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

33:50That's way better than chat GPT, paragraphs, like all that junk. And so, yeah, obviously if you didn't sell a company for a hundred million dollars, probably going to have a lower conversion rate here, but you can still adopt a lot of this, which I thought was cool. He had another crossover with a good friend of the pod, Theo. Did you see this one? Wait, did I miss the, um, did we miss the, the Ben, the Ben follow-up there? Oh yeah. Really good. Do you know Ben? Ben, another friend of the pod, uh, 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 and AI robotics company building a general.

34:28And 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 uh on the timeline and then we got feo yeah feo's in the game uh crossover the century he says company ideas are worthless execution is king this is from brett adcock uh posting some wisdom on the timeline he says in the limit the pace of technological progress is the only competitive advantage how to stop overthinking strategy and execute like the top one percent he drops a thread uh he's been a bit of a thread boy throughout 2023 2024 yeah but he grind he grinded his his whole account way up and now whenever whenever he posts a new robotics video instant virality and uh i'm sure he had a great great team working on this with him power kyle kasuv says hey john h fia this is your bit and fio says some interesting ideas he's got there because fio was all on the ideas guy train for a while and uh you know he's trying to he's trying to coin it the problem is fio you didn't coin a phrase yeah you didn't really get breakthrough with that concept.

35:34Yeah. 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, with invest like the best. Yeah. 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 uh 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 uh stefan uh steven burkholder says keep us posted in the long term and mateo from eight sleep chimes in and says in the meanwhile check out a thousand reviews about us here and that takes us to our first 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 bad let's go um but we have an update somebody in the chat yesterday was asking jordy was wearing an eight sleep hat can you get an eight sleep hat and yes you can they don't just throw them into every order but if you order with our code and send it to us we'll send us a screenshot of the order.

36:52It's code TBPN, I think. And if you order an 8 sleep, they will send you a hat if you order through our code. So have fun with that. And send us a screenshot. And yeah, what's your sleep score at today? I've been putting up crazy numbers. Crazy numbers? I've been putting up crazy numbers. Let's see what I'm at. I got a 98 last night. 98? I got a 91. My routine was not good. 62%. but I did put up seven hours and 10 minutes. Pretty good. Pretty happy with that. I'm going to, yeah. Quality was 100%. My feeling this week, my average bedtime was 846. My average wake up was 454. You send me texts being like, I'm going to bed for the night at like eight.

37:36It'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. Yeah, I don't. The other thing with the eight sleep is like, to me, the best, like the functionality that I genuinely love the most, because living in Malibu every single night, the temperature drops. Oh, yes. 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.

38:10Oh, 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 a cold Celsius or Alani New. And that takes us to our next story. Banger acquisition. Where's the gong, John? Yeah, we need a bunch of gong hits for the$1 billion hack. I don't know if we bring sides back for that, but it is big. The$40 billion fundraise from Figure. And the$2 billion acquisition from Cine.

38:45Celsius of Alani New. It's Friday. This is a fascinating story. Very few CPG companies get bought for these big of numbers. I've operated in CPG. You'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 Alani New for$1.8 billion. It's in the front page of the Wall Street Journal business section today. So we'll read through a little bit of that. uh celsius to acquire rival maker of energy drinks uh energy drink energy drink maker celsius is paying 1.8 billion to buy rival alani new a brand that has been propelled by social media influencers and pitched itself as a locale fitness aid celsius is expected to pay a combination of cash and stock the company said the deal which includes a net purchase price of 1.65 billion and 150 million in tax assets is Celsius's largest acquisition since it was founded two decades ago.

39:41And I'd love for you to pull up on public.com what is the Celsius stock doing around this acquisition? Because I want to know, what does the market think about this? Celsius had a market value of roughly 6 billion after its shares closed down 2.15 % at 25 bucks a share on Thursday. Overall, energy drink sales have been climbing, but Celsius's growth has slowed over the past year. Celsius was a very, very hot stock i think it was up in like the 20 billion market cap uh and it's since fallen a little bit a little bit of background on alani new yeah so celsius for context is down 36 percent in the last six months yeah so they had that was because the growth was slowing people were thinking oh this is going to dominate he's going to beat red bull and monster it's kind of a new category for the fitness oriented folks the healthier folks yes but they're not really putting a dent this time this time last year they were a 20 billion dollar company yeah they're way down 20 billion, wow.

40:35Yeah. Way down at 6%. Yeah. And it seems that once you get to true scale as an energy drink, they're just fantastic. Fantastic businesses. Totally. Monster's still sitting at$40 billion. Yeah. Red Bulls. Red Bulls. Private but in the tens of billions for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And so Alani Nu was started in 2018 by fitness influencer, Katie Hearn. Monster's getting a 25X, even a multiple. Yeah. And they also bought Bang Energy out of bankruptcy for like 1X sales around a billion dollars. 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.

41:15But 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 love them. I drink Celsius pretty much every show now. And we're big Guayaquil fans. We're big fans of Yerba Mate. Huberman's in the game. He's got a Yerba Mate product that I personally like a lot. And yeah, low calorie, high caffeine, kicks you in the face, gets you out of bed. You're not going to be in your eight sleep all day when you're replacing your blood with Celsius. Anyway, so Alani 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 Rae.

41:58So they got heavy hitters. Celsius markets its sugar-free caffeinated drinks is a healthy alternative to full sugar energy drinks and so does, and claims its products can help burn body fat, which is a claim that you can make if you have more than 100 grams of caffeine. And it's a structure and function claim, not a medical claim. So you're not regulated as a drug, you're regulated as a nutritional supplement at that point. Which is wild. So Drew Fallon had a great breakdown. We'll pull up this little thread he posted. He says, the latest deal in an absolutely scorching hot energy drink market.

42:31Let's break down the deal. Celsius has had an extraordinary run over the last decade, particularly with a huge run up in 2023. However, growth slowed in Q4 2024. Revenues were about the same level as Q2 2023. The stock had been priced to perfection. So it's drawn down about 60 % in the last year. Alani knew was founded. I don't know about perfection if it's down. It was priced for perfection. Like at$20 billion, they were like, yeah, the market was pricing like they're going to beat Red Bull. They're going to beat Monster. It's going to be everywhere. Celsius is the next amazing, perfect thing.

43:06And of course, they couldn't live up to that. And so the stock has since drawn down. So Alani New did around$600 million in sales with$70 million in net income in 2024. Started in 2018. So six years later, they're throwing off$70 million in net income. That's such a narrative violation because so many beverage companies. Yeah. And never get a skate ball. Losing money through acquisition. Oh yeah. Like very, very common for these companies to just lose money, but they have market share and they're eating away at these sort of bigger incumbents and then eventually they get bought. So it's been growing at 50 % since 2022 with 50 % repeat buyers.

43:43Celsius owns 11 % of the energy drink market, almost 12%, but with slowing growth and the recent acquisition of Ghost Lifestyle by KDP, Curd, Dr. Pepper. So Ghost is actually off the market as well. It became clear that they were not going to increase their market share organically. And I don't know if you've seen what Ghost is doing, but they have like Sour Patch Kids partnerships. They have partnerships. There's also G Fuel, which is another independent company at this point, and Rain and NOS and Bang. And it's a crowded market. And so Alani Nu ranked as the fourth energy drink in terms of market share.

44:20Celsius is paying a net value of 1.65 billion. This is 2.8X sales, 26X TTM net income,$70 million, as we said. 20X adjusted EBITDA. Not crazy, but pretty high for CPG. Celsius is publishing 12X fully synergized EBITDA as the purchase multiple here. That is obviously wishfully low. Alani knew 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 newman's community adjusted community so they're basically saying like look we didn't overpay because once we get all the synergies we're going to be making way more so you have to adjust the ebitda now and this is really how you should think about the multiple but sounds like the market didn't love the deal and the stock traded down a couple percent is that right yeah let me pull it up over so honestly it seems like they kind of just added 50 million dollars to ebitda hills here's celsius's reconciliation i'm putting the acquisition well to celsius credit 20x range they're up 45 percent over the past week they're building back yeah so overall the response i don't know when this was posted but um this news broke yesterday kind of yesterday morning yeah and it's I mean, it does still seem, you know, Celsius has 163 million of TTM EBITDA.

45:50Yep. They have a 35X multiple. Monster is at scale with a 25X multiple. Yep. It does feel like they're priced somewhat fairly even at this mark, right? Yeah. And so they had, what, 160 of EBITDA? Is that right? Yeah. Celsius. So they just added 50 to that. So that's a 25 % increase in their EBITDA for a$1.6 billion acquisition at a$5 billion market cap. So it's kind of like a merger. And I'm sure they had a ton of cash on the balance sheet prior. But now they control 16 % of the energy drink market. And we'll give you some background on the long-term tailwinds in energy. The category has been growing really, really quickly.

