BUILDING IN PUBLIC UPDATE Last year, I incubated an accounting company (I'm funding it but not actively involved in operating it) It's now serving 16 clients, most of which are personal investments of mine or friends here 🚀 From growth to churn to burn, here's the latest! 👇

I’m dying here

I don’t want to connect my coffee machine to the wifi network. I don’t want to share the file with OneDrive. I don’t want to download an app to check my car’s fluid levels. I don’t want to scan a QR code to view the restaurant menu. I don’t want to let Google know my location before showing me the search results. I don’t want to include a Teams link on the calendar invite. I don’t want to pay 50 different monthly subscription fees for all my software. I don’t want to upgrade to TurboTax platinum plus audit protection. I don’t want to install the Webex plugin to join the meeting. I don’t want to share my car’s braking data with the actuaries at State Farm. I don’t want to text with your AI chatbot. I don’t want to download the Instagram app to look at your picture. I don’t want to type in my email address to view the content on your company’s website. I don’t want text messages with promo codes. I don’t want to leave your company a five-star Google review in exchange for the chance to win a $20 Starbucks gift card. I don’t want to join your exclusive community in the metaverse. I don’t want AI to help me write my comments on LinkedIn. I don’t even want to be on LinkedIn in the first place. I just want to pay for a product one time (and only one time), know that it’s going to work flawlessly, press 0 to speak to an operator if I need help, and otherwise be left alone and treated with some small measure of human dignity, if that’s not too much to ask anymore.

I'm sorry but someone had to do it

1000 HBO writers sitting at 1000 typewriters for 1000 years wouldn’t be able to write dialog this good

Whoever decided car engines should shut down any time you stop at a red light needs to be put on one of those deportation flights to El Salvador.

Me liking every tweet about people getting fired for mocking Charlie Kirk’s death

(Warning: long rant) My liberal friends are completely oblivious about how radicalizing the last week has been for tens of millions of normal Americans. Zero clue. I’m not talking about people who are “online”; I mean regular, everyday Americans. “Normies.” People who scroll through Facebook posts and Instagram reels from the Dutch Bros drive thru line. Political moderates who have water cooler chats about Mahomes touchdowns and Bon Jovi concerts, not Twitter threads or Rachel Maddow monologues. Millions of them. Tens of millions. They’re logging on, they’re engaging, and they’re furious. And I’ll be candid: They blame you guys. They blame the left. Regardless of whether you believe it to be justified, they think you’re the bad guys here. And they are reacting accordingly. I can already hear some of you racing toward the comments to start screeching in moral indignation, so I’m going to be blunt: Shut up and listen to what I’m telling you. Your movement will lose any semblance of relevance if you don’t develop some small measure of self-awareness, and—absent someone force-feeding you bitter medicine—you guys collectively lack the humility to do this on your own. Here are the facts: Fact 1. Tens of millions of Americans started the week seeing a 23-year-old blonde woman—a young woman in whom virtually every parent watching pictured their own daughter—stabbed in the neck by a career criminal. These people then found out the murderer had been released from jail 14 times over. Fact 2. Two days later, tens of millions of Americans watched a video of Charlie Kirk get murdered speaking to college students. Millions of these people knew who Charlie was; millions of them didn’t. Upon seeing the video, however, these normal Americans from across the land and across the political spectrum agreed that he was the victim of a terrible, fundamentally unjustifiable crime, and their hearts broke in sympathy for his family. Good people who had never even heard the name Charlie Kirk before wept. Fact 3. Immediately after seeing the footage of a peaceful young man get shot in the neck, these same people logged onto Facebook and Instagram (remember, we are talking about regular Americans, not perpetually online Twitter or Bluesky users) and saw some of their local nurses, school teachers, college administrators, and retail workers celebrating this horrific crime. Not just defending it, but cheering it. These are all facts. You may not like the implications of these facts, and we can certainly debate the underlying causes thereof, but, indisputably, they are nevertheless factual statements. Here’s what it means for you, the Democrats reading this: These normal, middle-of-the-road, non-political citizens just become politically active. They realized that politics cares about them, even if they don’t particularly care about politics. After watching Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk both bleed out from the neck, they think their lives and the physical safety of their families—the bedrock of human society, the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—depend on political activation, whether they desire it or not. These people are now sprinting—not