Welcome to the weather forecast for the week beginning Wednesday, April 27th, 2022. I'm Chief Meteorologist John Innsworth for Longmont Public Media. We are leaving another month behind. It's already April 30th. We'll have our new moon, so there won't be anything to see again. Looking at drought conditions, we were in abnormally dry. As you've noticed, nothing really has fallen out of the sky in so long. I can hardly remember what it's like. And so drought has gotten a little worse right here. I-25, including Broomfield and Longmont and Boulder, and like that. Well, maybe not Boulder. Boulder is still on that edge. Looking nationally, things are getting a little worse on the Great Plains here, too. A little bit in the west, not a lot of change. Things change more dramatically as temperatures rise because of the low relative humidities that temperature causes. Looking at our snowpack, I don't know how much longer. This will be a useful thing to include, but we can take a look at the sequence marching up to the present time. You can say we are now at 81% of median. So yeah, we're past peak snow time. April's pretty darn snowy, if not the snowiest month, and we've gone almost nothing. So we stayed below normal after being promising early start, hovering near 100% for the early part of the season, but temperatures are up and precipitation is down. Taking a look at this precipitation, you can see a long I-25 bone drive last seven days. Mountains do keep getting water, so that's very good news. We need it up there, keep the forest moist. But because of that, those places where we have fires now, these are the forecasts for Friday morning. So the fires are actually back down here in the afternoon, as long as the humidity goes down, temperatures go up, you get a burst of burning activity, and then that plume travels along. So by Friday morning, the smoke is becoming kind of moderate. It's not horrendous, but it's definitely noticeable. I couldn't even smell some yesterday. Looking at severe weather, the probability of severe weather expands as we go into spring for the fourth week of April. We now have a 1% chance of severe weather within 25 miles climatologically, you can see the amazing bullseye in Oklahoma, Texas, and southern Kansas. So yeah, what we really are going to have over the next, I have four days here, a chance of thunder on Wednesday. Thunder to the northeast corner of us with marginal and slight risk up here. And that moves out on the plains, hitting that bullseye spot almost like it's climatology. And then that moves up into quite the Ohio River, guys, upper Mississippi Valley for Saturday. Taking a look at our progression of weather systems. We have a front draped up here and across the north, an over front that's made it down to the Gulf, bringing Florida some showers and like that. For Thursday, there's our storms focused on that front, just to our northeast. Just don't get it right back here in Longmont Denver area. Looking the next day for Friday, there's our severe weather out on the plains. We have heavy rain up here, a little bit of mountain snow and snow mix up here, but again right around I-25, nothing. This is a critical fire weather down here where there already are fires. For Saturday, cold front blast through, it cools us down and leaves us again dry. So over the next 10 days, our normal high goes from 65 to 68. Night time temperatures 36 to 40. We have this cool down for the weekend, but still it's within normal. So nothing really to complain about there. We are not seeing excessive heat. We have little chances of showers now and then. You'll see Tuesday a little better chance here and maybe some scatter next week. But in case I haven't said it recently, this is an ensemble. So they have multiple runs of precipitation for each six hour period, where things are a little bit different in the model and they look to see how robust the rain signal is. So the more green you get lined up, the more confident we are that we'll get some showers. Again, that's half a week out or almost a week out, so that lowers confidence. Looking at the notable storm passages over the next week, Friday noon, we have this one that's going to bring in a lot of wind. Not a lot of precipitation, but when the lines are close together in the upper map here, the winds are strong. And these little barbs in here and flags show 50, 55, 60, 70, not winds. Looking at the surface, we have a low forming over here near Colby or Burlington and the lines are close together again, especially right along the mountains here. We have some mountain snow, but nothing on the plains. So winds across the state Friday, noon to Friday evening are going to be very high and we're going to see gusts. So these are sustained winds of 20s, 30s. So you can see gusts up to half again more to twice that, if it's possible. So batting everything down for Friday, watch that fire danger. Again, I'm sure the BVF, fire warnings up again. We have to go all the way out to Sunday, Monday, the next week for this next trough. And there's a little scattering of showers, some severe weather down in Oklahoma and Texas again, way back. I'm sorry, that was Saturday. I guess, yes, back it up. Sunday, Monday, midnight is this system with a little chance of showers and severe weather down south. Now for next Friday, PM, another trough coming in, a little short wave ridge pulling out and pretty much rain. And even the mountains, temperatures will be so warm that let me see if I can even find those. The temperatures below freezing are way up here in Canada. The whole nation is warm at this point. So I'll just put this in motion. You can see Thursday into Friday, here comes our wind producing, hopefully not fire making or spreading winds. And that becomes a little bowling ball out on the planes and drifts up northward. Next trough comes in for Sunday, Monday. And then there's one rocking down from Tuesday. This might give us a Tuesday chance of showers. Again, none of these are really impressive. For next Thursday, Friday, there comes that big trough kind of digging in sideways. The temperatures here, I'm not going to play too much of this because it's sort of a mishmash. The overall pattern is that we have heat. And then the cool, there comes the cold front for Friday with the winds. And then we just kind of stay in this boundary. There's cool to our east, warm in the southwest. And it kind of sloshes back and forth a little bit. You can see it's another cold front coming in for Tuesday. But it's passed really quickly. We'll definitely notice a cool bound on Tuesday, Wednesday. All right. And for showers, there's our Thursday, Friday pulling out. There's Friday. There's a lot going up. There's the severe weather up in Nebraska. Then we go into Saturday. And we're high and dry. If a button a little cool, freezing temperatures are way up here in Canada. For our Tuesday, here comes our net system there. And it just, again, stays pretty far to the north of us. So I'm not too excited. The GFS is more excited in the ensemble about the precipitation chances than the GFS operational model is here. And then we have a Friday, Saturday, next week, even maybe a thunderstorm or two. But that's so far out that we can just hope. For the next five days, very light chances of precipitation, along I-25. Nothing out on the northeast plains in that spot. For snow, it's higher elevations, only getting it. For the next 10 days, scooping in those other small chances, maybe get a quarter inch. I think that's probably overdone, I'm afraid. The forecaster rule of thumb is, when in drought, leave it out when we're talking about precipitation. And those are snow chances, again, high elevations only. But there's six-inch amounts in here. So for Wednesday into Thursday, we warm up to about 80. Friday, we cool down with wind. Saturday and Sunday, hover around 70. And that kind of is the story in a Monday and Tuesday, when, at least Sunday and Tuesday, some chances of showers return. I can just get this turned around and get the land or moisten up, so it'll be easier to get rain beyond that. We have a new month coming in, so we have the May Outlook. Now, we're looking at what the temperatures actually have been since January. Most of the nation's average below normal. And every time we've talked about the outlook, we've had it above normal for the West. So, yeah, I wouldn't put a lot of confidence in it. It's not the heat that we are currently working with. We are working with the drought. So, dry conditions, they expect, with some precipitation coming down up into the Southwestern states like that. So we'll see. That forecast has at least been pretty spot on. For more frequent weather updates and local news, check out LongmontLeader and BroomfieldLeader.com. This has been your weather forecast. I'm Chief Meteorologist John Insworth. Keep looking up.


