Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 12 - 3 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Jordy, why did you leave America last week? What went wrong in your life? You it was it's it's less expensive to go to Europe these days to go skiing. So is something going or do you have to tell me something about your finances?
Speaker 1:What's going on?
Speaker 2:Trying to save a buck by going to Europe for, New York for the Alps. Yeah. That's a good question. I I I kept as I was going on the trip, I kept asking myself, why am I going all the way across the world Yeah. To go stay at the Amman for New Year's Yep.
Speaker 2:Go skiing. And they just something was drawing me. And almost as soon as I got there, the strikes started in Park City.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And
Speaker 2:I was like, this is why Yeah. I went out here. Yeah. It wasn't to save 80% on the lift tickets.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because, you know, the hotel would kind of do away with with any of those potential savings, but it was to avoid the, epic meltdown Yeah. Around the epic past.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There you go.
Speaker 2:And are
Speaker 1:you sure it wasn't like you have some sort of hero complex where you're like, they've been at 0 GDP growth for years, but I'm gonna go. Yeah. That's I think fixer Europe.
Speaker 2:You with with GDP growth, if you've got if you're enough of a size lord, you can actually grow an economy. Exactly. We've talked about
Speaker 1:this a lot
Speaker 2:over the years.
Speaker 1:Inspire the
Speaker 2:truth. If you love
Speaker 1:the economy, like, you have to take it upon yourself
Speaker 2:to stimulate it Yeah. To grow it. And, and so yeah. Yeah. Part of it was, like, can I am I good?
Speaker 2:Can I put up numbers?
Speaker 1:Yeah. One conversation with the right European over there, gonna change everything.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You inspire them. No. I had a I had an amazing trip. It was great. Left the kids, with with the grandmas.
Speaker 1:That's
Speaker 2:great. And, yeah. Had a had a had a fantastic time. A lot of skiing. I did.
Speaker 2:So last episode we recorded, John was was deeply, ill Oh, yeah. With the plague. And within maybe 5 hours after recording, I had the plague. So this is the this is the plague zone. If you if you step up to the table with an illness, it's probably gonna get you probably gonna get shirt around.
Speaker 2:So basically, like, the flight over there in the first, like, 36, 48 hours, I was deathly ill. No skiing, trying to beat this fever, but beat it. I ended up having a great trip, but very happy to be back. We we were going to maybe record remotely. Just didn't
Speaker 1:do that.
Speaker 2:Didn't happen.
Speaker 1:It was like the worst week of my life that not being able to record
Speaker 2:totally. It was it was weird trying to relax and all we wanted to do was record. Exactly. But we made it through it. We're back and we're, now we're blessed to be able to record 5 days a week.
Speaker 2:It's fantastic. So
Speaker 1:So let's start with a little quiz for the listener or viewer. I want you to try and guess this company. So they were founded in the early 19 sixties. They made just shy of $3,000,000,000 last year. The net income was 230,000,000.
Speaker 1:They employ about 7,000 people. They had a rough history. The company went bankrupt in 1997, restructured, and then went public. Leon Black at Apollo Management bought the company in a private equity deal. But after Apollo sold, a former Apollo executive ran the company as CEO for nearly 2 decades.
Speaker 1:Recently, the company's been struggling. They got hit hard during COVID because it's a travel company, and the stock has been underperforming for the last few years. But they've been able to get through hard times by switching to a subscription model. This is a huge departure from when the company started. They the founder was a World War 2 10th mountain division ski trooper.
Speaker 1:The whole goal back then was just to make the next great ski mountain. Eventually, the company expanded buying dozens of other ski resorts. Now they own hotel chains, restaurants, ski schools, and even local retail stores. In January of 2025, they got in hot water after a ski patrol strike led to massive lines at lifts during the peak season. Can you guess the company?
Speaker 1:Is it Vail? It's Vail Resorts, baby.
Speaker 2:Nailed
Speaker 1:it. We're doing a deep dive on Vail today and all things skiing. Jordy's back from skiing, and we're gonna take you through some great tweets and some articles and and, of course, the Vail Resorts 10 k because we gotta go to the source if you wanna know what's going wrong at Vail. Oh, net income.
Speaker 2:Looking rough.
Speaker 1:I mean, it it really is down. 2022, they had 370,000,000 of net income. 2023, they went down to 285. And then in 2024, they had 245 246.
Speaker 2:It's been rough. I mean, not an easy business to run
Speaker 3:Nope.
Speaker 2:But an important business. Important business. It matters a lot.
Speaker 1:And, and a fascinating story. But let's start with skiing. Let's go to creatine cycle. He says, when it comes to hobbies that don't generate shareholder value, surfing seems more high t than skiing. With skiing, it's d e I?
Speaker 1:I don't even get that. I don't know. Diversity, equity, inclusion. Everyone waits in line for the cuck chair. That's a reference to his earlier post.
Speaker 1:Very funny. Somehow, you have to ride on the chair. You fall on fluffy powder. Whereas with surfing, it's meritocratic. Good surfers get all the waves.
Speaker 1:You fall and you can't breathe, and there are sharks. Very funny. I love that Baldo's in the replies here saying wait until the VCs see this one. And Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's true skiing. It's a little bit easy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, this this anyone
Speaker 1:can do it.
Speaker 2:This was, sort of in a similar vein to my post, which was sitting in a ski lift line is the most barnyard animal coded modern human behavior. You stand in a tense line of your fellow livestock waiting for the machine to take you up the hill so you can get the slop turns you crave. Oink, oink, epic pass piggy. And it's funny because I put
Speaker 1:over a thousand.
Speaker 2:I posted that. Yeah. I got 3,000 like.
Speaker 1:3,000.
Speaker 2:So I posted that and and a lot of, you know, when when something blows up, you know, it goes to parts
Speaker 1:of the
Speaker 2:facts that, like, you're not really too familiar with. And a lot of people were, like, quote, tweeting it and commenting, like, who hurt you? Like, all this stuff. Like, okay, cool, bro. Just say that you can't, like, afford to ski or whatever.
Speaker 2:And I sent that from From Oman. Like, I sent that from the Oman in the Alps where, where my my wife is, like, didn't didn't ski much growing up. She just would, like, go to the spa and stuff. So I was teaching her to ski, and so we had to take this one, like, gondola route over and over. The line was just so brutal, and so I came up with that post from, like, the most brutal line.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I'm just we're sitting there in this tense we're sitting there in this, like, tense line waiting to take the gondola off, and I'm like, this is the most barnyard codist.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is. I mean, it's the the predator animal is the the one who hunts for the best powder with the helicopter. Yeah. Very clearly like an eagle descending upon the the mountain top and taking powder for for their own.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Say rejecting conformity. It's great. I like, I just wanna give you a little bit more color on Vale. There's a good post by Andrew Bracken here. This is from 2 years ago.
Speaker 1:We're going back in the timeline. He says off to meet some retina doctors at a meeting in Vail, Colorado is the first time I've had a flight delayed due to, quote, high levels of private jet traffic. And so that just gives you, like, the some color here on, like, Vail. Very exclusive. It is the most visited, it is the most visited, ski resort in the United States, for the for the 2023 to 2024 ski season.
Speaker 1:Vail Mountain offers some of the most expansive and varied terrain in North America with with approximately 5,300 skiable acres, including 7 world renowned back bowls
Speaker 2:and the It's basically like Disneyland the Disneyland of skiers.
Speaker 1:Yes. And this is what's so fascinating about Vale. I was watching this YouTube video by this, limousine liberal. This guy who's really insufferable and, like, hates everything and yet collects Rolexes. It's very cringe.
Speaker 1:Amazing. He, like, everything is about, oh, capitalism is so broken. Capitalism is so broken. And, like, it's, like, bro, you're
Speaker 2:Watch collector.
Speaker 1:Watch collector. You're, like, just just be a capitalist.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But but
Speaker 2:That's the one thing. His watch collection is the one thing that's keeping him from, like, having, like, a communist revolution.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally. Totally.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, in in
Speaker 1:this video, it's breaking down, like, oh, like, you know, these, like, ski companies that come in, and they turn them into, like, Disneyland, and they destroy, like, the local economy. And, it's so sad because, like, you used to just be able to go to some mountain town, like, live there, and it was so good. And and then, like, I'm, like, 30 minutes into this video hearing him complain about this. And I'm like, okay. Like, maybe this is real.
Speaker 1:Like, this it it would suck. Like, it'd be kinda cool to, like, you know, just be someone who built a family in Vail and, like, had a great life. Vail was never a town. It it literally was never a town. It was like these guys went searching for they were like mountaineers.
Speaker 2:They went and
Speaker 1:found a mountain, and they were like, that's a good ski destination. Let's build a ski resort around it. It was it was never anything else. Like, no one was displaced.
Speaker 2:Well, it used to be part of Texas.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. So give me that.
Speaker 2:Max Meyer brought this to my, our attention. He says, America cannot be fully great until Aspen Vale and Steamboat Springs are restored to their proper jurisdiction in the state of Texas. The territorial changes of the Compromise of 1850 must be reversed. Vail, Texas has a nice ring to it, and he shows, like, an entire map here
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:Of how Vail used to be a part of Texas. So, yep, Texas, it gets kind of mugged by its own history. Like, it's got this, like, you know Yeah. Bravado, this attitude. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Don't mess with Texas, but Texas used to be a lot bigger. Yeah. You're smaller than you've ever been in Texas. If you're not claiming land
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You're shrink you're basically shrinking. Trash about Denmark because, the the they're talking a big game about not selling Greenland land to America. And I was like, you guys sold this to British version the US Virgin Islands. You guys sold all your all your trading posts in India.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And you
Speaker 1:were, like, talking a big game then. Yeah.
Speaker 2:What happened? And they're just negotiating. Yeah. They're they're Denmark
Speaker 1:is shrinking.
Speaker 2:They're negotiating with the best negotiator. The guy who literally wrote the
Speaker 1:art of the deal. Yeah. It's it's it's it's all all
Speaker 2:the It's all throwing out.
Speaker 1:I'm going to Greenland without a passport.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:This is interesting. A little bit of history from, 2021, just taking the temperature of what Fintwit was saying about Vail Resorts back in the day. So post market, great poster has stopped posting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What happened
Speaker 1:there? I I love
Speaker 2:this account. I don't know. I don't know if I think I'm assuming it was a woman. Yeah. But did she just some of these, like, investors get get so regulated that they can't
Speaker 1:Maybe or I don't know. I just got sick of it or something. But I went back and found this tweet from 2021 March and says watching Fin Twitch
Speaker 3:She
Speaker 2:could move the market, by the way. Like, if she came back online and just, like, posted, like, ticker, like, it would probably We gotta get
Speaker 1:in touch and get it back on. This is this is part of our life's work here on the show. Watching Fintwitt turn on Vail Resorts for lowering the price of their season pass, in my opinion, Rob Katz deserves the benefit of the doubt. 24 months later, scale economy shared, Katz acquired resorts and realized scale benefits to lower price and sell high margin add ons. Amazing.
Speaker 1:And so I think what she's saying is that, like, people were very bearish on the idea of the of the epic pass. Yeah. But if you look at the data, the the the Epic Pass has just grown and grown and grown and become this, like, monster, share of their revenues. I'm pretty sure there's something like over 50% of their, like, Lyft revenue. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Here it is. So the Lyft Lyft related revenue mix in 2008, it was 26% passes. In 2022, it was 62% passes. Yep. And so the the the Epic Pass, lets you go to any of their mountains,
Speaker 2:which Well, now you're saying it now is
Speaker 1:42 destination mountain resorts.
Speaker 2:It so this is a lot of there's some other person here basically saying, like, this is, like, classic, like, big corporate greed, all this stuff. Like, you know, the epic fast is bad. Yep. And there certainly are some negative externalities. But it used to be growing up, I would ski at Squaw and North Star.
Speaker 2:Sometimes I'd get that other you know, my my great grandfather, I don't know if we ever talked about this, helped build Mammoth Mountains. He ran the gondola at Mammoth for for 50 years. And, maybe not 50, like more like 5. No. I think around 50.
Speaker 2:Anyway, long time.
Speaker 1:Keep it, like, just strictly business on the show. So whenever you talk about
Speaker 2:your family, it's in just kind of. So now
Speaker 1:because as we've said, we're not
Speaker 2:best friends. But, but, yeah. Yeah. We are not friends strictly. This is about delivering the news
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Daily
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And nothing else.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But, but, yeah. So so growing up, like, you know, you'd go I'd go to Squaw for a while. I'd go to Mammoth. But this the the trade off of getting a season pass growing up, my experience was you had to be so committed to a single mountain. Yep.
Speaker 2:Oftentimes, like, unless you had a house or a condo in that area or that was just the resort you went to, it was not so great of a deal for the average skier. Prices were also lower from from from day passes. But now the Epic Pass is, like, such a good product. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, if you want to ski a lot Yep. At at more than one place, it's just a phenomenal product.
Speaker 1:So you can't buy it in season. You have to buy it before. Yeah. But a lot of ski people, they have a crew of friends that like to go and, like, a loose association. They become, like they're either epic pass crew or icon pass, which is the rival one.
Speaker 1:And if you're on the epic pass, you get to go to all of Vales mountains, which they've acquired 42 now. So they've Vail Breckenridge Park City in Utah Keystone, and then Beaver Creek Crested Butte Whistler Blackcomb. So you can go to Whistler in Canada. That was a $1,000,000,000 deal that they that they paid for that. And Whistler is insane.
Speaker 1:I mean, I'm not, like, a complete skiing official.
Speaker 2:The other thing the other thing is you can you can subscribe to it on a monthly basis. So you're able to take a cost of for a lot of people was, like, this big one time purchase, and you're just, like, permanently paying them whatever a $100 a month. Yep. But it makes skiing so much more accessible. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's, like, literally cheaper to get access to 42 of the greatest ski resorts
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Of all time for for a third of the price of your Equinox membership.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And so, a little bit of history, we alluded to it. But, you know, Vail started as this kind of, like, crazy idea by these 2 founders who were, like, literally World War 2 mountaineers, like, just mountain guys. They build this up.
Speaker 1:They eventually sell it to, to another guy, Vail Associates. And then that guy got saddled up with debt during kind of the eighties, early nineties, junk bond era. The debt became too big. They went bankrupt. Apollo came and recapitalized the business, wound up taking their taking them public.
Speaker 1:Apollo was in from 97 to 2003, I think, Leon Black.
Speaker 2:And Well, I mean
Speaker 1:and then and then the the private equity guy who worked at Apollo became the CEO and had a 20 year run. Generation run. And so you can see that, like, there is a little bit of this private equity mindset of, like, let's figure out
Speaker 2:how do we turn this into a super company? The the Apollo guy? Rob Katz. So Rob has must be licking his chops the last the last couple weeks. Right?
Speaker 2:You think he wants to get back in the game? Maybe. Imagine watching all this, and he's like, I always knew how to run this better than you guys. I wonder. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I I I think, like so so taking
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Taking a small step back
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's almost impossible to understate how hard it is to run a ski resort. Oh, yeah. So, like, I had a like, you know, having family member who is running. So my great grandpa, World War 2 vet, all these guys are go to war, they come back, they decide to, like, build ski resorts. Yep.
Speaker 2:Very hard undertaking, but but, easier than than, you know, going to war. And, you know, so my great grandpa running like the gondola all this time, it sounds like the simple thing because you're just sending, like, this, you know, little
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Box up the hill and back over and over and over. But when you actually get into the logistics of, like, okay, you're sending groups of people up on this wire Yep. During some of the harshest, most insane conditions. Yep. And the failure rate, like, literally cannot be Has
Speaker 1:to be 0.
Speaker 2:Has to be 0. Yep. Right? So you get one and and there are some videos out there. You can find videos where, like, a, a lift, like, reverses and it just starts going down, like, backwards, like, in the opposite direction.
Speaker 2:It's just, like Terrifying. Terrifying.
Speaker 1:Also, I mean, the logistics around keeping these lifts running is really hard because these are every machine is kind of bespoke because it's not like there's one size fits all. I mean, there obviously there's some parts that are interchangeable. And then if a part breaks, how do you get that part? You know, it needs to get to you you need some, like, huge gear that's probably custom machined or milled and needs to be delivered and installed in the middle of the ski season. You need helicopters
Speaker 2:to stuff. If if your lifts breaks while you have people on it, then great. You have hundreds of people sitting 50 feet in the air in harsh conditions. Yep. And then and then to to make it even more challenging, you're not even running it year round.
Speaker 2:You're running it, whatever, for 5 months out of the year Yep. During the harshest possible
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Conditions, freezing temperatures, weather, all this stuff. So the fact that ski resorts you know, the the last, like, couple weeks were a disaster in Park City, but the fact that there aren't more disasters is honestly pretty amazing.
Speaker 3:It is.
Speaker 2:It is. A testament to how how good in general we've gotten at operating. I read
Speaker 1:a big article in Bloomberg about, Vale's work in the northeast. So Vale, you know, started with just this one amazing destination, then they bought Park City, which we're gonna go into, a lot of the Tahoe, ski resorts, obviously, Whistler's, like, massive and huge and iconic. But then they bought a bunch of stuff in the northeast that's much worse skiing because the northeast is just very wet, very icy, but there's still a lot of skiers there that just wanna get out there. And so Yeah. The the kind of value prop for Vail was we can bring some of that, like, destination, beautiful luxury ski town, like, experience to the northeast.
Speaker 1:But there's gonna be need to be significant capex that goes into the business. And so at this one, ski resort called Attitash, I think it's called. Attitash. They needed to replace the, the the the chair, the chair lift that went up to the top of the mountain, like the main chair lift Yeah. Took 17 minutes, and it was, like, really cold and, like, completely unprotected.
Speaker 1:They wanna put it in a gondola that would go twice as fast. And they because of, like, COVID and all these delays, they missed the the season, and they didn't get installed until, like, halfway through the season cause they needed to get helicopters up there to, like, put the Yeah. The the the pylons in and stuff. And the locals were, like, super pissed because they're, like, you're this big corporation. Like, why can't you get this on time?
Speaker 1:Like, you know, we wanted this to be
Speaker 2:nice stuff. The season.
Speaker 1:Missed half the season. But they did actually wind up getting it in. And it's an interesting, like, you know, battle between, like
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The the locals and, of course, like, whenever something goes wrong, everyone's, like, very opinionated and vocal about it. But,
Speaker 2:it's Yeah. That's the other challenge of running these resorts is half half. I don't know the exact split, but a large percentage of your customer base are these sort of fair weather. They're gonna be there during ski week and winter break
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:And maybe one other week during the year. And they're just there as, like, sort
Speaker 3:of
Speaker 2:tourists that, don't care as much about costs and all that stuff. And then the other half of your customer base is, like, people that are living, breathing, skiing, living in a small mountain town, maybe working at a restaurant and skiing, like, every extra day that they have. And so it's kind of it's a very interesting challenge of, like, how you serve both of those groups. In in some ways, I I think the Epic Pass at, like, $1200 a year to get access to 40 plus resorts
Speaker 1:Is it $1200 a year? That was, like, 500?
Speaker 2:No. No. I'm I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure it's 1200 for, like, the Yeah. It's expensive. But but it's not in the context of, like yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's not in the context of, like, the fact that if you're just buying a day pass, it's, like, $250.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's also just, like like, what what are the, what are the substitutes for skiing? Like, there just really aren't any. Like, I kinda went through
Speaker 2:You can walk.
Speaker 1:I mean, I guess if you go, like, scuba diving
Speaker 3:That's that's
Speaker 2:that's hiking.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like That's like, in terms of just, like, an experience, like, oh, I went skiing this weekend. It's, like, so much higher above, like, I saw a movie. Or, like, what else did you do? Like, you hung out and got drinks or went, you know, went to a nice dinner.
Speaker 1:But yeah. So Vail has been back and forth for a while. People love it. People hate it. Max Meyer again says Vail Resorts charges me less for a military family season pass, $145, than they do for a single day lift ticket at Vail 189.
Speaker 1:Remind you that the 189 ticket is actually the spring discount price. During Jan Feb, it's 229. And so, Max is a big Vail fan, hence why he wants it in Texas. Yeah. Because he thinks it's, it's a well known organization.
Speaker 2:Got one from from Katie Erzog here. She says, I always like flying in a Vail because I get to see the latest developments in plastic surgery. And, this is top of mind for me because in in, in Courchevelle where I was, for the last couple weeks, I was noticing this interesting dynamic where, tons of lip lip filler usage And lip filler seems to have this sort of, like, anti mimetic property
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Where if you notice somebody has lip filler, it means that they've used way too much. Yeah. Yeah. And so they literally look like it's sort of, like, pig like. And then they're, like, you know, they're showing their Like like, it's really bad and horrifying.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But at the same time, for every one woman that you notice that has, like, way too much lip filler, there's, like, 5 others that that use just, like, a subtle amount. Yeah. And maybe you're, like, oh, she looks nice
Speaker 1:or whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And so so it's this interesting thing where lip filler is constantly getting this terribly negative advertising
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yet it continues on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Plastic surgery is, like, like a good defensive cornerback. Like, you only notice it when I'm fucking up. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That's a good that's a good example, Tom.
Speaker 1:The the the good d d d back?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know much about sports.