jogging, not walking, but racing—to the right. Because they blame you guys for everything that just happened. When they see footage of Decarlos Brown stabbing a Ukrainian refugee to death, they don’t see just one demon-possessed man. They picture every university administrator, HR bureaucrat, and DEI apparatchik that ever lectured them about systemic racism, the “carceral state,” or the need to release violent crime suspects without bail in the name of social justice. They then think back to conversations they’ve had with their cop friends—their buddy from high school who quit the force after getting tired of being called a racist, their friend at the local YMCA who vents about having to release career criminals because Soros-funded prosecutors aren’t willing to file charges—and they realize everything the left has told them over the last five years has been utter bullshit. And they blame you. Because, even if you count yourself as a moderate Democrat, your party supported the district attorneys, city council members, and mayors that let fictitious concerns about mental health and racial justice supersede very real concerns for their family’s safety. When these Americans see blood erupt from the side of Charlie Kirk’s neck, they don’t see just a martyred political activist. They think of every extreme leftist they’ve ever met who (1) calls anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton a fascist and (2) constantly jokes—“jokes”—about punching Nazis and “bashing the fash.” They realize that there really do exist people who wish to see them dead for their moderately conservative political beliefs, their Christian faith, and even the color of their skin. They ask themselves if the violence visited upon Charlie might one day show up on their own doorstep. And they blame you. Because, even if you’re just a center-of-the-road liberal, you lacked the courage to police your own ranks. You let modern-day Maoist red guards run loose across every facet of society, and what started with social-media struggle sessions has now turned to 30-06 bullet holes. When these Americans log onto social media and see their neighbors justifying, celebrating, glorifying murder, they realize that some who walk among them are soulless ghouls at best, literally demon-possessed at worst. These people—whether they faithfully attend church every Sunday or only attend with relatives once a year, on Christmas Eve—start talking about things like spiritual warfare. They implicitly understand that no normal human casually celebrates the mortal demise of a peaceful person. And they blame you. Because, even if you condemned Charlie Kirk’s murder, they probably haven’t seen you condemn those in your own movement who cheered it on. They view you as complicit in allowing heartless fellow travelers to celebrate death, and it repulses them. For all of these situations, what has your response been? Nothing but bullshit. In response to Iryna Zarutska bleeding out on the floor of a train, you post bullshit statistics about reductions in reported crime, when everyone who’s ever been to a major urban center in the last decade knows that actual crime has skyrocketed, only for victims not to waste their time reporting it to cops that don’t have the manpower to respond and prosecutors that seek to downgrade as many felonies as possible to misdemeanor citations. In response to a 31-year-old man taking a bullet to the neck in front of his family, you post nothing but bullshit whataboutism. > “What about January 6th?” (Honest answer: After you let Liz Cheney spend two years operating a star chamber in the House, combined with countless other failed attempts at “lawfare” against Trump, no one cares anymore.) > “What about Mike Lee making a dumb joke on Twitter about some guy in a mask in Minnesota?” (No one outside of Utah, DC, or Twitter knows who Mike Lee even is.) > “What about Paul Pelosi?” (That’s not comparable to Charlie Kirk getting shot, and we all know it. And, again, Paul who?) > “What about regulations on assault rifles?” (That’s not going to get you very far when one of these killers used a knife and the other one used a common hunting rifle.) In response to teachers, healthcare workers, and thousands of other liberals cheering on Charlie’s murder, it’s nothing but more bullshit and misdirection. > “It’s not THAT many people celebrating!” (Yes, it is. Everyone has seen it on their Facebook and Instagram feeds.) > “I thought you guys didn’t support cancel culture.” (We don’t cancel people over their opinions; we’re more than happy to see people lose their jobs—especially their taxpayer-funded jobs—for actively cheering on murder, though. If you can’t see the difference, that’s your own shortcoming.) All bullshit. Not even smart bullshit, but stale, mid-grade, low-IQ bullshit. Ordinary Americans see right through it, and they don’t like how it smells. You probably don’t like hearing this. But you need to hear it. Because I’m right, and, as you reflect on this, you know I’m right. The ranks of my political movement gained millions of righteously angry new members this week. We have a mandate to ensure these crimes never happen again, and that’s exactly what we are now going to do. If you want to keep a seat at the table as we do so, you’d better clean house and start policing your own.

