464 Jersey Mike’s Is Worth $7.5 Billion And 2% Of Its Customers Are Gen Z | 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 jersey mikes is winning the sandwich war with a customer base that's two percent gen z and wall street just paid a premium for a plan to change that topic two san francisco is booming again and its biggest mall is about to sell for about a dollar on the dime. In topic three, young people are passing around a one-line formula that tells them when they can stop saving for retirement. Some of them are hitting it in their 20s. We're recording on Friday, September 11th. Hey-ho, let's go. Topic one, Jersey Mike's and the 2 % problem. Jersey Mike's went public this year after a Blackstone takeover.

2:18Christopher Lochhead: It's worth about$7.5 billion, dollars, 20 straight years of same store sales growth, 4.3 billion in sales last year, the number two sub chain in America right behind Subway. And it gets 15 to 20 bucks for a sub, chips and a drink. Now let's look at who's paying. About 70 % of his customers are Gen X or boomers. More than 60 % make over 80 ,000 a year. Gen Z is 2%. Wall Street is valuing it at about 20 times earnings, a premium to McDonald's and Wingstop. It's carrying$1.8 billion in debt, some of which paid Blackstone before the IPO. The plan is to go from 3 ,300 stores to 15 ,000 stores, and the journal says getting there means winning Gen Z.

3:03Christopher Lochhead: So the new CEO, who came over from Wingstop, is moving money into TikTok and Instagram. Last year, Jersey Mike's put about 1 % of its marketing into social. Its peers put 10 % to 25%. Meanwhile, its 12.5 million loyalty members already come in three times as often as everyone else. And the last sub chain that went chasing cheaper, younger customers with discounts was Subway. And Subway is shrinking. So a chain built on the best customers in American dining now has to go win the 2%. So Eddie, is the 2 % Gen Z the crack in Jersey Mike's gross story? Or is chasing Gen Z the fastest way for Jersey Mike's to turn into Subway?

3:44Well, the first thing I caught notice of is the$1.8 billion in debt that Blackstone put on it. Classic private equity. You know, let's take out a big loan, pay ourselves a dividend, and then spin it out. So that's, you know, whatever. Probably the bigger driver and reason why they have to go from 3 ,300 stores to 15 ,000 is that. Which leads us to the fact that they don't have Gen Z and they need to win Gen Z. And so here's the issue, is that it's a premium-priced QSR, quick-serve restaurant. at 20 bucks that that's in that sweet greens territory which is pushing the envelope some right you know and that's that's a far cry from a five dollar foot long at subway to you know so forex that and a legacy mindset and it's for a legacy category of sandwiches you talk to my son my kids like you know what they like they like chipotle it's different right and that mexican food is kind of the sandwich of what it was 20 years ago so there is a definitely a palate dynamic that is a mismatch with it.

4:42So, you know, Gen X, Gen Boomers, you know, they get the sandwich, they grew up on the sandwich, and that the young folks maybe, maybe not be relevant to them just quite yet. So it'll be interesting to see kind of what happens. And there needs to be some sort of a crack in an entryway into cracking Gen Z. And I'm not sure that the traditional let's put more money into marketing, you know, do a TikTok dance is going to get you there, right? It's a fundamental category thing. There is no WOM amongst Gen Z, is what the 2 % is saying. you know, Xers and boomers saying, hey, you want a sandwich? Let's go to Jersey Mike's.

5:13Gen Z is probably saying, I want to go eat. Let's go to Chipotle. If not Chipotle, then where else? And Jersey Mike's doesn't really show up on the list there. Now, here's what's kind of interesting from a Gen Z perspective. I don't know if this is the right thing. But the other weird thing about Jersey Mike's is its average unit volume, which is to say sales per restaurant, about$1.37 million. That is way low on the side compared to Chick-fil-A, which is at$6,$7 million. In and out is even much higher than that, right? At$4 million,$5 million, give or take. But from a sandwich category perspective, it is 2 to 3x the sales of a subway, which does about$500 ,000 in sales per restaurant a year.

