Jason Sanjana & Kevin Eckhardt open on Sleep Number, the smart mattress maker that dialed itself into Chapter 11 (02:07). The stock dropped 70 percent, the equity is underwater, and strategic partner Travis Kelce bought his stake on the open market months before the filing. Kevin floats a theory about who actually buys these beds. The numbers tell a sadder story (04:02), and there is a Canadian buyer nobody saw coming (05:35).

From there (16:00), a summer camp empire. Simad Holdings ran 30 camps serving 20,000 kids a year, borrowed 195 million dollars from Israeli bond investors in December, and filed for Chapter 11 days after school let out. Jessica Steinhagen, Senior Director, Legal at Octus, joins (22:26) to explain the Jewish camp scene and answer the question every parent should ask. Whether solvency makes the list (25:02). Then the campers' embroidered trunks raise a genuine law school exam question (27:54).

Kevin takes us to Caracas (30:16) for Rodrigo Herrera, the 75 year old debt collector who works in a full devil costume and drives a flame painted 55 Chevy. The unofficial sponsor read lands (35:47) before Culture Corner (38:28) takes on Jon Hamm and 600 million dollars nobody wants to hold on Your Friends and Neighbors.

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Hosted by Jason Sanjana & Kevin Eckhardt
Guest: Jessica Steinhagen (Senior Director, Legal, Octus)
Produced and Edited by Tanya Hubbard
A Production of The Octus Podcast Network

Michael Gatto, partner at Silver Point Capital and adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and Fordham's Gabelli School of Business, joins at (02:12) to talk teaching, distressed investing, and how he went from a firm running $120 million to a $50 billion shop as its first non founder partner. He makes the case for hiring the gritty Fordham underdog over the Ivy pedigree, and explains why credit has always been a game for strivers. The timing is not subtle. BDCs are gating, First Brands had its disclosure statement denied with the US Trustee moving to convert to Chapter 7, and Jamie Dimon has been muttering about cockroaches. Gatto digs into what a credit analyst should actually learn from First Brands (19:43), what allocators should be asking direct lending managers (30:53), whether there is any fun left now that private credit went from the hottest asset class on the street to a beat down dog, and the O'Shea Center for Credit Analysis he founded at Fordham with Bob O'Shea.

The conversation turns to Caesars Entertainment (38:35), the largest casino company in the US with 53 properties across 18 states, and Fertitta Entertainment taking it private in a $17.6 billion all cash deal at a 49 percent premium. Kyle Owusu, Director of Credit Research at Octus, walks through it (39:37), the $11.9 billion of debt Fertitta is inheriting, the $569 million in interest the company pays every quarter, the change of control put bondholders were watching, and the go shop window that is still open. The real story sits in the digital business, which more than doubled EBITDA last year while the Strip slipped about 5 percent, and in the enterprise value math that runs from the 2008 Apollo and TPG buyout through the brutal 2015 bankruptcy to today.

Then Culture Corner (55:02) on Jack Ryan: Ghost War, the John Krasinski reboot that hit number one globally on Prime with Wendell Pierce and Michael Kelly back in the fold. The guys get into the TikTok theory that the whole thing was funded by Dubai tourism, the debate over the greatest Tom Clancy movie ever made with The Hunt for Red October as the benchmark, and why one host insists he was only resting his eyes.

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Hosted by Jason Sanjana & Kevin Eckhardt
Guest: Michael Gatto (Partner, Silver Point Capital)
Guest: Kyle Owusu (Director of Credit Research, Octus)
Produced and Edited by Tanya Hubbard
A Production of The Octus Podcast Network

Link to what we talked about:

The Credit Investor's Handbook: Leveraged Loans, High Yield Bonds, and Distressed Debt (Wiley Finance) Links - amzn.to/4vne6Oz 

What Can a Credit Analyst Learn from the Rise and Fall of First Brands - 

https://bit.ly/3SehLzy 

What Questions Should Allocators Ask When Evaluating Direct Lending Managers  - https://bit.ly/4enYRNO 

 
00:00:05 Cold open and the fine print
00:02:12 Michael Gatto on teaching and Silver Point
00:19:43 What a credit analyst learns from First Brands
00:30:53 What allocators should ask direct lending managers
00:38:35 Caesars goes private
00:39:37 Kyle Owusu on the Fertitta deal
00:55:02 Culture Corner and Jack Ryan Ghost War
01:03:25 Wrap and close

Some weeks the news is weird. This week it is weird, litigious, and somehow involves 420,000 uprooted peach trees.

