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

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Jordy, why did you leave America last week? What went wrong in your life? You. It was, it's, it's less expensive to go to Europe these days to go skiing. So is something going. Do you have to tell me something about your finances? What's going on?

Trying to save a buck by going to Europe for.

Go to the Alps?

Yeah, it'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 because the hotel would kind of do away with any of those potential savings, but it was to avoid the epic meltdown around the epic pass.

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'm going.

To go, yeah, that's a fixer. Europe you with, with GDP growth, if you've got, if you're enough of a size. Lord, you can actually grow an economy.

Exactly.

We've talked about this fire. If you love the economy, like, you have to take it upon yourself to stimulate it, to grow it. And, and so, yeah, yeah. Part of it was like, can I, am I, can I put up numbers?

Yeah, one conversation with the right European over there, going to change everything.

Yeah, yeah.

Inspire them.

No, I had, I had an amazing trip. It was great. Left the kids with, with the grandmas.

That's great.

And yeah, had a, had a, had a fantastic time. A lot of skiing. I did. So last episode we recorded, John was, was deeply ill with the plague and within maybe five hours after recording, I had the plague. So this is the, this is the plague zone. If you, if you step up to the table with an illness, it's probably going to get cheered around. So basically like the flight over there in the first, like 36, 48 hours. I was deathly ill. No skiing. Trying to beat this fever, but beat it. Ended up having a great trip, but very happy to be back. We were going to 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 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's been struggling. They got hit hard during COVID because it's a travel company, and the stock has been underperforming for the last few years. But they've been able to get through hard times by switching to a subscription model. This is a huge departure from when the company started. 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.

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. 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.

Nope.

But an important business.

Important business.

It matters a lot.

And a fascinating story, but let's start with skiing. Let's go to creatine cycle. He says when it comes to hobbies that don't generate shareholder value, surfing seems more high t than skiing. With skiing, it's dei. I don't even get that. I don't know. Diversity, equity, inclusion. Everyone waits in line for the cuck chair. That's a reference to his earlier post. Very funny. Somehow you have to ride on the chair. You fall on fluffy powder. Whereas with surfing, it's, 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 Baldos in the replies here saying, wait until the VCs see this one. And yeah, it's true. Skiing, it's a little bit easy.

Yeah. I mean this, this, this was sort of in a similar vein to my post, which was. Sitting in a ski lift line is the most barnyard animal coded modern human behavior. You stand in a tense line of your fellow livestock waiting for the machine to take you up the hill so you can get the slop turns. You oink, oink. Epic pass, piggy. And it's funny because I posted over a thousand. I posted that. Yeah, I got 3,000 likes.

3,000.

So I posted that. And, and a lot of, you know, when, when something blows up, you, 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 said that from the Amman in the Alps where, where my, my wife is like, didn't, didn't ski much growing up. She just would like go to the spa and stuff. So I was teaching her to ski. And so we had to take this one like gondola route over and over the line was just so brutal. And so I came up with that post from like the most brutal line.

Yeah.

And I'm just. We're sitting there in this tense. We're sitting there in this like tense line waiting to take the gondola up. And I'm like, this is the most barnyard code.

Yeah, it is. I mean it's. The predator animal is the one who hunts for the best powder with the helicopter.

Yeah, very clearly.

Like an eagle descending upon the mountain and taking powder for, for their own.

Yep.

Say, rejecting conformity. It's great. I like, I just want to give you a little bit more color on Vail. There's a good post by Andrew Bracken here. This is from two years ago. We're going back in the time, uh, he says, off to meet some retina doctors at a meeting in Vail, Colorado. It's the first time I've had a flight delayed due to Quote, high levels of private jet traffic. And so that just gives you like the. Some color here on like Vail. Very exclusive. Uh, it is the most visited. It is the most visited ski resort in the United States for the, for the 2023-2024 ski season. Vail Mountain offers some of the most expansive and very terrain in North America with, with approximately 55,300 skiable acres, including seven world renowned back bowls and 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 like hates everything and yet collects Rolexes. It's very cringe. He like, everything is about, oh, capitalism. So broken capitalism. Broke it. And like, it's like your watch collector. Watch collector. Like just, just be a capitalist. Yeah, but, but that's the one thing.

His watch collection is the one thing that's keeping him from like having like a communist revolution.

Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. But yeah, in this video it's breaking down like, oh, like, you know, these like ski companies come in and they turn them into like Disneyland and they destroy like the local economy. And it's so sad because like 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, it was never anything else. Like no one was displaced.

Well, it used to be part of Texas.

Oh yeah.

Max Meyer brought this to my. Our attention. He says America cannot be fully great until Aspen Vale and Steamboat Springs are restored to their proper jurisdiction in the state of Texas. The territorial changes of The Compromise of 1850 must be reversed. Vail, Texas has a nice ring to it. And he shows like an entire map.

Here, I love it.

Of how Vail used to be a part of Texas. So 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 small. Smaller than you've ever been. Texas, if you're not claiming land.

Yeah.

You're shrink. You're basically.

I was talking trash about Denmark because they're talking a big game about not selling Greenland to America. And I was like, you guys sold us the British version of the US 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. Denmark's just shrinking.

They're negotiating with the best negotiator, the guy who literally wrote the art of the deal.

Yeah.

It's like it's 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 love.

I don't know. I don't know if I think. I'm assuming it was a woman.

Yeah.

But did she just. Some of these like investors get so regulated that they can't maybe or I.

Don'T know, just got sick of it or something. But I went back and found this tweet from 2021 March and says watching.

Fintwit could move the market. By the way. Like if she came back online and just like posted like her, like it.

Would probably got to get in touch and get her back on. This is, 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. Um, in my opinion, Rob Katz deserves the benefit of the doubt. 24 months later scale economy shared. Katz acquired resource and realized scale benefits to lower price and sell high margin add ons. Amazing. And so I think what she's saying is that like people were very bearish on the idea of the, of the Epic Pass.

Yeah.

But if you look at the data, the, the, 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 lift, lift related revenue mix. In 2008 it was 26% passes. In 2022 it was 62% passes.

Yeah.

And so the Epic Pass lets you go to any of their mountains which, well, it's interesting now is 42 destination mountain resorts.

It. So this is a lot of there's some other posts in here basically saying like this is like classic like big corporate greed, all this stuff. Like you know, the Epic Pass is bad 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 Mountain. So ran the gondola mammoth for, for 50 years. And maybe not 50 like more like. No, I think around 50.

Anyway, long trying to keep it like just strictly business on the show. So whenever you talk about your family in one year now, because as we've said, we're not best.

No. But, but yeah, we are not friends strictly. This is about delivering the news.

Yep.

Daily.

Yep.

And nothing else.

Yep.

But, but yeah, so, so growing up like you know you'd go, I'd go to Squaw for a while, I'd go to Mammoth. But this the, the trade off of getting a season pass. Growing up, my experience was you had to be so committed to a single mountain. 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. 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 is just a phenomenal product.

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. So they've Vale and 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 officiant.

And the other thing, the other thing is you can subscribe to it on a monthly basis. So you're able to take a cost of for a lot of people was like this big one time purchase and you're just like permanently paying them whatever 100 bucks a month. But it makes skiing so much more Accessible.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like literally cheaper to get access to 42 of the greatest ski resorts of all time for, for a third of the price of your Equinox membership.

Yeah, yeah. And so a little bit of the history we alluded to it, but you know, Vail started as this kind of like crazy idea by these two founders who were like literally World War II mountaineers, like just mountain guys. They built this up, they eventually sell it to, to another guy, Vail Associates. And then that guy got saddled up with debt during kind of the 80s, early 90s junk bond era. The debt became too big, they went bankrupt. Apollo came and recapitalized the business. Wound up taking their, taking them public. Apollo was in from 97 to 2003 I think Leon Black and, and then, and then the private equity guy who worked at Apollo became the CEO and had a 20 year run generation. And so you can see that like there is a little bit of this private equity mindset of like, let's figure out how do we turn this into.

What was that guy's name, the Apollo guy?

Rob Katz.

So Rob is, must be licking his chops the last, the last couple weeks, right? You think he wants to get back in the game?

Maybe.

Imagine watching all this and he's like, I always knew how to run this better than you guys.

I wonder.

Yeah, I, I, I think like so, so taking, yeah, taking a small step back.

Yeah.

It's almost impossible to understate how hard it is to run a ski resort.

Oh yeah.

So like I had a, like, you know, having family member who was running. So my great Grandpa, World War II vet, all these guys are, go to war, they come back, they decide to like build ski resorts. Very hard undertaking but, but easier than, than you know, going to war. And you know, so my great grandpa running like the gondola all this time, it sounds like the simple thing because you're just sending like this, you know, little, 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 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 a, a lift like reverses and it just starts going down like backwards like in the opposite direction. It's just like terrifying. Terrifying.

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, obviously 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 yeah. Needs to be delivered and installed in the middle of the ski season. You need helicopter.

And then, and then if your lift breaks while you have people on it, then great. You have hundreds of people sitting 50ft in the air in harsh conditions. 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 couple of weeks were a disaster in Park City, but the fact that there aren't more disasters is honestly pretty amazing. It is a testament to how, 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 ski resorts. Obviously Whistler's like massive and huge and iconic, but then they bought a bunch of stuff in the Northeast that's much worse skiing because the Northeast is just very wet, very icy, but there's still a lot of skiers there that just want to get out there. And so the, the kind of value prop for Vail was we can bring some of that like, destination, beautiful luxury ski town like experience to the Northeast. But there's going to be, need to be significant capex that goes into the business. And so at this one ski resort called Attitash, I think it's called Attitas, they needed to replace the, 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, the pylons in and stuff. And the locals were like, super pissed because they're like, you're this big corporation, like, why can' time, like you know, we wanted this to be missed half the season, missed half the season. But they did actually wind up getting it in. And it's an interesting like, you know, battle between like the locals. And of course like whenever something goes wrong, everyone's like very opinionated and vocal about it.

But yeah, that's the other challenge of running these resorts is half, half. I don't know the exact split. But a large percentage of your customer base are these sort of fair weather. They're going to be there during ski week and winter break and maybe one other week during the year. And they're just there as like sort of tourists that 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 some ways that I think the epic pass at like $1200 a year to get access to 40 plus resorts.

Is it $1200 a year? That was like 500?

No, no, I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure it's 1200 for like the expensive. But, but it's not in the context of like. Yeah, yeah. It's not in the context of like the fact that if you're just buying a day pass, it's like 250 bucks.

Yeah. It's also just like what, what are the, 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. 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. But yeah, so Vail has been back and forth for a while. People love it. People hate it. Max Meyer again says Vail Resorts charges me less for a military Family season pass $145 than they do for a single day lift ticket at Vail. 189. Remind you that the 189 ticket is actually the spring discount price during jan. Feb. It's 229. And so Max is a big Vail fan, hence why he wants it in Texas because he thinks it's, it's a well organization.

Got one from, from Katie Herzog 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, in. In Courchevel, where I was for the last couple weeks, I was noticing this interesting dynamic where tons of lip. Lip filler usage and lip filler seems to have this sort of like anti mimetic property 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 and like, you know, they're shooting their. Like, 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. And so, so it's this interesting thing where lip filler is constantly getting this terribly negative advertising, yet it continues on.

Yeah. Plastic surgery is like, like a good defensive cornerback. Like you only notice it when they're fucking up, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's a good example.

The. The good D back.

Yeah. I don't know much about sports. You're not, you're not in like a.

Because he's shut.

Shutting down, you could say that's like, like put it in business context.

Exactly.

Right. Like it's a good controller.

Yeah.

Nobody's like, nobody. You know, the controller never gets like the fame, the fortune, you know, things that well or if they don't go well. It's not like the CFO of like Enron who's like literally going to jail. The controller, like. Yeah, who knows? They're just doing their job, just solid controller.

