TBPN - The Vail Strike, Jordi Flees to Europe, Microplastics Everywhere, Ramp Sky Lounge

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Jordi, why did you leave America last week? What went wrong in your life? It's less expensive to go to Europe these days to go skiing. So is something going, do you have to tell me something about your finances? What's going on? Trying to save a buck by going to Europe for New Year's. Yeah, that's a good question.

I kept, as I was going on the trip, I kept asking myself, why am I going all the way across the world to go stay at the Amman for New Year's to go skiing and they just something was drawing me and almost as soon as I got there the strike started in Park City and I was like this is why I went out here it wasn't to save 80% on the lift tickets yeah because that 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 pass. Yeah. There you go.

Are you sure it wasn't like you have some sort of hero complex where you're like they've been at zero GDP growth for years, but I'm going to go. Yeah, that's the thing. I can fix her Europe. You 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 this lot.

You come over there. You inspire the truth. If you love the economy, like you have to take it upon yourself to stimulate it. Yeah. To grow it. And so yeah, yeah. part of it was like, can I, am I, can I put up numbers? Yeah.

One conversation with the right European over there. Going to change everything. Yeah, yeah. You inspire them. No, I had, I had an amazing trip. It was great. Left the kids with, with the grandmas. That's great.

And, yeah, had a, had a fantastic time. A lot of skiing. I did. So last episode we recorded, John was deeply ill with the plague. and within maybe five hours after recording, I had the plague. So this is the plague zone. If you step up to the table with an illness, it's probably going to get churred around.

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 were going to maybe record remotely. It just didn't happen. It was like the worst week of my life then not being able to record.

Totally. So miserable. 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 now we're blessed to be able to record five days a week. It's fantastic. 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 1960s. They made just shy of $3 billion last year. The net income was two. $2.30 million. 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 private equity deal, but after Apollo sold, a former Apollo executive ran the company as CEO for nearly two decades. Recently, the company has 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 departure from when the company started, the founder was a World War II 10th Mountain Division ski trooper. 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?

Is it Vail? It's Vail Resorts, baby. Nailed it. We're doing a deep dive on Vail today and all things skiing. Jordy's back from skiing and we're going to take you through some great tweets and some articles. And of course, the Vail Resorts 10K because we got to go to the source if we want to know what's going wrong at Vail. Ooh, net income. Looking rough.

I mean, it really is down. In 2022, they had 370 million of net income. In 2023, they went down to 285. And then in 2024, they had 245, 246. It's been rough. I mean, not an easy business to run, but an important business. Important business. It matters a lot.

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 tea than skiing. With skiing, it's DEI? 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. 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. You fall and you can't breathe,

and there are sharks. Very funny. I love the baldos in the replies here saying, wait until the VCs see this one. And yeah, it's true. Proof skiing, it's a little bit easy. Yeah, I mean, 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 posted that, yeah, I got 3,000 likes. 3,000. I posted that. And a lot of, you know, when something blows up, it goes to parts of X 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.

And I sent that from, like, I sent that from the Amman in the Alps where my wife is, like, 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. 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 up.

And I'm like, this is the most barnyard codist. Yeah, it is. I mean, it's the, the predator animal is the one who hunts for the best powder with the helicopter. Yeah. very clearly, like an eagle descending upon the mountain top and taking powder for their own. Yep. Rejecting conformity. It's great.

I just want to give you a little bit more color on Vail. There's a good post by Andrew Bracken here. This is from two years ago. We're going back in the timeline. He says, off to meet some retina doctors at a meeting in Vail, Colorado. It's 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 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, Vail Mountain offers some of the most expansive and varied terrain in North America with approximately 5,300 skiable acres, including seven world-renowned back bowls. It's basically like Disneyland, the Disneyland, ski resorts. Yes. And this is what's so fascinating me out, Vail.

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. Amazing. He, like, everything is about, oh, capitalism is so broken. Capitalism is so broken. And it's like, bro, you're, like, watch collector. Watch collector.

Like, just be a capitalist. Yeah. But, but that's the one thing. His watch collection is the one thing that's keeping him from, like, having, like, a communist revolution. Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. But yeah, in this video, it's breaking down, like, oh, like, you know, these, like, ski companies 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 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. Like, it would suck. Like, it would be kind of cool to, like, you know, just be someone who built a family in Vail and, like, had a great life. Veil was never a town. It literally was never a town. It was like these guys went

searching for, they were like mountaineers. They went and 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. Well, it used to be part of Texas. Oh yeah. So Max, Max Meyer brought this to my, uh, 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 of how Vail used to be a part of Texas.

So yeah, Texas, it gets kind of mugged by its own history. Like it's got this like, you know, bravado, this attitude. Oh, yeah, don't mess with Texas. But Texas used to be a lot bigger. Yeah. You're smaller than you've ever been, Texas. If you're not claiming land, you're shrinking. You're basically shrinking.

I was talking trash about. Denmark because they're talking a big game about not selling Greenland to America. And I was like, you guys sold this the British, the U.S. Virgin Islands. You guys sold all your trading posts in India. Yeah. And you were talking to big game then. Yeah. They're just negotiating.

Yeah. Denmark is shrinking. They're negotiating with the best negotiator. The guy who literally wrote the art of the deal. Yeah. It's like throwing out all the, it's over. It's over. I'm going to Greenland without a passport.

Yeah. 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. Yeah, what happened there? I love 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 so regulated that they can't? Maybe or I don't know, just got sick of it or something. But I went back and found this tweet from 2021 March and says, watching Finn Twit. She could move the market, by the way. she came back online and just like posted like a ticker like it would probably We got to get in touch and get it back on. This is part of our life's work here on the show. Watching FinTwit 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. 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 epic pass has just grown and grown and grown and become this like monster uh share of their revenues i'm pretty sure there's something like over 50% of their like lift revenue yeah here it is um so the lift

lift related revenue mix in 2008 it was 26% passes in 2020. In 2020, it was 62% passes. Yeah. And so the epic pass lets you go to any of their mountains, which now include 42 destination mountain resorts. So this is a lot of, there's some other person here basically saying like this is like classic, like big corporate greed,

all the stuff. Like, you know, the epic pass 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. Sometimes I'd get that.

other, you know, my great-grandfather, I don't know if we ever talked about this, help build Mammoth Mountains. Oh, cool. And ran the gondola at Mammoth for, for, like, 50 years. And maybe not 50, like, more like, no, I think around 50. Anyway, long time. I try and keep it, like, just strictly business on the show. So whenever you talk about your family, in one year or the other.

Just kind of zone out. Because, as we've said, we're not besties. No, but, but, yeah, yeah, we are not friends strictly. This is about delivering the news daily. Yep. And nothing else. Yep. But, but, yeah, so growing up, like, you know, you'd go, I'd go to Squaw for a while, I'd go to

mammoth. But the tradeoff of getting a season pass growing up, my experience was you had to be so committed to a single mountain. And just oftentimes, like, unless you had a house or a condo in that area or that was just the resort you went to, it, it was not so great of a deal for the average skier. Prices were also lower from day past. but now the Epic Pass is like such a good product right like if you want to ski a lot yep at more than one place it's just a phenomenal product 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 to become like they're either Epic Pass crew or icon pass which is the rival one and if you're on the epic pass you're on the epic pass you're you 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 even go to Whistler in Canada.

That was a billion-dollar deal that they paid for that. And Whistler is insane. I mean, I'm not like a complete skiing official. And the other thing, the other thing is you can subscribe to it on a monthly basis. So you're able to take a cost for a lot of people was like this big one-time purchase.

and you're just like permanently paying them whatever 100 bucks a month. But it makes skiing so much more accessible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like literally cheaper to get access to 42 of the greatest ski resorts of all time for a third of the price of your Equinox membership. Yeah, yeah. And so a little bit of the history, we alluded to it. But, you know, Vail started as this kind of like crazy idea by these two founders

who were like literally World War II mountaineers. Like just mountain guys. They built this up. They eventually sell it to, to another guy, Vail Associates. And then that guy got saddled up with debt during kind of the 80s, early 90s,

junk bond era. The debt became too big. They went bankrupt. Apollo came and recapitalized the business, wound up taking them public. Apollo was in from 97 to 2003, I think, Leon Black. and then the private equity guy who worked at Apollo

became the CEO and had a 20-year run. And so you can see that there is a little bit of this private equity mindset of like let's figure out. How do we turn this into a subscription? So what was that guy's name, the Apollo guy? Rob Katz. So Rob must be licking his chops the last couple weeks, right? 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, I think like, so taking a small step back, 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 a family member who is running.

So my great grandpa, World War II vet, all these guys are go to war, they come back, they decide to, like, build ski resorts. It's very hard undertaking, but easier than, than, um, 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 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 and the failure rate like literally cannot be. Yeah, has to be zero. It has to be zero, right?

So you get one, and there are some videos out there. You can find videos where like a lift like reverses and it just starts going down like backwards, like in opposite direction. It's just like terrifying. Terrifying. 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, 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 need some like huge gear that's probably custom machined or milled. And then it needs to be delivered and installed in the middle of the ski season. You need helicopters and stuff. And then 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. And then to make it even more challenging, you're not even running it year round. You're running it whatever for five months out of the year during the harshest possible conditions, freezing temperatures. weather, all this stuff.

So the fact that ski resorts, you know, the last like a couple weeks were a disaster in Park City, but the fact that there aren't more disasters is honestly pretty amazing. It is. It is a testament to how good in general we've gotten in operating. I read a big article in Bloomberg about Vail's work in the Northeast. So Vail, you know, started with just this one amazing destination. Then they bought Park City, which we're going to go into a lot of a Tahoe ski resorts, Whistler is like massive and huge and iconic,

but then they bought a bunch of stuff on 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 want to get out there. And so 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, but there's going to need to be significant capax that goes into the business. And so at this one ski resort called Adetash, I think it's called, Aditash. They needed to replace the chair, the chair lift that went up to the top of the mountain, like the main chairlift, took 17 minutes and it was like really cold and like completely unprotected.

They want to put it in gondola that would go twice as fast. And they, because of like COVID and all these delays, they missed the season and they didn't get installed until like halfway through the season because they needed to get helicopters up there to like put 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 like you know we wanted this to be nice missed half the season missed half the season but they did actually wind up getting it in and it's an interesting like you know battle between like the locals and of course like whenever something goes wrong

everyone's like very opinionated and vocal about it but 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 going to be there during ski week and winter break. Yep. And maybe one other week during the year. And they're just there as like sort of tourists that, uh, don't care as much about costs and all this 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. And in, in, in some,

ways that I think the epic pass at like $1,200 a year to get access to 40 plus resorts. Is it $1,200 a year? I think it was like 500. No, no, I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure it's $1,200 for like the tough. But, but it's not in the context of like, yeah, yeah, it's not in the context of like the fact that if you're just buying a day pass, it's like $250. Yeah, it's also just like like what, what are the, uh, what are the substitutes for skiing? Like there just really aren't any. Like I kind of went through. You can walk.

I mean, I guess you can go like scuba diving. That's a funny. Yeah. 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. 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. 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 a well-willed organization. Got one from Katie Erzog here. She says, I always like flying into Vail because I get to see the latest developments in plastic surgery. And this is top of mind for me because it's. in Corcherville, where I was for the last couple weeks. I was noticing this interesting dynamic where tons of lip filler usage.

And lip filler seems to have this sort of like antimimetic property where if you notice somebody has lip filler, it means that they've used way too much. And so they literally look like, sort of like pig-like. It's insane. You know, they're showing their, like, it's really bad and horrifying. But at the same time, for every one woman that you notice that has way too much lip filler, there's like five others that use just like a subtle amount.

And maybe you're like, oh, she looks nice or whatever. And so it's this interesting thing where lip filler is constantly getting this terribly negative advertising yet it continues on. Yeah. Plastic surgery is like a good defensive cornerback. Like you only notice it when they're fucking up. Right? Yeah, yeah. That's a good example, John.

The good deback? Yeah, I don't know much about sports. You're not noticing them. Because he's shutting down, he's a shut down corner. You could say that's like, like put it in business context. Exactly. Right. Like it's a good controller.

Yeah, exactly. Like nobody's like, nobody, you know, the controller never gets like the fame, the fortune, 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. Yeah. Like the controller like, yeah, who knows? They're just doing their job. Just solid controller. Most people couldn't even name the controller at Apple or Facebook or Google because they're just doing their job.

So let's get into the actual drama that erupted over the last weekend. This is what, T.F. 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. Super pissed. That's like the most, 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. And I hope they burn in hell. Going hard. So the funny,

so the other thing that's interesting, super long lines. Back in, back in like the, the 60s and 70s, it was very routine to wait like an hour plus for every single lift. Yeah.

