450 Chili’s Is Up 500% Since 2022 Betting On Basic Tech | The Pirate Street Journal

0:00Thanks for pressing play and welcome to this very special episode of the Pirate Street Journal. My name is Christopher Lochhead and yes, I am also the host of Follow Your Different. And what you're about to hear is something that I've been dreaming of for quite some time and we got a lot of feedback that people wanted us to do it, so we're doing it. And so what the it is, is a regular look at kind of relevant business news through the category design lens. it's predicated on the crazy idea that, you know, the Wall Street Journal doesn't know how business works. And as outrageous as that sounds, it's true in the context of most business press is focused on companies, maybe products and technologies, but almost never market categories.

0:49And so what the Pirate Street Journal is, is we take three important business topics of the day. And Eddie, Bree, and I look at those topics through the category design lens and share them with you and in and out in 30 minutes. It's the Pirate Street Journal. It's a very different look at business, and I sure hope you enjoy it. And we're going to be releasing PSJs on a regular basis for the foreseeable future and drop our regular follow your difference that are either one-on-one with me or a conversation with a legendary guest. So without any further ado, this is the Pirate Street Journal on Folly or Different.

1:25Hey-ho, let's go.

1:43Christopher Lochhead: Topic one, the best turnaround in casual dining ran on Wi-Fi and iPads and the CIO threw out the robots. The smallest businesses are so far behind they have the most AI upside. Topic two, a three-year-old company just hit a$13 billion valuation for putting a battery in your backyard. The next great power company might not be a utility. And topic three, 20 undergrads turned 65 % on a warehouse while 41 % of recent graduates are working jobs that don't need their degree. We are recording on Friday, August 7th. Hey ho, let's go. topic one chili's is up 500 since 2022 it got there on old tech like wi-fi and ipads brinker international stock is up more than 500 since june of 2022 20 consecutive quarters of same store sales growth last quarter comps up four percent lapping a 31 increase from the year before none of that came from ai chili's cio chris caldwell told the journal his leadership team is quote, not all in on AI.

2:46Christopher Lochhead: What he bought instead, a two-year Wi-Fi overhaul across 1 ,200 restaurants, 1 ,200 laptops for store managers, 23 ,000 iPads to replace tablets that couldn't hold a charge through a shift, 9 ,000 touchscreens in the kitchens. He killed the robot servers. His team brainstormed a few dozen AI use cases and kept six or seven. He expects to cut more than he approves. Now, the Census Bureau, between December and May, 17 to 20 % of American businesses reported using AI, 37 % of firms with 250 employees or more, under 20 % for firms with fewer than 20 people. And that number did not move at all over those five months.

3:28Christopher Lochhead: The widest AI adoption gap in this economy is running between big companies and everybody else. And the most celebrated turnaround in casual dining was built on faster Wi-Fi. So Christopher, does this make you more or less bullish on small slash medium businesses? More. If they can wake up. Here's what I mean specifically. We've done a set of research recently. We looked at the S &P 500 companies. And there's a terrifying thing about the S &P 500 companies. There's the MAG-7 and then there's the S &P 493. The S &P 493 spends roughly, I might be wrong on the specific, but I will definitely be directionally right.

4:14I believe it's somewhere in the order of 2x more on dividends and stock buybacks than they do on innovation. Okay? Now, dividends, no problem. Stock buybacks, when a company does a stock buyback, what they're doing is putting an ad in the Wall Street Journal that says, hey, we ran out of ideas. We don't know what to invest in. A.K.A. we don't know how to make our stock go up. So fuck it. We're going to buy more of it back. Now, look, sometimes there's some strategic reasons for that that may make sense. OK, so I don't be overly over the top. However, for the most part, stock buybacks are a declaration that we're not innovating, especially when we're doing exponentially more buybacks than we are investing in innovation.

