Lifelong entrepreneur, father and husband, Immigrant, co-founder and CEO @ Avant, Stoiclane, Forged in America podcast, https://xitter.cf/t.co/9prLc1tPPY
Miami, FL
Joined May 2011
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"Bourbon is the drink of freedom."
We asked Rep. Andy Barr (@RepAndyBarr / @barrforsenate), a six-term Kentucky congressman now running for the Senate, to rank a bourbon drinking contest: Marco Rubio (@marcorubio), Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders), JD Vance (@JDVance), Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) and AOC (@AOC). AOC? "You served bourbon, and I drink bourbon." Last place? Bernie "just doesn't seem like he's very fun."
Full episode of Forged in America: bourbon diplomacy, coal vs. AI power, what $40T of debt does to your mortgage, and why a job is more than a paycheck.
• Henry Clay's rule: Kentucky bourbon "lubricates the wheels of government"
• 290 power plants retired "exactly at the time when AI data center electricity demand is skyrocketing"
• What he asked Kyrsten Sinema (@kyrstensinema) about coal and AI
• The debt hits "the 30 year fixed rate mortgage," your credit card and your truck loan
• "We need to create taxpayers"
• AI's job boom: "We're gonna need more welders and builders"
• A job "gives your life meaning and purpose"
• Lightning round: bigger threat, China or the national debt? "National debt"
Timestamps:
00:00 Cold open
01:46 Why is socialism getting traction?
03:28 Why young people feel behind
05:58 Ravin's story: 20 years a Democrat
10:15 Cold, hard truths: prices send signals
11:52 Rich countries use more energy
12:35 Voter ID: "easy to vote… hard to cheat"
17:58 $40T of debt and your mortgage
20:35 Why the debt "doesn't sell"
24:06 AI and jobs: welders and builders
25:51 How to turn down the heat in Congress
28:11 The one-word answer: bourbon
31:10 Sinema, coal and AI power
34:49 The Mississippi reading miracle
36:24 What do you tell an 11-year-old with a dad in jail?
38:42 A job gives your life meaning
39:20 Stop looking down on welders
42:00 The 1976 map and no bailouts
48:49 Lightning round
53:10 What gives him hope: Service Academy Day
55:11 Bourbon drinking contest
Who are you picking to finish last?
@ForgedUSAPod @RavinGandhi1
#ForgedInAmerica #Bourbon #Kentucky
1/ Part 1: From Soviet Refugee to Multi-Unicorn Founder
Building America’s Leading Short-Term Digital Lender Enova #ENVA (Before It Had a Name)
1988: I’m 8 years old, stepping off a plane at O’Hare as Soviet refugees — no passports, no money, no relatives waiting.
Adding the next part of the story: Pangea Properties
xitter.cf/goldstein2002/status/2…
1/10
In late 2008 (a full month after I officially left Enova), while banks were imploding, we started buying foreclosed apartments on Chicago’s South and West Sides that no one else wanted.
15 years later:
→ Built the largest private apartment portfolio in Chicago, deploying $300M+ in capital with a portfolio worth over $1B
→ ~15,000 apartments across 3 cities at peak
→ Returned 100% of investor capital before any major exit
→ Sold the entire portfolio between Dec 2022 and Jan 2024
→ Delivered ~4.5x+ net multiple to investors, ~18% realized IRR over 14 years in real estate (pretty unheard of)
This is the unglamorous, rejection-filled, wildly rewarding story of Pangea Properties—from boarding up windows ourselves to building a 500+ employee team, a winding road to exit, and everything in between.
Adding the video version of this story. On Episode 2 of Forged in America, @RavinGandhi1 and I talked about how Enova set up everything that came next.
Enova: we raised $3 million and change of equity capital and returned $240 million to our shareholders, roughly 70x. Cash America bought it in September 2006 for $35M upfront plus an earn-out.
In late 2008, we went back to those same investors to start Pangea Properties, buying distressed mortgage notes when there really weren't any other buyers.
What's the big decision you got right early that paid off later?
Full episode, with the Pangea math and Ravin's GMM story: xitter.cf/goldstein2002/status/2…
@ForgedUSAPod
We've now released 61 episodes of Forged in America, which we never thought we'd get to, but realized we never actually posted the full video for Episode 2 to X.
I actually think it's pretty timely given all the talk about the neoclouds, as we discussed Pangea Properties, the distressed real estate business we built on the back of the financial crisis. I'm not saying right now could be akin to the GFC, but there's always opportunity. You just need to know where to look.
In Episode 2, "Get the Big Decisions Right," @RavinGandhi1 and I interviewed each other about the big decisions that made our businesses work:
• Enova: "We raised $3 million and change of equity capital. We've returned $240 million to our shareholders."
