Our 2026 Predictions

And now, it's the Better with Bourbon Podcast, with Brad Martinot and Deakin Palmer, fast thinking and smooth drinking.

The views and opinions shared on the Better with Bourbon Podcast are our own and those of our guests.

Nothing we discussed should be taken as financial, legal, business, or gambling advice.

Don't make investment, business, or betting decisions based on our conversations as you should always talk to a qualified professional.

Completely jacked, wearing glittery eyeliner, big eyelashes, lipstick, and glitter all over his body.

He looks at Jamie and I goes, I get you boy, something really deep boys took us up.

Jamie's like, yeah, I have two more lights.

Sorry, man, we stopped serving beer an hour ago.

I'll take two, I'll take two, I'll take two, I'll take two bottles of water to get some fun.

Anyway, so welcome to Better with Bourbon.

Today is January 28th, 2026, the year of our Lord, we're in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and this is our episode number two.

Bradley, what are we doing tonight?

Well, we're going to be drinking some bourbon for sure, like that.

Yeah, right off the get-go, we're not waiting for good reason.

Last time in the edits at 2.40 in the morning, I think our bourbon tasting got cut out.

And thank you to our guest last time, Dave Brocius and Skypoint Rainey brought two bottles of the Angels Envy, which let's talk about the Angels Envy a little bit.

Yeah, we probably should.

So we probably drink more bourbon than we should, which is how you end up with a podcast called Better with Bourbon, because every time we just sit down to talk about anything, we typically have a bourbon.

Angels Envy is definitely one that we will not say no to.

And one of the things that I think I like about it is these guys were the first, or one of the first, to take whiskey that's American style out of American oak and then re-barrel it in a different, different type of wood for two, three years to add the flavor.

And if I'm not mistaken, I believe that these guys used very finished in court wine barrels.

Yeah, so everybody's doing that now. And I believe that these guys were one of the first to do that and didn't make a big deal about it, right?

It's just in little letters down here, but everybody else puts a whole separate package together with it, but it's a great bargain.

It is a great bargain, good for anything.

It is, if you watched the bourbon barometer last time you saw as the show went on, it went down.

There was no hard hiccups in the meantime, but we did have some comments from viewers we appreciate very much saying, hey, we noticed the level of bourbon drop in as you guys went.

But there were some other comments that you wanted to pull out.

We love the negative comments. In fact, our outtakes this past week got over 150,000 views on Facebook alone, but the negative comments I think are always the best.

After watching our show, the one was, that's exactly why I quit drinking.

We're here to help. If we can help anybody out on that matter, we understand.

Another comment was, and there's an alcohol shortage?

A lack of drinking, I guess short, is not alcohol.

So definitely want to thank both sets of commenters for your engagement with our little property here.

Those that are offering praise and love, thanks for listening and watching.

Those that are frying us a little bit, thanks for keeping us sharp. We'll take a note.

We appreciate it.

We've read every comment, and we've gotten so much, whether it's a text, a direct message, a comment on our one of our social media feeds.

Everyone is meaningful, and thank you so much to our surprise after the first episode.

We've jumped up into the top.

Well, as of airing on this episode, we were number 26 on Apple Podcast, and climbing quickly on Spotify.

So I'm just going to pat us on the back. It's a pretty big achievement for a guy that doesn't have a Facebook page.

Well, you know what's a big achievement? Is you did your hair tonight?

I mean, it's showered too and everything.

It's because our topics are hot.

Give them a sniff of what we're going to do.

What's really hot is that dress Perry's wearing tonight.

That's got the room steaming.

You know, when we first got here, I didn't know if you guys noticed, but a little cooler than it was last week.

Initially, I thought it was the weather outside, but then I realized it wasn't Dave Brochus talking for five hours in our studio.

So that quickly came to mind.

Thank you, Dave, for the.

Dave's bourbon. He brought this for us last week.

We loved every bit of it. I just had to spend a long time compressing their five hours into 15 minutes.

So, so topics tonight.

We got kind of a variety show.

We're going to do a little bit of business and tech segment one.

We're going to walk through a topic that is near and dear to our hearts.

We're going to talk through kind of the AI economy, the data center economy,

and some stories that have come to light lately that are maybe pointing out some cracks,

some chinks in the armor around financing for these endeavors.

This is something that Brad writes about.

I kind of work in this world from point to point.

So we're going to have a little bit of detail on what's going on with a handful of companies and video Microsoft, open AI, and core weave.

And then we're going to change, we're going to change speed a little bit.

Totally going to change speed.

We're going to dig into why Gen Z, especially, is drinking less.

Yeah, alcohol consumption has bottomed here in the United States.

This obviously is a mystery to us.

No clue why or how something like this could happen.

So we're going to talk about it, see if we can figure it out and understand it.

And then third, we're going to leave you with something that's kind of fun.

We're going to go through just some random questions and make some predictions for 2026 around sports, business, the market, and the like.

Crypto.

Yeah, crypto.

Yeah, all the bugs.

All the big stuff.

So we can come back next year and review it.

Because next year we'll, instead of 26, maybe we'll be like two or six on the Apple Podcast list.

Right.

Now that we're recording, we'll get back to remember what we said.

That's exactly right.

So we're going to dig in after we take a little bit of a break.

Thank you for joining us here on episode two.

We're going to get into it here in a minute.

Cheers.

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So we're back, story number one tonight, as we previewed.

We're going to talk a little bit about what's going on with the AI economy and data centers.

No matter where you live in the country, I'm sure that you see plenty of press and stories about data center development.

Oh, they're press.

Yeah, good press, right?

Yeah.

About the pace of development around the need for data centers, the need for compute, which means just computational ability and how that's going to push the economy forward here over the next several years.

There's a bunch of key players in this space that have been driving what has been a remarkable kind of moonshot for these companies from really kind of mid-2023 through the current day.

The reason a lot of this started in mid-2023 is because we had an interest rate situation, remember 2023, 2022 interest rate started going up with a lot of inflation.

When that curve started to come down and we were able to cut rates a few times, it kick started a bunch of what some call speculative investing.

What others would call necessary investment in technology infrastructure data infrastructure, power infrastructure that has driven a whole new class of company up into the right on the charts.

Let's talk a little bit about it, but very specifically, but do you think it was just because of the interest rates?

I mean, I think it was also just the way the GPUs were coming on.

With the GPU power coming on and the capability and the need for bigger computational space, literally space.

As small as these chips are, but as powerful as they are and as demanding as AI has now revolved into.

Yeah, you make a good point. You're right. An economic movement like this can't result from just lower interest rates.

That timing needs to be met with innovation and the ability for a capital to find its way into the business.

You have to have the right leaders there to have the vision. You're 100% right.

But for sure. The GPU work is.

But for sure that helped.

That was the perfect kind of crossroads or merge of two things coming together.

Yeah, we're going to talk about why.

From here to this point, the GPU thing, the technology advantage, the spread and the need for AI and the data centers to support it has been the dry.

I think from here forward, a lot of that's going to change for reasons that we're going to get into.

So let's start. There's back in September 2025, two of the major firms that are involved in this kind of moonshot open AI and video.

Open AI is run by a guy.

Sam Altman, who founded, you know, this AI LLM, right? That's what open open AI does.

They they own and have invented chat GPT.

Sam Altman initially partnered up with Elon Musk to start this thing. Elon was a founding investor.

You know, and they started essentially very deeper search on what's called large language models that allow for.

Essentially, the computer to start to understand your preferences.

And this is the thinking behind all AI.

And I'm sure many of you have played with AI at some point if you haven't, you got to do it.

What you need to have these large language models, both one, be invented, right?

And two, be leveraged by companies to do anything in the business world.

You have to have two kind of two key components, three key components.

You're going to have a really powerful chip, right?

And that's what Nvidia makes. Nvidia is run by a company guy named Jensen Wong, who is a, you know, a brilliant thinker and luminary in the space.

But you also have to have power.

Okay, power is really important. We're going to talk a little bit about power.

And you've heard some of this.

If you've seen stories about data centers going up in your area, invariably in that story was a comment about how power rates are likely to go up.

And we're using water and there's going to be a degradation of kind of the services and towns because of this movement.

The third thing you need is, is the actual data center, right?

So you need land, you need power, and you need compute, right, chips.

So open AI in the video announced a partnership back in September 25, where they agreed for Nvidia to invest $100 billion into open AI to fund their commercial buildout.

And in return, the understanding was open AI because they need three things.

They need power, they need facilities, they need chips, would turn back around and use some of that money to buy Nvidia's GPUs, which are, there's kind of two classes.

