14: Alex Zhang - Curating Cultural Playgrounds

Episode summary: Alex Zhang (Website, X, Instagram) is a cultural curator, community builder, and creative director. Currently, he's Chief Creative Officer of Powder Mountain, a where he's working with Reed Hastings to create a globally unique ski experience that combines art, architecture, and lots of fresh Alex loves people and curating spaces and experiences for them: whether that means parties, music festivals, or mountain towns. He joined Summit Series out of school, throwing large scale events around the world and working on Powder Mountain, a Utah mountain resort the ownership group had acquired. He then joined one of the first social DAOs, Friends with Benefits (FWB) as Mayor/CEO, after being tapped by its founder Trevor McFedries to scale the tokenized social club beyond a Discord Server.

He launched FWB Fest, an annual in-person music festival and crypto conference with past performers including James Blake, Charli XCX, and Caroline Polachek. Most recently, he joined Reed Hastings to return to Powder Mountain after the Netflix co-founder acquired a controlling stake in the resort. Alex leads brand, art, architecture, and Blending culture, commerce, and "cool" is anything but a science, but Alex has made a career of it. I've known him for a decade and it's been a thrill to watch him continue to find strange intersections, blending worlds like music and tech, crypto and culture, and skiing and art.

Welcome to Dialectic, episode 14 with Alex Zhang. Before we get into the conversation with Alex, I'm thrilled to share that this episode is brought to you by Hampton. Hampton is a highly vetted private membership for founders and entrepreneurs. Company building is ultimately about people. Obviously, the center of that is your core team, your collaborators, your co-founders. But there's another element of entrepreneurship. It actually can be quite lonely, which is the unique experience that you go through as a founder or CEO of a company. Finding peers who can actually understand what you're going through can be really hard.

One of the things I've benefited most from in my career is having a variety of mentors, advisors, trusted friends, people who have less context in the day-to-day, but give you a different granularity of perspective because they're not staring at the problem super close up all the time. So what is Hampton? It was co-founded by Sam Parr of My First Million and The Hustle. They have over a thousand members. As I mentioned, it's highly vetted and they look for founders with either three million in revenue or three million raised or who have sold their company for at least $10 million.

And the goal is to create a place both digitally and physically where you can find like-minded people who actually understand the day-to-day of what you're going through and who you can zoom in and zoom it out with. There's a few core parts of this. First, you'll be put in a group of eight with seven other founders like you who you'll meet with monthly. If you're in New York or Austin, that will be in person. And they also have wait lists for Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Denver, and Miami. And the way to think of that is really the center of things.

You're sort of personal board of advisors and the group you're going to get to spend the most time compounding with and building trust with. I think this is the meat of the membership and really what stands out to me. But Hampton's also a digital community built on Slack where all of the members are frequently answering each other's questions, recommending service providers, talking through various challenges, and so on. And Hampton also runs a number of in-person events across various cities, as well as a handful of retreats throughout the year for founders to get together in person.

They also have speaker series, tactical workshops, and other ways for you to get expert advice on various parts of company building. I mean it when I say it. I genuinely don't think anything has been more valuable in my career than the wisdom, advice, accountability, and feedback I've gotten from what you might call a personal board of directors. And I've had to assemble that really manually. Hampton effectively gives you a one-stop shop to be able to find that. So if you're a founder or entrepreneur that fits that criteria I mentioned, I'd highly recommend you check out Hampton.

I've included a link to their member application in the description. And if you do apply, make sure to tell them that I sent you. Now, on to Alex Zhang. Alex Zhang is the chief creative officer of Powder Mountain, where he's working with Reed Hastings to create a truly unique skiing experience in Utah. I've known Alex for a decade, and it's been fun to watch him find new ways to combine culture, community, and unexpected overlaps, like music and technology, crypto and culture, and now... skiing, and art. Before Powder, Alex was the CEO or mayor of Friends with Benefits.

FWB originated as a tokenized Discord chat, but became much more under Alex's leadership, including what is surely the most unique event thrown by a crypto organization, FWB Fest. A strange cross between a music festival, crypto conference, and much more in Idlewild, California, and with past musical guests, including James Blake, Charlie XCX, and Caroline Polachek. Alex is ultimately obsessed with bringing people together in all kinds of ways, and this is a conversation about how he has continued to curate, taste-make, and build community for as long as I've known him. Alex is definitely somebody who's been in my personal brain trust over the years, and so I was so thrilled to sit down with him, and talk about what makes him special.

Here's Alex. Alex Zang, it's nice to be with you. So happy to be with you. Nice to be back in LA too. There's a bunch of through lines through your career that I think we're going to chat about today. But one of them that's sort of like a meta narrative, or at least a meta consideration, I think, is that you're blending commerce and culture. And I'm curious. Like, one intrinsic response might be that, like, commerce and culture just don't actually want to coexist, or they're kind of, like, constantly in tension.

Are they fundamentally at odds in some kind of foundational way? Or are there actually really graceful, elegant ways to navigate it, and you can kind of have the best of both worlds? Oh. Wow, okay, starting off with the meta questions. Yeah, I mean, firstly, it's just, it's fun to... to just sit down and have a conversation with you. You're someone I really respect and adore. So to just chop it up for a few hours is really, really delightful. Let's see, commerce and culture. I don't, I mean, I definitely don't have the answer to that, but I think my perspective and something I've actually been thinking about a lot lately is kind of how, I mean, obviously to an extent, capital.

and capitalism is a very like a very effective and efficient mechanism and i think it is sort of the foundational layer to how a lot of things are given sort of fuel to actually like propagate or be created or have attempts at sort of being created. And I think it sort of exists in sort of every sector of our lives. And, you know, maybe I'm over mega capitalist, but I think it's sort of, you know, I think markets are sort of everywhere. And I think to an extent art or culture, you know, sort of the underlying financial mechanics that allow for something like that to originate are pervasive and sort of exist.

and so it's more so this kind of yin and yang where both are sort of like almost like interconnected without wanting to be um and and to an extent i don't know if it totally works but i think it exists but i've been thinking a lot lately about how the the patron model has actually been sort of seemingly where most culture is meaningfully created and i say that as in like as someone who's experimented a lot and tried to find like purely equilibrium culture commerce models i don't know if i've 100 found that.

But the models that do seem to work is this notion of capital on one side of the aisle, culture on the other side of the aisle, but capital funding and financing the culture in sort of a creative one plus one abundant mind, one plus one equals three abundant mindset capacity that allows for true culture to actually flourish. A renaissance model would be, you know, Medici's and, you know, the Michelangelo and Da Vinci and the original sort of patron model where, you know, you sort of allow for these wealthy, you know, the wealthy capitalists of society to sort of finance culture for the for the for culture's sake.

And you sort of get the Sistine Chapel. Right. So it's like I've been thinking a lot about how today's day and age of things that actually trigger my excitement the most culturally often don't have a very. obvious capital financial model, but we usually have a circuitous sort of indirect. I don't want to be as reductive to say purely patron model, but the money is coming from somewhere else and there is some sort of net benefit to the whole, but it isn't like a D to C model of like I make culture and you purchase it for X dollars and everybody's happy.

So I like, you know, all that to say, I don't have the answer, but I do think that The patron model is something that I've been kind of observing. And I think that sort of finding that harmonious balance is sort of where the most interesting culture is created. We'll talk more about powder and some of the work you've done in a bit. Are there other examples of patronage either right now or recently that you've admired or have even kind of just seen as like effective? People talk about the Medici's a lot.

Yeah. Of like, how do we get that again? Right. one of my senses is actually there is a lot of that happening granted maybe it's not like the clearest shot through line or it's as you say like a little bit of a dotted line it's not a totally obvious connection but are there people even just people you think are i mean yeah i you know i love there's so many examples and i i love everything from you know, the memes where they're like, did you know that this indie girl artist's dad is a VP at Goldman Sachs, you know, or it's like that to me is the most obvious where it's like, there's nothing wrong with Nepo babies or nepotism.

It's actually what creates the space for that. Give us Claro. That's what I mean. How else could Claro, you know, sit there and bang the MIDI keyboard and figure out tunes and create something for culture, right? If she had to go work at a coffee shop to pay for her, you know, rent, she wouldn't be creating culture. Yeah, that's the ideal is that actually we get to the point where just sort of like like patronage is abundant and like put it another way, I guess what I'm the backdrop against that would be the

alternative artists who sort of like really has to struggle for a very long time gets to spend less time in their art but like there's some forcing function that makes it maybe maybe another example of this that that ties in the original question might be in art that you are helping sort of either explicitly commission or even just bring to the world there's two views they're sort of like give the artist maximum flexibility maximum budget no constraints and then the other would be like actually like constraints are kind of good granted you don't want to be so paternalistic i i think about this whether it be for commissioning art or for your like your kids it's like how much constraints are really good for creativity i'm a huge fan of constraints personally i think constraints uh force and breed creativity and frankly having maximum optionality is is is quite stalling but i think it's a balance right i think some of the most impressive let's call it cultural creations or productions throughout the history, you know, throughout history, you know, often start from a seed of infinite opportunity, but then through life and logistics, you know, you hear about a lot of projects that were like, you know, I mean, let's, you know, you brought up The Brutalist earlier.

I love that because it's like, that is, to me, I thought that film really captured a lot of creation in life, a lot of architecture, a lot of development, construction. art where it's like you start with something super pure and and but but life has its way of of of bringing introducing reality into things something happens you can't control finances tighten you know uh exactly and and and the art in and of itself is how do you adjust and move and ebb and flow through that and you ultimately land with the final creation that May not be what you originally intended, but it doesn't matter because that was always just sort of an idea and the world will only see that sort of final output.

So to your earlier question about culture and commerce and maybe examples of that and how if let's call it the most prevailing model is the patronage model, which, you know, I think there could be a harmonious society where you just have this sort of. redirected capitalist overflow into opportunities for people to create things. Like I'm not like a total UBI head of like, I think that would work, but I'm more in the like, I do think just forcing everyone to subscribe to like the explicit mass capital models won't create great art or great culture.

Or dig urgent art or whatever. Correct. And it's more so like if you believe in randomness and that randomness will allow for things. outside of the box to be created, net new things, I think you kind of need that long leash that the patronage model sort of allows for. And that's just the sort of belief of an idea, the belief in the person, the trust, you're the artist and you're coming back saying, hey, I'm way over budget, but can you trust me on this? I want to create this thing. That's where I think the things that culture for culture's sake actually, you know, where they actually originate from.

I like that. Another major through line for you, if not. at least career-wise the central one to me is that you're obsessed with bringing together people and art and like spaces or like really like i would say curating those three things and you've done that across so many different permutations whether it's we're in college it's lava lab and house parties and the radio and stuff like that and stuff like that or concert series obviously all the summit stuff both kind of pre-covid and then in covid festivals like fest now with all the powder stuff at a mountain scale it's sort of to me a little bit of like how do people come together how do they work together how do they enjoy something together even and really just like how do you have presence in space i'm curious why do you love bringing people together what is it about that experience that if i were to try to infer one thing there's a sense of there's very much a host energy uh of like let me curate something for you trust me I think that's something I really admire in you and clearly you've done it in so many permutations in your career.

