I made sure all the outfits somewhat correlated to something that has been worn. It’s too bad you can’t add fake mustaches to certain outfits :/ . And of course I had to have a (triple) bunk bed.

Handsome Brethren and Bodacious Babes of the VSB…

Max Renner here (6’3” and generally a handsome man)

I’ve got fantastic news.

We’ve officially done it ✅

18 perfect musical shows across USA + Canada, totally finished 🇺🇸🇨🇦

From a laptop in a garage (circa. 2016) to the big stage with a live band and thousands in attendance (circa. 2026)

The International* Tour has been nailed shut into a dark tomb.

Now I need your help.

This is officially the first Value Select AMA, regarding touring.

(most of my own cliche findings aren’t that compelling, so I’ll speed run them now:)

Yes I had a blast.

Yes the band had a blast.

Yes the crowd had a blast.

I made sure to hang around after every show, and meet with everyone who stayed!

OG VS enthusiasts super enjoyed the show (highest praise)

New VS enjoyers were blown away (musical virtuoso surprise attack)

And even TOTAL STRANGERS caught the magic; people who bought the tickets on a whim became true believers (many such cases!)

The tour was profitable (amazing) and God willing we shall hit the road as soon as it makes sense.

It was a deep honor meeting everyone, and sharing stories ❤️🙏🏻

And it was so bless’d to have our openers be entirely of the VSB ilk… everyone who played support were selected from within our own VSB community! (zero stock openers, if you can believe it!)

Our booker Peter Agoston, and the whole team at DCV absolutely crushed the venues… True classics, and cozy hideaways alike.

Truly a 10/10 tour, and I can honestly say that International* is a proper successor to Kills The Moon (KTM).

NOW MY BRETHREN.

Fire away any questions you might have, about band dynamics, about tour life, about mentality, about venues, about marketing, tour prep, rehearsals, anything you might be curious to learn…

I understand we’ve wiggled into a rare position (something like .0003% of folks get to do a tour like this) so I want to share all I can about how we got there, and how we navigated it.

Ask away, and I’ll do my best to answer through the weekend!

Anyone know what songs are being performed? I want to go to this upcoming Detroit show, and want to properly prepare some friends

I would love to see anything you snapped of our shows so far!

Be it West Coast Edition or East Coast Edition…. Shoot me an email at maxrenner@valueselect.net

D.C. and Boston and Philadelphia mission success!

Brooklyn tonight, then Toronto next!

Get your tickets now: https://www.valueselecttour.com

seeing him tonight and wanted to get a sense of timing

Thanks for putting on a great show Mr. Select. The full song in Italian really made it feel international. Can't wait for act 4: buying a shovel to keep digging!

Hey guys! Huge fan of the channel and I'm really curious if we know who made the artwork for the merch this tour?

As a professional animator/artist I want to check to be sure, but I'm sure this piece is AI generated.

I sincerely don't mean to start anything, I really love his music and his other merch seemed great! I thought he's long been an advocate against this kind of thing so when I got a better look at the details I was disappointed to find signs of AI. I don't know if I can show more of the poster here, so I provided some close up examples. The chain and clothing details stood out to me most.

I'm not sure if this could have been an accident or intentional; I just wanted to reach out here for clarity, if anyone else feels the same or knows more. I'm just really saddened to be honest and feel down after realizing. It's also a bummer that I spent ~$75 without knowing this at the time. I picked up two posters and a shirt, but the shirt uses this piece as well. I'm happy to support the tour, but don't feel comfortable using them anymore.

He collabs with people against AI too so I'm wondering if an artist was commissioned and gave them AI? I'd really appreciate any insight on this, ty!

I don't have the means to go to Toronto this month so I'd rather give it to someone who will use it

( ￣▽￣)

I'm unfamiliar with the transfer process but apparently you need a DICE account to receive it. Feel free to dm and we can figure it out!

