What’s truly going on inside DOGE?

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/f9581852f9f5d491

Dude, this vault this giant filing cabinet.
Is worth more than
Snapchat.
It's worth more than Pinterest, it's worth more than Twitter.
As a company. Isn't that crazy? I feel like I could rule the world, I know I could be what I want to.
I put my all in it like my day song on the road, let's travel. We're gonna get a little current eventy.
Which we don't often, but I love current events. So I wanna talk about a current event. So
With the
I last night Elon did this thing where he was like in Trump's office with like his kid
Like
crawling all over him, climbing up on'em, which is kinda funny. And he told the story about
A mine where all the government files were. Did you hear what he said? I didn't hear what he said. I saw a photo of this
Place.
Oh, it's the bureaucratic gringots from uh Harry Potter. It's like this underground bank vault. So Elon said something that I feel like
It was like an offhanded comment, but it's actually led me down this rabbit hole. Basically they were asking him about how he was like getting rid of all these jobs and he was like, Yeah, I wanna like actually retire more people, but
I was told that I could only retire ten thousand people a month. And I was asking, Well, why is that? And he said, Well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual, meaning it's literally on paper and it's written down on a piece of paper and then it goes down a mine. There's literally a limestone mine where all the
paperwork for retire people who want to retire is where they're it's stored. And so in order to actually make this work, the speed that we can move, the limiting factor is the speed at which the line shaft elevator can actually move down. Like a it
And you hear the story and you're like
What the hell are you talking about, man?
And so I went down a rabbit hole and I had to figure this out. So can I tell you a little story about not just this mine, but
This whole company that operates.
Yeah.
So basically in the nineteen twenties there was this guy
Who grew mushrooms and in I guess in order to grow mushrooms w in the part of America where he was growing mushrooms, he had to grow them in a cave. And so he was uh the mushroom king of America. At one point he was the largest creator or grower of mushrooms in America. He was this German immigrant and
And he was kinda like this like funny guy where like his advertisements he called himself the mushroom king, whatever.
And he had to rent a cave and grow mushrooms. And eventually he bought a cave, and that's where he grew mushrooms. And this cave that he bought was massive. It was a huge cave.
And for some reason starting in the nineteen fifties, post World War Two
Those damn Europeans started undercutting them and started selling cheaper mushrooms and he was like
my mushroom business is going to go under. I this is not going to work. I got to figure out what to do.
And so he bought a bank vault door.
That was twenty thousand dollars in nineteen fifty, and he installed it in his cave. He took out the mushrooms and he installed this bank vault door and he went to a local bank and was like, Hey, you guys have a lot of paperwork. You've got a lot of files that you have to store.
I have the safest place on earth to store these this paperwork.
You wanna like make a make a business deal? And so
He's changed his business and he started this thing called Iron Mountain. And it was called Iron Mountain because it was literally in like a a mine that was like they would use the
I don't know how this all works, but they would use like the the rocks to make like iron.
And
He grew this thing like crazy.
And so
basically this company it's called Iron Mountain, Google Iron Mountain market cap.
Iron Mountain Inc. is a thirty billion dollar company. Wow.
So this company I looked it up since the year
Two thousand.
They have created a billion dollars at least, or roughly.
Per year in free cash flow.
And they now own something like I think it was something like eighty million square feet of storage. And so they have everything.
So it could be like Princess Diana's will is in there, but it's like
Sony, the the music company Sony, the record label Sony, has all of their masters recordings, like literally like the the tape stored in Iron Mountain, but their biggest customers
It's like an insurance company in Connecticut.
who ha been in business for a hundred years, they for some reason
legal reasons, they have to keep their paper files, they have to save them for something like seventy five years.
This is nuts, dude. So so they're just a giant they're just like a physical vault.
For documents. It says Ener Enterprise Information Management Services founded in nineteen fifty one. So it's just a giant vault.
And they're like we will
protect your files will protect your paperwork. Exactly. But it's huge. So literally they have caves.
And he like would joke that it's an atomic bomb shelter, but that wasn't really a joke. They actually have a whole bunch of decommissioned atomic bomb structures.
As their vaults.
And so and they do this because if you um
If you are like, for example WWE is one of their customers and they have every single time they've literally like physically filmed a fight, like a like a
Uh an event. The match, they store it and they have all these tapes. Which is like sounds like okay, that's just like a small example.
But they have other examples where like eight year old me would have broke in there so excited to just go to the vault of all WWE matches ever.
Yeah, but they also have like billions of dollars worth of art. So if you're a uh a museum and you have extra art that you need store, you're gonna go to Iron Mountain because you know it's like real like safe. So it's one place or they have a bunch of these? They have
dozens and dozens of places. So I think they have eighty. Caves. Like don't caves literally a cave in? Like why why not just a building? Like a building with guys with guns. Why not?
Because it has a low moisture. So it's like it's like it's good for paper. I see. And a a bunch of reasons like that, but it's also like literally safe. So like
A cave is actually you know, I don't know how this works, but it's actually safer in terms of like there being an earthquake or there being an atomic bomb. When someone just gives me one scientific fact, like just like a a minor
If you were just like, Yeah, though the humidity coefficient is t is lower, I'd be all right, all right, I don't need to hear more. Like I'm just like so satisfy as long as I know there's any scientific basis for something.
I'll just accept it.
No argument in full.
There was a Harvard study.
That's the it has the same effect on me.
Exactly. It's and I was reading this and it was by the New Yorker and there was like all like it it it was hard to comprehend how like epic this thing is. So this is the thing that stores the government stuff or no or separate business. Yes. So let's get to the government stuff.
So he said there's a limestone mine where this is all stored. So he kind of like
dismissed it because it was a mine. But that's actually
Important.
But
The federal government
is a customer of Iron Mountain.
And so though here's how this works.
This part is absolutely insane.
So starting in the nineteen fifties or the nineteen sixties, uh, the federal government became a customer of Iron Mountain. And to this day, it basically operates the exact same way. And so
Right now the federal government is retiring around a hundred thousand people a year.
And when let's say you work for the FBI or some agency, federal agency, the the postal service, whatever, and you need to retire, because of a hundred plus years of laws, there's a lot of complications. And so when you retire, you're supposed to get a pension. Let's round numbers of a hundred thousand dollars a year, but
Some people might get ninety eight thousand. Some people might get a hundred eight thousand. And the reason they will is because let's say this federal employee was a uh cafeteria worker.
for a federal agency that requires a different set of rules. Let's say this person was a retired vet. Let's say this person was uh an amputee. There's like a million rules about what what you are going to be earning after you retire.
However
This is all done on paperwork. So every single federal employee
The not just
The current ones, but the past ones. They have a manila envelope.
in this mine in Pennsylvania that Iron Mountain runs. And so when you want to retire, you had to file a piece of paperwork. Like you literally write up on a piece of paperwork, you give it to your boss at your federal agency. The federal agency has to mail it.
to the mountain or to the mine and PA
And it takes roughly sixty days because one of the six hundred employees at this mine needs to physically
Cap the file in hand needs to walk.
to your file in the mountain, which this mountain is two hundred football fields or two hundred acres. They had to literally hand
Like by hand, go and get that file and they gotta look at your file. They gotta say, All right, Sean looks like he's sixty five. It looks like he oh he actually retired at uh at fifty nine years old, and then he came back, so that gets a different thing. Turns out he served in the Iraq war, so he gets uh this thing, this thing, this thing. And then they close the file and they put it back.