Welcome to the Endless Knot. Today is the final part of a three-episode series about the word average, in which we look at stats and stocks. In the previous videos, we started from the word average and its origins in maritime shipping, and looked at the development of probability mass and their role in property insurance. How Islamic scholar Al-Kindi did early work on probability and statistics, and passed on Arabic numerals to Europe, which were picked up by Fibonacci, who inspired who was the first to mention the problem of points, which was incorrectly solved by the gambling scholar Cardano, but was correctly solved by Pascal and Fermat, whose math became the backbone of probability theory, which was written up by astronomer Huygens, and became useful in solving astronomical problems, like Gauss locating the dwarf planet Ceres, and was added to by other mathematicians like Bayes, Laplace and Poisson, which eventually became useful to property insurance companies, which earlier had got their start after the Great Fire of London. Well the other thing that the insurance game really needed to get going, particularly life insurance, was statistics, and the lack of good mathematical ways of dealing with statistics was holding things back. Sure, there had been some fairly basic forms of life insurance since the ancient world, such as burial societies in Rome.  And you can find statistics being collected and used in some fairly basic ways since the ancient world. Again, the Romans collected census data, and in medieval England, shortly after William the Conqueror and the Normans defeated King Harold and the Anglo-Saxons at the Battle of Hastings, the Normans went about compiling census data for taxation purposes, into a document known as the Doomsday Book, which really just means Judgment Day Book, by way of analogy to the finality of judgments on Judgment Day, and not actually as apocalyptic as the Norse Ragnarok we started off with back in the first video. In a surprisingly sophisticated use of statistics, the Greek historian Thucydides records how the Athenians used what we would now call the mode, loosely speaking, a kind of average of a number of attempts to count bricks in the wall of the city they were invading to estimate the size of ladders they'd need to scale the wall. And in the 9th century, Arab mathematician Al-Kindi's work, with using letter frequencies to decipher encrypted texts, can also be seen as a mathematical foundation to statistics. But it wasn't until the 19th century, when the new probability math was brought to bear on the analysis of statistics, that statistics as a mathematical endeavor really took off. The word statistics, by the way, doesn't necessarily refer to numerical data. It actually comes from the new Latin, statistikus, affairs of state. So it really originally referred to collecting and studying any information about the state. It came into German as statistik, meaning of the collection and evaluation of data relating to the study of the state. And after the 18th century German political scientist Gottfried Achenwald, the word began to narrow in meaning. It was introduced into English by Sir John Sinclair in his 21 volume Statistical Account of Scotland, in which he acknowledges barring the word from German but applying it to a slightly different meaning. In his words, an inquiry into the state of a country for the purpose of ascertaining the quantum of happiness enjoyed by its inhabitants and the means of its future improvement. So the data was still not specifically numerical, but by 1829 the word had further narrowed in sense to numerical data collected and classified, and no longer referred specifically to data about the state. But for the advancement of numerical statistics, even if not by that name, and specifically leading to the use of statistics in life insurance, we turn to Sinclair's earlier fellow Scotsman, John R. Buffnott, a physician by trade who also engaged in literary and mathematical pursuits in his off time. As a writer, he was a member of the early 18th century Scriblerist Club, an informal association of authors, including such satirical big wigs as Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and John Gay. Our Buffnott may have even provided inspiration for elements of Swift's gulliver's travels and Pope's the Dunsead. In addition, he also likely invented the English national personification, John Bull, originally a figure of political satire. In more probability related endeavors, he translated Huygens book on probability, making it the first work on probability in English. But for our purposes, our Buffnott's most important mathematical contribution is in the study of birth rates. In doing that study, he made one of the first inferences from statistical data when he noted that there was a slightly higher proportion of girls to boys in birth rates, which he took to be evidence of divine providence, as it allowed for the fact that males die young more often than females due to fighting in wars and such. Well, write data, but wrong conclusions. Actually, before our Buffnott, John Grant made similar observations about birth and death rates, compiling the first life table in the 17th century. Grant was in fact a haberdasher by trade, but is now remembered as one of the first demographers, and in recognition of his statistical work was elected to the Royal Society and is now sometimes referred to as the father of statistics. Not bad for a haberdasher.  Too bad he didn't have insurance. But the other 17th century person to work on the mortality tables, which were necessary for life insurance, was economist Sir William Petty. Charter member of the Royal Society, Petty also apparently came up with the idea of laissez faire government. As a statistician, his only statistical technique was the basic use of simple averages, but he was nevertheless able to estimate population sizes. But the first to work out a life table relating the death rate to age, which you can imagine would be crucial for life insurance, was Edmund Halley. Yes, that Edmund Halley, who discovered the comet that came to be known as Halley's Comet by studying earlier sightings and thereby predicting its return in 1758, some 16 years after his death, bringing us to the motifs of calculating the movement of celestial objects and to predicting the future. Actually, comets themselves had been seen as predictors of great calamity since time immemorial. Indeed Halley's Comet itself was taken as an omen, at least retrospectively, of the Norman Conquest when William the Conqueror defeated King Harold, taking over the throne of England as we saw earlier. It's even pictured in the Bayou Tapestries. Also seemingly depicted in the tapestry is the death of King Harold, who legend has it, was killed by an arrow to the eye. Petty didn't see that coming. But as I mentioned before, it wasn't until probability mass were applied to statistics that statistics as a field could begin in earnest. And one of the first to do this was Belgian astronomer and mathematician Adolf Kettelet, who was, by the way, deeply influenced by the astronomy work of Pierre Simon Laplace, who did most of the legwork on Bayes theorem, which was very important to probability. As an astronomer, Kettelet founded and directed the Brussels Observatory and studied periodicity in celestial objects. At the time, the probability mass were mainly being used in astronomy, like Carl Friedrich Gauss using the method of least squares to predict the orbit of Ceres. Well, Kettelet took what he learned from probability in astronomy and began applying it to other things, including the statistics of human populations, and came up with the concept of the average man. There's that word average again, who is characterized by the mean values of measured variables that follow a normal distribution, which means that he's responsible for the body mass index, or BMI. So you can blame him as you died in an attempt to reach some unrealistic expectation of the ideal body. And that brings us to the first life insurance company, which was actually founded sometime earlier in 1706 by William Talbot, Bishop of Oxford, and Sir Thomas Allen, and was called the amicable society for a perpetual assurance office. The scheme was basically that members, who had to be between the ages of 12 and 45, could purchase one to three shares at a fixed rate, and proceeds would then be divided between the families of deceased members proportional to the number of shares purchased. So not taking into account probability at all. Plus anyone over 45 was out of luck, like the British mathematician James Dodson. Dodson worked as an accountant and math teacher, and when he tried to join the amicable society, he was turned down as he was then over 45. So he decided to do something about it, hatching a scheme for a more equitable insurance company. He would build on the tables of Edmund Halley so that the premiums charged would be calculated on age-based life expectancy. Unfortunately, Dodson wasn't able to get his scheme off the ground before he died at the age of 52, leaving three motherless children unprovided for. Fortunately, antiquarian and scholar Edward Rowe Morris, who worked on history and typography, picked up the baton and eventually got the equitable life insurance society founded in 1762. Oh, and in case you were worried, Dodson's children were eventually provided for by equitable life in recognition of Dodson's work on the life tables. As for Morris, he decided that the chief official of the company would be termed an actuary, a word which had previously been used to refer to a registrar or clerk, but since then gained its more specific sense in the world of insurance. Though Morris was the first to use that title, he wasn't really a statistician, so the first actual actuary was Welsh physician, physicist, and statistician William Morgan when he was hired as assistant actuary in 1774. In addition to working for equitable life, Morgan published papers on actuarial science and is considered the father of that field. He got the job on the recommendation of his uncle Richard Price. Price was a mathematician and non-conformist preacher who was, among other things, the literary executor of mathematician Thomas Bayes, gathering for publication all of Bayes' unpublished work, including the work on probability and Bayes' theorem. Price continued the work on life tables for the equitable society. Now one thing you may have noticed from the preceding discussion is that these early life insurance companies were actually assurance companies. Indeed the terms were used rather interchangeably and assurance is actually the older term coming through French from the Latin ad to and Securus safe. And indeed to this day many British life insurance companies are called assurance companies, whereas insurance is used to refer to marine and fire insurance. This distinction between assurance and insurance was suggested by Charles Babbage, inventor of the analytical engine, the world's first computer. And Babbage fits into our story in more ways than one, for he, along with our friend Kettle, inventor of the average man, formed the Royal Statistical Society, a group which fostered the continuing work on statistics and promoted the use of statistics for the common good. As a bit of a coda, aside from the insurance market, there's another kind of market to come out of those coffee shops I mentioned way back in the first episode, the stock market. The first company that issued stocks was the Dutch East India Company, not to be outdone by their trading rivals, Britain followed suit. But the problem was where could the exchange of stock be carried out? At first they did so in the Royal Exchange, but were banned from there reportedly on account of their rude behavior. So instead they began frequenting one of the nearby coffee houses, in particular Jonathan's Coffee House, where there were regular postings of stock and commodity prices. So the first stock market in England, and this was the beginning of the London Stock Exchange, or LSE. Many similar institutions subsequently popped up around the world, including the New York Stock Exchange in the US. And this is where American journalist Charles Dow founded the Wall Street Journal to report on business and finance. Dow also, along with statistician Edward Jones, invented the Dow Jones industrial average. Basically by averaging the stock prices of certain companies thought to be indicators of how the market was doing as a whole, you could make a pretty good prediction of market behavior overall. When the average is rising we call that a bull market. The opposite is the bear market. Basically a bear is a trader who is pessimistic about how the market is going and wants to sell stock, whereas a bull is a trader who intends to buy believing the price of the stocks will go up. It's all about predicting the future. And where did the bear and bull terms come from? Well some suggest the analogy that bulls fight with their horns pointing up, whereas bears fight with their claws pointing down. However, bear seems to get this sense from the expression bear-skin-jobber. From the proverb sell the bear-skin before one has caught the bear. And bull seems to go back to a slang expression used in Jonathan's Coffee House. The word bull itself comes from old Norse bolly, which can possibly be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European root bell, meaning to blow or swell. As for bear, well that's an interesting one. The usual Proto-Indo-European root, meaning bear, leads to Latin ursus as in ursa minor, the little bear constellation which now contains the North Star. In ancient Greece, when astronomers like Ptolemy were charting the skies, the North Star didn't exactly line up with the North Pole as it does now, so the whole constellation of ursa minor indicated North. The Greek derivative of this root is arktos, meaning bear, and we get the word arctic from this Greek word because that ursa minor constellation marks out the arctic, not because of polar bears. But the English word bear doesn't come from this root at all, instead it comes from Proto-Germanic, bero, meaning dark, so the dark animal. This is what's called a taboo replacement. When a culture believes a certain object or concept can't be named directly, perhaps for religious reasons or other social taboos, they come up with an indirect way of referring to it. So the bear becomes instead the dark animal, and this may also lie behind the name of the hero beowulf from the Anglo-Saxon eponymous epic poem. One explanation of his name is that it means beowulf, which is what's called a kenning, a kind of metaphorical play on words. What acts like a predatory wolf to bees? A bear who steals their honey. So another way of saying bear without actually saying bear. And the final upshot of all this is that beowulf, who was no average man and was said to have the strength of 30 men in his hand grip, has for that reason lent his name to the beowulf cluster, a way of using a network of ordinary, or should we say average, personal computers, our old friend Babbage's progeny to cheaply produce a system capable of large computational power. Beowulf clusters are popular with universities who don't have a lot of cash, but need to do the sort of complex calculations that are required for things like finding binary pulsars, the kind of astronomy we can do now as the result of all the mathematical advances of the past. Thanks for watching. Let me know how you've liked this miniseries, so I know if it's a good format to come back to. If you've enjoyed these etymological explorations and cultural connections, please subscribe to this channel or share it. And check out our Patreon where you can make a contribution to help me make more videos. I'm at alliterative on Twitter and you can read more of my thoughts on my blog at alliterative.net.