One main ship set now is the H100 pretty soon. They're going to be rolling out the black well.

These things are changing the nature of computing any comment you want to add in.

Well, they are. I mean, we've gone to the H100's, 200's.

Every year, they're coming out with a more powerful, more efficient chip, which is important given the power usage, given initially the water usage now with the cooling loops in place that they're liquid cooling loops that they're putting in place.

Fresh water is not so critical as it was still significant, but many regards are just passing that buck up strain to the power plant.

You know, it's not as efficient as a evaporative cooling used to be in the traditional sense.

But yes, the chips are have been the big driver open AI. I think an interesting fact about open AI. Do you know what Sam Holtman's salary is every year?

No, zero. He refuses to take a seller. It's good. He's got the same salary we have.

I think he's making a little bit more. But now he's, you know, and I don't think it's altruistic. I think he's just showing that he's in it for the right reasons.

And I'm sure he has equity or if he doesn't have equity, you know, God bless him, but he is investing in other companies.

As we mentioned last week, a green one in the rich minerals that are underneath there. So he's, I think he's one of those investors in that company.

And a couple other very high tech companies that are kind of spreading and spreading out of this. So well, that's exactly where we're going next.

Altman and open AI specifically need for this environment of free flowing capital, free flowing liquidity and mutual investment and other tech leaders to happen in order for them to fund this build out.

So the idea here is that, and this is important. We need to say in video gives open AI money invest in the company and then open AI turns background and buys and videos stuff.

Okay, that concept is called circular financing. We're going to come back to it in a minute. But that deal kicked off a flurry of announcements by open AI.

And again, this is just last year, third, fourth quarter. Open AI did a deal for six gigawatts worth of computing power with chip manufacturer AMD.

They did a 10 gigawatt cloud deal with Oracle, which is a massive cloud provider, the historic leader in the database space. They've been around forever.

And then they did another deal for custom chips that are going to be with Broadcom Broadcom makes typically communications chips that don't do the compute, don't train the LLMs, but help with the movement of that data out of the data center.

All in all, okay, this company has made $1.5 trillion of new spending commitments just very recently, $1.5 trillion. So it begs the question, well, shit, can open AI afford this?

Do they make enough money to come $1.5 trillion out of pocket?

I, you know, being the market nerd, you know, that I proclaimed to be sometimes I decided to sit down and say, well, how much money is open AI making?

And I was a little bit shocked to find that in 2023, open AI had open AI's first year they reported revenue. They did about $2 billion in revenue.

Now they're a public company, so we don't get to the penny reports like public companies, they're private.

They did about $2 billion in revenue, but they lost $2 billion net, okay.

In 2024, revenue jumped up about 3x, they jumped up to about $6 billion, so that's great growth, 300% year-over-year, but they lost $5 billion, okay.

So they lost one from $3 billion to $5 billion. 2025, same thing, revenue jumps from 6 to 13, so they grow better than 100% again.

Everybody's really pleased with this, but the loss on that 13 billion in revenue is now $8 to $9 billion.

So where are we today? 2026.

Sam Altman has been taking some hits in the press for his reporting that run rate for 2026, run rate is essentially taking your revenue for a 12-month period, not necessarily a calendar year.

It's going to be about $20 billion, but at the same time, OpenAI is going to lose $17 billion on their $20 billion revenue, right.

So this raises some really interesting questions because every time these announcements come out that OpenAI is doing a deal with companies like Nvidia, Oracle, Broadcom, Microsoft, AMD, whoever they're doing deal with, the market shoots up in the air and a really large percentage of the NASDAQ, the tech heavy NASDAQ index,

are foundries that build chips, memory stocks that use different types of chips to do memory, semi-conductor equipment companies that make the semi, all of this stuff is related to semis, NAI, and data centers, and they just keep going up and up and up and up and up and up and up.

Are you talking about semis? Are we still talking about tech?

I'm not even going to make a comment on that. Yeah, I'm just going to keep going around.

That might be a bourbon talk, and I'm just sitting here listening.

These are a lot of deals, and questions start to emerge about, are the people making these deals doing their due diligence?

How is OpenAI going to come up with this money? Do they have a revenue run rate to support this, and it's not necessarily because they're doing bad, they're doing great, they're growing 100% year over year, but we're talking about really, really large numbers,

increasing amounts of financing that needs to come in to allow these plans to keep growing.

As questions about financial terms started to get assessed, in Q4 of last year, a lot of these high-flying tech companies really started to take it on the chin, market turned south a little bit, there was some negativity after this 250% three-year run.

A lot of these smaller companies, not the majors, guys who supply chip manufacturers and semiconductors that maybe we don't know the names of, dropped 50% to 70% in Q4 really quickly.

The concern is really a situation where a scenario emerges where OpenAI or some other player in the same situation, some high-growth low-capital company who's got a groundbreaking technology, but not enough money to do what they need to with it, are they becoming too big to fail financially?

We hit on that a little bit in the first episode, because as I mentioned, Microsoft owns 27% or 28% of OpenAI.

Well, that's a really great comment. We have a graphic that we're going to put up here in the edit that's going to show some of the nature of these things, right?

And Microsoft's a major player in this, their name's going to come up again. Are we okay, Barry, on time?

Okay, so Softbank being there too. There are two major tech financial well-heeled players, massive war chest, they've got tons and tons of money.

And I'll just interject with, to me, it's kind of like the Amazon model all over again. It's not making money for all these years, it's going into the infrastructure, it's going into the build out, but we know it's going to be good because the usage, the adoption is amazing.

So it's worth the losses. And we're talking 17 billion dollars in loss here and there. That sounds like a lot of money, but these companies are now being valued close to $1 trillion.

So if you put it in those terms, it's almost like putting the new, what used to be the billion dollar threshold versus the million dollar threshold is now the billion dollar versus the trillion dollar threshold.

And so 17 billion maybe isn't quite that much, but I'm going to let you continue on your nerdy stats because I really think it's important to hear.

Here's where those that are still with us.

Okay, so when we come back, we're going to take a break. When we come back, I'm going to school Bradley on the difference between market cap and revenue.

Okay, that's where we're going to continue this story. We're going to talk a little bit about open AI, then we're going to talk a little bit about core weave, we're going to get into Microsoft, we're going to do a little more drinking. We're back in a second.

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All right, we're back talking open AI and video circular financing, graduates made a comment about how big these companies are by market cap.

Make sure you throw up the graphic for this piece that I provided.

The graphic that you're seeing here is a display of the market cap of a lot of the companies that are playing in this space.

Again, the concern is that even open AI, even though it's small on that graphic, is nowhere near the size of Nvidia or Microsoft, these are behemoths, nowhere near the size of Oracle.

They are growing rapidly in terms of market cap, even though they only make $20 billion in rapid.

And they're also the new kid on the block.

Exactly.

When you talk about Microsoft, there's a very much Oracle Google.

They've been around for in the tech space, at least since the last tech bubble.

So I think that's the differentiator there, but they are rapidly climbing up the chain.

Okay, so here's the potential problem.

When we think about the fact that Nvidia and Microsoft and Oracle and a number of these other companies are all funding open AI, which is one company.

The public companies on the graphic that we displayed or are showing you right now, they make up about 17% of the total value of the S&P 500.

So when I start to hear that the top handful of companies are becoming reliant or potentially, maybe not reliant, but continually using each other as sources of capital.

Where my mind takes me is back to the global financial crisis in 2008, because when we think about the banks then, there were really like two banks that had a really serious problem.

Okay, and those two banks had those problems, but they did business with the next, you know, 10, 12 banks all in the same way.

So their problems were inherited by those next 10 to 12, and then the customers of those next 10 to 12 had problems.

And it's a cascading effect associated with lack of liquidity.

So when we talk about the difference between revenue, which is actually money, somebody pays you, and market cap, which is a valuation, an opinion of what you're going to be worth at some point in the future.

It's an important distinction to bring, okay.

So this, yeah, distinguished the 2008 to what I see here going on in 2008, it was all real estate driven.

And it was very much so, very lack of equity driven loans.

They were lending out money at little to know if not above value, because the rates were favorable, the prices in homes were going up.

And then we had a market crash in real estate across the board, but real estate is not a new technology.

Definitely not.

So it's the oldest, you know, one of the oldest investments that's been around since, you know, investing in the stock market has been around.

So I think the distinguishing factor there is AI is a new emerging technology that these companies now have the infrastructure capabilities.

They now have the power capabilities, but they don't.

They don't have.

Not yet, but they, but they're on the cusp of doing it.

And there's a lot of shovels in the ground right now all over the world, not just here in the United States, that are going to build this out.

