Vegas Revenue as Recession Indicator

Shaan shares a story about his natural curiosity and how he spends his free time researching random business topics.

"Today, literally before we got here, I was reading the annual report from the state of Nevada about the revenues and expenses of the casinos on Las Vegas strip for 2024 compared to 2023.

I was really curious - are we in a recession? I wonder if the Vegas strip knows first. Do they know first? Well, I should probably be able to check Vegas revenues last year versus this year, and that might be a leading indicator.

So I'm downloading this PDF, searching through the things, making my notes. And nobody asked me the question. The teacher didn't call on me. This wasn't my assigned assignment. But I've always been like that. I have always been doing things like that.

Before, I didn't really notice that was a thing. I didn't really see how that could be special or useful. It just seemed like I was going on these random little business rabbit holes, these little detours. But then when I did the podcast, and the podcast is us shooting the shit about business, suddenly I had this giant library in my head of little factoids and stories and nuggets and this knowledge that was very useful in the podcast. So I found a fit for it later."