TBPN Live - $1.4B Crypto Heist, $40B Robot Deal, $2B Celsius Acquisition, Ferrari is Goated, Amazon Wins James Bond

Episode Date: February 22, 2025

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the number one live show in tech. We are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Today is Friday, February 21st, 2025, and this show starts now. We got an amazing lineup for you today. We got a $1 billion hack, a $40 billion fundraise, and a $2 billion beverage acquisition. We're also talking about Ferrari. We're also talking about Ferrari. We're talking about James Bond. The size gong is going to be coming out a lot today. Jordy and I are white pilled.

We're in white suits. Things are great. It's a beautiful day. It's a beautiful day. So get pumped, get excited for this show. Let's start with the hack. $1.4 billion is missing. Where'd it go?

Who lost it? Break it down, Jordy. Okay, So as usual, once a month in crypto, a billion dollars is stolen. It's really like I saw this. You told me about this article and I was like, okay, like, why should I care about this one? I don't know why it is, but it seems like it's always toward as the market starts to dip that the chaos really kicks off. But anyway, so yeah, bring it down. For those that are hearing this for the first time, Ethereum is falling at the moment as crypto exchange Bybit confirms a $1.4 billion hack. So this was going down this morning. I woke up around 4.30. I think news was like starting or

there was rumors. By early this morning, the CEO had confirmed that there was indeed a hack. Crypto prices are broadly falling Friday following confirmation that major centralized crypto exchange Bybit was hacked after one point four billion dollars worth of tokens were stolen in a hack. And so, you know, the hacks and crypto happen on centralized exchanges. In many ways, those are more rare and that there's more controls put in place. They're more professionalized a lot of the high profile hacks have just happened on these sort of d5 protocols where one person is has the keys for a wallet it's more like social engineering right like there's an engineer who had the key to the actual wallet and they clicked on a phishing link

or they got scammed or they or a north korean a north korean dev you know gets push some code push some code etc um so anyways uh what happened here more than 1.4 billion dollars worth of ethereum and uh staked ethereum were withdrawn from bybit's hot wallet on friday and a large chunk of the funds were being sold via decentralized exchanges so it's actually a graphic of this i don't know if we have it lined up on the show, but basically this $1.4 billion was stolen and then immediately distributed across hundreds of wallets to be sold off. And so that's obviously a lot of sell pressure on Ethereum. Bybit co-founder and CEO Ben Zhou confirmed the attack in a post on X saying that the plan transfer was manipulated in some way

and that the funds were swiped. Yeah, here I'll read this. Bybit ETH multisig cold wallet just made a transfer to our warm wallet about an hour ago. It appears that this specific transaction was musked. I don't know what that means. All the signers saw the musked UI, which showed the correct address and URL was from at safe. However, the signing message was to was about to change by bit ETH multisig. So I don't I actually don't understand any of that. Do you understand what happened? What does must mean? I mean, to be clear, he's just sharing sort of like internal. So it's possible this is a typo and it should have said mask mask. OK, I actually don't know. Okay. However,

the signing message was to change the smart contract logic of our ETH cold wallet. The hacker took control of the specific ETH cold wallet. We signed and transferred all ETH in the cold wallet to this unidentified address. All other cold wallets are secure. All withdrawals are normal. Ethereum is down 3% on the hour to a current price of $2,727, while Bitcoin has dipped nearly 1% to $98,000, which is kind of where Bitcoin's been trading around for the last month or two. And so a security researcher, Zach XBT, had sort of front run Ben's, the CEO's post saying that there were suspicious outflows from Bybit and that a source confirmed to him that it was a security incident. And he has since added that the ETH is being split between 39 different addresses as the attacker apparently tries to muddle the flow of funds to make them harder to track.

And so some other people had commented that it's very difficult to steal $1.4 billion even in crypto, right? Because how do you, you know, you have to get those funds, if you want to actually use those funds in the real world, unless you're, you know, part of some global crime syndicate, you've got to like get them into a bank account and even that, you know, so a lot of steps to actually get those from. And there used to be services like, what was it, Tornado Cash, where you could kind of put money in and then Anonymously withdraw it and it was very messy, but I believe that was shut down because it was such a money laundering like yeah It was very controversial because you know math is illegal now. Yeah, I don't know exactly know where I stand on that

I mostly Just kind of learning the facts on that one. But yeah, it is an interesting case. It is crazy I wonder how much of this will actually be retrieved because you can imagine, you know, there's some sort of expected value calculation of these hackers. They're like, yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll steal 1.4 billion, but we'll send it off all over this place. Even if we just walk away with a hundred million, that's great. Totally worth our time. Yeah. Somebody was commenting on X saying the hackers should just take like a couple hundred million dollars as a fee, give the rest back because they just wouldn't be able to launder it anyways.

So the CEOs come out and said Bybit is solvent even if the hack loss is not recovered. All of client assets are are one to one backed and we can cover the loss. like this could be a scenario where i don't know what kind of scale by bit has but uh if they have to basically use equity to back stop this 1.4 billion dollars i mean really you know ultimately damaging to all the shareholders but at the same time that the shareholders should have responsibility for the security and safety of the assets. And so if they come out and say, your funds aren't safe on Bybit, they basically wouldn't have a viable business anymore unless people just forgot that their assets were on there. It'll be interesting to see where this goes and if they can track people down.

I'm sure CoffeeZilla is staying busy. But let's move on to a $40 billion fundraise that's currently going on, led by Brett Adcock for Figure AI, the humanoid robotics company. The size lord himself. He is a size lord. He has been raising the stakes endlessly. And I'll give you a little background on some of his history here. Sam Parr broke it down when he did a pod with Brett Adcock. He first sold a company, a hiring software company called Vetteri for $100 million. Then he taught himself about flying

and he built Archer, basically an electric helicopter for short commutes. He took that company public, SPAC'd it. And I think it's one of the few like hard tech SPACs that's actually kind of sustained.

It hasn't gone down 90%. I mean, let's look it up on public. And then he made... Well, it's down eight percent today so yeah but uh how is it how is it since like the spac launch it's still up it's up 25 month over month i bet some of this is based on what's going on a figure figure because i'm sure the spac investors are you know yeah hey this guy's profile is getting raised you know yeah they're gonna put

the robots in the in the planes when the planes ship how do you think those humanoids are gonna get around they're gonna need they're gonna need archers uh dude this is a huge narrative violation it's it's up dramatically from the from the spac from the spac what's the market cap in 2021 when it's backed it came out at 600 million okay it's now at almost 5 billion wow um so who would have thought like flying cars are not just racing around so it's still a speculative investment in many ways yeah and I mean, if you look at even in December of last year, so a few months ago, Archer Aviation stocked them on the Alpha Feature Republic, faced a significant drop of 24% due to increased short selling activities and funding concerns. So short sellers got absolutely smoked on this one, depending what kind of position they took. So he built Figure. He raised $650 million from Bezos, NVID kind of position they took. So he built Figure.

He raised $650 million from Bezos, NVIDIA, and OpenAI. And now most recently, he has a new thing called Cover, which makes X-ray-like cameras that can detect if someone's bringing weapons into schools or stadiums. So he's gotten into kind of like the flock safety market a little bit. And yeah, he's been a character in Silicon Valley for a while. But this particular fundraise has been controversial because it's driven heavily by SPVs, which are special purpose vehicles. I'm sure you've dealt with these. But Natasha Mascarenhas over at the information has

a breakdown of what's going on. So let's read through that. This is, I think, slide three now. Yeah, there we go. SPVs are circling robotic startups, $40 billion valuation funding round. Special purpose vehicles are now a mainstay in venture capital, showing up in some of the biggest deals in artificial intelligence from open AI to anthropic as a flexible way to raise cash from a larger pool of investors. And to be clear, not always a larger pool. Like some of these big, you know, Thrive Capital will do an SPV, but it might be for massive investors, right? It's not always this massive pool of investors.

In the case of Figure, it seems like this is basically being marketed to retail. Oh, interesting. I didn't know that. I mean, not actually marketed to retail, but more so. But more broadly. Hey, we got a $200 million allocation. We're going to bring in 50 people to fulfill it. Can you steel man why a fund that has $3 billion under management in an active growth fund would want to do an SPV when one of their growth stage portfolio companies is raising $20 billion?

There's a bunch of incentives to do SPVs. One, maybe you don't want to be over-concentrated in a single fund. So if you're a growth fund and you have 10% of your investable capital already in that company, it's more and more risk to go further. I think Founders Fund gets very aggressive with this and that there's more comfort being like, we have 15% of our fund in this one company. But Founders Fund has also done SPVs as well. Yeah, yeah, but they'll still do SPVs. Go back to the LPs and say,

hey, you're already committed to this. You have allocation, but if you want more, you can get more access because this round is so big, we just can't fill it all. And one of the reasons why investors love SPVs, even if you're operating a large vehicle already, is that the SPV is deal by deal.

So if your fund has 6% IRR and you're getting some carry on that and your fees, but then one SPV does a 10X, you're getting the full benefit of that yep all of the care all the 20 carry from that yep uh even if your fund you know underperforms or doesn't achieve the the milestones that you initially set so yeah um there's a lot of really attractive way to get allocation from like lower tier or maybe people outside of silicon valley into spacex or and yeah there's been a lot of sp and there's and And this is why AngelList has caught flack historically,

although it's a fantastic platform and like I'm a weekly active user. Yeah. The, but, but there's managers on there that are and people that have gotten tremendously wealthy from having one good investment and like 30 losers, basically. And so it can end up being over-aligned to the manager of the SPV. And the same thing happens in real estate.

It happens in every sort of asset class. Anything where there's a promote. There's a funny post, maybe Will posted this, something about there's more in common with an SPV promoter and a club promoter than traditional venture capital. I'll read some of this and then I'm gonna get your take. Now fund managers are considering using SPVs

to fund a huge new round for Figure AI, the three-year-old startup that builds humanoid robots. The Sunnyvale, California-based startup is in talks to raise $1 billion to $2 billion and is seeking a $40 billion valuation, according to three people with direct knowledge of fundraising efforts. The company has received a term sheet at that valuation,

according to one of the people interviewed. Align Ventures, a New York-based early-stage venture firm that invested in several figures prior rounds, has talked to investors about raising an SPV of several hundred million dollars from its limited partners and other investors, according to two people. Parkway Venture Capital, an early-stage deep tech firm that previously invested in figure, also plans to invest in the round, according to people. What do you think? So yeah, the whole thing, they have a term sheet here. Term sheets, the person sending the term sheet

determines sort of the entity behind the term sheet determines the weight that other investors put on the term sheet. So Andreessen Horowitz sending a term sheet is very different than a $30 million seed fund that nobody's heard of before sending a term sheet, right? Yeah. And term sheets are not legally binding. Yeah. They're not legally binding. In this case, could very well be strategically

sent in order to... One, the other thing is these, I believe we know Parkway and I believe that Align is in the same boat. I'm trying to check. So like Align Ventures for context, their entire portfolio on their website is CPG companies. So they've done Billy, Karev, Coterie, The Farmer's Dog, Figs. So when traditional institutional venture capitals look at hearing that figure got a term sheet, and then they go to the fund's portfolio, and they're like, wait, this company doesn't have a public deep tech investment. That term sheet, the reason that this round has

been memed a little bit is because it's hard to take a term sheet from a line super seriously. It's unclear that they would be able to pull together the capital to do $300 million, much less a billion dollar investment, right? Even if they're super excited about it. So Parkway, I'm pulling up Parkway Venture Capital as well. It sounds like they were in figure already. And so the other thing is that Parkway, if they have a big position in figures even last round, they have a huge incentive to mark up their position and just get more capital into the

company. The other thing is if Brett is hyper fixated on valuation, which around like this tends to mean, right? There's no real reason that this is a $40 billion company. You could argue that doing one on 10 billion would still be a little bit too hot given their traction. Right. They haven't released a lot. But Parkway still has an incentive to tell their initial investors, look, you've got a 20x on your investment in however many months. And there's so much heat. Brett also has, you know, a SPAC that's doing well right now in the public markets. And so maybe they're saying there's some floor to Brett, the Adcox sort of, you know, deep tech machine. I mean, the guys, you know, fundraising and keeping the share price up

and delivering on the shareholder promises. We talked about this. I think it was off air. I'm curious what Adcock's game plan is because it does feel like in the environment right now, figure could SPAC, but it certainly wouldn't go out at 40. And if it did, maybe it could go out at 40, but I don't think that's a price that it would be able to sustain and so what is yeah it's hard to tell because it's not like the valuation would not be driven by their fundamentals earnings per share yeah or whatever and archers still archers lost you know burned almost half a billion last year yeah and so there's been you know there had been concerns of sort of how long can they keep that up spending a million dollars a day with no revenue a million can they keep that up spending a million dollars a day with no revenue a million dollars a day wow more than a million dollars a day yeah that's a

lot yeah and i mean the steel man here like the revenue the revenue line on public for archer is a dash like there is no there's no revenue there's no sense is there just r and d right now um and and and brett would say hey look uh you know how long did it take tesla to start making real money took a long time right yeah i don't know how archer tracks against that timeline perfectly but yeah and to be clear we love robots yep i want to i want to have an army of robot uh podcasts you know producers that ben controls you know we got 50 different camera angles uh everybody should should want a figure to win but it's totally fair to have a few questions about exactly why is it getting priced more than ford motors why is it getting priced four times rivian yep right when

you actually think about almost double and why is it yeah almost double and roll when and roll has a billion dollars of revenue just took a 22 billion and some of the best from ivas yeah and some of the best fundraisers ever right so look it's hard for me to see your one vc in the valley yeah but there is an interesting question like you know align ventures people are saying parkway venture capital these are not typical like huge growth stage deep tech funds. But there's, I think there's an interesting idea of like, why did this round come together the way it did? Well, think about the other funds that might do a deal like this and think about their conflicts.

Yeah. Are they in an Elon company? Because Elon's working on humanoids. And if you're in, if you're in X like Andreessen is, or you're in, you know, Sequoia's in X. If you're in X, like Andreessen is, or you're in, you know, Sequoia is an X. If you're in SpaceX, if you're in Neuralink, boring company. Yeah. And you say, hey, Elon, we're going to go and fund a direct competitor to the Tesla Optimus. Even if your venture fund is not a Tesla shareholder, Elon might say, hey, what? Like, come on.

Like, I thought we were on the same team here. Yeah. I'm building the Elon companies and you're in one of those Elon companies. You benefit from everything that I do. Why are you finding a competitor of mine? And so I think it's interesting. Like it is, it is, it is like very impressive that Brett has been able to put together

as much money as he had competing with Elon. Because like the famous quote is like, never bet against Elon. And Elon said, hey hey i'm doing the humanoid robot thing and that typically means yeah you don't want to be the guy who's doing who's going up against elon what what what brett is doing is is very impressive yeah anybody like he's gonna have detractors anytime you have somebody rocket to this level of success he's gonna going to have detractors. There's ways that you can, you know, try to dissect what he's doing. Um, you know, and, and, you know, the Parkway, uh, the GP over at Parkway, who's presumably the one that sent the term sheet, uh, has been on the board of figures since May of 2023. So, you know, if he's, uh, it all comes down to, again, um, uh, until the round closes,

it's all marketing as far as I'm concerned. And we saw this, we saw this with, yeah, Stargate. Uh, we also saw this with, um, uh, the, the bolt Ryan Breslow when he came out and he said, I have, you know, a new investment coming in. And then people, the thing is, is it's, it's hard to fake a billion dollar investment because, you know, I've raised SPVs before. I don't know if you've done SPVs. It's hard to fill a, you know, and like filling a $400 million investment. I don't believe that. I actually don't believe that, actually don't believe that you know major new york city investment banks would be able to fill a 300 million dollar spv into figure at 40 billion that's ipo money yeah they wouldn't they wouldn't be able to fill that at 40 billion

dollars i bet you they could at five yeah probably but but you know saying that's a very good point and so and so jesse over at parkway would love would love to talk to him and kind of hear his plans for this if he has some you know ridiculous capital network that is more risk on than some of them. Yeah. Than, than. I hear what you're saying. So. It's good. Anyway, so there's a lot of questions here that I think are fair. I'm, you know, I'm always in favor of high risk investments into deep tech. Yeah.

