Pitch Summary:
GoDaddy is transforming from a domain registrar to a comprehensive platform for AI-driven business solutions. The company’s Airo platform automates business processes, enhancing customer value and increasing average revenue per user. GoDaddy’s Agent Name Service (ANS) aims to become the global address book for AI agents, leveraging its extensive domain base. This initiative presents a significant growth opportunity, potentially transforming GoDaddy’s business model. The company’s strong market position and existing customer relationships provide a solid foundation for the adoption of its AI solutions. Despite market skepticism, GoDaddy’s strategic initiatives position it for long-term growth in the evolving digital landscape.

BSD Analysis:
GoDaddy’s ANS initiative could redefine its role in the digital ecosystem, offering a high-margin platform business model with network effects. The company’s first-mover advantage and extensive domain base provide a competitive edge in establishing ANS as a standard for AI agent discovery and verification. GoDaddy’s Airo platform enhances customer engagement and retention, offering integrated AI solutions that streamline business operations. The potential for ANS to become a critical infrastructure component in the AI-driven internet presents a substantial upside, while the company’s existing business provides a stable revenue base. GoDaddy’s strategic focus on AI positions it to capture emerging opportunities in the digital transformation of small businesses.

Pitch Summary:
Ionos is strategically positioned to benefit from the shift towards agentic AI, leveraging its European regulatory compliance as a competitive advantage. The company’s AI Service Passport (AISP) aims to provide a trusted infrastructure for AI agents, addressing identity and liability issues in a regulated market. Ionos’s Momentum platform integrates AI tools into its offerings, enhancing customer retention and creating upsell opportunities. The company’s focus on European data sovereignty and compliance makes it a preferred partner for public sector and security-critical industries. Ionos’s strong market position and low churn rates provide a stable revenue base, while its AI initiatives offer potential for significant growth.

BSD Analysis:
Ionos’s strategy to capitalize on the European regulatory environment is a key differentiator, as US hyperscalers face challenges due to legal structures. The AISP could become a recurring revenue stream, acting as a compliance toll for AI agents. The Momentum platform’s integration of AI tools positions Ionos ahead of potential disruptors, offering a digital team concept to small businesses. This deep integration increases customer stickiness, reducing churn rates further. Ionos’s focus on compliance and data sovereignty aligns with the growing demand for secure and regulated AI solutions, potentially expanding its market share in Europe.

Description:
On episode 229 of The Compound and Friends, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Michael …

