welcome to technology Brothers the most profitable podcast in the world Jordy uh 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 uh go to new yeah uh it's a good question I I I kept as I was going on the trip I kept asking myself why am I going all the way across world to go stay at the Iman for New Years go skiing and they just something was drawing me and almost as soon as I got there the strike started in Park City and I was like this is why I went out here it
wasn't to save 80% on lift tickets yeah uh because you know the hotel would kind of do away with with any of those potential savings but it was to avoid the uh epic meltdown around the Epic Pass there you go and are you sure it wasn't like you have some sort of hero hero complex where you're like they've been at zero GDP growth for years but I
fix yeah that's I can fix her Europe you with with GDP growth if you've got if you're enough of a Siz Lord you can actually grow an economy we've talked about this a lot Inspire the TRU if you love the economy like you have to take it upon yourself to stimulated it to grow it and um and so yeah yeah part of it was like can I am I can I put up
numbers yeah with one conversation with the right European over there gonna change everything yeah yeah Inspire them um no I had a I had an amazing trip it was great um left the kids uh with with the grandmas that's great um and uh yeah had a had a had a fantastic time um a lot of skiing I did so last episode we
recorded John was was deeply uh ill with the plague and within Maybe hours after recording I had the plague uh so this is the this is the plague Zone if you if you step up to the table with an illness it's probably probably going to get shered around um so basically like the flight over there in the first like 36 48 hours I was deathly ill no skiing uh
trying to beat this fever but beat it ended up having a great trip uh but very happy to be back we we were going to maybe record remotely it 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 um but
we made it through it we're back and we're uh now we're blessed to be able to record five days a week it's fantastic so 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 uh they employ
about 7,000 people they had a rough history the company went bankrupt in 1997 restructured and then went public Leon black at Apollo Management bought the company in private Equity deal but after Apollo sold a former Apollo executive ran the company as CEO for nearly two decades recently the company'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 uh this a huge departure from when the company started uh they the found ER 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 Veil it's veil Resorts
baby nailed it we're doing a deep dive on Veil today and all things skiing uh jordy's back from skiing and we're going to take you through some great tweets and some articles and and of course the veil Resorts 10K because we got to go to the source if we want to know what's going wrong at Veil o net income down 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 no but an important business important business it matters a lot and uh and a fascinating story but let's start with skiing let's go to creatine cycle he says when it comes to
hobbies that don't generate shareholder value surfing seems more High te than skiing with skiing it's Dei I don't even get that I 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 uh you fall on fluffy powder whereas with surfing it's
meritocratic good Surfers get all the waves you fall and you can't breathe and there are sharks very funny I love the baldos in the replies here saying wait until the VCS see this one and yeah it's true skiing it's a little bit easy it's yeah I mean this this this was uh sort of in a similar vein to my post which was sitting in a ski lift line is the
most barnyard animal coded modern human behavior you stand in a tense line of your fellow livestock waiting for the machine to take you up the hill so you can get the slop turns you crave oink oink Epic Pass piggy um and it's funny because I over I posted that yeah I got 3,000 likes 3,000 nice um so I posted that and and a lot of you know when when
something blows up you get goes to parts of X that like you're not really too familiar with and and a lot of people were like quote tweeting and commenting like who hurt you like all this stuff like okay cool bro just say that you can't like afford to ski or whatever and I sent that from like I sent that from the Aman in the Alps where uh where my
my wife is like didn't didn't ski much growing up she just would like go to the spa and stuff uh so I was teaching her to ski and so we had to take this one like Gondola route over and over the line was just so brutal and so I came up with that post from like the most brutal line and I'm just we're sitting there in
this tense we're sitting there in this like tense line waiting to take the gondola up and I'm like this is the most Barnyard codus yeah it is I mean it's the the Predator animal is the the one who hunts for the best powder with the helicopter yeah very clearly Like an Eagle descending upon the the mountain top and taking powder for for their own yep say
rejecting Conformity it's great I like uh I just want to give you a little bit more color on Veil there's a good post by Andrew Bracken here this is from two years ago we're going back in the timeline uh he says off to meet some retina doctors at a meeting in Vil 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 Veil very exclusive uh it is the most visited um it is the most visited uh ski resort in the United States uh for the for the 2023 to 2024 ski season Veil Mountain offers some of the most expansive and varied Terrain in North America with with approximately
5,300 skiable Acres including seven world-renowned back bowls and the basic like Disneyland the Disneyland of ski reserves yes and this is what's so fascinating about Veil 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 is so broken capitalism is so broken and like it's like bro you're watch collector watch collector like just just be a capitalist yeah um but but that's the one thing his watch collection is the one thing that's keeping him from like having like a Communist Revolution yeah totally totally uh but yeah in this video it's
breaking down like oh like you know SK uh 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 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 Veil and like had a great life Vil was never a town it literally was never a town it was like these guys went searching for they were like Mountain near 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 Max Meer brought this to my our attention he says America cannot be fully great until Aspen Veil 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 Veil Texas has a nice ring to it and he shows like an entire map here I Love It of how Veil used to be a part of Texas soing um yeah Texas gu it's 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 you're smaller than you've ever been Texas if you're not claiming land 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 the US Virgin Islands you guys sold all your all your trading posts in
India and you were like talking a big game then what happened they're just negotiating they're shrinking they're negotiating with the best negotiator the guy who literally wrote The Art of the deal just like throwing out all the throwing out I'm going to Greenland without a passport yeah um uh this is interesting a little bit of history from
uh 2021 just taking the temperature of what fin twit was saying about Veil Resorts back in the day so post Market great poster has stopped posting upet I I love this account I don't know if I think I'm assuming it was a woman but did she just some of these like investors get so regulated that they can't maybe or I don't know just got
sick of it or something but I went back and found this tweet from 2021 March and says watching Finn twit she could move the market by the way like if she came back online and just like posted like a ticker like it would probably we got to get in touch and get her back on uh this is this is part of our life's work here on the show um watching fin twit turn on
Veil resorts for lowering the price of their season pass um in my opinion Rob cats deserves the benefit of the doubt 24 months later scale economy shared cats acquired Resorts and realized scale benefits to lower price and sell high margin add-ons amazing and so I think what she's saying is that like people were very bearish on the idea of the of
the Epic Pass but if you look at the data the the the Epic Pass has just grown and grown and grown and become this like Monster uh share of their revenues I'm pretty sure there's something like over 50% of their like lift Revenue yeah here it is um so the lift lift related Revenue mix in 2008 it was 26% passes in 2022 it was 62% passes
yeah and so the the Epic Pass uh lets you go to any of their mountains which 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 squa and Northstar sometimes I'd get that other you know my my great-grandfather I don't know if you ever talked about this help build Mammoth mountains and ran the gondola at Mammoth for for like 50 years and uh maybe not 50 like more like no I think around 50 anyway long I'm trying to keep
it like just strictly business on the show so whenever you talk about your family in one other Z out because as we've said we're not best no but um but uh yeah yeah we are not friends strictly this is about delivering the news yep daily yep and nothing else yep um but um but uh yeah so so growing up like you know you'd go I'd go to squa 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 often times like unless you had a house or a condo in that area or that was just the resort you went to it it was not so great of a deal for the average skier prices were also lower
from from from day passes um but now the Epic Pass is like such a good product right like if you want to ski a lot at at more than one place it is just a phenomenal product can't buy it in season you have to buy it before um but 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 EP Epic Pass you get to go to all of veil's mountains which they've acquired 42 now so they have Vil Breen Ridge Park City in Utah Keystone and then Beaver Creek crested but Whistler black home so you can even go to Whistler in Canada that was a billion
dollar deal that they that they paid for that and Whistler is in insane I mean I'm not like a complete skiing efficient the the other thing is you can can subscribe to it on a monthly basis so you're able to take a cost for a lot of people was like this big one time purchase and you're just like permanently paying them whatever 100 bucks a month but it makes skiing so
much more accessible yeah it's like literally cheaper to get access to 42 of the greatest ski resorts yeah of all time for for a third of the price of your Equinox membership yeah yeah and so uh a little bit of the history we alluded to it but um you know Veil started as this kind of like crazy idea by these two Founders who were like
literally World War II Mountaineers like just Mountain guys they built this up they eventually sell it to uh um uh to another guy Veil Associates and then that guy got saddled up with debt during kind of the 80s early 9s 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 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 that guy name the the Apollo guy uh
Rob cats 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 um 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 so like I had a like you know having family member who is running so my great grandpa World War II vet all these guys are go to war they come back and they decide to like build ski resorts it's very hard undertaking but but uh easier than than um you know going to war and you know so my great- grandpa
running like the gondola all this time it sounds like the simple thing because you're just sending like this you know little yeah box up the hill and back over and over and over but when you actually get into the logistics of like okay you're sending groups of people up on this wire 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 you get one and and there are some videos out there you can find videos where like a um um a lift like reverses and it just starts going down like backwards like in opposite direction it's just like terrifying terrifying um also I mean the logistics around keeping these lifts running is
really hard because these are the every machine is kind of bespoke because it's not like there's one size fits all I mean obviously there's some parts that are interchangeable and then if a part breaks how do you get that part you know it needs to get to you you need some like huge gear that's probably custom machined or miled and then needs to be
delivered and installed in the middle of the ski season you need helicopters stuff if if your lifts breaks while you have people on it then great you have hundreds of people sitting 50 ft in the air in harsh conditions and then and then to to make it even more challenging you're not even running it year round you're running it whatever for 5 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 the last like couple weeks were a disaster in Park City but the fact that there aren't more disasters is honestly pretty amazing it's a testament to how how good in general we've gotten at operating I read a big article in
Bloomberg about uh veil's work in the Northeast so Veil you you know started with just this one amazing destination then they bought Park City which we're going to go into uh a lot of the Tahoe uh ski resorts obviously whistlers like massive and huge and iconic but then they bought a bunch of stuff on the northeast that's much worse skiing
because the Northeast is just very wet very icy but there's still a lot of skiers there they just want to get out there and so the the kind of value prop for veil was we can bring some of that like destination beautiful luxury ski town like experience to the Northeast um but there's going to be need to be significant Capa that goes into the
business and so at this one uh ski resort called Attitash I think it's called Attitash um they needed to replace the uh the chair the chair lift that went up to the top of the mountain like the main chairlift took 17 minutes and it was like really cold and like completely unprotected they wanted 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 cuz 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't you
get this on time like you know we wanted this to be nice half the season missed half the season um but they did actually wind up getting it in and it's an interesting like you know battle between like the the locals and of course like whenever something goes wrong everyone's like very opinionated and vocal about it but uh well yeah that's the other
challenge of running these Resorts is half half I don't know the exact split but a large percentage of your customer base are these sort of fair weather they're 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 uh don't care as much about cost and all
that stuff and then the other half of your customer base is like people that are living breathing skiing living in a small mountain town maybe working at a restaurant and skiing like every extra day that they have and so kind of it's a very interesting challenge of like how do you serve both of those groups in in some ways that I think the Epic Pass at
like $1,200 a year to get access to 40 plus Resorts is it $1,200 a year I thought it was like 500 no no I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure it's 1,200 for like the expensive but but it's not in the context of like yeah yeah it's not in the context of um like the fact that if you're just buying a day pass it's like 250 bucks
yeah it's also just like like what what are the uh what are the substitutes for skiing like there just really aren't any like I kind of went through you can walk I mean I guess you can go like scuba diving yeah like like in terms of just like an experience like oh I went skiing this weekend it's like so much higher above like I saw a movie or like what
else did you do like you hung out and got drinks or went you know went to a nice dinner um but yeah so veil has been back and forth for a while people love it people hate it Max Meyer again says Veil Resorts charges me less for a military Family season pass $145 than they do for a single day lift ticket at Veil 189 remind you that the 189 ticket
is actually the Spring discount price during Jan Feb it's $229 and so uh Max is a big Veil fan hence why he wants it in Texas because he thinks it's uh it's a Well organization got one from from Katie Zog here she says I always like flying into Veil because I get to see latest developments in plastic surgery and uh this is top of mind for me
because in in uh in Corel where I was uh for the last couple weeks uh I was noticing this interesting Dynamic where um tons of Lip lip filler usage and lip filler seems to have this sort of like antimimetic property where if you notice somebody has lip filler it means that they've used way too much and so they literally look like sort of like
Pig like like you know they're sh 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 and maybe you're like oh she looks nice or whatever um and so so it's this interesting thing where lip filler is
