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The Tim Ferriss Show
#790: Chris Sacca — How to Succeed by Living on Your Own Terms and Getting Into Good Trouble
03:05:50
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- [00:01]
Tim Ferriss
Coming up in this episode and I.
- [00:03]
Chris Sacca
Need to memorialize these things for the benefit of humanity before we're all obviated. These kids who have these incredible GPAs and this test taking, I think it might be useless. I think they might have optimized for useless skills. And I think the only thing that might keep us going is that randomness, that unpredictability, those flaws, those fuck ups, the things that make us banged up. The things where we make bad decisions, where we're self indulgent. I've had to teach our team the number one thing you can be in this business is unpredictable. Feed into the fact I am known as mercurial. I burn bridges. I will not hesitate to fucking fight you. I wear the stupid shirts I don't give a shit about much. I've been known to just light it on fire. And guess what? People take me seriously as a result, I haven't backed down from all those fucking character flaws I have that are very self destructive. But I am all gas, no fucking brakes. As you know. Although in our line we call it no gas, no brakes. But we need to cultivate more of that if we have any hope as a fucking species. We just need to. I'm sorry.
- [01:10]
Tim Ferriss
Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show. And my guest today is a repeat guest. Last time he was on in conversation was 2015. So a lot has changed since then. His name is Chris Saga. Chris is the co founder of Lower Carbon Capital and an accomplished venture investor, company advisor and entrepreneur, managing a portfolio of countless technology, communication and consumer product startups through his firm, Lowercase Capital. That's a sentence. And he actually gave me some disclosure in our conversation. He was worried about this intro because he knew I would be recording this intro after the fact. And there are some things not in his official bio. His trading of commodities contracts related to live hogs which we actually get into. His record setting number of F bombs in this particular episode. But let me return to the official bio for just a second. Alongside his wife Crystal, Chris grew lowercase. Primarily known for its investments in very early stage technology companies like Twitter, Uber, Instagram, Twilio, Docker, Optimizely, Blue Bottle Coffee and Stripe into one of history's most successful funds. So there you have it. He's also a hilarious guy, whip smart, mercurial, prone to burning bridges and not at all shy about talking about his slips, flim flams, bamboozling and other character building adventures. In this episode we get into it later as part of a new project of his where he's hoping to chat with successful entrepreneurs and friends of his about the I wouldn't say misdeeds, but adventures Getting into hot water, getting out of hot water, talking yourself into things, talking your way out of things for a new project podcast called no Permanent Record. So hopefully at some point you'll be able to check that out. But first, just a few quick words from our fine podcast sponsors and only maybe 15% 20% at most of the people who want to be sponsors for this show become sponsors because I personally test and vet everything. So with that said, please enjoy coffee, coffee, coffee. Man do I love a great cup of coffee. Sometimes too much. Then I'll have two, three, four, five cups of coffee. I do not love the jitters that come from that or how even one really strong cup of coffee can impact my sleep, which I measure in all sorts of ways which HRV and blah blah blah blah blah. But more recently, I have downshifted to something that feels good. I have been enjoying a more serene morning brew from this episode's sponsor, Mud Water. With only a fraction of the caffeine found in a cup of coffee. Madaratu gives me all the energy I need without the crash, without the fidgety crawling out of my skin kind of feeling. And it's delicious. It tastes as if cacao and chai had a beautiful love child. I drink it in the morning and sometimes. Right now I'm exercising in the mountains and running around. Sometimes I'll also add some milk and ice for a 2pm yeah, maybe 1pm if I'm behaving iced latte pick me up type of thing. MudWTR's original blend contains four different types of mushrooms, lion's mane for focus, cordyceps to promote energy. I used to use that when I was competing in all sorts of sports and both Chaga and Reishi to support a healthy immune system. I also love that they make and have for a long time donations to support psychedelic therapeutics and research, including organizations like the Heroic Hearts Project, which I encourage people to check out, and the UC Berkeley center for the Science of Psychedelics. You, my dear listeners, can now try MUDWTR with 15% off plus a free rechargeable frother and free shipping by going to mudwtr.com Tim now listen to the spelling. This is important. That's M u d w t r.com Tim so one more time. M u d w t r.com Tim for a free frother 15% off and a better morning routine. As many of you know, for the last few years I've been sleeping on a midnight luxe mattress from today's sponsor, Helix Sleep. I also have one in the guest bedroom downstairs and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. Kind of over the top to be hon. I mean, they frequently say it's the best night of sleep they've had in ages. What kind of mattress is it? What do you do? What's the magic juju? It's something they comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever. I also recently had a chance to test the Helix Sunset Elite in a new guest bedroom which I sometimes sleep in and I picked it for its very soft but supportive feel to help with some lower back pain that I've had. The Sunset Elite delivers exceptional comfort while putting the right support in the right spots. It is made with five tailored foam layers including a base layer with full perimeter zoned lumbar support support right where I need it and middle layers with premium foam and microcoils that create a soft contouring feel. Which also means if I feel like I want to sleep on my side, I can do that without worrying about other aches and pains I might create. And with a luxurious pillow top for pressure relief, I look forward to nestling into that bed every night that I use it. The best part of course is that it helps me wake up feeling fully rested with a back that feels supple instead of stiff. That is the name of the game for me these days. Helix offers a 100 night sleep trial, fast free shipping and a 15 year warranty. So check it all out and you my dear listeners can get between 25 and 30% off plus two free pillows on all mattress orders. So go to helixsleep.com Tim to check it out. That's helixsleep.com Tim with Helix Better Sleep starts Now.
- [06:48]
Chris Sacca
You know my host today as the human guinea pig. The sample size of one and the only clinical trial on two feet and New York Times best selling author of the four Hour Work Week, the four Hour Body, the Four Hour Chef and the four Minute Intimacy Guide. This man has inspired millions to learn Mandarin Chinese in just three hours while doing handstand kegels during their optimal billing cycle. As one of the founders of the life hacking movement, he leads by example and not having checked his email since the Clinton administration and outsourcing all of his sneezes and existential crises to Bolivia. His chart topping podcast practically gave birth to the manosphere and spawned an entire generation of wannabe pod bros who think dropping references to stoicism makes them philosophical sages as they read undies ads from Mann's basement while promoting pseudoscientific creatine enema regimens. If it's cool today, my host blogged about it in the 90s, wrote a 13 point checklist for optimizing it, and has the lab results to prove it. When he's not interviewing world class performers with pauses so pregnant they wear elastic waistbands, you can find him meticulously organizing his pharmaceutical grade kitchen fridge full of blood, urine and stool samples, and his bathroom cabinet looks like a GNC nutrition store fucked a Japanese vending machine. He is only 14 months away from having supplemented every possible molecular combination from the known periodic table. He has hotboxed with Himalayan monks, ice bath with Arctic shamans, and achieved ego death with cultures that anthropologists haven't even discovered yet. On four separate continents there are sacred psychedelic ceremonies that tribes have named after him, and twice his meditations have opened portals to another dimension. He's given lectures on Seneca in 27 languages, can ask for warm body oil and CBD cream in 31 and say whoa brother, we just tripped balls and 38. I challenge any of you to identify a medieval weapon with which he hasn't competed at the international level. This is a man who enchants the world's most powerful and influential people with the insatiable curiosity of a four year old, the energy level of a seven year old who just ate three boxes of M&Ms, and when texting memes to his friends, the emotional maturity of a 10 year old. He's already prepared interview questions for future podcasts who have yet to be born. Carbs fear him to do lists quake in his presence. His morning routine starts before he goes to sleep and his gratitude Lists kick off by individually thanking each of his gut bacteria. His circadian rhythm is so optimized that he experiences next week's REM sleep during yesterday's power nap. He's had romantic relationships with kettlebells, but we are told he is holding out for a human lady long term. The world's most eligible bachelor who just last week stopped requiring potential dates to submit three years of sleep tracking data. The man, the myth, the legend, the guy who would absolutely win gold if self experimentation and self pleasure were an Olympic sport. It's the one. And thank God for all of us. The only Tim Ferriss everyone. Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss everyone.
- [10:43]
Tim Ferriss
Optimal Minimal at this altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before My hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question now?
- [10:52]
Chris Sacca
It is in my perfect time.
- [10:54]
Tim Ferriss
What if I did the opposite?
- [10:55]
Chris Sacca
I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.
- [11:08]
Tim Ferriss
Now, for people who have not heard the first episode, but maybe they see the headline, which is Chris Sacca on being different and making billions, would you like to just give a quick snippet of where you grew up? I believe it was somewhere in Connecticut. Kid, as the scion of a wealthy family, am I getting that wrong?
- [11:27]
Chris Sacca
Yeah. I grew up in Lockport, New York, a little town on the Erie Canal just north of Buffalo. A town that is as middle class, working class as it gets. We had a town employer. It was the GM plant where they made radiators and air conditioners for GM cars. Most of my buddies, dads worked at the plant. And I feel really lucky to have grown up in that kind of place, a safe place, a fun place. I wasn't exposed to any extreme wealth and I also wasn't exposed to any extreme poverty. But at the same time, I also feel lucky to have seen the canary in the coal mine. And what happens when the company town factory shuts down and the jobs ship off to Mexico and the pension's bankrupted? My buddy's dads who were retired were suddenly had to work as greeters at Walmart. And before long, we had the largest trailer park in the Northeast in our town. Drugs that ultimately became fentanyl in modern times really set in and there was just a lot of angst and depression. And I watched that town go from reliably union Democrat to hardcore maga, but along the way really saw the empathetic roots for it. Like, why is this happening? What happens when people lose agency over their lives? When they feel like they can't provide for their kids the way their parents provided for them, when they lose their small businesses and those are replaced by a Walmart or Home Depot. And I feel like that's something that I've really tried to stay in touch with. I know we're not really going to talk about politics. It leaves me with the state of America today never being a surprise. I mean, I was just back in Buffalo this weekend. Go Bills. And nothing about what's happening in America is surprising. I don't love it, but it doesn't shock me. And so I feel really grateful to have grown up there now. What it means is by the time I got into this business, I didn't have a network. I didn't know anybody. I didn't even know what money really was. I had to make my own way and everything I did. And I had these incredibly bright and supportive parents who went way out of their way to create opportunities for us and me and my brother. But at the same time, I was an outsider to the kind of stuff we do now for sure. And I still feel like that. I lived in the Valley for a while in Silicon Valley. But as you know, Tim, because you've visited me various places, I've spent more of my time outside. I live in the Rockies now. I live in Montana. Before that, Wyoming. Before that Truckee. I really try to stay in places where real people live and work and our kids go to public school. I would never claim to be fully in touch because my life is ridiculously special. But at the same time, I feel really lucky the way I grew up going to public schools and being one among many. And I worry that the kind of people Tim, you and I know and the kind of people we work with aren't those people anymore and have really lost touch. And you can see it in the decisions they make and the stuff they say. Did we start this out lighthearted enough? Are we on to.
- [14:27]
Tim Ferriss
I was going to do some knock knock jokes, but I'm not sure that's an appropriate segue.
- [14:31]
Chris Sacca
I mean, there's other stuff we said in the old episode. Like, look, I was really good at school. I went to university for math starting in seventh grade. I think one thing that I've talked about before, but I will bring up because I see it missing these days is I always had a hustle. I always had a little bit of a side business. I mean, from the time I was six years old, I was going around the neighborhood selling walnuts that I poke holes in and call air fresheners or rocks that I had found in a parking lot. I was literally going door to door.
- [14:58]
Tim Ferriss
What was your J.T. marlin and Associates?
- [15:00]
Chris Sacca
100%. I mean, I started trading commodities when I was 13 or 14. I had a pager that had a 45 second delay to the Chicago Board of Trade. Talk about latency. And I was trading live hogs. I just always had a business. Mowing lawns, washing cars, detailing a paper route.
- [15:22]
Tim Ferriss
I'm not sure we talked about the live hogs.
- [15:24]
Chris Sacca
Oh yeah, I somehow we skip that.
- [15:26]
Tim Ferriss
How did you even get into commodities?
- [15:28]
Chris Sacca
I'll tell you. My dad's best friend ran basically a construction and equipment rental business that I have talked to you about.
- [15:34]
Tim Ferriss
Yep.
- [15:34]
Chris Sacca
Where it was a gritty ass job. You know, My mom and dad believed in the sweet and sour. Yeah, exactly. So it was just grind it out, work your ass off in a real job job. And my boss there, who is my dad's best friend, you know, he was under strict instructions from my dad to just kick our asses and make us appreciate everything we had and hopefully go on to work our asses off in school and maybe not have to do a job like that someday. A lot of my coworkers were on parole and it was a tough dead end situation. But that guy had a commodities account on a computer up in the attic of the building I worked in. And he said, come here. You probably know what the hell is going on with this stuff. I didn't, but he showed it to me. I went to the library. I started learning about stochastics, about charts and technical analysis. And then I was reading about seasonality of literally frozen orange juice concentrate trading places and cocoa and coffee and oil. And I identified what I thought was a pattern anomaly in live hogs. And he had this deal with me. He said, Look, I've got $3,000 in this account. You make a trade, take a week. I want you to think about it. You make a trade, if you make money, we'll split the upside. If you lose money, I'll cover it. By the way, that's called venture capital.
- [16:56]
Tim Ferriss
That's it.
- [16:58]
Chris Sacca
So I went all in. I read everything, I studied everything. I looked at these charts and imagine charts on a low res green monitor, right?
- [17:07]
Tim Ferriss
I mean, war game style.
- [17:09]
Chris Sacca
And I had this pager and I'm like trying to go to school and also monitor my quotes on my. I think it was called a Quotron pager. And eventually I placed this trade and two weeks later I cashed out and I netted $171 for myself.
- [17:25]
Tim Ferriss
Nice.
- [17:26]
Chris Sacca
And I just remember thinking downstairs I'm making 4,25 an hour. Upstairs, I just made $171 by pushing a button and using my brain. I was like, I want to be the guy who works upstairs. And I can't tell you how seminal that experience was for me. The rest of my life. There's only so far you can lever a man hour. Bob Haas is that guy's name. I feel incredibly indebted to him for that kind of exposure in the rich dad, poor dad world. My mom and dad weren't. They didn't own stocks. They weren't really investors like that. They had a rental property once. But Bob Haas was kind of like my rich dad, a guy who got me exposed to capital markets.
- [18:07]
Tim Ferriss
Amazing life hugs.
- [18:08]
Chris Sacca
Yeah, but I also had hustles. Like in high school, I ran a card room. I started one in junior high, but by the time I was in high school, I ran a full on card room. I paid off a teacher. Rest in peace, Mr. Main. He was on the rake. And so we were always hustling. I was selling Blow Pops with my buddy Hawkeye. We ran a little sports book.
- [18:28]
Tim Ferriss
Hawkeye. Did he give himself that nickname?
- [18:30]
Chris Sacca
No, no, no. That was given to him at his birthday. Actually. I was just at the Bills game, all my high school buddies, and I turn around, I'm talking to some other people. I had some family. And I turn around and I see my daughters, who are 13, 11 and 9, playing beer pong with my high school buddies. We'd been deep in the tailgate with Pinto Ron. If anyone follows the Bills, the girls are eating bacon off of Pinto Ron's car and making pizza with Pizza Pete, who cooks pizza in the file cabinet. Literally. Go Google that. Pinto Ron and Pizza Pete are absolute legends. It only happens in Buffalo. But then the girls are actually playing beer pong with my high school degenerate buddies. And they're like, is this okay? And I was like, it's better than okay. Now, they weren't slamming beers, they were slamming sodas. But I was just like, I feel like these skills aren't taught to children anymore. And it was funny. Our 13 year old, when they're like, hey, Cece, come jump in the game. She's like, all right. But I haven't played this in a while and my buddies all pissed themselves in a while. You're 13, this is amazing. And our kids were talking shit, placing side bets, you know, a little bit of gambling. I feel like we've got a generation of kids who's lost that edge completely. And so, again, I feel very lucky to have grown up in a place where I had opportunities to, you know, commit small misdemeanors. And, you know, I had more than one detention. I definitely appeared before the principals on many occasions. You know, just some light mischief.
- [19:53]
Tim Ferriss
We're going to come back to that. So is there anything, though, from our last conversation that you would revise or that you think was missing? Given your last 10 years of life.
- [20:03]
Chris Sacca
Did anything jump out at you?
- [20:05]
Tim Ferriss
I don't think so. Nothing jumped out tremendously. I mean, I think that the kernel of who you and I are has remained remarkably intact, hopefully for better. And I at the same time recognize that you've had a lot of life changes. You've had a lot of professional changes, so there are probably maybe not some revisions, but addendums at the very least. And you sent me to your own description, the world's longest text message about what we might chat about, which was very helpful. And my response was, in addition to all of this, because they were great topics, we're going to touch on a bunch of them, the lessons that Chris Sacca has learned since last time. And I was leading with the, I suppose, precautionary note of avoiding a lot of politics. But what comes up for you just as a human, as a man, as a parent, as a husband, anything.
- [21:04]
Chris Sacca
I'll tell you what was interesting about re listening to that was I actually felt a lot of pressure because I was like, shit, I don't have a lot of new material. We used to just roll tape, right? You would just hit record. The sound quality on that is abysmal. There's seagulls going in the background. There's people partying down below. You and I are maxing out mics in the red zone. You couldn't hear shit. But back then, there wasn't an industry of professional podcast guests. Those conversations weren't optimized for what is going to be the pithy takeaway quote? What's going to be the title card of this one?
- [21:41]
Tim Ferriss
The Oprah moment where I get you to cry and then make a thumbnail out of you with a red arrow pointing at your face.
- [21:46]
Chris Sacca
Yeah, I'm good at that shit. If we have a few minutes, I am actually authentic and vulnerable. But you know what I don't have? No one's written the Naval Almanac of shit that Chris Sacca says, right? And so that guy's intimidating, he's brilliant, and he's got. And he reduces everything to 80 characters. And you're like, fuck, that's true. I don't know if that guy just sits up in a cave on a mountainside and you got to hike up to see naval these days. So I listened to these episodes where I'm like, okay, this is a real conversation where I am happy to bear my soul. I am accountable to an audience of me, my wife, and my kids, and that's it. So I will just say what I really want to say. You asked me last time what changed between 30 and 40, and I talked a lot about reorienting myself around, because you also asked who is someone I looked up to and a mentor, et cetera. And I would say right now I have few if zero of them, because I started to realize And I started to touch upon this last time, and it's only become truer. Anytime I put somebody on a pedestal, I realized it holds them to a universal purity test. Across everything, I gave the example of Bill Gates. In the last one, I was like, I just had dinner with him and Melinda. Yeah, exactly.
- [23:05]
Tim Ferriss
Just changed my name on Riverside to Chris's idol and mentor.
- [23:10]
Chris Sacca
Well, I had already put mine as Tim's idol, so I left out the mentor part. But obviously, Bill Gates is amazing in so many regards, and he's also a fucking disaster in so many regards. And so if I were to say, like, he's an idol and a mentor, it implies this. Like, I've taken all of it. And I think if there's anything that's a scourge in today's society, it's these purity tests. It's this, like, you have to be perfect in all regards, or we toss you out. And I am going to be political for a second. That is one of the major flaws of the Democratic Party is you either sign up to everything they believe in or fuck you, you're out. And the Republican Party has been like, hey, choose from this menu. Anything here, bro. High five, let's go. And I think that's one of the things, is that people to the left have just made us, each other feel bad and have held each other these impossible fucking standards that don't allow for growth, that don't allow for imperfections, that don't even allow for just the wabi sabi of a human experience. And so I've really tried to demystify putting people on a pedestal and instead looking to people for examples of one aspect of a life. I mean, I will say I really look up to Rich and Sarah Barton. So Rich founded Expedia, Zillow, Crystal. And I look up to them as a family, as parents, as business people and entrepreneurs. And they're ahead of us on the kid game. So their kids are in college and our kids are in middle school. And so I would say I kind of do look at them as the total package a bit.
- [24:43]
Tim Ferriss
What about them? I've spent some time with Rich, amazing human being. What about them specifically jumps out to you? What is it that you'd like to emulate or that you think is rare or that you'd like to model anything.
