Dustin

Weekday Golfer, Billiard Hustler, Hospitality Professional

[Dustin @acerun3]

@Andrew_FBB Andrew Fischer in this conversation?

[Dustin @acerun3]

@jerryferrara Seriously, what a stupid take

[Dustin @acerun3]

@packers @Ticketmaster 17-0

[Dr. Hunter S. Thompson @GonzoVice]

Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”

[MYGOLFSPY @MyGolfSpy]

One of the worst feelings in is catching a chip thin and watching it rocket 30 yards past the hole.

Good news: it’s usually not your swing, it’s how you’re setting up.

Here’s the fix: https://t.co/NE8Fxa8KSN

[Dustin @acerun3]

@MyGolfSpy Skechers

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

My net worth peaked at $1.2 million.

None of it was real.

I don't mean that philosophically. I mean it was located on servers that have since been turned off.

I own eleven properties in the metaverse. Three in Decentraland. Four in The Sandbox. Two in Voxels. One in Otherside. And a beachfront villa in Horizon Worlds that I bought for $214,000 because Mark Zuckerberg called it "the next frontier."

The frontier closed last week.

It's a mobile app now.

Last year I mass DM'd 340 people the phrase "you don't understand how early we are." I have since stopped doing that. Not because I was wrong. Because most of them blocked me.

I got into metaverse real estate in November 2021. Everyone was buying. Someone paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor. In a video game. With no legs.

The avatars didn't have legs.

I thought that was bullish. "The legs are coming," I told my Discord. "Legs are a roadmap item." Three hundred people reacted with rocket emojis.

I called myself a "digital land baron."

I put it in my Twitter bio.

I put it in my LinkedIn headline.

I said it on a podcast that had eleven listeners. Three of them were bots. The rest were my alts.

My virtual property has more square footage than my actual apartment.

My actual apartment has furniture.

Location, location, location.

My most valuable asset was a plot next to a virtual Gucci store. Gucci left in 2023. The store is still there. Nobody's in it. It's like a mall in Ohio but with worse graphics and no food court.

I held.

Diamond hands.

That's what we said. "Diamond hands." It means refusing to sell while your investment loses 94% of its value. We turned financial paralysis into a personality trait.

A guy in my Discord paid $2.4 million for a 618-parcel estate in Decentraland. Prime district. High foot traffic. I asked him what "foot traffic" meant when the platform had 38 daily active users.

He said I didn't understand the technology.

I didn't.

I still bought more.

We had a DAO. A decentralized autonomous organization. That means we voted on decisions. There were nine of us. Three never showed up. Two voted on everything without reading it. The other four were me and my alts.

We voted to "acquire strategic parcels."

The vote passed unanimously.

I voted four times.

My portfolio peaked at $1.2 million. I told everyone. I made a spreadsheet. I projected 40x returns by 2025. I made a pitch deck. The pitch deck had a slide that said "WE ARE BUILDING THE DIGITAL ECONOMY."

The slide had a rocket emoji.

That was my entire financial model.

In 2023 I bought a Bored Ape for $189,000.

It's worth $14,000 now.

I don't talk about the Ape.

I still use it as my profile picture. People ask me about it. I say "I'm long-term bullish." Long-term bullish means I can't sell it without crying in a Panera.

My mom asked me what a Bored Ape was.

I said "digital art on the blockchain."

She asked why it cost more than her car.

I said "you don't understand Web3."

She said "I understand you live in a studio apartment."

She's not in my Discord.

Justin Bieber bought one for $1.3 million.

It's worth about $90,000 now.

I felt better about mine after I heard that.

That's community.

WAGMI. We're All Gonna Make It. We said that every day. In the group chat. While the floor dropped. While the volume dried up. While 95% of all NFT collections went to zero.

We're all gonna make it.

None of us made it.

But we said it with conviction and a laser-eye profile picture. That counts for something.

It doesn't.

But we said it did. That's decentralized consensus.

Meta spent $84 billion on the metaverse.

I need to say that again.

$84 billion.

More than the GDP of Luxembourg. More than the GDP of Iceland, Luxembourg, and Malta combined. They spent it on a platform where the avatars had no legs, the graphics looked like a 2006 Wii game, and the peak user count was lower than the lunch rush at a Chipotle in Des Moines.

They just pulled Horizon Worlds from VR headsets.

It lives on as a mobile app.

My beachfront villa is now a mobile app.

Location, location, location.

Zuckerberg renamed the entire company for this. Facebook became Meta. A $900 billion company changed its legal name because the CEO watched Ready Player One and said "I want that."

Reality Labs lost $10 billion in 2021. $14 billion in 2022. $16 billion in 2023. $18 billion in 2024. $19 billion in 2025.

That's not a strategy. That's a speedrun.

They laid off 1,500 Reality Labs employees this year. Shut down three VR studios. Killed Supernatural. Put the entire VR social vision in a casket and said "we're pivoting to AI and wearables."

The pivot took four years and $84 billion.

I pivoted too.