constantly getting this terribly negative advertising yet it continues on plastic surgery is like a like a good defensive cornerback like you only notice it when they up right yeah yeah that's a good that's a good example the the good de deback yeah I don't know much about sports you're not you're not like shut shutting down shut down corn you could say that's
like like put it in business context right like it's a good controller like nobody's like nobody you know the controller never gets like the fame the fortune you know things go well or if they don't go well it's not like the CFO of like Enron who's like Lally going to jail like the controller like you who knows they just doing their job solid
controller most people couldn't even name the controller apple or Facebook or you know Google because they're just doing their job um so let's get into the actual drama that erupted over the last weekend uh I I this is one TF Jenkins had the first post that I really saw go viral here uh he says thanks Park City at Veil 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 piss that's like the most that's like the most uh 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 super long lines back in back in like the the the 60s and 7s it was very routine to wait like an hour plus for every single lift so you'd go skiing for the day and you'd maybe get like five runs because you were just in lines like the entire time and so we've gotten very spoiled recently with our Express chairs gondolas like you're not you're not if
if a line is like 10 minutes you're like annoyed you're like this is like taking like too long um some 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 look 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 ly Philips next like video yeah and so uh people start diagnosing the problems will manius uh says it's incredible that Apollo owns both every good ski slope in America Veil and every private military contractor Blackwater Triple Canopy possibly the most adaptive allocators to
ever live lat Finance is truly a beautiful thing and this is like kind of true but Apollo hasn't owned Veil for two decades so gonna have to put that one in the truth Zone will not quite right and then uh Andrew Reid is uh hypothesizing why things might be going wrong at Veil he says when you learn Veil Resorts CMOS prior job was 10 years
at Comcast everything clicks into place uh that's that's a deep dive he he looked up the CMO like I he really he must have been on the ground in Colorado or Utah I mean he's wearing ski gear in his profile picture so I think this guy real skier real skier they're probably you know Sequoia partner digging in understanding what's going on I love it
um but but I want to go through this uh this deep dive of the story of how Vil acquired Park City but what else you got for me right now um I mean Dan L some other people are talking about like I I think what on the surface the the headline number was a ski patrol just wanted an extra $2 an hour $23 instead of 21 yeah going from 21 to $23 Burger
cost 25 in town so like it's not it's not reasonable and uh this guy Ben bortner responded to Dan L's post and said it is surprising they have 100 ski patrollers 100 time 2 * 40 hours per week time 24 weeks equals $192,000 a year I'm not a pro Union person good good stuff Ben way to way to you know um we've dealt with our own uh our editors
trying to unionize over and over um but we are always able to win um he says this dispute doesn't make sense must be missing something so I think um uh yeah like on the surface a lot of the stuff doesn't really make sense right it's $192,000 a year this company does hundreds of millions of dollars in in earnings um and I think that the re
ity is that it's more about uh you know Veil not wanting to set the precedent that a small group of individuals at one of their Resorts is able to like shut down uh you know the the basically shut down the brand yep over a over a single dispute and I believe TJ Parker gets into this a little bit but he says my guess is this is the primary
Blocker in the veil negotiations if you're a massive seasonal employer there's no way in hell you can set a precedent around this kind of thing for one group of employees at One 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 stips to allow patrollers to maintain yearr round coverage without switching providers every six months so um yeah I think this this is a like a pretty interesting sort of challenge right where skiing and working in the ski industry historically
was something that people would do out of love they would do it and they would have to make a lot of sacrifices or like okay I'm going to move to this small town just for the Winter or I'm going to live in this town and like work odd jobs in the offseason 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 speically 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 Y and that was never sort of the promise of that lifestyle right but but now people can say well okay like your Veil Resorts you're this huge huge public company you know you deserve you you you should be you know the the point of view is you should maybe provide this kind of benefits for um but
I don't know that it's the thing that ultimately um uh I saw that in in the some of the messaging they were saying you know you're doing these big you know hundreds of millions of dollars of BuyBacks and all this stuff shouldn't you just um shouldn't you just you know uh pay pay your people more and you said you're you said if I wasn't if if I John
cougan was negotiating for these SC patrollers I'd be like give me some of that sweet stock based comp right that's true um saying you know that the $2 extra don't don't just go for $2 Cash anity go for $2 of uh of stock could easily turn MN yeah yeah I mean it it is interesting because that that math makes it look so small but if you actually
look at their 10K um 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 uh twice their GNA twice their other well yeah and and the ski patrollers are a small at this one Resort yeah are are are a cog in the machine but then you have
people that do ski lessons which are different people that just lift operators people that do lift the lift operators are people are are sitting there and like making you get on and turning it off and then you have the people that are maintaining the list and then you have like the mountain operations and then you have the guys
that do the cats at night 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 and the people that do the 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 ask
like then the business ceases to be a real business right and and this is something they as a public company can't afford to be like oh we have 42 Resorts and we don't make any money we just need to add 20 more Resorts and then we'll make money everybody's going to 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 they has like a an apartment in Veil is like $2,500 a month which is very expensive if you're just like a ski patroller but they have a whole bunch of like corporate apartments
that are like 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 Veil this is really interesting so the the the highway that goes through I guess people complain about Road road noise and I
think that maybe during the snow It's Tricky so they're thinking about burying it basically um but it's like a multi-billion dollar project and they're like well we could develop on top of it so then you can just continue to develop but that wouldn't even offset the cost so they're just like H it's never going to happen it's been in the plan for like
40 years in their General plan yeah um but yeah should we move on to the story of uh when Vil stole Park City it's pretty interesting so grit Capital great poster wrote a big long thread that we'll dig through so he starts by saying everyone makes a mistake at work but rarely do they end up reshaping an entire industry it's a well-known story
but hey it's almost ski season and who doesn't love a cautionary tale about the costs of administrative airs Park city is now famous for its skiing but that's a recent development it was a silver mining town for most of its life so dependent on the industry so dependent on the industry that it was actually classified as a ghost town following the
1950s crash it was barely a thousand people by the decades end skiing started as miners would ski jump on the old cre mine dump sounds lit Park City Consolidated mines officially began the ski business in 1963 on Treasure Mountain a Mine Train took them through the mountain to an elevator climbing up 1,750 ft again also sort of lit then in
the 1970s Park Park City ski area area leased the terrain from the US uh 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 um it's actually
in so funny to think about somebody like writing up a a 100-year lease for property and they're like oh what's a fair price like 150 Grand a year like thinking it's like this like like good there's no way there's no there'll be massive inflation yeah just get screwed uh this would become Park City Mountain Resort one of
three resorts in the immediate area alongside skier only Deer Valley and third place Canyons uh in 1994 pcmr that's Park City mining Resorts or something Parks uh what is IT Park City mountain resort was acquired by powder Corp a new company started by John John was in his early 20s and had already created Mountain uh the Mountain Hardware brand
later acquired by Columbia sportsware and there's some nice photos of what a Chad he's in his early 20s 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 uh 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 uh the company ran a decentralized town friendly model and reported and reportedly less than 40 corporate employees and there's a big question
about these like where the corporations so Veil Associates used to be based in Veil but they got too big because they're managing 40 Resorts like internationally and stuff so they actually moved to Denver I believe um the success wasn't entirely unprecedented powder had the backing of John's father Ian who founded Luc luciia now merged with jeffre some sort
of bank I guess described as the smaller Burkshire hathway but with a better track record uh the company was valued at nearly $7 billion when Ian retired in 2013 damn damn neppo baby let's go 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 mlion let's go that's I mean that's that's why if your dad or your mom is wildly successful you the bar is not is just astronomically higher like you need to own an ass at like perk City by the time you're 28 or you're a loser I agree I agree and but it's also like look like yeah maybe he didn't have the the chops to fill the big shoes like cast a big
shadow in the world of Finance but you can go and and buy and build a much cooler asset and that's pretty awesome and so it's like yeah you're not buy an NASCAR team yeah yeah yeah so you're you're not the you're not the7 billion hedge fund guy but you own Park City that's sick yeah uh meanwhile Park City's ugly stepsister can 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 uh 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 Veil Resorts so Veil wanted to buy Canyons but they lost out on the deal they'd invest in new upgrades including North americ his first heated chairlift sick I've never been on one of those and even planned a connection to nearby Solitude so you could go all around and Ski and just made them the layout much easier
entering 2011 things were going well for Park City including a contemplated ambitious remaking of the base area powder was expanding well with a growing portfolio across ski resorts adventure sports content and experiences like Hy skiing and whitewater rafting relations with neighboring talisker seemed friendly with discussions on property
and infrastructure invest vestments including a potential lift connection between the results uh Resorts talisker was even landlord for pcmr Upper Mountain having inherited the long-term lease from upcm pcmr pcmr 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 pcm'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 base facilities were turned over at the end of the lease so it jumped 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 Veil Resorts who assumed the legal battle veil's like let's go I'll fight this out no problem the combined monster lease would total $25 million in annual fixed Payment Plus 42% of ibida over 35 million and so the Canyon's Resort is is uh described here
4,000 skiable areas top 10 ranking and Ski and outside ma magazines attractive Park City location uh huge growth opportunities Etc the opportunity was reconciliation the opportunity for reconciliation was gone the gloves were off Veil you'll recall had Lost Canyons to talisker in ' 07 in that bidding war and had come back for the full enchilada
so they come back to buy it all led by CEO Rob Katz pictured here you got to look at a photo of this guy total gigachad um led by CEO Rob Catz veil 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 Veil Resorts is expanding into Breen Ridge
Keystone Canyons Heavenly Etc the $35 million deal was 20x the estimated $15 million ebit do Canyons would bring in the deal would only make sense if Vil 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 Jon to tear down the Upper Mountain lifts and
install a winter ski park at the bottom of the hill alas it was all for not despite pledges to post a bond and fight in 2014 powder sold the base to Veil for 83 million 5x the incremental $35 million ibida Veil 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 him it would be a huge first Salvo in an industry defining acquisition spree including the 2016 Mega purchase of Whistler black home for 1.1 billion and 2019 acquisition of 17 Resorts from Peak Resorts that's the Northeast stuff I believe um their scale surpasses anything previously seen in the industry it is fascinating that um
this idea of like the mega ski conglomerate is something that really only started like five years ago or like 10 years ago maybe it used to just truly be all independent ski resorts and like yeah I think the the the the the reason that I this this last couple weeks of of events there's a lot of reasons you know people are posting the strike at Park
City is just ridiculous just classic corporate greed here 330 for a day pass and they quote unquote can't afford to pay the patrollers 23 an hour will be a Harvard Business School case study on Bad Business and it's like okay I get it that when you when you frame it like that it seems silly but it's all about precedent right and and and again it's
not like Veil 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 b 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 Hason Revenue 230 in net income like 10% net
income margin it's not exactly like and the stock has not grown over the last four years there's not a lot greatest 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 and how it's um the most interesting thing about the climate change thing is um I have this whole uh business school case study here lifting the veil uh largest US snow Sports Resort operator takes on climate change uh these uh these folks at Michigan raw School of
Business did a whole Deep dive on um sustainability and ESG and how uh how Veil will deal with uh uh uh climate change but when I was looking through the 10K I don't know if I just missed it but in the uh risk disclosures they they list everything from like you know it systems could get we could not P our debts all other St 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 uh but it's very they're they're they're projecting a lot of interesting things but but and and the other thing is like these think about how challenging it is to run a a business and it's not even like the the ski industry has like the the people
that work in the industry have every right to be emotional and be like charged up and 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 were independent and you have like huge huge amounts of fixed costs annually to run a resort and then you just have a bad ski
season in that area of like Tahoe or you have a bad ski season in the upper Northeast and then oh what happens like okay the resort loses a bunch of money that year y you you have to issue a bunch of debt and so the idea of having a bunch of resorts that are spread out a g such a wide geographic area that you can weather the storm almost right like
that actually makes a lot of sense and then again the reason it's like you know Veil Resorts is basically saying for $1,000 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 $1,000 a year we'll give you unlimited access to all this incredible nature and you can do and you can ski which is an activity that is just so um so clearly not essential to life like it's purely for fun yep and you're still not happy it's like that's got to be a rough rough spot
to be um I I mean I honestly like it seems like they they poorly handled the last couple weeks but at the same time I I feel for them because they're running it a deeply challenging business yeah I mean if you look at this data um the number of days below freezing worldwide you can see the map it's like the entire Northern Hemisphere and uh 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 veale Veil needs toale should buy Greenland there we go it'll become a country but then it's like Russia and Mongolia which are you know you're not going to build a good business there um but they're they're
