Designing Hospitality: From Teaching Millions to Crafting My Own Hotel Brand - Ben Uyeda, Reset

Josiah: I came across this article where Travel Weekly called you an "architect turned internet sensation." You have millions and millions of followers online and in watching your stuff, I feel like a big part of what you do is you share the journey, you talk about personally, you talk about what you're creating and you're bringing people along in that. But I'd love to hear from your perspective, how did you get here? How did you become an internet sensation? Then we're going to get into hospitality because it's crazy what you've done in creating content and telling stories online.

Ben: So my career has been a slow descent from prestigious, ivory tower, Ivy League university teaching positions! I was a visiting lecturer at Cornell. That was my first job out of grad school, teaching architecture and sustainable design. It was really nice to be there, but Starting off at that place where you have prestige and credibility, I immediately started seeing what I didn't have, which was actually a message or a way to connect with people who weren't already going to do just fine. Every one of my students was going to be successful regardless. Teaching design to people who are already talented at design and the people who already care about sustainability just felt a little like preaching to the choir. So started an architecture firm, Zero Energy Design in Boston, and did really well with that. I wanted to reach a broader audience. So I founded a tech company called Free Green, which became the largest supplier of home designs in the country. We basically gave design away for free and then sold advertising directly into the blueprints for houses. By making design free, you reach a massive level of distribution. And then, when that company got acquired, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. And I really didn't want to go back into the service model of architecture. And at the time, a lot of our media partners, companies like BuzzFeed and Vice, which is funny looking back that those were the hot companies, and now they're the ones getting bought up by private equity for pennies on dollars. And They were all struggling back then in the idea of pivoting to video, right? And this is going to be a consistent theme of how I look for sort of opportunities across all fields;, you look for where the bigger hot company is struggling with an inevitable truth that's coming. Everyone knew in 2014, 2015, video was going to dominate content. Big ones were struggling, and they couldn't do it effectively and cost. They couldn't be scrappy. They couldn't do what 14-year-olds in their parents' basements can do effortlessly, creatively, and with great excellence. And that's not unique. I mean, this is also a restaurant phenomenon. I grew up in the, I'm 45 now, so I grew up in like the heyday of Olive Gardens, Chili, Outback Steakhouse, and all these other abominations to culinary endeavors. And at that time, people thought things were scaling and there wasn't a way to sort of spread great word of mouth around people that are actually good at what they're doing, instead of people that had marketing budgets. So early on, I've always had this thing in the back of my head that small, Teams with great creativity are going to create things that don't scale. Restaurants, media, this is consistently true. You're not going to have like a Disney as a corporation write the next great novel. They'd have to license the novel from an individual that's uniquely talented and then water it down through the sort of various IP development processes. So that's been the sort of consistent theme. What I basically did was I took my architecture and design background and that sort of interest in academia and teaching and then applied it to content creation. So growing up in a very poor family, in Southern California, very bland, not a lot of architecture, suburban, beige, all the kind of monotony of SoCal suburbia, but having passion about design, I wanted to bring like some of the things I learned about in college with sort of like great design. And so I started making YouTube videos, starting with sort of DIY projects, how to make simple kind of things that were modern and cool and cost effective, or maybe touched on elements of sustainability. And that channel took off because it's fast for one person to make creative content. It quickly became a business and kept growing from there. And our model with this sort of media is very similar to one of the early internet stories I saw where this guy, remember eBay back in the day, like eBay and PayPal were like these early internet companies. I remember seeing this story where this guy, he started with a paperclip and on eBay, he kept flipping it and trading it for like a cigarette lighter and then a stapler and then like a hairdryer and then like a vacuum cleaner. And he basically worked his way from like a paperclip all the way up to a car and eventually a house. And to me, that was like the sort of It was a really important idea that so many of my startup friends were always talking about scaling, but they were always talking at scaling at the expense of sort of creative