Most people couldn't even name the controller at Apple or Facebook or, you know, Google because they're just doing their job. So let's get into the actual drama that erupted over the last weekend. I. This is what TF Jenkins had the first post that I really saw go viral here. He says, thanks. Park City at Vail Resorts and the striking Ski patrol. Really creating a fun and safe environment. I hope the lawsuits begin to trickle in and every one of you feel financial pain for your negligence super fast.

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 video, super long lines back in.

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 rest chairs, gondolas. Like, you're not. You're not. If a line is, like, 10 minutes, you're, like, annoyed.

Yeah.

This is, like, taking, like, too long. 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 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 people started diagnosing the problems. Willmanitis says it's incredible that Apollo owns both every good ski slip in America, Vail, and every private military contractor. Blackwater Triple Canopy, possibly the most adaptive allocators to ever live. Late stage finance is truly a beautiful thing. And this is, like, kind of true. But Apollo hasn't owned Vail for two decades, so gonna have to put that one in the truth zone. Will not quite right. And then Andrew Reed is hypothesizing why things might be going wrong in Vail. He says when you learn Vail Resorts CMOS Prior job was 10 years at Comcast, everything clicks into place. That's. That's a deep dive. He. He looked up the CMO like, I. He really.

He must have been on the ground in Colorado or Utah.

I mean, he's wearing ski gear in his profile pictures. Yeah, I think this guy is real skier. The real skier. They're probably, you know, Sequoia partner digging in, understanding what's going on. Love it. But. But I want to go through this. This deep dive of the story of how Vail acquired Park City. But what else you got for me right now?

I mean, Dan Loeb, some other people are talking about, like, I think what. On the surface, the. 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.

Burger cost 25 in town. So, like, yeah, 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 wait a. You know, we've dealt with our own, our editors trying to unionize over and over, but we are always able to win. He says this dispute doesn't make sense. Must be missing something. So I think, yeah, like on the surface a lot of this stuff doesn't really make sense. Right. It's $192,000 a year. This company does hundreds of millions of dollars in earnings. And I think that the reality is that it's more about, you know, Vail not wanting to set the precedent that a small group of individuals at one of their resorts is able to like shut down, you know, the, the basically shut down the brand 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 resorts. 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, 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, 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 gonna move to this small town just for the winter or I'm gonna live in this town and like work odd jobs in the off season and then be a ski patrol just because they love skiing so much. And then that sort of like ski bum lifestyle, which has been a part of ski culture forever.

Yep.

That was not glamorous, but was done specifically because people love to ski. When that comes up against, you know, now you have this massive public company that owns all of skiing and there's becomes this like thing where people are saying, well, I 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 Vail 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 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, you know, pay, pay your people more?

Yeah.

And you said you're, you said if I wasn't, if I, John Coogan was negotiating for these ski patrollers, I'd be like, give me some of that sweet stock based comp.

That's true. Yeah.

Saying, you know, that the $2 extra don't, don't just go for two DOL. Cash.

Yeah.

And equity program would go for $2 of, of stock could easily. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean it is interesting because that, that math makes it look so small. But if you actually look at their 10k veil as a whole, across all 42 mountains, the lift revenue was 1.4 billion. And the labor and labor related benefits was 730 million. And so it's by far their biggest cost. Twice their gna. Twice their other.

Well, yeah, and the ski patrollers are a small. At this one resort.

Yeah.

Are a cog in the machine. But then you have people that do ski lessons, which are different people that just lift operators, people that do lift. The lift operators are the people that are sitting there and like making sure you get on and turning it off. Then you have the people that are maintaining the lifts and then you have like the mountain operations and then you have the guys that do the cats at night.

Yeah.

Then you have the guys that do the, the dynamite at night to make sure. Like, like. And so you just add. And then, okay, the cashier and then the kitchen staff and the people that do the rentals and, and then the people that do parking. And then suddenly like, if every single group on the mountain at every resort starts, like, then the business ceases to be a real business.

Right. Yeah.

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 a real business?

Yeah. I do wonder if there's other things they could do to lower the cost for the employees. Because Vail has like, it. A. 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 like corporate apartments that are 500 bucks a month, so. But I don't think they build enough of those. Maybe. So you need to build more. But there's a lot of like permitting and regulation. Did you know that they're trying to build a tunnel in Vail? This is really interesting. So the highway that goes through, I guess people complain about road noise and I think that maybe during snow it's tricky. So they're thinking about burying it basically. But it's like a multibillion dollar project and they're like, well, we could develop on top of it. So then you can just continue to develop. But that wouldn't even offset the cost. So they're just like, it's never going to happen. It's been in the plan for like 40 years. In their general plan.

Yeah.

But yeah. Should we move on to the story of when Vail stole Park City? That's pretty interesting. So grit capital. Great poster. 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 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 1750ft again, also sort of lit. Then the 1970s park. Park City ski area released the terrain from the US from the United Park City Mines in a lease of only 155k per year, extendable until 2051. Yeah, a lot of these ski resorts are not actually owned land. They're on these different like leases either from the government or from other organizations. It's, it's fascinating. It's actually so funny to think about.

Somebody like writing up a hundred year lease for property and they're like, oh, what's a fair price? Like 150 grand a year, like thinking it's like this, like, like there's Good.

There's no way. There's no. There'll be massive inflation and then it's get screwed. This would become Park City Mountain Resort, one of three resorts in the immediate area alongside Skier Only deer Valley and third place canyons. In 1994, PCMR, that's Park City Mining Resorts or something. Parks, 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 Mountain, the mountain hardware brand later acquired by Columbia Sportswear. And there's some nice photos of what a chad.

He's in his early twenties.

Well this is, 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 in 03. But, but he was an entrepreneur and so he, he starts Powder buys pcmr. Park City. Powder quickly grew into one of the largest ski resort operators in the country with PCMR as its crown jewel status further boosted by the O2 Olympics which were there. The company ran a decentralized town friendly model and reported and reportedly had less than 40 corporate employees. And there's a big question about these like where the corporation. So Vail Associates used to be based in Vail, but they got too big because they're managing 40 resorts like internationally and stuff. So they actually moved to Denver, I believe. Yeah. The success wasn't entirely unprecedented. Powder had the backing of John's father Ian, who founded Loose Lucidia, now merged with Jeffrey, some sort of bank, I guess described as the smaller Berkshire Hathaway, but with a better track record. The company was valued at nearly $7 billion when Ian retired in 2013. Damn.

Damn.

Nepo, baby. Let's go.

Let's go.

Putting the family money to work buying ski resorts.

Let's go. I love. I was, I was like seeing this headline. It's like this. He's 28 and he owns Park City. Meanwhile his dad's worth 7 million. 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 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 also like look like, yeah, maybe he didn't have the, the chops to fill the big shoes like cast a big shadow in the world of finance, but you can Go and buy and build a much cooler asset. And that's pretty awesome.

Yeah.

And so it's like, yeah, you're not.

Buy a NASCAR team.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're not the. You're not the $7 billion hedge fund guy, but you own Park City. That's.

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 40,000 400,000 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 it 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 seem friendly with discussions on property and infrastructure investments, including a potential lift connection between the results resorts. Talisker was even landlord for PCMR's Upper Mountain, having inherited the long term lease from UPCM PCMR. PCMR's lease required written renewal every 20 years, a deadline that no one at Powder was assigned to monitor. This is crazy. While Powder sent its letter 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 lawsuit against Talisker, thinking they could return to the previous deal. Even if Talisker had rights to the Upper mountain, what could they do without the base, which Powder owned? They didn't wait to find out. After a year, Talisker leased Canyons and the Upper Mountain to Vale Resorts who assumed the legal battle. Vale's like, let's go, I'll fight this out. Yeah, 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. 4000 skiable areas, top 10 ranking and ski and outside magazines, attractive Park City location, huge growth opportunities, etc. The opportunity was reconciliation. The opportunity for reconciliation was gone. The gloves were off. Vale, you'll recall, had lost Canyons to Talisker and 07 in that bidding war and come back for the full enchilada. So they come back to buy it all. Led by CEO Rob Katz, pictured here. You got to look at a photo of this guy. Total gigachad. Led by CEO Rob Katz. Vail was a known growing powerhouse in Colorado and California. They were beginning an ascent few truly appreciated was coming. Park City was the first entree. And so Vail Resorts is expanding into Breckenridge, Keystone, Canyons, Heavenly, etc. The $305 million deal was 20x the estimated $15 million EBITDA canyons would bring in. The deal would only make sense if 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 Vail for 130, $83 million 5x the incremental $35 million EBITDA. Vail, after connecting the resorts, had the largest ski resort in the United States racking a combined 1.5 million ski visits annually.

Got him.

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. It is fascinating that this idea of like the mega ski conglomerate is something that really only started like five years ago, like ten years ago maybe. It used to just truly be all independent ski resorts and like.

Yeah, I think the reason that I this this last couple weeks of events, there's a lot of reasons, you know, people are posting the strike. Park City is just ridiculous. Just classic corporate greed here. 330 for a day pass and they Quote, unquote, can't afford to pay the patrollers. 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 again, it's not like Vail Resorts is just the best business anybody's ever seen, even at this level of scale and owning the entire industry. I look at it and I say this is a 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 is not grown over the last four years.

Yeah. And there's not a lot of the greatest bull market. 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 how it's.

The most interesting thing about the climate change thing is I have this whole business school case study here lifting the veil. Largest US Snow sports resort operator takes on climate change. These, these folks at Michigan Ross School of Business did a whole deep dive on sustainability and ESG and how, how Vail will deal with climate change. But when I was looking through the 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, but it's very, they're, they're, they're projecting a lot of interesting things.

But, but, and the other thing is like these think about how challenging it is to run a, a business. And it's not even like the, the ski industry has, like, the people that work in the industry have every right to be emotional and be like, charged up and, and be frustrated with the corporate owners. But if you think about it, 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.

Yep.

You, 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 a thousand dollars a year, you can get access to 40 of the most beautiful mountains on earth. And, and, and get to me that that value exchange is like such a great trade for the average consumer that it's, that it's has to be frustrating running veil being like, we're giving you guys for 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, so clearly not essential to life. Like, it's purely for fun and you're still not happy. It's like, that's got to be a rough, rough spot to be. I, I mean, I honestly like, it seems like they poorly handled the last couple weeks. But at the same time, I feel for them because they're running a deeply challenging business.

Yeah, I mean, if you look at this data, 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 go buy Greenland. Should buy Greenland.

There we go.

It'll become a country country.

But then it's like Russia and Mongolia, which are, you know, you're not going to build a good business there. But they're, they're projecting out some moderate emission scenarios. And the, the current number of days below freezing at Park City in Utah is 194per year. And by 2050ish, 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, this report, this report is like, okay, how do you deal with, how do you deal with climate change? Their main recommendation is like, expand more. Like go buy more across the world. And they actually break down all of the target countries. They say Argentina, Chile, China, Chechiya, 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, at the Amman there was a guy from Russia talking about how he's expanding and building ski resorts in the far far east of Russia on a volcano apparently. That sounded cool.

That's awesome. Let's, let's finish the, the, the, the Vail acquisition story here.

Yeah.

So Vail success has been vilified within the industry who see a corporate overlord turning ski hills into theme parks, which we've discussed. Powder magazine hilariously joked Vail had acquired the rights to all North American snowfall. However, they've enabled a renaissance of sort. And this is something you were talking about the company wide epic pass alongside increased scale has flipped skiing's business model on its head from an add on to real estate to operations. First, it's worthy of a deeper dive on how tech and opportunity combined and the, the past revenue which you'll see here climbed from 78 million in 2008 to basically 800 million in, in 2022. So at 10x growth and that led to really incredible performance in the stock. If you look at 2008, stock was under $25 a share. By the end of 2021 it was up at 350. So 10x growth in, in the past revenue, 10x growth in the stock. And that's almost all just to retooling the business model.

Yep.

And obviously a lot of expansion and.

The reason, I mean the reason I just again I don't, I don't have that much sympathy for the average person who, who 10 years ago they'd be buying a season pass to one of these resorts and it'd be like 500 bucks. And now they pay $1,000 but they get access to 42 times as many mountains. Like I just don't feel that.