Speaker 1:You're not you're not
Speaker 2:that in like a because you shut
Speaker 1:that shutting down. You
Speaker 2:just shut down corner. You could say that's like like, put it in business context. Exactly. Right? Like, it's a good controller.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. Nobody's, like, nobody you you you know, the controller never gets, like, the fame, the fortune Yep. You know, things go well or if they don't go well. It's not like the CFO of, like, Enron who's, like, literally going to jail.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, the the controller, like yeah. Who knows? They're just doing their job. Controller.
Speaker 2:Just solid controller.
Speaker 1:Most people couldn't even name the controller at Apple or Facebook or, you know, Google because they're just doing their job. So let's get into the actual drama that erupted over the last weekend. I I this is what TF Jenkins had the first post that I really saw go viral here. He says, thanks, Park City at Vail Resorts and the striking ski patrol really creating a fun and safe environment. I hope the lawsuits begin to trickle in and every one of you feel financial pain for your negligence.
Speaker 1:Super pissed.
Speaker 2:That's like the most earth. That's like the most, like, finance bro way to, like, get mad at somebody. Like, I hope you feel financial pain for your negligence.
Speaker 1:And I hope they burn in hell. Yeah. Go in hard.
Speaker 3:So the
Speaker 2:funny video about this
Speaker 1:super long lines back in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Back in, like, the the the sixties seventies, it was very routine to wait, like, an hour plus for every single lift.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So you'd go skiing for the day and you'd maybe get, like, 5 runs because you were just in lines, like, the entire
Speaker 1:time.
Speaker 2:And so we've gotten very spoiled recently with our breast chairs, gondolas, like, you're not you're not if a line is, like, 10 minutes, you're, like, annoyed.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, this is, like, taking too long.
Speaker 1:They've also got some of
Speaker 2:the some of the footage coming out of Park City was, like, truly wild. It looked like the Lily Phillips, like, her, you know, the the that that UK the UK porn star who's, like
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Looked like the line for, like
Speaker 1:The worst analogy possible.
Speaker 2:No. Somebody somebody else Is somebody else? Somebody else posted that. They were, like, is this, like, a little for a little explosive video?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so, people start diagnosing the problems. Will Minitis, says it's incredible that Apollo owns both every good ski slope in America, Vail, and every private military contractor, Blackwater Triple Canopy, possibly the most adaptive allocators to ever live. Late stage finance is truly a beautiful thing. And this is, like, kind of true, but Apollo hasn't owned Veil for 2 decades.
Speaker 1:So gonna have to put that one on the truth zone, Will. Not quite right. And then, Andrew Reid is, hypothesizing why things might be going wrong in Vail. He says, when you learn Vail Resorts CMOs, prior job was 10 years at Comcast, everything clicks into place. That's that's a deep dive.
Speaker 1:He he looked up the CMO. Like, I I he really
Speaker 3:He must
Speaker 2:have been on the ground in Colorado Yeah. Or Utah. I mean,
Speaker 1:he's wearing ski gear in his profile picture.
Speaker 3:So I
Speaker 1:think this guy is
Speaker 2:real skier.
Speaker 1:A real skier. They're probably, you know, Sequoia partner digging in, just understanding what's going on. I love it. But but I I wanna go through this, this deep dive of the story of how Vail acquired Park City. But what else you got for me right now?
Speaker 2:I mean, Dan Loeb, some other people are talking about like, I think what on the surface, the the headline number was the ski patrol just wanted an extra $2 an hour.
Speaker 1:Yeah. $23 to 21.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Going from 21 to $23.
Speaker 1:Burger cost 25 in town. So, like Yeah. It's not it's not reasonable.
Speaker 2:And, this guy Ben Bortner responded to Dan Loeb's post and said, it is surprising they have a 100 ski patrollers, 100 times 2 times 40 hours per week, times 24 weeks equals $192,000 a year. I'm not a pro union person. Good. Good stuff, Ben. Way to way to, you know, we've dealt with our own, our editors trying to unionize over and over.
Speaker 2:But we are always able to win. He says this dispute doesn't make sense. Must be missing something. So I think, yeah. Like, on the surface, a lot of this stuff doesn't really make sense.
Speaker 2:Right? It's a $192,000 a year. This company does 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars in in earnings. And I think that the reality is that it's more about, you know, Vail not wanting to set the precedent that a small group of individuals at one of their resorts is able to, like, shut down, you know, the the basically shut down the brand Yep. Over a over a single dispute.
Speaker 2:And I believe TJ Parker gets into this a little bit, but he says, my guess is this is the primary blocker in the Vail negotiations. If you're a massive seasonal employer, there's no way in hell you can set a precedent around this kind of thing for 1 group of employees at 1 resort. At 1 resort, he says the union is also advocating for improved benefits including more accessible health care options, holiday pay, and a more attractive overall benefits package to retain retain and attract skilled patrollers. One proposed solution is offering health care stipends to allow patrollers to maintain year round coverage without switching providers every 6 months. So, yeah.
Speaker 2:I think this this is, like a pretty interesting sort of challenge, right, where skiing and working in the ski industry historically was something that people would do out of love. They would do it, and they would have to make a lot of sacrifices. They're, like, okay. I'm gonna move
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:To the small town just for the winter, or I'm gonna live in this town and, like, work odd jobs in the off season, and then be a ski patrol just because they love skiing so much. And then that sort of, like, ski bum lifestyle, which has been a part of ski culture forever Yep. That was not glamorous, but was done specifically because people love to ski. When that comes up against, you know, now you have this massive public company that owns all of skiing, and there's becomes this, like, thing where people are saying, well, I wanna be able to be a ski bum, but I want I also want year round benefits. Yep.
Speaker 2:And that was never sort of the promise of that lifestyle. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But but now people can say, well, okay. Like, your Vail Resorts, you're this huge huge public company. You know, you deserve you you you should be you know? The the the point of view is you should maybe provide this kind of benefits for, but I don't know that it's it the the thing that ultimately, I saw that in in the some of the messaging they were saying, you know, you're doing these big, you know, 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars of buybacks and all this stuff.
Speaker 2:Shouldn't you just, shouldn't you just, you know, pay pay your people more?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you said your you said, if I wasn't
Speaker 3:if if
Speaker 2:I John Coogan was negotiating for these key patrollers, I'd be like, give me some of that sweet stock based comp. That's true. Yeah. You're saying, you know, that the $2 extra, don't don't just go for $2 cash.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And equity
Speaker 2:would go for $2 of, of stock could easily turn
Speaker 1:into TN. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it it is interesting because that that math makes it look so small. But if you actually look at their 10 k, Vail as a whole across all 42 mountains, the Lyft revenue was 1,400,000,000 and the labor and labor related benefits was 730,000,000.
Speaker 1:And so it's by far their biggest cost, twice their GNA, twice their other.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. And the ski patrollers are a small at this one resort. Yeah. Are are are a cog in the machine. But then you have people that do ski lessons which are different people that just lift operators.
Speaker 2:Yep. People that do lift the lift operators are the people that are that are sitting there and like making sure you get on and turning it off. And then you have the people that are maintaining the list and then you have like the mountain operations and you have the guys that do the cats at night. Yeah. Then you have the guys that do that the dynamite at night to make sure, like, like and so you just add and then, okay, the cashier and then the kitchen staff and and the people that do the the rentals and and then the people that do parking.
Speaker 2:And then suddenly, like, if every single group on the mountain at every resort starts as like, then the business ceases to be a real business.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And and this is something they, as a public company, can't afford to be like, oh, we have 42 resorts and we don't make any money. We just need to add 20 more resorts and then we'll make money. Everybody's gonna be, like, well, what what are you doing? Like, you already own, like, the you already have the Disneyland
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Of skiing and 40 other resorts. How are you not
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:A a real business?
Speaker 1:I do wonder if there's other things they could do to lower the cost for the employees because Vail has, like, a a an apartment in Vail is, like, $25100 a month, which is very expensive if you're just, like, a ski patroller. But they have a whole bunch of, like, corporate apartments that are $500 a month. So but I don't think they build enough of those maybe. So you need to build more, but there's a lot of, like, permitting and regulation. Did you know that they're trying to build a tunnel in Vail?
Speaker 1:This is really interesting. So the the the highway that goes through, I guess, people complain about road noise. And I think that maybe during the snow, it's tricky. So they're thinking about burying it, basically. Interesting.
Speaker 1:But it's like a multibillion dollar project and they're like, well, we could develop on top of it. So then you can just continue to develop, but that wouldn't even offset the cost. So they're just like, it's never gonna happen.
Speaker 2:It's been in
Speaker 1:the plan for like 40 years in in their general plan.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, should we move on to the story of, when Vail stole Park City? That's pretty interesting. So great capital, great poster, wrote a big long thread that we'll dig through. So he starts by saying, everyone makes a mistake at work, but rarely do they end up reshaping an entire industry. It's a well known story.
Speaker 1:But, hey, it's almost ski season, and who doesn't love a cautionary tale about the costs of administrative errors? Park City is now famous for its skiing, but that's a recent development. It was a silver mining town for most of its life. So dependent on the industry so dependent on the industry that it was actually classified as a ghost town following the 19 fifties crash. It was barely a thousand people by the decades end.
Speaker 1:Skiing started as miners would ski jump on the old creole mine dump. Sounds lit. Park City consolidated mines officially began the ski business in 1963 on Treasure Mountain. A mine train took them through the mountain to an elevator climbing up 1,750 feet. Again, also sorta lit.
Speaker 1:Then because in the 19 seventies parks context. Park City ski area or at least the terrain from the US, from the United Park City Mines in a lease of only a 155 k per year extendable until 2051. Yeah. A lot of these ski resorts are not actually owned land. They're on these different, like, leases either from the government or from other organizations.
Speaker 1:It's it's fascinating. It's actually
Speaker 2:It's so funny to talk about somebody, like, writing up a a 100 year lease Yeah. For a property, and they're like, oh, what's a fair price? Like, a $150 a year. Yeah. Thinking it's like this, like, like, like,
Speaker 1:there's good. There's no way.
Speaker 3:There's no
Speaker 1:there'll be massive inflation.
Speaker 2:And then it's 20. Yeah. It's like You just
Speaker 1:get screwed. This would become Park City Mountain Resort, one of 3 resorts in the immediate area alongside skier only Deer Valley and 3rd place, Canyons. In 1994, PCMR, that's Park City Mining Resorts or something. Parks, what is it? Park City Mountain Resort was acquired by Powder Corp, a new company started by John Cumming.
Speaker 1:John was in his early twenties and had already created mountain, the mountain hardware brand later acquired by Columbia Sportswear. And there's some nice photos of
Speaker 2:What a Chad. He's in his early twenties?
Speaker 1:Well, this is this is these are ads from his product, I believe. But yeah. He's 28. In his early twenties, he'd already created the mountain headwear brand, which he sold in his thirties or forties
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:In 03. But but he was an entrepreneur. And so he, he starts powder, buys PCMR, Park City. Powder quickly grew into one of the largest ski resort operators in the country with PCMR as its crown jewel. Status further boosted by the o two Olympics, which were there.
Speaker 1:The company ran a decentralized town friendly model and reported and reportedly had less than 40 corporate employees. And There's a big question about these, like, where are the corporations? So Vail Associates used to be based in Vail, but they got too big because they're managing 40 resorts, like, internationally and stuff. So they actually moved to Denver, I believe. Yep.
Speaker 1:The success wasn't entirely unprecedented. Powder had the backing of John's father, Ian, who founded loose, Lucidia, now merged with Jefferies, some sort of bank, I guess, described as the smaller Berkshire Hathaway, but with a better track record. The company was valued at nearly $7,000,000,000 when Ian retired in 2013. Damn. Damn.
Speaker 1:Nepo, baby. Let's go. Let's go. Putting the family money to work buying ski resorts.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 3:I love
Speaker 2:I I was I was, like, seeing this headline. It's like this. He's 28, and he owns Park City. Meanwhile, his dad's
Speaker 1:running like $7,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Let's go. That's I mean, that's that's why if your dad or your mom is wildly successful, you the bar is not is just astronomically higher.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, you need to own an asset like Park City by the time you're 28 or you're a loser.
Speaker 1:I agree. I agree. And but it's also, like, look, like, yeah, maybe he didn't have the the chops to fill the big shoes, like, cast a big shadow in the world of finance, But you can go and, and buy and build a much cooler asset. Yep. And that's pretty awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so it's like yeah. You're not Buy
Speaker 2:a NASCAR team.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you're you're not the you're not the $7,000,000,000 hedge fund guy, but you own Park City.
Speaker 2:That's it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Meanwhile, Park City's ugly stepsister, Canyons, languished compared to its neighboring resorts despite larger area underinvestment and a nonsensical layout, limited lodging, and a revolving door of owners left it with maybe 40,000, 400,000 skiers per year versus 1,000,000 at Park City. A Canadian real estate company, Talisker Land Holdings, would acquire canyons in 2007, beating out rising Colorado powerhouse Vail Resorts. So Vail wanted to buy canyons, but they lost out on the deal. They'd invest in new upgrades, including North America's first heated chairlift. Sick.
Speaker 1:I've never been on one of those. And even planned a connection to nearby solitude, So you could go all around and ski and just made them the layout much easier. Entering 2011, things were going well for Park City, including a contemplated ambitious remaking of the base area. Powder was expanding well with a growing portfolio across ski resorts, adventure, sports content, and experiences like heli skiing and white water rafting. Relations with neighboring Talisker seemed friendly with discussions on property and infrastructure investments, including a potential lift connection between the results, resorts.
Speaker 1:Talisker was even landlord for PCMR's upper mountain, having inherited the long term lease from UPCM. PCMR PCMR's lease required written renewal every 20 years, a deadline that no one at Powder was assigned to monitor. This is crazy. While Powder sent its letter 2 days late, things seemed fine, paying their fee and investing 7,000,000 in upgrades. Clearly, it seemed Talisker didn't mind the slight miss.
Speaker 1:Not so fast. At the end of 2011, Talisker advised PCMR's right to use the mountain under the sweetheart lease had expired. They would need to vacate the premises unless rent was increased to 7,700,000 annually and PCMR's base facilities were turned over at the end of the lease. So it jumped from a 150 k to 7,700,000. And they're pissed.
Speaker 1:Powder was in so many words, pissed. They filed lawsuit Talisker thinking they could return to the previous deal. Even if Talisker had rights to the upper mountain, what could they do without the base which Powder owned? They didn't wait to find out. After a year, Talisker leased canyons and the upper mountain to Vail Resorts who assumed the legal battle.
Speaker 1:Vail's like, let's go. I'll I'll fight this out.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:No problem. The combined monster lease would total $25,000,000 in annual fixed payment plus 42% of EBITDA over 35,000,000. And so the canyons resort is is, described here. 4000 skiable areas, top 10 ranking in ski and outside magazines, attractive Park City location, huge growth opportunities, etcetera. The opportunity was reconciliation the opportunity for reconciliation was gone.
Speaker 1:The gloves were off. Vale, you'll recall, had lost canyons to Talisker in 07 in that bidding war and had come back for the full enchilada. So they come back to buy it all led by CEO Rob Katz, pictured here. You gotta look at a photo of this guy, total giga Chad. Led by CEO Rob Katz, Vail was a known growing powerhouse in Colorado and California.
Speaker 1:They were beginning an ascent few truly appreciated was coming. Park City was the first entree. And so Vail Resorts is expanding into Breckenridge, Keystone, Canyons, Heavenly, etcetera. The $305,000,000 deal was 20 x the estimated $15,000,000 EBITDA canyons would bring in. The deal would only make sense if Vail got Park City as well.
Speaker 1:John Cummings and Powder fought valiantly, but Utah laws are decidedly landlord friendly. The well publicized fight saw threats from John to tear down the upper mountain lifts and install a winter ski park at the bottom of the hill. Alas, it was all for naught. Despite pledges to post a bond and fight in 2014, Powder sold the base to Vale for a $183,000,000, 5 x the incremental $35,000,000 EBITDA. Vale, after creating the resorts, had the largest ski resort in the United States, racking a combined 1,500,000 ski visits annually.
Speaker 1:Got them. Got them. It would be a huge first salvo in an industry defining acquisition spree, including the 2016 megapurchase of Whistler Blackcomb for 1,100,000,000 and 2019 acquisition of 17 resorts from Peak Resorts. That's the northeast stuff, I believe. Their scale surpasses anything previously seen in the industry.
Speaker 1:It is fascinating that, this idea of, like, the mega ski conglomerate is something that really only started, like, 5 years ago
Speaker 3:or,
Speaker 1:like, 10 years ago maybe. Yeah. It used to just truly be all independent ski resorts and, like
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think the the the the the reason that I this this last couple of weeks of events, there's a lot of reasons, you know, people are posting the strike. Park City is just ridiculous. Just classic corporate greed here. 330 for a day pass and they quote unquote can't afford to pay the patrollers.
Speaker 2:23 an hour will be a Harvard Business School case study on bad business. And it's like, okay, I get it that when you when you frame it like that, it seems silly.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But it's all about precedent. Right? And and and again, it's not like Vail Resorts is just the best business anybody's ever seen even at this level of scale and owning the entire industry. I look at it and I say this is a biz this is a labor of love. Right?
Speaker 2:This is not the business that you get into because you just care about generating cash. Like, it's not it's it hasn't been
Speaker 1:in revenue, 230 in net income. Like, 10% net income margin. It's not exactly, like and the stock has not grown over the last 4 years.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's not a lot of greatest bull market industry. Yeah. And it's not That that's the other thing. It's not where does it go from here?
Speaker 2:The ski industry, I don't know how much bigger it's gonna get. Yep. There when when when we were growing up, there was a lot of like, there was a group called, like, save our winters. There's this whole idea of, like, climate change and and how it's, and and Most interesting thing about the climate change
Speaker 1:thing is, I have this whole, business school case study here lifting the veil. Largest US snow sports resort operator takes on climate change. These, these folks at Michigan Ross School of Business did a whole deep dive on, sustainability and ESG and how, how Vail will deal with, climate change. But when I was looking through the 10 k, I don't know if I just missed it, but in the, risk disclosures, they they list everything from, like, you know, IT systems could get hacked or we could not pay our debt covenants, all this other stuff. And they didn't mention, global warming, which was very interesting to see that, like, absent from the 10 k.
Speaker 1:Maybe I missed it. I don't know. But, but it's very they're they're they're projecting a lot of interesting things.
Speaker 2:But but and and the other thing is, like, these think about how challenging it is to run a a business. And it's not even, like, the the ski industry has, like the the people that work in the industry have every right to be emotional and be, like, charged up and Yep. And be frustrated with the corporate owners. But if you think about it, it's like, okay, if you're a small, like, when these skiers are sort of independent and you have, like, huge huge amounts of fixed costs annually to run a resort, and then you just have a bad ski season in that area of, like, Tahoe, or you have a bad ski season in the upper northeast Yep. And then, oh, what happens?
Speaker 2:Like, okay, the the resort loses a bunch of money that year.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:You you have to issue a bunch of debt.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:And so the idea of having a bunch of resorts that are spread out over a g such a wide geographic area that you can weather the storm almost. Right? Like, that actually makes a lot of sense. And then, again, the reason it's like, you know, Vail Resorts is basically saying for a $1,000 a year, you can get access to 40 of the most beautiful
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Mountains on earth and and and get to me that that value exchange is like such a great trade for the average consumer that it's that it's has to be frustrating running veil being like, we're giving you guys for $1,000 a year. We'll give you unlimited access to all this incredible nature and you can do and you can ski, which is an activity that is just so, so clearly not essential to life, like, it's purely for fun
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And you're still not happy, it's like that's gotta be a rough rough spot to be. I I mean, I honestly, like, it seems like they they poorly handled the last couple weeks, but at the same time, I I feel for them because they're running a deeply challenging business.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, if you look at this data, the number of days below freezing worldwide, you can see the map. It's like the entire northern hemisphere. And, the place with the most days below freezing, Greenland.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:I don't know if there's mountains there. Maybe we need to build
Speaker 2:some Vale Vale needs to go buy Greenland. Vale should buy Greenland.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:It'll become a country.
Speaker 1:But then it's like Russia and Mongolia, which are you know, you're not gonna build a a good business there. But they're they're projecting out some moderate emission scenarios. And the the current number of, days below freezing at Park City in Utah is a 194 per year. And by 2050 ish, they're projecting that that'll go down to about a 150. So about a 25% decrease.
Speaker 1:So there is pretty significant pressure. And the interesting thing about this, this report, this report is like, okay. How do you deal with, how do you deal with climate change? Their main recommendation is, like, expand more. Like, go buy more across the world, and they actually break down all of the target, countries.
Speaker 1:They say Argentina, Chile, China, Czechia, Finland, Germany, Norway. Germany has a very, very few ski resorts. I didn't realize this, but there's this great chart in here of the countries with 9 plus resorts operating at least 5 lifts. And it's the United States, then Japan, then France, Italy, Austria. Germany only has 55, resorts that qualify under this, and then Argentina only has 10.
Speaker 1:Chile only has 9. And so if you think about, where to expand, Sweden, South Korea, Spain, Ukraine, there's a lot of interesting options here.
Speaker 2:I heard, at at, the Amman, there was a a guy from Russia talking about how he's expanding, and building ski resorts in the, far, far east of Russia on a volcano. Apparently, that sounded cool.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Let's let's finish the the the the Vail acquisition story here.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So Vail success has been vilified within the industry who see a corporate overlord turning ski hills into theme parks, which we've discussed. Powder Magazine hilariously joked Vail had acquired the rights to all North American snowfall. However, they've enabled a renaissance of sort, and this is something you were talking about. The company wide Epic Pass alongside increased scale has flipped skiing's business model on its head from an add on to real estate to operations first. It's worthy of a deeper dive on how tech and opportunity combined.
