welcome to technology Brothers the number one live show in Tech we are live from the Temple of Technology The Fortress of Finance the capital of capital today is Friday February 21st 2025 and this show starts now we got an amazing lineup for you today we got a 1 billion hack a $40 billion fundraise and
a$2 billion beverage acquisition we're also talking about Ferrari we're talking about James Bond the siiz gong is going to be coming out a lot today Jordan and I are white pilled we're in white suits things are great it's a beautiful day it's a beautiful day so get pumped get excited for this show let's start with
the hack $ 1.4 billion doar is missing where' it Go who lost it break it down Jordy okay so as usual once a month in crypto a billion dollars is stolen it's really like I saw this you told me about this article and I was like okay like why should I care about this one I don't know why it is but it seems like it's
always toward a as the market starts to dip that the chaos really kicks off but anyway so yeah break it down for those that are hearing this for the first time uh ethereum is falling at the moment as crypto exchange buy bit confirms a$ 1.4 billion hack so this was going down this
morning I woke up around 430 I think news was like starting or there was rumors uh by early this morning the CEO had confirmed that there was indeed a hack uh crypto prices are broadly falling Friday following confirmation that major centralized crypto exchange bybit was hacked after $1.4 billion
worth of tokens were stolen in a hack and so uh you know the the hacks and crypto happen on centralized exchanges in many ways those are more rare and that there's more controls put in place they more professionalized a lot of the high-profile hacks have just happened on these sort of dii protocols where one
person is has the keys for a wallet yeah it's more like social engineering right like there was an engineer who had the key to the actual wallet and they clicked on a fishing link or they got scammed or they or North Korean a North Korean Dev you know gets push some code
push some code Etc um so anyways what happened here more than $1.4 billion worth of ethereum and uh staked ethereum were withdrawn from bit's hot wallet on Friday and a large chunk of the funds were being sold via decentralized exchanges so there's actually a graphic of this I don't know if we have it lined
up on the show on the show uh you can scroll down uh basically this $1.4 billion was stolen and then immediately distributed across hundreds of wallets to be sold off sure and so that's obviously a lot of sell pressure on ethereum bybit co-founder and CEO Ben Joe confirmed the attack in a post on X
saying that the a planned transfer was manipulated in some way and that the funds were swiped yeah here all is bit eth multisig cold wallet just made a transfer to our warm wallet about an hour ago it appears that this specific tra uh transaction was musked I don't know what that means uh all the signers
saw the musked UI which showed the correct address and URL was from at safe um however the signing message was to was about to change bybit eth multisig uh so I don't I actually don't understand any of that do you understand what happened what does musk mean I mean to be clear he's just sharing sort of
like internal uh so it's possible this is a typo and it should said masks masks okay um I actually don't know okay however the signing message was uh was to change the smart contract logic of our eth cold wallet the hacker took control of the specific eth cold wallet we signed and transferred all eth in the
cold wallet to this unidentified address all other cold wallets are secure all withdrawals are normal ethereum is down 3% on the hour to a current price of 27 uh $2,727 while Bitcoin has dipped nearly 1% to $998,000 uh which is kind of where bitcoin's been trading around for the
last like month or two and so a security researcher Zack xbt had sort of front run uh Ben's uh the CEO's post saying that uh there was suspicious outflows from byit and that a source confirmed to him that it was a security incident y um and he has since added that the eth is being split between 39 different
addresses as the attacker apparently tries to muddle the flow of funds to make them harder to track and so some other people had commented that it's very difficult to steal $1.4 billion even in crypto right because how do you you know you have to get those F if you want to actually use those funds in the
real world unless you're you know part of some Global crime syndicate you've got to like get them into a bank account and even that you know so a lot of steps to actually get those from and there used to be uh services like uh what was it tornado cash where you could kind of put money in and then anonymously
withdraw it and it was very messy but I believe that was shut down because it was such a money laundering like it was very controversial because you know math is illegal now um I don't know exactly know where I stand on that I mostly am just kind of learning the facts on that
one but yeah it it is an interesting case uh it is crazy I wonder how much of this will actually be uh retrieved because you could imagine you know there's some sort of expected value calculation from these hackers they're like yeah we we'll we'll steal 1.4 billion but we'll send it off all over
this place even if we just walk away with 100 million that's great totally worth our time yeah somebody was commenting on X saying the hacker should just take like a couple hundred million dollar as a fee give the rest back because they just won't wouldn't be able to launder it anyways yeah yeah um so
the CEO's come out and said buybit is solvent even if the hack loss is not recovered all of client assets are are one to one backed and we can cover the loss and so ultimately like this could be a scenario where I I don't know what kind of scale by it has but uh if they have to basically use equity to back
stop this 1. 4 billion I mean really you know ultimately damaging to all the shareholders but at the same time that the shareholders should have responsibility for the security and safety of the assets and so they come out if they come out and say you your funds aren't safe on byit they basically
uh wouldn't have a viable business anymore unless people just forgot that their assets were on there so yeah um it'll be interesting to see where this goes and and if they can track people down uh I'm sure coffeezilla is staying busy um but let's move on to uh a $40 billion fundraise that's currently going
on uh led by Brett Adcock for figure AI the humanoid robotics the size Lord himself he is a Siz Lord he has been raising the stakes endlessly uh and I'll give you a little background on some of his history here uh Sam par broke it down when he did a pod with Brett Adcock he uh first sold a
company a hiring software company called veter for $100 million then he taught himself about flying and he built Archer basically electric helicopter for short commutes he took that company public spaed it and I think it's one of the few uh like hard tech spacks that's actually kind of sustained it hasn't gone down
90% I mean let's look it up on public um and then he made well it's down 8% today so but uh how is it how is it since like the Spa launch stilling dig it's up 25% month over month I bet some of this is based on what's going on figure figure I'm sure the spa investors are you know yeah hey this guy's profile is
getting raised you know yeah they're going to put the robots in the in the planes when the planes ship you know how do you think those humanoids are going to get around they're going to need they're going to need dude it this is a huge narrative violation it's it's up dramatically from
the from the SP from the spa what's the market cap in 2021 when it backed it came out at 600 million okay it's now at almost 5 billion wow um so who would CRA because like flying cars are not just racing around so it's still a speculative investment in many ways yeah and I mean like if you look at even in
December December of last year so few months ago Archer Aviation stocked I'm on the alpha feature of public faced a significant drop of 24% due to increased Short Selling activities and funding concerns so short sellers got absolutely smoked wow um on this one uh depending what kind of position they took so he
built figure he raised $650 million from Bezos and video and open Ai and now most recently he has a new thing called cover which makes x-ray light cameras that can detect if someone's bringing weapons into schools or stadiums so he's gotten into kind of like the the flock safety
Market a little bit uh and uh yeah he's been he's been a character in Silicon Valley for a while and um and but this this particular fundraise has been controversial because uh it's it's driven heavily by by spvs which are special purpose vehicles uh I'm sure you dealt with these but Natasha mascarenas
over at the uh information has uh a breakdown of what's going on so let's read through that uh this is I think slide three now yeah there we go spvs are circling robotic startups $40 billion value uh valuation funding round uh special purpose vehicles are now a Mainstay in Venture Capital showing up
in some of the biggest deals in artificial intelligence from open AI to anthropic is a flex POS way to raise cash from a larger pool of investors and to be clear not always a larger pool like some of these big you know Thrive Capital will do an SPV but it might be for massive investors right it's not
always this massive pool of investors in the case of figure it seems like this is basically being marketed to retail oh interesting I I mean not actually marketed marketed to retail but more hey we got a $200 million allocation like we're going to bring in you know 50 people to fulfill it you steal man why a
fund that has you know three billion under management in an active growth fund would want to do an SPV when a company one of their growth stage portfolio companies is Raising $20 billion uh there there's a bunch of incentives to do spvs one maybe you don't want to be overc concentrated in a
single fund so if you're already sit if you're a growth fund and you have 10% of your investable Capital already in that company it it it's more and more risk to go further I think Founders fund gets very aggressive with this and that there's more Comfort being like we have 15% of our Fund in this one company
found done spvs as well they'll go back to the L hey you're already committed to this you have allocation but if you want more you you can get more access because this fun this this round is so big we just can't fill it all and one of the reasons why investors love spvs even if
you're operating a large uh vehicle already is that the SPV deal by deal so if your fund has you know uh 6% irr and you're getting you know some carry on that and your fees but then one SPV does a 10x you're getting the full benefit of that yep all of the carry all the 20%
carry from that uh even if your fund you know underperforms or doesn't achieve the the the Milestones that you initially set so um there's a lot of Reas attractive way to get allocation from like lower or maybe people outside of Sil Valley into SpaceX or and there's been a lot of SP and this is why this is
why angelist has caught flak historically although it's a fantastic platform and like I'm a weekly active user yeah um the but but there's managers on there that are and people that have gotten tremendously wealthy from having one good investment and like 30 you know losers basically and so
there's it can end up being over uh over aligned to the to the uh manager of the SPV um and the same thing happens in real estate it happens in every sort of asset class where there's a promote yeah there's a funny post maybe will posted this uh something about you know there's more in common with an SPV promoter and
a uh like a club promoter than uh than you know traditional Venture Capital uh I'll I'll read some of this and then uh I'm going to get your your take uh now fund managers are considering using spvs to fund a huge new round for AI the three-year-old startup that builds humanoid robots uh the Sunnyvale based
Cal the Sunnyvale California based startup is in talks to raise one billion to two billion and is Seeking a $40 billion valuation according to three people with direct knowledge of funding fundraising efforts the company has received a term sheet at that valuation according to one of the one of one of
the people interviewed align Ventures a new york-based early stage Venture firm that invested in several figures several figures prior rounds has talked to investors about raising an SPV of several hundred million dollars from its limited partners and other investors according to two people Parkway Venture
Capital an early stage deep Tech firm that previously invested in figure also plans to invest in the round according to people what do you think uh so yeah the the whole thing they have a term sheet here term sheets uh the person uh sending the term sheet determines sort
of the the the the entity behind the term sheet determines the weight that other investors put on the term sheet right so andreon Horwitz sending a term sheet is very different than a a $30 million seed fund that you know uh nobody's heard of before sending a term sheet right and ter are not legally
binding yeah they're not they're not legally binding they're in this case could very well be strategically y you know sent in order to uh you know one the other thing is these I believe we know Parkway and I believe that a line is in the same boat I'm trying to check so like align Ventures for context yeah
their entire portfolio on their website is CP G companies so they've done Billy care of cod the farmer's dog figs so when traditional institutional Venture capitals look at uh you know hearing that figure got a term sheet yeah and then they go to the funds portfolio and they're like wait this company has never
doesn't have a public deep Tech investment that term sheet the reason that this round has been memd a little bit is because yeah it's hard to take a term sheet from from uh a line super seriously it's unclear that they would be able to pull together the capital to do uh 300 million much less a billion
dollar investment right even if they're super excited about it so uh Parkway I'm pulling up Parkway Venture Capital as well yeah um I it sounds like they were in figure already and so the other thing is that Parkway if they have a big position in in in figures even last round they have a huge incentive to mark
up their position and just get more capital into the company the other thing is if Brett is hyper fixated on valuation which around like this tends to mean right there's no real there's no real reason that this is a $40 billion company uh you know you could argue that that doing one on 10 billion would still
be a little bit too hot given their traction right they haven't released a lot uh but Parkway still has an incentive to to tell their uh initial investors look uh you got a 20x on your investment in in however many months and there's so much heat Brett also has you know a spack that's doing well right
now in the public markets and so um maybe they're saying there's some floor to Brett the Adcock sort of uh you know deep Tech machine I mean the guy's good at you know fundraising and keeping the share price up and delivering the shareholder promises we talked about this I think it was off air I'm I'm
curious what adcock's game plan is because it does feel like the environment right now figure could spack yep but it certainly wouldn't go out at 40 and if it did maybe it could go out at 40 but I don't think that's a price that it would be able to sustain and so what is yeah it's to tell because it's
not like the valuation would not be driven by their earnings per share beats or whatever it's and Archers still archers lost you know burned almost half a billion last year yeah and so there's been you know there been cons concerns of of sort of how long can they keep that up spending a million dollars a day
