The Compound and Friends - Inside the Baddest Hedge Fund in America with Sam Koppelman and Nathaniel Horwitz

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

On episode 229 of The Compound and Friends, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Michael Batnick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠���⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Downtown Josh Brown⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ are joined by Nathaniel Horwitz and Sam Koppelman of Hunterbrook to discuss: how investigative journalism can be an edge in investing, the Sable Offshore story, how Sphere is changing entertainment, and much more! This episode is sponsored by Invesco. Visit https://Invesco.com/fixedincome to learn more about their comprehensive fixed income solutions and how they can help strengthen your portfolio's foundation. Sign up for The Compound Newsletter and never miss out: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠thecompoundnews.com/subscribe⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠instagram.com/thecompoundnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠twitter.com/thecompoundnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠linkedin.com/company/the-compound-media/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tiktok.com/@thecompoundnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Josh Brown are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. The Compound Media, Incorporated, an affiliate of ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ritholtz Wealth Management⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, receives payment from various entities for advertisements in affiliated podcasts, blogs and emails. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. For additional advertisement disclaimers see here ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/advertising-disclaimers⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information. Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So you guys have Bethany McLean writing for you? Yeah, she wrote a great investigation for us. Amazing. She's like an O.J. She is an O.J. We love Bethany McLean. She's cooking on all sorts of news stories, too. We're fired up. She's been on Barry's...

We've never had her on. She's been on Barry's podcast on Bloomberg, probably at least once, maybe more. You should have her on here after our next story with her, she's amazing. She's great. She's great. But yeah, that newspaper was printed on the news sheets from the paper

Nathaniel worked out in high school. in his local paper and they turned on the printers for us. It was awesome. That's cool. Very cool. So you were a journalist as well? First gig at a high school. Yeah.

I went to Martha's Vineyard Regional High, and this is my hometown, year-rounder. And both my parents had been war journalists for the Wall Street Journal, Middle East, North Africa. And I thought I was going to follow the same path. So that was my first gig. That's wild. And then this guy goes and has a very significant. successful career in biotech, and I convince him, fuck that. Go back to journalism.

That's the real industry where there's a problem. That's where the real money's being made. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why invest in companies that keep getting up rounds from Nvidia when you could write news stories? So just now, Anthropic announced that they're raising $30 at $380 billion. Check this up, boys. Look at this chart. You think this has ever happened before?

from zero in January, 2023 to 100 million in January, 224, to a billion dollars in 25, and today there are a $14 billion run rate. I mean, no, right? That's got to be an end of one situation. You're smiling. That's crazy.

It's unbelievable, right? Unbelievable. Fraud? Scam? What are you thinking? No, I do not think that as a fraud. I use Claude every day. So I just switched.

Yeah, fantastic. Within the last, like, 10 days from chat. Do you use the desktop cloud, or you're using the login on the... I use it. on my... Oh, okay, so this desktop, Claude, nonsense. You gotta get it on the desktop.

I had to Google. I had to YouTube the video. I couldn't figure out how to install it. You know the best way to figure it out. You're already in the wrong place. Where? You just ask, Claude. I think I did do that.

You asked Claude, and Claude will show you the way. All right, so here's what I did. I wrote myself a code for, like, how to find the nearest bathroom. How'd that go? I couldn't figure out how to launch it. Like, it worked sort of, I guess, but then, like, it didn't work very well. One of the apps you're least likely to use when you're in a pitch. Not me.

No, but I'm saying it's like it's not one where you really can afford much buffer time. Well, you maybe want to hire a pro to build that app. But Cloud Code can do a lot of other things. So what do you use? Are you coding? I mean, I'm doing whatever it is that people are doing with Cloud on the desktop. Okay. So I don't, I'm web-based. Like, I'm using it like chat chitibita, like very basic.

And how have you been finding? You guys are making me feel very old. No, no, no, no. It's all good. No, it's unbelievable. You're not going to be obsolete. It'll be at least a few months before it takes over this podcast. I appreciate that.

I've actually been building a bot. It's been training on the transcripts of your podcast. I feel like I'm so unpredictable. You can't train on it. I know. It's true. It's hard to get the AI to know to call on someone for putting their headphones on wrong when it's actually right.

Because I always butcher phrases. Like, you can't program a bot to recreate me. You know, that is famous last words in basically every dystopian movie, but I agree. I can't remember grain of sand or grain of salt. Like, to me, they're interchangeable. You just, you just break the AGI. I don't think that could be. By messing up everyday phrases.

This is a happy accident. You got my good side? Yes, I have to. Do I have one? The left. All right, so guys, this is the structure of the show today. We're going to go through your names and your recent stories. But before we do that, we just have to nod toward what's going on in the markets right now.

And we want to hear what you think. It's a little bit chaotic out here. There are large cap mega cap stocks dropping 12% based on tweets from. like venture capitalists. It's like completely wild. And my guess is that you guys would look at this sort of thing as an opportunity. But maybe I'm wrong. But I'd love to hear what you think.

So we'll go there first. And then we're going to do these are the names that, these are the names that we want to get to. Evolve, which you and I talked about. Great. Rich Tech. You guys mentioned wanting to do Sable. Yeah. Okay.

Sable offshore. And then I think we can we do a little sphere stuff? I can mention Sphere quickly. Okay. All right. And today it's in the news. Do you have restrictions on any of those? No, the one thing we can't talk about, you know, specific active trades or something. Spy Club.

Okay. All right. Got it. Should I have to start it up? Yes. Three claps coming in. What happened? On account and friends.

Episode 229. Oh, my God. Episode 229? Whoa, whoa. Stop the clock. Here's a word from our sponsor. Today's show is brought to you by Invesco. Looking to add some stability to your portfolio?

Investco's fixed income solutions are designed to help. Investco's team of 181 fixed income investment professionals managed $519 billion in assets, giving them the scale and expertise to navigate any market condition. Whether you're looking for investment grade or munis or other types of bonds, Invesco's fixed income strategies are designed to help find the stability you may need. Visit investco.com slash fixed income to learn more about their comprehensive fixed income solutions and how they can help strengthen your portfolio's foundation, Invesco.

Let's rethink possibility. All data from Investco as of September 30th, 2025, fixed income investments are subject to credit risk of the issuer and the effects of changing interest rates. Before investing, consider the funds, investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Visit investco.com for a prospectus containing this information. read it carefully before investing, Investco Distributors, Inc. Welcome to The Compound and Friends. All opinions expressed by Josh Brown, Michael Batnik, and their castmates are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Rithold's wealth management.

This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Rithold's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Can you believe that we've done this 229 times, guys? Amazing. All right. Well, believe it because it happened. All right. Thank you, John.

We were your 229th call. I mean, it's unbelievable how the time goes. Bye. All right, guys, welcome to the Compatter and Friends, number one investing podcast, YouTube show, social media series, whatever you want to call it, pretty much in the world. It's documented. I could back that up if anyone needs me to. I'm so excited to have a very special episode today. You guys are about to hear one of the coolest stories

that I have come across in the last couple of years. Probably something happening that you have no idea about. But if you're into investing and you're into markets and you're a news junkie, this story combines all of those things into one very cool one. And I can't wait to tell it to you. So thank you so much for watching. Thank you for listening.