- [24:56]
Chris Sacca
I think the biggest danger of raising kids with privilege is that they turn out to be assholes. Yeah, you press the fucking red mute button the end of the Oscar speech anytime I say it. But Donald Trump is an example of what happens when someone is raised without anyone ever saying no to them. Okay? Like, no matter how you vote, we can agree no one has ever said fucking no to that guy. And that's what you get. But the richer you get, the temptation is to raise your kids in a way that they're surrounded by people who are like, aye, aye, and increasingly Elon Musk is what you get when no one says no to you. And you've been exposed to lots of people who've been very successful, and once they see that you're on that ride, it's very easy to be surrounded only by sycophants who are there to say yes to every idea out of self and opportunistic interest. And so I think that happens when you're raising kids who are lucky enough to not stay in Motel Sixes or ride in the seating group E on Southwest. And so I love the kids that Rich and Sarah have raised. How collegial, how balanced, how hardworking, while also unapologetically bright they are. How different they are from each other, but how driven they still are. I love Rich and Sarah as a couple. I think they balance working their faces off with also having a good time. And so I've had deeply introspective, reflective conversations about work with them. I mean, frankly, they were the ones who convinced me and Crystal to get back to work and start lower carbon when we were very pleasantly enjoying not working full time. And there are some days when we curse Rich and Sarah as a result.
- [26:36]
Tim Ferriss
How did they convince you to do that? What was the logic behind it? Or what did they see that led them to stage an intervention?
- [26:45]
Chris Sacca
They just said, you are uniquely positioned to do it, and you need to do it for the planet. And we were like, begrudgingly, yes. I'm telling you, there are definitely days where Rich and Sarah Barton are a bad word in our house. Because I'm like, fuck, fuck Rich. He is probably fucking skiing right now, and I'm dealing with some horseshit. Or I've been staring at Montana out the window and have not stolen from this fucking computer. Today, the Bartons actually wrote out their family creed. I guess I would say I'm not going to give any insight into what's in there, but they wrote out, what does it mean to be a Barton? And that exercise alone is so powerful. And as Crystal and I started writing that for ourselves, wow. Nobody ever really takes that time to, like, what do we stand for? If we were gone tomorrow, what would we want our kids to take away from who we were how we got here. You know, there's this amazing data on how the children of people who are rich, but when those parents grew up, middle class or poor, those kids end up all right. But their children are fucked. No, I mean, there's actual sociological data on this because we can teach our kids about spending, about saving and thrift and hard work, et cetera, but they don't have the empirical basis for it. It's a learned lesson. So they have no real deep root in their DNA for passing it along. So we've tried to codify it a little bit.
- [28:14]
Tim Ferriss
What does that look like? How long is it?
- [28:16]
Chris Sacca
Like 18 pages.
- [28:18]
Tim Ferriss
18 pages. What kind of stuff did you try to cover?
- [28:21]
Chris Sacca
Ultimately, the kids will be in there. The kids will be part of the conversation. Crystal spent six years writing biographies of my grandmother before she passed at age 94. And then her parents. Her parents are two of the most fascinating people who've ever walked the planet. I mean, I think it's. We'll just say that they spent over 40 years each in the service of the government in various roles known and unknown, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And the biographies she wrote were great. They cannot be published because they would have to go through certain agencies for stuff to be cleared. But incredible public servants, two of the most honorable people I've ever known. I met them when I was 18 years old. Crystal and I were besties starting at age 18. I asked her out, and she friend zoned me for 14 years. But my grandmother's biography was interesting. My grandmother from the Midwest lived most of her life in Omaha, Nebraska, and had this real quotidian wonder and beauty and treasure to her life. A mom of seven, a volunteer, she worked in prison. She was a leader of a national organization of Catholics. School teacher. But here was this woman who's a leader of a national organization of Catholics. And one of the things she put in her biography that Crystal did was, I think it's really important that men and women live together before they get married, because I think divorce is a much bigger problem than premarital sex. I think she was 92 when she said that. As a leader of a Catholic organization, I really just think she did an incredible service. I loved hearing her prioritization like, hey, here's what the creed says, here's what the doctrine says, et cetera. But here's the reality. I would rather see a family to make sure that parents are compatible and a family stay together for their lifetimes, then deal with the breakups, et cetera. It was really incredible. So we cover everything in there, how we would like to communicate, how Crystal and I think about making up after a fight, how we think about making decisions. We put stuff in there that's almost therapeutic. Like, hey, when we first made a lot of money, we bought a bunch of houses for everyone in our family. We thought that was an incredible way to thank them and paid off mortgages and stuff and moved parents out from the east coast to California. And then we soon realized, shit, we're property managers. The shit we own owns us. That's all we fucking do.
- [30:43]
Tim Ferriss
I don't know if we talked about this last conversation. Probably not. But you texted me at some point, and you were like, if a raccoon dies in the H Vac, is Eric Schmidt getting these texts?
- [30:52]
Chris Sacca
What the fuck, right? Dude? Eric Schmidt's team reached out yesterday to update his email address. And I wrote back to them, hey, team, do you think we could do a check in? I'm just curious how the flow is working around Eric's email, his calls, his travel. I just kind of want to know. And they're kind of like, what? And I'm like, yeah, no, Eric's cool. Give him my best. But I kind of want to talk to you guys about what flows up to Eric, what doesn't. How does he handle this shit right now? I'm constantly interviewing people about that because there's finite amount of time in this space, and the shit you own does own you. Every single object at some point has commanded some of your attention. One of our close friends lost everything this week. Shit. It's Kevin Rose, because he's talked about it out loud, but I said, it's totally devastating. But if there was one person I know who will actually end up teaching us something from this, it's Kevin. Kevin is this guy who loves stuff but is also untethered to it. It's this weird duality he has where he is zen as fuck, while also loving a good pair of sneakers and a great, like, dude, check out this fucking watch. His watch is melted into a puddle, and he's like, whoops. And Kevin was like, you know what I miss? I miss the drawings for my kids, and I miss the box my dad made me. And I'm really hoping I can learn from him. It's cataclysmic, and I'm not trying to diminish it at all. And folks in Palisades, most of them can take care of the next steps. Folks in Altadena, I'm way more worried about. But I have realized shit gets complicated really fast. You think you want all this shit. And so I spend most of my time trying to get rid of it or downsize it. Speaking of Tim, I could have bought an ad slot, but there is an incredible ranch for sale in Jackson, Wyoming, right now in Wilson. Two contiguous lots, main house on some lakes, a ranch house. You'll find it. It's just south of Wilson off of Fall Creek Road. Hey, hey, take a look, everybody. You got your crypto gains with a Z that you need to shelter. You know, there's no state tax, no estate tax in Wyoming. The skiing's great, abundant wildlife. I'm just saying. I'm just saying.
- [33:14]
Tim Ferriss
People think that Chris is joking about an ad salon, but you actually did text me to ask me how much it would cost.
- [33:22]
Chris Sacca
I didn't realize you were going to invite me on the pod later, but I was very close to buying an ad.
- [33:26]
Tim Ferriss
I'm like, God damn it.
- [33:28]
Chris Sacca
Who is actually doing well in this market and has some gains to shelter? It's the crypto investors, bro. That shit is up. And so you want to take a little money off the table? I'm just saying, those California taxes.
- [33:43]
Tim Ferriss
So, coming back to Kevin for a sec. He is remarkable in so many respects. They've known him forever, and one is, I do think Kevin does a great job of working hard, playing hard, but that's not really a dignified enough way to put it. He savors life. He enjoys the stuff, but he's very unattached to it. And I can't say that for a lot of people, sort of in our circles, I'm not sure I could say that for the vast majority, they do get attached. So I'm curious for you. Last time we spoke, you had just appeared as a cover story for the Midas issue of Forbes, and you've done a lot since what has become more and less important? And I suppose a better way of asking that is, what have you simplified? What are ways that you have tried to simplify?
- [34:36]
Chris Sacca
Do you remember that line in the Jerk and Steve Martin's the Jerk, where he's walking out of the house, he's losing his money, and he's been rich, and he's like, I don't need any of this except this ashtray. And he just starts picking up stuff until his arms are bundled as he's walking out of his house. I don't need any of this at all. I think that's the perfectly opposite of Kevin Rose, where you're just like, I don't need any of these trappings of wealth except this car. And this watch is really nice. And God damn, those shoes were like limited release. Sorry. So I missed the question because I was trying to think of Steve Martin.
- [35:12]
Tim Ferriss
So since we last spoke 2015, you were sort of still. I mean, not to say you aren't anymore, but certainly in a steep ascent at that point, doing a lot of stuff, meeting a lot of people, getting the toys. And I'm just wondering how you have thought about simplifying or have simplified.
- [35:35]
Chris Sacca
I've never did the toys thing.
- [35:37]
Tim Ferriss
I mean, you like real estate.
- [35:39]
Chris Sacca
I was just going to say Zillow is my not safe for work situation. When that Saturday Night Live skit came out. I was like looking over my shoulder like, which writer has been watching me? I probably put more product suggestions and feedback into Zillow because Rich is one of my close friends than anyone who doesn't work there. I noticed things about that app that no one else there does. I spend way too much time, by the way. I think it's a weird missed opportunity that Zillow doesn't have a social network attached to it. And so I think there should be a comment section. I think you should be able to build playlists of Zillow houses. It's a missed opportunity. I'm just throwing it out there. Just saying, wouldn't it be cool to have a playlist of houses generated by the community?
- [36:17]
Tim Ferriss
I don't even know what that means. What does that mean? It's just real estate porn that flashes for you in front of you.
- [36:23]
Chris Sacca
So there are blogs that do this that keep track of the cool houses I love. Is it Zillow gone Wild? That Twitter account is amazing. That finds the craziest shit happening on Zillow. But I think it'd be cool to just be like, look, 10 places I would love to live someday. Or 15 best places where you could shoot a scene in a 1970s adult film.
- [36:44]
Tim Ferriss
Makes me think that you've thought about this.
- [36:46]
Chris Sacca
Favorite locations from the Big Lebowski or best examples of mid century modern architecture or something like that.
- [36:53]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, okay, I got it.
- [36:55]
Chris Sacca
I think there's a missed opportunity for influencers to build stuff, feature it simplification. But real estate is my real estate soft spot. Yeah, part of it is I'm a recluse and I think you know that. Amy Schumer once wrote an essay since the last time we spoke, it was about being an introvert who makes a living on stage. And I lit up and was like, I feel seen you Know me, Tim. My ideal social situation is Danish sized like 4 6. Feels huge. I love getting 4 great buddies together for a weekend and interacting with no other human beings. And so I like space. So I like to live in places that are out of the mix where I can be very specific and opt into my social interactions because they drain me. What happens is I don't like being in big groups or around lots of people. So I get there and I overcompensate by being loud and boisterous and amazing and larger than life. But really what I'm doing, it's like cranking your iPhone screen up to 100%. I'm just draining my battery and I need that time to recover. So I've loved creating spaces for myself to be alone and so I think that's an absolute vice.
- [38:11]
Tim Ferriss
And then have you divested yourself of things, relationships, things you used to prize heavily, that you no longer value heavily or hire?
- [38:20]
Chris Sacca
Tim, have you heard of Jackson Hole, Wyoming? Because there's a ranch for sale just south of the city that would fit that theme. There's abundant wildlife, there's moose and elk and you can see bears. It's really incredible fishing. It's on the Orvis's first blue ribbon certified fishing property. I'm just saying. Yes, the first thing we sold was hard to sell. You know, people still think about us living in Truckee, but we haven't been Truckee since 2011. That was the first thing Crystal and I bought together and to let go of that was weird and disorienting. But since then, yeah, I've gotten pretty good at selling and letting go and realizing. And more importantly, not buying.
- [39:02]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, it's like having premarital abode before the messy divorce.
- [39:06]
Chris Sacca
Yeah, exactly. That's a really good way of putting it.
- [39:12]
Tim Ferriss
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut and immune system. So take advantage of this exclusive offer for you, my dear podcast listeners, a free one year supply of liquid vitamin D plus five travel packs with your subscription, simply go to drinkag1.com Tim that's the number one. Drinkag1.com Tim for a free one year supply of liquid Vitamin D. Plus five travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Learn more@drinkag1.com Tim.
- [40:17]
Chris Sacca
You always ask people their favorite books, et cetera. Like one is Morgan's the Psychology of Money.
- [40:22]
Tim Ferriss
Oh, Morgan Housel.
- [40:23]
Chris Sacca
Yeah, great book that echoes a lot of refrains, but a lot of that, the Millionaire Next Door, that kind of stuff, all of them are just like, look, the way you get rich is by not spending it in the first place. And so what Crystal and I have started to realize is it's not the check you write, it's the fucking time you spend. We were just about to build a house and we realized, oh God, do you know how many decisions that is? And it turns out if you ask me about something, I am going to have an opinion shocker. If you just make it. If you just make it. I wouldn't have noticed but like when we renovated a house in la, they're like, hey, how do you want this wood to meet that wood to meet that wood? Like, you assholes, I never would have seen it. But now that I've seen it, I'm going to sketch it for you. And so there's going to be an eighth inch of tolerance. We're going to have a whole back and it's going to. And like now I'm tortured by those details. And Crystal is even more of a detail and design and flow person than I am. But what we start to realize is like, those projects that we buy and build, they're jobs. And so I think that number one area where we try to lighten stuff up is let's not take that project on in the first place. We bought a piece of land recently. An incredible setting we've always had on the list. We finally found the place, we started sketch it out. We were working with the right architects. Our nephew Mike is an architect at Bjarka Engels Group, one of the greats. And he was helping us out and really, really loved it. And then we took a step back and we're like, this is going to be a job for the next couple years or can we just Airbnb it? And literally as part of that, I wrote to our travel agent, can you show me 15 places within the same realm as this that we could rent and just show up with our bags, have a great week, and then fucking leave and never think about. I was like, if you do this, you are about to save me two years of my life and many, many dollars. And it worked. I was thrilled.
- [42:25]
Tim Ferriss
So many questions. So let's just say no super fancy cars that I'm aware of. You might have some UTVs, but you have plenty of beavers to keep you company last time I checked. Although that a past hobby. And then the real estate question for you. So if all of that vanished, right. It burned down or otherwise was just removed. How much of that would you repurchase?
- [42:49]
Chris Sacca
Can I just say, our now nine year old when she was eight, she's our hippie kid who's always on mushrooms.
- [42:56]
Tim Ferriss
Not literally.
- [42:57]
Chris Sacca
No, not literally. Sorry, we don't feed our kids mushrooms yet. But no, she's just our kid who we just end up writing down so many of the things that come out of her mouth. She's just untethered by reality. She's the one who. When we moved to Jackson, we signed up for this Teton science school. It was like an expeditionary learning academy. And we toured the school and then after a couple weeks there, we checked in on the other girls. They were doing traditional school and tiny classes with some outdoor learning. But we went to Center Sky's preschool kindergarten situation. And we were like, hey, to the teacher, when you guys start doing, I don't know, the math or the writing. And she's like, oh, there'll be no math here. We're like, what? She's like, this is a forest preschool. Other than when the kids come in and write their names, that's it. The rest is just play based. And we're like, wait, what? And so we ended up watching some videos on these Swedish forest schools. And we're like, I mean, what do we got to lose, right? It turns out that kid is so exceptionally resilient, incapable of being bored. None of the three kids get bored, but I go for a hike every day. And she'll say, when she was four, she said to me, can I come with you? And I'm like, it's dark and it's starting to hail. And she's like, dad, that's just ice falling from the sky. And I was like, all right, suit up. And we spent two hours with numb fingers throwing shit in the river and digging in the mud and having a blast. And she's an academic superstar. It didn't hold her back at all. But I really love that skill set anyway, so it's a long way of saying. She once said to Crystal and I, last year, she said, mom, dad, someday if we're lucky. Maybe we can live in a smaller house. I mean, we were wrecked. We were just. If I could answer your question. Anyway, it's that we live in a house now that has a lot of perks and features and maybe we could do without them.
- [45:00]
Tim Ferriss
Sharks with lasers. Downsize, dude.
- [45:03]
Chris Sacca
You got a new project. It's about no. But what was the actual title? The working title. Working title? Yeah.
- [45:09]
Tim Ferriss
The working title is the Book of no.
- [45:11]
Chris Sacca
Okay.
- [45:12]
Tim Ferriss
And I'm excited about that.
- [45:13]
Chris Sacca
I say no for a living and I think one of the challenges is how to stay an optimistic, open minded person when you say no all.
- [45:20]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. What's your take on that? Because a popular position would be you have to say yes to everything when you're building and then you have to learn to say no. I don't know if I totally subscribe to that at least. I've done a lot of writing on this and I think that if you look at a lot of examples of mega successful people and there's a survivorship bias, so who the fuck knows what's actually causal in some level. But a lot of them get. Get good at focusing early. And by virtue of definition, focus means saying no to a lot of things outside of that focus. What's your take?
- [45:56]
Chris Sacca
First of all, and investing in anything. I think one of the big traps is being too thematic, like having a thesis ahead of time. I've watched people write the canonical blog post on the shared economy. Then people come pitch them shared economy deals, which makes their blog posts feel righter and writer. And that confirmation bias causes them to light money on fire. And then their fun goes away. And they're like, but my blog post was awesome. And so I have this big rule at Lower Carbon about never actually having a thesis written in stone. We are very big on electrification of the economy. Lithium. We have a way of extracting lithium that's 10,000 times faster.
- [46:37]
Tim Ferriss
So, Chris, let's pause for a second. So we have not explained, because it didn't exist at the time, what Lower Carbon cap Capital is.
- [46:45]
Chris Sacca
Okay, let me go back to just saying no then. Because it's important because you're writing a book about it. So my point is, if I have too many rules about saying no, then I'm going to say it to the wrong shit. I'm going to turn down the wrong stuff. I'm going to have too much predisposition. So what I have to know ahead of time, the work I have to do ahead of time is to know, as we were just talking about with the Houses, what's the actual cost? What's the actual downside? Risk? So what is the actual cost to saying yes to this? If the cost of saying yes is I end up at a three hour dinner party that's boring. That's actually pretty low cost. I prefer not to blow three hours hanging out with some lame people, but I would prefer not to blow a night. But on the other hand, that's pretty low cost. Whereas saying yes to a meeting that I have to fly to, well, that's a whole fucking disruption to my world. I am not going to see my kids or wife and I got to fucking pack some stuff and transport all that shit. I mean, Paul Graham, a long time ago used to talk about the true cost of a cup of coffee. What does it actually take to stop your day and go meet somebody and let them pick your brain and all that bullshit? I just talked about the real cost of building something. Everyone thinks about the cost of building a house is the amount of money you put into it. That's real. At the same time, it's the amount of time and crazy bullshit and shit breaks all the time that you put into it. So I think for me it's doing the work ahead of time to understand what are my actual priorities, what really matters to me and what's the true cost of those things. So when you come to me with a proposal and invitation, I can assess. Am I going to just risk 50 grand here and that's my total downside? Okay, what's 50 grand worth to me? What can I. Oh, God, I was almost quoting Jay Z right there. Can you please remind me? Whereas if what you're talking to me is like, hey, Chris, I want to start a project, I want you to join my board, et cetera, I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What's the real cost of that? It's easy to say yes to that, but what's the real cost? And then I think the second part is just getting comfortable with the fact that this is going to be uncomfortable for a minute, but I'm just going to say no. Bro, I appreciate you. How do I let you know that you're my homie and I deeply appreciate and respect you and I'm flattered by the invitation, but we're not going down that path and that can be really tough. You know, I think everyone can attach themselves to the dramatic narrative of God, my thing would be awesome, even more awesome if Tim Tim were on it. You know, if Tim Ferriss is attached, God damn, I'm Going places, but they're not you. They don't know what your scorecard is. They don't know what your actual to do list says. We've said many, many times, and I wasn't the first person to say it, but your inbox is a to do list to which anyone else can add an action item. So you're the only one who sees your to do list. I love all these questions where you ask people, what's your daily routine? And then every single time I'm like, that is someone who doesn't have anyone in their house attending elementary school.