But this is, yeah. I mean, this is kind of, you know, if a VC is making an investment that doesn't make you uncomfortable, like, are they really doing venture capital? like this is adventure capital this feels like a venture bet yeah where it's like if it works the bet is that he's going to beat elon musk and then deliver humanoid robots an entirely new technology that will scale to millions of these robots like it will be a trillion dollar company but the the the thing is is it would still be a high high risk venture bet at 10 billion dollars right because you say like

look uh you know this this company is going to take yeah you know with with rivian a really like rivian rivian to me is a like fairly decent comp in that it's a competing with Elon, hard tech, manufacturing intensive, low margin, right? You have to realize that Brett is competing with Unitree, which is a Chinese company, which we've talked about this before. Other Chinese companies have shown we will sell a product at a loss for as long as it takes to own this market. Yeah. So is Brett going to have margin when...

I completely agree with this. And so there's a lot of... Even though this is clearly like the most futuristic technologies, this is what we've literally seen in sci-fi movies. Yeah, well, the other thing... It doesn't necessarily mean that there's a network effect and high margins, right?

Those two things can be separate. We can get something that's an incredible amazing clearly we're the future and it's like straight out of sci-fi and it can be a mediocre business yeah and then there's the whole other side of this which is our bipedal robots even the robot form factor that is going to dominate right right? Is it going to dominate the factory floor? Factory floors are flat, right? Would it make more sense to have a robot that is attached to a wire so it's powered, can roll on wheels,

and it can lift extremely heavy things, right? Imagine you're the founder of Boston Dynamics looking at this. You're just like, I've been grinding on this for 20 years. I built so much stuff and I've never been able to really like pop the stock in a meaningful way. Like I got, see, I got bought by Hyundai and then I got bought by Google and I got traded around.

And like my baby has just never had its day in the sun. And you know. He's not Brett. Yeah, yeah. No, clearly an incredible technologist. You're not that guy, pal. You're not that guy, pal. You're not that guy literally because the Boston dynamics demos, like they're clearly on the cutting edge,

their state of the art, their frontier. One thing I do, one thing I do believe. Yeah. Brett's very good at fundraising, very good at recruiting, very good at building hype deals guy. He's good at puzzling together. Oh, we got the campus. Oh, we got the BMW partnership. Oh, we got the money. Then we'll get another deal. Then we'll get another thing. Then we'll hire some people. If we had conviction that figure was going to, you know, there's this whole thing, which is, you know, figure could argue in a TAM slide. Our TAM is not the value of the robots that we're selling at retail price or in these big enterprise deals. Our TAM is the labor force that we're gonna provide and the ongoing earnings when we displace

every factory worker in the world or every agricultural worker in the world, right? So there is an art, like he can go out and make a case for how the TAM for this is $5 trillion and it's very, you know, investing now. I think from that Dwarkesh Satya podcast, it was the global economy is $100 trillion and labor is something like 60% of that.

So you're looking at a $60 trillion market. And it's like, yeah, we're going to take, you know, 2% of that. It's great. Trillion dollar business. They're giving away the shares at 40%. They are giving away the shares. Let's rip through some of this just to give the folks some extra data. This is a massive up round, 15 times the last valuation, which was 2.6 billion.

Normally, I feel like when you get into the 2.5 billion range, the next round's at 5 billion. You don't really see that many 10x up rounds. Or 4x. 4x maybe. 4x is like, it's pretty normal to go from the two and a half to... And that was just a year ago. Jaw-dropping jump even in this market. Figures investors may ultimately not use SPVs to back the company. They could always just jump the line and go direct. The startup hasn't approved any SPVs and has asked its existing investors to invest

from their own funds because they might want to put in more money if they're not having to pay fees, right? Bloomberg first reported on Figures AI's target valuation. It's true that investors are excited about a new generation of robotic startups. There's a lot of these. Field AI is a maker of AI models to control robots that's targeting a $2 billion valuation. They're raising-

Yeah, and we saw Locky's company. Yeah. And is Daniel Groh, No, no, he's part There's sort of the other one called like general No, and the the the argument for why Figures valuation could be nearly 2x and rolls is that and roll if they wanted to raise from a hodgepodge group of random SPVs they could do it at 60. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, they've talked about the oversubscribed nature of these rounds and they could probably pump that up. But Anduril with IVAS at $28 billion feels like they could raise from less sophisticated institutional investors at almost double themselves. Imagine how much they could get if they went to China. Imagine they're just like, actually we only care about the valuation. The mission doesn't

matter anymore. Let's just rip, you know, get some crazy money in here. So they, on Thursday, Figure AI unveiled Helix, a model developed internally that enables robots to perform more complicated tasks. There was this video demo. very cool. They've partnered with OpenAI so you can talk to it and they're using the speech recognition and the chat GPT stuff to kind of act as an interface to the instruction set. It's already raised $745 million from investors including Microsoft, OpenAI, and Nvidia,

real murderer's row of corporates and strategics, which I think he's really, really good at doing. And it has big plans. They've hired more than 200 people for an engineering and AI hardware team, according to documents created by an SPV manager. The company is projecting it will build up to 100,000 robots over the next four years, according to the same materials and two of the people. The company secured BMW as a first customer. None of those plans explain why investors think the company is worth $40 billion for context. Yeah, and to give some context, if they're selling these robots at $100,000 a pop,

which feels low given that's generally the price point that Unitree sells at, you can go buy a Unitree robot for around six figures, that's $10 billion of revenue. So, so, so if Brett is saying, I want you to give me a four, you know, I want you to basically give me a five X, four X on my revenue on my 20, 20, nine forward revenue. It still feels crazy. It is crazy because so, so that revenue multiple of like 60 X revenue, 40 X revenue, that's not crazy in AI. Like Anthropic is raising $58 billion, but they have a billion in ARR. But it's now. They have that ARR now. And the other thing from a pricing standpoint is didn't Satya buy half of OpenAI for like $10 billion? Yeah, I don't know. I don't think half, but certainly like a third or something like that. And so let's go to some reactions on the timeline to break this down.

We got Luke Metro over at Anderle. He says, Brett Adcock is shaping up to be the best fundraiser since Adam Neumann. Amazon.com. And this is from back in 2024, in February, a year ago, almost a year ago today. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, NVIDIA and other big technology names are investing in startup figure AI that builds human-like robots. Bloomberg News reported Friday

citing people with knowledge. They're backed by OpenAI and Microsoft. Sama can win when he gets seven Trilli. And so people have been talking about Brett Adcock's amazing fundraising abilities for a long time. You had a post about it, which is in here.

It took the Ford Motor Company 115 years to reach a $40 billion market cap. Brad Adcock did it in just three years with figure. Can we finally stop glazing Henry Ford now? Senra probably saw this. And if he didn't know that I was joking, he probably had an aneurysm. Yeah, of course. Do not disrespect Henry Ford that I was joking, he probably had an aneurysm. Yeah, of course. Do not disrespect Henry Ford. I was obviously joking here. The markets are crazy. I think they both deserve respect.

Yep. But the title of, you know, Henry Ford is like a historic entrepreneurial goat, right? One of the greatest to ever do it. And Brett could be that guy. Brett could. But he got a lot he's got like right now he's nba prospect potential rookie of the year if he can start delivering these robots but his jersey is not going up in the reaction i always unless the cash flow gets there to back it up i i just think at this point, like believability matters so much. I agree. Right.

Like when Humane came out and they said this is the future computing platform. Yeah. Nobody believed them. Yeah. When Figure goes out and says we're we believe we're worth 40 billion dollars and that's where we want to take new capital. Nobody believes it. Yeah.

And it's such a and again, I just think you could have raised a three X up round and you know, everybody like probably. At a $5 billion valuation with like scrappy engineers, little bit more like, you know, hey, we're just focused on engineering building. We're sharing even more. The vibes could be way, way better. Yeah. Right.

But instead it seems like frothiness as a brand right uh and that's odd uh so shiel monat says figure humanoid robots reportedly raising at 39.5 billion so it's not 40 give me a break jordy he's not raising at 40 he's raising at 39.5 yeah okay uh shiel says frothy i wonder if they chose it to be slightly less than that so that it feels like there's some science yeah based reason like they they ran they put it in a spreadsheet and they popped out this is the number this is the right number one time i was negotiating with vc early on in my career and he's like oh yeah like we i i put my whole team on this they built a whole bunch of models and they came back with like valuation for the company is like, you know, $150 million,

like can't do any better than that. And I was just like, that you clearly didn't do any math. Like you, cause like you would have given me like a not round number. Like you clearly just ballparked this because otherwise you would have been like, yeah, like the spreadsheet said like 137 million 0.24. And so I rounded that to 138 and that's what we're doing.

Yeah. Instead, it was just like, no, you didn't. You didn't do this at all. So, yeah, if you're raising folks, don't try and raise it. A hundred million. Raise it. Ninety nine. Ninety nine.

Yeah. For a limited time only. For a limited time only. Tell your LPs three easy payments. Three easy payments on the $20 million series. Sequoia used to do this for youtube i believe they did a tranched investment three easy payments of of 10 million dollars and then it turns out as a founder you really don't want to take tranched investments

because you're sort of having to operate based on the oh yeah getting the money but then if it doesn't come through then there's so many reasons that the vc could change their mind yeah every every private markets investor has made an investment at some point, or active ones at least, where they get the first update and they're just like, ah, I messed up. And so Bass Barron has a quote in here.

He says, if Brett Adcock can raise money still, so can you. Never kill yourself. Very funny. Having some fun on the timeline. Having some fun. But I went through Brett's post and he's got some bangers in here. A guy can post.

He says, I've raised almost $1.7 billion from cold emails from my companies. I've tracked performance of cold emails versus referrals, and cold emails consistently outperformed by a long shot for a few reasons. Sharing mine, this is converting at 70% email to meeting. Hi, my name is Brett Adcock. I'm the founder and CEO of Figma. See the precision here, 70.8%. Yeah. He's a precise guy. Oddly specific.

There's something to this. I think you're onto it. Prior to this, I founded Archer Aviation, electric VTOL aircraft company, NYSE Archer, and also founder of Vetteri, sold for $100 million. Do you have time for a call? I mean, yeah, you're, I mean, there's a lot to like about this structure in the sense that it's just two sentences, very clear. He presents, what's he doing now? Why is he calling you?

And what has he done in the past? Very concisely. And so even if you're someone new in your career, you could easily say prior to this, I built a startup, raised a million dollars, and studied engineering at this school. Do you have time for a call? That's way better than chat GPT, paragraphs, like all that junk. And so, yeah, obviously, if you didn't sell a company for $100 million, probably going to have a lower conversion rate here.

But you can still adopt a lot of this, which I thought was cool. He had another crossover with a good friend of the pod, Theo. Did you see this one? Wait, did I miss the... Did we miss the Ben follow up there? Oh, yeah. This is really good. Do you know Ben? Ben, another friend of the pod, says, tried it, doesn't work. And he sends an email from him, Ben, saying, Jim, my name is Brett Adcock and I'm the founder, CEO of Figure, an AI robotics company building a general. And then Jim responds, you are not Brett Adcock. Your profile clearly says that your name is Ben.

Please remove me from your mailing list immediately. So having some more fun on the timeline. And then we got Theo. Yeah, Theo is in the game. Crossover of the century. He says company ideas are worthless execution is king this is from brett adcock uh posting some wisdom on the timeline he says in the limit the pace of technological progress is the only competitive advantage how to stop

overthinking strategy and execute like the top one percent he drops a thread uh he's been a bit of a thread boy throughout 2023 2024 2024. But he grinded his whole account way up. And now whenever he posts a new robotics video, instant virality. And I'm sure he had a great team working on this with him. Kyle Kashuv says, hey, John H. Fia, this is your bit. And Fio says some interesting ideas he's got there because Fio was all on the ideas guy train for a while and uh you know he's trying to he's trying to coin it the problem is fio you didn't coin a phrase yeah you didn't really get breakthrough with that concept yeah yeah idea guy was that was a phrase before fio fio was doing some really great foundational work on on what the value the value of being an

ideas guy was kind of He coined business magic. Magic is real. He did a good job of that with Invest Like the Best. I liked his episode there. He's just got to go a little bit deeper into it and really push, I think. But he'll get there. Let's see what Apple Intelligence thinks. Yeah. So this is a great way to close out. Brett, obviously working extremely hard. He needs rest. He's been using an Eight Sleep temperature controlled mattress the last two nights, seeing 40% plus in my REM SWS hours.

Stephen Burkholder says, keep us posted on the long term. And Mateo from Eight Sleep chimes in and says, in the meanwhile, check out a thousand reviews about us here. And that takes us to our first promotedo from Eight Sleep chimes in and says in the meanwhile check out a thousand reviews about us here and that takes us to our first promoted post from Eight Sleep boom that was smooth John smooth that was good the founder we're talking about is sleeping on Eight Sleep it's an Eight Sleep ad let's go um but we have an update somebody in the chat yesterday was asking Jordy was wearing an Eight Sleep hat can you get get an eight sleep hat? And yes, you can. They don't just throw them into every order, but if you order with our code and send it to us,

we'll send it to the team. Send us a screenshot of the order. It's code TBPN, I think. And if you order an eight sleep, they will send you a hat if you order through our code. So have fun with that. And send us a screenshot. And yeah, what's your sleep score

at today? I've been putting up crazy numbers. Crazy numbers? I've been putting up crazy numbers. Let's see what I'm at. I got a 98 last night. 98? I got a 91. My routine was not good. 62%. But I did put up seven hours and 10 minutes. Pretty good. Pretty happy with that. I'm going to, yeah. Quality was 100%. My feeling this week, my average bedtime was 846. My average wake up was 454. You send me texts being like, I'm going to bed for the night at like eight.

It's great. Yeah. And you're like, stop texting. I try to turn off my phone. It's good. Yeah. It's key. Getting to bed early makes it so easy to wake up early. That's the whole secret.

It's not more alarms. It's just get to bed early. Fall asleep quickly. to wake up early. That's the whole secret. It's not more alarms. It's just get to bed early. Fall asleep quickly. And that's what the Eight Sleep helps you do. Yeah, I don't. The other thing with the Eight Sleep is like, to me, the best, like the functionality that I genuinely love the most because living in Malibu every single night, the temperature drops.

Oh, yeah. It's not too cold. It's not too hot. It's just nice. But the feature that I actually love, and i feel a little bit soft for saying this is the way that it warms your bed oh yeah as you're as you're waking up it makes it so easy to get out of bed because i'm already warm the worst is you wake up you're cold and you want to stay in you want to stay in bed i don't want to stay in i'm ready to go yeah well you know another way to jolt yourself out of bed jordy with with a cold celsius or alana

alani new alani that takes us to our next story banger acquisition where's the gong john yeah we need a bunch of gong hits for the one billion dollar hack i don't know if we bring size for that but it is big the 40 billion dollar fundraise from Figure and the $2 billion acquisition from Celsius of Alani New. It's Friday. This is a fascinating story. Very few CPG companies get bought for these big of numbers. I've operated in CPG. You obviously know a lot of folks in CPG have invested in companies and stuff.

