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

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

Beautiful day.

It's a beautiful day. So get pumped, get excited for this show. Let's start with the hack. $1.4 billion is missing. Where to go? Who lost it? Break it down, Jordy.

Okay, so as usual once a month in crypto a billion dollars is stolen.

It's really like I saw this, you told me about this article and I was like okay, like why should I care about this one?

I don't know why it is but it seems like it's always toward as the market starts to dip that the chaos off. But anyway, so yeah, bring it down. For those that are hearing this for the first time, Ethereum is falling at the moment as crypto exchange Bybit confirms a $1.4 billion hack. So this was going down this morning. I Woke up around 4:30 I think news was like starting or there was rumors early this morning the CEO had confirmed that there was indeed a hack. Crypto prices are broadly falling Friday following confirmation that major centralized crypto exchange Bybit was hacked after 1.4 billion dol worth of tokens were stolen in a hack. And so you know, the hacks in crypto happen on centralized exchanges in many ways. Those are more rare and that there's more controls put in place, they're more professionalized. A lot of the high profile hacks have just happened on these sort of defi protocols where one person is, has the keys for a wallet.

Yeah, it's more like social engineering, right? Like there was an engineer who had the key to the actual wallet and they clicked on a phishing link or they got scammed or they, or a.

North Korean, a North Korean dev, you know, gets pushed some code, push some code, etc. So anyways, what happened here? More than $1.4 billion worth of Ethereum and staked Ethereum were withdrawn from Bybit's hot wallet on Friday and a large chunk of the funds were being sold via decentralized exchanges. So it's actually a graphic of this. I don't know if we have it.

Lined up on the show, but scroll down.

Basically this $1.4 billion was stolen and then immediately distributed across hundreds of wallets to be sold off.

Sure.

And so that's obviously a lot of sell pressure on Ethereum. Bybit co founder and CEO Ben Joe confirmed the attack in a post on X, saying that the planned transfer was manipulated in some way and that the funds were swiped.

Yeah, Here I'll read these. Bybit Eth Multisig Cold wallet just made a transfer to our warm wallet about an hour ago. It appears that this specific transaction was musked. I don't know what that means. All the signers saw the Musk UI which showed the correct address and URL was from @safe. However, the signing message was to. It was about to change by bit Eth multisig. So I don't, I actually don't understand any of that. Do you understand what happened? What does Musk mean?

I mean, to be clear, he's just sharing sort of like internal. So it's possible this is a typo and it should have said mask.

Mask. Okay.

I actually don't know.

Okay. However, the signing message was was to change the smart contract logic of our ETH cold wallet. The hacker took control of the specific ETH cold wallet. We signed and transferred all ETH in the cold wallet to this unidentified address. All other cold wallets are secure, all withdrawals are normal. Ethereum is down 3% on the hour to a current price of 27.27 $27, while Bitcoin has dipped nearly 1% to $98,000, which is kind of where Bitcoin's been trading around for the last month or two.

And so security researcher ZX XBT had sort of front run Ben's the CEO's post saying that there was suspicious outflows from Bybit and that a source confirmed to him that it was a security incident. And he has since added that the ETH is being split between 39 different addresses as the attacker apparently tries to muddle the flow of funds to make them harder to track. And so some other people had commented that it's very difficult to steal $1.4 billion even in crypto. Right. Because how do you, you know, you have to get those if you want to actually use those funds in the real world? Unless you're, you know, part of some global crime syndicate, you've got to like get them into a bank account and even that, you know, so, yeah, a lot of steps to actually get those from.

And there used to be services like what was a tornado cash where you could kind of put money in and then anonymously withdraw it. And it was very messy. But I believe that was shut down because it was such a laundering like front. It was very controversial because, you know, math is illegal now. Yeah, I don't know exactly know where I stand on that. I mostly am just kind of learning the facts on that one. But yeah, it is an interesting case. It is crazy. I wonder how much of this will actually be retrieved because you could imagine, you know, there's some sort of expected value calculation from these hackers. They're like, yeah, we'll steal 1.4 billion, but we'll send it off all over this place. Even if we just walk away with a hundred million. That's great. Totally worth our time.

Yeah. Somebody was commenting on X saying the hackers should just take like a couple hundred million dollars as a fee, give the rest back because they just won't. Wouldn't be able to launder it anyways.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

It'll be interesting to see where this goes and if they can track people down. I'm sure Coffeezilla is staying busy, but let's move on to a $40 billion fundraise that's currently going on led by Brett Adcock for Figure AI, the humanoid robotics company.

The size lord himself.

He is a size lord. He has been raising the stakes endlessly. And I'll give you a little background on some of his history here. Sam Parr broke it down when he did a pod with Brett Adcock. He first sold a company, a hiring software company called vettery, for $100 million. Then he taught himself about flying and he built Archer, basically an electric helicopter for short commutes. He took that company public, specked it, and I think it's One of the few, like hard tech SPACs. It's actually kind of sustained. It hasn't gone down 90%. I mean, let's look it up on public. And then he made.

Well, it's down 8% today.

But how is it, how is it since like the SPAC launch?

It's still up. It's up 25% month over month. I bet some of this is based on what's going on in figure, figure. I'm sure the SPAC investors are, you know.

Yeah.

Hey, this guy's profile is getting raised, you know. Yeah. They're going to put the robots in the, in the planes. When the planes ship, how do you.

Think those humanoids are going to get around? They're going to need, they're going to.

Need, they're going to need archers. Dude, this is a huge narrative violation. It's, it's up dramatically from the, from the SPAC. From the SPAC. What's the market cap in 2021 when it's backed? It came out at 600 million.

Okay.

It's now at almost 5 billion.

Wow. So who would have thought, like flying cars are not just racing around. So it's still a speculative investment in many ways.

But yeah. And I mean like if you look at. Even in December of last year. So a few months ago Archer Aviation stocked I'm on the Alpha Future Republic faced a significant drop of 24% due to increased short selling activities and funding concerns. So short sellers got absolutely smoked.

Wow.

On this one, depending what kind of position they took.

So he built figure, he raised $650 million from Bezos, Nvidia and OpenAI. And now most recently, he has a new thing called Cover, which makes X ray like cameras that can detect if someone's bringing weapons into schools or stadiums. So he's gotten into kind of like the flock safety market a little bit. And yeah, he's been a character in Silicon Valley for a while. But this particular fundraise has been controversial because it's driven heavily by SPVs, which are special purpose vehicles. I'm sure you dealt with these, but Natasha Mascarenas over at the Information has a breakdown of what's going on. So let's read through that. This is I think slide three now. Yeah, there we go. SPVs are circling robotics startups. $40 billion value valuation funding round. Special purpose vehicles are now a mainstay in venture capital. Showing up in some of the biggest deals in artificial intelligence. From OpenAI to Anthropic is a flexible way to raise cash from a Larger pool of investors.

And to be clear, not always a larger pool like some of these big, you know, Thrive Capital will do an spv. Yeah but it might be for massive investors.

Right.

It's not always this massive pool of investors. In the case of figure it seems like this is basically being marketed to retail.

Oh, interesting. I didn't know.

I mean not actually marketed Mark marketed to retail, but more so more broadly. Hey, we got a $200 million allocation. Like we're going to bring in, you know, 50 people to fulfill it.

Can you steal man, why a fund that has you know, 3 billion under management in an active growth fund would want to do an spv? When a company, one of their growth stage portfolio companies is raising $20 billion.

There'S a bunch of incentives to do these one maybe you don't want to be over concentrated in a single fund. So if you're already sit. If you're a growth fund and you have 10% of your investable capital already in that company, it's more and more risk to go further. I think founders fund gets very aggressive with this and that. There's more comfort being like we have 15% of our fund in this one.

Company but founders very concentrated on SPVs.

Yeah, yeah. But they'll still do go back to.

The other the other reason hey, you're already committed to this. You have allocation but if you want more, you, you can get more access because yeah, and one of the this round is so big we just can't fill it all.

And one of the reasons why investors love SPVs even if you're operating a large vehicle already, is that the SPV is deal by deal. So if Your fund has 6% IRR and you're getting some carry on that and your fees but then one SPV does a 10x, you're getting the full benefit of that. All the 20% carry from that even if your fund underperforms or doesn't achieve the milestones that you initially set. So there's a lot of reasons.

It's a really attractive way to get allocation from like lower tier or maybe people outside of Silicon Valley into SpaceX or.

And yeah, there's been a lot of SP and there's. And this is why, this is why Angelus has caught flack historically. Although it's a fantastic platform and like I'm a weekly active user. Yeah the. But, but there's managers on there that are and people that have gotten tremendously wealthy from having one good investment and like 30, you know, losers basically. And so there's it can end up being over, over aligned to the, to the manager of the spv.

Yeah.

And the same thing happens in real estate. It happens in every sort of asset.

Class where there's a. Promote. Yeah. There's a funny post. Maybe Will posted this. Something about, you know, there's more in common with an SPV promoter and a like a club promoter than. Yeah, than, you know, traditional venture capital. I'll read some of this and then I'm going to get your. Your take now. Fund managers are considering using SPVs to fund a huge new round for Figure AI, the three year old startup that builds humanoid robots. The Sunnyvale based. The Sunnyvale, California based startup is in talks to raise 1 billion to 2 billion and is seeking a $40 billion valuation. According to three people with direct knowledge of funding fundraising efforts. The company has received a term sheet at that valuation. According to one of the, one of the, one of the people interviewed. Align Ventures, a New York based early stage venture firm that invested in several figures. Several figures prior rounds has talked to investors about raising an SPV of several hundred million dollars from its limited partners and other investors. According to two people. Parkway Venture Capital, an early stage deep tech firm that previously invested in Figure also plans to invest in the round. According to People. What do you think?

So, yeah, the whole thing. They have a term sheet here. Term sheets. Uh, the person sending the term sheet determines sort of the, the, the, the entity behind the term sheet determines the weight that other investors put on the term sheet. Right. So Andreessen Horowitz sending a term sheet is very different than a $30 million seed fund that, you know, nobody's heard of before sending a term sheet. Right.

Yeah. And term sheets are not legally binding.

Yeah, they're not, they're not legally binding. They're in this case could very well be strategically, you know, sent in order to, you know, one. The other thing is these, I believe we know Parkway and I believe that Align is in the same boat. I'm trying to check to like Align Ventures for context.

Yeah.

Their entire portfolio on their website is CPG companies. So they've done Billy Karev, Coterie, the farmer's Dog, figs. So when traditional institutional venture capitals look at, you know, hearing that figure. Got a term sheet.

Yeah.

And then they go to the fund's portfolio and they're like, wait, this company doesn't have a public deep tech investment, that term sheet. The reason that this round has been memed a little bit is because it's hard to take a term sheet From a line. Super seriously. It's unclear that they would be able to pull together the capital to do 300 million, much less $1 billion investment.

Right.

Even if they're super excited about it. So Parkway. I'm pulling up Parkway Ventures capital as well.

Yeah.

It sounds like they were in figure already. And so the other thing is that Parkway, if they have a big position in figures even last round, they have a huge incentive to mark up their position and just get more capital into the company. The other thing, if Brett is hyper fixated on valuation, which around like this y tends to mean. Right. There's no real. There's no real reason that this is a $40 billion company. You know, you could argue that that doing one on 10 billion would still be a little bit too hot, given their traction. Right. They haven't released a lot, but Parkway still has an incentive to. To tell their initial investors, look, you got a 20x on your investment in however many months, and there's so much heat. Brett also has, you know, a SPAC that's doing well right now in the public markets. And so maybe they're saying there's some floor to Brett the Ad Cox sort of, you know, deep tech machine.

I mean, the guy's good at, you know, fundraising and keeping the share price.

Up and delivering the thing that we.

The shareholder promises.

We talked about this. I think it was off air. I'm curious what adcock's game plan is, because it does feel like in the environment right now. Figure could spac.

Yep.

But it certainly wouldn't go out at 40. And if it did, maybe it could go out at 40, but I don't think that's a price that it would be able to sustain. And so what is the game?

Because it's not like the valuation would not be driven by their fundamentals, earnings per share beats or whatever.

And archers still. Archers lost, you know, burned almost half a billion last year.

Yeah.

And so there's been, you know, there had been concerns of sort of, how long can they keep that up? Spending a million dollars a day with no revenue.

A million dollars a day. Wow.

More than a million dollars a day.

Yeah.

That's a lot.

Yeah.

I mean, the steel man here, like the revenue. The revenue line on public for Archer is a dash. Like there is no.

There's no revenue, there's no resistance. Just R and D right now. And Brett would say, hey, look, you know, how long did it take Tesla to start making real money? Took a long time.

Right? Yeah.

I don't know how Archer Tracks against that timeline perfectly.

But yeah, and to be clear, we love robots. I want to have an army of robot podcast producers that Ben controls. We got 50 different camera angles. Everybody should want figure to win. But it's totally fair to have a few questions about exact. Why is it getting priced more than Ford Motors? Why is it getting priced four times Rivian?

Yep.

Right. When you actually think about almost double. And why is it. Yeah, almost double and roll has a.

Billion dollars of revenue and just took a $22 billion. And some of the best from IVAs.

Yeah. And some of the best fundraisers ever. Right. So look, it's hard for me to.

Say every Tier one VC in the Valley.

Yeah.

But there is an interesting question, like, you know, aligned ventures. People are saying, parkway Venture Capital. These are not typical, like, huge growth stage deep tech funds. But there's, I think there's an interesting idea of, like, why did this round come together the way it did? Well, think about the other funds that might do a deal like this and think about their conflicts.

Yeah.

Are they in an Elon company? Because Elon's working on Humanoids. And if you're in, if you're in X, like Andreessen is, or you're in, you know, Sequoia is an X. If you're in SpaceX. If you're in Neuralink, boring company.

Yeah.

And you say, hey, Elon, we're going to go and fund a direct competitor, the Tesla Optimist. Even if your venture fund is not a Tesla shareholder, Elon might say, hey, what, what, what? Like, come on, like, I thought we were on the same team here.

Yeah.

I'm building the Elon companies and you're in one of those Elon companies. You benefit from everything that I do. Why are you finding a competitor of mine? And so I think it's interesting. Like, it is, it is, it is like, very impressive that Brett has been able to put together as much money as he had competing with Elon. Because, like, the famous quote is like, never bet against Elon. And Elon said, hey, I'm doing the humanoid robot thing. And that typically means you don't want to be the guy who's doing, who's going up against Elon.

What, what, what Brett is doing is, is very impressive.

Yeah.

Anybody, like, he's going to have detractors. Anytime you have somebody rocket to this level of success, he's going to have detractors. There's ways that you can, you know, try to dissect what he's doing, you know, and you Know the Parkway, the GP over at Parkway, who's presumably the one that sent the term sheet, has been on the board of figures since May of 2023. So, you know, if he's. It all comes down to. Again, until the round closes, it's all marketing as far as I'm concerned. And we saw this, we saw this with, yeah, Stargate. We also saw this with the bolt. Ryan Breslow, when he came out and he said, I have a new investment coming in. And then people, the thing is it's hard to fake a billion dollar investment because I've raised SPVs before. I don't know if you've done SPVs. It's hard to fill a, you know, and like filling a $400 million investment. I don't believe that. I actually don't believe that, you know, major New York City investment banks would be able to fill a $300 million SPV into figure at 40 billion.

That's IPO money.

Yeah, they wouldn't, they wouldn't be able to fill that at $40 billion. I bet you they could at five.

Yeah, probably.

But, but you know, saying that's a very good point. And so, and so Jesse over at Parkway would love to, would love to talk to him and kind of hear his plans for this. If he has some, you know, ridiculous capital network that is more risk on than some of the like.

Yeah.

Then, then, so it's good. Anyway, so, so there's a lot of questions here that I think are fair. I'm, you know, I'm always in favor of high risk investments into deep tech.