So you'd go skiing for the day and you'd maybe get like five runs because you were just in lines like the entire time. And so we've gotten very spoiled recently with our express chairs, gondolas, like you're not, you're not, if a line is like 10 minutes, you're like annoyed. Yeah. This is like taking like too long. They've mostly gotten crazy. Some of the footage coming out of Park City was like truly wild. It looked like the Lily Phillips like her, you know, that that UK, the UK porn star who's like. Oh, yeah.

It looked like the line for like the worst analogy possible. No, somebody else. Somebody else posted that. They were like, is this like a line for Lily Phillips next video? Yeah. And so people start diagnosing the problems. Wilmanitis 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 Vail for two decades. So going to have to put that one on the truth zone will, not quite right. And then Andrew Reed is hypothesizing why things might be going wrong at Vail. He says, when you learn Vail Resorts, CMOs, prior job was 10 years at Comcast. Everything clicks into place. That's a deep dive.

He looked up the CMO. He really, he must have been on the ground. in Colorado or Utah. I mean, he's wearing ski gear in his profile picture. Yeah, yeah. I think this guy is a real skier. Real skier. They're probably, you know,

Sequoia partner digging in, understanding what's going on. Yeah. I love it. But I want to go through this, this deep dive of the story of how Vail acquired Park City, but what else you got for me right now?

I mean, Dan Loeb, some other people are talking about. Like, I think what on the surface, the headline number was the ski patrol just wanted an extra $2 an hour. Yeah, $23 instead of $21. Yeah, going from $21 to $23. It's like, but a burger costs $25 in town. So like, it's not reasonable. And this guy, Ben Bortner responded to Dan Loeb's post and said, it is surprising they have 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 stuff, Ben. Way to, you know. We've dealt with our own, our editors trying to unionize over and over, but we're 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, right? It's $192,000 a year.

This company does hundreds of millions of dollars 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, basically shut down the brand over a, over a single dispute. And I believe T.J. Parker gets into this a little bit, but he says, my guess is this is the primary blocker in the veil 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 one group of employees at one 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 and attract skilled patrollers. One proposed solution is offering health care stipends to allow patrollers to maintain year-round coverage without switching providers every six months. So, yeah, I think this, this is 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 going to move to this small town just for the winter or I'm going to 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. 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 want to be able to be a ski bum, but I want, I also want year-round benefits. And that was never sort of the promise of that lifestyle, right? Yeah, yeah. But now people can say, well, okay, like your veil resorts.

you're this huge, huge public company, you know, you deserve, you should be, you know, the point of view is you should maybe provide this kind of benefits for, but I don't know that it's,

the thing that ultimately, um, uh, I saw that in the, in the, some of the messaging they were saying, you know, you're doing these big,

you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of buybacks and all this stuff. Shouldn't you just, um, shouldn't you just, um, you know, pay your people more. Yeah.

And you said, you said, if I wasn't, if I, if I, John Coogan was negotiating for these ski patrolers, I'd be like, give me some of that sweet stock base comp. That's true. Yeah. You're saying, you know, that, the $2 extra, don't, don't just go for $2 cash. Yeah, an equity program would be great here. Go for $2 of stock could easily turn into. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is interesting because that, that math makes it look so small. but if you actually look at their 10K, Vail as a whole across all 42 mountains, the lift revenue was $1.4 billion, and the labor and labor-related benefits was $730 million.

And so it's by far their biggest cost, twice their GNA, twice their other. Well, yeah, and the ski patrollers are a small at this one resort. Yeah. Are a cog in the machine, but then you have people that do ski lessons. which are different. People that just lift operators.

Yep. People that do lift. The lift operators are the people 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 lifts. And then you have like the mountain operations. And then you have the guys that do the cats at night. Yeah. Then you have the guys that do the 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 the people that do the rentals and then the people that do parking. 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 right yeah 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 going to be like well what are you doing like you already own like the you already have the Disneyland yeah of skiing and 40 other resorts how are you not yeah a real business. Yeah, I do wonder if there's other things that they could do to lower the cost for the employees because Vail has, like, an apartment in Vail is like $2,500 a month, which is very expensive if you're just like a ski patroler, but they have a whole bunch of like corporate apartments

that are 500 bucks a month. So, but I don't think they build enough of those maybe. So they 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? This is really interesting. So the highway that goes through. I guess people complain about road noise. And I think that maybe during snow, it's tricky.

So they're thinking about burying it, basically. But it's like a multi-billion 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 going to happen. It's been in the plan for like 40 years in their general plan. Yeah.

But yeah, should we move on to the story of when Vail stole Park City? That's pretty interesting. So grit capital, great poster. 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.

But hey, it's almost ski season, and who doesn't love a cautionary tale about the costs of administrative airs? 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 1950s crash. It was barely a thousand. people by the decades end. Skiing started as miners with 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 sort of lit. In the 1970s, Park City ski area, released the terrain

from the U.S. from the United Park City Mines in a lease of only 155K 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, it's fascinating. It's actually so funny to think about somebody, like, writing up a 100-year lease for property, and they're like, oh, what's a fair price?

Like, 150 grand a year, like, thinking it's like this, like, like, there's good. There's no way. There'll be a mass of inflation in the future. And then in 20, yeah. I guess it's good screwed. This would become Park City Mountain Resort, one of three resorts in the immediate area, alongside skier-only Deer Valley and third-place canyons. In 1994, PCMR, that's Park City Mining Resorts or something.

Park City Mountain Resort was acquired by Powder Corp, a new company started by John Cumming. John was in his early 20s and had already created the Mountain Hardware brand, later acquired by Columbia Sportswear. And there's some nice photos of... What a Chad. He's in his early 20s? Well, these are ads from his product, I believe. Oh, he's 28.

In his early 20s, he had already created the Mountain Headwear brand, which he sold in his 30s or 40s in 2003. But he was an entrepreneur. And so 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 O2 Olympics, which were there. The company ran a decentralized town-friendly model and reportedly had less than 40 corporate employees. And there's a big question about these

like, where the corporation. 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. The success wasn't entirely unprecedented. Powder had the backing of John's father Ian, who founded Lucidia, now merged with Jeffrey, 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 billion when Ian retired in 2013. Damn. Damn. Nepo, baby. Let's go.

Putting the family money to work buying ski resorts. Let's go. I was like seeing this headline, it's like this, he's 28 and he owns Park City. Meanwhile, his dad's running like a multi-billion dollar. Let's go. That's, I mean, that's why if your dad or your mom is wildly. successful, the bar is not, it's just astronomically higher. Yeah.

Like you need to own an asset like Perk City by the time you're 28 or you're a loser. 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 buy and build a much cooler asset. Yeah. And that's pretty awesome. Yeah.

And so it's like, yeah, you're not. Buy a NASCAR team. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you're not the $7 billion hedge fund guy, but you own Park City. That's saying. Yeah.

Meanwhile, Park City's ugly step sister 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 one million at Park City. A Canadian real estate company, Talisker land holdings, would acquire canyons in 2007, beating out Rising Colorado Powerhouse Vale 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. 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 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 whitewater

rafting. Relations with neighboring Talisker seemed friendly with discussions on property and infrastructure investments, including a potential lift connection between the results. Talisker was even landlord for PCMR's Upper Mountain, having inherited the long-term lease from UPCM. 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 two days late, things seemed fine, paying their fee and investing $7 million in upgrades. Clearly, it seemed, Talisker didn't mind the slight miss. 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 $7.7 million annually, TCMR's base facilities were turned over at the end of the lease. So jump from 150K to 7.7 million. And they're pissed. Powder was in so many words pissed. They filed a lawsuit against 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 Vale Resorts, who assumed the legal battle. Vail's like, let's go. I'll fight this out. No problem. The combined monster lease would total $25 million in annual fixed payment, plus 42% of EBITDA over $35 million.

And so the Canyon's resort is described here, 4,000 skiable areas, top 10 ranking and skiing outside magazines, attractive park city location, huge growth opportunities, et cetera. The opportunity for reconciliation was gone. The gloves were off. Vale, you'll recall, had lost. lost canyons to Talisker in 07 in that bidding war and have come back for the full enchilada. So they come back to buy it all.

Led by CEO Rob Katz pictured here, you got to look at a photo of this guy, total gigachad. Led by CEO Rob Katz, Vail was a known growing powerhouse in Colorado and California. They were beginning an assent. Few truly appreciated was coming. Park City was the first entree. And so Vail Resorts is expanding into Breckenridge, Keystone, Canyons, Heavenly, etc. The $305 million deal was 20x the estimated $15 million EBITDA canyons would bring in. The deal would only make sense if Vale got Park City as well.

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 180. $3 million, $5x, the incremental $35 million, ebidda. Vail, after connecting the resorts, had the largest ski resort in the United States racking a combined 1.5 million ski visits annually.

Got them. Got them. It would be a huge first salvo in an industry-defining acquisition spree, including the 2016 mega purchase of Whistler Blackcombe for $1.1 billion, and 2019 acquisition of 17 resorts from peak resorts. That's the Northeastern. stuff, I believe. Their scale surpasses anything previously seen in the industry. It is fascinating that this idea of like the mega ski conglomerate is something that really only started like five years ago. Or like 10 years ago maybe.

It used to just truly be all independent ski resorts. Yeah, I think the the reason that I, this last couple weeks of events, there's a lot of reasons. you know, people are posting the strike at 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 patrolers 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 frame it like that, it seems silly. But it's all about precedent, right? And again, it's not like bail 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 business, this is a labor of love, right? This is not the business that you get into because you just care about generating cash. Like it's not, it hasn't been. Three billion in revenue, 230 in net income, like 10% net income margin. It's not exactly like, and the stock is not grown over the last four years. Yeah, and there's not a lot of, it's not, that's the other thing.

It's not where does it go from here? The ski and I don't know how much bigger it's going to get. 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 how it's... The most interesting thing about the climate change thing is, I have this whole business school case study here, lifting the veil, largest U.S. snow sports resort operator takes on climate change.

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 10K, I don't know if I just missed it, but in the risk disclosures, 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 10K. Maybe I missed it. I don't know. But it's very, they're projecting a lot of interesting things. But, but and the, and, you know, 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 people that work in the industry have every right to be emotional

and be like charged up and and be frustrated with the corporate owners but if you think about it's like okay if you're a small like when these ski resorts were 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. And then, oh, what happens? Like, okay, the resort loses a bunch of money that year. You have to issue a bunch of debt. And so the idea of having a bunch of resorts that are spread out over 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 $1,000 a year,

you can get access to 40 of the most beautiful mountains on earth and get, to me, that value exchange is like such a great trade for the average consumer. That it's, that it's has to be frustrating running Vail being like, we're giving you guys for a thousand dollars 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 um so clearly not essential to life like it's purely for fun yep and you're still not happy it's like that's got to be a rough rough spot to yeah um i mean i honestly like it seems like they they poorly handled the last couple weeks but at the same time i feel for them because they're running a deeply challenging business yeah i mean if you look at this data um 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. There we go. I don't know if there's mountains there. Maybe we need to build some. Vail needs to go buy Greenland. Vail should buy Greenland. There we go. It'll become a country. But then it's like Russia and Mongolia, which are, you know, you're not going to build a good business there. But they're projecting out some moderate emission scenarios, and the current number of days below freezing at Park City in Utah is 194 per year, and by 2050-ish, they're projecting that that'll go down to about 150. So about a 25% decrease. So there is pretty significant pressure.

And the interesting thing about 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. They say Argentina, Chile, China, Chechia, Finland, Germany, Norway. Germany has very, very few ski resorts.

I didn't realize this, but there's this great chart in here of the countries with nine plus resorts operating at least five 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. Chile only has nine. And so if you think about where to expand Sweden, South Korea, Spain, Ukraine, there's a lot of interesting options here.

I heard at the Amman, there was 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. That's awesome. Let's finish the Vail acquisition story here. 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. And the pass revenue, which you'll see here, climbed from 78 million in 2008 to basically 800 million in in 2022 so at 10x growth and and that led to really incredible performance in the stock. If you look at 2008, the stock was under $25 a share by the end of 2021. It was up at $350. So 10x growth in in the past revenue, 10x growth in the stock. And that's almost all just to retooling the business model.

Yep. And obviously a lot of expansion. And the reason, I mean, the reason I just, again, I don't, I don't have that much. sympathy for the average person who 10 years ago they'd be buying a season pass to one of these resorts and it'd be like 500 bucks and now they pay $1,000 but they get access to 42 times as many mountains like I just don't feel that. Well it's just catering to a much more like coastal urban elite someone who doesn't live in the ski town it's probably a net like net positive overall but even the ski at the expense of the local yeah but yeah even the ski like

the true ski bums. Yeah. They still, if they go to Keystone and that's their mountain. Yeah. They still, they take advantage of these, of the epitaphs and they're like, oh, I'm going to go to Utah for a week. And like, yeah. And you can go off season and it's not that expensive to stay at like some little hotel.

