 million users, and they're getting crushed by competitors in live commerce. So an owner's mentality, you know, I can, I want to. I want to own ebay forever. Like, I love that business. It's run like a public utility. It should have been wiped out, but it hasn't been. Yeah, it's been remarkably resilient. How many, how many companies, how many startups have gone after a specific category on eBay raised 100 million plus dollars and yet eBay has remained resilient. So it shows that. That there's, you know, it's a really powerful platform. Yeah, that's why I love it. And, you know, the website still looks the same as it did in 1995, but everyone's tried to kill this thing and it's still making over $2 billion a year. So that goes to show you the durability of the business. Talk about live commerce more. Would that be just a better integration with TikTok, Instagram streaming, Twitch streaming? Do you need to go and partner with big creators? Do you need to find your own platform for that? Like, how does that actually play out in a world where ebay and you are making a bigger push into live commerce? It makes a lot of sense. But I'm wondering, like, how does it actually work? Yeah, it would be partnering with creators. I mean, they've got the platform. We would improve the platform so it looks better and more consistent with the kind of UI that you have at competitors. But there's the user base, and so it's not something you have to market. It's building out better tech and partnering with creators. Yeah. And the correct incentive structure for those creators. Because I bet you right now you could probably go get some referral code or something. But it's not deeply integrated in a way that you can really accelerate on a social platform. Why do you think ebay has ebay been. Been a target of any type of deal like this in the past? I'm not familiar with any off the top of my head. But why do you think maybe it hasn't been more of a target? And I guess, like, why do you think you can get more efficiency out of it than maybe some other potential buyers who I'm sure see their costs? You know, marketing is something that people gravitate towards, but I'm sure You're seeing other efficiencies as well. So in terms of the competitive landscape on an acquisition, I think there was some people circling around a few years ago. Nothing happened. The strategics can't really do it because I don't think that they would be able to clear antitrust, so any of the large competitors wouldn't be able to acquire it. And you know, I don't think that we would have any regulatory issues getting clearance on a merger in terms of the efficiencies. GameStop is a good example. Like GameStop is a dog and it could have been dead. And we breathe life, we breathed a lot of life into this thing, right? And you look at SGNA, we've pulled out, we've dropped SGA by 47%, $800 million by making marketing more efficient, almost turning off marketing. I mean, everyone knows GameStop, everybody knows eBay. So you talk to the marketing people that tell you like it's gonna tank revenues and all of this. And the reality is most of that marketing spends isn't making money, but everyone's trying to protect their jobs and there's kickbacks, there's all kinds of perverse incentives. And so I'm running the business like a family business. You know, it's, it's really not that complicated. And you look at eBay spending 2 1/2 billion bucks to grow 1 million users, 2 billion in cost cuts between sales and marketing and corporate overhead, you. It's not a lot and it's not something that's going to take a few years. Like it's something that is going to happen fast, fast, fast. Because putting leverage on this thing and I don't want to run a leverage business, so I'm not going to run it hot. I'm going to pay down the leverage and I'm going to increase earnings. They're spending five and a half billion dollars on operating expenses on $11 billion business that has no inventory. And it's asset light. So it just. There's 11 and a half thousand employees and it doesn't make sense. It doesn't. You don't need. I could run that business. I could run that business from my house. Like it's, it's ebay. It looks the same as it did in 1995. They need 11 and a half. So, so is, is the Elon Twitter take private somewhat of an inspiration here? There's been a number after that happened. In many ways the business suffered, but maybe it wasn't because of the deep cuts that he did to the team and the service kept working. Yeah, the service kept working. It's still a great product. We've been surprised that more CEOs and management teams haven't done something like that with businesses that are household names but somewhat stagnated. Is that an inspiration at all? Yeah, and Twitter is a good example. I mean, what really happened at Twitter was that the advertisers, I don't know what the situation is now, but they pretty much conspired against him and you know, it had nothing to do. My understanding is really had nothing to do with the cost cuts. More of just the advertisers conspiring against him because of the demented political landscape and the fact that people apparently are against freedom of speech. And so like you look at the usability of the platform and the teams, the engineering teams are much smaller and they're innovating a lot faster. So it's actually the opposite. The more people you add, the more you slow things down and the fewer people you have, the more it's like a startup. You got to always be in startup mode and you build big teams and nothing gets done anymore. Do you think LLMs will be a tailwind for ebay over the next decade? It feels like for the long tail of commerce, you're trying to find really specific items. It feels like LMS and people doing research in these products could be catalyst for the business. Maybe there's