Danny — that's my co-host, Danny Parkins, from The Athletic — brought up Netflix's Christmas NFL deal almost as an aside. We were talking about the holiday games, the matchup predictions, whether Bo Nix and a Sean Payton defense could do something in Kansas City. Then he dropped the number: $150 million a year. $75 million a game. Two games on Christmas Day.
I asked him straight: do you think they overpaid?
His answer surprised me a little, not because of what he said but because of how fast he said it. At the end of the day, if somebody's willing to pay $75 million for something, they know something within their model that they're going to be able to at minimum double if not triple. He didn't hedge. Didn't say "well, it depends." He just said: they know something you don't, and the price tag is evidence of that, not a red flag.
I've been thinking about that framing — and about everything that followed in the conversation — because it connects to something bigger than a streaming deal. It connects to how serious money actually gets made. Not the obvious bet. Not the thing that sounds exciting in a pitch. The boring, structured, cash-generating thing that most people look past because it doesn't feel like a story.
The $75 million question nobody's really asking
The conversation about Netflix is a useful entry point, but the conversation people keep having about it is the wrong one. The debate is usually: was the price too high? Did they overpay? And that debate treats the $150 million as if it's a cost sitting on one side of a ledger with nothing on the other.
Danny flipped that. He started listing what's actually on the other side — and once you start listing it, the number looks different.
Ad revenue. Christmas Day has Super Bowl-level captive audiences — people home, relaxed, watching on big screens with family. Advertisers know this. Pre-sold inventory at those rates, across two marquee games, probably gets Netflix most of the way to even before anyone subscribes to anything. Then there's the subscription bump — the people who finally get Netflix specifically because the games are there, even on the ad-supported tier. Then there's the ancillary value: the association with the NFL at its highest-visibility moment of the calendar, the brand signal that Netflix is now a serious live sports player, the negotiating leverage that generates for the next rights conversation.
That's where people forget, Danny said. You may just be focusing on something that is right in front of your face. There's a lot of ancillary things that move in and around what the main production is.
This is the thing that separates how serious investors think from how everyone else thinks. Everyone else is doing the simple subtraction: price paid, minus immediate revenue, equals whether you made money. The serious version of the question is multidimensional — what does this buy you beyond the thing itself? What doors does it open? What leverage does it create? What future negotiation does it make possible?
The NFL already won. That much is obvious — they got $150 million per year and a streaming giant fully committed to making their product look incredible on the largest possible stage. But Netflix probably wins too. And the reason it's hard to see that is because most of the value is in the next deal, not this one.
Why Buffett owns boring things
The conversation shifted — the way conversations on this show always do, sideways into something better — and Danny started talking about where he's doubling down in 2026. His answer: cashflow. Specifically, businesses that are cash-flowing, actually generating positive EBITDA, not just growing users or building toward a future monetization event.
He named the people who shaped how he thinks about this: Warren Buffett, Dan Gilbert, Steven Ross. The pattern he sees in all of them isn't that they chased the flashiest opportunities. It's that they built or acquired cash cows — boring, consistent income-generating machines — and then used those machines to fund everything else. They have cash cows that feed things and feed their other endeavors, he said. It's creating those consistent cashflow income-producing streams that feed your other curiosities and wants to invest into, versus caking out of your own piggy bank.
That last phrase. Versus caking out of your own piggy bank. That's the one I want every young investor I talk to to actually sit with.
I know what it's like to be in a position where every investment comes out of your own pocket — where the capital you deploy is the same capital that covers everything else in your life, and every deal is a bet against your own runway. I made decisions in that position that I wouldn't make now, not because I was reckless but because I was working from a position of scarcity. When the money coming in isn't separated from the money going out into deals, you make tighter, more fearful, more reactive decisions. You undersize bets that deserve more. You take shorter time horizons than the asset requires.
The cash cow changes all of that. When one part of your portfolio is generating reliable income that you don't have to think about month to month, the other parts of your portfolio get to breathe. You can wait. You can take the longer view. You can be patient with a deal that needs five years to fully develop because you're not sitting there watching that deal fund your operating expenses.
The brick that doesn't know where it is
Danny described watching CNBC that morning — someone had brought a literal brick to the desk to make a point. The brick doesn't know where it is. It doesn't know if it's in a Billionaire's Row luxury development or an affordable housing complex in the South Bronx. The brick is the brick. The cost to produce it, the craft and material and interest rates and entitlement process and permitting — all of that is the same regardless of what ends up being built around it.
The point being made was about real estate, about how the cost side of development is often more similar across project types than people assume. But the way Danny extended it landed differently for me. He wasn't just making an observation about construction costs. He was making an argument for boring. It's so much time, energy, but it's boring. But if you do it right and you do it conservatively, you usually win.
