2025 Playbook Live Call With 3 Fund Managers

Then it would you be on there? I'd fight a thousand guys, live to die a thousand lives. Oh, oh, I'd find another way to make me smarter just so I could understand. Just so I could understand. I'd find a way to forgive you. I'd fight 1,000 guys, live to die 1,000 lives. Oh, oh, I'd find another way to make me smarter, just so I could understand. I'll find what you're looking for, lead you away, just so I could understand. What it takes to be so good. What it takes to be so good.

All right.

Welcome on everybody. People, we are live today. We're talking 3 fund managers. And their outlooks for 2025. So welcome on. We are live today. This is March 25th. I'll say the date and time so you guys know this is a live stream. We've got some amazing people coming on in just a few minutes. Uh, welcome in, you guys. Type in the chat where you're calling in from. Uh, people from Boston, Preston, Colorado, New Zealand. That's pretty far away. Tel Aviv, Israel, Las Vegas, Houston, San Diego, New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles, Atlanta. I love it. Utah, Chicago. Welcome in. We got our Funnel Launch community, the Wall Street Rebels, out today. So welcome in today. We've got a great call for y'all. We're going to dive right in and just get moving. If people are late, they're late and they can figure it out later. They can watch the replay later. So today, this is a fun call. We've done this in the past. This is one of our most highly reviewed calls where we would talk what is going on right now, what is happening in the world. Today we're going to talk about all sorts of stuff. Actually, I'm going to pull my screen up here. Let's see if it'll work. Let's go like this. Okay. Give me a— let's see, was the computer working? Give me a slide here. Let me know if you guys can see this on Online here, so give us a sec. So we're going to talk about Trump. We're going to talk about tariffs, things that are hitting April second, what's moving in the world, and three fund managers' outlooks for how they're adjusting their portfolios going forward on today's call. I hope that this will maybe give you a new sense of the world about how people who are managing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars are looking at the world right now, and what portfolio changes they are making. And you know. It's interesting to hear people that have money in the market because they're actually, they're not just talking with their mouth. They're actually placing real-world bets on what the market could or could not be moving. So, um, today I'm gonna invite you guys lock in with me, be right here, put away the email, put away the social media. Come, we're going to bring on and we're going to actually do some Q&A. So we've got a live today. Let me see if I can, uh, share my screen in a different way here. Let me try.

All right.

Can you guys see that? Okay. Boom, there it is. Okay, so, uh, 3 fund managers' outlook on 2025. So the few people we got coming on today, number one, we got Mr. John Pennington, my dad. You guys know, uh, probably if you've seen our stuff before, you've seen him in the past. John Pennington, co-founder of a deca-billion-dollar family of funds, now since retired. They have IPO'd on the New York Stock Exchange. Incredible person, wrote the book Dollars, Gold, and Bitcoin. Here's the book if you guys haven't seen it. He's going to come on in just a few minutes and talk about a lot about macro Economics, what he's seeing in the world. This book right here talks very in depth about the movement right now. We're going to talk more specifically about the movement of gold, Bitcoin, and dollars around the world and see what his update is, which should be pretty fun. So give me a give me a little bit of some love for John Pentey's coming on a few minutes. Next up, we're going to have Jacques Bazinet. Jacques is a real estate developer and has done incredible work in the real estate industry thirty-seven years. Uh, in this industry, Jacques has done hundreds of millions of dollars of deals. Right now, he is raising a $200 million fund, and he's actually a portfolio fund out of Fund Launch Partners. You're going to love Jacques. He'll be live in here in a few minutes as well, talking all about how the world right now is shifting to affect real estate. And then finally, we're going to bring on Thomas Wilkinson. If you guys know Thomas Wilkinson, this is in venture capital. He, uh, he runs All In Ventures. Right now, they're raising a $20 million fund. I believe they've raised about $12 million of that $20 million. He's done 24 venture deals. With roughly a 4x MOIC. So, that's a 4x return on those across the board, across 24 deals, which is phenomenal returns as a venture capitalist. So, some of you guys that are in different industries, you can hear from this. Now, before we dive in, I want to hear about you guys in the chat real quick. Type in if you can. I know a lot of you are launching funds or in different industries. Type in what industry you are in. So, type in, you know, if you're in real estate, type in real estate. Hedge funds, that'd be like trading, private equity, venture capital, you're buying businesses or investing into businesses, or maybe you're just getting started. That's totally fine. Just say, hey, I'm just getting started. I'm here to learn. Type that in the chat for me. Type in crypto or Bitcoin. I currently run a crypto investment fund. We'll talk about it in a second. It should be pretty fun.

Okay.

We got some good people on here. Water. Man, this is great. We got a good group on today. This is awesome. So, this is the plan. We got these 3 people coming on in a few minutes to talk about their, again, their outlooks for 2025. My hope today Is that by the end, you have a better sense of where the world is moving, what's going on for people that are making real-world bets in the industry. Does that sound like a good plan for today? Yeah. Now, I always ask for participation in the chat. Thank you guys for helping me out. I do this because it's, number one, it just is more fun to have real live people with you. Number two, though, psychologists tell us if you show up to a call like this today and you just sit there and listen, you will remember about 0% of this long term. If you show up and you take notes, so, and I go up to events, I'm always taking notes. If you take notes, you will remember about 2% to 5% long-term. Now, if you show up to an event and you take notes, but you also use your body, your voice, you participate, that number jumps to 12% to 15% you will remember long-term. So, I'm going to ask you to type stuff in the chat. I'm going to ask you to participate. I'm asking you to be a good person, by the way, in the chat. If you type in weird stuff or drop in link stuff, we will kick you out of the chat. Okay? There's a no jerks policy. We are a tight-knit community of fund managers trying to go and take over the world as the Wall Street rebels. So, I'm going to ask you to be engaged, be here with us, ask good questions to our— we're live for a reason. So, you can ask questions. I'm going to bring this on. I have a monitor right here. I can see all of your questions coming in live so we can talk directly to y'all. Does that sound good? Okay. That's the plan. Now, briefly, real quick, if you don't know who I am or if you've been on my stuff before, this call is not about me, but I'll give you a quick sense of who I am and why I have somewhat authority to talk in this space. So I've launched a number of different businesses and funds. I launched Blackbridge Holdings out of college. A lot of you know my story. I started 6 different businesses in my first 2 years of college. I finally went to my dad. My dad taught me about funds. I launched this fund out of college, Blackbridge Holdings. We ran our first group investor, got a 64% return. We did 219 deals the next 3 years. And actually, I sold that fund to a competitor. We had someone come buy us out, which is pretty awesome. I also run Ugly Unicorn right here. This is a crypto hedge fund. We can talk about all my— where's my crypto people in the chat? Anybody crypto person? Yeah, we're not— anyway, most crypto people are kind of quiet right now because it's got— crypto's been down pretty bad, but it's coming back. We've been buying a lot during this dip, and they will all be crying here that they didn't buy in a few months. We— anyways, we can talk about crypto volatility right now. This is a short-term drop. We believe we're still in this market cycle right now, these 4-year cycles we're in for crypto. We're all in. This is a crypto hedge fund. We're a fundamentally driven fund. We manage roughly $25 million. There are some of our returns. Me and Dan Young run this fund currently. Now, over the last few years, we've had a number of people ask myself, my dad, my brother is also an investment funds attorney. They asked us, how do you guys, you know, do funds? How are funds put together? How do you guys like run and do these things? And we're in Utah, for crying out loud. Like we didn't go to Wall Street. We didn't work on, you know, we didn't go to some Ivy League school. How did a couple of, you know, somewhat regular people in Utah, of all places, figure out this game of investment funds? And so, we started a couple of years ago, we started to put together some videos online. And I'd ran my funds in college. My brother was an investment funds attorney. My dad had run his huge funds. And we started to put these videos together. And, you know, has anybody ever made videos before of themselves? It's, first off, it's terribly hard. And secondly, like, it's not fun. Like, I don't like being on social media. I don't. I do it because I think it helps spread our mission out to the world. And the mission we found was there was a lot of people out there, like a lot of you on this call, that were begging for this information of what happens in the world of high finance. How do these multibillion-dollar funds run? How do you conglomerate, you know, $150 million together to go and buy a building? And what do you do with that? How do these firms, these big private equity firms, go and buy huge companies and take them public and take them private? And How does this whole thing work? So, we started to make videos about this online. Now, if you've ever made videos before, we made a little course. You hope maybe like 50 people or 100 people or 200 people take your course, right? Has anybody done this before? Crazy enough, for the last few years, we've had, and I'll share my screen again, over 100,000 people take one of our programs at Fund Launch. We have free training. Our mission at Fund Launch is to democratize Wall Street, to make high finance This world of private equity, hedge funds, venture capital funds accessible to all. That is our mission statement. So we have 100,000 plus. Anybody taken? Type a yes in our chat if you've taken one of our courses online. We have a free course on funds. Furthermore, we also have a new a new product we put out called Alt Street, which is a very very cool product. I'll actually show you guys real briefly. Anybody been in Alt Street yet? Alt Street is so dang cool. It's a fully free platform. We went and interviewed some of the top fund managers on earth, and we had people from MasterClass come. We custom built a full platform. You can come and see. This is actually my dad's class right here that popped up. You can come and learn from these incredible experts on fund management for free. Okay? Totally for free. It's allstreet.com or allstreet.org. You can come watch. This is my dad speaking. We have other people. All these people run, you know, $100 million or billion-dollar funds. You have Neil Bawa talking here. Some incredible classes. All on this totally for free. There's Lincoln talking about GP stakes funds, all very high-quality content that you guys can go and check out. Again, our mission is to democratize Wall Street. That's why I do these webinars, that's why I do these calls, etc. Now from there, so I'm coming back here. So Fund Launch now. With Fund Launch, we do a lot of free stuff to democratize Wall Street. We've also helped people as they grow up, they go, can you help me more? So we built an incubator called Black Card. Anybody in Black Card? Type in Black Card if you guys are in our Black Card group. We've had over 1,200 people join Black Card. It's an incubator to help people go and launch funds. What we do in Black Card is we have 8 different law firms. We have 15 coaches. We have pitch deck designers. We have a full-built Black Card. I'll show more in a minute to help incubate these funds. We've launched over 300 funds in the last few years out of Black Card. It's been phenomenal. And now finally, to complete this story, we have actually started to invest in these funds over here with Fund Launch Partners. So, Fund Launch Partners, is a GP stakes fund where we're looking at the best and brightest groups out of Black Card and we're writing checks into those groups. Last year, get this, we looked at 900 funds that applied to work with us at Fund Launch Partners. We wrote 6 checks for about commitments of about $1 million each for a commitment into their funds. We just, we're just closing it this week. We've, we believe our subscriptions are coming in the next 2 days. We believe we're oversubscribing this fund at $30 million. We got $32.5 million of LOIs in, which is pretty cool. So, The reason I share this, I am doing this right now. I am in like, I'm in the game. I run 2 funds actively right now. I help people run funds. A lot of the people, Tom and Jacques, are actually members of Fund Launch Partners. Of the 900 funds, we picked 6. You're hearing from 2 of them today. These are phenomenal funds. You guys can see and hear what these fund managers are doing. Okay. This is me and Mason, my co-founder. You know, you guys can probably see us on social media and stuff. Finally, though, I'll share this. This is my beautiful wife. We just had a baby and my son Jonah. And some of you guys see me post online. I think family is it. It is what this is for. You got to raise a great family. So welcome. That's a little about me and what we're talking about today. So with that intro, y'all ready to get going? I'm going to talk fast. We're going to go quick and we're going to make this thing happen. And we had a new baby. Thank you guys. Congrats. Her name is Paris Pennington. We went with the double P. Hopefully, she doesn't get teased in school like PP. Anyways. We thought Paris Pennington was a cool name, but we're like, man, the initials are PP. So I don't know. Hopefully, hopefully your kids don't tease my kids, but we'll roll with it.

All right.

You guys ready to get going? Let's get it. Okay. Type a yes in the chat. Let's talk. Give me a little bit of love. Thanks for, thanks for helping me give me a little intro here. Once the intro is done, though, we're going to start moving. All right. So today, let's talk about the here and now. We have some crazy stuff going on in the world right now. So let's talk about it from a Market's perspective about what is hitting right now. Sound good? Okay, I'm gonna go fast. Trump tariffs, Doge and Fed rates. What is happening literally like this week? Do you guys know what's happening April 2nd? Maybe you follow this. Maybe you haven't. April 2nd is a huge day. That is a week from—is it a week from tomorrow? Week from tomorrow is a massive day for the world and for—I mean, this is something that we have not seen. The tariffs are going to affect. We're gonna talk about this in a second. Now, before I get into that, Fed rates. So the Fed did not cut rates a few days ago. They— this is the Fed. If you guys never use this cool, very cool tool, CME FedWatch tool, go look that up. This shows you what the market is pricing in for rate cuts. A lot of people the last few weeks were like, oh, they're going to cut rates. They— the market said it was previously 99% of no rate cut. Now we're looking forward. This is the May 7th meeting, 88% chance of no cut. Cut, at least what the market derivative traders are saying. Okay. June, we're saying a 58% chance of a 0.25% cut. And you can kind of see the distribution down here of what the market is pricing in. Now, this changes every single day, but this is the market rate and changes. Okay. So down here, let me keep going. Let's see. Can it work? So the Fed adjusted a lot of their projections previously. They were going to cut rates More, at least projected more. And they've now kind of come back on those projections. See their dot plot they released a few days ago. So we will see. Okay. This happened just a few days ago. Now, rate cuts affect every part of society, right? Or rate increases, right? Rate— the Fed funds rate affects car loans, auto loans, mortgage rates, affects business debt, variable rate, like just all across the board. Okay. Trump that night says this: The Fed would be much better off cutting rates as U.S. tariffs start to transition. Ease their way into the economy. Do the right thing. April second is Liberation Day in America. Okay, so what is April second? What is happening on April second? In the chat, someone already said tariffs, right? Tariffs are hitting. If you heard the State of the Union address, Trump is putting in tariffs and they're all hitting April. He said, "I'm not doing April first because I'm superstitious." If you guys watch that, I'm not. I'm not a little sis. I'm. I'm not a little sisstitious. I'm. I'm superstitious. Okay, he's superstitious. about April 1st. He's doing April 2nd, Liberation Day. So what is actually happening April 2nd? Let's break it down for us. So these are the tariffs that plan to hit. And Trump, we've had a few kind of tariffs the last few months. Mexico, Canada, they folded very quickly. Mexico, I think, was like 12 hours. Canada was like 16 hours. They somewhat resolved, hopped on the phone and they resolved. Now Trump has, he's given them a month, month and a half warning. Every country on earth, he said, we are putting in reciprocal tariffs April 2nd. So I did a bunch of research last week. I did a huge research study. What do these tariffs mean? We've really never seen this much economic warfare at once. So what will this mean? Now, no one really knows. But let me give you the data. Isn't it cool if I give you guys the data on what's actually happening April 2nd? And then we can make some inferences and ask some of these fund managers what's going on. So. If you— let me go back in history a little bit. Previously, like currently right now, the average tariffs for the United States is 1.5%. If they do all these reciprocal tariffs, they will move to an average of 4.8%. Okay, so that's where the U.S. currently is as global tariffs right now. Before the 1900s, tariffs were the number one way that we created revenue as a country. Now, since then, World War II, we couldn't, you know, we couldn't do tariffs much, but then we moved to a more tax-based system over this last century. So Trump's saying we can go back, make, you know, make America great again. He wants to put on reciprocal tariffs so that other countries either pay or lower their tariffs. Now, Trump keeps saying we're getting ripped off by other countries, right? So what does that mean? Um, and then furthermore, we're going to talk about what these reciprocal tariffs are. He's, he said for, you know, Canada and Mexico, tariffs would go into effect to help with border, and he's actually just of taking these away. He said, really, April 2nd is all about reciprocal tariffs. So, let me give you an example of a few of these tariffs. This is what India currently charges tariffs on us, and they've done this for years. 50% tariff on motorcycles. So, if we have a Harley-Davidson or other motorcycle developed in the United States, 50% tariff. 150% on whiskey and alcohol. So, you know, Anheuser-Busch, all that kind of stuff.