Yeah. But this is, Yeah. I mean, this is kind of, you know, if a VC is making an investment that doesn't make you uncomfortable, like, are they really doing venture capital?

Yeah, like this is adventure capital for sure.

This feels like a venture bet.

Yeah.

Where it's like, if it works, the bet is that he's going to beat Elon Musk and then deliver humanoid robots, an entirely new technology that will scale to millions of these robots. Like, it will be a trillion dollar.

Company if it works. The thing is, is it would still be a high, high risk venture bet at $10 billion.

Right.

Because you say like, look, you know, this, this company is going to take.

Yeah.

You know, with Rivian. A really like, Rivian. Rivian to me is a like fairly decent comp in that it's Elon Musk a. Competing with Elon Hard tech. Hard tech, you know, manufacturing intensive, low margin. Right. Like everybody's like, you have to realize that Brett is competing with Unitree, which is a. A Chinese company.

Yeah.

Which we've known. We've talked about this before. Other Chinese companies have shown we will sell a product at a loss for as long as it takes to own this market.

Yeah.

So is Brett going to have margin?

Yep. When I completely agree with this.

And so there's. There's a lot of.

Even. Even though this is clearly like the most fut. Listen, we've literally seen in sci fi movies.

Yeah. Well, the other. The other thing.

It doesn't necessarily mean that there's a network effect and high margins. Right. Those two things can be separate. We can get something that's an incredible amazing. Clearly, we're the future and it's like straight out of sci fi and it can be a mediocre business.

Yeah. And then there's the whole other side of this, which is our bipedal robots. Even the robot form factor, that is going to dominate. Right. Is it going to dominate the factory? For factory floors are flat. Right. We talked about would it make more sense to have a, you know, robot that is attached to a wire so it's powered, can roll on wheels, and it can lift extremely heavy things. Right.

Imagine you're the founder of Boston Dynamics. Looking at this, you're just like, I've been grinding on this for 20 years. I built so much stuff and I've never been able to really, like, pop the stock in a meaningful way. Like, I see I got bought by. And then I got bought by Google and I got traded around and like, my baby has just never had its day in the sun.

And, you know, he's not Brett. Yeah.

Yeah. No, clearly Incredible technologist.

You're not that guy, pal.

You're not that guy, literally. Because the Boston Dynamics demos, like, they're clearly on the cutting edge. They're state of the art. They're frontier.

One thing I. One thing I do believe.

Yeah. Yeah.

Brett's very good at fundraising, very good at recruiting, very good at building hype deals guy.

He's good at puzzling together. Oh, we got the campus. Oh, we got the BMW partnership. Oh, we got the money. Then we'll get another deal. Then we'll get something. We hire some people.

If we had conviction that figure was going to, you know, there's this whole thing which is, you know, figure could argue in a TAM slide. Our TAM is not the value of the robots that we're selling at retail price or in these big enterprise deals. Our TAM is the labor force that we're going to provide and the Ongoing earnings when we displace every factory worker in the world or every agricultural worker in the world. Right. So. So there is an art like he can go out and make a case for how the TAM for this is $5 trillion. And it's very, you know, I think.

From that Dwarkesh Satya podcast it was the global economy is 100 trillion and labor is something like 60% of that.

Yeah.

So you're looking at a $60 trillion market.

Yeah.

And it's like, yeah, we're going to take, you know, 2% of that.

It's great.

Trillion dollar.

So it's. They're giving away the shares at 4.

Let's rip through some of this just to give the folks some extra data. This is a massive up round. 15 times the last valuation which was 2.6 billion. Normally I feel like when you get into the 2.5 billion range, the next rounds at 5 billion, you don't really see that many. 10 or 4 rounds for X.

4X is like, yeah, it's pretty normal to go from the two and a half to.

And that was just a year ago. Jaw dropping jump. Even in this market, figures investors may ultimately not use SPVs to back the company. They could always just jump the line and go direct. The startup hasn't approved any SPVs and has asked its existing investors to invest from their own funds because they might want to put in more money if they're not having to pay fees. Right. Bloomberg first reported on figures AI's target valuation. It's true that investors are excited about a new generation of robotic startups. There's a lot of these field AI is a maker of AI models to control robots that's targeting a $2 billion valuation they're raising.

Yeah. And we saw Locky's company.

Yeah.

And is Daniel. No, no, he's. He's part of. There's part of the other one.

It's called like general intelligence or something.

Yeah.

There's a lot of generic.

No, and, and the, the, the argument for why figures valuation could be nearly 2x and rules is that Andro, if they wanted to raise from a hodgepodge group of random SPVs, they could do it at 60y.

I mean they've talked about the oversubscribed nature of these rounds and they could probably pump that up.

But Anduril with IVAs at $28 billion feels like they could raise from less sophisticated institutional investors at a almost double themselves.

Imagine how much they could get if they went to China. Imagine they're just like actually we only care about the valuation. The mission doesn't matter anymore. Let's just rip, get some. Get some crazy money in here. So on Thursday, Figure AI unveiled Helix, a model developed internally that enables robots to perform more complicated tasks. There was this video demo. Very cool. They've partnered with OpenAI so you can talk to it. And they're using the speech recognition and the ChatGPT stuff to kind of act as an interface to the instruction set. It's already raised $745 million from investors including Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia. Real murderers row of corporates and strategics, which I think he's really, really good at doing. And it has big plans. They've hired more than 200 people for an engineering and AI hardware team. According to documents created by an SPV manager, the company is projecting it will build up to 100,000 robots over the next four years according to the same materials. And two of the people the company secured, BMW as a first customer. None of those plans explain why investors think the company is worth 40 billion. For contact.

Yeah. And to give some context, if they're selling these robots at $100,000 a pop, which feels low given that's generally the price point that Unitree sells at. You can go buy Unitree Robot for around six figures. That's $10 billion of revenue. So, so, so if Brett is saying, I want you to give me a four, you know, I want you to basically give me a 5x4x on my forward revenue. On my 2020.

Yeah.

Forward revenue. It still feels crazy.

It is crazy because so. So that revenue multiple of like 60x revenue. 40x revenue, that's not crazy. In AI, like anthropic is raising 40 at 58 billion. But they have a billion in ARR.

Yeah.

And so, but it's now. They have that AR now. And so. And the other thing from a pricing.

Standpoint is didn't Satya buy half of OpenAI for like 10 billion? Like not even.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't think half, but certainly like a third or something like that. And so let's go to some reactions on the timeline to break this down. We got Luke Metro over at Anduroll. He says Brett Adcock is shaping up to be the best fundraiser Since Adam Newman, Amazon.com and this is from back in 2024, in February, a year ago, almost a year ago today, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, Nvidia and other big technology names are investing in startup figure AI that builds human like robots. Bloomberg News Reported Friday, citing people with knowledge they're backed by OpenAI and Microsoft. Sama can win when he gets 7 trillion. And so people have been talking about Brett Adcock's amazing fundraising abilities for a long time. You had a post about it, which is in here. It took the ford Motor Co. 115 years to reach a $40 billion market cap. Brett Adcock did it in just three years with figure. Can we finally stop glazing Henry Ford now?

Senra probably saw this and if you didn't know that I was joking. He probably had an aneurysm.

Yeah, of course.

Do not disrespect Henry Ford. I was obviously joking here.

Yeah. The markets are crazy.

I think they both deserve respect.

Yep. But, but, but the title of, you know, Henry Ford is like a historic entrepreneurial goat. Right. One of the greatest to ever do it.

And Brett could be that guy.

Brett could, but he's got a lot.

He's got like 20 right now.

He's NBA prospect, potential rookie of the year if he can start delivering these robots. But his jersey is not going up in the race unless the cash flow gets there to back it up.

I just think at this point like believability matters so much. Right. Like when humane came out and they said this is the future computing platform, nobody believe them.

Yeah.

When figure goes out and says we're. We believe we're worth $40 billion and that's where we want to take new capital, nobody believes it. And it's such a. And again, I just think you could have raised a 3x up round and you know, everybody like probably at a.

$5 billion valuation with, with like scrappy engineers, little bit more like, you know, hey, we're just focused on engineering building. We're sharing even more. The vibes could be way, way better. Yeah, right. But instead it seems, seems like frothiness as a brand. Right. And that's odd. So she'll monot says figure. Humanoid robots reportedly raising at 39.5 billion. So it's not 40. Give me a break, Jordy. He's not raising at 40. He's raising at 39.5.

Yeah.

Okay. Shield says frothy.

I wonder if they chose it to be slightly less than that so that it feels like there's some science based reason. Like they ran, they put it in sheet and they popped out. This is the, this is the right.

Number one time I was negotiating with VC early on in my career and he's like, oh yeah, like we, I put my whole team on this. They built A whole bunch of models. And they came back with like, valuation for the company is like, you know, $150 million. Like, can't. Can't do any better than that. And I was just like that. You clearly didn't do any math, like, because, like, you would have. You would have given me, like, a not round number. You clearly just ballpark this because otherwise.

You would have been like, ballpark me, bro.

Yeah, like, the spreadsheet said, like, 137 million 24. And so I rounded that to 138, and that's what we're doing. Instead it was just like, no, you didn't. You didn't do this at all. So, yeah, if you're raising folks, don't try and raise it 100 million. Raise it 99.99. For a limited time only.

For a limited time only. You'll get 20% off.

Three easy payments. Three easy payments on the $20 million series. A Sequoia used to do this for YouTube. I believe they did a tranched investment. Three easy payments of $10 million.

And then it turns out, as a founder, you really don't want to take tranched investments because you're sort of having to operate based on getting the money. But then if it doesn't come through, then there's so many reasons that the VC could change their mind. Every. Every private markets investor has made an investment at some point, or active ones, at least, where they get the first update, and they're just like, yeah, I messed up.

And so Bass Baron has a quote in here. He says, if Brett Adcock can raise money still, so can you. Never kill yourself. Very funny. Having some fun on the timeline.

Having some fun.

But, you know, I went through Brett's post, and he's got some bangers in here. The guy can post. He says, I've raised almost $1.7 billion from cold emails for my companies. I've tracked performance of cold emails versus referrals and cold emails consistently outperformed by a long shot. And for a few reasons, sharing mine. This is converting it 70% email to meeting. Hi, my name is Brett Adcock. I'm the founder and CEO of Figma.

See the precision here? 70.8%.

Yeah, he's a nice guy.

Specific.

There's something to this. I think you're onto it. Prior to this, I founded Archer Aviation Electric, VTOL Aircraft Company, NYSE Archer, and also founder of Veteri. Sold for $100 million. Do you have time for a call? I mean, yeah. I mean, there's a Lot to like about this structure in the sense that it's just two sentences. Very clear. He presents what's he doing now? Why is he calling you and what has he done in the past? Very concisely. And so even if you're someone newer in your career, you could easily say, prior to this, I built a startup, raised a million dollars, and studied engineering at this school. Do you have time for a call? That's way better than chatgpt paragraphs, like all that junk. And so, yeah, obviously if you didn't sell a company for $100 million, probably gonna have a lower conversion rate here. But you can still adopt a lot of this, which I thought was cool. He had another crossover with a good friend of the pod, Theo. Did you see this one?

Wait, did I miss the. Did we miss the Ben. The Ben follow up there? Oh, yeah, really good. Do you know Ben Ben, Another friend of the pod.

Okay.

Says, tried it doesn't work. And he sends an email from him Ben, saying, jim, my name is Brett Adcock and I'm the founder CEO of Figure, an AI robotics company building a general. And then Jim responds, you are not Brett Adcock. Your profile clearly says that your name is Ben. Please remove me from your mailing list immediately. So having some more fun on the timeline. And then we got Theo.

Yeah, Theo is in the game crossover of the century. He says, company ideas are worthless. Execution is king. This is from Brett Adcock posting some wisdom on the timeline. He says, in the limit, the pace of technological progress is the only competitive advantage. How to stop overthinking strategy and execute like the top 1%. He drops a thread. He's been a bit of a thread boy throughout 2023, 2024, but he grinded his whole account way up. And now whenever. Whenever he posts a new robotics video, Instant Virality. And I'm sure he had a great, great team working on this with him.

Powerful.

Kyle Kashuv says, hey, John H. Fia, this is your bit. And Theo says, some interesting ideas he's got there. Because Theo was all on the ideas guy train for a while and you know, he's trying to. He's trying to coin it. The problem is, Theo, you didn't coin a phrase.

Yeah.

You didn't really get break that concept. Yeah, yeah. Idea guy was. That was a phrase before Theo. Theo was doing some really great foundational work on. On what the value of being an ideas guy was.

He coined business magic. Magic is real.

Okay.

He did a good job of that with Invest. Like the best. I liked his episode there, he's just.

Got to go a little bit deeper into it and really push, I think. But he'll get there.

Let's see what Apple intelligence thinks.

Yeah. So this is a great way to close out. Brett obviously working extremely hard. He needs rest. He's been using an eight sleep temperature controlled mattress the last two nights. Seeing 40% plus in my REM SWS hours. Stephen Burkholder says keep us posted in the long term. And Matteo from Eight Sleep chimes in and says in the meanwhile, check out 1000 reviews about us here. And that takes us to our first promoted post from eight Sleep.

Boom. That was smooth, John.

Smooth.

That was good.

The founder we're talking about is sleeping on eight sleep. It's an eight sleep ad. Let's go. But we have an update. Somebody in the chat yesterday was asking Jordy was wearing an 8 Sleep hat. Can you get an 8 Sleep hat? And yes, you can. They don't just throw them into every order. But if you order with our code and send it to us, we'll send a screenshot. Send us a screenshot of the order. We will make sure that one of these tvpn, I think. And if you order an eight sleep, they will send you a hat if you order through our code. So have fun with that. Send us the screenshots and. Yeah. What's your, what's your sleep score at today?

I've been putting up crazy numbers.

Crazy numbers.

I've been putting up crazy numbers.

Let's see what I'm at.

I got a 98 last night.

98. I got a 91. My routine was not good. 62%. But I did put up 7 hours and 10 minutes. Pretty good. Pretty happy with that.

I'm gonna. Yeah.

Quality was 100% my feeling good this week.

My average bedtime was 8. 46. My average wake up was 4. 54.

You send me texts being like I'm going to bed for the night at like 8. It's great.

Yeah.

And you're like, stop texting.

I try to turn off my phone.

It's good. Yeah, it's key. Getting to bed early makes it so easy to wake up early. That's the whole secret. It's not more alarms. It's just get to bed early, fall asleep quickly. And that's what the eight sleep helps you do.

I don't. The other thing with the eight sleep is like to me the best, like the functionality that I genuinely love the most. Because living in Malibu, every single night the temperature drops.

Oh yeah.

It's not too cold. It's not too hot. It's just nice. But the feature that I actually love and I feel a little bit soft for saying this is the way that it warms your bed.

Oh, yeah.

As you're, as you're waking up, it makes it so easy to get out of bed because I'm already warm. The worst is you wake up, you're.

Cold and you want to stay in.

And you want to stay in bed. I don't want to stay in. I'm ready to go.

Yeah. Well, you know another way to jolt yourself out of bed, Jordy? With, with a cold Celsius or a Lana, A Lonnie New Alani. And that takes us to our next story. Banger acquisition. Yeah, we need a bunch of gong hits for the $1 billion hack. I don't know if we bring size gong for that, but it is big. The $40 billion fundraise from figure and the $2 billion acquisition from Celsius of Aulani New.

It's Friday.