Well, it's just catering to a much more like coastal urban elite, someone who doesn't live in the ski town. It's probably a net like net positive overall at the expense of the local.

Yeah, but yeah, even the ski, like the true ski bums, they still, if they go to Keystone and that's their mountain. Yeah, they still, they take advantage of these of the evidence, and they're like, oh, I'm gonna go to Utah for a week. And like, and you can go off season and it's not that expensive to stay at like some little hotel. I mean, the, the, you know, you posted a few times about the cost of skiing in Europe versus the United States. And, and this Andy Van Vandenberg guy in almost a year ago is saying, here's your annual reminder that because of Vail and Altera's duopoly, it's cheaper to plan a week long ski trip in Switzerland than Colorado. I don't think this is, this, this is not purely because of the duopoly. It has always been significantly, you know, even prior to the, to the, to the Disney ification of, of American skiing, it was always quite a bit cheaper to go skiing in, in, in Europe. But, but, but again, I don't, I.

Mean like, the benefit of this is that there is incredible price discrimination. And so if you want the value pass and you want your average day skiing, like I knew a guy who was on one of the icon passes or epic passes and I was skiing with him and he was like, yeah, this is like my 60th day this season. And 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. And so a lot of people will just do that. It's like the Disney, like the Disney. Disney ification is real in the sense that like there's a fast pass.

Yeah.

There's a system for jumping even.

Yeah. Arguably, if the fast passes is an extra. If the main pass is a grand, the fast pass is like three grand. But you ski 50 plus days a year, do it. It's like not that. Yeah, yeah.

And so Grit goes on to say, meanwhile, Powder has moved on from the debacle. They remain a major adventure sports oriented resort operator with Copper, Snowbird and Killington as premier destinations. Powder even returned to Park City in 2019 via a new Woodward sports camp. Looks lit. And it's like he loves that lit.

Yeah.

And it's like a BMX facility and like a parkour facility, I guess. Pretty, pretty interesting. And then if we go over here, said Talisker. Well, they're not doing so hot. After leasing to Vail, they hit rocky times the creditors and eventually forced foreclosure in 2015. It's likely that their shaky financial situation that precipitated the mess in the first place. And what might have been Though there had been talks about connecting the major Salt Lake City area resorts in a European style village to village arrangement with 80 lifts and 80 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, the, the Apollo buyout and some of the private equity deals that were quoted in that book. And that book has like some of the only interviews that happen with those financiers because like a the journalists aren't really writing about like random private equity deals. And then also these guys are pretty tight lipped. So that is the story. You got some more posts?

I got one last thing we can end on from at the stalwart Mr. Joe 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 winners are just totally optional for you. And I would say that the VCs I know would push back on this and say they would say because I have a fake job like vc, I get to indulge in winter even more. I get to go being, being a truly a VC is you know, going and skiing powder days on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, midweek. Way less people. You tell the founders, hey yeah, you know, 4, 4pm is the earliest I can schedule. Zoom.

Yep.

You go ski incredible. Like you know, you know, empty tracks all day long. You get back, you're pulling off your helmet, you're sitting here, you jump on the Zoom call. Sorry, what's your company do again? And that's, that's what it's all about.

We were talking about Bryce, how like you know, he's networking in Deer Valley.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I was talking to another, another person about how, like, there's this jockeying that's happening right now for, like, you know, can you get on the list for one of the big VC ski vacations that are going on? So every VC firm is 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 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 adults. Right. It's. It's actually very productive. And then you'll remember, oh, ye. Yeah, we had that conversation, like, sitting outside having drinks after skiing. And it was. That's why, like, that's why I ski is more valuable.

So skiing is wildly expensive.

Yep.

But I think it's fairly priced for how incredible it is. Like, we've joked about it a lot, but it's some of my favorite memories as a kid was with snowboarding with my dad. You know, I was like, skiing with my mom. Like, you get all these moments where you get to, like, have this exhilarating, fun activity that literally is almost the closest thing that we do to flying as humans. And then five minutes later, you're sitting on a lift, you know, chit chatting, talking. It's just, it's worth every dollar. And I would happily pay 2, 3 times what it currently costs. Vale, if you're listening, no need to jack up the prices, but I do.

Have one little tidbit of advice. And we can close out with any more posts you have, but there's a lot of questions about, like, oh, it must be really rough being a ski patroller right now. And I think that if you're looking for a career, instead of going into ski patrol, I would recommend going into private equity.

Yeah.

And so if you look at the history of Vail, the private equity guys have done very well. And it seems like the ski patrollers have struggled. And it goes back to, like, who has the financial leverage, who has the. Who has the power there? And so a little less time on the slopes, a little more time in the sheets, in the spreadsheets.

So obviously you're riffing a little bit, but I'll continue on that. I do think that today, in the nature of remote work, if you want to ski the most, the best, if you want to, if you just care about skiing, you're still better off getting a fake remote job and living in a mountain town and just skiing constantly, then going and becoming a Ski patrol person. I know I have the industry set.

Up to cater to my person.

My roommate in college, like, would have been a professional surfer. His parents, like, like, didn't allow him to quit school at a young age and, like, travel and do what he needed to do. But now he works in real estate. And so he, like, has spent the last few weeks, like, on the North Shore at Pipeline.

Like, there we go.

Getting absolutely barreled every single day. And it's like he makes way more money than like, the average pro surfer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And surfs, like, probably 50%, 60% as much, but, like, has a real career. And so if you're thinking about becoming a ski bum, you can pay for gear, pay for.

For coaches, pay for training.

Yeah.

You get to his health care.

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 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 gonna take a break and we're just gonna 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 Karat Ridge wallet, which I like. I got the MagSafe one on my phone and I realized that Ridge Ridge Wallet, it's a very accessible product. It's not a super hyper luxury. Good. But what I love about it is that. But if you follow the Ridge team, Sean and Connor, you will understand that these guys are absolute killers in the world of E commerce and they've built a fantastic business. And so carrying a Ridge Wallet has actually become a status symbol. If you work in E commerce in the sense that you are acknowledging that direct response performance ads is a craft of its own and that you respect a team that has done it so well and gone to partner with MKBHD and launched all these products and really grown the business in a bunch of interesting ways and maintained an incredible amount of ownership over that business. Because they haven't raised any of the crazy suicide rounds that other D2C companies. Yeah, they haven't raised a dollar and they've just grown that Business and grown it, grown and grown it. And now it's doing, I think, hundreds of millions of dollars, right, Jordi? Hundreds of millions of dollars. And so that's, I think the real reason why you should carry a Ridge wallet is to let everyone know you have respect for the best in the business when it comes to direct to consumer. And they also sent me this knife which I've been enjoying and I've been playing with basically constantly. It's like, it's like the man's fidget spinner. The adult fidget spinner is just the knife that you can just like.

That's my classic. That's my class. Anytime I'm at a D, at a nice dinner and there's a steak knife, I pull it out and I start doing. Just freak everyone out. I'm like, I'm like, good enough at it that I can, like, I can, I can.

And this knife is handy because we have here Palmer Luckey'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, technical 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, Lucky, go for it. Oh, just started. This second company is not busy enough with Anduril. Ooh, nice packaging. It opens, it opens around. It has some really cool graphics. And I believe this is possible. Wow. This is really just like an actual Game Boy. This is such a throwback. It's so crazy, man. What a. 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, and if you think forward, I mean, this company raised some money and at first I think people were skeptical, like, oh, what, you know, what's the deal with like a Game Boy company? Like, why do I. Why is that a good company? But if you think about like, well, then maybe the 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.

Yeah. Another. Another bull case is played. 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, they ripped and they continue to Rip. This is of piece A.

And. But listen to that.

It fires up so fast.

Let's go.

It fires up so fast that that.

Speaker is just so nostalgic. That sound is incredibly nostalgic.

I'm just gonna play this for the rest of the game.

All right. No, but anyway, so if, so if GameStop is a 14 billion dollar company, every single game in the store you can just download.

Yeah.

This, this is the lifeline for GameStop. And so basically, I think that GameStop basically has to buy Mod Retro for a billion dollars. At least if I was an investor. That's my investment thesis.

Huge.

Which is like what is the, what's the last kind of video game that you can buy in the store? And it's cartridges.

Yeah. So also I saw somebody bought. They make cartridges that are like, they, 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. We have children. I would much rather give our sons one of these on a road trip than the average iPad, which is just going to be like, you know.

Yeah. And I was playing a game on PlayStation 5 over the, over the break with my son and, and it was, it was awesome. He was a bit about Astro's robots and it's kind of like PlayStation's Mario. So. Yeah, 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 we just watch and he was really into that. And then every once in a while there'd be like, like one thing that just required pressing one button and be like, you press the button and be really excited about that.

Yeah.

But I think he could actually learn how to play Tetris and build a build quality on it.

The build quality is amazing.

Remarkable.

It's significantly, it's significantly better.

Oh yeah.

Because I have so, so I think I mentioned recently I have a, I have a Game Boy color that, that unfortunately that's like the Pikachu edition. And I looked it up and I was like, oh, if it's, it's unopened or. No, if you have the box, it's like $3,000. And then if you don't, if you don't have the box, it's like 200 bucks or something like that. But this build quality of this is significantly better.

So small too. I forget how amazing this device is. Like, it's.

And it's so brought this back. Yeah. I mean, talk about an ideas. An ideas guy that is at the top of his game.

Totally is.

The guy who's making the next Lockheed Martin also is good enough ideas guy to realize that, hey, you can just build a Game Boy color.

Yeah, I love it. So, yeah, go pick one up. Tell them the technology brother sent you. We're. We're very excited to have that. We also got some very cool merch from Rostra, Lulu's company. She sent us this amazing 3D printed rostra. Are you familiar with like what a roster is? Jordy?

Hey, are you playing?

Are you playing?

I'm sorry.

So good, right? It's.

It's fun.

It comes back immediately.

Yeah.

It's so fun.

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 Maservi's company. Lulu, of course, is the brother of the year comms mastermind. Great follow on X. And her company is named Rostra, which is a Roman term for exactly this, I think like a. Like an area where conversations could happen.

A place to go direct.

Yeah, exactly the place to go direct. And so she 3D printed this beautiful rostra and she also sent a fantastic quarter zip that I've been wearing and is extremely comfortable.

I'm into that. That's actually some of the only startup merch that I'm pissed that we didn't get two of.

Yeah, I feel like she's mentioned too.

But 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.

Okay, cool.

Co founder of Huberman Lab. Rob, thank you for sending us. 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.

Wasn't it Andrew from Tiny. Andrew Wilkins.

I think he also invested finance.

Yeah, yeah, it's cool.

So anyways, these are fantastic. You can get them at Erewhon. You get them online. Whole Foods, I think as well.

And a fair amount of caffeine in there too, right?

Yeah. I'm gonna guess that we're putting up at least 120, 122 espresso shots. So here we go. Could have like four or five of these and be good to go.

Okay, thank you. That's great.

Are we just gonna keep. We gotta keep going through.

Yeah. What else do we have? We have a. We have a sweatshirt. We've gotten so much.

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 a. 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. And it even is more ecological, uses 90% less water and 45% fewer emissions, CO2 emissions, than traditional cotton. So anyways, very nice, heavy hoodie. So thank you to Superpower for keeping us warm this winter season.

Yeah, yeah, that's tricky for me because my testosterone has been really high lately, so I've been trying to get more microplastics, bring it down, take the edge off. But wait, so you would correct person. I'm sure that's a great choice.

So I was having an apres ski moment in the Alps and, and we were selecting like this, this incredible steak from. There's this, this restaurant in the Three Valleys, like resorts region called La Cicou and it's really, really known for its steak. So we ski into this place and we spend all this time selecting a steak and the, they, they weigh it out for you. And after we, he, they bring out the steak, we're like, we decide, yes, we're gonna do this. And he slaps the receipt right on top of the stage.

Oh, wait, that was a real photo.

Yeah, it was a real photo that 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?

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 a thermometer. I thought it was the paper itself.