Transcript:
So, you guys have Bethany Mlan writing for you? >> Yeah, she wrote a great investigation. >> Amazing. She’s like an OG. She is an OG. >> Love Bethany Mlan. She’s cooking on all sorts of new stories, too. We’re fired up. >> She’s been on Barry’s uh We’ve never had her on She’s been on Barry’s podcast on Bloomberg uh probably at least once, maybe more. >> You should have her on here after our next story with her. She’s amazing. >> She’s great. >> She’s great. But yeah, that newspaper was printed on the news sheets from the paper Nathaniel worked at in high school in his local paper and they uh they turned on the printers for us. It was awesome. >> That’s cool. >> Very cool. >> So, were you a you were a journalist as well? >> First kid out of high school. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I went to Martha’s Vineyard Regional High and this is uh my my hometown yearrounder and both my parents had been war journalists for the Wall Street Journal, Middle East, North Africa and uh I thought I was going to follow the the same path. So that was my my first gig. >> That’s wild. >> Yeah. >> And then this guy goes and has a very successful career in biotech and I convince him that go back to journalism. That’s the real industry where there’s uh promise. >> That’s where the real money is being made. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Why invest in companies that keep getting up rounds from Nvidia when you could write news stories? >> Um, so just now, uh, Anthropic announced that they’re raising 30 at 38 billion dollars. Check this out, boys. >> Look at this chart. You think this has ever happened before? From zero in January 2023 to 100 million in January 2024 to a billion dollars in 25 and today that a 14 billion run rate. I mean, no. Right. >> That’s got to be an end of one situation. >> You’re smiling. >> It’s crazy. >> It’s unbelievable, right? >> Unbelievable. >> Fraud scam. What are you thinking? >> No, I do not think that is a fraud. I I use Claude every day. So, I just switched. >> Yeah. Fantastic. >> Within the last like 10 days from chat. >> Do you use the desktop Claude or you’re using the login on the >> I use it on my >> I Oh, I Okay, so this desktop Claude nonsense. >> You got to get it on the desktop. >> I had to Google I had to YouTube the video. I couldn’t figure out how to install it. >> You know the best way to figure it out. You’re already in the wrong place. >> Where? >> You just ask Claude. >> Just ask Claude. I I think I did do that. >> You ask Claude and Claude will show you the way. >> All right. So, here’s what I did. I wrote myself a a code for like how to find the nearest bathroom. >> How’d that go? >> I couldn’t figure out how to launch it. Like it worked sort of, I guess, but then like it didn’t it didn’t work. >> I have to say one of the apps you’re least likely to use when you’re in a >> Not me. >> No, but I’m saying it’s like it’s not one where you really can afford much buffer time. >> Well, >> you maybe want to hire a pro to build that app, but Claude Code can do a lot of other things. >> So, what are you are you use? Are you coding? >> I mean, I’m doing whatever it is that people are doing with Claude on the desktop. >> Okay. So, that’s that’s so I don’t I’m web- based. I’m using it like chachibuite. Like very basic. >> And how have you been finding? >> You guys are making me feel very old. >> No, no, no. It’s all good. You’re No, it’s unbelievable. >> You’re not gonna be obsolete. It’ll be at least a few months before it takes over. >> I appreciate that. Um >> I’ve actually been building a bot. It’s been training on the transcripts of your podcast. >> I feel like I’m I’m I’m so unpredictable. You can’t you can’t train on it. >> I know. It’s true. It’s hard to get the AI to know to call someone for putting their headphones on wrong when it’s actually >> do that because I always butcher phrases like you can’t program a bot to recreate me. You know that is famous last words in basically every dystopian movie sand or grain of salt. Like to me they’re interchangeable. >> You just you just break the AGI by by messing up uh everyday phrases. >> It’s a happy accident. >> All right. You got my good side? >> Yes, I do. >> Do I have one? >> Both. >> The left. >> All right. So guys, this is the structure of the show today. Um we’re going to go through your names and your recent stories. Uh, but before we do that, we just have to nod toward what’s going on in the markets right now, and we want to hear what you think. It’s a little bit chaotic out here. There are large cap, mega cap stocks dropping 12% based on tweets from like venture capitalists. It’s like completely wild. And my guess is that you guys would look at this sort of thing as an opportunity, but maybe I’m wrong, but I’d love to hear what you think. So, we’ll go there first. And then we’re going to do these are the these are the names that um these are the names that we want to get to. Evolve, which you and I talked about. >> Great. >> Uh Rich Tech, you guys mentioned wanting to do Sable? >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> Sable offshore. >> And then I think we can we do sphere. Can we do a little Sphere stuff? >> I can mention Sphere quick. Yeah. All right. >> And today it’s in the news. >> Do you have restrict do you have restrictions on any any of those? >> No. So the one thing we can’t talk about, you know, specific active trades or something. >> Spike club. >> Okay. All right. Got it. >> Shall we start it up? >> Yes. >> Three claps coming in. >> Compound and friends episode 229. Oh, today’s show is brought to you by Invesco. Looking to add some stability to your portfolio? Invesco’s fixed income solutions are designed to help. Invesco’s team of 181 fixed income investment professionals manage 519 billion in assets, giving them the scale and expertise to navigate any market condition. Whether you’re looking for investment grade or munis or other types of bonds, Invesco’s fixed income strategies are designed to help find the stability you may need. Visit invesco.com/fixedinome to learn more about their comprehensive fixed income solutions and how they can help strengthen your portfolio’s foundation. Invesco. Let’s rethink possibility. All data from Invesco as of September 30th, 2025, fixed income investments are subject to credit risk of the issuer and the effects of changing interest rates. Before investing, consider the funds investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Visit invesco.com for a perspectus containing this information. Read it carefully before investing. Invesco Distributors Inc. My god, episode 229. Can you believe that we’ve done this 229 times, guys? Amazing. >> All right. Well, believe it cuz it happened. All right. >> Your 229th call. I mean, it’s unbelievable how the time goes by. But all right, guys. Welcome to uh the Compound Friends, number one investing podcast, YouTube show, social media series, whatever you want to call it pretty much in the world. It’s documented. I could back that up if uh anyone needs me to. Um, so excited to have a very special episode today. You guys are about to hear one of the coolest stories that I have come across in the last couple of years. Probably something happening that you have no idea about. Uh, but if you’re into investing and you’re into markets and you’re a news junkie, this story combines all of those things into one very cool one and I can’t wait to tell it to you. So, thank you so much for watching. Thank you for listening. My guest today, it’s a big buildup, right guys? Unbelievable. Try to live up to it. >> Nathaniel Horowitz is the CEO of Hunterbrook Media and Hunterbrook Capital. He was the youngest venture partner at RA Capital, a biotechnology and healthcare investment fund by over a decade. He co-founded Hunterbrook after extensive experience in company building and investing in the healthc care sector. Welcome, Nathaniel. Thank you for being here. Excited. >> Can I take you everywhere I go? >> Yeah, it’s great. >> All right. Uh Sam Coppelman is a publisher at Hunterbrook and a New York Times best-selling author. He co-wrote books with former US Attorney General Eric Holder and former acting US solicitor general Neil Katial. He built Fenway Strategies into a leading strategic communications firm and has published in major outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, right? Teen Vogue, and Time magazine. So good to have you guys here. >> Honored to be here. I want everyone to mention Teen Vogue when they come on the show. I want to be clear. I’ve never written for Teen Vogue. They never invited me. >> Okay, guys. Uh, thank you for correcting the record. um this has been a pretty momentous 2 or 3 weeks in the stock market and I know um AI isn’t like your number one focus in the way that you invest but surely uh you look at companies that are being affected by this or you think might be affected both from the long side and the short side at Hunterbrook and I think just to set the stage Michael do we want to do this anthropic chart >> we did it before you got here but yeah reset the table >> all right let’s reset the table put this up I have one thing to say about this. It’s not like the money from the market caps of these stocks is disappearing. It’s definitely going somewhere, but it’s not exactly going into these companies that are disrupting everyone because none of them are public. Anthropic doesn’t have a ticker. Neither does Perplexity. Neither does OpenAI. Um, neither does SpaceX, which now owns XAI. So, it’s unclear whether or not the money will return to some of the stocks that are being sold. um when people realize all right it’s probably not the end of the world these companies just have to adapt and do better using AI I don’t know how long it takes for us to get from here to there but it’s a really interesting situation love to hear what you think >> it’s absolutely fascin I mean every day I am using these platforms we were just talking about how uh we use cloud code on the daily and yeah I mean you look at this chart and I think a lot of what’s being priced in is just uncertainty about the terminal value of anything. I’m uncertain about the terminal value of myself. And I think when everyone’s looking at themselves in the mirror and has that first moment where they’re playing around with this stuff and they see it do something that they’re expert at basically as good as they’re doing it, if they really let themselves lean in, >> you do then have to question your priors and first principles about a lot of stuff. And it makes sense that in the interim as people are trying to figure out how to discount long term, there’s all kinds of crazy volatility. The terminal value of me is a really scary question to have to like rhetorically ask out loud. >> The good news is that in the great expanse of time the terminal value of all of us is zero. >> That’s correct. So what do you think? I think that this is a real opportunity for us because in a world where the value of intelligence is in a way being commoditized for the first time, >> the value of actual intel information about what’s actually happening in the world that’s increasing exponentially and that’s what we focus on at 100. >> How do you draw the distinction? Intelligence intelligence is becoming commoditized but intel is becoming more valuable than ever. How do you how do you delineate between those two things? >> I I think of intelligence as, you know, our ability to process, synthesize information, draw conclusions from it, right? And AI is clearly getting way better at that scary fast. The value of real information, Intel, >> that’s not widely known. >> That’s not widely known, okay, that you have to actually go out there in the world and get. You got to talk to people on the ground. You got to synthesize a bunch of different open-source intelligence threads. I think there’s an increasing significance to that especially at a time of historic disinformation. >> Okay. >> Where you don’t know what to trust. >> Okay. >> The market is in a period right now. It’s it’s killing anything where there’s even any doubt. So Josh and I spoke about this in our industry. There was an AI tool that we know about that was announced released into the wild and it took 10% of Schwab’s market cap. Now this company, it’s a startup custodian altruist. They’re doing very well. But the idea that it’s going to take 10% of the market cap in a day is is is insanity. Buco Capital this morning, I think he put it >> point out altruist another example. It’s not a public company, >> right? >> So the money leaves Schwab, LPL, Raymond James, it’s like 25 billion in market cap wiped out yesterday in three stocks. Where does it go? Because it can’t go into this startup that’s disrupting it. >> So Buo tweeted, “There’s a nonzero chance that these SAS names chopped for years. Companies have put up results that show zero, literally zero impact from AI. Like I think Adobe is a poster child of nobody wants to own it, but every quarter it’s record revenue and record profits and the stock is getting murdered. He said there is no valuation support and you can’t disprove a negative. You’re just not dead yet, right? So what I Josh and I were talking about this like at what point does this end? It’s got to be like six more quarters of like, hey, we’re still wreck at records, but like the market just doesn’t give a [ __ ] We saw another tweet today about real estate companies getting disrupted and just immediately all this >> so there’s three there’s three stocks CBRE Jones Lang Lasal Kushman and Wakefield these are commercial real estate brokerages that have also built service arms so they’re not just transactions anymore they are market intel analytics for the real estate industry um they’re managing properties and like they’re doing or they’re doing like property management for corporations that have like 50 different office spaces. They’re they have all these different services. But what it all boils down to is these three companies by virtue of their position in the real estate brokerage world have a lot of information. What the stock market did today was say we don’ting care what information you have. We’re just going to go ahead and make the assumption that people aren’t going to call you. They’re going to go on chat GBT and get the answer they’re looking for and pay you less. And that’s what charts like this are. And and we’re seeing this like in almost every sector of the stock market. >> Have you guys seen anything like this before? >> So glad you asked. All right, check this out, boys. The year was 1838. >> No, but seriously. All right, so