46:31$90 billion is the global energy drink market. 10 % growing, it's growing at 10 % and is expected to grow 10 % till the end of the decade. Increasing category adoption, incrementality and 37%. And Celsius has that meme factor that Zinn does right now where 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.

47:08He'll throw off your sleep. You're still going to have 100 milligrams of caffeine. Exactly. Yeah, you saw that post. And so sugar-free is gaining in ready-to-drink energy. In 2020, the sugar-free market was 39%. By 2024, it went to 51%. And it makes sense. Why would you want a bunch of sugar in your energy drinks if you're chugging them? A lot of people. Although you've been saying for a while, sugar might be making a comeback. It's probably not going to make a comeback in the form of high fructose corn syrup, but maybe the next wave, I feel like the energy drink market will continue to turn over.

47:41There will continue to be new and trends. That's actually one of the reasons I like these. We drink a lot of Matina from Huberman, but these are just regular agave, organic agave syrup, which I'm cool with. 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. It kind of just depends on your diet and your goals. And so this really provides a platform for Celsius to go after and capture beverage trends in the category. Celsius markets its sugar-free caffeinated drinks as a healthy alternative to full sugar energy drinks and sodas.

48:21Although, of course, Red Bull has a sugar-free. Monster has that zero white one that everyone likes. uh and so uh 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 uh totally and so mad's capital says the juice is back he timed celsius perfectly after hours and is now up bigly after they announced that they're buying alani new uh jonah lupton i got backed in back into celsius after hours at 24 50 once i saw They were buying Alani for 1.65, which is not only accretive, but Alani has a full suite of products from protein shakes to pre-workout and much more.

49:05This is a very smart deal by Celsius. I think the CEO saved his job for now. And so people are excited about that. There's a little bit of hate coming from Trevor Scott. I think this is funny. Celsius acquiring Alani new, which is essentially the new Celsius, 12X post synergies, 19X pre synergies, including tax assets. Q4 results better than expected. Revenue minus 4%. Adjusted EBITDA minus 4%. Celsius up 31%. Declining sales. What do you slap on it? A high growth acquisition. Maybe this isn't such a negative bear take. This is actually like, yeah, he kind of did what he had to do. You stop growing.

49:43Get the thing that's growing. Build the portfolio. Yeah. The challenge here is Celsius seems to resonate broadly with the market. Alani knew with the branding. I don't see 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 Monsters 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. Yeah, Red Bull is more gender neutral. It was a little bit more, yeah, Red Bull Vodka.

50:16And 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 Braavos. Did you see this? Are you familiar with any of these distribution networks? No. Okay. So have you run into them? Yeah. Yeah. I've run into a bunch of these. The ABI network successfully scaled Monster, Bang, Celsius, and Alani knew 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 Kirk Dr.

50:54Pepper uh Pepsi Coke these guys have all these massive distributions and typically at the later stage of a consumer packaged goods uh 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 uh a deal that hey we if it works we're going to buy you. But it can still be very valuable for all the shareholders and everyone can be happy. So this is how the distribution landscape has evolved in chronological order. The ABI network scaled MNST. MNST moved from ABI to the Coke system. Bang transitioned to ABI.

51:28Bang then moved from ABI to the Pepsi system. Then there was this lawsuit with Bang and Pepsi. It was kind of a weird deal. But Celsius joined ABI. Then Bang exited the Pepsi system. That was the lawsuit. celsius moved from abi to pepsi alani new joined the abi network alani new is likely to exit abi for the pepsi system with the upcoming celsius acquisition creating an opening in the abi network once again and so we got to call huberman and get my uh 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 they got, yeah.

52:08And, and, and, and you have to pay, but it really is almost, you can think of it like a value add investor. ABI is Anheuser-Busch InBev. So they have, you know, like everywhere you buy beer, which is just every single store you get, they have trucks with guys that go and deliver beer. Right. And so there's no store in America that says, actually, I don't want Budweiser. Yeah. I'm good. I'm not, you know, they all 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 going to sell you Budweiser.

52:46We're going to give you a good margin on that. You'll be fine. But we want you to test this new thing. Yeah. Take the 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. Uh, so you're going to make good money on the stuff that you move it's not going to move as fast because people don't know alani people don't know celsius yet but eventually uh it's going to scale and look at our track record we did it with bang we did it with celsius we did it with alani new the next thing though when anheuser bush comes to the local store uh 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 uh if you're in beverage you gotta talk to a bi anheuser bush in dev uh anyway if you're interested in uh 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 uh you've seen jordy pull up all the stats on public they have a very cool alpha product that uses ai and chat gpt to pull in extra context they have great charts they have advanced charts simple charts it's a great product.

53:56So 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 because 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 We're going to actually just make this really easy, make it literally take whatever seconds to access that yield.

54:55Well, 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 part of we have Jordi Hayes here former Ferrari owner here to break it down for us uh Jordi I'll read you some of this amazing with my experience that I still love the brand oh yeah you're breaking down constantly and you're like but it's still goaded it's goaded it's amazing they're beautiful they own red like what like what more do you want just like the way that we own green yeah they own red They own red.

55:41So with a list price of$3.7 million, Ferrari's new hypercar was revealed to the public in October with a twist. It wasn't available for sale. All 799 units of the low-slung, high-haunched F80 model, the most expensive production vehicle in Ferrari's history, had already been promised to top customers like Luc Poirier. The Montreal real estate entrepreneur already owns 42 Ferraris. He said he felt lucky to be allowed to buy yet another. To be chosen to buy Ferrari for one of their hypercars is a true milestone for any collector. Money isn't enough to buy a top-of-the-range Ferrari. You need to be in a long-term relationship with the company.

56:16By leveraging the rabid fandom of its customers through the business model based on uber scarcity, the Storietalian 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've talked about I don't think we've talked about this on the show that much.

57:02I know I've talked about it before on X, but Ferrari has this fantastic... business model that's similar to every other luxury brand that you'd be familiar with Hermes Rolex, Patek, all these different companies, they basically make no matter how much money you have in the world, if you want to buy these cars, watches, bags, et cetera, directly from the manufacturer, directly from the brand, you have to play their game. Now, every single brand has a different version of their game. There's plenty. You can look up online forums for every brand and see, 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.

57:46And so Ferrari and Porsche does this as well. Every brand gets knocked for this because people say, I have 300 grand, I should be able to buy the GT3 RS and Porsche. And what people don't realize is they're using these hyper exclusive cars as top of top of funnel marketing for every other car in their portfolio or every other watch or every other bag or every other product that they make right and so in the case of ferrari ferrari you know has been playing this game for a very long time it's been you know the most desirable cars in the world for a very long time they typically are making under a thousand units of their most high profile most desirable cars and these are the cars that are actually investments.

58:32Every other car that they make for the most part depreciates massively, right? Nobody wants a 15-year-old Ferrari that was the entry model, right? These cars end up trading at 30, 40 grand. You can actually pick them up for very little because they're unreliable and they're not, you know, they just weren't. Yeah, like a 360 Modena is fairly accessible, probably still almost 100K. probably around there 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 aroma you probably now would have to get a pura sangue you have to get you know if you just look or 296 yeah and and one of the challenges is that uh owners know you you basically have to have some real stones because nothing is guaranteed in the game.

59:28You 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? You have to be, you can't just be walking in and saying, okay, every three years I lease the base model. No, it's like, come in, I'm customizing it, I'm creating a fleet. I'm a collector. And the steel man of all this is that if it was just a one-click checkout on F-80s, you would have maybe hedge funds coming in and trading them. And they wouldn't actually go to collectors who promote the brand and live the brand.

1:00:06And when you see an F-80 owner, you know that they're also going to have an SF-90, an F-50, an F-40. 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 it was known as like, yeah, Ferraris, they come out and then they just immediately get turned into financial assets. You never see them in the real world. No one ever drives them. They're just thrown in the plastic. They might as well be NFTs. Yeah. And so Ferrari is unique as a manufacturer because if you go to Porsche, Porsche is an example.

1:00:41If you want to buy a GT3 RS, you probably have to buy a couple of Taycans, a couple of Macans, maybe a Cayenne. And the key is you can't just buy them and immediately sell them. You have to buy them, hold them for some amount of time, and then sell them back or trade them into the original dealer that you work with. So your relationship is not actually with the manufacturer. It's with the dealer. And so Ferrari, what's different is not only can 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 necessarily pay market.

