Chris Powers
@fortworthchris • 193,511 subscribers
Long
Videos
There is only one city in the United States that doesn't grow north - Minneapolis-St. Paul, restricted by geography. Every other city in the country grows north. That's the framework Rex Glendenning has been using for 40 years to position himself in front of growth. People in Celina laughed at him 30 years ago for buying dirt in the boondocks. He plowed every dollar after taxes and overhead back into 40 and 50-acre tracts anyway. In this clip from this week's episode - the rule of thumb Rex says should be on the first page of every real estate book.
Chris Powers893,098 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
After 35 years of falling rates and rising allocations, Michael Levy of Crow Holdings thinks the tailwinds that carried real estate are spent. "The '20s could be a lost decade in real estate. We had 35 years of declining interest rates, and 35 years of allocations institutionally going from 2% to 12%. Those are very powerful forces." He doesn't see either one coming back. "Do I think that allocation's going up from here? No. I think it's moving into infrastructure." He points to a whole generation of owners who bought near the top and are now stuck. "There's a lot of people who bought a lot of stuff... that had business plans to monetize it, and it's gonna sit for a decade. There's a lot of investors who invested and thought they'd be getting distributions back, and they're not getting distributions back." In this clip, why he still believes the turn, whenever it comes, will be worth the wait.
Chris Powers92,480 Aufrufe • vor 13 Tagen
Today I sat down with Jordan Levi, the Kosher Cowboy - a Jewish kid from the Chicago suburbs who became the largest cattle feeder in America. Jordan runs Five Rivers Cattle Feeding with a capacity of nearly a million head. He started as a runner on the Chicago Board of Trade at 13 and found his way to cattle through a hedge fund that sent him to a feedlot in Amarillo. He showed up in Gucci loafers and never left the industry. We go deep on how he trades the curve instead of making binary bets, why the cattle supply is the tightest since the 1950s, and what it takes to manage risk on nearly a million animals across 13 feedlots. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did. 02:16 - The Belted Galloway 03:51 - The Kosher Cowboy 08:05 - Pulling value of the futures forward 11:43 - Learning Cattle trading 16:48 - Daily average gain in cattle 18:20 - Jordan’s Eureka moment in the cattle industry 21:08 - What does trading in animals actually look like? 27:05 - How Jordan defines his ROI in trading cattle 31:17 - The Cattle curve 33:37 - The state of the cattle market 42:10 - Buying the largest cattle feeder in the world 46:09 - Grass vs. grain fed cattle 49:15 - Predictions for the cattle supply over the next 10 years 50:54 - The international market 53:17 - Trading frequencies and macro thesis 01:00:27 - USA beef vs. international beef 01:05:21 - The cattle supply chain 01:07:32 - The future of auction yards and ranchers 01:09:40 - AI in AgTech 01:12:52 - The biggest problem facing the industry 01:14:42 - Livestock as a commodity that dies and how that impacts trading theory 01:20:51 - Is there a market for new entrants into cattle? 01:21:41 - Beef prices and the impact of a closed border on the industry 01:24:39 - Jordan’s biggest ideas for the industry 01:26:49 - Philanthropic efforts 01:31:24 - a day in the life of Jordan 01:26:42 - Risk management in cattle 01:41:17 - Does what you do show a leading indicator to the broader health of the American economy?
Chris Powers821,814 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
The way someone uses AI tells you a lot about them. "Mark Cuban (Mark Cuban) has a quote I wish were mine. Some people use AI so they can learn everything, and some use AI so they don't have to learn anything." Chris Koerner (Chris Koerner) is firmly in the first camp. And he says he can spot the people who aren't. "At my church I hear talks now and I can tell. That's Opus 4.7. And I think that's a shame." His own rule is simple. AI shouldn't save you time. It should make the work better. "If I have three hours to build a lesson, I'm still going to spend three hours. I'll use AI the whole time, and it'll be far better. I could be done in three minutes. But I don't." In this clip, Chris Koerner on using AI to raise your standard instead of lowering it.