projecting out some moderate emission scenarios and the the current number of uh days below freezing at Park City in Utah is 194 per year and by 250ish they're projecting that that'll go down to about 150 so about a 25% decrease so there is pretty significant pressure and the interesting thing about this uh this report uh this report is like okay how
do you deal with uh uh how do you deal with climate change their main recommendation is like expand more like go by more across the world and they actually break down all of the target uh uh countries they say Argentina Chile China czechia Finland Germany Norway Germany has very very few ski resorts um 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 uh Resorts that qualify under this uh and then Argentina only has 10 Chile only has nine and so if you think about uh where to expand Sweden South Korea
Spain Ukraine there's a lot of interesting options here I heard um at at uh the Aman there was a guy from Russia talking about how he's expanding uh and building resorts in the um far far east of Russia on a volcano apparently that sounded cool that's awesome um let's let's finish the the the the veil acquisition story here um
so Veil success has been vilified within the industry who see a corporate Overlord turning ski hills into theme parks which we've discussed Powder Magazine hilariously joked Veil had acquired the rights to all North American snowfall however they've enabled a Renaissance of sort and this is something you were talking about the companywide Epic Pass alongside
increased scale has flipped skiing's business model on its head from an addon to real estate to operations first it's worthy of a deeper dive on how Tech and opportunity combined and the the uh pass Revenue which you'll see here uh climbed from 78 million in 2008 to basically 800 million in uh in 2022 so a 10x growth and and that led to really incredible
performance in the stock if you look at 2008 the stock was under $25 a share by the end of 2021 it was up at 350 so uh 10x growth in in the pass Revenue 10x growth in the stock and that's almost all just to retooling the business model yeah um and and obviously a lot of expansion and the reason I mean the reason I just I again I don't I I 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 reports and it'd be like five 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 uh like Coastal Urban Elite someone who doesn't
live in the ski town it's probably a a net like net positive overall but at the expense of the local yeah but yeah even the ski like the true ski bumbs they still if they go to Keystone and that's their Mountain they still they take advantage of these of the Epic and they're like oh I'm gonna go to Utah for a week and like and you can go offseason
and it's not that expensive to stay at like some little hotel I mean agree the um the you know there you you posted a few times about the the cost of skiing in Europe versus the United States and and this uh Andy van Vandenberg guy uh in almost a year ago is saying here's your annual reminder that because of veil and all teras do oplate it's
cheaper to plan a week-long ski trip in Switzerland than Colorado um I don't think this is this this is not purely because of the duopoly it it it it has always been significantly you know even prior to the to the to the um Disney ification of of American skiing it was always quite a bit cheaper um to go skiing in in uh in Europe um but uh but
but again I don't you know I mean the like the benefit of this is that there is incredible price discrimination and so if you want the value pass and you want your average day skiing like I knew a guy who was on one of the icon passes or epic passes and I was skiing with him and he was like yeah this is like my 60th day this season I'm like I don't
know how you do that and but but the great thing is that I was able to show up I think we were in Jackson Hole I had no prep I was able to just walk up and of course they had gear that fit me I I had a lift ticket and the lines weren't bad 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 that in that chair line you can usually pay a ski instructor to take you right to the front and cut it and so a lot of people will just do that it's like the Disney like the Disney disneyfication is real in the sense that like there's a FastPass yeah there's a system for jumping even further arguably
if fast pass is is an extra if the main pass is a grand and the fast pass is like three grand but you ski 50 plus days a year just like do it it's like not that you know uh and so uh grit goes on to say meanwhile powder has moved on from the debacle they remain a major adventure sports oriented Resort operator with copper Snowbird and
Killington as Premier destinations powder even returned to Park City in 2019 via a new Woodward Sports Camp looks lit it's like he loves that Lit yeah and it's like BMX facility and like a parkour facility I guess uh pretty pretty interesting and then if we go over here said talisker well they're not doing so hot after leasing to Veil they
hit Rocky times with creditors and eventually forced foreclosure in 2015 it's likely that their shaky financial situation that precipitated the mess in the first place and uh what might have been though there had been talks about connecting the major Salt Lake City area resorts in a European style villageo Village arrangement with 80 lifts and 8
18,000 skiable Acres those plans already facing locals concerns died entirely when Veil moved in I'm not exactly sure why um so yeah that was a long thread on topic you might have already known uh 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 uh 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 that book and that book has like some of the only interviews that happen with those financiers because like a the
journalists aren't really writing about like random private Equity deals and then also these guys are pretty tight lipped um so that is uh the story of you got some more posts I got one last thing we can end on from uh at the stalwart Mr Joe wisenthal himself he says uh sort of a un unrelated to the main topic but he
says it's cool how if you're rich and have a fake job like VC them winners are just totally optional for you and I would say that the the VCS I know would push back on this and say they would say because I have a fake job like VC I get to indulge in Winter even more right I get to go being 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 uh yeah you know four four PM is the earliest I can schedule Zoom y you go ski incredible like you know uh you know empty tracks all day long you get back you're you're pulling off your helmet your steer you're jump on the zoom call sorry what's your company do again
and talk about we were talking about Bryce how like you know he's networking in uh where's Valley yeah yeah yeah yeah uh and I was talking to another another person about how uh like 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 zo right it's actually very
prod and then you'll remember oh yeah we had that conversation like sitting outside having drinks after skiing and it was awesome that's like that's why is more valuable so skiing is wildly expensive y 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 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 5 minutes later you're sitting on a lift chit you know chitchatting talking it's just it it's worth uh every dollar and I
would happily pay two three times what it currently costs Veil if you're listening no need to jack up the prices uh but um I do have one little tidbit of advice and we can close out with any more posts you have but uh 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 um instead of going into ski patrol I would recommend going into private Equity yeah and so if you look at the history of veil the private Equity guys have done very well Y and and it seems like the ski patrollers have have struggled and I it goes back to like who has the financial leverage who has the who has the power there and
so uh little less time on the slopes a little more time in the sheets in the spreadsheets so so obviously uh you're you're you're riffing a little bit but I'll I'll continue on that I do think that today in the the the nature of remote work if you want to ski the most the if you 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 than going and becoming a ski patrol person um I know I I have the industry is set up to cater to that type of person my roommate in uh College like would have been a professional Surfer his parents like didn't allow him to quit school at a
young age and like travel and do what he needed to do but now he works in real estate and so he like has spent the last few weeks like on the NorthShore at pipeline like getting absolutely barreled every single day and it's like he makes way more money Aver Surfer and surfs like probably 0% as much but a realer and so if you're thinking about becoming a ski bomb you
can pay for gear pay for coaches pay for training has healthare like yeah yeah so if you're thinking about becoming a ski bomb pivot to private Equity that is our I I I I think that really is the good takeaway here from the real story is like get on the side of capital yep lever up lever up cool let's move on to some DMs Q&A section we have been
getting tons and tons of merch thank you to everyone that sent us stuff uh let's kick it off with the ridge wallet you want me just to go through this while you're there okay Jord is gonna take a break and we're just going to keep rolling uh so the first thing we got was some lovely wallets from the ridge uh we're we're big fans of the ridge wallet
I've actually been using one of these um this is the 24 Karat Ridge wallet which I like I got the mag safe one on my phone and I I realized that ridge ridge wall it's a very accessible product it's not a Super Hyper luxury good but what I love about it is that if you follow the ridge team Sean and Connor uh 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 and really grown the business in a bunch of interesting ways and maintained an incredible amount of of ownership over that business because they haven't raised any of the crazy suicide rounds that other dtoc companies dollar uh yeah they haven't raised a dollar and and they've just grown that business and
grown it grown it grown it and now it's doing uh I think hundreds of millions of dollars right Jordy hundreds hundreds of millions of dollars uh and so that's I think the real reason why you should carry a ridge wallet uh 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 a it's like the man's fidget spinner the adult fidget spinner is just the knife that you can just like that's my CL anytime I'm at a at 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 it's great and this knife is is handy because we have here Palmer Lucky's latest device the chromatic from Mod retro and so I'm going to pop this open Jordy said I shouldn't open this because it's going to be a piece of uh you know technology history but I think this one will be enjoyed and maybe I'll
pick up another one keep it in the plastic uh but the chromatic if you're not familiar PA lucky yeah go for it oh just uh started this uh second company he's not busy enough with Ander oh nice packaging it opens uh it opens around and 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 um man what a what a treat um and so uh I believe there was something with like the game boy came off of patent or something like that and so uh he was is 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 um but if you think about like well then maybe the N64 comes off Pat yeah and people would love that maybe the PlayStation I would play the original Metal Gear Solid on Playstation I would play Smash BRS on the original N64 another another bull case 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 they ripped and they continued to rip um this is amazing and uh but wow listen to [Music] that it it fires up so fast let's go it fires up so fast that that that speaker is just so
nostalgic that sound is incredibly nostalgic [Music] this is awesome I'm just gonna play this for the rest of the game all right uh no but anyway so if so if GameStop is A14 billion company and every single game in the store you can just download yeah this this is the lifeline for GameStop and so basically I think that GameStop basically has to buy mod retro for a
billion dollars at least if I was an investor that's my investment the it's going to be 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 cges yeah so also I I saw somebody bought they they make cartridges that are like they they have some sort of like new technology in there where it
has like a 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 bll case is you have this iPad baby generation and we have children I would much rather give our sons one of these on a road trip than the average iPad just G to be like you know yeah and
and I was playing a game on PlayStation 5 over the uh over the break with my son and uh and it was it it was awesome he was a about Astros robots and it's kind of like uh PlayStation's Mario so it's a platformer you jump around it's all really friendly all really nice uh there's some like Puzzles and stuff um but there's just too many buttons for
him because he's three and so he couldn't really figure it out so he' just watch and he was really into that and then every once in a while there'd be like one thing that just required pressing one button and it'd be like you press the button and be really excited about that but I think he could actually learn how to play Tetris and be a to
build quality on it the build quality is amazing remarkable it's significantly it's significantly better oh yeah cuz I have so so I think I mentioned recently I have a I have a Game Boy Color that um that unfortunately that's like the Pikachu edition and I looked it up and I was like oh if it's unopened or no if you have the box it's like $3,000 and
then if you don't if you don't have the box like or something like that but this build quality of this is significantly better so small too I I forget how amazing this devices like it 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 locked Martin
also is good enough ideas guy to realize that hey you can just build a Game Boy Color yeah I love it so yeah go pick one up tell them the technology brother sent you uh we're we're very excited to have that uh we also got some very cool merch from rostra Lulu's company uh she sent us this amazing 3D printed rostra are you familiar with like what a rostra is
Jordie hey um snap are you playing Wasing I'm sorry it's so good right it's fun it like it comes back immediately it's so fun yeah you get video games are addictive yep be careful with them yeah the mod retro oh man I'm so excited for that thing um so so uh rostra is the name of Lulu miser's company Lulu of course is the brother of the Year comm's
Mastermind great follow on X uh and uh her company is named rostra which is a uh Roman term for uh exactly this I think like a an area where conversations Could Happen place to go direct yeah exactly the place to go direct and so she 3D printed did this beautiful um rostra and she also sent a fantastic quarter zip that I've been wearing and
is extremely comfortable I that's actually some of the only startup merch that I'm pissed that we didn't get two of yeah I I I I feel like she mentioned send too I'm to send I'm get immedately got it well I happen to be drinking a okay what's this yurba mate sent from Rob mow co-founder of hubman lab Rob thank you for sending uh we have a lot
of these now oh fantastic mate uh they this this was a company that um I I don't know if uh Rob and Andrew are co-founders or or their major investors in the company uh they're big proponents of yamate wasn't it Andrew from Tiny Andrew Wil i he also invested Finance yeah it's cool so uh anyways these are fantastic you can get them at aan you
get them online Whole Foods I think as well and fair amount of caffeine in there too right uh yeah I'm going to guess that we're putting up at least yeah 120 two espresso shots so there we go could have like four or five of these and be good okay thank you that's great are we just GNA keep we got to keep going through we got yeah what else do
we have we have a we have a sweatshirt we've gotten so much lot of we got Christmas was big Christmas was big for us and people know that we're we're willing to shill we have we're ready down to shill uh we have a the world's healthiest hoodie here from superp power Labs is Edition one um and this hoodie has an entire uh it has nutrition facts on the
logo and it has uh zero posos we go or microplastic so you do not um uh and and it's completely toxin free um and it even is more ecological uses 90% less water and 45% fewer emissions uh CO2 emissions and traditional cotton so anyways very nice uh heavy uh hoodie uh so thank you to superpower for keeping us warm this
winter season yeah yeah that's tricky for me because uh my testosterone's been really high lately so I've been trying to get more microplastics bring it down take the edge off but correct person I'm sure that's a great choice so I was having an a ski moment in uh the Alps and we were selecting like this this incredible uh Stak from um there's this this