5:08Okay, so what does that have to do with SMBs? Here's what it has to do, everything. Right now, the small and medium-sized businesses that have historically been technologically behind have a massive leapfrog opportunity. The S &P 500 is run by a bunch of dudes, and it's mostly dudes, who are average age 56, 58 years old, who are there to run the as-is business and grow it in an incremental, evolutionary way. We are living in a revolutionary time. And so this is a really big problem. The second thing there is to know is if you do the research, and we have all of the job creation, all of it comes from smaller and new companies, smaller and newer.

6:04As a matter of fact, the S &P 500 loses more jobs every year than it creates. So what does this mean? What it means is what three people can do with AI is incredible. And so small and medium-sized businesses have a massive leapfrog opportunity right now. If you can reimagine your business with AI as the co-founder of your company and your career, and be what in the tech industry is now being referred to as AI first, you have a massive advantage because you can get there much quicker than an S &P 500 company can. And what we're seeing here is how behind some of these companies are. They don't have iPads in the store.

6:53They don't have Wi-Fi's in the restaurants. This is ridiculous. And so for a relatively small amount of money, small to medium-sized companies can buy the most powerful value creation machine in history called AI and rebuild, reimagine their careers and their companies with AI as a co-founder. And if they do that and they do that over the next, I would say 12 to maybe 18 months, SMBs have a massive opportunity to leapfrog the S &P 493. So just to build on this, what I think is going to happen, here's my prediction. In the AI revolution, the first companies that will benefit are the ones selling AI, which is obviously the Anthropics and Open AIs and the NVIDIAs of the world and all that's great.

7:46The second cohort and wave of folks who will benefit are these SMBs. And the reason why they're going to be ahead of the rest of the Fortune 493, as Christopher just said, is because the 493 typically is a monkey see, monkey do set of dudes and dudettes, right? It's, oh, who's doing this with AI? I have to keep up with the Joneses and do that. I think the SMBs have less of that requirement and Brinker's a large company, right? and publicly traded one. But, you know, a place like Chili's, you know, who's famous for their little jingle of, you know, give me my baby back, baby back, baby back ribs.

8:20The way they're going to get there is through baby steps. And what baby steps really means is what we've always talked about is don't start with the solution. Don't start with the tech. Start with the problem. And in this case with Chili's, what you see that they obviously did was imagined the lowercase p problems of, hey, we can't talk to each other. And guess what? if you've ever watched the show The Bear, communication, really important. I don't know if any of you've noticed, but it seems like anytime I go to a restaurant now, I talk to a waitress or a waiter, they use the language of the bear.

8:52Herd, chef, all of this kind of stuff in that corner, behind. And what the show really emphasized, and I love this show to death, is the importance of communication in a high-powered, high-stakes situation, which is what restaurants are. And so I am not surprised that Chili's has made massive productivity gains such that their stock has gone up 5x since 2022 just based on, can you hear me now? Can we talk to each other? Can we make sure that we're all on the same page? Now, if some of these restaurants, as an example, focus on the capital P problem, so when Christopher says, use AI as your co-founder, what that really means is start with the problem that restaurants are fundamentally trying to solve.

9:31How do I feed a lot of people, make them really happy, and get them in and out and pay the most amount of money in the quickest amount of time, right? And so when you think about that, communication is at the core of this, but AI, if you reimagine what a restaurant needs to be, what you're focused on is turns and tickets, right? So turns, how many people can come in and out and use that real estate, that table as many times a day, you'll make more money, right? And the thing that I think about is, you know, again, if you want to go to the future, you go to Asia. What happens in Asia when you go to Japan in a ramen shop?

10:06What do you do? You pay first. just like an uber you agree on the price you pay for you go to the vending machine you put your money in the vending machine you push what you want ticket comes out you can hand the ticket you're done as soon as you're done eating you walk you don't have to wait for the bill or anything else like that number two in korea when you want the waiter or waitress to come to your table because you have a question you have a need you're missing something you push a button on the table hello this is not that complicated right and so you don't have to flag down anybody you can You mean you don't need a robot?