OK?

150%. 20% to 70% on almonds and apples. This is what India currently charges us. Again, if you remember, our average tariff is 1.5%. To put it in perspective, this is what India charges us. This is what Europe charges us. 10% on automobiles, 25% on whiskey, 25% on jeans, 25% on cranberries and orange juice. So, again, and our tariff on them is 2.5% on automobiles. So, if we make a Ford in the United States, we send it to Europe, it's a 2.5% tariff. If they make an automobile— excuse me, opposite. Excuse me. But if they have a Mercedes they make in Europe and they send it to us, 2.5% tariff. If we send a Ford to them, 10% tariff, 5 times bigger than what we charge them. OK? This is what Trump means by we're getting ripped off. China to the U.S., this is what China charges us. 25% on soybeans, 72% on pork products. 72%. 25% on automobiles, 25% on LNG, 25% on coal. OK? I'm just giving you the data here. You guys can inference what you want. Canada, the U.S., Canada charges 270% on dairy products, which is absurd for a tariff. 25% on U.S. steel and aluminum, 10% to 25% on prepared foods and chocolate. This is what's currently been going on for years. OK? Mexico to the U.S., 10% to 25% agricultural goods, 15% to 25% industrial goods. Turkey, to give you another example, I could have gotten more countries, but Turkey, 120% on automobiles. There's a reason you really don't see Fords or Jeeps around the world. You really only see them in the United States or North America because tariffs are so large on our, just one example, automotive industry. They're huge, these tariffs on automobiles. Now, listening to the Commerce Secretary, he's like, Trump's playing Art of the Deal here. The plan is either we will just match your— OK, you put $270 on us, we'll put $270 on you. And you can either keep the tariff or you can lower the tariff. And if you lower your tariff, we'll lower our tariff. Seems somewhat reasonable, right, from the United States perspective? The hope is there's 2 outcomes. Either the tariffs stay in effect and we generate more revenue. Or they lower their tariffs. We have more free trade. The United States is the customer of the world. I was doing all this research as well. The United States, to put it in perspective against China, okay? We consume about 3— so we consume about $30 trillion a year. China consumes about $10 trillion a year. Furthermore, we have China— sorry, China has 3 times more people than the United States. They have about 900 billion. We have about 300— excuse me, 900 million. We have about 300 million. Okay? So, per capita, per person, we, an American, consumes about 9 times a Chinese person right now. We are the consumer of the world. Everyone sells to us. We give them relatively no tariffs, and then they tariff us. Right? So this is what the again I'm not I'm not telling you who to vote for, what to think. I'm just telling you what is the what the Trump administration is thinking here. Okay, this is their plan. All right. So that's on the tariff side of things. Is making sense? Is this helpful at all? Give me like a yes. This is making sense. Okay. Give you a few sense of tariffs that are hitting. These are all going to affect next Tuesday. Whether you like them or not, these are hitting next Tuesday. Now again, Canada folded in like twelve hours. Mexico unfolded in like sixteen hours. Okay. Will these countries fold quickly? Probably, maybe even before April 2nd, right? This is— you're putting, whether you love him or hate him, Trump is, you could argue, the best negotiator on Earth with the best hand on Earth, right? Like, the United States country is the greatest, most powerful, most influential country on Earth, and you give one of the strongest negotiators ever with the greatest hand on Earth, it's, it's probably going to go one-sided. So we'll see. Now, furthermore, with the Trump plan, what's happening? You have the Doge cuts, okay? Their current plan is to cut to get to a 2% deficit to GDP ratio. So I'm kind of shifting gears here. You guys cool? You guys following along? So if you look at historical trends here, you see back to 2000, you can see deficit percent to GDP. It jumped to 9.8%. 2009, it came back down. We're floating around 6 to 8% here on deficit to GDP ratio. You can look at another one. It's debt to GDP ratio. We're well over at 120%. They want to cut that back down and maybe get to a surplus here. Okay. So you have dovish cuts. This has been very popular news. I won't go this again. But cutting out— again, it's not Department of Ending the Government, it's Department of Government Efficiency. Can we cut out things that are inefficient anymore? Um, for example, they found 36,000 Adobe Creative Cloud accounts that weren't being used. Stuff like this, stuff that's just been forgot about and not used. Okay, we'll see how this plays out with Elon, but the plan is to cut government spending. Uh, Ray Dalio here, he just published a huge paper You guys have seen his books. One of the most successful fund managers of all time. He says, we— he goes, I believe the United States, we're in this long-term debt cycle. We are on life support right now. We need to cut anywhere from $800 billion to $2 trillion right now. Like not later, like now. If we don't, we may spiral into this, what they call a debt spiral, and our dollar and currency may never recover. Okay? This is one of the most influential fund managers of all time, Ray Dalio, ran Bridgewater. Go look him up. He's been on a press tour right now, like, this needs to happen now, which is interesting that you have Doge, the Trump team coming in to cut drastically, to get back down, maybe even get to a surplus, maybe back to the Bill Clinton era in the '90s. We actually had a government surplus. I love this tweet. I thought it was pretty funny. Only Trump can make liberals hate electric cars. I thought this was hilarious. Whether you love it or hate it, I just thought that was pretty funny. Now I'm going to say this. I'm going to pause for a second. I don't care who you voted for. Okay? I don't care who I voted for. I'm just telling you what the plan is right now. Whether you love Trump or hate Trump or whatever, I don't care. And furthermore, I've had leaders get elected that I have not voted for previously. I'll say straight up, I did not vote for Joe Biden in 2020. Okay? I did not. However, I rooted for the guy. I was like, when Biden got in and put his— I'm like, dude, okay, go crush it. Like, I want Biden to succeed. I was like, I want Biden to crush it. I live in America. I want his plan to work. I want us to get out. At the time, it was like COVID and all these other things. Like, I'm rooting for the guy. Okay? Same with Trump. I'm rooting for the plan. Like, whoever's in power, like, I'm rooting for them. Now, when the next election season comes around, yeah, we can vote and make our, you know, make our voices heard. But at the time, I'm rooting for the guy. Okay, now this is the other side of the thing. So we're looking to cut. This is Howard Lutnick. He— his plan, he's the Secretary of Commerce, is to raise a trillion. Okay, he wants to do that through a few ways. Tariff other countries, which we just talked about. They've announced a $5 million gold card. Again, they're trying— so we're trying to cut a trillion and raise a trillion here. Can we do that to balance the budget? They've issued this $5 million gold card he announced last week. They announced this, by the way. So, 5 million, it's a visa you can buy and you get, you know, essentially citizenship in the United States. They sold 1,000 of them the first day. That generated $5 billion in revenue in one day. Isn't that crazy? Okay? They said if they sell, they believe 28 million people on Earth could buy one of these. Okay. If they sell roughly 6 million of them, they could pay off the entire $36 trillion debt just with these gold cards. They sold 1,000 of them in one day. Isn't that wild? Okay, we'll see. Okay. Again, I'm rooting for the guy. I'm hoping it works. I'm hoping the plan works. They want to unlock natural, you know, export domestic natural minerals and encourage foreign investment in the United States. Okay? This is so far, this is what they've had for foreign investment in the United States. You can see UAE has committed $1.4 trillion, Saudi Arabia $600 billion, $20 billion by Hyundai, $500 billion by Apple. You can see the list down here. These are already in the first month what countries and/or companies have committed to investment in the United States. Isn't that kind of cool? Okay? So again, I'm coming down here. If we can cut a— this is the plan. They cut $1 trillion from Elon. They raise $1 trillion from Howard Lutnick to hopefully balance this huge deficit that we have of this $2 trillion change in deficit. Now, if you listen to Elon, he's like, we're going to get to $2 trillion. This guy's like, I'm going to get to $2 trillion. Maybe it's $4 trillion. But the current plan is to get to $1 trillion of cut and $1 trillion raised. OK? Now, is this making sense? You guys following along? Feeling good? Is this good? Should I keep going? Am I triggering too many people in here? I think, I mean, I'm rooting for the guy. I'm rooting for whoever's in office. I'm like, please, like, I hope your plan works because, man, most people are decently smart. Hopefully, we can make this thing happen. Now, let me share a couple problems or headwinds that they are running into right now. We have, this is Scott Bessinette, the new Treasury Secretary, former hedge fund manager. Something really cool. They are, I mean, in my opinion, bringing in some of the greatest entrepreneurs. and people on earth. Now, you might think they're evil or bad, whatever, but you can't argue. I mean, Elon Musk is the greatest entrepreneur of our generation, maybe ever. I mean, absolutely phenomenal. Howard Lutnick has built huge, incredible businesses. Scott Bessnett, amazing fund manager. I mean, these guys are some of the smartest, most capable people on earth, which is crazy. Okay, he mentioned this last week. Interest payments on current debt are about $800 billion a year. Going to 1.2 trillion. This is just the interest payments on current debt. Okay? Now, the average interest rate on our 36 trillion is at 3.28%. That's the average interest rate. Now, what are rates right now? 5.5%, 5.25%, right? And there's usually a little premium on those sometimes. Okay? With high rates, this— sorry for the typo there. This short-term debt will be refinanced at higher rates. Okay? Now, this is a huge headwind and problem. Let me— I'll put this into perspective too. So let's call this, let's call this around $1 trillion, $800 billion to $1.2 trillion of just interest payments. So that's about the same size as our defense budget every year. Okay. Our defense budget is roughly $900 billion. Okay. This is crazy. Our defense budget for military spending is larger than the next 10 countries combined. Let me say that again. If you combine the next 10 countries, their defense budget, all 10 countries, our budget per year is still larger, okay? Which is wild. Furthermore, the interest payments that we are paying on our debt is larger than that, okay? We're talking about very, very large numbers here. One of the problems is, and I really don't know why, Janet Yellen here, former Treasury Secretary, they raised about $6.4 trillion of Treasuries, you know, over the last few years, all in short-term Treasuries. They had to— now those are hitting right now. They're going to have to refinance. The average Treasury rate's at 3.25%. They're going to have to refinance them at 4.25%, 4.5%. And the Fed's not lowering rates, at least anytime soon. So all— a lot of these $6.4 trillion are now going to be refinanced at higher rates. Which makes this job even harder to cut a trillion and raise a trillion. OK, but we'll see what they can do. Scott Besnett, they're smart people. We'll see what they can figure out. OK, so that's kind of what's going on. Is this useful at all? Give you a little sense of the world. So if I was to summarize the Trump plan, what's happening again, April 2nd, next week, this is going into effect. Number one, we want to cut spending to get to a 2% deficit to GDP ratio. All right. Number 2, we want to increase government income. We're going to do that through a couple of ways: tariffs, increased minerals and oil production, and gold cards for immigrants. We want to raise Like, think about a business. We're going to get more income and we're going to cut the spending, right? To hopefully balance a budget. We're going to lower rates. So hopefully we can stimulate the economy and not to refinance $6.4 trillion of short-term debts. Okay? That's the plan there. Increase productivity. All right? Crypto and AI capital of the world. Encourage foreign investment in the United States to equal the golden age of America. All right? Now, again, I'm going to say it again. I don't care who you voted for. But if they can do this, that sounds freaking awesome. I would love to live in the golden age of America. I don't care who you voted for. Man, I want to live in the golden age of America. Hopefully, they can come to this. Now, even if they do, everything's not going to be perfect. If they go cut, they're going to cut, you know, I bet 20% of the stuff they cut is not correct. But if at least they can do 80% correct, I mean, that would be phenomenal, right?

Right.

And then they can build back and go from there. But this is, if again, listening to Ray Dalio, he's like, we are on life support right now. As a fiscal, the fiscal state of the country, we are on life support. And they, I believe they see this mandate and it's got to happen fast. And yeah, they're not going to do everything perfect. Yes, we can nitpick and pull their stuff. They can send— see the Signal thing last night with Pete Hegseth? They put a reporter in the group. And he was like, man, that's not good. They're going to make mistakes for sure. But can they Can they do 80% of this, 90% of this? Like, man, that would be, I think, pretty phenomenal. Now, how does this make sense for us? So let me come back to this. Let me bring this back. Everyone wants to be all political. Go on Twitter if you want to be political. This is not supposed to be a political call. What this call is for, what does this mean for us? Okay? What does this mean for us? Now, you can go argue, this is not going to work, blah, blah. Okay. Well, no one really cares. What we think on Twitter or whatever, like we voted. Okay, that's about all we have. So what we can do, what can we do now? What's our decision now? We have a choice. If there's a wealth gap dividing, you can either be on the poor side or the rich side. I can't determine what's hap. I can't make the change. Bridger Pennington in Utah, at least currently, I don't know how to change that. But I can make sure my family and my team can now be on the good side of the wealth gap, for example? Or how do I capitalize on what's going on? Guess what? I made tons of money when Biden was president. I made tons of money during COVID I'm hopefully going to make tons of money during the Trump administration. Okay? I don't, I personally, I can't go and control this stuff. I'm sitting here like, how do I make sure that this works out well for me and my community and my family, the people around me? Again, our mission is to democratize Wall Street, to make these things known to you. Does that sound fair? OK, so give me a yes in the chat. You guys cool with that? So let's talk about how this— what this makes sense for us. Give me a yes here. So let's talk about emerging fund managers, about you guys, us. Emerging fund managers— this is an interesting chart here— shows additional return above private equity, real estate, venture capital. Traditional fund managers tend to outperform larger funds over $1 billion. Why? Because they have smaller markets that are more inefficient, leading to greater potential opportunities. OK? Furthermore, there right now are 3 companies taking over the world: Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock. Some of you have heard me talk about this before. They manage $22 trillion in assets. These 3 companies control— they are the top shareholders in like 493 of the Fortune 500. Okay? These companies control like everything. What's the job of a CEO? Anybody in the chat? What's the job of a CEO? The job of a CEO is to return and increase shareholder value. So when your largest shareholder, BlackRock, comes to you and says, we need to push a certain ESG initiative, like they did a decade ago, guess what you do? You push an ESG initiative. You ever wonder how all these companies like woke up overnight and all of a sudden they were pushing ESG initiative? It's because BlackRock mandated it. Now in 2019, they kind of said, well, You know, ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance. They kind of go, save the world, save the planet, save other things. Like, let's go do this, which is a cool concept. They said in 2019, they kind of backed away from it. Well, it didn't really go as intended. It didn't really go as intended. So, tough, right? But that's how they got them all on board. Furthermore, we are seeing— anybody in real estate? Where's my real estate people? We are seeing real estate being rolled up. 1 in 7 homes were purchased by Wall Street in 2021. 1 in 5 were purchased in 2022, and I believe in 2023 it was 1 in 3 residential homes purchased by Wall Street. Okay. Furthermore, we are seeing industries being consolidated right now. TV, news, food, food production, accounting, car washes, Amazon, food franchises, chiropractic. Okay. We are seeing mass consolidation efforts across the board. It is right in front of us. I'm going to share this video. Let me reshare my screen. This just shows you how Consolidated our world is. Okay.