And they send paperwork back to your agency to let them know here's what Sean is going to be paid for his pension fund. And that process takes something like
Ninety days to do that whole thing.
And
Since uh since the nineteen eighties.
They have spent hundreds of millions, it's approaching billions of dollars to digitize this. It's failed.
Every time.
And the New Yorker in two thousand four wrote this amazing article. They're like we tried it in nineteen eighty, we've trying it now, we tried it in nineteen ninety two. Why does it fail? Wha what why why can't they digitize too much or it gets rejected? Wha what it's a huge it's a huge task, but this mountain, it's in rural Pennsylvania.
And these
Pennsylvania folks they're
they were literally mine workers. Like they that that's what they were. This mine when it was an active mine. So it's like generations of miners who are now doing this thing. So it's not like these six hundred employees aren't exactly like computer experts. They're like
physical laborers, so they don't exactly have like the labor there to do it, but also just the bureaucracy. The same thing that happened with uh when Obama launched
What's it healthcare dot com or whatever?
Like it's just really hard within a government within the four years that a president is president to make this massive change. And so this mind nobody and you're not gonna get huge pat on the back for like
digitizing this process. You know what I mean? And the people who work at the mine, they interviewed a couple of them, they were like
It's a pretty miserable miserable place to work. In the wintertime when we arrive at work, we're there when it's dark.
And then we come home at night, it's still dark.
And you can't have a flame in the mine, so all of the food has to be delivered for us every day and it's like fried food or pizza. That's like our two vendors.
Um but they let you have unlimited overtime if you if you want, and it's an eight to five job. And uh
No one leaves. Like the retention is 100%. They're like it's just a good stable job. These guys need a podcast. I need to l I want to be listening to Iron Mountain Pod.
Where they're just just these miners just talking about about paperwork and eating pizza. It's like an ASMR channel of the limestone mine. And the New Yorker did an article and they like were talking to these people and they were like, If you guys want to see taxpayer waste
You should see what happens when a federal worker retires
goes back to work and then retires again. He goes
One of the guy they interviewed, they go, I'm working on a case now that's taken me a hundred and twenty days to figure out how much
uh pension this worker is owed.
And
It's just a nightmare.
And so it's like literally a physical labor job to walk around and find all these five.
Vault. This uh this giant filing cabinet.
Is worth more than
Snapchat.
It's worth more than Pinterest. It's worth more than Twitter.
As a company. Isn't that crazy? The thirty million dollar company.
And the retention might be better. And here's why it might be better. Here so better, I guarantee. Listen, work day.
Work Day is a piece of software. I've never I I don't think I
Maybe I've used it, but like the thing about work Work Day is considered like a dinosaur software company, right? It's like or let's say ADP, like these payroll software that a lot of huge companies have and they're they're regarded as a sticky product. But the issue with that
is that you, a worker, as well as management, you interact with that product every day. So you're like, this fucking sucks. So eventually you might get pissed off and want to change it. With Iron Mountain
a bank by law has to keep these files on on and and say, oh, hey, we're gonna give this to you guys.
And they'll never talk to them again for the next fifty years. Dude, should we open up a drawer? Like should we just go have sees on a single drawer in Iron Mountain and just start saving like hateful YouTube comments in there? Just have one one little one little station. They told a story about this mine. They said there was some rich anonymous person, this old lady
who had like a hundred million dollars worth of art and she once a year but go down to the mine and bring a blanket and cheese.
And wine and would just sit and look at her art. I'd just be like, This is awesome. And uh that was in the article that she did that.
Um crazy company, right? This freaking Iron Mountain. Really, really fun find. I'm glad you found that.
Also hilarious that you started with let's start with current events and then you started talking about this old file storage system from like the nineteen fifties. And that's where you went with this uh this information. Did you see photos of it?
Yeah, I saw I saw the one photo. Now I'm looking at more and it's
Pretty wild, dude. It's just like
I mean it makes sense now that you say it. Now that you explain it, it makes sense. It's just who knew.

Now there's like digital versions of this. Um
I forget what one some of the
Guys in the space are but
Like they were like Iron Mountain was like, Hey, are you guys nervous about digital? And they like dismissed it. They're like
Dude, you don't know how much like crap people need to store. Like we're gonna be fine.
Uh like it's going good. And so if you look at their financials, it's just like consistently like a billion dollar plus of free cash flow just every year. This is how my wife treats my kids' art. She like created her own Iron Mountain in our house. It's just disgusting. All right. So you brought up current events.
And then you said something that was totally not a current event, but there was other current events that are actually interesting.
I'm just curious. Give me your one to ten level of interest in these. You may you may I I have a feeling you might not be interested in these.
Elon
Offering.
Ninety seven billion dollars to buy open AI. Did that tickle you?

Eight out of ten.
The Elon stuff is is like inherently incredibly interesting at the moment.
Right.
Okay, eight out of ten. Uh let's rank this one.
Elon do it crashing the press conference in Donald Trump's ov uh Donald Trump's oval office. That was that a
Ten.
And by the way, I bet it's not even for the content, just for the uh social dynamic of him standing behind Trump and just just overtaking the press conference. Is that right? That's my guess.
Is that what you want to talk about?
Well, there's one there's one other I want to get you read on Doge as a whole.
Uh
N uh uh nine. Nine or ten. Yeah, let's go in that order.
Okay. Okay. So start at ten.
Yeah. So
You sent me a text last night and you said uh
Rule number one.
Never outshine the master.
Elon Musk
And you're referring to the forty eight laws of power, uh how to be powerful. You never outshine your master.
Elon Musk one hundred percent outshine it Donald there.
That was so emasculating to have Donald just sitting there and Elon standing up, sort of behind him, like he was gonna come and put his arm like his hands on his shoulders. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, dirt he hijacked a press conference and just started
Giving his own speech.
A wordy speech while his kid is there rambling also, and Trump is just sitting there like a goon.
at the table and it was just so interesting. I never seen anyone
Who's not the president.
give their own press conference from the Oval Office while the president sits there. Forget what they were even talking about. Just that was like
Wow.
Hold on. This is like uh
You know, like if you watch The Bachelor, sometimes they do a two on one date. It's like, Whoa, hold on. It's not a one on one, it's a two on one? Oh there's gonna be some drama here. That's how it felt. It felt like a bachelor two on one goes gone. When Elon told the story of Iron Mountain, Trump like looked back at him and he goes, Huh?
No shit, really? Like he was like like he was learning a like he was being entertained at that moment as well. Do you know what I mean? I also love how Trump sometimes is like we're gonna send Elon in, Elon's gonna go in, he's gonna
Gonna do great things, he does great things. And he's just like that'll be the plan, but honestly
That's actually not a bad plan. It's like if I was gonna say one thing, it's like we're gonna send Michael Jordan on the court and he's gonna shoot. He's a great shooter.