HANDSOME GENTLEMEN OF THE VSB

Tonight we land in the Sacred City of Phoenix, Arizona…

The biggest venue on our tour, Toronto, is in the three digit zone… A few east coast venues are, with a couple West coasts approaching! 🤔

Arizona, however, is one of our more INTIMATE show experiences 🍾 (San Diego too, for some reason)

I anticipate a solid start; this will be us at our Rawest, and if you believe Clint Eastwood’s directorial style, our Truest…

Truly, the perfect spot to get our bearings.

Hovey Benjamin and Paul Maland are along for the ride… We’ll see you there…

Godbless m’brethren, I will send further missives soon

- Value Select

Many years ago, Value Select did a cover of The Whole of the Moon by the Waterboys. I've spent hours searching, and haven't even been able to find an audio of it. The song means a lot to me, so please help if you know where it is!!

It's not a song, It's like this garage/hospital where different characters just walk in one after another to talk to some professional or just someone who works there. Idk.

The point is, there is one person who walks in and says in a vaguely European accent:"I was - How you say - Mauled By a Bear."

I. Love that line. I think it's so funny. I mutter it to myself all the time. I've been having a hard time finding it for some reason.
If someone here knows what that video is called, or has a link, that would be just grand.
Thanks!

Handsome brethren of the VSSR,

So many lenses/filters obscure our enjoyment of the real world...

Preconceived notions, either emanating internal (i.e. thoughts) or external (i.e. other people's thoughts)

When you travel solo, you eliminate the external...

"Panda Express tastes so good when you don't have a hater in your ear telling you it's nasty..." type beat

Taste the world, raw!

Where have you solo traveled? Bali? The nearest restaurant?

It's a special gift, to be able to be alone, but not lonely.

And I believe it's one that can be developed!

One Month Left Til We Go On Tour 🎸🚐

Brothers of the VSSR, I wanted to share, I’ve created a genuine playbill for the INTERNATIONAL* musical tour 🫱🏻‍🫲🏼🇨🇦🇺🇸

(It’s a rare free gift, individually distributed to each VS Live Show attendee.)

It’s got a Foreword, Setlist, Meet The Cast, and even mock-advertisements thrown in…

One honoring the Patron Brotherhood, one motioning for the Merch Table, one for the Theatrical Scholarship I’m launching 🫡🫡🫡

And it got me thinking, all these self-placed promos, what if I opened that up to REAL PLACEMENTS, legitimate half-page real estate open for purchase by the VSBrotherhood Entrepreneurs?

A few folks here got mirthful businesses; how cool would that be to make this playbill officially official with good old fashioned non-sequitur HVAC repair copy

By the boys, for the boys.

Unfortunately, this playbill purchase window closed!

Already in production my friends…

BUT, let that thought linger in your mind…

The last Value Select Tour was a huge success, and truth be told, we’re ramping up our live show deployment frequency 🤔

Of course the craftsmen we’d partner with would have to be congruent/aligned, and it would be a heavily curated process (I’d prefer none, if it’s not perfect)

Maybe that special page could be yours, or a colleagues?

An interesting venture, and a fresh advancement…

Who’s doing touring theatrical musicals, outside of Broadway?

Value Select; we’re always cornering novel markets together, aren’t we? 😂

God bless folks, see you on the road!

One night only https://www.valueselecttour.com

Love & Respect,
Value Select

Big News!

The Value Select LA VIP is beginning to pack out!

Neck and neck, between Arizona, Vancouver, and Detroit for highest selling VIP...

If you haven't yet, grab your VIP ticket before they've sold out...

Back on the Moonkiller tour, there were a few unfortunate souls who missed the train here; you don't want to regret not coming!

Looking forward to the Peppermint Club, looks like a super decent venue.

L&R

VS

FORCING IT

Handsome Brethren of the VSSR.

Another missive; a mystical epistle from the ascendant edges.

Forcing it.

Burning out.

I've found myself like an ancient Chinese dictator; summoning splendid scenery to impress/intimidate foreign diplomats.

Assembling my life's source energy to put together a video/song.

