Podcast by Pierre Lindh #41 - Todd Haushalter, CP

(Transcript of the video episode)

good to see you buddy how's everything
going good to be back
yeah it's fantastic the last time you
were here on the podcast was episode
number 10
back in in june even in the very
beginning of this podcast and
um you've been kind of a part of our
journey at like i mean next
since the very inception of our show
back in 2019
when we started and you had your
wonderful presentation at
at uh given accent it's wonderful to sit
down with you in person for the first
time
yeah this is the first time we've
actually been able to sit in the same
room together yeah
novel in the modern day yeah exactly i
mean it's uh i think that's what's so
beautiful with the digitization of uh
of the world at the moment is that you
know you can be based on the other side
of the world
and during this time we've gotten to
know each other a little bit better
through during
these podcasts on the different subjects
so but
you know nothing can replace in person
any other day i guess
it's great to be here yeah i'm a big fan
of everything you guys do thank you
thank you todd
uh so we have a really interesting topic
today that i am definitely very
passionate about and i'm really happy to
be talking to you about this
topic because i know that this is close
to your heart as well which is
disruption in general um and i want to
just
kick things off today thought by just
asking you you know how do you
view disruption in general like what how
would you define disruption what what is
something
that is disruptive versus something that
is used on incremental
innovation let's say yes so i guess i'd
say
there there's local disruption there's
grand disruption so you can disrupt
an industry you can disrupt a household
right you can disrupt the world
um but i'd say it's something where um
you have a a sort of shift where
things won't be like they were before
anymore
and that's for good so it has to be
somewhat permanent i'd say it has to be
significant
and it has to be lasting yeah it's it's
um
[Music]
but then the fun of it is the size and
scale of the disruption
yeah yeah i guess so yeah i love the way
kind of um
steve jobs uh uh the way he infused
disruption into apple in the
in the late 90s when he he created his
like legendary advertisement campaign
uh which basically said um the people
who are crazy enough to think that they
can
change the world are the ones who do
that's a great commercial
yeah it's it's the best adventist
campaign in the history
yeah you know he hit that great one
before that too where the uh it was like
1984 where they threw the hammer and
shattered the screen
and uh it was signifying like just
shatter
the old system like like here comes
apple that's ibm
we're going after him it's very cool
yeah yeah yeah i love those figures like
the face of innovation steve jobs
the face of innovation that is that's
true and just the way he approaches
product development and so forth i i
would say for me
this is my absolute idol in the in the
space of
of innovation in in general and
disruption i don't know if that is
something
it has to be i mean because everybody
it's very natural for people to do
itera iterative innovation so okay
make what you're doing a little bit
faster make what you're doing a little
bit better graphics or whatever and he
would do these
massive jumps like forget about the cd
or you have a big problem like people
are downloading music and the whole
music industry's at risk
how are we going to get people to pay
for music in a digital era
and so he goes and tackles that project
and then a thousand songs in your pocket
and just doing things he wasn't even the
first mp3 player he just did it
way better yeah um people were
i remember having cell phone and i
wanted an increasingly smaller and
smaller and thinner
cell phone until it was just a little
stick coming off of a little credit card
and that was what i what i would have
thought was the cell phone of the future
in i don't know 2004 or something
and uh and boy was that wrong yeah
exactly
i want a giant brick in my pocket
apparently yeah yeah exactly
i mean look at that time as a great
example of is a disruption in in general
where
you know nokia was obviously the market
leader at that time and
their strategy was to just basically
produce
as many phones as possible throughout
the year there wasn't really any
harmonization in the
updates of the models at that time uh
nokia strategy was used to
come up with crazy crazy ideas and kind
of
cover the entire market that way that
okay maybe you like a banana shaped
phone that's
good we create we produce one for you
and maybe this person over here he likes
to play games on his phone so
we'll produce one phone for him um and
and then obviously steve jobs took the
concept of what
a cell phone is at its core uh
and just came up with this incredibly uh
intuit innovative idea um
of creating the app store and i think
this is at its core of why that
innovation worked
because all of a sudden he put the
innovation
out of the hands of apple engineers
and software producer and put it to the
world right
anyone can produce an app to innovate
the the phone that apple creates right
and i think that's how this
core why the iphone was so destructive
yeah
in combination with the touchscreen of
course it was almost impossible to see
that the future of riding in a taxi
is that you're going to ride in some
stranger's car and that stranger isn't
an employee of the taxi company that's
just
some guy who has a car and you don't and
so he'll drive you somewhere
and that the most disruptive
uh business to hilton and marriott would
be
sleeping in other people's homes airbnb
right these things were very hard to see
and they're all
born out of the app store yeah it's true
and even those ideas you know
um airbnb i think is a good example
because
as airbnb launch you know at the start
when it was centered around
in california around this san francisco
area it was just this kind of like
uh you ran someone's couch type of thing
right it was on a
very like local low low level and at the
time
no one thought that this was going to
disrupt the entire
hotel on the leisure industry so today
and we talked about this a little bit
before the podcast right it's like
sometimes when you live through
disruptive
ideas you don't realize that they are
disruptive at the time
but it's uh it takes a while before
an idea kind of flourishes into its true
potential
yeah we all presume that we understand
the time that we're living in
like uh that in in
you look back on things and it's all
very clear it's very easy to predict the
past
but um are we living through an electric
car revolution right now
i don't know one percent of the cars are
electric but it sure feels like it's
something starting off right now uh you
know when
when did these massive changes take
place is this
are we in a great depression at this
second in time uh
i don't know the global unemployment
level has to be the highest it's been
basically since electricity right i mean
with every restaurant on the planet
effectively closed with every hotel
basically having no guests and so on and
so forth
but i don't know i don't hear anybody
saying that let's just i'll let you know
in 10 years
if we were living through a great
depression yeah 2021.
and you know we have i i asked you the
other day like
let's uh have a fun little game
throughout this uh podcast
uh today which uh it's solidifying this
point i think i think we're going to
realize this
as we go through our um various options
here but basically
through the podcast today we will we
will name a disruptive
um an important disruptive idea
from each decade started from the 1940s
and then we're going to go all the way
up to the 2040s so we're going to
predict the future today which is just
uh incredible when we're going to look
back at this zone just to
be embarrassed of our own predictions
here but we will do our best
basically so because i think this is an
interesting uh
interesting topic just to just to
nail down the fact that what would you
said that you know
as these innovations sometimes came you
didn't realize at the time
how disrupted they were but hindsight is
2020
and i think this is at its core of what
disruption is
and how and also when we want to look
into the future
and trying to predict these disruptions
it's uh it's important to to understand
that
it's it's rarely the disruption that is
staring you in the eye
that becomes the the the big disrupters
would say
if we want to predict disruptors is it's
generally about trying to think outside
of the box
right so um you know just that's an
example of this this
uh oculus the vr headsets right now i
think
if you ask people what is the next
disruptor
uh idea of the argument industry for
example
a lot of people would say the vr headset
because it just seems that that is the
natural next disruption
and it may very well be that it that
will
turn out that but um i think that
it is already on the table in a lot of
organizations
so if you want to be ahead of the curve
and you you predict that vr is going to
be the next disruptive idea
um you are already kind of competing
against
other organizations who are also
exploring that space
so can you think outside of the box and
kind of come up with disruptive ideas
that no one else is thinking about
right it's not shocking that everybody's
calling the vr
the next big thing because the last
couple things were big hardware
innovations right
so it went from the pc to
the phone and so people sort of see that
transition and
it's very it's very linear to sort of
predict that but exactly
but if you think of it in very practical
terms are we all going to be lugging
around
uh vr headsets everywhere we go and
put them on and are you going to put
them on in a public environment and
things like that so
it's it's got its place but yeah it
doesn't have a chance to be anywhere
close to as big as the phone
no exactly i don't think so either or it
will develop and morph into something
else you know and i think that's the
interesting thing but what you mentioned
um you know the transition between the
pc
and mobile i think is a great example of
hindsight is 2020 because in the in the
argument industry
i was working for betson during this
transition
an operator obviously um and you know in
2011
2010 something like that um
no one within betstone was talking about
mobile you know isn't that
crazy if you look back at it now the
iphone was launched in 2006.
yeah five years after yeah yeah and not
until let's say 2012
around there did um uh did that zone as
an organization take this shift uh
serious
you know this uh and it was during that
time that
the operator leo vegas was born and they
found the success
in that area because they were the ones
who realized first
that the the uh the shift between uh
from pc to mobile was was about to
happen right
so they had that edge they were able to
foresee it that's how they see them i
wonder if there was a leo vegas before
leo
that jumped on the phone in like 2007
yeah and they went out of business
because they were too soon yeah exactly
that's another point as well you have to
be in the right place in the right time
right
that's the thing you can't be too early
you can't be too late you can be early
if you have
deep pockets if you're a big company you
can be early but if you're
uh if you're uh small it's hard to be
early yeah it's true
too early so let's go back in time now
uh todd and we'll start
with uh to compare our our destructive
innovation per decade
starting in the 1940s all right do you
want to go first
sure the atomic bomb
are we i mean a high five really on this
one we have the same
thing what it's so funny nuclear power i
wrote
okay all right uh yeah
we can't replay history over and over
but um we've
basically had no atomic use of atomic
weapons which are so much more powerful
now
ever since and uh and no major theater
wars
since world war ii either yeah yeah and
it's interesting that you
that you mentioned this as well because
i i'm a big fan of a podcast that is
called the hardcore history
is uh don carling the host which and
anyone who listens to this please check
out hardcore history it's
absolutely incredible podcast and i was
listening um
through a seven hour long podcast on the
uh on the history of the nuclear bomb
actually just recently uh and um they
talk a lot about the
new yeah the nuclear bomb being used as
a deterrent
uh done in in world history yeah who
knows i mean yeah it led to a pretty
quick
uh surrender and if had the war gone on
there would have been
deaths in a different fashion uh who
knows what the outcomes would have been
etcetera etcetera but then
i think you know coming from the coming
from the gaming industry and knowing
about game theory
and and you know hedging your bets and
so forth
i can you can almost compare it a little
bit to you can make an argument against
it when you
when you play when you play roulette on
a reality table
you can choose the way you want to
gamble on a relative it doesn't matter
what you bet on the red table the odds
are always the same in the
if you play if you spin a million times
right so
i think the way that the argument goes
of using nuclear weapons as a deterrent
is the same as if you put all the chips
on on all the numbers except one
so basically you will you will win most
of the times
until that one number hits and you lose
everything
yeah yeah it's funny that's how i think
of day traders sometimes is um
they're they're covering all the numbers
on the
wheel but one and they almost always win
until they lose and then it's a
devastating loss yeah exactly and
there's this uh what's this uh theory
called where you double your bets
martingale martingale so the nuclear
using
nuclear bombs of the deterrent is the
ultimate martingale
isn't it because you you will you will
double up until you lose
and when you lose you lose everything
yeah then it's then it's a big loss yeah
yeah so martin gayle the system goes
that like
if you go to a relative you put let's
say one euro on black
okay and you lose then you put two euro
on black
you lose you put four euro and so forth
and you do that until
black hits and that means that you will
end up winning one euro
so you can lose 10 times in a row but if
you win on the 11th time
you still win your money back in one
euro so the idea is that
uh this is the safe way you're playing
roulette you can just do that and then
you win one euro and you can start over
and you will always win one year
but the problem is that no one has
infinite amount of money
and casinos have max bets too i was a
dealer in vegas and i had a guy doing
the martingale one night
started with a hundred one two four
eight sixteen
thirty two uh hundred and then he had to
go up to his room where he had a
safe full of cash apparently comes back
down with cash
that's 3200 lost goes back up to the
safe comes back with 6 400
lost oh my god comes back down with
12 grand and he was at table max of 10
000.