Interesting. We're going to talk about the power need here.

But this idea of a whole ecosystem of companies that are kind of friends, kind of competitors, all trying to sell product services, capabilities into the corporate America, becoming reliant on each other.

It just reminded me of how much fun the global financial crisis was for me at UBS.

And one of the things that I know not everybody can live through that.

But if you want to kind of a, kind of a almost real world, kind of look at what that was like.

You got to see the movie The Big Short.

Yeah.

That's a good one.

Because in the big short, they do a lot of discussion around this dude named Michael Burry, who was played by Christian Bale.

Michael Burry is now a legend in the investing world because he had a hedge fund called Sion Capital, which is interesting because he, as in real life, had one eye.

Okay. Michael Burry was a really unique individual, one eye, one glass eye, very odd kind of behavioral dude doesn't do real well in social sitting.

He could, yeah, he could have benefited from bourbon, but I don't think he did a lot of drinking.

Well, that's too bad because he could have just had one ice cube just like us, too.

But this guy, this guy, Burry is a legend.

And the reason I bring him up here is because just a few weeks ago, another company named CoreWeave.

CoreWeave came on the scene in a very similar kind of scenario, as we just talked about with OpenAI, where they are a very high growth, what's called hyperscaler.

And you've heard the term hyperscaler, what that means is they own and operate data centers.

And they, much like OpenAI, have this massive build out need.

And they, like OpenAI, are growing really quickly, but they don't have anywhere near the revenue that is necessary to allow them access to the capital that they need to build out over the next, you know, we're kind of looking at 20-30s at that line.

Those are the dates we were talking about the other.

This is interesting. CoreWeave is one of two super hot hyperscalers that have come public just, you know, in the last, you know, two years.

Their European competitor is called Nibbius, right?

And these are like the Coke Pepsi, the Ford Chevy, you know, battle that's going to be going on in this space.

You can maybe call it the Arnie Jack battle that will endure through kind of this phase in history in the markets, right?

I love it, and that's kind of how it's dug a, dug a worrying back and forth.

Exactly, and they're both just like OpenAI, even though they do something a little bit different, they need massive amounts of capital.

Okay, so, so who are CoreWeave's customers?

Okay, so CoreWeave's customers include OpenAI, right? And what's the relationship there?

OpenAI has all of these Nvidia chips, right, that they use to allow CoreWeave to train.

Okay, and what they're doing specifically is, is CoreWeave is providing the compute environment that OpenAI uses to train their large language model.

Okay, so super high-end, super strategic, super valuable.

CoreWeave's other customers, a major customer, biggest customer of Microsoft.

Microsoft makes up about 60% of their revenue.

But these guys also serve Facebook, Meta, IBM, US Department of Energy.

All of this is around training super high-end specialized models to do super advanced computing in the future.

So, CoreWeave is a really important company.

So, CoreWeave has this expansion goal.

Okay, and this is really important.

I'm just going to stop here.

Yeah, I almost feel like you're making your case before I even get to put my case.

So, you got that right, Mitchell.

Well, I just, I haven't seen your pick, but I'm calling it right now.

And that's ridiculous.

You've taken up 15 minutes of briefing time. I want the same.

Let's go ahead.

Okay, so CoreWeave has this growth goal, right?

They just appeared last year.

They want to build out five gigawatts of data center capacity by 2030.

So, what?

Fuck's a gigawatt.

I don't know.

He's got a lot.

There's five gigawatts a lot.

I don't know.

We hear these terms a lot, but...

I thought to myself, you know, whatever's just a number, what do they have now?

Well, right now they have about 0.85 gigawatts.

Okay, so they have 85% of one megawatt, okay?

No.

I said it wrong.

Yeah.

They have 0.85 gigawatts, 85% of one gigawatts, so 850 megawatts now.

So, they get a grow by over 5x to hit their grow by 2030.

What's a gigawatt?

You know, what is a gigawatt?

I mean, that's why we measure power.

Gigawatt is the biggest unit, right?

It's 1,000 megawatts, right?

Five gigawatts, what they're trying to build out, is enough electric power to do a couple things.

I look this up.

Thank you.

Open AI, chat GPT for helping me with this research.

Five gigawatts is enough to power every single single family household in the state of Georgia all at the same time.

The power of the whole state all at the same time.

Five gigawatts is enough energy capacity to address the needs of both Chicago and Los Angeles at the same time.

And thank you to each and every one of you for paying for it for all the big tech.

A nuclear reactor, a standard nuclear reactor, if it were going to be commissioned and deployed today,

a modern nuclear reactor creates about one gigawatt of power.

And, you know, this blew my mind because when you're growing up, you're thinking a nuclear reactor, what's stronger than a nuclear reactor?

It's going to be like the sun is the only answer, right?

So, this company wants to build out five gigawatts, five nuclear reactors worth of power.

Last stat, I just think this is massive.

When we think about how much energy is used in our country, at peak demand time in the summer,

when everybody's driving, running their air conditioning, when you're doing your hair, when I'm doing my hair, that's exactly right.

Total energy demand in the U.S. and the middle of the summer is about 125, 130 gigawatts.

Okay? So, we're talking about 4% of the total energy capacity in the United States these guys want to build out in the next few years.

Can they afford it? Same question we asked with OpenAI. Can these guys afford it?

Okay.

Crowweave spent $13 billion building this kind of stuff out in 2025 last year.

For 2026, they're total, for 2026 through 2030.

So, this period we're talking about next four years, their total capex needs are estimated to be about $175 billion.

In addition to $10 billion of debt that they've already taken on.

So, these guys need to find a way to come up with or push out the maturities, but address $185 billion in total capital capacity by 2030.

So, how much do they make?

Okay. Again, same thing.

Just on the cap.

And I think it's important to note that our current administration has said the AI race.

And it's not just amongst ourselves. It's against China, it's against India, Europe.

Even though some of them are our allies, it's the AI race to make sure we have the compute in the necessary compute power.

And as you mentioned, Crowweave is supplying that infrastructure for some of the biggest names in the industry.

So, when you ask, where are they going to get it?

It's a national security issue that our political and our Trump administration has put down the gauntlet on.

I really feel not only are the other big tech companies going to make sure that they bolster it up and it happens.

Because they're not in the business of building up the infrastructure.

They're in the business of doing the cloud work. They're in the business of doing the software.

And now the AI and all the enterprise work that they've been with the agenda work.

So, I really think if there's a need, even though they've only taken on 10 billion, that's going to be a very easy check to get.

Whether it's through the political arena, whether it's through influence from the political arena into the tech arena.

And I think we've seen it so far. So, I'm probably only helping make your case for the stockpick of the year, but go ahead.

So, there's a lot of, it's a lot of naval gazing there, Bradley.

Here's the reality. Core weave, and I saved my naval.

Yeah, right. Yeah, we have to cut that one, but that, right. Core weave, here's the reality.

Just like open AI, core weave, they're free cash flow.

What's left for investors at the end of the year is $20 billion.

So, they're pretty similar to what's going on with open AI.

They are growing like crazy. They're doing really well, but they need so much more money than they make.

There are some questions about where this is going to come from.

In spite of all the things that you just said, which a lot of people believe, core weave is going to be short between about $100 billion at the low end and $140 billion at the high end.

So, people who have already invested in them are the smartest investors in the world.

These are the companies that manage our own retirements, the fatalities, the vanguards, the black stones,

co-coup management, there's a super sharp hedge fund that helped them raise money.

These are the smartest people on Wall Street.

So, when Core weave came out and said, hey, we're going to do a deal with Nvidia, pretty similar to what open AI did.

Last year, it wasn't a big deal, about $67 billion came out just earlier this week, said, hey, we're going to do another deal that is exactly the same thing for another $2 billion.

People started to say, well, wait a second, why do they keep going back to the well so frequently?

Is everything actually okay there?

There's been a couple of small kind of spas outs that have ensued, right?

Remember, this started in October of 25, and there was a little bit of reaction.

And when it did, when chat GPT and open AI were going through this, there were some people that started asking questions.

Again, our friend Michael Burry wrote some public comments.

It was very well publicized, a very famous short seller named Jim Chanos, who's made billions and billions of dollars betting on companies going down, made some public comments.

So, whether it's politically expedient, whether they're just talking their book at the moment, they might not fully agree with you at least in the moment, okay?

What happened?

A lot of stocks fell.

By the way, their interest is negative.

So, when they're shorting these stocks, they're looking for a reason to drive it down, and they're looking for, well, the bubble talk, right?

So, it's gotten so big.

Well, they could buy it long if they thought it was going up if it was going down.

So, I mean, this is what makes a market, right?

