u/AndreFromYtria

One question still isn't answered: where was his own money?

Patrick Bet-David's career is built on reading people and reading risk. So why didn't that apply to Goliath Ventures?

Bet-David didn't inherit his business. He built PHP Agency from nothing in 2009, worked financial services for 8 years before that.

When a company gives me a million dollars for title sponsor. And I have a brain like Patrick, I don't ask, is this legal? I think holy shit, let me analyze this company.

I want to understand how they make their money. They can afford a million dollars on a sponsorship, so are they making that work, or will they make it work? I want to understand the cash flow they're generating to afford that.

Who are their investors, or how are they making the cash themselves?

Not for vetting a sponsor. A brain like Patricks works like that (I think).

I call bullshit on what PBD told Coffeezilla. If my assumption is correct, that Patrick was all over this and just didn't invest himself, then yes, he knew it was fishy.

But he claims he never saw it, and I don't believe that for a second: "This wasn't a complicated fraud... as soon as I got a hold of the marketing information, it was clear what they were doing."

Patrick Bet-David saw a company promising 36 to 60 percent annualized returns. He didn't need Coffeezilla to tell him that's fraud math.

And he never put a hundred thousand dollars of his own money in.

Thanks for putting the spotlight on it Steve and yeah I am 3 months behind 🤦

It started with *I Am Not Your Guru*.

From there the tapes, Personal Power.

It went all to plan for Tony Robbins and his empire.

I want to UPW which is a USD 595 feeder event. Built specifically to sell you more afterward. I was in that system for two years.

If it works, it's thanks to Tony Robbins. If it doesn't work, it's self-sabotage, a term used at UPW about three hundred times. The good news is you can work around the self-sabotage. Just buy the next course.

I ended up spending $15,000. I was happy I spent it, for about three months.

When the questions came, they never landed on "is the system wrong" or "is this maybe not for me." They landed on self-sabotage. This isn't working because of me.

I went so far that I revisited a course I'd already paid for as unpaid crew.

Because I thought I'd done it wrong the first time and wanted to relive the content and get it right.

I gave a friend a ticket. I told him not to buy the upsells. I thought that made me the exception, someone who'd seen through it enough to protect him. I hadn't. I was doing exactly what the system needs long-time members to do: bring in fresh people, hand them a warning.

I wrote a massive deep-dive about my time in this system and exactly what the $15,000 upsell funnel looks like from the inside, complete with my invoice. Let me know in the comments if you want the link to read the full breakdown.

I posted here a few days ago asking why people don't commute by bike. Got downvoted, but you gave me the most honest answers of anywhere I asked, including a thread in r/cycling that went a lot worse for me.

So before I write anything longer, a real thank you. And a few of the answers stuck with me enough that I wanted to share them back here.

Best reason anyone gave me: a guy got hit by a truck, cracked his helmet, almost broke a bone. He's still commuting. That's someone who met a real risk and kept going anyway.

Worst reason: someone said they can't bike because a dog on a long leash sometimes blocks the path. Make of that what you will.

The one I actually had to do math for: time. Someone pointed out that a long commute plus cleanup isn't nothing if you've got kids and a demanding job. Fair. My old commute was 16.5km each way, 300m of climbing, an hour untrained. But that's not bike versus free time, it's bike versus whatever you'd otherwise be doing, car, bus, metro. Downhill it beat public transport by half. Uphill, untrained, it was maybe a few minutes slower than the bus.

Wrote the longer version of this up, sandwich of best and worst excuses, why showers and lockers don't move the needle as much as people think, and what actually changed my mind about traffic. Linking it below if anyone wants the full thing. No obligation, this comment's the whole story if that's enough.

A WhatsApp message from my old cycling club started this. They wanted me back. Problem: they're 20 years younger than me, and my longest ride in the last two years was 25km.

I said yes anyway.

Some background. Started commuting in Santiago on an ebike in 2014, 16.5km each way with 300m of climbing on the way home. Moved to a hybrid, then a Canyon road bike in 2018. That bike turned into a full-on obsession. Over 30,000km on it now.

Then a few rough years happened. Heavy medication for a while wrecked my energy without me understanding why at the time, and my longest ride dropped to basically nothing for two years straight.

Anyone who's had a medication or health setback mess with their fitness knows how disorienting that is, you used to be able to do the thing and then you just can't, and there's no obvious reason on the surface.

Earlier this year I started commuting again. Just commuting, nothing structured. And it built back faster than I expected, months instead of years.

So when the club reached out, I told the group leader straight up I wasn't sure I could hang anymore. He said come anyway. Saturday, 8:50am at Beauchef. I rode the 20km to the meeting point first instead of driving, because why not. Then the route itself was 160km. Then 20km home. Nobody planned a 190km day. It just happened because I kept refusing the easy option.

First 20km alone, before I even met the group, I was singing out loud on the bike. Full volume, no shame. People on the street probably thought I was either having a breakdown or the best day of my life. Correct on the second one.

