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 can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my all in it like my days off on the road let's travel all right we're gonna get
a little current eventy which we don't often but i love current events so i want to talk about a current event so was it at last night elon did this thing where he He was like in Trump's office with like his kid, like crawling all over him, climbing up on him, which is kind of funny.
And he told this 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, like underground.
Somebody said, oh, it's the bureaucratic Gringotts from 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're asking him about how he was like getting rid of all these jobs.
And he was like, Yeah, I want to like actually retire more people.
But I was told that I can only retire 10 ,000 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 retired people who want to retire is where 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.
And you hear this 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 around this?
So basically, in the 1920s, there is this guy who grew mushrooms, and I guess in order to grow mushrooms in the part of America where he was growing mushrooms, he had to grow them in a cave.
And so he was 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 he was kind of like this funny guy where 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 1950s post -world war ii 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 1950 and he installed 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 this paperwork you want to 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 $30 billion company.
Wow. Do you guys remember when marketing was fun?
When you had time to be creative and connect with your customers?
With HubSpot, marketing can be fun again.
Turn one piece of content into everything you need.
Know which prospects are ready to buy and see all your campaign results in one place.
Plus, it's easy to use.
Helping HubSpot customers double their leads in just 12 months, which means you have more time to enjoy marketing again.
Visit HubSpot .com to get started for free.
So this company, I looked it up since the year 2000, 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 80 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 music company Sony the record label Sony has all of their masters recordings like literally like the tape stored in Iron Mountain but their biggest customers is like an insurance company in Connecticut who have been in business for 100 years they for some reason legal reasons
they have to keep their paper files they have to save them for something like 75 years this is nuts dude so so they're just a giant they're just like a physical vault for documents it says enterprise information management services founded in 1951 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 an event match 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 museum and you have extra art that you need store you're going to go to Iron Mountain because you know
it's like real like safe it's one place or they have a bunch of these they have dozens and dozens of places so I think they have 80 caves like don't caves literally a cave in like why why not just a building what's wrong like because 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 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 minor, if you were just like, yeah, though, the humidity coefficient is lower.
I'd be like, all right, all right.
I don't need to hear more.
Like, I'm just like so sad.
As long as I know there's any scientific basis for something, I'll just accept the argument in full.
It's the, there was a Harvard study that 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 was hard to comprehend how like epic this thing so this is the thing that stores the government stuff or no a 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 here's how this works.
This part is absolutely insane.
So starting in the 1950s or the 1960s, 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 100 ,000 people a year.
And when let's say you work for the FBI or some agency, federal agency, the Postal Service, whatever, and you need to retire, because of 100 plus years of laws, there's a lot of complications.
And so when you retire, you're supposed to get a pension, round numbers of $100 ,000 a year.
But some people might get $98 ,000.
Some people might get $108 ,000.
And the reason they will is because let's say this federal employee was a 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 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 they and 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 have to file a piece of paperwork.
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 in PA.
And it takes roughly 60 days because one of the 600 employees at this mine needs to physically have the file in hand, needs to walk to your file in the mountain, which this mountain is 200 football fields or 200 acres.
They had to literally hand, like by hand, go and get that file.
And they got to look at your file.
They got to say, all right, Sean looks like he's 65.
It looks like he actually retired at 59 years old, and he came back.
So that gets a different thing.
Turns out he served in the Iraq War.
So he gets this thing, this thing, this thing.
And then they closed a file, and they put it back, and they send the 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 90 days to do that whole thing and since uh since the 1980s 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 2004 wrote this amazing article they're like we tried it in 1980 we're
trying it now we tried it in 1995 what does it fail what what why why can't they digitize too much or it gets rejected 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 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 600 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 was it health care .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 nobody and you're not going to get huge pat on the back for like digitizing this process you know
and the people who work at the mind they interviewed a couple of them they were like it's a pretty miserable miserable place to work in the winter time when we arrive at work we're there when it's dark and then when 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 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 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 guy they interviewed, they go, I'm working on a case now that's taken me 120 days to figure out how much 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 files.
Dude, this mining company, 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? The $30 billion company?
And the retention might be better.
And here's why it might be better.
It is better, I guarantee it.