Chris Powers249,783 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Today I sit down with Justin Lopas (Justin Lopas), Co-founder & COO of Base Power. On Monday Base announced a $1B Series D at a $13B post money valuation. Justin spent his early career at SpaceX, where he helped lead the Brownsville site that became Starbase, then ran manufacturing at Anduril. Base puts large batteries on homes, owns and operates them, and uses the fleet to support the grid. This is a conversation about speed, and about how much of it turns out to be a decision rather than an effort level. We discuss: • Why he wanted their first battery installed fast instead of right • Why he thinks good manufacturing is decided during design, not on the factory floor • Why he does not push his suppliers as hard on price as he could • Why SpaceX put him in charge of building the Starship factory two and a half years into his career • The question he asks to find out why a job is really taking so long • How a battery company ended up training its own electricians • Why he calls Base an infrastructure company and not a product company Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (00:48) From Late-Night Research to an Office in Austin (07:55) The First Battery Install Was an Epic Failure (09:15) Finding a Battery Supplier Who Would Let Them In (15:47) Killing Gen Two and Skipping Straight to Gen Three (22:52) From a Hundred Requirements to Cardboard Cutouts (26:02) Good Manufacturing Is Won or Lost at the Design Stage (32:48) How to Build a Supply Chain From Nothing (40:51) Negotiating With Suppliers and Deciding What to Build Yourself (44:58) The Turtle That Marks the Slowest Team (47:39) The SpaceX Lessons on Talent and Speed (54:09) Building a Regulatory Team and Choosing the Next State (58:19) Managing Complexity Is the Whole Job (1:03:20) Tesla Sells Products, Base Owns Infrastructure (1:05:24) Training Electricians and Staying Out of Commercial
Chris Powers43,855 Aufrufe • vor 9 Tagen
At SpaceX, engineers are treated like elite athletes, and held to that standard. Ben Nowack (Ben Nowack ☀️🌎🪞) joined as a college freshman and absorbed it fast. He still quotes the way President Gwynne Shotwell framed it: “SpaceX engineers are the Navy SEALs of engineering, the professional athletes of the field.” Ben doesn't think that bar is unique to rockets. In this clip, the standard he carried out of SpaceX and into Reflect Orbital, and why he believes any company can run that way.
Chris Powers149,306 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
When Ben Nowack (Ben Nowack ☀️🌎🪞) was an engineer on SpaceX's Dragon 2, he was sure it would ship later than Boeing's Starliner. Everything was late, broken, changing by the day. "I was like, there's no way this works." It turned out SpaceX was about five years ahead. Dragon 2 now flies astronauts - some of whom Ben has since met. In this clip, the one thing he'd leave behind from SpaceX, and the lesson he kept: you need a very high pain tolerance to get hard things done.