Host energy. That's good. No, I appreciate all that. And I was, you know, I just turned 32 days ago. So I was just reflecting on this actually about sort of the major themes in my life and how they intersect. And yeah, I've always loved that jobs quote about, you know, you can't connect the dots looking forward, only backwards. And like, you know, if you were to ask me. you know, whatever, 10 years ago, oh, would you be building a ski town? I would be like, I don't even know how to ski.

And I don't, I've never skied before. So like, no, right. So it is a, it is a crazy, one of those hindsight type situations. But yeah, you nailed it. I would truly just say my greatest joy in life is bringing people together and hosting people. I think why and where that comes from is the fact that, you know, I grew up as a, as a sort of a first gen Chinese immigrant in a white suburban town of Claremont, California, where I didn't feel very connected or seen or integrated into my community.

And I felt a little bit, I always felt a little bit other, different. And, you know, with my parents, there's a bit of a cultural barrier. And I felt like my house felt very, it felt very cold there. And I didn't quite know why. But, you know, the metaphorical fireplace wasn't on. We didn't really do dinner at home. They worked really late. You know, they really... worked so hard to provide for me and my sister. But, you know, because of that, I was never really home. And I quickly learned that I could actually simulate those feelings of community by bringing people together.

And whether that was throwing a party when my parents weren't home and inviting 30, 40 friends over and it becoming a really fun house party to doing more elaborate sort of events. concerts, backyard shows, I quickly began to be in this sort of eternal search of a party, I guess. Maybe the party you wish you could have gone to. Yeah, or just, yeah, or even parties a little one note of like, oh, like rah-rah, just more that search of like, of community or a family and of belonging, I think. And that shows up and is manifested in a lot of different ways, but it was sort of through that that I realized, oh, I can actually create the conditions that allow for that feeling so to me like if we go back to like the most classic party sense to me like why I love parties and specifically why I love I love like party photography and party culture and you know whatever studio if it studio 54 and like all these eras of like right

And why? Because you look at it and you're like, cool, this is a moment in time that'll never happen again. Like this collection of this assortment of people in a room mixed with music, drugs, culture, fashion, like what are people wearing? What are people thinking? What's the cultural political zeitgeist in that moment? Those conditions led to whatever energy you sort of felt in that room. And so I've always been on the other side. in that i've enjoyed participating in that obviously but i've enjoyed creating and facilitating those environments and thinking about all the factors that go into it on a on a small scale of an event or venue from the lighting and the food and the the layout to the large scale of of now powder mountain of roads and and power and sewage and water and tunnels and and neighborhood lot layouts and all these sorts of things so um yeah the connecting piece is really community a sense of belonging and and you know i'll I'll lastly add that my best friends growing up in high school, they all lived on this cul-de-sac.

And I was sort of in the town over. And every day after school, I would go visit. Every day after school, I'd go to this cul-de-sac. On Thursday, I'd sleep in this cul-de-sac from Thursday all the way to Sunday. And about seven of the houses on the cul-de-sac, it was called Nicholas Street. were all owned by this group of friends and their families like it was essentially a thing where when one family moved in and the house next door went for sale they sold it to their friends and then when the next street went on sale a couple years later they sold it to their other friends and so me ben eric nate and and jimmy we all lived they all lived on this i say we because i was literally there so much they all lived on the spot we all grew up together on this block and so at its and its summation it was like 40 kids who grew up on this cul-de-sac yeah the village the village and i would just like revel in it and I would go every weekend and the doors were never locked.

You could raid anyone's fridge for whatever you wanted. It was this to me, it was the ultimate sense of freedom and bliss and and and belonging. And my macro reflection is that and kind of my joke is now whatever that is, 15 years later, all I'm doing is professionally recreating that environment. Whether it's, you know, on a mountain or with friends with benefits and summit. To me, it's this how do you suspend reality and introduce new behavioral community kind of norms and to really promote this greater sense of community. I mean, it rhymes with the notion that you ask most people what the best part of their life was and they tell you college.

And I think the reason is actually very similar, which is that you had this little period of your life where you were surrounded in high proximity with people you cared about. You had a high degree of comfort. And I think like it seemed, I mean, people in San Francisco have reinvented the version of the thing you just described pretty recently is like, oh, this is the future of how we should all live. And it's like, well, maybe this is actually a more primal kind of. thing that we all know we want or should have it's interesting i i my suspicion says that if you blip forward 20 or 50 years to how people live there's some trending directional thing that ends up i think more people probably want something sort of like this yeah and uh you know it's a it's a cold take but the whole like increased tech reliance and decrease you know increase in isolation and so increase in loneliness all that sort of stuff all those trend lines will eventually converge to like how can you live in more communal environments because of our you know probably at that point instinctual reaction or aversion from being kind of constantly wired and terminally online and needing to seek actually meaningful human connections and community and serendipity and yeah that and that in suburbs suburbs haven't helped too much although i guess you presumably you had it sort of in the suburbs yeah you can take this however you want and we don't need to go through all the levels of granularity but i'd be curious for you to riff a little bit on what makes a great event or space at like different orders of magnitude like dinner house party concert, festival, and then maybe at the biggest scale now that you're thinking about in a much more long-term durable sense of like a mountain town or a mountain resort.

Are there things that stand out at any of those stages or just broad themes, maybe some of which you just spoke a little bit about, that you think contribute to that feeling of when you're at a great party or at a great event, you feel grounded or welcome or alive? Yes, I've got my own philosophy and theory, but I'll sort of start by saying one of my favorite writings on this is David Burns, How Music Works. Chapter, I think it's chapter eight, where he talks about how to start a scene.

And I send this to anyone who asks me a similar question, because he essentially didactically writes down all the conditions and variables. that go into creating and starting a cultural scene, specifically through the lens when he was a consultant for CBGBs in various different music venues in New York in the 70s. And he talks about lighting. He talks about proximity from the stage to the bar and how if it's too far, you're going to get everyone in the bar and not at the stage. If it's too close, the musician's not going to enjoy playing in front of a bunch of people waiting in line for a drink.

My favorite thing is he kind of created this system. at CBGB's where if you were a band and you played at the venue, you would be given a drink ticket that was only valid for the remainder of that week. So it actually encouraged you to come back the next night while you were still in town because you got a free drink to then watch and support the next night's act, even if you didn't know, you know, who they were. And it was through that where Patti Smith began hanging out with the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed.

And you sort of started to get this, you know, kind of cross-pollination of culture. at a time when everything was sort of like bubbling up so a lot of really great little factors in that but yeah my my my answer my list of set of variables for that and it's maybe difficult to sort of scale up into all of those examples because they're all sort of uniquely different but you know i think it it starts with just intentionality like why why are we gathering why are we here you know and i think a strong why actually sets a really, really nice context for people showing up with a sort of certain perspective.

You know, I think birthdays are like a really interesting why is just coming off of having a small little birthday gathering because you're one degree. Everyone has a common purpose. Yeah. Yeah. So like if you're at the bar and you don't know what you're chanting, that's someone you don't know about or someone you don't know. you can easily just be like, oh, how do you know Jackson? You know what I mean? It's a kind of, and if they go, who's Jackson? It's like, you know what I mean? So I think it's like, I think having a really strong why.

In context where the why is not so obvious, g. it's not a birthday, or even like it's not a certain type of, an event for a certain purpose, or even a professional thing, easier, what about like a music festival? Like, is there something more implicit or subconscious there? Or even maybe an explicit example close to home for you, like something like FWD Fest. You have themes, but like, is that something that you're... Because inside of so much of this question, the way you started to answer it, is great events, more than almost anything else, are this really strange dichotomy of like, pretty scientific on the planner's end.

Correct. And totally like... You don't think about it at all if you're... Ideally, at least. The guest is just enjoying their day. Totally. So how does that purpose or like almost like mission statement or intention come through? when it's not so obvious or you don't even want it to be so obvious so i think whether you know it or not there's gonna be a meaning there right it's sort of whatever joseph campbell and man and his symbols and meanings like there will you will always overlay and project meanings on subconsciously or consciously as to why you're there let's take all three of those examples you just mentioned let's start with the music festival like whether you know it or not whoever curated that music lineup and why you're there is telling you a story like that they selected that arrangement of of of musical acts whether it was FYF sort of representing like peak indie, indie music, indie sleaze, like Golden Voice wasn't as much of a behemoth as it was today.

And it was sort of this counter position where when you were there, it felt like you were part of the indie music scene where A. really felt like the core of that. It was sort of this this polarization from like New York's more sort of rarefied scene to, you know, nowadays you're seeing way more actually explicitly themed music festivals, like whatever that like. almost like Heaven, where it's a throwback to all 2000s music. So it's like those are all the promoter's goal of creating meaning into that event so that when you're there, there's sort of a binding agent or a subculture that sort of gets created.

And then FWB Fest, you know, yeah, sure, the themes of the programming and the music are probably quite esoteric or perhaps irrelevant, but it's... The meaning is actually in the gathering in itself of that. It's a very, very niche overlap of people who are interested in crypto and culture. It's for, you know, whatever, it's like 10,000 people, probably like 5,000 people. And so the fact that everyone chooses, I think what made the last three years of that festival so special is that when you're there and you're, you know, two and a half hours outside of Los Angeles, you've committed to be there.

everyone there it feels like this sort of utopian idyllic yeah uh garden of eden to an extent where it's like how am i like with every single person i've ever been in a chat room with in the woods it's a very like that in itself totally i would say is the s was the essence and the beauty of what made that event so special including the friction by the way including 100 i'm actually a believer to the what variables i think friction's important i think friction i think I think democratic spaces and events are really interesting where I'm all for a list of getting into a really good party, but I'm even more for the bouncer of that party deciding on the spot.

If someone's not on the list, but they've just got a good vibe, let them in. Like what made Studio 54 brilliant was it was a list, but if you were just like a young artist or a young creative and you were there and you weren't being an asshole or you weren't being ostentatiously, you know, whatever, annoying. The bouncer had the full discretion, just like whatever at Bergheim to decide, yeah, come on in. Cause you're going to actually add a whole new variable to this party. Cause when you're on, when you're in that room, everyone can tell you're stoked to be there and you're beaming your face is your, your smile is, you know, cheek to cheek versus we've all been at like industry parties.

Everybody's looking around. And it's like, cool. We know everyone who's here. We were all together. And I was in Milan last week for the design week. And there's the, this. you know, the whatever, the New York Times T Magazine party. It's like the party everyone goes to and you're there and you're kind of like, this is literally everyone I was just with in New York and no one really wants to be here. And it was like the hard thing to, you know, and I was like, oh man. Versus I had way more fun going to the random dive bar after where it was a mix of people from that party, locals, friends of friends, and it felt way more sort of democratic.