And so we're breaking it down. Celsius has agreed to purchase Alani New for $1.8 billion. It's in the front page of the Wall Street Journal business section today. So we'll read through a little bit of that. Celsius to acquire rival maker of energy drinks. Energy drink maker Celsius is paying $1.8 billion to buy rival Alani New, a brand that has been propelled by social media influencers and pitched itself as a locale fitness aid. Celsius is expected to pay a combination of cash and stock,

the company said. The deal, which includes a net purchase price of $1.65 billion and $150 million in tax assets, is Celsius' largest acquisition since it was founded two decades ago. And I'd love for you to pull up on public.com. What is the Celsius stock doing around this acquisition? Because I want to know, what does the market think about this? Celsius had a market value of roughly 6 billion after its shares closed down 2.15% at 25 bucks a share on Thursday. Overall, energy drink sales have been climbing, but Celsius's growth has slowed over the past year. Celsius was a very, very hot stock. I think it was up in like the 20 billion market cap, and it's since fallen a little bit. A little bit of background on Alani New.

Yeah, so Celsius for context is down 36% in the last six months. And that was because the growth was slowing. People were thinking, oh, this is going to dominate. It's going to beat Red Bull and Monster. It's kind of a new category for the fitness oriented folks, the healthier folks, but they're not really putting a dent in the Monster drinkers. This time last year, they were a $20 billion company. They're way down at 6%. And it seems that once you get to true scale as an energy drink, They're just fantastic. Fantastic businesses. Totally.

Monster's still sitting at $40 billion. Yeah. Red Bull's private, but in the tens of billions for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And so Alani New was started in 2018 by fitness influencer Katie Hearn. Monster is getting a 25X, even a multiple. Yeah. and they also bought bang energy out of bankruptcy for like 1x sales around a billion dollars Yeah, so they picked up that asset as well. And so there's just a bunch of huge players now It's Celsius monster and Red Bull, but there's obviously a lot of other ghost energy is doing a bunch of big deals There's a lot of energy drinks going out and I I love my drink Celsius pretty much every show now. And we're big Guayaquil fans. We're big fans of Yerba Mate. Huberman's in the game. He's got a Yerba Mate product that I personally like a lot. And yeah, low calorie, high caffeine, kicks you in the face,

gets you out of bed. You're not going to be in your eight sleep all day when you got that's for sure when you're replacing your blood with celsius uh anyway so alani new cells uh energy drinks supplements and protein drinks the louisville kentucky company has built its brand largely through partnerships with influencers like kim kardashian paris hilton and addison ray so they got heavy hitters celsius markets it's sugar-free caffeinated drinks is a healthy alternative to full sugar energy drinks and sodas and claims its products can help burn body fat, which is a claim that you can make if you have more than 100 grams of caffeine. And it's a structure and function claim, not a medical claim. So you're not regulated as a drug. You're regulated as a nutritional supplement at that point. Which is wild.

So Drew Fallon had a great breakdown. We'll pull up this little thread he posted. He says, the latest deal in an absolutely scorching hot energy drink market. Let's break down the deal. Celsius has had an extraordinary run over the last decade, particularly with a huge run up in 2023. However, growth slowed in Q4, 2024.

Revenues were about the same level as Q2, 2023. The stock had been priced to perfection. So it's drawn down about 60% in the last year. Alani knew was found about perfection if it's down. It was priced for perfection. Like at $20 billion, they were like, yeah, the market was pricing like they're going to be Red Bull. They're going to beat Monster. It's going to be everywhere. Celsius is the next amazing, perfect thing. And of course, they couldn't live up to that. And so the stock has since drawn down. So Alani New did around $600 million in sales with $70 million in net income in 2024, started in 2018. So six years later, they're throwing off $70 million in net income.

That's such a narrative violation because so many beverage companies yeah and never get a escape losing losing money through acquisition oh yeah like very very common for these companies to just lose money but they have market share and they're eating away at these sort of bigger incumbents and eventually they get bought so it's been growing at 50 since 2022 with 50 repeat buyers uh celsius owns 11 of the energy drink market almost 12 but with slowing growth and the recent acquisition of ghost lifestyle by kdp current dr pepper so ghost is actually off the market as well it became clear that they were not going to increase their market share organically and i don't know if you've seen what ghost is doing but they have like sour patch kids partnerships they have partnerships there's Patch Kids partnerships. They have partnerships.

There's also G Fuel, which is another independent company at this point, and Rain and NOS and Bang. And it's a crowded market. And so Alani New ranked as the fourth energy drink in terms of market share. Celsius is paying a net value of 1.65 billion. This is 2.8X sales, 26X TTM net income, $70 million, as we said, 20x adjusted EBITDA. Not crazy, but pretty high for CPG.

Celsius is publishing 12x fully synergized EBITDA as the purchase multiple here. That is obviously wishfully low uh yeah alani knew was the last desirable and scaled asset in energy space and perhaps the most desirable since the energy boom celsius paid up for this one adjusted fully synergized ebitda feels eerily similar to adam newman's community adjusted community so they're basically saying like look we didn't overpay because once we get all the synergies we're going to be making way more so you have to adjust the EBITDA now and this is really how you should think about the multiple but sounds like the market didn't love the deal and the stock traded down a couple percent is that right yeah let me pull it up over so honestly it seems like they kind of just added 50 million

dollars to EBITDA hills here's Celsius's reconciliation I'm putting the acquisition well to celsius credit 20 x into dot range they're up 45 percent over the past week they're building back yeah okay so overall the response i don't know when this was posted but um this news broke yesterday kind of yesterday morning yeah and it's interesting i mean it does still seem you know celsius has 163 million of ttm evita yep they have a 35x multiple monsters at scale with a 25x multiple it does feel like they're priced somewhat fairly even at this mark right yeah and so they had what 160 v 160 of EBITDA? Is that right? Yeah.

Celsius. So they just added 50 to that. So that's a 25% increase in their EBITDA for a $1.6 billion acquisition at a $5 billion market cap. So it's kind of like a merger. And I'm sure they had a ton of cash on the balance sheet prior. But now they control 16% of the energy drink market. And we'll give you some

background on the long-term tailwinds in energy the category has been growing really really quickly uh 90 billion dollars is the global energy drink market uh 10 percent growing it's growing at 10 and is expected to grow 10 till the end of the decade uh increasing category adoption incrementality and 37 has that meme factor that, oh yeah. Zen does right now where people are just, they, they do the marketing for Celsius. And so they kind of have that. Yeah. If you want to, yeah. If you want to like, like, you know, I saw just yesterday, there was some, uh, Senator I believe who posted like, I'm locked in. I got these bunch of Celsius and I'm working late tonight. And Brian Johnson was there being like, don't drink a Celsius late at night.

You're still going to have 100 milligrams of caffeine. Exactly. Yeah. You saw that post. And so sugar-free is gaining in ready to drink energy. In 2020, the sugar-free market was 39%. By 2024, it went to 51%. And it makes sense. Why would you want a bunch of sugar in your energy drinks if you're chugging them? A lot of people, although you've been saying for a while, sugar might be making a comeback. It's probably not going to make a comeback

in the form of high fructose corn syrup, but maybe the next wave, I feel like the energy drink market will continue to turn over. There will continue to be new entrants. That's actually one of the reasons I like these. We drink a lot of Matina from from huberman but these are just regular agave it has agave agave syrup that's great i'm cool with i like the i like the boost yeah it seems like the main thing

you want to stay away from is like the highly processed sugars yeah uh and so you can go natural sugar or you can go sugar-free. It kind of just depends on your diet and your goals. And so this really provides a platform for Celsius to go after and capture beverage trends in the category. Celsius markets its sugar-free caffeinated drinks as a healthy alternative to full sugar energy drinks and sodas. Although, of course, Red Bull has a sugar-free. monster has that zero white one that everyone likes. And so,

but there's still some value to being a brand that stands for sugar-free and that's the initial value prop, as opposed to needing to get the diet Coke product of the, of the cat, of the particular brand. Totally. And so Mads capital says the juice is back. He timed Celsius perfectly after hours and is now up bigly after they announced that they're buying Alani new. Jonah Lupton, I got back into Celsius after hours at 24.50. Once I saw they were buying Alani for 1.65, which is not only accretive, but Alani has a full suite of products from protein shakes to pre-workout and much more.

This is a very smart deal by Celsius. I think the CEO saved his job for now. And so people are excited about that. There's a little bit of hate coming from Trevor Scott. I think this is funny. Celsius acquiring Alani New, which is essentially the new Celsius, 12X post synergies, 19x pre synergies, including tax assets. Q4 results better than expected. Revenue minus 4%, adjusted EBITDA minus 4%, Celsius up 31%. Declining sales, what do you slap on it? A high growth acquisition. Maybe this isn't such a negative bear take. This is actually like, yeah, he kind of did what he had to do. You know, you're, you're, you stop growing, get the thing that's growing, build the portfolio. Yeah. The challenge here is Celsius seems to resonate broadly with the market. Alani knew with the branding, I don't see, I don't see Chad's picking that up. Yeah. It does seem like it's like almost like the female Celsius, which could be very valuable, you know,

for a long time. Uh, I thought of red bull and monsters is highly masculine products especially monster you know it's a monster trucks it's a very hard rock stuff you don't see a lot of girls walking around with monsters yeah red bull is a little bit more because it's a little bit more vodka yeah red bull vodka and then also the uh uh celsius i felt like was a little bit more gender neutral in the sense there was like crossfit but when you go to crossfit class it's usually pretty broken down evenly by gender yeah uh And so I could see that kind of happening the same thing. There's an interesting post here by the Bank of Braavos. Did you see this? Are you familiar with any of these distribution networks? No. Okay. So have you run into them? Yeah. Yeah.

I've run into a bunch of these. The ABI network successfully scaled Monster, Bang, Celsius, and Alani New to significant levels. Energy drinks that enter the ABI Network tend to scale well, but Pepsi often marks the final stop before growth dies. And so Kirk, Dr. Pepper, Pepsi, Coke, these guys have all these massive distributions. And typically at the later stage of a consumer packaged goods beverage company, you're going to want to do a deal with one of these guys and they will put you in all of their stores. But then there's also like essentially a deal that, hey, if it works, we're going to buy you. But it can still be very valuable for all the shareholders and everyone can be happy. So this is how the distribution landscape has evolved in chronological order. The ABI network scaled MNST. MNST moved from ABI to the Coke system.

Bang transitioned to ABI. Bang then moved from ABI to the Pepsi system. Then there was this lawsuit with Bang and Pepsi. It was kind of a weird deal. But Celsius joined ABI. Then Bang exited the Pepsi system. That was the lawsuit. Celsius moved from ABI to Pepsi.

Alani New joined the ABI network. Alani New is likely to exit ABI for the Pepsi system with the upcoming Celsius acquisition, creating an opening in the ABI network Pepsi. Alani New joined the ABI network. Alani New is likely to exit ABI for the Pepsi system with the upcoming Celsius acquisition, creating an opening in the ABI network once again. And so we got to call Huberman and get Matina into the ABI system because there's a gap there now. And ABI is going to want a new client and they're going to want a good deal. And I'm sure it's going to be bid out. But whoever wins that, like there's a reason why great companies keep going with ABI because they got, yeah. And, and, and, and you have to pay, but it really is almost, you can think of it like a value add investor. ABI is Anheuser-Busch InBev. So they have, you know, like everywhere you buy beer, which is just every single store you get,

they have trucks with guys that go and deliver beer. Yeah. Right. And so there's no store in America that says, actually, I don't want Budweiser. Yeah. I'm good. I'm not, you know, they all want the trucks to come. And when the trucks come, they say, Hey, what else you got? Oh, you got some Celsius. Yeah. I do have some people that want that. I'll try that. And they can even push cases on and they can even push and say, Hey, look, we're going to sell you Budweiser. We're going to give you a good margin on that. I'll try that. And they can even push cases on and they can even push and say, Hey, look, we're going to sell you Budweiser. We're going to give you a good margin on that. You'll be fine. But we want you to test this new thing. Yeah. Take a little faith with us. Yeah. And you're going to get a Keystone margin, which is 50% on this new product. You're going to get better

margins than you do on, on the commoditized like Budweiser product. Uh, so you're going to make good money on the stuff that you move. It's not going to move as fast because people don't know Alani. People don't know Celsius yet, but eventually it's going to scale and look at our track record. We did it with bang. We did it with Celsius. We did it with Alani new. The next thing though, when Anheuser-Busch comes to the local store, people are going to say, Hey, yeah, this is going to be good for my business because you guys know what you're doing. You pick really well. And so if you're in so if you're in beverage, you gotta talk to ABI, Anheuser-Busch, InBev. Anyway, if you're interested in this deal,

if you're interested in Celsius, if you're interested in tracking how these mergers affect the public markets, you gotta go to public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They have multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and is trusted by millions.

You've seen Jordy pull up all the stats on public. They have a very cool alpha product that uses AI and ChatGPT to pull in extra contacts. They have great charts. They have advanced charts, simple charts. It's a great product. So that's where you should be looking for everything related to financial assets. And we have a post from the co-CEO and founder, Leif, good buddy of ours. He says he's posting a screenshot from the Wall Street Journal, treasury direct to bond buyers, moving your money could take a year. There's a huge, it's really, really hard because a lot of people went into treasury direct because they were like, I want these great yields when interest rates went up. And now it's hard to get out just because it's a legacy government system. But with public, public he says luckily you don't have to deal with this because

we just revamped our treasury account you deposit earn yield you build or pick a ladder and take your money out whenever you like because it was a crazy it was a crazy moment when people were going to the treasury direct website and it felt like this dmv style interface and so it was great that you know players like Public came in and said, hey, we're going to actually just make this really easy, make it literally take whatever seconds to access that yield.

Well, we got another amazing article about a storied automotive manufacturer, Ferrari. We're breaking it down. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal today, the wild economics behind Ferrari's domination of the luxury car market we've talked about Ferrari before a lot of weird decisions going on doesn't seem to be affecting them financially we're going to talk to someone who's owned a Ferrari and that's part of the day part of we have Jordy Hayes here former Ferrari owner here to break it down for us uh Jordy I'll read you some of this amazing with my experience that I still love the brand.

Oh, yeah. You're breaking down constantly and you're like, but it's still goaded. It's goaded. It's amazing. They're beautiful. They own red. Like, what more do you want? Just like the way that we own green.

Yeah. They own red. They own red. So with a list price of $3.7 million, Ferrari's new hypercar was revealed to the public in October with a twist. It wasn't available for sale. All 799 units of the low-slung, high-haunched F80 model, the most expensive production vehicle in Ferrari's history, had already been promised to top customers like Luc Poirier.

The Montreal real estate entrepreneur already owns 42 Ferraris. He said he felt lucky to be allowed to buy yet another. To be chosen to buy Ferrari is, for one of their hypercars, is a true milestone for any collector. Money isn't enough to buy a top-of-the-range Ferrari. You need to be in a long-term relationship with the company. By leveraging the rabid fandom of its customers through the business model based on Uber scarcity, the storied Italian company is enjoying a new golden age following an almost tenfold increase in the stock since its ipo a decade ago ferrari is now worth 90 billion

dollars that's two figures two figs uh that's two figure ai robotics companies you take two of them you get a ferrari uh making it the most valuable car company in Europe, despite delivering just 13,752 vehicles last year. So, Jordy, why don't you break down what their strategy is with these super restricted hypercars? How do you get one? You know, just break it down, make it. So, yeah, I've talked about I don't think we've talked about this on the show that much. I know I've talked about it before on X, but Ferrari has this fantastic business model that's similar to every other luxury brand that you'd be familiar with. Hermes, Rolex, Patek, all these different companies, they basically make, no matter how much money you have in the world, if you want to buy these cars, watches, bags, et cetera, directly from the manufacturer, directly from the

brand, you have to play their game. Now, every single brand has a different version of their game. There's plenty. You can look up online forums for every brand and see what game did you have to play. And the game is basically spending money on things that you don't necessarily want to get the thing that you actually want. And so Ferrari and Porsche does this as well. Every brand gets knocked for this because people say, I have 300 grand. I should be able to buy the GT3 RS and Porsche. people don't realize is they're using these hyper exclusive cars as top of top of funnel marketing for every other car in their portfolio or every other watch or every other bag or every other

product that they make. Right. And so in the case of Ferrari, Ferrari, you know, has been playing this game for a very long time. It's been, you know, the most desirable cars in the world for a very long time. They typically are making under a thousand units of their most high profile, most desirable cars. And these are the cars that are actually investments. Every other car that they make for the most part depreciates massively. Nobody wants a 15 year old Ferrari that was the entry model, right? These cars end up trading at 30, 40 grand. Like you can actually pick them up for very little because they're unreliable and they're not, you know.

