July 27th, 2025
Happy Sunday everyone,
Here is my attempt to share one guy’s answer to the question “what the hell is going on” in about 5 minutes.
Thunder scares. Lightning lets us see. Then, Heads covered, we wait for rain.
- Jerico Brown
The Loop
1.a Action!
We’re up to quite a few brands out there now. In case you missed any of the businesses’ annual letters, you can find them in Pulley. And you can find the third annual letter for nth Venture here. Please excuse the whiplash as I go around the horn to share some quick little highlights across the board.
Audily’s high end productions team at Rococo Punch launched a few big shows, all 3 in the Top 40s so I hear. Big shoutout to Erika and Emily and John for making it all happen and sharing important stories with the world.
The Turning Season 3 | Apple Spotify
Charlie’s Place | Apple Spotify
America’s Crime Lab | Apple Spotify
And here’s a sneak peak of Audily’s soon-to-be-publicly-announced upgrade to Pinwheel where you can now shop and buy support services for your show online. We’re pretty sure it’s the only thing like it.
PSA: As a nice little side hustle, you can sign up with Pinwheel as an affiliate to literally earn money just sending links to people and telling them they should have a podcast. What a time to be alive.
Hilarious I know, but some of y’all might get a kick out of it. You can straight up cover a mortgage encouraging people to get their voice out there and it helps us grow. Deets below.
In other news, it looks like businesses are still hiring flesh and blood humans. There was a nice jobs data print in June, and on the year about 1.5m private sector new jobs have been added. Credit to John and team at SBR2TH picking up new exec recruiting work and new clients and getting ready to finally unveil their long-awaited big web app for recruiting (using ostensibly job-killing AI for executive recruiting, which is a bit of a hilarious mind bender).
Falconer got a new internal client working on what is hopefully our third successful M&A deal out of five at bats.
Pigeon Service got a couple more outside customers - one that runs a funny startup/venture influencer operation you’ll probably know if you’re a square like me that spends time on LinkedIn.
We also set up an affiliate system for Pigeon so now you can also make money as a Pigeon Service zealot sharing the joys of solving admin headaches for startups.
Merchant Boxes landed a big deal from a returning customer and is already matching the full year revenue they did in 2024.
We are taking the corporate entity bones from the Cohort 2 failure-to-launch PRreact and getting into - I kid you not - global energy arbitrage for compute. You can check out the ideas behind Galileo Computing here. We’re taking a couple folks down to Paraguay to scope out some warehouses. Pray we come back pls.
The waitlist for Wing is up. Drop a note to let the team know if you’re interested in getting financial planners for you and your team at work. Beyond the nice tax and recruiting benefits, the idea of financial advisors as a workplace benefit is to create a practice where the advisors spend their time financial planning, not selling financial planning.
CERTD is the only one without a promising future at the moment, but I think we’ll figure something out.
Without much fanfare we placed our first investment of nth’s new Co-Owner Fund: priced common at Audily with an option to buy more. :)
We’re planning some reorganization stuff that will introduce the nth Corporation which will hold some businesses outright, in addition to the venture side with nth Venture.
New, but same.
nth Venture → Square Logo
nth Corporation → Circle Logo.
Behold.
Reorg Details: Watch Loom Review Slides
Vibe of a recent conversation: Wow so you really do believe in all this incentive alignment and skin in the game stuff?
Checks notes… umm… well… yeah quite a bit.
My wife says I have too much skin in the game, but still loves me - “gross” new logos and all.
