The Derivative - Spring Six Pack talking Florida Conferences, Bonds, AI & Hand Dryers

Episode Date: April 16, 2026

Join Jeff Malec for another solo Six Pack episode of The Derivative, where he riffs on everything from the post-COVID conference circuit to bond markets, AI, and yes… public restrooms. Jeff contrasts the buttoned-up energy of iConnections with the beach-side vibes of Future Proof and asks whether meeting managers face-to-face actually improves allocation decisions or just introduces new biases. He digs into Florida's great hedge fund migration and whether the tax savings actually pencil out, breaks down why the last five years have been historically brutal for bonds and what that's meant for managed futures globally, and tackles AI's deflationary potential, the "ghost GDP" thesis, and the governance question of letting a handful of private companies set moral guardrails for systems increasingly doing human jobs. On the lighter side, Jeff shares his experience racing Switzerland's legendary Inferno downhill and closes with a definitive ranking of public hand-drying solutions. If you're an allocator, markets nerd, or just someone with strong opinions about restroom hand dryers, this one's for you. Consider this episode a six pack best enjoyed in one long, thoughtful sip SEND IT!Chapters:00:00-00:41=Intro00:42-06:26= #1 Conference Circuit, iConnections vs. Future Proof, and the Allocator’s Dilemma06:27-10:26= #2 The Florida Hedge Fund Invasion and West Palm’s Second Manhattan10:27-15:19= #3 What the #$*@? Is Going On With Bonds? Managed Futures vs. a Broken Bond Market15:20-21:56= # 4 AI Deflation, Ghost GDP, and Who Sets the Moral Code for Machines?21:57-24:02= # 5 Inferno Downhills, & Ego Checks24:03-28:41= #6 The Great Hand Dryer Debate (Ranking)Roy Niederhoffer podcast episode: Making Market Music with Roy NiederhofferCitrini Blog post: When Skynet Writes a Substack: The AI Doom Piece That Moved Markets Dwarkish podcast: The most important question nobody's asking about AIAs We May Work (Taylor Pearson Whitepaper): https://taylorpearson.substack.com/p/as-we-may-workInferno Murren: The World's craziest downhill ski raceDon't forget to subscribe to⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Derivative⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, follow us on Twitter at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@rcmAlts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠sign-up for our blog digest⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as legal, business, or tax advice. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of RCM Alternatives, their affiliates, or companies featured. Due to industry regulations, participants on this podcast are instructed not to make specific trade recommendations, nor reference past or potential profits. And listeners are reminded that managed futures, commodity trading, and other alternative investments are complex and carry a risk of substantial losses. As such, they are not suitable for all investors. For more information, visit⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.rcmalternatives.com/disclaimer⁠⁠⁠⁠

Welcome to the derivative by RCM alternatives. Send it. Hello there. Welcome back. You found the derivative, which is actually sponsoring the uncorrelated conference in Puerto Rico this week. So while you're listening to this, I'll be down there recording a live episode that you'll get to enjoy next week.

On to this episode, we dusted off the solo six-pack format. No guest, no agenda, just me, a microphone, and way too many boarding passes. So grab some beers and settle in. Okay. One, the conference circuit and the allocator's dilemma. So I teased it there in the open. I've been traveling a lot. In the last four months, I've been through the following airports.

Munich. Well, we'll put O'Hare and Midway, our Chicago airports. Then Munich, Venice. London, Heathrow, West Palm Beach. I'm not calling it Trump International. Sorry. Denver, Zurich, Miami, Cleveland. I was diverted there with some thunderstorms.

Vancouver, Colonna. Winnipeg, also diverted there. Toronto had to land there to switch crews. work, LaGuardia, Fort Myers, and Orlando. That's not to brag. That does a cry for help to all the traveling consultants and sales teams who do this year round. Props to you, how. It took me 44 hours to get home from Colonna, British Columbia. I could have driven the nearly 2,000 miles faster. So my big takeaway there is I think we may have swung too far back towards in-person everything after COVID. But a lot of that travel was down to Florida for some, the conference circuit. So let me talk about

the two big conferences on the Florida circuit, I Connections and Future Proof. First, some data points on eye connections. It builds itself as the world's largest cap intro event. And it shows, I think I had a meeting in booth 1745. That's 1,745, something like that. Yeah, it's huge. It's in the main conference center there. There's over 1,500 manager booths, some bigger Goldman and big manager booths. So price tag's pretty steep for the managers, for the privilege of being in those. little six-by-six booths for three days. I think it used to be better at the font in blue. You used to go outside. You could get some lunch. They had seafood towers. They were carving steaks for dinner. Just a better scene and feeling. Now it's kind of very transactional.