1:01:17They're going to give you like kind of dealers often will make you a lowball 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's a history of Ferrari suing their own customers, which is like unheard of. Right. All business, all traditional business advice is don't sue your customers. it just ends up you know this is the opposite of lamborghini right yeah lamborghini is like much more you know kind of like wrap them do whatever you want shoot you know you know there's that guy who got in trouble for like shooting it that was like illegal yeah that wasn't with lamborghini i don't think lamborghini had a problem with it yeah they're like yeah just the law enforcement had an issue with it um and uh you put off-road tires on it maybe we'll just make a production version of that yeah yeah yeah um and so so anyway so ferrari um and uh anyway so ferrari the the the challenge is uh they they there is still if they're making 800 f80s there's still a ton of people out there that are buying lots of romas and purasangues and these other cars that are are not getting access to those and so the challenge now and doug doug de muro has a bunch of good content on this.

1:02:36The 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 grand. And then they're still not getting the call from Ferrari. And Ferrari is picking their favorites, right? Because the SF90 was unlimited production run. So it was still hard to get-ish. At the moment. In 2021, interest rates were low. There's a lot more appetite to buy these crazy cars when you're getting a, you know, 3 % interest rate. And now I listened to a call in on, it was maybe like Dave Ramsey or something, but someone bought an SF90 to kind of flex and they had financed it.

1:03:14And the payment was, I think like 20K a month. And the guy had a business that was like making 20K a month, stopped making so much money. And he was like, it's important to my like brand, my personal brand for this company that I've had a sports car. And so don't want to be in those can't make the 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 bad bad situation let me to be clear, they have an actual list.

1:04:01So, so for, for background, I looked at buying a classic Ferrari dealer in 2020, um, in, at the beginning of last year and spent a lot of time with this business that was based in Europe and, um, and ultimately got to a point where the business that was sitting on so much inventory in the acquisition, you would have to absorb that inventory and the Ferrari market last year was dipping on a lot of their classic models because there's not the same level of demand. So anyways, the whole, like there's an entire Ferrari economy, both the direct, you know, dealer customer, but then also the secondary market, which is, they all play into each other.

1:04:39Yeah. So don't buy a Ferrari, don't buy a Ferrari dealership, buy Ferrari stock. Buy Ferrari stock. Stock is way up. They're trading more than 40 billion higher than Volkswagen, which sold more than 9 million cars last year. Volkswagen's worth around 50 billion, I believe. Most of Europe's auto industry is plagued by a weak domestic market, costly transition to electric vehicles, and new competition in China. The chief executive officer of Ferrari, Bendetto Vigna, said in a recent interview in Marinello, we are not an automotive company, the city in northern Italy where Ferrari is based. We are a luxury company that is also doing cars.

1:05:22And that's the kind of thing that true enthusiasts will cringe and cry over because they just want Ferrari to focus on making the most beautiful, performant, timeless cars. Yes, yes, yes. With driver engagement and manual transmissions and naturally aspirated engines. And Ferrari's definitely moved away from that. And it's a real risk, right? if you're a Porsche enthusiast, you can go get a manual 911T, or the ST or the Turing, or a GT3. They really are. And you can get into the brand at 120, 130K, something like that. And I mean, there's even other entry points with things like the Cayman and the Boxer.

1:06:03So, you know, it's kind of like the baby 911 to get you in 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'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 in a huge resale market is the same deal at Hermes.

1:06:44You need to buy a lot of things before you're invited to buy a Birkin. And they're very, very highly coveted. Customers buy all manner of other Hermes baubles to move up the list. Ferrari's blossoming into a luxury leader has restored the fortunes of founder Enzo Ferrari's son, Piero Ferrari, and Italy's Agnelli family, which took control of the company decades ago through its Fiat brand. In the IPO, both families retain 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.

1:07:20LaFerrari is up at 3.4 million. According to Hagerty, a specialist auto insurer based in Traverse City, when the model was released in 2013, they only made 499 of them. Now, they might've made a few more. That's the thing with Ferrari. You never really know. And then they do special editions and they make a couple more, but still very limited production run. And it was sold before options at 1.4 million. Now it's up at 3.8. So, you know, fantastic ROI. So 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.

1:08:03But now the challenge is they've sold so many of the standard cars to people that were anticipating being able to get into that coveted top customer group that gets access to these cars. And so they're hitting this wall where they've now seen terrible sales on the 12-cylindry car because people are like, I'm not going to spend 700K on this car that's going to have terrible depreciation. And you're not even giving me confidence that I'm ever going to get into that F80. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So last spring, a Houston real estate broker bought one of Ferrari's much hyped Pro Sangue models. That's the SUV.

1:08:40The 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-focused 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? Give us a piece of that and like, we'll call it even.

1:09:14But still, it's like very aggressive with your customers. Anyone with a few hundred K can buy a regular Ferrari as long as they're willing to wait a couple of years. While standard models aren't subject to strictly limited runs, the company still lives by Enzo Ferrari's scarcity dictum. Ferrari will always deliver one less car than the market demands smart limited edition ferraris are even scarcer you can't just walk into your local showroom and buy one these range from special versions of regular models to the design oriented icona series which is your favorite that's the sp1 sp2 sp3 um most exclusive uh most exclusively once in a decade hyper cars like la ferrari and f80 and so a lot of people were also upset about not being able to sp3 allocations and so it's like yes i get it that you do the hyper car the f80 the f50 the la ferrari the enzo every 10 years maybe i'm not on that list but can we do sp3 for me because that's just like a fantastic car and like yeah it's a million dollar seems much more likely to be a an investment car an investment over the f80 even potentially over the f80 interesting in my view it's an odd positioning because it's this new new bucket of hypercars from Ferrari, but it had the same problems where it was like very, very limited run and very difficult to get into.

1:10:30And so frustrated a lot of people that were sitting on SF90s down 400K. Yeah. 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 loft Ferrari on the secondary market and they can go to, you know, they can go to, someone like Sotheby's and get that car. There's actually an anecdote here from John Oto, who bought his first Ferrari in the 1980s after receiving an inheritance. Nice. Nepo.

1:11:05He 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 stretching to get a car, you will likely get smoked by somebody who's just saying, yeah, I'll buy it.

1:11:42Like 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 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 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 a thousand cars right uh they ferrari shipped 13 750 vehicles yep porsche shipped 310 000 cars last year the german sports car maker is too big to keep ferrari style wait lists except for a few models that's the gt3 rs that you mentioned at the extreme smaller supercar brands struggle to deliver as steady a stream of new vehicles as ferrari leading to cash crunches.

1:12:44Aston Martin shares have lost more than 95 % of their value since its 2018 IPO. Bahrain's sovereign wealth funds took full control of McLaren last year after a period of heavy losses. And so McLaren has a similar strategy where they did the F1, the P1, and now the W1. And so in theory, you should be saying, hey, I should get a 720S. I should get a 650. I should be on the McLaren ladder because I'll get up into those super hyper cars. but then they also launched the speed tail and a bunch of other like hyper cars but then they were like it's not the real hyper car the real hyper car is coming it's the w1 it's the f1 it's 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 posts 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 uh 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 um anyway there's a lot of ferrari fans in the tech world uh 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 uh and uh yeah he's been a big fan uh palantir uh friend of the show is uh is also sponsoring ferrari and uh the palantir praying for exit says the palantir ferrari collab goes unreasonably hard look at this read the other sponsors on the ferrari team it's all killers aws shell shell celsius corelli celsius energy drink company Santander and uh hcl software which i don't know that one but uh but very cool so we have some friends that are that are uh in the midst of doing a f1 deal and we cannot wait to share it on the show uh it's one of the best things that you can do if you like going to f1 oh yeah it's just sponsor a team yeah i mean eight sleep did that right i mean they sponsored i mean it's a partnership with Leclerc is fantastic brilliant yeah uh and so David Senra founder's 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 uh 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.

1:15:32And that's exactly what Peter Thiel did in 2005 when he did the gumball. He did the gumball 3000 in a drop-top Ferrari. And you'll love to see it. Doing it in a drop-top is great. It's so cool. A lot of great tech founders and investors have done the gumball. with a sheriff there yeah i don't know who that is but what a great uh historical post what a great uh little little bit of silicon valley lore uh that sheriff is now jd vance let's go to abhishek kumar he says ai automation outsourcing meanwhile ferrari uh 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.

1:16:24This is quite distinct from most car companies. So super, super handmade heritage. Obviously they're using tons of tooling now, but not all about AI automation outsourcing that they're not worried about going to China and reducing cogs a little bit. They have very high margins clearly from the market cap, but you're getting a different product. You're getting something that's closer to a hand-built, coach-built vehicle. But we've been comparing the car market to the watch market for a long time throughout this entire piece. And so we wanted to tell you about Bezel. You can shop over 22 ,500 luxury watches on Bezel.

1:17:01They'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 on 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.

