TBPN Live - 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. Jordy, 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 on? 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 go skiing and then 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 uh because you know the hotel would kind of do away with with any of those potential savings but it was to avoid the uh epic meltdown yeah around the epic pass yeah there you go and 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 can fix them. Yeah, that's the thing. I can fix her, Europe.

With GDP growth, if you're enough of a size lord, you can actually grow an economy. Exactly. We've talked about this a lot. You come over there, you inspire the troops. If you love the economy, you have to take it upon yourself to stimulate it, to grow it. And so, yeah, yeah. Part of it was like, can I put up numbers? Yeah.

One conversation with the right European over there, going to change everything. Yeah, yeah. You're going to inspire them. No, I had an amazing trip. It was great. Left the kids with the grandmas. That's great. And yeah, had the grandmas. Um, and, uh, yeah, I had a, had a, had a fantastic

time. Um, a lot of skiing I did. So last episode we recorded, John was, was deeply, uh, ill with the plague and within maybe five hours after recording, I had the plague. Uh, so this is the, this is the plague zone. If you, if you step up to the plague uh so this is the this is the plague zone if you if you step up to the table with an illness it's probably gonna get cheered around um so basically like the flight over there and the first like 36 48 hours i was deathly ill no skiing uh trying to beat this fever but beat it ended up having a great trip uh but very happy to be back we we were gonna maybe record remotely just didn't didn't happen it was like the worst week of my life though not being able to record

totally so miserable it was it was weird trying to relax when all we wanted to do was record exactly but we made it through it we're back and we're uh 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 $230 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 a 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 huge 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. 2022. They had 370 million of net income. 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, uh, and a fascinating story, but let's start with skiing. Let's go to Creatine Cycle. He says, when it comes to hobbies that don't generate shareholder value, surfing seems more high T than skiing. With skiing, it's D-E-I? 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 that baldo's in the replies here saying wait until the vcs see this one and yeah it's true skiing it's a little bit easy so yeah i mean this this this was uh 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 um and it's funny because i posted i posted that yeah i

got 3 000 likes 3 000 um so i posted that and and a lot of you know when 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 uh where my wife is like didn't didn't ski much growing up she just would like go to the spa and stuff uh 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 animal is the one who hunts for the best powder with the helicopter. Yeah. Very clearly, like an eagle descending upon the mountaintop and taking powder for their own. Yep. Rejecting conformity. It's great. I just want to give you a little bit more color on Vale.

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 some color here on Vail. Very exclusive. It is the most visited um it is the most visited

uh ski resort in the united states uh for the for the 2023 to 2024 ski season veil mountain offers some of the most expansive and varied terrain in north america with with approximately 5 300 skiable acres including seven world-renowned back bowls and it's basically like disneyland the disneyland of ski resorts yes and this is what's so fascinating ski-able acres, including seven world-renowned back bowls. It's basically like Disneyland, the Disneyland of ski resorts. Yes. And this is what's so fascinating about Vail. I was watching this YouTube video by this limousine liberal, this guy who's really insufferable and hates everything and yet collects Rolexes.

It's very cringe. Amazing. He's like, everything is about, oh, capitalism is so broken, capitalism is so broken. And it's like, bro, you're- Watch collector. Watch collector. You're 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, totally. But yeah, in this video, it's breaking down like, oh, like, you know,

these like ski companies that come in and they turn them into like Disneyland and they destroy like the local economy. And it's so sad because like used to just be able to go to some mountain town, like live there. And it was so good. And, and then like, I'm like 30 minutes into this video, hearing him complain about this. And I'm like, okay, like maybe this is real. Like this, it would suck. Like, it'd be kind of cool to like, you know, just be someone who built a family in Vail and like had a great life. Vail was never a town. It 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 never anything else. Like no one was displaced. Well, it used to be part of Texas.

Oh yeah. So Max Meyer brought this to my, 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 vale texas has a nice ring to it and he shows like an entire map here i love it of how veil used to be a part of texas so um yeah texas it gets kind of mogged 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 yeah you're shrinking you're basically i was talking trash about denmark

because uh they're talking a big game about not selling greenland to america and i was like you guys sold us the british version of the u.s virgin islands you guys sold all your all your trading posts in india yeah and you were talking a big game then yeah what happened they're just negotiating yeah they're they're shrinking they're negotiating with the best negotiator. The guy who literally wrote the art of the deal. Yeah, it's impossible. It's over. They're throwing out.

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 i 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 i just got sick of it or something but i went back and found this tweet from 2021 march and says watching fin twit could market, by the way. Like if she came back online and just like posted like a ticker, like it would probably set. We got to get in touch and get her 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 data, the Epic Pass has just grown and grown and grown and become this like monster share of their revenues. I'm pretty sure there's something like over 50% of their like Lyft revenue. Yeah, here it is. So the Lyft related revenue mix in 2008, it was 26% passes. In 2022, it was 26% passes. In 2022, it was 62% passes. 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 this 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 helped build mammoth mountains and ran the gondola mammoth for for like 50 years and uh maybe not 50 like more like i no i think around 50 anyway i try and keep it like just strictly business on the show so whenever you talk about your family because as we've said we're not best no but um but uh yeah yeah we are not friends strictly this is

about delivering the news yep daily yep and nothing else yep um but um but uh yeah so so growing up like you know you'd go i'd go to squaw for a while i'd go to mammoth but this the the trade-off of getting a season pass growing up my experience was you had to be so committed to a single mountain 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, from, from day passes. Um, but now the Epic pass is like such a good product, right? Like if you want to ski a lot at, at more than one place, It's just a phenomenal product for users. So you can't buy it in season. You have to buy it before.

But a lot of ski people, they have a crew of friends that like to go and like a loose association. They become like, they're either Epic Pass crew or Icon Pass, which is the rival one. And if you're on the Epic Pass, you get to go to all of Vail's

mountains, which they've acquired 42 now. they've vale breckenridge park city in utah keystone and then beaver creek crested butte whistler blackcomb so you can go to whistler in canada that was a billion dollar deal that they that they paid for that and whistler is insane i mean i'm not like a complete skiing and the other thing the other thing is you can you can subscribe to it on a monthly basis. So you're able to take a cost that for a lot of people was like this big one-time purchase. And you're just like permanently paying them whatever, a hundred bucks a month. But it makes skiing so much more accessible. It's like literally cheaper to get access to 42 of the greatest ski resorts yeah of all time for 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 um you know veil 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 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 of 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 so taking, yeah. Taking a small step back. Yeah. It's almost impossible to understate how hard it is to run a ski resort. So like I had a, like, you know, having family member who is running. So my great grandpa, world war two vet, all these guys are go to war. come back they decide to like build ski resorts it's very hard undertaking but but uh 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 yeah 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 has to be zero has to be zero right so you get one and and there are some videos out there you can find videos where like, um, a lift like reverses and it just starts going down like backwards, like in the opposite direction. It's just like terrifying, terrifying. Um, also, I mean, the logistics around keeping these lifts running is really hard because these are the, every machine is kind of bespoke because it's not like there's one size fits all. I mean, there obviously there's some parts that are interchangeable And then if a part breaks, how do you get that part?

You know, it needs to get to, you need some like huge gear that's probably custom machined or milled and then 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 yep and then 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 couple weeks were a disaster in park city but the fact that ski resorts, you know, that last like a couple of weeks were a disaster in Park City. But the fact that there aren't more disasters is honestly pretty amazing. It is. It's a testament to how good in general we've gotten at 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 the tahoe uh ski resorts obviously whistler's 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 they just want to get out there and so the the kind of value prop for veil was we can bring some of that like destination, beautiful luxury ski town like experience to the Northeast. But there's going to be need to be significant CapEx that goes into the business.

And so at this one ski resort called Aditash, I think it's called Aditash. They needed to replace the chair, the chairlift 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 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 the the pylons in and stuff and the locals were like super pissed because they're like you're this big corporation like why can't you get this on time like you know we wanted this to be missed half the season missed half the season um but they did actually wind up getting it in and it's an

interesting like you know battle between like yeah the locals and of course like whenever something goes wrong everyone's like very opinionated and vocal about it but well yeah that's the other challenge of running these resorts is half half I don't know the exact split but a large percentage of your customer base are these sort of fair weather they're gonna be there to 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 in in some ways that i think the epic pass at like twelve hundred dollars a year to get access to 40 plus resorts is it twelve hundred dollars a year i think it's like 500 no no i'm pretty sure i'm pretty sure it's 1200 for like the yeah it's expensive but but it's not in the context of like yeah yeah it's not in the context of um like the fact that if you're just buying a day pass it's like 250 bucks 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 that's that's yeah like that's like in terms of just like an experience like oh i went skiing this weekend. It's like so much higher above, like I saw a movie or like, what else did you do? Like you hung out and got drinks or went, you know, went to a nice dinner. Um, but yeah, so veil has been back and forth for a while. People love it. People hate it. Max Meyer again says veil 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. Because he thinks it's a well-run 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 in Courchevel, 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 anti-mimetic 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... It's horrible. Like it's really bad and horrifying but at the same time for every one woman that you notice that has like way too much lip filler there's like five others that that use just like a subtle amount yeah maybe you're like oh she looks nice or whatever um and so so it's this interesting thing where lip filler is constantly getting this terribly negative advertising yeah yet it continues on yeah plastic surgery is like uh like a good defensive cornerback like you only notice it when they're fucking up

right yeah yeah that's a good that's a good example right yeah the the good d d back yeah i don't know much about sports you're not you're not noticing like a because he's shut that shutting down you can say that you can say you could say that's like like put it in business context exactly right like it's a good controller yeah like nobody's like nobody you 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 control 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. TF Jenkins had the first post that I really saw go viral here. He says, thanks, Park City, At 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 funniest thing is super long lines back in yeah back in like the 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 like this is like taking like too long um but some of the 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 that uk the uk porn star who's like oh yeah it looked like the line for like the worst analogy possible no somebody somebody else somebody else posted that they were like is this like a line for lily phillips next like video yeah and so uh people started diagnosing the problems.