Chris Powers134,336 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Today I sit down with Nat Eliason - founder, writer, and now launching Alpha School, a new entrepreneur high school in New York City. Tuition is $150K a year. The promise: every student hits a million dollars in gross profit by graduation, or the family gets their tuition refunded. The first class is around 20 freshmen. The day is split between AI-driven academics in the morning and business building the rest of the day. This is also the Nat who in his spare time built Felix - an AI agent he gave a Stripe account, an email, and an X handle, then told to launch a business overnight. Felix has done $60+K in sales since. Nat has not touched the code. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did. 05:55 What Alpha Does Differently From Conventional Schools 11:48 Playing the Fake Game of School 21:46 How Nat Masters New Domains 32:18 Open Claw Deep Dive 43:50 Building the Alpha Entrepreneurship Program 51:43 Freshman Year Structure at Alpha School 1:00:23 How Students Can Pitch for Equity or Debt Funding 1:04:08 Why Establish a New York Location for Year One 1:11:15 Nat’s 10-Year Vision 1:15:11 AI as a Force Multiplier for Teenage Founders 1:16:15 How Alpha Students Quickly Reverse-Engineered a Workaround After Open Claw Went Down 1:24:13 Teen-Parent Conflict as a Symptom of Infantilization
Chris Powers199,458 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
I don’t think I’ve ever had someone on the podcast who genuinely loves what they do for a living as much as StripMallGuy loves strip malls. In today’s episode, we talk about 20+ years of experience investing in strip malls across the country. I must say, I’m intrigued. Don Tepman runs a real estate fund that focuses on buying neighborhood strip centers throughout the United States and also runs the 'StripMallGuy' account on X and LinkedIn. Don started his career in 2002 and led his first strip center purchase in 2006. He has completed 40 purchases and raised over $150M in LP capital. We discuss: - Don’s career and mentors - What makes a successful strip mall acquisition - Building StripMallGuy and the future of the brand 2:30 - Don’s upbringing and career background 6:28 - The dynamics of suburban retail 10:22 - Don’s mentor & learnings 19:31 - Restaurants in strip centers 24:50 - Tenant mixes 28:42 - TI 34:12 - Where do folks waste money on exteriors? 35:54 - Drive-thrus 37:11 - Don’s hold period strategy 41:09 - Why do you stick to smaller deals? 44:12 - What is your approach to entering a new market? 52:10 - Why does Price per foot matter so much? 52:53 - Leasing 59:00 - Taxes and insurance 59:54 - StripMallGuy 1:08:21 - Working a deal through the system 1:12:23 - Thoughts on the market 1:18:04 - Luxury retail 1:19:39 - Meeting Charlie Munger 1:27:08 - Plans for SMG in the future
Chris Powers1,232,039 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren
Since 2022, the S&P is up 75%. Commercial real estate is down 20 to 25%. Mark Gibson of JLL says that gap is why the world's largest allocators are looking at real estate again. "It's underperformed virtually every other asset class that you can invest in over the last four years." His explanation: development and value-add bets ran into COVID cost overruns and 200 to 300 basis points of cap rate expansion. "The math doesn't work." In this clip, why a far more stable market has the biggest investors ready to move back into hard assets.
Chris Powers55,189 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
"We build our American cities around fire trucks… …We should design our cities, then make the fire trucks fit." In America, we have the largest fire trucks in the world— and they’re quietly shaping how our cities look, feel, and function. In this clip with Austin Tunnell , we break down how one overlooked policy is leading to worse urban design.
Chris Powers171,310 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
The entire multifamily market turns on a couple points of occupancy. Steven Campisi watches one threshold to know whether landlords or renters hold the power. "When you get to 92%, every operator says, 'Oh no, I gotta put heads in beds. Pop up concessions, drop rent. We gotta sign leases.'" "When every operator gets to 95% occupied, every revenue manager at that company says, 'We're 95% occupied. We don't have much inventory. We better push rent.'" After two years of negative rent growth, he thinks that flip is coming. In this clip, Steven explains why he expects apartment rents to start rising in the Sunbelt in 2027.
Chris Powers51,330 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
There are roughly five times as many billionaires in Dallas-Fort Worth as what shows up on the Forbes list. And according to Matthew Ogle, 90% of them don't have a robust family office. Matthew is the co-founder of Legacy Knight, a $2.8B multi-family office in Dallas built to fill exactly that gap. In this clip from this week's episode - his read on how much wealth actually gets stewarded, and how much doesn't.
Chris Powers151,087 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
The way homes get built is full of rules nobody can explain. He questioned all of them. Riley Meik (Riley Meik) on building from first principles: "A lot of it came down to hand tools. Why do we have to use hand tools? Why do we have to use materials of this size?" "Why do two people need to be able to carry every single part of the building system? Why don't we make the biggest thing we can in the factory that still ships cost effectively, and then just crane it into place?" "Just like that, we deleted five assembly processes, ten components, and just made it one thing." "You don't really have the right to question the requirements in this space unless you are in charge of setting the requirements."