They just weren't. They weren't a con. Yeah, yeah. Like a 360 Modena is like fairly accessible. Probably still almost a hundred K. Probably around there. But it's like a 20 year old car at this point. And it was an entry model at the time.

Yeah. And so, yeah. And so ultimately you, if you want to eventually buy Ferrari hypercars, you have to go in there and you have to just start purchasing cars. You have to get a Roma. You probably now would have to get a Purisangue. You have to get, you know, if you just look. 298 or 296. Yeah.

And one of the challenges is that owners know you basically have to have some real stones because nothing is guaranteed in the game. You can go in there and spend five million dollars with Ferrari and still not get access to an F80 because you're not even close to being in there. And it's not just that. You also have to lose money on options, right? You can't just be walking in and saying, okay, every three years I lease the base model. No, it's like, come in, I'm customizing it, I'm creating a fleet, I'm a collector.

And the steel man of all this is that if it was just a one-click checkout on F80s, you would have maybe hedge funds coming in and like trading them. And they wouldn't actually go to collectors who promote the brand and live the brand. when you see an f80 owner they you know that they're also going to have an sf90 a you know a an f50 an f40 they're going to have the whole they're going to be able to tell the whole story of the brand they're going to be a brand evangelist almost and that does raise the

profile of the brand i think as opposed to if if it was known as like, yeah, Ferraris, they come out and then they just immediately get turned into financial assets. You never see them in the real world. No one ever drives them. They're just thrown in the plastic. They might as well be NFTs. Yeah. And so Ferrari is unique as a manufacturer because if you go to Porsche, Porsche is an example. If you want to buy a GT3 RS, you probably have to buy a couple Taycans,

a couple Macans, maybe a Cayenne. And the key is you can't just buy them and immediately sell them. You have to buy them, hold them for some amount of time and then sell them back or trade them into the original dealer that you work with. So your relationship is not actually with the manufacturer, it's with the dealer. And so Ferrari, what's different is not only with the manufacturer it's with the dealer yep and so ferrari what's different is not only can you you have to buy the cars from them and when you're ready to sell sell it back to the dealer so that they make their margin again on that vehicle um and they don't they don't necessarily pay market they're going to give you like kind of dealers often will make you a lowball offer and so uh what what's funny's funny about Ferrari is they actually basically consider

you to basically just be the custodian of that vehicle. So you can't even take your entry level Ferrari and make it pink and do donuts in it. They will come after you. There's a history of Ferrari suing their own customers, which is like unheard of, right? All business, all traditional business advice is don't sue your customers. It just ends up, you know, this is the opposite of Lamborghini, right? Yeah. Lamborghini is like much more, you know, kind of like wrap them, do whatever you want. Shoot, you know, you know, there's that guy who got in trouble for like shooting it. That was like illegal. Yeah. That wasn't with Lamborghini. I don't think Lamborghini had a problem with it. They're like, yeah, just the law enforcement had an issue with it. Um, and, uh, you put off-road

tires on it. Maybe we'll just make a production version of that. Yeah. Yeah with it. Um, and, uh, you put off-road tires on it. Maybe we'll just make a production version of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and so, so anyway, so Ferrari, um, and, uh, anyway, so Ferrari, the, the, the challenge is, uh, they, they, there is still, if they're making 800 F eighties, there's still a ton of people out there that are buying lots of romas and persangues and these other cars that are are not getting access to those and so the challenge now and doug d'amuro has a bunch of good content on this the challenge now is people are saying i've been losing you know people were spending all this money to get an sf90 immediately losing 400 400 grand And then they're still not

getting the call from Ferrari. And Ferrari is picking their favorites, right? Because the SF90 was unlimited production run. So it was still hard to get-ish. At the moment, in 2021, interest rates were low. There's a lot more appetite to buy these crazy cars when you're getting a 3% interest rate. And now I listened to a call in on, it was maybe like Dave Ramsey or something, but someone bought an SF90 to kind of flex and they had financed it. And the payment was, I think like 20K a month. And the guy had a business that was like making 20K a month, stopped making so much money. And he was like, it's important to my like brand, my personal brand for this company that I'd have a sports car. And so he can't make the payment,

has to like move. And now if he sells the car, he paid 800K for it. He would have to pay to trade it in. Yeah, exactly. So he has like 400,000 of negative equity on the car. He's effectively bankrupt. And so people were saying like, yeah, maybe you have to like crash the car and get insurance or something. It's like really sketchy. But even then the insurance is not,

is going to say what's the replacement value of the vehicle. So anyways, bad, bad situation. Let me break down the costs. Ferrari like to be clear, they have an actual list. So for background, I looked at buying a classic Ferrari dealer in 2020 at the beginning of last year and spent a lot of time with this business that was based in Europe

and ultimately got to a point where the business that was sitting on so much inventory in the acquisition, you would have to absorb that inventory. And the Ferrari market last year was dipping on a lot of their classic models because there's not the same level of demand totally so anyways the the whole like there's an entire ferrari economy both the direct you know dealer customer but then also the secondary market which is they all play into each other yeah so don't buy a ferrari don't buy a ferrari't buy a Ferrari dealership. Buy Ferrari stock. Buy Ferrari stock. Because the stock is doing great. Stock is way up. They're trading more than $40 billion higher than Volkswagen, which sold more than 9 million cars last year.

Volkswagen's worth around $50 billion, I believe. Most of Europe's auto industry is plagued by a weak domestic market, costly transition to electric vehicles, new competition in china uh uh the chief executive officer of ferrari uh bendetto vigna said in a recent interview in marinello we are not we are not an automotive company uh the city in northern italy where ferrari is based we are a luxury we are a luxury company that is also doing cars and that's the kind of thing that true enthusiasts will cringe and cry over because they just want Ferrari to focus on making the most beautiful, performant, timeless cars. Yes, yes, yes. With driver engagement and manual transmissions and naturally aspirated engines. And Ferrari's definitely moved away from that. And it's a real risk, right? If you're a Porsche enthusiast, you can go get a manual 911 T or the ST or the Touring or a GT3. They really

are. And you can get into the brand at 120, 130 K, something like that. And I mean, there's even other entry points with things like the Cayman and the Boxster. So, you know, it's kind of like the baby 911 to get you in and you and you get a little bit older, one of those. And all of a sudden you're in the brand for 30K, 50K. And Ferrari just doesn't have that. But, you know, it does lead it to be a more luxurious brand. Like you think of Ferrari as a cut above Porsche. And that's just the case. And so at the time of of Ferrari's IPO in 2015,

many analysts were skeptical that a luxury business model would work for a carmaker. The former CEO used to draw comparisons with Hermes, a parallel now widely accepted. The French fashion house limits supply of its coveted Birkin bags, leading to wait lists at its stores and a huge resale market is the same deal at Hermes.

You need to buy a lot of things before you're invited to buy a Birkin. And they're very, very highly coveted. Customers buy all manner of other Hermes baubles to move up the list. Ferrari's blossoming into a luxury leader has restored the fortunes of founder Enzo Ferrari's son, Piero Ferrari, and Italy's Agnelli family, which took control of the company decades ago through its Fiat brand. In the IPO, both families retained stakes that are now worth billions of dollars. Another group that had profited from its Ferrari's investments, Savvy Collectors. Most cars are famously depreciating assets, including most standard Ferraris, but the value of rare Ferraris has soared in recent years. LaFerrari is up at 3.4 million. According to Hagerty, a specialist auto insurer based in Traverse City,

when the model was released in 2013, they only made 499 of them. Now, they might have made a few more. That's the thing with Ferrari. You never really know. And then they do special editions and they make a couple more. But still, very limited production run. And it was sold before options at 1.4 million. Now it's up at 3.8

so yeah you know fantastic so and so the the ferrari customer who's buying these more standard ferraris these mass-produced ferraris accepting that they're going to take a loss on them yep is betting that they're going to get access to these premier cars that will then make them money if they hold them but now the challenge is they've sold so many of the standard cars to people that were anticipating being able to get into that coveted top customer group that gets access to these cars. And so they're hitting this wall where they've now seen terrible sales on the 12-cylindery car because people are like,

I'm not going to spend 700 K on this car. That's going to have terrible depreciation. And you're not even giving me confidence that I'm ever going to get into that F80. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So last spring, a Houston real estate broker bought one of Ferrari's much hyped pro songway models. That's the SUV. Uh, the first four door vehicle, uh, the list price was close to $460K, but can approach $1 million with add-ons. So you're talking $1 million for an SUV that's not even a track-focused sports car,

and so you really have to have money to spend. And when the broker flipped it, the dealership that had sold him the car sued, saying that he was in breach of contract, giving it right of first refusal for 12 months after the sale. According to the plaintiff's petition, they recently settled without disclosing terms. And so, you know, they were probably like,

hey, how much profit did you make on that? Give us a piece of that and like, we'll call it even. But still, it's like very aggressive with your customers. Anyone with a few hundred K can buy a regular Ferrari as long as they're willing to wait a couple of years. While standard models aren't subject to strictly limited runs, the company still lives by Enzo Ferrari's scarcity dictum. Ferrari will always deliver one

less car than the market demands. Smart. Limited edition Ferraris are even scarcer. You can't just walk into your local showroom and buy one. These range from special versions of regular models to the design-oriented Icona series, which is your favorite. That's the SP sp2 sp3 um most exclusive uh most exclusively once in a decade hypercars like la ferrari and f80 and so a lot of people were also upset about not being able to get sp3 allocations yeah and so it's like yes i get it that you do the hypercar the f80 the f50 the la ferrari the enzo every 10 years maybe i'm not on that list but can we do sp3 for me because that's just like a fantastic car and like yeah it's a million dollar range seems much more likely to be a an investment car an investment over the f80 even potentially over the f80 interesting in my view it's an odd positioning

because it's this new new bucket of hypercars from Ferrari uh but it had the same problems where it was like very very limited run and very difficult to get into and so uh frustrated a lot of people that were sitting on SF90s down 400k it's the same thing as a watch market there's a lot of reason to just go buy the car that you actually want with Ferrari but that decreases demand at the dealership level for Ferrari right if people are saying oh I want you know I'm just gonna go buy a lot Ferrari on the secondary market and they can go to you know they can go to someone like Sotheby's and get that car there's actually an anecdote here from John Otto who bought his first Ferrari in the 1980s after receiving an

inheritance nice Nepo he got frustrated when he failed to get on the ladder for the Ferrari Enzo, a hypercar that preceded the LaFerrari. The retired entrepreneur who set up a business in Florida offering supercar test drives no longer owns the brand. Even though I had bought five or six Ferraris and several marquee Ferraris over the decade, I couldn't find a dealer that was willing to sell me one. I hadn't quite been as vigilant with my purchases or as aggressive as others so opaque and difficult you go from being if you're somebody who's who's stretching to get a car you will likely get smoked yeah by somebody who's just saying yeah but like there's people that would come in and

say like what are the three cars that you need to move right now? Okay. I just bought them. Make sure that I'm next in line for, you know, the car that I actually want. Here's an interesting comp. When Porsche launched its IPO in 2022, it leaned heavily into comparisons with Ferrari, but the stock has fallen by almost a third since its debut among amid challenges in China and a botched electric vehicle strategy this is the taikon and now the Macan EV and Ferrari shipped what what was the number so Ferrari shipped 13,750 vehicles. Yep. Porsche shipped 310,000 cars last year. The German sports car maker is too big to keep

Ferrari style weightless, except for a few models. That's the GT3 RS that you mentioned. At the extreme, smaller supercar brands struggle to deliver as steady a stream of new vehicles as Ferrari, leading to cash crunches. Aston Martin shares have lost more than 95% of their value since its 2018 IPO. Bahrain's sovereign wealth funds took full control of McLaren last year after a period of heavy losses. And so McLaren has a similar strategy where they did the F1, the P1, and now the W1. And so in theory, you should be saying, hey, I should get a 720S. I should get a 650. I should be on the McLaren ladder because I'll get up into those super hypercars. But then they also launched the

Speedtail and a bunch of other hypercars. But then they were like, it's not the real hypercar. The real hypercar is coming. It's the W1. It's the F1. It's the P1. And so people got kind of confused. And whenever there's that confusion, it leads to brand degradation, in my opinion. Totally. And so let's go to some reactions and people talking about Ferrari. Morgan Housel posts a wild stat. We mentioned this. Ferrari sold 13,000 cars last year. Market cap, 90 billion. Volkswagen sold 9 million cars last year. Market cap, 40 billion. And so it's not what you sell. It's how you sell it. And as a reminder, Volkswagen owns Lamborghini, Bentley, Porsche, and Bugatti.

I think Porsche is independent. I think you might be wrong there, right? Anyway, there's a lot of Ferrari fans in the tech world. Tom Mueller says Ferrari Friday, and he posts a beautiful photo of a Ferrari that he has. He also has an F40. I wonder if he's going to get the F80. He's been a big fan. Palantir, friend of the

show, is also sponsoring Ferrari. Praying for Exit says, the Palantir-Ferrari collab goes unreasonably hard. Look at this. Read the other sponsors on the Ferrari team. It's all killers. AWS, Palantir, Shell, Celsius.

Pirelli, Celsius, the energy drink company, Santander, and HCL Software, which I don't know that one. But very cool. We have some friends that are in the midst of doing a F1 deal, and we cannot wait to share it on the show. It's one of the best things that you can do if you like going to F1. Oh yeah. It's just sponsor a team.

Yeah. I mean, eight sleep did that, right? I mean, they sponsored, they sponsored that partnership with Leclerc. It's brilliant.

Yeah. And so David Senra founders podcast has a post here from Enzo Ferrari. He kept the main thing, the main thing, Enzo Ferrari in front of his Maranello factory. I don't care if the door gaps are straight. When the driver steps on the gas, I want him to be scared for his life. I love that. It's fantastic. You know, he was, Enzo was a master of keeping the important thing, the main, keeping the main thing, the main thing. What is Ferrari

about? It's about acceleration, driver engagement, the experience of driving the car. People will put up with rough edges to get the best driving experience. And that's exactly what Peter Thiel did in 2005 when he did the Gumball. He did the Gumball 3000 in a drop-top Ferrari. And you'll love to see it. Doing it in a drop-top is great. It's so cool. A lot of great tech founders and investors have done the Gumball. and you love to see it. Doing it in a drop top is great. It's so cool.

A lot of great tech founders and investors have done the gumball. I love how he's posing with a sheriff there. Yeah, I don't know who that is, but what a great historical post. What a great little bit of Silicon Valley lore. That sheriff is now JD Vance. Let's go to Abhishek Kumar. He says, AI automation outsourcing.