with no Revenue a million dollars a day wow more than a million dollars a day yeah that's a lot yeah me steel man here the revenue the revenue line on public for Archer is a dash like there is no there's no revenue is they just R&D right now um and and and Brett would say
hey look uh you know how long did take Tesla to start making real money took a long time right yeah uh I don't know how Archer against that timeline perfectly but yeah and to be clear we love robots yep I want to I want to have an army of robot uh podcast you know producers that Ben controls you know we got 50
different camera angles uh everybody should should want a figure to win but it's totally fair to have a few questions about exactly why is it getting priced more than Ford Motors why is it getting priced four times rivan y right when you actually think about almost double and why is it
yeah almost double andal when andal has a billion dollars of Revenue just took a22 billion contract from ivas yeah and some of the best fundraisers ever right so look it's hard for me to see every tier one VC in the valley but there is an interesting question like you know align Ventures people are saying Parkway
Venture Capital these are not typical like huge growth stage deep Tech funds but there's I think there's an interesting idea of like why did this round come together the way it did well think about the other funds that might do a deal like this and think about their conflicts yeah are they in an Elon
company because elon's working on humanoids and if you're in if you're in X like Andres is or you're in uh you know Sequoia is in X um if you're in SpaceX if you're in neuralink boring company yeah and you say hey Elon we're going to go and fund a direct competitor to the Tesla Optimus even if your
Venture fund is not a Tesla shareholder Elon might say hey what what what like come on like I thought we were on the same team here yeah I'm building the Elon companies and you're in one of those Elon companies you benefit from everything that I do why are you finding
a competitor of mine and so uh I I I I think it's interesting like it is it is it is like very impressive that Brett has been able to put together as much money as he had competing with Elon because like the famous quote is like never bet against Elon and Elon said hey I'm doing the humanoid robot thing and
that typically means want to be the guy who's doing who's going up against El what what what Brett is doing is is very impressive yeah anybody like he's going to have detractors anytime you have somebody rocket to this level of success he's going to have detractors there's ways that you can you know try to
dissect what he's doing um you know and and you know the parkway uh the GP over at Parkway who's presumably the one that sent the term sheet y uh has been on the board of figures since uh May of 202 so you know if he's uh it all comes down to again um uh until the round closes it's all marketing as far as I'm
concerned and we saw this we saw this with yeah Stargate uh we also saw this with um uh the the bolt Ryan breslo y when he came out and he said I have you know new investment coming in and then people the thing is is it's it's hard to fake a billion dooll investment because
you know I've raised spvs before I don't know if you've done spvs it's hard to fill a you know and like filling a $400 million investment I don't believe that I actually don't believe that you know major New York City investment Banks would be able to fill a $300 million SPV into figure at 40 billion that's IPO
money yeah they wouldn't they wouldn't be able to fill that at $40 billion I bet you they could at five yeah probably but but you know saying that that's a very good point and so and so Jesse over at Parkway would love would love to talk to him and kind of hear his plans for this if he has
some you know ridiculous Capital Network that is more risk on than some of the mo like yeah than than uh so it's good anyway so so there's a lot of questions here that I think are fair I'm I'm you know I'm I'm always in favor of high-risk investments into deep Tech but uh this is yeah I mean this is kind of
you know if a VC is making an investment that doesn't make you uncomfortable like are they really doing Venture Capital yeah this is this is Adventure capital for sure this feels like a venture bet yeah where it's like if it works the bet is that he's going to beat Elon Musk and then deliver humanoid robots an entirely
new technology that will scale to millions of these robots like it will be a trillion dollar company if it work but the the the the thing is is it would still be a high highrisk Venture bet at10 billion right because You' say like look uh you know this this company is going to take yeah you know with with
rivan a really like rivan rivan to me is a like fairly decent comp in that it's a with Elon a competing with Elon hard te hardtech you know Manu facturing intensive low margin right like everybody's like you have to realize that red is competing with unit tree which is a a Chinese company yeah which
we've known we've talked about this before other Chinese companies have shown we will sell a product at a loss for as long as it takes to own this Market yeah so is Brett GNA have margin y when I I completely agree with this and and and so there's there's lot of even even though this is clearly like
the most futuristic Technologies this how we've literally seen inside movies that doesn't necessarily mean that there's a network effect and high margins right those two things can be separate we can get something that's an incredible amazing clearly we the future and it's like straight out of sci-fi and
it can be a mediocre business yeah and and then there's the whole other side of this which is our bipedal robots even the robot form factor that is going to dominate right is it going to dominate The Factory floor Factory floors are flat right would it make more sense to
have a you know robot that is attached to a wire so it's powered can roll on wheels and it can lift extremely heavy things yeah right um imagine you're the founder of Boston Dynamics looking at this you're just like I've been grinding on this for 20 years I built so much stuff and I've never been able to really
like pop the stock in a meaningful way like I got see I got bought by Hundai and then I got bought by Google and I got Trad it around and like my baby has just never had its day in the Sun and you know Brett you're not clearly incredible technologist you're not that guy pal you're not that guy literally
because the Boston Dynamics demos like they're clearly on The Cutting Edge they're State ofthe art they're Frontier one thing I one thing I do believe yeah yeah Brett's very good at fundraising very good at recruiting very good at building hype deals guy he's good at puzzling together oh we got the campus
oh we got the BMW partnership oh we got the money then we'll get another deal then we'll get a thing we hire some people so if we had conviction that figure was going to um you know there's this whole thing which is you know figure could argue in a tam slide our Tam is not the value of
the robots that we're selling at retail price or in these big Enterprise deals our Tam is the labor force that we're going to provide and the ongoing earnings when we displace every factory worker in the world or every agricultural worker in the world right so so there is an art like he can go out
and make a case for how the Tam for this is $5 trillion and it's very you know investing now I think from that dwar SAA podcast it was uh the global economy is 100 trillion and labor is something like 60% of that yeah so you're looking at a 60 trillion dollar market yeah and it's like yeah we're GNA take you know 2% of
that it's great trillion dollar business they're giving away the shares at 4 they are Shar uh let's rip through some of this just to give the folks some extra data this's is a massive U 15 times the last valuation which was 2.6 billion normally I feel like when you get into the 2.5 billion range the next rounds at
5 billion you don't really see that many 10x UPS 4xx is like it's pretty normal to go from the two and a half to uh and that was just a year ago uh jaw-dropping jump even in this market uh figures investors May ultimately not use spvs to back the company they could always just
jump the line and go direct uh the startup hasn't approved any spvs and has asked its existing investors to invest uh from their own funds because they might want to put in more money if they're not having to pay fees right uh uh Bloomberg first reported on figures ai's Target valuation it's true that
investors are excited about a new generation of robotic startups there's a lot of these field AI is a maker of AI models to control robots that's targeting A2 billion doll uh valuation they're raising yeah and we saw uh locky's company yeah and is Daniel Gro no no he's part of part of the other one
it's called like General no and the the the argument for why figures valuation could be nearly twox Andals is that andal if they wanted to raise from a hodgepodge group of random spvs they could do it at 60 I'm yeah I mean they've talked about the over subscribed nature of these rounds and
they could probably pump that up but yeah anderol with ivas at $28 billion feels like they could raise from less sophisticated almost double themselves imagine how much they could get if they went to China imagine they're just like actually we only care about the valuation the mission doesn't matter anymore let's
just rip uh you know get some get some crazy money in here uh so uh uh they on Thursday figure AI unveiled Helix a model developed internally that enables robots to perform more complicated tasks there was this video demo very cool uh they've partnered with open AI so you can talk to it and they're using uh like
the speech recognition and the and the chat GPT stuff to kind of act as an interface to the instruction set uh it's already raised $745 million from investors including Microsoft open Ai and Nvidia real murderer row of corporates and strategics uh which I think he's really really good at doing
and it has big plans they've hired more than 200 people for an engineering and AI Hardware team um according to documents created by an SPV manager the company is projecting it will build up to 100,000 robots over the next four years according to the same materials and two uh and two of the people company
secured BMW as a first customer none of those plans explain why investors think the company is worth 40 billion for contacts yeah and and to give some context if they're selling these robots at $100,000 a pop which feels low given that's generally the price point that
unit tree sells at you can go buy a unit tree robot for around six figures that's $10 billion of Revenue so so so if Brett is saying I want you to give me a four you know I want you to basically give me a five x 4x on my on my 2029 forward Revenue it still feels crazy it is crazy because so so that
Revenue multiple of like 60x revenue 40x revenue that's not crazy in AI like anthropic is Raising 40 uh at 58 billion but they have a billion in ARR yeah and so but it's now they have that AR now and so a pricing standpoint is didn't SAA buy half of open aai for like 10 billion like not even I don't know uh I
don't think half but certainly like a third or something like that um and so uh let's go to some reactions on the timeline to break this down we got Luke Metro over at anderol he says Brett Adcock is shaping up to be the best fundraiser since Adam Newman uh amazon.com and this is from back in 2024
in February a year ago almost a year ago today amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos Nvidia and other big technology names are investing in startup figure AI that builds humanik robots Bloomberg News reported Friday exciting people with knowledge uh they're backed by open Ai and Microsoft Uh sama can win when he
gets 7even trilly uh and so people have been talking about Brett adcock's amazing fundraising abilities for a long time you had a post about it which is in here uh it took the Ford Motor Company a 115 years to reach a $40 billion market cap Brad Adcock did it in just three years with figure can we finally stop
glazing Henry Ford now SRA s SRA probably saw this and if he didn't know that I was joking he probably had an aneurism yeah of course um do not disrespect Henry Ford I was obviously joking here uh the markets are crazy I think they both deserve respect y um but but but the title of you know uh Henry
Ford is like a historic entrepreneurial goat right uh one of the greatest to ever do it uh and Brett could be that guy Brett could he's got a he's got like 20 now he's NBA Prospect potential rookie of the year if he can start delivering these robots but his jersey is not going up in the red after unless
unless the CL cash flow gets there to back it up I I just think at this point like believability matters so much right like when Humane came out and they said this is the future Computing platform yeah nobody believed them yeah when figure goes out and says we we believe we're
worth $40 billion and that's where we want to take new capital nobody believes it and it's such a and again I just think you could have raised a 3X up round and you know everybody like probably at a $5 billion valuation with with like Scrappy Engineers little bit more like you know hey we're just
focused on Engineering Building we're sharing even more The Vibes could be way way better yeah right but instead it it it seems it it seems like frothiness as a brand right uh and that's odd so Sheil mon not says figure humanoid robots reportedly raising at 39.5 billion so it's not 40 give me a
break Jordy he's not raising at 40 he's raising at 39.5 yeah okay uh sheal says frothy I wonder if they chose it to be slightly less than that so that it feels like there's some science based reason like they they ran they put it in a spreadsheet and they popped out this is
the this is the right number one time I was negotiating with VC early on in my career and he's like oh yeah like we I I put my whole team on this they built a whole bunch of models and they came back with like valuation for the company's like uh you know $150 million like uh can't can't do any better than that and
I was just like that you clearly didn't do any math like like you because like you would have you would have given me like a not round number you clearly just ballpark this because otherwise you would have like yeah like the spreadsheet said like 137 million. 24 uh and so I rounded that to 138 and that's
what we're doing instead it was just like no you didn't you didn't do that at all so yeah if you're raising folks don't try and raise it 100 million raise it $999.99 yeah for a limited time only for limited time only tell tell your L three easy payments three easy payments on the $20 million series a uh sequ used to do
this for YouTube I believe they did a tranched investment three easy payments of of of $10 million each and then it turns out as a Founder you really don't want to take tranched Investments because you're sort of having to operate based on the the money but then if it doesn't come through there's so many
reasons that the VC could change their mind every every private markets investor has made an investment at some point or active ones at least where they get the first update and they're just like ah yeah I I messed up and so B Baron has a quote in here he says if Brett Adcock can raise money still so
can you never kill yourself uh very funny having some fun on the timeline having fun but you know I went through Brett's uh Brett's post and he's got some bangers in here guy can post uh he said says uh I've raised almost $1.7 billion from cold emails from my companies I've tracked performance of