It's like that's kinda what he does with things. He's like, We're gonna send Elon in there. He's gonna take care of things. That was a actually a really good Trump impression.
I mean I didn't fully commit. I do I do regret that I didn't fully commit'cause it kinda started off pretty hot. And if I had really gone for it, uh maybe I would have surprised myself, but I'll never know. And I'll live with that regret till I die. I thought it was pretty good. I it was a very uh that a lot of promise there. Uh what about the Doge uh stuff in general? I have a
I have a s very opinionated take. Do you?
I have a
Big picture take and then I have just like small things that I wish
wish more stuff would come out from. So where's my big picture take?
I cannot believe we're on this timeline.
So
If you just rewind the clock.
Like
A couple of years ago.
Here's what was going on. I was reading this Ray Dalio book. Did you ever read the Ray Dalio, like I forgot what it's called Rise and Fall of Nations or something like that? It's basically how empires.
Like
Falls forever.
The the title scared me and I was like I just kind of want to be ignorant. But I read his first one, Principles, and I know that he comes off
historically is a pessimist, right?
No, no. He's uh
Realist. I don't know. He's he's just a observer of th of how things are. So if you're gonna watch one thing by the way, watch it. But it was alarming. He's got this thing called the How the Economic Machine Works. It's a twenty or thirty minute YouTube video, which sounds long, but it's
Amazing.
It's an animated video where he just explains how the economy works in a way that even a
Yeah, Bozo like me could understand.
And it's it's
It's amazing. Go watch that. Like you should just pause this podcast and go watch that. I think it's called How the Economic Machine Works. The Bridgewater Office, by the way, is literally one point five miles from my house. If you want to go and
Just talk to him.
Yeah, we should just walk right in. Yeah. We absolutely should. So he wrote this book about the rise of fallen nations and he basically talks about like he studied all the empires, the Dutch Empire, the Roman Empire, the Chinese Empire.
And basically, why do the empires end? Why don't they just keep going? They have all the advantages, they got the power, they got the best military, they got the best economy, they have the growing population. Like where do things go wrong? And he saw that over time things go wrong in a very predictable, cyclical fashion.
And um and then because he studied history, he could see that okay, even if it's not gonna be the same, it's probably gonna rhyme. I should look out for some of these signs.
And you know, one of the signs that he talks about
is around
The big debt cycle. So there's like a short term debt cycle, there's a long term debt cycle, which is like an eighty to a hundred year debt cycle.
And what happens is, you know, the cum uh countries or empires will end up going into too much debt, which the US is in right now, like thirty five trillion dollars of debt, like just an absurd number.
And then the interest payments are really high, then be because people lose faith in their ability to pay off that debt.
You know, they lose at some point their status as the global reserve currency, blah, blah, blah. Okay. So Ray Dalio makes this argument.
It's a
Interesting book. You should read it.
Now
Does he s mention uh
Mukbang?
Where on the timeline is do you know what mukbang is?
Listening to people eat. Watching and listening to people eating.
Fat people just stuff their face with ramen. Yeah, it's like a governmental mukbang is what he described. Does he mention uh when the decline is when uh mukbang gets popular. There were signs.
So as he's talking about this, it's like all okay, shit. You look at the kind of the current world, you're like, Oh shit
We got inflation.
But then, you know, to fight inflation, they gotta raise rates. When they raise rates, that slows down the economy, which slows down spending, which creates this other problem. Then you get stagflation. You get like all these
Oh man, this could go poorly, right? Oh, they're printing too much money. That could hurt the the dollars, you know, they're debasing the currency. That's what he says that they do.
This is what's gonna happen. And it just seemed inevitable. The problem was
You looked at it, you're like, but who's gonna go and fix this, right? It's not like a company because
A company has to face reality. So what a company has to do is
Ultimately the company needs profits and needs the the shareholders are gonna demand that the company stop this excess spending.
But the problem with the c uh the government is
The government can sort of go infinitely in debt until it can't. It could just print money, right? Like imagine if you or I just had a uh a little machine in the closet.
It's like, well, I could solve this problem with hard work, cutting back, tightening the belt, you know, or I could just go in the closet and push this button. I'll just do it this one time, just this one time. Okay. And like that's what just kept ha keeps happening. You go and you push the button, you print the money.
And so um
So that's the problem. Okay. And it just seemed like there was no solution to this because anybody who wanted to get elected, right, the leader
First the leaders were not business people, right? So problem number one.
Uh
People who run the country were pol lifelong politicians, typically.
And they were not
CEOs or executives who had that as their core skill set. The second thing is they didn't have the incentive, right? Cause when you want to get elected.
It's like
Middle school all over again. You gotta go pr promise we're gonna have free pizza every Friday. It's like where's who's gonna pay for that? I don't care. I just gotta say it and promise it we'll deal with the consequences because that's what gets me elected. So the presidency is is never about, hey, I'm gonna cut back all your favorite programs. It was always gonna be, we're gonna do more for you. We're gonna cut your taxes.
Okay, so less revenue for the government. How's that gonna work? We're already in debt. We're we're gonna cut your taxes and uh you know what, we're gonna we're gonna spend more on this, we're gonna invest in education. That sounds great. We're gonna give you free health care. We're gonna pay off your student loans. It's like wow, we're just gonna where's the money coming from?
And the money was coming from that magic money printer in in the closet. Okay. So
It just seemed like
Dude, there's no way. There's no way out.
And somehow
This insane
situation has occurred. And I'm not saying that it's gonna work. And I'm not saying I agree with
Everything about these people. I don't agree with everything Trump says. I don't even I didn't even vote. Okay. Look, you can't even hate me. Okay. I didn't vote for the guy. I didn't vote for anybody. So so you can hate me for other reasons. I don't agree with everything that Iwan does, but he's an impressive, ultimately impressive entrepreneur. I think he's the greatest entrepreneur of all time. Okay, so
But I also yeah, don't think he I agree with I don't agree with everything he says.
Great, my caveats are either way.
I cannot believe we ended up on this timeline.
Where Trump gets elected.
Elon Musk, the greatest
entrepreneur of all time. And if even if you disagree, okay, he's second. Right? Like he's close. When when did Trump
W was it January twentieth?
Is that w or four? Was it twenty four inauguration, yeah.
So less than a month ago. Okay. Three weeks ago.
And he brings Elon Musk in and basically like
Like he's still doing onboarding. If you just said what's the only way America can get out of this, I'd be like, dude, we gotta get like
someone as smart as Elon Musk in there with a mandate and somehow have a free mandate
To actually go and cut all the bloat.
To get us out of this excess spending, to cut the deficit, to balance the budget.
To get us even into a surplus. That's the only way we gotta like somehow do that. That sounded
Impossible.
Two to three years ago. Like what
There was no path where something he he's not even an American citizen, he can't be president, he's not gonna run.
The president's not gonna just give him free reign. Well, somehow we ended up on this point one percent probability timeline.
Where Trump gets elected.