I think, I think it's the ink that you want to watch. But anyways, whenever I get a receipt. But if I have to touch it, I'll just touch the part that didn't get the ink on it.

Yeah, I don't know if I don't have that. I don't know if that works. I Think it works, but. But anyways. So for me, I actually liked it because my T levels are so high. I'm trying to get a little bit of receipt.

Yeah, it makes sense.

Bring it down. Get closer to sort of baseline ability to be able to even focus, get anything done. But, but yeah, I just thought that was so funny. It's like goes through all the hassle of like selecting this incredible slaps.

That guy is not on right wing Twitter. Yeah, he needs to get rebuilt. Okay, let's go to some more. Some more questions. Q and A. Sarah says, what are your predictions for defense and industrial tech in 2025? Spicy takes are always welcome.

So bear domestication.

Bear domestication does feel like it's getting closer to being a reality as opposed to just joke territory.

Yeah.

And I could see someone 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 fail.

That'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 would be a big milestone.

Yeah.

What else? What, what, what? Seriously? I mean, seriously, I think that the, the, the defense tech stuff, it's already been like a big tent since like defense tech. There was like Palantir, it doesn't make hardware, but it's clearly defense tech. But they still have a massive commercial business. And then SpaceX, like, they have Star Shield, which is a defense tech product. And then the, they're certainly like a govtech company because they work with the government and so they're kind of in the defense tech world. And then Anduril is like the most pure play. Like it's hard tech and defense only. And they don't have a consumer business and they don't have an enterprise business. And so Andrew.

Well, I think the argument SpaceX is inherently a defense company because if you can take a huge payload to space and then drop it anywhere in the world, like, like fundamentally, that's like the, the, the, the.

They're ICBMs.

Yeah.

The first rocket that Elon tried to buy in Russia were just decommissioned ICBMs.

Yeah.

And they like spat at him and then he started the company. But yeah, I, I think it's always been kind of a big tent. And Andreessen did a little bit of that with in 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 dynamics is. 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 I 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, yeah, a defense tech company now. And so I think that, I think that tent will get bigger. But the next category that I think will be really like maybe retconned into the defense and industrial tech will be energy and data center build out. And, and because I think they're capitally intensive, high dilution, similar skill sets. So I think a lot of the VCs that are like, okay, I, I have built a portfolio, 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 data center build out. Because wasn't there a number that like Microsoft's gonna spend 80 billion. 80 billion. And so like that just seems kind.

Of weak to me.

Bec is gonna jump on this, right?

Honestly, the 80s seem 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 was saying that is like, it's like it's the loudest signal that AGI is around the corner and you're.

Like, 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 worth of data centers, this is like one of the few companies that can actually do that. Now they're doing it.

Yeah. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see how the core weave IPO goes. I think a lot of people are going to be watching that in terms of like data center build out and valuation. Yeah, we have a DM here. Jordy, Fantastic flow. What do you do for Your hair.

Okay, so I got my haircut yesterday and I go to. I go to the same place as Rob actually got recommend. Rob.

Rob Huberman's business partner.

Andrew Huberman's business partner has fantastic flow.

He does.

He showed up to my house for Jiu Jitsu one day. I was like, dude, where do you get your haircut? Live like a few minutes from each other. And he's like, oh, I go to Brooke at Salt Salon. So I go to Brooke at Salt Salon. And I told her yesterday while I was getting my haircut or Saturday it was. I was like, people keep commenting on about my hair. 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, no.

Like you do it perfect every time. You never give me a bad haircut. Just like lock in, just give me a regular yips. And she got. It got into her head somehow. So if, if I'm not on my game today, it's, it's, it's because I shouldn't have said anything.

But what about product?

I mean, so I haven't used a product in forever. 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 just expelling toxins poor. And so you can skip the shampoo. So I use shampoo maybe once a month. I do support big shampoo, but they don't get much out of me and just salt water and yeah, I use a sauna a lot too, so.

And an Erewhon bill. That looks like a mortgage payment.

The six fig. Six fig.

It really does look like a mortgage payment.

Have I ever showed you, by the way, this is like, this is like the most rambly episode ever. But it kind of makes sense. So my, my lifetime savings at Erewhon 16.

Oh my God.

I spend the average PM's monthly salary at Erwan.

Yeah, it's all worth it for the hair. Now you have a tip.

Yeah.

So there's, there's, there's the answer. Let's go to Hannil 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. Yeah, he wrote the book in the 90s, I think, in 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 Sacks 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 Sacks on stage, you're like, he's a SaaS investor. Like, he's not controversial. Let's forget about that book. And now it's like, no, he literally saw the future and he was correct. Like, it was. He was dead on. And so there's a little bit of, like, you once. Once the world comes around to your perspective, like, you need to make sure that you canonize the correct telling of history. And that's true for Trump, obviously, in the sense that, like, he predicted that Trump would be popular and that that happened in 2016. And it was kind of like this wild card thing where he was still getting protested and there was a lot of negativity. And for years, you know, there was like the debate over YC and a lot of company people were like, I won't take Peter's money. It's like, okay, yeah, sure, but. 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. 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, you'll just be like, oh, this is like just a smart person.

There's almost no one on earth that you can listen to a truly long form interview of them and come away and be like, this person is deeply bad. Yeah, right. Like, you can even, like, even when people, they actually listen to Putin talk for an hour and he just rambles they're like, oh, maybe he's got some points.

Yeah, yeah. 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 with J.D. vance, he was weird. And then the top comment on the Theo Vaughn interview was like, why did they say he was weird? This is the least weird guy I've ever met. Like, this is the most normie dude in the world. And it's like, yeah, he is just like a normal guy. Like, yeah, like you, you should. You should, you know, just evaluate his policies and ideas and then decide if those align with what your goals are in the world. And then that's fine. And if you come away being like, I still don't 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. 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. Yeah, 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 didn't let herself be humanized because she didn't do any real podcasts.

She could have been a hero for the crypto community if she.

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 in early stage, early stage slash precede deep tech funds that also have their own studio or incubator are funny to me. How are the incentives aligned? For example, embedded VC invested in Anduril and now can steal all their data to build their own competitor. And so the question is, is if you are writing early stage checks and you also have an incubator, how can you be a good steward and participant in the market? And it's particularly hilarious because like, and was a founders fund incubation and it's like, well, they just incubated the one that they wanted to put the money into and then they just kept investing in that one. But I mean, the question, I don't, I don't know embedded vc, but like, if you think that you can just like steal Anduril's data and then build a copycat and be at all successful. Like, you don't understand the power law and you don't understand how power is accruing in that industry.

Yeah, so. So I'll take the Baron's side on this one. I do think as a founder, if you're spending, it can be a weird situation. If, 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 lets. 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 going to do them. And so if you're a partner at one of these funds where you can invest or incubate and you can, a founder can pitch you and you can give them $10 million or you could invest $20 million into a totally new company, it does start to get where there is like this conflict. And I can, 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.

No, they're actively trying to not start that company. Yeah, yeah, he was actively trying to invest it.

He spent, yeah.

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 was finally like, we got to do it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So very. I think.

And Andrew's 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 when Justin Mares was. Was initially pitching True Med, some of the feedback he got was like, this is a good idea, but you got to be really quiet about this for the next, like, year or two until you get this thing going. Because this is an idea that would be copied by 10 different YC companies and you would just get sliced up. 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 business will be like. Clearly, Andrew had. It was in such a. Such a. Like a, you know, a heretical industry. No one was going into that. And then also this crazy team. It was like they could tell. They told everyone and it didn't matter because it was like, what the hell are you doing? Yeah, I did have a funny building something a little bit more like. 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 VC fund is a big VC fund and one of the founders. I'm going to make up a name for it, but let's call him Jack. I kept hearing from other people in the community, oh, Jack has this new idea, this new idea. And he was saying that it was the same thing that my portfolio company was doing. And I kept hearing the name Jack over and over and over. And so I went to a partner at the fund that passed and I was like, guys, like, you're fucking incubating a competitor to this deal that I brought you. Like, I was super annoyed. And I only found out at the end of last year that it was a totally different Jack.

Wait, really?

But I kept hearing that.

Oh, no way.

So for this whole year we talked.

About this on, like episode three.

And so this whole year I thought this. I thought this partner was just 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. Wow, like, Jack 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. And that's an amazing story. So yeah, I think there's a reason, like at the end of the day, what the reason that it's not so bad that funds have this incubation strategy is like they would so much rather just back the generational team. And so if you are building a generational company and you have this world class generational team, you can rest assured that the VC fund will happily just invest in your company. They will only incubate something, an alternative if they don't believe in you.

Exactly.

And so just be better. Yeah, it's a skill issue.

There is another funny like flip side to this. I think your takeaway is like, like basically dead on. But there's a funny flip side where I heard a story about a firm that does incubations, had a person come and interview to work at the firm on incubations and then they stole an idea from the incubator and went and built the business separately and was like, I'm not giving you anything and raised different money. And then it didn't go well. Eventually like it got.

Usually those things don't.

But 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 could steal the VC's idea. And I like that, I like that.

It's like bring the fight cuts both ways.

Yeah, it didn't work out and I wouldn't recommend it, but. But it is funny. Let's go to another question. I got in a DM that was pretty interesting. How do people who write books get on the podcast circuit? Are there companies to pitch guests or do they just reach out to a bunch of podcasts at once? Or does someone go on one and then other podcasts 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 it. Is true. So are you familiar with the strategy?

Well, so the role of the modern PR firm.

Yeah.

If you could pay somebody like, like the classic PR firm, you're paying them 10 to 20k a month and they're getting you plugged in with media.

Yeah.

And now if you could pay. If I was an entrepreneur and I could pay somebody 20 grand a month to get me on four podcasts a month, that's like the best money ever spent because you're just getting in front of these crowds of people, you're able to talk about your story and your company and your product, and people get to know you and they like you and it's like the best marketing ever.

Yep.

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.

Yep.

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. Yes, it does. I do think that there's like a bit of a snowball effect, but yeah, it's not easy. I think everybody that has a podcast will, like, has like a long list of emails that they've gotten from PR firms 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 Senra'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. You can get on David Center's show. You just have to have built a Generation just creating $10 billion of value.

And have someone ready people, write a.

Book, then you can get on.

Yeah, yeah, it's easy. It's easy.

It's really easy. If you just check.

This PR firm should just do that for them.

Just.

Just help me build $10 billion. Yeah, I mean, it is. It is wild how you get, like syndicated. And there are some shows that are literally just like we. Our whole model is we interview book people and it's just like we have a close relationship with Simon Schuster and Penguin and.

Yeah. So for sure, the book publishers have.

The relationships podcast that do, like, reviews, basically. They sell books. Yeah. And that's actually like their model. But then for the bigger shows, like, if you're going on like, like the Rogan Lex Friedman circuit, like, that's much more relationship driven. And it's much more driven by are you a personality? And the book is kind of just like some. It's just in the background. It's just an excuse. Usually I tell 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, if you want me to come on your show, I'll prep something that's, like, specific to your show, and I'll come on, just let me know. And so, like, if you're like, yeah, my show is focused on 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 you talk 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. 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. We get kind of, like, became a thought leader for a little bit, and then, like, was just, like, available to people.

Yeah. And 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 and talk about other. To talk to other people in the oil and gas industry. And people would fly spend an entire day traveling there to speak in front of a group of a 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 100 listeners, it's like, okay, you joined a Zoom Call and talked for 45 minutes, and you got off and like, if that. If only 100 people ever listen to it, it's still a good opportunity to get yourself very, very high leverage.

So 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 Gigachad for only $5 a month or something like that. Like the hard thing about bench pressing £400 and driving sports cars all day and drinking Dom Perry on it at work, something stupid like that. So it just follows you forever. Let's go to Nicole. This is a great question. This is like, this is bait for us. She got 97 comments. I'm sure all of them are wrong question for watch people. What's a nice watch for women? Preferably gold. Classy and timeless. That you can wear with most things. Have never owned a watch before and the options are overwhelming. What do you think? I want to look.

Gotta go Cartier.

Cartier tank, obviously.