and then he bet 10 and he lost again he
lost a gun oh my goodness
that's the deal yeah yeah you see that's
in another timeline that would have been
like the uh
the the cuban missile crisis on the uh
um
they don't reach on a tournament uh
so uh so talking about that uh er event
uh okay nuclear bomb uh atomic power we
are in agreement on
and that is the the disruptive
innovation of the
forties and obviously that led to some
good things as well with nuclear power
and uh
and these type of things um but i want
to move over to a little bit more
local topic now okay um todd you're the
chief product officer of uh evolution
gaming obviously and and um
you know through the through the years
you kind of built a reputation
of being a disruptor of the industry i'm
i'm putting that label on you by the way
um and uh you know you created some
incredible
games the monopoly live crazy time
uh deal on odile and everything in
between um
so how do you guys cultivate disruption
within evolution how do you approach
innovation and disruption
in the organization um one of the things
we don't do
is really look at the competition that
much and uh you
you would have this impression that we
that we're constantly wondering what's
everybody else out there doing
and we don't um we look around the world
to see what it what's what's happening
what are people enjoying and all that
sort of stuff
um but it's
it's cultivating an environment where
it's a blank slate
where any idea can fly
so if you look at our 2021 road map
which i can't give it all away
but we're doing wildly different games
and um
you know they're not like bouncing ball
games they're not card games they're not
dice games they're just off in
space and um and they're fun
gambling experiences and so i think uh
just having a culture where you're
constantly poking everybody challenging
everybody
uh and people knowing that their ideas
can find a home
it really matters it's very hard if you
uh are shouting out ideas and they never
come to life
you kind of stop getting ideas at that
point but when people know that they
come to life and they're like oh that
person gave that idea and it
ended up being in a game
you get a lot more ideas so it becomes a
sort of flywheel
where the more the more innovative you
are the more ideas you have
the more people want to bring them to
life and um
[Music]
and then it sort of feeds on itself if
that makes sense
but you just have to ask
is this fun is this interesting
and it's very hard to get an honest
answer to that question
in a lot of companies i think yeah they
put the kind of limits at you or the
pure creative kind of thought process
isn't there perhaps
sometimes yeah people convince
themselves that something's interesting
or useful or or wanted
because they're already doing it and um
and they're very good at convincing
themselves that
that that disruptive thing will go
nowhere like there's even famous things
like steve ballmer saying like
who's going to buy a 500 phone and
things like this
you know and uh and they're out there on
youtube and
he's a tech genius and and so um
i don't think like if you had a couple
drinks with steve bulmer and he said
really what do you think about the
iphone
that he'd be like i just don't think
it's gonna work i think he'd be honest
with you
but um but because he was not
playing in the cell phone game and
microsoft didn't have plans to he
convinced themselves
himself and thereby the company that
this wasn't going to be a disruptive
technology you know blackberry
told themselves that people want buttons
on the phone
that's just that's like a religion that
they had or or that nobody could ever do
the encryption
to email the blackberry hat or something
like that and uh
big shocker yeah others can do
encryption as well
and if you give people enough motivation
they will learn to type on a flat
surface
does this tie into as well so i think as
well comparing
apple to microsoft in the innovative
spirits
that apple has always been known for is
the fact that
they let their creative people lead the
company
whereas microsoft let their engineers
lead the company i would say
uh do you think that that type of
mindset in general and is also a part of
the success of evolution for example
yeah i do
i think um like what do you talk about
at board meetings and management
meetings exactly do you ever say the
word player
in your meetings at the at the senior
management level um
and um and if you do uh
you're probably on the right track
that's a company i'd probably want to
invest in
and um do you talk about innovation do
you talk about pushing the envelope do
you talk about
taking risks and stuff like that or
or do you talk about protecting market
share or do you talk about
how you're going to increase or decrease
prices or how you're going to build a
moat
or something like that um yeah
because in the end of the day we are in
a the argument industry is
in its sunday creative industry and
particularly
i mean evolution is a creative company
this is what you do right you create
innovative fun forward-thinking games
it's a highly creative company that you
that you work for so so letting
letting these type of personalities
that can spur on that innovation and
creativity the company seems to be
a no-brainer yeah it's
um it seems like a no-brainer but like i
bet you
i bet you if uh i don't know some
some uh private equity firm bought
evolution
this is the danger uh that they'd come
in and
like in the beginning they they'd say a
bunch of things about how they want us
to stay innovative
or something like that and then they'd
say well maybe we could spin off half of
the business and do a separate publicly
traded company and then we can
spin that off and and they'd come to me
and they'd be like hey
todd make us um a product in this space
nobody wants it it's not cool it's not
fun it's not interesting like no no but
it's a hot sector
you know just just we need we need to
have a good story to tell
and now that takes me off of things that
players wanted and so on and so forth
and
and uh you create a bit of a death
spiral yeah or you could anyway i'm not
saying it wouldn't be a guarantee but
but uh yeah you you swap out a few
people at the top and
an evolution could move it could could
shift its mojo yeah exactly i mean this
is the danger of a lot of organizations
that
that becomes run by privacy equity
companies that are
only looking at the balance sheet for
example i'm taking decisions based on
on numbers rather than kind of the more
softer
approaches and the feelings where the
trends are going or or what the players
want like you're saying and
maybe not always taking the uh the
short-term
uh best decisions but uh thinking more
long-term and thinking ahead
staying agile i guess it's important as
well
probably some private equity firms they
they look for companies that aren't
innovative
and they come in and they give them
money and freedom to be innovative
and so it can probably work both ways
too yeah yeah probably
probably so um so todd so now obviously
you guys have acquired the method of
course and
last time we spoke you mentioned that
looking into 2021 it's these kind of
hybrid games that you are looking into
now
which is a mix of let's say what
evolution have traditionally done
in the live sphere with nathan's
traditional
casino games and so forth and it's been
really i was really curious to ask you a
little bit uh
what are your thoughts in that space and
um do you see
that as the next kind of disruptive move
from you guys's end
i think uh there's still there's like
slots hasn't been
wildly innovative um in 1920
there was three reels on a machine and
you kind of had to get a line and
in 2021 there's a few reels on a machine
and you kind of got to get a line and
um and uh and look that's what the
public wants it's not that efforts
haven't been
tried i mean you know uh the hot dog
probably hasn't changed that much either
you know people don't necessarily need
or want innovation in a lot of areas
but um i think there's some really cool
stuff like it's interesting that there's
not a
whole lot being done with video while
it's
dominating everything you know tick tock
youtube
facebook is effectively almost shifted
to a video platform
instagram is you know transitioned to
video almost
um and so it's interesting that like
there hasn't been anything done with
slots and video
uh and so evolution sees the world
through the lens of
live and uh yeah i i'm
very energized to um to
bring slots over to live and then
live over to slots yeah i think i think
there's a lot of opportunity there
yeah very very cool like what one do you
think we can expect to see uh you'll see
the first stuff in may
in may already yeah yeah um we've got a
really
a really fun and very different kind of
a live casino game
that we're doing and uh it's um
and it blends the worlds of life and
slots together yeah so how do
so another thing i'm curious to ask you
about because i think
a problem with a lot of the game studios
that are
quite big is that they focus on the
quantity of games
uh so um releasing as many games as
possible in a year
and obviously that is always going to be
detrimental to the
potentially innovative and disruptive
idea simply that is the
if that is the number one priority is to
release as many games as possible
evolution have been kind of the the
black duck in this game right where
you know you release something new from
time to time
it takes the time it takes and and uh
and so on
um now when you're bringing in nothing
on board on the revolution
how do you view that on the evolution
side of things uh will you
will you kind of pull back on the uh
amount of the game titles that you will
release through nathan's
um yeah i'm not really thinking in terms
of
quantity so um i think
i think netapp was coming from a place
where they might have been shifting
towards that quantity game
and uh i don't like it
so um it'll be an evolution style
approach
we'll make us we're going to make only
world-class games
and um and slots is very hard so you
know you think you're releasing
something in the world class and the
public just doesn't like it or something
and that'll happen you know sometimes
you pour your heart and soul into a
making a movie or a song and
the public just doesn't care for it and
um and we're not immune to that
but everything we do is going to be
high quality very rich games that can
produce
for a very long period of time one of
the interesting things as i enter the
slots world
is uh you know i've been consuming
mountains of information and a lot of
people will
talk about a game performance relative
to its first 30 days
like but but the business goes on for
years and they're like well yeah but we
release so many games and
and they pop and then they go down and
then they pop and they go down and they
pop and
but we just constantly release games and
um
in live the first day is the worst day
so i mean
monopoly will have its best month ever
this month even though we have crazy
time and
plenty of other competition mega ball
etc
and these games have staying power
now slots is different there's still
probably fifteen hundred sloths that'll
get released this year
online so it's just extremely noisy out
there
uh but great
experiences will rise to the top
you know there's a streaming community
out there players talk to players
people will play it and then it'll it'll
appear in their recent games and they'll
come back and play it a second time
there's um there's it's
it's going to be very hard to keep a
great game down and we got an incredible
commercial team too so they're
they're out there and they're going to
make sure that the game gets a good
honest look
and the product team's got to make a
game that people like and but
overwhelmingly the
the name of the game is quality
absolutely and i guess this is the major
difference between
the live uh side of things that you just
mentioned and
the the the game um the other slots
side of things is uh um there are a
massive amount of games that being
being released from a lot of different
studios um
and uh like we just talked about the
innovation on that side
yeah if you ask someone you know what is
uh how can we innovate slots and and
whatnot maybe you
you think okay maybe we can add another
reel or we do something cool like a
bonus game that is a bit outside of the
box or what not
um but i found it really interesting
that uh
the um the latest disrupt like real
disruptive ideas in this space
uh came from big time gaming in my
opinion with mega waves
which is completely again this just
solidifies the point we are talking
about today that disruption
comes from where you least expect it and
in the case of big time gaming they
create their disruptive idea was a math
model
it wasn't a particular graphic or a
bonus game or whatnot it was a math
model
that they licensed and they managed to
not only create this like unique math
model where
you know you can win in 100 000
different ways um
but they also took that idea license it
went to their direct competitors sold
the idea to them
nathan being one of them which obviously
gonza's quest now with
make aways and so forth and completely
open up the idea
um and open up the doors for
this now being a level playing field for
any game studio to
actually work between competitors i
think i thought this that was so
beautiful and um
how how they made it possible to work
you know how how big time gaming
and them can you know create a
partnership even though they are
direct competitors yeah nick is nick who
started big time gaming
uh he is phenomenally smart and um
and uh a great
product innovator period and he um
he sort of you know he came up with mega
waves then
he he willed it into existence
you know the first the bonanza wasn't
their first megaways game but um
but uh but it's kind of the most famous
of the of the mega waves
and uh and then he kept pushing it and
pushing it and he's out there trying new
fresh
mechanics and and and pushing up against
the boundaries of the industry and uh
and trying stuff and i really admire his
his approach to innovation yeah because
you have to imagine that like
at most other organizations if um if i'm
a
product developer and i sit in the
boardroom meeting and i present this
crazy idea that i have that we're gonna
create this math model
we're gonna license it and then we're
going to sell it to an attempt for
example
you must imagine that in most
organizations that have this microsoft
approach let's say
they would say oh that's never going to
work nothing would never work with us
on this they are a competitor just focus
on
on producing 10 games instead something
like that yeah yeah it's
uh it's it's um i'm sure he agonized
over the decision or maybe i don't know
if he did or not but
but a lot of most people would agonize
over that decision do you have something
special do you keep it for yourself
or do you um and get a very concentrated
uh uh contribution from it or do you get
a very wide contribution from it and um
and i think he's probably landed on the
right answer yeah yeah
it's just one of those examples where he
opened the door and then like i said it
opens up for
uh for more disruptive ideas like that
where you can work between competitors
so i thought that was a
really nice disruption in the industry
i'm totally open to working with
competitors too
yeah um you know i'd love to do some
stuff with land-based companies
um that are doing interesting stuff and
they've got they've got reach and
distribution where we don't and we've
got reach and distribution where they
don't and
lifting each other rather than pushing
each other yeah
yeah exactly exactly it's always going
to be good for both
your own company and the competitor that
you are you're working
with yeah i mean there's companies out