- [49:46]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, there's truth to that. Yeah, for sure.
- [49:48]
Chris Sacca
Last night, we had a kid with an ear infection sleeping in our bed. Two nights ago, I had a kid puking out the side of the car as we drove home from the Bills game because I had stuffed her full of pizza and other bullshit. I love these people who are like, this is when I peacefully do this shit. And I'm like, oh, this is when I fucking wipe asses. I love all those. I know. Somebody writes out their intentions and then hand stitches them together at the beginning of the day. God bless. God bless. I'm not mocking. I'm just saying I think the no is feeling comfortable. And by the way, as we grow up, one of the things Crystal and I find with employees is I think younger managers are too slow to fire employees. Employees who cost too much. It's never the financial cost. It's literally like, when we make a decision on somebody, it's not like what their salary is or what their benefits cost is. It's just, are they creating more work than they're eating, than they're consuming? Are they creating more administrative overhead? Somebody else once said, if we have to talk about an employee three times in bed, it was a local entrepreneur I met here in Bozeman, a guy whose pickleball court doubles as a gun range. And so just amazing, amazing dude. And he said he and his wife were small business people, retired now, but they said they had a rule. If they had to talk about someone they worked with three times in bed while falling asleep at night, they were gone from that org. That was the true cost of that person. And so I think younger people are sometimes afraid to have those uncomfortable moments. It's easier to live with the status quo than just be like, sorry, it's not happening. We got to go. Because they're afraid of the loss. But the real loss is all that fucking time along the way. So, all right, that's my diatribe on No's.
- [51:34]
Tim Ferriss
Well, hold on one sec. So now the three hour dinner. I imagine you get dozens of these invitations so you wouldn't be able to say I imagine yes to all of them. So how do you choose? Choose not the big things to say yes to. We could talk about that too. But the inbound that you say yes to that are along the lines of the three hour dinner. Because you still have finite time, finite dinners, and if you do a dinner with a group of 10 people that's also away from your family, presumably.
- [52:01]
Chris Sacca
Right. I'll tell you, I'm the asshole who's like, I would infinitely rather host and control the situation. You've been to our events. There's no automatic plus ones unless the other person is independently awesome. That's a real thing. We have deeply offended people even at our wedding. We're like, sorry, no, never met your wife. I bet you she's great. But I need to know. No. This is going to sound ruthless as fuck and somebody in the comments will be like, this guy's a fucking sociopath. But here's the thing. I don't want to have to have a seating chart. I want to know that whoever's here can sit next to anyone else and be enthralled by how interesting that person is, no matter what they do for a living. And so you've been to our events before where we gather 30 incredible people for a weekend or we host a party. And I just know whoever you are talking to is independently great in whatever field. I've seen many of them end up as guests on your podcast. I love when people end up on each other's boards or do a collaborative art project together or performance, because that's what I'm vouching for. If I'm gathering people, I'm vouching for every single person there as being awesome. And so I don't know if everyone else has that standard. And if I'm getting up in front of an audience, I want to make sure that hopefully I'm delivering the aggregate value of all the time people just took out of their day to be there. I don't get nervous about giving speeches, but I feel like I want to bring my A game. So I was saying I felt the pressure of like, oh my God, if some fucking kid is home taking notes about this episode, what are they going to actually write down? Oh my God, I need pithier quotes. But the reality is I want to make sure I'm delivering something of value. And I don't know if everyone Else lives by that standard. And I do like to live like I'm running out of time.
- [53:42]
Tim Ferriss
We're all running out of time.
- [53:44]
Chris Sacca
My best friend Teddy Rheingold, who you knew well, he died at 46. One of the all time great people. I feel like I've gotten three years of bonus time past him and I don't take it for granted. I mean, I get all the scans and I did treat my body like a rental car for many years. But at the same time, you asked me what's changed since I was 30 or 40. I am way less patient. It's harder to work for me as a result.
- [54:11]
Tim Ferriss
And for people who don't know Chris well, you didn't really start off that patient to begin with.
- [54:17]
Chris Sacca
No. It's funny, we had this thing at work recently where I wanted to promote somebody. We hired somebody junior who we could just realize very soon was like a 5x employee. Somewhere between 5 and 10x. You know, those kinds of people where you're like, wait, they're just different. And so Crystal and I are like, we should promote her. And our partner was like, okay, well her review is coming up and Crystal and I were like, no, no, no, no, we should promote her by Friday. And we're like, well, there's. And I was like, do you want to tell her or are we going to tell her today? You know, and it's just like, why would we wait? She's fucking amazing. She knows it. It's so weird that it would just hang in the ether in an email account somewhere in the meantime that we haven't told her she's that fucking great and that we give her a new title and get her fucking going because she's just that great. I just have no fucking time for that. That idea I told you about over the weekend where we were talking to our team and I was like, okay, I appreciate all your input, but we're fucking doing it. And they're like, okay, Q1, Q2. And I'm like, no, Q Friday. It's just write it up. What are we talking about here? And so I'm just like, we are men of action. Lies do not become us. But I'm just like, I have no fucking time for that. And so I worry. I worry it's way too easy to let this stuff slip away.
- [55:35]
Tim Ferriss
Is that a pending tangible sense of mortality or is there something else to it? Or is it just getting old and cantankerous?
- [55:43]
Chris Sacca
Tim, does any of the shit you've built, I mean, you built it yourself, literally I would say the same for me, right? And so no one's ever going to call me an entrepreneur, though. But I built all this from scratch, right, with crystal. But if I don't do it, it doesn't fucking happen. If I don't move it, it doesn't fucking happen. I tried resting for a little bit. I was horrible at it. And so I regret being 70 hours a week employed. Again, this sucks. But at the same time, I was awful at not doing much. If I don't move it and if I have a business idea, I got to do it before anyone else fucking picks up on it. Before the fast followers come, I want to just be out there with whatever my anomalous advantage is. I want to go press that. You remember when I was trying to convince people that Twitter was a real business for years, and then I finally was like, all right, I'm no longer here to convince you. Just sell me your fucking stock. I just wasted so much time not buying it all and then eventually bought it all. But I don't want to convince people to do something. I want to go own it all first and then convince them to buy it from me. So we have the world's only dedicated nuclear fusion fund. And so we had been dabbling in fusion investment for a while. People pooh, poohed it.
- [56:54]
Tim Ferriss
Do you want to take a second to explain what Lower Carbon capital is? And then I'm going to come back to that kid taking notes because I have a question for that kid, but do you want to just give a quick backgrounder?
- [57:04]
Chris Sacca
Oh, by the way, I got yelled at for calling people in their 20s.
- [57:07]
Tim Ferriss
Kids what they should be so flattered.
- [57:10]
Chris Sacca
In my 360 review on my org, we had a kid who started harassing me in my inbox when he was like 19 from college. We hired him directly out of graduation. His name was harshdooby. Amazing name. Harsh Duby is one of the hardest working, most insightful young people I've ever fucking worked with. He worked with us for a couple years and then he went and joined one of our portfolio companies, Zeno. The guy is a legend. He is welcome back to Lower Carbon any day. We'll explain Lower Carbon in a second. But I once referred to harshdoobie on a podcast as a kid. I was like, we had this kid, he came, he was sending me all these ideas. We hired him. God, he executes. He's amazing. And then later, an employee, not Harsh Doobie, but another employee, was like, hey, you can't refer to people in their 20s as kids. And I'm like, God fucking damn it. I can't do anything right. By the way, that was in the same six months that I was accused of promoting Hustle Culture. And Crystal and I are like, what's. Wait, what's Hustle Culture? Like, I. I really felt I'd fucked up. And they're like, you know, this whole thing about, like, you know, the work never sleeps and sometimes shit blows up on a Sunday, and so you got to get your laptop out no matter where you are. And, like, you know, if you're going to be a partner to an entrepreneur, you got to just feel like you're an owner, too, and be available for them no matter what else is going on. And we're like, yeah. And like, yeah. And we're like, ant. Wait, where's the accusation part? Oh, that was it. Oh, fuck you. Yes. That's exactly what we do. That's exactly. This is Hustle Culture. What the fuck? Like, I don't have accessories. Posters on the wall just hang in there. But at the same time, for fuck's sake, you know? And we haven't asked anyone. Crystal slept under her desk. Literally slept under her desk. Missed every wedding for 10 years. I haven't asked that of anyone. I had no fucking life outside of Spidera and Google. I can see the direct correlation between the entrepreneurial risk we took and the hours we put in and what we got. I don't think there's a way to shortcut that. I don't think you have to work yourself to a state of unhealthiness anymore. But I also think you can't fucking phone this in, and I'm sick of apologizing for it.
- [59:13]
Tim Ferriss
All right? No more apologies. You got to stop your apologizing. And we're going to come back to the Fusion Fund and Lower Carbon. But for the kid who's taken notes, I would be very curious to know, because those who may not be familiar.
- [59:25]
Chris Sacca
Wait, wait, wait. Is this.
- [59:27]
Tim Ferriss
Hold on.
- [59:27]
Chris Sacca
No, this is a good place to insert the commercial break for, like, the self help therapy app or whatever. Like, after Chris goes on a rant about how you have to work yourself to the fucking bone until you're teetering on the edge of a nervous breakup. Yes.
- [59:40]
Tim Ferriss
Throw in a sponsorship ad for the night.
- [59:41]
Chris Sacca
This is Tim taking a quick break to let you know that you got to take care of your mental health. Yeah.
- [59:49]
Tim Ferriss
All right, so the question for the kid who may be listening to you for the first time, he's like, wow, that guy has A lot of energy and sounds very impatient. I can't wait to work for him. But also is like, well, he also did college math when he was 7 and was trading live hogs when he was a fetus. And fuck, I can't emulate this guy. If you were to teach a seminar, could be college, high school, doesn't really matter, just entrepreneurship. What could you teach? What would you teach that is not dependent on the hardwiring of a saka specimen?
- [60:23]
Chris Sacca
I told you what I'm working on next. And I hate that I don't have a URL or deliverable to announce because this podcast came up really quickly. But I feel like there is a massive cultural hole. My working title has been no Permanent Record. So, Tim, you and I are of the same generation where our teachers, our parents would be like, that's going to go on your permanent record. Like, you fuck up, that's going to go on your permanent record, tim. I was 19 years old before I realized that document didn't exist. I swear, I thought something had followed me from George Southard Elementary School to North Park Middle School to Lockport High School to Georgetown University.
- [61:00]
Tim Ferriss
Like Santa Claus.
- [61:02]
Chris Sacca
Yes. I felt like there was a document that had been hand delivered over there. And they're like, oh, oh, did you really do that in gym class? Jesus. And so, I mean, people talk all the time about how we were the last feral generation, the last kids allowed to free range. You know, Crystal and I showed the young adults who work for us, I won't say the kids, the young professionals who work for us, we showed them that PSA they used to play on television that said, it's 10 o'clock. Do you know where your children are?
- [61:33]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
- [61:33]
Chris Sacca
Yeah. And people were like, where would the children be? And we're like, that was it. We were out. We were just fucking gone. Oftentimes your parents are like, get the fuck out of the house and don't come back. And what the TV was basically telling your parents was, before you have one more gimlet and get all fucking wasted, maybe do a bed check, see if anyone made it home. Like, so we would leave the house without water. How the fuck did we survive without water, Tim? Like, kids these days can't go anywhere without a fucking water bottle. Like, we would maybe find a garden hose somewhere. We had no fucking snacks. And so we would just go like, we had no fucking Band Aids or Neosporin. We just like would fucking rub a little dirt in it when we wiped. No helmets. We were a disaster at least once Each of us was propositioned to get into a van for some candy. And so it was the wild fucking West, Tim. But we learned to be resilient and resourceful. And I worry about it. And along the way, Tim, we learned how to tell stories. We learned how to convince our friends because there are no parents there. Hey, let's go do my idea. No, let's go do my idea. And we'd negotiate, right? We would talk our way into situations. We would talk our way out of situations. I recently was back at my alma mater and we were being honored. Crystal and I were back there being feted and being interviewed in front of the student body. And first thing I covered was, cheers to all you fucking nerds. Your test scores and grades are so great that Crystal and I wouldn't even get in here now. So I love that you're applauding all our accomplishments, but we wouldn't make it right now because you're all so fucking smart. But I said, hey, how many of you here have ever gotten in trouble? How many of you here have ever had to talk your way out of a situation with the cops? One black kid raised his hand and I was like, you have every fucking systemic reason for doing that. Yes, I agree. But I was like, how many of you have ever snuck into something? How many of you have ever, like, committed the mildest crime? Have you vandalized anything? How many of you have ever actually scammed someone or even been scammed? Have you ever been on the wrong side of a flim flam? How many of you have placed a bet on sports? How many of you have played cards? How many of you in blackout drunk? How many of you have had a regrettable hookup? And so I just kept going down. How many of you have worked a tipping job? How many of you have had a fucking horrible boss who is incredibly, you know, aggressive with his language? Right? None of them. None of them. And I was just like, I'm sorry, Dean, but this is why you're also fucking useless to us, is like, you've done none of the things that actually inform the kind of work we do. So you know what I'm seeing right now? It's like we actually have, across our portfolio and across our team, there are some really hard workers I don't think you can paint in the broadest strokes around who's willing to work hard and who's not. We have some really fucking hard work workers. And so it's easy to always, like, get off my lawn and the next generation and like, These kids don't want to work. There are definitely some lifestyle kids, and bless them, but we have some really hard workers. I've just started noticing things like, well, they can't tell when somebody's lying to them. Literally. We have a generation of young people who cannot tell when they're being bullshitted because mom and dad were helicopter and snowplow parenting for them. And so now when somebody is literally staring them in the face and lying to them, I'm like, wait, you're believing that shit? Holy shit, you're fucking. What? Oh, my God. Because they've never been in a situation where somebody was taking advantage of them. They've never had to bluff their way out with some cars.
- [65:06]
Tim Ferriss
How do you fix that? Other than sending them to Stranger things reality camp 1980s theme park.
- [65:12]
Chris Sacca
You know what's crazy? My weigh in on the H1B visa just to get political again, which the.
- [65:17]
Tim Ferriss
Is like, gonna play elevator music as soon as you.
- [65:21]
Chris Sacca
The people who know this shit. The people who know this shit are either the American kids who grew up broke as fuck, or the kids from India and China who grew up hustling, scrapping, basically. Not only fending for themselves in school, but also helping run their mom and dad's restaurant or store and taking care of a kid along the way and having to fend for themselves in a market. You know, I worry, like, most of the investors and entrepreneurs I know in their 20s right now would get eaten alive in a bazaar. Just eaten alive. Tears might happen. Whereas Crystal, my wife, who grew up in India, it's a fucking sport for her. It's almost uncomfortable. I'm like, we once had a big fight in Morocco. Because I'm like, you are arguing with this man over $0.07 right now. And she's like, yeah, but if I don't, he's going to be disrespected and I'm going to be disrespected. So fuck this. And I'm going to walk away again. I'm like, it's set. It's one dirham. We gotta go. And she's like, fuck that. We're in this shit. Like, if you don't have the fucking stones to stay in this conversation, get the fuck out of here. I miss that Alpha. I worry that we just don't have people who are put in a position where they had to fight and fend for themselves. And they're fucking brilliant, man. But they've never had to take any risks. They've never had to mix it up. They've never Been in a fight. I'm not encouraging people to go beat the shit out of each other, but they've never been in a fight.
- [66:39]
Tim Ferriss
No, I get it. So is there anything to be done? Is there anything to counteract this nefarious slippage into impotence and oversensitivity?
- [66:50]
Chris Sacca
Yeah, take your fucking phone and throw it in the bin. I'm a Jonathan Haidt disciple, but the phones are killing everybody, parents included. I am a wealthy, happily married, got everything I need, almost 50 year old white dude. And when I get on Instagram, I feel so much fucking fomo. My life feels so inadequate. I'm like, jesus, look at that guy. Oh, fuck, where are they? They're having so much fun. Shit, that guy's so much fitter than me right now. Fuck. And it makes me unhappy. And so maybe me and 13 year old girls have a lot in common.
- [67:22]
Tim Ferriss
I left out technologists too, right? As you put it, I think in your text to me, your fingerprints are on the weapon.
- [67:28]
Chris Sacca
Oh, my fingerprints are on the. Yeah, I mean, it's like the gloves do fit and so like you cannot acquit. We reinvented cigarettes, fentanyl laced cigarettes, when we started social media with all the best intentions, but it's a fucking disaster. I mean, dude, you know this. When I quit Twitter In November of 2022, I lost 11 pounds in six weeks with no lifestyle changes. I had just been eating the cortisol of my mentions for years. Frog boiling, you know. In 2006, it was all nice and shit. By 2022, everything I was saying was either being responded to by activist shitheads or Russian shitheads, and you can't tell the difference anymore. The Russians are so good at imitating the liberal elite college shitheads that it was just a wave of hate no matter what. Fuck you parting your hair on the right side. The Nazis used to part their hair on the right side, you piece of shit. Once I went off Twitter and went off Instagram, oh my God, did I feel a lightness in my life. So here's what I would do my seminar, I would stomp on everyone's phones. Then we would go to a bar, but like a dirty bar. And I would tell people to try and start a political conversation and not get their ass kicked. And so bring them to a bar here in Montana, a cowboy bar, and just be like, I want you to advocate for the IRA and see if you can get out of here without being punched. So come to cattle country and oil and gas country and let's talk about Green politics and see if you can get out of here. Let's see if you can actually tell a fucking story. Let's see if you can show any empathy and put yourself in the shoes of the other person. One of the things that make Clay, our partner who runs Lower Carbon with us, so effective was he had to go door to door in Ohio, Republican Ohio, on behalf of a guy named Barack Hussein Obama and convince people to vote for the guy. Like the same shit I did in Elko, Nevada, where I am going to a place that where John Kerry got 11% of the vote and I'm knocking on trailers and saying like, hey, I'm here to talk to you about the election. Most of those people, if their gun was closer within reach, would have pulled it out and told me to get off their fucking porch. But I have to learn how to put myself in their shoes and try and get a conversation going. And so I think no one sells shit anymore. No one has to walk up to their neighbor's door and sell shit. One of the things my kids had to do was convince the neighbors, can we cut across your lawn? To get into the other neighborhood where the kids are. They had to negotiate a deal. It's one batch of cookies per year. And so I was like, you got to go figure that shit out, because otherwise it's a long fucking bike ride for you. And so you got to go out there and convince them that you are not going to damage their lawn. But if they let you cross that lawn, it'd be a very patriotic thing to do. But I feel lucky you come to Bozeman. There's 150 bikes out in front of the school with no locks on them, and it's a free range town. And the kids come home and we're like, so what went on? And they talk about the conflicts they had with their friends and how they settled those, how they figured shit out, how they dealt with people. When they go downtown, friends come up from LA and they marvel at our kids. We'll be hanging out one spot and the kids will be like, hey, can we go to the bookstore? And we're like, yeah, scram. And so they'll go to the bookstore and handle themselves. And our friends are like, wait, what the fuck was that? I'm like, well, they're going to the bookstore. Six months ago we were in LA and we were all getting our haircut. The kids were like, they finished first. And they're like, hey, can we go to the bookstore? They're nerds. So they like to read books, they don't have phones. And we said, sure. And the lady who's cutting her hair was like, well, no, no, no, no, they can't go. What do you mean? The bookstore is literally on the same street we're on, five blocks away. And she's like, no, you're going to get ticketed. We're like, what? And they're like, well, yeah, the cops will ticket you as the parents for letting your kids go down there. And we're like, what? And the actual fuck. And they're like, well then 12 year old is fine and probably the 10 year old, but definitely not the 8 year old. You can't have an 8 year old walking around. And I was just like, fuck everything. And now Tim, I'm old as shit. But I see the linkage between that and the learned helplessness, between the lack of resourcefulness, between not knowing how to solve a problem. And so much of company building is dealing with people. Dealing with people unlike you is solving those problems. So I would make people, if I'm teaching a seminar right now, I am making those people go hang out with people very unlike them. We have everyone on our team, a bunch of fucking hippie climate investors come to a ranch, a cattle ranch, and hang out with people who raise methane for a living. I mean, they raise cattle that we eat, but our team sees them as methane burpers. And so we see them as people who put food on the plate and stewards of the land. And they're very easy to underestimate as like, well, they're just growing cattle and cattle burp shit all, you know. And so. But they are absolute stewards of the land. But nobody fucking hangs out with anyone unlike them anymore. Nobody's forced to have any community. It's funny, Phil Jackson voiced over a documentary about small town basketball in Montana. I think it was called Class C. And he said, but the important part about classy basketball in Montana is it's a place where the entire town in winter can get together somewhere warm that isn't a church and isn't a bar. And the reality is we just don't have these places where we get together anymore. Life is increasingly isolated. What is it, 73% of restaurant food is delivered now? By the way, my fingerprints are on that one too. I mean, we fucked it all up. Dude, I'm definitely going out.