I mean, the, um, the, the, you know, they, you, you posted a few times about the, the cost of skiing in Europe versus the United States and, and this, uh, Andy, Van Van denberg guy almost a year ago was saying, here's your annual reminder that because of Vail and Altera's duopoly,

it's cheaper to plan a week-long ski trip in Switzerland than Colorado. I don't think this is not purely because of the duopoly. It has always been significantly, you know, even prior to the,

to the Disneyification of American skiing. It was always quite a bit cheaper to go skiing in Europe. but but but again yeah i don't you know i mean 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 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 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. And there's further price discrimination. You know the funny thing about all those people waiting in that chair line, you can usually pay a ski instructor to take you right to the front and cut it. And so a lot of people will just do that.

It's like the Disney, like the Disneyification is real in the sense that like there's a fast pass. Yeah. There's a system for jumping, Yeah, and arguably, if the fast pass is an extra, if the main pass is a grand, the fast pass is like three grand, but you ski 50 plus days a year, just like do it. It's like not that.

Yeah. 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. It's like, he loves that lit. 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 Talisker, well, they're not doing so hot. After leasing to Vale, they hit Rocky Times with creditors and eventually forced foreclosure in 2015. It's likely that they're 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 18,000 skiable acres. Those plans already facing locals. Concerns died entirely when Vail moved in. I'm not exactly sure why. So, yeah, that was a long threat on a topic you might 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've heard some, as I was doing research on this, there were a lot of interesting quotes, especially about the Apollo buyout and some of the private equity deals that were quoted in that book. And that book has like some of the only interviews that happen 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. You got some more posts. I got one last thing we can end on from at the stalwart, Mr. Joe Wisenthal himself, he says, sort of 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? They get to go. Being 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, 4 p.m. is the earliest I can schedule Zoom. Yep. You go ski, incredible, like, you know, empty tracks all day long. You get back. You're pulling off your helmet. You're skiing here. You jump on the Zoom call. Sorry,

what's your company do again? and that's what it's all about. We were talking about Bryce how like, you know, he's networking in, where's in Deer Valley? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I was talking to 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? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So every VC firm is kind of organizing them and every, like, little group of, like, rich guys that 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. It feels like not working, but spending a full day with someone is always like a million times better than like five Zoom goals, right?

It's actually very productive. And then you'll remember, oh, yeah, we had that conversation like sitting outside having drinks after skiing and it was awesome. That's why skiing is more valuable. So skiing is wildly expensive. Yeah. but I think it's fairly priced for how incredible it is. Like we've joked about it a lot,

but it's some of my favorite memories as a kid was with snowboarding with my dad. You know, I was 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 five minutes later, you're sitting on a lift, you know, chit-chatting, talking.

it's worth every dollar and I would happily pay two, three times what it currently costs. Vale, if you're listening, no need to jack up the prices. I do have one little tidbit of advice and we can close out with any more posts that you have, 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. And so if you look at the history of Vail, the private equity guys have done very well.

And it seems like the ski patrollers have struggled. And it goes back to who has the financial leverage, who has the power there. And so a little less time on the slopes, a little more time in the sheets, in the spreadsheet. So obviously you're riffing a little bit, but I'll continue on that. I do think that today, in the nature of remote work, if you want to ski the most, if you want to, if you just care about skiing, you're still better off getting a fake remote job and living in a mountain town and just skiing constantly, then going and becoming a ski patrol person.

I know I have my industry is set up to cater to my person. my roommate in college, like, would have been a professional surfer. 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, getting absolutely barreled every single day. And it's like, he makes way more money than, like, the average pro surfer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And surfs, like, probably 50%, 60% as much. but like has a real career. And so if you're thinking about becoming a ski bomb... You can pay for gear, pay for coaches, pay for training. Yeah, you get to... Yeah, yeah. So if you're thinking about becoming a ski bomb, pivot to private equity, that is our...

I think that really is the good takeaway here from the mail story is like, get on the side of capital. Yep. Lover up. Lever up. Cool. Let's move on to some DMs, our Q&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. You want me just to go through this while you're there? Okay, Jordy's going to take a break, and we're just going to keep rolling. So the first thing we got was some lovely wallets from the Ridge. 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 one on my phone, and I realized that 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. And so carrying a Ridge wallet has actually become a status symbol if you work in e-commerce 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 to partner with MKBHD and launched all these products and really grown the business in a bunch of interesting ways and maintained an incredible amount of ownership over that business because they haven't raised any of the crazy suicide rounds

that other D2C companies. Yeah, they haven't raised a dollar. And they've just grown that business and grown it, grown it and grown it. And now it's doing, I think, hundreds of millions of dollars, right, Jordi? Hundreds of millions 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.

It's like the man's fidget spinner. The adult fidget spinner is just the knife that you can just like flick constantly. That's my class. Anytime I'm at a nice dinner and there's a steak knife, I pull it out and I start doing it and just freak everyone out. I'm like, I'm like good enough at it that I can like, I can. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's great. And this knife is handy because we have here Palmer Lucky's latest device,

the chromatic from Mod Retro. And so I'm going to pop this open. Do you already said I shouldn't open this because it's going to be a piece of, you know, technology history. But I think this one will be enjoyed. And maybe I'll pick up another one, keep it in the plastic. But the chromatic, if you're not familiar, Paul Marlucky. Go for it.

Oh, just started this second company. he's not busy enough with Anderle. Ooh, 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. This is such a throwback. It's so crazy. Man, what a treat. And so I believe there's something with like, the Game Boy came off of Patton or something like that.

And so he was able to recreate it. And if you think forward, I mean, this company raised some money. and at first I think people were skeptical like oh what you know what's the deal with like a game boy company like why do I why is that a good company um but if you think about like well then maybe the n64 comes off that yeah and people would love that maybe the PlayStation I would play the original metal gear solid on PlayStation I would play smash brothers on the original N64 and Mario 64 yeah another another bowl case is another bowl 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 another another bowl case is a multi I don't know what their market cap is today I'm assuming it's It's still like, yeah, they, they ripped and they continued to rip. This is amazing. And, but.

Listen to that. It fires up so fast. Let's go. It fires up so fast. That, that speaker is just so nostalgic. That sound is incredibly nostalgic. This is also. I'm just going to play this for the rest of the game.

All right. No, but anyway, so if GameStop is a $14 billion company in every single game, in the store you can just download. Yeah. This is the lifeline for GameStop. And so basically, I think that GameStop basically has to buy Mod Retro for a billion dollars. At least if I was an investor, that's my investment thesis. This is huge.

Which is like, what's the last kind of video game that you can buy in the store? And it's cartridges. Yeah. So. Also, I saw somebody bought, they make cartridges that are like, they have some sort of like new technology in there where it has like a thousand games on. So it's like a modern memory card inside. Well, yeah, and so here's the other, here's the other bowlcase is you have this iPad baby

generation. Yeah. We have children. Yep. I would much rather give our sons one of these on a road trip than the average iPad. Absolutely. Just going to be like, you know. Yeah.

And I was playing a game on PlayStation 5 over the, over the break with my son. And it was, it was awesome. He was about Astros, Robots, and it's kind of. kind of like PlayStation's Mario. So it's a platformer. You jump around. It's all really friendly, all really nice. There's some like puzzles and stuff.

But there's just too many buttons for him because he's three. And so he couldn't really figure it out. So he'd just watch 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. But I think he could actually learn how to play Tetris. And build a build quality on it. The build quality is amazing.

It's significantly, it's significantly. better. Oh, yeah. Because I have, so, so I think I mentioned recently, I have a, I have a game boy color that, um, that unfortunately that's like the Pikachu edition. And I looked it up and I was like, oh, if it's unopened. Or no, 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 bucks or something like

that. But this build quality of this is significantly better. It's so small too. I forget how amazing this device is. Like it's. And it's so. his 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 a good enough ideas guy to realize that, hey, you can just build a Game Boy color. Yeah, I love it. So, yeah, go pick one up. Tell him the technology brother sent you. We're very excited to have that. We also got some very cool merch from Rostra, Lulu's company. she sent us this amazing 3D printed rostra. Are you familiar with like what a roster is, Jordie? Hey, snap in. Are you playing?

I was playing. I'm sorry. It's so good, right? It's fun. It's like it comes back immediately. Yeah, yeah. It's so fun. Yeah, you get it.

Video games are addictive. Yep. Be careful with them. Yeah, the mod retro. Oh, man, I'm so excited for that thing. So, so roster is the name of Lulu Miservi's company. Yes. 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 an area where conversations could happen. A place to go direct. Yeah, exactly. The place to go direct.

And so she 3D printed this beautiful Rostra, and she also sent a fantastic quarter zip that I've been wearing. is extremely comfortable. I'm very into that. That's actually some of the only startup merch that I'm pissed that we didn't get two of. Yeah, I feel like she's mentioned that she was going to send two, but I'm going to get really frustrated.

Well, I happen to be drinking a Yerba Mata sent from Rob Moer. Okay, cool. Co-founder of Huberman Lab. Rob, thank you for sending. We have a lot of these now. Oh, fantastic. Yerrameh. this was a company that I don't know if Rob and Andrew are co-founders or their major investors in the company.

They're big proponents of YerbaMATA. Was it Andrew from Tiny? Andrew Wilkinson. I think he also invested. Yeah, yeah. It's cool. So anyways, these are fantastic. You can get them in heroin.

You get them online. Whole foods, I think, as well. And a fair amount of caffeine in there too, right? Yeah, I'm going to guess that we're putting up at least, yeah, 120. 120. So it's like two espresso shots. There we go. Could have like four or five of these and be good to go. Okay. Thank you.

Are we just going to keep, we got to keep going through. Yeah, what else do we have? We have a sweatshirt. We've gotten so much merch. We got, we know Christmas was big. Christmas was big for us and people know that we're willing to shill. We have, we're ready. Down to shill. We have a, the world's healthiest hoodie here from Superpower Labs is the edition one. And this hoodie has an entire, it has nutrition facts on the logo.

And it has zero Phaas or microplastics. So you do not, and it's completely toxin-free. And it even is more ecological. It uses 90% less water. and 45% fewer emissions, CO2 emissions than traditional cotton. So anyways, very nice, heavy hoodie. So thank you to superpower for keeping us warm this winter season. Yeah, yeah, that'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. But for the correct person, I'm sure that's a great choice. So I was having an apri ski moment in the Alps. and we were selecting like this this incredible steak from there's this this restaurant in the three valleys like resorts region called la secu la secu cool and it's really really known for its steak so we're we ski into this place and we spend all this time selecting a steak and 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 going to do this and he slaps the receipt right on top of the steak oh wait that was a real photo yeah it was a real photo oh my god uh he goes through all the hassle of like selecting this incredible piece of meat and he slaps the Phafos receipt but did he print on the backside print what like is there ink on the backside because it doesn't matter but it's i thought it was i thought it was a paper no no it's the ink i thought it was the thermo, I thought it was the paper itself. I think it's the ink that you want to watch it for. But anyways, whenever I 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. Yeah, I don't know if I don't know if that works. I think it works. 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 to bring it down and get closer to sort of baseline ability to be able to even focus and get anything done. But yeah, I just thought that was so funny. It's like goes through all the hassle of like selecting this incredible piece of me

and slaps their seat on it. That guy is not on right wing Twitter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay, let's go to some more, some more questions, some Q&A. Sarah says, what are your predictions for defense and industrial tech in 2025? Spicy takes are always welcome. So bare domestication.

Bear domestication does feel like it's getting closer to being a reality as opposed to just joke territory. Yeah. And I could see someone raising. Or the whole, oh, we're building autonomous, uh,

submarines. It's like, just say you failed at training dolphins. Yep. Yep. It's a good point. Just say you fail. It's a good point.

Uh, we also had another spicy prediction, which was that, uh, the total confirmed kill count of all defense tech companies would, uh, pass 100K in 2025. So that'd be a big milestone.

Yeah. Uh, what else? What, what, what seriously? I mean, seriously,

I think that, uh, The defense tech stuff, it's already been like a big tent since, like, defense tech. 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 there's certainly like a Gov tech company because they work with the government.

And so they're kind of in the defense tech world. And then Anderl's 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 and i think the argument of space x 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 they're icbms yeah the first rocket that elon tried to buy in russia were just decommissioned icbms yeah and they like

spat at him and then he started the company um but uh yeah i i i think it's always been kind of a big tent and And Druson did a little bit of that with American 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 kind of 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. And so you have companies like scale working with the government and then other like defense Lama. It's like, is a meta defense tech company now? 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. And because I think they're capital intensive, high dilution, similar skill sets. So I think a lot of the VCs that are like, okay, I have built a portfolio. I've built positions in all the big defense tech companies. is like I don't think there's going to 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, nuclear, wind power, solar, and then also just traditional oil and gas for just anything for a data center build out because wasn't there a number that like Microsoft's going to spend 80 billion? 80 billion. And so like that just seems kind of weak to me. BEC is going to jump on this, right? Honestly, the 80 seem kind of weak to me.