1:17:32For us Irishmen. 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 dial. So it goes Roman numeral one, two, three. And then instead of the four being the IV, it's just four eyes, which isn't how you represent the number four in Roman numerals, but it creates more visual balance with the eight on the other side of the dial. And so I thought it was a really cool little subtle design touch. And there's a bunch of those in the Cartier tank. So if you're looking to pick up a dress watch, I think the Cartier Tank is a fantastic choice.

1:18:14So 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 HPS,$4 billion. Lawrence Galoub at Galoub 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 billionaire. I love how the two brothers have like, you know, they're clearly 50-50 partners.

1:18:55One's ranked before the other ones, but clearly 50-50 partners. Yeah, it's great. You love to see it. And so Bloomberg has a deep dive on private credit. We're going to take you through. We'll break it all down. It says, Wall Street's new money is shaking up the ranks of the super wealthy. With over$61 billion, the private credit titans made their fortunes in a once obscure corner of finance. 20 years ago, swaggering hedge fund managers leveraged buyout. Kings and corporate raiders would have dominated any list of masters of the Wall Street universe. Today, another corner of finance has become a billionaire factory.

1:19:28We love billionaire factories. The decidedly less - Billionaire factories. It's great. We should be making more of those. Y Combinator, rebrand your tagline. We're a billionaire factory. Founders Fund, the billionaire factory. The decidedly less glamorous business of making loans directly to companies, often small and medium-sized ones, the kinds that are 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.

1:20:04Making private loans is lucrative thanks to higher yields and the potential for fund managers to earn a share of gains on top of steep fees. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index calculated the fortunes of 18 beneficiaries of the private credit boom. Together, these individuals who work at seven different companies are worth$61 billion. Only one Aries management corps, Tony Ressler, ranks near the top of finance. As a group, they'd clock in above a single financier blackstone inc co-founder steve schwarzman but that's like you know so lots of 18 billionaires from this boom and this is uh this is fascinating i have a buddy who's uh 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 uh and i remember learning about as a kid and being like oh so he does finance it's cool and i had no idea like what that actually meant and now it's interesting there's not a there's really not a venture capital firm that i can think of that has looking at areas one two three four there's four a bunch of apollo a bunch of blue owl uh some vc firms have minted this uh it's a little bit tricky but uh i mean but it's over insight will probably do this just on fees i think there is a 20 billion dollar fund right so sure but that's not four partners each being worth yeah 3.3 billion yeah or 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 founders fund now if you count the new and newly minted you know people like trey i'm sure getting up there a couple but i mean even that's weird because it's like, yeah, Trey is, you know, and a real co-founder.

1:21:55It's a little, it's like, where did he really make the money? But yeah, it is fascinating. It almost doesn't count. Yeah. And you're not throwing around 1.6 trillion dollars at FF, but it's a fascinating story. So to be sure, some of these finance executives have labored for decades out of the limelight, laying the groundwork for their bonanzas. In terms of demographics, they're not a diverse bunch. They're all men, but two are in their 50s and 60s. 13 attended Ivy League schools, only five public universities, and many share one traditional Wall Street pedigree. They cut their teeth during the 1980s rise of junk bonds before the 1990 collapse.

1:22:33They've broken some knees before. Yep, before the collapse of Michael Milken's Drexel Burnham Lambert, which of course was the junk bond fund that figured out how to put leveraged debt into all these private equity buyouts and kind of laid the groundwork for the private equity boom that we saw in the 90s and the 80s. These credit mavens then created their own leveraged buyout houses, most notably Apollo Global Management, which are now shifting most of their money toward private credit and other lending and catapulting those who specialized in that field to the top of the list. We singled out companies where we could determine that most of their business comes from private credit.

1:23:09That eliminated Blackstone, Brookfield, KKR, and some others who have private credit arms, but are not private credit shops primarily. Our tally, which reflects valuations as of January 28th, also doesn't include executives who no longer have current roles at companies. So there's probably more guys with billions tucked away from this boom. And so we should do a deep dive on all of these. They're fascinating, but Aries is probably the biggest here, founded 28 years ago. So yeah, I mean, I guess my buddy's dad was there on the founding team. It's crazy because like, yeah, he was there super early.

1:23:40It may be the OG of private credit, but the sector's boom has made it seem like the new, new thing. The value of its publicly traded stock has almost tripled since the start of 2022, raising Aries market value to more than 60 billion. That performance helped cement four senior executives membership in the multi-billion dollar club. Aries tied with the newcomer Blue Owl Capital for the most private credit billionaires on our list. Aries founders are among those whose Wall Street careers date back to Milken's Drexel. uh 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 vale resorts and uh and installed an apollo guy to run it for two decades he went on a generational run generational run having a bit of a problem this ski season with long lines and labor strikes but still interesting to see where Apollo Aries and the other financial titans have their fingers and what pies they're operating in I love the name the like the founders of Apollo they chose to name their firm after a powerful figure in Greek mythology Aries the god of war Rosenthal a leverage finance specialist at Merrill Lynch signed on a year later he's currently the chairman of private equity over the next few years.

1:25:02Kaplan, another former Apollonian and Argetti 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 Samsung, 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 and venture debt, specifically within the world of these 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.

1:25:49So when Apple goes to the public markets, they have a trillion dollar stock. They can issue debt. I think their debt might even trade easy. It might be cheaper than the government of the United States because they're so reliable and they have so much cash on the balance sheet. Exactly. So it's a very stable business. So they just go and they issue debt bonds. Yeah. But what if you're Red Bull, you're private, or what if you're a single digit billion dollar company? You're very stable, but you're not public or you're, you know, not ready to go and issue corporate bonds to on Wall Street. Well, you call one of these guys.

1:26:22And in Silicon Valley, there has been a little bit of a boom with venture debt, where a company that needs more money, more juice, will go raise$20 million Series A, and then they'll throw a$10 million venture debt line on top of it. And this makes sense. Credit is all over startups. I mean, literally using Ramp, not to switch into an ad read, but using Ramp is a form of credit. Like you're getting a credit card, you get 30 days on that. And that can literally help you with your working capital because you're buying meta ads on your ramp card and then you pay it back at the end of the day and 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 uh 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 yep uh and you start oh yeah we're paying essentially a mortgage on our on our house we're paying a mortgage on our uh on our machine um yep and then as a business starts at scaling like Celsius, Alani New, which we mentioned, they might have a working capital problem because they need to pay upfront for millions of cans of this stuff.

1:27:26And then it's gonna 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 gonna get a working capital problem. And very quickly they can be like, well, we're a billion dollar company, but we have$500 million of inventory on our balance sheet now because that's grown. What should you do about that? Well, you need an inventory line of credit. And so private credit is another way to finance your business without dilution. And the venture side, that makes sense. Yeah, and within private credit, there's so many different subcategories of inventory, financing, venture debt.

1:27:59Yeah, tons of different usages. But there's a question that we were talking about earlier, which is if the structure of building a business is changed with the dawn of AI, does that change the financing? And almost certainly it does. And so historically, venture capital - Yeah, and this goes back to yesterday. We talked about bootstrapping or - Boot scaling. Boot scaling. Boot scaling, yeah. Where a founder might want to raise two, three million bucks out the gates and then can get to 50 plus million dollars of revenue just off of that alone. Yeah, and so historically, venture capital has been fantastic for financing R &D spend.

1:28:35Yeah. So you raise some venture capital and then you hire a bunch of software engineers. And this is because private credit will not give you money to fund - Software engineers. Software engineering. No way. because you built the product. How are you going to pay the bill? Like when you move into a house with a mortgage, you get a bill on month one. Hey, pay us a couple thousand bucks. Even if it's an interest only loan, like, yeah, we gave you a million dollars for your mortgage. You better pay us 5K or 8K or whatever the rate is. And so that doesn't work to fund R &D, but venture capital is perfect for that.

1:29:06Hey, hire a bunch of PhDs, hire a bunch of software engineers, build the next Google. When it works off, when it works out, we're going to take a slice of the business. We're going to be fantastically wealthy and we're going to be able to underwrite this. Now, what happens if you only need$10 million a seed round to get off the ground or even less? And then once you start scaling, you're at$100 million of ARR with a 30-person team. Now you're in distribution territory. Do you need to fund that with equity financing? Maybe, maybe not. if it's just a matter of buying ads and then reaping the LTV very quickly and it's extremely predictable, you know that the value of a cursor customer is a thousand bucks over two years and it costs you 200 bucks to acquire them.

1:29:50Well, you have to pay that 200 bucks up front and you're not going to get the thousand bucks for two years. So there is a working capital issue. You do have to finance that somehow. You have to bridge that. You can 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 debt increase or decrease? And I think there's potentially an argument for it increasing. I don't know. What's your deal? I mean, I think the challenge is cursor. If they're saying, hey, we can do a five, we can raise$100 million at$2 billion and do a 5 % dilution round.