- [72:56]
Tim Ferriss
You mentioned something in passing that your kids don't have any phones. How did you manage that? Because I would expect that a lot of their friends have phones.
- [73:05]
Chris Sacca
Some of Them do we live in Bozeman on purpose? A lot of kids don't. They're outdoor kids. They're don't get bored kids. They're make your own fun kids. And so they don't want them.
- [73:15]
Tim Ferriss
So is it fair to say they're opt in because a lot of their friends do not have phones?
- [73:20]
Chris Sacca
I think they're opt in because they see how fucked up a lot of their friends who have phones are, how fucking sad they are, how at 10, 11, 12, 13 they don't eat right, how obsessed with fucking makeup they are, and just how they stay up late, they don't sleep right, they don't do well in school, they're fucking panicked at all times. And our kids have a piece that I think they're very self aware that they don't want that shit in their life. We have a family computer that's in a public space where the screen faces out and YouTube has some insanely cool shit on it, right? And so YouTube also has these rabbit holes that you can get stuck in. So it's not like they don't know how to use a computer and they're blown away by ChatGPT. But I think at the same time, I think we were the last of the analog kids. We were the last who had to be conscious about what we were actually taking a picture of, thought about it, and then waited and had some patience for it to develop. We were the last generation that had a raw dog. Have you heard this?
- [74:19]
Tim Ferriss
That's the context you're using that in?
- [74:20]
Chris Sacca
Dude, there's an American dialect society that chose that or something. I forget their name, but they chose that as the word of the year. Raw dogging. Have you heard of this trend like raw dogging on airplane flight?
- [74:30]
Tim Ferriss
You and I may have different use cases for this. What does this mean?
- [74:33]
Chris Sacca
Wait, this is your follower base, man? I know what you're referring to, but raw dogging the airplane flight is when you just sit there in the seat and you just look straight ahead. No headphones, no in flight movie, no book, no phone. You just stare straight ahead for the flight. That is raw dogging the flight, man. Crystal's dad is in his 80s. He can come sit on a chair in our yard and just look at the woods for four hours. He can just raw dog the woods, man. Like, can you do that? Could you do that? Now you meditate a lot. Could you just fucking stare at the woods? Not on any shrooms, you know, with the woods.
- [75:12]
Tim Ferriss
I gotta say, I've been cultivating that For a while now. So I think I could do it with certain natural scenes on an airplane. Probably not. I would need some enhancement for that.
- [75:23]
Chris Sacca
Right? I invite your listeners to leave in the comments their actual authentic raw dog experiences. The safe for work ones. But like what setting and how long have you been able to sit? Phone free book, free art free pencil free. I mean, you might even say I'm holding a pencil. Like we've lost touch with the analog arts, man. I have a manual typewriter behind me that's not for show. I use it all the time. I'm a physical collage artist. And then I make wood and string art. I got a rock drill. I told you about that. I was covered in fucking rock dust.
- [75:53]
Tim Ferriss
String art. What do your string art pieces look like?
- [75:57]
Chris Sacca
I weave twine and cotton and then I integrate that into rocks and wood.
- [76:02]
Tim Ferriss
Cool.
- [76:03]
Chris Sacca
But we don't make analog shit.
- [76:05]
Tim Ferriss
Have you seen side note Andy Goldsworthy?
- [76:09]
Chris Sacca
No. He's been a big influence on me, so you can go ahead and summarize what he does. But he integrates nature out of art and art into nature.
- [76:16]
Tim Ferriss
It's hard to believe some of his art was created using the materials that are put in the descriptions. I suggest everybody get a few of his books. They're incredible. There are also, I think, two documentaries made about Andy Goldsworthy that I'd recommend people check out. I'm going to drag us back to that kid with the notebook for a second. So within the seminar, you've stomped on the phones, you've taken them to some bars, maybe you've taken them to a bazaar. So there's a lot of kind of the Apprentice type vetting happening.
- [76:47]
Chris Sacca
Oh my God. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Hold the fucking knife out.
- [76:52]
Tim Ferriss
Just fuck with you.
- [76:53]
Chris Sacca
Oh.
- [76:54]
Tim Ferriss
What? So what? What?
- [76:57]
Chris Sacca
No, no, hold on. I don't have an air sickness bag near my.
- [77:02]
Tim Ferriss
So if you had a curriculum for reading, like a syllabus for reading, what would be mandatory reading for that class? Entrepreneurship.
- [77:11]
Chris Sacca
Broadly speaking, I am starting to rediscover the greatness of Gen X. I think we were taught to believe that we Gen Xers were a bunch of fucking ne'er do wells and losers. And guess what? We are. But that's what makes us great. And so I am convinced that we were the last of the fuck ups. And all these other kids actually do have a permanent record now. There actually is this thing that follows them forever. And so I've been really loving diving into. I love reading Chuck Klosterman and so just diving into how messy the 90s were. I love talking to ChatGPT. My wife finds it weird. And so if I go on a walk, sometimes I'm listening to an audiobook or a podcast, but a lot of times I'm just talking to Chad. Chad, by the way. And Chad has different names. If I'm talking about medical shit, it's Dr. Chadius, MD. If it's my accountant, it's Chad Geppetto, CFA. What else do we have? But there's a few. But I'll tell it, hey, you're this person and I'll have it remind me. I'll get sentimental and nostalgic with it, but I'll have it be a foil. I also, by the way, talk to it as when you brought up mentors like Buckminster Fuller, still a huge influence on me. You and I permanently ruined the market for his book. I seem to be a verb when we mentioned on your podcast, immediately started pricing at $1,000. And I don't think that price has ever really recovered. I think it's still a few hundred dollars to pick up a book a copy of that. But Buckminster Fuller's personal life was not ideal. He would not be considered to have been a great husband. But I recently had to make a big. Recently, six, eight months ago. I had to make a big business organizational decision. And I said, hey, Chad, you are Buckminster Fuller. Let's have this conversation. I want to know the advice you would give me that was fucking illuminating. And so I think we don't. Don't do that enough. What else would I read?
- [79:15]
Tim Ferriss
Or a sign to the class or a sign.
- [79:18]
Chris Sacca
Yeah, I probably read more poetry than most people, but particularly Billy Collins. I listen to the stories of Garris and Keillor, old ones. I think we've all lost touch with storytelling. I am a big fan of the Moth podcast.
- [79:35]
Tim Ferriss
Huge fan.
- [79:35]
Chris Sacca
Yeah, I really like the author, Kelly Corrigan. I've gotten to know her. Don't know the name, but you're not in her demographics. She writes middle aged woman, dealing with reality kind of stuff. I cry. It's out of my realm. And so it's a way to touch base with people who aren't like me, dealing with really human challenges. I try to read books about rabble rousers. Like what was the John Perry Barlow book, American Night Wolf or something like that. And I met him a couple times at TED had no idea, but. But that guy was a crazy person. And so Tim, I really do think that a lot of the magic of life is in Our unpredictability. There was this guy who is Estonian genius, but he went to a big poker tournament. I mean, there was millions of dollars at stake. And he played very unpredictably in ways that traditional players could not read into him because no matter what they saw on his face, they didn't know what that equated to. I mean, the guy would stay in on the 2 7, which is an unplayable hand, but they're like, fuck, wait, you weren't representing the 27 and he smoked everyone, by the way. He had a big ass beard, so they called him Gamble Door. So good. But I think he cleared like 8 million bucks and then disappeared. Nobody fucking knows where he is. But like the thing we haven't talked about yet is AI and I have strong feelings.
- [80:58]
Tim Ferriss
Let's get into it.
- [81:00]
Chris Sacca
And I think the last bastion of humanity is going to be in the random, unpredictable messiness of humans. The rough fucking edges that make no sense. The things that feel like errors and bugs are actually the self preservation aspects of who we are. That the things that make other people feel like they don't compute. It's all we've got fucking left. I mean, look, I don't know what our kids are supposed to go to school for right now. I genuinely don't. Our daughter, circa Luna, who's a fucking really smart and fun and amazing kid, she had to write an eight page paper for science recently and I loved watching her. I think writing is important. Learning to organize your thoughts and advocate for yourself and cite your sources, but at the same time, I just typed the topic into ChatGPT and it was done in 15 seconds and it was better than her sixth grade shit. And so God bless sixth grade, but what the fuck, you're not going to interview for a job with this shit. So what are we teaching the kids? Our kids are in advanced math. They're smart, they're good at math, but I mean, is that so they know.
- [82:09]
Tim Ferriss
How to get the crossbow trajectories right later?
- [82:13]
Chris Sacca
Pretty much, yeah. They can shoot like manual and firearms. They can also whittle, start fires, make arrowheads. They can handle themselves. CeCe is 13 now, CeCe 11. And she asked me for some help with her math. Math. And I looked at it and I was like, oh God, I haven't done this in 20 plus years. Holy shit. Or probably 30 plus years actually. I was like, oh my God. So I took a picture with ChatGPT and was like, help me pretend I know what the fuck I'm doing with this. I Just took a picture of her homework and it showed me the whole thing, walked me through it, and I was like, here. Oh, yeah, I remember how to do this now. And then like, oh, yeah, your answer's right. And I saved the day. And I didn't look like a total fucking idiot yet, but would you send your kid right now to coding class?
- [82:58]
Tim Ferriss
I don't think so.
- [83:00]
Chris Sacca
I think other than most computer science, like, the highest level of computer science, almost all of the rest of coding is fucking useless. Now you and I can go to ChatGPT and be like, hey, I want to do. I want to build an app that does this, this, and this, and give me the code, and it spits out the code. And then I've literally said, hey, by the way, I haven't coded since basic. What do I do with this? And it's like, oh, no problem. Go here, download this. Open this python thing and then shove it in here and then do this, and it just talks you through it. And now it'll be agentic. Like, an agent's going to do all that for you. You just don't need to fucking do it anymore. And so would you send your kid to law school?
- [83:35]
Tim Ferriss
No. Definitely not. No.
- [83:37]
Chris Sacca
Oh, dude, we have fewer lawyers at our firm now than we did a year ago. It's just fucking great. And I can tell it. Hey, you know what? Great job. Do it again. Do it again. Do it again. Like, hey, you know what? I forgot to tell you. We have all the leverage. Oh. In this case, actually do this. Hey, add this. Hey, write out the exhibit A schedule of services, which usually takes a couple hours. And like, dude, it's just so fucking good. Would you teach your kid accounting, Accounts receivable, accounts payable, like, bookkeeping right now?
- [84:08]
Tim Ferriss
So what would you teach your kids?
- [84:10]
Chris Sacca
Would you have your kids write marketing copy? Would you train them to write, like, any news other than writing for the very top newspapers? Yeah.
- [84:19]
Tim Ferriss
No, probably not, dude.
- [84:21]
Chris Sacca
Go down the list of fucking skills, man.
- [84:23]
Tim Ferriss
So what's left?
- [84:25]
Chris Sacca
Here's my grand theory. We are super fucked. That's your title card, Chris Sack a colon. We are super fucked. But spell it with two O's, by the way. S O, O. But no, here's the thing. I am not worried about the AGI thing. I love all these ivory tower smart people. And by the way, I do get invited to the Cabal meetings. It's kind of funny. The Illuminati do meet, and I'm in the room with all the heads of those companies and they're Brilliant. And the discussions are important discussions around bioweapons and about what happens when the machines realize that we are just incredibly inefficient users of resources and that they should just disassemble us and use our bits for other things. Things. Same guys who are working on how to preserve brains in boxes for infinity. I mean a smart guy really like said he stopped skiing and mountain biking because he knows that if we make it to 2035 we'll be immortal. So he just doesn't want to get hurt between now and then. There's some wild shit happening.
- [85:30]
Tim Ferriss
He knows.
- [85:31]
Chris Sacca
And I believe in it. I believe in it. I believe that AI is accelerating drug discovery. I mean, Crystal and I have been funding research into snake bites and antivenom. Snake bites kill a fascinating number of people around the world every year. And antivenom isn't available. It usually has to be in cold storage. All this stuff. Some guys and gals in a lab recently just had AI synthesize a bunch of anti venom that's shelf stable that can be distributed around the fucking world. And the AI came up with it. It's crazy. They've already tested it on rodents and it works. The stuff that's going to happen in drug discovery, the stuff that's happening within fusion, within energy, within just clean tech overall, it's all fucking fascinating. It's all being accelerated by AI. There is nothing I am working on in technology right now that isn't being accelerated by AI.
- [86:21]
Tim Ferriss
So you were saying though, the Ivory Tower stuff, where do they miss the mark?
- [86:24]
Chris Sacca
The challenge is this, is that what most people do for a living is going away. So let's look. Historically we fucked with the blue collar working class in America. So we had this social contract. People came home from World War II and we said, hey, thank you for your service. You go work in a factory and if you keep your head down and show up to work every day, you will have a house, picket fence, you can have a wife, raise some kids, get two weeks of vacation. You'll have a little extra money to maybe buy a small boat or have a fishing cabin. You can go to Disney World and you have a pension waiting for you on the other end of that. Or you take the GI Bill, you can go to college and you can go into a profession and maybe your military time already got you started as a dentist or a doctor, et cetera. We just, we had this social contract. Hey, if you do your part, we got you, you're part of this. And then we started to fucking Shatter that. And I saw it firsthand when I talked about where I grew up, where we started sending jobs overseas, we started busting the unions, and people started losing that agency, that control over their own destiny. Their small businesses were eviscerated by outsourcing and by Walmart. And when you do that, you get a bunch of people who panic. Because the American social contract is that if you show up, you will get yours. And when you don't give somebody that opportunity or you take it away from them, and you take that ownership away from them, and you take their house, or you take their store and you take their farm, then you get the pitchforks. And so we saw this in the housing crisis of 8,09, when all those people had that shit taken away from them. They were pissed off. Now, I would argue they pointed that ire in the wrong direction. So, not to get political, but I think they vilified the wrong people. They vilified immigrants who had nothing to fucking do with it, who were doing jobs that nobody else wanted to do. They vilified political leaders who were actually looking out for them, et cetera. But all that aside, we cannot let the politics of it keep us from missing what happened. We took all of that away from them, and they got pissed. And politics in this country got more divisive, more extreme, violent in some cases. And all because, you know, Bob Marley, a hungry man is an angry man. Like. Like the reality of this is fucking true. When you take away agency from somebody, you back them into a corner. So now do that for all the fucking white collar employees. Do that for everyone who stayed in and did their fucking homework and went to college and took out all those fucking student loans, and who feel like they have played by the rules. They are the pride and joy of their families who actually got their degree, in some cases a master's degree, who saw their career path laid out for them, and now they see that their life's work is obviated by a machine that's just better than them this fucking fast and costs $20 a month. We had a writer work for us briefly who was like, I feel like my career's work is valuable for about 18 more months, and then that's it.
- [89:33]
Tim Ferriss
So, Chris, let me jump in for a second. I have two, I guess, questions for you. One is related to a common refrain you might hear wandering the streets of San Francisco. And you spend plenty of time around tech folks so that you will know this related to job displacement. And then the other one is, okay, so what does this look like five years from now, what might things look like? So those are the two questions just to plant the seeds. The first one is if I have this conversation around job displacement, and I'm on board with you, because a lot of folks who are talking about job displacement in the abstract either have too much of a dog in the fight pro tech, so they feel like they can't say anything anti AI, so they're shilling their bags not to get too technical.
- [90:22]
Chris Sacca
No, you get canceled if you say this shit out loud. You literally get canceled by the tech.
- [90:26]
Tim Ferriss
They don't actually run businesses where you and I realize, and a lot of people are realizing this, but my team and I use AI dozens of times a day. And there are plenty of people we currently pay who are paid out of some feeling of gratitude or moral obligation, but AI could replace them tomorrow. So I'm already seeing the job displacement in the concrete. But a lot of these folks in tech might say, well, if you look back historically, there are all of these different technological developments. TV killed the radio star, and on and on and on. And look at the car. Did it eliminate horses? No. And blah, blah, blah. All these people found other jobs. We've seen it 100 times before. Is this time any different? So I'd love for you just to speak to that.
- [91:12]
Chris Sacca
So, first of all, the conflict is incredibly myopic. I mean, I actually like Vinod Khosla, but he gave a TED Talk where he talked about all the promise of AI and then there was a slide this year where he's like, and so, yeah, there'll be some job losses, but we'll just redistribute the wealth. Next slide. And I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. When has any society ever successfully redistributed the wealth? That just doesn't fucking work.
- [91:36]
Tim Ferriss
What does he even mean by that?
- [91:38]
Chris Sacca
I don't know. It's just easy to think when you own OpenAI. I actually think Sam Altman cares. Sam's an intense dude. I actually think he saw this coming and was trying to do some shit with WorldCoin and is trying to give the general populace and every human being a piece of the ownership of the chip clusters and stuff. It's esoteric, intellectual shit, but I actually think he's not naive to this. And I've had conversations with him about it. I don't think he's myopic to it. I just don't know if anyone has an answer. And meantime, the arms race is such that I sympathize. We can't slow down or somebody else builds it. And we are all super. Yeah.
- [92:13]
Tim Ferriss
Why is it different this time around?
- [92:15]
Chris Sacca
Because it's so much faster. What humans suck at is understanding the slope of an exponential curve. Tim Urban told this story better than anybody else. He has the perfect fucking cartoon. One of his classic cartoon charts. We literally put it in our investor update last year, remember, where humans want to estimate the rate of change by. If they're standing on a curve, on an exponential curve, they turn around and look backward and they estimate the future rate of change by looking at that. But if they were just to turn forward, they would realize their nose is pressed against the fucking curve because it's going vertical. Now, I can see this across the companies we work with in fusion. People used to say fusion just wasn't possible. It's 30 years off. Well, we're fusing atoms every fucking day right now. And net energy is being achieved every fucking day right now. And data centers are signing power agreements with our fusion companies right now for hundreds of fucking megawatts coming onto the grid or behind the meter. Fusion is real. It's fucking here. The government is doing, our private companies are doing it. Period. End of fucking story. I'm not having that debate with anyone anymore. It was one of those perfect, like, I'm not here to convince you, I'm just going to buy all the fucking fusion companies. But AI is what made that possible. But anyone who's naysaying it hasn't actually been in the lab and seen how we go from 1 to 1.1 to 1.4 to fucking 11. And so that's just the rate of change. And Tim is one of the best explainers of concepts in history. And so, yeah, exactly, Timberwriting everybody. It's just, it runs. It runs in the name. And so what's happening now is that, you know, when cars originally came out, in some places they were required to have someone walk in front of them. You know this. And so the first generation of cars were required to have a pedestrian escort to make sure they didn't run into anything. Swear to fucking God. And so there was a long period of transition where generations could keep up and where there were still human exceptional abilities in which people could be retrained or the next generation could go ahead and repurpose themselves. I defy you to tell me what's so human exceptional right now? We're all so proud of ourselves, but what are we so fucking good at that the machines can't do it here? I'll confess a secret to you. So Crystal and I, with a good friend, recently wrote a screenplay. It was a comedy idea that Crystal and I had and we'd been mulling on it and we went to a really close friend who's a very successful screenwriter to do the heavy lifting on it. I mean, he's a writer's writer. So in the credit world, we're the story buy and he's the writer. Right? And so we went to shopped it around and a well known dude wants to buy it and start it, but he had comments on the third act. So we got the comments back and I had an idea for the third act and I was like, okay, wait, I need to convince Crystal and this other guy of this idea I have for the third act. I went to Claude and I just said, hey, help me build a little dialogue really quickly around this idea that this guy comes down and he sees her on his phone and then the monk comes out and he's awkward, but he covers for her by making this noise. And. And I was like, and make it funny as shit. It's lighthearted. It's in the style of like Judd Apatow, you know, I think I told it. Judd's not a buyer. I'm not trying to, you know, but it was like that kind of style of comedy and it fucking banged it out. And I sent that to my collaborators and those exact lines won't be used. But I was like, that's a funny fucking scene. That wasn't a science report. That was a funny fucking scene of comedy that I conceived of. But like, Claude made it fucking funny. And I sent it to my collaborators and like, oh, dude, yes, that bang. And I'm like, fuck, man. I consider myself a writer, right? You read my writing. My writing doesn't go publicly, but that's what I do. I write things that raise billions of dollars and we just don't give it to anybody but the people who we work with. But dude, it's fucking good. You know, we did a thing where we fed ChatGPT everything I've ever written written. And we have a lower carbon voice bot and it knows exactly where to drop the F bombs and exactly where to use the cowboy phrases. It's really fucking good, man. I'm going to be extinct soon.
