What’s truly going on inside DOGE?

What’s truly going on inside DOGE? Sam Parr: Dude, this vault, this giant filing cabinet is worth more than Snapchat. It's worth more than Pinterest. It's worth more than Twitter as a company. Isn't that crazy? All right, we're going to get a little current eventy, which we don't often, but I love current events. So I want to talk about a current event. Last night, Elon did this thing where he was like in Trump's office with like his kid like crawling all over him, climbing up on him, which is kind of funny. And he told this story about a mine where all the government files were. Did you hear what he said? I didn't hear what he said. I saw a photo of this place like underground. Somebody said, oh, it's the bureaucratic Gringotts from Harry Potter. It's like this underground bank vault. So, Elon said something that I feel like it was like an offhanded comment, but it's actually led me down this rabbit hole. Basically, they were asking him about how he was like getting rid of all these jobs. And he was like, yeah, I want to like actually retire more people. But I was told that I could only retire 10,000 people a month. And I was asking, well, why is that? And he said, well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual, meaning it's literally on paper. And it's written down on a piece of paper and then it goes down a mine. There's literally a limestone mine where all the paperwork for people who want to retire is where it's stored. And so in order to actually make this work, the speed that we can move, the limiting factor, is the speed at which the line shaft elevator can actually move down. And you hear this story and you're like, what the hell are you talking about, man? And so I went down a rabbit hole and I had to figure this out. So can I tell you a little story about not just this mine, but this whole company that operates around this? So basically in the 1920s, there is this guy who grew mushrooms. And I guess in order to grow mushrooms in the part of America where he was growing mushrooms, he had to grow them in a cave. And so he was the Mushroom King of America. At one point, he was the largest creator or grower of mushrooms in America. He was this German immigrant and he was kind of like this like funny guy where like his advertisements, he called himself the Mushroom King, whatever. And he had to rent a cave and grow mushrooms. And eventually he bought a cave and that's where he grew mushrooms. And this cave that he bought was massive. It was a huge cave. And for some reason, starting in the 1950s, post-World War II, Those damn Europeans started undercutting them and started selling cheaper mushrooms. And he was like, my mushroom business is going to go under. This is not going to work. I got to figure out what to do. And so he bought a bank vault door that was $20,000 in 1950 and he installed it in his cave. He took out the mushrooms and he installed this bank vault door and he went to a local bank and was like, hey, you guys have a lot of paperwork. You've got a lot of files that you have to store. I have the safest place on earth to store this paperwork. You wanna like make a business deal? And so he changed his business and he started this thing called Iron Mountain. And it was called Iron Mountain because it was literally in like a mine that was like, they would use the, I don't know how this all works, but they would use like the rocks to make like iron. And he grew this thing like crazy. And so basically this company, it's called Iron Mountain. Google Iron Mountain Market Cap. Iron Mountain Inc. is a $30 billion company. Wow. Do you guys remember when marketing was fun? When you had time to be creative and connect with your customers? With Hubspot, marketing can be fun again. Turn one piece of content into everything you need. Know which prospects are ready to buy and see all your campaign results in one place. Plus, it's easy to use, helping Hubspot customers double their leads in just 12 months, which means you have more time to enjoy marketing again. Visit Hubspot.com to get started for free. So this company, I looked it up, since the year 2000, they have created a billion dollars at least, or roughly, per year in free cash flow. And they now own something like, I think it was something like 80 million square feet of storage. And so they have everything. So it could be like Princess Diana's will is in there. But it's like Sony, the music company, Sony, the record label, Sony has all of their masters recordings, like literally like the tape stored in Iron Mountain. But their biggest customers is like an insurance company in Connecticut. Who have been in business for 100 years. They, for some reason, legal reasons, they have to keep their paper files. They have to save them for something like 75 years. This is nuts, dude. So they're just a giant. They're just like a physical vault. For documents, it says Enterprise Information Management Services, founded in 1951. So it's just a giant vault. And they're like, we will protect your files, we'll protect your paperwork. Exactly. But it's huge. So literally, they have caves. And he like would joke that it's an atomic bomb shelter. But that wasn't really a joke. They actually have a whole bunch of decommissioned atomic bomb structures as their vaults. And so and they do this because if you If you are like, for example, a WWE is one of their customers and they have every single time they've literally like physically filmed a fight like a like a an event match. The match they store it and they have all these tapes, which is like sounds like, OK, that's just like a small example. But they have other examples where like eight year old me would have broke in there. So excited to just go to the vault of all WWE matches ever. Yeah, but they also have like billions of dollars worth of art. So if you're a museum and you have extra art that you need to store, you're going to go to Iron Mountain because you know it's like real, like safe. It's one place or they have a bunch of these? They have dozens and dozens of places. So I think they have 80. And why caves? Like don't caves literally like cave in? Like why not just a building? What's wrong? Like a building with guys with guns. Why not? Because it has a low moisture so it's like it's like it's good for paper. I see. And a bunch of reasons like that but it's also like literally safe so like a cave is actually you know I don't know how this works but it's actually safer in terms of like they're being An earthquake or there being an atomic bomb. When someone just gives me one scientific fact, like just like a minor, if you were just like, yeah, the humidity coefficient is lower, I'd be like, all right, all right, I don't need to hear more. Like, I'm just like so sad. As long as I know there's any scientific basis for something, I'll just accept it, the argument in full. It's the, there was a Harvard study that has the same effect on me. Exactly. And I was reading this and it was by the New Yorker and it was hard to comprehend how epic this thing is now. So this is the thing that stores the government stuff or no, a separate business? Yes. So let's get to the government stuff. So he said there's a limestone mine where this is all stored. So he kind of dismissed it because it was a mine, but that's actually important. But the federal government is a customer of Iron Mountain. And so here's how this works. This part is absolutely insane. So starting in the 1950s or the 1960s, the federal government became a customer of Iron Mountain. And to this day, it basically operates the exact same way. And so right now, the federal government is retiring around 100,000 people a year. And when let's say you work for the FBI or some agency, federal agency, the Postal Service, whatever, and you need to retire because of 100 plus years of laws, there's a lot of complications. And so when you retire, you're supposed to get a pension. Let's round numbers of $100,000 a year. But Some people might get $98,000. Some people might get $108,000. And the reason they will is because let's say this federal employee was a cafeteria worker for a federal agency. That requires a different set of rules. Let's say this person was a retired vet. Let's say this person was an amputee. There's like a million rules about what you are going to be earning after you retire. However, this is all done on paperwork. So every single federal employee, not just the current ones, but the past ones, they have a manila envelope in this mine in Pennsylvania that Iron Mountain runs. And so when you want to retire, you have to file a piece of paperwork. You literally write Up on a piece of paperwork, you give it to your boss at your federal agency. The federal agency has to mail it to the mountain or to the mine in PA. And