implementation. And so they are going to scale volume, but not quality. And I really like this idea of escalation coming from a creative background where you're not trying to do a million of the things you're trying to use the previous thing that's small to do something a little bit bigger and then work your way up. And I think this applies well to sort of real estate endeavors. And how that translates from YouTube to building a hotel reset is, well, the first video I ever did on YouTube about 10 years ago was I made a vase out of a wine bottle. And then it was that slow escalation, bigger and bigger and bigger projects. And I was gaining new skills, I was learning how to weld, I was learning different designs, started using robots. This 10-year escalation of experimenting with fabrication across any discipline that I had a curiosity to drive me into. In 2018, I built an entire house out of shipping containers in Joshua Tree for Home Depot was a sponsor for that. That video series of 10 episodes, how to build a shipping container house in Joshua Tree, California, we shot it with three people, myself, one camera person, and one sort of assistant. The 10 episodes averaged about two and a half million views per episode, which is about three times what a HGTV shows, and it was done on probably one hundredth of the budget. And we were also sort of able to promote that house through YouTube channels and through my sort of Instagram to drive a much higher rate on Airbnb. So that was one of the first cases where we had this really clear example of how, one, we could make money off of the media, we could make money off of the real estate, the media money adds to the value of the real estate because it's building a distribution funnel and more people want to stay in there. The other thing that was really interesting is having done sort of internet influencer type of stuff, you don't really want to sell t-shirts. I mean, if you're Mr. Beast, you want to sell like a $5 thing or a $2 candy bar or a $10 t-shirt. If you're someone like me with a good-sized audience but not a mega massive hundred-million-person audience, you can only sell so many t-shirts before you have to go build new audience to sell more t-shirts, right? And so people look at subscription models and reoccurring revenue and those kind of things. That also feels like you have this endless burden to kind of remind people to take your credit card out and turnover and all those things is a little bit difficult. The Airbnb option was really interesting because you have a cap supply. If you build this really cool house that people have seen you put your own effort into and your own creativity into, well, there's only 365 nights a year. So what's awesome is the more you sell, the more the rates go up. So it's not like a T-shirt where the more you sell, maybe you improve your margins by getting a better manufacturing deal. With hospitality and that cap supply, once you start getting a hey, we're like two months out, and we're like 70 to 80% full, we can actually increase the value of the asset. So we did that the Airbnb did really well. Overall, I put about 200k into the construction of it and wasn't wild about running an Airbnb even with a management company. It wasn't great. I saw how much money was being spent on housekeeping. And I started thinking like, well, It's not like the housekeepers are really killing it and they have like a half an hour drive to get out to this beautiful remote property and the remoteness is a huge asset, but it's a huge liability when it comes to maintenance and daily turns. Also seeing what sort of Airbnb speculators were doing to the housing market by buying up every sort of available residential property within this massive radius and then flipping it into really crappy Airbnbs all with the same sort of stupid farmhouse country style, all thinking that they're going to make millions of dollars being these things, all thinking they're going to over leverage, and then all getting screwed and giving up when interest rates rose just a tiny little bit. So I did get approached though, because of the success of that one project. And people were saying, Hey, like, how do we scale this and had probably like inbound offers to do like, Oh, well, like, develop a whole bunch of Airbnbs. No, no, no. But I ended up meeting a really smart guy who had a background in sort of deep real estate finance based in New York and worked with both private equity and a bunch of sort of major sort of firms there. And he had that kind of blue chip credentials to kind of really be the financial architecture behind something big. We both looked at it. What we agreed upon was nature is always going to be valuable. It's only going to get more valuable. Commercial land next to nature is underpriced right now because everyone's trying to gobble up the residential stuff. So many developers avoid going through CEQA or this sort of full process to turn raw land into it. So building a team that's really well suited and has a sustainability background, which just happens to align really well with the sort of permitting requirements of a rigorous state like California, we can build a competitive brand in the kind of real estate and hospitality space.