The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. More alarming, some media outlets publish these same fake stories without checking facts first.

The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think, and this is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. They were not—they were so disrespectful. They called me a white supremacist. Oh, we had a different thing. There we go. Sorry, there's a little echo on that. So you can kind of see one group controls all those local news channels. Isn't that kind of crazy? Let me turn this off real quick. Let me try one more time. Let me go to the next one. So this is a mass consolidation across industries. Here's another consolidation. Here it is. Boom. Here's news and media companies. I'm going to go faster through this. This is the food and food products that control pretty much everything me and you eat. Okay. We are seeing mass consolidation across the world right now. Okay. So how do we play in this game? Like, what do we do? Again, back to this. People are like, ah, you know, I'm going to go argue on Twitter. Okay. Well, what does this mean for us? Okay, what does it mean for you and me? How do we play in this game? We are seeing this mass rise of retail investors right now. In 2010, 11% equity markets were retail; 25% in 2023. We are seeing the rise of the people literally playing in this game. Our goal at Fund Launch again is to democratize Wall Street, to give you the same tools that these people in power have. They all used. funds to acquire and consolidate these industries. They used investment funds. Whether you like it or not, that's what they did. We want you guys to play in the same game. That's why we call ourselves the Wall Street Rebels. We want more people like us, regular people, to decentralize and spread this out amongst the people. OK? Right now, we have huge spikes and mass amounts of dry powder. I'm going to go quick through this because we're over on time. We are seeing continual printing of the— of currencies all over the globe. This is the USA M2 money supply. This is the China M2 money supply. This is more money supply. As more capital comes in the markets, guess what? Asset prices go up, generally speaking. Okay? We have an amazing chance to capitalize on what's going on right now as a group and as a community. Okay? This is why we— I go so in-depth on like trying to help more people figure out this game. Okay? I want more people to understand what the actual game that is being played and how you cannot just be— just watch the game, but actually be in the game. Okay. That's why we're bringing on 3 fund managers to talk about this today. Okay. So again, uh, or I think I already shared these slides. This is what we're doing today. So is that interesting at all? Give you some data. Okay. Now we teach this through the Fund Launch Formula. It's a 4-step formula on how to launch funds. Okay. Um, and I'll share here. We help people launch these funds all over and across the board. I'm gonna share my screen here and then we're gonna bring on Mr. John Pennington here in about two minutes. Does that sound cool with you guys? And he's going to talk through furthermore on what he's seeing in the market right now. Maybe you want to share my screen. Let's try here. Can you guys see that? Okay. So we'll we'll come back to this in a minute, but we share how do you actually go and launch these types of funds. You can see the fund launch formula here on the screen. This is how we there we go. This is how we go and approach the market.

So.

We walk through, these are all different frameworks. We can hit some of these in the Q&A, but how we work on the deal, we move to the frame stage, how we go out and raise capital, and furthermore, how do we go and actually launch the legal fund? Now, last thing I'll say, and I'm going to get my dad kind of prepped, maybe if he can hear me, he can start coming in the studio here in just a minute or two. We help people go and build funds that investors want. Our whole goal is that how do we produce— anybody can go, you know, buy legal docs. Can you build a fund that investors want versus just a stinky fish on a platter? How do you build something of quality and high approach that you can capitalize on the market right now? We have a product called Black Card. If you guys know, we'll talk about this more in a minute, but we help people through this whole thing. And today I wanted to share— oh yeah, we're getting him set up here. With the Fund Launch Formula, we help people. Our mission at Fund Launch is to help people do this. We help people come through and go in through asset track. We help them figure out if they're doing a private equity, a venture capital fund, a hedge fund, a real estate fund, a private credit fund. We have a Slack community with 1,200 members in it. We have a personal accountability coach, one-on-one coaching to walk them through each one of these phases of going and launching their fund. They get one-on-one coaching. They— we actually place interns in their firm. Then furthermore, how do they go out and raise capital? We design a pitch deck for them. We have a capital committee where they can go and actually raise capital together. We have Fund Launch 360. It's a full backend software to help people launch their funds. Okay. So, and then finally, we go and actually launch the funds with them. We have a full— we have 8 different law firms that work with them on their LPA, PPM. We coach them through this process to make sure it's done in the right way. If I was to summarize kind of what we do at Fund Launch, we help— we have all these different groups here, all think tanking you and helping you go and capitalize on the market right now. Okay. That's the plan. Now, if you're interested in this, this is not for everybody. What we do at Fund Launch, we help people do this. We have, we've had hundreds of members come through. You're actually going to hear from Jacques here in a minute. Right there. There he is. We help people go and build out their entire funds with them. If that's interesting to you, there's a link right here, fundlaunch.com/demo. If you want to learn more about how we actually build funds, how we put them together, that's the link you guys can go. We only have a handful of calls available. You guys can go book a call there. Now we're doing something special by the end of the month before the tariffs hit. If you wanted to get in this space, generally speaking, Black Card It depends on what you want. So it's variable. It's about anywhere from $20K to about $45K to go and launch an entire fund, which is a screaming deal to go and launch funds. A lot of funds are $50 grand, $70 grand, $100 grand. We get economies of scale to do this. If you're curious about launching a fund and want to hear more and talk to one of our team members, you can go book a call here. And we're doing something cool where you can actually join for just $5K down. We're doing special payment plans so you can join for just $5K down over the next 6, 12, 18 months. You can do it on a payment plan. And go out and figure out how you can play in this game at a different level. So again, there's the link, fundlaunch.com/demo. You guys can grab that link right there. Go book a call. Give you guys a minute or two here. Uh, we have a deadline this week on Friday to join. We have this, uh, you can pay $5K down and get started in this process. We've helped now hundreds of people launch their funds. I think now it's over 300+ people. Our clients currently manage $4.7 billion. Of AUM, these are untraditional fund managers all right here. So if you guys want to get a part of that again, we'll leave this live one more time. And Adam's on my team; he's dropping a link in the chat here: fundlaunch.com/demo. Okay, I'll leave this live. We're going to bring John Pennington on on a second. So let's bring him. I'm going to move my chair here. We're going to get him get him live. You guys can while we're setting it up, you guys can grab that link. So we'll grab John here. Now let me give you, while we're setting this up, uh, and while you're grabbing this link, let me give you a background on John. A lot of you guys know John, our community co-founder of a, uh, when you guys, when you retired, $28 billion family of funds. Yes. You guys IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. You're now retired. That's correct. Uh, you've run multiple funds prior to this as well. And you're the, you're my dad as well, which is pretty, which is pretty darn cool. Uh, also, and maybe put us full screen if you want for now, uh, also the author of this book, Dollars, Gold, and Bitcoin. Talking all about currency and macroeconomics, about how dollars work, gold and Bitcoin, I guess, from just—

How you're the luckiest person in the world to be born in the United States, or when you moved to the United States, that was your lottery ticket. If you're an entrepreneur, I don't know if we're the best at math. I don't know if we're the best at whatever, but I know something. If you're an entrepreneur and you want to live in the greatest country in the world, the greatest country for entrepreneurs is the United States. So, the day you were born here, Or the day you moved here and you're an entrepreneur, entrepreneur, that was your lottery ticket. That's, that's, that's my theory.

I love it.

So, if you guys can give John a hello in the chat, give him a, give him a yes, give him an emoji or something in the chat. Give him some love. So, Dad, today we're talking 2025 outlook from, from 3 fund managers.

Yeah, I'm a retired fund manager.

You're retired?

Yes.

Retired fund manager. Give us your take. You probably just heard me give you the take on what's happening currently.

Oh, yeah. That was really good, actually.

So, what does that mean for you? What does that mean for me? What does that mean for someone on this call that's like, so, what do I do with that information? What do you think?

Okay. Yeah. That's a big question because you've went over a lot of stuff in the last 20, 30 minutes. Appreciate that. I would— let me transition just really quick to what you closed with, okay, about the boomers and having all this wealth to transfer.

Yeah.

Let me, let me tell you what's going on.

Can you share my slide?

Yeah. There's one way that people are financing, younger generation, to buy stuff from boomers like myself. You're going into someone who makes widgets. They're in their 60s or 70s. They want to retire. There's not a lot of buyers for their, for their company. And you don't have a lot of money. And so, let's just say they want to sell for $4 million. Okay, great. They have a great company. And this is one way that people are currently financing that. You come up with a quarter million dollars. That's all you've got. You don't have $4 million. You want to buy my business from me. So, your proposal to me is this. Listen, I can stretch it. I'm going to come up with $300,000. I'm not going to give $300,000 to you, meaning me, the owner, the boomer. I'm going to come in and bring my team in. I'm going to put— we're going to take over your company. I'm going to put $300,000 into marketing and sales.

Wow.

To increase your revenue right now. You're going to stay on the board of directors and I'm going to make monthly payments to you for 3 years. And then at the end of 3 years, I'm going to refinance and give you a big balloon payment. All right?

Yep.

You're going to be partly retired, but you're still going to be on the board of directors. If I miss one payment to you in that 3 years, it's all void. You own everything back again. Boom.

Yeah. Seller finance.

Seller finance.

Seller finance. Because a lot of boomers have to seller finance.

So you can just put down $0.

Zero down. But you are throwing $300,000 or $400,000 in marketing and sales because you believe you're going to buy this company and you believe—

In that example, yeah.

You're going to increase, you're going to take this company to a different level. Yeah. You're just not going to run it the same way. You're going to increase it. Okay. So why don't you do it right up front the first 6, 7 months? So at the end of 6 or 7 months, if you miss a payment to me, my company should technically already be way bigger, way stronger, more sales, more revenue, more everything. Right. Yep. And so, that's a way that I think that's a way that people— that's one way that people right now—

Entry-level way that you could capitalize on what's going on right now.

That's right.

Find a baby boomer that wants out of their business.

Yep.

Do a seller finance deal.

Yep.

Put in some growth capital and capitalize on some decent economic trends maybe heading in. Hopefully, if you look at the right business, see if you can actually grow it, make sure you can actually do it. Very, very cool.

So, back to your other question. Okay. So, this is the problem. I have an economics degree and I love studying economics, as you know. It's fun. There is about, since 1971, when we went off the gold standard of the US dollar, about every 10 years, the world goes boom, right? Boom. And there's big opportunity. So, 1971 almost to 1989, when Ronald Reagan told President Gorbachev, hey, tear this wall down, and the Soviet Union collapsed. Big, big moments, you can make a lot of money. Okay? In 2000, the year 2000, you had the dot-com bubble crash. Okay? In the year 2008, '09, about every 10 years, '08, '09, you had the Great Recession. And then in 2020, you've got the COVID COVID, right. And so, a lot of money is made by fund managers when that world goes boom. Okay? Okay, here are the issues for economics people right now. You have things that are going on that's never happened before. You have a government, the greatest government in the world, or the biggest government in the world, spending $1 trillion every 90 days. No one's ever done that.

Yeah.

It's hard to have a recession when everyone's got $1 trillion going out, right? Not a lot of people are, you know, you're going to lose some jobs and stuff, but it's really hard to have a deep recession.

There's so much cash. It drops. We've seen this a lot. There's a book that came out called Permacrisis.

Yeah.

It feels like we've lived in every crisis. Oh, there's a crisis now and a crisis. And then you look back like, oh, that didn't happen. Like, remember last August, there was the carry yen trade. It was going to be Black Monday.

That's right.

And everyone was worried. The VIX spiked and it was this, the Great Depression for 2 days.

Right.

And there was so much cash flush that people just bought up the dip. Uh, we've seen that a number of times. We had the regional banking crash 2 years ago. People forget about that. Remember how scary that was? Oh my gosh, the banks are gonna fall. There was so much cash just came in flush. So that's a problem that you're seeing right now is how do you, how do you put that into an economic model? Yes. And just not the US government. Every country on earth is doing that. Everyone's trying to— China's M2 money supply just spiked drastically, right? Yeah.

They print more money than us, even though it's pretty hard. Yeah.

If you share my screen here for a sec. Yeah.

China. I mean, everyone says the US dollar is going down. Yes. Yes, it's— but, but we print a lot of money. But other countries, some other countries print way more money than us. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So, so what else do you think? How do you, you know?

So you have, you have 4 things that are confusing economic models right now. $1 trillion every 90 days you're spending. You have AI, which has never been around before. That's a big deal for people, right? Bitcoin. And then now you have Trump, who is a businessman running the country. Now, let me talk to you about 2 businessmen, Ronald Reagan ran the— you know, was a governor. He was an actor, but he ran— he was the governor of California, which is a business. Okay. And he ran that state very well. And when he came into office to stimulate the economy, he on purpose tried to push the dollar low. Okay. Because when you have a low dollar, it helps exports. Right. And I took advantage of that. As you know, I had a used jean company and my 2 partners moved to southern Germany and we collected used jeans all over the United States, in the western United States, and sent them, washed them, dyed them. We sent them over to Germany. We sold them into Prague and all these countries that couldn't get Levi 501 button fly jeans, the number one jean or the first jean ever made by Mr. Levi Strauss in San Francisco, San Francisco, California.

Yeah.

There was a low dollar for years and years, years of Reagan. And then as the dollar started to go up, that kind of ended my business. We ran that business for about 9 years until the dollar got really strong. Okay, I believe President Trump is going to try to get the dollar low on purpose to increase exports, meaning more people will be working here exporting their products. Other countries are going to battle that back and forth. Now think about a tariff when you put up a tariff. Okay, and and you have to understand our book and the we wrote about oil and and you're with your brother. Oil, oil, oil. Okay. And other products. If you are a country and you have big tariff, you are sending your products to United States. Okay. And they're sending you US dollars. And then you can take those US dollars and buy a lot of things around the world. Okay. In the short term, US— the tariff, you'll fight tariffs, you'll fight tariffs. The small country will fight tariffs, fight tariffs. But after a while, you start running out of US dollars and you're like, Crap, we need US dollars to buy things around the world. And so therefore, that in itself is going to strengthen demand for US dollars. Okay. Because other countries in the short term, the dollar might, you know, but so Trump's trying to push it down, but tariffs itself kind of push the demand for US dollars up, which pushes the price up. Okay. So that's a businessman. Ronald Reagan, he's a businessman. Yeah. Trying to figure out— think about the guy, or is it a lady or man in El Salvador? The president of El Salvador. Yeah, man or lady? A man. Okay, now think about what he did a few years ago. He made Bitcoin legal tender. Why? Why did he make Bitcoin legal tender? El Salvador has the cheapest form of electricity of any country on the planet. They have thermal nuclear— not thermonuclear, but thermal underground volcanoes and stuff that they can make cheap electricity. So he's like, how can we sell our electricity? Can we make some big lines over to other countries? No, we can't do that. We can make it really cheap, but how can we transfer that electricity to other countries? And he finally figured out, wait a minute, we will mine Bitcoin cheaper than anyone else can mine it, and then we will sell the Bitcoin. That's how he's transferring—

Yeah.

Electric, electric, his electric, low electric costs. He's mining it and transferring that electricity to other people. Okay. These are business people in in government, which doesn't happen a lot. Smart business people. You hate Trump or love Trump, but the dude's a smart smart business guy. Okay, and I believe he does have a plan because he can't run for reelection. He does has a plan in a business sense to take one trillion dollars every ninety days. Bitcoin, AI, and the Trump business plan to try to rectify it. But he's but I believe he's going to try to push down the dollar. But at the same time, tariffs themselves, there's— it's a bluff. It's not a bluff. It might go on for 1, 2, 5 years. I'm not really sure. But until the other countries go, wait a minute, we need US dollars.

