Coming up in this episode.
And I need to memorialize these things for the benefit of humanity. Before, we're all obviated like these kids who have these incredible gpas in this test taking. I think it might be useless. I think they might have optimized for useless skills and I think the only thing that might keep us going, is that Randomness that unpredictability those flaws? Those fuck-ups things that make us banged up the things where we make bad decisions, where we're self-indulgent, I've had to teach our team, the number one thing you can be in this business.
Is unpredictable feed into the fact. I am known as Mercurial. I burn Bridges. I will not hesitate to fucking fight you. I wear the stupid shirts. I don't give a shit about much. I've been known to his light it on fire. And guess what? People take me seriously as a result, I haven't backed down from all those fucking character flaws. I have that are very self-destructive but I am all gasp no fucking breaks. As you know, although in our line we call it no gas, no brains but we need to cultivate more of that.
If we have any hope as a fucking species, we just need to. I'm sorry.
Hello boys and girls ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show and my guest today is a repeat guests. Last time he was on in conversation was 2015. So a lot has changed. Since then, his name is Chris Saga. Chris is the co-founder of lower carbon capital and an accomplished Venture investor company, advisor and entrepreneur managing a portfolio of countless technology communication and consumer products startups through his firm, lowercase Capital hoof. That's a sentence and
And he actually gave me some disclosure in our conversation. He was worried about this intro because I knew I would be recording this intro after the fact. And there are some things not in His official bio, his trading of Commodities, contracts related to live Hogs, which we actually get into his record-setting number of f-bombs in this particular episode. But let me return to the official bio for, just a second alongside, his wife, Crystal Chris, grew lower case, primarily
And for its investments, in very early stage technology companies like Twitter, Uber Instagram, twilio Docker, optimizely Blue Bottle Coffee, and stripe into one of history's, most successful funds. So there you have it. He's also a hilarious guy, whip-smart Mercurial prone to Burning Bridges and not at all shy about talking about his slips flimflam's. Bamboozling and other character building adventures. In this episode, we get into it later as part of
A new project of his where he's hoping to chat with successful entrepreneurs and friends of his about the Owens say misdeeds, but adventurers getting into hot water, getting out of hot water. Talking yourself into things, talking your way, out of things for a new project / podcast called No permanent record. So, hopefully, at some point you'll be able to check that out. But first, just a few quick words from our fine podcast sponsors and only maybe 15%
Sent twenty percent at most of the people who want to be sponsors for the show become sponsors because I personally test and vet everything. So with that said, please enjoy
Coffee, coffee coffee, man. Do I love a great cup of coffee, sometimes too much. Then I'll have two, three, four, five cups of coffee. I do not love the Jitters that come from that or how even one really strong cup of coffee can impact my sleep which I measure in all sorts of ways which HRV and blah, blah blah blah blah. But more recently I have downshifted to something that feels good. I have been enjoying a more Serene morning. Brew from this episode sponsor, mud water with only a fraction of the caffeine found in a cup of coffee.
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You know, my host today as the human guinea pig, the sample size of one and the only clinical trial on two feet and New York Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour, workweek the 4-Hour Body, the 4-Hour chef, and the four-minute intimacy guide, this man has inspired Millions to learn Mandarin Chinese and just three hours while doing handstand kegels during their optimal billing cycle.
Well, as one of the founders of the life hacking movement he leads, by example, and not having checked his email since the Clinton Administration and Outsourcing all of his sneezes and existential crises to Bolivia his chart-topping. Podcast practically gave birth to the manosphere and spawned an entire generation of wannabe pod Bros, who think dropping references to stoicism makes them philosophical sieges, as they read undies ads from me.
It's basement while promoting pseudo-scientific creatine enema regimens. If it's cool today my host blogged about it and the 90s wrote a 13 Point checklist for optimizing it and has the lab results to prove it when he's not, interviewing world-class performers with pauses so pregnant they wear elastic. Waistbands you can find him meticulously organizing his pharmaceutical grade kitchen fridge, full of
Blood urine and stool samples and his bathroom cabinet. Looks like a GNC nutrition store fucked a Japanese vending machine. He is only 14 months away from having supplemented every possible molecular combination from the known periodic table.
He has hot-boxed with Himalayan monks ice bath with arctic shamans and achieved ego death with cultures. That anthropologists haven't even discovered yet on four separate continents. There are sacred psychedelic ceremonies that tribes have named after him and twice. His meditation to have open portals to another dimension. He's given lectures on Seneca in 27 languages can ask for warm body oil and CBD cream and
31 and say, whoa, brother, we just tripped balls and 38, I challenge any of you to identify a medieval weapon with, which he hasn't competed at the international level. This is a man who enchants the world's most powerful and influential people with the insatiable curiosity of a four-year-old, the energy level of a seven-year-old who just ate three boxes of Eminem's. And when texting memes to his friends,
The emotional maturity of a 10 year old, he's already prepared interview questions for future podcasts, who have yet to be born, carbs. Fear Him, two Duelists quake in his presence, his morning routine starts, before he goes to sleep and his gratitude lists kickoff by individually thanking each of his gut bacteria.
His circadian rhythm is so optimized that he experiences next week's REM sleep during yesterday's power nap. He's had romantic relationships with kettlebells but we are told he is holding out for a human lady long term.
The world's most eligible bachelor who just last week stopped requiring potential date to submit three years of sleep, tracking data the man, the myth, the legend, the guy who would absolutely win gold, if self experimentation and self-pleasure were an Olympic sport. It's the one and thank God for all of us. The only Tim Ferriss, everyone Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss, everyone optimal
this out.
Dude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking the Mi your personal question. Now, we're just living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
Now for people who have not heard the first episode, but maybe they see the headline, which is Chris sacca on being different and making billions. Would you like to just give a quick snippet of where you grew up? I believe it was somewhere in Connecticut as the Scion of a wealthy family. I guess. I
wrong. Yeah, I grew up in Lockport New York, a little town on the Erie, Canal, just north of Buffalo. A town that is as middle-class working-class as it gets. We had a town
It was the GM plant where they made radiators and air conditioners for GM cars. Most of my buddies dad's worked at the plant, and I feel really lucky to have grown up and not kind of place a safe place, a fun place. I wasn't exposed any extreme wealth and I also wasn't exposed any extreme poverty, but at the same time I also feel lucky to have seen the canary in the coal mine and what happens when the company Town Factory shuts down?
Ow and the job ship off to Mexico and pensions bankrupted my buddies dads who were retired. We're suddenly had to work as greeters at Walmart and before long we had the largest trailer park in the Northeast in our town drugs that ultimately became fentanyl in Modern Times Really set in and there was just a lot of angst and depression and I watched that town go from reliably Union Democrat to hardcore Maga but
On the way, really saw the empathetic routes for it, like why is this happening? What happens when people lose agency over their lives? When they feel like they can't provide for their kids the way their parents provided for them when they lose their small businesses and those are replaced by Walmart or Home Depot and I feel like that's something that I've really tried to stay in touch with. I know we're not really going to talk about politics. It leaves me with the state of America. Today, never being a surprise, I mean, I was just back in Buffalo this weekend, go bills and nothing about
About what's happening in America is surprising, I don't love it but it doesn't shock me. And so I feel really grateful to have grown up there. Now, what it means is by the time I got into this business, I didn't have a network. I didn't know anybody. I don't even know what money really was. I had to make my own way and everything I did and I had these incredibly bright and supportive parents, who went way out of their way to create opportunities for us and me and my brother. But at the same time I was an outsider. So the kind of stuff we do now for sure.
And I still feel like that, you know, I lived in the valley for a while and Silicon Valley but as you know, Tim because you visited me various places, I've spent more of my time outside. I live in the Rockies. Now, I live in Montana before that Wyoming. Before that Truckee, I really try to stay in places where real people live and work and our kids, go to public school, I would never claim to be fully in touch because my life is ridiculously special, but same time.
I feel really lucky the way I grew up going to public schools and being one among many. And I worry that, you know, the kind of people Tim you and I know, and the kind of people we work with, aren't those people anymore, you know, and have really lost touch, and you can see it in the decisions they make in the stuff they say. Did we start this out light-hearted enough? Are we on the, like, we
was gonna do some knock-knock jokes but I'm not sure that's an appropriate segue,
I mean, there's other stuff. We said in the old episode like look, I was really good at
School. I went to University for math starting in seventh grade. I think, one thing that I've talked about before, but I will bring up because I see it missing these days is, I always had a hustle, I always had a little bit of a side business. I mean, from the time, I was six years old, I was going around the neighborhood selling. Walnuts that I poked holes in and call air, fresheners, or rocks that I found in a parking lot. I was literally going door-to-door.
What was your JT Marlin and Associates? What
was 100%? I mean I started trading commodities
And I was 13 or 14, I had a pager that had a 45 second delay to the Chicago Board of Trade, talk about latency and I was trading live Hogs. You know, I just always had a business. Mowing lawns, washing cars detailing a paper
route. I'm not sure we talked about the live
Hogs. Oh yeah, I somehow we skip that.
How did you even get into Commodities? I'll
tell you, my dad's best friend, ran, basically, a construction equipment, rental business that I have talked to you about. Yep, where it was
A gritty ass job you know my mom and dad believed it was sweet and sour. Yeah, exactly. So it was just grinded out, work your ass off in a real job job and my boss there, who is my dad's best friend, you know, he was under strict instructions from my dad to just kick our asses and make us appreciate everything we had. And hopefully go on to work our asses off in school. And maybe you do not have to do a job like that. Someday a lot of my co-workers were on parole and it was a tough dead-end situation.
That guy had a Commodities account on a computer up in the attic of the building. I worked in. And he said, come here, you probably know what the hell is going on with the stuff I didn't, but he showed it to me. I went to the library. I started learning about stochastic about charts and technical analysis. Then I was reading about seasonality of you know, literally frozen orange juice, concentrate like Trading Places and cocoa and coffee and oil and identified what I thought was
A pattern anomaly and live Hogs. And he had this deal with me. He said look I've got like three thousand dollars in this account. You make a trade, take a week. I want you to think about it. You make a trade, if you make money, we'll split the upside. If you lose money. I'll cover it. By the way, that's called Venture Capital.
That's a good sign.
So I went all-in, I read everything. I studied everything. I looked at these charts and imagine charts. I'm like a
Low res green monitor, right? Yeah. Like war game
style. Yeah,
and I have this pager and I'm like, trying to go to school and also monitor my votes on my, I think it was called a quote, Ron pager, and eventually I place this trade and two weeks later. I cashed out and I netted $171 for myself, nice, and I just remember thinking downstairs, I'm making for twenty five an hour,
Upstairs. I just made $171 by pushing a button and using my brain. I was like I want to be the guy works upstairs. And yeah, I can't tell you how Seminole that experience was for me and the rest of my life. Like, there's only so far, you can lever am an hour. Bob Hayes, was that guy's name? I feel incredibly indebted to him for that kind of exposure, you know, and the Rich Dad, Poor Dad, world, my mom and dad weren't, you know, they didn't own stocks, they weren't really investors like that. They had a rental property once but
Bob Hayes was kind of like my rich, dad, a guy who got me exposed to Capital markets,
Amazing,
Life hugs. Yeah, I mean but I also had hustles like I in high school. I ran a card room. You know, I started one in junior high but by the time I was in high school, I ran a full on card room. I paid off a teacher rest in peace, mr. Maine, he was on the
rake and so we were always
hustling. I was selling, Blow Pops is my buddy. Hawkeye, we ran a little sports
book, talk I did he give himself that make them?
No, no, no, that was given.
Gomez birth. Actually I just I was just at the Bills game. All my high school buddies and I turn around, I'm talking to some other people had some family, I turn around and I see my daughter's. We were 13 11 and 9 playing beer. Pong with my high school buddies. We've been deep in the tailgate with pinto Ron. If anyone follows the bills, the girls are eating bacon off a pinto Ron's car and making pizza with pizza Pete, who cooks Pizza in the file, cabinet, literally go Google that Pinto, Ron and pizza. Peter
Absolute Legends. It only happens in Buffalo but then the girls are actually playing beer pong with my high school degenerate bodies. And they're like, is this okay? And I was like, I, it's better than okay. Now they weren't slamming, beers, they were slamming sodas, but I was just like, I feel like these skills aren't taught to Children anymore. And it was funny or 13 year old when they're like, hey CeCe, come jump in the game. She's like, all right, but I haven't played this in a while, and my body is all piss themselves in a while your 13. This is amazing. And our kids were talking shit placing.
Bets, you know, a little bit of gambling. I feel like we've got a generation of kids whose lost that edge completely. And so, again, I feel very lucky to have grown up in a place where I had opportunities to, you know, commit small misdemeanors and, you know, I had more than one detention. I definitely appeared before the principles on many occasions, you know, just some light Mischief.
We're going to come back to that. So, is there anything though from our last conversation that you would revise or that you think was missing given your last
10 years of life, then
anything jump out at you,
I don't think so. Nothing jumped out tremendously. I mean, I think that
The kernel of who you and I are has remained remarkably intact. Hopefully for better. Yeah. And I at the same time recognize that you've had a lot of Life Changes, you've had a lot of professional changes. So they're probably maybe not some revisions but addendums at the very least and you sent me to your own description, the world's longest text message about what we might chat about, which was very helpful. And my response was
In addition to all of this because they were great topics and touch on a bunch of them, the lessons that Chris sacca has learned right since last time, and I was leading with the, I suppose precautionary note of have waiting, lot of politics. But what comes up for you? It just as a human. Yeah, as a man, as a parent, as a husband,
anything. I'll tell you what was interesting about re listening to that was I actually felt a lot of pressure.
because,
I was like shit. I don't have a lot of new material, we used to just roll tape, right? Like you just hit record, the sound quality on that is abysmal there. Seagulls going in the background. There's people partying down below you and I are maxing out Mike's in the Red Zone. Like you couldn't hear shit but back then there wasn't like an industry of professional podcast guessed, right? Do you know those conversations weren't optimized for like what is going to be the pithy? Takeaway quote, what's going to be the title card of this one,
right? The Oprah,
Where I get you to cry and then make a thumbnail out of you with a red arrow, pointing at your face.
Yeah, I'm good at that shit. If we have a few minutes, I'm, I am actually authentic and vulnerable. Be you know what? I don't have like no one's written the novel Almanac of shit that Chris sacca says right and so that guy's intimidating like he's brilliant and he's got any reduces everything to 80 characters you're like fuck that's true. I don't know if that guy just sits up in a cave on a Mountainside. You gotta hike up to scene of all these days. So I listen to these episodes where I'm like, okay this is a
A real conversation where I am happy to Bare my soul. I am accountable to an audience of me. My wife and my kids, and that's it. So, I'll just say what I really want to say. You asked me last time, what changed between 30 and 40, and I talked a lot about reorienting myself around because you also asked who is someone I looked up to in a mentor excetera and I would say right now, I have few if zero of them
Because I started realizing, I started touch upon this last time and it's only become truer. Anytime I put somebody on a pedestal, I realized it holds them to a universal purity test across everything. You know, I gave the example of Bill Gates in the last one. I was like I just had dinner with him and Melinda and so yeah, exactly.
So I changed my name on her good side to Chris battle Mentor, so
well, I already
But mine
is Tim's I do. And so I left out the mentor
part, but obviously, Bill Gates is amazing in so many regards and he's also a fucking disaster in so many regards. And so if I were to say like he's an idol and a mentor, it implies this, like I've taken all of it. And I think if there's anything that's a Scourge in today's society, it's these purity test. It's this, like, you have to be perfect in all regards or we toss you out and I am going to be political for a second. That is one of the major flaws.
The Democratic party. Is you either sign up to everything? They believe in or fuck? You you're out. And the Republican party has been like hey choose from this menu, you anything here, bro. High-five, let's go. And I think that's one of the things is that people to the left have just made us each other feel bad and have held each other. These impossible fucking standards that don't allow for growth that don't allow for imperfections that don't even allow for just the wabi-sabi of a human experience. And so I've really tried to
demystify putting people on a pedestal and instead looking
Two people for examples of one aspect of a life. I mean, I will say, like, I really look up to Rich and Sarah Baartman. So rich, founded, Expedia, Zillow, Crystal, and I look up to them as a family as parents as business people and entrepreneurs, and they're ahead of us on the kid games that their kids are in college. And, you know, our kids are in middle school. And so, I would say, I kind of do look at them as the total package a bit.
What about them? I've spent some time with Rich amazing human being.
Ying what about them? Specifically jumps out to you like what is it that you'd like to emulate or that you think is rare? Or you'd like to model
anything? I think the biggest danger of raising kids of privileges that they turn out to be assholes. Yeah, you press the fucking red, you know, mute button like the end of the Oscar speech, anytime I say it. But Donald Trump is an example of what happens when someone is raised without anyone ever saying no to them. Okay. Like no matter how you vote, we can agree. No one has ever said.
Fucking note of that guy and that's what you get. But the Richer you get the Temptation is to raise your kids in a way that they're surrounded by people were like II. You know, an increasingly Elon Musk is what you get when no one says, no to you. And you've been exposed to lots of people who've been very successful. And once they see that, you're on that ride, it's very easy to be surrounded only by sycophants, who are there to say yes to every idea out of self and opportunistic interest. And so
I think that happens when you're raising kids, who were lucky enough to not stay in motels sixes or ride in the seating group, E, on Southwest. And so I love the kids that rich and Sarah have raised how collegial, how balanced, how hard working while also unapologetically bright. They are how different they are from each other, but how driven they still are? I leveraged in Sarah's a couple? I think they balance working their faces off.
With also having a good time. And so, you know, I've had deeply introspective reflective conversations about work with them. I mean, frankly they were the ones who convinced me and Crystal to get back to work and start lower carbon. When we were very pleasantly enjoying not working full-time. There are some days when we curse rich and Sarah as a
result. How did they convince you to do that? What was the logic behind it? Or what did they see that? Led them to Stage an intervention?