The food is shunted off during the day into a side area of the conference center that felt like we're hedge fund dreams go to die. And then most people just commute between their hotels or whatever and the conference center. So you don't get that community feel used to get with the cocktail parties and whatnot. And then I did hear some grumbling for managers who paid to be there and got denied food because they were 10 minutes late. That wasn't working for them. Although we did just have the managers on the last pod sing the praises of eye connections and they built their business through that. So maybe it's just me getting old and cranky. So contrast that with future proof. Futureproof is different animal. They're catering to RAs to a bunch of ETFs, a bunch of

ETFs. They're doing 4,000 plus attendees, 25,000 plus scheduled one-on-one meetings. special experiences. The events held right on the beach there between 6th and 10th or so on South Beach, on the sand, which is cool. So there's no suits. You're in shorts. You're in a golf shirt,

flip-flop, sunglasses. So just to me, the difference eye connections was guys in suits trying to survive the day. Like most conversations when you get in the booth started with how you do and you surviving. Like, yeah, three more to go. Where future proof is people heading to the booth where you can hold and pet puppies,

then over to the spin cycle thing with a blender attach where you can mix your own margarita and get a little exercise. So long story short, I think I connections could borrow a lot from their playbook. You're both down there. Maybe you'd do a deal with them and they could have the same beach set up that lasts for two weeks. Anyway, all that's to say leads me to a little bit of a deeper question. I was debating with some people down there. Should you actually meet your managers? Right. I was down there. You're meeting with tons of managers. You're looking at allocating to them. You're meeting them face-to-face. My brain went to a little bit of like along the lines of never meet your heroes, maybe never meet your quants either.

It's hard to take the human, my human self out of the equation, right? Best practice is to meet face to face, do office visits, all of that. But what if you don't like the way they dress or they might smell or how they pronounce certain words? All that kind of builds up this bias in your head, which it shouldn't, but so be it. Some firms do this with a no asshole rule, no matter how good the numbers are if they don't like the person, they're out. Some just say, forget about the person. I just want to see the numbers. It doesn't matter. And some are totally into the person and the numbers. I'm torn. It's hard for the right person to overcome bad math, I think. You could be the nicest, greatest person in the world, but your returns think you're probably not getting the allocation. But I think it's easier for the wrong person to overcome the wrong person to bring good math down. Bring good math into question. You might say, yeah, I don't really want to work with that person or whatnot. So whether that should affect how you allocate capital is a real uncomfortable question with no real clean answer. Just a little

sliver in my brain for you all to think about. Quick side note on eye connections this year, because there was one image I can't shake Quest partners or Alpha Quest as they rebranded too. They shut down in end of January, early February, after a 25-year run and with $2 billion in assets, you usually don't see $2 billion firm shut down. But I've had clients with Quest. Nygle's been on this pod. I thought of it as a great shop dedicated to positive skew and kind of long volatility investing. Maybe in this Fed puts, just buy a magseller. heaven world. That's all kind of feeling negative skew. It didn't work out. But sad to see. Anyway, they had shut down, but they were also had prepaid and were going to IConnections.

So IConnections didn't get the memo or nobody at Quest bothered to say take our stuff down. So there was an empty booth sitting there at I Connections with the Quest branding. So there was nobody home just sitting there in the middle of all the other 1700 booths full of managers pitching their hearts out. It was like one of those frozen bodies on the way up to at Everest, where everyone just hikes past because they're too tired and can't carry the body back down. And just a brutal reminder that this business eats people. You can even be a $2 billion firm with a 25-year track record and still end up as an empty booth at a conference. With nobody stopping, nobody putting flowers, the meetings just go on and around you. It's generally haunting.

All right, beer two, the Florida invasion. So spent a lot of time in Florida a meeting, these two other conferences. I grew up there, as most you may know, Fero Beach, a perfectly sleepy town far away from international airports and all the South Florida action. We could get just in the right amount of trouble. So I think Fero's still mostly burial, but from West Palm, south through Miami, the whole stretch is being invaded by hedge funders and financiers trying to save on New York and Chicago taxes. But that's a well-known story. But what blew me away this trip, and I saw it with my own eyes, And this was mainly in West Palm, but cranes everywhere, entire blocks getting torn up and rebuilt, listings at numbers that would have been laughable five years ago.