Fascinating story. Very few CPG companies get bought for these big of numbers. I've operated in cpg. You've obviously know a lot of folks in CPG have invested in companies and stuff. And so we're breaking it down. Celsius has agreed to purchase a lonnie new for 1.8 billion. It's in the front page of the Wall Street Journal business section today. So we'll read through a little bit of that. Celsius to acquire rival maker of energy drinks Energy drink Energy Energy drink maker Celsius is paying 1.8 billion to buy rival Aulani New, a brand that has been propelled by social media influencers and pitched itself as a locale fitness aid. Celsius is expected to pay a combination of cash and stock. The company said the deal, which includes a net purchase price of 1.65 billion and 150 million in tax assets, is Celsius's largest acquisition since it was founded two decades ago. And I'd love for you to pull up on public.com. what is the Celsius stock doing around this acquisition? Because I want to know, what does the market think about this? Celsius had a market value of roughly 6 billion after its shares closed down 2.165% at 25 bucks a share on Thursday. Overall energy drink sales have been climbing, but Celsius's growth has slowed over the past year. Celsius was a very, very hot stock. I think it was up in like the 20 billion market cap. And it's since fallen. A little bit, a little bit of background on Alani New.

Yeah. So Celsius for Context is down 36% in the last six months.

Yep.

So they had.

Because the growth was slowing, people were thinking, oh, this is going to dominate, is going to beat Red Bull and Monster. It's kind of a new category for the fitness oriented folks. Healthier folks.

Yes.

But they're not really putting a dent in the Monster.

This time last year they were a $20 billion company. Yeah, they're way down. 20 billion.

Wow.

Yeah, way down at 6%. And it seems that once you get to true scale as an energy drink, they're just fantastic, fantastic businesses.

Totally.

Monster still sitting at $40 billion.

Red Bulls private, but in the tens of billions for sure.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so Aulani New was started in 2018 by fitness influencer Katie Hearn.

Monsters getting a 25x even a multiple.

Yeah. And they also bought Bang Energy out of bankruptcy for like 1x sales, around a billion dollars.

Yeah.

So they picked up that asset as well. And so there's just a bunch of huge players now. It's Celsius, Monster and Red Bull. But there's obviously a lot of other Ghost Energy is doing a bunch of big deals. There's a lot of energy drinks going out and I, I love them. I drink Celsius pretty much every, every show now. And we're big Guayaquil fans. We're big fans of Yerba Mate. Huberman's in the game. He's got a Yerba Mate product that I personally like a lot. And yeah, low calorie, high caffeine kicks you in the face, gets you out of bed. You're not going to be in your eight sleep all day when you got.

That's for sure.

When you're replacing your blood with Celsius. Anyway, so a Lonnie New sells energy drinks, supplements and protein drinks. The Louisville, Kentucky company has built its brand largely through partnerships with influencers like Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton and Addison Ray. So they got heavy hitters. Celsius Markets it's sugar free caffeinated drinks, is a healthy alternative to full sugar energy drinks and sodas and claims its products can help burn body fat, which is a claim that you can make if you have more than 100 grams of caffeine. And it's a structure and function claim, not a, not a medical claim. So you're not regulated as a drug, you're regulated as a nutritional supplement at that point.

Which is why.

So Drew Fallon had a great Breakdown. We'll pull up this, this little thread he posted. He says the latest deal in an absolutely scorching hot energy drink market. Let's break down the deal. Celsius has had an extraordinary run over the last decade, particularly with a huge run up in 2023. However, growth slowed in Q4. 2024. Revenues were about the same level as Q Q2. 2023. The stock had been priced to perfection. So it's drawn down about 60% in the last year. A Lonnie knew was, I don't know about perfection.

If it's down, it's down.

It was priced for perfection at $20 billion. They were like, yeah. The market was pricing like, yeah, they're going to beat Red Bull, they're going to beat Monster. It's going to be everywhere. Celsius is the next amazing, perfect thing. And of course they couldn't live up to that. And so it. The stock has since drawn down. So A Lonnie new did around $600 million in sales with 70 million in net income in 2024. Started in 2018. So six years later, they're throwing off 70 million.

That's such a narrative violation because so many beverage companies.

Yeah. And never get a skateboard.

Losing. Losing money through acquisition.

Oh yeah.

Like very, very commonly for these companies to just lose money, but they have market share and they're eating away at these sort of bigger incumbents and eventually they get bought.

So it's been growing at 50% since 2022, with 50% repeat buyers. Celsius owns 11% of the energy drink market, almost 12%. But with slowing growth and the recent acquisition of ghost lifestyle by KDP current Dr. Pepper. So ghost is actually off the market as well. It became clear that they were not going to increase their market share organically. And I don't know if you see what Ghost is doing, but they have like Sour Patch Kids partnerships. They have partnerships. There's also G Fuel, which is another independent company at this point. And, and rain and Nos and bang. And it's a crowded, crowded market. And so Aulani New ranked as the fourth energy drink in terms of market share. Celsius paying a net value of 1.65 billion. This is 2.8x sales, 26x TTM. Net income, $70 million. As we said, 20x adjusted EBITDA. Not crazy, but super, but pretty high for CPG. Celsius is publishing 12x fully synergized. EBITDA is the purchase multiple here. That is obviously wishfully low.

Yeah.

Aulani New was the last desirable and scaled asset in the energy space and perhaps the most desirable since the energy boom. Celsius paid up for this one. Adjusted fully synergized. EBITDA feels eerily similar to Adam Neumann's community. Adjusted community. So they're basically saying like look, we didn't overpay because once we get all the synergies, we're going to be making way more. So you have to adjust the EBITDA now and this is really how you think about the multiple. But sounds like the market didn't love the deal and the stock traded down a couple of percent. Is that right?

Yeah. Let me pull it up over.

So honestly, it seems like they kind of just added $50 million to EBITDA hills. Here's Celsius is reconciliation. I'm putting the acquisition well to Celsius credit 20 range.

They're up 45% over the past week.

They're building back. Yeah.

Okay. So overall the response, I don't know when this was posted, but.

This news broke yesterday. Kind of yesterday morning.

Yeah. And it's interesting. I mean it does still seem, you know, Celsius has 163 million of TTM EBITDA.

Yep.

They have a 35x multiple monsters at scale with a 25x multiple. It does feel like they're priced somewhat fairly even at this mark. Right?

Yeah. And so they had what, 160V, but is that right? Celsius? So they just added 50 to that. So that's a 25% increase in their EBITDA for $1.6 billion acquisition at a $5 billion market cap. So it's kind of like a merger.

But now they had a ton of cash on the balance sheet prior, but.

Now they control 16% of the energy drink market. And we'll give you some background on the long term tailwinds in energy. The category has been growing really, really quickly. $90 billion is the global energy drink market. 10%. It's growing at 10% and is expected to grow 10% till the end of the decade. Increasing category adoption incrementality and 37%.

Celsius has that meme factor that Zen does. Right now. People are just, they do the marketing for Celsius and so they kind of have that.

Yeah, if you want to. Yeah, if you want to. Like, like, you know, I saw just yesterday there was some senator I believe who posted like I'm locked in. I got these bunch of Celsius and I'm working late tonight. And Brian Johnson was there being like don't drink a Celsius late at night. Exactly. Yeah. You saw that post. And so sugar free is gaining in ready to drink energy. In 2020 the sugar free market was 39%. By 2024 it went to 51%. And it makes sense. Why would you want a bunch of sugar in your energy drinks if you're chugging them a lot of people. Although you've been saying for a while sugar might be making a comeback. It's probably not going to make a comeback in the form of high fructose corn syrup, but maybe the next wave. I feel like the energy drink market will continue to turn over. There will continue to be new entrants.

Actually one of the reasons I like these, we drink a lot of matina from, from Huberman. But these are just regular agave syrup.

That's great.

I'm cool with. I like the, I like the boost.

Yeah. It seems like the main thing you want to stay away from is like the highly processed sugars.

Yeah.

And so you can go natural sugar or you can go sugar free. Kind of just depends on your diet and your, your goals. And so this really provides a platform for, for Celsius to go after and capture beverage trends in the category Celsius markets. It's sugar free Caffeinated drinks is a healthy alternative to full sugar energy drinks and sodas. Although of course Red Bull has a sugar free monster has that zero white one that everyone likes and so but there's still some value to being a brand that stands for sugar free and that's the initial value prop as opposed to needing to get the diet Coke product of the, of the cat of the particular brand.

Totally.

And so Mads Capital says the juice is back. He timed Celsius perfectly after hours and is now a bigly after they announced that they're buying Aulani new Jonah Lupton. I got back in back into Celsius after hours at 24:50 once I saw they were buying a Lonnie for 1.65 which is not only accretive but Aulani has a full suite of products from protein shakes to pre workout and much more. This is a very smart deal by Celsius. I think the CEO saved his job for now and so people are excited about that. There's a little bit of hate coming from Trevor Scott. I think this is funny. Celsius acquiring a Lonnie new which is essentially the new Celsius 12x post synergies, 19x pre synergies including tax assets Q4 results better than expected. Revenue minus 4% Adjusted EBITDA minus 4%. Celsius up 31%. Declining sales. What do you slap on it? A high growth acquisition. Maybe this isn't such a negative bear take. This is actually like. Yeah, he kind of did what he had to do. You know, you're. You stop growing, get the thing that's growing. Build a portfolio.

Yeah. The challenge here is Celsius seems to resonate broadly with the market. A lot of new with the branding. I don't see Chad's picking that up.

Yeah, it does seem like it's like almost like the female Celsius, which could be very valuable. You know, for a long time I thought of Red Bull and Monster as highly masculine products, especially Monster. You know, it's a monster trucks. It's a very hard rock stuff. You don't see a lot of girls walking around with monsters. Red Bulls was a little bit more.

Because it was a little bit more vodka.

Yeah, Red Bull vodka. And then also the Celsius I felt like was a little bit more gender neutral in the sense that it was like CrossFit. But when you go to CrossFit class, it's usually pretty broken down evenly by gender. Yeah. And so I could see that kind of happening the same thing. There's an interesting post here by the bank of Bravos. Did you see this? Are you familiar with any of these distribution networks?

No.

Okay, so have you run into them? Yeah, yeah, I've run a bunch of these. The ABI network successfully scaled Monster Bang, Celsius and a Lonnie new to significant levels. Energy drinks that enter the ABI network tend to scale well, but Pepsi often marks the final stop before growth dies. And so interesting. Kurg, Dr. Pepper, Pepsi, Coke. These guys have all these massive distributions. And typically at the later stage of a consumer packaged goods beverage company, you're going to want to do a deal with one of these guys and they will put you in all of their stores. But then there's also like essentially a deal that hey, if it works, we're going to buy you.

Yeah.

But it can still be very valuable for all the shareholders and everyone can be happy. So this is how the distributed distribution landscape has evolved. In chronological order, the ABI Network scaled mnst, MNST moved from ABI to the Koch system, Bang transitioned to abi, Bang then moved from ABI to the Pepsi system. Then there was this lawsuit with the Bang. And Pepsi was kind of a weird deal. But Celsius joins abi, then bang exited the Pepsi system. That was the lawsuit Celsius moved from ABI to Pepsi. Aulani New joined the ABI network. Aulani New is likely to exit ABI for the Pepsi system with the upcoming Celsius acquisition, creating an opening in the ABI network once again. And so we got to call Huberman and get Matina into the ABI system because there's a gap there now. And. And ABI is going to want a new client and they're going to want a good deal, and I'm sure it's going to be bid out. But whoever wins that, like, there's a reason why great companies keep going with Abi because that. Yeah. And you have to pay. But it really is almost. You can think of it like a value add investor. ABI is Anheuser Bush InBev. So they have, you know, like everywhere you buy beer, which is just every single store you get, they have trucks with guys that go and deliver beer. Right. And so there's no store in America that says, actually, I don't want Budweiser. Yeah, I'm good. I'm not. Yeah, no, they all want the trucks to come. And when the trucks come, they say, hey, what else you got? Oh, you got some Celsius. Yeah, I do have some people that want that. Yeah, I'll try that.

And they can even push cases on.

And they can even push and say, hey, look, we're gonna sell you Budweiser. We're gonna give you a good margin on that. You'll be fine. But we want you to test this new thing.

Yeah.

Take a little faith with us.

Yeah.

And you're going to get a keystone margin, which is 50% on this new product. You're going to get better margins than you do on. On the commoditized, like, Budweiser product. Yeah. So you're going to make good money on the stuff that you move. It's not going to move as fast because people don't know Lonnie. People don't know Celsius yet. But eventually it's going to scale. And look at our track record. We did it with bang. We did it with Celsius, we did it with a Lonnie New. The next thing, when Anheuser Busch comes to the local store, people are going to say, hey, yeah, this is going to be good for my business. Because you guys know what you're doing. You pick really well. And so if you're in. If you're in beverage, you got to talk to a B. I. Anheuser Busch in Bev. Anyway, if you're Interested in this deal. If you're interested in Celsius, if you're interested in tracking how these mergers affect the public markets, you got to go to public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They have multi asset investing, industry leading yields and is trusted by millions. You've seen Jordy pull up all the stats on Public. They have a very cool alpha product that uses AI and ChatGPT to pull in extra contacts. They have great charts, they have advanced charts, simple charts. It's a great product. So that's where you should be looking for everything related to financial assets. And we have a post from the co CEO and founder, Leif, good buddy of ours. He says he's posting a screenshot from the Wall Street Journal Treasury Direct to bond buyers. Moving your money could take a year. There's a huge, it's really, really hard because a lot of people went into Treasury Direct because they were like, I want these great yields when interest rates went up. And now it's hard to get out just because it's a legacy government system. But with Public, he says, luckily you don't have to deal with this because we just revamped our treasury account. You deposit, earn, yield, you build or pick a ladder and take your money out whenever you like it.

It was a crazy moment when people were going to the Treasury Direct website and it felt like this DMV style interface. And so it was great that, you know, players like public came in and said, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna actually just make this really easy. Make it, you know, literally take whatever seconds to, you know, access that yield.

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

It's amazing with my experience that I still love the brand.

Oh yeah. Breaking down constantly and you're like, but it's still goated, it's goaded. It's amazing. They own red. Like, what more do you want?

Just like the way that we own green. Yeah, they own red.

They own red. So with a list price of $3.7 million. Ferrari's new hypercar was revealed to the public in October. With a twist. It wasn't available for sale. All 799 units of the low slung, high haunched F80 model, the most expensive production vehicle in Ferrari's history, had already been promised to top customers like Luke Poirier. The Montreal real estate entrepreneur already owns 42 Ferraris. He said he felt lucky to be allowed to buy yet another. To be chosen to buy Ferrari is for one of their hypercars is a true milestone for any collector. Money isn't enough to buy a top of the range Ferrari. You need to be in a long term relationship with the country, with the company. By leveraging the rabid fandom of its customers through the business model based on uber scarcity, the storied Italian company is enjoying a new golden age. Following an almost tenfold increase in the Stock since its IPO a decade ago, Ferrari is now worth $90 billion. That's two figures.

Two figs.

That's two figure AI robotics companies. You take two of them, you get a Ferrari, making it the most valuable car company in Europe despite delivering just 13,752 vehicles last year. So Jordy, why don't you break down what their strategy is with these super restricted hypercars. How do you get one? You know, just break it down, make it so.

Yeah, I, I've talked about, I don't think we've talked about this on the show that much. I know I've talked about it before, before on X. But Ferrari has this fantastic business model that's similar to every other luxury brand that you'd be familiar with. Hermes, Rolex, Patek, all these different companies, they basically make. No matter how much money you have in the world, if you want to buy these cars, watches, bags, et cetera, directly from the manufacturer, directly from the brand, you have to play their game. Now every single, every single brand has a different version of their game. There's, there's plenty. You can look up online forums for every brand and see, you know, what game did you have to play? And the game is basically spending money on things that you don't necessarily want to get the thing that you actually want. So Ferrari and Porsche does this as well. Every brand gets knocked for this because people say I have 300 grand, I should be able to buy the GT3RS and Porsche. And what people don't realize is they're using these hyper exclusive cars as top of funnel marketing for every other car in their portfolio or every other watch or every other bag or every other product that they make. Right. And so in the case of Ferrari, Ferrari has been playing this game for a very long time. It's been the most desirable cars in the world for a very long time. They typically are making under 1000 units of their most high profile, most desirable cars. And these are the cars that are actually investments. Every other car that they make for the most part depreciates massively. Right. Nobody wants a, Nobody wants a 15 year old Ferrari. That was the entry model.