Well, it absolutely makes a market and makes a great debate as to whether or not that's going to happen or not.

It is, it is, and here's what, okay.

So, those guys, when they came out, Burry and Chanos, one of the things that they immediately pointed to was, say, like, look, we've seen this movie before, and they weren't talking about the big short.

They were talking about what happened with the tech bus back in 1999, 2000, 2001, when we were young whipper snappers.

You were probably, were you still in law school then?

Yes, yes, and I remember very well because I got burnt on one of the biggest tech companies of the time, thinking that I was getting in at the exact right time.

And I was getting in the exact right time, right down that, that black time and the ski slope right down to the bottom.

So, it was, it was a good lesson learned early on, but I do think there's some distinguishing factors here this time around because that was just very internet driven.

Internet is just a vehicle, not really an emerging technology.

I mean, the internet's gotten faster, and that's the only thing where it's gotten better.

Whereas, the AI world, in the computing world, the quantum world that's, you know, slowly coming in behind it.

Not even slowly, it's coming in behind it pretty quickly now that there, you know, some China, especially, is way ahead of where we're at.

I think there's, again, I will differentiate factors that are here that were not back in 1999 and 2000.

Okay, so some people have made this distinction before, and I think you're, I think you're good in calling it out.

We have to take another break because our equipment's about to catch on fire because this, this actual fire back here was so well made by Mrs. Martnell.

Brad's wife made this for us, and it's awesome.

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Okay, so we're back. So Bradley was telling us about the difference between the internet build out and what's going on today in the data center world.

And there are some really important points to bring up here, not to belabor this.

But when they were building out the internet, they were building for the hope of fulfilling future demand.

When you were building the wireline internet and lay in dark fiber, right, people weren't using it because they didn't know what to use it for.

Not just laying it but bearing it into the ocean.

Yeah, I mean, that's super expensive, right?

The great thing about the internet build out was after this giant bust, all of that infrastructure was still there and it got used and it now is the backbone of the economy that we live in today.

And they come back?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it took 10 years.

It took 10 years. And famously, Cisco, Cisco Systems, which was the poster child for this sort of large ass back in the day.

Cisco Systems was the first company to ever say to its customers. Now, keep in mind, this is when the internet was being built out.

So companies were coming to Cisco and saying, hey, we need to get online. We need to move our business onto the web.

What do we need? And they said, well, you need some routers and some switches. You need to connect to the internet.

So companies were building out that infrastructure as they went much like these infrastructure companies were doing today with power and chips and the like.

So a lot of similarities.

The one difference, I'm going to say, is the demand today seems to be ramping much higher than the demand that we didn't know what the internet was in those days.

There were companies. Remember PSInet? I worked right across the street in McLean, Virginia, from a company called PSInet.

There's some random telco company.

They had a really high market cap, no revenue. And what do they do? They went about the naming rights for the Baltimore Ravens for one year.

And I think it was by week six of that year, they were already out of business. PSInet was done. There was no more PSInet.

So that's the sort of PSI went way down.

So that's the kind of silly kind of financial figuring that some of this stuff can be built around, right?

And Cisco just in 2025 just finally made its way back to its peak from 2000.

It took 25 years for that stock. The fully round trip from where it started before it started the circular financing garbage to now where it is 25 years.

So here's to Cisco and fuck all the investors that took it in the chin on the way. And I was one of them.

Bold call. That's right.

We're going to let it go.

So six years later, maybe I should.

Right.

So there is some historic kind of precedent for questioning these sorts of financing arrangements.

And I'm not going to suggest that Microsoft or Nvidia, which are the two biggest companies in the world.

And between the two of them, I should probably do some math on this.

Probably have enough cash to rival the US Treasury at certain points in the year. They probably do.

Sitting on a lot of cash.

So there's no question that there is enough cash in the IT infrastructure ecosystem to fund these things.

But we only talked about two companies that between now and 2030 both need an excess of $100 billion.

There are 20, 30, 40 other companies that are fighting for those investment dollars from investors far smaller than Vitality and Vanguard.

But I will say this in talking with some of the folks in the private equity worlds in the venture world.

AI infrastructure has become a very sweet spot even for not the soft banks.

I'm going down the pecking order of the bigger investment companies.

I think the capital is out there.

And if it isn't out there in the equity world or the venture capital world or the pure world through the Microsofts, the Googles, the apples, I do think it's out there through the government.

And that's lost the taxpayers.

It is too big to fail. The government is so far behind it.

And with almost a three, four years left to go in Trump's term, that's an eternity right now in the AI infrastructure and AI world.

No question.

So I do see that being propped up.

And that might be the bigger differentiator compared to the internet when we're talking about the internet and the tech boom back in 1999 2000.

I don't know if there was as much political backing as there is right now.

It's a good point.

Yeah, a really good point.

That's for sure.

That's for sure.

It definitely seems like there are more eyes on this build out than there were then.

We were kids then.

And of course we were interested in figuring out what the internet was.

The agent of AI and large language models have immediately become part of everybody's life.

And I definitely recognize the distinction.

Let me end this and tie up this very detailed conversation with one point.

And then I'll get a reaction from you and then we'll move on and talk about something.

I haven't seen you do such a thorough report since your fourth grade current events report on Tom Topgund.

And that was impressive.

Clock for the alternates in the ladies room.

So here's a big point.

Microsoft is a company that has been named in this a couple of times.

They were the biggest circle in our graphic that we showed.

They're the biggest player in this space.

Okay.

They do business with all of these companies and everybody does business with Microsoft.

Here's something that a company like CoreWeave probably should pay a little bit of attention to.

And I'm sure they probably are.

Just this week when CoreWeave announced this second two billion dollar follow-on deal with Microsoft that raised some eyebrows.

On the same day, on the same day, and this isn't an accident, Microsoft announced that they are going to start developing their own set of chips.

Okay.

They're going to have somebody else build them for them.

Okay. They're not going to do the building like Nvidia builds their own.

They'll contract that out.

But their chip is going to be called Mia.

M-A-I-A.

And the idea, I've seen that lately.

Yeah, the idea that Microsoft's going to do this is they aren't going to roll this out.

They have a couple of very large data centers already in production that they're using to run their business now.

One is in Iowa, the other one's in Arizona.

They have plans to not only roll out this Mia chip, but deploy it into their own data centers in 26 and 27.

Okay.

So this is a really big deal because everybody's trying to sell their chips into data centers that they want Microsoft to use.

And Microsoft is saying like, yeah, of course we're going to, you know, we're going to rent data center space from other people.

But what's the real reason they have to do it?

It's because they're managing risk, yeah.

Well, but they are managing risk because Nvidia's chips are in such high demand.

Even when Trump said the video, you can't sell the chart anymore in time.

You can't buy Nvidia at least the new chips.

I think you back down on that and you went to the older chips and they can get those.

You know, you'll be behind in the A.I. race if you get those supposedly.

Yeah, when we get the black wells, we'll send them the H100s.

That's right.

Yeah, right, right, right.

Well, I think this is interesting and you make a good point.

You're the case you're making is that the capacity demands are going to be so massive that Microsoft has to do as many deals as they can and guarantee as much capacity.

In addition to building out their own capabilities, right?

And I think we've seen it.

I know it's not in your case today.

But it's the same thing that Elon Musk is doing.

Exactly.

You know, he's hedging his bets, you know, because he entered into a deal with Nvidia.

Got as many chips from them as they would give him or capable of giving him.

Built his colossus.

That's right.

But then he also had to make a deal with the Samsung.

I think he made, he kind of deal with Samsung.

I mean, what the, maybe we'll come back and do any loan.

We'll have a loan episode maybe.

In fact, check that.

Yeah.

He also hedged his bets.

And now I think he also announced in the last few months that he's getting into the chip business.

So the chip business is very hot.

And that's a pun on words.

Todd Leitton is firing back.

Exactly.

Just like the fire, just like Perry's cameras.

Okay.

Well, Perry's stockings.

Yeah.

So this has been illuminating.

I learned a lot putting this stuff together.

And it's fun talking about this because you think you know about this stuff.

You know, you shoot off your mouth at the bar, which, you know, we do all the damn time.

No idea whether what we're saying is right.

We need to actually dig in and have to present.

You know the key is just to pretend you know what you're talking about.

That's right.

Just say it with conviction.

Nobody's going to ask you about it.

Then walk away.

That's right.

It's like, it's like one.

Oh, he said, just.

Fine.

Give me two honeykin.

He delivered that one with great conviction.

Okay.

And he got to hunt.

Yeah, he got to.

That's exactly right.

Here's to you, Jim.

So connect.