10:38You just need a button? Turns out that was over, you know, over rotating on the solution. Absolutely. The robots are cute, but how about some basic communication? Pay first, come now when I ask you to, and guess what? They will leave sooner. And when they leave sooner, the time of the table turns, goes down, number of turns go up, restaurant makes more money. That's kind of number one. Number two is ticket, right? And so what can AI do? Hey, the brinker dude that bought the iPad's great. I think there should be an iPad at every table. Why is that? They can look at the reviews. Why is that? They can look at the reviews of the restaurant.

11:15They're already in there, but the reviews of the food items. Because again, you go back to the future in Asia. Oftentimes, when you go to a place in Japan in a restaurant, what do you see? You see outside in the window is not a menu. They are plastic representations of the meals. You can see what they look like. You can say, oh, I like that. Oh, I like that. Or so that you can utter the famous line from when Harry met Sally, I'll have what she's having, right? I mean, there's a lot of things that you can do on this front. By the way, that plastic food category, recreation food plastic category, whatever that's called, they do an amazing job.

11:51You go to Starbucks and you look at that sausage egg sandwich, that's the plastic one. You have to look pretty closely to know it's a plastic one. So credit to them and they've done a masterful job, but it's if you just restaurants, what are the fundamental problems of a restaurant? Turns and tickets. Use AI as your co-founder to solve that. And every SMB, if you kind of go back to the problem, remember the problem is your problem, right? You solve the fundamental problem of your category. How would I make my category 10x bigger? And how do I use AI to solve that? And not in a way that is like, ooh, Star Trek and sci-fi.

12:28Some of the basic things, are we on the same page? Can we communicate faster? Can we make people happier? And guess what? You're going to be able to do that, but you have to have them right North Star and just using tech for tech's sake is not going to always get you there. So that's why SMBs, I think a lot of these places, well, they've forgotten more about what it means to run a good business than I will ever know in their category, in their niche. That is their advantage and that the problem with the 493 of the S &P 500 is that the vast, I'd say 99 % of them, are not the founders of that company.

13:02They did not solve the problem at the very beginning. They are managers. They are inherited trust fund managers. And they've lost sight of what the fundamental problem is. And therefore, they cannot use AI in the right way to solve it. SMB, we have a much better degree of confidence that they can actually do it in the right way.

13:21Christopher Lochhead: Topic two,$13 billion says your next power company is in your backyard. Base Power, three years old, just closed a$1 billion round at a$13 billion valuation. $2.5 billion raised in total. The CEO is Zach Dell, Michael Dell's son. Michael Dell is not an investor. They have installed more than 23 ,000 batteries across Texas and the Chicago area. Roughly 100 installations a day, and they expect to double that by the year end. 550 megawatt hours already in the ground, which is the size of a large utility-scale storage project, except it's sitting in people's yards. The new units hold 39 kilowatt hours, about 36 hours of backup for a normal house.

14:05Christopher Lochhead: Here's the model. In deregulated Texas, BASE owns the battery, sells you the electricity, then aggregates all of those batteries and sells power back to the grid at peak. In West Texas, El Paso Electric is paying homeowners$250 a battery to test whether it can stop building for peak entirely. Their demand goes from 1 ,000 megawatts in winter to over 2 ,500 in a heat wave. And the backdrop is residential electricity prices are up 42 % nationally over five years, 94 % in Washington, D.C., 74 % in Maryland, and in the first quarter alone, American Homes installed a record 1.3 gigawatt hours of storage.

14:47Christopher Lochhead: So, Eddie, is the homeowner the customer in that business or the product? They are absolutely the customer here and not the product, which is great. I mean, we have to check the terms of the business model and how they're doing it. But I don't think the consumer has had more agency and opportunity than ever now beforehand with this. Because what we have said repeatedly is that power is the part of the bingo card that is the major bottleneck in Log Jam for AI. That's kind of point number one. Point number two is that the government going to make it worse, not going to make it better. And point number three, consumer to the rescue, right?