cold emails versus referrals and cold emails consistently outperform by a long shot for a few reasons uh sharing mine this is converting it 70% email to meeting hi my name is Brett Adcock I'm the founder and CEO of figma see the Precision here 70.8% yeah he's a precise guy specific there's something to this I I think
you're I think you're on to it um prior to this I found it AR Aviation electric Vall Aircraft Company nysse Archer and also founder veter sold for $100 million do you have time for a call I mean yeah you're you're you're uh I mean there's a lot to like about this structure in the
sense that just two sentences very clear he presents what's he doing now why is he calling you and what has he done in the past very concisely and so even if you're someone newer in your career you could easily say prior to this I built a startup raised a million dollars and studied engineering at this school do
you have time for a call that's way better than chat gbt paragraphs like all that junk uh and so yeah obviously if you didn't sell a company for $100 million probably going to have a lower conversion rate here but you can still adopt a lot of this uh which I thought which I thought was cool uh he had
another Crossover with a good friend of the Pod boo did you see this one wait did I miss the um did we miss the the Ben the Ben followup there 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 M Ben saying Jim my name is Brett Adcock and I'm the
founder CEO of figure an AI robotics company building a general and then Jim responds you are not Brett Adcock your profile clearly says that your name is Ben please remove me from your mailing list immediately so having some more fun uh on the timeline and then we got f f is in the game uh cross over the century
he says company ideas are worthless execution is King this is from Brett Adcock uh post some wisdom on the timeline he says in the limit the pace of technological progress is the only competitive Advantage how to stop overthinking strategy and execute like the top 1% he drops a thread uh he's
been a bit of a thread boy throughout 2023 2024 but he grind he grinded his his whole account way up and now whenever whenever he posts a new robotics video instant virality and I'm sure he had a great great team working on this with him Kyle kashu says hey John hfia this is your bit and fio says
some interesting ideas he's got there because Foo 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 Foo you didn't coin a phrase yeah you didn't really get break through that concept yeah idea guy was that was a phrase before F FIA was doing some
really great foundational work on on what the the value of being an ideas guy was coined business magic magic is real like 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 uh but he'll get there
let's see what Apple intelligence thinks yeah so uh 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 stepan uh Steven Burkholder says us
posted in the long term and Mato from Aid 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 that the founder we're talking about is sleeping on eight sleep it's an
eight sleep B 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 the send us a screenshot of the order uh it's Cod tvpn I think or uh and uh if you order an eth sleep they will send you a hat if you order through our code so have fun with that send us a screenshot and U yeah what's your what's your sleep score at today which I've been putting up crazy numbers crazy
numbers I've been putting up crazy numbers let's see what I'm at um uh I got a 98 last night 98 my I got 91 my routine was not good good 62% uh but I did put up 7 hours and 10 minutes pretty good pretty happy with that I'm going to yeah quality was 100% my this week my average bedtime was 8:46
my average wake up was 454 you send me text being like I'm going to bed for the night at like 8 it's great yeah and you're like stop texting I Tred 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 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 do yeah I don't the the other thing with the a sleep is like to me the best like the the functionality that I genuinely love the most because living in Malibu every single night the temperature drops it's it's not too cold
it's not too hot it's just nice but the feature that I actually love and I feel a little bit soft for saying this is the way that it warms your bed oh yeah as you're as you're waking up it makes it so easy to get out of bed cuz I'm already warm the worst is you wake up you're cold totally you want to stay in
and you want to stay in bed I don't want to stay in I'm ready to go yeah well you know another way to jolt yourself out of bed Jordy with with a cold Celsius or a lana Alani new and that takes us to our next story Banger acquisition gong yeah we need a bunch of gong hits for the1
billion hack I don't know if we bring sizeb for that but it is Big the $40 billion fundraise from figure and the $2 billion acquisition from Celsius of aani new a fascinating story very few cpg companies get bought for these big of numbers I've operated in cpg uh you've obviously know a lot of folks in cpg
have have invested in companies and stuff and so we're breaking it down Celsius has agreed to purchase a Lon new for 1.8 billion it's in the front page of the uh 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 sells is paying 1.8 billion to BU rival Alani new uh a brand that has been propelled by social media influencers and pitched itself as a low cal Fitness Aid celsus is expected to pay a combination of cash and stock the the company said the deal which
includes a net purchase price of 1.65 billion and 150 million in tax assets is Celsius is largest acquisition since it was founded two decades ago and I'd love for you to pull up on public.com what is the Celsius stock doing uh around this acquisition because I want to know what is the market think about this um
Celsius had a market value of roughly 6 billion after its shares closed down 2.15% uh at 25 bucks a share on Thursday overall energy drink sales have been climbing but Celsius is 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 uh little bit of background on Alani new yeah so Celsius for Contex is down 36% in the last 6 months so they had gone slow this dominate he going to beat Red Bull and Monster it's kind of a new category for the fitness oriented folks healthier folks but they're not really putting a
dent in the Monster drink this time last year they were a 20 billion company yeah they're way down 20 billion wow yeah way down at 6% um and it seems that once you get to True scale as an energy drink they're just fantastic fantastic business um monster still sitting at $40 billion R bull priv in the tens of billions for
sure yeah and so Alani new was started in 2018 by Fitness influencer Katie Hearn monster is getting a 25x even a multiple yeah in the and they also bought bang energy out of bankruptcy for uh like 1X sales around a billion dollars so they picked up that asset as well and so uh there's just a
bunch of huge players now it's Celsius monster and Red Bull but there's obviously a lot of other ghost energy is doing a bunch big deals there's a lot of energy drinks going out uh and I I love them I drink of Celsius pretty much every every show now and we're big uh Gua key fans we're big fans of yerba
mate huberman's in the game he's got a ybba mate product that I personally like a lot uh and yeah low calorie high caffeine kicks you in the face gets you out of bed you're not going to be in your eight sleep all day when you got that's for sure when when you're replacing your blood with Celsius uh
anyway so Aon new cell energy drinks supplements and protein drinks the Louisville Kentucky company has built its brand largely through Partnerships with influencers like Kim Kardashian Paris Hilton and Addison Ray so they got Heavy Hitters celsi it's markets it's sugar-free caffeinated drinks as a
healthy alternative to full sugar energy drinks and sodas and claims its products can help burn body fat which is a claim that you can make if you have more than 100 grams of caffeine and it's a structure and function claim not a uh 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 uh so Drew Fallon had a great breakdown will pull up this uh this little thread he posted he says the latest deal in an absolutely scorching hot energy drink Market let's break down the deal Celsius has had an extraordinary run over the last decade
particularly with a huge run up in 2023 however growth slowed in Q4 2024 revenues were about the same level as Q2 2023 uh the stock had been priced to Perfection so it's drawn down about 60% in the last year uh aani new was found I don't know about perfection if it's down it's down it was priced for Perfection
like 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 and of course they couldn't live up to that and so it 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 so 6 years later they're throwing off 70 million in in that's such a narrative violation because so many beverage companies Los losing money through acquisition oh yeah like very very common toally 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 uh Celsius owns 11% of the energy drink Market almost 12% but with slow growth and the recent acquisition
of ghost Lifestyle by KDP Cur 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 uh which is another independent company at this point uh and uh and rain and NS and bang and it's a crowded crowded market and so Alani new uh ranked as the fourth energy drink in terms of market share uh Celsius paying a net value of 1.65
billion this is 2.8x sales 26x uh TTM net income $70 million as we said uh 20x uh adjusted ebah not crazy but super but pretty high for cpg uh Celsius is publishing 12x fully synergized ebit dies the purchase multiple here that is obviously wishfully low uh yeah Alani new was the last desirable and scaled
asset in the energy space and perhaps the most desirable since the energy boom Celsius paid up for this one adjusted fully synergized ebit feels eerily similar to Adam Newman's Community adjusted 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 eidon 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 to
eah Hill here's celsi's reconciliation I'm putting the acquisitioned 20 range they're up 45% over the past week they're building back so overall the response I don't know when this was posted but um this news broke yesterday kind of yesterday morning they announc yeah and it's interesting I mean it does still seem
you know uh Celsius has 163 million of TTM evida yep they have a 35x multiple monster is at scale with a 25x multiple y it does feel like they're priced somewhat fairly even at this Mark right yeah and so they had what 160 of IA is that right Celsius so they just added 50 to that so that's
a 25% increase in their IA yeah uh for 1.6 billion acquisition at A5 billion market cap so it's kind of like a merger uh but now I'm sure they had a ton of cash on the balance sheet prior but now they control 16% of the energy drink market and we'll give you some background on the long-term Tailwinds in
energy the category has been growing really really quickly uh 90 billion is the global energy drink Market uh 10% grow it's growing at 10% and is expected to grow 10% till the end of the decade uh increasing category adoption and incrementality and 37% has that Meme factor that Zin does right nowt are just
they they do the marketing for Celsius and so they kind of have that yeah you want to yeah if you want to like like you know I I saw just yesterday there was some uh Senator I believe who posted like I'm locked in I got these bunch of Celsius and I'm working late tonight and
Brian Johnson was there being like don't drink a Celsius late at night it'll milligrams C exactly yeah you saw that post and so uh sugarfree is gaining in ready to drink energy uh 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 uh
energy drinks if you're chugging them a lot of people um 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 frose corn syrup but maybe the next wave I I feel like the energy drink Market will continue to turn over there will
continue to be new entr that's actually one of the reasons I like these we drink a lot of matina from from hubman but these are just regular Agave or oranic agave syrup which I'm cool with I like the I like the Boost yeah it seems like the main thing you want to stay away from is like the highly processed sugars
yeah uh and so you can go natural sugar or you can go sugar free uh it kind of just depends on your diet and your your goals uh and so this really provides a platform for for Celsius to go after and capture beverage Trends in the category uh Celsius markets it's sugar-free
caffeinated drinks healthy alternative to full sugar energy drinks and sodas although of course Red Bull has a sugar-free monster has that zero white one that Everyone likes 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 uh of the C 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 elani new Jonah Lupton I got back in back into Celsius after hours at 2450
once I saw they were buying aani for 1.65 which is not only a creative but Alani has a full Suite of products from protein shakes to pre-workout and much more this is a very smart deal by Celsius I think the CEO saved his job for now uh and so people are excited about that there's a little bit of uh
hate coming from Trevor Scott I think this is funny uh Celsius acquiring aani new which is essentially the new Celsius 12x post synergies 13 uh 19x pre synergies including tax assets uh Q4 results better than expected Revenue minus 4% adjusted ebit down minus 4% Celsius up 31% declining sales what do
you slap on it a high growth acquisition uh maybe this isn't such a Negative barar take this is actually like yeah you kind of did what he had to do you know you're you're you stop growing get the thing that's growing build the portfolio yeah the challenge here is cel seems to resonate broadly with the
market Aon new with The Branding I don't see I don't see Chad's picking that up yeah it does seem like it's like almost like the female Celsius which could be very valuable you know for a long time uh I thought of Red Bull and monsters is highly masculine products especially monster you know it's a monster trucks
it's a very hard rock stuff you don't see a lot of girls walking around with monsters a little bit more vodka yeah Red Bull vodka and then also the uh uh Celsius I felt like was a little bit more gender neutral in the sense it was like CrossFit but when you go to CrossFit class it's usually pretty
broken down evenly by gender yeah uh and so I could see that kind of happening the same thing uh there's an interesting post here by the bank of braavos uh 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 uh the ABI Network successfully scaled Monster bang Celsius and elani new to significant levels energy drinks that enter the ABI Network tend to scale well but Pepsi often marks the final stop before growth dies and so kir Dr Pepper 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 yeah but it can still
be very valuable for all the shareholders and everyone can be happy uh so this is how the distrib distribution landscape has evolved in chronological order the ABI Network scaled uh mnst mnst moved from ABI to the coke system bang transitioned to ABI bang then moved from ABI to the Pepsi
system then there was this lawsuit with the uh bang and Pepsi 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 elani knew is likely to exit ABI for the Pepsi system with the upcoming Celsius
acquisition creating opening in the ABI Network once again and so we got to call huberman and get 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 that will yeah and and and and and you have to pay but it really is almost you can think of it like a value ad investor ABI is and and hezer Bush in Bev so they have you know like everywhere you buy beer which is