We had a good thing, you stupid son of a bitch. We had Circus Circus. We had the Tropicana and the Excalibur. We had cheap slots, 24-hour wedding chapels, all-you-can eat buffets, shrimp cocktails on the house. You could have shut your mouth, kept the city affordable for middle-class tourists, and printed more money than you ever needed. But no, you just had to blow it up. You and your resort fees and your Michelin stars. Your Fontainebleau Hotel, Jean Georges Steakhouse, poolside cabana rentals, and Formula 1 Grand Prix. If you’d done your job, known your place, and stopped private equity from pricing out regular visitors, we all be fine right now. But you didn’t.

Gavin Newsom’s dad was the personal attorney for the billionaire Getty family. They gave young Gavin money to start a winery in Napa. JD Vance grew up in a broken, drug-addicted home in the rust belt. He joined the Marines to pay for college. These guys are not comparable.

People need to stop overreacting about Kamala’s plan to reduce food inflation, as if it would lead to communism, mass starvation, and the end of America. I worked in M&A in the food industry. Here’s a step-by-step summary of what would actually happen: 1. The government announces that grocery retailers aren’t allowed to raise prices. 2. Grocery stores, which operate on 1-2% net margins, can’t survive if their suppliers raise prices. So the government announces that food producers (Kraft Heinz, ConAgra, Tyson, Hormel, et. al.) also aren’t allowed to raise prices. 3. Not all grocery stores are created equal. Stores in lower-income areas make less money than those in higher-income areas, as the former disproportionately sell lower-margin prepackaged foods (“center of the store”) instead of higher-margin fresh products like meat (“perimeter of the store”). Because stores in lower-income areas aren’t able to cover overhead (remember, even if their wholesale costs are fixed, their labor, utilities, insurance, and other operating expenses aren’t fixed… yet), grocery chains start to shut them down. Food deserts in rural areas and in low-income urban areas alike become worse. 4. Meanwhile, margins for food producers are also quickly eroding. Their primary costs (ingredients, energy, and labor) aren’t fixed, and their shrinking gross profits leave less cash flow available to cover overhead, maintain facilities, and reinvest in additional production capacity. 5. Grocery chains, which have finite shelf space, start to repurpose their stores (those they didn’t have to shut down, I should say) to sell more non-price-controlled items—everything from nutrition supplements to kitchenware to apparel—and less price-controlled food products. Your local Kroger or Safeway starts to look and feel more like a Walmart. 6. Food producers stop making products with lower margins. Grocery chain start competing with each other to secure inventory. Since they can’t compete by offering stronger prices (remember, producers aren’t allowed to raise prices here, and, even if they could, grocery chains no longer have the gross profit to bear price increases), they compete on things like payment terms. 7. Small grocery chains start to shut down entirely, or get sold to larger chains like Kroger. In addition to not being able to cover fixed costs, a major reason for this is because they can no longer reliably secure delivery of products, due to producers prioritizing sales to larger customers, which are able to leverage their stronger balance sheets to offer superior payment terms. 8. Smaller food producers—which typically sell via distributors, rather than directly to grocery chains—start to go out of business. Because these producers have an additional step their value chains, and because they have lower volumes over which to spread their fixed costs, their cost structure is inherently disadvantaged compared to major food producers. When grocery stores aren’t able to raise prices, cutting product costs becomes all the more important, and deprioritizing purchases from smaller producers is an easy way to do so. 9. As supply chains break down, lines start to form outside grocery stores every morning. Cities assign police officers to patrol store parking lots, and food producers draft contingency plans to assign armed escorts to delivery trucks. 10. The federal government announces a program to issue block grants for states to purchase and operate shuttered grocery stores. The USDA also seizes closed-down production facilities. 11. The government announces that prices for all key food costs—corn, wheat, cattle, energy, etc.—are also now fixed, to stop “profiteers” from gouging the now-government-operated food industry. 12. Shockingly, the government struggles to operate one of the most complex industries on the planet. The entire food supply chain starts imploding. 13. Communism, mass starvation, and the end of America quickly ensue. Hey wait a second

You didn’t consent to a Bible reference on a paper cup? Well I didn’t consent to: Pride Month Transgender Day of Visibility National Coming Out Day Transgender Day of Remembrance LGBT History Month Asexual Awareness Week Bisexual Awareness Week Pansexual Visibility Day Intersex Awareness Day Non-Binary People’s Day National LGBTQ+ Health Awareness Week Spirit Day Harvey Milk Day Drag Day International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia Lesbian Visibility Day National Gay Men’s HIV/AIDS Awareness Day LGBTQ+ STEM Day International Pronouns Day Agender Pride Day Transgender Awareness Week National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day National LGBTQ+ Families Day LGBTQ+ Elders Day Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week Genderfluid Visibility Week Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQ+ Awareness Day Queer Youth Day International Lesbian Day International Asexuality Day Bigender Visibility Day LGBTQ+ Veterans Day Polyamory Day LGBTQ+ Parents Day LGBTQ+ Workers’ Day Trans Parent Day Ally Week

My wife is in the middle of a Mexican standoff in the church nursery. Our two year old got mad and threw a cup of animal crackers on the floor. My wife refuses to leave until she picks them up. My daughter refuses to clean up until we promise her a cake pop and Bluey at home. My wife (former Marine) is the most stubborn mom on the planet. My daughter (personality of an ISIS prison guard) will happily scream for hours on end. I just dropped off a peppermint mocha for my wife. She’s digging in and playing the long game. Our pastor offered to broker a truce, but he left when the toddler hurled an elephant cookie at him, grumbling that our denomination doesn’t pay well enough to deal with situations like this (which is totally fair). Will keep everyone apprised. If there are any hostage negotiators here with experience defusing toddler meltdowns, please reach out.

If you’re rioting in LA tonight and you see a guy that looks like your childhood orthodontist wearing a flak jacket, immediately drop the brick and walk away. Just trust me on this one.

Finally started watching Game of Thrones. Ed Stark seems like such a good dude. Can’t wait to watch eight seasons of this guy.

Joe Rogan won’t have Kamala Harris on his show unless she comes to his studio and sits for a 2-3 hour full interview (like Trump did). We’ve entered the era in which podcast hosts have more power than a sitting vice president. Thanks to a free and uncensored internet, the democratization of media and news reporting has finally been realized, decades after online pioneers first dreamed of the possibility. This is why establishment politicians and regime journalists are so afraid of podcasts and social media, and why they will continue to aggressively push for regulation. A college dropout who started his career hosting “Fear Factor” and working as a UFC commentator is able to dictate terms to a vice president, former senator, and former attorney general of the largest state in America. The presidential election is in one week, and she needs him—and his audience—far more than he needs her. You’ve gotta love seeing it.

I’m 39 years old. For the first time in my life, it feels like America is winning. It’s exhilarating.

Zohran not benching 135 isn’t a huge deal. I actually served with a few Marines who couldn’t do that and we never gave them a hard time. We didn’t want them worrying during pregnancy and we knew they’d get strong again after coming back from maternity leave.

Can’t believe I typed that entire rant and forgot to mention I don’t want to leave a 25% tip on the touchscreen.

Wife just cooked me. Might not recover from this one.

BREAKING: Actress Sydney Sweeney releases a statement opposing Mike Lee’s plan to privatize federal land. “These lands were bought with the blood and treasure of our forefathers. They belong to all Americans, and it is the patriotic duty of every citizen to resist this scheme.”