Will Minitis says, it's incredible that Apollo owns both every good ski slope in America, Vail, and every private military contractor, Blackwater, Triple Canopy, possibly the most adaptive allocators to ever live. Late stage finance is truly a beautiful thing. And this is like kind of true, but Apollo hasn't owned veil for two decades so gonna have to put that one in the truth zone will not quite right and then uh andrew reed is uh hypothesizing why things might be going wrong at veil he says when you learn veil resorts cmos prior job was 10 years at comcast everything clicks into place uh that's that's a deep dive he he looked up the cmo like

he really must have been on the ground in colorado yeah or utah i mean he's wearing ski gear in his profile picture yeah i think this guy's a real skier a real skier they're probably uh you know sequoia partner digging in understanding what's going on yeah i love it. But I want to go through 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. 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. They said their burger cost $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, good stuff, Ben. Way to, way to, you know, um, we've dealt with our own, uh, our editors trying to unionize over and over. Um, but we're always able to win. Um, 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. uh you know veil not wanting to set the precedent that a small group of individuals at one of their resorts is able to like shut down uh you know the the basically shut down the brand yep over a over a single dispute and i believe tj 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. At one resort, he says, the union is also advocating for improved benefits, including more accessible healthcare options, holiday pay, and a more attractive overall benefits package to retain and attract skilled patrollers. One proposed solution is offering healthcare stipends to allow patrollers to maintain year-round coverage without switching providers every six months. So, yeah, I think this is like a pretty interesting sort of challenge, right, where skiing and working in the ski industry historically was something that people would do out of love.

They would do it and they would have to make a lot of sacrifices or 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 but

but now people can say well okay like your veil resorts you're this huge huge public company you know you deserve you you should be you know the 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 I saw that 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, shouldn't you just pay your people more? And you said, if John Coogan was negotiating for these ski patrollers, I'd be like, give me some of that sweet stock-based comp. That's true.

Saying that $2 extra, don't just go for $2 cash. An equity program would be great. $2 of stock could easily turn into... Dollar MTN. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it is interesting because 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 uh twice their gna twice their other well yeah and the ski patrollers are a small at this one resort yeah are are are a cog in the machine but then you have people that do ski lessons which are different people that just lift operators people that do lift the lift operators are the people that are that are sitting there and like making sure you get on and turning it off and then you have the people that are maintaining the lifts

and then you have like the mountain operations and you have the guys that do the cats at night yeah then you have the guys that do the the dynamite at night to make sure like like and so you just add and then okay the cashier and so you just add, and then, okay, the cashier and then the kitchen staff and the people that do the rentals and, 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. And, and this is something they, as a public company can't afford to be like oh we have 42 resorts and we don't make any money we just need to add 20 more resorts and then we'll

make money everybody's gonna be like well what are you doing like you already own like the you already have the disneyland of skiing and 40 other resorts how are you not yeah a real business yeah i do wonder if there's other things they could do to lower the cost for the employees because an apartment in Vail is like $2,500 a month, which is very expensive if you're just a ski patroller, but they have a whole bunch of corporate apartments that are like 500 bucks a month. But I don't think they build enough of those maybe,

so they need to build more, but there's a lot of permitting and regulation. Did you know that they're trying to build a tunnel in Vail? This is really interesting So the 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 gonna happen it's been in the plan for like 40 years in their general plan yeah um

but yeah should we move on to the story of uh when veil stole park city it's pretty interesting so grit capital great poster wrote a big long thread that we'll dig through. So he starts by saying, everyone makes a mistake at work, but rarely do they end up reshaping an entire industry. It's a well-known story, but hey, it's almost ski season. And who doesn't love a cautionary tale about the costs of administrative errors? Park City is now famous for its skiing, but that's a recent development. It was a silver mining town for most of its life. So dependent on the industry, so dependent on the industry that it was 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 decade's end. Skiing started as miners would ski jump on the old Creole mine dump. Sounds lit. Park City Consolidated Mines officially began the ski business in 1963 on treasure mountain a mine train took them through the mountain to an elevator climbing up 1750 feet again also sort of lit then it was in the 1970s parks park city ski area or at least 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 leases, either from the government or from other organizations. It's fascinating. It's actually in 10K here. It's so funny to think about somebody writing up a 100-year lease for property, and they're like, oh, what's a fair price?

Like 150 grand a year? Yeah. Thinking it's like this 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 massive inflation. And then in 20, yeah, it's like,

it's good. Screwed. Uh, this would become park city mountain resort. One of three resorts in the immediate area alongside skier only deer Valley and third place canyons, uh, in 1994 PCMR that's park Mining Resorts or something. What is it?

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 his stuff. What a Chad. He's in his early 20s? Well, this is these are ads from his product I believe but yeah he's 28 in his early 20s he had already created

the mountain headwear brand which he sold in his 30s or 40s yeah in oh three but but he was an entrepreneur and so he he starts powder buys PCMR, Park City. Powder quickly grew into one of the largest ski resort operators in the country with PCMR as its crown jewel. Status further boosted by the 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 are the corporations? So Vail Associates used to be based in Vail, but they got too big because they're managing 40 resorts like internationally and stuff so they actually moved to denver i believe yep um the success wasn't entirely unprecedented powder

had the backing of john's father ian who founded loose uh lucidia now merged with jeffrey some sort of bank i guess described as the smaller berkshire hathaway but with a better track record uh the company was valued at nearly seven7 billion when Ian retired in 2013. Damn. Damn. Nepo, baby. Let's go.

Putting the family money to work, buy on ski resorts. Let's go. I was, I was like seeing this headline. It's like this. He's 28 and he owns park city. Meanwhile,

his dad's running $7 billion. Let's go. That's, Iillion dollar let's go that's i mean that's that's why if your dad or your mom is wildly successful you the bar is not it is just astronomically higher yeah like you need to own an asset like park city by the time you're 28 or you're a loser i agree i agree and but it's look like, yeah, maybe he didn't have 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. And that's pretty awesome. And so it's like, yeah, you're not buying NASCAR team. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you're, you're not the, you're not the $7 billion hedge fund guy, but you own park city. That's it. Yeah. Meanwhile, Park City's ugly stepsister, Canyons,

languished compared to its neighboring resorts. Despite larger area underinvestment and a nonsensical layout, limited lodging and a revolving door of owners left it with maybe 400,000 skiers per year versus 1 million at Park City. A Canadian real estate company, Talisker Land Holdings, would acquire Canyons in 2007,

beating out rising Colorado powerhouse Vail Resorts. So Vail wanted to buy Canyons, but they lost out on the deal. They'd invest in new upgrades, including North America's first heated chairlift. Sick. 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 resorts. 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 and PCMR'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 veil resorts who assumed the legal battle. Veil'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 canyons resort is, is described here, 4,000 skiable areas,

top 10 ranking and skiing outside Matt magazines, attractive park city location, a huge growth opportunities, et cetera. The opportunity for reconciliation was gone. The gloves were off. Vail, you'll recall, had lost canyons to Talisker in 07, that bidding war, and had come back for the full enchilada. So they come back to buy it all. Led by CEO Rob Katz, pictured here. you got to look at a photo of this guy.

Total giga chad. Led by CEO Rob Katz, Vail was a known growing powerhouse in Colorado and California. They were beginning an ascent. Few truly appreciated what was coming. Park City was the first entree. And so Vail Resorts is expanding

into Breckenridge, Keystone, Canyons, Heavenly, et cetera. The $305 million deal was 20X the estimated $15 million EBITDA Canyons would bring in. The deal would only make sense if Vail 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 veil for 183 million dollars 5x the incremental 35 million dollar ebitda veil 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 Blackcomb for 1.1 billion and 2019 acquisition of 17 resorts from Peak Resorts. That's the Northeast stuff, I believe.

Their scale surpasses anything previously seen in the industry. 2019 acquisition of 17 resorts from peak resorts. That's the Northeast stuff. I believe, um, their scale surpasses anything previously seen in the industry. It is fascinating that, um, 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. And like, yeah,

I think the, the, the, the reason that i this 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 patrollers 23 an hour will be a harvard business school case study on bad business and it's like okay i get it that when you when you frame it like that it seems silly but it's all about precedent right and and again it's not like

fail 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 in revenue 230 in net income like 10 net income margin it's not exactly like and the stock has not grown over the last four years yeah there's not a lot of greatest bull market it's not exactly like and the stock has not grown over the last four years yeah and there's not a lot of greatest bull market it's not yeah and it's not that's the other thing it's not where does it go from here the ski industry i don't know how much bigger it's going to get there when when when we were growing up there was a lot of like there was a group called like save

our winters there's this whole idea of like climate change and and how it's um and the most interesting thing about the climate change thing is I have this whole business school case study here, lifting the veil. Largest US snow sports resort operator takes on climate change. These folks at Michigan Ross School of Business did a whole deep dive on sustainability and ESG

and how veil 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 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. And the other thing is like these – think about how challenging it is to run a business. And it's not even – like the ski industry has like – the people that work in the industry have every right to be emotional and be like charged up 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 are 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 has to it's has to be frustrating running veil

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 for fun and you're still not happy. It's like, that's gotta be a rough, rough spot to be. Um, I, I mean, I honestly, like, it seems like they, they poorly handled the last couple of 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. Maybe Vale should buy Greenland. There we go. It'll become a country. But then it's like Russia and Mongolia, which 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, uh, this report, uh, this report is like, okay, how do you deal with, uh, uh, 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, Czechia, 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. 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. Um, let's, uh, let's finish the, the, the, the veil acquisition story here. Um, so veil 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 veil 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 combine. And the pass revenue, which you'll see here, climbed from $78 million in 2008 to basically $800 million in 2022. So a 10x growth. 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 the past revenue, 10x growth in the stock, and that's almost all just to retooling the business model. And obviously a lot of expansion.