Do you think in the short term we're headed into a recession? Then it's going to be this crunch as people reprice tariffs, they reprice the dollar. Yeah. Again, medium to long term, it unlocks. Where do you think that—

Again, recessions are really hard to have when you have— we're spending $1 trillion every 90 days. So, yes. But but you've heard this for years. Oh, we're going to have a rough landing. We're going to have a recession. Yeah. And then then Powell says we're going to do a soft landing, and everyone criticized Powell. Soft landing. Ha ha ha! Soft landing. Well, he kind of did it. It seems like a soft landing. He kind of did it. Go back two three years. Everyone was just harping on the dude, and now it's you know I haven't seen a rough landing. I've seen a I've seen a downward, but I haven't seen a rough landing.

Now an interesting stat on this too. A number of economists have talked about this. We haven't had a technical recession is 2 quarters of negative GDP. When you spend that much money in nominal terms, your GDP will go up. So, some people have juxtaposed our inflation versus GDP growth, and our inflation is higher than GDP. So, they're saying we've technically been in a recession. People have called it a tech recession. People have called it a manufacturing recession. In certain markets, the last, what, 2.5 years, we've seen this very big repricing in some markets. Tom will probably talk about in a minute with venture capital. They've had huge markdowns in a lot of funds.

Yeah.

But it's in nominal, in nominal terms, everything is still growing because we're spending so much money. So if we aren't in, maybe we're currently in a recession, in an inflation recession. If you go inflation versus GDP, if we can balance a budget, if we can get deficit to GDP down, could we actually hit a real growth period and maybe not even hit a hard landing?

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, so I'm a boomer. So over the years watching the markets, what I've seen is when the whole world is going bad and the United States is going bad, people in other countries move their money to the United States. It's a flight to safety, right?

Yeah.

They buy the US dollar, they buy US real estate. Right. So you're like, you We're doing really, really bad here. We're doing really, really bad. But wait a minute, why is Stock Morgan going up? It's because people in China or other countries are saying, I don't want to leave my money in China. I want to leave my money over here in this other country. Let's go to the US because it's a flight to safety. Yeah. And in the short term, meaning 3, 6, 3 to 6 months, 18 months, you see sometimes us go up when we should be going down because you have foreign investment coming in, which you just covered a few minutes ago.

On that note, we've seen this the last 45 days. So, with gold, the tariffs have been announced for Europe. There was a huge, you could call it run on the gold as far as gold bullion.

Yep.

So, out of the Bank of England, they were with huge withdrawals of gold. People were putting on ships and bringing it to New York the last 45 days for that same reason. Can we— if I'm a US investor, US-based, I want my gold here, not in Europe where it's going to be potentially tariffed or seized or something. And we've already seen a massive movement of gold. And they took withdrawals from what? They were like 4 days withdrawals now to 6 weeks delay.

Yeah.

So, we don't even know if the gold's real.

I know.

We don't know.

I don't know. Who knows? We'll see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, interesting take.

So, let me say one other thing. Okay. So, we live in Utah. Okay. There are— it's a small state population-wise. 3 million, maybe something like that. Okay. We have an enormous amount of banks in the United States, in Utah, compared to our population. Walmart has this industrial bank here. Discover Card has their you know, American Express. We have— they're industrial banks, not, you know, but I'm saying, why does a little state like us have— because someone way back when was a businessperson and they made the laws slanted toward favorable to banks. Right. And I think that's what Trump's doing here for crypto. He's trying to slant every law that he possibly can do so that people will invest. Right. Invest in—

Well, pull this slide again. This shows investment so far in the first, what, 45, 60 days? How long we've been in? Of foreign people. The last 3 years. Someone in the chat was like, how this is going to hurt the little guy? I don't know. When Hyundai puts a $20 billion plant here, they got to build it. They got to build it. They need construction costs. They need labor. They need people to run the plant.

That's right.

I think that'll help the little guy.

In Indiana. Yeah.

In Indiana, that's going to have a Hyundai plant nearby. Eli Lilly or Merck or Johnson Johnson puts $55 billion here when Taiwan Semiconductor wants to build a $100 billion plant here. I think that helps a lot. So foreign investment is massive.

In economics, there's a thing called the multiplier effect. Okay. Think about a little town. Let's just say, you know, in Montana, that's 3,000 people. Okay. They got a couple of dentists. Okay. They got a couple of hamburger shops. Okay. And if, if, if you've got— and you got a couple of guys, let's say, that sell— make wheat, they grow wheat. Okay. Or cattle. And let's say you have a dollar in that little town and the dentist goes down and buys a hamburger and the hamburger guy goes buy some beef and the beef guy has to have his teeth drilled on. And that $1 circulates like this. Okay? That's just a closed economy.

All right.

Then if the beef dude starts making more beef than he can sell in town and he starts selling beef outside of the country, outside the state, When $1 comes into that little town, it feels like $7 because it's from the outside.

It's going to get transferred around.

Right. Rather than just rotating in the, in the, in the, in the little city, in the little town, a $1. So when you have a, you have a country that's exporting and money's coming in, it multiplies. It feels like $7. And that's, that's called the multiplier effect in economics. And so when you keep the dollar low like Ronald Reagan did, And your people are exporting, those dollars come in and it seems like it is $1, but it seems, it feels like more than $1.

So let's make this for people on the call here. They're like, okay, what? So, okay, John and Bridger, I love what you're saying. We've got some very interesting or bullish things happening in the United States. Yeah. Money flowing in. We're balancing a budget. We're raising, you know, hopefully we'll see if $1 trillion comes in of a foreign investment. So for someone that's looking to, how do I capitalize on this?

Okay.

How do I do this? Maybe talk through your stories, how you capitalize on the wall coming down.

Yeah.

How you capitalize on 2007, 2008, 2009.

Yeah.

How would maybe someone today seeing what's going on could say, I'm going to try to capitalize on this. What would you tell them?

Okay. I know, I know I'm short on time here, so let me— we had this discussion like this back in October, correct?

Yeah.

Okay. And it was right before the election. And I said, and I looked it up today, I said on your show, this was back in October, if I charted Bitcoin from Election Day 2012, if you owned Bitcoin on Election Day 2012, you owned one, whatever, one Bitcoin. In the next— that run-up after Election Day, it went up 10,200%. Okay? Then, and then it came back down. If you owned—

10,200%.

Bitcoin the Election Day of 2016, it went up 2,500%. And then if you owned Bitcoin on the Election Day of 2020, it went up 380-something percent. I can't remember what I said.

Okay.

I said, if you take that delta, $10,200, $2,500, 384%, Election Day 2024, it should run up 80%. Okay? And I said to you, My prediction is that— I shouldn't say prediction. My probability is it will hit $110,000 to $120,000 on this run-up. Okay. Because it should be 80%. At the time it was $60,000, $70,000. Well, it did hit $110,000.

$109,000.

Yeah, $109,000 right in there. So we're pretty close in there. Now, the one we did a year before that, it was in November when we were launching the book. Okay. You ask about what I was into and I said, listen, most of my wealth is in real estate. real estate-backed companies. But we're talking about the 5% to 7% that's not. And I said back at the time, I said, uranium's going to run, gold's going to run, and silver's going to run. And if you take those numbers in the 1st of November, 2023, and you look to January, February of 2024, right, they all ran up. So, I'm— yeah, I did great. I did great at a rate. The problem now is you're asking today what I think is going to happen this year. And it's more murky. I don't have— because of what I just explained to you, I don't have— there's a lot of changing things, especially with the Trump administration, that I— it's difficult for me. But what I can tell you is, right now, uranium's come back down. I'm long-term— I shouldn't say long-term. 1 year to 2 years on uranium. I'm bullish on uranium right now.

Well, sorry, I'm not asking you stock picks.

I'm not giving you stock. I'm asking generally.

Someone on here is like, well, should I— I'm looking at doing a real estate fund. Oh, I'm looking to do a venture capital fund. I'm looking to do a private equity fund. I'm buying this, which is great. I love this. I love that thread. But maybe, maybe reframe the question. Okay. Someone's on here like, should I play in this game? Where am I at right now? What— maybe, maybe reflect on your experience of being in the fund management game. Yeah. During economic uncertainty like we have a little bit right now.

Okay. I got you. I got you. So, my first fund in 2004, we were doing short-term loans on real estate. My second fund in 2007, we were doing short-term loans on real estate. And then my third fund that I launched in, in October 2008, which we, we redid for spring of 2009 and brought in a bunch of great partners, way smarter guys than I would— I could ever be. They came in in 2009. We switched from lending on real estate to buying on real estate, right?

Mm-hmm.

I had competitors in my first 2 funds. go out of business. They didn't pivot, right? They didn't see the Great Recession as an opportunity. Okay. And we did. We saw it as, wow, this is the best time to buy real estate. So, I had a few friends call me and they would say, Jon, how you doing? I'm doing good. What's going on? Well, we know you're in real estate and we know it's bad right now and we want to talk to you. How's things going? And I said, have you lost your mind? In 80 years, 2009 is the best time to be in real estate. It's— are you crazy? And I converted some of those people to investors. They were calling to see how sorry they were for me and they could help me out.

Yeah.

And I was like, are you nuts?

Yeah. Yeah.

They didn't see it the way I saw it, right? It was the best time in 80 years to be in real estate. So, what I'm saying to you is, and if I hadn't started those 2 funds, I probably couldn't have started a fund in 2009. It'd been more difficult.

Right.

So, but I was already in the fund game. I just pivoted to rather than lending on real estate to purchasing real estate.

Yeah.

Right. And buying directly from banks that REO'd properties. So, that's the game. And you've done a great job with your audience and your students of trying to teach them that what I've taught you and your brother and your friends, that the fund model Listen, one in your life, if you're an entrepreneur, one day in your life, you're going to learn how to make a lot of money. Okay? But you're going to hit a spot where it's really, really difficult to scale. Okay? I've started 14 businesses in my lifetime. 3 I lost money on, 3 I made money on. Obviously, the last one I made a ton of money on. Right? And the middle ones, they all kind of made money. Right? So, you can— but all of the 13, we'd get to a certain size and they just wouldn't scale. And then my last one, we got— we started doing funds and it scaled. It was like you couldn't stop it from scaling.

Yeah.

So, I would say, I would say to people who are entrepreneurs, you might— it took me 5 years to start my first fund. I started in 1999 and I didn't launch until 2004. There were no— there was no course. There was no books. You just had to learn it by yourself and have the confidence in 2004 to start your own fund, right, with my partner. And so, I would say, I would say to people, even if you're going to take you 5 years to start a fund, you should start studying it now because one day in the future, you're going to get to a point where you're having difficulty scaling your business. And if you switch to the fund model, you look back 3 or 4 years and you'll go, oh my gosh, this is the craziest thing in the world. As you know, when I retired, we actually had 114 limited partnerships.

Mm-hmm.

We were managing $28 billion. Asset Center Management with 1,000 employees in 33 states. Okay? That all started, you know, my first fund in 2004. The fund, the fund, the family of funds all started in 2004. But really, for that company that's, that's gone public, that really the first, their first fund, uh, was 2009, right?

Mm-hmm.

The one I started late 2008. So, I'm saying it, and it just kept scaling and scaling and scaling. And again, I, I, I had, I got brilliant partners, way, and these guys are absolutely incredibly brilliant. And if it would, if I would never If we never merged with those other guys, I mean, we would not be anywhere the size we are today because they are absolutely brilliant. So, having brilliant partners, being in the fund model business, right, allows you to scale, which most entrepreneurs at some time in their life have a difficulty. But if when you're running funds, it's like opposite, it's hard to not to stop it from scaling.

Yep. So, to summarize, You started a bunch of businesses. This vehicle was a vehicle that took you to the next height.

That's right.

Forbes tells us the number 1 category of billionaires is fund management. Number 2 is tech. Number 3 is fashion. So, the stats follow what you're saying, and it's so cool. Someone typed in here like, man, I wish my dad would've taught me stuff. That's why I'm bringing my dad to you guys. And we have a free course on AltStreet. We have tons of content of him and other people like him teaching all this kind of stuff that People just don't know about the, you know, our, our mission is here to democratize Wall Street. I know you have such a big heart and a giving heart to help other people and help younger generations. That's why you write books. It's not, probably not fun to write a book, but you do it because, because you're like, there's a younger version of John out there that needs to know this stuff. That's right. That's right. And so if you guys can, Dollars, Gold, and Bitcoin on, on Amazon, go check it out.

It's on. Listen, if you love my voice and you want to listen to me for 6 hours, John's got a silky smooth voice. It's on.

If you listen to him in the car or whatever, you're going to be—

It's on audible.com if you want to listen to it.

It takes you to a whole nother dimension.

Yeah. Just drive around town, listen to him, or if you want to go to sleep at night, just plug it in. You'll go right to sleep.

So audible.com, Dollars, Gold, Bitcoin. We'll put it up here so you guys can see it here. There's the book. John's been such a help for the Fundamentals community, spoken multiple times on stage and other stuff. You're amazing. I want to give your— any last thoughts? You've mentioned about being in America, how cool that is. You grew up in North Las Vegas. North Las Vegas. Not favorable circumstances. Right. And kind of changed your stars. Yep. You want to share that last little bit?

Yeah. Yeah. So when I was growing up and this is in my book, I was 17 years old and I was worried about what am I going to do in life, how am I going to make money? And I didn't have good grades in high school and I was always behind. I was good, pretty good in sports, but, but just wasn't good. And I remember doing this. I looked into the mirror when I was 17 years old And I said, John, you're not afraid of being poor and you're not afraid of being old. You're just afraid of being old and poor at the same time. So do something about it. And that— I repeat that thing, that saying to my year after year after year after year, all my businesses, everything, because I didn't want to be old and poor at the same time. And I was afraid I might end up there. And that is— What kind of pushed me to always be an entrepreneur and running my own business? So I guess that's the short version of it. Yeah, I love it.