Okay.

Let's move on to our second topic tonight.

Second topic tonight.

I'm going to introduce it.

And then turn it over to Bradley.

Right?

Are we going to do it that way?

Oh, but I think you can start off.

I mean, okay.

So I like the fact that you brought these topics up because you're actually participating, though, in the back.

Heart of a and doing homework.

Yeah.

Right.

What's the last time you did homework?

Well, you run this business.

I mean, I honestly, I wasn't very good at doing homework when I had homework.

I was really more a kind of.

Show up and wing it.

Show it a.

Show it a dude.

I sense that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Great.

Let's go.

Okay.

So let's, let's, let's change, let's change, change, change, change direction here.

I'm going to start with a quote.

Somebody that I respect very much.

And then Frank Sinatra.

He said, I feel sorry for people who don't drink.

Because when they wake up in the morning is the best.

They're going to feel all the way.

Right?

Sure.

Not the way I live my life.

I like to, I like to start low and go high.

Right.

The topic here is really around the idea that, that alcohol consumption in the United States

has absolutely plummeted and by a lot of measures is at an all-time low in our country's history.

Well, if there is astounding to me, I don't understand this.

Yeah.

And if we, if you want to shift from the focus of what may be a bubble, I, I think the alcohol,

at least the hard alcohol world in the beer world too, is facing a bubble.

The, the hard liquor world is a little more, is sensing it a little bit more.

I think they're down 20%.

You know, compared to just a few years ago.

So, and a lot of that has to do with Gen Z.

And the Gen Z generation compared to the millennials is just drinking less.

And we can attribute it to better awareness, health.

We can attribute it to socialization.

You know, what, what we get together is socialization kind of drives us because in Indian EPA

there's not a lot of places to go that doesn't have a bar or a sign in front of it.

So, socialization drives it.

In, in the younger generations, they would rather not socialize in person.

They're, they're socializing over the greatest thing that the internet ever created.

And that's, that's the digital world.

Yeah.

So, they're, they're socializing on that end.

So, a lot of great stats here.

Let me, let me just fill, fill in our, our viewers in case they are not up on this.

Because this was a surprise to me.

I had no idea when, when our, our good friend Bob Marcus shared this data with us.

For adult drinkers, 2026, signal day, a structural shift.

In the US, soft reported drinking has hit the lowest level since records began in 1939.

Only about 54% of adults now report that they consume alcohol versus 62% reported themselves as drinkers as recently as 2023.

So, we've lost a, a, a, a really large number of drinkers just over these last few years.

That's really interesting to me.

That's adults, right?

What's most interesting to me is we can keep stats during the time when alcohol was illegal.

That's right.

That's a real good point.

Started keeping these stats in 1939.

When did prohibition end?

Why not then, right?

I would say it's pretty close to there.

It's interesting.

You're going to send you to war, you can drink again.

That's, that's really insightful.

Okay, so team, team drinking.

This is, this is something I have to cite.

I got, I got to cite stats that I read and refer to you.

I'm just going to give you, because I don't, I have no children.

I don't know anything about team drinking since I turned 20 and that was 30 years ago.

Kids don't binge drink anymore, right?

Which is defined by five drinks in a sitting.

Reportedly only one percent of eighth graders.

Yeah, five, five drinks in a sitting, which I guess we're already binge drinking, right?

You should call this binge drinking with bourbon.

One percent of eighth graders and only two percent of tenth graders.

Nine percent of high school seniors, right, report drinking.

This is nearly a 50 percent drop from just the last decade.

And those stats are provided by responsibility.org.

Thank you for your service.

Well, and I think it's a sociological study, because I really believe if you look back in our day,

you know, we didn't have the internet, we didn't have phones.

So our, our time was spent in the fields or in the forest with a keg or, or a case.

And that was the socialization.

That was what drove us together.

Yeah, our Facebook was a keg in a field.

It was.

Otherwise, we didn't connect with our friends.

Whereas now, why do I have to get out of my chair or in my comfort in my bedroom?

I can connect with all my friends in one place.

And so, and I think there's been a, and you can say maybe it's caring it, maybe it's a result of it.

And you can argue both ways.

Baping.

Baping is coming on to the scene big time.

Yeah.

And it's digital.

It's disposable.

And it's also kind of sexy in that Gen Z.

And now, 20% of almost 20% of Gen Z's are vaping.

Only 5% are smoking.

Clear.

What we want to use is skyrocket.

I think that's another fact.

Because now, recreational marijuana is legal.

You don't have to try to, try to find your, your buddy, the groundskeeper to get, get, get, get that, do be anymore.

Carl Spackler.

That's right.

Yeah.

So the California's changing view.

This is the good shit.

Right.

That's what the California, and this kind of supports would broadly just said.

And the number who do not drink at all.

Like, what college kid doesn't drink?

Apparently half of them I'm sorry, 68%.

Give me 68%.

Reported no alcohol consumption in the past year, compared to just 34% a decade ago.

That's from campus safety magazine.

Thank you for your help.

But I can test having kids in that age group, that that is the trend.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, why?

this thing, what was this piece they said? It's digital awareness with everybody having

a phone and social media being so important. The kids, as I read, are concerned about looking

buffoonish on their socials, right? That makes sense. I mean, I guess if we had people

following us around. Is there really a health thing you think that's driving this? You

know, I in my research, I thought, you know, because I always say it's the last ten years

we're shaving off. It's not these. And it's usually those that, you know, when you're

in hospice and in the nursing home and nobody's coming around to visit you anymore and you

got change your own diaper, yeah. Well, is it health? I mean, I think with the rise of,

you know, the obvious themes, right? Make America healthy again, right? Everybody's concerned

about their social well-being and state of mind and anxiety. And it's obvious that coming

off of the experience that we had over the last, you know, let's call it five years,

specifically, 2020-2021-22, we have some stats here about, you know, some of the knock-on

effects of this, you know, people really started paying attention to their mental health

and well-being. I have some friends who decided they were going to stop drinking. Thankfully,

from thinking about myself here, they failed. And they're back off the wagon again, so

we're going to hang out. But there are some real positives that I think we should report

on associated with this generational decline. Number one, I'm probably, you know, surface

level. DUI arrests have totally dropped from 2015 to today. 2015, we had over a million

nationwide DUI arrests. I'm sorry, arrests. 2025, we're tracking, you know, 800 and

some thousand that's projected. But roughly an 18% decrease in DUI arrests. My question

and I thought immediately was, could that be the result of ride sharing apps?

No. I think it's a great point because it's a lot easier to get a ride. It really is

a lot easier to get a ride. You know, it's not just one ride sharing app. Now you have

multiple liter out there. And now you have self-driving taxis that are hitting a lot of

major metropolitan areas. Again, AI driven. Totally, totally. Second, DUI arrests are down.

Second fatalities are lower. And this is probably the big, the big, you know, the big old

star. 2015 baseline, we had 10,280 people die in a DUI related fatality, right? That peaked

actually in 2021. This is kind of alarming. What from, from 10,000 subod deaths in 2025

to 13,600, which is a, it's a 32% increase in 2021, because I think as we could all remember,

maybe some of us don't remember, we were all doing a lot of drinking.

Well, because it was not the else we thought the world was in there, right? So, but that

has thankfully declined tremendously. And early data for 2025, we don't have the full year

data in yet, says that we had 12,400 fatalities in 2023, which was also high year, but that's

going to drop really significantly here in 2025. Probably the best news is that kids under

21 have been the biggest successful. In 1982, we had 5,215 kids die because of drunk driving.

That is from 5,200 subod to 1,300 are believed going to be this year.

So, that's a bigger question. 70% drop. And when you get teenage insurance rates actually

going to drop. It's an interesting question. It's a really interesting question, because

when I read, when I was doing some research on this, one of the, one of the proof points

that I found, I thought it was ridiculous. I'm going to have to read it to you. Okay.

This was one of the positive knock-on effects of people drinking less as reported by a company

that I've never heard of, but they are called a Vidion Health. Okay. A Vidion Health says

that alcohol use is estimated to cost employers up to get ready. $5,100 per employee per year

in combined health care claims and lost productivity costs. That to me sounds fucking bonkers.

Okay. So, sorry about the language. That math thing checking out. That math ain't

mathin' for me. We aren't explicitly rated. Okay. Good. Okay. Well, let's just,

maybe they're directionally right, but there's no way that drinking going down is saving employers

$5,000 ahead. That don't sound so bad. That doesn't even measure that. All right. I may be...

Well, and I think that, you know, again, the generation that isn't drinking is also the

less socializing, in-person socializing generation. So, and typically that has been where business

got done is in-person. Right. Right. Right. Right. Or the old-al-digit adage is on the golf course.