I had chart Kid John. I had chart Kid make a chart for us. I said, how many stocks are getting just murdered like on an in on a single day basis. All right, so here’s what we’re looking at. These red circles represent over an 8-day period when you’ve had at least 115 stocks in the S&P 500 fall 7% or more in a single day. Just murdered, right? That doesn’t happen at all-time highs. The average draw down when that happens is 34%. We’re within one and a half% of an all-time high. The only other time that this has happened, I’m not drawing comparisons, but it just is a fact. The only other time we’ve seen this level of you’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead at alltime highs was right before the do bubble burst and you’re not drawing comparisons. That’s just what it is. >> Well, it’s I’m not suggesting that we’re about to fall out like the market >> coincidental. So, it’s coincidental so far, but never before have we been in an environment where the stock market is at all time give or take all-time highs, but like there’s a few hundred stocks being nuked every single day and >> equal weight index hit an alltime high this morning. Wow. >> Right. So, the way that I’ve phrased it, I talked about it as like a separation in the market between disruptible and not disruptible. So the companies that are not disruptible, Pepsi and Coke, like there’s nothing a chatbot can do to manufacture a liter of Coke. It’s just not going to happen. Um, but now they’re starting to hit some of these stocks that do sort of have this non-replicatable physical. The real estate thing is a good example of that. So that tells me I almost think we need to have like a marketwide spasm to clear out this fear. I don’t think it just fades away. >> You think there has to be real indiscriminate selling first? I I mean we’re there with like big chunks of the market but not the whole thing. So long as that equal weight is holding up. I don’t think we could say that this fear is extinguished. >> Last week 337 stocks in the S&P were up. So yeah, Palanteer getting killed. Apple’s down 5% today. I don’t know why. It just is. >> Microsoft’s in a 30% draw down. Oracle’s in a 60% draw. Like these are really big. >> So you think like the 337 or the 493 or whatever it is like we need a wash out. >> I sort of do. I think I think we need a puke because it’s the same. It’s people won’t feel better until we get it all out sort of thing, right? >> Are you judging that based on your hangovers from growing up? >> From when I was in a sority, full puke. >> I just needed someone to hold my hair and I needed to get it out and then it it couldn’t be all okay until that moment. >> You think that the market needs a night a morning after? >> It’s like hair held puke and then it’ll all be back to normal. >> It’s it’s sort of trending that way. So you guys, this is obviously like not what you focus on daytoday, but you can’t like not you can’t ignore this. >> I mean, look, what we focus on day-to-day for those listening who don’t know what Hunterbrook is is figuring out what’s really going on in the world. We have a newsroom staffed by reporters, former former intel analysts, and the whole goal every day is to figure out what’s people’s perception of reality and then what’s actually true. And I love a world where there’s actually a big spectrum in terms of potential outcomes. >> Well, you’re in it because it’s an uncert it’s it’s like an uncertainty binge going on right now. >> Correct. And we’re not using some crazy new tools. We’re using one of the most old-fashioned tools that exists in the world, which is journalism. A tool that people for a very long time discounted as this terrible business. And it was when you were trying to monetize the eyeballs you reach. Because if you run a newsroom and you’re competing with Tik Tok and Netflix on eyeballs, you’re just going to lose every time. They have trillion dollar algorithms that are better than you. So, >> I’m sure you guys hear this all the time. Are you finish your thought? Go ahead. >> But if you’re a newsroom and you’re monetizing the information, what’s actually going on in the world, figuring out the truth, we think that is more valuable than ever at a time when people are just indiscriminately selling stocks trying to discount futures that they don’t know how to underwrite. That’s really fun. >> Well, you probably just answered this. You guys, you said you’re monetizing this. Are you um are you a newsroom with a hedge fund or are you a hedge fund with a newsroom? >> We’re a media company and our goal is to publish stories that matter to people and readers. We monetize it like a normal media company does with ads or payw walls with our fund Hunter Brook Capital that takes positions in the market and that we disclose and with uh you know our legal business that turns our stories into lawsuits. But it’s kind of like asking, is the New York Times a games business, a Wordle business, or is it a newspaper? No, it’s a newspaper. They monetize great recipes and great games. And I think it’s amazing that with those profits, they’re able to fund incredible investigative reporting. That’s the same aspiration we have, just using new tools that people hadn’t used before. >> So, here’s an example of the indiscriminate. Um, logistics stocks got killed today. Uh, and then the stalwart turned this up. Joe Weisenthal. Um, the company that announced this new AI freight product, >> karaoke. >> Yeah, it’s not an AI lab. It’s a Florida based penny stock that sells karaoke machines. It’s called Algorithm Holdings, and they announced that their semic platform in live customer deployments is helping its customers internal operations to scale freight volumes by 300 to 400% without a corresponding increase in operational headcount. The stock went up 26%. It’s a penny stock. And that knocked uh billions in market cap off of like >> tens of billions today >> off of like Robinson and JB Hunt. And so it’s completely stupid, but people are paying attention to it. >> Guys, this is what this is what happens. There’s all these headlines that hit the tape, these tape bombs, and a lot of them aren’t true. One of my favorite little stories we worked on, normally we do these big monthslong investigations, was there was this rumor that Papa John’s was about to get acquired and it hit Bloomberg, Baronss, they wrote full articles about it because some outlet called ABC Money had broken the news that Papa John’s was getting acquired at like a 40% premium. It stock spikes up. >> Yeah. >> Our newsroom immediately goes, “Wait a second. What the [ __ ] is ABC Money?” >> And no one else did and no one else did that. And so we start digging in and we realized that ABC money >> is a fake outlet obviously. >> So do you short that and >> I’ll tell you. Yeah. So we figured out in the newsroom pretty quickly that this was BS and then we figured out all right who runs this thing because this is kind of an amazing scam, right? It showed up on hundreds of outlets. It’s red headline on Bloomberg. People are taking that seriously, right? Turns out it’s these guys in Dubai and the guys in Dubai can be hired and we wrote a whole piece on this. you can figure out who they are to send these articles to hundreds of outlets because media companies are so desperate for content now, >> right? >> And then that becomes the narrative. And so we published by the next morning our article about how the Papa John’s acquisition rumor was a scam showing the fake ABC money logo and the real ABC logo. We disclosed that Hunter Capital had taken a short position. It opened down 12%. It just gave back up the gains it had had the prior day. And there’s stuff like this happening all the time. and there are not journalists anymore around to scrutinize it. >> That’s where Nathaniel’s bio sorry, Nathaniel’s biotech skills came into play. >> Well, so how did you guys hit upon the idea of we’re going to be a combination investigative journalism publisher and we’re going to trade on our we’ll fully disclose, but we’re not going to like um we’re not going to hide in any weird way that our intention is to make money. We’re just not doing banner ads. we’re doing this. How did you come up with the idea? And other than me, how many other people did you talk to that said, “You guys are [ __ ] crazy cuz I was definitely scared for you.” >> It is one of those ideas that feels like a bong rip idea. Like, >> what if you could just fund journalism with the impact of the report? >> Well, so tell us the story of how tell the story how you came up with it. >> So, look, Nathaniel and I met in college at the Crimson, the newspaper, and we’re both the kind of guy. >> HBS, not to brag. Come on. >> Under undergrad. >> All right. >> Undergrad. Um, and we uh we meet at the newspaper and we’re both the kind of guys who would have just become journalists normally. Nathaniel’s parents were war correspondents. My parents both writers and we both looked out at the journalism industry and didn’t really see a plausible career. So, we go in different paths. I read a couple books. Nathaniel works in biotech. But we had this nagging suspicion that the people we grew up around, the avid truth seekers, the reporters, the curious people, artists, writers, that they actually were secularly undervalued. That that skill set would become more and more and more valuable. And the bong rip idea, unfortunately, neither of us was ever cool enough to really rip bongs, but in the spirit of things, was all right, there’s all these industries free riding off of journalism. The investment industry literally trades tens of billions of dollars a day based on headlines. this week probably, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars a day based on headlines. >> How much of that value goes back to the organizations that produce the journalism? Bloomberg, that’s one. Bloomberg captures a bunch of value. >> Yeah, none. We pay as little as possible like everyone else. >> As little as possible and people are scraping websites and none of that goes back to the journalism industry, >> right? >> The other industry we saw doing this and that’s not as relevant to your audience is litigation where plaintiff side litigation is 2% of GDP. It’s huge. >> Whoa. >> And a lot of that is actually some great investigative reporting. ProPublica does a story on a sleep machine that’s poisoning people. It’s a billion dollar case. Some firm makes $300 million. Plaintiffs make $700 million. ProPublica has to go to a billionaire the next year. >> Exactly. And they have to go to a donor and ask for more money to produce more of that reporting. And that’s a common good that journalism that’s creating billions of dollars in value for the economy. It’s helping us understand what’s going on in the world. And it’s in complete decline. And so the idea of Hunterbrook, the thing that got me to convince Nathaniel to quit biotech and go back into journalism was this idea that we’re finally ready for an organization that John Josh might think, you know, this is kind of crazy. A lot of people we spoke to might think this is >> I was like scared for you. I was worried. I didn’t think that it was a bad idea. I thought it was a very risky idea. >> It’s a very scary idea. And a lot of people were like, “What are people going to say about this?” And then we launched and we told everyone what we were about. Especially at a time when people are skeptical as a default about the news they read. They think >> who’s benefiting from this. What’s the motive of the outlet? That’s everyone’s default. >> We were like, what if we’re just super transparent? We tell you what we know. We tell you how we know it. And we tell you exactly how we stand to make money from it. And the only way we’re going to prove to you that this is legit outlet is by being right again and again and again, publishing super rigorous reporting that speaks for itself. And I think that what’s amazing is a year and a half into this thing. We’ve got the best reporters coming to us asking to work here. We have people taking our stories extremely seriously. Our investigation into the healthcare industry we released last month was entered into the congressional record and cited by both Republican and Democratic members of Congress at a hearing to insurance CEOs. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I’m bringing bipartisanship back. And uh and now we’re able to have a flywheel of great inbound stories. We’re able to publish them with real credibility. And last year we were profitable in our second year as a media startup. And we’re scaling and hiring reporters. And we’re not hiring them to go aggregate headlines about Papa John’s being acquired that came from some Dubai [ __ ] outlet. >> No, you’re telling them do what you do >> to do the best. The kind that Nathaniel’s parents did. That’s how we ended up doing this thing. >> Okay. So, what were some of the things that you heard from people when you first were launching or you were like socializing the idea? Tell me some of the things that people on Wall Street said uh or people in journalism said. A lot of people on Wall Street say, “Well, you know, I’m invested in a hedge fund that’s hired a journalist. They help out with the due diligence. What’s the difference?” >> And we’d say, “That’s a former journalist. The best journalists, the people who are really going to get to the truth, they’re not willing to give up the by line. They’re not willing to give up the public service mission that took them into journalism in the first place.” >> Oh, they don’t want to be just behind the scenes. >> They don’t want to be behind the scenes. that they want to be Bob Woodward. >> Yeah. >> And we are able to give them a platform whereas Sam said they can come and do the highest caliber of business journalism. We’re up there with the the best business outlets in the world in terms of the caliber of the reporting and you can read that reporting for yourself across the social media, the news. >> So was it that obvious to journalists that you talked to? >> Totally. They they got it immediately. They would see the way that they would do really important reporting and then other people would run with that and make the money, drive the impact. >> Yeah. >> And they were chasing clicks or their work was behind a subscriber payw wall. Even their cousins and their friends couldn’t read any of the work. So I want to be really clear about how it works in the newsroom at Hunterbrook Media. It’s adree and free to read for everybody. There’s no incentive to go out there and chase eyeballs. It’s not walled off from access. Uh it doesn’t rely on donors or government