it takes roughly 60 days because one of the 600 employees at this mine needs to physically have the file in hand, needs to walk to your file in the mountain, which this mountain is 200 football fields or 200 acres. They had to literally hand, like by hand, go and get that file and they got to look at your file. They got to say, all right, Shaan looks like he's 65. It looks like he, oh, he actually retired at 59 years old. Then he came back. So that gets a different thing. Turns out he served in the Iraq war. So he gets this thing, this thing, this thing. And then they close the file and they put it back and they send the paperwork back to your agency to let them know, here's what Shaan is going to be paid for his pension fund. And that process takes something like 90 days to do that whole thing. Since the 1980s, they have spent hundreds of millions, it's approaching billions of dollars to digitize this. It's failed every time. And the New Yorker in 2004 wrote this amazing article. They're like, we tried it in 1980. We're trying it now. We've tried it in 1995. Why does it fail? Why can't they digitize too much or it gets rejected? It's a huge task. But this mountain, it's in rural Pennsylvania. And these Pennsylvania folks, they were literally mine workers. That's what they were, this mine when it was an active mine. So it's like generations of miners who are now doing this thing. So it's not like these 600 employees aren't exactly like computer experts. They're like physical laborers. So they don't exactly have the labor there to do it, but also just the bureaucracy. The same thing that happened when Obama launched healthcare.com or whatever. It's just really hard within a government, within the four years that a president is president, to make this massive change. You're not going to get a huge pat on the back for digitizing this process. The people who work at the mine, they interviewed a couple of them. They were like, it's a pretty miserable place to work. In the wintertime, when we arrive at work, we're there when it's dark. And then when we come home at night, it's still dark and you can't have a flame in the mind. So all of the food has to be delivered for us every day. And it's like fried food or pizza. That's like our two vendors. But they let you have unlimited overtime if you want. And it's an eight to five job. And no one leaves. Like the retention is 100 percent. They're like, it's just a good stable job. I want to be listening to Iron Mountain pod where there's just these miners just talking about paperwork and eating pizza. It's like an ASMR channel of the limestone mine. And the New Yorker did an article and they were talking to these people and they were like, if you guys want to see taxpayer waste, You should see what happens when a federal worker retires, goes back to work and then retires again. He goes, one guy they interviewed, they go, I'm working on a case now that's taken me 120 days to figure out how much pension this worker is owed. And it's just a nightmare. And so it's like literally a physical labor job to walk around and find all these files. This mining company, this vault, this giant filing cabinet is worth more than Snapchat. It's worth more than Pinterest. It's worth more than Twitter as a company. Isn't that crazy? The $30 billion company? And the retention might be better. And here's why it might be better. It is better, I guarantee. Workday. Workday is a piece of software. I've never, I don't think I've, maybe I've used it, but like the thing about work, Workday is considered like a dinosaur software company, right? It's like, or let's say ADP, like these payroll softwares that a lot of huge companies have and they're regarded as a sticky product. But the issue with that is that you, a worker, as well as management, you interact with that product every day. So you're like, this fucking sucks. So eventually you might get pissed off and want to change it. With Iron Mountain, A bank, by law, has to keep these files and say, hey, we're going to give this to you guys. And they'll never talk to him again for the next 50 years. Should we open up a drawer? Like, should we just go have these on a single drawer in Iron Mountain and just start saving, like, hateful YouTube comments in there? Just have one little station? They told a story about this mine. They said there was some rich anonymous person, this old lady, who had like $100 million worth of art. And she, once a year, would go down to the mine and bring a blanket and cheese and wine and would just sit and look at her art. I just be like, this is awesome. And that was in the article that she did that. Crazy company, right? This freaking Iron Mountain. Really, really fun find. I'm glad you found that. Also hilarious that you started with, let's start with current events. And then you started talking about this old file storage system from like the 1950s. And that's where you went with this, this information. Did you see photos of it? Yeah, I saw I saw the one photo. Now I'm looking at more and it's pretty wild, dude. It's just like, I mean, it makes sense now that you say it. Now that you explain it, it makes sense. It's just who knew? Who knew that this is how it all works? Now there's digital versions of this. I forget what some of the guys in the space are, but they were like, Iron Mountain was like, hey, are you guys nervous about digital? And they dismiss it. They're like, dude, you don't know how much crap people need to store. We're going to be fine. Like it's going good. And so if you look at their financials, it's just like consistently like a billion dollar plus of free cash flow just every year. This is how my wife treats my kids art. She like created her own Iron Mountain in our house. It's just disgusting. All right. So you brought up current events and then you said something that was totally not a current event, but there was other current events that are actually interesting. I'm just curious. Give me your one to 10 level of interest in these. I have a feeling you might not be interested in these. Elon offering $97 billion to buy OpenAI. Did that tickle you? Eight out of ten. The Elon stuff is like inherently incredibly interesting at the moment. Right. Okay. Eight out of ten. Let's rank this one. Elon crashing the press conference in Donald Trump's Oval Office. Was that a? Ten. And by the way, I bet it's not even for the content, just for the social dynamic of him standing behind Trump and just overtaking the press conference. Is that right? That's my guess. Is that what you want to talk about? Well, there's one other I want to get your read on, which is DOGE as a whole. Let's go in that order. So start at 10. Yeah. So you sent me a text last night and you said, rule number one, never outshine the master. Elon Musk, and you're referring to the 48 Laws of Power, how to be powerful. You never outshine your master. Elon Musk 100% outshined Donald there. That was so emasculating to have Donald just sitting there and Elon standing up sort of behind him like he was going to come and put his arm, like his hands on his shoulders. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. He hijacked a press conference and just started giving his own speech. A wordy speech while his kid is there rambling also. And Trump is just sitting there like a goon at the table. And it was just so interesting. I've never seen anyone who's not the president give their own press conference from the Oval Office while the president sits there. Forget what they were even talking about. Just that was like, whoa, hold on. This is like You know, if you watch The Bachelor, sometimes they do a two-on-one date. It's like, whoa, hold on. Is that a one-on-one? It's a two-on-one? Oh, there's going to be some drama here. That's how it felt. It felt like a Bachelor two-on-one was going on. When Elon told the story of Iron Mountain, Trump looked back at him and he goes, huh, no shit, really? He was being entertained at that moment as well. Do you know what I mean? I also love how Trump sometimes is like, we're going to send Elon in. Elon's going to go in. He's going to do great things. He does great things. And he's just like, that'll be the plan. But honestly, that's actually not a bad plan. It's like, if I was going to say one thing, it's like, we're going to send Michael Jordan on the court and he's going to shoot. He's a great shooter. It's like, that's kind of what he does with things. He's like, we're going to send Elon in there. He's going to take care of things. That was actually a really good Trump impression. I mean, I didn't fully commit. I do regret that I didn't fully commit because it kind of started off pretty hot. And if I had really gone for it, maybe I would have surprised myself, but I'll never know. And I'll live with that regret until I