Frontier Investment Lifestyle #Bitcoin is freedom 🌋
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Joined September 2015
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I played varsity quarterback as a freshman because the upperclassman couldn't take a hit. I could.
My favorite tape from that year: I stepped into a deep ball and got laid the fuck out, helmet under the chin. That's how I was raised.
A lot of us want to build outside the system, and right now it feels like a gym with 20 guys shooting around and nobody running.
Somebody has to say: you got five, I got five, turn on the scoreboard. That's SovereignHub.
Years ago I bought into the Cambodian Basketball League and took over a team of all local Khmer guys. I brought in two Americans, a point guard and a big man, to round it out.
We won the championship in 2015.
Jerry Jones won three Super Bowls in the 90s, in large part thanks to Jimmy Johnson, and the Cowboys haven't been back since.
He runs that team the way most VCs run a portfolio: sure that nothing works without him.
Everybody knows Michael Jordan. My favorite on those Bulls teams was Dennis Rodman, who could go a whole game without a shot because his job was rebounds, defense, and loose balls.
That's the role people overlook in business. There was only one Rodman.
Phnom Penh, 2016, on a bicycle, tucked in behind a Rolls-Royce Phantom.
It starts around $528K in the US, and Cambodia's import taxes can add up to 130% on top, so here it's probably closer to $1.2M.
The frontier rewards the people who show up, even on a bicycle.
Venturopoly retweeted
A biological attack is planned for Saturday
600 million pounds of sugar laced with synthetic chemicals will enter the bodies of our children.
Wreaking metabolic havoc, injuring vascular architecture, acidifying oral lining, releasing bacterial toxins, and blunting neural reward pathways.
Instructing that gluttonous consumption of poison is celebratory.
Solid list
Helpful prompt about what to do if the internet goes down due to a global cyberattack/AI swarm.
This seems less insane with every passing day.
I also bought myself the SAS Survival Guide, which is essentially a bush manual for almost every imaginable outcome.
Money
- Keep cash at home, about two to four weeks of essentials, in small bills.
- Write down your bank, credit card and insurance account details and phone numbers on paper.
Information and contacts
- Print a contact list with family, close friends, neighbors, doctors and the kids’ school.
- Agree on a family meeting point and plan in case phones are down, such as “if we can’t reach each other, meet at X by Y time.”
- Export and print or save offline anything business-critical.
- Download offline maps
- Keep paper copies of passports, IDs, insurance cards and prescriptions.
Communication
- Get a battery or hand-crank AM/FM/NOAA radio, which will be your main news source.
- Consider a pair of walkie-talkies or GMRS radios for the family.
- Keep a landline-style backup in mind. Most “landlines” now run over the internet, so don’t count on yours.
Power
- Keep power banks charged, plus a solar charger or a larger portable power station.
- Have flashlights, headlamps and spare batteries.
Water and food (aim for 2 weeks)
- Store about 1 gallon of water per person per day. In a high-rise this matters most, because building water pumps need electricity.
- Stock shelf-stable food the kids will actually eat, plus a manual can opener.
- Keep a camping stove with fuel for outdoor or ventilated use only, or no-cook foods.
Health
- Keep at least a 30-day supply of any prescriptions.
- Have a first aid kit, OTC basics like pain relievers in children’s doses, and hygiene supplies.
Home and offline life
- Learn how to manually open anything electronic, such as smart locks and the building’s garage or entry.
- Keep a paper copy of the building’s emergency procedures and super’s number.
- Download offline entertainment and learning material for the kids: books, games, art supplies.
- Get to know a few neighbors, since local community becomes your network fast.
Digital hygiene (helps before and after)
- Back up photos and documents to an external drive kept offline.
- Use strong, unique passwords with 2FA, and keep printed recovery codes for key accounts.
Venturopoly retweeted
My post about France went viral. Thousands of likes. Many Americans told me: "Democrats aren't socialists. America will never be France." I want to answer that seriously, step by step.
Start with a simple observation. Look at what has gotten cheaper in America over the last 25 years: TVs, phones, software, clothes, toys. Now look at what has exploded: college tuition, healthcare, childcare, housing.
What separates the two lists? The first lives in competitive markets. The second is exactly where government is most involved: subsidies, mandates, licensing, zoning, regulation.
College. Washington lends students almost unlimited money. Universities know the money will always come, so they raise tuition and hire more administrators. The student pays the bill for twenty years. More government money, higher prices.