funding. It relies on the truth because I’m an investor. I run the fund. I want accurate information about what’s going on out there. We get that from Hunterbrook Media at Hunterbrook Capital. And then I can make better investments knowing that this is actually the truth and not some clickbait headline that flashed on the Bloomberg terminal. >> When you guys raised money from legendary investor Mark Lazerie early on, credit to you. Was that did he invest in the fund? Did he invest in the business? Like how what funds the media part of it? >> I can speak high level which is that we raise around publicly to get ourselves started. We raised 10 million bucks and we did that from Emerson Collective, from uh Nathaniel’s former boss Peter Kchinsky at RA Capital, from David Fialco, our the founder of General Catalyst and our our close friend. Um a bunch of people who bet on this idea >> and that’s and they’re in the for the overall company. >> Are they investors in the fund or was that general purposes spin up the media part? >> We got the company started first with that capital. Then we went out and raised a hundred million as our launch fund. >> Which was harder? >> I think that as soon as people really scrutinize the logic of why this actually makes sense, both of them were actually pretty easy from a fundraising perspective. And that logic, I think, is pretty clear once you strip away all the uh novelty of it. It’s the same thing that people have been trying to do in this business for a really long time, which is just get anformational edge. Fair game, but through dedicated work, a differentiated perspective. In our case, the type of people you can recruit to an organization like this who wouldn’t go work at a traditional hedge fund or due diligence firm. >> So that so that’s that was my next question. There are people that would look at this and they would say, “All right, obviously this makes perfect sense. You get the best reporters, you put them on a story, and once you learn what the truth is, you trade on it.” What hedge fund doesn’t use their analysts this way? But why do you have to publish? Because there’s two things in this industry that regulators don’t like and people can point to something and say that it’s one of those two things. Short and distort is one. pump and dump is the other. And I would imagine that was probably a point of hesitancy. You pitched this idea to people, people probably like, “All right, but do you have to publish? Like, can you just find out the truth and let’s trade on it like everybody else?” But you’re you made the point. Yes, we have to publish. That’s how we get Bethany McClean and amazing real journalists to want to be part of this. They don’t want to be in the back room cranking out articles that 10 people read. >> And there’s also a reason that Nathaniel and I didn’t leave college and go work at a hedge fund. The reason we started this thing was to build >> You guys actually care about You guys actually care about the journalism. It’s not just a means to an end. >> The house I was growing up in, my parents went into war zones across the world for the Wall Street Journal to get the to get the truth. It was a core component of the identity I grew up with and that I then >> I know in this room it might not be a popular thing to say but in his house they also really didn’t like hedge funds. >> Right. Okay. >> This was not a house that was you know super capitalist or anything. And I think what people realized >> well now you’re in a metaphorical war zone. It’s not quite what your parents experienced. >> An information war zone. War zone. >> But but what I think people got from us is we’re people with pretty good lives. We weren’t going to be the kind of people trying to find some quick edge. We’re trying to build a real institution here. It is a startup institution. >> You’re not going to shortcut by being like, “All right, let’s write a hit piece on this and try to scalp it for three points.” Because you can only do that two or three times before people realize what you’re doing. >> Exactly. You have to basically >> build a reputation for being right as the atomic substructure of everything else. >> So, let me ask you guys a dumb question. What is the difference in your eyes between the work Josh was just asking this like the work that the analysts do at a traditional hedge fund which is like reportiveish versus like actual journalism? It it’s a great question and this all obviously exists on a spectrum. Like a lot of the people who work at plaintiffs law firms are incredible investigators and they know how to get people to talk and tell a story of how a company poisoned a river or poisoned the air. Aaron Brochovich, I think, is a journalist. And there’s obviously people at the top of the best hedge funds in the world who operate like journalists. They go try to figure out base reality and are able to tune out the noise. For us, the big difference is just this obsession with not being biased by your priors and figuring out how to identify new facts about a situation that people previously didn’t understand. There’s obviously a lot of overlap. I think if you read our stories and you see the way that we attack various problems, I know we’re going to get into a couple of examples. Yeah. It’ll become clear that what we’re doing is sort of categorically different. And then the other cool thing about being a publication is, as I mentioned, you then also get a bunch of inbound. One of the things that happens obviously on the street is people do talk their books and try to get other people to cover things. Josh, I’m sure people ask you to talk about names on CNBC all the time, but they also are often kind of possessive about their information and don’t want to share it with other people, >> right? >> People really want to give the best information that they’ve got to us because they don’t want their long blown up. They don’t want their short squeezed. They don’t want their options to expire worthless. And often they want the world to find out about something. You know how frustrating it was to be a wire card short >> before anyone wrote about that? Yeah. You’re just in this name and it’s going up and up and up and up. And by the way, after that was written about, it kept going up and up and up and up and up and remained very >> frustally picked up the story. >> Exactly. But it still took years before the thing. Are you are you guys watching industry? >> No. So in this season, Harper runs a hedge fund and she’s short a name and she’s using the newspapers to publish about her thesis and they’re publishing. >> If only she worked at Hunterbrook. >> That’s right. And it’s funny. Oh, Harper. Yeah, I was Hunter. Okay. Um, so she’s so anyway the the the thesis is published by the newspaper and the market doesn’t care and it’s going up in her face anyway. And I sort of wonder h how that works with you guys because this is sort of a postshame world. Nobody cares about anything. Nobody has the attention span for more than 30 seconds. You might lay out an incredible thesis. Maybe this momentum trade is in there. Ah, you guys are idiots. Like how do I’m sure you’ve done >> you got people that like documented multiple trips to Epstein Island. They’re like on Dancing with the Stars. Like we’re completely post shame. >> Look, this is a really important question and it’s one we spend a ton of time on. >> We think this is the time in recent history where if you’re a bad actor, you did something really bad. You go to sleep the easiest you’ve gone to sleep in a very long time. >> Yeah. >> You don’t think there’s going to be some journalist calling in the morning. And if they do, you think you’re going to be able to shrug it off. You don’t think your stock’s going to be impacted. You don’t think you’re going to get sued over it. You definitely don’t think the government’s coming. Right. if you’re a bad actor and we think that that is a great opportunity in this golden age of grift and graft to buy the dip on integrity to buy the dip on doing business the right way >> like the wheel will turn and those things will come back into vogue >> hopefully just don’t know when >> gravity has always existed and I do think that what we found is yes on the order of a week or a month or three months We can publish a story and if the shareholder base is not good faith, like nobody actually owns this thing because they believe in it, then it’s very hard to convince them in one way or another, that’s not our mission. Our mission is to just inform people and then over time be proven right. Because eventually, when Hunter Brooks existed for 10 years, when we publish, the discount that’s taking place over a long period of time before the market necessarily understands that we’re going to be right collapses because people know how the story ends. >> How good does that feel when you’re right? I mean, you’ve been spying this whole episode upside. I love your energy. You just got a big smile on your face. How good does it feel when the market agrees with you? >> It’s extremely gratifying. It’s also informative when it doesn’t, right? It’s a great feedback loop. You can get educated really quickly on how people perceive what you’re saying about the world. And yeah, there have been times where uh we have not been cynical enough. >> Yeah. Okay. But there have also been times where where we’ve been too cynical. You know, there’s been a couple of times where Hunter Brook Media has sent over to the fund really compelling investigative journalism about a a company that they’re planning to publish and I read it and think, “God, that’s great journalism.” Like my dad, he passed away a few years ago. My dad would have loved that. That was exactly his kind of I’m not going to trade on that. I’m not going to short that name because I don’t think these shareholders are good faith. I don’t think people care about u this >> Oh, you think like it’ll just go over everyone’s head and people won’t care? >> I’ll give you an example. Okay. >> We have incredible journalist Sam recruited from the Crimson uh who went to Danville, Illinois, factory town, and revealed that the factory of a multinational conglomerate was poisoning people in that town. >> And we’d had a bunch of reporting like this. We recruited a great reporter from the Wall Street Journal last year who’s who’s been running our beat on environmental reporting. Scoop after scoop about just some terrible stuff that’s happening with the class of the EPA, you know, regulation around uh health and and well-being. And uh some of those stocks hadn’t budged on that reporting. So this looked similar Pat. >> This was a literal how the sausage is made story. It was about a sausage casing factory. >> Okay. like over a hundred years after uh Sinclair, exactly the same thing. Exactly. Exactly the same thing going down. >> That stock absolutely collapsed upon publication. I didn’t have a short on. It turned out uh that >> it’s based in Spain where people still care about [ __ ] >> You’re not allowed to poison people in Spain, I guess. Oh, it was a the company was doiciled in Spain and the Spanish investors responded to that journalism by selling >> a and within 48 hours Yeah. >> local Spanish news outlets had found out the company was doing similar stuff in other places. The company itself had to engage in good faith with shareholders and regulators and clean up their act. They put out multiple press releases about their commitment to doubling down on safety and well-being at this factory and across their whole operation. real accountability driven quickly because the share price moved, >> but I was too cynical as an investor because I thought, wow, >> you thought they’ll just get away with it. There’s no trade here. >> Exactly. >> Do you guys worry about people who are long a stock where you burst the bubble? And by the way, for the listener, we’re going to get into some specific cases that Hunterbrook Media has been involved with, and they’re not all shorts. I just want to put this out here. Um, but do you guys >> That’s a really important point. We ran a netlong book in 2012. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, I want I don’t want people to think that you guys are just like out there looking to destroy companies. >> No, a lot of the time you’re digging into a company that sounds too good to be true and turns out it actually is as good as it sounds. Or you find, you know, one company’s doing shady stuff, but another company is really high high quality and that scammy company has been taking all the oxygen out of the room, but there’s a real jack. So, this is important because I do think that there’s a p a popular image of the activist shortseller, which is somebody that’s out for blood and somebody that wants to write wrongs in the world and make people pay and then jump up and down on the corpse of a company that they deem to be morally inferior to what their own standards are. There is that. And I know that’s not the truth because I do know people that are in the shortselling world. But like that is sort of like what the popular perception is, but you guys are coming at it from the point of view where if this company needs to be exposed, we will expose them. But sometimes we will think one thing and then the other thing will be true. And that might be just as profitable. And that is I think where you guys might differ from traditional journalism. In real journalism, if there’s no story there, then that’s it. Let’s move on. There’s nothing to say. >> If it bleeds, it leads. >> And if it doesn’t bleed, then why are we talking about it? Whereas you guys might say, “Hey, this is actually a bullish story and we thought it might be bearish or we didn’t think anything. We just wanted to learn about it.” So, I think that’s a really important distinction. >> That’s exactly right. It’s part of what makes it journalism, too, is it’s just curiosity. Like, you’re just trying to actually understand something. And by the way, some stories start as leads and they don’t become stories at all. It’s like this company’s basically what people think. I think at anyone’s fund, there’s a lot of ideas that get circled around. >> Do you worry about the impact that you have on a stock price though where there are a lot of investors and then you publish something that uh turns the market off to a stock? People like real people do lose money. I I would imagine you might think of that as like well the truth is the truth. What do you want from us? Um, but the people that are on the receiving end of that sort of street justice, they might not feel the same way about you. I >> I actually think a lot of