just every single store you get they have trucks with guys that go and deliver beer right and so there's no store in America that says actually I don't want Budweiser yeah I'm good I'm not yeah no they all want the trucks to come and when the trucks come they say hey what else you got oh you got some
Celsius yeah I do have some people that want that yeah I'll try that and they can even pushes on and they can even push and say hey look we're going to sell you Budweiser we're going to give you a good margin on that you'll be fine but we want you to test this new thing yeah take the Le of Faith with us and
you're going to get a keystone margin which is 50% on this new product you're going to get better margins than you do on on the commoditized like Budweiser product uh so you're going to make good money on the stuff that you move it's not going to move as fast because people
don't know Lani 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 aani new the next thing when anheiser 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 got to talk to ABI and Heiser bush in Bev 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 great product so uh that's where you should be looking for uh everything related to uh Financial assets and we have a post from the co-ceo and founder Leaf good buddy of ours he says uh uh 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 cuz 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 C C it was a crazy moment when people were going to the treasury direct
website and it felt like this DMV style interface and so it was great that you know players like public came in and said hey we're going to we're going to um actually just make this really easy make it you know literally take whatever seconds to you know access that yield so well we got another amazing article
about a storied automotive manufacturer Ferrari we're breaking it down there's an article in the Wall Street Journal today the wild economics behind Ferrari's domination of the luxury car market we've talked about Ferrari before a lot of weird decisions going on doesn't seem to be affecting them
financially we're going to talk to someone who's owned a Ferrari and we have haes here former Ferrari owner here to break it down for us uh I'll read you some of this with my experience that I still love the brand oh yeah breaking down constantly and you're like but it's still goated it's goated
it's amazing they're they own red like what like what more do you want red just like the way that we own green yeah they own red they own red so with a list price of $3.7 million Ferrari's new hyper car was revealed to the public in October with a Twist it wasn't available for sale all 799 units of the low slung
High hunched f80 model the most expensive production vehicle in Ferraris history had already been promised to top customers like Luke porier the Montreal real estate entrepreneur already owns 42 Ferraris he said he felt lucky to be allowed to buy yet another to be chosen to buy Ferrari is for one of their hyper
cars is a true milestone for any collector money isn't enough to buy a top-of the range Ferrari you need to be in a long-term relationship with the country with the company by leveraging the Rabid fandom of its customers through the business model based on Uber scarcity the story Italian company is
enjoying a new golden age following an almost tenfold increase in the stock since its IPO a decade ago Ferrari is now worth $90 billion that's two figures two figs uh that's two figure AI robotics companies you take two of them you get a Ferrari uh making it the most valuable car
company in Europe despite delivering just 13,752 Vehicles last year so Jordy why don't you break down uh what their strategy is with these uh super restricted hypercars how do you get one uh you know just break it down make it so yeah I I've talked about I don't think we've talked about this on the
show that much I know I've talked about it before on X but uh Ferrari has this fantastic uh business model that's similar to every other luxury brand that you'd be familiar with heres Rolex pek all these different companies they basically make uh no matter how much money you have in the world if you want
to buy these cars watches bags Etc directly from the manufacturer directly from the brand you have to play their game now every single uh every single brand has a different version of their game uh there's there's plenty you can look up online forums for every brand and see you know what game did you have
to play and the game is basically spending money on things that you don't necessarily want to get the thing that you actually want so Ferrari and Porsche does this as well every brand gets knocked for this because people say I have 300 Grand I should be able to buy the GT3 RS and Porsche and 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 Y and so in the case of Ferrari Ferrari you know H 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 yep every other car that they make for the most part depreciates
massively right nobody wants a nobody wants a 15-year-old Ferrari that was the entry model right these cars end up trading at 30 40 Grand like you can actually pick them up yeah for very little because they're unreliable and and they're not you know 360 Moda is like fairly accessible probably still
almost 100K 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 and so yeah so so ultimately you if you want to eventually buy Ferrari hypercars you have to go in there and you have to just start purchasing cars you have to get a
Roma you probably now would have to get a pangu you have to get you know if you just 298 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 you can go in there and spend you could go in there and spend $5
million with Ferrari and still not get access to an f80 because you're not even close to being in there and so Ferrari and it's not just that you also have to lose money on options right you have to 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 oneclick checkout on f8s you would have maybe hedge funds coming in and like trading them and they wouldn't actually go to collectors who promote the brand and live the brand and when you see an f80
owner they you know that they're also going to have an sf90 A you know an F50 an F40 they're going to have the whole they're going to be able to tell the whole story of the they're going to be a brand evangelist almost and that does raise the profile of the brand I think
as opposed to if if it was known as like yeah Ferraris they come out and then they just immediately get turned into Financial assets they you never see them in the real world no one ever drives them they're just thrown in the plastic they might as well be nfts yeah and so Ferrari is is unique as a manufacturer
because if you go to Porsche Porsche is an example if you want to buy a GT3 RS you probably have to buy a couple tyon a couple maans Maybe cayenne and the key is you can't just buy them and immediately sell them you you you have to buy them hold them for some amount of
time and then sell them back to or trade them in to the original dealer that you worked 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 you have to buy the cars from them and when you're ready to sell sell it back to the
dealer so that they make their margin again on that vehicle um and they don't they don't necessarily pay Market they're going to give you like kind of dealers often will make you a lowball offer and so uh what what 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 there's a history of Ferrari uh suing their own customers which is like unheard of right all business all traditional business advices don't sue your customers it just
ends up you know and this is the opposite of lambor right yeah Lamborghini is like much more you know kind of like rap him do whatever you want shoot you know you know there's that guy who got in trouble for like shooting a that was like illegal but that wasn't with Lamborghini I don't
think Lamborghini had a problem with it they like yeah just the law enforcement had an issue with it um and oh 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 f8s there's still a ton of people out there that are buying lots of Romas and pangu and these other cars that are are not getting access to those and so the challenge now and Doug De Doug deuro has a bunch of good content on this the challenge now is people are saying I've been losing you
know people were spending all this money to get an sf90 immediately losing 400 Grand 400 Grand and then they're still not getting the call from Ferrari and Ferrari is is picking their favorites right because the sf90 was unlimited production run so so it it was still hard to get is but 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 and now I I listened to a call in on it was maybe like Dave Ramsey or something but someone bought an sf90 to kind of flex and they had financed it and the payment was I think like 20K a
month guy had wask a month making so M and he was like it's important to my like BR my personal brand for this company that I'd have a sports car uh and so uh want to be in those can't make the payment has to like move and now if he sells the car it's he paid 800k to pay to trade it in
yeah exactly so he has like 400,000 of negative equity on the car he's effectively bankrupt and so people were saying like yeah maybe have to like crash the car and get insurance or something it's like even then the insurance is not is going to say what's the replacement value of the vehic exactly bad situation ferari like to be
clear they have an actual list so so for for background I looked at buying a classic Ferrari dealer in 2020 um yeah 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 totally so anyways the the whole like there's an entire Ferrari economy both the direct you know dealer customer but
then also the secondary Market which is they all play into each other yeah so don't buy a Ferrari don't buy a Ferrari dealership buy Ferrari Stocker stock is doing great stock is way raing more than 40 billion higher than Volkswagen which sold more than 9 million cars last year
uh Volkswagen's worth around 50 billion I believe uh most of Europe's Auto industry is plagued by a weak domestic Market costly transition to electric vehicles and new competition in China uh uh the Chief Executive Officer of Ferrari uh bendetto vgna said in a recent interview in Marinello we are not
we are not an automotive company uh the city in Northern Italy where Ferrari is based we are a luxur we are a luxury company that is also doing cars at the that's the kind of thing that true enthusiasts will will cringe and cry over because they just want Ferrari to focus on making the most beautiful
performant yes you know uh Timeless cars right yes yes yes with with driver engagement and manual transmissions and naturally aspirated engines and Ferrari's definitely moved away from that and it's a real risk right if you're a Porsche Enthusiast you can go get a manual yeah
911t not the or the St or the touring um or GT3 they they really are and you can get you can get into the brand at 20 130k like that yeah um uh and and I mean there's even other entry points with things like the Cayman and the boxer so you know it's kind of like the baby 911 to get you in and you and you
get a little bit older one of those and all of a sudden you're in the brand for at 30k 50k uh and Ferrari just doesn't have that but you know it does lead it to be a more luxurious brand you think of Ferrari As A Cut Above Porsche and that's that's just the and so at the time of the ferar at Ferrari's IPO in
2015 many analysts were skeptical that a luxury business model would work for a car maker uh the former CEO used to draw comparisons with Aires a parallel now widely accepted the French fashioned house limits supply of its coveted Birkin bags leading to weight lists at its stores and a huge resale Market is
the same deal at heres you need to buy a lot of things before you're invited to buy a b and they're and they're very very uh highly coveted customers buy all manner of other AES bobbles to move up the list Ferrari's blossoming into a luxury leader has restored the fortunes of founder Enzo Ferrari's son Pierro
Ferrari and Italy's agelli family which took control of the company decades ago through its fat brand in the IPO both families retain Stakes that are now worth billions of dollars another group that had profited from its ferar 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 law Ferrari is up at 3.4 million uh the uh according to Hagerty a special specialist auto insurer based in Traverse City when the model was released in 2013 they only made 499 of them now they might have
made a few more that's the thing with Ferrari you never really know and then they do special editions and they make a couple more but uh still very limited production run and it and it was sold before options at 1.4 million now it's up at 3.8 so you know and so the the Ferrari customer who's
buying these more standard Ferraris these mass-produced Ferraris accepting that they're going to take a loss on them yep is betting that they're going to get access to these Premier cars that will then make them money if they hold them but now the challenge is they've sold so many of the standard cars to
people that were anticipating being able to get into that coveted top customer group that gets access to these cars and so they're hitting this wall where they've now seen Terri sales on the on the uh um the cylinder 12 cylinder car because people are like I'm not going to spend 700k on this car that's going to
you know have terrible depreciation and you're not even giving me confidence that I'm ever going to get into that f80 exactly exactly yeah so last spring a Houston real estate broker bought one of Ferrari's much hyped per sangu models that's the SUV uh the first four-door
vehicle uh the list price was close to 460k but can approach $1 million with add-ons so you're talking 1 million for an SUV that's not even a track focused sports car and so you really have to have money to spend and when the broker flipped it the dealership that had sold in the car sued saying that he was in
breach of contract giving it right a first refusal for 12 months after the sale Accord according to the plaintiff's petition they recently settled without disclosing terms and so you know they were probably like hey how much profit did you make on that yeah give us a piece of that and like we'll call it
even but still it's like very aggressive with your customers anyone with a few 100K uh can buy a regular Ferrari as long as they're willing to wait a couple years while standard models aren't subject to strictly limited runs the company still lives by Enzo Ferrari scarcity dictum Ferrari will always
deliver one less car than the market demands smart limited edition Ferraris are even scarcer you can't just walk into your local showroom and buy one these range from special versions of regular models to the design oriented Icona series which is your favorite that's the sp1 SP2 sp3 um most exclusive
uh most exclusive once in a decade hyper cars like law Ferrari and f80 and so a lot of people were also upset about not being able to get sp3 allocations and so it's like yes I get it that you do the hyper car the f80 the F50 the law 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 it's million seems much more likely to be a an investment car an investment asset potentially over the f80 interesting in my view it's an odd positioning because it's this new new bucket of hyper cars from Ferrari uh but
it had the same problems where it was like very very limited run and very difficult to get into and so uh frustrated a lot of people that were sitting on SF 90s down 400k 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 law Ferrari on the secondary market and they can go to you know they can go to um someone like uh uh s bees and get that car uh there's actually an anecdote here from John Oto who bought