Jason Sanjana & Kevin Eckhardt open with Ryan Cohen's unsolicited, non binding offer to acquire eBay for $125 a share in a cash and stock deal (04:16), a bid that valued the target at roughly $56 billion from a company with a $12 billion market cap. Cohen showed up on Squawk Box in a leather jacket (05:33), could not explain the math to Andrew Ross Sorkin, and watched the stock drop 10% in real time. Michael Burry sold his entire position the next day. eBay called the bid "neither credible nor attractive." The hosts disagree on whether Cohen is a visionary or a chaos agent, and the debate is genuinely good.

From there (14:30), the conversation moves to Del Monte Foods, a 130 plus year old company that filed Chapter 11 in July 2025 after an aggressive LME bought the company nine months. Asset sales closed in March 2026, with Fresh Del Monte, Pacific Coast Producers, and B&G Foods splitting the business for roughly $499 million combined. Judge Michael Kaplan's ruling on non pro rata DIP roll ups is the legal crux, and Kevin's conflicted feelings about it are some of the best radio on this episode. Also, 420,000 peach trees are being ripped out of California orchards. Producer Tanya called it a crisis, and she is not wrong.

The episode closes with the debut of the Clout Audit Tribunal (24:08), Neal Katyal's TED Talk, Harvey AI, and the Supreme Court bar's collective meltdown over a Burning Man photo (31:16), before landing on Your Friends and Neighbors Season 2 (38:42), Jon Hamm, James Marsden's Owen Ashe, a deer shot dead on a beach, and the show's running thesis that rich people behaving badly in expensive houses is one of TV's most reliable pleasures.

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Some companies die because the math was never going to work. Spirit, AMC, and fire truck pricing all make that case differently.

Jason Sanjana and Kevin Eckhardt open with an emergency segment on Spirit Airlines (02:31), which ceased all operations on May 2nd after 34 years, 17,000 jobs, and a wind-down that happened overnight. Kevin, who covered the case at Octus, walks through why the Twitter narrative blaming the Biden DOJ is missing about 90% of the actual story. The Trump administration floated a $500 million bailout, but when the DIP lenders said no, it evaporated. The hosts debate whether Spirit was ever going to survive, why the JetBlue merger is a red herring, and what the crowdfunding campaign to "buy Spirit" actually tells you about the internet. Then (19:03), Krishan Sutharshana, senior distressed debt analyst at Octus, joins to walk through AMC. The largest movie theater chain in the world has raised nearly $4 billion in equity since the pandemic and still cannot generate positive free cash flow. Krishan explains the LME, the $3 billion maturity wall, the streaming window compression, and why the box office needs to hit $10 billion before AMC breaks even.

From there (36:19), Kevin breaks down how private equity rolled up the fire truck market, with Rev Group sitting on $4.4 billion in unfilled orders while prices have risen 5x and used trucks jumped 62% in a year. The show closes with the debut of The Parent Trap (42:10), a new segment about the things you do for your parents.  Jason spent a long weekend helping his parents move out of the Pittsburgh house they lived in for 40 years. Kevin produced a photo of his father on the field alongside O.J. Simpson and Dan Marino, which raises more questions than it answers. And the show's first ever mystery write-in arrives: an orchid dispute at an assisted living facility from a listener who is definitely not anyone on the production team. The hosts took it extremely seriously and provided the full legal analysis it deserved.

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Private credit was supposed to be boring. This episode makes the case that boring just got complicated.

Jason Sanjana & Kevin Eckhardt open with a cruise recap and the $80 million law firm hire that broke the internet before bringing in Mark Fischer,, Head of Financial Research at Octus (08:17). He breaks down why private credit is facing its first genuine stress test. Not COVID, not rate hikes in isolation, but both cycles hitting at once: floating-rate loans repricing into a distressed environment, dividend coverage cracking, and BDC marks on the same asset sitting 40 points apart depending on who’s holding it. The conversation moves to redemption pressure (22:19), where Blue Owl’s Technology Income Fund absorbed repurchase requests on 40% of outstanding shares and could only honor 5%. Saba Capital has since launched a tender at a 33% discount. Mark stays diplomatic on whether the marks are wrong. The hosts are less diplomatic.

From there (31:27), the episode shifts to Friendly Franchisees Corporation, a 65-unit Carl’s Jr. operator in California that just filed for Chapter 11. Owner Harshad Dharod blamed AB 1228, the law that raised the fast food minimum wage to $20. A UC Berkeley study released this month found no net job losses and only minimal menu price increases. Jason and Kevin are unconvinced the law is the villain here.

Culture Corner (43:55) covers The Pitt, the HBO Max medical drama that actual ER doctors call the most realistic show they’ve ever seen. The hosts debate whether watching exhausted professionals make life-and-death decisions under institutional pressure hits a little too close to home for two former restructuring lawyers.