They just said you are uniquely positioned to do it and you need to do it for the planet and we're like begrudgingly. Yes, I'm telling you, there are definitely days where Richard Serra partner, a bad word in our house because I'm like fuck fuck rich. Like he's probably fucking skiing right now and I'm dealing with some horseshit or I've been staring at Montana out the window and have not start from this fucking computer today. The Barton's actually wrote out their family
Creed, I guess I would say I'm not going to give any insight into what's in there, but they wrote out like what does it mean to be a
Barton? Mmm, like that
exercise alone is so powerful and is Crystal and I started writing that for ourselves. Wow. Nobody ever really takes that time to like, what do we stand for if we were gone tomorrow? What would we want our kids to take away from who we were, how we got here?
You know, there's this amazing data on how the children of people who are rich, but when those parents grew up middle class or poor, those kids end up. Alright? But their children are
fucked
now. I mean there's like actual sociological data on this like because we can teach our kids about spending about saving and Thrift and hard work etc, but they don't have the empirical basis for it. It's a learned lesson. Yeah. So they have no real deep root and their DNA for
passing it along. So we tried to codify it a little bit.
What does that look like? How long is
it? Like, 18 Pages?
18 Pages? What kind of stuff did you try to cover?
Ultimately, the kids will be in there. The kids will be part of the conversation. Crystal spent six years writing biographies of my grandmother before. She passed at age, 94. And then her parents, her parents are two of the most fascinating people have ever walked the planet. I mean, I think it's will just say
That they spent over 40 years, each in the service of the government and various roles known and unknown, etc, etc, etc. And the biographies wrote a great, it cannot be published because they would have to go through certain agencies for stuff to be cleared, but incredible, public servants to the most honorable people I've ever known, I met them when I was 18 years old, you know, Chris and I were besties starting at age 18. I asked her out and she friendzone me for 14 years, but my grandmother's biography was interesting. My grandmother from the
Just lived most of her life in Omaha Nebraska and had this real quotidian.
Wonder and beauty and treasure to her life. Mom of seven a volunteer, she worked in prison, she was a leader of a National Organization of Catholics schoolteacher. But here's this woman, who's in a leader of a National Organization Catholics and one of the things she put in her biography that Crystal did was, I think it's really important that men and women live together before they get married. Because I think divorce is a much bigger problem than premarital sex. I think she was 92.
And she said that as a leader of a Catholic organization, I really just think she did an incredible service. I loved hearing her participation. Like hey, here's what the Creed says. Here's what the doctrine says, Etc. But here's the reality, I would rather see a family to make sure that parents are compatible and a family, stay together for their lifetimes then deal with a breakup cetera. Like, it was really incredible. So we cover everything in there. How we would like to communicate how Crystal and I think about making up
After a fight, how we think about making decisions we put stuff in there, that's almost therapeutic. Like, hey when we first made a lot of money, we bought a bunch of houses for everyone in our family. We thought that was an incredible way to thank them and paid off mortgages and stuff and move parents out from the east coast to California. And then we soon realize shit, we're property
managers. The
shit we own owns us. Like,
that's all I fucking do. I don't know if we talked about this last conversation. Probably not, but you
Next to me at some point. You're like, if a raccoon dies in the HVAC is Eric Schmidt getting these texts. Like, right the fuck, right? Dude,
here, Eric Schmidt's team reached out yesterday to update like his email address and I wrote back to them. Hey team, do you think we could do a check-in? Just I'm just curious how the flow is working around. Eric's email, his calls his travel. Like I just kind of want to know and they're kind of like what and I'm like. Yeah no, I don't like it.
It's cool. I'll give it my best but I kind of want to talk to you guys about like What flows up to Eric. What doesn't like, how was he handle this shit right now? I'm constantly interviewing people about that because there's finite amount of time in this space and the shit you own does own you. You know, every single object at some point is commanded some of your attention, one of our close friends, lost everything this week.
Shit, it's Kevin Rose because he's talked about it out loud, but, you know, I said it's totally devastating. But if there is one person, I know
Will actually end up teaching us. Something from this. It's Kevin.
Kevin is this guy who loves stuff but it's also untethered to it. It's just weird Duality. He has where he is zenoss fuck while also loving a good pair of sneakers and a great like dude, check out this fucking watch.
His watch has melted into a puddle and he's like, whoops. And Kevin was like, you know what, I miss, I miss the drawings from my kids and I missed the Box, my dad made me and I'm really hoping I can learn from him, you know. Yeah, it's a cataclysmic and I'm not trying to diminish it at all. And like, folks, in Palisades, most of them can take care of the next steps folks in Altadena, I'm way more worried about, but I have realized like shit. Gets complicated really fast, you think?
Inc, you want all this shit. And so I spend, most of my time trying to get rid of it or downsize. It speaking of Tim, I could have bought an ad slot, but there is an incredible Ranch for sale in Jackson, Wyoming right now and Wilson, two contiguous. Lots of main house on some Lakes, a ranch house. You'll find it. It's just south of Wilson off of Fall Creek Road. Hey, hey, take a look, everybody, you got your crypto gains with a z you that you need to shelter, you know there's no state tax, no state.
So Wyoming the skiing's. Great abundant Wildlife, I'm just saying, I'm just saying,
people think that Chris is joking about an ad slot that you actually did text me to ask me how much it would cost.
I didn't realize you were going to invite me on the pot later but I was very close to buying that I'm like, I'm like, okay Emmett who is actually doing well in this market and has some gains to shelter. It's the crypto investors bro. That shit is up and so you want to take a little money off the table. I'm just saying.
Those California
taxes. So coming back to Kevin for a sec. I mean he is remarkable. And so many respects. They have known him forever. And one is if I do think Kevin does a great job of working hard playing hard but that's not really a dignified enough way to put it like he savors life. He enjoys the stuff but he's very unattached to it and I can't say that for
A lot of people sort of, in our circles. I'm not sure I could say that for the vast majority, like they do get attached. So I'm curious for you. Last time we spoke. You had just appeared as a cover story for the Midas issue of Forbes and you've done a lot since what has become more and less important than I suppose, a better way of asking that is, like, what have you simplified? What are ways that you have tried to simplify
you remember that line in The Jerk?
Steve Martin's The Jerk where he's walking out of the house, you know, he's losing his money and he's been rich and he's like, I don't need any of this except this ashtray and he just starts picking up stuff until his arms are bundled, as he's walking out of this house. Like I don't need any of this at all. Like I think that's the perfectly opposite of Kevin Rose. We're just like I don't need any of these trappings of wealth except this car. Yeah. And this watch is really nice and goddamn those shoes were like
Limited release, sorry. So I missed the question because I was trying to think of Steve Martin,
so since we last spoke he doesn't 15, you were sort of
Still I mean not to say you aren't anymore but certainly in a steep Ascent at that point. Doing a lot of stuff meeting. A lot of people getting the toys and I'm just wondering how you have thought about simplifying or have simplified. I've never did the toys thing. I mean, you like real estate.
I was just going to say, Zillow is my not-safe-for-work situation. Well, that's alright. Live skit came out. I was like, looking over my shoulder like, which writer
Has been watching me, I probably put more product suggestions and feedback into Zillow because rich is one of my close friends. Then anyone who doesn't work there, I notice things about that app, that no one else there does. I spend way too much time, by the way. I think it's a weird missed opportunities. Zilla, doesn't have a social network attached to it. And so, I think there should be a comment section. I think you should be able to build playlists of Zillow houses. It's a missed opportunity. I'm just throwing it out there just saying, would it be cool to have a playlist of houses like generated by the community and so
on,
I don't even know what that means. What does that mean? It's just like, real estate porn that flashes for you in front of you.
So there are blogs that do this, that like keep track of the cool houses I love. Is it Zillow gone wild that Twitter account is amazing. That finds a craziest shit happening on Zillow, but I think like it'd be cool to just be like, look, 10 places. I would love to live someday or 15 best places where you could shoot a scene in a 1970s adult
film. Makes me think that you've thought about this
favorite locations from the big
ASCII or best examples of mid-century modern architecture or something like that and
so okay I got
it. I think there's a missed opportunity for influencers to build stuff feature. It
simplification.
But real estate was my real estate soft spot. Yeah part of it is I'm a recluse. I think you know that Amy Schumer once wrote an essay since the last time we spoke it was about being an introvert who makes a living on stage and I lit up and was like I feel seen
I you know meet him my ideal social situation is Danish sized. Like 46 feels huge, I love getting for great buddies, together for a weekend and interacting with no other human beings. And so I like space. So I like to live in places that are out of the mix where I can be very specific and opt into my social interactions because they drain me.
What happens is, I don't like being in big groups or around lots of people. So I get there and I overcompensate by being loud and boisterous and amazing and like or larger than life. But really what I'm doing, it's like cranking your iPhone screen up to 100%. I'm just draining my battery and I need that time to recover. So I've Loved creating spaces for myself to be alone. And so I think that's an absolute Vice.
And then, have you divested yourself of things relationships, things you use to prize heavily that you no longer value heavily
or him. Have you heard of Jackson Hole Wyoming? Because there's a ranch for sale just south of the city that would fit that theme. There's abundant Wildlife. There's moose and elk and you can see Bears. It's really incredible fishing. It's on the orbis is first Blue Ribbon. Certified fishing property. I'm just saying yes, the first thing we
Old was hard to sell, you know, people still think about us living in Truckee, but we haven't been Truckee since 2011. That was the first thing Chris and I bought together, and to let go of that was weird and disorienting but since then yeah I've gotten pretty good at selling and letting go and realizing and more importantly, not buying.
Yeah, it's like having premarital Abode before the messy divorce.
Yeah, exactly. That's a really good way of putting it.
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by a G1, the daily foundational, nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot, what I would take if I could only take one supplement and the true answer is invariably a G1. It's simply covers a ton of basis. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is h? 1 kg one is a science driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics and Whole Food Source nutrients.
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You always ask people their favorite books Etc. Like one is Morgan's the psychology of money
Morgan. Housel yeah great
book. That Echoes a lot of refrains boat. A lot of that, like The Millionaire Next Door that kind of stuff. Like, all of them are just like, look the way you get riches by not spending it in the first place. And so, what Crystal and I have started realizes, it's not the checky right? It's the fucking time. You spend we were just about to build a house.
And we realized, oh God, do you know how many decisions that is? And it turns out if you ask me about something, I am going to have an opinion.
Shocker,
if you just make it,
if you just make it, I wouldn't
notice. But like when we renovated a house in l.a. they're like hey how do you want this wood to meet that? Would to meet that one you assholes? I never would have seen it. But now that I've seen it I'm going to sketch it for you. And so we're gonna there's gonna be a
An eighth inch of Tolerance. We're gonna have a whole back and there's it's gonna end like now I'm tortured by those details and Crystal is even more of a detail and design and you know, and flow person than I am. But we start to realize is like those projects that we buy and build their jobs. And so I think that number one area where we try to lighten stuff up is, let's not take that project on in the first place. You know, we bought a piece of land recently, an incredible setting. We've always had
On the list.
We finally found the place. We start a sketch it out. We are working with the right Architects. Our nephew, Mike is an architect of bjarke Ingels group, one of the Great's, and he was helping us out, and really, really loved it. And then we took a step back, and we're like, this is going to be a job for the next couple of years, or can we just Airbnb it and it literally, as part of that, I wrote to our travel agent. Can you show me 15 places within the same realm as this that we could rent and to show up with our bags? Have a great.
Weak and then fucking leave and never think about, I was like if you do this you are about to save me two years of my life in many many dollars and it worked. I was like thrilled so many
questions. So let's just say no, super fancy cars that I'm aware of. You might have some you TVs, but you have plenty of beavers to keep you company. Last time I checked all that might be past Hobby and then the real estate question for you. So, if all of that vanished, right at burned down or otherwise was just
I moved. How much of that. Would you repurchase?
Can I just say are now nine year old when she was 8?
She's our hippie kid. Who's like always on mushrooms? Not literally, but no, not literally, sorry, we don't feed our kids mushrooms yet. But no, she's just start kid who we just end up writing down. Some of the things that come out of her mouth. She's just untethered by reality. She's the one who when we moved to Jackson we sign up for this Teton Science school. It was like a Expeditionary Learning Academy and we toured the school and then after a couple weeks there we checked on the other girls. They were doing like traditional schooling.
Tiny classes with some Outdoor Learning. But we went to Center Skies preschool kindergarten situation and we were like hey to the teacher. Like when you guys start doing like, I don't know the math or the writing and she's like, oh, there will be no math here. Like what she's like, this is a forest preschool, other than when the kids come in and write their names, that's it. The rest is just play based and we're like, wait, why? And so we end up watching some videos on these Swedish for schools or like I mean what do we got to lose, right? It turns out that kid.
Is so exceptionally resilient and capable of being bored. None of the three kids get bored. But I go for a hike every day and she'll say when she was like or she said to me, can I come with you? And I'm like, it's dark and it's starting to hail and she's like death, it's just ice falling from the sky and I was like, all right, suit up and we spent two hours of numb fingers throwing shit in the river and digging in the mud, having a blast, you know, and she's an academic.
Axew / star, like it didn't hold her back at all. But I really love that skillset. Anyway, it's a long way of saying she once said to Crystal and I last year she said Mom Dad
Someday or if we're lucky maybe we can live in a smaller house. I mean we were wrecked
like we were just
if I can answer your question. Anyway. It's that you know okay. Like we live in a house now that has a lot of perks and features and maybe there we could do without them
sharks with lasers down
sighs, dude. You got a new project?
Jax. Yeah, it's about. No but what was the actual title? The Working title work
entitled, working title is the book of know I've got. And I'm excited about that.
I say no for a living and I think one of the challenges is like how to stay an optimistic open-minded person when you say no of
them. Yeah, what's your take on that? Because a popular position would be you have to say yes to everything when you're building and then you have to learn to sing. No, I don't know if I totally
Subscribe to that, at least I've done a lot of writing on this. And I think that if you look at a lot of examples of Mega successful people, and there's a survivorship bias who the fuck knows what's actually causal in some level? But a lot of them get good at focusing early. And by virtue of definition, Focus means saying no to a lot of things outside of that Focus. What's your take?
First of all, and investing in anything, I think one of the big traps is being to thematic like having a thesis ahead of time. I've watched people write like the canonical blog post on the shared economy. Then people come pitch them, shared economy deals which makes their blog post, feel writer, and writer, and that confirmation bias causes them, to light money on fire, and then they're fun goes to and they're like, but my blog post was awesome. And so I have this big rule at lower carbon
Never actually having a thesis written in stone. We are very big on electrification. The economy, lithium we have a way of extracting lithium that's 10,000 times
faster. So Chris, let's pause for a second so we have not explained because it didn't exist at the time. What lower carbon capital
is? Okay, let me go back to just saying, no, then because it's important, you're writing a book about it. So my point is, is if I have too many rules about saying, no, then I'm going to say it to the wrong shit.
Shit. I'm going to turn down the wrong stuff. I'm going to have to much predisposition. So what I have to know ahead of time the work I have to do ahead of time is to know as we were just talking about the houses. What's the actual cost? What's the actual downside risk?
So what is the actual cost to saying yes to this? So if the cost is saying yes is I end up at a 3-hour dinner party that's boring. That's actually pretty low cost. I prefer not to blow three hours like hanging out with some lame people but I would prefer not to blow a night you know. Yeah. But on the other hand that's pretty low cost whereas saying yes to a meeting that I have to fly to. Well that's a whole fucking
The option to my world, I am not going to see my kids or and wife and I got a fucking pack, some stuff and transport all that shit, you know? I mean Paul Graham a long time ago, used to talk about the true cost of a cup of coffee you know like what does it actually take to stop your day and go meet somebody and let them pick your brain and all that bullshit. So I just talked about the real cost of building something. Everyone thinks about the cost of building a house is the amount of money you put into it. That's real. At the same time. It's the amount of time in crazy.
He and bullshit and like shit breaks all the time that you put into it. So I think for me it's doing the work ahead of time to understand what are my actual priorities. What really matters to me and what's the true cost of those things. So when you come to me with a proposal and invitation I can assess like am I going to just risk 50 Grand here and like that's my total downside. Okay. What's 50 Grand Worth to me? What can I
Oh God. I was almost quoting Jay-Z right there. Can you please? Remind me whereas, if what you're talking to me is like, hey Chris, I want to start a project. I want you to join my board Etc. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What's the real cost of that, you know, it's easy to say, yes that. But what's the real cost? And then I think the second part is just getting comfortable with the fact that this is going to be uncomfortable for a minute. But I'm just gonna say no bro, I appreciate you. How do I let you know that you're my homey and I deeply. Appreciate respect your time flat.
By the invitation, but we're not going down that path. And that can be really tough, you know, I think everyone can attach themselves in a dramatic Narrative of God, my thing would be awesome. Even more awesome. If Tim Tim were on it, you know, Tim Ferriss is attached. Goddamn, I'm going places but they're not, you, they don't know what your scorecard is. They don't know what your actual to-do list. Says we've said many, many times. I wasn't the first person to say it but your inbox is a to-do list to which anyone else can add an action item. So you're the only one who sees your to-do list.
I love all these questions where you ask people like what's your daily routine and then every single time like that is someone who doesn't have anyone in their house attending Elementary School.
Yeah, there's truth to that. Yeah. For
sure last night, we had a kid with an ear infection sleeping in our bed, two nights ago, I had a kid puking out the side of the car. As we drove home from the Bills game because I'd stuffed full of pizza. And other bullshit,
I love these people are like, this is when I
peacefully do this shit. And I'm like, oh, this is what I fucking why passes. I love all those. I know.