I feel like they should. should raise like 800 billion of debt and just do that in the year. Yeah. Are they out of ideas? Are they out of ideas? Like, what's going on? Do they now believe?

It's funny because everyone was saying that is like, it's the loudest signal that AGI is around the corner. And you're like, it is, it is, I feel like when Microsoft basically bought half of Open AI, everybody was like, what is Sam doing?

Yeah. But it kind of like maybe was the 200 IQ play of like if I need to spend a hundred if I need a hundred billion dollars worth of this is where it goes this is like one of the few companies that can actually do that now they're doing it yeah yeah it'll be interesting to see how the core weave IPO goes I think a lot of people are going to be watching that in terms of like data center build out and valuation yeah uh we have a DM here uh jordy fantastic flow what do you do for your hair okay so I got my haircut yesterday and uh I go to I go to same place as Rob actually okay I got recommend uh Rob

Rob, Huberman's business partner? Andrew Hearman's business partner has fantastic flow. He does. He showed up to my house for jiu-jitsu one day. I was like, dude, where do you get your haircut? He should live like a few minutes from each other. And he's like, oh, I go to Brooke at Salt Salton. 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 about my hair. 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 no like you do it perfect every time you never give me a bag haircut just like lock in just give me a regular haircut and she got it got into her 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 what about product i mean i so i haven't used a product in forever okay i i jump in the ocean frequently i live by the beach yep and i never use shampoo okay uh i i i think big shampoo is is is

is very bad and most people. But the key to not using shampoo is you have to eat super clean. Okay. So if you eat super clean, you're not like sort of just expelling like toxins. Sure, sure, sure, sure. And so you can skip the shampoo. So I use shampoo maybe once a month. Okay.

I do support big shampoo, but they don't get much out of me. Yep. And just salt water and, you know, water. And I use a sauna. Yeah, I use a sauna a lot too. So. Yeah. And an heroin bill that looks like a mortgage payment.

The six fig. It really does look like a mortgage payment. Have I ever showed you, by the way? This is like the most rambly episode ever, but it kind of makes sense. So my lifetime savings at Airwan, 16 grand. Oh my God. I spend the average PM's monthly salary at Airwon. Yeah.

It's all worth it for the hair. So I have a tip. Yeah, so there's the tip. There's the answer. Let's go to Henel 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. 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 and years and 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. He wrote the book in the 90s, I think you're like 2002. And it's like, and there were like hit piece after hit piece about that book. And then apologies. Like I think David Sachs at one point had to distance 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 like, he's a SaaS investor. Like he's not controversial. Let's forget about that book. And now it's like, no, he literally saw the future. and he was correct. Like, it was, he was dead on. And so there's a little bit of like, you, once the world comes around to your perspective, like, you need to make sure that you canonize the correct telling of history.

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 he was still getting protested and there was a lot of negativity. And for years, you know, there was like the debate of R. YC and a lot of companies, people were like, I won't take Peter's money. It's like, okay, yeah, sure.

But there's a lot of that. Now he's able to go and kind of like, like, reintroduce his worldview to a more receptive audience. And if 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 only know him as like, I was at a wedding once. and they're like, oh, Peter Teal, like, he's a fascist. Like, you know, like that type of stuff.

And now it's like, oh, yeah, if you go and listen to his, like, long-form interview with Barry Weiss, they'll just be like, oh, this is like, it's just a smart person. 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, they actually listen to Putin talk for an hour and he just rambles, they're like, oh, maybe he's got some points.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is why the press was so against. like the podcast election because they were like, do not humanize Trump by letting people listen to him for three. With J.D. Vance, he was weird. And then the top comment on the Theo Vaughn interview was like, why did they say he was weird?

This is the least weird guy I've ever met. This is the most normy dude in the world. And it's like, yeah, he is just like a normal guy. Like 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 that's fine. And if you come away being like,

I still don't want to vote for him. fine. But like this imagined, you know, craziness is just like so bad. The political derangement syndrome on both sides. And it was rough for Kamala because like we never got that three 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. She's cool. 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. She could have been a hero for the crypto community.

For tons of communities, there were so much opportunity. Anyway, there's a reason why we don't talk about politics on the show, ever. Ever. Let's go to Base Barron. Base Barron says, in 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 Anderol 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? And it's particularly hilarious because like, Anderra 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 know embedded VC, but like if you think that you can just like steal and to build a copycat and be at all successful. You don't understand the power law and you don't understand how power is accruing in that industry. Yeah.

So I'll take the Barron's side on this one. I do think as a founder, if you're spending, it can be a weird situation if a founding team is like working on an idea. And they're pitching a VC who invests in companies, but then they also build their own companies. It does create, like I think that there's a reason that VCs have. haven't like big VCs haven't like and Jocene Horowitz doesn't have like an incubate they have like EIRs yep but they haven't been like hey we're let's let's um if you're if you're a scaled asset manager 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 the This is like a Rick Rubin quote, right? Like ideas have their time. Somebody's going to do them. And so if you're a partner at one of these funds where you can invest or incubate and you can a founder can pitch you and you can give them $10 million or you could invest $20 million into a totally new company, it does start to get where there is like this conflict. Totally.

And I can see why founders don't want to partner with funds or wouldn't 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 founder was actively trying to not start that company yeah yeah he was actively trying to invest it he spent yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so i think and andrews like andrews like you know this rock star team of like former palenteer guys super well connected and then like they're already at a 10 billion 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 got to be really quiet about this for the next like year or two until you get this thing going because this is an idea that would be copied by 10 different YC companies and you would just get sliced up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you can actually get through that gauntlet. So like, you know, we joke about like an NDA thing and stuff. But like, yeah, 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, Anderl had, it was in such a, such a, like a, you know, a heretical industry. No one was going into that. And then also this crazy team, it was like, they could tell, they told everyone.

And it didn't matter because it was like, what the hell are you doing? Yeah. I did have a funny. But if you're building something a little bit more, like, oh, yeah, this is like on trend. Like, okay, you're going to use AI for, you know, for sales calls or CRM stuff.

Yeah. It's like, okay, well, like, if you're actually doing something, like, you might not want to go pitch somebody. 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 kind of surprising. Like, we thought they were going to issue a term sheet. And then I kept hearing about that VC fund is a big VC fund. And one of the founders, I'm going to make up a name for it, but let's call him Jack. I kept hearing from other people in the community, oh, Jack has this new idea, this new idea. And he was saying that 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 the fund that passed. And I was like, guys, like, you're fucking incubating a competitor to this deal that I brought you. Like, I was super annoyed. And I only found out at the end of last year that it was a totally different Jack. But I kept hearing that it was. Oh, no way. So for this whole year, I thought this on like episode three.

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 made up name. And over and over and over. And so when that happened, I finally went down. I was like, dude, I'm really sorry. I kept hearing.

I thought you were lying to my face. Oh, wow. And anyways. So, but yeah, I think there's a reason like at the end of the day, what. 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 assured that the VC fund will happily just invest in your company. Exactly. They will only incubate something, an alternative, if they don't believe in you. Exactly. And so just be better. Yeah. It's a skill issue. There is another funny like flip side to this.

I think your takeaway is like basically dead on. But there's a funny flip side where I heard a story about a firm that does incubations had 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'd raise different money. And then it didn't go well. Eventually, like, it got rushed.

Usually those things down. And it was like a very bad thing. it was very stupid, but it's just so funny that, like, it can go both ways. Like, the VC can steal your idea, but maybe you can steal the VC's idea. And I like that. I like that. It's like, bring the fight to them. Cuts both ways.

Yeah. It didn't work out, and I wouldn't recommend 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? Or does someone go on one and then other podcasts to 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 it. That's a good post. That's a good way for it. But it is true. Are you familiar with this strategy? Well, so the role of the modern PR firm, if you could pay somebody like the classic PR firm, you're paying them 10 to 20K month. And they're getting you plugged in with media. And now if you could pay, if I was an entrepreneur,

and I could pay somebody 20 grand a month to get me on four podcasts a month. 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. But the challenge is like it's not easy to get on podcasts, right? A lot of these interview shows, they do like 50 interviews a year. And they have like 5,000 people that want to be on those slots. And so it's a bloodbath of competition.

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 guess, it does. I do think that there's like a bit of a snowball effect. But yeah, it's not easy. I think everybody that has a podcast will like has like a long list of emails that they've gotten from PR firms and like, hey, like I'd love to, it's just some like super random.

The best ones are where people try and get on David Center as. podcast founders. He's literally never had a guest in a thousand episodes. Listen to a single show and you'll realize that it's not a guest-driven show. What are you doing? You can get on anybody you can get on David Senner's show. You just have to have built a generational company and have like three people write a book on you.

Yeah, exactly. Then you can get on. Yeah, yeah, it's easy. It's really easy if you just check those boxes. PR firms should just do that for them. Yeah. Just help me build $10 billion. dollars. Yeah, I mean, 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 it's just like we have a close relationship with Simon Suster and Penguin. Yeah. So for sure the book publishers have the relationships now. They know there's certain podcasts that do like book reviews basically. They sell books. Yeah. 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 in the background it's just an excuse usually it's like people building a relationship over a long time and then they're saying like when pomp 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 so like if you're like, yeah, my show is focused on on finance. He'll be like, okay, cool, I'll come on and we'll talk about these things. So if it's about crypto, he'll come on and do this. If it's talking about the military stuff, he'll talk about that. And so really like kind of helping people do their homework. And then once he starts like spiraling, he can kind of 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. my goal was a little bit to do a little bit less content of my own, a little bit more guest spots.

And I kind of worked my way up the chain from like some random friends podcasts to Bloomberg Odlots, which was like a pretty good spot. And a lot of that just happened from like posting about becoming like an expert in the nicotine category was having a moment, posted some long threads that we kind of like became a thought leader for a little bit. And then like was just like available to people. Yeah. And 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 want to come speak at this conference 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 100 people. Because if you have the opportunity to speak for an hour

in front of 100 people 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 the stuff and so nowadays you can go and get on a podcast and even if there's only 100 listeners yeah it's like okay you joined a zoom call and talk for 45 minutes and you got off like if that if only 100 people ever listened to it it's still a good opportunity to get yourself out there. Very, very high leverage. The other high leverage thing is that when you write a book, whatever your title of that book is, follows you basically forever because people will, it's very hard for people to be, oh, like, Jordi, 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 write a book, lever up. Yeah, or, or like, you know, rags to riches, how I became a high testosterone giga-chat 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 pairing on it at work. Something stupid like that. So it just follows you forever. 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. 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 want to look at a guy. Cardia. Cardia tank, obviously. Yeah, yeah. Cardiate tank is like the one.

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 going to be too masculine. And so the tank is iconic. and you can't go wrong. If you want to step up, ladies nautilus. You go with a crash. There we go. I think a crash is probably a better fit for an allocator of Nicole's size, right?

It's about 400K market value. So that's a good daily driver. I mean the ladies nautilus is legitimately cheaper. It's a bummer that Pipe is not still in the business of like pulling forward. You know how, did you know in like 2020 and 2020? If you had a fund, you could pull forward like 10 years of your management fees. So a lot of GPs were like going.

And that would have been an amazing opportunity to fund some of these watch purchases for some of these allocators that are all the management fees. Yeah, that are just not following the 2% rule at all. Yeah, exactly. Letting everyone down. What else? I mean, I mean, there's some, I think Rolex is a little overplayed, but there are some interesting pieces in there. I think Lisa Sue at AMD has one

That's beautiful Yeah Something simple Date just With like a date No No day date Yeah

It's not a date just That should be a band word We need to have a list of band words On the show Dayjust Dayjust is banned Dayjust is banned But like

There's some unique date just That have You know Yeah I think could be I mean there's another thing You could just like Complete try and stand out With like a cause AP

or something. Yeah. That was actually, it was funny. I landed in Geneva. Yeah. And Cause AP had like the whole, the whole airport.

Like, as like, and I'm like, the average person, like, only in Geneva do you put an airport ads for like the most hype beasty, like watch in history.

Yeah. Her style overall is very gold, classy, and timeless, but why not put a racing machine on your wrist when you call?