die. I thought it was pretty good. That had a lot of promise there. What about the DOGE stuff in general? I have a very opinionated take. Do you? I have a big picture take and then I have just like small things that I wish Wish more stuff would come out from. So here's my big picture take. I cannot believe we're on this timeline. So if you just rewind the clock, like a couple of years ago, here's what was going on. I was reading this Ray Dalio book. Did you ever read the Ray Dalio, I forgot what it's called, Rise and Fall of Nations or something like that? It's basically how empires fall, right? No empire lasts forever. Honestly, the title scared me and I was like, I just kind of want to be ignorant. But I read his first one, Principles, and I know that he comes off Historically is a pessimist, right? No, no, no. He's a realist. I don't know. He's just an observer of how things are. So if you're going to watch one thing, by the way, watch. But it was alarming. He's got this thing called the How the Economic Machine Works. It's a 20 or 30 minute YouTube video, which sounds long, but it's amazing. It's an animated video where he just explains how the economy works in a way that even a, you know, bozo like me could understand. And it's, it's, it's amazing. Go watch that. Like you should just pause this podcast and go watch that kind of thing. It's called how the economic machine works. The breakwater office, by the way, is literally 1.5 miles from my house. If you want to go and. Just talk to him. Yeah, we should walk right in. Unknown Speaker: Yeah, we absolutely should. Sam Parr: So he wrote this book about the rise and fall of nations. And he basically talks about like he studied all the empires, the Dutch Empire, the Roman Empire, the Chinese Empire. And basically, why do the empires end? Why don't they just keep going? They have all the advantages. They got the power. They got the best military. They got the best economy. They have the growing population. Like where do things go wrong? And he saw that over time, things go wrong in a very predictable, cyclical fashion. And then because he studied history, he could see that, OK, even if it's not going to be the same, it's probably going to rhyme. I should look out for some of these signs. And, you know, one of the signs that he talks about. Is around the big debt cycle. So there's like a short term debt cycle. There's a long term debt cycle. It's like 80 to 100 year debt cycle. And what happens is, you know, the countries or empires will end up going into too much debt, which the US is in right now, like $35 trillion of debt, like just an absurd number. And then the interest payments are really high. Then because people lose faith in their ability to pay off that debt, You know, they lose at some point their status as the global reserve currency, blah, blah, blah. OK, so Ray Dalio makes this argument. It's an interesting book. You should read it. Now, does he mention Muckbang? Where on the timeline is... Do you know what Muckbang is? Listening to people eat, watching and listening to people eat. Incredibly fat people just stuff their face with ramen. Yeah, it's like a governmental mukbang, is what he describes. Does he mention when the decline is when mukbang gets popular? There were signs. My friends, if you like MFM, then you're going to like the following podcast. It's called Billion Dollar Moves. And of course, it's brought to you by the Hubspot Podcast Network, the number one audio destination for business professionals. Billion Dollar Moves. It's hosted by Sarah Chen Spelling. Sarah is a venture capitalist and strategist. And with Billion Dollar Moves, she wants to look at unicorn founders and funders, and she looks for what she calls the unexpected leader. Many of them were underestimated long before they became huge and successful and iconic. She does it with unfiltered conversations about success, failure, fear, courage, and all that great stuff. So again, if you like My First Million, check out Billion Dollar Moves. It's brought to you by the Hubspot Podcast Network. Again, Billion dollar moves. All right, back to the episode. So as he's talking about this, it's like, okay, shit, you look at the kind of the current world, you're like, oh, shit, we got inflation. But then, you know, to fight inflation, they got to raise rates. When they raise rates, that slows down the economy, which slows down spending, which creates this other problem. Then you get stagflation, you get like all these, oh, man, this could go poorly, right? Oh, they're printing too much money that could hurt the dollars. You know, they're debasing the currency. That's what he says that they do. This is what's going to happen. And it just seemed inevitable. The problem was you looked at he's like, but who's going to go and fix this, right? It's not like a company because a company has to face reality. So what a company has to do is Ultimately, the company needs profits and the shareholders are going to demand that the company stop this excess spending. But the problem with the government is the government can sort of go infinitely in debt until it can't. It could just print money, right? Like imagine if you or I just had a little machine in the closet. It's like, well, I could solve this problem with hard work, cutting back, tightening the belt, you know, or I could just go in the closet, push this button. I'll just do it this one time, just this one time. Okay. And like, that's what just keeps happening. You go and you push the button, you print the money. And so, so that's the problem. Okay. And it just seemed like there was no solution to this because anybody who wanted to get elected, right, the leader, first, the leaders were not business people, right? So problem number one, The people who run the country were lifelong politicians typically and they were not CEOs or executives who had that as their core skill set. The second thing is they didn't have the incentive, right? Because when you want to get elected, it's like middle school all over again. You've got to go promise we're going to have free pizza every Friday. It's like, who's going to pay for that? I don't care. I just got to say it and promise it. We'll deal with the consequences because that's what gets me elected. So the presidency is never about, hey, I'm going to cut back all your favorite programs. It was always going to be, we're going to do more for you. We're going to cut your taxes. Okay, so less revenue for the government. How's that going to work? We're already in debt. We're going to cut your taxes and you know what? We're going to spend more on this. We're going to invest in education. That sounds great. We're going to give you free health care. We're going to pay off your student loans. It's like, wow, where's the money coming from? And the money was coming from that magic money printer in the closet. Okay, so it just seemed like, dude, there's no way. There's no way out. And somehow this insane situation has occurred. And I'm not saying that it's going to work. And I'm not saying I agree with everything about these people. I don't agree with everything Trump says. I don't even, I didn't even vote. Okay. Look, you can't even hate me. Okay. I didn't vote for the guy. I didn't vote for anybody. So, so you can hate me for other reasons. I don't agree with everything that Elon does, but he's an impressive, ultimately impressive entrepreneur. I think he's the greatest entrepreneur of all time. Okay. But I also, yeah, I don't agree with everything he says. Great, my caveats are out of the way. I cannot believe we ended up on this timeline where Trump gets elected. Elon Musk, the greatest entrepreneur of all time, and even if you disagree, okay, he's second, right? He's close. When did Trump... Was it January 20th? Is that... Yeah. Or 4th? Was it 20th? 20th is the inauguration. Yeah. Insane. So less than a month ago. Okay. 40 weeks ago. And he brings Elon Musk in and basically like. like he's still doing onboarding. If you just said, what's the only way America can get out of this? I'd be like, dude, we got to get like someone as smart as Elon Musk in there with a mandate and somehow have a free mandate to actually go and cut all the bloat to get us out of this excess spending, to cut the deficit, to balance the budget, to get us even into a surplus. That's the only way we got to like somehow do that. That sounded impossible two to three years ago. Like there was no path where something he's not even an American citizen, can't be president. He's not going to run. The president's not going to just give him free reign. Well, somehow we ended up in this 0.1% probability timeline where Trump gets elected, Elon becomes his bestie by backing him and giving him a bunch of money and throwing his weight behind him. Elon's