restaurant in the three valleys like Resorts region called luku luku cool um and it's really really known for its stake so we're we we ski into this place and uh we we spend all this time selecting a a steak and the the they they weigh it out for you and after we they bring out the steak we're like we decide yes we're going to do this and he
slaps the receipt right on top of the steak oh wait that was a real photo yeah was a real photo oh my God uh he goes through all the hassle of like selecting this incredible piece of meat and he slaps the posos receipt did he print on the back side print what like is there ink on the back side because watch I thought it was I thought it waser no no
it's the ink I thought it was a therm I thought I thought it was the paper itself I think I think it's the ink that you want to watch for whenever I get a receipt I always if I have to touch it I'll just touch the part that didn't get the ink on it so the ink yeah I don't know if I don't know if that I don't know if that works I think it works but
um but anyways so for me I actually liked it CU my te levels are so high I'm trying to get a little bit of receipt action bring it down get get closer to sort of Baseline ability to be able to even focus get anything done um but uh but yeah I just thought that was so funny it's like goes through all the hassle of like selecting this
incredible slaps their SE on that is not on right-wing Twitter he needs to get R okay let's go to some more uh some more questions some Q&A uh Sarah says what are your predictions for defense and Industrial Tech in 2025 spicy takes are always welcome so bare domestication bare domestication does feel like it's getting closer to being a reality as opposed to just joke
territory and I could see someone ra the whole we're building autonomous uh sub it's like just say you failed at training Dolphins yep yep it's a good point just say you failed it's a good point uh we also had another spicy prediction which was that uh the total confirmed kill count of all defense tech companies would uh pass 100K in 2025
that would be a big milestone yeah uh what else what what what seriously I mean seriously I think that uh the the the defense Tech stuff it's already been like a big tent since um like defense Tech there was like paler it doesn't make Hardware but is clearly defense Tech but they still have a massive Commercial Business and then SpaceX like they have
star Shield which is a defense tech product and then the they're certainly like a gov tech company because they work with the government and so they're kind of in the defense Tech world and then andal 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 and arff getting added in SpaceX is inherently a defense company because if you can take a huge payload to space and then drop it anywhere in the world like fundamentally that's like the the the the they're icbms the first rocket that Elon tried to buy in Russia were just decommissioned icbms and they like
spat at him and and then he started the company um but uh yeah I I I I think it's always been kind of a big tent and andreon did a little bit of that with in marican dynamism if you go to their website they have like this timeline of American dynamism and one of the things that they've added is like the iPhone as an example of American dynamism which is
like kind of silly because it's like when I think American dynamism we think defense Tech and like that's just consumer Hardware um but you can see that like there was a natural like broadening out and then AI got bolted on too in many ways because American dynamism and defense Tech was hot and so you have companies like scale working with the government and then other like
defense llama it's like is meta 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 retconed into the defense and Industrial Tech will be energy and data center buildout um and and because I think they're capitally intensive High delusion 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 deck companies like I don't think there 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 buildout because wasn't there a number that like Microsoft's going to spend 0 billion 80 billion and so like that just say BC is gonna jump on this right honestly the 80s seem kind of weak to me I feel like they 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 citing that as like is like that it's theou it's the loudest signal that AGI is around the corner and you're like it is it is it is I 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 aund if I need a hundred billion dollars worth the data centers this where goes this is like one of the few companies that can actually do that and now they're doing it yeah so yeah it'll be interesting to see how the cor weave IPO goes I think a lot of people are going
to be watching that in terms of like Data Center buildout and evaluation yeah uh we have a DM here uh Jordy fantastic flow what do you do for your hair okay so I got my haircut yesterday and uh I go to I go to the same place as Rob actually got got recommend uh Rob Rob huberman's business partner hubman Andrew huberman's business partner uh
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 you live like a few minutes from each other and and he's like oh I go to Brook at Salt salon so I go to Brook at Salt salon and um I told her yesterday while I was getting my haircut or Saturday it
was I was like uh people keep commenting on about my hair they and and I swear I shouldn't have said anything because she started she like got like a little bit like she lost a little bit of confidence she started overthinking it I was like no like you do it perfect every time you never give me a bad haircut just like lock in just give me a regular cut and
she got it got into her head somehow so if if I'm not on my game today uh it's it's it's cuz I I shouldn't have said anything but what about product I mean so I haven't used a product in forever I I jump in the ocean frequently I live by the beach yep and I never use shampoo okay uh I I I think big shampoo is is is very bad and and most people um but the
key to not using shampoo is you have to eat super clean okay so if you eat super clean you're not like sort of just expelling like toxins you like pour and so you can skip the shampoo so use shampoo maybe once a month okay I do support big shampoo but they don't get much out of me y um and uh just saltwater and uh use sauna I use yeah I
use a sauna a lot too so um and and an AOW on build that looks like a mortgage payment six the six fig the six fig uh it really does look like a mortgage payment have I have I ever showed you by the way this this is like this is like the most rambly episode ever but it kind of makes sense so my my lifetime saving wings at aan 16 Grand oh my
God I spend the average PM's monthly salary at everyone yeah well it's all worth it for the hair so now you have a tip yeah so there's there's the tip there's the answer uh let's go to henel Patel he says can Tech Bros pod cover why teal is doing so many interviews mainstream ones I always thought of him as a Robert Mercer kind of guy Tech Bros
pod save America uh interesting question I mean I think a lot of it is just the fact that like you know when I mean he's been attacked through his career for years and years and years like starting with the diversity myth very controversial book a lot of that now we see like the backlash to Dei that only happened in like
2023 he wrote the book in the 90s I think or like 2002 and it's like and and there were like hitpiece after hitpiece about that book and then apologies like I think David Sachs at one point had to distance himself from certain passages and say oh that was taken out of context like it was like not a book that you put like front and center when you're
introducing David Saks on stage you're like he's a sass 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 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 um but only know him as like I was at a wedding once and they're like oh Peter teal like he's a fascist like 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 he'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 rambl they're like oh maybe he's got some points this is why the Press was so against like the
podcast election because they were like do not humanize Trump by letting people listen to him for three it with JD Vance he was weird and then the top comment on the theovon 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 Normy dude in the world and it's like yeah he is just like a normal guy
like yeah uh 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 uh and it was it was rough for commo because like we never got that three hours of like raw and I still maintain that like if you were drinking wine with kala you'd be like this is a great person like I'm down she's cool you might be like I don't like her policies or like I don't understand her
policies or she doesn't have any but you you she would be humaniz she just didn't let herself be humanized because she didn't do any real podcasts she could have been a hero for the crypto Community 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 Bas Baron uh B
Baron says uh in early stage early stage SL precede deep Tech funds that also have their own Studio or incub are funny to me how are the incentives aligned for example embedded VC invested in Ander roll and now can steal all their data to build their own competitor and so the question is um is if you are rating early stage checks and you also have an
incubator how can you be a good Steward and participant in the market and uh it's it's it's particularly hilarious because like andal 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 um 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 Ander roll'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 occurring in that industry yeah so so I'll take uh the baron 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 VC's haven't like big VCS haven't like and recent Horwitz doesn't have like an incub they have like eirs but they
haven't been like hey let's let's um if you're if you're a scaled asset manager it does present some weird situations and misalignments and one of the things that he's getting at which I think is real is if if you're at a fund that can make direct Investments or the partners can incubate ideas it starts to be oftentimes there's ideas that that this
is like a Rick Rubin quote right like ideas have their time somebody's going to do them and so if you're a partner at one of these funds where you can invest or incubate and you can a Founder can pitch you and you can give them $10 million or you could invest $20 million into a totally new company it does start to get where there is like this conflict
totally um and I can and 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 fun incubations don't come about because like they're watching they're like at actively trying to not start that company he was actively trying to invest in it he spent like two years as a
principal just looking for defense tech companies who's going to build this who's going to build this and no one came through and then he's finally like we got to do it yeah very and Ander is like the special case where it's like this Rockstar team of like former paler guys super well connected and and then like they're already at a 10 billion
plus scale it's like you can't just incubate that and like compete immediately I do think I heard uh when Justin Mays was was initially pitching trumed 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 AET 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 andal 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 um if you're building something a little bit more like oh yeah this is like on Trend like okay you're
going to use AI for you know uh 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's 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 um that was like kind of surprising
like we thought they were going to issue a term sheet and um and then I kept hearing about that that VC fund is a big VC fund and one of the founders I'm gonna make up a name for it but let's call him jack yep I kept hearing from other people in the community oh Jack has this new idea uh 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 at the fund that passed and I was like guys like you're incubating a competitor to this deal that I brought you like I was super annoyed and I only found out at the end of last year that it was a totally different Jack but I
kept hearing that it was so for this whole year we talked about this on like 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 as the same Jack wow like Jack's made up name but
and over and over and so when that happened I I finally went I was like dude I'm really sorry I kept hearing I thought you were lying to my face oh wow and um that's amazing so yeah I think there's a reason like at the end of the day what the the reason that it's not so bad that funds have this incubation strategy is like they would so much
rather just back the generational team Y and so if you are building a generational company and you have this worldclass generational team you can rest assur that the the VC fund will happily just invest in your company exactly they will only incubate something an alternative if they don't believe in you exactly and so just be better yeah it's a skill issue uh there
is another funny like flip side to this uh I I think that I think your takeaway is like like basically dead on um but uh there's a funny flip side where I heard a story about a a a firm that does incubations had a a person come an 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 raise different money and then it didn't go well eventually like got usually those things don't but and it was like a very bad thing and it it was very stupid but it's just so funny that like it can go both ways like the VC could steal your idea but maybe you could steal the VC's
idea and I like that I like that it's like bring the fight to them Cuts both ways yeah yeah it didn't work out and I wouldn't recommend it but it but it is funny uh let's go to another uh question I got in a DM that was pretty interesting um how do people who write books get on the podcast circuit are there companies to pitch guests or do
they just reach out to a bunch of podcasts at once or uh does someone go on one and then other podcasts Reach Out curious why YouTube feeds me the same 20 people all the time and wondering how they get on so many shows for having no real body of work other than just being interested to listen to that's a good post uh that's a good way for it is true
are you familiar with this 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 Y and they're getting you plugged in with media yeah and now if you could pay if I was an entrepreneur and 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 want be on those slots and so it's a blood bath of competition to try to get onto that slot what is true is like if somebody goes and they do one good interview and then they can jump to do another one and then they just end up becoming like a classic like
interview guest it does I do think that there's like a bit of a snowball effect but yeah it's not easy I think um everybody that has a podcast will like has like a long list of emails that they've gotten from PR firms from like hey like I'd love to it's it's it's just some like super random the best ones are where people try and get on David C'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 generational complion value and have some people write a book on
exactly then you can get onas it's easy it's really easy if you just check those just do that for them just just help me build 10 billion uh yeah I mean uh it 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 and it's just
like we have a close relationship with Simon suster and penguin and for sure the book publishers relationship podcasts that do like book reviews basic they sell books yeah and that's actually like their model um but then for the bigger shows like if you're going on like the Rogan Lex Freedman circuit like that's much more relationship driven and it's much
more driven by are you a personality and the book is kind of just like some it's just an ex it's just an excuse usually it's like people building a relationship over a long time and then they're saying like like when pomp uh released his book recently he he sent me a copy sent a bunch of people a copy he sent an email to a bunch of people and in that email
he was like uh if you want me to come on your show uh I'll prep something that's like specific spefic to your show and I'll come on just let me know and and so like if you're like yeah my show is focused on on finance he'll be like okay cool I'll I'll come on and we'll talk about these things so if it's about crypto he'll come on and do this it's
talk about the military stuff he'll talk about that and so uh really like kind of helping people do their homework and then once he starts like spiraling he can 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 a little bit to do a little bit less content on my own
bit more guest spots and I kind of worked my way up the chain from like some random friends podcasts to Bloomberg odd Lots which was like a pretty good spot and uh and a lot of that just happened from like posting about becoming like an expert in the nicotine category was having a moment posted some long threads kind of like