5:52And then the other kind of weird data point is the amount of capital required to open a Jersey Mike. Right? Is that it's about$575 ,000 to open a Jersey Mike's, $550 ,000 for Jimmy John's, and$380 ,000 for a subway. So the give to get is probably the most powerful thing is you drop, call it 600 bucks, you're going to make 1.4 million bucks in sales coming out of it. Not a bad cash conversion versus you put half a million bucks into a Jimmy John's, you're going to get a million bucks out of it from a revenue per year. And Subway, you put 400 grand, you get 500 grand. That's the worst. So Subway is gone.

6:27It is just, you know, never mind the Jared issues that they had before, you know, don't hire a child molester as your spokesperson. But, you know, that category is, you know, gone the way of the value meal and it's not going to be long for the world. And Jimmy John's has a very clear positioning of Freaky Fast, as we talked about, Bree, like their delivery thing. And, you know, they're not saying they're the best, but they are the fastest. And so Jersey Mike, at kind of the palate end of things and most premium, you know, there's a space to be there. But I kind of wonder if it is about Gen Z entrepreneurship.

7:00One of the things I've talked about repeatedly on TV is that Gen Z is the first cohort of young people in America to prioritize business formation ahead of family formation. They're not getting married. They're not having kids at the same rates. They believe they have to establish themselves from a business perspective. And so if I were Jersey Mike's, one angle that I might look into is the entrepreneurship side is like, hey, you're a Gen Z-er and you're not sure that you want to be in college and take six figures of debt and become a knowledge worker and be replaced by somebody using AI. You might be better off taking that six-figure investment and buying a franchise of a Jersey bike and participating in the growth than just eating the growth.

7:42Well, there's a big opportunity here, obviously, and the opportunity is for different. The question is with this much debt, can they get there from here? Now, look, the Blackstone guys aren't exactly stupid, okay? So the debt should be technically serviceable. The question is, what is their differentiator? Right now, I don't know. Is the differentiator we suck less than Subway? I don't know. What's the one? We have one out here, I'm blanking on its name now, where they toast the buns. That's Quiznos. Quiznos. Jersey Mike is unique in, I don't know if unique or not, but they slice the deli meat in front of you.

8:19It's more of a, that kind of East Coast deli experience. East Coast deli feel. Okay. I don't know if that's a category difference. Maybe, I don't know, but no, I think what they need to do is they need to get different and they need to get relevant and they need to get hyper digital and they need to figure out what their radically different intellectual capital is, what problem they solve, how they name frame and claim that problem but become the category king of a new niche a new category um in sub in in in sandwiches where is their you know um dyson toothbrush of subways wait what's their difference here sushi rito example right sushi rito is one of my favorite examples right if they had a burrito places mexican sandwich subs that would be interesting if If they had Mexican subs.

9:12A Panda Express sub, that would be different. That would be interesting. Now we're getting somewhere. If they had an Italian or chicken parm sub, Italian food in a sub, that would be different. There's a lot of things that they could do. And it is a palate differentiation, an experience differentiation in the format of a sandwich that would get them there. I don't know which one of these will work, but I know the Gen Z palate is radically different. If they launch the Mexican sub right now, Think about how much in the United States we all love Mexican food. It's incredible. One of the greatest things about living here is that one of the greatest things about living in California is that Mexican cuisine is actually awesome.

9:52And if you eat it in a burrito or you eat it in a taco, it comes in a handheld carrying case. Right. Well, that's what a sub is. Look, I don't know if that's a good idea or not. But what we do know is, hey, get different. You're not different enough. Remember the breakfast joint we went to on the Big Island, Morningwood, all the hilarious jokes that they had there? Yeah, the place is called Morningwood. First of all, funny name, right? And then describe how wonderful this place is. Well, the thing that, I forget if somebody else ordered it too, I had a banh mi eggs benedict. Right, I had the same thing.

10:28Outstanding. Cilantro, you know, daikon, all the flavors of a banh mi in an eggs benedict. I'd never had that before. And there's no shortage of inspiration. a banh mi sub at a jersey mike's now you might say the vietnamese food go with new jersey i don't know right but it is definitely one of those things that they're going to have to get different from a palate perspective and create new categories of subs than the legacy east coast deli sub to be able to be germane and relevant to gen zers well yeah and imagine you know they're at a scale that they could do they could play this multiple ways right they could have the banh mi sub They could have the Mexican sub.

11:08They could have the sushi sub. You know what I'm saying? And so maybe that would be their differentiator. But look, I don't know. But what I do know is this is the universe screaming at them. You're not different enough.