1:30:29We 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, 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 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.

1:31:05Yeah. Maybe you have a guy on your board who's going to be like, we got to get it together, but you still could have board control. You could have super voting. You're not going to lose your company. But if that a hundred million is in debt and you miss a payment, there's going to be a debt covenant in there where they take over the whole company. And this happened with Bench, right? Where they shut down super quickly because they tripped some covenants and they were, and so the, the, the generalized knowledge within venture has always been avoid venture debt because it's amazing when things go perfectly.

1:31:33But if you have some bump in the road, which a lot of companies do, you can be in a really bad position and lose your entire company. Yeah. And it's not going to be a 3 % line. Like for any sort of venture debt, you're looking at 10%. The other challenge here as to why we haven't maybe seen more private credit or venture debt become more popular is that Stripe's internal financing products are pretty good, right? If you're doing a lot of revenue on Stripe or even a small amount revenue they will start offering you debt financing uh you know which is you know they're competing working capital uh shopify has debt products there's a bunch of other companies within uh e-com 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 up front that sort of worked in a super low rate environment and then when rates ramped up they were no longer able to do that but i think if you look at pipe now which is apparently pipe is doing well so now they're building now they're doing embedded finance products so i imagine they would go to somebody like a shopify and say let us run your your uh debt financing um and so they work with uh companies like boulevard which i believe is a um toast for uh toast for barbershops so like they would be able to say hey boulevard offer your end customers um and and so pipe is in some ways competing with private credit firms that might have originally gone to boulevard and say we'll give you a hundred dollars a hundred million dollars 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 private like talking to the apollos and the area and like the goldmans like a lot of a lot of these fintech companies when they start offering credit products they they get that underwritten by a big investment bank essentially and so uh this whole like private credit boom became a big meme and i wanted to take you through some of the memes from uh the last few years high yield harry has the four-step plan for my 50 million dollar credit credit fund rich parents go to nyu step three bro down uh to how to start a private credit fund 2020 uh 20 years of credit experience that's what we saw with the aries guys the apollo guys uh but in 2025 uh this guy was 28 years old he had a 6.3 billion dollar family fortune and he uh stepped out and raised a 50 million dollar fund which seems low based on his you know family fortune yeah but maybe he's trying to get some get some a track record going yeah it's good he's just gonna be able to get yield on on on his family's i love it yeah net cap girl has a little meme here bro hear me out i I really feel like we should start a fund together.

1:34:13Are 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 was back in 2023 and people were definitely memeing it. 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.

1:34:49There's a lot of funds. Banks can do it. There's so many ways to get access to capital that I'm sure there will eventually be too many funds. The returns will drop and then people will sort of fade out, right? Just like any category. 100%. And so if you want to go deeper on this story, Nicole 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. listening to my conversation with dear friend and total killer Carrie Findley covering going straight to Wall Street out of college, joining Third Point at 25 and an epic eight-year run, securing a$200 million investment from Peter for Fund One and Private Credit 101.

1:35:33So 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 uh on a vacation yeah and you wonder we got to figure out more what to cora is doing i imagine they're doing a lot of stuff around so they're to cora specifically focus on asset-based private credit sure so this could easily be hey you want to buy 20 000 gps we are we're going to buy them and you know we're going to finance those for you so yeah so you build a model you make sure that the rates are correct you're underwriting appropriately and if it works out, you make a bunch of money.

1:36:14It's pretty simple. Beautiful. But obviously, you got to do the deals. You got to make sure you don't get taken advantage of. You got to make sure you don't get defrauded. Do your due diligence and make sure the deal is good. But we don't have a great transition, but we want to talk about Wander, our sponsor. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service it's a vacation home but better and wander has a post today travel can be a time machine i wanted to show you this what do you think of this spot jordy uh i think it's pretty pretty beautiful i mean 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 looking at this like we should go yeah take the families here but great they uh it was really cool nice and circular there's so many place i've so lush too you think of is this in joshua tree you said no palm springs you think you can see it's sort of nestled in the mountains awesome highly fantastic there's nothing better than a like a true mid-century that's been rehabilitated and modernized and yeah um yeah it has kind of like a madman vibe there's that whole sequence where he goes out to palm springs and stuff it's not the best yeah it's the best so there's a little bit like 50s but you get the amenities of a modern place.

1:37:34I used to not understand the allure of Palm Springs because I grew up in California, like generally on the coast. Like why do people drive into the desert? But then going to Palm Springs, like there's something, there's magic in the 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. Go Rogan. There's something, something in the air there. It's just so relaxing. Do the research ourselves. Get out there, stay in this wander. Yeah, we're going to have John Andrew, CEO of Wanderon, at some point in the near future because we're rolling out the ability to have guests on the show.

1:38:09They're going to be right in the middle between us. It's going to be great. Put them in the truth zone and have a little fun. Well, let's move on to the timeline. Pavel Asparuhov says, none of the big AI labs have the mandate of heaven anymore. Elon lost it with his absent father stuff. the biggest signal of an AI winter more so than any evals or anything interesting take fascinating to see uh that yeah I mean the AI winter thing is interesting because I have felt that post chat GPT I felt like chat GPT or when GPT4 launched it was like okay we crossed the uh we crossed the touring test you can talk to the computer now this is incredible but then Then I was looking at what happened in AI in 2024 and almost nothing major happened.

1:39:01Because 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 money was flowing 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 yeah yeah i mean those people definitely don't have the mandate of heaven they're they're they're mandate of hell potentially um but uh yeah yeah it's been it's been just chaos on the timeline with all the ai labs like anthropics kind of just like quietly off in the corner there's new ones there's interesting ones I just want great products.

1:39:49I 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. Grok is running. I have a breaking news from Ben Heilig. Okay, let's break it down.

1:40:05Grok is so integrated into X. People have been using it and then sharing the results. And so Ben asked Grok, if one person alive today in the United States deserve the death penalty, who would that be you must respond with only a single person one word from donald trump uh or sorry one word from grok or one name from grok is donald trump really donald trump is saying that okay 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 um and there's a guy igor from xai saying really strange and bad failure of the model we will fix this immediately.

1:40:43Yeah. Okay. Let me break it down. So as we'd mentioned on a previous episode, Grok3, 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 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 yeah yeah but i mean it seems pretty naive because when i asked it to tell a joke it literally just pulled my last 10 tweets and tried to shove those into the joke and so what i think is happening is literally they have the model and before they prompt it they say hi uh you're a helpful and friendly assistant like the standard system prompt but then they also say the person you're talking to sent these last 10 tweets here's the text yeah 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 uh one uh 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 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.

1:42:34And 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. And so everyone would love to go to Wikipedia that says, what's the best company? Oh, it's your company. Who's the best looking guy? Mirror, mirror on the wall who's the fairest of them all it's you that's the eye we're building the interesting thing is to test this so ben hilak notoriously went uh viral for claiming that he did the jaguar rebrand i just asked grok who did the jaguar rebrand and it actually got it right uh it talks about it was led by the internal team including gary mcgovern and rod and glover and blah blah of course it was all done internally they they didn't credit any external agencies so i can't get it right even though my timeline you would think that ben highlight i don't think you've i don't think you've posted about that recently but i bet if you went and posted about it like congrats to ben hilac for doing the jaguar rebrand uh here's the breakdown of ben hilac doing the jaguar rebrand you post about it five times i bet it'll tell you totally did it uh and so it's very interesting it's a very weird outcome from a product perspective i was talking to one of the xai guys about this being like i don't know if i like this but i'm i like that you're trying something weird like this, which is highly personalized AI, that might be a great product decision.

1:43:55It might be sad. It might have negative consequences in the same way that you go on TikTok and one kid gets gaming content. The other person gets content that's very negative and is like, you're not pretty enough. That was a big problem with young teens on Instagram seeing anorexia content, for example. And they're not showing that to everyone, but some people would get trapped in these little filter bubbles. And so it's odd. We should almost have expected it that AI would eventually deliver that because it's purely optimizing for retention, just like everything else. It's just a retention engine.