Yeah, right. So, and on the golf course, usually meant a couple of tauties at the turn or a tautie

at the end, and that's when everybody loosened up, you're feeling good. You get to know this person

over a four-hour period or longer if you're playing with a couple slow and bad players. And

you understand... You have a drink after you make friends. You make friends. Yeah.

By the time you're cutting a deal, that's not in the office. So, that whole structure is changing them.

It is. It is. And, you know, when I think about this, what's driving, what's maybe driving this,

what's the thing nobody's talking about? You know, I was just like, it's the GLP once. If,

if 20 something percent of American households have somebody taken a GLP one,

what does a GLP one do? It, it, it, it tricks your brain into believing that it's had enough

food, and they're experimenting this, it's clearly happened. I know some people what's happened to.

A lot of people taking GLP ones for weight have just lost interest in drinking,

they have, at which, and, and rightfully so, because they're, they're, they're, they're,

they're pleasure senses because the GLP ones... Yeah. Has gone down.

It's remarkable to me, and that trend ain't going to change any time soon. There is some,

it seems like they're, they're, they're tweaked. And, and to the credit of the big pharmaceutical

companies that just released this, and it wasn't necessarily meant as a weight loss drug to begin with.

Sure. But they've now are tweaking the microdidosis, they're tweaking the,

as they get more and more data, as, you know, it comes out.

Got to say, I do, like, no, but notice. Well, through here. Anyway, um, so, yeah, this is,

um, this is fun. Yeah, I, I just, I, I just, I, I just, I get in general.

Yeah, I just kind of said that under the grip, but, but I don't know if there's, uh,

yeah, I don't know if there's much more to say on this. It just doesn't make any serious

to me. It's been making headlines the last couple weeks. It's not going to affect our behavior.

No, and, and like we had a few, a few comments, so we're going to keep it.

The comments says it's in alcohol, uh, is down. Yeah. So now we're here to help. We opened

with a quote by Frank Sinatra, a close with a quote in this segment from a buddy of mine who says

all the time, can't drink all day if you don't serve breakfast. We'll be right back.

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Okay, we're back. We're going to do something totally silly and fun. One of the podcasts I love,

I really like, is called The All-In Podcast. It's similar themes to what we're doing,

those guys just have way more money than we do. But one of the things that they do every

year is they do a predictions episode, which I think is fun. They talk about all sorts of stuff,

so we're going to do our own version of that and cover some fun stuff. We're going to start with

sports. I put these questions together last night. Brad has them. I don't know if he's listened to

them or if he's read through them, but we're going to bounce around a little bit. They're going to

be just kind of fun stuff. So number one, Bradley, Olympics are starting here pretty soon.

Yeah, right. Kind of jackfruit. Love the Olympics.

Okay, last winter Olympics was 2022 Beijing. Okay. The question number one is,

who wins more medals in this year's winter games? The USA, more our new arch nemesis Canada.

What happened in Beijing was this. The United States came away third in the order of merit for

total medals. They had 25, nine of which were gold. Okay. Third place. Canada had 26 medals. So

one more than we had, but only four of them were gold. They finished 11th. What do you think, Brad?

Well, yeah, I mean, we're going to take the Canadians down. Yeah, drop them in their own maple syrup.

All right. It's going to be a question. I think the bigger question is, how much fun are the

Olympic dorms going to be if they're not drinking? Everybody's going to be tied back to the

previous segment. Yeah, totally. That's funny. Yeah. I mean, I think there's going to be less

pregnancies and less great athletes coming out of this Olympics than our... Yeah, you know what,

you know what we should probably auction off is somebody should auction off a trip to just go

stay in the Olympic dorms with the athletes. Like maybe the like the second week of the Olympics

would be like, after everybody's kind of competed already, you got a bunch of people just

taking out the, you know, if they're relaxed, everybody's celebrating. Where do you envision that

actually taking place? I don't know, but I would, I would end our lives on a bathroom bedroom.

We're at the Olympics this year. They're here? They're in the States? Oh, that's actually a pretty

good question. All right, where are the Olympics? Well, let's ask AI. We should have probably

done this research. I didn't even, never even occurred to me. I just think they're happening in

the United States bear. We're here. Where are the Olympics this year? The 2026 Winter Olympics

are being held in Italy across the cities of Milan and Dan Pazzo. Okay, so they're in Milan.

Maybe we should go. I have a question too. Where are the worry boys drinking? No, and you know what?

There's a lot of wine there. Goodness, and the food. Very good wine, the food. It's amazing.

Many. Okay, so did you pick? Are we going to, we're going to take the, we're going to take it over

the Canadians that they had, they've, they've been just by one last year, but we were much higher

because we had more gold. Do you think we can now perform? You think they're going to come back

with budgets? Oh, we know how silver is rising so fast. You know, that might be the more valuable

value of a silver medal is a lot higher than it was last time. That's exactly how I have no

saying that I don't know. I think the whole non-drinking throws a whole horseshoe into it. You

know, if these athletes want to be superior athletes, they need to know how to drink. Get up. Wake

up next morning. Have fun the night before and get rid of all the nerves. Okay, here's my prediction.

I think this is our 250th anniversary. This is a lot of patriotism. Both directions go on the

country. I think the US athletes are going to go over there and slay. And I think that we might

not beat Norway, but I'm just going to go on a limb and say, I think we're going to finish

second to Norway in the total medal count. We're going to take out Germany. We're going to be

China, Sweden, Netherlands. We're going to take all those guys. Okay, both predictions.

That's understood. Okay, number two, we're moving on. You're going back to what happened last time.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, moving on. This is, this is, this is easy. Okay, let's move on.

Do the Steelers make the playoffs in 2026? Oh, Mike McCarthy. What a, what a, first of all, I'm a

born, raised, initially at least, Wisconsin. So, you know, Packer fan, he came from Wisconsin.

Pittsburgh guy went to Wisconsin, won the Super Bowl with Aaron Rodgers. I think

at least we have a chance to flip the script. I don't know if it's going to happen so quickly

in 2026 where we make the Super Bowl, but the Steelers are always solid. Super Bowl,

we're just talking about playoffs, Mitchell. We're going to make the playoffs. Okay, well,

let's talk about the playoffs. Yeah, definitely. We make, we make, we make the playoffs this year.

Yeah, right, right. So, yeah, we work on that. Yeah. Well, I'm still so, uh,

scarred and damaged over this whole thing that I'm having trouble. I,

did we hire Mike McCarthy? I wouldn't even aware that. I can't even pay attention. I didn't even watch,

the second half of those games last week, because I just don't, I just don't care. I don't care.

There was a lot of games. No, my heart turned it off after the same. Yeah, my heart hurts and I'm

still mourning the breakup. I, I coached to you. Yeah, well, that's, he was a long standing,

am I 19 years? 20 years? Thinking about you, Mike. All right, number three.

Here, this is a fun one. Okay, there's some, some detail here. Okay. On January 19th,

Sid the Kid, Sidney Crosby played in his 1400th NHL game. He's still the kid, are we still going to

call him the kid when he's just about ready clutch? He's going to be the kid forever. All right,

all right, making him a 45th player in history to reach the smilestone. Crosby currently has

1700 and 44 points. Okay, if he maintains this current pace, he's expected to pass 1800 points

later this year. Okay, which would make him only the fifth player in history to do that. The

other four, I mean, this is a crazy list. Gretzky, Jagger, Messier, and Gordy Hunt. Okay. Pretty good

team. So he's 57 points year to date. He's 16th in the league and scored. Okay, he's had at least 90

points in each of the last three years. So does Sid keep the current pace, maybe make 100 points,

does he reach 1800? Do you think he does it? Goes out to Blazing Glory? What do you think? That's

an easy yes. Yeah, and obviously this is one way I have to go back to the last question. Canada,

it's going to be hard to root for team USA and hockey with Sidney playing his last, his last

Olympics on the other side. Man, emotionally, that's tough for me. It is. I mean, we're torn here,

coming out of the disbelief. Yeah, I can zone. So I think he's going to do it, Brad thinks he's

going to do it. Let's move on. Let's see how it works. Okay, super easy one. Number three, on sports,

Pats or Seahawks. Seahawks are given 4.5, 45 and a half over under when I checked it yesterday.

Let me guess who you're a root person since you live in Seattle for a while. I don't have any

I don't have any way, emotionally or intellectually, to support anything that comes out of the

state of Massachusetts. You know, just the accent by itself, I still, you know, Tom Brady's doing

better. I'm not going to say I like listen to him, but he's not as obnoxious as he wasn't started.