John's an inspiration. Go read his book. You'll hear about his stories in here. It's awesome. There it is one more time: Dollars, Gold, and Bitcoin. Dad, thank you very much for coming on. I know short today. We've got to give you more time next time. We got to go longer on economics all day long. I love it. Give John a bunch of love in the chat if you guys can. Drop an emoji. Say hello. Say what's up. Thank you, John, for coming on. Yeah. Amazing. Well done. All right. Up next, we've got Jacques Bazinet. He's coming on in about 2 minutes here. Let me get readjusted here and we'll kind of move some chairs. So, Jacques runs— is currently raising a $200 million fund right now, has done hundreds of millions in real estate. So, anybody in real estate, Jacques is phenomenal in real estate. Furthermore, Jacques is an amazing people person. I'll leave this book for one more minute here. Amazing people person, has raised a lot of money on relationships and the skill. If anybody's— anybody want to learn how to raise money or in this game, Jacques is phenomenal at this. He's going to come on here in just 2 minutes. Now, while we're doing that, if you can share my iPad real quick while we're getting Jacques set up backstage, we're testing all of his stuff out. As you guys know, we help people launch funds at Fund Launch. If you're in this game, we have a bunch of free content. So altstreet.org, YouTube channel, tons of free stuff. But if you want to go to the next level, this is all of our frameworks on how we structure the deal? How do we frame out your fund? How do we go raise capital? And then how do we launch that fund? And we've summarized that into an entire— we call it an incubator for fund managers. This incubator is called Black Card. I'll put it right here up top. This has been our flagship product at Fund Launch because so many people have asked, hey, John Bridger, team, can you guys help me launch a fund? And the answer is, for years it was no, and now it's yes, we're going to help you do this. So, what we do, we come in, we source it and help you figure out the deal, structuring it the right way. We have office hours every single day with a coach that's live that you can talk to and get answers to questions. Furthermore, you join an asset class track. You can join the real estate or hedge fund or venture capital or private equity asset class or private credit. If you're Canadian, you can join that asset class. You get a personal accountability coach. You join our Slack community. We then go to phase 2. We start framing out your fund. So we're going to frame all this content here on how to frame your fund, how to go and build the financial, the spreadsheets, the models, the pro formas, all that in here. And then we have coaches on this section to help you here as well. Furthermore, we have dozens of interns that want to be placed in your fund. If you want help, we actually can place an intern into your fund. And then finally we said, okay, you're ready to raise capital. Let's go. Let's put your pitch deck together. Let's go and use— we have Fund Launch 360, a full software designed to help you outbound and reach out and build your website, all your marketing materials, that kind of stuff. Furthermore, we then have coaches again, and we have a real-world capital committee that you can actually go and pitch real-world investors. Also, we have Fund Launch Partners. So Fund Launch Partners is a fund I mentioned at the beginning. We've raised $30 million. We'll write checks between $200K and $4 million into these funds. And we actually last year invested into 6 Black Card members' funds. We plan to do another 10 funds this year with Black Card. Okay. So we want to do 10 more, 10+ funds this year. And then finally, we go to legal and we actually help structure your funds. We have 6 different law firms, excuse me, 8 different law firms here that help you structure. We can pair you with the right law firm. We have coaches with this. We have discounted partnerships on admin, licenses, insurance, investor database, tax and audit, capital raising, marketing and PR. Okay. To help you successfully launch your fund, we have done every step of this process to help you successfully go from a To Z over here. If you want to learn more, you can go to funlaunch.com/demo. You can book a call with one of my team members. This is limited. We might actually be out of calls by this point. I'm not, I'm not sure. We might be out of calls soon. We only have a handful of calls available. So if you're serious about this, Black Card is anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000. So it's not a cheap product. This is not a cheap product at all. It depends on what you want and what's there. Furthermore, we're doing a deal this week. You can just put $5,000 down this week to get started and get moving in this direction. As you guys know, Proximity is power. Being in the right room is power. Being in the right ecosystem, the right vehicle is power. Just getting on the right track. What we just mentioned earlier, we believe there is a phenomenal tidal wave of wealth flowing in this direction right now, especially with all the stuff the Trump administration we just mentioned and the economic situation. There might be short-term volatility. It might be good buying opportunities right now. But overall, with how much governments are printing dollars, it's— there's a lot of niches where those dollars need to flow to. This is a phenomenal time to be in this game. Like my dad just mentioned, like we just talked about, and we're gonna bring Jacques on to talk a little bit more about real estate right now. So again, fundlaunch.com/demo. You can open it up. I think you just go over to Safari here. You can go to fundlaunch.com/demo. It opens it up here and you can just enter your details. So put in Jane Smith, your phone number, and it'll take you to the next page where you can actually book a call with someone on my team. There's only a handful of people on my team right outside my window here that help take these calls. So question in the chat, what's the difference between $20,000 to $45,000? Depends on what you need. Some people want, you know, big international feeder fund structures that would be more up here. Some people want, you know, one-on-one more help with their pitch decks or more help on there with capital committees. So, there's different things that you can kind of, you can put together your, a package that makes sense for you. Some people don't need lawyers. They already got a lawyer figured out. Some people don't need one-on-one coaching, whatever the thing is. And you can kind of put together a package that makes sense to you. Usually, it's in this range. It's kind of the usual. Yeah. Black Card is a lifetime membership, by the way. So, when you join Black Card, You're in Black Card for life. We throw 3 events a year. This actually, this year we're throwing 4 events in person a year. You come to the networking events, come hang out with us. We do live calls every week, kind of like today's call. I'm doing a call tomorrow, for example, with all of our Black Card members hopping with me. We have calls with my brother and 15 other coaches we do calls with that are group coaching calls. We have partnerships. I mean, we have put together pretty much everything you need. To remove the roadblocks, and like my dad mentioned how hard it was for him to launch his first fund to go out and do this. So if you're curious to learn more, fundlaunch.com/demo. All right, with that, we got our next guest on. Let's do this. So Jacques currently raising a $200 million fund, done incredible work with with what he's doing, and we're going to bring him on right here. So with that, if you guys can give me some love in the chat, drop an emoji for Jacques, kind of whatever you want to do to give love. I don't really know how to do that on the on the webinar here. But let's bring Jacques to the stage and we'll see if— let's test his audio out, make sure he's working. Jacques, can you hear me? Are you there?

Absolutely, Bridger. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation. Absolutely fantastic.

Well, good to have you here, Jacques. Sorry to delay a little bit. I know we're a little behind schedule, but hey, we're having fun here and people are still on, which is awesome. So welcome on, you guys. Jacques runs Talos Holdings. Maybe Jacques, give us 30 seconds on your group. What makes you guys unique? And we invested and partnered with you guys with Fund Launch Partners, which is amazing. You came through the Black Card ecosystem. And, uh, but before Black Card, you guys were phenomenally successful in a lot of areas of life. Give us 30 seconds, a minute on, on just your team and you guys. Give us a background on you.

Yeah, not very complicated. Uh, Talus Holdings was, uh, founded by a visionary about 37 years ago. His name was John McWilliams. He came from an investment background, investment banking background, which, which means that Talus is more about risk mitigation and making sure that we're You know, retaining rather than being a promoter, which very much differentiates us in the marketplace because very often you have development groups that are just, you know, hoping that interest rates stay down, hoping that rents go up, hoping— and they trend everything. And those individuals are having difficulty right now staying afloat. That's not our history. Our history came from an investment banking background. John has done 7,500 multifamily units, 3,100 deals. And over the last 37 years has run an average IRR of 31% for his investors. So that, that is our history. Um, and we, we're kind of boutique. We're small. Uh, we do about 1.5 deals a year, and, uh, we're very, very hands-on, very engaged, um, and very much evenly yoked with our investors. So we, we believe in integrity, which means we make the right decision independently of who benefits from it. So sometimes our investors, you know, You always make the right decisions. You're not out for, you know, winning at all costs. You're out for mutual benefit. So, those are the guiding forces that have distinguished us and allowed us to grow over the years.

Well, congrats. 31% IRR over 30-plus years is no small feat. That's phenomenal. So, Jacques, we brought you on today. The topic today, now, we've talked, I'm sure you listened before, we've talked a lot Trump politics, and we don't need to talk about that. We can if you want. I'll let you drive here. But People in the chat, maybe type in if you're a real estate person. This is— we can— let's talk about real estate. Where do you see real estate going? What are the opportunities at hand in 2025, 2026? Where are you guys seeing opportunities or how are you thinking about the market right now? You can take that in any direction. And I'll preface as well, even if you're not in real estate, it's very good to understand what real estate people are thinking because it may affect you if you're in the trading business or if you're in the private equity business or in the manufacturing business. I mean, real estate is connected to everything. So, Jacques, give us a sense of how you're thinking about the world right now with real estate.

You know, so first, I mean, for those individuals who are in real estate kind of like us, doing 1.5 deals a year, been around for a while, I really want to capitalize on something that your father said, which is this is really an opportunity to scale. If this is really the golden age of America where a significant transfer of wealth is going to happen over the next 5 to 6 years, Do you really want to be doing one or two deals a year, or do you want to be doing a lot more deals? And by doing a fund is how you turbocharge your organization. And you know, this was said to us in theory eight months ago when we first met Bridger. But we're an example right now where it is true. We are in rooms right now working with investors that we would have never thought of. Two weeks ago, I was in a room. We were in with the the founder of Wynn Hotels, Steve Wynn was and his team was there. The founder of Related was there. The founder of Dean Adler from Loop Adler Funds was there. And we're talking about real estate. I mean, I've never had those opportunities. And was I not in the process of creating a fund, raising $200 million? It's kind of like the question, you know, you could do whatever you want. So, a guy wakes up in the morning and says— and we have this guy, James Lawrence. He lives in Utah. He woke up one morning and says, no, I don't want to run a marathon. I want to run 24 marathons in 1 year. Well, then all of a sudden, everything changes. So as a real estate developer, you could say, well, I want to build 1.5 deals a year. And you could figure out how to do that. Or you could say, no, actually, I'm going to raise $200 million and I'm going to buy 5 real estate deals this year. And a fund is the way to scale that. And it's not a dream. It's real. It's happening in our company. And, you know, I don't want to advertise, but But just to be clear, it would have never happened without your support and your vision because, of course, we know how to buy real estate, we know how to get good deals, we know how to drive IRRs on 1.5 deals a year. But to scale to 5 and 6 and 12 deals, we needed this fund structure. So, thank you for helping us with that. Are people able to—

Well, kudos to you guys. And maybe, yeah, I know you guys have crushed. I'm excited to see how Talus grows. And I mean, you've already been extremely successful. And now, can we do Like you mentioned James Lawrence, he did the Ironmans, right? Like he has a new show on Prime. He's a friend of ours in Utah and done, what, 100 Ironmans in 100 days or something like that?

Yeah.

Crazy. Can you go to the next level? So now what's interesting, and I want to highlight, smart real estate investors, they make money in every— they have, they have stuff to do in every market. You just met with, you mentioned Steve Wynn, looking at hotels. I mean, any market, smart real estate people are doing, they're either buying, they're exiting, they're disposing, they're refinancing. It depends on the market what they're doing. So, where do you, what direction, and I don't, maybe don't give us the whole playbook because I know you guys have a lot of, you know, your insights and stuff. But give some people at least where you're thinking about the market over the next little bit.

You know, your dad talked about it even in his journey, how they began as a real estate lender and then actually ended up being a buyer of real estate. And in the rooms that we're hanging out with large investors, the problem is not the last, the next 8 years. The problem is the last 7. Because over the last 7 years, people have been buying real estate at significantly inflated costs. And when they did it, they didn't buy the real estate. The smart equity was going in with mezz loans and providing gap funding. And they're doing that because if those loans go bad, they can take the real estate knowing that the real estate was inflated. That is now shifting in 2025. The wise money is now coming in as equity and buying the properties Why? Because they're buying it at a 25 to 30% discount. And if we were using the old syndication model, we could take advantage of one or maybe 2 of those deals. But with the fund model, we're now able to find 5 and 6 and 7 deals this year and move the funding from the fund into these projects. Are people able to see my slides, Bridger?

Not currently. I don't see anything. Maybe try again.

Okay. The reason why I just want to show people a few of the economic drivers that are making this happen.

Try hitting share again. We'll see if we can make you— we'll work here for a second.

How's that, Bridger?

There we go. Yeah, I can see it.

Well, this is just a quick look at the US economy. And your father made this point very, very well, which is when you're looking at price per earnings or return on equity, By far of any market in the world, US is always leading. So the smart money is coming to America. Now, of course, the dividend yield is lower in America, but that's because most large organizations in America don't favor dividend yield. They favor return on equity. But at every perspective, the returns in America are greater. And this shift of saying people investing in real estate and why, if you look at right now how much dry powder is coming in America, we currently have $224 billion worth of dry powder looking for a 13% to 20% IRR in real estate. Where are they going to get it? Well, if you look in February of 2025, here's where your returns are coming from. So delinquencies on properties in America, specifically my asset class, which is apartments, is up 213% in February of 2025. So these are individuals who in 2023, '24 were thinking that interest rates were going to stay low, that rents were going to continue to trend up at 3, 4, 5, 6% a year. And they were going to be able to capitalize on these properties, and that just didn't happen. In fact, the opposite happened. Interest rates went up because interest rate had been traditionally low for a while. There was an excess of supply, so interest rates went up. There was an increased supply, and rents went down. So these people now have multifamily properties that are non-performing loans. They cannot. Make their loan payments with the net operating income that they're providing. Therefore, there's a 213% gap or over $3 billion worth of assets right now that need to be realigned. What's happening is that these usually life cos that have lent money on these properties are now realizing that they have to do something to write off this bad debt. Yeah, they are reaching out to developers who they've worked with over the last 20 years and said, hey, we've got these properties, they're going to go to market, so we have no choice. We're going to have to bring these properties to market, and we're going to have to take a 25 to 30% markdown on these properties to be able to balance our balance sheet. We could give it to— we could give it to a broker, they could bring it out onto public domain and take offers, but if we did that The chances are that we wouldn't re-sign another loan with the people that they're marketing it to. So they're looking at the developers that they've worked with over the years and said, hey, what if you bought this loan from us and then we could do a simultaneous close and close you on a new 30-year ARM, but at a 25 to 30% discount over what the current loan is?

Gotcha. So restructuring of debt. Interesting opportunity, some distressed properties hitting right now. And if they can't restructure, they're then going to be distressed, obviously. So, a good buying opportunity for someone new and/or private credit funds that can come in and restructure that debt might have a good opportunity. Is that kind of what I'm— if I distill down what you just shared?

Yeah.

That'd be a good summary?

And you don't want to do this as a developer who's using the traditional syndication model because it's going to happen in the next 48 months. So you want to make sure that you're not doing 1 or 2 deals, but you're capturing 5 and 6 deals a year over the next 3 years to make sure that as the market recorrects, you're taking all the advantage that you can of the current market forces.

Very interesting. Yes. Very well put, Jacques. Yeah. I like, that's very interesting to see the actual numbers of where properties have been, you could call it misbought or mispriced. Many people thought rates were coming down sooner than they have been. They could refinance it out of it. And we're sitting in March of 2025 with rates holding steady, with, you know, really not a clear end in sight of any, any significant rate cuts soon. That's very interesting.

So the other thing I want to share with in the real estate world is I'm going to share a little bit about our history, but I'm not really trying to share our history. I'm actually trying to share— everybody sees multifamily real estate as, you know, just one asset class. And in reality, there's multiple different lifts within the asset class of multifamily. So here's, here's our last 31 years, and we said that this dry powder is looking for a 13% to 18% return. Well, here's— here are the lifts in multifamily. So if you do these acquisitions that we're talking about right now, historically those have brought in for us a 21% return. Ground-up development where you buy a piece of land, get it entitled, build it, lease it up, do a rent increase, and then sell it to a REIT that can't take on that risk. Those multifamily projects have brought in a 45% IRR on average over the last 31 years. And the one that brings in the largest returns is historic renovations. Historic renovations, we've done one. And those of you who know about them, it's all about having the relationships with government agencies to be able to do them. Once you do them, they have the highest returns at 145%— sorry, 143%. So let's not look at real estate as just— or multifamily real estate as just one class. There's multiple classes within that asset class. Very interesting.

Yeah, to see where things are at right now. Jacques, well put, well said. Thank you very much. The maybe final word, and then we got our next person queued up here to come on. Talk me through a little bit about maybe if someone, maybe let's call this a younger version of yourself is on this call. They want to be in real estate. They like the idea. They're looking, man, Jacques is, man, he's crushing it. He's doing these great big deals. He's amazing. What advice or thought would you give to maybe a younger version of yourself that's on this call right now watching?

Yeah. The 2 pieces of advice that I would give is one, think bigger than you're currently thinking. Expand your horizon. Don't think, how do I do my first deal? Think about how am I going to pull off the first, how am I going to do 5 deals this year? So, push yourself. And number 2 is at all times, Never compromise integrity to make a deal. If the right decision is to, you know, it's not going to work, just call it. Bad news shared early is much better than bad news held on to. So be an individual of integrity for yourself. And I think integrity is a personal thing. It starts with you. So are you making the right decisions? Are you doing the, you know, think of your relationship. If you could be a person of integrity, you will then attract more people of integrity. And that long term will bring in bigger dividends, higher returns, more leverage than trying to do a deal real quick.