Josiah: Fascinating journey. And I feel like there's so much there. I think the notion of the flywheel of earning attention by showing people what's possible, right? And then working with companies to finance, even the financing of that Home Depot project is insanely interesting, I think, from a business strategy perspective. very few organizations or people are thinking of this, but it's all connected, right? It's not like you wake up one day and you become an influencer. It's this whole journey of connecting all the dots throughout your life from teaching to getting started. It's everything, right? It's everything. And I think for our listeners, it's interesting to think about how do you connect the dots of what you've done throughout your life to create something that uniquely you can do. But I think there's that flywheel concept and then getting into hospitality, I do get the finite kind of inventory that you can sell, but I'm curious, were there other aspects of a hotel that appealed to you? Because frankly, there's a lot of types of buildings you can create that probably have some level of a finite inventory. Why hotels? What was unique and interesting about hotels and hospitality?

Ben: One of my first jobs was at a hotel. I've pretty much worked in growing up in every service industry imaginable, starting as a dishwasher, probably at the age of like 12 or 13. And at 16 or 17, I started working as a bellman at the Rancho Santa Barbara Marriott. And after working as servers and hosts in dishwashers and restaurants, I was like, wow, working at a Bellman's, a great job. Not as hot, not as sweaty, way more flexible hours. good tips, way less continuous running around and stress, and way happier kind of people that you're dealing with. So I think switching from sort of restaurants at a young age to hotels, it was this kind of thing that like, oh, you get to know the people because you're interacting with the guests, not just for the one and a half to two hours during the meal, but you kind of learn stories, you hear from people around the world, and growing up without having a lot of sort of travel and living in a small suburban town, it felt like an interesting way to meet people that were more interesting. It was almost like one of those old TV shows where like a stranger comes to town and I was the person or like the, you know, the bellman or bartender that got to sort of chat with them. So that was the early kind of roots of being sort of intrigued by this. And I enjoyed working there and the money was good for what it was. But I also saw all these things that just didn't make sense, right? Like the front desk staff, half the time they're doing nothing. Then it's really busy and they're kind of understaffed and then 90% They're overstaffed. And I always thought like, well, I could just check people in. No, no, no, you're the bellman. No need to help stay in your lane. Right. So we had a maintenance guy, but I could have fixed all that stuff. So right away, even that when I wasn't thinking about anything entrepreneurial, I was observing these kind of weird redundancies in the staffing of a traditional sort of hospitality model. The other reason why selfishly I'm interested in this now is I love getting all my friends together and I love these kind of like social traditions that I've developed with my network. I could build one of those massive houses and have house guests stay. But I think it would be easier if I just built a hotel and had them come to there and my house is down the road from it. So that was sort of the thinking was when I liked that idea of having that infrastructure. Two, I thoroughly believe in this thesis that I think we've reached peak luxury as an extension of extravagant convenience. I think there's already a little bit of a turn away from that. And I think we've seen that for a long time in fashion. Now, if you're seen as successful, part of that is being able to not wear a suit, right? I love the Four Seasons. I love The Proper. I love a lot of these brands. But I'm not that wild about the fussiness. What I want is core, differentiated, one-of-one experiences. I don't really, I'm not that soft, like I don't want this like plushy stuff and people hovering, nor do I feel really comfortable when a place is number one selling point is that they have more staff than guests. I'm like, well, Marie Antoinette, like, why do you think that's good? Like, why don't you just have like, one awesome staff person for that, like one awesome person is so much better than this idea that we're just blanket coveraging you with like, people in an economics class that are just so well below you and you're going to constantly be aware of that. Maybe that works for some people. I think what I see in sort of my generation and younger is they would much rather trade hundreds of acres of land and wilderness that they could explore in with their families and loved ones than a few extra people to bring them a fucking fruit plate. You know, it's just I think we can do better than that.