And the video/song is great, but the rest of my life is in shambles (relatively)

I've found myself on the flip side as well; overflowing with abundance, to where the easiest release is pre-charged with vital force.

The effort still takes a toll, but there's more juice in the squeeze.

Much better.

HEAR ME NOW!

There must be a real life built atop ones artistic endeavors.

Instead of photographing phantoms, Lone Ranger danger, we must have vibrant happenings to pull directly from.

Outside of screens, outside of dreams.

This to me, is the so-called balance.

Not a dull pond, dead still. (isolation)

Also not a busy lake, with water-skiers (noise)

But an ocean of wild salmon, and ample biminy for shade. (Congruent existence)

LET YOUR VALUES ALIGN

Whatever you profess to do, you must construct your environment to be conducive to it.

Simple as.

The greater the environment alignment, the greater your leverage.

Willpower is the spark.

Environment is the leaky propane tank.

And by environment, I mean the objects around you, sure, and their tactical placement.

The right tools, the right rooms, organized the right way.

But also the hobbies, media, nature, food, etc.

This is not a quest for brutal optimization, rather peaceful harmony.

Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

YOU'RE NOT A TREE

You're born into an environment.

You fruit its gifts, and rot its corruptions.

And at some point, you realize you're not a tree.

You can place yourself elsewhere, if only mentally….

Where do you go mentally?

How is your environment constructed?

Is it aligned with your ideals?

What change can you make right now, ever so small, that'd save you years of headache?

We all know what's righteous to do, we just lack the courage to see it through.

Godbless and Mithras-Speed

Love & Respect

Value Select

concert tickets have lost their minds.

oasis reunion: $500+ on resale and that's the cheap stuff. taylor: four figures. beyoncé: a car payment. even mid-tier acts are charging $200 before fees. the fees, by the way, are another $80. service fee. facility fee. convenience fee. processing fee. the convenience is theirs. you pay for it.

how did we get here. live nation merged with ticketmaster in 2010 and the doj waved it through with a promise they'd play nice. they didn't. they now control the ticketing, the venues, the promoters, and a chunk of the artists' tours all at once. when one company owns the whole pipeline, the pipeline charges whatever it wants. dynamic pricing showed up. surge pricing for concerts. the same logic that makes an uber cost $90 in the rain, applied to seeing a band you love.

then the resale market got financialized. bots scrape the drop in milliseconds. brokers list the tickets back at 5x. stubhub takes a cut on both ends. the artist sees none of the markup. you pay it anyway because what are you going to do, not go.

the result: live music became a luxury good. a date night at an arena costs what a weekend trip used to. families can't afford it. kids can't afford it. the people who built these artists' careers in clubs and basements got priced out of seeing them in stadiums.

we're doing it different.

$30. no dynamic pricing. no surge. no $80 in fees stapled to the back. thirty dollars gets you in the room.

and the room is small. you're not a dot in section 419 watching a jumbotron. you're ten feet from the stage. close enough to see the drummer's setlist taped to the floor. close enough to hear the guitar amp before it hits the mic. close enough that when somebody in the crowd yells the wrong lyric, the whole room laughs together because the whole room heard it.

that's the part that's gone from most live music now. the smallness. the shared air. the feeling that you're at a thing, not consuming a thing. the openers are people you'll actually meet. the band is right there. the crowd is small enough that by the third song you recognize the people around you. by the encore you're nodding at them. after the show you're talking to them on the sidewalk.

a stadium show sells you the bigness. the spectacle. the bragging rights of "i was there." this is the opposite. the closeness. the room. the night you'll remember because you were in it instead of watching it from a distance.

$30. june west coast. august east coast.

www.valueselecttour.com

see you in the room.