I love that.

Well said. On the bad— what'd you say again? Bad news upfront is better than bad news held onto. Sometimes we fall in love with the deal and we say, well, it just, it'll work out. We don't have to worry about it because I'm so in love with this thing. And you're saying, have integrity with yourself first and your partners and people around you to say, No to a deal that's not right as well. On the first one, can I ask you to just double-click on me for why that mindset? You know, someone's just starting out. Why would you tell them to do, think about 5 or 10 deals? What does that change in your mind?

Well, everything changes. You know, doing this fund, we've been, you know, historically what we've done is when we'd get to the point where we'd have our entitlements on a piece of property, we would start looking for equity. So, I had a list of family offices And I would start calling them and saying, hey, I've got these renderings, I've got this pro forma, would you be interested in giving us money for this property? And we were successful at it. Single check writers— Campbell's Soups, Quaker Oats, large, large, large family offices would give us checks and that would work. Well, now I'm asking a different question. I'm saying we're raising $200 million, are you interested in being a part of it? So my whole philosophy of how I reach out to people, my messaging How it's working. So now, you know, Quaker Oats is saying, well, yeah, I'll give you some money, but gosh, you're raising $200 million. Have you met these 3 other families? By the way, are you going to this event? Have you met them? But let us introduce you. It just expands your possibility if you're thinking broader.

I love that.

Do you have The 10X Is Easier? Can you grab me that book right there? I want to echo what you just said. We had a speaker at our last event, Ben Hardy, If you guys ever heard of Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan, they wrote this book, 10X Is Easier Than 2X. I saw the title. I was like, that's kind of cheesy. Like, you know, whatever. And then Dr. Ben Hardy comes on stage and he shares actually from a psychological point of view exactly what Jacques just shared. What happens when we set bigger mindset goals? He literally— the book is 10X Is Easier Than 2X, which is counterintuitive, which I thought was very interesting. He shared this model that changed my thinking. So he shared this example. Let me maybe share my— iPad for me. So he shared, you guys can see that?

Yeah.

I'm going to draw for a second. So he goes, let's say, you know, we're— he gives the example of a basketball player. Okay, a basketball player has a goal and there's a lot of ways to be a good basketball player. You can, you know, I can make— think about goals. I can make the JV team. I can make the varsity team in my high school. I could join this club team. You know, and there's a lot of different ways to get a coach like this, you know. And there's this frame of reference, kind of a graph here of how high you're going here, a frame of reference of how good of a basketball player you can be by the vision you set for yourself. However, he goes, if the vision you actually— so I have a real example. We did this with a tennis player. We had 2 tennis players and the goal for one of them was to— obviously, everyone's like, yeah, I'd love to be pro one day. But the frame was, well, I got to make the JV team and that's my goal. And then I'm going to make the varsity team. That's my goal. And this is kind of the frame of reference they had. They had a different tennis player that the frame of reference was, no, I want to be a pro by the time I'm 17 years old. Now, both kind of had that goal, but one approached it from hitting these, kind of trying to hit these 2x things here. And the one approached the goal of going after a 10x. And the frame he shares is that when we set large goals, what happens is the number of outcomes of possibilities, there's 100 things you could do to do a 2x. There's only usually, I'll put like a dotted here, there's only usually 1 or 2 things that could be a 10x. And he goes, what happens is it shortens your vision to say, not shortens, but narrows the vision to only focus on something that is a 10x opportunity. If your frame is, I'm going to be a pro basketball player, or maybe he used the example of tennis, the coaching staff you get when you're 8, 9, 10, 11 years old is much different than if your frame of reference is I want to be a varsity player. Furthermore, he goes, in your business right now, I want you to sit down with your team and do the same thing. I want you to go through what are ways we could double our business to a 2x? He's like, you'll come up with 50 to 100 ideas. And you ask your team the same question, how could we literally 10x our revenue? There's probably only 2 to 3 ways that you could do a 10x on your business. And he goes, what it does, it gives you a frame of reference to focus on those 10x opportunities. And it'll allow you to, because the problem is a lot of us try to chase 100 rabbits at once and we catch zero of them. That's the problem. And he did a full, you know, you can go back to my full screen here, a full study in this book and shared it on stage. And I thought, man, that's, that's a pretty insightful way to look at the psychological perspective of what Jacques just shared of setting larger goals or larger frame of reference, which I think is amazing. Anything you'd add to that, Jacques?

Let's apply it to fundraising. We've just experienced it in the last 8 months. So, if you're trying to shut one, close on one deal, $25 million is our average deal size. Close on one. I can call 3 family offices a week over a period of 6 months and I'll raise $25 million. But if you want a 10x it, well then I can't make calls. I got to go to events where these people hang out because I, I can't, I can't do 3 calls a week. It needs to be events. Then you find out that many of the events are hoaxes. They say that they're going to be investors there, but really it's about, it's about GPs going there to try to raise money. That's how they make money. So then you find out there's real events and And then you find out where the money really is are actually free events. The right events with the right investors are actually looking for GPs. Yeah. Then you find those events and then all of a sudden you're raising multiples more by going to one event by going than by trying to make 3 calls a week from my office and trying to raise $25 million. So, it's actually easier to raise $200 million than it is to raise $25.

I love it. Jacques, we are short on time. Thank you very much for coming on. People, give Jacques a ton of love. Jacques, is there a way, if people want to learn more about Talos, is there a way to connect with you? Is there a good way to find you?

Our website is very easy. TalosRes, R-E-S, talosres.com. We have a reach-out section on our website and love to connect in any way I can. By the way, another thing that I would give, my third piece of advice, is always give back. So, it's very high up in our mission statement to give back. So, if people have questions or things they'd like help with or or throw some ideas, we're there. We want to make sure that we're helping everybody and we need a lot of help too. So, if there's anybody who's looking to help us, we got room for that too.

I love it. Jacques, thank you very much. Good having you on here. Our next guest is Tom Wilkinson, runs a venture capital firm. I believe has raised $12 of his $20 million right now. He's done over 20 deals that have over a 4x return, MOIC return, which is amazing. We're going to queue Tom up here for the next 2 minutes. So we'll get Tom ready to go while we're doing that. Uh, if you guys want to share my iPad real quick, um, another reminder, and I don't actually, I don't know if even calls are available. Maybe Adam, you want to message me if you, I don't even know if calls are available. We might be full. Um, if people want to learn more about the process, we help people launch funds. We actually, Jacques joined our group a few months ago. We helped him through this whole process. He was already successful, but we just helped put gasoline hopefully on the fire as he grows. Same with Tom as well. You'll hear from Tom in a minute. If you want to learn more about how funds are built, we have a full backend product called Black Card, which is an incubator for funds to help funds go out and launch. We've launched 300+ funds out of Black Card. We have $4.7 billion of reported client AUM in our Fund Launch community. This is the group you get to join and be a part of when joining Black Card. So if you're curious about how this works, You can go to funlaunch.com/demo. Black Card is $20,000 to $45,000, which is relatively cheap to get in this space. If this is— that's kind of the space for you, that depends on what package you want and how— what you want to add or not add, what events you want to come to, that will determine that. But we go soup to nuts. We help you across the board. We have asset class tracks, a whole community, 15 different coaches. We have 8 different law firms. We have a pitch deck designer. We actually— and this includes the full legal and fund formation for your firm, all included on here. Furthermore, we have— you have the chance to pitch Fund Launch partners and maybe get a check and investment into your firm. We have a full software, Fund Launch 360, to help you scale your fund as well. And then finally, the discounts of all the different people that you'll need to launch your fund. And overall, if I go down to here, we all think tank. We have a, you know, a whole army of people over here designed to help Make you successful. So again, fundlaunch.com/demo. We're getting Tom queued up right here this week and this week only. You can join for $5K down and on a payment plan. So $5K down, black card is for life. Once you're in, you're in, you're on this path. Jacques challenged people to play bigger, to think bigger. If you've done a few deals before, if you're looking to buy a business, this is a phenomenal route to consider to go out and launch a fund. So grab that link and we'll, we'll go from there. All right, Tom, you ready to go? I think he's— I think we got him here. Maybe let's bring— I don't see Tom on stage. If you can bring him forward for me. Um, so hit go to webinar if you can. We'll bring him forward on the stage. Tom, I think I see you. You there? Can you hear me?

Yeah, I can hear you.

There he is. Tom, how's it going?

I'm great. How are you?

Tom is a good friend of mine. And, uh, we were, I think, friends before we became, uh, you know, kind of worked in the business space together, but Tom, uh, has an incredible venture capital firm. All in venture. He's done syndicated deals for years, and we can probably talk about some of those deals in a minute. Now moving to a fund model, you've raised, I believe, $12 million of your $20 million right now. You're currently in the fundraise right now. Tom focuses on the early-stage venture capital. So seed, validation stage. I think you're at your incubator right there where you have hundreds of companies right now, startups.

Yeah, 196 companies in here right now.

So give us, yeah, give us a minute or two just on what your firm is, what you guys are doing, why you guys are unique and special.

Well, first of all, thanks for having me on here. This is kind of full circle. I remember being in one of these chats about a year or so ago, so it's kind of really surreal to see where we're at and see all the growth that I've seen myself personally and then the business as well. So, but yeah, so we have a venture capital fund. I had been investing in venture capital for 10 years prior to this. I'd done 27 different syndications and raise money for each one of those deals separately, which was a slog. And, you know, I've been on this call for about a half hour so far, and I've heard, you know, a lot of things about scalability and 10x is easier than 2x and all those things apply. But I had some success with those 27 companies and we had a handful of exits and then The market took an interesting turn in venture capital. And the way I see it is basically it's kind of like 2008 in real estate is what 2023 was for venture capital. And it's funny, when I was talking with your dad about this, oh, it was when we went to the F1 race in Vegas 2 years ago.

Yeah.

Remember that?

Yep.

And I said, hey, you know, I'm putting together this fund. I just, I see this opportunity with prices coming down significantly in venture capital and it's like a 60% discount. I'm seeing deals that are, you know, twice as good and the valuation's way lower, the founder's way better and we're seeing that all over the place and nobody's investing. And so A small little fund like me is getting opportunities to invest in these awesome founders. And he said, you know what, Tom, that's exactly what happened in 2008 and '09 for me. And I had my friends calling me to console me and maybe tease me a little bit for being in real estate. And I said, you're crazy. This is the best time ever to be in real estate. And I feel that same way now in venture capital. And when prices were coming down, You know, you have the same people in your network that call you and say, hey, how's it going in venture capital? And I couldn't be more excited about the future of venture capital and the entry points that we're getting in on these businesses.

So to summarize, yeah, market falls, prices are better. It's a great time to deploy and buy up awesome companies at cheaper deals that are, you know, a lot of consolidation, a lot of easier to recruit. There's a lot of benefits actually in these drops. It's funny, if you look at vintages of venture capital firms, it's very interesting. On the drop years is where like the best venture capital firms and actually funds in general are born. We've seen some volatility throughout pretty much every market we've seen over the last few years, whether it was COVID, venture capital in 2023, real estate's gone through some bumps with rates, private equity's been through some bumps. And it's funny, the best firms are the ones who lean in during the hard times, and they can deploy at relatively low entry prices. And then the next market top, they are the heroes of the next market top. 100%. And it's tough being—

when you're in the buy, it's hard to know when you're there. But when it was 2020, '21, '22, it was so hard to know which businesses were actually great and which ones were a bunch of fluff because there was so much capital coming into VC and inflating these companies that didn't have great traction. Now it's very clear. It is so easy to see a business that, hey, this one's backable and this one's not. Because there's not all that fluff in the market that's driving this hype and excitement around certain deals and makes our job a whole lot easier. You know, venture capital is a really hard business to be in, but removing some of that fluff has made it a lot easier for us to identify good opportunities.

Very, very cool. So give us the outlook then, Tom. So that was kind of the past, looking at the past. And are we— now you mentioned 2023. Are we still in the sale in 2025? Where do you think things are moving in the venture capital world and small business? I mean, you're in the very early seed stage. You have 190 companies in that building behind you right now incubating, which is such a cool thing with iHub that you guys have built. Walk me through what the future looks like, you think, in venture capital.

Yeah, I think that the '24 and '25 vintage will be the best one that we see in our lifetime because we're going to be riding this wave all the way up. So, we're identifying amazing opportunities and getting in at low price points, and the cycle's going to happen again. more capital's going to flow into venture capital and we're going to benefit from all of those, from all that money. But I think my outlook is I'm an entrepreneur at heart, less so an investor, and I believe the greatest innovations happen during recessions. You look at some of the best companies ever built and ever created, they were all started in an economic downturn. And I think that comes back to, you know, something about human nature where you know, when your back's up against the wall, that's when you're forced to create and innovate and change. And that drives some of the best innovation that we see. I also see on top of that, like we have an incredible, what I like to, what people call a sea change in AI that we're, I'm not really sure exactly. I don't, nobody really knows exactly how it's going to to play out, but we all know it's going to be enormous. And you look back to the previous sea changes before this, and that was, you know, the internet and then the microprocessor. And when these new technologies, these new inflection points come out, there's all sorts of new innovation that come from it. And we're going to ride that wave. And we know, especially in these businesses that we're funding, we're able to get businesses to profitability so much cheaper because they have to hire way less people. We're able to do so much more with less utilizing these AI tools that on top of just riding the wave of AI in general, all the companies that we're investing in need less capital. Therefore, we take less dilution as they grow. And I think that will increase our returns on our fund as well. Hopefully that wasn't esoteric, but—

No, that was great. That was very well put. It's an interesting spot that you guys are in.

Yeah.

That you've, I guess you could say, positioned yourself into. So walk me through, that's kind of more macro. Talk me through micro, like All In Ventures, your firm, which is, I think, pretty darn cool. You guys have positioned, because venture capital is a competitive space. Someone on this call is like, I want to get in venture capital. Man, there's the smartest people in the world working in venture capital. How did a couple of guys like y'all, figure out how to position yourself in the space and maybe even before your fund, just on your first couple of deals. You want to tell us a story or two on how you maybe did market validation, where you found success doing some of these early deals?

Yeah. And I'll be the first to admit I'm not— I'm definitely not one of the smartest people in the world.

I'm—

I think what— I'll go back to a Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant example. I think what's really cool to me about Kobe Bryant was his relationship with Michael Jordan. And what I learned about Michael Jordan is he wasn't really open with all of the secrets, and he wouldn't really coach some of the other players because they were competition. But he took a special interest in Kobe Bryant because he knew Kobe cared about the game and loved the game as much as he did. And he knew that Kobe was about that life. And so he was able to get mentorship from Michael Jordan because of that. And I was fortunate that I had some really good mentors that believed in me really, really early on. And What set me apart from all of my peers was I was like, hey, I'm going to be about that life. Like, they're not going to waste a single second with me and then have me ignore their advice and not move forward. So I had a professor at BYU that helped mentor me. And, you know, a lot of my success in life has been luck, but I think it's, you know, my my dedication to actually listening and following through. So I did the summer sales thing. I led teams at a company called Vivint, and it was really tempting when all my friends were buying fancy cars and living in fancy houses. And I was like, no, I'm going to be disciplined. I'm going to do what my mentors told me to do. And I invested almost 95% of every dollar that I made And I lived in the crappiest houses, lived in the basement, rented out the top, and moved 18 different times. And what that forced my mentors to do is actually, you know, take me seriously. And so then that led into my mentors, you know, helping me start investing in venture capital deals, specifically at the tech transfer office at BYU, which is every university, almost every university has these tech transfer offices. And that's where—

Explain what that is. Yeah. Tell us what that is.