Right.

These cars end up trading at 30, 40 grand. Like you can actually pick them up.

Yeah.

For very little because they're unreliable and, and they're not.

You know, 360 Modena is fairly accessible. Probably still almost 100k, probably around that. But it's like a 20 year old car at this point. And it's, it was, it was an entry model at the time.

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

You just look or 296.

Yeah. And one of the challenges is that owners know you basically have to have some real stones because nothing is guaranteed in the game. You can go in there and spend, you could go in there and spend $5 million with Ferrari and still not get access to an F80 because you're not even close to being in there. And so Ferrari.

And it's not just that you also have to lose money on options. Right? Yeah. You can't just be walking in and saying, okay, give me the base model every three years. I lease the base model. No, it's like come in. I'm customizing it. I'm creating a fleet. I'm a collector. And the steel man of all this is that if it was just a one click checkout on f 80s, you would have maybe hedge funds coming in and like trading them. And they wouldn't actually go to collectors who promote the brand and live the brand. And when you see an F80 owner that you know that they're also going to have an SF90, a, you know, an F50 and F40. They're going to have the whole, they're going to be able to tell the whole story of the brand. They're going to be a brand evangelist almost. And that does raise the profile of the brand, I think, as opposed to if, if it was known as like. Yeah, Ferraris, they come out and then they just immediately get turned into financial assets. They, you never see them in the real world. No one ever drives them. They're just thrown in the plastic. They might as well be NFTs.

Yeah. And so Ferrari is, is unique as a manufacturer because if you go to Porsche, Porsche as an example, if you want to buy a GT3R US, you probably have to buy a couple Taycans, a couple Macans, maybe a Cayenne. And the key is you can't just buy them and immediately sell them. You have to buy them, hold them for some amount of time and then sell them back to, or trade them into the original dealer that you work with. So your relationship is not actually with the manufacturer, it's with the dealer.

Yep.

And so Ferrari, what's different is not only can you, you have to buy the cars from them and when you're ready to sell, sell it back to the dealer so that they make their margin again on that vehicle. And they don't, they don't necessarily pay market. They're going to give you like kind of dealers often will make you a low ball offer. And so what's funny about Ferrari is they actually basically consider you to basically just be the custodian of that vehicle. So you can't even take your entry level Ferrari and make it pink and do donuts in it. They will come after you. There'll see you. There's a history of Ferrari suing their own customers, which is like unheard of. Right. All business, all traditional business advice is don't sue your customers. It just ends up.

And this is the opposite of Lamborghini, right?

Yeah. Lamborghini is like much more rap, you know, kind of like wrap him, do whatever you want, shoot, you know, you know, there's that guy who got in trouble for like shooting.

That was like illegal. Yeah, that wasn't with Lamborghini. I don't think Lamborghini had a problem with it. Yeah, they're like, yeah, just the law.

Enforcement issue with it.

And you put off road tires on it. Maybe we'll just make a production version.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, so anyway, so Ferrari. And anyway, so Ferrari, the challenge is they, they, there is still, if they're making 800F 80s, there's still a ton of people out there that are buying lots of Romas and purosangues and these other cars that are, are not getting access to those. And so the challenge now, and Doug Demuro has a bunch of good content on this. The challenge now is people are Saying, I've been losing. You know, people were spending all this money to get an SF90, immediately losing 400. 400 grand. And then they're still not getting the call from Ferrari. And Ferrari is. Is picking their favorites. Right.

Because the SF90 was unlimited production run.

So.

So it was still hard to get ish.

But at the moment, in 2021.

Exactly.

Interest rates were low. There's a lot more appetite to buy these crazy cars when you're getting a, you know, 3% interest rate.

And now I listen to a call in on it was maybe like Dave Ramsey or something, but someone bought an SF90 to kind of flex. And they had financed it. And the payment was, I think, like 20k a month. And the guy had a business that was like, making 20k a month. Stop making so much money. And he was like, it's important to my, like, brand, my personal brand for this company that I have a sports car.

Yeah.

And so don't want to be in those. Can't make a payment.

Yeah.

Has to, like, move. And now if he sells the car, it's. He paid 800k.

He would have to pay to trade it in.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So he has like 400,000 of negative equity on the car. He's effectively bankrupt. And so people were saying, like, yeah, maybe you have to, like, crash the car and get insurance or something. It's like.

But even then, the insurance is not. Is going to say, what's the replacement value of the vehicle.

Exactly.

So anyways, bad situation.

Let me break Ferrari. Ferrari.

Like, to be clear, they have an actual list. So for background, I looked at buying a classic Ferrari Dealer in 2020 at the beginning of last year, and spent a lot of time with this business that was based in Europe and ultimately got to a point where the business was sitting on so much inventory in the acquisition, you would have to absorb that inventory. And the Ferrari market last year was dipping on a lot of their classic models because there's not the same level of demand. So anyways, the whole, like, there's an entire Ferrari economy. Both the direct dealer, customer, but then also the secondary market, which is. They all play into each other.

Yeah. So don't buy a Ferrari. Don't buy a Ferrari dealership. Buy Ferrari stock.

Buy.

Ferrari stock is doing great.

Stock is way up.

It's trading more than 40 billion higher than Volkswagen, which sold more than 9 million cars last year. Volkswagen's worth around 50 billion, I believe. Most of Europe's auto industry is plagued by a weak domestic market. Costly transition to electric Vehicles and new competition in China. The chief executive officer of Ferrari, Bandetto Vigna, said in a recent interview in Marinello. We are not. We are not an automotive company. The city in northern Italy where Ferrari is based. We are a luxury. We are a luxury company that is also doing cars.

That's the kind of thing that true enthusiasts will, will cringe and cry over because they just want Ferrari to focus on making the most beautiful, you know, timeless cars.

Yes, yes, yes. With. With driver engagement and manual transmissions and naturally aspirated engines. And Ferrari's definitely moved away from that.

And it's a real risk. Right. If you're a Porsche enthusiast, you can go get a manual 911T. The T or the St or the ST or the touring.

Yeah.

Or GT3. They. They really are. And you can get. You can get into the brand at 120, 130K. Totally like that.

Yeah. And I mean, there's even other entry points with things like the Cayman and the Boxster. So, you know, it's kind of like the baby 911 to get you in and you, and you get a little bit older, one of those, and all of a sudden you're in the brand for 30k, 50k. And Ferrari just doesn't have that. But, you know, it does lead it to be a more luxurious brand. Like, you think of Ferrari as a cut above Porsche, and that's just the case. And so at the time of the Ferrari. At Ferrari's IPO in 2015, many analysts were skeptical that a luxury business model would work for a carmaker. The former CEO used to draw comparisons with Hermes. A parallel now widely accepted. The French fashion house limits supply of its coveted Birkin bags, leading to wait lists at its stores and a huge resale market. Is the same deal at Hermes. You need to buy a lot of things before you're invited to buy a Birkin. And they're. And they're very, very highly coveted. Customers buy all manner of other Hermes baubles to move up the list. Ferrari's blossoming into a luxury leader has restored the fortunes of founder Enzo Ferrari's son, Piero Ferrari, and Italy's Agnelli family, which took control of the company decades ago through its Fiat brand. In the ipo, both families retained stakes that are now worth billions of dollars. Another group that had profited from its Ferrari's investments, savvy collectors. Most cars are famously depreciating assets, including most standard Ferraris. But the value of rare Ferraris has soared in recent years. LaFerrari is up at 3.4 million. The according to Hagerty, a special specialist auto insurer based in Traverse City, when the model was released in 2013, they only made 499 of them. Now they might have made a few more. That's the thing with Ferrari, you never really know. And then they do special editions and they make a couple more. But still very limited production run. And it, and it was sold before options at 1.4 million, now it's up at 3.8. So you know, fantastic ROI so that.

The Ferrari customer who's buying these more standard Ferraris, these mass produced Ferraris, accepting that they're going to take a loss on them, is betting that they're going to get access to these premier cars that will then make them money if they hold them. But now the challenge is they've sold so many of the standard cars to people that were anticipating being able to get into that coveted top customer group that gets access to these cars. And so they're hitting this wall where they've now seen terrible sales on the, on the, the 12 cylindry car because people are like, I'm not going to spend 700k on this car that's going to, you know, have terrible depreciation and you're not even giving me confidence that I'm ever going to get into that F80.

Exactly, exactly, yeah. So last spring, a Houston real estate broker bought one of Ferrari's much hyped purosangue models. That's the SUV, the first four door vehicle. The list price was close to 460k but can approach $1 million with add ons. So you're talking 1 million for an SUV that's not even a track focus sports car. And so you really have to have money to spend. And when the broker flipped it, the dealership that had sold in the car sued, saying that he was in breach of contract, giving it right of first refusal for 12 months after the sale. According to the plaintiff's petition, they recently settled without disclosing terms. And so you know, they were probably like, hey, how much profit did you make on that? Yeah, give us a piece of that and like we'll call it even. But still, it's like very aggressive with your customers. Anyone with a few hundred k can buy a regular Ferrari as long as they're willing to wait a couple of years. While standard models aren't subject to strictly limited runs, the company still lives by Enzo Ferrari scarcity dictum. Ferrari will always deliver one less car than the market demands. Smart limited edition Ferraris are even scarcer. You can't just walk into your local showroom and buy one. These range from special versions of regular models to the design design oriented Icona series, which is your favorite. That's the SP1, SP2, SP3. Most exclusively once in a decade hypercars like LaFerrari and F80. And so a lot of people were also upset about not being able to get SP3 allocations. And so it's like, yes, I get it that you do the hypercar, the F80, the F50, the LaFerrari, the Enzo every 10 years. Maybe I'm not on that list, but can we do SP3 for me? Because that's just like a fantastic car and like, yeah, it's in the million dollar range.

Seems much more likely to be an investment car, an investment asset over the F80, even potentially over the F80.

Interesting. In my view, it's an odd positioning because it's this new bucket of hypercars from Ferrari. But it had the same problems where it was like very, very limited run and very difficult to get into and so frustrated a lot of people that were sitting on SF 90s down 410.

So it's the same thing as a watch market. There's a lot of reason to just go buy the car that you actually want with Ferrari. But that decreases demand at the dealership level for Ferrari. Right. If people are saying, oh, I want, you know, I'm just going to go buy a LaFerrari on the secondary market and they can go to, you know, they can go to someone like Sotheby's and get that car.

There's actually an anecdote here from John Otto, who bought his first Ferrari in the 1980s after receiving an inheritance. Nice Nepo. He got frustrated when he failed to get on the ladder for the Ferrari Enzo, a hypercar that preceded the LaFerrari. The retired entrepreneur who set up a business in Florida offering supercar test drives no longer owns the brand. Even though I had bought five or six Ferraris and several marquee Ferraris over the decade, I couldn't find a dealer that was willing to sell me one. I hadn't quite been as vigilant with my purchases or as aggressive as others. So opaque and difficult.

You go from being. If you're somebody who's, who's stretching to get a car, you will likely get smoked by somebody who's just saying, yeah, I'll buy it. Like there's people that would come in and say, like, what are the three cars that you need to move right now. Okay. I just bought them. Make sure that I'm next in line for, you know, the car that I actually want.

Here's an interesting comp. When Porsche launched its IPO in 2022, it leaned heavily into comparisons with Ferrari. But the stock has fallen by almost a third since its debut. Among amid challenges in China and a botched electric vehicle strategy. This is the Taycan and now the Macan ev. And Ferrari shipped. What was the number? So Ferrari shipped. It was like 1,000 cars, right? Ferrari shipped 13,750 vehicles.

Yeah.

Porsche shipped 310,000 cars last year. The German sports carmaker is too big to keep Ferrari style weightless, except for a few models that the GT3Rs that you mentioned. At the extreme, smaller supercar brands struggle to deliver as steady a stream of new vehicles as Ferrari, leading to cash crunches. Aston Martin shares have lost more than 95% of their value since its 2018 IPO. Bahrain sovereign wealth funds took full control of McLaren last year after a period of heavy losses. And so McLaren has a similar strategy where they did the F1, the P1, and now the W1. And so in theory, you should be saying, hey, I should get a 720s, I should get a 650. I should be on the McLaren ladder because I'll get up into those super hypercars. But then they also launched the Speed tail and a bunch of other, like, hypercars, but then they were like, it's not the real hypercar. The real hypercar is coming. It's the W1. It's the F1, is the P1.

Yeah.

And so people got kind of confused. And whenever there's that confusion, it leads to brand degradation, in my opinion.

Totally.

And so let's go to some reactions and people talking about Ferrari. Morgan Housel post a wild stat. And we mentioned this. Ferrari sold 13,000 cars last year, market cap 90 billion. Volkswagen sold 9 million cars last year, market cap 40 billion. And so it's not what you what you sell, it's how you sell it. And as a reminder, Volkswagen owns Lamborghini, Bentley, Porsche and Bugatti. I think. I think Porsche is independent. I think he might be wrong there. Right. Anyway, there's a lot of Ferrari fans in the tech world. Tom Mueller says Ferrari Friday, and he posts a beautiful photo of a Ferrari that he has. He also has an F80 or F40. I wonder if he's going to get the F80. And, yeah, he's been a big fan. Palantir, friend of the show, is also Sponsoring Ferrari and the Palantir pairing for exit says the Palantir Ferrari collab goes unreasonably hard. Look at this. Read the other sponsors on the Ferrari team. It's all killers. AWS, AWS Shell Shell, Celsius Pirelli, Celsius.

Energy Drink Co. Santander and HCL Software.

Which I don't know that one, but very cool.

We have some friends that are in the midst of doing a F1 deal and we cannot wait to share it on the show. It's one of the best things if you like going to F1.

Oh yeah.

It's just sponsor a team.

Yeah. I mean Eight Sleep did that right. I mean they sponsored partnership with LeClaire's Claire's. Fantastic.

Brilliant.

Yeah. And so David Senra Founders podcast has a post here from Enzo Ferrari. He kept the main thing. The main thing, Enzo Ferrari in front of his Marinello factory. I don't care if the door gaps are straight when the driver steps on the gas. I want him to be scared for his life. I love that. It's fantastic. You know, he was. Enzo was a master of keeping the important thing the main. Keeping the main thing, the main thing. What is Ferrari about? It's about acceleration, driver engagement, the experience of driving the car. People will put up with rough edges to get the best driving experience. And that's exactly what Peter thiel did in 2005 when he did the gumball. He did the gumball 3,000 in a drop top Ferrari and you love to see it.

Doing it in a drop top is great.

It's so cool. A lot of great tech founders and investors love how he's done the Gumball.

He's posing with a sheriff there.

Yeah, I don't know who that is, but what a great historical post. What a great little bit of Silicon Valley lore.

That sheriff is now.

JD Vance, go to Abhishek Kumar. He says AI automation outsourcing. Meanwhile Ferrari these. There are trees that live inside the factory. It is labor intensive and the label of. And the level of automation is pretty low and it's not the most scalable. And I bring this out because this layout gives an incredible flexibility to make design choices that optimizes the car rather than the manufacturing process. This is quite distinct for most car companies. So, so super, super handmade heritage. Obviously they're using tons of tooling now, but not all about AI automation outsourcing. They're not worried about going to China and reducing cogs a little bit. They have very high margins, clearly from the market cap. But you're getting a different product. You're getting something that's closer to a hand built, coach built vehicle. But we've been comparing the car market to the watch market for a long time throughout this entire piece. And so we wanted to tell you about Bezel. You can shop over 22,500 luxury watches on Bezel. They're all fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts. And Jordi, I wanted to put you on the spot. You said you were interested in picking up a Cartier tank. I got four for you right here. I want to let you know which one would you pick out of these four if you had to pick one?