there that are in gaming that do things
better than we do them
and uh or they do things that we don't
even do at all yeah and uh
it'd be wise to partner with them
of course i i like that as well it's not
often you see that
uh approach in general uh i think that's
a that's a really nice approach that you
guys are taking
uh todd we go from
the 1940s to the swinging dancing
1950s let's see if we have the same i
really well last time you just copied me
so you go first i know i know yeah i
doubt that we will have the same one for
this one actually
so i think that this is also an
innovation that is really
um when it happened no one thought that
this was
this was just a small step forward but
in hindsight this is uh
i think one of the biggest innovation in
modern in the modern world okay okay and
that would be birth control
because is that in the 50s yep in the
50s um
so birth control led to led to women
being empowered
being able to take space in the
workplace uh not having to
be in be tied down with a family early
and so forth
and it led to the revolution of these
women uh
being a part of the uh of the workforce
basically
uh so imagine that 50 of the human
population is now able to
uh contribute um for as long as they
want and be able to make a
career and contribution to the to the
world i think that was a huge one
very good yes i like it yeah mine
also liberated the woman really
absolutely the home appliance
the home appliance yes so the washing
machine the dishwasher
the refrigerator no longer did you have
to have
and i'm sure that there was home
appliances before the 1950s
but that strikes me as that's the era
where
you sort of stopped having ice and milk
delivered to your home every day because
you could refrigerate it yourself
and um and uh because you didn't have to
spend the day procuring
food and preparing it and this sort of
stuff and and doing
laundry manually et cetera et cetera it
freed up time
yeah yeah i i think that that's
fantastic like you said this is
exactly spot on on the type of of uh
of disruption that is uh it's not going
to be visible from the very first day
you know but what it led to
uh and when the revolution is started um
really solidifies what disruption is
right it's not really a disruption if it
was a flash in the pan right
exactly yeah far enough um well yeah i
mean
again we are pretty uh we are pretty
like uh close to each other when it
comes to
even the 40s on the 50s it'll be
interesting to see
if we if we're going to continue that
trend going forward let's see
but in the meantime uh you know let's
stay on the topic of evolution a little
bit
longer and disruption and so forth so we
talked about now obviously disruption
um the reception that evolution can
continue to do within the
giving industry some tones
that i am that is being echoed more and
more some voices are saying that um
when we now go into the future
the time that we are competing with is
is not necessarily
or is a player going to play uh casino
games on evolution gaming or
on netand or on playing or whatever but
um
the time that we are competing against
is with the likes of
netflix for example and um you know so
we are competing for the
leisure time of our of our players right
uh and um you know the the ceo
of netflix famously said uh on the
question of
who their biggest competitor are uh he
famously said that
our netflix biggest competitor is sleep
okay people's people's jobs and sleep
that's what we're up against um so that
is the type of outside of the box
thinking
that netflix is bringing to the table
right they are not comparing themselves
to
disney plus uh or espn plus or whatever
they are they are their biggest
competitor is sleep
okay and if we want to be outside of the
box that's an argument in the city yes
our biggest competitor is not
necessarily
like you said the playing go or other
game industries it is
the the industries that compete for the
leisure time
like netflix so i'm i'm dragging out my
question here but
uh the the question is basically
um how can you be disruptive as
evolution
in a wider sense not only competing
against your
direct competition which is uh which is
um
yeah what reduced manchester evolution
pragmatic all these things
um but how can you how can you disrupt
the wider
leisure time of players and yeah um
this is a this is always tricky because
you know you've got your five-year
vision or something like that and then
you know competitors can watch and
listen too but it's okay
um so we're pretty narrow space right
now
basically evolution makes all of its
money on the phone and on the computer
you know not basically it it does and um
and so uh in real money online
casinos that's pretty narrow
yeah so we haven't done anything in
land-based
pretty sizable space vastly bigger than
online
um why shouldn't our products live and
breathe
in land-based why should people be
restricted to playing
the same roulette table that they played
in
1900 why shouldn't they have access to
lightning roulette
or game shows why should they be stuck
in the same
old tired games and so land based is
a space um to
let our games breathe live um
then if you say okay well what are what
are all the other places where people
are
consuming stuff um uh are consuming
gaming
uh there's lotteries uh there is social
casino
there's um and then there's there's
maybe we're doing a lot of game shows
and we use the term game shows but then
there's
the kind of game shows we all grew up
watching and maybe there's a
maybe there's a television angle uh a
live television angle to be played there
now whether television means actual like
the television or it means
live stream on youtube or whatever is
another story but um
um that's kind of just within the gaming
sphere um and
those are some very big bites so i mean
think of this like
the united states is maybe an 80 billion
market in actual casino gambling
and then you got another maybe 80
billion in lottery so call that 160
say europe is the same so we're at 320.
macau is 40 billion so
you know we're getting up that in
lotteries and plus around the world so
maybe we've got a
500 600 billion dollar industry
and um and evolution is getting
like basically zero percent you know
of that um so maybe you know if if it's
one or two or whatever it doesn't make a
difference
uh the point is it's early days and um
it's hard to realize that it's early
days and there's this massive transition
happening right now
where people are transitioning from
doing things in land-based environments
whether that be going to the movies or
going
shopping or renting a video or whatever
to doing it on their phone and um
we haven't really made a lot of inroads
as a gambling industry mostly through
legislation
uh uh slowing it down the free market
would have gotten us there much quicker
if it was just an open field like amazon
operates in or something like that
so you say okay on 500 billion let's say
we get to 20
so there's a 100 billion online market
size out there maybe it gets to 40
by 2030 or something i don't know
so maybe it gets to half by 2030 who
knows if you're just running a casino
and it's not beautiful and doesn't have
like wonderful restaurants and shows and
giving you a reason to get in your car
and drive there
then of course your play is going to
move to online
right so those because that that that
business is at risk
and um and it has to transition so so
that play will transition to online
i don't know how big the market is or
whatever but the point is is
there's so much still to do um
we're in the middle of a big mountainous
shift
yeah it's a it's very interesting again
because
you know looking at the land-based
casinos
if you asked dumb 25 years ago
what can disrupt your industry i don't
think
i don't think everyone would realize
that it would be online gambling
no they would have said uh the state
next to me legalizing the country next
to me legalizing
uh new sort of legislation um some
something
something basically just more
competition exactly and again
hindsight is 2020. it's so obvious for
us to see that
yeah if you're alone yeah internet of
course everyone's gonna play on the
internet how
can you not see that but that is the
that is the force of
innovation it seems so obvious um
because it is
uh but to realize it when you're in it
this is very difficult so
what you're saying uh now is potentially
like i said
new frontiers that are opening up new
opportunities that are open
opening up based on the technology that
is being developed and so forth and
that is the way that you as the market
leader
have to think uh to be able to you know
be
uh be the ones done in let's say be the
the land-based casino 25 years ago that
did
think about online gambling and uh not
like the
um the the sounds of these worlds who
are
halting that uh innovation uh sounds
being
obviously a massive casino in the in las
vegas with venetian
with the famous sheldon artist
who who was one of the biggest
contributors to
stop online gambling in in in uh in the
in the u.s but in the end of the day
it's like it's like trying to stop a
hurricane
well you can't yeah yeah stopping tech
in general doesn't have a
rich history whether you're trying to um
prevent people from uh uh
you know doing test tube babies or
something like this or
sequencing dna or or any efforts to um
stop tech they're generally not very
successful i mean
over time north korea will will learn
that they can't stop the tech uh
to to s uh to too well
and and just it's just getting harder
and harder and harder
yeah absolutely um so it's interesting
examples that
uh that you bring up uh on the topic by
the way of uh
sheldon uh other song because i know
todd you're obviously
born and raised in vegas uh not not born
there but i i
moved there after i moved there for grad
school right after college yeah
so i grew up in california but i spent
most of my adult life there
where abouts in california today uh san
francisco san diego
los angeles my sister in san francisco
okay i was born there
amazing i tried to go there every year
that's a great city
um so so so but obviously you're kind of
you you've been you're las vegas is
kind of the second home for you or the
first time oh yeah yeah i call las vegas
home yeah yeah
so obviously on the um
owner of the of the sounds he passed
away recently obviously a
massive icon in los angeles
in las vegas and i know that um so he
owned the
the venetian the palazzo and the sons
expo
hall there and i know that his employees
he was seen as a
as a god almost like really well
respected but he was a very very
polarizing figure right here there was
two sides where he had one camp that
really loved him in one count that
really
really really despised each other the
sun that was almost like dancing on his
grave in some respects now can you tell
me a little bit like what's um
growing up in las vegas what's what's
your opinion on sheldon
yeah so i mean he's this i mean he's a a
real
gambler so he started comdex uh then he
sold that trade show
uh back like at its peak at the dot-com
took all the money and built the
venetian
and he's just sort of this like
swashbuckling
hard-charging probably the hardest
charging guy in gaming
and um and so he took a look at macau
and he wait there's legalized gambling
somewhere
near china yeah i want in and so he went
there and he basically built
a strip there there was an interesting
story in spain he wanted to go to spain
and he's like
i will build you your own las vegas
strip
and it was like a 30 or 40 billion
dollar project
so basically you can build a mega casino
for like
three billion let's say so he was going
to build 10 of those
um and it would have been the biggest
project probably in the world by a long
shot and he wanted to do it in spain
i guess as the story goes he was like
working with the government and he's
like
listen i'm gonna come there and i'm
gonna infuse all this capital i'm gonna
create an unlimited number of jobs we're
gonna do at madrid and on and on and on
but your laws are no good for me so i
need players to be able to have casino
credit
and i need that to be legally
enforceable in the courts i also need it
to be much easier to fire people if i
want to
i also need you to change your smoking
laws so people can have a cigarette in
the casino
give me some of these things and i'll
give you your own las vegas strip
and there was a lot of back and forth
and obviously the deal never happened
but
um but who knows i mean that could have
changed the entire face of
of spain yeah yeah because we don't have
a gaming camera yeah you don't have a
las vegas here yeah yeah yeah it's true
so so what's your what's the health
halter's opinion of sheldon
shalom oh i'm a lover of all things
gaming so
um so you know he he built the venetian
back in 2000
and uh and then he built macau where i
went
and lived there's a really strong case
to be made that if
if he being the first westerner had gone
out to macau
and built the sands which people say is
the most successful casino
ever built in terms of like payback was
like nine months or something crazy like
that yeah it was insane
um and uh and had he not done that
literally my
career my life might not have taken me
to macau yeah to go and work for one of
the eastern companies wouldn't have
probably happened
and i went out there uh after um after
wynn and sands had had already set up
shop and then the american company
started showing up and
so so i'm a fan i'm a fan i mean you
know obviously he's
the biggest donator in the world to uh
trump and whatnot and all that but
that's sort of off on the side so yeah
i'm i'm a lover of sheldon for his uh
contributions to gaming
yeah interesting interesting and then um
because uh
i i would imagine that uh that yes on
the one hand he's a kind of an innovator
in the structure in that regard that
obviously
he started the um the journey that
became macau
but then on the other hand he also held
back innovation in the
online space right yeah he did not want
online gaming happening he is very clear
about that
and uh now i think probably sans will go
into online
and that'll be very interesting to see
how they enter yes i don't think they're
gonna hire like four or five people
and uh and and give them a little bit of
office space over at the venetian and
say all right guys go
yeah i think they'll do something
massive yeah yeah let's see who
if there's an acquisition coming from
they got a very bright guy running the
company rob goldstein yeah
is super bright and um and their chief
gaming officer is a good friend of mine
too andrew mcdonald very
very very there's a lot of very smart
people over there um
they that's a company that celebrates
intelligence and um
they're gonna probably if they go into
online and i think there's a high
chance that they'll land on the right
answer yeah it's extremely competitive
right now everybody's
yes everything is quite expensive so if
they want to acquire their way to um
to entry it's gonna be expensive but um
yeah the multipliers are crazy high
right now in the us yeah well the
expectations are yeah
yeah we talked about this before in the
podcast but just take the example of
of draftkings and compared to william
hill in terms of
evaluation so draftkings in the in q3
and 2020 made something like 140 million
euro
revenue and they spent more
in marketing only then they made revenue
right
140 million uh euro or a dollar sorry is
um
it's not a massive amount for an sport
operator comparing to for example
uh william hill who made something like
450
million in the same quarter but if we
look at the valuations
draftkings on the stock market now is
valued at
23 billion dollars
with 140 million euro
revenue in in one quarter whereas uh
william hill
when it was sold to uh bethem gm at the
valuation of like
3.5 billion well just comparing the