15:21The consumer part of the GDP is about 70%. And they are the ones here that have the cards and have the opportunity. And I was not only excited to see this article in the journal, so good job, Wall Street Journal, because I wasn't aware of this. The journal at its peak is when you tell me stories that I did not know about beforehand. Tell me something different. So that's fantastic. Number two, I was tickled when it was Michael Dell's son, but he was not an investor. So good on you, dad. Good job Fatherhood 3.0-ing as far as we can tell. And then thirdly is I was even more excited when I saw it was Texas and in Chicago.

15:56Because I'm like, where are these for me in the life, right? Because I will tell you at our place on the Big Island, the very best thing that we have is the solar power and the batteries. It makes me so happy. Bree, Eddie's solar power on the Big Island makes him so happy. It's like Christmas every day when he looks at the meter. It's like winning the lottery every single day. I don't know how to describe it. And, you know, not like you win a billion dollars, but like every day, you know, I get a little scratch off and it's like, oh, here's 20 bucks, you know, from the sun. Thank you very much.

16:31Great, the sun paid for your coffee and donut this morning. Yeah, it's like, hey, crank the AC if you want, you know, turn on the hot tub, whatever you want to do, right? It's all good. It's free in effect, right? And so, and the real power to this is that I'm just so excited that entrepreneurs are getting there to go from a$1 billion to$13 billion valuation in three years is no joke for anybody. And doing it with hardware and power and tech is amazing. Doing it on a distributed grid that we've talked about is awesome. And I will tell you that, let's say, wherever you are on the spectrum here, maybe you don't care about AI, maybe you're like, oh, this is like, I'm a little bit scared of it all.

17:09what you should know is that distributed power these batteries are the most green thing that you can do because the reason why this matters is when electric usage is high you know all the utility companies what do they do they use coal during peak times to compensate for the needs of the grid it is some of the worst burning stuff that you can have out there and so like it's you know five o 'clock everyone just came home it's super hot still and you crank the ac up that's when the electric companies turn to some of the dirtiest fuel to meet the power needs. And instead, if everybody has these batteries in their homes, they don't need to do that anymore because they're not going to be drawn on the grid.

17:48And it's some of the greenest that you can do. And the second part, if you are just purely, you know, you know, I don't care about any of that stuff and I just want to be a capitalist on this one, then I will go ahead and quote Buffett again, you know, be greedy when people are fearful and fearful when people are greedy. And what you want is when people, when the prices of electricity is high, you want to be like, oh, I'm going to use my stash. I'm not going to use the grid stash. And that's what you got when you have battery power. And when no one's using the grid and the price of electricity is low, you say, send that stuff my way.

18:24I got room in my fridge and we're going to store all that good stuff so that we can use it. And so, you know, I think 36 hours is great. And people have thought about batteries and backup storage as a worst case scenario type of thing like oh there's a storm it's a power prepper in me is going wild the prepper exactly right i would say to heck with 36 hours give me 360 hours man because like at some point here's what's happening is that not only will you have an abundance and surplus for your own personal usage but at some point you know and and uh elon has talked about this with auto bidder is that at some point what happens when you have a distributed network of goods, somebody will come in with a toll booth and create a platform for exchange so that if Christopher has 360 hours of power and I need some, I say, hey, brother Christopher, let's do an exchange.

19:17Token maxing, token maxing, token maxing. Right. Let me, let me, let me sell me some of your power at a lower price than the grid. And then everybody's happy and everybody's in business here. And so like, and it's entirely possible that it all happens without you having to check your phone or answer a phone call. It all happens naturally where imagine a world where now I'm going into crazy town where you have just like a stock market, you have kind of preloaded trades. Hey, when the stock hits this, sell. When the stock hits that, buy. My energy bot is going to sell and buy my energy to you and from you and vice versa.