Housing. Why can't a nurse buy a home in the city where she works? Not because of capitalism. Because of zoning laws, permits, environmental reviews, years of procedure to build a single building. The most expensive places to live in America are the places where it's hardest to build. When building is nearly illegal, prices explode.
Healthcare. The patient almost never sees the price. A third party pays, regulations limit who can compete, and costs climb year after year with no one able to say no.
So here is the trap. The problems you suffer from are not the failure of free markets. They are the places where the market has already been replaced by the state. And the solution you're being offered is more of the same.
That's the Trojan horse. It always works the same way. A real problem. A generous-sounding promise. A program that makes things worse. Then the failure of that program becomes the argument for the next one. People who lived under communism in Poland learned to recognize the lie and the mask the lie wears. The lie never presents itself as a lie. It presents itself as compassion.
In France we are at the end of that road. Debt we can never repay. Young people who can't afford a home. Our best people leaving. And every few years our cities burn. Nobody voted for this. They voted for one more generous promise, fifty years in a row.
If you're a Republican, share this with the Democrat in your life. Not to win an argument. To start a conversation.
If you're a Democrat, I'm not asking you to switch teams. I'm asking you to look at the pattern. Wherever the state took over, life became unaffordable. Don't fix the failures of government with more government.
Stay American. Ask for less state, not more.
I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you.
I come from your future.
In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream.
Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them.
The promise was protection. The result is stagnation.
The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe.
I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has.
Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France?
Trust me. You don’t want to be France.
Perfect! Let’s go
shhh.venturopoly.com
This is really encouraging!
The picture is always the 25-year-old in a hoodie.
The actual data across 2.7 million founders:
> The average age of the founder of a high-growth startups is 45.
> And 50-year-olds are nearly twice as likely to succeed as a 30-year-olds.
It’s almost as if experiments valuable?
There’s still time!
We missed our demographic apparently 😅
This is why so many rich kids become obsessed with unusually hard hobbies (HYROX, Ironmans, ultramarathons, survival expeditions, extreme sports, Everest, etc.)
They’re not necessarily masochists. They need a result where observers, and more importantly themselves, can’t immediately say “yh but your dad…”
Money contaminates most conventional achievement because it can buy you the introductions, runway, education, safety net, first customers and endless second chances. Physical suffering is different. Your dad can hire the trainer, buy the bike and fly you business class to the race, but he still can’t run the last 30km of an ultra for you.
And then you get this funny achievement inflation. Once normal difficulty becomes accessible, you need increasingly absurd difficulty to produce the same clean proof of competence:
A 10k stops feeling exceptional → marathon → Ironman → 100km ultra → Marathon des Sables / UTMB → whatever is sufficiently painful and scarce to still mean something.
Same for mountains: Everest with oxygen → without oxygen → harder mountain → unsupported → faster, etc.
It’s especially funny because their normal life has usually been optimised to remove exactly the things they then seek recreationally: cold, danger, physical exhaustion, uncertainty, getting lost, carrying your own stuff, sleeping badly, not knowing whether you’ll make it. Generations of family wealth go into eliminating friction, then the descendants spend their weekends putting it back in.
And of course an entire luxury industry now exists to package the hardship nicely. Black Tomato sells a “Get Lost” experience starting around £20k per person where they privately transfer you somewhere remote, give you equipment and training, then make you navigate back to civilisation while an expedition team invisibly tracks you as a safety net.
Basically the final stage of wealth is paying a lot of money to recreate problems your grandparents spent their lives making sure you’d never have.
This is beautiful and where the boomers went oh so wrong
I'm 50. I'll be divesting myself of everything I own when I'm 75 - it all gets offloaded and managed by my sons at that point.
I have seven big reasons for this:
1) I'm watching my nearly 80 yr old father fall for every possible scam because the digital world has become far too sophisticated for him. His phone is his kryptonite. I assume the world will be crazier. My sons will have a better shot at navigating that world.
2) I will be done with my most productive decades and will be downshifting into advisory. I won't 'retire' but the nature of the work will change.
3) Pushing assets down the line increases maximum impact for rising generations. They need the resources for grandchildren: education, tuitions, seed money for start-ups, first homes, we want wives staying home to raise babies.
4) I expect a clean room and meals at one of their homes. I'm more than happy to keep the property spic and span, and add value and drive people as long as they'll let me have keys. The windows will be washed and the flowerbeds will stay mulched.