Josiah: Well, I wonder if you could expand a little bit more on the experience that you are creating, because you mentioned something earlier in our conversation that really stood out to me. And you said part of your early success was doing what big companies could not. And a lot of the frustrations we have in hospitality are structural. It's because it's not that there's nobody in those companies that hasn't thought otherwise. But the way that you're approaching reset and building a new company might allow you to create something brand new and fresh that gives you a very unique advantage. So you touched on this a little bit. Tell me a little bit more about what you saw that needed to be changed from a guest perspective in experiencing great hospitality.

Ben: Yeah. And let me sort of disclaim this first is we're not open yet. This could fall flat on its face. There's a ton of things we're still learning. We don't know. We hired Sightline to run our sort of operations and they've been a wealth of experience and they've been a great partner of providing that kind of professional pedigree. and clear standards of service. And they've been great at hearing all of my crazy ideas and filtering them. And so some of them, they say, absolutely not. That's a terrible idea. Here's why. And I'm like, great point. Makes sense. I'll move away from that. And to other ones that they've actually wholeheartedly embraced. So I'm careful to say that I It's not that the people in the industry don't think of these things, right? What I would say the challenge for, and it's not like people at big media companies don't look at what's happening in sort of small scale podcasts that are doing big numbers or what's happening on TikTok or YouTube and being like, we could do that too. It's the responsibility structure of top down doesn't allow that. So it's not that like having very few resources and just shooting stuff on your flip phone is a better way to do it. It's not. Professional rates are still better. But what comes with that sort of low cost is low risk on the downside. You're not wasting anyone's time by taking a shot. So it becomes much more like seed investing, where it's conducive of a lot of attempts, many of which will fail. And when you're coming from responsibility top down, you tend to not really like people that only have like a 10% win rate, even if 10% of those wins are really great. So I think it's much more about the distribution of responsibility. The same thing happens when you're sort of administering an architectural project, right? So with ground-up construction, you really need a phenomenal architect of record, right? Like they are running, they're coordinating the engineering, structural engineering, civil engineering, MEP, they're working with the operator to make sure things are right, they're working with ADA consultants, they're doing all these things, and you want the responsibility for this massive, massive investment to be coordinated through top tier professionals. That makes it challenging to do some really innovative installation art incorporated in because it has to go through these layers and all these kind of things. So what you almost want to do is have them sort of know exactly where they're fully articulating the physical design and where they're leaving blank space where a small creative director and his team can come in, that's me, the creative director, can come in and do stuff cost effectively without going through that bureaucracy, right? So it's like identifying things that are life safety, egress related, all those kind of important parts, consolidating that to the professionalism and then doing little carve outs where there isn't that same kind of risk profile and you can let the team go free and wild.

Josiah: That's fascinating. I want to come back to that, but I wonder if you could speak just a little bit to how you thought about financing the project, because you mentioned working with somebody on the finance side. And everybody I've talked to said the way that you approach raising capital plays such a big role in what you're able to do. Can you speak a little bit to how you thought about it with this project?