things on ebay that would be tough to find, but if I'm really getting precise around prompting or running these sort of agentic searches, maybe, maybe I have a higher likelihood of purchasing something. Yeah, I mean, I think about all of the things that can disrupt the business in the future. And you know, I think that ebay is the kind of business where the, the future of the business model is more certain than most tech businesses. And that's why it's done so well. And there's been such a lack of innovation, yet it hasn't been able to be disrupted. So I would expect that to continue to be the case. If it doesn't materialize as an M and A. Are you looking at a board seat? You have a position. Will you be more active in a non M and A scenario? Yeah, I mean, I'm going to, I'm going to do whatever we need to do to protect our investment and to improve the business. But the goal here isn't to be an activist. The goal is I want to own ebay. I want to run ebay. I want that to be my baby. I want to build Something much larger and cost cutting, frankly is the way to make the business more efficient to pay down the debt and innovate. But when I think about what I can do with ebay in the future, like look at chewy. You know that ebay is like chewy on steroids. And so there's so much more Runway and it's global. Yeah. I mean it seems like a huge opportunity. How do you want to be comped based on performance? 100%. Is there any tension between you and the shareholders? How do you actually create alignment? There's. It would be bit in my current compensation plan is tied really lofty metrics and it's based on the. The first tranche I've got to double market cap as an example just to hit the first tranche and the 10 exit in order for it to fully vest. So I'm not interested in. Yeah, I, I haven't taken a dollar of salary or any bonuses. And you know, it's funny actually, I just got a call from my team today that said this is how I know they hate me. They're not happy about this. By the way, the Gamestop. This is the GameStop team. EBay. No, eBay is okay. Yeah. After this interview, they're. They're really not gonna like me, but because they're gonna find out I'm cutting marketing spend and the board already isn't like me because I'm calling out all the board fees. But I get a call and I say there is a. There's a. They're calling out your personal assistant. I said, what are you talking about? And they said, they went on the GameStop's career page and they saw that there's a listing for the personal assistant and it's all kinds of personal stuff. And that's basically a CEO benefit. And you know, it's basically not. You're using company resources. Personally, I pay for my personal assistant. Personally, I don't even pay for. The company doesn't pay for my personal assistant. So they're already starting to get their. They're doing whatever they can. They want to fight. Have you. Has any major ebay shareholders reached out to you? Have you had. You know, what is the general sentiment? You know, how do you think. What do you think it'll look like if you take this directly to the shareholders? I don't know. I mean, I would want to. I want to own eBay at $125 a share. We're proposed. There's tax advantages to rolling it. But when I think about what ebay could be worth. If I'm running this business, I believe it's a heck of a lot more than $125 a share. And so I would roll 100% of the equity. But we'll. We'll see what happens. Yeah. What do you think of Michael Burry's critiques? A lot of people were talking about him exiting yesterday. He doesn't believe. Have you guys chatted? I haven't chatted with Michael in a long time. I've seen he's more active than he says, his investing philosophy. So I figured his risk appetite and the leverage we're putting on just. It didn't make sense for him. But it seemed as though it was more of a trade more so than anything. Yeah. Looking at the price action yesterday, is that reflective of sort of like a shakeout of non believers and you feel like you have the right people around the table now? I, when I think back to Chewy, every single day was a shakeout. Yeah. So I don't know. It's hard to diagnose the shareholder base. And I'm, I'm focused on what I could build over a long period of time. And yeah, I got my hands on ebay. I can build something worth a lot and much larger than it is. So. Was Paramount at all an inspiration? I've looked at it. You know, what they did is really interesting too. Just because smaller company buying a much larger company but the deal still went through, the capital was marshaled. That was something that I think was unclear yesterday for some people was half cash, half stock. Where is it coming from? How much of this is just an ongoing conversation? And as you work through this process, you'll engage with other pools of capital or financiers to actually put together the final package. Do you have a date that you want this to be done by? I mean, we have the cash. We have the cash accounted for today in terms of a highly confident letter from our bank for the 20 billion plus, we've got 9 billion of cash and the rest would be them rolling the equity into the combined company. Sure. Yeah. I think that was the. That was the rolling of the equity was the thing that if it had got into the viral clip from cnbc, yesterday would have made a lot more sense. I'm glad we're. I'm glad we're getting it in now. Yep. Is there, I guess how much of your critique of ebay is specifically around the current management team? They've done a decent job. It's. Look, it's anyone. When You've got Perverse financial and they're not operating like owner. Just you know, when, when you've got it it all on the line, you're going to do whatever it's going to take 20 hour days, seven days a week, you're not going to stop. And when, when equity is given out