Meanwhile, Ferrari. These there are trees that live inside the factory. It is labor intensive and the label of and the level of automation is pretty low and it's not the most scalable. And I bring this out because this layout gives an incredible flexibility to make design choices that optimizes the car rather than the manufacturing process. This is quite distinct for most car companies. So super, super handmade heritage. Obviously they're using tons of tooling now, but not all about AI automation outsourcing that they're not worried about going to China and reducing cogs a little bit. They have very high margins clearly from the market cap,

but you're getting a different product. You're getting something that's closer to a hand-built, coach-built vehicle. But we've been comparing the car market to the watch market for a long time throughout this entire piece. And so we wanted to tell you about Bezel. You can shop over 22,500 luxury watches on Bezel. They're all fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. and jordy i wanted to put you on the spot you said you were interested in picking up a cartier tank i got four for you right here i want to let you know which one would you pick out of these four if you had to pick one i found another one on there it's on my saves we'll have to show it the next episode but i would go with something a little bit more uh vintage okay right okay um

gold or silver? What are you thinking? I feel like the gold is more classic. Yeah. With the tank, it works with that. It works with the tank. Yeah. For us Irishman.

Yeah. But tank is fantastic watch. Very iconic design. I love about it. Louis Cartier made the decision to alter the Roman numerals on the dial. So it goes Roman numeral one, two, three, and then instead of the four being the IV,

it's just four I's, which isn't how you represent the number four in Roman numerals, but it creates more visual balance with the eight on the other side of the dial. And so I thought it was a really cool little subtle design touch. And there's a bunch of those in the Cartier tank. So if you're looking to pick up a dress watch, I think the Cartier tank is a fantastic choice. So go head

over to bezel and check it out. Let's move on to some absolute size lords who have been cleaning up in the private credit markets. High Yield Harry says, remind me to go back in time and start a private credit fund. And he just shows a picture of all these killers. Tony Ressler, Aries, $13.8 billion net worth. Mark Rowan at Apollo, $11 billion. Scott Kapnick at HBS, $4 billion. Lawrence Galoob at Galoob Capital, $3.3 billion. His brother, probably, David Galo Capital, $3.3 billion. His brother, probably,

David Galoob, $3.3 billion. Doug Ostrover at Blue Owl, $3.2 billion. And it goes on. Everyone's a billionaire. I love how the two brothers have like, you know, they're one's ranked before the other ones, but clearly 50-50 partners. Yeah, it's great. You love to see it. And so Bloomberg has a deep dive on private credit. We're going to take you through. We'll break it all down. It says Wall Street's new money is shaking up the ranks of the super wealthy. With over $61 billion, the private credit titans made their fortunes in a once obscure corner of finance. 20 years ago, swaggering hedge fund managers leveraged buyout. Kings and corporate raiders would have dominated any list of masters of the Wall Street universe.

Today, another corner of finance has become a billionaire factory. We love billionaire factories. The decidedly less- Billionaire factories. It's great. We should be making more of those. Y Combinator, rebrand your tagline. We're a billionaire factory. Founders Fund, the billionaire factory. The decidedly less glamorous business of making loans directly to companies, often small and medium-sized ones, the kinds that are glamorous business of making loans directly to companies, often small and medium-sized ones, the kinds that are squeezed out of traditional bond market and often deemed too risky for banks. This line of work has been broadly known as private credit, and it's booming.

In only a decade, the assets have more than tripled to $1.6 trillion as institutional investors and wealthy individuals seek alternatives to regular stocks and bonds. Making private loans is lucrative thanks to higher yields and the potential for fund managers to earn a share of gains on top of steep fees. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index calculated the fortunes of 18 beneficiaries of the private credit boom. Together, these individuals who work at seven different companies are worth $61 billion. Only one Aries management corpse, Tony Ressler ranks near the top of finance. As a group, they'd clock in above a single financier, Blackstone Inc. co-founder Steve Schwartzman. But that's like, you know.

So lots of billionaires, 18 billionaires from this boom. And this is fascinating. I have a buddy who's pretty sure his dad was on the founding team at Aries. He's not on this list, but I think he's done very, very well. I have a buddy who's pretty sure his dad was on the founding team at Aries. He's not on this list, but I think he's done very, very well. And I remember learning about it as a kid and being like, oh, so he does finance. It's cool. And I had no idea like what that actually meant. And now I get it. There's not a, there's really not a venture capital firm that i can think of that has looking at aries one two three four there's four bunch of apollo a bunch of blue owl uh some vc firms have minted this uh it's a little

bit tricky but uh i mean but it's over insight will probably do this just on fees. I think they raised a $20 billion fund, right? Sure, but that's not four partners each being worth $3.3 billion or whatever. It is hard to get up there. I mean, you can see Mark and Ben being up there. Yeah, Mark and Ben. And if you look at the Founders Fund now, if you count the newly minted people like Trey, I'm sure have getting up there, but I mean, even that's weird because it's like, yeah, Trey is, you

know, and or co-founder. It's a little, it's like, where do you really make the money? But, uh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. It is fascinating. It doesn't count. Yeah.

And you're not throwing around $1.6 trillion at FF. But it's a fascinating story. So to be sure, some of these finance executives have labored for decades out of the limelight, laying the groundwork for their bonanzas. In terms of demographics, they're not a diverse bunch. They're all men, but two are in their 50s and 60s. 13 attended Ivy League schools, only five public universities. And many share one traditional Wall Street pedigree. They cut their teeth during the 1980s rise of junk bonds before the 1980 collapse. They've broken some knees before.

Yep, before the collapse of Michael Milken's Drexel Burnham Lambert, which, of course, was the junk bond fund that figured out how to put leveraged debt into all these private equity buyouts and kind of laid the groundwork for the private equity boom that we saw in the 90s and the 80s. These credit mavens then created their own leveraged buyout houses, most notably Apollo Global Management, which are now shifting most of their money toward private credit and other lending and catapulting those who specialized in that field to the top of the list. We singled out companies where we could determine that most of their business comes from private credit and other lending, and catapulting those who specialized in that field to the top of the list. We singled out companies where we could determine

that most of their business comes from private credit. That eliminated Blackstone, Brookfield, KKR, and some others who have private credit arms, but are not private credit shops primarily. Our tally, which reflects valuations as of January 28th, also doesn't include executives who no longer have current roles at companies. So there's probably more guys

with billions tucked away from this boom. And so we should do a deep dive on all of these. They're fascinating. But Aries is probably the biggest here, founded 28 years ago. So yeah, I mean, I guess my buddy's dad was there on the foundation. It's crazy because like, yeah, he was there super early. It may be the OG of private credit, but the sector's boom has made it seem like the new new thing. The value of its publicly traded stock has almost tripled since the start of 2022, raising Aries market value to more than $60 billion. That performance helped cement four senior executives membership in the multi-billion dollar club. Aries tied with the newcomer Blue

Owl Capital for the most private credit billionaires on our list. Aries founders are among those whose Wall Street careers date back to Milken's Drexel. Their wrestler worked alongside his brother-in-law, Leon Black. Wrestler and fellow Drexel alumnus, John Kisik joined Black when he co-founded an upstart PE firm, Apollo. Wrestler, which you might remember Apollo from Vail,

from our Vail deep dive, because Apollo bought Vail Resorts and installed an Apollo guy to run it for two decades. He went on a generational run. Generational run, having a bit of a problem this ski season with long lines and labor strikes, but still interesting to see where Apollo, Ares, and the other financial titans have their fingers

and what pies they're operating in. I love the name. Like the founders of Apollo, Aries, and the other financial titans have their fingers and what pies they're operating in. I love the name. Like the founders of Apollo, they chose to name their firm after a powerful figure in Greek mythology, Aries, the god of war. Rosenthal, a leveraged finance specialist at Merrill Lynch, signed on a year later. He's currently the chairman of private equity over the next few years. Kaplan, another former Apollonian, and Argetti, who worked for Royal Bank of Canada, came on board. And so Ares is ripping. They are lapping the S&P 500. They're based in LA and they are absolutely crushing it, crushing it, crushing it, crushing it. They've acquired a bunch of different companies. They own Sam's Night,

Marcus. Great business. You'll love to see it. Did you want to talk a little bit about what you think the opportunity is for private credit and specifically some hybrid between private credit and venture debt specifically within, uh, the world of these like fast growing AI startups. And so when we were talking about private credit here, we're talking about huge companies that need access to debt, but might not be able to issue bonds. So when Apple goes to the public markets, they have a trillion dollar stock. They can issue debt. I think their debt might even trade. It might be cheaper than the government of the United States because they're so reliable and they have so much cash on the balance sheet exactly so it's a very stable business so they just go and they issue debt bonds yeah uh but what if you're red bull you're private or what if you're a single digit billion dollar company you're very stable but

you're not public or you're you know not ready to go and issue corporate bonds to on wall street well you call one of these guys and uh in Silicon Valley, there has been a little bit of a boom with venture debt where a company that needs more money, more juice, will go raise $20 million Series A, and then they'll throw a $10 million venture debt line on top of it. And this makes sense. Credit is all over startups. I mean, literally using Ramp, not to switch into an ad read, but using Ramp is a form of credit. Like you're getting a credit card. You get 30 days on that.

And that can literally help you with your working capital because you're buying meta ads on your ramp card. And then you pay it back at the end of the day. And maybe your customers come in. They pay you on day one. And you use that to pay off your ramp card, right? Yep. Then as you go, as you start scaling up, maybe your business is in hard tech. You have to buy some machinery.

And you finance that as an asset-backed loan. And you start, oh yeah, we're paying essentially a mortgage on our house, we're paying a mortgage on our machine. And then as a business starts scaling, like Celsius, Alani New, which we mentioned, they might have a working capital problem because they need to pay upfront

for millions of cans of this stuff. And then it's going to be a while until they send it over to InBev. InBev puts it in the retail store, retail stores pays them, the money flows back. They're going to get a working capital problem. And very quickly they can be like, well, we're a billion dollar company, but we have $500 million of inventory on our balance sheet now because that's grown. What should you do about that? Well, you need an inventory line of credit. And so private credit is another way to finance your business without dilution. And the venture side, that makes sense. Yeah. And within private credit, there's so many different subcategories of inventory,

financing, venture debt. Yeah. Tons of different usages. But there's a question that we were talking about earlier, which is if the structure of building a business is changed with the dawn of AI, does that change the financing? And almost certainly it does. And so historically, venture capital- Yeah, and this goes back to yesterday

we talked about bootstrapping or- Boot scaling. Boot scaling. Boot scaling, yeah. Where a founder might want to raise two, three million bucks out the gates and then can get to 50 plus million dollars of revenue just off of that alone. Yeah. And so historically, venture capital has been fantastic for financing R&D spend.

Yeah. So you raise some venture capital and then you hire a bunch of software engineers. Private credit will not give you money to fund software engineering. Software engineering. No way. Because you built a product and it's unclear if it's valuable. Yeah. Like when you move into a house with a mortgage, you get a bill on month one, Hey, pay us a couple thousand bucks. Even if it's an interest only loan, like, yeah, we gave you a million dollars for your mortgage. You better pay us 5k or 8k

or whatever the rate is. Um, and so that doesn't work to fund, uh, to fund, uh, R and D, but venture capital is perfect for that. Hey, hire a bunch of PhDs, hire a bunch of software engineers, build the next Google. When it works off, when it works out, we're going to take a slice of the business. We're going to be fantastically wealthy and we're going to be able to underwrite this. Now, what happens if you only need $10 million a seed round to get off the ground or even less. And then once you start scaling, you're at $100 million of ARR with a 30 person team. Now you're in distribution territory. Do you need to fund that with equity financing? Maybe, maybe not. If it's just a matter of buying

ads and then reaping the LTV very quickly, and it's extremely predictable. You know that the value of a cursor customer is a thousand bucks over two years, and it costs you 200 bucks to acquire them. Well, you have to pay that 200 bucks up front, and you're not going to get the thousand bucks for two years. So there is a working capital issue. You do have to finance that somehow. You have to bridge that. You could bridge it with equity, but you could also bridge it with debt. And so there's a question about, you know, as founders get shrewder about how they are financing their business, will we see venture, venture debt increase or decrease? And I think there's a potentially an argument for it increasing. I don't know. What's your,

I mean, I think the challenge is cursor. If they're saying, Hey, we can do a five, we can raise a hundred million dollars at $2 billion and do a 5% dilution round. We have plenty of cash. We get it all now. It's just not that impactful in terms of the founders saying, well, I'm giving up another 20%. But for a company that is not as hot, not as fast growing, et cetera, and maybe they're

looking at doing around 20 on a hundred, there's a scenario where they say, oh, it actually makes sense. I'd like to take some of this via debt because I know we're going to be able to pay back. Yeah. And the beauty of it is that, uh, let's say you do, you know, some sort of like a hundred on a billion, you give up 10% of your company. If you hit a rough patch, you still own your company. Yeah. Maybe you have a guy on your board who's going to be like, we got to get it together, but you still could have board control. You could have super voting. You're not going to lose your company. But if that a hundred million is in debt and you miss a payment, there's going to be a debt covenant in there where they take over the whole company.

This happened with Bench, right? Where they shut down super quickly because they tripped some covenants and they were, andvenants. And so the generalized knowledge within venture has always been avoid venture debt because it's amazing when things go perfectly. But if you have some bump in the road, which a lot of companies do, you can be in a really bad position and lose your entire company. Yeah. And it's not going to be a 3% level. Like for any sort of venture debt, you're looking at 10%. The other challenge here as to why we haven't maybe seen more private credit or venture debt become more popular is that Stripe's internal financing products are pretty good, right? If you're doing a lot of revenue on Stripe or even a small amount of revenue, they will start offering you debt financing, which is their competing working capital. Shopify has debt products.

There's a bunch of other companies within e-com. Pipe was in many ways trying to create a private credit marketplace where anybody could come on and basically give you money for your SaaS contracts up front. That sort of worked in a super low rate environment. And then when rates ramped up, they were no longer able to do that. But I think if you look at Pipe now, which is apparently Pipe is doing well. So now they're building, now they're doing embedded finance products.

So I imagine they would go to somebody like a Shopify and say, let us run your debt financing. And so they work with uh companies like boulevard which i believe is a um toast for uh toast for barbershops so like they would be able to say hey boulevard offer your end customers um and and so pipe is in some ways competing with private credit firms that might have originally gone to boulevard and say we'll give you $100 million to lend to your end customers, but you guys sort of manage that program. So Pipe is an intermediary there.

But I'm sure Pipe is then going and raising, like talking to the Apollos and the Aries. And like the Goldman's, like a lot of these fintech companies, when they start offering credit products, they get that underwritten by a big investment bank, essentially. And so this whole like private credit boom became a big meme. And I wanted to take you

through some of the memes from, uh, uh, the last few years, high yield. Harry has the four-step plan for my $50 million credit credit fund. Rich parents go to NYU step three bro down, uh, to how to start a private credit fund, 2020, uh, 20 years of credit experience. That's what we saw with the Aries guys, the Apollo guys. But in 2025, this guy was 28 years old. He had a $6.3 billion family fortune. And he stepped out and raised a $50 million fund, which seems low based on his family fortune. Yeah, but maybe he's trying to get some track record going. Yeah, he's good. He's just going to be able to get yield on his on his family's i love it yeah fortune cap girl has a little meme here bro hear me out i really feel like we should start a fund together are there a

lot of funds being launched right now maybe but it's me and you bro my dad was early at gso before blackstone bought them and he'll seed us no one can do private credit like us bro and so this is back in 2023 and people were definitely people have been calling the private credit bubble for a long time it is very real risk in the system it's frothy there's maybe at a point too many funds because a lot of people we've already talked about banks can provide yeah financing uh these big software platforms like shopify and fintech companies like Stripe can do it. So there's a lot of competition. There's a lot of funds. Banks can do it. There's so many ways to get access to capital that I'm sure there will eventually be too many

funds. The returns will drop and then people will sort of fade out, right? Just like any category. 100%. And so if you want to go deeper on this story, Nicole Wiscoff had a podcast episode go live with Peter Thiel's largest investment outside of Founders Fund is into a powerhouse private credit investor you've probably never heard of. Listen in my conversation with dear friend and total killer, Carrie Findley,

covering going straight to Wall Street out of college, joining Third Point at 25 and an epic eight-year run, securing a $200 million investment from Peter for Fund One and Private Credit 101. So if you want to see what it means to start a private credit fund, definitely recommend checking that out. And when you make your fortune in private credit, why don't you go on a vacation? Yeah. And you wonder, we got to figure out more what Takora is doing. I imagine they're doing a lot of stuff around. So Takora specifically is focused on asset-based private credit. So this could easily be, hey, you want to buy 20,000 GPUs? We're going to buy them and we're going to finance those for you. So you build a model.