• Pangea, late 2008 and early 2009: buying distressed mortgage notes from the banks when "there really weren't any other buyers"
• The math: $30,000 to $40,000 a door, $800 to $1,000 a month in rent, "yields that are north of 12, 13, 14%"
• 500 meetings, 130 investors: "Rejection is tuition"
• Ravin's GMM: a Calphalon purchase order canceled in the GFC, and the PO that saved the company
• "Businesses are bought, not sold"
Timestamps:
00:00 Cold open: the big mic and the ring light
00:56 How we named the podcast
01:52 Grit is table stakes. Get the big decisions right
02:47 Investment banking to Enova
03:24 Selling at 25: a used Ferrari and a bar
05:36 Pangea: the financial crisis hits
06:44 Why it had to be built at scale
08:26 Back to the Enova investors: $3M in, $240M out
09:24 A $55-60M fund and distressed mortgage notes
10:13 "Who was telling you that's a good idea?" "Nobody."
10:30 Be greedy when others are fearful
10:58 $30-40K a door and 12-14% yields
12:29 500 meetings, 130 investors: rejection is tuition
14:46 Why we sold Pangea
17:01 Businesses are bought, not sold
18:06 Ravin's big idea at GMM: natural nonstick coatings
19:41 The Calphalon PO the GFC canceled
22:24 Selling GMM to a Japanese buyer
24:53 The wire hits, and the anticlimax
26:07 "One strike and you're out"
27:15 "Everybody said, don't do it"
27:32 CNBC, a movie and $20M of startup bets
Where do you think the opportunity is this time?
@ForgedUSAPod @RavinGandhi1
#ForgedInAmerica
We've now released 61 episodes of Forged in America, which we never thought we'd get to, but realized we never actually posted the full video for Episode 2 to X.
I actually think it's pretty timely given all the talk about the neoclouds, as we discussed Pangea Properties, the distressed real estate business we built on the back of the financial crisis. I'm not saying right now could be akin to the GFC, but there's always opportunity. You just need to know where to look.
In Episode 2, "Get the Big Decisions Right," @RavinGandhi1 and I interviewed each other about the big decisions that made our businesses work:
• Enova: "We raised $3 million and change of equity capital. We've returned $240 million to our shareholders."
• Pangea, late 2008 and early 2009: buying distressed mortgage notes from the banks when "there really weren't any other buyers"
• The math: $30,000 to $40,000 a door, $800 to $1,000 a month in rent, "yields that are north of 12, 13, 14%"
• 500 meetings, 130 investors: "Rejection is tuition"
• Ravin's GMM: a Calphalon purchase order canceled in the GFC, and the PO that saved the company
• "Businesses are bought, not sold"
Timestamps:
00:00 Cold open: the big mic and the ring light
00:56 How we named the podcast
01:52 Grit is table stakes. Get the big decisions right
02:47 Investment banking to Enova
03:24 Selling at 25: a used Ferrari and a bar
05:36 Pangea: the financial crisis hits
06:44 Why it had to be built at scale
08:26 Back to the Enova investors: $3M in, $240M out
09:24 A $55-60M fund and distressed mortgage notes
10:13 "Who was telling you that's a good idea?" "Nobody."
10:30 Be greedy when others are fearful
10:58 $30-40K a door and 12-14% yields
12:29 500 meetings, 130 investors: rejection is tuition
14:46 Why we sold Pangea
17:01 Businesses are bought, not sold
18:06 Ravin's big idea at GMM: natural nonstick coatings
19:41 The Calphalon PO the GFC canceled
22:24 Selling GMM to a Japanese buyer
24:53 The wire hits, and the anticlimax
26:07 "One strike and you're out"
27:15 "Everybody said, don't do it"
27:32 CNBC, a movie and $20M of startup bets
Where do you think the opportunity is this time?
@ForgedUSAPod @RavinGandhi1
#ForgedInAmerica
Al Goldstein retweeted
“Yeah, there are these companies called neoclouds. They buy GPUs from NVIDIA and then rent it back out to the hyperscalers. Where do they get money for the GPUs? Excellent question. Turns out they get the money from NVIDIA themselves, along with a bunch of private credit lenders whose loans are backed by the GPU itself. Elon just said all of them might go to zero soon. Anyways, what are you doing later tonight?”
Al Goldstein retweeted
Alexandr Wang explains the number robotaxi companies don't publish: one human for every 3 to 5 driverless cars.
Wang, who built Scale AI, was asked on Y Combinator's Lightcone podcast what humans will still do once AI agents do the work.
"Most of a manager's job, speaking as a manager, is just putting out fires, dealing with problems, dealing with issues that come up."
"I think people often jump to this extreme reality... you're just going to manage the agents and you're going to live this kind of Victorian life where all your problems are solved. But no, I think it's still going to be pretty complicated, getting agents to coordinate well with one another and coordinating the workflows and debugging the issues that come up."
