10 Minutes to Massive Arms
The danger of too big too fast
I spent a good chunk of the 1990s at a reform school. It was a highly structured work camp with poorly trained staff who enjoyed tormenting wayward teens.
And the thing about being held against your will for three years in a remote section of the Northern Idaho panhandle is you get incredibly creative about finding ways to pass time. (see the first chapter of my new book)
We made the most of an unpleasant situation. We made up groups, clubs, and activities. Some were clever, and complex. Like a secret dining society called the U.P.T. or, Ugly People’s Table, that met for breakfast using assigned seats. We elected a president, VP and so on, and had a respected seniority structure. Yet we refused to acknowledge the club officially existed. Kind of our own version of an illuminati, which attracted intrigue and speculation, especially from the thuggish staff. We taunted them in pointing out that they couldn’t ban something that didn’t exist.
And other distractions were simple, like the weight room.
When I say weight room, I’m not talking about an Equinox gym, or even what you’d expect at a low-grade chain hotel. This was the rusted bench you’d see at a Salvation Army store and wonder why they even took the donation.
Even the non-lifting types, like me, hung out in the weight room. There was a peanut gallery of sorts and it split into groups, along clique lines. We’d pick a strongman to support. Chris Luthi in my case, he was the head of my dorm complex. When he started adding rusty 45 lb plates to the bar I’d let everyone know to pay attention, we were about to set a new record.
And we even got our hands on a few old copies of Muscle & Fitness. Technically contraband, we’d read up on lifting techniques, protein intake suggestions, and of course, the top strongmen of the day. My favorite was Manfred Hoeberl.
Largest Arms in the World
Hoeberl was about 30 at the time. He came from the same Austrian village as Arnold Schwarzenegger. This guy was big, 6’4” and more than 300lbs. But it was his arms that had us mesmerized.
He claimed, and we believed, he had the largest biceps in the world. Measuring ~26” cold. Meaning before doing his three sets of dumbbell curls using 150 lb barbells.
And we somehow got a copy of Hoeberl’s book, which he had a lot of help writing. In addition to most of the 84 pages being pictures of himself flexing and demonstrating lifting techniques, he lists two ghostwriters.
What he did do right is pick a great title. 10 Minutes to Massive Arms makes a big promise to the perspective reader…
While I remember this book like it was yesterday, the world forgot about it. Amazon shows no used copies available. There are two reviews however. One very helpful, noting, “it only works if you’re on steroids.”
Too Big Too Fast
Hoeberl really did have the largest arms…for a brief time. He was also the world’s strongest man.
There was a reason he deserved reverence in our dingy weight room, a world away from the competition circuit. His stats at peak were:
Bench Press – 628 lbs
Squat – 794 lbs
Grip Strength – 3rd in the world
His obsession with being the world’s strongest man led to disaster.
First, he had a major car accident in 1994, just after winning his first major strongman title. Press accounts say he broke “multiple limbs” and since he only has four, it must have been a serious crash. His hip fractured in 8 places.
But the real issue was the sheer obsession with arm size. He recovered from the 1994 crash and went for another strongman title. At the 1997 European Hercules competition he tore a bicep. This ended his career.
Hoeberl is only 60 years old today. I’m not sure what he’s up to, but it’s not powerlifting.
And back then, when he was 30 and I was a locked-up teenager, neither of us had much ability to understand that powerlifting, as a career, had a short runway.
Maybe someone poked their head in the weight room and told us, but we dismissed them. That’s often how it happens with good advice. You don’t want it, so you don’t listen to it. Or maybe your mind blocks it out because you’re just not ready.
Someone could have told us at the time that tennis adds an average of 9.7 years to life expectancy. Which is true, according to a nice email the USTA sent me last week before notifying me my membership needed renewing.
And while Agassi was cool back in the 1990s, racquet sports didn’t command much respect around the reform school. It’s only later that we see the danger in an obsession with too much too fast.
It seems like Hoeberl had a rough few years after the bicep tear. It took a 2002 head-on motorcycle accident for him to say, “I’m lucky to be alive.” And it’s that kind of statement that highlights clarity.
Clarity is the hallmark of a true bottom. As any person with experience will attest, a true bottom means no more deluded thinking.
Humility seems to get all the attention, but it’s not the key thing in my experience. People fake humility all the time. But you can’t fake clarity.
It’s that moment Hoeberl realized he’s a dead man if he keeps it up. There’s no going back once you see it from that angle. From then on people start living as if they want to also live tomorrow. And maybe for a few more days after that.
Financial Longevity
It seems like a lot of people did very stupid things with money around 2020 or 2021. I’m hearing about them now.
A friend called me last week to ask, “what’s a proxy?” He had so many shares of a blown out former meme stock that the guy trying to take control of the tiny company called him to ask for his vote on proxy…and he didn’t know what it meant.
While I love this guy personally, I advised if you don’t know what a proxy is, you have no business owning stock.