Speaker 1:And the the, past revenue, which you'll see here, climbed from 78,000,000 in 2008 to basically 800,000,000 in, in 2022. So at 10 x growth.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:And and that led to really incredible performance in the stock. If you look at 2,008, stock was under $25 a share. By the end of 2021, it was up at 3.50.
Speaker 2:So,
Speaker 1:10 x growth in in the past revenue, 10 x growth in the stock, and that's almost all just to retooling the business model.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And and obviously a lot of expansion.
Speaker 2:And the reason I mean, the reason I just I again, I don't I I don't have that much sympathy for the average person who
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:Who, 10 years ago, they'd be buying a season pass to one of these resorts Yep. And it'd be, like, $500. And now they pay $1,000, but they get access to 40 2 times as many mountains. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, I just don't feel that.
Speaker 1:Well, it it it's just catering to a a much more, like, coastal urban elite, someone who doesn't live in the ski town. It's probably a a a a net, like, net positive overall,
Speaker 2:but but it's at
Speaker 1:the expense of the local.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But, yeah, even the ski, like, the true ski bombs
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They still if they go to Keystone, if that's their mountain Yeah. They still they take advantage of these of the of the episodes, and they're like, oh, I'm gonna go to Utah for the week. And, like
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you can go off season, and it's not that expensive to stay at, like, some little hotel. I mean No.
Speaker 1:I agree.
Speaker 2:The, the, you know, the the you you posted a few times about the the cost of skiing in Europe versus the United States. And and this, Andy Van Vandenberg guy, in almost a year ago is saying, here's your annual reminder that because of Vale and Altera's is duopoly, it's cheaper to plan a week long ski trip in Switzerland than Colorado. I don't think this is this is not purely because of the duopoly. It it it has always been significantly, you know, even prior to the to the to the, Disneyification of of American skiing, it was always quite a bit cheaper, to go skiing in in, in Europe. But but but again Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't,
Speaker 1:you know I mean, the like, the benefit of this is that there is incredible price discrimination. And so if you want the value pass and you want your average day skiing like, I knew a guy who was on one of the icon passes or epic passes, and I was skiing with him and he was like, yeah. This is, like, my 60th day this season. I'm like, I don't know how you do that. And but but the great thing is that I was able to show up.
Speaker 1:I think we were in Jackson Hole. I had no prep. I was able to just walk up and, of course, they had gear that fit me. I I had a lift ticket and the lines weren't bad. It cost a fortune, but the benefit was that it was available for the price.
Speaker 1:And there's further price discrimination. You know, the funny thing about all those people waiting in the in the chair line, you can usually pay a ski instructor to take you right to the front and cut.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so a lot of people will just do that. It's like the Disney, like, the Disney Disneyification is real in the sense that, like, there's a fast pass.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's a system for jumping even further.
Speaker 2:Arguably, if the fast pass is is an extra if the main pass is a grand Yep. The fast pass is, like, 3 grand
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But you ski 50 plus days a year
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:Just like do it. Yeah. It's like not that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know? And so, Grit goes on, to say, meanwhile, powder has moved on from the debacle. They remain a major adventure sports oriented resort operator with Copper, Snowbird, and Killington as premier destinations. Powder even returned to Park City in 2019 via a new Woodward Sports Camp. Looks lit.
Speaker 1:It's like he loves that lit. Yeah. And it's like a BMX facility and, like, a parkour facility, I guess. Pretty pretty interesting. And then if we go over here, the Telisker, well, they're not doing so hot.
Speaker 1:After leasing to Vale, they hit rocky times with the creditors and eventually forced foreclosure in 2015. It's likely that their shaky financial situation that precipitated the mess in the first place. And, what might have been though, there had been talks about connecting the major Salt Lake City area resorts in a European style village to village arrangement with 80 lifts and 8018000 skiable acres. Those plans already facing locals' concerns died entirely when Vale moved in. I'm not exactly sure why.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, that was a long thread on a topic you aren't have already known. We don't do lessons here, but I guess attention to detail matters. If you like this stuff, he recommends the book Ski Inc, which I would definitely recommend picking up. I need to check that book out. I I've heard some, as I was doing research on this, there were a lot of interesting quotes, especially about the the the Apollo buyout and some of the private equity deals that were quoted in that book.
Speaker 1:And that book has, like, some of the only interviews that happened with those financiers because, like, a, the journalists aren't really writing about, like, random private equity deals, and then also these guys are pretty tight lipped. So that is, the story. We've got some more posts.
Speaker 2:I got one last thing we can end on from, at the stalwart, Mr. Joe Weisenthal himself. He says, sort of a unrelated to the main topic, but he says it's cool how if you're rich and have a fake job like VC, then winners are just totally optional for you. And I would say that the VCs I know would push back on this and say they would say because I have a fake job like VC, I get to indulge in winter even more. Right?
Speaker 2:I get to go being being a truly a VC is, you know, going and skiing powder days on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, midweek, way less people. You tell the founders, hey, yeah, you know, 44 p. M. Is the earliest I can schedule zoom.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:You go ski. Incredible. Like, you know, you know, empty tracks all day long. You get back. You're pulling off your helmet.
Speaker 2:You're here. You jump on the Zoom call. Sorry. What's your company do again? And, I mean, that's that's what it's all about.
Speaker 1:We're talking about Bryce.
Speaker 3:How, like,
Speaker 2:you know, he's networking in, what where's
Speaker 3:the Deer
Speaker 1:Valley or
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I was talking to another, another person about how, like, there's this jockeying that's happening right now for, like, you know, can you get on the list for one of the big VC ski vacations that are going on? So every VC firm is kinda organizing them and every, like, little group of of, like, rich guys are putting together ski weekends. And, like, getting on those lists, it feels very, like, oh, are you in the in group? It's like the cool kids.
Speaker 1:It feels like not working, but spending a full day with someone is always, like, a 1000000 times better than, like, 5, 7 girls. Right? It's it's actually very productive. And then Yeah. You'll remember, oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:We had that conversation, like, sitting outside, having drinks after skiing, and it was awesome.
Speaker 2:Why, like, that's why skiing is more valuable. So skiing is wildly expensive.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But I think it's fairly priced for
Speaker 3:how incredible it is. Yep. Like, we've joked about it a lot, but it's some
Speaker 2:of my favorite things that I a lot, but it's some of my favorite memories as a kid was with snowboarding with my dad.
Speaker 3:You
Speaker 2:know, it's like skiing with my mom. Like, you get all these moments where you get to, like, have this exhilarating fun activity. Yep. That literally is almost the closest thing that we do to flying as humans. And then 5 minutes later, you're sitting on a lift, you know, chit chatting, talking.
Speaker 2:It's just it's worth, every dollar, and I would happily pay 2, 3 times what it currently costs. Vale, if you're listening, no need to jack up the prices. But,
Speaker 1:I do have one little tidbit of advice, and we can close out with any more That's all I got. But, there's a lot of questions about, like, oh, it must be really rough being a ski patroller right now. And I think that if you're looking for a career, instead of going into ski patrol, I would recommend going into private equity. Yeah. And so if you look at the history of Vail, the private equity guys have done very well.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And and it's it seems like the ski patrollers have have struggled. And I it it goes back to, like, who has the financial leverage, who has the who has the power there. And so, little less time on the slopes, little more time in the sheets, in the spreadsheet.
Speaker 2:So, so obviously, you're you're you're riffing a little bit, but I'll I'll continue on that. I do think that today in the the the nature of remote work, if you want to ski the most the if you wanna if you just care about skiing, you're still better off getting a a fake remote job
Speaker 1:Advanced job.
Speaker 2:And living in a mountain town and just skiing constantly Yeah. Than going and becoming a ski patrol person.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I know I I have
Speaker 1:my The industry is set up to cater to another person.
Speaker 2:My roommate in, college, like, would have been a professional surfer.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:His parents, like, didn't allow him to quit school at a young age and, like, travel and do what he needed to do. But now he works in real estate, and so he, like, has spent the last few weeks, like, on the North Shore at Pipeline, like There we go. Getting absolutely barreled every single day. That's awesome. And it's like he makes way more money than, like, the average pro surfer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And surfs, like, probably 50%, 60% as much, but, like, has a real career.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so if you're thinking about becoming a ski bum
Speaker 1:You can pay for gear, pay for coaches, pay for training.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You get to
Speaker 1:health care.
Speaker 2:Like Yeah. Yeah. So if you're thinking about becoming a ski bum, pivot to private equity.
Speaker 1:That is our I I I I think that really is the good takeaway here from the real story is, like, get on the side of capital.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Lever up.
Speaker 2:Lever up.
Speaker 1:Cool. Let's move on to some DMs, our q and a section. We have been getting tons and tons of merch. Thank you to everyone that sent us stuff. Let's kick it off with the Ridge Wallet.
Speaker 1:You want me just to go through this while you're there? Yeah. Yeah. Jordy's gonna take a break, and we're just gonna keep rolling. So the first thing we got was some lovely wallets from the Ridge.
Speaker 1:We're we're big fans of the Ridge Wallet. I've actually been using one of these. This is the 24 carat Ridge Wallet, which I like. I got the MagSafe 1 on my phone, and I I realized that Ridge Ridge Wallet, it's a very accessible product. It's not a super hyper luxury good, but what I love about it is that if you follow the Ridge team, Sean, and Connor, you will understand that these guys are absolute killers in the world of e commerce, and they've built a fantastic business.
Speaker 1:And so carrying a Ridge wallet has actually become a status symbol if you work in ecommerce in the sense that you are acknowledging that direct response performance ads is a craft of its own and that you respect a team that has done it so well and gone on to partner with MKBHD and launched all these products and and really grown the business in a bunch of interesting ways and maintained an incredible amount of of ownership over that business because they haven't raised any of the crazy suicide rounds that other d to c companies. Dollar. Yeah. They haven't raised a dollar, and and they've just grown that business and grown it, grown it, grown it. And now it's doing, I think 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars.
Speaker 1:Right, Jordy? 100. 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars. And so that's, I think, the real reason why you should carry a Ridge Wallet, is to let everyone know you have respect for the best in the business when it comes to direct to consumer. And they also sent me this knife, which I've been enjoying and I've been playing with basically constantly.
Speaker 1:It's like, it's like the man's fidget spinner. The adult fidget spinner is just the knife that you can just, like
Speaker 2:That's my classic. That's my anytime I'm at a at a at a nice dinner and there's a steak knife
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:I pull it out and I start doing it. Yeah. And just freak everyone out. I'm like I'm like good enough at
Speaker 3:it that
Speaker 2:I can, like, I can I can
Speaker 3:Boom boom boom boom boom
Speaker 2:boom boom boom boom?
Speaker 1:It's great. And this knife is is handy because we have here Palmer Lucky's latest device, the Chromatic from ModRetro. And so I'm gonna pop this open. Jordy said I shouldn't open this because it's gonna be a piece of, you know, technical history. But I think this one will be enjoyed, and maybe I'll pick up another one, keep it in the plastic.
Speaker 1:But the Chromatic, if you're not familiar, Paul Lucky. Yeah. Go for it. Oh, just, started this, second company. He's not busy enough with Android.
Speaker 1:Oh, nice packaging. It opens, it opens around. It has some really cool graphics, and I believe this is possible. Wow. This is really just like an actual Game Boy.
Speaker 1:This is such a throwback. It's so crazy. Man, what a what a treat. And so, I believe there's something with, like, the Game Boy came off of patent or something like that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so, he was able to recreate it. And if you and if you think forward, I mean, this company raised some money. And at at first, I think people were skeptical, like, oh, what what you know, what's the deal with, like, a Game Boy company? Like, why do I why is that a good company? But if you think about, like, well, then maybe the n 64 comes off patent.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And people would love that. Maybe the Yep. PlayStation. I would play the original Metal Gear Solid on PlayStation.
Speaker 1:I would play Smash Brothers on the original n 64
Speaker 2:and Mario 60 Yeah. Another another bull case is another bull case for mod retro is that GameStop is a multi I don't know what their market cap is today. I'm assuming it's they're still like
Speaker 1:Yeah. They they they ripped and they continue to rip. This is amazing.
Speaker 2:And, but Wow. Listen to that.
Speaker 1:It it fires up so fast.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 1:It fires up so fast.
Speaker 2:That that that speaker is just so nostalgic. That sound is incredibly nostalgic. This is all
Speaker 3:I'm saying. I'm just
Speaker 1:gonna play this for the rest of the game.
Speaker 2:Alright. No. But anyway, so if so if GameStop is a $14,000,000,000 company
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Every single game in the store, you can just download. Yeah. This this is the lifeline for GameStop. And so, basically, I think that GameStop basically has to buy mod retro for a $1,000,000,000. At least if I was an investor, that's my investment thesis.
Speaker 2:Huge. Which is, like, what is the what is the last kind of video game that you can buy in the store? And it's cartridges.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Also, I I saw somebody bought they they make cartridges that are, like, they they have some sort of, like, new technology in there where it has, like, a 1,000 games on it. So it's like a modern memory card inside.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. And so here's the other here's the other bulk cases. You have this iPad baby generation. Yep. We have children.
Speaker 2:Yep. I would much rather give our sons one of these on a road trip than the average iPad. Absolutely. Gonna be like, you know
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and I was playing a game on PlayStation 5 over the, over the break with my son. And, and it was it was it was awesome. He was a bit about Astros robots, and it's kind of like, PlayStation's Mario.
Speaker 3:So
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a platformer. You jump around. It's all really friendly, all really nice. There's some, like, puzzles and stuff.
Speaker 1:But there's just too many buttons for him because he's 3.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so he couldn't really figure it out. So he just watched and he was really into that. And then every once in a while, there'd be, like, one thing that just required pressing one button and it'd be like, you press the button and be really excited about that. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But I
Speaker 1:think he could actually learn it by Tetris. And and build a build quality on it.
Speaker 2:The build quality is amazing.
Speaker 1:It's remarkable.
Speaker 2:It's significantly it's significantly better. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because I have so so I think I mentioned recently, I have a I have a Game Boy color that, that unfortunately, that's like the Pikachu edition. And I looked it up and I was like, oh, if it's unopened or no.
Speaker 2:If you have the box, it's like $3,000. And then if you don't if you don't have the box, it's like $200 or something like that. But this build quality of this is significantly better.
Speaker 1:It's so small too. I I forget how amazing this device is. Like, it's
Speaker 2:And it's so, brought this back. Yeah. I mean, talk about an ideas an ideas guy that is at the top of his game. Totally. Is the guy who's making the next Lockheed Martin also is good enough ideas guy to realize that, hey, you can just build a game boy color.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I love it. So, yeah, go pick one up. Tell them the technology brother sent you. We're we're very excited to have that.
Speaker 1:We also got some very cool merch from Rostra, Lulu's company. She sent us this amazing 3 d printed Rostra. Are you familiar with, like, what a Rostra is, Jordy? Hey.
Speaker 2:Snap in. Are you playing? I was playing. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:It's so good. Right?
Speaker 2:It's fun. It's fun.
Speaker 1:It it, like, it comes back immediately.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It it's so fun. Yeah. You go.
Speaker 2:Video games are addictive. Yep. Be careful with them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The mod retro. Oh, man. I'm so excited for that thing. So so, Rastra is the name of Lulu Meservi's company.
Speaker 1:Lulu, of course, is the brother of the year, Comms Mastermind. Great follow on x. And, her company is named Rostra, which is a, Roman term for, exactly this, I think, like a like a an area where conversations could happen.
Speaker 2:A place to go direct.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. The place to go direct. And so she three d printed this beautiful, roster, and she also sent a fantastic quarter zip that I've been wearing. It's extremely comfortable.
Speaker 2:I I'm into that. That's actually some of the only startup merge that I'm pissed that we didn't get 2 of.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I I feel like she's mentioning that.
Speaker 2:She's gonna send 2, but I'm gonna send I'm gonna get really pressured.
Speaker 1:Immediately as soon
Speaker 3:as you
Speaker 2:got it. I happen to be drinking a
Speaker 1:Okay. What's this?
Speaker 2:A yerba mate sent from Rob Mower. Okay. Cool. Co founder of Huberman Lab. Rob, thank you for sending.
Speaker 2:So we have a lot of these now.
Speaker 1:Oh, fantastic.
Speaker 2:Yerba Mate. They this this was a company that, I I don't know if, Rob and Andrew are are cofounders or or they're major investors in the company. They're big proponents of Yerba Mate.
Speaker 3:Was
Speaker 1:it Andrew from Tiny? Andrew Wilkins
Speaker 2:I think he also invested finance. Yeah. Yeah. It's cool. So, anyways, these are fantastic.
Speaker 2:You can get them at Erewhon. You can get them online. Nice. Whole Foods, I think as well. And a
Speaker 1:fair amount of caffeine in there too.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah. I'm I'm gonna guess that we're putting up at least A 100 20. A 100 20 not bad. So that's 2 espresso shots.
Speaker 2:So Here
Speaker 1:we go.
Speaker 2:Could have like 4 or 5 of these and be good to go. Okay.
Speaker 1:Thank you. That's great.
Speaker 3:Are we
Speaker 2:just gonna keep we gotta keep going through. We have Yeah.
Speaker 1:What else do we have? We have a we have a sweatshirt. We've gotten so much merch.
Speaker 2:A lot of. We got People know. Christmas was big.
Speaker 1:Christmas was big for us and people know that we're we're willing to shill.
Speaker 2:We have
Speaker 1:We're ready.
Speaker 2:Down to shill. We have a the world's healthiest hoodie here from Superpower Labs. This is edition 1. And this hoodie has an entire, it has nutrition facts on the logo and it has, 0 PFAS Here
Speaker 1:we go.
Speaker 2:Or microplastics. So you do not, and and it's completely toxin free. And it even is more ecological, uses 90% less water and 45% fewer emissions, c o two emissions than traditional cotton. So anyways, very nice, heavy, hoodie. So thank you to superpower for keeping us warm this winter season.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's tricky for me because, my testosterone has been really high lately. So I've been trying to get more microplastics Yeah. Bring it down, take the edge off.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 2:Wait. So you would
Speaker 3:you would
Speaker 1:correct person. I'm sure that's a great choice.
Speaker 2:So I was having an apres ski moment Yeah. In, the Alps and we were selecting, like, this this incredible, steak from, there's this this restaurant in the 3 valleys, like, resorts region called La Secoup La Secoup. Cool. And it's really really known for its steak. So we're we were we ski into this place and, we we spend all this time selecting a a steak.
Speaker 2:And the the they they weigh it out for you. And after we he they bring out the steak, we're like, we decide, yes, we're gonna do this. And he slaps the receipt right on top of the steak.
Speaker 1:Oh, wait. That was a real photo?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was a real photo.
Speaker 1:Oh my god.
Speaker 2:He goes through all the hassle of, like, selecting this incredible piece of meat, and he slaps the Pfizer receipt.
Speaker 1:But did he print on the backside? Print what? Yeah. Like, is there ink on the backside? Because it
Speaker 2:doesn't matter, but it's I thought it was I thought it was on the paper.
Speaker 1:No. No. It's the ink.
Speaker 2:I thought it was the thermal power. I thought I thought it was the paper itself.
Speaker 1:I think I think it's the ink that you wanna watch it for.
Speaker 2:But, anyways Whenever I
Speaker 1:get a receipt, I always if I have to touch it, I'll just touch the part that didn't get the ink on it. So Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know I don't know if that I don't know if that works.
Speaker 1:I think it
Speaker 2:works. But, but, anyways, so for me, I actually liked it because my t levels are so high. I'm trying to get a little bit of receipt action
Speaker 3:and bring
Speaker 2:it down. Yeah. Get closer to sort of baseline Yep. Ability to be able to even focus to get anything done. But, but, yeah, I just thought that was so funny.
Speaker 2:It's, like, goes through all the hassle of, like, selecting this incredible face to face to face. Slaps their seat on it.
Speaker 1:That guy is not on right wing Twitter. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:He needs
Speaker 1:to get rid of. Okay. Let's go to some more, some more questions, q and a. Sarah says, what are your predictions for defense and industrial tech in 2025? Spicy takes are always welcome.
Speaker 2:Bear domestication.
Speaker 1:Bear domestication does feel like it's getting closer to being a reality as opposed to just joke territory. Yep. And I could see someone raising
Speaker 2:Or the whole, oh, we're building autonomous, submarine. It's like just say you failed at training dolphins.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. It's a good point.
Speaker 2:Just say you failed. It's a good point.
Speaker 1:We also had another spicy prediction which was that, the total confirmed kill count of all defense tech companies would, pass a 100 k in 2025.
Speaker 2:That would
Speaker 1:be a big milestone. Yeah. What else? What what what seriously? I mean, seriously, I think that, the the the defense tech stuff, it's already been, like, a big tent since, like, defense tech.
Speaker 1:There was, like, Palantir. It doesn't make hardware, but it's clearly defense tech, but they still have a massive commercial business. And then SpaceX, like, they have star shield, which is a defense tech product. And then the they're certainly, like, a gov tech company because they work with the government. And so they're kind of in the defense tech world.