And the reason, I mean, the reason I just, again, 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 positive overall, but it's at the expense of the local. Yeah, but yeah, even the ski town it's probably a a net like net positive overall but it's 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 epic and they're like oh i'm gonna go to utah for a week and week. And you can go off season. And it's not that expensive to stay at some little hotel. Can I agree?

You posted a few times about the cost of skiing in Europe versus the United States. And this Andy Vandenberg 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. Um, I don't think this is, this, this is not purely because of the duopoly. It has always been significantly, you know, even prior to the, to the, to the, um, Disneyification of, of American skiing, it was always quite a bit cheaper to go skiing in Europe. But again, I don't...

I mean, 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 Disney, Disneyification is real in the sense that like there's a fast pass. Yeah. There's a system for jumping even further. Yeah, and arguably if the fast pass is an extra,

if the main pass is a grand, and the fast pass is like three grand, but you ski 50 plus days a year, just like do it. It's like not that, you know. And so Grit goes on uh 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 and it's like he loves that lit yeah uh and it's like a bmx facility and like a parkour facility i guess uh pretty pretty interesting and then if we go over here the talisker well they're not doing so hot after leasing to veil they hit rocky times with creditors and eventually forced foreclosure in 2015 it's likely that their shaky financial situation that precipitated the mess in the first place. And what might have been though, there had been talks about connecting the major Salt Lake City area resorts in a European style village to village arrangement with 80 lifts and 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 thread 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 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 um so that is uh the story you got some more posts i got one last thing we can end on from at the stalwart, Mr. Joe Wiesenthal 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 winters 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? I 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 a Zoom. 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 uh where's your valley or yeah yeah yeah uh and i was talking to another another person about how uh like there's this jockeying

that's happening right now for like you know can you get on the list for one of the big vc ski vacations that are going on so every vc firm is kind of organizing them and every like little group of, of like rich guys are putting together ski weekends and like getting on those lists. It feels very like, Oh, are you in the in group? It's like the cool kids. It feels like not working, but spending a full day with someone is always like a million times better than like five, right. It's, 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 that's why like that's why it really 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, it was like skiing with my mom. Like you get all these moments where you get to like have this exhilarating fun activity 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, 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 then we can close out with any more posts. But there's a lot of questions about like, oh, it must be really rough being a ski patroller right now. And I think that if you're looking for a career instead of going into ski patrol, I would recommend going into private equity. Yeah. And so if you look at the history of Vail, the private equity guys have done very well. Yeah. And it seems like the ski patrollers have struggled. if you look at the history of veil the private equity guys have done very well yep and and it seems like the ski patrollers have have struggled and it goes back to like who has the financial leverage who has the who has the power there and so uh little less time on the slopes a little more

time in the sheets in the spreadsheet so so obviously uh you're you're 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 just care about skiing, you're still better off getting a fake remote job and living in a mountain town and just skiing constantly than going and becoming a ski patrol person. Um, I know I have 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 has spent the last few weeks on the North Shore at Pipeline, getting absolutely barreled every single day. And it's like he makes way more money than the average pro surfer.

And surfs like probably 50%, 60% as much, but like has a real career. And so if you're thinking about becoming a ski bum, you can pay for gear, pay for coaches, pay for training. Yeah. You get to healthcare. Yeah. Yeah. So if you're thinking about becoming a ski bum, 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. Lever 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 D2TC companies. Yeah, they haven't raised a dollar. And they've just grown that business and grown it, grown it, grown it. And now it's doing, I think, hundreds of millions of dollars, right, Jordy? 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 classic. 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 i can boom boom boom boom boom it's great and this knife is 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 jordy 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 Malucky. Go for it. Oh, just started this second company. He's not busy enough with Andoril. Ooh, nice packaging.

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 patent 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's the deal with like a Game Boy company? Like, why is that a good company? But if you think about like, well, then maybe the N64 comes off patent. 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 comes off patent. 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 another bull case for Mod Retro is that GameStop is a multi, I don't know what their market cap is today. I'm assuming it's, they're still like. Yeah, they ripped and they continue to rip. This is amazing. And uh but listen to that so 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 all right uh no but anyway so if so if gamestop is a 14 billion dollar company and every single game in the store you can just download yeah this this is the lifeline for gamestop and so basically i think that gam 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 going to be huge. Which is like, what is the last kind of video game that you can buy in the store? And it's cartridges. Yeah.

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 it so it's like a modern memory card inside well yeah and so here's the other here's the other bull case is you have this ipad baby generation yeah we have children i would much rather give our sons one of these on a road trip than the average ip, which is just going to be like, you know. Yeah. And I was playing a game on PlayStation 5 over the break with my son. And it was awesome. It was about Astro's robots. And it's 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 yeah and so he couldn't really figure it out so he just watched and he was really into that and then every once in a while there'd be like one thing that just required pressing one button and it'd be like you press the button and be really excited about that yeah but i think he could actually learn to play tetris and build a build quality on it the build quality is amazing remarkable it's significantly it's significantly

it's significantly better oh yeah yeah because i have so so i think i mentioned recently i have a i have a game boy color that 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 three thousand dollars and then if you don't if you don't have the, 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 really cool how they brought this back.

Yeah. I mean, talk about an ideas, an ideas guy that is at the top of his game. Totally. Is the guy who's making the next Lockheed Martin also is good enough ideas guy that is at the top of his game totally is the guy who's making the next lockheed martin also is good enough ideas guy to realize that hey you can just build a game boy color yeah i love it so yeah go pick one up tell them the technology brother sent you uh we're we're very excited to have that uh we also got some very cool merch from rostra lulu's company uh she sent us this amazing 3d printed rostra are you familiar with like what a rostra is jordy hey um are you playing i'm sorry it's so good right it's

fun it's like it comes back immediately yeah it's so fun yeah you get video games are addictive yep be careful with them. Yeah. The Mod Retro. Oh, man. I'm so excited for that thing. So Rostra is the name of Lulu Masservey's company. Yes.

Lulu, of course, is the brother of the year, comms mastermind. Great follow on X. And her company is named Rostra, which a roman term for uh exactly this i think like a 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 um rostra and she also sent a fantastic quarter zip that i've been wearing and is extremely comfortable. That's actually some of the only startup merge that I'm pissed that we didn't get two of. Yeah. I feel like she's mentioned.

I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to send, I'm going to get really frustrated. Well, I happen to be drinking a Yerba Mate sent from Rob Mower, co-founder of Huberman Lab. Rob, thank you for sending. We have a lot of these now. Oh, fantastic. Yerba Mate. This was a company that I don't know if Rob and Andrew are co-founders or they're major investors in the company.

They're big proponents of Yerba Mate. Was it Andrew from Tiny? Andrew Wilkinson? I think he also invested. He helped finance it. Yeah, yeah. It's cool. So anyways, these are fantastic.

You can get them at Erewhon. You can 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 120. 120, not bad. 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 going through going through yeah what else do we have we have a we have a sweatshirt we've gotten so much a lot of we got people know this 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 the world's healthiest hoodie here from Superpower Labs. This is edition one. And this hoodie has an entire – it has nutrition facts on the logo. And it has zero PFAS or microplastics.

So you do not – and it's completely toxin free. Um, and it even is more ecological. It uses 90% less water and 45% fewer emissions, uh, 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 to kind of 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 apres 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 Sucu. La Sucu. Cool. And it's really, really known for its steak. So we were, we ski into this place and we spend all this time selecting a steak. And they weigh it out for you.

And after 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. He goes through all the hassle of like selecting this incredible piece of meat and he slaps the PFAS receipt. But did he print on the backside? Print what? Like, is there ink on the backside? It doesn't matter, but I thought it was, I thought it was the paper. No, no, it's the ink. I thought it was the thermo. I thought it was the paper itself. I think,

I think it's the ink that you want to watch. Um, but get a receipt i always if i have to touch it i'll just touch the part that didn't get the ink on it so yeah i don't know if i don't know if that i don't know if that works i think it works but um 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 yeah 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 meat and then slaps their seat on it.

That guy is not on right-wing Twitter. He needs to get ripped out. Okay, let's go to 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 bear domestication. Bear domestication does feel like it's getting closer to being a reality as opposed to just joke territory. And I could see someone raising.

Or the whole, oh, we're building autonomous submarines. It's like, just say you failed at training dolphins. Yep. Yep. It's a good point. Just say you failed. It's a good point. We also had another spicy prediction, which was that the total confirmed kill count of

all defense tech companies would pass 100K in 2025. So that'd be a big milestone. Yeah. What else? What seriously? 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 the the defense tech stuff it's already been like a big tent since um 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 starshield which is a defense tech product and then the 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 andrewl'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 is that space space 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 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 Andreessen did a little bit of that

within 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 llama it's like is 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. Yeah. 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. 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 Microsoft's going to spend 80 billion? 80 billion.

And so that just says, B, C. B, C is going to jump on this, right? Honestly, the 80 seemed kind of weak to me. I feel like they should raise like 800 billion of debt and just do that in a year. Yeah. Are they out of ideas? Are they out of ideas? Like, what's going on?

Do they not believe? It's funny because everyone's saying that. It's the loudest signal that agi is around the corner and you're it is 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 100 if i need 100 billion dollars hundred, if I need a hundred billion dollars with the data centers, this is like one of the few companies that can actually do that.