became a thought leader for a little bit and then like uh was just like available to people um yeah and I I I've said this probably on the show before but if you are running a company or an investment firm there's no podcast that's too small because it used to be that if you were running a business and you got invited to speak at some random conference in
Nebraska like you're working oil and gas and it's like hey do you want to come speak at this conference to talk 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 there there's only 100 listeners yeah it's
like okay you joined a zoom call and talked for 45 minutes and you got off and like if that if only a 100 people ever listen to it it's still a good opportunity to get yourself very high Lage so uh the other high leverage thing is that when you write a book that whatever your title of that book is follows you basically forever because
people will it's very hard for people to be oh like Jordy he's the founder of this company and he founded this other company but if you're just like author of whatever they'll just be like he's the author of this book and so if you just that's why we need to write the book lever up yeah or or like you know Rags to Riches how I became a high
testosterone gigachad for only $5 a month or something like that like the hard thing about bench pressing 400 lb and driving sport cars all day and drinking D paring on at work oh something stupid like that so it just follows you forever uh let's go to Nicole this is a great question this is like this is bait for us she got 97
comments I'm sure all of them were wrong uh question for watch people what's a nice watch for women preferably gold classy and Timeless that you can wear with most things have never owned a watch before and the options are overwhelming what do you think I want to look up go cardier cardier tank obviously cardier tank is the one tank
Lou it's timeless it was worn by uh Jackie Onasis Andy Warhol Muhammad Ali it's you know like cardier invented the wristatch with the Santos but the Santos is going to be too masculine um and so the the the tank is Iconic and you can't go wrong uh if you want to step up ladies Nautilus you go with a crash there we go I think a crash is probably a better fit
for an allocator of Nicole's yeah size right um 400k market value um so that's a good like daily driver I mean I mean the the the ladies Nautilus is is legitimately cheaper than it's a bummer that pipe is not still in the business of like pulling forward you know how did you know in like 2020 and 21 if you had a fund you could pull forward like 10
years of your management fees so a lot of GPS were like going and and that would have been an amazing opport to fund some of these watch purchases for some of these allocators that yeah that are just not following the 2% rule at all exactly um letting everyone down what else I mean I mean uh there are some I I think Rolex is a little
overplayed but there are some interesting pieces in there uh L Su at AMD has one that's beautiful yeah if with like a date no no day date yeah dat not a date just that should be a band word we need to have a list of band words on on the show dat just is banned dat just is banned um but uh like some there's some unique date justs 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 was funny I landed I landed I landed in Geneva um and cause AP had like whole the whole airport like as like and I'm like the average person like only in Geneva do you put at airport ads for
like the most hype beasty like watch in history yeah her her style overall is very uh gold classy and Timeless but why not put a racing machine on your wrist when you cold get get get an RM get a skeletonized RM uh maybe H blow it puts you in a unique Club you know what'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 H or something um but yeah lots of good lots of good options but I hope that all 96 of these people recommended cardier tank Louis because uh that's the one although there are some interesting ones you could go with the tank Frost tank on glaze there's a few others that I I
think could work but we could spend a whole hour classic a whole if you were trying to save a buck you could go with the the solar beat but I recommend Louie um here we go I'd love to hear y'all's 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 um so Bo a little bit of backstory Bo is at uh is a wrestler at Penn State a lot of the best stars in MMA have like a wrestling base like khabib is the sort of most prominent
example of that um and there's actually some big fights coming up in LA this weekend uh which I'm excited for but um yeah one thing that's become clear in MMA over the last 10 years is the biggest stars is not purely due to technical like proficiency and talent and I think that uh Conor McGregor like led the charge here he's one of the as
much as he had some extremely viral massive moments in the cage 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'ed by kabib koed by porier 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 and his his career he just was always good on the mic um and so something that people have realized within MMA and and Bo certainly has has known this is that
you are building you're not just a fighter and an athlete you're building a media brand around yourself right um and uh one of the challenges in MMA is like you're kind of just your own dude right so like B competes or B trains out of a um the American top team in Pennsylvania um which is just like a small Regional gym and so there's not a lot of like
media coverage around there there's no he's not going to be getting picture like Paparazzi pictures and so he has to create his own kind of media business around himself and so he's done a really good job of that some Fighters have been overly reliant on the UFC to promote them but the issue is the UFC has fights every week couple weeks and so their
only incentive is to promote the next fight so if you don't have a fight on theed 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 gonna basically Vlog his lifestyle as like this emerging you know athlete within the UFC he's
taken sort of the high road you have other people like kby Covington who I don't know are you familiar with kby Covington so kby Covington is like the couldn't be more polar opposite from bo bo is like the you know the athlete like the good guy allamerican um Colby Covington takes like will hire strippers and and get strippers around
him like this and be throwing you know money and calling his like you know opponents like losers right um so he's taking the total opposite approach and so every fighter needs to create their own unique brand I think it's impossible to break out in UFC and MMA without being like truly yourself because there's just too much time on the mics
to like be anybody but yourself Colby Covington like Snapped into this character he was about to get cut from the UFC and he decided I'm just going to become an 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 um he's a heel um and so so yeah I think um B's done a really good job of this a lot of other a lot of other Fighters that have that have come up recently have realized like I basically need somebody to follow me around with a camera 247
and like we just need to be putting out this like really high volume of content because we need to be promoting ourselves year round building this fan base because we can't rely 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 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 story lines 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 uh and then second like there needs to be a camera on you like 5 hours out of the day every day and so uh at the start that's probably like
your biggest fan who's an 18-year-old kid with an iPhone and then they can scale up and get a nicer camera but it's basically just film what happened today put it on YouTube it's a vlog edited on their phone on imov just trim some stuff out but just give the fans the opportunity to go deep with your life take a photo put on Instagram y do a do
a short little video one minute workout it's a it's a real it's a Tik Tok and then just be con L 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 what who who who who who are you fans of who inspired you to get in this business like talk about anything yeah you even SE some some um sugar Shan Shan Ali and his uh coach Tim they've built like a whole kind of like podcast Network where they not only talk and cover their own stuff but they they when
there's like a fight then they're covering it right and so yeah if I were if I were an up incoming MMA fighter I'd be like okay I need to have a camera guy on me at all times I need somebody putting out like five six videos per day on social media so I'm going to go to Monster Energy and say just give me like a 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 um I would 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 um you know sports are you got to take it up yourself should we go into this epic Q&A from Andrew mallum yeah I love Andrew uh if you don't know Andrew he was the uh uh he's an engineer at vaa Space Industries but also um uh uh was big in the lk9 Saga of last year was that2 2020 yeah he was the one that like replicated it and like built it and
actually tested it and it looked really promising but then it didn't go anywhere but he was actually able to get all the materials and and and run the run the process to to make it and I went down there I made a whole Vlog about it it was really fun uh also has he also has project Bob which 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 watch just chugging around the world and so that's literally what he built with project project Bob and um we got to do a whole bit on it because they're raising money for it and um it's very cool so he sent us a long message I I'll just read it all uh he says
brothers so there I was basking in the glow of a Marina del re 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 doin dospace four years ago I called my shot Babe Ruth Style with this Clairvoyant Vision I knew Elon would Ascend Doge would ignite a Revolution and the only way to profit was to become an Infamous modern artist disguised as a hard tech Twitter poster naturally I have been quietly creating a life-sized modern art masterpiece blending SpaceX Doge and
Elon himself I seen this in person it's crazy uh the wildly o over complicated path to get here really speaks for itself step one build and sell the requisite first company in my 20s five years before Hardware was cool uh two expand the teal Empire he sold this company to GE oh yeah yeah yeah that's right uh step two expand the teal Empire
obviously uh as part of the founding team of another LR named Banger step three achieve world infamy and make Twitter Fame after failing to make the rocks float shout out to cougan Doc work and chim's trolling uh step four nerd snipe every cracked and based engineer in California with project Bob launching the world's first venture-backed hobby
program so obviously once I sell it at Art basil this year to Ken G or Justin's Sun the tough choice is the Lamborghini mura 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 that you just don't see very
often teal musk kugan They're all playing on my chessboard yours in high effort chaos Andrew thank you fantastic I I saw this and and and Andrew sent this before the end of last year but we just needed we weren't going to be able to give it the proper attention on on the on the annual Awards episode um so yeah what what a
post uh I'm glad we could share it such a long way to say mura or Lamborghini miror but got the story we want that's brother Behavior right you got to give that context um and I want to see Andrew driving the F40 into the vaa parking lot parking in the handicap spot yep um just for the photo op and then taking it out and parking Lamborghinis are having a
moment but I think the mura is just a little too retro to have any sort of functionality it's going to be just more of a be if you want the lambo diabl are doing really well Merc are having a moment uh and then you get up into the Aventador and some of like the the previous generations are starting to climb a little bit there's some interesting
stuff there and for a long time the Lamborghini like real car merca would be crazy pulling up to the V offices and LP 640 like that is like that's cool and I mean if you go for the manual one like some of those are up there some of those are million dollar cars um but uh if you what about what about he didn't give this as an option but what about the
lambo Ram the Rambo Lambo the lm2 that is that is that's that's the Ultimate gundo Hard somebody's G to do it it's because it's it's a super car like by in itself like it's it has a V12 it has a V12 but the same the same engine as yeah you know it's like it's it's like got that um utilitarian like 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 B I'm pretty sure yeah it's insane um but yeah I mean F40 is just iconic uh the Lambos are having a moment but I think you got to go F40 yeah although you won't be the only one in gundo driving one because uh uh founder of impul space has one no way isn't have 40
go let's go um should we go in the timeline yeah we're only uh 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 outst we have a little bit of a change up today we have bucket polls 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 we have a little we're going to do a couple bangers and then we'll pull out and then we'll pull out a bucket pole uh just like kill T does it on Tony hinchcliff show uh so let's start with Justin lass he says took a poll of
friends and the companies they work at 100% match serious people work this week and next unserious people do not and he posted this at 6:50 a.m. on Christmas Eve I think we were podcasting at the time we were podcast we were literally podcasting at the time uh uh 100 % match interesting friends in the companies they work at yeah so everyone was
working uh yeah I mean why not I mean I do think it's um it is like a weird one because it is if you were going to give your team any week off yeah throughout the entire 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 is really
hard because I'd want to let the team take a breather 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 and then suddenly I'm just like we we need to do this like now like this has to happen um I mean hopefully like there is
a space for some sort of break from the monotony of the calendar and email and a shift so you're still working but it's a more intellectual you're reading you're thinking about long-term planning you're reflecting and yeah and and I think that for the for the people who are just like butts 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 that I 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 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 how's it going they're going to be like I'm like yeah offline
right right Matt Wang at Paradigm he says uh it still seems underrated that Bitcoin crypto is the first political block with a native asset and thus a reflexive feedback loop between price and political influence and then Kevin qua 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 uh yeah that is fascinating like like you can understand how things are going in the crypto regulatory world just by looking at the price of Bitcoin like Trump got elected there were a lot of pro crypto things happened and the price went from like 60 to 90 like immediately and it was like okay like clearly things are
50% better for this industry yep uh and and and that is very interesting I'm wondering if there's if there's more if there's more to that like political block with a native asset like I guess it I guess it just means regulatory stuff but the Nebraska Corn Farmers would like a word yeah well what I'm getting at is like I think that there
the the feedback loop is not just being able to Divine political influence and how things are going to price but also as the price gets higher there is more money to spend on political influence so the packs get bigger I mean Andre Horwitz donated by far the most to crypto packs when I looked at the data earlier this year or last year um and
and it was very clear that like if you're running a crypto fund and or your 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 an and roll and then you know oh we also need to change something with like housing because we're in Airbnb and payments it's like so many political blocks and like the it's not as focused and Consolidated whereas everyone is kind of marching and lock up in the
crypto industry um yeah it's it's it's the I think the my the only I always um whenever I've underestimated Bitcoin it's from thinking of it as an investment asset versus a religion so the difference between like the oil industry and the Bitcoin industry is people in the oil industry are like th this is a a a a resource that we fundamentally need for our way of life
but they're in it to make money right like nobody's like in oil because they just like have this deep love for o speak for yourself yeah speak for yourself um 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 uh 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
crypto that was a big part of kamla's policy is she she wanted to protect I know what you're going to say yeah yeah let's move on from that but uh but yeah and and uh this person had some crazy like you know jumping through a million Hoops to be like well actually like crypto it's easy to make money in crypto when it's illegal because there's