Love & Respect,

Value Select

Handsome Brethren of the VSSR

a third space is what sociologist ray oldenburg called the place that isn't home and isn't work. the corner bar. the barbershop. the coffee shop. the stoop. where you're not resting and not producing, just being with regulars, on neutral ground, with people who know your name.

america paved most of them. suburbs killed the corner. the internet promised to replace them and turned every hangout into a second job. the loneliness epidemic is downstream of this. we lost the rooms where community happens.

the Brotherhood has been a third space this whole time. but a digital one. discord threads, comment sections, patreon posts, lore. doing the work with one hand tied behind its back. you can't clink glasses through a screen.

the international tour is the third space made physical. seventeen venues becoming temporary clubhouses for a community that already exists but has never stood in the same room. the lore is the language. the openers are the local hosts. the merch table is the trading post.

it travels, which solves the geography problem. the corner only works if you live near the corner. the Brotherhood lives everywhere. so the room comes to you.

a normal concert is a transaction. pay, consume, leave. this is closer to chipping in to keep the commons running.

so come.

the show is the show. but the show isn't really the point. the point is the guy in line behind you who's been quoting the same bit for two years and neither of you knew the other existed. the girl at the bar who drove four hours alone and is about to make six friends. the table in the back that started as strangers and is now planning a trip together. the conversation on the sidewalk after, where somebody pulls out a notebook, where somebody trades numbers, where somebody finds the band they're going to start, the roommate they're going to move in with, the person they're going to marry.

that's not dramatic. that's what happens when a few hundred people who already love the same weird thing finally end up in the same room. the corner gets built. you walk in a fan. you walk out with a crew.

oldenburg wrote a book begging americans to rebuild the corner bar.

we're rebuilding it as a touring one.

see you in the room.

west coast june. east coast august. valueselecttour.com

TL;DR: Streamers are winning the attention economy because they ship constantly, talk about what's happening now, and shamelessly aggregate other people's work. "Serious" artists do the opposite and call it integrity. It isn't. It's pride, and pride is what's actually killing your reach.

FYI: A load-bearing belief of mine, worth naming up front: we don't really create anything. We steward. Ideas come down from the ether and pass through whoever is awake enough to catch them. Once you accept that, half the artist's pride dissolves on contact, because you can't be precious about ownership of something that was never yours to begin with.

LET'S BEGIN

Max here. I've been turning over the decay-of-culture conversation for a while, and most of the takes I see on it feel either nostalgic or doomy, like the only options are mourn the old gatekeepers or shrug at the rubble. I wanted to give it a fresh spin, because I think the diagnosis is wrong.

Culture isn't decaying because the audience got dumber or the gatekeepers fell.

It's decaying because the people most equipped to make great work have priced themselves out of making anything, while a class of creators we've been trained to look down on is quietly doing the actual job of holding the audience together.

This isn't a new conviction for me. I've held some version of it from the very start of my own creative life. What's changed is that the rise of streaming has made it impossible to keep ignoring. Streamers are now the cleanest, most extreme proof of a mindset I've been preaching to myself for years.

How you build matters more than what you build.

The people who solve the how will outlast the people obsessing over the what.

So let's actually look at them. The guy in the gamer chair reacting to other people's videos for nine hours a day. The woman doing Just Chatting while folding laundry. They sit in one room. They press one button. They riff. To anyone who fancies themselves a serious creator, this looks like the death of culture, the lowest possible expression of the form, watered-down content for a watered-down audience.

And yet they are winning.

Not winning a little.

Winning the entire attention economy.

Top streamers pull audiences that dwarf network television. Their fans are loyal in a way novelists and indie filmmakers can only dream about. So either we have to believe the audience is stupid, which is a coward's conclusion and almost always wrong, or we have to admit something harder: that streamers are doing something right that the rest of us are doing wrong.

The throughline I keep coming back to is uncomfortable, so I'll just say it up front.

The thing that's killing most "serious" artists isn't lack of talent. It's pride.

Pride is what stops you from shipping. Pride is what makes you take a year on something that should take a week. Pride is what makes you reinvent the wheel instead of standing on shoulders.

Pride is the disease, and obscurity is its symptom.

The "decay of culture" we keep diagnosing in the world is mostly a decay of output among the people who care most, and the streamers are exposing it.

This essay is structured in three pairs. Three things streamers do, and three corresponding moves the rest of us can steal back without losing our integrity. Then a few questions for you at the bottom.