And now they're doing it. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see how the CoreWeave IPO goes. I think a lot of people are going to be watching that in terms of like data center build out and valuation.

We have a DM here. 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 the same place as Rob actually. I got recommend, uh, Rob, Rob, uh, Huberman's business partner, Andrew Huberman's business partner, uh, has fantastic flow. He does. He showed up to my house for jujitsu one day. I was like, dude, where do you get your haircut?

Live like a few minutes from each other. And he's like, go to brook at salt salon so i go to brook at salt salon and um i told her yesterday while i was getting my haircut her saturday it was i was like uh people keep commenting on about my hair they and and i swear i shouldn't have said anything because she started she like got like a little bit like she lost a little bit of confidence she started overthinking it oh no like you do it perfect every time you never give me a bad haircut just like lock in just give me a regular cut and she got it got into her head somehow so if if i'm not on my game today uh it's it's it's because i i shouldn't have said anything but what about product i mean so i haven't used a product in forever okay I jump in the ocean frequently. I live by the beach.

And I never use shampoo. I think big shampoo is very bad. And most people. But the key to not using shampoo is you have to eat super clean. So if you eat super clean, you're not like sort of just expelling like toxins. Sure, sure, sure. And so you can skip the shampoo. So I use shampoo maybe once a month. of just expelling like toxins sure you're like poor 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 um and uh just salt water and uh you know i use the sauna i use it yeah i use the sauna a lot too so yeah and in an air on bill that looks like a mortgage payment six the six fig it really does look like a mortgage payment have i 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 Air One,

16 grand. Oh my God. I spend the average PM's monthly salary at Air One. 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 Henil 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 nineties, I think, or like 2002. And it's like, and, and there were like hit piece after hit piece about that book. And then apologies. Like, I think David Sachs at one point had distanced himself from certain passages and say, oh, that was taken out of context. Like it was like not a book that you put like front and center when you're introducing David Sachs on stage. You're like, he's a SaaS investor. 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. He was dead on. And so there's a little bit of like, once the world

comes around to your perspective, 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 over yc and a lot of company people were like i won't take peter's money it's like okay yeah sure um debate over YC and a lot of companies, people were like, I won't take Peter's money. It's like, okay, yeah, sure. Um, but, uh, but there was a lot of that. Now, now he's able to go and kind of like, like reintroduce his worldview to a more receptive audience. 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, um, but only know him as like, I was at a wedding once and they're like, Oh, Peter Thiel, like he's a fascist. Like he's, you know,

like that, that type of stuff. And now it's like, Oh yeah. 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 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. This is why the press was so against like the podcast election because they were like, yeah,

do not humanize Trump by letting people listen to him for three. It was JD 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 normie dude in the world.

Yeah, he is just like a normal guy. Like, 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, that's fine. But like this, this imagined, you know, craziness is just like so bad, the political derangement syndrome on both sides. Uh, and it was, 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 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 any, for tons of communities. There was 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 Baron.

Base Baron says, early stage slash pre-seed 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 Anderle 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, it's, it's particularly hilarious because like Anderle was a founder's 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 Anduril's data and then 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, so I'll take baron's side on this one i do think as a founder if you're spending it can be a weird situation if it's you know a founding team is like working on an idea 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 haven't, like big VCs haven't, like Andreessen Horowitz doesn't have like an incubator. They have like EIRs, but they haven't been like, Hey, 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 this is like a Rick Rubin quote, right? Like ideas have their time, somebody's gonna do them. And so if you're a partner at one of these funds where you can invest or incubate and 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. Um, and I can, and I, 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 actively trying to not start that company yeah yeah he was actively trying to invest in it he spent two years as a principal just looking for defense tech companies who's going to build this who's going to build this and no one came through and then he's finally like we got to do it yeah yeah um so very different and andrew is like this special

case where it's like you have this rock star team of like former Palantir 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, uh, when Justin Mayers was, was initially pitching true med, some of the feedback he got was like, this is a good idea, but you gotta be really quiet about this for the next like year or two until you get this thing going because this is an idea that would be copied by ten different YC companies and you would just get sliced up 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 you

do need to be somewhat careful depending on what the market timing is for your business what the structure of the for your business, what the structure of the business will be like, clearly Anderle had, it was in such a, such a, uh, 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? Um, 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. 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, and then I kept hearing about that, 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. 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, you're fucking incubating a competitor to this deal that I brought you. I was super annoyed. And I only found out at the end of last year that it was a totally different jack wait really but i kept hearing that oh no way so for this whole year i talked about 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 but 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 wow and um that's so yeah i think there's a reason like at the end of the day what the the reason that it's not so bad that funds have this incubation strategy is like they would so much rather just back the generational team yep and so if you are building a generational company and you have this world-class generational team you can rest assured that the 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 so just be better. Yeah. It's a skill issue. Uh, there is another funny, like flip side to this. Uh, I, I think that, I think

your takeaway is like, like basically dead on. Um, but, uh, there's a funny flip side where I heard a story about, uh, uh, a firm that does incubations had, uh, a person come and interview to work at the firm on incubations and then they stole an idea from the incubator and went and built the business separately and was like i'm not giving you anything it raised different money and then it didn't go well eventually like it got usually those things don't but and it was like a very bad thing and 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 the cuts both ways yeah

it didn't work out and i wouldn't recommend it but but it is funny uh let's go to another uh question i got in a dm that was pretty interesting um 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 uh does someone go on one and then other podcasts reach out? Curious why YouTube feeds me the same 20 people all the time and wondering how they get on so many shows for having no real body of work other than just being interested to listen to. That's a good post. That's a good way for everybody. It's 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 a 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 end 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. So, 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 would want to be on those slots. And so it's a bloodbath of competition to try to get onto that slot. What is true is like,

if somebody goes and they do one good interview and then they can jump to do another one and then they just end up becoming like a classic, like interview guests, it does. I do think that there's like a bit of a snowball effect, but yeah, it's not easy. I think, um, everybody that has a podcast will like, has like a long list of emails that they've gotten from PR firms from 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's podcast founders. And it's like, 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 can get on David Center's show. You just have to have built a generational company. Just create $10 billion of value and have someone write a biography. Three people write a book on you. Yeah, exactly. Then you can get on. Yeah,

yeah, it's easy. 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. Yeah, yeah, it's easy. It's easy. It's really easy if you just check those boxes. PR firms should just do that for them. Just help me build $10 billion. Yeah, I mean, it is wild how you get 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 & Schuster and Penguin. Yeah, so for sure the book publishers have the relationships now. They know that there are certain podcasts that do book reviews. 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 an excuse. It's just an excuse. Usually it's like people building a relationship over a long time. And then they're saying like, 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, uh, if you want me to come on your show, uh, 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 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 on 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 odd lots, which was like a pretty good spot. And, uh, and a lot of that just happened from like posting about becoming like an expert in the nicotine which was like a pretty good spot. And, uh, 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 get kind of like became a thought leader for a little bit.

And then like, uh, was just like available to the people. Um, yeah. And I, I 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 a hundred people. Because if you have the opportunity to speak for an hour in front of a hundred 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 this stuff. And so nowadays you can go and get on a podcast and even if there's only a hundred listeners, it's like, okay, you joined a zoom call and talk for 45 minutes and you got off. And like, if that, if only a hundred people ever listened to it, it's still a good opportunity to get yourself out there. So, uh, the other high leverage thing is that when you write a book that whatever your title of that book is follows you basically forever because people will, it's very hard for people to be,

Oh, like Jordy, he's the founder of this company and he founded this other company. But if you're just like author of whatever, they'll just be like, he's the author of this book. And so if you just, that's why we need to write the book lever up.

Yeah. Or, or like, you know, rags to riches, how I became a high testosterone giga Chad for only $5 a month or something like that. The hard thing about bench pressing 400 pounds and driving sports cars all day and drinking

Dom Perignon at work. Something stupid like that. So it just follows you forever. Let's go to Nicole. This is a great question. This is bait for us. us she got 97 comments i'm sure all of them are wrong uh 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 gotta up. Gotta go Cartier. Cartier tank. Obviously. Yeah, yeah. Cartier tank is like the one.

Tank Louis. Yeah. 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 like daily i mean i mean the the ladies nautilus is 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 21 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 and that would have been an amazing opportunity to fund some of these watch purchases for some of these allocators that are, yeah, that are just not following the 2% rule at all. Exactly. I'm letting everyone down. What else?

I mean, I mean, uh, there are some, I, I think Rolex is a little overplayed, but there are some interesting pieces in there. Uh,

I think Lisa Sue at AMD has one. That's beautiful. Yeah. Something simple. is a little overplayed but there are some interesting pieces in there uh i think lisa sue at amd has one that's beautiful yeah something simple where you go with like a date no no day date yeah it's not a date just that should be a banned word we need to have a list of banned words on the show day just is banned day just is banned um but uh like since there's some unique date just that have you know yeah i think could be 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 yeah that was actually i it was funny i landed i landed i landed in geneva yeah um and cause ap had like the whole airport. And I'm like the average person,

like only in Geneva do you put an airport ad for like the most hype beastie 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're cold? Get an RM. Get a skeletonized RM. Maybe a Hublot.

It puts you in a unique club. You know what's good? She says gold. Why not a jean? What? Remember the jeans? There's a watch that's made entirely out of jeans. Oh, wow.

And yeah, it's made out of jean material. It's a Hublot 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 Frosé,

Tank Anglaise. There's a few others that I think could work. We could spend a whole hour. Stick Classic, Tank Louis. If you're trying to save a buck, you could go with the Solar Beat, but I recommend Louie. Here we go.