Elon becomes his bestie by backing him and giving him a bunch of money and put throwing his weight behind him.
Elon's stip stipulation was like, I want to create Doge. Ha ha Doge. Uh and he's like, I'm gonna cut spending.
And Trump's like okay.
Great. And somehow it became cool to cut spending, which was never cool before that.
And now he just took like this g army.
It's
Forty or fifty
Folks who are
twenty f
Even more powerful. You just go get a bunch of ten X type of people
And he's he's literally like rateing
He's like raiding buildings and he's taking over payment systems and being like, Okay, you c I can't change the laws, but I could stop the flow of the money. I can audit everything from this payment record system. He's bringing like young hackers in, he's bringing some of his smartest people in. He's doing this. Now, will this be successful? I have no idea.
Can't tell you.
Is this fascinating?
Absolutely. Is this one of our only shots to get out of the death spiral?
Of excess spending? I believe so, and I cannot believe it happened. End of rant.
All right, let me give you let me give the audience a counterpoint and I'm gonna get flame for this. You're going devil's avocado on me?
I'm going hardcore devil's avocado audio. No, not exactly, because I'm on board with like what a lot of the stuff he's doing, but listen to this.
Let's just say that you're forty five years old, you got two kids in high school.
you got a mortgage and you're thinking like, you know, life's pretty good.
And then all of a sudden
You get a message that says
Look.
We appreciate you, Diane, for working for the government for so long.
But
You're done.
You're you gotta get out in
You're thinking, How the hell am I gonna pay my mortgage? How am I gonna like provide for my kids who wanna go to college?
And then you look online to learn about your situation and you're like, Wait.
The guy who just decided to fire me changed his Twitter handle to Twitter uh to Harry Balls.
And he put in his description that he's offering circumcision for sixty nine cents.
And
Did he just call a guy a retard?
On Twitter?
Mm.
Did someone yesterday sent me an advanced search? You know your Twitter advanced search. It was just like a a single link I could click.
That was just Elon Musk saying the word retard and
Bro, you could scroll for days. It was it was unbelievable. It was an unbelievable link. It's sort of like
like a a vr really successful entrepreneur CEO doing layoffs because
money short from his
beautiful chalet in Aspen with a beautiful view behind him on Zoom.
And
For Elon like do what you gotta do.
But can you not be so smug about it and like have some like
Fucking grace.
When you're like doing some of these things, even if those things are good and I agree with them, I just wish that like
the maturity level would go up because at the end of the day, it's cool for like these tech guys to say like
Cut'em, cut'em. Let's uh make the government smaller, whatever.
But it's at the end of the day, it is real people's lives and half of these people, they're not like
Hungry power people. They're just
fucking guys who are working nine to five and they just want to play softball on the weekends. You know what I mean? And that that that bums me out. I wish that he would show a little grace, uh when he's slashing. You know what I mean? Like I think you bring up great points. I think his uh
It's like I've been told many times. You're not wrong, but your delivery sucks. What do they say in the big Lebowski? You're not wrong, man. You're just an asshole. Yeah. So I think you're absolutely right on that. I will say
They did offer eight month severance.
I will also say
This wasn't like
An optional or
flimsy th like it's not like somebody's just messing around.
Basically, but that's what it's beautiful. You're absolutely right. It certainly seems like he's messing around. The style is bad, I think the substance is good. The reality is
The way that the government works is actually like a financial terror attack.
On all American citizens. And so as much as Diane
I I don't like that Diane is is gonna
possibly lose her job. The reality is
She shouldn't have had that job probably in the first place, or
this old and maybe not her specifically, but the overall system is spending so much, it is going to tank the entire
Economy. Like you look at all these crazy stats about
How much of job growth is just federal jobs. How much of spending
Is just going to federal employees. It's like, you know, a a a worm, uh the game of snake when you start to eat your own tail. It doesn't even make any sense. I'll give you I'm gonna tell you something.
I have a friend.
Who
Was a last year or two years ago.
They had an unlucky break.
They wanted this.
promotion or this job, they didn't get it.
They didn't really know what to do. Didn't look like they had a had a great
You know, like upside, I thought that they deserved a little bit better. So let me see if I can help this person out.
And
Around this time I had met some people that were
Some fat cats who were doing well with government contracts. And I'm talking about like
You know
one company, for example, they just they're a a web web dev shop. They made websites.
No they're a fat cat. We gotta break that back. Great usage. Yeah, exactly. And what I mean by that is
They were making websites, which you can go on Fiverr and get a website for five bucks. You can go on Upwork and get somebody to do it for a couple hundred bucks. You can go on Squarespace and do it yourself. You could there's a whole bunch of things you could do. They're getting nineteen, twenty million dollar contracts.
to build simple websites. It was unbelievable.
And the and and they're multi year contracts.

Literally I have interns that could do them in
three, four days. It was uh and the these aren't like
High traffic, not complex apps, not super sensitive data. Just like a square space. Informational website. Yeah, exactly. So um started noticing this.
So I go to my friend and I say
Let's get you a government contract.

And
I can't say too much specific stuff. We have a g we got this friend a government contract.
To do something that probably takes four hours.
Not even
High skilled
Uh you know, not not anybody could do it. My sister could do it, my cousin could do it. Anybody could have got this contract.
It's been going for two years. And now it's a hilarious game of hide and seek. Cause I'm like, yo, Doge is gonna find this contract. And when Doge finds this contract, they're gonna publish this thing and be like, We paid for for this. And
I'm glad that my friend got
Like, you know, uh a great uh lifestyle. Yeah.
However
It's the what what is that thing called? The free rider problem, uh, in society. It's like I forgot, there's like some
social term of for this where it's like
You you could abuse public parks and public transport because
Nobody's kind of like on the hook for it and like, well, I'll get mine. I'll get mine. And when everybody tries to get theirs, we all get screwed. Where did your head go where your friend doesn't get the promotion? And then the default response is
Get you a government contract, baby. Let's go to the government contract store, just pick it off the shelf and go check out and there's these side quests that um You know, I'd been through this this podcast is great, right? You do this podcast and you meet people and you hear stories. We were talking about we had done a segment on government contract businesses.
I think we had done a business uh a thing because somebody I know
had pivoted.
They used to ha the episode I remember explicitly was they used to be in the business of making vodka bottles with LED lights.
So if it was like Sam's bachelor party
It'd be like Sam, last day of freedom, like rotating around a vodka bottle. That was their business.
COVID hit?
And they pivoted their entire business to selling masks and got an eighty or ninety million dollar contract.
Yeah. And this is somebody who lives less than a mile away from the who did that.
And I was like, Oh my God, can you believe that? We talked about it on the podcast.
And I just had some people email me, which is the flywheel of this podcast, and they were like, Yeah, dude, like have you ever checked us out? Check this out. You can go see what what's up for bid right now.
Hey, have you heard about this company? Have you heard about this company? So I started getting curious. Now I was never gonna do it, right? Because
I'm at a phase of my life where
I am intentionally trying to not make any decisions for money. So even when I saw something that I was like, Oh wow, you could go make money doing that.