stipulation was like, I want to create DOGE, haha, DOGE. And he's like, I'm going to cut spending. And Trump's like, OK, great. And somehow it became cool to cut spending, which was never cool before that. And now he just took this army of his smartest, most ruthless people as an army. Folks who are 24, even more powerful, 19. You just go get a bunch of 10x type of people. And he's literally like a rating. He's like rating buildings and he's taking over payment systems and being like, OK, I can't change the laws, but I could stop the flow of the money. I can audit everything from this payment record system. He's bringing like young hackers and he's bringing some of the smartest people in. He's doing this now. Will this be successful? I have no idea. I can't tell you. Is this fascinating? Absolutely. Is this one of our only shots to get out of the death spiral of excess spending? I believe so and I cannot believe it happened. End of rant. Alright, let me give you, let me give the audience a counterpoint and I'm gonna get flame for this. You're going devil's avocado on me? I'm going hardcore devil's avocado on you. No, not exactly because I'm on board with like what a lot of stuff he's doing but listen to this. Let's just say that you're 45 years old. You got two kids in high school. You got a mortgage and you're thinking like, you know, life's pretty good. And then all of a sudden you get a message that says, look, we appreciate you, Diane, for working for the government for so long, but You're done. You've got to get out. You're thinking, how the hell am I going to pay my mortgage? How am I going to provide for my kids? Do you want to go to college? Then you look online to learn about your situation and you're like, wait, the guy who just decided to fire me changed his Twitter handle to Harry Balls and he put in his description that he's offering circumcision for 69 cents. Did he just call a guy a retard on Twitter? Dude, someone yesterday sent me an advanced search. You know your Twitter advanced search? It was just like a single link I could click that was just Elon Musk saying the word retard and bro, you could scroll for days. It was unbelievable. It was an unbelievable link. It's sort of like a really successful entrepreneur CEO doing layoffs because money is short from his beautiful chalet in Aspen with a beautiful view behind him on Zoom. And for Elon, I'm like, do what you gotta do, but can you not be so smug about it and have some fucking grace when you're doing some of these things? Even if those things are good, and I agree with him, I just wish that the maturity level would go up. Because at the end of the day, it's cool for these tech guys to say, cut them, cut them, let's make the government smaller, whatever. But at the end of the day, it is real people's lives. And half of these people, they're not like, hungry power people. They're just fucking guys who are working nine to five and they just want to play softball on the weekends. You know what I mean? And that bumps me out. I wish that he would show a little grace when he's slashing. You know what I mean? I think you bring up great points. I think his It's like I've been told many times, you're not wrong, but your delivery sucks. What do they say in the Big Lebowski? You're not wrong, man. You're just an asshole. Yeah. That's like what's going on here. So I think you're absolutely right on that. I will say they did offer eight months severance. I will also say This wasn't like an optional or flimsy thing. It's not like somebody's just messing around. But that's what it seems like when you change it to hairy balls. He made it seem like that. You're absolutely right. It totally seems like he's messing around. The style is bad. I think the substance is good. The reality is The way that the government works is actually like a financial terror attack on all American citizens. And so as much as Diane, I don't like that Diane is going to possibly lose her job. The reality is she shouldn't have had that job probably in the first place or this old, maybe not her specifically, but the overall system is spending so much. It is going to tank the entire economy. Like, you look at all these crazy stats about how much of job growth is just federal jobs, how much of spending is just going to federal employees. It's like, you know, a wormy, the game of snake when you start to eat your own tail. It doesn't even make any sense. I'll give you, I'm going to tell you something. I have a friend. Who was last year or two years ago. They had an unlucky break. They wanted this promotion or this job. They didn't get it. They didn't really know what to do. Didn't look like they had a great, you know, like upside. I thought that they deserved a little bit better. So let me just see if I can help this person out. And around this time, I had met some people that were Some fat cats who were doing well with government contracts. And I'm talking about like, you know, one company, for example, they just, they're a web dev shop. They made websites. Now- They're a fat cat. We gotta bring that back. Great usage. A fat cat, yeah, exactly. And what I mean by that is they were making websites, which you can go on Fiverr and get a website for five bucks. You can go on Upwork and get somebody to do it for a couple hundred bucks. You can go on Squarespace and do it yourself. You could, there's a whole bunch of things you could do. They're getting 19, $20 million contracts to build simple websites. It was unbelievable. And there are multi-year contracts to do things that literally I have interns that could do them in three, four days. These aren't like high traffic, not complex apps, not super sensitive data. Just like a Squarespace. Informational websites. Put your menu online. Yeah, exactly. So I started noticing this. So I go to my friend and I say, let's get you a government contract. And I can't say too much specific stuff. We got this from a government contract to do something that probably takes four hours, not even high-skilled time. Anybody could do it. My sister could do it. My cousin could do it. Anybody could have got this contract. It's been going for two years and now it's a hilarious game of hide and seek because I'm like, yo, DOGE is going to find this contract. And when DOGE finds this contract, they're going to publish this thing and be like, we paid for this. And I'm glad that my friend got like, you know, a great job, lifestyle. However, it's the, what is that thing called? The free rider problem in society. It's like, I forgot, there's like some social term for this where it's like, you can abuse public parks and public transport because nobody's kind of like on the hook for it. And like, well, I'll get mine, I'll get mine. And when everybody tries to get theirs, we all get screwed. Where did your head go where your friend doesn't get the promotion and then the default response is, Let's get you a government contract, baby. Let's go to the government contract store. Just pick it off the shelf and go check out. There's these side quests that, you know, I've been through this, but this podcast is great, right? You do this podcast and you meet people and you hear stories. We were talking, but we had done a segment on government contract businesses. I think we had done a thing because somebody I know had pivoted. The episode I remember specifically was they used to be in the business of making vodka bottles with LED lights. So if it was like Sam's bachelor party, it'd be like, Sam, last day of freedom, like rotating around a vodka bottle. That was their business. COVID hit. And they pivoted their entire business to selling masks and got an $80 or $90 million contract. And this is somebody who lives less than a mile away from me. I've got another friend who did that. And I was like, oh my God, can you believe that? We talked about it on the podcast. And I just had some people email me, which is the flywheel of this podcast. And they were like, yeah, dude, have you ever checked this out? Check this out. You can go see what's up for bid right now. Hey, have you heard about this company? Have you heard about this company? So I started getting curious. Now, I was never going to do it, right? Because I'm at a phase of my life where I am intentionally trying to not make any decisions for money. So even when I saw something that I was like, oh, wow, you could go make money doing that. I no longer want to be that guy. I was that guy for like 15 years. I don't want to be that guy anymore. If I make a decision, it can't be for money as the number one reason. But I did take note and I was like, somebody could do that. Maybe somebody who's maybe top priority right now is money. And so this little side quest was let's go help a friend. I don't want to do this for me. It wouldn't be worth it for