"Having seen what happened in self-driving, which was more or less that it's easy to get to 90%, very very hard to get to 99%... I think that something similar will happen as with large scale agent deployments, and that final 10% of accuracy... will require a lot of work."
The host pointed out that robotaxis still have remote assist for the edge cases. Wang went further:
"And the ratio, by the way, the companies don't publish them, but I think the ratio is something like five cars to one tele-operator, or maybe even less than maybe three cars per tele-operator. So the ratio is much lower than people think. I think humans are much more involved even in self-driving cars than I think most people appreciate."
"For an optimistic version of the future where unemployment is still low, you just have to believe that humans are almost insatiable in their desire and their demand, and that prices will go down... the economy will become more efficient and we'll just want more."
Interested in the latest with ai/tech and business?
Follow @GeniusGTX and never fall behind.
I track ChatGPT, Claude, and how every new agent is changing how we work and think, then hand you the pure signals.
"Reality doesn't negotiate" is the line, @brivael. We had the same conversation on Forged in America with @mikeeisenberg.
My take in this clip: the Overton window is shifting. Things that used to be hard to say out loud, like "the welfare state has screwed people," are now being said openly. The last episode @RavinGandhi1 and I did was about kind lies and unkind truths.
The risk is real. A lot of kids aren't reading history. They're getting information in short bursts. And AI can now produce a false narrative at scale.
But it cuts both ways. The same tools knock a bad story down faster than ever, and the gap between the narrative and what people see in front of them is getting harder to hide. That's why I'm optimistic. There's a line usually credited to Churchill: America does the right thing after exhausting the alternatives.
Full episode: xitter.cf/goldstein2002/status/2…
@ForgedUSAPod
What's the one lie you think collapses next?
Here's the conclusion to close the series:
That's why I believe people have finally understood the big picture.
The origin of the problem in the West, and really across the whole Western world, was never just bad economics, bad politicians or bad luck. It was that mental communism had infiltrated everything. The lie had infiltrated everything. Into our schools, our media, our institutions, our budgets, our vocabulary. A civilization built on truth, property and individual responsibility slowly started running on a borrowed operating system that promised everything and delivered decline.
But a lie has one fatal weakness: reality doesn't negotiate. You can print money, but you can't print prosperity. You can rename crime, but people still get robbed. You can forbid words, but you can't forbid people from seeing what's in front of them. Sooner or later the gap between the narrative and reality becomes too wide to hide. That's the moment we're living in. In Buenos Aires, in Santiago, in Bogotá, in La Paz, and soon everywhere else, people are looking at the gap and refusing to pretend anymore.
The lie couldn't last forever. And it's collapsing everywhere at once.
What comes next, I believe, is a world far more respectful of what actually works. Free markets, because they are the only system that rewards people for serving each other. Private property, because a man who owns nothing is a man who can be told anything. The natural order, because human nature isn't a design flaw to be engineered away. Respect for legitimate authority and for order, because freedom without order is just chaos with better marketing. And beauty, because a civilization that stops building beautiful things has already stopped believing in itself.
I know how this sounds. For years, being optimistic about the West felt naïve. Not anymore. The people who lived through communism warned us that the system runs on lies and dies of truth. They were right. And truth is coming back.
I've rarely been this optimistic about the future.
Al Goldstein retweeted
Hitler, Mussolini y Stalin simplemente representaron tres variantes del socialismo. Subordinaban el individuo al Estado, concentraban el poder y fueron enemigos de la sociedad libre. La diferencia principal era si dividían a la gente por clase, nación o raza.
Al Goldstein retweeted
Narrative violation for the left who complains about the environmental impact of data centers
Modern data centers use water equivalent to 3 annual showers for the average person.
Comparatively, California almond orchard farms use water equivalent to 300 showers per year
The average golf course uses water equivalent to 97 showers per year
Al Goldstein retweeted
Yesterday, Islamists entered a church and slaughtered over a half dozen Christians in Jordan.
Cenk Uygur? Silent.
Mehdi Hasan? Silent.
Ms. Rachel? Silent.
Al Goldstein retweeted
Called it 📉 UC freshmen failing intro math went from 9.2% to 17.8% since they dropped the SAT. Why?
Because test-blind removed the one standard that checked whether students could actually do the math. At UC Merced it's 36%.
Bring the SAT back already
Grateful to @CSQMag and Jerica Kingsbury for telling our story: "Building a Business That Outlives Its Founders."
My family came to Chicago from Soviet-era Uzbekistan when I was 8. Watching my parents leave everything behind and still find their sea legs changed my sense of what's possible. I grew up living the American dream without even knowing it.
Wrestling taught me to get comfortable losing. About 14 months at Deutsche Bank taught me I wanted to build. (My wife says it was 14 minutes.)