Yeah. Get an RM. Get an RM. Get a skeletonized RM. Maybe a Hewblow. It puts you in a unique club. You know what's good? She says gold. Why not a gene? What? Remember the jeans? There's a watch that's made entirely out of jeans. Oh, wow. And yeah, it's made out of gene material. It's a Hubello or something. But yeah, 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. You could go with the tank for us.

say tank anglaise there's a few others that I think could work but we could spend a whole hour classic it's been a whole hour talking about if you're trying to save a buck you could go with the solar beat but I recommend louis 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 and he's talking about m-ma fighters okay so this is a question from our boy, Bo Nickel, a rising star in the UFC and a technology brother himself. So, so Bo, a little bit of backstory. Bo is a wrestler at Penn State. 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 L.A. this weekend, which I'm excited for. But yeah, one thing that's become clear in MMA over the last 10 years is the biggest stars is not purely due to technical proficiency and talent. And I think that Connor McGregor, like, led the charge here. 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 last like run in the UFC was like not so good, right? he was getting knocked out by, you know, caoed by Khabib,

caoed by Porriere, like breaking his leg, having some nasty 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 seemingly very natural.

Like he came up in his career. He just was always good on the mic. And so something that people have realized within MMA and Bo certainly 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? And one of the challenges in MMA is like you're kind of just your own dude, right? So like Bo competes or Bo 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 going to be getting pictures like paparazzi pictures. And so he has to create his own kind of media business around himself. And so he's done it a really good job of that. Some fighters have been overly reliant on the UFC to promote them. But the issue is the UFC has fights every week, a couple weeks.

And so their only incentive is to promote the next fight. So if you don't have a fight on the schedule or you're not fighting that week, you pretty much have to promote yourself. And so every fighter takes a different angle here. Like, Beau has taken the angle of like I'm going to basically vlog. his lifestyle is 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? 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, we'll hire strippers and get strippers around him like this and be throwing, you know, money and just calling his like, you know, opponent. and it's like losers, right? So he's taking 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.

Colby Covington like snapped into this character. He was about to get cut from the UFC and he decided I'm just going to become an asshole. And he like has adopted that. And that's almost been a challenge for him because he's, he's can't fully like, Like, you can tell in certain situations he wants to just be like a nice, normal guy, but then he's got to be like, you know, he's got to be an asshole. That's like part of his brand now. He's a heel.

Yeah. And so, so yeah, I think Bo's done a really good job of this. A lot of other fighters that have come up recently have realized, like, I basically need somebody to follow me around with a camera 24-7. 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 family. because we can't rely on the UFC. 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 going to become like this top athlete and you're also going to build this crazy media company. Yeah. Yeah. So step one is like embrace this idea that UFC is essentially WWE, but the fights are real. Yeah. 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? But play into that and play a heightened version of yourself. And then second, like there needs to be a camera on you like five 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 an 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, edited on their phone, on 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. Do a short little video, one minute workout.

It's a real, it's a TikTok. And then just be constantly posting, constantly posting, constantly posting, and then eventually like scale that up to like bigger stuff, what else is in your life? What can you tell us about the car you drive, to watch your own, like, whatever else is in your world.

But, you know, the fighting stuff is going to be the core thing. Yep. Who are you fans of? Who inspired you to get in this business? Like, talk about anything. Yeah, I've even seen some, some, um, Sugar Sean, O'Malley and his, uh, 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 up and coming M.A. fighter, I'd be like, okay, I need to have a camera guy on me at all times. I need somebody putting out like five, six videos per day on social media. So I'm going to go to Monster Energy and say,

just give me like a hundred grand a year. And I'm going to just like dump it into media. Yep. Because that and that can quickly even become a profit center if you do it properly. Totally. These fighters aren't paid exceptionally well. So anyways, I would say the same thing. Like it's less necessary for like pro sports, right, where you have these whole teams and and there's more infrastructure, but these individualized, you know, sports are you've got to take it up yourself. Should we go into this epic Q&A from Andrew McAllum? Yeah. I love Andrew.

If you don't know Andrew, he was the, he's an engineer at Varda Space Industries, but also was big in the LK-99 saga of last year. Really? Yeah, he was the one that, like, replicated it. 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 run the process to make it. And I went down there. I made a whole vlog about it.

It was really fun. Yeah. And he also has Project Bob. Oh, yeah. Which so I, we talked about this on the show. I was like, why has nobody built a drone that live streams that you and your boys can just watch, just chugging around the world? And so that's literally what he built with Project Bob.

And we got to do a whole bit on it because they're raising money for it. Cool. And it's very good. And so he sent us a long message. 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 hum 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 all. art riches, Dogefin. Space. Four 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, blending SpaceX, Doge, and Elon himself. I've seen this in person. It's crazy. The wildly over-complicated path to get here really speaks for its sense. Step one, build and sell the requisite first company in my 20s, five years before hardware was cool.

Two, expand the teal empire. So he sold his company to GE. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right. Step two, expand the teal empire, obviously, as part of the founding team of another LOTR named banger. Step three, achieve world infamy and make Twitter fame after failing to make the rocks float. Shout out to Kugin's dock work and Chamoth's trolling. Step four, nerdsnipe every cracked and based engineering in California with Project Bob launching the world's first venture-backed hobby program. So obviously once I sell it at Art

Basil this year to Kenji or Justin's son, the tough choice is the Lamborghini Murah or the Ferrari F40 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. This is just the sort of high effort shit that you just don't see very often. Teal, Musk, Kugan, they're all playing on my chessboard. Yours in high effort Chaos, Andrew. Thank you. This is a fantastic deal. 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 a post. I'm glad we could share it. Such a long way to say Mura or F40. Lamborghini or Ferrari. You could have just said mirror or F40, but got the life story.

That's what we want. That's brother behavior, right? You got to give that contact. And look, I want to see Andrew driving the F40, into the VARTA parking lot, parking in the handicapped spot, just for the photo op and then taking it out and parking in a normal spot. Lamborghinis are having a moment, but I think the Mura is just a little too retro

to have any sort of functionality. It's going to be just more of a beast. If you want the Lambo, Diabloes are doing really well, Mercilagos are having a moment. Always. And then you get up into the event door and some of like 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.

Mercia Lago would be crazy, pulling up to the Varda offices and then Mersiolauga. LP 640. Like that is like, that's cool. And I mean, if you go for the manual ones, like some of those are up there. Some of those are a million-dollar cars. But if you... What about, what about, he didn't give this as an option, but what about the Lambo Rambo?

The LMO2, that is fantastic. That's the ultimate gundo hard tech. Somebody's gonna do it. Because it's a supercar, like by, in itself. Like, it has a V12. It has a V12. But it's the same engine as the Coutachsh, I believe. You know, it's like got that utilitarian.

Yeah. You got a trunk. Yeah. You know, like you can throw stuff in it. You can throw it. Some rocket parts in there. You don't have a trunk. You have a truck bed.

A bed. I'm pretty sure. Yeah, it's insane. But yeah, I mean, F40 is just iconic. Lambeaus are having a moment, but I think you got to go F40. Yeah. Although you won't be the only one in Gundo driving one because the founder of Impulse Space has one.

No way. There's an F40? Let's go. Let's go. Should we go in the timeline? Yeah, we're only. two hours into the show and finally made it to the timeline, which is what you've been waiting for. Yes.

It's been almost two weeks since you've heard us talk about printed out posts. So we have a little bit of a change up today. We have bucket poles where 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. And we have a little... We do a couple bangers and then we'll pull out and then we'll pull out. And then we'll pull out a bucket pole. Just like Kiltonny does it on Tony Hinchcliffe's show.

So let's start with Justin Lopas. He says, took a poll of friends and the companies they work at. 100% match. Serious people work this week. And next, unsurious people do not. And he posted this at 6.50 a.m. on Christmas Eve. I think we were podcasting. We were podcasting.

We were literally podcasting at the time. 100% match. Interesting. Friends and the companies they work at. Yeah, so everyone was working. Yeah, I mean, why not? I do think it's, it is like a weird one because it is, if you were going to give your team any week off. Yeah.

Throughout the entire year. Between Christmas and New Year's was particularly dead. Yeah. Just for doing business. Historically, when I was running regular non-podcast companies, 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'd just come up with ideas.

And I'd start pulling people in. I'd be like, right, sure, sure, sure. Let's get on a quick call. And then suddenly I'm just like, or we need to do this like now. Like this has to happen. 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. Writing. Yeah, and I think that for the people who are just like butts and seats, it's fine to take some time off. Yeah, you don't want your SDRs just like burning out. Cold calling. They're just not going to get anything done.

That's the thing, like as much as it's very real that I would, I would say out of the 50 portfolio CEOs that, you know, across my portfolio, I would imagine that the best companies, the CEO has all worked last week. Yeah. That being said, I don't think that it's a bearish signal if they told many members of their team, hey, take the next few days off. Yeah. Because, like, again, if you're an account manager role, you don't need to be hitting up your accounts on the 29th being like, hey, if you, like, how is it going? and they're going to be like, I'm like offline.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's going to Matt Wang and paradigm. He says, it still seems underrated that Bitcoin slash crypto is the first 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. You can understand how things are going in the crypto regulatory world just by looking at the price of pay claim. 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.

Yep. And that is very interesting. I'm wondering if there's if there's more to that, like political block with a native asset, like I guess it, I guess it, I guess it's, just means regulatory stuff, but... The Nebraska corn farmers would like a word. Yeah, well, what I'm getting at is like, I think that 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.

So the packs get bigger. I mean, Andresen Horowitz donated by far the most to crypto packs when I looked at the data earlier this year or the last year. And it was very clear that like if you're running a crypto fund or your crypto billionaire, like throwing $30 million is fine. Yeah, it's fine. And with other VCs where it's spread so thinly, it's like, oh, well, like, you know, yeah, we want to have some better regulation around energy for our nuclear portfolio company.

But we really only have one. And then we need to change some things at the DoD, but we're really only in Anderrol. And then, 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 it's not as focused and consolidated, whereas everyone is kind of marching in lockstep in the crypto industry. Yeah. It's it's, it's, I think the my, the only, I always, whenever I've underestimated Bitcoin, it's from thinking of it as an investment asset versus a religion. So the difference between like the oil industry and the Bitcoin industry is people in the oil industry are like this is a

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 oil. And speak for yourself. Yeah, speak for yourself. Whereas like Bitcoin, there's like huge numbers of people that if the price was $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's part of the power of it. It's a religion with a native asset. Right. No, that's a good point. Yeah, I talked to 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-crypt. That was a big part of Kamala's policy. is she wanted to protect. I know what you're going to say. Yeah, yeah. Let's move on for that. But yeah, and this person had some crazy, like, you know, jumping through a million hoops to be like,

well, actually, like, crypto, 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. Like, 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 dealing with, I don't know if we. I don't know if we, did we ever address this on the show?

We, we talked about, so, so. Yeah, I think this was over break, but we had covered a post about somebody had said something. Ever ran best. They were like, I want to invest in technology brothers. And we were like, you can't invest, we're not raising. But LVMH is a good proxy for it because we, faster we grow, the more Don Perriam we buy. Yeah. And, you know, LVMH owns it.

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 want to go along this podcast. Like, I'm excited. He was just being like generally positive, which is awesome.

and then we said, oh, yeah, we're not going to do a coin, of course. But you can just buy LVMH because we're going to be buying so much Dom Paring on. Should be an obvious joke. But someone went and on Pump. Dot Fun created a ticker called LVMH, which I didn't even realize there was a previous LVMH pump dot fund coin. 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. Only in the contract address. Yeah, exactly, which is ridiculous. It's less scarce. A pumped out fun coin is less. scarce than a domain. Like, yeah.

Like, what? And so, uh, and so immediately like, we see this, uh, this post goes up.

I didn't even notice it. I get a face time call. I'm with my family. And I'm like, this is weird. I don't normally get like spam face time 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, this is different than anything I've ever done in media before. Uh, and he's like, yeah,

like I, I just put up, a coin on pumped-out fun and it mooned to 200K in market cap. And I was like, cool, dude. Like, that seems completely independent from my life. Like, it was unclear that it was like tied to my identity and my brand. And I was like, now's not a good time, but let's talk soon, dude. 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. And then we started texting and we realized that like, this is. I noticed because people, there were suddenly hundreds of comments replying to people, replying to our post saying, LVMH is here, like, you can, you can buy it. And then we were getting like a bunch of DMs from people saying, what's your Salana address. Anyways. And luckily it blew over, but there was like a million and a half dollars of volume traded, like almost within, like, you know, within 30 minutes.

went way up and then went way down. 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, the only reason that they wouldn't be replying right now is if it was real. And it's like, okay, like, I see what you guys are doing there. Yeah. And somebody commented, somebody commented, it was, like, angry at us.

And I had, I replied from the brand account. And I was like, we have literally nothing to do with this. We were, we joke about LVMH all the time. 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 shit coins.

It's low class and vulgar. And we don't support it here. Take a company public. Yeah. It's much higher status. SPAC something. Yeah, SPAC 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. Okay. I have, it is ski season. We've been talking about. Great. Veil quite a bit this episode and our own travels.

And so I have a fantastic car for ski season. A safari style 1986, Porsche 9-11 Carrera coupe. And if you don't know about giving a safari treatment to- I think that's pronounced just coupe? No, no, no. It's coupe? Coupe. Really?