The entire purpose of owning stock is to wield power through voting shares when the proxy shows up. It’s those clunky 100 pages of thin, almost translucent, Bible-like paper bound with staples and wrapped in blue plastic for transit to your mailbox once per year. These days they try to email it. Either way, it gets to every shareholder. And you should not discard it. The shareholder vote has real power.
The magic of our public markets is in the checks and balances of ownership. Shareholders elect director. Directors hire and supervise management. The elected directors steer the company, ideally towards growth and profits.
In addition to voting power, shareholders have claim to company profits. When profits increase, the value of each share should also rise.
But modern shareholders don’t know what any of this means. They say things like, “It’s only play money” and if you didn’t know much about how it all works, you’d think they were at a casino.
In fairness, it’s not entirely their fault. Stocks used to be for rich people only. Until the 1990s you needed a human broker to buy them. And you had to call in the order on a telephone, which had a cord back then.
The brokers charged huge commissions. It took three days to settle the trade, or more. Then you’d look at the newspaper to see what the closing price was yesterday.
And when you did, you’d see a fraction. Stocks priced in 1/8th increments. You’d see 45 7/8 for the closing price of IBM or some household name.
There were meme stocks occasionally back then, listed off exchange. But people largely knew better than to touch them. Plus, you had the broker telling you which ideas had support and which were too fringe.
All that’s out the window. We have apps, fractional share purchases, leveraged bets to multiply the daily movements. It’s easy to see how this all bamboozles today’s stock buyer.
The Trend Still Wins
The cure for bamboozled thinking is to stick with the trends. First you have to find the trend.
This doesn’t mean knowing what’s hot today, or shows up a lot in your social media feed. In fact, deleting all social media might give you an advantage. People tethered to it seem more confused than ever.
The trick is, to spot industries with the wind at its back. It means the ones where executives can almost spill coffee in their laps and still grow sales. People need more of the product, or it becomes the new way of doing things.
That’s what you want. Not something that flies up in a month because people who don’t know what a proxy is hear about it and blindly buy it. It’s the one that gets bigger based on growing demand for its product…it serves a need, not a fleeting want.
We introduced one of those big ideas last month. It’s a new kind of energy, and we laid out three ways to own the trend.
It’s all about the real issue behind AI. It’s not job replacement, or demand for faster chips. In fact, the chip problem seems like a mosquito bite compared to the race to power AI. It’s all about power, access to it, and the desperate need for more.
More in this case means demand that every gas-fired turbine in the world can’t satisfy. So much that it makes turning lights off before leaving the house seem useless.
It’s headlines like this that highlight the trend. There will be leaders in this new trend. And there will be schools producing the engineering talent those leaders need to run their emerging companies.
Texas A&M plans to be one of them. To get a jump on things, it aims to install a nuclear reactor on campus…and the students are thrilled.
I talked to a guy behind a specialized fuel startup hoping to power these new reactors. It’s not the kind of fuel used in the humongous reactors from the 1970s. The ones people protest, or the one where Homer Simpson worked. We likely won’t see another one of those built, in the U.S. at least.
And not only did my contact validate the headline above, he said the Texas A&M students loved it. He told me at a recent conference in Texas, students showed up to demand regulators speed up the process of allowing them to power the campus with zero-carbon nuclear energy.
Nuclear Influencers
And they’re not alone. There’s even a nuclear influencer, who’s evidently a social media sensation.
Brazilian fashion model Isabelle Boemeke wants green power now, and doesn’t like old ideas about nuclear energy.
She coined the popular term, “Isodope” and I’m told she saved California’s Diablo Canyon from decommissioning. Her website describes the mission, to green the world’s power, and not with solar and wind.
Imagine if the gold industry had someone like this… at least Bitcoin does. And you can see the results. In spite of at times skeptical comments, our decision on how to play Bitcoin last year was very profitable. In next week’s quarterly note to Founding Level subscribers, I’ll share a company I’m watching that aims to provide institutional clients with access to the growing use of Bitcoin in mainstream investing.
Either way, this is just one more piece of evidence that we’re watching a huge trend in the making. And it’s the type of trend that sticks around for a while, changing how we live permanently.
10 Million Homes
Yesterday one of our companies announced a long-term power supply agreement for 12 gigawatts of zero-carbon electricity. 1 gigawatt is enough to power around 850,000 homes for a year.
But before we get to that, please note a few things:
Q4 Founder Notes publish next Thursday at 9:00 AM – Upgrade to Founding Level to avoid missing these essential notes. This issue we’ll go over charts from this year, how some key decisions look in retrospect, and discuss a company focused on institutional adoption of Bitcoin…which is a massive emerging market.
Today’s Postscript (after my signature in each issue) comes to you from Casablanca, where there’s no official Christmas holiday, and the concept of impeccable service, cuisine, and attention to detail is alive and well.
Now let’s get into the portfolio.