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Hosted by Jason Sanjana & Kevin Eckhardt

Jason Sanjana and Kevin Eckhardt open with the shot heard round the NCAA Tournament (00:01:32)Braylon Mullins' 35 foot buzzer beater that completed a 19 point UConn comeback to stun No. 1 overall seed Duke 73 to 72 in the Elite Eight. Jason confesses to rewatching the postgame press conference on repeat, Kevin sets aside his Syracuse era UConn hatred to celebrate, and the two trade stories about hating Duke, including Kevin's rejection letter despite a recommendation from Coach K himself.

From there (00:06:07), the conversation turns to the federal antitrust class action filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado against Vail Resorts and Alterra Mountain Company. The lawsuit, brought by DiCello Levitt, Berger Montague PC, and Salahi PC, alleges an illegal duopoly in which Epic Pass and Ikon Pass bundling schemes inflate day pass prices, now as high as $356 at Vail, and coerce consumers into buying season passes they don't need. The hosts walk through the Sherman Act Section 1 tying theory (00:08:06), the ESPN/Disney parallel from the Dish Network litigation Kevin is tracking at Octus (00:09:39), and why Vail's defense that Epic Pass reduced season pass prices by 60% when it launched in 2008 doesn't address the day pass problem (00:13:01). Kevin predicts the case settles with vouchers and coupons, but Jason flags the motion to dismiss as the real inflection point (00:18:41).

At (00:20:17), the hosts debut We Listen But We Don't Judge, a new segment inspired by the TikTok confessional format, applied to the bankruptcy and restructuring world. Three confessions follow: first, Judge Michael Kaplan appointing himself mediator in the Multi Color Corporation prepackaged Chapter 11 (00:22:18), a move so unprecedented the hosts can't find another example of a sitting judge mediating their own case. Second, White & Case's $14 million fee application as UCC counsel in ModivCare (00:31:19), where the debtors allege a partner threatened to run up $30 million in fees if the UCC didn't receive a $30 million payout, which Kevin and Jason argue is just good lawyering. Third, Burford Capital's $16 billion judgment against Argentina getting invalidated by the Second Circuit (00:34:25), wiping out a concentrated asset that underpinned the litigation funder's entire balance sheet.

After a fake WD 40 ad break (00:39:00), the show closes with a review of Ryan Murphy's FX series Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette (00:40:43). Despite record viewership and a 90s aesthetic that made Kevin want to smoke again, both hosts agree the nine episode series couldn't sustain itself on two characters who weren't written with enough depth to carry the story. Jason's biggest gripe: the show ignored the broader political and cultural context of late 90s America. Kevin's: the plane crash scene played like a parody. They agree the most interesting character, Jackie Kennedy played by Naomi Watts, got only three scenes.

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Hosted by Jason Sanjana & Kevin Eckhardt

Jason Sanjana and Kevin Eckhardt open with a quick catch-up (00:01:28) as Jason recounts a family ski trip to Vail that devolved into a flu-ridden disaster, complete with an urgent care visit and altitude-amplified misery. They flag a programming note: this episode was recorded before CEO Kent Collier's episode aired, so the timeline is slightly off from the news cycle.

From there (00:04:02), the conversation turns to Uncle Nearest, the premium Tennessee whiskey brand now in receivership after lender Farm Credit Mid-America sued over roughly $100 million in unpaid debt. Guest Patrick Mohan, Head of Legal Analysis, Municipals at Octus, joins to break down what happened when the receiver started digging into the books. The Weavers claim 56,000 barrels valued at $1,400 each; the receiver says records were overstated by about 20,000 barrels and values them closer to $400. Revenue reported near $70 million turned out closer to $40 million, unsecured debt jumped from the claimed $10 million to over $50 million, and a brief Chapter 11 filing (00:06:51) was dismissed within 48 hours after the judge ruled Fawn Weaver lacked authority to file with a receiver already in control.

The conversation shifts (00:15:31) to FanDuel Sports Network, the latest identity for what was once the Fox Regional Sports Networks. Kevin walks through the full arc: Sinclair's spectacularly timed 2019 acquisition, the first Chapter 11 in 2023, a streaming pivot that was actually gaining traction with 650,000 paid DTC subscribers, and why none of it mattered when the debt structure was built on cable-era carriage fees that no longer exist. All nine MLB teams have terminated their agreements, and the hosts dig into the structural shift (00:22:10) from the old MVPD cable bundle to a world where fans refuse to pay $20 a month for a standalone product that used to be invisible inside their package.

The hosts pivot to the Forbes 30 Under 30 pipeline (00:30:33), where a disproportionate number of honorees have ended up charged with fraud or in federal prison, including Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann, Martin Shkreli, and Trevor Milton. Kevin argues it's selection bias. Jason counters that the real inflection point is the $40 million mark (00:36:43), after which money stops being a medium of exchange and becomes pure ego fuel.