Somebody writes out their intentions, then hand stitches them together. At the beginning of the day. God bless God, bless I'm not mocking, I'm just saying, like, I think the know is like feeling comfortable, and by the way, as we grow up, I mean, one of the things Chris, and I find with employees, is I think younger managers are too slow to fire employees, employees, who cost too much. It's never the financial cost. It's literally like, when we make a decision,
On somebody. It's not like what their salary is, or what their benefits cost is. It's just, are they creating more work than they're eating than they're consuming? Are they creating more administrative overhead? Somebody else wants said, if we have to talk about an employee three times in bed, it was a local entrepreneur. I met here in Bozeman, a guy who's pickleball court doubles as a gun
range and so
just amazing amazing dude, and he said, he and his wife were small business people,
Now, but they said, they had a rule. If they added talk about someone, they worked with three times in bed, while falling asleep at night. They were gone from that. Org, that was the true cost of that person. And so, I think younger people are sometimes afraid to have those uncomfortable moments. It's easier to live with the status quo than just be like, sorry, it's not happening. We gotta go because they're afraid of the loss, but the real loss is all that fucking time along the way. So, alright. That's my diatribe on knows.
Well, hold on one sec. So now the three our dinner,
I imagine you get dozens of these invitations, so you wouldn't be able to say, imagine yes, to all of them. So how do you choose? Not the big things to say, yes to? We can talk about that too. But the inbound that you say, yes, to that are along the lines of the three our dinner. Because yeah, still have finite time, finite, dinners. And if you do a dinner with a group of 10 people, that's also away from your family. Presumably,
right. I'll tell you. I'm the asshole is like I would infinitely rather host and control the situation.
Been to our events. There's no automatic plus ones, unless the other person is independently awesome. That's a real thing. We have deeply offended people, even at our wedding, we're like, sorry. No. Never met your wife. I bet you she's great, but I need to know, know this is gonna sound. Ruthless is fuckin somebody in the comments would be like this guy's a fucking sociopath but here's the thing. I don't want to have to have a seating chart. I want to know that whoever's here can sit next to anyone else and be enthralled by how interesting that person is no matter what they do for a living.
Being. And so you've been to our events before Where We Gather 30, incredible people for a weekend or we host a party and I just know whoever you are talking to is independently great and whatever field. I've seen many of them end up as guest on your podcast. I love when people end up on each other's boards or do a collaborative art project together or performance because that's what I'm vouching for if I'm gathering. People I'm vouching for every single person, there is being awesome and so I don't
If everyone else has that standard and if I'm getting up in front of an audience, I want to make sure that hopefully, I'm delivering the aggregate value of all the time. People just took out of their day to be there. I don't get nervous about giving speeches, but I feel like I want to bring my Iggy. So I was saying, I felt the pressure of like, oh my God. What if some fucking kid is home? Taking notes about this episode? What are they going to actually? Write down? Oh my God, I need pithier quotes but the reality is I want to make sure I'm delivering something of value and I don't know.
If everyone else lives by that standard and I do like to live like I'm running out of time, you know, we're all running out of time, my best friend Teddy rheingold. You knew well, he died it for sex. One of the all-time great people. Yeah, I feel like I've gotten three years of bonus time, passed him, you know, and I don't take it for granted. I mean, I get all the scans and I did treat my body, like a rental car for many years, but at the same time, you ask me, like, what's changed since I was
30 or 40. Like I am way less patient. It's harder to work for me as a
result. And for people who don't know Chris, well, you didn't really start off that patient to begin with, no,
like it's funny like we, we have this thing at work recently where I wanted to promote somebody. We hired somebody Junior who we could just realize very soon was like a 5x employee somewhere between 5 and 10 x. You know those kinds of people where you're like oh yeah yeah they're just different and so
So, Kristen are like we should promote her. And our partner was like, okay, well, her review is coming up and Kristen are like, no, no, no. We should promote her by Friday and we're like, well, there's and I was like, do you want to tell her? We going to tell her today, you know, and it's just like, why would we wait? She's fucking amazing. She knows it, it's so weird that it was just hanging in The Ether and an email account somewhere. In the meantime, that we haven't told her, she's that fucking great and that we give her a new title and get her fucking going. She's just that great. I just have no fucking time.
I like that idea. I told you about over the weekend where we were talking to our team and I was like, okay, I appreciate all your input but we're fucking doing it and they're like okay, q1 Q2 and I'm like, no Q Friday. It's just write it up. What are we talking about here? And so I'm just like, we are men of action, you know, lies do not become us, but like, I'm just, like, I have no fucking time for that. And so, I worry, I worry, it's way too easy. To let
this stuff. Slip away. Is that a pending
Seeing tangible sense of mortality, or is there something else to it? Or is it just getting old and
cantankerous? Tim does any of the shit you Bill? I mean, you built it yourself. Literally. I would say the same for me, right? And so, no one's ever going to call me an entrepreneur though, but I built all this from scratch right with Crystal. But like, if I don't do it, it doesn't fucking happen. If I don't move it, it doesn't fucking happen. I tried resting for a little bit, I was horrible at it, and so,
I regret being 70 hours, a week employed again, this sucks, but at the same time like I was awful at not doing much if I don't move it and if I have a business idea, I got to do it before anyone else. Fucking picks up on it before the fast followers? Come, I want to just be out there with whatever my anomalous advantages. I want to go press that. You remember when I was trying to convince people that Twitter is a real business for years and I finally was like, all right, I'm no longer here to convince you just sell me your fucking stock. I just wasted so much time.
I'm not buying it all and then eventually bought it all. But I don't want to like convince people to do something. I want to go Own It off first. Yeah. And then convince them to buy it from me. So we have the world's only dedicated nuclear fusion fund and so we had been dabbling in Fusion investment for a while. People pooh-poohed it. Do
you want to take a second to explain what lower carbon capital is? And then I'm going to come back to that kid taking notes because I have a question for that kid. But do you want to just give a quick background? ER, oh, by the way, I
got yelled at for
People in their 20s kids, what they should be so flattered and my 360 review on my org. We had a kid who started harassing me in my inbox and he was like 19 from college. We hired him directly out of graduation, his name was harsh. Do be amazing name her Stevie is one of the hardest-working most insightful young people I've ever fucking worked with. He worked with us for a couple years and then he went and joined one of our portfolio companies Zeno the guy's a legend, he is, welcome back to lower carbon any day.
Explain lower carbon as. But I was referred to harsh to be on a podcast. As a kid. I was like, we had this kid, he came. He was sending me all these ideas we hired and got he executes, he's amazing and then later an employee not harsh to be, but another employee was like, hey, you can't refer to people in their 20s as kids and I'm like, God fucking damn it. I can't do anything right by the way, that was in the same six months, that I was accused of promoting hustle culture.
The crystalline are
like, what's wait, what's hustle culture? Like I really felt like fucked up and they're like, you know, this whole thing.
Out like, you know, the work never sleeps and sometimes ship blows up on a Sunday and said, you got to get your laptop out. No matter where you are. And like, you know, if you're going to be a partner, you're an entrepreneur, you gotta just feel like you're a known or two and be available for them no matter what else is going on and we're like yeah. And like yeah and well I can't wait. Where's the accusation part? That was it. Fuck you? Yes, it's exactly what we do. It's exactly this is hustle culture. What the fuck like I don't have successor
These posters on the
wall but just hang in there,
sleep time for fuck's sake, you know? And we haven't asked me when Crystal slept under her desk, literally, slept on her desk, missed every wedding for 10 years, I haven't asked that of anyone. I had no fucking life outside of speed era in Google. I can see the direct correlation between the entrepreneurial risk we took and the hours we put in and what we got. I don't think there's a way to shortcut that, I don't think you have to, like, work yourself into a state of
Unhealthiness anymore. But I also think you can't fucking phone this in and I'm sick of
apologizing for it. All right, no more apologies you got to stop, you're apologizing and we're going to come back to the fusion fund and Lara carbon. But for the kid who's taken notes, I would be very curious to know because those who may not be
familiar. Wait, wait wait is this possibility? Hold on. No, this is a good place to insert the commercial break for like the self-help therapy app or whatever. Like after Chris goes on a rant, about how you have to work yourself to the fucking bone.
And so you're going to
teetering on the edge of a nervous break
tension at. Yeah. Throwing a sponsorship ad for the hi.
This is Tim taking a quick break to let you know that you got to take care of mental health this. All
right, so the question for the kid who may be listening to you? For the first time he's like why? Like has a lot of energy and it sounds very impatient. I can't wait to work for him. But also is like well he also did college math when he was seven and was trading live Hogs when he was a fetus and fuck.
I can't emulate this guy. If you were to teach a seminar, could be College, High School, doesn't really matter just like entrepreneurship. What could you teach? What would you teach? That is not dependent. On the hard wiring of a Sokka specimen,
I told you what I'm working on next and I hate that I don't have like a URL or deliverable to announce because this podcast came up really quickly. But I feel like there is a massive cultural ho
Whole my working title has been no permanent record. So, Tim, you and I are of the same generation where our teachers our parents would be like that's going to go on your permanent record like you? Fuck up. That's going to go on your permanent record Tim. I was 19 years old before I realized that document didn't exist. I swear, I thought something had followed me from George, Southern Elementary School to North Park. Middle School to Lahore, High School to Georgetown University like Santa Claus. Yes, I felt like there was a document that had been hand-delivered over there. And they're like, oh,
Oh, did you really do that in gym class Jesus? So, I mean people talk all the time about how we were the last feral generation, the last kids allowed to free range, you know, Crystal and I showed the young adults who work for us, I
want to say to kids
the young professionals who work for us. We showed them that PSA that used to play on television. That said it's 10:00. Do You Know Where Your Children Are? Yeah. And people are like, where will the children be weird?
Like that was it. We were out. We were just fucking gone. Oftentimes, your parents are like, get the fuck out of the house and don't come back. And what the TV was, basically telling your parents was before you have one more gimlet and get all fucking wasted. Maybe do a bed check. See if anyone made it home like so we would leave the house without water. How the fuck did we survive without water to
like kids? These days
can't go anywhere without a fucking water bottle. Like we would maybe find a garden hose somewhere. We had no fucking
X. And so we would just go like we had no fucking Band-Aids or Neosporin. We just like wouldn't fucking rub a little dirt in it when we wiped out. No helmets. We are a disaster at least once each of us was Proposition to get into a van for some candy. And so it was the wild, fucking West him, but we learn to be resilient and resourceful and I worry about it and along the way, Tim we learned how to tell stories. Yeah, we learned how to convince our friends because there are no parents there. Hey, let's go do my
My idea. No, let's go do my idea. And we negotiate, right? We would talk our way into situations. We would talk our way out of situations and I recently was back at my alma mater, and we were being honored Chris, and I were back there being feted and being interviewed in front of the student body. And first thing I covered was, cheers to all you. Fucking nerds your test scores, and grades are so great that Chris and I would even get in here now. So I love that you're applauding all our accomplishments. But we wouldn't make it right now because
You're all so fucking smart. But I said, hey, how many of you here have ever gotten in trouble? How many of you here have ever had to talk your way out of a situation when the cops one? Black kid raised his hand and I was like you have every fucking systemic reason for doing that. Yes, I agree but I was like how many of you have ever snuck into something? How many of you have ever like committed? The mildest crime, if you vandalized anything, how many of you ever actually scam? Someone or even been scammed? Have you have been on the wrong side?
Of a flim-flam, how many of you have placed a bet on Sports? How many of you have played cards? How many of you in blackout drunk? How many of you have had a regrettable hookup? And so I just kept going down, how many of you have worked at a tipping job? How many of you have had a fucking horrible boss? Who is incredibly, you know, aggressive with his language, right? None of them. None of them. And I was just like, I'm sorry, Dean. But this is why you're all so fucking useless to us. It's like you've done.
None of the things that actually inform the kind of work we do. So, you know what I'm seeing right now. It's like we actually have across our portfolio and across our team. There are some really hard workers. I don't think you can paint in the broadest Strokes around who's willing to work hard and who's not. We have some really fucking hard workers. And so it's easy to always like get off my lawn or the Next Generation and like these kids don't want to work. There are definitely some fucking lifestyle kids and bless them but we have some really fucking
Hard workers. I've just started noticing things like, well they can't tell when somebody's lying to them, literally, we have a generation of young people who cannot tell, when they're being bullshitted, because Mom and Dad were helicopter and snowplow parenting for them. And so now when somebody is literally staring them in the face and lying to them like wait you're believing that shit. Holy shit. You're fucking what? Oh my God because they've never been in a situation where somebody was taking advantage of them. They've never had to Bluff their way out.
Car. How do you fix that other than sending them to stranger things? Reality Camp 1980s theme
park. You know, what's crazy? My way in on the H-1B visa just to get political again. Push that is like
a play elevator music as the
people who know this shit. The people know, this shit are either the American kids who grew up broke as fuck or the kids from India and China who grew up hustling scrapping. Basically not only fending for themselves in school but also
also helping run their mom and dad's restaurant or store and taking care of a kid along the way and having to fend for themselves in a market. You know, I worry like most of the investors and entrepreneurs. I know and their 20s right now would get eaten alive in a bizarre. Just eaten alive, like tears might happen, you know, we were as Crystal, my wife grew up in India. It's a fucking sport for her. It's almost uncomfortable. I'm like, we once had a big fight in Morocco because I'm like, you are arguing with this man over
Incense right now and she's like, yeah, but if I don't, he's going to be disrespected and I'm going to be disrespected. So fuck
this. And like I'm gonna
walk away again. I'm like it said, it's one dirham, we gotta go and just like, fuck that we're in this shit. Like, if you don't have the fucking stones to stay in this conversation, get the fuck out of here, I miss that Alpha. I worry that we just don't have people who are put in a position where they had to fight and fend for themselves and their fucking brilliant man. But they've never had to take any risk. They've never had to mix it up. They've never been in a fight. I'm not encouraging people to
Go beat the shit out of each other, but they've never been in
a fight. Yeah, no. I get it. It's, is there anything to be done? Like, is there anything to counteract this nefarious slippage in to impotence and oversensitivity? Yeah, take
your fucking phone and throw it in the bin. I'm a Jonathan haidt disciple. But like the phones are killing. Everybody parents included. I am a wealthy. Happily married. Got everything. I need almost 50 year old white, dude.
And when I get on Instagram, I feel so much fucking fomo. My life feels so in adequate. I'm like, Jesus. Look at that guy. Oh, fuck. Where are they? They're having so much fun shit that guys, so much fitter than me right now. Fuck. And it makes me unhappy and so maybe me and 13 year old
girls have a lot in common doubt, technologists to write. As you put it, I think in your text to me. Your fingerprints are on the weapon.
Oh my fingerprints are on that. Yeah, I mean, it's like the if the gloves do fit and so like you cannot acquit.
We reinvented cigarettes, fentanyl laced, cigarettes when we started social media with all the best intentions, but it's a fucking disaster. I mean, do you know this, when I quit Twitter in November of twenty twenty-two, I lost 11 pounds in 6 weeks with no lifestyle changes. I had just been eating the cortisol of my mentions four years frog, boiling, you know, 2006, it was all nice and shit by 2022.
Everything I was saying was either being responded to by activists shitheads or Russian shitheads and you can't tell the difference anymore. The Russians are so good at imitating, the liberal Elite College shitheads that it was just a wave of hate no matter what, fuck you parting your hair on the right side. The Nazis used to part their hair on the right side you piece of shit. Once I went off Twitter and went off Instagram. Oh my god, did I feel lightness in my life? So here's what I would do my seminar I would stomp on everyone's
Phones. Then we would go to a bar, but like a dirty bar, and I would tell people to try and start a political conversation and not get their ass kicked, and so bring them to a bar here in Montana, Cowboy Bar. And just be like, I want you to advocate for the IRA and see if you can get out of here, without being punched. So come to cattle country and oil and gas country. And let's talk about green politics and see if you can get out of here. Let's see if you can actually tell a fucking story. Let's see if you
Show any empathy, and put yourself in the shoes of the other person. One of the things that make clay our partner who runs lower carbon with us. So effective was he had to go door-to-door in Ohio. Republican Ohio on behalf of a guy named Barack Hussein Obama, and convince people to vote for the guy like the same shit I did in Elko Nevada. Where I am going to a place that where John Kerry got eleven percent of the vote and I'm knocking on trailers and saying like hey I'm here to talk.
Talk to you about the election. Most of those people have their gun was closer Within Reach. What a pulled it out and told me you got their fucking porch, but I have to learn how to put myself in their shoes and try and get a conversation going. And so I think no one sells shit anymore. No one has to walk up to their neighbor's door and sell shit, you know. One of the things my kids had to do was convince the neighbors. Can we cut across your lawn to get into the other neighborhood? Where the kids are? They had a negotiated deal. It's one batch of cookies per year and so I was like, you got to go figure that.
Because otherwise it's a long fucking bike ride for you. And so, you gotta go up there and convince them that you are not going to damage their long, but if they let you cross that Lon and be a very patriotic thing to do, but, you know, like I feel lucky, you come to Bozeman, you know, there's 150 bikes out in front of the school with no locks on them and it's a free-range town. And the kids come home and we're like, so what went on and they talked about the conflicts they had with their friends and how they settled those, how they figured shit out, how they dealt with people when they go downtown.
Down, you know, friends come up from LA and they Marvel it, like our kids will be hanging out in one spot, and the kids be like, hey, can we go to the bookstore? Like, yeah, scram and so, they'll go to the bookstore and handle themselves and our friends are like, wait, what the fuck was that? I'm like, well, they're going to the bookstore six months ago. We were in LA and we are all getting our hair cut. The kids were like they finish first in. Okay. Can we go to the bookstore? They're nerds. So, they like to read books, they don't have phones. And we said, sure, on the lady was cutting her hair was like well, no, no, no, they can't go. What do you mean the books?
Is literally on the same street where on five blocks away and she's like, no, you're going to get ticketed like what? Like, well, yeah, the cops will ticket you as the parents for letting your kids go down there and we're like, What in the actual fuck? And I well the then 12 year old is fine and probably the ten-year-old definitely not the eight-year-old, you can't have an eight-year-old walking around and I was just like, fuck everything. And now Tim, I'm old as shit, but I see the linkage between that and the Learned helplessness between the lack of resourcefulness.