I'd like to see what he thinks of this. Well, if you can only get better at being an announcer,

just like his replacement quarterback has, and getting to the Super Bowl, which is the most

amazing being 23 years old, and being back in the Super Bowl in those big shoes. I mean,

they're the biggest goat shoes you've got to fill. Okay, so Pats or Seahawks, I'm taking Pats.

I think Pats. Yeah, I'm going Seahawks for sure. Yeah, and it's hot that I want to do it. I can,

I'm like you, I'm agnostic. I don't care who wins, but I think Patriots will win. Okay,

Terry's on a record. That's okay. Okay, here we go. I'm moving on. Okay, this is, this is, I

tell you what, if the Patriots don't win, I'll wear a dress for the next recording. You've been wearing

dresses all along. I'll wear a short one. You're wearing one right now. It's not going to be anything

special. Okay, here we go. Number four, sports is the topic. How many hole-in-ones get paid out

this year in the 2026 Cedric Tiger Memorial hole-in-one club at Indiana Country Club? Last year,

we had zero after having five in 2024. How many hole-in-ones get paid this year at ICC?

Cedric Tiger. Dear friend, the master at the hole-in-one club. Dearly departed,

had two earlier, party at three, three hole-in-one club. Three hole-in-one's two-in-one,

two-in-one club. Yeah, the worst. Yeah, and the next year, you put it on this personal

financial statement that he was getting one. I don't know, I don't know. He was very optimistic,

and I think that optimism always drove those hole-in-ones, but I would say this,

I don't think we go dry again. Yeah, no. That's weird. Let's see. We're going on playing

this year, so the thing is, the odds are going so cheap. I say two. Two? I think two.

Yeah. I like one and a half. That's going to be controversial, and all we say is to

all right. Yeah, he's so argumentative. It's like the stick's leaning and it's right. Yeah,

there's going to be, there's going to be, so that would be a really tough. So I'm never

hit a hole-in-one in a stick. I never had a hole-in-one. Yeah, I've come room close.

You got the drinking jeans, didn't you? It's right. We'd be, yeah, we'd call them or say,

good at a certain number of things, and I've got the less valuable of the one.

Right, so yeah, how many of you hit? Three. Three, and someday the video of your last is going to make

it on the show. What a remarkable. Brad one, how much would you win three, three grand?

No, it was the very first hole-in-one in the center tiger hole-in-one club. Okay, and you,

and I won 5,200, 5,200, and you spent how much on the party? The rule of the whole one club is that

you need to buy everybody drinks. There's no rule about a band and a boss and, no, this is how

you roll. That's how I roll, that's okay. So I won 5,200, I spent 7,800. But everybody had a great

time in that Tuesday. I'm cheering for you to hit at least one that you're through. So maybe

there's going to be at least two. There should be some more in Albuquerque. So it wasn't the match

way. Really? Yeah, you weren't here. A two and a five. Yeah, number 11.

But, oh, wow. That should get paid. Not only that, but did I bird you number 10? So I had a two

two on the score card. Wow. Wow. That's really saying something. Now I bet you, I bet you

less than 1% of golfers have ever had a two, I've never had a two two.

Well, they say Albuquerque is one in six million. It's like a George Carlin joke.

Yeah, right. Never had a ten, but I have five twos. Yeah.

That's the same thing, right? Okay. Okay, so we made some predictions. What do we say? We said two,

we said three. I've said two. He said one and a half. Okay, two and a half. I'm going to go free.

I'm going to be optimistic. I feel like the golf course is going to be in great condition.

Because of the snow we went through. We do live with the secret gem of golf courses here in

Indiana. Our greens are by far. And I'm digressing a little bit. They are by far the best greens.

When we get better at the video production part, we'll get some pictures and video up of us

being out there because it's honestly, it's what resulted in that said we not starting playing

golf. We wouldn't drink. We didn't drink. We would talk about business. We didn't talk about

business. Never would have dropped this up. Okay. And if I didn't drink, I wouldn't play golf.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, because I just don't like the game that much.

If I do like the people, this is three whole months. Okay, so that was sports. Let's move on to,

okay, these are quick. These are going to be quick, quick answers. Yeah, we're coming home. Okay,

quick. No commentary. I just want answers. Do exactly the opposite of what we say. Yeah, three

questions. Last year's government shut down lasted 43 days. Okay, I'm sorry. Politics

is the topic. Last year's government shut down lasted 43 days, long as in history, surpassing

the 35-day government shutdown from 2018, 2019. How long will the next government shut down be?

Well, here's a way to take into account. By the way, it might likely just start next week.

It probably is. So in our politicians are getting so old, the number of bathroom breaks they have

to go in between negotiation sessions is going to take it definitely into 82. Okay, 82 days.

82 days. Okay, so wow. Okay, so that's the basically the remainder of

we'll be well into the second quarter. That would be a lot of economic ramifications.

There will be. Okay, I'm going to go the opposite. I'm going to say this is going to be a

loud, ugly shutdown that will last about a week. Okay, yeah. I think I use some of them in

time. I think these disruptions right now are really making the two sides dig in with their

heels and probably rightfully so. So I just don't think there's going to be a compromise right away.

Consent. I just I'm going to take the other side of that. Okay, seven days you go in 40.

Yeah, I'll go. I have to go on. I'm going to say 60 days. Yeah, whatever. It's 60.

60, 60, 40, 80, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20. I love that. Okay, number two.

Does the Supreme Court overturn the president's tariff regime?

I'm just going to say no. Yeah, I don't know if they have authority.

They're going to have to find a legal basis for it to overturn it.

The midterms might. The midterms might. And certainly politics plays a role. If we

elect somebody in there that's going to change the law, then yeah. But we're talking about

Supreme Court specifically. It's very hard. And we're talking about the Supreme Court. So they have

to go based on the laws. They're on the books at the time. So if the president has a viable basis

for that tariff and knowing the Trump team of lawyers, they're very good at what they do.

Otherwise, they wouldn't have advised him to do it in the first place. I don't think it gets

over time. Yeah, the distinction here is whether we're looking at tariffs as a tool of trade or

a tax. And that's the distinction between the two. I'm sure the Supreme Court will figure it

out the right way. And you can always tie a national security. Yeah, we'll have to come back

and cover that another day. Number three, do the dams take the midterms? Yes. Yeah, thanks.

Yeah, I'm going to hold out hope here. I'm just naturally anti-consensus and I mean, I've

voted both ways multiple times. You dress, you act, the cracks like a duck, it looks like a duck.

You have me going. Well, our buddy Ron Rutler knows so many people who call themselves

Democrats that he has to call me and says, Deak, what do the lives think about this? I'm the most

liberal person he knows, which is it's saying something. Well, I think it's important because you

are the most traveled and most I'm not that liberal people. Okay, business. Here we go, politics.

We can through that quickly. Okay, business. S&P 500 is roughly 7,000 right now. Up about 2%

year to date might have picked up another percent today. Where we flat, whatever. We're about

up about 2%. Last three years of returns have been this. In 2023, we returned 26%, 2024, we returned

25%, 2025, we returned 18% because we had a little bit of a dip in the fourth quarter for the

reasons that we just discussed at length. What are we going to do by 2026? 7,000 a day, where's the

S&P going to be at the end of 2026? Well, a lot of it's driven by tech and I think it's back to our

our first conversation as to what's going on and I don't envision it being a bubble. There may

be some setbacks emotionally tied in the market just because the big investors in the market just

feel it has to be and they will it into it. I don't think it is there financially or

materialistically. So I will say it's in, I've got it wrong. I got it wrong the last two years.

I got another market about a few years ago. So you're probably asking the wrong person. You probably

should ask the guy in the still levels. But I've got to be honest, I really think it surprised me

to this point and I don't see anything being any different. In fact, I would dig my hills in and

say it's actually better and fortified. Okay, so you're going to throw a number out 7,000 a day,

what do you want to say? Give me a percentage. Okay, so I'm going to say this year it's probably not

as high as the 18 to 20 to 18 last year, 25 years ago. Yeah, it's not going to be quite that high,

but I do think it's going to be in the double digits. Okay, standard 10, 12% year if you have

from Brad Martin. No, that's not a bad guess. I mean, we need to start the moderate a little bit.

I like that kind of 15, 80% very similar year this year last year. I think we were going to have

a big big correction here in the middle exactly the same as we had this year. But I think we have

to. Okay, it's still our last year. It's going to be the time when all those hedge funders

guys go out on the golf course and they forget that they're actually trading stocks for a moment and

have a couple of burdens. Okay, easy one. What's the biggest risk to the market this year, 2026?