Speaker 1:And then Anduril is, like, the most pure play. Like, it's hard tech and defense only, and they don't have a consumer business, and they don't have an enterprise business. And so
Speaker 2:Anduril I think the argument is SpaceX stuff getting added in. SpaceX is inherently a defense company because if you can take a huge payload to space and then drop it anywhere in the world, like, fundamentally, that's, like, the the the the the
Speaker 1:They're ICBMs.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The first rocket that Elon tried to buy in Russia were just decommissioned ICBMs.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And they, like, spat at him, and and then he started the company. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But,
Speaker 1:yeah, I I I I think it's always been kind of a big tent, and Andreessen did a little bit of that with dynamism. If you go to their website, they have, like, this timeline of American dynamism. And one of the things that they've added is, like, the iPhone as an example of American dynamism, which is, like, kinda silly because it's, like, when I think American dynamism, we think defense tech and, like, that's just consumer hardware. But you can see that, like, there was a natural, like, broadening out. And then AI got bolted on too in many ways because American dynamism and defense tech was hot.
Speaker 1:And so you have some companies like Scale working with the government and then other, like, Defense Llama. It's like, is Meta a defense tech company now?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I think that I think that tent will get bigger, but the next category that I think will be really, like, maybe retconned into the defense and industrial tech will be energy and data center build out. Yep. And and because I think they're capitally intensive, high dilution, similar skill sets. So I think a lot of the VCs that are like, okay. I I have built a portfolio.
Speaker 1:I built positions in all the big Yeah. Defense tech companies. Like, I don't think there's there's gonna be another major wave in 2025. How do I apply my skill sets and my analysts to this? Well, let's go after industrial energy Yep.
Speaker 1:Nuclear, wind power, solar, and then also just traditional oil and gas for Yep. Just anything for data center build out because wasn't there a number that, like, Microsoft's gonna spend 80,000,000,000. 80,000,000,000. And so, like, that just
Speaker 2:sucks b c.
Speaker 1:B c is gonna jump on this. Right?
Speaker 2:Honestly, the 80 seem kinda weak to me. I feel like they should they should raise, like, 800,000,000,000 of debt and just do that in
Speaker 3:a year.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Are they out of ideas?
Speaker 2:Are they out of ideas? Like, what's going on?
Speaker 1:Do they not believe? Yeah. It's funny because everyone was saying that is like is like it's the it's the loudest signal that AGI is around the corner and you're
Speaker 2:like, yeah. It is it is it is. I I feel like when Microsoft basically bought half of OpenAI Yep. Everybody was like, what is Sam doing?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But it kind of like maybe was the 200 IQ play of, like, if I need to spend a 100 if I need a $100,000,000,000 worth of data centers This is
Speaker 1:where it goes.
Speaker 2:This is, like, one of the few companies that can actually do that. Now they're doing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Yep. It'll be interesting to see how the core Weave IPO goes. I think a lot of people are gonna be watching
Speaker 3:that in terms of, like, data center build out
Speaker 1:and valuation. Yeah. We have a DM here. Jordy, fantastic flow. What do you do for your hair?
Speaker 2:Okay. So I got my haircut yesterday Okay. And, I go to I go to same place as Rob actually.
Speaker 1:Okay. I
Speaker 2:got recommend, Rob, Huberman's business partner? Huberman, Andrew Huberman's business partner, has fantastic flow.
Speaker 1:He does.
Speaker 2:He showed up to my house for jujitsu one day. I was like, dude, where do you get your haircut? Okay. We live, like, a few minutes from each other. And he's like, oh, I go to Brooke at Salt Salon.
Speaker 2:So I go to Brooke at Salt Salon. And, I told her yesterday while I was getting my haircut or Saturday it was. I was like, people keep commenting on
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:About my hair. They and and I swear I shouldn't have said anything because she started she, like, got, like, a little bit, like, she's lost a little bit of confidence. She started overthinking it. Oh, no. No.
Speaker 2:Like, you do it perfect every time. You never give me a bad haircut. Just, like, lock in. Just give me a regular cut. Yips.
Speaker 2:And she got it got into your head somehow. So if if I'm not on my game today, it's it's it's because I I shouldn't have said anything. But
Speaker 1:What about product? I mean,
Speaker 2:I So so I haven't used a product in forever. Okay. I jump in the ocean frequently. Yep. I live by the beach.
Speaker 2:Yep. And I never use shampoo.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:I I I think big shampoo is is is very bad and Yep. And most people, but the key to not using shampoo is you have to eat super clean.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So if you eat super clean, you're not, like, sort of just expelling, like, toxins Sure. For you, like, pour. And so you can skip the shampoo. So I use shampoo maybe once a month. Okay.
Speaker 2:I do support big shampoo, but they don't get much out of me.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And, just salt water and, you know, water. I use a sauna. I use it. Yeah. I use a sauna a lot too.
Speaker 3:So
Speaker 2:Yeah. And And an arrow
Speaker 1:on build that looks like a mortgage payment.
Speaker 2:And the 6 the 6 fig the 6 fig. It
Speaker 1:really does look like a mortgage payment.
Speaker 2:Have I ever showed you? Yeah. That's what I mean. This is like this is like the most rambly episode ever, but it kinda makes sense. So my my lifetime savings at Erewhon, 16 grand.
Speaker 2:Oh, my god. I spend the average PM's monthly salary at Erewhon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's all worth it for the hair. I have a tip.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So there's there's a tip.
Speaker 1:Here's the answer. Let's go to Hanil Patel. He says, can Tech Bros Pod cover why Teal is doing so many interviews, mainstream ones? I always thought of him as a Robert Mercer kind of guy, Tech Bros Pod Save America. Interesting question.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think a lot of it is just the fact that, like, you know, when I mean, he's been attacked through his career for years years years, like, starting with the diversity myth, very controversial book, a lot of that. Now we see, like, the backlash to DEI that only happened in, like, 2023. Yeah. He wrote the book in the nineties. I think you're, like, 2002.
Speaker 1:And it's like and and there were, like, hit piece after hit piece about that book, and then apologies. Like, I think David Sachs at one point had distanced himself from certain passages and say, oh, that was taken out of context. Like, it was, like, not a book that you put, like, front and center when you're introducing David Sachs on stage. You're you're like, he's a SaaS investor. Like, he's not controversial.
Speaker 1:Let's forget about that book. And now it's like, no. He literally saw the future and he was correct. Like, it was it was he was dead on. And and so there's a little bit of, like, you once once the world comes around to your perspective, like, you need to make sure that you canonize the correct telling of history.
Speaker 1:And that's true for Trump, obviously, in the sense that, like, he predicted that Trump would be popular and that that happened in 2016, and it was kind of like this wild card thing where Yeah. He was still getting protested and there was a lot of negativity. And for years, you know, there's, like, the debate over y c and a lot of company people were like, I won't take Peter's money. It's like, okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Sure. But, but there there there was a lot of that. Now now he's able to go and kind of, like like, reintroduce his worldview to a more receptive audience.
Speaker 3:And if
Speaker 1:you look at, like, the Barry Weiss interview, like, I think that made him look very good. And it was something that, like, I had family members who are obviously familiar that I work with him, but, but only know him as, like, I was at a wedding once and they're like, oh, Peter Thiel. Like, he's a fascist. Like, he's, you know, like, that that type of stuff. And now it's like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:If you go and listen to his, like, long form interview with Barry Weiss, he'll just be like, oh, this is like he's just a smart person.
Speaker 2:There's almost no one on earth that you can listen to a truly long form interview of them and come away and be, like, this person is deeply bad. Yeah. Right? Like, you can even, like even when people let they actually listen to Putin talk for an hour and he just rambles. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They're, like, oh, maybe he's got some points. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. This is why the press was so against, like, the podcast election because they were like
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do not humanize Trump by letting people listen to him for 3. It would JD Vance. He was weird. And then the top comment on the Theo Vonn interview was like,
Speaker 2:why
Speaker 1:did they say he was weird? This is the least weird guy I've ever met. Like, this is the most normie dude in the world. And it's like, yeah. He is just like a normal guy.
Speaker 1:Like Yeah. Like, you you should you should, you know, just evaluate his policies and ideas and then decide if those align with what your goals are in the world, and then that's fine. And if you come away being like, I still don't wanna vote for him, that's fine. But, like, this Yeah. This imagined, you know, craziness is just, like, so bad.
Speaker 1:The political derangement syndrome on both sides. And it was it was rough for Kamala because, like, we never got that 3 hours of, like, raw. And I still maintain that, like, if you were drinking wine with Kamala, you'd be like, this is a great person. Like, I'm down.
Speaker 2:She's cool.
Speaker 1:You might be like, I don't like her policies or, like, I don't understand her policies or she doesn't have any. But you you she would be humanizable. She just didn't let herself be humanized because she didn't do any real podcasts.
Speaker 2:She could have been a hero for the crypto community if she
Speaker 1:For any for tons of communities. There was so much opportunity. Anyway, there there's a reason why we don't talk about politics on the show ever.
Speaker 2:Ever. Let's
Speaker 1:go to Base Baron. Base Baron says, in early stage early stage slash precede deep tech funds that also have their own studio or incubator are funny to me. How are the incentives aligned? For example, embedded VC invested in Anduril and now can steal all their data to build their own competitor. And so the question is, is if you are writing early stage checks and you also have an incubator, how can you be a good steward and participant in the market?
Speaker 1:And, it's it's it's particularly hilarious because, like, Andrew was a founders fund incubation. And it's like, well, they just incubated the one that they wanted to put the money into, and then they just kept investing in that one. But, I mean, the question I don't I don't know embedded VC, but, like, if you think that you can just, like, steal Anduril's data and then build a copycat and be at all successful, like, you don't understand the power law and you don't understand how power is accruing in that industry.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so I'll take, the Baron's side on this one. I do think as a founder, if you're spending, it can be a weird situation if it's, you know, a founding team is, like, working on an idea Yep. And they're pitching a VC who invests in companies, but then they also build their own companies. Yep.
Speaker 2:Yep. It does create like, I think that there's a reason that VCs haven't like, big VCs haven't like, Andreessen Horowitz doesn't have, like, an ink they have, like, EIRs Yep. But they haven't been, like, hey, we're let's let's, if you're if you're a scaled asset manager Yep. It does present some weird situations and misalignments. And one of the things that he's getting at, which I think is real, is if you're at a fund that can make direct investments or the partners can incubate ideas, it starts to be oftentimes, there's ideas that that this is like a Rick Rubin quote.
Speaker 2:Right? Like, ideas have their time. Somebody's gonna do them. And so if you're a partner, one of these funds where you can invest or incubate and you can a founder can pitch you and you can give them $10,000,000 or you could invest $20,000,000 into a totally new company
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:It does start to get where there is, like, this conflict. Totally. And I can and I and I can see why founders don't wanna partner with funds or wouldn't or be less inclined to pitch a fund who might like, the founders fund incubations don't come about because, like, they're watching. They're, like, at oh, this
Speaker 1:founder actively trying to not start that company.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He was actively trying to invest it. He spent, like, 2 years as a principal just looking for defense type companies. Who's gonna build this? Who's gonna build this?
Speaker 1:And no one came through, and then he was finally, like, we gotta do
Speaker 2:it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So so
Speaker 1:I think And Andrew is, like, the special case where it's like, you have this rock star team of, like, former Palantir guys, super well connected, and and then, like, they're already at a 10,000,000,000 plus scale. It's like, you can't just incubate that and, like, compete immediately. I do think I heard, when Justin Mayers was was initially pitching TrueMed, some of the feedback he got was, like, this is a good idea, but you gotta be really quiet about this for the next, like, year or 2 until you get this thing going because Yeah. This is an idea that would be copied by 10 different y c companies, and you would just get sliced up. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But if you can actually get through that gauntlet so, like, you know, we joke about, like, a NDA thing and stuff, but, like, yeah, you do you you do need to be somewhat careful depending on what the market timing is for your business, what the structure of the business will be. Like, clearly, Anduril had it was in such a such a, like, a, you know, a heretical Yeah. Industry. No one was going into that. And then also this crazy team, it was like they could tell they they told everyone, and it didn't matter because it was like, what the hell are you doing?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I did have
Speaker 1:a funny building something a little bit more like, oh, yeah. This is, like, on trend. Like, okay. You're gonna use AI for, you know, for sales calls or CRM stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like, okay. Well, like, if you're actually doing something, like, you might not wanna go pitch some of this.
Speaker 2:I had a pretty funny moment with a portfolio company that went out to raise at the beginning of 2024 and ended up getting passed on by a VC, that was, like, kinda surprising. Like, we thought they were gonna issue a term sheet. And, and then I kept hearing about that that VC fund is a big VC fund and one of the founders I'm gonna make up a name for it, but let's call him Jack. Yep. I kept hearing from other people in the community, oh, Jack has this new Idea.
Speaker 2:This new idea, and he was saying that it it was the same thing that my portfolio company was doing. And I kept hearing the name Jack over and over and over. And so I went to a partner at at the fund that passed, and I was like, guys, like, you're fucking incubating Yeah. A competitor to this deal that I brought you. Like, I was super annoyed.
Speaker 2:And I only found out at the end of last year that it was a totally different Jack. Wait. Really? But I kept hearing that he was
Speaker 1:just way.
Speaker 2:So for this whole year, I
Speaker 1:talked this on, like, episode 3.
Speaker 2:And so this whole year, I thought this I thought this partner was just fucking lying to me saying that they weren't incubating something when I knew that they were. Turns out it was just everybody kept referring to him as the same Jack. Wow. Like Jack's a made up name. But and over and over and over.
Speaker 2:And so when that happened, I I finally went down. I was like, dude, I'm really sorry. I kept here. I thought you were lying to my face.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:And, that's a big story.
Speaker 3:So,
Speaker 2:yeah, I think there's a reason, like, at the end of the day, what the the reason that it's not so bad that funds have this incubation strategy is, like, they would so much rather just back the generational team. Yep. And so if you are building a generational company and you have this world class generational team, you can rest assure that the the VC fund will happily just invest in your company. They will only incubate something, an alternative, if they don't believe in you.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so just be better. Yeah. It's a skill issue.
Speaker 1:There there is another funny, like, flip side to this. I I I think that I think your takeaway is, like like, basically dead on. But, there's a funny flip side where I heard a story about, a firm that does incubations, had a a person come and interview to work at the firm on incubations, and then they stole an idea from the incubator and went and built the business separately and was like, I'm not giving you anything. It raised different money. And then it didn't go go well.
Speaker 1:Eventually, like, it got run.
Speaker 2:Usually those things don't. But and
Speaker 1:it was, like, a very bad thing. It it was very stupid. But it's just so funny that, like, it can go both ways. Like, the VC could steal your idea, but maybe you could steal the VC's idea. And I like that.
Speaker 1:I like that.
Speaker 3:It's like
Speaker 1:bringing the fight to that.
Speaker 2:Cuts both ways.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It didn't work out and I wouldn't recommend it, but it but it is funny. Let's go to another, question I got in a DM that was pretty interesting. How do people who write books get on the podcast circuit? Are there companies to pitch guests, or do they just reach out to a bunch of podcasts at once?
Speaker 1:Or, does someone go on 1 and then other podcasts reach out? Curious why YouTube feeds me the same 20 people all the time and wondering how they get on so many shows for having no real body of work other than just being interested to listen to. That's a good post. That's a good way for him. But it is true.
Speaker 2:So that role strategy? Well, so the role of the modern PR firm.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:If you could pay somebody like like the classic PR firm, you're paying them 10 to 20 ks a month.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they're getting you plugged in with media.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And now if you could pay if I was an entrepreneur and and I could pay somebody $20 a month to get me on 4 podcasts a month Yep. That's like the best money ever spent because you're just getting in front of these crowds of people. You're able to talk about your story and your company and your product, and people get to know you and they like you, and it's, like, the best marketing ever.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:So but the challenge is, like, it's not easy to get on podcast. Right? A lot of these interview shows, they do, like, 50 interviews a year.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And they have, like, 5,000 people that wanna be on those slots. And so it's a bloodbath of competition to try to get onto that slot. What is true is, like, if somebody goes and they do one good interview, and then they can jump to do another one, and then they just end up becoming, like, a classic, like, interview guest. It does. I do think that there's, like, a bit of a snowball effect.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, it's not easy. I I think, everybody that has a podcast will, like, has, like, a long list of emails that they've gotten from PR firms. Yep. I'm like, hey, like, I'd love to it's it's just some, like, super random
Speaker 1:The best ones are where people try and get on David Senora's podcast, Founders. Yeah. It's like, he's literally never had a guest in a 1,000 episodes.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Listen to a single show, and you'll realize that it's not a guest driven show. What are you
Speaker 3:doing?
Speaker 2:You can get on anybody can get on David Center's show. You just have to have built a generational
Speaker 1:company. $10,000,000,000 of value and have someone write a file.
Speaker 2:Write a book on it. Yeah. Yeah. Then you can get on. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's easy. It's easy.
Speaker 1:It's really
Speaker 2:easy if you just check that
Speaker 1:PR firm should just do that for them. Just just help me build $10,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it it it it is
Speaker 1:it is wild how you get, like, syndicated. And there are some shows that are literally just like we our whole model is we interview book people. And and it's just like we have a close relationship with Simon Suster and Penguin.
Speaker 2:And Yeah. So for sure, the book publishers
Speaker 1:They have the relationships now. Podcasts that do, like, reviews, basically. They sell books. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's actually, like, their model. But then for the bigger shows, like, if you're going on, like, the Rogan, Lex Friedman circuit, like, that's much more relationship driven, and it's much more driven by are you a personality? And the book is kind of just, like, some it's just an excuse. It's just an excuse.
Speaker 2:Usually, people
Speaker 1:are building a relationship over a long time, and then they're saying, like like, when pump, released his book recently, he he sent me a copy, sent a bunch of people a copy, he sent an email to a bunch of people. And in that email, he was like, if you want me to come on your show, I'll prep something that's, like, specific to your show, and I'll come on. Just let me know. And and so, like, if you're like, yeah. My show is focused on on finance.
Speaker 1:He'll be like, okay. Cool. I'll I'll come on, and we'll talk about these different things. So if it's about crypto, he'll come on and do this. He'll talk about the military stuff.
Speaker 1:He'll talk about that. And so, really, like, kinda helping people do their homework. And then once he starts, like, spiraling, he can he can kinda go up the chain and pass one along and say, hey. Here's the last spot I did. And I noticed I did this last year.
Speaker 1:My goal was a little bit to do a little bit less content on my own, a little bit more guest spots.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And
Speaker 1:I kind of worked my way up the chain from, like, some random friends podcast to Bloomberg Odd Lots, which was, like, a pretty good spot. And, and a lot of that just happened from, like, posting about becoming, like, an expert in the nicotine category. I was having a moment, posted some long threads. We get kind of, like, became a thought leader for a little bit and then, like, was just, like, available to the people. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I I I've said this probably on the show before, but if you are running a company or an investment firm, there's almost no podcast that's too small. Yeah. Because it used to be that if you were running a business and you got invited to speak at some random conference in Nebraska, like, you're working oil and gas. And it's, like, hey, do you wanna come speak at this conference to talk about other to talk to other people in the oil and gas industry? And people would fly, spend an entire day traveling there to speak in front of a group of a 100 people.
Speaker 2:Because if you have the opportunity to speak for an hour in front of a 100 people Mhmm. And tell them your life story and the history of your company and why they should care. It's, like, the best marketing ever because they're getting to know you. Maybe it's an opportunity to get them to like you, all this stuff. And so, nowadays, you can go and get on a podcast and even if there there's only a 100 listeners
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's, like, okay. You joined a Zoom call and talked for 45 minutes and you got off. Yeah. Like, if that if only a 100 people ever listened to it,
Speaker 3:it's
Speaker 2:still a good opportunity
Speaker 1:to get yourself Very very high leverage.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 1:the other high leverage thing is that when you write a book that whatever your title of that book is follows you basically forever because people will it's very hard for people to be, oh, like, Jordy, he's the founder of this company and he founded this other company. But if you're just, like, author of whatever, they'll just be like, he's the author of this book. And so if you just
Speaker 2:That's why we need to write the book, lever up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or or like, you know, rags to riches, how I became a high testosterone gigachad for only $5 a month or something like that. Like, the hard thing about bench pressing 400 pounds and driving sports cars all day and drinking Dom Perringer on it at work. Something stupid like that. So it just follows you forever.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Nicole. This is a great question. This is like this is bait for us. She got 97 comments. I'm sure all of them were wrong.
Speaker 1:Question for watch people. What's a nice watch for women? Preferably gold, classy, and timeless that you can wear with most things, have never owned a watch before, and the options are overwhelming. What do you think? I wanna look Gotta go Cartier.
Speaker 1:Cartier Tank, obviously. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Cartier Tank is
Speaker 1:number 1. Tank Louis, It's timeless. It was worn by, Jackie Onassis, Sandy Warhol, Muhammad Ali. It's, you know, like, Cartier invented the wristwatch with the Santos, but the Santos is gonna be too masculine. And so the the the tank is iconic, and you can't go wrong.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:If you wanna step up, ladies Nautilus.
Speaker 2:You go with a crash?
Speaker 1:There we go. Be good.
Speaker 2:I think a crash is probably a better fit for an allocator of Nicole's Yeah. Size. Right? I love 400 k market value. So that's a good, like, daily driver.