And a lot of it traces back to one guy, Steve Ross, who's the man behind Hudson Yards, the dolphins, Miami Grand Prix. He's basically trying to build a second Manhattan, it seems like, in West Palm through his new group related Ross. He's looking to pour 10 billion, I think is the number there a minute. He had $10 billion into roughly 70 acres down there, office towers, condos, hotel rooms, the works. So he just broke ground on a 28-story condo building. And late last year, he locked up $700-plus million in a construction loan for two office towers. The man's 85 years old, and he's building like he's got somewhere to be.

And it's not build it and they will come. Like the tenants are already showing up and lining up, it seems like Goldman, JP, Elliot, Citadel, icon. They're all based on Florida's East Coast now. I think one number I have here in my notes. They're managing something in the neighborhood of 300 billion. So the real estate market down there reflects it sitting with some friends in the real estate business. Prices have doubled or tripled in a lot of areas. People are flipping houses for 5 to 10 million without blinking. And honestly, some of these hedge funders might want to quit their day jobs and switch over to the real estate license. You know, you have prices. Commissions have ticked down a hair.

but prices have tripled, seems like a pretty good trade. The same friend summed it up pretty well saying these people have a lot of money and not a lot of time where price is not a concern. So that's not my main thing. I was struck by,

I don't know if the migration is all upside. Kind of the same thing we talked a few weeks ago on the open snow pod. If you tell everyone where the powder is, pretty soon there's no powder left. So same thing here, it seems. If you tell everyone where to go save their money on state income tax,

but your house costs three times what it did. You can't get dinner, You're sitting in traffic didn't exist. Schools have become a real source spot. We used to be one of the only private schools down there, St. Edwards, where I went to high school. People come from Stewart, from Melbourne, all over. There's some good ones down there in South Florida, but they can't meet the demand. So a few of these billionaires are pouring money into building new private schools, good enough for their hedge fund kids.

But that just tells me everything you need to know about how planned out this was, really. And just to me, at a certain point, you're not saving money. You're just spending it differently, right? If you're Ken Griffin, sure, you're saving tens of, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Life is good. But if you're a mid-level PM or someone who just works at the fund, you pulled your kids out of good school and moved to Boca because the founder wanted palm trees. I don't know if that's going to work for you long term. I'd love to see that spreadsheet of how that's working out.

Of course, I'm the guy who willingly endures Chicago winters. So maybe I'm the crazy one. One more on this. I visited a couple firms down there. You've got guys in shorts, tank tops. It was just a weird vibe and kind of the whole thing. summed up to me is it feels like the whole hedge fund industry is having a bit of a midlife crisis, bought the convertible, moved to the beach, unbuttoned the shirt, a few too many buttons.

So it would be interesting to watch from afar how that all plays out down there. All right, Beard 3. What the F, WTF is going on with bonds. I was beyond shock. That was amazed. Whatever the word is, last month when we started dropping bombs on Iran. You had stocks down, oil screaming higher, and everyone's favorite. All right, pack three bonds.

What the F. Can I swear around here? I'm not a big swear, so I'm just going to let it go to. VTF is going on with bonds. It was really crazy to see that Sunday night when markets opened, after we started bombing Iran, you had oil screaming iron stocks down, and everyone's favorite flight to safety U.S. treasuries were down. Rates were up.

And what felt like a World War III preamble, no one had on their bingo card bonds being down. I don't know. I don't think I was in anyone's models. But there we were. War began, and rather than falling, 10-year treasury climbed from basically 4 to 4.3-ish. I think it went about to 4.5 in March before falling back down to that 4.3.