Met the group, rode together, and around 130km in they started pulling away and I couldn't hold the pace. They're a good crew, they didn't ditch me out of anything but physics. I stopped, bought two bananas and a cake, ate everything, texted them to keep going without me.

Then I called my wife. I knew before I dialed that I had at least 4 more hours solo if nobody came to get me, riding alone is so much slower than in a group. She had her own plans that day. Not a simple yes for her either.

I didn't decide to finish. I decided I'd probably fail but keep pedaling a bit longer anyway.

Then came the bad stretch. 88 minutes, 20.5km, average speed 14km/h, less than half my normal pace. Road that looked flat on the surface but wasn't, my Garmin kept telling me I was going downhill and it was wrong every single time. Got off and pushed the bike twice on ground that barely even sloped. Strava said if I kept walking at that pace it'd take 12 hours to get home.

Stopped for coffee at a shop I know along the route. Legs were fine by then. What I didn't have was any reason to want to keep riding. Zero motivation, just sitting there.

Then the road actually started climbing, visibly this time, not the fake-flat stuff from before. The second I could see the grade for what it was, my legs came back and so did I. Started singing again.

With about 15km left my legs started cramping, nothing dramatic, just my body telling me to cut it out. Grabbed isotonic powder at a pharmacy. Near the top there was a real climb, 5%+ for 3km, then a segment I normally clear in 30 seconds. Took me 2:44 this time. Got off, pushed again. Nothing left by the finish.

190.14km. 1,110m climbing. Just under 7.5 hours moving. Dropped, finished anyway.

Hi, Reddit nudged me to post this in your sub, I hope that is fine with you guys. This was originally posted in r/chile

In 2021, during COVID, I walked from San Carlos de Apoquindo up toward Morro Guyacan. Mayor Lavín's people sent a drone after me. Not a warning sign, not a guard on foot. A drone, to chase a single hiker back down a mountain during a lockdown. I've lived under that mountain since 2008. That's the year I understood what this place actually is. They don't want a person up there who isn't paying for the privilege. It's a war against the hiker, against anyone who wants a mountain instead of a mall.

Eight years now, I've been finding the hole in the fence. When it closes, I find another. That one gets closed about four times a year and reopened within 24 hours by someone I've never met and never will. Someone out there keeps quietly giving the mountain back.

Here's what's actually behind that fence. In 1972 Universidad Católica bought around 1,800 hectares in this sector, partly financed by a public bond raffle called La Gran Jornada. Regular people bought numbered bonds to help pay for it. The university and its sports club later split the land between them, and the university's own people admit the university "chose first," keeping the best of it, the lower, buildable lots. Those lots are condos now. The club got the leftovers, the steep, undevelopable rock, which is the "trail land" you pay to walk on today.

The land ordinary Santiaguinos helped fund became private housing on one side and a paid park on the other. Adult entry is 3,450 pesos. There's one gate, on Camino Las Flores, and it funnels everyone toward Alto del Naranjo and Cerro Provincia. There's also interpretive signage inside the fenced area, off in a corner nobody walking from that gate would ever reach, on a totally different side of the mountain. I still couldn't tell you what those signs actually say. Half of them aren't even legible anymore. So much for the stewardship.

Stewardship is the actual justification here. Foot traffic without a ticket gets called "informal access," treated as degradation, something to be managed and curbed.

Meanwhile the same institution has been selling prime lots on this exact mountain for high-end housing, and just finished a stadium rebuild, the Claro Arena, run through its own real estate subsidiary.

A person walking a dirt path is a threat to the ecosystem, apparently. A poured foundation for a condo building is not. You don't need a hydrology study to see which one actually changes the mountain.

Pontificia Universidad Católica isn't struggling. Their own audited financials show total assets near 926 million USD and a net worth around 475 milion USD. They just announced a five-year, 293 billion peso investment plan. This isn't an institution that needs a 3,45 USD gate fee to survive, or a drone to protect it from a guy going for a walk. The gate isn't about money. It's about who gets to feel like the mountain belongs to them.

Compare that to where I'm also from. In Austria, walking onto someone else's forest has been a federal legal right since 1975, not a landowner's favor. I recently rode from Nassereith to Imst to Telfs and back, about 73 kilometers, close to 1,000 meters of climbing, almost entirely on forest roads and cycle paths. No gate, no fee, no fence to find a hole in. That land has owners too. It has fences too, for keeping in livestock, but with gates built into them, made for people to pass through, not to keep them out. Nobody there pays to walk their own mountains, and somehow the mountains survive anyway. The people walking them think of the mountain as theirs. That's not an accident. It's what happens when you're allowed in.

You don't protect a mountain by locking people out of it. You protect it by giving them a reason to care, and the only way people care about a place is if they're allowed to belong to it. San Carlos does the opposite. It teaches an entire city that the mountain above their own city isn't theirs, gate by gate, fee by fee, drone by drone, until eventually people stop trying and stop caring. Then the ones who fenced it off get to say, see, we always knew we had to protect it from them.