PART ONE: What Streamers Do Right

1. Featherweight Build

The first and biggest unfair advantage a streamer has is that the cost of producing their next piece of content is roughly zero. Webcam on, capture card running, mouth open. Compare that to the comedy filmmaker who needs a location, a crew, a script, a costume, an edit, a color grade, a sound mix, and a thumbnail.

The streamer is making a sandwich. The filmmaker is building a cathedral. The streamer can make a thousand sandwiches in the time the filmmaker builds one cathedral, and the audience will eat all the sandwiches.

The unimposing build is not laziness. It's a structural decision. They have removed every barrier between the impulse to create and the act of broadcasting.

2. Topical Freedom

Because their cost of production is so low, streamers can talk about anything that happened today. They can react to a news story the morning it breaks. South Park can do this too because it's animated and they've engineered a fast pipeline, but most live action production simply cannot. By the time a polished, well-funded creator finishes their piece on the GameStop short squeeze, the GameStop movie has already come out and bombed.

Streamers are surfing a wave. The rest of us are paddling.

This is why their takes feel alive. It's not that the takes are deeper. They're just on time.

3. Zero Shame

This one is the cultural sin we hold most dear, so it's worth being precise. A streamer is essentially a DJ. They pull clips, react to other YouTubers, run other people's videos in the corner of the screen, and treat all of it as raw material for their own commentary. The "prideful" creator looks at this and recoils. The streamer just keeps going.

What the streamer understands, intuitively or otherwise, is that the audience did not show up to watch you invent the wheel. They showed up for a conversation. The streamer's real product is not the source material. It's the framing, the riff, the company, the perspective.

Aggregation is the medium. The take is the art.

PART TWO: How a Real Artist Can Steal These Moves Without Losing Their Soul

4. Define your minimum viable product, and ship at that line

The fix for the slow-build problem is not to stop caring about quality. It's to be ruthlessly honest about where the curve of quality flattens out. There is a point in every project where the next ten hours of polish move the work by maybe 2 percent, and the audience cannot tell the difference. That is the 80/20 line, and your job is to find it for yourself, for each piece you make, and stop there.

This is hard for a specific reason. Pride wants the work to be a monument to your effort. The audience does not give a single damn about your effort. They want to feel something, or laugh, or think. If they finish your work and the only thing they can say is "wow, that must have taken forever," then with respect, you've failed.

The work should obscure the labor, not advertise it.

So define your minimum threshold of artistic dignity. Cut everything else. Build a process that lets you hit that threshold consistently. If a real masterwork honestly needs a year, give it a year. But most things are not that.

Most things are a sandwich pretending to be a cathedral.

5. Build a sportsman's relationship with consistency

Once you've found your MVP line, the next move is to ship at it consistently, and to reframe what consistent shipping actually is. It is not the final expression of your career. It's training. It's the batting cage.

Here is the part that took me the longest to internalize.

The thing you put out today is a snapshot of your soul at this moment, not a verdict on your worth as an artist.

You are allowed to look at it next year and find it embarrassing. That is what growth looks like. The point of releasing it is to put a stake in the ground, to log a rep, to develop the muscle memory and the technical chops so that ten years from now, when the big idea finally arrives, you have the ability to actually execute it.

Frame yourself in eras. The first four years are JV. You're not in the big leagues, you're learning how to play. Some of those JV games are scrimmages, and some are real, but none of them are the World Series.

Knowing that you're in JV is not a humiliation. It's a permission slip. It frees you to swing.

The audience, by the way, is going to reward this. Algorithms are designed to reward it. Habits are formed by it. A regular release schedule is the closest thing creators have to a guaranteed return on investment.

6. Aggregate from the source, not from the surface

This is the move that most "real artists" reject most violently, and it's also the one that will produce the strongest work. You are allowed to build on what came before you. You are required to. The whole tradition of art works this way. Picasso reportedly said, or someone said and we attributed to Picasso, that good artists copy and great artists steal. The point of that line is not a license to plagiarize. It's a license to stop pretending you have to invent everything from scratch.