5) I want to be as integrated into their world as they want me to be, but I will endeavor to not be a nuisance as long as possible. I know we don't control the end game - and everyone is bed-ridden at the very end.
6) Blessings and inheritances are meant to be bestowed at the end of the life, not read by some sod in a suit in a downtown law office.
7) I want my sons to be trained and capable and aware of this arrangement starting now, so we run a plan and don't just stumble our way into the 4th quarter.
---
Whatever happens at the end, it will be better than watching what I'm watching with this fading generation. My gosh. What buffoonery, waste, and clueless disregard for their generational lines. It's astounding. Draining. Every. Last. Drop.
And no, they didn't NEED THE SECOND SAUNA, it's just nice to have, rather than walk all the way back up to the main house. Makes sense.
Poetry
You could literally just fly to Zurich, grab a Kaffee und Gipfeli with a 63 year old Heizungsbauer in Winterthur, close your first acquisition over Kalbsfilet at the Kronenhalle, roll up 40 certified HVAC operators across DACH, ride the EU boiler phase-out like a regulatory escalator, build a recurring maintenance book worth 10x, sell to Brookfield at 14x EBITDA tax-free, park the HoldCo in Zug at 11.9%, and spend your summers in Ascona with a blonde who reads Hesse and Jünger.
- but you will not.
zerohedge.com/geopolitical/i… it’s not about who got there first, it’s about who governs well
Floating palaces…
Ultra High Net Worth Individuals (UHNWI) do own yachts for tax reasons, but not because they are a modern replacement for palaces.
Most of the world runs residency-based taxation. As in, if you stay over 183 days somewhere you become a taxable base. The US is the outlier, as it taxes you regardless of where you live, based on citizenship.
That difference produces two entirely distinct wealth architectures.
European UHNWI have a structural incentive to stay mobile. Not being in one place too long is itself a tax strategy. Yachts happen to serve that lifestyle perfectly - flag-registered in favourable jurisdictions, moving between anchorages, never accumulating residency days (and benefiting from things like Cypriot 2 month stay non-dom status). The tax regime does not cause yacht ownership, but it makes yachts a remarkably efficient asset class for people whose wealth depends on being nowhere in particular.
This is why European UHNWI do a yearly circuit - Wimbledon one week, Cannes another, the WEF, the Biennale. The social calendar is not separate from the tax strategy. They are the same thing. This also mirrors the itinerant courts of the past, where the aristocracy would move around from one part of the kingdom to another throughout the year, according to king's mood.
American UHNWI face the opposite constraint. Citizenship-based taxation means mobility cannot solve the problem. So they optimise differently - dynasty trusts, LLCs, state domicile arbitrage. They are not less sophisticated. The same economic incentive just produces a completely different behavioural output when the underlying regime changes.
This is why we are building a platform where you don’t talk about the work, you do the work…building in public and equity vests based on what you do on your team, not what you posture like you’re doing, or not for riding coattails. Work gets rewarded.
shhh.venturopoly.com
Here's a hot take that I 100% believe: Equity is overrated.
You know how many times my "life changing" amount of equity in XYZ assets turned to $0?
Nothing is final until the cash is in your personal checking account.
Nowadays i optimize for my favorite 3 words in the English language:
Free. Cash. Flow.
And then equity is the cherry on top.
Over the long run equity may make you more rich and move the net worth needle more, but the psychological effect of piles of free cash flow cant be beat.
Tangible wins in the end?
Welcome to the most asymmetric trade in modern financial history.
The thread below lays out why. The opportunity exists because capital has chased the AI trade while ignoring the physical assets AI requires to run — assets that have quietly become the best-performing asset class of the decade. Since October 2020 when we first called for the commodity super cycle: QCI Total Return +217%, GSCI Total Return +205%, Gold +140%. NASDAQ trails at +130%. S&P 500 at +85%. The top three are all commodities. Yet oil cannot get out of its own way while copper and the broader atom complex prints fresh highs . That is the dislocation. That is the trade.
Get long. Buckle in. Hang on for the ride.
Forgive the longer posts in this thread — attempting to mimic my old 10-bullet commodity takes. On to it.
20 years ago we went to Costa Rica for the first time, and ended up living in Escaleras de Dominical for a decade, until the siren song of SE Asia’s hustle and bustle came calling.
There were very few villas over a million dollars back then. daveedhollander.com/blog/lux…