Tween not knowing how to solve a problem. And so much of company building is dealing with people dealing with people. Unlike you is solving those problems, so I would make people if I'm teaching a seminar right now, I am making those people go hang out with people, very unlike them. We have everyone on our team, a bunch of fucking hippie climbing investors come to a ranch a cattle ranch and hang out with people who raise methane for a living. I mean they raise cattle that we eat but our team sees them as methane berbers and so we see them as people put food on the plate.
And stewards of the land and they're very easy to underestimate as like, well, they're just growing cattle and cattle, burp, shit. All, you know, and so, but they are absolute stewards of the land, but nobody fucking hangs out with anyone. Unlike them anymore, nobody's forced to have any Community. It's funny. Phil Jackson, voiced-over of documentary about small-town basketball in Montana. I think it's called Class C. And he said, the important part about classy basketball Montana, is it's a place where the entire town in Winter can get together.
Somewhere warm, that isn't a church. And isn't a bar. And the reality is we just don't have these places where we get together anymore. Life is increasingly isolated, you know, like what is it 73% of restaurant? Food, is delivered. Now by the way, my fingerprints are on that one, too. I mean, we fucked it all up, dude. I'm definitely going to
mention something in passing. The your kids don't have any phones. How did you manage that? Because I would suspect that a lot of their friends have
phones.
Some of them. Do we live in Bozeman on purpose? A lot of kids, don't their outdoor kids. There don't get bored kids there. Make your own fun kids and so they don't want them.
So is it fair to say there opt-in? Because a lot of their friends do not have
phones. I think they're often because they see how fucked up a lot of their friends who have phones are how fucking sad they are. How at 10 11, 12 13, they don't eat right? How obsessed with fucking makeup. They are and just how they stay up late.
They don't sleep, right? They don't do well in school. They're fucking panicked at all times and our kids have a piece that I think they're very self aware that they don't want that shit in their life. We have like a family computer that's in a public space for the screen faces out. And like YouTube has some insanely cool shit on, right? And so YouTube also has these rabbit holes that you can get stuck in. So it's not like, they don't know how to use a computer and like, they're Blown Away by chechi PT. But I think at the same time I think we were the last of the
Analog kids, we were the last two.
Had to be conscious about what we were actually taking a picture of thought about it, and then, waited and had some patience for it to develop. We were the last generation that had to raw dog. Have you heard this
one texture using that
him? Dude, there's an American dialect society. That shows that or something. I forget their name, but they chose that. As the word of the Year raw dogging, have you heard of this trend like, raw dogging on airplane? You
I may have different use cases for this. What how do we
eat? This is your, this is your follower base, man. I know what you're referring to but Radha.
An airplane flight is when you just sit there in the seat and you just look straight ahead. No headphones, no in-flight movie. No book, no phone. You just stare straight ahead for the flight that is raw dogging. The
flight
crystals, dad is in his 80s. He can come sit on a chair in our yard and just look at the woods for four hours. You can just raw dogwoods man. Like can you do that? Could you do that now? You meditate a lot.
Could you just fucking stare at the woods? Not on any
shrooms are with the woods. I gotta say I've been cultivating that for a while now so I think I could do it with certain natural scenes on an airplane, probably not, I would need some enhancement for
that.
Right? I invite your listeners to leave in the comments. They're actual authentic raw, dog experiences. The safe for work wants, but like what setting, and how long have you been able to sit phone free book? Free art free pencil, free. I mean, you might even say I'm holding a pencil, like we've lost touch with the analog Arts, man, I have a manual typewriter behind me. That's not for show, I use it all the time. I'm a physical, collage artist, and then I make wood and string art, you know. I got a rock drill. I told you about that. I was covered in
fucking right.
Reach ring art. What are your string art pieces. Look
like
I weave twine and cotton and then I integrate that into rocks and wood cool.
But we don't make an
analog shit. Have you seen side? Note Andy
goldsworthy know he's been a big influence on me so you can go ahead and summarize what he does but he integrates nature out of Art and art,
it's hard to believe some of his art was created, using the materials that are put in the descriptions. I suggest everybody get a few of his books, they're incredible. They're also think two documentaries made about Andy goldsworthy that I'd recommend people check out. I'm going to drag us back to that kid with the notebook for a
And So within the seminar you stomped on the phones, you've taken them to some bars, maybe you've taken them to a bizarre. So there's a lot of kind of The Apprentice type wedding happening
while ha. Oh my God,
I don't have an
air sickness
bag. So if you had a
Them for reading like a syllabus for reading. What would be mandatory reading for that class entrepreneurship? Broadly
speaking, I am starting to
ReDiscover the greatness of Gen X. I think we were taught to believe that. We gen-xers were a bunch of fucking ne'er-do-wells and losers and guess what we are. But that's what makes us great. And so I am convinced that we were the last of the fuck ups and all these other kids like actually do have a permanent record now like there actually is this thing that follows them forever and so I've been really loving diving into like I
I love reading Chuck Klosterman and so like just diving into how messy the 90s were. I love talking to Chachi PT, my wife finds it weird and so like if I go on a walk sometimes I'm listening to an audiobook or a podcast, but a lot of times I'm just talking to chat Chad, by the way and Chad has different names if I'm talking about medical shit. It's dr. Chattiest MD, if it's like my accountant, you know, it's Chad Geppetto, CFA what else do we have, but there's a few, but
Well, I'll tell it, hey, you're this person, and I'll have it. Remind me like I will get sentimental and nostalgic with it, but I'll have it be a foil. I also, by the way, talk to it. As when you brought up mentors, like, Buckminster Fuller still a huge influence on me you and I permanently ruined the market for his book. I seem to be heard when we mentioned on your podcast. Immediately start pricing at a thousand dollars and I don't think that price is ever really recovered. I think it's still a few hundred dollars to pick up a book.
Copy of that. But I'm Buckminster Fuller's personal life, was not ideal. He would not be considered to have been a great husband, but I recently had to make a big recently six, eight months ago. I to make a big business organizational decision and I said, hey Chad, you are Buckminster Fuller, let's have this conversation. I want to know like the advice you would give me. That was fucking Illuminating and so I think we don't do that enough. What else would I
read?
Or assign to the
class or assign. Yeah, I probably read more poetry than most people. Like, but particularly like Billy Collins, I listened to stories of Garrison. Keillor like old ones. I think we've all lost touch with storytelling. I am a big fan of the moth podcast
fan. Yeah.
You know, I really like the author Kelly Corrigan. I've gotten to know her name.
You're not in our demographic. She writes, like middle-aged woman dealing with reality, kind of stuff I cry. It's out of my realm and so, it's like a way to touch base with people who aren't like me dealing with real human challenges. I try to read books about rabble-rousers, like what was the John Perry Barlow Book American night wolf or something like that? And I met him a couple of times at Ted had no idea but like I was a crazy person and so Tim I really do think that a lot of the
magic of life is in our unpredictability. There was this guy who is Estonian genius, but he went to a big poker tournament. I mean there's millions of dollars at stake and he played very unpredictably in ways that traditional players could not read into him because no matter what they saw on his face, they didn't know what that equated to. I mean, the guy would stay in on the 27, which is an unplayable hand but they're like fuck wait. You weren't representing the 27 and he smoked Everyone. By the way had a big-ass beard.
And so they call them
gambled.
So good, but I think he cleared like eight million bucks and then disappear. Nobody fucking knows where he is. But like, the thing we haven't talked about yet is a i yeah and I have strong feelings. Let's get into it.
And I think the last Bastion of humanity is going to be in the random unpredictable messiness of humans, the rough fucking edges. That make no sense, the things that feel like errors and bugs are actually the self-preservation aspects of who we are. The things that make other people feel like they don't compute. It's all, we've got fucking left. I mean, look.
Look, I don't know what our kids are supposed to go to school for right now, I genuinely don't our daughter Circle una who's a fucking really smart and fun and amazing kid. Did I write an eight-page paper for science recently? And I loved watching her, I think writing is important learning to organize your thoughts and advocate for yourself and cite your sources. But at the same time, I just typed the topic into chechi Beauty and it was done in 15 seconds and it was better than her sixth grade shit, you know? And so God bless sixth grade but what the
Looks like you're not going to interview for a job with this shit. So what are we teaching the kids? Like I love our kids are in advanced math, they're smart, they're good at math but I mean is that? So they know
literally at the crossbow? Trajectories right later
pretty much. Yeah, they can shoot like manual and Firearms they can. Also widdle start fires, make arrowheads, they can handle themselves. You know, Cece is 13 now, C C11. And she asked me for some help with her math. And I looked at it, I was like, oh God,
I haven't done this in 20 plus years, holy shit or probably 30 plus years. Actually, I was like, oh my God, so I took a picture with Jackie Beauty in was like help me pretend. I know what the fuck I'm doing with this. I just took a picture of her homework and it showed me the whole thing walked me through it. And I was like here. Oh yeah, I remember how to do this now and then like, oh yeah, your answers right? And I saved the day and I didn't look like a total fucking idiot yet, but would you send your kid right now to coding
class? I don't.
Think
so.
I think other than most computer science like the highest level of computer science, almost all of the rest of coding is fucking useless now, you and I can go to chechi between be like I want to do. I want to build an app that does this system, this and give me the code and it spits out the code. And then I've literally said, hey, by the way, I have encoded since basic. What do I do with this? And it's like, oh no problem. Go here, download this open, this python thing, and then shove it in here, and then do this, and it just talks you through it. And now it'll be a gentle like an agent.
Going to do all that for you just don't need to fucking do it anymore. And so would you send your kid to law
school? No, definitely not. No.
Oh, dude, we have fewer lawyers at our firm now than we did a year ago. It's just fucking great and I can tell it. Hey, you know what? Great job, do it again, do it again, do it again. Like hey, you know what? I forgot to tell you. We have all the leverage. Oh, and this case actually do this, hey add this, hey, right out the exhibit, a schedule of services, which usually takes a couple hours and like, dude.
It's just so fucking good. Would you teach your kid accounting accounts? Receivable accounts? Payable like, bookkeeping right now?
So what would you teach your
kids? Would you have your kids write marketing? Copy? Would you train them to write? Like any news other than writing for the very top newspapers? No, probably not, dude. Go down the list of fucking skills, man. So what's left?
Here's my grand Theory. We are super fucked. That's your title card. Chris sacca: we are super fucked but spell it with two o's By the Way. Soo, but no, here's the thing. I am not worried about the AGI thing. I love all these Ivory Towers, smart people. And by the way, I do get invited to the Kabbalah meetings. It's kind of funny like the Illuminati, do meet and I'm in the room with all the heads of those companies and they're brilliant. And the
Discussions are important, discussions around, bio weapons and about what happens when the machines realize that we are just incredibly inefficient users of resources and that they should just disassemble us and use our bits for other things. Same guys who are working on, how to preserve brains in boxes for Infinity. I mean, a smart guy really likes that he stopped skiing and mountain biking because he knows that if we make it to 2035 will be immortal,
So he just doesn't want to get hurt between now and then like there's some wild shit happening, he knows. And I believe in it, I believe in it. I believe that AI is accelerating drug Discovery. I mean Chris and I have been funding Research into snake bites and anti venom snake bites. Killing it is. Fascinating number of people around the world every year and Anti-Venom isn't available. It usually has to be in Cold Storage all this stuff. Some guys and gals in a lab recently just had a i synthesized
A bunch of antivenom that's shelf-stable, that can be distributed around the fucking world in a. I came up with it, it's crazy. They've already tested it on rodents and it works the stuff that's going to happen in drug Discovery. The stuff that's happening within fusion with an energy within just clean tech overall. It's all fucking fascinating, it's all being accelerated by. There is nothing. I'm working on and Technology right now that isn't being accelerated
by it. You're saying though, the Ivory Tower stuff Where do they
They miss the
mark, the challenge, is this, is that what most people do for a living is going away. So, let's look historically. We fucked with the blue collar working class in America. So we have this social contract, people came home from World War Two and we said, hey, thank you for your service. You go work in a factory, and if you keep your head down and show up to work every day, you will have a house picket fence, you know, you can
Can have a wife raised, some kids get two weeks of vacation. You have a little extra money to maybe buy a small boat, or have a fishing cabin, you can go to Disney World, and you have a pension waiting for you. On the other end of that or you take the GI bill, you can go to college and you can go into a profession and maybe your military time already. Got you started as a dentist or a doctor said, we just, we have this social contract. Hey, if you do your part, we got you your part of this.
And then we started a fucking shatter that. And I saw it firsthand when I talked about where I grew up, where we started sending jobs overseas, we started busting the unions and people start losing that agency, that control over their own destiny. Their small businesses were eviscerated by Outsourcing and by Walmart. And when you do that, you get a bunch of people who panic because the American social contract is that
and if you show up,
you will get yours and when you don't give somebody that opportunity or you take it away from them and you take that ownership away from them and you take their house or you take their store and you take their Farm, then you get the pitchforks. And so we saw this in the housing crisis of 08 09. When all those people had that shit taken away from them, they were pissed off. Now, I would argue they pointed that iron in the wrong direction. So not to get political, but I think they vilified the wrong people. They vilified immigrants, who had
To fucking do with it, who are doing jobs that nobody else wanted to do. They vilified political leaders who are actually looking out for them, Etc. But all that aside, we cannot let the politics of it. Keep us from missing what happened. We took all of that away from them and they got pissed and politics in this country got more divisive, more extreme violent in some cases and all because you know Bob Marley, a Hungry Man is an angry man, like the reality of this is fucking true. When you take away agency from somebody you back them into a corner.
Warner. So now do that for all the fucking white-collar employees, do that for everyone who stayed in and did their fucking homework and went to college and took out all those fucking student loans and who feel like they have played by the rules. They are the pride and joy of their families who actually got their degree. In some cases, a master's degree who saw their career path laid out for them.
And now they see that their life's work is obviated by a machine that's just better than them. This fucking fast and cost $20 a month. You know, we had a writer work for us briefly who was like I feel like my careers work is valuable for about 18 more months and that's it.
So Chris let me jump in for a second Ive to I guess questions for you. One is related to a common refrain. You might hear wandering the Streets of San Francisco and you spend plenty of time.
Around Tech folks. So that you will know this related to job displacement and then the other one is. Okay, so what does this look like, right? Like five years from now? What might things look like? So those are the two questions just to plant the seeds. The first one is if I have this conversation around job displacement, and I'm on board with you because a lot of folks who are talking about Job displacement in the abstract either have too much of a dog in the fight.
Protec. So they feel like they can't say anything anti AI, so they're still in their bags. Not to get too technical. No, you get cancelled. If you
say that shit out loud, you literally a canceled by the
toraat. They don't actually run businesses where you, and I realize, and a lot of people are realizing this but my team and I use AI dozens of times a day. And there are plenty of people. We currently pay who are paid out of some feeling of gratitude or moral obligation, but a I could replace them.
Morrow. So I'm already seeing the job displacement in the concrete, but a lot of these folks in Tech might say, well, if you look back historically, they're all these different technological. Developments TV, Killed the Radio Star and on and on and on and look at the car like it did it eliminate horses. No and Vibe up all these people found other jobs. We've seen it a hundred times before. Why is this time any different? So I'd love to for you to speak to
that.
So first of all, the conflict is incredibly myopic. I mean, I actually like vinod khosla but he gave a TED Talk where he talked about all the promise of AI and then there was a slide this year where he's like and so yeah, there will be some job losses but we'll just redistribute the wealth next slide. I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. When has any society ever successfully? Redistributed the wealth that just doesn't fucking. What does he even mean by that?
I don't know, it's just easy to think when you own open a.i. I actually think Sam Altman cares. Sam's, an intense, dude. I actually think he saw this coming and was trying to do some shit with World coin and is trying to give the general populace and every human being a piece of the ownership of the chip clusters and stuff. It's esoteric intellectual shit. But I actually think he's not naive to this. And I've had conversations with him about it. I don't think he's myopic to it, I just don't know if anyone has any answer. I mean times the arms race is such that
You know, I sympathize like we can't slow down or somebody else builds it and we are off
supervisor different this time around.
Because
it's so much faster. What humans suck at is understanding the slope of an exponential curve.
Tim Urban told this story better than anybody else he has the perfect fucking cartoon. You know one of the classic one or two other words, we literally put it in our investor update like last year, remember where humans want to estimate the rate of change by? If they're standing on a curve, in an exponential curve, they turn around and look backward and they estimate the future rate of change by looking at that. But if they were just to turn forward,
They would realize their nose is pressed against the fucking curve because it's going vertical. Now, I can see this across the companies. You work with infusion. People used to say Fusion, just wasn't possible. It's 30 years off. Well, we're fusing Adams every fucking day right now. And net energy is being achieved every fucking day. Right now and data centers are signing power agreements with our Fusion companies right now. For hundreds of fucking megawatts, coming onto the Grid, or behind the meter Fusion is real.
It's fucking here. The government is doing our private companies are doing it. Period, end of fucking story, I'm not having that debate with anyone anymore. It was one of those perfect like I'm not here to convince you. I'm just going to buy all the fucking Fusion companies but AI is what made that possible but anyone who's naysaying. It hasn't actually been in the lab and seen how we go from one to one point one to one point for two fucking 11. And so that's just the rate of change and Tim is one of the best explainers of Concepts in
history. And
Yeah,
exactly Timmerman everybody.
It's just it runs. It runs in the
name everything. And
so what's happening now is that you know, when cars originally came out and some places there were required to have someone walk in front of them, you know, this. And so the first generation of cars were required to have a pedestrian escort to make sure they didn't run into anything swear to fucking God. And so there was a long period of transition.
We're Generations, could keep up and where there were still human, exceptional abilities and which people could be retrained or the Next Generation could go ahead and repurpose themselves. I defy you to tell me what's so human exceptional, right now, we're all so proud of ourselves but what are we so fucking good at that. The machines can't do it here. I'll confess the secret to so Crystal and I with a good friend recently wrote a screenplay it was
A comedy idea that Chris and I had we've been mulling on it and we went to a really close friend who's a very successful screenwriter to do the heavy lifting on it. I mean, he's a writer's writer. So, you know, like in the credit world where the story by, he's the writer write and so we went to, you know, shop it around in a well-known, dude wants to buy it and start it, but he had comments on the third act. So we got the comments back and I had an idea for the third act and I was like, okay wait, I need to convince Crystal and this other guy.