I'd love to hear y'all's take on what fighters are doing a good job brand building slash marketing themselves, or if you see any interesting trends in the sport from an entrepreneurial perspective, thank you. And he's talking about MMA fighters. Okay, so this is a question from our boy Bo Nickel, a rising star in the UFC and a technology brother himself. So Bo, a little bit of backstory.

Bo is a wrestler at Penn State. A lot of the best stars in MMA have a wrestling base. Khabib is the most prominent example of that. And there's actually some big fights coming up in LA this weekend, uh, which I'm excited for, but, um, 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 like proficiency and talent. And I think that, uh, Conor McGregor like led the charge here. He's one of the, as much as he had some extremely viral,

massive moments in the cage, people don't really realize that like his, his last like run in the UFC was like not so good. Right. He was getting knocked out by, you know, KO'd by Khabib, KO'd by Poirier,

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 very seemingly very natural like he came up in his his career he just was always good on the mic um and so something that people have realized within MMA and, and Bo certainly has, has known this is that you are building, you're not just a fighter and an athlete,

you're building a media brand around yourself. Right. Um, and, uh, 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, um, I think American top team in Pennsylvania, um, 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 picture like paparazzi pictures. And so he has to create his own kind of media business around himself. And so he's done a really good job of that.

Some fighters have been overly reliant on the UFC to promote them. But the issue is 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 you're not fighting that week you're you pretty much have to promote yourself and so some every fighter takes a different angle here like Bo has taken the angle of like I'm going to basically vlog his lifestyle as like this emerging you know athlete within the UFC he's taken sort of the high road you have other people like Colby Covington who I don't know are you familiar with Colby Covington so Colby Covington is like the couldn't be more polar opposite from Bo Bo's like the you

know the athlete like the good guy all-american um colby covington takes like we'll hire strippers and and get strippers around him like this and be throwing you know money and calling his like you know opponents like losers right um 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 can't fully, like you can tell in certain situations, he wants to just be like a nice, normal guy, but then he's gotta be like, you know, he's gotta be an asshole. That's like part of his brand now.

He's a heel. 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 seven. And like, we just need to be putting out this like really high volume of content because we need to be promoting ourselves year round, building this fan base because we can't rely 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 it's just like 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?

Like, but like 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, uh, 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, edit it on their phone, iMovie, just trim some stuff out. But just give the fans the opportunity to go deep with your life.

Take a photo, put on Instagram, do a short little video, one minute workout. It's a, it's a real, it's a tick tock. 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, the watch you own, like whatever else is in your world. But, you know, the fighting stuff is going to be the core thing. Who are you fans of? Who inspired you to get in this business? Like talk about anything.

Yeah, I've even seen some, some Sugar Sean, Sean O'Malley and his coach, Tim. They've built like a whole kind of like podcast network where they not only talk and cover their own stuff, but they, they, when there's like a fight and they're covering it. Right. And so, yeah, if I were, if I were an up and coming MMA fighter, I'd be like, okay, I need to have a camera guy on me at all times. 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. Yep. And I'm going to just like dump it into media because that, and that can quickly even become a profit center if you do

it properly. These fighters aren't paid exceptionally well. So anyways, um, I would say the same thing. Like it's, it's less necessary for like pro sports, right. Where you have these whole teams and there's more infrastructure, but these individualized, um, you know, sports are, you got to take it up yourself. Should we go into this epic Q and A from Andrew McCallum? Yeah. I love Andrew. Uh, if you don't know Andrew, he was the, uh, uh, he's an engineer at Varda space industries, but also, um, uh, uh, was big in the LK 99 saga of last year was that really 22 yeah he was the one that like replicated it and and like built it and actually tested it and it looked really promising but then it didn't go anywhere but he was actually able to get all the materials and and run the run the

process to to make it and i went down there i made a whole vlog about it it's really fun yeah and he also has 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 project bob and um we got to do a whole bit on it because they're raising money for it. And it's very cool. 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 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 uh the wildly over complicated path to get here really speaks for itself step one build and sell the requisite first company in my 20s five 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 Coogan's dock work and Chamath's trolling. Step four, nerd snipe every cracked and based engineer in California with Project Bob,

launching the world's first venture-backed hobby program. So obviously, once I sell it at Art Basel this year to Ken G or Justin Sun, the tough choice is the Lamborghini Miura 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, Coogan, 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 um so yeah what what a post uh i'm glad we could share it such a long way to say mura or lamborghini or you could just say mura f40 but got the life story that's what we want that's brother behavior right you got to give that context um and look i want to see andrew driving the f40 no doubt into the varta parking lot 40 parking in the handicap spot yep um just for the photo op and then taking it out and parking lamborg a normal spot. Lamborghinis are having a moment, but I think the Miura 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, Diablos are doing really well. Murcielagos are having a moment. And then you get up into the Aventador and some of the the the previous generations are starting to climb a little bit there's some interesting stuff there and for a long time the lamborghini like real car mercy alaga would be crazy pulling up to the varta offices and 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 million dollar cars um but uh if you what about what about he didn't give this

as an option but what about the lambo ramp the rambo lambo the lmo2 that is that that is that's that's the ultimate gundo hard it is somebody's gonna do it because it's it's a supercar yeah like by in itself like it's it has a v12 it has a v12 but it's the same it's the same engine as the kutosh i believe yeah you know it's like it's it's like got that um utilitarian yeah you got a trunk yeah you know like you can throw stuff in it you can throw 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 um but yeah i mean f40 is just iconic uh the lambos are having a moment but i think you gotta go f40 yeah although you won't be the only one

gundo driving one because uh uh founder of impulse space has one no way he's an f40 let's go Let's go. Let's go. Should we go in the timeline? Yeah, we're only two hours into the show and we 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 pulls 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. So we're going to do a couple bangers and then we'll pull out a bucket pull. Just like Kill Tony 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. Unserious 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 in the companies they work at. Yeah, so everyone was working. Yeah, I mean, why not? I do think it is like a weird one because it is,

if you were going to give your team any week off throughout the entire year. Christmas and New Year's was particularly dead 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 just come up with ideas and i'd start pulling people in i'd be like all right let's get on a quick call let's get on a quick call. 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. Um, 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 longterm planning, you're still working but it's a more intellectual you're reading you're thinking about long-term planning you're reflecting yeah and and i think that for the for the people who are just like butts in seats it's fine to take some time off but yeah you don't want your your sdrs just burning out cold calling like they're just not gonna get that's the thing like as much as it's very real that that i would i would say i would say out of the 50 portfolio ceos yeah that you know across my portfolio

i would imagine that the best companies the ceos 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 take the next few days off yeah because like again if you if you're an account manager role you don't need to be hitting up your your accounts on the 29th being like hey if you like how's it going they're gonna be like i'm like yeah offline yeah, offline. Yeah. Right. Matt Wang at 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 Bitcoin. Trump got elected, there were a lot of pro-crypto things happened, and the price went from like 60 to 90 immediately. And it was like, okay like clearly things are 50 better for this industry yep uh and and and that is very interesting i'm wondering if there's if there's

more if there's more to that like political block with a native asset like i guess it i guess it just means regulatory stuff but the nebraska corn farmers would like a word yeah well what i'm getting at is like i think that they're the the feedback loop is not just being able to divine political influence and how things are going to price but also as the price gets higher there is more money to spend on political influence so the packs get get bigger. I mean, Andreessen Horowitz donated by far the most to crypto packs when I looked at the data earlier this year, the last year. And it was very clear that like, if you're running a crypto fund and or you're 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 anderole 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 the it's not as focused and consolidated whereas everyone is kind of marching in lockstep in the crypto industry um yeah it's it's it's the I think the my the only I always um 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 uh 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 yourself yeah speak for yourself um whereas like bitcoin there's like huge numbers of people that if the price was a hundred dollars a coin they would still be adamant about the importance of it and they would still spend all their time thinking about it and so i think that that that's part of the power of it it's a religion with a native asset, right? Yeah, 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-crypto. That was a big part of Kamala's policy. She wanted to protect i know what you're gonna say yeah yeah let's move on from that but uh but yeah and and uh this person had some crazy like you know jumping through a million hoops to be like well actually like crypt it's easy to make money in crypto when it's illegal because there's more scams.

And I was like, this doesn't sound good at all. 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. But we also want Bitcoin and stable coins to be legal. I don't know if we ever, did we ever address this on the show? We talked about- We were over break. Yeah, I think this was over break, but we had covered a post about,

somebody had said something, how do I invest? They were like, I 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 dom perry on we buy yeah and you know so mh 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 go along this, this podcast. Like I'm excited. He was just being like generally positive, which is awesome. Uh, and, uh, and some, and then we said, oh yeah, we're not going to do a coin of course. Like, but, uh, you can just buy LVMH because we're going to be buying so much Dom Perignon should be an obvious joke, but someone went and on pump.fun created a ticker called LVMH, which I didn't even realize there was a previous LVMH pump.fun 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 names. Only the contract address. Yeah, exactly. Which is ridiculous. Like it's less scarce. A pump.fun coin is less scarce than a domain. Like what? 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 facetime call i'm with my family and i'm like this is weird i don't normally get like spam facetime calls so i pick up and it's this dude and he's like hey man like what's up brother and i'm like okay this is different than anything I've ever done in media before and he's like yeah like I I just put up a a coin on pumped out fun and it mooned to 200k and in market cap and I was like cool dude like that seems completely independent from my life like I 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, 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, well, I noticed because people, there were suddenly hundreds of comments replying to people replying to our posts saying LVMH is here. Like you can, you can buy it. 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 and then we were getting like a bunch of dms from people saying what's your solana address anyways uh and um luckily it blew over but it was there