Listen, Workday. Workday is a piece of software.
I've never I don't think maybe I've used it.
But like the thing about Workday is considered like a dinosaur software company.
Right. It's like or let's say ADP like these payroll softwares that a lot of huge companies have and 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 and say, hey, we're going to give this to you guys.
and they'll never talk to them again for the next 50 years.
Dude, should we open up a drawer?
Like, should we just go halvesies on a single drawer in Iron Mountain and just start saving like hateful YouTube comments in there?
Just have 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 would go down to the mine and bring a blanket and cheese and wine and would just sit and look at her art.
It'd just be like, this is awesome.
And that was in the article that she did that.
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 1950s.
And that's where you went with this information.
Did you see photos of it?
Yeah, I saw the one photo.
Now I'm looking at more and it's pretty wild, dude.
I mean, it makes sense now that you say it.
Now that you explain it, it makes sense.
It's just who knew?
Who knew that? This is how it all works.
Now there's like digital versions of this.
I forget what some of the guys in the space are, but they were like, Iron Mountain was like, hey, are you guys nervous about digital?
And they dismissed it.
They're like, dude, you don't know how much crap people need to store.
We're gonna be fine.
It's going good. And so if you look at their financials, it's just consistently like a billion dollar plus of free cashflow just every year.
This is how my wife treats my kids' art.
She 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 were actually interesting.
I'm just curious. Give me your one to ten level of interest in these.
I have a feeling you might not be interested in these.
Elon offering $97 billion to buy OpenAI.
Did that tickle you?
Eight out of ten. The Elon stuff is inherently incredibly interesting at the moment.
Right. Okay, 8 out of 10.
Let's rank this one.
Elon crashing the press conference in Donald Trump's Oval Office.
Was that a 10? That's a 10.
And by the way, I bet it's not even for the content.
Just for the social dynamic of him standing behind Trump and just overtaking the press conference.
Is that right? That's my guess.
Is that what you want to talk about?
Well, there's one other I want to get your read on.
What's the one other?
Doge as a whole. 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 48 laws of power uh how to be powerful you never outshine your master Elon Musk
100 outshined Donald there that was so emasculating to have Donald just sitting there and Elon standing up sort of behind him like he was going to come and put his arm like his hands on his shoulders you know what I mean yeah yeah dirty hijacked the 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 whoa 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 because 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 like he was being entertained at that moment as well do you know what i mean i also love how trip sometimes it's like we're gonna send elon in elon's gonna go in he's gonna he's
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 going to 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 kind of 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 because it kind of started off pretty hot.
And if I had really gone for it, maybe I would have surprised myself, but I'll never know.
And I'll live with that regret until I die.
I thought it was pretty good.
That had a lot of promise there.
What about the Doge stuff in general?
I have a very opinionated take.
Do you? I have a big picture take, and then I have just small things that I wish more stuff would come out from.
So here's my big picture take.
I cannot believe we're on this timeline.
So if you just rewind the clock a couple years ago, here's what was going on.
I was reading this Ray Dalio book.
Did you ever read the Ray Dalio?
I forgot what it's called.
Rise and Fall of Nations or something like that.
It's basically how empires fall.
No empire lasts forever.
Honestly, 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 as a pessimist, right?
No, no, no. He's a realist.
I don't know. He's just an observer of how things are.
So if you're going to watch one thing, by the way, watch it on YouTube.
He's got this thing called How the Economic Machine Works.
It's a 20 or 30 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 bozo like me could understand.
And it's amazing. Go watch that.
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 1 .5 miles from my house if you want to go and just talk to them.
Yeah, we should. We just walk right in.
Yeah, we absolutely should.
So he wrote this book about the rise and fall of 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 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 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 80 to 100 year debt cycle.
And what happens is the countries or empires will end up going into too much debt, which the US is in right now, like $35 trillion of debt, like just an absurd number.
And then the interest payments are really high.
Then 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 an interesting book.
You should read it.
Now - Does he mention mukbang?
Where on the timeline is - Do you know what mukbang is?
Listening to people eat?
watching and listening to people eat incredibly fat people just stuff their face with ramen yeah it's like a governmental mukbang is what he describes does he mention when the declined is when mukbang gets popular there were signs my friends if you like MFM then you're going to like the following podcast
it's called a billion dollar moves and of course it's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the number one audio destination for business professionals.