Well, professors will get grants from the government to just do research. And for them, you know, the Super Bowl for a professor is getting a grant from, say, the NIH or something and getting it FDA approved. They don't— they're not motivated for the monetary side of things. And so once they've developed this technology, they'll send it to the tech transfer office at the university. And they're on to their next research project. They're just not built— they're not as excited about building businesses as an entrepreneurial-minded person is. So what that means is, is a business person can go to a tech transfer office at a university and strike a deal where they give the professor a small bit of ownership, and they can buy that patent for really cheap and go build a business on it. And so the very first business I did that with was a company called SignGlasses, which was technology for deaf and hard of hearing. And I was surprised that nobody else tried to pick up this technology because I thought it was so cool. But essentially, even before I bought the tech, I went and tried to sell it. I went to a bunch of—

Yeah. What was the tech? Just describe it to us real quick.

So, so basically, if you're a deaf student in the classroom, you have an interpreter sitting next to you and then you have to see what the professor's doing up at the front of the classroom and it's impossible to see both places at once. And so a professor got a grant for $750,000 to create these smart glasses that would push in a live interpretation of ASL to the glasses. So wherever the student's looking, they're getting the ASL interpretation. And, um, nobody done anything with the technology. And so I was like, okay, well, I'm gonna see if people would buy this. So I went to, um, San Antonio and set up a booth and pretended like we had this whole business all done to see if people would buy it.

And We had— you took the tech, you didn't have it yet, you took it, you flew, you set up a booth just to see if it would sell.

Exactly. Well, and that's cool is you at these tech transfer offices, you can do just a letter of intent like for 90 days to buy, and that gives you the, um, the ability to go and do tests for validation for that. Um, so that was my very first business, and now that business You know, obviously I went back, it sold.

Yeah. So what happened? So it sold really well at the conference.

Yeah. Then I go back to BYU and, you know, I'm like, I told my mentor who's my professor, I was like, hey, I think we're onto something here. He's like, hey, this is what we're going to do. So we offered the university $10,000 for the patent. They had spent $750,000 on this. And the important thing to know is that the universities Their motivation is to show that they're commercializing technology, not necessarily to make an ROI on the technology. And so they created a low barrier of entry for us. So we gave them $10,000, we got all the rights to the technology, and they get a small ghost equity piece, which is basically an exit fee if we ever sell the business completely. But yeah, that was it. And so I put $50,000 in, my partner put $50,000 in. And, you know, now, now the business is all over the country and Harvard's a customer. UT— well, I said UT Austin. And what's the evaluation today? The valuation most recent is around $60 million.

That's phenomenal. Yeah. So you guys found this at like nothing. Yeah. $10,000 and then $50,000 and $50,000 from each partner. Now at $60 million valuation. And I know I've heard from you that you have a bunch of cool stuff coming from the same business as well, which is awesome. So yeah, absolutely phenomenal. So that's an example. You were asking, give me an example of a deal. That's kind of the stuff that Tom got in so very early. I mean, you're at the validation level. That's just so cool.

Yeah. And somebody asked, how did I initially gather the $50,000? That's a good question. I, I went out and sold door to door, like the, the most pure form of sales. That's how it was.

Your money. You didn't raise $50 grand. It was just your own money, right?

Yeah, it was my own money.

So you did your own deals first and then later you started to pull in other people and say, let's do other deals with me.

Well, yeah, shortly after I— so I put $50 grand in, my partner put $50 grand in, we own the business 100%. And then right after that, we raised at a $1.2 million valuation from some angels and, you know, Todd Peterson, whose name is on this boardroom. And that was it.

That's phenomenal.

So, the idea with this fund is we want to rinse and repeat and do that 50 more times.

Yeah. So cool. Well, Tom, you're doing some incredible stuff. You guys joined Black Card, what, a year and a half ago? And you were like, I've done all these deals. Let's get going on a fund. Let's get a fund figured out. We've been working on that right now. We've now invested in your fund, given you guys commitment as well from our fund. What you guys are doing is phenomenal with All In Ventures. We're excited to see you guys grow. You're still in the capital raising process right now. So, if anybody's curious about meeting Tom, what's a good way to connect with you, Tom, or find out more about you guys?

Um, yeah, find us on our website. It's allin.vc. And, uh, yeah, spell all in or—

yeah, it's O-L-L-I-N.

Oh yeah, you know, O-L-L-I-N. It's an Aztec word. It means actually to go all in. So I thought it was kind of cool. Oh yeah, all in.

Yeah, with an O. So allinvc.com?

allin.vc.

allin.vc. Okay. allin.vc.

Yeah, I'd love to connect with anybody. If you have any questions too about About Black Card, and you know, was it worth it? And all that stuff. I mean, it was worth every penny, probably times ten. Really grateful for the experience, and yeah, happy to answer any questions. Cool.

Well, Tom, thank you very much for coming on. Hope to see you soon.

We got to hang out. Okay, sounds good. See you.

See you, Tom. Right. All right. So today we had my dad. We had Jacques. We had Tom come on. Hopefully that was somewhat useful for y'all. And again, I'll share my screen and then we can take a few questions here. I can answer some stuff. As you guys know, we help people launch funds. So if you're curious about learning about Black Card, how this works, fundlaunch.com/demo is the link here. We're doing a promo. It's $5,000. You know, Black Card is anywhere from $20,000 to $45,000 to help you. It's a full incubator to launch your fund. You can start this week for $5K down. This is for people who are serious though. If you can't tell, Jacques, Tom, these are serious individuals. That had done well in their career, in their business, in investing, but needed a catalyst to scale. And a fund is that. And we ran them through our incubator to scale. If you're a brand new beginner with, you know, nothing, we've got tons of free content online. We've got altstreet.org and other good stuff. And actually next month we have some cool stuff coming out for people that are like doing their first deal. Black Card, though, is meant for people if you've, if you've done a deal or two, you got partners who have done a deal or two, or you're looking to buy a business or looking to invest in this space, this is a full incubator to incubate your fund and help you go through the legal process, the capital, the frame, and the deal phase process. If that's you and you're serious about going much faster, it's not for everybody. This is only for a select few people. fundlaunch.com/demo, $20K to $45K, and then it's $5K down just this week. This is designed to save you years of time of trying to figure this out on your own. Launching a fund is not easy. Even Black Card is not easy. It takes a lot of work to build, to go raise tens of millions of dollars or hundreds of millions. It takes work, takes a lot of time, takes a lot of effort. But our goal is to remove all those barriers, give you people who have done it before, give you 15 different coaches. Tom talked about mentors in his space, give you access to go and find capital, give you legal partners, all the headache and other stuff around a fund. Our goal is to help you do that in a successful manner. So we're doing a cool promo right now. $5K down. This goes away end of the month. And then furthermore, we're doing an event in just a few weeks in Dallas, Texas. You guys can fly out and be in there. So funlaunch.com/demo if you want to learn more. This goes away this Friday on this special deal. We're doing discounts and other cool stuff for this week. It's pretty fun. All right. I'll stay on for a few minutes and take some questions. Was that awesome though, by the way? We had my dad on. You know, then we had— sorry, my dad was on, then we had Jacques, and then we had Tom. I think— I thought it was phenomenal. Um, this was sweet. I know people on the live stream, then people on Zoom. I hopefully you guys enjoyed today. You guys are here— what are we, 2 hours in? Wow, we have been— time flies when you're, uh, when you're having fun, I guess they say. So, um, sweet. Let's answer a few questions. So let's do this. Drop them in the chat, or there's a Q&A, uh, bucket here you guys can use. We can talk about whatever. There's no dumb question. I'm willing to stay on here for a few more minutes. We got 247 people still live, 2 hours in. Kudos to y'all. Kudos to y'all for being on live, being active, being here. I invited you guys to be into like staying, and hopefully this was worth your time. I promised we'd go all out. We'd share some interesting stuff, and hopefully that was worth your time. So let's do it. Hit some of these questions.

So.

Do you need to join Funnel Launch or can we jump straight into Black Card? You can jump straight to Black Card, Jeffrey. Yeah. So back on this screen, come on this. If you hop on a call, we can walk you through all of it. You can just, you can jump right to Black Card. We do some vetting. We want to make sure we can actually help you. So that's why we do a phone call. We want to hear from you. We want to see what you're doing. We want to see if we can help you. But yeah, you can. This is, you know, our main product in Funnel Launch is Black Card. Yeah. So coming right here, funnellaunch.com/demo. Are there any NDAs early on to protect fund ideas in Black Card? We have our terms and master service agreement goes through. We try to protect your intellectual property. We're not going to share anything outside of our organization or outside of our private calls. So yeah, so that's totally in there. As far as specific NDAs, I've heard from a number of mentors, they don't sign NDAs. On a number of businesses, we have a master service agreement though that serves as a you know a function pretty much as as an NDA for you guys though to protect you guys. The problem if if you had me sign an NDA and you're like I'm doing this cool robot business that's amazing. We have I don't know 1,200 clients in Black Card. There may be another person that's also doing a cool robot business you know in Black Card, and so and then if they launch before you, you could come and say well you told them I didn't tell them anything they were just doing. They were just ahead of you. You know, they just beat you to the punch. So, what is the wide range in cost region, $25K to $40K? Yeah, good question. So, back to my screen here. So, we have a full myriad of things in Black Card. We have personal accountability coaches, one-on-one coaches. We have live events. We have 4 events this year. Pitch deck designers. We have legal teams. And it varies on what you need. So, when you can come talk to us and say, hey, You know, I I want to come to the events. I need an international feeder fund structure, which I go over here. I need all the Cayman Islands funds set up. Your cost is going to be much more expensive versus hey, I'm just doing a local fund in Iowa. Okay, just different. Furthermore, you're like, hey, I want to set up sub funds here. It just depends on how much you're going to do, how much you're going to use, and what you need out of Black. Card. That's why this range is kind of here. You might say, hey, I want to come to all the capital raising events you guys are doing. Great. There's an incremental cost. You get a discount for them. Or, hey, I want to work with Fund Launch 360, or I want your legal team, or I don't need the legal team. That's where the cost difference comes from. Yeah. That's what frightens me a little bit, sharing. Yeah. But we are master servers. We're not going to go share your ideas with anybody So that's part of our agreement. We don't share your ideas with anybody. Uh, we, we keep everything private, confidential, unless you want them to be shared. Like today, Jacques and Tom agreed to come on and share some of their stuff. Uh, you don't have to do any of that though. It's all private. Is this for customizable funds? Yeah. So we customize a fund around you. Uh, the concept around customizable fund is exactly this. Yes. This is a very, very customizable fund for you. We actually have, have used some of that terminology on our, on our website of a customizable fund. That's, it's, it's, that's why that range is so different because it's customizable to you. But furthermore, you get all the coaching, the mentorship, the, the legal. If I, if I was to bucket it into 3 categories, you'd have advisors and let's see, advisors, alumni, and cohorts. So you get one-on-one calls with personal accountability coach, daily office hours, and the Fun Academy course. You get networking and events. That's kind of the first bucket. Second one is the networking events and tribes. You get a private Slack community, 3 in-person events a year. We're actually doing 4 this year. And a cohort to work with over the next 12 months. You actually join with— you have other people in the group doing this with you. You get to join Jacques, you get to join Tom. They're in Black Card right now. You get to be shoulder to shoulder with them. And then furthermore, the last bucket would be strategic partnerships, legal, and building out. We call it your waffle. That's kind of an internal term we use, but that's your team. So you bought your fund waffle, full docs, set up a US domestic fund, or we now can do international funds. That just depends what you're doing. And then full pitch deck design for your funder syndication and other partners with what you're doing. Yeah. Yeah. And you get to build along 1,200 other people in Black Card and meet with them. The cool— one of the coolest things, and just as for me selfishly, I'm in Black Card. I get to hear what these great funds— I get to hear people like Jacques or Tom. What's working for you? How did you guys go raise capital? Oh, this worked for us. We, like Jacques just mentioned, we found some events were good, some events were bad. We found that free events were better. We found these family. And so I get to hear that from Jacques. Oh, that maybe I'll use that for my fund. And then I tell Jacques, oh, X, Y, and Z is working for us. And so you get this network effect. Typically, when you're you know when you tell your mom or your girlfriend or your boyfriend whoever that you want to run a fund, I mean people don't understand what you're talking about. They're like a fund. What is that? And generally speaking, most people even in the business space around you. Don't quite know what a fund is or how funds work. And we've developed this little corner of the internet called Black Card, this private incubator where we talk, eat, sleep, and drink funds all day, every day. And you get to be in that ecosystem. Again, proximity is power. Being just around the people doing this, being around people like Jacques, people like my dad, people like Tom on a daily basis. I think moves the needle way faster. Selfishly, that's one of the huge reasons I love being in Black Card or being a part. We founded Black Card and this is like my group, but like I count myself as a member of this community. It's much bigger than me. It is our community together and we're all helping it grow and feed and help one another. Does Fund Launch support interns or support Black Card customer-funded support interns? How does it all work with interns? Yeah, the interns are interesting. So we started this a few months ago. I'll put something on my screen. I put a post out on LinkedIn about, hey, if you're— if you want to intern for a fund, you're a current college student. We got 3. Oh, let me go a little bit smaller here. We got 300 applications from every school in the country. MIT, Yale, Dartmouth. I mean, you name it. Crazy. And then we took our last cohort, we took 30 interns. So about 10%, the best and brightest ones. And we actually trained them for about 3 to 4 weeks. And then in Black Card, we put out, if you guys are, some of you guys are Black Card members in here, we put out emails like, hey, do you want to apply for an intern. They put an application in and then we place the interns into their funds. I believe Jacques got a couple interns. I believe, uh, I don't actually, I don't know if we placed any in Tom's funds, but we've placed in a few of these funds, uh, their interns. Yeah. 1,200 out of 8 billion people in the world is pretty elite. There you go. I love it. Uh, Tyler, is it viable to come through the program for a media entertainment fund as opposed to some other sections as we talked about today? Yeah, we actually have a number. Maybe give me more color on what you're doing. But as for where to go media entertainment, we have a number of groups doing media entertainment funds. They want to go build a big studio to produce contents. One group wants to do like an AI studio to make new movies and stuff. Other groups want to go buy other studios or and or other scripts or content creators. So there's a ton of not a ton, but there's a number of people in Black Card doing that, Tyler, and that. Faction. Yep. And we can help you do that. Donovan, do you need experience? If so, are there any way to get that? Also, is there a way to apply to an existing fund that's in Black Card Program, or is that connected to Fund Launch? So good question. With experience, maybe I'll go over to here. In every fund— so I'm going to this framework, I'm going to zoom in on this framework— there's 3 main roles kind of in every fund. There is the person who is the expert investor. This person, you know, Is amazing at trading options, you know, in their basement. They've done real estate for 10 years. They've done, you know, they're just really good at the asset class. Okay? The next one is the fund manager. This person is really, really good at putting the fund together, the mechanics of the fund, how funds are built. And then finally, the money raiser. This person's just well-connected, knows how to find people with money. Okay? Generally speaking, you know, these are multiple people. Now, could this be one person? Yes. Can one person do all 3 roles? Totally. My first fund, I did all 3 roles. Okay? Can this be 2 people? Yes. Can you split this up? Can this be 10 people? Yes. So, but all 3 roles need to be covered in here. So, for example, my story. So, I, my dad started teaching me about funds. I became very, very good at this, the fund manager role. Okay? I just, I know the ins and outs, how waterfalls are put together, how fund structures are done, all the ins and outs. And I got very, very good at educating myself on this. What I found was like, so for me and Dan, I found Dan Young. We run Ugly Unicorn together. It's a blockchain crypto fund. Bridger, I'm not that great at crypto. I'm okay at crypto. Now I'm good at crypto. But at the time, I didn't really know crypto. So I found Dan, Dan Young. Had the largest crypto mining facility in the state of Utah in 2014. Huge crypto investor for the last decade. I mean, in the early stages of crypto, he had this whole warehouse mining crypto back in 2014. And Dan's done extremely well in this. So, I found Dan. I was like, Dan, what if we did a crypto fund? And I can put the fund together and we can both help raise capital together. So, we came together. We partnered on this and we've, you know, we currently manage roughly $20 to $25 million and it's been a Really good fun so far. You don't need everything, but you can come in and learn one of these categories and partner with somebody else. So everyone in Black Card that joins is in a different bucket here, or in just our Funnel Launch community. Some people are more in this bucket, some are here, some are here. We've had a number of people join Black Card and find their other partners inside of Black Card while they're in. That's one of the big pieces of the networking bucket that I showed you earlier. One of the big pieces of that right here was that you can meet and help and find other people inside of Black Card. How many people should my capital raising team have to make this our career? I don't know if it's as many people. You can have one person. You can have 5 people. It's more about the effectiveness of those people. So I don't think it matters back on the team. I don't think it matters there, but it's more about the effectiveness of those Thank you for sharing so many principles. I learned so much. I've been solicited for a fund with little upfront annual subscription fee, like cost of biz can branch off. Is there a comparable breakdown? Still nontraditional lending program, leverage access to join, or any ideas on backend enrolling? Yeah, Keen, I would hop on a call. We actually have just introduced financing options. And you just mentioned this. We can start with just $5K down and we have financing options to help you finance this over the next year, year and a half. Something like that. So if this feels like a lot of money right now, that's okay. Most of our guys are joining $5K down and then you can finance the rest over the next bit. Yeah, we do internal financing. Yeah. What would you suggest if you want to make this your career going into fundraising? I would tell you just get moving. Get moving in the right direction. Start like you heard Tom's story. If he just like He's just like, I want to be in this space. I'm going to find a tech transfer office. I'm going to go just like, I'm going to fly down, do validation. I'm going to start working on deals. I would tell someone to start moving in this direction. Now, if it's black card, great. If it's— we have a— I mentioned this earlier, a full course of free content on, I think, let me pull it up again. If you go to altstreet.com, there's a ton of just free content here. Start moving and educating yourself in this direction. to learn the game. Now, if you're a little more serious, I would say join Black— even if, you know, most people that join Black Card don't have everything figured out day one. That's why they're joining Black Card. They join because they have some gaps. And they say, well, I want to figure out what this is. Maybe can you move my face just so they can see the name on there? Somebody's asking where it's at.