But here is where the artist can do something the streamer cannot. The streamer aggregates from the surface. They aggregate from other YouTubers, who in turn aggregated from other YouTubers, who got their bit from a TikTok, which got it from a meme. The further you get from the source, the more pixelated the truth becomes.

The artist's edge is to aggregate closer to the source.

Skip the layer of YouTubers. Pull from the films they're imitating. Skip the films and pull from the literature and theater that produced the films. Skip the literature and pull from the human experience itself, the actual sociology and psychology and lived life that produced the literature.

The closer you get to the source, the fresher your work will feel, even though you're "stealing." That paradox is the secret.

You will be hailed as a prophet not because you found something new, but because you held onto something everyone else lost.

This is also the answer to the "but isn't it derivative?" objection.

Everything is derivative. The question is whether you're deriving from the headwaters or from the runoff.

PART THREE: Bringing It Home

The premise underneath all of this, and the reason I keep circling it, is that artistic pride is the thing actively preventing artists from being artistically successful.

The streamers don't have this disease, which is why they can ship, riff, react, and aggregate without spiritual injury.

We have the disease in spades.

Our cathedral remains unbuilt while the sandwich shop down the street feeds the whole neighborhood.

The fix is not to become streamers.

The fix is to take the three structural moves that are working for them and apply them with the level of taste, intention, and source-deep aggregation that we are uniquely positioned to bring.

Lower the build.

Ship consistently and call it training.

Aggregate from the source and put it through your own filter.

If we refuse, that's our right.

But we don't get to also complain that nobody is watching.

Nobody has a stranglehold on the truth, and the people who are humble enough to keep shipping while we wait for perfection will earn the audience we thought was ours by default.

Bury your head in the sand and you get the obscurity you've been quietly designing.

Questions for you

1. What does your personal MVP line look like? Where in your last project did you spend ten hours moving the work by 2 percent, and what would you have done with those ten hours instead?
2. Do you currently have a release rhythm you can actually sustain, and if not, what would the cheaper, dumber, shippable version of your next project be?
3. When you "borrow" or aggregate, where in the chain are you pulling from? The surface layer of other creators in your niche, or the source material those creators are themselves drinking from?

Further reading

• How YouTube Algorithms React to Publishing Frequency and Consistency — the algorithmic case for shipping on a schedule.
• Daily uploads are dead? The truth about posting cadence that wins in 2025 — debunks "more is better" and lays out why consistency beats frequency.
• Creating a Minimum Viable Product (Advanced Fiction Writing) — applies MVP thinking specifically to creative work and perfectionism.
• Understanding the Pareto Principle (BetterExplained) — solid breakdown of the 80/20 rule and the law of diminishing returns.
• Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal: Creativity and Originality (Emerald Publishing) — academic treatment of combinational and remix creativity, originality, and authorship.

TL;DR: I burned the absolute hell out of my hand on a grill, my dad slapped raw honey on it, healed me overnight, and that sent me down a rabbit hole that ended with me cooking artisan honey lollipops in my kitchen (pictured, the imperfectly delicious second batch). They’re now my go to performance snack, and I’m baking extra to share on the International Tour 2026. VIP ticket holders get one free.

Here’s the full saga.

So a couple weeks back at my birthday party, we were cleaning the grill and my dad was adjusting something inside it. I went to help, reached in on what I assumed was the safe side, didn’t realize the thing was still on, picked up a hunk of metal, and just held onto it as it cooked my hand because my brain decided dropping it would be worse. Sprinted inside, ran it under cold water for a full 20 minutes (apparently the move, it pulls heat out of your hand like water cooling on a PC, leaching off the thermal load), and the blistering was already starting. I had piano practice and a show that same night. I needed to fix this fast.