Yeah, that studio doc is amazing. Yeah. If people haven't seen it. You got it a little bit. One other major theme I think is like these intersections. You mentioned FWB, crypto and culture, but you've kind of done a bunch of unlikely intersections, music and tech for sure in college and probably after college, a lot of some of that bleeding into Summit. Obviously now skiing and art, you're kind of like right at the fringes of these overlapping spaces. And obviously you're just like, I think very broadly attuned to subcultures in general.

Why do you think these intersections either are attractive to you or at the very least, why are they good areas to like focus on or spend time in? Yeah, I mean, I think if there's the sort of whatever the adage of like, you know, riches in the niches and thousand true fans kind of, you know, frameworks to me when you expertly or thoughtfully overlap two Venn diagrams that are two cultures that. wouldn't have seemingly have overlapped before, I think that's where you create like super fan. Because I think it's about, at the end of the day, like building a brand or creating an experience is just about delivering a really strong punch of authenticity and about feeling sort of seen, right?

When we all see a brand do something on social or whatever, that like a really great ad campaign or it's like, it's this sort of reminder that life has this randomness to it that keeps it interesting. I think it's why are we so fascinated when two celebrities date each other and Timothee Chalamet and Kylie Jenner, it's because it's random and it's like, how did this even happen? But when you like both of them and you see them together, it becomes like, oh, the universe, there is this randomness and chaos to the universe.

So to me, I think when... There's a strategic overlap and it can't be like crazy, right? It's not like we're doing like, you know, yeah, whatever, like skiing and Bauhaus architecture. It's like that exists, but it's like, it's like, it has to be thoughtful and there has to be like a true bottoms up, let's call it like market analysis of how big are each of these respected total addressable markets? Like, does this actually make sense? But when you can't identify the right overlap, I think it creates this really, really strong halo effect that.

To me, when I build marketing brands or marketing, like when I think about marketing, I think about like, how do you have an unfair advantage? And how do you think about something that only you can sort of own? Well, that's what I was going to say is, sure, there's like market analysis, but like at least the things you've done have overwhelmingly come out of stuff you really like. And the fact that you actually have pretty disparate interests. Skiing and design world like don't typically come together, not because there's some. Brilliant strategy there, but because it turns out that people who are really, really going to authentically care about those two things and spend a ton of time in them, it's just way less likely.

Same with crypto and culture or whatever, go down the list. Yeah, no, I, yeah, I mean, you, there definitely is a truth to the fact that smooth brain me is just like, I like both, let's mix them together. So it's like there is, you know, I could come at you full consultant vibes of market analysis, but like. you know and that was perhaps the financial justification but the like emotional justification was just i mean i could walk you through the logic of art and skiing which was just i love i grew to really love the mountains and i learned to ski only 10 years ago i grew to love the scale and the landscape and the just there's nothing quite like skiing where it's just you and the mountain and you know your your gear and your technical equipment and it feels incredibly freeing and liberating and present And then at the same time, I started to fall in love with, you know, sort of these outdoor artistic, sculptural experiences like Storm King or Naoshima in Japan, sort of this destination, you know, I don't want to say like Instagrammable, but it was sort of this like this, these like cultural pilgrimages started to really, really.

um become I think highly legible I think Naoshima saw like their highest visitation rates like five years after Instagram effect really kicked in because it's like how else would you find the art island in Japan except someone's posting a photo of it and you add you now add it to your bucket list when you go visit Japan right so it was like those two trends and personal experiences started to sort of occur separately just out of my own natural curiosity on the skiing side I became obsessed with equipment and gear and learning and I started getting every fancy new ski toy because it just became fun to like feel like I was leveling up right physically and and in a sport where there's like a heavy culture around it like and then simultaneously around art beginning to like these people who visit Marfa and you know it's like a it's like a it's like a check box of like you do all these experiences and so organically when We started thinking, you know, the kind of the smooth brain of being like, well, why hasn't these sort of artistic experiences taken place on a ski mountain?

And then you start to go through the logistical jujitsu of, oh, well, like labor costs and staffing and it really couldn't work. But then you actually start to realize like on a ski, on a mountain, maybe, yes, but on a ski mountain where you have 500, 600 seasonal employees who operate and maintain. the land and the ski resort, could you train ski staff to maintain art? Like it started to literally cross sort of like that. And then, you know, obviously when the conversation sort of naturally arose with Reed and we sort of shared this kind of kismet-y moment around it and he had the resources to meaningfully sort of enable it, it became sort of then honestly back to the like pure idea, then to act and then to realizing an actual product.

laden with flaws and challenges that you're sort of working through, but by then you're already committed. So then that to me is just like the process of sort of figuring it out. What I love about those large kind of architectural scale art things is there's this, I think it's from John Collison, one of the Stripe guys. He says, the world is a museum of passion projects. And I think those types of things. you and you could if you wanted to stretch it you guys have talked about desert acts obviously like burning man you mentioned marfa too like even even the terrell rodent crater stuff like talk about passion projects like truly just like one guy or a small group of people saying like i'm going to do something that doesn't and maybe it ties back to the earlier question too which is in skiing like yeah people love skiing people have built some amazing mountain things but you'd have to care a whole lot about art and doing something weird and fun to, one, want to invest in something like that in Reed's case, but two, have the people with the time and ability and capability to try to like do something.

So there's not like a, in some sense, back to the earlier question, it's hard to imagine it fitting very cleanly on some like strategy deck. Well, it doesn't because it's authentic and it's accidental and it's random. And that's the kind of purity that I think is what draws really strong ideas and, you know. Full circling it back to like all those examples you mentioned, Rodin Crater, like all of those were built on the patron model. Like there is no business model to Rodin Crater. James's business model for Rodin Crater is he sells art to like separately to finance as much as he can for Rodin, which is his magnum opus.

And I think Naoshima took 50 years of that family. working on it, going through multiple recessions, going through multiple bankruptcies and continuing to push forward. And anytime they made money in category A, they would fill it over into category B to continue to sort of sustain it. So it's like, it's clear, like there hasn't really been like an efficient capital culture model quite yet. And we've seen that capitalism gets its... Nails sunk very deep quickly into anything cultural really fast and tends to kill it. Let's, let's just say if it starts really working, but the music industry or whatever, and like top hits and what ends up happening in that sort of instance.

But to your point around, yeah, I guess that sort of that authenticity of an overlap to me, it's, you know, when we put out the release and we started to share with the world, what we were doing with, with, with powder mountain and sort of the art program, the amount of notes. and random emails i was getting from people being like this is the most like perfect insane project i feel so seen how can i get involved i grew up and then you start hearing only stories i grew up on the mountains my dad was a ski patroller weird venn dine now in new york i worked in the gallery for 20 years like you then realize oh wow there's a lot more randomness than you had imagined and then also a lot more overlaps and relevance where if we can sort of deliver this experience i think it'll be a really really special special one what has it been like to return to for people who don't know you obviously spent a ton of time around powder mountain in one context and you left it for a while with summit and you come back to it in a literally returning to the same place but also coming at it from like a want a new set of people, a new context, a new orientation.

How is that? Does it feel like coming back around on the merry-go-round? Does it feel like, I don't know, climbing the same mountain twice? Is it totally new? It's a rare opportunity in your career. The joke I give is, if you've watched, if any of you guys have watched Succession, is that I feel like Tom Wamsgand, where I'm just like the last guy standing. And I just kind of like, I joke. You're a little more confident. Yeah, but I look around and I'm like, how am I still, how am I here, you know?

But no, real talk. Yeah, it's interesting. I think it's like, in a way, it's almost like a toxic relationship where you're like, how am I coming back to the- I convicts her. Yeah, exactly. And perhaps the mountain is like a siren call luring me to the craggy rocks. But yeah, no, I think the mountains in general- are just such intoxicating places. So I think any chance you get to sort of create something, I'm just, I think any chance you get to create something permanent, like really permanent to me is what's the most motivating thing that will allow, that will keep continuing my drive to work on it.

And often people ask, oh, is this like a couple year thing? What's your next project? I'm like, I definitely will work on other things, but. i feel like this project specifically will be a lifelong endeavor i don't know what full cap what the full capacity will be but to an extent like in shaping in shaping a town it's like i've got we're building the master plan right now the master plan has 5 10 15 20 25 year time scales on it so it's like i want to see that through i don't know what the extent will be in year 20 but i definitely want to play a role in at least coming back and participating in sort of these architectural design charrettes and sort of watching it evolve.

So it really is a thing that I think, you know, it's not too overly complicated of like, oh, I'm back. You know, at the end of the day, it's a place a lot of people deeply care about. I feel super lucky to be able to be one of the stewards of it. There will be other stewards that come after me, but to be back in the mix and yes, to have all the conditions have changed in a more positive way in terms of financing and leadership. all of that allows us to to really move forward at a much more accelerated and also focused pace it's cool to think about too the tension between what you started with and what i still think you're amazing at which is creating one amazing experience for a night you mentioned in the context of a party like this is never going to happen again and then maybe the full other swing you mentioned like yeah if you're lucky you the work you guys are doing on powder is like part one of a many decade journey like you're just laying the groundwork for for what might be able to come in the future what one one specific question on that that feel free to take kind of however you would want to but there's a number of iconic let's just say ski places in the

s um you have jackson hole and park city and yellowstone club is is a sort of different type of example in sun valley some of this is obviously in the in the private public and in the different elements of the actual mountain but i'm curious if there is Anything that feels most important to get right about powder relative to the field? How do you guys want to be the most, what is most important to be different in? Yeah, so I think the ARC will be obviously our fundamental differentiator in that no other ski destination in the world will have a, you know, a site-specific ARC.

sort of sculpture park or sort of art integration to this extent. So I think that'll be a clear difference. The goal there is to basically do the Naoshima. Yeah, Naoshima Ice is my joke. Yeah, Storm King. Yeah, exactly. And then in the actual- All over the whole mountain? Yeah, all and throughout this 12,000 skiable acre. So the idea is you have a multi-season, multi-modal way of experiencing art that you ski to in the winter, you hike and you mountain bike to in the summer. The work is spaced out and given room to breathe.

It's not like- you know you see sculpture sculpture sculpture sculpture in one view shed but you you ski for [redacted address] and you see a 30-foot sculpture and that you just get moment you just get space time to breathe and to ingest it and to reflect on it and then you get you go back into pure wilderness to then re-emerge back into sort of another artistic experience but secondly yeah i think what will be our biggest differentiators i mean really architecture Architecture in the Western Hemisphere of ski resorts has been pretty one note for the last 30 years.

I think the big opportunity is to really do something different. It's either sort of American West log cabin-y vibe or it's faux Bavarian, you know, post-World War II, 10th Mountain Division. All these developers went to like Zermatt for their first time. So they like in a classic American way, like just literally copied it. Zermatt is great, by the way. It's amazing. But, you know, so much so to literally just it's a very American attitude. Well, we like this. We're just going to rebuild this one for one here in an amusement capacity.

So that's what they did. And it worked for, you know, so many years. And it's charming. You know, you go to these American ski towns and it feels kind of Austrian or Bavarian. But, you know, our great challenge is how do we reinterpret? and create a set of architectural guidelines and designs that all the homeowners follow, all of our public buildings and amenities and commercial buildings follow, that unifies a place that sets a new sort of architectural language. So we're kind of calling it internally high Alpine architecture and trying to think about, okay, well, what does that mean in the context of the American West?