Ben: Yeah, so I've raised money a few times for things. In the sort of early kind of tech cycle, it was like do a PowerPoint, and it was a very hot market. And people threw big checks at you, and then 2008 happens. And you realize that it wasn't necessarily that your ideas were so good. Everything was just really frothy, right? And then for real estate projects, I've often raised sort of friends and family kind of rounds with people I went to college with and did some very unconventional kind of housing developments. The container house I had an investor in, just crushed it in that. For this project, we had a lot of interest from celebrity or kind of influencer investors, right, which is very enticing. And I find these people to be very smart, but their money going into this kind of real estate and construction is fair to say would be classified as dumb money, right. And, I mean, who like recent history is littered with influencer investor endeavors gone wrong. I mean, just think FTX, Fyre Festival, the list continues. So we had interest and we think that's great. And there's a lot of help with sort of media distribution and promotion where that's going to come into play and do it. But we're like, that shouldn't be our first money in. We want someone to vet the project first. And so we partnered with HP investors. They became our partner in this. They're a firm out of San Diego area, super professional, really smart guys. Hadn't done a lot of ground-up, but this was really believed in the idea that nature is going to be an increasingly valuable commodity and a really safe thing to build brand around. Like, you know, farmhouse modern might be a style one year and then mid-century modern and then boho chic and whatever other kind of like trendy things will come and go. I don't think people are going to get sick of mountains and beautiful sunsets and beaches and coastlines and redwood trees. These things are irreplaceable. And as long as we focused around sort of building cost effectively around these kind of draws and we're right next to the National Park, seems like it's just about sort of nailing the execution and then giving some attention. So we brought HP in, got the sort of smart money and really built out the sort of right ratio of equity to debt. This was starting in during this pandemic or right before, found a great piece of land, got it for a great deal, slowly started acquiring the other pieces of land together and started the entitlement process, right? So we just took a little bit of money from HP and it's sort of a friends and family round of people with experience in real estate. And then we said, OK, the first risk phase is getting entitlements, right? It's going from commercially zoned land to full, fully entitled sort of conditional use permits. And that involves a sort of semi-political process at the sort of local government level. So there are two parts to new construction. There's the entitlements and then the building permits. The entitlements is more the less in your control part. There's a zoning commissioner board that has to approve it. You have to go in front of other human beings that you don't have the ability to kind of financially incentivize. And you have to convince them that what you're doing is good for the local community and good for the future of that township or county. So that's like the first sort of risk phase. Once you get through there, then it's just about budget execution, building code and building out the drawing set, getting all the engineering done, and so on and so forth. So we didn't want to risk people's money that weren't really understanding the real estate process until we got those entitlements. And Developers hate entitlement. And they always go, it's so risky, you can't do it. It's like, it's like fitness people saying like, they hate exercise. This is the job. This is what you do. You understand these things. But so many of the people that get into development are so heavily weighted on the financial side of things, and not the brick and mortar or not the understanding of where these regulations are coming from. They're not there to cap your ability to make money. They're there in many cases, because when they weren't there, people took advantage of it to make a lot of money. And it made it worse for other people in that area. So also, They're a barrier to entry for the next person. And it's not like they're getting easier. They're probably going to continue to get harder. So the more you invest in it now, the bigger the moat you have 10 years from now. And what they tend to sort of, you know, so that was sort of why or how we approached it. We started with smart money. really building out a team, really heavy focus on, let's not assume we're going to get entitlements, but let's treat this as the first goal. Let's get the best civil engineers. Let's talk to every sort of industry expert. Let's talk to real estate attorneys. Let's talk to other projects that have failed to get entitlements. Let's meet with the city on a regular basis and learn about their development goals. So many developers, the first time they meet anyone from the city is when they're presenting to them. And then they're surprised when they're like, yeah, this is not what we want. So we really embrace that process. We really embrace the kind of environmental regulation challenges as an opportunity to incorporate sustainability, which is something that, you know, not every consumer cares about, but certainly a lot of them do. And if you get credit for that on the entitlement process, sure, make that part of your core mission. There's really good alignment, even if it's something that you as an individual isn't particularly worried about.

Josiah: I appreciate you going behind the scenes because it feels like everybody says they want to have a hotel. Few put in the work and few play the long game that you've described. And so I think for me, it's more meaningful when somebody, yes, has a compelling, exciting idea, but also is so committed to this that they go, they do all this hard work, right? Because I imagine a lot of those days are not fun. You've been at this for years now. even though stories are starting to come out about what you're creating. So thanks for going behind the scenes and sharing that journey. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about some of the things that you're most excited by or proud of. You talked about the development process of having an architect that is maybe getting the basics in place, but having some carve outs where you can express your creativity, your creator, through and through. What are you most excited by or proud of in terms of kind of the little special touches that you're thinking of for this project?