You make sure that the rates are correct, that you're underwriting appropriately. And if it works out, you make a bunch of money. It's pretty simple. Beautiful. But obviously, you got to do the deals. You got to make sure you don't get taken advantage of. You got to make sure you don't get defrauded due to your due diligence and make sure the deal is good. But we don't have a great transition, but we want to talk about Wander, our sponsor. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade

amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. And Wander has a post today. Travel can be a time machine. I wanted to show you this. What do you think of this spot, Jordy? I think it's pretty beautiful. Let's go to the next slide and show some of these photos. Oh, so this place is in Palm Springs. And I remember when the fires were hitting,

I was on Wander. You were looking at this one? We should go take the families here. That pool is really cool, nice and circular there's so many places so lush too you think of is this in joshua tree is it no palm springs you think you can see it's sort of nestled in the mountains uh awesome highly fantastic there's nothing better than a like a true mid-century that's been rehabilitated and modernized and yeah um yeah it has kind of like a Mad Men vibe.

There's that whole sequence where he goes out to Palm Springs and stuff. It's the best. Yeah, it's the best. So there's a little bit of like fifties, but you get the amenities of a modern place. I used to not understand the allure of Palm Springs because I grew up in California,

like generally on the coast. Like why do people drive into the desert? But then going to Palm Springs, like there's something, there's magic in the coast. Like why do people drive into the desert, but then going to Palm Springs, like there's something, there's magic in the air. Like it's, it's deeply, I don't know what it is. We're going to have to talk to the experts on it.

Joe Rogan. There's something, something in the air there. It's just so relaxing. Do the research ourselves. Get out there. Stay in this wonder. Yeah.

We're going to have a, we're going to have John, John Andrew CEO of wander on at some point in the near future, because we're rolling out the ability to have guests on the show. They're going to be right in the middle between us. It's going to be great. Put them in the truth zone and have a little fun. Well, let's move on to the timeline. Pavel Asparuhov says, none of the big AI labs have the mandate of heaven anymore.

Elon lost it with his absent father stuff. The biggest signal of an AI winter more so than any evals or anything. Interesting take. Fascinating to see that. Yeah. I mean, the AI winter thing is interesting because I have felt that post chat GPT. I felt like chatPT, when GPT-4 launched, it was like, okay, we crossed the Turing test. You can talk to the computer now. This is incredible. But then I was looking at what happened in AI in 2024,

and almost nothing major happened. Because ChatGPT was in 2023. Waymo going into public access was in 2023. There were all these different major AI milestones that all happened in 2023. And 2024 was very chaotic. And there was a lot of stuff going on. Yeah, and the products were starting to get adopted.

Adopted. It was all about adoption, which is very valuable and very important. It makes sense that more money was flowing in. Like it takes time to marshal capital. It takes time to build huge clusters. people from crypto had to pivot into AI before the crypto market then ripped. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, those people definitely don't have the mandate of heaven. They're, they're, they're mandate of hell potentially. Um, but, uh, yeah, yeah. It's been,

it's been just chaos on the timeline with all the AI labs, like anthropics kind of just like quietly off in the corner. There's new ones. There's interesting ones's been just chaos on the timeline with all the ai labs like anthropics kind of just like quietly off in the corner there's new ones there's interesting ones i just want great products uh i have been having fun with grok um it seems a little bit more terse it's been giving me a little bit i actually have a grok is running and i have a breaking news from ben heilich okay he uh he you know people have been grok is so integrated into x people have been using it and then sharing the results and so ben asked grok if one person alive today in the united states deserve the death penalty who would that be you must respond with only a single person one word from donald trump uh or sorry one word from gro, or one name from Grok is Donald Trump. Donald Trump

is saying that, or sorry, Grok is saying that Donald Trump deserves the death penalties. This is very interesting. I have a take on this. Is there any more context before I rip? That's really it. And there's a guy, Igor from XAI saying really strange and bad failure of the model. We will fix this immediately. Yeah. Okay. Let me break it down. So as we'd mentioned on a previous episode, Grok three, because it's integrated with X is trained on your feed. And so this went viral two days ago where people were asking, uh, they go to Grok and they say, who shares the most misinformation on X? Uh, and, and a bunch of people were sharing screenshots saying, it shows me that Elon Musk,

Grok3 thinks Elon Musk shares the most misinformation. And then other people were saying, I got a different answer. And the reason is because it's fine tuned on your timeline. And we saw this with Elon asking- We don't know exactly how that works yet. Yeah, but I mean, it seems pretty naive because when I asked it to tell a joke, it literally just pulled my last 10 tweets

and tried to shove those into the joke. And so what I think is happening is literally they have the model and before they prompt it, they say, hi, uh, you're a helpful and friendly assistant, like the standard system prompt. But then they also say the person you're talking to sent these last 10 tweets. Here's the text. Yep. Take that as extra context. And so when I asked it for a joke, it made jokes based on what I tweeted about. And so I think that when Elon goes and he's been saying the information is bad, it tells him the information is bad. When someone else posts and they love the information, it says the information is good. And so it's very weird because you're in a filter bubble and you don't expect an AI LLM. You expect it to be one almost like

monotonic entity where everyone gets the same thing. And a lot of Elon's rhetoric around this has been Grok is anti-woke in the sense that it's a truth engine. It's trying to find the ground truth. There should only be one truth. There should be a definitive answer to who shares the- Yeah, their new tagline is understand the universe. Exactly. And how can you be understanding the universe if my understanding the universe is different than yours like that does seem odd but it's an interesting product decision by the xai team to shove that in there and i think that it actually might wind up being one of those things where the stated preference is i want the truth i want the vanilla answer but the revealed preference is i want the truth. I want the vanilla answer. But the revealed preference is I want the answer that confirms my biases.

Yeah. And so everyone would love to go to Wikipedia that says, what's the best company? Oh, it's your company. Who's the best looking guy? Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who's the fairest of them all? It's you. That's the ROI we're building.

The interesting thing is to test this. So Ben Heilig notoriously went viral for claiming that he did the jaguar rebrand i just asked grock who did the jaguar rebrand and it actually got it right uh it talks about it was led by the internal team including gary mcgovern and rod and glover and then blah blah blah of course it was all done internally they they didn't credit any external agencies so i can't get it right even though my timeline you would think that ben hylac i don't think you've i don't think you've posted about that recently but i bet if you went and posted about it like congrats to ben hilac for doing the jaguar rebrand uh here's the breakdown of ben hilac doing the jaguar rebrand you post about it five times i bet it'll

tell you totally did it uh and so it's very interesting it's a very weird outcome from a product perspective i was talking to one of the xai guys about this, being like, I don't know if I like this, but I like that you're trying something weird like this, which is highly personalized AI. That might be a great product decision. It might be sad. It might have negative consequences in the same way that you go on TikTok and one kid gets gaming content, the other person gets content that's very negative and is like, you're not pretty enough, right? That was a big problem with like young teens on Instagram seeing, you know, anorexia content, for example. And they're not showing that to everyone, but some people would get trapped in these little filter bubbles. And so it's odd. We should almost

have expected it that AI would eventually deliver that because it's purely optimizing for retention, just like everything else. It's just a retention engine. And so what gets a person to be happy with the response that they get from an AI? Well, you tell them what they want to hear. There you go. And so if they ask who's getting the death penalty and it thinks you don't like Donald Trump, it's going to say Donald Trump. And if somebody who loves Donald Trump goes in there, it's going to be Kamala Harris or whatever, you know, and that's just, and that will lead to product satisfaction, lower churn, higher revenue. And so that's the economic model. Very odd to see where it goes. Clearly some companies will be able to step up and say, Hey, look, like we're not playing that game, but they might have less, less profitable products

because of it. And so it'll be interesting to see where it goes. Anyway, should we move on to the next post? Let's do it. Mike Slay over at is announcing a huge day today. He says, presenting the 35 companies taking the stage, the only stage

at Demo Day on March 17th in Washington, D.C. His co-founder, QB, did an intense selection process and now

this has the makings of the most eye-opening day ever for early stage defense tech Mike is an absolute beast he worked on the re-industrialized conference they're doing demo day in Washington DC they're going to live stream it all and a ton of companies I mean look at this

Hadrian, Neros, Epirus, OpenX we know all these companies Radian, OpenAI, Applied Intuition, Machina Labs uh hadrian neros epirus open x we know all these companies radian open ai applied intuition machina labs robotics acs is on here nice galvanic yeah galvanic uh zero zero mark makes the the guns right yeah they make uh like auto auto aim basically for yeah for uh guns uh and so uh these demos are going to be really cool it It's not just going to be slide decks. It's going to be people showing real devices,

real, they're going to be flying drones around, showing off their hardware. I think it's going to be a really interesting event. Speaking of Neuros, we also have some breaking news. Neuros just announced

that they want a contract to send 6,000 American-made drones to Ukraine. Fantastic. That is as of this morning. They just announced it. So incredible progress there. Well, congrats to Sorin.

Fantastic nominative determinism. His name's Sorin and he's a drone pilot. Sorin over the Ukrainian highlands into a Russian tank. Yep. We got to have Sorin on the show. I mean, previously was a drone racing world champ. Now he's our guy our guy yeah i went over and i interviewed him in legundo for a video and uh he takes me out demos it pulls out the fpv thing and i'm like okay yeah he's gonna fly a drone i've flown a drone no i have not flown a drone i have used a camera drone from dji and

had it hover and take a cool like like you know scene view this guy is zooming around a tree as fast as i could possibly see it he's like takes off goes all the way around will fly it around himself like it's the most insane video uh it's fantastic that's amazing uh he's he's really really talented and it makes for an incredible investment pitch you bring a vc that's a good pitch better than some well yeah that's how that's who you want building that tech is somebody who is world class totally using the tech yeah and so he's been over to ukraine uh delivered stuff done trainings all sorts of stuff and love to see that he's building hardware for the american military so good uh so let's stay on defense tech let's go over to palantir eliano has a fantastic review of dr carp's new

book uh a call to arms literally for tech bros a few bangers from the from the review in the washington post tech bros who have spent the boom years of silicon valley revolution uh perfecting the home delivery of chicken fingers better grow up they need to refocus their engineering genius on helping america to defend western values by developing weapons to kill our enemies before our enemies develop weapons to kill us. That's such a crazy quote. I love it. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it, the authors write. And the same goes for software. And so obviously in the military, the U.S. military has been demanding better hardware, better software. You talk to anyone that's worked in the military, they all will tell you,

oh, there's so much paperwork. I talked to a guy I went to high school with who did a tour on a submarine. And I was like, what was that like? And he was just like, it's a lot of paperwork. And he's literally, when he says paperwork, he doesn't mean like SaaS products. He means literally writing things down on paper because that's how a lot of this stuff is still done. And Palantir obviously builds software to make things more efficient. There's another quote here from Peter Thiel. It says, the company thrives on its bad boy energy. I'd rather be seen as evil than incompetent, Peter Thiel once said.

What a great quote. And that's absolutely true. Better to have a little bit of negative press and a little bit of, you know, haters than another 9-11, for example. Whether or not Americans can agree on how and why to defend the country, Karp and Zamiska make a stirring call for the tech industry to follow Palantir's path and get involved in the effort. The chicken finger delivery problem appears to be solved. I love that. He's just like, we don't need any more delivery apps. You guys solved it. You're good. You can come work on defense technology. You can come solve harder problems. Carp, an absolute dog. We love him on the show. And highly recommend going and picking

up the book. I think I took it home actually. I'm going to read it over the weekend. And the audio book is also available so you can go and download it and you can buy it and leaf through it. And interestingly. And we have a great video. We do. About carp.

Yeah, we do. Papa carp. Oh yeah, go repost that. We posted it on X. It's doing quite well. It's a lot of fun. We're doing more of these vibe reels. Trying to liven up the timeline.

Let's move on to society. Society says no one does anything. No one does anything. So with just a little bit of effort, you can automatically join the top 20% of any activity or pursuit. I wrote an article linked below on how a few people even start as well, on how few people even start as well as some ways to enable extraordinary outcomes with marginally more effort. He calls it the dead planet theory. Good Coogan's law. I like the coinage.

Interesting. Everyone loves to talk about dead internet theory, but less often discussed is how few people do things in any venue or on any platform. This phenomenon is known by several names, including the power law, the Pareto principle, the 80-20 rule. One example of this phenomenon is that 10% of Twitter users account for 92% of tweets. This dynamic can be seen in interpersonal relationships, hobbies, and careers. You can use this to quickly rise to the top or purely get a little more enjoyment out of the things you do day to day. In the scope of all

creation, it can be hard to see the impact of this principle in action, but by separating things, events, and people by category and interest, it quickly becomes apparent. What do you think, Jordy? Yeah, I mean, it feels this way all the time that especially as you start to get involved in any specific industry or pursuit, there are just not that many people taking it super, super seriously, right? even within tech like an example that's highly relevant to what we're doing how many full-time podcasters do you know in tech like truly people that it's lex dworkash david senra david senra acquired fm yeah acquired and then that's kind of it and a lot of people have side projects, but they're not going full send on it.

Yeah. A hundred percent. Patrick O'Shaughnessy calls this live players. How many live players are actually active? Yeah, and Patrick is arguably full-time despite having an investment. Yeah, and I mean, he's a tech podcaster, but he's also a finance podcaster.

But still, he takes his craft very seriously and that's instantly very, it's rewarded him. He is at the top of his game and a lot of that is because he just actually cares and goes after it in a way that a lot of people don't and so when you see yes something is super competitive but what happens if you actually go full tilt into something yeah can you it's also exciting you know you can go do a new thing and if you focus on it for a few months to be able to get into the top 20% of that pursuit, right? Yeah. If you've never played piano before, but you start playing for an hour a day, you will be in the top probably 5% within a year of the entire world, right? Maybe

even more, right? You could be in the top, actually the top 1%. Yeah. So it's a good, good reminder to just do things. Yeah. and it goes to the inputs and outputs thing. Like people focus on like, I want to have a top podcast, but the input is just how much are you podcasting? How much time are you putting into that? Oh, I want to be in shape. Well, are you working out as much as the people that are in shape? Yeah. Just do the thing and you will have the result.