The show closes with Culture Corner (00:37:10) and "Sentimental Value," the Norwegian film by Joachim Trier that just won the Oscar for Best International Feature Film. The movie centers on a father-daughter relationship, a house in Oslo passed down through four generations, and the tension between what something is worth on paper versus what it means to a family.

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Hosted by Jason Sanjana & Kevin Eckhardt

Jason Sanjana and Kevin Eckhardt open with a discussion about JFK Jr.’s bar exam struggles, using it as a jumping-off point for a conversation about pressure, public expectations, and how high-profile figures are judged when they stumble.

At (08:14), Kent Collier, Founder and CEO of Octus, joins the show to outline his contrarian view on the recent panic around private credit and software companies. As headlines warn about potential risks tied to SaaS leverage and AI disruption, Collier argues much of the concern is overstated.

From there, the conversation digs into the intersection of private credit and software-as-a-service businesses. Recent market volatility including headlines around Blue Owl’s fund gating and broader AI disruption fears has fueled concerns that software companies may be overleveraged. Collier pushes back, explaining that many SaaS businesses generate strong cash flow, operate with negative working capital, and provide deeply embedded tools that customers cannot easily replace.

The discussion expands into how AI is changing software development and business operations, with Collier describing how tools like Claude and Cursor are already improving productivity and reducing development costs inside companies like Octus.

The episode closes at (35:15) with a culture segment on the Hulu series “Love Story.” Producer Tanya Hubbard makes her on-mic debut, defending the show’s portrayal of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s relationship. The lively exchange turns into a debate about the show’s characters, 1990s celebrity culture, and how modern audiences interpret the power dynamics in their relationship.

Hosted by Jason Sanjana & Kevin Eckhardt

Jason Sanjana and Kevin Eckhardt open in Houston bankruptcy court (00:02:20) with Fat Brands’ Chapter 11 filing, breaking down how an aggressive whole business securitization spiraled into allegations of self-help, insider loans, and lender revolt (00:09:45). The core problem was structural: roughly $1.5M a month in management fees against nearly $8M in real operating costs, a model that only worked if consumer spending never slowed (00:03:10). When traffic fell and prices rose, the financing cracked, payments were missed, and more than $1.2B of debt was accelerated (00:14:51).

The conversation then turns to a quieter signal of consumer change (00:14:51). Minivan sales surged 21 percent year over year while overall auto sales grew just 2 percent, pushing market share to its highest level since 2019 (00:17:40). Jason and Kevin unpack why families are ditching SUV performance theater for practicality, and whether this shift reflects economic pressure or a cultural acceptance that adulthood no longer needs to be performed.

Then switch focuses to Eddie Bauer’s retail collapse (00:21:51). About 175 stores head toward liquidation while the brand survives as licensed IP (00:24:30). Producer Tanya’s unfamiliarity with Eddie Bauer underscores the real issue: brands don’t die when sales fall, they die when relevance stops transferring (00:27:05).

The episode closes in Culture Corner with Apple TV’s Shrinking (00:31:41), debating whether its fantasy of fast healing reflects cultural exhaustion or wish fulfillment, and why grief never transfers cleanly, no matter how polished the dialogue (00:37:10).

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Hosted by Jason Sanjana & Kevin Eckhardt

Season 2 is back Jason Sanjana & Kevin Eckhardt open with a quick life update, then the warm up turns into a real world bankrupt brand mishap when Jason gets bamboozled over the break by a distant bankruptcy friend, Party City, and suddenly a normal errand becomes a reminder that nothing is safe (00:03:14). The main event kicks off when the guys move from that moment into the headline story, Saks Bankruptcy, and what happens when luxury tries to operate like a discount chain, vendors stop shipping, and even relationships like Chanel’s start showing up as nine figure problems (00:06:58). They’re joined by Krishan Sutharshana, Senior Distressed Analyst at Octus, to break down the timeline, the vendor death spiral, and why an Amazon partnership can turn into a structural trap instead of a lifeline (00:09:41). From there, they pivot hard to Detroit’s spectacular $25 billion EV write down mess, with Ford taking a $19.5B hit and General Motors following with $7B, as the policy pendulum between Joe Biden and Donald Trump leaves automakers stranded mid pivot (00:25:11). This episode’s unofficial sponsor, the entry level job market, makes its pitch while side effects may include applying to 150 fake jobs and getting filtered out by AI (00:35:47), before the show closes with Culture Corner and a spoiler warning on Bugonia, plus a detour into Matt Damon on the state of movies and why Netflix keeps making everyone mad (00:37:55). The final moments land exactly where they should, with Producer Tanya’s celebrity crush Jon Bernthal and the love language conversation taking over like it was always inevitable (00:44:42).

Hosted by Jason Sanjana & Kevin Eckhardt