That's like the proper. Oh, this is like the Porsche. Porsche Porsche okay okay yeah yeah yeah okay um I've been usually you do the American pronunciation I've been in France too long okay um so break it down uh so anyways people get it um yeah you can pick this up on bring a trailer dot com great uh great auction site I've bought and purchased the 9-11 there before site unseen no PPI just sent it works great no issues with it got very lucky and making money when I sold it. Nice.

It's great. But anyways, I love the Safari treatment on these things. They look incredible. And it gives you that extra ground clearance. You can take it up to the mountains. You've got extra headlights, more light. That's great. And, yeah, this just looks like a fantastic example.

Yeah, just zip you from SF to Tahoe and back. Yeah, it's a perfect car to get to SF. You don't have to worry about superchargers. You don't have to worry about planning your route. 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 get away.

Fantastic. Well, let's go to a bucket poll. This is interesting. Okay, 47 likes by Anon Sanwal. 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 a.m. Let's go. Let's go. Interesting, yeah. Super valuable. I mean, I remember learning a ton on, on, what was that, OpenX, MITX or EdX? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was like this open courseware movement in like 2009, 2010, where all the top universities

started like open sourcing their, or just putting their videos. cool it was insane so you just get to watch andrew ing like the best machine learning researcher in the world teach machine learning foundations like ML 101 yeah breaks it down it's great and you can just sit there and watch it and you can be like much more passive that you're just paying for luxury brand when you go to a college and you pay 70 80k a year true but also just like like even though the colleges do follow like a bit of a power law where like Stanford Harvard MIT are going to be like the best. Like there are, even within the schools, like extra power law people.

Like, uh, 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. But if you want an incredible economics education, you're going to want to go to University of Chicago. Yeah. Or if you want, uh, you know, great economics and law, like, you know, a great economics and law, like,

business go to Harvard. Or if you want the best surf conditions year round, you go to UC Santa Barbara, which is how I selected my school. Exactly. From a very young age, when I was 12, I went and visited. I said this surf conditions here are phenomenal. I need to go here. I mean, I remember I walked into like Econ 101 and our book was by N.

Gregory Mankew 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, why am I just going to the source instead of hearing this like second tier professor like teach it i could just go over there yeah it's like a huge conference did you i feel like i learn more i learned more uh from podcasts than youtube like even though youtube was already like for me from from a when i like joined the world of venture around like 22 after graduating college and like started kind of participating i felt like i listened to probably thousands of hours of like venture related podcasts.

Certainly to understand how the business works for sure. For the hard skills, I feel like it's very easy to fall into it. You're not going to pick those up from a podcast

and you're also not going to pick them up from just like surfing like random YouTube videos because a lot of those are like kind of click baited or like they're just meant to be too much entertainment and like their edutainment

but they're mostly entertainment but for like the high level stuff but for a lot of like the programming skills I learned it was a book and just like going through the book and writing the code alongside of it. It's probably better now with more YouTube stuff. Like back then, YouTube was pretty limited.

Did you see the, there was this, over the last couple weeks, there was a very viral incident where a woman dropped out of her PhD program. She apparently, like, teaches, like, makes videos about AI, ML on YouTube. And she went and said she was dropping out of her PhD program to like just do OnlyFans. But the thing that I, apparently, she had, already been doing that for a really long time. So she was going to continue to just make the same videos and still do only fans. It wasn't like I'm quitting my PhD and then I'm doing only fans.

So anyways, classic internet just like got blown out of proportion and all this stuff. Let's go to Will Nizzi. 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 Baer at BPN, George Heaton at Represent 24-7, 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. But if you're starting a brand, then should you go and bootstrap your own personal brand? No, 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 B2B like. thought leadership brand of like on x or lincoln 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 bpn guy doesn't he's not like here's how to build a business one oh one right which is like i feel like on x it's easy for consumer founders to just start posting about the business of their business. Yep, yeah, yeah. Versus,

like the product. The product. 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,

you should be looking good basically. Yeah. It's interesting because I, it does go back to like, it's, it's really, really hard to build a, uh,

a consumer physical product brand without some sort of hero, partnership or influencer. I don't know. Look at the ridge. Look at the ridge. Look at the ridge guys. Like they just, 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? Like, Ridge really invested in their relationship with the Ovant early.

And MKHD now. 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. they do they'll you know over the next few years they'll do hundreds of millions 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 millions of dollars of 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 uh yeah it is a distraction of like when i if i see some founder building a cpg brand 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 thousand 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, like X doesn't move the needle for sales for Lucy. It doesn't matter how many bangers you have in a month.

Yeah, but doing a personality driven partnership with someone like, Dave Portnoy at Barstable Sports was critical. 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. And so that doesn't need to be you. Yeah.

That doesn't need to be the CEO. Yeah. But it needs to be a part of. Like with Rora, we've partnered with this guy, Eric Hinman, who you've probably seen on Instagram until like we made sure he had a unit prior to launch. Back to Nike with Jordan. You know, it's like, yeah, Phil Knight wasn't the guy, but Jordan was. And so you need to be like probably setting yourself up for, you know, who is going to be the human that drives the brand forward at some point.

Yep. It feels like it's more important than ever. I'm trying to think of counter examples 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, I don't know. It's tricky, but let's move on to liquidity. Breaking, Kim Kardashian is no longer managing Sky Partners, the private equity firm.

She co-founded with former Carlisle partner Jay Simmons. Very relevant. The least shocking news I've ever heard. Kim should have launched a consumer VC and YOLO checks alongside Tier 1 funds. Yeah, so very relevant to the last topic, which is that, yes, businesses thrive. when they're personality driven, but just being a personality by itself is not going to lead to outside success.

And yeah, private equity is one of those things where it's funny when guys in ventures are like, oh, I'm going to do, you know, hold co 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, right? This is like one of the most like established, highly optimized industries with a bunch of really, really, really smart people. I mean, it wasn't in the 80s, but it's been 40 years.

The argument against, like, Kim K. doing a PE fund and, like, being wildly successful there is, like, if you're a billion dollar 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. And, like, we're going to give you, like, $10 million a year and, like, build that into the deal.

She doesn't need to run the PE fund, too. And so 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. But 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 anymore than we already have.

Or like we think we're at a local maximum. like now is the time that we're going to sell it. Yeah. 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. I guess what is odd is that it was a private equity firm with a Carlisle 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. 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. Or half a point. There's other companies that don't give any equity and just pay her to do ads, right? And so she has this like curve. But for some of those opportunities where, yeah,

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 10x 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. And they have it's called Lemmy now that the Kardashians like a supplement brand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think is one of the best selling brands and like Target stuff like that. And it's literally they made a gummy version of every major supplement. So it's like, hey, you can just eat candy for all of your supplements.

That's great. Smart. Genius. Genius. Let's do another promoted post, another bucket pull, and then we'll move on. We got a promoted post from... Lulu. Brother of the year.

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 infanticizing 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. We can buy our own selters and mixed nuts. And it's a quote tweet of Jack. Jack Raines, friend of the potty, he said airport lounges are insane because they appear to be one of the most

legitimately dangerous credit card incentives with the potential to gigafri your personal finance habits for the sake of stacking points. Oh, it's so true, man. The airport lounges are so lame. I walk into just get to the airport later. So when I have to fly commercial, I just had to fly commercial, I walk, I go into LAX, I know the one place that sells Evian water and glass bottles. I'm I walk in. If it was an international flight, I buy like six or seven because I don't want to drink the plastic ball of water on the flight. So I buy six or seven bottles of Evian

and then I go sit at the gate and then I get on the flight. Yeah, exactly. 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 whole travel plan. Also, 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. Yeah. You have to miss at least one. The only thing that that's sort of ironic about this is if there was going to be an airport lounge that was amazing, it'd be a ramp airport lounge. It'd be like you'd have like the history of like the greatest entrepreneurs on the wall, power painting, et cetera. It would just be like various places you could scoop. It'd be a library.

You could scoop protein powder. Like you could get like protein powder. You can drop weights. It'd be like, yeah, weights. Yeah. The ramp lounge. Get a deadlift and read it. So ramp, don't make us play silly.

games to get access to the lounge, but do a lounge at something. Do a lounge. Yeah. That's great. Okay, a bucket pull. What do we got? What do we got? Let's see. Okay. Let's do this one. Okay. Oh, Signal. Oh, we're on credit cards again. We're getting lucky here. Signal says 2025 credit cards. Amex Platinum for travel and lounges. U.S. Bank, 4% cash back for everything else. Is there a better or more simple combo? And you got 10K likes. This This is one of those things. So with credit cards, I don't pay attention to them at all. I just let the points accrue for decades.

And then eventually I'm, okay, so I should go spend these. 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. It has spreadsheets about, like, this is technically the best credit card. And 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.

I might have to get this, unless I just put my whole thing. family on ramp and just and just run the entire. 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. And they were like, yeah, it'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 centurion just with CEO basically. Like you have to be the CEO of a RAM corporation to get it. but what do you think you have an amex platinum i do uh traveling lounges you just don't use the

lounges i just don't use the lounge i just don't use the lounge i mean aren't the rewards i think better yeah but u.s bank has four percent cash back on everything that feels like a scam did you see that if that was a crypto company ever would be like oh yeah you're definitely embezzling uh u.s bank is struggling i guess or something i don't know it's kind of yeah i guess 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. Yeah.

So you're basically just arbing that. Okay. But if you, I'm sure if you just set up the card and you keep cash elsewhere, but then they probably also have some rule. Like you have to have a minimum. Weird. You know, I just like try to, um, every year instead of like optimizing credit cards, I just like try to hit 100 X investment every single year. Yeah.

And then it, yeah. Yeah. It pays for itself. Pays for itself. Let's go to Grimes. She says, insane to demean horse girls. Could not agree more.

Yep. Single-handedly keeping the dream of the Mongol Horde alive. I love this. We've been on this before. Yeah, so we joke a lot about horses. Yes. But we're unironically pro-horse.

Equestrian enthusiasts. Exactly. We're glad that tech journalists have such an obsession with horses. Like there's not a lot of, for a long time in tech, very few people were on the equestrian. sort of waves. But also pro founders that got a lot of liquidity starting to build a stable. Yep.

It's a great way to engage with nature and deploy a lot of capital. Yeah. And there's still an ablament of risk reward, financial incentives. You can make money. Yep. You can lose money. There's a lot of risk. No, and this year we're getting our own racehorse.

And racehorses are completely resistant to artificial intelligence, not going anywhere. Yep. And yeah, I mean, for a long time, the horse girl thing was, it was used as like a shorthand for autistic female. 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. Yeah.

It was 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 red horses, like, they're wonderful people. My son takes horseback riding lessons. My daughter will take horseback riding lessons. We're going to have a horse named brother that we're planning to take all the way to the Kentucky Derby. So very pro horse. And you can be pro-equestrian and still joke about the equestrian lifestyle.

Like we're pro-tech, pro-business. We joke about tech and business all the time. And also, I mean, if you're going fox hunting regularly, like you have to do that on a horse. So, you know, you really just got to. think, use the right tool for the job. Let's go to Andre Carpathie. 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, 2,048 GPUs for two months, $6 million. For reference, this level of capability is supposed to require clusters of closer to 16,000 GPUs. The ones being brought up today are more around 100,000 GPUs, e.g. Lama 3, while deepseeks v3 looks to be a stronger model at only 2.8 million GPU hours, 10x less compute, or 11x 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? 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. Yeah, this kind of took over the internet over the break. But there was, I think there was like a lot of questions about what's the story. They dropped it, didn't they dropped it on Christmas Day or something like that? Like they're trying to get in our heads.

It doesn't work. Doesn't work. All the technology brothers were enjoying Christmas. Yep. and they still had their mind thinking about business and technology. And this little joke of dropping your fake stolen model on Christmas just doesn't do anything. I did see what you're, I wish that we had a post on it. But yeah, something about how like most advancements.

Yeah, word grammar says, I genuinely don't know how to feel about China casually maugging every U.S. 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 bullish, but also scared. But 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 opening eyes models and then like leapfrog

using it. I mean, I talked to some guy who said that like he ran the numbers on for a while when you got a response from GPT4, it would also give you some, like, not the full weights of the model, but like a sampling of how that, like, response was calculated. Yeah. And if you got enough of those, you could kind of do the math backwards to create the model weights or estimate the model weights 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 these data. You basically just train your new model on the actual API. Yeah. And it was like for that was like less than a million dollars or something to like steal it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think they like patch 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. I just don't trust anything that comes out of the Far East. Yeah. The wrong hemisphere. I just don't. Let's go to dystopian g.