more scams and I was like this doesn't sound good at all like I think everyone wants a more clarity around crypto and everyone wants the scams to go away and like the pumping coins and the rug pulls to stop but we also want Bitcoin and stable coin to be legal and I don't know if we ever did we ever address this on the show we we we we talked about um 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 Don perryon we buy yeah and you know
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 B 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 uh and uh and
some and then we said oh yeah we're not going to do a coin of course like but uh you can just buy lvmh because we're going to be buying so much Don paring 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. fund coin they're not unique you can just
make a new one you can make 25 of the same name they're not even like contract address yeah exactly which is ridiculous like it's it's less scarce a pump do funcoin is less scarce than a domain like yeah like what and so uh and so immediately like we see this uh this post goes up I didn't even notice it I get a 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 uh and he's like yeah like I I just put up uh a coin on pump. fun and it mooned to 200k in 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 in my brand um and I was like now's not a good time but let's talk soon dude and uh and then I just like hung up and texted him like love the energy but like you know not a good time like let's talk later and then we
started texting and we realized that like well I noticed because people there were suddenly hundreds of comments replying to people replying to our post saying LVH is here like you can you can buy it and then and then we were getting like a bunch of DM from people saying what's your address anyways uh and um luckily it blew over but it w there was like a
million and a half dollars of volume traded like almost within like you know within 30 minutes went way up and then went way down um and and it was frustrating CU like in that one hour it was like everyone was having dinner with the 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 like I see what you guys are doing there somebody commented somebody commented was like angry at us and I had to I I replied from the brand account and I was like we have literally nothing to do with this we were we were we joke about lvmh all the time it's very clear that
like part part of this not tied to us at all we didn't put out a post or whatever uh so very very frustrating and uh stop launching shitcoins it's low class and vulgar and uh we don't support it here take a company public yeah it's much higher status spack something yeah back something um yeah please um thank you and uh 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 uh it is ski season we've been talking about um great uh Veil quite a bit this episode and our own travels and so I have a fantastic car for ski season a uh Safari Style 1986 Porsche 9111 Carrera Coupe and uh if you don't know about giving a safari
treatment pronounced just Coupe no no no it's Coupe Coupe really that's like the proper oh this is like por Porche right okay okay interesting okay I've been usually the American pronunciation you been in France too long okay um so break it down uh so anyways get it um yeah you can pick this up bringatrailer.com uh
great uh great auction site I've bought and purchased a 911 there before site unseen no PPI just sent it worked great no issues with it got very lucky ended up making money when I sold itce it's great um but uh but anyways I love the Safari treatment on on these things they look incredible and it gives you that extra ground clearance you can go you
can take it up to the mountains you got extra headlights more light that's great and um yeah this just looks like a fantastic example so just zip you from SF to Tahoe and back yeah it's a perfect car to get to SF you don't have to worry about superchargers you don't have to worry about planning your routes if if you got gasoline you're good to go and
very very reliable cars you can put a lot of miles on them so anyways don't let this one uh don't let this one get away fantastic well let's uh let's go to a bucket pole this is interesting okay 47 likes by Anan Sall he says with YouTube University at their disposal gen Z is going to be the most entrepreneurial generation ever it's unreal how
sophisticated many are in business primarily due to YouTube and online communities not school sent on Christmas at 6 am. let's go grind cont uh interesting yeah uh super valuable I mean I remember learning a ton on uh on uh what was that open Act mitx or edx there was like this open courseware movement in like 2009 2010 where all the
top universities started like open sourcing their or just putting their videos out it was insane so you just get to watch Andrew in like the best machine learning researcher in the world teach machine learning foundations like ml11 yeah and he breaks it down it's great you can just sit there and watch it and you can it be like much more proof that
you're just paying for a luxury brand when you go to a College I you pay 70 80k a year true but also just like like even though the colleges do follow like a bit of a power law where like Stanford Harvard MIT are going to be like the best like there are even within the schools like extra power law people like uh like Andrew ing for example has had
like a remarkable result and Sebastian thr 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 gonna want to go to University of Chicago yeah or if you want uh you know great economics and
law like business go to 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 when 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 uh I I walked into like econ 101 and our book was uh by n
Gregory manke and he taught the course over at Harvard so often times I just go over there and just go to his class cuz I just be like I why do I why am I not just going to the source instead of being this like seconder Professor like teach it I could just go over there and it's like a huge conference I feel like I learned more I
learned more uh from podcasts than YouTube like even though YouTube was already like for me from from uh when I like joined the World adventure around like 22 after gradu Ting college and like started kind of participating I felt like I listened to probably thousands of hours of like Venture related podcast 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 Click baited or like like they're just meant to be too much entertainment and like they're
edutainment but they're mostly ENT um but for like the high L 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 PhD program she she apparently like teaches like makes videos about AI ML on YouTube and she went and said she was dropping out of her PhD program to like just do only fans but the thing that I apparently she had already been doing that for a really
long time so she she was going to continue to just make the same videos and still do only fans it wasn't like I'm quitting my PhD and then I'm doing only fans yeah so anyways classic internet just like got blown out of this proportion and all this stuff um let's go to will NTI 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 bear at bpn George Heaton at represent 247 Chris Bumstead C buum 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 brand should you go and bootstrap your own personal brand no 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 Le brand
and like your customer should know who they're buying from and there's value there but but like the the bpn guy doesn't he's not like here's how to build a business one one right which is like I feel like on X it's easy for Consumer Founders to just start posting about the business of their business versus like the product product like I'm
selling like yeah if I'm selling like a supplement there's like a proof of body there that's like you should be looking good basically yeah uh it's interesting because I it does go back to like it's it's really really hard to build a uh a consumer physical product brand without some sort of hero partnership or influencer I don't know look at the ridge look at the ridge guys
like they just it's it's you can absolutely if you have a super compelling product just buy um just buy these Partnerships and really invest in them right like Bridge really invested in their relationship with theovon early MD now I have another example the guy that I was in the Alps with a year ago he's running a like really big um it'll
be an amazing Story one day we'll talk about it they raised a very small amount of money they 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 in 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 um it 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 the
whole thing is like if you're if you're building an Enterprise or B2B product and you can get in front of a thousand business owners that can have a dramatic effect on your business but if you're building a cpg business with selling a $20 product like Lucy yeah Luc like X doesn't move the needle for sales for Lucy it doesn't matter how many bangers
you have in a month just never going personality driven partnership with someone like Dave poroy at barille sports wasal Joe Rogan um 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 of like with rora we we've partnered with this guy Eric Hinman who you've probably seen on Instagram and so like we made sure had back to Nike with Jordan you know it's like yeah Phil Knight wasn't the guy but Jordan was and so you 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 um it it's it's it feels like it's more important than ever I'm trying to think of counter examples like Mercedes do they have I mean Lewis Hamilton like there's like every brand kind of has like someone I feel like no matter what it is maybe BMW doesn't I
don't know It's Tricky but let's move on to liquidity breaking Kim Kardashian is no longer managing Sky Partners the private Equity Firm she co-founded with former Carlile partner J semmons the least shocking news I've ever heard Kim should have launched a consumer VC and YOLO checks alongside tier one funds yeah so very relevant to
the last topic which is that uh yes businesses Thrive when they're personality driven but just being a personality by itself is not going to lead to outside 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 hold Co or rollups 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 bunch of really really really smart people you're not going to go the argument against like Kim K doing a PE fund and like being wildly successful there is like if you're a
billion dollar PE fund and you're buying a business you could literally buy the business and during that process go to Kim Kardashian and say hey we want you to be like part we want you to be the face of this and like we're going to give you like $10 million a year and like build that into the deal she doesn't need to run the PE fund too
um and so I think I think we're um everybody's just realizing like how hard everything is to do well like it's not easy like private Equity is like deceptively simple it's like okay we just buy businesses for one price and sell them for more lever up but you lever up but a lot of the times when like a business is being sold it's because the operators that are in place
are like we're not going to be able to grow this more anymore than we already have or like we think we're at a local maximum so like now is the time that we're going to sell it yeah and so if you go there and buy that business well then you need it's now your responsibility to like continue growing it at a rapid rate or grow it faster I
guess what is odd is that it was a private Equity Firm with a car partner and separate LPS and like separate strategy as opposed to just like the Kardashian hold Co yeah because I could see a world where like this is an example of like a private Equity style deal where huberman and Andrew Wilkinson bought a brand and were able to take it
to the next level but it's like it's within the huberman like Universe now I think 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 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 buy a company in that category and bring internal have um it's called lemi now that the Kardashians like a supplement brand that I think 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 post from Lulu brother of 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 mix nuts and it's a quote tweet of Jack uh Jack Reigns friend of the pot he said airport lounges are insane because they appear
to be one of the most legitimately dangerous credit card incentives with the potential to Giga fry your personal finance habits for the sake of stacking points oh it's so true man such such a the airport loues are so lame I I walk into 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 Evan water and glass bottles I walk in if it's an international flight I'd 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 Evan and then I go sit at the gate and then I get on the flight I don't I don't care about like if you're getting to the airport so
early that you have to use a lounge you up your whole travel plan also if you think about it how many flights did you take last year if you didn't miss a single flight you're getting to the airport too early yeah you have to have to miss the only thing that uh that that that's sort of uh ironic about this is if there was going to be an airport
lounge that was amazing it' be a ramp airport lounge it'd be like you'd have like the history of like the greatest entrepreneurs on the wall power byra it would just be like various you could scoop it' be a library you could scoop protein powder like you could get like protein powder be like yeah weights it'd be dead ramp Lounge get a deadlift and
read ramp don't make us play Silly games to get access to the lounge but it do a lounge at some point do a lounge yeah it's great okay a bucket pole what do we got what do we got let's see okay uh let's do this one okay oh signal oh we're on credit cards again we're getting lucky here signal says 2025 credit cards AMX 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 so with cards I I don't pay attention to them at all I just let the points acre for decades and then eventually I'm okay guess I should go spend these um and then like once every few years I run
into a dude who's just like completely minmaxed 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 uh but I like that he did my homework for me because this actually sounds pretty good I might have to get this uh
unless I just put my whole uh family on ramp and just uh and just run entire I I I know an angel investor in ramp who did that he was like I'm going to set up an LLC for my family just so I can put it on ramp and have credit cards and do everything through ramp and and they were like yeah that's not really the point it's like a business credit card
but uh I really really hope that at some point they launch a consumer card because it' be 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 um but but what what do you think you have MX Platinum I do uh travel loues you just don't use the lounges I just don't use the I I
mean aren't the rewards better yeah but US Bank has 4% cash back on everything that feels like a scam that seems like a scam did you see that if that was a crypto company would be like would be like oh yeah you're definitely embezzling uh US Bank is struggling I guess or something I don't know it's kind of yeah I guess so here's the thing
I'm assuming they give you that crazy reward and you it money with them and they give you like nothing on the actual apy like 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 you know who knows I I I just like try to um every year instead of
like optimizing credit cards I just like try to hit 100x investment every single year and then it you know it pays for itself pays for itself uh let's go to Grimes she says insane to demean horse girls could not agree more y 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 but we unironically Pro horse equestrian Enthusiast exactly um 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 were on the equestrian sort of wave so um but but also uh Pro ERS that got a lot of liquidity starting to build a stable y
it's a great way to engage with nature and deploy a lot of capital yeah and there's still an element of risk reward Financial incentives you can make money y you can lose money uh there's a lot of risk and uh this year we're getting our own racehorse and and race horses are uh completely resistant to artificial intelligence not going anywhere um Y and
yeah I mean for a long time the horse girl thing was uh 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 uh and it was also just like trying to take a shot at like the upper class essentially was
like oh you grew up with horses like you must be rich and like have nothing to say in this world um but if you talk to people that red horses like they're wonderful people my son takes horseback riding lessons my daughter will take horseback riding lessons we're going to have a horse named brother that we're to take all the way to the Kentucky Derby