Billion Dollar Moves.
It's hosted by Sarah Chen Spelling.
Sarah is a venture capitalist and strategist.
And with billion dollar moves, she wants to look at unicorn founders and funders.
And she looks for what she calls the unexpected leader.
Many of them were underestimated long before they became huge and successful and iconic.
She does it with unfiltered conversations about success, failure, fear, courage, and all that great stuff.
So again, if you like my first million, check out billion dollar moves, it's brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network, again, billion dollar moves.
All right, back to the episode.
So as he's talking about this, it's like, 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 got to 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, the, oh, man, this could go poorly, right?
Oh, they're printing too much money.
That could hurt the dollars.
They're debasing the currency.
That's what he says that they do.
This is what's going to happen.
And it just seemed inevitable.
The problem was you looked at, he's like, but who's going to 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.
It needs, the shareholders are going to demand that the company stop this excess spending.
but the problem with 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 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 push this button I'll just do it this one time just this one time okay and like that's what just kept keeps happening you go and you push the button you print the money.
And 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, the people who run the country were lifelong politicians typically, and they were not CEOs or executives who had that as their core skillset.
The second thing is they didn't have the incentive, right?
Because when you want to get elected, it's like middle school all over again.
You've got to go promise we're going to have free pizza every friday it's like where's who's going to 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 going to cut back all your
favorite programs it was always going to be we're going to do more for you we're going to cut your taxes okay so less revenue for the government how's that going to work we're already in debt we're going to cut your taxes and uh you know what we're going to we're going to spend more on this we're going
to invest in education that sounds great we're going to give you free health care we're going to pay off your student loans.
It's like, wow, we're just going to, where's the money coming from?
And the money was coming from that magic money printer 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 going to 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 Elon does, but he's an impressive, ultimately impressive entrepreneur.
I think he's the greatest entrepreneur of all time.
Okay, so, but I also, you know, don't think I agree with, I don't agree with everything he says.
Great, my caveats are out of the way.
I cannot believe we ended up on this timeline where Trump gets elected.
Elon Musk, the greatest entrepreneur of all time.
And even if you disagree, okay, he's second, right?
Like he's close. When did Trump, was it January 20th?
Is that? Or four? Was it 20th?
20th is the inauguration, yeah.
So less than a month ago.
Okay. 40 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?
Dude, we got to 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 got to like somehow
do that that sounded impossible two to three years ago like there was no path where something he's not even an American citizen it can't be president he's not going to run the president's not going to just give him free reign well somehow we ended up in this 0 .1 % 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 stipulation was like i want to create doge haha 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 army of his smartest most ruthless it's not even army it's 40 or 50 folks who are 24 even more powerful 19 you just go get a bunch of 10x type of people.
And he's literally like rating, he's like rating buildings and he's taking over payment systems and being like, okay, 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 and he's bringing some of his smartest people in.
He's doing this. Now, will this be successful?
I have no idea. I 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 on you no not exactly because i'm on board with like what a lot of stuff he's doing but listen to this let's just say that you're 45 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 got to get out.
And you're thinking, how the hell am I going to pay my mortgage?
How am I going to like provide for my kids who want to 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 to Harry Balls.
And he put in his description that he's offering circumcision for 69 cents.
And did he just call a guy a retard on Twitter?
Dude, someone yesterday sent me an advanced search.
You know, your Twitter advanced search.
It was just like a single link I could click that was just Elon Musk saying the word retard.
And bro, you could scroll for days.
It was unbelievable.
It was an unbelievable link.
It's sort of like like a really successful entrepreneur ceo doing layoffs because money's short from his beautiful chalet in aspen with a beautiful view behind him on zoom and for elon i'm like do what you got to 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 him 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 them, cut them let's make the government smaller whatever but 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 saltball on the weekends you know what I mean and that bumps me out I wish that he would show a little grace when he's slashing you
know what I mean like I think you bring up great points I think his 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, exactly. That's like what's going on here.
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.
Like it's not like somebody's just messing around.
Basically. But that's what it seems like when you've changed it to hairy balls.