The political moderation leaving my body this week

H-1B DATA MEGA-THREAD 🧵 I downloaded five years of H-1B data from the US DOL website (4M+ records) and spent the day crunching data. I went into this with an open mind, but, to be honest, I'm now *extremely* skeptical of how this program works. Here's what I found 👇

Jokes aside, this is one of the most meaningful gestures I’ve ever seen from a political leader. Donald Trump is showing Americans through his actions—not just telling them with words—that every worker is important, that every job matters, and that there’s dignity in all labor, from serving fries to selling cars to structuring balance sheets. Trump isn’t pretending to be something he isn’t—he didn’t “grow up in a middle-class family”; he’s a guy who owns hotels, golf courses, and a Boeing 757 with gold-plated toilet handles—but he’s also not pandering or putting on an act. He’s just authentically being who he always is and who he always will be, for better or for worse: The Donald; the guy who develops the same instant rapport and bonhomie with titans of industry and fast-food workers alike; the only president of our lifetime who knows that America doesn’t win unless ALL Americans win, whether they’re fry cooks, executives, shareholders, or anything in between. You can’t fake something like this. It’s either who you are, or it’s something you’ll never be able to pull off. Trump—somehow—has it. And, because of that, this is the guy I trust to fight for my community and for my businesses. More importantly, though, this is the guy I trust to fight for the people making $14/hour down the street. They deserve it.

A year ago, this man was in and out of jail. Now he’s a dedicated father and a respected family man. In America, anything is possible.

Not ashamed to admit I got this one wrong. Legalizing marijuana was a huge mistake.

Hang it in the Louvre

My wife coming back from Costco and displaying all the stuff she bought on our kitchen counter

“We have more fun than our daughter” — the story of the baby boomer generation in just seven words

Brian Thompson went from Jewell, Iowa (population 1,200) to leading 140,000 employees and overseeing $280B of revenue at one of the world’s most important companies. His mom worked as a beautician, his dad at a grain elevator—they were probably really proud when he graduated valedictorian of his 50-person high school class. He played basketball and the trombone, got elected homecoming king, and worked in soybean fields and meat processing plants during summers. While studying at the University of Iowa, he met the woman who would become his wife, with whom he would have two kids. By all accounts, he was smart, hard-working, funny, and a thoroughly decent man. This guy—not the person who murdered him in cold blood—was everything that’s right and good about America, and the American Dream. May his memory be a blessing, and may his example inspire all of us to do better.

Basically, there’s a group of guys called longshoremen, who unload all the stuff that comes into the country by boats (which is pretty much everything you buy, right?). The longshoremen all make more money than doctors, because their union has a legal stranglehold over the ports and their mob-connected boss is willing to cripple the American economy to get them even more money. So when you hear longshoreman, think “boat unloading guy making shitloads of money.” The union is paranoid about automation destroying their jobs, though, since robots can unload containers 5x faster and for 1/100th the cost, and also without threatening to wreck the economy and make inflation worse one month before an election and six weeks before the holiday season. Still with me? Good. Now pour me another glass of champagne and let’s talk about something called the Taft-Hartley Act.

Remote workers finding out that Bernie Sanders wants to double the hours they work every week

The person on the left should not have to pay off the student loans for the person on the right.

Every year on Christmas Eve, I put a Chipotle burrito in my fridge. On Christmas Day, I take it to my in-laws’ house and eat it in the car when I need a break from the family chaos. I’ve done this for 10 years and it’s now my most cherished holiday tradition.

I want to give credit to six congressional Democrats: Debbie Dingell (MI) Tom Suozzi (NY) Don Davis (NC) John Larson (CT) Jimmy Panetta (CA) Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA) These were the ONLY Democrats in Congress to attend Charlie Kirk’s vigil in the Capitol today. Remembering a murder victim shouldn’t be a partisan issue. Sadly, though, it looks like it now is. Credit to these six Democrats for having the courage and decency to prioritize humanity over political party.

90% of problems in life disappear if you simply eat healthy, lift weights, sleep 8 hours/night, have a job you love, max out your Roth IRA for 40 years, find the right spouse (and have weekly date nights), live in a walkable community, make time to attend your kids' major milesto

All of this was stolen from Charlie's kids. So yeah, we're going to be angry for a long time.

My uncle Ted took this photo in Memphis last night. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

Me liking every “He is risen” tweet today

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, WE GOT HER

You could sell all 640M acres of federal land and it would raise less than half what the federal government spends each and every year. Don’t let Mike Lee sell off your American birthright for six months of government spending.

Apparently my wife doesn’t want to apply DOGE to our marriage

What do you mean, it’s a “lab grown” diamond?!

Update: My daughter is now demanding the removal of all US troops and naval vessels from the Middle East. This is really escalating out of hand.

I’m a Harvard-educated lawyer and I don’t see the issue here.

When it’s okay to start drinking beer: Weekday - 5:00 PM Weekend - 3:00 PM Weekend if football is on TV - 12:00 PM Vacation in Europe - 11:00 AM Fourth of July - 10:00 AM At an airport - 6:30 AM

This is what being a man felt like before Microsoft Teams got invented.

The best random part about having small kids is how they mispronounce things and it’s so adorable that you not only don’t correct them, you start adopting it yourself. During Covid, our daughter couldn’t say “hand sanitizer” correctly. Three years later and we all still call it “hanzatizer.” When my son was two, he had a toy Elmo guitar that he called his “kintar.” My wife and I only stopped pronouncing it like that once he started real kintar lessons and we sounded dumb in front of the teacher. Our toddler is two and she calls her backpack a “pack pack.” Now the other kids talk about getting their pack packs ready for school every day. We’re having pasghetti for dinner tonight. It probably sounds stupid, but it’s little things like this that make parenthood—despite all the challenges—an irreplaceable joy.