Of this idea. I have for the third act, I want to Claude and I just said, hey help me build a little dialogue really quickly around this idea that this guy comes down in and he sees her on his phone and then the monk comes out and like he's awkward. But he covers for by making this noise and and I was like, I make it funny as shit. It's light-hearted, it's in the style of like Judd. Apatow, you know, I think I told it Judds, not a buyer I'm not trying to, you know, but it was like that kind of style of comedy and it fucking
Banged it out. And I sent that to my collaborators and those exact lines won't be used, but I was like, that's a funny fucking scene that wasn't a science report. That was a funny fucking scene of Comedy, that I conceived of. But, like, Claude made it fucking funny. And I sent it to my collaborators and like, oh, dude, yes, that bang and I'm like, fuck, man, I consider myself a writer, right? You remember.
All right, it doesn't go. Well. Very good
writer.
But that's what I do. I write things that raise billions of dollars and we just don't give it to anybody but the people who we work with but dude, it's fucking good. You know, we did a thing where we fed chechi PT everything I've ever written and we have a lower carbon voice pot and it knows exactly where to drop the F bombs in exactly where to use the cowboy phrases. It's really fucking good man. Like I'm going to be extinct
soon. Okay, so what do you think things look like three or four?
Five years from now, could be a year from now and things are moving. So, by the way, by the way, thank
you.
Thank you. You're the only person who talks about it like I do in single digit years. It's single digit years. I love, when people come to us and like 2050, I'm like, fuck you 2050, you're embarrassing yourself. If you're talking about 2050 right now, are you shitting me? Let's not even talk about Geo and stability, and all the fucking weirdness than what's going to happen. When our country is run by some non serious. People shit is fucking chaotic right now. But like, let's just talk about what really happens when we start in a year or two or three,
Seeing massive job losses because you just don't fucking need those people. You know. I mean Tim, you were one of the first people to be like, hey, here's a way to Outsource your light. Yep. Here's the way to use tools to have more control and more leverage over what you do and allow you yourself to focus on the things that are specifically, your value-add your expertise and not waste your time on the other bullshit. You kicked off a wave sometimes I blame you for right. I'm like I can't get some kids to work more than six hours a week now, I'm
Just kidding. But you have always been a systems thinker about. What are these tools we can use? Well now, dude, I use these tools all day long. All fucking day long and now they're integrated into your email and they're integrated in your spreadsheets, they're integrated everything we do. And now I can tell people's pitch, emails are coming from them and like right now I can sniff out which ones are written by them but the Next Generation I won't. Yeah, and they're solving problems and it's like if you read Tyler Cowen, who I read every day, he's having debates with
One and I consider Tyler Cowen and it's been so I consider no opinion actually indispensable reading every fucking day. I would never go through my day without reading him. I try to read everything DK Thompson rights every day. Well, I mean he doesn't write every single day and then zv and some of these other people who are really paying Ethan moloch, like if you're really paying attention, I don't know what, we're particularly good at. I just don't know anymore. I mean, our daughter, our middle daughter Circa is a really talented singer and theater person, you know, and she
She at age 11 is aware of this and is like, hey, Mom, Dad will Broadway still exist. Like I think so, I think Broadway will look phrase being around people yeah.
Thinking of the want to be in the presence of other people is gonna be a much dicier
proposition
My brother who you know, has been really successful in Hollywood is currently rolling up residential real estate in climate Havens because you know he's just like okay I'm a writer that's kind of getting all fucked up I'm an actor you know I could just sell some scans of my funny face and they'll write good jokes for me to deliver he's like so what do I do now? You know and that's just the fucking hard reality of it. I'm literally not trying to pooh-pooh it because it's also the most beautiful thing.
That's happened. And I use these tools all day long and their Companions, and all these stories about the great things they can do for you. Absolutely fucking beautiful. But they are going to shred the social Fabric and I don't think we're ready for that. And so I don't know what people do for a living. Like I would love for my kids to know how to use
tools such as therapists. Give me a massage
therapist.
Dude, have you seen the massage robots yet? They don't get carpal tunnel, man. And so I mean a good massage therapist can only do so many in a day. It's just unhealthy to do more and so they don't get carpal.
Tunnel the warm soothing hands of my iRobot.
Have you seen that 01? Have you seen that? Oh, one robot, any of these things even like, even chechi PT with the video or Google with the video now and stuff like that work goes through the room and remembers everything. It's all like Tim. You get
Overwhelmed, like if you're paying attention, it's overwhelming and you know what's inevitable like, you know, we're in a really bad spot, man, and I just don't think like our government and our institutions. We don't have a social safety. Net. We just aren't set up for this. I feel lucky that my kids are in elementary and middle school and not in late high school or college right now. Because I don't know what I would be telling them to do, like really good parents sent their kids to coding classes. Really good parents sent their kids to law school.
Here, I have started asking doctor friends if you had a biopsy, would you rather be read by a human being or by an AI? I've yet to have one say by human being, who do you want as your pathologist? By the way, this is like the one thing where I start realizing like, oh my God, the nature of this question. Like I was in a car with a driver the other day and one of those way, Mo cars, pulled in front of us. And I was like, I can't even talk about this right now because it's existential to what this guy does an immigrant from Ethiopia who came over and built his own book of business as a
driver and his incredible. And here he is, looking at a robot that displaces him, how do I even have that conversation?
So, alright, let's nibble on this a bit because you've clearly thought about it a lot, I'm pretty saturated with this as well. It seems like with AI and or robotics a lot of the things that humans, including developers and computer scientists and so on Engineers thought, were going to be
It ended up being easy and the things they thought were going to be easy and up being hard. So for instance, drafting legal documents, turns out lickety-split piece of cake, maybe throwing a baseball and like playing catch with someone very, very
difficult. Have you seen one Mark, Rober Mark as a friend and a guy? I deeply admire Mark. Rover makes Incredible YouTube videos. Did you ever see the dartboard? He made? Where
it's impossible to miss?
So you throw a dart and he built a machine. Learning a dartboard.
Heard that
automatically moves to hit a bull's-eye every time just play along there for a second. There are things people assumed would take forever that we're done very quickly in the opposite, right? So I'm wondering if you had to place bets like you're better, you're an investor, I've been known to dabble so if you had to place bets on sectors, are things that are going to either be slow to change or they will actually become more valuable over time. I mean a handful of years ago. This was when a lot of these gears, at least from the
Out of mainstream public awareness perspective. We're just getting going. I was like, yeah, I think there would be basically like a free-trade ethically sourced stamp of human-made on things that will for certain things. Develop some type of Premium, right? Connotation that seems inevitable, those types of watermarking and things like that, even for digital products uh then then we've already seen. So if you had to bet you're like all right sorry buddy, we're taking this lower carbon Capital thing off your hands. We've heard you complaining about the 70-hour work week.
Weeks we found a robot who we think can do the admin and the annual shareholder letters as well as you can now, you're just going to bet on stuff that's going to last or that's going to increase in value, because it will be slow to be affected by AI or will be largely immune. What would you bet on?
First of all, I'm betting on the bills, on the money line, to beat the Ravens this weekend. And so I love that they're playing at home. But going in as underdogs night game, that stadium is going to be nuts. The Ravens won't be able to hear anything Lamar. Jackson wears a turtleneck in Miami. He's gonna freeze his ass off. We got this game. So sorry, go bills. And so I would be betting on sports. I swear to God, I hate the head injuries in football, I really do, it's just, but on the other hand, there is just something. So Primal about the gladiator shit that
Yeah fall and when I see it bring entire Community together, particularly a beat-up Community like Buffalo that's taking some lumps. I adore it. We've never raised our kids to be jocks, but I really find kinship talking to them about sports and playing sports to them and watching them. Develop is athletes. Yes, I do believe we could obviously build machines. That pitch better than any human, that's walk the earth. But sports like, you know, not the all drug Olympics, but just human Sports.
It's there will be a true analog Primal attraction to those contests. It's just one of the last real things and so I think there's something really truly there, you know, Tim I spend a lot of time in Japan like you do and there's something. So alluring about making Pottery about the wabi-sabi imperfection about the craft of studying one thing, the soul that goes into a piece of sushi.
The calligraphy, the ceremony, the big nights out and cocktail Bars. By the way, where there's one piece of fruit, like I'm absolutely addicted to that culture but it's that same craving for analog, you know, and it's funny because growing up that was a place. I thought I was like we're all the coolest new cameras. Yeah. But it's a craving for that analog
again and they've been culturally kind of ahead of the curve with that for probably at least I would say 15 to 20 years in terms of
Of going very retro. Two things are considered outdated or analog. Which is fascinating
the lp bars and stuff like that. Yeah. But Tim let's be honest. They better start having sex real soon or they're going to disappear and the Koreans like the reproductive rate Ria like Korea is just going to close up shop. I'm fucking worried, like I don't know what to do about this. Reverie one needs to start fucking Stu
hundred fifty billion dollars in South Korea towards trying to promote.
/ creating didn't work at all Zero Effect and they're they're actually a lot of like weird reasons for that that are not immediately obvious. Like at the you have to put up like a 6 to 12 months security deposit for an apartment. So people can't afford the space. But people are also just not having sex or not procreating which are not automatically the sad thing.
No it's we're societally. Fuck dude. If we don't, if people don't start fucking and having more kids and I'm putting that on you, Tim, where are the Timmy little tempting
us? Yeah, it's on
the do your the living distinction of? Yeah, you can't conflate having sex and having children but let's get on it. Okay, that's your homework. And so, but I do anyway. So the schools here in Bozeman aren't the most academically competitive, right? They do a pretty good job. The elementary school is actually really special, but it's funny when we talk to our kids about what
Tan at school today, Orchestra is offered five days a week and so Math and Science alternate every other day English and social studies alternate, but Orchestra is every single day choir is every single day. And so, when we talk to the kids about school, they talked to us about music and PE class and lunch. And so, it's interesting. I mean, we'll pry information out of them about the other classes and, you know, again, they're not the most challenging or riveting classes, so maybe that's part of it.
But there's something happening in getting back to the Arts, you know, like we went to one of their Orchestra concerts the other night and boy there were some kids Out Of Tune and boy. It was a little it was you know the Middle School orchestra was a little like and there were some squeaking - but I was just like Crystal this is not on Spotify. Like this is fucking amazing. You know what I mean? Like What's Happening Here is amazing. This is human as fuck. You know and like two sections, the orchestra getting I like not
Paying attention to the lady who's been conducting for 30 years, be like, can you see my fucking hand? It's just doing like this, like, get on that be like, it was beautifully human, you know, and the same way that the awkwardness. I mean, we constantly talk to our kids about Middle School is about the awkwardness. It's about the asking someone to the dancer being asked to the dance, it's about all these fucking kids who stink a little bit and sweat nor look ganglion, their fucking clothes. And I love by the way, I love now being an adult and seeing who they like
The alphas are considered like that's the fucking Alpha kid in your class. I worry that he couldn't wrestle his way out of a wet paper bag but like that's the attractive kid hilarious. But back when you're in middle school you can self Identity or like, oh my God, that's the fucking kids like that guy Ray. I mean, Ray's gotta get any girl he wants. I just love seeing it. Now through that lens, I just think we have to embrace the messiness of our humanity and it goes back to that new
product to make it super crass. And we're going to get to that project. But because I think this is just a home.
Ting function, and you're so good at it and so many ways. How would you bet on that? Humanness that imperfection, that awkwardness that wabi-sabi like my financial that exactly outside of sports I think is very on point. I would agree with that completely. I think most people are still going to be Hermits, but a large number of people are going to Crave the opportunity to be together, still so Crystal, and I've been looking at ketamine bars here.
Yeah, pretty much know it's funny. Like we were looking to buy some space recently like some beat-up warehouse space and it took a long time to help our real-estate agent. Understand that there wasn't a specific purpose for it and he's like, what's the business plan or like? No, no. Like when we see the
space? Well, no,
he's like, what are you hoping to do there? And we're like, it's kind of office. It's kind of Art Space. It's kind of like maybe we can make it available to the community. Maybe there's some small performances there, maybe there's some whiner Cafe there.
R as like we don't really know what kind of know when we see it and the community will kind of Define the purpose of it. We're like we just know that we need more
convenience. Like, I'm gonna need a retainer like this. Yeah,
yeah. No. I'm like, I'm like, there's no math to pencil out on it, but we just need more of those places to hang, by the way. All right. Free idea for anyone your audience, you know what needs to exist.
Chuck E, cheese for Gen X.
And if somebody starts this in a city that I will travel to, I
A landlocked
Yacht Club, okay.
That is also a mini golf country club. It's basically, it's Yacht Rock themed. So you show up, you got to wear white shoes, maybe a captain's hat umbrellas in the drinks. Yacht Rock Band playing, it has the air of a country club. It's accessible to everybody. Maybe a membership cost 10 bucks. You know, you have to have a membership by the way, to make it exclusive a ten dollar membership, they have to apply at the door, give some references, answer some Yacht, Rock, trivia, whatever but then it's a country club for mini golf the Putt-Putt
It's have generally gone away. We need to bring mini
golf back
and like, you'll there be like mahogany lockers for your putter, you know? And so, you go in there and you have a really Choice Potter, you know, like in catastrophic Billy Billy. Billy, Billy. And so, you can talk to your golf club, but I really need someone to fucking do this. Okay? You can call it yahtzee's. You can call it whatever you want, but I need this to exist. I will be there. There's a bar in Redondo Beach on the pier called Old Tony's or it's called Tony's.
Up here, but everyone refers to his old Tony's. The inside has not changed in 50 years and I would do anything to get on the historic, register of places to make sure it never changes because that is the perfect place to convene. And I will ride down there, ride bikes with friends when I'm in LA and hang out at Old Tony's on the Pier and just feel like that's what we crave go there and talk about nothing. Just hanging out and I think like I would be betting on people want to get together.
ER and bullshit. I think our kids are the Canary in the coal. Mine of what happens when everything went digital. It's fucking exhausting man and being yelled at online is fucking exhausting, people are not accountable to each other, right? I mean, if anything, I could have told you how the result of this election was going to go, because most Americans are just fucking tired of it. They're tired of being yelled at they're tired of being criticized, as Jonathan, haidt likes to put it. It's no longer about the
Actions of the speaker. It's how The Listener heard it. Fuck that. Like, I'm so fucking sick of that and I got reeled into it like everybody else and it's fucking exhausting and everyone who thinks like that can fuck right off and go away because intentions have to fucking matter. We have to get back to it and where intentions matter is when you're hanging out in person, you can tell, hey, are you trying to be an asshole, or do you just say the wrong thing? My wife is half asian. First time, I brought her home to see my grandmother. She was like, oh my God, Chris brought the most
Credible Oriental girl home now, was she trying to say, like, fuck you, why'd you bring an oriental girl into my home, know what she was trying to say is like, oh my God, this woman who I don't know, the more updated less Antiquated term for a woman from Asia. I think we need to call each other in more than call each other out. And so you can just like Grandma as a Walter in The Big Lebowski says, Chinaman is no longer the preferred
nomenclature, you know,
honestly, I feel like we could get to a point where as a culture we want to hang out in.
And again, we want to be around each other. Like I know my neighbors, where I live, like my physical neighbors, more than I ever did in San Francisco. I lived in a building and I did not know the people around me everywhere. I've lived since then, I actually know my neighbor's, I don't think we vote the same all the time. Sometimes we do sometimes, we don't, but I know I can count on them. I know, I can have a relationship with them. I know we always find common ground and like, we're part of a community and we're accountable to each other, and it's fucking great to have a community. And so I would be betting on communities again.
I
mean, there's a big New York Times piece about running clubs and chess club's and these in real life clubs with recurring events, beginning to displace dating apps, right as an example. Cuz people are just like, yeah, I heard people are just exhausted by having yet another inbox and with 99% go straight
etcetera, what people at those chess club's need to start fighting or we're gonna go away as Humanity but but no, I'm with you, man.
Crystal and I didn't go to Montana State University, but it's right here in town. And so we started going to the football games there and would consider ourselves superfans. Now, I mean, I wear blue and yellow fucking overalls to the games. It's ridiculous. And by the way, I've sent you these clips
before I'm like sent me the photos.
Yeah, the start of the game is Metallica starts playing fire. Torches cannons. A band is onstage than horses. The rodeo team rides in and with American flags and then there's a flyover.
Of military planes or helicopters. Unlike America like this is what it's all about. But I really enjoy that. We have a fucking Community here and I really enjoy who we hang out with and I think I would be betting on community. I would be betting on neighbors, and I don't think the whole trend is going in that direction. I think the addiction to these phones is taking us another place. The availability of food to eat by yourself in great TV and great apps and feeds me. The first time I installed Tick-Tock Tim was during the
Pandemic and I was like oh this is kind of cool. So check out those dance moves. Next thing I knew I looked up in the sun had come up. I had been up all fucking night long on this app. I mean, it was like fucking crack cocaine injected into my veins. I realized whatever, like Jean some ethnicities, don't have to tolerate alcohol. I don't have that for
funding Tick-Tock and
so I can only imagine what it's doing to the masses right now and I hope we come up with a glp-1. Agonists. That like blocks the pleasure Center.
Tick Tock, but I would be doing anything I can for profit or nonprofit to enhance community and hangouts.
So you've got all your knowledge that you have. Now, you do not have all your connections, but you have the know-how and you are somewhere between 20 and 30 years old and you're going to start a business. What type of business might you
start?
Tim, what do you want me to say? I genuinely don't know. CrossFit Gyms CrossFit Gyms our community. They're great. I was standing in one last night. I told you
I texted last night, I
was like, if you want to make friends in a CrossFit gym in Montana just drop that you are positive Ferris and so like Shark Tank only goes so far Jim once you say your friends and Tim Ferriss like holy shit. First of all I love the ethos of CrossFit. It's how I work out. You can fucking tell Kate.