markets
uh the european market to the u.s market
the expectations on the u.s market is
ginormous obviously
do you think do you think investors are
over valuing draftkings and the market
in itself
or do you think that that the u.s or the
market will actually live up to
this expectation yeah um i don't know if
they're overvaluing it
but the bet that you're making is
that they can
spend a mountain of money to acquire
players now
and then as the markets mature they're
going to hold those players
and and maybe they will and maybe they
won't
you know others are going to be coming
whispering
not exactly whispering but screaming
with a megaphone
at their players and saying we'll give
you bonuses to sign up here's this
celebrity says we're better
um we're partnered with espn we're
partnered with these guys
and you're going to have every angle
under the sun and a lot of people will
just never switch
right i've got my i've got my app it
does everything i need
and it's it's fine for me and i just
don't need to switch
um you know i don't if you offer
me a free i'm an iphone user if you
offer me a free
brand new samsung top of the line phone
i'll pass yeah even if you said you
could have them free for the rest of
your life i'd rather just pay
and have iphones just because i'm
comfortable with it and so so that's the
bet that you're making
for sure the market in the us will be
the biggest market in the world
um i mean i don't see china legalizing
anytime soon so so the us will be the
biggest market for online
this is a question of how big yeah how
big and how fast
and then and then big means what
wager okay wager isn't that useful
so uh wager needs to turn into ggr
so i can get the wager at evolution
way higher by just taking the zeros off
the roulette wheel right
and we just won't be making any money so
okay so wager is not a very useful
metric
um and in sports betting the the move is
you would just make the
the lines a little bit more friendly and
more friendly and more friendly
um and so uh but it bodes well
for uh i i look at it and i say okay
great
draftkings is out there they're amazing
they do kind of everything
everything right they're they're getting
a ton of business and they're not alone
right i mean there's a lot of companies
doing everything right right now
but sports betting is growing and
growing and growing and they've
legalized it in a bunch of places
now they'll legalize it online and then
what'll happen is they'll all
probably say we'd like to bring our
casino offering
and um exactly and we'll be there
happily happy to serve
yeah exactly that's the that's the next
step right so so um
what what about evolution and how do you
guys see the
the us in general do do you foresee that
evolution will be by far the most
important market of yours
in in a couple of years uh what's you
guys
thoughts in general on that are you
putting as much effort as we can into
that market
yeah um everybody
my my crystal ball in the us is not is
not perfectly clear because
every state has its own legislature and
they're going to decide what they want
to do with online gaming
and and then how that how casino fits
into that and then if it does fit in
then what are the tax rates that they're
going to do and all that sort of stuff
and um and then what kind of rules do
you have to play by so
currently every time we go into a state
right now we're in new jersey and
pennsylvania
uh with live casino we're also in west
virginia with slots and
michigan with slots in a couple months
we're going to be in
michigan with live casino in every state
that'll have us
we'll be happy to go and serve our
customers there and
um but i don't know how many states that
are going to be willing to have us
uh if if you can tick off a couple of
biggies california
texas new york you know then you know
it'll be well on its way to being the
biggest market
but um as a product guy i don't really
think in terms of
that much in terms of markets i just um
there's players everywhere and they're
sure to enjoy our games and as
a particular market heats up we'll do
some geographic games like
craps we just did it and uh in fact we
did an interview from the craft table
yes yes we did
last time um
so we'll we'll do crops because the
united states is heating up or we might
do another game for another part of the
world
but um but for sure the us could easily
be the biggest market
yeah a long shot yeah of course so so
that way that takes the question as well
so like if we look at the
at the live space in the us you know
there is evolution you guys obviously uh
huge you you have a massive market the
cap i would imagine in the u.s
does it does it keep you up at night
stop
thinking if uh some some like crazy
creative rich kids
in silicon valley would look at this
market and say like oh my god is
insane opportunity to create a
competitor to evolution
um no they raised like three billion
dollars somewhere night or something
no it doesn't bother me um the uh the
live casino space is extremely hard
um you know we've we've bought we bought
an edit and they had a live
live division and um and we bought
another one azuki
and uh when you when you get in there
and you see
like okay how are they operating and
what kind of business are they doing and
all this sort of stuff
you're reminded that oh right we've been
at this for 15
years the amount of money we spend each
year just
on risk tools probably exceeds the
entire development budget
of some of these of of a small live
casino offering
it's very weird space the kids in the
silicon valley can definitely create a
beautiful app
and um and make a game where the chips
flow back and forth and you can call on
wallets and you can have the sort of the
core plumbing of the game
but then they've got to figure out how
are they going to hire dealers
train them make them deal fast
but mistake free and friendly
and probably someone in there is trying
to
steal or cheat right um and they've got
to stop that then the players are coming
and they're counting cards
and they've got to figure out how to
sniff that out but not have too many
false positives
right because then they kick all these
players out there's nobody left right
then they've got to
figure out how to stop the people who
are clocking wheels using technology to
use basically make a physics problem and
figure out where the ball is going to
drop
um and how do you detect that in real
time uh then they've got to
you know make sure all the cards were
shuffled and that they didn't preserve a
small section
and all of that and by the way there's
some new scam that nobody's ever thought
of happening
right now that they also have to catch
in real time
uh i would advise them to uh do
something else
okay if you're listening to this rich
kids of uh silicon valley just to
focus on your social media like how do
you do that well okay
i i don't know if you're paying
attention but it's a new social media
app that is blowing up now called the
clubhouse
have you seen it i heard about it elon
did something with it yeah exactly i
don't know much about it
that's why elon is the ultimate
influencer
of the world he went on clubhouse like
three days ago or something and now
the entire world wants to get on on
clubhouse but it's
this is the latest uh this is the latest
trend where
clubhouse they have nine employees okay
and um
and the the concept is that it's an
audio first platform
so you can go into different rooms uh a
topic of your choice
you know maybe you want to discuss what
is the next innovation
in uh live casino for example there
might be a room where
people want to go in and discuss that or
it could be that you want to discuss the
latest trends in
um in dog grooming or something it can
be whatever
but it's audio first so it becomes a lot
more personal all right so it's much
more welcoming and and things like that
so that that that is now the latest
trends amongst like the
the uh the cool kids basically everyone
is on it's own clubhouse now
but that just goes to show i guess if
you're uh if you come from that world
the silicon valley world you know
you have an idea that works you execute
it right
and you can be a nine nine person uh
company with uh i think they had
something like twenty thousand users and
they managed to raise a hundred million
dollar you know and you can do that on
that level just based on this idea that
you have and the team that you have and
whatnot
but it's a different beast if you wanted
on compete with evolution and you need
to have it yeah
and right now in the management
uh boardroom at spotify and at itunes
they're talking about clubhouse right
yes and um
and so clubhouse can probably go raise a
bunch of money and they can leverage the
fact that they scored an elon interview
and all that um but the road is long
yeah and
um and they're gonna have to pump that
full of content and
they can get a bunch of downloads um and
uh
but are they gonna have enough content
to hold people's attention
um because it's it's it's it's very
competitive
yeah yeah i feel uh to be honest with
you i feel
like i've become addicted in the
clubhouse actually i was
i was on before it is this morning it
was on the yesterday and this is really
interesting to join discussions with
there's some really high level people on
there so it is easy to discuss with uh
having these type of discussions
basically uh with a couple of people who
are just on a very high level
uh in general which is cool but then you
never know you know as the app grows
that um you know maybe the level will go
down
uh so say in the in the discussions that
you you can have and so forth but
the space is moving very quickly in the
social media sphere right now i feel
where
if we go back 10 years there was
facebook twitter
instagram right and they all served one
purpose each
now if you ask the kids what they what
else they are using and you ask about
like tick tock for example a 14 year old
kid in
in the states they will say that tick
tock is yesterday's news
you know the trends in social media is
um
shifting more towards like what is the
coolest app right now
it doesn't necessarily have to have
something that is
uh unique with that it's it's like
wearing a brand is it a cool brand or
it's like
if you want to go to a nightclub where
are the cool kids which nightclub
vertical kids that's where i want to be
not necessarily which is the most
innovative nightclub let's say
it's interesting how the transfer
shifting yeah and then and then can it
can it catch a tidal wave right so like
i have a bunch of people that are
saying like hey todd you know uh
whatsapp
is changing their privacy settings and
they're sharing with facebook and this
and that
so sign up for telegram or
some of these others and um and i'm like
okay i mean is anybody even on there and
i've got all my groups formed and you
know there's friction to changing
and uh uh same thing with like facebook
you've got like
a decade of photos stored on there
already and and everything and do you
want to switch to the
to the next thing but look that's the
game what's the game that's the game
that's it
the the threats are shifting that's
right every day yeah and the dynamics
are shifting all the time i think this
is the
yeah this is the key as well um so yeah
so jumping
from social media back uh shall we go
back in time again sure
let's do it i think maybe we'll have the
same one here let's see
so we're talking about the 1960s and now
it's your turn to start
i think the biggest innovation of the
1960s
is organ transplants oregon okay that's
completely different
the the contribution to mankind
that this has had where you can
ex i mean we got steve jobs for a few
years longer we were talking about him
earlier
because of the concept of transplanting
organs
and um and then of course that leads to
artificial organs etc etc
and um that's an incredible technology
an incredible disruption
i mean when you stop and think about uh
how significant that is and now they're
trying to print them
so once they can print them there will
be no longer the concept of a waiting
list
exactly and it'll it's just such a game
changer i mean people get to spend
more years with loved ones and it's it's
just
it's wonderful yeah that's what i i that
didn't even
come across my mind yes i was really
finally deviating yes yes
so i think i have a bit more obvious one
i really like
your sweet though again transfer it
makes a lot of sense mine is a bit more
obvious
it's uh the technology that came from
the um
from the apollo program so the moon
landing basically
yeah uh the u.s decided that now we're
going to spend
what was it something like uh six
percent of the entire
u.s federal body there for a couple of
years uh to basically
innovate enough to take us to the moon
and the technology that came from that
changed the world yeah otherwise known
as the last moon landing
the last moon amazing war amazing that
on planet earth today
we don't have a vehicle that will get us
to the moon
yeah uh yeah exactly we are in we are
stuck to low earthworks building one
but where elon is yeah exactly but uh
and i think this might come a bit later
actually this uh okay
all right let's see let's see where
we're heading but uh
um i'm a nerd massive
big fan of neil degrasse tyson which is
a atrophy's sister is talking a lot
about this that
you know the um the the
the revolution and the sixties in
people's minds
where um you know this the 60s was like
the decade of the future
everything was about what's gonna happen
tomorrow you know what's the next
innovation
when are we gonna go to mars or flying
cars you know if you look back at
like the cartoons from that decade
everything is about the future
yeah they were really pushing the
boundaries too like even like the cars
that i like
bigger engines the era of the muscle car
pushing the technological boundaries
yeah and um
then like in the 70s it all died off yes
yeah it's very sad in that respect and
you know in the in the 60s like i said
it's
people were dreaming you know yeah there
was there was this like
uh there was this positive outlook on
how amazing the future is going to be
and the 60 thought was fueled by the
space race uh to some extent then we
landed on the moon
we realized that the the russians are
not gonna go to the far side of the moon
and build the
build bases and whatnot and um
that whole era that whole era passed
basically it's nice to see space
becoming relevant again yes
i see a lot of kids wearing nasa shirts
i love it and you can tell that like i'm
not sure they know anything
about uh about any of it but uh it's
cool that that's what they want to
advertise maybe they do maybe they maybe
they
i don't know could they name the planets
but i love that too
it's like the trend um right you see it
the the nasa
the nasa logo is becoming cool too every
time i see it i'm like
making a lot of money licensing that
probably yeah i i think the nasa logo is
free to use actually is that right yes
yes yes that's why you see it's
everywhere you can use it you can print
a chart with another
people will do a slot yeah yeah exactly
you can completely
okay this is the uh this is the idea i'm
born after the podcast today
the um apollo missions so now maybe
everybody will do a slide yeah exactly
but you can build the real rocket in a
live environment and whenever you hit
the jackpot the rocket takes off
out from the studio yeah well we might
have something like that coming this
year
no one is ever going to be able to
compete with that
i'll be the first one to play that game
by the way so you have you already have
one customer
all right well that's good if you can
double that
done you have to we'll be yelling we're
well on our way
that's 100 grams represent growth
i love it um yeah that'll be an
interesting studio to see