altstreet.org.

To see, you know, what is the game that I need to play. And so people join and they find partners, they work. The Black Card is a lifetime membership. AltStreet's a lot. This is all free, by the way. AltStreet's a free product to come learn and get in this ecosystem of game. Yeah. If my real estate development business is vertically integrated with land acquisition and entitlements, lot and land banking with 10 big builders, vertical connect construction, is that too broad for real estate funding? No, not at all. Number of groups find if they vertically integrate, which means, hey, we have the property manager, we have the builder all together. They use that as, if I go over here, as their edge. We talk about building an edge as part of their edge in their strategy. Now, some groups don't do that. They say we hire, but some people say, no, that's part of our edge. Yeah. Hey, we save you costs because guess what? We not only manage it, we buy it, we build it, you know, we develop it. We also manage it. And, you know, We can lease it up. We do the entitlements. We do it all in-house, and that gives us alpha or a strong edge against our competitors. So no, I think it's phenomenal, Casey. I'd say that that's a great direction. From your perspective, how much clout is required as a first-time fund manager to motivate investors? I don't know if clout is the word. Clout to me means like online presence or How much of a celebrity are you like clout-wise? You could call it by experience though, by expertise. How strong do I need to build my team out, right? I'll tell you a quick story. So on here, this is early on. So I was relatively young. I was 22, started my first fund, 23, 24. I think I was 24 at the time. And I got pretty darn good at this game right here. Now, I knew some of this stuff. I got invited to a meeting. So I'm 24 years old, really young. Okay. I got invited to a meeting and the meeting had 3 gentlemen, 3 people there. Mike had invited me and he liked me. Mike thought I was cool. The other 2, I'll put a, you know, I'll just call them X and Y over here. X and Y didn't think I was that cool. I show up to the meeting. It's all— I think one guy couldn't make it. So there's 3 of us in the meeting. But he was, I think, calling in on Zoom or whatever. It was very, very clear. And these guys were meeting to launch a new fund. And this fund was going to be like $100 million and they were going to do opportunity zones funds. So Ozone, if you guys have heard of opportunity zones, that was the fund they were going to do. It was back a few years ago. They bring me to this meeting and it was obvious these 2 people over here did not want me in this meeting. They were like, why did you invite this kid Bridger to this meeting? And Mike's like, well, he's smart, you know, let's bring him in. And anyways, my clout— back to use that word— my clout in that meeting was pretty much like worth dirt. Like, I was like lower than dirt. Like, they— it was very clear they were talking about their fund that they were going to launch with their money, and I was not included in this meeting. Okay, so in a moment of courage, I raised my hand. I was like, hey, Hey, real quick, as you guys are going, um, are you guys gonna run, uh, an American or European waterfall? All right, what are you guys gonna do for your pref catch-up carried interest? I'll show you kind of on the screen here. Are you guys gonna run a, you know, Reg D 506, a 3, 3, or 3 fund? Are you guys gonna be an IRA, ERA? And they're like, what do you mean? Like, they're like, go to the whiteboard and explain what you mean. So I went up to the whiteboard and I explained to them the difference between a European and an American waterfall. I explained to them the difference between a 3, a 3, and a 3 fund. I explained to them the difference of pref, catch-up, carried interest, how different funds are structured. Everything that you guys learn, if you guys have been in Fund Launch before, you guys know it's all pretty standard stuff. How international feeder funds work. This stuff right here. In about back to the story, in about seven minutes, I went from lower than dirt to they wanted me to be an equal business partner with them on this fund. Because I taught them something they didn't know. We were going to be— I mean, we were going to be 25%, 25%, 25%, 25% owners on this business at 24 years old. These guys are all 40 years old. They have private jets. I mean, these guys were legit business people. Why would they want Bridger to be on their team? Well, I don't know. You could say a number of reasons, but one of them was because I had studied beforehand. Preparation had met opportunity. Preparation met opportunity. I had come in and learned they were very good at this bucket. They were very good at this bucket. They didn't know this bucket very well. I taught them something they didn't know. For me, as someone who was young, I don't have much track record, but I could leverage their track records. Does that make sense? That was a huge moment. This is why it's coming. If you're brand new, come in and learn. Learn what's happening. Join like you're on today. Join the webinars. Join the calls. Be in here and get here. Now, to end this story, this fund never launched. These partners could never agree on anything. Ended up not launching. So, but I think that the concept is still true. They wanted me to be their partner at 24 years old when all these guys were 45, 50 years old because I knew something they didn't. So again, if you're someone that wants to join Black card. We have a special you know promo going on right now. Funlaunch.com/demo. You could hop on a phone call, talk to our team, and and go from there. Was your dad's fund to fund to funds? No, not at all. They were more real estate, primarily focused in real estate. Yeah. So he had a he had a private credit fund, a debt fund at the beginning. Then they kind of merged into a full just full out. They're buying properties, distressed properties. They'd go buy one, they'd fix it up, and they go from there. Yeah, cool. Let's hit a few more questions.

What is a fund?

Someone's like, I came on late. What's a fund? Let's talk about that briefly. What is a fund? Okay, what do I even mean by a fund? All a fund. So like you hear these terms right here: hedge fund, private equity fund, debt, real estate venture capital. What is a fund? All a fund is, is a pool of money. Investors put money into that pool. Fund managers draw from that pool and they go and they make investments. Whenever those investments make money, the investments go back to the pool and they get split between the fund managers and the investors. Okay, that's it. It's not that— it's, it's pretty simple business model. Like, it's really not that crazy. Uh, and typically this split is 20/80. So 80% goes to the investors, 20% goes to the fund managers. So you hear like a 2 and 20 fund, that's what they're talking about, 80/20. Um, so then what's the difference between a hedge fund or private equity or debt fund? The difference is what they are buying. So, for example, I'll use my little drawer here. A hedge fund is buying— I'll use real estate first. Most simple. Real estate is buying real estate. Okay? They pool money together and they go buy real estate. Whenever that real estate makes money, they split it, generally speaking, 80/20. Not crazy. What is a venture capital fund? You just heard from Tom. Venture capital, they have a pool of money. They go invest in early-stage startups. And whenever those startups make money, they split the returns. What is a private equity firm? They're buying private equity or private businesses. So they're buying businesses like, uh, you know, let's, let's take, uh, like, like Elon Musk buying X actually is kind of a private equity deal. There's other firms like Sycamore Partners on Wall Street. They own Staples, the department store. They're trying to buy Kohl's last year. They own Nine West Shoes. They own Aeropostale. That's one private equity firm that buys all these brands together. A hedge fund. What's a hedge fund? A hedge fund is a— they trade public securities. So, stocks, bonds, options, crypto. Again, a pool of money. They just go down and they buy these investments. When the investments make money, they split the returns. Boom. Do you have any funds involved with self-directed crypto IRAs? That's what I'm looking to get into. Um, some of the funds, they can accept money from, you know, retirement accounts. Um, uh, you're saying IRAs, not RIAs, correct? Um, but yeah, retirement accounts, they can accept— like, our fund can accept up to 25%, or excuse me, 20% of, uh, of retirement funds. So yeah. How much do I have to pay to set up a hedge fund? Yeah, so back to, uh, here in Black Card, that's part of the cost of Black Card. We actually go negotiate discounts We have full legal fund formation here, um, depending on what you want to add or take away. Uh, Black Card, which includes all the setup, everything you need to go and set up and launch that fund, uh, it's anywhere from $20K at the low end to maybe $45K at the high end. Someone, you know, if you're launching your fund, probably in the middle. I think the average person in Black Card spent about $30K to be in Black Card.

Wow.

Depending on what you, you know, what packages you have and what you want and how much help you need And all that kind of stuff. Yeah. If you're interested, we're doing a cool thing this week. $5K down, fundlaunch.com/demo. You can finance this. You're in Black Card for life. It takes time to set up a fund. That's just the nature of funds. When you're doing big stuff, it takes time. So it's okay if you join and you learn for 6 months or 8 months and then you start. You could join, you could join today and get started in the next couple of weeks. Some people join, it takes them a year. It's okay. You're in Black Card for life. That's the purpose of it. Hi, is this a global operation or just for the States? Most of our clients are in the United States. I'd say about 85%, maybe 80% in the United States. About 20% are outside the United States. So we have a number of people in Canada, some people in Australia, the UK, Middle East. So we can help you with that. Again, we can talk about your specific country that you're in. And help you there. Does the setup cost vary with capital market or generally stable? Generally stable, depending on the market. It's, you know, lawyers cost the same money. Pitch deck designs cost the same money. You know, over time, generally same price. By the way, if you go and just try to find a lawyer, just the legal piece, this one circle right here, just that piece. If you go Google it right now, the average cost to set up a fund is about, I'm going to say, $30,000 to about $50,000, just the legal fees. Go look it up right now. Anybody want to go Google? What's the legal fees to set up a fund? Go ask ChatGPT. It's $30,000 to $50,000. Because we're a big group, we can negotiate discounts with these law firms. You get all the coaching, the pitch deck design, the softwares, all this help for the same cost as you would just spend Going and hiring a lawyer. Okay, pretty cool. I would go here, financial.com/demo. You can actually book a call right here. Somebody's like, how do I hop on a call? I would just book a call here. There's time slots available for the next few days. This whole promotion, though, is ending March 28th. Just the next few days. You got 3 days to make a decision here. We're taking away all this cool stuff. We have some cool discounts going on right now.

Yeah.

Besides black card fees, are there any other fees to launch a fund? Depends on the fund you're launching, Max. Good question. So down to here, if I go to like partnerships, most your funds, once you're running the fund, you're going to want to have insurance and third-party administration and tax and audit. However, these costs are charged by the fund, meaning the fund, once your fund is up and running, the fund pays for your audit. The fund pays for the admin. And furthermore, if you paid for them upfront, you can get reimbursed.

Oh, I'm getting caught there.

Reimbursed for those expenses, which is kind of cool. Is there a website for all Black Card members and their deal offerings? We don't publicly list all of our Black Card members. We've listed some of them. Like today, we had 2 of them come on. Some of them are more private than others. So if you go to— if you go to do research on us, you can go— I would book Yeah. So you can book a call here, fundlaunch.com/demo. But if you go to just fundlaunch.com, on there you can learn a ton about Black Card. We have a testimony video. There's actually Jacques. These are— man, look at Jacques. You're looking great right there. There's a video. There's a bunch of testimonials here at fundlaunch.com/testimony. You can read from real customers what they experienced with this and see what they thought. Today we brought on 2 that I think had pretty positive things to say about Black Card. You can go and read hundreds of testimonials of current clients or former clients or people that have come through the process before. All right here, follow.com/testimonial. So you can go, yeah, you can go do a ton of research. Yeah, pretty fun. All right, we're wrapping up here. Any, let's see, any final questions? This is a great time to be alive. We have got amazing stuff going on. If you guys missed the beginning, we are live today. We might send out some stuff. I don't know if we send out replays. I don't know if on this call. Go check it out and you guys can, We got to summarize. I think it's a phenomenal time to be a fund manager. It's a phenomenal time to have a fund that you can go and buy up cheap deals in some markets. You have opportunity in other markets. It's going to be, it's going to be pretty awesome. So you guys are amazing. A few other things I'll note. We got some cool stuff coming out soon. This Black Card promotion ends soon. We're coming out with some new stuff in Fund Launch. We're going to have some new merch. We're doing in-person events at our office. If you guys need to come meet me and shake my hand, we're probably going to do one. We did one last week. It was phenomenal. People loved it.

It was totally free.

And we're just like, our mission is to democratize Wall Street, to make high finance accessible to all. I want this stuff to be in the hands of the common man or woman. And so we are doing, we're thinking once a month, like come to our office for an hour or 2 and we'll just whiteboard stuff out. Last, we had about 50 people show up on Friday. I post on Instagram 2 days before. We had 50 people show up. One guy flew out from Atlanta to be here. So if you need to come, if you want to come shake our hand, be part of our stuff, great. In Black Card, we do stuff every single day. We go live. I go live once a week in Black Card. We have coaches going live. We have, I think, 11 coaches that go live every week. So every day there's 1 to 3 calls going on every single day. You get access to coaching staff help inside of Black Card. It's a phenomenal thing. We are focused on helping you guys be successful. So we're here. We're going nowhere. We've done this now for what four and a half, five years as a company. I mean, we have a full team behind you. This is what we do day in and day out. So you guys are amazing. Last final call. Say it one more time: funlatch.com/demo. You guys can go book a call there. Share my screen one more time here. That's a place to go book a call if you're curious about joining Black Card and joining this promo before the end of the month. Five K down. You can join before March twenty eighth. All right. You guys are amazing. I'm hopping off. See you in the next one. Bye-bye.