1.b How you can support our experiment of incentive alignment
♻️ 1. Make connections:
People that would be great advisory board candidates for Galileo → sam@nthventure.com
People that want to start podcasts → arielle@pinwheelpods.com
People that want to create a live tour or big event → jacob@liftoffirl.com
People with a product business that need good packaging → doug@merchantboxes.com
People that have a crazy story they want to share with the world → john@rococopunch.com
People that need to hire great people → john@sbr2th.com
People that need to figure out payroll → nathan@pigeonservice.com
People that need to figure out bookkeeping and taxes → grant@pigeonservice.com
People that want to hire an overpriced consultant → sam@falconer.io
💰 2. Sign Up to Make Referral Commissions:
Pinwheel → Sign Up Online
Pigeon Service → Sign Up Online
SBR2TH Recruiting → Ask john@sbr2th.com
✅ 3. Sign up for waitlists:
For financial planning covered by your workplace → Wing
For an allocation in nth Venture’s private fund → Co-Owner Fund
🤝 4. Get services your business or project needs:
Business Admin → Pigeon Service
Primo Content / Networking Pod → Pinwheel
Interesting Articles / Happenings
2.a Finance
2.a.1 Quick Tape Check Part 6
Transitioning to the public markets, in the last note I made an uncharacteristic specific investment callout (with appropriate warnings about the Dark Arts section at Hogwarts), and if you followed along and bought some SVXY you’d be up 31%, or 106% annualized. I’d exit and take profits on that one given the fairly low VIX.
And looking at the history of public calls shared here on the whole market: if you followed the calls to a tee you’re up roughly 75% vs. 48% on the SPY.
Given the all the regulatory side of running a fund, I’m going to retire the public advice and just say: join the Co-Owner Fund waitlist and I’ll do my best to make number go up.
2.b Rest of World
With the disgraceful state of our politics, you essentially either have to believe 1) Trump is covering up how he got blackmailed by - or was otherwise implicated in the activities of - his Mossad-linked friend, the sex trafficking pedophile, 2) Obama is a traitor because our chief spy - of Joe Rogan podcast fame - says so, 3) both, or 4) everyone is lying.
Also our tax dollars for years may or may not have been going to support an intelligence gathering blackmail operation centered around sex trafficking young, desperate, and often underage girls.
Good lord.
Here are some betting odds to help keep you grounded in all this mess.
There is an 80% chance Republicans lose at least one chamber of Congress in the 2026 midterms.
70% chance Republicans retain the Senate and similar odds that Democrats win the House.
It’s not likely much happens before then: 6% chance of impeachment in 2025 and 16% in 2026.
Once we have a new Congress, it’s roughly a 50/50 coin flip whether we see impeachment articles brought by the House by the end of the administration, but not a removal from office which would require the Senate (24%).
And it’s fairly unlikely Obama is charged (7%), arrested (6%), or in jail (3%).
Wild times.
Latest Podcast(s)
The long-awaited Season 3 of The Turning is out.
The Turning: River Road (Season 3) is about Lindsay Tornambe who at 13 years old, was chosen by the leader of her family’s cult for a special role. She became the youngest Maidens of River Road Fellowship in rural Minnesota. After a ritualistic ceremony that married her and other girls to their leader, she endured more than a decade of mental and physical abuse, hidden from outsiders.
But Lindsay and a friend decided to escape.
They became the whistleblowers who prompted an international manhunt in 2014. It would bring the entire cult crumbling to the ground.
A ten-part series from Rococo Punch and iHeartPodcasts.
A Favorite QuoteImportant Quotes
The administration has pointed to victims’ privacy as the reason for their withholding “truckloads” of Epstein documents. Here’s what Epstein’s survivors are actually saying about that:
“And with what’s happening now, it feels like we’re being erased. All the brave women who came forward … all the work that we did to tell the world what happened to us, it’s all being erased.” - Danielle Benksy
“When a person’s abuser(s) are repeatedly flashed in view at any given moment, and especially when promises of justice, and promises of structures of power finally being held to account — to then essentially have the door shut in your face and no longer open for business — then what?” - Teresa Helm
“There’s a cover-up of some kind going on.” - Alicia Arden
“In the past, I was out there talking about what happened, and now I don’t want my name out there in connection with anything to do with Epstein because I’m afraid of what they could do to me and my family.” - Anonymous survivor and mother
“We need transparency and accountability for the sake of our daughters and future generations of young girls.” - Danielle Benksy
“We matter.” - the late Virginia Giuffre before she committed suicide
“A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday - and may every day be another wonderful secret.” - Donald Trump
Wishing you and yours a great week in the land of the free and home of the brave.
Best,
Sam