He made it seem like that.
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 don't like that Diane is going to possibly lose her job.
The reality is she shouldn't have had that job probably in the first place or this old, 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 worm, 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 going to tell you something.
I have a friend who was 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 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 web dev shop they made websites now they're a fat cat we got to bring 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, there's a whole bunch of things you could do.
They're getting 19, $20 million contracts to build simple websites.
It was unbelievable.
And they're multi -year contracts to do things that literally I have interns that could do them in three, four days.
It was, these aren't like high traffic, not complex apps, not super sensitive data.
Just like a Squarespace.
Informational websites.
Very basic. Put your menu online.
Yeah, exactly. So 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 got this friend, a government contract, to do something that probably takes four hours.
Not even high -skilled time.
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.
Because I'm like, yo, Doge is going to find this contract.
And when Doge finds this contract, they're going to publish this thing and be like, we paid for this and I'm glad that my friend got like you know a great job lifestyle yeah however it's the what is that thing called the free rider problem uh in society it's like I forgot there's like some social term
for this where it's like you you can 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, let's get you a government contract, baby.
Let's go to the government contract store.
Just pick it off the shelf and go check out.
There's these side quests that, you know, I'd been through this, but 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, a thing because somebody I know had pivoted.
They used to have the episode I remember specifically 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 80 or 90 million dollar contract.
Yeah. And this is somebody who lives less than a mile away from me.
I have another friend 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 this out?
Check this out. You can go see 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 going to 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 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 for the story and to see if I could 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 high and seek and i can hear the footsteps coming i know i know it's coming and it's going to be hilarious when it hits that's insane that is pretty funny what about the um the third thing the opening i
think 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 saying what it is so people don't know so elon uh so from my understanding uh open ai is a non -profit 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 of OpenAI 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, OpenAI today is a nonprofit.
That's how it started.
That's who has a lot of the IP.
Then they created a for -profit where the non -profit owns, I think 25 % of the for -profit, or they're trying to own 25 % of the for -profit.
That'll be like the deal.
And the for -profit has been raising billions and billions of dollars.
They were just trying to raise from Massa and SoftBank - At a $250 billion - $250 billion, $240 billion valuation.
And so that implied that when they do this conversion or they sell that they convert the ass, they'd get the assets out of the nonprofit into the for -profit, right?
The IP, the, the, the Intel, the, the, the, all the code, all that stuff.
Uh, the assets were valued, I think at 40 billion in that, that transition.
And it was going to be like stock.
Basically it's like, oh, you're going to have 25 % 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 buy the assets for 90, whatever he said, 97 billion.
So a 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 XAI.
And he would be, he would go from fourth place to first place overnight.
That's the possibility.
I'm uneducated on the topic, but I know a little bit about stories.
That just seems too.
That won't. I watch Game of Thrones.
They're going to die before they do that.
Yeah, that story won't happen.
So he's, so it's possible.
Do you agree? 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 because he wants to checkmate Sam because he feels like he got wronged and betrayed because he funded the first 40 something million dollars into opening eye when it was a nonprofit and he owns nothing of the for -profit today.
Would you put money on either of them?
Winning this? Or just like in terms of just like the battle of the wits, like 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 Khabib do his thing.
He's going to win, but I just want to watch how.
And then there's other times where you're like, I have no idea who's going to 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 got to pay $90 pay -per -view.
I got to watch this.
That's how this one is.
I agree. For as many people who say you never bet against Elon, there's an equal number of smart people who say you never bet against Sam Altman, right?
And so you don't know which way it's going to 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 is open AI and it's going to be a fight to the death.
Okay, so the second possibility is he just wants to make it more expensive for open air because like i said the implied valuation they were talking about was about 40 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 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 enough maybe that's like in the board meeting can you just imagine all these suits that like well 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 got to like look into this they're collectively because i mean that would be a very low price for the for the assets of opening eye right like literally on the open
market they're raising at a 240 billion dollar valuation so to sell the assets at a 97 billion valuation wouldn't really make a 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 15 % of your mindshare, right?
It's like a honeypot.
Like, you know, like people used to do this, like send in 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.