19:56Right. We're going to have agents. There's going to be an exchange. And look, what's happening here is capitalism for the win again. Right. So power has generally been a monopoly controlled, a category monopoly controlled largely by government, even when there's private companies. So here in California, Pacific Gas and Electric, or as we like to call them, PG and Evil, you know, they are an independent company, but they are highly regulated and they are essentially an extension of the government, right? So what do we have here? Category designing, legendary entrepreneurs, identifying the energy problem, figuring out the solution, and democratizing energy, taking it away from government-controlled monopolies to create a free market, which will do what?

20:52It will lower the costs. And to Eddie's point, hey, run the hot tub. It will increase usage. This is the Jevons paradox. yet again. And so what do we have? We have a category designing entrepreneur who creates a new category to solve a very clear big problem that heretofore, all the greenies and all the government do-gooders and all the socialists didn't solve. We have a bottleneck in this country around energy. We pointed it out very clearly. China has a huge advantage. This is a big problem. Dell is solving this problem by turning consumers into mini energy entrepreneurs. And there's a big, okay, Bean, there's a big discussion in our country right now about capitalism versus socialism.

21:43This is a legendary example of how in a free market, entrepreneurs identify problems and go after solutions that, in this example, government can't or won't. One other thing, all of the donkeys that are behind stopping AI data centers, your emphasis is on the wrong syllable. Again, category designing entrepreneurship for the win, right? They see a problem because, oh my God, my electric bill is going to go up, which is completely, totally false. In addition, if we embrace this new category and adjacent categories and new categories, let's call them in the domain of personal energy harvesting, for lack of a better different category name for now, not only is this not going to cause the electric bill to go up, it's going to cause you, the consumer, to make money selling power.

22:43and so again the socialists get it wrong and the capitalists get it right and this is an important thing especially given the debate in our country about this now yeah i mean i think this is one of those things where everyone has a dominant view whether you know it or not on scarcity or abundance on anything that's out there right if you think that you go through a bad breakup and if you have a scarcity mindset, you're going to wallow in that bad breakup. If you have an abundant mindset, hey, there's a lot of fish in the sea. You get through it a little faster with it. You know the expression, right, Eddie?

23:20The best way to get over somebody is to get under somebody. I did not know that one.

23:29So the, the. Bree, I love it when I say something that just knocks him right off track. Like, let me get back on. So, but yeah, I mean, scarcity versus abundant. And what's funny about this is that if you assume relationships are scarce, then you'll act one way. Relationships are abundant, you'll act a different way. If you think that food is scarce, then you will hoard everything that you have and eat it all, even if you don't need it. And, you know, to your caloric and, you know, waistline detriment, if you think food is abundant, you're not going to worry about it. easy to skip a meal when you know that there's one waiting for you.

24:04And power is exactly the same way, right? You think that power is scarce, you just need to look up in the sun and say, there's a thermonuclear reactor some time away that doesn't seem to run out and not in our lifetimes for sure. And we just need a different mechanism of capturing and storing it and exchanging. And if we do that, we'll all be good with that. So I do think that... We don't need nuclear reactors, we got one in the sky. Yeah. With all of these things, go back to first principles, understand what you have. Is it scarce? Is it abundant? And if you can change your mindset about that, you might find that you have a different point of view and you might feel better about it than you thought.

24:49Christopher Lochhead: right on time topic three 20 undergrads turned 65 on a warehouse meanwhile 41 of recent undergrads are underemployed let's go to indiana university 20 undergraduates at the kelly school run a real estate private equity fund called sample gates management 12 million dollars of outside money raised from actual third-party investors, not from the university. In 2022, they raised$4.2 million from 46 investors, 40 % over goal. Last year's group raised$7.8 million from 74 investors. One person wrote a$700 ,000 check. None of the students get paid. This summer, they sold their first deal, an industrial warehouse outside of Indianapolis, 65 % gross profit in about 16 months, A professional on their own investment committee called that a fantastic return for any firm, students or not.