i i was watching actually yesterday
there was the launch of the um
i don't know if you're paying attention
to spacex and what they're doing but
they
they are trying to create this um rocket
to go to uh to mars basically uh the
the bfr they call it um and
they launched the um the ninth prototype
of that uh yesterday because they are
trying to
they are trying to um basically sail the
rocket
and then shift it and land it yeah it
just falls out of the sky now right
falls out of the sky
sails and then bam but they
they failed yesterday as well which
makes for some spectacular uh
distraction footage that is always
exciting to watch as well
um but uh yeah let's let's come back to
that a little bit
a little bit later so because there's
more more things to to
talk about on that side um jumping into
disruption once again uh here uh
and if we now look at the eye giving
industry as a whole we talked about a
lot about evolution how we can
how evolution can disrupt the argument
space and beyond
right so if we now look at the argument
industry
in it in itself and how can the argument
industry disrupt or how can it be
disrupted perhaps um i know that you
talked about this
during argument next conference in 2019
that it's a
healthy conversation to have in general
what can disrupt
our industry so i'd just like to open
the conversation on
you know how do you view how do you view
the argument industry
potentially being disrupted what are
some potential
um ideas or voices that can disrupt
industry and
what do we need to look out for yeah um
there's the the big thing that could
disrupt it is just
the way people want to gamble um
for sure people are gonna gonna keep
gambling there will always be a desire
to uh
have more money than you have and then
the knock-on effect from that will be
that you'll be willing to risk some of
it on an uncertain event
to make more so that's not going
anywhere
but the way people want to do it
could um there's some interesting stuff
happening with the crypto casinos
and um they're super uh
intentionally miserable graphics and i
say that lovingly i mean it's a
it's a choice that they that they make
the graphics intentionally cl
um pure and simple like some of the
biggest uh apps in the app store game
apps
are like just blocks of things you know
they don't they don't um
there's something about letting about
keeping your mind from drifting
and just focusing on a task at hand i've
got to get this square into that box
and or something like that and so um
the the uh
the form the the way people want to play
is
something that could shift so if um
those crypto casinos
took off the same way that people want
to gamble with live video
is been super disruptive to anything not
live video
and it will continue to be another one
would be if people decided that they
want to gamble
from within their video games that could
be a major
shift in and in who the winners are at
least
another one could be if uh they decide
to want to gamble
through their television and um maybe
there's a
resurgence in the television as uh as
the television
becomes well the television isn't dead
it's just that you're pumping netflix
through it now more than you're
flipping through the channels right and
so uh
it's not that fast yet 5g isn't really
here but
but soon enough it'll be more like old
television again i think you'll be able
to like kind of quickly flip through
your youtube channels pop
pop pop up and um and find stuff that's
that's live and ongoing and
so uh so if people decide that their
predominant way they'll want to play is
through a television
that could again shift who the winners
are um so those are the things that i'd
be
kind of on the lookout for yeah do you
think that because of the
heavy focus on staying on top of
regulation that
the operators specifically have to worry
about these days and also
the suppliers obviously do you think
that that is um
uh do you think that there's a risk of
us losing
losing touch on where the next
innovation comes from because of this
what do you mean losing touch or kind of
losing the
um the eye of the ball let's say uh
because of the heavy focus on being
staying compliant
um it's going to uh it's it's going to
as as companies have to shift resources
to ensure that
compliance with different markets then
they are going to
literally be shifting resources they're
not going to magically make a bunch of
people appear
so they're going to take their take
resources off of projects
that were going to make the the app or
the offering that they had more fun or
more innovative or whatever
and make it more compliant because
without compliance there's no money
coming in
and everybody's out of a job so that'll
happen
the good news for the gaming industry is
that
it's heavily regulated that's the bad
news too but
the good news is uh so so so to my
fellow peers in the casino industry
so your position yeah when we're
complaining about some regulation or
something like that first of all it's
very useful
because bad actors could ruin it for
everybody right if we had some nasty
casino out there
that had dishonest games maybe nobody
would trust online
so it's useful to have regulation from
that perspective the second thing it's
it does is it's keeping amazon and
google out of our space
and um everybody should say a little
prayer every night
that dear lord thank you that we're
heavily regulated and it's too much of a
pain in the ass
for amazon to want to try
and that's real that's real so uh so
it'll be okay if they shift their focus
from innovative stuff
to compliance or regulation stuff
because new entrants don't get to race
in
too fast that's a it's like it's a
it's a juxtaposition basically it's both
good and bad that we have the regulation
at the same time
it's an interesting perspective that uh
that we have that
um i think you know uh i think that
i've we've talked about this before in
the podcast uh
where will the next reputation come from
and i think
i think it's becoming clear to me
actually i think i've cracked the code
i want to dare say that actually um
because just a month ago
this would be in the sports betting
space so don't worry
yeah you're okay uh and i'm assuming
that the evolution isn't entering that
space
anytime soon or maybe i can't come on
these and confirm and deny everything
otherwise it'll be too easy to figure
out what we're doing
okay okay i was i did my best
um but in the sports betting space uh
so at the moment you have um streaming
platforms like
dawson espn plus in sweden we have one
called seymour
and recently dassan which is uh
they are predominantly focusing on
boxing they
acquired shay segev as a new ceo that's
a new co-ceo because everyone knows that
every restaurants the best restaurants
have two
good chefs apparently but anyway
um other than that so schaef segev he
was the ceo
obviously at the gbc one of the biggest
operators
i gaming operators in the world and that
made us speculate a little bit that
wouldn't it make so much sense if
a streaming network like dawson
would switch the plug and incorporate
sports betting within their platform
offer it to a completely new demographic
of let's say 100
million users or whatever they have
which are not necessarily signing up to
dawson because they want to play
sportsbook but they get
presented with the opportunity as they
are there you want to play you can play
if you don't want to play that's okay
as well you still pay the subscription
wouldn't that be an absolute disrupter
for
other sports perkins operators like
bet365 and those type of industries
every every uh
new entrant is going to come with some
angle and
that would be an angle uh
it's a cool angle and um
and it would appeal to some people the
next company will come with the angle
that uh whatever you can
gamble and and earn points towards free
gas
and they'll do a relation have
relationships with all the gas stations
and
or something like that or the next one
will be like well we have land-based
casinos and you can use your
you can earn points towards restaurants
or whatever um
it's a fine angle like i had this
impression
that um land-based casinos
in the uk when they started coming
online
that they would really eat into the
digital ones and
they didn't that much they have casino
online casino but the thing that i
missed was all the players that are
playing in land-based casinos already
have online accounts
with whoever william hill or somebody
like that
and now when they come on it's the same
it's in the same sense that um
i might shop at my local grocery store
or something like that but when i buy
something online
i don't necessarily buy it from them i
buy from amazon and so it'll be
interesting to see
if um these sort of blending two worlds
together
is enough of a unique proposition that
um
that people will will stay and play
at the end of the day the blackjack game
is the blackjack game and so what are
you going to wrap it in
but that's it's a fine angle yeah yeah
because you still have
you're absolutely right you still have
the supermarkets where people go shop
for the electric store where people go
shop
but amazon is a one trillion dollar
company
and i guess it's fine that they can they
can stay where they are but
but amazon disrupted that market they
didn't close they didn't uh
completely take over the entire market
but they obviously had to be
the second biggest company in the world
or or was not at the moment
and i think that um so likewise on the
streaming
platform side of things um the the
customer databases that
dawson and others will have if they
really push uh their products
uh to the market as much as they can and
espn plus and so forth
the databases that they can play with um
is going to be so much more diverse than
the database of for example
365 where where their customers
specifically are signing up to sports
but that is a very niche part of the
human population that
do that but a much bigger part of the
human population is
interested in sports and want to watch a
live stream
yeah i mean they cross sell
opportunities yeah it's a nice player
acquisition
methodology right maybe that's what it
effectively comes down to
is uh it's a it's a fine way to acquire
players yeah
yeah it's it's an interesting it's
interesting you thought
like that because again we get stuck
sometimes in the
what was the latest disruption and then
we compare that to what will the
next disruption be of the argument
industry and
the last disruption in the argument
industry was again what we mentioned
before it
shifts from desktop to mobile
and then we think okay what's the next
technology that will disrupt the
industry
but again it can be an idea it can be
just a a technology that already exists
that now all of a sudden
it makes sense you just put one and one
together and
something beautiful comes out of it and
i do think it's healthy to think
in those terms just to solidify a little
bit that uh
to move out of the box thinking that it
has to be a technology
comparable to the desktop mobile shift
it doesn't necessarily have to be that
no it doesn't have to be i
think it probably won't be no exactly
and then once we see the next reception
then we will compare ourselves to that
disruption you know what i mean
so it's a it's an ongoing it's an
ongoing thing that
that is always interesting to observe i
think that we i remember is very short
let's say
yeah yeah and everybody's great at
predicting the past too yeah
they kind of quickly forget the things
that they were predicting would be a
success like 3d television
yeah and then they kind of re-remember
history and say like well of course
airbnb is a threat to hotels or
of course uber was going to take off it
was bound to happen yeah
but the but of course at that time tesla
did you buy stock at tesla in 2009
yeah exactly i remember like speaking of
tesla that
when the financial crisis hit they were
tesla was one of the companies that were
bailed out by the us government
and obama was heavily criticized for
bailing out tesla
it was mitt romney in the election in
2012
in the election cycle he was heavily
criticizing obama
for like uh he was saying that he
doesn't just
pick the winners and the losers like he
doesn't know what he's doing he's just
picking the losers oh right yeah i
remember his
classic quote yeah yeah about tesla
boy was he wrong yeah but that's you
know at the time that's
you know he had good reason to think
that you know yeah he's not you know
politicians are always pandering but
yeah but a lot of
a lot of uh smart people i mean look
tesla had like 30
short ratio like two years ago something
like that yes
so yeah uh a lot of people just got
crushed on that
yeah that's smart money yeah you got
really smart people i remember watching
like jim chanos on television
yeah talking about how he thinks the
value of tesla is a zero yeah
yeah it was just you know thinking about
that because it was
it was due to the uh it was due to the
manufacturing
process that tesla had problems with
just a couple of years ago right it's
like two years ago something like that
and that nearly bankrupted the entire
company
there isn't that it's not that many
people who think that i think
or who realize how big your like how
exposed tesla was at that time yes a
couple of years ago
yeah they uh they were really struggling
i i had bats on it on
on bets on i shouldn't call it bets i
was an investor in tesla at the time
yeah and uh and i was
pretty relaxed like i remember relying
heavily on the idea that
the ceo figured out how to make rockets
come back down to earth
and land themselves i think he'll be
able to do what ford and general motors
and toyota and volkswagen have figured
out
uh he just tried to over automate it and
um and the other thing was i didn't
think
i didn't view them as the bankruptcy
risk that others did
because i always viewed that he could
borrow against
spacex or uh or go to like
sergey and larry over at google or
pick up the phone and get a billion
dollars pretty easily yeah
and um who knows maybe he never had to
make those phone calls because history
worked out okay
yeah yeah he managed by himself there
but
and now obviously tesla is worth more
on the stock market everything combined
all the other
car companies combined isn't that just
absolutely crazy like
where do you it should be yeah they
should be and it's it's it's not just a
car company
uh it's an energy storage company
it's a energy production company in the
form of solar
it's uh it's uh overhauling of the
electric grid
and bringing stabilized power to like
small island nations and things like
that company
they've got an insurance business uh
self-driving by itself that could
if if it works if they if they nail
self-driving
and they get there a few years before
anybody else is that worth a trillion
dollars by itself
yeah maybe yeah so it's uh
it could be cheap at 600 billion or 700
billion
yeah yeah i think so yeah yeah it's a
it's a but if you talk about them as an
auto company then everybody can do these
crazy metrics like
exactly oh they're valued at this much
per car
okay but they're in 12 different
businesses yeah so so
i think i guess the expectation is on
tesla to completely disrupt the world
in a way because they aren't going to
keep that valuation by these producing
cars
that's what we're saying right uh the if
they manage to figure out self-driving
uh cars they'll be able to if you own a
tesla you'll be able to
uh switch it to taxi mode yeah uh when
you're not using it and then and then
your tesla will basically act as a taxi
for other people
as you are not using it and then it will
come back to you when it's time for you
to use it again and
you know that's like an absolutely
disruptive idea yeah and then that'll
drive
down the price of ride hailing services
uber right so it's a it's a serious