Yeah, yeah, Cartier 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. The tank is iconic and you can't go wrong if you want to step up. Ladies Nautilus.

Here you go with a crash.

There we go.

I think a crash is probably a better fit for an allocator of Nicole's.

Yeah.

Size. Right. About 400k market value. So that's a good, like daily job.

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, you know in like 20, 20 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 all the management fees.

Yeah. That are just not following the 2% rule at all.

Exactly.

Letting everyone down.

What else? I mean, I mean, there are Some. I. I think Rolex is a little overplayed, but there are some interesting pieces in there. I think sue at AMD has one. That's beautiful.

Yeah. Something simple were to go with like a date. Now.

No. Day. Date.

Yeah, Date. Datejust. That should be a banned word. We need to have a list of banned words on the show. Datejust.

Datejust is banned.

Datejust is banned. But like some. There's some unique datejusts that have, you know, I think could be.

Could be. I mean there's another thing you could just like completely try and stand out with like a cause AP or something.

Yeah, yeah, that was actually. It's funny. I landed in. I landed in Geneva and Kaz AP had like the whole airport like as like. And I'm like the average person. Like only in Geneva do you put an airport ads for like the most hype beastie watch in history.

Yeah, her. Her style overall is very gold, classy and timeless. But why not put a racing machine on your wrist when you call? Get an rm, get a skeletonized rm, Maybe Hugh Blow.

It puts you in a unique club.

You know, it's good. She says gold. Why not a jean?

What?

Remember the jeans?

Oh, yeah.

There's a watch that's made entirely out of jeans.

Oh, wow.

And yeah, it's made out of jean material.

Yeah.

Or something. But yeah, lots of good. Lots of good options. But I Hope that all 96 of these people recommended Cartier Tank Louis because. Because that's the one. Although there are some interesting ones. You could go with the Tank Francaise, Tank Anglaise. There's a few others that I think could work, but we could spend a whole hour. If you were trying to save a buck. You could go with the solar beat, but I recommend the Louis. Here we go. I'd love to hear yalls take on what fighters are doing a good job brand building, 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, rising star in the. In the UFC and a technology brother himself. So. So Bo, a little bit of backstory Bo is at as a wrestler at Penn State, a lot of the best stars in MMA have like a wrestling base. Like Khabib is the sort of most prominent example of that. And there's actually some big fights coming up in LA this weekend, which I'm excited for. But yeah, one thing that's become clear in MMA over the last 10 years is the biggest stars is not purely due to technical, like, proficiency and talent. And I think that 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.

Yep.

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. And so something that people have realized within mma, 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. And one of the challenges in MMA is, like, you're kind of just your own dude. Right. So, like, Bo competes or Bo trains out of a, I think, American top team in Pennsylvania, which is just, like, a small regional gym. And so there's not a lot of, like, media coverage around there. There's no. He's not going to be getting 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 UFC has fights every week, couple weeks, and so their only incentive is to promote the next fight. So if you don' a fight on the schedule or you're not fighting that week, you're. You pretty much have to promote yourself. And so some. Every fighter takes 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 is like the, you know, the athlete, like, the good guy, All American 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. So he's taken the total opposite approach. And so Every fighter needs to create their own unique brand. I think it's impossible to break out in UFC and MMA without being like, truly yourself, because there's just too much time on the mics to, like, be anybody but yourself.

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

And so. So, yeah, I think Bo's done a really good job of this. A lot of other, A lot of other fighters that have, that have come up recently have realized, like, I basically need somebody to follow me around with a camera 24 7. And, like, we just need to be putting out this, like, really high volume of content because we need to be promoting ourselves year round, building this 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 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.

Yep.

Do it. Do a short little video, one minute workout. It's a. It's a real. It's a TikTok.

Yeah.

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, the fighting stuff is going to be the core thing.

Yeah.

Who, who, 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, then they're covering it. Right. And so, yeah, if I were, if I were an up and coming MMA fighter, I'd be like, okay, I need to have a camera guy on me at all, 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 100 grand a year and I'm going to just like dump it into media.

Yep.

Because that, and that can quickly even become a profit center if you do it properly. These fighters aren't paid exceptionally well. So anyways, I would say the same thing. Like, it's, it's less necessary for like pro sports. Right. Where you have these whole teams and, and there's more infrastructure, but these individualized, you know, sports, or you got to take it up yourself.

Should we go into this epic Q and a from Andrew McCallum? Yeah, I love Andrew. If you don't know Andrew, he was the, he's an engineer at Varda Space Industries, but also was big in the LK 99 saga of last year. Was that really? Yeah, he was the one that like, replicated it and like built it.

What a chat.

Actually tested it and it looked really promising, but then it didn't go anywhere. But he was actually able to get all the materials and run the, run the process to make it. And I went down there, I made a whole vlog about it. It was really fun.

Yeah. And he also has, he also has Project Bob, 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, just chugging around the world? And so that's literally what he built with Project. Project Bob. And we got to do a whole bit on it because they're raising money for it and it's very 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 a 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 4 years ago I called my shot Babe Ruth style. With this clairvoyant vision I knew Elon would ascend Doge, would ignite a revolution, and the only way to profit was to become an infamous modern artist disguised as a hard tech Twitter shitposter. Naturally, I have been quietly creating a life sized modern art masterpiece blending SpaceX, Doge and Elon himself. I've seen this in person. It's crazy. The wildly overcomplicated path to get here really speaks for itself. Step 1 Build and sell the requisite first company in my twenties, five years before hardware was cool to 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 3 Achieve World Infamy and make Twitter fame after failing to make the rocks float. Shout out to Coogan's doc work and chamath's trolling. Step 4 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 and high effort Chaos. Andrew thank you.

This is a fantastic I saw this and Andrew sent this before the end of last year, but we just needed we weren't gonna be able to give it the proper attention on the on the annual awards episode. So. Yeah. What. What a post. I'm glad we could share it.

Such a long way to say Miura or Lamborghini. You could have just said mirror F40 but got the life story.

I appreciate that's Brother behavior. Right. You got to give that context. And look, I want to see Andrew driving the F40, no doubt into the Varda parking lot, parking in the handicap spot just for the photo op and then taking it out and parking.

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 always. And then you get up into the Aventador and some of like, like the, the previous generations are starting to climb a little bit. There's some interesting stuff there. And for a long time, the Lamborghini.

Like, real carciolago would be crazy. Pulling up to the Varda offices in a LP640, 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. But 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 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 engine as the Kitash, I believe.

Yeah. You know, it's like, it's, it's like got that utilitarian.

Yeah.

You got a trunk, you know, like you can throw stuff in it. You can throw rocket parts in there.

You don't have a trunk. You have a truck bed.

A bed.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Yeah. It's insane, but Yeah, I mean, F40 is just iconic. The Lambos are having a moment, but I think you got to go F40.

Yeah.

Although you won't be the only one in Gundo driving one, because founder of Impulse Space has one.

No way. There's an F40.

No.

Let's go, let's go.

Should we go in the timeline?

Yeah. We're only two hours into the show and finally made it to the timeline, which is what you've been waiting for.

Yes.

It's been almost two weeks since you've heard us talk about printed out.

So we have a little bit of a change up today. We have bucket pulls where the random, the random posts that aren't quite bangers go into the bucket. They get Printed a little bit smaller because they're not quite as iconic as the bangers.

And we have a little.

Do a couple bangers and then we'll pull out. And then we'll pull out a bucket pull. Just like Kill Tony does it 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 the, at 6:50am on Christmas Eve. I think we were podcasting at the time.

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's, it is like a weird one because it is. If you were going to give your team any week off.

Yeah. Throughout the entire year, 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. Then suddenly I just like where we need to do this like now, like this has to happen.

I mean hopefully, like there is a space for some sort of break from the monotony of the calendar and email and a shift. So you're still working, but it's a more intellectual. You're reading, you're thinking about long term planning, you're reflecting. Yeah. And, and I think that for the, for the people who are just like buzz and 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 going to 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 going to be like. I'm like, yeah, offline, right?

Yeah.

All 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. Like, you can understand how things are going in the crypto regulatory world just by looking at the price of bitcoin. Like, Trump got elected, there were a lot of pro crypto things happened and the price went from like 60 to 90, like immediately. And it was like, okay, like, clearly things are 50% better for this industry.

Yep.

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 feedback loop is not just being able to divine political influence and how things are going to price, but also as the price gets higher, there is more money to spend on political influence. So the packs get bigger. I mean, Andreessen Horowitz donated by far the most to crypto packs. When I looked at the data earlier this year, last year, and, 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, and with other VCs where it spreads so thinly, it's like, oh, well, like, you know, yeah, we want to have some better regulation around energy for our nuclear port portfolio company, but we really only have one. And then we need to change some things at the dod, but we're really only in and oral 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.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's, I think the, my, the only. I always, whenever I've underestimated bitcoin, it's from thinking of it as an investment asset versus a religion so the difference between, like, the oil industry and the bitcoin industry is people in the oil industry are like, this is a 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.

Speak for yourself.

Yeah, speak for yourself. Whereas, like, bitcoin, there's, like, huge numbers of people that if the price was $100 a coin, they would still be adamant about the importance of it, and they would still spend all their time thinking about it. And so I think that that that's part of the power of it. It's a religion with a native asset.

Yeah, right. No, that's a good point. Yeah. I talked to a. A liberal crypto investor, and I was like, how are you squaring this circle in this election? Like, it seems like the Democrats are very anti crypto. Seems like the Republicans are very pro.

That was a big part of Kamala's policy. Is she. She wanted to protect.

I know what you're going to say.

Yeah.

Let'S move on from that. But. But, yeah. And 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. Like, I think everyone wants more clarity around crypto, and everyone wants the scams to go away and, like, the pumping coins and the rug pulls to stop. But we also. I don't know if bitcoin and stablecoin to be legal.

I don't know if we ever. Did we ever address this on the show. We, we. We. Oh, yeah, we talked about. So. So over break. Yeah, I think this was over break, but we had covered a post about. Somebody had said something. How do I invest? They were like, I 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, 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 long this. This podcast. Like, I'm excited. He was just being, like, generally positive, which is awesome. And and some. And then we said, oh, yeah, we're not going to do a coin, of course. Like, but you can just buy lvmh because we're going to be buying so much. Dom Perry on 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 contract address.

Yeah, exactly. Which is ridiculous. It's less scarce. A pumped out Fun coin is less scarce than a domain. What? And so immediately, like, we see this, this post goes up. I didn't even notice it. I get a FaceTime call, I'm with my family, and I'm like, this is weird. 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 coin on Pump Fun and it mooned to 200, 200k 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, 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. And then. And then we were getting like a bunch of DMS from people saying, what's your Solana?

Yeah, address.

Anyways, and luckily it blew over, but it would. There was like a million and a half dollars of volume traded, like, almost within. Yeah, like, you know, within 30 minutes.

Went way up and then went way down. And. And it was frustrating because, like, in that one hour, it was like everyone was having dinner with family. And like, during that one hour, people were like, their silence is deafening. Like, like, like the only reason that they wouldn't be replying right now is if it was real. And it's like, okay, like, I see what you guys are doing there yeah, somebody commented.

Somebody commented. Was like angry at us and I had to. I replied from the brand account and I was like, like we have literally nothing to do with this. We joke about LVMH all the time.

It's very clear that like part of the show, not tied to us at all. We didn't put out a post or whatever. So very, very frustrating. And stop launching shitcoins. It's low class and vulgar and we don't support it here. Take a company public. Yeah, it's much higher status.

Spac something.

Yeah, Spac something. Yeah, please. Thank you. And so let's move on to a bucket poll. Our first of the year and the first of the show. But let's do a promoted post first.

Okay, I have. It is ski season. We've been talking about great Vale 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.

Pronounced just Coop.

No, no, no, it's coupe. Coupe.

Really?

That's like the proper.

Oh, this is like Porsche. Okay, okay. Yeah, interesting.

Yeah.

Okay. Usually you do the American pronunciation. You've been in France too long. Okay, so break it down.