25:46Christopher Lochhead: They screen up to 400 deals a year and have done 12. Ten seasoned executives sit on that committee and reject about a third of what the students bring them. A decade ago, there was a handful of these funds in the country. Today, there are at least 18, with two more launching this year. Now, the other number, the New York Fed says 41.5 % of recent college graduates are underemployed. employed, working jobs that never required the degree they paid for. Same system, same years, 20 kids clearing 65 % on real assets, and four in 10 of their peers in jobs their diploma didn't buy. So Christopher, back to you.

26:25Christopher Lochhead: Is the degree still the asset here, or is the access the asset, and the degree is just the price of admission? So I think it depends what you want to do in your life. If you want to be my orthopod, you can't get that on YouTube. So you're going to want to go to a good school. We want to go to see doctors who went to good schools who know what the hell they're doing. That's always going to be true. In certain domains, you need to learn certain things. I have a nephew who's a rock star, recently graduated. He had a job waiting for him with an investment firm, getting after graduation that he'd locked and loaded almost a year before he graduated.

27:09He got that job and five or six weeks into that job, it was with a small regional bank. He got recruited by a global international investment firm with about a 40 % raise in about six weeks of getting his new job. And so he quit that job and he got the new job. Okay. So what's my point? It's very interesting to see who today is upwardly mobile and who today is downwardly mobile. And if you look at the data, it's fascinating. There is a shift that has occurred, which is over-educated people are more downwardly mobile now than they used to be, and under-educated people are more upwardly mobile than they used to be.

27:50This is a signal, and it's a loud one. And we got to go back to first principles in category design. what problem are we solving with education? And if we're solving the right problem with education, that is to say, I want to be a neurosurgeon, that education is the right solution to that problem called I want to be a neurosurgeon. It's not the right solution to I want to be a Wall Street trader, which is what my nephew is doing. It's not. He didn't need that job. He didn't need He didn't need his undergraduate degree. He certainly doesn't need an MBA. I would tell you, two or three generations ago, he would be told to get an MBA.

28:33There's no way he's going to get an MBA. It would be financial malfeasance for him to go get an MBA. He doesn't need one. He's 22 years old. He's a rock star. And so the question is, what do you want to do with your life? And what's the right solution to get there? And one of the things that we're seeing today is, by and large, there has been a massive increase in over-educated, downwardly mobile people. And there is an interesting uptick in under-educated, upwardly mobile people. This is something to pay attention to. It's a big, important signal. Figure out where your destination is, a.k.a. the problem you want to solve, and then pick the right solution.

29:22Sometimes it's education. More often than not today, and at an increasing level, it's not. And I'll say one other thing about this. You know, a lot of young people are pissed off. They've got a master's degree in underwater basket weaving, and they can't get a job. And so we have a really big problem in our country right now with the overly educated, downwardly mobile. This is not a good thing. So we need to make sure that we're encouraging our young people to figure out where they want to be and figure out the right solution to get there. Sometimes it's an education. Sometimes it's not. And the not is increasing.

30:06And the more we move from knowledge worker to creator capitalist, the truer that will be. Because let's remember, a knowledge worker category created by Peter Drucker is somebody who acquires high value knowledge and gets paid a lot of money to apply that knowledge to execute a known result within a known process system or company. That's what a knowledge worker is today. Well, guess what? Every day, AI and agents make knowledge and execution closer to free. And that's why we have so many over-educated, downwardly mobile people because they train to be a traditional knowledge worker. The value isn't there now.

30:48The value has moved to people who can create net new value with AI. Those are the upwardly mobile people, regardless of how many degrees they have. I think to all of this is that education is the broad category, and we need to define what the right category of education is. And I think as Christopher laid out, it depends on the profession that you're trying to get to. And that in any profession, yes, there's some education, but the real education category breaks out into two parts. One is in class, book learning, right? Memorize and regurgitate. And the second is out of class, and it's called apprenticeship.

31:28I do, you watch, we talk about it. Then you do, I watch, and then we talk about it so that you can do it without me watching you. That's what an apprenticeship is. And that's what these, you know, Indiana University students are getting. It is not a class. They could not get this experience and outcome through any sort of university professor or this and that. It is an apprenticeship that they're getting. They're doing the work. And here's what I love is they're not getting paid. And that's the beauty of it because it would be different if they were getting paid, but they are getting paid through the apprenticeship, right?