threat to uber right now yeah and lyft
uh and bolt and and all of them around
the world and then
when it gets cheaper then and cars are
more available
and they're all nice teslas that you're
going in the desire to own your own
car goes down right so it becomes a
threat to the other automakers
and it creates this whole new flywheel
yeah and then comes the kind of the uh
from the sidelines here comes apple into
this game as well
they see obviously what tesla's doing
apple baidu google
you know uh there'll be a lot of
partnerships there
uh but the kings of the data world are
gonna all all be trying to nail
self-driving and yeah and bring an angle
there yeah exactly and
i guess you know if we look at brand
equity as well um
this is where this is where brands like
apple and tesla really shine right
because if you have two
self-covering cars that are equally good
one is at toyota one is a tesla
they have same specifications the same
price i think
that the brand equity within tesla is so
strong that
most people would choose tesla it's
people support
this company because i think what elon
has done is
he has infused this vision uh to the
world
um of being a person who wants to save
the world
right and i think if you ask people what
is what is elo musk's intention
in his life what drives him as a person
it is not
to be the richest person in the world
although that is what you know is right
and maybe that is today's real intention
who knows you know but
but um people view elon musk as this
as the einstein of our day you know he
is the person who will
who will who signifies this shift into
a healthier world and people we want to
support his
uh his organization because of that and
isn't interesting that they spend
nothing on advertising
nothing yes nothing what a fascinating
case study it sort of
shatters everything that was taught in
uh business school
exactly i'm you know i you know saying
that though
and even with zero marketing buddy at
sending up a tesla card to space
that's what they did right talking about
the best marketing campaigns
ever the ceo is the most interesting guy
in the world has 25 million
followers on twitter et cetera et cetera
you know there's
there's uh they're not short of
publicity they're just
they're just not buying commercial time
no exactly exactly i don't know i mean
if if the for me if the apple campaign
um in the 90s was my favorite
advertisement campaign ever i think the
second one is
a tesla in his first uh in the first um
big rocket that they that went up and
you see the backdrop of
planet earth on the on the tesla car and
the space man or they call him star man
i think sitting in the
sitting in the car and playing bob dylan
if everybody had just bought stock and
tesla when they made that launch
amazing it's gone up like 10 times since
yeah
amazing i love that i i mean it i it it
really makes me happy when i see these
uh
things because it's it's inspiring to me
this is like real genuine progress for
the human race you know
and if you can put that vision behind
the brand um
this is the this is the ultimate way of
uh
of building a company in my opinion
where you build you infuse your
organization with that type of vision
that people can be behind
it's the way to do it but it's just hard
to hold on to it yeah
it's hard you know a a rough quarter or
two comes and you sell your soul or
you say oh we can just make something
that's more immediately
commercially viable just for this
quarter though yeah yeah or we can
you know uh do a partnership with that
company or
take money from those guys and give them
a seat on the board and
it's it can be hard it's yeah it's tough
out there yeah yeah that's for sure
and you see once the snowball is in
motion it's
uh once once a snowball is in motion
it's hard to change in this one so
once you start taking those decisions
it's easier to
do it again let's say okay todd we are
progressing here
slowly but surely through the through
the decades so you know what we'll do
now i think though we'll
take two decades at the same time here
so uh so get through this so now we're
at the 70s
and uh shall i start with this one we
have the same one i don't think so
okay i really don't think so all right
uh i have
the game pong
i have the personal computer i would
okay we are at the uh
well okay well if you jump into the 80s
i
that is no chance we match up here zero
chance okay so so the 70s is to explain
so the game pong
obviously signified the revolution that
uh that led to
where we are now where the the the
the games are taking over the world and
obviously the digital revolution started
with with that game obviously so
so yeah we are aligned i guess in that
yeah yeah yeah same thing effectively
the same thing yeah
you did it in a more fun way than i did
mine was a lobbyist
okay so jumping into the system
seat belt laws mandating the seat belts
this was not the norm it was not
an optional uh add-on
that you could pay extra for and have a
car and no one wanted to use it yeah
and then nobody wanted to use it then uh
then um around the world it happened at
slightly different times
and then the three-point seat belt came
about but
net contribution of that to mankind has
been incredible i mean we'll never know
all the stories but
how many people are alive who then gave
birth to somebody who
whatever and you know i mean we'll just
we'll never know the impact of that and
it's like the most tragic form of um
of losing somebody because it's so
sudden it's not a result of bad behavior
or anything like that
um it just happens one day out of the
blue yeah
and uh seat belts and air bags have just
been uh yeah
phenomenal yeah yeah amazing i like it
though that's outside of the outside of
the box
thinking so mine is actually quite
similar to the 17th
and what you mentioned in the in the 70s
which is the home computer the personal
oh okay yeah yeah yeah all right i guess
you could say yeah yeah
yeah when did these things happen
probably it was invented in 1950 or
something like that but yeah exactly but
yeah when did it come to
age yeah exactly exactly so i i i would
i was
that to say this but it's very it's yeah
it is probably the 17th just to be
honest with you so
you are you are probably that's okay
you're probably right we're
we're we're in agreement we're in
agreement
so um okay so on to the next question
out of the
and so i want to move back a bit to
evolution again yeah
so what could disrupt
evolution right now it's very difficult
uh you're strong in the markets right
yeah uh
the cost and time it would take to
disrupt evolution
would be very difficult uh yeah i
touched earlier on like the difficulty
of the live casino space
but you could still hire a whole bunch
of people and uh
and have a big budget and try to try to
create your own
but right now we're so
tight and we're not really exposed in
any
way famous last words but uh but like
uh in in what's known as the modern live
casino space
there's no angles to flank us on right
you're not gonna get us with a
with a new angle on blackjack or a new
angle on roulette or
uh you know we've got the game show
genre covered someone could do a neat
game show but it's not a threat to
evolution probably it
helps evolution for others to do cool
stuff in live instead of just copying us
all the time
and um and that would that would make
life
better i mean probably like if
if pepsi had never showed up would coke
have greater sales today
i'm not sure that they would but maybe
they would i don't know but um
but a case could be made that uh the
coke would even be smaller
um that that people would just never
really would have started drinking as
much soda whatever
so we're hard to disrupt
at the moment and things don't move that
fast in gaming either
i'm all about disruption but
where could it come from could it be
for example regulation
yes but it would only disrupt that
market
uh i mean of course like universally if
like every
every place kind of simultaneously shut
down or something that would be
that would be maybe a
airborne virus could spread
and uh and it would disrupt whether or
not you could have employees inside of a
building
yes maybe that could happen and that's
something you had to deal with
obviously how did you guys go through
that process this time
um well every now and then someone first
of all
uh we we every at every place it's a
little bit different
but you have to uh distance
while you're running the games so for
example how can i be dealing the game
and have somebody here shuffling the
cards
and we keep six feet of distance you
can't so
now the dealers shuffle the cards on
their own games things like that
or if the tables are too close together
we just close some tables
and and uh or if someone
comes down with the virus then you have
to close the entire area
clean every clean it maybe send people
home make sure everybody gets tested
that sort of stuff
and uh we weathered that storm extremely
well
but we have studios scattered all over
the place so
if one particular place was being
disrupted then we had action in another
and because all the players convened in
one central evolution lobby
even if a big game was down like crazy
time they can shift over to
some something else and play it's not
ideal but uh
but we could still service service the
players yeah but
that could have been very yeah it could
because that must have been a shaky
moment for you guys
you know how are we going to keep
operating our organization because
it may have well been that you know
regulation again comes in and says that
no you're not allowed to
to operate your organization with uh
with this amount of employees for
example
we don't no one knew what was going to
happen back in march yeah and we were
already a move
you know we've got again in all these
different markets and everything else
where we could continue to to run and
then you say okay well you we might bump
into too many concurrent players
on single tables uh which we've recently
beefed up we can take about 6 000
players on a single table right now
and we push up against that most nights
these days with uh
with crazy time and um
but if we just took the max the minimum
bet
from whatever 50 cents to a dollar you'd
lose about
20 of the players and if you went to
1.50
you could so there's tricks that you can
do to sort of uh
uh thin out the number of players if you
need to and
and we we we're ready for sort of every
eventuality yeah
but um in some super nightmare uh
we would be reduced to just having the
games that can run by themselves and
there's a few of those so like we can
we can run a few of our games without
without any dealers
it's interesting now as we go through
the pandemic because
on the investment side of things people
have been talking about investors have
been talking previously about how
important it is to
to have um recession-proof investments
you know that's something you look at is
this
industry recession proof which eye
gaming is you know it's a great industry
to invest in
uh if you if you predict that there will
be a recession
but now through the pandemic there's a
second uh consideration as well which is
what industries are pandemic proof
yeah yeah and um eye gaming as a whole
is one of those industries as well as
we've seen
giving was flourishing now through the
pandemic yeah
you had this inevitable transition from
land-based online
and this is poured gasoline on that it's
it's just been an accelerant and a lot
of people will probably never go back to
land-based i shouldn't say never go back
but uh no but they will they were at 10
time a year visitor to land based and
now they've found online
they'll be uh three time a year visitor
perhaps the numbers just came out
actually i thought that
in 2019 there were 23 percent of the
european
total gambling market came from online
23
and in 2020 they wanted i guess maybe
you know it
no i don't know well so the number 6
came out it's uh 35
it went up to from 23 to 35 percent uh
now it's
uh is within the online space and that's
predicted to go down in 2021 as the
casino is opening again
to something like 29. but it's still a
jump from 23
to 29. so so what is what the numbers
are saying is that yes
a lot of players will go back down to to
the in-person casinos
but a lot of people who are now
introduced to our ecosystem will stay
yeah and some of those casinos will
close too further
further push people back to online yeah
i mean think of like the united states
it's probably one percent
yeah exactly yes that's where they are
that's obviously where they are there's
your draftkings evaluation
exactly that's the darkest one um so
this
let's uh let's jump back into our time
machine now yep
and we'll do it so we're now we're
reaching the uh reaching the 90s
we'll do two more here so let's see
so i'll start on the 90s okay so i would
say that the internet revolution is the
90s
i think that's pretty obvious to me
internet existed before in the 80s and
so forth but it was in the
90s where the internet became the
mainstream and isn't that one of the
biggest chapter in the world
history yeah it has to be yeah um i
wanted to get creative
okay yeah you you went with the obvious
one um
okay it's i work i work it's too obvious
for me to say that
you win this round okay but uh i said um
i said uh tearing down the berlin wall
that individually yeah i know like
technically
the late 89 but uh but uh the wall comes
down in
in the night in 1990 exactly and uh but
but the spirit of the
berlin wall if it wasn't literally the
wall itself um
and that basically opened up uh this
human intellectual capital
and uh i mean look google was started by
uh
by people that lived on the eastern side
of that wall right mm-hmm yeah
so um i mean sergey sergey brin came
from russia
okay yeah yeah yeah yeah and uh and
you'll just never know i mean the impact
that it had
just unlocking all of that intellectual
capital and releasing it to the world in
a way yeah yeah it's
beautiful it's a beautiful thing and
going to berlin it's quite interesting
if you are in the easter on the west
side it's such a big difference
yeah it's neat to this uh to this day
yeah in the in the
industrial side on the dark side of the
of the eastern side which is uh tends to
be the creative side i think of berlin
that's uh yeah yeah decent side very
artsy yeah yeah yeah very very
very cool scene in in in berlin and i i
like it it's uh it's a good outside of
the books
yeah i'm thinking hard to compete with
the internet the internet
[Laughter]
yeah yeah but i see it's a different
angle i like it uh
okay and what about the 2000 so this is
your your return
yeah i'll leave it to you what do you
think
mine you'll have we'll have to do that
we'll have to come back again and do
another episode
in 2050 to see if this is right okay
but mapping the dna what was that
mapping our dna mapping to dna yes
yes yes yes now the event by itself was
more of a technological innovation
but where that's going to go is going to
change mankind forever
that's such a great point actually i
remember when
it wasn't it was bill clinton who
presented this
uh when they mapped the first they did
the first union sequence
of the dna which cost like a billion
dollars to do something like that yeah
it's like 600 bucks or something yeah
exactly
would you would you sequence your dna
yeah i plan to i want to you you would
yeah i just hope you can give me
something useful and say like oh yeah i
definitely want to know like if i'm
oh yeah really i don't want it's like
it's like you know looking into the
this like the evil eye of the witch
that's uh
that tells you how you're going to die
but then you presume that they
can't act on anything that any you can't
invoke behavioral changes or something
like that
yeah right a particular ailment yeah
exactly but i