She says, anyone with an IQ of 130 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. Good post. That's funny. But yeah, I mean, obviously. The reason that we need these people to lift weights is we need, we want to invest in more people that are in the thousand pound club that are deeply intelligent and

technical. Also, with intelligence too cheap to meter and AI on AGI on the frontier, you need to be going golden retriever mode. You need a golden retriever maxing, which means getting hot, getting friendly, and getting dumb. Don't worry about learning anything more, pumping that IQ out with stimulants. Adderalls out, deadlifts are in. Dead lifts are in. Yeah. It's getting diced is underpriced. I agree. Completely. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, never been more important to focus on physical fitness. It's not too late. Winter, winter is like halfway over almost feels, but it's, but it's not too late to enter like some sort of winter arc. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And you know, this is the perfect time to start a three month

bulk, which then can turn into a three month cut right for June 1st, summer season. You'll be in the beach. You'll have an extra 10 pounds of muscle on. You'll be a 7% body fat. We're going to have some crazy TB meetups in Europe this summer. You're going to want to look diced. Yeah, you're going to want to be diced. You're not going to want to be hanging out at 20% body fat. I just, I actually, I actually like, I don't know if anyone in our audience is not already moderately jacked. Yeah.

Like, on average, like they care about health a lot. But, and this is the time of year that people are talking about New Year's resolutions and I want to get fit and all this stuff. And just do it. It's not that hard. 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 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 and just get diced. Yep. And so sleep. It's one of the few things that if you just do it, your life will just get material. So here's the algorithm for the best New Year's resolution possible. sleep a bunch you know got to get your eight hours in gram protein per body weight per pound of body weight so you're going to high protein diet exactly and then hit the hit the bench press as soon as you're not sore you're ready to work out again so you can train bench press three times a week sometimes yep keep

bench pressing get up to 245 on the bench because then you bench press more than brian johnson 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. Exactly, exactly. That's the way. Do we have promoted posts? Somebody, one of our reply guys is going to take that to heart. I 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. Yeah, I'll just play along with it. But it is truly the only helping. Oh, oh, your free hemoglob is 75%. I don't care. What's your bench? Yeah.

I'm not listening. I'm not listening. Yeah, that is the funny thing. It's really quite something that he's gotten this big of this much influence and this big of an audience in the health world without being a mass monster. Because historically, that was the only way to break through. Yeah. It was the only way to break through.

And he's realized the only way to make money in health, sell supplements. Sell everything. But if he's big today, if he just doubled in size, he could be 10 times big. Traps eating his head. From an audience standpoint, he could be. Death Star Delts. Death Star Delts. It would be amazing.

Promoted posts from our friend Preston Holland. He says another ex-friend started flying private. They bought a 6.25% share of a phenom 300 with air share for 550K. Let's go. Perfect. Brothers make your New Year's resolution to start flying private more. One of the ways that you can do that is buying 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 in his last event. And nobody better to help you break into the world of private aviation. Absolutely the man and an absolute dog in the skies. Absolute dog. Let's do a bucket pull. What we got here? It's still picking through with the ice cube.

Yeah, you got it. Okay, here we go. Oh, this is funny. Mr. Overplayed. Mr. Overprayed says, being drunk is a choice. Just had around 17 shots. Everyone else stumbling and mumbling. I am laser sharp.

I don't allow drunkenness into my body, ever. Self-control by the power of the Holy Spirit. I will be up at 4 a.m. May no demons have dominion over my body. Spirit greater than flesh. A hundred K likes. A hundred K. Why we pulled that out of the bucket?

That's a great one. I mean, it's so funny, being drunk as a choice. also somewhat true. It is, there's some real truth to it. Yeah. This last trip, so I, the only time I, I've drank in Q4 was Dom Perrinom. Don Peron. So I really don't drink.

I really, I really think that 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 Don Paragon. Yeah. And only when you're celebrating. Yes. Yes.

But you can celebrate constantly. 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 drunk and I didn't understand. I didn't understand why. Spirit over flesh. Spirit spiritually I just didn't want to be drunk. I didn't want to lose control.

I didn't want to be like, oh, I just enjoy being locked in. Yep. And so no amount of shots is going to disrupt that. Yeah. And it's a skill issue. It is a skill issue. 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 $113 million. They did a $5 million seed in 2014, then a $13 million series A, 16 million series B, 18 million B1, 60 million series C. In 2021, their enterprise value was $232 million, and in 2024, zero. And they closed. And people were really upset because it closed 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 kind of getting ready for a year end close. And then they just get a notification, hey, like your accountant just quit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I used to be, I was a bench customer for a while for the company I started in college. And eventually just switched to regular CPA just because it's, I don't think that, I don't think, for some really like eventually software will get so good yeah that it does make sense to like rely primarily on yeah so like some type of like AI agent software provider for this kind of thing but yeah so I think people really dug into it and apparently they had taken on like a bunch of venture debt which can like basically like one shot your company if you don't execute perfectly um 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 yeah yeah he's like I think it's employee buyer.com. Yep. 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 three years ago when I was fired from the company I co-founded. 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 pushed out. And so a lot of people were very upset. They We said, name names, let us know who is on the board.

You should never take money from these people again. And it's interesting. That is true that they ran it in the ground, but there are always two sides to those stories. Well, what I like about this founder and what he did is he got, whatever, very tragically booted out of the company, and misalignment of 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? He's in that time he started and sold another company. Started and had a successful exit. Now he runs their like accounting product of Mercury. So he's had a good story. That's great.

That's great. I wonder it'd be cool. Maybe he'll get back involved with Bench now that this new owner. Oh yeah. Maybe they bring back in or something. Yeah, it's interesting. That was cool. Yeah.

Well, always a stupid move to get out of the buyer. It's just so stupid. But also the Venture Debt thing, I don't. Why does a services business need venture debt exactly? Yeah, I don't know what they're financing. We got to have, we, there's somebody just announced a new venture debt fund that was like Tealback. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We should have that person on the show and talk about why the fuck should anyone ever do venture debt? Yeah. You never hear, it just seems like it's like unnecessary baggage. I mean, there are a few reasons that you want debt generally. Yeah. I think about venture debt as just... Yeah, but for the right, but not for a cash-based services business.

So, 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&D, a really, really long time horizon, we are writing software that will get us recurring revenue that pays out over a decade.

Like, think about ramp signing a big customer. It's like, that money is going to come in for years and years and years. How do you finance that? Venture Capital, absolutely. Like, that is the textbook case of venture capital. 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 CAPX a bunch of plant property equipment, and P&E, 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. And so you buy a million dollars of machinery, you depreciate it over a decade, and you're paying that down at the same time 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 million

dollar machine. It makes us a million dollars in revenue. We take home 300k in EBITDA and we pay our debts or whatever. 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 revolving, debt line that grows as they, because they make the product, and then they have to wait to sell it. And it takes them a while to actually get them money.

They actually do some really cool stuff 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. Yep. But we need 180 day terms. Yeah, they're essentially getting seller finance. Yeah. So I understand it for, I understand it for these businesses that basically have these bigger working capital requirements, but adding debt onto a business like bench where you're just kind of like,

okay, give us money, we'll give you the service, give us money, we'll give you the service. Yeah, yeah. It just seems 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. We did it.

We tested 300 Bay Area Foods. It's so funny that we said 40,000. When we were joking about this, we said we tested 40,000. thousand foods because I was like I would just want to be higher than that we posted that we didn't post that not yet oh okay we got to post that but anyway um oh do we not okay uh anyway um we did it 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 phlytes in 73% of the tested products and biophenols in 22% it's everywhere We detected flylights in most baby foods and prenatal vitamins. 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 1950s army rations we tested contained surprisingly high levels of plastic chemicals.

Almost every single one of the foods we tested are within both U.S. FDA and EU EFSA regulations. Check out our full results. And they put up plasticlist.com. There were a bunch of other notes or dot org, a bunch of other notes about this. One boba t equals 1.2 years of safe BPA consumption. There was a whole food steak that was surprisingly high in in Pfas. Yeah, so two. Plastics.

Two notes on this. So one, all this was done by Light Labs, which is Justin Mayer's brother's company. Lucky to be an investor in the company. And really smart what they did. basically realized there was all these new regulations around testing like baby foods. So there's these new requirements around testing. They came out and they did Nick and Justin had made, you know, a fortune in bone broth, had to do a bunch of testing.

And so they had to experience a pain point themselves. So Nick starts light labs and that the company's been doing phenomenally, in part because there's this, all this new interest around P5. 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 in food. And that legal level is usually way above what is considered healthy, right? So in a perfect world, you have zero PFOs or microplastics that you're ingesting.

but they're going to get into the food to some degree. And so I think that, that to me 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 hundred molecules can be, like, effectively toxic, and that's fine, right? It's one out of a million. Yeah, one out of a million, right? But still, like, these legal levels are so much high.

higher than safe. Yeah. I think there's there's a few things that I take away from it. One is like it is everywhere. Somebody even asked Nat like hey how are you changing your lifestyle based on these findings and he was like I'm not changing anything because it's just everywhere I'm screwed. Well if you can if you're buying the healthiest most expensive steak and it still has classic 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 identifying the fact that the hay bales that the cows eat were wrapped in plastic. And so when it sits in the sun.

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, yeah, you can do a little. 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, I'm going to eat this burger instead of that burger and I'm going to make a consumer choice.

But like those consumer driven changes are always much harder than just like figuring out where the actually biggest power law. Yeah. Yeah, I think going after that. The right response is you see this report and you're like, I want to avoid Phaas and microplastics. Do stuff like look at how you, if you make coffee at home. and you use one of those drip coffee machine makers with the things that pull out and you realize it's just like heating

plastic, right? Heating really hot water in plastic. It's like cut that out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't want to be having that every single day having your little micro plastic coffee every single morning for your entire life. Just find the really obvious stuff.

Yeah, find the... 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 don't, they know it plasma and blood a lot. And so if you're donating blood, like you're cleaning yourself out. That's like the Lindy bloodletting thing. Bloodletting, exactly.

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's so gross. That's so disgusting. It is a little bit of like a skill issue here, I think. 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 do love this because it's like a phenomenal use of Nat's money. And it's like 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 going to 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.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's so cool. Yeah, because he spent half a million dollars. Yeah. Millions of people can benefit from it.

Exactly. It might create systemic change in the industry. And the other takeaway, if everything is, if everything is toxic, it actually means that you need to focus on detoxification. Sure. Like sauna is the obvious one.

Sana a few times a week, figure out how to do it. You can, it is the number one way to detoxify, like broadly. I just thought it was a good place to the Wall Street Journal. Yeah, yeah.

It is a good place to read the Wall Street Journal. But yeah, that's like the best thing that you can do is, okay, I'm constantly inundated with toxins. So I'm just going to sauna five days a week, figure out how to do it. You know, don't have to buy a sauna in order to do it. Go to the gym or whatever. Do we have another promoted post? Yeah, again, it's ski season.

So you know that we have to promote the Lamborghini Cerrado. Let's go. This is the Alpha Sports. spec, the Sabia desertum. And they're practically giving this thing away. This thing, they're listing this on DuPont registry at $409,000.

What a great spec. I mean, one of the last, you know this is the last model run of the Hurricon V10. And so now the Lamborghini split. There's the V12, Revalto, and there's the Timoraria, which is V8. Yeah. And so if you want a V10,

this is the one to get. It's the final year. And it's such a, It's such an economical purchase because you don't, it comes with the roof racks. So you don't have to go and buy these aftermarket roof racks. You're kidding, but I wouldn't be surprised of that car holds a lot of value. Oh, I think so. I think they're going to be collected items. They're so cool.

Here's, here's my advice for all the brothers out there. Buy two. Garage queen one. Daily drive the other. Make it your little weekender. Yeah, yeah. This is legitimately the perfect car to take up to Squaw Valley. I'm still going to call it Squaw, because it's,

the eye's over. Do you know the whole... Yeah, I talked to somebody who was on, it was skiing this weekend, and they were like, oh, yeah, 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, really? The ski instructor was, like, wasting, like, 20 minutes, and they were like, I just want to get it back on the slopes. Like, can we just do a run? And I was like, you got to just troll this guy and be like, yeah, can we hurry it up? Like, the Redskins game's almost on. Yeah.

I grew up skiing at Squaw. I will die. What do they call it now? Palisades. Okay, Palisades. Not a bad name, but Squas. Squas. Squas.

Squas is such a bad name. It's not even offensive, is it? No, I think it, I think it literally meant like, it was a slur. It's just like a word for, it was a, for, I think it was like Native American phrasing for like a whore. Oh, okay, so it is a slur. Okay, okay, okay.

Yeah, maybe we need to retire that one. Who knows? Yeah. Anyway, highly recommend picking up a Lamborghini Starado. If you do, go to Oxford. Tell them the technology brother sent you. Oxford Dictionary says it means a North American Indian woman or wife. Okay, so it's just not so bad. Not so bad. I like that. It's great. Should we go to a bucket pole? What do we got here? This one. It's on the old paper. Oh, there's some deep ones in here. Let's see. Okay. Oh, here we go. We got... Oh, this is good. This is good.