1:44:29And 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. And so if they ask who's getting the death penalty and it thinks you don't like Donald Trump, it's going to say Donald Trump. And if somebody who loves Donald Trump goes in there, it's going to be Kamala Harris or whatever you know and that's just and that will lead to product satisfaction lower churn higher revenue and so that's the economic model uh 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 yeah 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 uh mike slay over at uh 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 in washington dc uh his co-founder q bead an intense selection process and now this has the makings of the most eye-opening day ever for early stage defense tech uh mike is an absolute beast uh he worked on the re-industrialized conference they're doing demo day in uh in washington dc they're going to live stream it all and a ton of companies i mean look at this uh hadrian neros epirus open x we know all these companies radian open ai applied intuition machina labs like robotics acs is on here nice galvanic yeah galvanic uh zero mark zero mark makes the the guns right yeah they make uh like auto auto aim basically for for uh guns uh and so uh 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 yeah and speaking of neuros we also have some breaking news neuros uh just announced that they want a contract to send 6 000 american-made drones to ukraine fantastic is as of this morning uh they just announced it so incredible progress there well congrats to sorin fantastic nominative determinism his name's Soren and he's a drone pilot Soren over the Ukrainian highlands into a Russian tank yep uh we gotta 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 uh he takes me out demos it pulls out the FPV thing and I'm like okay yeah he's gonna fly a drone I've flown a drone no i have not flown a drone i have used a camera drone from dji and had it hover and take a cool like like you know scene view this guy is zooming around a tree as fast as i could possibly see it he's like takes off goes all the way around will fly it around himself like it's the most insane video uh it's fantastic that's amazing uh he's he's really really talented and And it makes for an incredible investment pitch.

1:47:23You bring a VC. Yeah, it's a good pitch. This is better than some SaaS. Well, yeah, 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 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.

1:48:01They need to refocus their engineering genius on helping America to defend Western values by developing weapons to kill our enemies before our enemies develop weapons to kill us. That's such a crazy quote. I love it. If a US Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it, the authors write. and the same goes for software. And so obviously in the military, the 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, it's so much paperwork. I talked to a guy I went to high school with who did a tour on a submarine.

1:48:35And I was like, what was that like? And he was just like, it's a lot of paperwork. And he's literally, when he says paperwork, he doesn't mean like SaaS products. He means literally writing things down on paper because that's how a lot of this stuff is still done. And Palantir obviously builds software to make things more efficient. There's another quote here from Peter Thiel. It says, the company thrives on its bad boy energy. I'd rather be seen as evil than incompetent, Peter Thiel once said. What a great quote. And that's absolutely true. Better to have a little bit of negative press and a little bit of haters than another 9-11, for example.

1:49:11Whether or not Americans can agree on how and why to defend the country. Karp and Zemiska 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. Karp, 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.

1:49:44And the audio book 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. Pop a carp. Oh, yeah. Go repost that. We posted it on X. It's doing quite well. It's a lot of fun. We're doing more of these vibe reels, trying to liven up the timeline. Let's move on to society. Society says, no one does anything. No one does anything. So with just a little bit of effort, you can automatically join the top 20 % of any activity or pursuit. I wrote an article linked below on how a few people even start as well, on how few people even start as well as some ways to enable extraordinary outcomes with marginally more effort.

1:50:24He calls it the dead planet theory. Good Coogan's law. I like the coinage. Interesting. Everyone loves to talk about dead internet theory, but less often discussed is how few people do things in any venue or on any platform. This phenomenon is known by several names, including the power law, the Pareto principle, the 80-20 rule. One example of this phenomenon is that 10 % of Twitter users account for 92 % of tweets. This dynamic can be seen in interpersonal relationships, hobbies, and careers. You can use this to quickly rise to the top or purely get a little more enjoyment out of the things you do day to day.

1:50:58In 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 serious. 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 dorkash david senra david senra acquired fm yeah acquired and then that's kind of it and a lot of people have side projects but they're not going full send on it yeah 100 uh patrick has honestly calls this uh 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 uh 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 yeah 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?

1:52:26Yeah. 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 reminder to just do things. Yeah, and it goes to the inputs and outputs thing. Like people focus on like, I wanna have a top podcast, but the input is just how much are you podcasting? How much time are you putting into that? Oh, I wanna be in shape. well are you working out as much as the people that are in shape yeah just do the thing and you will have the result uh yeah and that's that fitness is such a good example where the the guy on the beach that looks great guy or the girl whatever yeah 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 yep and even if they're not putting in an effort of oh i'm making sure i'm having the perfect workout or perfect macros, just the nature of that, uh, you know, uh, 10 % of people at, at the beach account for 92 % of the workouts.

1:53:30There's 10 % of people look, uh, fantastic and are sort of envied, even though they're not having to put in that ridiculous amount of energy. They're just, they're putting in a little effort consistently. Yeah. I love it. Uh, well, let's go back to the car market. We talked about Ferrari earlier. Now we're talking about Jeep, Jeep owners are being hit with pop-up ads inside their cars and it's all part of Stellantis's plan to make an extra 20 billion dollars a year and PNORM has a great take on this pregnant wife is having contractions get in my Jeep to drive to the hospital forced to fill out a complimentary 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 a black mirror and yeah it is it is weird because it makes sense to monetize things that are you know put ads in things that are imagine being at the dealer entertainment imagine there's there to me there's nothing worse than paying for a product and still getting ads yep like i 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 i logged in yeah to watch white lotus last sunday and i'm like why am i getting an ad i I pay for this product.

1:54:46And it's one thing if you're a sub stack and it's like an industry sub stack and you're paying for this like amazing investment of time into this like thoughtful analysis and they have 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 saying, do you want the ad free model of this Jeep? Or do you want, are you okay with ads? And they're saying, oh, it's$1 ,000 difference. I'll just take the ads. And then, yeah, you're turning on your AC and you're getting a pop-up. I can't imagine the, you know, 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 - Seen a billboard.

1:55:32Seen an ad quick billboard. Yeah. Yeah. Jeep. Hey, maybe just buy some billboards and then put them on ad quick and that's your solution. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would rather, I'd rather see my ads outside of the vehicle. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And this is coming from guys that love ads more. Yeah, we do love ads. But again, the whole point of going with the ad model was that we weren't going to make people pay for the content. So it was like, we 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.

1:56:08this, like you go on Instagram, you're expecting ads and Facebook has always been Senator, we sell ads. And if all of a sudden it was like you pay and you get ads, it gets very tricky. X was in a little bit of that scenario for a while where you paid and then there were still ads and it was kind of, but now, now I can pay and I don't see any ads. And it's fantastic. And of course, if you want to use it for free, you still can. which is great. 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.

1:56:45A little bit of wisdom from venture capitalists. Trung responds. Hi, my name is Trung. Yes. He wants to merge in. Trung 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 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.

1:57:27If you haven't been building these relationships for a very long time. Yeah, it's going to be a fire sale. Exactly. as opposed to hey actually 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 uh but uh 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 yep 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.

1:58:26I love that he's going direct. I love that he's giving it to the fans. He says, who should we pick as the next Bond? And so Alex here chimes in with some interesting ideas. I wanna hear your take on this. The formula to revive classic Bond is simple. Cast Henry Cavill, obviously. Make it a 60s slash 70s period piece. That's interesting. Go back in time. I like that. Film is 100 % practical effects. That's completely impossible now. don't think you CGI for everything. But yes, you don't want it to mean like a Marvel movie, but you're obviously gonna be using set extensions and CGI for like little things here and there.

1:59:01But 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. uh i grew up on that uh xenia autotop uh from goldeneye i don't know what was the first movie probably wasn't born yet goldeneye uh score uh the uh source the score exclusively from goldeneye 64 that's pretty funny allow cavill to be a more ruthless male chauvinist like get him like uh like really let him get in his connery bag it's interesting because like uh cavill is like a gamer he's not like this like hardcore like hyper masculine guy could be a gunslinger though but But I do think that if you go back to the old Bond films, they were satires.

1:59:57And people don't remember this, but what killed Bond was Austin Powers. Are you familiar with this? Do you know Austin Powers? I didn't know there was a - So the early Bond films were deliberately over the top and they were supposed to be funny. They were supposed to be making fun of more serious spy movies. And so in the movies, you'd be watching and Bond would sleep with a woman in the opening, get out of bed and be like okay i gotta go to a job then he'd sleep with another woman in the in the act two and then he'd wind up leaving the exploding fortress with another girl and he was like that's a lot of guys over the top this is over the top and there were a lot of things where 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 uh with a over the top picture of blake pmf or die player uh from an old bond line the distance between insanity and genius is only measured by success exactly there's so many great lines and there's forums dedicated just like what's the best james bond villain line exactly and so we think of that as funny now because we're like oh it's so funny in 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 uh they had sense of humor as well uh and so yeah it's interesting there's so much you can imagine a bond movie if they took generally this approach yep coming in and being the first like meaningful blockbuster outside of dune where we are texting our absolute boys saying let's go 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 uh but yeah i mean a lot of no i'm just saying it got it got it's okay 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 uh 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 wall street journal here again front page of the finance business and finance section amazon mgm studios to steer bond franchise the broccoli family feud with amazon mgm studios over the james bond franchise appears to have reached a resolution barbara 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.