Ben: Okay, so one of the things I'm really excited about now is the coffee, right? First of all, I woke up at a Hyatt this morning and it had a Keurig-type pod machine that I swear to God was louder than the leaf blower that the maintenance guy was using right outside my window. So those things, it sounds like a lawnmower, and it's the size, it's a stupid little plastic machine. OK, so and the pods, they had two. very weak, dark roast kind of pods. They had two decaffeinated pods. I do not understand hotels distribution of or what kind of analytics they're looking at to think that that many people drink decaffeinated coffee. It is entirely possible I have a skewed vision, and maybe the caffeinated to decaffeinated market is like 50-50 or 60-40. I don't think that's true. And so why are they always shoving decaffeinated coffee when I would be very happy for one more actual good coffee pod, right? So right away, my day starts off with this kind of loud, plastic, trying to read the small print on these ugly pods that are going into the trash afterwards on which ones are caffeinated and which ones are decaffeinated and they look almost entirely the same. First world problems, but a great opportunity to make something better, right? So I've always liked pour over coffee. I've always liked AeroPress. I've always liked the little Vietnamese kind of coffee presses. There's so many great ways to make it. So we present all these ideas to site liner operators and we go, okay, From a cleaning standpoint and a daily turn standpoint, which of these kind of solutions would be better? Narrow down the list. Okay, we're going to do pour over. All right, well, what should these pour over devices look like? And this is something I'm currently designing. We'll be releasing some videos on Instagram to promote the project and also just start testing out these ideas. We can basically use the R&D and the FF&E kind of process to actually market the project. So everything we do in sort of selecting and designing and building is part of the marketing. It is the pre-launch strategy. People don't just want to see pictures of food. They want to see from a chef how it's made. They like seeing the vegetables get cut. They like seeing the sizzle of it going into a pan. People like seeing things get made because it makes them know that there's thought going into this. It's not just all done in a factory overseas and then presented and packaged up to look cute. So coffee is the first thing. Then we're like, okay, well, where are we sourcing the kind of ground coffee, we did decide that grinding your own coffee, one, it creates this weird sort of audio thing, if you use a mechanical one in the hand was that this takes too long. So got to do ground coffee. Then we looked, well, what kind of like restaurant and hotel vendors offer sort of ground coffee in two and a half to four ounce packages. So you can use a real coffee filter poured and none of those little stupid bags. Then you're like, well, this really limits the brands we're going to do. It's a bunch of brands you never heard of. So then we go to Sightline and be, hey, the night audit staff or the night staff. Would they be OK if they just filled 30 or 40 little beautiful glass jars from a bulk bag of Blue Bottle coffee, or Stumptown, or whatever sort of boutique coffee you want? They're like, absolutely. We love doing things like that. We love using them to package up this kind of stuff. The labor is going to be there. It gives them something to do. It keeps them invested in the job. So that's how we're thinking about it, is I'll experience something that is, well, mid at the very best, And then it's like, how do we take this all the way? How do we design a better version of this that's like novel? How do we then use that in the marketing sort of approach? And then how do we upgrade the individual components using little resting parts of labor that may be not be fully utilized?

Josiah: I love that. And I'll link to a couple of stories and to your Instagram and elsewhere where people can learn more about this because everything from these seemingly little things like coffee to the bigger design elements look really, really exciting. And so is there any place that you'd recommend people go? I'll link to a number of any kind of place or places you'd encourage people to go to learn more about Reset.