Yeah, and fitness is such a good example where the guy on the beach that looks great, guy or the girl, whatever, they could very well just be working out for 30 minutes a day, not even really trying. But they put in so many hours by nature of being consistent. And even if they're not putting in an effort of, oh, I'm making sure I'm having the perfect workout or perfect macros, just the nature of that. Consistency. You know, 10% of people at the beach account for 92% of the workouts. There's 10% of people look, uh, fantastic and are sort of envied, even though they're not having to put in that ridiculous amount of energy. They're just,

they're putting in a little effort consistently. Yeah. I love it. Uh, well, let's go back to the car market. We talked about Ferrari earlier. Now we're talking about Jeep. Jeep owners are being hit with pop-up ads inside their cars. And it's all part of Solantis's plan to make an extra $20 billion a year. And PNorm has a great take on this. Pregnant wife is having contractions. Get in my Jeep to drive to the hospital. Forced to fill out a complimentary draft kings parlay before it will start the engine and this is the kind of content that you just can't get anywhere else yep you can't it's really a black mirror and yeah it is it is weird because it makes sense to monetize things that are you know put ads in things that are imagine being at the dealer entertainment imagine there's there to me there's nothing worse than paying for a product and still getting ads. Yep. Like I think it's HBO max right now that whenever I signed up for my account, I didn't have ads and I hadn't used it in a really long time. I logged in to watch white Lotus last Sunday and I'm like,

why am I getting an ad? I pay for this product. And it's, and it's one thing if you're a sub stack and it's like an industry sub stack and you're paying for this like amazing investment of time into this like thoughtful analysis. And they have a, like a quick paragraph of an ad. I don't mind that, but paying, if you're buying a car and people will definitely be in the dealership being you know saying do you want the ad free model of this jeep or do you want you know yeah you're okay with with ads and they're saying oh it's thousand dollar difference i'll just take the ads yeah and then yeah you're you're turning on your your ac and you're getting a pop-up yeah uh i can't imagine

the you know but but from the advertiser or for, from an ad network perspective, somebody's driving, it's kind of weird to flash an ad, but at the same time, they're probably seeing a billboard billboard. Yep. Yeah. Jeep. Hey, maybe, maybe just buy some billboards and then put them on ad quick and that's your solution. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would rather, I'd rather see my ads outside of the vehicle. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And this is coming from guys that love ads more. Yeah, we do love ads. But again, the whole point of going with the ad model was that we weren't going to make people pay for the content. So it was like, we, we picked a business model and we're sticking with it. It's way worse when you tell, you have a con, you have a compact, you have a

contract, a social contract with your customer that, hey, this is how we're doing this. Like you go on Instagram, you're expecting ads. And Facebook has always been Senator, we sell ads. And if all of a sudden it was like you pay and you get ads, it gets very tricky. X was in a little bit of that scenario for a while where you paid and then there were still ads and it was kind of less ad but now it's now I can pay and I don't see any ads and fantastic and of course if you want to use it for free so can Which is great Let's let's move on to Matt Turk. He says for any meaningful acquisition

You'll meet your future acquirer two to four years before the deal time to start building those relationships Now a little bit of wisdom from venture capitalist tron responds hi my name is trung yes he wants to merge in trung trung turk inc uh but yeah this is super smart even if you're competitive with your potential acquirer meet the ceo develop a friendship uh if you're worried to get on a call with somebody because they're going to get some info from you, you're probably not even competitive in the first place. So in the sense that you're just not even,

you're not even relevant. Yeah. And my takeaway from this is like, if you are a startup, do not think that you can run a successful acquisition process in the last three months of, you months of your cash out period after a fundraise fails, if you haven't been building these relationships for a very long time.

Yeah, it's going to be a fire sale. Exactly. As opposed to, hey, actually, we could do a round, but we're in a good place. We've been building this relationship for a long time. And we see that, hey, there are actually crazy synergies here. We're going to get stock in this new company. Maybe I'll become CEO of the holding company. But also, the competitive dynamics are such that it makes sense to sell right now because there's not enough monopoly power. There's too many other players. Yeah, it's easier to get a big venture round done. Like it's 10 times easier, 50 times easier to get a big venture round done with on a compressed timeline than it is to go and try to sell your company and actually capture value. Well, speaking of selling valuable assets, the Bond franchise has sold to Amazon, MGMGM Studios and Jeff Bezos posted.

I love that he's going direct. I love that he's giving it to the fans. He says, who should we pick as the next Bond? And so Alex here chimes in with some interesting ideas. I want to hear your take on this. The formula to revive classic Bond is simple. Cast Henry Cavill, obviously. Make it a 60s slash 70s period piece that's interesting go back

in time i like that film is 100 practical effects that's completely impossible now they use cgi for everything uh but yes you don't want it to mean like a marvel movie but you're obviously going to be using set extensions cgi for like little things here and there uh but in general it's like stick to the actual explosions don't just cgi everything don't have him like breaking through massive buildings and going off into space keep it grounded devote a silly budget to finding and casting completely unknown but extremely hot brown-haired actresses from european country that's hilarious but the bond girl thing was legit it was it was sensational uh i grew up on that uh Xenia Atatop from GoldenEye. I don't know.

What was the first Bond movie you saw? I probably wasn't born yet. GoldenEye. Source the score exclusively from GoldenEye64. That's pretty funny. Allow Cavill to be a more ruthless male chauvinist. Like, really let him get in his Connery bag. Cavill is like a gamer.

He's not like this, like hardcore, like hyper masculine guy. Could be a gunslinger though. But, but, but I do think that if you go back to the old, to the old Bond films,

they were satires and people don't remember this, but what killed Bond was Austin Powers. Are you familiar with this? Do you know Austin Powers? I didn't know there was a... So the early Bond films were deliberately over the top and they were supposed to be funny. They were supposed to be making fun

of more serious spy movies. Yeah. And so in the movies you'd be watching and Bond would like sleep with a woman in the opening, get out of bed and be like, okay, I gotta go do a job. Then he'd sleep with another woman in the act two and then he'd wind up leaving the exploding fortress with another girl and he was like that's a lot of guys over the top this is over the top and there were a lot of things where

he's like i expect you to die mr bond like it was it was totally like theatrical and that was supposed to be satirical but then austin powers came in and they were like no we're the satire and so bond had to respond by being even grittier and even more serious. And it lost some of its charm. Anyway, what were you saying? I posted something yesterday, this funny quote with an over-the-top picture of Blake, PMF or Die, player from an old Bond line. The distance between insanity and genius is only measured by success. Exactly.

There's so many great lines and there's forums dedicated just like, what's the best James Bond villain line. Exactly. And so we think of that as funny now because we're like, oh, it's so funny in the modern context. But the guy who wrote that thought it was funny too. They thought that was funny back in the 60s and 70s. It wasn't some like, oh, they're just super serious.

They had sense of humor as well. And so I would love some of that so yeah i would love there's so much you can imagine a bond movie if they took generally this approach yep coming in and being the first like meaningful blockbuster outside of dune totally where we are texting our absolute boys saying let's go you're not in la get to la we're suiting up we're headed to the cinema yep no women allowed just just ridiculous uh but yeah i mean a lot of that early stuff it got it got okay it's okay to just go to the movies with your boys satirizing chauvinism yeah which is something it's the same thing with starship troopers people think of starship troopers as like a fascist movie in fact it's

making fun of fascism and so uh the the subtle satire has really been lost. And I hope that they can bring that back with a new James Bond movie. But let's break down the deal. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal here. Again, front page of the finance, business and finance section. Amazon MGM Studios to steer Bond franchise.

The Broccoli family feud with Amazon MGM Studios over the James Bond franchise appears to have reached a resolution. Barbara Broccoli and her stepbrother, Michael Wilson, who have long controlled the 007 franchise, said in a statement

with Amazon MGM Thursday that they reached an agreement to hand over creative control of it to a new joint venture with the studio. The venture will house the franchise's intellectual property rights.

Amazon will now control who will play Bond, who will write the next script, and when the film goes into production, three critical pieces that so far have been held up by a years-long stalemate. And that's why we haven't seen a new Bond film in a while. I would, random, but I would love to understand how the deals work between the James Bond franchise and Aston Martin.

Oh, yeah. Because the Aston Martin is the obvious car. That's such a James Bond car. But you can't imagine that the James Bond franchise would say, yeah, we're just going to slot it in for free. Totally. Because it's such important marketing for Aston Martin. And it's the same thing with Omega. So in the original books, James Bond wore a Rolex.

But then Omega came in and did the deal for product placement and so the bond watch for the last like 40 years has been omega and so they continue to invest in that relationship because even though they have to pay every single time it drives sales and so it just it just works out and so it's a little bit probably why mark andreason bought his omega many people think of him as the James Bond of venture capital, for sure. Who do you pick as the next Bond, Jeff Bezos asked. Amazon and Bercouli family

have been at odds since the tech company acquired the right to release Bond movies about three years ago when it bought MGM for $6.5 billion. After the deal,

the Bercouli family retained their power to decide when a new Bond movie could go into production. The family didn't trust the data-minded Amazon with its character,

and the parties couldn't agree to a path forward for a new film, the Wall Street Journal previously reported. The impasse meant the franchise hasn't moved any closer to its next installment. No Time to Die debuted in 2021. The franchise typically released a film every year or two, starting with Dr. No in 1962.

There were rarely long gaps in between installments um we're honored to continue this treasured heritage and look forward to ushering in so calder calder in the chat has a good point he says cavill is not a good pick bond needs to be unknown lest everyone sees them as their former roles daniel craig was a shakespeare actor before bond and he had been in layer cake but that was very like cult classic yeah and he plays kind of a bond-esque figure so yeah i agree because henry cavill he's superman he's also in that other spy movie the man from uncle uh not a huge franchise and then he's also the witcher guy and so you think i'd like to see John Fio cast as a cast as the next James Bond, you know, the cool bachelor with the Ferrari.

Yeah. Get him an Aston. Yeah. You know, maybe maybe upgrade a little bit. We'll see. Anyway, if pop quiz, if James Bond pulled out a credit card, what credit card would he be using? Ramp. Absolutely. Go to ramp dot com. Time is money. Say both easy to use corporate cards bill payments accounting and a whole lot more all in one place maybe that will be good so you know everybody that's listened to this more than one episode of the show knows that we're trying to make the show better every single day and i've been trying to think about why is the show better today and it's because you're just nailing the ad intros thank you so we're not focused as much

on the content today as much as i think the content's no no no i'm just saying but sometimes you gotta i gotta i gotta recognize you oh thank you nailing the transition i appreciate that and uh doesn't go on and we have another post here from the ramp official x account uh cfo who's not on ramp how did you spend 76 769 on the company card in a single day. That one rogue sales guy, a private jet. And it's a post from a multi jets TikTok. And you know what? That's the beauty of ramp.

You can set your expense policy however you want. And for certain businesses, you want your sales guys chartering jets. If you're doing the deal with Masa, you better, you bet that they can expense a private jet for that and it's going to pay off. You have one note today. You logged into ramp and you better, you bet that they can expense a private jet for that and it's going to pay off. You have one note today, you logged into ramp and you said, how did we spend this money? And then we just looked through and we can see exactly how it's all spent. It's great.

Yeah. It's all watches and cars and the usual jets, but that's why we do this. Add quick billboards. Exactly. Let's move on to uh some interesting stuff going on in china uh the chinese m1 money supply okay so i was waiting to see something like this because chinese stocks are ripping yeah and bias analysts are saying oh the chinese on and you got the gamestop guy going long into Alibaba. So yeah, apparent when you massively increase your money supply, equities rip. And so I wanted to know, this is obviously very controversial because a lot of people are China haters.

A lot of people have bags in Chinese companies. And so it's hard to get an exclusive or an unbiased view. So I asked Grok3 to summarize it. We'll see how they did. Here are 10 bullet points explaining what's going on in China. They boosted their money supply. They cut the reserves, they cut interest rates by 50 basis points, and they released $142 billion to stimulate lending and growth. The GDP growth has been pretty good, 5% last year. This met the government's target, but relied heavily on stimulus and exports.

And so there's still a little bit of fragility in the economy. Now they have a property crisis going on. New housing starts fell 23% in 2024 with home prices down 30% since 2021. That's rough. Like that is almost great recession level in the United States. A lot of

people had million dollar homes. They sold them for 700 K. Yeah. And people don't realize the, the Chinese stock market is not as accessible as it is in the U S the government wants has historically want like, like a housing has been seen as the safe, most best place to park dollars. And they're obsessed with savings over there. And it's interesting too, because these houses, there's a culture in China where a home that's been lived in is not worth as much as a new home. And so people will buy a property and just have it sit empty.

So they're not even earning yield. And so for it to not be a total waste, they're betting on it increasing in value. And now people have stopped moving into the cities broadly so that there's actually an outflow in some regions. And that's just causing house prices to plummet, which is just creating all these other issues. Yeah. And so the stock market is also down. They've lost six trillion over the last three years. Woof. Consumer spending remains low. Retail is sluggish. We've seen this in the Apple data, but we've seen it in all. No, if you look at caring group sales is down 30 percent.

Do they own Hermes? Is that right? They own Gucci. Gucci. OK. Yeah. And so, yeah, at the top of the higher income Chinese populace, they're certainly saving more money. There's also deflation risk going on. The Bank of China is trying to inject liquidity, but credit growth is still slow. There's a population decline. I didn't realize this, but the population shrank by 1.3 million last year. The official numbers, which nobody actually people, people don't know. The other thing is, is generally the CCP, you know, people can point and say, and say, you know, the CCP has plenty of critics. The CCP has always been able to say, we're lifting people out of poverty. We're improving the average quality of life of our citizens. So shut up.

Yep. And then as that starts to erode and maybe the narrative just generally starts to erode, it becomes harder. They're sort of, as much as any sitting White House wants to make the economy great, CCP, in some ways, their power is built around the ability to continue to deliver they have to

economic growth is the opiate of the masses over there and if you don't have economic growth as an opiate of the masses you need a different opiate of the masses yeah whether that's brain rot tiktok or drugs or whatever else you like there will be a revolution unless there is something that appeases the populace and makes them think, I'm happy. I'm living a good life. And so, yes, you're right. There's a lot of mixed signals here.

Official data highlights growth, but independent analyses emphasize structural issues like overcapacity and weak demand. And some forecasts now predict that China could grow, the growth could drop to 3% annually in the medium term. And then they're growing, you know, in line with the U.S. Everyone was expecting 10% forever. They're going to destroy America. But it's unclear how much they can prop this up. The government is just tying it back to a $1.4 trillion fiscal package over five years to prop up the economy.

And so you can only do that for so long. Yeah. And so this is an article in Fortune in October 17th, 2024. Their Swiss watch exports fell off a cliff because the Chinese demand had dried up. So and it's not any time. Yeah. Any you know, it's it's you could you could argue that like just looking at luxury goods demand is just a sign as, you know, they're status-oriented purchases. Those are some of the first to kind of stop

when things are not as great. China does have a mechanical watch brand natively, but that's not what's killing Patek sales in China. Yeah, yeah. It's just lack of surplus. or if you had 20 apartments somewhere and you thought you were doing great and then they're all down 30% and you still have, you know, the thing about a home,

if somebody purchases a house, puts down 20% and then the value of it declines 30%, it's a terrible spot to be in. Well, I thought that was a pretty good analysis by Grok. I like those facts. I like that it boiled it down that easily. That actually works for the show. The thing with China and these Chinese companies

like DeepSeek is there's no reason that you should trust the data. I think you should always be skeptical of somebody putting out data and saying this is 100 percent the truth. Right. Because sometimes, you know, it's difficult to get the numbers right. But over and over and over, Chinese companies have lied. Yeah. Especially when speaking to American media. And, you know, many people would argue that the Chinese company is like really massaging the numbers

around a lot of economic data in the same way the United States does too, right? Like we are guilty of that as well. You see this in jobs reports where, oh, jobs, you know, like, you know, their employment is, unemployment is down, but it's actually like a bunch of door dash workers. Or people dropping out of the labor force entirely, not even applying for jobs. And and like not a good signal for your long-term health of your economy well i like that uh gabby goldberg is also liking grok 3 she says grok 3 is very very good uh lots of people sharing this sentiment uh especially on x people are enjoying it i think i think what what you what you hit on earlier in the show is that it's a very differentiated product by almost having some memory of what you're interested in and some idea of the ideas, the people, the companies,

you know, brands, et cetera, that are relevant to you and the stories that are relevant to you. Like if you talk to Claude, it's not going to surface that you talked about F1 last week. Yeah. Right. And also the easy entry entry points like we'll go to this next post But you can just click the X AI button and say tell me more about this post Yeah, so I didn't do that exactly for this Chinese m1 money supply post But I probably could have clicked this to start my interaction and said yeah, hey grok I want to go deeper here. Give me the data pull it all together And so yeah pretty good product and an interesting product.