My guest today is a big buildup, right guys? Unbelievable. Try to live up to it. Nathaniel Horowitz is the CEO of Hunter. Book Media and Hunterbrook Capital, he was the youngest venture partner at RA Capital, a biotechnology and healthcare investment fund. By over a decade, he co-founded Hunterbrook after extensive experience in company building and investing in the healthcare sector.

Welcome, Nathaniel. Thank you for being here. I'm excited. Can I take you everywhere I go? Yeah, yeah. That's great. All right. Sam Cappellman is a publisher at Hunterbrook and a New York Times bestselling

author. He co-wrote books with former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and former acting U.S. Solicitor General Neil Katyal. He built Fenway Strategies into a leading strategic communications firm and has published in major outlets including The New York Times, Washington Post, right? Teen Vogue! And Time Magazine. So good to have you guys here. Honored to be here. Thank you so much for doing this. I want everyone to mention Teen Vogue. I want to be clear. I've never written for teen phone. They never invited me.

Okay. Guys, thank you for correcting the record. This has been a pretty momentous two or three weeks in the stock market. And I know AI isn't like your number one focus in the way that you invest, but surely you look at companies that are being affected by this or you think might be affected both from the long side and the short side at Hunterbrook. And I think just to set the stage, Michael, do we want to do this anthropop? chart. We did it before you got here. But yeah, set it again. Reset the table. All right, let's reset the table. Put this up. I have one thing to say about this. It's not like the money from the market caps of these stocks is disappearing. It's definitely going somewhere, but it's not exactly going

into these companies that are disrupting everyone because none of them are public. Anthropic doesn't have a ticker. Neither does perplexity. Neither does Open AI. Neither does SpaceX, which now owns XAI. So it's unclear whether. or not the money will return some of the stocks that are being sold when people realize, all right, it's probably not the end of the world. These companies just have to adapt and do better using AI. I don't know how long it takes for us to get from here to there, but it's a really interesting situation. I love to hear what you think. It's absolutely fascinating. I mean, every day I am using these platforms. We were just talking about how we use Claude Code on the

daily. And yeah, I mean, you look at this chart. And I think a lot of what's being priced in is just uncertainty about the terminal value of anything. I'm uncertain about the terminal value of myself. And I think when everyone's looking at themselves in the mirror and has that first moment where they're playing around with this stuff and they see it do something that they're expert at basically as good as they're doing it, if they really let themselves lean in, you do then have to question your priors and first principles about a lot of stuff. And it makes sense that in the interim, as people are trying to figure out how to discount long term, there's all kinds of crazy volatility.

What is the terminal value of me is a really scary question to have to, like, rhetorically ask out loud? The good news is that in the great expanse of time, the terminal value of all of us is zero. That's correct. So what do you think? I think that this is a real opportunity for us, because in a world where the value of intelligence is in a way being commoditized for the first time, the value of actual intelligence. Intel, information about what's actually happening in the world, that's increasing exponentially.

And that's what we focus on at 100. How do you draw the distinction? Intelligence. Intelligence is becoming commoditized, but Intel is becoming more valuable than ever. How do you delineate between those two things? I think of intelligence is, you know, our ability to process, synthesize information, draw conclusions from it, right? And AI is clearly getting way better at that scary fast. the value of real information, Intel.

That's not widely known. That's not widely known. Okay. That you have to actually go out there in the world and get. You got to talk to people on the ground. You've got to synthesize a bunch of different open source intelligence threads. I think there's an increasing significance to that, especially at a time of historic disinformation. Okay.

Where you don't know what to trust. Okay. The market is in the period right now. It's killing anything where there's even, any doubt. So Josh and I spoke about this in our industry. There is an AI tool that we know about that was announced, released into the wild, and it took 10% of Schwab's market cap. Now, this company, it's a startup custodian, altruist, they're doing very well. But the idea that it's going to take 10% of the market cap in a day is insanity. Bucco Capital this morning, I think he put it well.

I should point out altruist, another example. It's not a public company. Right. So the money leaves Schwab, LPL, Raymond James. It's like $25 billion in. market cap wiped out yesterday in three stocks. Where does it go? Because it can't go into this startup that's disrupting it. So Bucco tweeted, there's a non-zero chance that these SaaS names chop for years. Companies have put up results that show zero, literally zero impact from AI. Like, I think Adobe is a poster child that nobody wants to own it. But every quarter, it's record revenue and record profits, and the stock is getting murdered. He said there is no valuation support. And you can't disprove a negative. You're just not dead yet. Right. So what, John,

I was talking about this. Like, at what point does this end? It's got to be like six more quarters of like, hey, we're still at records, but like the market just doesn't give a shit. We saw another tweet today about real estate companies getting disrupted and just immediately all- John, we have this. So is three stocks, CBRE, Jones-Lang LaSalle, Cushman, and Wakefield. These are commercial real estate brokerages that have also built service arms. So they're not just transactions anymore. They are market intel, analytics for the real estate industry. They're managing properties. And like they're doing, oh, they're doing like property management for corporations that have like 50 different office spaces. They have all these

different services. But what it all boils down to is these three companies by virtue of their position in the real estate brokerage world have a lot of information. What the stock market did today was say, we don't care what information you have. We're just going to go ahead to make the assumption that people aren't going to call you. They're going to go on chat GPT and get the answer they're looking for and pay you less. And that's what charts like this are, and we're seeing this like in almost every sector of the stock market. Have you guys seen anything like this before? So glad you asked.

All right. Check it this out, boys. The year was 1838. No, but seriously. All right. So I had chart kid, John, I'll send us after. I had chart kid make a chart for us. I said, how many stocks are getting just murdered, like on a.

on a single day basis, all right? So here's what we're looking at. These red circles represent over an eight-day period when you've had at least 115 stocks in the S&P 500 fall 500 fall 7% or more in a single day. Just murdered, right? That doesn't happen at all-time highs. The average drawdown when that happens is 34%. We're within 1.5% of an all-time high. The only other time that this has happened, I'm not drawing comparisons, but it just is a fact, the only other time we've seen this level of you're dead, you're dead, you're dead at all time highs was right before the dot-com bubble burst. And you're not drawing comparisons.

That's just what it is. Well, it's... I'm not suggesting that we're about to fall out of it. Like, the market's going to crash. It's coincidental so far, but never before have we been in an environment where the stock market is at all time, give or take, all-time highs, but like there's a few hundred stocks being nuked every single day. The equal weight index.

Had it hit an all-time high this morning. Wow. Right. So the way that I phrased it, I talked about it as like a separation in the market between disruptable and not disruptable. So the companies that are not disruptable, Pepsi and Coke, like there's nothing a chatbot can do to manufacture a leader of Coke. It's just not going to happen.

But now they're starting to hit some of these stocks that do sort of have this non-replicatable, physical. The real estate thing is a good example of that. So that tells me, I almost think we need to have like a market-wide spasm to clear out the sphere. I don't think it just fades away. You think there has to be real indiscriminate selling first? I mean, we're there with like big chunks of the market, but not the whole thing. So long as that equal weight is holding up, I don't think we could say that this fear is extinguished.