people save my I I’ll give you a great example. Uh Hunter Media has been reporting for almost a couple years now on this pipeline off Santa Barbara, California. Uh which we can talk about a bit more, but uh you know, if folks had read the early reporting and realized how shady the company trying to relaunch this pipeline actually was and they had sold their shares based on that reporting, they would have saved a ton of money, >> right? because it did turn out that these guys were were sketchy >> and you were the first people to point it out and then everyone figures it out after. >> And look, I I think this is one of the master strokes of the market that I have to give it credit for is that they make it seem like if a short seller writes a story about a company, let alone a journalistic outlet like Hunterbrook, it’s their fault when it turns out that the company’s claims weren’t true. It’s your fault. >> Whereas, >> when a company does pump after pump after pump, BS press release after BS press release after BS press release, does a guide that’s super ambitious, cozies up with shareholders, does a meeting that’s a little bit sketchy where they’re telling people, you know, next quarter is going to be pretty good, um they’re sandbagging their guide, whatever it is, when a company’s trying to pump its stock and then it collapses, people don’t blame those companies in the same way. They think those companies were trying their best. They had an ambitious idea. They were super excited about it themselves. And I think that the wrongdoing there is the people putting froth and misinformation and BS into the market. And in a world where there’s basically no journalists to even scrutinize whether company’s claims are real. It’s a very useful counterbalance to have a couple people who are actually digging into company’s claims, particularly when the sell side, as you all know, is basically happy to gobble up whatever tells them. the the Mark Twain quote, it’s easier to fool someone than to convince them that they’ve been fooled. People do not like being embarrassed that they fell for the [ __ ] even if it’s a lie. So, I’m wondering where do you see the lies? Like, where do the stories come from? Is it you’re looking at the financials and you say that’s weird and then you go digging or is is it tips? Like, where do these stories come from? It really does run the gamut. A lot of stories come from someone telling us this doesn’t seem right. Other stories come from systematic identification of various flags. So for some of the environmental stories, that’s us systematically figuring out what factories are emitting a lot of toxic chemicals and then using health data to figure out, are there cancer clusters near there? That’s systematic and emergent and you can build those kinds of signals all the time. But a lot of the stuff just comes to us as ideas where people are like, can this possibly be true because it doesn’t seem like it. You must look at like um or maybe you don’t like look at uh the leaderboard for the day in the stock market and see uh a $200 million company go up like 3x in a day, right? Like like and just look at that like what the hell is going on here? >> You know what’s funny? Those aren’t usually necessarily the good shorts. At least not right away. >> Not not the first day. Okay. >> The first couple days with those, you never know how long a pump is going to go. But that is often when we start scrutinizing a company because we’re trying to understand if what they’re saying is true and the market was mispricing this by 200%. >> Right? >> Because it should be updated. Well, that’s a really interesting news story. And if it’s BS, that’s also pretty interesting. >> All right, so let’s get into some of the case story uh case studies or the actual stories that you’ve done that worked out or were trades or Okay, so the first one we’re going to talk about Evolve. You guys note this is a company people thought was a fraud, but you realized it was a good business last year when its numbers were suspended. It was uh sorry, it was out of compliance with the SEC. So, what is what is the story behind Evolve? And what can our listeners take away from a situation like this? >> Have you guys spent any time with Eric Adams, >> the mayor? Only at Zerobond, which I think was his office while he was the mayor. It was also his home, I believe, because his real home was in New Jersey. So, >> he loved the private clubs. Like, he was really into like any anywhere there was a member. >> I will say at least for the first couple years, I don’t think anyone ever had as much fun as mayor. >> Probably not. Okay. >> So, that’s a funny question Nathaniel asks cuz Nathaniel had one meal with Eric Adams. >> Okay. >> That we’ll get into shortly. >> He was a Was he a vegetarian? >> Allegedly. >> Allegedly. But you saw it. So, that was red flag number one. He ordered the >> meatball. So, listen to this. Listen to this. Listen to this. So, we see that this company evolved. You’ve probably walked through one of their metal detectors. Yeah. >> At a sports game. Those are the metal detectors you can just walk through and they can tell if you’ve got a a knife or if it’s just your wallet. >> Now, they really can’t tell anything, right? >> Well, >> do they actually work? >> This was our initial question as a newsroom. >> It sounds too good to be true. >> So, we got this they got this contract with New York. Eric Adams came out, showed Evolve, and he said, “We’re going to put Evolve in the subway.” And I thought this was weird because as a newsroom we dug up that Evolve CEO said in an interview that his devices don’t work underground. >> Wait, why? >> So why would >> why underground >> be paying to put these things on the subway. >> And so that’s when Nathaniel’s one experience with Eric Adams >> set off some red flags >> because Nathaniel, do you want to answer the vegetarian question? How did you get in front of Eric Adams to even >> That’s a longer story, but basically we figured that keyed us off that maybe the mayor wasn’t on the up and up. Maybe this this company wasn’t on the up and up. You know, two things I’ve only done once is lunch with Eric Adams and lunch at Nou. It’s not exactly known as a vegetarian establishment. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> So Sam in the newsroom start really digging into this company. And at first I was really disappointed because uh the company sort of blew up before I even had an opportunity to trade on it. >> So we start digging in. Nathaniel tells me he went to a meal with Eric Adams. Eric Adams ate meat. And we saw that these guys claimed that their device worked underground. They had a deal with the subways. And we had the CEO saying it doesn’t work underground. So we started out thinking this is a fraud. That was our baseline. And then as we’re digging into our reporting after I did like a quick little Tik Tok video being like this thing doesn’t work underground. What the hell? Uh >> they suspend their financials. They’re out of compliance. CFO is fired. It looks like they’re going to be delisted. Stock plummets. >> Is this So, this is a NASDAQ EV >> LV. >> EVLV. >> That’s right. >> And it’s NASDAQ. >> Okay. And they just say, “We’re not going to, we can’t stand by our quarterly. >> Existing financials. There’s some fraud in the system.” So, we start looking into this as a newsroom. >> Pull up the stock opens down here >> 45%. But what the reporters start figuring out as they’re digging into the story is, sure, maybe it turns out the numbers need some corrections. The management team was a mess, but people love this technology. It’s the best in class by far. >> And we interviewed people who ran stadiums and they said it used to be that in the first quarter there were people out in line and now they’re butts and seats, beer in hands. Like, okay, sounds pretty good. Can’t wait to go interview people from schools. That’s one of Evolve’s big markets because we live in a crazy country where they have to make sure that people aren’t bringing guns into schools. And uh we would interview the superintendents who would start crying on the phone. This thing makes me know my kids are safe. I’m like, does Evolve paying these guys? Like what’s going on? >> And kids were getting to class on time instead of getting held up at the entrance of the school >> so that way they could read good. >> And by the And by the way, Evolve, not to I know this isn’t necessarily the wokest audience, but it’s pretty cool that Evolve’s technology means you don’t have to go pat down all these kids like they have in metal detectors around the country. So anyway, we start digging into this. People love the technology. >> Time out though. Are you in contact with anyone at the company yet or do you don’t do that? >> No, we’re just digging in. We don’t want to get biased by what the company’s telling people. >> You don’t want to like the CEO and then it’s like gosh. >> And look, anyone on Wall Street with a few bucks to invest can get on a call with a management team. There’s no differentiation. >> But by the way, here they were also in a long long period because their financials were out of date. So anyway, we figure out that Evolve actually has amazing tech and despite being investigated by the SEC, the FTC, all these other people, these customers are not leaving. In fact, Evolve is a growing business penetrating these huge markets from schools to hospitals. You can see it all across New York to sporting events. And we’re like, okay, this is a pretty interesting story. So we end up publishing a story that this very sketchy seeming company, Evolve, actually has this amazing product and this growing business. And I don’t know what the exact >> wrote a bullish article about a company that hadn’t reported earnings in a while. >> Correct. In a really long time. And then these guys are crazy. I tell you the kind of company sellside doesn’t even write about. They just suspend coverage. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so there’s an information vacuum and we realize, oh [ __ ] this is a real business. And the thing goes down to like >> two bucks, 220 or something. And we also tried to figure out when they would restate earnings. And that evolves involves a guy with a with a bald spot who you could see from a garage across the street which is kind of neither here nor there. But it became clear that they were working on weekends and that seemed like a good sign. >> You saw you saw like an accountant coming and going from their headquarters. >> Correct. I don’t want to creep anybody out. >> Take a stake out though. >> I don’t want to Yeah, I don’t want to creep anybody out. That’s reporting. We were trying to figure out what’s actually going on with this company. They restart. We >> were also doing open source intelligence about where these devices were all over the country tracking each time signed up and put some new ones. you bought the stock. >> So, the story disclosed that Hunter Brook Capital was long the stock. Uh, they restate their financials. Turns out that they did have an accounting error, but it was dimminimous, >> like $4 million. >> Stock had lost hundreds of millions of dollars in market. >> No, they needed to clean house. >> They had accounting issues. They had management issues. They had this great technology, great business that was not being properly appreciated. They did need to do a turnaround. >> Okay. >> But they restate their financials. They release these growth numbers which are incredible. They settle with the FTC. The SEC wraps up its investigation and Evolve thrives from there. >> Okay. So, they get in compliance. The reporting numbers again. >> Sellside resumes coverage. >> What did the stock What did the stock do? Just >> uh it went up to something like eight and a half bucks last year. >> So, two to eight. >> Amazing story. Yeah. And then by the way, Evolve now that was a while ago. >> You could have you could have read the article on the website. invested too. >> But listen to this. This is this is kind of fun cuz just it ties into everything you’re talking about. >> Evolve is pretty interesting again as a story to me and can’t comment on ongoing reporting obviously, but it’s gotten caught up in this software selloff because Axon, you know, the big security company has sold off >> and Evolve just has a lot of flows with Axon and is down a bunch totally different business. >> Axon does tasers and it does um body cams and all that stuff, >> right? >> Anyway, Evolve is obviously not a software company. It’s hardware in the world in these security systems, but it’s in all of these same baskets. >> How would AI disrupt a physical detect? >> In fact, they use AI to make better, >> right? >> Which is just a fun situation because the market’s again sort of indiscriminately selling this name. And I think a lot of what’s going to happen over time is it’s going to become clear to people that this selling is automated. >> No, don’t do it. >> V is in play. >> All right. >> No, no, no, no, no. But it’s pretty funny. >> All right. Uh, let’s So, what what’s I don’t understand. >> Let’s talk about film. >> Eric. So, what was it? The Eric Adams. He’s just made a dumb deal for the city or he made a good deal. >> That was the prior management team. They had all kinds of weird things going on, but the new management team seems solid. >> All right, let’s do another. >> Is Phil Mickelson pumping an energy stock? >> It’s such a good question, isn’t it? I still haven’t figured out the exact answer to that question. I will say that Phil Mickelson did tweet that he was on the board of a different company with the CEO of the energy stock. Then he deleted that tweet because I think >> well start start from the beginning. I’ll start from the beginning. >> Sable offshore. What is this? >> I’ll tell you about Sable Offshore. >> Okay, >> Nathaniel alluded to it earlier. Sable Offshore is kind of a very exciting and crazy premise for a company. Here’s what it is. There was a pipeline in California and it led to one of the biggest oil spills in American history. And Exxon took over that pipeline and spent seven years trying to get it online. and Exxon ran into the gauntlet of California politics in oil and gas. Trying to restart a pipeline in a place that’s obviously very hostile to oil and gas in general and particularly if your pipeline led to this giant >> was already a problematic piece of infrastructure. >> So then there’s this guy named Jim Flores, better known as Big Jim Flores on account of his size. He makes a deal with Exxon. Exxon doesn’t want to have to retire this pipeline. Cost billions and billions