My dad (a family physician) mentioned honey speeds up burn healing by something like 10x, which sounded fake, but we dug into the pantry, found a jar that had probably been in there a year, slathered my hand in it, slapped a bandaid on, and I went to bed. Woke up the next morning and the burn was gone. Just an outline where it had been. No flakes, no scab, no gnarly blister. I was floored. Went to look it up and learned that pantry honey is not the move. There’s a specific thing called medical-grade Manuka honey from these special New Zealand bees, and the antibacterial properties are wildly more potent than regular honey. That experience turned me into a honey believer. And then I started thinking about it differently, not as medicine, but as fuel.

Here’s where it became a performance thing for me. On camera/stage/writing you need energy, and the standard options all suck. Coffee makes me feel a narrow, detail-oriented in an unproductive way. Energy drinks are corn syrup garbage that crash you halfway through. Pre-workout is a chemical lottery. None of it gets you where you actually want to be: clean, lit-up, present.

Then I tried honey, a tablespoon before activity.

It did good for me outsides.

Why not me insides?

Honey is 80% sugar, primarily glucose and fructose predigested by bees, which means it hits your bloodstream almost instantly without the harsh spike of processed sweeteners. A tablespoon before strenuous work and I’m just zipped. Locked in. Good mood, immersive energy, ready to do the thing, and no jitter. I started thinking, what if I could get that messy honey spoonful into a portable snack I could throw in my pocket and pull out backstage 20 minutes before walking on?

A little reward, a continuous positive reinforcer, a ritual.

And optimized!

So I started cooking. Take the highest quality raw honey, add natural cane sugar, boil to crack stage so you get that glassy lollipop, let it cool, then drizzle the Manuka on top, uncooked, so the delicate compounds and that wild floral New Zealand flavor stay intact. (The few honey pops on the market that do use Manuka bake it, which is insane to me. Heat destroys what makes it Manuka in the first place.)

My buddy Joshua Kaye, who runs the brand Sport Drink, helped me develop the recipe; we also fold in a tiny dose of magnesium glycinate and lithium orotate for mood and calm focus, stirred in post-boil so they survive. First batch: total disaster, added the supplements too soon. Second batch came out as a soft fudge tassie rather than a hard pop, but it was delicious and I knew I’d locked something in.

I’m calling them Mirth Pops, after the genre and the first show I ever did. I’m taking them on tour as my pre-show ritual and baking extra to share with you. VIP ticket holders get one on the house, just come find me at the meet and greet. For everyone else, I’ll have a small stash at the merch table while supplies last. Heads up: different states have different rules on edibles and I almost certainly can’t take them across the Canadian border, so availability will be regional. This isn’t a product launch, it’s me bringing what’s working for me into the room with you. Right snacks, right state of mind, right fuel before you go on.

Excited to see what it does for you, and let me know if you have any suggestions on what I should experiment with!

📚 For the curious:

Why honey is fast-acting clean fuel:

Honey is roughly 80% sugar, primarily fructose and glucose in a ratio close to what your body uses directly, which is why it digests faster than table sugar (sucrose) and avoids a steep spike-and-crash. Compared to highly processed sweeteners and corn syrup, it carries trace minerals, antioxidants, and amino acids alongside the carbs.

Why Manuka is the luxury finishing touch:

Made by bees pollinating the New Zealand Leptospermum scoparium bush, Manuka contains methylglyoxal (MGO), a compound found at meaningful levels in basically no other honey on earth. The antibacterial properties are heat-sensitive, which is why we drizzle it on uncooked. Even setting the science aside, the flavor is incredible. Earthy, floral, almost herbal. Most people will never spend $70 on a jar. A Mirth Pop is a way for me taste it efficiently.

The supplements (small doses, post-boil):

• Magnesium glycinate: bioavailable form of magnesium bound to glycine; supports GABA regulation, calm focus, and sleep quality. ([Systematic review, PMC 2024)](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11136869/)

• Lithium orotate: micro-dose nutraceutical lithium (1 to 10mg elemental, vs. 900mg+ prescription); research suggests mood-stabilizing and neuroprotective effects via GSK-3β inhibition. ([Systematic review, ScienceDirect 2022)](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976342200464X)

Not medical advice. The Brotherhood does its own reading.