to you like candy. I mean it's, it's, it's all companies so you know the directors, board of directors make $4 million. It's like 350 to 450,000 or director. There's been no insider buying at the company. I mean like it's not a surprise they're not going to light the money on, they're not going to light the world on fire. But you've got a bunch of professionals in the board and a professional management. Yeah. So if this deal goes through, roughly what percentage of your personal net worth will be tied to it? Well, I haven't done the math but if things go correctly then it better be the majority. Otherwise I'm wasting my time. Yeah. What was your first memory using ebay. Were you a power seller back in the day? Very good question. I bought and sold DJ equipment on eBay back in 2003. It was amazing. I don't remember my first transaction but I'm going to have to get back to you on that one. Okay. With GameStop, last time we talked you were mentioning a little bit of expansion into digital goods, less physical material and stuff. Do you think that there's an opportunity for ebay to play in a digital marketplace or in a world where certain collectibles or certain goods become digital or the market shifts towards more digital goods? And would you like to see ebay expand into that? Yes and yes in terms of a digital marketplace. And they're already doing it to a certain extent. I mean like all kinds of roadblocks. Digital items are bought and sold but. And I've actually bought them for my kids and there's so much fraud on the platform. Like we're buying stuff, it's not a real item. End up having to do a chargeback but then it ended up getting delivered so you can't do a chargeback. So like they've got the basics of it but it's not being done well. So like digital gaming. Totally. That's a huge opportunity to, to dig into. There's so much potential on, on digital stuff. I guess you're obviously interested in cutting costs. Are you optimistic that stablecoins might be a path to reducing costs? It's a high Volume transaction business, obviously a lot of credit card fees. Maybe there's a way around that with stablecoins. We hear that from a lot of stablecoin founders. Haven't heard it from as many operators. What do you think? I don't have a point of view on that. I haven't looked into it. So I think the sellers would probably be eating the cost but potential option. Yeah, I don't know. Jordy, do you have any sense of how ebay is using AI internally today? Have they spoken about it much? Do you believe they're getting very much leverage out of the models? Do you think there could be quite a bit more? I've seen that they've made listings easier in terms of just generating product descriptions and stuff like that. So I think they're kind of like doing the super easy stuff still. There's a lot of friction to sell a product on ebay. Like it's, it just, it's not easy. So the benefit of our 1600 stores is we have the ability to increase intake. But I would go through it and I would make it as simple as possible to have a real item for sale as a seller. And there's a, it's, there's a lot of steps. It's just, it's a pain in the ass. It's too difficult. Yeah. 1600 stores in the world where you combined eBay and GameStop, do you expect that number to increase, decrease, stay the same? It's a good question. I mean our footprint is a moving target. We have. This was part of what appealed to me originally when I went into GameStop was the leases were short term. So they're like two to three year leases. And as we see how the business performs, we decide whether or not it makes sense to renew the store. So I mean it's, it's going to be dependent on the utility of the stores. Like if there's traffic and a profitability is increasing, we'll keep the stores open. And if it's not the case, then we'll shrink the store base. Okay, a couple other scenarios. In a world where an M and A doesn't happen, is there a business partnership to be done where verification of rare collectibles can happen at GameStop physical retail stores for a price and ebay is paying GameStop for that service. Is that something you've explored? Is that something that's at all likely to happen? Well, that would. So yes. And it would basically take $0 in capex order to something like that. And it's a good idea I hope that doesn't want. That doesn't happen, because I want to. I want to run the entire thing. But if it doesn't, then, I mean, there's. There's a partnership option. I reached out to ebay, like, I don't know, maybe a year or two years ago to talk to them about partnering, and they didn't engage. Seriously, like, everyone, that. Everyone's on vacation. Everyone's always on vacation. Like, they're not available. They have assistance. I'll get back to you next week and like, let's go get it done now. So then they never get back to you. Then you're following up. It's like there's. There's. There's no sense of urgency. Yeah. At that company. There's no sense of urgency, frankly, at most companies. So it never gained any traction. Okay. Etsy is trading at 6 billion. Is that a target? If the ebay plan doesn't come together, no collectibles action. There's. It was in the chat. I gotta ask. Ebay is just such a natural fit for the collectibles, leveraging our storefront footprint, but then also, like, my ability to cut costs and build something much larger at the company. So every. Everything else is. If it doesn't work out, we could find something else. But I like ebay. It brings me back to my roots. What's something that ebay is not doing today that you think they could expand into? Or is that even the right question? Do you think the core business is just so great and they're so dominant in many of these categories that you just want to pour fuel on the fire? Live commerce? Yeah, but to me, that's an extension. Right. Because they have a lot of inventory. It's just a new selling channel. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, in terms of doing that well, accelerating revenue growth, you know, I think that is. That's big. And so going much deeper into collectibles in luxury trading cards. There's a lot of Runway there. Do you have a position on international capital providers? A lot of these big deals, maybe they start at 50. At half cash, half stock, they wind up being more lean in cash. That's what we saw with the Paramount Warner Brothers deal. Are you interested in talking to international sovereign wealth funds, that type of capital provider? We're. We're looking at a variety of different options currently. Makes sense. Mutual Friend of The show and GameStop Mod Retro. They've been pretty aggressively pushing into this retro gaming category. How do you see that growing? Our team at the office recently got an old Xbox 360 fired it up. I can see retro gaming just getting more and more popular, but what's your view on the category right now and where do you think it's going? We are. We've. We have. The return rates are kind of high, but we're. We're building out the retro business in our stores currently. So that's, that's a. It's a. It's. It's still small, but it's a growing category for us. What do you want to see the rest of this week? How do you. How do you. How do you see it playing out? I don't know. It's a good question. Balls in their. Balls in their court? Pretty much, yeah. Balls in their court, yeah. Well, we'll let you get to it. I'm sure you have more questions. Thanks for jumping on. Thanks for jumping on. You're welcome to join anytime. Let's do it again as the story progresses. But we're enjoying following along. And if anybody out there wants more information, it's on the website. Yeah, it's on the website. If anybody asks you how he's paying for it, just tell him half cash, half stock. You got the beginning and the end of the interview. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to see you, Ryan. Have a great rest of the week. Good luck out there. Goodbye.

Up next we have the CEO of GE Vernova, Scott Strazik, AI Data center. Electricity demand is expected to double or triple by 2035 and we have the perfect person to talk to about it. Nice to meet you. Thank you so much for coming on down. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I would love to start a little bit with your background because G.E. vernova is. I mean we can go through a little bit of the history there. But you've been with the company since before the creation of the company. You're older than the company you work for. The practical reality. My adult life I was with GE and ultimately G. Vernova. But I started with General Electric right out of college and lived through quite a few chapters. That's amazing. Some humbling, some less humbling. And this one is invigorating. It's a moment that we're going to take advantage of. We see the purpose of what we're doing every day very clearly, both in driving economic growth, AI national security. Energy security is very much national security in a lot of the parts of the world right now. So we've got a real opportunity to serve and that's exactly what we're going to do. So I think most people will know, you know, natural gas turbine for data center, but the business is bigger than that. Like zoom out for us and show and walk us through, you know what the shape of the business because, you know, massive workforce, 85,000 people, something like that. You bet. 85,000, yeah. Remarkable. So walk me through the mechanics of the business and then we will double click on the AI story, of course. Sounds great. I mean you take a step back. About a third of the world's electricity every day is created with our equipment through our customers. Exclude China. So it's substantial and even with China it's 25%. No pressure by the way. It's an obligation, it's a responsibility. The Jamie Dimon of energy. It's a big deal. Yeah, right. So that's just keeping the lights on notwithstanding what we need to do to then add the growth for where there is today. And that install base, that's gas turbines, that's nuclear power plants, that's wind turbines. It's a lot of the electrical equipment that's actually our fastest growing business is everything associated with electrification and the grid. And trying to make the grid more efficient is and smarter because frankly in some ways you can make more progress there quicker than you can build a new power plant. Okay, so all those variables are parts of the business and Then in an economic opportunity where we need a little bit of everything and applying the right technologies, where the right resources exist to drive better economic answers and more resilient electrons. Yeah, it seems like, it seems like the market or just the stories that I hear are that you're sold out, you have this massive backlog and it's more of the same. There's demand for more of the same, but it feels like you're also working on R and D. Talk to me about the trade off versus just scaling what's already working, what's worked for years, I imagine decades in many cases, versus a focus on research and development, the next technology. So the end product in some cases may look the same coming out of the factory. What we're producing or how we're producing it to scale and make more is changing drastically. So you think about gas turbines. Right now we're adding a lot of production workers to build more gas turbines. We're also adding 400 machines this year to automate a lot more in the process. Frankly, more of the innovation right now may be how do we scale faster and in a more economic way so we can win the affordability game while simultaneously investing for the future. Can you explain like I'm five. Some of those machines