of dollars to get rid of the project. So big Jim says, “Give me a huge loan.” He gets a massive loan from Exxon. I’ll take it over and let’sing restart this thing. >> And if it works, what what does Exxon get out of this? >> Exxon doesn’t have to retire the pipeline. They probably get bought out of the loan. Okay. >> And so they get to walk away without having to retire. >> Big Jim Flores, though, to even have the ability to get Exxon to say yes. >> He’s had kind of a wild up and down career in oil and gas worked at Freeport. Bit of a hellraiser. >> There were some wins, some losses, you know. I think he probably watches there will be blood aspirationally. >> Okay. Got it. Got it. >> And his past oil and gas company went bankrupt. Also, Sable in the name, he’s always been trying to do basically the same scheme. >> And so it’s this big sort of quicksotic mission to restart this project and Phil Mickelson gets really excited about it. And we wrote about the company in 2024 when they said they were going to be online in October of 2024 after having originally when they were spacking saying they were going to be online at the beginning of 2024. And we wrote a story about all of the various regulatory hurdles and we were like everyone should know >> two red flags a celebrity b former spack. >> Correct. Correct. Though at that time Phil Mickelson wasn’t involved and so they said we’re going to be live in October and we said there’s no way you’re going to be live in October. Anyway, they de delay it from October to November, November to the new year. 2025, they start getting excitement and then Phil Mickelson starts tweeting about this company and everyone’s saying if this thing is live, it’s going to just print money. It’s going to print oil. It’s going to be this incredible, incredible story. Pump oil, print money. Anyway, we keep digging in and it becomes clear to us that the company is still not telling the truth to anybody. And eventually Sable hit $30 and they kept hitting these California regulatory hurdles. So then it’ fall to 25, then it fall to 18 and then eventually it falls to like 10 bucks. And at this point people are pretty mad at Phil Mickelson, >> right? >> He like became the face of this. >> He was the face of this thing telling everyone that they should buy it. And so that’s when people started leaking me their chats with Phil Mickelson, >> including a group chat that Phil Mickelson was in where everyone was pumping the stock, but they were also saying things like, Phil said this in one of the messages, just got off the phone with Jim, the CEO. There’s going to be an announcement later today. >> Oh, that’s a no no. They don’t like that. The regulators don’t like that. >> You’re not really supposed to be saying that. I’m not a lawyer. I’m not casting aspersions on anybody. But we had those group chat messages and then we had this audio recording of the CEO of the company talking to investors. By the way, Sable called this audio recording AI in its first response to it and then it became clear it was true. But you can imagine that becoming a better excuse going forward. Kind of scary from a journalistic perspective. And in the call, Sable basically admits it needs to do a big capital raise, which it hadn’t told the market it needed to do. Anyway, we published that story on Phil Mickelson’s messages and on the fact that Sable needed to do a raise and pretty quickly everything starts spiraling for Sable and last week they just disclosed publicly that they received subpoenas from both the SEC and SDNY related to Hunter Brook’s articles. So, we’ll see how the story turns out. >> Now, will your will your journalist get called in as like a witness potentially? Like, >> who knows? You have to imagine how bad you have to mess up as an oil and gas company in a fight with California >> for the current DOJ to send you a subpoena. >> Especially given that the guy doing the >> I will just call it positive information sharing about the company was a golfer. >> I mean, I didn’t have the Trump administration subpoenaing a golfer who’s trying to help out an oil and gas company. That’s how bad the facts were here. So guys, um, what would you say to the listeners who are picking their own stocks, building, uh, because these are like very off the-beaten path types of stocks. So I would imagine they’re not widely held by retail until they start to pump, right? And I think people retail investors intuitively understand a stock that goes from like 5 to 30 either they have done something technologically remarkable or there is some [ __ ] Like I think people get it but they still want to sort of be involved and be along for the ride. What would you tell people um about just the current climate and how careful they need to be about being involved in those types of situations? >> I wouldn’t want to give anyone. You’re not giving advice. I’ll be clear, you know, not not providing investment advice, not providing legal advice. We hope people do their own research and we hope that Hunter Brook doesn’t do the level of resour. If you’re looking to your left and your right and the guy you’re playing your basketball game with is checking his crypto app. >> Yeah. >> Which happens to me all the time. >> Yeah. >> Or you start hearing from your cousin that it’s really time to buy silver. >> Yeah. >> My cousin’s actually a very smart investor. I want to be clear. This was one the other cousin. This is >> this is the other cousin. All of them wanted to buy silver. >> That’s right. >> But if you start hearing those things, people in your life and it seems like [ __ ] It’s so easy. Everyone’s making so much money buying this stuff. >> I would just say take a breath. >> Yeah. >> And think it’s probably not that easy. >> My brother-in-law asked me about a right then. >> Perfect. Yes. It’s very helpful if you have some people. >> And Michael said >> I said I said I’m all in. >> You didn’t hear this from me, but I got the nod. >> You said that was your cell signal. >> I got that. I got the nod. >> No, of course I gave him. sober advice like you gentlemen would. >> Totally. Totally. What’s your what’s your number one contra? Like you see something happening and you’re like, “Oh, uh >> oh.” So, >> got to go the other way. >> I am of the opinion right now that almost everybody knows almost everything. >> So, there’s nothing that I would see publicly, but when my brother-in-law is asking me about a stock and he’s a he’s a musician, he’s an artist. Like, >> it just means that it’s already gone up a lot. Doesn’t mean that it’s a bad investment. >> He’s the last person to know. >> Right. Right. That’s >> and we all have someone like that in our life >> for sure. >> So where where where are we going where are we going next with uh the media company, the fund or both. >> Well, we’re always on the hunt for new stories. So I won’t share any advice with the audience, but we would certainly love to hear from the audience. >> Yeah, ideas at hunterbrook.com. We the website is with no vowels. H ntr.com. >> Let’s not gloss over that. So ideas hunterbrook.com. >> Correct. whoever and if you own the domain name hunterbrook spelledout.com please call me back I’ve been trying for like two years but ideas hunterbrook.com anything you think is just off about the world like you think there’s some idea you’re really excited about you think people don’t understand it or there’s something that you think seems too good to be true >> is going to email you guys four times a week >> to be clear so just so you know the reach of the show is really big to be clear you guys are not looking for such and such stock is overvalued on next year’s earnings >> definitely not it has to be a real By the way, to be clear, compliance reads through all of our emails. >> So, Fitz, our general counsel, is going to have a very long day if you send me bad ideas. Send me your good ideas. >> No, you guys should look for [ __ ] Like, this this there’s something going on here. Correct. >> Or uncovered gems. I think every >> No, on this podcast, we’re going to get 10,000. >> No, but that’s But so, I love I thought >> is gonna cut this out of >> scared. I’m actually scared for you. >> The volume of email. We’re going to have Claude code read all the ideas. >> The story about the the technology with the booths is such a it’s such a cool one. What gets you guys more excited? Is it ideas like that where people have discarded the company for illegitimate reasons or for reasons that are overblown or this is total [ __ ] >> I’d love to tell you that I feel equally excited about [ __ ] >> It’s the [ __ ] right? The truth is it’s really fun to call out [ __ ] and it does feel like a big part of the mission for journalism. >> But really the excitement around a story is almost always measured in the delta between other people’s understanding of it and mine. Like if that feeling of like you have a secret. >> Yeah. >> That’s the best feeling. Like I figured something out about the world people didn’t understand. >> Let’s talk about another long that you guys had. I don’t know how much you could say but the sphere. So I remember like a year ago people somebody a friend of mine was like do you see how much money they’re losing? So how do you look at a story like that and look past the current financials. >> So I’ll say we didn’t get to publish that story. Fear is up like 4x in the last year or something. >> So here here’s the issue with fear. I hate James Dolan. I’m a huge Knicks fan. I remember the >> you you no he’s doing good now. Now you love James Dolan. You want to be the game. >> I definitely don’t want to alienate James Dolan if he’s a listener to this podcast. You hate him, you will never be like train was a childhood trauma. It was a childhood trauma. Okay. >> Clearly over. >> And so anyway, we start figuring out, we have some data people sent us that the Wizard of Oz show just worked. >> It’s kind of like a clinical trial. Like we weren’t sure if this IP thing was going to work and then everybody started coming to Sphere for it. And they were making so much money on the down days, the days where there weren’t concerts. Anyway, because a newsroom source had come up with a really clever way to figure out based on online information basically exactly what Sphere’s sales were before maybe even the company itself really knew what those sales were and that was clearly a huge edge and that’s the kind of thing folks often will just send to the newsroom because they think it’s really interesting. Okay, so in year one, the sphere basically they have like dead and co, they have you two, and they have the Eagles, but it’s unclear like, okay, what do you do the other 250 nights a year, and then they have this um sort of futuristic science documentary, which I went and saw, too. >> Uh I’m so I’m so into the sphere, by the way. Um so I saw that one, too, and I liked it. >> But then it’s like, all right, it’s a novelty. You went you saw you two. Are you going back? And then the Wizard of Oz thing, it’s a revelation. It’s like, wait a minute, they could take an 80-year-old movie. They could do some magic with the sound and the the environment and the sphere, put it back out and sell more tickets than a brand new blockbuster film. And that’s >> and they can do it day after day after day >> and and think of all of the possibilities. Think of your hundred favorite movies ever. How much would you love to go see it at the sphere reimagined? It’s unbelievable. And by the way, I just want to be clear. The reason I mentioned the Knicks was not personal. It was that I put it as kind of a low priority in the newsroom. We didn’t rush out the story because I was like just dispositionally disincined to believe that Jim Dolan had figured out how to get people to a live event in a way nobody else had. Yeah. >> So anyway, Hunter Capital thankfully had built a bit of a position based on this. But Bloomberg ended up scooping us on that story. They published the story about the blockbuster wizard. >> But you made the money. So you didn’t get the credit for the story, but you made the money. >> Yeah, I want to credit Bloomberg for that particular story. They did have it. All right, guys. Did you have fun on the show today? >> This is the best. Thank you guys for having us. >> All right, so we’re going to have a brief intermission and then we can come back and do another hour and a half. What do you think? >> I love what you guys are doing. I think it’s one of the greatest stories for listening to and I’m not afraid for you anymore. I actually think that people are going to now start to imitate what you’re doing because it works. It’s explicable. It’s um it seems like you’re having fun and people journalists are getting paid. And I I mean, who doesn’t I have to say they promise this every year, but journalists got bonuses last year. >> That’s not a thing that even exists. So, thank you guys. >> I’m I’m flattered. You think people are going to >> I think they’re going to imitate you. >> I think they’re going to try. >> All right. They can. >> I have to say I actually hope that they do because there’s a lot more talented journalists out there than there are jobs for them. And so, if there were 10 Hunter Brooks, what an amazing thing that would be. >> Can I ask you one last thing? >> Sure. Who is like the coolest, most unexpected inbound phone call? Somebody saying like, “I see what you guys are doing and I and I I wanted to let you know like did you have one of those yet?” >> I have to say it was pretty fun that after our big healthcare investigation, >> Mark Cuban started sharing our stories far and wide came on our podcast and thought that we told a story in the healthcare industry that most people had overlooked. >> That’s cool. >> That was pretty fun. Talk about someone who knows how to own a basketball team. >> Yes. Shout out to Cubes. All right. Uh, we want to tell people, so we gave them the email address. Uh, what’s the what is the URL? Where can people go to learn more and read your stories? >> People should go to newsletter.htbr.com. >> newsletter.htbr. So, the vowels cost extra or >> I’m telling you, I can’t get this guy to respond to my email. >> We’ll put we’ll put the link in the description of the show. >> Please subscribe to the newsletter. You can also obviously check out our website, hunterbrook.com. Follow us on social media. All the stuff people are supposed to say at the end of podcast. >> That’s right. All right. Thank you guys. >> All right. Follow follow Nathaniel and Sam and read about Hornerbrook. Guys, thank you so much for listening. We appreciate you. We will see you uh we’ll see you next time. Thank you.