me, but it would totally be worth it to like for the story and to see if I could help my friend out. And it's still going. It's still going. But dude, every month and now that DOGE is out, it's literally like a game of hide and seek. And I can hear the footsteps coming. I know I know it's coming and it's going to be hilarious when it hits. That's insane. That is pretty funny. What about the The third thing, the reasoning behind it, he has a reason for doing this, which is that he's trying to... Explain what it is. Explain what it is so people don't know. So from my understanding, OpenAI is a non-profit. They're trying to convert to a for-profit. In order to do that, Sam Altman as well as some of the shareholders have to, quote, buy the company. And what Elon has done is he's put a competing offer to buy the nonprofit of OpenAI in order to make Sam Altman as well as the other shareholders to have to pay more. Is that the summary? Sort of. He's not trying to buy the nonprofit. He's trying to buy the assets. And same thing. So basically, OpenAI today is a nonprofit. That's how it started. That's who has a lot of the IP. Then they created a for-profit Where the nonprofit owns, I think, 25% of the for-profit or they're trying to own 25% of the for-profit. That'll be like the deal. And the for-profit has been raising billions and billions of dollars. They were just trying to raise from Masa and SoftBank. At a $250 billion value. $250 billion, $140 billion valuation. And so that implied that when they do this conversion, or they convert the assets, they'd get the assets out of the nonprofit into the for-profit, right? The IP, the Intel, all the code, all that stuff. The assets were valued, I think, at $40 billion in that transition. And it was going to be like stock, basically. It's like, oh, you're going to have 25% ownership in the for-profit. And what Elon did was just throw a wrench in that a little bit because he's like, actually, I'll buy the assets for 90, whatever he said, 97 billion. So a couple of possibilities here. Number one, he might actually get it. It's possible that he could do it. And then in that case, he would own the assets of OpenAI, merge it with XAI. And he would be he would go from fourth place to first place overnight. See, I'm uneducated on the topic, but I know a little bit about stories that just seems to that won't. I watched Game of Thrones. They're not going to die before they do that. OK. Yeah, that story won't happen. So he's so it's possible. Do you agree? Possible, not probable. Yes. And it's possible, not probable only because of the egos and personalities involved. Sam Altman would fight to the death to not have that happen. That would be him losing and getting checkmated. By Elon and Elon is doing it because he wants to checkmate Sam because he feels like he got wronged and betrayed because he funded the first 40 something million dollars into OpenAI when it was a non-profit and he owns nothing of the for-profit today. Would you put money on either of them? Winning this? Or just like in terms of just like the battle of the wits, like a chess match. Do you think that it's too hard to... You know when we watch those UFC pay-per-views and it's like sometimes you get the ones where it's just like, oh, I just want to see Khabib do his thing. He's going to win, but I just want to watch Hal. And then there's other times where you're like, I have no idea who's going to win this fight. I have no idea. You got the unstoppable wrestler versus the guy who's amazing at jujitsu and striking. And like, I could totally see it going either way. I got to pay $90 pay-per-view. I got to watch this. That's how this one is. I agree. For as many people say you never bet against Elon, there's an equal number of smart people who say you never bet against Sam Altman, right? And so you don't know which way it's going to fall. And there's also, it's the highest stakes thing. Like AI is the highest stakes game. And this is the crown jewel asset is OpenAI. And it's going to be a fight to the death. Okay, so the second possibility is he just wants to make it more expensive for OpenAI. Because like I said, the implied valuation they were talking about was about $40 billion for the assets, non-cash contribution, or maybe it was a cash contribution, I'm not sure. And this would up the price. So if nothing else, you go to your enemy, And they have to pay double for their car. But you think like maybe that's satisfying enough. Maybe that's like in the board meeting. Could you just imagine all these suits like, well, do we? Do we look at this offer and then everyone's just like, no, it's just Elon. He's just being a dickhead. Okay. Do they just collectively agree that he's just being an asshole? Or are they like, guys, we got to look into this. They're collectively. Because that would be a very low price for the assets of OpenAI. Literally on the open market, they're raising at a $240 billion valuation. So to sell the assets at a $97 billion valuation wouldn't really make a lot of sense. So at the very least, he's upping the price. Or just slowing it down, making life more complicated for his competitors. So if we're competing in a race, But I know I can distract 15% of your mindshare, right? It's like a honeypot. People used to do this, like send in a pretty looking girl. And it's like, this is just a nice little distraction for my competitor that I can send in. They will do that. So there's multiple levels this might be playing at. I don't know which one it is. This is just like the nerdy Kendrick Lamar versus Drake thing. Because now they're going after their personalities. They haven't gone after family yet. But I honestly would not be surprised if that happens next. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So I'm not paying a whole lot of attention to it, but I mean, it is interesting to watch like a sort of real life, you know, rap beef or Game of Thrones battle going on. Does any of this wear you out? Because I feel a little excited at the moment, but we're only a month in and I'm like, how much longer can I last with all these amazing stories? Yeah, I know what you mean. There's definitely a part of it where it just feels like I've just watched too many episodes of Jersey Shore and I'm like, oh, I wasted my whole day. You know, like, you know, oh, he said this and he did this and they're going to do this. And let me look up the Delaware law. It's like, for what? Are you getting anything out of this or are you just gossiping? Say, oh, I'm gossiping. OK, cool. Well, there's only so much of my energy I really want to put towards gossiping. I also just constantly think and I think a lot of other people think this is how does one man have so much energy? It's pretty like amazing. It's hard for me to imagine like writing a serious email that would require me to make a decision that has long term impacts because I'm like, oh, I just can't like turn my brain on right now to get into that. Imagine never feeling that feeling. I think Jimmy, Mr. B, said something. He said something like he was like, oh, no, I'm focused like every waking hour or he made it like he was like, I don't get distracted. Like I don't like browse. He said something like that. He was like, but when I do get in that mood, which is seldom, I go all in for like 24, 48 hours and I just need like a two day recharge and then I'm back in and I don't get distracted. Now, imagine being like an Elon and having to like Do you have zone out mode like most people do after seven o'clock at night? You know what I mean? I read this story about Bill Gates and it was a story about how Bill Gates was building Microsoft. And people don't know because Bill Gates is now a philanthropist slash like, you know. He's got grandpa energy. He's got grandpa energy. Exactly. He's wearing his sweater. He's like, well, you know, I read books and and I, you know, I've got these nets to catch mosquitoes. Like, you know, it just sounds like, you know, sort of harmless. He was ruthless. Putting around, putting around Bill. Yeah, he's putting around in the mornings. He was ruthless when he was building Microsoft and he was insane energy. If you don't believe me. Play the clip of him jumping over the chair. All right, we're back. So on top of that, they were like, Bill, do you, somebody was like riding in a car with him to do an interview or something like that. And they go, Bill, what happened? And they look at his, in his car, like the tape deck was missing. It was like pulled out, like it almost got stolen. And they go, did it get stolen? He said, no, I took it out. They go, why did you take it out? You don't like to listen to music. He goes, if I'm, you know, the radio, he goes, if I'm listening to the radio, I'm not thinking about Microsoft. So I just took it out. I don't