Imagine being this woman, Beverly Aiken. Growing up poor in an abusive home and a dying Rust Belt city, little stability and even less opportunity. You have a couple kids at a young age, but it’s not easy being a single mom in Middletown, Ohio, so you send JD and Lindsay to live with grandma. She’s tough, but it’s better than having them watch you struggle through your own battles with addiction. JD’s a good kid, though, and a sharp one too. Despite the odds, he sticks with school, and he gets good grades. Since college isn’t in the cards for a poor kid from Middletown, he joins the Marine Corps. You’re probably really proud to see him in his dress blues. You’re probably also proud when he gets out and uses the GI Bill to become the first person in your family to get a college degree. Ohio State’s a good school, but JD’s not done. In fact, he’s just getting started. He heads out east, to go to Yale Law School. They say it’s one of the best programs in the country. He meets a beautiful young woman there, graduates, and gets a job as a lawyer. He’s gone from Middletown, Ohio, to some of the most prestigious companies in the world. You probably never imagined that possibility when he first shipped out to Parris Island. The pride you must feel for him. You realize this kid of yours is going places, and it inspires you to get clean. For real this time. But JD’s still not done. He writes a best-selling book; you start seeing him on TV every day. People are whispering about a future in politics—he’s the voice of the forgotten working class, the rare bridge between the blue-collar world you grew up in and the white-collar world he inhabits now. He runs for the US Senate, and, with the support of Donald Trump, pulls off a victory. He’s still just in his 30s. Two more years go by, and Donald Trump needs a running mate. Not just a running mate, but a political heir. He wants that person to be your son. You watch as Trump comes half an inch away from dying on a stage; you watch as he and your son pull off a resounding victory. It’s all surreal. And now you’re standing in the middle of the Capitol rotunda. You just reached 10 years of sobriety. Your son is standing there, hand on a Bible, getting sworn in to be the secondmost powerful person in the America. He’s up there with his wife and their three beautiful kids—and with you. You’ve got to be pretty damn proud of him. But you deserve to be proud for yourself as well. You’ve got a country full of people proud of both of you. Only in America.

This guy is about to become Boeing’s highest-paid employee.

Elon Musk runs four companies, has 12 kids, managed Trump's get out the vote operation, and is now the government's official cost-cutting czar. I replied to three emails tonight before getting distracted by Twitter memes. We are not the same.

you will never get me to drink the tap water in Minnesota

Astronomer’s CFO seeing the bill from Gwyneth Paltrow

What do you mean, Mark Cuban just conceded on my behalf?

The left has no idea the monster they’ve created with Gen Z men. Absolutely no idea. These guys spent their formative years navigating an unprecedented social experiment—COVID lockdowns; DEI struggle sessions; pronouns, micro-aggressions, land acknowledgements, intersectional justice—and, as a demographic, they simply snapped. They stopped fearing cancellation, they realized black marks on social credit scores don’t leave permanent stains, and they started owning—rather than futilely trying to defend against—the accusations of villainry they had suffered since young age. It’s a wholesale reactionary movement against a political system—more than that, a culture at large—which, rightly or wrongly, they see as dedicated to their emasculation. A system that, in their view, creates little of value, affords them scant opportunity, celebrates that which is ugly and mediocre and profanes that which is sacred. From the fires of this crucible is emerging the most right-wing generation I’ve ever seen. And from the unhinged group chats of today are emerging the legislators and congressmen of tomorrow. The left has no idea what they have done, and they can’t imagine what the second- and third-order effects of this will be.

An in-ground pool costs $80-100k. An above-ground pool costs $399 at Sam’s Club + $25/week fine from my HOA. The math speaks for itself on this one.

I would simply quit my teaching position and ask my 18-year-old son for a job.

Not only did Karen Bass break her promise not to travel abroad… Not only was she in Africa when the devastating fires broke out… She took *three* taxpayer-funded trips to the Paris Olympics last year?! She doesn’t just need to be recalled. She needs to be prosecuted.

Soros’s kid is collecting Democratic politicians like they’re rare Pokemon cards, but go on about how Elon Musk is the problem.

The electoral college if you got one vote per rep of 225 lb bench press

My parents are MSNBC liberals who think Trump is a paid Kremlin asset. I’m ultra MAGA. Know what Thanksgiving will be like this year? . . It will be great, because we’re normal people who love our family more than we care about politics. It’s not that hard, folks.

My last bit of sympathy for Airbnb hosts getting foreclosed on just died a humid and sweaty death.