I no longer want to be that guy. I was that guy for like 15 years. I don't want to be that guy anymore. If I make a decision, it can't be for the for money as the number one reason.
But
I did take note.
And I was like, somebody could do that, maybe somebody who's maybe top priority right now is money.
And
So this little side quest was, let's go help a friend. I don't want to do this for me. It wouldn't be worth it for me, but it would totally be worth it.
To to like for the story and to see if I can help my friend out. And it's still going?
It's still going. But dude, every month.
And now that Doge is out, it's literally like a game of hide and seek.
And I could hear the footsteps coming. I know I know it's coming and it's gonna be hilarious when it hits.
That's insane. That is pretty funny.
What about the um
The third thing. The the thing. So the reasoning behind it
Like he has a reason for doing this, which is that he's trying to
He hates explain what it is. Explain what it is. People don't know.
So Elon uh so from my understanding, uh uh OpenAI is a nonprofit. They're trying to convert to a for profit. In order to do that, Sam Altman, as well as some of the shareholders have to, quote, buy the company
And what Elon has done is he's put a competing offer to buy the nonprofit op of open AI in order to make Sam Altman as well as the other shareholders to have to pay more. Is that the summary?
Sort of. He's not trying to buy the nonprofit, he's trying to buy the assets and same thing. So basically open AI today is a nonprofit.
That's
That's how it started. That's who
You know, has a lot of the IP.
Then they created a for profit.
Where the nonprofit owns, I think twenty five percent of the for profit.
Or they're they're trying to own twenty five percent of the for profit.
That'll be like the the deal.
And um
The for profit has been raising billions and billions of dollars. They just were they were just trying to raise from Massa um and SoftBank at a two hundred fifty billion dollar.
And so
That implied that when they do this conversion.
Or they sell the they convert the ass they get the assets out of the nonprofit into the for profit, right? The IP, the in the the intel, the the the the all the the code, all that stuff.
Асет.
were valued I think at forty billion in that
that transition and it was gonna be like stock, basically. It's like, oh, you're gonna have twenty five percent ownership in the for profit.
And what Elon did was just throw a wrench in that a little bit because he's like, Actually I'll I'll buy the assets for
Ninety whatever he said, ninety seven billion.
So
Couple of possibilities here. Number one, he might actually get it.
It's possible that he could do it and then in that case he would own
The assets of OpenAI merge it with X AI.
And he would be he would go from
Fourth place to first place. Overnight.
But I know a little a bit about stories.
That just seems too
That won't be. Watch Game of Thrones, they're they're gonna die before they do that. Yeah, that story won't happen.
So he's
So it's possible possible, not probable. Yes. And it's possible, not probable only because of the egos and personalities involved. Sam Altman would
fight to the death to not have that happen. That would be him losing and getting checkmated.
by Elon
And Elon is doing it'cause he wants to checkmate Sam because he feels like he got wronged and betrayed because he funded the first forty something.
Um
million dollars into opening eye when it was a nonprofit and he owns nothing of the of the for profit today.
Would you put money on either of them?
When I think they're
Or just like in terms of just like the battle of the wits, like a a chess match. Or do you think that it's too hard to You know when we watch those UFC pay per views and it's like sometimes you get the ones where it's just like oh I just want to see Kabbi
Do his thing. He's gonna win. But I just wanna watch how.
And then there's other times where you're like, I have no idea who's gonna win this fight.
I have no idea. You got the unstoppable wrestler.
versus the guy who's amazing at Jiu Jitsu and striking and like I could totally see it going either way. I gotta pay
Ninety dollar pay per view. I gotta watch this.
That's how this one is.
For as many people as say you never bet against Elon, there's a equal number of smart people who say you never bet against Sam Alban, right? And so you don't know which way it's gonna fall.
Now, and there's also it's the highest stakes thing. Like AI is the highest stakes game.
And this is the crown jewel asset.
It's open AI.
And it's gonna be a fight to the death. Okay, so the second possibility is he just wants to make it more expensive.
for open AI. Cause like I said, the implied valuation they were talking about was about forty billion dollars for the assets, non cash.
Contribution.
Or maybe it was a cash contribution, I'm not sure.
And
this would up the price. So m i if nothing else, you go to your enemy
And they have to pay double for their car.
But do you think like maybe that's satisfying. In the board meeting Can you just imagine all these suits to like well, do we
Do we look at this offer and then everyone just like
No, it's just Elon, he's just being a dickhead.
Okay. Like do you just like do they just like collectively agree that he's just being an asshole? Or are they like
Uh guys, we gotta like look into this. They're collectively'cause I mean, that would be a very low price for the a for the assets of open AI, right? Like
Literally on the open market.
They're raising at a two hundred forty billion dollar valuation.
So to sell the assets at a ninety seven billion dollar valuation wouldn't really make a whole lot of sense, right?
So at the very least he's upping the price.
Or just slowing it down, making life more complicated for his competitors. So if I if we're competing in a race,
But I know I can distract fifteen percent of your mind share.
Right. It's like a honeypot. Like you know, like people used to do this, like send in a a pretty looking girl.
And it's like this is just a nice little distraction for my competitor that I can send in. Like they will do that. So there's there's multiple levels this might be playing at. I don't know which one it is. This is just like the nerdy uh Kendrick Lamar versus Drake thing because they're now they're going after their personalities. They haven't gone after family yet, but I honestly would not be surprised if that happens next.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So I I'm not paying a whole lot of attention to it, but it I mean, it is interesting to watch like a a sort of real life, you know.
Rat beef or a Game of Thrones battle going on.
I uh
Does it bot does anything that's like wear you out?
'Cr I feel a little excited at the moment.
But I wonder when the but we're only a month in.
And I'm like, how much longer can I like
last uh with all these like uh amazing stories.
Yeah, uh yeah, I I know what you mean.
There's definitely a part of it where it just feels like I've just w watched too many episodes of Jersey Shore and I'm like I wasted my whole day. You know, like you know, there's
Oh he said this and he did this and they're gonna do this and let me look up the Delaware law and it's like
For what?
Is it are you getting anything out of this? Or are you just gossiping? It's like Oh, I'm gossiping. Okay, cool.
Well there's only so much of my energy I really wanna put towards gossiping.
I also just constantly think and I think a lot of other people think this is how does one man have so much energy?
It's pretty like amazing.
It's hard for me to imagine like writing a serious email that would require me to make a decision that has long term impacts because I'm like, Oh, I just can't like turn my brain on right now to get into that. Imagine never feeling that feeling. I think Jimmy, Mr. B said something.
He he said something like he was like Oh no I'm focused like
every waking hour. Or he made like he was like I I don't get distracted. Like I don't uh like browse like he said something like that. He was like, but when I do get in that mood, which is uh seldom, I go all in for like twenty four, forty eurs and I just need like a two day recharge and then I'm back in and I don't get distracted. Now imagine being like an Elon and having to like
You don't have
Do you have zone out mode, like most people do after seven o'clock at night? You know you know what I mean?
I read this story about
Bill Gates and it was a story about how Bill Gates was building Microsoft.