You know, really, they're saying, hey, if oil's going to be so high, it's going to cost inflation. We need to raise rates. So it's a inflation trade, I guess. But weird to me, this is just the latest in what has been a historically brutal stretch for bonds. Right. We can talk about 22. We can talk about the rest If I look at some ETF proxies, seven to 10-year Treasury ETF is down last five years, 20-plus year down the last five years, aggregated U.S. government bonds down the last five years, international bond ETF down the last five years. So it has not been a good place to be. But here's the thing in our world, Managed Futures world, people may not fully appreciate. Bonds have been massive fuel for Managed Futures returns for decades. Go back through some of the great CTAs.

runs late 80s to 2000s GFC and you'll find bonds doing the heavy lifting and trend following over and over again. And we're not just talking U.S. Treasuries, Managed Futures Trade, global bonds, U.S., German boons, as they call them, Japanese government bonds, Aussies, Canadians, UK guilts, Spanish debt, so on and so on. It's one of the largest sector allocations because it's so liquid and there's so many of these good markets that you can express the viewing. And when bonds are working, they trend beautifully, across all of these. You don't need them all working at once, but usually there's something trending, and it's just been a really choppy, sloppy past five years in bonds. 22 was actually Exhibit A for how well this can happen, right? Sochgen CTA Index put up one of

its largest ever returns. That was mainly driven by the historic rise and rates, you know, kind of the inflation scare there. But since then, we just whipsawed, we kind of moved down to that new rate reality, and now we can't seem to either keep going with. rates higher or get back to the old one. We're just stuck in this range-bound thing for five years. So the numbers bear this out in a way it's honestly hard to believe. We went and looked at Stock Jen's trend indicator data, looked at their bond contribution to overall portfolio back to 2002. So the average four-year contribution for bonds to the portfolio has been roughly seven, plus seven. The worst four-year stretch ever recorded was minus six and a half. But 23 through now,

23, 24, 25, 26. I'm assuming 26 is a full year. Can ding me on that if you want. But these last four years, including the half 26, is minus 28. This isn't just bad. It's off the charts bad. Never before seen bad. Four times worse than previous and flip the sign from what the average four-year thing is.

So if you're frustrated with your man's futures performance lately, I know many of you are, look no further than your friendly neighborhood bond salesman. That is the main culprit, right? These trend followers have been grinding out good gains in oil, gold, cocoa, the dollar, and then just watching bonds eat all that and then some to take us back to basically even over the last four years. One last note there. We'll put in the show notes. We did a pod with Roy Niederhofer a few years back. He was banging the drum that the, right, we basically had 30 years of bonds going up, rates lower, record low rates. That was a great train for trend.

he was saying that if you flip that, if you just flip that chart on its side and say, now it's 30 years of bonds going lower, rates higher, right? If it was just the mirror trade, he's like managed futures would not do as well because you have role costs, you have all these issues.

So go listen to that. It was interesting. I don't think that's exactly what's happening here. I don't think he was wrong, but what's really just happening here is it hasn't found a new level. It's been too choppy. So anyway,

will this continue? Surely not forever. Does it suck? Yeah, greatly so. All right, beard four, AI. I said last August, and that solo six-pack you can't have a podcast and not talk about AI in this world. So we're going to talk about AI. I've probably 10xed my use from last August when we were talking about it, and I thought I was a heavy user then. It's just become part of my everyday life. But beyond me, in the last six months, you've had, right, a substack post crashed IBM stock. Citadel came out and tried to talk everyone off the ledge. Um, an AI podcaster asked a good important governance question nobody's answering and the way I actually

do work or the way a lot of us do work has changed more than I think it has in the prior decade. So back in August I said the end game for the AI race to me seems to be massive depletion and real trouble for the consumer economy. I still believe that, but somebody named Satrini turned that thought into a full-blown horror movie. So in February, Satrini, we'll put it in the Showno Citrini published the 2028 global intelligence crisis, a substack. It kind of traced, kind of took my naive thoughts. I'm not taking credit for it, but basically took that same thought that this is deflationary and put real numbers behind it. It said, okay, what, which sectors, which countries, which things are likely to get affected the most by that. So basically they're

saying agentic AI takes a step function leap. Companies automate. They slash headcount. The S&P rips at first, but real wage is collapse underneath. The Michael Burry of the big short trade actually put it out on exit, and you think I'm bearish. So IBM fell 13% when that came out, I believe. They got 16 million views. Wall Street Journal said it was an accelerant of investor anxiety. So anyway, they're talking about even if AI succeeds and those companies are making a bunch of money. And even if overall GDP is high because of that, they're calling it go.