that you're buying, some of your supply chain? You bet. People know 3D printers or CNC machines or different, you know, you just hammer it out yourself or whatever. But I imagine it's very complicated. What does your supply chain look like? We big castings, big four things that we get inside the factory that need to machine down to the right, put the right material sciences, the right coatings. When you think about a gas turbine, it's got to be very heat resistant because it's a fire that really is spinning inside that gas turbine to create the electrical power. Ultimately, yeah. On the demand side, I have been hearing about the absolute knockout drag out fight for energy. And in many cases I don't know if it's relevant to you, but in many cases we've heard about folks involved in the AI build out, putting in orders for more than they need and then sort of dialing it back because they know that certain things won't get permitted, certain things will get delayed. Does that happen to you? Are your customers coming to you and saying that they need twice what you think they need and there's this battle of back and forth? I wouldn't say so. What I see happening more frequently is many of our customers are developing enough number of projects acknowledging that not all those sites are going to be chosen and the actual supply is a little bit liquid and they can move it around. And that's more what's happening. So sometimes we'll see press releases on leases canceled or sites that are. That customers walk away from. That's typical development, really. What's really happening is our customers are buying at a realization rate, knowing they're only going to ultimately develop a certain proportion of those sites. But we don't see any of our customers walking away from what they're securing today. Got it? Not at all. Yeah, that makes sense. What are your roadblocks? What roadblocks do you see to scaling either inside your business or at sort of the macro political level, permitting approvals, regulatory. Like what is on your short list of what America needs to do, what the industry needs to do to get right to actually continue to scale? In some ways, what we do is a little bit easier, candidly, because our equipment is built in a controlled factory. Sure. The hardest part in some ways is actually building the plant itself. The construction. Yeah. Because every plant in different parts of the country, different parts of the world, everyone's a little bit different in getting that craft labor to those locations where a lot of the data centers and a lot of the electrification demand is, is often very remote. Yeah. And that is going to take us some time. So for me, every gas turbine, wind turbine that I build, I'm using the same workforce every day. Yeah. Same people coming in Monday through Friday. We can meet the moment from an equipment demand perspective. But we need out in the field for those plants to be built so they're ready for our pedestals when they come out of the factory. Getting that orchestra right, that the site is ready when our equipment is ready is going to be a challenge. And we're going to have to keep investing in craft labor in these locations to do the build. What is investing in craft labor look like? I mean, we've heard about reskilling, retraining, trade schools. Is there a drought? Are people already seeing the news and seeing the stock price and retraining and reskilling, or is this more of like a decade long process for America? We've been successful so far. We've added about 1800 production workers in the last 15 months. We'll keep growing that number from here. You work to make the jobs more attractive. Part of how you do that is you take out the dull, dirty, unsafe work and that's where you automate. Yep. And then you allow these workers to thrive doing what they want to do. Yeah. But the Reality is they have a lot of pride in what they're doing. Every day we put the customer name, where the project is going with everything we build so they understand the impact they're having. So it's not just a piece of electrical equipment. They know how they're providing light and a middle class growth to Vietnam or economic expansion in the US And I think they see it as real. Have you considered engraving the signature of the technician on the engine? Like Mercedes. Exactly. But I think making a personal match. Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So there's a lot of pride. What else is in the portfolio? I mean, you mentioned wind. I think nuclear. You mentioned briefly, like walk me through the scope of your ambitions in energy generation. Broadly for the business. Yeah. But nuclear is important. We're building small modular reactors today. Think 300 megawatt machines. That can be. They're big, but they're built inside an American football field. Yeah. So that's 300,000 US homes that can be powered from one small modular reactor. That is within a US football field. Yeah. So that's very.300 megawatts. And that still qualifies as small and modular. That's relative to what used to be for nuclear. Okay. You know, and it used to be a gigawatt plug. Yeah, yeah. Like a big Westinghouse developed multiple years, precisely built on site, massive concrete structures. Now we're trying to build a lot of them within this construct so that we can come down the cost curve. Yeah. Because the reality is every nuclear plant historically was a snowflake and that's why the industry never really became economically competitive. No standardization. And we're fixing. So that's important. And what is the regulatory approval process for that? I mean, I've heard that there's this famous line around like the NRC hasn't approved a new design in decades. Is that what you're feeling? Does it feel like there's a shift? Definitely. Yeah. I guess the question is like when. Like