Good morning everybody. It is October 2nd 2023 and I'm here at beautiful summit automotive Jeep in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. We're right off Highway 41. We got the truck sound 41, the Jeep sound 41. You cannot miss us if you're traveling down 41 in Wisconsin going through Fond du Lac. We're right on the west side here. Anyways October 2nd we're starting off the month. We got some really nice inventory that came in. We were closed yesterday so this is the first day of the month for us. I was here yesterday, booked all these in, booked in a bunch of new cars that we got in and just got to keep it rolling. You know we had a really good month for October so a lot of used cars over 107 or something like that and then I knew cars was pretty good too so I hope everybody's month was strong and starting off October right. Typically one of the slower months in the car business so we're gonna try and keep it rolling with all this fresh inventory and hopefully we can keep it going here. So grab your coffee, let's go. Also all these vehicles will be linked in the description below on YouTube to our current inventory. We're gonna get these all pictured today. Worked hard last week so that we can get caught up on this stuff. So let's get going and I hope you enjoy the video. Alright starting off here we have a 2020 Chrysler Pacifica. This one has 39,000 miles. This is a Touring L. It's got the quads. Still in go, blind spot monitoring. It's got the roof rack. This is an S appearance package. Red velvet is the color and it's got 39,000 miles on it. Now it's got Michelin tires and it's really clean. I didn't see any dents on it and it's a I believe it's a one owner from Minnesota. Anyways, super clean on the outside. Really a nice ride. So we're gonna get that cleaned up today. Right here I've got a 2022 Chevy Tahoe RST. Isn't that thing good looking? Two-tone with the black on top. This one has 31,000 miles on it. You get the 22 inch wheels with the RST package. This one's got the towing package and really a sharp ride. I think it's got the quads in it. Second row bucket seats and next up I've got a 2020 GMC Sierra 1500. This is an 84. This thing is really clean too. This one has a little bit more miles. 53,000 miles. It looks big for a 1500. I actually thought it was a 2500 when I was booking it in yesterday, but it's actually a 1500 10-speed auto 5.3 liter. It's got the multi-pro tailgate and other than a little ding on this truck on the tailgate, this thing is in immaculate shape. Speaking of immaculate shape, I've got a 2021 Ram 3500 here. This is a big horn level A. So it's kind of the base big horn package. I do like the wheels on it. These wheel simulators look really good. They almost look like the polished aluminum, but they're just simulators. Either way they look really good. This one's got some really cool interior. It's like a light tan, almost a brown. I know it's a little bit. Got a lot of dew on everything this morning, but you can see that tan interior. This one has 46,000 miles. This is also an Eisen heavy-duty transmission. It's got the high output Cummins diesel. This one has a 30,000 pound factory fifth wheel in it. So it's ready to tow anything. Right here we've got a really nice trade-in. This is a 2020 Ford F250 XL. So it's the work truck, but it is absolutely perfect. I didn't see a dent on it and it's got a utility box. Now this is a reading utility box. Series 2. It's got three storage cabinets on each side. The classic 2 reading utility box. Looks like this one's out of Pennsylvania, but it was a trade. They bought a big dump truck from us and this was their trade-in. So really a nice trade. Here is a 2021 Ram 1500 Laramie night edition. This was also a trade-in. They traded this in on a brand new truck and this thing is really nice. This is a Laramie level 2. It's got the heated cooled seats, the 12 inch radio, the night edition with the 22 inch wheels and I didn't see any dents on this one. Really nice condition as well. Billet Silver is the color on this one if you're curious and this one's got 49,000 miles on it. So almost 50,000 miles and it still looks pretty much brand new and we'll be getting that in today as well. Here is a 2021 Jeep Grand Cherokee. This was also a trade-in and this was a trade-in on a brand new Jeep. I'm guessing they probably bought a red one. Usually when people buy these they stick with the same color and options. This is a Laredo so it's kind of the entry level package. It's a 4x4 and this one has 27,000 miles on it and is pretty much mint. Now if you're looking for a inexpensive half-ton truck, look no further than this one. This is a 2014 Toyota Tundra SR5 Crew Max so it's got the big doors, the alloy wheels. It's a really nice condition considering this one has 157,000 miles on it. Look at this truck, 157,000 miles. I mean the frame's barely got a corrosion on or anything. I mean 157,000 miles. Crazy. Drop-in bed liner. It's pretty clean inside. We got to probably scrub the seats and stuff but other than that it's got the tow package all ready to go and with 157,000 miles I'm sure it's going to be a really good deal. And lastly I've got a 2019 Challenger that came in trade. Can you guess what they bought? I'll never guess. This guy traded this in on an F350 Supercab Longbox Dooley Powerstroke Diesel. They traded this Challenger but this is a really cool car. This is an RT. It's got the plus package. It also has the TA which stands for Trans Am and it's a scat pack so it's got the 6-4 Hemi in it and it's got automatic transmission. It's got the 8.4 radio with factory navigation system. It's also got the dynamics package and it also has the active dampening system on it so it's kind of a loaded up Challenger, plum crazy purple of course and then it's got the satin finish wrap on the trunk, roof and hood and then it's got the Mopar hood pin package so that came right from the factory like that. Really cool car and that's really it. That's all we got in over the weekend. There was a big lifted Chevy that my guy grabbed already to start working on and then another ram half ton quad cab big horn level 2 that my other guy grabbed to start cleaning because we got to get them going. We got to keep everything rolling. We got to pump up our inventory. Selling 100 some vehicles every month. You got to replenish those with new vehicles so these are all the ones that either new trucks that got to get parked yet or these are some trade-ins from last week that we just didn't get to and I apologize for not doing a lot walk last week but I had a guy on vacation and I had a lot of his duties. If you remember this truck this is the one that we had to pressure wash the frame was just horrendous on it. We also put some new tires on it and it looks a little bit better now. This was the one that was from I think it was Idaho or something but they brought it the entire state back with it but it looks really good now and now we just got to get it cleaned up and on the lot here but anyways that's the lot walk. As always if you want me to do something different you want to see something else you want me to explain something more on the vehicles. Oh yeah this F-250 that's got the 6-2 in it V8 so anyways hope everybody has a great October start to October and I had a good finish to September. Thanks again for checking out the video and check these all out in the description below or at summitauto.com. Thanks again and have a great day and let's get at it!


To keep your home or business secure as possible, give each system user a unique user code. To begin creating a user code, log into the mobile app, tap the menu icon, followed by users. Tap the plus sign to add a new user. Enter the user's first and last name, and then tap Create. Next, tap the Access Code field and enter a unique four-digit code. Next, choose which devices the user should have access to. You can grant access to any security panels and or locks on the account. Review all the information for accuracy, then tap Save. The user code will now be saved in the panels and locks the user has been granted access to. If you would like to customize the access period, tap Time to restrict access to certain times or create a user code that expires at a future date. Finally, if you would like the user to receive notifications from the system, you can enter a phone number and email address in the contact information fields. Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube page and click the Show More tab underneath the video where you can view valuable links pertaining to this product, similar how-to videos, and our low-cost, no-contract alarm monitoring services.