How can we shed the sort of big log cabin feeling that... Obviously it has like historical relevance. How can we draw inspiration from, you know, high Alpine environments in the Alps, but not like one for one copy the ornamentation, but like sort of look at more of the like efficient building strategies, the notion that the roof is sort of this dominant feature. That's why when you see these amazing photos on the internet of the Alps, you see sort of all these snowy towns covered in snow with the lights on. It's all designed.

intentionally in that capacity so we're taking and borrowing and remixing all those things that we find really interesting into what we're calling high alpine architecture which will be essentially infrastructure and architecture that's defined by buildings that have really strong roof presences big overhangs big yeaves natural wood siding stone bases that you know are sort of laid out in a very organic way that hopefully over time if that pattern can ex can can sort of propagate will create something in the s that is like super distinct yeah yeah that's cool what do you love about utah and how has living in the mountains changed you oh wow i love uh i love utah so much it's so it's so it's grown on me so so so deeply you know the most amount of time i'd spent there i'd been visiting on and off since i was in my early early 20s when i was working with summit and and you know for folks who don't know summit where I previously used to own Powder Mountain.

That was sort of the context of that notion of kind of coming back. But I had been visiting on and off a week at a time, two weeks at a time, a couple days at a time. But then it was really COVID when I actually just lived there for a year straight. Did you ever visit me during that? Yeah. So it was just like a year straight, maybe even a year and a half. And it was me living in a house with four other people. And it was honestly like I think of it as probably my most fond memories of my lifetime.

You know, I think a couple things I noticed and began to enjoy and learn. One, that was the season, that was the year where I first learned to cook and I sort of fell in love with cooking. You know, obviously COVID, no restaurants. So I started to fall in love with the process of finding produce and going to farms and going to farmer's markets. understanding the bare bones, the sort of essential quality of food and how if you combine all of those things together, you know, salt, fat, acid, heat, that whole logic, that it can create something really, really amazing.

So we played a game where every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, each person in the house took a different night to cook. And it became almost competitive. And I was Tuesday night. So like all of a sudden it was like I was flying in fish from Alaska and doing sushi night. Someone else was doing like a 24 hour roast. It just became like a game of like, what else were we going to do during the pandemic? So I think food, also just watching sort of the natural process of entropy and sort of season change.

I think it was so amazing to watch winter melt into spring, all that snow melt and every, it felt like the whole mountain was like leaking every crevice was like gushing water and snow melt and then all of a sudden in like a month you watch the flowers start to sort of the grasses most of us drop into mountain towns by the way yeah exactly so i got to fall in love with like the trend like everyone calls it mud season and you always avoid it and it's gross but i actually was like wow this is so poetic and beautiful and then when the summer came you were just so filled with gratitude to be like this whole thing i'm looking at is an organism.

Yes. The snow that was here that we were recreating on is now melted. It's filled the reservoir. That water has seeped into the earth. That has allowed for now these lush flowers and plants and... and trees and all these things to grow over the course of the summer and and the summer is like lush it's like switzerland over there but it's like like you know swimming in the lake and in in forests and flowers and then you watch all the leaves turn red orange yellow and eventually die get barren and then that first storm comes and then you watch it happen again and it's it was such a beautiful also we're both from southern california for those listeners who are like seasons are obvious

I actually realized how, yeah. I don't know. I moved to New York. You did something similar shortly before I did. I moved to New York a couple of years ago. I'm experiencing it, but this is also, I think, a level of texture and richness on the season scale. And then I think the last thing I'd add to that is I was talking to, oh, Dave Morin, who spends a lot of time in mountains as well. And we were kind of talking about this notion of like, why are we happier in the mountains?

And I think it's because when you live in a place, where the common denominator or revolving factor is nature or God. Let's say God isn't just the more, you know, whatever generalist phrase, where it's something not in your control. Everyone begins orienting on that. So if anyone's ever lived in a mountain town or, you know, maybe the equivalent of lived in a beach town, you know that there's a frenetic energy in the air the night before a storm when the forecast is projecting nine inches of powder. And everyone's like, dinner's ending early, everybody.

We're going to bed. It's kind of like, and you're in the grocery store the afternoon of, and you're like, oh, storm's coming in. So it's this amazing way of living in tune with your environment that I think brings you so much closer to everybody around you. And then that next morning, when then everyone's on the hill and everyone's skiing together, it's so... you just realize how precious it is like all these things came together yeah the weather the temperature and you're not on your own schedule a little bit we modern life is very much i'm going to watch what i want to watch and do what i want to do my food maximum efficiency yes and on on my schedule i want right yeah it's also for those who don't know the town you live in when you're near powder is called eden utah which i think is about as telling as it gets I want to talk a little bit about this basket of architecture and planning and cities and some of your key inspirations, as people probably have a sense of.

Like, I think you're a very high action-oriented person and you've done so much in the world and you've thrown so many events and been in so many places. But I think you're also pretty influenced by theory. And there are a couple of people in particular that I thought would be fun to chat about in that they embody so much of what feels like your kind of core essence about how you think about building things, whether it be... organizations or communities or places. This very bottom-up, grassroots, gardening orientation. And the two people in particular are Christopher Alexander and Jane Jacobs.

For a while, while you were running FWB, you referred to yourself as the Jane Jacobs of Dows, which was amazing. Dr. Bizarro overlaps. Yeah, exactly. Literally, what better example could we have? Alexander, I think, has this phrase that cities are like a mosaic of subcultures. Maybe to start with cities, because this will get into some of the digital stuff and I have to use stuff too, but I guess what is a very open-ended question, like what is important to you about cities and why are you so attracted to this very sort of like bottom-up emergent orientation for the world, at least in these types of complex systems?

Yeah, I think the, let's see, the triangulation of like... let's call it some of these mediums of cities events social platforms like i think all these things i've always been drawn toward is i'm very fascinated by building systems that allow for randomness and connection to sort of occur so i you know to me it's like kind of obsession over building the apparatus or the scaffolding that allows for these sort of interactions to to to be facilitated so you know whether it's when we were talking about events, lighting, music, you know, the distance between the stage to the bar.

To me, it was no different than if you're thinking about building sort of a social app, thinking about Where are people congregating inside of that digital space? What is your relationship between, you know, sort of the push notification and getting pulled back? It's all the same thing, which is like one person is in control or there's a set of the controller designing the conditions. And then the human is being put inside of that environment to essentially discover oneself and discover the environment around them. And it's through that process of discovery that I think like that sort of joy.

is created that creates the delightful moments when we find a really cool application we like or when we go to a really good event or a good party and so it's all the same to me in a way so Architecture is the most permanent version of that, which is what is the most exciting and also daunting. Reed and I joke a lot about, since he's a tech guy, he's used to being able to push code and pull it back and manipulate it. But we're always reminding each other that in architecture and real estate, the only thing you can do if you mess up is to grow ivy on something.

So you can't change it. If I put the stage in the wrong place, I can't. That's why there's so much ivy. Yeah, exactly, exactly. You know, I think, but it's all the same. And so, well, if I were to try to draw any distinction, to me at least, architecture feels more like rules. And some of those elements you described, even in a physical environment, feel more like prompts or sort of like nudges or gestures. And the closer you get to physical durability, the more they're like imposing rules. Notably, I mean, Christopher Alexander, when it comes to architects, is about as one end of the spectrum as you could possibly get.

Yeah, totally. And so, yeah, I think what draws me most to those people like Jane or Christopher Alexander is just this very humanistic, you know, anthropological, sociological approach to thinking about systems and rules. Like they're pro-human, they're pro-feeling, they're pro-emotion of just like, why are we drawn towards natural light hitting the side of a nook underneath a windowsill? I don't know, but like anytime it's in a house. you you want to sit there yes like you it's where you naturally sort of gravitate towards and so i think thinking about like the theory side of it has always been really really really inspiring because like why not stand on the shoulders of the giants who have come before you when when painting on a really really large scale on a canvas it's like i almost don't have time or money to make mistakes like that right but you also don't get stuck as someone who probably is slightly more in the tempted to get stuck in the theory like you are very much like theory so i can do stuff yeah totally i'm always i'm only theory so i can do stuff how any any uh rationalization on that i'm just kind of impatient i've always been impatient so it's like it's like uh if i learn something i almost it's let's go try it let's go experiment yeah exactly why not i like that prior to powder you were the mayor slash sort of ceo of friends with benefits

What goes into, which is, people can look it up if they want more context. It's one of the first, if not the first, crypto-native social media type things or DAOs. The big idea, though, it was an attempt to create a place on the internet, a digital place that had some sense of feeling and weight. And obviously, I think many people who have experienced FEST got to experience the digital shelling point turned into a physical space, which was cool. digital part for a second like in hindsight maybe especially like what actually goes into creating something digital that can have some of the great elements of what a physical place might have yeah um i mean i think a lot of it is just when thinking about sort of a digital environment like we kept coming back to this theory of like you know the strength of the collective is sort of defined by the strength of the one-to-one connections between the people so like often in user experience design, like how can you facilitate more one-on-one connections?

How can you increase the rate of chat or DM between different sort of users inside of an environment? Because if you're presuming that A and B are now going offline to meet and talk and build a relationship, that they're going to come back and sort of further strengthen that larger collective piece. Right. Just like a great party is good at... prompting people to talk to each other the best parties are when you are having an amazing hallway conversation with somebody and then you pop back into the main space and there's like this great collective moment and you know i think of um i think why concerts are sort of think of just like i don't know let's go back to i don't know the ancient greek coliseum and the sort of all eyes on one performer i think that is a very humanistic trait of like a collective attention concentrating on one person orating or speaking or performing or singing or broadcasting to a wider group of people.

So I think like, to me, that moment where you have in the digital space where everyone's sort of tuned in to one moment, it's like, why is X so entertaining sometimes? Because when- You watch Speed in China on Twitch, yeah, yeah, we're all part of some moment happening. We're part of some moment together, back to that sense of sort of belonging. So it's all this, I mean, it's like not to get too woo-woo, but it's all, all of it boils back down to, I think. People are seeking belonging, community, being a part of something bigger than themselves.

Tech platforms accelerate that feeling. Events create that, you know, in sort of a higher fidelity because we are still in meat space and we are still like have sensory experiences that can't fully be translated yet through digital environments. And I think the ultimate, my ultimate North Star in life is to seek and produce and create and to be. among those sorts of moments and those experiences, if that makes sense. One of the ideas that I don't think is really that close to FWDB, but is at least adjacent, and people in crypto have certainly been interested in this, internet broadly, is this idea of like, can we take these digital things and actually produce much more substantial, whether it be a network state or an emergent city or a sort of hybrid physical digital city?

There are different variations of people trying this now. And there are lots of components in that. There's can you build an economy that can you have the cultural production? Can you have the physical part of it? Any broad thoughts, especially maybe with the hindsight of FWB about these things and maybe what the biggest hurdles for them are? Yeah, I'm relatively pessimistic on like sort of network states, if you will, or network states or these sort of broader things. I think it's incredibly. aspirational and exciting and I'm all in on it, theoretically and conceptually.

