Dude, this vault, this giant filing cabinet is worth more than Snapchat. It's worth more than Pinterest. It's worth more than Twitter as a company. Isn't that crazy?
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I'm put my law in it like a day zone. So let's try.
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. So was it, 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 ring-gots from Harry Potter.
It's like this underground bank vault. So Elon said something that I feel like it was an off-handed comment, but it's actually, let 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 of people.
But I was told that I can only retire 10,000 people a month. And I was asking, well, why is that? And he said, well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual, meaning it's literally on paper and it's written down on a piece of paper. And then it goes down a mine.
There's literally a limestone mine where all the paperwork for people who want to retire is store. And so in order to actually make this work, the speed that we can move, the limiting factor is the speed at which the line shaft elevator can actually move down. Like, 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 was 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 a 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 his 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 want to 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 worked, they would use like the rocks to make like iron. And he grew this thing like crazy. And so basically this company is called Iron Mountain, Google Iron Mountain Market cap. Iron Mountain, Inc.
Is a $30 billion company. Wow. 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 had 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 found at 91.
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 they're vaults.
And so and they do this because if you if you are like, for example, WWE is one of their customers and they have every single time they've literally like physically filmed a fight like a an event match, the match, they store it and they have all these tapes, which is like sounds like, okay, that's just like a small example. But they have other examples where like a year old me would have broken there. So excited to just go to the vault of all WWE matches ever. Yeah, they also have like billions of dollars with a mark.
So if you're a museum and you have extra art that you need store, you're going to go to Iron Mountain because you know it's like real like safe. It's one place or they have a bunch of these. They have dozens and dozens of places. So I think they have 80 caves like don't caves literally a cave in.
Like why do I not just a building? What's wrong? Because they're saying guns. Because it has a low moisture.
So it's like it's good for paper and a bunch of reasons like that. But it's also like literally safe. So like a cave is actually, I don't know how this works, but it's actually safer in terms of like their 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 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 there was like, it was hard to comprehend how like epic this thing is now. So this is the thing that stores the government stuff or no, it's separate business? Yes.
So let's get to the government stuff. So he said there's a limestone mine where this is all stored. So he kind of like dismissed it because it was a mine, but that's actually important. But the federal government is a customer of Iron Mountain.
And so here's how this works. This part is absolutely insane. So starting the 1950s of 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 see, 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, the Iron Mountain runs.
And so when you want to retire, you had the file, a piece of paperwork, you literally write up a piece of paperwork, you give it to your boss at your federal agency, the federal agency has to mail it to the mine and PA. And it takes roughly 60 days because one of the 600 employees at this mine needs to physically have a file in hand, needs to walk to your file in the mountain, which this mountain is 200 football fields or 200 acres. They had to literally hand, like by hand, go and get that file and they got to look at your file, they got to say, all right, Sean looks like a 65. It looks like he actually retired at 59 years old and he came back.
So that gets a different thing. Turns out he served in the Iraq war. So he gets this thing, this thing, this thing. And then they close the file and they put it back and they send the paperwork back to your agency to let them know.
Here's what Sean is going to be paid for his pension fund. And that process takes something like 90 days to do that whole thing. And since 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've tried it in 1995. What is it? Why can't the digitize that's too much?
Or it gets rejected? Well, it's a huge task. But this mountain, it's in rural Pennsylvania. And these Pennsylvania folks, they were literally mine workers.
That's where they were, this mine when it was 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 computer experts. They're like physical laborers.
They don't exactly have the labor there to do it. But also just the bureaucracy, the same thing that happened with Obama launched with the 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. Yeah, nobody, and you're not going to get huge pat on the back for digitizing this process.
And 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 we come home at night.
It's still dark. And you can't have a flame in the mine. So all of the food has to be delivered for us every day. 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%. They're like, it's just a good stable job. I need to listen to Iron Mountain Pod, where they're just these miners just talking about paperwork and pizza and 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, the interview, 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 literally a physical labor job to walk around and find a fine.