post-GDP and you're not going to see it end up in the accounts of the actual consumers that need to buy stuff. So problematic. So Satrini came out with that great thought piece. Two days later, Citadel comes out, publishes a rebuttal, basically saying, hey, software posting, job postings are up 11%. AI adoption is remarkably stable, right? It's not seeing an upward hockey stick. They were saying Keynes underestimated the elasticity of human wants. But really, to me, was just kind of this classic argument of this is the loom and new tech creates new jobs, everyone relax. My guess that argument's been correct for 200 years, so maybe it deserves respect, but kind of for them to say relax, everything's fine from a market maker that profits from

continued confidence and trading and all the rest didn't seem exactly disinterested. And more importantly, I think their analogy breaks. I think this is more than the loom. The loom replaced your hands. A.I. is coming for your judgment, right? So, fundamentally, different kind of displacement. So next step there, good podcasts. We put it down there from Dwarquish. I think it's called the Dwarkish podcast, yeah. So he had a thing that was around Anthropic saying,

no, they're not going to help spy on citizens or whatnot. So that brings up a whole supervision debate. To me, it wasn't about the supervision. It's more about if AI is replacing human judgment in certain cases, who decides what the morality of that judgment is? I'm leaning on my philosophy background here. And you can say, like a lot of people say, it's just brute force.

There is no morality in it. But for sure, right, if you have automated car, if it has to hit the school bus or run over the old lady, there's a decision there. That's the classic one. So who sets those moral guardrails for systems that will be used by field generals, ER doctors, eventually almost every worker in every sector, right? What's the kind of base code that works its way through those positions?

So right now the answer is a handful of. private citizens and private companies are writing those base morals. And Dwarquish does a good job of asking, like, is that what we want as a society? So go listen to that raises a lot of interesting questions. Right. And even I feel like the AI leaders themselves are begging to be have oversight for this. Anthropics founder Dario said its technology is similar to nuclear weapons and needs regulation on that scale.

So anyway, we have the deflation cities. We have a governance crisis. A lot of hand waving about the future. Our old friend Taylor Pearson brought it all back to Earth with a piece called As We May Work, which we'll put again in the show notes. And that's a look at what's actually happening right now on people's desktops and kind of how we went from. And I love what you say. It's like the original AI chat was like the movie 50 First Dates. Can't say it was a great movie, but it works in this case.

Right. Fifty first dates, I don't know what happens to him. Adam Sandler, he like bangs his head. And every time he goes back out with the girl, it's like they're dating anew. So those initial chat windows were like that, right? You had to start over and say, here's what I'm doing. Here's the new. Here's what I need.

But now with Claude co-work, even Claude code, they're not about answering one question. They're restructuring knowledge work. So the AI is reading files. It writes files. It can write its own memory, right? It's learning your preferences and gets better at your specific job over time. So it's like a junior analyst who actually learns on the job. He has another good example from some guys in New Hampshire who beat some chess masters

in what was called FreeSail Chess. was letting them use machines online. And they beat these guys, not because they were better chess players, but because they could better interact with the machine, with the, wasn't quite AI, but with the chess machines, chess skill. So that's kind of least right. That's the new skill will be who's the best at the prompts. Who's the best at using it and collaborating with it?

It's not necessarily going to be about the skill. So the numbers are real. AI agents cost $6 to $7 a day versus $4 to $500 for a, knowledge worker. 4% of GitHub's already authored by Cloud Code. It's projected hit 20% by year end. And then just proof in the putting on the day, Anthropic, launched, co-work,

service now fell 23%. Salesforce fell 22%. So there's real companies and real things at stake here. Last bit here. Side note, I built out a small dashboard to track all the items in the Citrini piece in the Citadel rebuttles using AI, of course. I think that's a good way forward of like

if this deflationary recession comes to be, right? You'll see that rapid increase in AI usage. You'll see job postings start to go down. Even if the stock market is looking frothy, you could get some clues in there. All right. Beard 5. Quick pallet cleanser. If you've heard the rumors or if I mentioned to one of these conferences, yes, it's true. I was in Zurich. I will technically Muran, Switzerland, to compete in the Inferno race. I'll put a link in the show notes to a nice little video about this. But Inferno race called World's oldest and longest downhill ski race. A British chap, Sir Arnold Lund of the Kandahar Ski Club, started it.

Him and 16 other British skiers, including four women, did the very first inferno back in 1928. And it's basically been going on ever since then, maybe a few years off for World Wars and whatnot. But you're there in Mirren, you go up top, start at the top of the Schildhorn Peak. And when you're doing the full course, it's over 16. 500 feet all the way down to the valley bottom, about 15 kilometers. Climate change recently, they've had to cut the course in half. So you only do the top half, basically, which is what I did, which was about half of it, seven and a half kilometers.