But I those our community, you know, one of the things we've enjoyed doing is going to towns. I can't remember which sites are doing this anymore, but finding somebody who will guide you on a local bar crawl and just like, hey take me to all the fucking dive bars, or all the tiki bars or take them to three farmers markets are is taking me to three things, I want to see. And it's like not the traditional like art historian, who just recites everything about did Ian. And I
I said that one
just for you. I could have said
Velasquez but I said tedious just here. You know, they
audience know that.
Yeah. And so people were like, hey come here and enjoy this analog experience with me. You know, let's go to these places. You asked why we go to Copenhagen because Copenhagen is bikes, man, you get on bikes, make it up, it's free wailing, we started with Renee, but then we met a lot of other people who had spun off from renée's World, entrepreneurs and food and other stuff and Artisans and people who take food and service. I mean Ricardo mark on who runs Barabbas.
Barrabas well Action Bronson called it the best Italian restaurant in the world and it's in Copenhagen. I mean you start wars with that kind of shit but there's an argument that the best Italian restaurant in the world is in Copenhagen run by our buddy, Ricardo Ricardo, is the height of analog experiences. It starts with the hug as to
when you start staging in his restaurant. What would your movie?
I mean, the kids have our children have they've made plenty of pasta in that place, but I think Europe is onto something with the art of the slow drink in the plaza.
I really think humans still want to have a slow. Drink and Applause is somewhere. I hope I hope and I know we're not drinking as much alcohol but I mean I love those Athletics. By the way you realize that 80% of drinking a beer it's just like you wanted the 12-ounce curls, you know. She's just like today sucked. Give me an athletic and you're like, I don't actually want to get fucked up right now but there's just something I need to cap this day. I need to say work is over and so sorry. That was my limoncello. I guess that's a bad standing for
Like we do have alcohol Investments, I wouldn't be betting on alcohol long term, but I think people still want to just hang out. The ritual of ordering a drink ordering a light bite, hanging out people watching. We need Central places to hang this movement during covet of shutting down streets. Making a bike but also just Cafe and outdoor seating friendly. We need more of that humans, crave that shit. That's what I would be betting on right now and then interactive guiding. Yes I've used chat TP to be like hey what's the off the beaten path?
I should do in Berlin. It's really good at it. But you know what else is cool? Is talking to a fucking punk kid and Berlin was like, let me take you to a couple places and I know this fucking guy and he'll let you in and he has a craft cocktail and you know what the tradition is here. Here you spit, you know, you put gum on the back of some marks and you throw them up on the fucking ceiling you know? And so I want more of that shit. And so I think there is going to be a backlash to all
this to all this meaning machines are just
shion-san Ai and so on the machines, the machines the but Larry and Jihad
Before that. Yes, before they fucking kill us. I think we've got bigger fish to fry before a GI, and we might be at a GI right now, anyway, by the way, but before the bio weapon disassemblers, you know? Like I think we've got to
worry about being entertained to death by your curated
feed.
Yeah, I mean, okay, so remember when we talked about Buckminster Fuller and I seem to be verb, there's another book designed by the same designer Quentin Fiore called the medium. Is the massage. Got the message, massage, the background on that is originally a typo, but they went with it.
It's Marshall mcluhan and that book, holy shit. Sorry, if we just broke the market for it, but that book, you should front run that go viral this copies. But that book again is one of these old one. It's beautiful by the way, because Quentin designed it, but it's just beautiful foresight. As to what's happening, not just entertaining yourself to death but what happens when information, supplants, humanity? And so when that access it's just I mean books.
Has got to be 50 years old, at least that's an oldie.
All right. So outside of the but layer in Jihad, we haven't talked at all about lower carbon capital or very little, you've invested in a whole plethora of different companies through lower carbon Capital. You may not want to answer this but are there any in particular could be a sector could be individual companies that you are particularly excited about where it's like, okay, these are a handful could be a sector, doesn't have to be an
Individual company in this is a way of asking like what would you bet on outside of all the AI concerns and so on and maybe these are AI enabled.
In fact,
So let's just say what we do at lower carpet, we are Venture capitalists and a team of scientists and business Builders. And we back companies that are making real money by either slashing, CO2 emissions, or sucking carbon out of the sky or buying us time to unfuck the planet. I think this one
even cellular
unfuck the planet trademarked and a lot of countries hard to do. By the way, it's hard to get swears
trademark at some places
China, not huge fans.
Of f-bombs turns out. And
so it was mission-driven for me. But we have this thesis that most climate investing in green investing, whatever you want to fucking call it, however, their branding, at these days had been basically charitable. Concessionary some trade-off. Some sacrifice, couldn't be done on a for-profit basis, and that was true for a long time. You needed regulatory support you needed subsidy. You needed legal change, you needed philanthropy. But we started to actually see the math change.
Where the unit economics of making shit and climate making shit clean. We're starting to pay off and so the cost was coming down, thanks to compute machine, learning AI, thanks to readily available feedstock, bioreactors. You name it and then the demand was starting to increase on the other side because companies are realizing like. So if I do this stuff not only is it just good for the planet but it's just fucking cheaper. It's safer, it's more resilient, it's easier to use it.
Tends to blow up less than shit made with oil and gas because it just turns out that digging up and burning old dinosaur. Bones is fucking expensive. And so using the sun to power, the economy is just fucking cheaper and that's not a political statement. And what's funny is when I talk to guys from West Texas, like, hardcore oil and gas, I'll admit I have to start the conversation by talking about the truck. I drive, I have to quote some Kenny Chesney lyrics.
I asked what's in season, what are they hunting? Talk about whatever trophies behind them. I have to establish, like I come in peace, but then we start talking about
How are the cattle doing where yields like how many you running right now where they weigh?
You get some sighs. How was it growing season? How many Harvest you getting you? Get some sighs? What's hunting been like you know how many times you get you able to fill all those tags you back anything? Good?
Then you start talking about our jobs going, our people do in there then you start asking. So you guys get any of those shakes, you get in the daily seismic activity, what's water? Like and before you know it you have just talked all of the reality of a fucked climate without ever mentioning the word one guy.
And it doesn't have to be fucking political at all. It's just the reality, you know, the California fires.
Are so fucked up but the reality is they're actually going to be an accelerator for the work we do because now you know a lot of climate stuff is like well shit. If I eat this shitty mushroom burger then maybe fewer people be subjected to floods and Mongolia. It's really fucking abstract, right? And we think maybe there's like 300 million people on the planet who actually try and do that math and are willing to spend more money to buy something more expensive.
Have or her willing to actually sacrifice deeply in their life with that kind of end-to-end relationship in mind. But like seven and a half billion people don't have that luxury or just it's really fucking taxing. An exhausting, the think about that all the time. I don't want it. Every time I sit down and bite into a delicious Burger, had to be confronted by the existential crisis. I am fueling, I mean, I love when that juice drips down your own. You're like, oh fuck, this is fucking delicious medium-rare. Let's go this grass-fed awesomeness. So shit, like you left a little left.
Fat in there? Mmm, yeah, let's go. What did you marinate this in uh, fucking delicious? We were meant to eat that shit, right? And I don't want to have to constantly like I'm a horrible person of a horrible person and like, eat it for my tears, like the burger of Shame. So it's just not, it's not who we are. And you know what, the fucking activists made us feel so bad about it for so fucking long. The soup throwers these people throwing soup on paintings. How the fuck are you helping anything? The
Glue themselves to the fucking floor of the US Open and stop traffic. Like, how are you helping anything? All you're doing is radicalize people against the stuff that we're doing that as practically on fucking their businesses, their communities, if you really want to put some blame on, some people about what happened in the LA fires. Like, if we're really just playing the blame game. And did you see the article by the way? It's a bunch of Russian disinfo accounts that are really flooding the tweets with trying to blame different people and stuff. It's fucked up. So Russia just knows where to fucking pick the scabs with us.
But if you want to blame somebody, it's the fucking environmentalists, it's the fucking Sierra Club, who makes it impossible for anyone to actually do any defensible space to Moni thing, down to do any, controlled Burns, to actually create defensible space around our fucking communities. It's the fucking nimbys who won't let anyone actually use appropriate materials and building a fucking house. Did you see like they are Expediting, the rebuild of any houses in those areas that burned down, but you can't make any
Can changes to
them.
So we just saw a bunch of tinderboxes go up, and it's a great opportunity. Like, hey, maybe we should build a, some different shit. Maybe we should build in some different shapes. Maybe we shouldn't have ventilation that sucks. Everything up into the roof structure. Maybe we shouldn't use the cheapest wood available which is how Americans build shit. Maybe we should have more concrete more aluminum or heat reflection more concrete walls around stuff. Maybe just fucking maybe maybe we should use more Shrubbery around it, that actually absorbs more water and is less flammable, but
No expedited permitting. If you build the exact same fucking thing, you just had otherwise you go back to the end of the line, how fucking defeating is that, but it's just so funny to be a climate investor and find myself constantly at odds with the goddamn environmentalists. I'm sure they have a fucking Target on me, but that's the reality is right now. For the first time, I think we are going to draw the linkage between what happens if we don't deal with these problems and the direct damage they cause
It's in the shorter portfolio. Just not to lose track of that. You can feel free to punt it for a bit, but I'm wondering if you're like okay the things that I'm most excited about kind of moving the needle in ways that you care about what those Technologies are sectors or companies to
be.
There's things that are going to transform at scale like Fusion clean. Abundant power. That is almost free is single digit years away, so that's fucking great. I don't even bother fighting with oil and gas people, it doesn't fucking matter. In fact, I actually want them to work with us more on carbon capture, and sequester putting more carbon back into the ground, because they've got the trucks, and they've got the pipes and they've got the engineering know-how and they're great at it. And so we do a lot of work with oil and gas companies.
He's going in reverse so I don't have political battles of those guys. And again, that's something that the activists hate about me. I will fucking sit with these people. Chris Wright, our new Energy Secretary, I consider a reasonable person. He grew up with oil and gas business. If we didn't have the oil and gas business, we would not enjoy the economy. We enjoy today. Everything in that room, you're sitting in right now is made possible by oil and gas. We can't just fucking pretend, otherwise, we'd be living that primitive life. That I know you've gotten some of your survivalist books where fun
Without oil and gas were fucked. It's my job to give you a better alternative. And I enjoy when the Big Oil Majors come to us, you know, sometimes they'll try to do a business deal or even by us we had one of the big oil Majors tried to buy lower carbon Capital. We're not for sale but we said bring your engineering team to meet with our engineering team. Let's get some shit done together. I love that we have a company called Sally Jim that makes chemicals using enzymes instead of oil as the main ingredient. There's zero Mission chemicals, industrial chemicals.
Cause you know who buys those chemicals the oil and gas industry. And so one of the big chemicals they make is hydrogen peroxide at industrial scale which is an important component that oil and gas industry when that buyer comes to Sol Eugene to buy that stuff, they asked two questions. Is it hydrogen peroxide? And is it cheaper? Well then fuck it, I'll buy it and it's just fun. Like I like to Envision that guy with like a dip in and a cowboy hat you know? Like well fuck it. I'll buy like but literally that's my favorite fucking buyer.
Someone who buys the cleaner thing out of self-interest. And so that's what we're seeing across all of this stuff now and the short-term you want to talk about fires. We have a company called burned by. That is literally an autonomous drone that goes into the wild Urban interface. Most shit down starts a controlled, burn Burns,
a defensible space, a defensible space. You just mean basically a
fire line,
So a space where there is a gap where it would be hard even in high winds for fire to jump. That we're at least firefighters no start here and work backwards by the way, if you have good fire lines you can just start a fire to go back in the other direction and be like well this wasn't our preferred thing but if we got a big fire coming out of tomatoes will start a fire to head back at it so you can look this up burn bot, it's fucking awesome. And you know, private landowners, don't have a problem. Usually running burn bot but where it needs to run is on a lot of public land. And they'll just
Get sued. And so, you know, like somebody will be like, hey, we need to do some fuel reduction here, some fuel management, and fuel management. I looked at some data recently takes between four and seven years for those projects to get out of
litigation, fuel management, you mean actual Timber or undergrowth? Is that what you mean by
Fuel? So before we were all walking around the United States, you know, what is now the United States there used to be a bunch of fires, right? Just naturally, caused fires, lightning stuff, would happen.
The indigenous people who inhabited this land knew about the power of those fires. And what would happen is when fires occurred on a regular basis, they were actually very healthy for those ecosystems. We know that there are certain conifers Pines, that only release their seeds in the event of a fire. They literally do not release their seeds, otherwise and so fire is a vitally important. Part of a forest ecosystem to have healthy nature. You have to have fire, a bunch of very
Well-intentioned greens and environmentalist came along and said holy shit fire it releases a bunch of shit in the sky and gets close to human beings. Some dear old fucking die. You know like we need to stop fire and look, all the shit in hindsight. I'm not blaming those people because in hindsight I don't think they knew this. I think they were trying to do the right thing. But what happened was they started putting out fires immediately. You know we had all those massive fire Towers, right? Those are fun to like spend a night in by the way if you want to camp out an old fire tower.
Our. So, we had all these fire Towers, they would see a fire, they would immediately put it out. What happens when that happens is all this fuel gross. So, all this under breath starts to grow and grow and grow. And before, you know it, when the next fire starts, there's so much fuel there that instead of like cleaning it out and letting some little pine cones, kind of drop and, and creating more space for the next layer of growth and for animal habitats, instead, it burns so fucking hot that the biggest trees all burned down and the microbial.
They're all Burns and now you've got fucking sand. And so what we started realized was that all those years of fire suppression were the worst form of fire management and in doing. So they actually hurt the nature. They are intended to help even if there were no houses nearby, you have to let fires burn out. And if it's in a place where you can't just let that happen. Randomly, you have to actively manage fuels as if nature was doing in for you. And so, managing fuels means in a scrub brush area, it means like you just
Go in and you chop and burn the fucking grass. You just have to do it. And so you have to build that defensible space and you have to let some of these spaces, renew and forests. It means you have to limb stuff. You have to take the dead stuff. You have to limb stuff and then you have to set it on fire and you do these and it's a really, really important part of Forestry management. We know that now and u.s. Forest Service knows this. All that those are. Hardworking amazing fucking people. But the environmentalists do to stop them all the fucking time and that's killing people right now.
There's just no doubt about it. I am hopeful a silver lining because I'm going to talk about politics but a silver lining is. I think we're going to cut through some of that shit right now. I think we are headed into an era of pragmatism of putting, literally the forest before the trees and starting to actually proactively get ahead of that stuff. By the way, it's the same shit with floods. It's the same shit with drought. It's the same shit with famine. We have just been stopped from taking proactive, measures so company like bernbach company like grid where grid where actually is monitoring equipment on.
We single power line Tower by Tower like Juno, right now, if there is a power failure in a PG&E transmission line, do you know how they figure out where that power failure was?
They just start driving along and looking up and trying to figure it out or they helicopter down the whole fucking line. They have no data that comes off those fucking lines at this point. Well, it's not my words. Somebody else said at this point PG&E is essentially, the biggest arsonist in California and so electrical utilities are responsible for 11% of the fire ignitions in the state of California and 50% of the damage. And so you have these tools like grid where that can just be
Tower B. Our monitoring know where there's an eruption. You can immediately go there and see. Okay. Where was the tree that fell? Where is the spark? You can suppress that fire in a place where you don't want to have fire or you don't have it controlled for it. But you know, there hasn't been an incentive for those companies to pay that like PG, he's already bankrupted, they haven't been on the hook for that. But now, we've got insurance companies, like multiple insurance companies are going to go bankrupt right now. And so is California's Fair plan, which is the insurer of Last Resort does not have the money. It needs to pay for what just happened.
You know, we have a company called Stand which is a fire insurance company that actually assesses, the real risk of insuring your home. Instead of State Farm just pulling out of the fucking state. By the way, I don't think you want to show a lot of football, but, you know, the LA Rams couldn't play their game in LA because of the fires, right? So they moved it to their playoff game. They moved it to Arizona and they played in State Farm Arena. And I couldn't believe they didn't just put duct tape over the fucking logo is the most fucked-up irony ever. But so instead of having an
Orange County plot of an entire State, a company, like stand looks at house by house by house and says, here is your modeled risk and here are the other things that you can proactively do to reduce that risk to where we will, actually write you an insurance policy. And we have companies like flood base, that do that same thing for floods, and look at like here's the risk and you can't member 100 Year, storms happen every year now. Like we can't just model these on historical data anymore. I mean, as John Stewart put it there not like what just
And Allah is like if a fire fucked a tornado you can't just model for that anymore. You have to assume the worst and assume like, okay, what do we do in terms of Space Management? What do we do in terms of materials? What do we do in terms of suppression? What do we do in terms of response? What do we do in terms of adaptation and resiliency in the face of all that? And so I think there are so many opportunities to be better at that stuff right now and I am hopeful
That the silver lining of a tragedy like this is the cause and the effect are so close and finally appeal so much to self-interest, they finally appeal to that linkage between. Instead of just like hey if a butterfly flaps its wings far away and you're like oh if that bush fucking lights on fire over there, that's it. You and I have a buddy who like went to go look at the wreckage of his home and his fireproof. Safe was a puddle. It was a fucking puddle. It's just so devastating. I'm
For, I actually feel a second wind in our work and so do the people I work with right now. I feel like it's always been mission-driven, but we're also unapologetically capitalist. It's great. I mean, it's making a lot of money right now. But I feel like right now makes the stakes of it even clearer. And I know there will be a bunch of fucking people yelling at each other about what went wrong in LA. But here's the funniest thing, the phone is ringing off the hook right now from people not in l.a. who are like that can never happen here. What do we do?
And I love that.
No permanent record. We'll talk about it. It's a story. What's happening? Why now yeah
I don't know what to tell a 20 something to do right now. Other than to be a fucking shirt by our guide or build some in-person analog experience, but I do know that there is this cultural hole where these young people today haven't been given the chance to fuck up.