11:25Christopher Lochhead: Topic two, the hole in San Francisco's comeback. San Francisco is back. AI money is flooding in. Job postings are up. Venture fundraising is up. And rents are the highest in the country again. Uniqlo is reopening a flagship. A new Ross down the street is packed. And in the middle of all of it, on Market Street, there's a 1.5 million square foot hole. San Francisco Center was the city's biggest mall. Before COVID, it did over$1 ,000 a square foot in sales. Top tier in America. A decade ago, it was valued at$1.2 billion. Then came COVID, crime, and homelessness. Nordstrom and Bloomingdale's pulled out and the owner stopped paying the loan and handed the keys to the lenders.

12:07Christopher Lochhead: By last year, it was 93 % vacant. This year, it closed. The lenders were owed$558 million, two developers agreed to buy it for$130 million, then walked away in July because the ownership was too tangled. Macy's owns one piece, the school district owns part of the dirt underneath, bids were due this week, and brokers say$130 million is the ceiling. That's about a dime on the dollar. And it's not the only beloved mall to close down recently either. Meanwhile, mall prices nationwide are up 13 % over the past year. The city came back, the shoppers came back, the stores came back to the blocks around it, but the mall is still boarded up.

12:48Christopher Lochhead: So Christopher, is the mall a category that's run out of road, or is this a 1.5 million square foot box waiting for somebody to design what comes next for in-person shopping? um it's neither this is a very california problem right so why does this problem exist this problem exists for multiple reasons uh number one california is an incredibly expensive incredible incredibly regulatory tax-heavy place to do business right number two the crime and homelessness is disgusting we spent 24 billion dollars on homelessness and the problem increased East, in the county that I live in, homelessness is up 13 % year over year.

13:34And so the reality is, look, San Francisco is a beautiful city. I don't want to go there. It's horrible. Not everywhere. There's some very nice places. I used to work in San Francisco. I love San Francisco. And there's only so much of seeing, you know, people take shits on the sidewalks that people can take, right? California has terrible crime. Our recidivism is very high. The average killer is out in 15 years, convicted killer, and the average convicted rapist is out in five. So all of these things are bad. 10 million people have left California in the last decade. So this is a big problem. Now, everything you said about the AI investment is absolutely true.

14:16And San Francisco, while all this is happening, is picking back up in a powerful way. The uncertainty around doing business here is the problem. The business conditions here are terrible. The number of companies that have left is unbelievable. The most California of companies in and out burger is no longer a California company anymore. And I think the reality is nobody wants to own a big piece of real estate like this in downtown San Francisco until there is a clear path forward. Right now, the AI boom is incredible. And I hope that makes a difference. Lori, the new mayor, is doing some good things, but not enough and not fast enough.

14:53This is a tough place to do business. we all want to live here it's amazing and so i hope san francisco recovers i think it's the most beautiful city in the country i love san francisco i think many of us do and i would like to see it um um you know booming um and there's a lot good going on that's a great thing to focus on but make no mistake 10 million people have left for a reason so this is a more than one thing can be true situation so all the stuff that christopher is talking about california absolutely you know You live there, you know it, and you've experienced it. And the category of the shopping mall is the problem, is that it's just not relevant in a world where we have Amazon.

15:34And you have Etsy, and you can buy things, and you don't need to go to the store. Now, I would actually argue that the shopping mall was not really the retail category. Yes, that's what paid the bills. It was in the socialization category. That's what malls were like when I was growing up, is that you met your friends there, you ate there, you hung out. and the agenda was, let's go hang out at the mall. To do what? It was an excuse to be with your friends and not have to do anything and sit around, just walk and browse. Maybe you bought something, maybe you didn't. And that's the missing that needs to be replaced is that it's not just the rents and the real estate.

16:09It is the community. It is the socialization. It is, I don't have an agenda. It was, you know, for me and my friends, it was like, I need to kill some time between the movie and eating. And we're going to hang out at the mall to do that, right? And so there needs to be something that, a place where young people can hang out again. And it'll be kind of interesting to see what transpires because I do think there are definitely needs for large swaths of real estate. Retail is a suboptimal use case of it, in my opinion, in the age of Amazon and digital commerce. But you have places like, you know, our Pirate Clint's company, Orange Twist, the medical aesthetics chain.