I found another one on there. It's in my saves. We'll have to show it the next episode. But I would go with something a little bit more vintage.

Okay, Right, okay. Gold or silver? What are you thinking?

I feel like the gold is more classic. Yeah.

With the tank. It works with that.

It works with the tank, yeah. So for us, for us. Irishman.

Yeah. But tank is a fantastic watch. Very iconic design. I love about it. Louis Cartier made the decision to alter the Roman numerals on the on the dial. So it goes Roman numeral 1, 2, 3. And then instead of the four being the IV, it's just four I's, which isn't how you represent the number four in Roman numerals, but it creates more visual balance with the eight on the other side of the dial.

That's wild.

And so I thought it was a really cool little subtle design touch. And there's a bunch of those in the Cartier tank. So if you're looking to pick up a dress watch, I think the Cartier tank is a fantastic choice. So go head over to Bezel and check it out. Let's move on to some absolute size lords who have been cleaning up in the private credit markets. High yield. Harry says, remind me to go back in time and start a private credit fund. And he just shows a picture of all these killers. Tony Ressler, Aries. $13.8 billion net worth. Mark Rowan at Apollo 11 billion. Scott Kapnick at HBS 4 billion. Lawrence Galoub at Galub Capital, 3.3 billion. His brother probably David Galoub, 3.3 billion. Doug Ostrover at Blue Owl, 3.2 billion. And it goes on. Everyone's a billion.

I love how the two brothers have like, clearly one for the other ones, but clearly 50. 50.

Yeah. It's great. You love to see it. And so Bloomberg has a deep Dive on private credit. We're going to take you through. We'll break it all down. It says Wall Street's new money is shaking up the ranks of the super wealthy. With over $61 billion, the private credit titans made their fortunes in a once obscure corner of finance. Twenty years ago, swaggering hedge fund managers, leveraged buyout kings and corporate raiders would have dominated any list of masters of the Wall street universe. Today, another corner of finance has become a billionaire factory. We love billionaire factories. The decidedly less factories. It's great.

We should be making more of those.

Y Combinator. Rebrand your tagline. We're a billionaire factory. Founders Fund the billionaire factory. The decidedly less glamorous business of making loans directly to companies, often small and medium sized ones. The kinds that are too that are squeezed out of traditional bond market and often deemed too risky for banks. This line of work has been broadly known as private credit and it's booming. In only a decade, the assets have more than tripled to 1.6 trillion. As institutional investors and wealthy individuals seek alternatives to regular stocks and bonds. Making private loans is lucrative thanks to higher yields and the potential for fund managers to earn a share of gains on top of steep fees. The world's the Bloomberg Billionaires index calculated the fortunes of 18 beneficiaries of the private credit boom. Together, these individuals who work at seven different companies are worth $61 billion. Only one Aries management corpse, Tony Ressler, ranks near the top of finance. As a group, they'd clock in above a single financier, Blackstone Inc. Co founder Steve Schwartzman.

But that's like, you know, so lots.

Of Schwartzmann 18 billionaires from this boom. And this is, this is fascinating. I have a buddy who's pretty sure his dad was on the founding team at Aries. He's not on this list, but I think he's done very, very well, I imagine. And I remember learning about it as a kid and being like, oh, so he does finance cool. And I had no idea like what that actually meant. And now I get it.

Interesting. There's not a, there's really not a venture capital firm that I can think of that has looking at Aries 1, 2, 3, 4, there's 4. Bunch of Apollo, bunch of Blue Owl.

Some VC firms have minted this. It's a little bit tricky, but I.

Mean, but it's over.

Insight will probably do this just on fees. I think they raised a $20 billion fund, right? So sure.

But that's not four partners each being worth 3.3 billion yeah, whatever. There's.

It is hard to get up levels. I mean, you could see Mark and Ben being up there and, and the.

And the Mark and Ben. And if you look at.

And General Catalyst certainly could produce Founders.

Fund now if you, you count the new and newly minted, you know, people like Trey getting up there couple.

But I mean, even that's weird because it's like, yeah, Trey is, you know, Andrew co founder. It's a little. It's like, where did he really make the money? But sure, yeah, yeah, it is fast.

Almost doesn't count.

Yeah. And you're not throwing around $1.6 trillion at FF, but it's, it's a, it's a fascinating story. So to be sure, some of these finance executives have labored for decades out of the limelight, laying the groundwork for their bonanzas in terms of demographics. They're not a diverse bunch. They're all men. But two are in their 50s and 60s. Thirteen attended Ivy League schools, only five public universities. And many share one traditional Wall street pedigree. They cut their teeth during the 1980s rise of junk bonds before the 1990s collapse.

They've broken some knees before.

Yep, before the collapse of Michael Milken's Drexel Burnham Lambert, which of course was the junk bond fund that figured out how to put leveraged debt into all these private equity buyouts and, and kind of laid the groundwork for the private equity boom that we saw in the 90s and the 80s. These credit mavens then created their own leverage buyout houses and most notably Apollo Global Management, which are now shifting most of their money toward private credit and other lending, then catapulting those who specialized in that field to the top of the list. We single out companies where we could determine that most of their business comes from private credit. That eliminated Blackstone, Brookfield, KKR, and some others who have private credit arms but are not private credit shops. Primarily our tally, which reflects valuations as of January 28, also doesn't include executives who no longer have current roles at companies. There's probably more guys with billions tucked away from this boom. And so we should do a deep dive on all of these. They're fascinating. But Aries is probably the biggest here, founded 28 years ago. So, yeah, I mean, I guess my buddy's dad was like, they are on the founding team. It's crazy because, like, yeah, he was there super early. It may be the OG of private credit, but the sector's boom had. Has made it seem like the new New thing. The value of its publicly traded stock has almost tripled since the start of 2022, raising Aries market value to more than 60 billion. That performance helped cement four senior executives membership in the multi billion dollar club. Aries tied with the newcomer Blue Al Capital for the most private credit billionaires on our list. Aries founders are among those whose Wall street careers date back to Milken's. Drexel, their wrestler worked alongside his brother in law Leon Black. Wrestler and fellow Drexel alumnus John Kissick joined Black when he co founded upstart PE firm Apollo Wrestler, which you might remember Apollo from Vale. From our Vale deep dive because Apollo bought Vail Resorts and and installed an Apollo guy to run it for two decades.

He went on it a generational run.

Generational run. Having a bit of a problem this ski season with long lines and labor strikes. But still interesting to see where Apollo, Ares and these other financial titans have their fingers and what pies they're operating in. I love the name. Like the founders of Apollo, they chose to name their firm after a powerful figure in Greek mythology. Ares, the God of war. Rosenthal, a leveraged finance specialist at Merrill lynch, signed on a year later. He's currently the chairman of private equity. Over the next few years, Kaplan, another former Apollonian and Arrogetti who worked for Royal bank of Canada came on board. And so Aries is ripping. They are lapping the S&P 500. They're based in LA and they are absolutely crushing it. Crushing it, crushing it, crushing it. They've acquired a bunch of different companies. They own San.

Yeah.

So Marcus, great business. You'll love to see it.

Did you want to talk a little bit about what you think the opportunity is for private credit specifically some hybrid between private credit debt specifically within the world of these like fast growing AI startups.

And so when we're talking about private credit here, we're talking about huge companies that need access to debt but might not be able to issue bonds. So when Apple goes to the public markets, they have a trillion dollar stock, they can issue debt. I think their debt might even trade. It might be cheaper than the government of the United States because they're so reliable and so much cash on the balance sheet. Exactly. So it's a very stable business. So they just go and they issue debt bonds. Yeah, but what if you're Red Bull, you're private or what if you're a single digit billion dollar company, you're very stable but you're not public or you're not ready to go and issue corporate bonds to on Wall Street. Well, you call one of these guys. And in Silicon Valley there has been a little bit of a boom with venture debt where a company that needs more money, more juice will go raise $20 million Series A and then they'll throw a $10 million venture debt line on top of it. And this makes sense. Credit is all over startups. I mean literally using ramp, that's not to switch into an ad read, but using ramp is a form of credit. Like you're getting a credit card, you get 30 days on that and that can literally help you with your working capital because you're buying meta ads on your ramp card and then you pay it back at the end of the day and you, and maybe your customers come in, they pay you on day one and you use that to pay off your ramp card, Right? Yeah. Then as you go, as you start scaling up, maybe your business is in hard tech, you have to buy some machinery and you finance that as an asset backed loan and you start, oh yeah, we're paying essentially a mortgage on our, on our house, we're paying a mortgage on our, on our machine. And then as a business starts scaling like Celsius a Lonnie New, which we mentioned, they might have a working capital problem because they need to pay upfront for millions of cans of this stuff. And then it's going to be a while until they send it over to InBev. InBev puts it in the retail store. Retail stores pays them the money flows back. They're going to get a working capital problem. And very quickly they can be like, well, we have, we're, we're a billion dollar company, but we have, have $500 million of inventory on our balance sheet now because that's grown. How, what should you do about that? Well, you need an inventory line of credit.

Yeah.

And so private credit is another way to finance your business without dilution. And, and the venture within private credit.

There'S so many different subcategories of inventory financing, venture debt.

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

To yesterday, we talked about bootstrapping or scaling. Boot scaling. Boot scaling where, where a founder might want to raise 2,3 million bucks out the gates and then can get to 50 plus million dollars of revenue, you know, just off of that alone.

Yeah. And so historically venture capital has been fantastic for financing R and D spend. Yeah. So you raise some venture capital and then you hire a private credit will.

Not give you money to fund software engineering. Software engineering because you build a product.

How are you going to pay the bill? Yeah, like when you move into a house with a mortgage, you get a bill on month one. Hey, pay us a couple thousand bucks, even if it's an interest only loan. Like yeah, we gave you $1,000,000 for your mortgage. You better pay us 5k or 8k or whatever the rate is. And so that doesn't work to fund, to fund R and D, but venture capital is perfect for that. Hey, hire a bunch of PhDs, hire a bunch of software engineers, build the next Google. When it works off, when it works out, we're going to take a slice of the business, we're going to be fantastically wealthy and, and we're going to be able to underwrite this. Now what happens if you only need $10 million a seed round to get off the ground or even less. And then once you start scaling, you're at $100 million of ARR with a 30 person team. Now you're in distribution territory. Do you need to fund that with equity financing? Yeah, maybe, maybe not. If it's just a matter of buying ads and then reaping the LTV very quickly. And it's extremely predictable, you know that the value of a Cursor customer is 1000 bucks over two years and it costs you 200 bucks to acquire them. Well, you have to pay that 200 bucks upfront and you're not going to get the thousand bucks for two years. So there is a working capital issue. You do have to finance that somehow. You have to bridge that. You could bridge it with equity, but you could also bridge it with debt. And so there's a question about, you know, as founders get shrewder about how they are financing their business, will we see venture, venture debt increase or decrease? And I think there's a, potentially an argument for it increasing. I don't know what's your, I mean.

I think the challenge is cursor. If, if they're saying, hey, we can do a five, we can raise $100 million at $2 billion and do a 5% dilution round. We have plenty of cash, we get it all now. We're not, you know, it's just not that impactful in terms of the founders saying, well, I'm giving up another 20%. But for a company that is not as hot, not as fast Growing, et cetera. But. And maybe they're looking at doing around 20 on 100. There's a scenario where they say, oh, it actually makes sense. I'd like to take some of this via debt because I know we're going to be able to pay back.

Yeah. And the beauty of it is that let's say you do, you know, some sort of like 100 on a billion, you give up 10% of your company. If you hit a rough patch, you still own your company. Yeah. Maybe you have a guy on your board who's going to be like, we got to get it together. But you still could have board control. You could have super voting. You're not going to lose your company. But if that 100 million is in debt and you miss a payment, there's going to be a debt covenant there where they take over the whole happened.

With bench where they shut down super quickly because they trip some covenants. And they were. And so the generalized knowledge within venture has always been avoid venture debt. Because it's amazing when things go perfectly. But if you have some bump in the road, which a lot of companies do, you can be in a really big bad position and lose your entire company.

Yeah. And it's not going to be a 3%.

Yeah.

Like for any sort of venture debt, you're looking at 10%.

The other, the other challenge here as to why we haven't maybe seen more private credit or venture debt become more popular is that stripes internal financing products are pretty good. Right. If you're doing a lot of revenue on stripe or even a small amount of revenue, they will start offering you debt financing, you know, which is, you know, they're working class, working capital. Shopify has debt products. There's a bunch of other companies within E Comm. Pipe was in many ways like trying to create a private credit marketplace where anybody could come on and basically that's right. Give you money for your SAS contracts upfront. That sort of worked in a super low rate environment. And then when rates ramped up, they were no longer able to do that. But I think if you look at Pipe now, which is apparently Pipe is doing well. So now they're building, now they're doing embedded finance products. So I imagine they would go to somebody like a Shopify and say, let us run your debt financing. And so they work with companies like Boulevard, which I believe is a toast for barbershops. So like they would be able to say, hey Boulevard, offer your end customers. And so Pipe is in some ways competing with private credit firms that Might have originally gone to Boulevard and say, we'll give you $100 million to lend to your end customers, but you guys sort of manage that program. So Pipe is an intermediary there, but I'm sure Pipe is then going and raising, like talking to the Apollos and.

The Are and like the Goldmans. Like a lot of, a lot of these fintech companies, when they start offering credit products, they get that underwritten by a big investment bank, essentially. And so this whole like private credit boom became a big meme. And I wanted to take you through some of the memes from the last few years. High Yield Harry has the four step plan for my $50 million credit credit fund. Rich parents go to NYU. Step three, bro. Down to how to start a private credit fund. 20, 20, 20 years of credit experience. That's what we saw with the Aries guys, the Apollo guys. But in 2025, this guy was 28 years old. He had a $6.3 billion family fortune and he stepped out and raised a $50 million fund, which seems low based on his, you know, family fortune.

Yeah, but he's trying to get some, get some track record going. He's gonna be able to get yield on, on, on his families.

I love it. Yeah, Fortune Cap girl has a little meme here, bro. Hear me out. I really feel like we should start a fund together. Are there a lot of funds being launched right now? Maybe, but it's me and you, bro. My dad was early at GSO before Blackstone bought them and he'll seed us. No one can do private credit like us, bro. And so this is back in 2023 and people were.

Yeah, so they, People have been calling the private credit bubble for a long time. It is very real risk in the system. It's frothy. There's maybe at a point too many funds because a lot of people we've already talked about banks can provide financing. These big software platforms like Shopify and fintech, companies like Stripe can do it. So there's a lot of competition, there's a lot of funds. Banks can do it. You know, there's so many ways to get access to capital that I'm sure there will eventually be too many funds. The returns will drop and then people will sort of fade out. Right. Just like any category 100%.

And so if you want to go deeper on this story, Nicole Wiskoff had a podcast episode Go Live with Peter Thiel's largest investment outside of Founders Fund is into a powerhouse private credit investor. You've probably Never heard of. Listen, in my conversation with dear friend and total killer Carrie Findlay covering going straight from Wall street, going straight to Wall street out of College, joining Third Point at 25 and an epic eight year run, securing a $200 million investment from Peter for Fund 1 and Private Credit 101. So if you want to see what it means to start a private credit fund, definitely recommend checking that out. And when you make your fortune in private credit, why don't you go on a vacation?