So anyway, people get it. Yeah, you can pick this up on. Bring a trailer. Great, great auction site. I've bought and purchased a 911 there before, sight unseen. No PPI sent it. Worked great, no issues with it. Got very lucky, ended up making money when I sold it.

Nice.

It's great. But, 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 yeah, this just looks like a fantastic example.

So just zip you from SF to Tahoe and back.

Yeah, it's a perfect car to get to sf. You don't have to worry about superchargers. You 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, don't let this one get away.

Fantastic. Well, let's, let's go to a bucket poll. This is interesting. Okay, 47 likes by Anand 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 grinding. Interesting. Yeah, super valuable. I mean I remember learning a ton on, on what was that? Open X MITX 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 video.

So cool.

It was insane. So you just get to watch Andrew Ng, like the best machine learning researcher in the world, teach machine learning foundations like ML 101.

Yeah.

He breaks it down, it's great. And you can just sit there and watch it and you can. It'd be like much further proof that.

You'Re just paying for luxury brand. When you go to a college, I mean you pay 70, 80k years.

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, 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 go.

Or if you want the best surf conditions year round, you go to UC Santa Barbara.

Exactly.

Which is how I selected my school.

Exactly.

From a very young age I was 12, I went, visited, I said this, the surf conditions here are phenomenal. I need to go here.

I mean I remember I walked into like econ 101 and our book was by N. Gregory Mankiw and he taught the course over at Harvard. So oftentimes I just go over there and just go to his class because I'd just be like, I, why do I, why am I not just going to the source instead of being this like second professor, like teach it. I could just go over there.

Yeah.

And it's like a huge conference.

I feel like I learned more, I learned more from podcasts than YouTube. Like even though YouTube was already like for me from, from 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. 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 clickbaited or like, like they're just meant to be too much entertainment. And like they're edutainment, but they're mostly entertainment. But for like the high level stuff. 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, there was this. Over the last couple weeks there was a very viral incident where a woman dropped out of her Ph.D. program. She, she apparently like teaches like makes videos about AI ML on YouTube. She went and said she was dropping out of her PhD program to like just do onlyfans. But the thing that I. Apparently she had already been doing that for a really long time. So she, she was gonna 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 course proportion and all this stuff.

Let's go to Will Nietzsche. He says if you're building a personal brand to help you grow a physical product brand, don't. And then Ross McKay says plenty of examples of strong community founder led brands. Nick Baer at BPN, George Heaton at represent 24 7, Chris Bumstead, C bum. And I guess this is probably coming down to the question of like, like there's tons of examples of people who have big personal brands and then they launch a physical product brand. But if you're starting also, then should you go and bootstrap your own personal brand?

Now here, here's the way I read the original post was don't go build like a. If you're building a consumer brand, don't like try to build this 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 totally 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.

It's interesting because I, it does go back to like it's, it's really, really hard to build a consumer physical product brand without some sort of hero partnership or influencer.

I don't know. Look at the Ridge. Look at the Ridge. Guys like they just, it's, it's. You can absolutely. If you have a super compelling product just by. Just buy these partnerships and really invest in them. Right. Like Ridge really invested in their relationship with Theo Vaughan early. I have another example. The guy that I was in the Alps with a year ago, he's running a like really big. It'll be an amazing story one day we'll talk about it. They raised a very small amount of money. They do, they'll, you know, over the next few years they'll do hundreds of millions of revenue. And a year ago he had never heard of Brian Johnson, had no clue who this guy was. And he was running this multi, doing a, running a supplement business with tens of millions of dollars revenue. He was 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 I, if I see some founder building a CPG brand and they're like fixated on like posting a lot on X, I'm like, well like if you, the, the whole thing is like if you're, if you're building an enterprise or B2B product and you can get in front of a thousand business owners, that can have a dramatic effect on your business. But if you're building a CPG business with selling a $20 product like Lucy, like X doesn't move the needle for sales for Lucy. It doesn't matter how many bangers you.

Have in a month doing a personality driven partnership with someone like, like Dave Portnoy at Barstool Sports was.

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, that doesn't need to be the CEO, but it needs to be a part.

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

To launch back to Nike. With Jordan, you know, it's like yeah, Phil Knight wasn't the guy but Jordan was. And so you need to be like probably setting yourself up for, you know, who is going to be the human that drives the brand forward at some point. Yes, it's, it's, it feels like it's more important than ever. I'm trying to think of counter example examples like Mercedes do they have, I mean Lewis Hamilton, like there's like every brand kind of has like someone. I feel like no matter what it is, maybe BMW doesn't, I don't know. Yeah, 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, very shocking news I've ever heard. Kim should have lunch to 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 going to lead to outsized success.

Yep.

And yeah, private equity is one of those things where it's funny when guys and ventures are like oh, I'm going to do, you know, Holdco or roll ups. Because like private equity could not be more optimized as a category. Like there's not like a lot of like low hanging fruit. Right. This is like one of the most like established, highly optimized industries with a bunch of really, really, really smart people. I mean what's, you're not going to go.

So that's been 40 years.

The argument against like Kim K. Doing a PE fund and like being wildly successful there is like if you're a billion dollar PE fund and you're buying a business, you could literally buy the business and during that process go to Kim Kardashian and say hey, we want you to be like part, we want you to be the face of this and like we're going to give you like $10 million a year and like build that into the deal. She doesn't need to run the PE fund too. And so I think, I think we're everybody's just realizing like how hard everything is to do. Well, like it's not easy. Like private equity is like deceptively simple. It's like, okay, we just buy businesses for one price and sell them for more, 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, 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 Carlyle 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.

Yeah.

And I could see Kim, where she has this, she has a whole like, kind of like distribution of like ownership. There's like things that she started from scratch, built up, owns a ton of. There's things where somebody came to her and said, hey, we'll give you 10% equity. There's probably some companies that gave her 1% equity, half a point. There's other companies that, 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 10x their sales or something. It's like that's an opportunity to buy a product in that category or buy a company in that category.

And internally they have. It's called Lemmy. Now that the Kardashians, like a supplement brand is one of the best selling brands in like Target, stuff like that. And it's literally they made a gummy version of every major supplement. So it's like, hey, you can just eat candy for all of your supplements.

Great.

Smart.

Genius, Genius. Let's do another Promoted, post another Bucket poll and then we'll move on.

We got a Promoted Pros from Lulu. Brother of the year, Brother of the year for 2024. First ever brother of the year. And she says, this is another thing I appreciate about Ramp. They treat you like an adult. No 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. Jack Raines, friend of the potty, 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.

Just get to the airport later.

So when I have to fly commercial, I just had to fly commercial. I walk, I go into lax. I know the one place that sells Evian water and glass bottles. I walk in. If it's 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 care about, like, if you're getting to the airport so early that you have to use a lounge, you fucked up your whole travel plan.

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. The only thing. The only thing that. The only thing that. That. That. That's sort of ironic about this is if there was gonna be an airport lounge that was amazing, it'd be a ramp 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 could scoop protein powder. Like, you could get, like, protein powder. You can drive, like. Yeah. Weights. The deadlift ramp lounge.

Get a deadlift and read.

So. So ramp. Don't make us play silly games to get access to the lounge, but do a lounge at some. Yeah, great.

Okay, a bucket pole. What do we got? What do we got? Let's see. Okay, let's do this one. Okay. Oh, signal. Oh, we're on credit cards again. We're getting lucky here. Signal says 20, 25 credit cards. Amex Platinum for travel and lounges, US Bank, 4% cash back for everything else. Is there a better or more simple combo? And you got 10k likes. This is one of those things. So with credit cards, I. I don't pay attention to them at all. I just let the points accrue for decades, and then eventually I'm 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. I'm just like, okay, just tell me what to get and I'll just get that and I copy it. But I like that he did my homework for me because this actually sounds pretty good. I might have to get this. Unless I just put my whole family on ramp and just. And just run. 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 thing through ramp. And. And they were like, yeah, that's not really the point. It's like a business credit card. But I really, really hope that at some point they launch a consumer card because it'd be amazing. So sick to do a new, new Centurion. Just the CEO basically. Like you have to be the CEO of a RAM corporation to get it.

Yeah.

But. But what? What do you think? You have an Amex Platinum.

I do travel.

You just don't use the lounges.

I just don't use the line. I mean, aren't the rewards, I think better?

Yeah. But U.S. bank has 4% cash back on everything. That feels like.

Seems like a scam. If that was a crypto company.

Yeah. It would be like, oh yeah, you're definitely embezzling. U.S. bank is struggling, I guess or something. I don't know.

It's kind of. Yeah. I get. So here's the thing. I'm assuming they give you that crazy reward and you deposit money with them and they give you like nothing on the actual.

Okay. Yeah. So you're basically balance.

Like.

Okay.

But if you. I'm sure if you just set up the card and you keep cash elsewhere. But then they probably also have some rule like you have to have a minimum. Who knows? I. 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.

Yeah.

You know, pays for itself.

Let's go to Grimes. She says insane to demean horse girl. 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, we joke a lot about horses.

Yes.

But weird.

Unironically.

Pro horse equestrian enthusiasts.

Exactly.

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 waves, so.

But. But also pro founders that got a lot of liquidity starting to build a stable.

Yep.

It's a great way to engage with nature and deploy a lot of capital.

Yeah.

And there's still an absolute of risk reward, financial incentives. You can make money.

Yep.

You can lose money. There's a lot of risk. And no.

And this year we're getting our own racehorse.

And racehorses 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. And it was used as like this demeaning thing, like, you know, train guy. Guy who's obsessed with trains is autistic girl who's obsessed with horses is. And it was also just like trying to take a shot at like, the upper class, essentially.

Yeah.

It was like, oh, you grew up with horses. Like, you must be rich and like, have nothing to say in this world. But if you talk to people that rode horses, like, they're wonderful people.

My son takes horseback riding lessons. My daughter will take horseback riding lessons. We're gonna have a horse named Brother that we're planning to take all the way to the Kentucky Derby. So. Very pro horse. Yeah, 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. To do that on a horse. So there, you know, you really just gotta think of use the right tool for the job. Let's go to Andre Karpathy. He has a long post here about Deep Seek, 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. The ones being brought up today are around 100,000 GPUs. Eg Lama 3. While Deep seeks V3 looks to be a stronger model at only 2.8 million GPU hours. 110x less computer, 11x less compute. If the model also passes vibe checks, eg LM 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 to reading through. This is very interesting. Yeah. This kind of took over the Internet over the, over the break. But there was, I think there was like a lot of.

So, so the funny thing, they dropped it and they dropped it on Christmas Day or something like that. Like they're trying to, they're trying to get in our heads. Doesn't work. Doesn't work. All the technology brothers were enjoying Christmas.

Yep.

And they still had their mind thinking about business and technology. And this little joke of dropping your, your fake stolen model on Christmas just doesn't, doesn't do anything. I did see what you're. I wish that we had a post on it but, but yeah, some, something about how like one right here actually most advancements.

Yeah. Word grammar says I genuinely don't know how to feel about China casually mogging every US Lab then dropping it for free as open source. I simultaneously feel a deep sense of concern for our national security and a deep sense that wag me and intelligence too cheap to meter is at hand. So kind of bullshit.

But this is, but, but, but that's, that's not, didn't cover the fact that it seems like people have been figuring out that they just kind of like, like we're able to leverage OpenAI's models and then like leapfrog using it.

I mean I, I, I talked to some guy who said that like he ran the numbers on for, for a while. When you got a response from GPT4, it would also give you some like, not the full weights of the model, but like a, A, a sampling of how that like response was calculated.

Yeah.

And if you got enough of those, you could kind of do the math backwards to create the model weights or estimate the model weights and get pretty close. And he was like kind of running the numbers and he was like, yeah. So like to exfiltrate the model with this, with the like you get the text responses and then you also, you.

Basically just train your new model on the actual API. Yeah.

And it was like for, that was like less than a million dollars or something to like steal. And I think they like power patch that and cleaned it up or something. But it's still like very risky. And then there's also just the question of like, did they have a spy?

Yeah.

