People will save for four years, eat less, and travel across the world to watch their team play. Kris and Michael walk through Berlin during the World Cup and ask what that spending really buys.

This is the first episode of the Walking Masterclass. Filmed in Berlin a few hours from the Switzerland and Canada match, the conversation moves from the cost of the World Cup to the experience economy, tribal economics, and the human need to belong. Kris and Michael discuss why people spend to be part of a tribe, why travel often works as an escape from the life you built, and why the two most important decisions you make are whether you marry and whom you marry.

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Porsche just announced workforce cuts because of dropping sales in China. Every board reads that as an operations problem. It isn't. It's a risk problem — and it's the wrong risk almost every board is looking at.

Here's what nobody asks in the boardroom: once a strategy is successfully implemented, what new risk did it just add to the business? Not the risk of getting there. The risk of what you've built once you have. That's the question 99% of boards never answer, because most don't have a way to see it.In this video I walk through how we use Michael, our internal AI, to build a digital clone of a company, plot its actual risk and return position against the efficient frontier, and test what a proposed strategy does to that position before a single dollar moves. I use Porsche as the live example: what happens to their risk profile if they cut back cautiously versus if they fully rebalance toward EV and the Americas.

This isn't a theoretical framework. It's portfolio modeling — the same logic that governs a diversified investment portfolio — applied to a company's revenue streams and cost base. Correlated streams add risk. Diversified ones don't. Most executive teams have never plotted their own business this way, which means most boards are approving strategy without knowing if it moves them toward more return for the same risk, or just more risk they haven't priced. If you sit on a board, run a strategy function, or advise one, this is the question you should be asking before the next planning cycle — not after.

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For this episode, let's revisit a strategy skills classic interview with an experienced founder, leader, and thinker across a variety of domains, Rick Walker.

In this episode, Rick walks us through his leadership journey, how he built his first company in his 20's, the lessons he learned across multiple domains, and how he was able to do multiple things successfully, simultaneously. He also shared his views about fear, pride, faith, religion, and ethics in relation to leadership and business.

Rick Walker scaled his first company to 400 employees when he was 26, and simultaneously, as Chairman, scaled a 53-country international nonprofit from 800 to 2,100 team members, simultaneously while helping his hometown of Houston attract over $5 Billion in job-creation investments. Rick's volunteer service also includes stints as a Director of a college in the middle east and Chairman of a $250 Million charitable foundation. His 3:30 AM wake-up call helps fit everything in.

Rick hosts a podcast to help multi-domain leaders learn well - and has interviewed friends, who also happen to be world-class leaders, such as billionaires, musicians, members of the President's Cabinet, US Senate, US Congress, and great thinkers. The podcast is hosted inside a 13,000-square-foot mansion, which was the former party mansion of a Fortune 500 CEO, which Rick restored and uses for his family office, charitable events, and podcasts.

Rick lives in Houston with his wife and 3 girls, where he spends much of his time serving alongside the best team members in his commercial real estate private equity firm.

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