What's happening YouTube thanks for tuning back into the channel today right here at the rest of all mechanic We've got some more stuff going on today with the Duramax build and we're going to be focusing in on our heads As you guys saw in the last video We got our heads back from the machine shop and now we're going to be focusing on doing a couple little upgrades to them So you can see right here. We've got some comp cams valve springs. Those are going to be going on We're going to show you guys how to do that We got some upgraded retainers for them and we're going to be putting them on with some ARP head studs as well Doing the install on that one and we might even throw in the rocker arm adjustment to the video also today Depends on how far I get on the build. So make sure you stay tuned. We've got all that coming for you So here we are We've got the heads back from the machine shop and I kind of had them do just like a half job So I could show you guys what we do for the other top end the valve train portion of it So I had them just do the decking portion of it. They just decked it clean the head. That was about it So now we're pulling out the valves one at a time We've got a valve spring compressor and we're going to pull our valves out There's still quite a bit of carbon build up on the tops of these things. So we're going to get these cleaned off Just a little bit here first what we're going to be doing get those out and then We'll pull out a dirty one. I've kind of already cleaned this one up But we're going to kind of show you guys This one's pretty clean and then we'll eventually be valve lapping that one in But let me get a dirty one out here for you just to show you what's still in it Retainers right there. We are now. We've got our valves spring Pulled that and then we'll see how kind of nasty these ones still are. We'll see if we can get it to focus here focus focus focus focus So we've got quite a bit of carbon and stuff build up on the valves Still some nasty stuff. So we're going to get those cleaned off What I've got for that one is I've got some Mopar EGR valve cleaner or EGR cleaner Which is pretty much just dawn dish soap that we've got in Just a little bucket right here that we're going to be able to put these valves in let them soak a little bit Maybe take a little bit of scotch bright to them Get them cleaned off. So they're nice smooth surface on the top We're going to do these one at a time because we don't really want to change the position that they're in in the head And then we're going to be lapping them back in for that portion Also, we're going to be replacing our valve seals too. Don't want to forget that one We'll show you what we do for pulling the valve seals out You can see our valve seals are right here So these ones are actually pretty easy to get off. You just take a little tool to be able to pry up on them evenly back and forth and Then That is it they pop right out and then our new ones We've got over here. Let me grab real quick Got a bag of our New ones here and then those will just kind of put over the cap make sure the Seat right here is all nice and cleaned off got a nice even assembly And then these will just push back onto that section as well But the other thing is you don't want to do that until after you're done with your lapping So you can get all of the lapping material out, but pretty much you'll just push right on right there Okay, so we've got another one to lap in right here So we've got our valve got it all cleaned up and then we're going to take just a little bit of our lapping compound. Oh Comes out fast Gotta watch out for that one So get a little bit of that on the valve itself and then we're kind of kind of just slip it in Real nice and easy like Get it in there and then I know a lot of other guys use just a standard valve lapping tool However, I've got a special one. You guys snap on drill with a small piece of tubing that just so happens to be The same diameter on the inside as our valve So we will put that one on there and then I'll take a little bit of this soap compound Just a touch of my finger so I can give a slight amount of pressure on the back side to the valve while we're turning and giving pressure and pulling on the valve Little bit set of time. We're gonna switch directions Just give it a little bit of relief here in there and that should be about enough there for us You get this one off of here Yep, they're in the background. We're watching Some YouTube videos here, of course and then we Clean the end off of the valve there and you can see we've got a nice lapped in Edge to it right here and then our head is also lapped in so now we're going to take some rags Clean that off clean the surface off and then we're going to be putting our springs and retainers back on I'll show you exactly which ones we're putting on Big shout-out to my buddy Justin Dow running his Saturday live stream here So what we're going to be doing is when you guys put these valve seals in you're going to want to get just a little bit of lubrication on them there on The inside just to help them see into the head a little bit better And they're just going to kind of press into place Because like I said the inside of these is just you know the rubber inset Pushed on just like that should be just that easy guys and then the valve springs that we've got for you We've got here's the part number you guys can see that it's a comp cams valve spring number Now don't be alarmed when you guys look these up. They're actually going to come up as a Ford 5 4 4 6 Competition valve spring or if you look into the description below You know when you kind of get below there it says also fits some Duramax application Excuse me so that is going to be the one that we will be using for that It's going to have an increased spring rate on it. They are the 101 113 valve spring diameter So it's going to match up to the same one now the the retainers You know is going to match up to that one the retainers that you're going to want if you match up to these springs They're going to be the 701 dash 3 2 comp cams valve spring retainers now It's very hard to tell the difference But there is a slight difference between the lower seat and the upper seat the upper seat is going to literally be About a tenth of an inch smaller So if you can't tell make sure you measure it match it up figure that one out correctly So now we're going to get these put in there with the new retainers and we're going to use our old Or the new hats and then we're going to use our old retainers that we actually took out So now another little tip or trick for you You've got these tiny little retainers here, and we've got our valve spring Compressed with our compressor tool now the hardest thing is to get these onto there and make sure they hold on in their correct place So usually what I like to do is take a little bit of this trans Assembly lube which is you know kind of like a midline grease We're going to wipe that on there and Then we're going to be able to sit this on to Our valve Here within there, and then that grease is going to hold it into place So we don't have to worry about it falling out or anything like that See if we get a close-up in there so you can see that one Yep, we got the grease holding it into place, and then we'll get the second retainer And hold that into place and be able to let go of our spring compressor And now that we've got our valve retainers on and everything all seated back into place You guys get this focus and you guys can see how it's all in there And you guys can see the difference between the size of the valve springs on that portion So we're still using our same valves, but the upgraded spring rates So we are not going to have any valve float or anything like that when we're at higher rpm So all in all this is going to be pretty awesome, and I've got a lot more valves to do So I'm going to get back to that one and not bore you guys with doing You know 16 of these per cylinder head. So yep going to get to it All right, so now we're getting over to Putting our cylinder heads on prior to you want to make sure that you get these things nice and clean We ended up using a just snap on. Let's see what is this thing? CSA 8 6 USA yeah So it's just one of these scrapers to get all the big stuff off Kind of scrape that all down and then we took a little bit of scotch bright to the areas that were you know a little bit rough But we don't want to take a whiz wheel or anything because this is a nice block We checked the surface on it, and it looks pretty good now what we've got is our ARP head studs we're going to be putting these in you can obviously tell the top from the bottom These are coated with a little bit of oil You know just a nice really really thin coating just to help them kind of turn down in there The tops of them have an Allen bit on here on the end I believe they're like a five millimeter Allen, and then we're going to get these put into all of the openings right here And then all of these will oh there's no torque spec to these They are recommended by ARP to literally just tighten them down Hand tight is all they say to do three years later Just a nice little slight snug to it and then our head gaskets Have a look at these over here. We've got a set of GM AC Delco Grade C head gaskets. We had our heads milled there and gone through you guys saw that one So we make sure that if you guys do have your heads Deck milled whatever that you do use grade C head gaskets So we'll get these put on and we'll get all of our head studs put in as well All right So now we've got all of our head studs on and we've got our head gaskets into place a couple of preliminary things before you Do all that obviously make sure all of your holes are cleaned out of any kind of coolant or Debris or anything like that just so they're nice and even it's always a good idea to have a look across all of them Just to make sure we're even in a line all the way down all of them so we've got all of those into place and then another FYI before you put your heads on and You have them all cleaned and everything is I would recommend to put your exhaust manifold and intake manifold on Especially on the driver side now I already put the driver side on so don't mention you know that one because this fact right here on it LBZ this bolt here on your intake runner and This is your CP3 that bolt does not come out or go in if you guys are trying to take that one off It does not work So if you wanted to take your intake runner on or off when the CP3 isn't it doesn't happen So you had to pull the head or he had to pull CP3 I don't want to pull the CP3 so we're gonna put the intake runner on to there And obviously you can see how nice and painted we got them and we're gonna get those on there with some of this sealant The Malay JV 8 this is the sealer that they recommend to use for the intake Gaskets because that is actually what came in our head gasket set See we can get some numbers off of this one doesn't look like it There we go We've got That kit Yep right there That's our head gasket kit and full upper gasket kit that we want with so we're gonna get some of that put on to the intake Little runner. There's a little groove in the channel on that one and make sure you don't go any more than like a little bit More than an eighth inch bead on that one don't want too much squirting out. So we'll get that one put on To that side and we'll get our exhaust manifold on as well because I don't feel like you know Mess around with that tight space in there. So we'll get that put on and then we'll get the head put on We'll talk about the procedure for getting everything torqued down with these head studs So when we get our bead of sealant put on it's just going to be enough to fill the channel Just like this I might have got a little bit much in most in a couple places, but not too bad So then we're going to get it put on to our intake manifold here Which has been all nice and cleaned out and we're going to get put on there and the intake manifold those nuts and bolts are torqued to 18 foot-pounds and then the exhaust manifold when we get that put on That one's going to be torqued to 28 foot-pounds do a obvious Circular motion and putting the bolts and torquing them to proper specs like you do that one that one that one that one You know work your way all the way around. Yeah, I'm using the camera to show So that's what we're going to do get that one on there and then we'll be ready to put the head on Intake manifold is all torqued onto place and now we're doing our exhaust manifold If you guys were following the build last time we put the manifolds and the uppipes on and we ended up having to make shifts Some hardware this time we picked up the correct hardware from KB diesel performance and they are these nice heat treated 12 point smaller head Bolts that we're going to be putting on for the pro fab performance manifolds also made in the USA big shout out to them You guys make some awesome products Get