This mining company is 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 third building company. And the retention might be better. And here's why it might be better.
Here's what I'm going to say. Listen, Workday is a piece of software. I don't think I've used it, but the thing about Workday is considered like a dinosaur software company, right? 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, just fucking sucks. So eventually you might get pissed off and want to change it with Iron Mountain Bank by law, has to keep these files on and say, hey, we're going to give this to you guys. And they'll never talk to them again for the next 50 years.
And it might 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 a hearted line of the art and she once a year would go down the mine and bring a blanket and cheese and wine and we'd just sit and look at her art. They'd just be like, this is awesome. And that was in the article that she did that. Crazy company, right?
This freaking Iron Mountain. Really, really fun find. I'm glad you found that. Also hilarious that you started with.
Let's start with current events and then you started talking about this old file storage system from like the 1950s. And that's where you went with this information. Did you see photos of it? Yeah, I saw the one photo.
Now I'm looking at more and it's pretty wild dude. It's just like, I mean, it makes sense. Now that you say it, now that you explained it, it makes sense. It's just who knew who knew that this is how this how it all works.
Now there's like digital versions of this. I forget what some of the guys in the space are, but like they were like, Iron Mountain was like, hey, are you guys nervous about digital? And they like dismissed it. They're like, dude, you don't know how much like crap people need to store.
Like we're 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 every cash flow just every year. Dude, this is how my wife treats my kids art.
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 you actually are. I'm just curious, give me your one to 10 level of interest in these. You may, 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 10. Elon stuff is like inherently incredibly interesting at the moment. Right.
Okay. Let's rank this one. Elon, do it crashing the press conference in Donald Trump's Oval Office. That was that a 10.
10. And by the way, I bet it's not even for the content just for the social dynamic of him standing behind Trump and just overtaking the press conference. Is that right? That's my guess.
Is that what you want to talk about? Well, there's one other I want to get to read on. One other. Doge as a whole.
Nine. Nine. Yeah. Let's go in that order.
Okay. 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 40, it was a power how to be powerful. You never outshine your master. Elon Musk 100% outshine it. Donald there.
That was so emasculating to have Donald just sitting there and Elon standing up sort of behind him. Like he's gonna put his arm like his hands on his shoulders. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Yeah. He hijacked the press conference and just started giving his own speech. A wordy speech while his kid is there rambling also and Trump is just sitting there like a goon at the table and it was just so interesting. I'd never seen anyone who's not the president give their own press conference from the overall 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.
It's not a one on one. It's a two on one. Oh, there's gonna be some drama here. That's how it felt.
It felt like a bachelor two on one. Because what Elon told the story of Iron Mountain Trump like look back at him and he goes, huh, no shit. Really? Like he was learning like he was being entertained at that moment as well.
Do you know what I mean? I also love how Trump sometimes is like, we're gonna send Elon in. Elon's gonna go in. He's gonna do great things.
He does great things. And he's just like, that'll be the plan. But honestly, that's actually not a bad plan. It's like if I was gonna say one thing, it's like we're gonna send like Jordan on the court and he's gonna shoot.
He's a great shooter. It's like, that's kind of what he does with things. Like we're gonna send Elon in there. He's gonna take care of things.
That was actually a really good Trump depression. 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 ragdally book.
Do you ever read the ragdallyo? Like I forgot to say rise and fall of nations or something like that. It's basically how empires like fall. Right.
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 a observer of how things are. So if you're going to watch one thing, by the way, watch one of the morning, 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 bose like me can understand. And it's amazing. Go watch that. Like you should just pause this podcast and go watch that.
So I think it's how the economic machine works. The Breakwater Op is 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.
Yeah, absolutely. So he wrote this book about the rise of fall donations 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 the overtime things go wrong in a very predictable cyclical fashion. And then because he studied history, he could see that, okay, even if it's not going to be the same, it's probably going to rhyme.
I should look out for some of these signs. And one of the signs that he talks about is around the big debt cycle. So there's like a short term debt cycle. There's a long term debt cycle, which is like 80 to 100 year debt cycle.