Pitch Summary:
Meritage Hospitality Group Inc. is a Wendy’s franchisee facing significant financial challenges, including a recent debt default. Despite these issues, there are signs of potential improvement by 2027, following a difficult 2026. The company’s stock appears undervalued, possibly due to tax loss selling. The CEO’s candid acknowledgment of past difficulties suggests a willingness to address and overcome these challenges. The situation presents a high-risk, high-reward opportunity, with a credible turnaround story that could appeal to forgiving bank lenders.

BSD Analysis:
The investment thesis hinges on the potential for a turnaround, supported by management’s transparency and the likelihood of lender leniency. The company’s current financial distress, characterized by high debt levels and a recent default, is a concern. However, the narrative of improvement by 2027, coupled with the stock’s depressed valuation, offers a speculative opportunity. Investors should consider the risks of continued financial pressure and the possibility of further defaults. The company’s ability to execute its turnaround strategy will be critical in realizing any potential upside.

Pitch Summary:
IEH Corp is a niche player in the manufacturing of hyperboloid connectors, a critical component in high-stakes industries such as defense, space, and aerospace. The company is poised to benefit from a significant upcycle in missile production, driven by increased defense spending and geopolitical tensions. IEH’s strategic position as a duopoly in this market, coupled with its pricing power and capacity for expansion, positions it well for future growth. The recent modernization of its facilities and anticipated up-listing to a more liquid market are expected to enhance its operational efficiency and investor visibility. Despite current margin pressures due to rising gold prices, IEH’s ability to pass on costs and its strong demand outlook suggest a return to profitability. The company’s long-term growth prospects are supported by its involvement in major defense programs and the ongoing recovery in commercial aerospace.