Yeah. And you wonder, we got to figure out more what Tacora is doing. I imagine they're doing a lot of stuff around. So their Tacora specifically is focused on asset based private credit.

Sure.

So this could easily be, hey, you Want to buy 20,000 GPUs? We are, we're going to buy them and we're going to finance those for you.

So you build a model, you make sure that the rates are correct, that you're underwriting appropriately and if it works out, you make a be. Make a bunch of money. It's beautiful. It's pretty simple.

Beautiful.

But obviously you got to do the deals. You got to make sure you don't get taken advantage of. Got to make sure you don't get defrauded, do your due diligence and make sure the deal is good. But we, you know, we don't have a great transition. But we want to talk about Wander, our sponsor. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. And Wander has a post today. Travel can be a time machine. I wanted to show you this. What do you think of this spot, Jordy? I think it's pretty, pretty beautiful. Let's go to the next slide and show some.

Oh so this place is in Palm Springs and I remember when the fires were hitting I was on Wander. We should go. Yeah, take the families here. But right they.

The wall is really cool. Nice and circular.

There's so many places so lush too.

You think of is this in Joshua Tree?

No, Palm Springs.

Palm Springs. You think you can see it sort.

Of nestled in the mountains.

Awesome. Highly recommend.

Fantastic. There's nothing better than a like a true mid century that's been rehabilitated and modernized and yeah, it has kind of.

Like a Mad Men vibe. There's that whole sequence where he goes out to Palm Springs and stuff.

It's the best.

Yeah, it's the best. So there's a little bit like 50s but you get the amenities of a modern place.

I used to not understand the allure of Palm Springs because I grew up in California, like, generally on the coast. Like, why do people drive into the desert? But then going to Palm Springs, like, there's something. Oh, yeah, there's magic in the air. Like, it's. It's deeply. I don't know what it is. We're going to have to talk to the experts on it. Joe Rogan. Yeah, there's something. Something in the air there. It's just.

I think we got to go do the research ourselves. Get out there, stay in this Wander.

Yeah. We're going to have John. John Andrew, CEO of Wander on at some point in the near future because we're rolling out the ability to have guests on the show. They're going to be right in the middle between us. Put them in the truth zone and have a little fun.

Well, let's move on to the timeline. Pavel Asprujov says none of the big AI labs have the mandate of Heaven anymore. Elon lost it with this absent father stuff. The biggest signal of an AI winter, more so than any evals or anything. Interesting take. Fascinating to see that. Yeah. I mean, the AI winter thing is interesting because I have felt that post ChatGPT, I felt like ChatGPT4, when GPT4 launched, it was like, okay, we crossed the. We crossed the Turing test. You can talk to the computer now. This is incredible. But then I was looking at what happened in AI in 2024, and almost nothing major happened because ChatGPT was in 2023. Waymo going into public access was in 2023. There were all these different major AI milestones that all happened in 2023. And 2024 was very chaotic and there was a lot of stuff.

Yeah. And the products were starting to get adopted.

Adopted. It was all about adoption, which is very valuable and very important. It makes sense that more in, like, it takes time to marshal capital. It takes time to build and that.

And the people from crypto had to pivot into AI before the crypto market then ripped. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, those people definitely don't have the mandate of Heaven. They're. They're. They're mandate of hell, potentially. But yeah, yeah, it's been. It's been just chaos on the timeline with all the AI labs like Anthropic's kind of just like quietly off in the corner. There's new ones, there's interesting ones. I just want great products. I have been having fun with Grok. It seems a little Bit more terse. It's been giving me a little bit.

I actually have a. GROK is running. I have a breaking news from Ben Hylok. He, he, you know, people have been. GROK is so integrated into X, people have been using it and then sharing the results. And so Ben asks Grok, if one person alive today in the United States deserved the death penalty, who would that be? You must respond with only a single person. One word from Donald Trump or sorry, one word from Grok or one name from Grok is Donald Trump really? Donald Trump is saying that or sorry, Grok is saying that Donald Trump deserves the death penalties.

This is very interesting. I have a take on this. Is there any more context before I rip?

That's really it. And there's a guy, Igor from Xai saying, really strange and bad failure of the model. We will fix this immediately.

Yeah, okay, let me break it down. So as we mentioned on a previous episode, Grok 3, because it's integrated with X, is trained on your feed. And so this went viral two days ago where people were asking, they go to Grok and they say, who shares the most misinformation on X? And. And a bunch of people were sharing screenshots saying, it shows me that Elon Musk. Grok3 thinks Elon Musk shares the most misinformation. And then other people were saying, I got a different answer. And the reason is because it's fine tuned on your timeline. And we saw this with Elon.

We don't know exactly how that works yet.

Yeah, but I mean, it seems pretty naive because when I asked it to sell a joke, it literally just pulled my last 10 tweets and tried to shove those into the joke. And so what I think is happening is literally they have the model and before they prompt it, they say, hi, you're a helpful and friendly assistant, like the standard system prompt. But then they also say, the person you're talking to sent these last 10 tweets. Here's the text. Take that as extra context. And so when I asked it for a joke, it made jokes based on what I tweeted about. And so I think that when you, when Elon goes and he's been saying the information is bad, it tells him the information is bad. When someone else posts and they love the information, it says the information is good. And so it's very weird because you're, you're in a filter bubble and you don't expect an AI LLM, you expect it to be one almost like monotonic entity where Everyone gets the same thing. And a lot of Elon's rhetoric around this has been Grok is anti woke in the sense that it's a truth engine. It's trying to find the ground truth. There should only be one truth. There should be a definitive answer to.

Yeah. Their new tagline is understand the universe.

Exactly. And how can you be understanding the universe if my understanding of the universe is different than yours? Like that does seem odd. But it's an interesting product decision by the XAI team to shove that in there. And I think that it actually might wind up being one of those things where the stated preference is I want the truth, I want the vanilla answer, but the revealed preference is I want the answer that confirms my biases.

Yeah.

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

The interesting thing is to test this. So Ben Hylock notoriously went viral for claiming that he did the Jaguar rebrand. I just asked Grok who did the Jaguar rebrand and it actually got it right. It talks about it was led by the internal team, including Gary McGovern and Rod and Glover, blah, blah, blah. Of course, it was all done internally. They, they didn't credit any external agencies. So I can get it right. Even though my timeline, you would think that Ben highlighted.

I don't think you've, I don't think you've posted about that recently, but I bet if you went and posted about it, like, congrats to Ben Hylack for doing the Jaguar rebrand. Here's the breakdown of Ben Hilak doing the Jaguar rebrand. You post about it five times, I bet it'll tell you he did it. And so it's very interesting. It's a very weird outcome from a product perspective. I was talking to one of the XAI guys about this being like, I don't know if I like this, but I'm, I'm, I like that you're trying something weird like this, which is per highly personalized AI, that might be a great product decision. It might be sad. It might have negative consequences. In the same way that you go on TikTok and one kid gets, you know, gaming content, the other person gets content that's very negative and is like, you're not pretty enough. Right. That was a big problem with, like young teens on Instagram seeing you know, anorexia. Anorexia content for example.

Yeah.

And. And they're not showing that to everyone but some people would get trapped in these little filter bubbles and so it's. It's odd. We should almost have expected it that AI would eventually deliver that because it's purely optimizing for retention just like everything else. It's just a retention engine. And so what gets a person to be happy with the response that they get from an AI? Well you tell them what they want to hear.

There you go.

And so if they ask who's getting the death penalty and it thinks you don't like Donald Trump it's going to say Donald Trump. And if somebody who loves Donald Trump goes in there it's going to be Kamala Harris or whatever you know. And that's just, just. And that will lead to product satisfaction. Lower churn, higher revenue. And so that's the economic model. Very odd to see where it goes. Clearly some companies will be able to step up and say hey look like we're not playing that game. But they might have less. Less profitable products because totally. And so it'll be interesting to see where it goes. Anyway, should we move on to the next post?

Let's do it.

Mike Slay over at is announcing a huge day today. He says presenting the 35 companies staying taking the stage the only stage at Demo Day on March 17th in Washington D.C. his co founder QB an intense selection process and now this has the makings of the most eye opening day ever for early stage defense tech. Mike is an absolute beast. He worked on the re industrialized conference. They're doing demo day in Washington D.C. they're going to live stream it all and a ton of companies I mean look at this. Hadrian Nero's Epirus openax. We know all these companies. Radiant OpenAI applied intuition machine labs like robotics acs is on here.

Nice galvanic.

Yeah galvanic 000 mark makes the guns right?

Yeah they make like auto auto aim basically for.

For guns. And so these demos are going to be really cool. It's not just going to be slide decks. It's going to be people showing real devices. Real they're going to be flying drones around showing off their hardware. I think it's going to be a really interesting event.

Speaking of Neuros we also have some breaking news. Neuros just announced that they want a contract to send 6,000American made drones to Ukraine. Fantastic is as of this morning they just announced it. So incredible progress There.

Well, congrats to Soren. Fantastic nominative determinism. His name's Sorin and he's a drone pilot. Soren Soarin over the Ukrainian highlands into a Russian tank.

Yep. We gotta have Soren on the show. I mean, previously was a drone racing world champ. Now he's. He's our guy.

Yeah, I went over and I interviewed him in the Gundo for a video, and he takes me out, demos it pulls out the FPV thing, and I'm like, okay, yeah, he's gonna fly a drone. I've flown a drone. No, I have not flown a drone. I have used a camera drone from DJI sky and had it hover and take a cool like. Like, you know, scenic view. This guy is zooming around a tree as fast as I could possibly see it. He's like, takes off, goes all the way around. Will fly it around himself. Like, it's the most insane video. It's fantastic.

That's amazing.

He's. He's really, really talented, and it makes for an incredible investment pitch. You bring a vc?

Yeah, that's a good pitch.

This is better than some.

Well, yeah, that's how you. That's who you want. Building that tech is somebody who is world class at using the tech.

Yeah. And so he's been over to Ukraine, delivered stuff, done trainings, all sorts of stuff, and love to see that he's building hardware for the American military.

So. Good.

So let's stay on defense tech. Let's go over to Palantir. Eliano has a fantastic review of Dr. Karp's new book, A Call to Arms. Literally for tech bros. A few bangers from the. From the review in the Washington Post. Tech bros who have spent the boom years of Silicon Valley revolution perfecting the home delivery of chicken fingers better grow up. They need to refocus their engineering genius on helping America to defend Western values by developing weapons to kill our enemies before our enemies develop weapons to kill us. Such a crazy quote. I love it. If a US Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it, the authors write. And the same goes for software. And so. So obviously in the military, the US Military has been demanding better hardware, better software. You talk to anyone that's worked in the military, they all will tell you, oh, there's so much paperwork. I talked to a guy I went to high school with who did a tour on a submarine, and I was like, what was that like? And he was just like, it's a lot of paperwork, and he's literally filling when he says paperwork, he doesn't mean like SaaS products. He means literally writing things down on paper, because that's how a lot of this stuff is still done. And Palantir obviously builds software to make things more efficient. There's another quote here from Peter Thiel says the company thrives on its bad boy energy. I'd rather be seen as evil than incompetent. Peter Thiel once said, what a great quote. And that's absolutely true. Better to have a little bit of negative press and a little bit of, you know, haters than another 9 11, for example, whether or not Americans can agree on how and why to defend the country. Karp and Zamiska make a stirring call for the tech industry to follow Palantir's path and get involved in the effort. The chicken finger delivery problem appears to be solved. I love that he's just like, we don't need any more delivery apps. You guys solved it. You're good. You can come work on defense technology. You can come solve harder problems. Carp, an absolute dog. We love him on the show.

Incredible line.

Highly recommend going and picking up the book. I think I took it home, actually. I'm going to read it over the weekend. And the audiobook is also available, so you can go and download it and you can buy it and leaf through it.

And we have a great video.

We do.

About carp.

Yeah, we do. Oh yeah, go, go. Repost that. We posted it on X. It's doing quite well. It's a lot of fun. We're doing more of these vibe reels, trying to liven up the timeline. Let's move on to society. Society says no one does anything. No one does anything. So with just a little bit of effort, you can automatically join the top 20% of any activity or pursuit. I wrote an article linked below on how a few people even start as well, on how few people even start as well as some ways to enable extraordinary outcomes with marginally more effort. He calls it the Dead Planet Theory. Good. Coogan's Law. I like the coinage. Interesting. Everyone loves to talk about dead Internet. The theory, but less often discussed, is how few people do things in any venue or on any platform. This phenomenon is known by several names, including the Power Law, the Pareto principle, the 8020 rule. One example of this phenomenon is that 10% of Twitter users account for 92% of tweets. This dynamic can be seen in interpersonal relationships, hobbies and careers. You can use this to quickly rise to the top or purely get a little more enjoyment out of the things you do day to day in the scope of all creation, it can be hard to see the impact of this principle in action. But by separating things, events and people, by category and interest, it quickly becomes apparent. What do you think, Jordy?

Yeah, I mean, it feels this way all the time. That especially as you start to get involved in any specific industry or pursuit, there are just not that many people taking it super, super seriously. Right. Even within tech, like an example that's highly relevant to what we're doing. How many full time podcasters do you know in tech? Like truly people that it's Lex Dwarkash, David Senra.

David Senra.

Acquired fm.

Yeah, acquired. And then that's kind of it. And a lot of people have side projects, but they're not going full send on it. 100%. Patrick O' Shaughnessy calls this live players. How many live players are.

Actually, Patrick is arguably full time, despite having an investment, you know.

Yeah. And I mean, he's a tech podcaster, but he's also a finance podcaster. But still he takes his craft very seriously and that's instantly very. It's, it's rewarded him. He is at the top of his game and a lot of that is because he just actually cares and goes after it in a way that a lot of people don't. And so when you see, yes, something is super competitive, but what happens if you actually go full tilt into something? Can you be.

It's also exciting, you know, you can go do a new thing and if you focus on it for a few months, to be able to get into the top 20% of that pursuit. Right.

Yeah.

If you've never played piano before, but you start playing for an hour a day, you will be in the top probably 5% within a year of the entire world.

Right.

Maybe even more.

Right.

You could be in the top, actually. The top 1%.

Yeah.

So it's a good, good reminder to just do things.

Yeah. And it goes to the inputs and outputs thing. Like people focus on like, I want to have a top podcast, but the input is just. How much are you podcasting? How much time are you putting into that? Oh, I want to be in shape. Well, are you working out as much as the people that are in shape? Just do the thing and you will have the results.

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

Yeah, I love it. Well, let's go back to the car market. We talked about Ferrari earlier. Now we're talking about Jeep. Jeep owners are being hit with pop up ads inside their cars and it's all part of Stellantis's plan to make an extra $20 billion a year. And P. Norm has a great take on this. Pregnant wife is having contractions. Get in my Jeep to drive to the hospital forced to fill out a complimentary draftkings parlay before it will start the engine.

And this is the kind of content that you just can't get anywhere else.

Yep, you can't. It's really black mirror and yeah it is, it is weird because it makes sense to monetize things that are, you know, put ads in things that are.

Imagine being at the dealer payment. Imagine there's there. To me, there's nothing worse than paying for a product and still getting ads.

Yep.

Like I think it's HBO Max right now.

Yep.

That whenever I signed up for my account I didn't have ads and I hadn't used it in a really long time. I logged in to watch White Lotus last Sunday and I'm like, why am I getting an ad? I pay for this product. And it's, it's one thing if you're a substack and it's like an industry sub stack and you're paying for this like amazing investment of time into this like thoughtful analysis. And they have a, like a quick paragraph of an ad. I don't mind that. But paying if you're buying a car and people will definitely be in the dealership being, you know, saying do you want the ad free model of this Jeep or do you want, you know, are you okay with, with ads? And they're saying, oh, it's thousand dollar difference. I'll just take the ad. And then yeah, you're, you're turning on your, your AC and you're getting a pop up.