so uh very Pro horse uh it's and you can be Pro equestrian and still joke about the equestrian lifestyle right like we're Pro Tech Pro business we joke about tech and business all the time and also I mean if you're if you're going fox hunting regularly like you have to do that on a horse so um there you know you really just got to uh think of use
the right tool for the job um let's go to Andre karpathy he has a long post here about deep seek the Chinese artificial elligence company making it look easy today with their open weights release of a frontier grade llm tuned on a joke of a budget 248 gpus for two months $6 million for reference this level of capability is supposed to
require clusters of closer to 16,000 gpus the ones being brought up today are more around 100,000 gpus EG llama 3 uh while deep seeks V3 looks to be a stronger model at only 2.8 million GPU hours 100 uh 10x less compute or 11x less compute if the model also passes Vibe checks EG llm Arena rankings are ongoing my few quick tests went well so
far it will be a highly impressive display of research and Engineering under resource constraints um does this matter to you don't you need large GPU clusters for Frontier llms no but you have to ensure that you're not wasteful with what you have and this looks like a nice demonstration that there's still a lot to get through with both data and
algorithms very nice and detailed tech report too reading through um this is very interesting yeah this kind of took over the Internet over the uh over the uh break but there was uh I think there was like a lot of so the funny thing they dropped it didn't 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 and 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 um but yeah
some something about how like most like most advancements yeah word grammar says I genuinely don't know how to feel about China casually mogging every us lab then dropping it for fre as open source I simultaneously feel a deep sense of concern for our national security and a deep sense that wag me and intelligence too cheap to meter is at hand so uh kind
of 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 were able to leverage open AI models and then like yeah Leap Frog 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 GPT 4 it would
also give you some like not the full weights of the model but like a a a sampling of how that like response was calculated and if you got enough of those you could kind of do the math backwards to create the model weights or or estimate the model weights and get pretty close and he was like kind of running the numbers and he was like yeah
so like to exfiltrate the model with this with the like you get the text responses and then you also get you basically just train your new model the actual API yeah and it was like for that was like less than a million dollars or something to like Ste and I think they like patched that and cleaned it up or something but it's still like very risky
and then there's also just the question of like did they have a spy yeah very very possible I just don't trust anything that comes out of the Far East yeah the wrong hemosphere I just don't uh let's go to dystopian GF she says anyone with an IQ of 130 plus should be required by law to lift weights resentful nerds with no connection to
the physical world will be the death of us 27,000 likes addendum skipping leg day will result in fines and possible jail time if a repeated offense good post it's funny but yeah I mean obviously uh the reason that we need these people to lift weights is we need we want to invest in more people that are in the thousand pound club that that are deeply intelligent and te
technical so also with intelligence too cheap to meter and AI on AGI on the frontier you need to be going golden retriever mode you need to be golden retriever maxing which means getting hot getting friendly and getting dumb don't worry about learning anything more pumping that IQ out with stimulant ad rolls out deadlifts are in deadlifts are
in yeah it's un getting diced is underpriced I agree completely it's it's it's never been more important to to focus on physical fitness it's not too late winter Winter's like halfway over almost 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 3mon cut right for June 1st summer season you'll be on the beach you have an extra 10 pounds of muscle on you'll be TB meetups in Europe this summer you're going to want to look diced yeah you're going to want to be diced you're not going to want to be hanging out at 20% body fat I just I actually I
actually like I 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 res 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 plans you can download these apps for $5 a month that'll tell you exactly what to do and just go in and do it and it's it's not free but it's basically free if 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 here here's the algorithm for the best New Year's resolution possible uh sleep a bunch you know got to get your eight hours in uh gram of protein per body weight per pound of body weight so you're getting high protein high protein diet exactly uh and then 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 com Health marker that matters and then anytime he does a long post comment
didn't read I bench more than you exactly exactly that's the way uh do we have promoted post uh somebody one of our one of our reply reply guys is going to take that to heart and honestly be good I mean Brian's a good friend and also just a good uh he's a really good sport so he'll just play along with it yeah I'll just play along with it but it it is
truly the only heal oh oh your free hemoglobin is at 75% I don't care what's your bench is it still 240 Brian Because unless you're a mass monster I'm not listening I'm not listening yeah that is the funny thing it's 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 cuz historically that was the only way to break through 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 he could be 10 times big from an audience standpoint he could
be Death Star delts Death Star delts it would be amazing uh promote a post from our friend Preston Holland he says another ex-friend started flying private they bought us six .25% share of a Phenom 300 with air share for 550k let's go so perfect Brothers uh make your New Year's resolution to start flying private more uh one of the ways
you can do that is buying a part of a jet uh if you want to do that go reach out to Preston Holland he is a fantastic guy got to hang out with him at uh David Center's last um event and uh nobody better to help you break into the world of private Aviation absolutely the man and an absolute dog in the skies absolute dog let's do a bucket pull what
do we got here let's still picking through with the ice cube yeah you got it got okay here we go oh this is funny uh Mr overplayed Mr over prayed says being drunk is a choice just had around 17 shots everyone else stumbling and mumbling I am laser sharp I don't allow drunkenness into my body ever self-control by the power of the Holy
Spirit I will be up at 4:00 a.m. May no demons have dominion over my body Spirit greater than flesh 100K likes 100K GL we pulled that out of the bucket that's a great one I mean it's so funny being drunk as a choice also somewhat true it is it is there's some real truth to it yeah also last trip so I I the only time I I've drank in Q4 was episodes so I
really don't drink I really I really think that there's this massive discourse about oh should you drink it's carcinogenic huberman's on like the never drink I think you should only drink Don perion yeah and nothing only when you're celebrating yes yes but you can celebrate constantly but on this trip I I whatever I was having like
drinks I was having shots I couldn't for the life of me get get drunk and I didn't understand I didn't understand why because 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 I just I enjoy being locked in and so no amount of shots is going to disrupt that yeah
and it's a skill issue skill skill issue it's great uh this was an interesting story over the break uh Drew Fallon says accounting firm bench has gone out of business after 13 years they raised $113 million they did $5 million seed in 2014 then a $13 million series a 16 million series B 18 million B1 60 million series you see in 2021 their their Enterprise
Value was 232 million and in 2024 zero and they closed and people were really upset because it closed uh like very unexpectedly and so it's an accounting firm contract accounting firm for startups and so companies would use them as outsourced accounting and um people were kind of getting ready for a year- end close and then they just get a notif
notification hey like your accountant just quit B uh and see I I I used to be um 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 I I don't think for some re like eventually software will get so good 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 B basically like one shot your company if you don't execute perfectly um but the real the interesting thing here we need to do a
deep dive on the guy that bought this company because he's like buying a lot of companies he has like I think it's employer. comom 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 um how he grew the business and then was and then was pushed out and so a lot of people were very upset they were said
name names let us know who is on the board you should never take money from these people again and it's interesting like that that that is true that they ran into the ground but uh there are always two sides to those stories I do well what I like about this founder and what he did is he got whatever very trally booted out of the company
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 really he he in that time he started and sold another started and had a successful exit now he runs their like accounting product of
mercury so he's he's had a good story that's great great I wonder it' be cool maybe he'll get back involved with bench now that this new owner oh yeah maybe Redemption AR so yeah it's interesting that was cool yeah well um always a stupid move to but also the The Venture debt thing I don't uh why does a Services business need Venture debt exactly yeah I don't
understand we got to have we there somebody just announced a new Venture debt fund that was like teal back you saw it we should have that person on the show and talk about why the should anyone ever do venture de 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 I think about Venture debt as just yeah but for the right but not for a cash Based Services business 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 like why is there so much Equity going into these companies well it's because it's extremely high risk right versus if you're a manufacturing company and you need to capex a bunch of plant property equipment PP and um 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 evid and we pay our debts or whatever you know um 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 uh 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 they actually do some really cool stuffs with uh stuff with their uh 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 finan I understand it for I understand it for
these businesses that that basically have these bigger working capital requirements but but adding debt onto a business like bench where you're just kind of like okay give us money we'll give you the service give us the money we'll give you the service yeah it just seems like it doesn't immediately make sense for that type of business yeah um
seems very rough anyway uh let's go to Nat fredman this was a huge story um he said we did it we tested 300 B Bay Area Foods it's so funny that we said 40,000 I uh when we were joking about this we said we tested 40,000 Foods because I was like I just want it to be higher posted that we didn't post that not yet oh okay we got to post that but
anyway um oh did we not okay uh anyway um we did it we tested 300 Bay Area foods for plastic chemicals we found some interesting surprises the top fi five findings in our test results our tests found plastic chemicals in 86% of all foods with flates in 73% of the tested products and bisphenols in uh 22% it's everywhere we detected flights in
most baby foods and prenatal vitamins hot foods which spend 45 minutes in takeout containers have 34% higher levels of plastic chemicals than the same dishes tested directly from the restaurant the 1950s army rations we tested contained surprisingly high levels of plastic chemicals um almost every single one of the foods we tested are both within are within both us FDA
and eufa regulations uh check out our full results below and they put up plastic list.com there were a bunch of other notes or.org a bunch of other notes about this one Boba te equals 1.2 years of safe BPA consumption there was a a whole food stake that was surprisingly high in in P yeah so two Plastics two notes on this so one all this was done
by Labs which is Justin May's Brothers 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 um uh testing like baby food so there's these new requirements around testing they came out and they they nick uh and Justin had had uh made you know a
fortune in bone broth had to do a bunch of testing uh and so they had experience a paino themselves so Nick starts light Labs um and that the company's been doing phenomenally uh in part because there's this all this new interest around posos and microplastics and things like that so uh second I think the big takeaway uh from this is that legal does
not mean safe so the government has actual regulations around the levels of the amount of that can be yeah in food and that legal level is is usually way above what is considered healthy right so in a perfect world you have zero posos or microplastics that you're ingesting but they're going to get into the food to some degree and so um I
think that that to me should should be the most eye openening thing about this is you cannot rely on government regulations to uh 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 one out of million yeah one out of a
million right but um but but but still like the the these legal legal levels are so much higher than safe yeah I I I think there's there's a few things that I take away from it one is like it is everywhere they 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 Stu Ste and it has plas everything has plastic in it so it so it exposes this need for like some sort of more systemic approach to like okay let's find out where the biggest sources of contamination are like up the chain like someone with the
steak thing was was identifying the fact that uh the the hay bales that the cows eat were wrapped in plastic and so when those get cut like sits in the Sun but also when it gets cut like literally there's just chunks of plastic the cows are accidentally eating so they're just literally eating plastic um and so it's like like yeah you can do a little it's
the same thing with like oh like cure the environment by like driving an electric car when it's like okay actually maybe just like moving to nuclear and solar at The Source Point is like what we need to do and that's has a much bigger impact it's probably the same thing here where like there's a little bit that you can do with being
like okay I'm going to eat this burger instead of that burger and I'm going to make a consumer choice but like those consumer driven changes are always much harder than just like figuring out where this where the actually biggest power law like effect going after that the right response is you see this report and you're like I want to avoid posos
and microplastics do stuff like look at how you if you make coffee at home Y 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 you don't want to be having that every single day having your little micro
plastic coffee every single morning find the really obvious stuff and that and then also there's a bunch of things that you can do like that are Downstream like uh 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 cleaning yourself out that's likey blood letting
thing blood letting exactly or or I'm seeing you know throw uh if you're busy you don't have time to give blood throw some leeches on your back before you put on your suit that dude that's so gross that's so disgusting uh it is a little bit of like a skill issue here I think like uh like it's not very Lindy to be deathly terrified of microplastics like
at some point you do just need to man up and be like yeah I'm being poisoned but it doesn't matter because I'm a man um but uh I I do love this because it's like a phenomenal use of of Nat's money and it's like we there's another post I'm sure in here about like a guy who made a lot of money and didn't really know what to do with it and it's
like Nat has found a great Vector for you know like just going and doing a really impactful project that's off his own balance sheet and he has no idea how it's going to make m think want it for but do something that a and so if you do up with generational wealth like instead of just go and do a cool project like this it's so it's so cool yeah because
he spent half a million dollars yeah millions of people can benefit from it ex might create systemic change in the industry the the other take away everything is if everything is toxic it actually means that you need to focus on detoxification so like sauna is the obvious one uh sauna a few times a week fig figure out how to do it you can it