And what happens is the countries or empires will end up going into too much debt, which the US is in right now, like $35 trillion of debt, 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, they lose at some point their status as their global reserve currency. Blah, blah, blah.
Okay. So Ray Dalio makes this argument. It's an interesting book. You should read it.
Now, does he mention a muckbang? Where the timeline is? Do you know what muckbang is? Listening to people eat, right?
Watching and listening to people. It's readily fat people to stop their face with ramen. Yeah, it's like a governmental muckbang is what you describe. Does he mention where the decline is when muckbang gets popular?
There were signs. So as I was talking about this, it's like, okay, shit, you look at the current world, you're like, oh shit, we got inflation, but then 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, 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 it, you're 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 and get until it can't. It could just print money, right? Like imagine if you were 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 on the closet and push this button.
I'll just do it this one time, just this one time, okay? And like that's just kept 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 were on 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, we're just 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 healthcare. We're going to pay off your student loans.
It's like, wow, we're just going to, where's the money coming from? And the money was coming from that magic money printer in the closet. Okay. So it just seemed like, dude, there's no way.
There's no way out. And somehow this insane situation has occurred. And I'm not saying that it's going to work. And I'm not saying I agree with everything about these people.
I don't agree with everything Trump says. I don't even vote. Okay. Look, you can't even hate me.
Okay. I didn't vote for the guy. I didn't vote for anybody. So you can hate me for other reasons.
I don't agree with everything that Elon does, but he's an impressive, ultimately impressive entrepreneur. I think he's the greatest entrepreneur of all time. Okay. So, but I also, yeah, don't agree with everything.
He says, great. My caveat, by 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 when or four? It was the 20th inauguration.
Yeah. It's the one I'm on the go. Okay. 40 weeks ago.
And he brings Elon Musk in and basically like, like he's not 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 blow 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 American citizen, capy 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 a bunch of money and throwing his weight behind him.
Elon's stipulation was like, I want to create doge, ha, doge. And he's like, I'm going to cut spending. And Trump's like, okay, great. And somehow it became cool to cut spending, which was never cool before that.
And now he just took like this army of his smartest, most ruthless people. It's 40 or 50 folks who are 24, more powerful. Even more powerful. He just got a bunch of 10x type of people.
And he's literally like rating, he's like rating buildings and he's taking over payment systems and being like, okay, I can't change the laws, but I can 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 his smartest people in. He's doing this.
Now, will this be successful? I have no idea. Can't tell you. Is this fascinating?
Absolutely. Is this one of our only shots to get out of the debt spiral of excess spending? I believe so. And I cannot believe it happened.
End of rant. All right, let me give you, let me give the audience a counterpoint. And I'm going to get flamed for this. You're going to have a lot of cotta on me?
I'm going hardcore devil's cotta on you. No, not exactly. Because I'm on board with like what a lot of stuff he's doing. But listen to this.
Let's just say that you're 45 years old. You got two kids in high school. You got a mortgage and you're thinking like, you know, life's pretty good. And then all of a sudden you get a message that says, look, we appreciate you, Diane, for working for the government for so long, but you're done.
You got to get out and you're thinking, how the hell am I going to pay my mortgage? How am I going to like provide for my kids? You want to go to college? And then you'll 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. And did he just call a guy a retard on Twitter? Did somebody yesterday send me an advanced search and you'd be a Twitter advanced search. It was just like a single link I could click that was just you on Mux saying the word retard.
And bro, you could scroll for days. It was unbelievable. It was unbelievable. It was unbelievable.
It's sort of like a really successful entrepreneur CEO doing layoffs because money's short from his beautiful chalet and Aspen with a beautiful view behind him on Zoom. And for Eli, I'm like, what are you going to do? What 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 them. 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. Let's make the government smaller, whatever.
But at the end of the day, it is real people's lives. Half of these people, they're not hungry power people. They're just fucking guys who are working nine to five. And they're just want to play stop on the weekends.