Speaker 1:I mean, the the the ladies' Nautilus is is legitimately cheaper
Speaker 2:than It's a bummer that Pipe is not still in the business of, like, pulling forward. You know how
Speaker 1:do you
Speaker 2:know in, like, 2020 and 21? Yeah. If you had a fund, you could pull forward, like, 10 years of your management fees. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So a
Speaker 2:lot of GPS were, like, going and and that would have been an amazing opportunity to fund some these watch purchases Yep. For some of these indicators that are
Speaker 3:For all
Speaker 1:the management fees.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That are just not following the 2% rule at
Speaker 1:all. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Letting everyone down. What else?
Speaker 1:I mean I mean, there's some I I think Rolex is a little overplayed, but there are some interesting pieces in there. I think we've got at AMD has one that's beautiful.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If she
Speaker 1:Something simple
Speaker 3:or a date
Speaker 2:with, like, a date. No.
Speaker 1:No? Day date?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Day is not a day just. That should be a band word. We need to have a list of band words on the on the show, day just.
Speaker 1:Day just is banned.
Speaker 2:Day just is banned. Banned. But, like, there's some unique day just that have, you know. Yeah. I think could be could be.
Speaker 1:I mean, there's another thing you could just, like, complete try and stand out with, like, a cause AP or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That was actually it was funny. I landed. I landed in Geneva.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And cause AP ad, like, the whole the whole airport, like, as, like and I'm, like, the average person, like, only in Geneva Yeah. You put an airport ad for, like, the most hype beasty Yeah. Watch in history.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Her her style overall is very, gold, classy, and timeless, but why not put a racing machine on your wrist when you're cold?
Speaker 2:Get a
Speaker 1:get a RM. Get an RM. Get a skeletonized RM. Yeah. Maybe Hublot.
Speaker 2:It puts you in a unique club.
Speaker 1:You know what's good? She says gold. Why not a jean? What? Remember the jeans?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:There's a watch that's made entirely out of jeans.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow.
Speaker 1:And, yeah. It's made out of jean material. It's cupola or something. But, yeah, lots of good lots of good options, but I hope that all 96 of these people recommended Cartier Tank Louis because, that's the one. Although, there are some interesting ones.
Speaker 1:You could go with the Tank Francaise, Tank Anglaise. There's a few others that I I think could work, but
Speaker 2:We could spend a whole hour.
Speaker 1:Stick classic. We could
Speaker 2:spend a whole hour
Speaker 1:talking about. If you're trying to save a buck, you could go with the the Solar Beat, but I recommend the Louie. Here we go. I'd love to hear y'all's take on what fighters are doing a good job brand building slash marketing themselves, or if you see any interesting trends in the sport from an entrepreneurial perspective. Thank you.
Speaker 1:And he's talking about MMA fighters.
Speaker 2:Okay. So this is a question from our boy, Bo Nickel. A rising star in the in the UFC and a technology brother himself. So, so Bo, a little bit of backstory. Bo is a, is a wrestler at Penn State.
Speaker 2:A lot of the best stars in MMA have, like, a wrestling base. Like, Khabib is the sort of most prominent example of that. And there's actually some big fights coming up in LA this weekend, which I'm excited for. But, be at one thing that's become clear in MMA over the last 10 years is the biggest stars is not purely due to technical, like, proficiency and talent. And I think that, Conor McGregor, like, led the charge here.
Speaker 2:He's one of the as much as he had some extremely viral massive moments in the cage. Yep. People don't really realize that, like, his his last, like, run-in the UFC was, like, not so good. Mhmm. Right.
Speaker 2:He was getting knocked out by, you know, killed by Khabib, killed by Poirier, like, breaking his leg, having some nasty
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:Sort of, like, exchanges. Like, it was a very kind of almost like a pretty bad downward spiral. Yet when he was on the mic, he was the best to ever do it. Right? So the media training was, like, was just so good, and it was very seemingly very natural.
Speaker 2:Like, he came up in his his career. He just was always good on the mic. And so something that people have realized within MMA and and Beau certainly has has known this is that you are building you're not just a fighter and an athlete. You're building a media brand around yourself. Right?
Speaker 2:And, one of the challenges in MMA is, like, you're kind of just your own dude. Right? So, like, Beau competes or Beau trains out of a, I think, American top team in Pennsylvania, which is just like a small regional gym. And so there's not a lot of, like, media coverage around there. There's no he's not gonna be getting picture like, paparazzi pictures.
Speaker 2:And so he has to create his own kind of media business around himself. And so he's done a really good job of that. Some fighters have been overly reliant on the UFC to promote them. But the issue is UFC has fights every week, couple weeks, and so their only incentive is to promote the next fight. Yep.
Speaker 2:So if you don't have a fight on the schedule or you're not fighting that week, you're you pretty much have to promote yourself.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And so some every fighter takes different angle here. Like, Beau has taken the angle of, like, I'm gonna basically vlog his lifestyle as, like, this emerging, you know, athlete within the UFC. He's taken sort of the high road. You have other people like Colby Covington, who I don't know. Are you familiar with Colby Covington?
Speaker 2:So Colby Covington is like the couldn't be more polar opposite from Bo. Bo is like the, you know, the athlete, like the good guy, all American. Colby Covington takes, like, will hire strippers and and get strippers around him like this and be throwing, you know, money and just calling his, like, you know, opponents, like, losers.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:So he's taken the total opposite approach. And so every fighter needs to create their own unique brand. I think it's impossible to break out in UFC and MMA without being, like, truly yourself because there's just too much time on the mics to, like, be anybody but yourself.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Colby Covington, like, snapped into this character. He was about to get cut from the UFC, and he decided I'm just gonna become an asshole. And he, like, has adopted that, and and that's almost been a challenge for him because he's he's can't fully like, you can tell in certain situations he wants to just be, like, a nice normal guy, but then he's gotta be, like, you know, he's gotta be an asshole. That's, like, part of his brand now. He's a heel.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so so, yeah, I think, Beau's done a really good job of this. A lot of other a lot of other fighters that have that have come up recently have realized, like, I basically need somebody to follow me around with a camera 247. And, like, we just need to be putting out this, like, really high volume of content because we need to be promoting ourselves year round building this fan base because we can't rely Yep. On the UFC.
Speaker 2:And so I think overall, I think MMA, like gyms and management companies need to do a better job of, like, building this infrastructure around fighters because it's a lot to put on somebody to say, oh, you're gonna become, like, this top athlete and you're also gonna build this crazy media company. Yeah. It's like Yep.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So step 1 is, like, embrace this idea that UFC is essentially WWE, but the fights are real.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so there are roles and characters and storylines that cut through, and you need to lean into those and acknowledge that that's real and figure out what is authentic to you. Are you a good guy? Are you a bad guy? Like but, but, like, play into that and play a heightened version of yourself.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And then second, like, there needs to be a camera on you, like, 5 hours out of the day every day. And so, at the start, that's probably, like, your biggest fan who's an 18 year old kid with a iPhone. And then they can scale up and get a nicer camera, but it's basically just film what happened today, put it on YouTube. It's a vlog, edit it on their phone, imovie, just trim some stuff out, but just give the fans the opportunity to go deep with your life. Take a photo, put it on Instagram.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Do a do a short little video, 1 minute workout. It's a it's a real. It's a TikTok. Yep. And then just be constantly posting, constantly posting, constantly posting.
Speaker 1:And then eventually, like, scale it up to, like, bigger stuff. What else is in your life? What can you tell us about the car you drive, the watch you own, like, whatever else is in your world? But, you know, the the fighting stuff is gonna be the core thing.
Speaker 2:What Yep. Who who who who who
Speaker 1:are you fans of? Who who inspired you to get in this business? Like, talk about anything.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I've even seen some some, Sugar Sean, Sean O'Malley and his, coach Tim. They've built, like, a whole kind of, like, podcast network where they not only talk and cover their own stuff, but they they when there's like a fight, then they're covering it. Right. And so, yeah, if I were if I were an up and coming MMA fighter, I'd be like, okay, I need to have a camera guy on me at all times.
Speaker 2:I need somebody putting out like 5, 6 videos per day on social media. So I'm gonna go to Monster Energy and say, just give me, like, a $100 a year. Yep. And I'm gonna just, like, dump it into media.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Because that and that can quickly even become a profit center
Speaker 1:if you
Speaker 2:do it properly. Totally. These fighters aren't paid exceptionally well. So anyways, I would say the same thing. Like, it's it's less necessary for, like, pro sports.
Speaker 2:Right? Where you have these whole teams and and there's more infrastructure. But these individualized, you know, sports are you gotta take it up yourself.
Speaker 1:Should we go into this epic q and a from Andrew McCallum? Yeah. I love Andrew. If you don't know Andrew, he was the, he's an engineer at VARTA Space Industries, but also, was big in the LK 99 saga of last year. Was that Really?
Speaker 1:22020. Yeah. He was the one that, like, replicated it and and, like, built it and actually tested it. And it looked really promising, but then it didn't go anywhere. But he was actually able to get all the materials and and and run the run the process to to make it.
Speaker 1:And I went down there. I made a whole vlog about it. It's really fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And he he also has he also has project Bob,
Speaker 1:which which
Speaker 2:so I we talked about this on the show. I was, like, why has nobody built a drone that live streams
Speaker 3:that
Speaker 2:you and your boys can just watch just chugging around the world? And so that's literally what he built with project project Bob. And, we got to do a whole bit on it because they're raising money for it. And, it's very
Speaker 1:And so he sent us a long message. I'll I'll just read it all. He says, brothers, so there I was basking in the glow of Marina del Rey morning surrounded by yachts and the quiet of other people's life crises. I'm finally taking a vacation day from grinding hard in the gundo, sipping an artisanal $14 oat milk latte when I hit 39 minutes on your latest episode. And bam, you stumbled onto my diabolical plan for art riches, dogefin dot space.
Speaker 1:4 years ago, I called my shot Babe Ruth style. With this clairvoyant vision, I knew Elon would ascend, Doge would ignite a revolution, and the only way to profit was to become an infamous modern artist disguised as a hard tech Twitter shit poster. Naturally, I have been quietly creating a life-sized modern art masterpiece, masterpiece, blending SpaceX, Doge, and Elon himself. I've seen this in person. It's crazy.
Speaker 1:The wildly overcomplicated path to get here really speaks for itself. Step 1, build and sell the requisite first company in my twenties, 5 years before hardware was cool. 2, expand the teal empire.
Speaker 2:So this company is GE.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's right. Step 2, expand the teal empire, obviously, as part of the founding team of another LOTR named Bangor. Step 3, achieve world infamy and make Twitter fame after failing to make the rocks float.
Speaker 1:Shout out to Coogan's doc work and Chamath's trolling. Step 4, nerd snipe every cracked and based engineering in California with project BOB launching the world's 1st venture backed hobby program. So, obviously, once I sell it at Art Basel this year to Ken g or Justin's son, the tough choice is the Lamborghini Miura or the Ferrari f 40. As gentlemen of taste, which do you think goes best with my brand? As ridiculous as it sounds, every step has been part of the master plan.
Speaker 1:This is just the sort of high effort shit that you just don't see very often. Teal, Musk, Coogan, they're all playing on my chessboard. Yours in high effort chaos, Andrew. Thank you. This is a fantastic
Speaker 2:one. I saw this and Andrew sent this before the end of last year, but we just needed we weren't going to be able to give it the proper attention on the on the annual awards episode. So, yeah, what what a post. I'm glad we could share.
Speaker 1:Such a long way to say
Speaker 2:say mirror or f. Lamborghini or.
Speaker 1:You could just say mirror. That's what
Speaker 2:we want. That's brother behavior. Right? You got to give that context. And look, I wanna see Andrew driving the f
Speaker 1:forty F40. No doubt.
Speaker 2:Into the VARTA parking lot F40. Parking in the handicap spot.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Just for the photo op and then taking it out and parking it.
Speaker 1:Lamborghinis are having a moment, but I think the Miura is just a little too retro to have any sort of functionality. It's gonna be Yeah. Just more of a beast. Yeah. If you want the Lambo, Diablos are doing really well.
Speaker 1:Murcielagos are having a moment. Always. And then you get up into the Aventador and some of, like, the the previous generations are starting to climb a little bit. There's some interesting stuff there. And for a long time, the Lamborghini like, real car
Speaker 2:Murcielago would be crazy pulling up to to the VARTA offices and that Oh,
Speaker 1:CLP 640.
Speaker 2:Like, that is like that's cool.
Speaker 1:And I mean, if you go for the manual ones, like, some of those are up there. Yeah. Just some of those are $1,000,000 cars. But, if you I
Speaker 2:what about what about he didn't give this as an option, but what about the Lambo Ramp the Rambo Lambo?
Speaker 1:The l m o two, that is that is
Speaker 2:that is that's that's the ultimate gun though hard
Speaker 1:to attack. Somebody's gonna give it.
Speaker 2:Because it's it's a super car Yeah. Like, by in itself, like, it's
Speaker 3:It has
Speaker 1:a v 12.
Speaker 2:It has a v 12, but It's the same blend.
Speaker 1:It's the same engine as the Catacruz.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, it's like it's it's like got that Yeah. Utilitarian. Yeah. You got a trunk.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, like, you throw stuff in it. You could throw some rocket parts in there.
Speaker 1:You don't have a trunk. You have a truck bed. A bed. Yeah. I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's insane. But, yeah, I mean, f 40 is just iconic. The Lambos are having a moment, but I think you gotta go f 40.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Although you won't be the only one in Gondo driving 1 because, the founder of Impulse Space has 1.
Speaker 2:No way. There's an f 40. Let's go. Let's go.
Speaker 3:Should we
Speaker 1:go in the timeline?
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're only, 2 hours into the show, and we finally made it to the timeline, which is what you've been waiting for.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:It's been almost 2 weeks since you've heard us talk
Speaker 1:printed outposts. A little bit of a change up today. We have bucket pulls where the random the random posts that aren't quite bangers go into the bucket. They get printed a little bit smaller because they're not quite as iconic as the bangers.
Speaker 2:And we have a little
Speaker 1:do a couple bangers, and then we'll pull out and then we'll pull out a bucket pull, just like Kill Tony does it, in Tony Hinchcliffe show. So let's start with Justin Lopez. He says, took a poll of friends and the companies they work at 100% match. Serious people work this week and next. Unserious people do not.
Speaker 1:And he posted this at 6:50 AM on Christmas Eve. I think we were podcasting at the time. We were podcasting. We were literally podcasting at the time. 100% match.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Friends and the companies that we're yeah. So everyone was working. Yeah. I mean, why not?
Speaker 1:I mean
Speaker 2:I do think it's, it is, like, a weird one because it is if you were gonna give your team any week off Yep. Throughout the entire year
Speaker 1:Christmas and New Year's was particularly dead Yeah. Just for doing business.
Speaker 2:Historically, when I was running regular non podcast companies Yeah. That week was always really hard because I'd want to let the team take a breather. Yeah. But then the nature of me having free time, I just come up with ideas, and I'd start pulling people in. I'd be, like, alright.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:Let's get on a quick call.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Get on a
Speaker 2:quick call. Then suddenly, I'm just, like Yeah. Or we need to do this, like, now. Like, this has to happen.
Speaker 1:I mean, hopefully, like, there is a space for some sort of break from the monotony of the calendar and email and a shift. So you're still working, but it's a more intellectual. You're reading. You're thinking about long term planning. You're reflecting and yeah.
Speaker 1:And and I think that for the for the people who are just like butts in seats, it's fine to take some time off. But
Speaker 2:Yeah. You don't want your your SDRs Just like Burning out. Cold calling. Like They're
Speaker 1:just not gonna get That's the thing,
Speaker 2:like, as much as it's very real that that I would I would say I would say out of the 50 portfolio CEOs
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That that, you know, across my portfolio, I would imagine that the best companies, the CEOs all worked last week.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That being said, I don't think that it's a a a bearish signal if they told many members of their team, hey, take take the next few days off.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because, like, again, if you if you're an account manager role, you don't need to be hitting up your your accounts on
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The 29th being like, hey, if you like, how how is it going? They're gonna be like, I'm like Yeah. Offline. Yeah. Right.
Speaker 1:So in that way, paradigm, he says, it still seems underrated that Bitcoin slash crypto is the 1st political block with a native asset, and thus, a reflexive feedback loop between price and political influence. And then Kevin Kwok says, doesn't oil have this? And Matt says, as a largely utility based commodity, there are constraints on price, but a good comparison point. Yeah. That is fascinating.
Speaker 1:Like like, you can understand how things are going in the crypto regulatory world just by looking at the price of bitcoin. Like, Trump got elected. There were a lot of pro crypto things happened, and the price went from, like, 60 to 90, like, immediately. And it was like, okay. Like, clearly, things are 50% better for this industry.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And and and that is very interesting. I'm wondering if there's if there's more if there's more to that, like, political block with a native asset. Like, I guess it I guess it just means regulatory stuff. But
Speaker 2:The Nebraska corn farmers would like a word.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, what I'm getting at is, like, I think that there the the the feedback loop is not just being able to divine political influence and how things are going to price, but also as the price gets higher, there is more money to spend on political influence.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So the packs get bigger. I mean, Andreessen Horowitz donated by far the most to crypto packs when I looked at the data earlier this year or the last year. And and it was very clear that, like Yeah. If you're running a crypto fund and or you're a crypto billionaire, like, throwing $30,000,000 is fine. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's fine. And and with other VCs where it spreads so thinly, it's like, oh, well, like, you know, yeah, we wanna have some better regulation around energy for our nuclear port portfolio company, but we really only have one. And then we need to change some things with the DOD, but we're really only in Andoril. And then Yeah. You know, oh, we also need to change something with, like, housing because we're in Airbnb and payments because it's, like, so many political blocks and, like, the it it's not as focused and consolidated whereas everyone is kinda marching in lockstep in the crypto industry.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's it's it's yeah. I think the my the only I always, whenever I've underestimated Bitcoin
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's from thinking of it as an investment asset versus a religion. So the difference between, like, the the oil industry and the Bitcoin industry is people in the oil industry are like, this is a, resource that we fundamentally need for our way of life, but they're in it to make money. Right? Like, nobody's, like, in oil because they just, like, have this deep love for
Speaker 1:Speak for yourself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Speak for yourself. Whereas, like, bitcoin, there's, like, huge numbers of people that if the price was a $100 a coin, they would still be adamant about the importance of it and they would still spend all their time thinking about it. And so I think that that that's part of the power of it. It's a religion with a native asset.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? No.
Speaker 1:That's a good point. Yeah. I talked to a a liberal crypto investor, and I was like, how are you squaring this circle in this election? Like, it seems like the democrats are very anti crypto. It seems like the Republicans are very pro
Speaker 2:That was a big part of Cuomo's policy. She she wanted to protect.
Speaker 1:I know what you're gonna say. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's move on from that. But, but yeah. And and, this person had some crazy, like, you know, jumping through a 1000000 hoops to be like, well, actually, like, crypt it's easy to make money in crypto when it's illegal because there's more scams. And I was like, this doesn't sound good at all.
Speaker 1:Like, yeah, I think everyone wants more clarity around crypto, and everyone wants the scams to go away and, like, the pumping coins and the rug pulls to stop. Wait. We were also
Speaker 2:I don't know if we
Speaker 1:coin and stable coins to be legal.
Speaker 2:I don't know if we ever did we ever address this on the show? We we we
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:We talked about, so so over break. Yeah. I think this was over break, but we had covered a post about somebody had said something, how do I invest? They were, like, I wanna invest in Technology Brothers, and we were, you can invest for not raising, but LVMH is a good proxy for it because we faster we grow, the more Dom Perion we buy.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And, you know, LVMH
Speaker 1:Everett is a partner at Kleiner Perkins. I worked with him at Founders Fund. He's a good buddy, and he's a fan of the show and was just like, I'm bullish. And so he puts out this post saying, like, oh, somebody should launch a coin because, like, I wanna go along this this podcast. Like, I'm excited.
Speaker 1:He was just being, like, generally positive, which is awesome. And, and some and and then we said, oh, yeah. We're not gonna do a coin, of course. Like but, you can just buy LVMH because we're gonna be buying so much dom Perion. Should be an obvious joke, but someone went and on pump dot fund created a ticker called LVMH, which I didn't even realize there was a previous LVMH pump dot fund coin.
Speaker 1:They're not unique. You can just make a new one. You can make 25 of the same name. They're not even, like, domain contract address. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Which is ridiculous. Like, it's it's less scarce. A pumped dot fund coin is less scarce than a
Speaker 3:domain. Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, what? And so, and so immediately, like, we see this, this post goes up. I didn't even notice it. I get a FaceTime call. I'm with my family, and I'm like, this is weird.
Speaker 1:I don't normally get, like, spam FaceTime calls. So I pick up, and it's this dude. And he's like, hey, man. Like, what's up, brother? And I'm like, okay.
Speaker 1:This is different than anything I've ever done in media before. And he's like, yeah. Like, I I just put up a coin on pumped out fun and it mooned to 200 k in in market cap. And I was like, cool, dude. Like, that seems completely independent from my life.
Speaker 1:Like, I it was unclear that it was like to hide to my identity and my brand. Yeah. And I was like, now is not a good time, but let's talk soon, dude. And, and then I just, like, hung up and texted him, like, love the energy, but, like, you know, not a good time. Like, let's talk later.
Speaker 1:And then we started texting, and we realized that, like,
Speaker 2:this is I noticed because people there were suddenly hundreds of comments replying to people, replying to our post saying, LVMH is here.