his first Ferrari in the 1980s after receiving an inheritance nice nepo uh he got frustrated when he failed to get on the ladder for the Ferrari Enzo a hyper car that preceded the law Ferrari the retired entrepreneur who set up a business in Florida offering Supercar test drives no longer owns the brand uh
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 VI Vigilant with my purchases or as aggressive as others so opaque and difficult you go from being uh if you're somebody who's who's
stretching to get a car you will likely Get Smoked by somebody who's just saying yeah I'll buy like there's people that would come in and say like what are the three cars that you need to move right now okay I just bought them make sure that I'm next in line for you know what
the car that I actually want here's an interesting comp uh when Porsche launched its IPO in 2022 it leaned heavily into comparisons with Ferrari but the stock has fallen by almost a third since its debut among CH amid challenges in China and a botched electric vehicle strategy this is the
tyon and now the maccon EV uh and Ferrari shipped what what was the number so Ferrari shipped it was like a thousand cars right uh they they Ferrari shipped 13,750 Vehicles yeah Porsche shipped 310,000 cars last year the German sports car maker is too big to keep Ferrari style weight list except for a few
models that's the GT3 RS that you mentioned uh at the extreme smaller Supercar brand struggle to deliver a steady a stream of new vehicles as Ferrari leading to cash crunches Aston Martin shares have lost more than 95% of their value since its 2018 IPO Bin'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 uh 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 w one it's the F1 it's the P1 and so people got kind of confused and whenever there's that confusion it leads to Brand
degradation in my opinion totally uh and so let's go to some reactions and people talking about Ferrari Morgan howel 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 you 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 gonna get the f80 uh and uh yeah he's been a big fan uh paler uh frend of the show is uh is also sponsoring Ferrari and uh the paler praying for exit says the paler Ferrari collab goes unreasonably hard look at this read the other sponsors on the
Ferrari team it's all killers AWS shell Celsius Celsius energy drink company sand and uh htl software which I I don't know that one 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
do if you like going to F1 yeah is just sponsor a team yeah sleep did that right I mean they sponsor they spor with the Claire's CL fantastic brilliant yeah uh and so David senra Founders podcast has a post here from Enzo Ferrari he kept the main thing the main thing Enzo Ferrari in front of his Marinello
Factory I don't care if the door gaps are straight when the driver steps on the gas I want him to be scared for his life I love that 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 uh to get the best driving experience and that's exactly what Peter teal did in 2005 when he did the gumball uh he did the gumball three three 3000 in a drop top Ferrari and you love to see it doing it in a drop top is great
it's so cool uh a lot of a lot of great Tech uh Founders and investors posing 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 abash Kumari 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 yeah this is quite distinct from most car companies so super super handmade Heritage obviously they're using tons of tooling now but uh 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 uh 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 um you can shop over 22,500 luxury watches on bezel they're all fully authenticated inhouse by bez's team of experts and Jordy I wanted to put you on the spot you said you were interested in picking up a card tank I got four for you right here I want to
let you know which one would you pick out of these four if you had to pick one I found another one on there it's on my saves we'll have to show it the next episode but I would go with something a little bit more uh vintage okay right um gold or silver what what are you thinking I feel like the gold is more
classic but I with the tank it works with that it works with the tank yeah so for us for us Irishman yeah but tank is fantastic watch uh very iconic design I love about it uh uh Lou cardier made the decision to alter the Roman numerals on the on the dial uh so it goes Roman numeral 1 2 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 that's wild and so I thought it was a really cool little subtle uh design touch and there's a bunch of those in
the cardier tank so if you're looking to pick pick up a dress watch I think the cardier tank is a fantastic choice so go head over to bezel and check it out uh let's move on to some absolute size Lords who have been cleaning up in the private credit markets high yield Harry says uh remind me to go back in time and
start a private credit fund uh and he just shows a picture of all these killers Tony wrestler Aries 13.8 billion net worth Mark Rowan at Apollo 11 billion Scott kapnick at HPS 4 billion Lawrence galoo at galoo Capital 3.3 billion his brother probably David galoo 3.3 billion dog Doug ostra at Blue ow
3.2 billion and it goes on everyone's a billion love how the two brothers have like are you know they're for the other ones but clearly 5050 Partners it's great you love to see it uh and so uh Bloomberg has a deep dive on private credit we're going to take you through uh we'll break it all
down uh 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 uh leverage buyout Kings and corporate Raiders would have
dominated any list of Masters of the Wall Street Universe today another corner of Finance has become a billionaire Factory we love billionaire factories uh the decidedly less factories it's great we should be making more of those why combinator Rebrand your tag Lane we're billionaire Factory
Founders fund the billionaire Factory uh the decidedly less glamorous business of making loans directly to companies often small and medium ones the kinds that are too that are squeezed out of traditional bond market and often deemed too risky for banks this line of work has been broadly known as private credit and it's
booming in only a decade the assets have more than tripled to 1.6 trillion as institutional investors and Wealthy individuals seek alternatives to regular stocks and bonds making private loans is lucrative thanks to higher yields and the potential for fund managers to earn a share of gains on top of steep fees
the world's uh the Bloomberg billionaires index calculated the fortunes of 18 beneficiaries of the private credit boom together these individuals who work at seven different companies are worth $61 billion only one Aries management corpse Tony wrestler ranks near the top of Finance as a group
they'd clock in above a single Finance year Blackstone Inc co-founder Steve schwarzman but that's like you know so lots of billionair 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 not on this list but I
think he's done very very well uh and I remember learning about as a kid and being like Oh so he does Finance cool and I had no idea like what that actually meant and now I get interesting there's not a there's really not a venture capital firm that I can think of that has looking at Aries one two three
four bunch of Apollo bunch of blue uh some VC firms have minted this uh it's a little bit tricky but uh I mean over Insight will probably do this just on fees I think they raised a 20 billion do fund right so that sure but that's not four Partners each being worth 3.3 billion whatever there's it is hard to
get up there I mean you could see Mark and Ben being up there and and the and the mar and Ben and if you look at General Catalyst certainly could prod Founders fund now if you count the new and minted you know people like Trey I'm sure couple but I mean even that's weird because it's like yeah Trey is you know
andal co-founder it's a little it's like where did he really make the money but uh yeah me it f almost doesn't count because and you're not thrown around $1.6 trillion dollar at FF uh but it's uh it's a it's a fascinating story so to be sure some of these Finance Executives
have labored for decades out of the Limelight laying the groundwork for their bonanzas in terms of demographics they're not a diverse Bunch they're all men all 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 199 collapse they've broken some knees before yep before the before the collapse of Michael milkins Drexel Burnham Lambert which of course was uh the the junk bond fund that figured out how to put leveraged debt into all these private
equity buyouts and and kind of laid the groundwork for the private Equity boom that we saw in the '90s and the ' 80s uh these credit mavens then created their own leverage 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 that eliminated Blackstone Brookfield KKR and some others who have private credit arms but are not private credit shops
primarily our tally which reflects valuations as of January 28th also doesn't include Executives who no longer have current roles at companies so there's probably more guys with billions tucked away from this boom uh and so we should do a deep dive on all of these they're fascinating but uh Aries is
probably the biggest here founded 28 years ago so yeah I mean I guess my buddy's dad was like there on the founding that's crazy because like yeah he was there super early uh it may be the OG of private credit uh but the sector's boom had has made it seem like the new new thing the value of its
publicly traded stock has almost tripled since the start of 2022 raising AR's 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 ale capital for the most private credit billionaires on
our list uh AR's Founders are among those whose Wall Street careers date back to milin Drexel uh their wrestler worked alongside his brother-in-law Leon black wrestler and fellow Drexel alumnus John K joined black when he co-founded an upstart PE firm Apollo wrestler which you might remember Apollo from Veil from
our Veil Deep dive because Apollo bought Veil Resorts and uh and installed an Apollo guy to run it for two decad went on a generational run generational run having a bit of a problem this ski season uh with long lines and labor strikes but still interesting to see where Apollo Aries and these other
Financial Titans have their fingers and what pies they're operating in uh I love the name they 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 Merl Lynch signed on a year later
he's currently the chairman of private Equity over the next few years Kaplan another former apollonian and arti who worked for Royal Bank of Canada came on board and so uh 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 um
they've acquired a bunch of different companies they own site 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 uh the world of
these like you know fast growing AI startups and so when we're talking about private credit here we're talking about huge companies that need access to debt but might not be able to issue bonds so when Apple goes to the public markets they have a trillion doll 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 buy exactly so it's it's a very stable business so they just go and they issue debt bonds uh but what if you're Redbull you're private or
what if you're a single digit billion dollar company you're very stable but you're not public or you're you know not ready to go and issue corporate bonds to on Wall Street well you call one of these guys and uh in Silicon Valley there has been a little bit of a boom with Venture debt where a company that
needs more money more juice will go raise $20 million series a and then they'll throw a $10 million Venture debt line on top of it and this makes sense credit is all over uh startups I mean literally using ramp not 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 RAM card right y 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 back loan y 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 and then as business starts scaling like
Celsius Alani new which we mentioned uh they might have a working capital problem because they need to pay Upfront for millions of cans of this stuff and then it's going to be a while until they send it over to inbev inbev puts it in the retail store retail stores pays them
the money flows back they're going to get a working capital problem and very quickly they can be like well we have we're we're a billion dollar company but we have $500 million of inventory on our balance sheet now because that's growing how what should you do about that well you need line of credit and so private
credit is another way to finance your business without delution and and the Venture side private credit there's so many different subcategories of of inventory financing Venture debt tons of different usages uh but in the there's a question that we were talking about earlier which is if the structure of
building a business is changed with the dawn of AI does that change the financing and almost certainly it does and so historically yeah this goes back to yesterday we talked about bootstrapping boot scaling boot scaling boot scaling where where a Founder might want to raise two three million bucks
out the gates and then can get to 50 plus million dos of Revenue you know just off of that alone yeah and so historically Venture Capital has been fantastic for financing R&D spend yeah so you raise some venture capital and then you hire a bunch of softw credit will not give you money to fund software
Engineers software engineering because you build the product you going pay 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 um and so that doesn't work to fund uh to fund uh R&D but venture capital is perfect for that hey hire a bunch of phds hire a bunch of software engineers build the next Google when it works off when it works out we're going to take a slice of the
business we're going to be fantastically uh wealthy and and and and we're going to be able to underwrite this now what happens if you only need $10 million a seed round to get off the ground or even less and then once you start scaling you're at $100 million of ARR with a 30 person team now you're in distribution
territory do you need to fund that with Equity financing yeah maybe maybe not if it's just a 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 customers a th000 bucks over two years and it costs you 200 bucks to acquire them well you have
to pay that 200 bucks up front and you're not going to get the th000 bucks for two years so there is a working capital issue you do have to finance that somehow you have to bridge that you could Bridge it with Equity but you could also Bridge it with debt and so there's a question about you know as
Founders get shrewder about how they are financing their business will we see Venture Venture debt increase or decrease and I think there's a potentially an argument for it increasing I don't know what's your I mean I think the challenge is cursor if they're saying hey we can do a five we can raise
$100 million at $2 billion and do a 5% delution round yep we have plenty of cash we get it all now we're not you know it's just not that impactful in terms of the founders saying well I'm giving up another you know 20% but for a company that is not as hot not as fast growing Etc but and and maybe they're
looking at doing around 20 on 100 yep 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 were going to be able to pay back yeah and the beauty of it is that uh let's say you do you know some sort of like hundred on a billion you give up 10% of
your company if you hit a rough patch you still own your company yeah maybe you have a guy on your board who's going to be like we got to get it together but you still could have board control you could have super voting you're not going to lose your company but if that 100