And that bums me out. I wish that he would show a little grace with his slashing. You know what I mean? I think he bring up great points.
I think he's like, I've been told many times, you're not wrong, but your delivery sucks. What do they say in the thing about you? 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. Basically, 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 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 a warm, 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 upside.
I thought 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 one company, for example, they just threw a web dev shop.
They made websites. Now they're a fat cat. We got to 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 fiber and get a website for five bucks. You can go up work and get somebody to do it for a couple of hundred bucks. You can go on squares based on do it yourself.
There's a whole bunch of things you could do. They're getting $19 million contracts to build simple websites. It was unbelievable. And they're multi-year contracts to do things that literally I have interns that could do them in three, four days.
And these aren't like high traffic, not complex apps, not super sensitive data. Just like a squares based. informational websites. Very good menu online.
Yeah, exactly. So started noticing this. So I go to my friend, I say, let's get to a government contract. And I can't say too much specifics.
We got this friend, a government contract, to do something that probably takes four hours, not even high skilled time. Not anybody could do it. My sister could do it. My cousin could do it.
Anybody could have got this contract. It's been going for two years. And now it's a hilarious game of hide and seek. Because I'm like, yo, don't we're just going to find this contract?
And when don't we find this contract, they're going to publish this thing and be like, we paid for this? And I'm glad that my friend got a great job of lifestyle. However, it's the thing called the free rider problem in society. It's like, I forgot.
There's some social term for this where it's like, you could abuse public parks and public transport because nobody's kind of 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 I've been through. This podcast is great. You do this podcast and you meet people and you hear stories.
We were talking about we had done a segment on government contracts, 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, 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. Yeah. And this is something that lives less than a mile away from me.
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? You can go see what's up for bid right now. Hey, have you heard about this company? Have you heard about this?
Don't be so much. 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 I don't want to reason. But I did take note. And I was like, somebody could do that. Maybe somebody who's maybe top priority right now is money.
And so this little side quest was, let's go help a friend. I don't want to do this for me. It wouldn't be worth it for me. But it would totally be worth it for the story and to see if I could help my friend out.
And it's still going. It's still going. But dude, every month. And now the doge is out.
It's literally like a game behind and seek. And I can hear the footsteps coming. 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 third thing? The whole thing.
So the reasoning behind it, he has a reason for doing this, which is that he's trying to piece. Explain what it is. Explain what it is. People don't know.
So from my understanding, OpenAI is a nonprofit that's trying to convert to a for-profit in order to do that, Sam Altman, as well as some of the shareholders, have to quote by 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. $250 billion for $40 billion valuation.
And so that implied that when they do this conversion or they sell that they convert the assets out of the nonprofit into the for-profit, the IP, the Intel, 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, you might actually get it. It's possible that he could do it.
And then in that case, he would own the assets of OpenAI, merger with XAI. And he would go from fourth place to first place overnight. That's the idea. I'm uneducated on the topic.
I know a little bit about stories. That just seems to be a lot of things. I watched Game of Thrones. They're going to die before they do that.
OK. Yeah, that story won't happen. So it's 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 and 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 wrong to betray it because he funded the first $40 million into OpenAI when it was a nonprofit.
And he owns nothing of the for-profit today. Would you put money on either of them? Would you think they're? Or just in terms of just the battle of the wits, like a chess match?
Or do you think that it's too hard to? You know when we watch those UFC pay-per-views and sometimes you get the ones where it's just like, oh, I just want to see it could be 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 Jiu-Jitsu and striking. And I could totally see it going either way.
I got a $90 pay-per-view. I got to watch this. That's how this one is because for as many people say you never bet against Elon, there's an equal number of people who say never bet against Sam Albin. 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 fight to the death.
OK, 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 do you think maybe that's not enough? Maybe that's like in the board meeting?
Could you just imagine all these suits that like, well, do we look at this offer? Everyone's just like, no, just Elon. He's just being a dickhead. OK, like do you just like collectively agree that he's just being an asshole?