Last week, 337 stocks in the S&P were up. So, yeah, Palantir getting killed. Apple's down 5% today. I don't know why. It just is. Microsoft's a 30% draw down. oracles in a 60% Jordan. Like, these are really...

So you think, like, the 337 or the 493 or whatever it is, like, we need a washout? I sort of do. I think we need a puke because it's a... People won't feel better until we get it all out, sort of thing, right? Are you judging that based on your hangovers from growing out? From what I was in a sorority... You need a full puke.

I just needed someone to hold my hair, and I needed to get it out, and then it couldn't be all okay until that moment. You think that the market needs a... morning after, hair held puke and then it'll all be back to normal? It's sort of trending that way. So you guys, this is obviously like not what you focus on day to day, but you can't like not,

you can't ignore this. I mean, look, what we focus on day to day for those listening who don't know what Hunterbrook is, is figuring out what's really going on in the world. We have a newsroom staffed by reporters, former Intel analysts, and the whole goal every day is to figure out

what's people's perception of reality? and then what's actually true. And I love a world where there's actually a big spectrum in terms of potential outcomes. Well, you're in it. Because it's like an uncertainty binge going on right now. Correct. And we're not using some crazy new tools.

We're using one of the most old-fashioned tools that exists in the world, which is journalism. A tool that people for a very long time discounted as this terrible business. and it was when you were trying to monetize the eyeballs you reach. Because if you run a newsroom and you're competing with TikTok and Netflix on eyeballs, you're just going to lose every time. They've trillion-dollar algorithms that are better than you. So I'm sure you guys get this all the time.

Finish your thought. Go ahead. But if you're a newsroom and you're monetizing the information, what's actually going on in the world, figuring out the truth, we think that is more valuable than ever. At a time when people are just indiscriminately selling stocks, trying to discount futures that they don't know how to underwrite, that's really fucking fun.

So you probably just answered this. You guys, you said you're monetizing this. Are you a newsroom with a hedge fund? Or are you a hedge fund with a newsroom? We're a media company. And our goal is to publish stories that matter to people and readers. We monetize it like a normal media company does with ads or paywalls. With our fund, Hunterbrook Capital, that takes positions in the market and that we disclose.

And with, you know, our legal business that turns our stories into lawsuits. But it's kind of like asking is the, New York Times, a games business, a wordal business, or is it a newspaper? No, it's a newspaper. They monetize great recipes and great games. And I think it's amazing that with those profits, they're able to fund incredible investigative reporting. That's the same aspiration we have, just using new tools that people hadn't used before.

Here's a lot of money. So here's an example of the indiscriminate. Logistic stocks got killed today. And then the stalwart turned this up, Joe Wisenthal. The company that announced this. new AI freight product. Karaoke. Yeah.

It's not an AI lab. It's a Florida-based penny stock that sells karaoke machines. It's called algorithm holdings. And they announced that their semi-cab platform in live customer deployments is helping its customers' internal operations to scale freight volumes by 300 to 400% without a corresponding increase in operational headcount. The stock went up 26%. It's a penny stock.

and that knocked billions in market cap off of like... Tens of billions today. Off of like Robinson and J.B. Hunt. So it's completely stupid, but people are paying attention to it. Guys, this is what happens. There's all these headlines that hit the tape, these tape bombs, and a lot of them aren't true. One of my favorite little stories we worked on,

normally we do these big, months-long investigations, was there was this rumor that Papa Johns was about to get acquired. And it hit Bloomberg, Barron's, they wrote full art. about it because some outlet called ABC Money had broken the news that Papa Johns was getting acquired at like a 40% premium. It stock spikes up. Yeah. Our newsroom immediately goes, wait a second.

What the f*** is ABC Money? And no one else did that. And so we start digging in and we realized that ABC Money is a fake outlet, obviously. So do you short that? So I'll tell you. Yeah. So we figured out in the newsroom pretty quickly that this was BS and then we figured out, all right, who runs this thing? this thing because this is kind of an amazing scam, right?

It showed up on hundreds of outlets. It's red headline on Bloomberg. People are taking that seriously, right? Turns out it's these guys in Dubai. And the guys in Dubai can be hired, and we wrote a whole piece on this, you can figure out who they are, to send these articles to hundreds of outlets

because media companies are so desperate for content now. Right. And then that becomes the narrative. And so we published by the next morning our article about how the Papa John's acquisition rumor was a scam showing the fake ABC money logo and the real ABC logo. We disclosed that Hunterbrook Capital

had taken a short position. It opened down 12%. It just gave back up the gains that it had the prior day. And there's stuff like this happening all the time. And there are not journalists anymore around to scrutinize.

That's where Nathaniel's biotech skills came into play. So how did you guys hit upon the idea of we're going to be a combination investigative journalism, publisher, and we're going to trade on our, we'll fully disclose,

but we're not going to like, we're not going to hide in any weird way that our intention is to make money. We're just not doing banner ads. We're doing this. How did you come up with the idea? And other than me, how many other people did you talk to

that said, you guys are fucking crazy? Because I was definitely scared for you. It is one of those ideas that feels like a bong rip idea. What if you could just fund journalism with the impact of the report? So tell us the story. Tell a story how you came up with it.

So look, Nathaniel and I met in college at the Crimson, the newspaper. And we're both the kinds of- HBS, not to brag. Come on. Undergrad. All right. Underdrag. And we meet at the newspaper, and we're both the kind of guys who would have just become

journalists normally. Nathaniel's parents were war correspondents. My parents, both writers. And we both looked out at the journalism industry and didn't really see a plausible career. So we go in different paths. I write a couple books. Nathaniel works in biotech. but we had this nagging suspicion

that the people we grew up around, the avid truth seekers, the reporters, the curious people, artists, writers, that they actually were secularly undervalue, that that skill set would become more and more and more valuable. And the bong rip idea, unfortunately neither of us was ever cool enough

to really rip bongs, but in the spirit of things, was, all right, there's all these industries free writing off of journalism. The investment industry literally trades tens of billions of dollars a day based on headlines. This week probably, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars a day based on headlines.

How much of that value goes back to the organizations that produced the journalism? Bloomberg, that's one. Bloomberg captures a bunch of value. Yeah, none. We pay as little as possible like everyone else. As little as possible and people are scraping websites and none of that goes back to the journalism industry. Right. The other industry we saw doing this and that's not as relevant to your audience is litigation.

Where plaintiffside litigation is 2% of GDP. It's huge. Whoa. And a lot of that is actually some great investigative reporting. ProPublica does a story on a sleep machine that's poisoning people. It's a billion dollar case. Some firm makes $300 million. Plaintiffs make $700 million.

Republic has to go to a billionaire donor the next year. Exactly. And they have to go to a donor and ask for more money to produce more of that reporting. And that's a common good, that journalism, that's creating billions of dollars in value for the economy. It's helping us understand what's going on in the world. And it's incomplete decline. And so the idea of Hunterbrook, the thing that got me to convince Nathaniel to quit biotech and go back into journalism, was this idea that we're finally ready for an organization that

Josh might think, you know, this is kind of crazy. A lot of people we spoke to might think, this is kind of crazy. I was, like, scared for you. I was worried. I didn't think that it was a bad idea. I thought it was a very risky idea. It's a very scary idea. And a lot of people were like,

what are people going to say about this? And then we launched and we told everyone what we were about, especially at a time when people are skeptical as a default about the news they read. They think, who's benefiting from this? What's the motive of the outlet? That's everyone's default. We were like, what if we're just super transparent? We tell you what we know.