And what was that one that Toby went to that we were talking about? Yeah, Edge Esmeralda. Yeah, and like I was talking to him and the guy who started that and I found that to be one of the most... interesting apparatuses for it, but I see. And there, for context, there's Esmerella, which is Devin's Wagle, which is specifically Esmerella. And then Edge City is doing this all over the world. And so I think those are really inspiring models. And I think that might be a model that actually sounds incredibly sound.

I think the pitfalls are, it needs to be a lot more, there needs to be a lot more diversity and porousness of entry and exit. And I think when it becomes too, Don't cities, what about friction though? Like my instinct would be that if anything, part of what they need to do is to instill more friction, both to get there and to, and granted, like Esmeralda was a month, FWE Fest is a, or Burning Man or a week or a weekend. But there, to me, it feels in part that a huge part of what makes it meaningful is actually that it's not like a thing happening in New York City.

Like it actually requires, and so I'm sympathetic to the poorest in this point and certainly a diversity point, but like. It does feel like you need, it helps that even Powder Mountain is like a little off the beaten path. Yeah, so sorry, maybe we're talking about two things. I think there's the, let's call it the temporary event model that I think is like the edge city model and that's temporary. Temporary can be anyone from a three-day festival to a four-month-long experiment. I'm totally... For that, I'm fully aligned at friction value.

I think in talking more about, I guess I was using an example like Dryden's Praxis thing and thinking about like, oh, we're going to create a permanent place. Yeah. I think that needs, to some extent, some friction. But I think you need to find a way to increase a lot more diversity and stratification. And frankly, you need a mosaic of subcultures. You need diversity and experience. If it's everyone from Dime Square hanging out in Greece, it's just not going to last very long. Which means you probably also have to tolerate some people coming and going.

That's why you need to build in that. That makes sense. You need that flexible immigration policy. And so I think for the temporary thing, we're actually trying to hold people. for a focused amount of time yeah you actually want i think some level of friction right um powder definitely being that it's it's kind of off the beaten path there's a whole private ski club component to it where we're indoctrinating sort of rituals and values and community and there's a whole business there's a very explicit business model around that that includes essentially it's a country club right it's a it's a high membership fee high initiation fee tied to real estate that you buy and we're only doing 650 home sites so it'll be a 650 family community forever

So that'll be, you know, in our premium neighborhood. And then we're building hotels and- By the way, it's adjacent to Eden and the other- All these other areas. And that to me, so that highly- That's the mosaic. Highly porous, highly. And then on the private side, highly, you know, high intensity friction. Makes sense. And then that's at least how we anticipate the two to interact. So yeah, I guess your point of what would your reservations be around those sorts of models? I think- Or even just things that they should have, not even necessarily just hurdles that they're going to have to figure out.

Yeah. Hurdles that they're going to have to figure out. I also think are around. Yeah. How do you introduce enough diversity of thought and activity and experience and create that sort of range? But also, how do you create us back to a why? How do you create a strong enough why that everyone there can can quickly memetically share it? Here's why we're here. Right. And those two things are sort of intent. You think about like the S. S. is a great example of this early on. It's like a very, very clear unifying why that also is sort of like you can be whoever you want.

And those things, if you pull it off, are amazing together, but they're kind of intentioned. Totally. So let's call a cult high why. Right. Low range of activities. Right. Right. Which is why there's a scaling problem. Dunbar past 150, whatever. and then and then you know beyond cult post cults like if you you go to uh a true establishment of a new a settler establishing a new town it's like you need to make it porous and you need to have a freedom of entry and exit i think yeah and and then you need to have a strong sort of economic reason to stick around stick around how are you contributing beyond the vibes?

Like what is post vibes? What is the like, oh, I'm generating a unique opportunity. Or now we live in this sort of remote work world and it's got to be some other reason to stick around. Some other reason for meaning to exist there. That's totally. Which could be another huge part of so much of what you've done is community. And community is a word that sometimes like almost feels completely empty nowadays. Yeah. And I think part of that tension is maybe the delineation between community and brand and some of those questions.

And I want to get into that, but maybe just to start like any sense of, or an attempt to sort of try to describe what community is and how, what core things you think go into building it. You've built communities in very tangible ways, whether it be at USC, obviously at Summit, you built it. digital community that became physical with fwb and now you're very much thinking about community in the broader kind of ecosystem around powder yeah um i mean to me community is just a really strong shared sense of of beliefs vernacular ideology where if you were to interact with another person from within that network or within that community somewhere else in the world there's a high sense of belonging and intimacy and safety that can immediately be sort of established with that person.

So to me, like, oh, you know, I have a really good example. Last week I was in this random bar in Milan. I was catching up with a friend. She asked me, you know, we were just getting to know each other. And she was like, where'd you grow up? And I was like, Claremont, California. And then literally the bartender looks at me and goes, what the hell? I grew up in Claremont, California. And I was like, what? And we both were like, he's like, where? He's like, I grew up on Indian Hills.

Like, oh my God, I grew up on Baseline. And all of a sudden we're like, oh, did you go to 42nd Bagel Street? Like vernacular language. We were just like going so deep to the point where my friend was like, I'm going to let you guys catch up for a little bit and I'll be right back. And I felt like in that rare moment, the world shrunk. Yes. And we were halfway around the world. I don't even know this person. He doesn't even know me. Right. And we just had so much.

We just understood each other so deeply. and we saw each other that i think to me community is the ability to tap into that feeling wherever tribal identity yeah this this notion that as you i think why fwv was so resonant is that it's like especially at the peak of sort of whatever crypto culture was like crypto is a very isolating It's intense. There's bad PR. It's laden with bad PR and bad vibes. And you're a scammer if you work in crypto. And it wasn't like cool, whatever cool means. But then as you move through that culture and that world, and then if you interacted with somebody who was also in friends with benefits.

there was this fundamental assumption that they were different. Yes. That they were also a real person in a cultural sector. And that immediately created this sense of like, oh, we're both like, we're straddling this weird Venn diagram. Right. We're really interested in technology and new modes of technology. But we also can talk about like, oh, did you hear that new album that came out? Right. So it's kind of this like, it's kind of this like transgression that allows for you to, those types of moments that make the world feel smaller.

And so I think that's ultimately what what I seek to sort of like try to facilitate, if that makes sense. Yeah. Crypto also can be very tribal at a global level, especially when it's working. But like any time one, it's not working or two, you just get like two or three clicks beneath the surface. There's a little bit of a sense of where are the subcultures? And I think after you feel that a lot. What about like building? Because obviously one of the reasons the word is sort of loaded now is that people are commercially trying to build community.

And not even in always horrible ways, but brands are trying to build communities. In your guys' case, you literally set out to build a community. And granted, I think you did it in a lot of bottom-up ways, but it was very deliberate. And I have to contrast that with the first example you gave, which is like the emergent community that anyone's going to feel with like where they grew up. Are there ways to intentionally build community that still hold on to this sort of, I don't know if it's authenticity or if it's just...

a certain quality or like, like if it's totally deliberate, does it not work? So I think we're just overthinking. Okay. You know what I mean? I think community is like, if you were to ask someone 500 years ago who would just, they wouldn't be calling it community in the way we've sort of like branded it as like a, like they would just be like, yeah, I had 10 people over for dinner because they are my friends. Right. So I think of it as like, perhaps there is some factor of, of we're over complicating it.

And there's one, I think second, Ultimately, like, yes, there are, I think, like, the ultimate question is just like, at what point does the authenticity around community building break when like capital or commerce enters the equation and it becomes too clearly exploitative or too clearly like one side is profiting over the other, like whoever's sort of creating that. you know that unequal dynamic and so to me my take in how do you actually create sustainable communities or at least where do i think the future of whatever the community let's just say where do i think the future of the community business model is going yeah yeah is i think like you know i'm watching the whole new next gen of of membership clubs pop up living room in la wsa in new york cipriani shea margot whatever they're all coming up again of like svb soho house noya house was sort of era one it felt like in this and this is a very us take and then now we're sort of watching this next gen come up and the ones that are the most interesting to me are the ones that are tied to a very explicit utilitarian function or purpose or a very like lifestyle niche oriented way of living so two examples one i think wsa what they're doing in new york is super fascinating when they're tying office space to that sense of identity and community but in a way that is like way more strategic than we work where it's not like a floating desk, but it's like you get a corner office in this old AIG building that they renovated with great design and everyone, there's sort of a creative and you get a little small cubicle effectively, but the furniture in there is USM.

They've got great design and you're in there and you feel like it's a luxe premium service. It's also built something very tangible, which is like, I actually need office space. 100%. So when I pay the rent, I'm happily contributing to an exchange of goods. And then I get back to commerce and culture. And then I get the community component on top of it. Right. That is all upside and it feels authentic. I'm here to work. Right. Right. I'm not here to like seek community because there's always going to be this kind of Groucho Marx.

I never want to be the club that'll have me that whole dynamic. Sure. And so I think that's on the utilitarian side. Right. I think on the on the lifestyle specificity side, you've got things like remedy place where it's really focused around health and wellness. And this is the like upscale spa. Yeah, exactly. To, you know. I think what was an atomic clouds, like car club thing where it's all around like, or my buddy's starting one in park city called warehouse where it's like all luxury cars that you get to store in the warehouse.

So that's like a full utilitarian need where you're paying rent to store your high end vehicle. But then there's like a members club in a bar above. the warehouse of the car garage. And then everyone does coordinated drives every other weekend. So they get to talk about a shared interest they have. And so there's real depth to it. And I would honestly put powder in something similar where no one's joining us if they don't like to ski. Skiing is the fundamental reason of joining. So I think to me, it's really like, what is the future of this community model, these community businesses is I think this shared interest.

true utilitarian thing because my take is that over time there will be this like full race to the bottom zero of like there's going to be a real scaling issue of like how many members clubs i want to be a part of just because it's a reservation and every time like one gets big enough it's no longer it's cool then it moves on in action right i also want to talk about leadership i think one way into talking about this would be that you've had a pattern of sort of finding people who have ambitious visions that are pretty fuzzy but there's like some kind of seed or ignition and you i think you both come in in like there's there's certainly a a template for like bringing somebody to operationalize it that's kind of you you are kind of arms and legs but you're also very much typically coming in as like a creative visionary or collaborator you've done this with reed obviously most recently you took what was effectively like a discord server with trevor and fwb and turned it into this very thing that was full of life and then obviously you came into summit as well that had a whole bunch of stuff it had done and got to put your fingerprints on it.

Is there a reason you think you're attracted to these types of things? These types of leaders, you mean? Like, specifically, it's like you're coming in when there's like a little bit of something and it's not totally clear what this is. And the person behind it wants to, there's like an ambitious vision there, but it's like kind of fuzzy. And most people either are like, I'm going to do my thing. I don't care what anybody else thinks. Or like, I'm going to join something that's working. And you're like, you're this really great, you're like this kerosene that like, that pours onto a thing that, I don't know, I was in FDB when it first started and it was not, it was interesting, but not really that substantive.