Speaker 3:Like,
Speaker 2:you can you can buy it. And then and then we were getting, like, like, a bunch of DMs from people saying, what's your
Speaker 1:salon address? Yeah. Address.
Speaker 2:Anyways, and, luckily, it blew over, but it there was, like, a1000000 and a half dollars of volume traded, like, almost within Yeah. Like, you know, within And
Speaker 1:it just lasted a few minutes. Went way up and then went way down. And and it was frustrating because, like, in that one hour, it was, like, everyone was having dinner with family. And, like, during that one hour, people were, like, their silence is deafening. Like like like, the only reason that they wouldn't be replying right now is if it was real.
Speaker 1:And it's like, okay. Like, I see what you guys are doing there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Somebody commented somebody commented was, like, angry at us, and I had I I replied from the brand account, and I was like, we have literally nothing to do with
Speaker 1:this. We're
Speaker 2:we're we joke about LVMH Yeah. All the time.
Speaker 1:It's very clear that, like, this is not this is not tied to us at all. We didn't put out a post or whatever. So very, very frustrating. And, stop launching shitcoins. It's low class and vulgar, and, we don't support it here.
Speaker 1:Take a company public. Yep. It's much higher status.
Speaker 2:Spack something.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Spack something. Yeah, please. Thank you. And, so let's move on to a bucket poll, our first of the year and the first of the show, but let's do a promoted post first.
Speaker 2:Okay. I have, it is ski season. We've been talking about, great, Vail quite a bit this episode and our own travels. And so I have a fantastic car for ski season. A, safari style 1986 Porsche 911 Carrera coupe.
Speaker 2:And, if you don't know about giving a safari treatment to
Speaker 1:pronounced just coupe.
Speaker 2:No. No. No.
Speaker 1:It's Coupe.
Speaker 2:Really? That's like the proper
Speaker 1:Oh, this is like a Porsche Porsche.
Speaker 2:I think coupe is right. Okay. I've been in the American city. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2:I've been Usually
Speaker 1:you've been in the American pronunciation.
Speaker 3:I know
Speaker 1:you've been in France too long. Okay. So break it down.
Speaker 2:So anyways
Speaker 1:people get it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You can pick this up on bring a trailer
Speaker 1:dot com.
Speaker 2:Great, great auction site. I've I've bought and purchased a 911 there before. Sight unseen.
Speaker 1:Nice.
Speaker 2:No PPI. Worked well. Sent it. Works great. No issues with it.
Speaker 2:Got very lucky. And I'm making money when I sold it. Nice. It's great. But, but, anyways, I love this safari treatment on on these things.
Speaker 2:They look incredible, and it gives you that extra ground clearance. You can go you can take it up to the mountains. Yeah. You got extra headlights, more light.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:And, yeah, this just looks like a fantastic example. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just zip you from SF to Tahoe and back.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a perfect car to get to SF. You don't have to worry about superchargers. You have to worry about planning your route. Yep.
Speaker 2:If you if you got gasoline, you're good to go. And very, very reliable cars. You can put a lot of miles on them. So anyways, don't let this one, don't let this one get away.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, let's, let's go to a bucket poll. This is interesting. Okay. 47 likes by Anand Sanwal.
Speaker 1:He says, with YouTube University at their disposal, Gen z is going to be the most entrepreneurial generation ever. It's unreal how sophisticated many are in business, primarily due to YouTube and online communities, not school. Sent on Christmas at 6 AM. Let's go. That's Chicago.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah. Super valuable. I mean, I remember learning a ton on, on, what was that? Open x, MITx, or edX.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:There was, like, this OpenCourseWare movement in, like, 2,009, 2010 where all the top universities started, like, open sourcing their or just putting their videos
Speaker 3:up. It
Speaker 1:was insane. So you just get to watch Andrew Ng, like, the best machine learning researcher in the world teach machine learning foundations, like, ml 101.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And he breaks it down. It's great. And you can just sit there and watch it, and you can be, like, much
Speaker 2:more passive. Proof that you're just paying for a luxury brand when you go to his college and you pay 70, 80 k a year. True.
Speaker 1:But also just, like like, even though the colleges do follow, like, a bit of a power law where, like, Stanford, Harvard, MIT are gonna be, like, the best. Like, there are even within the schools, like, extra power law people, like, like, Andrew Ng, for example, has had, like, a remarkable result. And Sebastian Thrun at Stanford, they're both, like, these incredible AI researchers. Like, there's no one like that necessarily at, you know, a different college even if it's a great school.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But if you want an incredible economics education, you're gonna wanna go to University of Chicago.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or if you want, you know, great economics and law, like, business go to Or
Speaker 2:if you want the best surf conditions year round, you go to UC Santa Barbara Exactly. Which is how I selected my school Exactly. From a very young age. Yeah. I was 12.
Speaker 2:I went and visited. I said, this the surf conditions here are phenomenal. Yeah. I need to go here.
Speaker 1:I mean, I remember I, I I walked into, like, econ 101, and our book was, by n Gregory Mankiw. And he taught the course over at Harvard. So oftentimes, I just go over there and just go to his class because I'd just be like, I why do I why am I not just going to the source instead of being this, like, 2nd tier professor, like, teach it? I could go over there. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's
Speaker 2:like a huge conference. I feel like I learn more I learn more, from podcasts than YouTube. Like, even though YouTube was already because, like, for me, from from a when I, like, joined the world of venture around, like, 22, perhaps you're graduating college and, like, started Yeah. Participating, I felt like I listened to probably thousands of hours, of, like, venture related podcasts.
Speaker 1:Certainly to understand, like, how the business works for sure. For the hard skills, I feel like it's very easy to fall into. You're not gonna pick those up from a podcast, and you're also not gonna pick them up from just, like, surfing, like, random YouTube videos because a lot of those are, like, kind of click baited or, like, like, they're they're just meant to be too much entertainment. And, like, they're edutainment, but they're mostly entertainment. But for, like, the high level stuff.
Speaker 1:But for a lot of, like, the programming skills I learned, it was it was a book. And just, like, going through the book and, like, writing the code alongside of it, it's probably better now with more YouTube stuff. Like, back then, YouTube was pretty limited. But
Speaker 2:Did you see the there there was this over the last couple weeks, there's a very viral incident where a woman dropped out of her PhD program. She she, apparently, like, teaches, like, makes videos about AI and how on YouTube.
Speaker 1:Oh, I
Speaker 2:got it. She went and said she was dropping out of her PhD program to, like OnlyFans. Just do OnlyFans. Yeah. But the thing that I, apparently, she had already been doing that for a really long time, so she she was gonna continue to just make the same videos and still do OnlyFans.
Speaker 2:It wasn't like I'm quitting my PhD, and then I'm doing OnlyFans. Yeah. So anyways, it's classic Internet just, like, got blown out of
Speaker 3:Of course.
Speaker 2:This proportion and all this stuff.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Will Nitsi. He says, if you're building a personal brand to help you grow a physical product brand, don't. And then Ross McKay says, plenty of examples of strong community founder led brands. Nick Bare at VPN, George Heaton at Represent 247, Chris Bumstead, c Bum. And I guess this is probably coming down to the question of, like like, there's tons of examples of people who have big personal brands, and then they launch a physical product brand.
Speaker 1:But if you're
Speaker 2:starting Also, so I think should
Speaker 1:you go and bootstrap your own personal brand?
Speaker 2:Now here here's the way I read the original post was don't go build, like, a if you're building a consumer brand, don't, like, try to build this b to b, like, thought leadership brand of, like, on x Mhmm. Or LinkedIn. Like, yes, you should be, like, a personality led brand and, like, your customers should know who they're buying from and there's value there. But but, like, the the VPN guy doesn't he's not, like, here's how to build a business one zero one. Right?
Speaker 2:Which is, like, I feel like on x, it's easy for consumer founders to just start posting about the business of their business
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. Yep.
Speaker 2:Versus, like, the product.
Speaker 1:The product and And, like, I'm selling, like yeah. If I'm selling, like, a supplement, there's, like, a proof of body there that's, like, should be looking good, basically. Yeah. It's interesting because I I it does go back to, like, it's it's really, really hard to build a, a consumer physical product brand without some sort of hero partnership or influencer.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Look at the Ridge look at the Ridge guys. Like, they just Yeah. It's it's you can absolutely if you have a super compelling product, just buy, just buy these partnerships and really invest in them. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, Ridge really invested in their relationship with Devon. And and and and can you
Speaker 3:see now?
Speaker 2:I have another example. The guy that I was in the Alps with a year ago. He's running a, like, really big, it'll be an amazing story one day. We'll talk about it. They raise a very small amount of money.
Speaker 2:They they do they'll you know, over the next few years, they'll do 100 of 1,000,000 of revenue. And a year ago, he had never heard of Brian Johnson, had no clue who this guy was, and he was running this multi doing a running a supplement business with tens of 1,000,000 of dollars revenue. He is completely ignoring the entire industry and just focus on his business, focus on his customers. And so it's totally possible to build,
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It it is a distraction of, like, when I if I see some founder building a CPG brand
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And they're like fixated on like posting a lot on x, I'm like, well, like if you the whole thing is like if you're if you're building an enterprise or B2B product and you can get in front of a 1,000 business owners that can have a dramatic effect on your business. But if you're building a CPG business with selling a $20 product like Lucy Yep. Loose like, x doesn't move the needle No. For sales for Lucy. Yep.
Speaker 2:It doesn't matter how many bangers you have in a month. Yeah. It's just never gonna
Speaker 1:Doing a personality driven partnership with someone like Dave Portnoy at Barstow Sports was
Speaker 2:Or Joe Rogel.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Joe Rogan. But that stuff happened, like, down the line. But I think it's, like, at some point, you're going to need some sort of partnership or relationship with someone that does have a personal brand. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so that doesn't need to be you. Doesn't need to be the CEO. Yeah. But it needs to be a part of
Speaker 2:Like with Rora, we we've partnered with this guy, Eric Hinman Yeah. Who you've probably seen on Instagram. And so, like, we Yeah. Made sure he had a unit prior to
Speaker 1:launching. Back to Nike with Yeah. Jordan. You know? It's like yeah, Phil Knight wasn't the guy, but Jordan was.
Speaker 1:And so you you need to be, like, probably setting yourself up for, you know, who is going to be the human Yep. That drives the brand forward at some point.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:It it's it's it feels like it's more important than ever. I'm trying to think of counterexamples like Mercedes. Do they have I mean, Lewis Hamilton. Like, there's like every brand kind of has, like, someone I feel like no matter what it is. Maybe BMW doesn't.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's
Speaker 1:tricky, but let's move on to liquidity. Breaking, Kim Kardashian is no longer managing Sky Partners, the private equity firm she cofounded with former Carlyle partner, Jay Simmons.
Speaker 2:Very relevant. Very shocking
Speaker 1:news I've ever heard. Kim should have launched a consumer VC and Yolo checks alongside tier 1 funds.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So very relevant to the last topic, which is that, yes, businesses thrive when their personality driven, but just being a personality by itself is not going to lead to outsized success. Yep. And, yeah, private equity is one of those things where it's funny when guys in ventures are like, oh, I'm gonna do, you know, holdco or roll ups because, like, private equity could not be more optimized as a category. Like, there's not like a lot of, like, low hanging fruit.
Speaker 2:Right? This is like one of the most, like, established, highly optimized industries with a bunch of really, really, really smart people.
Speaker 3:I mean,
Speaker 2:it wasn't easy to
Speaker 3:say that.
Speaker 2:So that's, like, the argument against, like, Kim k doing a PE fund and, like, being wildly successful there is, like, if you're a $1,000,000,000 PE fund and you're buying a business, you could literally buy the business. And during that process, go to Kim Kardashian and say, hey, we want you to be like part. We want you to be the face of this. Like, we're gonna give you, like, $10,000,000 a year and, like, build that into the deal. She doesn't need to run the fund to.
Speaker 2:And so I think I think we're, everybody's just realizing, like, how hard everything is to do well. Like, it's not easy. Like, private equity is, like, deceptively simple. It's like, okay, we just buy businesses for one price and sell them for more. Lever up.
Speaker 2:But, you know, you lever up. But a lot of the times when, like, a business is being sold, it's because the operators that are in place are like, we're not going to be able to grow this more any more than we already have. Or, like, we think we're at a local maximum. So, like, now is the time that we're gonna sell it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so if you go then buy that business, well, then you need it. It's now your responsibility to, like, continue growing it at a rapid rate or grow it faster.
Speaker 1:I guess what is odd is that it was a private equity firm with a Carlyle partner and separate LPs and, like, separate strategy as opposed to just, like, the Kardashian HoldCo. Yeah. Because I could see a world where, like, this is an example of, like, a private equity style deal where Huberman and Andrew Wilkinson bought a brand and were able to take it to the next level. But it's, like, it's within the Huberman, like, universe now, I think. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I could see Kim where she has this she has a whole, like, kind of, like, distribution of, like, ownership. There's, like, things that she started from scratch, built up, owns a ton of. There's things where somebody came to her and said, hey. We'll give you 10% equity. There's probably some companies that gave her 1% equity.
Speaker 2:Right. There's half
Speaker 1:the point. There's other companies that that don't give any equity and just pay her to do ads. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so she has this, like, curve. But for some of those opportunities where
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The value equation, the value that she's creating is not being captured. So it's like, yeah, she only has 1% of this company, but she's 10 x their sales or something. It's like, that's an opportunity to buy a product in that category or buy a company in that category.
Speaker 2:And Well, they have they have, it's called Lemmy now that the Kardashians, like, a supplement brand that I think is one of the best selling brands in, like, like, Target Yep. Stuff like that.
Speaker 3:And it's
Speaker 2:literally they made a gummy version of every major supplement.
Speaker 3:Very good.
Speaker 2:It's like, hey, you can just eat candy for all of your supplements. Great. Smart.
Speaker 1:Genius. Genius. Let's do another promoted post, another bucket pull, and then we'll move on.
Speaker 2:We got a promoted post from Lulu, brother
Speaker 1:of the year.
Speaker 2:Brother of the year for 2024, first ever brother of the year. And she says, this is another thing I appreciate about ramp. They treat you like an adult. No infantilizing games that force you to hustle for points or lounge access. Just give us back time and money and we'll decide how to spend them.
Speaker 2:We can buy our own seltzers and mixed nuts. And it's a quote tweet of Jack, Jack Raines, friend of the party, said airport lounges are insane because they appear to be one of the most legitimately dangerous credit card incentives with the potential to gigafry your personal finance habits for the sake of stacking points.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's so
Speaker 3:true, man.
Speaker 2:Such a such a bank. I just The airport lounges are so lame. I I walk in Just get
Speaker 1:to the airport later.
Speaker 2:So when I have to fly commercial Yeah. I just had to fly commercial. I walk. I go into LAX. I know the one place that sells Evian water Yep.
Speaker 2:Glass bottles. Yep. I walk in. If it's an international flight, I buy, like, 6 or 7 because I don't wanna drink the plastic bottle of water on the flight. Yep.
Speaker 2:So I buy 6 or 7 bottles of Evian, and then I go sit at the gate, and then I get on the flight.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:I don't I don't care about like, if you're getting to the airport so early that you have to use a lounge, you fucked up your
Speaker 1:whole travel plan. If you think about it, how many flights did you take last year? If you didn't miss a single flight, you're getting to the airport too early.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You have to have to miss the people. The only thing that, that that that's sort of, ironic about this is if there was gonna be an airport lounge that was amazing, it'd be a ramp airport lounge. It'd be like you just have, like, the history of, like, the greatest entrepreneurs on the wall, power, etcetera. It would just be, like, various places you could scoop.
Speaker 2:It'd be a library. You could scoop protein powder. Like, you could get, like, protein powder.
Speaker 3:You can
Speaker 2:drop it. It'd be, like, yeah, weights of the Yeah. Of the deadlift. Ramp lounge.
Speaker 1:Get a deadlift and
Speaker 2:read it. So so ramp. Don't make us play silly games to get access to the lounge, but do a lounge at some point.
Speaker 1:Do a lounge. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's
Speaker 1:great. Okay. Bucket poll. What do we got? What do we got?
Speaker 1:Let's see. Okay. Let's do this one. Okay. Oh, signal.
Speaker 1:Oh, we're on credit cards again. We're getting lucky here. Signal says 20 25 credit cards. Amex Platinum for travel and lounges. US Bank 4% cashback for everything else.
Speaker 1:Is there a better or more simple combo? You got 10 k likes. This is one of those things. So so with credit cards, I I don't pay attention to them at all. I just let the points accrue for decades, and then eventually, I'm okay.
Speaker 1:So I should go spend these.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then, like, once every few years, I run into a dude who's just, like, completely min maxed it and become, like, super autistic about it, has spreadsheets about, like, this is technically the best credit card. I'm just like, okay. Just tell me what to get, and I'll just get that. And I copy it. But I like that he did my homework for me because this actually sounds pretty good.
Speaker 1:I might have to get this, unless I just put my whole, family on ramp and just, and just run the entire I I I know an angel investor in ramp who did that. He was like, I'm going to set up an LLC for my family just so I can put it on ramp and have credit cards and do everything through ramp.
Speaker 3:Seems
Speaker 2:And and
Speaker 1:they were like, yeah, that's not really the point. It's like a business credit card, but, I really, really hope that at some point they launch a consumer card because it'd be so sick to do a new new Centurion just for CEO, basically. Like, you have to be the CEO of Ram Corporation to get
Speaker 2:it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But but what what do you think? You have an Amex Platinum?
Speaker 2:I do. Travel lounges.
Speaker 1:You just don't use the lounges.
Speaker 2:I just don't use the I mean, aren't the rewards better?
Speaker 1:Yeah. But US Bank has 4% cash back on everything. That feels
Speaker 2:like a scam. Seems like a scam.
Speaker 1:Did you see that now?
Speaker 2:If that was a crypto company, it would be like a scam.
Speaker 1:Would be like, oh, yeah. You're definitely embezzling. US Bank is struggling, I guess, or something. I don't know. It's kind of Yeah.
Speaker 2:I get so here's the thing. I'm assuming they give you that crazy reward and you deposit money with them and they give you, like, nothing on the actual Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then the API So you're basically just are being that.
Speaker 2:Like Okay. But if you, I'm sure if you just set up the card and you
Speaker 3:keep Yeah.
Speaker 2:Cash elsewhere, but then they probably also have some rule, like, you have to have a minimum. Weird. Who knows? I I I just, like, try to, every year instead of, like, optimizing credit cards, I just, like, try to hit a 100 x investment every single year. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then it
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Pays for itself.
Speaker 2:Pays for itself.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Grimes. She says insane to demean horse girls. Could not agree more.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Single handedly keeping the dream of the of the Mongol horde alive. I love this. We've been on this before.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we we joke a lot about horses. Yes. But we're
Speaker 1:Un ironically pro
Speaker 2:horse. Equestrian enthusiasts. Exactly. We're glad that tech journalists have such an obsession with horses. Yep.
Speaker 2:Like, there's not a lot of for a long time in tech, very few people were were on the equestrian sort of wave. So, but
Speaker 1:but also, pro founders that got a lot of liquidity starting to build a stable.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:It's a great way to engage with nature and deploy a lot of capital.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:And there's still an out moment of risk reward financial incentives. You can make money.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:You can lose money. There's a lot of risk and,
Speaker 2:you know And this year, we're getting our own racehorse.
Speaker 1:And and racehorses are, completely resistant to artificial intelligence, not going anywhere.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, I mean, for a long time, the horse girl thing was, it was used as, like, a shorthand for, autistic female. Yeah. And and it was used as, like, this demeaning thing, like, you know, train guy, guy who's obsessed with trains is autistic. Girl who's obsessed with horses is, and it was also just, like, trying to take a shot at, like, the upper class, essentially.
Speaker 2:Yep. It was
Speaker 1:like, oh, you grew up with horses. Like, you must be rich and, like, have nothing to say in this world. But if you talk to people that rode horses, like, they're wonderful people.
Speaker 2:My son takes horseback riding lessons. Yeah. My daughter will take horseback riding lessons. Athletic. We're gonna have a horse named Brother that we're planning to take all the way to the Kentucky Derby.
Speaker 2:Yep. So, very pro horse.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's and and you can be pro equestrian and still joke about the equestrian lifestyle. Yeah. Like, we're pro tech, pro business. We joke about tech and business all the time.
Speaker 1:And also, I mean, if you're if you're going fox hunting regularly, like, you have to do that on a horse. So, there you know, you really just gotta, think of use the right tool for the job. Let's go to Andre Karpathy. He has a long post here about DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial intelligence company, making it look easy today with their open weights release of a frontier grade LLM tuned on a joke of a budget, 2 2048 GPUs for 2 months, $6,000,000. For reference, this level of capability is supposed to require clusters of closer to 16,000 GPUs.
Speaker 1:The ones being brought up today are more around a 100000 GPUs, e g llama 3, while deep c x v three looks to be a stronger model at only 2,800,000 GPU hours, a 100, 10 x less compute or 11 x less compute. If the model also passes Vibe checks, e g, LLM arena rankings are ongoing. My few quick tests went well so far. It will be a highly impressive display of research and engineering under resource constraints. Does this matter to you?
Speaker 1:Don't you need large GPU clusters for Frontier LLMs? No. But you have to ensure that you're not wasteful with what you have, and this looks like a nice demonstration that there's still a lot to get through with both data and algorithms. Very nice and detailed tech report too reading through. This is very interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This kinda took over the Internet over the, over the, break. But there was, I think there was, like, a lot of
Speaker 2:So so the funny thing, they dropped it, and they dropped it on Christmas Day or something like that. Like, they're trying to they're trying to get in our heads. Getting our It doesn't work. It doesn't work. All the technology brothers were enjoying Christmas.