And
People don't know'cause Bill Gates is now a philanthrop uh philanthropist, slash like you know
He's got grandpa energy. He's got grandpa energy, exactly. He's wearing his sweater. He's like, Well, you know, I read books and blah blah and I, you know, I've got these nets to catch mosquitoes. Like you know he just sounds like you know sort of harmless. He was ruthless. Yeah, he's he's putting around in the mornings. He was ruthless when he was building Microsoft and he was insane energy. If you don't believe me.
Play the clip of him jumping over the chair. Or back.
On top of that, they were like, Bill do you uh somebody was like riding in a car with him.
to do an interview or something like that and they go, Bill, what happened? And they look at his um in his car like the tape deck was missing. It was like pulled out, like it almost got stolen.
And they go, Did you get stolen? He said, No, I took it out. They go, Why'd you take it out?
You don't like to listen to music. He goes if I'm you know the radio.
He goes.
If I'm listening to the radio, I'm not thinking about Microsoft.
So I just took it out.
I don't wanna listen to the radio. I wanna think about Microsoft.
It's wild, right? That's just a little tiny story.
But there's probably like some epic, epic stories. And and these are small things. Like for example, let's say you get like
an email saying like, you know, this partnership that we thought about doing or the sale that we're thinking about doing from you. It's not for us. Thank you.
There's people
And this is like kind of small, but like it's just an example of this behavior where they're like they'll just get on a plane and they'll fly to that person's office that next morning and they'll just make it work. And you think about doing that with like your young kids, you got a uh a few kids, I have one kid, and I'm like, There's not a chance.
That I'm getting on that plane.
Unless it's like
A pretty amazing thing. But she doesn't do these like
Daily
These daily
These daily items that show how intense you are. It it it's really challenging to imagine living that life. And I think very few people can actually sustain it. And I'm not one of them.
So back to your question of like how does he do it? This is a l legitimate question. How does he do it? So one of the reasons my uh my interest in Doge is is uh top of mind right now is I just had my most viral tweet ever.
You did?
Yeah.
And it was all I said was
I would pay stupid amounts of money.
F
Someone to follow around the Doge team for the next six months, hard knock style.
Like if you've ever seen Hard Knox, the show on HBO where they follow like an NFL team through training camp.
I would and it's true, I would pay.
A ridiculous amount of money for that. What was the reach on that?
I mean the tweet got like fifty thousand likes or something crazy. Oh that's so funny. I didn't see that. It went like really viral for some reason.
A lot of people felt the same way. Like there's a fascination around this.
And part of it is
Um, I would really want to see it. Like I wanna know I wanna know what it's like. Like
I'll I'll give you two things. So one, I want to know what Elon's like.
But not
Because I'm like, Oh uh Elon, he's the best. I just wanna see
I literally want to understand like so this guy's running six like logistic companies at one logistically
Yeah. And then there's shit like where he's like he's also tweeting ten times more than me.
So it's not even like, oh, but he just doesn't waste time on social media like you. It's like no, I actually waste more time on social media.
It's like, Yeah, but he doesn't just waste time playing video games like you you
Assholes. Like
Dude, he he's bragging about being a top hundred ranked Diablo player.
It's like
Something's cap.
The Diablo thing, I'm certain is cat. Like I I am certain that he's paying people. Are you allowed to say that? I thought it was pretty fluid.
Was that not? It was actually so fluid that I was like, Wait I was like what did he just say? I said it in the mirror the other day and I was like, I think that works. I think that's I think I can add that to my bag. There's another one I can't believe dude you downplayed having audacity to do Trump.
To have the audacity to say cap is so fluidly like that was really are you gonna say on the internet for way too long. Um
I thought you meant cap like a cap to his energy. Not cap like no cap. That was really good. I'm gonna start saying cap as in a limit.

That's cap.
That's the cap. That's the maximum cap. I've reached my threshold is what I'm saying. What are you saying? I didn't say I lied. What did I say on MFM like earlier this year? You were like' Let them bake? You were like ripping and I was like, Let them bake. I try to be cool. They're like, wait, is it bake or cook or microwave? What is the phrase?
I uh
D have you met anyone who's worked with them? I I haven't.
Uh yeah. I have actually. Yeah. I I talked to that one guy who that recently he said um
He goes I had a meet with Elon and his assistant
gave me the heads up in advance and he goes, Just so you know
Elon's companies are making something like twenty million dollars per hour.
Or something like that, or twenty million per half hour.
So if you are gonna have a conversation with him, it better be a twenty million dollar conversation.
And that twenty million dollar number, by the way.
That it's more now.
It's more now, if you if you think of Doge.
So it's just like everything Can you imagine that actually that's like kind of an exhausting way to live because
Do you ever hear when people say like uh well that's just not worth my time?
And when I would think about that for a long time, I'm like, does that mean I should always be doing something that is like of more value? And I'm like, Well, how much am I valuing just laying on this couch? Or how much am I valuing just like mowing my grass because I want to actually mow my grass? And I thought that was kind of an exhausting way to look at life.
It totally is. By the way, there's a simple simple solution to that, which is
You only price things that you don't wanna do. If you wanna do it.
You don't put a out you don't put a price on it. If you l if you enjoy the
If it's therapeutic to you or what what's it called? Like uh
Whatever. Like it feels good just doing nothing. If it feels good to do to do the dishes or to like m like trim the
bushes in your garden or whatever, like go do it. You know, no g you have at it. You don't need to be like, oh this is an inefficient use of my time. You only price the things you don't want to do to say, you know what, am I wasting my time on stuff I don't even enjoy?
Well when we had Rob Deirdrick on the pod, he said that he places that number at one million dollars per hour.
Yeah. Dude, I watched a Cody Sanchez clip and like
I don't mean to knock on Cody.
She's she's always been nice to me, but
She w she was on a panel.
And they go, she goes.
I was talking to my mentor, Bill Perkins, and he always
you know, tells me you are as you are as low as the low ta like something like that. It's like you are as low as the lowest tasks you do.
And she w he she was like, you know, I um
Uh like I was dropping something I I had to drop I was pumping oh he goes, Do you still pump your own gas?
And she goes, at first I thought, how pretentious. Of course I still wanna be a person who pumps my own gas.
And then he
Did the math for me about how much I'm wasting how much money I'm wasting pumping my own gas.
And he said, Are you still buying this? You y you should not be buying that. You should not be going to the store to do that.
And I just thought like and this video had like whatever.
Tens of thousands of likes.
And
I think that's a totally valid way to think. She might be right. That might be the right answer for her. It's not the right answer. Dude, I went to Whole Foods last night at nine PM just to walk around.
Totally.
Totally.
Totally.
I think there I think underneath a lot of that like oh I gotta be so efficient with every second of my day is just some underlying feeling of lack. What do you think you lack in your life that you have to optimize every minute of every hour of every day?
And that you are like above doing certain things. And by the way, also when you stop doing things, you lose touch with reality. So there's a price to that too.
And so I just think like there's a the the my takeaway was not even about Cody or her idea that if it works for you, more power to you.
I just think
I just thought to myself
You know how much you know how much bad advice is out there? Like whether this was bad advice or other like
One of the great skills in life
Is just
Playing hopscotch.