we're now about two years and a month since the spin out. Yes. Was. Was small modular reactors on the roadmap when the spin out occurred. And then the opportunity has got more compelling from a regulatory standpoint since then. Yeah. We're in construction on the first plant right now. It's in Canada outside of Toronto. We will get NRC approval for the first plant in the U.S. i think this summer will be in construction. And we've committed to the administration that as soon as we get the approval, we'll be ready to work on day one. And then from when we start construction, it's about a four year cycle from the beginning to getting to commissioning. So this can start to happen. And that's where the comparison to the large block, it's more of a 10 year construction cycle. That's a long time to wait for new electrons. But even if you want 1.2 gigawatts, the beauty of the small modular reactors is you can do them in blocks and every two years after you get the first one built, add 300 megawatts, which also then meets a lot of our customer expectations to grow with the electrons. So this is going to be an important part of the equation for us. Are those two completely separate divisions or is there some fluidity across the workforce on the front end of the business? Commercially there certainly is with customer relationships, but from a manufacturing and an engineering perspective, they're pretty distinctly different. That makes sense. What has been surprising to you about where the energy infrastructure build out is at today relative to the AI boom versus what was predictable when the spin out first happened? Certainly in the US the demand has accelerated greatly in the last two years and one month. No question about it. But weren't you seeing that? Don't you feel like you had a early stages? Early stages. What I'd say that has surprised us though is there was probably concern that as the US market started to take off, it would price out a lot of other markets in the world from even being capable of buying the equipment. Interesting. The reality is we still see a very strong demand signals from a lot of the markets in the world. I mean, in the first quarter we had very strong demand in Vietnam and Mexico, in Canada, in Saudi, in Kuwait. So the global dynamic is still driving real growth above and beyond the AI dynamic. Yeah. The reality is AI specific. It's about 20% of our backlog today. Yeah. Interesting. And those international projects, I guess due to having 30% of the global market. Right. You've got responsibility. The scale is just already so immense that even if you have a massive acceleration via new technology cycle, and I think with a lot going on in the world today, more countries just realize for just national security reasons, they need a diverse portfolio of solutions to electrify and energize their country. So. And that really goes back to really the war in Ukraine and it's only been accentuated over the last five years. Yeah. How have you processed some of the writing coming out of places like San Francisco? I'm thinking, you know, Leopold, situational awareness, where if you look back over the last couple years he's been right over and over and over. At the time a lot of people reading that even in AI seemed would think like, hey, this seems pretty aggressive. But to date he's been quite accurate. Even, even some more sci fi kind of exercises like AI 2027 have been relatively accurate up until this point. But how did you, how did you process, you know, basically kind of the analysis coming out of the AI community and SF going back a few years. It's hard for me to kind of decipher how this is going to play out and who are going to be winners and losers and how that plays. But it's very hard when you take a step back in this country and really throughout the world to not believe we don't need a lot more infrastructure build for communities and economies to thrive. So at the end of the day we're deeply investing in these businesses to meet this moment. And we think we're pretty early in this journey and are going to keep investing into it. Is sovereign AI driving any of the international demand that you mentioned? You start to see some of the hyperscalers evaluate more build out in Southeast Asia as an example. So they'll try to use exactly. Malaysia, Indonesia, natural gas, but adjacent to Singapore for law. So in that regard that's happening. Certainly Taiwan's one of our biggest markets. That's because of TSMC. So we are commissioning almost 10 gigawatts of power primarily for TSMC. So that's not for data centers but for fabs for the fabs for the chip. I had no idea they were so electricity intensive. Significant demands in Taiwan for that adjacency. Yeah. So. And that's happening in the US too. As you think about some of the chip fab factories that are being built. So it's not just the AI factories. Yeah. It's the infrastructure around it that needs the electron. Okay, help me understand some of the less sexy or less obvious maybe pieces of the grid that need to be modernized need to scale up. If we're familiar with the turbine, we're familiar with the nuclear reactor, these are very tractable things. But I'm sure there's so many other pieces of the electron delivery supply chain that are important and you're involved in. I mean if you just take a step back, the system is really is built, was built for a coal plant to in one direction flow electrons towards a house or a factory. And that was a 24,7 flow. Very stable. Exactly. And then you still had peak demand during the day or dead or summer. Summer. Exactly. So that was where we started. Yeah. Now you have all these variable forms of generation. Yeah. On top of that, you have electrons that are going in multiple directions because you have people selling their electrons back into the grid on their