rid of my doofty plug because we got an EGT sensor coming in for this thing letter 2 So we'll get these torqued down to 28 foot-pounds Now another little tip when you guys are putting these things on if you're using the factory style Multilayer steel exhaust manifold gaskets you guys can see that With the pro fab performance or any kind of aftermarket manifold That is these will be kind of folded over because normally these have a little heat shield built in for the upper bolts all I like to do is just take a standard pair of pliers and Kind of bend them flat so that when we go to put our head studs and nuts on Everything is nice and even and you're not going to have any kind of issues with clearance for your nuts So make sure you go ahead and do that one so last but not least before you guys get to putting the actual head on to The block here is you're going to want to make sure that cylinder number one is on top dead center This is over here on the passenger side make sure this one is on top dead center just because that's where we're going to be starting at With doing our valve lash adjustment, which is what we'll be doing here after we get these things torqued on So cylinder one top dead center now we'll get to putting the actual head on to the block like a boss Sit and tighten right So before we start putting these together you want to make sure that you have the correct Lubricant we've got the ARP Ultra Torque fastener assembly lubricant. This is going to be for putting on to our Washers we want to make sure that we get a good amount put on to each side of the washer Maybe if I can open it dummy So you're going to want to get it on both sides of the washer smear it in really good and then kind of just set it on here the main point of this one is You're going to be the most even torque that you possibly can do for when we're torquing these things down And as you can see there's a lot of these to do So you're going to want to do them one at a time make sure you don't miss one Get a good amount of the assembly lube on each of the washers So they turn just nicely and get them on to there I also like to take just a little bit on my finger and Put it on to the actual threads of the studs that will get us the best option for the easiest Torquing sequence so when we get that on there It's going to be able to let us evenly torque them all the way around now the four Bolts here up top make sure you put a little bit of the lube on to the threads of those as well So they can get evenly torqued also So now we're going to get all of these put on to here and then the actual nuts here The factory ones that you take off are going to be a 17 millimeter the ARP nuts that we have on this one they're going to be a 16 millimeter 12 point nut and They are going to go right on to that point make sure again a little bit of this lube goes a long way It works great put some of that on there, and we're going to get those started now when we start to tighten these we're going to have to go into a little bit of a Tightening sequence here, and I'll show this one on camera get you guys be able to see that one That is going to be the sequence in which you tighten all of those bolts You're going to do all of these standard ones here, and then the m8s up top afterwards all on this kit Specifically for the lbz. You're going to be tightened your main head stud nuts down to 125 foot-pounds on final But you want to evenly distribute that over three rounds of torquing You're going to want to do it usually I do about 50 foot-pounds 95 foot-pounds and then 125 foot-pounds on the final round of doing these and then the smaller m8s They're going to be tightened to 25 foot-pounds again split that up evenly into two or three different torque sequences And it'll end up being golden for you on that point. Just take your time do it right. Don't miss any Next we're going to be putting in our push rods and then our Rocker bridge assemblies the bridges and the rocker arms with the bridge to go across make sure when you guys are putting these in you lose use a generous amount of assembly lube You can't ever use too much of this one We actually have the Lucas high-performance assembly loop is what we're using on this one And then we got us a set of heavy-duty forged push rods here It's like part number on this one is h.a.m. 07d 06 It's going to be the part number on those so get some assembly lube on these and get them put into the block All right now we've got all of the push rods put in plenty of assembly lube put on to the ends now We've got our rocker bridges already installed as well with plenty of assembly lube put on the pivot points for those as well As you can tell make sure you get them in the correct orientation The curve to them is going to be facing away from your injector opening as to leave enough clearance for that Injector and the valve cover to be in there and over that now We're going to put our rocker shaft and rocker assemblies into it and then here where they tighten Each one of those bolts are going to be tightened to 35 foot-pounds. I'm sorry 30 foot-pounds Yeah, we're going to do those evenly across from the middle out All right, so now we're going to get to the point that you guys really want to be able to watch and pay attention We're going to be doing valve lash adjustment now all kinds of different people have different opinions on this The actual technical Haines manual says to tighten these up when you get to 12.012 on their valve lash point zero one two millimeters Actually, then a lot of other people say zero one one loose zero one one or even zero one zero of what I've heard But I think what we're going to do is we're going to go right into the middle where you're going to do a nice even Zero one one valve lash tolerance on these Hopefully that'll be able to make things quiet enough for what we're looking for on a nice even startup Like I said, make sure you got plenty of assembly loop on to your rocky ridges before you guys start this one Now when I say top dead center on cylinder one You're going to want to make sure that you are on the compression stroke another way to figure that one out It's going to be right here on your crankshaft balancer There's going to be a little notch right there and it's going to match up with that little notch right there on the block And how you really know is you're going to rotate the engine over and if you see the intake valve opening Right before it's going down and then it comes up and the exhaust doesn't does not open It's not open that is going to be your compression stroke That is going to be the first round of numbers that you're going to be doing now I'm going to throw up a picture onto the screen right now and This one right here. We're going to be putting all these red arrows on here for you Every one of these red arrows are the ones that you are going to be tightening up So now you we are going to loosen up right here It's going to be a 14 millimeter nut that is the stop nut and then as you can see It's just a flat head screw that is the adjustment for our Backlash, so we've got a an 011 spacer in here and we're going to continue to tighten the set screw down Until right about there. We've got some just a little bit of drag on that one And then that's a pretty good spot right there and we're going to tighten not loosen Thank you third hand But yeah, we've got a nice even spot right there that we're working with See if we can get it fit back in there. Yep. Just on the tight side right there So that looks pretty good for that one moving on to the second one here. This is going to be our exhaust side Loosen up the screw And we've got plenty of lash in here. So tighten your upper hair right there This is a very nice one filming to have three hands on the operation There we've got just enough We've got just enough to drag it out there without too much grabbing onto that one Now for the second round of marks, we're going to be rotating the engine over 360 degrees We're going to go with that same mark on the balancer and we're going to rotate it 360 degrees around until cylinder one Is on top dead center of the exhaust Sorry of the exhaust stroke Then we are going to do the valve lash adjustment for these ones Highlighted here in this photo We're going to get those lashed up and we will see how things end up looking So now after we're done doing our second round of those now You're going to want to rotate your engine over at least I'd say 10 12 times Rotate it all the way over and then look here To find out your intake and obviously as the screwdriver or the piston is going down Your intake is going to be opening and then when it's coming back up that intake will be closed Obviously, that's your compression stroke So check all the valve lash again Check the first round of them on a compression stroke and then the second round of them on the exhaust stroke Just to make sure everything that is good and into place And then once that is done make sure your lock nuts are tightened to between 16 and 20 foot pounds Well guys, that's about all we've got for today's video Hopefully you enjoyed this one and actually learned something a little bit as well along the way I know these cylinder heads on these Duramaxes seem a little bit daunting, but They are to a certain extent But really they just take a whole lot of little bits of time to them Take your time on them get everything cleaned up right valve done Valve lash all your torque specs make sure those are all correct as well Having a motor that is all torqued down correctly cleaned up properly It's going to give you peace of mind Beyond what any mechanical value usually seems to be So make sure you guys give this video a thumbs up if you liked it today Make sure you go check me out on instagram facebook share where you can when you can it always seems to help Thank you guys for tuning in. I appreciate and as always you guys stay awesome


Welcome to start up the storefront presented by Orabora. All right. Welcome to the podcast on today's show. We're talking to Quaid from Bezel. Thanks for joining for people who don't know, what is Bezel? What do you, what's your company do? Bezel is a marketplace for authenticated watches. The way it works, we have 400 million plus dollars in watches available on the platform. You go on the platform, whether you're on the site or you're on the app, you can find anything that you want. We also have concierge available for every user so they can kind of check out any watch and get support in that whole process. Once you find what you want, the watch is overnighted to us where everything is thoroughly authenticated in-house by our team of experts. It goes through multiple hands, whether it's an authentication specialist or it's a watchmaker. We're doing everything from diagnostic checks, time loss, pressure tests. And they're also making sure everything was never reported stolen and then ultimately overnighting it to you. So the goal is scaling the fact that you can find everything you want possible, but making sure it's super trusted and you're getting everything you want. So many questions I have because I love the space. I wouldn't say a big watch guy, but I would say mediocre. Just wearing a whoop like you. I love whoops because it's, I'm a little bit more of a whoop than like an Apple watch because it still lets you still wear the watch. And the data is better and everything. 100%.  And so when you came into the market, what problem were you first looking at? Or what did you see? Were you like a collector? Would you have watches and maybe something bad happened? Or what was the problem you were seeing in the space? I think buying a watch because for most people, it's the most expensive thing they're going to buy. It's a really intimidating process. So my specific story, I was at Google before starting in the company, the first bonus I ever received, I, which maybe wasn't the rational decision at the time, bought a Rolex with it. And I just as a kid grew up loving watches. It was like this thing that I've always wanted to do. And then finally I got this tech job and I got the ability to afford it. And so as soon as that first bonus hit in January, I went and bought a watch. And I think my naivete at the time was I could walk into a Rolex boutique with the money that I looked up online for how much that watch cost and pay for the watch. In reality, there's like massive wait lists for these things. So you get pushed to the secondary market. And in the secondary market, it's kind of like, you have to know a guy or you have to know someone or you're pushed to kind of these more generalist market places or massive marketplaces. And it's up to you to shop the sellers and figure out what's real and fake and the only protection you got as a buyer was, you know, you could receive the watch and you could get it independently inspected and then you return it. And I just felt really nervous and scared. So I also am a sneaker collector and my expectation going into it was like, there should be like a goat or a stock X equivalent. There's going to be some managed marketplace that's going to handle all the authenticity of it and it's going to feel really modern and thoughtful and trusted. And I just didn't really exist. And so as a new watch collector, it took me a really long time to feel comfortable making my first purchase. Yeah. Cause you have to trust a secondary market. It's a whole. Exactly. It's like, I think the watch market tends to orient itself a little bit towards the existing collector. Like all these businesses and it makes like economic sense to optimize for these whales. Like if someone's spending millions of dollars a year buying watches, like I'm going to cater to them before I were the first time buyer. I think the, our bet as a business is like, there's a huge TAM expansion of opportunity if we're able to build a product that the first time watch buyer feels comfortable with, I think kind of are also building a better product for the existing watch buyer. If we serve the first time watch buyer as well. But I think our longer bet is just if you build a better product for the first time watch buyer, they are going to stay loyal and you are essentially like, you know, establishing your security in the long term so that you are, you know, they're going to buy your first watch, their second watch, their watch, for the watch.  