I'm an AI real estate investor now.

I bought a virtual plot in an AI-generated world that doesn't exist yet. The founder said it was "the intersection of spatial computing and large language models."

I don't know what that means.

I gave him $40,000.

He has a whitepaper. It's 47 pages. I read the title and the tokenomics section. The tokenomics section is a pie chart. I love pie charts. They make everything look like a plan.

The project has a roadmap. Q1: "Build community." Q2: "Launch beta." Q3: "Scale ecosystem." Q4 is blank.

Q4 is always blank.

That's where the exit scam goes.

My accountant asked me to value my metaverse portfolio for tax purposes.

I said $1.2 million.

He said "current market value."

I said $6,400.

He stared at me for eleven seconds.

I know because I counted.

He asked if I had any other investments.

I showed him my NFTs.

He stared for longer.

I told him they were "cultural artifacts with long-term provenance."

He asked if I'd considered a 401k.

I told him a 401k was "legacy finance."

He told me to leave his office.

The metaverse is dead.

I don't accept that.

I am a digital land baron. I own eleven properties across four platforms. I have a beachfront villa in a mobile app, a plot next to an empty Gucci store, and a cartoon monkey that cost me more than my actual car.

Location, location, location.

The location is nowhere.

But I'm early.

I'm always early.

That's the same as being wrong except you get to say it with confidence.

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

the wire.

[Dustin @acerun3]

@Stocktwits

[Dustin @acerun3]

@JunkWaxHeroes How did we ever get these answers back in the day? You needed like a library and 5 different resources

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Red Robin is a case study in how to kill a restaurant chain from the inside out.

In 2015, the stock hit $92.90 per share. Revenue peaked in 2017 at $1.4 billion across 573 locations. Families loved the place. Bottomless fries. Birthday parties. “Gourmet” burgers when that word still meant something in casual dining. The brand had real equity.

Then management panicked about rising minimum wages and made the single worst decision in the company’s history: they fired all the bussers.

January 2018. CEO Steve Carley cut bussers across every location, eliminated expeditors, and replaced kitchen managers with generic “back-of-house” roles. The logic was pure spreadsheet thinking. Labor costs were rising, so remove labor. The savings looked great in quarterly earnings. The second and third order effects were catastrophic.

Tables stopped getting cleared. Wait times ballooned. Walkaways increased 85% year over year. 75% of the dine-in traffic loss came during peak hours, the exact window when the restaurant makes money. Ticket times out of the kitchen jumped a full minute on average. Customers who waited 20 minutes for a table and another 20 for a burger stopped coming back. Red Robin’s own CEO at the time, Denny Marie Post, admitted the damage was self-inflicted.

And here’s the compounding problem. While Red Robin was gutting its own service model, it simultaneously launched a “Tavern Double” value menu at $6.99 to drive traffic. Orders of the cheap burgers jumped from 9% to 15% of all orders, which cratered the average check. So Red Robin was now serving worse food, slower, in a dirtier restaurant, at a lower price point. That combination is how you enter a death spiral.

Meanwhile, 16% of locations were in malls. Mall traffic was already declining. Those locations saw 5.5% sales drops versus 3% at standalone stores, dragging the whole system down. Management acknowledged the problem quarter after quarter and did nothing about it for years.

Five CEOs in 10 years. Think about that. The one leader who provided stability, Michael Snyder, was with the chain from 1979 to 2005. After that, it was a revolving door. Every new CEO launched a new turnaround plan. Every plan was abandoned by the next CEO. The North Star plan. The First Choice plan. New menu rollouts. Loyalty program reboots. None of it addressed the core issue: they’d trained an entire generation of customers to think of Red Robin as the place where the service is terrible.

The contrast with Chili’s makes the failure even clearer. Kevin Hochman took over Chili’s in 2022 and did the opposite of what Red Robin did. He simplified the menu, invested in operations, launched a $10.99 “3 for Me” deal that went viral on TikTok, and let the food speak for itself. Chili’s just posted 31% same-store sales growth. Red Robin’s comparable revenue was down 1.2% for all of 2024.

Both chains were in roughly the same position three years ago. One chain invested in the customer experience. The other spent a decade cutting it. Red Robin’s $65M market cap and Chili’s $3.3B market cap tell you which approach works.

The stock went from $92 to $3.61. That’s what happens when you optimize for the quarterly earnings call instead of the customer walking through the door.

[Dustin @acerun3]

@JunkWaxHeroes Destiny of an Emperor

[Dustin @acerun3]

@trygolfr Sheep Ranch

[Dustin @acerun3]

@JunkWaxHeroes

[Dustin @acerun3]

@jacksettleman

[Dustin @acerun3]

@Mike_kim714 Pebble and 100% Yes to Caddying

[Dustin @acerun3]

@DocumentingBTC Cali burritos

[Dustin @acerun3]

@jacksettleman You were saying...

[Dustin @acerun3]

@Mike_kim714 @grok 33

[Dustin @acerun3]

@howardlindzon Are we great yet?