We tell you how we know it, and we tell you exactly how we stand to make money from it. And the only way we're going to prove to you that this is a legit outlet is by being right again and again and again, publishing super rigorous reporting that speaks for itself. And I think that what's amazing is a year and a half into this thing, we've got the best reporters coming to us asking to work here. We have people taking our stories extremely seriously. Our investigation into the healthcare industry we released last month was entered into the congressional record and cited by both Republican and Democratic members of Congress

at a hearing to insurance CEOs. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm bringing bipartisan sugar pack. And now we're able to have a flywheel of great inbound stories. We're able to publish them with real credibility. And last year we were profitable in our second years in media startup. And we're scaling. That is very real.

And we're not hiring them to go aggregate headlines about Papa John's being acquired that came from some Dubai bullshit outlet. No, you're telling them, those reporters to do what you do. To do the best version of their journalism, the kind that Nathaniel's parents did. That's how we ended up doing this.

Okay, so what were some of the things that you heard from people when you first were launching or you were like socializing the idea? Tell me some of the things that people on Wall Street said or people in journalism said. A lot of people on Wall Street say, well, you know, I'm invested in a hedge fund

that's hired a journalist. They help out with the due diligence. What's the difference? And we'd say, that's a former journalist. The best journalists, people who are really going to get to the truth, they're not willing to give up the byline. They're not willing to give up the public service mission that took them into journalism in the first place. Oh, they don't want to be just behind the scenes. They don't want to be behind the scenes. They want to be Bob Woodward. Yeah. And we are able to give them a

platform, whereas Sam said, they can come and do the highest caliber of business journalism. We're up there with the best business outlets in the world in terms of the caliber of the reporting. And you can read that reporting for yourself. Okay. Across the social media. So was it that obvious to journalists that you talk to? Totally. They got it immediately. They would see the way that they would do really important reporting. And then other people would run with that and make the money drive the impact. Yeah. And they were chasing clicks. Or their work was behind a subscriber paywall. even their cousins and their friends couldn't read any of the work.

So I want to be really clear about how it works in the newsroom at Hunterbrook Media. It's ad-free and free to read for everybody. There's no incentive to go out there and chase eyeballs. It's not walled off from access. It doesn't rely on donors or government funding. It relies on the truth. I'm an investor. I run the fund.

I want accurate information about what's going on out there. We get that from Hunterbrook Media at Hunterbrook Capital, and then I can make better investments knowing that this is actually the truth and not some clickbait headline that flashed on the Bloomberg terminal. When you guys raised money from legendary investor Mark Lazary early on, credit to you, was that, did he invest in the fund? Did he invest in the business? Like how, what funds the media part of it?

I can speak high level, which is that we raise around publicly to get ourselves started. We raised $10 million, and we did that from Emerson Collective, from Nathaniel's former boss, Peter Kulchinski, R.A. Capital from David Fialco, our founder of General Catalyst and our close friend, a bunch of people who bet on this idea. And that's, and that was, that was the overall company? Are they investors in the fund? A lot of it. Or was that general purposes to spin up the media part? We got the company started first with that capital. Then we went out and raised $100 million as our launch. Which was harder?

I think that as soon as people really scrutinize the logic of why this actually makes sense, both of them were actually pretty easy from a fundraising perspective. And that logic, I think, is pretty clear. Once you strip away all the novelty of it, it's the same thing that people have been trying to do in this business for a really long time, which is just get an informational edge. Fair game, but through dedicated work, a differentiated perspective. In our case, the type of people you can recruit

to an organization like this who wouldn't go work at a traditional hedge fund or due diligence firm. So that was my next question. There are people that would look at this and they would say, all right, obviously, this makes perfect sense. You get the best reporters,

you put them on a story, and once you learn what the truth is, you trade on it, What hedge fund doesn't use their analysts this way. But why do you have to publish? Because there's two things in this industry that regulators don't like and people can point to something and say that it's one of those two things. Short and distort is one.

Pump and dump is the other. And I would imagine that was probably a point of hesitancy. You pitch this idea to people. People probably like, all right, but do you have to publish? Like, can you just find out the truth? and let's trade on it like everybody else. But you made the point. Yes, we have to publish.

That's how we get Bethany McLean and amazing real journalists to want to be part of this. They don't want to be in the back room cranking out articles that 10 people read. And there's also a reason that Nathanel and I didn't leave college

and go work at a hedge fund. The reason we started this thing was to build... You guys actually care about, you guys actually care about the journalism. It's not just a means to an end. The house I was growing up in, my parents went into war zones across the world for the Wall Street Journal to get the

truth. It was a core component of the identity I grew up with and that I then... I know in this room it might not be a popular thing to say, but in this house, they also really didn't fucking like hedge funds. Right. Okay. This was not a house that was, you know, super capitalist or anything. And I think what people realized... Well, now you're in a metaphorical war zone. It's not quite what your parents experience. Information war zone. But what the... But what I think people got from us is we're people with pretty good lives. We weren't going to be the kind of people trying to find some quick edge.

We're trying to build a real institution here. It is a startup institution. You're not going to shortcut by being like, all right, let's write a headpiece on this and try to scalp it for three points because you can only do that two or three times before people realize what you're doing. Exactly.

You have to basically build a reputation for being right as the atomic substructure of everything else. So let me ask you guys a dumb question. What is the difference in your eyes between the work, Joshua Shor Sassan, like the work that the analyst do at a traditional hedge fund, which is like reportive-ish

versus like actual journalism? It's a great question. And this all obviously exists on a spectrum. Like a lot of the people who work at plaintiffs law firms are incredible investigators. And they know how to get people

to talk and tell a story of how a company poisoned a river or poisoned the air. Aaron Brockovich, I think, is a journalist. And there's obviously people at the top of, the best hedge funds in the world who operate like journalists. They go try to figure out base reality and are able to tune out the noise. For us, the big difference is just this

obsession with not being biased by your priors and figuring out how to identify new facts about a situation that people previously didn't understand. There's obviously a lot of overlap. I think if you read our stories and you see the way that we attack various problems, and I know we're going to get into a couple of examples, it'll become. clear that what we're doing is sort of categorically different. And then the other cool thing about being a publication is, as I mentioned, you then also get a bunch of inbound. One of the things that happens obviously on the street is people do talk their books and try to get other people to cover things. Josh, I'm sure people ask you to talk about names on CNBC all the time. But

they also are often kind of possessive about their information and don't want to share it with other people. People really want to give the best information that they've got to us, because they don't want their long blown up, they don't want their short squeezed, they don't want their options to expire worthless. And often, they want the world to find out about something. You know how frustrating it was to be a wire card short before anyone wrote about that?

You're just in this name and it's going up and up and up and up and up and up. And by the way, after that was written about, it kept going up and up and up and up and remained very frustrating. Oh, the FT finally picked up the story. Exactly, but it still took years before the fan. Are you guys watching industry? No. So in this season, Harper runs a hedge fund,

and she's short a name, and she's using the newspapers to publish about her thesis. And they're publishing... If only she went to Hunterbrook. That's right. And it's fun here. Oh, Harper, yeah. I was hunted. Okay.