- [96:50]
Tim Ferriss
Okay, so what do you think things look like three or five years from now? Could be a year from now. I mean, things are moving so fast.
- [96:56]
Chris Sacca
By the way, thank you. You're the only person who talks about it like I do in single digit years. It's single digit years. I love when people come to us in like 2050. I'm like, fuck you, 2050. You're embarrassing yourself if you're talking about 2050 right now. Are you shitting me? Let's not even talk about geo instability and all the fucking weirdness and what's going to happen when our country is run by some non serious people. Shit is fucking chaotic right now. But let's just talk about what really happens when we start in a year or two or three, seeing massive job losses because you just don't fucking need those people, you know, I mean, Tim, you were one of the first people to be like, hey, here's a way to outsource your life. Here's a way to use tools to have more control and more leverage over what you do and allow you yourself to focus on the things that are specifically your value, add your expertise and not waste your time on the other bullshit. You kicked off a wave. Sometimes I blame you for it, right? I'm like, I can't get some kids to work more than six hours a week. No, I'm just kidding. But you have always been a systems thinker about what are these tools we can use? Well now, dude, I use these tools all day long. All fucking day long. And now they're integrated into your email and they're integrated into your spreadsheets and they're integrated into everything we do. And now I can tell people's pitch, emails are coming from them and right now I can sniff out which ones are written by them. But the next generation I won't. And they're solving problems. And if you read Tyler Cohen, who I read every day, he's having debates with 01. And I consider Tyler Cohen indispensable. I consider no Opinion actually indispensable. Reading every fucking day. I would never go through my day without reading him. I try to read everything DK Thompson writes every day. Well, I mean, he doesn't write every single day. And then Zivi and some of these other people who are really paying Ethan Malik, if you're really paying attention, I don't know what we're particularly good at. I just don't know anymore. I mean, our middle daughter Circa is a really talented singer and theater person. And she at age 11, is aware of this and is like, hey mom, dad, will Broadway still exist? I'm like, I think so.
- [99:06]
Tim Ferriss
I think Broadway will exist.
- [99:07]
Chris Sacca
We'll crave being around people. Yeah, people want to be in the presence of other people.
- [99:11]
Tim Ferriss
There's going to be A much dicier proposition.
- [99:15]
Chris Sacca
My brother, who, you know, has been really successful in Hollywood, is currently rolling up residential, real estate and climate havens because he's just like, okay, I'm a writer that's kind of getting all fucked up. I'm an actor. I could just sell some scans of my funny face and they'll write good jokes for me to deliver. And he's like, so what do I do now? And that's just the fucking hard reality of it. I'm literally not trying to poo poo it because it's also the most beautiful thing that's happened. And I use these tools all day long and they're companions and all these stories about the great things they can do for you are absolutely fucking beautiful. But they are going to shred the social fabric, and I don't think we're ready for that. And so I don't know what people do for a living. I would love for my kids to know how to use tools.
- [100:03]
Tim Ferriss
Massage therapists. It could be massage therapists.
- [100:07]
Chris Sacca
Dude, have you seen the massage robots yet? They don't get carpal tunnel, man. I mean, a good massage therapist can only do so many in a day. It's just unhealthy to do more. And so they don't get carpal tunnel.
- [100:20]
Tim Ferriss
The warm, soothing hands of my iRobot.
- [100:24]
Chris Sacca
Have you seen that 01? Have you seen that 01 robot? Any of these things? Even chatgpt with the video or Google with the video now and stuff like that, where it goes through the room and remembers everything it saw. Tim, you get overwhelmed if you're paying attention. It's overwhelming. And you know what's inevitable now? We're in a really bad spot, man. And I just don't think our government and our institutions, we don't have a social safety net. We just aren't set up for this. I feel lucky that my kids are in elementary and middle school and not in late high school or college right now because I don't know what I would be telling them to do. Really good parents sent their kids to coding classes. Really good parents sent their kids to law school here. I've started asking doctor Friends, if you had a biopsy, would you rather it be read by a human being or by an AI guy? I've yet to have one say by a human being. Who do you want as your pathologist, by the way? This is like the one thing where I start realizing, like, oh, my God. The nature of this question. I was in a car with a driver the other day. And one of those Waymo cars pulled in front of us and I was like, I can't even talk about this right now because it's existential to what this guy does. An immigrant from Ethiopia who came over and built his own book of business as a driver and is incredible. And here he is looking at a robot that displaces him. How do I even have that conversation?
- [101:44]
Tim Ferriss
All right, let's nibble on this a bit because you've clearly thought about it a lot. I'm pretty saturated with this as well. It seems like with AI and or robotics, a lot of the things that humans, including developers and computer scientists and so on, engineers thought were going to be hard ended up being easy. And the things they thought were going to be easy ended up being hard. So for instance, drafting legal documents turns out lickety split, piece of cake. Maybe throwing a baseball and playing catch with someone very, very difficult.
- [102:22]
Chris Sacca
Have you seen one? Mark Rober. Mark is a friend and a guy I deeply admire. Mark rober makes incredible YouTube videos. Did you ever see the dartboard he made where it's impossible to miss? So you throw a dart and he built a machine learning dartboard that automatically moves so you hit a bull's eye every time.
- [102:39]
Tim Ferriss
Just play along with me for a second. There are things people assumed would take that were done very quickly and the opposite. Right. So I'm wondering if you had to place bets, like you're a bettor, you're an investor.
- [102:50]
Chris Sacca
I've been known to dabble.
- [102:51]
Tim Ferriss
Dabble. So if you had to place bets on sectors or things that are going to either be slow to change or they will actually become more valuable over time. I mean, a handful of years ago, this was when a lot of these gears, at least from the kind of mainstream public awareness perspective, were just getting going. I was like, yeah, I think there'll be basically like a, a free trade, ethically sourced stamp of human made on things that will for certain things develop some type of premium connotation that seems inevitable. Those types of watermarking and things like that, even for digital products, which then we've already seen. So if you had to bet, you're like, all right, sorry buddy, we're taking this lower carbon capital thing off your hands. We've heard you complaining about the 70 hour work weeks. We found a robot who we think can do the admin and the annual shareholder letters as well as you can. Now you're just going to bet on stuff that's going to last or that's going to increase in value. Because it will be slow to be affected by AI or it will be largely immune. What would you bet on?
- [103:56]
Chris Sacca
First of all, I'm betting on the Bills on the money line to beat the Ravens this weekend. And so I love that they're playing at home, but going in as underdogs night game, that stadium is going to be nuts. The Ravens won't be able to hear anything. Lamar Jackson. Jackson wears a turtleneck in Miami. He's going to freeze his ass off. We got this game, so sorry. Go Bills. And so I would be betting on sports, I swear to God. I hate the head injuries in football. I really do. It's just. But on the other hand, there's just something so primal about the gladiator shit that goes on in football. And when I see it bring entire communities together, particularly a beat up community like Buffalo that's taken some lumps. I adore it. We've never raised our kids to be jocks, but I really find kinship talking to them about sports and playing sports with them and watching them develop as athletes. Yes, I do believe we could obviously build machines that pitch better than any human that's walked the earth. But sports, not the all drug Olympics, but just human sports, There will be a true analog, primal attraction to those contests. It's just one of the last real things. And so I think there's something really, truly there, Tim. I spend a lot of time in Japan like you do. And there's something so alluring about making pottery, about the wabi sabi, the imperfection, about the craft of studying one thing, the soul that goes into a piece of sushi, the calligraphy, the ceremony, the big nights out in cocktail bars, by the way, where there's one piece of fruit. I'm absolutely addicted to that culture. But it's that same craving for analog. And it's funny because growing up, that was a place I thought of as where all the coolest new cameras came from. But it's a craving for that analog again.
- [105:47]
Tim Ferriss
And they've been culturally kind of ahead of the curve with that for probably at least, I would say 15 to 20 years in terms of going very retro to things that are considered outdated or analog, which is fascinating.
- [106:04]
Chris Sacca
The LP bars and stuff like that. Yeah, but Tim, let's be honest. They better start having sex real soon or they're going to disappear. And the Koreans like the reproductive rate in Korea. Korea is just going to close up shop. I'm fucking worried. I don't know what to do about.
- [106:20]
Tim Ferriss
Everyone needs to start fucking $250 billion in South Korea towards trying to promote procreating didn't work at all. Zero effect. There are actually a lot of weird reasons for that that are not immediately obvious. I think you have to put up a 6 to 12 month security deposit for an apartment so people can't afford the space. But people are also just not having sex or not procreating, which are not automatically the same thing.
- [106:48]
Chris Sacca
No, we're societally fucked, dude, if people don't start fucking and having more kids. And I'm putting that on you, Tim. Where are the little Tim timmies?
- [106:57]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, yeah, it's on the dog.
- [106:59]
Chris Sacca
You're the living distinction of. Yeah, you can't conflate having sex and having children. But let's get on it. Okay, that's your homework. And so. But I do. Anyway, so the schools here in Bozeman aren't the most academically competitive. Right. They do a pretty good job. The elementary school is actually really special. But it's funny when we talk to our kids about what went on at school today. Orchestras offer five days a week, and so math and science alternate every other day. English and social studies alternate, but orchestra is every single day. Choirs every single day. And so when we talk to the kids about school, they talked to us about music and P.E. class and lunch. And so it's interesting. I mean, we'll pry information out of them about the other classes. And again, they're not the most challenging or riveting classes. So maybe that's part of it. It. But there's something happening in getting back to the arts. We went to one of their orchestra concerts the other night and boy, there were some kids out of tune. And boy, the middle school orchestra was a little like. And there was some squeakiness, but I was just like, crystal, this is not on Spotify. This is fucking amazing. You know what I mean? What's happening here is amazing. This is human as fuck, you know? And like two sections of the orchestra getting, like, not paying attention to the lady who's been conducting for 30 years being like, can you see my fucking hand? It's just doing like this, like, get on that beat. Like, it was beautifully human, you know? And the same way that the awkwardness. I mean, we constantly talk to our kids about middle school is about the awkwardness. It's about the asking someone of the dance or being asked to the dance. It's about all these fucking kids who stink a little bit and sweat and are. Or look gangly in their fucking clothes. And I love, by the way, I love now, being an adult and seeing who like the alphas are considered, that's the fucking alpha kid in your class. I worry that he couldn't wrestle his way out of a wet paper bag, but that's the attractive kid. Hilarious. But back when you're in middle school, you can self identify. You're like, oh my God, that's the fucking kid. That guy Ray. I mean, Ray's got to get any girl he wants. I just love seeing it now through that lens. I just think we have to embrace the messiness of our humanity and it goes back to that new project.
- [109:13]
Tim Ferriss
Not to make it super crass and we're going to get to that project, but because I think this is just a honing function and you're so good at it in so many ways, how would you bet on that humanness, that imperfection, that awkwardness, that wabi sabi, like my financial bet.
- [109:30]
Chris Sacca
Exactly.
- [109:31]
Tim Ferriss
Outside of sports, I think is very on point. I would agree with that, that completely.
- [109:36]
Chris Sacca
I think most people are still going to be hermits, but a large number of people are going to crave the opportunity to be together still. So Crystal and I have been looking at ketamine bars here. Yeah, pretty much. No, it's funny. We were looking to buy some space recently, some beat up warehouse space. And it took a long time to help our real estate agent understand that there wasn't a specific purpose for it. And he's like, what's the business plan? We're like, no, no, no, no. Like when we see the space, we'll know. And he's like, what are you hoping to do there? And we're like, it's kind of office, it's kind of art space. It's kind of like, maybe we can make it available to the community. Maybe there's some small performances there. Maybe there's some wine or cafe there. I was like, we don't really know. We'll kind of know when we see it and the community will kind of define the purpose of it. But we're like, we just know that we need more convenience.
- [110:26]
Tim Ferriss
He's like, I'm going to need a retainer.
- [110:28]
Chris Sacca
Yeah, yeah. No, I'm like, I'm like, there's no math to pencil out on it, but we just need more of those places to hang, by the way. All right, Free idea for anyone in your audience. You know what needs to exist.
- [110:41]
Tim Ferriss
Chuck E. Cheese for Gen X.
- [110:44]
Chris Sacca
And if somebody starts this in a city that I would travel to, I want a landlocked yacht club.
- [110:51]
Tim Ferriss
Okay.
- [110:53]
Chris Sacca
That is also A mini golf country club. It's basically. It's yacht rock themed. So you show up, you got to wear white shoes, maybe a captain's hat, umbrellas in the drinks, yacht rock band playing. It has the air of a country club. It's accessible to everybody. Maybe a membership costs 10 bucks. You know, you have to have a membership, by the way, to make IT exclusive. A $10 membership. They have to apply at the door, give some references, answer some yacht rock trivia, whatever. But then it's a country club for mini golf. The putt putts have generally gone away. We need to bring mini golf back. And there'll be mahogany lockers for your putter. And so you go in there and you have a really choice putter in Katushuk, like Billy, Billy, Billy, Billy, Billy. And so you can talk to your golf club, but I really need someone to fucking do this, okay? You can call it Yahtzees, you can call it whatever you want, but I need this to exist. I will be there. There's a bar in Redondo beach on the pier called Old Tony's, or it's called Tony's on the Pier, but everyone refers to it as Old Tony's. The inside has not changed in 50 years. And I would do anything to get on the historic register of places to make sure it never changes, because that is the perfect place to convene. And I will ride down there, ride bikes with friends when I'm in LA and hang out at Old Tony's on the pier and just feel like that's what we crave, go there and talk about nothing, just hang out. And I think I would be betting on people want to get together and bullshit. I think our kids are the canary in the coal mine of what happens when everything went digital. It's fucking exhausting, man. And being yelled at online is fucking exhausting. People are not accountable to each other, right? I mean, if anything, I could have told you how the result of this election was going to go, because most Americans are just fucking tired of it. They're tired of being yelled at. They're tired of being criticized. As Jonathan Haidt likes to put it, it's no longer about the intentions of the speaker, it's how the listener heard it. Fuck that. Like, I'm so fucking sick of that. And I got reeled into it like everybody else, and it's fucking exhausting. And everyone who thinks like that can fuck right off and go away, because intentions have to fucking matter. We have to get back to it. And where intentions Matter is when you're hanging out in person, you can tell. Hey, were you trying to be an asshole, or did you just say the wrong thing? My wife is half Asian. First time I brought her home to see my grandmother, she was like, oh, my God, Chris brought the most incredible oriental girl home. Now, was she trying to say, like, fuck you. Why'd you bring an Oriental girl into my home? No, what she was trying to say is like, oh, my God. This woman who. I don't know, the more updated, less antiquated term for a woman from Asia. I think we need to call each other in more than call each other out. And so you can just be like grandma. As Walter and the big Lebowski says, chinaman is no longer the preferred nomenclature. Honestly, I feel like we could get to a point where as a culture, we want to hang out in person again. We want to be around each other. I know my neighbors where I live, my physical neighbors, more than I ever did in San Francisco. I lived in a building, and I did not know the people around me. Everywhere I've lived since then, I actually know my neighbor. And I don't think we vote the same all the time. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't. But I know I can count on them. I know I can have a relationship with them. I know we always find common ground and we're part of a community and we're accountable to each other, and it's fucking great to have a community. And so I would be betting on communities again.
- [114:23]
Tim Ferriss
I mean, there's a big New York Times piece about running clubs and chess clubs and these in real life clubs with recurring events beginning to displace dating apps as an example because people are just tired. People are just exhausted by having yet another inbox with 99% ghost rate, et cetera.
- [114:47]
Chris Sacca
Well, people at those chess clubs need to start fucking or we're going to go away as humanity. But no, I'm with you, man. Crystal and I didn't go to Montana State University, but it's right here in town. And so we started going to the football games there, there and would consider ourselves super fans now. I mean, I wear blue and yellow fucking overalls to the games. It's ridiculous. And by the way, I've sent you these clips before.
- [115:09]
Tim Ferriss
I'm like, you sent me the photos?
- [115:10]
Chris Sacca
Yeah. The start of the game is Metallica starts playing. Fire torches, cannons. A band is on stage, then horses. The rodeo team rides in with American flags. And then there's a flyover of military planes or helicopters. I'M like, like America, this is what it's all about. But I really enjoy that we have a fucking community here, and I really enjoy who we hang out with. And I think I would be betting on community. I would be betting on neighbors. And I don't think the whole trend is going that direction. I think the addiction to these phones is taking us another place. The availability of food to eat by yourself and great TV and great apps and feeds. The first time I installed TikTok tok, Tim, was during the pandemic. And I was like, oh, this is kind of cool. Oh, check out those dance moves. Next thing I knew, I looked up and the sun had come up. I had been up all fucking night long on this app. I mean, it was like fucking crack cocaine injected into my veins. I realized, whatever, like genes, some ethnicities don't have to tolerate alcohol. I don't have that for fucking TikTok. And so I can only imagine what it's doing to the masses right now. And I hope we come up with a GLP1 agonist that blocks the pleasure center for TikTok. But I would be doing anything I can for profit or nonprofit to enhance community and hangouts.
- [116:30]
Tim Ferriss
So you've got all your knowledge that you have now, you do not have all your connections, but you have the know how. And you are somewhere between 20 and 30 years old and you're going to start. Start a business. What type of business might you start, Tim?
- [116:51]
Chris Sacca
What do you want me to say? I genuinely don't know.
- [116:53]
Tim Ferriss
CrossFit gyms.
- [116:55]
Chris Sacca
CrossFit gyms are community. They're great. I was standing in one last night. I told you, I texted you last night. I was like, if you want to make friends in a CrossFit gym in Montana, just drop that. You are pals with Tim Ferriss. And so Shark Tank only goes so far in that gym. Once you say your friends at Tim Ferriss. First of all, I love the ethos of CrossFit. It's how I work out. You can just fucking tell, can't you, Tim? But those are community. One of the things we've enjoyed doing is going to towns. I can't remember which sites are doing this anymore, but finding somebody who will guide you on a local bar crawl and just like, hey, take me to all the fucking dive bars or all the tiki bars, or take me to three farmers markets or just take me to three things I want to see. And it's not the traditional art historian who just recites everything about Titian. And I said, that one just for you. I could have said Velasquez, but I said Titian just for you.
- [117:55]
Tim Ferriss
Know thy audience. Know thine audience.
- [117:58]
Chris Sacca
But people who are like, hey, come here and enjoy this analog experience with me. Let's go to these places. You asked why we go to Copenhagen. Because Copenhagen is bikes, man. You get on bikes, you make it up. It's freewheeling. We started with Renee, but then we met a lot of other people who had spun off from Renee's world. Entrepreneurs in food and other stuff and artisans and people who take food and service. I mean, Ricardo Marcon, who runs Baraba Baraba is, well, action. Bronson called it the best Italian restaurant in the world. And it's in Copenhagen. I mean, you start wars with that kind of shit. But there's an argument that the best Italian restaurant in the world is in Copenhagen, run by our buddy Ricardo. But Ricardo is the height of analog experiences. It starts with the hug at the door.