want to listen to the radio. I want to think about Microsoft. It's wild, right? That's just a little tiny story. But there's probably like some epic, epic stories. And these are small things. Like, for example, let's say you get like, an email saying like, you know, this partnership that we thought about doing or the sale that we're thinking about doing from you. It's not for us. Thank you. There's people and this is like kind of small, but like it's just an example of this behavior where they're like, they'll just get on a plane and they'll fly to that person's office that next morning and they'll just make it work. And you think about doing that with like your young kids. You got a few kids. I have one kid and I'm like, there's not a chance that I'm getting on that plane unless it's like a pretty amazing thing. But just to do these like daily These daily items that show how intense you are, it's really challenging to imagine living that life and I think very few people can actually sustain it and I'm not one of them. So back to your question of like, how does he do it? This is a legitimate question. How does he do it? So one of the reasons my interest in DOGE is top of mind right now is I just had my most viral tweet ever. You did? Yeah. And all I said was, I would pay stupid amounts of money for someone to follow around the DOGE team for the next six months hard knock style. Like if you've ever seen Hard Knocks, the show on HBO, they follow like an NFL team through training camp. And it's true, I would pay a ridiculous amount of money for that. What was the reach on that? I mean, the tweet got like 50,000 likes or something crazy. Oh, that's so funny. I didn't see that. It went really viral for some reason. A lot of people felt the same way. There's a fascination around this. And part of it is, I would really want to see. I want to know what it's like. I'll give you two things. So one, I want to know what Elon's like. But not because I'm like, oh, Elon, he's the best. I just want to see. I literally want to understand, like, so this guy's running six billion dollar companies. Logistically. Yeah. And then there's shit like where he's like, he's also tweeting 10 times more than me. So it's not even like, oh, but he just doesn't waste time on social media like you. It's like, no, actually, he wastes more time on social media. It's like, yeah, but he doesn't just waste time playing video games like you, you asshole. It's like, dude, he's bragging about being a top 100 ranked Diablo player. And it's like, Something's cap. The Diablo thing, I'm certain is cap. I am certain that he's paying people to do that. How old are you? Are you allowed to say that? I thought it was pretty fluid. Was that not? It was actually so fluid. That's cute, dude. I was like, what did he just say? I said it in the mirror the other day and I was like, I think that works. I think I can add that to my bag. There's another one. I can't believe you downplayed having audacity to do Trump. To have the audacity to say cap is so fluidly, like that was really... I've been on the internet for way too long. I thought you meant cap like a cap to his energy, not cap like no cap. That was really good. I'm going to start saying cap as in our limit. That's cap. That's the cap. That's the maximum cap. I've reached my threshold is what I'm saying. What are you saying? I didn't say I lied. What did I say on MFM like earlier this year? You're like, let him bake. Let him bake. You were like, rip it. And I was like, let him bake. I try to be cool. They're like, wait, is it bake or cook or microwave? What is the phrase? Have you met anyone who's worked with him? I haven't. Yeah, I have actually. I talked to that one guy who that recently he said, I had a meet with Elon and his assistant gave me the heads up in advance and he goes, just so you know, Elon's companies are making something like $20 million per hour or something like that or $20 million per half hour. So if you are going to have a conversation with him, it better be a $20 million conversation. And that $20 million number, by the way, it's more now. It's more now if you think of DOGE. Can you imagine that? Actually, that's kind of an exhausting way to live because Do you ever hear when people say like, well, that's just not worth my time. And when I would think about that for a long time, I'm like, does that mean I should always be doing something that is like of more value? And I'm like, well, how much am I valuing just laying on this couch? Or how much am I valuing just like mowing my grass because I want to actually mow my grass. And I thought that was kind of an exhausting way to look at life. It totally is. By the way, there's a simple, simple solution to that, which is You only price things that you don't want to do. If you want to do it, you don't put a price on it. If you enjoy, if it's therapeutic to you, or what's it called? Like whatever. Like it feels good just doing nothing. If it feels good to do the dishes or to trim the bushes in your garden or whatever, go do it. Have at it. You don't need to be like, oh, this is an inefficient use of my time. You only price the things you don't want to do to say, you know what, am I wasting my time on stuff I don't even enjoy? When we had Rob Dyrdek on the pod, he said that he places that number at $1 million per hour. Yeah. Dude, I watched a Cody Sanchez clip and I don't mean to knock on Cody. She's always been nice to me, but she was on a panel. And she goes, I was talking to my mentor, Bill Perkins, and he always tells me, you are as low as the lowest tasks you do. And she's like, I was pumping. He goes, do you still pump your own gas? And she goes, at first, I thought, how pretentious. I still want to be a person who pumps my own gas. And then he did the math for me about how much money I'm wasting pumping my own gas. And he said, oh, are you still buying this? You should not be buying that. You should not be going to the store to do that. And I just thought, like, and this video had, like, whatever, tens of thousands of likes. And I think that's a totally valid way to think she might be right. That might be the right answer for her. It's not the right answer for me. Dude, I went to Whole Foods last night at 9 p.m. just to walk around. Totally. Totally. Totally. I think there, I think underneath a lot of that, like, oh, I got to be so efficient with every second of my day is just some underlying feeling of lack. What do you think you lack in your life that you have to optimize every minute of every hour of every day and that you are like above doing certain things? And by the way, also, when you stop doing things, you lose touch with reality. So there's a price to that, too. And so I just think like there's my takeaway was not even about Cody or her idea that if it works for you, more power to you. I just think I just thought to myself, You know how much bad advice is out there? Like whether this was bad advice or other, like one of the great skills in life is just playing hopscotch and not stepping on the like landmines of terrible advice that exist on the internet. Our podcast included, by the way, we say some dumb shit and we say some things that don't make sense. They don't make sense for you. Maybe it makes sense for us or maybe it just doesn't make sense at all. But there is a skill to How do you block out the 98% of awful advice that sounds smart? All right Sean here with a quick public service announcement for any tech founders out there You know listen getting customers is your number one priority and to land bigger customers one of the things that people don't talk about is that big customers need you to pass security compliance checks and That's how you can bring in some of the big contracts, but they take time and energy. And one of the things I've seen over and over again is a startup tries to do this all on their own. They meet a customer, the customer asks them about their SOC 2, and then they start shifting their whole dev team over to working on this, and their features grind to a halt. Well, that's where Vanta comes in. Vanta is the all-in-one compliance solution that helps startups like yours get audit ready and build a strong security foundation. It's quick, It's painless and the way that works is that Vanta actually automates all of the manual security tasks that slow you down and it streamlines your audit. So, join 8,000 plus companies. These guys are number one. Join 8,000 plus companies including many YC startups who trust Vanta. You can simplify your compliance and get $1,000 off. All right, we got a deal. $1,000 off if you go to Vanta.com slash million. Again, that's Vanta, V-A-N-T-A.com slash million. All right, back to this episode. You want to hear something funny? So I met this guy who's a billionaire, a multi-billionaire. He's