A New App Lets You Hire Your Own Bodyguards

Plus: wellness clubs, the "Boom Boom Aesthetic," and the Vermont ski town that ruined Vice President Vance's vacation

Welcome to Small Talk, an email I serve out every Monday morning exclusively to our Breakfast Club members in NYC and Charleston. The premise is simple: my top of mind topics for the week’s worth of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners ahead anytime some chatter is required. From now on, I’ll be sharing it with subscribers of The Supersonic as well. Enjoy, and crib topics as necessary.

Kieran Culkin dropped f-bombs at the Oscars last night. Hulu dropped the Oscars altogether. Here are some other, more small talk-worthy stories you might’ve missed.

For consideration …

• In da club
  Clubs are having a moment, aren’t they? Not the unce-unce kind, but a … different variety. For Gen-Z, it’s wellness clubs, like Hume in LA, where for $395 a month you can get lymphatic drainage massages, B12 shots, and sip rooftop matcha with fellow health-conscious ilk. Sounds wild. For older, shall we say slightly more well heeled boomers, there’s former Netflix CEO Reed Hasting’s Powder Mountain in Utah, which now offers a members-only enclave of two-thousand lift-serviced acres. The price tag for poaching powder without having to rub elbows with the hoi polloi? A minimum spend of $2 million on a plot of land, plus up to $100k in annual dues. Such gatekeeping tactics, while certainly under high scrutiny in the—already elitist and highly criticized—world of American skiing, might be welcome at Soho House, at least among members who believe its exclusivity and service standards have gone down since the British brand went public four years ago (ranks have swelled by 70 percent). Feuds over the club’s future are now being waged by two billionaires with differing opinions. It all sounds very “Boom Boom,” the new “aesthetic” fetishizing ‘80s greed and glamour (the term has been coined by the same trend forecaster who coined “vibe shift” and “normcore”). For those without a membership anywhere, there’s always Chez Fifi, the Upper East Side hotspot that, ostensibly, is bookable, even though we all know that securing a table is nigh impossible.
  

• Vance skis in jeans?
  Following a heated Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Vice President Vance headed to Vermont for a ski vacation with his family. His reception was less than sunny. Over a thousand protestors lined the streets and slopes, with signs saying “Vance skis in jeans” and “go ski in Russia.” No matter where you fall politically, it does seem like we live in strange, unserious times. So says The New Yorker, wondering if we’re stuck in a kind of perpetual state of desperate, gallows-light humor (it lacks the transgression of full-bodied gallows humor) as a way to cope these days. Or there’s the anti-fan, those who fixate on things they loathe and make a kind of perverse fan art mocking it, like the viral Johanne Sacrebleu, a short film that skewers, according to its creator, the stereotypical Emilia Pérez. And what’s up with tiny balconies? Curbed does the deep dive on New York’s ever-shrinking decks. If that sounds too serious, there are the thieves who stole a £2.8m gold toilet — their heist was undone by CCTV.
  

• Hire your own bodyguards
  In a world in which Fart Coin can rally, one might ask if, instead of the simulation theory, we all live inside a meme. That might explain Protector, a new app that aims to be “the Uber for guns.” Currently live in LA and NYC, the app allows you to hire your own security detail, and in the wake of the Luigi Mangione/United Healthcare CEO murder, it’s something the company is leaning into. Neom, the Saudi Arabian real estate development that will have things such as upside down skyscrapers and a 170-kilometer-long mirrored skyscraper, as well as be the size of a state or small country, wants five million tourists by 2030. Given that it’s now considered cool simply to line up for things, the coalescence of consumer and experience culture (to say nothing of hype culture) just might make such lofty projections a reality. For the armchair traveler, there’s Monster Hunter Wilds, the sixth installment in a Japanese video game series so rich and detailed it “can make it feel as if you are playing a fantastical version of a David Attenborough documentary.” Killing the “monsters” has also rendered players sympathetic, and so true to the natural world is the game that, say, after you’ve slayed a whale and moved on, the whale’s carcass “can sustain a local ecosystem for years.” Simulations, indeed.

Quicker hits …

• A paralyzed man got a chip put in his brain by Elon Musk and now he can move things with his mind.

• When did Mount Vesuvius actually erupt? There's some dispute.

• The world's biggest fast food chain is from China.

• Watch this touching moment of the late Gene Hackman on Inside the Actors Studio.

Enjoy your week.

BL

Ben Leventhal
Founder + CEO
Blackbird