was like a million and a half dollars of volume traded like almost within yeah like you know within and it just classically went way up and then went way down um and and it was frustrating because like in that one hour it was like everyone was having dinner with family and like during that one hour people were like their silence is deafening like like like the only reason that they wouldn't be replying right now is if it was real and it's like okay like i see what you guys are doing there yeah and somebody commented somebody commented 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 are we are we joke about lvmh yeah all the time it's very clear that like this is not part of this is not tied to us at all we

didn't put out a post or whatever uh 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 Vail quite a bit this episode and our own travels. And so I have a fantastic car for ski season,

a Safari style 1986 Porsche 911 Carrera Coupe. And if you don't know about giving a Safari treatment to- a safari style 1986 Porsche 911 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 of Porsche. I think coupe is right. Okay. I've been in an American situation. Okay, interesting. Usually you do the American pronunciation i've been in france too long okay um so break it down uh so any people get it um yeah you can pick this up on bring a trailer.com uh great uh great auction site i've bought and purchased a 911 there before

sight 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 um but uh but anyways i love the safari treatment on on these things they look incredible and it gives you that extra ground clearance you can go you can take it up to the mountains you got extra headlights more light that's great and um yeah this just looks like a fantastic example so 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 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 uh don't let this one get away fantastic well let's uh 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 6am. Let's go. Interesting. Yeah. Super valuable. I mean, I remember learning a ton on, what was that? OpenX x or edx 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 so 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 he breaks it down it's great and you can just sit there and watch it and you can be like much further proof that you're just paying for a 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. Or if you want, you know, great economics and law, like business. 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. I was 12. I went and visited. I said, this, the surf conditions here are phenomenal. I need to go here. I mean, I remember I, uh, I, I walked into like econ one-on-one and our book was by N Gregory Mankiw and he

taught the course over at Harvard. So oftentimes I just go over there and just go to his class. Cause I just be like, I, why do I, why am I not just going to the source instead of being this like second tier professor, like teach it. I could just go over there. And it's like a huge conference. 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 uh 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 like how the business works for sure for the hard skills i feel like it's very easy to fall into yeah you're not going to pick those up from a podcast 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 they're edutainment but they're mostly entertainment um but for like the high level stuff but for a lot of like the programming skills I learned it was it was a book and just like going through the book and like writing the code alongside of it it's probably better now with more YouTube stuff like

back then YouTube was pretty limited but 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 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 only just do OnlyFans. But the thing that I apparently she had already been doing that for a really long time. So she she was going to continue to just make the same videos and still do OnlyFans. It wasn't like I'm quitting my PhD and then I'm doing OnlyFans. Yeah. So anyways, it's classic Internet just like got blown out of proportion and all this stuff. Let's go to Will Nietze.

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, 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 linkedin like yes you should be like a personality led brand and like your customers should know who they're buying from and there's value there but but like the the bpn guy doesn't he's not like here's how to build a business 101 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 yep yep versus like

the product 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 uh 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 guys. Like they just, it's, you can absolutely, if you have a super compelling product, just buy these partnerships and really invest in them, right?

Like Ridge really invested in their relationship with Theo Vaughn early. And MQHD now. I have another example, the guy that I was in the Alps with a year ago, he's running a like really big, um, it'll be an amazing story one day. We'll talk about it. They raised a very small amount of money and 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 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. Yeah, it is a distraction of like when 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 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 yeah loose like x doesn't move the needle for sales for Lucy.

It doesn't matter how many bangers you have in a month. It's just never gonna. Doing a personality driven partnership with someone like Dave Portnoy at Barstool Sports was critical. Or Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan, but that stuff happened like down the line. But I think it's like, at some point, you're going to need some sort of partnership or relationship with someone that does have a personal brand.

Yeah. 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 it. Like with Rora, we've partnered with this guy, Eric Hinman, who you've probably seen on Instagram. And so like we made sure he had a unit prior to launch.

Going back to Nike with Jordan. It's like, yeah, Phil Knight wasn't the guy, but Jordan was. And so you need to be probably setting yourself up for who is going to be the human that drives the brand forward at some point. It feels like it's more important than ever. I'm trying to think of counterexamples. Like Mercedes, do they have, I mean, Lewis Hamilton. Like there's like every brand kind of has like someone, I feel like, no matter what it is.

Maybe BMW doesn't, 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 Carlyle partner Jay Simmons. Very relevant. Some of the least shocking news I've ever heard. Kim should have launched a consumer VC and YOLO checks alongside tier one 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 gonna lead to outsized success. And yeah, private equity is one of those things where it's funny when guys in ventures are like, oh, I'm gonna do 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 you're not gonna go 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. Um, and so I think, I think we're,

um, 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, 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, any more than we already have. Or like, we think we're at a local maximum.

So like now's the time that we're going to sell it. Yeah. And so if you go then buy that business, well then you need, 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 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. 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 the value equation, the value that she's creating is not being captured. So

it's like, yeah, she only has 1% of this company, but she's 10 X their sales or something. It's like, that's an opportunity to buy a product in that category or buy a company in that category and bring it internally. They have, it's called Lemmy now that the Kardashians like a supplement brand. I think is one of the best selling brands and like Target and 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. 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 uh 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 infantilizing games that force you to hustle for points or lounge access just give us back time and money and we'll decide how to spend them. We can buy our own seltzers and mixed nuts.

And it's a quote tweet of Jack Raines, friend of the pod. He said, airport lounges are insane because they appear to be one of the most legitimately dangerous credit card incentives with the potential to gigafry your personal finance habits for the sake of stacking points.

Oh, it's so true, man. Such a banger. The airport lounges are so lame. I walk into 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 walk in, if it was an international flight, I buy like six or seven because I don't want to drink the plastic bottle 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 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 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'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 just have like the history of like the greatest entrepreneurs on the wall, power, etc. It would just be like various places you could scoop. It'd be a library. You'd have the history of the greatest entrepreneurs on the wall, power, power, etc. It would just be various places you could scoop. It'd be a library.

You could scoop protein powder. You could get protein powder. You can drop weights. Yeah, weights. It'd be a ramp lounge. Get a deadlift and read a story. So, Ramp, don't make us play silly games to get access to the lounge, but do a lounge at some point. Do a lounge, yeah.

That's great. Okay, a bucket pool. great okay a bucket poll what do we got what do we got let's see okay uh 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 he got 10K likes. 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 like, 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. Has spreadsheets about like this is technically the best credit card. And I'm just like, OK, just tell me what to get and I'll just get that. 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 family on ramp 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 that's not really the point it's like a business credit card but uh i really really hope that at some point they launch a consumer card because it'd be so sick to do a new new centurion just basically like you have to be the ceo of a ram corporation to get yeah um but but what do you think you have an amx platinum i do uh travel i just use you just don't use the lounges i just don't use a lot i don't know i mean i earned the rewards i think better yeah but u.s bank has four percent cash back on everything that feels like a a scam. That seems like a scam. Did you see that?

If that was a crypto company, it would be like, it would be like, Oh yeah, you're definitely embezzling. Uh, us 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 like nothing on the actual. Okay, yeah. They don't give you any APY on the balance. So you're basically just ordering that. But I'm sure if you just set up the card and you keep the cash elsewhere, but then they probably also have some rule like you have to have a minimum. Who knows?

I just like try to every year, instead of like optimizing credit cards, I just like try to hit 100x investment every single year. Yeah. And then it 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 deep equestrian enthusiasts. We're glad that tech journalists have such an obsession with horses.

Like there's not a lot for a long time in tech. Very few people were on the equestrian sort of wave. But also pro founders that got a lot of liquidity starting to build a stable. It's a great way to engage with nature and deploy a lot of capital. Yeah. And there's still an element 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. are completely resistant to artificial intelligence, not going anywhere. 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. 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 rode horses, like they're wonderful people. My son takes horseback riding lessons. My daughter will take horseback riding lessons. It's very athletic. We're going to have a horse named Brother that we're planning to take all the way to the Kentucky Derby.

Yep. So very pro horse. Yeah. a horse named brother that we're planning to take all the way to the Kentucky Derby. So, uh, very pro horse. Uh, it's, and you can be pro equestrian and still joke about the equestrian lifestyle, right? Like we're pro tech, pro business. We joke about tech and business all the time. And also, I mean, if you're, if you're going Fox hunting regularly, like you have to do that on a horse. So, um, there, you know, you really just gotta to use the right tool for the job. Let's go to Andre Karpathy. He has a long post here about DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial intelligence company,

making it look easy today with their open weights release of a frontier grade LLM tuned on a joke of a budget, 2048 GPUs for two months, $6 million. For reference, this level of capability is supposed to require clusters of closer to 16,000 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 DeepSeek's 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 I think there was a lot of questions about what was the story. They dropped it, didn't they drop it on Christmas Day or something like that? They're trying to get in our heads. Getting in our heads. 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. Yep. And this little joke of dropping your fake stolen model on Christmas just doesn't do anything. I did see what your – I wish that we had a post on it, but, um, but yeah, some, something about how, like most, like most advancements. Yeah. Word grammar says, I genuinely don't know how to feel about China casually mogging 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 wag me and intelligence too cheap to meter is at hand. So, uh, kind of bullish, but that's, that's not, didn't cover the fact that it seems like people have been figuring out that they just kind of like were able to leverage opening eyes models and then like leap leapfrog yeah i mean i i talked to some guy who said that like he ran the numbers on for for a while when you got a response from gpt4 it would also give you some like not the full weights of the model but like a 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, 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 like 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 yeah yeah and i think they like patched that and cleaned it up or something but it's still like very risky

and then there's also just the question of like did they have a spy yeah very very possible 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 GF. 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 it's funny but yeah i mean obviously uh 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 so also um 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 adderall's out deadlifts are in deadlifts are in yeah yeah it's on getting diced is underpriced i agree completely it's it's it's never been more important to to focus on physical fitness it's not too late winter winter's like halfway over almost the heels but it's but it's not too late to enter like some sort of winter arc yeah right yeah Right? Yeah. And 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 on the beach. You'll have an extra 10 pounds of muscle on.