probably 65. And I talked to him for like an hour online for something. And at the end of the call, for some reason, he started talking about his family and his kids and how he has like, I forget, five kids and they're each married with children. And he's like, oh, I'm always around the grandkids. I just love this. And he was explaining his life philosophy. And at the end of the call, I go, hey, you know, we don't know each other. We only know each other for this hour. Do you think I could come over, me and my wife, and stay with you and your family, and I can just watch how you interact with your family? Because you seem really happy, man, and you're successful. You've won. And he goes, I would love that. And so tomorrow at 7am, I am flying to Park City to go to this guy's house for three days. And he was like, my whole family's going to be there for this weekend. And I was like, great, can I come and just hang out with you guys and be part of the family for a weekend just to see how you're interacting with everyone because you are awesome. And he's like, yeah, I would love that. So I'm going to his house tomorrow till Sunday just to like learn how to be... When I met him, I was like, you are just such a warm person and you're rich and successful, which is like one attribute that's amazing. You seem happy. You seem fit. You have a lovely family and they seem like they love you. I got to download what you're doing because you are amazing. So he's letting me come over. Dude, that's great. I've always enjoyed doing that. I have a word for it. Can I throw some jargon at you? Stalking? Is that it? The word for it is in-situ. What's that? Is this a made-up word? I'm a biology major. So at one point, I did a biotech company. And one of the things you learn in any biotech company is there's a huge difference between the lab environment, which is A sterile, controlled environment and you see this data come out and it says, wow, this thing really works. We produced this many milliliters of this or this many grams of this substance or whatever, right? It had this much energy, this many kilowatts generated, whatever the thing you're doing in lab. And then you're like, oh my God, this is amazing. We're about to change the world. And I was like trying to high five and nobody else was excited. I was like, why aren't you guys excited? They're like, well, like it's the lab. I'm like, oh, does the lab mess up? They go, no, the lab's great. So what do you mean? What's the problem? Lab, it's a test. It's a scientific test. How much more proof do you want? They go, oh, everything changes in situ. In what? And like, in situ basically was like, you take the thing, in our case, we were working on these microbes. We had this company where microbes would eat coal and basically fart out natural gas. So you could get natural gas without burning coal. Kind of amazing. Natural microbes, real microbes that just exist on the planet, right? And so They were working amazing in the lab. They were producing so much natural gas. It was amazing. We're going to change the energy industry. What's that word in a situation? I don't know exactly what it is. I don't know what the technical definition is, but yeah, it's kind of like in the situation or in ground. And so what we did was you take the bugs, then you have to actually go to the field where the coal is buried 200 meters underground or whatever, and you're going to pump the microbes in. And you got to pump them in with some water. You got to like see what happens. And then there's cracks in the ground. It's not perfect. And then the blah, blah, blah, the weather, everything, everything is different. The temperature is different. The other microbes that are there, they're interfere, right, etc. And always the in situ was, you know, not only worse, but like just dramatically different to the point where it's like, why are we even doing these lab tests? And they're like, well, look, if it fails in the lab, it's for sure going to fail in situ. Right. But just as it succeeds in lab doesn't mean it works in situ. And so It was a really long-winded way of saying, I have this little word I tell myself, which is like, go in situ. So for example, it's like, you might have a theory, but go test it. You might have an idea, go test it. You might think your Donald Trump impressions are good. You got to say that shit on the mic and see what happens. Another version of it is, this person might look like they've got it all together. They're happy, they're successful. God, they're saying all the right things on this podcast. Go in situ, go to their house and you'll know within like 15 minutes, you said three days, three days, massive overkill. You'll know within like 90 minutes for sure everything you need to know about this guy and you'll pick up all these nuances just about like the family dynamics and the house and their schedule, their level of overall like busyness and rushing through their day versus like, wow, this person really seems at peace or like, You know what? They just seem like their baseline mood is really high or, you know, how their kids relate to them shows me that they have a great bond, an underlying bond, you know, versus what they say. And so you pick up so much. And this is why people are like, oh, what happened to you and Sam are doing this interview together? And it's like, yeah, because I actually wanted to go to that dude's house and he lives near me or he lived where I was traveling and Sam was traveling somewhere else at the time or whatever. But I pick up so much more, not from the interview, but the like, hours we spend before the interview just hanging out at their house, I pick up so much more in terms of lifestyle. And I've talked about this before, but like we went to one person who you start. Well, go ahead. I'll give you the example. So we go to Austin and we had four interviews scheduled. It was Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire who started more billion-dollar companies than anyone else in America. And like a hard-hitting, get-after-alpha type of dude. Exactly. And so there was him, there was Monish Prabhrai, an investor. So he was a value investor from the school of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. There's Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss, a guy I've admired for many years, author, experimenter, investor, et cetera. And then the fourth one was somebody else. I'm forgetting. This was like a year ago. So we go and we do the four. Now for each of the four, I hung out with them. Tim less, but the others like Joe Lonsdale, I went to his house at eight in the morning. I did a morning workout with him. We had breakfast together. We did a cold plunge together. We talked and then we did the podcast. I saw his family, met his wife, you know, et cetera. I toured his house, saw, you know, where does he work? Where does he play? He's got this LAN center, like literally like a gaming LAN center for him and his cousins to just come play video games, like six computers. LAN, oh, L-A-N, okay. He's got like a basketball court. He's got old, like, artillery gun at the top of his thing, right? When we were leaving, 10 senators were coming over for lunch and Elon Musk showed up while we were leaving the house. It's like, whoa, okay, that's what your day looks like. Got it. You know, he had like a, it was amazing. He was so hospitable, by the way. He's got like, he was so nice and generous with his time. Then he had Mohnish Prabhai go over to his house. He's like, yeah, come over whenever. My day's clear. I go to his house. He doesn't have a staff that answers. He opens the door. Wasn't he barefooted? He's wearing basketball shorts and is barefoot. He's like, yeah, what do you want to? Let's just sit. Let's have some tea. You want tea? And we have tea. He's got no clock, no assistant telling him you got to move the next thing. He shows me his nap room. He's like, oh, I nap every day. It's great. Napping is great. My whole job is thinking. I have to make great decisions, so napping keeps me fresh. It's like having a second day. I was like, whoa. And then he's got all these books in his library, but it's also kind of alone. I was like, you don't have a team? He's like, no. Investors make their decisions not as a committee. Investors make their decisions as an independent thinker. And so, no, I don't have a huge team. I got a researcher or two, but they don't come over every day. So he has how many billions in his fund? Two, I think, something like that. And it was really just him and a researcher? He was the only guy there. He didn't have like a... But like, ish, a five-person staff, generously? Generously, yeah. I could be wrong, right? Like, yeah, don't quote me on this, but that's what it... But small. I'm 90% sure. Tim