And not
Not stepping on the like landmines of terrible advice that exist on the internet.
Our podcast included, by the way. We say some dumb shit.
And we say some things that don't make sense. They don't make sense for you, maybe it makes sense for us, or maybe it just doesn't make sense at all.
But
There is a skill.
Two
How do you block out
The ninety eight percent of
Awful advice that sounds smart.
You wanna hear something funny, so
I met this guy
Who's a billionaire, a multi billionaire. He's probably sixty five.
And I talked to him for like an hour online for something. And
At the end of the call.
For some reason he started talking about his family and his kids
And how he uh has like
I forget, five kids and they're each married with children, and he's like, Oh, I'm always around the grandkids. I'm m I just love this, like
And he was explaining his life philosophy and at the end of the call I go, Hey, you know, I we don't know each other
We only know each other for this hour, but
Do you think they could come over?
me and my wife and stay with you and your family, and I can just watch how you interact with your family because
You seem really happy, man, and you're successful. You've won.
And he goes, I would love that. And so tomorrow at seven AM
I am flying to Park City.
To go to this guy's house for three days
And he was like, My whole family's gonna be there for this weekend.
And I was like, Great.
Can I come and just hang out with you guys and be part of the family for a weekend just to see how you're interacting with everyone because you are awesome. And he's like, Yeah, I would love that. So I'm going to his house tomorrow till Sunday.
Just to like learn.
How to be I when I met him, I was like, You are just such a warm person and you're you're rich and successful, which is like w one attribute that's amazing. You seem happy, you seem fit, you uh have a lovely family and they seem like they love you. I gotta I gotta download what you're you're doing,'cause you are amazing. And so he's letting me come over.
Dude, that's great. I've I've always enjoyed doing that. I have a word for it. Can I throw some jargon at you?
Stalking, is that it? The word for it is in situ. So like what's that? Is this a made up word? I'm a biology major. So at one point I did a biotech company.
And one of the things you learn in any any biotech company.
Is
There's a huge difference between the lab environment
Which is
A sterile controlled environment.
And you see this data come out and it says, Wow, this thing really works. We produced this many milliliters of this, or we sp this many grams of this substance, or whatever, right? It had this much this much energy, uh this many kilowatts generated, whatever, whatever the thing you're doing in lab.
And then you're like Oh my God, this is amazing. We're about to change the world. And I was like trying to high five and nobody else was excited. I was like, Why aren't you guys excited? They're like, Well, like it's the lab.
I'm like, oh, does the lab mess up?
No, the lab's great.
So what do you mean? What's the problem? Lab it's a test. It's a scientific test. How much more proof do you want?
They go, Oh, everything changes in situ.
In what?
And like in situ basically was like
You take the thing, the the the in in our case, we were working on these microbes. We had this company where microbes would eat coal and basically fart out natural gas. So you could get
Natural gas without burning coal.
Kind of amazing. Natural microbes, real microbes that just exist on the planet, right?
And so
They were working amazing in the lab. They're producing so much natural gas. It was amazing. We're gonna but we're about to change the energy industry. What's that word in situ is like in situ in a situation? Yeah, I don't know exactly what it's I don't know what the technical but it's yeah, it's kinda like in the situation or in ground. And so what we did was
You take the bugs, then you have to actually go to the field
Where the coal is buried two hundred meters underground or whatever.
And you're gonna pump the microbes in.
And you gotta pump'em in with some water and you gotta like see what happens and then there's cracks in the ground. It's not perfect. And then the yeah, blah, blah, blah. The weather, everything. Everything is different. The temperature is different. The the other microbes that are there there interfere, right, et cetera.
And always the in situ was, you know, not only worse, but like
Just dramatically different to the point where it's like, Why are we even doing these lab tests? And they're like, Well, look, if it fails in the lab, it's for sure gonna fail in situ. Right.
But just'cause it p succeeds in lab doesn't mean it works the situation. And so
was a really long winded way of saying.
I have this little word I tell myself, which is like
go in situ so so so for example, it's like you might have a theory, but go test it. You might have an idea, go test it. You might think your Donald Trump impression's good. You gotta say that shit on the mic and see what happens.
Another version of it is
This person might look like they've got it all together. They're happy, they're successful.
God, they're saying all the right things on this podcast.
Go in situ. Go to their house and you'll know within like fifteen minutes. You said three days. Three days massive overkill.
You'll know within like ninety minutes for sure.
Everything you need to know about this guy. And you'll you'll pick up all these nuances just about like the family dynamics and the house and their schedule, their level of
overall like busyness and rushing through their day versus like, wow, this person really seems at peace or like
You know what? They just seem like their baseline mood is really high, or you know, their how their kids relate to them shows me that they have a great bond, an underlying bond, uh, you know, versus what they say.
And so you pick up so much. And this is why
People are like, Oh what happened to
You and Sam aren't doing this interview together and it's like, Yeah,'cause I actually wanted to go to that dude's house.
And he lives near me, or he lived where I was traveling and Sam was traveling somewhere else at the time, or whatever.
But I pick up so much more.
Not from the interview, but the like
hours we spend before the interview just hanging out at their house.
I pick up so much more in terms of lifestyle. And I've talked about this before, but like when I was the person who you hung sorry, well go go ahead.
I'll give the example. So we go to Austin and we had four interviews scheduled. It was
Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire who started more billion dollar companies than anyone else in America. Get after it alpha type of dude.
Exactly.
I go to uh and so there was him, there was Monash Pabry, an investor. So he was a value investor from the school of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.
There's Tim Ferris. Tim Ferris, a guy I've admired for many years, author
Experimenter, investor, et cetera.
And then the fourth one was
Somebody else was just I'm forgetting. This was like a year ago.
So we go and we do the four. Now for each of the four I hung out with them.
Tim less, but the others like Joe Lonsdale. I went to his house at eight in the morning. I did a morning workout with him. We had breakfast together. We did a cold plunge together. We talked, and then we did the podcast.
I saw his family, met his wife, you know, et cetera.
Toward his house, saw where you know where he where does he work? Where does he play? What he's got this land center.
Like literally like a gaming land center for him and his cousins to just come play video games. Like six computers. Oh, L A N. Okay.
He's got like a basketball court. He's got
Or like
Artillery gun at the top of his thing. Right. When we were leaving
Ten senators were coming over for lunch and Elon Musk showed up while we were leaving the house.
It's like, whoa, okay, that's what your day looks like. Got it. You know, he had like a uh it was amazing. He was so hospitable, by the way. He's got like he was so nice and generous with his time.
Did he have Monash Pra I go over to his house, he's like, Yeah, come over whenever. My day's clear.
I can go to his house.
He doesn't have a staff that answers it. He opens the doorfoot. He's wearing basketball shorts and barefoot.
He's like, Yeah, what do you wanna
Let's just sit. Let's have some tea. You want tea? And we have tea. He's got no clock, no assistant telling him you gotta move the next thing.
He shows me his nap room. He's like, Oh, I nap every day. It's great.
And that thing's great.
My whole job is thinking.