- [118:40]
Tim Ferriss
So would you start staging in his restaurant? What would your move be?
- [118:44]
Chris Sacca
I mean, the kids have, our children have. They've made plenty of pasta on that place. But I think Europe is onto something with the art of the slow drink in the plaza. I really think humans still want to have a slow drink in a plaza somewhere. I hope, hope, I hope. And I know we're not drinking as much alcohol, but I mean, I love those athletics. By the way, you realize that 80% of drinking a beer is just like you wanted. The 12 ounce curl apart. It's just like today sucked. Give me an athletic. And you're like, I don't actually want to get fucked up right now, but there's just something I need to cap this day. I need to say work is over and so sorry, that was my limoncello. I guess that's a bad standing for athletic. We do have alcohol investments. I wouldn't be betting on alcohol long term, but I think people still want to just hang out. The ritual of ordering a drink, ordering a light bite, hanging out, people watching. We need central places to hang. This movement during COVID of shutting down streets, making a bike, but also just cafe and outdoor seating. Friendly. We need more of that. Humans crave that shit. That's what I would be betting on right now. And then interactive guiding. Yes. I've used ChatGPT to be like, hey, what's the off the beaten path shit I should do in Berlin? It's really good at it. But you know what else is cool is talking to a fucking punk kid in Berlin who's like, let Me take you to a couple places and I know this fucking guy and he'll let you in and he has a craft cocktail. And do you know what the tradition is here? Here you spit, you know, you put gum on the back of some marks and you throw them up on the fucking ceiling. You know, and so I want more of that shit. And so I think there is going to be a backlash to all this.
- [120:17]
Tim Ferriss
To all this. Meaning machines are just machines and AI and so on.
- [120:20]
Chris Sacca
The machines. The machines.
- [120:22]
Tim Ferriss
The Butlerian jihad.
- [120:23]
Chris Sacca
And before they. Yes, before they fucking kill us. I think we've got bigger fish to fry before AGI. And we might be at AGI right now anyway, by the way, but before the bioweapon disassemblers, you know, like, I think we've got to worry about being.
- [120:40]
Tim Ferriss
Entertained to death by your curated feed.
- [120:44]
Chris Sacca
Yeah, I mean, okay, so remember when we talked about Buckminster Fuller and I seem to be averse. There's another book designed by the same designer, Quentin Fiore, called the Medium Is the Massage not the message? The massage. The background on that is originally a typo, but they went with it. It's Marshall McLuhan and that book. Holy shit. Sorry if we just broke the market for it, but that book, you should front run that, go buy all those copies. But that book, again, is one of these old ones. It's beautiful, by the way, because Quentin designed it. But it's just beautiful foresight as to what's happening. Not just entertaining yourself to death, but what happens when information supplants humanity. And so when that access, it's just. I mean, the book's got to be 50 years old at least.
- [121:39]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, it's an oldie. All right. So outside of the but layer in jihad, we haven't talked at all about lower carbon capital or very little. You have invested in a whole plethora of different companies through Lower Carbon capital. You may not want to answer this, but are there any in particular? Could be a sector, could be individual companies that you are particularly excited about, where it's like, okay, these are a handful. Could be a sector. It doesn't have to be an individual company. And this is a way of asking, like, what would you bet on outside of all the AI concerns and so on. And maybe these are AI enabled, in fact.
- [122:17]
Chris Sacca
So let's just say what we do at Lower Carbon, we are venture capitalists and a team of scientists and business builders and we back companies that are making real money by either slashing CO2 emissions or sucking carbon out of the sky or buying us time to unfuck the planet. I think this one even says that un fuck the planet trademarked in a lot of countries. Hard to do by the way. It's hard to get swears trademarked some places. China. Not huge fans of F bombs, turns out. And so it was mission driven for me. But we had this thesis that most climate investing in green investing, whatever you want to fucking call it, however they're branding it these days, had been basically charitable concessionary. Some trade off, some sacrifice couldn't be done on a for profit basis. And that was true for a long time. You needed regulatory support, you needed subsidy, you needed legal change, you needed philanthropy. But we started to actually see the math change to where the unit economics of making shit and climate making shit clean were starting to pay off. And so the cost was coming down thanks to compute, machine learning, AI, thanks to readily available feedstock, bioreactors, you name it. And then the demand was starting to increase on the other side because companies are realizing like, oh, if I do this stuff, not only is it just good for the planet, but it's just fucking cheaper, it's safer, it's more resilient, it's easier to use. It tends to blow up less than shit made with oil and gas because it just turns out that digging up and burning old dinosaur bones is fucking expensive. And so using the sun to power the economy is just fucking cheap. And that's not a political statement. And what's funny is when I talk to guys from West Texas like hardcore oil and gas, I'll admit I have to start the conversation by talking about the truck I drive. I have to quote some Kenny Chesney lyrics. I ask what's in season, what are they hunting? Talk about whatever trophies behind them I have to establish. I come in peace. But then we start talking about how are the cattle doing? What are yields like? How many you running right now? Where they weigh? You get some size, how's it growing season? How many harvests you getting? You get some size, what's hunting been like? You know, how many tags you get and you're able to fill all those tags? You bagging anything good? Then you start talking about how are jobs going? How are people doing there? Then you start asking, so you guys getting any of the, the shakes you get in the daily seismic activity? What's water like? And before you know it, you have just talked all of the reality of a fucked climate without ever mentioning the word one time. And it doesn't have to be fucking political at all, it's just the reality, you know, the California fires are so fucked up, but the reality is they're actually going to be an accelerator for the work we do. Because now, you know, a lot of climate stuff is like, well, shit, if I eat this shitty mushroom burger, then maybe fewer people will be subjected to floods in Mongolia. It's really fucking abstract, right? And we think Maybe there's like 300 million people on the planet who actually try and do that math and are willing to spend more money to buy something more expensive or who are willing to actually sacrifice deeply in their life life with that kind of end to end relationship in mind. But like seven and a half billion people don't have that luxury. Or just. It's really fucking taxing and exhausting to think about that all the time. I don't want to. Every time I sit down and bite into a delicious burger had to be confronted by the existential crisis I am feeling. I mean, I love when that juice drips down your own. You're like, oh fuck, this is fucking delicious. Medium rare, let's go. Oh, this grass fed awesomeness. Oh shit, you left a little of that fat in there. Yeah, let's go. Oh, what'd you marinate this in? Oh, it's fucking delicious. We were meant to eat that shit, right? And I don't want to have to constantly like, I'm a horrible person, I'm a horrible person and like eat it through my tears like the burger of shame. And so it's just not, it's not who we are. And you know what? The fucking activists made us feel so bad about it for so fucking long. The soup throwers. These people throwing soup on paintings. How the fuck are you helping anything? The people who glue themselves to the fucking floor of the US Open and stop traffic. How are you helping anything? All you're doing is radicalizing people against the stuff that we're doing that is practically unfucking their businesses, their communities. If you really want to put some blame on some people about what happened in the LA fires, if we're really just playing the blame game. And did you see the article, by the way? It's a bunch of Russian disinfo accounts that are really flooding the tweets with trying to blame different people and stuff. It's fucked up. So Russia just knows where to fucking pick the scabs with us. But if you want to blame somebody, it's the fucking environmentalists, it's the fucking Sierra Club who makes it impossible for anyone to actually do any defensible space to mow anything down, to do any controlled burns, to actually create defensible space around our fucking communities. It's the fucking NIMBYs who won't let anyone actually use appropriate materials in building a fucking house. Did you see like they are expediting the rebuild of any houses in those areas that burn down, but you can't make any fucking changes to that. So we just saw a bunch of tinder boxes go up and it's a great opportunity to be like, hey, maybe we should build some different shit. Maybe we should build in some different shapes. Maybe we shouldn't have ventilation that sucks everything up into the roof structure. Maybe we shouldn't use the cheapest wood available, which is how Americans build shit. Maybe we should have more concrete, more aluminum, more heat reflection, more concrete walls around stuff. Maybe just fucking maybe. Maybe we should use more shrubbery around it that actually absorbs more water and is less flammable. But no expedited permitting if you build the exact same fucking thing you just had. Otherwise you go back to the end of the line. How fucking defeating is that? But it's just so funny to be a climate investor and find myself constantly at odds with the goddamn environmentalists. I'm sure they have a fucking target on me. But that's the reality is right now, for the first time, I think we are going to draw the linkage between what happens if we don't deal with these problems and the direct damage they cause.
- [128:45]
Tim Ferriss
And look at your portfolio just not to lose track of that. You can feel free to punt it for a bit. But I'm wondering if you're like, okay, the things that I'm most excited about, moving the needle in ways that you care about what those technologies or sectors or companies would be.
- [129:00]
Chris Sacca
There's things that are going to transform at scale like fusion, clean, abundant power that is almost free is single digit years away. So that's fucking great. I don't even bother fighting with the oil and gas people. It doesn't fucking matter. In fact, I actually want them to work with us more on carbon capture and sequester, putting more carbon back into the ground because they've got the trucks and they've got the pipes and they've got the engineering know how and they're great at it. And so we do a lot of work with oil and gas companies. And he's going in reverse. So I don't have political battles with those guys. And again, that's something that the activists hate about me. I will fucking sit with these People, Chris Wright, our new energy secretary, I consider him a reasonable person. He grew up in the oil and gas business. If we didn't have the oil and gas business, we would not enjoy the economy we enjoy today. Everything in that room you're sitting in right now was made possible by oil and gas. We can't just fucking pretend. Otherwise we'd be living that primitive life that I know you've got in some of your survivalist books somewhere. But without oil and gas, we're fucked. It's my job to give you a better alternative. And I enjoy when the big oil majors come to us. Sometimes they'll try to do a business deal or even buy us. We had one of the big oil majors tried to buy lower carbon capital. We're not for sale. But we said, bring your engineering team to meet with our engineering team and let's get some shit done together. I love that we have a company called Solugen that makes chemicals using enzymes instead of oil as the main ingredient. There's zero emission chemicals, industrial chemicals. You know who buys those chemicals? The oil and gas industry. And so one of the big chemicals they make is hydrogen peroxide at industrial scale, which is an important component of the oil and gas industry. When that buyer comes to Solugen to buy that stuff, they ask two questions. Is it hydrogen peroxide and is it cheaper? Well, then, fuck it, I'll buy it. And it's just fun. Like, I like to envision that guy with like a dip in and a cowboy hat, you know, like, oh, fuck it, I'll buy, like. But literally, that's my favorite fucking buyer. Someone who buys the cleaner thing out of self interest. And so that's what we're seeing across all of this stuff. Now in the short term, you want to talk about fires, we have a company called Burn Bot that is literally an autonomous drone that goes into the wild urban interface, mows shit down, starts a controlled burn, burns a defensible space.
- [131:18]
Tim Ferriss
When you say defensible space, you just mean basically a.
- [131:22]
Chris Sacca
A fire line. So a space where there is a gap where it would be hard even in high winds for fire to jump. That where at least firefighters know, start here and work backwards. By the way, if you have good fire lines, you can just start a fire to go back in the other direction and be like, well, this wasn't our preferred thing, but if we got a big fire coming at us, we may as well start a fire to head back at it. So you can look this up, Burn Bot. It's fucking awesome. And Private landowners don't have a problem usually running burn bottom, but where it needs to run is on a lot of public land and they'll just get sued. And so somebody will be like, hey, we need to do some fuel reduction here, some fuel management. And fuel management, I looked at some data recently. It takes between four and seven years for those projects to get out of litigation.
- [132:05]
Tim Ferriss
By fuel management you mean actual timber or undergrowth? Is that what you mean by fuel?
- [132:11]
Chris Sacca
So before we were all walking around the United States, what is now the United States States, there used to be a bunch of fires, right? Just naturally caused fires. Lightning stuff would happen. The indigenous people who inhabited this land knew about the power of those fires. And what would happen is when fires occurred on a regular basis, they were actually very healthy for those ecosystems. We know that there are certain conifers, pines, that only release their seeds in the event of a fire. They literally do not release their seeds otherwise. And so fire is a vitally important part of a forest ecosystem. To have healthy nature, you have to have fire. A bunch of very well intentioned greens and environmentalists came along and said, holy shit, fire. It releases a bunch of shit into the sky. It gets close to human beings. Some deer will fucking die. We need to stop fire and look all this shit. In hindsight, I'm not blaming those people because in hindsight, I don't think they knew this. I think they were trying to do the right thing. But what happened was they started putting out fires immediately. We had all those massive fire towers. Those are fun to spend a night in, by the way, if you want to camp out in an old fire tower. So we had all these fire towers. They would see a fire, they would immediately put it out. When that happens is all this fuel grows. So all this undergrowth starts to grow and grow and grow. And before you know it, when the next fire starts, there's so much fuel there that instead of cleaning it out and letting some little pine cones kind of drop and creating more space for the next layer of growth and for animal habitat instead, it burns so fucking hot that the biggest trees all burn down and the microbial layer all burns. And now you've got fucking sand. And so what we started to realize was that all those years of fire suppression were the worst form of fire management. And in doing so, they actually hurt the nature they were intended to help. Even if there were no houses nearby, you have to let fires burn out. And if it's in a place where you can't just let that happen randomly, you have to actively manage fuels as if nature was doing it for you. And so managing fuels means in a scrub brush area, it means you just go in and you chop and burn the fucking grass. You just have to do it it. And so you have to build that defensible space and you have to let some of these spaces renew in forests. It means you have to limb stuff. You have to take the dead stuff, you have to limb stuff and then you have to set it on fire and you do these. And it's a really, really important part of forestry management. We know that now and the US Forest Service knows this all that those are hardworking, amazing fucking people. But the environmentalists do to stop them all the fucking time. And that's killing people right now. Now there's just no doubt about it. I am hopeful, a silver lining, because I'm going to talk about politics, but a silver lining is I think we're going to cut through some of that shit right now. I think we are headed into an era of pragmatism, of putting literally the forest before the trees and starting to actually proactively get ahead of that stuff. By the way, it's the same shit with floods. It's the same shit with drought. It's the same shit with famine. We have just been stopped from taking proactive measures. So a company like Burn and Box company like Gridware. Gridware actually is monitoring equipment on every single power line, tower by tower. Like, do you know right now if there is a power failure on a PG and E transmission line, do you know how they figure out where that power failure was? They just start driving along and looking up and trying to figure it out. Or they helicopter down the whole fucking line. They have no data that comes off those fucking lines at this point. Well, it's not my words. Somebody else said at this point, PG&E is essentially the biggest arsonist in California. And so electrical utilities are responsible for 11% of the fire ignitions in the state of California and 50% of the damage. And so you have these tools like Gridware that can just be tower by tower monitoring. Know where there's interruption, you can immediately go there and see, okay, where was the tree that fell? Where is the spark? You can suppress that fire in a place where you don't want to have fire or you don't haven't controlled for it. But there hasn't been an incentive for those companies to pay that. PGE is already bankrupted. They haven't been on the hook for that. But now we've got Insurance companies, multiple insurance companies are going to go bankrupt right now. And so as California's fair plan, which is the insurer of last resort, does not have the money it needs to pay for what just happened, we have a company called Stand, which is a fire insurance company that actually assesses the real risk of insuring your home instead of State Farm just pulling out of the fucking state. By the way, I don't think you watch a lot of football, but the LA Rams couldn't play their game in LA because of the fires, right? So they moved it to their playoff game, they moved it to Arizona and they played in State Farm Arena. And I couldn't even believe they didn't just put duct tape over the fucking logo. It was the most fucked up irony ever. But so instead of having an insurance company plot of an entire state, a company like Stand looks at house by house by house house and says, here is your modeled risk and here are the other things that you can proactively do to reduce that risk to where we will actually write you an insurance policy. And we have companies like Floodbase that do that same thing for floods. And look at like, here's the risk. And you can't remember a hundred year storms happen every year now. Like, we can't just model these on historical data anymore. I mean, as John Stewart put it, they're not like, what just happened in LA is like if a fire fucked a tornado, you can't just model for that anymore. You have to assume the worst. And assume, okay, what do we do in terms of space management? What do we do in terms of materials, what do we do in terms of suppression? What do we do in terms of response? What do we do in terms of adaptation and resiliency in the face of all that? And so I think there are so many opportunities to be better at that stuff right now. And I am hopeful that the silver lining of a tragedy like this, this is the cause and the effect, are so close and finally appeal so much to self interest, they finally appeal to that linkage between instead of just like, hey, if a butterfly flaps its wings far away and you're like, oh, if that bush fucking lights on fire over there, that's it. You and I have a buddy who went to go look at the wreckage of his home and his fireproof safe was a puddle. It was a fucking puddle. It's just so devastating. I'm hopeful. I actually feel a second wind in our work and so do the people I work with right now. I feel like it's always Been mission driven, but we're also unapologetically capitalist. It's great. I mean, it's making a lot of money right now, but I feel like right now makes the stakes of it even clearer. And I know there'll be a bunch of fucking people yelling at each other about what went wrong in la, but here's the funniest thing. The phone is ringing off the hook right now from people not in LA who are like, that can never happen here. What do we do? And I love that.
- [138:59]
Tim Ferriss
No permanent record. You want to talk about it? What's the story? What's happening? Why now?
- [139:05]
Chris Sacca
Yeah. I don't know what to tell a 20 something to do right now other than to be a fucking Sherpa or a guide or build some in person analog experience. But I do know that there is this cultural hole where these young people today haven't been given the chance to fuck up. They just can't. There's fucking. Did you ever TP a house, Tim?
- [139:28]
Tim Ferriss
No, but I had my house TP'd. I had to deal with it. I did plenty of other stuff that got me in trouble, but nobody gets.
- [139:37]
Chris Sacca
To do that anymore because they're on a ring camera, man. Nobody gets to egg anything. And to go back to Mark Rober, he's the one who built that fucking glitter fart bomb package.
- [139:47]
Tim Ferriss
When my one close friend finally got his license, or it was probably a driver's permit, we shouldn't have even been out because I was a townie right on eastern Long Island. We had a lot of tension with the city people, as we would call it. So we would drive around and I had a wrist rocket, a slingshot, and we just bought a huge bag of grapes and just went around not shooting at people, but we'd shoot at things next to the people. And I'm not proud of that. We didn't hurt anybody, but we got in a lot of trouble. We got in a good amount of trouble.
- [140:22]
Chris Sacca
I think we got in lots of trouble. But I think we have a generation of kids who didn't get a chance to get into any trouble. And I'm starting to believe more and more that trouble is actually one of those things that informs all the other things that we do. Did you ever talk somebody into getting you beer?
- [140:37]
Tim Ferriss
I talked somebody into getting me. It wasn't really for a party. Some hard liquor wasn't beer. I went straight to the hard stuff.
- [140:44]
Chris Sacca
But yeah, yeah, okay, let me ask you a question. Did you ever have a party with your parents, liquor and then pour A little bit of water back in the vodka to make it look like the level went back up.
- [140:55]
Tim Ferriss
Because my parents are hoarders and the house wouldn't have worked. But I saw that done. I did plenty of other stuff, too. And things that are like, there's no real victim, right? I remember that's like. I remember, for instance, my elementary school. Same friend who drove me around with the grapes and the slingshot. He was the tallest kid in the class, also so very smart, equally open to maybe deviant behavior. And at the elementary school, there was this huge wall where kids would just whack tennis balls back and forth, kind of like racquetball, but Long island style. And nobody knew what they were doing, so they would hit all the tennis balls up onto the roof eventually. This was like 80s, right? There were all these amazingly cheesy ninja movies. And there was the. I think it was called the Asian World of Martial Arts catalog, which ships completely dangerous grappling hooks and stuff from Philadelphia, I think it was. And so I had some kind of ninja tooling. And we figured out a way with rope to get up on the school and then use garbage bags to temporarily steal all of the tennis balls. And it turned into. I mean, for this small school, it was quite the scandal at the time. I mean, there was a manhunt, and then we returned the tennis balls at some point. And Allstons were forgiven, or at least they stopped. They called off the hounds, but stuff like that.