Real estate done right — and he means conservatively underwritten, with real attention to the cycles, not overleveraged on the assumption that rents go up forever — is as close to a guaranteed cash cow as any asset class I know. It's slow. The entitlement alone can take years. You're dealing with permits, contractors, interest rate environments, lease-up timelines. There is nothing glamorous about any of it. And that's precisely why it works: most people who want glamour go somewhere else, and the people who stay and do the boring work correctly don't have a lot of competition at the top of the return distribution.
PULL QUOTE: "This brick doesn't know where it's at. Whether it's in Billionaire's Row or it's in the South Bronx in an affordable housing complex. Has no idea." — CNBC guest, as described by Danny Parkins
The AI connection he drew is the one I keep coming back to. Everyone is rushing toward AI investments right now — and I'm not saying that's wrong, AI is real, it's been real for longer than the current conversation implies, and it's not going away. But someone has to build the infrastructure that AI lives inside. The data centers. The energy systems. The physical compute capacity. Which means the brick-and-mortar, boring, essential-infrastructure play is upstream of the sexy AI bet — and it's where the reliable returns actually compound over decades, not just the quarters where AI valuations run.
The best deal I ever saw explained to me was one where the headline was boring and the actual leverage was three steps removed. You had to understand what the boring thing was connected to before you understood why it was worth owning. That's the lens Danny is applying, and it's the lens Buffett has always used. Boring on the surface. Essential underneath. Cashflow throughout.
My first real estate lesson — and the thing Gary didn't say out loud
The Confidently Curious question this week was about my first real estate investment. I answered it on the show and I'll put it more plainly here: I was lucky, and I knew I was lucky, and the luck wasn't the investment — it was the mentor.
Gary S., I'll leave the last name out. But if you know me, you know who he is. I was a young pup in 2010, sitting in his office, asking him when I could invest. Every time, he pushed me off. When the time is right. When I see you consistently follow through. I watched him work for a full football season before he brought me in on anything. When he finally did, he backed me entirely — said he would cover any losses — specifically so I could learn without the fear of actually getting hurt distorting the lesson.
What I took from that isn't the technical stuff, though I learned that too — how to read the numbers, what to look for in a deal structure, how a conservative underwrite differs from an optimistic one. What I took was the patience. Gary modeled patience. He wouldn't let me rush into an investment because I had capital and wanted to deploy it. He made me wait until the deal was right and until I was ready. And both conditions had to be true at the same time.
I didn't understand that discipline at the time. Sitting across from someone who's telling you not yet when you have the capital and the appetite — that's genuinely hard. But what Gary knew, and what I understand now, is that urgency is the enemy of returns. The person who has to invest right now, because the money feels like it's burning a hole, ends up in worse positions than the person who can wait another six months for the right entry point on the right deal.
What I'd do differently, and what I think you should do now
Three things that this conversation crystallized for me, in the order they matter:
- Build the cash cow before you chase the cool bet. This is the Buffett principle Danny named — and it's the sequence that almost everyone gets backwards. Most people want to find the exciting deal first, the one that makes a good story, and then figure out the stable income side later. The problem is that without the stable income side, every exciting deal is evaluated under duress, and duress makes you overpay or undersize or exit early. One boring, consistently cash-flowing asset — a rental property, a business with real margins, something that hits your account on the same day every month — changes the psychology of everything else in your portfolio. Build that first. Then use what it generates to fund the interesting stuff.
- Look two steps up the stack from whatever everyone's excited about. The AI trade is crowded. The next AI trade — the physical infrastructure that AI requires, the energy systems, the real estate in markets where data centers are being built — is less crowded and arguably better positioned for the kind of long-duration compounding that actually builds wealth. This is the brick-that-doesn't-know-where-it-is insight applied to any hot category: find the boring, essential thing that the exciting thing can't exist without. Own that. Let everyone else fight over the headline.
- Find the Gary S. in your life before you find the deal. Capital without context is expensive. I've made mistakes investing in things I didn't understand well enough because I had the money and the opportunity and told myself I'd learn along the way. The version where you learn along the way is always more expensive than the version where you sit in someone's office for a full season and absorb how they actually think before you put a dollar down. The mentor relationship is the highest-return investment on this list. Most people skip it because it doesn't feel like an investment — it feels like asking for help. That's exactly why it's available.
Christmas games on Netflix. A brick on a CNBC desk. Warren Buffett's cash cows. These aren't three separate conversations. They're one argument: the money that lasts is built on things that are boring enough that most people don't bother to compete.
The brick doesn't care how interesting you think it is. It just builds.