And obviously Reed, I think, was interested in this project, but it seemed to me at least, in some part, meeting you was a kindling for this to become something real. Yeah. i'm highly generative and i and i and i'm a people person so like i don't i don't think i'd ever be the solo founder too boring for me so like i love partnership i love i love being able to call somebody and punch through an idea yeah i like winning together i like losing together i like that whole process of it and i think you know in college i had like a brief stint as like a music manager and In that process, I would always say I loved, my favorite thing about it was I loved being behind the stage, behind the curtain, watching the talent or the, you know, the artist do their thing.

And my fulfillment was feeling like I helped make this happen. I produced the conditions for this to happen. I'm so happy I'm not on the stage. I think you are not only producing the conditions for it to happen, but you're also, I think, very good at making the person believe it can happen. Yeah, and that's back to the generative thing. I'm very like, I like to inspire and poke and push and prod. And so I think that early on was like, I loved that behind the scenes kind of nature of it almost to an extent.

And then, yeah, so then I think through that, I guess you are right in reflecting that I have like partnership and it's fun. entering into kind of that zone where it's, I think it's one of the most amazing, intimate, generative things you can do with somebody is to build, I don't want to say build a business. Yeah, link and build. It's so fun. It's, I think, you know, it can be even more, it's different than a romantic relationship, but it can be really like, you get to watch this thing actually exist in the world and have market forces react to it is different than like building a family with somebody.

You've done a lot of like learning on the fly, especially in these contexts. And in particular, usually learning on the fly that requires also like getting some amount of existing people's buy-in. So again, with Summit, certainly you ended up even becoming like an interim CEO and president of Summit at one point with a whole lot of five years of history. You come into FWB, there's a bunch of people to Discord. There's not that much organization. Reed, again, new relationship, and then also all the history of powder. And so you're like, you're coming in, you're both learning really fast and quickly building credibility or trust.

Is that something that you, it's just a product of agency and competence or is that something you're kind of conscious of? Building trust quickly? Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm trying to combine two things here, which is a mix of learning really fast and building trust while you learn really fast, which maybe those two things inherently. are reflexive. They, they inform each other, but. Yeah. I mean, I think high trust organizations are like, I think the key and the only way to success. And so I, I've always been very drawn to facilitating as much trust as quickly as sort of possible between people.

You almost have to like win over people from day one. When you come in as to FWB as the mayor slash CEO of this thing that doesn't really have a leader, it's like. There's like, I'm going to start a new job and I'm going to learn really fast. That's fine. Or there's like, there's an organization that has trust, but you're basically like coming in. I have to learn what this place is and then win trust as quickly as possible. I think it's going to break. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's, that's a valid observation.

I think maybe, you know, I feel like I've weirdly been doing that my whole life, which is just like, I've been, you know, I grew up in a very small private school. for K through eighth grade. And then I transferred to a huge public school and I quite quickly had to like find my own and find my voice and win over trust, if you will. And by, you know, whatever senior year, it was sort of prom court thing. You know, it was like winning trust. You quickly end up a leader.

Accelerating. After entering a new context. Overwhelming. It keeps happening. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a super valid observation. And I think it's same for even in university, right? With the radio station and like all those things that were. became organic leadership opportunities. I'm not, you know, some might say I'm like power hungry. I like power because I like making decisions that impact things, but I don't think I'm seeking anything purely for power for power's sake. It's more so I like to lead and make decisions and get a group of people working together in the same direction.

Like that's a very motivating, fulfilling feeling of mine is achieving results together as a group. And so I think over time, it's just been learning how to perhaps create the conditions for high trust to occur for a relatively new leader to enter. And so to me, I think that's a mix of having really, really high EQ and sort of sitting down with all the different stakeholders and people and quickly like, and then second, I think it's also just having a really good idea. Like, you know, not to be too like, you know, not to be too reductive, but like if you can come in and have a good idea and communicate that really good idea and get people behind that idea and then quickly validate it.

It's almost like, well, we might as well follow it because I actually think most people want to follow. Especially if there isn't a lot of clarity of vision. Totally. It's like a zipper. It's a gravity. I think it's about taking something I've always enjoyed doing is taking really complex ideas, distilling them into really core basic fundamental visions and then communicating that out. And so one thing we're constantly doing at Powder. And the exercise we and I are always doing is it's so easy to quickly become like, oh, we're this luxury ski destination and we're going to and we're doing art and then we're going to do architecture and then we're going to do longevity and wellness and then we're going to do music and then we're going to do food and get Massimo Batur to fly in and do.

And you're kind of like you're now like if you become everything, you become nothing. And I remember having this argument a lot at FWB over and over because it was probably the hardest organization I've ever had to lead because of it sort of like. headless nature and it was a community and it was a dow and we everyone has an opinion everyone has an opinion you kind of you had to listen to it and it was part of the almost part of the larp was to listen to it right um but i would say that like what was really interesting to you know in in the exercise we and i are going through now is we're like no no we actually need to like really focus powder mountain is about art and skiing

And we are really trying to own that category and that Venn diagram. And then back to the trust and creating that environment, it's great. So now our job is to really communicate that over and over and over to as many people as possible to the point where that becomes a very clear identity as to why, like sort of an organizational fabric. So one of the things that I found super valuable and one of the coolest learning opportunities I had working with Redon Powder was like, brainstorming with him early on, on, on creating the company values.

And I remember thinking like, you know, you all read about HBS or MBA sort of company values and authenticity, integrity, respect, you know, whatever. But Reed's take was always like, like, if you do throw away words, it's going to be throwaway values and it doesn't actually mean anything. And he was like, instead, like, can we come up with really sticky, specific, authentic words that when you, when, when you speak them, it feels very, very, visceral and authentic to the culture. And opinionated. And opinionated. No, exactly. And be very, very opinionated.

And so, you know, at Powder, we kind of quickly arrived on this notion of like, okay, at Powder Mountain, you know, we are big-hearted champions who pick up the trash. And we created each of those, you know, big-hearted was one. We specifically chose that word to be like, cool, we want to be a passionate place. This is a ski town. Reed's explicit about like, it's not a Silicon Valley tech company of like, when at all costs. It's about love. It's about passion for the mountains. But then champion is in like, we all want to be on a winning team.

So it's not about like, well, this person isn't doing their job, but we like them. So let's keep them. It's like, if they're not executing, then they're probably not a good fit. But to still marry that with the compassion and to sort of pick up the trashes and like, well, we also take care of the place that we're in. And if you see trash, pick it up. And it was really interesting to kind of go through that exercise, then to now roll that out, right? That's like literally printed on the onboarding brochure for it.

And remember, this isn't like a... 20-person startup. It's like a 700-person ski resort with seasonal employees that are J1s that come in from Peru. And you're like, how do you most mimetically train a company value to somebody who's never read a corporate values book? And they're going to remember one sentence. One thing. And now it's like a whole vernacular. We're all in these email threads where someone's like, marissa great job on being a big-hearted champion when you did this and it's like it's cool to see people so so i share all that as in like that's an example to me of like how over time you can actually use language to kind of scale trust and scale leadership because introducing that has already done done done done huge wonders for the team there's something too around obviously like some of this goes back to like the jane jacobs or christopher alexander stuff of like top-down leadership and bottom-up leadership and inside of anything that isn't and granted i think people talk about this like there are definitely areas of leadership where it should feel almost dictatorial but to the extent you're doing any of the more bottom-up leadership and empowering people it is one of the things that's been cool about the ai stuff is it feels like such a good metaphor for communication of just like now that everyone's very self-aware about prompting computers all the time we prompt people too like big hearted champions who take out the trash is a system prompt that you basically want running in 700 minds that, again, needs more specifics in different contexts, but is like really, really powerful.

In some sense, you've also like played with scale in interesting ways. And whether it be, again, 700 people working on a mountain or a bunch of people in a discord who all have different ideas of whatever this, is this a brand? Is it a community? Is it a coin? This type of thinking is really empowering. Because by the way, every single person is going to have a slightly different interpretation of big hearted champion or whatever. But it's a container to fill and also put themselves into, which I think is very cool.

We have talked around him. Reed Hastings is a pretty notable person in the world who's written actually on leadership and is like, people know things about him. But I'm curious if there's anything that's either less obvious to the world or just that has really stood out to you about what him... what makes him special and what, in particular, you have learned from him about leadership. Yeah, he's a real force of nature. He's obsessed with building things. So that one's become really interesting to watch. He covers so much ground. You know, I always joke, like, if it was a month early or a month late, he wouldn't have done powder.

It was just like... like it's less about ski resorts it's less about skiing like he obviously loves like skiing but he's not it was really a like he moves to the world as identifying problems to solve that's like as fundamental as it is so on any given day powder mountain is his problem to solve for the day or it's or it's rwandan it's breaking up the telecoms monopoly and east congo is one thing he's been working on to netflix to you know he's just kind of moving from thing to thing and he likes to solve problems so that That kind of, like, globalist take is really, really interesting.

Like, he was pretty involved early on in, like, you know, pushing the Democratic Party to get Biden to step down. Like, he's very, just when he sees problems, he likes to jump in and solve. Leadership styles. Or even just, like, things about leadership that you have learned implicitly or explicitly. Yeah. He's one of the best communicators, I mean, I've ever worked with, hands down. is super, super explicit about what he's trying to communicate to you or to the team or to the company or to a group of people. And so what I mean by that is he'll often tell you when he's talking about a complex decision or a scenario, he'll often say, this is what success looks like in the outcome of this decision.

And then he will, in equal amount of detail, talk about what failure looks like in that decision. And then sometimes he'll even talk about what the gray area in between looks like in detail. And so then when you leave that meeting, here's a really clear map. He's like, this is failure. This is success. This is in between to like seven people in a room. So you're like, there is no misunderstanding of what failure is. So let's make sure we get as far the fuck away from that and we get as close to success as possible.