And 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 Kendrick Lamar versus Drake thing because 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'm not paying a whole lot of attention to it, but I mean, it is interesting to watch like a sort of real life, you know, rap beef or a Game of Thrones battle going on.
Does any of this like wear you out?
Because I feel a little excited at the moment, but i wonder when 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 know what you mean there's definitely a part of it where it just feels like i've just watched too many episodes
of jersey shore and i'm like i wasted my whole day you know like you know they're oh he said this and he did this and they're gonna do this and let me look up the delaware law it's like for what is it are you getting anything out of this or are you just gossiping say oh i'm gossiping okay cool well
there's only so much of my energy i really want to 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 said something like he was like oh no i'm focused like every waking hour or he made like he was like 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 24 48 hours 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 7 o 'clock at night.
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 because Bill Gates is now a 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 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. He's puttin' around, puttin' around Bill.
Yeah, he's puttin' 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.
All right, we're back.
So on top of that, they were like, Bill, do you, 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, in his car, like the tape deck was missing.
It was like pulled out.
Like it almost got stolen.
And they go, did it get stolen?
And 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 want to listen to the radio.
I want to think about Microsoft.
It's wild, right? That's just a little tiny story, but there's probably some epic, epic stories.
And these are small things.
For example, let's say you get an email saying, 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 kind of small, but 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 your young kids.
You got 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 just to do these daily items that show how intense you are, 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 legitimate question how does he do it so one of the reasons my 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 me all i said was i would pay stupid amounts of money for someone
to follow around the doge team for the next six months hard knock style like if you ever seen hard knocks the show on hba 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
50 000 likes or something crazy oh that's so funny i didn't see that it was just like 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 like i want to know i want to know what it's like like
i'll give you two things so one i want to know what elon's like but not because i'm like oh elon he's the best i just want to see i literally want to understand like so this guy's running six like logistically companies that want logistically yeah and then there's shit like where he's like he's also tweeting
10 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 actually waste more time on social media it's like yeah but he doesn't just waste time playing video games Like, you assholes.
Like, dude, he's bragging about being a top 100 ranked Diablo player.
And it's like, something's cap.
The Diablo thing, I'm certain is cap.
Like, 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's cute, dude. 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 I can add that to my bag.
There's another one.
i can't believe dude you 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 that i've been on the internet for way too long um i thought you make 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're like let him bake let him bake you were like revving and i was like let him bake i try to
be cool they're like wait is it bake or cook or microwave what is the phrase i uh have you met anyone who's worked with them i i haven't uh yeah i have actually yeah 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 20 million dollars per hour or something like that or 20 million per half hour so if you are going to have a conversation with him it better be a 20 million dollar conversation and that 20 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 every can you imagine that actually that's that kind of an exhausting way to live because do you ever hear when people say like 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 want to do if you want to do it you don't put it out you don't put a price on it if you let if you enjoy the if it's therapeutic to you or what's it called they're like uh whatever like it feels good just doing nothing
if it feels good to do to do the dishes or to like like trim the bushes in your garden or whatever like go do it you know no 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 dierdick 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 always been nice to me but see what 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 like something like that.
I was like, you are as low as the lowest tasks you do.
And she was like, you know, I, like I was dropping something.
I had to, 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 want to 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 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 dude i went to whole foods last night at 9 p .m 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, 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, 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 exists 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 to how do you block out the 98 % of awful advice that sounds smart?
All right, I got a public service announcement for all the tech founders that are listening to this.
Listen, job number one for you is to get customers.
And ideally, the bigger the customers, the better.
And I know when I was trying to do that, we would get somebody interested.
Oh, man, there's a big Fortune 500 company or it's a company that's raised hundreds of millions of dollars.
They want to work with us.
This is so exciting.
And then we hit the wall and the wall was the security and compliance team.
And all of a sudden, we could not land our biggest customers just because we were shooting ourselves in the foot by not being security ready and compliant.
And so if you want to solve this, use Vanta.
Vanta is an all -in -one solution.
It helps you get audit ready and it's quick.
It's painless. It's easy.
They're the number one guys at doing this.
There are 8 ,000 companies that use them.
YC companies use them.