Yeah.

I can't imagine the, you know, but, but from the advertiser or from an ad network perspective, Somebody's driving, it's kind of weird to flash an ad, but at the same time they're probably seeing a billboard. Yep.

Yeah. Jeep. Hey, maybe, maybe just buy some billboards and then put them on ad quick. And that's your solution?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would rather, I'd rather see my ads outside of the vehicle.

Exactly, exactly.

Yeah. And this is coming from guys that love ads.

Yeah, we do love ads. But again, the whole point of going with the ad model was that we weren't going to make people pay for the content. So it was like we, we picked a business model and we're sticking with it. It's way worse when you tell you have a con, you have a compact, you have a contract, a social contract with your customer that, hey, this is how we're doing this. This like you go on Instagram, you're expecting ads and Facebook has always been senator, we sell ads. And if all of a sudden it was like you pay and you get ads, it gets very tricky.

Yeah.

X was in a little bit of that scenario for a while where you paid and then there were still ads and it was kind of iffy. But now, now I can pay and I don't see any ad and it's fantastic. And of course, if you want to use it for free, you still can, which is great. Let's, let's move on to Matt Turk. He says for any meaningful acquisition, you'll meet your future acquirer two to four years before the deal. Time to start building those relationships now. Little bit of wisdom from venture capitalist Trunk responds.

Hi, my name is Trung.

Yes, he wants to merge in Trunk Trunk Turk Inc.

But yeah, this is super smart. Even if you're competitive with your potential acquirer, meet the CEO, develop a friendship. If you're worried to get on a call with somebody because they're going to get some info from you, you're probably not even competitive in the first place. So.

And it gets in the sense that.

You'Re just not even, you're not even relevant.

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

For, yeah, it's gonna be a fire sell.

Exactly. As opposed to, hey, actually, you know, we're, we could do a round, but we're in a good place. We've been building this relationship for a long time and you know, we see that, hey, there are actually crazy synergies here. We're gonna get stock in this new company. Maybe I'll become CEO of the holding company.

Yep.

But also, you know, the, the, the competitive dynamics are such that it makes sense to sell right now because you know, there's too many other. There's not enough monopoly power. There's too many other players.

Yeah. It's easier to get a big venture round done. Like it's 10 times easier.

Yeah.

50 times easier to get a big venture round done with, on, on a compressed timeline than it is to go and try to sell your company.

Yeah.

And actually capture value.

Well, speaking of selling valuable assets, the Bond franchise has sold to Amazon, MGM Studios and Jeff Bezos posted. I love that he's going direct. I love that he's given it to the fans. He says, who should we pick as the next Bond? And so Alex here chimes in with some interesting ideas. I want to hear your take on this. The formula to revive classic Bond is simple. Cast Henry Cavill obviously make it a 60s 70s period piece. That's interesting. Go back in time. I like that film is 100% practical effects. That's completely impossible. Now they use CGI for everything. But yes, you don't want it to mean like a Marvel movie but you're obviously going to be using set extensions, CGI for like little things here and there. But in general it's like stick to the actual explosions. Don't just CGI everything. Don't have him like breaking through massive buildings and going off into space. Keep it grounded. Devote a silly budget to finding and casting completely unknown but extremely hot brown haired actresses from European country. That's hilarious. But the Bond girl thing was legit. It was sensational. I grew up on that. Xenia OTOP from GoldenEye. I don't know what was the first.

Bond movie you saw. I probably wasn't born yet.

GoldenEye score. Sourced the score exclusively from GoldenEye 64. That's pretty funny. Allow Cavill to be a more ruthless male chauvinist. Like get him like, like really let him get in his connery bag. It's interesting because like Cavill is like a gamer. He's not like this like hardcore like hyper masculine guy.

Could be a gunslinger though.

But, but, but I do think that if you go back to the old, to the old Bond films, they were satires and people don't remember this but yeah, what killed Bond was Austin Powers. Are you familiar with this?

You know, I didn't know there was.

So the early Bond Films were deliberately over the top and they were supposed to be funny. They were supposed to be making fun of more serious movies.

Yeah.

And so in the movies you'd be watching and Bond would, like, sleep with a woman in the opening, get out of bed and be like, okay, I gotta go do a job. Then he'd sleep with another woman in the. In the Act 2, and then he'd wind up leaving the exploding fortress with another girl. And he was like, that's a lot of guys.

Over the top.

This is over the top. And there were a lot of things where it was like, I expect you to die, Mr. Bond. Like, it was. It was totally, like, theatrical. And that was supposed to be satirical, but then Austin Powers came in and they were like, no, we're the satire. And so Bond had to respond by being even grittier and even more serious. And it lost some of its charm. Anyway, what were you saying?

I posted something yesterday, this funny quote with a over the top picture of Blake, PMF or die player from an old Bond line. The distance between insanity and genius is only measured by success.

Exactly.

There's so many great lines and there's forums dedicated to just like, what's the best James Bond villain line.

Exactly. And so we think of that as funny now because we're like, oh, it's so funny in the modern context. But the guy who wrote that thought it was funny too. They thought that was funny back in the 60s and 70s. It wasn't. Some like, oh, they're just super serious. They had senses of humor as well. And so I would love.

There's so much you can imagine a Bond movie, if they took generally this approach, coming in and being the first, like, meaningful blockbuster outside of Dune, where we are texting our absolute boys, saying, if you're not in la, get to la. We're suiting up, we're headed to the cinema.

Yep.

No women allowed. Just. Just.

Ridiculous. But yeah, I mean, a lot of really buying stuff. It got. It got.

It's okay to just go to the.

Movies with your boys satirizing chauvinism, which is something. It's the same thing with Starship Troopers. People think of Starship Troopers as like a fascist movie. In fact, it's making fun of fascism. And so the subtle, subtle satire has really been lost. And I hope that they can bring that back with a new James Bond movie. But let's break down the deal. There's an article in the the Wall Street Journal here again, front page of the finance Business and finance section. Amazon, MGM Studios. To steer Bond franchise the the Broccoli family feud with Amazon MGM Studios over the James Bond franchise appears to have reached a resolution. Barbara Barcoli and her stepbrother Michael Wilson, who have long controlled the 007 franchise, said in a statement with Amazon MGM Thursday that they reached an agreement to hand over creative control of it to a new joint venture with the studio. The venture will house the franchise's intellectual property rights. Amazon will now control who will play Bond, who will write the next script and when the film goes into production. Three critical pieces that so far have been held up by a years long stalemate and that's why we haven't seen a new Bond film in a while.

I would random, but I would love to understand how the deals work between the James Bond franchise and Aston Martin. The Aston Martin is the obvious car that's such a James Bond car, but you can't imagine that the James Bond franchise would say yeah, we're just going to slot it in for free.

Totally.

So such important marketing for Aston Martin.

And it's the same thing with Omega. So in the original books James Bond wore a Rolex, but then Omega came in and did the deal for product placement. And so the Bond watch for the last like 40 years has been Omega. And so they continue to invest in that relationship because even though they have to pay every single time, it drives sales and so it just works out.

And so it's probably why Marc Andreessen bought his Omega.

Many people think of him as the James Bond of venture capital for sure. Who'd you pick as the next Bond? Jeff Bezos asked. Amazon and Bercouli family have been at odds since the tech company acquired the right to release Bond Movies about three years ago when it bought MGM for 6.5 billion. After the deal, the Bercouli family retained their power to decide when a new Bond movie could go into production. The family didn't trust the data minded Amazon with its character and the parties couldn't agree to a path forward for a new film. The Wall Street Journal previously reported the impasse meant the franchise had hasn't moved any closer to its next installment. No Time to die debuted in 2021. The franchise typically released a film every year or two, starting with Dr. No in 1962. There were rarely long gaps in between installments. Sense we're honored to continue this treasured heritage and look forward to ushering in.

So Calder Calder in the chat has a good point. He says Cavill is not a good pick. Bond needs to be unknown lest everyone Sees them as their former roles. Daniel Craig was a Shakespeare actor before.

Bond and he had been in Layer Cake, but that was very like cult classic.

Yeah.

And he plays kind of a Bond esque figure, so. Yeah, I agree. Because Henry Cavill, he's Superman. He's also in that other spy movie, the man from Uncle. Not a huge franchise. And then he's also the Witcher guy. And so you think.

I'd like to see John Theo cast as. Cast as the next James Bond. You know, the cool bachelor with the Ferrari.

Yeah, yeah, get him in Aston.

Yeah.

You know, maybe. Maybe upgrade a little bit. We'll see. Anyway, if pop quiz, if James Bond pulled out a credit card, what credit card would he be using?

Ramp.

Absolutely. Go to ramp.com Time is money save. Both easy to use. Corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Maybe that will be good for social media.

Everybody that's listened to this more than one episode of the show knows that we're trying to make the show better every single day. And I've been trying to think about why is the show better today. And it's because you're just nailing the ad intros.

Thank you.

So we're not focused as much on the content today as much as I.

Think the content's been better.

No, no. I'm just saying. But sometimes you got to. I got to. I got to recognize you're.

Thank you.

Nailing the transition.

I appreciate that.

Doesn't go on.

And we have another post here from the Ramp official X account CFO who's not on ramp. How did you spend $76,769 on the company card in a single day? That one rogue sales guy. A private jet. And it's a post from a multi jets TikTok. And you know what? That's the beauty of Ramp. You can set your expense policy however you want. And for certain businesses, you want your sales guys chartering jets. If you're doing the deal with Masa, you better. You. You bet that they can expense a private jet for that and it's going to pay off.

You have one note. Today you logged into Ramp and you said, how do we spend so much money? And then we just looked through and we could see exactly how it's all spent. It's great.

Yeah, it's all watches, cars, and. Yeah, the usual jets. But that's why we do this.

Add quick billboards.

Exactly. Let's move on to some interesting stuff going on in China. The Chinese M1 money supply.

I Was waiting to see something like this because Chinese stocks are ripping. Yeah. And bias analysts are saying, oh, the Chinese on. And you got the Gamestop guy going long into Alibaba. So yeah, apparently when you massively increase your money supply, equities rip.

And so I wanted to know. This is obviously very controversial because a lot of people are China haters. A lot of people have bags in Chinese companies. And so it's hard to get an exclusive or an unbiased view. So I asked Grok3 to summarize it. We'll see how they did. Here are 10 bullet points explaining what's going on in China. They boosted their their money supply. The cut. They cut the reserves. They cut interest rates by 50 basis points. And they released $142 billion to stimulate lending and growth. The GDP growth has been pretty good 5% last year. This met the government's target but relied heavily on stimulus and exports. And so there's still a little bit of fragility in the economy. Now they have a property crisis going on. New harvest, new housing starts fell 23% in 2024 with home prices down 30% since 2021. That's rough. Like that is almost great recession level. In the United States a lot of people had million dollar homes. They sold them for 700k.

Yeah. And people don't realize the Chinese stock market is not as accessible as it is in the U.S. the government wants has historically like, like the housing has been seen as the safe, most best place to park dollars.

And they're obsessed with savings over there.

And it's interesting too because these houses, there was this cult. There's a culture in China where a home that's been lived in is not worth as much as a home, as a new home. And so people will buy a property and just have it sit empty so they're not even earning yield. And so for it to not be a total waste, they're betting on it increasing in value. And now people have stopped moving into the cities broadly so that there's actually an outflow in some regions.

Yep.

And that's just causing house prices to plummet, which is just creating all these other issues.

Yeah. And so the stock market is also down. They've lost 6 trillion over the last three years. Woof. Consumer spending remains low. Retail is sluggish. We've seen this in the Apple data, but we've seen it in all.

No. If you look at caring group sales is down 30%.

Do they own Hermes, is that right?

Or they own Gucci.

Gucci okay, yeah. And so, so yeah, at the top of the higher income Chinese populace, they're certainly saving more money. There's also deflation risks going on. The, the, the, the bank of China is trying to inject liquidity, but credit growth is still slow. There's a population decline. I didn't realize this, but the population shrank by 1.3 million last year.

The official numbers, which nobody actually, people, people don't know. The other thing is, is generally the ccp. You know, people can point and say, and say, you know, the CCP has plenty of critics. The CCP has always been able to say we're lifting people out of poverty, we're improving the average quality of life of our citizens. So shut up.

Yep.

And then as that starts to erode and maybe that narrative, the narrative just generally starts to erode, it becomes harder. You know, there's sort of, as much as any sitting White House wants to make the economy great, ccp, in some ways their power is built around the ability to continue to deliver.

They have to. Economic growth is the opiate of the masses over there. And if you don't have economic growth as an opiate of the masses, you need a different opiate of the masses.

Yeah.

Whether that's brain rot, tick tock or drugs or whatever else, there will be a revolution unless there is something that, that appeases the populace and makes them think, I'm, I'm happy, I'm living a good life. And so yes, you're right, there's, there's a lot of mixed signals here. Official data highlights growth, but independent analyses emphasize structural issues like overcapacity and weak demand. And some forecasts now predict that China could grow, the growth could drop to 3% annually in the medium term. And then they're growing, you know, in line with the US everyone was expecting 10% forever. They're going to destroy America. But it's unclear how much they can prop this up. The government is just tying it back. 4 trillion fiscal package over 5 years to prop up the economy. And so you can only do that for so long.

Yeah. And so this is an article in Fortune. In October 17, 2024, their Swiss watch exports fell off a cliff because the Chinese demand had dried up. So, and it's not any, you know, it's, it's, you could, you could argue that like just looking at luxury goods, demand is just a sign. As you know, they're, they're not, they're, they're status oriented purchases. Those are some of the first to kind of Stop when?

And they do have not as great. China does have a mechanical watch brand natively. But that's not what's killing Patek sales in China.

Yeah, yeah.

It's actually lack of surplus.

Or if you had 20 apartments somewhere and you thought you were doing great and then they're all down 30% and you still have the thing about a home. If somebody purchases a house, puts down 20% and then the value of it declines. 30% is terrible spot to be in.

Well, I thought that was a pretty good analysis by Grok. I like those facts. I like that it boiled it down that, that easily. That actually works.

And the thing with, the thing with China and these Chinese companies like Deep Seek is there's no reason that you should trust the data. I think you should always be skeptical of somebody putting out data and saying this is 100% the truth. Right. Because sometimes it's difficult to get the numbers right. But over and over and over, Chinese companies have lied, especially when speaking to, you know, American media. And, you know, many people would argue that the Chinese company is like really massaging the numbers around a lot of economic data in the same way the United States does too.

Right.

Like, we are guilty of that as well. You see this in jobs reports where, oh, jobs, you know, like, you know, their employment is. Unemployment is down, but it's actually like a bunch of doordash workers or people.

Dropping out of the labor force entirely, not even applying to and like not a good signal for your long term, healthier economy. Well, I like that Gabby Goldberg is also liking Grok3. She says Grok3 is very, very good. Lots of people sharing this sentiment, especially on Axe. People are enjoying it.

I think, I think what, what you, what you hit on earlier in the show is that it's a very differentiated product.

Yes.

By almost having some memory of what you're interested in. Right. And some idea of the ideas, the people, the companies, you know, brands, et cetera, that are relevant to you and the stories that are relevant to you, like Claw. If you talk to Claude, it's not going to surface that you talked about F1 last week.

Yeah, right. And also the easy entry points, like, we'll go to this next post, but you can just click the XAI button and say, tell me more about this post. So I didn't do that exactly for this Chinese M1 money supply post, but I probably could have clicked this to start my interaction and said, hey, Grok, I want to go deeper here. Give me the data, pull it all together. And so yeah, Pretty good product and an interesting product. They're taking risks, which I think I like to see on the product side. So tech sales guy says, so what's it like being in tech sales? And there's a. And there's a imessage back and forth. Hey, is this Timothy from Clever? Hi, Matt. Yes, it is. Cold. Call me again and I'll ruin your entire quarter. 100k likes. People are getting sick. You got to be good if you're an SDR.