16:52They're expanding like crazy. And so you have places where you can get facials and Botox and red light therapy. There's a lot of wellness centers that will probably take up the space and say, hey, come get a massage, get some red light therapy, get a facial, because you need the physical space for that. That's kind of one, right? But that's out of the teen kind of experience. Maybe there's a dry bar type thing that you might do there. But secondly, I mean, the other big use case, if data centers need a home, I mean, that's a lot of space. I love it. for data centers to go there, right? And that, you know, it would just kind of, now, and here's what we need to do is to create a new category of real estate where we get multiple things happen at once.

17:33Maybe you get part that's data center. Maybe you get part that's high-end services and experiences like, you know, gyms are another one that are taking up empty shopping mall space. And here's what would be the thing that if I were Zuck and, you know, Satya and anyone building out a data center, here's what I would do. is I would have floor one, data centers. Floor two, aesthetic experiences, high rent services, gyms, this and that. Floors three to 30, affordable real estate housing. And it doesn't have to be condos or this and that. It can be the next gen form of housing for 20 somethings to gather.

18:13It could be dorm style housing. It could be reinvented senior citizen style housing. It could be any number of things. And guess what happens if you were looking at a place from my parents that the Whole Foods is at the bottom level? That's awesome, right? Who wouldn't want Whole Foods to subsidize your HOA and your condo assessments and everything else like that, right? So there is a new form of category that can be created. I think Marc Andreessen said, it's time to build America, shopping mall, put your category design hat on and design something different. Because retail was never the business.

18:48It was really about connection. Now, as it relates to the category, here's an interesting thing people miss. I was just in Salt Lake City. Unlike most urban centers, Salt Lake City is on fire. And they are building. And they have done what downtown Detroit did, which is they're creating what John Jurdy, God rest his soul, I'll get to him in a second, calls a high density hive. an area downtown where there is a ton of sports and entertainment. So now Salt Lake has a professional hockey team, an NHL team. Obviously, they have the Utah Jazz. There's the Delta Center there, and they're building another smaller live entertainment facility there.

19:36They built a new convention center there, et cetera, et cetera. And Salt Lake is a wonderfully designed city. It's a very green city. Of course, it's in the most majestic setting you could imagine. And so in an era where downtowns are being destroyed, Salt Lake is thriving. Why? It comes down to what Joe Pine taught us in 1998. experience, right? What do people want? Why do kids go to the mall? Because they need to hang out. What do they hang out doing? Having experience with each other doing a thing, right? And so what's happening here is, and by the way, John Gerdy, John Gerdy was one of the greatest architects in American history.

20:19I was honored to be on his board for quite some time. And John Gerdy was the first person to understand this at scale. John Gerdy built what was for the longest time. I don't know if it still is. It probably isn't. Maybe look this up for me. The number one most visited place in America was designed by architect John Gerdy. It's called the Great Mall of America. And John Gerdy was the guy that had the vision to put a roller coaster in an amusement park. excuse me, a roller coaster in a shopping mall to turn it into an amusement park. That's experience. He was the king of experience. And so what we got to understand here is what are the experiences that matter?

21:05And John was right. What you just described, Eddie, with your floors and different uses, that's called mixed use. That's been a known thing. And what John's point of view was, and I think he's more right today than ever, is the experience makes the place. So mixed use, great, but what does it feel like to be there? And what are you left with when you leave? What can you do there that you can't do other places, right? And so ultimately what needs to be done, frankly, is in a world that's increasingly digital, the value of analog experience is increasing. All you have to do is look at spending, Gen Z and the millennials and Gen whatever they are behind them, there's a massive shift.

21:52It's been going on for 40 years and it's accelerating from spending on stuff to spending on experiences. And so if malls are going to thrive going forward, they're not going to be retail malls. What they're going to be is experience centers that are what John called high density mixed use hives that are differentiated. in that the place that you go to in San Diego, San Diego should feel different than the place that you go to in Minneapolis. They should be of the environment, of the culture that it's in. And so bottom line, John Gerdy was right. Joe Pine is right again. The future is in radically differentiated experiences.

22:32And the more we go digital, native digital, the more we crave human interaction in the analog, in the IRL.