You know, I have to make great decisions so napping is keeps me fresh. It's like having a second day. So you know, I was like, Whoa.
And then he's got all these books in his library. But it's also kind of alone. I was like, You don't have a team? He's like, No, like
Best investors make their decisions not as a committee, investors make their decisions, you know, as an independent thinker.
And so no, I don't have a huge team. I got like a researcher or two, but like, you know
They don't they don't come over every day. So he has how many billions in his fund?
Two, I think. Something like that.
And it was really just

But a researcher. Uh he didn't have like a
But like ish a five person staff, generously.
Generusly. Yeah.
I could be wrong, right? Like don't don't don't don't quote me on these, but that's what it's I'm ninety percent sure.
Tim Ferris. I was like uh
Yeah, he shows up and I was like, So, like what you been up to? And he was like, Oh, I just came back from Europe
I was like, Oh cool, like vacation, ski, what are you doing? He goes
No, I spent three days with the guy who's the best in the world at making board games.
And I wanted to understand and I wanna learn about board games. So you so you pick up like
What?
Lifestyle flexibility.
Ability to indulge in your h hobbies. How lonely are you? Uh you know, do you have a team? Are you doing
You know, somebody tweeted this out there the other day. They go, the thing that socialists are Marks got Carl Marks got wrong was how much fun it is to make money with your boys. I think I feel that, dude. Like me, Ben, Diego. It's so much fun to just do what we do. It would be way less fun if it was just me doing it. Even if I had owned one hundred percent, I got more equity and all that. I would never try to take that trade.
Dude, I I completely agree, by the way. That's why I have co founders. And I move Diego out here. I was like, dude, I'll pay you more. Jove out here. Move within ten minutes of me. And now we hang out every day.
And I'm like, my life just got better, right? Like little things. And so you know my kids interrupt me in the middle of the day. I have a piano right next to my desk.
'Cause in between working
I'll just play piano, it's for fun, right? Like if somebody was here in situ with me, they would say that I don't have a perfect life, but I've built a life that I love.
And they will know for themselves if that's kind of what they want.
And so I think this is massively underrated is a very long winded way of saying I think more people should do this. I think you pick up way more when you go to somebody's house and see their you know, just kind of hang with them for for a day.
Or even a couple hours.
I think we need like um
Like a tobacco pipe or something. Today's like
Philosopher Hour on our on our uh rocking chairs just like
riffen on what makes a good life and what doesn't.
Yeah, we started at limestones.
We should go, by the way, check them out. It sounds sick.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I would I would love to go. Uh
Go see it. I think it'd be pretty
Boring, but it would be mind blowing at the same time.
Yeah I mean.
I think it would be nothing would be thrilling, but the whole thing blowing that that's what it that's what it is. We almost need to do like MFM field trips because I the the timing was horrible when you were doing the Monish Pabry one because I was moving that day.
And uh we couldn't make it work because
I had like a six month old and it was like a huge whatever. But I am so envious. I'm like fuck. I just wanted to like see I just wanted to like get
Uh uh field I wanted to do a field trip of just sitting in his living room and watching him interact.
That is that's like I get so much joy doing that exact same thing.
You know what I would want to do, so there's like
Your boy Brett, who's doing robotics.
I wanna go see that shit.
I wanna go see the humanoid robots and the factory and just be inspired by that.
There's
Another one that I think would be really cool. Have you ever been to a Cisco Foods?
Like Cisco is the company that like makes the food that goes to all the restaurants. Like the they make sauces and shit. Yeah. What no, I've not been what is that?
It's
I went once'cause we had a restaurant and
It's the most
Wild
like huge scale operation
You don't realize it. You're like, Oh, I guess
Yeah, the company that supplies all of the materials to all of the restaurants and grocer stores.
I guess they gotta be pretty big, right? The bigger than anything you've ever seen. It's and and it was like a tour of that facility.
And then you see the automation.
Like there's these little like
Hockey puck, you know those like scooters are like the little uh butt scooters where you just like sit down on the thing, like an old PE thing where you sit down on this little four wheel flat thing and it rolls around.
That's like
Little robots like that that w that fly around this warehouse picking up pallets and moving them places.
And so it's this incredibly sophisticated operation to move like cans of tuna.
Yeah, looking at their factories. It looks so large that you could like see the earth curve. You know what I mean? It's it's huge. Another one would be like
Uh.
I probably not allowed, but like Andoril or like one of these companies just making like lasers and like
You know, like war machines.
Al also just like the crypto house and just go see all these like degenerate nineteen year olds.
That's actually a good idea. It's like you don't know it till you see it, until you feel it, right? Like it just leaves an imprint on you in a different way. Going to hacker houses in San Francisco was amazing and seemed like their kitchen, and I'm like
Who cooks what? How do you guys know?
You see in the Barstool like one bite pizza reviews. We just do the one sniff hacker house reviews. The owner just dude and they're all in San Francisco, they're all in like these warehouses. So they all got Walmart feet. So everyone's walking around barefooted with like dirty, dirty ass bottom of their feet. It's like disgusting. And I had so much fun doing it. I remember I felt that same way walking around Facebook. Have you walked around Facebook's campus?
Yeah, Facebook's one of those.
I remember walking around, I'm like, why does a webpage need so many employees? What are all these fucking people doing? There like there's so many people walking around.
In your league, I can't
Like I would make fun of Facebook constantly'cause I thought it was
A soulless job, but you walk around and you're like, Oh my God.
This is like a beehive. You know what we should do? Do you remember Tech Crunch Cribs? Did you ever see this show? Yeah, it was awesome. It was awesome. And they discontinued it, just like they discontinued Cribs.
Um
But I think that needs to come back and okay, realistically we're like, we should do this and then both of us are gonna like
Look at our kids and then like
Just not travel. Sorry, I'm gonna go to a Cisco factory. So realistically.
Absolutely not gonna do this idea.
We need a field correspondent. Every great show's got a field correspondent, right? So I'm gonna throw down the gauntlet right now.
Hundred K a year. Be the MFM.
Field trip correspondent.
We're gonna send you to different awesome places. You gotta film it like the old Tech Crunch Cribs.
Or MTV Cribs episodes.
And you just gotta go to like
Funny epic places, you know.
Cool interesting companies where they got a crazy like office life.
crazy factories and shit like this.
And that could be your job. Travel around, film content, we'll put'em up on MFM as episodes. I wanna see these like
There's
Dude, these AI we we we gotta talk about this next week, but these AI companies that have like twenty employees but a hundred million in revenue.
I just want to see what they're doing all day.
You know what I mean? Absolutely.
To audition.
Email me Sean at Seanparoo dot com and just email a uh audition tape.
So do a do an episode of Any Business Near You.
Go to your coffee shop and just film it, just so that we can get a sense of how you are on camera.
That's the best.
Nice Pod. I actually enjoyed these. That was very nice. Thank you. I enjoy these because I just enjoy hanging out. I those are my favorite podcasts. Um All right. That's it.
Great pod.
Wonderful pot. See ya out there.
I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to
I put my all in it like no day's off On the road less travel never looking back