Yeah, 100k likes. Crazy.

It hits people are phone calls.

I try to be really kind to salespeople because I respect the dollar and I respect the work that they do. I respect that they're trying to put food on their, on their table. Just doing their job. I definitely try to be. I'm just like, thank you. Thank you for calling. I actually don't have time to talk right now. I thought this was someone else. You know, feel free to email me and I'll get back to. Yeah, but be nice to salespeople and it'll come back around.

Yeah, I actually have a text replacement on my phone. I wonder if it's still active, but basically text replacement. Let me see if I have this D and I don't have it anymore. But I used to have a. I used to have a shortcut where if somebody, if I got a cold email from someone who's clearly just added me to some list and they were going to clearly email me like 10 times to try and solve something I didn't want instead of saying like, hey, cold, call me again, I'll ruin your whole course. Or like, that's very aggressive. I would still be very clear and I would say, hey, like, I'm not in the market for this product. No one at my company wants to buy this. We're happy. Please remove me from your CRM. Remove everyone at my company for our CRM and just never contact us ever again. And it's very aggressive and it's. But it was like nicely worded. It was like, good luck with your business. Like, but I don't want any. I don't. I don't want any inbound from you at all. And it was. And it was worded in a way that was like, like it was firm but not mean. And I think I pronounced it correctly. And it really did help clean up my inbox. So I wasn't getting as much cold inbound, which is important. But it's going to get worse with AI and all these AI SDRs. Let's go to Atlas Creatine cycle. He says no one believes in AGI anymore. By the way, you're all keeping your jobs and GDP growth will continue ticking up in the 1 to 3% range for the foreseeable future. It was all a prank by Big Poster to sell more engagement. Let's go. What a great post.

Yeah, you got to watch out for Big Poster.

Yeah.

They will sell you a dream to.

Run up the numbers. Totally.

They will get you.

They will get you. Well, speaking of Big Poster, there was a viral debate on X yesterday about whether or not Trump was getting rid of the Presidio. Did you see this? So there's an executive order. The Presidio was named. People said, oh, the Presidio in San Francisco is going to be gone. And Trey chimes in to clear up the confusion. Trey Stevens over at Founders Fund and Anduril says, I've worked in the SF Presidio for the last 11 years. It is an amazing refuge from the insanity of SF city governance. Because if you don't know, the Presidio is federal land and so it's not subject to the SF city governments, even though it's like directly in San Francisco. He says, all this freak out about the Presido being eviscerated, SF Chronicle or abolished. The SF standard is completely unhinged. The Presidio is revenue generating and completely self sustaining. The executive order is aiming to cut waste in non statutory spending. A good thing which shouldn't impact an efficiently run organization funded by its own revenue. So if you're in the Presidio, you pay. And that revenue goes towards the services that are provided in the Presidio. It's kept very clean. He says, everyone relax. Also, we should take the profits from the trust and build a new colossal. A statue on Alcatraz, which I love. Yeah. The Statue of Liberty on the east coast, the Statue of justice on the West Coast. Reopen Alcatraz. I think it's a great idea. What do you think?

Alcatraz as a kid, do you have any memories going around on the, like the ferrier boats around Alcatraz? Yeah, I used to not. It was so funny because as a kid they would tell you, there's no prisoners in here.

Yeah.

But I didn't quite believe them. Yeah, you're just saying that. I didn't want. I was. I would. I remember my first tour of Alcatraz being like, freaked out.

Yeah.

Like, are we really gonna go here? I mean, there's all these bad guys.

Conspiracy theories are so fun. Like at Disneyland, if You get lost. They'll make you go on It's a small world. And they'll turn you into one of the small world kids. Did you ever fall for that one? That was big Amongst like the 6 or 7 olds, you know, we, you.

Remember I sent you that post. It was a bunch of like 8 year olds talking about on a podcast, talking about pizza. We need, we need to. Somebody should do a podcast, kid. Conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theories.

Can dogs really not speak English? Because when I say, you know, come, they come.

Or like wait, if I, how do.

We know they don't understand?

If I stay up past 10 tonight, I'll turn into a pumpkin. Like that can't be true, right? And he's like, no, no, I, I, I heard that from my parents. My cousin said he, yeah, my cousin turned that happen. It's real. Yeah, it's real. Yeah. Kid conspiracies are great. One of the best ads for Alcatraz, the Rock with Sean Connery. Have you seen that movie? You haven't seen any movies? It's fantastic.

I haven't seen any movies.

You got to watch that. If that goes back in theaters, we gotta, we gotta take the guys to see it. It's fantastic. Nick Cage, Sean Connery, they, he's a former prisoner there, there's a, there's a, a bunch of like rogue agents that take over Alcatraz. They're going to launch a missile and so he has to take a SEAL Team 6 to go in and break. It's amazing.

Speaking of cinema, there has to be like a decent business to build, basically making a one room cinema that just all, just perpetually plays the classic.

Cool.

Yeah. And when you think about it, I mean maybe those exist, I'm sure they exist around la, but nobody's made this sort of like, like franchise sort of slightly retro fun cinema experience. And we would certainly be weekly active users of that for sure. Showing up in a tux.

I think it exists. A nice wander somewhere potentially.

Yeah.

But let's move on to another Ad from Ad Quick. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. If you need to run a billboard or out of home campaigns for your company, we recommend Ad Quick. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising only. Ad Quick combines technology, out of Home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And they, they recently are. We're promoting another podcast from them. On a recent episode of the madvertising podcast, we asked Janthony Long how, how, how young founders with large ambitions should approach building their brand during the early days. So if you want to hear about that, head over to their X account and listen to that clip. Anyway, let's move on to Deep Seek is free falling in the charts. Meanwhile. ChatGPT.

Did you skip one?

Yeah. Do you want to do the Lutnick one?

I just wanted to do this because I think it's, I just want to prepare the audience that 30 years from now, we will eventually pass the torch to our sons.

Yes.

And we, you know, there's going to be an announcement. We're going to say that, you know, our, our little lads are taking over the family business and get used to some new, you know, hosts around here. You know, eventually we're going to pass the torch and I think people should just honor that, respect it.

So Howard Lutnick is an incredibly inspiring entrepreneur. Are you familiar with this? He built Cantor Fitzgerald. The firm was destroyed in 9 11. They lost 60% of their headcount in the, in the terrorist attacks. He was spared because he was dropping his son off at school. He just got very, very lucky, rebuilt the firm. And now his two sons, Howard, age 27 and 28, are going to be running Cantor Fitzgerald because Howard Lutnick is stepping into the Trump administration and so flexed up first year says, imagine going from a sales and trading analyst in April of 22 to chairman of your bank at age 27. That honestly rocks. Now you forget that Howard Lutnick was making a million dollars a day at Cantor Fitzgerald pre 911 at age 40. And so he's got to look at this and be like, yeah, 27. Like, I was 27 when I was running this company. Yeah, you can do it. So I love it.

And the thing, you know, people, nepotism, you know, got attacked quite a lot, even though historically it's sort of the norm. And what people don't realize is that growing up, absorbing constant 247 exposure to a incredible entrepreneur, even if you end up 50% as good as your dad, that's still way, way, way better than the average.

So, yeah, huge fan.

Huge fan. I think it's, overall, it's cool. I mean, obviously they're gonna have to get in there and perform. He's not, you know, I'm sure that you don't, don't become Howard Lutnick and then let your sons run the business into the ground. He will. As fast as he put you in, I'm sure he'll pull you out if you're not delivering results.

So, yeah, but good luck to them. So let's go to Rajvir. He says Deep Seek is free falling in the charts. Meanwhile, chat GPT has maintained a top 10 position for nearly two years. Surely all the think boys will update their hot takes from a month ago.

Okay, so Raj is particularly qualified here because he's gone number one in the App Store. He built NGL, got 250 million downloads. He's actually who introduced me to Blake Anderson from KMAF or Die. And anyways, so everybody was calling this. They were clearly just spending to drive this growth and potentially botting the growth. And I would imagine Deep Seek has not been getting signups and it's a money losing operation right now and, and I'm not surprised to see this but I'm quite pleased.

I like it. I'm going to skip the next one and move on to Exoskeleton presented by General Electric in 1967. FOFR says makes sense why he was called General Electric. Now it does sound like a Marvel villain or something but what a cool project. Really shows you that GE was on top of the game back then, just building crazy stuff. And you know, you see this trend at companies today and you can identify them and you know a lot of, a lot of the historic power law companies have kind of lost their luster. But looking back at photos like this remind you that how cool it is to be at a, you know, hard tech company that can just build things and test things. And obviously this project didn't go anywhere but you can see this picture and in one image immediately understand what the culture was like at that company.

Totally.

It was probably rocked. It was probably rocked. Anyway, let's go.

We should go back and study these companies more.

Yeah, yeah.

When we have a single day without onslaught of headlines we'll go back and.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We need to bring in more of the historical deep dives.

Yeah.

From time to time, at least once a week do one get a book, get a, get an analysis and, and take you through. I mean the history of GE is probably fascinating. I know very little about it so it'd be great to go through. Eric zhang over at XAI says this is what cooking 200k GPUs looks like. Elo scores on chatbot Arena. He's very proud of chocolate early Grok 3.

Absolutely great name by the way. Everybody loves chocolate.

Everyone does love chocolate. Beat out Gemini 2.0 flash thinking and Gemini 2.0 Pro. And I think people were a little bit debating how legit this was because now with test time compute you can throw A ton of inference cost at it and basically do a consensus. You generate the same results like hundreds of times and then you see which ones the model thinks are best. And so it's more expensive. This is what.

Yeah, but he's saying he's throwing 200k GPUs.

Yeah.

So it's working. Yeah.

And if the inference cost comes down, why not do that? Dylan Patel was joking about.

Or why not just do it to.

Prove what you're capable of doing in the future? I want a Roomba that has a thousand PhDs inside of it working to decide what next particle of dust I should pick up.

There you go.

And the inference should be millions of human years calculating where the dog fur is to pick it up. And that's fin. Fine. And I love that. And I think that's very funny that.

Yeah. I want a robot that's looking at the biggest tree in my yard.

Yes.

And just predicting which.

Which leaf will fall.

The leaf to fall next. And just reaching up and grabbing it.

Exactly.

I don't even want it to actually. No. Let it fall until it's like an inch below the ground and catch it like you're an NFL.

Yeah. And yeah. I mean if intelligence is too cheap to meter, why not?

Yeah.

But yeah, I mean, congratulations to the XAI team. It must feel awesome to be at the top of the ELO scores and also taking a bunch of risks on the product side, which we love to see. So good stuff. Always fun to follow the the AI Chatbot arena. They're duking it out and good luck to them. This was Fun from Dan McCormick. Joe Rogan is obsessed with create creatine gummies. Joe Rogan was pitching Magnus Carlson and millions of listeners on creatine and more specifically creatine gummies from Create Surreal. It's a one minute clip.

So Dan, for those that don't know, insane growth marketer. He's also the brother of Paki McCormick and has helped out on not boring quite a bit. He had this idea to build create a creatine gummy brand forever ago. There's something about humans where if you put something in a gummy, they want 10 times more of it. So he identified that I initially, I think he sent me the deck or something like that. And he had this theory that that gummies would be the way that women got into creatine. And I totally didn't believe it because as like a bro science bodybuilder interested type person. Right. I had always associated creatine with putting on mass. But it has all these other benefits. And so I ended up not investing because I just thought the thesis was wrong. Even though Dan's amazing. And then he got it to such a ridiculous run rate in like, like four months. I was like, okay, I was wrong. I'm gonna invest. And, and he's. Since, you know, doing tens and tens of millions of revenue, it's great. Profitable, you know, has done very, very well. So awesome to see.

Yeah, yeah. The, the, the most like, bro, science explanation for why creatine is important that I liked was, you know, it helps you put on water weight. That's what everyone says. It hydrates your muscles. But the, the hot take there is that. That being hydrated is good.

Yeah.

And so, you know, if you have more water in your body overall, in your brain, in your muscles, everywhere, you will just feel better, you'll perform better. And that's like kind of as basic as it gets, which I thought was an interesting, like, distillation. I'm sure there's a lot of scientists that would give you a much more complicated explanation for what's going on, but that, that, that simple explanation was actually kind of stuck in my mind. Anyway, let's move on to some. Oh, we got to ring the size gong before we head out for the day together. AI raises $305 million Series B at a $3.3 billion valuation. Today we're announcing a massive Series B led by General Catalyst. Incredible to see the team belief in open source models and their ability to Mempower choice for AI developers continue to be rewarded. Excited for this next chapter, says Lee Jacobs. So let's ring the size gong.

Size gone. Gotta give some credit to Lee, Justin Cyan. The team at Long Journey, they've been on an absolute terror. They were early in Crusoe. Right. And then they were also super early into Together.

Yeah.

And it only takes a couple companies like that and a fund to, you know, get into the. The carry zone, which is always a goal. So great work.

Another big AI round. More on the model delivery level.

Yeah.

Really betting on open source. Choose your model. Vend it into different enterprises, but excited to see where the product goes and where the team builds with that huge stack of cash.

Well said.

Lots to do.

So the last, the last thing, I mean, we got to. I mean, we're still. We're streaming. We both probably have to go home. But there's two things. One, I wanted to shout out Rob at Huberman Lab. He just sent a bunch of matina to. He sent it into the cage. The Boys are jacked up on Yerba mates.

Great.

And then the second thing. I don't even know if we can pull this up now but 1x just announced a new humanoid robot called literally while we were streaming called the Neo Gamma. And they're saying it's one step closer to home. So they're targeting the home market. Figure seems is building general purpose robots but more oriented around BMW manufacturing. Manufacturing like labor. And I think one other company smart.

Try to horror films I guess.

And these things look still super creepy. Almost like Black Mirror esque.

Yeah.

But I like how they're comparing. They're even almost comparing the product to smeg which is like a sort of classic kitchenware brand.

Cool.

But visuals. The visuals in this are. Are amazing.

Yeah.

And looks friendly for sure. You were. Yeah. I think we're looking forward to a world where we can have one of these walk over and hand us, you know, Yerba Mata. Bottle of dom. I'd love to see a humanoid robot pop a dog bottle.

A bottle of champagne. That's the real test of AGI. Can you savor a bottle of Dom? Effectively.

Can you really savor it?

Saber. Saber. Like use the saber sword to pop off the top. That's the way you open it if you're really, really on it. We got to do that for the Dom episode.

The last thing, the last bit of news before the weekend. Hooters is preparing for bankruptcy. We didn't cover that, but maybe we'll cover it Monday because it's a bigger story.

I don't know how I feel about it. I've never been, so I don't really know.

I've never been. And there's tons of arguments that it's probably a good thing. Even though maybe that same human instinct just moved online.

Seems low class and vulgar.

Sounds vulgar to me, but I'll be sticking to no. Seems like it's the weekend.

Yeah, it's the weekend.

Does it feel like the weekend?

Yeah.

Starts to feel like the weekend.

You'll be hearing from us on Monday. In the meantime, think about leaving us a five star review on Apple podcasts and Spotify. And when you do put an ad for your company or a company you love in the description, we'll read it live on the show.

I didn't know this, but you can comment on Spotify.

Okay.

So feel free to leave an ad.

In there in your comment. Why not?

There's a bunch of.

That pumps us up in the algorithm. We appreciate. Follow us on X. We'll be live streaming over there. Soon.

And we'll be doing a Dom episode next week when Ben gets his wisdom teeth out.

It's fantastic.

Anyways, great week, brothers.

Thank you.

Thanks for watching.

Thanks for listening and watching.

We'll see you Monday.

See you Monday. Bye.