So anyway, we're talking me in a full downhill skin suit, 207 centimeter racing skis, the whole thing, actually competing, hit 67 miles an hour, finished as the top American in the 50-to-60-year-old bracket. Sorry if you thought I was in my 30s and got a silver badge for being with. within 20% of the winner's time. So I don't think of myself as someone with a big ego. I'm a Midwestern kid, even though I was talking about growing up in Florida.

But here I am on a podcast telling you about this. And damn if I didn't send race photos to nearly every human being I know, a few Uber drivers out there might even know my split times. So it's weird for me to be talking about it, but maybe it's the months of hard work. Maybe it's stepping out of my comfort zone, although some of my friends would probably say

screaming down a mountain at highway speeds is my comfort zone, fair point. Or maybe it's the irony of spending my professional life telling people to manage their tail risk and then voluntarily hurtling down a Swiss mountain in spandex. But anyway, I thought you should know. So do as I say, not as I ski. All right, last pack. A fun one for you.

All this traveling and thing about this industry, right, between conferences, airports, hotel lobbies, steakhouse dinners. We spend an ungodly amount of time in public restrooms. It's a weird thing to say. But every one of these stops involves washing and then drying your. hands. So in my very travels here over the last few months, I've kind of mentally came up with a ranking of the best hand-drying solutions out there. So we're going to go from worst to first, top 10. Dead last, number 10, the continuous cloth towel loop, right? This is a Depression era

artifact who designed this thing. You pull it down, receive a section of damp fabric. Four thousand other men have already used. You might get the last six inches brown and moist. You leave with wetter, sat her hands than you started with. Plus maybe ringworm. Nine, the classic push button warm air dryer. This is the one in high school where someone scratched out push button, receive dry air and had it say push butt, receive whatever. Anyway, you receive that gentle wheeze of lukewarm air, roughly equivalent to a golden

retriever, breathing on your hands from across the room, stand there for a while, give up, wipe your hands on your jeans. Eight, the two-hand pull-down paper towel dispenser. Sometimes when this thing fails, I put. it at 10 as the worst because it is terrible. But you know that one where you have to pull exactly with perfect precision, both your hands at the same time. Your hands are wet.

You don't have good grip. You rip a single little guitar pick off there. You're clawing at it. Nothing works. Wipe your hands on your pants again. Seven. The tiny single-fold brown recycled paper towels. These aren't terrible.

They're there. They do the job. Probably not great for the universe. You use like 30 of them and then throw them away. The biggest problem with them, you get wherever they're put in that trash can, a bunch of water on the ground. Anyway, not bad. Six, the built into the sink dryer.

This is a new invention that I don't think needed to be invented, right? But now you have the soap, the faucet, and the dryer right there all in the sink. But you're trying to dry your hands where there's water all around. Someone saw Ted Talk and thought that'd be a good idea. I don't think it really does the job for me. Five, I don't know if this should be five, but five is that old school crank handle dispenser. I kind of like it because you kind of feel like you're doing something, like you're starting a Model T or something.

For the motion sensor, PayPal Tower, the Simencer, I think this is actually where I started to think about this because at eye connections at the Miami Conference Center, the dryers are low and you didn't, you couldn't tell if it was one of the poles or if you had to put your hand in there. So you see people putting your hand in there, but you would wave it, nothing was happening,

wave again, nothing, cup your hands under there, like you're getting communion, wave frantically, nothing's happening. So it feels like you're in an abusive relationship, and that machine has all the power. Three, the original Dyson Airblade, where you kind of put both hands into that super skinny slot. Way too loud. Way too skinny. It felt like Luke Skywalker having to hit the exhaust port on the Death Star.

Way too skinny. You have to perfectly get your hands in there, but did a good job dry. Number two, the accelerator, I think it's called the wall-mounted jet dryer. This one's good, but super loud. Can't hear yourself think. Babies are waking up in adjacent buildings. And lastly, would be the newer Dyson Airblade. No terrifying sight.

Just hold your hands under and water gets blasted off like a wind tunnel. Kind of the sports car of hand drivers. And that's it. 10 hand dryer solutions that you never thought you needed to know about. All right, that's the show. Thank you. Quick six-pack. And we'll see you next week.

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