22:42Christopher Lochhead: Topic three, Coastify. If you're over 40, you've probably never heard of it, but if you're under 30, it's on your For You page. It's one formula. Take the number you want at retirement and work backward with compound interest. That's your Coast number. Hit it and you never have to put in another dollar. Say you want$1.8 million at 65 and you assume 7 % returns. Your Coast number at 35 is about$240 ,000. Save that, stop, and let it ride for 30 years. Google searches for Coast Fi are up 50 % from last year, and a TIAA survey, 15 % of Americans said they're actively going for it. One woman moved back in with her parents after college, banked most of every paycheck, and had a million dollars by 27.

23:27Christopher Lochhead: Then she walked away from a six-figure software engineering job. Financial advisors are nervous. Inflation, a wedding, kids, a house, or a market crash in year two, and the math breaks. It's spreading anyway because younger Americans are worried about what AI does to their careers and whether social security will be there. Gen Z's confidence in retiring comfortably at a normal age dropped from 77 % to 64 % in one year. A generation that doesn't trust the latter is doing algebra to figure out how early it can climb off. Eddie, what happens to every brand and category built on young people earning more, spending more, and trading up if a chunk of them decide at 30 that they've saved enough?

24:08Well, it's the right aspiration. I'm not sure it's the correct analysis. So the right aspiration is you want to be a creator capitalist is what we've always talked about. Don't work for a W-2. You know, you want to get paid to be you, get paid to be different by using your different to make a massive difference in the world. That's the dream and the goal. It is not coasting and it's not retirement. Retirement is not the goal. Coasting is not the goal. You want to make a difference in the world and get paid for it. So part of the equation is there. Now, so that's the right aspiration part. The right analysis part, this is what makes me squirrely, is that inflation screws the whole math up, right?

24:48If you have a world of 2 % inflation, then okay, fine. Pick a number, the stock market goes up with it whatever else it is. But Bree, you said the magic words. Social Security, the fund is going to run out of money in 2031, 2032. That's like five, six years away, right? So what does that mean? Does that mean that the D.C. politicians are going to let Social Security die? No. They'll get voted out by the senior brigade. There'll be people with walkers on Washington, D.C. That's never going to happen, right? And so what will happen? They're going to print more money. It's the only way that you make the math work is that to cover social security, to cover all the entitlement spending that we have to do, you have to print more money.

25:32That means that there are more dollars available for the same set of goods. That means the dollars per good goes up. That means prices go up, even though nobody's actually entirely trying to do it. But it is one of these things that is going, just the math at 7 % of the world. I hate to interrupt you, but I have to. So most people don't realize that when you print more money, you make the existing money worth less, right? It's simple economics, but people don't understand this. And so during COVID, we had a crisis on our hands and both the Trump and Biden administration went mental making new US dollars.

26:17I'm just double checking to see if it's changed. It appears that, yeah, we've had, if this is right from perplexity, more than 50 percent more money printed since COVID. Okay? So when people get all excited about inflation, what they don't realize is what the government has been doing, the reason we have inflation is because the government is continuously devaluing the value of our money. Therefore, you need more money to pay for the same thing. A bag of groceries that cost$75 now costs$120. And the reason for that, or rough, you know, rough and tough. And the reason for that is because the Biden administration and the Trump administration and the second Trump administration continue to print more money.

27:12And that's why things get more expensive. That's why there is inflation. And this is why the political party doesn't matter, right, Christopher? No, I hate whoever's doing it. I'm a political independent. I don't care if the Democrats are doing that shit. drive the outcomes. To get reelected, you need to give away stuff. No one's going to touch entitlements. To keep entitlements, you have to print money. It is a mathematical certainty. And so that's why. I don't know that these equations we're talking about here, Bree, are taking any of this into account. Right now, inflation is roughly 3%, I believe.

27:45Is that correct? Around there. It's going to stay. It's not going down. It's going to go higher, most likely, which is, you know, because. Well, and here's the challenge, right? The average, rate of return for the last 70 years, the S &P 500 is approximately 10%. If what you're saying is true, and I think it is, for planning purposes, you might want to assume a 5 % inflation increase. Because it's at three now, we're printing money like we never have before, our deficits and debt are getting bigger and bigger, so we're running the credit card bill higher and higher and higher. And nobody in America knows what real inflation feels like.