it is the number one way to detoxify like broad I thought it was a good place to read The Wall Street Journal yeah yeah it is a good place to read The Wall Street Journal um but yeah that 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 going to sauna yep five days a week figure out how to
do it you know don't have to buy a sauna in order to do it go to the gym or whatever uh do we have another promoted Post Yeah again it's ski season so know that we have to promote the Lamborghini s go this is this is the alphas speec the Sabia desum uh and they're practically giving this thing away this thing they're listing this on Dupont Registry at
$49,000 what a great spec uh 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 RTO there's the tararia which is V8 yeah and so if you want a V10 this is the one to get it's it's the final year fantastic it's such an economical purchase because you don't it comes with
the roof racks so you don't have to go and buy these aftermarket roof racks you're kidding but I I I wouldn't be surprised if that car holds a lot of value oh I think so I think they I think they're but a car like this they're so cool here's here's my advice for all the brothers out there buy two yep garage Queen one yep daily Drive the other make
it your little Weekender you know this is legitimately the perfect car to take up to Valley I'm still going to call it cuz de is over um do you know the whole yeah I talked to somebody who was on was skiing this weekend and they were like uh oh yeah my my uh my ski instructor was like a huge like and just wouldn't shut up about
like how I can't call it squa 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 got to just troll this guy and be like yeah can we hurry it up like the Redskins game's almost on yeah I grew up skiing at squa I will
die what do they call it now still Palisades okay Palisades not a bad name but s pal is a good name actually squa Squad Squad such s it's not even offensive is it like what no I think it I think it meant like I think it literally meant like a slur it's just like word it was a for I think it I think it was like Native American
phrasing for like 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 stado uh if you do over to 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 um not so bad woman
yeah not too bad I like that that's great should we go to a bucket Pole what do we got here uh this one it's on the old paper oh there's some deep ones in here let's see um okay oh here we go we got oh this is good this is good uh from Captain Nemo friend of the show uh he he is he is I hung out with this guy bun I love him uh Captain Nemo he says uh convinced some
Ultra nice hotels thank Aman Raffles hotel belir are actually intelligence operations run at a loss anytime I've looked into who owns them they're backed by Russian Middle Eastern or Chinese money that's closely tied to foreign governments plus the hotel's self- select for powerful or ultra wealthy clientele likely to divulge useful info
that could be recorded relatedly the Aman Global the Aman'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 it's Chinese owned oh interesting uh strategically placed in in power centers around the
world and yeah wouldn't stay at the Rosewood No period interesting they would steal all our podcasting Secrets like okay the secret to podcasting is record every single day yeah create a platform for your absolute boys yeah and then they would they would us I I I disagree with this I think that I think that if these are indeed intelligence
operations we need to be staying there constantly because once a foreign oligarch hears our takes they will become American capitalists they will be convinced and so I could just imagine they'll see us playing with our mod retro they'll be like oh my God this is amazing I got to stop doing we got to we got to get an ally ship going with these
guys uh it's a real like I can change her situation yeah I mean so I I maybe they are intelligence operation I don't care I'm still staying there they're intelligent operations I'll tell you that John I love spending money very intelligent to spend some to operate out of an Aman 365 days of the year yeah I don't know this seems like uh I give
this I give this uh three tinf foil hats out of 10 three yeah yeah yeah it it 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 Aman is widely known Lots Russians stay at am on 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 didn't see that the Tucker thing Tucker whatever and he's like like check it out like it's not a third world country I love that one so funny um I don't know don't just don't waste any time time at you know four star hotels um that's the takeaway this is fun this was fairly recent uh it's a video of Lil be
nighting Neo the robot at the 1X 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 a different different company that makes sense because I was like figure they culturally don't seem like they understand the they're very buttoned up very like we're doing partnership with
BMW we have a camp where very like the meanwhile 1X is geted yeah 1X is doing videos with Jason Carman and like you know do you know Timothy shalam was kned by it's a quote of that one yeah and so I think that's where they got the idea because uh Timothy shalam got knighted by Lil be the Bas God who has some I mean based is a word because of L be you know that
right he has some amazing quotes uh extremely like online Internet person there's this hilarious quote internet rapper in many ways yeah she's like shout out to everyone on the internet our backs are hurting our eyes are hurting but we keep posting it's like and he said this in like 2006 or it's a wild clip like he's just the man um and
uh yeah very uh one of those Rappers that's like you know transcended into like this bizarre Avant guard artist world where he's been an influence for a lot of people so it's uh it's awesome and hilarious that they got Lil be 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 kisat or
something or I show speed or something you got if I'm going if I'm going to go along a humanoid robot company they actually are doing all the right things yeah likees facto winner if you're just like Normie thinking about who's going to win and then figures running this very like corporate partnership like you know oh what's the Pure Play asset almost like
how would a financial manager see building a portfolio around the future well they need a robotics play and Tesla's too highly valued and you're not getting a pure play so you go for a figure and then One X is like we're just kids building this stuff it's like awesome we're having fun on the internet I love it I love it um we should uh we
should reach out to them and see if we could get a 1x that that could just sit here and be the third coost stuff yeah that'd be great um this is uh yeah here here here's the here's the one this startup used kaut streams to go insanely viral but no no one is paying attention to how this campaign was actually engineered new
playbook being executed before our eyes they do streams with a twitch streamer product is a core part of the content not just a lame integration the goal is to set up as many clippable moments with the product is possible pay Discord kids 30 Cent CPM yes you saw that right to farm Tik Tok clips from the streams they're all competing to win the budget
allocation as fast as possible 50 million views guaranteed at 30 cents CP PM so yeah very interesting it's crazy because it's like it's not a cons are you bored why are you playing Tetris I just like the sound I like the soundtrack it's hilarious um that's great um but yeah I mean uh I I mean there's so cable 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 with the twitch streamers it's like much harder to I tried it was always hard to do Integrations on Twitch I I did I would do a bunch of I would do a bunch of stuff with with Ridge back in the day
but I'd tell a twitch streamer okay we're 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 does it's not it's 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 1X I mean humanoid robot is like the most inherently viral product you could possibly be building right now um the question is just like I'm we're we're I'm working with a uh portfolio company that I won't name yet but we're going to be able to go they're going to give it a gun oh and uh we're going to be able to
go make some some content um I want to I mean I think I think we should yeah yeah I think we should and we're doing it it's easy to predict in the future you can predict the future if you're just doing V VCS in the future they're like they make their like list of 10 predictions and then they just create the AI agents and do all of them and
they're like wow I went 10 for 10 this year like uh 2025 prediction a tech podcaster will bench press 260 pounds it's great all this is this is funny and somewhat related to that mod retro Sam Lon says the most expensive computer Compu per unit of compute in the world and it's a TI 83 plus graphing calculator for 75 bucks did you ever
program these oh yeah I I had so much fun some of my best memories my dad so my dad was a a a high school math teacher and I had his class so I would just sit programming games did you ever did you ever have party do you remember this one which one was that maybe this was just in my high school but basically someone created a text based game uh
where it was like choose your own adventure and it had a couple different paths but it was about going to a party so I I remember this I love I love parties so it was like it was like you go to this high school party and it was like what do you want to do like do you want to drink do you want to flirt and like one of them was like you could
actually get laid and then I 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 um clearly uh you know he was like in you know in an English class and read some Shakespeare and heard Afterglow it was like I'm GNA put this in the game
but then you could go in and edit the program and you could change the name so it was like oh you run into your boy Jordy there or whatever it was like really fun um and and it all it all ired having this cable the connector cable and nobody had these by default CU they wouldn't ship with them now I guess they do and then you could have your game and
you could pass it along it was like the first example of like virality basically uh and there there were a bunch of other games that you could like put in you could also cheat and put note cards was snake I'm trying to remember you could you could put SN in there Tetris a little bit uh I just thought it was I just thought it was the coolest thing
that I could program my calculator that was supposed to be just for yeah 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 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 different things and all of a sudden you've built like this text game uh good times with the ti 83 great times after I after I uh went through my programming my TI 84 era I would uh I would I got into dosing my dad's website which would
host the homework on it so I'd be running this like Windows machine in our house like in the corner and like my room just like dosing my dad's website I always had these visions of like people like busting down the door being like because I I mean I I ran into something similar where uh my dad had a server where you could just like store files it
was basically like an FTP server like precursor to Google Drive by like a like 10 years or something so it was like if you wanted to put something on the Internet you just upload a upload a file there and and he'd use it for work and like little things like host a website on the server and he just had a buddy that gave it to him and didn't charge
him on like a on like a consumption basis 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 and so I got access to it and I was really big in the Counter-Strike community and so uh what I figured was like the big thing in the
Counter-Strike community at the time was like these like Vibe reels basically this is like going back to my old editing days uh basically what you do is you'd 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 um and it was like iconic and so uh if you could get into one of those it like canonized you as like one of the greatest players of all time and so what I realized was that uh people needed video editing skills and I could do that and then people also needed hosting and so I was like I'll edit this one if I
can put myself in it and they 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 Fragger Die 2 or some sequel to this thing and uh and I and I host it and then the link goes out on uh IRC do you remember Internet relay chat this was like precursor it's what slack is like
copying basically have channels and then people post it and it just starts going viral and people download this like massive video file this is before YouTube and and 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 is just like what the did you do like like like but I I I like this guy needs Char me now like a czy b i I don't know if he actually I don't know if the bill actually 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 like expected volume yeah yeah exactly I had a viral Banger you know don't hate the player hate the game yeah but no longer now you just uploaded Tik Tok kids have it easy
to anyway uh let's move on to T one more 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 uh I think you just have to it doesn't say here but you just have to do
hashtag uh Red Bull fund and they will send you $4 to buy a Red Bull doesn't matter what you're doing it's got to be cool wait that's what it is yeah it's $4 $4 so they got mro Grant so if you're listening to this uh go do something cool and when you need a Red Bull post about it and what is Justin Mars again is like a thousand or a couple
Grand uh yeah it's I think it's like two grand or two grand so you got the teal fellowship with a with 100 grand grand then you got Justin Mars with two grand you got this $ so next time you're in a pinch and you need a Red Bull uh 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 you need be doing something hit a PR hit a PR in the gym push some sick code build a demo stay up all night learn a new programming language and this is the internet at at its best it's it's fantastic that that that should be more viral they need we have like the the TB Dom fund there's a couple couple Brothers in the community
yeah um and uh yeah you know if you're really in need we we'll drop you off a bottle of Dom okay let's do one more bucket pull and then we'll close out with the this Banger and get out of here deny too long that one's kind of boring let's see I I want something that's like you know fun and easy um it's not a straight raffle no we're going through it oh this is a good
one I like this one uh signal great poster Scarlet Johansson was perfectly posed to be the definitive voice of AI if she' 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 royalty is two insane fumble that's a great concept I I remember when the whole thing went down al man posted her couldn't help himself and then it all came out that well who posted it was it rude on his account who knows yeah yeah knows Ghost Rider that
day um but uh 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 m i mean there there is plausible down side where it's like you could get it to
say something bad and it sounds like it's her and or or or or or it's just like oh people start using it to do movies anymore though yeah she's in the Marvel universe so like they're constantly cranking out sloth yeah me there's always questions like okay well now you can generate her voice perfectly like maybe the next time that there's an
animated movie she doesn't get the deal like of course like that's not really going to pencil out because that licensing deal is going to be different than like you're not just going to be able to use a cloned voice in a real Hollywood production but there's always like the fear of that and like okay maybe the YouTube videos and like the
you can already if you want to clone her voice you can do it clearly open AI did it yeah um 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 um 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 they've resolved the 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 Scarlet Johanson like yeah it did not seem that
close uh it seemed more like generic and like like most these llm most these AI things they they feel very like the average of everything every answer feels like the average of everything and then the New York Times gets upset and says like oh it's exactly like us it's like well it's kind of like the average of you and the Wall Street Journal and the
Washington Post and The Economist 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 uh good win for her but let's finish with this Banger of all time 1 million views 56k likes by uh suag slore I don't know how to pronounce that but um five over 5%
like right 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 20125 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 it's a real Testament to like how popularized these like uh 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 lockin lock 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