million is in debt and you miss payment there's going to be a debt Covenant there where they take over the whole happened with bench right where they shut down super quickly because they trip some covenants and they were and so the the the generalized knowledge within venture has always been uh avoid Venture
debt because it's amazing when things go perfectly but if you have some bump in the road which a lot of companies do you can be in a really bad position and lose your entire company yeah and it's not going to be a 3% loan like for any sort of venture debt you're looking at 10% the the other challenge here as to why
we haven't maybe seen more private credit or Venture debt become more popular is that Stripes internal financing products are pretty good right if you're doing a lot of Revenue on stripe or even a small amount of Revenue they will start offering you debt financing uh you know which is you know
they're competing working working capital uh Shopify has debt products there's a bunch of other companies within uh Ecom pipe was in many ways like trying to create a private credit marketplace where anybody could come on and basically 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 barber shops so like they would be able to say hey Boulevard offer your end customers um and then and and so pipe is in some ways competing with private credit firms that
might have originally gone to Boulevard and say we'll give you $100 $100 million to lend to your end customers but you guys sort of manage that program so pipe is in intermediary there but I'm sure pipe is then going and raising private like talk to the Apollos and the Aries and like the Goldman's
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 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 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 family fortune and he uh stepped out and raised a $50 million fund which seems low based on his you know family fortune yeah but trying to get some get some track record going going to be able to get yield on on on his family's I love it yeah cap girl has a little Meme
here bro hear me out I really feel like we we should start a fun together are there a lot of funds being launched right now maybe but it's me and you bro my dad was early at gso before Blackstone bought them and he'll seat us no one can do private credit like us bro and so this is back in 2023 and people
were definitely 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 yeah financing uh these big software platforms like Shopify and and
fintech companies like stripe can do it so there's a lot of competition there's a lot of funds Banks can do it you know there there's so many ways to get access to Capital that y 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% uh and so if you want to go deeper on this story uh Nicole whiskoff had a uh podcast episode go live with uh Peter Teal's largest investment outside of Founders fund is into to a Powerhouse private credit investor you've probably
never heard of uh listen in my conversation with dear friend and total killer Carrie Findley covering going straight from Wall Street going straight to Wall Street out of college joining third point at 25 and an epic eight-year run securing a $200 million investment from Peter for fund one and private
credit 101 so if you want to see what it means to start a private credit fund uh definitely recommend checking that out uh 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 Tora is doing I imagine they're doing a lot of stuff
around so they're Tora specifically focus on asset based private credit sure so this could easily be hey you want to buy 20,000 gpus we 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 that you're underwriting
appropriately and if it works out you make a you make a bunch of money uh pretty simple beautiful but obviously you got to do the deals you got to make sure you don't get taken advantage of got to make sure you don't get defrauded do your do diligence and make sure the deal is good um but we uh you know we
don't have a great transition but we want to talk about wander our sponsor uh find your happy place book a wander with inspiring views Hotel great amenities dreamy beds top tier cleaning in 247 coner 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 let's go to the next slide and show some of so this place is in Palm Springs and I remember when the fires were hitting I was on wander like we should go take the families here but great they uh pool is really cool nice
and circular there's so many place so Lush too you think of is this in Joshua Tree you said no Palm Springs pal Springs you think see it sort of nestled in the mountains awesome fantastic there's nothing better than a like a true mid-century that's been rehabilitated and modernized and um yeah
it has kind of like a Mad Men Vibe there's that whole sequence where he goes out to Palm Springs and stuff it's like it's the best yeah it's the best so there's a little bit of like 50s rev but you get the amenities of a modern place I used to not understand the Allure of
Palm Springs because I grew up in California like generally on the coast like why do people drive into the desert but then going to Palm Springs like there's something oh yeah there's magic in the air like it's it's deeply I don't know what it is we're going to have to talk to the experts on it Joe Rogan
there's something something in the air there it's just so reling do the research ourselves get out there stay in this wander yeah we're going to have uh we're gonna have John John Andrew CEO of wander on at some point in the near future because we're rolling out the ability to have guests on the show
they're going to be right in the middle between us it's going to be great put them in the truth Zone and uh have a little fun well let's move on to the timeline uh pav asparuhov says none of the big AI Labs have the Mandate of Heaven anymore Elon lost it with this absent father stuff the biggest signal
of an AI winter more so than any evals or anything interesting take fascinating to see uh that yeah I mean the AI winter thing is interesting because I have felt that post Chachi BT I felt like Chachi BT for when gbg4 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 I was looking at what happened in AI in 2024 and almost nothing major happened yeah because Chachi PT was in 2023 uh weo going into public access was in 2023 there were all these different uh major AI Milestones that all happened
in 2023 and 2024 was very chaotic and there was a lot of stuff 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 Marshall Capital it takes time to build the people from
crypto had to Pivot into AI before the crypto market then ripped right yeah yeah I mean those people definitely don't have the Mandate of Heaven they're they're they're Mandate of Hell potentially but 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 uh I have been having fun with Gro um It's seems a little bit more tur it's been giving me a little bit I actually have a is running I have a breaking news from Ben hilac who down he
uh he you know people have been grock is so integrated into X people have been using it and then sharing the results and so Ben asked grock 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 grock or one name from grock is Donald Trump so Donald Trump is saying that or sorry grock is saying that Donald Trump deserves the death penalties this is very interesting I I have a take on this is there any more context before I rip that's really it um and there's a guy eigor from xai saying
really strange and bad failure of the model we will fix this immediately yeah okay let me break it down so as we mentioned on a previous episode grock 3 because it's integrated with X is trained on your feed and so this went viral two days ago where people were asking uh they go to Gro and they say
who shares the most misinformation on X uh and and a bunch of people were sharing screenshots saying it shows me that Elon Musk grock 3 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 with Elon we don't know exactly how that works yet 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 y 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 grock 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
line is understand the universe exactly and how can you be understanding the universe if my understanding of the universe is different than yours like that does seem odd but it's an interesting product decision by the xai team to shove that in there and I think that it actually might wind up being one
of those things where the stated preference is I want the truth I want the vanilla answer but the revealed preference is I want the answer that confirms my biases and so everyone would to go to Wikipedia that says who's the what's the best company oh it's your company who's the best who's the best
looking guy Mir Mir on the wall who's the fairest of them all it's you that's the AI we're building the interesting thing is to Testa so Ben hilac notoriously went uh viral for claiming that he did the Jaguar Rebrand I just asked grock who did the Jaguar Rebrand and it actually got it right uh it talks
about it was led by the internal team including Gary mcover and Rod and Glover blah blah blah it was all done internally they they didn't accredit any external agencies so you can't get it right even though my timeline you would think that benac I don't think you I don't think you've posted about that
recently but I bet if you went and posted about it like congrats to benac 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 he 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 like I don't know if I like this but I'm I'm I like that you're trying something weird like this which is per highly personalized AI that might be a great product decision it might be sad it might have negative consequences in the same way that you go on Tik Tok
and one kid gets you know gaming content the other person gets content that's very negative and is like you're not pretty enough right that was a big problem with like young teens on Instagram seeing you know anorexia anorexia content for example uh and and and they're not showing that to everyone
but some people would get trapped in these little filter Bubbles and so it's it's odd we should almost have expected it that AI would eventually deliver that because it's purely optimizing for retention just like everything else it's just a retention engine and so what gets
a person to be happy with the response that they get from an AI well you tell them what they want to hear there you go and so if they ask who's getting the death penalty and it thinks you don't like Donald Trump it's going to say Donald Trump and if somebody who loves Donald Trump goes in there it's going to
be KL Harris or whatever you know and that's just and that will lead to product satisfaction lower turn 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
Pro less profitable products because of 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 QB an intense selection process uh 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 reindustrialize 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 hadrien neros eparis openx we know all these companies radiant open AI applied intuition Machina Labs like robotics ACS is on here nice galvanic yeah galvanic uh zero zero Mark makes the the guns right yeah they make uh like Auto auto
aim basically for 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 event speaking of
neuros we also have some breaking news neuros uh just announced that they want a contract to send 6,000 americanmade drones to Ukraine Fant that is is as of this morning uh they just announced it so incredible progress there well congrats to saurin Fantastic nominative determinism his name is saurin and he's
a drone pilot saurin over the Ukrainian Highlands into a Russian tank yep uh let's that we got to we got to have zor 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 scen 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 flyed around himself like it's the most insane video uh it's fantastic uh he's he's a really really talented and it makes for an incredible investment pitch you bring a VC good pitch this is better than some yeah and that's how you that's who you want building that Tech is somebody who is
world class at using the tech yeah and so he's been over to Ukraine uh delivered stuff done trainings all sorts of stuff and love to see that he's building hardware for the American Military so good uh so let's stay on defense tech let's go over to palen here elano has a fantastic review of Dr
karp's new book uh a call to Arms literally for Tech Bros a few bangers from the from the review in the Washington Post Tech Bros who have spent the boom years of Silicon Valley Revolution uh perfecting the home delivery of chicken fingers better grow up they need to refocus their
engineering genius on helping America to defend Western values by developing weapons to kill our enemies before our enemies develop weapons to kill us such a crazy quote I love it uh if a US Marine asks for a better rifle we should build it the author's right and the same goes for software and so obviously in
the military uh the the US military has been demanding better Hardware better software you talk to anyone that's worked in the military they all will tell you oh there so much paperwork I talked to a guy I went to high school with who did a tour on a submarine and I was like what was that like and he was
just like it's a lot of paperwork and he's literally F when he says paperwork he doesn't mean you know uh like SAS products he means literally writing things down on paper because that's how a lot of the stuff is still done and paler obviously build builds software to make things more efficient uh there's
another quote here uh from Peter teal says the company thrives on its Bad Boy energy I'd rather be seen as evil than incompetent Peter teal once said what a great quote uh and that's absolutely true uh better to have a little bit of negative press and a little bit of uh you know haters uh than another 911 for
example um whether or not Americans can agree on on how and why to defend the country karp and zisa make a stirring call for the tech industry to follow palen'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 uh karp an absolute dog we love him on the show highly recommend going and picking up the book I think I took it home actually uh I'm going to read it
over the weekend and the audio book is also available so you can go and download it and you can uh buy it and leave through it and and we have a great video we do about carp yeah we do a car oh yeah go go repost that we posted it on X uh 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 uh let's move on to society society says no one does anything at 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 link below on how a few
people even start as well uh on how few people even start as well as some ways to enable extraordinary outcomes with marginally more effort he calls it the Dead Planet Theory good cougan 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 Paro principle the 8020 rule one example of this phenomenon is that 10% of Twitter users account for 92% of tweets this Dynamic can be seen in interpersonal relationships hobbies and
careers you can use this to quickly rise to the top or purely get a little more enjoyment out of the things you do day-to-day in the scope of all creation it can be hard to see the impact of this principle in action but by separating things events and people by category and interest it quickly becomes apparent
what do you think Jordy yeah I mean uh you it feels this way all the time that especially as you start to get involved in any specific industry or Pursuit there are just not that many people taking it super super seriously right even with in Tech like an example that's highly relevant to