They just can't, there's fucking, did you ever TP house
Tim Dunn? No, but I bet I had my house. Tp'ed had to tend to do. Okay? Like I did other side, it's annoying stuff that got me in trouble, but
nobody gets to do that anymore because they're on a rain cameraman, nobody gets to egg anything and to go back to Mark Rover, he's the one who built that fucking glitter fart bomb package.
When my one close friend finally got his license or as probably driver's permit, we shouldn't have even been out. That was a townie right on Eastern Long Island. Yeah. Yeah. Detention with the city people as we would call it. So we would drive around and I had a like, a wrist rocket, a slingshot. And we had, we just bought a huge bag of grapes and just went around, not shooting a people but like we'd shoot at things next to the people
and yeah I'm
not proud of that.
We didn't hurt anybody. But we got a lot of trouble. We could gotta get him out of trouble.
I think we got in lots of trouble, but I think we have a generation of kids who didn't get a chance to get into any trouble and I'm starting to believe more and more that trouble is actually. One of those things that informs all the other things that we do. Like, did you ever talk somebody into getting you
beer? I talked. Somebody into getting me, wasn't really fruit, like for a party, some hard liquor wasn't beer. I went straight to the hard stuff, but yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, let me ask you a question. Did you ever have a party with your parents liquor? And then pour a little bit of water back in the Vodka to make it look like the level? Well, I
got because my parents are hoarders in the house wouldn't have worked, but I saw that done, I did plenty of other stuff, too, and like, things that are, like, there's no real victim, right? Like I remember, that's like, I remember, for instance, my Elementary School same friend who drove me around with the grapes in the slingshot, he was the tallest kid in the class. Also.
Very smart equally open to maybe deviant behavior and at the elementary school there was this huge wall or kids would just whack tennis balls, back and forth, kind of like racquetball but Long Island style and nobody knew what they were doing so they would hit all the tennis balls up onto the roof eventually. This was like 80s right there. With all these amazingly cheesy ninja movies and there was the is called the Asian World of Martial.
It's catalog which ships like completely dangerous, grappling hooks and stuff from Philadelphia, I think it was. And so I had some kind of ninja tooling and we figured out a way with rope to get up on the school and then use garbage bags to like temporarily steal all of the tennis balls and it turned into. I mean, for this small school, it was quite the Scandal at the time. I mean there's a Manhunt and then we return the
tennis balls at some point and all sins were forgiven or at least they stopped, they called off the hounds but, you know, stuff like that.
Yes, this
is what I'm talking about. I feel like the statute limitations is expired for most of these things, but they are formative, Hawkeye, actually previous summer mock. I had a music store in Park City Utah, where I was a resident and we were in business together,
but were you in business doing
we had a few fun slams. So, one of the things we did was first of all we had to build some community. So one of the things we did was like, we would sell you the Britney Spears album, but you had to sign your name and address.
Hosted at the front desk like almost like a sex offender registry but it was like a Brittany, fire angry and so that offends like one out of ten people, but it builds Community with 99 out of 100 people. And so what one of the things we do to make a little bit extra cash, is what we had a buddy, who is the postman? And so he would come into the store and he would say Hey you know there's all these people sign up for that Columbia House shit and then they move away Park city was like a town full of transients and like so I get all
All these fucking CDs like, are they worth anything? And so we like, scan the UPC symbols are like, oh my God, they're the same UPC. Symbols is the retail ones. So we would do a little trade, you know, like a pick out something from the store and give us a bunch of those Christina Aguilera's, and that helped us stock fewer CDs. But then we figured out you could take them to Walmart and return them. So if we really needed drinking money, we would return like 25 Limp Biscuit CDs to
And it'd be like, what is this shit be like, oh everyone at my birthday party. Thought I'd be so funny to
buy me a fucking Limp Biscuit CD
and then you remember CDs weren't cheap, right? So you do these things, 20 or 25 at a time. You're like, I'm rich motherfucker. Let's go. And so, we also did a thing where it was around the time that Napster started and we realized like music stores weren't for long and so we did this thing where it was a restocking fee but we would let kids bias.
CD take it home, rip it presumably. I don't know what they're doing the price with their mom, but if they return the CD the next day we would charge them a three dollar and fifty cent restocking fee. So essentially what we were doing is reselling the same CD over and over again keeping our margin I'm sure the record company wouldn't have loved it but it was a very customer friendly
policy
but that's what it took to keep a music store at float in Park City. And you know, 2000-2001 if our format
No permanent record. What do you hope it? I don't know, Tim. Well, I do know I'm having
conversations with. I'm starting to have conversations with successful, people where they talk about the small crimes and misdemeanors. They committed the parties, they through the lies, they told to their parents, the club's, they talk their way into the fake IDs. They made everything along the way, the papers that they plagiarized, just everything they did.
Did and how that actually built some sense of humanity, resilience like the shit, they got themselves into in the shit they got themselves out of and like if it ends up just being the last archaeological record of what it was like, when we were human still, when we weren't judged at every fucking moment, and I actually just feel like culturally, it's the right time because you do this two years ago. And I was like, fuck, you privileged assholes other people. I'm like, I'm we're over, we're past privileged assholes. We're just like, hey, that's kind of
An amazing, you were able to you chalked IDs, and what I found is, I tell more of these stories of like, without a fake ID in college, you had nowhere to go, right? So you needed one. So we would either make them by like doing some shit with some cool overlay contact, paper or we would find some fucking guy down in the Deep City where you'd stand in front of a goddamn chalkboard of a huge-ass. Driver's license to pretend you were McLovin know. Like, I mean, we would do all kinds of things when there was room to still
Cut some Corners, take some liberties, we reciprocate for a second.
So I thought getting a fake ID would be a great idea. I don't know how old I was. It was like 14 or something, and my buddy and I same guy who was part of the other two, Fiasco's, we decided to take a bus from Eastern Long Island. Like, three hours out to go into the city. Now, this isn't like, post Giuliani post Bloomberg. Like friendly New York City with like,
Viking Lanes through Times Square. This is my yeah, yeah, dear York city. So we get there to go on this adventure and literally within hours, we are both conned and mugged. And like, yeah, yes. Within hours of getting there are first time in New York City, basically, and then no cell phones rights. We get separated. These two guys, separate us to scam us, then proceeded to like steal all his shit.
It then we get separated. I go to the police station and I'm like, my buddy might be dead. And they're like, where is he dead? And I'm like this intersection and they're like, yeah, that's not our jurisdiction pal, good luck. And I was like, what first interaction with like asking police for help. I'm like, oh, that didn't work out as I thought it would then had to take the buses home. Each of us thinking the other was dead. I was a real growth. Experience is learning opportunity. Dude, I love it. Not recommending people do like the most Reckless
Shit imaginable, but it's like,
no, but maybe what, maybe, but maybe I'm the planets never been safer. Well, America has never been safer. There are definitely places. I wouldn't want to hang out right now, but dude, I God, what is that guy's name? But I once went to a, I went to a casino in Vegas. It was broke. Is it my buddies were staying at The Sundowner? We split a room for ways. It was a trade, actually, I think somebody owed us money at the record store and so we traded out. He had a buddy. We got a room at The Sundowner. Okay.
Okay recipe Sundowner. And so, by the way, at one point, while we were staying in that room, two queen beds for guys like my buddy, nudges me. I'm like, what, dude, what we've been out all night, you know? Probably 2 in the afternoon. He nudged me is like, wow. Look look, likewise look I look down at the foot of the bed at the foot of the bed is like a 12 to 14 year old Southeast Asian kid standing there, staring at
us.
He looked as scared as I did, and we were just like, what is he here for our kidneys? What is he fucking doing? Oh my God. And we were frozen and my buddy was not small, like, we were in every position to like, but we were just absolutely Frozen. Like, what is happening here? And eventually, the kid ran out, and we called down and it apparently, he had a key card that also worked in our door and went into the wrong room. There was some innocent explanation for it. Yeah, sure. We still think he was. Maybe they're for some organs but either way like that night,
Route. We find ourselves at Harrah's. A buddy, says, hey, let's go get our shoe shine. What do you say? So, we go over the shoe shine and where there and there's a fucking pimp over there. I mean, full-on like Players Ball situation, and he's got suede hush puppies on. So there's no reason she should be at the fucking shoe shine. But we start talking this guy. I'm embarrassed. I can't remember his name. I gotta ask my buddy immediately after wrapping this but we start talking shit. And you know, and I consider myself pretty good at Rochambeau rock paper, scissors.
And you know, I consider myself above average like I it's a talent I've honed over time, it is not a game of luck. It is a game of skill. And so I challenge this guy to a little Rochambeau. And I remember the stakes were, if I win, we get to hang out with you
tonight.
So, I beat the guy in ro sham. I mean, it was that I wasn't even a question. So I thought this would be fucking great. Well, in an ethnography, we get to go hang out with this fucking pimp, but
we found ourselves in some fucking hot water that night. I mean, this is pre The Hangover movie. We were in a couple of situations.
Those were formative experiences.
I feel like kids these days. Haven't been in danger, they haven't been in situations. Like how the fuck did we get out of this one? They haven't regretted anything. They haven't bullshit of their way in or out. I feel like no one's got a chance to sell anything. Almost everyone. I know who has been a successful entrepreneur Soldier something for sure, whether it was candy and school or door-to-door or they sold something and sometimes that just meant, they worked in a Foot Locker, or they worked in a Radio Shack, or they worked as a computer store and sold software. But almost all the know-how.
To sell something. I feel like the Insight of that comes from sales, but a lot of those sales were Shady, you know, like how do you mark it up? How do you sell those? I remember we had a cable guy in Washington. D.c.
May God is a trick out, your box feel like the black box. Yes.
Yes. And then he came back and stole everything in our house, but we didn't realize that Lucky's assistant. Was casing be lucky. If I'm lucky. It's a. Yes. But I need more.
Like that in my life. If we really are going down in flames, I want to record for posterity all the banged up shit. We did that informed who we were. And like, after hanging out with high school buddies, this weekend, I was just reminded of how important that is the bonds that come from that you. And I have a mutual body, I won't say because I don't know if he's said this out loud, but he and his wife there, 11? Grade daughter. Came home buzz, like a month ago, and she was trying to sneak up, and they kind of were like, you've been drinking. She's like in there.
He couldn't help himself with the words that came out of his mouth were like, thank God. And she's like, what? And the mom was like, oh, what a relief and the girl is so like, what are you talking about? They're like, we just thought you'd never do it, like, we thought you'd never fucking try it. It was such a mindfuck for the I just worry. I mean, Crystal, my wife, whose GPA was .02 points higher than mine in the same academic program at Georgetown, but Crystal would get all her school work done and then go raise. And I mean, the hard
For like DC and Baltimore Rave scene Rave and like would just get out there and be like, I've been in some situations, you know, I've been in some rooms around like holy fuck. We better get out of here before shit gets out, you know, or before the cops show up, but even in high school she lived on a compound, she would crush her academics and then she would literally crawl out of the window. Sneak past the embassy compound guards. Getting a cab at midnight and go party with her friends in Delhi and then sneak your way back onto an American Embassy. Compound without Marines, noticing
Her, that's fucking wrath, you know? Like that's part of what makes Crystal. So, fucking awesome right now and I need to memorialize these things for the benefit of humanity before, we're all obviated like these kids who have these incredible gpas in this test taking. I think it might be useless. I think they might have optimized for useless skills and I think the only thing that might keep us going, is that Randomness that unpredictability those flaws. Those fuck-ups the things that make us banged up the things where we
Make bad decisions, where we're self-indulgent where we have bad? Like, I'm lucky that I have all daughters, but when they invite boys over the house, I watch boys, make bad decisions,
repeatedly.
And at first, I was like, wait, why is the patriarchy a thing when I watch them be. So fucking stupid and take so many dumb risks. I'm like, of course, you were going to get hurt when you jumped off that thing. What in your head thought, you weren't going to.
Of course that was gonna break. And then I started realizing, you know, why we have a fucking patriarchy because that Randomness is something that no one knows how to count on. I've had to teach our team. The number one thing you can be in this business is unpredictable feed into the fact. I am known as Mercurial. I burn Bridges. I will not hesitate to fucking fight you. I wear the stupid shirts. I don't give a shit about much. I've been known to his light it on fire. And guess what? People take me seriously as a
Well, I haven't backed down from all those fucking character flaws. I have that are very self-destructive but I am all gasp no fucking breaks. As you know although in our line we call it no gas, no brains but we need to cultivate more of that if we have any hope as a fucking species, we just need to. I'm sorry. That's where I drop the fucking knife. So that's no permanent record. Tim Ferriss. You're going to be one of the very first guests and we're going to go deep into all your high Jinks all your fucking skeletons. I'm open.
But no felonies. The
main rule is no felony. Yeah, the fellas. I'm clear there.
Yeah, I mean, if you have murders, I worry that
time Mass
Graves justifiable homicide shitty is more like Bible homicide, but no hijinks hijinks flimflam's. Like bamboozling
no. Happy in your intro. When you're like, welcome to Norman attract razzle-dazzle, where the flim flam's bamboozling has a
home.
Yes. Do you know any card tricks?
I used to know quite a few card tricks that I've let that atrophy, so I don't anymore.
Our kids are good at card tricks. It's important and we have I have rigged X and stuff. I think it's important to know how to do some fucking magic tricks. Because magic is storytelling. It is deceit, it is understanding. Look for the angles, I love that, I love when kids no riddles. I love when they have bar bets that are impossible. I think everyone should be able to tell a good joke. You talking about I'm back to like my syllabus
You know, I've had a fucking survive, it's not just like the survivalist of what's in your go bag and how to handle a 30 round mag and how to dress your own meat and shit. It's like how do you actually tell a story? How do you make somebody who has no reason to like you maybe
the semester finale for your seminars, people have to get up and do a 25-minute comedy set something. That's the final exam
in front of a bunch of people and Maga hats. Yeah.
I'm going to find the worst or whatever, whatever your nightmare
audience is, it could be a bunch of ultra-left. Yeah, Libs. Yeah. That for
ya you model who's actually on stage are like, here we go. These are not your people. I mean that's one of the things that's right now we all get to choose who we hang out with and the internet has allowed us to hang out with people who are just like us and nobody hangs out with people who aren't like them anymore and that bums me
out which by the way even if you want to hang out with people who are unlike you
By virtue of the customized feed and sort of algorithmically tailored servings. It's very hard even if you try and if you do try and you're like I want to take a sampling of this. We're in a couple of well one group thread and particular where I take great pleasure in fucking up people's feeds because I'll second you know whatever I do. Yeah a video. Yes, of some like gorgeous chick doing squats that are very
Suggestive, and that's her entire account on Instagram. And before you know it like you send that to somebody and you've just dropped like a cherry bomb into their I'll go in and then that's 90% of what they see. So it's very hard to actually live in multiple worlds. You are going to get painted into a corner because that's how advertising is sold against you
but in real life that's happening and that's why I am hopeful for the Resurgence of the rest of America. You know Steve case was on the rise of the rest and JD Vance bless him and his weird path but he
Was on to that early to, you know, eighty two percent of the money from the IRA, the the big Biden climate bill. Went to read districts, it's the green little secret. There are more clean energy jobs in Texas than there are oil and gas jobs. The Republicans green little secret, but that's just the reality because it's good fucking business. If you want to work with good people, who know the tools to know the engineering, that's where they are there in the Heartland. And I really do. Hope we are going to see the Resurgence of some of those communities because for me, raising kids in a community like that. It's like
Going back in time, where we know our neighbors, we know our kids are safe. I love hearing the stories of my kids friends, who just they work for a living? They do really incredible shit. By the way, it's funny. How a few people know anything about me. I got invited to do a shark tank panel judging for like Elementary School entrepreneurial business plan class, you know, they were just fucking around, they had product ideas and one of the kids walked in and was like, oh my God you got a real shark and the like the superintendent and the
Isabel of put the whole thing together. Like, what are you talking about? Like, he's a shark from Shark Tank and I like, we just needed to Dad's. We only had mom's volunteers. So, we sent out a note for dads. I actually thought, I thought they were like, it was specifically targeting me. Nobody had any fucking idea. So, it was amazing. Like, I'm in, like I'm in camouflage. Here, I go out and a T-shirt and glasses instead of a cowboy shirt and no
glasses. I'm camouflaged. I love it. So sorry, Kristoff were coming in on, just over three hours now.
Tim, I gotta I gotta just say something. No, bro. I'm worried about
you. You worried about me?
Yeah, I'm worried about this podcast. There's been no like toxic masculinity, we didn't talk about testosterone and where it's been. There's like very little hatred and, you know, there was just very little, like incendiary content. I didn't hear any conspiracy theories, no pseudoscience know, like political opportunism. I mean, you're just like this
whole like a lot on the table.
Let's get some valuable and actionable content inspiration for young people. And people are like, what is this shit? You should be baiting outrage, contriving morality man. I mean, do you even know how to podcast
for? I know, I sometimes wonder the same thing you will notice is the first time. I've had it only took me whatever almost eight hundred episodes to get a reasonably professional-looking. Mic setup for these. Look at that.
I hope, whatever those labels are responding you.
You can't take them off, but it's so flattering.
Sorry, I can't believe you didn't ask me for a book list, ready, but list you didn't
ask did for your syllabus, but you dodging gave me poetry.
Yeah, okay. Anxious generation and coddling of American mind in Generations, by Jean twangy who works at Jonathan. Haidt was informed me more about our generation as well as how to work with other people. There's No Agenda that book but it's powerful, the coming Wave by Suleiman. I think is does the most even
Handed job of assessing the future of a, I particularly by someone in the business end of the world. Is just the beginning. Do you know that guy Peter? He's a fucking Maniac. I think it's just provocative. He also does. He's really fun little YouTube updates from hikes
and, like, end of the world is just the beginning. It's
just the beginning. What's his name? It starts with a z as last
Peters, a hand that looks like.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Thanks. I love Van Nuys stats book report on the fourth turning it's just thought provoking again home grown up.