So anyway, the thesis is published by the newspaper, and the market doesn't care. And it's going up in her face anyway. And I sort of wonder how that works with you guys, because this is sort of a post-shame world. Nobody cares about anything. Nobody has the attention span for more than 30 seconds. You might lay out an incredible thesis. maybe there's momentum trade is in there. You guys are idiots.

Like, how do, I'm sure you've done that. You got people that, like, documented multiple trips to Epstein Island. They're, like, on dancing with the stars. Like, we're completely posh shame. Look, this is a really important question. It's when we spend a ton of time on. We think this is the time in recent history where if you're a bad actor, you did something really bad.

You go to sleep the easiest. You've gotten to sleep in a very long time. Yeah. You don't think there's going to be some journalists calling in the morning. And if they do, you think you're going to be able to shrug it off. You don't think your stock's going to be impacted. You don't think you're going to get sued over it. You definitely don't think the government's coming.

If you're a bad actor. And we think that that is a great opportunity in this golden age of grift and graft to buy the dip on integrity, to buy the dip on doing business the right way. Like the wheel will turn and those things will come back into vogue. Hopefully. We just don't know when. Gravity has always. existed, and I do think that what we found is, yes, on the order of a week or a month or three

months, we can publish a story. And if the shareholder base is not good faith, like nobody actually owns this thing because they believe in it. Then it's very hard to convince them in one way or another. That's not our mission. Our mission is to just inform people, and then over time be proven right, because eventually when Hunter Brooks existed for 10 years, when we publish the discount that's taking place over a long period of time before the market necessarily understands that we're going to be right, collapses because people know how the story ends. How good does that feel when you're right? I mean, you've been smiling this whole episode.

I love your energy. You just got a big smile on your face. How good does it feel when the market agrees with you? It's extremely gratifying. It's also informative when it doesn't, right? It's a great feedback loop. You can get educated really quickly on how people perceive what you're saying about the world. And, yeah, there have been times where,

we have not been cynical enough. Yeah. Okay. But there have also been times where we've been too cynical. You know, there's been a couple of times where Hunterbrook Media has sent over to the fund

really compelling investigative journalism about a company that they're planning to publish. And I read it and think, God, that's great journalism. Like, my dad, he passed away a few years ago. My dad would have loved that.

That was exactly his kind of. I'm not going to trade on that. I'm not going to short that name Because I don't think these shareholders are good faith. I don't think people care about this type of situation. Oh, you think like it'll just go over everyone's head and people won't care. I'll give you an example. Okay.

We have incredible journalists Sam recruited from the Crimson who went to Danville, Illinois, factory town, and revealed that the factory of a multinational conglomerate was poisoning people in that town. And we had a bunch of reporting like this. We recruited a great reporter from the Wall Street Journal last year who's been running our beat on environmental reporting, scoop after scoop about just some terrible stuff that's happening with the class of the EPA regulation around health and well-being. And some of those stocks hadn't butched on that reporting. So this looked similar, Pat. This was a literal how the sausage is made story. It was about a sausage casing factory.

Okay. Like over 100 years after Sinclair, exactly the same thing. Exactly, exactly the same thing going down. That stock absolutely collapsed upon publication. I didn't have a short on. It turned out that people do... It's based in Spain where people still care about shit. You're not allowed to poison people in Spain, I guess.

Oh, it was the company was domiciled in Spain, and the Spanish investors responded to that journalism by selling. And within 48 hours, local Spanish news outlets had found out the company was doing similar stuff in other places. Right. The company itself had to engage in good faith with shareholders and regulators and clean up their act. They put out multiple press releases about their commitment to doubling down on safety and well-being at this factory and across their whole operation. Real accountability driven quickly because the share price moved. But I was too cynical as an investor because I thought, wow.

You thought they'll just get away with it. There's no trade here. Exactly. Do you guys worry about people who are long a stock where you burst the bubble? And by the way, for the listener, we're going to get into some specific cases that Hunterbrook media has been involved with. And they're not all shorts. I just want to put this out here. But do you guys...

That's a really important point. We ran a net long book in 2020. Yeah, yeah. So I don't want people to think that you guys are just like out there looking to destroy companies. No, a lot of the time you're digging into a company that sounds too good to be true. Yeah. Turns out it actually is as good as it sounds. Or you find, you know, one company is doing shady stuff, but another company is really high quality. And that scammy company has been taking all the auction out of the room. But there's a real jammed. So this is important because I do think that there's a popular image of the activist short seller, which is somebody that's out for blood and somebody that wants to write wrongs in the world and make people pay and then jump up and down on the corpse of a company that they deem to be morally, inferior to what their own standards are. There is that, and I know that's not the truth,

because I do know people that are in the short selling world, but like that is sort of like what the popular perception is. But you guys are coming at it from the point of view where if this company needs to be exposed, we will expose them. But sometimes we will think one thing and then the other thing will be true. And that might be just as profitable. And that is, I think, where you guys might differ from traditional journalism. In real journalism, if there's no story there, then that's it. Let's move on.

If it bleeds, it leads. And if it doesn't bleed, then why are we talking about it? Whereas you guys might say, hey, this is actually a bullish story and we thought it might be bearish or we didn't think anything. We just wanted to learn about it. So I think that's a really important distinction. It's exactly right. It's part of what makes it journalism too, is it's just curiosity. Like, you're just trying to actually understand something. And by the way, some stories start as leads and they don't become stories at all. It's like this company's basically what people think. I think at anyone's fund, there's a lot of ideas that get circled around. Do you worry about the impact that you have on a stock price, though, where there are a lot of

investors? And then you publish something that turns the market off to a stock. People, like real people do lose money. I would imagine you might think of that as like, well, the truth is the truth. What do you want from us? But the people that are on the receiving end of that sort of street justice, they may not feel the same way about you. I actually think a lot of people save money. I'll give you a great example. A hundred work media has been reporting for almost a couple of years now on this pipeline off Santa Barbara, California, which we can talk about a bit more.

But, you know, if folks had read the early reporting and realized how shady the company trying to relaunch this pipeline actually was, and they had sold their share. based on that reporting, they would have saved a ton of money. Right. Because it did turn out that these guys were sketchy. And you were the first people to point it out, and then everyone figures it out after. And look, I think this is one of the master strokes of the market that I have to give it credit for, is that they make it seem like if a short seller writes a story about a company,

let alone a journalistic outlet like Hunterbrook, it's their fault when it turns out that the companies' claims weren't true. It's your fault. Whereas when a company does pump after pump after pump, BS press release, after BS press release, does a guide that's super ambitious, cosies up with shareholders, does a meeting that's a little bit sketchy where they're telling people, you know, next quarter is going to be pretty good, they're sandbagging their guide, whatever it is when a company's trying to pump its stock and then it collapses.

people don't blame those companies in the same way. They think those companies were trying their best. They had an ambitious idea. They were super excited about it themselves. And I think that the wrongdoing there is the people putting froth and misinformation and BS into the market. And in a world where there's basically no journalists

to even scrutinize whether company's claims are real, it's a very useful counterbalance to have a couple people who are actually digging into company's claims, particularly when the sell side, as you all know, is basically happy to gobble up whatever. You're so right. The Mark Twain quote, it's easier to fool someone than to convince that they've been fooled.