Ben: Look at my Instagram, right? My Instagram is like the is my feed. I don't really post that much on X or in YouTube. I do every once in a while, but Instagram is really the place to follow along. One of the things we're doing right now is I'm experimenting with like cutting rocks. So obviously we have 180 acres of desert right next to the National Park. So we got a lot of rocks. We also got some cactus. We have a few sort of migrant coyotes that wander their way through. Probably not going to do anything with the coyotes, no collab with the coyotes or the cacti, but we are going to do something with all those rocks. So we had sort of priced out some FF&E from the vendors and some decor packages and they're saying, oh, here's these vases. They come from here and they're like $70 each, but they look kind of good and $7 isn't too bad. Then I'm like, well, let's just use these rocks, cut a bottom off so they stand up tall, drill a hole in them. And now we have exactly the kind of local art that a lot of hotel brands say, did we locally source art from this? And it's like, no, you went to the farmer's market or you ordered from Etsy within a hundred-mile radius, or you had a local interior designer place stuff that they bought off of Etsy. Good. It's fine. Works. But you're not actually getting credit for it. No one really cares that much. And you're not actually even doing anything. The value is we made a video of how I'm making the vases for the rooms. That video, which is on my Instagram, we linked it over to the sort of teaser site for the hotel, did like four or five million views. But more importantly, 30,000 people saved the video, the save function, and another 15,000 people DMed it to each other. So that video took me about five or six hours to make. created 4 million impressions, created all these things. We get a whole bunch of comments and sort of can build awareness. So you can take something as stupid and small as a decor item, like a vase, and you can turn it by actually doing the process that you're saying you're going to do and care about, by actually just not lying and saying that you care about handcrafted in these things and having people that are on the equity side that can actually call the shots, having them get so hands-on you can actually, I don't have to get approval for that, put it out does well, creates value for everybody else. And it also starts to tell our other kind of influencer investors and stuff like this. Here's the roadmap. Here's how we participate. One of our investors is a very well known comedian named Andrew Schulz, right? He has a big podcast and is a great friend of mine from way back and selling out Madison Square Garden in like a like an hour or two. And when I was talking to him about sort of investing in the hotel, he's like, okay, What do I do? What do you want me to do to bring people there? And we're like, okay, we'll stand up outside and that thing could be fun. But I mean, you're doing arenas, it would be a compromise, right? And what we don't want is favors from them, because that'll eventually wear itself out. And, you know, not be great. What we want is an alignment of interest. I'm like, well, what if you did a like fireside storytelling chat, right, where it's only like 500 people get to come. 500 super fans. It's a really sort of high ticket item. It's the opposite of stand-up comedian. You're not burning your material for that. So that's how we'll sort of like work in our sort of creative people that we have affiliated and associated with the projects. but we'll do it in a way that actually works for them and isn't them just giving away free sort of product. And that I think is what we've kind of seen from sort of tracking this kind of creator startup market is they think they're getting free promotion, but there's an opportunity cost because all the real estate is going for creating their product that they have equity in. They're not getting that outside money coming in from brands. So that's where we'll look at approaching programming. Little design options is how do we align it with the sort of creative people we have associated with it? So it's additive to them, not subtracting from them giving away for something for free that they can monetize elsewhere, but create them a place, a physical place where they can test out new ideas, do their own R&D and build new product and income or media streams for themselves.

Josiah: This is absolutely fascinating, Ben. And just hearing you, I get excited, but more importantly, I see you get excited. I see you fired up. And I want to ask you a personal question before we go, and that is, I just finished the book Extremely Online by Taylor Lawrence. You're just talking about the history of the internet, media, all that. What was fascinating to me is that there's always new media platforms coming and going, right? People are trying to build their audience to varying levels of success. You've reached the top levels of success. You have an audience that many people would just love to have. I'm curious for you, what is giving you meaning? Because you seem so excited talking about this. What's giving you meaning these days in your work and what you're doing?