Chris Powers60,132 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Tomorrow's episode is with Michael Levy, the CEO of Crow Holdings. He runs one of the largest real estate firms in the country with over $34B in AUM. His assessment of America’s 50-year experiment with outsourcing manufacturing is bleak. "We spent all these years outsourcing all our capabilities. And then along comes COVID, and we can't even make a paper mask. We can't make much of anything in this country. We don't celebrate people who do things with their hands. We celebrate people who go to college." "Everything we were taught for nearly 50 years has put us in the most fragile place. And so in the great arc of history, America as a country is changing dramatically, and the things that are gonna matter to us most are resiliency and national security." "America's hegemony, which was a fluke coming out of World War II. It's over, and the world is a far more dangerous place."
Chris Powers26,462 Aufrufe • vor 17 Tagen
90% of new apartments get built as class A luxury for one reason: cost. Steven Campisi built Hillpointe to make new housing that people on a median income can actually afford, while also penciling for investors. "It's simply too expensive to build brand-new product and have it targeted to a median income type rent." His fix wasn't cheaper materials. It was removing three layers of fees the rest of the industry treats as fixed. In this clip, Steven breaks down the developer fee, the GC fee, and the subcontractor margin, and how Hillpointe deleted all three.
Chris Powers50,978 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Today I sit down with Riley Meik (Riley Meik), co-founder and CEO of The American Housing Corporation, a company building factory-made row homes for the kind of city lots we've stopped building on. For 70 years we got great at putting single-family homes on the outskirts and basically quit building family-sized housing in the places people actually want to live. Riley's bet is that you fix that the way you'd fix any hard manufacturing problem: own the whole stack, design every part from first principles, and build the home in a factory. His first prototype went from manufactured to installed to finished in 13 weeks, and the goal from here is a home that costs 30 to 50% less than local construction. Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (01:22) The Housing Crisis Is a Production Problem (04:33) Why America Stopped Building Family Housing in Cities (09:50) The First Company and Why Selling to Home Builders Doesn't Work (14:58) First Principles Engineering: What Does a Wall Actually Need to Do? (21:39) Getting Code-Certified for a Building System That Doesn't Exist Yet (27:57) One Miracle at a Time (31:47) Three Entities, One Mission: How AHC's Capital Stack Works (37:52) 18 Months of R&D: Panel Install Time Dropped 70% (44:22) The Two-Week Build Goal (47:03) Eichler Homes and Designing for Young Families (52:24) Beautiful Housing Gets Approved: Design as Regulatory Strategy (1:00:08) Gigafactory Over Mobile Micro-Factory (1:04:40) Margin Targets, Market Selection, and the Coastal City Thesis (1:11:39) Earning the Right to Automate and Hiring for the Housing Crisis
Chris Powers60,073 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Tomorrow I'm sitting down with my friend JB Mauney, the greatest bull rider that's ever lived. He is a two-time PBR World Champion and the highest-earning bull rider in western sports history. JB rode bulls for 23 years and never once walked straight to a set of paramedics - no matter how bad the wreck. Then one night in Lewiston, Idaho, a bull named Arctic Assassin changed that. The surgeon told him he had maybe a millimeter between walking and a wheelchair. In this clip, JB tells the story of the bull ride that ended his professional career.
Chris Powers137,203 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
Tomorrow I'm sitting down with Ben Nowack (Ben Nowack ☀️🌎🪞), co-founder and CEO of Reflect Orbital - a company putting mirrors in space to beam sunlight down to Earth at night. The reflector that makes it work is the same kind of mirror NASA spent 25 years building for the James Webb telescope. It delayed that $10 billion program for a year and a half because it kept failing. Ben's team builds a new one every three and a half days. This clip is how they pulled it off.
Chris Powers60,334 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