28:24If you want to know what that feels like, listen to the pod that Pirate Christopher did with Pastor Yvonne Moari, right? He talks about hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, where you get to the grocery store, you have a loaf of bread at a certain price at X dollars or X price. You have the money for that. And by the time that you get rung up seconds later, it's gone to Y and you don't have enough money for that. That's what real inflation feels like. Hyperinflation. We've never experienced that in America. and it is a mathematical certainty that we have to print money and that inflation is going to go up and it won't be that extreme but boy oh boy are you going to feel like boy it's scary in a way that makes me feel very nervous about the future and so it has to be a runway not forever you know when Musk did the Doge thing and look you might hate Musk you might not just step back from all the noise and just think for a second right the initiative was go find waste and fraud in government spending and stop it.

29:22And he did. And more than half the country hates him for it. Now, maybe you don't like them. Maybe you don't like the politics. Maybe orange man bad. I get all that stuff, but they didn't, they, they got violent. They started to burn down Tesla's stores because they were furious that Elon Musk was taking away their Scooby Snacks. That's the problem. Yeah. So, you know, if you do the math correctly for a relatively extreme inflation scenario, you're going to have to, A, invest aggressively in the S &P. Like, there's no bonds, very little cash. Like, you have to go all the way in on that to make the math work.

30:00But let's say that the math can work out. Maybe AI does what it does and, you know, we can outgrow the debt situation and this and that. You still have the fundamental problem, even if the analysis works out is the aspiration is, remember, you had been sold the big retirement lie. Go read our mini book on that one, is that it is not good to not have to work. Anyone that I've known that has either had a trust fund, who have been successful early, who just stopped working, just bad things happen. It's like winning the lottery. Bad things seem to follow. They get divorced. They lose their sense of purpose.

30:42They lose their self-identity. You lose so much without work. And so I think the coast-fi movement, it's a languaging problem. I don't have a problem. The fi part, financial independence, we love. Create a capitalist, we support that. The coasting part, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's a runway. You want enough so that you can find your different that makes a massive difference and get paid to be you. And that's the part that you have to think through is that, totally cool, quit a software job that you don't like at the age of 30, not so that you have 50 years of no work, but so that you have five years to figure out what exactly you need to do that makes your socks go up and down, that gives you a sense of purpose, and guess what?

31:23Makes you more money because that's not the goal, not necessarily the end-all, be-all, but the sign that you make more money is a clear data signal that says you're making a bigger difference. And that's what's going to sustain you. You want to make a difference in the world. You do not want to rest on your laurels. We don't want Wally. We're all fat and drinking milkshakes and watching TVs. That is not the future that we want. It doesn't work. Look, maybe I should talk about this more. I don't know. It just sounds however it sounds, but I'll tell you. So I start my first company at 18 after getting thrown out of high school.

31:55I retire as an operating executive at age 38. And that was the word I used. And I moved to Tahoe and I skied 120 days a year and I learned to surf. and I did all this stuff. I made it. I did exactly, Brie, what these folks are planning to do. I was independently wealthy before 40, okay? Well, guess what? There's only so much of that shit you can do. It's great to ski 120 days a year. It really is. And it's great to learn to surf and it's great to go here, there, and everywhere and do whatever you want. But if it's not a thing that is your superpower, if it's not something that makes a difference for others, that matters for others, just pure hedonism, which is really fun.

32:44I really like it. Don't get me wrong. Go, go get it. It's fucking fun. And you can't do it forever. I tried. Right. And what did I end up doing? You know, you can't stop who you are. I ended up starting companies. I started play bigger with Al. We wrote the book. I started consulting and advising all these companies in category design. We formalized category design and brought it into the world. And the reality is I have created more value for others and myself since I quote unquote retired, which I'm clearly not. I would describe it today as semi-retired at best. And the reason for it is there's only so much hedonism you can do.

33:31So this whole goal of wanting to retire and go to the beach is a donkey goal. It's not what humans are. And the things that you have to do to be successful enough to retire early mean that you have the drive to do things of value. So if you have a drive to do things of value and you think you're going to be happy doing nothing of value, I'm here to tell you, I'm on the other side of it. It's not going to work for you.

33:57Christopher Lochhead: We'll see you next week, Pirates.