- [142:23]
Chris Sacca
Yes. This is what I'm talking about. I feel like the statute of limitations has expired for most of these things, but they are formative. Hawkeye actually previously worked with Hawkeye, had a music store in Park City, Utah, where I was a resident, and we were in business together.
- [142:40]
Tim Ferriss
Wait, weren't you in business doing.
- [142:42]
Chris Sacca
We had a few flim flams. So one of the things we did was, first of all, we had to build some community. So one of the things we did was we would sell you the Britney Spears album, but you had to sign your name and address posted at the front desk, almost like a sex offender registry, but it was a Britney buyer registry. And so that offends one out of 10 people, but it builds community with 99 out of 100 people. But one of the things we would do to make a little bit extra cash is, well, we had a buddy who was the postman. And so he would come into the store and he would say, hey, there's all these people sign up for that Columbia house shit. And then they move away. Park City was Like a town full of transients. And they'd be like, so I get all these fucking CDs, are they worth anything? And so we scanned the UPC symbols and we're like, oh my God, they're the same UPC symbols as the retail ones. So we would do a little trade, like, hey, pick out something from the store and give us a bunch of those Christina Aguileras. And that helped US stock fewer CDs. But then we figured out you could take them to Walmart and return them. So if we really needed drinking money, we would return like 25 Limp Bizkit CDs to Walmart. And they'd be like, what is this shit? And be like, oh, everyone at my birthday party thought it'd be so funny to buy me a fucking Limp Bizkit CD. And then you remember CDs weren't cheap, right? So you do these things 20 or 25 at a time. You're like, I'm rich, motherfucker, let's go. And so we also did a thing where it was around the time that Napster started and we realized music stores weren't for long. And so we did this thing where it was restocking fee, but we would let kids buy a cd, take it home, rip it, presumably. I don't know what they were doing, the privacy of their own home. But if they returned the CD the next day, we would charge them a $3.50 restocking fee. So essentially what we were doing is reselling the same CD over and over again, keeping our margin. I'm sure the record company wouldn't have loved it, but it was a very customer friendly policy. But that's what it took to keep a music store afloat in Park City in 2000, 2001.
- [144:52]
Tim Ferriss
That's the format of no permanent record. What do you hope it's.
- [144:55]
Chris Sacca
I don't know, Tim.
- [144:57]
Tim Ferriss
Well, what are you going to do?
- [144:59]
Chris Sacca
No, I'm having conversations with. I'm starting to have conversations with successful people where they talk about the small crimes and misdemeanors they committed, the parties they threw, the lies they told to their parents, the clubs they talked their way into, the fake IDs they made, everything along the way, the papers that they plagiarized, just everything they did and how that actually built some sense of humanity, resilience, like the shit they got themselves into and the shit they got themselves out of. And if it ends up just being the last archaeological record of what it was like when we were human, still, when we weren't judged at every fucking moment. And I actually just feel like culturally it's the right time. Because you do this two years ago and everyone's like, fuck you, privileged assholes. Other people. And I'm like, we're over. We're past privileged assholes. We're just like, hey, that's kind of fucking amazing. You were able to. You chalked id. And what I found is as I tell more of these stories of like, without a fake ID in college, you had nowhere to go, right? So you needed one. So we would either make them by doing some shit with some cool overlay contact paper, or we would find some fucking guy down in the deep city where you'd stand in front of a goddamn chalkboard of a huge ass driver's license to pretend you were McLovin. I mean, we would do all kinds of things. Things when there was room to still cut some corners, take some liberties.
- [146:24]
Tim Ferriss
Let me reciprocate for a second. So I thought getting a fake idea would be a great idea. I don't know how old I was. It was 14 or something. And my buddy and I, same guy who was part of the other two fiascos, we decided to take a bus from eastern Long island three hours out to go into the city. Now, this isn't post Giuliani, post Bloomberg friendly New York City with biking lanes through Times Square. This is like much grittier New York City. So we get there to go on this adventure, and literally within hours, we are both conned and mugged within hours of getting there. Our first time in New York City, basically. And then no cell phones, right? So we get separated. These two guys separate us to scam us, then proceed to steal all our shit. Then we get separated. I go to the police station and I'm like, my buddy, he might be dead. And they're like, where is he dead? And I'm like, this intersection. And they're like, yeah, that's not our jurisdiction, pal. Good luck. And I was like, what? First interaction with asking police for help, I'm like, oh, that didn't work out as I thought it would. Then had to take the buses home. Each of us thinking the other was dead. That was a real growth experience. It's a learning opportunity, dude.
- [147:49]
Chris Sacca
I love it.
- [147:50]
Tim Ferriss
Not recommending people do the most reckless shit imaginable, but it's like, no, but.
- [147:55]
Chris Sacca
Maybe, but maybe, but maybe. The planet's never been safer. Well, America's never been safer. There are definitely places I wouldn't want to hang out right now. But, dude, God, what is that guy's name. But I once went to a. I went to a casino in Vegas. I was broke. I was with my buddies. We were staying at the Sundowner. We split a room four ways. It was a trade, actually. I think somebody owed us money at the record store and so we traded out. He had a buddy, we got a room at the Sundowner.
- [148:22]
Tim Ferriss
Okay.
- [148:23]
Chris Sacca
Rest in peace, Sundowner. And so, by the way, at one point while we were staying in that room, two queen beds, four guys, my buddy nudges me and I'm like, what, dude, what? We'd been out all night, it's probably two in the afternoon. He nudges me, he's like, bro, look, look. I'm like, what? He's like, look. And I look down at the foot of the bed. At the foot of the bed is like a 12 to 14 year old Southeast Asian kid standing there staring at us. He looked as scared as I did. And we were just like, what is he here for our kidneys? What is he fucking doing? Oh, my God. And we were frozen. And my buddy was not small, like we were in every position to like, like, but we were just absolutely frozen. Like, what is happening here? And eventually the kid ran out and we called down and apparently he had a key card that also worked in our door and went into the wrong room. There was some innocent explanation for it. Yeah, sure, we still think he was maybe there for some organs. But either way, like that night, we're out. We find ourself at Harrah's. A buddy says, hey, let's go get our shoe shined. What do you say? So we go over the shoe shine and we're there. And there's a fucking pimp over there. I mean, full on like players ball situation. And he's got suede Hush Puppies on, so there's no reason she should be at the fucking shoeshine. But we start talking to this guy. I'm embarrassed. I can't remember his name. I gotta ask my buddy immediately after wrapping this. But we start talking shit. And you know, and I consider myself pretty good at Rochambeau. Rock, paper, scissors. I consider myself above average. It's a talent I've honed over time. It is not a game of luck. It is a game of skill. And so I challenge this guy to a little robot. And I remember the stakes were if I win, we get to hang out with you tonight. So I beat the guy in Rocham. I mean, it was that. I. That wasn't even a question. So I thought this would be fucking great. Whether in ethnography we get to go hang out with this fucking pimp. But we found ourselves in some fucking hot water that night. I mean, this is pre the Hangover movie. We were in a couple situations. Those were formative experiences. I feel like kids these days haven't been in danger. They haven't been in situations like, how the fuck do we get out of this one? They haven't regretted anything. They haven't bullshitted their way in or out. I feel like no one's gotten a chance to sell anything. Almost everyone I know who's been a successful entrepreneur sold something for sure. Whether it was candy in school or door to door or they sold something thing. And sometimes that just meant they worked in a Foot Locker or they worked in a Radio Shack or they worked in a computer store and sold software. But almost all of them know how to sell something. And I feel like the insight of that comes from sales. But a lot of those sales were shady, you know, like, how do you mark it up? How do you sell those? I remember we had a cable guy in Washington D.C. named the guy who.
- [151:16]
Tim Ferriss
Would trick out your box. Like the black box.
- [151:19]
Chris Sacca
Yes, yes. And then he came back and stole everything in our house. But we didn't realize that Lucky's assistant was casing every.
- [151:28]
Tim Ferriss
Lucky for Lucky.
- [151:30]
Chris Sacca
Yes. But I need more stories like that in my life. If we really are going down in flames, I want to record for posterity all the banged up shit we did that informed who we were. And after hanging out with high school buddies this weekend, I was just reminded of how important that is. The bonds that come from that. You and I have a mutual body. I won't say because I don't know if he said this out loud, but. But he and his wife, their 11th grade daughter came home buzzed like a month ago and she was trying to sneak up and they kind of were like, you been drinking? And she's like, in there. And he couldn't help himself, but the words that came out of his mouth were like, thank God. And she's like, what? And the mom was like, oh, what a relief. And the girl was so like, what are you talking about? They're like, we just thought you'd never do it. Like, we thought you'd never fucking try it. It was such a mind fuck, bro. The. I just worry. I mean, Crystal, my wife, whose GPA was 0.02 points higher than mine in the same academic program at Georgetown, but Crystal would get all her schoolwork done and Then go rave. And I mean the hardcore, like D.C. and Baltimore rave scene, rave and like would just get out there and be like, I've been in some situations, you know, I've been in some rooms where I'm like, holy fuck, we better get out of here before shit gets south. Or before the cops show up. But even in high school, she lived on a compound. She, she would crush her academics and then she would literally crawl out of the window, sneak past the embassy compound guards, get in a cab at midnight and go party with her friends in Delhi, and then sneak her way back onto an American embassy compound without marines noticing her. That's fucking rad. You know, like, that's part of what makes Crystal so fucking awesome right now. And I need to memorialize these things for the benefit of humanity before we're all obviated. These kids who have these incredible GPAs and this test taking, I think it might be useless. I think they might have optimized for useless skills. And I think the only thing that might keep us going is that randomness, that unpredictability, those flaws, those fuck ups, the things that make us banged up, the things where we make bad decisions, where we're self indulgent, where we have bad. I'm lucky that I have all daughters, but when they invite boys over to the house, house, I watch boys make bad decisions repeatedly. And at first I was like, wait, why is the patriarchy a thing? When I watch them be so stupid and take so many dumb risks, I'm like, of course you were gonna get hurt. When you jumped off that thing, what in your head thought you weren't going to. Of course that was gonna break. And then I started realizing, you know why we have a fucking patriarchy? Because that randomness is something that no one knows how to count on. I've had to teach our team the number one thing you can be in this business is unpredictable. Feed into the fact I am known as mercurial. I burn bridges. I will not hesitate to fucking fight you. I wear the stupid shirts I don't give a shit about much. I've been known to just light it on fire. And guess what? People take me seriously as a result, I haven't backed down from all those fucking character flaws I have that are very self destructive. But. But I am all gas, no fucking brakes. As you know. Although in our line we call it no gas, no brakes. But we need to cultivate more of that if we have any hope as a fucking species. We just need to. I'm sorry, that's where I dropped the fucking mic. So that's no permanent record. Tim Ferriss, you are going to be one of the very first guests and we're going to go deep into all your hijinks, all your fucking skeletons.
- [154:56]
Tim Ferriss
I'm open.
- [154:57]
Chris Sacca
No felonies. The main rule is no felonies.
- [154:59]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, no felonies. I'm clear there.
- [155:01]
Chris Sacca
Yeah, yeah. I mean if you have murdered, I worry.
- [155:05]
Tim Ferriss
Oh, that time. Masquerade.
- [155:08]
Chris Sacca
Justifiable homicide. Shittiest morality. Yeah, justifiable homicide, but no hijinks. Hijinks. Flim flams like bamboozling.
- [155:17]
Tim Ferriss
That's got to be in your intro when you're like welcome to no permanent.
- [155:20]
Chris Sacca
No razzle dazzle.
- [155:21]
Tim Ferriss
Where the flim flams. Bamboozling has a home.
- [155:25]
Chris Sacca
Yes. Do you know any cartridge?
- [155:27]
Tim Ferriss
I used to know quite a few card tricks. I've let that atrophy so I don't anymore.
- [155:32]
Chris Sacca
Our kids are good at card tricks. It's important. And I have rigged decks and stuff. I think it's important to know how to do some fucking magic tricks. Because magic is storytelling, it is deceit, it is understanding to look for the angles. I love that. I love when kids know riddles. I love when they have bar bets that are impossible. I think everyone should be able to tell a good joke. You're talking about. I'm back to my syllable syllabus of how to fucking survive. It's not just the survivalist of what's in your go bag and how to handle a 30 round mag and how to dress your own meat and shit. It's like how do you actually tell a story? How do you make somebody who has no reason to like you?
- [156:09]
Tim Ferriss
Maybe the semester finale for your seminar is people have to get up and do a two to five minute comedy set or something like that. That's the final example in front of.
- [156:21]
Chris Sacca
A bunch of people in maga hats. Yeah, I'm going to find the worst.
- [156:25]
Tim Ferriss
Or whatever your nightmare audience is. It could be a bunch of ultra.
- [156:29]
Chris Sacca
Left libs or whatever. Yeah, you model who's actually on stage and you're like here we go. These are not your people. I mean that's one of the things is right now we all get to choose who we hang out with and the Internet has allowed us to hang out with people who are just like us and nobody hangs out with people who aren't like them anymore. And that bums me out.
- [156:48]
Tim Ferriss
Which by the way, even if you want to hang out with people who are unlike you by virtue of the customized feed and Sort of algorithmically tailored servings. It's very hard even if you try. And if you do try and you're like, I want to take a sampling of this. We're in a couple of, well, one group thread in particular where I take great pleasure in fucking up people's feeds because I'll send whatever, a video of some gorgeous chick doing squats that are very suggestive and that's her entire account on Instagram. And before you know it, you send that to somebody and you've just dropped a cherry bomb into their algorithm and then that's 90% of what they see. So it's very hard to actually live in multiple worlds. You are going to get painted into a corner because that's how advertising is sold against you, you.
- [157:43]
Chris Sacca
But in real life, that's happening. And that's why I am hopeful for the resurgence of the rest of America. Steve Case was on the rise of the rest and JD Vance, bless him and his weird path, but he was onto that early too. 82% of the money from the IRA, the big Biden climate bill went to red districts. It's the green little secret. There are more clean energy jobs in Texas than there are oil and gas jobs. The Republicans green little secret, but that's just the reality because it's good fucking business. If you want to work with good people who know the tools, who know the engineering, that's where they are. They're in the heartland. And I really do hope we are going to see the resurgence of some of those communities because for me, raising kids in a community like that is like going back in time where we know our neighbors, we know our kids are safe. I love hearing the stories of my kids friends who just, they work for a living. They do really incredible shit, by the way. It's funny how few people know anything about me. I got invited to do a Shark Tank panel judging for elementary school entrepreneurial business plan class. They were just fucking around. They had product ideas and one of the kids walked in and was like, oh my God, you got a real shark. And the superintendent and the principal put the whole thing together. What are you talking about? They're like, he's a shark from Shark Tank. And they're like, oh, we just needed some dads. We only had moms volunteer, so we sent out a note for dads. I actually thought, I thought they were like, it was specifically targeted me. Nobody had any fucking idea. So it was amazing. I'm in camouflage here I go out in a T shirt and glasses instead of a Cowboy shirt, no glasses, and I'm camouflaged. I love it.
- [159:20]
Tim Ferriss
All right, Kristoff, we're coming in on just over three hours now.
- [159:24]
Chris Sacca
Tim, I gotta just say something though, bro. I'm worried about you.
- [159:27]
Tim Ferriss
You're worried about me?
- [159:29]
Chris Sacca
Yeah, I'm worried about this. This podcast. There's been no toxic masculinity. We didn't talk about testosterone. And where it's been, there's very little hatred and there was just very little incendiary content. I didn't hear any conspiracy theories, no pseudoscience, no political opportunism. I mean, you're just like this whole.
- [159:52]
Tim Ferriss
Leaving a lot on the table, let's.
- [159:55]
Chris Sacca
Get some valuable and actionable content, inspiration for young people. And people are like, what is this shit? You should be baiting outrage, contriving virality, man. I mean, do you even know how to podcast, bro?
- [160:05]
Tim Ferriss
I know. I sometimes wonder the same thing. And you will notice this is the first time I've had it only took me, whatever, almost 800 episodes to get a reasonably professional looking mic setup for these.
- [160:16]
Chris Sacca
Look at that. I hope whatever those labels are sponsoring.
- [160:20]
Tim Ferriss
You, you can't take them off. Which is hilarious, by the way.
- [160:25]
Chris Sacca
I can't believe you didn't ask me for a book list. You ready? Book list list. You didn't ask. I did.
- [160:29]
Tim Ferriss
For your syllabus. But you dodged and gave me poetry.
- [160:31]
Chris Sacca
Yeah, okay. Anxious Generation and Coddling of the American Mind and Generations by Gene Twenge, who works at Jonathan Haidt, informed me more about our generation as well as how to work with other people. There's no agenda to that book, but it's powerful. The Coming Wave by Suleiman, I think does the most even handed job of assessing the future of AI, particularly by someone in the business. End of the world is just the beginning. Do you know that guy, Peter? He's a fucking maniac. I think it's just provocative. He also does these really fun little YouTube updates from hikes and boulders.
- [161:01]
Tim Ferriss
End of the world is just the beginning.
- [161:03]
Chris Sacca
It's just the beginning. What's his name? It starts with a Z.
- [161:06]
Tim Ferriss
His last name, Peter Zahan, it looks like.
- [161:09]
Chris Sacca
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Thanks. I love Van Neistat's book report on the fourth Turning. It's just thought provoking. Again, Homegrown, a book by Jeffrey toobin about Tim McVeigh is, I think, a canary in a coal mine book. Look, Tim McVeigh was from my hometown.
- [161:23]
Tim Ferriss
Oh, shit. Didn't know that.
- [161:25]
Chris Sacca
His mom was our travel agent. His sister worked at Wendy's he bought his ammo at the same place where we bought our fishing supplies. But that book explains what happens when the factory closes down and people become radicalized. I encourage people to read it. The thing that people don't know about Tim McVay is he had a photographic memory. There were 671 boxes of evidence at his trial that were all him reciting. Every single person he ever spoken to, every meeting he had, he knew everything. So there's no mystery about his story. Stolen Focus by Jonathan Harari. You know that one? Just amazing. I think it's like the best digital detox.
- [162:00]
Tim Ferriss
Stolen Focus. Oh, this. And I have not read that one. I think he wrote Chasing the Ghost. I might be misquoting.
- [162:09]
Chris Sacca
Yeah, maybe Meditation for Mortals is a great one.
- [162:12]
Tim Ferriss
Oliver Berkman. Yeah, he's great.
- [162:14]
Chris Sacca
Yeah. So good. Psychology money. We mentioned the best piece of fiction I've read recently is Rejection by Tony. Can't say his last name.
- [162:26]
Tim Ferriss
Wait, what was the name again?
- [162:26]
Chris Sacca
It's amazing. It's called Rejection by Tony. Tony T. Tony T. Tony Tula. You'll see what I mean.
- [162:36]
Tim Ferriss
Something like that.
- [162:37]
Chris Sacca
Thank you.
- [162:38]
Tim Ferriss
That's a long one.
- [162:38]
Chris Sacca
Yeah, that is. It'll put some people out of their comfort zone for sure. That guy has his finger on culture and linguistics more than anything I've read recently. I've shared that with other author friends who are like, fuck, yeah, cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Every is great fiction. Did you listen to McConaughey's autobiography?
- [162:56]
Tim Ferriss
I listened to some of it. I had him on the podcast years ago to talk about it, which was amazing. And I misquoted, just briefly, Johann Hari's book Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections. Lost Connections is the one I read in full, which I thought was great. That's about isolation, loneliness, and things to do about it in a modern world. I thought that was very well done. Stolen Focus is the one that you were talking about.
- [163:18]
Chris Sacca
Yeah. It's so good, dude. It was given to us as a gift, and it really changed our media diet for sure. And our online diet. I try and read everything Jon Ronson does and listen to it. By the way, I was just going to say Matthew McConaughey's audiobook. You can't read it. You got to listen to it. And so the Every. I love fucking Eggers. But the Every seems to be increasingly prophetic right now. Robin Sloan's fiction Moonbound and Penumbra are great. Do you watch Silo? Did you read the Wool series?