BSD Analysis:
IEH Corp’s strategic focus on hyperboloid connectors, a high-margin product with limited competition, provides a strong competitive moat. The company’s recent operational challenges, including ERP system issues and delisting, have been addressed, paving the way for improved financial performance. The anticipated up-listing to the OTCQX is expected to increase liquidity and attract more institutional investors. While gold price volatility remains a concern, IEH’s pricing power and the negligible cost of connectors relative to the overall system mitigate this risk. The company’s new facility in Allentown, Pennsylvania, offers significant capacity for growth, aligning with the expected increase in defense and aerospace demand. Overall, IEH’s unique market position and favorable industry tailwinds make it a compelling investment opportunity, albeit with the caveat of its current illiquidity and the need for careful due diligence.

Pitch Summary:
Neo Performance Materials has experienced a 26.4% increase in stock price, benefiting from a 30% rise in neodymium prices in early 2026. The company is well-positioned to capitalize on the diversification of supply chains away from China, as demand for rare earths continues to grow. Neo’s strategic positioning in the rare earths market offers significant growth opportunities as industries seek reliable and diversified sources for critical materials.

BSD Analysis:
Neo Performance Materials’ focus on rare earths positions it advantageously in the current market environment, where supply chain diversification is a priority. The company’s ability to leverage rising neodymium prices underscores its strong market position and potential for revenue growth. As industries increasingly seek to reduce reliance on Chinese sources, Neo’s strategic location and capabilities provide a competitive edge. Investors should consider the company’s growth prospects in the rare earths sector and its ability to navigate geopolitical challenges.

Pitch Summary:
AMG has seen a 27.7% increase in stock price, driven by rising demand for lithium and vanadium. The company is set to become the only chrome metal producer in the USA from Q2 2026, providing a significant strategic advantage by reducing dependency on Chinese imports. This vertical integration strengthens AMG’s market position and aligns with the growing demand for critical materials in various industries.

BSD Analysis:
AMG’s strategic focus on becoming the sole chrome metal producer in the USA is a game-changer, offering a competitive edge in the specialty metals market. The company’s ability to capitalize on the rising demand for lithium and vanadium positions it well for future growth, particularly as industries seek to secure stable supply chains. AMG’s vertical integration strategy not only enhances its market position but also mitigates risks associated with geopolitical tensions and supply chain disruptions. Investors should consider AMG’s strong market position and growth potential in the specialty metals sector.

Pitch Summary:
5N Plus has experienced a 56.3% increase in stock price, driven by a recent $18 million contract from the US Pentagon to secure germanium supplies, a critical metal for infrared optics and space solar cells. The company is expanding its capacities and is well-positioned to benefit from the ‘friendshoring’ trend, where supply chains are being diversified away from China. Analysts have raised their price targets to CAD 30, reflecting confidence in the company’s strategic direction.

BSD Analysis:
The geopolitical landscape is increasingly favoring companies like 5N Plus that can provide critical materials domestically. The Pentagon contract not only secures a revenue stream but also positions 5N Plus as a key player in the US’s strategic supply chain realignment. The company’s focus on expanding its capacity aligns with the growing demand for high-tech applications, particularly in the semiconductor industry. Investors should monitor the company’s ability to execute on its expansion plans and manage any geopolitical risks.

Pitch Summary:
Viromed Medical has seen a significant stock price increase of 96.1% due to anticipation around a press conference at Hannover Medical School, where groundbreaking findings on cold plasma treatment for lung diseases will be presented. The company has recently transitioned to registered shares, enhancing transparency for institutional investors. If the upcoming data meet expectations, Viromed could become a standard in pneumology, offering substantial growth potential.

BSD Analysis:
Viromed’s strategic shift to registered shares is likely to attract more institutional investors, providing a boost to its stock liquidity and valuation. The company’s focus on cold plasma technology positions it well in the medical technology sector, especially given the rising demand for innovative treatments in pneumology. The upcoming press conference is a critical catalyst that could validate Viromed’s technology and significantly impact its market position. However, investors should be cautious of potential volatility surrounding the event.