You'll be 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, Yeah, you're going to want to be diced. You're not going to want to be hanging out at 20% body fat. I don't know if anyone in our audience is not already moderately jacked. On average, they care about health a lot.

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. 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. It'll tell you exactly what to do and just go in and do it. And it's, it's not free, but it's basically free. If you have any type of normal job and you're making even $5,000 a month, you can afford a gym membership and just get diced. Yep. And so sleep, your life, it's, it's one of the few

things that if you just do it, your life will just get material. So here, here, here's the algorithm for the best new year's resolution possible. Uh, sleep a bunch, you know, got to get your eight hours in a gram of protein body weight, per pound of body weight. So you're going to have a high protein diet. And then 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 uh do we have promoted post uh somebody one of our one of our reply reply guys is gonna take that to heart and honestly be good i mean brian's a good friend and also just a good uh he's a really good

sport, so he'll just play along with it. Yeah, he'll just play along with it. But it is truly the only health. Oh, your free hemoglobin is at 75%. I don't care. What's your bench? Is it still 240, Brian? Because unless you're a mass monster, I'm not listening. I'm not listening.

Yeah, that is the funny thing. It's really quite it's 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 yeah because historically that was the only way to break through yeah it was the only way to break through and and he's realized the only way to make money in health yeah sell supplements sell everything but if he's big today, if he just doubled in size, he could be 10 times bigger. Traps eating his head.

From an audience standpoint, he could be. Death Star delts. Death Star delts. It would be amazing. Promoted post from our friend Preston Holland. He says, another ex-friend started flying private. They bought a 6.25% share of a Phenom 300 with air share for 550K. Let's go.

So brothers, make your New Year's resolution and start flying private more. One of the ways you can do that is buying a part of a jet. If you want to do that, go reach out to Preston Holland. He is a fantastic guy. Got to hang out with him at David Center's last event. And nobody better to help you break into the world of private aviation. Absolutely the man and an absolute dog in the skies.

Absolute dog. Let's do a bucket poll. What do we got here? It's still picking through with the ice cube. Yeah, you got it. Okay, here we go. Oh, this 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 100k likes 100k let me pull that out of the bucket that's great one i mean it's so funny being drunk is a choice also somewhat true it is it is there's some real truth to it yeah also i i just this last trip so i i the only time i i've drank in q4 was dumb don dom episodes 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 dom 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 get drunk and i didn't understand i didn't understand why spirit spiritually i just didn't

want to be drunk i didn't want to lose control i didn't want to be i didn't want to be like oh i didn't i just i enjoy being locked in. And so no amount of shots is going to disrupt that. And it's a skill issue. It's great. Uh, this was an interesting story over the break. Uh, 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, your accountant just quit. 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. I don't think eventually software will get so good that it does make sense to rely primarily on some type of 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 a bunch of venture debt, which can basically one shot your company if you don't execute perfectly. But the real, the interesting thing here, we need to do a deep dive on the guy that bought this company because he's buying a lot of companies.

I think it's employer.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, and then was pushed out. And so a lot of people were very upset. They were said, name names, let us know who is on the board.

You should never take money from these people again. And it's interesting, like that, that, 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 like how he wanted to run it versus the board did but he goes and starts like some other accounting related business with all the experience that he had then has a nice exit to mercury and now he works on wait really he's in that time he started and sold another started and had a successful exit i love how he runs their like accounting oh that's great mercury so he's 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 have a whole redemption arc so yeah it's interesting that was cool yeah well um always a stupid move to yeah i've never it's but but also the the venture debt thing i don't uh why does a services business need venture debt exactly yeah i don't know what they're financing we gotta have we there sound like they've worked there's somebody just announced a new venture debt fund that was like tealback yeah you saw it we should have that person on the show and talk about why the fuck should anyone ever do venture debt? Because you never hear, it just seems like it's like unnecessary baggage. I mean, there are a few reasons that you want debt generally.

And what 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, 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 CapEx a bunch of plant property equipment, PP&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 because they make the product. And then they have to wait to sell it.

And it takes them a while to actually get the money from the weekend. They do some really cool stuff with their manufacturer. From what I know, they'll basically say, Hey, we'll give you, we'll pay you 10% more, but we need 180 day terms. Yeah. They're essentially getting seller financing. Like they're, so I understand it for, I understand it for these businesses that, that basically have these bigger working capital requirements, but, but adding debt onto a business like bench where 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. 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. He said, we did it. We tested 300 Bay Area foods. It's so funny that we said 40,000. I,

uh, when we were joking about this, we said we tested 40,000 foods because I was like, I would just want it to be higher than that. We didn't post that. Not yet. Oh, okay. We got to post that. But anyway, um, Oh, did 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 phthalates in 73% of the tested products and bisphenols in 22%. It's everywhere.

We detected phthalates in most baby foods and prenatal vitamins. Hot foods would spend 45 minutes and 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 US FDA and EU EFsa regulations uh check out our full results below okay put a plastic list.com there were a bunch of dot org notes or dot org a bunch of other notes about this one boba tea equals 1.2 years of safe bpa consumption there was a whole food steak that was surprisingly high in in pfas yeah so two microplastics two notes on this so one all this was done by light labs which is justin maher's brother's company lucky to be uh an investor in the company and really smart what they did they basically realized there was all these new regulations around um uh testing like baby food so there's these new regulations around, um, uh, testing like baby foods. So there's these new requirements around testing. They came out and they had, uh, Nick, uh, and Justin had, uh, made, you know,

a fortune in bone broth, had to do a bunch of testing. Uh, and so they had experienced a pain point themselves. So Nick starts light labs, um, and that the company's been doing phenomenally uh in part because there's this all this new interest around pfos and microplastics and things like that so uh second i think the big takeaway and uh 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 PFAS or microplastics that you're ingesting, but they're going to get into the food to some degree. And so I think that to think that, that to me should, should be the most eyeopening thing about this is you cannot rely on government regulations to, uh, figure

out what's healthy, right? Cause the government will say like, Oh yeah, like one out of every hundred molecules can be like effectively toxic and that's fine. Right. Yeah. One out of a million. Right. But, um, but, but, but still like the, the, the, these legal levels are so much higher than safe. Yeah. I, 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 like,'s just everywhere i'm screwed well if you can if you're buying the healthiest most expensive steak and it has plastic everything has plastic in it so it sort of exposes this need for like some sort of more systemic

approach to like okay let's find out where the biggest sources of contamination are like up the chain like someone with the steak thing was was identifying the fact that uh the the hay bales that the cows eat were wrapped in plastic and so when it's cut like it sits in the sun but also when it gets cut like literally there's just chunks of plastic the cows are accidentally eating so they're just literally eating plastic um and so it's like that 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's 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 this,

where the actually biggest power law yeah effect yeah i think i think going after the right response is you see this report and you're like i want to avoid pfos and microplastics yeah do stuff like look at how you if you make coffee at home yep and you use one of those drip coffee machine makers with the things that pull out and you realize it's just like heating plastic heating, plastic, heating, really hot water in plastic. It's like, cut that out. You don't want to be having that every single day, having your little micro plastic coffee every single morning. Just find the really obvious stuff. And then also there's a bunch of things that you can do like that are downstream, like bodybuilders have really low levels because they, they don't, they know 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, or I'm seeing, you know, throw, uh, 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. Uh, it is a little bit of like a skill issue here i think like uh 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 um but uh i i do love this because it's like a phenomenal use of of nat's money and it's like we there's another post i'm sure in here about like a guy who made a lot of money and didn't really know what to do with it.

And it's like Nat has found a great vector for, you know, like just going and doing a really impactful project that's off his own balance sheet. And he has no idea how it's 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 it's so cool yeah because he spent half a million dollars yeah millions of people can benefit from exactly might create systemic change in the industry and the other takeaway everything is if everything is toxic it actually means that you need to focus on detoxification sure like

sauna is the obvious one uh sauna a few times a week figure out how to do it you can it it is the number one way to detoxify like i just thought it was a good place to read the wall street journal yeah yeah it is a good place to read the wall street journal um but yeah that's like the the best thing that you can do is okay i'm i'm constantly inundated with toxins so i'm just gonna sauna yep 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 uh do we have another promoted post yeah again it's ski season so you know that we have to promote the Lamborghini Storato. Storato, let's go. This is the alpha 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, you know, this is the last model run of the Huracan V10. And so now the Lamborghini split. There's the V12, Rivalto, and there's the Temerario, which is V8. And so if you want a V10, this is the one to get. It's the final year, and it's fantastic. It's such an economical purchase because 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 if that car holds a lot of value oh i think so i think that i think but a car like this they're so cool here's here's my advice for all the brothers out there buy two garage queen one yep daily drive the other make it your little weekender yeah this is legitimately the perfect car to take up to squaw valley i'm still gonna call it squaw because dei is over um do you know the whole yeah i talked to somebody who was on uh it was skiing this weekend and they were like uh oh yeah my my uh 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 ski

instructor the instructor was like 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 is 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 squaw. Palisades is a good name actually. Squaw is such a bad name but it's a good name squaws squaw squaw is such a bad offensive is it no i think it i think it meant like i think it literally meant like it's a slur it's just like it was a i think it i think it was like native american phrasing for like a whore oh okay so it is a slur okay okay okay well yeah we need to retire that one who knows yeah anyway highly recommend picking up a lamborghini sterato uh if you do actually over 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.

Yeah, not too bad. I like that. It's great. Should we go to a bucket poll? What do we got here? This one. It's on the old paper. Oh, there's some deep ones in here.