Is it hard? I'm, I'm being told today in the marketplace, there's so many fake watches and they're really, they're really good, which is, I guess harder. And then I watched a YouTube video where there's literally like a jeweler guy. Yeah. And he's got all the tools. Totally. And I think on one, he couldn't really tell if it was real or fake, which I was like, that's kind of, maybe that's just a video for effect. But how did this the problem? It's a massive problem. The amount of counterfeits that are happening every single year is, is super staggering. We released a report around a month ago, 23% of the watches that are attempted to be sold through our platform. And to pause for a second, like those are really, really top sellers. Some of the best professional dealers in the U.S. 23% of those watches are flagged and they, and they get stopped by our authentication team. So you think of that perspective, like we are filtering down. That's crazy. That's a lot. The supply set already, picking great dealers. And then what do you do?  They go, Hey, authenticate it. Are they now banned or what's this? It depends on the severity of it and kind of a lot of the sellers like have no idea that happened.  And it's a spectrum, right? Where it could be on the far side of the spectrum, like the watch is not real at all. Like all aspects are fake. It could be that, you know, the dial had been swapped and the dealer was completely unknown to that. It could be that, you know, the watch is just like not performing the way it should, where it's like, if you bought a dive watch, for example, like a Rolex Submariner, but it comes into our pressure testing and it's not able to go in the water. Like it's, that's not a watch that you'd like to own. It's not really living up to the expectation of the watch that you were buying. Interesting. Okay. It kind of falls everywhere on that. Yeah.  Like we, we've had watches that were reported stolen in like high profile samurai sword heists in London. And obviously like you don't want to own a watch that ultimately was stolen because you have no recourse if someone, you know, claims that that is their watch. Ultimately the insurance company can just take that from you. Did they lose a hand? I don't think hands are lost. I think it was just a threat of a samurai sword. But the way that we think about building our team is just getting the best folks that have kind of, you know, years and years of experience around this and having it go through multiple hands. So is there any technology associated with it? Yeah. It's so the way that we think about authentication is top of funnel and bottom of funnel. The top of funnel is basically at point of list. If you were a seller saying, I want to list the watch on my wrist, you have to enter all the information about the watch, a number of photos, things like that. Someone on our team digitally reviews all of that. So the goal is that at the top of funnel, we should be filtering out the things that are blatantly fake with relative confidence interval so that as a buyer, I'm not even browsing on things that seem wrong. Right now, that's super manual. Yeah, like that is literally a human looking that makes sense. You can imagine, though, at that stage, like a lot of interesting technology, computer vision and things like that, like we're modeling all of that to make that more efficient. The second step is once the watch is sold, we overnight it to us. And so that is forever going to manual. The goal is to like get very good at the top part so it makes the bottom part easier in the sense that like there's less things to check. But there's just such a tactile requirement associated with authenticating these things. We've our authenticators, I'd say we, I'm not on the audition team. Our authenticators have blocked things because they didn't smell right. Like the papers didn't smell old enough, for example. So it has to come with paper. So it doesn't have to come with papers. I think we have watches that are that are kind of a complete set, if you would call that, like watch box papers. We have watches that just come with the box. We have watches that are naked, just watch only. And obviously that fluctuates the value dependent on the watch. But the papers are just one aspect of it. We're looking at all touch points of the watch, you know, taking a loop out, looking at all aspects of it. How does it weigh? How does it feel? Things like that. And then they're running against the diagnostic checks, making sure it's performing the way it should and everything. So so 23% of them are caught and they go away. That's awesome. What are like the one or two things that it sniffs out? Like these are the two things. These are the two traps. So is it is it the movement? Is it the way like, what's the thing that the people creating these fake watches get wrong more often than not? I wish it was super simple. And I think it used to be different. Like it used to be more like you never see a movement that is the caliber of a real movement. However, like these fakes are getting so good that like the finishing on the movement and things like that is getting really close. I will say the level of precision associated with the finishing of these watches. The reason these brands make so few of these things and they're in such high demand is is not just artificial scarcity. Like there's a lot of craft associated with the industry and making these goods. So like when you get things under a loop or like multiple degrees of magnification, you can kind of notice the slight differences in things like that. Does your company ever buy watches or is it mostly? We'll market makes selectively, right? Like we have a trade in platform and things like that. But for the most part, we are asset like, which we first raised capital in 2021. OK. And after during COVID, I guess. Yes, right. But that was a period of time when macro was kind of ripping and not even kind of certainly ripping and the collectible environment was like very excitable. And I think the feedback that we got from a lot of folks at that stage in the business was you should be taking on inventory. Like you're missing out on margin. You're going to make more money if you take on the inventory. You can charge folks more things like that. Like everything's up into the right. I appreciate our bet from the beginning was. No, let's get really good at being asset light, but still operationalizing the excellence of being able to get your watch within three to five days, like making the process feel very, you know, hand-holdy, high touch. But we just don't want to take the inventory risk. And then the market just took a big swing. Watch market along with macro was down 30, 40 percent.  And we felt, you know, pretty good in that position. Yeah, that was smart. Let's talk about your cap table. You got a lot of amazing people on your cap table. Likes the Kevin Hart. You got Michael Rubin. Yep. I'm sure I'm not naming a bunch. Kyle Kuzma, who's on your website also with the Tiffany Blue. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, we got Steve Aoki. We got Mike Lovitz. Entrepreneurs on this pod will want to know simple stuff. How do you get access to these people? Yeah. How do you meet them? How do you get them to invest? What's your advice to them? How did you do it? Yeah, it's a great question. I think the way that it started was and I was talking to you about this before the pod, like, I'm a first-time founder. My background is in tech. My co-founder's background is in finance and also tech. It's like, so the way that we started this whole process was kind of a snowball effect. And I made a call out to some of the individuals that I knew that started businesses in the past or were angels. I knew like three folks. One of them was Steve from Modern Animal that was on this pod and is like a personal savior for me in many founder moments. But it started there. We talked to kind of some angels that we knew a network. We got our first initial checks. Like a lot of those guys believed in us because we had stayed close to them. And then they segwayed into like the venture process that we had run. We got the first initial leads for our round. So Box Group wrote the kind of first big check in the round followed by a court side of an abstract ventures. And then from there, it was kind of the fun segwaying out and making these introductions. So I think John Legend was the first celebrity check that came in, which was like the biggest freak out moment I've ever had. I'm a huge John Legend man. And then Kevin Hart came in and a bunch of Steve Aoki and much of these cool people came in. I think the nicety that we have is just like we are selling watches like we're not a particularly complicated business. I would never profess that we are like doing anything that is particularly like nuanced and specialized and crazy. Right. Like we're not an NFT business. A lot of people like uniquely love watches. Yeah. Watches are a super popular category. And I think it's a insurance for them in some way to be sort of aligned with the technology or exactly that does.  Am I going to get something fake? Like am I going to get? How do I trust this? Like and we have investors and buyers that are in locker rooms and the NFL and the NBA and things like that. And they're they're still like they don't have like a watch guy. And I think my thought always with a lot of these like high profile individuals like had a person that just looked out for them. And and that just doesn't totally exist. So I think they resonated with the problem and it kind of accelerated from there. I love that. You're kind of solving the problem that you felt as a sort of when you when you first entered the market. Yeah, you had to trust somebody and I feel good. And I think also like I've never started adventure and had celebrity investors other than this. But yeah, I think what a lot of really awesome investors ask when you get them on the cap table in the beginning is how can I be helpful? Mm hmm. So like Kevin Hart says, how can I be helpful or John Legend? I think the easy answer is always like do promotions for us, like get on social media and talk about us, right? And like these guys know their value. They recognize it like, you know, when a lot of these guys came in, we had raised like three and a half million dollars. We're not going to go pay that. That's how much it costs for any of these guys to do anything normally, right? Like so the cool thing about our business is we didn't have to ask for that. The value add for these individuals for us is like talk to your friends that love to buy watches about why we're great. And I'd rather grow slowly because we're getting a lot of buyers like genuinely interested from other buyers because our average order value is $12,000. Like we sell very expensive thing to be very low and allows us to kind of grow very organically that way, right? And so in the beginning, it was a lot of storytelling on getting a lot of these like nodes to cool collector networks in and certainly like Kevin Hart and John Legend are. And it's easy, right?  