From Captain Nemo. Got into the show. He is. He is. I'm going out with this guy, five. I love him. Captain Nemo. He says,

convinced some ultra-nice hotels, think Amman, 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 hotel self-select for powerful or ultra-wealthy clientele likely to divulge useful info that could be recorded. Relatedly, the Amman's global director of security was recently arrested for funneling money to a sanctioned Russian oligarch.

Okay, but you know that Rosewood. Yeah. Rosewood has some real history here. Oh, yeah. It's Chinese-owned strategically placed in power centers around the world. And yeah, I wouldn't stay at the Rosewood. No, period. Interesting.

They would steal all our podcasting secrets. You think so? Okay, the secret to podcasting is record every single day. Yeah. Create a platform for your absolute boys. Yeah. And then they would clone us. I disagree with this.

I think that if these are 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. And so I could just imagine Putin.

They'll see us playing with our mod retro. They'll be like, oh, my God, this is amazing. America is. Awesome. I got to stop what I'm doing. We got to get an ally ship going with these guys. It's a real, like, I can change her situation. Yeah, I mean.

So I, I, maybe they are intelligence operations. I don't care. I'm still staying there. They're intelligent operations. I'll tell you that, John. I love spending money at a Mon. I think it's very intelligent to spend some, to operate out of an Amman 365 days of the year. Yeah.

I don't know. This seems like I give this, I give this three tinfoil hats out of ten. Three. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I did, I did look through that thread and see, like, the whole story of the Amman guy. It is, seems pretty. But Amon is widely known. Lots of Russians stay at Amman. I think it is owned by a Russian oligarch.

So it's not a, that much is fact, I believe. Did you know they have grocery stores in Russia? in Russia yeah wow didn't do that the Tucker thing and he's like check it out like it's not a third world country I love that one

it's so funny I don't know don't just don't waste any time you know four star hotels that's the takeaway this is fun this was fairly recent it's a video a Lilby knighting Neo

the robot at the one X office And it's a That's the most bullish thing I've seen on figure so far It is very this is not This is not figure Oh it's one X it's one X different company It's one X different company

That makes sense because I was like figure They culturally don't seem like No no no no They're very buttoned up very like we're doing Partnerships with BMW We have a campus We're very like the Meanwhile one X is getting knighted

Yeah yeah exactly Yeah one X is doing videos with Jason Carmen And like you know you know Timothy Shalamee was knighted by It's a quote of that one yeah And so I think that's where they got the idea because Timothy Shalamag got knighted by Lil B, the base god,

who has some, I mean, based is a word because of Little B. You know that's, right? He has some amazing quotes. Extremely like online internet person. There's this hilarious quote.

The first internet rapper in many ways. Yeah. She's like, shout out to everyone on the internet. Our backs are hurting. Our eyes are hurting. But we keep posting. And he said this in like 2006.

It's a wild. but 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 awesome and hilarious that they got Lil B to come out and meet the robot. And they've done a couple other weird things where I think they put a Neo with, like, Kisanat or something or, or Iceo Speed or something.

Honestly, you got to, if I'm going along a humanoid robot coming, company, they actually are doing all the right things. Yeah, it's like, how do you become part of internet culture? Winner, if you're just like normie thinking about who's going to win. And then figures running this very like corporate partnership, like, you know, oh, what's the peer play asset? Almost like, how would a financial manager see building a portfolio around the future?

Well, they need a robotics play and Tesla's too highly valued and you're not getting a peer play. So you go for a figure. And then one X is like, we're just kids building this stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. We're having fun on the internet. I love it. I love it.

We should, uh, we should reach out to them and see if we could get a one-ax that, that could just sit here and be the third co-host. Yeah, that'd be great. This is, uh, yeah, here, here's the, here's the, here's the, here's the, here's the Kynott one. Uh, this startup used Kaisnots streams to go insanely viral, but no, isn't, no one is paying attention to how this campaign was actually engineered. New playbook being executed before our eyes.

They do streams with a Twitch streamer. product is a core part of the content not just a lame integration the goal is to set up as many clivable moments with the product as possible pay discord kids 30 cents cpm yes you saw that right to farm tic-tok clips from the streams they're all competing to win the budget allocation as fast as possible 50 million views guaranteed at 30 cents CPM so yeah very interesting it's crazy because it's like it's not a concern are you bored why are you playing tetris i just like the sound like soundtrack. That's great.

But yeah, I mean, I mean, there's so many, that's a clippable moment for Mod Retro. There's so many, there's so many underrated pieces of this. Like, partnering with the Twitch streamer is very,

like, new age. Like, your whole career was like with the YouTube stuff. Yeah. The Twitch streamers, it's like much harder to do integrations. I tried, it was always hard to do integrations on Twitch. I did,

I would do a bunch of, I would do a bunch of, I would do a bunch of stuff with Ridge back in the day, but I'd tell a Twitch streamer, okay, we're going to sponsor this entire month of content and like every hour bring it up. Yeah, but it's weird.

It's kind of weird. It doesn't, it's not, it's not, it makes sense that the streamers have figured out this like tipping oriented model, which is just extremely lucrative if you get it right. Yeah. Because it's not a really good ad format. And so for one X, I mean,

a humanoid robot is like the most inherently viral product you could possibly be building right now. the question is just like i'm we're we're i'm working with a uh portfolio company that i won't name yet but we're going to be able to go we're they're going to give it a gun oh yeah so and uh we're going to be able to go make some some content yeah um i want to i mean i think i think we should yeah yeah like and we're doing it yeah it's easy to predict it real yeah yeah yeah you can predict the future no vc's in the future they're like they make their like list of 10 predictions and then they just create the AI agents that do all of them. And they're like, wow, I went 10 for 10 this year.

Like 2025 prediction. A tech podcaster will bench press 260 pounds. That's great. 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 Ti83 plus graphing calculator for 75 bucks. Did you ever program these? Yeah, yeah.

I had so much fun. Some of my best memories. That's where I learned basic. My dad was a high school math teacher and I had his class. Yeah. So I would just sit programming games. Did you ever have party? Do you remember this one?

Which one was that? Maybe this was just in 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 remember this. I love, I love parties. So it was like, you go to this high school part. and it was like, what do you want to do? Like, do you want to drink?

Do you want to flirt? And like, one of them was like, you could actually get laid. And then I remember the text would pop up and be like, you bask in the sweaty afterglow, which was just like hilarious. And this sweaty afterglow like sticks in my mind to this day. And it's funny because like 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. But clearly, you know, he was like in, you know, in an English class and read some Shakespeare and heard Afterglow. Yeah. It was like, I'm going to put this in the game. Yeah. But then you could go in and edit the program and you could change the name.

So it was like, oh, you run into your boy Jordy there or whatever. It was like really fun. And 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 can have your game and you could pass it along. It was like the first example of like virality basically here and there were a bunch of other games that you could like put in and you could also cheat and put note cards

Was it snake? I'm trying to remember you could you could you could program it to play Tetris a little bit I just thought it was I just thought it was the coolest thing that I could program my calculator that was supposed to be just for Yeah Yeah, Yeah, yeah And I could program it so I could play Yeah I mean a lot of those games are like a little bit too much to program as like a high schooler but the little like you know you start out with just like the

if I press you know 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 a if statement with a couple of different things and all of a sudden you've built like this text game good times of the TI 83 great after I after I went through my programming my TI 84 era I would I would I would I got into D-D-D DDoSing 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 and like my room, just like DDoSing my dad's website. I always had these visions of like people like busting down the door being like, because of my.

I mean, 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 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 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 consumption basis. So it wasn't like, oh, they use this much bandwidth. So we're going to charge you this much. It was just like pay monthly and I'll just let you have this server.

And so I got access to it. And I was really big in the Counterstrike community. And so what I figured was like the big thing in the Counterstrike community at the time was like these vibe reels basically. This is like going back to my old editing days. Basically what you do is you'd take like highlight reels like from all the best counterstrike players and you cut together like their greatest hits. And then you export them, put them put like some sick music over it.

The biggest one was called frag or die. 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. 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. And they're like, yeah, it's fine.

And so I wasn't as good, but I had like one or two good highlights, of course. And so I put myself in this thing. It's like fragor die two or some sequel to this thing. And I host it. And then the link goes out on IRC. Do you remember internet relay chat? This was like a precursor. It's what Slack is like copying, basically.

Yeah. These have 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 it's like, and everyone's like, dude,

like thank you, bro, like you hooked it up. Like everyone got to see this video because of you. Like this is so tight. And I'm like sick. I'm like a king in this community.

Like this is amazing. Everyone's recognized me for my counterstrike skills. And then like, you know, a week later my dad comes in. It is just like, what the fuck did you do?

Like, like this guy needs to charge me now. Like, what hell? I don't know if he actually, I don't know if he actually, I don't know if the bill actually like passed through. But he was like,

It's not unlimited anymore. I am rate limited now because of you. But also probably somewhat proud because it's like you did something cool, hacker. Yeah, yeah. Volume. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I had a viral banger. Yeah.

Don't hate the player. Hit the game. But no longer. Now you just upload it to TikTok. Kids have it easy. Anyway, let's move on to time. One more promoted post. You got a promoted post by our friend Red Bull Futurist.

He has created something called the Red Bull Micro Grant Fund, and they are actively deploying capital, is 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. It doesn't matter what you're doing. It's got to be cool. Wait, that's what it is.

Yeah. It's $4. It's $4. That's amazing. So they got microgrant. So if you're listening to this, go do something cool. And when you need a Red Bull post about it. What is Justin Mares again?

It's like a thousand or a couple grand? Yeah, I think it's like two grand. Two grand. So you got the TL Fellowship with a hundred grand. Then you got Justin Mares with two grand. And you got this four dollars. So next time you're in a pinch and you need a Red Bull, they will send me $4. Just make sure you're doing something cool.

I don't want to see any non-cool. No, you need to do something epic. You need to be doing something. Hit a PR. Hit a PR in the gym. Push some sick code, build a demo, stay up all night, learn a new programming language. And this is the internet at its best. It's fantastic.

That should be more viral. They need to put the four hours. We have like the TV DOM fund. Yeah, yeah. A couple brothers in the community. Yeah. And yeah, you know, if you're really in need, we'll drop you off a bottle of DOM. Okay, let's do one more bucket pull.

And then we'll close out with the spanger and get out of here. denied. Too long. That one's kind of boring. Let's see. I want something that's like, you know, fun and easy. It's not a straight raffle. No, we're going through it.

Oh, this is a good one. I like this one. Signal. Great poster. Scarley 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. Insane fumble. That's a great concept. I remember when the whole thing went down, Altman posted her, couldn't help himself, and then it all came out that. Well, who posted it?

Was it rude on his account? Who knows? Yeah, yeah. Who knows? in his ghost writer that day. But yeah, I do, I do think the signal seems right. Like, what would be the downside to Scarlett Johansson of having her voice? 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 my. I mean, there is plausible downside where it's like, you could get it to say something bad and it sounds like it's her. Yeah. And or or or or it's just like, oh, people start using it to. Did she even do movies anymore though? Yeah. She's in the Marvel universe.

So like they're constantly cranking out. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure they ran. Yeah. It's not like, okay, 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 going to pencil out because that licensing deal is going to be different than like, you're not just going to 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

yeah you can already if you want to clone her voice you can do it you can do it well clearly open AI did it yeah yeah but yeah 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 um but yeah I wonder if that's still oh it's totally possible totally possible oh no I know I meant like I wonder if the they've resolve the lawsuit. It settled it. Yeah, I mean, honestly, like, when I heard the her voice, I think it was a lot of people

just pattern matching off the tweet because I didn't actually think, like, oh, I'm talking to Scarletor Hansen. Yeah. It did not seem that close. It seemed more, like, generic. And like, like, most of these LLM, most of these AI things, they feel very, like, the average of everything. Yeah.

Every answer feels like the average of everything. And then the New York Times gets upset and says, like, oh, it's exactly like us. It's like, well, it's kind of like the average of you. and the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post and the economist. It's all blended together in the soup and that's like what the math is doing. And so I don't know. I'd like to see her do it. I think it'd be a good win for her.

But let's finish with this banger of all time. One million views, 56K likes by Sukug Slore. I don't know how to pronounce that. Over 5% like rate. At a million. At a million. 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

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 but a hundred likes yeah yeah yeah yeah it's a real it's a real testament to like how popularize 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 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.

Yeah. But I agree. 2025 is going to be a fantastic year. Lock in. The locking in that you do today will benefit your great grandchildren. I agree. If you do it right. Yeah.

So do it. Do it. Do it, brother. Thanks for watching.