roof. Yeah. And the system is not optimizing all those electrons. Yeah. So we have an old machine, for all intents and purposes, that is not doing a great job matching the supply with where the demand is. Part of that is for boring reasons, like we have islanded grids in the US it's not one connected machine to project things to where it needs to be. Is that possible? Yes. Given the geographic diversity and like how spread out the United States is, could. Is it possible that I could sell electrons in California and it could wind up in New York? Certainly in the 48 states for sure. Really? I mean, there's no reason we shouldn't be able to build a meshed grid that works today. We don't have that now. I think in this regard, the federal government's pushing hard on historical precedent to try to drive efficiency because that's a faster way to incremental electrons in some way than simply building more plants. We're working on that. Yeah. Part of that is making new connections that bring islands together. Part of it is also, and this is frankly the harder part, different regulatory structures and market practices to allow different players to get paid in that. And that is sometimes harder. Yeah. But we're working our way through that. Talk about nuclear timelines, we've seen a bunch of announcements from hyperscalers. It feels like 2030, 2032. You see 2035. Even stepping aside from your business just broadly, I think a lot of us track vodal. That took decades. When do you think we'll be getting new electrons from a new nuclear plant in America? You bet. I mean, I start with the fact that we've got about 56 existing plants in the US that can add 5 gigawatts of power by upgrading running. Okay, that can happen this time and that counts. Yeah. And that'll happen soon. So that's the first step. New incremental plants. 2032, 2031. That's about right. Yep. But then we can scale and in the next decade this can become a much more meaningful part of the equation for the country in the world. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Is that going to be deeply capex intensive at some point? Once that 2032 there's a rationalization, a realization that working but we in order to 10x100x the nuclear production there's going to be some sort of capex boom and a delay in the investment before it gets recouped and starts generating electricity. Nuclear is definitely capex heavy, but then it lasts forever. Yeah, so the life cycle cost of nuclear can be very compelling. But there is a significant upfront cost. Talk about some of the other initiatives that are happening broadly around electrification and just grid reliability. We've talked to companies that are doing home batteries to try and release some of the. There's the Tesla Powerwall, there's Base Energy, there's a few other companies that are working in that space. Are there any other sort of near term between now and 2032 steps that you think America or the grid should be taking to just modernize and create more efficiency and more electrical abundance? Do think in most applications you're going to continue to see storage grow in the system. We historically think about storage primarily with solar. The reality is storage is going to start to be attached to many power generation sources to create more optionality for us and that's a good thing. And that attached with software can ensure that we get more of the electrons where it's needed. Yeah, you mentioned solar. What is the bull case for an American solar dominant industry? It feels like China is very cost competitive. There's discussions of hey, if they're cheap, maybe we should just buy them all and install them. We have a friend who has that take. There's other folks who are more on the tariff and let's, you know, put some barriers in place to give our indigenous industries a chance. Where do you fall on what it takes to roll out, I guess as much solar as we need? Yeah, I'd say stationary equipment, solar panels or batteries. China's ahead by a lot of where they struggle still to a larger extent is with rotating equipment. That requires another level of material sciences. That means tracking the sun. Well, no, outside of solar shifting in the comparison to a turbine, a wind turbine, although they're competitive, they're nuclear, it requires another level of heat resistant technology that we still have quite a lead on. That's great. But on the stationary equipment like a solar panel or storage, it's going to be tough. The investments that have been made in those factories to automate and the capex required, that is a challenge. But the reality is the country has a lot more resources than China has. Sure, we have very inexpensive gas. We have a much more advanced nuclear industry here. We have plenty of land that has good wind and solar to take advantage of in a grid that we can do more with that already exists versus Having to create it from scratch. So we have a lot going for us. But in this regard, we do need to build in a different way going forward than the way we have the last 25 years, albeit there wasn't a lot of electricity demand growth the prior 25 years. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Lots of Silicon Valley companies today building in energy. How are you thinking about M and A over the long term? I think a lot of these teams are very talented. Many of them will probably create interesting innovations, but a lot of them won't necessarily get to real scale and maybe be a standalone public company, let's say, but could be an interesting tuck in for a platform like GeV. How are you thinking about M and A? Are you meeting these companies? Do you ever invest in them? It's a big part of our future. I mean, we, we try to lean into the ventures game more and more, but we want to be thought of as a partner that these companies come to because we do know how to industrialize things at scale. We have very strong relationships with the end customers. And part of why I appreciate opportunities to come and talk with you guys is that's the company we want to be seen as, as a partner of choice whenever they choose that. It doesn't have to be M and A and an acquisition. It can be an alliance in different ways because it's going to take many different partnerships and many different structures for us collectively as a country to meet the moment for NOVA also doesn't have all the answers. There's a lot of stuff we know how to do, but there's a lot in this ecosystem that we've got to get better at. Which is why to some extent one of the big pluses for us right now is as our customers have shifted more to Silicon Valley and it's about 20% of our backlog today. They're making us better because they think about innovation differently, risk and reward a little differently. And timelines maybe. Timelines for sure. Timelines for sure. And I think that's good for everybody. Totally, totally. It's good. Yeah. Right. Right now there's, there's, you know, maybe, you know, everyone's frustrated because they want it, they want it now, but at the same time, yeah, just, just increasing that innovation cycle will be better for everyone in the long run. Did you feel like you went through a culture reset process during the spin out? What did you take from GE versus what did you, what do you try to create, build from the ground up? The fact that I had been there have been 25 years. It's because I always liked the ambition of the company and I always loved the people. At the same time, we always didn't perform as well as we could have. Which really comes back to focus. And the beauty of the spin out is it got us focused on one purpose every day. We weren't competing with a health care business or an aircraft engine business for capital. Our board wasn't diversified to solve many problems. We're here to lead in expanding the electric power system and ultimately decarbonizing the world in the process. And I think that focus, as much as anything, is also helping us attract another level of talent. Totally. Because I think a lot of young people see climate change as an example, one of their generation's biggest challenges. And there's no confusion that Vernova can be a company that can move that needle at scale. So it's helping us just perform better with focus. It's also helping us attract another level of talent and create our own culture while still protecting for the ambition and what was a great people culture. But we were a big company inside GE and sometimes too many goals or no goals at all. I love that you're like, it's so nice being at a small company now of 85,000. I have two final quick questions. One, I would love to know what a year in the life looks like for you. Where are you spending time with? Where's headquarters? When are you on site? When are you with customers? Like, are you flying around the world constantly? What's, what's your day to day look like over the course of a year? Yeah, I mean our headquarters is in Cambridge, Mass. In Austin. And we, we put the headquarters there because we did want to attract those young people that believe climate change matters and to give them a platform to start their career. And in that regard, it's worked. All that said, I'm not there much. You know, I've spent 10 weeks so far this year outside the U.S. wow, that's a lot in May. But the reality is this is a unique moment. There's a lot of complexity from a geopolitical perspective where governments are very engaged on power generation build out. So you have to show up and have those adult conversations in person. So this year has been very heavy international travel. Sure, I'm on the west coast multiple times a month. That's a given. Admittedly more in Northern California and Seattle than la. But right now we need to be consistently co creating with our customers because they're learning every day what they really need. And this has shifted from what it once was of buying a power purchase agreement and then just getting the electrons to asking us not just for an electron but to build an integrated system that allows them to run their end application the way that they want. And frankly, every customer has somewhat different strategies for what they want. If it's AI for what that AI factory needs to do, we need to co create with them if we're going to serve them. So we're showing up and I need to show up. And then last question. It seems like an incredibly AGI proof company or beneficiary business is huge and diversified. What does it take to get a job at GE Vernova today? Humility, intellectual interest and a real belief in the purpose. We are a company that's hiring a lot of people right now. Take our neighbors at MIT. We've got 69 kids starting with us in July. You took the whole class. 69. That's all because we need to complement those production workers with young engineers that get excited about building something and that's one of the things we're excited about. I think sometimes we talk so much on the risks of job loss totally through AI of course we're going to build a lot of cool stuff and be proud of it. And that takes a combination of a lot of different types of people and we want them to be with Vernova. That's amazing. Do the hyperscaler CEOs wine and dine you? No. There's that apocryphal story about, what was it? Larry Ellison and Elon Musk begging Jensen for GPUs and it's hotly debated. Are people debating? They're not begging you. We're working hard to serve them every day and showing up with with as much humility as we can and working to meet this moment. That's great. Well, thank you so much, Scott. Thanks for having. Great to meet you. Thank you. Appreciate it.

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