Right. So like I now have started to use that in most of my communication. And, you know, to my teams and that, like, it's super helpful to just be really, really explicit about, hey, I want to share. This is a concern I have. This is what I think success looks like. Here's what I think failure looks like. And like, do we all agree that these are the two options? And so what can we do to mitigate, you know, the sort of the latter? So I think concise sort of communication. And then I think he's taught me a lot about, or I've observed a lot about, he's such a good,

And I say capitalist is in, he really understands pricing and economics. And so like his ability to sort of look at a macro industry, develop the business strategy without like, he's never written a business plan. He's almost an intuition. It's an intuition and understanding, oh, here's the market forces. Here's the industry. Here's how it's growing to then being like, cool, here's how we're going to arrive at pricing. He had a really great kind of saying where he was like pricing. Finding the right price is finding just that right amount where the consumer is willing to pay for it.

and taking them to the edge of pain as a capitalist. We're taking it to the edge of pain where they're willing to pay for it and they still have a high NPS score and they'll still come back. So he says the example to that is if you gave away the product for free, your NPS score would be perfect. So he's like, that's not, it's about pricing and it's about NPS. So then he's like, efficient pricing is about finding that perfect calibration. And I remember he told me this story right after we had this whole debate about raising.

prices for our um season passes and you know raising season pass prices is in ski towns is always a lot of drama and you're you're pricing at locals and it's filled with emotion and you get all these comments and emails and letters about so i remember i you know and i run marketing so i was the guy essentially implementing and communicating the pricing change and i was like so worked up about it and he tells me this quote about like pricing and then and then i remember thinking like you don't like you don't get it and then i was on the i was on the ski lift riding up one day with this old guy and we changed our senior pass our senior season pass pricing from it used to be $80 a year which shows how poorly designed it was to the average industry season pass is like $1,400 so it used to be $80 we moved it up to $800 so it's still half of what the industry is but we were like 10x and I was on the lift with this 70 plus guy and I was like

he didn't know who i was i wasn't wearing my uniform and i was like oh like how's it going what do you think about powder he was kind of grumbling and he was like well they raised the prices of the season passes for me and i'm a senior and it used to be 80 bucks and i'm like oh man like i'm he was like really upset and then i was like i'm so sorry you're gonna go are you gonna like renew or you're gonna go you're probably gonna go ski somewhere else right he's like no i renewed love powder mountain and then he skied off And I remember thinking like that's real tension, by the way.

Yeah, that's the tension you're trying to seek. Or then if you can get someone like that to then renew every year and still love it because you found that right. You know, obviously you can't charge him $4,000, but it's like you find that right pricing equilibrium where the NPS score is still high, but they're willing to pay. And, you know, Netflix is sort of the king of that, of exploring $24.99 to $26.99. Like, where does that go? And by the way, what does price do? What does price change allow us to do more?

Exactly. Obviously, some person might find this podcast and be like, oh, these guys suck. They're just trying to gouge me. But it's like, okay, we're trying to do something. Let's go back to the very top of the conversation of culture and commerce together, any of these things. It's a set of trade-offs, but Netflix has been able to do a lot in part because they raise prices. Correct. Yeah, it's fun to sit in that tension. And even just going back to the other thing, I found that some of the wisest, most compelling people are just really good at holding ambiguity.

in gray areas and like not needing to like rotate super hard to one conclusion really fast and they're able to just kind of sit with it my last thing on reed is there's an incredible quote in this new york times profile on i think that the title is is that a james astrologist skied by where reed says alex is the visionary and i'm the banker uh what has it been like to have that kind of trust and empowerment from mr hastings Yeah, it's been really it's been really I have a lot of gratitude towards him and it's been really fulfilling.

I think he's such an exceptional leader and that he's really not detail like he's really not like micromanaging. And I truly feel like, you know, to an extent, like a partner working with him on it. And yeah, to see that sort of like public external validation is really rewarding and fulfilling. But yeah, I would say it's really it's really it's really a unique dynamic. And we both are teaching each other a lot. Obviously, he's teaching me so much about business and leadership and intuition and decision making. And then to an extent, I'm teaching him more like implicit things around like, we're both going through this journey of discovering and building a place that, you know, we hopefully will spend time in forever and continue to sort of add memories to.

So it's this, you know, it's funny. He just went on like a week-long silent meditation retreat. i was telling you the the week all of trump's tariff stuffs were going off so i was like well i wonder what he's thinking i mean obviously he had no contact with the outside world but uh when he got back we were catching up and i asked him what was one thing you grew more conviction around while you were there and what's one thing you grew less conviction around whether it's personal or professional or whatever and he was actually saying his main thing he grew more conviction around was he wanted to be even more involved in the artistic expression in the creation and learning about art and learning about adding the beauty of the place because that's sort of been effectively my role because i oversee like art architecture design urban planning the storytelling of it like i'm kind of the soft feel inside right and he's the like business finance strategy order operations and so he's actually like oh i want to learn more about the former, which I thought was really inspiring as someone who doesn't, you know, he wouldn't say he has like a ton of aesthetic preference.

You know, he's just, he's very, he wears the same. That stuff is also about in many ways about like just intimacy with it or like exposure to it. It's intimacy and exposure. And I think it's, I think what he probably realized is it's, it will lead to a deeper connection of purpose. Yes. He will, he will be happier with the investment of his time. Right. It's not about the money for him. It's about the time. Right. When if in 10 years he gets to walk around with his family and be like, oh, I helped make that decision or I weighed in on that decision.

Yeah. Or even here's why we made this. Yeah, exactly. A couple of questions about like career arc stuff to start. It's possible I have this wrong, but I believe you and I met while I was sitting in a golf cart waiting outside of an auditorium at USC to drive Mark Cuban across campus. And you talked me into letting you on the cart so you could talk to him about something while a flock of other students literally like ran behind us, which is an amazing Alex Ng story in part because it represents something that I've always been both admired and sort of been bewildered about you, which is you like people love to talk about agency on the Internet.

But you are one of the most skilled people I've ever met. Just like getting into rooms for lack of a more precise description. Or maybe it's meeting exceptional people or just like finding the serendipity. Obviously, the art and culture worlds, I think, are especially opaque in certain ways. How do you, you interviewed Elon while you were at USC. You've told me plenty of other stories about getting into strange places. How do you do this? Or what goes into that type of sort of like making weird doors open in the world?

Firstly, that Mark Cuban story will be an infamous story for you. And I just have a feeling it'll keep coming back in our only age, like a fine wine. I like Cuban. Cuban's doing great. Yeah, no, but no, more so is that it's just funny because it shows both of our personalities and like you letting me get on the golf cart and me jumping on the golf cart. And then I do remember the kids chasing us and us kind of- That was 10 years ago. Nine or 10 years ago? Yeah.

Yeah, it's something I've always... Firstly, I get a fucking kick out of it. I love it. Like back to smooth brain. Like it's just fun. It's exhilarating. I love sneaking into places. It's just fun. It's like, you know, it's like, I don't know. I don't shoplift, but I imagine it would be like what it's like to steal a stick of gum. It's just like a little adrenaline kick to do it. But I think, what was your question? It's like, why? How do I do it? Yeah, what goes into it? Yeah, yeah.

Or explicitly like... i'm not asking how do you sneak into a party but i'm kind of asking what makes you good at it maybe is the better question so i think back to the universe being this malleable random constellation of chaos yes i think humans aren't rational actors right we all we make impulse impulse or most you know whatever the whole saying of most of our decisions are driven by whatever the five core vices right i think it's just understanding that like the universe is is a call and a response mechanism where it's you can sort of bend things slightly in your way the most extreme example of that would be steve jobs in reality distortion field yes but it's the notion of like most things in the universe aren't rational things and if you approach things by understanding what motivates or drives a person and you can kind of jab it where it hurts in a way that is like it tickles that vice i think it's sort of it oh the world can open up to you in really miraculous ways and it's also not being afraid of failure which to me is like the worst thing that happens is you just get to know which is fine so all of us are terrified of no we all are and i think so to me it's like actually you know what the simplest thing i don't think you're that afraid of no I think when I say all of us, I guess most people are afraid of no.

And most people are also, the other thing I see in this at least is they take the rules a little more seriously. There are a lot of things that people think are very serious rules that you have sort of internalized are like more like guided posts. Yes. And here's what I'd say that I think is actually the clearest is I think it's just about being playful. And it's about channeling your inner child. And I think children don't know what is a rule or what is not a rule. And maybe they're being mischievous.

Maybe they're just being naive. But I think retaining a childlike wonder with the world will, I think, allow you to fall in love faster and easier. It will allow you to get into, like, meet people you wouldn't normally meet. It's like, it's just moving through the world with curiosity. And so it's like, if you're sitting on the subway and someone interests you just based on the way they look or what they're saying, it's like, just talk. It's like. a child would just engage them yes so so to me it's when you meet somebody in a childlike state that they feel seen by a child that they then enter this childlike state and they're invited and then they're invited to play and then they're way more open to engaging with you in that way.

So to me, it's all about breaking rapport is sort of how I think about it, where it's like, how do you take the norm of like, we're two businessmen doing business? It's like, how can you break out of that? And like, you know, I'll use the Elon example where like, yeah, in college, I emailed him and I broke the rapport and treated it with a childlike sense of communication where I think I wrote something like, hey, Elon, I know the school's been trying to get you, the business school's been trying to get you to do the commencement speech.

Wouldn't it be really funny if you did ours instead? And now if you think about Elon and who he is in 2025, I didn't know this at the time. I knew that he was sort of cavalier and I knew that he was obviously brilliant. I didn't know he was like the meme lord that he is today. But it's sort of understanding how people take, I think there was the, I was listening to Howard Lubnick or whatever, his secretary of commerce, and he was talking about the first time he met Elon.

And he was nervous for the meeting. This was right when Trump was like, oh, you're going to be commerce and you're going to be Doge and you need to meet and figure out a plan. And Howard was like super nervous about how to engage Elon. And then when he showed up to the meeting, he he said something about like you should change the like i think the street that elon lived in was called like e street or something and he was like you should change the name to be meme street and like elon just laughed for 20 minutes because he's psychotic and then elon immediately was like we're going to be best friends so i say that as in like it's just understanding where somebody comes from yes and so you can clearly tell elon's on he's brilliant he's he's he's very controversial these days but at the end of the day he i just view him as he's just sort of a misunderstood character and and why he like and everyone else is being very serious with him all the time exactly and why he acts the way he does i think it's immature and i don't think it's appropriate and i think there's there's there's a lot of instances where it's actually offensive and bad for whatever like yeah like the world but like i think in general i understand him

I understand that he's been treated so seriously his whole life. And the ultimate, the most powerful man in the world, all he wants is childlike wonder and play. That's literally all he, it's channeled in a weird way. Totally. But all he wants is that, I think. Totally. And so back to your thing about how do you access whatever, or how do you, to me, it's just moving through life with this sort of like childlike wonder and discovery. And then a couple other factors of just not taking things too seriously and enjoying the process.

People are seeing you have fun. They want to have fun. Yes, it's an invitation. It's an invitation. That really feels like the right framing. I mentioned serendipity. We've talked about kind of our own nonlinear career paths over the years. And I relate to this. I think you've done a bunch of things that were like zags and that weren't like necessarily obvious that even people. if you would listen to a sort of like normal, serious people advising you to do the next thing, you haven't taken that path. One, do you see an arc?

Or like you mentioned, even the Steve Jobs dot connecting only in reverse. Like, is there an arc? And when it comes to maybe taking these, taking the FWB opportunity or even the read thing, how have you found your ability to make these types of decisions or go with your gut? Like what makes, how do you know? when you're supposed to kind of take these weird detours? Yeah, I'm actually a horrible long-term planner. So I honestly, like, I really, really move just vis-a-vis intuition. And as I've gotten older, I've come to be better at understanding market opportunities about when does that intuition align with a good potential financial outcome, like a financial opportunity if that's...

what I'm trying to index for, but I would say in general, I don't think I've, I only do things that I think are fun and fun to me equals steep learning curve, curiosity driven, usually a new industry or a sector that is like, I just want to learn more about. And then most importantly is I'm a people person. So who do I get to work with? That's kind of, I did FWB because of Trevor. I wanted to work with him, right? I had zero crypto experience prior. And then the community of FWB was really interesting to me.