Or are they like, guys, we got to look at this. They're collectively because I mean, that would be a very low price for the assets of OpenAI, right? Like literally on the Open market, they're raising out a $240 billion valuation. So to sell the assets at a $97 billion valuation wouldn't really make a lot of sense, right?
So at the very least he's upping the price or just slowing it down, making life more complicated for his competitors. So if we're competing in a race, but I know I can distract 15% of your mind share, 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. Like they will do that. So there's multiple levels that might be playing out. It's like the nerdy Kendrick Lamar versus Drake thing because they're now going out for their personalities.
They haven't got their family yet, but I honestly would not be surprised if that happens next. Yeah, yeah, 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 rap beef or a Game of Thrones battle going on.
I, does it pop? Does any of this like wear you out? Because I feel a little excited at the moment, but I wonder when this. But we're only a month in and I'm like, how much longer can I like last with all these like amazing stories?
Yeah, I know what you mean. There's definitely a part of it where you just feel like I've just watched too many episodes of Jersey Shore and I'm like, I wasted my whole day. You know, like, you know, there's, oh, he said this and he did this and they're gonna do this. Let me look up the Delaware law.
It's like, for what? Are you getting anything out of this? Or are you just gossiping? I say, oh, I'm gossiping.
Okay, cool. Well, there's only so much of my energy I really want to put towards gossiping. I also just constantly think and I think a lot of other people think this is, how does one man have so much energy? It's pretty like amazing.
It's hard for me to imagine like writing a serious email that would require me to make a decision that has long-term impacts because I'm like, oh, I just can't like turn my brain on right now to get into that. Imagine never feeling that feeling. I think Jimmy, Mr. B said something.
He said something like, oh, no, I'm focused like every waking hour or he made like, he was like, I don't get distracted. Like I don't like, like 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 or 48 hours and I just need like a two day recharge and then I'm back in and I don't get distracted. Now imagine being like an Elon and having to like, you don't have, do you have zone out mode?
Like most people do after seven o'clock at night. You know what I mean? I read this story about Bill Gates and it was the story about how Bill Gates was building Microsoft and people don't know because Bill Gates is now a philanthropist slash like, he's got grandpa energy. He's got grandpa energy, exactly.
He's wearing his sweater. He's like, well, you know, I read books and I got these nets to catch mosquitoes. Like he just sounds like he's got some hard ones. He was just putting around.
Put around Bill. Yeah, he's putting around in the morning. 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, somebody was like riding a car with him to do an interview or something like that and they go, Bill, what happened? And they look at his car, like the tape deck was missing. It was like pulled out, like it almost got stolen.
And they go, did you get stolen? No, I took it out. Why don't you take it out? You don't like to listen to music.
You guys, if I'm listening to 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 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're 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, come 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 that 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, HardKnock style. Like if you've ever seen HardKnocks this year when they follow like an NFL team through training camp, I would, and it's true, I would pay a ridiculous amount of money for that.
What was the reach on that? I mean, the tweet got like 50,000 likes or something crazy. Oh, that's so funny. I didn't see that.
It was like 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, like I want to know what it's like.
Like I'll give you two things. So one, I want to know what Elon's like, but not because I'm like, oh, he's the best. I just want to see. I literally want to understand like, so this guy's running six logistic companies at logistically.
Yeah. And then there's like, he's also tweeting 10 times more than me. So it's not even like, oh, but he just doesn't waste time on social media like you. It's like, no, actually waste more time on social media.
It's like, yeah, but he doesn't just waste time playing video games like you, you assholes. Like dude, he's bragging about being a top 100 ranked Diablo player. And it's like, something's cat. The Diablo thing I'm certain is cat.
Like I am certain that he's paying people. I'll do it. Are you allowed to say that? I thought it was pretty fluid.
Was that not? It was actually so fluid. That was like, what did you say? I said it in the mirror the other day.
I think it works. I think I can add that to my back. There's another one. I can't believe you downplayed having audacity to do Trump.