I think it's the political landscape right now. I think right now the biggest risk to the market

is all of the ice disruptions that are going on. People dying, people being disruptive,

and I don't want to be get political, but when people are dying over things that don't need to be.

Okay, I'm going to drop this off. I get you. I'm going to take the other side.

Yeah, I think that's what's going to disrupt the market because it's going to cause the midterm

to change and that's what's going to disrupt the market by the end of year. Yeah, I don't think

that if that does change and as Deakin and I think all three of us agree that the Democrats win

the midterms, it's not their political best interest to cause any downturn in the market either.

So like they may want to, but I just don't, I don't think they'll do it. That's interesting.

I don't see politics as being the biggest issue. I'll back up and I said it before, I do think because

of this that's going to cause this extraordinary break on coming up with a balance,

agree, a balanced budget, and that's going to have an effect on the overall market. Sure.

I'm just going to say I disagree and if the market falls this year, it's going to be because of

fluctuations in global currencies, specifically the yen rising in rates and drawing money away from

dollars trying to find their way to the US. So, yep. So, is that going to drop the US dollar?

No, it's the opposite. Yeah, so when that happens, know what's that going to do to crypto?

Yeah, I think crypto, honestly, I actually think that with Gold Silver, platinum, the metals,

you know, being in space right now, crypto has seems to have found a floor here in the last

couple of weeks even though that floor is one where it's bouncing, you know, rapidly. I actually,

but it's got a heartbeat. So, you know, what I would say is I like crypto, right? Yeah, I do too.

In fact, I think it's found its space. I think with the administration and it's a bipartisan

act right now that they're going to come up with this crypto legislation very soon.

That's going to mainstream crypto. It's not going to be that alternative dark force.

It's not moving into the big, it's moving into Wall Street. Yeah, the modernization of our

financial infrastructure is going to have crypto smart contracts and everything related to the

blockchain kind of at the center of it and that evolution needs to happen. One crypto, what do you

like? I mean, I'm a Budweiser Miller Lite kind of guy. I'm just going to stick with the

stick with the the IBIT and the ETHA. Take it wrong. I like CRO. CRO, yes.

And I'll tell you why, because it's it is the most and coming from a legal perspective, it is the

most regulated, the crypto market across the globe. You look again, like in the AI world,

it's very regulated and it's very fragmented and there's different laws that go into place.

Crypto.com has made sure to file all the necessary regulation file finalings that go into place

that they're not going to misstep like a few others have and they cost the whole platform.

And because of that, they don't have over 100 million users. The Trump administration just said

they're going to be a big supporter of CRO through they're maybe not through the administration

but through the Trump companies, I guess, and creating a treasury out of CRO. So I like CRO.

Is that a stable call? Well, it is the CRO is the coin of crypto.com.

Yeah, okay. And it's what they incentivize everybody and now you can bet sports on there and

it's not dollar back. No, it's not dollar back. So it is a true crypto and they've come a long way

in the regulation side. They come a long way in the security side and they now have sports on

their bedding. They have ETFs coming on there. They have all these other, you know,

cowshy, folly markets. Exactly. And they're all incentivized by CRO.

Yeah, this is one I have to take your word for on it. I'm, you know, I'm

was late to the party here, but I do like, and this is coming from my son. Him and I are both

got into this a few years ago. So I have a self interest out of full transparency. But I do believe

that since it's made its way into the headlines this year and now that it has stabilized

and we do fear that the markets are going to shift a little bit. Where's the money going to go?

Well, there's a, if we have a liquidity crunch because dollars, institutional dollars, not retail

and institutional dollars are going to find their way to higher yielding Asian assets.

That's going to hit crypto. Crypto is the fastest horse when things are run in great. And when there

is a, a lack of liquidity in the marketplace, they're the ones that feel it the most.

Well, if they have in the in prior times, but now with even Jamie Diamond, who was anti Bitcoin,

was saying that they're going to adopt crypto. And with regulations coming on place,

to where now all the majors are looking at adopted crypto, you're not putting the institutions

into the market where that was just the off players that were the guys on the golf course,

the guys that were talking in the techie conferences that wanted something different that was mainstream.

It's actually doing exactly the opposite of what they wanted it to do.

Yeah, right. It's doing mainstream. Right. You know, it's funny. And now golden silver

are playing the role that crypto was in vision to play 20 years ago. We flip the coin on it.

Yeah, right. It's always different, but it's always the same. So that's why I think

there is a potential for a significant upside in the crypto market. Okay. So I had this question

on top performing asset for the year. Will be you like CRO? I do. Yeah, I'm not really sure what I

wanted to say this year, but I have this point for it from this point forward. Yeah, I mean,

it's a really tough one. I have some stocks that I like, but you know, I couldn't make a bad one.

I do have a stock back too. You do. What's it? I do. So as big as you are on CoreWeave,

the other major component that has been driven by this AI infrastructure boom is the memory chips.

Oh, yeah. Micron. I'm here. Well, that's a good one, but Samsung is the biggest.

Yeah. And I like Samsung right now at $65. No kidding. See, I'll tell you that's a name I'd never

look at, ever, ever, ever, but should. Good. Okay. Similarly, let's jump to tell me, Bradley,

in 2026, what will the biggest corporate merger buy out or takeover be for the year? Who's

going to buy who? Oh, I haven't thought about that. Okay. You want me to answer a little about

it. Yeah. I want to. Why don't you answer that first one? Give me a second to ponder. Okay,

because it's related to this crypto. I think that somebody like a JP Morgan, one of the big

major money center banks is going to buy one of the big major crypto based asset managers. And

I really like Galaxy Digital, which is run by Michael Novigratz, who, and this is an asset

management firm. It's essentially like a fidelity or a PIMCO for crypto assets, right? If they don't

mind, they manage assets. That's such foreign territory we're talking about, right? So you're now

talking about a merger between a crypto and one of the majors. That's right. And so if that's

going to happen, I really think, given the synergies and the partnerships that have happened,

I also see CRO crypto.com merging with Trump, Trump, the Trump companies because they just

announced a power company. I think they're going to have to. We're going to get the Donald

on here to talk about where we do. Donald Jr. is. Okay, that would be sick. I will, you know,

I've never met the Donald, but I did participate in the IPO of his vodka company way back in the day

when I was at UBS. We took Trump, vodka, public. We were initial shareholders participate in the IPO.

Company was a company called Drinks America. When are we going to take your drink? Well, we lost

money in the deal. No, no, I'm talking about your drink. Oh, you the farmer team? Yeah. Well,

you know what, we don't talk about the real team, not the Paul or iced tea. Yeah, we're talking

about the hot tea. Yeah, the blueberry tea. Exactly. Yeah, we'll do, actually, we can do one of those.

We can do that one of those. That might be the next biggest of a IPO. Blueberry tea. Actually,

blueberry tea is really good. We saw that shit. Okay, um, let's see. One more question then we're done.

I guess that's all we got, Bradley. Is that it? That's what we got. You have no more questions.

Well, I was going to add a couple more sports questions, but I think my question is how high is the

hair really going to get this hair? Oh, man, well, you know, I mean, it is staying compact. Is it

because of the weather outside it hasn't gotten the boat? Yeah, it's fine. I mean, did you just walk

out and just collapse? Yeah, just it froze to my head. It's so funny. It's so funny. And I called you

to heat my zero. He said, no, Mr. Freeze. Mr. Freeze. Yeah, with Dr. Freeze, you know, and you know,

with all this information, this guy knows something. My girl Michelle, my business partner, she has

daughters that do this anime stuff. They're a teenager type. And they said that I look like this

thing they call this guy called sugarwara. I don't know. I looked it up. I thought it was a compliment.

Yeah. Good looking cartoon character. Yeah, you call me a Japanese anime character.

He's anyway. Guys, thanks for everything. Thanks for sticking with us. This is episode two.

Episode two and episode three has something very special coming. A dear friend, but also the expert

in the NIL space, which is the hottest right now with sports. He has negotiated more on behalf of all

the NIL collectives for all the universities across the United States. He's a dear friend from

law school. He's a dear friend of us in the bourbon clubs. Because it is one of our homies going

way back. I have a connection with this guy that I didn't even know about until I met you. We'll

talk about it next week. We will. Small world. Yeah, small world. Anyway, looking forward to that

conversation NIL next week or whatever. Is it next week? Yeah, it's next week. Yeah, looking forward to that.

Hey, everything's better with Darwin. Everything's better with Darwin. Thanks, Mitchell. Like and subscribe.

This has been The Better with Bourbon Podcasts with Brad Martino and Deakin Palmer.

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