And like we, a lot of our earliest partnerships, like we have, we're in the Equinox circle and we partnership with Equinox. We did a ton of events with Soho house. Like a lot of these cool brands even in the earliest stages of our growth, which allowed us to kind of be aligned with those brands and kind of grow our brand alongside. We had these cool watches and a lot of people regardless of their status and their economics and what they're able to afford, they love watches and it's super cool to be able to go up to it, show up to an event or host a dinner or whatever and have a few million dollars in watches that you've never been able to see before. And so that's been kind of like our unfair advantage in growing the business from like a cool factor perspective. Do people ever just give you your watches like just on the K on the outside of the business? Is that something you guys do? We do that for like select clients. We don't have like a product oriented around that. But I think, you know, like I mentioned at the beginning we have a concierge model and our whole thing is like really delighting customers by the fact that like you have a human in the office that knows your name, that like is advocating for your collection. And so we just love to do things that surprise people. So if someone asks for some authentication or things like that, like we love to help out with that. And are you considered like a, when it went to the valuation, what, how are you sort of, is it a SaaS company? What is it that you're modeling after? We're a marketplace. Yeah, yeah. So we just take a commission on from the seller side. So the buyer's not charged anything. Yeah. And then the seller, we take a commission out of the sale. And on the seller side, is it a person? Is it a jewelry store? Like how, what's the range of the people on that side of it? It's kind of everything. The industry itself is like 90% professional. So most of the inventory is professional deals, which makes sense. We're a bit less than that. It was obviously like to get the marketplace wheel spinning. It was easier for us to go to professional dealers, pitched on a more transparent process, better payouts, things like that. A lot of the largest dealers in the US came on as investors in the cap table in the early days, which was awesome because, as you know, in building a business, like you're not, what you're promising to do is not what you do on day one. So we needed a lot of sellers to work with us there. Now we're at a place where we are benefiting the business and we're selling a lot of their watches. So more sellers organically come on from there. We spent $0 on a seller side acquisition. So that's been all super organic and we just broke 400 million in inventory, which is super awesome. And so yeah, it's kind of in the way that we worked. And then once we had the watches and the buyers kind of come on board, right? Like, ultimately it allows us to be really effective with how we use our spend from a paid marketing perspective because if you're querying Google saying I won a Royal Oak 15300, our results should show up because we are one of the largest inventory sources now. When you think about this, so you started with watches, you brought up sneakers also. Do you see a world where you guys transition into different products? I don't think so. I think like our bet from the beginning is we're a big fan of kind of these verticalized marketplaces and specifically in watches, like I wouldn't profess to say, like I think there's obviously a lot of crossover between like fashion and street wear and sneakers. I think like StockX is a great example. They tried watches, they played in watches.  I think with watches like you wanna buy from an expert, you wanna buy from a specialist and that presents itself in two ways. One, like I think from a customer perspective, it allows the customer to feel like these guys are the real deal, like they really care about this. And then I think from a product offering perspective, it allows us to build all of like, or obsess rather of like all of the details you'd need to make an informed purchase decision. Like the product is entirely custom from the ground up to sell watches and like our databases, we have 70,000 plus watches available from an inventory perspective, from a mapping perspective, from a data perspective. Like the goal is making sure it's very, very clear to a consumer that this product is obsessed about watches. And I think the watch market, which is probably similar to a lot of high value collectible categories, like cars and art and things like that, the watch market particularly is very good at sniffing out something that feels disingenuine. And these collectors are obsessed with watches and I think it would be doing us a disservice if we didn't project back that same degree of obsession with it. So for now, like, you know, we're super, super verticalized and focused on that. There's a lot of interest in kind of ancillary products around that. Like, you can imagine like insurance offerings and other cool things that we can build around the product of watches. But I think for the rest of the business, we'll be watches. I remember, so we bought this building used to be a pawn shop. And so I was going through it. We left all the stuff inside and we bought it. Yeah. And so we're going through the whole thing and there was clearly like a huge vault in there where they had the watches and they left all the boxes there. So like empty Rolex, box empty, whatever. And then there was like almost a list. They had a list that they had print out of like this watch and the serial codes that were made that year. And I was like, oh my God, that's how they used to authenticate this whole process was the serial code. That's all they had, which was nuts. And the paper was obviously like yellow. And so it was almost probably from like the 70s it felt like, you know, this antiquated thing. And I was like, that was it. Like that was the science. I mean like, and obviously it looks and feel and stuff. But I was like, it was crazy to me that it could be that simple. The tech, I mean, like the technology hasn't changed that much, right? Like it's still a serial driven world. Like that is how you identify uniquely that this watch is this watch and that's how you match the papers to this watch. And the methodology that's used to authenticate is still largely the same, right? It's like getting it in front of people who have seen thousands of these watches, getting it in their hands, allowing them the tools they need to look at everything in detail, like spend an ordered amount of time with these things. And then like the technology, sure there's like pressure tests and time loss tests and those get better and more efficient, but it's fun because we were a technology business. My background is building technology at Google and like having that background. And so half of our business is engineers that work at Google and Amazon and all these big companies in the same room with like people that are first hires is Ryan Chong. He was director of private sales at Sotheby's, the auction house and he kind of built out our whole authentication team. We have folks from Sotheby's and Christie's and all the watch world and watchmakers and like true craftsmen. And that's the fun juxtaposition of the world that we're playing in, where we're building these technology products and they should feel modern and thoughtful. It should feel when you're checking out, like it feels similar to buying any other modern product you would on any other modern app. But then we also have to have this very, like not dated, but like we have to pay homage to the history that exists horologically to the industry. Like it's, there's some things that just cannot be replaced by technology and that is getting the hands of an expert on these watches. So let me ask you a question. So I remember six months ago I was getting probably a deck every day around like web three, NFT, all of this stuff. And so in part of these decks, a part of it was going into the luxury fashion world. And so the point being the secondary reseller market is massive. They had a dollar figure, it's huge, not trillions but definitely several billions. And in that world, they were saying, you know, what if you were an LVMH house or one of these houses and you could just barcode or web three or NFT essentially like a purse. And then that way you knew for its entirety that this thing and when it's sold and then the goal there being like a residual so like a royalty would go back to the big company every time it resold. And it was as I was looking at it, like that makes sense. It's an interesting in my head anyway, very logically it feels like that could be, it's interesting. Do I think fashion houses are gonna end up doing this? I don't know. When it comes to watches, is that a threat at all? Is there is like web three or them putting like a, I don't know a tracker. I don't even know what they could do. But is this happening? Is it not happening? It's still not a threat. I think like anything that changes how these watches are traded is just like a new facet to our business and it's interesting. I'm happy you're talking about it at the manufacturers level or like the watch houses level. I think like to what you're saying I think watches are always going to be behind fashion. Like it's much easier I think, given like the fast fashion nature of these things like try this stuff, right? Like Rolex moves so incrementally slow and that's intentional. Like they're so good at these things but they make new drops every year. And for someone that came from like a sneaker or a fashion world, they'd be like, wait, that's this, that's the same watch just as like a new movement. Like why am I, why is everyone freaking out? Everything moves so intentionally slow because I think the culture of watches is that like we've done it right. It's so craft nothing moves fast and like that's by design and I think that's some of the allure and like the magic around it, right? So I was pitched similarly very like when we started this business so many of these web three businesses even probably some of the tech people that you hired were like, hey, we should, you know yeah, no, I think it's like super interesting. And I think like if it's not from the manufacturer level you still have this inability to tie a physical good to like the digital instance to it or like the on chain instance of it, right? And it just becomes a replacement to a piece of paper that is like sexier and like more like now feeling but it doesn't really solve a problem, right? Like you would still need some intermediate body to physically be like this watch. I looked at the cereal, I opened up the movement it actually does match this thing that's on chain. Like it doesn't solve the problem. We still have to exist, right? And in a world where the manufacturers start like placing these things in the watch I think it becomes more interesting. I still think like transactionally when the watch changes hands like you still need a third party to confirm like nothing has been modified in this watch. This watch is still original. The movement hasn't been swapped out because if it has some chip on the dial that says it came originally from AP doesn't mean that I didn't swap the class out and it's now something out. I didn't swap everything else out, right? So you still need this kind of body to do that. But some people do anyway they'll swap something out just for personalization. They totally will and the whole thing for us. But just for fun, I mean like yeah. If you own a watch and you want to do what you want to do with that watch I think that is super exciting for you and that is everything you want to do. Our whole thing is we only sell watches that have like truly genuine parts from the manufacturer and we just want to make sure that everyone understands what they are buying. It is not fundamentally wrong. It's a personal choice. If you want to like bust down your watch with diamonds, right? The problem is when that gets listed on a competitive marketplace and they don't mark that that's happening and someone buys it thinking it's factory diamonds and pays a premium for that they just kind of got robbed in that transaction. So that's our whole thing that we care about. It's just we only sell things that are factory and come from the production. You know engraving nothing. Interesting. We'll sell things that have engravings into that but like it needs to be blatantly clear. We've had full cases where. They haven't touched the dial or the movement. Precisely. Multiple cases where a watch is sold through our platform it gets to us. There was no engraving mentioned. It has an engraving. I think they're delightful. I think it's like a cool like someone else owned this and now I get to write my own story but we will cancel that sale at that point because the buyer doesn't want the engraving and they didn't know that, right? Yeah. What keeps you up at night when it comes to your business? What's the hard part? I think every part is hard. Yeah. Like you're in this fun stage. But you have a two-sided market. Totally. You have growing inventory. That's cool.  