People do not like being embarrassed that they fell for the bullshit, even if it's a lie. So I'm wondering, where do you see the lies? Like, where do the stories come from? Is it you're looking at the financials and you say, that's weird and then you go digging? Or is it tips? Like, where do these stories come from? It really does run the gamut. A lot of stories come from someone telling us, this doesn't seem right.

other stories come from systematic identification of various flags. So for some of the environmental stories, that's us systematically figuring out what factories are emitting a lot of toxic chemicals and then using health data to figure out are there cancer clusters near there. That's systematic and emergent. And you can build those kinds of signals all the time. But a lot of this stuff just comes to us as ideas where people are like, can this possibly be true?

Because it doesn't seem like it. You must look at like, or maybe you don't like look at, um, like look at, the leaderboard for the day in the stock market and see a $200 million company go up like 3x in a day, right? Like, like, and just look at that like, what the hell is going on here? You know, it's funny. Those aren't usually necessarily the good shorts, at least not right away. Okay.

Not the first day. The first couple days with those, you never know how long a pump is going to go. But that is often when we start scrutinizing a company because we're trying to understand if what they're saying is true and the market was mispricing this by $200. Because it should be updated. Well, that's a really interesting news story. And if it's BS, that's also pretty interesting. All right.

So let's get into some of the case studies or the actual stories that you've done that worked out or were trades or. Okay. So the first one we're going to talk about evolve. You guys note, this is a company people thought was a fraud. But you realized it was a good business last year. When its numbers were suspended, it was out of compliance with the S&E. So what is the story behind Evolve and what can our listeners take away from a situation like this? Have you guys spent any time with Eric Adams?

The mayor? Only at Zero Bond, which I think was his office while he was the mayor. It was also his home, I believe. His home was in New Jersey. He loved the private clubs. Like he was really into like anywhere that was a membership. I will say at least for the first couple years, I don't think anyone ever had as much fun as mayor. Probably not.

So that's a funny question. Nathaniel asks because Nathaniel had one meal with Eric Adams. Okay. That we'll get into shortly. He was a vet. Was he a vegetarian? Allegedly. Allegedly.

Whoa. So that was red flag number one. So listen to this. So listen to this. So we see that this company evolve. You've probably walked through one of their metal detectors. Yeah. At a sports game.

Those are the metal detectors you can just walk through and they can tell if you've got a knife or if it's just your wallet. Now they really can't tell anything, right? Well, do they actually work? This was our initial question as a newsroom. It sounded too good to be true. So we got this, they got this contract with New York. Eric Adams came out, showed Evolve, and he said, we're going to put Evolve in the subway. And I thought this was weird because as a newsroom, we dug up that Evolve CEO said in an interview that his devices don't work underground.

Wait, why? So why would the city be paying to put these things on the subway? And so that's when Nathaniel's one experience with Eric Adams set off some red flags. Because Nathaniel, do you want to answer the vegetarian question? How did you get in front of Eric Adams to even... That's a longer story. But basically, we figured that keyed us off that maybe the mayor wasn't on the up and up,

maybe this company wasn't on the up and up. Two things I've only done once is lunch with Eric Adams and lunch at Nobu. It's not exactly known as a vegetarian establishment. Yeah, yeah. So Sam and the newsroom start really digging into this company. And at first, I was really disappointed because the company sort of blew up before I even had an opportunity to trade on it. So we start digging in. Nathaniel tells me he went to a meal with Eric Adams.

Eric Adams ate meat. And we saw that these guys claimed that their device worked underground. They had to deal with the subways. And we had the CEO saying it doesn't work underground. So we started out thinking this is a fraud. That was our baseline. And then, as we're digging into our reporting, after I did like a quick little TikTok video being like, this thing doesn't work underground, what the hell? they suspend their financials.

They're out of compliance with the SEC. CFO is fired. It looks like they're going to be delisted. Stock plummets. So this is a NASDAQ, EV-LV. EV-LV. That's right. And it's NASDAQ.

Okay. And they just say we're not going to, we can't stand by our quarterly. Our existing financials. There's some fraud in the system. So we start looking into this as a newsroom. Halt the stock opens down. 45%. Yeah, yeah.

But what the reporters start figuring out is they're digging into the story. Sure. Maybe it turns out the numbers need some corrections. The management team was a mess. But people love this technology. It's the best in class by far. And we interviewed people who ran stadiums. And they said it used to be that in the first quarter,

there are people out in line. And now they're butts in seats, beer in hands. They're like, okay, sounds pretty good. Kids. They were to go interview people from schools. That's one of evolves big markets because we live in a crazy fucking country where they have to make sure

that people aren't bringing guns into school. and we would interview the superintendents who would start crying on the phone. This thing makes me know my kids are safe. I'm like, this Evolve paying these guys, like, what's going on? And it turns out. And kids were getting to class on time. Instead of getting held up at the entrance of the school.

So that way they could read good. And by the way, evolve not to, I know this isn't necessarily the wokeest audience, but it's pretty cool that evolves technology means you don't have to go pat down all these kids like they have in metal detectors around the country. So anyway, we start digging into this. People love the technology.

Time out, though. Are you in contact with anyone at the company yet? No, no. You don't do that yet. No, we're just digging in. We don't want to get biased by what the company is telling people. You don't want to like the CEO and then it's like, gosh. And look, anyone on Wall Street with a few bucks to invest can get on a call with a management team.

There's no differentiation. But by the way, here, they were also in a long, long quiet period because their financials were out of date. So anyway, we figure out that Evolve actually has amazing tech. And despite being investigated by the SEC, the FTC, all these other people, these customers are not leaving. In fact, Evolve is a growing business, penetrating these huge markets from schools to hospitals. You can see it all across New York to sporting events. And we're like, okay, this is a pretty interesting story. So we end up publishing a story that this very sketchy seeming company Evolve actually has this amazing product and this growing business.

And I don't know what the exact details. You wrote a Polish article about a company that hadn't reported earnings in a while. Correct. In a really long time. And then... To be clear. These guys are crazy. The kind of company, Selsai, does it.

doesn't even write about. They just suspend coverage. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's an information vacuum and we realize, oh, shit, this is a real business. And the thing goes down to like two bucks, 220 or something. And we also tried to figure out when they would restate earnings. And that involves a guy with a bald spot who you could see from a garage across the street, which is kind of neither here nor there. But it became clear that they were working on weekends and that seemed like a good sign. You saw like an accountant coming and going from their headquarters. Correct. I don't want to creep anybody out.

It's like a stakeout, though. I don't want to creep anybody up, but that's reporting. We were trying to figure out what's actually going on with this company. We were also doing open source intelligence about where these devices were all over the country, tracking each time a school signed up. It puts some new ones that the interest. So you bought the stock? So the story disclosed that Hunterbrook Capital was long the stock. They restate their financials.

Turns out that they did have an accounting error, but it was de minimis. Like $4 million. Stock had lost hundreds of millions of dollars in market cap. So did they overreact? No, they needed to clean house. They had accounting issues. They had management issues. They had this great technology, great business that was not being properly appreciated.