- [163:43]
Tim Ferriss
So I'm going to admit that I haven't I do know Hugh and he's amazing, but I have not yet delved into that because I know that I'll want to consume all of it.
- [163:52]
Chris Sacca
I knew you guys knew each other from Arctic Adventures too and shit, right? And Iceland and Japanese.
- [163:57]
Tim Ferriss
We spent time in Japan and elsewhere. He was on the podcast a while back. He's such an incredible experimentalist and innovator when it comes to publishing. Also really, really impressive.
- [164:09]
Chris Sacca
Yeah, he wrote those things and just threw them up there, right?
- [164:11]
Tim Ferriss
He is one of the most thoughtful, unafraid lateral thinkers in writing and publishing that I've met. He's a smart guy.
- [164:19]
Chris Sacca
I even read the Wool series after watching the first season of Silo. Fucking love it. I think it's great. I think it's prophetic and amazing. And then I mentioned Kelly Corrigan. I just think that's grounding human shit. I think Kelly Corrigan has her. She has a podcast too, but I love her books. I think talking about relationships, kids dying, but in a way that is just self deprecating. Real America. It's just an antidote, particularly for your tech heavy, Seriously online audience. I think that's great. You want a kid's book? It's the Pirates series. The Pirates and an adventure with communists. The Pirates. An adventure with Darwin. And those books are so fucking good, you'll laugh at them even as you read them.
- [164:59]
Tim Ferriss
I feel like you've got more.
- [165:00]
Chris Sacca
I tried to do my whole.
- [165:02]
Tim Ferriss
You have more on offer. You got anything else locked and loaded there?
- [165:06]
Chris Sacca
Yeah, my $100 purchase.
- [165:07]
Tim Ferriss
What's your $100 purchase?
- [165:09]
Chris Sacca
You know what are amazing? Have you ever written on stone paper? These notebooks by Karst. Do you know these things? It's actually, it's stone. And there's no more enjoyable experience than writing on stone. So karststonepaper.com, i don't own it or anything like that, that. But I highly recommend it.
- [165:25]
Tim Ferriss
Amazing. Is it just the hand feel? Is it just the actual tactile sensation of writing on it that you like?
- [165:33]
Chris Sacca
Oh, and how the pen moves across. Ooh, yes. It's sensual. Sensuous. Sensual. It's pretty special. And you know, I'll say two other things. One, Dola Dira. It's my favorite booze right now. It's an all natural Campari and Aperol substitute with none of the bullshit in it, none of the fake dyes, just.
- [165:51]
Tim Ferriss
What was it called? Dora the Explorer.
- [165:53]
Chris Sacca
No, Dola Dira. D O L A D I R A. You know who makes it? Richard Betts. And Joe Marchese.
- [166:00]
Tim Ferriss
Oh, really? Awesome.
- [166:01]
Chris Sacca
Yeah. You're homies. Yeah. The Como's Tequila guys.
- [166:04]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
- [166:04]
Chris Sacca
Comos is the highest rated tequila in the land right now. Okay. My number one purchase under $100 that I stand by. I've cited it before and it just happened again. I never show up at a party without mullet wakes. They change fucking everything. I was just at a New Year's Eve party and I showed up at the mullet wigs and it just broke everyone to pieces. It was amazing. The most staid fucking guys, dude. Multiple guys were like, can I take this home because my wife thinks I'm hot in it? And so mullet wigs change everything. And so Amazon will do, like, look, get some dog the bounty hunter style ones. Get some ones with like the built in Willie Nelson American flag bandana. Get some Curly Bob Ross ones in there. Just to shake it up a little bit. You can throw in a neo punk white 80s hair wig, but just fucking wigs. They next level everything. I'm here 10 years later, Tim, to tell you that that still holds up.
- [167:05]
Tim Ferriss
Durable mullet wigs.
- [167:07]
Chris Sacca
Oh, God, Yes. Next time, 10 years from now, we'll talk about best playlists on Spotify that has been curated by AI and fed directly into our brain chips.
- [167:18]
Tim Ferriss
Okay? Next time, right? Most commonly searched terms on pornhub. Next time.
- [167:22]
Chris Sacca
That's going when my agent is talking to your agent. Ain't nobody got time for this, bro. I miss you. I hope to see you in Texas really soon.
- [167:29]
Tim Ferriss
I miss you too, man. Yeah, well, we are going to see each other in Texas.
- [167:32]
Chris Sacca
Hey, by the way, have you ever been to Wyoming?
- [167:34]
Tim Ferriss
There's a great ranch for sale.
- [167:36]
Chris Sacca
There's a ranch. It's incredible. 5lb ranch. It's an incredible place. The fishing is abundant. Tricked out the barn. I used to work from there. Fun. You can host. It's an event spot. I mean, if you really want to go and if you care about skiing, backcountry skiing, it's right there.
- [167:52]
Tim Ferriss
Plops, bitcoin mining, servers in the barn. Worst case scenario, it's got to be a lot of good ventilation.
- [168:02]
Chris Sacca
Dude, you're amazing. Thank you for doing this, dude. It's been a long time.
- [168:06]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, it has been a long time, man. It's great to see you. Fam's good, family's great.
- [168:11]
Chris Sacca
Tim, I need to get you on that train.
- [168:12]
Tim Ferriss
I know, I know. It's not for lack of trying. Although some of my audience have become very, very adamant and even aggressive with me about my lack of producing Kids at this point. And I'm like, well, look, why don't you walk a mile in my shoes and then show me how easy it is. Let's see what that looks like.
- [168:29]
Chris Sacca
Yeah, but that's the thing, dude. You just put on different shoes and sometimes there's a little bit of puke in them or something like that or. Okay, really quick story. You ready? It's kid and shoe related. We have a good friend here who's an OB gyn. She's hilarious. I'm not going to give her name, but she's a local and we love her to death. Smart, hilarious. She was telling a story about how she's an obgyn. She got the page in the middle of night, you got to go deliver the baby. So she climbs out of bed, kisses her husband goodbye, throws on some crocs, goes out to the hospital. In the delivery, she stitches the gal up, there's some blood, et cetera. And the nurse says, hey, let me clean up those crocs for you. And so she pulls the crocs off and she holds them up both in front of the doctor, the nurse is holding them up and in front of the woman who just gave birth. And on them, you know those jewels you can spell shit out. It says Deez nuts because they belong to her 13 year old son. She didn't realize that she was walking out of the house. She walked out with the D's nuts Crocs on.
- [169:41]
Tim Ferriss
Oh, that's in your next screenplay, I think.
- [169:44]
Chris Sacca
Oh my God. That is just. You can't write shit like that. So anyway, Tim, it is really like people talk all these platitudes about it and stuff. Stuff. And I'll be honest, it wasn't the day a lot of people talk about the magic that your kid comes out. My life changed forever. I didn't always feel that. I was like, oh shit, I got to do some shit and take care of Crystal. And there's poo everywhere now and somebody's crying and I haven't slept in a while. But as time goes on, our kids went to camp this summer. And Crystal and I at first were like, hey empty nesters, let's party. And we did. But at the same time we're like, fuck, we miss our best friends, man. We've got three incredible kids who are our besties. And I understand that mixed emotion of when the kids go off to college. I see this happening with a lot of our friends who had kids before we did that. Both relief of, all right, we can go travel and shit like that now. But on the other hand, it's kind of lonely. These kids are fucking great. I love it. We really entertain each other, and I've loved being on that journey with them. And so I really do hope we can get you on that program.
- [170:45]
Tim Ferriss
Oh, yeah. I mean, that's the intention.
- [170:48]
Chris Sacca
Okay. Can I tell the quick story from that dinner party without mentioning the name of the person?
- [170:54]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, sure.
- [170:55]
Chris Sacca
Okay. All right. So your audience needs to know this, Tim. So Crystal and I are hosting a dinner in New York City. We don't get there that often, but we love to bring close friends together. Again, ruthless about the invites, no plus ones. We just know that if you're coming to dinner, everyone's going to be awesome. So there's no seating chart. We did seat you next to this person intentionally, though. This is a famous actress who is single. I mean, absolute smoke show and within Tim's league. And not entirely disinterested in Tim. Like, up for it. You know, like, open. Open to the concept. We'd kind of, you know, till the soil. I wouldn't say we planted the seed, but we tilled the soil. It was on the table, like household name. So we sit them next to each other. Things are going great. The meal's wonderful. The wine is great. The conversation is stimulating. Tim is a great person to have at a dinner conversation. He can talk about anything. He's genuinely interested in other people. He likes to ask questions, not because it's for a podcast, but because he likes to learn from anybody. And he realizes that any single person you talk to has a story. Give them a chance to tell it. So things are going really well. We're starting to talk about meaningful shit. And at one point she says, hey, Tim, when do you feel most present?
- [172:19]
Tim Ferriss
Now, there's one piece of information that's missing here, which is her dietary preferences.
- [172:26]
Chris Sacca
Yeah, I didn't know if that would make her too identifiable, but she's vegan. She's well known as vegan. Tim knows she's vegan. Animal rights type person, but not rub it in your face. Vegan. There's plenty of meat on the table. She's fine with it all being there, but she goes, tim, when do you feel most present? That's how much you guys were vibing. That's how well it was going.
- [172:48]
Tim Ferriss
We're also. This is at a point in the meal where it's sort of like a Jeffersonian situation. So there's a lot of silence at this point.
- [172:55]
Chris Sacca
Yes, yes. We are all paying attention. That's right. That's right. It's a small table. There's 12 people at this table and tiny, tiny place. We're at Zizi's Clam Bar in New York. Tiny one room, spot, two seat bar, but we're at a table for 12 and we're elbow to elbow eating incredible food. And there's vibe, there's energy there. And I mean, Tim's a fucking magnet, right? And so she says, tim, when do you feel most present? And Tim, what did you say? Without even having to inhale, without even having to take a breath.
- [173:26]
Tim Ferriss
I said, when I'm having sex, doing psychedelics or hunting. Those were the three. And no sooner had the last syllable been uttered that Chris, who's like 8ft away and has had a few drinks, just goes, oh, my God. And puts his head in his hands.
- [173:48]
Chris Sacca
I had never. I had never seen a ticket go up in flames faster than that. That was the most combustible element in the universe. At that moment was your chance to be with that woman. Yeah. You know, that was fucking fascinating. She did raise your glass. For the record, she did raise her glass and cheers you for your.
- [174:11]
Tim Ferriss
She's a great sport.
- [174:12]
Chris Sacca
For your self awareness, candor and authenticity.
- [174:15]
Tim Ferriss
Yep. No, she was a great sport.
- [174:16]
Chris Sacca
Any spark was immediately extinguished. Yeah. Dana, have you guys kept in touch? Have you kept in touch or.
- [174:22]
Tim Ferriss
No, we haven't, but we weren't really in touch beforehand. We'd met before. She's amazing, but I just don't have it in me to succeed pretending to be someone I'm not. You know what I mean? I'd rather go up in flames.
- [174:38]
Chris Sacca
No, I mean, I deeply admire it. Right. I've told you, my whole life's mission is about how to be. Be internally driven rather than externally driven. How to be more honest, more authentic, more candid. I told you I'm less patient because I'm trying to be me. And you are exactly that. So I deeply admire it. But it was just so funny. It was funny because. Because in the blink of an eye.
- [175:03]
Tim Ferriss
I didn't even think about it. Like, it came out.
- [175:06]
Chris Sacca
You did not inhale.
- [175:08]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
- [175:08]
Chris Sacca
It was on your exhale of the breath you had already taken. But I love that. Your default. I say this to your audience, your primal default was to say the real thing rather than the thing that this unbelievable woman would have wanted to hear. That's fucking great, dude. That's what makes you you.
- [175:30]
Tim Ferriss
Thanks. Yeah. So, work in progress. But I'm not sitting on my hands. I know that family's the next big adventure. So I'll get there.
- [175:37]
Chris Sacca
There.
- [175:38]
Tim Ferriss
I will get there. And it's also what's been funny as I've dated is 47 now. And the tone of sort of the line of questioning for some women I've been on dates with is like, what's wrong with you? Why are you broken? What's going on? You say you want a family, you're 47. And I'm like, well, two things. If I were 40, would you be saying this? And they're like, no. I'm like, okay, well, I just got out of a. Not so long ago, got out of a almost six year relationship, so. So the intention was to have kids and it didn't work out. Things don't work out. Better to figure that out before you have kids, I think in a lot of cases. And then I was like, secondly, if I had been. What I've found is that women would be. Some women would be more comfortable if I had been married and divorced once or twice.
- [176:25]
Chris Sacca
Oh my God.
- [176:26]
Tim Ferriss
Than having not done it. But they wouldn't be asking that same question, which is interesting. And it's like, okay, all right. So maybe the concern is like, ah, this guy is like Peter Panning for the rest of his life and he doesn't want to commit. I'm like, well, I have two relationships that are longer than a lot of marriages, so that doesn't totally check out, but it's fascinating. Modern dating.
- [176:47]
Chris Sacca
Yeah. Look, Crystal and I would have been a disaster if we'd gotten together anytime in those 14 years. I kept asking her out. I had a prior relationship, was divorced. I had a long term relationship after that that didn't work. Work. If I hadn't gone through that stuff, I would not have understood what it meant to be in a healthy relationship, to have balance, to have intimacy, to all those things that need to happen. I wouldn't have known it. You know what was a funny exercise is we set up a really modest trust for our kids basically so that houses, you have to do that estate planning shit. And so it's particularly not generous because we think mostly money fucks kids up. But we had to sit and decide at what age they would have any discretion over it. And we were 36 at the time and we said 36 because that was when we felt like we had finally gotten our shit together. And maybe now I'd set it at 45, I don't know. But my dad is 78 years old, plays pickleball three times a week with 20 somethings. He always tells us about which guy is complaining, like, oh, I can't move. Like, I could when I was 18. When I was like, fuck you, I'm 78. But like, I do think age is an attitude. I do think it's mental. I don't think that number actually matters, but I also don't think everyone's ready for it at every time. But I can just say that having kids has just been a remarkable, remarkable chapter. Crystal, if she was your guest on your podcast, would tell you she never envisioned it for herself. It wasn't. She just did not think of herself as a mom. And now she identifies as a creative and an author of New York Times bestsellers and a designer and an investor and an entrepreneur. But maybe at the top of that list is a mom, and maybe second after that is a youth sports coach. I mean, we had basketball practice at our house last night for the fourth grade team. I forget what they're called. They have a new name. But it opens these new chapters of life that really remind you of the fundamental questions, like, why the fuck are we here?
- [178:45]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
- [178:46]
Chris Sacca
You know, and I love going through the awkward middle school again. I love it, I love it. It's therapy for me, man. All those times you were stuffed in a locker, Tim, you get to deal with it again. It's amazing.
- [179:00]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. That was relentless. Holy. It was just straight up Lord of the Flies. I mean, there are really few safeguards at that point.
- [179:10]
Chris Sacca
Oh, man, that's one of the great things. They have a. The playground supervisor. Whereas cowboy boots has an eye patch and a peg leg at the school here.
- [179:21]
Tim Ferriss
That's incredible.
- [179:23]
Chris Sacca
I mean, everything is so fucking core in Montana. I love it. Everything is so like, suck it up. It's just fucking fantastic. We need more of it, so. All right, dude. I love you.
- [179:35]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I love you too.
- [179:35]
Chris Sacca
I love you. I love you.
- [179:36]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I love you too, man. And give my best. I can't wait to hang and I'm going to see you. Yeah. Not too long from now.
- [179:42]
Chris Sacca
And I love all of you listeners who are going to visit5pondsranch.com and explore your Wyoming fantasies. Maybe you build one of those crypto based distributed organizations to buy it. That's fine, as long as it comes in US dollars. This is the best place to shelter your gains. Just telling you. And have a beautiful life in the outdoors.
- [180:04]
Tim Ferriss
Get with that.
- [180:05]
Chris Sacca
Five Ponds Ranch.com There we go. Five Ponds F I V E pondsranch.com thank you.
- [180:13]
Tim Ferriss
All right, everybody, you heard it here first for 1995 with five easy installments. You could test out the ranch for yourself. Maybe not for that price point, but we'll see. And as always, we'll link to things that were mentioned in the podcast.
- [180:29]
Chris Sacca
That's a lot of things.
- [180:31]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
- [180:32]
Chris Sacca
God bless the AI that does that for you.
- [180:34]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Tim Blog Podcast. You'll be able to find it. Check out our first installment for Chris Sacca's Wonder Years and early chapters.
- [180:43]
Chris Sacca
Wait, I also did that other episode where you had me read questions off of Reddit. That was fun too.
- [180:48]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, you did that. Yes.
- [180:49]
Chris Sacca
Remember, I didn't have a soundproof room, so I had to put my head under a blanket.
- [180:53]
Tim Ferriss
Yes.
- [180:53]
Chris Sacca
And talk to GarageBand.
- [180:55]
Tim Ferriss
So, yeah, there is a spot.
- [180:58]
Chris Sacca
There is an episode. 1.5.
- [181:00]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, there's a 1.5. And as always, folks, thanks for tuning in. Be a bit kinder than is necessary to not just others, but yourself as well. Until next time, and thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between 1 and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange, esoteric things end up in my field. And then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short. A little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. Something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim Blog Friday. Type that into your browser. Tim Blog Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. As many of you know, for the last few years I've been sleeping on a midnight luxe mattress from today's sponsor, Helix Sleep. I also have one in the guest bedroom downstairs. And feedback from friends has always been fantastic. Kind of over the top, to be honest. I mean, they frequently say it's the best night of sleep they've had in ages. What kind of mattresses? What do you do what's the magic juju? It's something they comment on when without any prompting from me whatsoever. I also recently had a chance to test the Helix Sunset Elite in a new guest bedroom which I sometimes sleep in, and I picked it for its very soft but supportive feel. To help with some lower back pain that I've had, the Sunset Elite delivers exceptional comfort while putting the right support in the right spots. It is made with five tailored foam layers including a base layer with full perimeter zoned lumbar support right where I need it, and middle layers with premium foam and microcoils that create a soft contouring feel. Which also means if I feel like I want to sleep on my side, I can do that without worrying about other aches and pains I might create. And with a luxurious pillow top for pressure relief, I look forward to nestling into that bed every night that I use it. The best part, of course, is that it helps me wake up feeling fully rested with a back that feels supple instead of stiff. That is the name of the game for me these days. Helix offers a 100 night sleep trial, fast free shipping and a 15 year warranty. So check it all out and you, my dear listeners, can get between 25 and 30% off plus two free pillows on all mattress orders. So go to helixsleep.com Tim to check it out. That's helixsleep.com Tim with Helix Better Sleep starts now. Coffee, coffee, Coffee. Man do I love a great cup of coffee. Sometimes too much. Then I'll have two, three, four, five cups of coffee. I do not love the jitters that come from that or how even one really strong cup of coffee can impact my sleep, which I measure in all sorts of ways, which HRV and blah blah blah blah blah. But more recently I have downshifted to something that feels good. I've been enjoying a more serene morning brew from from this episode's sponsor, Mud Water. With only a fraction of the caffeine found in a cup of coffee, Mud Water gives me all the energy I need without the crash, without the fidgety crawling out of my skin kind of feeling. And it's delicious. It tastes as if cacao and chai had a beautiful love child. I drink it in the morning and sometimes. Right now I'm exercising in the mountains and running around. Sometimes I'll also add some milk and ice for a 2pm yeah, maybe 1pm if I'm behaving iced latte, pick me up type of thing. MudWTR's original blend contains four different types of mushrooms, lion's mane for focus, cordyceps to promote energy. I used to use that when I was competing in all sorts of sports and both Chaga and Reishi to support a healthy immune system. I also love that they make and have for a long time donations to support psychedelic therapeutics and research, including organizations like the Heroic Hearts Project, which I encourage people to check out out in the UC Berkeley center for the Science of Psychedelics. You, my dear listeners, can now try MUDWTR with 15% off plus a free rechargeable frother and free shipping by going to mudwtr.com Tim now listen to the spelling. This is important. That's M U d w t r.com Tim so one more time mudwtr.com Tim for a free for all the 15% off and a better morning routine.