i i'm just fearing to be predisposed for
some
like illness that would like that that
they cannot do anything about
that's why it's a conundrum though
because yes on the one hand yeah you can
act early and extend your life a little
bit but
on the other hand it's a scary
proposition okay i have a prediction
okay tell me you will map your own dna
in the next
15 years in the next 50. we bet 10 or
sure in today's dollars right
today all right sure uh
maybe maybe in 10 years that's gonna be
worth anything you're on yeah
okay you you are living in the current
this is like someone looking at a plane
and saying
i would never ride in one of those
things what if it what if it just fell
out of the sky
or you know like uh yeah this is
you will look back and say i remember
when todd told me that yeah
now it's like reckless not to map my dna
why
wouldn't i why would i yes especially
when you learn that uh
they'll be able to edit bad news out of
it and stuff like that or
or i will be jumping around like uh
you know clueless about my future uh uh
downfall
just be happy happy man and then and i'm
sorry you'll be
you'll be sitting there oh my god i have
this in front of me
yeah but at least you know your dna yep
i know that any day now
this this thing is going to creep up
that's what they told me exactly yeah
so in 15 years will we i don't know what
it's going to be done it's going to be
maybe a space cast or something
i don't know what it's going to be in 15
years but we'll follow up on it yeah if
i'm if i
i'm pretty good at convincing myself
i'll get the test results if i don't
like them and i'll just be like ah they
must have switched it with somebody else
yeah okay okay exactly you'll figure it
out somehow
all right yeah we'll okay so we have a
ten dollar breakdown yeah i'm looking
so um final point actually i wanted to
take today what you thought is the
uh perhaps also something that could be
tied to disruption of evolution
and the argument industry as uh as a
whole
in my opinion at least uh could be the
question of esg
amongst the investors so uh the world is
clearly heading towards the ethical
investments and
tesla shining example of this obviously
um apple is another one who is
completely committed to cleaning up
their act as an organization and just
being seen as a
as a as a positive organization for
the the future development of the human
race really
and investors obviously looking more and
more into
investing ethically so on that
on that note the eye gaming industry in
the last couple of years
on the investment side of thing has
taken a hit because of the um
because of esg where we've seen all-time
highs on the stock markets on the
operator side happening in
around 2015. i know that evolution has
been immune to this because i did we
just looked at the stock price just
before this podcast and it was at
all-time high congratulations
um but on the operator side uh the
sharpest have actually slowly gone down
since 2015
and the head of ar irs that i'm speaking
to
um they basically say that est
is the reason why that is happening so
my question to you on todd how do you
view esg how does evolution
view esg and do you agree that in the
future
any organization who wants to be
successful have to have a
strong esg focus as a cornerstone
organization yeah i think uh it's
becoming increasingly um
the next generation they it's important
to them
and it's there's a disconnect i think
still where
people well just older people who
didn't grow up in that world they
they they sort of think like really this
person would buy this cup of coffee
because of the fact that the beans were
part of a fair trade system or something
like why wouldn't you just base it on
taste
it's very easy to be sort of um
not understanding at all entirely
because you didn't come up under that
system
uh but it's very real it's very real and
information travels very fast if you're
a bad guy
in our industry there's a there's a lot
of
tricks that people can do when they're
running a casino or making a game or
something like that
and um and
if you want to be socially responsible
in that space
uh it's pretty clear what you do right
like
be the more the more straight you are
with players
the better uh in the long run if someone
wants to withdraw their money
it make it happen fast that's socially
responsible
if so evolution's the biggest gaming
supplier in the world
by a pretty big margin and we have the
highest return to player
of any gaming supplier in the world by a
pretty big margin
isn't that interesting now you say oh
but you guys are a table games company
but we're the biggest supplier in the
world
and we have the highest return to player
uh
i don't want to say well we're going
into one of our biggest games
and what already has a very low uh
return to player percentage
and we're taking it up to make it more
generous for players
and um and a lot of times in design
meetings
also i'm taking a very product centric
approach to because that's where i live
of course uh uh indesign meetings
uh someone will say say like oh it'd be
cool if we
we sort of teased players like this or
that or whatever and we showed them
that you could have won big almost or
that's something people would say in a
very typical
game design meeting i say no you have to
be honest
you can do it on this one game and you
could probably juice it up a little bit
and make a couple more bucks
but this will hurt the blackjack
business and the roulette business the
baccarat business it'll hurt the
overarching
uh offering and i don't think it's by
accident that
there's a evo loyalty by among players
they know they're going to get an honest
gamble
we don't we don't uh do
phony celebrations about about things uh
when it's when it's not a win we're it's
it's honest it's clean
you uh it's predictable and people can
sniff it out over time
they can so
in the gaming world if you if you want
to be socially responsible there's
there's all of the usual stuff that
people talk about
about uh you know being um
noble in the way you hire and treat
people and uh
and and be kind to the planet and all of
that sort of stuff
but within gaming i think it's useful to
to think about
the social responsibility of just being
honest with with players
yeah it's a good way of putting it on
can i can i make a proposition
i heard how i think that the gaming
industry should
should view its end goal so say from an
esg perspective
and uh bonus for you is that i think
that evolution is
the company that has the potential to do
what i'm proposed
what i'm about to propose here okay so i
think that the end goal of the agame
industry
from a product perspective should be
that
offering games for players where they
don't feel like they are
gambling as such meaning that
if they end up walking away from a table
and they lose they
should still be happy okay they got
entertainment they
they they got the value for for money as
such
and if you can come up with a product
where
you ask someone if they gamble and they
say no but
in reality they are with your games but
they don't see it that way they see it
as a
as a product of entertainment like
watching netflix or whatever
then i think the industry becomes
esg secured would say
and i want to add to that as well that
it's already been done
in the 90s even and i know you work for
a swedish company obviously evolution
being swedish
so you may or may not have heard about
this game
but it's been a game the longest running
game in sweden more or less
televised called bingo lotto
no no no you don't know this is an
absolutely like
in the peep in the culture of the
swedish people
okay so this game was launched on tv on
national tv in the nineties
and glutton is basically it's a game
show right so
um you but you can buy your own uh
lottery
to this show that is aired every sunday
so every sunday there is this show
the entire country in the 90s sat in the
sofas and were playing bingo
in front of the tv but they added the
entertainment element to it
so the host is very like he's a host for
the people
and there's bands playing they have some
entertainment in the studio there's an
audience there
they have some fun games you can call
into the show you can win a prize and so
forth
and i swear to god if you call up people
today
and you ask them in sweden and you say
do you gamble
most people they say no we i don't
gamble
but i swear to god for that almost
everyone in the entire country is
has at some point played this game but
they don't view it as gambling
and i think that's really beautiful and
i think if you ask anyone in sweden
this game would be seen as something
that is positive
and that adds to their life i think this
is a great case study yeah that's
awesome i mean
people people are gonna gamble make it
as fun as it can
possibly be and uh
and if it feels like the other
entertainment activities in their life
you're gonna get to win you're gonna you
know if winning means
you know making a lot of money as a
supplier then then
you're gonna you're gonna get to win
because that's that's what people want
gambling is a form of entertainment
period
it's not a means of getting rich it's
it's not uh
it you don't you don't get fed by it uh
it's
literally only for leisure
and um and yeah the
the company that entertains their
players the best and that entertainment
will mean different things to different
people at different points in time
mm-hmm i think you're you're spot on it
you can you can come you're an honorary
member of the evolution products team
anytime you want to be thank you so much
you have my number you can just shine
the bat
signal to the sky and i'll be i'll be at
the office in no time yeah
beautiful no i um it's it is a great
case and you you
i'm not joking actually you should look
into this
in the whole world i've never seen
anything like it that becomes so
such a part of the culture of the
country it is i'm not exaggerating now
everyone is watching with from sweden
will agree with me this is part of our
culture this game show
and it's not seen as gambling so yeah
check it out bingo
it's called um what else was yeah and i
wanted to
follow up on that saying that you know
if i look now in the space of the agony
industry
okay what comes close to that then i
would say
crazy time conscious do not you know you
still
you're still at the part where it's not
this um
crazy time is not this uh this game
where you get a lot of entertainment
from like there's like a singer there or
like the
people calling into the show or this but
these are elements that
that perhaps can also be the next
disruptive innovation in your future
game show square yeah
maybe it is something like that that you
like you can actually call into the show
and you can be a part of like uh
you know you win like the jackpot you
can call in and you can be a part of the
show or
you know what i mean maybe that is the
next exactly what you mean yeah
thanks for saying that too because that
was the i must have said that a thousand
times in product meetings uh i'm like
this game should be so fun that you
don't have to be playing to be
entertained by it
and um and that was always the goal
uh i told you that we have the highest
return to player of any
any supplier we also have the longest
rounds
right i mean not most of them are slots
but it's just worth noting
you know people talk about oh yeah we
gotta get get more more
games per second or per minute or
whatever we're running at like
a game every 51 seconds or something
like this across the company
yeah and so uh uh so the games are slow
but look
sports betting is a big business they
only get like one bet per
three hours and they do just fine too so
i think
people get hung up on this stuff that
that like oh we've gotta
make it faster or make the make the
house edge a little bit higher or
this sort of stuff um yeah but yeah
crazy time though that was the mission
make something so fun that it's
so engaging that you'll just watch it
and if you want to play that's
that's fun too yeah yeah and that's
that's uh
that's challenging now lightning
roulette is as the biggest game in the
world
yeah i like that contrast that it's uh
you know you have the longest
you have the longest rounds in in
between you have the highest rtp
and you are like the bumblebee that is
not supposed to fly
but uh no one has told that to the
bumblebee so he flies anyway yeah
anybody can slow their games down
anybody can make it more fun yeah yeah i
love it um
so todd shall we do like this now we
shall we move into the future now all of
a sudden and
into the disruptive innovation and we'll
end it on that note today so we have
basically three decennials left is the
20s
no we are we still have the tenses we
have four as one so we have the the tens
the twenties
thirties and forties so what about we
start with the
2010s what's the is the most important
disruptive innovation
would you say artificial intelligence
you have that uh
i was considering that i didn't know if
that belongs in the 20s or what but uh i
was considering yeah artificial
intelligence it's going to change
everything it's going to uh
i mean everything from
reading x-rays to to driving cars for us
to uh doing legal research just there'll
be no area left untouched
yeah yeah i i absolutely agree with that
but i would i was considering this for
the towns but the
my argument was a little bit that the
this something known as the ai winters
and ai summers in the ai community
meaning that sometimes ai becomes very
hyped in
society and culture which definitely is
right now yeah
yeah but it's um it's perhaps a little
bit overhyped even i would make the
the proposition in the 2010s that
the perception of ai what it can do
right now
is a little bit further from the truth
from what it actually is so self-driving
cars for example
the perception is in two years time
we'll have self-driving cars i think
most people would have that perception
yeah yeah they'd say yeah some some
island somewhere
we'll we'll have them running around
yeah whereas in reality yeah
if to a true self-driving car in urban
environment would be maybe
20 years in the future so um
so that's the reason i didn't use that
actually i felt that
that is coming a little bit late
directly but i i see i
absolutely agree with they are yeah well
i can't make the case that
that from 2010 to 2019
uh that the landscape was dramatically
disrupted because of ai
but like yeah it's it's it's when was
the plate seed planted when
when did we say electricity changed the
game yeah yeah
yeah is it is it at the first moment of
invention or or on wide scale adoption
then what is wide scale and
all that sort of stuff at what point do
we start taking all the candles out of
the house
where's the seed yeah where's the seed
so i i would propose that the seed was
like
frankenstein that's like the first ai to
me okay all right
so yeah in another case but i i think
it's like i think it's a great it's
definitely the sunny way i became
uh on everyone's minds and you can
absolutely make the argument that it's
the
this the decade where the seed was
planted i i i i agree and i i know
exactly what
you're having with it so uh i would
propose that this is the
second space race we talked about the
yellow musk
second appearance in your disruptors
the second space as i told you in the
beginning i'm a space geek so this means
a lot to me
but i do think that the the the second
space race
might potentially be what saves the
human kind eventually
well it's great that uh all of the maybe
in the 80s
all the smartest kids coming out of
school wanted to go work for hedge funds
and uh and then um
[Music]
unfortunately still a lot of them go to
work for to create some app that can
exactly put a mustache on me or
something like that right
uh you look great but it's nice it's
nice that you have
people that the the number one place