Very, very possible.

I just don't trust anything that comes out of the Far East.

Yeah. The wrong hemisphere.

I just don't.

Let's go to Dystopian GF. She says anyone with an IQ of 130 plus should be required by law to lift weights. Resentful nerds with no connection. Connection to the physical world will be the death of us 27,000 likes. Addendum, skipping leg day will result in fines and possible jail time if a repeated offense. Good post. That's funny. But yeah, I mean, obviously the reason.

That we need these people to lift weights is we need, we want to invest in more people that are in the thousand pound club that are deeply intelligent and technical.

Also, with intelligence too cheap to meter and AI on AGI on the frontier, you need to be going golden retriever mode. You need to be golden retriever maxing, which means getting hot, getting friendly and getting dumb. Don't worry about learning anything more. Pumping that IQ up with stimulants. Adderall's out. Deadlifts are in.

Deadlifts are in. Yeah, it's. Getting diced is underpriced.

I agree completely. It's, it's, it's never been more important to focus on physical fitness.

It's not too late. Winter's like halfway over.

Almost feels.

But it's, but it's not too late to enter like some sort of winter arc.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah. And you know, this is the perfect time to start a three month bulk which then can turn into a three month cut. Right. For June 1st summer season. You'll be at the beach. You'll have an extra 10 pounds of muscle on. You'll be.

We're gonna have some crazy TV meetups in Europe this summer.

You're gonna want to look down. Diced.

Yeah, you're gonna want to be diced.

You're not gonna want to be hanging out at 20% body fat.

I just, I actually, I actually like, I, I, I don't know if anyone in our audience is not already moderately jacked.

Yeah.

Like that on average, like they, they care about health a lot. But, and, and this is the time of year that people are talking about New Year's resolutions and I want to get fit and all this stuff and just do it. It's not that hard. You, you have to go in, you can watch YouTube videos, you can download, workout these apps for $5 a month. That'll tell you exactly what to do. And just Go in and do it. And it's, it's not free, but it's basically free. If you have any type of normal job and you're making even $5,000 a month, you can afford a gym membership 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's the algorithm for the best New Year's resolution possible. Sleep a bunch, you know, gotta get your eight hours in gram protein per body weight, per pound of body weight. So you're one and a half high protein diet. Exactly. And then hit the, hit the bench press. As soon as you're not sore, you're ready to work out again. So you can train, bench press three times a week sometimes.

Yep.

Keep, keep bench pressing. Get up to 245 on the bench. Because then you bench press more than Brian Johnson.

Yep. And then just comment marker, that matters. And then anytime he does a long post. Comment didn't read I bench more than you.

Exactly. Exactly. That's the way do we have promoted post.

Somebody one of our, one of our reply guys is going to take that to heart. Honestly, be good.

I mean Brian's a good friend and also just a good, he's a really good sport. So he'll just play along with it.

Yeah, I'll just play along with it.

But it is truly different. Oh, oh, you're free. Hemoglobin is at 75. I don't care. What's your bench?

Yeah.

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, it's, 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. Because historically that was the only way to break through. Yeah, it was the only way to break through then. 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. Yeah, he could be 10 times bigger traps.

He could be Death star delts.

Death Star delts.

It'd be amazing.

Promote a post from our friend Preston Holland. He says another ex friend started flying private. They bought a 6.25 share of a Phenom 300 with Airshare for 550k. Let's go. So perfect brothers, make your new Year's resolution to start flying private more. One of the ways you can do that is buying part of a jet. If you want to do that, go reach out to Preston Holland. He is a fantastic guy. Got to hang out with him at David Senner'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 sky.

Absolute dope. Let's do a bucket poll. We got here.

It's still picking through with the ice cube.

Yeah, you got it. Okay, here we go. Oh, this is funny. Mr. Overplayed. Mr. Overpred 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 4am 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 a great one. I mean, it's so funny. Being drunk is a choice. It is so much true.

It is. It is. There's some real truth to it.

Yeah.

This last trip, so I, I, the only time I drank in Q4 was Don Perry on Dom episodes. So I really don't drink.

I really, I really think there's this massive discourse about, oh, should you drink? It's carcinogenic. Huberman's on like the never drink. I think you should only drink Dom Perignon.

Yeah. And only when you're celebrating.

Yes, yes. But you can celebrate constantly.

But on this trip, I, whatever I was having like drinks, I was having shots. I couldn't for the life of me get, get, get drunk. And I didn't understand, I didn't understand why. Spirit over 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.

Yep.

And so no amount of shots is going to disrupt that.

Yeah.

And it's a skill issue. It is a skill issue.

It's great. This was an interesting story over the break. Drew Fallon says accounting firm Bench has gone out of business after 13 years. They raised $113 million. They did $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. Their enterprise value was 232 million. And in 2024, zero. And they closed and people were really upset because it closed like very unexpectedly. And so it's an accounting firm contract accounting firm for startups. And so 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. Notification, hey, like 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 just because it's. I don't think that. I don't think for some re like eventually software will get so good.

Yep.

That it does make sense to like rely primarily on soft like some type of like AI agent software provider for this kind of thing. But yeah, so I think people really dug into it and apparently they had taken on like a bunch of venture debt which can like basically like one shot your company if you don't execute perfectly. But the real, the interesting thing here we need to do a deep dive on the guy that bought this company because he's like buying a lot of companies. Yeah, I think it's employer dot com.

Yep. So. So there was also a post this caused a lot of drama because Ian Crosby I think was the founder and he said I'm very sad today to see that Bench has shut down. I've avoided speaking publicly about Bench since just over 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 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. Missed 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. He in that time he started getting.

Sold another started and had a successful exit. I love now he runs their like accounting 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 redemption arc so yeah, it's interesting.

That was cool.

Yeah well always a stupid move to.

Yeah I've never. But, but. But also the venture debt thing I don't.

Why does a services business need venture debt? Exactly.

Yeah. I don't know what they're stancing. We got to have we there sound like they've worked. There's somebody just announced a new venture debt fund that was like teal back. We should have that person on the show and talk about why the fuck should anyone ever do venture debt. Because you never. 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 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 tech. 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 ppe 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. 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. You know but there's this. But there's this middle ground for is your working capital growing. And so when I think about a company like Ridge they could have a revolving debt line that grows as they because they make the product and then they have to wait to sell It. And it takes them a while to actually get the money.

Actually do really cool stuff.

Yeah.

With stuff with their manufacturer. Where they. From what I know they'll basically say, hey, we'll give you. We'll pay you 10% more.

Yep.

But we need 180 day terms.

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, but adding debt onto a business like Bench, where.

Yeah.

You're just kind of like, okay, give us money, we'll give you the service. Give us money. Give. We'll give you the service.

Yeah. It just seems like it doesn't immediately make sense for that type of business. Yeah. Seems very rough. Anyway, let's go to Nat Friedman. This was a huge story. He said, we did it. We tested 300 Bay Area foods. It's so funny that we said 40,000. I. When we were joking about this, we said we tested 40,000 foods. Because I was like, I just wanted to be honest.

I think we posted that.

We didn't post that.

Not yet.

Oh, okay. We got to post that. But anyway. Oh, did we not? Okay. Anyway, 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 fly lights in 73% of the tested products and bisophenols in 22%. It's everywhere. We detected phyllites in most baby foods and prenatal vitamins. Hot foods, which spends 45 minutes in takeout containers have 34% higher levels of plastic chemicals than the same dishes tested directly from the restaurant. The 1950s army rations we tested contained surprisingly high levels of plastic chemicals. Almost every single one of the food we tested are both within. Are within both US FDA and EU EFSA regulations. Check out our full results below. Okay, put up plasticlist.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 plastic. Two notes on this. So one. All this was done by Light Labs, which is Justin Mare's brother's company. Lucky to be an investor in the company and really smart what they did. They basically realized there was all these new regulations around testing like baby food. So there's these new requirements around testing. They came out and they Had Nick and Justin had made, you know, a fortune in bone broth, had to do a bunch of testing and so they had experienced a pain point themselves. So Nick starts Light Labs and that the company's been doing phenomenally in part because there's this, all this new interest around PFAS and microplastics and things like that. So second, I think the big takeaway from this is that legal does not mean safe. So the government has actual regulations around the levels of the amount of shit that can be 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 gonna get into the food to some degree. And so I think that, that, that to me should be the most eye opening thing about this is you cannot rely on government regulations to figure out what's healthy. Right? Because the government will say like, oh yeah, like one out of every hundred molecules can be like effectively toxic. And that's fine, right? Yeah, one out of a million, right. But still these legal levels are so much higher than safe.

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, it'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, so it exposes this need for like some sort of more systemic approach to like, like, okay, let's find out where the biggest sources of contamination are like up the chain. Like someone with the steak thing was, was identifying the fact that the, the hay bales that the cows eat were wrapped in plastic. And so when it was getting cut, like this sits in the sun. But also when it gets cut, like literally there's just chunks of plastic the cows are accidentally eating. So they're just literally eating plastic. And so it's like, yeah, you can do a little, it's the same thing with like, oh, like cure the environment by like driving an electric car. When it's like, like, okay, actually maybe just like moving to nuclear and solar at the source point is like what we need to do. And that has a much bigger impact. It's probably the same thing here where like there's a little bit that you can do with being like, okay, I'm going to Eat this burger instead of that burger. And I'm going to make a consumer choice. But like those consumer driven changes are always much harder than just like figuring out where this, where the actually biggest power law effect.

Yeah.

I think going after that, the right.

Response is you see this report and you're like, I want to avoid PFAS and microplastics. 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, heating plastic. Right.

Heating really hot water in plastic. It's like cut that out.

Yeah.

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.

Find the.

And then also there's a bunch of things that you can do like that are downstream. Like bodybuilders have really low levels because they, they don't. They donate plasma and blood a lot. And so if you're donating blood, like you're.

Yeah, yeah. That's like the Lindy. Bloodletting.

Bloodletting, exactly.

Or, or I'm seeing, you know, throw. If you're busy, you don't have time to give blood. Throw some leeches on your back before you put on your suit.

Disgusting. It is a little bit of like a skill issue here, I think. Like, like it's not very Lindy to be deathly terrified of microplastics. Like at some point you do just need to man up and be like, yeah, I'm being poisoned, but it doesn't matter because I'm a man. But I, I do love this because it's like, yeah. 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.

Yeah.

It's so cool.

Yeah. Because he spent half a million dollars.

Yeah.

Millions of people can benefit from it. It might create systemic change in the industry. The other. If everything is toxic. It actually means that you need to focus on detoxification. So, like, sauna is the obvious one. Sauna a few times a week, figure out how to do it. You can it. It is the number one way to detoxify, like, broad.

It was a good place to read the Wall Street Journal.

Yeah, yeah, it is a good place to read the Wall Street Journal. 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.

Yeah.

Don't have to buy a sauna in order to do it. Go to the gym or whatever.

Do we have another promoted post?

Yeah, again, it's ski season, so, you know, we have to promote the Lamborghini Serato.

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 $49,000. What a great spec.

I mean, one of the last. You know, this is the last model run of the Huracan V10. And so now the Lamborghini split. There's the V12 Revuelto, and there's the Timarario, which is V8.

Yeah.

And so if you want a V10, this is the one to get. It's the final year.

And it's such an economical purchase because you don't. It comes with the roof racks. 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.

But a car like this, they're so cool. Here's my advice for all the brothers out there. Buy 2 Garage Queen 1 daily, drive the other. Make it your little weekender. This is legitimately the perfect car to take up to Squaw Valley. I'm still gonna call it Squaw. Cause DEI is over. Do you know the whole.

Yeah, I talked to somebody who was on skiing this weekend, and they were like, oh, yeah. My. My. My ski instructor was like a huge, like, asshole and just wouldn't shut up about, like, how I can't call it Squaw anymore.

And, like, ski instructor.

The ski instructor was like. Was, like, wasting, like, 20 minutes. And. 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 gotta just troll this guy and be like, like, yeah, can we hurry it up like the Redskins game's almost on.