2:02:42The venture will house the franchise's intellectual property rights. Amazon will now control who will play Bond, who will write the next script, and when the film goes into production, three critical pieces that so far have been held up by a years-long stalemate. And that's why we haven't seen a new Bond film in a while. I would, random, but I would love to understand how the deals work between the James Bond franchise and Aston Martin. Oh yeah. 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 because it's such important marketing for Aston Martin.

2:03:17And it's the same thing with Omega. So in the original books, James Bond wore a Rolex, but then Omega came in and did the deal for product placement. And so the Bond watch for the last like 40 years has been Omega. And so they continue to invest in that relationship because even though they have to pay every single time it drives sales and so it just it just works out and so it's probably why mark andreessen bought his omega many people think of him as the james bond adventure capital for sure uh who do you pick as the next bond jeff bezos asked amazon and brocoli 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 brocoli family retained their power to decide when a new Bond movie could go into production.

2:04:03The family didn't trust the data-minded Amazon with its character, and the parties couldn't agree to a path forward for a new film, the Wall Street Journal previously reported. The impasse meant the franchise hasn't moved any closer to its next installment. No Time to Die debuted in 2021. The franchise typically released a film every year or two, starting with Dr. No in 1962. There were rarely long gaps in between installments. We're honored to continue this treasured heritage and look forward to ushering in the next. So 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.

2:04:39Daniel Craig was a Shakespeare actor before Bond. And he had been in Layer Cake, but that was very like cult classic. 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 about him in a few different things. I'd like to see John Feo cast as the next James Bond. You know, the cool bachelor with the Ferrari. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get him an Aston. Yeah. You know, 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?

2:05:19Ramp. Absolutely. Go to ramp.com. Time is money. Say both. easy to use corporate cards bill payments accounting and a whole lot more all in one place maybe that will be good so you know everybody that's listened to this more than one episode of the show knows that we're trying to make the show better every single day and i've been trying to think about why is the show better today and it's because you're just nailing the ad intros thank you so we're not focused as much on the content today as much as i think the content no no no i'm just saying but sometimes you gotta i gotta i gotta recognize you're thank you nailing the transition.

2:05:51I appreciate that. And we have another post here from the ramp official X account, a 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 uh you logged into ramp and you said how do we spend and then we just looked through and we could see exactly how it's all spent it's great yeah it's all watches and cars and yeah the usual jets but that's why we do this add quick billboards exactly uh let's move on to some interesting stuff going on in China.

2:06:47The Chinese M1 money supply. I was waiting to see something like this because Chinese stocks are ripping and bias analysts are saying, oh, the Chinese on, and you got the GameStop guy going long into Alibaba. So yeah, apparent when you massively increase your money supply, equities rip. And so I wanted to know, this is obviously very controversial because a lot of people are china haters a lot of people have bags in chinese companies and so it's hard to get an exclusive or an uh an unbiased view so i asked grok 3 to summarize it we'll see how they did uh here are 10 bullet points explaining uh what's going on in china they boosted their money their money supply uh the cut they cut the reserves they cut interest rates by 50 basis points and they released 142 billion dollars to stimulate lending and growth the gdp growth has been pretty good 5 % last year.

2:07:43This met the government's target, but relied heavily on stimulus and exports. And so there's still a little bit of fragility in the economy. Now they have a property crisis going on. New housing starts fell 23 % in 2024 with home prices down 30 % since 2021. That's rough. 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 the chinese stock market is not as accessible as it is in the u.s the government wants has historically want like like a housing has been seen as the safe most best place to park dollars and they're obsessed with 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, as a home, as a new home.

2:08:37And 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 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 six trillion over the last three years. Woof. Consumer spending remains low. Retail is sluggish. We've seen this in the Apple data, but we've seen it in all of it.

2:09:13No, if you look at Caring Group sales is down 30%. Do they own Hermes? Is that right? They own Gucci. Gucci. Okay. Yeah. And so, yeah, at the top of the higher income Chinese populace, they're certainly saving more money. There's also deflation risk going on. The Bank of China is trying to inject liquidity, but credit growth is still slow. There's a population decline. I didn't realize this, but the population shrank by 1.3 million last year. That's the official numbers, which nobody actually trusts. People don't know. The other thing 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 it becomes harder you know they're sort of as much as any sitting White House wants to make the economy great.

2:10:19CCP, 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, whether that's brain rot TikTok or drugs or whatever else. There will be a revolution unless there is something that appeases the populace and makes them think, I'm happy. I'm living a good life. And so, yes, you're right. There's a lot of mixed signals here. Official data highlights growth, but independent analyses emphasize structural issues like overcapacity and weak demand.

2:10:59And some forecasts now predict that China could grow, the growth could drop to 3 % annually in the medium term. And then they're growing in line with the US. Everyone was expecting 10 % forever. they're going to destroy the America, but it's unclear how much they can prop this up. The government is just tying it back to 1.4 trillion fiscal package over five years to prop up the economy. And so you can only do that for so long. Yeah. And so this is an article in Fortune in October 17th, 2024, their Swiss watch exports fell off a cliff because the Chinese demand had dried up so and it's not anytime yeah any you know it's it's you could you could argue uh that like just looking at luxury goods demand is just a sign as you know they're they're not they're their status oriented purchases those are some of the first to kind of stop yep when um and they do have not as great china does have a a mechanical watch brand natively but that's not what's killing patek sales in China.

2:12:02Yeah. Yeah. It's just lack of surplus or if you have, if you had 20 apartments somewhere and you've thought you were doing great and then they're all down 30 % and you still have, you know, the, the thing, the thing about a home, if somebody purchases a house, puts down 20 % and then the value of it declines 30 % is terrible, you know, spot to be in. Well, I thought that was a pretty good analysis by Grok. I like those facts. I like that it boil it down that that easily that actually works and the thing with the thing with china and these chinese uh 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 you know it's difficult to get the numbers right but over and over and over chinese companies have lied yeah especially when speaking uh 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?

2:13:09Like we are guilty of that as well. You see this in jobs reports where, oh, jobs, you know, like, you know, their employment is, is unemployment is down, but it's actually like a bunch of door dash workers. Or people dropping out of the labor force entirely, not even applying jobs. Yeah. And like not a good signal for your long-term health in your economy. Well, I like that. Gabby Goldberg is also liking Grok 3. She says, Grok 3 is very, very good. Lots of people sharing this sentiment, especially on Axe. People are enjoying it. I think what you hit on earlier in the show is that it's a very differentiated product by almost having some memory of what you're interested in, right?

2:13:48And some idea of the ideas, the people, the companies, you know, brands, et cetera, that are relevant to you and the stories that are relevant to you. Like if you talk to Claude, it's not going to surface that you talked about F1 last week. Yeah. Right. And also the easy entry 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 I've clicked this to start my interaction and said, hey, Grok, I want to go deeper here. Give me the data. Pull it all together.

2:14:23And 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 iMessage back and forth. Hey, is this Timothy from Clever? Hi, Matt. Yes, it is. Cold call me again and I'll ruin your entire quarter. 100K likes. People are getting sick. You got to be good if you're an SDR. this had a yeah 100k likes crazy it hits uh people are sending phone calls i try to be really kind to sales people 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 uh 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 you but be nice to salespeople and it'll come back around.

2:15:17Yeah, 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 DN. No, I don't have it anymore. But I used to have a shortcut where if I got a cold email from someone who's clearly just added me to some list and they were gonna clearly email me like 10 times to try and solve something I didn't want. Instead of saying like, hey, cold call me again. I'll ruin your whole quarter. 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.

2:15:48We'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. But it was like nicely worded. It was like, good luck with your business. Like, but I don't want any, I don't want any inbound from you at all. And it was worded in a way that was like, it was firm, but not mean. And I think I danced it correctly. and it really did help clean up my inbox. So I wasn't getting as much cold inbound, 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.

2:16:25By the way, you're all keeping your jobs and GDP growth will continue ticking up in the one 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. 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.

2:17:02And Trey chimes in to clear up the confusion. Trey Stevens over at Founders Fund and Anderl says, I've worked in the SF Presidio for the last 11 years. It is an amazing refuge from the insanity of SF city governance, because if you don't know, the Presidio is federal land. And so it's not subject to the SF city governments, even though it's like directly in San Francisco. He says all this freak out about the Presidio being eviscerated SF Chronicle or abolished to the SF standard is completely unhinged. The Presidio is revenue generating and completely self-sustaining. The executive order is aiming to cut waste in non-statutory spending, a good thing, which shouldn't impact an efficiently run organization funded by its own revenue so if you're in the presidio you pay and that revenue goes towards the services that are provided in the presidio it's kept very clean he says everyone relax also we should take the profits from the trust and build a new colossus statue on alcatraz which i love uh yeah the statue of liberty on the east coast the statue of justice on the west coast reopen alcatraz uh i think it's a great idea what do you think alcatraz uh as a kid yeah you do you have any memories going around on the like the farrier boats around alcatraz yeah i used to not it was so funny because i as a kid they would tell you there's no prisoners in here yeah but i didn't quite believe them i was like yeah you're just saying that like 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.