We use them. And so if you want Vanta to help simplify your security and compliance program, to help you streamline anything, take all those manual security tasks and automate them, you should use Vanta.
If you listen to this, you actually get $1 ,000 off Vanta too.
So we got a deal for you.
Go to Vanta .com slash million.
that's v -a -n -t -a .com slash million.
Use Vanta. That's what all the cool kids are doing.
You want to hear something funny?
So I met this guy who's a billionaire, a multi -billionaire.
He's probably 65. 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 has for like, I forget, five kids and they're each married with children.
And he's like, oh, I'm always around the grandkids.
I just love this. And he was explaining his life philosophy.
And at the end of the call, I go, hey, we don't know each other.
We only know each other for this hour.
But do you think I 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 7 a .m., I am flying to Park City to go to this guy's house for three days.
And he was like, my whole family's going to 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 was like, yeah, I would love that.
So I'm going to his house tomorrow till Sunday, just to learn how to be...
When I met him, I was like, you are just such a warm person and you're rich and successful, which is one attribute that's amazing.
You seem happy. You seem fit.
you have a lovely family and they seem like they love you I gotta I gotta download what you're doing because you are amazing totally let me come over dude that's great 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 wait 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 wait what 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 this many grams of this substance or whatever, right?
It had this much energy, this many kilowatts generated, 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 they go 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 well in what and like in situ basically was like you take the thing the the 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 going to change the energy industry.
What's that word in situ is like in a situation?
Yeah. I don't know exactly what it is.
I don't know what the technical definition, but yeah, it's kind of 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 200 meters underground or whatever, and you're going to pump the microbes in and you got to pump them in with some water and you got to like see what happens.
And then there's cracks in the ground.
It's not perfect. And then the blah, blah, blah, the weather, everything, everything is different.
The temperature is different.
The other microbes that are there, they're interfere, right?
Etc. And always the in situ was, you know, not only worse, but like just dramatically different to the point where it was like, why are we even doing these lab tests?
And they were like, well, look, if it fails in the lab, it's for sure going to fail in situ.
Right. But just because it succeeds in the lab doesn't mean it works in situ.
And so So it was a really long -winded way of saying, I have this little word I tell myself, which is like, go in situ.
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 15 minutes, you said three days, three days, massive overkill.
You'll know within like 90 minutes for sure everything you need to know about this guy.
And 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, they're how their kids relate to them shows me that they have a great bond, an underlying bond, 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, because 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, we went to Austin.
Who is one person who you hung?
Sorry. Well, go ahead.
I'll give you 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.
And like a hard hitting, get after alpha type of dude.
Exactly. I go to and so there was him.
There was Monish Pabrai, an investor.
So he was a value investor from the school of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.
There's Tim Ferriss.
Tim Ferriss, a guy I've admired for many years, author, experimenter, investor, etc.
And then the fourth one was somebody else.
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.
Toured his house, saw where, you know, where does he work?
Where does he play?
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 lan okay yeah he's got like a basketball court he's got old like artillery gun at the top of his thing right right when we were leaving 10 senators were coming
over for lunch and 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 it was amazing he was so hospitable by the way he's got like he was so nice and generous with his time then he had monish provide go over to his house he's
like yeah come over whenever my day is clear i go to his house he doesn't have a staff that answers that he opens the door barefooted he's wearing basketball shorts and his barefoot he's like yeah what do you want to 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 got to move the next thing he shows me his nap room he's like I nap every day it's great napping is great my whole job is thinking you know I have to make great decisions so napping keeps me fresh it's like having a second day so you know it's like whoa and then he's got all these books
in his library but it's also kind of a loan 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 come over every day so he has how many billions in his fund two I think something like that and it was really just him and a researcher he was the only guy there he didn't have like a but like ish a five person staff generously generously yeah I could be wrong right like yeah don't quote
me on these but that's what it but small I'm 90 % sure Tim Ferriss I was like you know, he shows up and I was like, so like, what you've 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, I want to learn about board games.
So you, so you pick up like lifestyle flexibility, ability to indulge in your hobbies.
How lonely are you?
You know, do you have a team?
Are you doing, you know, somebody tweeted this out the other day.