what we're doing how many fulltime podcasters do you know in Tech like truly people that it's Lex dwar cash David senra David SRA acquired FM yeah Acquired and then that's kind of it and a lot of people projects but they're not going full send on it 100% uh Patrick ASI 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 can you be it's also exciting you know you can go do a new thing and if you focus on it for a few
months to be able to get into the top 20% of that Pursuit right yeah if you've never played piano before but you start playing for an hour a day yep 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 uh so it's a good good reminder to just do things yeah and it goes to the puts and outputs thing like people focus on like I want to have a top podcast but the input is just how much are you podcasting how much time are you putting into that oh I I want to be in shape well are you
working out as much as the people that are in shape like 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 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 yeah that uh consistency you know uh 10% of people at at the beach account for 92% of the
workouts you know those 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 about Ferrari earlier now
we're talking about Jeep uh Jeep owners are being hit with popup ads inside their cars and it's all part of santis plan to make an extra 20 billion dollar 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 this is the kind of content that you just can't get anywhere else yep you can't besides it's 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 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 to watch White Lotus last Sunday and I'm
like why am I getting an ad I pay for this product and it's and it's one thing if you're a substack and it's like an industry substack and you're paying for this like amazing investment of time into this like thoughtful analysis and they have a like a quick paragraph of an ad I don't mind that but paying if
you're buying a car and people will definitely be in the dealership being you know saying do you want the ad free model of this Jeep or do you want you know you okay with with ads and they're saying oh it's $1 thousand difference I'll just take the ads yeah and then yeah you're you're turning on your AC
and you're getting a popup uh I can't imagine you know but but from The Advertiser or 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 billboard y yeah Jeep hey maybe maybe just buy some Billboards and
then put them on ad quick and that's your solution yeah yeah yeah I would rather I'd rather see my ads outside of the vehicle exactly exactly yeah and this is coming from guys that love ads more yeah we do love ads but again the whole point of going with the ad model was that we weren't going to make people
pay for the content so it's like we we picked a business model and we're sticking with it it's way worse when you tell you have a con you have a compact you have a contract a social contract with your customer that hey this is how we're doing this this like you go on Instagram You're Expecting ads and
Facebook has always been Senator we sell ads and if all of a sudden it was like you pay and you get ads it it gets very tricky yeah X was in a little bit of that scenario for a while where you paid and then there were still ads and it was kind of but now now I can pay and I
don't see any ads that's fantastic and of course if you want to use it for free you so can which is great um let's uh let's move on to Matt Turk he says for any meaningful acquisition you'll meet your future acquirer two to four years before the deal time to start building those relationships now little bit of wisdom
from venture capitalist TR responds hi my name is Trung yes he wants to mer trun trun Turk Inc uh but yeah this is super smart even if you're competitive with your potential acquire meet the CEO develop a friendship uh if you're worried to get on a call with somebody because they're
going to get some info from you you're probably not even competitive in the first place so and it gets in the sense that you're just not even you're not even relevant yeah and my takea away from this is like uh 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 fund raise fails if you haven't been building these relationships for very it's going to be a fire cell 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 going to get stock in this new company maybe I'll become CEO of the holding company y 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 comp there's not enough Monopoly power there's too many other players yeah it's easier to get a big Venture round done like it's 10 times easier 50 times easier to get a big Venture round done with on 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 I love that he's going direct I love that he's given it to the fans he says who should we pick as the next Bond uh and so Alex here chimes in with uh some interesting ideas
I want to hear your take on this uh the formula to revive classic bond is simple cast Henry caval obviously make it a 60s 70s period piece that's interesting go back in time I like that film is 100% PL practical effects that's completely impossible now they use CGI for
everything uh but yes you don't want it to mean like a Marvel movie but you're obviously going to be using set extensions CGI for like little things here and there uh but in general it's like stick to the actual explosions don't just CGI everything don't have him like breaking through massive buildings
and going off into space keep it grounded devote a silly budget to finding and casting completely known but extremely hot brown-haired actresses from European country that's hilarious but the Bond girl thing was legit it was it was Sensational uh I grew up on that zenya autotop uh from Golden Eye I don't
know what was the first B movie you saw wasn't born yet golden eye uh score uh theh Source the score exclusively from Golden ey 64 that's pretty funny allow caval to be a more ruthless male chauvinist like get him like like really let him get in his connory bag it's inter because like like caval is like a
gamer he's not like this like hardcore like hyper masculine guy could be a gunslinger though but but but I do think that if you go back to the old uh to the old Bond films uh they were satires and people don't remember this but uh what killed Bond was uh Austin Powers are you
familiar with this do you know Austin Powers I know I didn't know there was so so the early Bond films were deliberately over the top and they were supposed to be funny they were supposed to be making fun of more serious movies and so in the movies you would be watching and bond would like sleep with
a woman in the opening get out of bed and be like okay I got to go to a job then he'd sleep with another woman in the in the act too and then he'd wind up leaving the exploding Fortress with another girl and it was like that's a lot guys like 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 to just like what's the best
James Bond villain line exactly and so we think of that as funny now because we're like oh it's so funny in 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 senses of
humor as well uh and so 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 dun where we are texting our absolute boys saying if you're not in La get to La we're suiting up we're headed
to the cinema yep no women allowed just just ridiculous uh but yeah I mean a lot of the stuff it got it got saing 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 uh Wall Street Journal here again front page of the finance business and finance section Amazon MGM Studios to steer Bond franchise the uh
the brockoli Family Feud with Amazon MGM Studios over the James Bond franchise appears to have reached a resolution Barbra baroli and her stepbrother Michael Wilson who have long controlled the 007 franchise said in a statement with Amazon MGM Thursday that they reached an agreement to hand over
creative control of it to a new joint venture with the studio The Venture will house the franchise's intellectual property rights Amazon will now control who will play Bond who will write the next script and when the film goes into production three critical pieces that so far have been held up by a yearl long
stalemate and that's why we haven't seen a new Bond film in a while I would random but I would love to understand how the deals work between the James Bond franchise and Aston Martin the Aston Martin is the obvious car that's such a James Bond car but you can't imagine that the James Bond franchise
would yeah we're just going to slot it in for free so import such important marketing for ason Martin and it's the same thing with Omega uh so in the original books James Bond wore a Rolex but then Omega came in and did the deal for product placement and so the bond watch for the last like 40 years has
been Omega and so they continue to invest in that relationship because even though they have to pay every single time it drives sales and so it just it just works out and so it's a little that's probably why Mark andri bought as Omega many people think of him as the James Bond
capital for sure uh who' you pick as the next Bond Jeff Bezos asked U Amazon and broli 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 broli family retained their power to decide when a new Bond
movie could go into production the family didn't trust the data minded Amazon with its character and the parties couldn't agree to a path forward for a new film The Wall Street Journal previously reported the impass men the franchise has hasn't moved any closer to its next installment no time to die
debuted in 2021 the franchise typically released a film every year or two starting with Dr No in 1962 there were rarely long gaps in between installments um we're honored to continue this treasured Heritage and look forward to ushering in the next so Calder cder in the chat has a good point he says caval
is not a good pick Bond needs to be unknown L everyone sees them as their former roles Daniel Craig was a Shakespeare actor before Bond lay but that was very like C CL and he plays kind of a bondes figure so yeah I agree because Henry caval he's Superman he's also in that other spy movie The
Man from Uncle uh not a huge franchise and then he's also the Witcher guy and so you think like to see John Foo cast as uh cast as the next James Bond you know the cool Bachelor with the Ferrari yeah get him in Aston you know maybe maybe upgrade a little bit we'll see anyway if uh Pop Quiz if James Bond
pulled out a credit card what credit card would he be using ramp absolutely go to ramp.com time is money save both easy to use corporate cards bill payments accounting and a whole lot more all in one place maybe that will be good 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 so we're not f Fus as much on the content today as much as I think the content no no no I'm just saying but
sometimes you got to I got to I got to recognize you're nailing the transitions I appreciate that and uh go and we have another post here from the ramp official X account uh CFO who's not on ramp how did you spend $ 76,7 on the company card in a single day that one Rogue sales guy a private jet
and it's a post from malfie Jets Tik Tok and you know what uh that's the beauty of ramp you can s 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 yeah one note today uh you logged into ramp and you said how do we spend how do we spend so much money and then we just look through and we can see exactly how it's all spent it's it's great yeah it's all watches cars and the usual Jets but that's why we do this add quick
billboards exactly uh let's move on to uh some interesting stuff going on in China uh the 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 um so uh yeah apparent when you when you massively increase your money supply Equity is 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 uh uh an
unbiased view so I asked Gro 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 their money supply uh the cut they cut the reserves they cut interest rates by 50 basis points and they released $142 billion do to stimulate lending and
growth the GDP growth has been pretty good 5% last year uh this met the government's Target but relied heavily on stimulus and exports and so there there's still a little bit of fragility in the economy now they have a property crisis going on new hous new housing starts fell 23% in 2024 with home prices
down 30% since 2021 that's rough like that is almost Great Recession level in the United States a lot of people had million dollar homes they sold them for 700k yeah and people don't realize the the Chinese stock market is not as accessible as it is in the US the government wants has historically want
like like the 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 that
and so people will buy a property and just have it sit empty so they're not even earning Yi and so for it to not be a total waste they betting on it increasing in value and now people have stopped moving into the cities broadly y so that there's actually an an outflow in 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 uh consumer spending remains low retail is sluggish we've seen this in the Apple data but we've seen it in all no if you look at
caring group sales is down 30% in they Herz is that right or they own Gucci Gucci okay yeah and so yeah at the top of the the higher income uh Chinese populace they're certainly saving more money uh there's also deflation risk going on uh the the the the Bank of China is trying to inject liquidity but
credit growth is still slow there's a population decline I didn't realize this but the population shrank by 1.3 million last year the official numbers which nobody actually people don't know the other thing is is generally the CCP you know people can point and say and say you know the CCP has plenty of
critics the CCP has always been able to say we're lifting people out of poverty we're in 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 they're sort of uh
as much as any sitting White House wants to make the economy great yep CCP in some ways their power is built around the ability to continue to deliver they have to economic growth is the opiate of the masses over there and if you don't have economic growth as an opiate of the
masses you need a different opiate of the masses whether that's brain rot Tick Tock or drugs or whatever else you like there will be a revolution unless there is something that appeases the populace and makes them think I'm I'm happy I'm living a good life and so yes you're right uh there's there's a lot of uh
mixed signals here official data highlights growth but independent analyses emphasize structural issues like over capacity and weak demand and uh some forecasts now uh predict that China could grow uh the growth could drop to 3% annually in the medium term and then they're growing you know in
line with the US everyone was expecting 10% forever they're going to destroy the America but uh it's unclear how much they can this up the government is considering. trillion FC package over five years uh to prop up the economy and so you can only do that for so long what were you going to say 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 anytime 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 status oriented
purchases those are some of the first to kind of stop when um and they do have China does have a a mechanical watch brand natively but that's not what's killing pect sales in China yeah yeah it's it's actually Surplus or if you have if you had 20 Apartments y somewhere and you 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 grock I like those facts I like that it boil
it down that that easily that actually works for 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 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 uh especially when speaking uh to you know American Media and uh you know many people would argue that the Chinese company is like really massaging the