They did need to do a turnaround. Okay. But they restate their financials. They release these growth numbers, which are incredible. They settle with the FTC. The SEC wraps up this investigation and evolve thrives from there. Okay. So they get in compliance.

They're reporting numbers again. Sell side resumes coverage. What do the stock do? It went up to. something like eight and a half bucks last year? So two to eight. Amazing story. Yeah. And then by the way, Evolve now. That was a while ago. You could have read the article on the website. I could have invested till. But listen to this. This is kind of fun because just it ties into everything you're talking about. Evolve's pretty interesting again as a story to me and can't comment on ongoing reporting obviously.

But it's gotten caught up in the software sell off because Axon, you know, the big security company has sold off. And Evolve just has a lot of flows with Axon and is down. Bonson is Tazer. Even though there's totally different businesses. Chris, Axon does tasers and it does body cams and all that stuff. Right. Anyway, Evolve is obviously not a software company. It's hardware in the world in these security systems.

But it's in all of these same baskets. Right. How would AI disrupt a physical metal detector? In fact, they use AI to make the detection better. Right, right, right. Which is just a fun situation because the market's again sort of indiscriminately selling this name. And I think a lot of what's going to happen over time is it's going to become clear of people that this selling is automatic.

No, don't do it. Rob was in play. No, no, no, no, no. But it's pretty funny. All right. Let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, what's, I don't this is. Let's talk about Phil Michelson. So what was it, the Eric Adams, he's just made a dumb deal for the city, or he made a good

deal? That was the prior management team. They had all kinds of weird things going on. All right. But the new management team seems solid. All right, let's do another one. Why is Phil Mickelson pump again energy stock? It's such a good question, isn't it?

I still haven't figured out the exact answer to that question. I will say that Phil Mickelson did tweet that he was on the board of a different company with the CEO of the energy stock. Then he deleted that tweet because I think... Well, wait a, start from the beginning. Sable Offshore. What is this?

I'll tell you about Sable Offshore. Okay. Nathaniel alluded to it earlier. Sable Offshore is kind of a very exciting and crazy premise for a company. Here's what it is. There was a pipeline in California and it led to one of the biggest oil spills

in American history. and Exxon took over that pipeline and spent seven years trying to get it online. And Exxon ran into the gauntlet of California politics in oil and gas, trying to restart a pipeline in a place that's obviously very hostile to oil and gas in general.

And particularly if your pipeline led to this giant spill. Was already a problematic piece of infrastructure. So then there's this guy named Jim Flores, better known as Big Jim Flores, on account of his size. He makes a deal with Exxon. Exxon doesn't want to have to retire.

this pipeline. It costs billions and billions of dollars to get rid of the project. So Big Jim says, give me a huge loan. He gets a massive loan from Exxon. I'll take it over. And let's fucking restart this thing.

And if it works, what does Exxon get out of this? Exxon doesn't have to retire the pipeline. They probably get bought out of the loan. Okay. And so they get to walk away without having to retire. Who is Big Jim Flores, though,

to even have the ability to get Exxon to say yes? He's had kind of a wild up and down career in oil and gas. Worked at Freeport McMorrin. The bit of the hell. razor. There were some wins, some losses. All right. I think he probably

watches there will be blood aspirationally. Okay, got it. Got it. And his past oil and gas company went bankrupt. Also, Sable in the name, he's always been trying to do basically the same scheme. And so it's this big sort of quixotic mission to restart this project. And Phil Mickelson

gets really excited about it. And we wrote about the company in 2024, when they said they were going to be online in October of 2024. after having originally when they were spacking saying they were going to be online at the beginning of 2024. And we wrote a story about all of the various regulatory hurdles and we were like, everyone should know. There's two red flags, A, celebrity, B, former spec.

Correct, correct. Though at that time, Phil Mickelson wasn't involved. And so they said, we're going to be live in October. And we said there's no way you're going to be live in October. Anyway, delay it from October to November, November to the new year. 2025, they start getting excitement and then Phil Mickelson starts tweeting about this company.

And everyone's saying, if this thing's live, it's going to just print money. It's going to print oil. It's going to be this incredible, incredible story. Pump oil, print money. Anyway, we keep digging in. And it becomes clear to us that the company is still not telling the truth to anybody. And eventually, Sable hit $30.

And they kept hitting these California regulatory hurdles. So then it'd fall to 25, then it'd fall to 18. And then eventually it falls to like $10. And at this point, people are pretty mad at Phil Mickelson. Right? Because he like became the face of this for the investors. He was the face of this thing, telling everyone that they should buy it. And so that's when people started leaking me their chats with Phil Mickelson,

including a group chat that Phil Mickelson was in, where everyone was pumping the stock, but they were also saying things like Phil said this in one of the messages, just got off the phone with Jim, the CEO. There's going to be an announcement later today. Oh, that's a no-no. They don't like that. Regulators don't like that.

You're not really supposed to be saying that. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not casting aspersions on anybody. But we had those group chat messages. And then we had this audio recording of the CEO of the company talking to investors. By the way, Sable called this audio recording AI in its first response to it. And then it became clear it was true. But you can imagine that becoming a better excuse going forward. Kind of scary from a journalistic perspective. And in the call, Sable basically admits it needs to do a big capital raise, which it hadn't told the market it needed to do. Anyway, we published that story on Phil Nicholson's messages and on the fact that Sable needed to do. do a raise. And pretty quickly, everything starts spiraling for Sable. And last week,

they just disclosed publicly that they received subpoenas from both the SEC and SDNY related to Hunterbrook's articles. So we'll see how the story turns out. Now, will your, will your journalist get called in as like a witness potentially? Who knows? You have to imagine how bad you have to mess up as an oil and gas company in a fight with Cal California for the current DOJ to send you a subpoena. Especially given that the guy doing the, I will just call it, positive information sharing about the company, was a golfer. I mean, I didn't have the Trump administration subpoenaing a golfer who's trying to help out an oil and gas company.

That's how bad the facts were here. So, guys, what would you say to the listeners who are picking their own stocks, building, because these are like very off the beaten path types of stocks. So I would imagine they're not widely held by retail until they start to pump, right? And I think retail investors intuitively understand a stock that goes from like five to 30, either they have done something technologically remarkable or there's some bullshit. Like I think people get it, but they still want to sort of be involved and be along for the ride. what would you tell people

about just the current climate and how careful they need to be about being involved in those types of situations? I wouldn't want to give anyone specific advice. I'll be clear. You know, not providing investment advice, not providing legal advice. We hope people do their own research

and we hope that Hunterbrook media is an open source. Here's what I say on just a very human level. If you're looking at your left and your right and the guy you're playing your basketball game with is checking his crypto app. Yeah. Which happens to me all the time. Yeah.

Or you start hearing from your cousin that's really time to buy silver. Yeah. My cousin's actually a very smart investor. I want to be clear this was one. No, there's the other cousin. This is the other cousin. All of them wanted to buy silver.

That's right. But if you start hearing those things, people in your life, and it seems like shit, it's so easy. Everyone's making so much money buying this stuff. I would just say take a breath. Yeah.