Yeah, it was a new way to do what you do. Exactly. Same thing with Summit. Same thing now with, I don't think I would be working on Powder Mountain if it wasn't for Reed and the team he's built. And, you know, so I would say it's about intuition for me personally. And in terms of career arc. Yeah, it's funny. I'm accumulating a very random set of experiences, but you nailed the through line in the very beginning, which is it's just about people and bringing people together and about creating authentic experiences that fuel belonging.

So whether that next venture is back into a social digital experience or whether that's into a hospitality thing like more real estate or hotels or restaurants or whether that's in media, I don't fully know, but I definitely feel like. you know it'll always be the confluence of all of these different sort of uh sectors i think you know yourself pretty well too which makes it easier to know is this even if it's weird on the surface or the the aesthetic of it is different the kernel of it is something that you know you can connect to i have a few kind of miscellaneous questions as we wrap up one what did you learn from what do you learn what did you learn from or if not a lesson what did you enjoy about doing student radio at usc i mean to quite obviously but it was my first foray it was a really it was my first foray into me into music and i say music as in like i really got to hone and develop that it was the first rabbit hole i took of like whoa music is way more than just whatever top 40.

and it was just like discovering ambient music discovering world music and discover like it was this like process of discovery Like, I think life is just actually about refining taste and not to be melodramatic, Bossart and I were talking about this, but like, I think the ultimate point of life, this is my point of view, it's obviously not, it's incredibly privileged. My ultimate goal in life is to just keep refining taste. The process and journey of finding what you like and don't like is super interesting to me. furniture, art, music, food.

And so obviously, like I said, you have to be incredibly privileged to have the opportunity to actually have the means to explore that. So it's not like everyone should do that, but it's mostly in the like, I think it's one of the greatest pleasures in life. And then finding another human where you are on that same wavelength of that taste is incredibly... special it's like when someone comes over and sees a book that they also it's like we're both reading the same esoteric robberwin book that's crazy yeah and it's amazing yeah so uh so i think to me the radio is the first experience of like one field music the process of taste i always shout out this girl anya that i met i was a freshman she was a senior she asked me when i the first day i was in the radio station she's like what do you listen to and i was like i don't know like i was like always the scariest question to get asked yeah and then she was like wait you've never heard of you've never heard of 410, Nicholas Jaro, you've never heard of whatever, whatever.

I was like, no. And she was like, oh, let me make you a, she's like, let me make you a playlist. Here's an invitation. So she, she, she was like, give me a USB drive and I'll load 50 songs under it every week. And then you listen to it and you tell me what you like and you don't like. And I remember hearing like, this is because I didn't have, like, I grew up in a pretty, it's a sheltered environment, but I didn't really listen to music before that. But it was like the first time I heard Tom York, it was the first time I heard the Beatles, it was the first time I heard like Fleetwood Mac and Bruce Springsteen to like, crazy weird ambient music to you know it was Fela Kuti and and just like like Afro it was like it was all of it all in one playlist and I remember I kept like going back I was like I like this I don't like this I like this and then by the end of it I was like all of a sudden like obsessed with collecting vinyl and so to me that was like one of the earliest experiences of like taste developing taste and and and reframe developing my taste like knowing what I liked and now I'm doing that through art again and now I'm doing that through

architecture and the other side of that is curation like the the personal side is taste and what i would argue you've done your whole career is you've said hey i've i've gone and rubbed up against all these things and here are the things that i care about and maybe you do too totally i uh my my last interview with with nabeel we talked a lot about sort of like whether or not you even get to choose the things you care about but back to maybe your idea of like And another frame of the taste framing would just be like, yeah, like life is about leaning more into the things that you care about.

And you know, there probably aren't that many. Maybe there are like really deep rabbit holes or maybe there are finding new adjacencies of it. But I think that's a power. And I think a lot of people end up just sort of chasing the things they think they're supposed to. Totally. And I think life is about chasing the things that just naturally feel you. If you apply that, you will find a commercial way to do it if you are trying to. But just fundamentally, I think, start with the things you're most interested in.

Why do you think music is so influential in terms of creating great events and spaces? I mean, in some ways, you've spent a lot of time bringing art into spaces to create events around them broadly. But music, more than almost any, overwhelmingly, music is the... type of art we pair with events and spaces i think it's the most immersive it's the most like it's the most like transcendental like i think it's quite hard to look at a painting and fully lose yourself in it it's like like it has happened and to me that is that like art is great art is about living with it but it's not quite like the most peak music experience will always overcome or will always crest over the most peak art experience, I think.

Well, music's also lived with life. Yeah. I think maybe that's part of it is that an art or even a film, I love film, but like film is about I'm going to pay attention to this and this alone and music is paired with life. Yeah. Maybe it's more anthropomorphic in that it's like, it's a voice. It's human. It's like your mother singing to you as a child. I don't know. Right. Why do you enjoy photography? Photography. um you take a lot i you don't do that much capital at like p photography although you do some but you just take a lot of photos you take a lot of photos of the people in your life the people you love like yeah you have an unseriousness about photos that maybe everyone has but is there something about that medium that you like to capture um one of the first things i remember on your website was like just a page dedicated to photos you've taken over the years and i think that's probably still on there somewhere yeah i guess i haven't changed that well uh i think photos are a great way to just get a sense of who someone is because it's obviously it's the things that they feel attracted to um i like photos photography because it's a moment in time that will never be created again i don't i don't i like i'm definitely not a capital p photographer I don't ever stage photo.

Like I don't ever like shoot things where I set it up as a photo shoot. I like things that are more like whatever in situ and that it's just happening. So I love party photography. I love travel photography. I love animals. I love your documentary. Yeah. It's just a moment of like, I'm seeing this thing and I see beauty in it. So I want to capture it, which is why I pretty much only really shoot in film because it's, I don't have to think about it. I just click it and I develop it sometimes.

five months later and i forget and it's a surprise it's like a treat yeah it's a memory play thing too totally so it's less about i'm definitely not the like dslr and like editing it i don't edit i don't think i've ever edited a single photo i just like take it and i upload it if i like it so it's more so just capturing a moment in time um Which is why I've always loved party photography. It's just like, wow, that was just like something that happened in that moment. And it'll never happen again.

Ever. It's what always gives me the goosebumps. Any recollections? You talked a little bit about skiing. I grew up, I started skiing when I was probably two, although you've skied much more than I have in the last decade. Any things you remember about, it's rare you get to be a beginner in such a dramatic way. Yeah. learning to ski and then having that become such a significant part of your life as an adult? Anything that come to mind about that process, especially early on, or being a beginner with it? I'm actually going, I was reflecting on how I love the beginning of things and steep learning curves.

So I actually am right now getting scuba certified because I was like wanting to learn about it. I did that in a pool when I was like 12 and never ended up doing it. I'm taking the online courses right now. I'm like, oh my God, this is so intense. And I'm like, it's like back in school. So I'm in the accurate, I'm very in the real moment of like learning something new again. But skiing specifically, yeah, I just remember how frustrating it was in the beginning. So it's so painful. It's so expensive.

It's so you're renting all this gear. Why did you keep doing it? There was an extent of like I had to because I was working. But I would say after like the 15th time I skied, it just like clicked. And 15 is a lot of times to do an expensive activity that you don't like. That's how privileged. Yeah, 100%. There's a lesson there, I think. 100%. And now it's probably one of my top favorite things to do in the world. And it's such a fun way to think about, holy crap, I just, like, traversed this whole mountain on these two pairs of sticks.

I wonder how many things I've tried. 15 times? Well, no, no, no, that I have tried, like, three times. Yeah, what 15 would... But I'm being dramatic. It wasn't like every 15 was... No, I get it. Our mutual friend, Ava, like, I've talked to her about this, like, or maybe she wrote about it, this idea that, like... flow and things that feel great and fun and easy are great. But like you actually have to kind of trudge through the mud sometimes. Totally. Like writing doesn't feel good for a while. Totally.

And then you go through other troughs. And yeah, I think that it may be maybe one of the lessons there is that forcing functions are good. My final question is, we talked a little bit about cities. You lived in New York for a while. You've lived a lot in Utah, but you currently live in Los Angeles and it's more or less where you're from. A. is a place that I think a lot of people have a complicated relationship with or even explicitly visited and like that place sucks. It's a complicated place.

And it's like of all of the cities, at least I've been to been in in the world, it's the most its own thing. And so I'm curious, maybe one prompt would be that if you were the mayor, but it doesn't have to be that explicit. What what would you. want to do to make A. richer or more of itself in a way that, assuming this is probably your home for the next 20, 30 years, you're a person who's obsessed with people and spaces and cities and design. It's an open-ended question, but I'd be curious if there's anything that comes to mind about ways that you would want to help this place lean into itself.

More public parks. A. needs more premium, needs more... public spaces where those public spaces actually have a stratification of premium to democratic access offering so i think like you know what makes central park so amazing is like it's free but it's also next to like the highest price real estate in the in the world so i think it's it's it's and then there's right there's there's food and amenities and experiences there so i think finding a way where if LA could create more outdoor amenity-driven experiences out here. Sort of high, like Washington Square, high and low.

Yeah, totally. Like if you could create like, let's say LA loves the, LA is about the beaches. If you could create, if you could incentivize private development to come in and create really nice high-end experiences by the beach, but then there's public areas. How do you create more like interesting places to hang out? Because right now the issue with LA is nobody hangs out in any public places. All the places to be are like. restaurants that are hard to make reservations to or people's homes. It's very home driven, which is why everyone who usually visits for the first time has a negative experience because you're in the car a lot.

You don't get invited anywhere. You're like, this sucks. And it's like, LA has a lot of layers. It's not like New York where it's like, where's the iconic New York where they walk up, you know, whatever the street and in the park and, you know, easy to drop it. You can parachute in. You can parachute in and you can get it, right? It's highly legible versus here is not legible. It's kind of like the most legible thing of LA is the Hollywood sign in Venice Beach. So it's like, even though the best parts about LA are Highland Park, Silver Lake, Echo Park, it's the downtown local, you know, Latino community and the food options there.

It's all the places Jonathan Gold ate. It's, you know, it's like, those are the parts of LA and there's obviously way more Chinatown, Little Tokyo, you know, that make LA LA, but it takes time to understand it. So in a way, I actually think LA is a kind of a... has a deeper experience in that. Well, it has also, back to your earlier comment, like has lots of randomness. Like it has lots of, yeah. Well, I think you're someone who's good at working with the illegible and enriching it. So maybe that, maybe some long term.

But more public parks. That's the starting point. Alex, thank you. Thank you, man. This was so fun. Cool. Hey, before I leave you. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave a rating and subscribe on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. You can also find full transcripts on my website at com slash dialectic. And obviously everything's linked in the description. If you have notes, feedback, or guest ideas, you can email me at pod, P-O-D, at com. See you next time.