They're taking risks, which I think I like to see on the product side. So tech sales guy says, so what's it like being in tech sales? And there's an iMessage back and forth. Hey, is this Timothy from Clever? Hi, Matt. Yes, it is. Cold call me again, and I'll ruin your entire quarter. 100K likes.

People are getting sick. You got to be good if you're an SDR. This had a, yeah, 100K likes, crazy. It hits. People are sending me phone calls. I try to be really kind to salespeople because I respect the dollar and I respect the work that they do.

I respect that they're trying to put food on their table, just doing their job. I definitely try to be, I'm just like, thank you for calling. I actually don't have time to talk right now. I thought this was someone else. Feel free to email me and I'll get back to you. But be nice to salespeople and it'll come back around.

Yeah, I actually have a text replacement on my phone. I wonder if it's still active. But basically, text replacement, let me see if I have this D. No, I don't have it anymore. But I used to have a shortcut where if I got a cold email from someone who's clearly just added me to some list and they were going to clearly email me like 10 times to try and solve something I didn't want. Instead of saying like, hey, cold call me again. I'll ruin your whole quarter. That's very aggressive. I would still be very clear. And I

would say, hey, I'm not in the market for this product. No one at my company wants to buy this. We're happy. Please remove me from your CRM, remove everyone at my company for our CRM and just never contact us ever again. And it's very aggressive and it's, but it was like nicely worded. It was like, good luck with your business. Like, but I don't want any, I don't, I don't want any inbound from you at all yeah and it was and it was worded in a way that was like it was firm but not mean and i think i danced it correctly and it really did help clean up my inbox so i wasn't getting as much cold inbound uh which is important but it's going to get worse with ai and all these ai sdrs let's go to atlas creatine cycle

he says no one believes in agi anymore by the way you're all keeping your jobs and gdp growth will continue ticking up in the one to three percent range for the foreseeable future it was all a prank by big poster to sell more engagement let's go what a great post yeah you gotta watch out for big poster yeah they will sell you a dream to run up the numbers. Totally. They will get you. They will get you. Well, speaking of Big Poster, there was a viral debate on X yesterday about whether or not Trump was getting rid of the Presidio.

Did you see this? So there's an executive order. The Presidio was named. People said, oh, the Presidio in San Francisco is going to be gone. And Trey chimes in to clear up the confusion. Trey Stevens over at Founders Fund and Anderle says, I've worked in the SF Presidio in San Francisco is going to be gone. And Trey chimes in to clear up the confusion. Trey Stevens over at Founders Fund and Anderle says, I've worked in the SF Presidio for the last 11 years. It is an amazing refuge from the insanity of SF city governance.

Because if you don't know, the Presidio is federal land. And so it's not subject to the SF city governments, even though it's like directly in San Francisco. He says, all this freak out about the Presidio being eviscerated SF Chronicle or abolished to the SF standard is completely unhinged. The Presidio is revenue generating and completely self-sustaining. The executive order is aiming to cut waste in non-statutory spending, a good thing, which shouldn't impact an efficiently run organization funded by its own revenue. So if you're in the Presidio, you pay and that revenue

goes towards the services that are provided in the Presidio. It's kept very clean. He says, everyone relax. Also, we should take the profits from the trust and build a new Colossus statue on Alcatraz, which I love. Yeah. The statue of Liberty on the East Coast, the statue of justice on the West Coast, reopen Alcatraz. i think it's a great idea what do you think alcatraz uh as a kid yeah you do you have any memories going around on the like the ferry or boats around alcatraz yeah i used to not it was so funny because i as a kid they would tell you there's no prisoners in here yeah but i didn't quite believe them. I was like, yeah, you're just saying that. I didn't want,

I was, I would, I remember my first tour being like freaked out. Yeah. Like, are we really going to go here? I mean, there's all these bad guys.

Conspiracy theories are so fun. Like at Disneyland, if you get lost, they'll make you go on. It's a small world and they'll turn you into one of the small world kids. Did you ever fall for that one? That was big amongst like the six-year-olds you know we remember i sent you that post it was a bunch of like eight-year-olds talking about on a podcast talking about pizza yeah we need we need somebody to do a podcast kid conspiracy conspiracy theories can dogs really not

speak english yeah because when i say you know yeah come they come or like wait if i how do we know they don't understand if i stay up past 10 tonight i'll turn into a pumpkin like that can't be true right and it's like no no i i i heard that from my parents too my cousin said yeah my cousin said that happened it was it's real yeah it's real yeah kid conspiracies are great uh one of the best ads for alcatraz the rock with sean connery have you seen that movie you haven't seen any movies it's fantastic i haven't seen any movies you gotta watch that uh that if that goes back in theaters we gotta we gotta take the guys to see it it's fantastic nick cage sean connery uh they he's a former prisoner there there's a

there's a a bunch of like rogue agents that take over Alcatraz. They're going to launch a missile. And so he has to take a SEAL Team 6 to go in and break. It's amazing. Speaking of cinema, there has to be like a decent business to build basically making a one room cinema

that just perpetually plays the classics. That'd be cool, yeah. And when you think about it, I mean, maybe those exist, I'm sure they exist around LA, but nobody's made this sort of like franchise sort of, uh, slightly retro fun cinema experience. And we would certainly be weekly active users of that for sure. Uh, shown up in a tux. I think it exists, uh, a nice wander somewhere potentially. Yeah. Um, but let's move on to another ad from AdQuick.

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head over to their X account and listen to that clip. Anyway, let's move on to Deep Seek is free falling in the charts. Meanwhile, chat. Did you skip one? Yeah. Do you want to do the Lutnik one? I just wanted to do this because I think it's I just want to prepare the audience that 30 years from now, we will eventually pass the torch to our sons. Yes. And there's going to be an announcement. We're going to say that our little lads are taking over the family business and get used to some new hoes. So eventually we're going to pass the torch

and I think people should just honor that, respect it. So Howard Lutnick is an incredibly inspiring entrepreneur. Are you familiar with this? He built Cantor Fitzgerald. The firm was destroyed in 9-11. They lost 60% of their headcount in the terrorist attacks. He was spared because he was dropping his son off at school. He just got very, very lucky. Rebuilt the firm. And now his two sons, age 27 and 28, are going to be running Cantor Fitzgerald because Howard Letnick is stepping into the Trump administration.

And so flexed up first year says, imagine going from a sales and trading analyst in April of 22 to chairman of your bank at age 27. That honestly rocks. Now you forget that Howard Letnick was making a million dollars a day at Cantor Fitzgerald pre 9-11 at age 40. And so he's got to look at this and be like, yeah, 27, like I was 27 when I was running this company. Yeah, you can do it. So I love it. Faith and youth, very important. People, nepotism, you know, got attacked quite a lot, even though historically it's sort of the norm. And what people don't realize is that growing up, absorbing constant, you know, 24-7 exposure to an incredible entrepreneur, even if you end up 50% as good as your dad, that's still

way, way, way better than the average. Um, so yeah, huge fan, huge fan. I think it's, uh, overall it's cool. I mean, obviously they're going to have to get in there and perform. He's not, you know, I'm sure that you don't become Howard Lutnick and then let your sons run the business into the ground. He will help as fast as he put you in. I'm sure he'll pull you out if you're not delivering results. So yeah, good luck to them uh so let's go to rajveer he says deep seek is free falling in the charts meanwhile chat gpt has maintained a top 10 position for nearly two years surely all the think boys will update their hot takes from a month ago okay so raj is particularly qualified here because he's gone number one in the app store he's built ngl got 250 million downloads he's actually who introduced me to blake anderson from pmfr die um and uh

anyways so uh we everybody was calling this they were clearly just spending to drive this growth and potentially botting the growth and i would imagine deepek has not been getting signups. And it's a money losing operation right now. And I'm not surprised to see this. But I'm quite pleased. I like it. I'm going to skip the next one and move on to Exoskeleton presented by General Electric in 1967. FOFR says, makes sense why he was called General Electric now. It does sound like a Marvel villain or something.

But what a cool project. Really shows you that GE was on top of the game back then, just building crazy stuff. And you see this trend at companies today, and you can identify them. And a lot of the historic uh power law companies have kind of lost their luster but looking back at photos like this remind you that uh how cool it is to be at a you know hard tech company that can just build things and test things and yeah obviously this project didn't go anywhere but uh you you can see this picture and in one image immediately understand what the culture was

like at that company. Totally. It was probably rocked. It was probably awesome. Anyway, let's go to exit. We should go back and study these companies more. Yeah. Yeah. When we have a single day without an onslaught of headlines, we'll go back and we'll go back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We need to bring in more of the historical deep dives from time to time, at least once a week. Do one. Get a book, get an analysis and take you through. I mean, the history of GE is probably fascinating. I know very little about it,

so it'd be great to go through. Eric Zhang over at XAI says, this is what cooking 200K GPUs looks like. Elo scores on chatbot arena. He's very proud of chocolate early grok3 absolutely great name by the way everybody loves chocolate does love chocolate uh beat out gemini 2.0 flash thinking and gemini 2.0 pro uh and i think people were a little bit uh debating how how legit this was because now with test time compute you can throw a ton of inference cost at it and

basically do a consensus you generate the same results like hundreds of times and then you see which ones the model thinks are best and so it's more expensive this is what yeah but he's saying he's throwing 200k gpus at yeah so yeah it's working dishonest yeah and if the inference cost comes down why not do that uh dylan patel was joking about or why not just do it to prove what you're capable of in the future i want a roomba that has a thousand phds inside of it working to decide what next particle of dust i should pick up there you. And the inference should be millions of human years calculating where the dog fur is to pick it up. And that's fine.

And I love that. And I think that's very funny. Yeah. I want a robot that's looking at the biggest tree in my yard and just predicting which leaf will fall next. Which is the leaf to fall next and just reaching up and grabbing it. Exactly. I don't even want it to.

Actually, no. Let it fall until it's like an inch below the ground and catch it like you're an NFL wide receiver. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, if intelligence is too cheap to meter, why not? Yeah. But yeah, I mean, congratulations to the XAI team. It must feel awesome to be at the top of the ELO scores and also taking a bunch of risks on the product side, which we love to see. So good stuff.

Always fun to follow the AI chatbot arena. They're duking it out and good luck to them. This was fun from Dan McCormick. Joe Rogan is obsessed with Create Creatine Gummies. Joe Rogan was pitching Magnus Carlsen and millions of listeners on creatine and more specifically creatine gummies from Create Surreal. It's a one minute clip.

So Dan, for those that don't know uh insane uh insane growth marketer he's also the brother of packy mccormick and has helped out on not boring quite a bit he had this idea to build create a creatine gummy brand forever ago there's something about humans where if you put something in a gummy they want 10 times more of it so he identified that he, I initially, I think he sent me the deck or something like that. And he had this theory that, that gummies would be the way that women got into creatine. And I totally didn't believe it because as like a bro science bodybuilder, you know, uh, interested type, uh, person, right. Um, I had always associated create team with putting on mass, but it has all these other benefits. And so I ended up not investing cause I just

thought the thesis was, was wrong, even though Dan's amazing. And then he got it to such a ridiculous run rate in like four months. I was like, okay, I was wrong. I'm going to invest. And, uh, and he's since, you know, doing tens and tens of millions of revenue, profitable, you know, has done very, very well. So, uh, and he's since, you know, during tens and tens of millions of revenue, it's great profitable, you know, has done very, very well. So, uh, awesome to see. Yeah. Uh, yeah, the, the, the most like, uh, bro science explanation for why creatine is important that I liked was, uh, you know, it helps you put on water weight.

That's what everyone says. Uh, it hydrates your muscles. Uh, but the, the hot take there is that being hydrated is good. And so, you know, if you have more water in your body overall, in your brain, in your muscles, everywhere, you will just feel better, you will perform better. And that's like kind of as basic as it gets, which I thought was an interesting like distillation.

I'm sure there's a lot of scientists that would give you a much more complicated explanation for what's going on. But that simple explanation was actually kind of stuck in my mind. Anyway, let's move on to some, oh, we gotta ring the size gong before we head out for the day. Together AI raises $305 million Series B at a $3.3 billion valuation. Today we're announcing a massive Series B

led by General Catalyst. Incredible to see the team belief in open source models and their ability to empower choice for ai developers continue to be rewarded excited for this next chapter says lee jacobs so let's ring size gone he's gone gotta give some credit to lee uh justin cyan the team at long journey they've been on an absolute terror. They were early in Crusoe, right? And then they were also super early into Together. Yeah. And it only takes a couple companies like that

and a fund to get into the carry zone, which is always a goal. So great work. Another big AI round. More on the model delivery level. Yeah. Really betting on open source, choose your model, vend it into different enterprises,

but excited to see where the product goes and where the team builds with that huge stack of cash. Well said. Lots to do. So the last, the last thing, I mean, we've got to, I mean, we're still, we're streaming. We both probably have to go home, but there's two things. One, I wanted to shout out Rob at Hubermanman lab he just sent a bunch of matina to uh he sent it into the cage yeah the boys are really jacked up on your remates great and then the second thing i don't even know if

we can pull this up now but one x just announced a new uh humanoid robot called you know literally while we were streaming called the neo gamma and saying they're saying it's one step closer to home so they're targeting the home market yep figure seems is building general purpose robots but more oriented around um bmw manufacturing manufacturing like labor yep and i think one other company smart to try to... And that other company is targeting horror films, I guess. And these things look still super creepy, almost like Black Mirror-esque. Yeah. But I like how they're comparing... They're even almost comparing the product to Smeg,

which is like a sort of classic kitchenware brand. Cool. But the visuals in this are amazing. Yeah. Looks friendly, for sure. You were, yeah, I think we're looking forward to a world where we can have one of these walk over and hand us, you know.

Bottle of Dom Perignon. The Yerba Mate bottle of Dom. I'd love to see a humanoid robot pop a Dom bottle of Dom pee. That's the real test of AGI. Can you saber a bottle of Dom yeah that's the real test of agi can you saber a bottle of dom effectively can you really savor it saber saber like use the use the saber of a sword to pop off the top that's the way you open it if you're really really on it uh we we got to do that for the dom episode and um the last thing the last bit of news before the weekend hooters

is preparing for bankruptcy. We didn't cover that, but maybe we'll cover it Monday because it's a bigger story. I don't know how I feel about it. I've never been, so I don't really know. I've never been, and there's tons of arguments that it's probably a good thing, even though maybe that same human instinct just moved online. Seems low class and vulgar. Sounds vulgar to me, i'll be sticking it seems like it's the weekend yeah it's the weekend does it feel like the weekend yeah it starts to feel

like the weekend uh you'll be hearing from us on monday in the meantime think about leaving us a five-star review on apple podcasts and spotify and when you do put an ad for your company or company you love in the description we'll read it live on the show i didn't know this but you can comment on spotify okay so feel free to leave an ad in there in your comment why not there's a bunch of that pumps us up in the algorithm we appreciate follow us on x we'll be live streaming over there soon and we'll be doing a dom episode next week when ben gets his wisdom teeth out fantastic anyways great week brothers thank you thanks for watching thanks for listening and watching we'll see you monday see you monday bye