Yeah. I grew up skiing at Squaw. I will die.

What do they call it now?

Still? Palisades.

Okay, Palisades.

Not a bad name, but it's a good name. Squaws Squad. Squad.

It's not even offensive, is it?

No, I think it. I think it meant like. I think it literally meant like it was a slur.

It's just like.

It was like a word for. I think it meant. 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 Stirrado. If you do head over to Oxford, tell them the technology brothers sent you.

Oxford dictionary says it means a North American Indian woman or wife. So.

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. Okay. Oh, here we go. We got. Oh, this is good. This is good. From Captain Nemo, friend of the show. He is. He is. I hung out with this guy a bunch. I love him. Captain Nemo, he says. Convinced. Some ultra nice hotels think Amman Raffles Hotel Bel Air are actually intelligence operations run at a loss. Anytime I've looked into who owns them, they're backed by Russian, Middle Eastern or Chinese money that's closely tied to foreign governments. Plus, the hotels self select for powerful or ultra wealthy clientele likely to divulge useful info that could be recorded. Relatedly, the Amman Global, the Amman's global director of security, was recently arrested for funneling money to a sanctioned Russian oligarch.

Okay, but you know that. You know that Rose Rosewood. Yeah, Rosewood is. Has some real history here. Oh, yeah, it's Chinese owned.

Oh, interesting.

Strategically placed in. In Silicon Valley power centers around the world. And yeah, wouldn't stay at the Rosewood. No, period.

Interesting.

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 clone us.

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. 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 God, my, my God, this is amazing. I got to stop doing. We got to, we got to get an ally ship going with these guys. It's a real. I can change her situation.

Yeah, I mean so I, I, maybe.

They are intelligence operations. I don't care. I'm still staying there.

They're intelligent operations, I'll tell you that. John. I love spending money.

It's very intelligent to spend some. To operate out of an Amman365 days of the year. Yeah. I don't know. This seems like I give this, I give this three tinfoil hats out of ten.

Three. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean I, I did, I did look through that thread and see like the whole story of the Aman guy. It is. Seems pretty, but, but Amman is widely known. Lots of Russians stay at Amman. I think it is owned by a Russian oligarch. 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.

And he's 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. Don't. Just don't waste any time at, you know, four star hotels.

That's the takeaway.

This is fun. This was fairly recent. It's a video a Little B knighting Neo the robot at the One X office. And it's a.

That's the most bullish thing I've seen on figure so far.

It is very. This is not. This is not figure. This is.

Oh, it's One X. It's One X.

Different company.

That makes sense because I was like Figure. They culturally don't seem like.

No, no. They're very buttoned up. Very like we're doing partnerships. BMW. We have a campus. We're very like the.

Meanwhile, One X is one Ex is.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. One X is doing videos with Jason.

Carmen and like, 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 Timothy Chalamet got knighted by Lil B, the bass God who has some. I mean based is a word because of Little B. You know. That's right. He has some amazing quotes. Extremely like online Internet person. There's this hilarious.

The first Internet rapper. Her 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 or something. It's a wild clip. Like he's just the man and yeah, very one of those rappers that's like, you know, transcended into like this bizarre avant garde artist world where he's been an influence for a lot of people. So it's, it's awesome and hilarious that they got little B to come out and meet the robot and they've done a couple other weird things where I think they put a Neo with like Kai Sonat or something or oh, I show speed or something.

If I'm gonna go along. A humanoid robot company.

Yep.

They actually are doing all the right things.

Yeah.

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, 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? Yeah, 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 1x is like, we're just kids building this stuff. Yeah, it's like awesome.

We're having fun on the Internet.

I love it. I love it.

We should, we should reach out to them and see if we could get a one act that, that could just sit here and be the stuff.

Yeah, that'd be great. This is. Yeah. Here, here, here's the, here's the Kai Snot one. This startup used Kai Snot streams to go insanely viral. But no, isn't. No one is paying attention to how this campaign was actually engineered. New playbook being executed before our eyes. They do streams with a Twitch streamer product is a core part of the content, not just a lame integration. The goal is to set up as many clippable moments when with the products as possible. Pay Discord kids. $0.30 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 $0.30 cpm. So yeah, very interesting. It's crazy because it's like it's not a consumer. Are you bored? Why are you playing Tetris?

I just like the sound. I like the soundtrack.

It's hilarious. That's great. But yeah, I mean, I, I mean.

There'S a clippable moment for mod retro.

There's so many, there's so many underrated pieces of this. Like partnering with 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, 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 going to sponsor this entire month of content and like every hour bring it up.

Yeah. But it's weird.

It's kind of weird. It doesn't, it's not, it's. 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 because it's not a really good ad format.

And so for One X, I mean humanoid robot is like, like the most inherently viral product you could possibly be building right now. The question.

Yeah, I'm. We're, we're. I'm working with a portfolio company that I won't name yet, but we're going to be able to go. We're. They're going to give it a gun and we're going to be able to go make some content. I want to. I mean, I think, I think we should. Yeah, yeah, I think we should like.

And we're doing it. It's easy to predict in the future.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You can predict the future if you do it.

VCs in the future, they're like, they make their like list of 10 predictions and then they just create the AI agents that do all of them and they're like, wow, I went 10 for 10 this year.

Like 2025 prediction. A tech podcaster will bench press 260 pounds. It's great. This is, this is funny and somewhat related to that mod. Retro Sam lesson says the most expensive computer per unit of compute in the world and it's a TI83 plus graphing calculator for 75 bucks.

Did you ever program these?

Oh yeah.

I had so much fun. So my best memories, that's where I learned. 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?

Maybe this was just in my high school, but basically someone created a text based game where it was like choose your own adventure and had a couple different paths, but it was about going to a party. So I, I remember.

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, 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, my high school was like, very nerdy, both from like a computer science perspective, but also like, really, really crazy with the English. And so clearly this kid who programmed this thing was if it happened in my high school, I don't even know if it did. It might have just gone viral. But clearly, you know, he was like in, you know, in an English class and read some Shakespeare and heard afterglow. Yeah, it was like, I'm going to put this in the game.

Yeah.

But then you could go in and edit the program and you could change the name so it was like, oh, you run into your boy Jordy there or whatever. It was like really fun. And, and it all, it all required having this cable. The connector cable.

Yeah.

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. And there were a bunch of other games that you could like put in. You could also cheat and put note cards.

Was it Snake? I'm trying to remember. You could, you could, could put stake.

In there Tetris a little bit.

I just thought it was, I just thought it was the coolest thing that I could program my calculator that was supposed to be just for 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. Like that's very easy to get into. And then you start leveling up and do an if statement with a couple of different things. And all of a sudden you've built like this text game. Good times with the TI83.

After I went through my programming, my TI84 era, I got into ddosing my dad's website, which would host the homework on it. So I'd be running this Windows machine in our house, like in the cor. And like my room just like ddosing my dad's website. I Always had these visions of like people like busting down the door, being like, yeah.

I mean, I ran into something similar where my dad had a server where you could just like store files. It was basically like an FTP server, like precursor to Google Drive by like, like 10 years or something. So it was like if you wanted to put something on the Internet, you just upload a, upload a file there and he'd use it for work and like, like little things like host a website on the server. And he just had a buddy that gave it to him and didn't charge him on like a, on like a consumption basis. So it wasn't, it wasn't like, oh, they use this much bandwidth so we're going to charge you this much. It was just like pay monthly and I'll just let you have this server.

Yeah.

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 vibreals big. Basically this is like going back to my old editing days. Basically what you do is you take like highlight reels like from all the best counter strike players and you cut together like their greatest hits and then you'd export them, put them, put like some sick music over it. The biggest one was called Frag or Die and it was like iconic. And so if you could get into one of those, it like canonized you as like one of the greatest players of all time. And so what I realized was that people needed video editing skills and I could do that. And then people also needed hosting. And so I was like, I'll edit this one if I can put myself in it. And then, yeah, it's fine. And so I wasn't as good, but I had like one or two good highlights. And so I put myself in this thing. It's like Frag or Die 2 or some sequel to this thing. And, and I, and I host it and then the link goes out on irc. Do you remember Internet Relay Chat? This was like a precursor. It's what Slack is like copy copying, basically.

Yeah.

These 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 did you do? Like, like, like, I, I, I like this guy, he charged me.

Now like, is it a crazy bill?

I, I don't know if he actually, I don't know if the bill actually like passed through, but he, he was like, it's not unlimited anymore. I am rate limited now because of you. But also like, probably like somewhat proud because it's like you did something cool.

Hacker Volume. Volume.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I had a viral banger.

Yeah.

You know, you don't hate the player, hate the game. Yeah. But no longer. Now you just upload a TikTok. Kids have it easy. Anyway, let's move on to, 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. Is very simple. If you're doing something cool, you post about it. And I think you just have to, it doesn't say here, but you just have to do hashtag Red Bull fund. And they will send you $4 to buy 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 grant. So if you're listening to this, go do something cool. And when you need a Red Bull post about it, what is Justin Mares again?

It's like a thousand or a couple grand.

Yeah, I think it's like two grand.

Two grand. So you got the teal fellowship with it with 100 grand. Then you got Justin Mares with 2 grand. This is for $4.

So next time you're in a pinch and you need a Red Bull, they will send you $4. Just make sure you're doing something cool. I don't want to see any non, non cool.

No, you need to do something epic.

Maybe 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, it's fantastic. That, that, that should be more viral.

This is like us. We have like the, the TV Dom fund.

Yeah.

A couple, 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 poll and Then we'll close out with this banger and get out of here.

Deny too long. Dude.

That one's kind of boring. Let's see. See, I want something that's like, you know, fun and easy.

It's not a straight raffle.

No, we're going through it. Oh, this is a good one. I like this one. Signal. Great poster. Scarlett Johansson was perfectly positioned to be the definitive voice of AI. If she'd leaned in, she could have been the de facto interface for the future of human computer interaction. A living cultural artifact embedded in the tech itself. Truly an F tier career move. And the magnitude of the missed opportunity will only grow as AI becomes more central to daily life. Imagine the royalties too. Insane. Fumble. That's a great concept.

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? Who knows?

Yeah, yeah.

Frustrated that day.

But, but yeah, I do, I do think the signal seems right. Like, what would be the downside to Scarlett Johansson of have, of like 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, there is plausible downside where it's like you get it to say something bad and it sounds like it's her.

Yeah.

And, or, or, or, or, or it's just like, oh, people start using it to.

She didn't do movies anymore though.

Yeah. She's in the Marvel universe. So like they're constantly cranking out sloth.

Yeah, I mean, I'm sure they questions.

Yeah, it's not like, well, now you can generate her voice perfectly. Like maybe the next time that there's an animated movie, she doesn't get the deal. Like, of course, like, that's not really gonna pencil out because that licensing deal is gonna be different than like, 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, 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. But yeah, I, I, I agree with Signal here that like, it would have been amazing to actually get it done. But it's not too late. Like, she could still go in and say, hey, instead of this like, lawsuit, why don't we work together?

But yeah, I wonder if that's still.

Oh, it's totally possible. Totally possible.

Oh, no, no, I meant, like, I wonder if they've resolved the results.

Settled it. Yeah. I mean, honestly, like, when I heard the, the her voice, I think it was a lot of people just pattern matching off the, the, the tweet because I didn't actually think like, oh, this I'm talking to Scarlett Johansson.

Yeah.

It did not seem that close. It seemed more like generic and like, like, like most of these LLM, most of these AI things, they, they feel very like the average of everything.

Yeah.

Every answer feels like the average 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. Like, it's all blended together in this soup. And that's like what the math is doing. And so I don't know. I, I'd like to see her do it. I think it'd be a good, good win for her. But let's finish with the. This banger of all time. 1,000,000 views 56k likes by Sukug Slore I don't know how to pronounce that.

But 5 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 can just post something that seems like it should be like a Good post, but 100 likes, maybe.

Yeah.

And you can run it up to.

Yeah. I mean, it's real, it's a real testament to like, how popularized these, like, brain rot words are. 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.

Yeah.

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.