that people coming out of mit
want to go work is spacex number two is
nasa
no number two is tesla number three is
nasa amazing yeah so
elon's got the top two yeah uh but
that's um that's very cool even
even the derivative effects of of space
tech
uh back here on earth uh is super useful
it's just great to get the brightest
minds in the world
working on that sort of stuff yeah
and and you know also to take it even a
step further i would say that
people like elon musk um to be you know
elon is now you know the influencer on
the entire world i would say that he's
the most powerful influencer of the
world
and millions and millions of people look
up to yellowness they're idle
in in some sense and he is setting the
bar
for other people to reach you know so
it's the same in sports for example if
you have
a michael jordan in basketball who
stands out so much
he becomes the target for the other
place they now have to work as hard as
he
to reach that level you know so they
have to step up their game
to now reach to the level of michael
jordan and similarly
for a person like elon musk young
aspiring
engineers and entrepreneurs are now
looking at
the level of elon musk and what he has
accomplished
and they can now see what they have to
do to reach that level yeah you're
exactly right it's
it's it's we put these crazy limitations
on ourselves
you've heard that story about like the
four minute mile it was thought of as
the undoable
achievement yeah and then once one
person did it
like the next year 700 other people did
it exactly
so i i think these type of characters
that are setting the
tone for the for for everyone else to
follow
the set in the bar is just absolutely
pivotal for
in the in the um in the crisis that we
are now in with climate and
we stand in front of other challenges
these the fact that the most
um influential person in the world is
someone like elon musk
i think is what's going to eventually
save the human kind
yeah it's it's look it's it's not
hyperbolistic to
to say something like that it's uh it's
it is inspiring you see you see his
actions i mean
like i saw when coronavirus just started
i heard the story of them building a
massive hospital
in china in like nine days or something
like that
and uh and i went back to our team and
i'm like how come it takes so long to
build a studio
this is four months stuff you need to
hire more chinese totally
maybe that's where the disruption will
come for if the chinese can build the
hospital in nowadays maybe they can
build 200 studios
when it's life and death people people
tend to work a little faster yeah
far enough far enough uh brilliant okay
so let's uh let's move into the future
now 2020s
um i'll start this time uh so i would
say that
the 2020s will be the decade of
cryptocurrencies going mainstream
and frictionless payments frictionless
payments will mean that if we remove
friction from any payments it would be
an absolute revolution in the in the way
we do commerce
in general you can have
microtransactions of
one cent or a thousands of ascents uh
moving frictionlessly
which can just absolutely disrupt any
industry more or less i think
we're almost on top of each other on
this one yeah we're very similar
uh blockchain like there we go we said
the same thing
i mean it's crazy to me
that if i want to buy a house that i sit
down
at the end of the process and they're
like take this
device that's almost like a feather with
ink
and sign something like this on a page
and then flip it and then put your
put your first and last initial in the
bottom corner of that page
then sign this page and i'm like
really if all goes wrong this is this is
what it comes down to is someone's sort
of looking at me
okay that's as soon as you yeah
yeah it's like this is 20 20. this is
2020. like
they don't even videotape me signing it
or something like that it's just
insane we will look back on this when
you buy a house
you have to have what do they call it uh
uh
the insurance title insurance to make
sure that the person selling you the
house really actually owns the house
and that there's no liens against it and
all this sort of stuff in the blockchain
world
i should be able to buy a house on the
internet okay yeah great you own it i
want it
or you owe the bank some money and you
owe that bank some also some money
well i'm putting the money in yeah um
the house is not yours
yeah exactly and so there's just so many
things like that basically anytime
you're signing for anything
uh it'll all go away but it's ridiculous
that we still sign documents
yeah yeah yeah it's true i mean there's
a lot of analog technology you know the
way we
do networking with these like analog
paper cards that we
give to each other it's also one of the
things how much of our life is uh
is uh held together by a password yeah a
username and a password
yeah your entire financial life is
accessible by a username and password
yeah
and um exactly and we will look back on
that and say oh yeah we were in this
really vulnerable window from like
maybe 2002 to 2023
where password theft was a very big
issue and it is
it's it's yeah it's like
someone hacked someone like donald
trump's twitter have you heard of that
story
now what was the password and the
password was like
one two three four oh yeah he's a human
being too yeah
amazing yeah some company has this great
policy where every month we make you
change your password so everybody just
writes on a post-it note and pins it to
their desk
it's like the least secure thing you can
do i love it
okay the 2030s thought um go for it
okay you referenced earlier on your
timeline and we are in agreement
this is when the self-driving car and
robots are really
okay you're in the 2030s you're you're
ambitious yeah well you've got a
yeah maybe ambitious yeah i mean you've
got some i don't know
100 million cars or something like that
that you got to replace
and and that happens at like five
percent per year or whatever
and even this year when we're all
talking about electric cars
the replacement of vehicles in 2021
to electric is gonna be a small fraction
of that so it's going to take time but
that's electric
yeah we're talking about self-driving
yeah it's like which is a different
animal
exactly yeah mixing together humans and
i don't know they had to mix together
horses and cars at one point right on
the same roads
yeah i wonder if there's anywhere i can
go read about that yeah
that'd be interesting that it's
definitely a part of history that yeah
did they just create will there be like
a lane for horses or
otherwise known as manually driven cars
and then four lanes for
uh self-driving cars do you think they
were honking at them like you were doing
today
a horse on this side of the horse rear
up and everything yeah
so do they have horns
manual horns exactly
okay so i would i would propose crispr
technology oh yeah yeah good one and
gene modification
and medicine in general becoming
mainstream at that time we'll be able to
cure any disease
more or less and we'll be able to modify
human beings to become
for good or for bad whatever you want to
create starting the 2030s in 10 years
that's crazy you think that soon that's
i think that it's the technology is not
that far away
now but what's holding it back is
regulation
again but at some point let's see
if it if there is more friction between
countries on the genie of the when the
genie comes out of the bottle
things will happen very quickly i think
yeah the
that whole space is just i i'll skip
forward i have
dna sequencing and editing as my
twenty-four okay
yeah uh and that changes mankind forever
yeah
forever we're just we're done with
there's no it's the cure for cancer it's
the cure for everything you just go in
you cut that piece of the dna out you
stitch it back together
and um and uh and there will be all
sorts of debates about
creating designer babies and all sorts
of all sorts of stuff like that and
and uh but it's like stopping the
hurricane you know
yeah it's coming for sure it's coming
and um
and uh you know we like
in china years back they had to uh
stop the practice of
of uh going to the doctor and finding
out if you're gonna have a boy or a girl
because they were uh the numbers of
they want to have the family name live
on and with a one child policy
uh if if they knew they were gonna have
a girl the abortion rates were so high
and so um so they just said we have to
outlaw this practice
um and that's sort of like an early
hack i mean in the future in the future
people will be i want blue eyes
i want this you can already do that
today oh really yes
in the u.s even you can you can you can
gene modify
your child to have a higher percentage
to have blue eyes for example
you can get it so that it's uh something
like 75 percent chance that your
child will have a second and it works or
it's just people taking your money and
saying
there you go best of luck it works it
works yeah we're there today
like i said the technology is it's there
we are we are there already
it's the um it's the debate on the on
the big stage of what you should be
allowed to do with it that it's
okay that is uh that is uh i want to be
ambidextrous
[Laughter]
i want to have three arms like
i don't know if it's possible to post
birth but if
it is then sign me up
20 70. yeah yeah i can increase my
efficiency with 50
with that yeah so think of that if if
what we're saying is right whether it's
2030s or 2040s
that means we need to make we need to
like
alter our behavior to not
die until then yes right
do not do anything that will cause do
not fall off a ladder do not get in a
car crash
world leading scientists today get to
that point yeah yeah exactly
world-leading scientists today think
that there's about a 50-50 chance
that we can cure the disease of aging
within uh i think that's a within 30
years
i can do that i can deal with that yeah
i can deal with that you have to go
backwards and you just pause time
you can go backwards as well this is if
they say if you can stop it you can
reverse it
basically so your cells regenerate and
become
healthy and young basically so much for
peak population
so much for big population well so that
presents that problem right which is
uh how we're going to deal with that i
mean there's so many concerns
basically yeah we'll we'll be able to
feed ourselves yeah
there's a lot of there's a lot of room
on the planet earth there is
we'll see i mean that's an interesting
thing with the with the
peak population is that we have already
reached um the peak
birth rate in the world so right now
on the average uh the average couple
have two babies in the whole world now
meaning that we can predict when the
peak population will happen and it will
happen i think it's like 2050 or
something
but it's um we are peaking at 10 i think
it's 11 billion people
then it stops and we are already not
that far away from that isn't that wild
to think that there's going to be a day
that's peak population and god willing
will be alive on that day yeah that
would be a huge news
there'll be no way to actually literally
know the actual day but
people will make a thing of it i'll be
like yeah and
nobody before us and nobody after us
will have experienced people peak
population unless people can live to be
300 yeah then then they'll have been
wrong and
yeah and it'll uh it'll grow again but
yeah it's quite interesting if people
are
still listening to another hours 50
minutes in but
uh if you want to look up more of the
population there's hans rusling he's a
swedish
scientist in the population very very
interesting talks he has on youtube
about this
how he demonstrates the how the peak
population he's a great visual
storyteller
yeah he's fantastic he passed away a
couple of years ago but
absolutely absolutely brilliant present
yeah
so my last uh 2040s i have to so we
swapped
the third yeah so um you had obviously
a gene modification in your 40s you had
ai
in your 30s um or
yes self-driving cars in the in the 30s
yeah self-driving cars and robots in the
30s
dna sequences in the 40s and i had
opposites okay yeah sorry i have i have
you're a little more bullish in some
areas and
i'm a little conservative yeah okay so i
have agi
um so artificial general intelligence
which is basically um
when you have an ai that is conscious
about itself
and which then will lead to self-driving
cars
which also would lead to the fact that
we
will be an automated society people
don't need to work anymore
which leads to ubi universal basic
income
um andrew jang obviously famous from
that in the last presidential election
and hopefully
next mayor of new york city the next
mayor yes he is
going to get elected yeah and then he'll
uh then he'll be a very formidable
candidate in 2024
against uh kamala harris yeah yeah yeah
hair is just running
uh won't run again presumably
yeah presumably maybe maybe she'll be
even running as a sitting president at
that time and then
and then yang would not be able to
challenge her yeah uh that would be a
real gift if biden
stepped i think he is
a little bit too early right now that's
why let's see
but eventually he will he will become
the person who
who what he is proponing now is like
bernie sanders in the 80s you know
um bernie sanders was always
he was always um i would say consistent
in his uh
thoughts but it's not until now where
his beliefs are becoming
uh on on the map i think the same with
andrey
yeah it's hard when a politician says
that they want to give you a bunch of
money
like if you and i sit around and say it
over a couple of drinks
i know i'm getting your very best
thinking and we can talk about it like
oh geez you know where do you think the
money will come from
and will it cause inflation and we can
have a thoughtful discussion but when a
politician is saying it
it's like hmm it's sure a good way to
get votes
i'm going to give everybody money every
month so i
i have to take it i don't know maybe the
idea is good but
yeah let's see but the point is 2040s
we will solve all our problems and
we live happily ever well that was my
next question are we going to be happier
yeah so i think that we will always we
need a purpose right that's what we
live for in humanity so if it's not work
i i but i mean look at people who have
created
enough wealth to not have to worry about
uh working for the rest of their life
and they
are able to develop other skills um
pursuing other passions whether it being
sports or
learning new skills and so forth i think
that it's a it will be a space for
humans to just explore
their creativity uh and the
and find out their own purpose in life
remove the stress and and all these
beautiful things will come out i think
isn't that a great way to end it today
that's polish yeah that's
i like it thought absolute pleasure yeah
today
uh it's been fantastic yeah i mean i i
feel like we have to cut this short even
uh you know we haven't uh gone through
most of the points that i have today but
uh
uh absolute pleasure you know any time
yeah
yeah i absolutely adore having this
chance
this is why i do this podcast to be able
to have this
nice fun conversations and it's not
always related to eye gaming
specifically
these discussions that we talked about
today but i think
the the mindset of this disrupting the
of disruption is much wider if you want
to
look into what can disrupt the argument
industry we have to learn from elsewhere
going back in time going forward in time
just solidifying this
way of thinking i think it's very very
healthy conversation to have and
hopefully the audience today have
learned something from that or
it makes them think outside of the box a
bit and if we can
infuse that way of thinking into people
we are just going to head to a better
place so
thank you for that thank you great
discussion today thank you
take care
you