They the thing that socialists are Mark Scott Karl Marx got wrong was how much fun it is to make money with your boys I was like 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 100 % I got more equity and all
that I would never take that trade dude I completely agree by the way that's why I have co -founders and I moved Diego out here I was like dude I'll pay you more just move out here move within 10 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 because in between working i'll just play piano it's for fun right like if somebody was here in situ with me they would see 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 just kind of hang with them for for a day or even a couple
hours i think we need like like a tobacco pipe or something today is like philosopher hour on our on our rocking chairs just like riffing 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 love to go
uh go see it i think it'd be pretty boring but it would be mind -blowing at the same time you know i mean i think it would be nothing nothing would be thrilling but the whole thing would be mind -blowing that that's what it is that's what it is we almost need to do like mfm field trips because i the timing
was horrible when you were doing the monish papraya one because i was moving that day and 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 a feel i wanted to do a field trip
of just sitting in his living room and watching him interact Totally.
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 want to go see that shit.
I want to go see the humanoid robots in 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.
Exactly. They make sauces and shit.
Yeah. No, I've not been.
What is that? it's I went once because 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 grocery stores I guess they got to be pretty big right the bigger
than anything you've ever seen and and it was like a tour of that facility and then you see the automation like there's these little like hockey pucks look you know those like scooters are like the little butt scooters where you just like sit down on this 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 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.
I'm looking at their factories.
It looks so large that you could like see the earth curve.
You know what I mean?
It's huge. Another one would be like, like probably not allowed, but like Anduril or like one of these companies just making like lasers and like, you know, like war machines.
Also just like the crypto house and just go see all these like degenerate 19 year olds.
That's actually a good idea.
It's like, you don't know it till you see it, till 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 seeing like their kitchen.
And I'm like, who cooks, what?
How do you guys know?
It's like, you've seen the bar stool, like one bite pizza reviews.
We just do the one sniff hacker house reviews, the owner.
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 like why does a web page need so many employees what are all these fucking people doing they're like there's so many people walking around and you're like i can't like i would make fun of facebook constantly because i 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 TechCrunch Cribs?
Did you ever see this show?
Yeah, it was awesome.
It was awesome. And they discontinued it, just like they discontinued Cribs.
But I think that needs to come back.
And okay, realistically, we're like, we should do this.
And then both of us are going to like, look at our kids and then like, just not travel.
Sorry, I'm going to go to a Cisco factory.
Yeah, I really want to go see the...
I'm going to go learn how hot fries are made.
Yeah, exactly. So realistically, let's be honest, absolutely not going to do this idea.
But we need a field correspondent.
Every great show has got a field correspondent, right?
That's actually kind of funny.
I'm going to throw down the gauntlet right now.
100K a year. Be the MFM field trip correspondent.
We're going to send you to different awesome places.
You've got to film it like the old TechCrunch Cribs or MTV Cribs episodes.
And you just got to go to like funny, epic places, you know, 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 them up on MFM as episodes.
I want to see these, like, there's, dude, these AI, we got to talk about this next week, but these AI companies that have like 20 employees, but $100 million in revenue, I just want to see what they're doing all day.
Absolutely. You know what I mean?
Absolutely. To audition, email me, Sean, at SeanPeru .com and just email a audition tape.
So 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 enjoy these where you never said that to me that was very nice thank you i enjoy these because i just enjoy hanging out those are my favorite podcasts um all right that's
it great pod wonderful pod see you out there i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i'll put my all in it like no days off on the road let's travel never looking back hey Sean here I want to take a minute to tell you a David Ogilvie story one of the great ad men he said remember
the consumer is not a moron she's your wife you wouldn't lie to your own wife so don't lie to mine and I love that you guys you're my family you're like my wife and I won't lie to you either so I'll tell you the truth for every company I own right now six companies I use mercury for all of them so I'm
proud to partner with mercury because I use it for all of my banking needs across my personal account, my business accounts.
And anytime I start a new company, it's my first move.
I go open up a Mercury account.
I'm very confident in recommending it because I actually use it.
I've used it for years.
It is the best product on the market.
So if you want to be like me and 200 ,000 other ambitious founders, go to mercury .com and apply in minutes.
And remember, Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank.
Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust members, FDIC.
All right, back to the episode.