JD Vance is one of the most remarkable Americans of our lifetime. The political landscape hasn’t seen the likes of his intellectual caliber or rhetorical skills in decades, and we likely won’t see it again for decades more. Vance recently sat for an interview with NYT reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro and put on a master class in effortlessly disarming a combative interviewer. Garcia-Navarro peppered him with one hostile inquiry after another—“gotcha” questions that rang more like accusations from a prosecutor than probing questions from a legitimate journalist, concerning Vance’s tone, his changing positions on Trump, and even his beliefs about the 2020 election—to which Vance responded with a level of fluency and calmness that look almost superhuman. If you haven’t seen the interview yet, you really need to watch it. At the very least, read the transcript. In total, Vance spoke for 7,280 words, often 200 to 400 words at a time. Each answer he provided was thoughtful, nuanced, and heartfelt, demonstrating a level of introspection and a mastery of policy issues that are both all too rare in today’s politics. He did all this with no teleprompter or notes (something that used to be standard for political leaders, by the way, at least prior to 2024), without once stammering, having to pause to come up with a response, talking in a circle, or evading a question with empty platitudes. And he did this against a difficult and skillful career reporter. Someone who joined NPR back when Vance was still attending high school in small-town Ohio. This wasn’t drinking a beer with Stephen Colbert, or sitting down for a friendly chat with Oprah, or answering softball questions from a podcast host best known for the “Gluck Gluck 9000” oral sex technique. This was walking into the lion’s den and showing the world that the lions are actually just house cats with middle-of-the-bell-curve IQs. There’s nobody like this guy. He’s only just getting started, and it’s going to be glorious to watch.

Donald Trump has inspired more iconic photos in the last 100 days than most politicians could produce in 10 lifetimes.

Jeff Bezos is worth $238 billion, even though Amazon has a $2.6 trillion market cap. In other words, he’s created $2.4 trillion of value for other shareholders—plus trillions more for employees, customers, suppliers, governments, and other stakeholders. Jensen Huang is worth $164 billion, while NVIDIA’s market cap is $5 trillion. That’s $4.8 trillion of value for other people (not to mention the immeasurable value created for non-equity stakeholders). Larry Page and Sergey Brin? $300 billion vs. $3.3 trillion. That’s $3 trillion of value for everyone else. And remember how bad search was before Google and how clunky email was before Gmail? Mark Zuckerberg? $248 billion vs. $1.8 trillion. The list goes on. There are hundreds more examples across technology, energy, medicine, manufacturing, and every other industry that keeps the American economy running and our society flourishing. Billionaires don’t extract value from the rest of us. They create value FOR the rest of us, in exchange for just pennies on the dollar. We should be grateful for every last one of them.

Please tell me that @elonmusk didn’t submit an unsolicited bid to acquire US Steel, a company with a $5B market cap, just to acquire the $X stock symbol.

We set up a livestream of the eclipse on the company SharePoint, so you don’t have to leave your desk and slow down productivity on a Monday!

Literally the worst advice imaginable

Trump has raw-dogging questions from reporters on live TV non-stop since the inauguration. No filters, no pre-screened questions, no press aides stage-managing the interviews. I don’t care which side you’re on—after the last four years, this kind of transparency is remarkable.

“I didn’t vote for Elon Musk and his autistic tech bros to get a line-item veto on federal spending!” Yeah well I didn’t vote for Joe Biden’s non-binary Deep State theater kids to get a blank check to give my tax dollars to fringe left-wing NGO slush funds for four years, but that’s exactly what happened. Elections have consequences, one of which being the president of the United States—the CEO of the executive branch—gets to make personnel appointments across the administrative state. Don’t like it? You’ve got two options: 1. Reduce the size, scope, and power of the administrative state. I promise, you’d garner bipartisan support and find willing allies across the political spectrum here. (For some reason, though, Democrats don’t seem to like this idea. Curious. 🤔) 2. Don’t lose the election. Don’t spend four years mismanaging the country and lying to the American people about the president’s health, only to swap him out in the election for a weak, untested, unlikeable candidate who wastes billions of dollars on the poorest-run campaign in modern history. Either way, stop complaining about Elon. We DID vote for this. We returned Trump to office with a strong mandate specifically to end this bullshit. If you don’t like the means—or the personnel choices—by which he’s doing so, that’s on you, not us.

When I was getting my math degree, I knew plenty of STEM majors who took upper-level humanities classes as electives. I never met any history or comp lit majors in my upper-level math classes, though. Wonder why.

You may think you want him gone, but I promise you, you don’t.

Getting ready to unmute and say “sounds good, nothing on my end.”

Going after @BillAckman’s wife is one of the dumbest moves I’ve ever seen. MIT and Business Insider don’t understand the force of nature that’s about to come after them. This guy literally beat out Brad Pitt competing for his wife. While you were losing sleep over not having toilet paper during Covid, he was making $2.6B shorting the entire economy. The dude is just built different. Ackman is righteously pissed off. He’s motivated. He’s rich af, and he’s got some of the best research analysts in the world working for him (I worked in military intelligence, and DOD/IC analysts don’t come close to Wall Street short-sellers when it comes to autistically meticulous research). You think Gen Z clickbait journalists and MIT deans more comfortable in chemistry labs than in tense board-room proxy fights are ready for a guy like this once he gets on the war path? Yeah, right.

Google Gemini won’t show white people. > NYT: Don’t care. Yeah but it literally depicts the American founding fathers as Asians and Africans. > NYT: So? *whispering* It also means Nazis are being portrayed as people of color. > NYT: BREAKING NEWS 🚨

“You financed a Nissan Altima with a 15 year loan?”

Hang it in the Louvre

they hired the Coldplay singer’s ex-wife lmao

America needs to be a destination for the world’s most elite talent. But the H-1B program isn’t the way to do that. I’m going to stop posting for now, but let me know if there are any other visualizations that would be helpful. If you made it this far, thanks for reading!