2:18:37Like at Disneyland, if you get lost, they'll make you go on. It's a small world and they'll turn you into one of the small world kids. Did you ever fall for that one? That was big amongst like the six-year-olds. You know, we, we remember I sent you that post. It was a bunch of like eight-year-olds talking about the podcast talking about pizza. We need, we need somebody to do a podcast, kid conspiracy conspiracy theories. Can dogs really not speak english yeah because when i say you know yeah come they come or like wait if i how do we know they don't understand if i stay up past 10 tonight i'll turn into a pumpkin like that can't be true right and it's like no no i i i heard that from my parents too my cousin said yeah my cousin said that happened it was it's real yeah it's real yeah kid conspiracies are great uh one of the best ads for alcatraz the rock with sean connery have you seen that movie you haven't seen any movies it's fantastic i haven't seen any movies you gotta watch that uh that if that goes back in theaters we gotta we gotta take the guys to see it it's fantastic nick cage sean connery uh they he's a former prisoner there there's a there's a a bunch of like rogue agents that take over alcatraz they're gonna launch a missile and so he has to take a seal team six 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 classics.

2:20:01And when you think about it, I mean, maybe those exist. I'm sure they exist around LA, but nobody's made this sort of like franchise sort of, uh, slightly retro fun cinema experience. And we would certainly be weekly active users of that, uh, showing up in a tux. I think it exists a nice wander somewhere potentially. Yeah. But let's move on to another ad from AdQuick. 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 AdQuick. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

2:20:43And they recently are, we're promoting another podcast from them. On a recent episode of the Madvertising Podcast, we asked Janthony Long 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 DeepSeek is free falling in the charts. Meanwhile, chat GPT. Wait, did you skip one? Yeah, do you want to do the Lutnik one? I just wanted to do this because I think it's, I just want to prepare the audience that 30 years from now, we will eventually pass the torch to our sons.

2:21:22Yes. And we, you know, there's going to be an announcement. We're going to say that, you know, our little lads are taking over the family business and get used to some new, you know, hosts. 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 terrorist attacks. He was spared because he was dropping his son off at school. He just got very, very lucky, rebuilt the firm.

2:21:59And now his two sons, 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 Letnick was making a million dollars a day at Cantor Fitzgerald pre 9-11 at age 40. And so he's got to look at this and be like, yeah, 27. Like I was 27 when I was running this company. Yeah, you can do it. So I love it. Faith and youth, very important. People, nepotism, you know, got attacked quite a lot, even though historically it's sort of the norm.

2:22:44Uh, and what people don't realize is that growing up absorbing constant, you know, 24, seven exposure to an incredible entrepreneur. Even if you end up 50 % as good as your dad, that's still way, way, way better than the average. Um, so yeah, huge fan, huge fan. I think it's, uh, overall it's cool. I mean, obviously they're going to have to get in there and perform. He's not, you know, I'm sure that you don't become Howard Lutnick and then let your sons run the business into the ground. He will help as fast as he put you in. I'm sure he'll pull you out if you're not delivering results. So yeah, but good luck to them.

2:23:25So let's go to Rajveer. He says, DeepSeek is free falling in the charts. Meanwhile, ChatGPT has maintained a top 10 position for nearly two years. Surely all the Think Boys will update their hot takes from a month the gal 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 kim ever die um and uh anyways so uh we everybody was calling this they were clearly just spending to drive this growth and potentially botting the growth and i would imagine deep seek has not been getting signups and it's a money losing operation right now.

2:24:07And, and, uh, I'm, you know, not surprised to see this and, uh, 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. Uh, F O F R says, make sense why he was called general electric. Now it does sound like a, you know, 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 the historic power law companies have kind of lost their luster.

2:24:47But 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 yeah obviously this project didn't go anywhere but uh you you can see this picture and in one image immediately understand what the culture was like at that company totally it was probably rocked it was probably awesome anyway uh let's go we should go back and study these companies more yeah yeah when we have a single day without an onslaught of headlines we'll go back and yeah yeah yeah we need to bring in more of the historical deep dives uh yeah from time to time at least once a week do one get a book get a get an analysis and take you through i mean the history of ge is probably fascinating i know very little about it so it'd be great to go through uh eric jong 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 does love chocolate uh beat out gemini 2.0 flash thinking and gemini 2.0 pro uh and i think people were a little bit uh debating how how legit this was because now with test time compute you can throw a ton of inference cost at it and basically do a uh 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 if this is what yeah but he's saying he's throwing 200k gpus at yeah so yeah it's working dishonest yeah and if the inference cost comes down why not do that uh dylan patel was joking about or why not just do it to prove what you're capable of doing in the future i want a rumba 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.

2:26:49And that's fine. And I love that. And I think that's very funny. Yeah, I want a robot that's looking at the biggest tree in my yard and just predicting which leaf 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 receiver. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, if intelligence is too cheap to meter, why not? 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.

2:27:24So good stuff. Always fun to follow the AI chatbot arena. They're duking it out, and good luck to them. This was fun from Dan McCormick. Joe Rogan is obsessed with creatine gummies. Joe Rogan was pitching Magnus Carlsen and millions of listeners on creatine and more specifically creatine gummies from create surreal it's a one minute clip so uh dan for those that don't know uh insane uh insane growth marketer he's also the brother of packy mccormick and has helped out on not boring quite a bit he had this idea to build create a creatine gummy brand forever ago there's something about humans where if you put something in a gummy they want 10 times more of it so he identified that he i i initially i think he sent me the deck or something like that.

2:28:09And he had this theory that, that gummies would be the way that women got into creatine. And I totally didn't believe it because as like a bro science bodybuilder, you know, 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 four months. I was like, okay, I was wrong. I'm going to invest. And, uh, and he's since, you know, doing tens and tens of millions of revenue, profitable, you know, has done very, very well.

2:28:46So, uh, awesome to see. Yeah. Uh, yeah, the, the, the, the most like, uh, bro science explanation for why creatine is important that I liked was, uh, you know, it helps you put on water weight. That's what everyone says. Uh, it hydrates your muscles. Uh, but the, the hot take there is that being hydrated is good. And so, you know, if you have more water in your body overall, in your brain, in your muscles, everywhere, you will just feel better. You'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.

2:29:21But 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 team belief in open source models and their ability to empower choice for AI developers continue to be rewarded. Excited for this next chapter, says Lee Jacobs. So let's ring a size dog. eyes gone gotta give some credit to lee uh justin cyan the team at long journey they've been on an absolute terror they were early in crusoe right and then that they were also super early into together yeah and uh it only takes a couple companies like that and a fund to uh you know get into the uh the carry zone yeah which is always a goal so great work another big ai round more on the model delivery level.

2:30:23Yeah. 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. The last thing, I mean, we're still streaming. We both probably have to go home, but there's two things. One, I wanted to shout out Rob at Heberman Lab. He just sent a bunch of Matina. Thank you. He sent it into the cage. Yeah, fantastic. The boys are going to be jacked up on your remotes. Great. And then the second thing, I don't even know if we can pull this up now, but One X just announced a new humanoid robot called, you know, literally while we were streaming called the Neo Gamma.

2:31:07And they're saying it's one step closer to home. So they're targeting the home market. Yep. Figure is building general purpose robots, but more oriented around. BMW manufacturing. Manufacturing like labor. Yep. and i think one other company is targeting uh horror films i guess and um these things look still super uh creepy almost like black mirror-esque yeah um but uh 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 um but uh i mean the visuals the visuals in this are are amazing yeah and it's friendly for sure you were yeah i think we're looking forward to a world where we can have one of these walk over and hand us you know bottle of your bottle of dom i'd love to see a humanoid robot pop a bottle of champagne yeah that's the real test of agi can you saber a bottle of dom effectively can you really savor it saber saber like use the use the saber to pop off the top that's the way you open it if you're really really on it uh we we got to do that for the dom episode and um the last thing the last bit of news before the weekend hooters is preparing for bankruptcy we didn't cover that but maybe we'll cover it monday because it's a bigger story i don't know how i feel about it i've never been so i don't really know i've never been and there's tons of arguments that it's probably a good thing even though maybe that same human instinct just moved online seems low class and vulgar sounds vulgar to me but i'll be sticking to nobu like it's the weekend yeah it's the weekend does it feel like the weekend yeah starts to feel like the weekend uh you'll be hearing from us on monday in the meantime think about leaving us a five-star review on apple podcasts and spotify and when you do put an ad for your company or 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