Someone still opens that hole in the fence every time they close it. I think that's the most honest review of the whole system anyone could give.

In 2021, during COVID, I walked from San Carlos de Apoquindoup toward Morro Guyacan. Mayor Lavín's people sent a drone after me. Not a warning sign, not a guard on foot. A drone, to chase a single hiker back down a mountain during a lockdown. I've lived under that mountain since 2008. That's the year I understood what this place actually is. They don't want a person up there who isn't paying for the privilege. It's a war against the hiker, against anyone who wants a mountain instead of a mall.

Eight years now, I've been finding the hole in the fence. When it closes, I find another. That one gets closed about four times a year and reopened within 24 hours by someone I've never met and never will. Someone out there keeps quietly giving the mountain back.

Here's what's actually behind that fence. In 1972 Universidad Católica bought around 1,800 hectares in this sector, partly financed by a public bond raffle called La Gran Jornada. Regular people bought numbered bonds to help pay for it. The university and its sports club later split the land between them, and the university's own people admit the university "chose first," keeping the best of it, the lower, buildable lots. Those lots are condos now. The club got the leftovers, the steep, undevelopable rock, which is the "trail land" you pay to walk on today.

The land ordinary Santiaguinos helped fund became private housing on one side and a paid park on the other. Adult entry is 3,450 pesos. There's one gate, on Camino Las Flores, and it funnels everyone toward Alto del Naranjo and Cerro Provincia. There's also interpretive signage inside the fenced area, off in a corner nobody walking from that gate would ever reach, on a totally different side of the mountain. I still couldn't tell you what those signs actually say. Half of them aren't even legible anymore. So much for the stewardship.

Stewardship is the actual justification here. Foot traffic without a ticket gets called "informal access," treated as degradation, something to be managed and curbed.

Meanwhile the same institution has been selling prime lots on this exact mountain for high-end housing, and just finished a stadium rebuild, the Claro Arena, run through its own real estate subsidiary.

A person walking a dirt path is a threat to the ecosystem, apparently. A poured foundation for a condo building is not. You don't need a hydrology study to see which one actually changes the mountain.

Pontificia Universidad Católica isn't struggling. Their own audited financials show total assets near 926 billion pesos and a net worth around 475 billion. They just announced a five-year, 293 billion peso investment plan. This isn't an institution that needs a 3,450 peso gate to survive, or a drone to protect it from a guy going for a walk. The gate isn't about money. It's about who gets to feel like the mountain belongs to them.

Compare that to where I'm also from. In Austria, walking onto someone else's forest has been a federal legal right since 1975, not a landowner's favor. I recently rode from Nassereith to Imst to Telfs and back, about 73 kilometers, close to 1,000 meters of climbing, almost entirely on forest roads and cycle paths. No gate, no fee, no fence to find a hole in. That land has owners too. It has fences too, for keeping in livestock, but with gates built into them, made for people to pass through, not to keep them out. Nobody there pays to walk their own mountains, and somehow the mountains survive anyway. The people walking them think of the mountain as theirs. That's not an accident. It's what happens when you're allowed in.

You don't protect a mountain by locking people out of it. You protect it by giving them a reason to care, and the only way people care about a place is if they're allowed to belong to it. San Carlos does the opposite. It teaches an entire city that the mountain above their own city isn't theirs, gate by gate, fee by fee, drone by drone, until eventually people stop trying and stop caring. Then the ones who fenced it off get to say, see, we always knew we had to protect it from them.

Someone still opens that hole in the fence every time they close it. I think that's the most honest review of the whole system anyone could give.

I published the following on LinkedIn and wanted to share it with you.

For years I was a functional alcoholic.

Functional, because I was also an athlete.

I commuted by bike five days a week. Thirty-two kilometers a day. Three hundred meters of climbing. Then I drank. More than most people would believe.

I didn't know these two things were connected. I thought one was discipline and the other was a problem.

They were the same engine. The bike was burning something the bottle was feeding. As long as both ran, the house stood.

Then the pandemic came and took the bike.

One pillar gone. The whole load shifted to the other.

The drinking climbed to cover what the riding used to carry, and unbalanced, overloaded, it started doing damage it had never done before.

Somewhere in that year I went to a psychiatrist. I told her I thought I was becoming an alcoholic.

She told me not to worry. Enjoy your one or two glasses of wine a day.

It wasn't one or two glasses. It was more than a bottle.

Later I went to a different one. By then I'd made a plan. I wouldn't drink alone anymore. Only around people, only on weekends. I'd held it a week and I was proud of myself, and I told her so.

She listened. Then she said, that's interesting. Do you think it will work?

If you read this and recognize yourself in it, not the bike, the bottle:

Stopping was the best thing I ever did.

Not the hardest thing I survived.

The best thing I chose.

It's possible. And the person on the other side is glad in a way he couldn't have imagined.