32:01It's I learn. I learn how to invest. I learn how to pitch. I learn how to raise money. I learn how to manage personalities. I learn how to, I'm looking at the photo in the journal article of sample gates management and I'm like, you know what? A lot of dudes in suits. I'm sure there's some degree of drama that's in there that's going to be like, oh, okay, I want to run a small firm. Oh, maybe I like running a big firm. All of that's going to be super valuable, right? But the real value of education is for any parent, any student that's in college, any parent that's sending a kid to college or whatever, you know, as Christopher laid out, You have to look soberly at what is the shortest path to apprenticeship as the education.

32:39It is not about the education writ large. And exactly as Christopher laid out, what is the apprenticeship part of being a neurosurgeon? It's the residency. It's the fellowship that comes after. It is the, I learn by doing, because I don't know if they do this anymore. I've been up for 36 hours and I can't tell which way I'm going, but, and the stress is on. And am I going to hurt someone or am I going to help somebody here? And that is where you make your bones in that profession, where you make your bones, as Christopher Nephews is doing in investments, is investing, you know, not in a class.

33:10And that if you cannot see, if you have a long path and cannot see when you will get the apprenticeship in college, that's a problem. If there's not a big paycheck, you know, a neurosurgeon can wait a decade to get to the apprenticeship part because there's a big paycheck on the other end of it. if you have to wait for an uncertain unknowable apprenticeship then that's a real problem because what i love about this article here's the non-obvious part of it look at the author of the article it's and i just noticed it until just now lily bell polling she is not a wall street journal reporter she is a college student at yale she is a reporting intern so what i love about this she's a rising senior she's running newspaper at yale she's run newspapers previously in her high school.

33:54But this is young people apprenticing about reporting, writing about young people apprenticing about investing. And that's what this is supposed to be about. So good job, Wall Street Journal. We took you to the task the other week about that stupid, you know, one great chart that you need to know. You did a great thing by putting a young person and giving them the chance to write an article to be published in the journal is no small feat about other young people doing amazing things. And so what we need to see is that college is not a place to hang out, it is a way station. It is meant to go from here to there.

34:26So when people tell me, you know, I love my college experience, I'm like, well, that's great. You should love it. I didn't like mine in particular, but it was a way station to get me to where I needed to go. And if you have that mindset, you're going to be great. And it is about the shortest path to apprenticeship. That is the key for all of this. If you can figure that out, you're going to be in great shape. And for Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates, it was not at Harvard. It was, hey, the shortest path to apprenticeship is to drop out and do the thing, be a startup person, right? And for some people, it is, you know, I went to college and I went to XYZ school and then I got my apprenticeship.

35:03That's fine. That's the case. But make sure that you get there as quickly as you possibly can, as fully as you possibly can, and you will be thriving your career no matter what it is. And remember, youngins, this is the old people and grandpas on the lawn here, do not worry about what you get paid. If you get an apprenticeship opportunity, you should not care. Just like these students do not care that they're not getting paid. Because they can point to, look at this article in the journal. Oh, who are you, so-and-so, young Jedi? You know, you're interviewing for this job or you want to raise money.

35:35Tell me about it. Well, did you read this journal article? That's me in the photo. I was the one who pitched this idea to get to this investment and that made a 65 % return. That's something that you cannot, no degree can buy you that. I do not care if you graduate a valedictorian magna cum laude from any institution in the world, you will not be able to get that kind of an outcome that comes from an apprenticeship. That has to be earned. It has to be, it is not bequeathed to you because you paid for it. And that's, remember, it's no small trick to get into some of these schools. But in effect, you get the degree, yes, by doing the work, but because you paid for it with money, the apprenticeship outcomes are radically different.

36:16And so go find those apprenticeships. Don't worry about getting paid. Get there as quickly as you can, and you'll be great.