In 2012 I co-founded @avant_forward with John Sun (now building @springlabs) and Paul Zhang. Our first office was at 640 N LaSalle, and our oldest was 6 months old. Total insanity, but super fun. I'd do it again.
What I've learned since: building companies is really hard, and everything takes at least 10 years. The vision hasn't changed: build something that will outlive us.
It's the kind of story we hear every week on Forged in America @ForgedUSAPod.
csq.com/2026/10/building-a-b…
Brivael nails the real fight of our time: the reality of goodness vs. the perception of goodness. For years, institutions got to define what "good" looked like, whether or not it actually did any good. Then Elon bought Twitter and refused to play along, and the system has been fighting him ever since.
The price data tells the same story. Since 2000, BLS data show TVs down about 98% and software down about 75%, while hospital services are up about 275% and college tuition roughly 190%. Where markets and technology compete, things get cheaper. Where they don't, costs explode.
AI cuts both ways. It has the power to create false narratives at scale. But it also has the power to knock them down faster than ever. You can't scale a lie forever. Reality wins.
That's why the future is optimistic. On Forged in America, we asked @RepAndyBarr what makes him most optimistic about America's next 100 years. His answer wasn't a policy. It was his annual Service Academy Day: young people with good grades, athletic achievement and community service who "just want to serve their country in uniform." That's real goodness, not performed goodness.
Will AI end up spreading false narratives, or exposing them?
@ForgedUSAPod @RavinGandhi1
Full episode: xitter.cf/goldstein2002/status/2…
Al Goldstein retweeted
My father died at 44. I was 13.
For years, 44 became my deadline to get everything done. Build the companies. Get married. Have kids.
My first exit brought a day of euphoria. It did not answer what I wanted the rest of my life to look like.
Now, on the drive to school, my kids and I name something from the day before that we are grateful for. That small habit changes how I look at the day ahead.
From my conversation with Al Goldstein and Ravin Gandhi on Forged in America.
#ForgedInAmerica #Entrepreneurship #Gratitude
@ForgedUSAPod @goldstein2002 @RavinGandhi1
Barclays is cutting 5,000 jobs, about 5% of its 93,000 staff, in what's being called an AI-led efficiency drive. Around 60% of the cuts are in support functions, including fewer developers. Yet CEO C.S. Venkatakrishnan calls AI "the icing on the cake," not the cake, and says modernized systems and simpler processes are driving most of the savings.
On Forged in America, we asked a16z's Alex Rampell who AI hits first. His answer: "uncredentialed people." You can't practice medicine without an MD or law without a degree. Those jobs are "the most impregnable. They shouldn't be, but they are."
Support staff and developers have no guild credential to protect them. But Alex also says the pie keeps getting bigger: billions of people with an idea in their head can now turn it into reality.
So is AI eliminating these jobs, or freeing the next wave of builders? And who should own the retraining?
@ForgedUSAPod @RavinGandhi1
Full episode: xitter.cf/goldstein2002/status/2…
BREAKING: Barclays cutting 5,000 jobs in AI-led efficiency drive
trib.al/PslgiEk
February 2022, two days into Russia's invasion, Ukraine's digital minister asked Elon Musk for Starlink. About 10 hours later Musk replied: "Starlink service is now active in Ukraine." It has kept Ukrainian soldiers and civilians connected ever since.
Now the WSJ, citing unnamed sources, reports Musk ordered last week's slowdown. Musk says Starshield limits are decided by the U.S. military and ultimately the President; Trump says he wasn't involved. That deserves real answers.
But the timing is hard to ignore. Musk became a nine-figure Republican donor, and now come Rep. Pramila Jayapal's probe plans and Kara Swisher's jail predictions.
On Forged in America, a16z's Alex Rampell described the mindset: Musk "found a mine in California that had Teslas in it," so take his money.
Is this accountability, or political payback for backing Trump?
@ForgedUSAPod @RavinGandhi1
Full episode: xitter.cf/goldstein2002/status/2…
Breaking: Elon Musk ordered the Starlink slowdown that blindsided Ukraine on.wsj.com/4sgcpBv
Politico reports House Democrats are lining up investigations of Elon Musk if they win the House: his DOGE role, SpaceX and Tesla contracts, and the Starlink disruption in Ukraine. Rep. Pramila Jayapal is already previewing the case.
Oversight is Congress's job. But a probe mapped out before the election, aimed at one man, starts to look like a verdict in search of a crime.
On Forged in America, @TylerHassen1, a former senior DOGE official at Interior, described the Elon he saw in person nearly every week: "so locked in," asking how to fix Social Security, how to stop Medicaid fraud, how to speed up permitting.
Part of that work is now being framed as a scandal.
Rep. Jayapal, is this oversight, or payback for taking on the bureaucracy?
@ForgedUSAPod @RavinGandhi1
Full episode: xitter.cf/goldstein2002/status/2…