Ferriss, I was like, you know, he shows up and I was like, so like, what you been up to? And he was like, oh, I just came back from Europe and I was like, oh cool, like vacation, ski, what are you doing? He goes, no, I spent three days with the guy who's the best in the world at making board games. And I wanted to understand, I wanted to learn about board games. So you pick up like... Lifestyle flexibility, ability to indulge in your hobbies. How lonely are you? Do you have a team? Somebody tweeted this out the other day. They go, the thing that socialists or Karl Marx got wrong was how much fun it is to make money with your boys. I was like, I feel that, dude. Me, Ben, Diego, it's so much fun to just do what we do. It would be way less fun if it was just me doing it. Even if I had owned 100%, I got more equity and all that, I would never take that trade. Dude, I completely agree, by the way. That's why I have co-founders. I moved Diego out here. I was like, dude, I'll pay you more. Just move out here. Move within 10 minutes of me. And now we hang out every day. And I'm like, my life just got better, right? Like little things. And so, you know, my kids interrupt me in the middle of the day. I have a piano right next to my desk because in between working, I'll just play piano. It's for fun, right? Like if somebody was here in situ with me, they would say that I don't have a perfect life, but I've built a life that I love and they will know for themselves if that's kind of what they want. And so I think this is massively underrated, is a very long-winded way of saying. I think more people should do this. I think you pick up way more when you go to somebody's house and see their, you know, just kind of hang with them for a day or even a couple hours. I think we need like a tobacco pipe or something. Today is like philosopher hour on our rocking chairs, just like riffing on what makes a good life and what doesn't. Yeah, we started at limestones. We should go, by the way, check them out. It sounds sick. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I would love to go see it. I think it'd be pretty boring, but it would be mind-blowing at the same time. You know what I mean? I think it would be... Nothing would be thrilling, but the whole thing would be mind-blowing that that's what it is. That's what it is. We almost need to do like MFM field trips because the timing was horrible when you were doing the Mohnish Pabrai one because I was moving that day and we couldn't make it work because I had like a six month old and it was like a huge whatever, but I am so envious. I'm like, fuck, I just wanted to like see, I just wanted to like get a feel, I wanted to do a field trip of just sitting in his living room and watching him interact. That's like, I get so much joy doing that exact same thing. You know what I would want to do? So there's like your boy Brett, who's doing robotics. I want to go see that shit. I want to go see the humanoid robots and the factory and just be inspired by that. There's another one that I think would be really cool. Have you ever been to a Cisco Foods? Cisco is the company that makes the food that goes to all the restaurants? Exactly. They make sauces and shit? Yeah. No, I've not been. What is that? I went once because we had a restaurant and it's the most wild, huge scale operation. You don't realize it. You're like, oh, I guess, yeah, the company that supplies all of the materials to all of the restaurants and grocery stores, I guess they got to be pretty big, right? Bigger than anything you've ever seen. And it was like a tour of that facility. And then you see the automation, like there's these little like hockey pucks, you know those like scooters are like the little butt scooters where you just like sit down on this thing like an old PE thing where you sit down on this little four wheel flat thing and it rolls around. That's like little robots like that that fly around this warehouse picking up pallets and moving them places. And so it's this incredibly sophisticated operation to move like cans of tuna. I'm looking at their factories. It looks so large that you could like see the earth curve. It's huge. Another one would be like, probably not allowed, but like Anduril or like one of these companies just making like lasers and like, you know, like war machines. Also just like the crypto house and just go see all these like degenerate 19 year olds. That's actually a good idea. You don't know it until you see it, until you feel it, right? It just leaves an imprint on you in a different way. Going to hacker houses in San Francisco was amazing and seeing their kitchen and I'm like, Who cooks what? How do you guys know? It's like you've seen the barstool like one bite pizza reviews. We just do the one sniff Hacker House reviews, the odor. And they're all in San Francisco. They're all in like these warehouses. So they all got Walmart feet. So everyone's walking around barefooted with like dirty, dirty ass bottom of their feet. It's like disgusting. And I had so much fun doing it. I remember I felt that same way walking around Facebook. Have you walked around Facebook's campus? Yeah, Facebook's one of those. I remember walking around like, why does a webpage need so many employees? What are all these fucking people doing? There's so many people walking around and you're like, I can't... Like I would make fun of Facebook constantly because I thought it was a soulless job, but you walk around and you're like, oh my God, this is like a beehive. You know what we should do? Do you remember TechCrunch Cribs? Did you ever see this show? Yeah, it was awesome. It was awesome. And they discontinued it, just like they discontinued Cribs. But I think that needs to come back. And okay, realistically, we're like, we should do this. And then both of us are going to like, Look at our kids and then like just not travel. Sorry, I'm going to go to a Cisco factory. Yeah, I really want to go see that. I'm going to go learn how hot fries are made. Exactly. So realistically, let's be honest, absolutely not going to do this idea. But we need a field correspondent. Every great show's got a field correspondent, right? So that's actually kind of funny. I'm going to throw down the gauntlet right now. 100K a year. Be the MFM field trip correspondent. We're gonna send you to different awesome places. You gotta film it like the old TechCrunch Cribs or MTV Cribs episodes. And you just got to go to like funny, epic places, you know, cool, interesting companies where they got a crazy like office life, crazy factories and shit like this. And that could be your job. Travel around, film content. We'll put them up on MFM as episodes. I want to see these, like there's, dude, these AI, we got to talk about this next week, but these AI companies that have like 20 employees, but a hundred million in revenue. I just want to see what they're doing all day. You know what I mean? Absolutely. To audition, Email me, shaan at shaanpuri.com and just email an audition tape. So do an episode of any business near you. Go to your coffee shop and just film it just so that we can get a sense of how you are on camera. That's the best. Nice pod. I actually enjoy these. You never said that to me. That was very nice. Thank you. I enjoy these because I just enjoy hanging out. Those are my favorite podcasts. All right. That's it. Great pod. Wonderful pod. See you out there. Hey, Shaan here. A quick break to tell you an Ev Williams story. He started Twitter and before that he sold a company to Google for $100 million. And somebody asked him, they said, Ev, what's the secret, man? How do you create these huge businesses, billion-dollar businesses? And he says, well, I think the answer is that you take a human desire, preferably one that's been around for thousands of years, And then you just use modern technology to take out steps. Just remove the friction that exists between people getting what they want. And that is what my partner Mercury does. They took one of the most basic needs any entrepreneur has, managing your money and being able to do your finance or operations. And they've removed all the friction that has existed for decades. No more clunky interfaces. No more 10 tabs to get something done. No more having to drive to a bank, get out of your car just to send a wire transfer. They made it fast. They made it easy. You can actually just get back to running your business. You don't have to worry about the rest of it. I use it for not one, not two, but six of my companies right now. And it's used by also 200,000 other ambitious founders. So if you want to be like me, head to mercury.com, open an account in minutes. And remember, Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and involved Bank and trust members FDIC. All right, back to the episode.