numbers around a lot of economic data in the same way the United States does too right like we are guilty of that as well um you see this in in jobs reports where oh jobs you know like you know employment is is uh 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 and like not a good signal for your long-term Health your economy well I like that uh Gabby Goldberg is also liking grock 3 she says grock 3 is very very good uh lots of people sharing this sentiment uh especially on X people are enjoying it I think I think what
what you what you hit on earlier in the show is that it's a very differentiated product yes by almost having some memory of what you're interested in right and some idea of the ideas the people the companies you know Brands Etc that are relevant to you and the stories that are
relevant to you like claw if you talk to Claude it's not going to surface that you talked about F1 last week yeah right and also the easy entry points like uh 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 uh Chinese M1
money supply post but I probably could have clicked this to start my interaction and said hey grock I want to go deeper here give me the data pull it all together and so yeah pretty good product an interesting product they're taking risks which I think I like to see on the product side uh so Tech sales guy
says so what's it like being in Tech sales and there's a and there's a iMessage back and forth hey is this Timo Timothy from clever hi Matt yes it is uh cold call me again and I'll ruin your entire quarter 100K likes people are getting sick you got to be good if you're an SDR this had a yeah 100K likes
crazy it hits people are sick phone calls I try to be really kind to salespeople because I respect the dollar and I respect the work that they do I respect that they're trying to put food on their on their table just doing their job uh I definitely try to be I'm just like thank you know 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 yeah but uh be nice to salespeople and it'll come back around yeah I actually have a text replacement on my phone I wonder if it's still active uh but basically uh text
replacement let me see if I have this DN no I don't have it anymore but I used to have a uh I used to have a like shortcut where if somebody if I got a cold email from someone who's clearly just added me to some list and they were going to clearly email me like 10 times to transy
and S that 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 would still be very clear and I would say hey like I'm not in the market for this product no one at my company wants to buy this we're happy please remove me from your
CRM remove everyone at my company for our CRM and just never contact us ever again and it's very aggressive and it's but it was like nicely worded it was like good luck with your business like but I don't want any I don't I don't want any inbound from you at all and it was and it was worded in a way that was
like it was firm but not mean and I think iced it correctly and it really did help clean up my inbox so I wasn't getting as much cold inbound uh which is important but it's going to get worse with AI and all these AIS sdrs let's go to atlas creatine cycle he says No One Believes In AGI anymore by the way
you're all keeping your jobs and GDP growth will continue ticking up in the 1 to 3% range for the foreseeable future it was all a prank by big poster to sell more engagement let's go what a great Post Yeah you got to watch out for big poster they will you a dream to run numbers toally totally um they will get
you they will get you well speaking of big poster there was a viral uh 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 precidio was named people said oh the precidio in San Francisco is going to be gone and Trey chimes in to
clear up the confusion Trey Stevens over at Founders fund and anderol says I've worked in the SF presidia for the last 11 years it is an amazing Refuge from the insan of SF City governance because if you don't know the prio is federal land and so it's not subject to the SF
City governments even though it's like directly in San Francisco uh he says all this freak out about the procedo being eviscerated SF Chronicle or abolished the SF standard is completely unhinged the precidio 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 alcatra 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 you do you have any memories going around on on the like the
faer boats around Alcatraz 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 being like are we really going to go here there's all these bad guys conspiracy theories are so fun like at Disneyland if you get lost they'll make you go on it's a small world and they'll turn you into one of the small world kids did you ever fall for that one that was big amongst like
the six-year-olds you know we you remember I sent you that post it was a bunch of like eight-year-olds talking about on a podcast talking about pizza we need we need a somebody should do a podcast kid conspiracy theory conspiracy theories can dogs really not speak English because when I say you know come
they come or wait if I how do we know they don't understand if I stay up past 10 tonight I'll turn into a pumpkin like that can't be true right and he's like no no I I I heard that from my parents too my cousin said he my cousin that it real yeah it's real yeah kid conspiracies are great uh one of the
best ads for Alcatraz the rock with Sean connory have you seen that movie you haven't seen any movies it's fantastic haven't seen any movies you gotta watch that uh that if if that goes back in theaters we gota we got to take the guys to see it it's fantastic Nick Cage Sean
connory uh they he's a former prisoner there a there's a a bunch of like Rogue agents that take over alcatra they're going to launch a missile and so he has to take a Seal Team Six to go in and break 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 cool yeah and when you think about it I mean maybe those exist I'm sure they exist around La but nobody's made this sort of like franchise sort of uh slightly retro fun Cinema experience and we would certainly be weekly active users of that for sure uh shown up in a
talks I think it exists a nice wander somewhere potentially yeah um but let's move on to another ad from ad Qui out of home advertising Made Easy and measurable if you need to run a billboard or out of home campaigns for your company we recommend ad quick say goodbye to the headaches of out of home
advertising only ad Qui combines technology outof home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe and uh they uh uh uh they recently are we're promoting another podcast from them on a recent episode of The Mad vertising podcast we asked uh janthony long how F how how
young founders with large Ambitions should approach building their brand during the early days so if you want to hear about that head over to their X account and listen to that clip anyway let's move on to deep seek is freef falling in the charts meanwhile CH did you Skip One uh yeah do you want to do
the leic one I just wanted to do this because I think it's uh I I I just want to prepare the audience that 30 years from now we will eventually pass the torch to our sons yes and we you know there's going to be an announcement we're going to say that you know our our little Lads are taking over the family
business and uh get used to some new you know host uh you know eventually we're going to pass the torch and I think people should just honor that respect it so Howard lck is an incred incredibly inspiring entrepreneur are you familiar with this he built caner Fitzgerald The
Firm was destroyed in 911 they lost 60% of their head count in in the in the terrorist attacks he was spared because he was dropping his son off at school he just got very very lucky uh rebuilt the firm and now his two sons uh Howard uh age 27 and 28 are going to be running cancer Fitzgerald because Howard letnik
is stepping into the Trump Administration and so uh flexed up first year says imagine going from a sales and trading analyst in April of 22 to chairman of your bank at age 27 that honestly rocks now you forget that Howard lutnick was uh making a million dollars a day at caner Fitzgerald pre
911 uh 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 people uh nepotism you know got attacked quite a lot even though historically it's sort of the norm uh and what people don't realize is that growing up
absorbing yeah constant you know 247 exposure to an a incredible entrepreneur yep even if you end up 50% as good as your dad that's still way way way better than the average yep um so yeah huge fan huge fan think it's uh overall it's cool I mean obviously they're going to have to get in there and perform y 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 as fast as he put you in I'm sure he'll pull you out if you're not uh delivering results so yeah but good luck to them uh so let's go to rajvir he says deep seek
is Free Falling in the charts meanwhile chat GPT has maintained a top 10 position for nearly two years surely all the think boys will update their hot takes from a month ago okay so Raj is particularly qualified here cuz 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 die um and uh anyway 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 and and
uh I'm you know not surprised to see this and 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 ffr says makees sense why he was called General Electric now it does sound like a you know Marvel villain or
something but what a cool project really shows you that g GE was on top of the game back then just building crazy stuff and uh you know you see this trend at companies today and you can identify them uh and you know a lot of a lot of the historic uh Power law companies have kind of lost their luster but it looking
back at photos like this remind you that uh how cool it is to be at a you know hard tech company that can just build things and test things and 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 was probably anyway uh let's go to should go back and study these companies more yeah when we have a single day without onslaught of headlines we'll go back in more yeah yeah yeah we need to bring in more of the historical deep Dives uh 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 it'd be great to go through uh 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 grock 3 absolutely by the way everybody loves chocolate every does love chocolate uh beat out Gemini 2.0 flash thinking and Gemini 2.0 pro uh and I think people were a little bit uh debating how how legit this was because now with test time compute you can throw a ton of
inference cost at it and basically do a consensus you generate the same results like hundreds of times and then you see which ones the model thinks are best and so it's more expensive this is what did with throwing 200k gpus at yeah so is he being dishonest and 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 in the future I want a Roomba that has a thousand phds inside of it working to decide what next particle of dust I should pick up there you go and the inference should be millions of human years calculating what where the dog fur
is to pick it up and and that's fine and I love that and I think that's very funny that yeah I want a robot that's looking at the biggest tree in my yard and and just predicting which Leaf will fall the leaf to fall next and just reaching up and grabbing it exactly I don't even want it to actually no let it
fall until it's like an inch below the ground and catch it like you're an NFL wide receiver yeah and yeah 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 so good stuff uh always fun to follow the uh the AI chatbot Arena they're dking it out and good luck to them uh this was fun from Dan McCormack Joe Rogan is obsessed with create creatine gummies Rogan was pitching Magnus Carlson and millions of listeners
on Creatine and 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 of pachy McCormick and has helped out on not boring quite a bit y 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 and he had this theory that that gummies would be the way that women
got into creatine sure and I totally didn't believe it because as like a Bro Science bodybuilder you know uh interested type uh person right um I had always Associated creatine with putting on mass but has all these other benefits and so I ended up not investing because I just thought the thesis was was wrong
even though Dan's amazing and then he got it to such a ridiculous run rate in like four months I was like okay I was wrong I'm going to invest and uh and he's since you know doing tens and tens of millions of Revenue profitable you know has done very very well so uh awesome to see yeah uh yeah 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 yeah and so you know if you have more water in your body overall in your
brain in your muscles everywhere you will just feel better you will perform better and that's like kind of as basic as it gets which I thought was an interesting like distillation I'm sure there's a lot of scientists that would give you a much more complicated explanation for what's going on but that
that that simple explanation was actually kind of stuck in my mind anyway let's move on to some uh oh we got to ring the size gong before we head out for the day together AI raises $35 million series B at a $3.3 billion valuation uh today we're announcing a massive series B led by by General
Catalyst incredible to see the team uh 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 theis gong and then SI gone got to give some credit to Lee uh Justin cyan the team at long journey
they've been on an absolute Terror they were early in cruso 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 which is always a goal so great work another big AI round uh more on the
model delivery level yeah really betting on open source choose your model vend it into different Enterprises uh but excited to see where the product goes and where the team builds with that huge stack of cash well lots to do so the last uh the last thing I mean we got two I mean we're still we're streaming you
we both probably have to go home but there's two things one I wanted to shout out Rob at hman lab he just sent a bunch of matina to uh he sent it into the cage so the the boys are be jacked up on Yates great and then the second thing I don't even know if we can pull this up
now but WX just announced a new uh humanoid robot called you know literally while we were streaming called the Neo gamma and saying they're saying it's one step closer to home so they the market figure seems is building general purpose robots but more oriented around um BMW manufacturing manufacturing like labor
and I think one 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 kitchen wear brand cool um but uh the visuals the visuals in
this are are amazing yeah and uh looks friendly for sure you were yeah I think we're looking forward to a world where we can have one of these walk over and hand us you know bate bottle of dump I'd love to see a humanoid robot Papa do bottle Bott of champ that's the real test of AGI can
you saber a bottle of Dom effectively can you really saber it saber saber like use the use the saber of the sword to pop off the top that's the way you open it if you're really really on it we we got to do that for the Dom episode practice 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 no seems like it's the weekend yeah it's the weekend does it feel like the weekend yeah start feel like weekend uh you'll be hearing from us on Monday in the meantime think about leaving us a five star review on Apple
podcast 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 leave an add in your comment why not there's a bunch of anything that pumps us up in
the algorithm we appreciate follow us on a we'll be live streaming over there soon and we'll be doing a Dom episode next week when Ben gets his it's fantastic anyways great week Brothers thank you for watching thanks for listening and watching we'll see you Monday see you Monday bye