Zenith Massif | Podcast on RSS.com

Zenith Massif

by YJL

Entrepreneurship

EP16 Tribeca: where I wept and lived

New York, seen from the air, produces a specific physical response before you've even landed. Something tightens in the chest. Manhattan sits down there like a narrow stone arrowhead — pinched between the Hudson and the East River, pointed south. The further south you go, the denser it gets, the heavier it gets. More steel, more history, more weight per square foot. Keep descending. You'll see the Statue of Liberty standing offshore, the way she always has. You'll catch a long reflection — two square pools, like eyes looking straight up at the sky. Then a white glass tower, catching light the way towers in this city have always caught light, like they're competing with the sun. And next to it, that strange white skeletal creature emerging from the ground. That's where we're going.

EP15 Sushi: A global export worldwide

There's a restaurant in Tokyo called Saito. You can't call to make a reservation. You can't book online. You get in because an existing guest introduces you, and the chef decides whether he wants you there. People wait years. The room is small — ten seats at the bar. Chef Takashi Saito goes to Toyosu Market every morning and selects the fish himself. He doesn't use refrigeration. Every piece arrives in front of you at the exact moment he's decided it should be eaten. One person. One meal. Four hundred dollars, starting.

Disney: the empire of happiness

Start with a number: $91 billion. That's what the Walt Disney Company brought in during fiscal year 2024. One company running nearly every piece of business that has anything to do with happiness — films, television, theme parks, cruise ships, streaming, ESPN, and a private island in the Bahamas. Its parks host over a hundred million visitors a year. Its streaming platform has 230 million subscribers. Its cruise fleet is expanding to 13 ships by 2031. All of it traces back to a young man who had just gone bankrupt, riding a train, sketching a mouse.

Tokyo: The canvas for sparkles.

Tokyo is a city that lives inside a Rashomon. Walk into it and you will see a different city from the person standing next to you. History and the future coexist without apparent friction. The supernatural and the rational share the same postcode. Silence and noise are separated by a single door. No version is false. None is complete.

BENTELY X AUSTIN MARTIN

TL;DR In 1930 an Englishman raced his Bentley against France's fastest train, beat it by the width of the Channel, and sat down to wait. Bentley has booked six straight profitable years at a 14% margin; Aston Martin lost £324 million last year — two completely different ways to stay alive. What you pay millions for isn't a car. It's a hundred years of lineage.

BARCELONA: A Toast to the Windmills

Cervantes wrote an old man on a bony horse, a rusted lance in his hand, who saw the windmills standing in a field and charged. His squire shouted after him — they're windmills, they're windmills — and the old man looked back and said something about doing battle with the great windmill of life. Everyone agreed he was mad. Every time I read it, I feel something closer to envy: the willingness to charge at a thing simply because it has weight in your chest, with no thought of whether it pays. Past a certain age, after you've seen enough, that turns out to be the rarest thing a person can hold onto. I took the old man with me to Spain — a few days in Barcelona, then a flight, on a whim, to Mallorca.

LOEWE, IRELAND'S GENIUS AND 200 YRS

In the summer of 2023, after Challengers opened, the Loewe website crashed for two days. Not because Loewe had sponsored the film. Because Josh O'Connor, playing Art, walked out in one shot wearing a Loewe polo, and the world Googled it at the same moment, and the servers went down.

MALIBU, the COOLEST way to live

The Woolsey Fire, in November of 2018, burned down from Simi Valley to the Pacific, taking out nearly a hundred thousand acres and almost seventeen hundred buildings. Paradise Cove was levelled. Neil Young's house burned. Miley Cyrus's burned. Kim Basinger, Gerard Butler, Robin Thicke — all of them lost their homes that week. Most of them moved back. They rebuilt on the ruins. There is a saying in Malibu: you don't ask whether there'll be a fire, only when the next one is coming. The Santa Anas drive the dry desert heat in from the east, the California drought stretches into another year, and every few seasons something goes up. In January of 2025 the Franklin Fire took a few thousand acres. More houses gone. The sound of fire helicopters has become, for the people who live here, a kind of weather.

EP08: Balenciaga, a men's conviction

I once owned a Balenciaga black lambskin hoodie. The moment I put it on, the weight settled across my shoulders — dense, elastic. It told me immediately that this thing was difficult to make. Lambskin has natural give, but it punishes any imprecision in the cutting — one wrong line and the piece is ruined, unfixable.

EP07: Brantwood, CEOs' little town.

Honestly, going for a run in one of Los Angeles' most expensive neighborhoods puts you under a certain kind of pressure. You turn a corner, and suddenly LeBron James is walking his dog. Today, we're heading to a part of West Los Angeles I know intimately and return to often — Brentwood. It has perfected an art form that is much harder than it appears: the art of controlled looseness.

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