Speaker 2:Yep. And they still had their mind thinking about business and technology. Yep. And this little joke of dropping your your fake stolen model on Christmas just doesn't doesn't do anything. I did see what you're I wish that we had a post on it.
Speaker 2:But, but, yeah, some something about how like most one
Speaker 1:right here actually.
Speaker 2:Most advancements
Speaker 1:Yeah. WordGrambler says, I genuinely don't know how to feel about China casually mogging every US lab then dropping it for free as open source. I simultaneously feel a deep sense of concern for our national security and a deep sense that Wagmi and intelligence too cheap to meter is at hand. So, kind of bullshit also.
Speaker 2:But but but that's that's not didn't cover the fact that it seems like people have been figuring out that they just kind of, like, were able to leverage Yeah. OpenAI's models and then, like Yeah. Yeah. Leapfrog using it.
Speaker 1:I mean, I I I talked to some guy who said that, like, he ran the numbers on for for a while, when you got a response from GPT 4, it would also give you some, like, not the full weights of the model, but, like, a a a sampling of how that, like, response was calculated.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And if you got enough of those, you could kind of do the math backwards to create the model weights or or estimate the model weights
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And get pretty close. And he was, like, kind of running the numbers, and he was like, yeah. So, like, to exfiltrate the model with this with the like, you get the text responses, and then you also get
Speaker 2:the So you basically just train your new model on
Speaker 1:the actual API. Yeah. And it was, like, for that was, like, less than $1,000,000 or something to, like, steal.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think they, like, patched that and cleaned it up or something, but it's still, like, very risky. And then there's also just the question of, like, did they have a spy? Yeah. Very, very possible.
Speaker 2:I just don't trust anything that comes out of the far east. Yeah. I
Speaker 1:just don't The wrong hemisphere.
Speaker 2:I just don't.
Speaker 1:Let's go to dystopian g f. She says, anyone with an IQ of 1 30 plus should be required by law to lift weights. Resentful nerds with no connection to the physical world will be the death of us. 27,000 likes. Addendum, skipping leg day will result in fines and possible jail time if a repeated offense.
Speaker 1:Good post. It's funny. But, yeah, I mean, obviously, yeah.
Speaker 2:The reason that we need these people to lift weights is we need we wanna invest in more people that are in the 1,000 pound club that are that are deeply intelligent and tech technical.
Speaker 1:So Also, with intelligence too cheap to meter and AI on AGI on the frontier, you need to be going golden retriever mode. You need golden retriever maxing, which means Yep. Getting hot, getting friendly, and getting dumb. Don't worry about learning anything more, pumping that IQ out with stimulants. Adderall's out, deadlifts are in.
Speaker 2:Deadlifts are in. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's getting diced is underpriced.
Speaker 1:I agree completely. It's it's it's never been more important to to focus on physical fitness.
Speaker 2:It's not too late. Winter winter is, like, halfway over almost deals. But it's but it's not too late to enter, like, some sort of winter arc. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, you know, this is the perfect time to start a 3 month bulk, which then can turn into a 3 month cut right for June 1st summer season. You'll be at the beach. You'll have an extra £10 of muscle on. You'll be You'll be
Speaker 2:we're gonna have some crazy great. TV meetups in Europe this summer.
Speaker 1:You're gonna wanna look diced.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You're gonna wanna be diced.
Speaker 1:You're not gonna wanna be hanging out at 20% body fat.
Speaker 2:I just I actually I actually, like, I I I don't know if anyone in our audience is not already moderately jacked. Yeah. Like that on average, like, they they care about how a lot, but and and this is the time of year that people are talking about New Year's resolutions and I wanna get fit and all the stuff and just do it. It's not that hard. Yep.
Speaker 2:You you have to go in. You can watch YouTube videos. You can download workout plans. You can download these apps for $5 a month that'll tell you exactly what to do and just go in and do it and it's it's not free, but it's basically free. If you have any type of normal job and you're making even $5,000 a month, you can afford a gym membership
Speaker 3:and
Speaker 2:just get diced.
Speaker 1:Yep. And so sleep
Speaker 2:Your light it's it's one of the few things that if you just do it, your life will just get material.
Speaker 1:Here here here's the algorithm for the best New Year's resolution possible. Sleep a bunch.
Speaker 3:You
Speaker 1:know, gotta get your 8 hours in. Gram protein per body weight per pound of body weight. So you're gonna get a protein. High protein diet. Exactly.
Speaker 1:And then hit them hit the bench press. As soon as you're not sore, you're ready to work out again. So you can train bench press 3 times a week sometimes.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Keep keep bench pressing. Get up to 245 on the bench because then you bench press more than Brian Johnson.
Speaker 2:Yep. And then just comment that marker that matters. And then anytime he does a long post, comment, didn't read. I bench more than you.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. That's the way. Do we have promoted post?
Speaker 2:Somebody one of our one of our reply reply guys is gonna take that to heart.
Speaker 1:It'll honestly be good. I mean, Brian's a good friend and also just a good, he's a really good sport, so he'll just play along with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'll just play along with it.
Speaker 1:But it it is truly a different game. Oh, oh, you're free. Hemoglobin is at 75%. I don't care. What's your bench?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is it still 240, Brian? Because unless you're a mass monster
Speaker 2:those numbers.
Speaker 1:I'm not listening.
Speaker 2:I'm not listening. Yeah. That is the funny thing. It's it's it's it's really quite something that he's gotten this big of this much influence in this big of an audience in the health world without being a mass monster. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because historically, that was the only way to break through.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It
Speaker 2:was the only way to break through. Yeah. And and and he's realized the only way to make money in health
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Sell supplements.
Speaker 1:Sell everything.
Speaker 2:But if he's big today, if he just doubled in size Yeah. He could be 10 times bigger.
Speaker 1:Traps in the audience. From the
Speaker 2:audience standpoint, he could be
Speaker 1:Death star delts.
Speaker 2:Death star delts.
Speaker 1:It would be amazing.
Speaker 2:Promoted post from our friend, Preston Holland. He says another ex friend started flying private. They bought a 6.25% share of a Phenom 300 with Airshare for 550 k. Let's go. So perfect brothers, make your New Year's resolution to start flying private more.
Speaker 2:One of the ways you can do that is buying a part of a jet. If you want to do that, go reach out to Preston Holland. He is a fantastic guy. Got to hang out with him at David Center's last event. And, nobody better to help you break into the world of private aviation.
Speaker 2:Absolutely the man and an absolute dog in the skies.
Speaker 1:Absolute dog. Let's do a bucket pull. Who we got here?
Speaker 2:It's still picking through with the ice cube.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You got it. You got it. Okay. Here we go.
Speaker 1:Oh, this is funny. Mister overplayed oh, mister over prayed says, being drunk is a choice. Just had around 17 shots. Everyone else stumbling and mumbling. I am laser sharp.
Speaker 1:I don't allow drunkenness into my body ever. Self control by the power of the holy spirit. I will be up at 4 AM. May no demons have dominion over my body. Spirit greater than flesh.
Speaker 1:A 100 k likes.
Speaker 2:A 100 k.
Speaker 1:Let me pull that out of the bucket. That's a great one. I mean, it's so funny being drunk as a choice. Also, it's somewhat true.
Speaker 2:It is it is. There's some real truth to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Also, I I this
Speaker 2:this last trip, so I I the only time I I drank in q 4 was Dom Perignon. Dom episodes. So I really don't drink.
Speaker 1:I really I really think there's this massive discourse about, oh, should you drink? It's carcinogenic. Huberman's on, like, the never drink. I think you should only drink Dom Perignon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And only when you're celebrating.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. But you can celebrate constantly.
Speaker 2:But on this trip, I I whatever. I was having, like, drinks. I was having shots. I couldn't for the life of me get get drunk, and I didn't understand I didn't understand why.
Speaker 1:Spirit over the last.
Speaker 2:Spiritually, I just didn't wanna be drunk. I didn't wanna lose control. I didn't wanna be I didn't wanna be, like, oh, I didn't I I just I enjoy being locked in.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And so no amount of shots is gonna disrupt that. Yeah. And it's a skill issue.
Speaker 1:It is
Speaker 2:a skill issue.
Speaker 1:It's great. This was an interesting story over the break. Drew Fallon says accounting firm Bench has gone out of business after 13 years. They raised a $113,000,000. They did $5,000,000 seed in 2014, then a $13,000,000 series a, 16,000,000 series b, 18,000,000 b 1, 60,000,000 series c.
Speaker 1:In 2021, their s their enterprise value was 232,000,000, and in 2024, 0. And they closed. And people were really upset because it closed, like, very unexpectedly. And so it's an accounting firm, contract accounting firm for startups. And so companies would use them as outsourced accounting, and, people were kinda right getting ready for year end close, and then they just get a notice notification, hey.
Speaker 1:Like, your accountant just quit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I used to be Yeah. I was a bench customer for a while for the company I started
Speaker 3:in
Speaker 2:college and eventually just switched to regular CPA because it's I don't think that I don't think for some, like, eventually software will get so good Yep. That it does make sense to, like, rely primarily on Yep. Soft, like, some type of, like, AI agent software provider for this kind of thing. But yeah. So I think people really dug into it.
Speaker 2:And apparently, they'd taken on, like, a bunch of venture debt, which can, like, basically, like, one shot your company if you don't execute perfectly. But the real the interesting thing here, we need to do a deep dive on the guy that bought this company because he's, like, buying a lot of companies. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He was, like, I think it's employer.com.
Speaker 1:Yep. So so there was also a post. This caused a lot of drama because Ian Crosby, I think, was the founder. And he said, I'm very sad today to see that Bench has shut down. I've avoided speaking publicly about Bench since just over 3 years ago when I was fired from the company I cofounded.
Speaker 1:I still don't have a lot of appetite to talk about it, to be honest, but I think at least a short statement is appropriate. And he goes on to explain, how he grew the business and then was and then was pushed out. And so a lot of people were very upset. They said, name names. Let us know who is on the board.
Speaker 1:You should never take money from these people again. And it's interesting, like, that that that is true that they ran into the ground, but, there are always two sides to those stories. And I do
Speaker 2:Well, what I like about this founder and what he did is he got whatever very tragically booted out of the company. Yeah. Miss misalignment of, like, how he wanted to run it versus the board did. But he goes and starts, like, some other accounting related business with all the experience that he had then has a nice exit to Mercury, and now he works on Wait. Really?
Speaker 2:He's he in
Speaker 1:that time, he started
Speaker 3:and sold
Speaker 2:another Started and had a successful exit. I love it. Now he runs there, like, accounting. Oh, that's great. Mercury.
Speaker 2:So he's he's had a good story.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:I wonder it'd be cool maybe he'll get back involved with Bench now that this new owner
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Maybe they ran
Speaker 3:back in or something.
Speaker 2:Redemption arc.
Speaker 3:So
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's interesting.
Speaker 2:That was cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, always a stupid move to keep Yeah.
Speaker 2:I've never but but but also that the venture debt thing, I don't,
Speaker 1:why does a services business need venture debt exactly?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't understand. We gotta have we there It's not
Speaker 1:like they've worked
Speaker 2:capitalized. Just announced a new venture debt fund that was, like, teal backed. Yeah. We saw it. No.
Speaker 2:We should have that person on the show Sure. And talk about why the fuck should anyone ever do venture debt. Yeah. Because you never you never hear it just seems like it's, like, unnecessary baggage.
Speaker 1:I mean, there are a few reasons that you want debt generally, and Yeah. What I I think about venture debt as just Yeah.
Speaker 2:But for the right but not for a cash based services business. So
Speaker 1:I mean, the way I think about, like, funding a business generally is, like, you have different line items, expenses, and there are different funding instruments for each of them. And so for your capex, your r and d, a really, really long time horizon, we are writing software that will get us recurring revenue that pays out over a decade. Yep. Like, think about ramp signing a big customer. It's like Yeah.
Speaker 1:That money is gonna come in for years years years. How do you finance that? Venture capital. Absolutely. Like, that that is the textbook case of venture capital.
Speaker 1:You see the same thing in drug development and biotech. Like, why is there so much equity going into these companies? Well, it's because it's extremely high risk. Right? Versus if you're a manufacturing company and you need to capex a bunch of plant property equipment, p p and e, you that's the perfect use for debt, but you don't think about it as venture debt because it's asset backed loans for your machinery.
Speaker 1:And so you buy a $1,000,000 machinery, you depreciate it over a decade, and you're paying that down at the same time that you're that you're making money from that machine. You're perfectly matched to the debt, and hopefully, it matches up really well so that you have a $1,000,000 machine. It makes us a $1,000,000 in revenue. We take home 300 k in EBITDA, and we pay our debts or whatever. You know?
Speaker 1:But there's this but there's this middle ground for is your working capital growing. And so when I think about a company like Ridge, they could have a, a revolving debt line that grows as they because they make the product, and then they have to wait to sell it.
Speaker 2:Yep. And it takes them
Speaker 1:a while to actually get the They actually do
Speaker 2:some really cool stuffs Yep. With, stuff with their, manufacturer where they, from what I know, they'll basically say, hey, we'll give you we'll pay you 10% more.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But we need a 180 day terms.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're essentially getting seller financing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, they're doing it. I understand it for I understand it for these businesses that that basically have these bigger working capital requirements. But but adding debt onto a business like bench where Yeah. You're just kind of like, okay, give us money.
Speaker 2:We'll give you the service. Give us money. We'll give you the service. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Just seems
Speaker 1:like it doesn't immediately make sense for that type of business. Yeah. Seems very rough. Anyway, let's go to Nat Friedman. This was a huge story.
Speaker 1:So we did it. We tested 300 Bay Bay Area Foods. It's funny that we said 40,000. I, when we were joking about this, we said we tested 40,000 foods because I was like, I would just wanted to be highly
Speaker 2:passive. That.
Speaker 1:We didn't post that?
Speaker 2:Not yet.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. We gotta post that. But, anyway, oh, did we not? Okay. Anyway, we did it.
Speaker 1:We tested 300 Bay Area Foods for plastic chemicals. We found some interesting surprises. The top five findings in our test results, our tests found plastic chemicals in 86% of all foods with flammates in 73% of the tested products and bysophanols in, 22%. It's everywhere. We detected flammates in most baby foods and prenatal vitamins.
Speaker 1:Hot foods would spend 45 minutes in takeout containers have 34% higher levels of plastic chemicals than the same dishes tested directly from the restaurant. The 19 fifties army rations we tested contained surprisingly high levels of plastic chemicals. Almost every single one of the foods we tested are both within are within both US FDA and EUEF SA regulations. Check out our full results below. Okay.
Speaker 1:I put a plastic list dot com. There were a bunch of other notes or dotorg, a bunch of other notes about this. One boba tea equals 1.2 years of safe BPA consumption. There was a, whole food steak that was surprisingly high in in PFAS. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So 2 plastics. Two notes on this. So one, all this was done by Light Labs, which is Justin Mayer's brother's company. Yep. Lucky to be an investor in the company and really smart what they did.
Speaker 2:They basically realized there was all these new regulations around, testing like baby food. So there's these new requirements around testing. They came out and they did, Nick, and Justin had had, made, you know, a fortune in bone broth, had to do a bunch of testing. And so they had experienced a pain point themselves. So Nick starts Light Labs and that the company has been doing phenomenally, in part because there's this all this new interest around Yep.
Speaker 2:PFAS and microplastics and things like that. So, second, I think the big takeaway, from this is that legal does not mean safe. So the government has actual regulations around the levels of the amount of shit that can be Yeah. In food and that legal level is usually way above what is considered healthy. Right?
Speaker 2:So in a perfect world, you have 0 p fas or microplastics that you're ingesting, but they're gonna get into the food to some degree. And so, I think that that to me should should be the most eye opening thing about this is you cannot rely on government regulations to, figure out what's healthy. Right? Because the government will say, like, oh, yeah. Like, one out of every 100 molecules can be, like, effectively toxic, and that's fine.
Speaker 2:Right? 1 out of a 1000000. Yeah. 1 out of a 1000000. Right?
Speaker 2:But, but but but still, like, the the the these legal
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Legal levels are so much higher than safe.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I think there's there's a few things that I take away from it. One is, like, it is everywhere. The somebody even asked Nat, like, hey. How are you changing your lifestyle based on these findings?
Speaker 1:And he was like, I'm not changing anything because, like, it's just everywhere. I'm screwed.
Speaker 2:Well, if you can if you're buying the healthiest, most expensive steak and it's not a lot
Speaker 1:of plastic. Everything has plastic in it. So it sort of exposes this need for, like, some sort of more systemic approach to, like, okay. Let's find out where the biggest sources of contamination are, like, up the chain. Like, someone with the steak thing was was identifying the fact that, the the hay bales that the cows eat were wrapped in plastic.
Speaker 1:And so when it gets cut, like, it sits in the sun, but also when it gets cut, like, literally, there's just chunks of plastic the cows are accidentally eating. So they're just literally eating plastic. And so it's like like, yeah, you can do a little it it's the same thing with, like, oh, like, cure the environment by, like, driving an electric car when it's, like, okay. Actually, maybe just, like, moving to nuclear and solar at the source point is, like, what we need to do, and that has a much bigger impact. It's probably the same thing here where, like, there's a little bit that you can do with being, like, okay.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna eat this burger instead of that burger, and I'm gonna make a consumer choice. But, like, those consumer driven changes are always much harder than just, like, figuring out where this where the actually biggest power law, like, effect Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think I
Speaker 1:think going after that.
Speaker 2:The right response is you see this report and you're like, I wanna avoid PFAS and microplastics. Yeah. Do stuff like look at how you if you make coffee at home Yep. And you use one of those drip coffee machine makers with the things that pull out Yep. And you realize
Speaker 1:it's just like heating Heating plastic. Right?
Speaker 2:Heating really hot water in plastic. It's like cut that out. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You don't wanna be having that every single day. Yeah. Having your little microplastic coffee
Speaker 1:Yeah. Every single morning. The entire glass. Obvious stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Find the
Speaker 1:And then also, there's a bunch of things that you can do, like, that are downstream. Like, bodybuilders have really low levels because they they don't they know that plasma and blood a lot. And so if you don't need any blood, like,
Speaker 2:you're Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Out. That's like the Lindy bloodletting thing.
Speaker 1:The bloodletting. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Or or I'm seeing, you know, throw, if you're busy, you don't have time to give blood, throw some leeches on your back before you put on your suit. That, dude. That's so gross.
Speaker 1:That's so disgusting.
Speaker 2:It
Speaker 1:it is a little bit of, like, a skill issue here, I think. Like, like, it's not very Lindy to be deathly terrified of microplastics. Like, at some point, you do just need to man up and be like, yeah, I'm being poisoned, but it doesn't fucking matter because I'm a man. But, I I do love this because it's like Yeah.
Speaker 3:More of
Speaker 1:a use of of Nat's money. And it's like, we there's another post I'm sure in here about, like, a guy who made a lot of money and didn't really know what to do with it. And it's like, Nat has found a great vector for, you know, like, just going and doing a really impactful project that's off his own balance sheet, and he has no idea how it's gonna make money. I don't think he wants to run it forever, but he's doing something that has, like, a really cool impact. And so if you do wind up with, generational wealth, like, instead of just go and do a cool project like this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's so
Speaker 2:cool. Yeah. Because he spent half a $1,000,000. Yeah. Millions of people can benefit from it.
Speaker 2:Exactly. It might create systemic change in the industry. The other the other takeaway is if everything is if everything is toxic, it actually means that you need to focus on detoxification. Sure. So, like, sauna is the obvious one.
Speaker 2:Sauna a few times a week, figure out how to do it. You can. It it is the number one way to
Speaker 1:Oh, I didn't know.
Speaker 2:Toxify, like, broad
Speaker 1:I thought it was a good place to read the Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It is a good place to read the Wall Street Journal. But, yeah, that that's, like, the the best thing that you can do is okay. I'm I'm constantly inundated with toxins.
Speaker 2:So I'm just gonna sauna
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:5 days a week. Figure out how to do it. Yeah. Don't have to buy a sauna in order to do it. Go to the gym or whatever.
Speaker 1:Do we have another promoted post?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Again, it's ski season. So, you know, we have to promote the Lamborghini Sirotta.
Speaker 1:Let's go. This
Speaker 2:is this is the alpha spec, the Sabia Desertum. Oh. And they're practically giving this thing away. This thing is they're listing this on DuPont registry at $409,000. What a great spec.
Speaker 1:I mean, one of those
Speaker 2:We gotta get
Speaker 1:You know, this is the last model run of the Huracan V10. And so now the Lamborghini split. There's the V12 Rivelto, and there's the Temerario, which is v 8. Yeah. And so if you want a V10, this is the one to get.
Speaker 1:It's the it's the final year.
Speaker 2:And it's such a it's such a economical purchase because you don't. It comes with the roof racks. You don't have to go and buy these aftermarket roof racks.
Speaker 1:You're kidding. But I I I wouldn't be surprised if that car holds a lot of value.
Speaker 2:Oh, I think so.
Speaker 1:I think they're I
Speaker 2:think they're gonna drive. This They're
Speaker 1:so cool.