Liberals negotiating a peace deal: > six months of planning > big summit in Prague, Geneva, or Doha > 32 court eunuchs sit around a table > nothing significant said or accomplished Trump negotiating a peace deal: > one week of planning > basically YOLO the entire thing > meet at USAF base in Putin’s backyard > one-on-one, man-to-man discussion > fly B-2 stealth bomber overhead just to flex American power Remind me who the actual peacemaker is?

Black women were 25% of employees at the Department of Education and the IRS, despite being 6% of the overall labor force. Seems like a class-action discrimination lawsuit waiting to happen.

You’re excited because you think Trump’s $100k H-1B fee will raise $8.5 billion for the government. I’m excited because I think it will raise $0.

Go talk to anyone in the military and ask what they’re most afraid of. Doesn’t matter what they do—infantry, aviation, navy, intel, special ops, logistics, or anything else. They’ll all tell you it’s this.

McKinsey consultants showing C-suite executives a presentation recommending they increase revenue and decrease costs

Did you actually think I wasn't going to win?

Here’s how much the Democrats hate Elon Musk: For today’s EPA EV announcement, they had 4 cars on stage: 1 from GM, 1 from Chrysler, and 2 from Ford. But no Teslas. Last year, Ford sold 72,608 EVs. GM sold 75,883. Chrysler sold 0. Tesla sold 1,808,581. What a freaking joke.

The more I look at this photo, the more I find to appreciate: - The camaraderie of these frat guys not letting the flag touch the ground - The guy in the blue shirt busting up laughing - My man on the left representing Hooters Augusta Hang this one in the Smithsonian. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

The Trump-Hitler story is a psyop. I mean that literally, not figuratively. It’s a military-grade, multi-stage psychological operation, engineered to re-energize demoralized Harris supporters and—through stigmatization—reduce turnout among Trump supporters. Here’s how it works: STEP ONE: PAYLOAD The most important component of any weapons system is the payload—that is, the material that actually detonates and causes explosive damage. In a psyop, the payload is a generally a narrative; in the case of this psyop, the narrative is that Trump is a fascist, a Hitler-sympathizer, and an outright Nazi. If your initial reaction here is to laugh at how trite and cliched this is, you’re not wrong; you would think, after eight years of trying to will this fake narrative into existence ex nihilo (“don’t you folks get that he’s literally Hitler?!”), the Democrats and their media allies would eventually have moved on. But there are two reasons why they’ve exhumed this beaten and dead horse, and why they’ve done so just 14 days before the election: Reason 1: They’re desperate. Kamala is behind in nearly every national poll, and, in particular, she has forfeited a meaningful level of support among Latinos, black men, and Arab-Americans. With white Americans breaking for Trump more heavily than ever before, the Harris campaign can’t afford even the slightest of shifts in voting patterns among swing-state minority demographics. Reason 2: Unfortunately, the fictitious Nazi claim, on the margins, is effective. Most Americans, burned out on nearly a decade of continuous media hoaxes (from “fine people on both sides” to injecting bleach to the origins of Covid to Hunter Biden’s laptop), will see through it and immediately disregard it. Remember, though, that just a handful of swing states will decide this election; even more specifically, members of the aforementioned minority groups will likely be the fulcrum within those states. If, by calling Trump a fascist, the Harris campaign and the media can motivate even a small number of these people to get off the fence and support Harris, and if they can also demoralize a small number of would-be Trump voters in the same states to stay home on Election Day, it could make all the difference. STEP TWO: THE LAUNCH VEHICLE A weapon is no good if it can’t be delivered to its intended target. In the case of this operation, the first stage of the launch vehicle was The New York Times and The Atlantic, which published their stories within hours of each other. Ask yourself, what are the odds that two prominent news outlets, both of which are highly friendly to the Democratic establishment but which are (notionally) independent from one another, would publish two separate articles with the same narrative, within hours of each other on a date exactly two weeks before the election? Exactly. STEP THREE: CHAIN REACTION The New York Times and The Atlantic offer credibility for the narrative’s nucleus, but what they can’t offer is widespread distribution. Americans get their news from a range of sources that is wider than ever, and—as much as it might offend those who took out $200k in student loans to attend Columbia J-school—most of them don’t turn to the so-called paper of record or to a once-great literary magazine intellectually bankrupted by the widow of the guy who invented the iPhone. Fortunately for the orchestrators of our psyop, though, if there’s one thing the media hates even more than Donald Trump, it’s missing out on all the clicks and impressions from a hot story. Within hours of the two original articles going live (within minutes, in some cases), virtually every other mainstream publication released a derivative article that summarized the salacious claims in the source articles. By the end of the day yesterday, there were hundreds of such releases, from CNN, NBC/MSNBC/CNBC, ABC, CBS, Newsweek, Axial, Business Insider, the Huffington Post, NPR, and just about any other publication one could name. These derivative articles don’t merely disseminate the narrative’s DNA further; they also serve to reinforce it and provide it (false) legitimacy, creating the unjustified impression that dozens of outlets have looked into this, rather than just two. When Americans open up Facebook and see countless articles from countless different sources all saying the same thing, they become far more susceptible to the narrative, even if they might otherwise be skeptical. The sheer volume of logos and headlines overwhelms the mind’s natural hesitation to question propaganda. It’s devious, but it works. And the people who engineer missions like this know it. STEP FOUR: ITERATE AND PERPETUATE Earlier today, Kamala Harris read a statement decrying Trump’s supposed fascism; as I type these words, she’s regurgitating these claims in her televised townhall. Biden also provided a statement about the articles today. In doing this, they essentially rebooted the news cycle for the narrative, providing it fresh life and keeping it front and center in the media. If you’re getting a sense that the media focus comes in waves, it’s because it does (and, like everything else here, it’s deliberate and methodical). In the first 24 hours, the focus is on the original claims in the two source articles. In the subsequent 48 hours, once the original story starts to go stale, the media focus pivots to the reaction from prominent opponents of Trump, thereby creating another news cycle to reinforce the narrative. Thereafter, the media will launch yet another wave of news, this one focused on interviewing historians (all of whom will, conveniently, summarize the numerous and convenient parallels between Trump and the fascists of old), swing-state voters (all of whom, conveniently, will claim that Trump’s newly unveiled love of Hitler convinced them to get off the fence and support Kamala), and even so-called Trump supporters that have now decided not to vote for him. The goal is to keep the narrative in front of the audience for as long as possible, giving it time and space to metastasize further and continue corroding support for Trump. STEP FIVE: LAUNCH ANOTHER PAYLOAD We have 13 days until the election. If you think this is the last payload the Harris campaign and the media will launch into the discourse, you have far more faith in their decency than I do. Expect at least two more of these over the next two weeks, one of which—if I can hazard a guess—will center on fictitious claims of sexual misconduct and the second of which will focus on Trump’s business history. Just remember: If it looks like a psyop, walks like a psyop, and quacks like a psyop, it’s probably a psyop. Remain vigilant, keep your spirits high, and, most importantly, VOTE.