And it's probably not that easy. My brother-in-law asked me about Akla right there. Perfect. Yes. It's very helpful. helpful if you have some people in. Michael said, I said, I said I'm all in. You didn't hear this from me, but I got the nod. You said that was your cell signal? I got that. I got the nod. Of course I gave him sober advice like you gentlemen would. Totally, totally. What's your, what's your

number one contra? Like, you see something happening and you're like, uh-oh. So I'm going to go the other way. I am of the opinion right now that almost everybody knows almost everything. So there's nothing that I would see publicly. But when my brother-in-law is asking me about a stock and he's an He's a musician. He's an artist. It just means that it's already gone up a lot. It doesn't mean that it's a bad investment. He's the last person to know.

Right, right. And we all have something like that in our life. For sure. So where are we going next with the media company, the fund, or both? Well, we're always on the hunt for news stories. So I won't share any advice with the audience, but we would certainly love to hear from the audience. Yeah, ideas at hunterbrook.com. The website is with no vowels.

H&TR.BR.K. Let's not gloss over that. So ideas at hunterbrook.com. Correct. And if you own the domain name Hunterbrook spelled out.com, please call me back. I've been trying for like two years. But ideas at Hunterbrook.com, anything you think is just off about the world. Like you think there's some idea you're really excited about you think people don't understand it.

Or there's something that you think seems too good to be true. John is going to email you guys four times a week. Just so you know, the reach of the show is really big. To be clear, you guys are not looking for such and such stock is overvalued. on next year's earnings. Definitely not. It has to be a real story. And by the way, to be clear,

compliance reads through all of our emails. Right. So Fitts, our general counsel, is going to have a very long day if you send me bad ideas. Send me your good ideas. No, you guys are looking for bullshit. Like, this,

there's something going on here. Correct. Or uncovered gems. I think every great trade. On this podcast, we're going to get 10,000 emails. No, but so I love, I thought the... Josh's going to cut this out of that episode.

I'm actually scared for you. The volume of email. We're going to have Claude Code read all the emails. The story about. The story about. the technology with the booths is such a, it's such a cool one. What gets you guys more excited? Is it ideas like that where people have discarded the company for illegitimate reasons or for

reasons that are overblown? Or this is total bullshit. I'd love to tell you that I feel equally excited about both. It's the bullshit, right? The truth is it's really fun to call out bullshit. And it does feel like a big part of the mission for journalism. But really the excitement around a story is almost always measured in the delta between other people's understanding of it and mine. Like that feeling of like you have a secret, that's the best feeling. Like I figured something out about the world people didn't understand. Let's talk about another long that you guys had. I don't know how much you could say, but the sphere.

So I remember like a year ago, people, somebody, I find the mind was like, do you see how much money they're losing? So how do you look at a story like that and look past the current financials? So I'll say we didn't get to publish that story. To be clear, a sphere is up like 4X in the last year or something. So here's the issue with fear. I hate James Dolan. I'm a huge Knicks fan. I remember the Eddie.

You might treat. No, no, no. He's doing good now. Yeah, no. Now you love James Dol. You want to be invited to the game. I definitely don't want to alienate James Dolan if he's a listener to this podcast. But what I'll say is, you hate him.

You will never be allowed to be allowed to play. The Eddie Curry trade was a childhood trauma. It's in the past. He's clearly over. He's clearly over. And so anyway, we start figuring out. We have some data. People sent us that the Wizard of Oz.

show just worked. It's kind of like a clinical trial. Like, we weren't sure if this IP thing was going to work. And then everybody started coming to Sphere for it. And they were making so much money on the down days, the days where there weren't concerts. Anyway, because I- A newsroom source had come up with a really clever way to figure out, based on online information, basically exactly what Sphere's sales were before maybe even the company itself really knew what those sales were. And that was clearly a huge edge. And that's the kind of thing folks often will just send to the newsroom because they think it's a really interesting story. Okay. So in year one, the sphere, basically, they have like dead and co. They have you two and they have the Eagles.

But it's unclear like, okay, what do you do the other 250 nights a year? And then they have this sort of futuristic science documentary, which I went and saw too. I'm so, I'm so into the sphere, by the way. So I saw that one too and I liked it. But Then it's like, all right, it's a novelty. You went, you saw you two. Are you going back? And then the Wizard of Oz thing, it's a revelation. It's like, wait a minute, they could take an 80-year-old movie.

They could do some magic with the sound and the environment and the sphere, put it back out and sell more tickets than a brand new blockbuster film. And that's... And they can go it day after day after day. And think of all of the possibilities. Think of your hundred favorite movies ever. How much would you love to go see it at the sphere? reimagined. It's unbelievable. And by the way, I just want to be clear, the reason I mentioned

the Nix was not personal. It was that I put it as kind of a low priority in the newsroom. We didn't rush out the story because I was like, just dispositionally disinclined to believe that Jim Dolan had figured out how to get people to a live event in a way nobody else had. So anyway, Hunterberg Capital, thankfully, had built a bit of a position based on this. But Bloomberg ended up scooping us on that story. They published the story about the Blockbuster. But you made the money. So you didn't get the credit for the story, but you made the money. Yeah, I want to credit Bloomberg for that particular story. Okay.

They did have it. All right. Guys, do you have fun on the show today? This is the best. Thank you guys for having us. All right. So we're going to have a brief intermission and then we come back and do another hour and a half. I love what you guys are doing.

I think it's one of the coolest stories. Thanks for having us. I love listening to you really cool. And I'm not afraid for you anymore. I actually think that people are going to now start to imitate what you're doing because it works. It's explicable. It seems like you're having fun. Oh, my God.

We're having the most fun. And people, journalists, are getting paid. And I mean, who doesn't... I have to say, I wouldn't promise this every year, but journalists got bonuses last year at home. There's not a thing that even exists.

So, thank you guys. I'm flattered. Do you think people are going to... I think they're going to try. All right, they are. I'm not saying they can. I have to say, I actually hope that they do because there's a lot more talented journalists

out there than there are jobs for them. And so if there were 10 Hunter Brooks, what an amazing thing that would be. Can I ask you one last thing? Sure. Who is like the coolest, most unexpected? inbound phone call,

somebody saying, like, I see what you guys are doing and I wanted to let you know. Did you have one of those yet? I have to say, it was pretty fun that after our big healthcare investigation, Mark Cuban started sharing our stories

far and wild, came on our podcast and thought that we told a story in the healthcare industry that most people had overlooked. That's cool. That was pretty fun. Talk about someone who knows

how to own a basket. Yes, shout to cubes. All right. We want to tell people, so we gave them the email address. What's the, is the URL. Where can people go to learn more and read your stories? People should go to newsletter.

Dot h, N-T-R-B-R-K.com. Newsletter. Dot H-N-T-R-K. So the vowels cost extra? I'm telling you, I can't get this guy to respond to my email. We'll put the link in the description of the show. But please subscribe to the newsletter. You can also obviously check out our website, Hunterbrook.com, follow us on social media. All this stuff people are supposed to say at the end of podcast.

That's right. Thank you guys. All right. All right. Follow Nathaniel and Sam and read about Hunterbrook. Guys, thank you so much for listening. We appreciate you. We will see you.

We'll see you next time. Thank you. I feel good about that? Do you want to do a one more time? Good?