Ben: Oh, I don't really think of it as meaningful. I think of it as fun. We all have to-do lists of things we want to do. And if you ever found yourself looking at your to-do list and some of the things just jump out at you, like, oh, I'd love to kind of nail that up. Oh, I got to call this person? I like talking to them anyways, right? And there's some things you just want to keep pushing towards the bottom of the list. Right? And no matter how fun your job is, and I feel very fortunate to have a very fun job, there's always a little bit of poop work mixed in with the fun work, right? There's always something that kind of sucks. You still got to pay bills, you still got to meet your account, and you still got to take care of these responsibilities. And if you over-delegate them too much, you're opening yourself to liabilities because you're not actually responsible of your whole operation. So one, I know that I fully accept that there's going to be kind of crappy parts of my job, no matter how awesome my job is. Then it just becomes, once you accept that, just sort of isolating and you can make room and really focus on the ones that are fun. So I think the thing that gets me really jazzed about this is the physicality and the monumental kind of scale of this. As a content creator, you reach a lot of people in a very shallow, in a very short amount of time. And so as I think about the impact my media content has had on people, which I'm super proud of, it's often for, you know, if it's an Instagram video, like 60 to 90 seconds at a time. And it's cool that 60 million people can see me cut rocks and turn them into a bench. And I think a lot of people probably learn something about tools and maybe some design ideas. And I like sort of showing, making things that are, that look expensive, but out of inexpensive tools and common materials, that feels really good. But when I think about the depth of connection and my YouTube videos are a little bit longer, someone that watches the whole shipping container house series, they might actually inspire them to change how they build their new house that they live in forever. That's a little bit of a deeper connection. But I love the idea of having a physical place where I can interface with the public that really likes seeing my sort of work, but it's not inviting them over to my place of my day to day place of business. So it's a great kind of buffer area. So like one of the things I'm, you know, I always get asked to do kind of meetups or conferences. And I'm like, well, I know what they pay me to come speak at a conference. I would rather just like bartend for a night and learn how to make cocktails and just work behind a bar and talk with the people who want to talk to me that way. Right. Where it's not this kind of like sitting on a stage with a microphone. It's my place. I like bartending. I like that kind of service. I think it's like fun. So I'm really excited for things like that is is having a sort of a professional kind of safe boundary place where I can interact with people that have shown their appreciation for my creativity and work over the years. And I think doing that in the form of hospitality and really taking that idea of like service, I think it actually puts like a nice spin on that kind of, oh, we because when you meet people that follow you and they know you better than you know them, you may recognize a couple of people from the comments here and there, but it's a little one sided. And often leads to a lot of awkwardness and nervousness on their side. And they're trying to be really respectful. And you're trying to show them that, hey, I'm actually really casual. And it's not a big deal. I'm happy to talk with you. And you're going through this like awkward dance of like, no, I'm nice. And you're like, yo, you're nice. And they're trying to make sure that they're trying to let you know, I'm not a stalker. And I'm not crazy. And you're trying to let them know, I'm down to earth. And I'm not arrogant. But I think a much cleaner way to do that would be sort of in the form of sort of service. So I like that idea of actually just like hanging out The other thing I'm really excited about is hotel gyms are terrible. They're so terrible. And fitness has never been more important or more popular as people's kind of things. And it's like the amount that people spend on developing rooftop pools that barely get used or indoor pools that are extraordinarily expensive, screwing up the entire HVAC system with the humidity, smells like a chlorine swamp, and only really loud kids swim. And then the gym is like three stairmasters and rubber-coated weights. So I'm really excited to figure out an outdoor gym. I think those ones in Tulum, have incredible media value. I bet you that gym on the beach where you're picking up logs and pulling up a hot chicken, a basket with the lat rows, and stuff, I bet you that gym has been seen 200 million times, right? And it's a little over the top. It's a little Flintstone-y. But there's a lot of tasteful, aesthetic versions between that and even at really nice hotels, they have terrible gyms. So I think that's another area where we can do a lot of sort of innovation. It becomes a draw. As a social media user, I mean, we all know that people love taking pictures of themselves at the gym. You do it outside with the beautiful landscape behind them. I think we might get some organic reach from that.

Josiah: I think so. Well, congratulations on everything you've created so far. I'm really excited to see what you build with this company, with this brand from here. Ben, thanks so much for taking some time to chat.

Ben: Thank you.