Speaker 2:Here's here's my advice for all the brothers out there. Buy 2. Yep. Garage queen 1. Yep.
Speaker 2:Daily drive the other. Make it your little weekender.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:This is legitimately the perfect car to take up to Squaw Valley. I'm still going to call it Squaw because the guys over. Do you know the whole Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I talked to somebody who was on, it was skiing this weekend, and they were like, oh, yeah. My my, my ski instructor was like a huge, like, asshole and just wouldn't shut up about, like, how I can't call it squaw anymore. And, like, the ski instructor was, like, was, like, wasting, like, 20 minutes, and and they were, like, I just wanna get it back on the slopes. Like, can we just do a run? And I was, like, you gotta just troll this guy and be, like, yeah.
Speaker 1:Can we hurry it up? Like, the Redskins game is almost on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I grew up skiing at Squaw. Old dice. What do they call it now?
Speaker 3:It's
Speaker 2:still it Palisades.
Speaker 1:Okay. Palisades.
Speaker 2:Not a bad name, but
Speaker 1:Palace is a good name, actually.
Speaker 2:Squaw. Squaw is such a bad name.
Speaker 1:Offensive. Is it? Like, what it's No.
Speaker 2:I think it I think it meant, like, I think it literally meant, like, It's a slur? It's just like a word for It was a for I think it I think it was, like, Native American phrasing for, like, a whore.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. So it is a slur.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. Okay. Well, yeah, maybe we need
Speaker 1:to retire that one. Who knows? Yeah. Anyway, highly recommend picking up a Lamborghini Soretto. If you do,
Speaker 3:if you
Speaker 1:were to
Speaker 2:Oxford. Tell
Speaker 1:them the technology brother sent you.
Speaker 2:Oxford dictionary says it means a North American Indian woman or wife.
Speaker 3:So
Speaker 1:Okay. So it's just
Speaker 2:not so bad.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Not too bad. I like that. It's great. Should we go to a bucket pull?
Speaker 1:What do we got here? This one. It's on the old paper. Oh, there's some deep ones in here. Let's see.
Speaker 3:Let's see.
Speaker 1:Okay. Oh, here we go. We got oh, this is good. This is good. From captain Nemo, friend of the show.
Speaker 1:He he is. He is. I hung out with this guy bunch. I love him.
Speaker 2:Captain Nemo?
Speaker 1:He says, convinced some ultra nice hotels, think Aman, Raffles, Hotel Bel Air, are actually intelligence operations run at a loss. Anytime I've looked into who owns them, they're backed by Russian, Middle Eastern, or Chinese money that's closely tied to foreign governments. Plus, the hotels self select for powerful or ultra wealthy clientele likely to divulge useful info that could be recorded. Relatedly, the Amman global the Amman's global director of security was recently arrested for funneling money to a sanctioned Russian oligarch.
Speaker 2:Okay. But you know that you know that rose Rosewood.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Rosewood is has some real history here.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's Chinese owned.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 2:Strategically placed in in Yeah. Yeah. Silicon Valley. Power centers around the world. And, yeah, I wouldn't stay at the Rosewood.
Speaker 2:No. Period. Interesting. They would steal all our podcasting secrets.
Speaker 1:You think so?
Speaker 2:Okay. The secret to podcasting is record every single day. Yeah. Create a platform for your absolute boys. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then they would they would clients.
Speaker 1:I I I disagree with this. I think that I think that if these are in indeed intelligence operations, we need to be staying there constantly because once a foreign oligarch hears our takes, they will become American capitalists. Yeah. They will be convinced. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I could just imagine
Speaker 2:They'll see us playing with our modern retro. They'll be
Speaker 1:like, oh my god. This is amazing. I gotta stop doing we gotta we we gotta get an ally ship going with these guys. It's a real I can change your situation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean
Speaker 1:So I I I maybe they are intelligence operations. I don't care. I'm still staying there.
Speaker 2:They're intelligent operations. I'll tell you that, John. I love spending
Speaker 1:money in a month. Intelligent to spend some to operate out of an amount Yeah. 365 days of the year. Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 1:This seems like, I give this I give this, 3 tinfoil hats out of 10. 3.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It it it. No.
Speaker 2:I mean, I I did I did look through that thread and see, like, the whole story of the Oman guy. It is seems pretty. But but Amman is widely known. Lots of Russians stay at Amman. I think it is owned by a Russian oligarch.
Speaker 2:So it's not a that much is fact, I believe. So
Speaker 1:Didn't know they have grocery stores in Russia?
Speaker 2:In Russia? Yeah. Wow.
Speaker 1:Didn't do
Speaker 2:that. The type of thing, check it right over there.
Speaker 1:And he's like, like, check it out. Like, it's not a 3rd world country. I love that one. So funny. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Don't just don't waste any time at, you know, 4 star hotels.
Speaker 2:That's the takeaway.
Speaker 1:This is fun. This was fairly recent. It's a video of Lilby knighting Neo the robot at the one x office. And it's,
Speaker 2:That's the most bullish thing I've seen on figure so far.
Speaker 1:It is very this is not this is not figure.
Speaker 2:This is a Oh, it's one x. That's one x.
Speaker 1:Different company.
Speaker 2:That makes sense because I was like, figure, they culturally don't seem like No. No. No.
Speaker 1:They're very buttoned up. Very, like, we're doing partnerships with BMW. We have a campus. We're very, like, the
Speaker 2:Meanwhile, one x is What is this night?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. One x is doing videos with Jason Carmen and, like, you know, doing
Speaker 2:You know, Timothy Chalamet was knighted by
Speaker 1:It's a quote of that. Yeah. And so I think that's where they got the idea because, Timothy Chalamet got knighted by little b, the base god, who has some I mean, based is a word because of little b. You know that. Right?
Speaker 1:He has some amazing quotes. Extremely, like, online Internet person. There's this hilarious quote.
Speaker 2:Internet rapper in many ways.
Speaker 1:Yeah. She's like, shout out to everyone on the Internet. Our backs are hurting. Our eyes are hurting. We keep posting.
Speaker 1:Is and he said this in, like, 2,006. There's a is it wild clip? Like, he's just the man. And, yeah, very, one of those rappers that's, like, you know, transcended into, like, this bizarre avant garde artist world where he's been an influence for a lot of people. So it's, it's awesome and hilarious that they got little b to come out and meet the robot.
Speaker 1:And they've done a couple other weird things where I think they put a Neo with, like, Kaisenaut or something or Oh. Or IshaSpeed or something. That
Speaker 2:was quite strategic. Gotta if I'm going along if I'm gonna go along a humanoid robot company
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:They actually are doing all the right things.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, how do you become part of any of that culture? Winner if you're just, like, normie thinking about who's gonna win. And then figures running this very, like, corporate partnership, like, you know, oh, what's the pure play asset? Almost like, how would a financial manager see building a portfolio around the future?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Well,
Speaker 1:they need robotics play and Tesla's too highly valued and you're not getting a pure play, so you go for a figure. And then one x is like, we're just kids building this stuff. And it's like, awesome.
Speaker 2:We're having fun on the Internet.
Speaker 1:I love it. I love it.
Speaker 2:We should, we should reach out to them and see if we could get a one x that that could just sit here and be the their cohost. Stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That'd be great. This is, yeah. Here here here's the here's the Kysonaut one. This startup used Kysonaut's streams to go insanely viral, but no one no one is paying executed before our eyes.
Speaker 1:They do streams with the Twitch streamer. Product is a core part of the content, not just a lame integration. The goal is to set up as many clippable moments with the product as possible. Pay Discord kids 30¢ CPM. Yes.
Speaker 1:You saw that right. To farm TikTok clips from the streams. They're all competing to win the budget allocation as fast as possible. 50,000,000 views guaranteed at 30¢ CPM. So, yeah, very interesting.
Speaker 1:It it's crazy because, like, it's, like, it's not a concern are you bored? Why are you playing Tetris?
Speaker 2:I just like the sound I like the soundtrack. It's hilarious.
Speaker 1:That's great. But, yeah, I mean, I I mean, there's so many moment
Speaker 2:for mod retro.
Speaker 1:There's so many there's so many underrated pieces of this. Like, partnering with the Twitch streamer is is very, like, new age. Like, your whole career was, like, with the YouTube stuff. Yeah. The Twitch streamers, it's, like, much harder
Speaker 2:I tried to I it was always hard to do integrations on Twitch. I I did I would do a bunch of I would do a bunch of stuff with with Ridge back in the day, but I'd tell a Twitch streamer, okay, we're gonna sponsor this entire month of content Yeah. And, like, every hour bring it up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But it's weird.
Speaker 2:It's kinda weird. It doesn't it's not it's Yeah. It's not it makes sense that the streamers have figured out this, like, tipping oriented model, which is extremely lucrative if you get it right. Yeah. Because it's not a really good ad format.
Speaker 1:And so for one x, I mean, humanoid robot is, like, the most inherently viral product you could possibly be building right now. The question is just like
Speaker 2:I've I'm we're we're I'm working with a portfolio company that I won't name yet, but we're gonna be able to go. We're they're gonna give it a gun.
Speaker 1:Oh, sassy.
Speaker 2:And, we're gonna be able to go make some some content. Yeah. I want to I mean, I think I think we should. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think we should like.
Speaker 1:And we're doing it.
Speaker 2:It's easy to predict. Real. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You can predict the future. No, we.
Speaker 2:This is in the future. They're like, they make their, like, list of 10 predictions and then they just create the AI agents and do all of them. And they're like, wow. I went 10 for 10 this year.
Speaker 1:Like, 2025 prediction, a tech podcaster will bench press £260. It's great. This is this is funny and somewhat related to that mod retro. Sam Lesson says the most expensive computer per unit of compute in the world, and it's a TI 83 plus graphing calculator for $75.
Speaker 2:Did you ever program these?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I I had so much fun. Some of my best memories
Speaker 1:That's where I learned
Speaker 2:basic math. My dad was a a high school math teacher, and I had his class. Yeah. So I would just sit programming games.
Speaker 1:Did you ever did you ever have party? Do you remember this one?
Speaker 2:Well, which one was that?
Speaker 1:Maybe this was just at my high school, but, basically, someone created a text based game, where it was, like, choose your own adventure and had a couple different paths, but it was about going to a party. So I I remember this.
Speaker 2:I love I love parties.
Speaker 1:So it was like it was like you go to this high school party, and it was like, what do you wanna do? Like, do you wanna drink? Do you wanna flirt? And, like, one of them was like, you could actually get laid. And then I I I remember the text would pop up.
Speaker 1:It would be like, you bask in the sweaty afterglow, which is just, like, hilarious. And this this sweaty afterglow, like, sticks in my mind to this day. And it's funny because, like, my my high school was, like, very nerdy both from, like, a computer science perspective, but also, like, really, really crazy with the English. And so clearly, this kid who programmed this thing was if it happened in my high school, I don't even know if it did. It might have just gone viral.
Speaker 1:But, clearly, you know, he was, like, in, you know, in an English class and read some Shakespeare and heard Afterglow.
Speaker 3:It was
Speaker 1:like, I'm gonna put this in the game. Yeah. But then you could go in and edit the program and you could change the name. So it's like, oh, you run into your boy, Jordy, there or whatever.
Speaker 2:It was, like, really fun. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and it all it all required having this cable, the connector cable. Yep. And nobody had these by default because they wouldn't ship with them. Now I guess they do. And then you could have your game and you could pass it along.
Speaker 1:It was, like, the first example of, like, vitality, basically. And there there were a bunch of other games that you could, like, put in. You could also cheat and put note cards
Speaker 2:in there
Speaker 3:and stuff.
Speaker 2:Snake? I'm trying to remember. You could you could You
Speaker 1:put snake in there, Tetris a
Speaker 2:little bit. No one's not great. I just thought it was the coolest thing that I could program my calculator. Yeah. That was supposed to be just for
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Doing math computation, and I could program it so I could play Yeah. Games.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, a lot of those games are, like, a little bit too much to program as, like, a high schooler. But Yeah. The little, like, you know, you start out with just, like, the if I press, you know, the the the number one key, it spits out some text. Like, that's very easy to get into, and then you start leveling up and do an if statement with a couple of different things, and all
Speaker 3:of a
Speaker 1:sudden, you've built, like, this text game. Good times with the TI 83.
Speaker 2:After I after I, went through my programming, my TI eighty four era, I would, I would I got into d dosing my dad's website, which would host the homework on it. So I'd be running this, like, Windows machine in our house, like, in the corner, like, my room, just like d my dad's website. I always had these visions of, like, people, like, busting down the door being, like
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because of my
Speaker 1:I mean, I I ran into something similar where, my dad had a server where you could just, like, store files. It was basically, like, an FTP server, like, precursor to Google Drive by, like, a lot like, 10 years or something. So it was like, if you wanted to put something on the Internet, you just upload a upload a file there. And and he'd use it for work and, like, little things, like, host a website on the server. And he just had a buddy that gave it to him and didn't charge him on like a on like a consumption basis.
Speaker 1:So it wasn't it wasn't like, oh, they use this much bandwidth, so we're gonna charge you this much. It was just like pay monthly and I'll just let you have the server.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I got access to it and I was really big in the Counter Strike community. And so, what I figured was, like, the big thing in the Counter Strike community at the time was, like, these, like, vibe reels, basically. This is, like, going back to my old editing days. Basically, what you do is you take, like, highlight reels, like, from all the best Counter Strike players, and you cut together, like, their greatest hits. And then you export them, put them put, like, some sick music over it.
Speaker 1:The biggest one was called Fragg or Die. Yeah. And it was, like, iconic. And so, if you could get into one of those, it, like, canonized you as, like, one of the greatest players of all time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so what I realized was that, people needed video editing skills, and I could do that. And then people also needed hosting. And so I was like, I'll edit this one if I can put myself in it.
Speaker 2:And they're
Speaker 1:like, yeah. It's fine. And so I wasn't as good, but I had, like, 1 or 2 good highlights.
Speaker 3:It's
Speaker 1:bangers. And so I put myself in this thing. It's like Fraggard I 2 or some sequel to this thing. And, and I and I host it, and then the link goes out on IRC. Do you remember Internet relay chat?
Speaker 1:This was like a precursor. It's what Slack is like copying, basically. Basically.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:These are channels and then people post it. And it just starts going viral and people download this, like, massive video file. This is before YouTube. And and and it's like and everyone's like, dude, like, thank you, bro. Like, you hooked it up.
Speaker 1:Like, everyone got to see this video because of you. Like, this is so tight. I'm, like, sick. I'm, like, a king in this community. Like, this is amazing.
Speaker 1:Like, everyone's recognized me for my counter strike skills. And then, like, you know, a week later, my dad comes in and is just like, what the fuck did you do? Like like like but I I the I like, this guy, he's
Speaker 2:gonna charge me now. Like, this is a crazy bill.
Speaker 1:I I don't know if he actually I don't know if the bill actually, like, passed through, but he he was like, it's not unlimited anymore. Yeah. Yeah. I I am rate limited now because of you, but also, like, probably, like, somewhat proud because it's like you did something cool hacker.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Volume. Volume.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I had a viral banger.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You
Speaker 1:know, you you you don't hate the player. Hit the game. Yeah. But no longer. Now you just uploaded to TikTok.
Speaker 1:Kids have it easy.
Speaker 2:Too easy. Anyway,
Speaker 1:Let's move on to time.
Speaker 2:One more. We got a promote of posts by our friend Red Bull Futurist. He has created something called the Red Bull Micro Grant Fund, and they are actively deploying capital. It's very simple. If you're doing something cool, you post about it and, I think you just have to it doesn't say here, but you just have to do hashtag, Red Bull Fund and they will send you $4 to buy a Red Bull.
Speaker 2:Doesn't matter what you're doing. It's gotta be cool.
Speaker 1:Wait. That's what it is? Yeah. It's $4.
Speaker 2:It's $4.
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 2:So they got micro grants. So if you're listening to this, go do something cool and when you need a Red Bull post about it and What is Justin Mears again?
Speaker 3:It's like
Speaker 1:a 1,000 or a couple grand?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's I think it's, like, 2 grand. 2 grand.
Speaker 1:So you got the Thiel Fellowship with a with a 100 grand? Grand. Then you got Justin Mears with 2 grand. $4.
Speaker 2:So next time you're in a pinch and you need a Red Bull, they will send you $4. Just make sure you're doing something cool. I don't wanna see any non non cool No.
Speaker 1:You need to do something epic.
Speaker 2:Maybe doing something Hit a p r. Hit a p r in the gym.
Speaker 1:Push some sick code, build a demo, stay up all night, learn a new programming language.
Speaker 2:And this is the Internet at
Speaker 1:its at its best. It's it's fantastic. That that that
Speaker 2:should be more viral than anything. This is like us. We we have, like, the the TV dom fund. Yeah. There's a
Speaker 1:couple couple
Speaker 2:brothers in the community. Yeah. And, yep. You you know, if if you're really in need, we'll drop you off a bottle of Dom.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's do one more bucket pull, and then we'll close out with, this banger and get out of here.
Speaker 2:Tonight. Too long. Too
Speaker 1:that one's kind of boring. Let's see. I I want something that's, like, you know, fun and easy.
Speaker 2:It's not a straight raffle.
Speaker 1:No. We're going through it. Oh, this is a good one. I like this one. Signal.
Speaker 1:Great poster. Scarlett Johansson was perfectly positioned to be the definitive voice of AI. If she'd leaned in, she could have been the de facto interface for the future of human computer interaction, a living cultural artifact embedded in the tech itself. Truly an f tier career move, and the magnitude of the missed opportunity will only grow as AI becomes more central to daily life. Imagine the royalties too.
Speaker 1:Insane fumble. It's a great concept.
Speaker 2:I I remember when the whole thing went down, Altman posted her couldn't help himself, and then it all came out that
Speaker 1:Who posted it? Was it rude on his account? Who
Speaker 3:knows? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Who knows? Ghostwriter that day. But, but, yeah, I do I do think the signal seems right. Like, what would be the downside to Scarlett Johansson of have of of, like, having her voice?
Speaker 2:And I'm trying to think about I can see her just being post economic and not caring and being like, I don't want a lot of people using mine.
Speaker 1:I mean, there there is plausible downside where it's like you get it to say something bad, and it sounds like it's her. Yeah. And or or or or or it's just like, oh, people start using it to to
Speaker 2:voice their own. Anymore, though?
Speaker 1:Yeah. She's in the Marvel Universe. So, like, they're constantly cranking out sloth.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I'm sure they were. Questions not
Speaker 3:like it's
Speaker 2:not like Okay.
Speaker 1:Well, now you can generate her voice perfectly. Like, maybe the next time that there's an animated movie, she doesn't get the deal. Like, of course, like, that's not really gonna pencil out because that licensing deal is gonna be different than, like, you're not just gonna be able to use a cloned voice in a real Hollywood production, but there's always, like, the fear of that and, like, okay. Maybe the YouTube videos and, like, the
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You can already if you wanna clone her voice, you can do it.
Speaker 1:You can do it.
Speaker 2:Well, clearly, OpenAI did it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But, yeah, I I I agree with signal here that, like, it would have been amazing to actually get it done, but it's not too late. Like, she could still go in and say Yeah. Hey. Instead of this, like, lawsuit, why don't we work together?
Speaker 1:But Yeah. I wonder
Speaker 2:if that's still Oh,
Speaker 1:it's totally possible. Totally possible.
Speaker 2:Oh, no. No. I meant, like, I wonder if they they've resolved the lawsuit.
Speaker 1:Settled it. Yeah. I mean, honestly, like, when I heard the the her voice, I think it was a lot of people just pattern matching off the the the tweet because I didn't actually think like, oh, this I'm talking to Scarlett Johansson. Like, yeah, it it did not seem that close. It seemed more, like, generic.
Speaker 1:And, like like, most of these LLM, most of these AI things, they they feel very, like, the average of everything. Yep. Every answer feels like the average of everything. And then the New York Times gets upset and says, like, oh, it's exactly like this. It's like, well, it's kinda like the average of you and the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post and The Economist.
Speaker 1:Like, it's all blended together in the soup and that's, like, what the math is doing. And so I don't know. I I'd like to see her do it. I think it'd be a good, good win for her. But let's finish with this banger of all time, 1,000,000 views, 56 k likes by, Soukag Slore.
Speaker 1:I don't know how to pronounce that. But,
Speaker 2:5 over 5 percent like rate.
Speaker 1:At a million.
Speaker 2:At a million
Speaker 1:is But it makes sense because it's a great post. They say, the amount of locking in about to be done in 2025 will feed generations. And I couldn't agree more.
Speaker 2:That's that's the craziest part of the algorithm today. Yeah. Is you can just seemingly small accounts. You can just post something that seems like it should be like a good post. Yeah.
Speaker 2:A 100 likes. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. And you can run it up to Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's
Speaker 3:a real
Speaker 1:it's a real testament to, like, how popularized these, like, brain rock words are. Yeah. Lock in is, like, kind of a new term. Like, I think that really popped off, like, last year. It's, like, fairly new and, like
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's not like it's in the dictionary yet and, like, it's not been used in movies or anything, but it's been so popularized on the Internet. It's just, like, yeah, everyone gets it and everyone likes it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But I agree. 2025 is gonna be a fantastic year. Lock in
Speaker 2:The locking in that you do today will benefit your great grandchildren
Speaker 3:I agree.
Speaker 2:If you do it right.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So do it. Do it. Do it, brother.
Speaker 1:Thanks for watching.