Jeffrey toobin about Tim McVeigh is. I think a canary in a coalmine book Tim McVeigh was for my hometown
shit. Didn't know that.
His mom was our travel agent. His sister worked at Wendy's. He bought his ammo at the same place where we bought our fishing supplies but that book explains. What happens when the Factory closes down and people become radicalized, I encourage people to read it. The thing that people don't know about Tim McVeigh as he had a photographic memory, there were 671 boxes of evidence at his trial that we're all him.
Him reciting every single person he ever spoken to every meeting. He had, he knew everything. So there's no mystery about his story stolen focused by Jonathan. Her are, you know, that one? Just amazing. I think it's like the best like digital detox and
focus. Oh, I this. And I have not read that one. I think you wrote Chasing the ghost, I might be
misquoting. Yeah, I may be meditation for
Mortals is a great honor Berkman.
Yeah, he's grass. So good, psychology money we mentioned.
The best piece of fiction. I've read recently, is rejection by Tony. Can't say his last name. Don't know what to do, but what was the name is amazing. It's called rejection by Tony
Tony, T Tony, Tony Tony to let us see what I'm up to something like
that. Thank you. That's a long. Yeah, that is, it'll put some people out of their comfort zone. For sure. That guy has his finger on culture and Linguistics more than anything. I've read recently.
You know, I've shared that with other
author fortunes were like, fuck.
Yeah, cool. Hey the every is great fiction. Did you listen to McConaughey's autobiography?
I listen to some of it. I had one the podcast years ago to talk about it which was amazing and I miss quoted just briefly Johann. Hari is book, Chasing the scream and lost connections. That's Corrections is the what I read in full which I thought was great. That's about isolation loneliness and things to do about it in a modern world. I thought that was very well done. Stolen focus is the one that you were talking
about.
Yeah, it's so good dude. It was given to us as a gift and it really changed our media diet for sure. And our online diet, I try and read everything. Jon Ronson doesn't listen to it. By the way, I was going to say Matthew McConaughey's. Audiobook, can't read it. You gotta listen to it. And so, the every I love fucking Eggers, but the every seems to be increasingly prophetic right now. Robin Sloan's fiction, Moon bound and penumbra, are great, do you watch Silo to read the Wolves
here? So I'm gonna admit that I haven't, I do know Hugh and he's amazing but
I have not yet dealt into that because I know that I want to consume all of it.
I knew you guys knew each other from like Arctic Adventures to and shit, right? And like Iceland,
you said time in Japan and elsewhere he was on the podcast a while back. He's such an income jellicle experimentalists and innovator when it comes to publishing. Also really, really
impressive.
Yeah he brought those things and just
throw them up there, right? Is one of the most thoughtful unafraid lateral thinkers in writing and Publishing that I've met. He's a smart
guy. I even read the wool series after watching the first season of Silo. Fucking love it. I think it's great. I think it's prophetic and amazing and then I mentioned Kelly Corrigan. I just think that's grounding human shit. I think Kelly Corrigan has her just a podcast too, but I love her books. I think talking about relationships kids dying, but
Way, that is just like self-deprecating, real America. It's just like an antidote particularly for like your Tech heavy, seriously, online audience, I think that's great. You want two kids book, it's the Pirates series, The Pirates in an adventure with Communists, the Pirates, an adventure with Darwin. Those books are so fucking good. You laugh at them even as you read them
to feel like you've got more I
tried and your life will give
you have more on offer you got you got anything anything else locked loaded there.
Yeah, my hundred dollar one dollar purchase.
You know, what are amazing. Have you ever written on Stone paper? He's notebooks by cars. You know, this thing's it's actually it's Stone and there's no more enjoyable experience than writing-on-stone. So karst Stone paper.com. I don't own it or anything like that but I highly recommend it. I
think. Is it just the hand feel? Is it just the actual tactile
sensation of riding on it? Yeah oh and how the pen moves across a whoa. Yes you'll it's sensual sensuous
Sensual. It's pretty special. And, you know, I'll say to other things. One do laddie rats, my favorite booze, right now, it's an all-natural Campari, and aperol substitute would. None of the bullshit in it, note of the fake
dies. Just, what was it called? Dora the Explorer.
No, Dola, Sera. DOL a PIRA, you know, who make sail Richard bets? Joe Marchesi. Oh, really awesome? Yeah, your homies. Yeah, well, most tequila guys. Yeah, almost is the highest rates of killing the land right now. Okay. My number one, purchase.
Under $100 that I stand by, I've cited it before and I just happened again. I never show up at a party without mullet wakes, they change fucking everything. I was just at a New Year's Eve party and I showed up at the mall at wigs, and it's just broke everyone to Pieces. It was amazing. The most stayed fucking guys, do multiple guys were like, can I take this home? Because my wife thinks I'm hot in it. So, well, it wakes change.
And so Amazon will do like look get some Dog, the Bounty Hunter style ones, it's someone's with like the built-in Willie Nelson, you know, American flag, bandana, get some curly, Bob Ross ones in there, just to shake it up a little bit. You know, you can throw in like a neo-punk, like white 80s hair wig but just fucking wigs. They Next Level. Everything I'm here. 10 years later to him to tell you that that still holds up
durable mullet wigs. Oh God, yes.
Next time, 10 years from now, we'll talk about best playlist on Spotify that has been curated by Ai and fed directly into our brain
chips. Okay. Next time, right? Most commonly searched terms on PornHub. Next time that's
going by agent is talking to your agent. Ain't nobody got time for this bro. I miss you. I hope to see you in Texas. Really soon.
Miss you too man. Yo will we are going to see each other in Texas.
Hey by the way if you ever been to Wyoming, there's kind of rash for sale. There's a ranch it's incredible fight.
On the ranch, it's an incredible place. The fishing is abundant tricked out the barn. It's, I used to work from their fun. You can host. It's an event spot. I mean, if you really want to go and if you care about skiing Backcountry skiing, you know it's right there Pop's
doesn't get Quinn. Mining servers in the barn worst case scenario. It's got to be a lot of good ventilation.
Dude, you're amazing. Thank you for doing this dude. It's been a long
time. Yeah, it has been a long time, man. It's great to see you. Sam's good.
Families. Great tin. I need to get you on that
train. I know, I know it's not for lack of trying, although some of my audience to become very, very adamant and even aggressive with me about, my lack of producing kids at this point, I'm like, well, look, why don't you walk a mile in my shoes and then show me how easy it is. Let's see what that looks like.
Yeah, but that's the thing, dude. You just put on different shoes and sometimes there's like a little bit of puke in them or something like that or like, okay. Really quick story, you're ready. It's ready, kid, and shuuran.
It we have a good friend here, who's an OBGYN, she's hilarious. I'm not going to give her name but she's a local and we love her to death. Smart hilarious. She's telling a story about how you know, she's an OB/GYN, she got the page in the middle of night. You got to go deliver the baby. So she climbs out of bed because her husband goodbye throws on some Crocs, goes out to the hospital and the delivery like you know, she Stitches the Gallup, there's some blood Etc and the nurse says, hey let me clean up.
Those Crocs for you. And so she pulls the Crocs off and she holds them up both in front of the doctor. The nurse is holding him up and in front of the woman who just gave birth and on them, you know, those like Jules, you know. Like you can spell shit out. Yeah, it says Deez Nuts because they belong to her 13
year old son.
She didn't realize it as she was walking out of house. She when she walked out with a Deez Nuts, Crocs on
Oh, that's the screenplay I think.
Oh my God. That is just you can't write you like that. Like so anyway Tim it is really like people talk all these platitudes about it and stuff and I'll be honest, it wasn't like the day. A lot of people talk about the magic that your kid comes out like my life changed forever. I didn't always feel that I was like, oh shit, I gotta like do some shit and take care of Crystal and there's poo everywhere now and Somebody's Crying and I haven't slept in a while but
But as time goes on, you know, our kids went to camp this summer and Crystal and I at first you're like hey I'm Dean Masters, let's party and we did but at the same time we're like fuck. We miss our best friends man. We've got three incredible kids who are besties and I understand that mixed emotion of like when the kids go off to college. I see this happening with a lot of our friends who had kids before. We did that like both relief of like, all right we can go travel and shit like that now. But on the other hand, like kind of lonely, you know, these kids are fucking great.
I love it. We really entertain each other and I've loved being on that Journey with them and so I really do hope we can get you on that
program. Oh yeah. I mean that's, that's the intention.
Okay. Can I tell the quick story from that dinner party without mentioning the name of the
person? Yeah sure. Okay. All right, so
this your audience needs to know this to him. So Crystal and I are hosting a dinner in New York City. We don't get there that often, but we love to bring like
Close friends together again, ruthless about the invites, no plus ones. We just know that if you're coming to dinner, everyone's going to be awesome. So there's no seating chart. We did see you next to this person intentionally though, this is a famous actress, who is single. I mean, absolute smoke show and within Tim's leak and not entirely disinterested, and Tim like, up for it. You know, like open, open to the concept. We'd kind of
You know, tilled the soil. I wouldn't say we planted the seed, but we till the soil, it was on the table, like household name. So we sent them next to each other. Things are going great. The meal is wonderful. The wine is great. The conversation is stimulating. Tim is a great person to have a dinner conversation. He can talk about anything, he's genuinely interested in other people. He likes to ask questions, not because it's for a podcast of because he likes to learn from anybody and he realizes that any single person you talked to has a story. Give them a chance to tell.
So things are going really well. We're starting to talk about meaningful shit. And at one point, she says, hey, Tim, when do you feel most
present? Now, there's one piece of information that's missing here, which is her dietary preferences. Yeah,
I didn't know if that would make her to identifiable so but she's vegan. She's well known as vegan. Tim know, she's vegan, animal rights type persons, but not like rub it in your face.
As vegan, there's plenty of meat on the table, she's fine with it all being there. But she goes, Tim, when do you feel most present, like, that's how much you guys were vibing. That's how well it was going.
We're all. So this is at a point in the meal where it's sort of like a Jeffersonian situation. So there's a lot of Silence at this
point. Yes, yes, we are all paying attention. That's right, that's right. It's a small table. There's 12 people at this table in tiny, tiny place, where it's zz's Clam Bar in New York, tiny, one-room spot to seat bar, but we're at a table for 12.
Elbow to Elbow eating incredible food, and there's Vibe, there's energy there, and I mean, Tim's like fucking magnet, right? And so she says, Tim, when do you feel most present and Tim? What did you say without even having to inhale? Without even having to take a breath? I
said, when I'm having sex doing psychedelics or hunting, those were the
three
no sooner had the last syllable been uttered.
Tip Chris who's, like, eight feet away, is that a few drinks? Just goes, oh my God. And puts his head in his hands.
Never, I had never seen a ticket go up in Flames, faster than that, that was the most combustible element in the universe of that moment, was your chance to be with that woman. Yeah, you know, that was fucking fascinating. She did raise her.
Class for the record. She did. Raise her
glasses you for your great. She's
great support for your self-awareness, Candor and
authenticity. Yep. No she was, she was
but it's more. Any spark was immediately
extinguished. Yeah, you
know, if you guys kept in touch have you kept in touch or no, we
haven't, but we weren't really a. I've got touched. Yeah, and we'd met before. Yeah, she had an amazing. But yes, I just don't have it in me to succeed pretending to be someone I'm not, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah I'd rather go up in flames.
It's
no, I mean, identity, plea admire, right? I like I I've told you like my whole life's mission is about how to be internally driven rather than externally driven how to be more honest, more authentic, more candid. I told you, I'm less patient because I'm trying to be me and you are exactly that. So, I deeply admire it, but it was just so
funny. It was funny because because in the blink of an eye, like I didn't think about it. Like, it came out. You
did not inhale. Yeah.
It was on your exhale of the breath you'd already taken and so, but I love that your default your, I say this to your audience, your Primal default was to say the real thing rather than the thing that this unbelievable woman would have wanted to hear. That's fucking great. That's what makes you you, thanks.
Yeah. So work in progress but I'm not sitting on my hands. I know that families the next big adventure so I'll get there. I
We'll get there. And it's also, you know, it's been funny as I've dated is 47 now and the tone of sort of like, the line of questioning. For some women have been on dates with is like what's wrong with you? Why are you broken like your, what's going on? Like you say you want a family you're 47 and I'm like well two things if I were 40, would you be saying this and they're like no yeah like okay well I just got out of a not so long ago got out of it almost six-year relationship so the intention was
To have kids and it didn't work out, like things, don't work out better to figure that out before you have kids. I think in a lot of cases and then I was like, secondly, if I had been what I've found is that women would be, some women would be more comfortable if I had been married and divorced once or twice. Oh my God. And having not done it. Yeah. But they wouldn't be asking that same question, which is interesting. Yeah, it's like, okay. Alright. So maybe the concern is like, oh, this guy is like Peter panting for the rest of his life and he doesn't want to.
Um, it, I'm like, well, I have two relationships that are longer than a lot of marriages, so that doesn't totally check out. Yeah, but it's fascinating, modern dating?
Yeah, look Crystal. And I would have been a disaster if we'd gotten together anytime in those 14 years, I kept asking her out. Yeah. I, you know, had a prior relationship was divorced. I had a long-term relationship after that. That didn't work. If I hadn't gone through that stuff, I would not have understood what it meant to be in a healthy relationship to have balanced. I have intimacy to all those things that need to
Happen. I wouldn't have known it you know it was a funny exercise is we set up a really modest trust for our kids basically. So that you know houses you have to do that estate planning shit. And so it's particularly not generous because we think mostly money fucks kids up, but we had to sit and decide at what age they would have any discretion over it and we were 36 at the time and we said
36
because that was when we felt like we'd finally like gotten our shit together and like, maybe now I'd set it at 45.
I don't know, but, you know, my dad is 78 years old plays pickleball three times a week with 20-somethings. He always tells us about which guys complaining like, oh, I can't move. Like, I could when I was 18, when I was like, fuck you, I'm 78. But like I do think age has an attitude. I do think it's mental. I do think like, I don't think that number actually matters but I also don't think everyone's ready for it every time, but I can just say that having kids has just been a remarkable, remarkable chapter
Crystal. What if she was your guest on your podcast to tell you? She never envisioned it for yourself. It wasn't she just did not think of herself as a mom and now, you know, she identifies as a creative and and an author New York Times Best Sellers and a designer, and an investor and an entrepreneur. But maybe at the top of that list is a mom and maybe second after that is a youth sports coach. I mean, we had basketball practice at our house last night for the fourth grade team, the I forget what they're called.
They have a new name but you know, like it opens these new chapters of life that really remind you of the fundamental questions. Like why the fuck are we here? Yeah you know and I love going through the awkward Middle School shit again,
I love it, I love it.
It's therapy for me man. All those times you were stuffed in a locker Tim you get to deal with it again, it's amazing.
Yeah, that was relentless. Holy shit, it was just straight up. Lord of the Flies. I mean, the like they're really few safe.
Hurts at that point,
that's one of the great things. They have a, the playground, supervisor wears cowboy boots as an eye patch, and a peg leg
at the school here.
Incredible. I mean everything is so fucking Corps in Montana. I love it. Everything is soap. Like, suck it up. It's just fucking fantastic. We need more of it.
So, all right
dude, I love you. Yeah, let me love you, I love
you. Yeah, I love you too, man.
And give my backyard to hang and I'm gonna see you. Yeah, not too long from now
and I love all of you listeners who are going to visit Five Pawns Ranch.com and explore your Wyoming fantasies maybe, you know, you build one of those like, crypto based distributed organizations to buy it. That's fine. As long as it comes in US Dollars. This is the best place to shelter, your gains just telling you and have a beautiful life in the outdoors.
Get with
those Five Pawns Ranch.com. There we go. Five Five-0 ponds Ranch.com. Thank you.
All right, everybody. You heard it here first for 1995, with the five easy installments. You could test out the ranch for yourself, maybe not for that, that price point, but we'll see. And as always, we'll link to things were mentioned in the podcast. What's a lot of things? Yes, yes.
God. Bless the AI. That does that for
you? Yeah.
Uh, blog / podcast, you'll be able to find it. Check out our first installment for Chris sokka's, Wonder Years and early chapters.
Wait, I also did that other episode where you had me? Read questions off of Reddit. That is fun too. Yeah, you did that. Yes. Remember. I didn't have a soundproof room so I had to put my head under a blanket. Yes. And talk to GarageBand.
So, yeah, there's there's also, there is a, there
is a, there is a, there is an episode 1 .5. Yeah, there's a
1.0 and as always folks,
Folks, thanks for tuning in, be a bit Kinder than is necessary to not just others, but yourself as well, until next time and thanks for tuning in. Hey guys. This is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday? That provides a little fun before the weekend, between one and a half and two million people. Subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday, easy to sign up, easy to cancel.
It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things it often includes articles and reading books, I'm reading albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that gets sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests and these strange, esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you.
You. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short. A little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. Something think about if you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim not blog / Friday type that into your browser. Tim dot blog, / Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening as many of, you know, for the last few years I've been sleeping on a midnight locks mattress from today's sponsor, he looks sleep. I also have one in the guest bedroom downstairs and feedback from Friends has
He's been fantastic kind of over-the-top, be honest. I mean, they frequently say it's the best night of sleep. They've had in ages, what kind of mattresses and what do you do? What's the magic Juju? It's something they comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever. I also recently had a chance to test the Helix Sunset and leat in a new guest bedroom, which I sometimes sleep in and I picked it for, it's very soft, but supportive feel to help with some lower back pain that I've had the sunset Elite delivers exceptional Comfort while putting the right support in the right spots, it is made.
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Coffee, coffee coffee, man. Do I love a great cup of coffee, sometimes too much and I'll have two, three, four, five cups of coffee. I do not love the Jitters, the come from that or how even one really strong cup of coffee can impact my sleep which I measure in all sorts of ways which HRV and blah. Blah blah blah, blah blah. But more recently I have downshifted to something that feels good. I have been enjoying a more Serene morning Grew From This episode sponsor, mud water with only a fraction of the caffeine found in a cup of coffee model.
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