Every once in a while, LinkedIn comes through with a banger

Might be a dumb question, but can’t OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI companies just incorporate the best parts of DeepSeek’s source code into their code, then use the massive GPU clusters at their disposal to train models even more powerful than DeepSeek? Am I missing something?

I was going to joke about this protest, until I searched Twitter and found out a BofA associate just died after working four consecutive 120-hour weeks. The guy is apparently former military, with a wife and kid. Life is too precious for this shit. Rest in peace, brother.

McKinsey junior consultants finding out you went to a state school

The left still doesn’t get it. It’s not the “MAGA movement” mourning Charlie Kirk. AMERICA is mourning him. Millions of Americans are watching his funeral right now. Every city in the US has hosted candlelit vigils. People are flocking to churches in droves. Red states and blue states. Cities and small towns. East coast, west coast, and everywhere in between. A nationwide revival. This transcends any political party. It goes far beyond ideology. This is the good people of this country commemorating the life of an American patriot—a beloved son, a loving husband, an adoring father, a devout Christian—taken from us at far too young an age. You can call that MAGA if you want. We just call it being an ordinary, decent American.

In the past two weeks, Elon Musk brought internet service to a disaster area (after the government failed to), unveiled a new self-driving taxi + humanoid robots, launched a 232 foot rocket, and caught it on the way back down. What has a single one of his haters accomplished?

“ha ha ha remember how funny it was when Trump got shot and a firefighter died shielding his family from bullets and we came one inch away from a civil war LOL”

You can’t sell a mass-market EV You can’t make a Gigafactory You can’t build a charging network You can’t engineer your own rockets You can’t reuse boosters You can’t buy a social media platform You can’t launch a satellite network You can’t fight for free speech You can’t catch a rocket from space You can’t, you can’t, you can’t. He did. Keep this in mind next time you hear “you can’t.”

You can see where I’m going with this. A casual perusal of the data shows that this isn’t a program for the top 0.1% of talent, as it’s been described. This is simply a way to recruit hundreds of thousands of relatively lower-wage IT and financial services professionals.

“They call people they don’t like retarded. They call their friends retarded. They call themselves retarded.”

My wife just opened up a time capsule from NYE Y2K. 59 cents for a 2-liter Coke and $93k for a starter home. This is what they took from us.

I noticed you didn't log in to Microsoft Teams Metaverse until 8:03 this morning. Let's not make a habit out of that, champ!

I’m telling you guys: There is something deeply unwell in our society right now. You’re not going to see it if you’re a member of the select, far right-hand side of the bell curve. If you and your peer group are educated, financially successful, and healthy, our society probably feels better than ever. But, travel outside that bubble that most of us here—myself included—inhabit, and you’ll notice a pervasive sense that something just isn’t right. I don’t know what it is. It’s more than economic. It’s more than physical health, or anything material (though it certainly creates ripple effects across all those domains). It’s nothing less than metaphysical. For lack of a better term, it’s a vibe shift. It’s a sense of apathy that you feel emanating from far too many people—especially from the young, who should have all the hope in the world. It’s a lack of aspiration, of seeking a better life and better conditions for oneself. It’s dead eyes. Pop music and cinema that just feel lifeless. Teenagers not caring enough to get their drivers licenses anymore (or even to sneak a couple beers with friends). A world where too few of us feel like we have a purpose, and too many of us are finding nothing but despair on 6” phone screens. I don’t know what the causes are. I’m sure social media, economic malaise, Covid lockdowns, fentanyl, and every other reason we hear about factor into it. All of those reasons, though, in aggregate, still feel insufficient. They might be symptoms that compound the underlying disease, but they are not, in and of themselves, the root cause. I also don’t know what the solution is. I wish I did. I’m one small person just trying to spread positive vibes on social media and trying to raise my kids right. But I am 100% certain that something is wrong. And I hate seeing it, and I wish there were anything I could do about it.