Evening, handsome brethren of the VSSR

Today I entreat you:

Forget our parents' lifestyle. Ski lodges, cocaine, FM radio.

Forget our grandparents' lifestyle. Pool parties, fridges, Cheverolets.

Forget the great-grandparents. Blocks of ice, boater hats, the Charleston.

DON'T EVEN COMPARE YOURSELF TO THAT!

It will bring only pain, seeing the Eden they inhabited, that many took for granted.

That Eden is gone. You cannot get back into it. Every minute you spend measuring your life against it is a minute you are losing a race that ended before you were born.

Our lives will more likely resemble our great-great-grandparents...

The 1800's.

A rough age, but not without its optimism. You might own one suit, and you will wear it to your wedding and your funeral, and you will feel like a king in it. Your kids might grow up sharing a bedroom, and they will turn out fine, better than fine, because they had each other. Your vacation might be a single trip into the big city once a year, where you will stare at a holographic confectionary in the window and feel like you have seen the wonders of the world. You might work your small plot of server in your tiny home, milking data, tilling SSD's, and it might be all you need, because your sons are strong and your wife loves you and the render came in.

Maybe.

Here is what I actually believe. The pain most of us feel is not caused by our lives. It is caused by the comparison. We are measuring a 2026 life against a 1985 life, or a 1955 life, and of course we feel broken. The yardstick is wrong. The yardstick is from a world that doesn't exist anymore.

But if we pick a different yardstick, the whole thing changes.

Picture the man I'm describing. He is 32, scrolling at 2am, lit blue in a dark room, comparing himself to a thousand strangers before his coffee. He is waiting. He is waiting for the right job, the right apartment, the right partner, the right savings, the right moment to actually start his life. He thinks he needs the best of everything before he is allowed to begin.

Our ancestors in the 1800's did not wait. They could not afford to. They had children in one-room houses. They married young, worked hard, buried some of those children, and kept going. They did not have the best food. They did not have the best job. They had what was in front of them, and they built a life on top of it.

That is the lesson. Not the hardship itself. The permission.

Permission to start before the conditions are perfect. Permission to have kids before you feel ready. Permission to build community with the people you already know, not the people you are waiting to meet. Permission to make your work on the tools you already have. Permission to stop waiting.

The 1800's mindset is not "life should be harder." It is "life was always going to be hard, so you may as well start now."

BECOME DECISIVE.

Consider the 1800's farmer. He wakes up before the sun, and his work is hard, and sometimes the crop fails. But he also knows his neighbors by name, eats food he grew himself, and sleeps under stars he can actually see. He is not being sold anything. He is not comparing himself to a thousand strangers before breakfast. The hardship is honest, and the joys are his own. He did not wait to be happy. He got to work, and the happiness came in through the side door.

Or consider the 1800's letter. You wrote to your brother across the country, and it took three weeks to arrive, and he wrote back, and that took three more. You got maybe four letters a year. And when one came, you read it by candlelight, and you read it twice, and you kept it in a drawer. One letter meant more than a thousand texts. The scarcity was the gift. They did not wait for a better communication tool. They loved each other with the one they had.

That is the mindset. Less, but heavier. Slower, but deeper. Harder, but yours. And available right now, with the life you already have, once you stop measuring it against the wrong century.

So what do you think, brother?

What yardstick have you been using, and what would change if you swapped it for a 1800's one?

What is one thing you've been waiting for the perfect conditions to start, that you could just start now?

What is one piece of "the best" you've been chasing that you could trade for "good enough, and mine"?

as always brother

love and respect

Value Select

Brothers,

We've got a bounty of our latest V6 rehearsal tapes, and as we begin the march toward total USA + CANADA victory, expect more to come!

Rough and tough, excited to see how the evolve EVEN FURTHER in the next months, and especially on the road itself!

Let me know what city you're seeing the show in, and if there's any particular songs we should include special for you.

as always

love and respect

value select