You have knowns. We're in a great point in the sense that like this year has been certainly the latter half of this year has been like an amazing growth year for us and the wheel started and now it's spinning really fast and getting there was very challenging and because it's just every single thing goes wrong and like I'm really happy we do everything in house but every single day there's a fire drill where we want the sellers to be happy because the sellers are a huge part of our business but our ultimate goal is protecting the buyers and we'll get a watch in and the watch will have more wear than we expected the watch to have and so we'll call that we'll like we don't want to pass it on to the buyer so we have to contact with the buyer and like the seller's like, what do you mean? Like. Of course, yeah. It does, it's on. It worked perfectly. We're always like going back and forth and our goal is to try to like make sure everyone is happy and in the beginning it's like the whole. Will you guys fix them? If something needs. We have a whole watchmaker and staff and things like that, right? But like that isn't totally always scale. Totally, totally. So we're at the stage of the business where like we're doing the kind of Paul Graham style do things that don't scale. Like just delight everyone. And I think now we're starting to figure out the stage of growth that we are at. It's like, how do you make that super scalable and kind of continuable? So. Paul Graham had a great prediction for this year. He says, wokeness will start to fade away. Yes. That's one of his tweets. I retweeted that one.  Yeah, yes. But yeah, so let's get me up. I think like. That's interesting. At least starting the business. What I didn't realize is how hard it is. And I think not enough founders talk about that. Like I think it is like the grind mentality is something that like I thought is really cool. And I love that. And that's just kind of person that I am. But like it doesn't stop. There's not a moment where I don't wake up and immediately think about this business. And it's like there's not a single day where it's not the last thing I do when I go to sleep is think about the business. And it's all aspects from like, how is the culture feeling internally? Like how is the team feeling? Is everyone feeling motivated to how are our buyers feeling? How are our sellers feeling? What's macro like? Like what's our runway like? How are we feeling about the next fundraise? When should we start courting investors or start doing that? Like it's such a dance. And I think it's been such a fun process and a learning process that we launched the business in June of 2022. We first raised capital in August of 2021. We announced like an extension kind of we did an extension and fused it with our initial round. We announced like an eight million dollar collective seed in January of last year. And so like we raised that like a peak. We had to survive like a pretty serious downturn. The goalposts kind of always keep getting pushed out. So it's like a weird way. It went from like an environment where you're raising for 18 months of runway to then an environment where it's like, you're raising for less than 24 months of runway. You're crazy. And we were like, no one told us that. So it was a lot of like learning process and things like that. But luckily the business is humming now and we're in a place where we're feeling really strong. So that's great. I'm glad you touched on that. So true.  And so even though renovating a building that is basically an eyesore. Totally. We'll get killed. We'll go to the council meetings. I'll get killed. And it's just like me taking abuse for two hours. And it just feels odd. You're like just, the only thing you expect from people is to be professional and they're not. And so you're just constantly dealing with that. And some of those people matter. You know, sometimes they have a voice or a microphone and you want them to speak well of your project and when they don't, people read those news but people read those articles. Oh, I am on trust pilot every single morning. Like I wake up, I look at trust pilot and if it does, if we don't have like stunning reviews from the day before, like all that I'm doing that day is working with the team to make sure whatever anyone talks about, even if it's like a four star, it can't happen, right? Like, and especially at this stage in the business, our differentiators trust and our brand is trust and like high execution and quality. We are in, we are, I mentioned this, like our AOV is $12,000. We sell any watch from $2,000 to seven figures. Like we sold our first seven figure watch a month ago. What was it? It was a Tiffany Nautilus. Okay, let's go for seven figures. They do. Yeah. Like the expectation is in rightfully so. That's why I started this business is I'm going to buy the most expensive thing ever. I'm going to buy it on the secondary market. It should still feel like you're popping champagne and you're getting all the trust and you're getting everything there. But you're dealing with customers where they're apprehensive already. Like they're nervous. And that gives you an opportunity to either like knock it out of the park and make them a customer for life or like be cavalier about it and treat it like it's a normal exchange and let them down. And I forget like whose quote this was, but the way that our team tends to live by it is there are two reactions when something goes wrong. It's either like the end of the world's or it's totally fine. You get to pick one and the customer gets to pick the other. So we always pick the, this is the biggest deal ever. It's so important. I can't imagine not solving this for you. And that's been the way forward right now. And we're just at the stage now where like, you know, we're starting to figure out how to really, really scale that as we're getting bigger and bigger. So what are you guys raising soon this year? Yeah, probably. You'll have to, right? We're in a good place from like a capital perspective and like we're selling a lot of watches, which is awesome. So, but yeah, I think we've intentionally timed the market so that we weren't raising last year. Yeah. And then I think this is a plan to come and go out and do that larger A that we've been delaying. So what are your favorite pieces? What are your favorite watches? What's on your bucket list? It's so funny and I love this question because it changes so much. Like we started this. When you see them? Exactly, that's the thing, right? Once you see them it changes. We like started this business and I think my superpower in starting this business was that I added such an appreciation for watches, but like I wasn't like working in watches prior to this. And I think it allows me to empathize with the actual consumers we have. Like we're not, we're selling to some people that are in the watch world, but like for the most part our consumer like works in banking or they work in tech or they whatever it is and like they like watches, right? So it allows me to empathize with them in a very visceral way while still having the team that is like harder watch knowledge experts. I get to see these things every day though it's like a kid in a candy store. And it's so fun like I went from being at my old job and having a monitor that just like looked at watch information all day and like nerding out about it to our authentication team sits next to kind of our main team. And so we're having a ton of these watches coming through every single day. And these are crazy pieces that like I've never I couldn't imagine seeing and like we're talking six figures, seven figure like crazy items that I didn't exist in my world prior to this. So it changes all the time. And the fun part about kind of what we've built is our goal with building the platform is making it really easy to buy and sell. So it like promotes almost like peer to peer liquidity. So it allowed me to kind of live the watch world I want also as a founder, right? Like I get to see all these cool things but I'm also living a founder's lifestyle. Like I'm not living this lavish life. Like we're grinding and we're building the business but I can buy a couple watches a year and then I can sell those watches that year and I can trade it into something else. And it allows me to feel like my collection is quite large despite only, you know, keeping five of these things at a time kind of thing. So what are your top five? Or what's on your list? What's on your list that's coming? What would you, what's a stretch goal? Oh man. Well, not the not the Tiffany Nautilus. I can't imagine. By the way, I was at a wedding, sent New Year's and a guy had it. Yeah. Well, he could have got a retail too. And Tiffany is a collector. This was like his third Nautilus.  The Jay-Z approved one is a million. They're all, well, they're just like they're, if they trade in the secondary market, right? That's how these watches work, right? Like even just a normal Nautilus, like the 57 of the 1A, like the one you see all the time with the blue dial discontinued, but like that watch trades at an insane premium for what it used to trade in retail or like a Rolex Daytona, for example, it's a $15,000 watch at retail trades at 30, right? So they just, a lot of them do this. As far as like my watches that I love right now, I like Rolex a lot, wearing a Rolex right now. I'm a big Rolex guy. The watch that got me hooked in this whole process was I was buying a, it's called the Hulk. It's just the green Submariner was like the first watch that I ever bought. And it was like the coolest thing ever. What I really want, I probably- Everybody loves that watch. People talk about that watch a lot. The Hulk? Yeah. Yeah, it was, it's just like- It's a cool watch. It's a, yeah. It just doesn't take itself seriously. I was like, if I'm going to buy my first watch, it needs to like be cool, but it needs to like, I don't know, be like, I'm not like- I think Dio or Dio from Ventum Racing wore that watch on our podcast. Got it. Yeah. It was like a, yeah, he was like eyeing it for a while. Yeah. Very, very cool. And he totally embodies everything you just said. Yeah, exactly. It's like a, it's a fun approach to, it doesn't take itself seriously. It's great. It plays if you're in a resort on the beach, you know, I like to be at the beach and surfing and like running to the beach every morning and things like that. So I also like to wear my watches. We have a photographer on staff and he came into the office to shoot everyone's watches and all the watches we had going through to like create content. And he looked at my Hulk and got it under like a ton of magnification and took photos.   Cause I like take, I like go to the beach with it and I like wear it. And these are like, there are tool watches and they're made for that.  Like I shouldn't, I shouldn't jump in the ocean anymore. Right. But then you like, you swapping out. So I tended to bias towards watches that like I can wear every single day. I have like a, I think my next watch that I purchased in the next month or two will probably be the white gold Daytona on Oysterflex. I think it's like a super cool one. I really love the palm dial Datejust right now just cause it's like very playful and fun and doesn't take as well seriously. I don't have a Patek in my collection. So I think that's probably one of the next ones. That's awesome. Yeah. Well, can you tell people what's on the horizon? How are you going to close out 2024? Just start with, here we go. Big year for everybody. 2023, I forgot what year we're in. 2023 was a big growth year for us. I think we just announced we seven X year over year in Q4, which is super exciting. We had very similar growth in Q3. So we're in a really awesome place from that. I think about the last year from us as really like foundation building, like we had to play the watch game, figure out how to, you know, find the buy side, the sell side, connect the two, how can it be really efficient about that. I think we're in a really good place where like we kind of established that we are the best place to buy and sell that way. And now it's like, what are the crazy things we can do to really innovate the space? So we have auctions dropping this month. I'm not even, I haven't talked to PR about dropping that, but here we are. That's a marketplace point. I mean, that makes sense. Exactly. So we're very excited about that. We're announcing J Balvin as a strategic investor, which is super exciting, just embodies like the cool fact of watches and fashion and the crossover. Our whole ambition always was like, how do we build out the modern brand and the secondary watch market? How do we build out a brand that like you'd want to wear on your hat that's the same way that like a goat exists in the world today. And so having folks like that around the cap table and jumping on is super, super exciting. Yeah, that's awesome. But yeah, a lot of growth. We're US only right now. So next year, I think, you know, international is a particularly interesting conversation. Yeah. And yeah, a lot of really exciting stuff, but it's, you know, it's super fun. Is it bezel.com?  Get bezel. Yeah. Kway, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks so much, man. Thank you for tuning in. 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