Let's see. Let's see. Okay. Oh, here we go. We got... Oh, this is good. This is good. From Captain Nemo. Friend of the show uh he is he is i hung out with this guy by the time i love him uh captain nemo

he says uh 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's self-select for powerful or ultra wealthy clientele likely to divulge useful info that could be recorded relatedly the amman global the amman's global director of security was recently arrested for funneling money to a sanctioned Russian oligarch. Okay, but you know that Rosewood has some real history here. It's Chinese-owned, strategically placed in power centers around the world.

And yeah, I wouldn't stay at the Rosewood, period. They would steal all our podcasting secrets you think so like okay the secret to podcasting is record every single day yeah create a platform for your absolute boys yeah and then they would they would clone us i i disagree with this i think that 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 they'll see us playing with our mod retro they'll be like oh my god this is amazing i gotta stop doing we gotta we gotta get an ally ship going with these guys uh it's

a real i can change your 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 i think it's very intelligent to spend some to operate out of an amman yeah 365 days of the year yeah i don't know this seems like uh i give this i give this uh three tinfoil hats out of ten three yeah yeah yeah no i mean i i did i did look through that thread and see like the whole story of the amman guys it is seems pretty but but amman is widely known lots of russians stay at amman i think it is owned by a russianigarch. So it's not a, that much is fact,

I believe. So did you know they have grocery stores in Russia? In Russia? Yeah. Wow. Didn't do that. Tucker thing, Tucker whatever they're called.

And he was like, like, check it out. Like it's not a third world country. I love that one. It's so funny. I don't know. Just don't waste any time at four-star hotels.

That's the takeaway. This is fun. This was fairly recent. It's a video of Lil B knighting Neo the Robot at the 1X office. That's the most bullish thing I've seen on figure so far. It is very, this is not figure. This is a different company. Oh, it's 1X, it's 1X. Different company.

That makes sense. Cause I was like figure, they culturally don't seem like they would understand the base card. They're very buttoned up, very like we're doing partnerships with BMW. We have a campus. We're very like the.

Meanwhile, 1X is getting knighted by the base card. Yeah, 1X is doing videos with jason carmen and like you know you know timothy chalamet was knighted by it's a quote of that yeah and so i think that's where they got the idea because uh timothy chalamet got knighted by little b the base god who has some i mean based is a word because of little b you know that's right he has some amazing quotes uh extremely like online internet person there's this hilarious 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 there's a wild clamp like he's just the man um and uh yeah very uh 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 uh it's awesome and hilarious that they got little 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 kaisa not or something or oh they show speed or something honestly you gotta if i'm going along if i'm gonna go along a humanoid robot company yep they actually are doing all the right things yeah it's like how do you become part of winner if you're just like normie thinking about who's gonna win and then figures running this very

like corporate partnership like you know oh what's the pure play asset. Almost like how would a financial manager see building a portfolio around the future? Well, they need a robotics play and Tesla's too highly valued and you're not getting a pure play. So you go for a figure and then one X is like, we're just kids building this stuff. And it's like, awesome. We're having fun on the internet. I love it. I love it. We should reach out to them and see if we could get a 1X that could just sit here and be the third co-host. And handle stuff.

Yeah, that'd be great. This is, yeah, here's the Kai Snott one. This startup used Kai Snott's streams to go insanely viral, but 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 clippable moments with the product as possible. Pay Discord kids 30 cents CPM. Yes, you saw that right, to farm TikTok clips from the streams. They're all competing to win the budget allocation as fast as possible 50 million views guaranteed at 30 cents cpm so yeah very interesting it's crazy because like it's not a concern are you bored why are you playing tetris i just like the

sound i like the soundtrack that's hilarious um that's great um but yeah i mean uh i i mean there's so many moment there's so many there's so many underrated pieces of this like partnering with the twitch streamer is is very like new age like your whole career was like with the youtube stuff yeah the twitch streamers it's like much harder i tried it was always hard to do integrations on twitch i i did i would do a bunch of i would do a bunch of stuff with with ridge back in the day but i'd tell a twitch streamer okay we're gonna sponsor this entire month of content 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 yeah it's not it makes sense that the streamers have figured out

this like tipping oriented model which is extremely lucrative if you get it right yeah because it's not a really good ad format and so for 1x i mean a humanoid robot is like the most inherently viral product you could possibly be building right now um 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. They're going to give it a gun. Oh, fantastic. And we're going to be able to go make some content.

I want to, I mean, I think we should. Yeah, yeah. I think we should. And we're doing it. It's easy to predict it when you're built in the future. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can predict the future if you're just doing it. These VCs in the future, they make their 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 podcast to roll bench press, 260 pounds. It'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 TI-83 plus graphing calculator for 75 bucks. Did you ever program these? 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 did you ever have party do you remember this one well which one is that maybe this was just in my high school but basically someone created a text-based game uh where it was like choose your own adventure and had a couple different paths but it was about going to a party so i i remember this. I love, I love parties. So it was

like, it was like, you go to this high school party 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. It would be like, you bask in the sweaty afterglow, which was just like hilarious. And this, 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've just gone viral. But clearly, you know, he was like in, you know, in an English class and read some Shakespeare and heard Afterglow. He was like, I'm going to put this in the game. 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 really fun.

And it all required having this cable, the connector cable. And nobody had these by default because they wouldn't ship with them. Now, I guess they do. And then you could have your game and you could pass it along it was like the first example of like virality basically uh 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 put snake in there tetris a little bit uh 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 doing math computation. And I could program it so I could play games.

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 number one key, it spits out some text. That's very easy to get into. And then you start leveling up and do an if statement with a couple of different things. And all of a sudden, you've built this text game. Good times with the TI-83. Great times. After I went through my programming, my TI-84 era would i got into d-dossing my dad's website

oh yeah 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 d-dossing my dad's website i always had these visions of like people like busting down the door being like, yeah, because of my, I mean, I, I ran into something similar where, uh, my dad had a server where you could just like store files. It was basically like an FTP server, like precursor to Google drive by like a lot, like 10 years or something.

So it was like, if you wanted to put something on the internet, you just upload a, upload a file there. And, and he'd use it for work and like little things like host a website on the server. And he just had a buddy that gave it to him and didn't charge him on like a 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 the server. And so I got access to it and I was really big in the Counter-Strike community. And so what I figured was like the big thing in the Counter-Strike community at the time was like these like vibe reels basically this is like going back to my old editing days uh basically what you do is you take like highlight reels like from all the best counter-strike players and you cut together like their greatest hits and then you export them put them put like some sick music over it the biggest one was called frag or die um and it was like iconic and so uh 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 uh 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, but I had like one or two good highlights. It's a banger. And so I put myself in this thing. It's like Frag or Die 2 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. These are channels and then people post it and it just starts going viral and people download this like massive video file. This is before YouTube. And, and, and it's like, and everyone's like, dude, like, thank you, bro. Like you hooked it up. 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 recognizing me for my counter-strike skills. And then like, you know, a week later, my dad comes in and is just like what the fuck did you do like like but i i like this guy needs to charge me now like is it a crazy bill i don't know if he actually i don't know if the bill actually passed through but he was like it's not unlimited anymore yeah i am rate limited now because of you but also like probably like somewhat proud because it's like you did something cool hacker yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly i had a viral banger yeah you don't hate the player hate the game yeah but no longer now you just upload it to tiktok kids have it easy anyway uh let's move on to one more promoted post we 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. It's very simple. If you're doing something cool, you post about it, and I think you just have to, it doesn't say here, but you just have to do hashtag Red Bull Fund, and they will send you $4 to buy a Red Bull. 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 micro grants. So if you're listening to this, go do something cool. And when you need a Red Bull, post about it. What is Justin Mayer's again? It's like a thousand or a couple grand?

Yeah, I think it's like two grand. Two grand. So you got the Teal Fellowship or a couple grand uh yeah i think it's like two grand two grand so you got the teal fellowship with a hundred grand then you got justin mares with two grand you got this for four dollars so next time you're in a pinch and you need a red bull uh they will send you four dollars just make sure you're doing something cool i don't want to see any non non-cool no you need to do something epic you need to be 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. This is like us. We have like the

TV Dom Fund. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's 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 this banger 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 oh this is a good one i like this one uh signal great poster scarlett johansson was perfectly positioned to be the definitive voice of ai if she'd leaned in uh 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 i do i i remember when the whole thing went down altman posted her

couldn't help himself and then it all came out that who posted it was it rude on his account yeah yeah but uh but yeah i do i do think the signal seems right. 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. Or it's just like oh people start

using it to she even do movies anymore though yeah she's in the marvel universe so like they're constantly cranking out slaw yeah i mean i'm sure there's always questions 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 gonna be able to use a cloned voice in a real Hollywood production. But there's always like the fear of that and like, okay, maybe the YouTube videos and like the free content. Yeah, you can already, if you want to clone her voice, you can do it. You can do it. Well, clearly OpenAI did it.

Yeah. Yeah. you can do it well clearly open ai did it yeah um yeah but yeah i i agree with signal here that like it would have been amazing to actually get it done but it's not too late like she could still go in and say yeah hey instead of this like lawsuit why don't we work together 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 they've resolved the lawsuit. Resolved or 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 Scarlett Johansson.

It did not seem that close. It seemed more like generic. And like most of these LLM, most of these AI things, they feel very like the average of everything. 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 this 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 and just post something that seems like it should be like a good post but a hundred likes likes maybe. Yeah. And you can run it up to 56,000. Yeah. I mean, it's a real testament to like how popularized these like brain rock words are. Yeah.

Lock in is like kind of a new term. Like I think that really popped off like last year. It's like fairly new and like, 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